Books, Arts & Manners: Beyond Stalin

When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia’s Revolution and Its People, by Elizabeth Becker (Simon & Schuster, 502 pp., $19.95)

As little as 12 years ago, Americans were still arguing with each other as to whether the other side in the Vietnam War was “really” Communist, and whether American withdrawal from Indochina would lead to a “bloodbath.” How quaint that all seems now! How much blood does it take to make a bloodbath? To the open-eyed it was no surprise when the Laotian Communists butchered tens of thousands of a small population, when the Vietnamese Communists massacred hundreds of thousands of a much larger one, and when both set up the standard horrors and messes characteristic of the early decades of Communist rule.

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Francis B. Randall

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When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia’s Revolution and Its People, by Elizabeth Becker (Simon & Schuster, 502 pp., $19.95)

As little as 12 years ago, Americans were still arguing with each other as to whether the other side in the Vietnam War was “really” Communist, and whether American withdrawal from Indochina would lead to a “bloodbath.” How quaint that all seems now! How much blood does it take to make a bloodbath? To the open-eyed it was no surprise when the Laotian Communists butchered tens of thousands of a small population, when the Vietnamese Communists massacred hundreds of thousands of a much larger one, and when both set up the standard horrors and messes characteristic of the early decades of Communist rule.