ure itself — individuals do not exist, these Maoists also preached — that is, until its stupendous failure forced even the most radical of Maoists to step back and reevaluate. This failure-followed-by-reevaluation changed Maoism across Asia and the world — with one appalling exception: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot understood that industrialization and the cities which emerge through the division of labor would have to be eliminated if the Khmer Rouge were to come anywhere close to an egalitarian society. This is why almost immediately after the Khmer Rouge took power (in April of 1975), the regime began evacuating Phnom Penh. They were, in a very real and literal sense, merely acting with the courage of their Communist convictions.
“The worst that can be said of Pol Pot was that he was sincere,” Vincent Cook also wrote, correctly, and continued:
“The Cambodian people were in fact freed of the ‘alienation’ of a division of labor and individual personality, and were reduced to a perfectly uniform egalitarian existence on the collective farms. If the cruel reality of the Khmer Rouge slave state didn’t quite come up to the extravagant eschatological expectations of Marxist true believers, the fault lies exclusively with those who think of the Marxist pattern of historical development and its egalitarian outcome as a desirable state of affairs. It is not enough to say of Pol Pot, as Prince Sihanouk did: ‘Let him be dead. Now our nation will be very peaceful.’ We must also acknowledge that a Pol Pot-type passion for equality remains as a threat to the peace and well-being of every nation even if the former dictator himself is dead.”
There should be no forgetting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge — no matter how much time has past or will pass — no whitewashing them, no cultural amnesia concerning them, nor any diminishment whatsoever nor rationalization of their utter evil, especially not by academic elites, like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and Anita Dunn (first Barack Obama’s council and now Joe Biden’s) and all the others who once praised Pol Pot for his Communist convictions and the “just society” he despotically built, nor any of the ideologically bankrupt intellectuals explicitly calling for Communism today and telling us, as a “reminder,” that “Communism is good.” These people must be ideologically confronted and exposed and defeated — routed — on the battleground of ideas, because the truth is that when the facts are made clear and their philosophies presented in full, without their interminable equivocations, circumlocutions, obfuscations, and jargon, there is no argument — they don’t have one — and so they don’t stand a chance. And do you know why they don’t have an argument?
Because nobody has a right to the life or labor of any other individual human being.
If anyone ever tells you differently, ask them how. Ask them from where their edict and premise derive, and Karl Marx will no longer do — not that he ever did. Ask them by what natural order of affairs, what fact within nature — either human nature or nature apart from humans — do they propound such a doctrine and decree. Because in the history of the entire world, no good answer has ever been given to this question, and do you know why?
Because no good answer for it exists, or ever will.
The Cambodian Killing Fields should stand eternally as a horrific, monolithic, twisted moment to the philosophy of egalitarianism, and the human race should never forget that any minister of force preaching the egalitarian doctrine-of-envy — which is to say, anti-individualism — that person, that minister of force, is an ideological offspring and disciple of Pol Pot.
I am well aware that most people today espousing socialism and egalitarianism — especially those who’ve grown up in the first-world and take its comparative freedom for granted — are not despots-in-waiting, tyrants-to-be, or full-blown dictators of the blackest breed. But I know also that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al, are exactly where and to what these politico-ethical-economic ideologies lead.
I know also that