Is there any defence to Pol Pot?

[BornDeist]

Is Pol Pot as awful as it seems or is this propaganda at work?

[DoCt SPARTAN]

I've only heard the bad really........

I cant think any of anything that can cover the crimes he's committed

[Illegalitarian]

Pol Pot was a Yankee comprador whose power was born out of the outrage that followed how the previous government handled the bombings of Cambodian villages by US forces during the Vietnamese genocide.

He did nothing to advance class struggle or try and build a socialist society as we know the mode of production. He did nothing to advance the theoretical contributions to Marxism. He was an idealist, primitivist despot to the core.

There is no defending the actions of the Khmer Rouge, not as a socialist of any stripe. Not as someone who cares for human life. Not even as a fucking fascist or anything else.

That being said, It's unscientific to jump on the "but he killed billions" train, as that is a black book of communism-esque criticism; very shallow and meaningless if we're to look at the material conditions of Cambodia at the time and understand why things happened the way they did.

In all reality, much like the red guards of Mao, The Democratic Republic of Kampuchea had very little control over its Khmer Rouge thugs. It was a loose confederation of young people-filled and controlled gangs given guns and told to eliminate "enemies of the people" at their own discretion, and this played out, in reality, as feudalistic social relations overcoming their inherent contradictions in the form of territory disputes, personal grudges being acted upon, ethnic clashes with Chinese and Vietnamese minorities, etc.

It was the intensified process of changing modes of production worsened by a mad man's dream of turning back the hand of time. Nothing more.

Then enter Vietnamese social imperialism, stripping away the Cambodian people's right to self-determination in the form of an invasion that installed yet another puppet government, rather than arming anti-Khmer Rouge communist forces.

As a side note, it's all too often forgotten that many of the deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge happened after the government collapsed. Being left without enough food and medical supplies, many people died horrible deaths after the KM had fallen, due to the west's refusal to send much needed relief to the area due to the issue of "politics being involved".

[Os Cangaceiros]

There probably isn't a good defense. A certain degree of understanding can be ascertained regarding the barbarism of the KR, though, b/c a lot of the people in Cambodia in that time had come of age during a time of war and attrition. Military organizations formed with a large amount of war orphans are often extremely dangerous and barbarous (other good examples might include the Taliban in Afghanistan or the RUF in Sierra Leone). When the only socialization a kid gets is killing for their friends and watching their friends get killed, well, that doesn't bode well for any respect for human life or empathy, obviously. An author I read made this point about why the violence in Afghanistan during the 1990's was so brutal and I think it applies to Cambodia as well.

[blake 3:17]

There's a good discussion of the class basis of Pol Pot's movement in Jonathan Neale's book on the Vietnam War -- it's one of the few that's made any sense.

[IllumiNaughty]

Theres nothing good to say about pol pot. He was yet another western puppet. I wouldnt be surprised if he was simply created by the CIA.

[Dialectical Wizard]

Didn’t the Khmer Rouge engage in ethnic cleansing or something?
These Stalinist regimes almost resemble fascist regimes at times, I always found this a interesting phenomenon although I despise fascists and hardcore Stalinists.

[Comrade Jacob]

It was just one big accident. He said he was very sorry afterwards.

[Alexios]

A lot of Maoists apologize for DK actually

[Sea]

From what I've read, the "killing people for wearing glasses" thing is a cold-war myth, but most of the stuff you hear about him having been a sick murderous nationalist fuckwit is 100% correct. He was pals with Ceausescu and had lips like a fish. What more damning evidence do you want?
Didn’t the Khmer Rouge engage in ethnic cleansing or something?
These Stalinist regimes almost resemble fascist regimes at times, I always found this a interesting phenomenon although I despise fascists and hardcore Stalinists.Pol Pot had nothing to do with Stalin, and DK had nothing to do with the USSR under Stalin's tenure.

[DDR]

Didn’t the Khmer Rouge engage in ethnic cleansing or something?
These Stalinist regimes almost resemble fascist regimes at times, I always found this a interesting phenomenon although I despise fascists and hardcore Stalinists.

Too bad that another Stalinist was the one who endend the Khmer Rouge regime, namely Uncle Ho.

[Dialectical Wizard]

Pol Pot had nothing to do with Stalin, and DK had nothing to do with the USSR under Stalin's tenure.



When I say Stalinism I mean the whole Marxist-Leninist bunch, from Stalin to Mao and so on. To me there all the same, there may be a little difference between them. But they were all influenced by Stalin’s bureaucratic regime.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Too bad that another Stalinist was the one who endend the Khmer Rouge regime, namely Uncle Ho.

He died in '69.

[Illegalitarian]

He died in '69.


Are you sure? I'm pretty sure I saw him at a Dunkin' Donuts in Nashville just a few weeks ago.

[TheIrrationalist]

From a Marxist or leftist ideological viewpoint nothing. He was nothing more than a palingenetic nationalist. His, and Khmer Rouge's, ideas pretty much broke from the usual Marxist-Leninist and Maoist tendencies as they adopted weird ideas about Cambodian palingenesis.

[DDR]

He died in '69.

I should stop posting stoned as hell... Anyhow, IRC, either zinn of chomsky wrote in favour of the khmer in the 70s.

[Illegalitarian]

He can't even be called a Marxist-Leninist, Maoist or otherwise.

Call him what he was. A primitivist. The CPK organized the Khmer Rouge and directed them to move everyone out of the cities and into the countryside so they could "start again" from the beginning, a concept they called "Year Zero".


This may or may not have been due to some warped stagist bullshit idealism about developing a strong agricultural base before moving on to the industrial. I'm really not sure, but in practice, it was some sort of warped fucked-up primitivism with a hint of influence from the Jacobin movement, also warped and fucked up.



I should stop posting stoned as hell... Anyhow, IRC, either zinn of chomsky wrote in favour of the khmer in the 70s.


I've heard this charged against Chomsky and Cummings both, but I've yet to see any proof of this.

[Red Commissar]

There was a user called milk here who posted a lot of Khmer Rouge related stuff, it helps to dispel some simplifications. It is a different take at least, check out his posts. Check out his posts, they were informative for me at least.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=11970

There was a group he moderated involving the group with some links to their documents and history, but it has since gone away.

[Althusser]

A lot of Maoists apologize for DK actually

Yeah, no that's not true at all.

[Sea]

When I say Stalinism I mean the whole Marxist-Leninist bunch, from Stalin to Mao and so on. To me there all the same, there may be a little difference between them. But they were all influenced by Stalin’s bureaucratic regime. Okay, I'll bite. What differences were there? What similarities?

[argeiphontes]

Anyhow, IRC, either zinn of chomsky wrote in favour of the khmer in the 70s.



I've heard this charged against Chomsky and Cummings both, but I've yet to see any proof of this.

That didn't happen. It's something Zizek said to discredit Chomsky. Chomsky just wrote something like "the extent of the atrocities can't be ascertained in western media" and Zizek tried to blow it into support of the Khmer Rouge.

And you're giving weedless me some serious ressentement, DDR. :mad: ;)

[Illegalitarian]

I would be really interested in an actual defense of the Khmer Rouge.


I mean, yeah, it would be DPRK defending-tier bullshit, but I'd like to actually read someone jump through all of those hoops. I'd dig it.


I'll post more of what I know on the subject tomorrow, it's actually really interesting stuff.

[DDR]

That didn't happen. It's something Zizek said to discredit Chomsky. Chomsky just wrote something like "the extent of the atrocities can't be ascertained in western media" and Zizek tried to blow it into support of the Khmer Rouge.

IRC I belive this is the writting: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19700604.htm

Althought the format that I remember was a photocopy of a newspaper.


And you're giving weedless me some serious ressentement, DDR. :mad: ;)

No weed, but hash.

[G4b3n]

It was just one big accident. He said he was very sorry afterwards.

Oh, well good for him. I am sure all the people who died as a result of the brutality of his anti-worker regime would totally forgive him.

[BITW434]

Even Jason Unruhe doesn't defend Pol Pot, that should tell you a lot :laugh:

[Sabot Cat]

Saloth Sar organized the mass murder of millions. He was a blight to Cambodia, humanity, and communism, the last of which has its name continually dragged through shit because of people like him. I don't think it's good to find creative ways to try to defend him.

[sixdollarchampagne]

I should stop posting stoned as hell... Anyhow, IRC, either zinn of chomsky wrote in favour of the khmer in the 70s.

My recollection is that Chomsky (who, face to face, is really very pleasant) went through a period of defending Democratic Kampuchea, in a somewhat indirect manner, something like, "the changes in Kampuchea enjoyed peasant support," or something like that, I think.

I do remember that, when the first claims of a terrible slaughter in Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge, were made here in the US, Chomsky, at a public talk at MIT (which I attended), ridiculed that idea that a slaughter was being carried out. So much for omniscience.

[PhoenixAsh]

http://chomsky-must-read.blogspot.nl/2010/10/chomsky-on-cambodia-wwwphnompenhpostcom.html

[Illegalitarian]

This is a subject I've both studied and wrote upon extensively for years now.

If anyone has any specific questions regarding anything DK related, ask away.

[Ismail]

Pol Pot was backed by the CIA after he was thrown out of power. The Khmer Rouge even praised Reagan's election in 1980. He had nothing to do with the CIA beforehand.

What's also overlooked is that while in power Pol Pot endorsed Mao's right-wing "Three Worlds Theory" (wherein China allied with such staunch anti-imperialists as the Shah of Iran, Pinochet and Mobutu in the name of opposing the USSR) and denounced the "Gang of Four."

There's also this:

"Like our Democratic Cambodia, Yugoslavia is a non-aligned country which has adhered to the position of preserving independence. Friendship between our two countries is therefore based on the same principle. We have always esteemed and respected Comrade President Tito and the friendly Yugoslav people. Comrade President Tito and the Yugoslav people have always supported and helped us. We have sympathy for them and wish to express our thanks to Comrade President Tito and the friendly Yugoslav people."
(Pol Pot, quoted in Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 8 No. 3, 1978. p. 413.)

The Khmer Rouge starting claiming territory in southern Vietnam and launching border excursions against the country. In response Vietnam marched into Phnom Penh with the backing of pretty much the entire Cambodian population. This is where the CIA's funding of the Khmer Rouge came in. The USA and UK, as well as pseudo-socialist countries like Yugoslavia and the DPRK, denounced the Vietnamese and recognized the Khmer Rouge as the rightful representatives of the Cambodian people, keeping the ambassador from "Democratic Kampuchea" at the UN up until 1991 or so.

Hoxha recalled in his diary his meetings with Khmer Rouge officials before they took power:

"Cambodia was called a socialist country. On top of this 'socialist' country the 'communist party' was allegedly in force, which was led by two main persons, a certain Ieng Sary and Pol Pot. Also in this leadership was Khieu Samphan. But the highlights were the first two.

We neither met Pol Pot nor had ever heard the name. He was kept secret, and Ieng Sary we met in person several times and our impression was not good. He was not a Marxist. Many of his views were not only shallow but also wrong."
(Enver Hoxha. Ditar për çështje ndërkombëtare Vol. 12. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1985. p. 14.)

[Dialectical Wizard]

Pol Pot was backed by the CIA after he was thrown out of power. The Khmer Rouge even praised Reagan's election in 1980. He had nothing to do with the CIA beforehand.

What's also overlooked is that while in power Pol Pot endorsed Mao's right-wing "Three Worlds Theory" (wherein China allied with such staunch anti-imperialists as the Shah of Iran, Pinochet and Mobutu in the name of opposing the USSR) and denounced the "Gang of Four."

There's also this:

"Like our Democratic Cambodia, Yugoslavia is a non-aligned country which has adhered to the position of preserving independence. Friendship between our two countries is therefore based on the same principle. We have always esteemed and respected Comrade President Tito and the friendly Yugoslav people. Comrade President Tito and the Yugoslav people have always supported and helped us. We have sympathy for them and wish to express our thanks to Comrade President Tito and the friendly Yugoslav people."
(Pol Pot, quoted in Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol. 8 No. 3, 1978. p. 413.)

The Khmer Rouge starting claiming territory in southern Vietnam and launching border excursions against the country. In response Vietnam marched into Phnom Penh with the backing of pretty much the entire Cambodian population. This is where the CIA's funding of the Khmer Rouge came in. The USA and UK, as well as pseudo-socialist countries like Yugoslavia and the DPRK, denounced the Vietnamese and recognized the Khmer Rouge as the rightful representatives of the Cambodian people, keeping the ambassador from "Democratic Kampuchea" at the UN up until 1991 or so.

Hoxha recalled in his diary his meetings with Khmer Rouge officials before they took power:

"Cambodia was called a socialist country. On top of this 'socialist' country the 'communist party' was allegedly in force, which was led by two main persons, a certain Ieng Sary and Pol Pot. Also in this leadership was Khieu Samphan. But the highlights were the first two.

We neither met Pol Pot nor had ever heard the name. He was kept secret, and Ieng Sary we met in person several times and our impression was not good. He was not a Marxist. Many of his views were not only shallow but also wrong."
(Enver Hoxha. Ditar për çështje ndërkombëtare Vol. 12. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1985. p. 14.)



Although I do admire the work you have put in your post. Just one small critique, Hoxha was also not a Marxist but an opportunist. Your overly grotesque great man theory confuses me comrade.

[Illegalitarian]

Wha?

Hoxha was definitely a Marxist. Say what you will about Albania under his leadership, there are certainly many opinions on that, but no one claims that the man wasn't a Marxist.

[Ocean Seal]

Yes, the typical line is American imperialism made him do it.

[Killer Enigma]

There's so much bullshit around Pol Pot and Democratic Kampuchea that it could have fertilized every farm around Phnom Penh. If you want to read the gold standard historical account of the period, read Michael Vickery's Cambodia: 1975 - 1982 (http://michaelvickery.org/vickery1999cambodia.pdf). Vickery was and still is a vocal supporter of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, which was the government that assumed power after the Khmer Rouge were driven out of power by the Vietnamese in 1979. It doesn't stop him from cutting through the absolute garbage and totally false accusations levied at the Khmer Rouge during the period. People talk about Chomsky apologizing for Pol Pot, which isn't true. However, I've personally corresponded with Chomsky on Democratic Kampuchea, and he told me the same thing I'm telling you now - if you want to understand the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, you read Vickery's book, no exceptions.

Ismail tells you Pol Pot was backed by the CIA. That isn't true, and it's based on a total misreading of the whole PRK period. When the Khmer Rouge was driven out of power, they amassed on the north and northwestern border with Thailand where they fought an armed conflict with the PRK government into the early 1990s. The deposed Prince Sihanouk, living in the United States at the time, was recruited by the CIA to organize the remaining monarchist elements in Cambodia and Thailand (huge amount of refugees fled across the border during the US bombing and the DK period) and form a provisional government, of which the remaining Khmer Rouge elements that didn't defect would form a nominal part.

This provisional government received diplomatic support by the US, China, a lot of Western European countries and Thailand, among others, and some limited arms and supplies were funneled to them. However, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge received no direct aid by the CIA or the US, and Sihanouk cut them out of the bulk of the operations, which was why the KR resistance eventually folded. That may seem like quibbling, but it's important because the CIA never wanted to support Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge, nor did they. It flies in the face of the easy cop-out response by leftists uncomfortable with the period and unwilling to learn the history. It's an easy one-liner to say that Pol Pot was a US puppet, but it's not consistent with the history or the demonization that took place then and now.

I like Vickery's point. The Khmer Rouge was a very impressive peasant resistance force to US imperialism and the Lon Nol puppet regime in Phnom Penh. At one point, their cadre numbers were no more than 100 - in other words, they had to have some very deep connection to the masses in order to have a tiny organization, even by Cambodian standards, seize power. The US intelligence services were so baffled by the KR's secrecy that they believed Pol Pot and Saluth Sar - the same person - were two different people, and they knew almost nothing about Pol Pot at that.

When they came to power, Vickery shows that the experience of the DK varied greatly by region. In the east, you had a much more relaxed, multi-ethnic agrarian socialist experience with very few executions and some serious gains in terms of living standards for peasants. In other parts like the south and southwest - the strongholds of the Pol Pot faction of the KR - repression was far more heavy handed, and the KR became very unpopular in the region because of it. And Vickery looks at all of the experiences in-between, which are very diverse. Needless to say, you can't paint the period with the same brush of 'house of horrors'.

Furthermore, life really didn't change for the better or worse for most peasants under the KR, other than they became the favored social class. Most of the horror stories come from Thai refugee camps by city dwellers forced to work in conditions that Cambodian peasants worked in for centuries. Imagine putting a CEO to work in a warehouse or autofactory and forcing them to work, at gun point, for the same wages as the lowest paid worker. They would reflect on the period as horrific too, but it wouldn't tell you much of anything about how ordinary workers perceived the events.

Most peasants were more than happy to see the city dwellers put to work. The cities had ruthlessly exploited the countryside for centuries, and there were fewer than 1,000 workers (in the Marxist sense of the term) in Cambodia at the time. Those people generally stayed in their jobs and were forced to train peasants to do urban labor. It's not socialism or a dictatorship of the proletariat, but it's enough to make me roll my eyes whenever people say Pol Pot hated workers and exterminated them. It just patently did not happen.

Vickery sums up the DK experience as an unleashed peasant hysteria against the bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements of the city that collaborated with Lon Nol and Prince Sihanouk. They made huge ultra-left errors in throwing nearly everyone onto the countryside, which represented enormous opportunity costs and provided no real way to change their objective conditions of underdevelopment. However, like it or not, the KR was made up of Marxists. They didn't really carry out Marxist-Leninist strategies for socialist construction, and no one is arguing that they built socialism, but they're part of the history of the left.

Trying to cut them out is just a way to placate the weak stomachs of Western petty bourgeois leftists. Read the stories about Cambodia before the KR. Now there's some stories that will make your stomach turn.

[Killer Enigma]

Saloth Sar organized the mass murder of millions. He was a blight to Cambodia, humanity, and communism, the last of which has its name continually dragged through shit because of people like him. I don't think it's good to find creative ways to try to defend him.
I'm sorry Red Rose, and I mean this with all due respect, but this is the most brain-dead claim I've ever heard about Pol Pot. No more than 1.7 million people died in Cambodia during the whole period, starting before the KR took power and going well into the 1980s. That's a huge death toll, for sure, but more than half came from the brutal US bombing campaigns and the routine massacre of peasant villages sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge by the Lon Nol puppet regime.

Vickery, who I mentioned in a previous post, puts the number of real population decline in Cambodia closer to 700,000 for the whole Khmer Rouge period. That's starvation from droughts, destroyed crops, babies that were never even conceived but still represent a population decline, and - yes - executions. Of all four of the factors I just named, executions made up far and away the lowest percentage.

Vickery's book makes clear that executions took place almost exclusively on a class basis. If you worked for Lon Nol's police or state apparatus, you had no chance of survival. If you worked for Prince Sihanouk's state but were not part of the police apparatus, you probably had a 50-50 shot at surviving. If you were a US collaborator, no chance.

But even then, the picture is more complex because Vickery shows that many regions (26 in all that the KR divided the country into) had very lenient leadership from local peasant associations that executed almost no one, even collaborators. Then you had other regions, like the south, where executions took place at a far higher rate.

The point is, you're just repeating BS. Notice nothing in what I'm saying is a 'creative defense of Pol Pot.' Just look at the history and go with that. It's important because if you believe all of this shit, you'll believe anything.

[Killer Enigma]

Last point, the charge of racism gets levied at Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. As they lost popularity in the south because of heavy handed repression, they turned to base ethnic chauvinism and anti-Vietnamese prejudice to try and regain support. It wasn't an official policy, nor was it implemented nationally. In the east, for instance, the only reports of ethnic cleansing happened after the Pol Pot faction moved to expel the Vietnamese settlers on the border region in 1978. Prior to that, the eastern regional DK governments were multi-ethnic and had no problems stemming from sectarian conflict.

It's important to put it all in context, though. Cambodia, especially the CP of Cambodia and later the Khmer Rouge, experienced a lot of Vietnamese chauvinism throughout their histories. The Vietnamese, for instance, refused to recognize the communist resistance because they had a back-channeled deal with Prince Sihanouk to oppose US bombings in their country. It's an understandable position for the Vietnamese, who saw hundreds of thousands of people die every month from US bombs and wanted all of the allies they could get, but the resentment felt by Cambodian peasants and guerrilla fighters is also understandable.

[Ismail]

Ismail tells you Pol Pot was backed by the CIA. That isn't true, and it's based on a total misreading of the whole PRK period. When the Khmer Rouge was driven out of power, they amassed on the north and northwestern border with Thailand where they fought an armed conflict with the PRK government into the early 1990s. The deposed Prince Sihanouk, living in the United States at the time, was recruited by the CIA to organize the remaining monarchist elements in Cambodia and Thailand (huge amount of refugees fled across the border during the US bombing and the DK period) and form a provisional government, of which the remaining Khmer Rouge elements that didn't defect would form a nominal part.This was the Reagan Administration's line, that Pol Pot just happened to field the strongest forces against the Vietnamese but that the US was arming the two other groups (Sihanouk's forces and the KPNLF, the latter staffed by former Lon Nol lackeys) as "non-communist alternatives" to the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge, like the two other groups, had camps in Thailand where they received support from the US-backed regime there. Also, to use your own source (Vickery, p. 357), "Ieng Sary was reported as expressing satisfaction with Reagan's election victory, and he admitted association with anti-communist guerillas in southern Laos. FEER [the Far Eastern Economic Review] also reported a meeting between Son Sen and Phoumi Nosavan [Laotian CIA-backed anti-communist]. In an August 1980 interview with Stephen Heder, Thiounn Mum said DK hoped for U.S. aid, and he asked, 'if there are no DK forces, then how can the forces which these Americans support in Vietnam and Laos develop? Kampuchea is the key....'"

You also ignore that China was essentially a US ally during this period. It invaded Vietnam in 1979 with the permission of the USA, it provided the bulk of assistance to the Khmer Rouge on the same basis.

For more on the Khmer Rouge's support by the USA see: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html

[Redcanadian123]

I would consider Pol Pot to be at best a tragic hero; Pol Pot wanted to better the world at any cost, even if it meant destroying it's people.

[Ismail]

I would consider Pol Pot to be at best a tragic hero; Pol Pot wanted to better the world at any cost, even if it meant destroying it's people.That's not really an analysis of anyone though. We don't judge Deng or Gorbachev by "they felt they were doing what was best," since their consciousness didn't derive from some supreme moral idea but from the class they represented.

Pol Pot's idea to "better the world" involved disastrous economic policies in his country and allying with Chinese and American imperialism. By the 90s KR leaders had business interests in Thailand and in areas they occupied inside Cambodia, and even their public rhetoric called for a multi-party bourgeois democracy and opposition to any relations with the "Vietnamese communists."

To quote Pol Pot himself in 1997: "When I die, my only wish is that Cambodia remain Cambodia and belong to the West. It is over for communism, and I want to stress that."

[Killer Enigma]

This was the Reagan Administration's line, that Pol Pot just happened to field the strongest forces against the Vietnamese but that the US was arming the two other groups (Sihanouk's forces and the KPNLF, the latter staffed by former Lon Nol lackeys) as "non-communist alternatives" to the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge, like the two other groups, had camps in Thailand where they received support from the US-backed regime there. Also, to use your own source (Vickery, p. 357), "Ieng Sary was reported as expressing satisfaction with Reagan's election victory, and he admitted association with anti-communist guerillas in southern Laos. FEER [the Far Eastern Economic Review] also reported a meeting between Son Sen and Phoumi Nosavan [Laotian CIA-backed anti-communist]. In an August 1980 interview with Stephen Heder, Thiounn Mum said DK hoped for U.S. aid, and he asked, 'if there are no DK forces, then how can the forces which these Americans support in Vietnam and Laos develop? Kampuchea is the key....'"

You also ignore that China was essentially a US ally during this period. It invaded Vietnam in 1979 with the permission of the USA, it provided the bulk of assistance to the Khmer Rouge on the same basis.

For more on the Khmer Rouge's support by the USA see: http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html
That's exactly what I said, though. The US supported Sihanouk's forces, which were in a united front with the remaining Khmer Rouge elements. By extension, and only by extension with no direct link, you can say the US supported Pol Pot in that way. But that's not how you or other critics presented the argument. You've backtracked.

[Ismail]

That's exactly what I said, though. The US supported Sihanouk's forces, which were in a united front with the remaining Khmer Rouge elements. By extension, and only by extension with no direct link, you can say the US supported Pol Pot in that way. But that's not how you or other critics presented the argument. You've backtracked.No I haven't. The Khmer Rouge openly sought US aid, it received such aid in various ways, little of it directly.

But to deny that the US aided the Khmer Rouge because there is no "direct link" is splitting hairs. The Clark Amendment in the USA formally barred the government from backing UNITA in Angola, yet UNITA continued to receive support via US arms through and coordination with South Africa, Zaire, China, Israel, and other states materially aiding UNITA. No one would say that the US stopped assisting UNITA just because the Amendment was passed.

To give one example from the John Pilger article linked in the webpage above, "Weapons from West Germany, the US, and Sweden were passed on directly by Singapore or made under license by Chartered Industries, which is owned by the Singapore government. These same weapons were captured from the Khmer Rouge. The Singapore connection allowed the Bush administration to continue its secret aid to the 'resistance,' even though this assistance broke a law passed by Congress in 1989 banning even indirect 'lethal aid' to Pol Pot."

US assistance via proxy is still US assistance.

[Killer Enigma]

It's qualitatively different than those other examples, UNITA especially. Money found its way to the Khmer Rouge indirectly and incidentally to the support that the Sihanouk-led united front received Thai (read: US aid) and some CIA support. Pol Pot wasn't a puppet of the West. He wasn't a CIA agent. He wasn't working for the US in any discernible way. That Ieng Sary made overtures towards the West says more about the degeneration and desperation of the organization than it does about its politics.

I'm really not trying to split hairs here. The Left found an easy way to write off Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by extrapolating from tenuous connections to the West in a very particular situation. It's lazy and done to assuage people's weak stomachs. No one, including myself, is saying it was principled for the KR to enter the united front with Sihanouk, nor am I arguing that they were a revolutionary movement at the time. But the claims you (and more egregiously made by others) undermine a much-needed sober look at the KR and the whole experience of Kampuchea. We don't get any closer to that by distorting history.

[Ismail]

It's qualitatively different than those other examples, UNITA especially. Money found its way to the Khmer Rouge indirectly and incidentally to the support that the Sihanouk-led united front received Thai (read: US aid) and some CIA support.It wasn't "incidentally," there are various sources that note that the CIA indirectly assisted Khmer Rouge forces in order to keep them in fighting condition against the Vietnamese and Kampuchean armies, not to mention the fact that the US was working with the KR's main backer, China.


That Ieng Sary made overtures towards the West says more about the degeneration and desperation of the organization than it does about its politics.This doesn't make much sense. The KR's politics in power, in foreign and domestic policy, had little in common with Marxism. It already proclaimed adherence to China's "Three Worlds Theory," which had been concocted to justify a Chinese alliance with US imperialism.

[Killer Enigma]

Since you didn't really say anything substantially different than I did, I'm done with this argument, at least for the time being.

[G4b3n]

Wha?

Hoxha was definitely a Marxist. Say what you will about Albania under his leadership, there are certainly many opinions on that, but no one claims that the man wasn't a Marxist.

Within the realm of Marxism, when someone is "not a Marxist" it typically means they advocate for an interpretation of Marx which the accuser disagrees with.

[d3crypt]

None whatsoever. Any ML stalinist fuck's want to debate this, message me. In the mean time fuck Stalin, Trotsky, Pol Pot, The Kims, and the rest of the fuckers!!! :p:star3::reda::hammersickle:

[Ismail]

Any ML stalinist fuck's want to debate this, message me. In the mean time fuck Stalin, Trotsky, Pol Pot, The Kims, and the rest of the fuckers!!!The only people who apologize for Pol Pot are certain Maoists. "ML stalinist fuck's" do not.

Hoxha's views on the Khmer Rouge regime, in the context of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam:

In Cambodia, the Cambodian people, communists and patriots, have risen against the barbarous government of Pol Pot, which was nothing but a group of provocateurs in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Chinese revisionists, in particular, which had as its aim to discredit the idea of socialism in the international arena... The anti-popular line of that regime is confirmed, also, by the fact that the Albanian embassy in the Cambodian capital, the embassy of a country which has given the people of Cambodia every possible aid, was kept isolated, indeed, encircled with barbed wire, as if it were in a concentration camp. The other embassies, too, were in a similar situation. The Albanian diplomats have seen with their own eyes that the Cambodian people were treated inhumanly by the clique of Pol Pot and Yeng Sari. Pnom Pen was turned into a deserted city, empty of people, where food was difficult to secure even for the diplomats, where no doctors or even aspirins could be found. We think that the people and patriots of Cambodia waited too long before overthrowing this clique which was completely linked with Beijing and in its service.

When the first conflicts broke out on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, the view of socialist Albania was, and the world is witness to this, that disagreements between the two neighbour countries should be resolved through talks and without the interference of the Chinese or Soviet social-imperialists. But this was not done. On the contrary, the Pol Pot group, incited by Beijing, brought out in Pnom Pen daily communiques in which they announced that thousands of Vietnamese were being killed by its army on Vietnamese territory....

But the question must be asked: Why do the Chinese imperialists allegedly have the right to defend the barbarous fascist Pol Pot group, and Vietnam does not have the right to support the revolutionaries and the people of Cambodia to build a free, independent and sovereign country?

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Is there any defence to Pol Pot?

..erm...nope, not really.

[Killer Enigma]

No one who gives pithy one-liners knows a damn thing about Kampuchea. And frankly, Ismail's knee-jerk quoting of Enver Hoxha doesn't exactly scream knowledgeably either. If you haven't read Vickery's book, you really shouldn't talk about it.

[Light of Lenin]

While I agree that the issue of Khmer Rouge should be dealt with in an unbiased fashion, it should also be pointed out that defense of the Khmer Rouge is almost always tied to defense of the Soviet-Social Imperialism line. Besides the handful of independent (non-communist) scholars like Chomsky and Gareth Porter who took a position on Cambodia back in the 70s, the only other people who defend Pol Pot in the West are Ortho-Maoists pushing the reactionary Soviet-Social Imperialism line, which today only serves the interests of US imperialism.

It should also be mentioned, that the only Labor Bureaucrat to ever became a US president, Ronald Reagan (president of the Screen Actors Guild, if you could call working in imperialist Hollywood "work"), gave the Khmer Rouge $85 million dollars throughout the 80s to fight the Vietnamese and the People's Republic of Kampuchea. The Labor Bureaucrat Ronald Reagan regime even successfully defended the right of the Khmer Rouge to represent Cambodia at the United Nations, paralleling Western refusal to recognize the People's Republic of China at the UN (and instead recognizing Chiang Kai-shek).

[Ismail]

No one who gives pithy one-liners knows a damn thing about Kampuchea. And frankly, Ismail's knee-jerk quoting of Enver Hoxha doesn't exactly scream knowledgeably either. If you haven't read Vickery's book, you really shouldn't talk about it.I have read his book, I've even quoted it against you. I've read some other writings on the Khmer Rouge as well. I doubt you'd consider Hoxha one of those "petty bourgeois leftists" with "weak stomachs" which you seem to believe are the only people who denounce the Khmer Rouge.


Besides the handful of independent (non-communist) scholars like Chomsky and Gareth Porter who took a position on Cambodia back in the 70s, the only other people who defend Pol Pot in the West are Ortho-Maoists pushing the reactionary Soviet-Social Imperialism line, which today only serves the interests of US imperialism.In the 80s the Chinese actually abandoned the line that capitalism had been restored in the USSR. Also the idea that the denunciation of Soviet social-imperialism means praise for the Khmer Rouge is nonsense, considering that Albania was consistently opposed to both US and Soviet imperialism and denounced both the Khmer Rouge and Chinese imperialism as well.

[Alexios]

Albania: The Biggest Little Country in the World

[Ismail]

Albania: The Biggest Little Country in the WorldBack in November you claimed that, "Albania didn't even exist until WW2." And when the idiocy of that statement was pointed out you wrote, "For what, 20 years? Before that it was controlled by the Turks and before that the Byzantines and Bulgarians. Real rich historical content." You evidently have some chauvinist attitude about Albania that compels you to randomly attack it, not for the ideology of its leader, but because of the fact that it was Albania which this leader led.

"World reaction, whether or not in power, hates our system of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Party of Labour of Albania which leads this small country, and fights them with all possible means. Our enemies accuse us of having isolated ourselves, but their aim is that socialist Albania should open itself up, that is, should be a prey to the neighbours and to the imperialist, capitalist and revisionist states. World reaction fears small Albania, not because of the number of its population, not because of the size of its territory, or because of its armaments, but because of its ideology and policy. . . We are inflexible about this and will be so in the future, too." (Selected Works Vol. VI, pp. 734-735.)

[milk]

Pol Pot was a Yankee comprador whose power was born out of the outrage that followed how the previous government handled the bombings of Cambodian villages by US forces during the Vietnamese genocide.

He did nothing to advance class struggle or try and build a socialist society as we know the mode of production. He did nothing to advance the theoretical contributions to Marxism. He was an idealist, primitivist despot to the core.

There is no defending the actions of the Khmer Rouge, not as a socialist of any stripe. Not as someone who cares for human life. Not even as a fucking fascist or anything else.

That being said, It's unscientific to jump on the "but he killed billions" train, as that is a black book of communism-esque criticism; very shallow and meaningless if we're to look at the material conditions of Cambodia at the time and understand why things happened the way they did.

In all reality, much like the red guards of Mao, The Democratic Republic of Kampuchea had very little control over its Khmer Rouge thugs. It was a loose confederation of young people-filled and controlled gangs given guns and told to eliminate "enemies of the people" at their own discretion, and this played out, in reality, as feudalistic social relations overcoming their inherent contradictions in the form of territory disputes, personal grudges being acted upon, ethnic clashes with Chinese and Vietnamese minorities, etc.

It was the intensified process of changing modes of production worsened by a mad man's dream of turning back the hand of time. Nothing more.

Then enter Vietnamese social imperialism, stripping away the Cambodian people's right to self-determination in the form of an invasion that installed yet another puppet government, rather than arming anti-Khmer Rouge communist forces.

As a side note, it's all too often forgotten that many of the deaths attributed to the Khmer Rouge happened after the government collapsed. Being left without enough food and medical supplies, many people died horrible deaths after the KM had fallen, due to the west's refusal to send much needed relief to the area due to the issue of "politics being involved".

Pol Pot was a try-hard Stalinist, who with an understanding of Vietnamese-taught doctrine aimed to industrialise Cambodia within a compressed time scale.

Democratic Kampuchea as a state was a work in progress, the contours of which began to emerge but the regime was never able to fully consolidate itself.

The various zones which made up the country showed in their workings a decentralised autonomy within certain limits, that is the borders of the zones themselves. The main DK institution that could be said to have had considerable centralisation was the military and connected to that state security. The freedoms regional administrations enjoyed in the governing of their areas were trumped every time by the central government when it came to confrontation between it and the zones. The central government was easily able to purge those zones and did so. In that regard if you wanted to escape the centre, you had to do so with your feet.

DK extremism had nothing to do with the supposedly 'radical phase' of the GPCR, from the mid to late 1960s.

[milk]

There's so much bullshit around Pol Pot and Democratic Kampuchea that it could have fertilized every farm around Phnom Penh. If you want to read the gold standard historical account of the period, read Michael Vickery's Cambodia: 1975 - 1982 (http://michaelvickery.org/vickery1999cambodia.pdf). Vickery was and still is a vocal supporter of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, which was the government that assumed power after the Khmer Rouge were driven out of power by the Vietnamese in 1979. It doesn't stop him from cutting through the absolute garbage and totally false accusations levied at the Khmer Rouge during the period. People talk about Chomsky apologizing for Pol Pot, which isn't true. However, I've personally corresponded with Chomsky on Democratic Kampuchea, and he told me the same thing I'm telling you now - if you want to understand the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, you read Vickery's book, no exceptions.

Ismail tells you Pol Pot was backed by the CIA. That isn't true, and it's based on a total misreading of the whole PRK period. When the Khmer Rouge was driven out of power, they amassed on the north and northwestern border with Thailand where they fought an armed conflict with the PRK government into the early 1990s. The deposed Prince Sihanouk, living in the United States at the time, was recruited by the CIA to organize the remaining monarchist elements in Cambodia and Thailand (huge amount of refugees fled across the border during the US bombing and the DK period) and form a provisional government, of which the remaining Khmer Rouge elements that didn't defect would form a nominal part.

This provisional government received diplomatic support by the US, China, a lot of Western European countries and Thailand, among others, and some limited arms and supplies were funneled to them. However, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge received no direct aid by the CIA or the US, and Sihanouk cut them out of the bulk of the operations, which was why the KR resistance eventually folded. That may seem like quibbling, but it's important because the CIA never wanted to support Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge, nor did they. It flies in the face of the easy cop-out response by leftists uncomfortable with the period and unwilling to learn the history. It's an easy one-liner to say that Pol Pot was a US puppet, but it's not consistent with the history or the demonization that took place then and now.

I like Vickery's point. The Khmer Rouge was a very impressive peasant resistance force to US imperialism and the Lon Nol puppet regime in Phnom Penh. At one point, their cadre numbers were no more than 100 - in other words, they had to have some very deep connection to the masses in order to have a tiny organization, even by Cambodian standards, seize power. The US intelligence services were so baffled by the KR's secrecy that they believed Pol Pot and Saluth Sar - the same person - were two different people, and they knew almost nothing about Pol Pot at that.

When they came to power, Vickery shows that the experience of the DK varied greatly by region. In the east, you had a much more relaxed, multi-ethnic agrarian socialist experience with very few executions and some serious gains in terms of living standards for peasants. In other parts like the south and southwest - the strongholds of the Pol Pot faction of the KR - repression was far more heavy handed, and the KR became very unpopular in the region because of it. And Vickery looks at all of the experiences in-between, which are very diverse. Needless to say, you can't paint the period with the same brush of 'house of horrors'.

Furthermore, life really didn't change for the better or worse for most peasants under the KR, other than they became the favored social class. Most of the horror stories come from Thai refugee camps by city dwellers forced to work in conditions that Cambodian peasants worked in for centuries. Imagine putting a CEO to work in a warehouse or autofactory and forcing them to work, at gun point, for the same wages as the lowest paid worker. They would reflect on the period as horrific too, but it wouldn't tell you much of anything about how ordinary workers perceived the events.

Most peasants were more than happy to see the city dwellers put to work. The cities had ruthlessly exploited the countryside for centuries, and there were fewer than 1,000 workers (in the Marxist sense of the term) in Cambodia at the time. Those people generally stayed in their jobs and were forced to train peasants to do urban labor. It's not socialism or a dictatorship of the proletariat, but it's enough to make me roll my eyes whenever people say Pol Pot hated workers and exterminated them. It just patently did not happen.

Vickery sums up the DK experience as an unleashed peasant hysteria against the bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements of the city that collaborated with Lon Nol and Prince Sihanouk. They made huge ultra-left errors in throwing nearly everyone onto the countryside, which represented enormous opportunity costs and provided no real way to change their objective conditions of underdevelopment. However, like it or not, the KR was made up of Marxists. They didn't really carry out Marxist-Leninist strategies for socialist construction, and no one is arguing that they built socialism, but they're part of the history of the left.

Trying to cut them out is just a way to placate the weak stomachs of Western petty bourgeois leftists. Read the stories about Cambodia before the KR. Now there's some stories that will make your stomach turn.

Vickery's book, while having an interesting view of DK, and at the time offering nuance with regard to the varying ways in which it was briefly governed, is nevertheless outdated and his thesis of a 'peasant revolution' doesn't hold water these days.

[BolshevikBabe]

None whatsoever. Any ML stalinist fuck's want to debate this, message me. In the mean time fuck Stalin, Trotsky, Pol Pot, The Kims, and the rest of the fuckers!!! :p:star3::reda::hammersickle:

Almost no M-L "Stalinists" defend Pol Pot, sorry.

The level of understanding of Marxism-Leninism a lot of people here have is absolutely shocking.