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Cambodia under the K.R. was the closest man has come to pure communism



I think the closest mankind has ever come to the kind of communist "Utopia" the leftists and Marxists want was "Democratic Kampuchea", i.e. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge government, which was in power from 1975 to 1978. They made everybody equal, by moving all city-dwellers out to the countryside, so that nobody had an advantage over the rural peasants. They also eliminated (i.e. killed) anyone with an "unfair" advantage, like having an education or being able to speak a foreign language. Capitalism was banned, so there was no competition, only everybody working together for the common good. Private property was banned also, so nobody could have their own food, only what was provided by the collective. In order to avoid starvation, then, people had to eat insects and lizards, and drink cow blood. Oh, and one more thing. There was no money. Since everyone was cared for by the state, there was no need for it. They had huge money bonfires.

Watching The Killing Fields and reading about what the Khmer Rouge did is an excellent way to see what happens when the leftists get their way. Anyone who wants to use government force to make everyone equal and to eliminate private property and money and capitalism, is fighting for another "Democratic Kampuchea".



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[deleted]

dictatorship

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Lot of No true Scotsman going on in here...

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I can't agree with that, Mars atax. I tend to agree with kessingler and jubinell...
Yes, the Khmer Rouge were communists and Pol Pot became obsessed with communism when in France--don't know why people would even debate that. The name Khmer Rouge was created by Sihanouk to refer to all leftist, communist groups that opposed him; all those from the right were referred to as Khmer Bleu.
However, what we came to know as Pol pot's Khmer Rouge is his far more perverse version of your westernized view of what communism looks like, and can't be characterized as "pure communism". If anything, Pol Pot strived for a pre-communist communism.
Unless I missed it, no one has mentioned the long history of the Khmer people and its complex relationships and wars with neighbouring empires/tribes, and its relevancy in Pol Pot's scheme. A la Hitler, Pol Pot believed the Khmer race was superior and hoped to see the great Khmer Empire rise up again. For him, the Khmer Loeu, the hill tribes, were the ideal model of 'primitive communism' (which can't be "pure communism" as you intend it) and he modeled his new agrarian society after them, mixed with an idealized vision of what was once a formidable empire.

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Pol Pot held a grudge towards his fellow communists of Viet Minh. There was this historical enmity between Cambodian and Vietnamese, as Cambodian saw the Vietnamese as the people that destroyed the mighty Cham empire. And also because he was treated like a junior partner by the Viet Minh.

So, from this grudge, he developed a obsession to overdo the Vietnamese and Chinese communists in their quest for the communist utopia. He hated the Vietnamese, and looked up to Mao as his role model. True to his obsession, he saw Mao's communist utopian projects and decided to make something similar, but of course, way "better".

In one account, Pol Pot visited the ailing Zhou Enlai and was warned by Zhou about the calamities created by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Naturally, Pol Pot smiled, ignored Zhou's warning, and went on to create his own Great Leap Forward in Cambodia. Unsurprisingly, his my-great-leap-forward-will-be-much-much-better-than-your-great-leap-forward resulted in the creation of utterly primitive irrigation systems which failed utterly, which lead to even worse starvations and more deaths.

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lol still going on about the commies and the lefites are you? What are you like 100 years old? What a joke.

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