BANNEDTHOUGHT

Suppression of News in Cambodia (Kampuchea) and Information
about Cambodian History and Democratic Kampuchea led by Pol Pot


      The Pol Pot government in Cambodia (or Kampuchea in the Khmer language), which was known as Democratic Kampuchea, was a brutal peasant nationalist regime which came to power in April 1975 after years of horrendous bombing of the country by the American imperialists, and was overthrown by invading Vietnamese troops in January 1979. Although often quite erroneously called a “Maoist” movement and regime, it was nothing of the kind, and never claimed to be—though it did consider China to be a friend and ally.

      Far from seeking to build and expand an urban proletariat and put the working class in power, the Pol Pot regime emptied out the cities, abolished money, and attempted (with little success) to create a rural peasant socialist utopia. It used the harshest methods, and killed a very large number of people (though claims by anti-communist ideologists in the West of the number of deaths were grossly exaggerated and included hundreds of thousands of people who were actually killed by the massive US bombing of the country during the Vietnam War, and the resulting starvation and chaos). For an extensive summation of the Pol Pot regime from a Maoist point of view see: “Condescending Saviors: What Went Wrong with the Pol Pot Regime”, by F.G., A World to Win, #25 (1999), online at: http://www.bannedthought.org/International/RIM/AWTW/1999-25/PolPot_eng25.htm

      However, it should be stated that a deep and thorough investigation of Democratic Kampuchea, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and Pol Pot, still remains to be accomplished by foreign revolutionary Marxists. At present we do not know all that much about the internal debates and struggles within the CPK and the full story about why the Cambodian revolution in the 1970s took the course that it did, beyond the unpleasant fact that large numbers of CPK members were themselves tortured and killed by their paranoid and apparently undisciplined “comrades”. For that reason we are seeking to provide as many hard-to-find documents here as we can in order to help facilitate further historical research. As far as we know, more recent Cambodian communists themselves have not yet summed up their own historical experience and developed a new revolutionary path forward.

      After the overthrow of Pol Pot by the Vietnamese, Cambodia became for a time a virtual semi-colony of revisionist Vietnam. Gradually it then developed into what is now more of a typical backward “Third World” comprador authoritarian dictatorship open to more general imperialist intervention and predation.

      If you know of other suppressed documents and news reports that should be posted here, contact us at: freespeech@bannedthought.org




Contemporary Cambodia and the Suppression of Free Speech in that Country



Democratic Kampuchea and Pol Pot

Basic Government Documents:

Foreign Relations and Wars:

Cambodian Economy:

Communist Party of Kampuchea:

Pol Pot:

Foreign Commentary about Democratic Kampuchea (Positive and Negative):

Academic Studies (Generally from a bourgeois perspective, of course):




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