Follow the Leader
“Strong friendships seldom depend upon frequency of visits for their strength and meaning. While [I] have had too few occasions to be with you…..I draw deep strength and inspiration from our bond…”
Lyndon B. Johnson
1960; People's Republic of China
Thirty million: the invisible numbers.
Dry blistery tongues, struck with miserable hunger
Praying for the considerate kiss of a gun to bring infinite slumber
The carnivorous sun beats on victims like symphony drums
Until skin is vermillion in color; a charred agrarian slave is
Paid in various grains, while the General reaps incomparable wages
Invariant matrices riddle the nefarious state - People's Communes
An endless cycle of labor, the whispers of evil call you
And you work until your feeble fall through - coerced into service
Till your used up and collapse before a metallurgical furnace
Vertebrae curving - under the colossal weight of this hostile state
Rebels abducted and vanished at the witching hour..
Their blood drips from the lips of Mao's vicious scowl
With no device to limit power - his subjects collapse like broken vessels
- The apathy of an open desert beneath the Sun's angry flame
is The helm and call of his scary reign -
1977; Democratic Republic of Kampuchea
Villagers huddled in filthy corners
Skin stretched thin over ribs, these victims tortured
In this prison, corpses riddle floors like sickened portents
Of the grimness forming -
It tumbles in to the prison in the form of Cambodian villagers
Those abducted - stolen, imprisoned till the end of their eroding existence
It's so cold - they're either frozen or prone to explosive conniptions
And they're eyes hold the visions - they've recently seen
Desperate stares tell of the red Khmers
Like a fever dream - their families huddle in little shacks
As the Santabel exhibits its vicious wrath, they'd strike and maim
With rifles trained, they'd lock up survivors - the violence drained
The blood of traditional thought - any eminent scholar
Would be left crippled to rot in disgusting tenement squalor
The entire peasantry slaughtered by Pol Pot's scythes of destiny
Eliminate dissonant talk - the most primal weaponry
And let the survivors raise crops to be stolen away in government trucks
For a leader who assumes that next to nothings enough
Stomachs rumbling, surrendering, become another drop in the ocean
Another corpse in a mass grave, another captive in holding...
- This savage controlling Cambodia, this psychotic sovereign
Finally recreating his dream of a genocidal apocalypse -
Countless thrones have designed a virulent victory
That can inspire a mind like a child in infancy
in science, we stand on the soldiers of giants
But government sails on the bloody tides of history
Quote:
Once in power, Pol Pot began a radical experiment to create an agrarian utopia inspired in part by Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution which he had witnessed first-hand during a visit to Communist China.
Mao's "Great Leap Forward" economic program included forced evacuations of Chinese cities and the purging of "class enemies." Pol Pot would now attempt his own "Super Great Leap Forward" in Cambodia, which he renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea.
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http://www.historyplace.com/worldhis...de/pol-pot.htm