The below photograph might be of interest to a few in light of the previous post. A portrait of guerilla leader Son Ngoc Minh, carried in a procession of party (KPRP) militants in 1952. I offer my apologies to those who use small monitors, with that annoying scrolling you have to do, left and right.
{ 2 } Comments
Thank you. ’52 was before the thin democratic measures were imposed on Sihanouk by the French to meet the agreements on independence at Geneva. They were still fighting with those peasant rebels who had a certain bandit charisma. They and their followers later sought protection with the Prachea Chon. From looking elsewhere it appears Cardboard cut out figurehead Minh died in Peking while his Hanoi based comrades were killed or scattered by Pol Pot’s friends when the Khmer Rouge insurgency entered the stage of full war in their homeland. Trouble between the older and younger generations.
Known among peasants as the “party of the plough,” Pracheachon figure Keo Meas, close to Pol’s age, was liquidated in Democratic Kampuchea. Conflict between “old” and “young” wasn’t necessarily over clearly marked fault-lines or cracks. Influences and personalities overlapped.
On matters of disagreement over the correctness of Khmer Communist history, and similar to the above picture, here is Minh again, in a photo taken of a 1984 parade in Cambodia’s capital, celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Vietnamese liberation of Phnom Penh. Other than customary portraits of Marx and Lenin, Communist youth carry aloft likenesses of Ho Chi Minh and lastly Son Ngoc Minh. A display of legitimacy, ownership and influence which, for a Pol Potist, would evoke a reaction nothing less than shit-gripping in its intensity.
Post a Comment