The Wages of "Settlers" is Srebrenica, Part III: American Imperialism Isn't Racist Against Communists, It's Got Lots of Communist Friends

The European colonization of Indochina did not happen against the will of the local bourgeoisie, but largely with their collaboration. The Khmer Empire, Vietnam, Laos, these all continued to exist on paper. The monarchs continued to reign, their tax collectors continued to gather taxes next to the French colonial tax collectors. (When the Japanese occupied the region, a third layer of tax collection was added; capitalism is very efficient.)

The Konbaung dynasty, which ruled the Third Burmese Empire, was the exception to this rule. Aggressively nazbol and expansionist, they ran up against the British Raj. Unlike the French, the British ejected the Konbuang scions from power after three bitter wars. However, the Kingdom of Siam was left alone by both Britain and France as a neutral buffer state between their colonial possessions, and its monarchs would go on to collaborate with the Japanese imperialists as well.

We've already explored how the geography of Indochina encouraged nazbol militarism, both then and now. The Burmese Empire was an aggressive and expansionist barracks state, and modern Myanmar is ruled by the military that liberated it from Japan. The other two main ideological trends in the region's politics are monarchy and communism.

Monarchy is a type of government where all legal and political authority derives from one ruling dynasty. Outside of that simple political form, its substance can come from just about any point on the triangle compass. Monarchs can be conservative, liberal, fascist, nazbol, even synthetic leftist in the case of many modern European royals.

Debatably, they can even be communist. Although the modern communist tradition is staunchly republican, early UK Labour was officially Jacobite. And though stereotyping the DPRK as a "communist monarchy" is so much Western propaganda, there is a grain of truth to it. Monarchs that strive for the good of their nation's working class above all else tend to enact juche unconsciously; they behave politically as the symbol for their nation's working class, a stand-in for the "atheistic worship of the masses," as juche phrases it. With this organic connection between monarch and working class subject, such monarchs can strike down bourgeois and petty bourgeois oppressors within and without the nation. Such monarchs are rare and usually relegated to premodern times before communism was ever defined as such, so this aspect of monarchy is usually unrecognized by historians, monarchists, and communists alike. But elements of this can be found in the reigns of Gustav Adolf II and even in some of my ancestors the Stuarts, at least before they became kings of England too and went Hollywood.

As an ideology, monarchies are mostly relegated to premodern eras, and modern monarchies are mostly relics of the past devoid of any real power. This is not true in Indochina. In Indochina, the monarchies died hard, for when they lived they were literally revered as gods, and in Thailand still are.

During the revolutionary period of Indochina, the Viet Cong set up a logistics network called the Ho Chi Minh Trail that passed through border areas of Laos and Cambodia. As Laos and Cambodia were not officially parties to the Vietnam War, this was an eminently sensible decision on the part of the Viet Cong that minimized the risk of interception of supplies and personnel. Unfortunately, it also drew Laos and Cambodia into the war; Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal carpetbombed the border areas in an attempt to stamp out the trail.

Those operations didn't work to accomplish their stated goals, but they did work in radicalizing the Khmer and Laotian peasantry. North Vietnam helped organize the Pathet Lao and the Khmer Rouge, and trained and equipped their cadres, who were sent back home to overthrow their Western-allied monarchies. The CIA was deployed to stop this, and operating from bases in monarchist Thailand they created air bridges to support monarchist forces within these two countries.

In Laos, the CIA took advantage of clan divisions within the Hmong people to turn some of the Hmong against the Pathet Lao, but it was futile. As the tide of workers' and peasants' revolution swept over Laos, those same CIA airbridges were used to evacuate many of the Hmong reactionaries, and many of them live in the United States today. Relations between the central governments of Vietnam and Laos and many of the Hmong are still strained because of this history, but both countries retain significant populations of 1.4 million and 0.6 million, respectively. If there were real repression ongoing, there would be a serious refugee crisis, and the CIA wouldn't stop letting us know about it. Instead, the Dubya administration actually prosecuted a Hmong exile leader for trying to overthrow the Laotian government, and only stopped after Obama's election.

In Cambodia, King Sihanouk ruled and played a different sort of game of neutrality. Instead of staying out of the Vietnam War, he both allowed the Viet Cong to set up the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the US to bomb it. Being all things to all people ended up pleasing nobody, and he was ousted in a military coup that established the Khmer Republic as a firm American ally. It was this that led to the Vietnamese turning the Khmer Rouge loose on Cambodia. King Sihanouk was visiting Beijing when the coup occurred, and with Chinese encouragement he endorsed the Khmer Rouge and appointed Pol Pot his prime minister.

With the backing of the godlike figure of the king, the Khmer Rouge immediately won the support of the peasantry. They were largely a cutout for the Vietnamese military at first, but recruits swelled the ranks and the Khmer Rouge became a real fighting force. Eventually they had captured the entire countryside and had Phnom Penh encircled.

But as the Khmer Rouge grew stronger, it exercised more autonomy relative to the Vietnamese. Cadres trained by the Vietnamese were purged, and nationalist sentiment against Vietnam was stoked. After the fall of Phnom Penh and the declaration of "Democratic Kampuchea," Pol Pot could finally pursue the Sakaist dream of taking "Land Back™" for the Cambodian people without restriction.

Firstly, we must explain Pol Pot's class background, to understand what drove these deviations in his Marxist-Leninist ideology. Put simply, he was born petty bourgeois, and grew up to become bourgeois. He was born to wealthy farmers.

Although "petty bourgeois" is used to describe both small business owners like wealthy farmers as well as the people hired by the bourgeoisie to fight the class war against the workers, there is a subtle difference between the two. The petty bourgeoisie fighting the class war, that is the police and clergy and artists and intellectuals, can hope to become wealthier and more renowned, but lacking their own means of production they cannot hope to rule within the capitalist system. Small business owners, on the other hand, do have a small but realistic chance to "own this boot one day" because they do own their own means of production. On the triangle compass, the petty bourgeoisie that fight the class war are either fascists or social democrats; whereas the petty bourgeoisie that own minor means of production are more properly located on the nazbol end of the bourgeois spectrum. If they play their cards right, they can become the big bourgeoisie that rule their country. A social democrat is a disempowered fascist; a nazbol is a liberal without money yet.

So Pol Pot was born into such a family, and then he went to college at the elite schools of Cambodia. Simply receiving a higher education does not necessarily make one bourgeois, of course. But this wasn't just a college education; this was akin to going to Oxford or Harvard. Graduating from such institutions was a ticket into serving in the government. While technically a government minister in a capitalist society does not own the means of production, they indirectly control everyone's means of production, and can easily parlay that indirect control into bribes sufficient to acquire their own substantial means of production during or after their stint of government service. Several of Pol Pot's classmates went on to government service, and he made his lifelong friends and political connections among this class. The wealthy farmer from the sticks was indeed one day owning this boot.

Bourgeois and petty bourgeois class interests deviating supposed class traitors from correct theory and praxis should not be news to anyone who's had even a passing familiarity with woke kids on Twitter. This is what they do all day long. Unfortunately for both Cambodia and Vietnam, one of these woke kids gained control of both a communist party and an entire country.

We must secondly consider the geopolitical chessboard of the time to understand why Pol Pot received the help he did from the quarters he did.

Mao's China had been trying to assert its ideological primacy in the socialist world ever since the death of Stalin. Khrushchev's blundering denunciation of Stalin in his secret speech gave Mao the perfect excuse to begin this effort. Mao himself had class interests similar to Pol Pot's, so his motives were probably more about self-aggrandizement than ideological purity. And Khrushchev and Brezhnev were hardly paragons of socialist virtue themselves. The leadership of both sides deserved to lose, but the only real losers in this split were the workers of both China and the USSR.

The course of this Sino-Soviet split resembled the Mongol civil war, geopolitically. Mao's assertion of the ideological primacy of China carried echoes of Qubilai Khan's attempt to assert the Yuan Dynasty's control over all of the Mongol khanates. The geopolitical actions of Mao's China mirrored the geopolitical actions of Qubilai Khan's China. China's alliance with Pakistan began and matured under Mao's rule, mirroring the Toluid dynastic links between Qubilai's China and Hulegu's Il-Khanate. Mao's principal geopolitical rival was the Soviet Union, which occupied the same exact territory as the Golden Horde and the Chaghatai Khanate which opposed the Toluids in the Mongol Civil War. Mao's successors invaded Vietnam and also supported the Cham and mountain-dweller FULRO insurgency against the Vietnamese state, but both of these failed to militarily conquer the country, and friendly relations only resumed after these conflicts; Qubilai's China likewise threw failed invasion after failed invasion at Dai Viet and Champa but succeeded at last in establishing a tributary relationship.

The United States had endorsed and encouraged the Sino-Soviet split at every step of the way, as a way to weaken the Soviet Union and the larger communist bloc. The American alliance was endorsed by all of the rapidly-changing leadership in China: it began under Mao, continued under the Gang of Four, and was ratified until the present day by Deng and his successors. It only started breaking down recently, under the administrations of Xi and Trump. The Dengist "reform and opening up" began during this period of alliance. Although the reform and opening up allowed China to swiftly modernize its economy, the American alliance brought serious downsides in its foreign and domestic policy. The Cultural Revolution had weakened China, but on a fundamental level, the bourgeois arrogance of China's woke middle class of the day was similar to the bourgeois arrogance of America's modern woke middle class. Abandoning the Cultural Revolution meant abandoning its upsides of cultural equality of the countryside and cities, as well as its downsides of discouraging economic development.

The Sino-American alliance also degraded the rest of Chinese foreign policy. China's communist allies became more synthetic and rooted in the petty bourgeoisie, and China's non-communist allies became more reactionary. Pakistan suffered an outright takeover by Islamist extremists and political domination by its military and intelligence services, and this extremely chauvinist interpretation of Islam and reactionary political arrangement prevails there to this day. Albanian ultras abandoned their Chinese alliance at this stage, only to thoroughly sell out to America themselves after the Cold War as discussed earlier.

Not only did China and its communist allies support America during this period, but America and its allies supported them back. America thoroughly denies it, but it lent both official and unofficial aid to the Khmer Rouge even at the height of the Killing Fields. America used its UN veto to prevent recognition of the Vietnamese-backed communist government of Cambodia, forcing continued recognition of the genocidal Khmer Rouge upon the rest of the UN until 1993. America sanctioned Vietnam for its eventual liberation of Cambodia from Khmer Rouge genocide, and blocked IMF loans to Vietnam on those grounds. America's ally Thailand permitted Khmer Rouge guerrillas fighting the Vietnamese-backed government to move across their territory and trade in their markets to raise money.

Zbigniew Brzezinski describes how America handled this contradiction between its staunchly anti-communist and anti-totalitarian public stance, and its quiet aid for the Khmer Rouge: "I encourage[d] the Chinese to support Pol Pot... we could never support him but China could." And so there was no paper or money trail whatsoever, but America allied itself with China and American resources flowed there. In a totally completely unrelated development, no really you guys, China then put a million troops on the Soviet border to keep them neutral as they invaded Vietnam in punishment for the occupation of Cambodia, and the imperialists kept their mailed fists clean.

Thirdly, we must understand what drove Pol Pot's fury at the Vietnamese in particular. After all, socialist Vietnam had just armed the Khmer Rouge, delivered Cambodia into his hands, and even let his cadres enter Phnom Penh themselves so they could take all the glory. In every respect, the Vietnamese acted with self-restraint and in comradely solidarity towards the Khmer Rouge, but the Khmer Rouge prepared for merciless war anyway.

Why did he do it? As a petty bourgeois nazbol turned bourgeois academic, Pol Pot was encouraged to formulate his theory in bourgeois nationalist ways. Where the Vietnamese saw an opportunity to build a united front against imperialism and capitalism in Indochina, Pol Pot saw an opportunity to backstab the foremost communist nation in the region in the name of Land Back™. Keeping the monarchs and their feudalism in power, keeping the American flag waving ominously over the slums surrounding each base, none of that mattered. There was a slice of the Mekong delta that used to be Cambod- er, Khmer, and Vietnam needed to Gib. Clay. Nao.

Yes, that's right. Like all such synthetic leftist regimes, Pol Pot needlessly changed the words for things. It wasn't Cambodia anymore, it was Khmer, for that great and ancient empire that built Angkor Wat. This was so much of a piece with synthetic leftist fascination with aesthetics: a concern more for the way things look than the way things work. I've got an idea for an article that'll drop in the indeterminate future titled "Latinx Womyn are Thermidorian" that will explore this facet of the modern-day fascist.

But this fascination for aesthetics, though it looks harmless and easily-accommodated enough on the surface, does come at a price. Workers are often the people of a society who, because of some manner of disability, cannot move up the social ladder towards the bourgeoisie. Therefore, this makes the rights of the disabled - even the intellectually disabled - important to workers' rights as a whole. Changing the way things are said or done in society requires a cost of adjustment that is minor for most, but harder for them. This is where a lot of bigotry originating from within the working class fundamentally comes from, I believe - still not an innate belief in superiority, but a desire to quell the mentally exhaustive process that comes with adjusting well-established behaviors and routines for people ill-equipped to do that.

This is why it must only be done when the harm being done by the perpetuation of the status quo is real and sustained. The banning of the n-word from polite society is one such real accommodation: it came at a cost to the intellectually disabled, but was eminently worth doing, as that term is so hateful and hurtful. Society as a whole gained by its passing, even if it came with a real adjustment cost to this portion of the working class. The ideal of social solidarity means that we will be able and willing to sacrifice a little bit for people on the other side of society, and by all doing this, everyone will be much better off in the long run. This particular case was a contribution worth making, and the pain of adjustment is largely done, and now everyone's better off.

However, the crusade to end that beget the crusade to end every single slur under the sun. And then not just slurs, but everyday terms of speech, to question the very fabric of our language itself, and if we don't or don't know that some people expect us to know, we're bigots. There are terms that followed the n-word that were probably also worth banning. There was also a point where the terms being banned were used unironically by the group themselves, or where various synonyms of "dumb" were successively banned, up to and including "dumb" itself. They are proposing a non-stop adjustment cycle with the rules and schedule released in hipster fashion ("oh, this rule of our iron-reich social ettiquette? you've probably never heard of it"), by which the working class can be tried and convicted as Nazis out of sheer lack of social clout alone. The bourgeoisie have turned anti-fascism into fascism itself, and the workers are ultimately made to pay the price, whipped and doxxed and cancelled into submission. The fig leaf justifying this naked classism is that they were not able to adjust quickly enough to someone else's murky and academically complex standards.

And this process is not just playing out in America today, but it also played out in Cambodia in the revolutionary era. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge purged their ranks of cadres trained by or with soft feelings towards Vietnam. They were going to create an ethnically pure Khmer state rooted in the soil, denuded of their decadent Chinese and Vietnamese settler-colonials and the cities they controlled. Their party became a pack of spoiled rich Settlers kids, Sakaist Third Worldists posturing as Marxist-Leninist-Maoist orthodoxy.

And the saddest part is, to the eternal discredit of Maoism, they were probably not even wrong about their ideology. Mao and his successors endorsed the movement, and supplied it arms, funding, and even diplomatic and military support. This was mostly done in unspoken agreement with American imperialism. While America couldn't possibly sully its liberal democratic reputation with such a move as openly supporting the Khmer Rouge, China certainly could, and did. They were willing pawns of Henry Kissinger supporting fascism in Red clothing, and anyone wondering why comrades could ever possibly question something China does in good faith can start here. The revolutionary Chinese government has gone astray before, and helped tear down the edifice of the communist bloc in times past. No, the scurrilous geopolitically-motivated charges of American imperialism about Xinjiang and Tibetan Buddhism are obvious hogwash. But there are still real criticisms of recent Chinese foreign policy to be made from the perspective of the principle of the defense of the anti-imperialist bloc of countries itself.

Maoism has often veered into these utopian, synthetic leftist, so-ultra-it's-fascism-again deviations. Besides the homeland itself and Cambodia, there was also a formation of the Peruvian academic middle class called the Luminoso Sendero, or Shining Path, that terrorized the workers so hard that they backed decades of IMF reaction, just to see the backs of them. Only as of the last few months of this piece's writing has an anti-imperialist party come to power in Peru, and it was only by foreswearing and condemning the Luminoso Sendero altogether.

In Cambodia's case, its own expression of synthetic leftism was rooted in Maoism's elaboration on Leninism's extension of the mass base of the party to the peasants. Because many of these are properly speaking not workers but petty bourgeois and thus ideologically nazbol or liberal in their character, the Cambodian revolution got derailed by this class. A reactionary petty bourgeois movement wore the clothes of a working class movement to present itself to the world. And that presentation involved ruthlessly backstabbing the ally that brought them to power, butchering civilians, and it culminated in the Killing Fields and two unnecessary wars by "communists" against Vietnam.

On to Part IV: "Communist Friends With Death Camps"