Alex > Recent Status Updates

Good info about the 1068 famine.

Castro wasn't actually that nice to priests and the Church. Not murderous, but closing religious schools and expulsing 131 priests and monks in a single day is not very pious.

The Khmer Rouge took some of their ideology from Mao, specifically concerning the land reform and their own "Great Leap Forward".

One prisoner in Kach Roteh only survived by telling the Khmer Rouge torturers, who were mostly children and juveniles, aesops fables and classical animal fairy tales of the Khmer.

It seems the Khmer Rouge took special delight in torturing children. At least, that's what one prisoner describes.

Also, the Khmer Rouge, like the Chinese and apparently the North Koreans, believed in the heredity of class.

Every communist should read this book.

One Khmer Rouge deserter was forced to eat his own ears before he was executed. There are other cases of cannibalism.

Correction: Of course 1977 wasn't the year of "liberation".

To commemorate the day of liberation, 17th of April 1977, the Khmer Rouge exterminated the village of the ex-president Lon Nol.

The Cham, a muslim minority, were also cruelly persecuted. Among other things, they were forced to breed pigs and eat pig meat. Of a thousand hajji, only thirty survived.

According to one historian, Sliwinski, 48,6% of Catholics died under the Red Khmer, the largest proportion of all minorities. The Cathedral of Phnom Penh was also the only building of the city to be levelled. It didn't help that the Catholics were largely an urban population and often had a Vietnamese heritage.

Allegedly, Pol Pot personally broke Vorn Vets leg during a struggle session.

"I must say I have never seen an evil man who in all his deeds and words did not depart far from the path of right; whenever a man leaves the middle course, to whatever extreme he inclines he takes his stand far from virtue."
That's an assessment I don't share at all.

Also, she didn't lose one word about the fact that the Franks were at one point requested by the Byzantines.

An expert bowman among the Byzantines ostensibly shot through the shields of the crusaders in such a way that the shield was nailed to the mail armor, disabling but not killing them. As that skill is in the level of shooting someones gun out of their hand, I don't believe the author.

"And he turned to me and said gently, "What would you in this forest of serenity? Seek you a lost self in the green shadows, or is it a home-coming in your twilight?""