I've been gripped by an obsession with Cambodian history for the past year. I started with the fall of Angkor civilization and went through to the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Everything about the Khmer Rouge is disturbing, but one thing that really surprised and unsettled me...is just how familiar the culture and rhetoric of its early stages feels to me.
What I mean is...Pol Pot grew up relatively priviledged and he had no real interest in class dynamics or politics until he went to college in Paris where he joined the campus communist club. Several of his Khmer Rouge co-tyrants were friends he met in college. Their time in Paris is extremely well-documented through personal letters and interviews with people who knew their clique.
Honest to god, Pol Pot and his communist club buddies sounded indestinguishable from the condescending, unwashed fedora bros handing out hammer and sickle pamphlets at my own college in Chicago; politically myopic and ideologically rabid in a way that's completely detatched from the reality of human lives. One of their group started having moral pangs about the prospect of mass-slaughtering "counter revolutionaries" for the greater good, so Pol and the others ostracized him by excluding him from one of their communist direct action trips. I saw the same petty shit happen among my old extreme left peers. Friendships instantly ended because someone couldn't get behind the idea of a righteous bloodbath revolution.
It made me reflect on western tanky culture in a new way. They're easy to make fun of, and to dismiss as sheltered, phone-addicted trend chasers...but good god...what if one of them actually got power? Most of them would eat their words and melt into little puddles under the pressure...but if any of them stuck to their guns and followed through with their "XYZ group that I hate gets the wall after the revolution" rhetoric...they'd be another Pol Pot and the world would see another Cambodian genocide.
The Khmer Rouge had a squarely leftist justification for every one of their crimes against humanity. They were championing the rural "peasant" class by mass murdering the elites and intellectuals in the cities, they were decolonizing, breaking the lingering chains of French influence, they were enacting moral retribution against the Vietnamese who had racially abused the Khmer for centuries. The logic is there, even if it's heartless and detached from the reality of human suffering. On its face, I have to think that your average edgelord tanky would agree with the intent and the principles of the Khmer Rouge. I never hear them talk about or acknowledge the Khmer Rouge though, which is really saying something considering these are the same people who will glaze North Korea. They're not even going to attempt PR on this one. Tbh I don't think a lot of western tankies have ever even heard of the Khmer Rouge.
They have heard of my newest obsession though, which is the rule of Mao Zedong. My research on China is slow going, because I periodically get so angry that I have to stop because I think about the fact that there are delusional redditors who excuse and dismiss and lie about the realities of the "Great Leap Forward" and everything that followed. They don't even have the threat of censorship and they're still guzzling propaganda like they're getting paid (some of them probably are getting paid).
Tldr: tankies are dangerously delusional and ignorant of history
