I’m watching The Killing Fields on TCM tonight. One thing that strikes me: the Khmer Rouge government doesn’t want intellectuals, or anybody who knows how to do anything other than plant seeds and pick plants. It kills such people, and just wants uneducated people to farm, and do nothing else. I understand that the Khmer Rouge philosophy was Maoist at its root, but not even the Chinese Cultural Revolution was as cruel as what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodians.
What did the Khmer Rouge hope to achieve in Cambodia, especially with an uneducated population?
Don’t look at the whole movement. Look at the individuals making choices.
If you’re in a situation where people are being killed for not being zealous enough in their support for the killings, you’re probably going to try to out-kill the people around you so your fervor doesn’t get questioned and you don’t end up as one of the victims. It’s dangerous to be the guy who questions whether all the killing is necessary.
As I understood it - they wanted to create a pure Marxist society. The thought was that anyone with western education, or exposed to ideas from the capitalist system, was a corrupting influence and would set back the cause of creating their pure society. It extended to ideas such as - if you had glasses, you must have been educated, and therefore there was no way to cleanse you of these polluted capitalist ideas. If you ran a store or taught in a school, ditto. If you were part of an existing government bureaucracy - ditto.
General though is they eliminated 10% or more of the population. I suppose they thought this was practical because they planned to start with a purely peasant base who would be shown only the “true” way. It would have been far more challenging in a more widely educated, less agrarian society.
Someone more knowledgeable can elaborate, but basically Marx said the final worker’s paradise would have no money, everyone worked for the common good and pooled everything, etc. The Khmer thought this was a shortcut to get there.
Based on Marx’s ideas about the Paris revolutions, and other revolutionary movements he studied, communism developed the idea that ‘counter-revolutionaries’ would work to reverse the revolution, and that the existing system didn’t just need to be removed from power – it needed to be broken and destroyed to prevent it from returning to power.
There wasn’t anything unusual about the French-based political ideas of Red Cambodia: other communist revolutions had done the same thing, and it was standard communist ideology. Both China and Russia had genocidal purges. Cambodia just took it farther.
America would have been anti-communist anyway, because of the strong individualistic, anti-communal streak in American politics, but it’s interesting to realize that American involvement in Vietnam wasn’t just because of fear of Russia, or China, or opinion on the best form of government. It was also because revolutionary communist governments killed people.
Just that whether an Indochinese regime was communist or not, or a bunch of murdering thugs or not, was not what determined whether they enjoyed American support; things were more complicated than that.