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

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Pol Pot's Cambodia: Socialist Vision Carried To Its Logical Conclusion
Pol Pot's Cambodia: Socialist Vision Carried To Its Logical Conclusion — Manhattan Contrarian
28 Feb 2021 ~~ By Francis Menton

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.

• 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.
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.”


Comment:
Hmm.... Lessons in Progressive Marxist Socialist Communism from Cambodia.
The Progressive Marxist/DSA Democrat Left in this country, indirectly orchestrated this genocide in Cambodia by leaving that part of the world to the knives of the Communists,
Anyone who believes that PM/DSA Democrats will stop if we just give them what they demand, today, is NUTS.
They NEVER stop.
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,
Lest we forget, Barack Obama's friend and ghost writer Bill Ayers gave us a peek at what he envisioned once he and his cabal took over. He claimed that a miniumum of 25 million Americans would have to be exterminatedd in order to take complete control. See: Give Us Liberty: 18 Months Into The Fundamental Transformation of America (giveusliberty1776.blogspot.com)
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Are we to believe that the ideology of those elitists within the Progressive Marxist/DSA Democrat Left have changed their attitudes toward those they cannot "re-educate"?

Lesr we forget the closest ally to the Progressive Marxist/DSA Democrat Left idol is “Mao Zedong Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1949 until his death in 1976 and now Xi jinping.
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.”
There is no good reason to believe the Progressive Marxist/DSA Dempcrat Leftists because of their past and present allies.