Pol Pot's Cambodia: Socialist Vision Carried To Its Logical Conclusion
/About two years ago I visited Cambodia. While there I wrote this January 2019 post, which focused on the “killing fields” genocide that swept Cambodia in 1975-79, during the rule of the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot. In connection with my trip, I bought the Ben Kiernan history titled “The Pol Pot Regime,” which I have just now gotten around to reading.
Why my fascination with Cambodia in the day of the Khmer Rouge? It is one of the clearest modern instances of leftist/socialist ideology put into practice and then pushed to its logical conclusion. Highly educated elitists got taught a utopian vision of a transformed society with perfect fairness and justice, and they determined to impose that vision upon the backward and unlearned masses in their country. Then they came to power, and got the opportunity to carry out their plans. The circumstances in Cambodia were such that they could implement their plans with few to no constraints. We get to study the results. Any relevance to our current situation is for the reader to draw.
Kiernan’s basic approach is that he sought out and interviewed several hundred Cambodians who lived through the events and survived the genocide. The interviews took place starting after the fall of the regime (1979), through the 1980s and into the early 90s (the first edition of the book came out in 1996). This approach has obvious pluses and minuses. On the plus side, this is primary source, first hand information. On the minus side, the people available for interview were not randomly selected and have major gaps in their collective knowledge. Obviously, none of them were killed. If any of them were involved in the killings, they certainly don’t admit to it. Nor did any of the leaders of the regime submit to interviews, so there is nobody to offer testimony as to “here’s why we did it,” or “here’s what we were trying to accomplish.” Nevertheless, there is much to learn.
Here are the things that I find most interesting:
The “peasant revolution.” Naturally the mythology of the Khmer Rouge movement was that it was a “peasant revolution.” It was the opposite — a movement of pointy-headed elitist utopianists. Pol Pot (birth name: Saloth Sar) was born in 1925 to a relatively wealthy farming family (Kiernan: “In later years the family would have been ‘class enemies.’”) with some 30 acres of land and six buffalo. One of Sar’s cousins was a dancer in the royal palace, and became one of the King’s principal wives; then one of his sisters moved into the palace and also became a royal consort. By the age of six, Sar too had moved into the royal palace, and after that was sent to top French colonial schools of the time. In his early twenties, they sent him off for further education in Paris. Big mistake. That’s where he took up the trendy Communism of the day. What later became the Khmer Rouge inner circle — in addition to Pol Pot, it was the Thiounn brothers, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Son Sen — were all his pals from his days as a student in Paris. Needless to say, poor Cambodian peasants did not get sent off to school in Paris.
Military victory. Cambodia in the early 1970s had a U.S.-backed government headed by a military strongman named Lon Nol. Pol Pot had a guerrilla army called the Khmer Rouge that obtained substantial backing from the Soviet Union and China (Kiernan provides no information on the magnitude of the aid). In 1975 the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, and in connection with that withdrew its support for Lon Nol. The Lon Nol regime quickly fell to the Khmer Rouge.
The vision of the anointed. Pol Pot and his pals took their Communist training with utmost seriousness. During their years fighting in the jungle, they put together a full utopian vision to be implemented when they would have power. They were not going to make the mistakes of prior failed attempts at socialism. Instead, this was going to be a far more pure and vigorous variety of the ideology. The vision — much of which seems ridiculous today — included that the cities would be evacuated and everyone sent to the country to work the fields; private property would be entirely abolished, with personal property mostly confiscated and land held collectively; money would be abolished; markets would be abolished; and the nuclear family would be replaced with communal eating and communal care for children.
The early days. In the telling of Kiernan’s witnesses, there was widespread support for the new regime at the outset in 1975. The cities were quickly emptied without substantial resistance, with most people going to some region or village where they had some relatives or other connections. Most of the “new” people were welcomed in the villages and quickly put to work. The work was heavy and manual — tending rice fields or building irrigation works including dams. In the early days, most of the witnesses report that there was sufficient food to eat.
The “indentured agrarian state.” This is Kiernan’s term for the organization of society imposed by the Khmer Rouge. Essentially all work was in agriculture, and everyone took orders from the central state. Private initiative was not welcome.
The killings begin. In my January 2019 post I reported (based on information received while in Cambodia) that the Cambodian genocide was internal to the Khmer ethnic group, rather than involving the extinction of ethnic minorities. Not quite. Beginning in the early days of the Pol Pot regime (1975), essentially all ethnic minorities in Cambodia were wiped out. From Kiernan, page 251: “Chams, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thais, Lao and twenty other groups, who comprised close to 20 percent of the population, were virtually erased from history by the CPK [Communist Party of Kampuchea].”
The killings continue. Aside from the ethnic minorities, the implication from Kiernan’s interviews is that the killings started slowly, but accelerated as 1975 moved to 1976, 1977 and 1978. As noted, Kiernan’s methodology does not give a good basis for understanding if there was an overall plan behind the killings, and if so, what the plan might have been. From this perspective, the whole thing appears largely random, although it may not have been. Rather than mass deportations, this genocide proceeded more like tens or twenties at a time. Time and again, a witness reports something like “Twenty people were taken away from the village ‘for study.’ We never saw them again.” Some of the disappeared had had disagreements, however minor, with Khmer Rouge authorities, or had resisted ongoing disruptions (like having their children taken away). In the less random category, essentially everyone who had held a position of any significance in the Lon Nol regime disappeared. So did nearly everyone who had substantial education or held a professional job prior to 1975.
The economy deteriorates. Kiernan’s methodology does not provide for any kind of coherent overall view of the economy, and in any event it is likely that no honest aggregate economic statistics exist from this period. However, with witness after witness, the story is the same. In 1975 the food rations were generally adequate, and then they went downhill from there. By 1977 many were starving, and by 1978, almost everybody was hungry and there were large numbers of deaths from starvation.
The denouement. By 1979 the situation had become so unstable that Vietnam, then under the control of the Communist successors to Ho Chi Minh, stepped in and removed Pol Pot. Of an initial population of under 8 million in 1975, about 3 million had died. However, the breakdown of those deaths between murder and starvation is less clear.
So do our pointy-headed elites today have anything comparable to the Khmer Rouge vision to impose upon the common people in order to achieve a version of utopia? You might check out the latest brief video from the World Economic Forum with the title “Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world.”