Khmer Rouge - Ideology

Ideology

The Khmer Rouge's ideology was based on an extreme version of Khmer nationalism and xenophobia. It combined an idealization of the Angkor Empire (802–1431), with an existential fear for the existence of the Cambodian state, which had historically been liquidated under Vietnamese and Siamese intervention. Their ideology was also influenced by colonial French education, which posited Khmers as "Aryans among Asians", who were morally superior to Chinese or Vietnamese. The spillover of Vietnamese fighters from the Vietnam War further aggravated anti-Vietnamese feeling. The Khmer Rouge explicitly targeted the Chinese, Vietnamese, and even their partially Khmer offspring for extinction; although the Cham Muslims were treated unfavorably, they were encouraged to "mix flesh and blood", to intermarry and assimilate. Some people with partial Chinese or Vietnamese ancestry were present in the Khmer Rouge leadership; as in the Soviet Union, they either were purged or participated in the ethnic cleansing campaigns.

Although a radical movement, the Khmer Rouge also drew on the idioms of Cambodian Buddhist culture. The time that the party spent in the forests in the 1960s, supposedly accumulating knowledge, has similarities to Buddhist lore. Before coming to power, the Khmer Rouge also demonstrated characteristics of "the Buddhist ideals of propriety and social justice", more so than the current government. Rather than maintaining a bureaucracy based on names and reputation, the Khmer Rouge also used charismatic leadership that is characteristic of Buddhist societies.

The Khmer Rouge's social policy focused on working towards a purely agrarian society. Pol Pot strongly influenced the propagation of this policy. He was reportedly impressed with how the mountain tribes of Cambodia lived, which the party interpreted as a form of primitive communism; as a result, those minorities received more lenient and sometimes even favorable treatment than the urbanized "bourgeois" Chinese and Vietnamese. Pol Pot wanted to remove social institutions and to transform the society into an agrarian one. This was his way of " a complete Communist society without wasting time on the intermediate steps" as the Khmer Rouge said to China in 1975. The evacuation of the cities disproportionately affected Chinese and Vietnamese, who were unused to agricultural work, segregated from Khmers in labor camps, and forbidden to speak their own language or practice non-Khmer religion.