Meanwhile, back in Cambodia, a more grassroots, rural-based Khmer Communist movement had emerged within the domestic nationalist struggle for independence from French colonialism. Its founding leaders were Khmer Buddhist monks, and the rank and file, mostly peasants, received training from Vietnamese revolutionaries committed to a worldwide, Communist-led anti-colonial struggle headed by the USSR. French intelligence reported in 1952 that Cambodian rebel activity even included "several autarchic agricultural enterprises, like kolkhozes." Their model was Soviet, not the undeveloped Vichy-era autarchy of Khieu Samphan's dissertation.
By contrast, the former Vichy ideology of hierarchy and soil, or "work, family and homeland," continued to greatly influence the Khmer elite it had fostered, which included the young Sar and Samphan, who returned from Paris in 1953 and 1959, respectively. For instance, the "king's representative," Nhek Tioulong, proclaimed in 1951 that all Cambodians must "Work" according to their station in life: "Officials, be loyal and faithful servants of the State and of the People. Farmers, be good farmers; artisans, try to be good artisans."
Most important, that traditional view of the utility and virtue of farmers and rural life proved surprisingly receptive to the Maoism that was about to engulf first China and then Cambodia, after its independence from France in 1954. A decade later, for example, in July-August 1965, a delegation of the kingdom's Royal Khmer Socialist Youth visited China just prior to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. The Cambodians cabled a message home from Beijing, praising Mao's attempt to "create a type of new man in China" and to "suppress the superiority of intellectual labour over manual labour." Prince Sihanouk, who had abdicated his throne in 1955 to play a direct and dominant political role, immediately responded that Cambodia should take up "this example." He added, significantly: "We have until now followed too slavishly the paths traced by Western civilization, and that has caused us certain social problems, that of unemployed intellectuals, that of pure intellectuals who are much less competent citizens than the new men who are being formed in China." The prince urged "thoroughgoing reform." Ten days later, he announced the establishment of a Royal Khmer Socialist Youth cooperative, which he called a "mixed (Khmer-Chinese) enterprise for agriculture and pastoral activity."
Sihanouk remained unaware that three years earlier, Saloth Sar had quietly taken over Cambodia's Communist underground, then known as the Workers' Party of Kampuchea, after the mysterious death in 1962 of its founder, the former monk Tou Samouth. Sar was even now secretly visiting Mao's China and was still there in September 1965 when Sihanouk conducted a state visit. On his clandestine return to rural Cambodia in 1966, Saloth Sar discarded his party's fraternal ties to the Workers' Party of Vietnam by giving it a new name, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), that laid claim to a higher ideological status, equivalent to that of the Chinese Communist Party. In the same year, Sar established the CPK journal Tung krahom (Red Flag), which he named after the Chinese Communist magazine started by Peng Pai in 1927 and relaunched during the Great Leap Forward in 1958.
As much as Saloth Sar, Khieu Samphan, and their younger generation of mostly elite, French-trained Communists scorned the previously Vichy-sponsored Khmer monarchy and mandarinate, they also rejected the pro-Vietnamese Communism of their own veteran revolutionary predecessors. And just as fiercely as they opposed the traditional Khmer hierarchy, they maintained an ideological fervor for rural life that Maoist egalitarianism and the Cultural Revolution only reinforced. The new, largely French-educated elite who now led the CPK even adopted an anti-intellectual, antiurban policy. In May 1968, the Sihanouk regime denounced rebel "Khmers Rouges" in the jungles of northeast Cambodia, where Saloth Sar had secretly taken over the northeast zone CPK branch, for "inciting people to boycott schools and hospitals and leave the towns." At a mass meeting that Khieu Samphan organized in February 1970, rebels said of Sihanouk, "Let him break the soil like us for once," and they insisted that "no distinctions" be made "between Khmers."
This new egalitarianism, then, was both racial and rural. Khieu Samphan had left Phnom Penh three years earlier to join the CPK insurgency, on the advice of Saloth Sar. In his memoirs, Samphan recalled his first meeting with the CPK guerrilla commander, Mok, in the Cambodian jungle in 1967. He described the experience in terms that suggest he was mesmerized by a rural romance. In a peasant hut that evening, Samphan wrote, he found Mok dressed "like all the peasants" in black shorts and unbuttoned short-sleeved shirt. "The diffuse glow of the lamp nevertheless revealed to us the deep and piercing eyes which stood out on his bearded face.... He asked affably about our trip and recommended that we never leave the house." The daring Mok himself "moved about freely,... sometimes bare-chested, revealing his hairy chest and arms.... In fact, in the face of his activity, I became well aware of my limits. And more deeply, I felt pride to see this man I considered a peasant become one of the important leaders of a national resistance movement."
The new CPK's radical rural departure from its more orthodox proletarian Communist roots is evident in documents it published in 1971, as it began to expand throughout the countryside after the Vietnam War engulfed Cambodia, following General Lon Nol's overthrow of Sihanouk's neutral regime the previous year. The party divided Khmer society into five vanna (classes): feudal, capitalist, petty bourgeois, peasant, and worker. In theory the working class was "the leader" of the party's "worker-peasant alliance," but in practice the CPK assigned workers no political role. As these documents stated, "In the countryside it is fixed to make the three lower layers of peasants the base [of the revolution]. In the towns it is fixed to make the whole petty bourgeoisie the base." Workers, whom the CPK divided into the "pure" and the suspect "partly pure" working class, were not the party's practical constituency. After the CPK won its 1975 victory and forcibly emptied Cambodia's cities, another party document explicitly acknowledged this: "Concretely, we did not rely on the forces of the workers. The workers were the overt vanguard, but in concrete fact they did not become the vanguard. In concrete fact there were only the peasants."
Despite its rejection of traditional authority, the CPK's victorious new regime, which took the name Democratic Kampuchea (DK), became ever more hierarchical and totalitarian. The party's claim to be leading a "worker-peasant" revolution meant merely that Cambodians were to become an unpaid rural plantation workforce, tending vast fields of irrigated rice land. In September 1975, a few months after the CPK deported the urban population into the countryside, party documents opined somewhat confusingly that because the deportees, "our new peasants," had no means of production, "so they are workers." As for the longtime rural inhabitants, "We can't push forward modern agriculture by remaining peasants." Here and elsewhere, the CPK made occasional, often symbolic gestures to Stalinist industrialization or Maoist orthodoxy, but its dominant vision remained overwhelmingly rural, and its propaganda was peasant-oriented. As DK head of state Khieu Samphan claimed in 1977: "In many places, water is flowing freely, and with water the scenery is fresh, the plants are fresh, life is fresh and people are smiling. ... The poor and lower middle peasants are content. So are the middle peasants." A few months later, Pol Pot added: "People from the former poor and lower middle peasant classes are overwhelmingly content ... because now they can eat all year round and become middle peasants." That seemed to be the party's vision of the future, not the emancipation of the working class. A CРК journal went far beyond even Maoism when it announced that the countryside itself, not the urban proletariat, composed the vanguard of the revolution: "We have evacuated the people from the cities which is our class struggle." These unorthodox Communists wrote laconically of the proletariat: "There is a worker class which has some kind of stand. We have not focused on it yet." Time had transcended the historical proletariat: "We do not use old workers. ... We do not want to tangle ourselves with old things. In crushing their enemies, Khmer Rouge cadres regularly resorted to agricultural metaphors such as "pull up the grass, dig up the roots" and proclaimed that the bodies of city people and other victims would be used for "fertiliser." In the Cambodian countryside from 1975 to 1979, the CPK's extreme revolution caused the deaths of approximately 1.7 million people from overwork, diseases, starvation and, in probably 500,000 cases, outright murder of political and ethnic "enemies."
The CPK targeted a range of political and "class" groups. Especially at first, these were the remnants of the defeated Lon Nol regime (1970-75), long accused of opposition to peasant interests, but the victims increasingly included any suspected opponents or rivals at all, including large sections of the CPK's own rank and file and many peasants associated with them. Several Khmer Rouge songs struck bitter notes of political extermination. "The Red Flag," for instance, which began "Glittering red blood blankets the earth-blood given up to liberate the people," concluded: "Don't spare a single reactionary imperialist: drive them from Kampuchea." Even a song entitled "The Beauty of Kampuchea," celebrating the "Khmer children" serving in the army, ended with: "[T]hey chase the Lon Nol bandits, with swords and knives hacking at them, killing them, until the Lon Nol bandits are destroyed." Another song, "Rainfall in Pisakh," concluded: "Intertwined as one, our anger shoots out at the imperialists - the Americans, and their reactionary lackeys, killing them until they disappear." Upgrading a traditional term for routing enemies, kchat kchay (scattering), DK adopted a more final goal, "scatter them to the last" (kchat kchay os roling).
Like many agrarianists in other countries, or even Prince Sihanouk, who nodded in the same direction with less ideological obsession, the CPK's cult of the peasant might have been relatively harmless but for its additional racialist and historical preoccupations. These lay behind Saloth Sar's early adoption - in Paris in 1952 - of the pseudonym "Original Khmer." They derived not only from the dominant Vichy ideology of his youth but also from the worldview of the traditional Khmer elite, among whom he spent his adolescence in the royal palace compound.