Cuatro años en el infierno: Consideraciones sobre la tragedia camboyana

According to legal positivism, the set of norms which between 1975 and 1979 governed Cambodians' life under Pol Pot's regime was a juridical system, was Law. This essay refutes such a claim arguing that the extreme irrationality of that assortment of commands could not be Law because, besides lacking any systematicity, it could not serve the common good ever so little, while, on the contrary, it lead to the obliteration of the Cambodian people. The paper goes into the ideological sources of that policy and maintains that their conglomeration of prescriptions hinged upon the principle of non-liberty, namely that whatever is not mandatory is forbidden. Upon assessing several characterizations of the khmer-krahom regime, the paper concludes that it is no longer rational to be a Marxist after the Cambodgian tragedy, which does not necessarily entail rejecting the principle of the community of goods.