The most detailed section of the speech deals with the national democratic revolution (1960-1975). Its twenty-nine pages trace the fortunes and strategies of the Communist party of Kampuchea without mentioning any intellectual roots or any assistance from foreign powers—independence—mastery, perhaps. Instead, it lists several allegedly independent decisions reached at the 1960 congress and stresses several of Pol Pot’s idées fixes. One of these was that landlords formed an essential component of “feudal” Cambodian rural life. The corollary was that the elimination of landlords would eliminate injustice. In fact, as we have seen, landlordism was rare in Cambodia. Another of Pol Pot’s ideas was that total collectivization would be welcomed by “more than 90 percent” of the Khmer people. A third was that “contradictions” abounded in Cambodian society (even when nearly everyone was a contented supporter of the party). Cambodia’s history could be perceived in terms of these contradictions and the class struggle leading up to the empowerment of the rural poor: “We all know the Angkor of past times. Angkor was built during the slave period. It was our slaves who built it under the yoke of the exploiting classes of that time, for the enjoyment of the king. If our people were capable of building Angkor they can do anything.”

Pol Pot concluded his speech by discussing the post-1975 period. He suggested that the revolution began to have shortcomings only after its success. He referred to an “infamous handful of reactionary elements” still at work in Cambodian society, but said they numbered only “2 percent” of the population (perhaps 140,000 men and women); the remaining 98 percent, a “vast, productive force,” had been liberated into the revolution. No mention is made of the party’s Four Year Plan, although Pol Pot added that since 1975 living standards had fallen for “only 5 percent” of the population and had risen to “the level of middle peasants” for the rest—testimony that flies in the face of hundreds of interviews with survivors. In his discussion of foreign policy, Pol Pot noted that “the political system of Democratic Kampuchea ... does not permit us to aggress.” By reading between the lines, we can see that Pol Pot was contrasting Cambodia with Vietnam.44

Soon after the speech was broadcast over Radio Phnom Penh, congratulations arrived from North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Romania. The Vietnamese national radio noted, heavy-handedly, that the Vietnamese had “always considered their special relationship with ... Kampuchea as their sacred cause” (emphasis added). With friends like that, Pol Pot may have mused, what would Cambodia do for enemies?