Why Did the Killing Fields Happen?

 

Friend Xerxes has rfecently returned from a trip to Cambodia, in which he visited the “Killing Fields.” He expresses deep puzzlement over how such brutality could have happened. He notes that the executioners were mostly young men, and credits it all to male aggression. Then he shifts to portraying the Khmer Rouge as “ultra-nationalists,” and draws parallels to Trump.

He oddly—or perhaps predictably—does not mention the name “Khmer Rouge.” That “rouge” is the elephant in the room that he is determined not to see. That isn’t garden-variety nationalism.

As for the executioners generally being young males, that can most easily be accounted for by the fact that the task of killing without guns required hard manual labour and physical strength. It follows that the executioners would be young men. Their own individual motivations were pretty much beside the point in any case: what motivated those giving the orders?

The Khmer Rouge were in practice nationalistic. But so was the Lon Nol regime they overthrew: nationalism cannot have been the essential ingredient in their secret sauce nor in their rise to power. They were Marxists, communists, Rouge, and their official ideology was actually, in contrast to the regime they replaced, internationalist.

The clue to what caused the mass killings was that, when they came to power, they declared it to be “year zero.” They were a millenarian movement. Millenarianism (Wikipedia): “the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which ‘all things will be changed.’" 

This is the heart of Marxism. True communism will be a time of total equality and plenty, and nobody will need to work or do anything they do not want to do. There will be no government, for the lion will lie down with the lamb. One can achieve heaven on earth by political action. But in order to do this, obviously, all evil on earth must be tracked down and completely eliminated. So the mass killings begin.

This is what motivated the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and no doubt most of their acolytes: the dream that they were achieving paradise. Here, now, imminently.

To do so, of course, everything about the current social, political, economic systems must be smashed; they are tainted with evil. They brought evil into the world. “All things will be changed.” Nobody must read. Statues and monuments must be pulled down. Money must be abolished; religion must be abolished; the family must be abolished. Any might reintroduce bad influences. 

Xenophobia, let alone nationalism, was therefore not the main impetus. The problem was that the outside world was, as yet, beyond Khmer Rouge government control, and so a source of possible bad influences.

So too Maoist China, or Stalinist Russia, or Kim’s North Korea, or Castro’s Cuba. In principle, these too were internationalist movements. But they had to draw an iron curtain around the territory they controlled to prevent evil influences. As with Cambodia, in China, Mao actually overthrew and supplanted the Nationalists.

Millenarianism in politics always leads to holocaust. Nazism was another millenarian movement. It was committed to creating the new race, the “superman,” and a “thousand-year reich.” This too would be a paradise on earth—for this new species. They too had to exclude and eliminate polluting elements. The French Revolution went down the same path, under the Jacobins. They too declared a year zero, a new age of reason. This led inevitably to fear and suppression of all dissent, of foreign influences, and to mass executions.

In all these cases, the longer term agenda was not nationalism, but world conquest by their millenarian ideology. 

This includes the Khmer Rouge. They actually started the war with Vietnam that ended in their downfall.

It is not Trump, nor the rising Euro-nationalists, but the modern “woke” left and the Eurocrats, that resemble the Khmer Rouge.