Anonymous #1 16h

I do also think they sucked, I was just reading through OOP’s post and was like wait is this from the Khmer Rouge

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Anonymous OP 15h

Worth noting that the deposed president who was removed to make way for the Khmer Rouge didn’t even have exclusively negative things to say about the regime. He had his critiques of course but also reported how happy many of the citizens were despite not having much wealth. There is a tiny bit more nuance that what we get in the west

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Anonymous #2 9h

One in four Cambodians was killed…

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Anonymous #3 9h

Wasn’t trying to downplay that, apologies if it sounded like I was. I was trying to provide the context that it wasn’t purely murderous and cruel, there were some things that worked despite it being a failure overall. Which is why I say nuance

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Anonymous #2 9h

This is literally the same as those people who go to slums in Bangladesh and go “see they may have a horrible disease from drinking raw sewage water but at least they’re happy”

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Anonymous #2 9h

Ah okay. I’d be interested to hear what specifically he or others would consider to be successful about it? Because I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a successful aspect of the Khmer Rouge. I know there’s still people who apologize for it but I had assumed that was mostly from anti-Vietnamese ethnonationalism.

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Anonymous #3 9h

It was from a book that I already returned but generally speaking the unseated previous ruler of Cambodia was allowed to move around the country a bit during that time and wrote about how the people he saw in the countryside and fields seemed genuinely content for the most part, singing songs and working together and whatnot, despite being pretty poor. He wrote that, having ruled the country himself, he would’ve been able to tell if the behavior was a forced performance. Plenty of bad things to

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Anonymous #2 9h

Report as well but that’s all very well known. The author included his testimony because, having been unseated by the Khmer Rouge himself he was the last person you’d expect to give them any grace. The book was the Jakarta method if you ever feel like giving it a look

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Anonymous #2 9h

Was also interesting to note that in Cambodia, where communists massacred a bunch of people, there are museums to remember what happened. In Indonesia, where anti communists massacred communist civilians (over a million of them) there are no remembrances, only a museum dedicated to propping up the lie that gave rise to the massacre. The true killings and story have been entirely suppressed by the now right wing Indonesian gov (with lots of cia help)

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Anonymous #2 9h

Happy singing songs and working together after depopulating a quarter of the country is what the white supremacists want in the US after depopulating all the immigrants and anyone they don’t like

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Anonymous #1 9h

I’m just telling you what was reported at the time, I’m not saying they had an admirable system set up or anything. Really my only point was that it wasn’t purely an evil cabal of people bent on extermination, they had some good intentions and that resulted in some positive outcomes for some of their people, despite the project overall being a stunning failure

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Anonymous #2 9h

Which is how it’s always covered anyway, we aren’t ever short on condemnation of that regime. I just think some context and nuance is important to consider to humanize the situation and bring some dimension into history

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Anonymous #2 9h

I mean is there any reason to believe that’s a change from how things were before? I would assume people have always been singing songs in rural Cambodia. And while rural Cambodians did die under the Khmer Rouge, the primary targets of genocide were urbanites and ethnic minorities. So it makes sense that if any group kept going business as usual, it’d be rural ethnic Khmer.

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Anonymous #2 9h

I mean yeah I don’t think they were pure evil (though it’s hard to view the torture prisons in any morally ambiguous light). It was atrocities committed in pursuit of Pol Pot’s vision of an agriculturalist utopia.

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Anonymous #3 8h

Yk that’s a fair question and I don’t have an answer for you, they only spent a few paragraphs on his account and I don’t know enough about the history of Cambodia to say if this was much of a change or not

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