My personal opinion is I consider the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot to be revisionist rather than fascist, I don’t have the exact quote but didn’t Pol Pot say something along the lines of “I didn’t understand/read Marxist theory”.
Pol Pot said that communism was the enemy and that they needed to emulate the west shortly after Vietnam invaded them lol. Don’t think he was anything but an opportunist.
I don't think they would really be considered fascist in terms of a marxist definition of it, there might be a fancier term but I think they would be more described as something like a reactionary agrarian nationalist movement.
My only understanding of the Khmer Rouge is they were partially funded by the CIA.
When your foreign policy is "whatever is the opposite of the USSR"
Many such cases unfortunately. I do wonder what the world would look like had the sino-Soviet split not been as stupid as it was. Did Russia and China really dislike each other THAT much?
this doesn't really answer your question directly but I think it is at least tangientally helpful to see Xi's take here:
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!
As bad as this sounds, but if it didn't play out as it did, I think the PRC would've collapsed or been close to collapse, or be like DPRK by the end of last century without the split. The split enabled Kissinger to do the whole opening up China thing, when the writing was on the wall for the USSR, which ultimately made it what it was today.
From what I understand this is mainly in connection to the conflict between them and Vietnam, not that they engineered the Khmer Rouge rising to power.
Makes sense I guess. You’re pretty much screaming for funding from the west when you’re fighting their geopolitical enemy and also telling your followers “no I haven’t read Marx, now go shoot those scientists”
Fascism isn't necessarily a clear lineage of the ideology itself but it can be mostly neatly summarized as a rejection of the enlightenment and an attempt to get rid of the ills of society through culture. Pol pot in this case actually neatly fits into both characteristics with a full hearted rejection of revolutionary theory and adoption of counter revolutionary theory, as well as the attempt to fix the ills of society through culture itself.
A lot of the original fascists had links to elements of nihilist and anarchist theorists due to the overlapping philosophical-ideological criteria to create the conditions for the idiosyncratic and in most ways contradictory principles of fascism. Pol pot probably qualifies along similar lines as these early fascists with his initial identification with communism and subsequent counterrevolutionary turn
I would just say they were reactionary Khemer nationalists.
