# Pol Pot - the history of a nightmare



## Eoghan (Mar 9, 2013)

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge
I was drawn to the biography of Pol Pot partly because of the heinousness of his regimes crimes. Most interesting were the methods employed by the Khmer Rouge. The whole scale deportation of city populations seems unbelievable but he did it. It is slow to start and it took about 100 pages before I was interested enough to really spent time reading it.

What I find educational are the origins of the Khmer Rouge and the peculiar way they developed communism. Classical Marxist-Leninism sees communism as the rising up of the “working class” the proletariat. I had mistakenly believed that this was anybody who worked for a living. This is not correct however. It specifically refers to people working for others. This breeds the question of the worker receiving an equitable share of what they produce. In Cambodia subsistence farmers were not asking whether they had an equitable share of the produce of their hands. They had 100% of what they produced – and it was barely enough. The Khmer Rouge “adapted” communism with a cultural interpretation based on Buddhism, the traditional religion of Cambodia (p150) and the model of the French Revolution of peasants led by bourgeois intellectuals (p72). 

Therevada Buddhism is intensely introspective. The goal is not to improve society or redeem one’s fellow men; it is self-cultivation, in the nihilistic sense of the demolition of the individual. So it was that using the vocabulary of Buddhism the emphasis was on “proletariat consciousness”.

There was a precedent in the case of China in which Mao said there was no need to go through the stage of bourgeois capitalism. Instead a “democratic revolution” followed by a “socialist revolution” would suffice (p70).

What is more difficult to explain is the cruelty and indifference. In reading of the flat denial of atrocities I was struck by the similarities with the Nambari in Babylon 5. Indeed was I not a fan of the series I doubt I would have understood the cultural roots which led to the denial of atrocities. One of the Nambari lies about who was to blame for a bar fight. This is amusing and innocuous but becomes crucial later in a murder trial. The witness is said to be lying but “Nambari do not lie”. Fact is that lying is “permitted” if it is done to “save face” for another. This comes close to explaining the Cambodian ease of lying where a straight answer would cause loss of face (p207).

The reason for the mass deportations is more difficult to explain. There is a clue in the belief that “private trade like private ownership implied the pursuit of gain and attachment to individual possessions. It was by definition dishonest.” (p247)

There were many other points, one of which was the use/control not only of the private lives but the language used to express thought. 

·	The ownership of private land was forbidden
·	Cooking food in your house was forbidden (communal canteens) p334
·	Foraging for food was forbidden when people were starving (this was an individualistic activity) p346
·	Married couples were separated (weekly “visits”)
·	Ownership of anything above the bare minimum was forbidden
·	The educated were killed in villages (they were privileged like the rich) p254
·	Mother and Father replaced by Aunt and Uncle p324
·	Free choice of spouses was explicitly condemned and marriages were celebrated collectively for a minimum of ten couples.
·	Money was printed for issue by the regime in China. It was issued briefly in one liberated zone but with no goods, no shops, no markets the regime withdrew it in 
favour of barter. There are some Khmer Rouge notes out there - I bought one on EBAY and have it as a bookmark in the book.

From a spiritual point of view one of the worst pronouncements of Pol Pot came on page 176 said in the context of executions, ‘I do not care if I am sent to hell,’ he cried, ‘I will present the relevant documents to the Devil himself.’

In terms of language there are scattered examples throughout the 450 pages of the book. Most sinister was the concept of ‘spiritual private property’ p316. “To destroy physical private property the appropriate method was the evacuation of the towns… But spiritual private property is more dangerous, it comprises everything that you think is ‘yours’, everything that you think exists in relation to ‘yourself- your parents, your family, your wife.’ Everything of which you say, ‘It is mine…’ is spiritual private property.

The knowledge you have in your head, your ideas, are mental private property. To become a true revolutionary you must… wash your mind clean. That knowledge comes from the colonialists and imperialists … and has to be destroyed.”

The fullest discussion is on pages 324-325. Nuon Chea (the Khmer equivalent of the Nazis regime’s Goebbels). “…words conveying lyrical or bourgeois sentiments like ‘beauty’, ‘colourful’ and ‘comfort’ were banned from the airwaves. The goal was that outlined in 1984, a book which neither Pol nor Nuon had read but whose principles they grasped intuitively:
The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought… In 
the end we will make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because 
there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that 
will ever be needed will to be expressed by exactly one word, with 
it’s meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed 
out and forgotten… Every year fewer and fewer words, and the 
range of consciousness always a little smaller… In fact there will 
be no thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not 
thinking… Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”


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## Mushroom (Mar 9, 2013)

Hegelian dialectics mixed with Eastern mysticism results in horrific consequences.


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