Profiles in Communist Tyranny: Pol Pot.

Once again, here I am defending why the people and the places I hold dear are virtuous and once again, here I am attempting to shine a light on the things that go bump in the night.  Didn’t we fight in two big wars, and a couple smaller ones, and spend a decade proving that the theory of Social-Commune- ism is a recipe for failure.  Did we not prove the superiority of the Capitalist system?   I know many of us watch Glenn Beck, all of us real whackos do anyway, so I won’t start with Mao.  I will start with someone equally as crazy, and just as idealistic as any other third rate CommisSocialist dictator.  I doubt many people know any more about him than most would know about good ol Chairman Mao.  But Pol Pot was a great visionary thinker of socialist theory Just like Mao, check it out:

Saloth Sar, aka  "brother number one" or most commonly in the west, Pol Pot, from Politique potentielle, was the leader of the Cambodian communist movement known as the Khmer Rouge and was Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) he became the de facto leader of Cambodia in mid-1975. During his time in power, Pol Pot imposed a version of agrarian collectivization, forcing (nearly all) city dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects toward a goal of "restarting civilization" in a "Year Zero" state. Property became collective, and education was dispensed at communal schools. Children were raised on a communal basis. Even meals were prepared and eaten communally. Pol Pot's regime was extremely paranoid. Political dissent and opposition were not permitted. People were treated as opponents based on their appearance or background. The combined effects of slave labor, malnutrition, poor medical care, and executions resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million people, approximately 21% of the Cambodian population.

He studied radio electronics at the EFR in Paris from 1949 to 1953. As a result of failing his exams in three successive years, he was forced to return to Cambodia in January 1954. Historian Philip Short has said that Saloth's poor academic record was a considerable advantage within the anti-intellectual PCF, who saw uneducated peasants as the true proletariat and helped him to quickly establish a leadership role for himself among the Cercle Marxiste (Marxist Circle).

By the summer of 1968, Saloth began the transition from a party leader working with a collective leadership into the absolutist leader of the Khmer Rouge movement. Where before he had shared communal quarters with other leaders, he now had his own compound with a personal staff and a troop of guards. Outsiders were no longer allowed to approach him. Rather, people were summoned into his presence by his staff.

After a central committee meeting in May 1972, the party under the direction of Saloth began to enforce new levels of discipline and conformity.  These policies, such as forbidding minorities from wearing jewelry, were soon extended to the whole population. A haphazard version of land reform was undertaken by Saloth. Its basis was that all land holdings should be of uniform size [equality]. The party also confiscated all private means of transportation at this time [I don’t want to be CEO of a car company]. The 1972 policies were aimed at reducing the peoples of the liberated areas to a sort of feudal peasant equality. These policies were generally favorable at the time to poor peasants and extremely unfavorable to refugees from towns who had fled to the countryside.

In 1973 he decreed the process of reorganizing peasant villages into cooperatives and individual possessions were banned. Anyone with an education was singled out in the purges and killed. A set of new prisons was also constructed in Khmer Rouge run areas. When the Khmer Rouge took the town of Kratie in 1971, Saloth and other members of the party were shocked at how fast the liberated urban areas shook off socialism and went back to the old ways (capitalism). Various ideas were tried to re-create the town in the image of the party, but nothing worked. In 1973, out of total frustration, Saloth decided that the only solution was to send the entire population of the town to the fields in the countryside. He wrote at the time "if the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?". Shortly after, Saloth ordered the evacuation of the 15,000 people of Kompong Cham for the same reasons. Internationally, Saloth and the Khmer Rouge were able to gain the recognition of 63 countries as the true government of Cambodia and they were given a seat at the United Nations. In September 1974, Saloth decreed that money would cease to be put into circulation and quickly be phased out.

In Beijing in 1975 Saloth's "death list" of enemies to be killed was publicized.   The list, which originally contained seven names, quickly expanded to include all the senior government leaders along with the military and police leadership. The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. The country’s name was officially changed to "Democratic Kampuchea". Outsiders were targeted and Buddhists, Muslims, Western-educated intellectuals people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, disabled people, and foreigners were either exiled, killed, or  put in the S-21 camp for interrogation involving torture in cases where a confession was useful to the government. Confessions forced at S-21 were extracted from prisoners through such methods as raising prisoners by their arms tied behind and dislocating shoulders, removing toenails with pliers, suffocating a prisoner repeatedly, and skinning a person while alive.

Pol Pot adopted the Maoist [there’s that loveable little rascal again] idea that peasants were the true working class. In 1976, people were reclassified as full-rights (base) people, candidates and “new people” - so called because they included most of the people who had been forced from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to two bowls of rice or soup per day, which led to widespread starvation.  The state-controlled radio proclaimed that only one or two million people were needed to build the new communist utopia. As for the others, as they put it, "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss."

Hundreds of thousands of the refugees from the cities  were taken out in shackles to dig their own mass graves. Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers would beat them to death with iron bars and hoes or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge directive ordered, "Bullets are not to be wasted." These mass graves are often referred to as The Killing Fields. Pol Pot died sometime in 1998, and gradually the Country changed direction.

…Class warfare, destruction of capitalism, state control of industry, hmmmm.  By the way…now Cambodia is a Constitutional Monarchy and parliamentary representative democracy …  huh…

Wow after reading that I can certainly see why so many in OUR government really look up to the Marxists.  Their track record of successfully running governments is so fantastic, and they love the poor people too!

-Kook

* no you nutcases, or the foIks at the DOJ, I am not saying Obama is going to round us up and kill us, or that he wants to, or that he would, I am just saying this is Communism.  Many of our presidents advisors and pals like communists such as Mao.  This guy was also a follower of Mao.  That is all I am saying.  This is what loving and following Communist policies has always led to.  Everywhere.