# The Khymer Rouge ...what were they thinking?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-khymer-rouge-what-were-they-thinking/689249>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 25, 2014, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-khymer-rouge-what-were-they-thinking/689249 "2014-05-25T23:33:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 41

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**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\
**Post date:** [May 27, 2014, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-khymer-rouge-what-were-they-thinking/689249/41 "2014-05-27T12:21:57Z")

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> [@foolsguinea](#):
>
> Yay, simplistic dualism!
> 
> You know who drove the Khmer Rouge out of power? An invasion by the USSR-backed Vietnamese.
> 
> And where was the great right-wing power, the USA, during all this? Well, we sort of cooperated with the remnants of the Khmer Rouge and considered them a legitimate government in exile, as part of our cooperation with Red China.
> 
> Politics isn’t really only about “left” and “right.”
> 
> ETA: And for the record, if we define “left” as resembling Marx, then the Khmer Rouge were about as non-left as could be. Marx believed in urban workers gaining power, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary removed people’s power to make them agrarian peasants.

There was a political cartoon of the time - “Domino Theory Revisited”. It showed the Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian leaders pushing their giant dominos on top of each other and leaving Thailand standing on the side watching bemused and untouched. Remember that Vietnam also went to war with China… The western war hawks had always claimed that communism had to be stopped in Vietnam lest it proceed to Cambodia, Thailand, then Indonesia, etc. Not quite.

> [@R.P.McMurphy](#):
>
> I’ll also add that the Khmer Rough were a perfect example of what happens when a radical, dogma inspired group takes over. First they kill their enemies. Then they kill people they suspect might be their enemies for whatever reason. Innocents die and the paranoia really takes hold. So then, they start to kill each other.

This is the classic “reign of terror” phase of the revolution - any revolution. The larger consensus group that may have thrown out the original regime becomes increasingly more strident with its ideology. The more shrill the screams of ideology become, the easier it is for the various factions to pick off their rivals by claiming they were insufficiently faithful to the ideals of the revolution. Generally, toward the end, the revolution tends to consume its own; as the more moderate leaders are picked off, the tone of leadership gets more and more irrational.

(One of the most surprising aspects of history is - why did the American Revolution manage to escape this phase?)

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