Chapter 4: Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba — Communism’s Other Faces
4.1 Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge (1975–1979)
The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot (born Saloth Sar), seized power in Cambodia in April 1975 and immediately began one of history’s most radical collectivist experiments. Within days of taking the capital Phnom Penh, they forcibly evacuated all cities — forcing millions of people, including hospital patients, into the countryside at gunpoint. The goal was ‘Year Zero’: the complete destruction of existing society and the creation of an agrarian collective utopia.
Money was abolished. Schools, hospitals, and temples were closed or destroyed. Wearing glasses was punishable by death — it marked the wearer as an intellectual. The Khmer Rouge eliminated an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people in four years — approximately 25% of Cambodia’s entire population. The killing fields — mass graves scattered across the Cambodian countryside — were discovered after Vietnam’s military intervention ended the regime in 1979.
| Category Targeted | Fate |
| Intellectuals and professionals | Executed |
| Buddhist monks | Executed or forced into labor |
| Vietnamese and Chinese minorities | Systematically massacred |
| Anyone wearing glasses | Often executed |
| Former government officials | Executed |
| ‘Enemies’ as defined by party | Tortured and killed at Tuol Sleng (S-21) |
4.2 North Korea: The Hermit Kingdom’s Ongoing Atrocity
North Korea, founded by Kim Il-sung in 1948 and continued under Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, represents communism’s most complete surviving totalitarian state. Juche — a form of ultra-nationalist self-reliance doctrine — replaced Marxism-Leninism as official ideology while preserving total party control. The country has been in a state of artificial famine-level food insecurity since the 1990s, when the collapse of Soviet subsidies eliminated the artificial life support that kept the command economy functioning.
| NORTH KOREA FAMINE 1994–1998 | Estimated 240,000 to 3.5 million deaths — in a country of approximately 22 million people |
The political prison camp system (kwanliso) holds an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 prisoners at any given time. Entire families are imprisoned for the perceived crimes of one relative — a practice called ‘guilt by association’ that extends to three generations. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry (2014) concluded that North Korea’s crimes against humanity include ‘extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence.’
4.3 Cuba: Castro’s Tropical Socialism
Fidel Castro’s Cuba offers a particularly well-documented case study in socialist economic destruction. When Castro seized power in 1959, Cuba had the second-highest GDP per capita in Latin America and one of the hemisphere’s highest literacy rates. Sixty-plus years of communist governance have produced chronic shortages of food, medicine, and basic goods; rampant political repression; and a population so desperate to escape that hundreds of thousands have risked death at sea on makeshift rafts.
Castro’s government executed an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 political prisoners in the years following the revolution. The political prison system held tens of thousands of dissidents. Cuba’s state-controlled media and one-party system have survived six decades only through a combination of fear, controlled information, and a welfare system that trades political submission for basic subsistence.
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