>>64106839
Was reading a part of a book about this. The Khmer Rouge was a deeply weird group of people. The leadership was a group of urban radicals (to the extent that Cambodia even had much in the way of towns and cities in the 60s) who had a schizo blend of ideas from Marxism and Maoism to anarchism to Cambodian nationalism and reconquering the Kampuchea Krom (by Krom... that's the Mekong Delta!). The strongest anti-Vietnamese sentiment before they came to power actually existed among the urban population (that is, their own social mileau), not the peasantry, and then when the Pol Pot regime came to power, they did the strange thing of marching the entire urban population (really) into the countryside to till the rice paddies and dig canals.
This was a huge disaster and a ton of people were killed or worked to death or murdered by peasants who hacked them to death with machetes because of rural peasant chimpout class hatred. A bunch of people starved to death. And while this was going on, there were bloody purges within the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot's faction emerged victorious, and they were the most strongly anti-Vietnamese faction as well, and considered Vietnam their principal enemy, and a lot of people who were purged were accused of being in cahoots with Vietnam. So this destroyed everybody but these intense anti-Vietnamese chauvinists. And so the theory here is that Pol Pot started shit with Vietnam because of some pre-existing beliefs about Vietnam, and that he must have also hoped to unite the population including the ex-urbanites who were driven out into the countryside.
At any rate, those people (or the survivors anyways) were too hostile to fight for the Khmer Rouge, and the peasantry saw their own quality of life decline below already very poor standards, and were mostly bummed out and apathetic, and so the Vietnamese army invaded and smashed them.
