My personal opinion is I consider the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot to be revisionist rather than fascist, I don’t have the exact quote but didn’t Pol Pot say something along the lines of “I didn’t understand/read Marxist theory”.
I don’t think they would really be considered fascist in terms of a marxist definition of it, there might be a fancier term but I think they would be more described as something like a reactionary agrarian nationalist movement.
Pol Pot said that communism was the enemy and that they needed to emulate the west shortly after Vietnam invaded them lol. Don’t think he was anything but an opportunist.
My only understanding of the Khmer Rouge is they were partially funded by the CIA.
CIA and china unfortunately lol
Damn a pretty common China regional L for some fucking reason.
When your foreign policy is “whatever is the opposite of the USSR”
From what I understand this is mainly in connection to the conflict between them and Vietnam, not that they engineered the Khmer Rouge rising to power.
Fascism isn’t necessarily a clear lineage of the ideology itself but it can be mostly neatly summarized as a rejection of the enlightenment and an attempt to get rid of the ills of society through culture. Pol pot in this case actually neatly fits into both characteristics with a full hearted rejection of revolutionary theory and adoption of counter revolutionary theory, as well as the attempt to fix the ills of society through culture itself.
A lot of the original fascists had links to elements of nihilist and anarchist theorists due to the overlapping philosophical-ideological criteria to create the conditions for the idiosyncratic and in most ways contradictory principles of fascism. Pol pot probably qualifies along similar lines as these early fascists with his initial identification with communism and subsequent counterrevolutionary turn
Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge were libs.
I would just say they were reactionary Khemer nationalists.
