Pol Pot

What are your opinions on Pol Pot? I am personally sympathetic to him and the movement he led, but the whole 1975-1979 period of Democratic Kampuchea is still quite confusing to me despite the fact that I have read a lot about it.

Pol Pot was not a real communist in my opinion. He killed half of the population in the country and did not give his people medical care or education. Thank God for our Vietnamese comrades that did stop him before he did kill all of his people in the country. His policy was more xenophobic than the Nazi. Kind of ironic that the west did support him after he was ousted out of power. Also how is the whole period of Democratic Kampuchea confusing?

Neil Lim wrote:Pol Pot was not a real communist in my opinion. He killed half of the population in the country and did not give his people medical care or education. Thank God for our Vietnamese comrades that did stop him before he did kill all of his people in the country. His policy was more xenophobic than the Nazi. Kind of ironic that the west did support him after he was ousted out of power. Also how is the whole period of Democratic Kampuchea confusing?

He didn't kill half of the population. I don't know where you got those figures and I hope I could correct you, but our internet connection isn't working properly and I'm currently using my old Nokia. There were at least attempts to give the people proper education and medical care and these were successful to an extent in some cooperatives. The "Khmerization" had mostly political reasons behind it. For example many ethnic Vietnamese were sympathetic to Vietnam, a country which had supported various coups d'état against the leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. The period is confusing because it is hard to determine the roles played by different individuals in the events, I don't know who did and what.

Pol Pot was not a communist but an idealist. His concept of "Year Zero" which meant returning to that year was completely idealistic, primitive and devoid of of any Marxist Philosophy.

This article is an interesting read
http://espressostalinist.com/2011/10/27/pol-pot-was-not-and-is-not-a-communist/

slavicsocialist wrote:Pol Pot was not a communist but an idealist. His concept of "Year Zero" which meant returning to that year was completely idealistic, primitive and devoid of of any Marxist Philosophy.

Pol Pot had plans to industrialize the country after the problem of food production would be solved. In the last years of the regime, they started to train some people for this task.

The problem of Saloth Sar, aka POLitical POTential (where his nom de guerre came from) was that he wanted to skip lengthy transitions to declare Cambodia a communist state (how come you wanted a communist state since communism has no state?). Yes, he was an idealist whom with year zero he tries to create an ambitious plan involving a crude version of the great leap forward. Worse, his distaste for the middle class made the situation worse as compared to his examples like Mao or Stalin. Mao did accept the intelligentsia, but Pol Pot, in spite of being a frustrated Maoist, made people instead rally to Heng Samrin and the Vietnamese.