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I POL POT's TOTAL REVOLUTION: an INQUIRY of DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA AS a POLITICAL RELIGION a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED to the GRADU

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I POL POT's TOTAL REVOLUTION: an INQUIRY of DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA AS a POLITICAL RELIGION a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED to the GRADU POL POT’S TOTAL REVOLUTION: AN INQUIRY OF DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA AS A POLITICAL RELIGION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE AUGUST 2012 By Steven Michael DeBurger Dissertation Committee: Manfred Henningsen, Chairperson Louis Herman Michael J. Shapiro Kate Zhou Chhany Sak-Humphry Keywords: Democratic Kampuchea, Political Religion, Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot i ii ABSTRACT Employing Eric Voegelin’s concept of ‘political religions,’ this dissertation constructs a narrative based on published memoirs and autobiographical reflections, as well as philosophical and historical texts, in a quest for an alternate understanding of the violence produced by Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) during the political existence of Democratic Kampuchea from 1975-1979. Its goal is a discussion of the veiled aspects of the regime scholars may have only glossed over, those aspects mainly being politico-religious, spiritual, metaphysical, and aesthetic. Depicting certain vignettes, this work merely pieces together the hybrid assemblages that make up the Cambodian revolutionary aporia, or unresolved paradox. It tells the story of the physical and socio-spiritual destruction of the previous faith –Khmer Buddhism. This despiritualization creates a vacuum into which the CPK leadership, or Angkar , reconfigures itself as the new ‘god’. It examines the spiritual, mystical, and aesthetic disintegration of the society and Angkar ’s implementation of itself as the substitutive source of transcendence, truth, beauty, and knowledge. The dissertation then veers off to consider, not only the mechanisms of the regime itself but the individual within the regime, the perpetrators of the violence, and more specifically the pnuemopathology, or spiritual sickness, of individuals that operated within the government’s secret Phnom Penh prison and extermination facility Tuol Sleng. The ideologies and primacy of the regime are also studied, enabling for the construction of an alternate, or secondary reality, to exist within Tuol Sleng – a secondary reality where the acts of torture and murder become banal tasks for the maintenance of the iii government. It also goes on to describe the forging of the aesthetic state pursued by Angkar and its similarities to other regimes of terror. It also explains how Angkar shared revolutionary teleology with Mao Tse-tung thought, and more specifically how the peasant was used as an instrument of revolution. Finally, the role of ethnic-nationalism and the anti-Vietnamese sentiment is touched on, and how this ultimately led to the demise of the Khmer Rouge totalitarian political experiment. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. PREAMBLE : “The spade is your pen, the rice field your paper.”………1 CHAPTER 2 : “Religion is the opiate [of the people].”………………............................11 Locating the Religious in Survivors’ Memoirs CHAPTER 3 : “If you destroy a statue of the Buddha, you will be rewarded with a sack of cement.”……………………………………………………….....39 The Rise and Demise of Khmer Buddhism CHAPTER 4 : “It was the Angkar who saved your life, neither God nor genii.”……….61 Voegelin and the Political Religion of Democratic Kampuchea CHAPTER 5 : “For the Angkar , there is no god, no ghosts, no [religious] beliefs, No supernatural.”………………………………………………………...79 The Spiritual, the Mystical, and the Aesthetic of Democratic Kampuchea CHAPTER 6 : “He who breaks the Angkar’s laws condemns himself to prison.”…….101 Voegelin and the Secondary Reality of S-21 CHAPTER 7 : “Absolutely do not hide anything from the Angkar .”...………………..130 Deleuze, Barthes, and S-21 Photography CHAPTER 8 : “We need model people, model villages, model houses!”……………..147 Notes on the Aesthetics of Politics v CHAPTER 9 : “Comrade, you must steel yourself, you have to reconstruct yourself!”……………………………………...168 Forging the Aesthetic State: Notes on ‘Fascism’ and the Khmer Rouge CHAPTER 10 : “Worker-peasants unite tightly to make up a single stack!”………….188 The Peasant in Revolutionary Teleology: Marx, Mao, and Pol Pot CHAPTER 11 : “Smash the Viets! Smash them until you break their backs!”………..213 Ethnic Nationalism and the ‘Vietnamese’ Purges of Democratic Kampuchea CHAPTER 12 : “Just hearing the name ‘Angkar’ gives us goose flesh.”……………...242 Some Concluding Comments APPENDIX : “There are enemies who bare their faces to all; there are enemies who wear masks.”…………………………………...252 Nuon Chea: The Political Lieutenant BIBLIOGRAPHY :…………………………………………………………………….258 vi CHAPTER 1. PREAMBLE “The spade is your pen, the rice field your paper.”1 Professor Karl D. Jackson was more than correct when he articulated that the “massive bombardment that fell on the Kampuchean people between 1969 and 1973 supplied the insurgents with a potent hate-object and undoubtedly delivered to the revolution thousands of recruits and sympathizers” (Jackson 1989, 37). New information from that period has emerged adding to the already incomprehensible figures to support Jackson’s claim. According to Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen in 2006’s “Bombs over Cambodia”, “The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having ‘unknown’ targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all” (Kiernan & Owen 2006, 62-63). “To put 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II. Cambodia may be the most heavily bombed country in history” ( Ibid., 67). Another intriguing feature is that the database shows the bombing began four years earlier than was widely believed — not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson ( Ibid. ). The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for over thirty years, is now clearer than ever. “Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an 1 Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, (Locard 2004, 96) 1 insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide” ( Ibid., 63). According to Ben Kiernan, “The unverified official estimate of 50,000 dead may be regarded as a minimum, in a possible range of 50,000-150,000 Cambodian civilians killed by US bombing from 1969 to 1973” (Kiernan 2004, xxiii ). However, during the commencement of the United States Strategic Air Command’s “Operation Menu,” by 1967 full-scale civil war had erupted in the Cambodian countryside. The newly renamed Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), led by Saloth Sar under the nom de guerre Pol Pot, mounted a violent domestic insurgency first against Sihanouk’s Royalist troops and later the Republican forces of Lon Nol. And after the nearly decade long conflict Cambodia emerged from the ashes as Democratic Kampuchea (DK)—a phantasmagorical agrarian-communist regime that fell neatly into no category. Directed by the mysterious and omnipresent Angkar (‘the Organization’) command, its stranglehold on the nation from April 17, 1975 to January 7, 1979 was so totalizing, regimented, and laborious in its violence, that in response to its own horrors, apologies have yet to be spoken and justice has yet to be achieved. Although many of DK’s leaders have since died, and few are standing trial at the Khmer Rouge Genocide Tribunal for crimes against humanity in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), most of its executioners continue to walk the streets and paths of the Kingdom today. The CPK (or as it was later coined by the Cambodian head of state Norodom Sihanouk as "Khmer Rouge," French for "Red Khmer", and was later adopted by English speakers) was led by a small group of Parisian-educated Khmer elites; or as Southeast 2 Asian war correspondent Neil Davis later described the Khmer Rouge (KR), a “xenophobic clique of disenchanted, radical so-called intellectuals” with a “vitriolic hatred” (Davis from Bowden 1987, 265). And not unlike other twentieth century totalitarian movements, it was responsible for campaigns of eliminating “enemies” of the revolution. The DK government conducted selective and systematic annihilation of political, ethnic, racial, and religious groups, as well as their own cadres and privileged classes they believed to be counterrevolutionaries. The Communist Party of Kampuchea marched triumphantly into a ‘liberated’ Phnom Penh, and “chose to direct the fire of war against their own people, singling out for eradication army officers, bureaucratic functionaries, royalty, Western-educated professionals, landowners, skilled laborers, Buddhist monks”, and the Chinese, Thai, Cham, and Vietnamese-Khmer ethnic minorities (Jackson 1989, 37). In just three years, eight months, and twenty days, the Democratic Kampuchean regime extinguished approximately 1.7 to 2 million lives, and “may have witnessed the greatest per capita loss of life in a single nation in the twentieth century” ( Ibid., 37). Nearly 1/4 of the country's total population was liquidated under the Khmer Rouge’s “experiment in Stone Age communism” through execution, torture, starvation, disease, and forced labor (Maguire
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