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>> [Up to two million people are thought to have died under Pol Pot]
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> http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19770625.htm
This typical BBC (typical for most media) leaves out the deaths caused by the US bombardment leading to the rise of KR. US intelligence at the time (according to Michael Vickery) stated KR were responsible for no more than ~750K, most of which came from starvation, harsh conditions, overwork . They attribute 35K to executions. The majority of deaths wrapped into this number, ~1.2M, occurred during the US bombardment from 1970 to 1975, which was directed at the farming capacity Cambodia.
No doubt was PP was a monster, but the distortions are worse. Then Douglas Pike refers to PP as the "charasmatic leader of peasant revolution" in 1978 at Vietnam invaded to stop PP's madness.
And the BBC is the morning news staple at KPFT in Houston, a Pacifica station, right in drive time.
[WS:] I am not sure what your argument is. If you argue that BBC is an unreliable source on the subject, I suggest the book by one of its correspondents Philip Short _Pol Pot, the anatomy of a nightmare_. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Short's work is a systematic attempt to debunk two popular Western myths about Pol Pot - that he was a product of Communism or "Marxism - Leninism" and that he was an exceptional monster in Cambodian history. Short does a nice job trying to demonstrate a link between Pol Pot's rise to power and the US and China's policy to undermine Soviet and Vietnamese influences in Indochina. He claims that Pol Pot was a Chinese puppet, tacitly supported by the US, because of his staunchly anti-Vietnamese position.
Moreover, Short argues that Pol Pot's atrocities were not qualitatively different from the atrocities of his predecessors, Price Sihanouk and Lon Nol. He argues that brutal violence against enemies has been in fact deeply ingrained in the dynamics of the Khmer society.
As to Marxism Leninism - Short argues that Pol Pot's position was in fact its exact opposite. While M-L was built on the strength of the industrial proletariat - Pol Pot was staunchly opposed to industrialization, urbanization and proletariat, in favor of peasantry. It is the attempt to de-urbanize Cambodia, forcibly relocate its population to the country side and create a rural utopia that produced the heaviest loss of life - Short claims.
Furthermore, Short links Pol Pot's rural utopia to two intellectual sources - Theraweda Buddhism and western anti-intellectualism popular on the Left. Pol Pot studied in France and Eastern Europe in the 1950s, and was exposed to this form of anti-intellectualism, which according to Short's sources left a lasting impression on him.
In short, Short argues that Pol Pot was for the most part a local product of the dark side of the Khmer society - enabled by military and financial support from China and to lesser extent the US and Thailand, which tried to undermine Soviet influence in Indochina, and exonerated by Western leftist intellectuals of the populist and anti-intellectual persuasion.
Wojtek