Pol Pot never even pretended to be a maoist until after Mao's death iirc. And I'm pretty sure he didn't even really understand maoism, or marxism, or any of these things. Basically he was a massive idiot and a psycho. Like, the dude had to repeat a bunch of classes in school, and when he went to France he read Marx and by his own admission didn't really understand much, preferring Stalin and Kropotkin (lmao). People who knew him before he became who he became just describe him as "mediocre and pleasant". I'm not even 100% sure he understood what was happening from what I have read about him. It genuinely confuses me how he managed to rise as high up as he did, but from accounts about him he was charismatic, because he was really polite and soft spoken to everyone. Btw Pol Pot isn't even his real name, but it wasn't like with Lenin either, he had a bunch of weird nick names like 87, 99, first brother, and many more. Pol Pot is just one that stuck.