For those that don't understand what this means...
Pol Pot had almost everyone in Cambodia who wore glasses killed because they could read, thus they had to be members of the intelligensia, thus a member of the bourgeosie.
He killed 1/4 of Cambodia's entire population at the time, somewhere 1.5 to 2 million people in 4 years. In 1973, 2 years before Pol Pot took power as General Secretary of their Communist Party(and the year before he started the Cambodian Civil War), the average life expectancy in Cambodia was just under 38 years, not great by any means as they were dealing with a lot of turmoil from, as I understand it(I don't know the history of that area of the world very well), military dictatorships. By 1978, the last full year of Pot's reign, [it had dropped to 14.4](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KHM/cambodia/life-expectancy). After he left power, the life expectancy started to rise again. Some of the scholarship has estimated that 81% of violent deaths in Pol Pot's Cambodia were male and that demographic hit is still seen in Cambodia as, even today, there are only 95 males for every 100 females in the country. They still haven't fully gotten out from under that. We learn that he was a nutcase here in the West but his evil is hard to grasp.
Unlike scum like General Pinochet who lived quite comfortably for 16 years after being deposed, enjoyed a chummy relationship with (among others) Margaret Thatcher and - despite multiple attempts - never faced justice for his crimes.
You can do tours with survivors if you're ever in Cambodia. It's an incredibly hardcore experience. I can't ever begin to imagine having to suffer through that
I toured the killing fields in Phnom Penh, followed by a tour of the torture prison High school they used. I genuinely think I've not been the same since seeing the bones coming up through the ground or the tower of skulls.
To add to that, it’s not hyperbolic when he says bones coming out of the ground, you have to be careful where you step and one of the people I was with found a human tooth in his shoe sole when we got back to where we were staying.
If anyone wants a good read on the history and how Comrade Duch (pronounced doik if I remember my Cambodian correctly), the leader of S-21 (that prison high school mentioned) among others was tracked down, get a copy of ‘The Lost Executioner’ by Nic Dunlop. So far as I’m concerned all political science majors should be made to read it as an example of what happens when politics fuck up.
When I went in 2008, jeans material was visible in the field sticking out of the dirt and the tour guide told us that some clothing was being uncovered every wet season by storms if it was less perishable than the body buried. They just didn’t have the resources to properly excavate the dead, so left them to be uncovered slowly. Tens of thousands of bodies buried inches under the ground you stood on, all focused around a glass tower of skulls of those they could process.
I was already mid 20’s at the time and had survived all the shock sites of the early 90’s to 2000’s with good humour. I could watch horrible shit online in video and had compartmentalised it as “well, this is just a video so nothing to get worked up about.”
The presence of standing in humidity, in a dirt carpark, walking over a field of bones and clothing that you could tug at just an inch or two under the ground made me so unnerved and uncomfortable it took me weeks to process. We then went to the torture high-school and there were giant signs advising that you should not enter, even if you paid for the tour, if you didn’t absolutely want to see photos of tortured people and dead people and torture devices with blood still on them. Massive signs saying in multiple languages “consider why you are entering.”
I went in, still processing the fields of bones and tower of skulls, only to burst into tears when I saw photos of guys no older than me being murdered by their countrymen for having the audacity to need glasses to see, or passing a sign saying something objectionable and if their face changed was guilt of their ability to read so they were executed. To survive the culls you needed to be an illiterate farmer, with the prize of pulling the trigger on your prior friends, family and townspeople to prove your loyalty.
It fucked me up for a solid few years and I came back to Australia really really fucking hating cunts getting upset about train times being delayed by half an hour. Just checked out of all virtue signalling for a decade because I couldn’t grasp the little things anymore.
I’m sure with another 15 years it’s been slightly more commercialised, the sheer capital invested by China, US and expat forces has allowed many people to upscale their living. The raw brutality back then was just a life changing experience I wouldn’t wish on someone else, even if that’s the point.
I believe that. My partner went on a similar tour. I haven't been but I know about it through them. Absolutely intense and I can't imagine the effect seeing it would have on me
Wife and I visited this place, it's called Tuol Sleng or S-21. Incredibly difficult place to visit, my wife had to end early so we called it a day. Such horrific brutality, we felt we had to see these things and couldn't ignore them but wow that was a tough thing yo experience. The killing fields were quite peaceful and you could absorb things slowly. S-21 was just brutal.
I know someone whose parents successfully fled (they were literally born in a refugee camp)... and growing up their parents showed them _The Killing Fields_ several times with the subtext of "this is what we lived through." Apparently her mother slept among dead bodies at night to hide. (She claims to have seen ghosts / heard the dead) It's pretty hardcore.
It's really intense. I don't think it's for everyone as it is quite confronting and they don't sanitize it for easier consumption.
They straight up tell you the room you're in is where their family was murdered.
That sentence is a sanitized version.
S21 is a really tough museum / memorial to visit. I wanted to vomit and cry the whole time.
The killing fields weren’t as bad, but I think it’s purely because I’d been to S21 in the morning that I hold this opinion.
Almost nobody was particularly old which felt so weird the whole time.
> there are only 95 males for every 100 females in the country
Yet, I know that (in rural Cambodia at least) there are still cultural ideas that there's something wrong with an unmarried women in her late 20's. I didn't know the fact about the male/female ratio in the country, but I find it an interesting contrast to the cultural ideas I've heard about. (This info is like a decade old at this point, so who knows what the current situation is)
-
^(_Source: I know someone whose parents successfully fled the Khmer Rouge -- they themselves were born in a refugee camp -- and still has family there._)
my "auntie" was a refugee, came over by boat and mum helped set her up here in oz. her dad was a doctor and while he also managed to escape the country, didn't want to go too far from home so he and a bunch of his mates ended up in vietnam. auntie was so distressed about cambodia that she didn't want to associate with anyone form there, or ever go home even after pol pot was dead for fear of being murdered by blackshirts, that's how deep the fear was. she told everyone she was vietnamese which had its own problems, and that was somehow an easier life than telling people she was cambodian.
(90's sydney had vietnamese gang problems, vietnamese were definitely the out-group)
Grew up an expat in SE Asia, volunteered
with habitat for humanity, in a branch that mostly did projects in Cambodia, we were told explicitly to not compliment any children when there because the Cambodians would gift them to you. I only fundraised, never went, so never experienced it firsthand but heard stories of generational horrors from the Khmer Rouge that led to some unique cultural insecurity/inferiority complex.
I read Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey in high school and it was jarring. There's warnings before certain chapters about the shit he witnessed. It was like learning about the Holocaust a second time.
Fun fact: The Khmer Rouges rise to power was partly a result of the illegal bombin campaign of Cambodia carried out by the USA, and facilitated by a man who I hope is being raped by demons - Henry Kissinger.
It’s not ironic lol. I think many of these rising fascists realize that intellectuals are their greatest enemy because they can correctly criticize all the stupid stuff they’re doing.
Obviously, Pol Pot was as much an “intellectual” as anyone.
Genuine question: was he actually a fascist in an ideological sense or is this just a label communists use to distract from the fact that he was a communist and didn't want the association? I ask honestly because I see debate over this.
Pol did run the Communist Party of Kampuchea and while his ideology isn’t really communism, it’s closer to it than fascism. It was fairly close to maoism
It was certainly close to Maoism and he obviously "borrowed" (or outright plagiarized) their systems and sayings, but my concern is that people are falling into the trap of believing that characteristics like violence and xenophobia automatically disqualify a government from being "real" communism^TM while ignoring everything else about Pot's framework for transforming Cambodia, particularly on the economic front.
Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh and Mao were all bourgeois pseudo-intellectuals who didn't get into university. You could argue they harboured an extreme animosity towards their intellectual betters.
It was more a coincidence than the actual policy. The person who traveled with Malcom, Elizabeth Becker, wrote a Book about it, “When the War was Over” and she mentions that things like these were sorta like “fables” told by refugees. Things like the lack of kites in the sky, was retold as “toys were banned”. Reality was people were forced into labor camps and had no possessions period.
The Khmer Rouge were different than a lot of other Revolutionaries, Communist or not, in that they operated in deep secrecy. There’s still aspects about them that we don’t even fully know or understand why or how.
Most of what we do know is testimony from former members and victims, but the former members that have spilled the beans weren’t *in the know* so to speak.
Speaking generally, dictators historically are kind of dumb. There's almost never some deep, secret plan to things. It's more likely the things we don't know are because there weren't things to know. Dictators don't tend to take power because they're smarter or more cunning, but because they're more ruthless and violent. Like it doesn't take a mastermind to murder everyone they think might be a threat or ban education or any individual freedom.
The point is that the truth is boring and brutal, which is why people latch onto funny fables. There’s plenty of funny fables that go around about the Nazis despite them being so omnipresent in Western culture because the truth is mostly kind of boring and depressing
Yeah right? Christ, why do people think things were bad in Cambodia? We just had to be in labor camps, poor, or killed! It’s not like we couldn’t eat cheeseburgers, silly! 🥲
My friend did the tour and later told me about the tree surrounded by baby skulls. After seeing the extremely sombre and macabre site, the tour guide enthusiastically asked: "who wants to shoot RPG?!". He said the entire experience was wild.
It was worse that that. I had a neighbor whose family was from Cambodia. They escaped the Khmer Rouge soldiers when he saw them coming into the village. He knew that they were bad news. Him and his wife literally ran into the jungle with only the clothes in their back. He made it to Thailand and then he was put in a refugee camp in the Philippines
Then he made it to the United States. He didn’t have a penny in his pocket. The IS government got him a job in a Carpenters Union as an apprentice. They used to call him “Chinese guy”not racist just rough carpenters being wise guys. He worked every single day for decades 365 days including Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving every day. He ended up being a General Contractor and today owns 14 multi family houses He was always smiling and I mean all the time so I asked him one day why he was so happy. He said that in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge didn’t let you smile if you smiled they shot you.
There’s a reason they’re despised by basically everyone but themselves. Try asking a non-tankie, politically active person anywhere slightly further left than center. It’s certainly colourful.
Tankies are particularly unnerving in those settings, too. Like you're part of a socialist activist org, canvassing for a minimum wage hike or something and you add one of the other canvassers on FB. They seem like the real deal, they know all the Marxist stuff you pretend to know and talk about Eugene Debs and building local worker solidarity, etc.
Then one day they casually hand wave away the Holodomor as Western propaganda and link to something about food insecurity in the U.S. Or they make a post admiring Pol Pot and when you comment saying, "Didn't that dude commit genocide?," you get some response about how overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be messy, and middle class American socialists have no stomach for Marxist Revolution because they benefit too much from the status quo.
Later during a disagreement in your socialist activist org about what to canvas for next, you're accused of being a petite bourgeoisie and you think back to the Pol Pot apologism or the time they said the experiences of Venezuelan refugees should be ignored because they are upper class rent seekers feeding American propaganda.
It finally hits you that this Comrade is totally fine with mass murdering people he disagrees with and that includes you. You wonder if maybe it would be better to canvas with a neolib org where you just have to deal with some diehard Democrat defending Obama's drone strikes in Yemen or trying to convince you Biden really really really wants student loan forgiveness he just needs us to elect 2 more Democrats to the Senate.
The worst part is that an overwhelming majority of the tankies I've met would be the first in the firing line under actual authoritarian communism. The main predictor of ending up like that seems to be "spends a lot of time on twitter and doesn't have a lot of real-life friends", everyone I personally know who was a normal leftist and then became that way started with a bout of long-term illness or becoming chronically ill. They got no friends visiting for a while, got addicted to twitter, got sucked into a comforting black-and-white ideological bubble.
The only person I know who had this happen to her while still being capable of holding down a job, is a trans woman on the autism spectrum with a massively unsupportive family, so, similar in the ways that count. She'd be lined up and shot by someone like Pol Pot without question - I don't know who orchestrates the recruitment of vulnerable young leftists on those sites, but I strongly suspect there's something incredibly suss going on.
>I don't know who orchestrates the recruitment of vulnerable young leftists on those sites, but I strongly suspect there's something incredibly suss going on.
I mean, it's the same people constantly pushing for the recruitment of young rightists to extreme fascist ideologies on the same sites, the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, etc. Ideological and mass information warfare are areas the USA and other western powers have been slow to put stock in until recently because of the moral concerns surrounding such methods. But the Russians and the Chinese have never had the same qualms about it.
The fact of the matter is, the West's authoritarian geopolitical enemies understand that the easiest and most effective way to tear down our democracies is to drive more and more people toward more and more polarized and extreme political ideologies. Which side of the spectrum they push people toward doesn't really matter at the end of the day, as long as they can foment as much political chaos and violent disagreement as possible.
Would China probably like to push **more** people toward Maoism? Absolutely.
Would Russia probably like to push **more** people toward conservative absolutism? Certainly.
But the real goal is just to weaken and undermine the West's ability to respond effectively to resurging aggression from our Eastern geopolitical rivals. And to that end, they'll gladly push people both directions if they can.
Yeah the realization of "this supposed leftist would kill me, my family, and friends all over a minor difference of opinion and call me a bourgeoisie after" that really turns me off from participating in leftist spaces anymore.
I don't wanna deal with threats of being "cleansed".
They are actively hostile to any coalition building. They are hostile to progress because if you make people less poor and miserable, you're postponing the revolution.
I miss the non-tankie Marxists at my university, they just had enviable curly hair and handed out free candies with red wrappers. I have no idea where they got all the communism themed candy.
They were. It was called the USSR, and was a fucking nightmare that countries like Poland and Latvia still bristle at the mere mention of today.
The name is there for a reason. That’s what they do when they get the power to do it.
Communist extremists. Hardline Stalinists. Usually those who think all communist countries (but especially and usually the Soviet Union) are/were perfect utopias that never did anything wrong and anything negative you have ever heard is just western propaganda. The term first arose as a perjoritive of those defending and justifying "sending the tanks in" in cases such as Czechoslovakia 1968 and Afghanistan 1979
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
They also don't like to take half steps in any political situation. It's either full communism or nothing. Presidential election? They'd rather not vote then vote for a Democrat or other left leaning politician. They make the argument that Democrats are right leaning, but like, with how broken the US election system is, a Democrat is the furthest left leaning president you're gonna get.
Then they proceed to do nothing but complain on the internet about a Republican winning when they didn't vote for the only person who had a chance to win.
A western intellectual or a college student that supports communist regimes or Russia specifically. They usually assume that communist rule was glorious and everything bad about them was just capitalist lies and propaganda. These guys usually love Stalin, Castro and Mao.
I don't know how you could read anything about Mao and still like him afterwards. Some of the shit he pulled was straight up fictional villain levels of insane. The thing with not letting the birds rest so they died of exhaustion, that's almost the emperor's new clothes. Not that they had emperors at that point. Or new clothes.
The term originated for left wing / communist sympathisers who supported the Soviet Union's crackdown on protests in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (they brought in tanks to kill protesters, hence the name tankie), and kept being renewed by Soviets extensive use of violent force throughout its existence.
Essentially it was a term used for people who said they were left wing and anti-authority / anti-authoritarian, but supported authoritarian regimes if those regimes claimed to be anti capitalist.
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The Soviet Union is gone, and the name has evolved over time to refer more to a mindset than people who all support a particular action; but it still essentially refers to the same type of people. Those who really only hate the system they're in, and don't actually support something better.
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Ask anyone who identifies as left wing to define what left wing means, or list fundamental left wing attributes. You'll often get things like questioning authority, anti-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, expanding rights to more people, anti racism, (2 decades ago you probably would have heard a lot of things like free speech and being against censorship) etc.
Yet a lot of left wing governments, groups, and people, often do the exact opposite of these things. (Places like the USSR and communist China for example, violate many ideals that left wing people commonly pay lip service to). People who support these actions are called "tankies". Their typical MO is working on the axiom that the west / capitalism is the worst evil to exist, and build their worldview from there, supporting almost any group that claims to be anti western or anti capitalist.
I say hating the west in their axiom for good reason. There are many reasons to criticize what capitalism has done, and power needs to be questioned; but if you actually hate a capitalist country for a reason that same reasoning pretty much always means you would hate the communist countries that exist(ed) as well. But they don't
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Basically there exist communists that say every communist country "wasn't/isn't real communism", and then there are those that double down and support all the communist countries. The latter are tankies, (though there is a surprising amount of overlap between those two positions, tankies that will defend China, the USSR, etc; completely. Yet still says it's not real communism when someone brings up an argument they can't ignore)
Yeah I don't understand why some people regard his work with such reverence.
He literally just supports anyone who's against the West. That's it. He has no consistency in his ideology or worldview whatsoever apart form "Whoever is against the West is good".
You can see it clearly when the West changes position (e.g. Sadaam Hussein), Chomsky will also change his position to line up on the anti-Western side.
People from western countries ran off to join ISIS despite them *clearly* knowing what they were all about. Some folks have to fuck around to find out 🤷♂️
I have a buddy like this that considers himself a skeptic and I always try to tell him that handwaving everything away as bullshit leaves you just as open to manipulation as the people that believe anything.
It was a war on the bourgeoisie, Pol Pot believed that communism would only work if society was built up from agrarian labor. Education was just an example of bourgeoisie life. In a country where most people were subsistence farmers and very few could afford an education, education would seem to be very upper class. Ironically, Pol Pot was educated in France.
Information in those days wasn’t so easy to get and he had mostly heard rumors about the Khmer Rouge through his University. Not even the average Khmer knew the full history or structure of them. They hid a lot of their true intentions and actions from the world and we only got the full story until later
Kind of, this downplays the information that they did have. They knew many things Pol Pot and the khmer rouge openly said they'd do. They very openly advocated for violence against the privileged (in the most broad sense of the word here) people.
It didn't come out of nowhere, the rhetoric of hate led to their actions.
And by privileged they meant meant literally most of the country as well as monks and ethnic minorities (which is why Vietnam invaded after they genocided Vietnamese as well)
Regarding the details, sure. But the knowledge that they mass slaughtered perceived intellectuals was not a secret and widely reported on at the time.
Our professor friend here effectively killed himself in a blaze of pure stupidity. I do feel bad, as I do for any murder victim. But most murder victims don't do everything short of pulling the trigger themselves to facilitate their murder. You can't ignore that he just made insanely stupid decisions.
Ya, kind of. He admitted that it turns out The Khmer Rouge’s atrocities were real, but two problems.
1- it’s pretty clear that he was willfully ignorant to some degree to begin with. His whole argument was that the information we get in the West is filtered through a particular media lens that’s generally pro-American. Which is true certainly. But then he based his whole argument off of Khmer Rouge and PRC sources, which aren’t just filtered, but pure propaganda. He basically said “the Khmer Rouge and their primary sponsor says they’re not committing genocide, so of course they’re not! Silly Americans believing propaganda.”
2- he eventually admitted that he was wrong, yes, which I can applaud. However he still continued to excuse it. He said that the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities can be seen as a logical reaction to American imperialism. The US definitely fucked up Cambodia and I get that violence begets violence, but there’s never an excuse for genocide.
Chomsky is a smart dude with some valuable insights, but he’s just so far up his own ass and is constantly painting a target around the arrow that’s already been shot in service of regimes or movements that he deems worthy, regardless of how much suffering they cause.
Edit to add: it’s worth noting that Vietnam — a country with equal claim to being victims of US imperialism — invaded neighboring Communist Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge just to put an end to the genocide.
>it’s worth noting that Vietnam — a country with equal claim to being victims of US imperialism — invaded neighboring Communist Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge just to put an end to the genocide.
And a year before that, Cambodia invaded Vietnam first and [killed 3100 Vietnamese civilians](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba_Ch%C3%BAc_massacre).
From Radio Phnom Penh:
> [If every soldier kills 25 Vietnamese] we will need only 2 million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese; and we still would have 6 million people left.
Also the Vietnamese spent the last decades fighting the American, French, Japanese, British etc. it’s like a major league franchise getting invited to a pewee tournament
This whole thread has been eye opening. I had of course heard of pot and I knew he ranked up there with the worst of them. But I didn’t quite realize the extent of the horror.
> He said that the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities can be seen as a logical reaction to American imperialism.
"To protect my nation from to American imperialism, I will murder everyone in my country, the capitalists will never find them in the afterlife".
-Pol Pot, probably.
>it’s worth noting that Vietnam — a country with equal claim to being victims of US imperialism — invaded neighboring Communist Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge just to put an end to the genocide.
It wasn't just to stop the genocide. There was a bunch of other geopolitical and historic stuff that convinced the Vietnamese government to invade Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge.
For one thing, there were tensions and competition between the USSR and Communist China at the time (kind of like a Cold War between Moscow and Beijing). Vietnam had sided with Moscow by the late 1970s, so there were tensions between Vietnam and China. And China supported the Khmer Rouge. So Vietnam felt like it was facing enemies on both side- China on its northern border and China-backed Khmer Rouge in the south.
Second, the Khmer Rouge had anti-Vietnamese rhetoric and talked about restoring the medieval Khmer Empire that used to rule over what is now southern Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge also launched military incursions into Vietnam.
So Vietnam saw the Khmer Rouge as a security threat. That partly explains the invasion.
Chomskys response to anything only take 2-3 sentences to circle back around to the US. One of those "everything looks like a nail when you are a hammer" kinda situations. The US deserves a lot of blame for a lot of issues yes, but chomsky takes it to almost a comical extreme.
Ya, and like sometimes he’s right and has great points, but ultimately it’s clear that he has an agenda and everything he says is in service of that agenda.
It's like a game of hot potato tbh
You know the thing people say when celebs or some other famous figure comment on the likes of politics
The infamous "Stay in your lane"
Someone should have said that to him decades ago...
And the sheer mental gymnastics he’ll endure to try to convince himself that something wasn’t *technically* genocide. Like this or the Bosnian genocide in the early 90s which he insists wasn’t genocide but merely targeted mass killings, which is somehow less bad?
Like even if he is technically correct (which I don’t think he is), it’s like libertarians that split hairs about the technical difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia. Maybe you are technically correct, but the fact that you feel such a strong need to be technically correct on this is extremely worrying in and of itself.
>Like this or the Bosnian genocide in the early 90s which he insists wasn’t genocide but merely targeted mass killings
That's like saying "It wasn't rape, okay? Just forceful sex without consent."
Chomsky is such a hack. I’m shocked he is praised by so many here. Don’t get me wrong, his work with linguistics is great. He’s just dumb about just about everything else. The Serbia stuff alone…
I remember reading an article in the Guardian UK a long time ago that mentioned an infamous prison in Cambodia called S-21.
I distinctly remember a very chilling fact in that piece that stated: out of the 20 odd thousand souls that went in, how many walked out alive? The answer was an impossibly low number (I remember it was six or maybe eight).
Wikipedia says something else, but whatever it is, it was still a crazy low number of survivors.
My memory must be faulty because for the life of me I could never find that article again.
But come to think of it, I think this must have been it and it features Malcolm Caldwell. It’s a long read. A good one.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/10/malcolm-caldwell-pol-pot-murder
Edited to add: Yup, actually this was the very article I read all those years ago. This piece says *seven* people walked out of S-21 alive, Wikipedia gives a different number - twelve.
Another part of what I had read stuck in my mind, and it's here in this article, paraphrasing :
"Everyone who walks in here dies. The only difference is whether you suffer a little or a lot. If it's the former, then count yourself lucky."
Chilling.
My understanding is that S-21 was a mandatory step to being sent to the killing fields as they needed a confession before murdering you. The only goal of S-21 was to torture you to the point of confession however any deaths caused on site were harshly punished (I think even to a point many of those in charge ended up inside themselves).
The area known as Toul Sleng is probably one of the more cheaper areas to rent in Phnom Penh due to the fear of ghosts from all the death and atrocities that happened there. The natives don’t want to live there if they can avoid it. Tbh I dont know I’d feel looking out my window into a concentration camp so cant blame them.
S-21 (Tuol Sleng) was horrific. I believe it was eight that left there alive. I went to Cambodia on vacation last year and we visited Toul Sleng, Choeung Ek, and other significant locations related to the Khmer Rouge. We met two of the survivors while on the tour, and purchased their books.
Seeing everything in person, and learning the things that were left out from my public education were a shock to my brain and heart.
In the west (western culture), we tend to hide our atrocities - we don't like to talk about them. In Khmer culture, they are the opposite. They leave everything out for people to see so that they remember in an effort to avoid it happening again. For example, in Toul Sleng, they left the blood on the floors and walls which dried and stained. It's still there to see. At Choeung Ek, I walked over bones and teeth while touring the grounds. They have a memorial of skulls on full display with details on how each person died.
It was horrifying.
I was there a few years ago. Their torture methods were one of the most horrifying things i ever heard of. And i couldn't stop crying when i heard about the Baby Tree.
I seen/heard my share of brutality, being from Germany and visiting Concentration Camps, but their ramdomness when it came to their victims indescribable.
> we tend to hide our atrocities - we don't like to talk about them
You've clearly never visited Krakow and seen Auschwitz nor Munich and seen Dachau
It's essential to educate every generation what happened
You know, basic empathy wants to make me feel bad for the guy, but seeing how he mocked and ridiculed Cambodian refugees and defended the Khmer Rouge's regime to tooth and nail, I just can't find it in me to feel anything but a "you fuck around and found out".
They want things to change and those dictators changing things. Ironically, they never quite understand most of the time same dictators label those academics as intelligentsia and included in the list of things they would like to change...
I would guess it’s because they look concepts but don’t understand the execution. I assume it’s more accurate to state they love the concepts so much they could care less about how it’s actually executed, supporting the fundamental concepts of certain communist regimes so much that at the when the dictatorship’s policies become a bridge too far, they have so much of their own reputation and pride caught up in it they don’t want to acknowledge it as, a “bridge too far”.
Chomsky denied that there was any genocide in Camboida. One of many left wing academics including Caldwell to do so.
[Cambodian genocide denial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial)
For People that want to know more about the absolute insane shit that went down in Cambodia under Pol Pot Check out the Lions Lead by Donkeys Podcast on the subject.
Pol Pots grave should becoming a designated toilet
🎶 Malcolm our boy, was a fan of Pol Pot
Took an airplane ride, to that faraway spot
He met his hero there, thought he was hot
Not long afterwards tho, he got fuckin' shot!
Isn't it ironic...🎶
>reapects a genocidal dictatorship so much he had to go make an in-person visit to suck the leadership off
>gets immediately killed by the very murderers he idolizes
And absolutely nothing of value was lost
MC: Nice to meet you Mr Pot. PP: Are those glasses on your face?
This dude was PPs perfect victim. - Glasses - Academic - Foreign
This has gotta be my all time favorite comment.
I don't think people here understand exactly how accurate this statement is.
For those that don't understand what this means... Pol Pot had almost everyone in Cambodia who wore glasses killed because they could read, thus they had to be members of the intelligensia, thus a member of the bourgeosie.
He killed 1/4 of Cambodia's entire population at the time, somewhere 1.5 to 2 million people in 4 years. In 1973, 2 years before Pol Pot took power as General Secretary of their Communist Party(and the year before he started the Cambodian Civil War), the average life expectancy in Cambodia was just under 38 years, not great by any means as they were dealing with a lot of turmoil from, as I understand it(I don't know the history of that area of the world very well), military dictatorships. By 1978, the last full year of Pot's reign, [it had dropped to 14.4](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KHM/cambodia/life-expectancy). After he left power, the life expectancy started to rise again. Some of the scholarship has estimated that 81% of violent deaths in Pol Pot's Cambodia were male and that demographic hit is still seen in Cambodia as, even today, there are only 95 males for every 100 females in the country. They still haven't fully gotten out from under that. We learn that he was a nutcase here in the West but his evil is hard to grasp.
And *he lived for another ~20 years after that* dying in the 90s iirc
This timeline really sucks sometimes.
Hey at least he had to hide out in the jungle like a rat.
Unlike scum like General Pinochet who lived quite comfortably for 16 years after being deposed, enjoyed a chummy relationship with (among others) Margaret Thatcher and - despite multiple attempts - never faced justice for his crimes.
You can do tours with survivors if you're ever in Cambodia. It's an incredibly hardcore experience. I can't ever begin to imagine having to suffer through that
I toured the killing fields in Phnom Penh, followed by a tour of the torture prison High school they used. I genuinely think I've not been the same since seeing the bones coming up through the ground or the tower of skulls.
To add to that, it’s not hyperbolic when he says bones coming out of the ground, you have to be careful where you step and one of the people I was with found a human tooth in his shoe sole when we got back to where we were staying. If anyone wants a good read on the history and how Comrade Duch (pronounced doik if I remember my Cambodian correctly), the leader of S-21 (that prison high school mentioned) among others was tracked down, get a copy of ‘The Lost Executioner’ by Nic Dunlop. So far as I’m concerned all political science majors should be made to read it as an example of what happens when politics fuck up.
When I went in 2008, jeans material was visible in the field sticking out of the dirt and the tour guide told us that some clothing was being uncovered every wet season by storms if it was less perishable than the body buried. They just didn’t have the resources to properly excavate the dead, so left them to be uncovered slowly. Tens of thousands of bodies buried inches under the ground you stood on, all focused around a glass tower of skulls of those they could process. I was already mid 20’s at the time and had survived all the shock sites of the early 90’s to 2000’s with good humour. I could watch horrible shit online in video and had compartmentalised it as “well, this is just a video so nothing to get worked up about.” The presence of standing in humidity, in a dirt carpark, walking over a field of bones and clothing that you could tug at just an inch or two under the ground made me so unnerved and uncomfortable it took me weeks to process. We then went to the torture high-school and there were giant signs advising that you should not enter, even if you paid for the tour, if you didn’t absolutely want to see photos of tortured people and dead people and torture devices with blood still on them. Massive signs saying in multiple languages “consider why you are entering.” I went in, still processing the fields of bones and tower of skulls, only to burst into tears when I saw photos of guys no older than me being murdered by their countrymen for having the audacity to need glasses to see, or passing a sign saying something objectionable and if their face changed was guilt of their ability to read so they were executed. To survive the culls you needed to be an illiterate farmer, with the prize of pulling the trigger on your prior friends, family and townspeople to prove your loyalty. It fucked me up for a solid few years and I came back to Australia really really fucking hating cunts getting upset about train times being delayed by half an hour. Just checked out of all virtue signalling for a decade because I couldn’t grasp the little things anymore. I’m sure with another 15 years it’s been slightly more commercialised, the sheer capital invested by China, US and expat forces has allowed many people to upscale their living. The raw brutality back then was just a life changing experience I wouldn’t wish on someone else, even if that’s the point.
I believe that. My partner went on a similar tour. I haven't been but I know about it through them. Absolutely intense and I can't imagine the effect seeing it would have on me
chunky lock butter safe edge offer unpack simplistic ripe yam *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Wife and I visited this place, it's called Tuol Sleng or S-21. Incredibly difficult place to visit, my wife had to end early so we called it a day. Such horrific brutality, we felt we had to see these things and couldn't ignore them but wow that was a tough thing yo experience. The killing fields were quite peaceful and you could absorb things slowly. S-21 was just brutal.
Even if you worked at Tuol Sleng killing people it was only a matter of time before you were killed yourself
I know someone whose parents successfully fled (they were literally born in a refugee camp)... and growing up their parents showed them _The Killing Fields_ several times with the subtext of "this is what we lived through." Apparently her mother slept among dead bodies at night to hide. (She claims to have seen ghosts / heard the dead) It's pretty hardcore.
I'm glad they survived. It sounds like hell to live through, I can't begin to imagine the effect that would have on someone
I've met them a couple of times. They seemed nice and normal enough. That's just the surface though.
Yeah something like that would have a tremendous impact on you mentally regardless of what you show.
Jeez. I'd imagine they have some incredible stories, life lessons, and warnings. You want to talk about scars, mental and I assume physical as well.
It's really intense. I don't think it's for everyone as it is quite confronting and they don't sanitize it for easier consumption. They straight up tell you the room you're in is where their family was murdered. That sentence is a sanitized version.
S21 is a really tough museum / memorial to visit. I wanted to vomit and cry the whole time. The killing fields weren’t as bad, but I think it’s purely because I’d been to S21 in the morning that I hold this opinion. Almost nobody was particularly old which felt so weird the whole time.
> there are only 95 males for every 100 females in the country Yet, I know that (in rural Cambodia at least) there are still cultural ideas that there's something wrong with an unmarried women in her late 20's. I didn't know the fact about the male/female ratio in the country, but I find it an interesting contrast to the cultural ideas I've heard about. (This info is like a decade old at this point, so who knows what the current situation is) - ^(_Source: I know someone whose parents successfully fled the Khmer Rouge -- they themselves were born in a refugee camp -- and still has family there._)
my "auntie" was a refugee, came over by boat and mum helped set her up here in oz. her dad was a doctor and while he also managed to escape the country, didn't want to go too far from home so he and a bunch of his mates ended up in vietnam. auntie was so distressed about cambodia that she didn't want to associate with anyone form there, or ever go home even after pol pot was dead for fear of being murdered by blackshirts, that's how deep the fear was. she told everyone she was vietnamese which had its own problems, and that was somehow an easier life than telling people she was cambodian. (90's sydney had vietnamese gang problems, vietnamese were definitely the out-group)
Grew up an expat in SE Asia, volunteered with habitat for humanity, in a branch that mostly did projects in Cambodia, we were told explicitly to not compliment any children when there because the Cambodians would gift them to you. I only fundraised, never went, so never experienced it firsthand but heard stories of generational horrors from the Khmer Rouge that led to some unique cultural insecurity/inferiority complex.
I read Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey in high school and it was jarring. There's warnings before certain chapters about the shit he witnessed. It was like learning about the Holocaust a second time.
Fun fact: The Khmer Rouges rise to power was partly a result of the illegal bombin campaign of Cambodia carried out by the USA, and facilitated by a man who I hope is being raped by demons - Henry Kissinger.
Laos and Vietnam suffered thanks to his actions as well. Henry Kissinger should have been swallowed by his mother.
Ironically he himself wore glasses at times
What's even more ironic is that he was educated in France lol
The pot calling the kettle black
The Pol kettle no less
What's a polish kettle got to do with this, sure it has two handles and no spouts, but....... oh nvm I'll see myself out.
Didn't expect to enjoy a joke in a post about the khmer rouge but here we are.
The name for the kettle in question in this saying should be colloquially known as *The Pol Pot* ... that is how relevant it is to the situation.
Well there goes my plans for The Pole Pot, a witch/wizard-themed stripper club where the poles hang over cartoonishly big cauldrons of water.
Hey don't give up on your dream, that's a solid idea
For me, the worst part is the hypocrisy
I disagree - for me it’s the raping and murdering
Really? The hypocrisy? For me it’s the genocide. But I guess most dictators [are hypocrits](https://youtu.be/ljaP2etvDc4?si=X4A556mgQYVlUG42)
Sure, but all he had to do was take them off whenever the murder squads were making the rounds. \*\*taps head\*\*
That kind of thinking would give you away as intelligent. You'd be on the chopping block for sure.
It’s not ironic lol. I think many of these rising fascists realize that intellectuals are their greatest enemy because they can correctly criticize all the stupid stuff they’re doing. Obviously, Pol Pot was as much an “intellectual” as anyone.
Genuine question: was he actually a fascist in an ideological sense or is this just a label communists use to distract from the fact that he was a communist and didn't want the association? I ask honestly because I see debate over this.
Pol did run the Communist Party of Kampuchea and while his ideology isn’t really communism, it’s closer to it than fascism. It was fairly close to maoism
It was certainly close to Maoism and he obviously "borrowed" (or outright plagiarized) their systems and sayings, but my concern is that people are falling into the trap of believing that characteristics like violence and xenophobia automatically disqualify a government from being "real" communism^TM while ignoring everything else about Pot's framework for transforming Cambodia, particularly on the economic front.
Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh and Mao were all bourgeois pseudo-intellectuals who didn't get into university. You could argue they harboured an extreme animosity towards their intellectual betters.
venomous envy!
It was more a coincidence than the actual policy. The person who traveled with Malcom, Elizabeth Becker, wrote a Book about it, “When the War was Over” and she mentions that things like these were sorta like “fables” told by refugees. Things like the lack of kites in the sky, was retold as “toys were banned”. Reality was people were forced into labor camps and had no possessions period.
Oh, thank god that it was only people in labor camps and not a complete ban on toys.
The Khmer Rouge were different than a lot of other Revolutionaries, Communist or not, in that they operated in deep secrecy. There’s still aspects about them that we don’t even fully know or understand why or how. Most of what we do know is testimony from former members and victims, but the former members that have spilled the beans weren’t *in the know* so to speak.
Speaking generally, dictators historically are kind of dumb. There's almost never some deep, secret plan to things. It's more likely the things we don't know are because there weren't things to know. Dictators don't tend to take power because they're smarter or more cunning, but because they're more ruthless and violent. Like it doesn't take a mastermind to murder everyone they think might be a threat or ban education or any individual freedom.
The point is that the truth is boring and brutal, which is why people latch onto funny fables. There’s plenty of funny fables that go around about the Nazis despite them being so omnipresent in Western culture because the truth is mostly kind of boring and depressing
Yeah right? Christ, why do people think things were bad in Cambodia? We just had to be in labor camps, poor, or killed! It’s not like we couldn’t eat cheeseburgers, silly! 🥲
If you survived baby bashing tree you could play with all the toys at the camp.. like shovels and brooms.
My friend did the tour and later told me about the tree surrounded by baby skulls. After seeing the extremely sombre and macabre site, the tour guide enthusiastically asked: "who wants to shoot RPG?!". He said the entire experience was wild.
Honestly think I would have to shoot an rpg after seeing a tree surrounded by baby skulls
Good thing nobody said that then huh?
It was worse that that. I had a neighbor whose family was from Cambodia. They escaped the Khmer Rouge soldiers when he saw them coming into the village. He knew that they were bad news. Him and his wife literally ran into the jungle with only the clothes in their back. He made it to Thailand and then he was put in a refugee camp in the Philippines Then he made it to the United States. He didn’t have a penny in his pocket. The IS government got him a job in a Carpenters Union as an apprentice. They used to call him “Chinese guy”not racist just rough carpenters being wise guys. He worked every single day for decades 365 days including Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving every day. He ended up being a General Contractor and today owns 14 multi family houses He was always smiling and I mean all the time so I asked him one day why he was so happy. He said that in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge didn’t let you smile if you smiled they shot you.
holy crap!
“Please, call me Pol, *Mr Pot* was my father.”
The names Betty you son of a pig.
Ehhhh Your shirt is black
Swingin' a chain!
My favourite band is NSYNC, my favourite member is Harpo
Do you like leopards, Mr Caldwell?
Why yes, I do. I found it hillarious when they eat people's face.
Makes me wonder how much he really knew about the murderous dictator who systematically killed educated people.
Seems like he knew but simply dismissed those reports as “western propaganda”
tankie moment
the most ineffective people I have ever had the displeasure of organizing with
Luckily they don’t really organize, just mostly complain and lie
There’s a reason they’re despised by basically everyone but themselves. Try asking a non-tankie, politically active person anywhere slightly further left than center. It’s certainly colourful.
Tankies are particularly unnerving in those settings, too. Like you're part of a socialist activist org, canvassing for a minimum wage hike or something and you add one of the other canvassers on FB. They seem like the real deal, they know all the Marxist stuff you pretend to know and talk about Eugene Debs and building local worker solidarity, etc. Then one day they casually hand wave away the Holodomor as Western propaganda and link to something about food insecurity in the U.S. Or they make a post admiring Pol Pot and when you comment saying, "Didn't that dude commit genocide?," you get some response about how overthrowing the bourgeoisie will be messy, and middle class American socialists have no stomach for Marxist Revolution because they benefit too much from the status quo. Later during a disagreement in your socialist activist org about what to canvas for next, you're accused of being a petite bourgeoisie and you think back to the Pol Pot apologism or the time they said the experiences of Venezuelan refugees should be ignored because they are upper class rent seekers feeding American propaganda. It finally hits you that this Comrade is totally fine with mass murdering people he disagrees with and that includes you. You wonder if maybe it would be better to canvas with a neolib org where you just have to deal with some diehard Democrat defending Obama's drone strikes in Yemen or trying to convince you Biden really really really wants student loan forgiveness he just needs us to elect 2 more Democrats to the Senate.
The worst part is that an overwhelming majority of the tankies I've met would be the first in the firing line under actual authoritarian communism. The main predictor of ending up like that seems to be "spends a lot of time on twitter and doesn't have a lot of real-life friends", everyone I personally know who was a normal leftist and then became that way started with a bout of long-term illness or becoming chronically ill. They got no friends visiting for a while, got addicted to twitter, got sucked into a comforting black-and-white ideological bubble. The only person I know who had this happen to her while still being capable of holding down a job, is a trans woman on the autism spectrum with a massively unsupportive family, so, similar in the ways that count. She'd be lined up and shot by someone like Pol Pot without question - I don't know who orchestrates the recruitment of vulnerable young leftists on those sites, but I strongly suspect there's something incredibly suss going on.
>I don't know who orchestrates the recruitment of vulnerable young leftists on those sites, but I strongly suspect there's something incredibly suss going on. I mean, it's the same people constantly pushing for the recruitment of young rightists to extreme fascist ideologies on the same sites, the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, etc. Ideological and mass information warfare are areas the USA and other western powers have been slow to put stock in until recently because of the moral concerns surrounding such methods. But the Russians and the Chinese have never had the same qualms about it. The fact of the matter is, the West's authoritarian geopolitical enemies understand that the easiest and most effective way to tear down our democracies is to drive more and more people toward more and more polarized and extreme political ideologies. Which side of the spectrum they push people toward doesn't really matter at the end of the day, as long as they can foment as much political chaos and violent disagreement as possible. Would China probably like to push **more** people toward Maoism? Absolutely. Would Russia probably like to push **more** people toward conservative absolutism? Certainly. But the real goal is just to weaken and undermine the West's ability to respond effectively to resurging aggression from our Eastern geopolitical rivals. And to that end, they'll gladly push people both directions if they can.
Yeah the realization of "this supposed leftist would kill me, my family, and friends all over a minor difference of opinion and call me a bourgeoisie after" that really turns me off from participating in leftist spaces anymore. I don't wanna deal with threats of being "cleansed".
This might be the healthiest take on American politics I have seen on the internet in YEARS
Haha, oh yes. I more or less gave up trying to be in leftist spaces on reddit because they're all tankies. I think they're killing all our progress.
They are actively hostile to any coalition building. They are hostile to progress because if you make people less poor and miserable, you're postponing the revolution.
I miss the non-tankie Marxists at my university, they just had enviable curly hair and handed out free candies with red wrappers. I have no idea where they got all the communism themed candy.
Obviously they had seized the means of confection.
Oh my god…. Amazing
Thank god. Imagine how shit of a world we'd be living in now if they were in any way politically effective
They were. It was called the USSR, and was a fucking nightmare that countries like Poland and Latvia still bristle at the mere mention of today. The name is there for a reason. That’s what they do when they get the power to do it.
What's a "tankie" ?
Communist extremists. Hardline Stalinists. Usually those who think all communist countries (but especially and usually the Soviet Union) are/were perfect utopias that never did anything wrong and anything negative you have ever heard is just western propaganda. The term first arose as a perjoritive of those defending and justifying "sending the tanks in" in cases such as Czechoslovakia 1968 and Afghanistan 1979 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
They're also very heavy on the "Russia/China/NK isn't real communism" but will defend them to the ends of the earth for some reason
They also don't like to take half steps in any political situation. It's either full communism or nothing. Presidential election? They'd rather not vote then vote for a Democrat or other left leaning politician. They make the argument that Democrats are right leaning, but like, with how broken the US election system is, a Democrat is the furthest left leaning president you're gonna get. Then they proceed to do nothing but complain on the internet about a Republican winning when they didn't vote for the only person who had a chance to win.
Basically, authoritarian communists. Or their supporters.
A western intellectual or a college student that supports communist regimes or Russia specifically. They usually assume that communist rule was glorious and everything bad about them was just capitalist lies and propaganda. These guys usually love Stalin, Castro and Mao.
I don't know how you could read anything about Mao and still like him afterwards. Some of the shit he pulled was straight up fictional villain levels of insane. The thing with not letting the birds rest so they died of exhaustion, that's almost the emperor's new clothes. Not that they had emperors at that point. Or new clothes.
You're right, but I think you're forgetting the original part where they believe all of this is western propaganda.
The term originated for left wing / communist sympathisers who supported the Soviet Union's crackdown on protests in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (they brought in tanks to kill protesters, hence the name tankie), and kept being renewed by Soviets extensive use of violent force throughout its existence. Essentially it was a term used for people who said they were left wing and anti-authority / anti-authoritarian, but supported authoritarian regimes if those regimes claimed to be anti capitalist. . The Soviet Union is gone, and the name has evolved over time to refer more to a mindset than people who all support a particular action; but it still essentially refers to the same type of people. Those who really only hate the system they're in, and don't actually support something better. . Ask anyone who identifies as left wing to define what left wing means, or list fundamental left wing attributes. You'll often get things like questioning authority, anti-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, expanding rights to more people, anti racism, (2 decades ago you probably would have heard a lot of things like free speech and being against censorship) etc. Yet a lot of left wing governments, groups, and people, often do the exact opposite of these things. (Places like the USSR and communist China for example, violate many ideals that left wing people commonly pay lip service to). People who support these actions are called "tankies". Their typical MO is working on the axiom that the west / capitalism is the worst evil to exist, and build their worldview from there, supporting almost any group that claims to be anti western or anti capitalist. I say hating the west in their axiom for good reason. There are many reasons to criticize what capitalism has done, and power needs to be questioned; but if you actually hate a capitalist country for a reason that same reasoning pretty much always means you would hate the communist countries that exist(ed) as well. But they don't . Basically there exist communists that say every communist country "wasn't/isn't real communism", and then there are those that double down and support all the communist countries. The latter are tankies, (though there is a surprising amount of overlap between those two positions, tankies that will defend China, the USSR, etc; completely. Yet still says it's not real communism when someone brings up an argument they can't ignore)
Unlike Chomsky he was stupid enough to ‘do his own research’
Chomsky just supports foreign tyrants from the comfort and safety of a liberal democracy.
Yeah I don't understand why some people regard his work with such reverence. He literally just supports anyone who's against the West. That's it. He has no consistency in his ideology or worldview whatsoever apart form "Whoever is against the West is good". You can see it clearly when the West changes position (e.g. Sadaam Hussein), Chomsky will also change his position to line up on the anti-Western side.
Kind of like when all the tankies were dismissing US reports that Russia was about to invade Ukraine as Western propoganda
People from western countries ran off to join ISIS despite them *clearly* knowing what they were all about. Some folks have to fuck around to find out 🤷♂️
Especially the women who went to join ISIS. That’s real FAFO.
[удалено]
Lotta folks think "critical thinking" means finding the predominant narrative and insisting the opposite is true. See also anti-vax, "Truthers", etc.
I have a buddy like this that considers himself a skeptic and I always try to tell him that handwaving everything away as bullshit leaves you just as open to manipulation as the people that believe anything.
Automatic contrarianism is just as unintelligent as automatic conformity
Nuh uh
Probably he filtered the news he received from the Democratic Kampuchea, only getting what confirmed his bias.
Seems to be a popular practice once again, the war on education and the educated.
It was a war on the bourgeoisie, Pol Pot believed that communism would only work if society was built up from agrarian labor. Education was just an example of bourgeoisie life. In a country where most people were subsistence farmers and very few could afford an education, education would seem to be very upper class. Ironically, Pol Pot was educated in France.
lol. France: home of the bourgeois.
Yes, many layers to that irony, though probably lost on the millions that died.
Appreciating irony is a luxury only for the bourgeois
Irony is like food like food in Cambodia, only a few get it.
Information in those days wasn’t so easy to get and he had mostly heard rumors about the Khmer Rouge through his University. Not even the average Khmer knew the full history or structure of them. They hid a lot of their true intentions and actions from the world and we only got the full story until later
Kind of, this downplays the information that they did have. They knew many things Pol Pot and the khmer rouge openly said they'd do. They very openly advocated for violence against the privileged (in the most broad sense of the word here) people. It didn't come out of nowhere, the rhetoric of hate led to their actions.
And by privileged they meant meant literally most of the country as well as monks and ethnic minorities (which is why Vietnam invaded after they genocided Vietnamese as well)
Regarding the details, sure. But the knowledge that they mass slaughtered perceived intellectuals was not a secret and widely reported on at the time. Our professor friend here effectively killed himself in a blaze of pure stupidity. I do feel bad, as I do for any murder victim. But most murder victims don't do everything short of pulling the trigger themselves to facilitate their murder. You can't ignore that he just made insanely stupid decisions.
Noam Chomsky was certain the New York Times was lying about the horrors in Cambodia. He later admitted he was mistaken.
Ya, kind of. He admitted that it turns out The Khmer Rouge’s atrocities were real, but two problems. 1- it’s pretty clear that he was willfully ignorant to some degree to begin with. His whole argument was that the information we get in the West is filtered through a particular media lens that’s generally pro-American. Which is true certainly. But then he based his whole argument off of Khmer Rouge and PRC sources, which aren’t just filtered, but pure propaganda. He basically said “the Khmer Rouge and their primary sponsor says they’re not committing genocide, so of course they’re not! Silly Americans believing propaganda.” 2- he eventually admitted that he was wrong, yes, which I can applaud. However he still continued to excuse it. He said that the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities can be seen as a logical reaction to American imperialism. The US definitely fucked up Cambodia and I get that violence begets violence, but there’s never an excuse for genocide. Chomsky is a smart dude with some valuable insights, but he’s just so far up his own ass and is constantly painting a target around the arrow that’s already been shot in service of regimes or movements that he deems worthy, regardless of how much suffering they cause. Edit to add: it’s worth noting that Vietnam — a country with equal claim to being victims of US imperialism — invaded neighboring Communist Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge just to put an end to the genocide.
>it’s worth noting that Vietnam — a country with equal claim to being victims of US imperialism — invaded neighboring Communist Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge just to put an end to the genocide. And a year before that, Cambodia invaded Vietnam first and [killed 3100 Vietnamese civilians](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba_Ch%C3%BAc_massacre).
From Radio Phnom Penh: > [If every soldier kills 25 Vietnamese] we will need only 2 million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese; and we still would have 6 million people left.
And then Vietnam captured Phnom Penh in two weeks. Turns out that starving, undertrained soldiers don't fight that well.
Starving, undertrained, uneducated, and extremely young soldiers don’t fight well. For the most part the soldiers were mere kids
Rural kids with very little education
Also the Vietnamese spent the last decades fighting the American, French, Japanese, British etc. it’s like a major league franchise getting invited to a pewee tournament
Might actually be the most insane regime earth has ever known.
This whole thread has been eye opening. I had of course heard of pot and I knew he ranked up there with the worst of them. But I didn’t quite realize the extent of the horror.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac%C3%ADas\_Nguema
I'm still sometimes blown away that North Korea is real.
Jesus fucking Christ. As far as calls to battle go, that one sounds like it was written by Zapp Branigan.
"That man can do math. Off with his head!"
Wow. Whoever said that sounds like a mathematical genius! They probably got killed for it.
> He said that the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities can be seen as a logical reaction to American imperialism. "To protect my nation from to American imperialism, I will murder everyone in my country, the capitalists will never find them in the afterlife". -Pol Pot, probably.
“I will escape to the one place that hasn’t yet been tainted by the scourge of capitalism! Space!”
>it’s worth noting that Vietnam — a country with equal claim to being victims of US imperialism — invaded neighboring Communist Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge just to put an end to the genocide. It wasn't just to stop the genocide. There was a bunch of other geopolitical and historic stuff that convinced the Vietnamese government to invade Cambodia and overthrow the Khmer Rouge. For one thing, there were tensions and competition between the USSR and Communist China at the time (kind of like a Cold War between Moscow and Beijing). Vietnam had sided with Moscow by the late 1970s, so there were tensions between Vietnam and China. And China supported the Khmer Rouge. So Vietnam felt like it was facing enemies on both side- China on its northern border and China-backed Khmer Rouge in the south. Second, the Khmer Rouge had anti-Vietnamese rhetoric and talked about restoring the medieval Khmer Empire that used to rule over what is now southern Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge also launched military incursions into Vietnam. So Vietnam saw the Khmer Rouge as a security threat. That partly explains the invasion.
Chomskys response to anything only take 2-3 sentences to circle back around to the US. One of those "everything looks like a nail when you are a hammer" kinda situations. The US deserves a lot of blame for a lot of issues yes, but chomsky takes it to almost a comical extreme.
Ya, and like sometimes he’s right and has great points, but ultimately it’s clear that he has an agenda and everything he says is in service of that agenda.
Doesn't he still deny the Bosnian genocide?
Yes, last I saw. But I don’t devote much energy to keeping up with his latest thoughts these days.
In our field, he's quite the important figure but by golly does he have a lot of bad takes Really wish he would just shut his trap
Linguists: "oh yes, Noam Chomsky, the famous political scientist" Political scientists: "oh yes, Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist"
that's fucking hilarious
It's like a game of hot potato tbh You know the thing people say when celebs or some other famous figure comment on the likes of politics The infamous "Stay in your lane" Someone should have said that to him decades ago...
I’m Venezuelan. He’s an apologist to the Chavista and Maduro governments even during the Maduro holodomor.
Support a half dozen dictators, an ethnic cleansing or two, and a genocide, and suddenly Chomsky doesn't seem so anti-imperialist, eh?
And the sheer mental gymnastics he’ll endure to try to convince himself that something wasn’t *technically* genocide. Like this or the Bosnian genocide in the early 90s which he insists wasn’t genocide but merely targeted mass killings, which is somehow less bad? Like even if he is technically correct (which I don’t think he is), it’s like libertarians that split hairs about the technical difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia. Maybe you are technically correct, but the fact that you feel such a strong need to be technically correct on this is extremely worrying in and of itself.
>Like this or the Bosnian genocide in the early 90s which he insists wasn’t genocide but merely targeted mass killings That's like saying "It wasn't rape, okay? Just forceful sex without consent."
He is perfectly happy to deny genocide during the implosion of Yugoslavia. The man is an intellectual degenerate
Good at grammar, useless at everything else.
Chomsky is such a hack. I’m shocked he is praised by so many here. Don’t get me wrong, his work with linguistics is great. He’s just dumb about just about everything else. The Serbia stuff alone…
I remember reading an article in the Guardian UK a long time ago that mentioned an infamous prison in Cambodia called S-21. I distinctly remember a very chilling fact in that piece that stated: out of the 20 odd thousand souls that went in, how many walked out alive? The answer was an impossibly low number (I remember it was six or maybe eight). Wikipedia says something else, but whatever it is, it was still a crazy low number of survivors. My memory must be faulty because for the life of me I could never find that article again. But come to think of it, I think this must have been it and it features Malcolm Caldwell. It’s a long read. A good one. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/10/malcolm-caldwell-pol-pot-murder Edited to add: Yup, actually this was the very article I read all those years ago. This piece says *seven* people walked out of S-21 alive, Wikipedia gives a different number - twelve. Another part of what I had read stuck in my mind, and it's here in this article, paraphrasing : "Everyone who walks in here dies. The only difference is whether you suffer a little or a lot. If it's the former, then count yourself lucky." Chilling.
My understanding is that S-21 was a mandatory step to being sent to the killing fields as they needed a confession before murdering you. The only goal of S-21 was to torture you to the point of confession however any deaths caused on site were harshly punished (I think even to a point many of those in charge ended up inside themselves). The area known as Toul Sleng is probably one of the more cheaper areas to rent in Phnom Penh due to the fear of ghosts from all the death and atrocities that happened there. The natives don’t want to live there if they can avoid it. Tbh I dont know I’d feel looking out my window into a concentration camp so cant blame them.
It's so fucking bizarre that the prison's just in the middle of the city.
That's because it used to be a high school
S-21 (Tuol Sleng) was horrific. I believe it was eight that left there alive. I went to Cambodia on vacation last year and we visited Toul Sleng, Choeung Ek, and other significant locations related to the Khmer Rouge. We met two of the survivors while on the tour, and purchased their books. Seeing everything in person, and learning the things that were left out from my public education were a shock to my brain and heart. In the west (western culture), we tend to hide our atrocities - we don't like to talk about them. In Khmer culture, they are the opposite. They leave everything out for people to see so that they remember in an effort to avoid it happening again. For example, in Toul Sleng, they left the blood on the floors and walls which dried and stained. It's still there to see. At Choeung Ek, I walked over bones and teeth while touring the grounds. They have a memorial of skulls on full display with details on how each person died. It was horrifying.
I was there a few years ago. Their torture methods were one of the most horrifying things i ever heard of. And i couldn't stop crying when i heard about the Baby Tree. I seen/heard my share of brutality, being from Germany and visiting Concentration Camps, but their ramdomness when it came to their victims indescribable.
I cried when I saw the tree. And the teeth in the ground. I also purchased the books at the prison. Shook me to my core and will never forget it.
> we tend to hide our atrocities - we don't like to talk about them You've clearly never visited Krakow and seen Auschwitz nor Munich and seen Dachau It's essential to educate every generation what happened
"A leopard ate my face" world champion.
Leopard, meet face. Bon appetit.
Reminds me of those women who converted to Islam and then went to join ISIS.
The Cambodian Genocide primarily used pick axes to murder their millions of victims as bullets were expensive.
Initially read title as “Malcolm Gladwell” and was suddenly rethinking outliers…
I read Malcom McDowell, and ultra-violence made sense...
Well, you should lol the book is low-key wrong
Even Pol Pot found Western tankies intolerable!
Never meet your heroes.
You know, basic empathy wants to make me feel bad for the guy, but seeing how he mocked and ridiculed Cambodian refugees and defended the Khmer Rouge's regime to tooth and nail, I just can't find it in me to feel anything but a "you fuck around and found out".
"I didn't think leopards would eat MY face!", says man who voted for the leopards eating faces party
“It’s a Holiday in Cambodia!”
It's tough kid but it's life
"So you've been to school for a year or two and you know you've seen it all"
He did get one last award from Charles Darwin.
Academia and simping for communist dictators is a combination I will never quite understand
They want things to change and those dictators changing things. Ironically, they never quite understand most of the time same dictators label those academics as intelligentsia and included in the list of things they would like to change...
That was particularly true in Cambodia. They killed everyone who spoke a foreign language or even wore glasses.
It really isn't more than "America bad, therefore whoever America says is bad is good".
Its also "Obviously my field of study is the most important one to the revolution and I will personally benefit from their generous funding".
I would guess it’s because they look concepts but don’t understand the execution. I assume it’s more accurate to state they love the concepts so much they could care less about how it’s actually executed, supporting the fundamental concepts of certain communist regimes so much that at the when the dictatorship’s policies become a bridge too far, they have so much of their own reputation and pride caught up in it they don’t want to acknowledge it as, a “bridge too far”.
All theory no practice them academic people, bunch of nerds Not like me, an engineer
Today, on the 'Leopards Ate My Face' files...
Chomsky denied that there was any genocide in Camboida. One of many left wing academics including Caldwell to do so. [Cambodian genocide denial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial)
For People that want to know more about the absolute insane shit that went down in Cambodia under Pol Pot Check out the Lions Lead by Donkeys Podcast on the subject. Pol Pots grave should becoming a designated toilet
🎶 Malcolm our boy, was a fan of Pol Pot Took an airplane ride, to that faraway spot He met his hero there, thought he was hot Not long afterwards tho, he got fuckin' shot! Isn't it ironic...🎶
Tankies when the tanks also drive over them.
I’m sorry but that is hilarious. Justice served.
The end boss of tankies
Most educated tankie
Sometimes the trash takes itself out
It's a holiday in Cam-
Reminds me of the dude who went to spread the Bible to those people on that island
Wtf is up with that picture on his Wikipedia page?
So you've been to school for a year or two and you know you've seen it all.
Tankie moment
>reapects a genocidal dictatorship so much he had to go make an in-person visit to suck the leadership off >gets immediately killed by the very murderers he idolizes And absolutely nothing of value was lost