WI: The Pol Pot regime lives on

Am I the only one who doubts there would be an overthrow? Didn't Pol Pot carefully cull his ranks every few years and with almost everyone in a camp without food, who makes a good revolutionary?

That really depends on how much China is willing to support them. For reference, China only props up North Korea because it's a valuable asset as a buffer state between the US-controlled South Korea and China, and in recent years, relations between North Korea and China have been fraying. Also, I should point out, relations between North Korea and China depend heavily on the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party.

Aside from being a alternative to Vietnam, why would China continue to support the Kampuchea?
 
To what extent were the Khmer Rouge involved with the opium trade? If the Pot regime continues to trash the country, i could see it turning into a lawless failed state more or less similar to what Somalia is or is seen as, with rampant presence of drug trading, child prostitution (i wouldn't put that past the KR), and all other sorts of contraband.
 
Well, of course, that is the real difference: though in some places, they actually 'rule', for a given value of the word, they are not generally trying to affirm themselves to the outside world as the exclusive and legitimate rulers of the place.
In a sense, Daesh was the same, as in they weren't claiming any specific area, and also they notionally did not care at all about what others thought of their legitimacy or lack thereof (they were seeking some form of "effective" rule, as opposed to recognition of it).
In another sense, obviously they were not the same in the sense that their aim was indeed to construct a political structure (which the Mafia is not generally interested in running, since it is less profitable than its other endeavours).

On the contrary, Daesh claimed to be running not only Syria and Iraq but the entire Islamic World as a Caliphate. Now they didn't care if the rest of the world saw them as legitimate. The rest of the world consisted of heretics and infidels anyway as far as they were concerned.

The way to determine if a given group is "the government" is to find out if they can enforce the rules on their members without any possible "higher authority" in their territory that can stop them from doing so. In the US you can defy the Mafia and appeal to the Federal Government for protection. You will have to be in the Witness Protection Program for the rest of your life but you can do it as there is a higher authority.

In the "Calphiate" there was no one who could be considered a higher authority than Daesh in the areas they controlled.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
I agree, the sad fact a lot of psychotic dictatorships lasted a long time. Stalin and Mao ruled their respective countries their entire lives and neither was that much better than Pol Pot.
Pretty much anyone is much better than Pol Pot. Even ISIS and North Korea.
 
It is not clear to me how much longer the Khmer Rouge could stay in power, if only because the Pol Pot regime was destroying the underpinnings of the Cambodian state. How can the Khmer Rouge run a country—how well?—if the educated and the urbanites are all dead? I wonder if the border clashes which led to the Vietnamese invasion might have been an example of just this sort of phenomenon.
 
It is not clear to me how much longer the Khmer Rouge could stay in power, if only because the Pol Pot regime was destroying the underpinnings of the Cambodian state. How can the Khmer Rouge run a country—how well?—if the educated and the urbanites are all dead? I wonder if the border clashes which led to the Vietnamese invasion might have been an example of just this sort of phenomenon.

Nobody thinks it could run it well, it proved totally incapable of doing so OTL. What we think is that it could potentially run it indefinitely.
 
It seems to me that eventually the population drops so low that Thailand and Vietnam say "well, what the hell" and effectively divide Cambodia between them.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics.
 
Pretty much anyone is much better than Pol Pot. Even ISIS and North Korea.

Agreed. Anyone short of Himmler who overthrows Pol Pot deserves to be considered liberators, relative to the Khmer Rouge. And, to be honest, I'm not even sure about Himmler.
 
Am I the only one who doubts there would be an overthrow? Didn't Pol Pot carefully cull his ranks every few years and with almost everyone in a camp without food, who makes a good revolutionary?

He did, and the system was siloed with each district having an entirely separate administration and military and reporting directly to the center. He even initiated several mini civil wars where he would have the districts on either side invade a district and purge all the soldier and cadre. None of this was efficient but it served as a check on power together with there being essentially no civil society. He ruled for three years with his insanity with essentially no internal threats.

I would think at some point society will stop functioning... or maybe they reach an equilibrium of some sort they did control a portion of Cambodia for two decades after they were removed from power.
 
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