Important to Humanity

Presumably in order to help absolve itself of being the educational, scientific and cultural wing of Hamas, UNESCO has added one of America's more spectacular cultural achievements to its list of world heritage sites. Two Khmer Rouge prisons and a killing field are to be ranked as a fitting twentieth-century contibution to the catalogue of human aspiration that includes the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat. Despite the official Hollywood recognition of the Cambodian catastrophe, the selection may well be controversial; not least because, unlike the colonisers of America and the Righteous State, the brutal communists of the Khmer Rouge did not aspire to genocide. They were not trying to exterminate the Cambodian people, merely to deliver them into a redeeming agrarian utopia: a patriotic urge akin to the British establishment's penchant for rewriting the history of the Second World War and kicking out the wogs, and having rather less in common with Marx and Lenin than with the more otherworldly reaches of Buddhism. It was doubtless this lack of appropriate ethnic cleanliness that prevented the Khmer Rouge being fully accepted into the international community until after its officially brutal communist régime acquired a measure of legitimacy through its heinous removal by the communist Vietnamese.