Thoughts on the Death of Mass Murderer Ieng Sary:Cambodian Political Culture and North Korea by Nate Thayer

I'm not sure I agree with everything in this article, but as always Nate Thayer is provocative and gives food for thought.  I'm not sure the Khmer Rouge trials should be abandoned altogether, but Nate Thayer does do a good job of pointing out the hypocrisy of them.

And also an interesting take on the Khmer Rouge phenomenon itself.  From his article:
The dirty little secret is that Khmer Rouge weren’t communists. They were Cambodian. In the heart of  far to many Cambodian’s, there lurks a Khmer Rouge in varying degrees of dormancy. And while the Khmer Rouge philosophy was on the extreme end of mainstream Cambodian political culture, it fit then and fits now quite comfortably into today’s Cambodian political culture, which  is being rehabilitated by the UN court to give it legitimacy and released back to run the Cambodian society.

Is it just me, or does this type of phrasing lend itself to racist interpretations?
But I do agree to some extent with his next point:
Of the 18 members of the central committee of the communist party that took power in 1975, only four spoke a foreign language. Since neither Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, or Engels were ever translated into the Khmer language, it is hard to argue that the unspeakable failure and suffering that occurred under the Khmer Rouge was a result of communist—or, for that matter, any outside–ideology. 

Conservatives are fond of portraying Communism as a sort of bogey man, in which otherwise rational people will turn into psychotic mass murderers as soon as they become converted to a doctrine of collectivism.  But although these atrocities were committed in the name of communism, might there not have been other historical factors at play which caused the bloodshed to get out of control?