Thread by @FascioLiftorio

The thread of today is based on the result of the poll, nostalgia and ideological schizophrenia.

Pol Pot: Urbanites, Rice Fields & Paranoia

When I started making threads, I had the brilliant (not) idea of talking about Pol Pot. As dumb as it sounds, despite the full legend that goes around him, there’s quite a few things to keep in consideration when understanding his person.

As years have gone by, a massive story has been created around Mr. Saloth Sar, that is, that this man was a massive maniac that killed 6 million Cambodians, destroyed glasses, retvrned to monkey, and wanted an Agrarian NeoKampuchean Empire.

The reality of this story is far more complicated than what it seems, and this is due to several factors; misinformation, myths, and legit lies. Before I explain what I mean by this, keep in mind that the purpose of this thread is NOT to defend Pol Pot…

it is absolutely not making the case for Based Epic NazBol Pol Pot, and it is not justifying nor supporting the outcome of his policies. At most, you can see what’s presented in this thread as niche knowledge with some comparisons being made throughout it.

Saloth Sar (AKA POLitique POTentielle AKA Radical Politics), was a cambodian man that studied in France, and, like many other figures of Post-WW2, adopted Communism since at his view, this was the best means for a movement of National Liberation.

It is perhaps not the best thing to do to cathegorize him as a Communist, even though some people see him as the true bringer of Communism, the man held no ideological conviction and this can be seen in how he dropped it like hot iron…

once support from Communist nations was no longer coming in. At most, in Pol Pot one can see a reality of most leaders trying to make nationally organic movements in their respective countries after the fall of Fascism.

Through his writings we can see that the guy was not ideologically brilliant, and was quite simplistic with what he wanted to do, nevertheless, his actions and policies would be highly conditioned by the situation of Cambodia at the time.

Cambodia was going through a Civil War before the rise of Pol Pot, and not only that, the meme of Life Expectancy is one of the few shots of information people give when pointing the flaws of the guy. Reality of said data is that, even before he got…

power, life expectancy was already sinking, and why is that? The Civil War, American Bombings (Operation Freedom Deal) and, a country with a history of internal division. Perhaps the most important factor to keep in mind from all of this…

are the American Bombings, which caused 25% of the Population to leave the fields behind, and aim for the cities. This would paralyze the production of food in the country, and would force it to depend on foreign aid by the United States. Said aid, would…

be removed once Pol Pot toppled the Pro-US government of Lon Nol. This is where the funny meme of getting people out of the cities comes from, it was not out of Pol Pot saying “Ok guys, we have to be agrarian idiots and destroy technology bc Yes”.

If one even bothers to look at the situation of Cambodia, and the literal declarations of Pol Pot himself, one can see that the reasoning behind forcing people into the fields was not out of ideological dogmatism, but out of necessity + ideological autism.

At the view of God Pot, Cambodia had to start over and eventually industrialize the country. Yes, he literally wanted to industrialize the country. He believed that the food question had to be solved, and then, an eventual jump for industrialization had to begin.

As he was trying to get people into the fields, one of the first issues came into place, that is, intellectuals refusing to leave the cities. In that way, the CPK chooses to do the meme of “smashing urbanites”. Not because they hated intelligence as people say…

but due to a bizarre similarity (yet taken to the extreme) with the Fascist notion of Anti-Intellectualism; those who criticize, tear apart everything, yet never take action, are to be deemed as useless intellectuals, hence, were enemies of Fascism.

In the same manner, for the movement of Pol Pot, intellectuals that were useless for the country if they were not contributing. Although there was no explicit policy to “kill urbanites”, troops were encouraged to deal with them as “they saw fit.”

Another instance where Fascism and the Khmer Rouge coincide would be in the establishment of the idea of the Aesthetic State, that is, the desire of a mixture of aesthetics and politics through cultural, political and biological restructuring of the nation.

The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot retrieved from Cambodian History what they deemed as useful for rebuilding the Khmer Nation under a new mythos and structure, which, while looking back to the past, walked torwards the future.

Paranoia and a lack of conviction turned him into a leader that lacked authority, and enabled places like S-21 to manifest. Pol Pot lacked overview of the country and never actually formed a proper State, at most, he remained acting as if he was a partisan.

His policies still resulted in the famine he was trying to stop, paranoia led him to constant purges, and eventually, his aggresive posture with Vietnam caused his downfall. It is in this way in which he relegates himself to die in a godless jungle.

Some of his failure was conditioned by certain factors that were out of his reach, and a lot of the people that criticize him for it, would have had the same hard time he had on taking charge of a country such as Cambodia in 1975. Nevertheless…

his actions although “rational”, ended up being a failure that still ended in a famine. Which, even then, the number of people that died in his regime, is an amalgation of the results of bombings, the civil war, famine and the purges.

Now, after so many years and despite having “rational intentions”, he’s known as the crazy guy that killed people with glasses (literal lie, members & non members of the Pol Pot cabinet wore glasses). Nobody even attempts to understand his…

character, hence, he will remain punished by history no matter how many idiots go around trying to explain why he did what he did (me). The Cambodian Experience has some interestings things to look into, yet remains to be an eternal failure.

The End