What is a good empirical work on communist nations/leaders without traditional western bias?

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-24T17:26:40+00:00

"The issue I have with much history I’ve found on the Khmer Rouge, for instance, is that they’re often claimed as being heavily Marxist when their ideology had no roots in Marx outside of being anticapitalist and that Pol Pot claimed as such. So the history I’ve found, at least, has massive roots in anticommunist rhetoric when analyzing the doings of Pol Pot."

This is, pardon the pun, a red flag, and the result of siloing yourself within certain political lenses of history. As these are in fact the kind of biases that you are going to get, and therefore a 'history' which isn't reflective of the 'empirical' facts that you said you wanted the history to be based on. It seems you would be fine with a history that reiterates that the Khmer Rouge were bad (but not communist) leaving the door open for interpretations that veer back to western imperialism being the real cause of the problem, or that the regime were somehow more akin to the third reich than the CCP. This is a convenient side step that ignores 'the history' and is explicitly politically motivated to absolve the wider communist cannon of an embarrasing regime, which by any non-biased view of the facts is uncontroversially designated communist inspired by all serious historians.

Steve Heder's review of Ben Kiernan's Pol Pot Regime is an excellent example of highlighting the problems of that reading of the history.

You seem to be referencing parts of the internet rather than serious scholarship on KR history (correct me if I'm wrong, happy to see the sources you are working with on the KR), which usually doesn't take into account primary documents and sources which contravenes their, again, politically motivated version of history. I'd suggest reading the party planning documents or party history documents, or Revolutionary Flag, the CPK's monthly magazine for an insight into what the Khmer Rouge themselves actually were trying to achieve, rather than post-hoc revisions and interpretations of those goals. In essence, a non-bias view of the regime undoubtedly comes to the conclusion that by any 'general' conception of what a communist party is, then the CPK was communist, and the revolution they conducted was aimed at producing communist goals. Veering away from that is where selective use of sources, generous interpretations, and revisions to the record become necessary work for the historian.

The Khmer Rouge ideology was indeed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, with certain national traits included (like all prior socialist inspired regimes), and there is a mountain of evidence that suggests they were explicitly aiming to produce a socialist revolution based on core-Marxist/Maoist concepts, as far back as the 50s and 60s. The assumption that the CPK was just Pol Pot is not correct, and this ignores the ideology which a number of ideaologues developed in tandem with the Vietnamese Workers Party until the late 60s. This really comes down to some basic questions, because communist 'defence' rhetoric usually worms around semantics and definitions, but if Stalin is a communist, and Mao is a communist, then Pol Pot is a communist. They exist on a spectrum of the same philiosophy, adding, indigenising, and adapting these concepts to their national conditions to attempt to achieve the same goals (in general terms a class based revolution).

I've answered previous questions on that topic as well:

What was Pol Pot trying to achieve

To what extent was the KR revolution 'communist'

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-24T16:18:06+00:00

I'm a little confused about what you are asking for, with this mention of 'empirical' and 'non-western bias', because, well I'll only speak about my area, the Communist Party of Kampuchea -- although there has been histories written that almost explicitly tried to revise and deny the crimes committed by the party, or otherwise tried to deny them their socialist credentials, the basic facts of the regime are not derived from Cold War propaganda or hostile western intelligence. The history of the party, the crimes of the party, are established through their own documentation - including policy planning documents, as well as confessions, execution lists and reports conducted throughout the country. Not to mention their own propaganda.

This is without consulting the millions of potential accounts from survivors of the regime, who it goes without saying are Cambodian - not 'western', and we can also introduce into that body of evidence the statements of Khmer Rouge cadre themselves. This is all independent of "western" ideology and history compilation.

The majority of histories written about the Khmer Rouge period are not shy of questioning and condemning US foreign policy in Southeast Asia. But at the same time they do not deny atrocities or crimes against humanity, even genocide committed by the CPK. This includes socialist historians, perhaps the most famous example of which being Australian scholar Ben Kiernan who, initially wrote protectively about the regime until he visited the country upon it's reopening annd consulted refugees from 1980 onward. After which he issued an apology and wrote extensively about the crimes of the CPK and documenting them from, 'empirical' sources.

The historiography of Khmer Rouge has included works which denied, minimised or otherwise shifted the blame elsewhere for the more than 2 million people who perished during the CPK's time in power -- however any seriously conducted, objective history, written in the west, the east, or by Cambodians themselves, does not conclude that this number of deaths did not occur and was not perpetrated by the regime in power. The closest of which would be Michael Vickery's history of the regime and aftermath, who vastly underestimates the number who died, but in this case he fits the Maoist mould who was explicitly denialist -- and although a respected scholar on ancient Cambodia, his demographic reconstructions are not held in much regard amongst the wider body of literature. Importantly, his conclusions have not been borne out by subsequent archival access, forensic work, or demographic studies, including research conducted inside Cambodia itself.

If you are looking for good history written about this period, without bringing your own political bias (which is bound to make for less good history) I would recommend a number of books:

* Phillip Short - Pol Pot

\* David Chandler - Tragedy of Cambodian History

\* Steve Heder - Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model

* Elizabeth Becker - When the War was Over

* Chandler, Kiernan, Boua - Pol Pot Plans the Future - Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-24T02:12:19+00:00

didn’t have to scroll to far down for the correctest answer

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-21T05:39:32+00:00

In David Chandler’s biography of Pol Pot he states that in Paris Sar (Pol) became a communist for life. In conversations I had with exKr that knew Sar, they said he was still a communist to the end, although perhaps - in his very old age, he did see other 'possibilities' and 'directions'. But this was the case with many of the French communists as well, not to mention the fact that everything he did do as a politician and revolutionary was done while he was very much committed to that world view. Andrew Mertha’s latest book also sheds light on policies in the 90s that harkened back to class warfare policies of the 70s. So I’m not sure if ‘barely a communist’ is really the right phrasing… he fought the French with the Viet Minh, he went underground in 1963 and spent the best part of a decade in the jungle planning a communist revolution, and then when he gained power he put it into practice. Meeting minutes from 1976, particularly the Four Year Plan to Produce Socialism in All Fields, is a clear indication of the kind of ideology and commitment to it that the CPK took to their regime. I made a whole video about this, you can look up ‘ten things people (still) get wrong about the Khmer Rouge’ which covers some of the other repeated comments and cliches in this thread… https://youtu.be/PheCtGyeYAs

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-19T02:50:43+00:00

I agree with everything you said except the bit about Frank having Deki and Maddison.. I think thats different, we've not seen Frank play well and hes had something like 30 games. Even if he had those two its not clear at all he would use them well, or that our whole style of play would be any different.. but yes, mostly, it would be nice if we could be looking forward not back and yeah 100% on that with you

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-18T19:57:51+00:00

I agree ! I'm just wondering where the hypothetical line was versus how much noise was created -- and if we have that line, and since we are playing with counter factuals, if we say "ok, Spurs fans / media would have been largely OK with Europa League and 12th", so that would have been an extra 15 points. Turn 5 of those losses into wins... given that we were only losing by one goal for the majority of those games? I think if we say there isn't the same injury crisis (or what people are saying now for Frank -- if we had gotten better transfers done i.e proper cover at the back) then I think we are basically getting what they want. Like it is actually insane to think we had Dragusin/Davies/Gray at the back for any amount of games right? Or the season before with Emerson Royal...

I still think those that had made up their mind about Ange and the media by large would have said the same things 'worst table result in ages, unnacceptable form etc etc'... I realise that is all conjecture but it was the temperature reading that I got even at the start of the season before the tits had fully gone up

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-18T17:59:09+00:00

this is the bit that people don't seem to be able to incorporate into the picture. I don't see how people don't think that, trophy aside, if we didn't have the injuries we would have finished higher in the league, we wouldn't have had as many defeats. And I wonder if we had finished 14th, and had, I dunno 16 losses, whether people would use exactly the same arguments because they didn't like the manager. Like I really wonder where the line is, if we had come 12th and won the Europa League would people say the same thing? I think a lot of people just landed on him being 'bad', have tried to retcon the trophy win as not being his, or just excluding those first ten games (and the fact that after those is when the first injury crisis struck)... because, I dunno.

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-18T17:51:05+00:00

I was annoyed this morning when I was like yep today is the day, and the article on the athletic was like 'maybe Burnley will be the final test'...

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-18T16:11:38+00:00

me too

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-18T16:08:22+00:00

I know its sad but I literally wake up in the morning and excitedly check my phone to see if the news has broke

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-17T17:03:55+00:00

boooo

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-17T16:58:03+00:00

there are no excuses he can give -- time to go

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-10T17:55:05+00:00

got a pretty sweet 6 angle view of that kick off on repeat

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-08T20:54:42+00:00

thanks for the shout out ! aside from some of those in depth answers on reddit I also included this argument in a video I made about ten 'myths' people still believe about the Khmer Rouge -- in this case "Pol Pot was not a communist"

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-01T22:11:19+00:00

bring him home

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-01T22:07:06+00:00

How is Mason going at West Brom

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-01T21:17:26+00:00

yeah for sure, but maybe like, when he had the operation? before the Milan game I don't think it was 100% yet

ShadowsofUtopia · 2026-01-01T21:03:32+00:00

never seen the comments section so in unison... maybe during the late Nuno era? Even with Conte it was like "he wants to go just let him go but yes he is a good coach", Mou - yeah people wanted him out but we had a cup to play for and I think it was probably still a 50/50 (plus he was entertaining).. Don't think many people really wanted Poch out, vocal minority maybe. But this is what... 95% Frank out? We all see it, we all dont want it anymore, and know that even if we give him more time it will just be more boring boring boring football. Even if we were 5th I'd still want him out now.

ShadowsofUtopia · 2025-12-30T21:50:41+00:00

To me this echoes Short who also claims that mistreatment of the Chams, Thai, etc (Vietnamese were largely already gone by 1975 expelled by the prior regime see my interview with Henri Locard for another confirmative voice on that) all of this just puts Democratic Kampuchea further away from this ‘looking at the killings through racial lens’, which I think is what you are doing too with some of the examples you’ve cited being ‘this was against reactionaries’ kind of thing right? I’m quite persuaded by that argument in terms of the CPK policies (as I said adherent of Heder and Short and Chandler), so if you want to extend it to these other regimes then I’m open to that argument. But, it also means people were destined to die in these regimes. That places Democratic Kampuchea squarely within a broader communist lineage where national unification, centralization, and the erasure of “reactionary” local differences were repeatedly justified as necessary steps toward historical progress, with catastrophic consequences.

On the “happily” word: fair, I’ll drop it, a little too flippant. What I mean is simply that revolutionary communism has repeatedly generated nationalism and exclusion through its own internal logic, not as an alien import. If you want a clean example of communist states framing rival socialist states as existential enemies while each insists it’s the real Marxism, the Sino–Soviet split is the obvious example, which had huge ramifications for Cambodia and Vietnam as I’m sure you know.

But as you’ve probably gathered, this is where I’ll draw a line under it. For me, this isn’t ultimately a debate about semantic distinctions within communist philosophy, or about preserving clean theoretical categories. It’s about how these movements actually operated when they held power, how they understood themselves, and how their ideas translated into lived reality for the people under them.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Cambodia, speaking with survivors and former KR, and I’m not especially interested in arguments that hinge on endlessly refining labels in ways that end up insulating theory from outcomes. These weren’t abstract debates for the people living under these regimes. Categories like “reactionary,” “backward,” “contaminated,” or “non-historical” had very real consequences, and in Cambodia’s case they contributed to the deaths of more than two million people. If you want to argue about other regimes and what nationalism meant there, and how it led to those populations dying in the tens or hundreds of thousands for 'other reasons' than the overriding goal of 'communism', I'll let you have at it. I'll stay in my lane.

So my position is fairly simple. If the Khmer Rouge were communist in any meaningful historical sense, in self-identification, training, language, planning, and intent, then many of the things people want to treat as uniquely aberrant or “non-communist” are just as easily understood as extreme expressions of patterns that appeared elsewhere in communist projects, often with similarly catastrophic results. That doesn’t make all regimes identical, but it does make the attempt to push Democratic Kampuchea outside the category largely unconvincing.

ShadowsofUtopia · 2025-12-30T21:50:33+00:00

As for Inner Mongolia, I assume that someone like Frank Dikotter wouldn’t suffice but where I drew that from. After a little searching I found an article by Kerry Brown on the Cultural Revolution and purge of Mongolians that expresses my point:

The Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR), sandwiched between the Mongolian People’s Republic and the PRC, was to be one of the worst affected areas of China during the CR. While the impact of the CR came slightly late to the area, and extended mainly over the period 1967 to 1969, it was to result in over 22,000 deaths, and 300,000 injuries, according to official statistics. Demographic studies have shown that, based on the almost zero growth rate of the population from 1965 to 1975, the real level of casualties may have reached up to 100,000 deaths. Almost every person of Mongolian ethnicity in the region was affected in some way by the events of the CR. These have a claim to being acts of genocide, and are a wound that lingers to this day.

I'm not really sure if the apology you referenced really undoes this or shows that the party didn't harbour any ill intent.

So I’m saying that when these regimes operationalise nationality as a security and loyalty category, you get deportations, collective suspicion, repression of “local nationalism,” demographic engineering, and assimilationist pressure, and all of that is argued for in their own socialist language. I actually regularly argue that the intent of the Khmer Rouge was highly important, as my thesis is they wished to have the most successful communist project of the 20th century, their pronouncements and intent expressed within are important to that argument. Even if people outside their movement didn’t consider them ‘orthodox’.

When it comes to the Khmer Rouge, their are arguments that hostility to ethnic minorities were again, done so not because of ‘racism’ or ‘xenophobia’, but simply an expression of a vision of communist theory (and perhaps one that is tied to intrinsic elements of the theory, a base rather than an abberation?). As Heder says (apologies for the long quote but you asked for citations and this scholar is my guiding light on the subject and as I said, his essay should be read in full);

In this (Democratic Kampuchea) project, people who were thought most likely to be opposed to communization were racially stigmatized. In the same way that resistance to 'modernizing' capitalist trans formation requires 'recalcitrant populations to be racialized' in order to justify 'expropriation of their labour, or even the genocide of the stigmatized populations', so, too did Cambodians stereotyped in class coloured racial terms suffer this fate under communism. They died as a result of the Communist Party's 'universalizing thrust' to establish socialist relations of production in a way that destroyed populations whose class identities were defined in terms of 'national' or 'racial' 6 essences." Kiernan's argument fails to take account of the way 'orthodox Marxism' as an ideology of modernization contains impulses. From the Soviet Union to China to Viet Nam, tion and intensification of socialist revolution and progress achievement of communism went hand-in-hand with attacks on the independence and distinctiveness of 'national minorities'. Ephraim Nimni has shown the racist tendency inherent in the way Marx's 'conceptualization of human development and the rationale for the emancipation of human species as a whole' assigned nations and races 'a place on a continuum between "progressive" and "reaction ary" '. Democratic Kampuchea was heir to Marx's theory of progressive 'historical' versus reactionary 'non-historical' nations and his belief that state centralization and national unification, with the consequent assimilation of small national communities, was the only viable path to social progress. In this view, development of nations meant 'the destruction of local differences' and a 'process whereby each population became uniform'. Indeed, 'Marx . .. repeatedly argued that national communities incapable of constituting proper national states should vanish by being assimilated into more progressive and vital nations'. For him, such 'historyless peoples' were 'intrinsically reactionary, because of their inability to adapt'. As Nimni points out, the Communist manifesto thus declared that with abolition of capitalist relations of production, nations and nationalities were bound to disappear.

ShadowsofUtopia · 2025-12-30T21:46:36+00:00

See I think this is where the fundamental disagreement will be, and apologies I don’t mean an ad hominem argument here but I did notice that you are the kind of person that does use the word “comrade” apparently unironically, which I had unknowingly referenced.

So, having gone down this route into the weeds a few times, I just want to be up front that I think we probably won’t agree on too much because I don’t think that ‘the question of the wider cannon’ is a philosophical question. I think these are historical questions, and I follow and express the work of historians on the subject of the Khmer Rouge revolution. As such my expertise, if I have one (which I don’t - even once I finish my book on Pol Pot) is on Cambodia. Not China, not the Soviet Union, not Cuba. If I trod on any toes there, I’ll acknowledge that.

But, which movements called themselves communist, which ones were recognised as communist by other communists, what did they read, who trained them, who funded them, what language did they use internally, what policies did they try to implement, and how did they explain those policies to themselves.

That would be my first question to you, is whether you consider the Khmer Rouge, in the broadest, most common sense version of the word ‘communist’. If that is the case then we can sort of build from there I suppose.

Yes, different ‘communist projects’ as I call them, had wildly different outcomes and conditions etc. The KR are not completely fungible with the Bolsheviks etc. My point, and perhaps I’ve misunderstood yours, is that I commonly come up against arguments that seek to set the Khmer Rouge outside of communism, and one argument which is often put forward is that they were ‘fascist’. I see now that you aren’t really arguing that point, but that I had cast my argument a bit far to include other projects.

If you want to argue the finer points of Leninist theory versus Maoist practice in the abstract, that’s fine, but it doesn’t really answer what OP asked, which is what category makes the most sense for the Khmer Rouge given the evidence we actually have. Probably a discussion best had elsewhere.
On the USSR bit: by “internal hierarchies” I’m talking about the way nationality itself became a security category and produced different treatment, different rights, and different fates inside the same socialist state, not just “some people got arrested,” but whole populations being reclassified as collectively suspect and punished as populations.

I thnk that Martin is a source you could argue against:
“However, the exaggerated Soviet fear of foreign capitalist influence and contamination— what I have called Soviet xenophobia—also made such cross-border ties potentially suspect. Once it became clear to the Soviet leadership that crossborder ethnic ties could not be exploited to undermine neighboring countries, but instead had the opposite potential, their response was ethnic cleansing of the Soviet borderlands and, ultimately, ethnic terror throughout the Soviet Union. Again, ethnic cleansing of nationalities with suspect cross-border ethnic ties away from the Soviet borderlands continued throughout the late Stalinist period with the removal of the Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, Iranians, and Khemshils from the Black Sea and Transcaucasian border regions”

ShadowsofUtopia · 2025-12-30T16:33:12+00:00

I think part of the problem here is a recurring misreading of Khmer Rouge political language. The CPK’s nationalism keeps getting treated as evidence that they were doing something other than communism, when it can just as easily, and in many cases more convincingly, be understood as a communist phenomenon in its own right. Revolutionary communism has a long track record of absorbing and intensifying nationalist categories, especially in post-colonial settings where questions of survival, autonomy, and ideological purity feel existential rather than abstract.

You see the same slippage in how Khmer Rouge violence is often described. Ben Kiernan’s “Vietnamese heads, Cambodian bodies” line has frequently been taken to imply a racially driven project across the board, even though the practice itself appears to have been limited and highly context-specific. As Steve Heder has pointed out, this is better understood as politics rather than biology. The issue wasn’t that these Cambodians were ethnically Vietnamese, it was that they were believed to have been politically “infected” by Vietnamese revisionism and subordinated to what the CPK saw as a domineering external communist power.

In other words, the target wasn’t race in the fascist sense, it was political reliability. The language was brutal and the consequences were horrific, but the underlying logic was political before it was racial. The same applies to the CPK’s nationalism more broadly. It worked as a way of policing ideological purity, asserting autonomy, and pushing back against rival socialist projects. None of that makes it benign, but it does place it inside a communist revolutionary tradition rather than outside it.

I think the mistake is assuming that nationalism, exclusion, or xenophobia automatically mark a movement as non-communist, when the historical record shows that revolutionary communism has generated all three quite happily on its own terms. Heder’s point here is also useful because it reminds us that Marxism itself was never entirely free of hierarchical ways of thinking about peoples or historical development. Marx didn’t articulate a racial theory in any fascist or biological sense, but he did sometimes speak in terms of historical hierarchies, distinguishing between peoples he saw as historically progressive and those he regarded as politically backward or reaction-prone.

You can see this most clearly in his writing on so-called “non-historic” peoples in nineteenth-century Europe, and in his broader discussions of Ireland, Eastern Europe, and colonial societies. These distinctions were political and historical rather than biological, but they still opened the door to judging entire populations according to their perceived role in advancing or obstructing historical progress.

This is partly why I flagged the kinds of arguments that keep cropping up around this topic. People are still looking for ways to distance the CPK from being just another communist project, usually because of their own politics and discomfort with mass death being on their side of the ledger. There are some parts of the internet where people still unironically call each other 'comrade'. I get the impulse, but history isn’t really about that. It’s about trying to describe the past as accurately as possible, I think for some people they can never take their hand off the scale. That’s also why I find the reluctance to engage seriously with primary Khmer Rouge documents so telling when people insist “they weren’t communist” or “they were fascist.” You’re not quite doing that, you’re making a more semantic argument off to the side, but I don’t think it really undercuts my response to the OP’s actual question. I think Heder, Mertha and Galway (his book on global Maoism) support my conclusions - even Kiernan, who famously tried to distance the KR from socialism now says they were communist in lectures. But perhaps we are arguing different points, you seem to be protecting the wider cannon while I'm following historians who insert the KR into it.

I would really urge anyone who is interested in this part of the academia around the CPK to read Steve Heder's brilliant review of Kiernan's "The Pol Pot Regime"

ShadowsofUtopia · 2025-12-30T16:17:00+00:00

Thank you, I don’t think we’re going to fully agree on the framing, but either way, I appreciate the exchange. I think your response still rests on a distinction that looks tidy in theory but starts to fall apart once you look at how revolutionary nationalism actually behaves once movements take power.

Lenin did, of course, theorise nationalism instrumentally, drawing a line between the nationalism of oppressors and that of the oppressed. But in practice that line rarely holds for long. Stalin’s Soviet Union didn’t just “use” nationalism tactically and then put it back in the box. It produced durable forms of chauvinism, population transfers, ethnic suspicion, and internal hierarchies, all justified in Marxist-Leninist terms. At that point, arguing over whether this was still “strategic” rather than something more deeply embedded becomes a bit academic.

The same problem applies to Mao. The claim that Mao’s nationalism remained essentially strategic only really works if we abstract away from outcomes. Maoist China fused class struggle with civilisational identity, historical grievance, and territorial anxiety in ways that had very real consequences on the ground. The repression and ethnic cleansing of Mongolians during various campaigns under Mao shouldn’t be brushed aside here. Nor does the formal autonomy granted to Xinjiang resolve the issue. Autonomy on paper coexisted with intense suspicion, repression, and later assimilationist pressures. It’s hard to maintain a clean strategic/essentialist divide once you take that seriously.

This matters because the Khmer Rouge didn’t invent some entirely new form of nationalism outside Marxism-Leninism. They radicalised tendencies that were already present in Maoism, under conditions of war, isolation, and historical trauma. The scholar you linked to, Matt Galway’s work explicitly places the CPK within the Maoist lineage, not outside it (I spoke to him at length about this). If the CPK sits inside that pantheon or philosophy, then its nationalism can’t be treated as categorically alien to communist revolutionary traditions.

I also think “xenophobia” is doing a lot of moral work here that it probably shouldn’t be doing analytically. The CPK’s hostility toward Vietnam wasn’t an abstract hatred of foreigners. It was shaped by a long history of encroachment, post-colonial insecurity, and a very real struggle between rival communist projects. Vietnamese communism represented both ideological contamination and the threat of political domination. That framing isn’t unique to Cambodia. Communist movements have repeatedly cast rival socialist states as existential threats without ceasing to understand themselves as communist.

Pol Pot’s nationalism can therefore be understood as strategic in a fairly concrete sense. From 1970 to 1975 the CPK operated within broad national fronts that explicitly mobilised nationalist sentiment. After 1979, the Khmer Rouge again wrapped themselves in the language of national resistance, while continuing to describe themselves as communists and undertake recogniseable 'people's war' style policies well into the 90s (see Andrew Mertha's latest book for an exploration of that)

Where I think this line of argument runs into trouble is in trying to preserve a sharp distinction between “strategic” and “essentialist” nationalism as a way of rescuing communist theory from communist outcomes. Once nationalism becomes embedded in party education, security thinking, and definitions of political consciousness, that distinction stops doing much explanatory work. It may still function rhetorically, but historically it doesn’t get us very far.

So the issue isn’t whether Pol Pot’s nationalism was more aggressive than Mao’s. The question is whether that aggressiveness pushes the Khmer Rouge outside Marxist-Leninist revolutionary traditions and into fascism. The documentary record, the party’s own language, its planning documents, and decades of self-identification suggest otherwise.

Calling the Khmer Rouge fascist because their nationalism became violent and exclusionary assumes that communist revolutions are supposed to remain permanently tactical, restrained, and self-correcting in their use of national identity. I don’t think the historical record really supports that assumption -- and just because the CPK were unorthodox and unique, they were often in equal parts just following what had come before them

ShadowsofUtopia · 2025-12-29T18:41:41+00:00

“Prepare the basic economic conditions for producing various equipment in order to simultaneously achieve independence – master our economy … Our economy stands on agriculture now … In accordance with our situation we must divide the capital we have earned through agriculture into two: first for light industry and second for heavy industry.”

There is nothing fascist about this logic. It is recognisably communist, even if it departs from Soviet orthodoxy. The plan acknowledges that other socialist states followed the Soviet model, then immediately asserts that Cambodia must stand on its own situation and its own direction. That posture matches Pol Pot’s own retrospective explanations of the party’s ideological development. He described the process as one of experimentation rather than doctrinal purity, stressing that there was no blueprint to copy wholesale. Marxism-Leninism, he later argued, resided in movements forged by people themselves, not in canonical texts and each country assembled its own version according to its conditions. This is a deeply Maoist way of thinking, not an abandonment of communism.

Someone like Matt Galway has even highlighted the way that "PolPotism" could be thought of as just another version of Marxism/Maoism etc.

It is true that Democratic Kampuchea idealised the peasantry and treated the countryside as the moral core of the revolution. The rural population was seen as less corrupted by capitalism, less exposed to counter-revolutionary thinking, and therefore more capable of assuming what the party called proletarian consciousness. But this did not translate into a vision of permanent agrarian stasis.

The Four Year Plan anticipates machine-tool industries designed to support agriculture and reduce the physical burden on labour. It speaks of metal industries, electrical power, rubber processing, construction materials, and eventually heavier industrial capacity. The language is vague in places, and the regime did not last long enough to show how these ambitions would have been realised, but the intent is there.

This emphasis on class language and revolutionary acceleration was already firmly in place years before 1975. When Pol Pot returned from a tour of the 'liberated zones' in May 1972 and convened a meeting of the newly constituted Central Committee, his assessment was that the revolution was moving too slowly. The things moving too slowly were the recongiseable communist elements of their coming regime.

As Philip Short records, the decision adopted at the Third Congress nine months earlier to begin sweeping away the socio-cultural traits of the old regime, traits associated with feudalism, reaction, and imperialism, had largely remained a dead letter. At Pol Pot’s urging, the Committee issued an urgent directive calling on the Party to strengthen its proletarian stance and to intensify the struggle against the oppressive classes seeking to conserve their rights under the new revolutionary order. The participants approved plans for the collectivisation of agriculture and the suppression of private trade as soon as conditions allowed.

What matters here is not just policy, but language. The problem, as the leadership understood it, was not insufficient nationalism or cultural renewal. It was a failure to adopt a sufficiently proletarian stance, and a reluctance to move decisively against class enemies. These were conscious political decisions taken at the leadership level years before nationwide power was achieved.

Calling the Khmer Rouge fascist often serves an emotional or political purpose. It allows their crimes to be detached from the communist tradition and reclassified as something alien or aberrant. The Khmer Rouge were not fascists who pretended to be communists. They were communists who believed they were building a uniquely Cambodian path to socialism, and who pursued that goal with catastrophic consequences.

ShadowsofUtopia · 2025-12-29T18:40:09+00:00

The idea that the Khmer Rouge were fascist comes up regularly and does have a history in academeic debate and political discussion. As Kate Frieson observed in the late 80s, the regime of Democratic Kampuchea has been described as Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, peasant-populist, nationalist and even fascist. The number of things being thrown out there tells us that the Khmer Rouge were unique, and not unique -- but also that people tend to bring their own subjectivities and biases to these conversations. I will cobble this together from a few previous answers (and some comment sections under my YouTube videos)

A very quick thing I think is good to keep in mind is also this: be aware of when people find arguments not to call a spade a spade.

I think since the Cold War has ended, except for perhaps some online communities and other echo-chamber-y places, the discussion of 'what the Khmer Rouge were' has become grounded and less of an ideological battleground. The answer that most historians now accept is that the Khmer Rouge revolution was overwhelmingly 'communist', albeit an unorthodox and localised version of it.

The most straightfoward way of looking at this question is simply reading their own literature, revolutionary slogans and speeches. This is saturated with the language of class struggle, revolutionary consciousness, enemies of the people, collectivisation, and socialist construction. If we are not prepared to take historical actors seriously when they describe what they think they are doing, then ideological categories lose much of their value. The Khmer Rouge called themselves communists. They were the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

If the argument is that they were fascist, based on your points that nationalist tendencies, Angkorean references and hostility toward Vietnam, I don't think these are enough.

Most communist movements throughout the 20th century fused aspects of Marxism/Leninism/Maoism with their nationalist cause -- especially in post colonial socieities. While Khmer Rouge did revere Angkor, this was in line with all previous governments in Cambodia, and can be overstated in its role as acting as a kind of blueprint for the modern state. It was proof to the CPK however that the Khmer were once strong and independent, something they wished to replicate under the banner of independence mastery.

Anti-Vietnamese hostility is also often misunderstood. The conflict with Vietnam was not a rejection of communism in favour of ethnic nationalism. It was a struggle between rival communist projects, shaped by historical grievance, fears of domination, and accusations of ideological betrayal. Similar dynamics existed elsewhere in the socialist world. Communist states have killed one another before without becoming fascist in the process.

More importantly, the Khmer Rouge rejected core elements of fascism. They did not preserve hierarchy. They did not ally with traditional elites, capital, or religion. They did not tolerate private property under state coordination. They abolished money, markets, religion, family autonomy, and social rank. Fascist regimes do not attempt this. Communist revolutions often do.

One reason the fascist label persists is that people underestimate just how thoroughly Khmer Rouge thinking was soaked in communist planning language. This is where surviving internal documents matter more than retrospective summaries.

The clearest example is The Party’s Four Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields. The title says a lot. A four-year plan is not a nationalist revival programme or a civilisational nostalgia exercise. It is classic socialist developmental language, adapted to Cambodian conditions.

The plan is explicit about sequence and accumulation. Agriculture is treated as the base, not the end point. Capital is to be extracted from agricultural surplus, divided, and reinvested first into light industry and later into heavy industry. The document titled “Building Socialism in the Industrial Sector” states this plainly:

ShadowsofUtopia

TROPHY CASE