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The Asian Holocaust
| Article
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17676 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1990 |
2,078 Words |
| Author
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Harry G. Summers, Jr.
Harry G. Summers, Jr., a retired U.S. army colonel, was a
military analyst for CNN, NBC, and the Los Angeles Times
during the Persian Gulf crisis. The sequel to his award-
winning Vietnam War analysis, On Strategy II: A Critical
Analysis of the Persian Gulf War, is forthcoming from Dell in
February 1992. |
FOR THE SAKE OF ALL LIVING THINGS
John M. Del Vecchio
New York: Bantam Books, 1990
790 pp., $19.95
The Cambodian holocaust ranks among the most terrible tragedies of this century. Fueled by a demented vision of an idealistic agrarian future, during their almost four-year reign of terror from April 1975 to December 1978, the Khmer Rouge tortured, starved, and massacred some two to three million Cambodians - one-third to one-half of the entire population. Forced to go into hiding during the 1978-1989 Vietnamese occupation, in 1990 the Khmer Rouge are once again waiting in the wings to resume their grisly terror.
Preventing genocide in the future by understanding how it happened in the past is the task that John M. Del Vecchio sets for himself in his monumental new novel, For the Sake of All Living Things. His earlier novel, The 13th Valley, was published to critical acclaim in 1982. Centered on the exploits of his old unit, the "Screaming Eagles" of the 101st Airborne Division, this book "was originally intended as a story about American veterans of the Vietnam War that would also include segments on Vietnamese and Cambodian soldiers and their families." Once into the writing, however, he found "the Cambodian section took on a life of its own."
True believers
Del Vecchio's new book's title is drawn from a Buddhist vow, "I shall become enlightened for the sake of all living things," and his intent is to enlighten the American people about the travail that Cambodia has experienced in the last two decades. His novel is intended not only to t ell a story but also as a vehicle for the propagation of his views of the "truths." To put that truth in perspective requires some understanding of the arguments and debated that have gone before. It also requires an understanding of the "true believer," a type the late Eric Hoffer defined as one who would kill you for your own good.
Hoffer used as his example the Dominican monk Tomas de Torquemada, the grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition who put people to the rack and had them burned at the stake not so much because they were Jews or heretics but to save their immortal souls. But Pol Pot, the evil mastermind of the Cambodian bloodbath, is an even better example of what Hoffer had in mind. A pseudointellecual, half-educated in France, Pol Pot
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