Have just watched another depressing yet morbidly fascinating doco on the Khymer Rouge and the inconceivable level of cruelty and mass murder inflicted on the Cambodian people by them. The whole tragic episode has been well documented …but what I have never seen explained is what exactly was Pol pot’s vision for Cambodia? After killing all the “enemies of the people” (defined as anyone who could speak French, doctors, teachers, anyone with a degree etc etc), emptying out all the cities, breaking the concept of a family unit …what was he hoping to end up with?? A utopia of terrified, malnourished subjigated people spending their lives in brutal manual labour? It just doesn’t make sense.
Other historic despots at least had some sort of understandable vision (albeit inexcusable)…but what was his?
He envisioned a totally communistic, agrarian society that had no need for technology or urban living. That why he drove people out of the cities and killed the intellectuals.
Ironically, if you visit the Killing Fields outside on Phnom Penh there is a survivor that sells his book. The reason he survived was that he was able to repair typewriters.
To say that Pol Pot was misguided is an ultimate understatement.
To see how far Cambodia has come in 40 years, considering the carnage and loss of many of their most capable people, is remarkable.
Why do you assume that they had any kind of “vision”?
The one thing that characterize the political left is that they all have a lust for power over other people, and enjoy nothing better than to dictate to others how they should live their lives.
So the tragedy of Cambodia is the logical outcome of the political left getting absolute power.
I’ve been pondering this for a long time. I’ve had some personal experience with it in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’ve read a number of books about early Communist China and other things. Here are my personal conclusions:
The mob needs and enemy to fear and hate. The fact that the “enemy” in this case was the wealthy, the landowners, and the educated allows them to easily portray them as greedy, immoral, etc. Think ‘Occupy Wall Street’ with guns. Also, check out Nietzche’s Master & Slave morality.
The wealthy, the landowners, and the educated are the ones with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The poor have everything to gain and little to lose, so they are the ones you want on your side during a revolution.
Pol Pot killed anyone who even LOOKED intellectual, largely because educated people have the ability to call him out on his BS and provide a counter-argument. They can also educate others, which is even worse. The Communist Chinese did the exact same thing: Anyone educated got whacked or at least placed under heavy scrutiny and suspicion, and anyone who asked questions or pointed out flaws in the Communist agenda got punished as a counter-revolutionary. People interested in survival learned really fast not to argue or ask pointed questions.
OP mentioned the disintegration of the family unit… Welcome to Communism! Actually, it doesn’t matter if you are talking about Nazi Germany, Red China, North Korea, or Scientology… dictators HATE competition, so any other source of community and motivation (be it family, school, church, or whatever) must either be subverted or destroyed.
Rejection of technocracy is the same phenomenon we see in the Middle East. They know that the First World nations have surpassed them in power, wealth, and knowledge. So they have two choices… Admit that they are subordinate to the First World and spend the rest of their lives trying to catch up, or they can completely reject the First World and all Western values by creating a competing value system that gives meaning to their shitty, impoverished lives. Again, check out “Slave Morality.”
At the end of the day, it all boils down to power. Again, you can talk about Afghanistan, or Liberia, or Sierra Leone, or any other hell-hole in the third world and you’ll see the same thing. You take a starving farmer who is poor, ignorant, and has no future, hand him an AK-47, and let him make something of himself. Even being a terrorist is more glamorous, exciting, and meaningful than being a shepherd. Get yourself a beret and a Che Guevara t-shirt and you are on the fast track to money, power, fame, and women. You now have the power to overthrow the existing social structure (where you were at the bottom) and claim your place as King of the Shit People, or whatever you want to call yourself. You don’t even have to buy into the cult. My personal theory (supported by many anecdotes and experience) is that many of the horrible people in this world aren’t even hard-core Communist or Jihadist believers… they just want the $$$$$.
As Milton wrote, it’s better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.
Not that I’ve studied Marxism or read much about it, but IIRC he thought the ideal “end game” of economics was a worker’s paradise, where the need for money, government, a ruling elite, etc. would become irrelevant. He saw the bankers as the merchant class, the intellectual elite that supported them, as obstacles to accomplishing this end. The ideal “state” would simply be collectives of workers selflessly producing what they could to distribute equally among the rest of society. Basically the Christian ideal of “give up all your riches and follow me”, but without God… (and f course, anyone who was active in a religion was a toady to the ruling elite - religion was the opiate of the masses and all that)
Pol Pot’s logic was that anyone who was part of the current “establishment” was already tainted and therefore unable to participate in the coming workers’ paradise. Similarly, the technology needed to keep a large city going was only encouraging elitism and feelings of superiority. Everyone had to move back out to the land and become peasants so they could all be equal. It got to the point where anyone with glasses was killed because it was assumed they were literate - in French - and therefore beyond saving.
As is usual with revolutions when they reach the phase of “reign of terror” each member of the group was competing to outdo the others in “revolutionary zeal”. No act was too depraved as long as the underlying justification could be tied to the ideals of the revolution.
The Cambodian Khmer Rouge were much influenced by the Chinese Communists. In China too the party had been very critical of professionals and city folk in general, idealizing peasants and the agrarian community. Many people there found themselves stripped of their profession and shipped off to remote farms to work on the land. Cambodia took it a step further by emptying the cities completely.
Pretty much SOP for those on the left side of the political equation. All who disagree with their vision need to be violently dealt with. No matter where you look it is the same.
Chihuahua poses some interesting points, but I’m not sure I’d fully agree with number 4. Some dictators like Franco or Pinochet were strongly pro-family. Franco also based a lot of his power on the Catholic church. So I would claim that dictators tend to target sources of community… unless they can subvert them.
Without knowing much about Cambodia I would guess that the Khmer Rouge never had a chance of subverting the intellectuals, so they just decided to wipe them out?
One of the ways that Marxism in practice was at fundamental odds with Marxism in theory is that Marx’s theory of history states that socialist and ultimately communist states would emerge out of advanced industrialized capitalist countries with large urban proletariat classes. That doesn’t really describe any of the countries that became nominally Marxist (with Cambodia perhaps one of the least so) and so various corollaries and revisions to Marxist theory had to be invented to explain how these countries were simply going to skip that step in Marx’s theory of history. That’s one of the major reasons for the proliferation of post-Marx sub-ideologies like Leninism, Maoism, etc
One of Maoism’s major modifications of Marxist theory was the rejection of an urban proletariat class being a necessary precursor to communism, pointing to the rural peasantry instead as the revolutionary class, essentially removing the steps between feudalism and communism, but they still believed in the gist of the Marxist progression of history.
The Khmer Rouge were influenced by the rural and agrarian nature Maoism but took it in an even more radical direction. As their ultimate goal, instead of looking towards the industrialized communism at the end of Marx’s progression of history, they looked backwards to the tribal primitive communism that he placed at the beginning, before even feudalism and slave societies. Thus, while the other Marxist states were in the position of trying to industrialize and modernize while simultaneously moving towards communism, the Khmer Rouge thought that the path to their communist endgame was by de-industrializing and de-modernizing.
It simply comes down to an insatiable desire to have power and control over people. Pol Pot is certainly not the first to do it. Nor will he be the last.
As a conservative-libertarian, I would like to agree with you. But this is not a left-wing/right-wing thing. Radicals on both ends of the political spectrum want the same thing: power and control over people.
I think a some of the above comments over simplify the nature of things. The Khmer Rouge (aka Communist Party of Kampuchea) and its hellish reign was based upon a lot of factors common to a great number of similar hellish regimes, and has not a great deal to do with simple left versus right (indeed that idea is already betraying a very Western idea of the nature of politics.) The ideas behind the regimes philosophy were ironically highly intellectual* - a thesis disputing the need to modernise and industrialise an agrarian economy as a precursor to economic and societal progress (which probably answers the OP). It started as a communist set of ideas, but diverged very significantly. As the Khmer Rouge gained power the ideas became quickly inward looking, highly xenophobic and nationalistic. They killed everyone of Vietnamese or Chinese heritage, including members of the party. A country that has been invaded and dominated by its neighbours (and carpet bombed by the US) can very easily find a fertile ground for highly nationalistic ideals. In recent times the nearest approximation to the overall structure of the party’s actions would be closer to the Nazis than much else. The Khmer Rouge were also different to many other totalitarian regimes in that they were not expansionist, rather inward looking and isolationist.
There is little doubt that according to the party’s ultimate manifesto the founders of the party should themselves have been executed very early in the game.
A big part of the ultimate disaster was total inattention paid by the rest of the world. It wasn’t until the Vietnamese army invaded (initially to world condemnation) that the outside world found out what had been going on. Left to itself the revolution had started to feed on itself (in a manner we have seen in other revolutions - including famously the French) with a seemingly endless need to continue to find excuses to execute people. Becoming a self perpetuating reign of terror that gutted the country. By then ideology had long ceased to matter.