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Michael Ezra
I Malcolm Caldwell, Scottish Marxist academic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS) was born in 1931. A lifelong man of the left, he had been the Chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a long-term member of the Labour Party [1] even standing as a Labour candidate in the 1977 local elections in Bexley, Kent. [2] He had also been selected by Bertrand Russell to be on the founding board of a radical monthly magazine The Spokesman that was supported by the Russell Foundation. [3] He was known to make some absurd and preposterous prophecies, claiming that by the 1990s there would be no oil left in the world [4] and that by the mid-1980s, Scotland would be independent of England. [5] But Caldwell was most in his element when writing about the demonstrated strengths of the communist system. [6] With a persuasive ability, he helped to transform at least one persons anti-authoritarianism and love of ordinary people into a fierce and angry communism. [7] Whilst he ultimately became known for his support for the Communist regime in Cambodia, [8] Pol Pot was not the only despotic dictator to garner his approval. Kim Il-Sungs North Korea, Caldwell believed, was an astonishing tribute not only to the energy, initiative and creativeness of the Korean people, but also to the essential correctness of the Juche line. No non-free world country that he had visited (including China) had impressed him more in terms of its all-round economic achievements. [9] On a report of a trip he made to North Korea, his astute political analysis included the observation that the female military uniform is quite attractive: fitted tunic and pleated skirt. [10] Caldwell had gone further than vocal critics against the war in Vietnam; he wanted North Vietnam to win. He headed up the South-east London Centre for Socialist Education that staged an event in 1966 to raise money for the purchase of arms by the Vietcong for use in their heroic resistance to foreign military aggression. [11] His support for Ho Chi Minhs North Vietnam went so far that in 1967, the Guardian reported that Caldwell, along with the 1960s radical Tariq Ali, were considering opening up a North Vietnamese restaurant and that Hanoi had been approached who promised to provide a super-chef. [12]
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Michael Ezra lives in London. His essay The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and her Critics appeared in Democratiya 9 (Summer 2007). Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Steve Heder for his help with an enquiry, Sophal Ear and David Patrikarakos for their comments on a draft of this essay and Paul Bogdanor for his encyclopaedic knowledge of relevant source material. Finally, the assistance by the staff at SOAS library, including help gaining me access to the personnel file of Malcolm Caldwell, is very much appreciated. References
Barron, John and Anthony Paul 1977, Peace With Horror: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia, London: Hodder and Stoughton, NB. This book was published in the USA with the title, Murder of a Gentle Land. Becker, Elizabeth 1978a, Terror Slaying in Cambodia, The Washington Post, 24 December: A1. Becker, Elizabeth 1978b, Phnom Penh: A Vanished Citizenry; Former Phnom Penh People Hard to Find, The Washington Post, 31 December: A1. Becker, Elizabeth 1982a, Cambodia: Murder with a twist: New findings indicate that the real killers of British scholar Malcolm Caldwell in Cambodia were not the Vietnamese, Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 116, Number 16, 16-22 April: 20. Becker, Elizabeth 1982b, How a Western radical fell victim to a murderous Oriental intrigue, Guardian, 21 April: 8. Becker, Elizabeth 1988, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, New York: Public Affairs.
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Notes
[3] New journal for Left on sale next week, 1970. [4] Windschuttle 2006. [5] Becker 1988, p. 427. [6] Caldwell 1967. [7] Hawkins 1998. [8] In this essay, for the period under Pol Pots leadership, Cambodia and Democratic Kampuchea are used as interchangeable terms. [9] Caldwell 1979a, p. 94.
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