RUTGERS UNIVERSITY professor Alex Hinton has warned that our government’s prosecution of the war on terror may be causing us to resemble the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal gang that once ran Cambodia. In a piece titled “Lessons from killing fields of Cambodia–30 years on,” published in the Christian Science Monitor last month, Hinton concluded that “the Khmer Rouge teach us difficult lessons about ourselves and the world in which we live.” The chief lesson, according to Hinton, is that we risk heading down “their path to evil” through our conduct “right now in the war on terror.” Hinton’s piece, of little consequence in its own right, represents a specimen of the left’s use of the war on terror to deconstruct American values.

To negate Hinton’s bizarre analogy, one need only recall the history of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. Hinton, without irony, does this himself. The Cambodian government, he notes, collectivized production and consumption, forced essentially its “entire population” into backbreaking and unceasing labor, abolished freedom of worship, cut off contact between its citizens and the outside world, attempted to control what the public “ate and did every day,” and–oh yes–caused the death of more than 1.7 million of the country’s 8 million inhabitants.