Was Pol Pot secretly an anarchist?

I watched a documentary this morning on Pol Pot and what struck me were the similarities between his thought and praxis and Bakuin(ism) (I acknowledge that a lot of contemporary anarchism owes more to council-communism and syndicalism than it does to Bakuin) in that the whole way that the core of the "organization" remained secret goes almost completely hand in hand with Bakuin's stuff about "Invisible dictatorship", and also would seem to flow out of what he wrote in "catechism of a revolutionist". Then there is seeing the peasants and the lumpens as more "pure" revolutionary material because of their being more "natural" than urban workers. Then there is the cultural nihilism and wanting to sweep everything away that belongs to the past culture as opposed to integrate from it what is truly human. This of course was also the strategy of Blanqui, who hated the working class and believed socialism could only be implemented by a secret intellectual elite via a coup.

I also saw a lot of parallels between Brother Number One and Nestor Makhno for very much the same reason. Like Makhnovtchina the Khmer Rouge wasn't really a "state" in a traditional sense. Makhno also organized the peasants (not the industrial proletariat) into a revolt that was very free-form, decentralized, and not tied down to a single set of moral principles, much like the Angkor. Makhnovtchina also resulted in mass clusterfuck.

So in conclusion it seems to me that rather than an example of the "failure" of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the Khmer Rouge should be used as an example of the failures of anarchism, blanquism and ultra-leftism.

Other urls found in this thread:

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-the-paris-commune-and-the-idea-of-the-state
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-revolutionary-catechism
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sergey-nechayev-the-revolutionary-catechism
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-letters-to-a-frenchman-on-the-present-crisis
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-statism-and-anarchy#toc2
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Pol Pot was also a devout Buddhist in his youth and the KR's destructive tendencies seemed to be reminiscent of Buddhism's idea of non-attachment (same thing Zizek criticizes over and over).

Then why did Pol Pot ban Buddhism?

They wanted to go after the monks' orders, but their ideology was heavily Buddhist-influenced.

I would say this is more of a failure of idealism. How could the Khmer Rouge lead a proletarian revolution with only a peasantry as the revolutionary subject?
Without the material prerequisite for a communistic revolution it seems obvious that what would follow would be a royal fuck up. The idea of a "year one" revolution is undialectical as fucks.
also
I hope your leaving us Councilists out of this hot take

Catechism of a Revolutionary was written by Nechayev, not Bakunin. And Bakunin wasn't exactly a fan of the manifesto.

There are none. Nestor Makhno didn't operate a secret organization implementing totalitarianism, he was a guerilla leader among an army that operated along democratic principles.

Where did you find these lies about Bakunin?

The invisible dictatorship is not a secret dictatorship. Here he talks about the socialists of the Paris Commune:
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-the-paris-commune-and-the-idea-of-the-state

I'm not sure how anything written in his Revolutionary Catechism applies to Pol Pot, are you sure you are not confusing it with Nechayev's? Nechayev's work is about organizing revolutionaries, while Bakunin's is about organizing society, just compare them:
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-revolutionary-catechism
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/sergey-nechayev-the-revolutionary-catechism

Finally, he did not think the lumpen or the peasants were more "pure" or "closer to nature." He did not think that the peasants were revolutionary at all, but he thought, at least in France in 1870, that the workers could use them as allies:
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-letters-to-a-frenchman-on-the-present-crisis
For the so-called "lumpen," Bakunin thought that the poorer workers in Italy were in a better position to kickstart the revolution than their better-off counterparts in Germany and Switzerland, because they had nothing to loose and would even burn down "their own" (mostly rented) neighbours:
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-statism-and-anarchy#toc2

Bakunin was still vanguardist and elitist though.

To be fair, most leftists know fuckall about "dialectics".