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”.

  • Tunnelvision [they/them]
    ·
    10 months ago

    My only understanding of the Khmer Rouge is they were partially funded by the CIA.

        • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
          ·
          10 months ago

          When your foreign policy is "whatever is the opposite of the USSR"

          • Tunnelvision [they/them]
            ·
            10 months ago

            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?

            • emizeko [they/them]
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              10 months ago

              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!

              —Xi Jinping, 2013

              corn-man-khrush

            • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]
              ·
              10 months ago

              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.

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • Tunnelvision [they/them]
        ·
        10 months ago

        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”