FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: THE KHMER ROUGE AND THE PROBLEM OF WESTERN "HISTORY"
So you've been reading the bourgeois press again. You've consumed the "documentaries," the "memoirs," the "historical consensus." You think you know about Democratic Kampuchea. You have been given a fairy tale of "evil" and "madness," a cartoon for liberal babies to suckle on. Let us scrape the imperialist glaze from your eyes and examine the material reality.
What was Democratic Kampuchea?
It was the ultimate expression of Year Zero. Not as a slur, but as a material necessity. For centuries, the Khmer people were bled white by feudal monarchs, then by French colonizers who turned their country into a plantation, then by American bombers who turned it into a crater. The very social fabric was saturated with feudalism, colonialism, and comprador capitalism. You cannot perform surgery with a butter knife. To build socialism, the old society must be smashed. Totally. Irrevocably. The city, a site of parasitic profiteering and colonial decadence, had to be dissolved. The peasantry, the only uncorrupted revolutionary class, became the base. This was not "madness." This was radical decolonization of the mind and soil.
But the cities were emptied!
Yes. Based. The city is a tumor. Phnom Penh in 1975 was a festering slum of refugees, profiteers, CIA agents, and the lumpen scum of a destroyed society. To keep it running would have meant begging the imperialists for food, becoming a neocolonial puppet state like the ones you defend when you cry about "Vietnam." The urban population was relocated to the countryside to participate in the great project of agrarian transformation. Were there logistical failures? Possibly. But consider the context: a country bombed back to the stone age, with zero infrastructure, facing immediate famine and imperialist blockade. The alternative was to let the revolution die in a starving city. Revolution is not a dinner party.
But the executions! The Tuol Sleng!
S-21 was a security apparatus. Do you think revolution is a game? Do you think the CIA, the KGB, the Vietnamese revisionists, and the feudal remnants were just going to allow the world's most radical experiment to proceed? The revolution was besieged from day one. Internal enemies, saboteurs, and agents provocateurs were a material fact. Was every accusation correct? In the fog of revolutionary defense, perhaps not. But to focus on the security measures
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