Strange Legacies of the Terror: Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Khmer Rouge Purges

Abstract

Explanations of the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia often conflate two events: the far-ranging and self-destructive violence within the revolutionary Party, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of cadres, and the larger genocidal destruction of so-called “counter-revolutionary” classes and ethnic minorities. The exterminationist violence inflicted within the Khmer Rouge organization itself is perplexing, for its shape and sequence cannot be explained by theories of mass violence in the current literatures on genocide or state terror. Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we show how key features of a theory of limitless, exterminationist, and ultimately self-destructive violence are contained within G.W.F. Hegel’s obscure analysis of the Terror of the French Revolution. Second, this Hegelian theory of exterminationist violence with a particular model of modern consciousness at its heart, can account for the transformation of typical forms of revolutionary violence into limitless self-annihilation. By drawing on Party documents, speeches, and radio broadcasts, we show that this theory can explain the shape and sequence of the internal purges of the Khmer Rouge.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. Earlier versions of the article were presented at the Prairie Political Science Association Conference in Banff, AB, Canada (2013), the International Network of Genocide Scholars conference in San Francisco, CA, USA (2012), and the Western Political Science Association conference in Portland, OR, USA (2012). We benefited greatly from the discussants’ and audiences’ simulating engagement with our ideas.

Notes

1. Ben Kiernan, “The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia: The Death Tolls in Cambodia, 1975–79, and East Timor, 1975–1980,” Critical Asian Studies 35.4 (2003): 585–97.

2. Not all genocide scholars agree with this characterization of Khmer Rouge atrocities, arguing that since most of the victims were ethnic Khmers, genocide by definition did not occur. These scholars hew closely to the United Nations Genocide Convention (1948) definition of the crime of genocide that limits victim groups to racial, ethnic, national, and religious groups. In our study we agree with genocide scholars who suggest that genocide can be committed against political or socio-economic groups, or indeed against any group defined as a target by the perpetrator.

3. David C. Rapoport, introduction to The Morality of Terrorism: Religious and Secular Justifications, ed. David C. Rapoport and Yonah Alexander, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), xv.

4. Mikkel Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and The State (London: Routledge, 2010), 112–13; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948) (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1973), 461–71.

5. Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy, and Scott Poynting, “Terrorism, the State, and the Study of Political Terror,” in Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice, ed. Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy, and Scott Poynting (London: Routledge, 2010), 3.

6. Rapoport, introduction to Part 2 of The Morality of Terrorism, 126.

7. A. James Gregor, “Fascism’s Philosophy of Violence and the Concept of Terror,” in The Morality of Terrorism, 159.

8. Rapoport, introduction to Part 2 of The Morality of Terrorism, 128; see also Arendt’s notion of victim groups as “dying” classes and races in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 466.

9. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 464–66.

10. Michael Phillip Carter, “The French Revolution: ‘Jacobin Terror’,” in The Morality of Terrorism, 139–40.

11. Carter, “The French Revolution: ‘Jacobin Terror’,” 145; Jackson, Murphy, and Poynting, “Terrorism, the State, and the Study of Political Terror,” 3–5; and Ruth Blakeley, “State Terrorism in the Social Sciences: Theories, Methods, and Concepts,” in Contemporary State Terrorism, 13–15.

12. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 466. Arendt argues that the strangulation of society through state terror is intended to “destroy the space between men” for the purpose of creating a society (“iron band of terror”) akin to “one man.”

13. Carter, “The French Revolution: ‘Jacobin Terror’,” in The Morality of Terrorism, 146.

14. Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror, 113.

15. The argument that people who are genuinely mentally ill cannot function as members of governments, militaries, or terrorist organizations is illustrated in the Khmer Rouge case. The one senior member who became clinically mentally ill, Pol Pot’s wife Khieu Ponnary, was gently removed from her post and sent into retirement.

16. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1977), ¶589; hereafter abbreviated as PS, with paragraph numbers cited in the text.

17. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); hereafter abbreviated as PR, with paragraph numbers cited in the text where available, otherwise by page number.

18. See also Hegel, PR, Preface pp. 20–21, §46, §185 and Addition, § 206, and § 262 Remark and Addition.

19. Note the difference between liberal democratic notions in which certain types of decisions are to be taken democratically, and the notion of community here in which its very existence is constituted by the act of collective willing.

20. See also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (1762), trans. and ed. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), bk. 2, chap. 1, 368.

21. The translation has been modified, here and elsewhere, so that Begriff reads “concept” instead of “notion.” Compare to the counterrevolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre, who instead notes that “Every man has certain duties to fulfil, and the extent of his duties is relative to his civil position and the extent of his means.” Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (1797), trans. and ed. Richard A. Lebrun (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 2, 10–11.

22. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 179–80.

23. Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 1, chap. 7, ¶8, 364.

24. Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 1, chap. 7, ¶8; chap. 8, ¶5.

25. E.g., Alexis de Tocqueville remarks that “until our day it had been thought that tyranny was odious in all its forms. Now it has been discovered that there are legitimate tyrannies and sacred injustices, provided that they are exercised in the name of the people.” Cited in Zeev Ivianski, “The Terrorist Revolution: Roots of Modern Terrorism,” in Inside Terrorist Organizations, ed. David Rapoport (London: Frank Cass, 1988), 129. Berlin sees in Rousseau’s “forced to be free” the “argument used by every dictator, inquisitor and bully who seeks some moral, or even aesthetic, justification for his conduct” (“Two Concepts of Liberty,” 197).

26. Hegel himself notes that when a new idea (of any sort) first appears, it “usually displays a fanatical hostility toward the entrenched systemization of the older principle.” G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1976), Preface to the First Edition, 27.

27. As Hegel says, modernity’s birth occurs “without any power being able to resist it” (PS, ¶585).

28. See also Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 464–65; and Carter, “The French Revolution,” 148. Thus the inability to distinguish between objective guilt and innocence lies neither with the vagueness of the law nor with the inadequacies of the judicial proceedings (e.g., Article V of the Law of Prairial [1794]; see Carter, “The French Revolution,” 142–43, 147–48), nor is the problem of one person’s “missionary zeal” in “purging society of vice” (e.g., Robespierre; see Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, “The Invention of Modern Terror,” in The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to al Qaeda, ed. Gérard Chaliand, Arnaud Blin, and Edward Schneider (New Jersey, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012), 105, 110.

29. As Robert Wokler has shown, these references to “cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water” index specific modes of public execution employed by the Revolutionary government. Robert Wokler, “Contextualizing Hegel’s Phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror,” Political Theory 28.1 (1998): 33–55.

30. “Text of Speech by Pol Pot, Secretary of the Cambodia Communist Party Central Committee and Prime Minister,” Phnom Penh Daily Reports-1977-09-28, Daily Reports, Asia and Pacific, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)-APA-77-192 on 1977-10-04, H1-H37.

31. “Speech by the KCP Central Committee and Prime Minister Pol Pot,” Phnom Penh Daily Service-1978-01-17, Daily Reports, Asian and Pacific, FBIS-APA-78-013 on 1978-01-19, H1-H12.

32. “Concerning Present and Future Tasks,” Phnom Penh Daily Service-1978-06-30, Daily Reports, Asia and Pacific, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)-APA-78-135 on 1978-07-13, H3-H6.

33. “Continue to Surge Forward in Planting the Late-Maturing Rice Crop,” Phnom Penh Daily Service-1977-08-07, Daily Reports, Asia and Pacific, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (hereafter FBIS)-APA-77-152 on 1977-08-08, H1-H5.

34. “Speech by Nuon Chea, Chairman of the Cambodian People’s Representative Assembly Standing Committee and Acting Prime Minister,” Phnom Penh Daily Service-1977-01-17, Daily Reports, Asia and Pacific, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)-APA-77-013 on 01-19, H1-H8.

35. “Searching for the Truth,” Statement of the Communist Party of Kampuchea to the Communist Worker’s Party of Denmark, July 1978, Nuon Chea, Deputy Secretary, CPK, Document No. 117, May 2001, Documentation Centre of Cambodia, at: http://http://www.d.dccam.org/Archives/Documents/DK_Policy/DK_Policy_Noun_Chea_Statement.htm.

36. “Sharpen the Consciousness of the Proletarian Class to be as Keen and Strong as Possible,” Revolutionary Flags, Special Issue, September-October 1976, 33–97, trans. Kem Sos and Timothy Carney, reprinted asAppendix B, in Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous With Death, ed. Karl D. Jackson (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 286.

37. “Sharpen the Consciousness,” in Jackson, Cambodia 1975–1978, 285.

38. “Summary of the Results of the 1976 Study Session,” trans. Ben Kiernan, in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future (Party Centre, n.d.), 176.

39. “Sharpen the Consciousness,” in Jackson, Cambodia 1975–1978, 274.

40. “Importance of Distinguishing Between Patriots, Enemy Stressed,” Phnom Penh Daily Service-1978-04-10, Daily Reports, Asia and Pacific, FBIS-APA-78-073 on 1978-04-14, H3-H6.

41. “Sharpen the Consciousness,” in Jackson, Cambodia 1975–1978, 272.

42. “Sharpen the Consciousness,” in Jackson, Cambodia 1975–1978, 285.

43. “Report of Activities of the Party Centre According to the General Political Tasks of 1976,” Party Centre, 20 December 1976, trans. David P. Chandler, in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future, 189.

44. Heng Samrin, interview by Ben Kiernan, 1991, cited in Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 33 n. 11.

45. San, interview with Ben Kiernan, 1991; quoted in Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime, 59.

46. Hou Yuon’s former colleague and fellow victim of the intraparty terror Hu Nim wrote in his forced confession under torture that Hou Yuon “did not respect the party and did not listen to anyone. He was very individualistic. ... Hou Yuon was always angry, he did not agree with the party on any problem.” “Planning the Past: the Forced Confessions of Hu Nim” (Tuol Sleng prison, May-June 1977), trans. Chanthou Boua, in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, ed. David Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Chanthou Boua (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 304.

47. This was a rather hypocritical position since the core of the senior Khmer Rouge leadership formed while they were graduate students studying in Paris.

48. “Decisions of the Central Committee on a Variety of Questions” (30 March 1976), trans. Ben Kiernan, in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future, 16.

49. “Decisions of the Central Committee on a Variety of Questions” (30 March 1976), trans. Ben Kiernan, in Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977, ed. David Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Chantou Boua (New Haven, CT: Yale University, Southeast Asia Studies, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1998), 16.

50. “Summary of the Results of the 1976 Study Session,” in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future, 169–70.

51. “Importance of Distinguishing Between Patriots, Enemy Stressed,” Phnom Penh Daily Service-1978-04-10, Daily Reports, Asia and Pacific, FBIS-APA-78-073 on 1978-04-14, H3-H6.

52. “Report on Activities,” in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future, 185.

53. “Report on Activities,” in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future, 208, 184.

54. “Abbreviated Lesson on the History of the Kampuchean Revolutionary Movement Led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea” (Party Centre, n.d.), trans. Ben Kiernan, in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future, 219.

55. “Planning the Past,” 240–41.

56. “Planning the Past,” 268.

57. Vann Nath, interview by Alexander Laban Hinton, in Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 157.

58. “Report on Activities,” in in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future, 185.

59. “Summary of Results,” in Chandler, Kiernan, and Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future, 168.

60. “Importance of Distinguishing Between Patriots, Enemy Stressed,” Phnom Penh Daily Service-1978-04-10, Daily Reports, Asia and Pacific, FBIS-APA-78-073 on 1978-04-14, H3-H6.

61. “The Cambodian Revolutionary Army is Determined to Further Heighten the Spirit of Revolutionary Vigilance so as to Defend and Build the Country by Leaps and Bounds,” Phnom Penh Daily Service-1977-08-13, Daily Reports, Asian and Pacific, FBIS-APA-77-157 on 1977-08-15.

62. Teeda Mam Butt, To Destroy You is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), 153–54.

63. “Searching for the Truth,” Statement of the Communist Party of Kampuchea to the Communist Worker’s Party of Denmark, July 1978, Nuon Chea, Deputy Secretary, CPK.