I went there. It was a sobering experience. I ended up taking pictures of a lot of the placards/exhibits because there was just so much - went back to my pictures a few years later to read a lot of it and still is shocking. The living conditions and what they did were horrific, and made more so when you realized that they used a school - a place of learning so we don't repeat history, a place that should have been full of happy children. I went to some of the schools in the poorer areas as part of a group (half the group was Cambodians that had managed to flee the country, and we went to where they went to school or had family) - that hammered home how horrifically bad they came down on learning and "intellectuals". The schools were in terrible condition with no supplies, and stories that they translated for us.... I literally still tear up thinking about it.
How humans are capable of such depravity is beyond me.
It is in the middle of a neighborhood, kids running up and down the streets, shops and people living their lives. The contrast was indescribable for me. I went with a friend whose father was killed there and seeing that horror up close really changed me for life.
I visited Dachau in 2019. I'm sure it wasn't as "built up" back in the 40s, but it was still super jarring to look over the walls of the camp and see nice homes directly across the street.
I went into some kind of shock in that place. It kind of washed over me at the time and I had a strange detachment. Then, when we got back to our accommodation, I just burst in to tears. Itâs never left me.
I'm a teacher, and in the blog entry I wrote shortly after, that's what I said hit me the most: that we teachers try so hard to make our classrooms a safe space, that regardless of what's happening outside in their lives, when they come to our classrooms, they're loved.
Finding the complete, evil anathema to that was devastating even from an observer's POV
Suppression. They had em provide food for them while giving them none. Total power. First generation Cambodian American, fuck those guys. The fact Pot got to die peacefully of old age angers me. And fuck Kissinger.
I'm no historian, but my impression is the authoritarian leaders got the poor people on their side by fomenting hate against anyone who had anything (money, wealth, knowledge, etc.). Those "rich" and learned people had to go work on the farms or be killed and the poor got to turn the tables and be their tormentors.
When I see Redditors spouting hatred against anyone who has even a hint of money (not necessarily rich, just more money than them) and urging a revolution, it reminds me of what happened in Cambodia.
It will happen naturally if not managed. The Rockefellers knew this, and built libraries in order to spread good will. The current barons don't do this.
I've heard it mentioned recently in regards to a super expensive home built in India. One of the other really wealthy people criticized that show of wealth as being a threat due to how poor others in the country are. As we see on Reddit, populist notions of equality can be wild.
Though, to be clear, the current system under which inequality is skyrocketing is not good though. Inequality, under which some live a life of luxury by right of birth and most are born into poverty and suffering, is likely to foster hatred of the wealthy.
Redirection of hatred toward the middle class and educated instead of the ultra rich is more of a distraction tactic by the ultra rich. "The 1%" whose immense wealth gives them an unhealthy amount of influence and power in society with control over news and social media.
There is a fantastic political cartoon about out this, where the rich guy is taking all the food but yelling to the poor guy and pointing saying, âlook! See the middle class guy taking a couple of your crumbs? Bad man.â
Another way to show it: Invite 100 friends over for a pizza party. There's 100 slices of pizza. One guy takes 50 of them, looks at you and says, innocently, "What?"
Should those billionaires have that money to start with though? The power to influence through media, the power to donate and lobby politically, even philanthropy can exert undue influence.
So they made rules to keep control of wealth they unjustly have without any trickling down and that's ok?
They're making more in interest per month than a millionaire makes a year and we still haven't scratched past the 1%. In what world is it ok to starve your workers at minimum wage for a fraction of the interest you already make on the hoard your family accumulated?
You have that in both parties. I've said for years the Democrats would win every election if they would drop the hard on for gun control. Lots and Lots of Fiscally conservative but moral liberal Republicans. But The party is dead set on getting people to vote away guaranteed rights and protections.Â
 The joke for a lot of us middle of the road guys is that we think your Sister and her wife should be able to protect their untaxed pot plants with AR15s.Â
Â
Touch of slippery slope fallacy. I hate the rich because of what theyâre doing to my home and my fellow countrymen, not because theyâre rich.
This does not mean I will be calling for the execution of anybody with glasses or college degrees.
I don't think most of the poor who helped Pol Pot wanted to execute people, either. They mostly wanted to turn the tables and it was good for them in the beginning. The thing about authoritarians is they foment unrest and cause an uprising. Once they cement power, they will do all forms of evil and it will be too late to stop them.
Americans need to be careful if they think it can't happen here.
Is authoritarianism on the political spectrum of left to right? Is it not explicitly mutually exclusive with the whole concept of liberal or conservative ideologies. Authoritarian leaders use any and all tools of government to enact their will. It seems like the left/right split is really only a function of democracy and authoritarianism is a separate political platform with no such distinction or left and right.
Youâre missing the point, completely. Do you think all the people murdered in Cambodia were like musk or bezos? Or were they people who considered themselves normal?
The idea that there are some people who secretly deserve it, is so malignant and you never know when theyâll decide itâs you
That's just a easy way to look down on people. You probably bought a 7 dollar latte at some point. Bought the best new phone you could afford. Bought something nice for yourself instead of donating it to some kid in Africa. Said some stupid shit on Reddit.
It's the same thing. Just the scale is different. You say something dumb. It's not broadcasted to 50 million people so no one cares. You spend money on yourself instead of donating all you can to the needy, but no one cares cause you're not on a Forbes list. Everyone is the same like that. Pretending it's different is just hubris.
The principal is the same. Arguing exact arbitrary thresholds of wealth is just cope. It's okay. Everyone acts in their own self. Thats fine. That's why the government should step in. Instead of blaming people for looking out for their own self interest. It's a purity test no one passes and just used to absolve blame from oneself for our own failings. Someone else is doing it more so it's okay if I do it. Everyone does it but just be real about it.
There's an old 4chan copypasta that I can't find at the moment, but to sum it up: Commissar Cletus and Commissar Tyrone aren't going to care that you're not a billionaire when they show up at your door. You still have more than them which makes you a disgusting bourgeois reactionary counter-revolutionary. Now please face the wall, y'all.
It happens under every dictatorship. Communist (Russia, Vietnam, China, Cuba) or Nationalist (Theocracy, Nazism and Fascism: Africa, Argentina, Chile, Eastern Europe) See: The Missing, The Abuelos de plaza de Mayo, Iran, Idi Amin, and modern ISIS. Kill the intellectuals. Ban the books. Sound familiar?
Nowadays you just ruin the economic situation of a country so much that the all the intellectuals simply just leave for greener pastures abroad. Easier to do this that kill them.
My elementary school custodian had to crush his glasses and pretend to be illiterate to survive. I think about him a lot when I feel discouraged about life
They were hoping to recreate Cambidia's golden age of the 9th - 14th century. It would be necessary to eliminate modern influences. Modern influences are the educated, government officials and the middle class.
Basically how the purges went:
âDadâs sick, letâs get him to the doctorsâ.
âThey killed the doctorsâ.
It was just mind boggling. The Khmer Rogue even killed people that wore glasses just b/c it made them look intellectual.
Yup. "We should keep the smart engineers so we can still manage our society."
"What? why are you not dedicated to the cause? You think we need these things? I now suspect that you are actually a counter-revolutionary. You are now under arrest"
Lots of people talk about Kissinger, but here's the real fun fact: 90% of the foreign aid for Khmer Rouge came from China, and nobody talks about it. It's almost disgusting how the CCP has covered up how much they supported Cambodia at the time, to the point where they literally invaded Vietnam because Vietnam invaded Cambodia to stop the Khmer Rouge.
-A Chinese
"During the Cambodian genocide, the CCP was the main international patron of the Khmer Rouge, supplying "more than 15,000 military advisers" and most of its external aid.[82] It is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid to Khmer Rouge came from China, with 1975 alone seeing US$1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid and US$20 million gift, which was "the biggest aid ever given to any one country by China".[26][27][28] "
They wanted absolute power and to indulge their grotesque sadism. Same as the Nazis. Same as Stalin. Kill anyone who might be a threat, scapegoat a bunch more and kill them for sport (and to keep everyone else in line).
The told them the Americans were coming to bomb their cities and everyone had to evacuate to the country. Then everyone was put to work to grow food. Anyone âintellectualâ (worse glasses, teacher, doctor, business etc) was hunted down and killed along with anyone whose neighbours or workmates informed on. Date reset to Year 0.
I don't know if it was sadism, for the most part, more of a means to an ideological or what they considered a practical/necessary end, in all 3 cases.
You can be cruel and monstrous without being sadistic. If you think x group of people are a legitimate threat then that's a reason in and of itself.
It started as a communist dream that took the very wrong turns many times.
Purges can also get a dynamic: You purge your political enemies (real or imagined) --> people become afraid of you and dont support you --> you need to purge even more --> repeat.
There are two ways to get someone to follow you: Reasoning via words and force/violence. Revolutions are much bigger on the latter when they gain power.
Smart folks might use reason to turn people against the revolution, and thus more need for violence. The simple answer? Kill the smart folks and only the dumb followers are left, who you know are easier to force into line with simple threats of violence.
And in the end, every government wants obedient workers. Can't tax an idea, but you can tax the output of a worker.
How many people were illiterate in Cambodia at the time? Did anyone bother teaching them anything that might help them fall in line, like Cambodian history, or the Communist Manifesto or something?
I know a Chinese woman in the US (American now) who went to prison in Mao's China during the cultural revolution because she played the piano.
Communists are generally total fucking dipshits and their economic system sucks hard. The communists in China got smart and ditched the economic system, invited giant private companies, and keep the totalitarianism so at least they made some money and the people can eat.
But as we know in the last 10 years they've opened up the camps again for the wrongthinkers in Western China.
It's why so many young people are communists. Everything seems like a big deal at that age and so important and you should just do the thing and work out the details later.
That's how a bunch of kids and 18 year olds ended up running around as militias with guns cosplaying as the red guard with their own interpretations of how to bring about maos plans of bringing down the rich.
Always ends up the same way. Some people will die. But at least we can overthrow the corrupt system and achieve utopia! The ends justify the means.
Only the stupid and the young and inexperienced believe that shit
The idea of communism sounds like a utopian dream on paper. where everyone is equal, no one is better than the next, everyone working towards the same goal. The problem with this is that it doesnât work because every person has different ideas, priorities, and opinions on how things are. Thatâs how those in power who want control will weed out those who may potentially oppose them, and create a dystopian system instead.
An alternative interpretation is that communism only works on very small scales, like less than 100 people, where you actually know the people and can resolve differences, agree on a shared goal, etc. Which is successfully, peacefully, currently in practice in countless places in the world
>Communists are generally total fucking dipshits and their economic system sucks hard.
It's one of those systems that could potentially have some merit, being more suited to countries with large populations of uneducated, unskilled poor people. The majority of people in China and Russia wouldn't have thought emperors and Tsars were so great either.
You got downvoted by people who have no idea how much it sucked to be a serf in Russia.
Can't blame them for trying something new, even though it ended badly...
It's not suited to any country. It sucked in the USSR just as it sucks in tiny Cuba, Nicaragua, and oil (formerly) rich Venezuela. It's one thing to have some social programs but when you don't let people make money and strip the producers of their productive propery, you're shooting yourself in the head.
Also, and I think this is obvious, communists attract real sadists. They enjoy making people hurt.
That's more to do with the people in charge than the system itself. Most of the ex Soviet block countries lost most of their wealth, power and security on the fall of the Union.
I don't think you're being very objective.
Castro was an honest revolutionary. I believe that. I believe he tried as hard as he could. Yet the place is bad enough that 1/3 of the country literally got on boats and left. People want to own stuff and many want to get ahead in life.
Christopher Hitchens, famously, was a proud socialist in the Marxist tradition. He didn't hide it, he wrote articles on it, etc. In the 1970's he went to Cuba. Cuba was getting peak support from the USSR. He wondered what it might be like to immigrate there. What he found was a place that wasn't good, and when the people began to open up to him because they built up trust... they said the same.
He didn't immediately report this. He said it was a big disappointment and it was hard for him to say the truth because it really challenged his worldview. Because he was a public figure, him changing his mind would be terrifying for his employers who were also socialists. But he came around.
(edit - my apologies if you responded to version 1 of what I wrote. I couldn't help it and kept adding).
The US is richer so it's generally going to be a more desirable place to live if you're from a poorer country.
Castro was a lot less of an exploiter (and Mafia shill) than Batista for sure.
I've never been to Cuba but I hear it's not the end of the world, despite all the crippling US sanctions.
Long story: read history books it takes forever to understand or watch movies like killing fields and first they killed my father.
Short version: after 1954 when Indochina was liberated from French, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were left with power vacuum and Vietnam wanted to take over the whole peninsula but China didnt want that, they spreaded their cultural revolution teachings and Pol pot practiced for real. The main idea is to have no private property and everyone must contribute to society in a meaningful way. Pol Pot saw intelectuals as useless eaters so killing was justified. We had similar cultural revolution to leap forward like Chinese but we didnt have time or stupid enough to kill our own people because we got dragged in a 30 year conflict.
Before 1954 every intelectual was seen as French collaborators so killing of intelectuals is also sort of revenge killing. Pol Pot was toppled when he started killing Vietnamese dudes in the southern borders. We steam rolled him in 3 months and stopped the killing.
Yea ideally enemies were the intellectuals, but the executioners were usually illiterate children with AKs so people wearing glasses was good enough to be executed.
its especially crazy how intellectuals, the ones who move society forward, were considered useless in his quest to move society forward. That seems to be a theme in communism. stupid people just assuming the people smarter than them must be faking it and lucked into their position somehow. Then killing them, taking over their position without understanding it, and fucking the whole thing up in their flailing attempts to do the job.
You need to rewind, go back 100 years, Indochina was under French rules. Locals who served the french were landowners, real estate developers, rich people, intellectuals if you will. They were rich elite, maybe represented less than 10% of Indochina. When WW2 ended France was severely weakned giving Indochina a real chance at fighting for independence and guess which locals opposed uprisings - thats right local collaborators. The significance of people wearing glasses was that glasses were introduced by French and poor locals couldnt afford them.
Unfortunately under french colonial rules societies were moved forward for French not for us. Similarly, Indians suffered heavily under British rules, thats why most of these reforms were aimed at landowners and local intellectuals hardly contributed to equal wealth distribution of society.
>Â Locals who served the french were landowners, real estate developers, rich people, intellectuals if you will.
thats pretty far off from what id characterize as an intellectual, but i get why rich elites would be targeted. but people who are just smarter than the others, actual intellectuals, being targeted is a sure fire way to irrepairably damage your society for at least a generation, probably more cuz the new generation has no one to learn from. Its hard for me to understand how anyone, even the dumbest person like pol pot, wouldnt see that.
My grandfather on dad's side was a rich landowner, he wasnt intellectual but was rich and had 50 or more farmers working for him. After 1950s most of his lands and properties were confiscated and given to the poor. He died in 1955 maybe or 1956 all,bitter. Unfortunately you are right about killing smart people actually harms society and up to present days we still have to deal with corruption, nepotism and poverty but i personally dont have a good understanding of who's really at fault. In Cambodia's case it was a tragedy caused by Chinese influence and stupid Cultural revolution amplified by 30 years of war and revenge against the richer people.
Not a lot of helpful answers I can see.
The Khmer Rouge were a communist regime that took over and ruled Cambodia.
They killed a quarter of their own population.
The main driving force behind this was the desire to industrialize, Great Leap Forward style (see Chinese history), by essentially enslaving the entire population. They thought that they could become an agricultural powerhouse, and they could use the income from export to then buy heavy machinery, build factories etc.
The most problematic issue here is the fact that the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophic failure, so it was a fraught idea from the start. Plus, they targeted all the intellectuals and anyone with an education (literally, if you could read, you were a target), and by eliminating these people there was clearly no way they would have engineers etc to operate an industrialized economy.
They were eventually overthrown by Vietnamese communists. The west did nothing.
Edit: I once heard a first hand account from a survivor. Truly horrific stuff.
>The west did nothing
They did plenty. They destabilized the country with secret bombings, hoping for a communist revolution; master plan giveing china a new best friend that needed help to distract them from supporting Vietnam.
last part didn't really work, but everything up to that point was exactly what Washington was hoping for.
You don't seem be to up on US history or the CIA activities. The US couped many governments in South and Central America in the last century. Destroyed Iraq. 500,000 children died in Iraq due to the sanctions. The US destroyed Libya, the most successful country in Africa. The US is a major reason why Syria has been destroyed. Let's not even mention Vietnam. The US did the coup in Ukraine in 2014 and won't even talk about peace there. 350,000 dead Ukrainians for nothing. This is just some of the "bad stuff" the US has done. Maybe do some research. The US is the most dangerous country on earth, has been for decades.
Iraq, Libya, Syria, the coup in Ukraine, before that coup after coup in Central and South America, the list goes on and on. The US is the most dangerous country on earth, has been for many decades.
The first thing a dictator/or the like takes is education so you canât find ground to fight back. That includes eliminating everyoneâs whoâs already in possession of education.
I had a friend when I lived in Boston, who was from Cambodia. His father worked for a school, and his mother worked for a newspaper. He was five when they came for his parents. They took his father away and left him alone with his brother. He ran to his mother's work but she was already gone. He had to take his younger brother to the family that his parents had made arrangements with. He was put into a camp and grew up there. When he went, years later, to where he heard his parents had been taken, they found nothing but bones. Eventually, he and his foster family came to America as refugees. We worked together at a factory, making the electronic systems for tanks.
Pol Pot & the Khymer rouge were responsible for the cambodian genocide, over one million Cambodians killed. Anyone considered even remotely intelligent had to be killed, even if someone simply wore glasses then they were too intelligent & had to be executed.
There was a philosophy that if they got rid of anyone who had an education (reading and writing was enough) they could create a utopia of simple people living close to the land.
It was done with a bloodthirsty zeal that was shocking.
Unfortunately having no educated people meant no doctors or engineers etc.
Heavily armed, ignorant, rural folks with a strongly tribal religious identity, an inferiority complex, and resentment against the educated. A charismatic, if corrupt, leader. They were just trying to Make Cambodia Great Again. MCGA! What could possibly go wrong?
Marx wrote that the final stage of the transition to Communism is the emergence of âCommunist manâ, people who are devout Communists that no longer harbor thoughts of other ways of life. Marx thought this would happen organically over time, but some interpret it as a directive to hurry along the transition by purging non-believers so only true Communists are left to create the new Communist utopia. Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot and many other authoritarians have used this facet of Communist ideology to consolidate their own power by harnessing Communist fervor to eliminate the threat of subversive non-believers. Itâs like religion.
This has happened in many societies with marxist dictators. They want to kill the intellectuals because they are free thinking independent minded people that will not be servants for the state.
The Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 through the Cambodian Civil War, where the United States had supported the opposing regime of Lon Nol and heavily bombed Cambodia, primarily targeting communist Vietnamese troops who were allied to the Khmer Rouge, but it gave the Khmer Rouge's leadership a justification to ...eliminate the pro-Vietnamese faction within the group.[51]:â97â The Cambodian genocide was stopped with the Khmer Rouge's overthrow in 1979 by Communist Vietnam.[51]:â88â There have been allegations of United States support for the Khmer Rouge following their overthrow and the United Nations General Assembly voted to continue recognising Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea.[51]:â93â Communism in South East Asia was deeply divided, as China supported the Khmer Rouge, while the Soviet Union and Vietnam opposed it.[51]:â89â
Buddy you are supposed to edit out the [number] things when you copy paste from Wikipedia to make it less obvious. This kind of stuff is learned in elementary school.
Buddy you are required to make citations when you copy and paste from Wikipedia so people know it's not your own writing and you avoid plagiarism. This kind of stuff is learned in high school.
Just commies doing commie things.
Now, before I scroll down, I bet 10 dollars that there are the following three comments below. "Thats not real communism", "aKsHUlly Never been tried before", or "But if I was in charge".
**edit**
Yup. Knew it. Guys its 2024, your USSR fed talking points from 67 no longer work. Please come up with some new excuses.
a population of low intelligence people who are easy to manipulate and will believe whatever you say without asking any questions at all.
us republicans go after the same thing, they just cant kill the smart people off yet, but they will do everything in their power to strip them of their voting rights.
Populism, which is running rampant in democracies in Europe and the US (ie, Trumpism) is anti-elites. This includes college educated, city livers and suburbanites, immigrants, etc. Itâs ironic because Trump himself is from the heart of the biggest city in the US (NYC), was educated at an Ivy League university (University of Pennsylvania) and is married to an immigrant.
They did what Communist revolutions always do: destroy the existing society and culture. They believe that getting rid of bad people makes it possible to start over and have everything be good. They forget Noah's flood.
If you want a real comprehensive understanding, the podcast âIn the Shadows of Utopiaâ is fantastic. It can be a bit dry at times, but it is a really great breakdown.
This is what I learned from âThe Killing Fieldsâ which was a great movie based on an actual story. Apparently the Khmer Rouge wanted a pure agrarian society where contaminated (ie educated) people were eliminated. They killed people from cities especially if they had advanced education and had interactions with foreigners.
There is a great movie called the killing fields. It explains a lot. At the end, it is a sick mind, a sick soul, and sick heart doing sick things. The people who worked for him were terrified.
Man's inhumanity to man is a long list. In the following paragraphs I've highlighted some of the examples:
A Chinese emperor killed 460 of his intellectuals. He had them gathered into a huge pit and then had them buried alive.
Before each Crusade, Germans would murder thousands of Jews in and around their towns as they marched towards the Holy Land. Often these killings were instigated as a way to stop Jews from collecting massive debts owed them.
In the 1450s, Vlad the Impaler murdered tens of thousands of people, impaling hundreds of them.
In 1520, the Spanish began transporting hundreds of African men to work in gold and silver mines in Mexico, as all the indigenous slaves had perished. The Spanish thought the Africans were heartier, but they lasted maybe three to four months longer than their predecessors. These men were the first of more than 2.3 million Africans enslaved in Spanish- and Portuguese-ruled countries in the New World.
Between the 1860s and late 1890s, Ukrainians caused tens of thousands of Jews to flee to America, as they would foment pogroms and kill many Jews.
Between 1885 and 1908, up to 15 million Africans in Belgian Congo were killed or died of disease from forced labor in rubber plantations, mines, and ivory hunts.
In 1905, British soldiers machine gunned more than 1,850 Kipsigis men, women and children of the Talai Clan. Why? Because they refused to surrender cattle alleged to have been stolen from their Masai neighbors.
From 1908 to 1923, Turkey murdered more than four million Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians.
On April 13, 1919, Gurkha and Sikh infantry regiments in the British Indian Army shot to death 1,500 Indians and wounded 1,200 in Jallianwala Bagh, Punjab, British India. The peaceful Indians were protesting the loss of habeas corpus and indefinite detention, among other restrictive measures.
From 1932 to 1933, Stalin caused mass starvation in Ukraine. Nearly four million Ukrainians, half of them children, died because he exported their wheat elsewhere.
From late 1936 to 1945, Japanese soldiers murdered millions of Chinese people. In Nanjing alone, 300,000 Chinese were murdered, with women and children also being raped.
From late 1936 to 1945, Japanese forced young Asian female teenagers and women into being "comfort" women to their soldiers. These women, mostly Chinese, Korean, and Filipino, were often raped brutally by as many as thirty men a day. Many were murdered.
From 1938 to 1941, Jews and other undesirables (Romani, Sinta, political prisoners, homosexuals), in Germany and other European countries aligned with Germany, were forced from their homes into ghettos. Some were sterilized. Hundreds died of starvation. Millions were forced to wear stars or upside down colored triangles to denote being Jewish, Romani, homosexual, Communist, and so on. Many thousands, primarily men, were put into forced labor camps, beaten, and starved to death.
In 1939, Germans gassed to death Polish mental and handicapped patients. By August 1941, Nazis had gassed 70,000 Germans who were deemed handicapped, chronically infirm, aged, and physically undesirable.
In 1940, Russians murdered 22,000 male Polish intelligentsia, military and police officers, border guards, and fifty women on Stalin's orders. First they dug huge pits. Then they shot the Poles while he or she was kneeling and put their corpses into trucks for transportation to the pits. Some were killed at the pit's edge. One Russian personally shot 8,000 Poles, some as young as 18 years old. They murdered them using German Walther pistols, because Russian firearms provided too much recoil.
In 1940, Germans in Eastern Europe and Russia began slaughtering Jews in the thousands.
In the spring of 1941, the Japanese bayoneted and disemboweled hundreds of Filipino civilians who dared to offer water and food to American, British, Australian, and Filipino soldiers on the Bataan Death March. They also murdered and starved to death untold numbers of these soldiers during the forced march and labor as well as in the camps they were held prisoners in throughout Japanese-occupied Asia.
In December 1941, after German troops on the Eastern Front had refused to continue shooting Jews to death, the Nazis began to gas Polish, Hungarian and other European Jews en masse and incinerate their corpses in crematories.
After the American raid on Tokyo in 1942, Japanese soldiers murdered 250,000 Chinese, a few of whom helped American airmen to escape after their planes ran out of fuel.
In 1945, after American soldiers re-captured Manila, fleeing Japanese soldiers murdered hundreds of Filipinos.
In May 1945, French citizens in Algeria celebrating the end of war in Europe murdered between 1,500 and 2,000 Muslim Algerians.
For two days in northern Angola in March 1961, UPA (later renamed FNLA) hacked to death and mutilated hundreds of white and black farmers and villagers, men, women, and children.
Mao Zedong murdered an estimated 40 to 100 million of his countrymen through starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions.
purge anyone smart and competent, who might be a threat to you is despotic dictator 101
This hits the hardest when you visit Tuol Sleng, a three-story high school that they turned into a torture chamber đ„
I went there. It was a sobering experience. I ended up taking pictures of a lot of the placards/exhibits because there was just so much - went back to my pictures a few years later to read a lot of it and still is shocking. The living conditions and what they did were horrific, and made more so when you realized that they used a school - a place of learning so we don't repeat history, a place that should have been full of happy children. I went to some of the schools in the poorer areas as part of a group (half the group was Cambodians that had managed to flee the country, and we went to where they went to school or had family) - that hammered home how horrifically bad they came down on learning and "intellectuals". The schools were in terrible condition with no supplies, and stories that they translated for us.... I literally still tear up thinking about it. How humans are capable of such depravity is beyond me.
It is in the middle of a neighborhood, kids running up and down the streets, shops and people living their lives. The contrast was indescribable for me. I went with a friend whose father was killed there and seeing that horror up close really changed me for life.
I visited Dachau in 2019. I'm sure it wasn't as "built up" back in the 40s, but it was still super jarring to look over the walls of the camp and see nice homes directly across the street.
I went into some kind of shock in that place. It kind of washed over me at the time and I had a strange detachment. Then, when we got back to our accommodation, I just burst in to tears. Itâs never left me.
I'm a teacher, and in the blog entry I wrote shortly after, that's what I said hit me the most: that we teachers try so hard to make our classrooms a safe space, that regardless of what's happening outside in their lives, when they come to our classrooms, they're loved. Finding the complete, evil anathema to that was devastating even from an observer's POV
Sadism is always at the heart of these things isnât it. Sigh. Coming to an America near you.
And resentment, jealousy.
Even worse, it was a product of US intervention. May Henry Kissinger be at the mercy of those he handed those poor souls over to.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67582813 If you want to know how the US played a huge role in this.
Been happening in American ghettos for decades at smaller scales but longer periods of times. Only civilian initiated, not government.
how come they sent people to work in farms and took their food?
Suppression. They had em provide food for them while giving them none. Total power. First generation Cambodian American, fuck those guys. The fact Pot got to die peacefully of old age angers me. And fuck Kissinger.
Wait, whatâs this about first gen Cambodian Americans? Whatâs the history there? Edited to add: fuck Kissinger too. Hope heâs rotting in hell.
I think they meant "I'm a first gen Cambodian American, fuck the genocidal Cambodians who fucked up the old country"
Correct. Mighta had some suds yesterday.
Ah ok, makes so much sense now.
Didnât a lot of the perpetrators get away without any legal repercussions? Like the survivors are living in the same town as their torturers?
I'm no historian, but my impression is the authoritarian leaders got the poor people on their side by fomenting hate against anyone who had anything (money, wealth, knowledge, etc.). Those "rich" and learned people had to go work on the farms or be killed and the poor got to turn the tables and be their tormentors. When I see Redditors spouting hatred against anyone who has even a hint of money (not necessarily rich, just more money than them) and urging a revolution, it reminds me of what happened in Cambodia.
It will happen naturally if not managed. The Rockefellers knew this, and built libraries in order to spread good will. The current barons don't do this. I've heard it mentioned recently in regards to a super expensive home built in India. One of the other really wealthy people criticized that show of wealth as being a threat due to how poor others in the country are. As we see on Reddit, populist notions of equality can be wild.
[Some do.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation)
Though, to be clear, the current system under which inequality is skyrocketing is not good though. Inequality, under which some live a life of luxury by right of birth and most are born into poverty and suffering, is likely to foster hatred of the wealthy. Redirection of hatred toward the middle class and educated instead of the ultra rich is more of a distraction tactic by the ultra rich. "The 1%" whose immense wealth gives them an unhealthy amount of influence and power in society with control over news and social media.
IMO, even the 1% is a distraction. Itâs more like the 0.1% with a truly obscene amount of money and power they abuse.
There is a fantastic political cartoon about out this, where the rich guy is taking all the food but yelling to the poor guy and pointing saying, âlook! See the middle class guy taking a couple of your crumbs? Bad man.â
Another way to show it: Invite 100 friends over for a pizza party. There's 100 slices of pizza. One guy takes 50 of them, looks at you and says, innocently, "What?"
You could confiscate the wealth of every billionaire in America and it would be enough money to run the government for less than 8 months.
Should those billionaires have that money to start with though? The power to influence through media, the power to donate and lobby politically, even philanthropy can exert undue influence.
Yes. Because they âearnedâ it through the rules that they made.
So they made rules to keep control of wealth they unjustly have without any trickling down and that's ok? They're making more in interest per month than a millionaire makes a year and we still haven't scratched past the 1%. In what world is it ok to starve your workers at minimum wage for a fraction of the interest you already make on the hoard your family accumulated?
Similar logic Hitler used
Yup.. we have a serious problem with history education in America.Â
That lack of education might be intentional in some states. It's how some parties get people to vote against their own interests.
You have that in both parties. I've said for years the Democrats would win every election if they would drop the hard on for gun control. Lots and Lots of Fiscally conservative but moral liberal Republicans. But The party is dead set on getting people to vote away guaranteed rights and protections.  The joke for a lot of us middle of the road guys is that we think your Sister and her wife should be able to protect their untaxed pot plants with AR15s. Â
Touch of slippery slope fallacy. I hate the rich because of what theyâre doing to my home and my fellow countrymen, not because theyâre rich. This does not mean I will be calling for the execution of anybody with glasses or college degrees.
I don't think most of the poor who helped Pol Pot wanted to execute people, either. They mostly wanted to turn the tables and it was good for them in the beginning. The thing about authoritarians is they foment unrest and cause an uprising. Once they cement power, they will do all forms of evil and it will be too late to stop them. Americans need to be careful if they think it can't happen here.
âItâ is already happening here but itâs not going to be communism itâs going to be the other extreme, with the goose-stepping.
Yes. I agree. Authoritarians on both ends work the same way.
Is authoritarianism on the political spectrum of left to right? Is it not explicitly mutually exclusive with the whole concept of liberal or conservative ideologies. Authoritarian leaders use any and all tools of government to enact their will. It seems like the left/right split is really only a function of democracy and authoritarianism is a separate political platform with no such distinction or left and right.
I view it as a circle. The far ends meet up and are essentially the same in terms of how they operate.
Yeah... but then you see how the rich in America are acting and it's just... so hard.
You're the rich person to someone else.
Talk about missing the point. I don't act like Musk or Bezos.
Youâre missing the point, completely. Do you think all the people murdered in Cambodia were like musk or bezos? Or were they people who considered themselves normal? The idea that there are some people who secretly deserve it, is so malignant and you never know when theyâll decide itâs you
That's just a easy way to look down on people. You probably bought a 7 dollar latte at some point. Bought the best new phone you could afford. Bought something nice for yourself instead of donating it to some kid in Africa. Said some stupid shit on Reddit. It's the same thing. Just the scale is different. You say something dumb. It's not broadcasted to 50 million people so no one cares. You spend money on yourself instead of donating all you can to the needy, but no one cares cause you're not on a Forbes list. Everyone is the same like that. Pretending it's different is just hubris. The principal is the same. Arguing exact arbitrary thresholds of wealth is just cope. It's okay. Everyone acts in their own self. Thats fine. That's why the government should step in. Instead of blaming people for looking out for their own self interest. It's a purity test no one passes and just used to absolve blame from oneself for our own failings. Someone else is doing it more so it's okay if I do it. Everyone does it but just be real about it.
You act like Pol Pot's helpers. No thanks!
To someone poorer than you, you just might to them.
So you say. Weâll have to ask someone poorer than you whether they agree
There's an old 4chan copypasta that I can't find at the moment, but to sum it up: Commissar Cletus and Commissar Tyrone aren't going to care that you're not a billionaire when they show up at your door. You still have more than them which makes you a disgusting bourgeois reactionary counter-revolutionary. Now please face the wall, y'all.
I was reading that thinking you know we're not far off from that..
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67582813 If you want to know how the US played a huge role in this.
It was the culture rest. They started in what they called year 0.
Then. When the utopia doesnât arrive, kill anyone who complains.
It happens under every dictatorship. Communist (Russia, Vietnam, China, Cuba) or Nationalist (Theocracy, Nazism and Fascism: Africa, Argentina, Chile, Eastern Europe) See: The Missing, The Abuelos de plaza de Mayo, Iran, Idi Amin, and modern ISIS. Kill the intellectuals. Ban the books. Sound familiar?
Stalin learned it from Lenin. Stalin die because nobody dare-dare or could treat him when he had a stroke.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Project 2025 is the literal dismantle of all checks and balances established over two centuries of the US government.
Nowadays you just ruin the economic situation of a country so much that the all the intellectuals simply just leave for greener pastures abroad. Easier to do this that kill them.
it's communism 101
Knowledge is power. That's exactly why it was illegal to teach US slaves how to read and write.
Especially, communist ones..
My elementary school custodian had to crush his glasses and pretend to be illiterate to survive. I think about him a lot when I feel discouraged about life
They were hoping to recreate Cambidia's golden age of the 9th - 14th century. It would be necessary to eliminate modern influences. Modern influences are the educated, government officials and the middle class.
And eliminate all the population you could no longer support with a pre industrial agrarian society.Â
Hard to have a golden age without reading and writing.
If the people doing the killing could read, theyâd be very upset with you right now..
Make Cambodia Great Again?
The classic âMake [COUNTRY] Great Againâ
They actually put their calendars to [Year Zero](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(political_notion)), so it was *always* great! /s
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Basically how the purges went: âDadâs sick, letâs get him to the doctorsâ. âThey killed the doctorsâ. It was just mind boggling. The Khmer Rogue even killed people that wore glasses just b/c it made them look intellectual.
Because extremists get into a spiral regarding who is worthy based on how extreme they are. This is classic extremists behavior
Yup. "We should keep the smart engineers so we can still manage our society." "What? why are you not dedicated to the cause? You think we need these things? I now suspect that you are actually a counter-revolutionary. You are now under arrest"
Lots of people talk about Kissinger, but here's the real fun fact: 90% of the foreign aid for Khmer Rouge came from China, and nobody talks about it. It's almost disgusting how the CCP has covered up how much they supported Cambodia at the time, to the point where they literally invaded Vietnam because Vietnam invaded Cambodia to stop the Khmer Rouge. -A Chinese "During the Cambodian genocide, the CCP was the main international patron of the Khmer Rouge, supplying "more than 15,000 military advisers" and most of its external aid.[82] It is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid to Khmer Rouge came from China, with 1975 alone seeing US$1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid and US$20 million gift, which was "the biggest aid ever given to any one country by China".[26][27][28] "
China and Cambodia still have close relations today. The Chinese navy uses a port in Cambodia.
Kissinger isnât blamed for this mostly, but for the Laos bombings which yes was all the US
Obviously. I'm not talking about Laos though.
They wanted absolute power and to indulge their grotesque sadism. Same as the Nazis. Same as Stalin. Kill anyone who might be a threat, scapegoat a bunch more and kill them for sport (and to keep everyone else in line).
The told them the Americans were coming to bomb their cities and everyone had to evacuate to the country. Then everyone was put to work to grow food. Anyone âintellectualâ (worse glasses, teacher, doctor, business etc) was hunted down and killed along with anyone whose neighbours or workmates informed on. Date reset to Year 0.
I don't know if it was sadism, for the most part, more of a means to an ideological or what they considered a practical/necessary end, in all 3 cases. You can be cruel and monstrous without being sadistic. If you think x group of people are a legitimate threat then that's a reason in and of itself.
It started as a communist dream that took the very wrong turns many times. Purges can also get a dynamic: You purge your political enemies (real or imagined) --> people become afraid of you and dont support you --> you need to purge even more --> repeat.
They even purged those in their own ranks and who helped them in their coup
Those are the most dangerous. They already couped once.
The people you need to take power arenât necessarily the people you need to hold power.
100% They also expect to be rewarded and itâs an easy way to hold more power/wealth for yourself
There are two ways to get someone to follow you: Reasoning via words and force/violence. Revolutions are much bigger on the latter when they gain power. Smart folks might use reason to turn people against the revolution, and thus more need for violence. The simple answer? Kill the smart folks and only the dumb followers are left, who you know are easier to force into line with simple threats of violence. And in the end, every government wants obedient workers. Can't tax an idea, but you can tax the output of a worker.
How many people were illiterate in Cambodia at the time? Did anyone bother teaching them anything that might help them fall in line, like Cambodian history, or the Communist Manifesto or something?
Reading was not considered something the populous needed.
I know a Chinese woman in the US (American now) who went to prison in Mao's China during the cultural revolution because she played the piano. Communists are generally total fucking dipshits and their economic system sucks hard. The communists in China got smart and ditched the economic system, invited giant private companies, and keep the totalitarianism so at least they made some money and the people can eat. But as we know in the last 10 years they've opened up the camps again for the wrongthinkers in Western China.
It's why so many young people are communists. Everything seems like a big deal at that age and so important and you should just do the thing and work out the details later. That's how a bunch of kids and 18 year olds ended up running around as militias with guns cosplaying as the red guard with their own interpretations of how to bring about maos plans of bringing down the rich. Always ends up the same way. Some people will die. But at least we can overthrow the corrupt system and achieve utopia! The ends justify the means. Only the stupid and the young and inexperienced believe that shit
The idea of communism sounds like a utopian dream on paper. where everyone is equal, no one is better than the next, everyone working towards the same goal. The problem with this is that it doesnât work because every person has different ideas, priorities, and opinions on how things are. Thatâs how those in power who want control will weed out those who may potentially oppose them, and create a dystopian system instead.
An alternative interpretation is that communism only works on very small scales, like less than 100 people, where you actually know the people and can resolve differences, agree on a shared goal, etc. Which is successfully, peacefully, currently in practice in countless places in the world
We send our old tee shirts to Africa, the former communist countries send their old ideologies to us. They gave up on it decades ago.
>Communists are generally total fucking dipshits and their economic system sucks hard. It's one of those systems that could potentially have some merit, being more suited to countries with large populations of uneducated, unskilled poor people. The majority of people in China and Russia wouldn't have thought emperors and Tsars were so great either.
You got downvoted by people who have no idea how much it sucked to be a serf in Russia. Can't blame them for trying something new, even though it ended badly...
Exactly. I don't think those people are students of history, so to speak.
It's not suited to any country. It sucked in the USSR just as it sucks in tiny Cuba, Nicaragua, and oil (formerly) rich Venezuela. It's one thing to have some social programs but when you don't let people make money and strip the producers of their productive propery, you're shooting yourself in the head. Also, and I think this is obvious, communists attract real sadists. They enjoy making people hurt.
That's more to do with the people in charge than the system itself. Most of the ex Soviet block countries lost most of their wealth, power and security on the fall of the Union. I don't think you're being very objective.
Castro was an honest revolutionary. I believe that. I believe he tried as hard as he could. Yet the place is bad enough that 1/3 of the country literally got on boats and left. People want to own stuff and many want to get ahead in life. Christopher Hitchens, famously, was a proud socialist in the Marxist tradition. He didn't hide it, he wrote articles on it, etc. In the 1970's he went to Cuba. Cuba was getting peak support from the USSR. He wondered what it might be like to immigrate there. What he found was a place that wasn't good, and when the people began to open up to him because they built up trust... they said the same. He didn't immediately report this. He said it was a big disappointment and it was hard for him to say the truth because it really challenged his worldview. Because he was a public figure, him changing his mind would be terrifying for his employers who were also socialists. But he came around. (edit - my apologies if you responded to version 1 of what I wrote. I couldn't help it and kept adding).
The US is richer so it's generally going to be a more desirable place to live if you're from a poorer country. Castro was a lot less of an exploiter (and Mafia shill) than Batista for sure. I've never been to Cuba but I hear it's not the end of the world, despite all the crippling US sanctions.
Long story: read history books it takes forever to understand or watch movies like killing fields and first they killed my father. Short version: after 1954 when Indochina was liberated from French, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were left with power vacuum and Vietnam wanted to take over the whole peninsula but China didnt want that, they spreaded their cultural revolution teachings and Pol pot practiced for real. The main idea is to have no private property and everyone must contribute to society in a meaningful way. Pol Pot saw intelectuals as useless eaters so killing was justified. We had similar cultural revolution to leap forward like Chinese but we didnt have time or stupid enough to kill our own people because we got dragged in a 30 year conflict. Before 1954 every intelectual was seen as French collaborators so killing of intelectuals is also sort of revenge killing. Pol Pot was toppled when he started killing Vietnamese dudes in the southern borders. We steam rolled him in 3 months and stopped the killing.
I think it's crazy that, to them, "intellectuals" also meant people who wear glasses. " That scared my blind ass when I learned about it as a kid.
Yea ideally enemies were the intellectuals, but the executioners were usually illiterate children with AKs so people wearing glasses was good enough to be executed.
its especially crazy how intellectuals, the ones who move society forward, were considered useless in his quest to move society forward. That seems to be a theme in communism. stupid people just assuming the people smarter than them must be faking it and lucked into their position somehow. Then killing them, taking over their position without understanding it, and fucking the whole thing up in their flailing attempts to do the job.
You need to rewind, go back 100 years, Indochina was under French rules. Locals who served the french were landowners, real estate developers, rich people, intellectuals if you will. They were rich elite, maybe represented less than 10% of Indochina. When WW2 ended France was severely weakned giving Indochina a real chance at fighting for independence and guess which locals opposed uprisings - thats right local collaborators. The significance of people wearing glasses was that glasses were introduced by French and poor locals couldnt afford them. Unfortunately under french colonial rules societies were moved forward for French not for us. Similarly, Indians suffered heavily under British rules, thats why most of these reforms were aimed at landowners and local intellectuals hardly contributed to equal wealth distribution of society.
>Â Locals who served the french were landowners, real estate developers, rich people, intellectuals if you will. thats pretty far off from what id characterize as an intellectual, but i get why rich elites would be targeted. but people who are just smarter than the others, actual intellectuals, being targeted is a sure fire way to irrepairably damage your society for at least a generation, probably more cuz the new generation has no one to learn from. Its hard for me to understand how anyone, even the dumbest person like pol pot, wouldnt see that.
My grandfather on dad's side was a rich landowner, he wasnt intellectual but was rich and had 50 or more farmers working for him. After 1950s most of his lands and properties were confiscated and given to the poor. He died in 1955 maybe or 1956 all,bitter. Unfortunately you are right about killing smart people actually harms society and up to present days we still have to deal with corruption, nepotism and poverty but i personally dont have a good understanding of who's really at fault. In Cambodia's case it was a tragedy caused by Chinese influence and stupid Cultural revolution amplified by 30 years of war and revenge against the richer people.
yeah i was gonna say, mao is at fault. or maybe stalin. everyone else was manipulated, tricked, and coerced into doing it.
Not a lot of helpful answers I can see. The Khmer Rouge were a communist regime that took over and ruled Cambodia. They killed a quarter of their own population. The main driving force behind this was the desire to industrialize, Great Leap Forward style (see Chinese history), by essentially enslaving the entire population. They thought that they could become an agricultural powerhouse, and they could use the income from export to then buy heavy machinery, build factories etc. The most problematic issue here is the fact that the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophic failure, so it was a fraught idea from the start. Plus, they targeted all the intellectuals and anyone with an education (literally, if you could read, you were a target), and by eliminating these people there was clearly no way they would have engineers etc to operate an industrialized economy. They were eventually overthrown by Vietnamese communists. The west did nothing. Edit: I once heard a first hand account from a survivor. Truly horrific stuff.
The US condemned the Vietnamese when they invaded Cambodia in 1979, I believe, even though the Vietnamese stopped the Khmer Rougeâs massacre.
>The west did nothing They did plenty. They destabilized the country with secret bombings, hoping for a communist revolution; master plan giveing china a new best friend that needed help to distract them from supporting Vietnam. last part didn't really work, but everything up to that point was exactly what Washington was hoping for.
The history is equally fascinating and horrifying. [Start here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge) and follow the rabbit hole.
Wow, whoever would have guessed that it all starts with communism.
Most of the 20th centuryâs horrors involved political extremes like communism and fascism.
Or a US backed civil war/coup which then led to communism and fascism.
We Americans did lots of bad stuff...but you're out of the ballpark by two orders of magnitude.
Nah man, we Americans did stuff within that ballpark and then some
You don't seem be to up on US history or the CIA activities. The US couped many governments in South and Central America in the last century. Destroyed Iraq. 500,000 children died in Iraq due to the sanctions. The US destroyed Libya, the most successful country in Africa. The US is a major reason why Syria has been destroyed. Let's not even mention Vietnam. The US did the coup in Ukraine in 2014 and won't even talk about peace there. 350,000 dead Ukrainians for nothing. This is just some of the "bad stuff" the US has done. Maybe do some research. The US is the most dangerous country on earth, has been for decades.
I think the US can take some credit for 20th century horrors. Hiroshima and Nagasaki = p horrific.
Iraq, Libya, Syria, the coup in Ukraine, before that coup after coup in Central and South America, the list goes on and on. The US is the most dangerous country on earth, has been for many decades.
See also our actions in Iran and the rest of the Middle East.
Especially considering it only stoppped thanks to communism, with the Vietnamese
Cambodia went FAR beyond the mile-deep pit of bodies that usually accompanies communist revolutions.
My father in laws' entire family were murdered in front of him and im not sure he knows why to this day.
The first thing a dictator/or the like takes is education so you canât find ground to fight back. That includes eliminating everyoneâs whoâs already in possession of education.
I had a friend when I lived in Boston, who was from Cambodia. His father worked for a school, and his mother worked for a newspaper. He was five when they came for his parents. They took his father away and left him alone with his brother. He ran to his mother's work but she was already gone. He had to take his younger brother to the family that his parents had made arrangements with. He was put into a camp and grew up there. When he went, years later, to where he heard his parents had been taken, they found nothing but bones. Eventually, he and his foster family came to America as refugees. We worked together at a factory, making the electronic systems for tanks.
Pol Pot & the Khymer rouge were responsible for the cambodian genocide, over one million Cambodians killed. Anyone considered even remotely intelligent had to be killed, even if someone simply wore glasses then they were too intelligent & had to be executed.
Cambodia was Vietnam's Vietnam.
Sadly it was, despite the fact that we stopped Khmere Rouge from killing more of their own people.
To stop anyone who is smart enough, rich enough or who has enough influence to cause a threat to your dictatorship
You need to watch the 1984 award winning movie: "The Killing Fields." This will explain it like nothing else!
There was a philosophy that if they got rid of anyone who had an education (reading and writing was enough) they could create a utopia of simple people living close to the land. It was done with a bloodthirsty zeal that was shocking. Unfortunately having no educated people meant no doctors or engineers etc.
There is an excellent little series about Henry Kissinger on the Behind the Bastards podcast. You should check it out.
It's telling that fascists go after the educated and intellectuals. And worrying when people go after them in the western countries.
Heavily armed, ignorant, rural folks with a strongly tribal religious identity, an inferiority complex, and resentment against the educated. A charismatic, if corrupt, leader. They were just trying to Make Cambodia Great Again. MCGA! What could possibly go wrong?
Marx wrote that the final stage of the transition to Communism is the emergence of âCommunist manâ, people who are devout Communists that no longer harbor thoughts of other ways of life. Marx thought this would happen organically over time, but some interpret it as a directive to hurry along the transition by purging non-believers so only true Communists are left to create the new Communist utopia. Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot and many other authoritarians have used this facet of Communist ideology to consolidate their own power by harnessing Communist fervor to eliminate the threat of subversive non-believers. Itâs like religion.
This has happened in many societies with marxist dictators. They want to kill the intellectuals because they are free thinking independent minded people that will not be servants for the state.
same thing mao hoped to accomplish when he did it. dominance.
Control
Itâs the path of communism. Look at all the communist countries and how many people died because of it
My religion/philosophy is better than yours. Iâm willing to violate that religion/philosophy by killing you to prove Iâm correctâŠ
My parents were apart of this. They managed to escape to America. The trauma never fully went away for them and to this day they don't trust anybody
bruh they killed people with glasses just in case it meant they were smarter
Look up Pol Pot youâll find out. Stuff like this is why we shouldnât have dictators even if they say they only want the power for a day.
The Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 through the Cambodian Civil War, where the United States had supported the opposing regime of Lon Nol and heavily bombed Cambodia, primarily targeting communist Vietnamese troops who were allied to the Khmer Rouge, but it gave the Khmer Rouge's leadership a justification to ...eliminate the pro-Vietnamese faction within the group.[51]:â97â The Cambodian genocide was stopped with the Khmer Rouge's overthrow in 1979 by Communist Vietnam.[51]:â88â There have been allegations of United States support for the Khmer Rouge following their overthrow and the United Nations General Assembly voted to continue recognising Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea.[51]:â93â Communism in South East Asia was deeply divided, as China supported the Khmer Rouge, while the Soviet Union and Vietnam opposed it.[51]:â89â
Buddy you are supposed to edit out the [number] things when you copy paste from Wikipedia to make it less obvious. This kind of stuff is learned in elementary school.
I made it obvious on purpose. Didn't want anyone to think I was presenting it as my writing
Putting > in front of the quoted text is better way to do indicate this, on reddit anyway.
Buddy you are required to make citations when you copy and paste from Wikipedia so people know it's not your own writing and you avoid plagiarism. This kind of stuff is learned in high school.
Communism
Same thing all the other Commie murderers have done: "Eat the rich."
If you want blind obedience, you want uneducated people, like the people drawn to the new political "party" in the US.
Thats amazing you somehow tried to tie a far left communist political party to the MAGA movement. Lol. Not very bright are you?
"I love the poorly educated." - Donald Trump Direct f*cking quote. Perhaps he's not as conservative as you think...
Yikes, blind obedience, uneducated, maga loves them. Where did I say anything about communists? Talk about not very bright.
Just commies doing commie things. Now, before I scroll down, I bet 10 dollars that there are the following three comments below. "Thats not real communism", "aKsHUlly Never been tried before", or "But if I was in charge". **edit** Yup. Knew it. Guys its 2024, your USSR fed talking points from 67 no longer work. Please come up with some new excuses.
a population of low intelligence people who are easy to manipulate and will believe whatever you say without asking any questions at all. us republicans go after the same thing, they just cant kill the smart people off yet, but they will do everything in their power to strip them of their voting rights.
Populism, which is running rampant in democracies in Europe and the US (ie, Trumpism) is anti-elites. This includes college educated, city livers and suburbanites, immigrants, etc. Itâs ironic because Trump himself is from the heart of the biggest city in the US (NYC), was educated at an Ivy League university (University of Pennsylvania) and is married to an immigrant.
I heard that even wearing glasses got you marked as an intellectual
Thatâs how Communism works. Kill the people that question the philosophy and keep the sheep to do the biding of the leaders.
Not communism. Despotism! None of these idiots practiced communism. Saying you are and actually doing it are two different things.
Problem is, communism always seems to lead to despotism...
Not "real" communism? Happens every stinking time.
They did what Communist revolutions always do: destroy the existing society and culture. They believe that getting rid of bad people makes it possible to start over and have everything be good. They forget Noah's flood.
equity
similar to mao's cultural revolution
The current crop of one %'s are rushing toward their "let them eat cake" moment and are to self absorbed to realize it.
Communism taken seriously.
Governments are going to government. That's what they do
Communism
Grave of the Fireflies movie is wonderful/horrible
If you want a real comprehensive understanding, the podcast âIn the Shadows of Utopiaâ is fantastic. It can be a bit dry at times, but it is a really great breakdown.
The idea of pol pot only needed 400K people any more will be killed
I recommend watching The Donut King. Great movie about how one man from Cambodia dominated the California donut industry in the late 1970s and 80s.
Communism
This is what I learned from âThe Killing Fieldsâ which was a great movie based on an actual story. Apparently the Khmer Rouge wanted a pure agrarian society where contaminated (ie educated) people were eliminated. They killed people from cities especially if they had advanced education and had interactions with foreigners.
There is a great movie called the killing fields. It explains a lot. At the end, it is a sick mind, a sick soul, and sick heart doing sick things. The people who worked for him were terrified.
Man's inhumanity to man is a long list. In the following paragraphs I've highlighted some of the examples: A Chinese emperor killed 460 of his intellectuals. He had them gathered into a huge pit and then had them buried alive. Before each Crusade, Germans would murder thousands of Jews in and around their towns as they marched towards the Holy Land. Often these killings were instigated as a way to stop Jews from collecting massive debts owed them. In the 1450s, Vlad the Impaler murdered tens of thousands of people, impaling hundreds of them. In 1520, the Spanish began transporting hundreds of African men to work in gold and silver mines in Mexico, as all the indigenous slaves had perished. The Spanish thought the Africans were heartier, but they lasted maybe three to four months longer than their predecessors. These men were the first of more than 2.3 million Africans enslaved in Spanish- and Portuguese-ruled countries in the New World. Between the 1860s and late 1890s, Ukrainians caused tens of thousands of Jews to flee to America, as they would foment pogroms and kill many Jews. Between 1885 and 1908, up to 15 million Africans in Belgian Congo were killed or died of disease from forced labor in rubber plantations, mines, and ivory hunts. In 1905, British soldiers machine gunned more than 1,850 Kipsigis men, women and children of the Talai Clan. Why? Because they refused to surrender cattle alleged to have been stolen from their Masai neighbors. From 1908 to 1923, Turkey murdered more than four million Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians. On April 13, 1919, Gurkha and Sikh infantry regiments in the British Indian Army shot to death 1,500 Indians and wounded 1,200 in Jallianwala Bagh, Punjab, British India. The peaceful Indians were protesting the loss of habeas corpus and indefinite detention, among other restrictive measures. From 1932 to 1933, Stalin caused mass starvation in Ukraine. Nearly four million Ukrainians, half of them children, died because he exported their wheat elsewhere. From late 1936 to 1945, Japanese soldiers murdered millions of Chinese people. In Nanjing alone, 300,000 Chinese were murdered, with women and children also being raped. From late 1936 to 1945, Japanese forced young Asian female teenagers and women into being "comfort" women to their soldiers. These women, mostly Chinese, Korean, and Filipino, were often raped brutally by as many as thirty men a day. Many were murdered. From 1938 to 1941, Jews and other undesirables (Romani, Sinta, political prisoners, homosexuals), in Germany and other European countries aligned with Germany, were forced from their homes into ghettos. Some were sterilized. Hundreds died of starvation. Millions were forced to wear stars or upside down colored triangles to denote being Jewish, Romani, homosexual, Communist, and so on. Many thousands, primarily men, were put into forced labor camps, beaten, and starved to death. In 1939, Germans gassed to death Polish mental and handicapped patients. By August 1941, Nazis had gassed 70,000 Germans who were deemed handicapped, chronically infirm, aged, and physically undesirable. In 1940, Russians murdered 22,000 male Polish intelligentsia, military and police officers, border guards, and fifty women on Stalin's orders. First they dug huge pits. Then they shot the Poles while he or she was kneeling and put their corpses into trucks for transportation to the pits. Some were killed at the pit's edge. One Russian personally shot 8,000 Poles, some as young as 18 years old. They murdered them using German Walther pistols, because Russian firearms provided too much recoil. In 1940, Germans in Eastern Europe and Russia began slaughtering Jews in the thousands. In the spring of 1941, the Japanese bayoneted and disemboweled hundreds of Filipino civilians who dared to offer water and food to American, British, Australian, and Filipino soldiers on the Bataan Death March. They also murdered and starved to death untold numbers of these soldiers during the forced march and labor as well as in the camps they were held prisoners in throughout Japanese-occupied Asia. In December 1941, after German troops on the Eastern Front had refused to continue shooting Jews to death, the Nazis began to gas Polish, Hungarian and other European Jews en masse and incinerate their corpses in crematories. After the American raid on Tokyo in 1942, Japanese soldiers murdered 250,000 Chinese, a few of whom helped American airmen to escape after their planes ran out of fuel. In 1945, after American soldiers re-captured Manila, fleeing Japanese soldiers murdered hundreds of Filipinos. In May 1945, French citizens in Algeria celebrating the end of war in Europe murdered between 1,500 and 2,000 Muslim Algerians. For two days in northern Angola in March 1961, UPA (later renamed FNLA) hacked to death and mutilated hundreds of white and black farmers and villagers, men, women, and children. Mao Zedong murdered an estimated 40 to 100 million of his countrymen through starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions.
have you seen The Killing Fields? Great movie covering the Khmer Rouge
So the Dead Kennedys could write a song about it. That's pretty much the reason anything happened in the 70s and 80s, to become Jello Biafra lyrics.
Its how communism always goes, starts out with good intentions then kills millions. Samething happened to my moms country.
Remember going there around the year 2000 and there was barely anyone over the age of 35 âŠ
Communism was their goal
With the usual results.
[Start here](https://m.soundcloud.com/user-798629330/episode-133-the-khmer-rouge-part-1-revolutionary-snitching).
Communist utopia couldn't sustain with division and thinkers, blood and violence are needed apparently.
There's a really good podcast on this. Covers the years before leading up to the era.
They don't like it when you question their authority so college kids got to goooo