I would like to emphasize that the Khmer Rouge Communist Party of Kampuchea Cambodia was INFLUENCED and INSPIRED by The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx aka MARXISM!
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[source: wikipedia]
The Khmer Rouge (Khmer: “Khmer Krahom” in Khmer) literally translated as Red Cambodians was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan. Democratic Kampuchea was the name of the state as controlled by the government of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.
Khmer Rouge means Communist Cambodians. 'Rouge' comes from the French word for red, which is a symbol of communism. Khmer means people from the Cambodian region. This was another name for the Communist Party of Kampuchea that was given by the former King Sihanouk. The organization began in January 1968 as the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea and was changed thirteen years later to Party of Democratic Kampuchea.
This organization is remembered primarily for its policy of social engineering, which resulted in genocide. Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the deaths of thousands from treatable diseases (such as malaria). Arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks between 1975 and 1978, are considered to have constituted a genocide.
After taking power, the Khmer Rouge leadership renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge subjected Cambodia to a radical social reform process that was aimed at creating a purely agrarian-based Communist society. The Khmer Rouge forced around two million people from the cities to the country to take up work in the agricultural field. They were not only forcing people out of their homes, but then also depriving humans of their basic rights as they controlled how Cambodians acted, what they wore, who they could talk to, and many other aspects of their lives. Over the next years, the Khmer Rouge killed many intellectuals, city-dwellers, minority people, and many of their own party members and soldiers who were suspected of being traitors.
The population in Cambodia was around 7,100,000 at the beginning of what ended up being the most lethal regime of the 20th century. Throughout the next ten years, 3,300,000 people (including men, women, children, and foreigners) were killed and by the end of the genocide, there was a total of slightly less than four million that were lost to the ways of the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities". Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education, many urban dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments.
The Khmer Rouge believed parents were tainted with capitalism. Consequently, children were separated from parents and indoctrinated in communism as well as taught torture methods with animals. Children were a "dictatorial instrument of the party" and were given leadership in torture and executions.
One of their mottos, in reference to the New People, was: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss". This philosophy that the Khmer Rouge had developed over time. It started as communist party that was working together and searching for direction from the Vietnamese guerrillas who were fighting their own civil war.
Pol Pot was a key leader in the movement after he returned to Cambodia from France. He had become a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) which gave guidance to the ideas of the Khmer Rouge.
The movement gained strength and support in the northeastern jungles and established firm footing when Cambodia’s leader Prince Sihanouk was removed from office during a military coup in 1970. The former prince then looked to the Khmer Rouge for backing. With the threat of Civil war looming, the Khmer Rouge gained support by posing as a “party for peace”. [<=== What a JOKE! (emphasis mine)]
As the Khmer Rouge gained power they focused on an ideology of establishing a purely agrarian society. Pol Pot highly influenced the propagation of this policy. It is believed that he was influenced by the way that tribes of the north-eastern jungles lived. He respected that they lived “free of Buddhism, money or education” and decided that this was a good way for the people of Cambodia to start living. He wanted social institutions to be removed and make the society all agrarian. This was his way of “[creating] a complete Communist society without wasting time on the intermediate steps” as the Khmer Rouge said to China in 1975.
By the 1970s, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge combined its own ideas with the anti-colonialist ideas of the PCF, which its leaders had acquired during their education in French universities in the 1950s. The Khmer Rouge leaders were also privately very resentful of the Vietnamese, and were determined to establish a form of communism very different from the Vietnamese model.
After four years of rule, the Khmer Rouge regime was removed from power in 1979 as a result of a invasion by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and was replaced by moderate, pro-Vietnamese Communists. The Khmer Rouge survived into the 1990s as a resistance movement operating in western Cambodia from bases in Thailand. In 1996, following a peace agreement, their leader Pol Pot formally dissolved the organization. Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998, having never been put on trial. The Khmer Rouge is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million people or 1/5 of the country's total population (estimates range from 850,000 to 2.5 million) under its regime, through execution, torture, starvation and forced labour. Because of the large number of deaths, and because ethnic groups and religious minorities were targeted, the deaths during the rule of the Khmer Rouge are often considered a genocide as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.
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