Gary Glitter - The thinking-man's Pol Pot?

December 28^th – Where do we get our reference points from? I mean, take obscenity; what makes one thing obscene and another not when you know, all along, the bounds of propriety have been well passed on both counts… Sorry, you know how my head works and I tend to write these things as I think them, hence you’ve had to sit through 362 days of gobbledegook… apologies; bit late now but nonetheless heartfelt. I’ll try and explain.

When the Americans got involved in Vietnam I’m sure the reasons they did made sense to those who instigated it; politicians, arms dealers, commie-haters in general, they all owned a tub of balm-of-conscience they could rub on themselves in moments of challenge (I was going to write doubt rather than challenge but those sorts of self-promoting pedants are never in any doubt as to the rightness of their stance, and anyway, Uncle Sam would soon crush those of the backward jungle-hustlers persuaders. I remember the highly-coloured T shirts of the day you could buy and wear with pride. Caricatures of cigar-chomping, muscle-laden US Marines with a blazing machine gun in each hand, two strips of belted ammo whizzing through the magazine, as they rode a drop-top, blown Chevy hot rod with the emblem;

VC FOR BREAKFAST – KILL A GOOK A MINUTE

emblazoned above their head in bold, black-and-red capitals…PC wasn’t all it could have been back then.

I think one of the central things that impressed themselves on me about war, when you watch real action movie footage of actual battles, is the total randomness of the slaughter. Why one person gets killed and another not, why a collapsing building hit by tank fire destroys one group of people and not another. Less puzzling is the systematic slaughter of thousands by leaders who believe they have the vision that others lack and that this vision somehow needs the well-planned murder of anyone outside of the central tenet of their belief; Pol Pot was onesuch.

This was a man so secretive it took the very best the international community could put together by way of counter-intelligence over a year to figure out that Pol Pot and Saloth Sar were one and the same person. He it was who masterminded the Cambodian communists (CPK’s) resistance against the might of both the Vietnamese and the US war machine…for years. Trouble was, as with just about every leader we’ve had and got, it’s a case of don’t do as I do, do as I say. Pol Pot decided that a return to an agrarian culture would be the best way forward for his people; not for him you understand, just the people. For him, he would live in the manner to which he would like to become accustomed, which meant the best of everything, but the people? They could slog it out in the fields every day (that’s as in every day) and live on a daily, small bowl of rice…between six; besides, honest labour was good for the soil…I mean soul. Dissenters were executed, intellectuals were murdered (those intellectual enough to dare to ask why) non-willing workers were put into forced labour camps and people who became sick because of a poor, inadequate diet, a lack of simple medicines or brutish working conditions were left to die: this ideology accounted for the deaths of around 3 million people; 25% of the Cambodian population in just four years; for those of a fussy inclination that’s 2,400 per day.

Now you’d reckon that even a relatively poorly-armed populace would eventually say;

FM, that’s a-fuckin’-nuff. Get this mad, bad and dangerous to know fruit-loop outta here.

But, no, even after three years of his policies Pol Pot still commanded sufficient influence and support to run it through a fourth. It was an army of Vietnamese forces that eventually cut short his regime (ably supported by outside forces, of course) but even then, Pol Pot escaped capture and melted into the jungles where he was guarded and cared for by the Chinese and a core support group of Khmer Rouge who, one imagines, thought he’d been doing a good job and needed preserving. As governments of pragmatism do in all these cases they elected a repenting Khmer Rouge general (goodness knows how involved he’d been in the massacres) as the new leader of an installed government more to their liking and Pol Pot was declared persona non grata by the bulk of the people who had once fought under his banner; one of the lessons learnt early on by a persecuted populace is when to switch sides.

If you take away nothing else from this chat then carry this with you: in matters of high concern (political power, conglomerate power, monetary gain) you can trust no one; they’ll sell their granny (and yours) for a crack at the title and they don’t care who they fuck over to get and keep it; seriously. Blair, Merkel, Farage, Cameron, Hamid, Medina, Bush, Abbott, Hollande. And this is because they have the ability to brush aside singular deaths for the pursuit of the greater good…make of that what you will.

Thing is you can’t fathom the workings of a population fighting for personal survival and the doctrine of the bullet. In spite of Mr. Pot having presided over and personally orchestrated the wholesale slaughter of his countrymen their was still enough support for him to be a troublesome alternative to what was laughingly called the official governing body by the pragmatist politicians. Amazing isn’t it; slit y’ throat one day, best of pals the next. My guess is rubber and timber had something to do with the need for some sort of settlement to be reached…timber that the wholesale use of the Agent Orange strategy had left standing that is.

South East Asia has something of a troubling reputation for sex tourism, particularly for child-sex tourism. Open touting by Lady Boys and prostitutes of all ages are seen as part of the local colour of the towns and cities, indeed it’s often the only way to earn a living above subsistence level. And for this market there’re many of that persuasion who scrimp and scrape to be able to afford their annual sojourn in order to indulge their little peccadilloes. And although indulging in under-age sex isn’t exactly condoned, still it’s easier to obtain there than in most other so-called civilised countries…or is it that it’s just better concealed in such other civilised countries?

However, even here there’s a certain line over which it would seem even the Vietnamese demand something must be done. When Gary Glitter’s extradition was sought by the UK government on child pornography charges in 2002, on this day he was swiftly ushered onto a plane and deported to face the wrath of the British courts; the process took a matter of weeks.

Now I don’t want to get into an argument with anyone about the merits of a sleb indulging in some under-age sex versus the finding and persecuting of a mass murderer but, does the preceding not strike anyone else as, well, at all odd?