The Horrific Stories were True

Some humility on the left, years later. Powerline:

The Times (London) is giving away a DVD of "The Killing Fields" to readers today. It has accordingly called on William Shawcross to comment on the film and has published his column "Remember: For Cambodia, read Iraq." Shawcross refers to his own experience researching the events depicted in the film:

At the end of 1975 I went to the Thai-Cambodian border to talk to refugees. Their horrific stories of people with glasses being killed as “intellectuals” and of “bourgeois” babies being beaten to death against trees were being dismissed as CIA propaganda by the antiAmerican Western Left, but it seemed obvious to me that they were true. I wanted to discover how the Khmer Rouge had grown and come to power; I wrote a book called Sideshow, which was very critical of the way in which the United States had brought war to Cambodia while trying to extricate itself from Vietnam.

But horror had engulfed all of Indo-China as a result of the US defeat in 1975. In Vietnam and Laos there was no vast mass murder but the communists created cruel gulags and, from Vietnam in particular, millions of people fled, mostly by boat and mostly to the US. Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble.

You see, in the aftermath of our catastrophic retreat, the horrific stories were true.