Critical Race Theory– Pol Pot, The Year Zero, and Orwellian “Black is Good, White Is Bad”

A few decades ago the Cambodian Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, declared that the time was Year Zero, and all vestiges of the past were to be erased or destroyed; every trace of the bourgeois capitalist society that had turned the noble Khmer people into its running dogs expunged.  Nothing was to be retained All those who had been employed in tainted, reviled professions and occupations were to be punished, re-educated, and reformed.  Those who had worked the land would be the models for a new, universal peasantry, and thanks to their doctrinal purity, example, and innate rectitude would help assure the success of the revolution.

Pol Pot ordered the evacuation of all Cambodian cities, sinkholes of capitalist excess, infectious, rotting places of retrograde ignorance and despair.  In 1975 millions of Cambodians left urban areas in forced marches, allowed to carry nothing of their tainted, infected past.  In one decisive moment, they were declared landless peasants whose needs would be provided by the State and whose work would be only in the benefit of the people.  Over 2,000,000 people or 25 percent of the population died from hunger, disease, or torture.

Throughout Cambodia, deadly purges were conducted to eliminate remnants of the "old society" - the educated, the wealthy, Buddhist monks, police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and former government officials. Ex-soldiers were killed along with their wives and children. Anyone suspected of disloyalty to Pol Pot, including many Khmer Rouge leaders, was shot or bludgeoned to death.  "What is rotten must be removed," a Khmer Rouge slogan proclaimed.

The Khmer Rouge was one of most brutal Communist regimes of the Twentieth Century.  Inspired by Mao’s cultural revolution of radical agrarianism and Soviet gulags, it ended only by the rout of the Vietnamese army.

Similarly the American Left has been inspired by Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin and has employed their radical attempts to erase the past to create a new, righteous communalist society.  The Left is no more forgiving than these dictators – there can be no discussion, no compromise, no complicity, no complaisance when the very nature of society is at stake.  All heretics and apostates must be called out, disgraced, and marginalized.  There is no room for opinion, only action.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is at the core of this radical, authoritarian attempt to reconfigure American society in a ‘progressive’ image.  There have been no systems as completely corrupt as slavery and the white supremacist capitalism which enabled it. The white race in its entirety and in perpetuity is not only responsible for slavery and the capitalism which enabled it, but as a consequence is the very embodiment of evil.

Being white is to be inherently corrupt. Whiteness is an evil which cannot be attenuated, only extirpated and destroyed. Only when the white race is subjugated to the same indignities and indecencies that they inflicted on the black man, can some measure of retribution if not moral justice be effected.  Only when whites are derogated and dismissed from power and authority can American society regain its democratic balance

Demonizing whites and reducing them to insignificance is not enough for CRT activists.  Black society must accede to power and rule in a more moral, reformist, egalitarian society.  Reduced to its most essential, the progressive mantra is eerily like the animals in Orwell’s Animal Farm – four legs good, two legs bad; or black is good, white is bad.

CRT radicals have been as thorough and universal in their planning as Pol Pot, for they have understood the importance of re-education and indoctrination and have easily understood that children are the most susceptible and credulous of the population.  If CRT can be instituted in primary schools, then the reform of the adult population will be easier.  In the Pol Pot regime children were indoctrinated, used as spies, and their cries of j’accuse were enough for summary execution. 

If white children are told from kindergarten that they are worth less than black children, that their fathers, grandfathers, and ancestors have been responsible for the evils of the world, and that black people are innately superior to whites, they can be used as spies and infiltrators in the white adult population just as they were under Pol Pot and the East German secret police.

Such indoctrination is important because it influences the young before they are able to critically assess the issue of race, society, and civilization. 

It is harder to dismiss the civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Europe – white civilizations and those responsible for art, ideas, enlightened governance, science, religion, political philosophy, and the very principles on which America was founded – when students are older, more mature, and more critical.  If white guilt and assumptions of white evil precede logical analysis and critical thinking, objectivity is lost and the race is won.

By removing all vestiges of European civilization as part of the CRT progressive social cleansing, CRT activists both deny its validity and relevance. However  they, like Pol Pot, are left with a void to fill.  He declared that all Western and Eastern philosophy, science, literature, art, and governance were ipso facto wrong and destructive; but he had nothing but a punitive primitivism to put in its place. 

What is the CRT progressive Left proposing to fill the void left after white civilization is discredited? How does blackness translate to a reformative social system? How does post-1865 black history or earlier African history provide the foundation for a more just and equitable society?  Just having been oppressed is not enough.

The Left does not stop here.  It’s radical reform efforts to raise alternate sexuality to a par with heterosexuality are as authoritarian as its racial politics.

Transgenderism has been raised to an ideal sexuality while heterosexuality has been demoted as antiquated, irrelevant, and elitist as whiteness.  The Biblical, mythical, and religious underpinnings of heterosexuality are, say liberal activists, irrelevant.  Just as Pol Pot denied the past and declared The Year Zero, so do gender activists argue that the final, irretrievable end to heterosexuality has come, and a new age of gender fluidity and sexual choice is upon us.

George Will in an article in the Washington Post criticizing CRT notes:

Besides, CRT’s toxic precepts — silence is violence, but debates perpetuate oppression; reason is a myth disguising power differentials; an individual is a mere fragment of a tribe; society is always and everywhere an arena of zero-sum conflict; pluralism is an instrument of “repressive tolerance”; White people who deny their racism thereby confirm it; teaching is a political act; etc. — can be rebranded and insinuated into curriculums under new labels.

What can be done about the child abuse of which Dwight-Englewood (school) is just one among thousands of rapidly multiplying symptoms? Prudent people are uneasy about state legislatures forbidding the teaching of critical race theory (CRT): Although legislatures have a responsibility to oversee the uses of taxation, and education policy, they also have a sorry history of interventions in schooling, often for the purpose of stoking cultural conflicts.

Note well Will’s deliberate use of the term ‘child abuse’.  The Left’s insistence on indoctrinating the young with a virulent political agenda is nothing less.  

More and more parents and raising their voices against such indoctrination and imposition of a subjective, baseless, and ignorant theory on the young.  Perhaps there is an end in sight, perhaps there is a chink in the progressive wall; and perhaps this idiocy will end soon.