Cambodian doctor Nal Oum survived the Cambodian genocide after being targeted by the Khmer Rouge communist regime, along with other “intellectuals,” and forced to join a mass exodus from the city to the countryside to live and perform forced labor.
Oum has a sincere warning for the free world, especially for the people in the United States, his home for the past 30 years. Socialist and Marxist ideology has infiltrated American society and divided Americans, with the aim of destroying it from within, he said.
“They come to destroy you from the inside, from the cell of the nation, means the family first,” Oum said in interview for the EpochTV program “American Thought Leaders.”
“The family, after that the nation. Their ambition, is not only one country, it’s the world. But to me, I feel something like, probably America would be the first priority, before the whole world.”
Oum issued this warning because he survived a brutal communist regime that almost destroyed his country.
The Khmer Rouge (KR) controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Marxist leader Pol Pot, who authorized the killing of over 2 million Cambodians and made the “intellectuals” work on communal farms in the countryside, resulting in whole families dying from starvation, sickness, or overwork.
A young Cambodian woman looks at the main stupa in Choeung Ek Killing Fields, which is filled with thousands of skulls of those killed during the Pol Pot regime in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Aug. 6, 2014. (Omar Havana/Getty Images)
Communists don’t achieve their aims out in the open, but instead disguise themselves under the banner of socialism, Oum continued.
“They gained the ground very fast in France, president after president. They keep themselves of socialism, the midway. You know, they have the communist party. The Communist party never succeed to have government in administration, legally,” said Oum.
“But, through a socialist label it was easy for the communist to infiltrate. And please believe, where I come from in Cambodia, I know Vietnam, I know all the people surrounding my country, how the communists plan to rule the world.”
He saw the Vietnamese communists move into his country and take over Cambodia by destroying the society from within first, and then proclaiming to be the saviors who would rescue them.
Oum said he has seen big changes happening in the United States for the last seven to eight years in all walks of society, including at the highest levels of government.
Cambodians flee Khmer Rouge insurgents during artillery shelling of Phnom Penh on Jan. 28, 1974. (AP Photo)
“But for sure, something has changed but I am afraid to tell that this change, if we together, all the people of America, not aware of that, and start to do something to stop it, it will be, I am sorry to tell that, like where I come from (Cambodia) [and] it is a little hard to get rid of it later.”
He said these Marxists use “the sophisticated machine of propaganda” to achieve their goals. In Cambodia he saw the regime use phycological warfare and public opinion warfare, he said. “Manipulate the public, and then the other one, legal warfare.” They will go to any length to gain and keep power, he added.
Karl Marx’s doctrine is the foundation for their thinking, said Oum. People are indoctrinated little by little over time, like osmosis, and he sees this happening in the United States and likened communism to the coronavirus infection, saying it infects and destroys.
“They are not like other people, once they get indoctrinated. Once they get the information, the doctrine, from the propaganda, etc., that forms in the minds a kind of belief.”
Members of the Democratic Socialists of America gather outside of a Trump-owned building in New York City on May 1, 2019. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“When you become communist, you have to do this and do this. You have to gain the power by violence, intimidation, by killing, by destroying anything.” He said those that follow a Marxist ideology, or communism in disguise, have many other strategies to gain and keep power.
“Infiltration, divided, division of society … if there no [unrest] they can create the unrest. The communists tell themselves, create one (unrest) in the country where you go.”
Marxism employs this strategy of dividing society into two groups, with one group being labeled the oppressor and another being oppressed, and Oum sees this playing out in American society today.
Antifa and Black Lives Matter demonstrators protest on election night near the White House in Washington on Nov. 3, 2020. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)
Oum stressed that Marxists and socialists use a tool not usually thought of as deadly but it can be just as lethal as a gun: language.
“We see the communists with their guns, with their anything. But what we usually, hardly we can see, you forget that their language, their dialectic language, what we call the revolutionary language, their own—created by their own—is powerful like a weapon,” Oum said. “They can kill you with their language.”
He said the regime did not value life, and only the labor one could perform was valuable to them. In order to survive, he said you had to “make yourself blind, make yourself deaf, make yourself mute, three rules. Don’t witness anything.”
After a year of living under the brutal regime, doing hard labor, and witnessing unimaginable death, he summoned his courage to run away and escape to Thailand with a clear goal: telling people what he had witnessed under the KR.
When he began planning his escape, he said Winston Churchill’s words came to him, “to pray in the darkest time,” and so, although religion was suppressed, he went to a nearby village to pray before a Buddha statue and ask for courage.
A map that shows the borders of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. (Google Maps)
In the days that followed he began his 22-day journey under the cover of darkness, with only a small bag of dry rice hidden in his sleeve. Sensing a connection to the spiritual realm, he trekked through the jungle and contracted malaria but finally made it out of communist Cambodia into Thailand.
He said he was sustained by one thought throughout his 22 days: to tell the world what he had witnessed under the communist regime, which had a complete disregard for human life and the individual.
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