David Chandler also stated, in testimony before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, that the “frequency of locally-led rebellions in the nineteenth century – against the Thai, the Vietnamese, the French and local officials suggests that Cambodian peasants were not as peaceable as their own mythology, reinforced by the French, would lead us to believe.”39
Violence by various rebel groups continued in rural areas during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The Khmer Rouge moved from politics to guerrilla war in 1968. The Sihanouk government’s actions during the Samlaut peasant rebellion I have already described. One scholar on Cambodia, Ben Kiernan, writes:
During 1968 in Kompong Cham, the Provincial Governor Nhiem Thein organized witch-hunts for suspected Communists. According to a witness, provincial officials were ordered to take part in beating innocent peasants to death. According to another witness, in Prey Totoeng (a village in Hu Nim’s former electoral district) two young children accused of being messengers for the guerrillas had their heads sawn off with palm fronds. Also in 1968, 40 schoolteachers accused of subversive activities were, on Sihanouk’s orders, bound hand and foot and thrown from a cliff at Bokor in Kampot.40
Kiernan further notes that in a May 1968 speech Sihanouk described what happened to captured communists thus: “I...had them roasted. When you roast a duck you normally eat it. But when we roasted these fellows, we had to feed them to the vultures. We had to do so to ensure our society.”41 Communist violence, which became rampant in occupied territories after 1970, was also increasing: in mid-1969, communists publicly executed government-appointed officials in five villages.
Vickery points out that peasant revolutions have often been extremely violent and cites the examples of Spain, Russia, and Vietnam.42 He means to show that the excesses of Pol Pot were results of a Cambodian tradition of violence and “poor-peasant” frustration, rather than Marxism-Leninism.43 However, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and some of the practices of communist countries also contributed: they influenced Cambodian communist ideology and offered models for action. These models included Stalin’s brutal collectivization of the peasantry and his later purges, the early Yugoslav purges, and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China.
Experiential and intellectual sources of ideology and fanaticism
Out of these cultural roots, combined with personal experience, members of the Pol Pot group developed their destructive ideology. For example, their deep-seated view of Vietnam as hereditary enemy may have been confirmed when Vietnam, in the late 1960s, not wanting to antagonize Sihanouk, refused material help to the Cambodian communists. In fact, when the Cambodian communists began to arm themselves in 1967-68, North Vietnam discouraged them. This was frequently cited after 1975 as evidence of North Vietnamese ill will. Although the Vietnamese provided essential military help after Lon Nol came to power, the past was not forgotten. The hatred of North Vietnam grew with the Paris peace accord of January 27, 1973, which ended the war between the United States and North Vietnam. The Khmer communists saw it as a sellout and refused to be part of it. The U.S. bombers, called off Vietnamese targets, concentrated their bombing on the Khmer communists. The Khmer Rouge ordered the Vietcong and Vietminh out of the country.
There were other reasons for mistrust of all outsiders, even communists. In order to maintain friendly relations with Sihanouk, China provided his government with military equipment that was used against the Khmer Rouge. Even the Soviet Union sold Sihanouk arms. It seemed that the whole world, communists and imperialists, were enemies of the Khmer Rouge. In addition, Pol Pot and his associates were victims of brutal repression by the supposedly democratic government of Sihanouk’s Cambodia. Being forced to live in the forests was traditionally regarded as a disgrace, and this may have been another source of frustration and anger.44
The Khmer Rouge ideology also had intellectual sources, some of which are traced by Craig Etcheson.45 The writings of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Lin Piao, and Mao Tse-tung had led the Pol Pot group to accept the need for a communist revolution. Lenin and others convinced them that a vanguard party could create a revolution that “leaped” the stage of mature capitalism originally described by Marx as a prerequisite for communist revolution. Mao persuaded them that a people’s war was necessary to crush such “national-democratic” structures of oppression as police, courts, labor unions, myths, and religion. Soviet writings convinced them that socialism could evolve in one country before the emergence of a unified global communism.
All members of the central group led by Pol Pot had been students in Paris together and members of the Stalinist French Communist Party and communist study groups. They continued to work together, which created many opportunities to influence each other and evolve a coherent ideology. Etcheson argues that they must have been influenced by the thinking of French revolutionaries. Robespierre led the Reign of Terror with the maxim that a revolution has no constant laws but must adjust to changing circumstances. A group of radical leftists who called themselves the Conspiracy of Equals published a manifesto in 1796 asserting the principle that the revolutionary end justifies all means. The ideology of the Pol Pot groups seems to have contained all these ideas, although their sources are necessarily conjectural.
Vickery points to a source closer to home, the thinking of Son Ngoc Thanh.46 This complex man was an anticolonialist enemy of the French, a collaborator of the Japanese during their brief occupation of Cambodia, and probably a CIA collaborator while he was opposing Sihanouk from the
