Talk:Khmer Rouge/Archive 2

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Mar 26

This is not going to be settled by the people editting this, this is just a back and forth edit war. What is the next step, arbitration? Let us bring this into arbitration or whatever. Hanpuk 05:49, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'll start by putting this on the Wikipedia:Requests for comment page. Hanpuk 05:54, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

My problems with the version Maveric put in:

1) The death toll is put in the first paragraph. Why is this not done for every political party? American political parties would go off the charts with this. It's just ridiculous.

2) A ridiculous number like 2 million is put in the first paragraph (aside from disagreeing with the number, the author of the number, Ponchaud, says he is counting people prior to the CPK takeover with that number. So they are going against their own source), yet the American CIA estimated 50,000-100,000 executed in 1980. Of course this can be debated, but why not later on in the article? My attempts to change 900,000 to the American CIA's 50,000 are continually undone, although the ridiculous 2 million, who even the original source of the 2 million number (Ponchaud) would say is ridiculous to say was post-1975, is kept up. I also don't know what "They are generally considered responsible for the deaths of between 900,000 and 2 million people during their rule; see below for fuller discussion." even means.

3) The name Khmer Rouge was invented in the Western press. They always called themselves the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Khmer Rouge just sounds like a crazy, foreign name. Even the name of the group is biased against them. They are stuck with the propaganda name the French state department chose for them, not what they call themselves.

4) The it goes on from the death toll to more propaganda. "Year Zero", another name to make them sound crazy. Then, "When the Khmer Rouge came to power they attempted to create a classless utopian society. They carried out a radical program of emptying the urban areas, closing schools and factories, abolishing banking and currency, outlawing religion, ending private property, and moving the population into collective farms" Which concludes with "This policy, known as "year zero", soon turned into a reign of terror, and resulted in the deaths of a large number of Cambodians through executions and starvation." Great, it is a neutral point of view fact that their government was a "reign of terror". Of course, the American mass bombing of the countryside, the war against the Prince and the Vietnamese invasion four years later were all just pleasantries happening during this time.

5) The CPK was at war with the Cambodian monarchy, the US and then Vietnam. When they took power, all of the foreign humanitarian aid was immediately cut off, which I guess was meant to try to starve people to death or something. So the CPK sends people in the cities which had recently become overcrowded due to the bombings and sends them to the countryside to grow their own food. This is called "radical", "Year zero", a "reign of terror" and so on and so forth. I'm sure if the CPK had let things be and there was a famine there would be much lamentation here about how the CPK starved millions of people to death.

I'll try chiming in again here. I do find the research you're doing as to the figures interesting, but there are a quite a number of sources mentioned in the article other than Ponchaud, such as the Yale project and AI. Although I don't know their methods, I doubt you can just dismiss all this scholarship as based solely on a misunderstanding of a figure in one book. As for the name, you've already had the common names policy explained to you numerous times: This is the English encyclopedia, and uses the names English speakers use and are familiar with, regardless of the source of that name, whether it's the "corporate press" or implantation by aliens. Your claim that it's "crazy" and "foreign" is ridiculous; are Renaissance and Cinco de Mayo "crazy, foreign name"s? If the KR has a bad reputation, it's not because of their ("scary") French name. Finally, claiming the KR evacuated the cities to avert a famine and not as part of their utopian agricultural collectivization is not consistent with present historical consensus, nor is implying it's all the fault of the US (like everything, apparently) convincing either. You do seem to know some things about the subject which could be worthwhile additions to these articles, but your present tactic of using multiple accounts to attack pages and people and insert wild claims about corporate conspiracies and so on is not the way to go about this. A possibly enlightening comparison would be the AIDS articles, where a persistent faction insists that HIV does not cause AIDS and that this has been proven by medical data; just like you, they're sure they are right, but the fact that their beliefs run counter to scientific consensus means they must accept lessened coverage. -- VV 07:52, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)


Some research

The Yale Cambodian Genocide Project, part of the Yale Genocide Studies Program. They claim extensive documentation. Quote:

In Phnom Penh in 1996, for instance, we obtained access to the 100,000-page archive of that defunct regime's security police, the Santebal. This material has been microfilmed by Yale University's Sterling Library and made available to scholars worldwide. As of December 2003, we have also compiled and published 22,000 biographic and bibliographic records, and over 6,000 photographs, documents, translations, and maps, along with an extensive list of CGP books and research papers on the genocide.

The CGP estimates "approximately 1.7 million" deaths, roughly 21% of the country's population, died during this period. You can read Ben Kiernan's "The Demography of Genocide: Cambodia and East Timor" (Critical Asian Studies, 35:4, 2003) [in .pdf format] for a more detailed account of how these figures were reached. -- The Anome 08:27, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The CGP also states:

From 1979 to 1983, the Cambodian government supported a research committee to survey the country, in every province, and in some provinces right down to the village level, to attempt to determine what had happened in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. [...] The research committee reported the deaths of 3,314,000 persons under the Khmer Rouge regime. We believe that this is the source of the figure most commonly cited in Cambodia as to the human toll of the genocide.

Note that the CGP has revised this Cambodian government figure downwards to a more cautiously calculated estimate of 1.7 million dead, based on the evidence it has reviewed. -- The Anome 08:36, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Meta-analysis?

Note: for what it's worth, taking the figures given by the two ex-members of the regime together as a single figure of 900,000 (that is to say, treating them as a single source, "the former regime"), we end up with seven data points in the article.

Sources:

  • Rummel = 2 million
  • State Dept = 1.2 million
  • CGP = 1.7 million
  • Ponchaud = 2 million
  • Amnesty International = 1.4 million
  • Cambodian government = 3.3 million
  • Pot Pot et al = 0.9 million

Doing some arithmetic:

  • Geometric mean = 1.69 million
  • Arithmetic mean = 1.83 million
  • Median = 1.7 million (the CGP figure)

All of these suggest that the CGP figure is a good "central" estimate, close to the geometric and arithmetic means on either side of it, and with all three clustered within a 10% range. With a population of seven data points, we are just within the range of statistical testing: does anyone want to do the honours? -- The Anome 08:48, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Well, after searching for it, I just put in a redirect from t-distribution to Student's t-distribution. ;) -- VV 09:06, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Who is R. J. Rummel and what credibility does he or she have on this issue? Adam 09:19, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

R. J. Rummel: A well-known academic writer on the topic of genocide. 10,300 Google hits. See vita here: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/LONGVITA.HTM -- The Anome 09:27, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK now I know who he is. I remain dubious about his credibility if he is the one responsible for these allegations that millions of German POWs were starved to death by the Allies. Adam

No, that was James Bacque. See Rummel's own take on this at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP13.HTM where he rejects Bacque's figures. Rummel estimates between 4,500 and 56,000 dead; the official German investigation gave a figure of 4,532. -- The Anome 09:39, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK then. What are his Cambodian estimates based on? Adam 09:44, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

See here: R. J. Rummel's calculations for Cambodian genocide figures -- The Anome 09:51, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

And a quote from Rummel:

While my history and facts of this democide (link) are rarely challenged, my mid-estimate of 2,000,000 (in a range of 600,000 to 3,000,000) murdered by the Khmer Rouge has received considerable criticism from the left as a gross overestimate. However, recent research by the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale has come close to my figures.

The Anome 10:00, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK. Adam 10:05, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Putting the photos of 24 presumably executed people at the top is ridiculous. Bush presided over hundreds of executions as governor of Texas, as well as federal executions as president. What would happen if the first image on the Republican page or George Bush page was 24 people he executed? It would be deleted immediately as POV. Yet some people have an axe to grind with the Communist Party of Kampuchea, so they do this. It's not allowed on the Republican party page so I will not allow it here.

This page has simply gotten worse since I put it on request for comments.

"The Khmer Rouge thus combined Stalinist ruthlessness with the extreme utopianism of Maoism and a powerful xenophobia." Great, it's a fact they used "Stalinist ruthlessness" whatever the hell that means. "When the Khmer Rouge came to power they were determined immediately to create a classless society by force." What government does not do what it is trying to do by force? Do you think people pay their rent in the US because they like supporting their landlord? Every few years (perhaps more often) there are shootouts between police evicting people on behalf of American landlords. Everything every government does is by force, or with the threat of force, it is not acceptable to spell this out anywhere else on Wikipedia (except perhaps generic pages on government), so I will not allow it here. Hanpuk 18:49, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

What you are missing, Hanpuk, is the scale factor. Wikipedia contains much that is critical of the U.S. and other governments: indeed no country or goverment is without misdeeds. However, most governments tend not to kill their own populations in vast numbers. When they do, we tend to write about it in articles. -- The Anome 23:16, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
On the RFC page, you ask "Whether people seeking to paint the Communist Party of Kampuchea (which they call the Khmer Rouge) in a bad light are doing so by facts, or just throwing mud." I believe that the criticism is fact-based. NPOV requires that we report the CPK viewpoint, as well as the anti-CPK viewpoint. It does not require us to view these two as equal. Historical opinion is overwhelmingly that the CPK was responsible for vast numbers of deaths. Even its own former leaders admitted this. -- The Anome 23:22, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I do not mind properly sourced anti-CPK viewpoints (as well as criticism of it or criticism of its misuse - such as people here attributing the Ponchaud number of 2 million to 1975-1979 when that number covers the pre-1975, pre-CPK rule period as well. Or counter-criticism of these criticisms.
What I do mind is stuff such as "historical opinion is overwhelmingly that the CPK was responsible for vast numbers of deaths". If this is the case, why not just cite the opinion of these people. Even the anti-CPK people who post here have disagreements on the numbers of deaths in Cambodia, never mind "that the CPK was responsible for", which is a totally different matter. This is a subjective question in itself - the news talks sometimes of battered children that fall through the cracks of government agencies and are killed, and then the question of whether the government has responsibility in their deaths or not.
As far as "[The CPK's] own leaders admit...the CPK was responsible for vast numbers of deaths" this probably refers to the sentence "Former Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, who could be expected to give underestimations, give figures of 1 million and 800,000, respectively. An estimate of 1.5 million (from a total population of about 7 million in 1975) seems a reasonable consensus". I'm presuming that the source of Khieu Samphan allegedly gave a figure of 1 million dying, to quote from the Wikipedia article "as a result of the Khmer Rouge's policies". Well for one, Khieu Samphan would not have called the CPK the "Khmer Rouge". Secondly, in the alleged interview in question, Khieu Samphan did not attribute the deaths to the policies of the government. And thirdly, that this interview ever happened is disputed, for one, by the person who gave the 2 million number (Ponchaud) that is bandied about so frequently here. The alleged interview was allegedly given to an obscure Italian Catholic magazine, Famiglia Cristiana (see? I'm doing all the work here). So the only source that exists for this supposed admission is a writer for an obscure Roman Catholic magazine from Italy. It's fine to put it in, as long as it is noted that in the alleged interview Khieu Samphan did not blame the CPK for the deaths, as is said, and that the original source is an obscure Italian Catholic magazine, which some people doubt the authenticity of. Hanpuk 02:08, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This page is now protected - i hope a reasonable discourse can solve this problem. PMA 22:29, Mar 26, 2004 (UTC)

Just as people in countries all over the world died through one way or another from 1975-1979, so people died in Cambodia - old age, disease, or even execution (just as hundreds are executed every year in just one of the fifty US states, Texas). Some of the people who died were executed, especially members of the former regime, and some of those deaths can be pegged in terms of responsibility to the CPK leadership. There seems to be a desire to use confusing language in this article however, to try to imply every death in Cambodia from 1975-1979 was due to execution by the government. People do not seem satisfied to present facts and let people draw their own conclusions. From the current locked article:

First paragraph - "The Khmer Rouge are generally held responsible for the deaths of at least a million people during their rule."

"The Khmer Rouge thus combined Stalinist ruthlessness with the extreme utopianism of Maoism and a powerful xenophobia."

"When the Khmer Rouge came to power they were determined immediately to create a classless society by force." (how come it's not mentioned on the US government page how it is "by force" that class is created in US society - I certainly would not pay rent to a landlord if I didn't know the landlord would send some fellows with nightsticks and guns (the police) to my door to forcibly evict me if I stopped paying him his rent)

"The Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the deaths of a higher proportion of its own country's population than any regime in modern history." - the whole paragraph this is in is ridiculous. Was the percentage higher than the (ignored in the US media) percent of the population killed in East Timor around the same time? No one even approaching a neutral point of view would say so.

"An estimate of 1.5 million (from a total population of about 7 million in 1975) seems a reasonable consensus." - why is presenting the facts not enough, it seems people feel that they can not trust people to look at the different reports and make up their own minds, people have to be told what a "reasonable consensus" is.

I want to see

1) A clear distinction between overall deaths from 1975-1979 in Kampuchea from executions directly linkable to the CPK. There seems to be a desire to present a confusing mesh of these two distinct things so that a greater number of deaths is implicated on the CPK.

2) As far as placing blame - some anti-CPK amazingly said "executions represented only a minority of the death toll, which mostly came from starvation." Well now we're getting somewhere. Of course this comes into contradiction with the notion that the CPK getting people into the fields so that they would be self-sufficient instead of starving was some horrible, "radical" event. I'd also ask how much the CPK was to blame if the US had been bombing the countryside to oblivion and Phnom Penh was overcrowded with many starving prior to the CPK takeover. Or what effect the cut off in foreign humanitarian aid had when the CPK took over - did the change of policy cutting off the humanitarian aid that the prior regime had had help result in deaths by starvation?

3) I want to see attributions for what is said. And attributions with #1 in mind Hanpuk 02:31, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks to PMA for protecting this article, which is now in a reasonably encyclopaedic form, though of course far from perfect. It can now stay protected until Hanpuk goes away. Hanpuk's objections above veer between the ridiculous and the grossly dishonest. He is entitled to be a Communist, but he cannot be a Communist and an encyclopaedia editor. Adam 07:14, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I have now been informed that Hanpuk is another name for the user also known as Richard Chilton and Lance Murdoch, a notorious inserter of Communist propaganda and lies into a range of articles. This person ought to be banned in my opinion. Adam 08:02, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Shame on you, Adam. Yes, he can be a Communist and an encyclopedia editor. You may not respect pluralism, but that doesn't matter. The owner of the site does, and he's the one who decides who gets to be an editor on Wikipedia. Note Jimbo Wales' comments on the User:JoeM page:
It's really important to have fire-brand young College Republicans helping out here, just as it's really important to have fire-brand young communists working here, but ONLY so long as they agree to set aside differences in order to lay out the facts, not the moral or political conclusions.
Jimbo goes on to tell JoeM that if he respects private property, he'll respect his wishes. I'm expecting that you'll respect private property, and stop harassing and browbeating Hanpuk for ideological reasons. So calm down. IMHO, you ought to give Hanpuk credit for being open about who he is and what he believes. This does take a lot of courage, after all. If you all agree to work within the framework of NPOV, stay factual, stay specific, cite disputed claims, and avoid value-laden terminology in your edits, a Communist and a diehard anti-Communist ex-Communist can work together constructively on Wikipedia. 172 15:34, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
BTW, the more I think about it, the more troubled I become over Adam's statements. I will support User:Hanpuk if he wants to copy my comments above and paste them into a Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Adam Carr page. IMO, the following statements by Adam ought to be posted in such a page:
He is entitled to be a Communist, but he cannot be a Communist and an encyclopaedia editor. Adam 07:14, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I have now been informed that Hanpuk is another name for the user also known as Richard Chilton and Lance Murdoch, a notorious inserter of Communist propaganda and lies into a range of articles. This person ought to be banned in my opinion. Adam 08:02, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
You "have now been informed"? What are you, an officer at Interpol? I am Hanpuk, not anyone else. I have followed the rules, refrained from edit wars, and escalated to Request for Comments on this page when I thought it could not be handled here. I have also laid out facts on the Khmer Rouge and tried to engage in discussion. Instead I get accused of being some other user (who is not banned so I don't see the point of the accusation), which I'm not, I am told communists are not allowed to edit on Wikipedia by the authority of Adam Carr (I am not a member of any communist party), and my edits are simply reverted, without discussion (despite my desire to have a discussion), with a great deal of antipathy and scorn. And I see little discussion about the CPK on the CPK discussion page, just ad hominem attacks and the like. You've said what you have to say, can you please keep this page for discussion on the topic, and keep ad hominem stuff on wherever page it is supposed to go (I have a feeling it is not supposed to be cluttering up the CPK discussion page, for one thing). Hanpuk 22:34, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
In two just edits, Adam has arguably called for banning users for ideological reasons, blatant abuse of admin privileges, and an overall practice of McCarthyism on Wikipedia. Perhaps opening up a discussion on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Adam Carr will teach him to be less abusive. 172 20:40, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
172 - the RfC process is not supposed to be used as a blunt tool to threaten to beat people over their heads with. --mav 21:41, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
It's not? That's been my experience; I've been beaten over my head with it. But I'll take another look at the policy. BTW, do you have any advice regarding Hanpuk? IMO, after a handful of correspondences with him, his charges of abuse and auto-revert do deserve attention and do carry some weight. This user has obvious problems with NPOV, but not on a scale that warrants a ban. Other "POV users" are allowed to play constructive roles in WP; they just don't get to be the sole writers of articles on controversial subjects. However, Hanpuk's been singled-out because he upsets the ideological sensibilities of a select number of harsh opponents. 172 21:57, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)



Yes, Lancemurdoch, JohnWoolsey, HectorRodriguez, Richardchilton, Venceremos, and Hanpuk are all one and the same person. I myself proposed banning on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Richardchilton, but that did not elicit response, despite the huge number of complaints there (see, e.g., the IRC logs). And, as the one who identified them as the same and as someone who has been active in combatting his attacks on articles, I have been subject to relentless abuse by them (him) and their ideological allies. This is ongoing at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/VeryVerily. It's very tiring. This user has declared war on Wikipedia, written a personal attack on Jimbo, and is wasting my and many other people's time that could be spent working on articles. What will it take for action to be taken? -- VV 09:18, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I do not know any of those people you are talking about. I am Hanpuk, not anyone else. And being that whoever you're talking about is, as you say, not banned, but simply someone you proposed be banned, I don't know what you are trying to do anyhow.
Anyhow, I have spent a great deal of time writing down what I think here and trying to discuss it. I think some of what The Anome put in is POV, like "This policy, known as 'year zero', soon turned into a reign of terror..." but at least he is following Wiki etiquette. He is backing up his figures with references, he seems willing to have a NPOV page where all points can be put across. Adam Carr has outright stated above that he doesn't believe people should be able to edit the encyclopedia if he disagrees with them politically. VeryVerily talks about some other user who HE thinks should be banned (but who isn't), and then falsely accuses me of secretly being that user. I, on the other hand, have tried to get people to discuss the page, have mostly refrained from edit wars, and escalated to the next step, putting the page on Rfc when I thought it had to be escalated. Since I have tried to conform to Wiki etiquette, and have nothing but (perhaps minor accidental) divergences from it, I have to be accused of being someone else - who apparently isn't banned by the way so I don't know what the point is except ad hominem mud throwing. Can we please keep this page to the discussion of the CPK, and keep all of this ad hominem talk elsewhere? Hanpuk 22:34, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Good advice: Keep this page to the discussion on top, and keep all of these ad hominems elsewhere. 172 07:51, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

VV says above that he has proved that Hanpuk is the same person as Lance Murdoch etc etc, but even if he hadn't it is obvious from comparing their edits that they are the same person. Adam 07:59, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"The Khmer Rouge thus combined Stalinist ruthlessness with the extreme utopianism of Maoism and a powerful xenophobia." I agree with this sentence, but it does seem very POV. Could this view be accredited to someone (e.g. "many in the west" or something?)
"When they came to power, they attempted to force Cambodian society to move immediately to the most radical form of Communism ever envisaged by a party in power." I think this should be NPOVed by stating it was what they saw as the most radical form of Communism (if it was), as I wouldn't say they practiced any form of Communism, despite calling themselves that - just as China doesn't practice any form of democracy, despite its full name.
"they drove the population at gunpoint" some of them? or is it a metaphor?
Basically, my point is that I suspect Hanpuk's reasons for objecting to the tone of the article are extremely murky, but that some of the points raised about the need to NPOV the article have some value. Warofdreams 16:42, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I agree this sentence has POV problems, and would welcome proposed rewrites. I hope us cooler heads can work on such issues rationally without the trolls and ideologues causing problems and wasting our time. -- VV 00:52, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Here is a sentence from the article Holocaust:

"The Holocaust was methodically carried out in virtually every inch of Nazi-occupied territory, with Jews and other victims being persecuted in what are now 25 present-day nations of Europe, being sent to concentration camps in some nations, and death camps in other nations."

Here is another sentence:

"Many in the west allege that the Holocaust was "methodically" carried out in virtually every inch of Nazi-occupied territory, with Jews and other so-called victims being allegedly persecuted in what are now 25 present-day nations of Europe, being allegedly sent to "concentration camps" in some nations, and so-called death camps in other nations."

Which do we prefer, historiographically, aesthetically and morally?

Adam 00:31, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That sentence is indeed over the top, and needs more than just an attribution to be fixed. But there's an article I'd really be afraid to touch. -- VV 00:52, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)


S-21

There is no mention of Khmer Rouge's famous Jail S-21, which was where many citizen were Killed.--Plato 10:46, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

And nor can there be until this article is unprotected, which can't happen until Hanpuk and his various aliases are banned from Wikipedia. It's a pity, but this is one of Wikipedia's major structural weaknesses. Adam 11:24, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

April 4

The Khmer Rouge is certainly the name used by everyone in Cambodia today for the party that was in power between 1976-1979.

The Khmer Rouge are properly considered among a very select league of political parties and political movements for having killed an extraordinary number of their fellow citizens and other residents. Moreover, they managed to achieve world class status as mass murderers in a small country. The leaderships of the CPSU, CCP, the Nazis, and Suharto's Indonesian Army had the personnel and material of much larger states available when they committed crimes of a comparable scale.

If a party or party leadership in any political regime, including liberal democracies, has committed crimes of a similar nature or comparable scale against its own civilian population or the civilian populations of other countries, then that certainly deserves reference in its respective page. Mass murder is relevant to establishing the identity of a political party or political movement. For that reason, reference to the Nixon administration's bombing campaigns in Cambodia, which killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians and gave many other Cambodians reason to join the KR, ought to be made in the page for the U.S. Republican Party. The same is true for the Socialist Party of France because of the Mitterand government's very close ties as arms supplier etc. to the nationalist Hutu militias responsible for the Rwanda genocide.

  • Wow! Anybody else notice the parallelism here? Both Nixon's Republican Administration and Mitterand's government's support of arms to the Hutus are examples of direct or indirect foreign aggression, NOT crimes of a ruling party against its own people. Foreign-directed aggression is all too ordinary part of inter-group interactions throughout human history, and characterized the political behavior of the majority of group leaders with enough power to commit it. Only a select few truly nasty governments deliberately kill millions of their own citizens. As detestable as Nixon and Mitterand may have been to many of their own citizens, this equating to Pol Pot is offensively stupid. Finally, the evidence that US bombing of the eastern edges of Cambodia in 1970 killed "hundreds of thousands" of Cambodians (maybe several times the population of the eastern provinces)? alteripse

The Khmer Rouge established the most closed regime on the planet during the roughly 3 years that they were in power. Only the Taliban have achieved a comparable degree of international isolation. While in power, the KR rejected all offers of foreign aid except that from the PRC.

I suspect that what Hanpuk needs to do is actually go to Cambodia and visit the Documentation Center in Phnom Penh and one of the many killing fields to convince himself that these crimes did in fact take place. He would find it very convincing. Substituting ideological commitment and scepticism about the morality of the U.S. government for well established historical fact is politically immature. Do we have a page for Maoist volunteerism?

US and the Khmer Rouge

There should be something in the article about US backing of the Khmer Rouge as a lever against the Vietnamese Communists ie US backing of the Khmer Rouge in the UN, State Dept support etc. AndyL 04:59, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

That would be a useful addition. RickK 05:01, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

There should be a reference, but this is not an article about US foreign policy. Rants on this topic in this article will be de-ranted. Adam 10:41, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Well of course you would want to do this. The US government was not only the real enemy of the CPK (until 1979 at least, then in the eyes of the US government they walked on water) behind the US's proxy Cambodian army, the US government is really who turned the CPK from a small group to eventually the group that would take over Cambodia, mostly due to the 1969 US government decision to begin bombing Cambodia. Hanpuk 16:24, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Incidentally, I don't know who has noticed, but "Hanpuk" has switched to rampaging other Cambodia articles, such as Cambodia, History of Cambodia, and Democratic Kampuchea. They've all been protected now. Oh, and agree with Adam about not making yet another article a US slam-fest. -- VV 10:48, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Right, everyone must purge any content that says anything negative about the US government. Yes, commissar! Hanpuk 16:24, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)
You will agree though, that the left wing is as equally capable of spitting out bullshit as the right wing is. 211.28.122.253
Hanpuk is just trolling. He wants every article to be devoted to how everything bad in every country is the US's fault. No one has suggested purging all negative US content, of course. -- VV 22:55, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Cambodia

There are 5 Cambodia pages under contention, I think if someone (VeryVerily?) would feel compelled to edit all 5 pages as well, a centralized discussion of the issues common to all pages (number of people killed in Cambodia, history of CPK) udner contention could be discussed here, in one centralized location, unless someone has a better idea. Unless someone thinks 5 seperate discussions of the same issue on 5 different pages is a better idea (or more likely no discussion and just a revert).

Most of the points I've made above already. It's up to others to decide. I am refuting flat out wrong arguments like "Ponchaud says 2 million died 1975-1979". Ponchaud did not say that his timeline started BEFORE 1975. Anyone can go pick up his book and see this. I correct an error which is undeniable and the mud-slinging starts, I'm whitewashing genocide, I'm a crazed whatever, I'm accused of being a sock puppet of someone, anything and everything ad hominem instead of the issue at hand. I mean, wouldn't sourcing these wild claims bolster your argument? Unless there are no credible sources for the wilder claims made here. Hanpuk 06:23, 5 May 2004 (UTC)