Cultural Revolution vs Year Zero

[Invincible Summer]

What's the difference? I don't know too much about Cambodia/Pol Pot, but I've heard some non-leftists compare Year Zero to the GPCR. I don't see many Maoists do this, so what's going on here?

[Proletarian Ultra]

The GPCR was a many-sided campaign of artistic ferment, socialist education, mass work and political struggle - usually with words but sometimes with fists or worse. The careers of many party officials were ruined, with some beaten to death or driven to suicide. One part of the GPCR involved sending young party cadres to work in villages to teach and learn from the peasantry.

Year Zero involved evacuating the entire urban population at gunpoint to work as gang labor in the countryside, with enormous mortality resulting.

I suppose there's sort of a resemblence. Kind of like the resemblence between The Princess Bride and Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma.

[redSHARP]

year zero was a terrible plan that was vaguely socialist and led to the deaths of millions. Some scholars argue that the Cambodian genocide was due to racism not socialism. Year zero was an attempt to start cambodia anew and rebuild society using the peasants as a base, from there the government wanted to expand cambodian borders to their former khmer empire's borders.

[Invincible Summer]

I suppose I should elaborate:

I've heard the comparison made between the "Destruction of the Four Olds" aspect of the GPCR and Year Zero, although obviously they didn't turn out the same way. What I suppose the argument is, is that Year Zero's goal of turning Cambodia into a fresh slate on which to build a new society is the same/similar in spirit to the aspect of the GPCR that involved destroying vestiges of old reactionary culture.

How does one make clear that the GPCR was/would not be the same as Year Zero?

[Adi Shankara]

I suppose I should elaborate:

I've heard the comparison made between the "Destruction of the Four Olds" aspect of the GPCR and Year Zero, although obviously they didn't turn out the same way. What I suppose the argument is, is that Year Zero's goal of turning Cambodia into a fresh slate on which to build a new society is the same/similar in spirit to the aspect of the GPCR that involved destroying vestiges of old reactionary culture.

How does one make clear that the GPCR was/would not be the same as Year Zero?


There were a number of differences between the two, even though they may seem minor, they were important to their respective "vanguards". mostly though, it was how they were carried out and the degree of brutality that made the difference.

in Cambodia, "Year Zero" was meant to be a turning back of the clock, to start over in society, and replace the "old, bourgeoisie culture with a revolutionary new one", much like the Chinese cultural revolution; however, Pol Pot wanted to turn the nation into a nation of peasant farmers that produced rice for export and to achieve self-efficiency to aid in a war against the Vietnamese, whereas Mao more or less wanted to consolidate his power against Deng Xiaopeng and Liu Shaoqi;
beyond the impending war against Vietnam though, Pol Pot's motives for the way Year Zero were mostly unknown, and I guess personally it could possibly be just paranoia from the top down.

in China, people weren't as indiscriminately killed as they were in Cambodia; also, most people in China's cultural revolution died from starvation, whereas in Cambodia, it was a combination of forced labor, reduced rations (when they were still exporting food) and disease.

Pol Pot also had extreme contempt for city dwellers, often ordering Khmer Rouge cadres to target them and exterminate them for being "urban petty bourgeoisie", even if they were just starving proletariat fleeing the countryside from US bombing campaigns--he wanted to literally destroy every city in Cambodia (hence why Phnom Penh became a ghost town within a week after it fell to the Khmer Rouge), and return to the Krom village system, where everyone would become a farmer or a soldier.

in China, even if not completely earnest, there was an attempt to "rehabilitate" counter-revolutionaries, whereas in Cambodia, they were simply shot; many people in Cambodia were killed for something as simple as having an eye sight problem, or having visited Phnom Penh before the revolution began.

China also didn't attempt to destroy education, just remove the bourgeousie elements--Pol Pot was strongly against even basic literacy and education, as he gives in this 1978 speech:

"We are building socialism without a model. We do not wish to copy anyone; we shall use the experience gained in the course of the liberation struggle. There are no schools, faculties or universities in the traditional sense, although they did exist in our country prior to liberation, because we wish to do away with all vestiges of the past. There is no money, no commerce, as the state takes care of provisioning all its citizens. The cities have been resettled as this is the way things had to be. Some three million town dwellers and peasants were trying to find refuge in the cities from the depredations of war. We evacuated the cities; we resettled the inhabitants in the rural areas where the living conditions could be provided for this segment of the population of new Cambodia. The countryside should be the focus of attention of our revolution, and the people will decide the fate of the cities."

Speaking of the above quote, it's interesting to note that Pol Pot simultaneously distanced himself and compared himself to Mao Zedong, yet he vehemently refused any comparisons of his "Year Zero" to the Cultural revolution, as noted above.

In Retrospect, I guess they both followed the same premise of revolutionizing culture and destroying the Bourgeoisie elements from society--just, Pol Pot did it in such an extreme way that it exterminated 20% of Cambodia's population, whereas in China, it was more controlled, though that's not to say there was extreme tragedy from that failed experiment as well.

[Adi Shankara]

Interesting side note: despite his cruel, sadistic brutality, I still have a shred of sympathy for Kang Geak Eav, aka Comrade Duch, Warden of Tuol Sleng prison, for he was a bright and studious boy who watched family members starve while growing up in the countryside, but that didn't stop him from becoming the top of his class at Lycee, even being accepted to a prestigious city school.
When he grew increasingly frustrated at the wealth of his peers and living with the memory of the country poverty, he became a communist upon graduation and receiving his teaching certificate...and then in he was captured in 1967 and literally tortured every single day for two years to give up party names, using the worst thinkable measures; nail pulling, electrocution, simulated drowning, etc.

So it's sad to think that may have been what turned Kaing Guek Eav into a monster...afterall, Robert Mugabe had a drastic personality change himself when he was tortured by the Rhodesians and his daughter died while he was in prison...

who knows how these otherwise pathetic souls would've turned out if they hadn't been subject to such terrible abuse before?

I'm not justifying their behaviors...just saying, that it wasn't like they were always psychopaths...for many in the regime, they were turned into these monsters by their predecessors.

I saw this report that when brought to the "whipping tree" (a place where they brought babies to be "whipped" against trees, like a baseball bat), he broke down and cried, and everyone present said it didn't seem staged--I believe this, only because I don't think Duch was evil. just turned into a monster by his past. he must be severely punished for his crimes, but I hope that the Cambodian people find a way to find justice, then forgiveness...that must be a terrible thing on your conscience to live with.

"In February, 2008, as part of the judicial process, Duch was taken to the scene of his crimes. He reportedly collapsed in tears after stating, "I ask for your forgiveness -- I know that you cannot forgive me, but I ask you to leave me the hope that you might."

[Proletarian Ultra]

I suppose I should elaborate:

I've heard the comparison made between the "Destruction of the Four Olds" aspect of the GPCR and Year Zero, although obviously they didn't turn out the same way. What I suppose the argument is, is that Year Zero's goal of turning Cambodia into a fresh slate on which to build a new society is the same/similar in spirit to the aspect of the GPCR that involved destroying vestiges of old reactionary culture.

How does one make clear that the GPCR was/would not be the same as Year Zero?

Anyone whose main problem with the Khmer Rouge is that they didn't respect traditional Buddhist culture enough, is not worth debating.

Or if the contention is that antagonism toward old culture is inevitably a slippery slope toward the killing fields - I certainly hope that person is a traditionalist Catholic, or an Orthodox Christian, b/c otherwise I call bullshit.

[thälmann]

even i think maoism is wrong, its not possible to explain khmer rouge with it. what was done in cambodia has nothing to do with scientific socialism or some marxist classics or other left theories. i think its possible to say it was the worste cind of revisionism. all was thrown away: historical materialism, class struggle and so on.

it was like crazy students and backward peasent youth run amok against ordinary people...and the victims were in the most proletarians and urban petty bourgois, not enemys of an socialist revolution

[Adi Shankara]

Anyone whose main problem with the Khmer Rouge is that they didn't respect traditional Buddhist culture enough, is not worth debating.

Or if the contention is that antagonism toward old culture is inevitably a slippery slope toward the killing fields - I certainly hope that person is a traditionalist Catholic, or an Orthodox Christian, b/c otherwise I call bullshit.

the problem that made Pol pot and Mao such utter failures in revolutionizing society, is they tried to create communism in one step, without an intermediate socialist stage; that, and old culture was never meant to be "destroyed"--just the bourgeoisie elements, and to it was meant to be built off of to create a new society.

[Invincible Summer]

the problem that made Pol pot and Mao such utter failures in revolutionizing society, is they tried to create communism in one step, without an intermediate socialist stage; that, and old culture was never meant to be "destroyed"--just the bourgeoisie elements, and to it was meant to be built off of to create a new society.

I wouldn't say that the millions of Red Guard were a "failure in revolutionizing society," but that's just me.

Furthermore, I'm pretty sure the New Democratic stage was supposed to be the foundation for building the socialist and communist stages, as it fulfilled the roles of bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution.

[Dimentio]

The Khmer Rogue are very hard to define. While they certainly were inspired by Mao, I would claim that they developed an own and profoundly insane ideology which Pentti Linkola would approve (I actually think he claimed them to be the ideal government).

[Adi Shankara]

I wouldn't say that the millions of Red Guard were a "failure in revolutionizing society," but that's just me.

But anyone can raise an army; doesn't mean it was raised for the right purposes or not; it just takes a good skill to convince people that what you're saying isn't a pack of lies.

[Dimentio]

The proletarian cultural revolution's success should be evaluated with what China is today. I think the question why the GPCR, Stalin's purges and Hoxha's anti-revisionism all failed to prevent the degeneration of the states the parties ran is a matter of the expectancies of the population, the interests of the party cadres and the manner in which the world is working. In order to get a system to somewhat function, you need to be able to stimulate the interests of its participants, and ultimately the only thing which is working is to ensure the safety of the citizen and her other needs, from the most basic ones to the superficial. Ultimately, human beings feel alienated in groups larger than 150 individuals, and would thus start to create the foundations for inequality in order to make society overviewable. In short, societies larger than 150 individuals tend to form groups and those groups get different access to the means of production, since most people demand security in return for giving a minority material privileges to ensure the interests of the majority.

I know the analysis seems crude, but that is the challenge we have to answer is my guess.

[redSHARP]

many scholars also see the genocide resulting from "year zero" was based off racist polices by the khmer and pol pot. i need to gather my sources on that one, but it is interesting. also the US supported pol pot and used him as a way to harass Vietnam. so to get a grasp on "year zero" try finding death rates of the varying ethnic groups in Cambodia at the time.