Letter: Calling the Pot black (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Calling the Pot black

Dear Editors,

John Bissett's article in the August Socialist Standard was excellent. There was a curious parallel between the Ceausescu and the Pol Pot dictatorships at the time they were being given Western aid and tacit approval. Not only did the Queen dub the Rumanian ruler, Sir Nicolai but the British press was encouraged to spell his country as Romania so as to emphasise its historic link with Rome. Similarly newspapers began to spell Cambodia as Kampuchea as a sop to Pol Pot. This policy was quietly dropped when the scale of the Khmer Rouge massacres became more widely known. However, the public abhorrence of the Pol Pot regime has been insidiously used by defenders of the oppressive system operating in Vietnam founded by Ho Chi Minh. These people are loud in their condemnation of the Khmer Rouge but have maintained a fifty-year long silence with regard to Ho’s initial task on behalf of his masters in the Kremlin. That was to murder the entire leadership of Indo-China's substantial Trotskyist movement in the interregnum between the collapse of the WWII Japanese occupation and the re-establishment of French colonial rule.

Later, when the French were finally defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the Vietcong began their slow but sure mastery over the independent states that came into being in the wake of France losing her South-East Asian territories. American intervention in the Indo-Chinese civil war certainly introduced a massive increase in the technology of destruction but there was little they could teach the Vietcong by way of the cruel and treacherous methods of guerrilla warfare in which they eventually proved victorious.

Rivalry between Vietnamese and Cambodian nationalism goes back a long way. But a bone of contention which has been little commented upon by Western specialists on Asian affairs is the way Pol Pot claimed that his savage treatment of the population under his control was laying down the pre-conditions for a moneyless Communist society with no private property whatsoever. In my opinion these claims must have been a major irritant in Leninist circles where to be reminded of what their original aim was supposed to be was very uncomfortable indeed. Stalin sent people to Siberia for less!

Eddie Grant, 

London NW4