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Quote of the Day: Down with the Individual, Down with Private Property
Socialism seems to attract many of our millennials. So let’s go through some Khmer Rouge slogans and sayings to get a sense of what real socialism is. And no, real socialism is not Norway or Sweden, but Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime. A regime that was ruled by the right people: the highly educated, the intellectual elites.
All slogans and sayings are taken from Henri Locard’s book Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar, which I talked about in one of my previous posts.
Published in GeneralIf you want to join the socialist revolution, you must totally disperse your own individual property.
The loftiest attitude is necessary to follow the strict discipline of the Angkar: no freedom, no selfishness, no individualism.
If you wish to live exactly as you please, the Angkar will put aside a small piece of land for you.
The entire working class is the master of factories, master of all industries.
Comrade, bowing deeply is now out of date.
The people and soldiers-same treatment: if someone makes a mistake, his neck will be shortened.
There are no more sales, no more exchanges, no more complaints, no more robberies, no more looting, no more individual property.
Embrace the proletarian condition!
Destroy the old order, replace it with the new.
Once there is no individual property, then we can work for a perfect revolutionary society.
He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse!
On the work site until death!
And how many died?
With all taxes (Corporate, Federal, State, Local) taking over 50% of productive peoples income, and inflation reducing any savings (including so-called Capital Gains taxed by Fed and State), are we that much better off?
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For the moment? Yes.
No one knows for sure because there are few records . R. J. Rummel (a Univ of Hawaii Political Science professor who spent his life studying and tabulating what he termed democide) puts the total at 2.6 million as per the Communist Body Count website. Pol Pot killed about a third of his people during his reign of terror something no other dictatorship has ever come close to.
Aspirational for future socialists.
Our brief visit to Cambodia was heart-rending. So much death, so much loss. I don’t know how a country ever fully recovers from that devastation. Thanks, LC.
With respect to individual production we seem to be at least halfway there already. Let’s try to hold it right there, no more.
What does this mean?
A small plot, maybe 6’x2′ and 6′ under ground.
Perhaps so. But it’s strange they would even suggest it beside the supposed elimination of private property.
I had the same question, and I am skeptical that Arahant answered it. So, I still have it. I don’t think it’s necessarily an important question, though. If the socialists in fact offer the remnant of liberals only a small piece of land in an isolated enclave in a collectivist society, they are offering to those who believe in equal justice for all a sub-society without the division of labor, which is a traditional primitive society continually at the brink of starvation.
Threats had to be repeated very often and very clearly. Serey is the Khmer word for free, but it goes deeper than the English definition of free. Serey means liberty, self-reliance and determination. And the notion of being self-reliant and free in Khmer culture ties to the ability to own private property. This might come as a surprise to westerners, but Khmers were and still are quite individualistic. And we are very family oriented. Even the French thought so too back in the colonial period. The majority of the regime’s slogans focused on the effort to kill the notion of being serey within the small pot (the individual, the family) and built the big pot (the collective).
But yes, it’s your grave.
It doesn’t. Not really. At least, not that generation.
So, to Mark and Aaron: 😜
This is the greatest post ever. Let Freedom Ring!
Serey goes deeper than the usual English definition of free. But American liberals misuse the word free when they use it describe what they believe. When a true American says “free”, he doesn’t mean “free”. He means serey. That is, he doesn’t mean “having the ability of a full human being to do as he wishes, without having the responsibility of self-reliance”.
Like the Khmer people, the true American knows that personal freedom and responsibility for oneself are inseparable. Perhaps this is a truth known across many places and times.
I think this quote from Keith Ellison, Vice-Chair of the Democratic Party, fits in well:
But, they are not liberals; they are Progressives.
I didn’t write clearly. I meant that we conservatives refer to our basic value as “freedom”, when we that is only half of an indivisible idea. We mean “serey”. Independence, which means “not being dependent” and “free to act on our own behalf”. They are two sides of the same coin.
LC, does there remain division over the Khmer Rouge? Do some people claim those times were not so bad? Are some people outcast or suspected because of their ties to the old regime? How much agreement is there about what went wrong and what should be avoided in the present?
There were some peasants that didn’t suffer as badly as the rest. They were known as the base people. They were the village people that were already there when the new people (city dwellers) arrived. Of course some of them died from starvation just the same. But they didn’t suffer wholesale slaughter as the city people did, unless they were found helping the new people or were vocal against the regime. Most of them were decent people, while some were Khmer Rouge soldiers.
As for the surviving Khmer Rouge top brass, cadres and guerrilla fighters, they and all their families still live in their last stronghold in the northern part of the country. They all maintain that they were unaware of any monstrosities committed by the regime. Also, after the regime was driven out in 1979, the country was rebuilt by the victims and killers and their descendants. Killers and their victims live side by side. The killers of my grandmother’s cousin still live within walking distance from most of my relatives. Most people in Cambodia do not want to talk or go searching in the past because they might not like what they find. My mom’s cousin was married (under duress) to a senior Khmer Rouge cadre, which was why his entire family survived. Another of mom’s cousins was married to a Khmer Rouge collaborator (also under duress and after they killed her father). So this is a taboo in Cambodia. Some people don’t want to admit that there are Khmer Rouge members in their family.
I’m not a conservative. I’m a liberal. My point, which you seem to have missed, is that we need to reclaim the language and not allow Progressives, Socialists, and other enemies to destroy our language. We are not a capitalist society; we have a free market economy. Men are not women. Women are not men. “Social justice” is neither.
I understand your point about language very well, and I strongly agree with it.
I’ll rephrase my thought, using your definitions, a semantic contract being a prerequisite for verbal communication of ideas, and any single-use, local semantic contract being as good as any other.
I think we were already in complete agreement, and got caught in a semantic trap.
As is the struggle against collectivism!