The Eyes of the Pineapple

A few days ago I had a nerdy online argument (as you do) over the nature of Khmer Communist aims, as understood by the Pol Pot group, and what was supposed to have happened in Democratic Kampuchea under their leadership. Not that it means much, but I believe that despite seeming absurdities and an overriding irrationalism and utopian tendency (think Louis Marie Babeauf with black pyjamas), they were indeed modernisers, using a peculiar interpretation of the Leninist paradigm. Now, he took this to be a defence of them, when it is merely an understanding of what they claimed to be, and tried to put into practice, perhaps shedding better light on how and why they failed. But, apart from my opponent accusing me of being a “left-wing David Irving,” (and upon reading that I nearly spat my tea out laughing), and just to point out here I am not “left-wing” in a Marxist-Leninist sense, nor do I have an academic reputation to tarnish, he also came out with the tired and lazy trope of the Khmer Rouge being some kind of backward revivalists, to quote “they wanted to re-establish the old Khmer Empire.” And if they didn’t, then “why did they have the Angkor temple on their flag and not a hammer and sickle or star? You really are a card.” At that point I thought that perhaps my opponent is actually a 14-year old who has a glib and superficial understanding of the “politics” he espouses. Say, for example, his supporting of Cuba. While it is always worthy to note this former Soviet pawn and potential launchpad for medium-range nuclear missiles has had a more favourable development for its population’s needs than some other countries of the Caribbean, this lonely enclave of sun kissed Stalinism-lite is going nowhere fast with its tired attempt at a transition from our presently grim mode of production, and sooner or later it’s gonna be saying hello to neo-liberalism. Fingers crossed this transition won’t be as brutal as that which happened in the former Soviet Union. That said, and to put things plainly, politically I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Maybe with a penchant for attacking the mere artifice of things, my opponent’s got some old and outdated revolutionary imagery and symbolism safely co-opted by capitalism minus its political content littering his bedroom, or perhaps even Tipp-Exed on his school bag, amongst the dirty clothes including commercial rock band hoodies that his mum picks up on a weekly basis because he can’t be arsed putting them in the washing machine himself. Well, regarding this niche blog about a misunderstood group of people who erected one of the most awful regimes in the name of socialism, what is it that the young ‘uns say these days? “Pwned!” or something. Communists (with a capital C) like flags. Pretty red ones. Including the Khmer Rouge, who, apart from developing their own extreme political mindset by soaking up other strong local influences which owe nothing to Marxism or Leninism for that matter, as a political movement they largely kept their ‘Communism’ secret for years, causing all sorts of after the fact confusion.

So, for the benefit of keyboard warrior numpties and anyone else who might be interested, here is a concise post on pretty red flags.

The above flag belongs to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (like, so kewl, with a hammer and sickle). Also known as Angkar or Angkar Padevat (the Organisation, or Revolutionary Organisation). This Party and its politics actually evolved from a proto-Bolshevist organisation formed with the guidance of the Vietminh during the First Indochina War. Set up in 1951, it was called the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party. A separate but dependant organisation connected to the Indochinese Communist Party. I say proto-Bolshevist because the Vietnamese Communists didn’t intend this Party to be a Communist Party in the real sense, because orthodox (or Stalinist) precepts decided against it, Communist Parties by definition being aimed at an organised working class membership. A silly thing to suggest for a society so thoroughly peasant as Cambodia’s. By the 1960s a new generation of Khmer Communists would come to control this organisation, with no ICP tradition, and who developed their own Maoist-like political line. It was in September 1966 that the organisation would have its name changed to the CPK, when Salot Sar and his chums in the maquis were twiddling their thumbs thinking of ways in which to kick-start a rural insurgency and overthrow the repressive Sangkum. To their surprise and good fortune, long built-up social pressures exploded in March and April 1967 with the spontaneous Samlaut Rebellion, seeing thousands of peasants leaving their villages for the forests, the aftermath of which would see a considerable number join the maquisards. And, in 1967 around about the same time there was also the stirring of hill tribe minorities in Ratanakiri (with the help of the CPK), to resist an attempt by a state plantation to take their land. By 1968 the (still inadequate) Khmer Rouge insurgency had begun, with hundreds of ragtag and ill-equipped militants fighting Lon Nol forces, loosely coordinated by the CPK. Although I would prefer to call the CPK a pseudo-Communist Party. The organisation had next to no working class membership, and as far as I am aware did not use democratic centralism that much, particularly in later years. Mind you, on a side note, Bolshevism these days could be deemed an anachronism, considering it is 2010, not 1910. The dustbin of history springs to mind. There’ll be no revenge of the dinosaurs.

Well, here above we have the national flag of Democratic Kampuchea, the image of a three-towered temple on a red background my online opponent thought was the Party’s flag and somehow proof of Khmer Rouge non-Communist aims. But this flag is actually older than DK and goes back to the First Indochina War, when the region became a single battleground against the colonialist French, and the Vietminh attempted to organise collaborative efforts with homegrown and diverse Cambodian nationalist guerilla bands, known collectively as the Khmer Issarak. The above flag belongs to the Khmer People’s Liberation Committee, formed with about 800 fighters in February 1948, and this motley bunch of Thai-sponsored nationalists, leftist sympathisers and venal, apolitical bandits handy at the task of killing people, had some contact with both leftists and nationalists of the Vietminh. It was headed by, among others, a charismatic but ruthless warlord named Dap Chhuon, believed to be in possession of supernatural powers, and whose own little ‘army’ provided most of the fighting muscle. Issarak fighters in their dealings with the Vietnamese and already paid-up sympathisers among the Khmers, would have exposure to socialist ideas and join the Vietnamese-dominated Indochinese Communist Party. A development which would cause a leadership split over these nationalist/socialist differences. But another problem was a switching of sides and a significant chunk of the Committees’ fighting capability removed. Amnesty for Issarak commanders and troops was offered, a deal involving them being allowed to remain as adminstrators of (albeit in a pro-government manner) the areas they had previously controlled as rebels. Chhoun left the forest and prostrated himself before a young King Norodom Sihanouk dressed in French military uniform, at Angkor Wat in October 1949, along with his followers including a large group of female retainers (a perk of the job I suppose). Afterwards, he was appointed governor of Siemreap and Kompong Thom, and what could be considered semi-autonomous regions which he ruled almost as his own fiefdom.

The above flag, with its five-towered temple design, belongs to another Issarak group, formed in April 1950 as a result of the differences already briefly mentioned. Named the United Issarak Front, this was based in the eastern part of the country, and would be subject to heavy Vietminh involvement. Headed by a former Buddhist monk by the name of Pham Van Hua, also known as Achar Mean, and lastly by his socialist pseudonym Son Ngoc Minh, this organisation, with the help of thousands of Vietnminh guerillas would come to control a rather large part of Cambodia during the war, including the creation of a provisional and alternative government in the areas they controlled. The end of the conflict, however, would see the territorial gains come to Sweet FA when less than favourable terms agreed at the Geneva Conference of 1954, would see Cambodia be allowed full independence, and the hope of a Communist regroupment zone, or partition like that which happened in Vietnam, dashed. These Khmer ICP card-carriers, unless giving up and returning to their old lives had nowhere to go except North Vietnam, with many slipping out of the country. It is this flag which would be revived firstly by the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation of 1978, a political and military front cobbled together in order to prepare for taking power when the Khmer Rouge problem in Phnom Penh had been solved once and for all. And then it was to be the national flag of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the successor to the Pol Pot regime. Indeed those old Khmer Vietminh, or Khmer Hanoi, would follow the tracks left by Russian tanks when the massive Vietnamese invasion force toppled the DK government. But a few years earlier these veterans of the First Indochina War had tried to enmesh themselves in the CPK apparatus during the Cambodian Civil War, filtering back into the country. Those younger upstarts, the Pol Pot group, who had control of the Party, were having none of that. They carried out a campaign of murder which saw those emigres who had waited for years in Hanoi, being trained as cadre by the Vietnamese Communists to take command of the Cambodian movement, leg it back over the border. If they were lucky.

Now, I’ve only skimmed over the differences, rivalries and other ‘stuff’ which helps explain this rather complicated set of affairs. I haven’t mentioned the connections and crossing over of ICP members and future DK leaders (such as Nuon Chea) between the two Issarak organisations. I haven’t gone over the legal and sister organisation to the KPRP, known as the Pracheachon, or People’s Group (or as Cambodia’s peasants knew it “the party of the plough”) and which was manned by ICP members and war veterans who didn’t leave for Hanoi. I haven’t gone over the rise of the new generation of Khmer Communists who with two historically developed tendencies, eventually coalesced and became the DK leadership. I haven’t gone over the geopolitical considerations of the Vietnamese Communists regarding the Second Indochina War, and how this messed things up a bit in their wartime collaboration with the Khmers, and ensured that by April 1975, there was a new government in Phnom Penh consisting of people who would be intent on less than cordial relations with their neighbour. I haven’t gone over how some of the Khmer Vietminh returnees in the early 1970s weren’t murdered but did actually find some trusted place in the burgeoning Communist apparatus. Nor have I gone over the relative autonomy of the zones DK was divided into, and the political differences between the Khmer Rouge regarding how they should deal with the Vietnamese. If anything, the above shows simply there has been a need by two distinctive (there were three) Khmer Communist tendencies with a generational gap to express a ‘correct’ historical continuity regarding influence and ownership of the Cambodian Communist movement. After all, the Pol Potists would do a lot of revising when it came to the history of Cambodian Communism, trying to reshape it as a creation purely of their own making, both in and out of power, and the KPLC flag was an obvious choice given the other UIF flag represents that earlier tendency of the Khmer Vietminh, who would be an object of enmity and who would finally come to power in January 1979.

And moving on, to the symbolism of Angkor. This was never an indication let alone proof of Khmer Rouge aims to send the country back to the “dark ages,” “middle ages” or even more stupidly back to the “stone age.” The latter was actually something said by US Air Force General Curtis LeMay during the Vietnamese conflagration, with his unveiled threat to the Communists in Hanoi regarding the capability and willingness to ruin the infrastructure of North Vietnam: “My solution to the problem would be to tell frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the stone age.” Of course, as war spread, Cambodia’s countryside too would be transformed into a pockmarked moonscape. The Khmer Rouge would come to capture state power while riding on the back of a bomb-saturated American exit strategy. But once they captured state power, they weren’t the first, as seen above, to use the symbolism of Angkor as an intellectual and nationalist rallying point. Something to hold up as an example of past greatness, the apogee of Khmer achievement, a source of pride and a marker of indigenous Khmer identity which differed to and contrasted with, indeed challenged French colonialist arrogance and racism which saw the subjects of this country as merely dark, dumb, untrainable yokels to be exploited. The Khmer Rouge had their work cut out, for revolutions are not just made of ideas, but also resources. But there was never a desire to recreate medieval Cambodia, but rather surpass its achievements. I have witnessed from people a confused and contradictory explanation of Khmer Communism and its Pol Potist tendency. That Pol Pot and his comrades had forsworn any form of Marxism in favour of a purely indigenous primitivist ideology before they took power in Cambodia. And this primitivism is seen in so much of what they did, and in the context of Year Zero, seemed deliberately overexecuted, for as well as resetting the clock to zero, they actually wanted to go further, to reduce society to a pre-civilised state that would have to relearn socialisation beyond the immediate community. And then in the same breath, that Pol Pot was a Cambodian nationalist who wanted to return his country and people to the social balance Cambodia had during the Khmer Empire. That he picked and chose whatever tidbits of revolutionary ideology and philosophy suited his purpose. Firstly, who cannot see that the term Year Zero was merely an analogy, an intellectual nod to the revolutionary calender used by the French from 1793 to 1805? Educated Khmers of a certain age will have known since their childhoods of the French Revolution through their exposure to the old and uniform French school syllabus, which citizens proper and subjects in the colonies alike were taught. And they would have been made to see it as not just a milestone in France’s history, but of the world. An object of reverence and redemption. Yes we can go on about the blank slate policy of the Khmer Rouge, but they were never primivitists who wanted to send the country back to a pre-civilised state but rather under their leadership a prodigious jump into modernity would be attempted. And the utterance of Year Zero was an expression of the DK leaders superimposing the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary model on the old French one, where in the minds of Cambodia’s schoolchildren, as in France, it was viewed as the destruction of an archevil ancien regime. In 18th century France there would be a replacing of an old elite by the victorious bourgeoisie supposedly representative of the whole population, and in 20th century Cambodia under the Communists they would be put in its place instead as the country caught up with and took part in the world concert of proletarian revolution. As for the latter, how can the Khmer Rouge have used Angkor as a model to somehow recreate the past, by forcing Cambodian society into a pre-civilised state, when Angkorean achievements rediscovered and researched since the 19th century have shown that it was once a great civilisation?

That aside, the DK leadership would cherry pick whatever was useful for their own analysis of Cambodian history, when they superimposed an ill-fitting and vulgar Marxist schema upon it, to explain how their own voluntarism saw the smashing of an old mode of production and with it the culmination of all their efforts in leading Cambodia into the socialist transition stage, that is, using a Marxist-Leninist framework of development in a ‘backward’ country. Although Angkorean slave labour was bemoaned but the wonders built by it applauded, the cliché of Angkor’s greatness was nothing more than a focal point in shaping a new Khmer identity, independent and free from colonial constraints, again the apogee of a distant and more glorious cultural heritage from which inspiration could be derived. It wasn’t a model to be applied, a blueprint to be followed. The French did, then, bring modern ideas, and the use of Angkor as a rallying point has not just been used exclusively by Communists, indeed they were late in taking it up when in opposition to them, for among those fortunate enough to receive an education was the popular wannabe bourgeois Son Ngoc Thanh (and the older Communists would try and capitalise on his name, as seen with the pseudonym of Pham Van Hua). With this education weapons and tools could be fashioned not only to be rid of the French but also used to modernise and democratise Cambodia. Not only was he a pioneer in modern anti-French political organisation, and armed rebellion against the French and Norodom Sihanouk, but Thanh was also a leader in Khmer language journalism and along with it the development of new vocabularies which could replace French in fields where it had previously been used. His 1936 involvement with the first Khmer language and nationalist newspaper Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat) evoked this glorious Khmer past in its very title. In the early years of his Khmer Serei guerilla movement, there was the creation of a ‘liberated zone’ in the Cambodian countryside from where his followers could sally forth with clapped-out guns to do battle with the army of Lon Nol. He would also make illegal radio broadcasts from his jungle base at Phnom Malai, where he called on patriotic educated youth to leave the towns and join his rebellion among the peasants. By the late 1960s the Khmer Rouge would have their own liberated zones, territory where Phnom Penh’s writ no longer ran, and also had in their possession a mobile radio station during the civil war (Liberation Radio of the FUNK), which they used inadequately to pepper the capital with propaganda and menacing warnings to the Khmer Republic elite. Although they were both modernisers, Pol Pot and Thanh’s politics were different, indeed in opposition to one another. But nevertheless, as Michael Vickery has noted in his Cambodia 1975-82, the political shifts and trajectories of the Pol Potists would over the years come to mirror those of Thanh: from being revolutionaries, to irreconcilable nationalists, to venal and desperate intriguers in exile ever on the lookout for foreign support.

Yes, there are interesting parallels which can be seen between the time of Angkor and Democratic Kampuchea, and although the DK leadership will have been aware of them to some extent, they are just coincidences with knobs on. For example, from David Chandler’s Seeing Red: Perceptions of Cambodian History in Democratic Kampuchea, during the reign of King Jayavarman VII (1178-1220) the land was ruled by a more or less invisible directorate (the organisation or Angkar of DK), which dictated the activities of the King’s subjects. During this period of Angkorean history, the population was put to work on large-scale infrastructure projects, in order to produce surpluses for the exclusive use of their invisible rulers, who had mobilised them using a set of ideas held by a chosen few and not fully understood by most (Mayhayana Buddhism, or Communism from 1975), and which had also been used as the justification for destroying pre-existing society and rebuilding it anew. Indeed, society was felt to have died and been reborn at the end of a devastating war. And not just during the rule of this Builder-King, there was the state control of a large and sophisticated irrigation system, built by slave labour, which could allow up to three good rice harvests a year and was central to the success of the old Empire. In the short period of DK, the government used a framework of development partly bequeathed to the Communists by Lenin, and which saw as the first stage of draft industrialisation, the attempt to build a countrywide irrigation system under centralised state control intended for the mass production of rice. And we know the ghastly methods they used to go about completing this vast infrastructural feat. However, Sihanouk during the Sangkum years also toyed with the idea of transforming agricultural practices and better harnessing water power through irrigation, to help rice production in a country which has had some of the poorest yields in the region. But, with a lack of initiative and importantly money, these plans never left the drawing board. It’s easy to see how people can come to make such silly conclusions about the Khmer Rouge, what with the confusing and contradictory statements and boastful rhetoric also spoken from the mouths of Pol Pot front men. Of course, in power, with their own version of a Great Leap, they thought they would be leaping into modernity, but with keeping in mind what I’ve written above, ironically and unintentionally it could be said they made a Great Leap into a backward Asiatic Mode of Production. But that’s for another post…

Lastly, above we have two images, one accurate, the other not so, regarding a flag which has been wrongly attributed to the Khmer Rouge over the years. See this old post here. The ‘Khmer Rouge’ seen in the photos and video weren’t Khmer Rouge at all, but members of a small organisation called the Monatio (National Movement). Not much is known about how this group was created, but it’s generally thought that it was set up by high-level civil servants in the Lon Nol government, as a last-ditch attempt to present themselves as friends to the in-coming Khmer Rouge armies on April 17 1975. Those who took to the streets were students and soldiers, some of them dressing up in Khmer Rouge garb. They seized the city’s radio station and broadcast a pre-recorded message, welcoming the peasant soldiers who were filing into the city from all directions, and proposed a talk on the conditions of surrender. Apparently, the real Khmer Rouge weren’t impressed, broke them up and dispersed them along with the rest of the population, whether genuine urbanite or peasant refugee. The leaders in the higher levels of the civil service were executed.

The version of the Monatio flag at the top with the blue and red diagonally split background is the correct version, seen on the streets that morning. The one below it is the wrong approximation of it, and which has been used lazily by all manner of people, from those who write Wikipedia articles to a news organisation like the BBC.