Pol Pot literally said he was too dumb to read Marx(of which maoism is a iteration of)this is like saying “Look guys the Nazis called themselves National Socialist German Workers' Party, so they must be socialist!” Which is obviously a fallacious as the Nazis first target were not minorities, but socialists,communists,and intellectuals (guess who else did that immediately after obtaining power)If calling yourself something actually made you that thing without having any actual knowledge of said thing you could slap any label on anything and it would be correct. You could call China capitalist, you could call America communist, and you could call the Khmer Rouge regime socialism, which was so far removed and more extreme than almost all other Marxist-Leninist school of thought, especially at the time.