https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese...
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!
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_s...
But the Khmer Rouge were the communists! They were officially the “Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK)”.
It was a complicated time to be deciding who to coup.
They couldn't politically support the cause of their former enemy, so Cambodians suffered for longer, until Vietnam got bold enough to invade and liberate them (Edit: I don't know whether the aim was to liberate, the aim probably was to invade but it resulted in liberation).
But yeah, I don't remember any material support either. But the political support was deciding in keeping the madmen going in the country.
[0] "A Problem from Hell" by Samantha Power
In terms of support, it seems you can even quote Kissinger on it:
"You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won't let that stand in our way."
"The Thais and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina. We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything for Pol Pot. But I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something for Pol Pot." (Edit, others meaning China in the context) [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_s...
It's not true. Pol Pot was a madman that created his own crazy theory that included parts of Marxism.
Where does Marx said that the city populations must be evacuated to the villages and teachers killed?
Anyway, the point is not in the details. My point is that USA meddling with politics in remote countries usually results in civil war, millions of dead people and economical decline that lasts for decades. It was true for Cambodia, it's true for Arab Spring countries, it's true for Ukraine which is the last known victim of USA backed revolution to this day. How many more victims this world needs?
>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
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.
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.
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-roug...
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, who's more evil?
"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...
One can dispute this belief, and no doubt they were both brutal, but there is a difference between a genocidal policy with the aim of extermination, and the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests.
Put another way, you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions (although I know this is stretching things quite a bit), whereas those who were targeted by the nazis had no hope of escape.
sure, as long as we admit that in practice you really couldn't because punishment, although supposedly for crimes, was irrational enough to be essentially random.
> the state exerting its power to punish those it thinks are working against its interests
is as bad and wrong as saying the same thing about the Holocaust.
> Put another way, you could, in theory, avoid punishment in the Soviet Union by avoiding certain actions
No, you couldn't. You're implying that the millions of people murdered, tortured, dispossessed, and imprisoned in gulags under Stalin somehow had it coming and could have avoided their "punishment" by just behaving better. Stop spreading lies, and stop trivializing the crimes against humanity committed by the early Soviet Union.
This does not explain why the Nazis were also targeting the disabled and blacks, for example, does it? What crimes had the disabled and blacks committed against the state? Also, how could people not living in Germany, the Poles and Slavs, have committed crimes against the German state?
See, the Nazis were not motivated by any good faith belief that the groups they targeted had committed any specific crimes against the state. They believed that these groups should not exist at all, and they were prepared to, ultimately, hunt them down for extermination anywhere in the world.
I think equating the Communists and the Nazi is rather repugnant. Yes, both were brutal, but to downplay the unparalleled evil of the Nazi regime betrays a lack of critical analysis of what actually happened.
The whole system was set up to routinely fabricate absurd evidence against innocent people and send them to Gulags (or straight against the wall). It was needed, because the rulers needed their population to be terrorized (less chance of a rebellion) and also because it provided huge amounts of free labor for the Gulags.
I don't think anybody up high believed for a second that any significant fraction of people they condemned to death, torture or lives destroyed in Gulags were guilty of anything.
I see echoes of this kind of thinking everywhere in the present.
I think there is a simpler explanation (assuming you went to school in a Western country). The USSR under Stalin was allied with the western powers during WWII. Presenting Stalin as "just as bad" as Hitler would cast doubt on the whole moral justification of the war and would undermine the image of the western powers as the good guys who fought the evil Nazis to save the world from tyranny.
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.
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.)
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.