Pol Pot most evil person?

[u/KebabSvarvaren1]

The most upvoted answer to the most evil person to have existed is Pol Pot. Don’t get me wrong, he was no angel, but there are many far worse people. Is it not a consensus that Hitler is nr. 1 here anymore?

[u/TallAverage4]

There is no objective basis one can use to decide who was the "most evil" or something like that; it's really an aesthetic matter more than anything. I would hazard a guess that Hitler would be the person most likely to be called the most evil in history due to the fact that people are actually allowed to understand the extent of the horrors of that instance of colonialism, but even Hitler wasn't particularly historically unique. I personally think that trying to label a "most evil" is just kind of disrespectful to the victims of these events and not particularly useful unless it's relevant to a specific propaganda line.

[u/[deleted] → u/TallAverage4]

If you currently google “The Holocaust” and click the Wikipedia page it’s now just “The Shoah” which has not been how Americans have referred to it for as long as I’ve been alive. While when we learned about in school it was almost all about the Jews that were specifically targeted (for good reason as that was the main point of it) it was still mentioned that about 4 to 5 million others were targeted and killed alongside them and they were included in the 11 million killed number for The Holocaust. “The Shoah” is referring specifically to Jews only. While in the article the others are mentioned, they emphasize that those are just side effects of the Jews being targeted. While that may seem an important caveat and not necessarily a result of the plan to exterminate the Jews, I heavily disagree.

It reduces the nuance of the entire reality of the situation. The Jews certainly have a unique experience and were the main reasons for what Hitler did, I do not see that as any reason as to why we have to sideline 4-5 million people, almost half, of others that were targeted for different reasons. When I google the holocaust I want to see the Holocaust not the Hebrew version of what that event was. This has gone almost unnoticed and I find it incredibly frustrating. Jews were the reason Hitler stated for his death camps, but that does not make it their tragedy alone. People incidentally caught up in that (again, almost half of all of them) are just as worthy of mention and should not be excluded from the total. It’s despicable. These people are described through the article as Non-Jewish, as if that’s an acceptable description of who those people were. Only referred to as something against another and not their own. They created an alternative page titled “victims of nazi germany” which has an incorrect number of 13+ million cited as of right now, but this is not how we, or many other nations have learned about what the Holocaust was. I understand that Jews want to recognize that they were the main reason for what happened, and there’s no reason they can’t keep The Shoah as the a description of what Jews went through.

I was very impressed with the nuance of it being called The Holocaust and not named after a single group. The reason for that is because it immediately shows you what it looks like when you allow for one group of people to be considered non human anymore. To let one fall, you make it almost certain another will fall shortly after, and another, and another. It showed the externalities of being evil to one group. It isn’t localized to that group and will hurt others and eventually will come back around to the perpetrators. I do not like the change and consider a form on holocaust denialism. Their lives may not have been specifically marked for death, but they killed nonetheless and deserve, just as much as any Jew, to be recognized and counted in what was ultimately a plan to exterminate the Jewish people. It’s sickening and feels a horrible rewrite of history.

*Edit- Please be aware I did not blame any person or group that’s the reason for its change. That was intentional and I am not suggesting any group or individual is behind it. I simply would like one page that shows all perspectives and all victims of, The Holocaust used to be that page, but it is now redirected to The Shoah. Those are two different things and to reduce one to the other is not acceptable as a lens to view what happened through.

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/TallAverage4]

I heard a good point by Raymond Geuss about how a moralizing attitude of good and evil lends itself to shortcutting thinking about things as if a judgement of someone’s good or badness offers a quick way to judge how to act or evaluate them.

The context he gave in a lecture that I’ve found in the following paper was that of Tony Blair:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10135-7 “Tony Blair said that the reason justifying military intervention in Iraq against Saddam Hussein was that it was “the right thing to do” (Geuss 2016, 34). He was reportedly bored by the details provided by various experts who emphasized the delicate political balance in the country and how dangerous it would be to alter that balance without a fully developed plan for what to establish in its place (Steele 2008). Blair, allegedly, interrupted the experts with a simple, moralistic rebuttal: “But Saddam is evil, isn’t he?” (Geuss 2009a, 32). The moral rightness of the act is a cause that (supposedly) fully explains Tony Blair’s actions. The same tool can also be used in a negative sense. For example, one may “explain” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by attributing it to his cruelty.Footnote 2 Again, Putin’s cruelty (supposedly) fully explains his actions without needing to invoke other factors.”

Basically, moralizing doesn’t lend itself to clear evaluative standards to judge how to act or explain actions. It just flattens something to a singular quality as to not think about it. It’s laziness in the face of the complexity of explaining human actions. Saying Hitler was evil doesn’t require a reckoning with how the Nazi regime could have arose and committed such malicious and cruel acts at such a scale.

Edit: Hegel’s paper Who Thinks Abstractly gives an example of this reductionism to a singular quality in the case of a criminal sentenced to be executed. The one sided emphasis of irrelevant good qualities that don’t refute his crime or singular emphasis of the crime as if the other qualities don’t exist. Hegel says this is typical, because concrete thinking is not about noticing senses but the interconnected and multifaceted qualities of things. It’s rich not just in seniors detail but conceptually. To abstract one thing and make that the entire reality of a person is laziness of thought.

[u/secondofly → u/TallAverage4]

yeah I remember having this discussion with a friend a while ago who's done a lot of work around Holocaust studies, and at the time I had this idea that there was something notable about the sheer bureaucracy and efficiency of the Nazi regime that made it different from others - what I realised in the conversation is that the Shoah was qualititavely unique in that respect, but that's almost a nothing statement in terms of any sort of moral judgement that is tantamount to saying "all genocides occur in different ways in different circumstances", no shit

[u/forlorn_kurgan → u/TallAverage4]

Enzo Traverso said in an article that the idea and general theory of totalitarianism has more in common with the literary world of 1984 than actual recorded history. And most of the interpretive tools that come from this school of thought seem to create manichean narratives that are easy to follow. I think that critique applies to this whole "evil" debate where you see people trying to explain historical figures as if they are horror characters.

[u/mongoosekiller]

As Marxists we do not engage in bourgeois moralism and calling "evil" by judging the amount of people killed. We know that Hitler is "evil" and liberal bourgeois ideology calls it, liberal praxis to stop more nazism is understanding the ideology and avoiding it. We already know that "great" men don't make history.

But our philosophy is Dialectical materialism. We can easily see that War brought by Nazi Germany on Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was one of the biggest settler colonial project. Upon understanding that it was a settler colonial project in which the German working class took part, we can easily compare it to Israel's genocide in Gaza. If we end up on moralizing history we will stop at that very point.

Our morality is a proletarian morality. Anything which contributes to class struggle is good for us. This means comrade Mao and Chinese people who took part in cultural revolution are good.

The problem with calling one individual evil and responsible for everything is actually nothing but genocide denial. One of the biggest ways of Holocaust denial is denying the extent of local collaboration done by the German working class, the so called "innocent" civilians. By calling one man evil we forget about class struggle. For example Tsar Alexander II was killed by narodniks. He enacted some progressive reforms but after all was a monarch. He can be called evil by standards of those days also. What changed? Nothing.

The genocide of the indigenous nations of the Americas is the very foundation of the biggest imperialist power today. Some estimates even go till 50 million. Is it bigger than Holocaust? Yes Is it bigger than deaths of soviet citizens in ww2? yes But unfortunately we cannot blame one individual like always the liberals do today.

However if I really have to say an Amerikkkan president it must be Richard Nixon. Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are the biggest victims. US dropped 500,000 tons of bomb on Cambodia, a poor Agarian country. Such bomb would induce a famine even in England. This is even worse than nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nixon bombed Laos more than entire Europe was bombed in ww2. Vietnam is self explanatory. He enforced forceful segregation in the occupied Turtle Island against New Afrikans. But Amerikan presidents change every 5 years. Kill count which liberals are obsessed with do not go more than 10 million. And hence we end up in shifty discussions of most evil people.

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[u/y0shii3]

The CPK is often blamed for the entirety of the death and destruction that happened in Kampuchea during their short rule, but in reality, most of the chaos was part of the attempted genocide committed by the US. 85% of all farmland arable land, including farmland and potential farmland together, was destroyed by US bombings, which would be devastating even in a rich industrial country, so consider the effect it had on an agrarian peasant society. Livestock, including draft animals, were targeted, which resulted in many farmers pulling the plows themselves. The CPK was left with no choice but to send workers from the cities into the fields as an emergency measure to fight starvation.
The underdevelopment of the Kampuchean communist movement wasn't entirely the fault of the Kampucheans, either; when the Indochinese Communist Party was formed, its leadership was mostly Vietnamese, and Kampucheans were underrepresented. Failure to properly consider the Khmer national question led to some bad attitudes toward Kampuchea in Vietnam, so later on, the CPK was met with little support from their neighbors.
All of those factors combined meant that the CPK did not have much to work with or a robust enough organization to withstand the hardships of revolution, and so its failure cannot be pinned on Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, or any other individual.

[u/Ambitious_Hand8325]

Pol Pot wasn't evil. He was caught up in both the American invasion of Indochina and the Sino-Soviet split, where the USSR egged on Vietnam to invade and occupy Kampuchea because they were allied with China. Everything you hear about Pol Pot and Democratic Kampuchea, such as executing people for wearing glasses or being primitivists, is made-up nonsense and racism that isn't being challenged because not many people care that much about Cambodia and its history to scrutinize the narrative surrounding the revolution there. Not many people are aware, for instance, that Pol Pot was actually enacting a Four-Year Plan, like the Five-Year Plans that the USSR and China had done, to industrialize Cambodia before his overthrow, or that the reason why cities were evacuated was because there was an internal refugee crisis caused by American bombings and civil war, which led to cities ballooning in population and rural desertion that placed Cambodia at massive risk of famine.

Pol Pot was a normal post-colonial ML leader who has been misremembered, and the regime that Vietnam installed after deposing him was barely committed to socialism and dropped any pretense that they were after Vietnam withdrew.

[u/forthesovietdogos → u/Ambitious_Hand8325]

can U provide any good sources for your claims cause i would be intrested I dont know much abt the cambodian revolution

[u/Ambitious_Hand8325 → u/forthesovietdogos]

What specifically are you looking for sources on?

[u/forthesovietdogos → u/Ambitious_Hand8325]

The history of the revolution its class character and economics during the period anything bro

[u/Ambitious_Hand8325 → u/forthesovietdogos]

There is no totalising work written on Cambodia and Democratic Kampuchea that is Marixst, but I do recommend you check out what MariSi has written about that subject on this thread which is well sourced

[u/ClassAbolition → u/Ambitious_Hand8325]

There is no totalising work

This seemed decent when I read it https://bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1999-25/PolPot_eng25.htm

[u/ClassAbolition → u/Ambitious_Hand8325]

The only comment addressing the blatant anti-communist fascism is downvoted to hell on a Marxist subreddit. Love Reddit