On the Right

New York, Feb. 24—At one end of the world, the People’s Republic of China is worried over the activities of its client state, Cambodia. Worried because Cambodia’s leader Pol Pot has transformed Cambodia into a vast Buchenwald for the purpose of torturing and killing Cambodians by the hundreds of thousands? Troubled because Pol Pot has depopulated Phnom Penh, attempted to extirpate every trace of culture, punished literacy with death or imprisonment? No. Well after Pol Pot had established himself as the most vicious tyrant since Hitler and Stalin, he was being feted in Peking at a banquet to which the Americans were not invited because we have shamefully declined to show the back of our hand to free China in Taiwan. No, China is upset because the Cambodians are harassing the North Vietnamese, and this is destabilizing.

At the other end of the world the newest client state of superpower Communism is Ethiopia, and there are no signs at all that the Soviet Union is having any trouble in telling Ethiopia what to do. To begin with, the Soviet Union has firmly recognized the primacy of Colonel Mengistu. The Colonel commended himself to the Communists by the coup through which he came to power. Last April the revolutionary magazine Afrique-Asie ran a long interview with Fidel Castro in which Castro fairly glowed about Mengistu. Castro described the coup—in which Mengistu killed six members of the Dergue with his own hands—as Africa’s first “truly Marxist revolution” and said that Cuba would render all assistance to it.

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

New York, Feb. 24—At one end of the world, the People’s Republic of China is worried over the activities of its client state, Cambodia. Worried because Cambodia’s leader Pol Pot has transformed Cambodia into a vast Buchenwald for the purpose of torturing and killing Cambodians by the hundreds of thousands? Troubled because Pol Pot has depopulated Phnom Penh, attempted to extirpate every trace of culture, punished literacy with death or imprisonment? No. Well after Pol Pot had established himself as the most vicious tyrant since Hitler and Stalin, he was being feted in Peking at a banquet to which the Americans were not invited because we have shamefully declined to show the back of our hand to free China in Taiwan. No, China is upset because the Cambodians are harassing the North Vietnamese, and this is destabilizing.

At the other end of the world the newest client state of superpower Communism is Ethiopia, and there are no signs at all that the Soviet Union is having any trouble in telling Ethiopia what to do. To begin with, the Soviet Union has firmly recognized the primacy of Colonel Mengistu. The Colonel commended himself to the Communists by the coup through which he came to power. Last April the revolutionary magazine Afrique-Asie ran a long interview with Fidel Castro in which Castro fairly glowed about Mengistu. Castro described the coup—in which Mengistu killed six members of the Dergue with his own hands—as Africa’s first “truly Marxist revolution” and said that Cuba would render all assistance to it.