There's a strange tale in the Observer magazine today by Andrew Anthony, here. It concerns the fate of a British academic called Malcolm Caldwell murdered in Pol Pot's Cambodia.
Caldwell was a political tourist in Cambodia there to observe what he thought was the creation of the perfect communist society. He was somewhat blind to the mass killing and torture that underpinned a paranoid and ideological state. It's a grisly tale where Andrew returns to a number of themes he touched on in his excellent book Fall Out - How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence.
Notably: "The link between Marxist-Leninist ideology and communist terror has never been firmly established in the way that we understand Nazi ideology to have led inexorably to Auschwitz."
As an aside, anarchist rockers Crass made the same point in what is possibly their only decent track, Bloody Revolutions, the lyrics of which are in Love Songs, a collection of poems and lyrics published by Pomona, here. "Transportation details will be left to British Rail, where Zyklon B succeeded North Sea Gas will fail." etc etc
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