Rob Weir on the most economically equal society in history

Q: What was the most economically equal society in history? 

A: Probably Cambodia under Pol Pot.  He was the only one who tackled the central inequality of all developing nations, that between the rural agricultural workers and the well-educated professionals in the city. 

His solution?  Empty the cities entirely, close the schools and universities, and force everyone into the country to work on the farms.  Only then would Cambodians finally be equal. 

Of course, many resisted this plan, or at least were suspected of resisting it.  Pol Pot had a solution for this as well.

~ Rob Weir, Quora answer, June 16, 2022

Henry Kissinger on taking orders from Nixon to bomb Cambodia

[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.

~ Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State

Noam Chomsky on the U.S. bombing of Cambodia

Nixon at one point informs Kissinger . . . that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves . . . genocide.

~ Noam Chomsky

Greg Grandin on Kissinger's bombing campaign in Cambodia from 1969-1973

All told, between 1969 and 1973, the U.S. dropped half-a-million tons of bombs on Cambodia alone, killing at least 100,000 civilians...

In fact, that bombing campaign did have one striking effect: it destabilized Cambodia, provoking a 1970 coup that, in turn, provoked a 1970 American invasion, which only broadened the social base of the insurgency growing in the countryside, leading to escalating U.S. bombing runs that spread to nearly the whole country, devastating it and creating the conditions for the rise to power of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

~ Greg Grandin, "Kissinger, the Bombardier," LewRockwell.com, November 11, 2015

Jordan Peterson on Cambodian socialism in the late 1970s

Marxist ideas were very attractive to intellectual utopians. One of the primary architects of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, received a doctorate at the Sorbonne before he became the nominal head of Cambodia in the mid-1970s. In his doctoral thesis, written in 1959, he argued that the work done by non-farmers in Cambodia's cities was unproductive: bankers, bureaucrats and businessmen added nothing to society. Instead, they parasitized the genuine value produced through agriculture, small industry and craft. Samphan's ideas were favourably looked upon by the French intellectuals who granted him his Ph.D. Back in Cambodia, he was provided with the opportunity to put his theories into practice. The Khmer Rouge evacuated Cambodia's cities, drove all the inhabitants into the countryside, closed the banks, banned the use of currency, and destroyed all the markets. A quarter of the Cambodian population were worked to death in the countryside, in the killing fields.

~ Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An antidote to chaos



A woman rides a bicycle by a stack of destroyed cars, cast aside by the Khmer Rouge as a symbol of the bourgeoisie.

Phnom Penh, 1979