Communism and Genocide: Cambodian Edition

“I was shot three times. I lay limp in the ditch. It was filled with my family's blood…My mother was dead. My baby sister was dead. My grandmother was dead. My aunt and uncle were dead. My babysitter was dead.” – Alive in the Killing Fields.

With little fanfare, China celebrated 75 years of communism in 2024, marking Mao Zedong’s establishment of the People’s Republic of China following the end of the civil war in 1949.  At its inception, the new government was China’s latest shot at redemption, following a Century of Humiliation, where China all too often kowtowed to the demands of foreign nations.  Since Mao’s victory, however, the liberation of the Chinese people would have to wait.  Instead, the people suffered their worst disgrace following the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in a famine that killed 30 million, and the Cultural Revolution, which sent millions more to hard labor.  But China’s newest humiliation wouldn’t be confined to its own borders but would bleed into the surrounding nations in the region.  By the 1960s, its effects would begin to be seen in Cambodia. 

In Nawuth Keat’s 2009 memoir, “Alive in the Killing Fields”, Keat, a Cambodian native who survived Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, alerts us to the dangers of communism in his family’s story of executions, starvation, and their eventual escape to a new life in the United States.  A youth book for all ages, Keat begins with the Khmer Rouge attack on his village in 1973 at the age of 9.  Although his family was wealthy, based on local standards, they were not immune to the depravity of the communist regime that formed in the 1960s, to oppose the existing government. 

Cambodia gained its independence from France in 1954. By 1970, the Cambodian king would be ousted in a military coup, leading to a civil war that the Khmer Rouge would eventually win, with 90 percent of their funding coming from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).    

Under the direction of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia in 1975, driving city dwellers to the countryside into forced labor.  Holding themselves up as the organization of saviors, citizens were now expected to work for the common good in the rice fields, where everyone became peasants and workers.  Mimicking China’s Great Leap Forward, Maoist collectivist agrarian policies predictably led to widespread famines.  By the end of their reign, up to three million Cambodians would be lost, or nearly 40 percent of the population. While most came from executions, the remainder died from starvation and disease. 

The Khmer Rouge, as the dark-skinned majority of the Cambodian population, were susceptible to the nationalism that was spreading throughout the world and set out to cleanse intellectuals and minorities ethnically.  Like China’s Red Guard, the youth of Cambodia’s villages made up the bulk of the guerrilla movement.  They outlawed private property and held political indoctrination meetings where all Cambodians were required to attend.  Their goal: to dismantle society as it was and liberate themselves from the past by beginning anew to create their utopian commune. 

In addition to hard labor, Cambodians were subjected to torture, and family separation, many residing in the nearly 200 prisons.  With swollen, distended bellies from malnutrition, citizens stole food to survive, knowing their punishment, if caught, was death.  And it was here, in the Killing Fields, where nearly 24,000 mass graves held the murdered corpses of those executed in the rice fields of Cambodia.  Those who fled ended up in equally miserable refugee camps in Thailand.  As US forces fought a losing war in Vietnam to fight the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, a Vietnamese military invasion of Cambodia in 1978 led to the toppling of the Khmer Rouge.   

In 1969, US President Richard Nixon called for self-reliance in the defense of foreign nations' own countries, with the US promise to assist its allies only after their own resistance failed.  A clear rejection of the practice that sent 500,000 US soldiers to Vietnam and resulted in a war with over one million civilian casualties.     

Whether in China, Cambodia, or the many nations throughout the world at the time, the Communist Party adopted the color red to reflect the blood of the workers, the proletariat.  Yet, by the end of the war, the Khmer Rouge, the red party of the Communist movement, had themselves filled the fields with the blood of their captives.   Showing yet again how another attempt at communism in the East simply resulted in another theater of war and more bloodshed for the innocent people they targeted.