There are several illustrations out there about the torture of people in Khmer Rouge prisons, including chopping people’s hands off.
This all started as a communist, or pseudo-communist revolution.
What the hell caused them to chop people’s hands off? Among all of the other horrifying things they did.
In modern times, I know very few that even rival all the brutality that this regime committed, not by death count but by the sheer inhumanity of the deaths.
I need a detailed explanation of all this.
The idea of understanding “why” people or groups commit atrocities is attractive, but unfortunately it can be hard to pinpoint a reason.
Excessive brutality in warfare has a long history. Few people realize that taking bodyparts of your enemy as trophies was common in WW2, american forces in the pacific did that a lot for example. The sheer hatred you may end up feeling for the enemy is enough to push you to do things you wouldn’t imagine, since brutalizing a corpse has a lot of meaning psychologically.
For what concerns “institutionalised” brutality, like in some comparable cases such as imperial japan’s treatment of China or the Belgian Congo, you have a combination of two factors:
- An ideology centered around the fundamental inferiority of the enemy, which leads to dehumanization
- A culture that promotes nationalism and militarism/militancy, which causes people to inflate the value of their “mission” and thus of the lengths they are willing to go to accomplish it
- A military command structure that emphasizes local autonomy, meaning that crimes commited by individual groups of soldiers have a smaller chance to actually make it up the ranks and be tried, as the leading officer doesn’t necessarily need to report everything to their superiors.
I believe democratic Kampuchea sort of… adapted? those principles to a “communist” context. It was an agrarian movement that despised urbanites and urban life, due to a deep social divide. They were an extremely militant movement, and they were organized in local cadres who enjoyed a great level of autonomy (and thus impunity).
Yea American soldiers in the Pacific had at times made necklaces out of teeth or bones. I know that they were fighting Japanese Fascists, but still thats fucked up.
The Khmer Rouge were mostly ethno-nationalists, it’s the same trick as the “national socialists” really
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Wow. Originally I thought it was based of the Indian Maoists to X some oppressive bougie assholes, but now I’m not so sure.
These guys are gonna push more and more away from communism due to their bad experiences with communists (cutting off ears of poor folk, because most people don’t know that MLM is merely a subsect of communism and doesn’t represent communism as a whole). Did they get fundings from the CIA or something?
As much as MLMs love to call everyone revisionist, they themselves are actually revisionists. They threw overboard DiaMat and instead practice book worship and other dogmatism.
Where is the sources of the illustration of the brutality? A picture is worth a thousand words and I need the context that the pictures would show to answer your questions.
