I was in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand for a few weeks in early 2016 and did some of that same tour you’re probably doing. I recall learning that same fact about the Khmer Rouge killing off all the intellectuals, including people with glasses. I also recall that learning that after the conclusion of the four years of Pol Pot’s rule, 25% of the population had been killed, which is insane, of course.
There is this built-in tension within Marxist theory between, on the one hand, a notion, clear in Marx’s own writings, that a communist revolution will happen inevitably and naturally when the inherent contradictions of capitalism boil over, leading to inhuman conditions for the proletariat, the growth of its consciousness as an oppressed class and, in the end, revolution, and, on the other hand, a notion, largely developed by later Marxist theorists such as Lukacs and Gramsci, that for a revolution to occur, proletarian revolutionary consciousness needs to be nurtured and roused up by a vanguard of intellectuals, since otherwise what Lukacs called “reification” and what Gramsci called “hegemony” will work to keep the proletariat subservient. Up until the present day, every communist revolution that we’ve seen has fallen into that second category, meaning that, far from “inevitable,” these revolutions have required resort to brutal coercion and authoritarian measures to keep themselves going. Whether the more “inevitable” variety of communism will ever surface on the world stage is an open question, but to this point, the record of these regimes has obviously been abysmal.
I don’t see the modern-day U.S. or West as anywhere near all-out communism at this point (though socialism does appear to be on the horizon), but certainly, the restrictive speech and thought policing typical of communist regimes seems to have gained a clear foothold on these shores. The irony is that it’s really the elites that are betraying us and turning over ideological control of our societies over to people who would destroy them from within, as I’ve argued here:
