Lets have another pointless discussion thread about these guys, who they were and what they were doing at the time.
I'll start:
>They were CIA pretending to be collaborators who dissapeared soon after…
59 posts and 76 image replies omitted.>>2557706i mean they really did kill a lot of people and really did mass evacuate the cities, the vietnamese themselves outright proved it when they went there, are some of the stories outlandish? certainly but many of them are probably real
>>2557436Those two images kind of express (almost) all of what USAID is about, they set up legitimate programs to help proles while pushing a certain worldview favorable to Amerikkka at the same time. And it's also a vector for intelligence gathering and covert ops although this aspect has been exagerated a bit.
>>2557708>the vietnamese themselves outright proved it when they went thereBut did they really murder millions?
>>2557713>Although a new Cambodian currency had been printed in China during the civil war, the Khmer Rouge decided not to introduce it. At the Central Committee Plenum held in Phnom Penh in September, they agreed that currency would lead to corruption and undermine their efforts to establish a socialist society.[238] Thus, there were no wages in Democratic Kampuchea.[239] The population were expected to do whatever the Khmer Rouge commanded of them, without pay. If they refused, they faced punishment, sometimes execution.I find this very hard to believe.
>>2557713I remember Chomsky claimed that he believed that 2 million died during the whole period going back to the Cambodian civil war. Around 800,000 could be blamed on American shenanigans and 1.2 million on the Khmer rouge. That's just how I remember what he said I think there's a video on YouTube where he states his belief on these matters.
>>2557713millions? it's sort of hard to prove that, the best explanation is that they did at least murder a significant number, probably in the hundreds of thousands (say, 300-500k) whereas the rest were what we'd call deaths by reckless negligence, that is to say, while they didn't directly kill them, they may as well have as they were caused directly by the khmer rouge's policy, likewise there's the aforementioned US bombing beforehand which also contributed to these deaths
>>2557715it's not that hard to believe, there's enough witness testimony and enough overall evidence to at least make it a reasonable enough thing to say
Victims of leftism
>>2557716this reads like pretentious dystopian fiction wholly inspired by readings of postmodernist philosophy, of the french post-structuralist kind
>>2557773very reasonable take tbh. you also have to keep in mind the scale of the US carpet bombing during the civil war. they bombed the whole mainland southeast asia during that time with laos and kampuchea getting the absolute worst of it because of the ho chi minh + sihanouk trails (first covers laos and cambodia, second is through cambodia only, both lead to "south" vietnam
aka kampuchea krom)
<https://data.opendevelopmentcambodia.net/en/dataset/us-bombing-in-cambodia-1965-1975- >>2565363why do you feel you must interpret him, or anyone as an individual at all? i mean it would theoretically be kind of interesting to approach pol pot from a schizoanalytic angle but that seems
>>>/dead/ on arrival
>>2547940The same happened to Che in the Congo, why do people think that their "magikkk" has some effect on real, material and dialectical physics
>>2565692some of the magikk, like traditional medicines derived from herbs (myth and medicine being inseparable in many societies), was (and still is, in places) a reasonably well-enough to work explanation for the processes of real, material and dialectical physics
not unheard of are drugs used today being extracted, isolated and used on their own in scientific medicine, like the antimalarial drug
artemisinin which was discovered during the secret chinese cultural revolution-era program
project 523, along with a number of other compounds extracted by Tu Youyou from a variety of traditional chinese folk remedies that she collected the recipes of on a journey throughout the country. this earned her a nobel prize in physiology
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228382-000-the-modest-woman-who-beat-malaria-for-china/however just like the medicinal plants which often contain not only the healing component(s) but also a number of other compounds including the ones with quite unpleasant side effects if ingested/applied on a human, if not outright poison that kills them; the magikk has a comparable byproduct of such in the idealist ways of thinking it is self-reinforcing
>picrelmedicinal plant of strychnos nux-vomica for thread [people's] tax. strychnine trees grow on ទួលស្លែង, Tuŏl Slêng [tuəl slaeŋ]; lit. "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill"
another famous species is the chankiri tree Cambodian man kept live land mines as yard decorations>PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Authorities in northwestern Cambodia have scolded a man for his lawn decorations – old land mines and other abandoned ordnance still containing live explosives, an official said Friday.
>About 30 unexploded munitions were hung from a tamarind tree and scattered around the man’s yard, said Khen Srieng, an official from the Cambodian Mines Action Center, the government agency that oversees mine clearance.>Khen Srieng, who went to the man’s home on Wednesday to collect the munitions for destruction, said they were left over from three decades of civil war that ended in the 1990s and that most of the mines were still active and dangerous.>He said the man used to be a junk collector and had gathered the devices from rice fields and forests near his home to sell as scrap. The man, whose name was not released, told Khen Srieng that after the government banned the sale and purchase of land mines and other unexploded ordnance, he didn’t know what to do with them.>Violators of the ban are rarely if ever prosecuted, because they are generally poor villagers seeking a bit of extra income. CMAC lectured the man for breaking the law.>CMAC chief Heng Ratana, who on his Facebook page described the situation as “unbelievable,” said the man sometimes acted as an unlicensed deminer by clearing mines from the fields of other villagers for money, and then kept them.
>The man’s house is in Banteay Meanchey province near the Cambodian-Thai border, where there was combat in the 1980s and 1990s between Cambodian government forces and communist Khmer Rouge fighters.>An estimated 4 million to 6 million uncleared land mines and other pieces of unexploded ordnance remain in Cambodia.>A January report by the Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority said there were 77 casualties from land mines and other unexploded ordnance last year, including 12 fatalities. It said that from 1979 to 2019, such items killed 19,780 people and injured 45,075 others.https://apnews.com/article/oddities-cambodia-land-mines-686df8b93bee30be43ec394c8749dcb0 >>2547940t.
>>2557706>>2557708I read some of Michael Vickery's book on the subject. It's pretty interesting. He describes the worst violence being an internal purge that occurred a bit later waged by Pol Pot's faction against KR cadre in the eastern zones. He describes Pol Pot as a petit-bourgeois peasant populist with extreme nationalist tendencies and made analogies to the the green Tambov rebellion during the Russian civil war.
>>2557713Don't think so but it was a lot.
>>2574030>videoshe's so real for this
>He describes the worst violence being an internal purge that occurred a bit later waged by Pol Pot's faction against KR cadre in the eastern zones. kind of trve… internal purge of '78 having to do with eastern zone cadres "being influenced by vietnam". turned out to be actually trve in heng samrin's case lol
>He describes Pol Pot as a petit-bourgeois peasant populist with extreme nationalist tendenciessounds too "great man"-ish. while there were certainly petit-bourgeois peasant populist tendencies in his faction and the resulting actions, he
personally was the least petit-bourgeois, certainly less so than ta mok and nuon chea for example
>made analogies to the the green Tambov rebellion during the Russian civil war.do you remember the exact title of book this was stated in? this sounds interesting, weren't russian civil war green/peasant uprisings primarily motivated by resentment towards both the whites' random acts of chauvinist terror and the reds/bolsheviks' prodrazviorstka policies?
>>2574155thank you anon♡
>you know a lot more about this subject than I do soi don't really think so tbh, actually i could be very wrong on a lot of stuff and not know it ;( but i guess it's nice that i give off the appearance at least
>you might find some of the debates in it interestingyes, from the screenshots you've provided it seems like vickery & radkey either had a rather poor understanding of what was going on in civil war era russia or tried to purposely mislead the reader in order to feed into "le evil gomunists" narrative, for starters looks like they did not distinguish between left and right SRs and instead grouped them as a single unit with a clear political program and organization, which is missing a lot of nuance as left SRs later fought among the bolsheviks
true that their [left SR] leaders were later executed thoughthe last sentences of 2nd picture also seem to be deliberately misleading as highlighting the greens' high use of violence as "exceptional" during the civil war, in reality "actions that explored the ultimate recesses of all that is fiendish in human nature" were common from all sides involved (mostly whites though, owing to their movement's inherently reactionary and chauvinistic nature, and foreign interventionists' support)
>along with Chomsky i just really hope this (easily disprovable) narrative about him being "cambodia denier" dies out soon, if there's a reason to hate him it's the epstein connections
What if it was just a massive LARP group
>>2575309well
technically MONATIO were indeed larping as KR revolutionaries, see here
>>2547935 picrel is some more trve KR [child] soldiers for comparison
>>2574168>tried to purposely mislead the reader in order to feed into "le evil gomunists" narrativeEh, well, that's one excerpt. Vickery at least was pretty sympathetic towards the Vietnamese communists (from what I've read) and was fairly Marxist in his approach. I think he's one of the more left-wing historians who wrote about the KR.
>>2575338excuse me anon i am silly, primary source overdose i guess ┐(´～｀;)┌
>he's one of the more left-wing historians who wrote about the KR.would you say there are more of them that you're familiar with?
>>2575353thank you, noticed that their wikipedia page has a link to FULRO, the
actually CIA-sponsored anti-vietnamese and anti-communist ethnic/religious minority rebels in vietnam and cambodia. also sponsored by earlier sihanouk and lon nol, allegedly china too. nate thayer talked to some of their remains in the 90s, apparently they weren't even aware of their leader's death back in 1975
>When two correspondents visited FULRO’s remote guerrilla headquarters last month, they found an army unaware of the world around them and desperately seeking instructions and resupply from their leadership.>Col. Ayun and his lieutenants gathered around the reporters, hungrily seeking information. “Please, can you help us find our president, Y’Bham Enuol?” Colonel Ayun asked. “We have been waiting for contact and orders from our president since 1975. Do you know where he is?”>Neither Ayun nor his troops, who gathered around to meet the first journalists to find them since they fled to the jungles after the American defeat in Indochina in 1975, knew that their leader was executed 17 years before by the Khmer Rouge.>They fell silent when informed; some wept quietly.>Situated in a string of five villages carved out of dense forest along a raging river, the group of 407 guerrillas and their families have no access to even the smallest luxury items except from fighters returning from Vietnam.<https://natethayer.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/vietnam-era-renegade-army-discovered-lighting-the-darkness-fulros-jungle-christians/second-third picrel is FULRO (Degar/Montagnard minority specifically) troops with united states army soldiers
>>2578917Sihanouk, uncle ho, and brother number 1?
>>2578956close enough, leftmost is Kaysone Phomvihane - Laotian communist [Lao People's Revolutionary Party & Pathet Lao] leader and first president of Lao People's Democratic Republic
>Despite the shifting influences of neighbors Thailand and Vietnam on Cambodia after the demise of Angkor, Theravada Buddhism subsisted with no major shocks or rifts to the established religious order for several hundred years (Harris 2005). Theravada Buddhism endured in spite of incursions by Islam, the French, the Japanese, and the Americans to name a few. The religion’s only genuine struggle for the continuation of its existence occurred during three years, eight months, and twenty days between April 1975 and January 1979. For the duration of that timeframe, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), or as Prince Sihanouk infamously coined them, the “Khmer Rouge”, organized one of the most brutal assaults on any religion in modern history.
>Democratic Kampuchea’s minister of Foreign Affairs Ieng Sary, soon after the Khmer Rouge victory, announced to the world that the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s government “granted freedom to all religious groups, a freedom which was clearly written into the new constitution: ‘Every citizen of Kampuchea has the right to hold any belief in religion and has as well the right to have neither belief nor religion. Any reactionary religion interfering with Democratic Kampuchea and her people is strictly prohibited’ (Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea, chapter XV, article 20). However, as he also asserted that the monasteries were opened throughout the country at that time (Newsweek September 4, 1975)”, the Communist Party of Kampuchea actually aimed to exterminate all religious beliefs (Yang Sam 1987: 67).
>The eradication of Buddhism under the Khmer Rouge destroyed more than just the religion sanctioned and supported by the previous regime; it destroyed something that was integral to the traditional Khmer way of life. Although not completely immune to the secularizing tendencies of modernization, Cambodians were a highly religious people (Hawk 1990: 131). “Like Roman Catholicism in Poland, Theravada Buddhism in Cambodia embodied and represented Cambodia’s tradition, culture, and identity. For centuries it was the main source of learning and education” (Ibid: 131). According to missionary Francois Ponchaud who lived in Cambodia from 1965 until he was forced to flee Phnom Penh ten years later: “until April 1975 the word for ‘race’ and ‘religion’ in Cambodia were the same, and in everyday language ‘Khmer’ implied ‘Buddhist’” (Ponchaud1978: 126). Keyes believes, “the attack on Cambodian Buddhism went well beyond the Marxist notion that religion serves to disguise class relations. The Khmer Rouge sought, by eliminating the institution that had for so long served as a basic source of Khmer identity, to create a new order with few roots in the past” (Keyes 1994: 58).
>Monk evacuees were treated not unlike any other ordinary Khmer individual. All those forcibly removed from the cities, later to be dubbed ‘New People’ by the Angkar, including monks, were subject to starvation, random beatings, arbitrary arrest, and execution along the route to the countryside. Once there, young monks “were grouped for reeducation…forced to disrobe and were sent to the youth mobile unit where they were moved from one labor field to another. Elderly monks who seemed to be able to keep their saffron robe a little longer were repeatedly asked to leave their monastic life” (Yang Sam 1987: 68). Charles F. Keyes, from his essay “Communist Revolution and the Buddhist Past in Cambodia,” explains the destruction of Buddhism in more detail:
<In 1969/1970, the last time a count was made, there was some 65,000 monks and novices in Cambodia’s 3,369 wats. Of these, 2,385 monks and 139 wats were affiliated with the Thommayut order. During the war between 1970 and 1975 more than one-third of the wats were destroyed; many monks and novices were killed, left the order, or became refugees…In the immediate aftermath of its takeover in 1975, the Khmer Rouge did not immediately move to ban Buddhism but by the end of the year it had been declared to be a “reactionary religion.” Monks and novices, even those in the base areas that Khmer Rouge had controlled before April 1975, were compelled to disrobe…In 1980 it was estimated that five out of every eight monks were executed during the Pol Pot regime. Major temple-monasteries were destroyed and lesser ones were converted into storage centers, prisons, or extermination camps. The former cremation grounds at Choeung Ek wat on the edge of Phnom Penh became one of the major sites for mass executions. Images of the Buddha were often decapitated or desecrated in other ways; copies of the Buddhist scriptures were burned or thrown into rivers (Keyes 1994: 55-56).
>The eradication of Buddhism under the Khmer Rouge destroyed more than just the religion sanctioned and supported by the previous regime; it destroyed something that was integral to the traditional Cambodian way of life. There is the story of the Venerable Chea Tong who survived the Pol Pot period that sheds light on the typical treatment of many of those who chose the monastic life. In 1975 this monk was forced with around a hundred of his fellow monks and novices to leave their wat in Phnom Penh and walk to a community some fifty kilometers north. Here they were forced to disrobe and were informed that religion was feudal and oppressive and monks were useless parasites, leeches living on the blood of the people. During the existence of Democratic Kampuchea, Chea Tong’s monastic companions disappeared; some, he heard were executed. The temple monastery in the community he lived and labored was “turned into a food storehouse and pigs were kept in front of the temple.” Khmer Rouge cadre, in an act of moral inversion, even “shot the giant cement statue of the Buddha inside the temple between the eyes” (Richardson 1981: 104)
<The Khmer Rouge and the Re-Visioning of the Khmer Empire: Buddhism encounters Political Religion - Steven Michael DeBurger, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, 2011
the paper is quite idealist in its analysis and conclusions, however it's still interesting as a document of particular incidents of assaults on the theravada buddhist religion committed by the CPK, in a society where daily life is deeply intertwined with theravada buddhism
>Francois Ponchaud
the man who infamously coined (fabricated) "Year Zero" as a CPK concept, applying the term to their policies to liken it [the kampuchean revolution] to the french revolution
>picrel
Decapitated statues at Angkor, Cambodia, which were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge (photo taken 6 May 2006)
>>2586185Their families probably fled the country and probably ended up somewhere in California
>>2586185That was the outfit everyone wore then.
>>2584119>Theravada Buddhism subsisted with no major shocks or rifts to the established religious order for several hundred years Wtf is he on about, that's not true? What about Rama IV's Dhammayuttika Nikaya reformation, for example, and so on.
reposting because i fucked up some formatting>>2586320not sure about that, might as well just have been killed after the initial separation (families were deliberately separated and worked in different parts of the country, or in mobile brigades all across it), or reunited after a while.
>vidrel for cambodian live tv show reuniting families after the dust settled down>>2586345trve which is why i supposed they might be just country children however child soldiers were such a common occurrence at the time
>>2586356i suppose he meant
its survival only, i agree the wording is pretty poor if that's what he wanted to convey
also a somewhat relevant paper:
>The monastic order in Cambodia has been divided into two fraternities (nikaya) since 1855 when King Norodom imported the newly-formed Thommayut (dhamayutika nikaya) from Thailand through the agency of Maha Pan, a Khmer monk belonging to King Mongkut’s spiritual lineage. Norodom subsequently had Wat Botum Vaddey constructed, according to the demarcation ritual (nadisima) of the newly formed order, adjacent to the new royal palace in Phnom Penh as the headquarters of the new order and Maha Pan was subsequently installed as its sanghareach (Meas Yang 1978, 38).>In Thailand the introduction of the new order had passed off without opposition. This was not the case in Cambodia where frequent skirmishes between Mohanikay and Thommayut monks seem to have occurred with some regularity (Bizot 1976, 9). The influence of the colonial power may have been a factor here since the French regarded the Mohanikay, particularly those belonging to its reformed wing, to exercise a beneficial influence on the populace and towards the protectorate. Thommayut monks, on the other hand, were regarded as potentially intransigent, not least because it was thought that they owed their allegiance to the Thai court (Forest 1980, 143).>There is little to distinguish the two orders in terms of doctrine yet they disagree over the interpretation of some elements of discipline, most notably the wearing of robes, of sandals, the carrying of the begging bowl, and the consumption of drinks after midday. Differences may also be noted in the two order’s pronunciation of Pali and techniques of liturgical recitation (Brunet 1967, 202). The essentially urban Thommayut has also been much smaller in terms of numbers and geographical spread.
>Some evidence exists to suggest that Thommayut monks suffered even greater discrimination during the DK period than their Mohanikay co-religionists; the communists certainly made a distinction between rural and city monks. In the early days of the revolution the former were characterized as ‘proper and revolutionary’ while the later were classed as ‘imperialist’, probably as a result of their close associations with Thailand. We have already noted that during the early PRK period institutional Buddhism was re-established under a Unified Sangha. Many prominent figures of the time argued that this arrangement was devised, at least in part, to eliminate the elitist and monarchical influences of the Thommayut. One senior monastic source claimed that after unification ‘our monks are neither Mohanikay nor Thommayut but Nationalist monks’. It was only in December 1991 that Sihanouk once again created two sanghareach: Ven. Tep Vong taking control of the Mohanikay with Ven. Bour Kry becoming his Thommayut equivalent.not exactly a "proper" buddhist but still interesting:
>Perhaps most surprisingly, Ta Mok - the most brutal of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, is known to have expressed typically idiosyncratic environmentalist views: ‘Whoever destroys the forest is not allowed to be a leader… Whoever blows up and shoots fish are yuon [a derogatory term for the Vietnamese] and have their throats cut … Whoever burns the forest, if arrested, has to be burned alive’ (Khmer Rouge Papers for 7 December 1997, quoted in PPP 7/10, 22 May–4 June 1998).
<Harris, Ian (August 2001), "Sangha Groupings in Cambodia", Buddhist Studies Review<https://journal.equinoxpub.com/BSR/article/view/14469>>2586637¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>>2588832
Who are you talking to?
>>2588869To target a specific audience, in a place like this, is unproductive. Angkar is speaking to everyone that has attentive ears to hear her and clear-sighted eyes to witness her red truth.
>>2588832i agree with most of these conclusions, however i would consider it necessary to clarify some of the premises made here:
>It was the ultimate expression of Year Zero. Not as a slur, but as a material necessity.<Year Zerois a falsification and the CPK never used that term - not in any speeches, not in any written material distributed both on the outside and the inside (internal party materials, party print magazines (of which there were several at the same time) distributed throughout the country, etc)
>Yes. Based. The city is a tumor. the city as a concept is not, but PP
at the time quite literally
was a tumor on the body of kampuchea festering with (petite) bourgeois agents, swollen from refugees fleeing the widespread US bombings. however CPK was not opposed to cities at large and had projects of rebuilding several ones, with hopes of repopulating them after they solved the immediate food supply problem
>S-21, Tuol Slengwas only
one of the Security Prisons, other Security Prisons operated throughout the country both before and after the revolution
maybe it's a good idea to make a post on /edu/ addressing some of the common misconceptions about Communist Party of Kampuchea which are constantly parroted by leftists (including on /leftypol/ at large), however i'm not sure how to go about this
>>2588832
> You would understand this if you had read a single theory beyond your Rainbow Capitalism 101 textbook.
What do gay people have to do with anything?
Anyhow Pol Pot's regime was just an anarcho-fascist bandit state no different than Makhnovshchina. Killing all the intelligentsia isn't immoral, it's just counterproductive. You need a few intellectuals as prisoners for operating the machinery.
>>2589990>gay people<rainbow capitalism 101this term does not imply "gay people bad", only that capitalists profit off idpol. basically they are saying you're a radlib
>anarcho-fascist bandit state just like anarcho-monarchism and nazbol gang i presume? please elaborate on how makhnovschina compares to democratic kampuchea
>MINUTE OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE - THE FRONT, 11 March 1976
<Unofficial translation by Bunsou Sour; edited by Prof. David Chandler
tl;dr version:
>AGENDA: SIHANOUK'S RESIGNATION FROM HIS POST
>Comrade HEM [Khieu Samphan] reported to the Standing Committee on the resignation of Sihanouk.
>First directive: We don't reject him. We ask him to remain in the same position. If he wishes to remain with us, he could remain for 5 months, 1 or 3 years, as long he would like. If he cannot resist, it is not because of us, it is not our fault. In fact he won't be able to remain with us. He and his family can see very well that they won't have well-being. We don't give him any choice, if he does not wish to remain, too bad for him. <…> But we request that he remains with the people. The people will preserve his nationalist undertakings and we also will congratulate him and will do our utmost to implement the resolution of our extraordinary session of the National Assembly.
>Second Directive: in the event that he insists on resigning. We thank him. <…> His departure will render the situation complicated to China. The enemy does not cease to condemn and criticize us. If we refuse to allow him to leave, the enemy can criticize us at least for one month. Certain reasonable attitudes of Sihanouk show a patriotic spirit, but his wife has no patriotic spirit at all. Consequently, if we are not clear in solving this problem, it is possible that unresolved questions will complicate our tasks later on. Thus we should go for the first solution and if that does not work, adopt the second one.
>Comrade HEM [Khieu Samphan] made several reports to the Standing Committee on the Sihanouk problem. He [Sihanouk] has made a categorical decision to resign. He asks Angkar that it TAKE PITY ON him. He lowers and humbles himself only requesting Angkar that it accepts his resignation. This resignation is not against us…
>Comrade Secretary General [Pol Pot] pointed out that it is an important question to be decided by the Central Committee of the Party. But Comrade Secretary General has already prepared a number of ideas, which WERE supported by the Standing Committee:
<1. To forbid Sihanouk from leaving the country is the first measure to be taken.
<2. It is necessary to call a meeting of the Council of Ministers to submit to it reports on the matter, in order for the latter to make a decision.
<3. To dispatch telegrams to the sons of Sihanouk asking them to return as soon as possible, pointing out that they must come for the New Year and the National Day celebration. We must solve this problem once and for all. We must also solve it for the interests of our revolution.
<In reality, Sihanouk is a meek tiger, which only has its skin and bones left, without claws and the fangs. His beard has also been shaven. Thus all that remains is to wait for the day of his death. But if this old tiger is freed in the street, all the children would certainly be afraid of it. Certain old men that did not know this meek tiger would also be afraid.
>Sihanouk participated with us in our Revolution despite his differences with us. That is the reason why our Party decided that Sihanouk should become President of Democratic Kampuchea. But Sihanouk refuses. Thus it is up to him, he can remain or not, it is his problem.
>But vis-a-vis the people and the Nation, Sihanouk must also be punished for his fault of having massacred the people. Thus our decision is reasonably taken in every respect. We shall not change it. But if he continues to resist us, we shall take measures to liquidate him.
>>2592419Really appreciate your work on KR, this is probably the most informative thread on /leftypol/ right now.
For now I have a question that's probably a bit funny, but I'm curious. There are a few pictures on the internet of alleged Pol Pot statues that are now stored in the Tuol Sleng Museum. Yet at the same time we are told that Angkar was 100% secretive and no one was allowed to know the identity of "Comrade One".
Do you know of any sources confirming that these statues were displayed in public?
>>2592432thank you anon („• ֊ •„) i wouldn't consider this to be much work though, mostly copy-pasting random material i find somewhat interesting due to various reasons. thank you for paying attention♡
>There are a few pictures on the internet of alleged Pol Pot statues that are now stored in the Tuol Sleng Museum. yes honestly i was also rather surprised by these (genuine) statues at S-21/Tuol Sleng, especially with the vietnamese
Kampuchea Dossier 3: The Dark Years pamphlet stating this in particular:
<In the two workshops [at Tuol Sleng presumably just after the Vietnamese discovery], busts and portraits of Pol Pot are seen everywhere. One can imagine under what constraint painters and sculptors were made to do this work. (published by Vietnam Courier, Hanoi - 1979)https://archive.org/details/kampuchea-dossier-3
>Yet at the same time we are told that Angkar was 100% secretive and no one was allowed to know the identity of "Comrade One".the secrecy (including initially) applied not only to the high leadership, but to all levels of the CPK organization, following stated by Nuon Chea (Brother No.2) in a speech to the visiting Communist Workers' Party of Denmark in July 1978:
<The Communist Party of Kampuchea has never before been legal. This is also true of other progressive organizations we created. We developed the tactic of secrecy, firstly, to defend ourselves, secondly, to mobilize more forces, and finally to serve our struggle, for example, in mobilizing intellectuals. We found they would not join us if we used semi-illegal forms, but with legal forms such as celebrations and visiting temples, they joined in. Thus, we made them join us step-by-step. Many semi-secret and semi-illegal and secret activities were organized so as to protect the wholly illegal and secret activities of the party centre. Thus, when the enemy attacked from outside, he struck semi-illegal and semi-secret activities only and we were able to defend our party and its leadership. In the neo-colonial, semi-feudal society [regimes of Sihanouk and Lon Nol which both actively persecuted Cambodian communists, or the "Khmers rouges" as Sihanouk generalized them to western press], we had to work in complete secrecy, both inside the party and inside other organizations. This also applied to party members working among the masses. Since liberation [April 17th 1975], we continue secret work because we consider the strategic line to be more important than tactics. We have published the names of only a few of our cadres and members. Not many need to be public. During the war, all of them were secret in this area, we learned from the bloodstained experience of the Communist party of Indonesia.<Operating secretly, our organization has the following rules. Three members are required to form a cell, for example in a factory. If there are more than three members, a cell secretary must direct party work. If there are up to six people, we form two separate cells having no contact with each other. Even with five people we organize two separate party cells, which work secretly and separately. If the enemy discovers one cell, the other can continue its work. There are no direct contacts among cells. <…> We form cells having no knowledge of each other and which are unable to contact each other. The same applies to contacts between the designated leading cadre and the leadership. Contacts are arranged through a third person. If the enemy captures the leading cadre, he will not be able to identify the leadership, only the go-between. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/denmark/kr.pdf
>Do you know of any sources confirming that these statues were displayed in public?sadly i don't know whether they were actually
displayed in public in particular, it's true that there were plans at distributing public depictions of pol pot, however i'm not completely sure whether this is a "personality cult" per se; otherwise you could argue that a "personality cult" of xi jinping exists nowadays in china because they have depictions of him in public at cpc's meetings (and those being broadcasted throughout the country)
<While Mao’s [CPC] had used the Cultural Revolution to “sell” proletarian culture to the masses, Pol Pot never followed through on a cult of personality or his greater designs for a revolutionary culture. By 1978, Pol Pot [or rather the CPK Central Committee] was leaning toward a personality cult, with “concrete evidence for a cult of personality [in the form of] oil portraits of Pol Pot found at S-21 in early 1979” and “molds for concrete busts of Pol Pot” (Chandler 1999, 149). The brutal regime’s overthrow at the hands of invading Vietnamese forces meant that no such plans would ever be realized by the CPK or its followers.<https://muse.jhu.edu/article/679026 From Revolutionary Culture to Original Culture and Back: "On New Democracy" and the Kampucheanization of Marxism-Leninism, 1940–1965; Matthew Galway, 2017 >>2592482Fascinating, thanks. So they were probably looking forward to a more or less stable socialist society like in China where such depictions could be displayed?
>>2592506yes; they did plan on the regime lasting a lot longer than it turned out to be and made plans spanning over multiple years, the first one and the only one that they could put to action before the invasion was a four-year plan (instead of the more "typical" five-year plans) presumably to have it finished by a "round date" of 1980
tables in picrel 3-4 from
Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977 1988, Yale University Southeast Asia Studies - useful only for the translations/tables, authors' prefaces are rather biased
<mfw ben kiernan Unique IPs: 18