Brad De Long wrote:
>
> No. You are being silly.
Indeed. You have given no evidence that you have read beyond the first paragraph of my post or anything else on Cambodia besides crude caricatures in Newsweek and usenet groups. I can go down to my neighborhood watering hole and have this conversation with a local lush. You discuss the appropriateness of an analogy of Cambodian reality with a fictional work and not the nature of that reality itself.
"Democratic Kampuchea" was much worse than
> anything Orwell could imagine when he wrote _Animal Farm_.
>
> Go back and read _Animal Farm_. In _Animal Farm_ the lies and the violence
> are all *functional*: they are ways that the party--excuse me, the
> pigs--cement and maintain their rule, divert attention away from their own
> corruption and incompetence, and so forth.
That is exactly the function the lies and violence had in "Democratic Kampuchea." The massacres were a result of the Phnom Penh based faction of the CPK trying to exercise absolute control over factions in the countryside. See Ben Kiernan *The Pol Pot Regime* p25-7, 92-6,96-101,235-7,436-9.
"The two most important themes in the history of the POl Pot regime are the race question and the struggle for central control...Khmer Rouge conceptions of race overshadowed that of class...this was neither a proletarian revolution that privileged the working class nor a peasant revolution that favored all farmers. Favors in Dk such as they were, were reserved for approved Khmers...the second theme of this book is the CPK Center's unceasing, and increasingly successful, struggle for top down domination." Kiernan p26-7
In short, DK (and Suharto, Bosnia etc) is what you get when you privilege race over class in identifying ethnicity with the state and when one faction of the party/state tries to impose absolute control over other factions.
Kiernan also argues that the Khmer Rouge disaster resulted from an inadequate understanding of historical materialism.
"Much of the horror of DK resulted from goals of true reactionaries: their attempts to turn back the clock. THe regime was confronted with the human and material forces of history, in an endeavor to destroy existing social groups (for instance those of foreign origin, education, or employment). Here Maoism proved a useful ideological tool, for it stresses the capacity of human will power to triumph over material conditions and and so reverse historical trends."
>
> In "Democratic Kampuchea," in Stalin's Russia, in Mao's China, in North
> Korea, there was little that was functional about the death and the terror.
> Does anyone think that the Soviet famine of the early 1930s or the Great
> Terror itself made the Party more secure?
It may have not made the party in toto more secure but the purges and the Ukrainian famine was certainly functional to Stalin's rule and his control *over* the party. I don't think its even controversial. I know Mark Jones would dispute the nature and role of the famine but probably not the role of the purges.(I hope I'm not putting words in Mark's mouth.)
Sam Pawlett