Why the difference? Why yet another instance of an eliminationist assault’s absence, especially given the Nazis’ unequaled readiness to practice eliminationist politics? The Nazis’ racism deemed German communists and socialists members of the master race, meaning that when cured of the putative poisonous influence of the Jews and of their communist ideological leaders, they would embrace Nazism and help build the Nazi-Germanic empire and future. As in almost every critical respect, here the Nazi leaders knew their people well, correctly expecting that legions of the political Left’s rank and file, sharing their racist views, would forsake their Marxism and willingly contribute to the Jews’ elimination and Europe’s conquest and subjugation.
The communist Khmer Rouge resembled the Germans in much of Europe by turning Cambodia into a gargantuan camp, though the Khmer Rouge exerted a thorough totalitarian penetration of social life that other regimes seeking total control only dream of, and to which the Nazis never aspired or came close to achieving. (For non-Jewish, non-gay, non-Gypsy Germans, the Nazis allowed a surprising degree of freedom.) The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis, designated a range of ideological enemies, considered, to various degrees, polluted racially and by foreign acculturation, and also differentially dangerous to the Khmer Rouge and the putatively pure Khmer (Cambodian) people. Even though the Khmer Rouge controlled all Cambodians equally, their eliminationist orientation, like that of the Germans, played itself out markedly differently with different groups.
The Khmer Rouge wanted to utterly purify the Khmer people according to their antimodern, racist, Marxist ideological amalgam, calling for primitive socialist equality and conformity. This accounts for their hatred of urban life and their intention that only racially pure Khmer live within Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge sought to reduce or destroy the country’s putative polluted essence by eliminating all people of non-Khmer races, religions, locales, and allegiance. Theirs was to be the most thoroughgoing and rapid eliminationist transformation yet. In September 1975, the Khmer Rouge leaders told Cambodia’s former ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk they wanted to outdo their role models, the communist Chinese: “We want to have our name in history as the ones who can reach total communism with one leap forward. So we have to be more extremist than Madame Mao Tse-tung and the Cultural Revolution leadership in China. We want to be known as the only communist party to communize a country without a step-by-stop policy, without going through socialism.”9 In 1976 the Khmer Rouge expressed similar aspirations and self-praise in their government’s newspaper, criticizing the Vietnamese communists as “too slow”: “The Khmer method has no need of numerous personnel. We’ve overturned the basket, and with it all the fruit it contained. From now on we will choose only the fruit that suit us perfectly. The Vietnamese have removed only the rotten fruit and this causes them to lose time.” On the radio, the Khmer Rouge broadcasted their guiding ideological maxims, including: “What is infected must be cut out,” and “What is too long must be shortened and made the right length.”10 As the Khmer Rouge wanted only people suiting them “perfectly,” the range and number of those infected or too long, needing to be cut out or shortened, was expansive.
The Khmer Rouge’s ideology held modern and urban life to be inauthentically Khmer. In their first act to overturn the entire fruit basket, within days of taking power, they began to eliminate people from cities, driving millions on death marches to inhospitable rural destinations. The Khmer Rouge, the modern world’s most extreme levelers, then subjected Cambodians to an ideologically driven brutal regimen expressing the radical eliminationist orientation that made Cambodia our time’s most murderous small country. Arn Yan, a survivor, explains, the Khmer Rouge’s “doctrine gave us no human rights, no sympathy, and no freedom to do anything.” The Khmer Rouge treated any failure to conform, however inadvertent or unavoidable, as a willful assault upon the regime. That is why, as Yan recalls, “sometimes we would make only a small mistake but they pointed us out to the killers and we would be killed.”11 Nevertheless, the Khmer Rouge’s lethality varied greatly for different Cambodian groups, flowing, as it did, from the leaders’ and their followers’ differing conceptions of those groups. This included their fundamentally differentiated conception and treatment of base people, also known as old people, those under the Khmer Rouge’s territorial control prior to their final military conquest of all Cambodia, whom the Khmer Rouge therefore favored, and of new people, those falling into the Khmer Rouge’s hands with the final victory, and therefore, only due to this small temporal difference, not an ethnic difference, deemed far less reliable. Under the Khmer Rouge, approximate death tolls and mortality figures were:12
Approximate Death Tolls Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979
This regime’s murderousness, like the Nazis’, was clearly differentiated and targeted according to its conception of the victims. Chhun Von explains that “the old people, they have more rights, they have more freedom, they have enough food to eat. They have a good doctor to treat them when they get sick, but the new people never. They treat the new people like animals.”13 The Khmer Rouge killed base (or old) people and new people at very different rates. The mortality rate among the new people was 80 percent greater. For the rural Khmer alone, the most privileged social category, the Khmer Rouge killed those deemed new at a two-thirds greater rate than those deemed old. And much testimony from survivors verifies that these differential numbers also reflected the Khmer Rouge perpetrators’ much greater harshness and brutality and outright murderousness toward the new people. Teeda Butt Mam, a survivor, conveys the Khmer Rouge’s mindset:The people on the Khmer Rouge death list were the group called the city people. They were the “new” people. These were any Cambodian men, women, girls, boys, and babies who did not live in their “liberated zones” before they won the war in 1975. Their crime was that they lived in the enemy’s zone, helping and supporting the enemy.
The city people were the enemy, and the list was long. Former soldiers, the police, the CIA and the KGB. Their crime was fighting in the civil war. The merchants, the capitalists, and the businessmen. Their crime was exploiting the poor. The rich farmers and the landlords. Their crime was exploiting the peasants. The intellectuals, the doctors, the lawyers, the monks, the teachers, and the civil servants. These people thought, and their memories were tainted by the evil Westerners. Students were getting education to exploit the poor. Former celebrities, the poets. These people carried bad memories of the old, corrupted Cambodia.
The list goes on and on. The rebellious, the kind-hearted, the brave, the clever, the individualists, the people who wore glasses, the literate, the popular, the complainers, the lazy, those with talent, those with trouble getting along with others, and those with soft hands. These people were corrupted and lived off the blood and sweat of the farmers and the poor.
Very few of us escaped these categories.14
No data capture the mortality rate of people the Khmer Rouge considered particularly westernized—the highly educated and professionals—especially ideologically polluted and dangerous. Yet much testimony indicates the perpetrators were particularly brutal and murderous toward them, targeting them initially for extermination.
The Khmer Rouge’s racism, wedded to its apocalyptic vision of Cambodia’s current situation and future, inspired them to adopt a near total eliminationist policy against non-Khmer races and people putatively bearing non-Khmer cultural sources. This was presaged in the regime’s ideological declaration that ethnic minorities, more than 15 percent of Cambodia, composed only 1 percent of the population—an error likely reflecting the Khmer Rouge’s racist and cultural eliminationist politics’ intent, rather than a wildly poor demographic estimate. Conceiving of people with skin lighter than the dark putative pure Khmer as corrupted, the Khmer Rouge sought to eliminate them. Moly Ly recalls that one day, “About fifty families were transferred to another district. . . . A few days later it was revealed by the local soldiers that these families had Vietnamese blood and for that reaso
n were put to death. I lost quite a few friends, most of them were Chinese Cambodians. The complexion of their skin was only a little lighter than mine.”15 This was one small moment in the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to eradicate ethnic Vietnamese Cambodians. Upon taking power they expelled 85 percent of them and then annihilated all remaining twenty thousand. By 1979 no ethnic Vietnamese remained alive in the country.
The Khmer Rouge’s eliminationist campaign included exterminating the Chams, an indigenous people, deemed doubly suspect due to their distinct ethnicity and Islamic faith. They expelled the Chams from their 113 villages, murdering 100,000 and sprinkling the remaining 150,000 in small groups around the country. They slaughtered the Chams’ leaders and elites, banned their “foreign language,” and prohibited Islam. One Cham peasant explains, “Some Cham villages completely disappeared; only two or three people remained. We were persecuted much more than Khmers.”16 They killed about 40 percent of other ethnic minorities, Chinese, Laotians, and Thais. They appear to have entirely obliterated one people, the Kola, numbering perhaps two thousand. They considered Buddhist monks the bearers of an alien religious encrustation upon Cambodians. It may be that only 3 percent of seventy thousand monks survived.
The Khmer Rouge’s murderousness and brutality varied regionally. On the ground, local perpetrators greatly affect targeted peoples’ fate. The Khmer Rouge leadership’s infighting for power and position also led to differential murderousness and some internal purges. Nevertheless, the overall and highly differentiated eliminationist assaults upon the different discrete groups is unmistakable, driven by the Khmer Rouge’s conception of humanity and of existing and desired Cambodian politics and society. They wanted to eliminate the categories of urban dwellers and urban life; indeed they seemed to want to eradicate urban life’s very notion, so they emptied the cities, towns, and even villages. They beheld the Vietnamese as the Khmers’ ancient foe to be totally eradicated, so they expelled most and slaughtered the rest. They especially targeted elites, including Khmers, for extermination. They exterminated non-Khmer religious bearers, both Buddhist and Islamic, almost completely.
The relationship between intent and action here is ironclad and unmistakable. Eerily reminiscent of the German leadership’s discussion at the Wannsee Conference of their already operational plans to exterminate European Jewry, Pol Pot, shortly after taking power, laid down the general contours of the Khmer Rouge’s eliminationist program at their five-day leadership meeting. Monks “had to be wiped out.” The Chams, as a putatively foreign and an Islamic people, had to be utterly eliminated as a people, with a large percentage slaughtered and the rest expelled, scattered, and repressed. The remaining Khmer, differentiated in Khmer Rouge thinking, needed their ranks radically thinned, albeit at a much lower rate, which amounted to this backward-looking Marxist-racist regime and its adherents murdering a still stunning 15 percent to 25 percent in less than five years. Had the hundred thousand or so Vietnamese the Khmer Rouge chose to eliminate through expulsion resisted and tried to stay in their homes, the Khmer Rouge certainly would have slaughtered every last one—just as they killed all the remaining Vietnamese—in which case they would have murdered not 20,000 but 120,000. This is, among our time’s many other instances, an unambiguous example of eliminationist means’ interchangeability, the perpetrators deeming expulsion and killing equivalent substitutes and solutions to the same problem. This again underscores that examining mass killing in isolation of other eliminationist acts fundamentally fails to specify the real political and social phenomenon, and inherently produces erroneous analyses and conclusions. Because the Khmer Rouge differentiated Cambodia’s people according to ascriptive and racist categories, they generally did not distinguish among men and women, or adults and children. To them, each person’s nature was principally determined not by his or her deeds or threats or by individual acculturation or stances but by the perpetrators’ social and political mapping of each person’s group membership. The Khmer Rouge conceived of westernized people, the racially impure, and others as “carriers of germs.” Their imputed corruption was infectious, an incurable, dangerous virus threatening everyone. Thus the Khmer Rouge leaders urged their followers to “cut down” and “uproot” not only those whose putative nature or actions earned them this fate, but also their children.17
Just as the peoples and groups a given eliminationist system’s perpetrators choose to target vary, and just as the perpetrators’ relative lethality toward different target groups varies, death rates also vary enormously from one eliminationist system to the next. Because mass annihilation and elimination are purposeful and discretionary political acts, such systems’ variable overall destructiveness needs to be explained rather than ignored, taken for granted as such systems’ natural feature, or treated as structural features of such systems, regimes, the international order, etc. Take five major eliminationist political systems oriented toward refashioning their domestic or regional worlds with a sustained eliminationist orientation and programs: communist China, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and Khmer Rouge. Although establishing a firm numerical basis for comparison is hard, because death tolls are imprecise and the adequate metric, owing to the vastly differently sized (and in some cases rapidly changing) populations under each regime’s control, is difficult to establish, some instructive conclusions can be drawn. Even if a higher estimate is correct that the Soviets killed on the order of 20 million people during their thirty-five years of mass murdering, the yearly average would be close to 600,000 people. If the lower 8.5 million estimate is correct, the yearly average would be 250,000. The communist Chinese killed on the order of 50 million during their twenty-six years of systematic mass murdering that coincided with Mao’s reign, so approximately 2 million a year. (This excludes the Chinese’s longer and annually less deadly eliminationist campaign in Tibet, which, if included, would substantially reduce the yearly average.) The Japanese annihilated on the order of 6 million people during their eight years of mass murdering, a yearly toll of 750,000 (a higher estimate of 10 million makes the yearly average 1.25 million). The Khmer Rouge killed by far the highest percentage of their (small) dominion’s people, roughly 20 percent, though the yearly total was less than these other regimes, about 400,000. The Germans killed on the order of 20 million people during their four years of systematic mass murdering, making them by far the most intensive mass murderers, at almost 5 million annually. Even if we date their systematic mass murdering from the war’s beginning in 1939, rather than the implementation of their coincident decision in 1941 to systematically slaughter the Jews and attack the Soviet Union, this still yields the highest yearly mass-murder rate at 3.3 million. The Germans’ extermination of the Jews, at 1.5 million per year, makes just this aspect of their mass murdering more annually annihilationist than the other regimes’ total mass murdering, except for that of the communist Chinese. The Germans’ murderousness of the Jews was so intensive, even before they had moved to their eliminationist assault’s explicit total exterminationist phase, that had the communist totalitarian regimes adopted that killing rate (the percentage of total inhabitants killed per year), they would have reached their actual victim totals much sooner. At the Germans’ killing rate (mainly through starvation) in the Warsaw Ghetto camp, which shortly after its establishment with about a half million Jews was about 1 percent per month, or more than 10 percent per year, the Soviets would have killed all their victims (depending on the estimate) in about half a year to one year, instead of thirty-five. The communist Chinese would have needed a little more than a half year, not a quarter century. Even the thoroughly murderous Khmer Rouge would have murdered all their victims in less than half the actual time.
Why did the Germans’ annual mass-murder rate exceed, indeed dwarf, the others’ already colossal rates?j Unlike that of the various communist murderers and the Japanese, the Germans’ creed was explicitly annihilationist . As a core matter of ideology and policy it called for the elimination, with a
lethal reflexiveness, of tens of millions (eventually probably hundreds of millions) of people. Unlike the communists, the Germans did not want to rehabilitate people they incorporated through conquest, because they grounded most of their victims’ undesirability in their imputed racial and biologically based inferiority and perniciousness. The Germans’ proactive plans to annihilate an itemized list of more than eleven million Jews, their official programs to slaughter those they deemed mentally ill and developmentally disabled, their general exterminationist drive against Sinti and Roma, their wanton murder of millions in Poland and the Soviet Union fundamentally differentiated them in two respects from the communists. First, when the Nazis and all those Germans following them surveyed the map of Europe and beyond, they saw peoples to be destroyed, violently subjugated, enslaved, or somehow eliminated. When the communists gazed upon their relevant maps, they did not particularly covet others’ territory or think it must be cleared of human impediments. They did not see peoples in all directions to be destroyed. But they did see people they had to transform, to fit their mold, which meant possibly sacrificing a substantial number for the greater good. Indeed, their Marxist social theory, whatever its substantial pathologies and inhumanity, sought positive social transformation through economic restructuring and change. They (except the Khmer Rouge) did not, as the Nazis did, study these maps with general murder in their eyes. The second difference followed from the first: killing’s motive and consequent manner. The communists—though not the Japanese—killed human beings in their understanding of humanity’s cause, envisioning a beneficent communist future for all humanity—thriving, having plenty, and living in freedom and harmony. This vision of humanity was an ideologically driven fantasia and therefore foundationally unreal and unrealizable, requiring inhumane means, with inhumane, indeed catastrophically inhumane results. But this is a far cry from the Germans’ annihilationist ethos and practice seeking to place one race above all others, to refashion all human society according to a racial biological, draconian cast and slave system, and to kill vast numbers practically for its own sake. Hence, the Germans’ far greater murderousness, its different quality.
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