Mao's government's views
"Great Victory of the Cambodian People" (1975) *** .PDF version (11 megabytes, .pdf)
MIM analysis
Factually, the skulls in such a photo can not tell us how or when they died, which is what makes it a cheap propaganda trick to point to such a photo in the case of Cambodia where many thousands died in savage 1) killings of Vietnamese who invaded Kampuchea 2) killings of Kampucheans killed by Vietnamese and a few years earlier 3) bombings by u.$. bombers and other killings by u.$. ground troops. In fact, these skulls should by all rights be the skulls of u.$. invaders.
The Kampuchean people had had a long civil war--thanks to Uncle $am who backed a corrupt and inept puppet regime that made Kampuchea a candidate for poorest and most starving country in the world. The U.$. Cabinet official Robert McNamara in charge of the Pentagon has since then admitted that the united $tates killed multiple millions of people in Indochina. Considering Kampuchea's small population, weak economy and poor military position against the united $tates, traitors serving Uncle $am would definitely merit execution. If the Khmer Rouge did kill these people and these skulls are not Vietnamese, then the horror is the difficult period u.$. imperialism put the Kampuchean people through such that the regime killed traitors in the midst of a long war. Had the united $tates butted out long ago, things would have been a lot easier including for people inclined to serve the Yankee master. In the long wars of the 1960s and 1970s in Kampuchea, it is easy for comfortable Westerners to come in and point to one act in a war and conjure up who carried it out and for what reason. They point to a few thousand skulls to justify (after the fact) why they killed 600,000 Cambodians and millions of Vietnamese.
The photo of skulls from people killed by U.$. imperialism would be immensely larger, including the bombing of Cambodia by Richard Nixon. That's one reason the capitalist media has very low credibility on Kampuchea. It never reports the whole context or gives any indication of the injustices done to the Kampucheans by foreigners and why Kampucheans were used to seeing politics as such a life and death matter.
After u.$. teachers and journalists have explained the u.$. war and civil war it promoted and the u.$. public's role in that, then they have the right to talk about what the Khmer Rouge was doing and whether it was communist or not. Then, they should also discuss the fact that the u.$. government eventually switched sides and started supplying the Khmer Rouge with weapons. TEACHERS! If you did not know these facts, count yourself uneducated! Don't try to cram decades of wars in another country into the heads of your students with a photograph and some platitudes! It's a very twisted and sick thing to do to point to Kampuchea and in effect taunt the powerless for their susceptibility to u.$. wars! The vast majority of high school students in the united $tates get no Third World education whatsoever, so in general "education" on Kampuchea like these skull photos is just cheap propaganda.