Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare documents the rise and fall of both Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot was not a madman; he did not have Hitleresque personal qualities. Quite the contrary, he was social in a retiring way, not wanting the spot light, and seeking, throughout his “career,” to avoid scrutiny in part by frequently changing his name and hiding his location.As a student in Paris, he was not the most intelligent, or even the most ideologically driven among expat Cambodian students. But as he entered political life, he became a more fervent advocate of complete and total social engineering. Small believes that Pol Pot was just as influenced by the more bloody aspects of the French Revolution as by Marx, Lenin, or Mao.When he gained power in 1975, he emptied Cambodia’s cities, and started year zero, an attempt to create a new kind of person who was not a person at all; an entity that was devoted to the state. This was a pure totalitarian vision. Pol Pot only cared for this vision; human life meant nothing alongside of this ideal. More than a million Cambodians died in the process.Short make some interesting assertions. One is that America and China, new allies, supported the Khmer Rouge against the trio’s common enemy, Vietnam. In that case, our government is an accessory to genocide.Short also makes a great many negative generalizations about Cambodians (if he wrote such things about African-Americans, they would be deemed racist). It is disturbing to read that Cambodians are lazy, or prone to extreme violence despite their outward smiles and politeness. He also believes that the kind of Buddhism practiced in Cambodia, with its world denying theology, was one of the elements that molded the Khmer Rouge nihilistic joyride.Really? Really??

Before my trip to Cambodia in 2012, I did some research in the country and its history. Although the Khmer Empire has a vast and quite long history, the Khmer Rouge often dominates our image of the Kingdom of Wonder. That period of 3 years and 8 months annihilated a nation, erased all of its industries and traditional culture as well as killed a quarter of the population, so the disproportionate focus in the KR is understandable.Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare is an exhaustive biography of the mastermind of the Khmer Rouge. At 560 pages long, it covers the life of Saloth Sar (his original Khmer birth name) from his fairly privileged childhood to his education (academic and political) to his taking of power and his life post-Khmer Rouge.Saloth Sar was born into a Chinese-Khmer family that was relatively prosperous compared to others around him. He had the opportunity to attend the French schools in Phenom Penh, a rare opportunity not available to the majority of his countrymen. It seems that he was not a stellar student but he still got accepted to study in Paris. Assuming family connections took care of this.In Paris, he spent more time studying Marxist theory and meeting Vietnamese Marxists. Similar to Stalin and Lenin, he got much of his political education abroad. One thing that struck me was that while the Khmer were inspired by the revolutionary efforts of the Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh in particular, the centuries-old ethnic tensions between the two group frequently got in the way of their “glorious struggle”. The Vietnamese often saw the Khmer as lazy and unintelligent while the Khmer frequently perceived the Vietnamese as treacherous and manipulative. Not a good start to any relationship, to be sure.I will assume at this point that many of you are already aware of the Khmer Rouge and its atrocities. For this review, I chose to focus on the early life of a man who was known to be quite easy going and a rather unmotivated student and later became the leader of one of the most genocidal regimes in the 20th century.Grim reading to be sure, but this biography helped me to see where Cambodia came from and served to explain much of the corruption and poor infrastructure of the nation today.

For me, it was always easier to find information about what happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot's regime than understanding why it happened that way. Why were the Cambodians massacred? At first it seemed to me lunacy was the only explanation, but with this book I finally understood the motivations behind such murderous regime.Basically, the Khmer Rouge was not communist at all. Their "intellectuals" recognized they read Marx and didn't understand it. They were actually lead by a belief that modernity was the greatest evil and it should be destroyed. This derived from the fact that the Khmer Empire, which gave origin to modern Cambodia, was solely based on agriculture. They were also influenced by a branch of Buddhism that values self sacrifice and hardship.It's a bit of a heavy reading because of how detailed it is, and also because a western can sometimes get a bit confused with so many Cambodian names, but, if, like me, you're curious about why the Khmer Rouge regime was such a massacre, it will please you a lot!

Arrivée en temps et en parfait état.

Wer dieses Buch zur Hand nimmt, sollte einiges an Geduld mitbringen. Zwar verzichtet der Autor auf die Beschreibung der ganz frühen Jahre Pol Pots, tatsächlich beginnt die politische Formung seines Protagonisten aber in den vierziger Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts. Die nächsten dreissig Jahre bis zur Machtübernahme in Kambodscha muss der Leser mitgehen. Das ist nun einmal so, weil man ohne die Vorgeschichte die Vorgänge im Kambodscha der siebziger Jahre nicht verstehen kann, ist aber zuweilen recht anstrengend. Trotzdem: Dies ist sicher eines der besten Bücher zu der Person Pol Pot und der jüngeren Geschichte Kambodschas und absolut empfehlenswert wenn man Geduld und fortgeschrittene Kenntnisse der englischen Sprache mitbringt.

Narrated at the pace of a bulldozer and sparing no sweet words for anyone, this book documents the atrocities and the surrealism of 20-th century Cambodia and its inability to transform itself into a normal country. Hard to believe at times, yet completely (and sadly) true