Pol Pot

[promethean]

I think he has been unfairly negatively portrayed. Specifically, the deaths that were caused by the US bombing and the Vietnam invasion have been mostly attributed to him. Agree/disagree?

[Optiow]

Wrong. I think we can all agree that the man was a nutter. He killed everyone who wore glasses, and he killed people for picking fruit off trees...

Regardless of the circumstances, he did no good for the population, and therefore it is correct to portray him negatively. Perhaps if he had SOME remorse for how many he killed trying to create his 'Utopia' I may understand, but he did not. And therefore I think the discussion is at an end.

[Invincible Summer]

I don't know enough to make a solid criticism of Pol pot without sounding like I'm just parroting Western propaganda.

While one could make a decent argument defending Stalin and Mao, I personally think that Pol Pot is one of the most embarrassing/reputation-damaging things that's happened to the communist (er... "communist") movement

[erupt]

I've always viewed the Khmer Rouge's state as a "rogue nation," in my own kinda way.

[Hiero]

He killed everyone who wore glasses, and he killed people for picking fruit off trees...


That was other Cambodians.

[Guerrilla]

He killed everyone who wore glasses

http://www.kaosradioaustin.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=530&g2_serialNumber=2

[Jayshin_JTTH]

I don't know enough to make a solid criticism of Pol pot without sounding like I'm just parroting Western propaganda.

While one could make a decent argument defending Stalin and Mao, I personally think that Pol Pot is one of the most embarrassing/reputation-damaging things that's happened to the communist (er... "communist") movement
I don't see how he is an 'embarrassment', he is a historical figure who lived and died ages ago. And the only people who bring up the Khmer Rouge these days are either ultra-conservatives or bourgeois liberals (even they don't do it much) to make an 'argument' for anti-communism.

This is despite Pot himself making a clear statement when he was alive that "We are not communists, we are revolutionaries, we do not belong the traditional orientation of communism in Indochina" (you'll forgive me if that quote is off just a little).

Also, it was the Vietnamese communists that finally offed him when he sent troops across the border and massacred Vietnamese peasants for the hell of it.

AND he and his goons were on the CIA payroll to fight the Vietnamese in Cambodia after he was overthrown.

[erupt]

http://www.kaosradioaustin.org/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=530&g2_serialNumber=2
Exibit A: Why I agree with a previous post stating Pol Pot was a "nutter." Well said if he killed people for wearing eye glasses, and in this photogenic picture, he's wearing a pair.

[scarletghoul]

Ah, guess it's Pol Pot season in Learning again.

I agree that there is a lot of distortion in the way Pol Pot is portrayed and it's true that the US and Vietnamese role is never taken into account, and it's silly to suggest that he was some kinda primitivist asian monster thing. However it's still not 'unfair' to view him negatively overall. He made serious ultra-leftist mistakes among other things. That's a very brief summary of my position.

There are more informative posts in these old threads-
http://www.revleft.com/vb/pol-poti-t141490/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/pol-poti-were-t129896/index.html?t=129896

[scarletghoul]

Exibit A: Why I agree with a previous post stating Pol Pot was a "nutter." Well said if he killed people for wearing eye glasses, and in this photogenic picture, he's wearing a pair.
ever considerd that maybe he didnt kill poeple for wearing glasses ?
I've never seen any evidence of a central Khmer Rouge government command saying that everyone with glasses should die. Of course there was extreme anti-intelectualism, and seeing as how a lot of the grassroots or regional cadres made these kinds of decisions of who to kill or detain, it's possible that some local cadre decided to target people with glasses as that was a sign of being intellectual. However I haven't seen anything to suggest that Pol ordered such an 'opticide' on a nationwide level.

[AK]

^ and here's our resident Pol-Potist now :p

[scarletghoul]

:p guess you missed the 100,000,000 times I called him ultra-leftist and said it's correct to view him negatively.

[hatzel]

Of course there was extreme anti-intelectualism, and seeing as how a lot of the grassroots or regional cadres made these kinds of decisions of who to kill or detain, it's possible that some local cadre decided to target people with glasses as that was a sign of being intellectual.

Another good sign of being intellectual is studying at a variety of exclusive schools in both Cambodia and France, at a time when it was still very rare for people to have such an opportunity. Or maaaaaybe (WARNING!!! POP PSYCHOLOGY TIME!!!) he was just jealous at all those people who actually succeeded in their education, so wanted to off them so that he, despite being an academic failure, would be able to become superior, the top intellectual, by merely eliminating anybody with a better academic record than him...

[Queercommie Girl]

I don't like Pol Pot at all but trying to explain serious political issues with "personal factors" like "jealousy towards intellectuals" is really quite ridiculous.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

Another good sign of being intellectual is studying at a variety of exclusive schools in both Cambodia and France, at a time when it was still very rare for people to have such an opportunity. Or maaaaaybe (WARNING!!! POP PSYCHOLOGY TIME!!!) he was just jealous at all those people who actually succeeded in their education, so wanted to off them so that he, despite being an academic failure, would be able to become superior, the top intellectual, by merely eliminating anybody with a better academic record than him...
That's a pretty vague speculation.

Scarletghoul gets props for actually analysing the Cambodian regime without merely calling him a lunatic dictator or praising the regime in a black and white fashion. Thanks to the great man theory of history, all fingers point to the all powerful Pol Pot, where as in reality, a bureaucratic and ultra-leftist dictatorship grew out of the situation, of which contained a large number of men, Pol Pot being only one of them.

The Khmer Rouge is not an example of how a revolution should pan out, but there are conditions that lead to the situation in Cambodia. For that reason, the situation there cannot merely be attributed to one man, but a regime of ultra-leftists that did not reflect the notion of class struggle and liberation. Their mistakes should be analysed properly and understood, rather than being thought of as a "bad example of communism" or whatever has been said previously. It was not an example of communism at all, Pol Pot and his clique were at best a group of ultra-leftist nationalists. We shouldn't even let their mistakes tarnish the name of communism more than it already has been, and for that reason we should take an objective look at the situation in order to come to that conclusion. Pol Pot was not a communist in practise, the Khmer Rouge did not have methods that could be deemed effective methods of revolutionary struggle, but how can we highlight these points whilst being so pedantic?

Pol Pot was just a man, who eats, shits and dies like any other man. Not someone who single handedly shot people with glasses or forced them to work, there are a world of other influences and conditions that lead to the situation in Cambodia.

[gorillafuck]

He was a total nut, ideologically.

Also, I'm pretty skeptical of the explanation that children being murdered en mass in the killing fields can be explained away by "ya gotta understand, THE US WAS BOMBING". Props to the Vietnamese communists for taking him out.

[Pavlov's House Party]

I don't like Pol Pot at all but trying to explain serious political issues with "personal factors" like "jealousy towards intellectuals" is really quite ridiculous.

yeah pretty much. its like arguments about stalin/hitler killing however millions of people because they had bad childhoods.

the thing that seperates pol pot from other revolutions is that it was basically a peasant revolt given modern technology and marxist drapings. had the khmer rouge been compared with peasant uprisings in 19th century europe it would have been pretty unsurprising.

[mykittyhasaboner]

The Khmer Rouge were stooges in service of US imperialism.

The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/pilgerpolpotnus.pdf)

A more readable copy:http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/UncleSam_PolPot.html

On the Side of Pol Pot: US Supports Khmer Rouge (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/polpotnus.pdf)

Grover Furr (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html) sums it all up using these sources.

[Sasha]

Trashed:


*dead kennedys vid*


Only reactionaries wear glasses.

*trotsky pic*


Pol Pot?Is it smockable?:thumbup1:

and have some verbalwarnings all around, no one-liners, no joke posts, no offtopic flamebaiting in these sections boys, keep it in chitchat

[M-26-7]

Wrong. I think we can all agree that the man was a nutter. He killed everyone who wore glasses, and he killed people for picking fruit off trees...

Regardless of the circumstances, he did no good for the population, and therefore it is correct to portray him negatively. Perhaps if he had SOME remorse for how many he killed trying to create his 'Utopia' I may understand, but he did not. And therefore I think the discussion is at an end.

In the interest of accuracy, the Khmer Rouge did not kill everyone who wore glasses. That is a Cambodian myth according to Elizabeth Becker, one of the leading Western scholars on Democratic Kampuchea. However, she also points out that it is a myth which, like all such cultural myths, serves a purpose: to capture the fact (this part is not myth) that the KR killed people simply for having an education, because of their ideological hostility to what they called "intellectuals". Also, to emphasize that KR killing was seen as extremely arbitrary by the Cambodian population.

[Red Commissar]

Pol-Pot is also attributed to a thought from a Catholic Cardinal termed "Pol-Pottery", which in his opinion is proof of the evils of atheism. :lol:

As for Pol Pot? Honestly I could care less for him. I'm not upset that his regime was overthrown.

[Adi Shankara]

tl;dr: Pol Pot was a Khmer-Supremacist primitivist who exterminated non-Khmers like the Cham, and so it took some REAL communists like the Vietnamese to invade Cambodia and remove his regime of primitivist, racial-supremacist terror. He had no regard for marxism, and took the most insurgent tenets of Maoism and applied it to his nativist primitive views.

[Dimentio]

Wasn't Pol Pot a disciple of Sartre?

[Adil3tr]

Didn't he renounce communism? And whats the point of arguing about this anyway?

[hatzel]

I don't like Pol Pot at all but trying to explain serious political issues with "personal factors" like "jealousy towards intellectuals" is really quite ridiculous.

I know, that was the point of the pop psychology warning...stress on the pop, not the psychology. Personally we could just to resort to explaining serious political issues by the claiming that Pol Pot was a bit of a dickhead, because, to be honest, all explanations are just as viable. Because they're all bullhonk, unnecessary, and there's no point trying to look for a motive in any historical figure's actions, just deciding whether or not the actions undertaken as a result of these 'explanations' are good or bad or indifferent or whatever. If we agree that Pol Pot did some shit stuff, then we can just say he was a complete **** and get on with our lives.

Legitimate point, though, that he was a privileged little private schoolboy, jewel of the middle class, so in fact he was clearly killing his own. Hence he was clearly a bit of a loony-toon...

[Invincible Summer]

I don't see how he is an 'embarrassment', he is a historical figure who lived and died ages ago. And the only people who bring up the Khmer Rouge these days are either ultra-conservatives or bourgeois liberals (even they don't do it much) to make an 'argument' for anti-communism.


So you're saying that communists shouldn't take positions on past "communist" movements to explain that our goal isn't just to kill everyone?

He is an "embarrassment" because whenever people think "communism," they think "Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed lots of people." But like I said, one can defend Stalin and Mao fairly well... and although scarletghoul's post is very good I still don't think it absolves Pol Pot


This is despite Pot himself making a clear statement when he was alive that "We are not communists, we are revolutionaries, we do not belong the traditional orientation of communism in Indochina" (you'll forgive me if that quote is off just a little).
Yes, but the point is that everyone else sees him as one, which is why I said "communist" movement.

[Palingenisis]

Wasn't Pol Pot a disciple of Sartre?

Ive heard that....That somehow Pol Pot was interested in putting into reality this or that part of Sartre's thinking...But can never find out WHAT parts exactly...I think the whole Sartre thing could be right propaganda...Maybe?

He was influenced by Kropotkin and was very into his book on the French revolution.

[Os Cangaceiros]

The Khmer Rouge were stooges in service of US imperialism.

The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/pilgerpolpotnus.pdf)

A more readable copy:http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/UncleSam_PolPot.html

On the Side of Pol Pot: US Supports Khmer Rouge (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/polpotnus.pdf)

Grover Furr (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html) sums it all up using these sources.

This is actually really interesting, and good propaganda to use against the "when the USA withdrew from Vietnam, millions were slaughtered in Cambodia" idiots. :rolleyes:

[Os Cangaceiros]

Ive heard that....That somehow Pol Pot was interested in putting into reality this or that part of Sartre's thinking...But can never find out WHAT parts exactly...I think the whole Sartre thing could be right propaganda...Maybe?

He was influenced by Kropotkin and was very into his book on the French revolution.

Lenin was at one point "very into" Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What Is To Be Done? I guess that means that Lenin was a utopian socialist. :rolleyes:

[milk]

tl;dr: Pol Pot was a Khmer-Supremacist primitivist who exterminated non-Khmers like the Cham, and so it took some REAL communists like the Vietnamese to invade Cambodia and remove his regime of primitivist, racial-supremacist terror. He had no regard for marxism, and took the most insurgent tenets of Maoism and applied it to his nativist primitive views.


The Khmer Communist version of 'war communism,' it could be said, made a great leap into a neo-asiatic mode of production. From 1975, however, their enlarged and heavily militarised and regimented organisation, carried over from the war, was supposed to see the country make a prodigious jump into modernity. You'll find nothing of value in the silly trope (used by both the left and right) that they were backward Khmer Empire revivalists, or primitivists who wanted to create an agrarian 'utopia.' They were modernisers, and used a peculiar interpretation of the Leninist paradigm. Agriculture was the base on which to rapidly (given the hubris of the CPK) industrialise the country.

[milk]

In the interest of accuracy, the Khmer Rouge did not kill everyone who wore glasses. That is a Cambodian myth according to Elizabeth Becker, one of the leading Western scholars on Democratic Kampuchea. However, she also points out that it is a myth which, like all such cultural myths, serves a purpose: to capture the fact (this part is not myth) that the KR killed people simply for having an education, because of their ideological hostility to what they called "intellectuals". Also, to emphasize that KR killing was seen as extremely arbitrary by the Cambodian population.

Becker isn't a scholar, but a journalist. But she is only partly right, in that there was never a central directive to 'exterminate' people on the basis of such things as wearing spectacles, but in fact people were not always killed for having possessed an education either. On this theme, I think it would be worthwhile to know just how urban Cambodia operated, who and what urban people actually were, and before the war too, to help in an understanding of why the poor peasants indulged in a bit of schadenfreude from 1975. Here (http://www.pacificdiscovery.org/credit/SEAreadings/Vickery.%20The%20Gentle%20Land.pdf) is the opening chapter of Michael Vickery's book Cambodia, 1975-1982, which offers a (Marxist) insight into the workings of urban Cambodia, for these urban people were, in the main, those who were seen to be on the wrong side of that war and were, rightly or wrongly, brought down a peg or two in the years after it.

For me, the more illuminating views of DK have come from the likes of Michael Vickery who, as mentioned above, has applied Marxism to Cambodian history, including the DK regime, and has demonstrated the un-Marxist choices made by them, and that the poor-peasant social forces, among other things, ended up pulling the Communists along the path to disaster. Or rather, it may be illuminating to those interested in wanting to understand the nature of the Cambodian Revolution, which doesn’t begin from the “I told you so” starting point that Communism, or specifically its Bolshevised version, is bad, and therefore, unsurprisngly, Communists are bound to do bad things. Pol Pot's ally Ta Mok, for example, while although perhaps being unable to grasp the finer points himself, nevertheless represented certain poor-peasantist and nationalist tendencies which are important in understanding Pol Potism.

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

I think this pretty bluntly describes the context in which the Khmer Rouge came to power:


The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) draft end-of-term report noted that when U.S. rice aid stopped in April 1975, Cambodia was "on the brink of starvation." The bulk of rice production now depended on "the hard labor of a seriously malnourished people."
...
The USAID report went on: Even with completely favorable natural conditions, the prospects for a harvest this year good enough to move Cambodia very far back towards rice self-sufficiency are not good. ... If ever a country needed to beat its swords into plowshares in a race to save itself from hunger, it is Cambodia. The prospects that it can or will do so are poor. Therefore, without large scae food and equipment assistance there will be widespread starvation between now and next February and probably more of the same next year. ... Slave labor and starvation rations for almost half the nations people ... will be a cruel necessity for this year and general deprivation and suffering will stretch over the next two to three years before Cambodia can get back to rice self-sufficiency.(quoted from Ben Kiernan: The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79.)

[milk]

Their victory was, indeed, a Pyrrhic one. A disastrous mismanagement of the economy, with the Communists inheriting a ruined country following a devastating war, but then exacerbating serious problems any type of government would have faced, with at-first rational decisions being overridden by foolish and extreme ideological considerations.

[chegitz guevara]

It is important to keep in mind, though, that the famine which killed over a million Khmer did not occur until the final year of the Pol Pot government.

[L.A.P.]

Pol Pot was a fuckhead. Thank god Vietnam got over foreign relations bullshit and stayed true to their ideology by taking him the fuck out.

[milk]

It is important to keep in mind, though, that the famine which killed over a million Khmer did not occur until the final year of the Pol Pot government.

But they brought about a disaster with partially autarkic political decisions, a mismanagement of the economy and the attempted, bloody restructuring of a weak, skeletal state that never really stood on its feet. Towards the end of the regime their ad hoc irrigation system, built with brutal inefficiency, did actually produce bumper harvests, but this meant no increase in rations for the labouring population, for the government was either exporting it for much-needed capital for productive reinvestment, or busy stockpiling it in preparation for a war with the Vietnamese.

[Hiero]

The Khmer Rouge were stooges in service of US imperialism.

The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/pilgerpolpotnus.pdf)

A more readable copy:http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/UncleSam_PolPot.html

On the Side of Pol Pot: US Supports Khmer Rouge (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/polpotnus.pdf)

Grover Furr (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html) sums it all up using these sources.

The US only supported the Khmer Rouge after Vietnamese invasion. China did the same. This is a different Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot began to lose popularity. Remmeber it was the Khmer Rouge who turned Pol Pot over to Cambodian authorities.

The support of the Khmer Rouge by the US is oppurtunism on boths sides. Just the same as Israel supporter Hamas, it didn't make Hamas a pro-Israeli group.

[milk]

After the fall/liberation of Saigon in 1975, the shift in the Southeast Asian balance of power had to be contested as a geopolitical confrontation, and short of direct US military involvement, it formalised into an anti-Vietnamese, anti-Soviet, American-Sino alliance. Pol Pot fitted into that attempt to isolate and destabilise a pro-Soviet government which, like the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, had found itself to be an economic and political pariah. Or to put it another way, had found itself to be on the 'wrong' side of the Cold War.

[chegitz guevara]

But they brought about a disaster with partially autarkic political decisions, a mismanagement of the economy and the attempted, bloody restructuring of a weak, skeletal state that never really stood on its feet. Towards the end of the regime their ad hoc irrigation system, built with brutal inefficiency, did actually produce bumper harvests, but this meant no increase in rations for the labouring population, for the government was either exporting it for much-needed capital for productive reinvestment, or busy stockpiling it in preparation for a war with the Vietnamese.

My point was that the American bombing campaign cannot be blamed for the later famine, except in that the cities were emptied, in part, because of a fear that they would be bombed.

[milk]

My point was that the American bombing campaign cannot be blamed for the later famine, except in that the cities were emptied, in part, because of a fear that they would be bombed.

Okay, but which was proven to be false. Provincial market towns like Ang Tassom were emptied by the Khmer Rouge before the war ended. The decision to empty the capital was a political, not humanitarian decision.