No Holiday in Cambodia

"Ocasio-Cortez already receives a high number of death threats; by allowing this PAC to air an ad that links her to genocidal violence in Cambodia, ABC grants undeserved legitimacy to ideas that make her a target."https://t.co/fUWquQjDKc

— Democratic Coalition (@TheDemCoalition) September 13, 2019

This is probably deeply ill-advised of me to notice, but I'm a Gen-X blogger who realized a long time ago that I'm not really presidential material (even if the fitness of the current resident makes even me and my tattoos feel a little like, what the hell? Y not?) so let me just say--wow, but by the visibly melting frame of the yet-living Hank Kissinger, are we really going to go through whether the left-liberalism calling itself democratic socialism is kinda Khmer Rougey and not take notice of the entire right-wing foreign policy failure at influencing positive change with respects to....

Why, no. No we are not doing that. Or at least, you go ahead and do that history dissertation if you've a mind, but:  This is actually just my usual warning that conservative rhetoric is inflammatory and that inflammatory rhetoric is really the thing we should worry about regarding genocide, not mere issues of domestic economy. Because conservatives have been doing this thing with inflammatory and violent rhetoric. And sometimes it results in bad things.



There is an argument to be made that "The Squad" are idealists that are not familiar with the pitfalls of idealist arguments, backed up with the ways those arguments have been backstopped with violence, but those arguments both depreciate the intellect and personal lived experiences of the congresswomen, and deprecate the democratic experiment we have here in the US. Socialism could not prosper here if it was not popular. The potential for a deadly populist movement attacking people for their beliefs is seldom a liberal thing. The NYT op-ed page would scarcely approve.

The targeting of AOC strikes at her as a dangerous gadfly--as if she is dangerous because she doesn't know where her economic ideas lead politically. But she is a scholar in that regard. And as a freshman congresswoman, I'm not sure what her authority to even initiate a deadly pogram of any sort would be, but I can understand very well why that type of imagery would be used. The ad is an inflammatory and incoherent shambles, but its intent is transparent. Socialism in the US is alleged to be just like murderous communism in a country entirely unlike ours in a different time. Because why not?

The reason why not is because there is no reason why it should be. We can adopt some economic plans that might be beneficial, reject others, and  it's all about representatives voting. What sort of privileged, elite-benefitting zomby would have it otherwise? The dangerous gadfly is the one who associates well-intentioned representatives with malignant ghosts as if democracy as a force for change meant nothing.