The shortest section of the document—covering three pages in Khmer—dealt with “culture, literacy, art, technology, science, mass education, and propaganda and information.” The low priorities given to culture, literacy, and art reflected the rejection of traditional culture by the former schoolteachers who wrote the plan as well as their slavish imitation of Chinese models. Turning their backs on “2,000 years of history” also meant turning their backs on the many-faceted Cambodian culture that had developed over these millennia for the pleasure (Communists would say the “mystification”) of privileged and ordinary people alike. High culture that was accessible to peasants included complex dances, instrumental and vocal music, highly developed decorative skills (evident in woven textiles, bronze work, wood carving, and Buddhist temple paintings), and a long tradition of oral and written poetry—to say nothing of the “feudal” grandeur of Angkor. It also included sophisticated works of Buddhist teaching and exegesis and a wide-ranging collection of ethically oriented poems, known as chbab.

The leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, bewitched by the defeat of the Americans and by slogans like “Three tons per hectare” may have thought there would be little time and energy to devote to these peripheral aspects of existence until the problems of the economy had been solved. This is a generous reading. More likely, they were contemptuous or fearful of the private pleasures that culture, in a wide sense, had always offered to ordinary Khmer.

To be sure, Cambodia’s poor peasants had survived without science, technology, literacy, mass education, and propaganda and information for hundreds of years. They had drawn pleasure, comfort, and cohesion, as the Communists did not, from their daily lives, building these up from such ingredients as families, religion and rituals, friendships, informal traveling (dao lenh), eating and gossiping together, and sharing in often backbreaking work. They would probably not have used the word vapp ‘thoa (“culture”) to describe what they were doing, but they would have enjoyed culture “from above” when they attended Buddhist ceremonies or poetry recitations or welcomed royalty to their villages.

Cambodia’s rural poor may have been ripe for revolution, but many were stubborn and unwilling to accept the sacrifices (or unable to perceive the benefits) involved in overturning their prerevolutionary lives. The exceptions were landless peasants, teenagers, and those who had accepted Marxist-Leninist teaching. In the leaders’ view, the peasants’ “empty hands” gave them a head start toward utopia. The peasants themselves would have preferred to have more materials to work with, and to keep most of their cultural baggage—even or perhaps especially when “culture” came to them from other, supposedly “higher,” levels of society. In this context, there is something ominous, even repulsive, about outsiders to poverty and rural life fashioning for rural people a twentieth-century state from nothing, while forbidding them the benefits that might have accrued from education, science, and technology and cutting them off from the pleasures they derived from family life.15