SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:47 am Johnno - you are right in that i probably understated the intellectual make-up of the KR leaders.
But personally, I still reckon you are overstating it.
Those quoted CV's of the KR leaders are very glossed up.

I don't really consider fiery young revolutionaries who go off to uni and come back into a variety of public sector jobs to be "intellectuals". Or the odd bloke who comes from an academic background.
By that definition any political activist who studies Che Guevara's handbook in the railway yard, or marxist theory at Berkeley, could be called an intellectual.
By and large, most of those on your list ^^^ could not be considered to come from Cambodia's authentic intellectual class.

There will alway be some input from genuine intellectuals. But here, they were not the ones most active in the eventual, fatal, Khmer rouge incarnation.
The revolution was shaped on political theory. The Central Committee members were political zealots - that is not the same thing as intellectualism.

(just my take)

It might be disturbing to remind those “belles âmes” (as we say in French) of a few biographical details of Kaing Kek leu, aka Duch, the former executioner in chief of the Tuol Seng central Khmer Rouge detention and torture center, who just passed away in Phnom Penh at the age of seventy-seven.
Duch, the son of Khmer peasants, was endowed with outstanding qualities: he had an intense desire to learn, he was self-disciplined and had the passionate energy of a hard worker. Unlike several future prominent leaders of the revolution, he didn’t make it to the prestigious Paris universities, but he did manage to study at lycée Sisowath, the best French school in Cambodia.

Johno35 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 9:08 pm

SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:47 am Johnno - you are right in that i probably understated the intellectual make-up of the KR leaders.
But personally, I still reckon you are overstating it.
Those quoted CV's of the KR leaders are very glossed up.

I don't really consider fiery young revolutionaries who go off to uni and come back into a variety of public sector jobs to be "intellectuals". Or the odd bloke who comes from an academic background.
By that definition any political activist who studies Che Guevara's handbook in the railway yard, or marxist theory at Berkeley, could be called an intellectual.
By and large, most of those on your list ^^^ could not be considered to come from Cambodia's authentic intellectual class.

There will alway be some input from genuine intellectuals. But here, they were not the ones most active in the eventual, fatal, Khmer rouge incarnation.
The revolution was shaped on political theory. The Central Committee members were political zealots - that is not the same thing as intellectualism.

(just my take)

Notice something interesting. When it is written that the Khmer Rouge targeted “intellectuals,” teachers and the educated no one objects. That is true. But point out that the movement was created and led by teachers, lawyers, professors, and intellectuals and suddenly these holders of PHD’s and degrees from French Universities are just “fiery young revolutionaries” or “the odd bloke”...... Or They couldn’t be intellectuals because they are Khmer!

I’m not suggesting that they were all geniuses. Whether they were or were not “on par” with Western Intellectuals is irrelevant. There are a great number of professors who are very well educated and teach at the most prestigious universities and I would also consider them complete fools....very well educated fools.

The fact of the matter is that the senior Khmer Rouge were made up of the intelligentsia of the country at that time.

Keep in mind when they ran off from their teaching positions into the jungle, the University of Phnom Penh was roughly 6 years old. Between 1953 and 1975 Cambodia’s medical school graduated 500 medical doctors, 120 pharmacists, 80 medical assistants, and 90 dentists.

There were not many educated people in Cambodia during that time to begin with. Saying that they were just fiery revolutionaries who came back to “public sector jobs” ignores the fact that most revolutionaries are not men of business who leave the private sector to make revolutions.
Most Revolutions begin their formenting in Universities not in factories.

The Khmer Rouge leaders were the very definition of the Cambodian “Intelligentsia” (Intellectuals or highly educated people as a group, especially when regarded as possessing culture and political Influence)

Comrade Duch of S-21 can still quote Balzac and Alfred De Vigny and it would not surprise me if he were able to beat the majority of the members of this forum on a Physics exam. I’d also bet that Ieng Thirith who was the minister of Social affairs could quote more Shakespeare than most members of this forum.

The history of Cambodia that has been presented in news articles has been disingenuous. The casual visitor to Cambodia or reader of a BBC article will often assume that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were illiterate peasants targeting the Intellectuals. They were not. They were the intellectuals of their time, the professors and educators of the country.

A prime example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399 “Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed.”

“Duch’s teacher at the National Institute of Pedagogy in Phnom Penh, Duch joined the revolution as part of what he identified as a group of intellectuals. Indeed, many of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, including Pol Pot, were intellectuals who had been teachers.” - The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer by Alexander Hinton

SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 2:35 am For a thousand years the God-kings did not want Khmers to develop logic or think for themselves.
The KR did not want people who had the ability to critically think.

"Thank the stars things are all different now"