Pol Pot

William Vollman gets through a whole book review on Pol Pot without once mentioning that the U.S. backed the regime. How soon we forget. Plus, we're the reason the U.N. never intervened in the Rwanda genocide. And we never did bomb those railways to Auschwitz, did we? Our crimes of commission pale before those of omission, in case you think we shouldn't have started the war on Iraq. Nice opening, though. "I remember the first time I saw the killing fields at Choeung Ek: pits with rainwater in them, scraps of cloth and concretions of bone in the exposed earth. In one mass grave swam fat, unwholesome frogs. A child was catching them; his family was going to eat them. When I try to conceptualize Cambodia's suffering, that sight--repulsive to me, ordinary to the boy--reminds me equally of the presence of the murdered and the sad expedients of the living. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge had been expelled by the Vietnamese a dozen years before, but their influence remained everywhere. Obviously it was the Khmer Rouge's fault that children were catching dinner in mass graves."