‘Democratic Kampuchea’ in retrospect
Posted on Monday 26 July, 2010
Filed Under International
KAING Guek Eav admits overseeing the torture and execution of thousands of men, women and children at Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng prison during the 1970s, but insists that he was only obeying orders. The historical resonances are so obvious that they are in no need of reiteration here.
The Khmer Rouge cadre – otherwise known as Duch – has been sentenced to 35 years for his crimes, and is likely to serve 19 of them. He might just live long enough ultimately to be released, although he will be a very old man if he ever does emerge from prison.
It will be interesting to see if the same writers that argued that Saddam and Milosevic were hapless victims of victor’s justice will hastily concoct reasons why Duch and others of his ilk, who will be standing trial in the coming period, merit qualified support.
Yet the verdict of the United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh will ultimately prove a mere footnote in the story of Democratic Kampuchea, a saga that decades later retains a special capacity to shock, even for those of us well versed in the history of twentieth century totalitarianisms.
Estimates of the death toll during the four years in which Pol Pot and his gang were at the helm vary enormously. But when even apologists open the batting by talking down the killings to a mere 740,000, you get some idea of the enormity of what occurred.
The usually cited figure is around 2,000,000, roughly equating to 20% of the population. Among the victims were many people considered to be intellectuals, a definition that could include being a teacher, or even wearing reading glasses.
The dilemma for the left is that the government we are talking about was headed by a communist party, and constitutionally proclaimed itself a ‘state of the people, workers, peasants, and all other Kampuchean labourer.’
Nothing about the Communist Party of Kampuchea at the time it seized power seemed to make it stand out from similar political formations elsewhere in the region during this period. Many CPK leaders had been schooled in Paris, capital of the former colonial power, under the auspices of the Parti Communiste Français. Its strategy of protracted people’s war was pretty much textbook Maoist orthodoxy.
A case could be made – and some have indeed made it – that the atrocities perpetrated by Pol Pot are not qualitatively different from the horrors seen in Russia during the hey-day of the Gulag or China at the time of the worst excesses of the cultural revolution.
Even now, some far left groups reject the name ‘Khmer Rouge’, on the grounds that it is ‘actually an anti-communist term of abuse’, and utilise instead the more cumbersome designation of the People’s National Liberation Armed Forces of Kampuchea.
They also stress that the anti-imperialist credentials of the CPK, and in the concrete context of US involvement in Indo-China in the years in question, that is difficult to dispute.
Moreover, great store is also laid on the introduction of planned property relations. Kampuchea, we are told, was scientifically speaking a workers’ state. ‘Despite its disgusting nature this was the terror of a bureaucracy based on post-capitalist property forms,’ recent analysis from one Trotskyist outfit proclaims.
The logic is that the CPK was to some extent worthy of backing, because of its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist aspects, in the same way that mainstream Trotskyism argued for defence of the Soviet Union in world war two and in various conflicts throughout the cold war on these very grounds.
Yes, I understand and appreciate the internal coherence of the argument. Once upon a time, I would have delivered similar rhetoric myself. Given that what came about could not have been foretold, there might even have been an excuse for confusion at the time.
But if this is the conclusion to which a theory leads, the obvious rejoinder is that there has to be something wrong with the theory. Not to repudiate such errors would be a major mistake.
UPDATE: As Captain Swing points out in the comments box, the political right also has a case to answer, and one more serious than the mere extention of ineffective verbal support at that.
Nixon’s decision to bomb neutral Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 claimed 500,000 lives, and created the preconditions for the CPK takeover. After the ouster of Pol Pot following Vietnamese intervention in 1978, the US and the UK continued to back the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government.
It is thanks to Reagan and Thatcher that this ghastly group retained control of the Cambodian seat at the United Nations. As late as the late 1980s, Britain provided military training in Thailand for Khmer Rouge operatives.
By not taking these important factors into consideration, my hastily-written post above offers less than half the picture. I’ll try to do better next time.
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45 Responses to “‘Democratic Kampuchea’ in retrospect”
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Yeah, why is it that murdering sons-of-bitches like Che, Joe and Mao still get fucking T-shirts made with their faces on and laudatory articles after all these years? Is it just because they’re lefties and lefties look after their own?
It was these sort of responses to the Khmer Rouge that were one of the reasons I abandoned Marxism around 1990, though I was never a Trot and am still very much on the left.
These barbaric killings just made no sense at all, apart from some vague rubbish about those being killed being the bourgeoisie.
And before the right wing trolls start posting about “Chomsky blah blah bla blah….”, let us remember “the secret and illegal bombing of then neutral Cambodia by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger between 1969 and 1973 caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power.”
And that after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1978 the Americans and Thatcher government continued to support the Khmer Rouge in exile as the legitimate government of Cambodia.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200004170017
@ Obnoxio The Clown
And what about the deaths caused by capitalism, how do we count these?
We can’t because we wouldn’t know where to start, or where to stop.
You the “libertarian” on here? I find most so-called “libertarians” have more in common with right-wing, saloon-bar bores than any coherent ideology.
I think Gordon Brown and Blair killed as many in Iraq then Saddam ever did, and that other nutter Bush.
War crime can you claim insanity.
“It will be interesting to see if the same writers that argued that Saddam and Milosevic were hapless victims of victor’s justice will hastily concoct reasons why Duch and others of his ilk, who will be standing trial in the coming period, merit qualified support.”
Come back to me when the mass murderers Bush and Blair are standing trial. Or Kissinger for that matter.
It is fascinating to speculate why ordinary people might be put off of politics.
I suspect one thing is, whataboutery.
It is that chronic incapacity of politicos to engage with a particular issue.
In this example we have moronic Robert making his typically deep contributions, and Dean, who should know better.
In both cases there is no genuine desire to engage with Dave’s arguments or even acknowledge the bleeding obvious (the mass murder committed by the Khmer Rouge).
No, instead we are treated to a bit of whataboutry…
I wonder if Dean or Robert could even find Cambodia on a map?
I can’t recall really having met anyone who ever had a good word for the Khmer Rouge, so I think Dave is tilting at windmills a little here.
There was a very good analysis by Pete Binns, when he was stil an SWP intelectual many years ago in ISJ, which explained how Poll Pot’s killing fields were rationalised by the Khmer Rouge themselves, and did have a certain terrible logic to them, once you accepted the idea that anything could be justified in the name of developing economic autharchy in a terribly poor and war ravaged country.
What about finding Palestine on a map?[No,no!Can't make everything about Israel, it's what these Zionists want]
recent analysis from one Trotskyist outfit proclaims
Well four years old. But probably the most recent you could find. And isn’t “outfit” a pejorative except when applied to the RCP(God rest their soles)?
Of course I would say that you don’t have to throw out the Marxist baby with the deranged workers’ state analysis bathwater. In answer to Captain Swing, when I studied Soviet Politics, one popular question was whether there was method in the Stalinist madness. Obviously with Cambodia the logic is harder to see, but for a ruling class to maintain power its first need is to enforce justification of its rule, and the Khmer Rouge ideology did that(Incidentally, I think Chomsky did only deny that things had gone badly wrong for a short period).
Mod,
David started it with the silly comment I quoted. If he makes comments like that he should expect that sort of response.
But now Captain Swing has put him right not a bad article.
The late Alan Ginsberg found the Burning Ghats of Benares so horrendously fascinating that he visited day after day, to the surprise and dismay of some of his chums.
I never understood the feeling until I went to S-21.
S-21 – Tuol Sleng – is a place of such dreadful fascination that I was drawn to it for 5 successive visits after the first. My wife sat across the road in a teashop or stayed in our guesthouse by the lake; 1 visit was more than enough for her.
The most horrendous thought – to me – was that a few of those processed through* S-21 were former teachers of pupils at the school … imagine being tortured in the Geography Room of your old High School.
Some points about S-21:
* Few were actually killed at S-21 unless they exasperated their torturers and were killed more-or-less by accident. They were taken off to Chung Euk – the killing fields outside PP – to be killed. A handful were killed in S-21 as the Vietnamese entered PP.
Most – over 70% – of those processed through S-21 were party comrades. Some were husband-wife-children.
Some of the torturers and many of those tortured were former Buddhist monks.
=============================================
Andy Newman rightly observes that few really loved the KR except silly ninnies like poor Malcolm Caldwell but aiding the KR after the DRV had invaded and installed a client regime in PP was another matter.
The Thais, Americans, Brits and Chinese all aided the KR because the Viet-installed PP regime was a creation of the Viets and the Viets were allies of Moscow and so it naturally followed that anything annoying the Viets annoyed the USSR
The Thai generals did well skimming foreign aid and getting rich on the timber and gems coming westwards out of Cambodia. Happy generals do not launch coups so the Bangkok government was happy too.
The Chinese were delighted to annoy the DRV and the DRV’s big USSR patron
The Brits and – especially – the Americans were delighted by the opportunity to annoy the USSR at one remove.
NOTE:
All the above statements can be and have been briskly disputed in the USA and elsewhere.
Dean,
You and others should get a blog and try to do even half as good as Dave does, you’ll find it harder than it seems.
Anyway, Dave’s initial comments were throw away remarks leading to the nub of his argument, which conspicuously everyone avoids, or doesn’t understand:
The attitude of the PRC towatds the KR as insurgents in the period before Lon Nol was overthrown in 1975, in actual power in the period before the DRV armed forces entered PP and – later – in resistance, and based in and supplied through Thailand, is close to incomprehensible.
The KR, as mean and narrow ethno-nationalists, killed Sino-Khmer and Sino-Vietnamese with ecstatic delight, often atrociously [in Kep-sur-Mer, the local bourgeoisie - mainly Sino-Khmer and Sino-Viet-Khmer - who could be found still alive were squeezed into a large metal petrol tank at a gasoline station ... which was then welded shut]
Yet such was the hatred the PRC bore the DRV that such deliberate atrocities committed against fellow-Han were overlooked by Beijing.
Still find it hard to swallow.
Mod,
Tell him to get rid of the fucking comments box if he doesn’t want criticism!!
One can write reams about beastly Richard Nixon bombing “neutral Cambodia” but the facts are these:
Sihanouk gave the NLFSV and the DRV permission to use eastern Cambodian territory as a supply route – both from Laos east of the Mekong [the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail'] and through the ports of Cambodia – Kapot, Kep and Sihanoukville.
In love with intrigue for its own sake, Sihanouk simultaneously quietly assured the US Ambassador to PP that he had no objection to the USAF bombing the NLFSV/DRV supply routes in the eastern part of his country.
By the way, Cambodia is knee-deep in well-funded historians of the SOUR AND BITTER TIMES [as the Cambodians call the tragic years], – mainly Americans and Australians.
They hate one another like poison and are eager to denounce one another and undermine one another’s careers at the slightest opportunity.
I recommend a visit to all readers here.
I don’t know the specifics of the Cambodian case, but in general, British and American foreign policy is guided by what is good for their bourgoisies. What advantages were gained from supporting the Khmer Rouge? Was it containment and pissing off Russia? It’s a mistake to think that the ruling class are guided by morality.
In them days the ‘Domino Theory’ was still believed in, Ratty.
One met Americans with Thai wives who reckoned Thailand would fall to the Commies within 5 to 10 years.
WHY AID THE VILE KR?
Tie down the Viets in Cambodia and Thailand will not fall to the Reds.
It’s easy to forget that there WAS a Communist insurgency in Thailand [this is all haf-forgotten ancient history NOW of course ... the only insurgency in Thailand is the low-level but annoying Jihadist insurgency in the south of the country]
In retrospect it might seem like the Commies in Thailand were on a hiding to nothing from the word go but much the same was assumed in Cambodia before Sihanouk was ousted by Lon Nol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_Thailand
@ skidmarx
“when I studied Soviet Politics, one popular question was whether there was method in the Stalinist madness”
In the early days you could say there was some “ideological justification” behind the killings, he could claim was getting rid of opponents in the party, counter-revolutionaries and sections of society opposed to the industrial working class (tiny as it was) like the kulaks.
But later in the 1930s they started to make no sense at all, you could not “justify” them “ideologically” at all. Many were fellow party members, he nearly wiped out the officer corps in the army, which really badly affected the Soviet Union in the war.
There is a theory they just developed their own momentum and party members were given quotas to kill,or exile each year and were too afraid for their own live to do anything about it.
I mean Hitler at least had some crazed “ideological justification” for killing Jews, Communists, homosexuals, gypsies etc. But apart from the “Night of the Long Knives” against Ernst Rohm and the SA, he didn’t go in for wholesale killing of fellow party members.
The historian Alan Bullock wrote a joint biography of Hitler and Stalin and was asked if he could only meet one of them which one would it be?
He immediately replied “Hitler”. When asked why he replied “because I’d have a much better chance of coming out of the meeting alive than if I met Stalin”.
Presumably, with dictators like Stalin the whole thing develops a logic of its own: one has to keep on killing to keep people terrorised and too frightened to organise against one. Everyone must become a potential enemy in that situation and the best way of maintaining a grip on society is to totally smah and atomise it. Human beings can be very cruel.
Good comments above. I recall Shirley Williams doing her best to warn about the KR. It did take the film the ‘Killing Fields’ to give a sense of the futility of it. But it was to late to do anything. Not that anyone wanted to do anything. I am convinced the only credible kind of government is a democratic one that can be held to account and voted out. The best you can expect from dictators is to be marched off to oblivion. I think the 20th century has proven that.
This is sneaky stuff, David, it implies lots, but says nothing. You know that there is a long-standing condemnation of the Cambodian regime under Pol Pot, and this trial will not bring up any ‘hastily’ concocted excuses. This is obvious if only because of the length of time between the well-known atrocities and the recent court case – any putative ‘excuses’ will be well known by now.
As to your substantive point about the anti-capitalist / imperialist nature of the regime, and therefore an initial support for it on the left, well it didn’t last long. The left tried to place the regime in the deformed or degenerated workers’ state model, but plainly it didn’t fit. Given the way the regime took power, this is no surprise.
The precipitous withdrawal by the US from Cambodia left the country in the hands of the only viable state power, guerilla fighters, people with guns – ferocious but incompetent in wielding governmental power.
Jimmy, only a tiny percentage of the British public really give two hoots about foreign policy issues and then only if their telly screens are full of starving picanninies or scenes of carnage as the Tooty-Fruities chop up the Hootie-Wooties [or vice versa]* night after night.
The asinine attempts of some on the Left to make a fuss about the Tories’ rather not-terribly-nice allies-of-a-kind in the European Parliament probably captured the attention of 1% of the electorate. Very briefly.
* Set the following to music:
Oh, the tall ones are chopping up the short ones
Or is the other way round?
We must intervene and tell them they’re wrong
so give me a buck or a pound …
[continue in the same vein for five verses and Joan Baez and Annie Lennox can sing it together. Could be a nice little earner.]
For socialists it’s very hard to explain unless you are prepared to break from Leninism. The idea of a small intellectual cadre leading the workers/peasants ends up with a ‘red terror’ so easily if it is actually achieved. This is why in the end Trotskyism has been a dead end path the last seventy years.
Stormtrooper Corr: You know at your age with your experience you really should know better. Why the adolescent need to shock? You must have loads of money and live in a lovely place and have lots of friends, so why this pathological need to visit websites and spread rightwing poison? Did you see something nasty in teh woodshed as a boy?
I am not certain killing Kulaks was the policy, rather taking away their money lending powers.
As Engels noted:
“The peasants were unable to meet the payments to the state and they had to borrow: they had too much to die and not enough to live on. A gang of kulaks (money-lenders) pounced on these tillers of the soil, who gradually became indebted to such an extent as to lose all hope of ever freeing themselves. When the usurers were no longer willing to provide advances, the peasants were forced to sell their harvests to obtain money, and they sold not only the wheat they needed to live on but also their vital seed-corn, so that future harvests were jeopardised. “
I wouldn’t call that analysis recent. It was actually written in the 1980s. But I take your point nonetheless.
“The liquidation of the Kulaks as a Class” has been documented in great detail by ex-USSR citizens like “I chose Freedom” Kravchenko.
Many thousands or tens of thousands of people perished in great misery.
Far worse was that the smartest and most enterprising population of many of the rural areas of the USSR were destroyed as a productive class and it was not until well into the late 1960s or early 1970s that production of decent food was up to 1918 levels.
Even then, the distribution system was such a buggered up mess that someone with two “illegal” [i.e. off-the-books] cows would find it worth his/her while to fill two suitcases with good-quality home-churned butter, FLY [!] to Moscow or Leningrad and sell the produce door-to-door or in government [!] offices and them FLY back home again.
The “illegal” production of ham, pork, bacon, all milk products like butter or decent cheese was over 30% of the USSR’s “legal” production and in the case of really good food it was well over 50%.
In short, until well within living memory, the USSR was like wartime Britain. There was enough plain food to go around but anything for a special occasion like a birthday had to be scored on the black market.
Perhaps I ought to add that the Communists in Bulgaria, while unswerving loyal to Moscow from 1944 until the Iron Curtain ripped apart, were happy enough to consolidate fields into enormous productive areas* for wheat and sunflower seed oil yet did not mess with people’s profit-on-the-side pickling of vegetables, honey production and small-scale stock-rearing.
The Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking minorities had a rougher time of things. The Greek-speaking stock-rearing semi-nomads had much of their stock confiscated because they were obviously far “too rich” and the Turks, with their production of tobacco and raisins as well as their contacts and family links with Turkey, were looked upon with suspicion as a Fifth Column.
Sue R. I am all in favour of Tony Blair, Annie Lennox, Mary Robinson and so on romping off up the Limpopo or the Gambia or the Zambezi to stop savages engaging in savage practices so long as they are spending their own self-earned money in doing so and nobody else’s. We can all see that Tony Blair has outgrown his early enthusiasm for such activities, being happier to tour the U.S. lecture circuit.
In the heyday of the Blairite “ethical foreign policy” Grinning Tony was prepared to tell everyone who would listen – and, in those days, many were – that Britain would readily intervene to stop the Whatsits being cruel to the Whosits, or vice versa.
* Go to Google Earth or Wikimapia to see the immense fields around the City of Dobrich. Then look at the field system around Kardzhali in the Turkish-minority area; the little fields are more like those of County Leitrim.
Reading Bob Conquest on Stalin’s terror, the KR are arguably in the same mould.
In Stalin’s case (in which I’ve read a touch more), it seems clear that he was haunted by his own ascent to power – the Bolshevik conspiracy seized power practically out of no-where, and he was sure that others could/would try to do the same – the terror was born of fragility of power. Essentially, he began life as a gangster, and ruled as a gangster.
Rule as a gangster, behave as a gangster…
@Captain Swing – if I recall correctly, there were earlier trials of supposed industrial wreckers that didn’t have much of a rational justification, except to allow for some social mobility by removing a layer of managers. In private monopoly capitalism there is not always a one-to-one correspondance between the needs of capital and the actions of capitalists, for state capitalisms to survive over a period there had to be some way for them to pull back the institutional pressure towards the worst excesses. In Cambodia it is explainable that they went the way they did because the American bombing had reduced the apparent value of Cambodian lives to the world, and the backwardness of the country made it seem rational to the KR leaders that an autarkic society based on the abandonment of the towns justified by a fierce anti-intellectualism was a way forward.
Skidmarx, Cambodia in the fifties and sixties was well on the way to prosperity and happiness [otherwise so many Sino-Vietnamese, with their nose for a good thing and their sharp entrepreneurial instincts, would not have flocked there in such numbers]. Sihanouk opened all sorts of schools and colleges all over the country, even in areas which were subsequently carpet-bombed by B-52s.
What ballsed up everything was the deliberate and calculated policy of the DRV and the NLFSV, with Sihanouk’s willing or unwilling acquiescence and connivance, to use Cambodian territory as a conduit to supply the war of armed subversion in the RoV, despite all the promises made at Geneva.
As a consequence of THIS, the immense B-52s and smaller – tactical and more precise – aircraft of the USAF started bombing eastern Cambodia BUT ONLY AFTER Sihanouk, as clever and fond of intrigue as Mr Toad Himself, had told the U.S.Ambassador in PP that it was quite all right by him if the Americans did so.
One of Sihanouk’s junior wives even had a financial interest in a trucking company moving goods from Sihanoukville, Kampot and Kep to NLFSV dumps near the RoV border.
As for Sihanouk and the KR, long before Lon Nol seized power while Sihanouk was on hols in 1970, it had been part of Sihanouk’s too-clever-by-half domestic strategy to have local Communists tracked down, abducted and murdered.
One could go on, but the fact is that it is all too easy to blame the big dumb stupid crass ugly Americans – who responded to the RoV’s desperate pleas for assistance – for carnage which Southeast Asians saw fit to impose on themselves over a twenty-year period.
Here endeth the lesson.
The moralism that the SWP engages in really, really pisses me off. Skidmarks says that teh Americans did not value South East Asian lives, well, life is cheap in those countries and it always has been. As for Deen, I guess he’s showing us ‘Islamic Socialism’ in practice. Don’t bother organising state banks or cheap rates of credit, just KILL the usurers and money lenders.
Outside Siem Reap in Cambodia there’s an indoor / outdor museum of hardware – mainly mines but tanks and artillery pieces and other stuff too – from the Cambodian theatre of the IndoChina War.
Rather like the “BOO HOO PITY ME” display at Hiroshima Peace Park, it takes the form of “look at what awful foreigners did to us” but staring at all the hardware I found myself involuntarily thinking of the workers in the USSR, China, the USA [to name the obvious main suppliers of all this very costly kit] who had to get out of bed on cold dark winter mornings and – of course – the Soviet, Chinese and American citizens whose resources paid for it and I felt a pang of sympathy first and foremost for those workers and those citizens rather than the Cambodians, whose leaders’ cruelty and folly had brought disaster upon their country.
“Each man is author of all that the Sovereign doth”
Thomas Hobbes
Sewer,
Firstly your new name is Sewer, i.e. the vessell that carries around effluent or shit. Your words are the shit. If anything we are the rats scurrying around trying to avoid your shit.
Anyway, read again what I said instead of jumping to conclusions. I claim that there was no policy of killing Kulaks just removing their powers. How that policy was carried out in practice is another thing.
I am sure Churchill asked Stalin at Yalta how many he had killed to implement his agrarian policy. Stalin casually remarked around 6 million.
It’s actually possible for us to go to the horse’s mouth and study the policy documents of the Khmer Rouge regime, thanks to their publication, in English translation, by American scholars. It’s also possible to read the documents which the Khmer Rouge circulated amongst their low-level cadre, as educational material. Khmer Rouge economic policies owed far more to Eurocentric visions of breakneck industrial expansion than they did to any notion of agrarian communism, and the training texts Khmer Rouge cadre received made almost no mention of Marx. I blogged about this at:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/01/agrarian-communism.html
according to liberal historian Patrick Raszelenberg’s book Die Roten Khmer und der Dritte Indochina-Krieg. Institut für Asienkunde, Hamburg 1995, their ideology was more based on nationalism and the economic theories of the German 19th century economist Friedrich von List than on Maoism
Talking of Asian Revolutionaries and Stalin, as we were, not many of us – me included until very recently – know about this man …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virendranath_Chattopadhaya
The name reminds one of George Bernard Shaw’s unkind jeering at Tagore as Stupendranath Begorr but Chattopadhaya’s tragic tale ought to be better known.
Who decided to kill him – we know who condemned him – and precisely why was this decision made?
If you’re looking for a method in Stalin’s slaughter of the 1930s, it seems to me there are two key points.
First the consolidation of his own power within the apparatus. Most people sent to the Gulag were members of the apparatus, but it was only after Kirov was assassinated in 1934 that the Stalin faction took complete control.
Second driving wages down below the necessary physical minimum in order to create a surplus for investment. Hence the massive scale of the Gulags, forced labour camps, which required mass arrests and terror to supply their ever diminishing (due to death) and expanding (due to arrests) work force.
Yvgenia Ginsberg “Into the Whirlwind” describes it from the inside.
If the logic of the degenerated/deformed workers’ state analysis of DK was that ‘the CPK was to some extent worthy of backing’, it’s remarkable that this ‘recent analysis’ (written in 1982) denounced the CPK as a counter-revolutionary force pursuing a reactionary utopia. The group that wrote it advocated the defence of DK against imperialism (and likewise the defence of Cambodia under the Heng Samrin regime, where this was very much a live issue in the form of British and US backing of the Pol Pot remnants) despite the regime, which they denounced.
Trotsky never equated defence of the socialized property forms with defence of the regime. Lots of his followers (though not these, at least in this pamphlet) have. You seem to be doing the same: saying that this analysis implies some degree of support for the horrors of the Pol Pot regime, and therefore that this analysis must be wrong. No, and no.
The Cambodian expereience does put quite starkly the question of what benefit to the mass of the population were these “socialized property forms”, and why a “workers’ state” without workers control should be considered preferable to other forms of class economy. It is possible to oppose foreign intervention without defending the economic formation.
Sure. In Cambodia the ‘benefit’ was mainly in terms of potential. If the Pol Pot regime had been overthrown and replaced by a workers’ state with workers’ control these same property forms could (on the Trotskyist view) have been used in a very different way, rather than for starving and bludgeoning the masses.
Explaining this point in Cambodia is, no doubt, a hard row to hoe.
But seriously, I think the really significant failure of the left in the west was in not making a bigger campaign around the sanctions against Vietnam and against the Heng Samrin regime. The way the US and UK (and China) got stuck in behind the Pol Pot remnants and diplomatically isolating and economically punishing the new regime was just breathtaking. It was part of the same policy as the Western backing of the contras and death squads in Central America, Unita in Angola, Renamo in Mozambique, and the mujahedin in Afghanistan. That global White Terror of the 1980s has been too soon ‘forgotten’.
I just don’t see why officically socialising property when it is still in the hands of an elite amounts to a step forward.
THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY SEEMS TO BE MY FRIEND FOR THE TIME BEING
Ken MacLeod, the point was in the eyes of people like Reagan and Thatcher – to name just two – the opportunity to punish the appallingly tiresome Muscovite bear and the bear’s junior allies was quite irresistable.
Rather like the Israelis air-dropping arms* to the Yemeni Royalists in the sixties; not because they gave a tinker’s curse precisely which bunch of qat-chomping Yemenis ran Yemen but simply because the Yemeni Royalists were tying Nasser down in a foreign policy adventure the Yemeni Republicans could not win without foreign – Egyptian – help.
I wish I could remember the source, but it is claimed that a loose-lipped State Department staffer justified aid to the KR – against the DRV and the DRV-installed government in PP – on the grounds that “We’re hoping for a better result [against the DRV/NLFSV] this time.”
If you are close to a University with a good archive of, say, back copies of the ‘Economist’ you can read up on the period.
Yes, on ethical grounds it was indeed a sordid story but all-too-sadly understandable.
* Nobody seems to be quite sure whether this tale is 100% true or the sort of fine story which journalists dream up over a bottle of Scotch.
Bill Corr – I don’t need to read up on the period, because I remember it! You’re quite right about the Cold War motivation for the policy.