• Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I don't think anyone really considers pol pot a communist mate. And who was it that ended the Khmer Rouge hmm? Communists.

    He was brainwormed from the start, lacked a lot of theory that we usually consider essential, and seriously was deeply reactionary. He was communist when he wanted China's support(announced in 1977), and then in 1981 he disbanded the communist party when he wanted capitalist support. The man was a monster and an opportunist that did whatever he had to.

    But don't believe me, here's quite an important quote:

    "We are not communists ... we are revolutionaries" who do not 'belong to the commonly accepted grouping of communist Indochina."

    -- Leng Sary, 1977 Former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Cambodia

    Declaring Pol Pot's actions the fault of communism when the Khmer Rouge were only publicly declared ""communist"" for the 4 years of 1977-1981 when the Khmer rouge existed in total between 1951 and 1999 is utterly absurd and is only the kind of thing that people who don't know the history do.

    If anything they had a hardline anticommunists stance from the moment they were thrown out by the actual communist vietnamese in 1979, and they found support among capitalists, notably Thailand who used them as a buffer against communism spreading to Thailand.

    • redhotpepper@lemm.ee
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wikipedia puts the name change at 1971. In what way was the Khmer Rouge not a Communist party? They were literally forcing the entire population onto agricultural communes. One quote from a foreign minister doesn't move the goalpost.

      Vietnam didn't ride in to heroically liberate Cambodia from "pretend communists", it was literally in response to military aggression ordered by Pol Pot.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Wikipedia puts the name change at 1971. In what way was the Khmer Rouge not a Communist party?

        They only declared their politics to be communist publicly when Mao asked them to, presumably because he was suspicious that they were not and felt that publicly stating it made it politically easier on him to offer the (mistaken) support to them that he did.

        Vietnam didn't ride in to heroically liberate Cambodia from "pretend communists", it was literally in response to military aggression ordered by Pol Pot.

        And yet that is what happened. They did heroically liberate Cambodia, and they were absolutely revisionists at best. I don't see how this is difficult for you to understand, the fact that they dissolved and ceased being ""communist"" as soon as it was politically beneficial to do so should be enough to you to show you their commitment to communism as an ideology was paper thin at best. And that's completely ignoring the fact that all of their actions were out of line with communist theory.

        Wikipedia puts the name change at 1971. In what way was the Khmer Rouge not a Communist party?

      • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        In what way was the Khmer Rouge not a Communist party?

        In literally every way that matters. A name is just a name, a political party can call themselves anything they want, and none of their politics were communist in any way.

        Granted, you're probably one of those dipshits who thinks the Nazis were socialist, given your fixation on names.

      • mustardman [none/use name]
        ·
        1 year ago

        They were literally forcing the entire population onto agricultural communes

        Ah yes the official and only definition of communism 🤡