Appendix B: Koreans in Japan and the DPRK

Abstract

It is not often that an entire group of people change their minds on a foreign policy issue, at least within a short space of time. On Kampuchea, this did occur around 1978, when most of those who had previously sympathized with the Khmer Rouge declared their disillusionment. It meant admitting that there was much truth to the militant anti-communists' well-publicized case against the Khmer Rouge, who were indeed one of history's most brutal regimes. In the same period, however, as Michael Vickery has shown in “Democratic Kampuchea—CIA to the Rescue,” many of the same anti-communists suddenly dropped their opposition to the Khmer Rouge, whom they now saw as a useful opponent of Vietnamese communism.