When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, they did so with the intention of obliterating its hierarchical political culture in order to reconstruct Cambodian society from ground zero as the world’s most egalitarian, and therefore revolutionary social order.

That passage comes from historian Karl Jackson, in a heartbreaking book, published by Princeton Press, called Cambodia 1975 – 1978. In this book, Jackson describes the Khmer Rouge (which was the name of the socialist-communist-Marxist party that took over Cambodia in the mid-1970’s) as “sectarians and radical egalitarians [who] saw the diversity and differences between people as the root of all evil.”

This ideology was extrapolated directly from the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The Khmer Rouge was led by a cult-of-personality named Pol Pot, Western educated, who was also the architect of the Killing Fields – a seemingly incomprehensible genocide where Cambodian cities were systematically depopulated, and the entire Cambodian citizenry was enslaved on collective farms with a horrifyingly draconian ideology-of-equality imposed upon all.

“Typically, the slightest dissent would be punished by the offender getting clubbed or starved to death, and so many Cambodians were dispatched by such methods (approximately 1.7 million between 1975 and 1979 according to one estimate) that fields filled with corpses became the macabre hallmark of the regime” (Ibid).

From the Journal of Asian Studies (1998):

“First, they tried to eliminate the use of linguistic registers that connoted kinship, age and other social differences. The word comrade, mitt, was suppose to replace titles, honorifics and even kin terms. Second, many non-verbal cues that connoted status, such as polite greeting forms and bending down before superiors, were also discouraged.”

A historian by the name of Jay Jordens writes that the “Khmer Rouge realized Buddhism was at the core of Khmer ideas of social hierarchy. Thus by abolishing religion and destroying all vestiges of Buddhism; monks, texts, images, rituals, and so on, they might destroy the moral underpinnings of the beliefs in ‘unequal souls'” (Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia, 1996).

And from the website Asia Pacific Curriculum:

By 1977, the distrust on the part of the leadership had reached paranoiac heights and the purges of suspected traitors increased. Even the ranks of the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves were purged, sending increasingly larger numbers of them and their families to prisons where they were tortured and then murdered. The most notorious of these prisons was S-21, a high school in Phnom Penh that was converted into a prison and torture centre run by Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch. Out of an estimated 15,000 prisoners who were sent to S-21, only seven survived.

Prisoners housed there were photographed and tortured to produce confessions. When the interrogators were finished, the prisoners’ corpses were carried by truck to the “killing fields” outside of Phnom Penh. There are approximately 20,000 of these mass graves in various locations in the country.

The relatively short time that Pol Pot ruled — approximately four years — was a living nightmare. An estimated one-quarter of the Cambodian population was killed. I ask you to please pause for a moment and process that.

These were each individual human beings, like you and me, with individual human lives and loves and passions and dreams and problems and sadnesses and joys, and their individual lives were real and important. Yet they were murdered as if they were nothing — nothing but cogs in a collectivist machine which in reality existed only inside the warped and grotesque mind of a dictator.

The Cambodian people who survived survived only on “a ladle of watery rice gruel a day.” They were forced into back-breaking labor most of their waking hours – separated from their families (families do not matter in the Communist ideology, if you don’t know, since all humans are comrades equally — your parents and siblings and children supposed to mean the same to you as parents, siblings, and children of all other people, even if you’ve never seen any of these other people in your life, nor they you).

Pol Pot’s regime forced the Cambodian people to eat in spectacularly unsanitary cooperatives, treating them worse than the poorly treated farm animals. They lived under incessant terror of being reported, even for minor acts “such as taking a coconut from a tree or allowing cattle to graze in the wrong field.”

And incalculable number of people died as a direct result of these filthy, terror-stricken conditions.

Vietnamese minority groups in particular were singled out for persecution and annihilation. So were the Cham Muslim minorities.

Survivors report that urbanites suffered harder work and even greater suspicion than the peasantry.

Virtually the entire population labored on farms, and do you know why? Because the ideology of egalitarianism decrees that all humans do everything the same. Thus, since the government could neither force people into instant expertise and specialization, which takes time and study and practice, nor the comparatively luxurious standards of urban living, which must come from a level of wealth and production they could not come close to affording, the government went for the opposite: evacuating the cities overnight and forcing everyone, no matter their knowledge and training, into impoverished subsistence agriculture — abolishing, with astonishing speed and extreme force, all specialization and the division of labor, which is, of course, hierarchical and therefore regards by all egalitarian standards as “bad.”

In terms of the sheer numbers of individual lives taken, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin killed far more people than Pol Pot, and yet Pol Pot and his genocidal regime stands out among them all — for being, in my opinion, the most horrific and evil-perfect-practitioner of this ideology: an ideology that regards individuality as non-existent, people only worth anything to the extent that they help produce food “collectively.” Thus the Khmer Rouge slogans, written and posted where the Cambodian people could read them, contained a disgusting and shocking murderous disregard for individual human life:

“To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss. Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.”

The Khmer Rouge is among the most ghastly of proofs about which you will ever read regarding the paramount role of ideas in human life.

For those who harangue and harass me and others like me for our defending individuality and individual rights, who think that the idea of egalitarian-socialism is nothing to even remotely consider or entertain, please read deeply about Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge — their obliteration of individual rights, the destruction of the entire concept of individuality and independent thinking: read what it led to in Cambodia, and then come back and harangue me. I have plenty more to say — beginning with the fact that egalitarianism is still, right up to this present moment, in one form or another, the defining characteristic and cornerstone of virtually all leftist ideology of the last two-hundred years. It’s most recent and most faddish iteration is the “racial-privilege-inequality” narrative which has infected the world like a plague.

As Vincent Cook expressed it so well:

Mass death is certainly no stranger to Communism. Even today a terrible famine stalks North Korea to remind us of the lethal nature of Marxism. However, Pol Pot has earned a special place in the history of Marxian Communism as his Khmer Rouge earned the special distinction of being the one Communist movement in history to actually attempt the full and consistent implementation of the ideals of Karl Marx.

Most Marxists would recoil at the suggestion that Pol Pot is the logical conclusion of their social philosophy, yet any honest assessment of Marx’s theory cannot conceal the fact that the radical egalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge is precisely what Marx predicted would be the ultimate culmination of all human history. It must be clearly kept in mind that industrial socialism, as it was known in the former Soviet Union and other mainstream Marxist states, is not the endpoint of Marx’s philosophy of history. In his view, the abolition of capitalist production relations is only the first stage of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

Marx anticipated that there would be a radical redistribution of wealth and a withering of the global socialist state (the “crude” stage of communism) followed by a fundamental transformation of human nature as all individual culture, personality, and economic uniqueness disappeared (the “higher” stage of communism). Marx looked forward to a time when individuals would be freed from an alleged alienation from their own humanity supposedly caused by the division of labor and money-based economic transactions. Individuality would be replaced by a new generic “species-being” [Marx’s term] personality, a personality that would specialize in nothing and be an expert at everything.

It is now a fact fairly well-known, even among socialists, that economic calculation under pure socialism is an impossibility. And yet compared with the idea that any country or economy could survive, let alone prosper, after government abolishes the division of labor — simultaneously crushing all individuality in the process — the calculation problem (as it’s known) seems downright minor, even though it is not minor at all: yet it seems so simply because this latter idea is sheer madness.

“Most Communist movements, faced with the utter infeasibility of industrial production under socialist central planning (let alone an abolition of the division of labor), chose to reconcile themselves with capitalism in various ways and to defer the Marxist ideal of higher Communism to a remote future that would conveniently never come. Some Communists, notably the Soviets and especially the Yugoslavs, practically admitted that the species-being ideal would never be realized and were willing to settle for varying degrees of centralized socialistic control mixed with elements of capitalism” (ibid).

Maoists, however, remained pure — at least for a time.

Thus the “Cultural Revolution” of China which vainly tried to transform human nature itself — individuals do not exist, these Maoists also preached — that is, until its stupendous failure forced even the most radical of Maoists to step back and reevaluate. This failure-followed-by-reevaluation changed Maoism across Asia and the world — with one appalling exception: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot understood that industrialization and the cities which emerge through the division of labor would have to be eliminated if the Khmer Rouge were to come anywhere close to an egalitarian society. This is why almost immediately after the Khmer Rouge took power (in April of 1975), the regime began evacuating Phnom Penh, the capital and most populous city in Cambodia. They were, in a very real and literal sense, merely acting with the courage of their Communist convictions.

“The worst that can be said of Pol Pot was that he was sincere,” Vincent Cook correctly wrote, and continued:

“The Cambodian people were in fact freed of the ‘alienation’ of a division of labor and individual personality, and were reduced to a perfectly uniform egalitarian existence on the collective farms. If the cruel reality of the Khmer Rouge slave state didn’t quite come up to the extravagant eschatological expectations of Marxist true believers, the fault lies exclusively with those who think of the Marxist pattern of historical development and its egalitarian outcome as a desirable state of affairs. It is not enough to say of Pol Pot, as Prince Sihanouk did: ‘Let him be dead. Now our nation will be very peaceful.’ We must also acknowledge that a Pol Pot-type passion for equality remains as a threat to the peace and well-being of every nation even if the former dictator himself is dead.”

There should be no forgetting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge — no matter how much time has past or will pass — no whitewashing them, no cultural amnesia concerning them, nor any diminishment whatsoever nor rationalization of their utter evil, especially not by academic elites, like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and Anita Dunn (Barack Obama’s so-called “Director of Communication” and now legal council for Joe Biden’s) and all the others who once praised Pol Pot for his Communist convictions and the “just society” he despotically built, nor any of the ideologically bankrupt intellectuals explicitly calling for Communism today and telling us, as a “reminder,” that “Communism is good.” These people must be ideologically confronted and exposed and defeated — routed — on the battleground of ideas, because the truth is that when the facts are made clear and their philosophies presented in full, without their interminable equivocations, circumlocutions, obfuscations, and jargon, there is no argument — they don’t have one — and so they don’t stand a chance. And do you know why they don’t have an argument?

Because nobody has a right to the life or labor of any other individual human being.

If anyone ever tells you differently, ask them how.

Ask them from where their edict and premises derive, and the answer “Karl Marx and his say-so” will no longer do — not that it ever did because it most certainly did not.

Ask anyone who tells you differently — anyone who says to you that others do, in fact, have a right to the life and labor or other individual human beings — by what natural order of affairs, what fact within nature, either human nature or nature apart from humans, gives rise to this murderous ideological doctrine?

I beseech you to ask any and all people this question.

Because in the history of the entire world, no good answer has ever been given to this question — because no good answer for it exists or ever will exist.

Because it’s a false and deadly doctrine.

It is wrong.

The Cambodian Killing Fields should stand eternally as a horrific, monolithic, twisted moment to the philosophy of egalitarianism, and the human race should never forget that any minister of force preaching the egalitarian doctrine-of-envy — which is to say, anti-individualism — that person, that minister of force, is an ideological offspring and disciple of Pol Pot.

I am well aware that most people today espousing socialism and egalitarianism — especially those who’ve grown up in the first-world and take its comparative freedom for granted — are not despots-in-waiting, tyrants-to-be, or full-blown dictators of the blackest breed. But I know also that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al, are exactly where and to what these politico-ethical-economic ideologies lead.

I know also that once a principle has been breeched, even to a small degree, it becomes increasingly easy — easy and then easier and easier and easier — for that principle to be breeched again and again, more and more. So that you soon hear people saying: “What do you mean, government can’t legitimately restrict an individual’s freedom of action, or expropriate her property? Certainly they can. Governments do it all the time, and they’ve been doing it for decades. Look at military conscription — the draft — or look at 1913, when the Federal Reserve was created and then, that same year, laws came into being which passed the national income tax, which is certainly a type of expropriation, and then Herbert Hoover and his passage of Smoot–Hawley, which of course paved way for the New Deal, with all its price and wage controls, and then Social Security, which was meant to be temporary, and then Medicare and Medicaid and then TARP, followed by Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar ‘stimulus,’ whose thousands of pages nobody read in full before it was rammed through and made into the law of the land, and then his taxpayer-funded bailouts and his taxpayer subsidizations of ‘renewables’ and then Obamacare. Why should Donald Trump’s new laws be any different?”

Why, indeed?

Thus are new laws endlessly enacted, and endlessly justified. And then one day, freedom is gone, and nobody quite knows how. Or cares.