Pol Pot's Cambodia: Socialist Vision Carried To Its Logical Conclusion

Manhattan Contrarian ^ | 28 Feb, 2021 | Francis Menton

[MtnClimber]

About two years ago I visited Cambodia. While there I wrote this January 2019 post, which focused on the “killing fields” genocide that swept Cambodia in 1975-79, during the rule of the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot. In connection with my trip, I bought the Ben Kiernan history titled “The Pol Pot Regime,” which I have just now gotten around to reading.

Why my fascination with Cambodia in the day of the Khmer Rouge? It is one of the clearest modern instances of leftist/socialist ideology put into practice and then pushed to its logical conclusion. Highly educated elitists got taught a utopian vision of a transformed society with perfect fairness and justice, and they determined to impose that vision upon the backward and unlearned masses in their country. Then they came to power, and got the opportunity to carry out their plans. The circumstances in Cambodia were such that they could implement their plans with few to no constraints. We get to study the results. Any relevance to our current situation is for the reader to draw.

Kiernan’s basic approach is that he sought out and interviewed several hundred Cambodians who lived through the events and survived the genocide. The interviews took place starting after the fall of the regime (1979), through the 1980s and into the early 90s (the first edition of the book came out in 1996). This approach has obvious pluses and minuses. On the plus side, this is primary source, first hand information. On the minus side, the people available for interview were not randomly selected and have major gaps in their collective knowledge. Obviously, none of them were killed. If any of them were involved in the killings, they certainly don’t admit to it. Nor did any of the leaders of the regime submit to interviews, so there is nobody to offer testimony as to “here’s why we did it,” or “here’s what we were trying to accomplish.” Nevertheless, there is much to learn.

Here are the things that I find most interesting:

The “peasant revolution.” Naturally the mythology of the Khmer Rouge movement was that it was a “peasant revolution.” It was the opposite — a movement of pointy-headed elitist utopianists. Pol Pot (birth name: Saloth Sar) was born in 1925 to a relatively wealthy farming family (Kiernan: “In later years the family would have been ‘class enemies.’”) with some 30 acres of land and six buffalo. One of Sar’s cousins was a dancer in the royal palace, and became one of the King’s principal wives; then one of his sisters moved into the palace and also became a royal consort. By the age of six, Sar too had moved into the royal palace, and after that was sent to top French colonial schools of the time. In his early twenties, they sent him off for further education in Paris. Big mistake. That’s where he took up the trendy Communism of the day. What later became the Khmer Rouge inner circle — in addition to Pol Pot, it was the Thiounn brothers, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Son Sen — were all his pals from his days as a student in Paris. Needless to say, poor Cambodian peasants did not get sent off to school in Paris.

Military victory. Cambodia in the early 1970s had a U.S.-backed government headed by a military strongman named Lon Nol. Pol Pot had a guerrilla army called the Khmer Rouge that obtained substantial backing from the Soviet Union and China (Kiernan provides no information on the magnitude of the aid). In 1975 the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, and in connection with that withdrew its support for Lon Nol. The Lon Nol regime quickly fell to the Khmer Rouge.

The vision of the anointed. Pol Pot and his pals took their Communist training with utmost seriousness. During their years fighting in the jungle, they put together a full utopian vision to be implemented when they would have power. They were not going to make the mistakes of prior failed attempts at socialism. Instead, this was going to be a far more pure and vigorous variety of the ideology. The vision — much of which seems ridiculous today — included that the cities would be evacuated and everyone sent to the country to work the fields; private property would be entirely abolished, with personal property mostly confiscated and land held collectively; money would be abolished; markets would be abolished; and the nuclear family would be replaced with communal eating and communal care for children.

The early days. In the telling of Kiernan’s witnesses, there was widespread support for the new regime at the outset in 1975. The cities were quickly emptied without substantial resistance, with most people going to some region or village where they had some relatives or other connections. Most of the “new” people were welcomed in the villages and quickly put to work. The work was heavy and manual — tending rice fields or building irrigation works including dams. In the early days, most of the witnesses report that there was sufficient food to eat.

The “indentured agrarian state.” This is Kiernan’s term for the organization of society imposed by the Khmer Rouge. Essentially all work was in agriculture, and everyone took orders from the central state. Private initiative was not welcome.

The killings begin. In my January 2019 post I reported (based on information received while in Cambodia) that the Cambodian genocide was internal to the Khmer ethnic group, rather than involving the extinction of ethnic minorities. Not quite. Beginning in the early days of the Pol Pot regime (1975), essentially all ethnic minorities in Cambodia were wiped out. From Kiernan, page 251: “Chams, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thais, Lao and twenty other groups, who comprised close to 20 percent of the population, were virtually erased from history by the CPK [Communist Party of Kampuchea].”

The killings continue. Aside from the ethnic minorities, the implication from Kiernan’s interviews is that the killings started slowly, but accelerated as 1975 moved to 1976, 1977 and 1978. As noted, Kiernan’s methodology does not give a good basis for understanding if there was an overall plan behind the killings, and if so, what the plan might have been. From this perspective, the whole thing appears largely random, although it may not have been. Rather than mass deportations, this genocide proceeded more like tens or twenties at a time. Time and again, a witness reports something like “Twenty people were taken away from the village ‘for study.’ We never saw them again.” Some of the disappeared had had disagreements, however minor, with Khmer Rouge authorities, or had resisted ongoing disruptions (like having their children taken away). In the less random category, essentially everyone who had held a position of any significance in the Lon Nol regime disappeared. So did nearly everyone who had substantial education or held a professional job prior to 1975.

The economy deteriorates. Kiernan’s methodology does not provide for any kind of coherent overall view of the economy, and in any event it is likely that no honest aggregate economic statistics exist from this period. However, with witness after witness, the story is the same. In 1975 the food rations were generally adequate, and then they went downhill from there. By 1977 many were starving, and by 1978, almost everybody was hungry and there were large numbers of deaths from starvation.

The denouement. By 1979 the situation had become so unstable that Vietnam, then under the control of the Communist successors to Ho Chi Minh, stepped in and removed Pol Pot. Of an initial population of under 8 million in 1975, about 3 million had died. However, the breakdown of those deaths between murder and starvation is less clear.

So do our pointy-headed elites today have anything comparable to the Khmer Rouge vision to impose upon the common people in order to achieve a version of utopia? You might check out the latest brief video from the World Economic Forum with the title “Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world.”

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[ETL]

BLM co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, says in interview she and co-founder, Alicia Garza, are inspired by Mao Zedong

Meanwhile, Mao Zedong, via his so-called “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution”, is reported to have killed close to 70 million people!

Below, from Time Magazine, February 26, 2018

“[Patrisse] Cullors [CO-FOUNDER “BLACK LIVES MATTER”] weaves her intellectual influences into this narrative, from black feminist writers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, to Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

Reading those social philosophers “provided a new understanding around what our economies could look like,” she says.

Aric Jenkins | Time Magazine | February 26, 2018
________________________________

“I went through a year-long organising programme at the National School for Strategic Organising (NSSO), and it was led by the Labour Community Strategy Centre.

We spent the year reading, anything from Marx, to Lenin, to Mao...”

-—Patrisse Cullors, co-founder Black Lives Matter

_____________________________

Profile: Mao Zedong (aka Mao tse-Tung)

“Mao Zedong was the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1949 until his death in 1976.

Mao is arguably the greatest mass murderer in history, eclipsing even the murderous Joesph Stalin in this regard.

Some 70 million Chinese, along with countless Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchus, Koreans, Hmong, Uyghurs, and other nationalities, perished at his hands during his long and brutal reign.”

DiscoverTheNetworks com

[Bulwyf]

A lot of us got it very clearly 20 years ago or more, but apparently we’re still in the awkward phase.

[BobL]

“When I began doing it here years ago, there were actually people who accused me of exaggerating or even being “paranoid”.”

I never got that treatment, but instead I’m just ignored by the Germans, I mean Americans, thinking “It can NEVER happen here, not in this wonderful country that is the envy of the world.”

And, sadly, I do think it will take a bloodbath for enough people on our side to finally ‘get it’. And then they’ll try to get out, but find themselves locked out by the rest of the world...because they waited too long.

[BobL]

“A lot of us got it very clearly 20 years ago or more, but apparently we’re still in the awkward phase.”

Not enough, sadly. I don’t see how we overcome that, either.

[ETL]

You’d think the communists in the Democrat party and those running the “peaceful protests” in our streets would learn from history, yet they never seem to.
________________________________

The long bloody FAILED history of COMMUNISM...

And you can add to the following totals the now ONE MILLION PLUS (worldwide) already dead from the communist China virus that they KNOWINGLY set loose upon the world. .......

“The Black Book of Communism, a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone [65+ million for communist China under Mao Zedong]), and some say that number is too low.”

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
by Jonah Goldberg, August 2008

[Nateman]

[taterjay]

Thanks for the additional information. By the time Vietnam ended, I doubt anyone wanted to hear much about that part of the world. Yes, there was Nixon, the oil crisis, inflation, lots of other distractions going back to the mid 70s when this occurred.

[BobL]

Yea, there was plenty to report on. But I also remember Ford saying that as far as we’re concerned, the Vietnam War is over.

Incredible that we were able to win the Cold War with leadership like that.

[ETL]

Lol! That’s great!

And I know you did the work yourself, having seen many of your previous stuff over the years.

[Nateman]

Actually some one else came up with the idea. I just clean up the speech balloons so it was easier to read.

[ETL]

Still, nice job!

It’s a good one.

[MtnClimber]

I agree, very good dark humor.

[MtnClimber]

Playbook for Progressives must be the master’s-level follow on to Rules for Radicals.

[Nateman]

This one I can take credit for. (Or the blame)

[ETL]

Lol! That reminds me a LOT of a cartoon series I did years ago for a science club I belonged to here in New York years ago. Put a little of everything into it. Some I did were like a “Find Waldo”-type challenge.

[aquila48]

“That’s why ANYONE who thinks that they’ll stop if we just give them what they demand, today, is NUTS.

Think about it - 50 years ago, they only wanted to not be arrested for what they did in the bedroom. We gave them it. Now we have Drag Queens in libraries reading to little kids and a Drag Queen testifying to Congress last week. Get it, yet?

They NEVER stop”

And why should they? Relying on them to voluntarily stop is like relying on termites to voluntarily stop destroying a house when they’ve been allowed to eat away one room without repercussions?

Utopians, like termites, have to be constantly fumigated to keep them from destroying the whole “house” - and we are not doing that.

How does that saying go? “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Edmund Burke

[Nateman]

Speaking of Waldo...

[SunkenCiv]