The Case Against Socialism by Rand Paul

Author:Rand Paul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

The Cure for Failed Socialism Is Always More Socialism

Pol Pot is now infamous as a mass murderer: the architect and executioner of the killing fields of Cambodia. But first and foremost, Pol Pot was a socialist. Before he created the persona Pol Pot, he was just Saloth Sar, the son of a well-to-do small farmer. The day Saloth Sar won a government scholarship to study in France, the fate of millions of Cambodians was sealed. In France, Saloth Sar became enamored with Marxism, visited socialist Yugoslavia, and joined the French Communist Party.1

When he returned to Cambodia, he began writing under the pseudonym Pol Pot, advocating for revolution and organizing a communist resistance. By 1960, Pol Pot had become a leader in the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party and renamed it the Workers’ Party of Kampuchea, which later became the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

Pol Pot’s Marxist education in France might have all been for naught if the Vietnam War had not come to Cambodia’s border. Pol Pot saw an opportunity and moved his operations to the northeast border with Vietnam to ally his revolution with the North Vietnamese communists.

The big breakthrough for recruitment came in 1969 when the Vietnam War arrived at the Cambodian border. There’s nothing like U.S. bombs dropping on your countrymen to encourage enlistment. The bombing continued for four years, with tens of thousands of Cambodians killed.

In addition to the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, America backed a coup in 1970 by Lon Nol. Pol Pot allied with the deposed leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk and thousands of recruits flocked to Pol Pot and his communists.2

There is a foreign policy lesson here that the foreign policy swamp-dwellers in Washington, D.C., still fail to understand. The blowback from constant intervention in everybody’s civil war often leads to unintended consequences. Virtually every time the United States chooses sides in another country’s civil war, there is a backlash that encourages the growth and resistance of the other side. Not to mention that more often than not, the United States chooses to support “the lesser of two evils.”

Popular resistance to the U.S.-backed coup allowed the Khmer Rouge to grow strong enough that they laid siege to Phnom Penh and took over the capitol in 1975. Pol Pot gave himself the title “Brother Number One.” Within hours of the takeover of the capitol, the population was ordered into the countryside. It is estimated that over two million people were expelled from Phnom Penh alone. It’s likely that history has never seen, and hopefully will never see again, such a massive forced exodus.

The Khmer Rouge, like the French revolutionaries, even established their own calendar. The day they conquered Phnom Penh began “Year Zero.”3

Pol Pot then ambitiously went about creating “complete socialism” or complete abolition of private property. The Khmer Rouge instituted their socialism by banning access to world markets and abolishing money, all private property, all market exchange, and prices. They then expelled all urban dwellers to the countryside. Pol Pot’s goal was to avoid the food shortages that plagued communist Russia.

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