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Pol Pot and his government was responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries.

Pol Pot and his government was responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries. A lot of Cambodians migrated to Vietnam (including the author of this wonderful piece). The history about this period is interesting if you're looking for a good read. It's not being widely taught, even during Vietnamese K12 education. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese...

TeeMassive 5y ago
> Pol Pot and his government was responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time I always found arguments that makes the point that "X is responsible for more deaths than Y" weak and invalid when they fail to mention the time frame.
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  Yea, I think when comparing the deadliness of ideologies, the true measure should be something like mortality/(time x population) For example, the Nazis killed 11M over 12 years and the German population was about 70M in 1939. Thus, their deadliness is 11/(70x12) ~ 1/70 The USSR killed 40M (a middling estimate) over about 70 years and the Soviet population was 170M in 1939, so their deadliness is 40/(170x80) ~ 1/340 or about 1/5 as deadly as the Nazis. This intuitively makes sense to me since the Nazis actively sought to exterminate people, whereas most (not ALL) deaths in the USSR were accidental because communism is useless.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    I wouldn't call deaths in the USSR "accidental". Starving and executing kulaks was no accident, they were punishing the rich. People worked to death in the gulags were not an accident. They may have killed less people per year compared to Nazis but that doesn't make them less deadly. In terms of sheer human loss for society, they were 4 times worse than the Nazis (according to your estimate). If you consider how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious. I've always considered Nazis and communists to be in the same bucket: authoritarian killers. Communists often get a moral pass somehow, unlike Nazi and I wonder if it's because most schools and history teachers are biased; they teach about Nazi concentration camps but don't teach about gulags. I had to read books and books in school about Nazis and I didn't even know Solzhenitsyn existed.
    - anticodon 5y ago
      > how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious. How many exactly? West operate lies of notorious propagandists like Solzhenitsyn (which never had access to any statistics). E.g. in the books published on the west you can find absurd numbers like "Stalin sent two millions to the camp X", and later historians prove that you can't place more than 1200 persons in camp X, and there weren't enough houses even for the guards for such absurd amount of people and there weren't roads or waterways to transport that many people, and there're no even you know payment sheets for the number of guards required to guard two millions prisoners. But the West continue to regurgitate the same old lies over and over because who would want to know the truth? The best truth is that USSR was evil, so every tiny piece of evidence saying otherwise should be well hidden from public. It's not like in the contemporary Russia there are powers willing to open that truth either.
    - anticodon 5y ago
      Also, one closely guarded secret nobody cares about: currently amount of people in prisons in USA is almost equal to the number of people sent to prisons and camps by Stalin. So, who's more evil?
      - sien 5y ago
        The one who did this: "This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[7] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[8][9] some 390,000[10] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[11] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[12] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[13] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes, though not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era.[2][14]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...
        anticodon 5y ago
        Wikipedia is also a propaganda tool. Are [9][9][12][13][14] written based on historical documents? On the documents from the Soviet/Russia archives? I seriously doubt so. Pretty sure, they contain same bullshit as Solzhenitsyn books: "I saw 2 millions prisoners walking to the camp and it was only one of Stalin's forced labor camps"...
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    > For example, the Nazis killed 11M over 12 years and the German population was about 70M in 1939. Thus, their deadliness is 11/(70x12) ~ 1/70 I don't have real numbers, but I'd guess at least 95% of the people the Nazis killed were foreigners. So that math makes little sense.
    - watwut 5y ago
      Yep. Even ignoring non-Jewish victims, majority of holocaust victims were foreign Jews and not Germans of Jewish descent. Mostly because Europe and Africa as a whole had more Jews then Germany itself. Ignoring Jews, Germans were more ruthless and murderous toward Polish or Russian people then toward western ones. And they much more ruthless and murderous toward western then toward Germans themself. (And yes they were ruthless and murderous toward German population too.)
      - saiya-jin 5y ago
        Slavs generally, gypsies and other 'non-aryan' races. They had plans for the world after conquering it, which would basically wipe all local population in vast swaths of euroasia to make room for them. Jews were just first in line because Hitler was a war and childhood traumatized psychopath.
    - burntoutfire 5y ago
      The Nazis also sent millions of German troops to war. Around 8 million of them died fighting IIRC.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    > over about 70 years You included the most liberalized (less hard core communist) years of the Soviet Union. > This intuitively makes sense to me since the Nazis actively sought to exterminate people, whereas most (not ALL) deaths in the USSR were accidental because communism is useless. The Holodomor was caused by explicit policies. The purges were intentional. People who pointed out problems were considered anti-revolutionaries. Skilled laborers were purged or fled.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  He was quick. Took only four years I think.
pphysch 5y ago
Not defending Pol Pot, but attributing mass death solely to his regime is a bit misleading when it corresponded with a hostile foreign power carpet bombing the region with hundreds of millions of bombs, many still unexploded, over a decade or so.
- romwell 5y ago
  Not defending the US bombing of Cambodia, but it's a bit misleading to bring this up without quantifying that there's at least an order of magnitude difference in fatalities between the two. What's noteworthy, though, is that the Khmer Rouge was fighting against the puppet government installed by the hostile foreign power; and that the king displaced in the coup sided with Khmer Rouge as a result, which meant quite a bit in terms of support. That's to say, the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would have not been there, if not for the US meddling. You don't have to take my word - take it directly from them[1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-rouge/khmer-rouge-jailer-says-u-s-contributed-to-pol-pot-rise-idUSTRE5351VF20090406 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-rouge/khmer-roug...
  - pphysch 5y ago
    They can not be so easily delineated. Carpet bombing = loss of homes and farmland = general socioeconomic crisis = extreme political instability. And very much by design.
    - romwell 5y ago
      I agree, I just was pointing out that the death toll from the bombing wasn't even the worst consequence. Pol Pot was, in effect, the largest bomb dropped on Cambodia.
      - culi 5y ago
        It's funny how many people died in the name of "anti-communism" and in the end it was Marxist-Leninists that finally overthrew Pol Pot
      - 5y ago
romwell 5y ago
It's remarkable how nearly everything you just wrote applies to Belarus (with small changes): >Pol Pot and his government were responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries. Adolf Hitler and his government were responsible for the death of 1/4 Belarussian population (a third of them Jews) in a short span of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries. A lot of Belarussians joined the partisan effort, the largest guerilla warfare of that war (including the writer of Come and See, an acclaimed film about those days): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See The history about this period is interesting if you're looking for a good read. It's not being widely taught, even in Russian K12 education. Both Vietnam and Belarus were liberated by the Communists across the border, who have ruled both countries until the collapse of the USSR in 1991-1992. Ever since that, both countries have been under a de-facto dictatorial rule of a former communist official (though holding "democratic elections" on paper) - Hun Sen in Cambodia, Lukashenka in Belarus. There are many differences, of course, but there aren't many countries that lost 25% of their population to genocide, were ruled by communists after that for decades, and have been ruled by the same person since 90s.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- telesilla 5y ago
  Come and See remains the most horrific film I've seen. Critically important how it shows the brutality of that war. The Act of Killing is the most brutal documentary I've seen and in fact could not finish it. On Indonesia's executioners of communists. For a take on the Cambodian travesty see The Killing Fields.
anticodon 5y ago
Pol Pot came to power due to USA backed coup. USA spies tried to kill king of Cambodia multiple times but failed. So, they taught and financed guerillas to oust the king by means of military coup and install a pro-USA government. Pro-USA government didn't last long, and Pol Pot took its place. And, BTW, the most well hidden secret is that USA supported Pol Pot and even provided financial support to his government. USA: making a better world through revolutions, coups and military invasions for more than a century!
- nickff 5y ago
  >” And, BTW, the most well hidden secret is that USA supported Pol Pot and even provided financial support to his government.” According to Wikipedia, the USA did not materially support the Khmer Rouge, though they did vote in favor of certain UN resolutions which favored the regime. Do you have some evidence or support for your claims? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_support_for_the_Khmer_Rouge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...
  - wonnage 5y ago
    It's more that they spent the entirety of the Cold War period propping up any dictators they could find as long as they weren't communists, and it usually backfired.
    - nickff 5y ago
      >” It's more that they spent the entirety of the Cold War period propping up any dictators they could find as long as they weren't communists, and it usually backfired.” But the Khmer Rouge were the communists! They were officially the “Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)”.
      - wonnage 5y ago
        Yeah they supported the right-wing dictator that deposed the king who then joined Pol Pot and enabled his rebellion to succeed. And policy shifted after the 70s when they decided communism was ok, as long as you opposed the USSR. This was the justification for normalizing relations with China, who wound up supporting the Khmer Rouge, since they opposed post-war Vietnam (who they had just supported in the Vietnam War), which was a USSR ally. It was a complicated time to be deciding who to coup.

TeeMassive 5y ago

> Pol Pot and his government was responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time I always found arguments that makes the point that "X is responsible for more deaths than Y" weak and invalid when they fail to mention the time frame.

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
Yea, I think when comparing the deadliness of ideologies, the true measure should be something like mortality/(time x population) For example, the Nazis killed 11M over 12 years and the German population was about 70M in 1939. Thus, their deadliness is 11/(70x12) ~ 1/70 The USSR killed 40M (a middling estimate) over about 70 years and the Soviet population was 170M in 1939, so their deadliness is 40/(170x80) ~ 1/340 or about 1/5 as deadly as the Nazis. This intuitively makes sense to me since the Nazis actively sought to exterminate people, whereas most (not ALL) deaths in the USSR were accidental because communism is useless.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I wouldn't call deaths in the USSR "accidental". Starving and executing kulaks was no accident, they were punishing the rich. People worked to death in the gulags were not an accident. They may have killed less people per year compared to Nazis but that doesn't make them less deadly. In terms of sheer human loss for society, they were 4 times worse than the Nazis (according to your estimate). If you consider how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious. I've always considered Nazis and communists to be in the same bucket: authoritarian killers. Communists often get a moral pass somehow, unlike Nazi and I wonder if it's because most schools and history teachers are biased; they teach about Nazi concentration camps but don't teach about gulags. I had to read books and books in school about Nazis and I didn't even know Solzhenitsyn existed.
  - anticodon 5y ago
    > how much freedom and how many lives they ruined with forced labour, it's even more egregious. How many exactly? West operate lies of notorious propagandists like Solzhenitsyn (which never had access to any statistics). E.g. in the books published on the west you can find absurd numbers like "Stalin sent two millions to the camp X", and later historians prove that you can't place more than 1200 persons in camp X, and there weren't enough houses even for the guards for such absurd amount of people and there weren't roads or waterways to transport that many people, and there're no even you know payment sheets for the number of guards required to guard two millions prisoners. But the West continue to regurgitate the same old lies over and over because who would want to know the truth? The best truth is that USSR was evil, so every tiny piece of evidence saying otherwise should be well hidden from public. It's not like in the contemporary Russia there are powers willing to open that truth either.
  - anticodon 5y ago
    Also, one closely guarded secret nobody cares about: currently amount of people in prisons in USA is almost equal to the number of people sent to prisons and camps by Stalin. So, who's more evil?
    - sien 5y ago
      The one who did this: "This contained official records of 799,455 executions (1921–1953),[7] around 1.7 million deaths in the Gulag,[8][9] some 390,000[10] deaths during the dekulakization forced resettlement, and up to 400,000 deaths of persons deported during the 1940s,[11] with a total of about 3.3 million officially recorded victims in these categories.[12] The deaths of at least 5.5 to 6.5 million[13] persons in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 are sometimes, though not always, included with the victims of the Stalin era.[2][14]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...
      - anticodon 5y ago
        Wikipedia is also a propaganda tool. Are [9][9][12][13][14] written based on historical documents? On the documents from the Soviet/Russia archives? I seriously doubt so. Pretty sure, they contain same bullshit as Solzhenitsyn books: "I saw 2 millions prisoners walking to the camp and it was only one of Stalin's forced labor camps"...
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  > For example, the Nazis killed 11M over 12 years and the German population was about 70M in 1939. Thus, their deadliness is 11/(70x12) ~ 1/70 I don't have real numbers, but I'd guess at least 95% of the people the Nazis killed were foreigners. So that math makes little sense.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Yep. Even ignoring non-Jewish victims, majority of holocaust victims were foreign Jews and not Germans of Jewish descent. Mostly because Europe and Africa as a whole had more Jews then Germany itself. Ignoring Jews, Germans were more ruthless and murderous toward Polish or Russian people then toward western ones. And they much more ruthless and murderous toward western then toward Germans themself. (And yes they were ruthless and murderous toward German population too.)
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      Slavs generally, gypsies and other 'non-aryan' races. They had plans for the world after conquering it, which would basically wipe all local population in vast swaths of euroasia to make room for them. Jews were just first in line because Hitler was a war and childhood traumatized psychopath.
  - burntoutfire 5y ago
    The Nazis also sent millions of German troops to war. Around 8 million of them died fighting IIRC.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  > over about 70 years You included the most liberalized (less hard core communist) years of the Soviet Union. > This intuitively makes sense to me since the Nazis actively sought to exterminate people, whereas most (not ALL) deaths in the USSR were accidental because communism is useless. The Holodomor was caused by explicit policies. The purges were intentional. People who pointed out problems were considered anti-revolutionaries. Skilled laborers were purged or fled.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
He was quick. Took only four years I think.

pphysch 5y ago

Not defending Pol Pot, but attributing mass death solely to his regime is a bit misleading when it corresponded with a hostile foreign power carpet bombing the region with hundreds of millions of bombs, many still unexploded, over a decade or so.

romwell 5y ago
Not defending the US bombing of Cambodia, but it's a bit misleading to bring this up without quantifying that there's at least an order of magnitude difference in fatalities between the two. What's noteworthy, though, is that the Khmer Rouge was fighting against the puppet government installed by the hostile foreign power; and that the king displaced in the coup sided with Khmer Rouge as a result, which meant quite a bit in terms of support. That's to say, the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would have not been there, if not for the US meddling. You don't have to take my word - take it directly from them[1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-rouge/khmer-rouge-jailer-says-u-s-contributed-to-pol-pot-rise-idUSTRE5351VF20090406 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cambodia-rouge/khmer-roug...
- pphysch 5y ago
  They can not be so easily delineated. Carpet bombing = loss of homes and farmland = general socioeconomic crisis = extreme political instability. And very much by design.
  - romwell 5y ago
    I agree, I just was pointing out that the death toll from the bombing wasn't even the worst consequence. Pol Pot was, in effect, the largest bomb dropped on Cambodia.
    - culi 5y ago
      It's funny how many people died in the name of "anti-communism" and in the end it was Marxist-Leninists that finally overthrew Pol Pot
    - 5y ago

romwell 5y ago

It's remarkable how nearly everything you just wrote applies to Belarus (with small changes): >Pol Pot and his government were responsible for the death of 1/4 Cambodian population in a short amount of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries. Adolf Hitler and his government were responsible for the death of 1/4 Belarussian population (a third of them Jews) in a short span of time, not counting deaths from neighboring countries. A lot of Belarussians joined the partisan effort, the largest guerilla warfare of that war (including the writer of Come and See, an acclaimed film about those days): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See The history about this period is interesting if you're looking for a good read. It's not being widely taught, even in Russian K12 education. Both Vietnam and Belarus were liberated by the Communists across the border, who have ruled both countries until the collapse of the USSR in 1991-1992. Ever since that, both countries have been under a de-facto dictatorial rule of a former communist official (though holding "democratic elections" on paper) - Hun Sen in Cambodia, Lukashenka in Belarus. There are many differences, of course, but there aren't many countries that lost 25% of their population to genocide, were ruled by communists after that for decades, and have been ruled by the same person since 90s.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
telesilla 5y ago
Come and See remains the most horrific film I've seen. Critically important how it shows the brutality of that war. The Act of Killing is the most brutal documentary I've seen and in fact could not finish it. On Indonesia's executioners of communists. For a take on the Cambodian travesty see The Killing Fields.

anticodon 5y ago

Pol Pot came to power due to USA backed coup. USA spies tried to kill king of Cambodia multiple times but failed. So, they taught and financed guerillas to oust the king by means of military coup and install a pro-USA government. Pro-USA government didn't last long, and Pol Pot took its place. And, BTW, the most well hidden secret is that USA supported Pol Pot and even provided financial support to his government. USA: making a better world through revolutions, coups and military invasions for more than a century!

nickff 5y ago
>” And, BTW, the most well hidden secret is that USA supported Pol Pot and even provided financial support to his government.” According to Wikipedia, the USA did not materially support the Khmer Rouge, though they did vote in favor of certain UN resolutions which favored the regime. Do you have some evidence or support for your claims? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_support_for_the_Khmer_Rouge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...
- wonnage 5y ago
  It's more that they spent the entirety of the Cold War period propping up any dictators they could find as long as they weren't communists, and it usually backfired.
  - nickff 5y ago
    >” It's more that they spent the entirety of the Cold War period propping up any dictators they could find as long as they weren't communists, and it usually backfired.” But the Khmer Rouge were the communists! They were officially the “Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)”.
    - wonnage 5y ago
      Yeah they supported the right-wing dictator that deposed the king who then joined Pol Pot and enabled his rebellion to succeed. And policy shifted after the 70s when they decided communism was ok, as long as you opposed the USSR. This was the justification for normalizing relations with China, who wound up supporting the Khmer Rouge, since they opposed post-war Vietnam (who they had just supported in the Vietnam War), which was a USSR ally. It was a complicated time to be deciding who to coup.