this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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They wanted to trick the German people into thinking that they would help them. Since the socialists actually cared about the people.
Excellent marketing and PR.
Same reason why Pol Pot was a MLM. Excellent optics that buy you support to then accomplish your real goals.
dont think I'd call Pol Pot an MLM
He was not. But he called himself one, that’s the point I was making.
We all know his positions were different, but his optics were focused around using Maoism to his personal advantage.
A Maoist, not a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. No one really called themselves an MLM til the 80s, when the PCP/Shining Path officially "synthesized" it.
True, but wouldn’t a Maoist by extension be a Marxist-Leninist? MLM certainly had its connotations because of groups like the shining path, but I meant that more in the way that he used legends from Marxist-Leninism, and Maoism to draw support.
I would say you are probably correct. A lot of it is semantics - I think prior to the eighties you're just more likely to run into phrases like "adherent to Mao Zedong Thought" rather than "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist".
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge's words on the matter
emphasis mine
Undeniably, I would say, they were Maoist, but at the time 'Maoism' and 'Marxism-Leninism' were considered pretty much one and the same by "anti-revisionists" or those communists who split with the USSR after Khruschev's coup d'etat. I'd say calling Pol Pot a 'Maoist' is a fair enough examination, it's just that to him "Maoism" and "Marxism-Leninism" were synonymous. I'd maybe go so far as to call him a proto-MLM.
source: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/cpml-pol-pot.htm