1968 Won the Culture War Because Nobody Paid Attention to 1979

 By James Gawron

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There is little to argue with in Dr. Victor Davis Hanson’s level-headed piece, “So who won the ’60s?“

Republicans would claim that they have won more presidential elections since 1968. They would argue that the silent majority eventually saved much of what was still traditional America. Radicals of the ’60s such as Bill Ayers and Jane Fonda were never widely popular.

But turn on the television, watch a movie or an NFL game, listen to popular music, visit a campus, notice how crowds dress and speak, walk down a sidewalk in a major city, and examine the behavior of our celebrities and political class: It’s hard not to conclude that the ’60s won out.

Although the Republican Party and conservatives generally have made powerful counterattacks, the left has used the zeitgeist of 1968 to win the culture war over and over again. I believe the reason for this is that the lesson of 1968 has been preserved in our cultural memory but the lesson of 1979 has been lost if it ever was fully understood.

We withdrew from Southeast Asia in 1975. No longer was America using military force to attempt to counter Communism in the region. With North and South Vietnam now both Communist under Hanoi’s control and with the everpresent world power influence of close by Chinese and Russian Communism, Pol Pot defeated the Lon Nol government and took over Cambodia. This at first appeared a trivial outcome for the region but strangely the most significant event now unfolded. From 1975-1979, the Khmer Rouge perpetrated one of the worst genocides in the already blood-soaked 20th century. Emptying the cities they mass-murdered city dwellers rationalizing it by their twisted ideological scheme. So sick was the Khmer Rouge madness that in 1979 the North Vietnamese invaded and destroyed the Khmer Rouge to be rid of them.

What lesson should have been learned from this but was not. We had been indoctrinated by such lights as Lenin and Frantz Fanon that cultural imperialism was responsible for all of the ills of the developing world. The need of the West to impose its will on other cultures was the root of the problem. From the end of WWII on, the litany against colonialism in our intellectual bastions relentlessly went unchallenged. Marxist liberation movements were seen as a just response to this Western capitalist tyranny.

Cambodia is the answer to all of this. What possible rational reason could the Khmer Rouge have had to commit this atrocity? Did they feel insecure with Communist North & South Vietnam to their east, with Communist China to their north, with Communist Russia more than happy to ship in whatever aid they needed? There is only one answer. It is the answer that the Marxists don’t ever want you to think of. G-dless amoral Communism is just that. Once these master propagandists obtain power their true nature is revealed. Human beings are either moldable clay to be formed into their hideous obsessions or they are threats to be destroyed. Marxism is an inhuman ideology. It was, it is, and it always will be. For all of colonialism’s arrogance, for all of the American cultural clumsiness, none of it was as evil as the genocide perpetrated by the pure Marxist ideologues of the Khmer Rouge.

If that lesson had been learned then 1968 would have been answered once and for all by 1979.

https://ricochet.com/574539/1968-won-the-culture-war-because-nobody-payed-attention-to-1979/