or 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. In his view, the abolition of capitalist production relations is only the first stage of the worldwide proletarian revolution.
Marx anticipated that there would be a radical redistribution of wealth and a withering of the global socialist state (the “crude” stage of communism) followed by a fundamental transformation of human nature as all individual culture, personality, and economic uniqueness disappeared (the “higher” stage of communism). Marx looked forward to a time when individuals would be freed from an alleged alienation from their own humanity supposedly caused by the division of labor and money-based economic transactions. Individuality would be replaced by a new generic “species-being” [Marx’s term] personality, a personality that would specialize in nothing and be an expert at everything.
It is now a fact fairly well-known, even among socialists, that economic calculation under pure socialism is an impossibility. And yet compared with the idea that any country or economy could survive, let alone prosper, after government abolishes the division of labor — simultaneously crushing all individuality in the process — the calculation problem (as it’s known) seems downright minor, even though it is not minor at all: yet it seems so simply because this latter idea is sheer madness.
“Most Communist movements, faced with the utter infeasibility of industrial production under socialist central planning (let alone an abolition of the division of labor), chose to reconcile themselves with capitalism in various ways and to defer the Marxist ideal of higher Communism to a remote future that would conveniently never come. Some Communists, notably the Soviets and especially the Yugoslavs, practically admitted that the species-being ideal would never be realized and were willing to settle for varying degrees of centralized socialistic control mixed with elements of capitalism” (ibid).
Maoists, however, remained pure — at least for a time.
Thus the “Cultural Revolution” of China which vainly tried to transform human nat