Pol Pot was a wanker, but does anyone like him?

[Comrade Jacob]

I have never come across anyone on this forum that likes Pol Pot but now is their time to creep out of the woodworks.
Pol Pot = shitty, murderous, racist, reactionary wank-puddle
Potites, come defend him if you exist.

[The Feral Underclass]

I don't think they're permitted to post on the board are they?

[Comrade Jacob]

Maybe under opposing ideologies?

[G4b3n]

A sort of ironic thread coming from a hardcore tankie Stalinist.

[Comrade Jacob]

A sort of ironic thread coming from a hardcore tankie Stalinist.

It really isn't.
"Tankie Stalinist"
Oh, stop it you!

[Sasha]

dont know wheter the user Milk is still arround, while not a kmer rouge supporter he was very knowledgeable on the subject.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

He built part of the roads in Zagreb. I don't care about his subsequent career, this cements him as the universe's greatest monster.

[Sasha]

You never been to Lelystad huh? Pretty sure that city was designed to be a portal to the demonworld.

[mushroompizza]

He was a primitivist who killed 50% of the local population wanted history books to start with him and was anit-intellectual even though he studied at a French university. Love the guy!

[MarcusJuniusBrutus]

Well, his mum probably liked him.

[consuming negativity]

the us government funded him for decades

of course i give money to wal-mart/amazon/etc. on occasion and i fucking hate all of them

[Os Cangaceiros]

There's a few reasons I can think of why he isn't defended much by leftists. 1) the US gov't did support the Khmer Rouge state in exile (in Thailand), as alluded to above, and the taint of US gov't support is something that tends to linger with leftists, 2) the Khmer Rouge's ultimate undoing was an invasion by Vietnam, which had garnered a lot of left-wing support throughout the 60's and 70's, and, perhaps most obviously, 3) the Khmer Rouge was pretty fucked up & destructive, even by the standards of other despotic regimes. The regime's ideology was Khmer supremacist, for one thing, and supporting a ruler or state associated with ethnic cleansing is kind of hard to stomach.

[willowtooth]

I though pol pot only killed about 150,000 people?

[Q]

I though pol pot only killed about 150,000 people?

Wikipedia makes a claim of about 1 to 3 million people (three references on that page) and I believe 2 million is the number that is generally accepted. So, why would you think 150k?

And I believe Pol Pot defenders are banned. Rightly so.

[willowtooth]

sorry can't post links yet because im new here, but you should be able too find it if you google the first sentence. and im not a polpotist or pol pot apologist

By 1975, already an estimated 10% of the Kampuchean population-- 600,000 had died as a result of the Vietnam War. (1) Those 600,000 deaths were caused by U.S. efforts to track down Vietnamese communists into Cambodia.

Nixon's ordering of the bombing of Cambodia and U.S. troop forays into Cambodia were a turning point in the movement against the Vietnam War in the United States. Today, however, many people who never opposed the U.S. role in Indochina are complaining about Pol Pot's violence. That's just hypocrisy that is increasingly easy to get away with as people forget about the U.S. war in Indochina.

The U.S.-instigated war-- bombing in particular-- also caused the creation of 2 million refugees, who flooded the cities. The cities then came to depend on U.S. food aid to live because of the war and the inefficiency of the right-wing Lon Nol regime. (2)

Hence, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power from Lon Nol in 1975 in the worst possible situation: The people were starving; Kampuchea was the poorest country in the world and one-third were refugees.

The next charge frequently heard from the imperialist critics is that Pol Pot oppressed the people by forcing them out of the cities. It is true that Pol Pot had Phnom Penh emptied; however, given that these people were starving and that the economy was a shambles, it was not a bad move economically. (3) It seems likely to have saved lives, something not usually considered by Khmer Rouge critics. Even so, on the negative side, the Khmer Rouge admitted that 2 or 3,000 people died in the process of migration out of Phnom Penh. (4)

The next charge is that to carry out supposedly crazy communist policies, Pol Pot simply executed people for little or no reason. However, as with propaganda against Stalin, the bourgeois propagandists overlook certain subtleties. (5)

Pol Pot did not execute 2 or 3 million people as the press often leaves the impression without explaining. Pol Pot executed between 75,000 and 150,000 people, who were disproportionately urban dwellers, upper class or intellectual, between 1975 and 1979. Vietnam invaded in December 1978 and threw the Khmer Rouge out of power in January 1979.

The 2 or 3 million figure comes from counting all deaths in the 1975 to 1979 period based on estimates of population. A Finnish inquiry commission concludes that 1 million or fewer people died in the Pol Pot period. (6) At least several thousand of those were caused by repeated military clashes with Vietnam.

[Tim Cornelis]

I suspect communer is a Potist: he said academics, being unproductive, are leeching off of the labour of the proletariat.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were reactionary socialists through and through. Feudal socialism. They even made positive references to previous Khmer Empires, which is incidentally reminiscent of fascism's (which is a sort of ultra-reactionary petty bourgeois socialism) palingenetic ultra-nationalism. So the bourgeoisie was opposed to Pol Pot insofar it was a form of anticapitalist reaction:

"In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history."

[#FF0000]

gotta say my views on pol pot softened when I actually had to hang out with academics one day.

[red-winter]

He built part of the roads in Zagreb. I don't care about his subsequent career, this cements him as the universe's greatest monster.

Those uneven bricks though *shivers*

[Mr. Piccolo]

I have come across members of strange Leftist sects in the real world and online, but I have never met a follower of Pol Pot.

[Atsumari]

I came across former Pol Pot supporters from the Asian American community, mostly offshoots of the Communist Workers Party and Asian Americans for Equality. They saw hope in Pol Pot after Soviet and Chinese revisionism and when the horrors was made 100 percent clear, they became social democrats and then dissolved afterwards. Most of the former members are now bleeding heart liberals working for either the Green or Democratic Party and one of them is a CEO of an alternative energy company.
What was most interesting was that Michio Kaku was once part of the CWP and AAFE, contributed to The Guardian (old one), and even organized events for the Worker's World Party

Also, we cannot forget this lovely anti-Revisionist on YouTube

+ YouTube Video

And among the Cambodian community, they all hate Pol Pot, but they seem to hate the Vietnamese even more for their invasion.