History Repeating: The Horrors Of Communist Takeover Through The Eyes Of A Little Girl

‘First They Killed My Father’ Reveals Real Horrors Through the Eyes Of a Little Girl

BRYAN PRESTON

The poorly-organized militias easily took control of the city streets. There was no resistance. Right after that, they sorted people out according to who they worked for, how rich they were. They broke up families and took their property away, in the name of making everyone “equal.”

Then the street executions followed. And more followed them. Millions more. 

Ordinary people who had been living ordinary lives suddenly found themselves ruled by these young, unelected militias who openly hated and loudly denounced everyone who disagreed with them. They forced children into labor or warfighting, while the old were ostracized, marginalized, or killed. 

It was Year Zero, but to the rest of the world it was 1975 and the place was Cambodia, though it’s happened in one guise or another elsewhere, wherever socialism, communism, and national socialist variants have taken hold. 

First They Killed My Father tells the story of Luong Ung, a happy five-year-old girl in Phnom Penh. Her father was a high-ranking government official. Her family was Cambodian upper middle class up until April 1975. Then the Khmer Rouge swept the government aside and destroyed all in their path in the name of imposing Marxism with a Cambodian twist — the “Khmer” being the nationalist brand to the “Rouge,” meaning “red” for communism. The clever grafting of racial identity with communism set Cambodia on a terrible path. 

This film sees Cambodia’s communist holocaust through the eyes of a little girl caught up in the terrible events. Her bewilderment pulls the viewer right down with her through the jungles and into the mud on the collective farms and paramilitary training camps. 

First They Killed My Father is based on a true story and was shot in Cambodia using all local actors speaking in their native Khmer. It’s subtitled throughout. There are no Hollywood stars; most of the story is carried on the shoulders of seven-year-old actress Sareum Srey Moch. Her mostly unemotional performance conveys the confusion and numbness her real-life counterpart — Luong Ung, on whose memoirs the film is based — must have felt as the Khmer Rouge destroyed her life and forced her into servitude and warfighting.

As we see statues toppled, vandalized, and beheaded in streets given over to rioting mobs now, the ghost of Pol Pot is there. As people set about burning the books of J.K. Rowling and denouncing every single thing that came before them, the Khmer Rouge is there too and it should remind us of other sinister moments in history. 

The Khmer Rouge, little known to most Americans, ruthlessly judged its forebears — toppling and beheading their statues, crushing gender in favor of revolutionary androgyny, intentionally destroying families, society, and culture to remake it all in their own image. Sound familiar?

America’s schools are teaching wokeness and socialism now, in the guise of a false “equality.” Are they teaching where these bad ideas lead? Evidently not. Millennials and Gen Z aren’t getting educated, to the point that too many of them have little or no understanding even of the Nazi holocaust. They have no idea the Khmer Rouge even happened, or that Venezuela is happening — and most importantly, why. 

Instead of teaching wokeness, schools must show First They Killed My Father and Mr. Jones, two recent films that tell the truth: that socialism is slavery and its lofty promises are terrible lies.