France Has A Lot To Answer For

 https://x.com/kristof_poland/status/2097553265994957173?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

" Pol Pot – What Happens When a True Believer Takes Power. He learned it in Paris. And he thought it was for real – not just the moral posturing of irresponsible French intellectuals in their Parisian cafés. That was the difference. And the difference was two million dead. Most communist leaders were opportunists. They used the ideology to seize power, and once they had it, the ideology bent to serve the power. Stalin was a gangster with a philosophy. Mao was a warlord with a manifesto. They killed millions – but in the service of control, not conviction. Pol Pot was a true believer. And that made him the most dangerous kind. In the early 1950s, as a scholarship student in Paris, he encountered the French Communist Party, the Marxist study circles, the cafés of the Latin Quarter where the ideas circulated among students who would never face the consequences of taking them seriously. The French intellectuals produced these ideas from comfortable apartments – moral posturing, civilizational performance, the gesture of opposition without the risk of implementation. They never intended it to be taken literally. Pol Pot took it literally. He returned to Cambodia with the complete theory in his head and the absolute conviction that it was correct. And when he took power in April 1975, he did not wait. Within days – within days – he ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh. Two million people expelled from the capital on foot, at gunpoint, regardless of age or condition. Hospitals emptied. Patients wheeled out on their beds into the street. Because the city was the problem – the center of capitalism, corruption, bourgeois contamination. An honest communist works in the fields. So everyone would work in the fields. Then he abolished money. Completely. Overnight. The most total implementation of Marxist economics ever attempted – no currency, no markets, no private property, no trade. The economy would be organized by the Angkar – the Organization, which knew what people needed and would provide it. This is what the theory says. He did what it said. Year Zero. The past abolished. The educated eliminated – they carried the old consciousness in their heads. The family destroyed – it created loyalties that competed with the collective. Glasses confiscated – wearing them suggested literacy, which suggested education, which suggested bourgeois contamination. The killing fields were not a deviation from the theory. They were its conclusion, applied by a man who had read the texts carefully and believed them completely. Between 1975 and 1979, approximately two million Cambodians died – a quarter of the entire population. Executed, starved, worked to death. The French intellectuals who produced the ideas that formed him were never held responsible. Sartre continued to write. The cafés continued to operate. In the universities of Paris and Berkeley and Columbia, professors explained that Cambodia was a deviation, an excess, a misapplication. It was not a deviation. It was the experiment. The answer to the question: what happens when you take the theory seriously and have the power to implement it without constraint? The intellectuals who taught him went home for dinner. He went home to Cambodia. That is the difference between posturing and belief. And it is why ideas have consequences – especially the ones that are never meant to be taken seriously."