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[SovietSupreme]

Happy New Year from friends in Soviet Union!

[Greji]

Happy New Year from friends in Soviet Union!

Hey! Happy New Year Supreme! Long time no see on the board. I was worried you mighta got run over by a herd of Yaks on your way to the Dear Leader's wake!

[Mike Oxlong]

I think I cracked the code...he's encouraging his comrades to drink black Russians tonight. Banzai kampai!

[dimwit]

Having just returned from Cambodia and witnessing the depravity of the Pol Pot regime, I guess I'm not much in the mood to jest about communism, just as visit to Auschwitz doesn't lead one to want to make Jewish mother jokes.

None the less, a happy new year to all and here is to hope that 2013 will be a hell of a lot better than 2011.

[Yokohammer]

None the less, a happy new year to all and here is to hope that 2013 will be a hell of a lot better than 2011.

Personally, I'm kind of hoping that there'll be a year between 2011 and 2013, possibly named "2012," and that it'll be a good one!

[SIZE="1"](Sorry ... couldn't resist ...)[/SIZE]

[Coligny]

Dood... what you saw was not communism...

Like amerika today is not... whatever it claimz to be...

[dimwit]

Err Happy 2012.

Got to start reading what I type.

Coligny. I am not talking about present day Cambodia which as far as I can see is pretty much like Vietnam (good supermarkets by the way). But I did visit Tuol Sleng and saw the true face of communism.

[Coligny]

That s what i m sayin'

Maybe it was written 'communism' on the label... but even back then... it never was...

[Typhoon]

That s what i m sayin'

Maybe it was written 'communism' on the label... but even back then... it never was...

..ism is what ...ism does.

[dimwit]

I don't know how you define communism but to me it is attempting to make everyone proletariat, in this case by murdering anyone who has any talent and turning the rest into rural stone age peasants is about as equal as you are going to get.

Or is it the fact that they committed genocide that bothers you? Because if that is the case, Mao and Stalin were much grander mass murderers than Pol Pot.

To put it another way what was not communist about the Khmer Rouge?

[jingai]

I don't know how you define communism but to me it is attempting to make everyone proletariat, in this case by murdering anyone who has any talent and turning the rest into rural stone age peasants is about as equal as you are going to get.

Or is it the fact that they committed genocide that bothers you? Because if that is the case, Mao and Stalin were much grander mass murderers than Pol Pot.

To put it another way what was not communist about the Khmer Rouge?

I think the Khmer Rouge was pretty far out there compared to other countries espousing communist policies (see Cuba, E. Europe, etc. which were nothing like the Khmer Rouge.) The idea of systematically de-industrializing and forcibly moving people from the cities to the countryside was a far cry from the vision of Karl Marx where urban factory workers would rise up and take control of the means of production from the owners.

I haven't studied their history much but it seems like they took the Maoist idea of rural peasants as a revolutionary class to the extreme- that peasants were the *only* revolutionary class and all others had to be eliminated. Even that went way beyond Mao who at least at an intermediary step of "re-education" and not just killings.

It's too bad the US helped the Khmer Rouge come to power by bombing the heck out of their country. Later the (communist) Vietnamese had to clean up the mess by deposing the Khmer Rouge, in spite of opposition from the (communist) Chinese. Which is the true face of communism?

Anyway, happy New Year Comrades!

[Coligny]