“Year Zero” – The Origins and Problems of an Enduring Historical Label

At the end of the Cambodian Civil War in April 1975, the victorious yet largely hidden from view Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) initiated one of the most radical social upheavals of the 20^th century. The country’s major cities were forcibly evacuated, money was abolished, religion was banned, and a new social hierarchy was introduced. It divided the population into the ‘base people’ who had been living under the communists in the so-called ‘liberated areas’ of the countryside and those ‘new people’ from the cities who were now being introduced to the revolutionary society. This was a countrywide collectivization of labour, aimed at producing huge agricultural yields, along with the numerous irrigation projects and vast canals that would be dug to facilitate it.

Effectively, Democratic Kampuchea, the revolutionary name of the country, became one vast worksite – a “prison with no walls” as many survivors described it. This revolution created conditions in which more than two million people died in under four years, perhaps a quarter of the population. As many as half of that number were directly murdered by the state.

As the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge approaches, it is important to reflect on how this period of history is remembered and discussed. One persistent claim is that Pol Pot, the leader of the CPK, or others within the organization, “declared” their revolution as “Year Zero.”

This widely repeated notion, though unsubstantiated by historical evidence, could even be seen to shape the perceptions of what the Khmer Rouge revolution really was.

So why did this meme of the Khmer Rouge “Year Zero” originate, how has it come to be so commonly repeated, and should it be?

Out of Nothing

In early 1979, the late journalist John Pilger produced a haunting documentary film; Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia. The film opened in silence, with images of the dead and dying, suffering women and starving children, juxtaposed with the victorious black pyjama-clad armies of the Khmer Rouge conquering Phnom Penh. Pilger was on location in the country in the wake of the Vietnamese led invasion which had ousted the Khmer Rouge regime. He states, looking directly at the camera, that on the morning of the 17^th of April 1975, “a totally new society, the like of which we’ve never known” came into being, and that “the new rulers of Cambodia called this Year Zero, the dawn of an age where there would be … only work and death”.

Throughout the documentary, and in Pilger’s accompanying articles, he repeatedly uses the phrase “Year Zero” and claims it was how they branded of their revolution. This is given as a matter of fact.

Two years before Pilger’s widely watched documentary, the first book to properly explore the reports of the horrors occurring behind the closed borders of the new socialist state had been published, Cambodia: Year Zero. It was the work of Francois Ponchaud, a French missionary who had spent a decade in the country right up until the point that he was deported by the Khmer Rouge, along with all other foreigners, in the wake of their total victory. Interestingly, “Year Zero” only appears in the title of the book, nowhere is it claimed to be an actual phrase that was heard in the country.

Since then, the phrase has clung to the history of the Khmer Rouge. A google search will produce countless uses of it across all manner of sites, including news articles from the BBC, or educational spaces like Britannica and Wikipedia. All share the same sentence, with some deviations, where it is stated as an obvious fact that the beginning of the revolutionary period in Cambodia was “declared Year Zero by Pol Pot”.

However, none of these websites include a source which gives any evidence of this “declaration”, by Pol Pot or any other representative of the CPK. It isn’t attributed to a speech, nor radio transmission that were regularly translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Neither is an issue of Revolutionary Flag, the monthly propaganda magazine published by the CPK referenced. If a source is provided, such as on Wikipedia, it references John Pilger’s documentary, or an article on the BBC, highlighting a kind of citation loop.

The fact is that historians of the period do not find “Year Zero” being declared by Pol Pot, in fact Pol Pot’s identity as the leader of the CPK was still hidden for the first years of their time in power. It is not found in the minutes of meetings of the central committee of ministers and leaders, it is not in any publications, or pronouncements. It wasn’t even one of the numerous slogans monotonously and repetitively spouted by the varied levels of Khmer Rouge cadre who enforced the slave-like conditions onto the people enduring the revolution.

“Year Zero”, as we shall see, is a western concept which has been projected onto what happened after the CPK came to power in 1975. While it does accurately convey a society which was being ‘swept clean’, there may be other lingering connotations to the phrase that are less appropriate.

Pol Pot wrote a song to celebrate the victory of the 17^th of April, which could be seen as an actual “declaration” and sourced accordingly. It effectively illustrates what the regime was all about:

Let us be determined to wave always higher the red banner of revolution!

Let us build our homeland to achieve a Great Leap Forward, a gigantic, glorious, prodigious leap forward!

Année Zéro

Francois Ponchaud published Cambodge Année Zéro first in 1977, the English translation following in 1978 – the last full year the Pol Pot regime held power. It detailed the contempt for human life that was a fundamental facet of the attempt to produce the “purity” of their revolution. The book was hugely insightful, a groundbreaking look at what life under the Khmer Rouge was like – particularly as the country’s borders had been closed to all but “friendly delegations” for years. The reports that came out from those who were sympathetic to the ideology of the regime naturally found that there was nothing untoward going on behind the veil, in fact the people and country were thriving. This was in stark contrast to the testimony of those refugees who had managed to escape from the country and told of the nightmare that they survived.

Included in the book, amongst the reality of widespread starvation, massacre and unrelenting labour, were indications of what the CPK themselves were claiming to be doing:

Looking back to the glorious past of the struggle against the imperialists, we are impelled to continue the fight to build a new Kampuchea with a radiant future, overflowing with happiness, and to build a modern economy by transforming our traditional agriculture and industry into a modern agriculture industry. We have to build the nation, to build our history.

The idea was that Democratic Kampuchea required a clean slate and a new society to replace the one that had been so corrupted by “imperialists”. Given Ponchaud’s background and education, you might presume that the title he chose for the book was a reference to the similarities between the French Revolution and the Cambodian one. In the late 18^th century, the revolutionary Republican Government sought to sweep aside the Ancien Régime, to that end they even created a new calendar system.

“Year One” was declared to have begun the same year as the storming of the Bastille.

Ponchaud’s re-appropriation of the phrase in the Cambodian context, as well as the book’s status as being the first prominent work to expose what would become common knowledge about the human tragedy of Democratic Kampuchea, gave “Year Zero” an enduring stickiness to the subject.

However, the French missionary may not have been making such a surface level comparison with his choice of title.

A prominent scholar of Cambodian history and the Khmer Rouge regime, Steve Heder, has suggested that Ponchaud’s use of that title had a more layered meaning. Heder believes that the title was a critique of what Ponchaud perceived to be the nihilism of the Khmer Rouge revolution. This was apparently a result of influence from 19^th century political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville who was critical of the French revolutionary’s capacity for murderous excess and their attempts to erase the past. This was an afront to the project of building on human progress and because of this, it led to utter chaos.

Ponchaud himself stated that he had originally been “not opposed” to the revolution in 1975, although what he saw and heard in the subsequent years made him realise that a chaos had reigned. In Heder’s view, Ponchaud was not explicitly targeting the communist ideology of the Khmer Rouge. Rather, his criticism smuggled into the title was for the destructive, eliminationist policies that were employed.

“Year Zero” was a means for him to describe the Khmer Rouge attempts to erase the past, and was thus a nihilistic, meaningless project.

However, as Heder has suggested, Ponchaud’s use of the phrase and its attendant critique of nihilist tendencies ignores that the Khmer Rouge had a structured political theory, and that they did not seek to destroy the old Cambodian society out of ‘meaninglessness’. Rather, in their view, they wanted to replace the old systems with new ones, based on the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideals of class struggle, collective ownership, anti-imperialism and the primacy of the peasantry in achieving their socialist society.

In their view, the revolution had a plan, reason and meaning, it just necessitated a totality of adoption to the extent that the old society had to be completely smashed… along with any person thought to be unable to participate in the new society.

There is also the potential that the nihilism that Ponchaud sensed in the Khmer Rouge stemmed from a parallel view of Cambodian Buddhism.

Ian Harris, author of several books on Buddhism in Cambodia, has noted that Ponchaud’s critique may have been connected to long standing accusations of the nihilistic nature of Buddhism by Western philosophers and theologians since the time of Schopenhauer. Given Ponchaud’s decade of missionary work in a country where it is not uncommon to hear the phrase “to be Cambodian is to be Buddhist”, perhaps he held similar sceptical views of the state religion and even its connection to the revolutionaries who sought to destroy it.

Whether Ponchaud was knowingly connecting aspects of Khmer Rouge ideology to the cultural milieu of Cambodian Theravada Buddhism is hard to say. But it is an area of the history that has been studied. For instance, it was noticed by a former prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, Francois Bizot, himself a longtime resident of the country who, along with Ponchaud and other foreigners, was deported after the fall of Phnom Penh. Modern scholars such as Alex Hinton and Philip Short have also done insightful work on the topic.

As Theravada Buddhism is practised by the vast majority of Cambodians, it was also influential on the Khmer Rouge. In fact, many leaders of the movement, including Pol Pot, had spent time as monks at points in their lives. So, despite banning religion, turning pagodas into grain houses or pig pens, defrocking monks and declaring that Buddhism was dead, Theravada Buddhism still played a key role in the development and propagation of CPK ideology.

For instance, Hinton and Short have both convincingly argued that Theravada Buddhist terminology, grammar and ‘thought’ was key to transplanting the western concepts of Marxism-Leninism into local minds. Indeed, one of the most important concepts to the Khmer Rouge ideology was sâtiarâmma, which translates to revolutionary or proletarian consciousness. This Buddhist tinged take on the Marxist staple of ‘class consciousness’ incorporated concepts related to mindfulness and perception, claiming that class was based not on economic status but a state of mind that could be built on and realised. It was of paramount importance to mindfully assess and carry out the political ‘line’ of the party. Short goes as far as to contend that it became “the central pillar of Khmer communism.”

The inability to properly exhibit this “revolutionary consciousness”, perhaps via associations with suspected counter revolutionaries, minor infractions such as stealing food to survive, having ties to the old government (amongst many, many others), would often result in imprisonment and a hasty execution. Though imprisonment was not always a pre-requisite to death.

The influence of Buddhism on the CPK was also apparent through the emphasis on renunciation. In their new society, the Khmer Rouge insisted that personal possessions and private control over one’s life was renounced. All individualistic notions had to be eliminated, to the extent that ‘the self’ was given to the party, and detachment was urged even from the family unit. As Harris suggested, “there can be little doubt that the internalization of aspects of an older religiously-inspired thought universe was very pervasive during the (Khmer Rouge) period.”

It is doubtful that Ponchaud was expressing quite this level of insight into the ties between Theravada Buddhism and the Khmer Rouge revolution when he conceived of the nihilist critique as referenced in the title of his book.

However, it does suggest the beginning of the Khmer Rouge “Year Zero” meme to be less about what the CPK themselves “declared” their project to be, and what an outsider projected onto it.

Regardless of the exact intent behind his use of “Year Zero” as the title, it did not signal a politically biased explanation of what was going on in the country, though his book would be famously criticised by certain prominent Western commentators who were convinced that things were fine behind the closed borders of Democratic Kampuchea. Although, that became harder to maintain once the walls came down and the mass graves began to be shown to the world by the Vietnamese.

Which brings us to Pilger’s visit.

The Contradiction

Watching Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia is still a heartbreaking experience. The documentary showed the awful conditions that the country had been left in as the Khmer Rouge had been swiftly removed from power by the Vietnamese. It brought the world’s attention to a terrible suffering. It highlighted the callousness of the Cold War realpolitik which simultaneously kept a remnant of the Khmer Rouge alive on the border with Thailand and denied compassionate relief for the Cambodian people as famine began to take hold.

The substantial donations and aid that the documentary’s impact can be credited as bringing into the country must be highly commended.

However, in terms of the version of history that the film sought to promote, it wasn’t perfect. While much can be excused given the somewhat lacking understanding of what had happened in Democratic Kampuchea, there are certain notes that Pilger strikes that signal his own political biases. This criticism of his work would sometimes be levelled at Pilger’s reporting over the next forty years. In Year Zero, it is worth examining some of the details that were focused on and ask why others were glossed over or ignored altogether.

The context of the period is crucial to understanding the angle that Pilger promoted, and perhaps why the phrase “Year Zero” featured so prominently, then and thereafter.

The invasion of Democratic Kampuchea by the Republic of Vietnam was launched on Christmas Day 1978, and by January 7^th they had rolled practically uncontested into Phnom Penh. This was achieved by the army of the Vietnamese Workers Party (VWP) and supported by those former Khmer Rouge who had defected to Vietnam fearing purges by Pol Pot that had killed tens of thousands of their fellow cadre. The Khmer Rouge had also launched numerous raids into Vietnam that had taken a ghastly toll on civilians. The Vietnamese, far superior in terms of population size and military strength easily defeated their former comrades, the party they had initially created in the early 1950s.

But the wider picture involves the benefactors of both the CPK and the VWP.

Vietnam was part of the Soviet sphere of influence, the Cambodians were aligned with China. The Sino Soviet Split had produced more than twenty-five years of high tension between the two titans of 20^th century communism, and the conflict between the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists was in part a proxy war between the two bigger powers (although tensions between Cambodia and Vietnam were centuries old). Substantial Chinese support for the CPK dated back to the mid-1960s, part of a larger plan to support a potential barrier to the uncontested spread of Vietnamese communist influence over the states which formally comprised French Indochina. From a Chinese perspective, a Vietnamese led socialist federation of Laos and Cambodia would have created a large Soviet aligned presence on an even larger area of its border. This eventuality wasn’t completely delusional and had been the subject of some planning around the same time that the Vietnamese had created the first Indochinese Communist Party.

The Vietnamese invasion of Democratic Kampuchea was primarily driven by national security concerns rather than humanitarian motives. The crimes against humanity being committed by the CPK against their own people were of less concern than the threat to Vietnamese sovereignty and interests. Nevertheless, the invasion ultimately had the effect of a humanitarian intervention as it removed the Khmer Rouge from power and brought an end to their direct control over Cambodia.

By 1979, the Khmer Rouge were militarily defeated, but able to regroup on the Thai border. This was facilitated by continued Chinese financial and military aid, creating a thorn in the side of the Vietnamese and the new regime they had installed in Cambodia, the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). The United States, seeking rapprochement with China since the Nixon presidency, had decided to go along with this arrangement and this led to their ‘indirect’ diplomatic and financial support for the new Cambodian coalition which included the Khmer Rouge.

It was a sorry state of affairs.

This was the Cambodia that Pilger had entered. A society recovering from an unimaginable trauma, and being occupied by a foreign power.

As the documentary was aired in October 1979, it can be presumed that he was in filming and conducting interviews perhaps a month or two prior. Just nine months after the Vietnamese invasion. This was a period where a new (still socialist) government, had been set up, and this created a contradiction.

How were the Vietnamese, aligned with the Soviets, and those Khmer Rouge who had defected to their side, going to differentiate themselves to the Cambodian people and the outside world watching? A somewhat imaginative line was required to be drawn to separate the apparently ‘good communism’ from the bad. As the eminent scholar of Cambodian history, David Chandler suggested:

“PRK officials refused to distance themselves from Marxism Leninism or one-party rule, instead they preferred to demonize the ‘genocidal Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique,’ blaming the 1975-1979 catastrophes on individuals rather than on the extreme but recognizably socialist policies of the CPK … as far as the PRK was concerned, DK had a fascist rather than Communist government.”

There is an example of this captured in a slightly surreal moment from an East German documentary produced at this time, Kampuchea: Death and Rebirth. In an interview with a former Khmer Rouge who had become the minister of culture and information in the PRK, he spoke about how the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique had abandoned Marxism, and thus betrayed the people. Then, to subtly convey his convictions, he said “I always carry two pictures with me, everywhere. The pictures of Marx, and Lenin.” Smiling, he pulled out two poster-sized, rolled up portraits of the dynamic duo and showed them to the camera.

This conveyed a new line that is still regularly shared by those hoping to expunge the embarrassment of the Khmer Rouge project from the big book of attempts at communism: That they were not “real communists”. Instead, they were genocidal racists and more like the Third Reich than Stalin’s Soviet Union.

What that argument tries to proclaim is the notion that Marxism-Leninism is somehow incompatible with racism. This is far from accurate.

If anything, it can be shown that to the degree the Khmer Rouge were guilty of specific racially motivated crimes, that this could be reasonably resultant of their communist ideology. It was not just the occasional piece of writing or correspondence attributed to Marx himself that was racist, but perhaps also some core concepts within his view of the world that ended up being so well adopted in the 20^th century.

A senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Ephraim Nimni, has argued that Marx’s idea of human development and the emancipation of the whole of humanity led to the designation of different races and ethnicities on “a continuum between progressive and reactionary”. In essence, some races are doomed to extinction as a historical fact due to being inherently ‘reactionary’.

In Steve Heder’s view this conforms to the Khmer Rouge worldview, and he argues that:

“From the Soviet Union to China to Vietnam, acceleration and intensification of socialist revolution and progress toward achievement of communism went hand-in-hand with attacks on the independence and distinctiveness of ‘national minorities’ … Democratic Kampuchea was heir to Marx’s theory of progressive ‘historical’ versus ‘reactionary non-historical’ nations and his belief that state centralization and national unification, with the consequent assimilation of small national communities was the only viable path to social progress”

This would explain why a kind of ‘pamphlet’ that was published by the regime, Democratic Kampuchea is Moving Forward, amongst figures about agricultural output and workers in flourishing in factories, stated that minorities comprised less than one percent of the population. The real figure was close to twenty percent. Their erasure, particularly the attempted genocide of the Muslim Cham minority, was as much a function of the communist ideology of the CPK as it was a result of their supposed ‘racial totalitarianism’.

While this may be a chicken and egg scenario, where racism is a result of class analysis or vice versa, the two were very tightly linked in CPK ideology.

The portrayal of Pol Pot as "Asia's Hitler" became a prominent narrative in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime, symbolized by displays at sites like Tuol Sleng, which was transformed into the “Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes.” Exhibits, including mass graves and exhumed remains, were arranged in ways reminiscent of Holocaust museums. This narrative was promoted to visitors and aimed at highlighting the unique horrors of the Khmer Rouge while legitimizing the Vietnamese invasion and the subsequent establishment of the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). This framing emphasized the unparalleled brutality of the Khmer Rouge, distancing their actions from any connections to the socialist regimes which had come before it.

Pilger’s Year Zero

Pilger, who required an invitation and visa from the PRK to film his documentary, aligns with the party's narrative in several respects. His portrayal of Cambodia as an "island of peace" before the U.S. bombing under Nixon and Kissinger simplifies the complex political and military dynamics of the region. For example, it omits the presence of Vietnamese troops stationed along Cambodia's borders and their role in destabilizing the Sihanouk regime. Furthermore, Marxism-Leninism, the official ideology of the Khmer Rouge as declared by Pol Pot in 1976, is notably absent from Pilger's analysis. Instead, his documentary highlights China's involvement, echoing Vietnamese criticisms amid the Sino-Soviet split.

Nowhere does Pilger mention how instrumental the Vietnamese communists were in creating the Cambodian communist movement and guiding it through the 1950’s and 1960’s. How Vietnamese communists had undertaken similar policies of land reform which led to tens of thousands of state sponsored killings, or indeed the massacres of South Vietnamese civilians that occurred in Hue in 1968. Pilger makes it clear that Pol Pot was not a communist revolutionary who was following a blueprint established in previous revolutionary regimes, but rather his intent was “bringing Cambodia back to the stone age”.

As the British journalist Oliver Kamm wrote of Pilger in 2006, “such omissions go beyond partisanship. In asserting what the evidence will not support, Pilger displays little research and culpable incompetence.”

The culmination of Pilger’s cherry picked facts and assertions is in his reliance on “Year Zero” to do a lot of heavy lifting in imagining the society that he could not possibly draw any historical similarities with.

Littered throughout the documentary, as well as the accompanying articles he wrote at the time, are references to “Year Zero”. Such as the Vietnamese Army driving into Phnom Penh and finding the city “virtually as it had been left on the first day of Year Zero”, or when he figuratively speaks of a headstone which might have read “Here lies the consumer society … Abandoned 17 April, Year Zero”. Given Pilger’s characterisation of revolutionary Cambodia as a stone age experiment conducted by racist anarchists (as opposed to an organised, if extreme, communist party) it would make sense for him to continually emphasise their revolution as “Year Zero” rather than draw parallels with any other, apparently more successful attempts.

This was not done in the same way as Ponchaud, with his critique of nihilism aside, who used the phrase to draw similarities to a previous revolution, to describe another regime looking to destroy the past.

Pilger’s use infers a separate, new endeavour. This was an endless regression, an almost primitivist desire to redefine time beginning not just with the evacuation of Phnom Penh on the 17^th of April, but as if Cambodian society was going to be physically relocated to the ancient past. It reframes the revolution as an attempt not to destroy the past but to somehow inhabit it. Perhaps this satisfies orthodox Marxists, as it invalidates the CPK as they lacked the ‘correct’ interpretation of class struggle and the progress of history.

In doing so, Pilger perpetuated a new version of the “Year Zero” meme. He created the idea of the ‘stone age Khmer Rouge’, and absent from his commentary was any indication of what the future looked like from their perspective, or who they might have been trying to copy and surpass. This painted the CPK as a tiny group of chaotic individuals who lacked an ideology, and made it clear that their revolutionary society bore no resemblance to previous attempts at the communist project, such as in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the Peoples Republic of China or indeed, in revolutionary Vietnam. All of which, at various points, contributed to an ideological basis for Pol Pot’s vision for Cambodia.

This denied a certain amount of agency to the murderous regime. It asserts that they seemingly came out of nowhere, absent from the organizational structure that had been bestowed on them by the Vietnamese communists, or the influence of the Maoists, and infers that their only goal was to turn back the clock, apparently forever. It promoted the idea of the Khmer Rouge as ‘mindless killers’, rather than the much more frightening prospect that they knew exactly what they were doing and carried on doing it as part of a plan.

The Super Great Leap Forward

The CPK were distinctly Cambodian, just as all other Marxist-Leninist parties have brought some degree of national characteristics to their respective revolutions. This does not negate the fact that they themselves considered themselves to be the vanguard of a communist movement. The intentional obfuscation of the Khmer Rouge ideology, the worldview which produced their policies - policies which directly led to the deaths of at least two million Cambodians - has occurred since 1979. Arguments have been made that the economic conditions in the country were so far removed from late-stage capitalism that it cannot have been considered a “communist revolution”.

The Khmer Rouge themselves refuted the idea that their revolution was not Marxist in nature. Khieu Samphan was a prominent leader in Democratic Kampuchea and one of the French educated intellectuals who made up a portion of the CPK. He had become a member of the French communist party in the 1950s. His doctoral thesis sought to apply Marxist Leninist theory to Cambodian conditions.

Samphan described how the Khmer Rouge approached a communist project in the country:

It is true that the Cambodian communist party was based on the poor peasantry rather than the working class – but you can’t use that as an argument for saying it wasn’t a Marxist party, or that there was no economic basis for a communist party in Cambodia. In fact, we applied the criterion of ‘material conditions’ quite correctly, because the poor peasants were the most impoverished, the most oppressed class in Cambodian society, and it was this class that was the foundation of the Cambodian Party.

They also applied their theories once they had achieved power.

In 1976, a meeting of the most senior decision-making body of the party produced a planning document titled The Party’s Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields. It is one of the best starting points for understanding Democratic Kampuchea. The document outlines the situation the CPK was facing, that they lacked any real economic resources except agriculture and in particular rice harvests. It highlights the fact that rice farming was not focused on as some way to achieve a stone-age society, but as a socialist collectivization scheme to propel Democratic Kampuchea into an industrial economy. Part one of the four-year plan was:

“To seek, gather, save, and increase capital from agriculture, aiming to rapidly expand agriculture, our industry and our defence rapidly. OBJECTIVE: To produce rice for food to raise the standard of living of the people, and in order to export as to obtain capital for the imports which we need … In accordance with our situation we must divide the capital we have earned through agriculture into two; first for light industry second for heavy industry.”

The plan was to put every possible human resource into maximising rice production to fund light and then heavy industry. This was highly reminiscent of the Soviet and Chinese “x number of year plans”, the key difference being that Cambodia lacked any European style industrial sector to speak of. They planned to create it via a reliance, at first, on the only thing they had: agricultural exports.

But the planning went on to include the need to quickly develop industries capable of producing chemicals, technology as well creating a technicians, civil aviation, pharmaceuticals, tourism and trade. The document also outlines plans for developing a revolutionary culture, including literature and art based on the worker-peasant class. To this end, they wished to “struggle to abolish, uproot, and disperse the cultural and literary and artistic remnants of the imperialists, colonialists, and all the other oppressor classes.”

The claim that the Khmer Rouge were ‘not real communists’, or that they wished to create an unending stone age in Cambodia seems to not map onto their stated aims. Pol Pot himself described the relationship he felt that his party had with orthodox communist theory, stating that it “resides within the movements forged by the people, and the people’s movement in each country puts together its own Marxism-Leninism”. Their aim, and the millions of deaths they caused by pursuing it was, as Heder suggested:

“That Democratic Kampuchea would thereby be forged into an agriculturally self-sufficient and industrialised country that would surpass all other countries in the rapid achievement of communist prosperity and strength and thus become totally independent from all foreign countries, whether capitalist or socialist, and impervious to military threats”

The people of Cambodia suffered the party’s ambitions. They would need to be tempered, their revolutionary consciousness would need to be cultivated or, if they were unable, swept away.

Intellectuals or anyone with ties to the previous regime were obvious, even to low level cadre, of being suspected to be contrary to these plans. Just as in Maoist China, far more emphasis was placed on ‘revolutionary experience’ rather than the corrupt imperialist experience which had been learned in the cities. But that was not to say that the regime did not want technical expertise, they still wanted the lights to be on in Phnom Penh, for the factories to begin working.

Elizabeth Becker, a journalist who was part of a small group that was shown inside the country in 1978 witnessed the risible attempts that the Khmer Rouge were making to achieve their “Super Great Leap Forward”. In one of Phnom Penh’s new ‘classrooms’, plastered with slogans such as “We the Communist Party Are Correct and Clear Sighted”, she was shown working children as young as eight years old. It was explained that through just months of revolutionary education these barely literate kids would have the scientific training equivalent to a bachelor degree in the west. It was claimed these children were already superior to European engineers.

That this was a total farce, that the CPK were ridiculously overconfident in their revolution’s capacity for success, does not diminish the belief they had in the ideology which underpinned it.

The historian Henri Locard compiled a book of the slogans that were regularly regurgitated in Democratic Kampuchea. The most common, phrase “without a doubt” was highly illustrative of the proposed intentions of the CPK: “With the Angkar, we shall make a Great Leap Forward, a prodigious Great Leap Forward.” The translation will often differ between ‘prodigious’ and is often simplified as ‘super’. Locard claims that the Khmer Rouge would not have been aware of the dramatic failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign in the 1950s and the tens of millions of deaths that had occurred. The Chinese Communist Party never having officially admitted it in their statements. But he goes on to say that the CPK, devotees of Mao, would not have blamed the policy itself, but rather that it was not carried out with the appropriate conviction. Nor did the Chinese have the stomach to eradicate any possible resistance to carrying it out.

In essence, they didn’t try hard enough.

If Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism are incorporated into the various mutations of communist ideology, then why not the Khmer Rouge variant?

The CPK were not trying to permanently take Cambodia back to the stone age. They were attempting to create a socialist society, just like Lenin, Stalin, Mao and all the other prophets of communism. Arguing that the CPK were “not real communists” would suggest that any of the other attempts at this kind of revolution in the 20^th century was equally far away from the “real communism” that had been predicted to occur by the founders of scientific socialism. The “ideal” situation for this transition to socialism had not been in Russia, Eastern Europe, China or Vietnam, and yet one or more of these will often be looked at by people still unironically using the word “comrade” as having been a worthwhile endeavour, despite the millions who died.

If the CPK maintained that they were a Marxist-Leninist party, and their leaders were card carrying communists, and they preached the virtues of Maoism, then surely their socialist credentials are better than most. Refusing to call a spade a spade is obviously done to pursue an agenda.

So, on April 17^th, 2025, fifty years after the CPK began one of the 20^th century’s last socialist revolutions, and we remember the victims of that horrendous regime, we should not attempt to shroud what they were trying to do as some kind of obscure project never seen before. The CPK were following a blueprint, although one that they had tweaked to suit Cambodia. They stuck with that blueprint, killing anyone who got in the way.

“Sweeping clean” to the bone.

Yes, “Year Zero” does manage to metaphorically capture so much of what the CPK did in Cambodia, as a new start, a new beginning. But we should not continue to state that they themselves came up with the phrase and declared it to have begun once they took power. Similarly, we should be weary of an overemphasis on their revolution as a stone age experiment rather than an attempt to recreate the collectivised farming efforts of the Great Leap Forward or the anti-intellectual purges of other socialist regimes denies the reality of their miserable project.

To the extent that “Year Zero” obfuscates the reality, scope and reasons for the murderous Khmer Rouge project, it should be rethought of in its applicability.