![]() Virtually all educated people, including teachers, engineers, and technicians of every type were forced into re-education through hard labor. The country’s larger cities were forcibly evacuated and their inhabitants resettled as peasants in rural areas, forming an underclass called “base people”. Pol Pot’s vision of an agrarian revolution quickly led to slavery. Guerrilla warfare between various factions continued until 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power under Pol. ![]() An ostensibly anti-communist but largely pointless heavy bombing campaign by the United States near the end of the Vietnam War further destabilized the rural areas of the country. In the late 1960s, disputes over rice trade and further oppression by Sihanouk led to widespread unrest that set the stage for an open insurrection by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge communists. Sihanouk continued the violent repression of opposition parties while keeping the United States at a distance. China, no ally of the Soviets, sought to mitigate Soviet influence in Vietnam by aiding the Khmer. The Khmer communists in Cambodia, led in secret by Pol Pot, slowly and steadily gained strength, quietly forming alliances with China. This pattern continued into the mid-1960s. ![]() After winning, the new government entered into a balancing act between captialist and communist influences: likely due to a secret agreement with Vietnam, Vietnamese communist activity was limited to border areas in exchange for Cambodia’s refusal to accept anti-communist aid from the United States or Western Europe. The elections were heavily rigged in his party’s favor. Faced with a popular nationalist opposition party, Sihanouk abdicated his throne to his father to participate in politics. In the early 1950s, France agreed to Cambodian independence with the stipulation that hereditary monarchy give way to a constitutional monarchy with open elections. To this he added a cultural history of Theravada Buddhism. Pol ended up returning to Cambodia with a mixture of Marxism, Maoism, and Kropotkin’s anarchism (which admired the French revolution rather than Bolshevism) under his belt. For Cambodia, Mao’s interpretation was a better fit: the industrial phase was not required. Furthermore, Marxism’s requirement for a culture to pass through a phase of industrial captialism before communist revolution didn’t sit well with Cambodia’s pre-industrial, agrarian cultural background. The Cambodians weren’t ingesting European Marxism wholesale, though: being relatively new to the French language, they were impatient with French translations of abstract, technical Russian and German texts on the nuances of Marxist theory. There, he and other Cambodian students quickly become involved with the French Communist Party. As the child of an middle-class (relative to the deep poverty that defined the agrarian under-classes) family, he won a prestigious scholarship to study radio technology in Paris. The simultaneous stress of a communist insurgency in Vietnam and the rise of nationalist political movements in Cambodia was pushing an already strained French colonial rule close to the breaking point. Cambodia held a cultural memory of greatness that hearkened back to the 12th century, when the lost kingdom of Angkor Wat was the jewel of southeast Asian civilization. ![]() The hereditary monarch, King Sihanouk, ruled in name only. BackgroundĬambodia entered the post-WW2 era chafing under a century of French colonialism. The book is exhaustively detailed and very well-written I highly recommend it if you want to learn more. This post is based on the book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short. While there were certainly elements of this – as I’ll discuss – Pol Pot’s regime was more about brutal slavery and vicious punishment of any deviance, regardless of the person. The term “genocide” has been controversial with reference to the Khmer Rouge regime: while they systematically murdered or starved somewhere between 1.7 and 2.3 million people, for the most part the killings didn’t target a specific racial, ethnic, or religious group. It’s a particularly strange case of different cultural, political, and historic influences converging in a disastrous way. While I’d like to come back to those events if I can endure the topic that long, I’m starting with non-Western events.įirst up is Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, partly because I grew up in the 1980s around a lot of first or second-generation Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants, but never knew much about the politics behind their flight from Southeast Asia. Most education about these topics in the US is focused around Nazi Germany, or occasionally the Soviet Union under Stalin. I’ve decided to start a reading project on genocides and violent totalitarian dictators. ![]()
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