And anyone who thinks that Pol Pot had the best of intentions is basically willfully ignorant. I can recommend some wonderful books on Cambodia if you’re interested, Greg

Adrian, I doubt that there is a book on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge era that I have not read over the past four years, but please make your recommendations. If any of the books you recommend is one I have not read, then I will gladly do so.

All of the books I have read, and there have been a couple of dozen, have indicated that Pol Pot was sincerely motivated, according to his own lights and his indoctrination to create, from scratch, a pure, utopian communist society purged of corruption which would re-establish the glory of the Khmers in the days of Angkor. Perverse and misconceived though his views were and and monstrous though his actions were in implementing them, I have never read anywhere that he was anything other than utterly sincere in his intentions. If you can lead me to a book which convincingly argues otherwise I would be happy to revise my views of Pol Pot.

It’s worth reflecting that within Khmer society today there is a constituency that still supports the Khmer Rouge and that when his second in command Ta Mok (aka the Butcher) died late last year there were very genuine demonstraions of grief among those people at his passing.

Cambodia and its people are perhaps more complex than you understand from the outside.

Still, I await your recommendations. Since I have spent a significant part of the last four years trying to understand Khmer society and the Khmer psyche, especially vis a vis the Pol Pot era which still hangs heavily upon them, anything that adds to my understanding will be gratefully considered.

And anyone who thinks that Pol Pot had the best of intentions is basically willfully ignorant. I can recommend some wonderful books on Cambodia if you’re interested, Greg

Re your China comments I’m afraid that I’ll have to observe of you something I said in a comment I made in respect of an earlier Green commenter:

one of the things I find on threads about climate change is the amazing level of ignorance combined with self-righteous arrogance of many, not all, of the Green interlocutors.

A further thought on your comment:

Only a basic change in patterns of production and use can allow ecologically appropriate technologies to have their beneficial effect. But this means a basic change in need patterns and in the whole way life is lived.

I’m afraid that that grandiloquent line of reasoning would go down like a lead balloon in Cambodia. You see, they’ve been there, done that.

They call it the Pol Pot years and they don’t remember it with any joy. He had the best of intentions to create utopia, just like you.

You are a dead-cert angel of mercy, living on $1 a day, in a hovel with no running water or servants or hygenic food, and you dispense largesse by day and encourage the tillers of the soil to go that extra yard, for their own good, and teach them what they have never known, how to run their own country and look after and educate and govern their own people.

At night you read your fav neoliberal ranters by candlelight and meditate on your amazing personal fortitude, self-sacrifice, compassion and uniqueness I think you should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize gregm. Truly.

re China. I see you have the “Great Man”view of history. Always a worry. And more than a little old fashioned, hackneyed, juvenile and politically useless, I have to say.

The regime today is the same Stalinist centralized bureaucracy and is one and the same as that which fashioned the “Great Leap Forward”. Why is that do you think and how can it possibly be?

And do I really need to tell you about the price paid for the current great leap forward? The human and environmental price that is, which is where our discussion began and the differences continue to lie.

Indeed, why have unions, by your argument? Everything built by human beings we see around us and enjoy, built by human labour, housing, railways, bridges, electricity, social services, such as provision of public education and healthcare, comes from the labor of workers, produced by workers, using their collective skill, creativity and ingenuity for the benefit of society.

But you say, gregm, these people, us, the majority, should we have no meaninful rights, no voice, no veto power, and capital must be allowed to do what it must to realise, and appropriate, for the benefit and enrichment of a minority, the wealth we produce.

If, to use your example, I pay someone to build me a house does that mean that person should have a veto right over my use of that house? It was my money that paid for that house to be built. It is my private property. The person who built the house for me did so in exchange for my money so that I could benefit from the house, not for the benefit of society.

Why should it be different from any other form of endeavour. I paid for it; I own it.

But at a more practical level, the issue that Karen raised which I was discussing is that, like it or not, capital is mobile and if you try to limit its flow through “veto rights” it will just go somewhere else where it has less constraints. That’s the lesson we learned in the 1970s which led to the economic reforms of the 1980s.

Economics deals with realities and not with “rights” and if you try to ignore that and try to restrain capital someone somewhere else won’t and you will be left to stagnate economically. Just as if we stop exporting coal to our economic detriment someone else will quickly pick up the slack to their economic benefit. No less coal will be burned in the world as a result. It’s a tough world out there and no-one else in the world believes that they owe Australia or its unions or its workers any favours.

Perhaps you should visit Cambodia to see just what a tough world it is. Workers in Cambodia’s garment factories get paid $2 per day. Work in those factories, which is drudgery, are highly sought after, because the alternative is unemployment and destitution. Is it any wonder that faced with that sort of competition (then from Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan) Australia’s textile, clothing and footwear industry wilted away in the 1970s.

I mean “the safe handsâ€? you are referring to in China are the exact same Stalinist centralised bureaucratic regime responsible for both things: your “illiterateâ€? (revealing descriptor) and your sensible, positive economic policies today. Now, How Can This Be maestro?

As polluted skies points out you are pursuing an illusion. In the 1950s the Chinese communist party was divided into two camps, the Rightists (the camp of the economically literate, sensible and pragmatic) broadly grouped under Deng Xiaoping and the Leftists (the camp of the extreme ideologues and economic illiterate) grouped under Mao Zedong. The conflict between them played out, at the cost of tens of millions of Chinese lives, until Mao’s death in 1976 and Deng’s rise in 1978, which saw the final rout of the Leftists.

Mao was the author of the catastrophic Great Leap Forward and when that failed Deng got, for a short time, the ascendancy and introduced limited agricultural reforms to undo its damage. Mao got his revenge with the Cultural Revolution which at one stage saw Deng cleaning out pig-sties. With Mao’s death Deng regained ascendancy and saw off the Leftists (you may recall the trial of the Gang of Four) for once and for all.

Mao was therefore responsible for the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. Deng, who adamantly opposed, it was the architect of China’s economic liberalisation. But you would have understood that if you had read my posts properly in the first place.

The safe hands I referred to were an allusion to Peter Costello, although under Hawke and Keating were both excellent economic managers and reformers.

All clear now?

Cambodia today is a magnet for Western carpetbaggers.

Quite right, Greta and I avoid them like the plague. You really wouldn’t believe the number of Western NGO types living high on the hog as they dispense “technical guidance” to Khmers on “development” which has had exactly no visible benefit to the Khmers at all. The Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, not a lovely character but a very astute one, has complained that for all of the US$600 million foreign aid (about 15% of its GDP) Cambodia gets each year, most of it ends up in the pockets of those carpetbaggers without the purported skills transfer to Cambodians ever taking place and without visible benefit to Cambodians.

The days of the carpetbaggers may be coming to an end, however, as last year China gave Cambodia a US$600 million no-strings-attached foreign aid grant so Hun Seen may see that as an opportunity to see the back of the Western NGO do-gooders. Not that that will do any good to the ordinary Cambodians though, as its pretty evident that China intends to treat Cambodia as an economic colony providing raw materials to fuel China’s industry.

Meanwhile the Cambodian economy is powering along (last year it was said to have grown by 13.4%) on its textile exports and its tourist industry centred around the temples of Angkor.

You should visit it some time. Given your professed concern for the poor of the third world and your Green convictions I am sure that I could arrange you a three month home-stay in a Khmer village. I am sure that you would enjoy the early nights as the electric generator (if there is one) goes off at nine pm and you cover yourself with your mosquito netting and I am sure that you’ll take the problems of sanitation (well you know, things like a lack of potable water and basic sewerage) in your stride. After all 10 million Cambodians have to.

Perhaps you can while away the evenings with them explaining to them why they should resist the evils of electricity (there is talk of a grid from Thailand and Vietnam which will bring them cheap electricity) and that:

Growth might be the alpha and omega of national and international economies but limits to growth do exist and until this is recognised and acted on we will just keep chasing our tails in an orgy of production, accumulation, waste and ecological destruction.

I think that as they’d be, most of them, living on as little as a dollar a day, and would think that to double that to two dollars a day so that they can more readily indulge in an orgy of soap buying from time to time to keep themselves and their kids clean or in an orgy of food buying to better feed their kids, would be a signal good thing you may have some trouble in convincing them, but who knows? You just might.

Perhaps your argument that:

Only a basic change in patterns of production and use can allow ecologically appropriate technologies to have their beneficial effect. But this means a basic change in need patterns and in the whole way life is lived.

and that they are pioneers in this may strike a chord, but I doubt it. As you go out into the rice-fields each day to help them plant or reap the rice, as part of your home-stay, you may appreciate that their lives resolve around back-breakingly difficult labour and why they yearn for those new-fangled mechanical rice-planters and rice-harvesters across the border in Thailand, which are powered by evil fossil fuels, to relieve them of it.

But if not then, from their point of view, you are part of the problem and offer no solutions. Just another carpetbagger riding on their backs and there are plenty of them already.

Not deliberately Karen, which you would know, if your had read my previous posts referring to the Great Leap Forward. I am sure that Mao’s intentions with the Great Leap Forward, which Deng vigorously opposed for its economic madness, were benign though totally misconceived, for Mao was an economic illiterate, but its consequence was to cut the food supply of China by 25%.

Just proves how important it is to keep economic policy in safe hands.

Gosh, you’re not a closet fellow traveller are you gregm? I mean “the safe hands” you are referring to in China are the exact same Stalinist centralised bureaucratic regime responsible for both things: your “illiterate” (revealing descriptor) and your sensible, positive economic policies today. Now, How Can This Be maestro?