“So what’re you saying, that your family isn’t white trash with a fear of the other?”

Nah mate, sort of a yellow colour, but goes darker when caught by the sun. I just turn red.

Yes, concerned parents protesting that local authorities had decided to secretly place convicted child sex offenders on social housing estates. Until uncovered by the tabloid press. Imagine, the brain-control waves being beamed out from Wapping. One of the photos taken at what appears to have been a peaceable protest, had an Asian family at the head of the crowd of families, which must have caused some annoyance to certain people. But let’s be straight here. If the inarticulate masses are unable to know what is best for themselves, being as they are, uneducated, narrow and full of irrational prejudices, then surely such people as misunderstood sex beasts could be accommodated in the nicer parts of town. The liberal middle class types living in these areas would be able to come up with ‘progressive’ solutions to the problem of what to do with known sex offenders in the wider public. Instead of dumping them on housing estates, without bothering to tell the residents.

Mrs Reid? She’s one of my favourite pieces of ‘meat.’ She’s going grey too, and looks nice with it, when she doesn’t colour her hair. All this talk of objectification reminds of that band formed out of Big Black, controversially named Rapeman. Some campus-style feminists (cushioned middle class ‘mummy and daddy wouldn’t buy me a pony’ types) would disrupt their gigs, heckling and so on. I was told that Steve Albini once retorted at one of these demos, when the band played in the UK, that he couldn’t make out what they were saying to him, asking one woman if she had a cock in her mouth.

The idea of a working class, without erroneously dividing it into differing sections of interest and novelty depending on skin colour is something which frightens white middle class people. And you know as well as I do that the UK, England especially has one of the highest interracial relationship rates in the world, most of these occurring among the uncouth masses. It’s higher up the social ladder that things become hideously white.

So,

“although I am indeed a white prole with rough hands, my partner isn’t white, and neither is my son.”

what’re you saying is that your family isn’t white trash with a fear of the other?

She is sexy though eh?

Oi Pineapple! Here’s some middle class media totty:

I agree with your comment. The Pol Pot group did not suddenly appear from the jungle to fulfil some ancient prophecy, or act like some weird abomination, independent of the conditions that helped create their political outlook. Bolshevism, or variations of it transmitted by the French Communist Party or ICP, may have provided a political ‘structure,’ of Party and organisation etc, but also aside from interpretations of Maoism – the peasantry as revolutionary agent through warfare, mental reform of the individual and associated efforts to close the social gap between intellectual and worker etc – you’re very much correct in home-grown factors importantly helping to shape what they became. And their turning to ultra-nationalism has to be viewed not only in the light of conflict and competition with the Vietnamese Communists, but placing it into the context of Sihanouk’s anti-democratic Sangkum era. There is still, as you’ve already said, some idea that Cambodia was some tranquil, harmonious place destroyed by a murderous Khmer Rouge watershed, with little thought given to understanding their origins. Nationalism is evident no matter the political colouration, the blunt Lon Nol with his mumbo-jumbo Neo-Khmerisme also holding close dear dreams of establishing some new Mon-Khmer empire, or at least to transform Cambodia into an important regional power. It is probably true that the DK leaders knew of the sophisticated irrigation system built by slave labour under the Angkor Kings, enabling up to three or more harvests per year, and which was a key to the success of the old Empire. But with their attempt to build their own country-wide irrigation system under centralised state control for the purposes of mass rice production, they didn’t want to take society backwards, but to surpass that more glorious Khmer past. Similar to what you put above, the significance of Angkor is misunderstood, instead of being the intellectual rallying point for a new nascent nationalism. After all, Thanh the moderniser’s first newspaper evoked the memory of Angkor in its title.

As for Kiernan’s Samlaut study, then you may be able to get hold of a copy by ordering it through the Monash University website. I think they still sell copies from their working papers series. If not, then if I get a decent scanner bought in the new year, then I can make a copy, convert into PDF format and send it to you.

Yes, you’re quite right – and this is the particular bit people always fail to understand: the Khmer Rouge were not seeking to create some kind of anti-intellectual agrarian utopia, and when even the BBC parrots this kind of ‘analysis’ it makes me want to bang my head against the nearest wall. As you said elsewhere, an individual’s reconfigurability for manual work – whether they were an intellectual or not – was ideologically significant to the KR, and they were suspicious of ‘foreign’ intellectual influence, but ultimately they were looking to drag the country out of the Stone Age (in which it had been kept by a combination of French regional policy, Sihanouk’s conception of the Cambodian peasantry’s ambitions, and lastly thousands of tons of American explosive) rather than send it back there. Moreover, they were attempting to do so without outside help, even at a terrible cost, and here’s where the unique mix of domestic influences, whether positive or repressive – Thanh, Sihanouk, Khmer conceptions of nationhood, etc etc – become most important.

I’m off to eat my tea now. Cottage Pie (sorry Christine), in fact.

But, because I’m working class I made it using one of them packet mixes.