When one is interested in humanity and makes an effort to learn things about it, you come across some pretty disparate chapters that seem hard to believe. One such crazy corner of history is Cambodia from 1975-1979, when the Khmer Rouge decided to take social engineering to new levels of insanity. Making a go of collectivization, liquidating class enemies and trying to demolish cultural traditions were the nuts and bolts of 20th Century Communist revolutions. In quite a few cases, this process went a bit off the rails and things degenerated into state sponsored bloodletting. Even so, what happened in Cambodia is singular. The Khmer Rouge probably had the least developed country to attempt Communism with, but regardless of this, the leaders threw caution to the wind and attempted to make reality conform to their wildest socialist fantasies.
As with all the horrid pieces of history, of which there are a great many, it seems most common to just shudder slightly within one's soul when hearing of it and then go get some ice cream so as to not give up all hope. As a student of history I for some reason like to stare into the abyss of human insanity, ostensibly in order to discover the reasons such things happen. A big part of our modern world seems to be predicated on the belief that we have somehow gotten better as a species, that we no longer have the same predilection for the ultra-violence. In my opinion, this is the metaphorical ice cream we feed ourselves in order to hide from the terrifying truth.
After gaining independence from France through essentially nagging and public shaming, King Sihanouk led his little kingdom into the Modern Era with panache and relentless demagoguery. He had many faults, but he did seem to love his country and its people a great deal, even if he didn't think they were ready to have a say in government. He vacillated between the West, the Communists and the non-aligned movement before eventually taking a fairly anti-US Imperialism stance as the war in Vietnam escalated and threatened to engulf Cambodia. Over time he became more and more autocratic as a nascent intelligentsia began to question his decisions, if not his overall leadership. Although still pretty damn popular with the common folk he was eventually deposed by some of his subordinates while abroad because he had managed to alienate most of the elites. The new rulers of the country immediately joined the American side of the Vietnam war and attempted to dislodge the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces that had essentially overrun the eastern provinces of the country. This didn't work because by this point the Vietnamese Communists had essentially embraced spartan levels of martial discipline, courage and skill. Once it became clear that they would never defeat the Vietnamese the government came to rely heavily on US B-52s to do the killing for them. This obviously also led to thousands of Cambodians dying as well, not to mention the majority of the countries elephants. Just as in Vietnam, this bombing campaign turned large segments of the population against the government in Phnom Penh. The deposed King Sihanouk had aligned himself with the Communists because they were the only ones really challenging the new government that had betrayed him and also because his hosts in Beijing, where he had taken residence, probably pressured him to do so. His voice on the radio urging the people to join the Communist insurgency to crush the traitorous regime managed to turn a rag tag bunch of idealists who were little more than a Vietnamese proxy force into a large scale uprising with genuine popular support. It also gave the Khmer Rouge greater legitimacy in the eyes of many observers. After all, the man who was essentially seen as Cambodia incarnate was supporting them, he surely knows best.
After gaining independence from France through essentially nagging and public shaming, King Sihanouk led his little kingdom into the Modern Era with panache and relentless demagoguery. He had many faults, but he did seem to love his country and its people a great deal, even if he didn't think they were ready to have a say in government. He vacillated between the West, the Communists and the non-aligned movement before eventually taking a fairly anti-US Imperialism stance as the war in Vietnam escalated and threatened to engulf Cambodia. Over time he became more and more autocratic as a nascent intelligentsia began to question his decisions, if not his overall leadership. Although still pretty damn popular with the common folk he was eventually deposed by some of his subordinates while abroad because he had managed to alienate most of the elites. The new rulers of the country immediately joined the American side of the Vietnam war and attempted to dislodge the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces that had essentially overrun the eastern provinces of the country. This didn't work because by this point the Vietnamese Communists had essentially embraced spartan levels of martial discipline, courage and skill. Once it became clear that they would never defeat the Vietnamese the government came to rely heavily on US B-52s to do the killing for them. This obviously also led to thousands of Cambodians dying as well, not to mention the majority of the countries elephants. Just as in Vietnam, this bombing campaign turned large segments of the population against the government in Phnom Penh. The deposed King Sihanouk had aligned himself with the Communists because they were the only ones really challenging the new government that had betrayed him and also because his hosts in Beijing, where he had taken residence, probably pressured him to do so. His voice on the radio urging the people to join the Communist insurgency to crush the traitorous regime managed to turn a rag tag bunch of idealists who were little more than a Vietnamese proxy force into a large scale uprising with genuine popular support. It also gave the Khmer Rouge greater legitimacy in the eyes of many observers. After all, the man who was essentially seen as Cambodia incarnate was supporting them, he surely knows best.
The war that followed was brutal and long. America did to Cambodia what they had to South Vietnam- made it dependent on copious amounts of US dollars and weapons, enabling their governments to become heinously corrupt to the point where victory was utterly impossible. When corruption has gotten to a level where generals in your army are selling weapons to the enemy instead of giving it to their own troops, defeat is only a matter of time. When the Khmer Rouge finally entered Phnom Penh on April 17th, 1975 a great many Cambodians were ready for a change in government and society, even if they were a bit fuzzy on the details of what sort of change that would be. At least the war would end, they reasoned. It couldn't possibly be any more corrupt or incompetent, they thought. How horribly wrong they were.
The Central Committee of the Cambodian Communist Party (CPK) was one of the weirdest, most deranged bunch of lunatics to ever wield power in the modern era. First of all, they didn't even admit that they ran the country for a long time, instead just calling themselves 'Angkar' and ruling the land through mysterious messages, the source of which was a closely guarded secret. They also thought modern medicine and education simply weren't necessary, cities ought to be abandoned and Vietnam could be militarily crushed with relative ease.
What one thinker called the 'tyranization of practice at the hands of theory' is a good way to describe how Democratic Kampuchea was governed. Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and a handful of others thought they would succeed where so many other revolutions had failed, not by going carefully and thoughtfully deducing lessons from the past, but instead going full tilt towards classless agrarian Communism based on autarky. The barbarity of what followed, even by the fucked up standards of the 20th Century, are hard to fathom. Rough estimates are that a quarter of the country died (somewhere in the realm of 1-2 million people) in the under 4 years the experiment was conducted.
The killing of the educated, the arming of indoctrinated children, more or less planned famine and even the devouring of its own revolutionary cadre was so staggering that it took years for the outside world to finally accept what had happened. If the Vietnamese hadn't put a stop to it, who knows how much longer it could have gone on. If we take North Korea as an example, potentially many years longer. Most of the West acknowledged the Khmer Rouge government in exile as the legitimate representative of Cambodia all through the 1980s, and they occupied Cambodia's seat at the UN with other exile movements based in Thailand. They weren't even ever really defeated, but eventually just allowed to be incorporated into the Cambodian military and government in the 90s, often not even having to move from the areas they had operated in. Pol Pot lived to the ripe old age of 72 in his quiet corner of Cambodia watching his grandchildren grow up. This is perhaps the most disturbing part, that those who caused so much suffering were themselves allowed to live out their lives.
A major reason for what took place in Cambodia was obviously external and hardly something for which the local population can be blamed. The Cold War and the American war next door were obviously direct antecedents. The Sino-Soviet split also played a major role in what happened, as China was so desperate to find a way to isolate Vietnam, then an ally of the USSR, that they were willing to tolerate almost any government in Cambodia as long as it was loyal to them. Having said all that, there is still a lingering question of how any people could allow themselves to be brutalized on such a monumental level and to then not demand the heads of those who had done it.
When it's a concentration camp or gulag, that is one thing, but damn near an entire society is hard to comprehend. In Bosnia or Rwanda, there were ethnic and religious tensions that made their genocides conceivable, but Cambodia is a different beast all together. When a very belatedly attempt to put some of the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial some years back they actually found it fairly difficult to convict them of genocide, because they had killed overwhelmingly Khmer people and did so without any consideration of race, religion or nationality. It would seem to me that what happened during those dark years was the result of pursuing an idea, one believed to be so intrinsically good, that it justifies any means to achieve it. Add to that the context, America pulling frantically out of South Vietnam as the NVA closes in on Saigon at the exact same time that Phnom Penh falls to the Khmer Rouge and we start to understand why the world didn't really think much about Cambodia during the next 4 years. Another factor worth considering is that Cambodia had been kicked around by stronger neighbors for centuries, and so was rather paranoid about other countries trying to take it over, which made much of the CPK propaganda easily digestible.
These days in Cambodia, the genocide is mostly for tourist consumption it seems. They don't teach about it in public schools so as to not incur the wrath of the government, which is headed by a former battalion commander of the Khmer Rouge who eventually defected to the North Vietnamese and turned on his former comrades. The people obviously still bear psychological scars from this period and trans-generational trauma seems very common. The country has a great many problems, but the people seem to me incredibly resilient. The smiles and the little acts of kindness I see every day gives me hope for this imperiled species we call humans.
The Central Committee of the Cambodian Communist Party (CPK) was one of the weirdest, most deranged bunch of lunatics to ever wield power in the modern era. First of all, they didn't even admit that they ran the country for a long time, instead just calling themselves 'Angkar' and ruling the land through mysterious messages, the source of which was a closely guarded secret. They also thought modern medicine and education simply weren't necessary, cities ought to be abandoned and Vietnam could be militarily crushed with relative ease.
What one thinker called the 'tyranization of practice at the hands of theory' is a good way to describe how Democratic Kampuchea was governed. Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and a handful of others thought they would succeed where so many other revolutions had failed, not by going carefully and thoughtfully deducing lessons from the past, but instead going full tilt towards classless agrarian Communism based on autarky. The barbarity of what followed, even by the fucked up standards of the 20th Century, are hard to fathom. Rough estimates are that a quarter of the country died (somewhere in the realm of 1-2 million people) in the under 4 years the experiment was conducted.
The killing of the educated, the arming of indoctrinated children, more or less planned famine and even the devouring of its own revolutionary cadre was so staggering that it took years for the outside world to finally accept what had happened. If the Vietnamese hadn't put a stop to it, who knows how much longer it could have gone on. If we take North Korea as an example, potentially many years longer. Most of the West acknowledged the Khmer Rouge government in exile as the legitimate representative of Cambodia all through the 1980s, and they occupied Cambodia's seat at the UN with other exile movements based in Thailand. They weren't even ever really defeated, but eventually just allowed to be incorporated into the Cambodian military and government in the 90s, often not even having to move from the areas they had operated in. Pol Pot lived to the ripe old age of 72 in his quiet corner of Cambodia watching his grandchildren grow up. This is perhaps the most disturbing part, that those who caused so much suffering were themselves allowed to live out their lives.
A major reason for what took place in Cambodia was obviously external and hardly something for which the local population can be blamed. The Cold War and the American war next door were obviously direct antecedents. The Sino-Soviet split also played a major role in what happened, as China was so desperate to find a way to isolate Vietnam, then an ally of the USSR, that they were willing to tolerate almost any government in Cambodia as long as it was loyal to them. Having said all that, there is still a lingering question of how any people could allow themselves to be brutalized on such a monumental level and to then not demand the heads of those who had done it.
When it's a concentration camp or gulag, that is one thing, but damn near an entire society is hard to comprehend. In Bosnia or Rwanda, there were ethnic and religious tensions that made their genocides conceivable, but Cambodia is a different beast all together. When a very belatedly attempt to put some of the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge leaders on trial some years back they actually found it fairly difficult to convict them of genocide, because they had killed overwhelmingly Khmer people and did so without any consideration of race, religion or nationality. It would seem to me that what happened during those dark years was the result of pursuing an idea, one believed to be so intrinsically good, that it justifies any means to achieve it. Add to that the context, America pulling frantically out of South Vietnam as the NVA closes in on Saigon at the exact same time that Phnom Penh falls to the Khmer Rouge and we start to understand why the world didn't really think much about Cambodia during the next 4 years. Another factor worth considering is that Cambodia had been kicked around by stronger neighbors for centuries, and so was rather paranoid about other countries trying to take it over, which made much of the CPK propaganda easily digestible.
These days in Cambodia, the genocide is mostly for tourist consumption it seems. They don't teach about it in public schools so as to not incur the wrath of the government, which is headed by a former battalion commander of the Khmer Rouge who eventually defected to the North Vietnamese and turned on his former comrades. The people obviously still bear psychological scars from this period and trans-generational trauma seems very common. The country has a great many problems, but the people seem to me incredibly resilient. The smiles and the little acts of kindness I see every day gives me hope for this imperiled species we call humans.
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