Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (129 page)

On 23 April troops began emptying the other cities, with populations ranging from 15,000 to 200,000. There were many atrocities. In Siem Reap over one-hundred patients in the Monte Peth hospital were murdered in their beds with clubs and knives; forty more were killed in the military hospital. Following the pattern of Stalin in Poland, there were massacres of officers: at Mongkol Borei, for instance, a group of two-hundred were driven into a minefield laid specially for the purpose. At the Svay Pagoda near Sisophon, eighty-eight pilots were clubbed to death. Other groups murdered
en masse
were street beggars, prostitutes, the seriously wounded and incurably sick found in hospitals, civil servants, teachers and students. As in the big Indonesia massacre, the families of the ‘guilty’ were slaughtered to prevent ‘revenge’: Khmer Rouge girl-soldiers took off the women and small children to the death-pits. But little attempt was made to hide the killings: bodies were left to decompose or floated in scores down the rivers.
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By June 3,500,000 people from the cities and 500,000 from ‘bad’ villages had been scattered over the countryside, and set to work to build new villages, often with their bare hands. Slackers were told they would be ‘ground down by the wheel of History’, a striking image of Leninism in practice. Sexual intercourse was forbidden; adultery or fornication punished by death, the sentence being carried our ruthlessly. Married couples were forbidden to have prolonged conversations together: this was known as ‘arguing’ and punished by death on the second offence. As famine and epidemic developed, the old and sick and the very young (especially if orphans) were abandoned. Executions were in” public, relatives being forced to watch while their brother, mother or child was garotted or decapitated, stabbed, bludgeoned or axed to death. Sometimes entire families were executed together. Former officials were often tortured to death, or mutilated before execution. At
DO
Nauy, Colonel Saray Savath had his nose and ears cut off and was then crucified to a tree, dying the third day. In the same place a teacher called Tan Samay, who disobeyed orders not to teach his pupils anything except soil-tilling, was hanged, his own pupils, aged eight to ten, being forced to carry out the execution, and to shout ‘Unfit teacher!’ as they did so.
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The sickening list of cruelties is endless.

In April 1976, the leader of the
Angka Loeu
, Khieu Samphan, became head of state, being succeeded as head of government by another middle-class fanatic intellectual, Pol Pot. As head of state, Khieu attended a conference of so-called non-aligned nations in Colombo in August 1976, and in a confused interview with an Italian magazine appeared to admit that a million ‘war criminals’, as he termed them, had died since the Khmer Rouge took over. At that
time large-scale murders were continuing. According to one set of calculations, based on interviews with over 300 witnesses and the work of the French scholar François Ponchaud, who questioned many more, about 100,000 Cambodians were executed, 20,000 died trying to flee, 400,000 died in the forced exodus from the towns, a further 430,000 died in the camps and ‘villages’ before the end of 1975, and 250,000 more in 1976. Hence between April 1975 and the beginning of 1977, the Marxist-Leninist ideologues ended the lives of 1,200,000 people, a fifth of the population.
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Although the Cambodia atrocities attracted the most attention in the West, social engineering of a similar kind took place in Laos and South Vietnam. In Laos the middle class had been destroyed or driven out to Thailand by the end of 1975, when a People’s Democratic Republic was declared, in reality a cover for colonization by North Vietnamese. Minorities were destroyed or expelled and in the north mass-settlement by North Vietnamese peasants took place in the years 1977–8. In July 1976, South Vietnam was ‘unified’ with the North under Northern control. As in Cambodia, large but unknown numbers of city-dwellers were moved by force into the countryside. The Secretary-General of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Le Duan, announced that living standards would now fall. ‘People in the South’, he said, had ‘attained living-standards too high for the country’s economy’. Such a ‘consumer society’ was the ‘complete opposite of a truly happy and civilized life’. So that was that. The party journal wrote of ‘our entire people’s submission to the will of the advanced class representing society’. By January 1977 there were 200,000 political prisoners, in addition to many thousands of executions. In December 1978 the North Vietnam élite finally broke with the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, invaded the country and occupied Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979. The whole of Indo-China was now in practical terms ‘united’ under a North Vietnamese military dictatorship, with 200,000 Viet troops in Kampuchea (as Cambodia was now called) and 20,000 in Laos. By 1980, Vietnam had well over 1 million in its armed forces, next to Cuba the largest,
per capita
, in the world.
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It was a gruesome climax to the ‘liberation struggle’, which now entered a new phase, with guerrilla movements, supported by China, taking the field against Hanoi, and with Soviet Russia supplying the North Vietnamese imperialists with the helicopter gunships to maintain their paramountcy. But the twentieth century has been crowded with such ironies.

These events were viewed apathetically in America, and indeed in the West as a whole. They were merely one marginal aspect of the process of disillusionment so characteristic of the Seventies decade, and which centred increasingly on the flagging performance of the
world economy. The Vietnam War and its bitter sequel, the Great Society and its collapse, the Imperial Presidency and its demolition: these constituted, in combination, a suicide attempt by the superpower of the West. They were powerful factors in ending the great post-war economic expansion and in returning international society to the fear and disarray of the 1930s. Equally important, they undermined the capacity of American leadership to respond to the new instability.

NINETEEN
The Collectivist Seventies

Economic disorder precedes the military disorder of war. The economic collapse of the early 1930s undoubtedly made possible the Second World War. In its aftermath, Western statesmen earnestly sought guidance to prevent this pattern recurring. The result was the Keynesian age. He had defined the essence of his philosophy in his famous letter to the
New York Times
in 1933: ‘I lay overwhelming emphasis on the increase of national purchasing power resulting from governmental expenditure, which is financed by loans.’
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During the 1950s and 1960s this Keynesian emphasis became the leading principle of economic policy in all the major Western economies. Moreover, Keynesianism was adopted at the international level. In July 1944 at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, he and the American Treasury official Harry Dexter White created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The haughty King’s man found White intolerably rude: he had ‘not the faintest conception’ of ‘civilized behaviour’. White called Keynes ‘Your Royal Highness’. But in practice these two men, both of whom had guilty secrets, worked well together. Keynes contended that London’s pre-1914 role of running the international money system had been left vacant, because of British weakness, between the wars: hence the disaster. The new system was to fill the gap. It extended ‘the principles of local banking to the international field … when one chap wants to leave his resources idle, those resources are not therefore withdrawn from circulation but are made available to another chap who is prepared to use them – and to make this possible without the former losing his liquidity.’
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The new system came into existence in May 1946. It worked very well, mainly because the US economy boomed, and American policy-makers were prepared to run the world on Keynesian lines. There was a world-wide, insatiable demand for dollars, and Washington was prepared to provide them either through Marshall Aid,
other foreign aid programmes, or cheap loans. The result was the most rapid and prolonged economic expansion in world history. World trade, which had actually contracted by 3 per cent in the early 1930s, and only recovered the lost ground in the late 1930s, grew over the quarter-century 1948–71 at the remarkable average annual rate of 7.27 per cent.
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Nothing like this had ever been experienced before. Even in the brief 1926–9 frenzy, the rate had been only 6.74 per cent. Industrial expansion was comparably exotic. In the 260-odd years for which reasonable figures are available, 1705–1971, the quantity of industrial production in the world rose 1,730 times. Considerably over half this increase came in the post-1948 quarter-century. The growth in industrial production over the whole world averaged 5.6 per cent, sustained year after year.
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The framework of stability which made possible this phenomenal material improvement in the human condition was provided by the dollar as a generously administered international currency. But the reliability of the dollar depended on the strength of the American economy. And in the 1960s successive American presidents placed that economy under growing strain. Moreover, America’s was essentially a businessman’s economy. Its success lay in great part in the existence of a favourable climate, in which businessmen felt safe and esteemed. That climate had existed in the 1920s. It had disappeared in the 1930s. It had reappeared in the war, when business was needed to destroy Hitler, and it had been sustained until the end of the Eisenhower administration. In the 1960s came a great change. The national climate turned hostile to business. The first sign of trouble was a return to the vigorous enforcement of anti-trust legislation. The Justice Department made a frontal assault on the electric industry. Early in 1961, top officials of General Electric and Westinghouse, and the companies themselves, were convicted of price-fixing. Sentencing alone took two days. Seven leading businessmen went to gaol; the fines totalled nearly $2 million.
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That was only a foretaste. The Kennedy brothers had been brought up by their speculator-father to hate businessmen.
⁶
The result was the 1962 attack on the steel industry, led by the Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy, who had learnt the techniques of harassment and judicial manipulation as one of Joe McCarthy’s staff. The
Christian Science Monitor
asked: ‘After this display of naked power… how free will the American economy be?’ The
Wall Street Journal
complained that the government was coercing the steel industry ‘by the pressure of fear – by naked power, by threats, by agents of the state security police’.
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The result was the first big post-war fall in the New York stock market. It recovered, but stocks in some industries never again kept ahead of inflation. In 1966, with
inflation passing the 3 per cent barrier for the first time, and with interest-rates pushing up to the then-daunting level of 5
per cent, the sparkle went out of the Great Bull Market. In 1968, the culminating year of Lyndon Johnson’s troubles, the growth of stocks ended completely, with the Dow-Jones industrial index short of the magic 1,000-mark. Twelve years later, adjusted for inflation, it had fallen to about 300.
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In the decade of the 1970s alone the value of common stocks on the New York Stock Exchange fell by about 42 per cent.
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Cumulatively, the loss of confidence in stocks – that is, in the American business economy – was as great as in the Hoover collapse, though spread over a much longer period.

The flagging stock exchange was only the beginning of the troubles of American business. In 1961 Rachel Carson published
The Sea Around Us
and the next year
The Silent Spring
, in which she drew attention to the alarming pollution of natural resources and the destruction of organic life caused by the processes of booming modern economies, especially the dumping of toxic chemicals and the use of insecticides to raise agricultural production. In 1965 Ralph Nader published
Unsafe at Any Speed
, presenting the characteristic product of the American auto industry, the very heart of the industrial economy, as a death-trap. These books were necessary correctives to the harmful side-effects of rapid growth. But they introduced an era in which the protection of the environment and the consumer became a quasi-religious crusade, fought with increasingly fanatical zeal. It had a peculiar appeal to the hundreds of thousands of graduates now pouring off the campuses as a result of the expansion of higher education, keen to find ways to express the radicalism they absorbed there. Nothing was more calculated to produce a climate hostile to business than the growth of the health and safety lobby. It became a salient feature of American life from the mid-1960s onwards and was soon reflected in a mass of regulatory legislation. With his extraordinary capacity to get laws through Congress, Lyndon Johnson began the process: in 1964 the Multiple Use Act and the Land and Water Act; in 1965 the Water Pollution Act and the Clean Air Act; in 1966 the Clean Water Restoration Act. When Johnson faltered, the ‘Conservation Congress’ of 1968 took the initiative and held it into the 1970s, when a series of gigantic Acts imposed what was termed ‘Ecotopia’ on American business: the Environmental Protection Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the Clean Air Amendments Act and a whole series of Food and Drug Acts. By 1976 it was calculated that compliance with the new regulations was costing business $63 billion a year, plus a further $3 billion to the taxpayer to maintain the government regulatory agencies. Total costs rose to over $100 billion by 1979.
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