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In power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into "Old People" through agricultural labor. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation. In Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would be moved only about "two or three kilometers" outside the city and would return in "two or three days." Some witnesses say they were told that the evacuation was because of the "threat of American bombing" and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would "take care of everything" until they returned. These were not the first evacuations of civilian populations by the Khmer Rouge. Similar evacuations of populations without possessions had been occurring on a smaller scale since the early 1970s. The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population ("New People") into agricultural communes. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labor camps. During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who had the potential to undermine the new state (including intellectuals or even those that had stereotypical signs of learning, such as glasses) and killing many others for even minor breaches of rules. |
RPhilbeck wrote on Sun, 30 March 2008 16:46 | ||
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080330/ap_on_re_us/obit_pran
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Jay Kadis wrote on Mon, 31 March 2008 15:23 |
...No one has yet implemented true communism. |
Legrande Matinbois wrote on Tue, 01 April 2008 12:20 | ||
Yeah. Because first thing ya know, some free-thinking dissenter doesn't feel like subordinating himself to the incontestable authority, and then, dad-gummit, the exalted keeper of the Utopian vision must deploy the all-powerful enforcers of the vision to kill him... For the "common good", of course. Legrande |
Legrande Matinbois wrote on Tue, 01 April 2008 12:20 |
Communism has clearly failed as a governing strategy. The Chinese system can be better described as totalitarian hyper-capitalism than anything Marx would recognize. Communism's real danger today is its enduring power as a rhetorical device. Virtually any government action can be dismissed by equating that action to socialism and then equating socialism to communism. |