nor they you).
Pol Pot’s regime forced the Cambodian people to eat in spectacularly unsanitary cooperatives, treating them worse than the poorly treated farm animals. They lived under incessant terror of being reported, even for minor acts “such as taking a coconut from a tree or allowing cattle to graze in the wrong field.”
And incalculable number of people died as a direct result of these filthy, terror-stricken conditions.
Vietnamese minority groups in particular were singled out for persecution and annihilation. So were the Cham Muslim minorities.
Survivors report that urbanites suffered harder work and even greater suspicion than the peasantry.
Virtually the entire population labored on farms, and do you know why? Because the ideology of egalitarianism decrees that all humans do everything the same. Thus, since the government could neither force people into instant expertise and specialization, which takes time and study and practice, nor the comparatively luxurious standards of urban living, which must come from a level of wealth and production they could not come close to affording, the government went for the opposite: evacuating the cities overnight and forcing everyone, no matter their knowledge and training, into impoverished subsistence agriculture — abolishing, with astonishing speed and extreme force, all specialization and the division of labor, which is, of course, hierarchical and therefore regards by all egalitarian standards as “bad.”
In terms of the sheer numbers of individual lives taken, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin killed far more people than Pol Pot, and yet Pol Pot and his genocidal regime stands out among them all — for being, in my opinion, the most horrific and evil-perfect-practitioner of this ideology: an ideology that regards individuality as non-existent, people only worth anything to the extent that they help produce food “collectively.” Thus the Khmer Rouge slogans, written and posted where the Cambodian people could read them, contained a disgusting and shocking murderous disregard for individual human life:
“To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss. Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.”
The Khmer Rouge is among the most ghastly of proofs about which you will ever read regarding the paramount role of ideas in human life.
For those who harangue and harass me and others like me for our defending individuality and individual rights, who think that the idea of egalitarian-socialism is nothing to even remotely consider or entertain, please read deeply about Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge — their obliteration of individual rights, the destruction of the entire concept of individuality and independent thinking: read what it led to in Cambodia, and then come back and harangue me. I have plenty more to say — beginning with the fact that egalitarianism is still, right up to this present moment, in one form or another, the defining characteristic and cornerstone of virtually all leftist ideology of the last two-hundred years. It’s most recent and most faddish iteration is the “racial-privilege-inequality” narrative which has infected the world like a plague.
Mass death is certainly no stranger to Communism. Even today a terrible famine stalks North Korea to remind us of the lethal nature of Marxism. However, Pol Pot has earned a special place in the history of Marxian Communism as his Khmer Rouge earned the special distinction of being the one Communist movement in history to actually attempt the full and consistent implementation of the ideals of Karl Marx.
Most Marxists would recoil at the suggestion that Pol Pot is the logical conclusion of their social philosophy, yet any honest assessment of Marx’s theory cannot conceal the fact that the radical egalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge is precisely what Marx predicted would be the ultimate culmination of all human history. It must be clearly kept in mind that industrial socialism, as it was known in the former Soviet Union and other mainstream Marxist states, is not the endpoint of Marx’s philosophy of history. 