I don’t believe I made the point that contemporaries criticized their fascism outright, I made the point that they were fascist and rejected Marx. Calling them Communist isn’t accurate in any way, plus they were stopped by the Vietnamese Communists.
The history of geopolitics in Asia is very complicated and cannot be summed up in a short Lemmy comment, my point was to distance Pol Pot from Communism, because he wasn’t a Communist and denounced Communism, nor did he implement Socialism.
China, the USSR, and North Korea were/are Socialist, and should be judged as such, for better and for worse. Pol Pot and the gang were not, so judging them as though they were is just silly.