This, readers (and there are quite a few), will be the last post until we’re into the new year, and so far I think I’ve got enough encouragement to carry on with this small project, or historical hobby, in my spare time. I think it was a reviewer of Ben Kiernan’s comprehensive world study of genocide, Blood and Soil, who remarked that given his grim area of specialism, when attempting to strike up intelligent conversation with an interested member of the opposite sex, he would be deemed a sicko at parties. Alas, I’m not a party person, whether it be the Indochinese Communist Party, Vietnam Workers’ Party, or the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Nor do I possess Kiernan’s experitise or own a jacket with leather elbow patches that academics of a certain age seem to like wearing. I’m in a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, but feel unsure as to whether or not she’s been recently feigning interest … Err, in this blog of course. So, The Eyes of the Pineapple is sort of like a bad tribute band, playing covers in a less than lively pub. The previous incarnation of this site, which lasted for nearly a year, wasn’t so ‘successful’ (dare I use that word even now?) for I misunderstood the more appropriate use of the blog format (bloody young ‘uns having to point this out to me elsewhere); hence my earlier indecision over whether to carry on as a blog, or create a small ‘conventional’ website instead. Let’s face it, the content found here is very niche indeed, but over the last three months, my thus far eleven posts are actually being read by people. Or they’re just watching the videos. But, that is not to mention the many comments that have been left here, meaning some rather good discussion has been had on the themes touched upon in the various postings. Which is also good for the reason that I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about Khmer Communist ambitions regarding modernity.
So there will be future posts; or to be charitable, reheated dishes of history written by other people.
In a pre-emptive action, to prevent the possibility of any more stuffed mailbags blocking the doors of Pineapple HQ, here’s a little explanation of this blog’s address: Padevat.
Some quotes from Serge Thion’s revised paper presented at a 1981 seminar held at Chiangmai, Thailand, where learned beards and leather elbow patches held sway on the possible reasons for why things went pear-shaped in Kampuchea. Called The Cambodian Idea of Revolution:
In pre-colonial Cambodia, as in most traditional polities, the concept of revolution as the replacement of a ruling social stratum by another, was non-existent. But if we take the word in its old European usage, i.e. the violent replacement of a ruler, or a dynasty, by another one, then revolutions did occur. Slight or slow social changes may have followed them, but the distribution of social power remained basically the same.
In Cambodia, there are two sources of the idea of revolution, namely the French school syllabus and the international Communist movement. The two are not unrelated.
Yes, I hear you mutter, but what’s that got to do with those people, you know, nutters dressed in black pyjamas? Well, not only were they armed with Russian or Chinese-made Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, they had a peculiar take (fully understood or otherwise) on Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s contribution of voluntarism to revolutionary thinking of the Marxist sort. On how to go about making a twentieth-century socialist revolution on social terrain far removed from what a transition to ‘socialism’ could be deemed as being feasible by a bloke with a big beard and a drink problem who lived in the nineteenth-century. Something which, in part, suggests the origins of people like Salot Sar’s political thinking, is their superimposing what is quoted below onto the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary model, or its later Asian ‘Maoist’ variant, but minus any critiques of it formed by other competing revolutionary currents coming from the working class movements of Europe — the left communists, ‘workerists,’ anarchists of the syndicalist variety etc. Methinks there has been too much use of the suffixes ism and ist there. The mark of a pseud. The Bolshevist (sorry) model, historically unreceptive in central and western parts of Europe being particularly attractive to colonial ‘national liberation’ leaders, in parts of the world where it has proved to be a path to some form of modern change, with also unpleasant results.
The French were very slow in establishing an original educational system in Cambodia. The first French school, in the 1880s “catered chiefly for Chinese and Vietnamese children.” In 1905 probably no more than 500 Khmer children were attending protectorate schools. A Lycee was not established in Phnom Penh until the 1930s, but a handful of young aristocrats, like Sihanouk, generally was sent to Saigon or Hanoi to attend a lycee. Under the centralized French educational system, all pupils, whether in Phnom Penh or any French town, were expected to master the same knowledge. History was taught with no adaptation to local conditions, so that future citizens and colonial subjects alike would identify with French history and with French political values. Since 1870, in the republican education system, the 1789 revolution has appeared as a central event, not only in French, but in world history. It is hailed as the destruction of an archevil ancien regime and the first victory of a universal bourgeosie, representative of the whole population. Every nation is supposed to go through such a redeeming experience. The most subversive ideas, figures and groups are carefully erased from the official picture, so as to make this troubled period more an object of reverence than a source of inspiration.
But never mind imported French colonial arrogance or Russian inspiration. Nor Mao’s blank sheet of paper upon which ‘the most beautiful pictures’ can be painted; what about the local meaning of the word ‘revolution’?
Even before World War II, the very word “revolution” existed in political language, although I am not able to say when it first crept into Cambodia usage. The Khmer word padiwat is derived, as is its Thai equivalent, from Pali pattivattam. The Dictionary of the Pali Language, by R.C. Childers (London, fourth printing, 1909) shows that pati means “towards, back in return, against” and vattam means “going on, continuance, succession,” also “a circle, region, realm,” as in samsaravattam, “revolution or realm of transmigrations.” The general meaning of “moving against,” implying also a circular motion, was then an apt translation, in several Southeast Asian languages, of the Latin “revolution.” It can safely be assumed that this Pali word was first introduced into modern political speech in countries other than Cambodia. Thailand, with the birth of an indigenous CP in the thirties, is a most likely place. The 1932 coup which established both military power and constitutional monarchy was also a padiwat, and many military coups since then have been named padiwat.
So, there you have it.
Lastly, on my list of gifts I want from Father Christmas this year, is the personal account of life under the DK regime, written by an ethnic Chinese Cambodian ‘old-society’ engineer named Ping Ling. It’s called Cambodia: 1,360 Days! Apparently never published, it’s limited to a few copies in manuscript form. If one can’t arrive by reindeer, or FC’s little helpers can’t steal a copy from someone’s bookshelf or storage box, then I’d be willing to part with a considerable amount of cash for it. Thanks in advance. It would be a big improvement on last year. As well as smellies, I received twenty Lambert & Butler.
Above scanned picture taken from the Kampuchean Communist Party journal Tung Padevat (Revolutionary Flags).
{ 35 } Comments
Not that fat man who’s got an unhealthy interest in children. I can imagine you in some little archive room, ‘Pineapple’s Cupboard,’ compiling old, dusty Commie publications. Fucking nerd.
Well, I’ll take that as a compliment. And I’ve got two interesting and little-known facts for you. In 1968, the DDR’s ruling Socialist Unity Party’s theoretical journal gave mention to the Khmer Rouge insurgency, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and gave the year of the Khmer Party’s founding as being … 1960. Perhaps to the ire of the North Vietnamese, who were dispatching their own Hanoi-based Khmer cadres to the Cambodian maquis. After, of course, they’d been handed copies of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder to batter their comrades around the head with.
In Sheffield, England, back in the 1980s, (not sure of the exact year, however), a social worker and closet homosexual lied to his wife about ‘working late’ one night. He arrived home with a bloodied head, and told his concerned other half that he’d been attacked by one of his clients. But he’d really been out cottaging, and got battered by a wrench-wielding bloke in a public lavatory.
LMAO TSE-TUNG at the last bit.
I must admit your dilettantist historical efforts are interesting but a little bit weird at the same time. You still going to Leeds for that Russian thingy then?
Not sure. I got in touch with a lecturer, but there’s always the balance between earning and learning. As I’ve commented before, a small ball of humanity is taking up time and funds. I’ll see. And ‘weird’? You haven’t seen anything yet. I’ve got a growing pile of old ‘Commie’ publications and bumph: copies of Peking Review, pamphlets, discoloured journals and the like. Just need a scanner that works properly and then I’ll share them with you. Oh Advanced Book Exchange! A few search terms, a few clicks and then hundreds of sellers. One man’s dull is another man’s technicolour. I’ve got a vinyl-jacketed Little Red Book going spare if you want one. Lin Biao-ised rote learning in the Stalinist vulgate. You can’t beat it.
I think everything’s gone very well so far, and it’s timely as well.
I was looking at the BBC website the other day and noticed that they’d devoted a small piece to Khieu Samphan being charged with genocide by the current tribunal. An infobox, of the kind beloved of news organisations, helpfully informed me that the Khmer Rouge was a “Maoist regime” and that it made “a bid to create [an] agrarian utopia”. There was more half-baked shite on other pages, in case you wanted some ‘background’.
It’s this kind of ‘quality’ reporting that makes a site like this more necessary than ever.
Well you’re the best contributor here so far. You know your stuff. I miss our Cambodian visitor Tong as well. Said he had things to do but would be back though. I’d like to know a bit more about him. I think he received his higher education in the Soviet Union, so I’m guessing he’s perhaps of a certain age, i.e. an old chap who was fortunate enough to reap the rewards of Sihanouk’s friendly foreign policy towards the Communist world bloc (and I only say this because he seems to dislike the French) . Or, alternatively, he’s a little younger and went to Russia for his education during the isolated years of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea.
In the age of t’internet, it can be almost gob-smackingly stupid how people employed by ‘respected’ not to mention ‘professional’ news organisations can just trawl through places like Wikipedia for their background info when writing up on subjects. I haven’t had the benefit of some journalists formal ‘education’ either. I’m not sure if it’s still up on the site, but the BBC at least used to display what was thought to be the CPK flag, but which is in fact an inaccurate version of the Monatio flag. Talk about lazy. The Maoist bit is sort of correct, but ultra-Maoist KR leanings were more to do with the moral tendency regarding attempts to reshape the collective consciousness of the populace and forging people anew by way of working elan. And the description of DK being a utopia is lazy too, because as most people can grasp with a little background reading, Leninist-style planned economies can transform countries into industrialised, relatively modern nation-states. The Khmer Communists didn’t get past first base, however, with an accompanying not to mention horrific loss of life. Agrarian? Duh, wrong again. Aiming for the modernisation of agriculture is much more apt. Of course you’re going to base most, if not all, industrial development on agriculture if your country is mostly, well, agricultural in its output. And Khieu Samphan’s earlier reformist, rather than revolutionary, doctoral analysis called for the above.
Yep, regarding the silly flag, it’s still archived on the site. Whoever put that together seems to have a “dark and mysterious” understanding of the Khmer Rouge.
Yes, it’s always interesting to get the Cambodian perspective on things – the conflicts in SE Asia in general, but most particularly the Cambodian civil war and its aftermath, are particularly notable for being entirely subject to Western historiography. Few academics, and even fewer journalists, have asked the Cambodian (or Kampuchean, for that matter) people about their experiences; fewer still have asked them to write about it, with the exception of a few accounts packaged as ‘misery memoirs’ in more recent years, and certainly there’s very little discussion of actual politics. The problem goes back beyond DK, of course – our source for much of the information on the Sangkum years is, disturbingly, Sihanouk himself. the rest is just filling in blanks by lazy foreign correspondents.
I actually thinkthe source for the whole ‘agrarian utopia’ trope might have its roots partly in PRK propaganda, trying to portray their predecessors as mutant barely-communist heretics (as opposed to the shiny, forward looking PRK) and partly in Sihanouk and the French’s earlier depictions of Cambodia as just that – it remains a fact that for a century and more, various rulers did try and keep Cambodia in the middle ages, and what’s more put out the story that it was just the way the average Cambodian peasant wanted it to be.
Thinking about this Maoism business, there’s more I missed out admittedly. Earlier I was referring to the DK period only, but I suppose where it comes in before Communist-rule is the thin layer of outsider intellectuals, rejected by the traditional political system, then coming into contact with the mass of the peasantry, acting as a substitution for a vanguard working class. Although the real proles in the Cambodian siltation instead of being cultivated were seen as just another decadent formation occurring in the hated towns. This idea of those coming from the exploiting classes, but without power, in a way committing suicide, shedding their old class background to be then absorbed by the peasantry they had assumed leadership of. So class background rather than economic status becomes very important. The backgrounds of those differing from the revolutionary agent (the peasants) seen as a possible, and feared, bridgehead for the re-establishment of the old order. Hence the cultural or physical liquidation in the DK years of what Angkar viewed as non-poor peasant. Promoting people with the ‘correct’ background regardless of ability and so on.
On to the agrarian utopian label lazily applied to the Khmer Communists. The origin of such baloney might be found in how DK was interpreted by those outside the Communist world; a view formed from the mixture of 1) a limited understanding of the rural and peasant component of the revolution, but being aware of its importance, with 2) the proud and perhaps impudent claims made by Pol Pot front men that their own brand of revolutionary ardour could allow them to simply jump the necessary social phases, seen as a must in more orthodox thinking. A confidence perhaps originating in the accelerated process of radical organisation within their forced cooperative system during the war years. But not on course to produce instant communism when the war was over, however. Their own logic, as difficult as it is to fathom, teeming with contradictions, wouldn’t allow it. The Khmer Communists had to appraise the situation without openly admitting they were failing in the above, when during their very own development plan it was stated there were leading sectors of their cooperative system, meaning cooperatives more advanced than others, beyond those just producing a rice surplus. They were still following a (simplified) ‘Leninist’ logic towards the completion of a transition phase called ‘socialism.’
I think you’re a little wrong when it comes to academics, although correct about hacks. The likes of Kiernan, Vickery and Thion have made extensive use of ordinary Cambodian experience in order to find some clarity regarding the Kampuchean Revolution and its aftermath. Kiernan and Vickery interviewed many Cambodians who lived in the old Thai border camps. They included former Party cadres and soldiers, to ordinary refugees. The latter were largely those who were marked as ‘depositees’ in a burgeoning society, which had in its interim period before a supposedly new contradiction free future, artificial social divisions created by the DK leaders themselves. Also included with them were the other favoured ‘base’ villagers, a significant portion of which fled the invading Vietnamese army with the disarrayed RAK forces. And during the war, a younger and sunburnt Thion managed to wander over the battle fronts into the liberated areas during, I think, 1972, where he spoke with Khmer Rouge soldiers. But of course you’re right about Western dominance over writing the history of the region.
As for the French in earlier times, they probably just saw more advantages in ‘their’ proper colony of Cochin-China than Cambodia, and so wanted to connect some of Cambodia’s limited agricultural promise (Cambodia’s rice yields have been among the poorest in the region) to Saigon. They also found utility in the well-established mandarin tradition when importing Vietnamese officials to help administrate what the dark country bumpkins were deemed incapable of doing. Medieval Cambodia would have been of course Angkor… Although I know you were just using ‘Middle Ages’ as a divergent figure of speech. The centuries-later French presence saw a town-based bureaucratic elite, centred on the royal court and connected officials at the village level, draining the countryside through taxation and peasant indebtedness. Something the Khmer Communists (or a section of them) either misunderstood in their analysis, or just conveniently ignored, so as to fit it into their rigid, easy as A B C Soviet-style schema of class contradictions.
Lastly, and ironically, the ruined country (as in major infrastructural damage) could have opened up a path towards a ‘primitive communism’ for the Pol Potists to follow, had they chosen to. But they were modernisers, after all.
Yeah, it’s noteable that the very early wave of radicals in Cambodian politics were, as you put it, primarily ‘outsider intellectuals’ in the absence of any genuine Khmer working class . Some of them came right from the top of the strata: the founder of the Democratic Party was a Sisowath, albeit a card-carrying member of the French communist party. Kiernan makes the point at some length that it was the predominantly Indic, high-culture frame of reference of these early radicals that gained a hold in the KR, rather than the demotic culture of Cambodia (which, ironically enough, probably affected the character of the Khmer Republic in some ways more than that of Democratic Kampuchea, for all the latter’s emphasis on the rural peasantry). As for the poor old ‘working class’, I suppose that, as well as the fact that the theorists of Democratic Kampuchea mistrusted anything emanating from the old urban economic systems, there was the complicating issue that a lot of the urban working class were actually Vietnamese – another legacy of the French division of Indo-China.
Anyway, yes, the agrarian utopia thing. I think there are a number of sources feeding into the trope, but as you say a lazy interpretation of what DK’s public statements actually meant is probably at the root of it. Statements such as “with rice we can have everything” (assuming that was actually said at any point) are very easy to cast in this kind of light if you
don’t realise that “everything”, in this context, equals “a functioning modern society in thirty years”. Look at that film you posted a few weeks back: sure, there are buffalo and hand tools, but there are also trains, cars and road rollers.
As you said, a few academics have looked into this in a lot more detail, but it’s been left to the hacks for the most part. I hadn’t heard about Thion managing to interview those on the other side of lines in 1972, though…I assumed that everyone was too terrified of the KR’s reputation at that point to even consider it.
The “first we have rice, then we can have everything” is from, I think, Pol Pot himself, part of his 1977 speech, where he talked about the pressing need to improve the food situation, and then expand rice production, through infrastructure development, allowing other sectors of the economy to eventually develop too. Handicrafts, light industry, cultural spheres such as schooling and so forth.
There’s an interesting Monash working paper named Brahmin and Mandarin, exploring differences between the Khmer and Vietnamese Communists, by looking into historic cultural influences which possibly shaped their later political outlooks. There is the argument elsewhere that the education of Khmer people (except for the kind imported by the French) was imbued with a rote-learning aspect originating in formal Buddhist teaching in a partially literate society, perhaps shedding light on why the Khmer Communists simplified their politics into sets of strict ethical rules to be applied rigidly. Although this is an area which, admittedly, I’m not too hot on commenting about.
There were home-grown proles in Cambodia, but the more ‘advanced’ were in fact Vietnamese, yes. A product of the better economic and corresponding social development occurring in the French colony next door. These proles were brought in to work Cambodia’s rubber plantations (like those sent to work down the tin mines of Laos), and if politically motivated towards the left, supported the North Vietnamese, or NLF in the south.
I’ll have to check references, regarding the Thion bit I mentioned earlier, to see if I’ve mixed up people.
Ah, the only reference I have found so far, regarding Thion’s visit (or visits) to Khmer Rouge- controlled territory, is in Short’s Anatomy. He mentions Lon Nol’s intelligence service reporting on Serge Thion making a trip to the Special Zone around Phnom Penh in 1971, when planning and preparation was being made for Khmer Rouge units to step up attacks on the capital. It says Thion had remarked that it was amazingly easy for people to cross between Republican and GRUNK areas; which allowed Lon Nol intelligence (and the CIA) to be well-informed. It goes into some detail in the notes, on another trip (or maybe the year has been mistaken) made by Thion, into Khmer Rouge territory:
“This was amply demonstrated by the accuracy of a contemporary Interior Ministry report on Thion’s visit: ‘Agent 044 reported that in early January 1972, a Frenchman, name unknown, thin and tall with a pointed nose, red hair and sandals, left Phnom Penh on National Road 5 for Thpong district of Kompong Speu in enemy-controlled territory in the South-West. When he reached [their area], he presented the enemy with a pistol. On January 13 1972, the Frenchman was seen taking part in a celebratory meeting at Wat Krang Phngea, Sangkat Veal Pun, in Oudong district of Kompong Speu. He carried a notebook and a bag full of documents. The source stressed that those Khmers [Rouges] strictly banned the Frenchman from seeing any Vietnamese.’ In December 2001, the village chief of Ra Smach, who had escorted Thion thirty years earlier, confirmed that they had indeed been under instructions to prevent their visitor seeing any sign of the Vietnamese presence.”
Given what Francois Bizot (in his slightly theatrical account of being held prisoner by Comrade Duch et al) said about the degree of paranoia regarding ‘CIA agents’ then current, I’m surprised Thion got away with his life doing this, but then again he no doubt took care to get decent accreditation first. On the other hand, maybe the Special Zone was organised rather differently than, say, the region of Kampot.
I’ve yet to read the Short biography properly – I got a bit turned off (or rather the book got bumped down the reading list) by the several reviews which said he’d gone partly down the route of blaming many of the DK excesses on some kind of innate Khmer capacity for violence: let’s face it, practically any nation can be depicted as having a fairly brutal culture, if you look at its pre-industrial period, or any period of civil conflict. Then again, no doubt I’ll get round to reading it fully at some point.
I’m glad I’m back, I will certainly fulfill my promises in a few days, when I get to the library. I will compose my list of books I’d like to get, maybe you have some of them, we can exchange with pdfs. Some of them are unpublished as well, like that Chinese 1360 days. Is it in English rather than Chinese? Maybe it wouldn’t hurt us (or you, your English better) to contact that Short guy, see if he’ll be ready to part with some of his stuff, or maybe he’ll spare the contacts to the above mentioned reclusive authors? If you find any interesting books here http://www.library.ualberta.ca/
I can scan any interesting item for you or anybody else interesting in the same topic, unless I’m working and absent. I will post my desired list too, and I encourage everyone to do so, maybe having one item repeated on many lists will bring some collective resolution to purchase or something similar. I have scanned by the way Historical Dictionary of Cambodia just for my reference, I can upload it if anyone wishes, it’s too big though, settings I played with I screwed up quite a bit that scan.
Concerning agrarians, was it mentioned in Anatomy that late KR flags carried no hammer but sickle? Would it be a reflection on a new kind of agrarian approach. There’s also it seems another point, whatever KR leaders didn’t say but just implied, or could have implied. Khmers don’t like to talk straight, they will present you with a pile of mumbo-jumbo, it’s hard to make them to formulate their ideas. They keep it close to themselves. It’s possible to see how urbanization could be detested by Khmers. This is just wrong path of development of modern world. This is why Pol Pot speaks that to everything he learnt he owed to his countryside experience, I can see that.
Always nice content to read on your blog, I will look into future posting of 5 hour Pol Pot’s speech. I wouldn’t risk to drink water on that one! But who knew? What embarrassment it probably was to run for a leak amongst the silent auditorium and never ending speech of Comrade Secretary!
Ib: Short’s biography, in my opinion (not that it matters) is among the best books for the general reader, that at least attempts to examine Khmer Rouge politics minus the rubbish that has been written about them. For example he dispels some of the agrarian primitivism crap that has, and is still lazily put about. About which we’ve been recently discussing here in the above comments. And yeah, I do agree with you about the suggestion there is a Khmer cultural predisposition to extreme violence. At the very start of the book, he mentions that awful 1990s acid attack on a young Karaoke Bar queen, which destroyed her looks; in fact, destroyed her face. Carried out by the jealous wife of a man who’d been having an affair with her. I hold my judgement on this area, as admittedly I’m not confident enough to make such pronouncements on a people and society I still have little understanding of. That said, what makes the Khmers easily predisposed to extreme violence? Were the DK political prisons, in matters of cruelty, that different to the French torture chambers of Algeria? Were the traumatised KR troops running through rice fields in 1973, towards a frightened enemy, exceptional in their brutality, more so than the results of a strategic decision to drop thousands of tons of bombs, destroying whole villages in the process? Interestingly Short has the courage to say that he doesn’t believe the DK regime was genocidal in intent. Far from absolving the Khmer Communists of their responsibility for the tragedy that unfolded, his assessment of the widespread deaths – which are a sobering, punch in the face indictment of a sincere attempt to abrogate multi-formed suffering – is that it has to viewed in the context of how their ingrained ideological and nationalist tendencies played havoc with their ambitious program for modernising the country into a sort-of Socialist Kampuchea. Genocide is a term that can be used for political expedience rather than winning justice for the victims and survivors, but also a term which helps at least give some sense of the magnitude of the suffering that went on, most of it completely unnecessary.
Tong: Welcome back. I am indeed interested in sharing info, and perhaps books and the like. Although, at this very moment I’m tired from working a tough shift last night. Bloody Christmas. So I need to be in more of an ‘awake’ state before talking about this further, if you understand my meaning. I’ll certainly take you up on offering any mutual help in finding some hard-to-find texts. I’ve found an online shop named Dalley Book Service (run by an American who used to live in Laos) a decent place to get hold of old working papers and the like. I also got a copy of Sak Sutsakhan’s account of the Cambodian Civil War, from him. I’d be grateful for receiving a PDF copy of the Cambodian historical dictionary you mentioned. That’s the book co-edited by Justin Corfield and Laura Summers isn’t it? I’ve been wanting to get hold of a proper copy, but been put off by the price. Lastly, I have to say I laughed when you talked about the potential comradely faux pas, on whether or not a cadre should take a loo-break during Pol Pot’s long-winded, tedious speech.
Oh, Tong, I forgot about your question regarding the CPK flag and Short’s book. I’ll check, but I think you may have got your wires crossed. What I mean is that the earlier legal sister organisation to the KPRP, the Pracheachon, was known as the ‘party of the plough’ among peasants.
Interesting, the Thion trip to see the Khmer Rouge. Maybe he gave the pistol to them as a gift to signal to his hosts he came as a friend.
Thanks for a website, I’ll check it up, Here’s the link for Historical Dictionary of Cambodia which is indeed under redaction of Justin Corfield and Laura Summers
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=L9SXH33X
It’s really kind of rare and useful to have too, you mentioned in the other post Mey Pho or other less known personalities, most of them there, though it doesn’t provide exact source for each article. Like Wikipedia, says that Pol Pot was Chinese origin which is doubtful, even Short doesn’t mention it I guess, many of the articles in that dictionary also somewhat doubtful, nevertheless, here it is.
Khmer Republic in War I will borrow in my library, thanks though but there’s many more of what I wish to see, maybe I’ll do the list today after checking the website you provided.
Thanks for the link. Damn it! My free trial period for the RAR archive program has run its course . Will have to sort it out soon.
I have Corfield’s A History of the Cambodian Non-Communist Resistance. I also have a copy of Kenneth M. Quinn’s 1976 Naval War College Review paper named Political Change in Wartime: The Khmer Krahom Revolution in Southern Cambodia, 1970-74. It’s very good but this paper is, I believe, a revised version which is shorter than the original he wrote. I don’t think it was published, so I’m guessing it’s quite rare and probably sat in a university library, or on some obscure but lucky person’s bookshelf somewhere. The original is, I think, named The Khmer Krahom Programme to Create a Communist Society in Southern Cambodia.
If you have any requests Ib, then I’ll see what I can dig out.
For my part, I’m going to try and see if I can get hold of a full copy of Khmers Stand Up!, which I have in incomplete form at the moment. It might take a little while. I’m always interested in sharing information as well as my own ill-informed ideas…
That Historical Dictionary is pretty damn good. Where else could you find a mention of people like Isoup Ghanti or Op Kim Ang?
“I’m going to try and see if I can get hold of a full copy of Khmers Stand Up!”
I’ve been searching in vain for a copy of that. Like I said elsewhere, if I get a scanner up and running, I’ll make a copy of Kiernan’s study of the Samlaut rebellion for you.
Well, I can certainly get access to a copy of Khmers Stand Up! – when I do I’ll scan it.
Cambodia’a economy and industrial development by Khieu Samphan
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8BEYWEG9
Wow! Thank you. I guess this is the English translation by Laura Summers? I’ll find out in a minute or two…
From the Alberta University library catalogue I request the following:
Phnom Penh : A Cultural History
Sihanouk : Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness
Before Kampuchea : Preludes to Tragedy
The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia : Rule and Response (1859-1905)
Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981
How Pol Pot Came to Power : Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975
The Pol Pot Regime : Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (latest edition if possible)
Beyond the Horizon : Five Years with the Khmer Rouge (personal account of life in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, by French woman and DK official Laurence Picq)
Kampuchea : Politics, Economics, and Society
Pol Pot Plans the Future : Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977
Kampuchea as a Factor in the Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1975-1984
Kampuchea Between China and Vietnam
Foreign Policy of Kampuchea
I know there is a copy of the DK Black Book (Livre Noir) listed, but it’s not an English translation. I would be very grateful for any of the above.
The two papers I mentioned in comment 19 will be posted to this blog soon, in January or February, available for downloading in PDF.
Texts with me at this moment are:
Brahmin and Mandarin : A Comparison of the Cambodian and Vietnamese Revolutions
The Samlaut Rebellion and its Aftermath : The Origins of Cambodia’s Liberation Movement 1967-70
The Khmer Republic at War and the Final Collapse
The Eyes of the Pineapple : Revolutionary Intellectuals and Terror in Democratic Kampuchea
Communist Party Power in Kampuchea : Documents and Discussion
Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea : Eight Essays
Cambodia, 1975-1982
The Ingratitude of the Crocodiles (Serge Thion article on the Black Paper)
Kampuchea in the Seventies : Report of the Finnish Inquiry Commission
Long Live the 17th Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (English translation of the 1977 Pol Pot speech)
Kampuchea (American solidarity visit made by David Kline to DK in 1978)
FUNK statements from Norodom Sihanouk, Khieu Samphan et al, published in Peking Review 1970
Message of condolence sent by the CPK Central Committee (Pol Pot et al) to the Chinese Communist Party for the state funeral of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, published in Peking Review 1976
Yes, I can do that, after library will be opened once again when holidays over. Somewhere in the middle of January I might have a few books scanned for you, just make whatever priorities in case if you have any.
I was going to write an answer earlier but it got deleted, so my list would be quite hard to get items I guess:)
Y Phandara, Retour a Phnom Penh
Ros Chantrabot, La Republique Khmer
In Sopheap, Khieu Samphan aggrandi et reel, unpubl. manuscript ( possession of P. Short)
Serge Thion and Ben Kiernan, Khmer Rouges! I would love too see it too from lb. if possible.
Nuon Chea provided Nate Thayer with a manuscript of handwritten history of CPK
Tep Kunnal- 9 notebooks with Pol Pot memoirs- possession of Chandler? 0r Heder.
Marie A.Martin, Le Mal Cambodgien
Francois Debre, Revolution de la Foret
Some books I see on Amazon but in range from 50 and up, that’s bullshit. Some are simply unavailable, there’s an option of interlibrary loan in my library. In January I will go to check how it works, maybe it would be actually cheaper get the book from the other libraries than to buy for such prices.
Can you possibly write to some of this scholars to try to get some material from them? Maybe there could be some luck? Or at least if they could provide the addresses or contacts for above mentioned In Sopheap, so I would next time in Phnom Penh get a nice translator or just submit a list of questions. I don’t know whether it’s possible to send letters to jailed leaders of DK. Maybe it’s not allowed, or I would prefer not to draw attention. I had a nice opportunity before arrest I was in Battambong, I could’ve went to Pailin just to ask a few questions of Nuon Chea, but it was so spontaneous and I didn’t have much money (not an unusual state of polpotist I guess) so I dropped the idea. Or maybe I should try to interview relatives, there’s a bit different things I interested, I’m in more private affairs then private, see the things people were influenced the thoughts they lived with, the places they went the food they ate. Maoism is not that attractive anymore after knowledge that Mao consumed a 1 kg of beef in one single meal. Nor his orgies with peasant girls are not exactly what true third worldist is looking for. There’s much more simple life style that KR lived and that what attracts me. Like that that Khieu Samphan sold vegetables after he came back to PP after he got doctorat. I strolled the same pretty much streets and stayed in very close places as beloved leaders:) so I try to get the same feelings as they did..
The unpublished manuscript stuff above is rare, so it’s (as you’ve identified with a few so far), located in someone’s private collection, and they probably wouldn’t want to part with it permanently. Or, such things are occasionally sold at high prices online. For example I have bought some rare items, even when the price was, I felt, too much. But on the other hand, it’s good to have such things in your collection, so tough decisions have to be made if you’ve got the money to spare. For example I bought the translated Pol Pot speech for 70 quid. I also paid 90 quid for a study of Red Guard factionalism during China’s Cultural Revolution. Excellent for expanding my knowledge, but the sellers hold you to ransom! Sometimes you’ve just got to have an item though.
I could try and write to a few people, particularly Short, but perhaps he wouldn’t be interested in dealing with a small-town prole with an amateur interest in Southeast Asian Communism. Although correspondence with such people might interesting enough to post to this blog too.
I think I still have a couple of Margaret Slocombe journal papers with me, They’re either on my external hard drive, or on my old computer, which is now in landfill. I’ll have to check. One of them is an interesting look at the PRK’s K-5 Plan to defend and consolidate new government control after the DK overthrow, while attempting to destroy the regrouped Khmer Rouge forces and their former enemies turned allies. Another is on a small peasant rebellion against Khmer Rouge-rule in Chikreng during 1977.
I’ll be out of my country for some time in February and possibly all of March. I have a partner and young boy to care for: she is not working at the moment, so need to save money. I might not be able to scan much of what I have until this family priority is met first. Responsibility demands I work, like most other people having to deal with the mundaneness of life. One day, though, I will be in Cholpon-Ata on a long-term study and work basis. What a place to live with your family! On the shores of lake Issyk-Kul, the Tien Shan mountains in the distance. My dream will become reality.
Maybe some of those scholars will be kind enough to share I hope, Short left his email in the book, seems like a nice guy. Maybe worth to try?
Those prices that you mentioned are pretty high! I bought many of my books initially in Phnom Penh so I dealt with copies. The most expensive was a Khieu Samphan book, which I payed 7 bucks.
I understand your family circumstances, mine were pretty much the same, high debts, costs of sponsorship and stuff with the exception that mine are over, heh. It’s over for a year or so. Canadian government is nice when you try to sponsor your family member, they don’t hold your back even if you don’t have any money.
He was doing so well, showing off his ‘culture.’ Then he had to go and ruin it by mentioning Withnail and I.
Oh, you’re on about him with a hairstyle that resembles an orange microphone cover. That film is loved by many a student, and I use the term student pejoratively. Bruce Robinson also and earlier wrote the screenplay for The Killing Fields, a film almost ruined by Mike Oldfield. It also contains some less than subtle product placement. “Mercedes Number One!” exclaims a Lon Nol soldier, who in his later incarnation as a Khmer Rouge cadre holds a knife to Dith Pran. Actually the Mercedes bit is before that memorable scene where the hacks witness a KR attack on a Coca-Cola bottling plant, with ragged peasant troops running towards it and into the path of mortars.
From about 4:30 mins into this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdPbMQs4UqY
In case if nobody saw this movie. Much more realistic than Killing Fields piece of crap. It’s Vietnamese production and it’s reek of Soviet influence, even the music is similar crappy tunes of contemporary Russian movies. Anyways, just in case you didn’t see it.
I think this film is called Blank Page, by Vietnamese director Ho Quang Minh:
I see that whoever uploaded this video appears to be some Khmer chauvinist weirdo with a dislike of the Vietnamese. There is the use of the word Yuon. The title of the video also suggests this guy has a strange take on the development of Khmer Communism.
The Killing Fields is cringe-worthy in places. And the characterisation of Schanberg is annoying. There is, however, a short harrowing moment in a scene of the DK period, where a young peasant girl checks the hands of a worker in a rice paddy, and then points him out for elimination; her older male companions then drag the hapless fellow off to his death with a plastic bag pulled tightly over his head. So quickly and without question is he snuffed out. But the village school lesson given by Angkar, where a cadre with piece of chalk in hand, urges a child to cross out a stick man family on a blackboard, made me want to groan. I would like to see a new film made about the Cambodia of this period, which perhaps after some decent research has been done, fictionalises the lives of ordinary peasant refugees and their experiences of fleeing their villages, rather than displaying the didactic worthiness and moral outrage grandstanding of foreign journalists. Something that also includes the fall of Phnom Penh, and the antics of the Monatio would be interesting.
This sweet new film on contemporary Cambodia seems to avoid cliche and didacticism, even though it’s a take on East meets West, middle class white boy meets impoverished Khmer girl. Mind you my life has recently consisted of Moscow-bound working class white boy meets female member of the reconstituted post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan intelligentsia! The finished cut has dialogue in poorly-used Russian, so it might need to be dubbed over or subtitled for other markets.
Some Khmer chauvinist- every single of them. There’s an interesting topic, since many of Khmer intelligentsia are Chinese descendants or have some portion of Chinese blood (this true also for Thai elites, where Queen and Taksin are of Chinese descent, those that I know at least, actually all of them are) so all these so called elites misrepresent Khmers my hating Vietnamese who mostly are the lowest social class, the most exploited people in Cambodia. My heart 100 percent stays with these wretched people, poor Khmers don’t seem to hate Vietnamese unless they spoiled by elites, which is the case.
Chinese-Vietnamese antagonism I think plays part in many of these relationships. Chinese played the same role as Jews played in Russia and Europe and even after revolution in Cambodia nothing changed in terms of the elites. Three revolutions and some people managed to take posts in every regime that was in power. In “Stay alive my son” author shows Chinese who dealt with rice vs. gold while people were starving in KR new people camp. There’s less known resolution of PRK in the middle of 80-s which prohibited Chinese to live in Phnom Penh. Lon Nol struggled Chinese by forcing them to change shop signs in Khmer. In Russia some people survived through Tsar and through communist repressions of 20-s. Isn’t it strange? Don’t call me chauvinist but I have to expose later Chinese role in SEA society, which also promotes hate and chauvinsm like those yellow shirts in Thailand to Khmers and Cambodia. They recently send 4000 Hmongs back to Laos. They are without hearts these people, their God is money, like wrote Marx.
Concerning the movie, I think this is interesting trend, trend which is truly third worldist trend, defying own nationial traditions. My case is the same where’s white married to Asian. I observe trend like this, I even have an article in Russian which I should translate to English, about interracial marriages. I know some people who married interracially, interesting there’s some Jews who seem to defy their traditions too. I mentioned French traditionalist Guenon who married Egyptian and completely changed his lifestyle to that of Egyptian. His deed is a blueprint to me, change the First world for a Third World.
There seems to be Sino-Khmer mixed heritages among KR leaders too. Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary for example. Chinese people in Vietnam didn’t fare too well during the ‘third’ Indochina conflict, seen as potential fifth column in the unified country. I’m sure you know about the exodus of Chinese from Vietnam, the desperate plight of the ‘boat people’ who left for refuge elsewhere, with many dying attempting to do so. This was just another ugly consequence of wider regional political developments in the region. Chinese Communist policy towards Indochina after finding rapprochement with the Americans, had been designed to check the influence of the Vietnamese, seen at one-time as being a stalking horse for their sworn enemy: the Soviet Union. This thin ribbon of land seen as a bridgehead for spreading Russian influence in the region, China’s backyard. After the Vietnamese Communist victory, the Soviets wanted to make a strong military presence felt there, including the proposal to install nuclear missiles. The Vietnamese, afraid of their big neighbour, wisely shied away from the opportunity to become a Soviet pawn, like some sort of Southeast Asian Cuba. Although even when the practical Vietnamese leaders, in their bid for post-war reconstruction joined the Communist bloc’s trading organisation, the Comecon, the Chinese viewed this as a very hostile act. It isn’t surprising that the PRK were suspicious of the Chinese, and that this unfortunately filtered down into vulgarised chauvinism, feeding tensions when, after all, the Chinese government had openly promised to bleed the PRK (and Vietnamese) dry. It was Chinese arms and American money, as well as diplomatic support, which was helping Pol Pot’s exiled government to destabilise the Phnom Penh regime for a decade and more.
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