What does a surviving Khmer Rouge look like?

The OP asked for what would have happened, had Pol Pot not messed with Vietnam.

The KR enjoyed some degree of external support BECAUSE OF their anti-Vietnamese stance. If they decide to go soft on the Vietnamese, they`ll lose this support base, which means that a foreign intervention (whether orchestrated by Western power and e.g. their Thai allies, or orchestrated by China) in the 1980s becomes likely if the insanities continue.

On the other hand, there`s no safe way of knowing. On one side, we have Mao´s Cultural Revolution, Stalin`s purges and the mass murders committed by Franco`s, Pinochet`s and Varela`s regimes etc., which all finally subsided after a certain period, giving way to authoritarian or totalitarian, unfree and oppressive systems, where internment camps and the execution of political prisoners still exists, but industrial-style killings have stopped. On the other hand, we have the Nazi holocaust which continued until the liberation. Difficult to say which path the KR would have taken. Their regime had little in common with any of the above, I know. Once again, that makes their case all the more unpredictable.

Isn`t the Continuation Fallacy one of the major discoveries Alternate History has given us: that, given one reason which IOTL led to the end of an abrupt change to a situation, is removed, we tend to overstate the continuities and assume that the situation just continues as it was prior to OTL´s change?
There´s even a cognitive psychological explanation for this:
We have schemata and episodic memory about the situation which existed prior to the change (just like we have such knowledge structures about the changes which occurred IOTL) - regardless of whether we`ve actually lived through the times or not, they`re almost always conveyed via media/histories/sources anyway -, but we can`t have schemata and episodic memory about something that didn`t exist. Given the task to imagine an alternate path of history, it is just so much simpler for our brain to dwell within the frames of the (comparatively detail-rich and concrete) schemata and episodic memories of what existed prior IOTL, then to construct an imagined scenario from mere theoretical and comparatively abstract considerations.

Perhaps this is why so many people assume the KR would just continue the 1975-79 phase into the 1980s?
 
It's likely that the Khmer Rouge keep up the killing unabated into the early 1980s. However once they purge the "counter-revolutionary" forces, they will have to shift towards a more "normal" situation (i.e. post Cultural Revolution China) or they will have to start to bring the purge into the party.

Alternatively, we could see the purges shift towards the "enemy within" with Pol Pot focusing on cleansing the ruling clique. However, as Pol Pot starts eliminating more opponents within the party we might see an event similar to the Thermionic Reaction in France, whereby regime elements turn against the leader and establish a "moderate"/technocratic dictatorship, if only to save their own skin.
 
Salvador wrote:

On the other hand, there`s no safe way of knowing. On one side, we have Mao´s Cultural Revolution, Stalin`s purges and the mass murders committed by Franco`s, Pinochet`s and Varela`s regimes etc., which all finally subsided after a certain period, giving way to authoritarian or totalitarian, unfree and oppressive systems, where internment camps and the execution of political prisoners still exists, but industrial-style killings have stopped. On the other hand, we have the Nazi holocaust which continued until the liberation. Difficult to say which path the KR would have taken. Their regime had little in common with any of the above, I know. Once again, that makes their case all the more unpredictable.

Heh. I'm remembering back to the western triumphalism of the Gorbachev years. There was a Pepsi ad shot in that '80s rock video style, about all the changes that were taking place in Russia, and pointing out semi-seriously that the recent introduction of Pepsi might have something to do with it. One of the supposed liberalizations portrayed was a young woman getting ready to go out on the town, and her father asking "Isn't that skirt a little short?" (Kind of ironic coming from the country that backed the Mujahideen against the Russians, but whatever).

Now I'm imagining a similar ad for an ATL Democratic Kampuchea glasnost.

ANNOUNCER: Recently, there have been a few changes in Kampuchea.

DAD TO DAUGHTER: Hey, are those glasses you're wearing?
 
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Now I'm imagining a similar ad for an ATL Democratic Kampuchea glasnost.

ANNOUNCER: Recently, there have been a few changes in Kampuchea.

DAD TO DAUGHTER: Hey, are those glasses you're wearing?
LOL.
I wasn`t alluding to a perestroika-style turn and reform of the KR.
I rather thought about the kind of "normality" or "stability" that many murderous regimes turned into.
To use the Soviet parallel: The perestroika didn`t come right after Stalin´s purges of 1936. First of all, there came Khrushchev, then the long decades of Breshnev. Expecting the KR to turn from savage mass murder directly to Gorbachev would be a little much. But they could have settled for something that resembled what their Laotian and Vietnamese neighbours were doing.
 
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