Pol Pot and his government was responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries. A lot of Cambodians migrated to Vietnam (including the author of this wonderful piece). The history about this period is interesting if you're looking for a good read. It's not being widely taught, even during Vietnamese K12 education.
Pol Pot came to power due to USA backed coup. USA spies tried to kill king of Cambodia multiple times but failed. So, they taught and financed guerillas to oust the king by means of military coup and install a pro-USA government.
Pro-USA government didn't last long, and Pol Pot took its place.
And, BTW, the most well hidden secret is that USA supported Pol Pot and even provided financial support to his government.
USA: making a better world through revolutions, coups and military invasions for more than a century!
>” And, BTW, the most well hidden secret is that USA supported Pol Pot and even provided financial support to his government.”
According to Wikipedia, the USA did not materially support the Khmer Rouge, though they did vote in favor of certain UN resolutions which favored the regime. Do you have some evidence or support for your claims?
IIRC from [0] US politicians long regarded the horror stories out of Cambodia as exaggerated tales at best, enemy propaganda at worst, since the Cambodian regime was opposed to the newly formed Vietnamese government.
They couldn't politically support the cause of their former enemy, so Cambodians suffered for longer, until Vietnam got bold enough to invade and liberate them (Edit: I don't know whether the aim was to liberate, the aim probably was to invade but it resulted in liberation).
But yeah, I don't remember any material support either. But the political support was deciding in keeping the madmen going in the country.
Again according to Wikipedia, the Khmer Rouge were initially supported by the North Vietnamese and Chinese, only turning against the former later on. The USA appears to have opposed the Khmer Rouge until they were largely a spent force. Given the articles on the subject, and my understanding of the political situation at the time, I find it hard to believe that the USA abetted any Khmer Rouge activity.
The article you cited ends with the victory of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. It deals with the events before the Khmer Rouge rule of terror, which lasted until 1979.
In terms of support, it seems you can even quote Kissinger on it:
"You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won't let that stand in our way."
"The Thais and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina. We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything for Pol Pot. But I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something for Pol Pot." (Edit, others meaning China in the context) [0]
It's more that they spent the entirety of the Cold War period propping up any dictators they could find as long as they weren't communists, and it usually backfired.
>” It's more that they spent the entirety of the Cold War period propping up any dictators they could find as long as they weren't communists, and it usually backfired.”
But the Khmer Rouge were the communists! They were officially the “Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)”.
Yeah they supported the right-wing dictator that deposed the king who then joined Pol Pot and enabled his rebellion to succeed. And policy shifted after the 70s when they decided communism was ok, as long as you opposed the USSR. This was the justification for normalizing relations with China, who wound up supporting the Khmer Rouge, since they opposed post-war Vietnam (who they had just supported in the Vietnam War), which was a USSR ally.
It was a complicated time to be deciding who to coup.
USA murdered many Cambodian civilians while bombing enemy soldiers in Cambodia [0]. This behavior gave a lot of political capital to revolutionaries who later did genocide.
It's not true. Pol Pot was a madman that created his own crazy theory that included parts of Marxism.
Where does Marx said that the city populations must be evacuated to the villages and teachers killed?
Anyway, the point is not in the details. My point is that USA meddling with politics in remote countries usually results in civil war, millions of dead people and economical decline that lasts for decades. It was true for Cambodia, it's true for Arab Spring countries, it's true for Ukraine which is the last known victim of USA backed revolution to this day. How many more victims this world needs?
It's remarkable how nearly everything you just wrote applies to Belarus (with small changes):
>Pol Pot and his government were responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries.
Adolf Hitler and his government were responsible for the death of 1/4 Belarussian population (a third of them Jews) in a short span of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries.
A lot of Belarussians joined the partisan effort, the largest guerilla warfare of that war (including the writer of Come and See, an acclaimed film about those days):
The history about this period is interesting if you're looking for a good read. It's not being widely taught, even in Russian K12 education.
Both Vietnam and Belarus were liberated by the Communists across the border, who have ruled both countries until the collapse of the USSR in 1991-1992. Ever since that, both countries have been under a de-facto dictatorial rule of a former communist official (though holding "democratic elections" on paper) - Hun Sen in Cambodia, Lukashenka in Belarus.
There are many differences, of course, but there aren't many countries that lost 25% of their population to genocide, were ruled by communists after that for decades, and have been ruled by the same person since 90s.
Not defending Pol Pot, but attributing mass death solely to his regime is a bit misleading when it corresponded with a hostile foreign power carpet bombing the region with hundreds of millions of bombs, many still unexploded, over a decade or so.
Not defending the US bombing of Cambodia, but it's a bit misleading to bring this up without quantifying that there's at least an order of magnitude difference in fatalities between the two.
What's noteworthy, though, is that the Khmer Rouge was fighting against the puppet government installed by the hostile foreign power; and that the king displaced in the coup sided with Khmer Rouge as a result, which meant quite a bit in terms of support.
That's to say, the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would have not been there, if not for the US meddling. You don't have to take my word - take it directly from them[1].
They can not be so easily delineated. Carpet bombing = loss of homes and farmland = general socioeconomic crisis = extreme political instability. And very much by design.
I agree, I just was pointing out that the death toll from the bombing wasn't even the worst consequence. Pol Pot was, in effect, the largest bomb dropped on Cambodia.
> Pol Pot and his government was responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time
I always found arguments that makes the point that "X is responsible for more deaths than Y" weak and invalid when they fail to mention the time frame.
Yea, I think when comparing the deadliness of ideologies, the true measure should be something like
mortality/(time x population)
For example, the Nazis killed 11M over 12 years and the German population was about 70M in 1939. Thus, their deadliness is 11/(70x12) ~ 1/70
The USSR killed 40M (a middling estimate) over about 70 years and the Soviet population was 170M in 1939, so their deadliness is 40/(170x80) ~ 1/340 or about 1/5 as deadly as the Nazis.
This intuitively makes sense to me since the Nazis actively sought to exterminate people, whereas most (not ALL) deaths in the USSR were accidental because communism is useless.
You included the most liberalized (less hard core communist) years of the Soviet Union.
> This intuitively makes sense to me since the Nazis actively sought to exterminate people, whereas most (not ALL) deaths in the USSR were accidental because communism is useless.
The Holodomor was caused by explicit policies. The purges were intentional. People who pointed out problems were considered anti-revolutionaries. Skilled laborers were purged or fled.
Yep. Even ignoring non-Jewish victims, majority of holocaust victims were foreign Jews and not Germans of Jewish descent. Mostly because Europe and Africa as a whole had more Jews then Germany itself.
Ignoring Jews, Germans were more ruthless and murderous toward Polish or Russian people then toward western ones. And they much more ruthless and murderous toward western then toward Germans themself. (And yes they were ruthless and murderous toward German population too.)
Slavs generally, gypsies and other 'non-aryan' races. They had plans for the world after conquering it, which would basically wipe all local population in vast swaths of euroasia to make room for them. Jews were just first in line because Hitler was a war and childhood traumatized psychopath.
I wouldn't call deaths in the USSR "accidental".
Starving and executing kulaks was no accident, they were punishing the rich.
People worked to death in the gulags were not an accident.
They may have killed less people per year compared to Nazis but that doesn't make them less deadly. In terms of sheer human loss for society, they were 4 times worse than the Nazis (according to your estimate).
If you consider how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious.
I've always considered Nazis and communists to be in the same bucket: authoritarian killers.
Communists often get a moral pass somehow, unlike Nazi and I wonder if it's because most schools and history teachers are biased; they teach about Nazi concentration camps but don't teach about gulags.
I had to read books and books in school about Nazis and I didn't even know Solzhenitsyn existed.
The difference is that the nazis were killing people based on who they were; the communists purged people based based on their belief that they had committed crimes against the state or were working against it.
One can dispute this belief, and no doubt they were both brutal, but there is a difference between a genocidal policy with the aim of extermination, and the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests.
Put another way, you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions (although I know this is stretching things quite a bit), whereas those who were targeted by the nazis had no hope of escape.
>you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions (although I know this is stretching things quite a bit),
sure, as long as we admit that in practice you really couldn't because punishment, although supposedly for crimes, was irrational enough to be essentially random.
No, you're seriously misrepresenting history there. First, the Nazis were also convinced that the Jews and certain other minorities had committed crimes against the state and the German people, so there's not a meaningful difference between Hitler's and Stalin's motivations. Second, calling the murdering of the kulaks
> the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests
is as bad and wrong as saying the same thing about the Holocaust.
> Put another way, you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions
No, you couldn't. You're implying that the millions of people murdered, tortured, dispossessed, and imprisoned in gulags under Stalin somehow had it coming and could have avoided their "punishment" by just behaving better. Stop spreading lies, and stop trivializing the crimes against humanity committed by the early Soviet Union.
> First, the Nazis were also convinced that the Jews and certain other minorities had committed crimes against the state and the German people, so there's not a meaningful difference between Hitler's and Stalin's motivations.
This does not explain why the Nazis were also targeting the disabled and blacks, for example, does it? What crimes had the disabled and blacks committed against the state? Also, how could people not living in Germany, the Poles and Slavs, have committed crimes against the German state?
See, the Nazis were not motivated by any good faith belief that the groups they targeted had committed any specific crimes against the state. They believed that these groups should not exist at all, and they were prepared to, ultimately, hunt them down for extermination anywhere in the world.
I think equating the Communists and the Nazi is rather repugnant. Yes, both were brutal, but to downplay the unparalleled evil of the Nazi regime betrays a lack of critical analysis of what actually happened.
> One can dispute this belief, and no doubt they were both brutal, but there is a difference between a genocidal policy with the aim of extermination, and the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests.
The whole system was set up to routinely fabricate absurd evidence against innocent people and send them to Gulags (or straight against the wall). It was needed, because the rulers needed their population to be terrorized (less chance of a rebellion) and also because it provided huge amounts of free labor for the Gulags.
I don't think anybody up high believed for a second that any significant fraction of people they condemned to death, torture or lives destroyed in Gulags were guilty of anything.
> Communists often get a moral pass somehow, unlike Nazi and I wonder if it's because most schools and history teachers are biased
I think there is a simpler explanation (assuming you went to school in a Western country). The USSR under Stalin was allied with the western powers during WWII. Presenting Stalin as "just as bad" as Hitler would cast doubt on the whole moral justification of the war and would undermine the image of the western powers as the good guys who fought the evil Nazis to save the world from tyranny.
Also, one closely guarded secret nobody cares about: currently amount of people in prisons in USA is almost equal to the number of people sent to prisons and camps by Stalin.
"This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[7] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[8][9] some 390,000[10] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[11] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[12] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[13] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes, though not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era.[2][14]"
Wikipedia is also a propaganda tool. Are [9][9][12][13][14] written based on historical documents? On the documents from the Soviet/Russia archives? I seriously doubt so. Pretty sure, they contain same bullshit as Solzhenitsyn books: "I saw 2 millions prisoners walking to the camp and it was only one of Stalin's forced labor camps"...
> how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious.
How many exactly? West operate lies of notorious propagandists like Solzhenitsyn (which never had access to any statistics).
E.g. in the books published on the west you can find absurd numbers like "Stalin sent two millions to the camp X", and later historians prove that you can't place more than 1200 persons in camp X, and there weren't enough houses even for the guards for such absurd amount of people and there weren't roads or waterways to transport that many people, and there're no even you know payment sheets for the number of guards required to guard two millions prisoners.
But the West continue to regurgitate the same old lies over and over because who would want to know the truth? The best truth is that USSR was evil, so every tiny piece of evidence saying otherwise should be well hidden from public.
It's not like in the contemporary Russia there are powers willing to open that truth either.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese...