Pol Pot Journals

ប៉ុលពត កម្ពុជា ប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ

Monday, October 30, 2006

Casino Rouge

What do the Kampucheans do to commemorate Pol Pot and his movement. Now in the extremely tiny town of Anlong Veng, The last strong hold of the army of Democratic Kampuchea, there are tourist sites and now a full size casino.
Before the town had dirt roads and the buildings lived in by the former KD rulers, were simple cinderblock buildings. While the organization may be gone, some of its former members are still around and can remember their glory days.
According to The Cambodia Daily:

"A small dirt path snakes through the tall grass beyond Bin Saravuth's stall to Pol Pot's final resting place, which is marked with a Ministry of Tourism sign that reads "Pol Pot was cremated here."A low shelter of wood and corrugated metal has been built over a pile of dirt and ash where the body of Democratic Kampuchea's Brother No 1 apparently lay burning at his unceremonious cremation, days after his April 1998 death. Locals have also constructed a new wooden fence around the area, which earlier this month appeared freshly swept and clear of weeds and refuse.Sticks of incense and offerings of now-shriveled flowers decompose in front of a wooden shrine set up beside the cremation site evidence of remaining loyalty to the notorious leader.Apparently unaware of the upkeep at the site, Seang Sokheng, the district tourism director, said he has designs to build a fence around Pol Pot's resting place, which he was optimistic would help lure tourists."We plan to clear the grass and bush around Pol Pot's grave. It's quite overgrown and difficult for tourists to go there," he added."We think Pol Pot's grave is a potential destination for Anlong Veng," said Seang Sokheng, who also told of plans to offer boat rides to promote tourism at the swamp around Ta Mok's house."

And:

"During the Khmer Rouge, before integration, everybody was very disciplined and followed the Khmer Rouge rule: To not drink alcohol, no prostitution, no gambling," said Im Sopheap, a former rebel soldier and also now a deputy Anlong Veng district governor."Now Anlong Veng has been transformed into a liberal place," he said. "A casino is against the rule we used to follow. I don't understand why they're building it."

Apparently a lot of Kampucheans are trying to use Pol Pot as a tourist attraction and there seems to be some reverence for him by some of the locals. He wasn't hated by everyone, apparently.




Sunday, October 15, 2006

Dissalusionment with Democratic Kampuchea

Excerpts from: Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie Tales from the 1970s counter-culture: Drugs, sex, politics and rock and roll
By Steve Otto

Chapter Seventeen 1979- A changed world

“The Khmer revolution has no president. What we are trying to do has never been done before in history.”

- Ieng Sary, foreign minister of Democratic Kampuchea

The one thing I could always count on with Ian was a good political conversation, when he wasn’t trying to pick up women. On this particular winter day, I walked into the Bier Stube and found Ian and one of his friends talking about the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia, now called Kampuchea.

“I agree with Henry Kissinger,” Ian said. “The Vietnamese did not go into Cambodia for humanitarian reasons. They went in to take advantage of the instability of Pol Pot’s government and then install a regime that would benefit them.”

“I can agree with that,” I said.

This was one of the few times that I did agree with Ian. It was ironic because I had discussed this matter with Shokrollah about a week earlier and he also agreed with Ian and me. Of course we agreed for different reasons.

In December of 1978 Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea and overthrew its leaders. By January of 1979, they installed a new government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, headed by Heng Samrin. Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea government was over. His organization was pushed out into Thailand. He and his followers formed a guerrilla army of resistance. The Vietnamese kept troops and advisors in Kampuchea to help establish the new government.

My discussion with Ian reminded me of a conversation I had had with Shokrollah about the Khmer revolution of 1975. We had just left a Friends of the Iranian People’s meeting.

“I refused to just believe what a lot of reporters in the main-stream Western press are saying,” He said. “There may be some truth to those reports, but I won’t just take their word for it. And I don’t believe they are just real vicious as the reports say. That sounds like propaganda to me.”

I finally had to agree with him that the reports deserved some skepticism. The Western press was biased enough that if no one had been killed during that government, I seriously believe the press reports would have been almost the same. I had learned to be skeptical of foreign reporting. Shokrollah was even more so.

At first, I took the press reports for their face value; that Pol Pot was really mean. He killed a lot of people and banned just about anything a person, as myself, would like to do, such as listening to rock music. But after talking to Shokrollah, I began realizing that people from third world countries might see things differently. I decided to try to see the other side. I too began to question all the horror stories and noticed that certain leaders were singled out as brutal and evil who just happened to be opponents of US foreign policy. The Shah of Iran and Chile’s Pinochet were rarely, if ever, singled out for their torture and murder of political prisoners. Only opponents of US foreign policy were. Many foreign students told me Uganda’s Amin was brutal, but he also took a stand against imperialism. It was for that stand, they said, that Western journalists and politicians focused on his human rights abuses. ………….

After gaining an appreciation for Maoist philosophy, I was intrigued with the idea of a miniature Maoist revolution in Kampuchea. I began to notice the far-left tendencies of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, which the press called

the Khmer Rouge. It was the only other Maoist revolution to succeed in the world at that time. Kampuchea’s rulers eliminated money and private property. Democratic Kampuchea seemed fiercely independent, even though it got some military aid from China. For some time, I had mixed feelings about Pol Pot. On one hand, his movement seemed to be far to the left and yet there was no justification for those executions. I was also puzzled. I was so impressed with the philosophy of Mao, I couldn’t understand how a government that tried to imitate it could produce such a disaster. It was during the Cultural Revolution that Mao and Chiang Ching broke with Marx’s view that everything is based on economics. They insisted that ideas are more important than material things. That was a view that I agreed with. How could Kampuchea go so terribly wrong?

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the Kampuchea regime was not Maoist. It had an alliance with China but the CPK considered itself an ideological rival rather than having fraternal ties with the Chinese Communist Party. China simply needed Democratic Kampuchea to counter Vietnam’s expansion. The CPK’s views on Marxism were muddled and poorly developed. Most of the ideological documents of Pol Pot and his CPK were kept secret from all those outside the party, both inside and outside the country. They began leaking out of the country starting in 1979. Most of their ideology was summed up in two documents, Decisions of the Central Committee on a Variety of Questions and The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields, 1977 - 1980.

By 1979, both Shokrollah and I began to see that Democratic Kampuchea had some serious problems.

“They made a lot of mistakes,” Shokrollah said one night after our meeting. “They didn’t tolerate any of the nationalist bourgeoisie, which they may have needed in the short run. They should not have arrested Sihanouk, who

was progressive and had a popular following. The fact that they fell so fast showed they lacked popular support. But that was no excuse to invade the country and occupy it as Vietnam did.”

Saturday, October 14, 2006

The Indochina war spilled over into the streets of the USA



Most of the New Left grew out of the US involvement in Indochina. The following is an example

Here at home, the protest against the Vietnam War was beginning to wind down, since Nixon was withdrawing troops and ending the draft. However there were still our own radicals, such as the Weathermen or Weather Underground, as they called themselves, who were planting bombs by now.
A new group emerged, the Symbionese Liberation Army or SLA. They kidnapped Patty Hearst, the daughter of the famous newspaper mogal, William Randolph Hearst.
On August 21, 1973, they issued a Declaration of Revolutionary War & the Symbionese Program:
“The Symbionese Federation and The Symbionese Liberation Army is a united and federated grouping of members of different races and people and socialistic political parties of the oppressed people of The Fascist United States of America, who have under black and minority leadership formed and joined The Symbionese Federated Republic and have agreed to struggle together in behalf of all their people and races and political parties’ interest in the gaining of Freedom and Self Determination and Independence for all their people and races.”
They also robbed some banks and were trying to form an armed uprising. They didn’t last long, but it was clear that radicals had brought the war to the streets of America.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Another the Communist Party of Kampuchea song

The Society of the Future

Stand up all the slaves!

Stand up the wretched of the earth!

We suffer cruelly, we stifle, our chest is about to burst!

From today, life or death, no mailer!

Let us at once make a clean sweep of the past!

Crowds of slaves, stand up!

Tomorrow, our new regime will be restored:

We shall be masters of all the fruits of our labor!

Refrain

Now this is the final struggle:

Let us all band together and tomorrow

The Internationale will be the society of the future!

Let us all band together and tomorrow The Internationale will be the society of the future!