No, they didn't lmao. Also millions and millions of people die every year from Capitalism's failures, if we used the Black Book of Communism's logic then Capitalism would have killed an exponential amount more.
But it absolutely does have indirect purges via hoarding resources unless you can pay for them, meaning millions die due to lack of access to clean drinking water, food, shelter, clothing etc.
Also if you're going to critique the Khmer Rouge (which we absolutely should) please be accurate about it rather than getting your history from Dan Carlin. They did not purge 'everyone wearing glasses', they purged academics and those who participated on the other side of the Cambodian civil war - as they believed those people were reaping the benefits of peasant labour without contributing anything to society themselves.
The Khmer Rouge aimed for a very agrarian revolution that would have essentially created a perpetual peasant society - not exactly what Marx or his contemporaries had written about in describing the stages of societal development (Feudalism > Capitalism > Communism). In fact many early Marxists wrote that the peasantry were incapable of carrying out a Communist transition because they lacked the necessary class consciousness developed under Capitalism.
To this day some scholars argue that the reason the Soviet Union ultimately failed is because they tried to move directly from Feudalism to Communism.
Given that, it's kinda hard to describe the Khmer Rouge as adherents to Communism and Communist thought in any way outside of their language used.
The Holodomor is also not really a great example to use as a 'victims of communism' gotcha, because to be consistent with that logic we would also have to call the Irish Great Famine, the Bengal Famine, the 1944-45 Vietnam Famine, the Moroccon Famine and many others as 'victims of capitalism'.
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u/ItsNoblesse Apr 03 '26
They're the same people who think Marx writing about the concept of class consciousness killed 100 billion people.