by Rand Paul
NPR reported “that [the] huge harvest gave them away. Local officials figured out that the farmers had divided up the land, and word of what had happened in Xiaogang made its way up the Communist Party chain of command.”
The farmers worried that they would be executed, but they were lucky to have taken this risk just as Deng Xiaoping was coming to power. Deng and his lieutenants were deciding to allow a little Adam Smith to creep in and give a boost to the moribund socialism that had, by that time, killed millions of Chinese.1
On the one hand, it is a great relief to see the horrific socialism of Mao thaw enough to allow at least some version of private property and profit to exist. Yet it is an immeasurable calamity that tens of millions of Chinese had to die before the Chinese discovered the horrors that come when a government tries to enforce complete socialism. Let’s hope today’s American socialists will realize that violence is not an aberration but a necessary tool if you want a society made “equal” by redistribution of wealth and property.
Chapter 28
The Cure for Failed Socialism Is Always More Socialism
Pol Pot is now infamous as a mass murderer: the architect and executioner of the killing fields of Cambodia. But first and foremost, Pol Pot was a socialist. Before he created the persona Pol Pot, he was just Saloth Sar, the son of a well-to-do small farmer. The day Saloth Sar won a government scholarship to study in France, the fate of millions of Cambodians was sealed. In France, Saloth Sar became enamored with Marxism, visited socialist Yugoslavia, and joined the French Communist Party.1
When he returned to Cambodia, he began writing under the pseudonym Pol Pot, advocating for revolution and organizing a communist resistance. By 1960, Pol Pot had become a leader in the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party and renamed it the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea, which later became the Communist Party of Kampuchea.
Pol Pot’s Marxist education in France might have all been for naught if the Vietnam War had not come to Cambodia’s border. Pol Pot saw an opportunity and moved his operations to the northeast border with Vietnam to ally his revolution with the North Vietnamese communists.
The big breakthrough for recruitment came in 1969 when the Vietnam War arrived at the Cambodian border. There’s nothing like U.S. bombs dropping on your countrymen to encourage enlistment. The bombing continued for four years, with tens of thousands of Cambodians killed.
In addition to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, America backed a coup in 1970 by Lon Nol. Pol Pot allied with the deposed leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk and thousands of recruits flocked to Pol Pot and his communists.2
There is a foreign policy lesson here that the foreign policy swamp-dwellers in Washington, D.C., still fail to understand. The blowback from constant intervention in everybody’s civil war often leads to unintended consequences. Virtually every time the United States chooses sides in another country’s civil war, there is a backlash that encourages the growth and resistance of the other side. Not to mention that more often than not, the United States chooses to support “the lesser of two evils.”
Popular resistance to the U.S.-backed coup allowed the Khmer Rouge to grow strong enough that they laid siege to Phnom Penh and took over the capitol in 1975. Pol Pot gave himself the title “Brother Number One.” Within hours of the takeover of the capitol, the population was ordered into the countryside. It is estimated that over two million people were expelled from Phnom Penh alone. It’s likely that history has never seen, and hopefully will never see again, such a massive forced exodus.
The Khmer Rouge, like the French revolutionaries, even established their own calendar. The day they conquered Phnom Penh began “Year Zero.”3
Pol Pot then ambitiously went about creating “complete socialism” or complete abolition of private property. The Khmer Rouge instituted their socialism by banning access to world markets and abolishing money, all private property, all market exchange, and prices. They then expelled all urban dwellers to the countryside. Pol Pot’s goal was to avoid the food shortages that plagued communist Russia.
Vincent Cook describes Pol Pot’s attempt at pure socialism as “being the one Communist movement in history to actually attempt the full and consistent implementation of the ideals of Karl Marx.”4
The Khmer Rouge tried to put in place what Marx and Engels advocated for in The Communist Manifesto of 1848: “The theory of the Communists [that] may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”5
As Morgan O. Reynolds, a retired professor of economics at Texas A&M University, puts it, the Khmer Rouge not only strove for Communism in all its so-called glory, they seemed hell-bent on bringing Plato’s Republic to life in Cambodia. From Plato’s Republic:
. . . what has been said about the State and the government is not a dream, and although difficult not impossible . . . when true philosophers are born in the reigning family in a state, one or more of them, despising the honors of this present world which they deem mean and worthless . . . will begin by sending out into the country all the inhabitants of the city who are more than ten years old, and will take possession of their children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws, which will be such as we have described: and in this way the State and constitution of which we were speaking will soonest and most easily attain happiness, and the nation which has such a constitution will gain most.6
What made Pol Pot so dangerous is that when the economy collapsed, he drove ever harder toward socialism. When mass starvation broke out, he persevered unrelentingly in pursuit of total socialism. Where many communist regimes before him had tacitly accepted a little capitalism here and there, Pol Pot was uncompromising. He achieved, more than his predecessors, the true goal of abolishing all private property and he didn’t seem to mind if it took more than a few broken skulls.7
Of course, it didn’t work. Even after he killed more than a million “resisters,” starvation killed another million or more. Estimates are that the Khmer Rouge may have killed between 13 and 30 percent of the Cambodian population during Pol Pot’s regime.8
Not surprisingly, complete confiscation of property takes an extraordinary amount of force. No resistance to the collectivization of property was tolerated. Not only were property owners who resisted killed, but intellectuals, opposition leaders, and anyone of wealth was systematically eliminated.9
The massacres were not all of landowners resisting collectivization. As James Pierson reminds us, “Pol Pot and his comrades sought to follow the socialist example set by Mao—that is, to purge the socialist movement of impure elements, which resulted in the massacre of religious and national minorities, intellectuals, and those living in cities.”10
The killings were so numerous that bullets had to be conserved. The Khmer Rouge resorted to clubbing their victims to death.
Like Pol Pot, the other Khmer Rouge leaders were from well-off families. The leadership of the Khmer Rouge were educated in law and economics and like Pol Pot received at least some of their education in Paris during the 1950s. Marxist-communist ideals were not just slogans; the leadership authored essays espousing their socialism. As Reynolds points out, though, “Like Lenin and his fellow armchair intellectuals, none of the Cambodian philosopher-kings ever did manual labor for a living or managed any enterprise.”11
Choeung Ek served as one of the killing fields; 8,895 bodies were dumped in mass graves there.12
Choeung Ek is about an hour’s drive from Phnom Penh. Today there is a memorial there. Travel writer Elaine McArdle describes what lies “behind the gates of the once tranquil orchard” as a “mass grave for almost 20,000 men, women and children who fell victim to the Khmer Rouge regime and many of whom were tortured before their deaths.”
McArdle describes “the incredible sadness that surrounds the site. Visitors wander around in silence . . . tears streaming down their faces. Fragments of bones surface during heavy rain and rags of clothing still protrude from the ground.
”
In the center of Choeung Ek is a giant tree they call “the Killing Tree.” It is said that the Khmer Rouge bashed the heads of children against the tree to save ammunition. The children were “preventative killings” to prevent them from growing up to avenge their parents’ executions.
The memorial culminates at the Buddhist Stupa, where McArdle tells us, “thousands of skulls [are] arranged in order of age and sex . . . many of which display signs of trauma. It’s impossible not to stare into the empty sockets and wonder what tortures they suffered and what horrors they witnessed before their death.”13
It’s tempting to ask what if? Georgie Anne Geyer was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in the late 1960s covering Vietnam and Southeast Asia. She happened to interview Prince Norodom Sihanouk just before the Khmer Rouge took over.
She asked Sihanouk: “What are you going to do about the Cambodian students going to France?”
As Geyer remembers:
The quintessentially voluble Sihanouk looked very serious for a moment. Then he spoke slowly. “They are learning a strange kind of French Marxism, which they are mixing with our ancient Khmer mysticism,” he said. A pause. “I have now forbidden our young people from going to France to study.”
Still another pause. Then he looked me straight in the face, with a sad look that is etched in my memory, and added, “But it may be too late.”14
In 1997, when Pol Pot was finally turned over to international authorities, Geyer admitted that it had been too late. As Geyer put it: “The toxic Soviet European Marxist genie had been let out of the bottle to poison what had been a peaceful and prosperous Southeast Asian land. All the beautiful traditions of Cambodia’s national life soon gave way to the horrors committed by those students who went to France.”15
As they say, ideas have consequences and bad ideas can have disastrous consequences. Combine bad ideas, socialism, and U.S. intervention in Vietnam and Cambodia and you have a recipe for disaster. War especially rewards survival of the most brutal. When “the most brutal” also have received the messianic message of Marxism, you have a recipe for genocide.
As Geyer reports: “Under Pol Pot’s coldly fanatical, French Marxist–trained eye, his guerrillas mercilessly drove masses of Cambodians out of the cities. In that once-prosperous countryside I had known, upward of 1 million Cambodians were savagely put to death on ideologically correct collective farms. Officials, intellectuals, even people who merely wore glasses, were killed, usually by blows of hoes to the back of their head.”16
So massive were the killings that they required bureaucratic centers to process the executions. Experts believe Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh “processed” twenty thousand prisoners, many of whom were tortured and killed—but, as Geyer points out, “only after they were driven to the ‘confessions’ that Pol Pot so loved and pored over.”17
War selected for Pol Pot’s barbaric savagery, but it was the ideology he imbibed as a young communist in France that fueled the “complete socialism” of the killing fields. Scholars estimate between one and two million people were killed. A Yale University study had identified twenty thousand mass grave sites that according to their estimates indicate about 1.3 million executions.18
How could so much killing occur without the people coming together to resist? Solzhenitsyn explained in The Gulag Archipelago that for violence to become genocide it requires ideology:
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes. . . . That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. . . . Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.19
It’s hard not to wonder about what is lost when a generation is essentially exterminated. What alternate future could Cambodia have had if not for the “complete socialism” of Pol Pot? Geyer looks back nostalgically at Cambodia before Pol Pot when she writes: “There is a surfeit of guilt to go around for the destruction of that lovely little country. If the French colonialists had left Vietnam earlier and not held on to their overseas empire, the whole area could have had moderate leaders. If the United States had not gotten into Vietnam, and then not invaded Cambodia, Pol Pot would never have found the colonial excuse and the support for his movement. If, if, if . . .”20
One would have thought that at least the international community would have contemporaneously condemned the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. Instead, the United Nations General Assembly voted to allow the Khmer Rouge to retain its seat in the UN until 1993. But then again, the “Human Rights” Committee of the UN has historically been a rogues’ gallery of human rights violators.21
In the end, it wasn’t Cambodians who defeated Pol Pot but an invasion from his onetime ally, the Vietnamese. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge government in 1979, Pol Pot escaped to Thailand to live in exile for another eighteen years. He continued to insert himself into what was left of Khmer Rouge politics, including ordering the execution of his self-appointed replacement. Even the Khmer Rouge finally tired of him and handed him over to the international court, but not until 1997. He died, presumably from suicide, in custody.
As with Stalin or Hitler, the left wants to write off Pol Pot as a historical oddity unconnected to his underlying ideology of socialism.
Reynolds understands that the killing fields should not “be dismissed as crazy, fanatical, or insane and then quickly forgotten.”
Reynolds believes “close inspection reveals nothing illogical or irrational about the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, given their goals.” In fact, according to Reynolds,
[Their goals] were to completely replace the market economy with socialism. To be sure, it was much more determined and extreme than most socialist efforts, but this only makes the Cambodian experiment all the more essential to understand as an example of the pre-eminent issue of our age—socialism versus capitalism, collectivism versus individualism, death versus life. Originally, the word “socialism” was coined to express opposition to individualism. The brutal attempts of the Khmer Rouge and other communists to suppress all traces of individuality are not irrational but quite predictable and intelligible.22
Witnessing the killing fields of Cambodia, Vincent Cook writes, “It is not enough to say of Pol Pot, as Prince Sihanouk did: ‘Let him be dead. Now our nation will be very peaceful.’ We must also acknowledge that a Pol Pot–type passion for equality remains a threat to the peace and well-being of every nation even if the former dictator himself is dead. Rather than retreating into amnesia about the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, we should never forget that the killing fields of Cambodia will stand forever as a grotesque monument to egalitarianism, and take heed that those who preach the egalitarian gospel of envy are, whether they know it or not, apostles of Pol Pot.”23
Morgan O. Reynolds, writing at FEE, warns that in the killing fields, “the bones of millions of Cambodians suggest why living human beings will never reach socialism.” And, I might add, should never attempt such foolishness.24
Chapter 29
Poetry Can Be Dangerous Under Socialism
Joseph Stalin supposedly said a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
How dangerous was it to lampoon Stalin? Well, the poet Osip Mandelstam found out the hard way when he recited but didn’t even write down the following lines about Stalin:
His unwieldy fingers are greasy like worms.
His words ar
e as staunch as the weights made of lead.
Like roaches his whiskers lengthen in laugh.
And teasingly shine, his polished boot-flaps.
Stalin was not amused.
Mandelstam, one can only imagine, was busting a gut trying not to laugh as he recited his little satirical ditty to his friends and literary colleagues, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova.
They didn’t appear to enjoy his good humor as Mandelstam closed with:
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.1
As the story goes, fear consumed both Pasternak and Akhmatova. Pasternak reportedly replied to Mandelstam as he finished his satirical epigram to Stalin: “What you just read . . . is not poetry, it is suicide. You didn’t read it to me, I didn’t hear it, and I beg you not to read this to anyone.”2
Either the walls had “ears” or Mandelstam couldn’t resist reciting his little ditty to others. Whatever the details may have been, Mandelstam was arrested shortly thereafter in the spring of 1934.
In an extraordinary call, Stalin called Pasternak to get his opinion of the “crime.”
When Pasternak received the call from Stalin, he didn’t exactly prove himself a profile in courage. Stalin said of Mandelstam: “He’s a genius, he’s a genius, isn’t he?”
Pasternak avoided the question, saying, “But that’s not the point.”
“Then what is?” Stalin asked.
Pasternak suggested they meet to talk.
“About what?”
“Life and death,” he said.
Stalin hung up without replying.3