Democratic Kampuchea was not Marxist

[Rakhmetov]

The Pol Pot clique did not even claim to represent Marxism-Leninism in their constitution. The term Marxism-Leninism cannot be located in it.
http://www.dccam.org/Archives/Docume...nstitution.htm

Contrast this with the Vietnamese constitution which mentions several times to Marxism-Leninism.
The Communist Party of Vietnam, the vanguard of the Vietnamese working class, the faithful representative of the rights and interests of the working class, the toiling people, and the whole nation, acting upon the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and Ho Chi Minh's thought, is the force leading the State and society.
http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~vern/van_kien/constit.html

[Captain Marinesko]

Something to add: Ieng Sary publicly stated that the KR were not Communists as well. After the overthrow by the Vietnamese, the US knowingly aided the Khmer Rouge in its fight against the new government.

[ScottishStalinist1]

The Red Khmers did claim to be Marxist-Leninists. For example:

"This is more concrete. Some of our cadres who have lived overseas, and who worked with foreign communist panics, regularly request foreign documents, claiming we neglect the study of Marxism-Leninism. But we tell them that Marxism-Leninism develops by means of the struggle of the people; our experiences are genuine Marxist-Leninist documents."

Statement of the Communist Party of Kampuchea [CPK] to the Communist Workers' Party of Denmark, July 1978.

[Odysseus]

The KR was not even remotely communistic. On top of the fact that their plan for Cambodia made absolutely no sense.

[Autoreduction]

Ah the desperate need to clean your specific "ism" of any guilt. Why not try and learn from the mistakes instead?

[Daniel Shays]

I don't understand why everyone is so perpetually overeager to distance themselves from the Red Khmers. So they weren't orthodox Marxist-Leninists. Why bash them so much? It only lends credibility to the similarly outrageous claims put forth by the bourgeois media about other anti-imperialist and socialistic movements.

[Odysseus]

Originally Posted by Autoreduction

Ah the desperate need to clean your specific "ism" of any guilt. Why not try and learn from the mistakes instead?

I think what we should learn from the KR situation is that we cannot take any 'communist' movement at face value.

[Autoreduction]

Originally Posted by Daniel Shays

I don't understand why everyone is so perpetually overeager to distance themselves from the Red Khmers. So they weren't orthodox Marxist-Leninists. Why bash them so much? It only lends credibility to the similarly outrageous claims put forth by the bourgeois media about other anti-imperialist and socialistic movements.

Call me bourgeois, but I am pretty much against genocide. By the way are you now The phora User Formerly Known As Daniel Shays?

[Captain Marinesko]

There is enough evidence to substantiate mass killings and idiotic policies of the KR. Plus they later received funding and help from the CIA when the latter wanted to overthrow the government that the Vietnamese brought into power.

[Rakhmetov]

I don't understand why everyone is so perpetually overeager to distance themselves from the Red Khmers.

They cannot be regarded as socialists. Even Stalinism is characterized by a non-capitalist road to socialism. Even the first quarter century of the People's Republic of China saw the transformation of one of the world's most backward and wretched lands to a significant industrial power. The economic policies of the Pol Pot clique did not remotely resemble these developments.

Why bash them so much?

They were discredited when they acted as a proxy for U.S. imperialism throughout the 1980s when they conducted a terroristic counter-revolutionary movement in the People's Republic of Kampuchea.

Call me bourgeois, but I am pretty much against genocide.

There was no genocide in Democratic Kampuchea. That is just slander propagated by the imperialist media. To begin with, the population of Democratic Kampuchea was predominantly Khmer. The claim that the Pol Pit clique committed genocide against Kampuchea cannot be substantiated. The demographic catastrophe in Democratic Kampuchea resulted from the genocidal USA aggression in Indochina which spread to Kampuchea. 600,000 were killed as a result of US bombings. The country's agricultural infrastructure and transportation were destroyed; Phnom Penh absorbed millions of refugees. With or without the Khmer Rouge, there still would have been catastrophic famine and disease in Kampuchea in the mid 1970s.