Antimulticulture
2005-08-08 11:55:34 UTC
Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19042
By John Perazzo
August 8, 2005
Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the
Communist Party that ruled Cambodia from
1976-1979. "Khmer Rouge" (or Khmer Reds) was the
French rendering of the organizations official
name: the "Communist Party of Cambodia," later the
"Party of Democratic Kampuchea" and also the
"Communist Party of Kampuchea," or CPK. (Kampuchea
is the local name for Cambodia.)
Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in what is now the
province of Kompong Thong, Cambodia in 1925. He
came from a prosperous farming family that in 1931
moved to the capital, Phnom Penh, where the young
Pol Pot learned some of the rudiments of Buddhism
and was subsequently educated in a series of
French language schools.[1] In 1946 he joined Ho
Chi Minhs Indochinese Communist Party and three
years later was awarded a scholarship to study
radio engineering in Paris.[2]
While in Paris, Pol Pot joined with other
Cambodian students to create the Paris Student
Group, forerunner to the Khmer Rouge. He also
authored the pamphlet Monarchy or Democracy, in
which he openly challenged the legitimacy of
Prince Norodom Sihanouks Cambodian government and
pledged to someday institute a democracy "pure as
a diamond."[3] In 1952 he joined the French
Communist Party, a move that would prove to have a
profound influence on the rest of his political
life. Nearly all of his fellow Khmer Rouge leaders
of the 1970s were educated in France and were
members of the French Communist Party.[4] The
professed goal of these leaders was to bring "real
socialism" to Cambodia.[5] Vietnamese Communism
exerted an even greater influence on the Khmer
Rouge during its formative years; the CPK was
originally part of the Vietnamese-controlled
Indochinese Communist Party.[6]
Pol Pot returned to Cambodia in 1953 after his
scholarship was revoked (due to his poor academic
performance) and joined Ho Chi Minhs Viet Minh,
the antecedent of the Viet Cong. He also became a
member of the Kampuchean Peoples Revolutionary
Party. For the next several years, he earned a
living by teaching geography and history at a
private school while organizing resistance to
Sihanouk, who was the King of Cambodia from
1941-1955, its Prime Minister from 1955-1960, and
the countrys head of state (with the title
"Prince" thereafter).[7] In 1960, the Paris
Student Group took control of the Kampuchean (or
Khmer) Peoples Revolutionary Party (KPRP), which
began to break away from its Vietnamese
connections and was renamed the Workers Party of
Kampuchea (WPK). Within three years, Pol Pot had
been named the WPKs secretary-general.[8]
During 1965-1967, Pol Pot traveled extensively in
North Vietnam and China. He entreated North
Vietnam to provide him with military assistance to
overthrow the Sihanouk regime but was turned
down.[9] Officially Cambodia was "neutral" in the
Indo-china conflict; this suited North Vietnam,
which used Cambodias position to advance its own
aggression. The North Vietnamese created a
"National Liberation Front (Vietcong) in South
Vietnam to advance their aggressive designs on the
South. In 1968 the Vietcong were wiped out during
the Tet Offensive. But the North Vietnamese kept
the fiction alive by continuing their infiltration
of North Vietnamese army regulars into the South
and pretending that they were revolutionary
guerrillas representing the population of South
Veitnam. The infiltration route was called the "Ho
Chi Minh Trail," and part of it ran through
"neutral" Cambodia. When the United States
attempted to inderdict this line of support, the
international Communist community, backed by the
Western "anti-war" movement, protested that the
United States was "violating" Cambodias
neutrality. Pol Pots strategy of Communist
revolution in Cambodia immediately would have
undermined this scheme.
Pol Pots trip to China, then in the throes of the
Cultural Revolution, inspired him to envision an
agrarian Communist utopia where the very lifeblood
of his nation could be poured entirely into
agricultural projects of the grandest scale; this
vision would prove to be the inspiration for the
notorious "killing fields," to be described below,
where many hundreds of thousands of slave laborers
perished under the most oppressive conditions
imaginable.
By 1968 the Khmer Rouge had gained the support of
China and was in control of the Cambodian border
with Vietnam. In 1969 the U.S., in an effort to
prevent the Vietcong from withdrawing to bases
across the Cambodian border, began a campaign of
bombing raids against Cambodian targets; these
raids, however, failed to achieve their desired ends.
In a 1970 coup, Sihanouks government was
overthrown and the Minister of Defense, Lon Nol,
took control of the country. At this point Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge, with the assistance of China
and North Vietnam, initiated a guerrilla war that
would persist for five years.
In November 1970, President Nixon asked the U.S.
Congress to provide the Cambodian government of
Lon Nol with $155 million in aid, of which $85
million would be earmarked for military assistance
to help prevent the Khmer Rouge from taking power.
American leftists, however, were adamantly against
this proposal. One opponent of the policy was
Anthony Lake, who in 1969 had become an aide to
then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but who
because he opposed Nixons bombing raids (designed
to support Lon Nol against Pol Pot and the Khmer
Rouge) in Cambodia soon parted political company
with Kissinger and the President. By 1972 Lake was
an activist in the McGovern presidential campaign,
whose platform was founded upon the axiom that the
military conflicts of Southeast Asia were rooted
in the "arrogance of American power" rather than
in Communist aggression.[10]
During this period, many American leftists openly
supported a Communist takeover in Southeast Asia.
Among the most notable spokespeople of this
position was the popular actress Jane Fonda and
her husband Tom Hayden, whose public comments were
unambiguous in their expressions of contempt for
America and sympathy for the Communists. On
November 21, 1970, Fonda told a large University
of Michigan audience, "If you understood what
Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on
your knees that we would some day become
Communist."[11] At Duke University, she
elaborated, "I, a socialist, think that we should
strive toward a socialist society, all the way to
Communism." The dual villains of Southeast Asian
conflicts were, in her view, "U.S. imperialism"
and "a white mans racist aggression."[12]
Fondas husband Tom Hayden in the early 1970s
organized an "Indo-China Peace Campaign" (IPC) to
lobby Congress to cut off American aid to the
regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Assisted by
radical Democrats in Congress like Ron Dellums,
Bella Abzug, Robert Drinan, Elizabeth Holtzman,
Pat Schroeder, and David Bonior, Hayden
established a caucus in the Capitol, where he
lectured and agitated for an end to anti-Communist
efforts in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The IPC
worked tirelessly to help the North Vietnamese
Communists and the Khmer Rouge emerge victorious.
Hayden and Fonda took a camera crew to Hanoi and
to the "liberated" regions of South Vietnam to
make a propaganda film called Introduction to the
Enemy, whose purpose was to persuade viewers that
the Communists were going to create an ideal new
society based on justice and equality, when the
Americans left.[13]
With a nation deeply divided thanks to the
pressures of the anti-war left and a Democratic
Party that had turned its back on the war, Nixon
was persuaded that the United States could neither
win the war nor maintain its armies in the battle.
In 1973 he signed a truce with North Vietnam that
led to the withdrawal of all American forces.
Nixon hoped the agreement would preserve the
governments of Cambodia and South Vietnam. But the
North Vietnamese had no intention of observing the
truce; neither did Pol Pot.
Months later the American "anti-war" left and its
allies in the Democratic Party led by Senator
Edward Kennedy brought down the Nixon presidency
in the Watergate affair. Hayden and his likeminded
supporters gained immense political leverage from
Nixons resignation in August 1974. That years
midterm elections, which were held just three
months after the resignation, resulted in
catastrophic losses for Republicans and ushered in
a new group of Democratic legislators determined
to undo the Nixon peace policy and surrender
Cambodia and Vietnam to the enemy.
They succeeded all to well. The first act of the
newly elected Democrat Congress voted to cut off
funding for South Vietnam and Cambodias Lon Nol
government in January 1975. When Republicans had
warned earlier that a Pol Pot victory would
inevitably result in a "bloodbath" in Cambodia,
anti-war Democrats like John Kerry and Anthony
Lake brushed their concerns aside and accused them
of trying to stir up "anti-Communist
hysteria."[14] Turning a blind eye to all portents
of the horrors that a Pol Pot regime was likely to
bring, American leftists viewed him instead as an
aspiring liberator of the Cambodian people. They
thus repeated the same "mistake" they had made in
regard to Lenin, Stalin and Mao, each of whose
regimes were marked by targeted extermination
campaigns implemented by leaders who saw
themselves as infallible, who perceived the
presence of political enemies everywhere, and who
tolerated no dissent.
In March 1975 Anthony Lake, who was one of the
Democrats chief foreign policy experts (later to
become Bill Clintons National Security Adviser)
wrote a Washington Post column titled "At Stake in
Cambodia: Extending Aid [to Lon Nol] Will Only
Prolong the Killing." Lake reaffirmed the lefts
position that the Khmer Rouge was not a
totalitarian force, but rather a coalition of
"many Khmer nationalists, Communist and
non-Communist," whose only ambition was to gain
independence for the Cambodian people. He warned
that if America alienated Pol Pot and his Khmer
Rouge followers, it would only "push them further
into the arms of their Communist supporters."
The Khmer Rouge, Lake conceded, "are indeed
supported by Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow. But to the
extent we know much about them, they include many
Khmer nationalists, Communist and non-Communist.
Once they gain power, we must hope for as much
nationalism on their part as possible."[15]
Calling for "an immediate, peaceful turning over
of power" to the Khmer Rouge, Lake backed the
American cutoff of support for non-Communists, who
he believed should be barred from playing any role
in Cambodias new government. "Why should the
Khmer Rouge agree to share power when they can
expect to seize it?" he asked rhetorically.[16]
(Notably, Lakes poor judgment cost him nothing
politically. President Jimmy Carter appointed him
to be the State Departments Policy Planning
Director, and many years later President Bill
Clinton named him to be his National Security
Advisor.)
After U.S. funding was cut, the regimes of South
Vietnam and Cambodia were quickly overrun by the
Communists. The South Vietnamese capital of Saigon
surrendered on April 30, 1975 and was immediately
renamed Ho Chi Minh City, as the Communists
proceeded to execute tens of thousands of
Vietnamese while more than a million fled the
country. Lon Nols government in Cambodia fell
thirteen days earlier, on April 17, when Khmer
Rouge forces took control of Phnom Penh. The
atrocities of Pol Pot commenced immediately
thereafter.
From the moment it ascended to power, the Khmer
Rouge characterized its newfound preeminence as a
turning point in human history. "The Khmer
revolution has no predecessors," said the party
leaders. "What we are trying to bring about has
never been accomplished at any time in
history."[17] That objective was the eradication
of capitalism and the establishment of a Communist
society dedicated to agricultural productivity.
Pol Pot was prepared to pay any price to realize
his goal; his currency of choice would prove to be
the rivers of tears and torrents of blood flowing
from the broken spirits and bodies of his own
people. The result would be one of the most
pitiable chapters of human suffering in the
recorded history of mankind.
To garner sympathy and support for their cause,
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge depicted Kampuchea
(Cambodia) as a nation whose people had been
victimized and oppressed by others. The Khmer
Rouge portrayed the Cambodian people as unmatched
in their innate ability to bring about a pure
socialist order; this laudatory portrayal of
Cambodians was a remarkable irony in light of the
atrocities the Khmer Rouge would soon inflict on
those millions of unfortunate souls. "We are
making a unique revolution," said the leaders. "Is
there any other country that would dare abolish
money and markets the way we have? . . . We are a
good model for the whole world."[18]
Given their vision of their revolutionary rise to
power as a watershed event in human history the
dawn of a new era the Khmer Rouge strove to
eviscerate all records and memories of the
"ancient regime" that had preceded the revolution
and everything that contradicted its vision for a
new world order. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were
inspired by Maos infamous adage, "It is on a
blank page that the most beautiful poems are
written."[19] In accordance with that premise,
they set about the task of consigning to flames
the Cambodian peoples identity papers, documents
and certificates, and photograph albums.[20] Thus
all records of those pre-revolutionary days when
the nation was, in the view of Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge, mired in ignorance and class
oppression literally went up in smoke. The faces
of deceased loved ones that had once peered at
their survivors from the pages of photo albums
were no more. The Khmer Rouge had no patience for
the human emotions that made such keepsakes
valuable to those who held them.
The task of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was to do
to the spirits of their countrymen precisely what
they had done to their papers and portraits
obliterate them, because emotions, like faded
photographs, were of no use in furthering the
cause of the revolution. The leaders
systematically worked to dehumanize an entire
population, separating all Cambodians from any
sense of attachment to their own histories,
identities, and loving relationships. There was no
room in the soil of Pol Pots utopia for
individual personalities, desires, or dreams to
take root. Henceforth, every waking hour of every
living person was to be devoted entirely to the
service of the dictators Communist state.
A revolution of such self-declared magnitude
merited, in the eyes of Pol Pot and his leading
aides, the special honor of being identified as
the dawn of a new era, the starting point from
which all subsequent passage of time would be
measured. Thus like the Jacobins of the French
Revolution Pol Pot reordered the calendar
itself, designating the year 1975 as year "Zero,"
a hugely symbolic act embodying the idea that the
world was going to be created anew.[21]
Within hours after capturing Phnom Penh, which was
home to some 2 to 3 million people, the Khmer
Rouge forced the citys entire population to
relocate to various regions of the countryside and
begin working on massive agricultural projects as
slave laborers who were compelled to devote,
unquestioningly, every last drop of their sweat
and blood to the communal creation of Pol Pots
agrarian utopia. In addition to these people,
several hundred thousand residents of other cities
were also forced to relocate and become
agricultural slave laborers in service of the
Khmer Rouge. All told, approximately half of
Cambodias population was uprooted all at
once.[22] From the moment the decree requiring
their relocation was issued, the city-dwellers
were given just 24 hours to leave their homes.[23]
Bustling urban areas were transformed overnight
into eerie, deserted ghost towns. If anyone asked
why they were being forced to suddenly uproot
their lives and families, Khmer Rouge authorities
told them the lie that the United States was
planning to bomb their city.[24]
The rationale behind these forced relocations was
the Khmer Rouges concept of the Communist ideal:
a nation of simple, uneducated, hardworking
peasants toiling for the realization of their
infallible masters noble dream. Moving people out
of the cities served the purpose of separating
them from potentially "contaminating" outside
influences that might cause them to question their
loyalty to Pol Pot things such as books,
newspapers, television, and radio. The Khmer Rouge
viewed city-dwellers as the detestable antithesis
of the peasant ideal; because they had chosen city
life for themselves, they were presupposed to have
an allegiance to capitalism, which Pol Pot deemed
the root of all evil.[25] Thus by a single
sweeping decree, the Cambodian dictator
transformed them, en masse, into an army of
agricultural slave laborers serving his Communist
state.
In many thousands of cases, the forced relocations
caused family members to be separated from one
another when they were assigned to work in
different districts or regions of the country. As
the days and weeks thereafter passed, these people
became increasingly aware that they would likely
never see their loved ones again. The Khmer Rouge
forbade, on pain of death, any clandestine
correspondence between family members in separate
work camps; the human feelings of the slaves
mattered nothing to Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge;
the only concern was to squeeze out of them as
much labor as possible, until they died of
exhaustion or illness. And because in death they
could no longer be of service to the revolution,
their surviving loved ones were not permitted to
grieve their passing; tears and expressions of
mourning were strictly forbidden, again on pain of
death.[26] Every vestige of humanity and sentiment
was to be crushed out of existence; Cambodians had
only two options: turn their hearts to stone, or
die at the executioners hand.
In this sorrowful atmosphere, hopelessness,
depression, and spiritual surrender quickly became
the norm for Cambodias people, whose families,
freedoms, values, and aspirations had been
wrenched from them overnight without warning or
negotiation. As is told in The Black Book of
Communism, "Scenes of death and despair
abounded."[27] The early days of the Khmer Rouge
regime were marked by an enormous spike in the
incidence of suicides, especially by those who had
been separated from their families; the elderly,
who feared that they had become burdens and
liabilities to their relatives; and those people
who had previously been accustomed to living in
relative comfort.[28]
The Khmer Rouge had a purpose for separating
children from their parents; the goal was to train
the youngsters, from the earliest age, not to
develop their own personalities and talents but
rather to blindly follow orders not the orders
of their parents, but the orders of the
government. The objective was to turn them into
heartless beasts who saw nothing sacred or worthy
of honor in any human being, including themselves.
Such training was designed to groom them as the
Khmer Rouge soldiers of the future. As one
survivor describes, "They [children] were taken
very young, and the only thing they were taught
was discipline. They learned to obey orders,
without asking for any justification. They didnt
have any belief in religion or in tradition, only
in the orders of the Khmer Rouge. Thats why they
killed their own people, including babies, the way
you kill a mosquito."[29]
In some cases family members who had been
separated did eventually see each other again, but
weeks or months would generally intervene between
such contacts, leaving them always in a state of
fear, longing, and worry over the condition of
their loved ones. These emotions were exacerbated
by the fact that Pol Pot suspended all postal
service in the country; consequently, it often
happened that people did not learn of the deaths
of their loved ones until many months after those
deaths had occurred.[30]
In those instances where families did manage to
stay together, the Khmer Rouge did its best to
sabotage the relationships between husbands and
wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters.
They coerced children to track the political views
of their parents and to report any deviations from
official Party doctrine "for their own good."[31]
This was yet another way in which the Khmer Rouge
turned even the most loving human bonds into sick
admixtures of suspicion, fear, and betrayal.
Moreover, the Khmer Rouge placed severe
restrictions on sexuality (intercourse was a crime
punishable by death for workers in the labor
camps) and marriage (as innumerable couples were
split apart by being assigned to separate camps).
These restrictions, combined with the malnutrition
and disease that characterized daily life in Pol
Pots Cambodia, resulted in a 65 percent decline
in the countrys birth rate.[32]
The population relocations were fraught with
peril, in many cases requiring weeks of walking
with insufficient food and water and no access to
medical assistance. Many people died en route to
their appointed work stations. The infirmed were
simply permitted to die unattended and
uncomforted; they were considered "useless mouths"
that could only consume but could not produce, and
thus their deaths were welcomed by the Khmer
Rouge.[33] And as was noted previously, the Khmer
Rouge permitted no displays of grief or sadness
even for the death of a parent or a child. The
leaders of the revolution considered the death of
the weak or the ill to be something positive, a
type of Darwinian natural selection that weeded
out those who were incapable of contributing to
the building of Pol Pots utopia.
When the uprooted city people arrived en masse in
the rural villages, village life was thrown into
turmoil and chaos. Private property was abolished,
and all were forced to live on communal farms.
Massive discontent prevailed. Rather than attempt
to diminish hostilities, however, the Khmer Rouge
instead tried to incite class hatred between the
former city dwellers (referred to as the "New
People" in the villages) and the country folk. To
promote such antipathy, the Khmer Rouge depicted
the villagers as the "patriotic proletariat" whose
turf was being overrun by "lackeys of the
capitalist imperialists."[34] To further stoke the
flames of hate, Pol Pot instituted an apartheid
system that obliged the New People and the
villagers to live in two separate parts of town;
nor were they permitted to speak to one another or
interact in any way. An openly discriminatory
legal system was established, wherein only the
rural folk had any rights at all.[35]
The inter-group animosity that the Khmer Rouge
encouraged was part and parcel of a larger
political strategy. By keeping alive high levels
of contempt between the two populations, Pol Pot
could rest assured that no spontaneous, unified
revolts against his authority would ever
develop.[36] Frequently the New People, who had
been stripped of all their former possessions,
were offered an opportunity to "return to their
native village" or to work in a cooperative where
conditions were easier. Many jumped at such
chances, only to discover, to their horror, that
the offer was nothing more than a trap designed to
identify those people whose concern for their own
individual well-being had not yet been destroyed,
and who were thus in need of "re-education" by
means of still greater suffering and deprivation.
As Pin Yathay, the victim of one such ordeal,
explains: "This [offer of return to their native
village] was really nothing more than a ploy to
weed out people with individualist tendencies . .
. Anyone who fell into the trap showed that he had
not yet got rid of his old-fashioned tendencies
and needed to go thru a more severe regime of
retraining in a village where conditions were even
worse."[37]
The conditions in Cambodias overcrowded
"re-education" centers were horrific: inmates
received miniscule food rations and had no access
to medical care, wash water, or toilets. Their
ankles were chained to an iron bar fixed to the
floor, and their elbows were tied behind their
backs. The average life expectancy in such places
was about three months.[38] Notwithstanding these
horrors, Pol Pot boasted that his country was
entirely without a single officially designated
"prison." "We dont have prisons," he explained,
"and we dont even use the word prison. Bad
elements in our society are simply given
productive tasks to do."[39]
Pol Pot and his fellow Khmer Rouge leaders spoke
passionately of the blissful future that
presumably lay just ahead for Cambodias people.
In August 1976 Pol Pot unveiled the roadmap by
which he hoped to arrive at his utopia his Four
Year Plan whose objective was to dramatically
increase agricultural production and thereby raise
capital, through exports, for the further
cultivation of his dream. The short-term goal was
the industrialization of agriculture and the
development of diversified light industry, to be
followed shortly thereafter by the development of
heavy industry.[40] All this would be accomplished
by the toil of Pol Pots vast network of slaves.
Giving motivational talks to the very people he
had turned into destitute, dispirited creatures,
Pol Pot said in a long 1977 speech, "Because we
are the race that built Angkor [the capital of the
ancient Khmer empire], we can do anything."[41]
The specifics of the Four-Year Plan called for the
tripling of Cambodias rice production (without
any improvement in agricultural equipment or
methods). The people were put to work on the
daunting task of tripling the surface area of the
rice fields in the countrys northwest, a project
that involved clearing vast tracts of land and
massive irrigation projects. Pol Pots goal was to
have two and eventually three harvests per
year.[42] The average workday for his slaves was
11 to 12 hours, but sometimes went as long as 19
hours. In some places workers were given no days
of rest; every day was a workday; in other places,
one day in ten was a day of rest but that day
was filled with long, mandatory indoctrination
meetings the workers were obliged to attend.[43]
One survivor of Pol Pots regime recalls life in
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: "[T]here were no
prisons, no courts, no universities, no schools,
no money, no jobs, no books, no sports, no
pastimes . . . There was no spare moment in the
twenty-four-hour day. Daily life was divided up as
follows: twelve hours for physical labor, two
hours for eating, three hours for rest and
education, and seven hours for sleep. We all lived
in an enormous concentration camp. There was no
justice. The Angkar [Angkar Padevat, or
Revolutionary Organization, the semisecret cover
for the CPK] regulated every moment of our lives.
. . The Khmer Rouge . . . would compare people to
cattle: Watch this ox as it pulls the plow. It
eats when it is ordered to eat. If you let it
graze in the field, it will eat anything. If you
put it into another field where there isnt enough
grass, it will graze uncomplainingly. It is not
free, and it is constantly being watched. And when
you tell it to pull the plow, it pulls. It never
thinks about its wife or children."[44]
In short, people were turned into beasts of
burden; the idea that human life had any special
value distinguishing it from that of a goat or a
spider was dismissed as a sentimental absurdity.
"Losing you is not a loss," went one popular
adage, "and keeping you is no specific gain."[45]
People were forced to repress their personalities
entirely; their individual character traits were
deemed inconsequential. Their only duty was to
blindly obey the authority of Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge. In a manner reminiscent of Stalinist
Russia, people were forced to attend long rallies
during which they were obliged to look alert,
shout praise or disapproval on demand, and voice
public criticism of themselves or others.[46]
All traces of human creativity, ingenuity, and
individualism utterly vanished from the country.
Education, freedom of movement, trade, medicine,
religion, and writing disappeared. Strict dress
codes were put in place, requiring everyone to
wear black, long-sleeved shirts buttoned up to the
neck. The range of acceptable public behaviors
became exceedingly narrow: public displays of
affection were outlawed, as were arguments,
insults, complaints, and tears.[47] People were
drilled to become automatons bereft of all
emotion; such creatures, of course, would be well
suited to obey orders even those requiring them
to crush another mans skull.
The inhabitants of Pol Pots Cambodia were further
demoralized by the hunger from which they
constantly suffered. Since the 1920s, Cambodia had
regularly exported hundreds of thousands of tons
of rice each year while simultaneously feeding its
own population. But after the collective canteens
of Pol Pot became the norm in 1976, the average
Cambodians daily diet consisted of only thin rice
soup containing about for teaspoons of rice. To
supplement these meager rations, people foraged
for anything they might be able to swallow:
snails, frogs, rats, crabs, lizards, snakes, red
ants, spiders, mushrooms, and roots. Some were
reduced to stealing food from the troughs of farm
pigs. In many cases, these desperate, starving
wretches had no choice but to steal from one
another.[48]
Dehumanized by this miserable existence, the
Cambodian people underwent a profound loss of
moral values. Cheating, stealing, and lying became
survival mechanisms and drastically altered the
character of Cambodian culture.[49] Barbaric
practices like cannibalism became commonplace.
Cambodians lost entirely their traditional
Buddhist compassion.[50] The Black Book of
Communism recounts an incident where one
individual demonstrated empathy for another who
was suffering greatly. He was harshly reproved by
a Khmer Rouge soldier, who told him: "You dont
have a duty to help these people. On the contrary,
that proves you still have pity and feelings of
friendship. You must renounce such sentiments and
wipe all individualism from your mind." [51]
The peoples hunger served the political ends of
Pol Pot; the less they ate, the more their bodies
wasted away; this in turn diminished the amount of
food their bodies could store, thereby diminishing
the possibility that they might try to run
away.[52] Still, many did try to escape. So
profound was their despair, that tens of thousands
of refugees braved terrible dangers, often
wandering for weeks through deep and perilous
jungles in search of freedom, knowing that if they
were captured they would be instantly put to
death.[53]
In this land of want and starvation, Pol Pot
presented his grand agricultural schemes as
precisely what would ultimately lift the people
out of their misery. But it was not to be. In
practice, Pol Pots agricultural projects proved
to be poorly planned, inadequately coordinated,
and in many cases colossal failures. One reason
for this was the Khmer Rouges intransigent
rejection of technology and technicians. The
partys leaders, convinced of their own
omniscience, generally dismissed the notion that
they needed anyone to advise them in the science
of building dikes, dams, and canals.[54] "To build
dams," said the Khmer Rouge, "all you need is
political education."[55] With this mindset, the
leaders dictated unchangeable and in many cases
nonsensical orders, resulting in the
construction of inadequate dams and canals that
were washed away by floods which sometimes
engulfed hundreds of workers at a time. Other
projects resulted in water flowing in the wrong
direction or ponds silting up. Hydraulic engineers
in the workforce who could foresee these disasters
were obligated to remain silent, lest their
warnings be perceived as evidence that they were
questioning the authority and wisdom of the
Angkar;[56] this would only gain them a round of
barbaric torture, or possibly execution.
Notwithstanding the many setbacks and tragedies,
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge stubbornly refused to
acknowledge any need for education or specialized
knowledge to guide their development projects.
Because life was so cheap in their eyes, they were
quite willing to squander the toil, the health,
and even the lives of millions of people whom they
considered utterly expendable, no more
intrinsically valuable than oxen. "We dont need
the technology of the capitalists," said one Khmer
Rouge leader defiantly. ". . . . Under our new
system, we dont need to send our children to
school. Our school is the farm. We will write by
plowing. We dont need to give examinations or
award certificates. Knowing how to farm and how to
dig canals those are our certificates. We dont
need doctors any more. They are not necessary. If
someone needs to have their intestines removed, I
will do it [he made the motion of carving an
imaginary knife against his stomach]. We dont
need any of the capitalist professions! We dont
need doctors or engineers! We dont need
professors telling us what to do. They were all
corrupted. We just need people to work hard on the
farm!"[57]
There were also tragic consequences resulting from
the massive, forced population movements of the
Cambodian people to regions where they were put to
work on Pol Pots land-clearing and irrigation
projects. With so many people displaced from their
homes, fully 80 percent of Cambodias
already-existing farmland became depopulated and
went untended. Meanwhile, starving, underfed
workers struggled to be productive on the projects
they had been assigned. As one eyewitness
describes: "The spectacle was frightening:
indescribable human misery, total disorganization,
and appalling waste."[58]
As Cambodian life and culture collapsed under the
weight of Pol Pots disastrous policies, a key
tactic of the Khmer Rouge was to keep people
ignorant of all ideas contrary to its own dogmas.
Consequently, education was all but eliminated
throughout the country. In those locales where
schooling still existed, it amounted to nothing
more than an hour per day devoted to teaching
revolutionary songs to young children (ages 5 to
9); the instructors were frequently barely
literate themselves.[59] Literacy was immaterial
to the Khmer Rouge; in fact, it was seen as
something negative. Pol Pot and his henchmen
preferred to lord over a population of
simple-minded folk who had never been taught to
question anything; who had never been exposed to
ideas about freedom or human dignity. The only
knowledge the Khmer Rouge countenanced was of a
practical, rather than a scholarly or
philosophical, nature: "[O]ur children in the
rural zones . . . know a calm cow from a nervous
one. They can stand both ways on a buffalo. They
are masters of the herd. . . . They know all the
different varieties of rice like the back of their
hands. . ."[60]
Foreign influences in general were cast out of the
country by the Khmer Rouge. All publications
containing "imperialist writing" French or
English were destroyed. Capitalism was vilified
as an evil system whose every last vestige needed
to be obliterated. "No more capitalistic books
now," was a popular slogan spoken by Khmer Rouge
soldiers to Cambodian children. ". . . Why do you
have foreign books? Are you CIA? No more foreign
books under the Angkar."[61]
Virtually all Cambodians who had received even
moderate levels of formal education prior to the
revolution, such as civil servants and
intellectuals, were eliminated in stages in a
series of purges. Each successive purge called for
the slaughter of those further down the
hierarchy.[62] Among those specifically targeted
were people who wore eyeglasses, which were
symbols of reading and learning; Pol Pot perceived
such individuals as threats because they were
carriers of the ideas of the pre-revolutionary
culture. As one Khmer Rouge leader said in 1975,
"We have some people among us who still wear
eyeglasses. And why do they use eyeglasses? Cant
they see me? If I move to slap your face and you
flinch, then you see well enough. People wear them
to be handsome in the capitalist style. They wear
them to be vain. We dont need people like that
any more."[63] In time, educated people were
virtually nonexistent in Cambodia.
While Pol Pot was carrying out his genocide,
numerous American leftists functioned as his
apologists. Notable among these was the
American-hating MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who
viewed Pol Pot as a revolutionary hero. When news
of the "killing fields" became increasingly
publicized, Chomskys faith in Pol Pot could not
be shaken. He initially tried to minimize the
magnitude of Pol Pots atrocities (saying that he
had killed only "a few thousand people at
most").[64] He suggested that the forced expulsion
of the population from Phnom Penh was most likely
necessitated by the failure of the 1976 rice crop.
Wrote Chomsky, "the evacuation of Phnom Penh,
widely denounced at the time and since for its
undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many
lives."[65] In a 1977 article in The Nation,
Chomsky attacked those witnesses and writers who
were shedding ever-brighter rays of light on Pol
Pots holocaust; he accused them of trying to
spread anti-communist propaganda. In 1980, when it
was indisputable that a huge proportion of
Cambodias population had died at the hands of the
Khmer Rouge, Chomsky again blamed an unfortunate
failure of the rice crop rather than systematic
genocide. He also quibbled about the number of
dead, saying that most estimates were inflated,
and that the actual number could not have exceeded
a million. Finally, he concluded that whatever had
in fact occurred in Cambodia, the U.S. was to
blame.[66]
Members of the middle class were also targets of
Pol Pots purges, as were all people with any
degree of social standing. In addition, Pol Pot
ordered the execution of all members of the Lon
Nol government (including thousands of politicians
and bureaucrats alike), and all those suspected of
being loyal to the Sihanouk regime. In these
executions, which were generally preceded by
torture, there were never any trials or clear
charges brought. The aim was to crush anyone with
an independent spirit, with an educated mind, with
an ethical or religious value system, and with any
quality that might threaten Pol Pots preeminence.
Pol Pots paranoia about suspected enemies was
reminiscent of Stalins. All that was required for
an arrest was three allegations that a suspect was
a "CIA agent."[67] To satisfy their bosses,
interrogators extorted confessions from such
people by any means necessary; in one particular
district, fully 40,000 of the 70,000 inhabitants
were put to death as "traitors collaborating with
the CIA."[68]
The Khmer Rouge also exterminated large
proportions of various ethnic minority groups,
including about half of the 400,000 Chinese, and
an even higher percentage of the Vietnamese who
had stayed in Cambodia after 1975 (lowball
estimates of the death rates for both groups hover
around 37 to 38 percent).[69] After mid-1976, all
Vietnamese people in Cambodia were forbidden to
leave the country. An April 1977 directive
required that all Vietnamese be arrested and
turned over to security forces. Also to be
arrested were their friends and anyone who spoke
Vietnamese.[70]
Among the particularly notable victims of Pol
Pots wrath were the Cham, the largest indigenous
minority in Cambodia, who numbered some 250,000 in
1970. They were Muslims who made their living
mostly as farmers and fishermen. In 1975 the Khmer
Rouge, demanding that the Cham take new names that
resembled Khmer names, decreed: "The Cham
mentality is abolished forthwith. Anyone who does
not conform to these orders will be punished
accordingly."[71] Thereafter, merely speaking the
Cham language was an offense punishable by
death.[72] After mid-1978, the Khmer Rouge began
systematically exterminating Cham communities.[73]
By the end of Pol Pots regime, 40 to 50 percent
of all Cham in Cambodia had perished.[74]
Contemptuous of religion in general, Pol Pot and
the Khmer Rouge targeted people of faith
aggressively. During Pol Pots reign, more than 48
percent of Cambodian Catholics disappeared;[75]
the number of monks living in the country dwindled
from approximately 60,000 to 1,000.[76] The
cathedral in Phnom Penh was razed to the ground.
Nor were Catholics the only religious group whose
ranks were decimated. Muslim clerics were put to
death as well. Mosques were razed or converted
into buildings dedicated to other purposes;
prayers were banned; and Korans were burned.
Muslims were often forced to choose between
raising pigs and eating pork [acts forbidden by
their traditions], or being killed.[77]
Notably, Pol Pot chose not to cultivate, for his
own self-aggrandizement, a cult of personality
like that of Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Instead
knowing that phantoms in the dark may inspire
greater fear than those revealed in the light of
day he deliberately sought to terrorize the
population by making himself mysterious. His
fearsome presence loomed everywhere, but few had
ever seen his face. He never once appeared in
public until after the 1976 "elections." He
authorized no official portraits or statues made
in his likeness; he authorized no official
biography; he published no compendium of his
thoughts or philosophy; and few photos of him
existed anywhere.[78] To further create an
atmosphere of terror, Pol Pot ordered landmines to
be set around the countryside; these were, like
him, invisible but deadly. Pol Pot referred to
landmines as his "perfect soldiers" who
discouraged attempted escapes.[79]
Under Pol Pot, Cambodians lives always hung by
the barest thread; people were at all times just a
single minor mistake or accident away from the
torture chamber or the executioners rifle.
Between 1975 and 1979, hundreds of thousands of
Cambodians were executed by Khmer Rouge henchman.
A popular Khmer Rouge slogan was, "All we need to
build our country is a million good
revolutionaries. No more than that. And we would
rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to
live."[80] Among the offenses punishable by death
in the work camps were: not working hard enough,
wearing jewelry, stealing food, drinking an
alcoholic beverage, making a secret visit to a
family member in another camp, having sexual
relations, grieving over dead relatives, losing or
striking a cow, failing to control an ox, plowing
a crooked furrow, failing to complete ones
assigned work, making a negative comment or a joke
about the regime, complaining about conditions,
saying that one was hungry, taking part in
religious trance ceremonies, and expressing
religious beliefs generally. Even exhibiting
emotional closeness to ones family members was a
serious transgression; though the first offense
was generally not grounds for execution, the
second often was.[81]
But specified offenses were by no means
prerequisites for execution. Khmer Rouge guards
murdered many Cambodians merely because they
could. In some cases, people were killed to make
fertilizer; their corpses were buried in mass
graves situated near crop fields.[82]
Records from the Tuol Sleng interrogation center
in Phnom Penh indicate that from 1975-1978, some
14,499 Cambodians were tortured and executed
there; only seven survived the interrogation
process.[83] At least twenty other such camps
operated in the country during the Khmer Rouge
reign of terror. In each of the twenty provinces
that have been investigated to date, more than
1,000 mass burial grounds have been found.[84]
The most popular method by which the Khmer Rouge
put people to death was by blows to the head,
which scholars say accounted for about 53 percent
of all executions; gunshots accounted for another
29 percent; 6 percent were hanged or asphyxiated;
and 5 percent had their throats slit. Another 2
percent were executed publicly; their deaths were
generally extremely gruesome so as to serve as a
warning to onlookers; they were often buried up to
their chest in a ditch filed with firebrands, or
their heads were doused with gasoline and set
ablaze.[85]
But even such awful forms of execution did not
mark the end of Pol Pots complete control over
the fate of every Cambodian. His assault on his
countrymens traditional values followed them even
beyond the grave. In Cambodia, longstanding custom
called for the cremation of the remains of the
dead; survivors were comforted by their possession
of even a few ashes of their departed loved ones.
But Pol Pot refused to show respect for such
"primitive" practices. He banned cremations and
instituted, in their stead, simple, unceremonious
burials. In Cambodians traditional belief system,
consigning the body of a loved one in the earth
without traditional rites was not only
disrespectful, but also compromised the
possibility of the dead persons
reincarnation.[86] Such things counted for nothing
in Pol Pots Cambodia, where the dead were
considered useless cowards who, by dying, had
robbed the Angkar of manpower.[87] As a logical
extension of this outlook, Pol Pot forbade people
to even speak of the dead. The very word "death"
became taboo; people were required instead to
refer to a dead person as "a body that has
disappeared."[88]
The exact extent of the genocide wrought by Pol
Pot and the Khmer Rouge has defied calculation.
1.2 million dead is the low estimate, from U.S.
officials; the Vietnamese-sponsored government,
the PRK (Peoples Republic of Kampuchea), claimed
3 million; Amnesty International claims 1.4
million, and the Yale Genocide Project claims that
the final tally was 1.7 million. Whatever the
precise figure may be, it is clear that between
one-seventh and one-fourth of Cambodias
population was exterminated by Pol Pot.[89]
In 1978 the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and
quickly overthrew the Khmer Rouge, causing Pol Pot
to flee into Thailand. The following year, a
peoples tribunal in Phnom Penh sentenced Pol Pot
to death for genocide.[90] For the next 18 years,
Pol Pot maintained an army on the Thai-Cambodian
border; he yielded military command of the Khmer
Rouge to his brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, in 1985.
The Vietnamese-backed government was overthrown in
1989. Refusing to recognize the new coalition
government that emerged in 1993, Pol Pot continued
to order arrests, purges, and murders within the
ranks of the Khmer Rouge. His influence was
steadily eroding, however. In 1997 Khmer Rouge
leader Ta Mok had Pol Pot arrested for a
particular series of murders he had ordered. Pol
Pot died in April 1998, shortly after learning
that he was to be handed over to the Americans for
trial. In an interview given shortly before his
death, Pol Pot claimed that he had never intended
to kill so many people; that the calamities
brought about by his regime were the result of his
inexperience in government and his inability to
rein in the zealous movement that he had started;
and that all his actions had been "[f]or the love
of the nation and the people."[91]
Today millions of Cambodians bear deep physical
and mental scars from the reign of Pol Pot. A host
of social evils such as violent crime and
corruption plague present-day Cambodia at rates
that are exceedingly high for a Southeast Asian
country. Cambodian refugees now living abroad are
frequently haunted by nightmares and suffer from
the highest rate of depression of any Indochinese
group.[92]
It should be noted that the atrocities of Pol Pot
were not at all unique among Communist
revolutions. His extermination campaign had many
parallels with those of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao,
who between them may have killed 100 million
people who stood between them and the progressive
future. In each case, there was the systematic
extermination of the class enemy as they sought to
wipe clean the slate of the past and usher in the
dawn of the new; in each case there was the
creation of vast slave networks and concentration
camps; the widespread use of torture; the
implementation of crackpot economic theories
inspired by Marx, the paranoid perception that
enemies of the regime lurked everywhere; the
determination to stamp out every last dissident,
both real and imagined, the designation of
particular classes as being "enemies of the
people," unworthy of the most rudimentary human
rights; the complete subjugation of the
individual; and an omnipotent state that sought to
control every imaginable aspect of peoples lives;
and the banishment of all spiritual rites and
beliefs, effectively making the dictator the only
"deity." In short, the abominations of Pol Pot
were not an aberration, but a culmination of the
Communist fantasy, the fulfillment of long,
grotesque tradition of the movement for "social
justice."
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multi-culty
"Abolish Multi-Culty and String Up The Traitors!"
http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19042
By John Perazzo
August 8, 2005
Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the
Communist Party that ruled Cambodia from
1976-1979. "Khmer Rouge" (or Khmer Reds) was the
French rendering of the organizations official
name: the "Communist Party of Cambodia," later the
"Party of Democratic Kampuchea" and also the
"Communist Party of Kampuchea," or CPK. (Kampuchea
is the local name for Cambodia.)
Pol Pot was born Saloth Sar in what is now the
province of Kompong Thong, Cambodia in 1925. He
came from a prosperous farming family that in 1931
moved to the capital, Phnom Penh, where the young
Pol Pot learned some of the rudiments of Buddhism
and was subsequently educated in a series of
French language schools.[1] In 1946 he joined Ho
Chi Minhs Indochinese Communist Party and three
years later was awarded a scholarship to study
radio engineering in Paris.[2]
While in Paris, Pol Pot joined with other
Cambodian students to create the Paris Student
Group, forerunner to the Khmer Rouge. He also
authored the pamphlet Monarchy or Democracy, in
which he openly challenged the legitimacy of
Prince Norodom Sihanouks Cambodian government and
pledged to someday institute a democracy "pure as
a diamond."[3] In 1952 he joined the French
Communist Party, a move that would prove to have a
profound influence on the rest of his political
life. Nearly all of his fellow Khmer Rouge leaders
of the 1970s were educated in France and were
members of the French Communist Party.[4] The
professed goal of these leaders was to bring "real
socialism" to Cambodia.[5] Vietnamese Communism
exerted an even greater influence on the Khmer
Rouge during its formative years; the CPK was
originally part of the Vietnamese-controlled
Indochinese Communist Party.[6]
Pol Pot returned to Cambodia in 1953 after his
scholarship was revoked (due to his poor academic
performance) and joined Ho Chi Minhs Viet Minh,
the antecedent of the Viet Cong. He also became a
member of the Kampuchean Peoples Revolutionary
Party. For the next several years, he earned a
living by teaching geography and history at a
private school while organizing resistance to
Sihanouk, who was the King of Cambodia from
1941-1955, its Prime Minister from 1955-1960, and
the countrys head of state (with the title
"Prince" thereafter).[7] In 1960, the Paris
Student Group took control of the Kampuchean (or
Khmer) Peoples Revolutionary Party (KPRP), which
began to break away from its Vietnamese
connections and was renamed the Workers Party of
Kampuchea (WPK). Within three years, Pol Pot had
been named the WPKs secretary-general.[8]
During 1965-1967, Pol Pot traveled extensively in
North Vietnam and China. He entreated North
Vietnam to provide him with military assistance to
overthrow the Sihanouk regime but was turned
down.[9] Officially Cambodia was "neutral" in the
Indo-china conflict; this suited North Vietnam,
which used Cambodias position to advance its own
aggression. The North Vietnamese created a
"National Liberation Front (Vietcong) in South
Vietnam to advance their aggressive designs on the
South. In 1968 the Vietcong were wiped out during
the Tet Offensive. But the North Vietnamese kept
the fiction alive by continuing their infiltration
of North Vietnamese army regulars into the South
and pretending that they were revolutionary
guerrillas representing the population of South
Veitnam. The infiltration route was called the "Ho
Chi Minh Trail," and part of it ran through
"neutral" Cambodia. When the United States
attempted to inderdict this line of support, the
international Communist community, backed by the
Western "anti-war" movement, protested that the
United States was "violating" Cambodias
neutrality. Pol Pots strategy of Communist
revolution in Cambodia immediately would have
undermined this scheme.
Pol Pots trip to China, then in the throes of the
Cultural Revolution, inspired him to envision an
agrarian Communist utopia where the very lifeblood
of his nation could be poured entirely into
agricultural projects of the grandest scale; this
vision would prove to be the inspiration for the
notorious "killing fields," to be described below,
where many hundreds of thousands of slave laborers
perished under the most oppressive conditions
imaginable.
By 1968 the Khmer Rouge had gained the support of
China and was in control of the Cambodian border
with Vietnam. In 1969 the U.S., in an effort to
prevent the Vietcong from withdrawing to bases
across the Cambodian border, began a campaign of
bombing raids against Cambodian targets; these
raids, however, failed to achieve their desired ends.
In a 1970 coup, Sihanouks government was
overthrown and the Minister of Defense, Lon Nol,
took control of the country. At this point Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge, with the assistance of China
and North Vietnam, initiated a guerrilla war that
would persist for five years.
In November 1970, President Nixon asked the U.S.
Congress to provide the Cambodian government of
Lon Nol with $155 million in aid, of which $85
million would be earmarked for military assistance
to help prevent the Khmer Rouge from taking power.
American leftists, however, were adamantly against
this proposal. One opponent of the policy was
Anthony Lake, who in 1969 had become an aide to
then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but who
because he opposed Nixons bombing raids (designed
to support Lon Nol against Pol Pot and the Khmer
Rouge) in Cambodia soon parted political company
with Kissinger and the President. By 1972 Lake was
an activist in the McGovern presidential campaign,
whose platform was founded upon the axiom that the
military conflicts of Southeast Asia were rooted
in the "arrogance of American power" rather than
in Communist aggression.[10]
During this period, many American leftists openly
supported a Communist takeover in Southeast Asia.
Among the most notable spokespeople of this
position was the popular actress Jane Fonda and
her husband Tom Hayden, whose public comments were
unambiguous in their expressions of contempt for
America and sympathy for the Communists. On
November 21, 1970, Fonda told a large University
of Michigan audience, "If you understood what
Communism was, you would hope, you would pray on
your knees that we would some day become
Communist."[11] At Duke University, she
elaborated, "I, a socialist, think that we should
strive toward a socialist society, all the way to
Communism." The dual villains of Southeast Asian
conflicts were, in her view, "U.S. imperialism"
and "a white mans racist aggression."[12]
Fondas husband Tom Hayden in the early 1970s
organized an "Indo-China Peace Campaign" (IPC) to
lobby Congress to cut off American aid to the
regimes in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Assisted by
radical Democrats in Congress like Ron Dellums,
Bella Abzug, Robert Drinan, Elizabeth Holtzman,
Pat Schroeder, and David Bonior, Hayden
established a caucus in the Capitol, where he
lectured and agitated for an end to anti-Communist
efforts in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The IPC
worked tirelessly to help the North Vietnamese
Communists and the Khmer Rouge emerge victorious.
Hayden and Fonda took a camera crew to Hanoi and
to the "liberated" regions of South Vietnam to
make a propaganda film called Introduction to the
Enemy, whose purpose was to persuade viewers that
the Communists were going to create an ideal new
society based on justice and equality, when the
Americans left.[13]
With a nation deeply divided thanks to the
pressures of the anti-war left and a Democratic
Party that had turned its back on the war, Nixon
was persuaded that the United States could neither
win the war nor maintain its armies in the battle.
In 1973 he signed a truce with North Vietnam that
led to the withdrawal of all American forces.
Nixon hoped the agreement would preserve the
governments of Cambodia and South Vietnam. But the
North Vietnamese had no intention of observing the
truce; neither did Pol Pot.
Months later the American "anti-war" left and its
allies in the Democratic Party led by Senator
Edward Kennedy brought down the Nixon presidency
in the Watergate affair. Hayden and his likeminded
supporters gained immense political leverage from
Nixons resignation in August 1974. That years
midterm elections, which were held just three
months after the resignation, resulted in
catastrophic losses for Republicans and ushered in
a new group of Democratic legislators determined
to undo the Nixon peace policy and surrender
Cambodia and Vietnam to the enemy.
They succeeded all to well. The first act of the
newly elected Democrat Congress voted to cut off
funding for South Vietnam and Cambodias Lon Nol
government in January 1975. When Republicans had
warned earlier that a Pol Pot victory would
inevitably result in a "bloodbath" in Cambodia,
anti-war Democrats like John Kerry and Anthony
Lake brushed their concerns aside and accused them
of trying to stir up "anti-Communist
hysteria."[14] Turning a blind eye to all portents
of the horrors that a Pol Pot regime was likely to
bring, American leftists viewed him instead as an
aspiring liberator of the Cambodian people. They
thus repeated the same "mistake" they had made in
regard to Lenin, Stalin and Mao, each of whose
regimes were marked by targeted extermination
campaigns implemented by leaders who saw
themselves as infallible, who perceived the
presence of political enemies everywhere, and who
tolerated no dissent.
In March 1975 Anthony Lake, who was one of the
Democrats chief foreign policy experts (later to
become Bill Clintons National Security Adviser)
wrote a Washington Post column titled "At Stake in
Cambodia: Extending Aid [to Lon Nol] Will Only
Prolong the Killing." Lake reaffirmed the lefts
position that the Khmer Rouge was not a
totalitarian force, but rather a coalition of
"many Khmer nationalists, Communist and
non-Communist," whose only ambition was to gain
independence for the Cambodian people. He warned
that if America alienated Pol Pot and his Khmer
Rouge followers, it would only "push them further
into the arms of their Communist supporters."
The Khmer Rouge, Lake conceded, "are indeed
supported by Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow. But to the
extent we know much about them, they include many
Khmer nationalists, Communist and non-Communist.
Once they gain power, we must hope for as much
nationalism on their part as possible."[15]
Calling for "an immediate, peaceful turning over
of power" to the Khmer Rouge, Lake backed the
American cutoff of support for non-Communists, who
he believed should be barred from playing any role
in Cambodias new government. "Why should the
Khmer Rouge agree to share power when they can
expect to seize it?" he asked rhetorically.[16]
(Notably, Lakes poor judgment cost him nothing
politically. President Jimmy Carter appointed him
to be the State Departments Policy Planning
Director, and many years later President Bill
Clinton named him to be his National Security
Advisor.)
After U.S. funding was cut, the regimes of South
Vietnam and Cambodia were quickly overrun by the
Communists. The South Vietnamese capital of Saigon
surrendered on April 30, 1975 and was immediately
renamed Ho Chi Minh City, as the Communists
proceeded to execute tens of thousands of
Vietnamese while more than a million fled the
country. Lon Nols government in Cambodia fell
thirteen days earlier, on April 17, when Khmer
Rouge forces took control of Phnom Penh. The
atrocities of Pol Pot commenced immediately
thereafter.
From the moment it ascended to power, the Khmer
Rouge characterized its newfound preeminence as a
turning point in human history. "The Khmer
revolution has no predecessors," said the party
leaders. "What we are trying to bring about has
never been accomplished at any time in
history."[17] That objective was the eradication
of capitalism and the establishment of a Communist
society dedicated to agricultural productivity.
Pol Pot was prepared to pay any price to realize
his goal; his currency of choice would prove to be
the rivers of tears and torrents of blood flowing
from the broken spirits and bodies of his own
people. The result would be one of the most
pitiable chapters of human suffering in the
recorded history of mankind.
To garner sympathy and support for their cause,
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge depicted Kampuchea
(Cambodia) as a nation whose people had been
victimized and oppressed by others. The Khmer
Rouge portrayed the Cambodian people as unmatched
in their innate ability to bring about a pure
socialist order; this laudatory portrayal of
Cambodians was a remarkable irony in light of the
atrocities the Khmer Rouge would soon inflict on
those millions of unfortunate souls. "We are
making a unique revolution," said the leaders. "Is
there any other country that would dare abolish
money and markets the way we have? . . . We are a
good model for the whole world."[18]
Given their vision of their revolutionary rise to
power as a watershed event in human history the
dawn of a new era the Khmer Rouge strove to
eviscerate all records and memories of the
"ancient regime" that had preceded the revolution
and everything that contradicted its vision for a
new world order. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were
inspired by Maos infamous adage, "It is on a
blank page that the most beautiful poems are
written."[19] In accordance with that premise,
they set about the task of consigning to flames
the Cambodian peoples identity papers, documents
and certificates, and photograph albums.[20] Thus
all records of those pre-revolutionary days when
the nation was, in the view of Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge, mired in ignorance and class
oppression literally went up in smoke. The faces
of deceased loved ones that had once peered at
their survivors from the pages of photo albums
were no more. The Khmer Rouge had no patience for
the human emotions that made such keepsakes
valuable to those who held them.
The task of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was to do
to the spirits of their countrymen precisely what
they had done to their papers and portraits
obliterate them, because emotions, like faded
photographs, were of no use in furthering the
cause of the revolution. The leaders
systematically worked to dehumanize an entire
population, separating all Cambodians from any
sense of attachment to their own histories,
identities, and loving relationships. There was no
room in the soil of Pol Pots utopia for
individual personalities, desires, or dreams to
take root. Henceforth, every waking hour of every
living person was to be devoted entirely to the
service of the dictators Communist state.
A revolution of such self-declared magnitude
merited, in the eyes of Pol Pot and his leading
aides, the special honor of being identified as
the dawn of a new era, the starting point from
which all subsequent passage of time would be
measured. Thus like the Jacobins of the French
Revolution Pol Pot reordered the calendar
itself, designating the year 1975 as year "Zero,"
a hugely symbolic act embodying the idea that the
world was going to be created anew.[21]
Within hours after capturing Phnom Penh, which was
home to some 2 to 3 million people, the Khmer
Rouge forced the citys entire population to
relocate to various regions of the countryside and
begin working on massive agricultural projects as
slave laborers who were compelled to devote,
unquestioningly, every last drop of their sweat
and blood to the communal creation of Pol Pots
agrarian utopia. In addition to these people,
several hundred thousand residents of other cities
were also forced to relocate and become
agricultural slave laborers in service of the
Khmer Rouge. All told, approximately half of
Cambodias population was uprooted all at
once.[22] From the moment the decree requiring
their relocation was issued, the city-dwellers
were given just 24 hours to leave their homes.[23]
Bustling urban areas were transformed overnight
into eerie, deserted ghost towns. If anyone asked
why they were being forced to suddenly uproot
their lives and families, Khmer Rouge authorities
told them the lie that the United States was
planning to bomb their city.[24]
The rationale behind these forced relocations was
the Khmer Rouges concept of the Communist ideal:
a nation of simple, uneducated, hardworking
peasants toiling for the realization of their
infallible masters noble dream. Moving people out
of the cities served the purpose of separating
them from potentially "contaminating" outside
influences that might cause them to question their
loyalty to Pol Pot things such as books,
newspapers, television, and radio. The Khmer Rouge
viewed city-dwellers as the detestable antithesis
of the peasant ideal; because they had chosen city
life for themselves, they were presupposed to have
an allegiance to capitalism, which Pol Pot deemed
the root of all evil.[25] Thus by a single
sweeping decree, the Cambodian dictator
transformed them, en masse, into an army of
agricultural slave laborers serving his Communist
state.
In many thousands of cases, the forced relocations
caused family members to be separated from one
another when they were assigned to work in
different districts or regions of the country. As
the days and weeks thereafter passed, these people
became increasingly aware that they would likely
never see their loved ones again. The Khmer Rouge
forbade, on pain of death, any clandestine
correspondence between family members in separate
work camps; the human feelings of the slaves
mattered nothing to Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge;
the only concern was to squeeze out of them as
much labor as possible, until they died of
exhaustion or illness. And because in death they
could no longer be of service to the revolution,
their surviving loved ones were not permitted to
grieve their passing; tears and expressions of
mourning were strictly forbidden, again on pain of
death.[26] Every vestige of humanity and sentiment
was to be crushed out of existence; Cambodians had
only two options: turn their hearts to stone, or
die at the executioners hand.
In this sorrowful atmosphere, hopelessness,
depression, and spiritual surrender quickly became
the norm for Cambodias people, whose families,
freedoms, values, and aspirations had been
wrenched from them overnight without warning or
negotiation. As is told in The Black Book of
Communism, "Scenes of death and despair
abounded."[27] The early days of the Khmer Rouge
regime were marked by an enormous spike in the
incidence of suicides, especially by those who had
been separated from their families; the elderly,
who feared that they had become burdens and
liabilities to their relatives; and those people
who had previously been accustomed to living in
relative comfort.[28]
The Khmer Rouge had a purpose for separating
children from their parents; the goal was to train
the youngsters, from the earliest age, not to
develop their own personalities and talents but
rather to blindly follow orders not the orders
of their parents, but the orders of the
government. The objective was to turn them into
heartless beasts who saw nothing sacred or worthy
of honor in any human being, including themselves.
Such training was designed to groom them as the
Khmer Rouge soldiers of the future. As one
survivor describes, "They [children] were taken
very young, and the only thing they were taught
was discipline. They learned to obey orders,
without asking for any justification. They didnt
have any belief in religion or in tradition, only
in the orders of the Khmer Rouge. Thats why they
killed their own people, including babies, the way
you kill a mosquito."[29]
In some cases family members who had been
separated did eventually see each other again, but
weeks or months would generally intervene between
such contacts, leaving them always in a state of
fear, longing, and worry over the condition of
their loved ones. These emotions were exacerbated
by the fact that Pol Pot suspended all postal
service in the country; consequently, it often
happened that people did not learn of the deaths
of their loved ones until many months after those
deaths had occurred.[30]
In those instances where families did manage to
stay together, the Khmer Rouge did its best to
sabotage the relationships between husbands and
wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters.
They coerced children to track the political views
of their parents and to report any deviations from
official Party doctrine "for their own good."[31]
This was yet another way in which the Khmer Rouge
turned even the most loving human bonds into sick
admixtures of suspicion, fear, and betrayal.
Moreover, the Khmer Rouge placed severe
restrictions on sexuality (intercourse was a crime
punishable by death for workers in the labor
camps) and marriage (as innumerable couples were
split apart by being assigned to separate camps).
These restrictions, combined with the malnutrition
and disease that characterized daily life in Pol
Pots Cambodia, resulted in a 65 percent decline
in the countrys birth rate.[32]
The population relocations were fraught with
peril, in many cases requiring weeks of walking
with insufficient food and water and no access to
medical assistance. Many people died en route to
their appointed work stations. The infirmed were
simply permitted to die unattended and
uncomforted; they were considered "useless mouths"
that could only consume but could not produce, and
thus their deaths were welcomed by the Khmer
Rouge.[33] And as was noted previously, the Khmer
Rouge permitted no displays of grief or sadness
even for the death of a parent or a child. The
leaders of the revolution considered the death of
the weak or the ill to be something positive, a
type of Darwinian natural selection that weeded
out those who were incapable of contributing to
the building of Pol Pots utopia.
When the uprooted city people arrived en masse in
the rural villages, village life was thrown into
turmoil and chaos. Private property was abolished,
and all were forced to live on communal farms.
Massive discontent prevailed. Rather than attempt
to diminish hostilities, however, the Khmer Rouge
instead tried to incite class hatred between the
former city dwellers (referred to as the "New
People" in the villages) and the country folk. To
promote such antipathy, the Khmer Rouge depicted
the villagers as the "patriotic proletariat" whose
turf was being overrun by "lackeys of the
capitalist imperialists."[34] To further stoke the
flames of hate, Pol Pot instituted an apartheid
system that obliged the New People and the
villagers to live in two separate parts of town;
nor were they permitted to speak to one another or
interact in any way. An openly discriminatory
legal system was established, wherein only the
rural folk had any rights at all.[35]
The inter-group animosity that the Khmer Rouge
encouraged was part and parcel of a larger
political strategy. By keeping alive high levels
of contempt between the two populations, Pol Pot
could rest assured that no spontaneous, unified
revolts against his authority would ever
develop.[36] Frequently the New People, who had
been stripped of all their former possessions,
were offered an opportunity to "return to their
native village" or to work in a cooperative where
conditions were easier. Many jumped at such
chances, only to discover, to their horror, that
the offer was nothing more than a trap designed to
identify those people whose concern for their own
individual well-being had not yet been destroyed,
and who were thus in need of "re-education" by
means of still greater suffering and deprivation.
As Pin Yathay, the victim of one such ordeal,
explains: "This [offer of return to their native
village] was really nothing more than a ploy to
weed out people with individualist tendencies . .
. Anyone who fell into the trap showed that he had
not yet got rid of his old-fashioned tendencies
and needed to go thru a more severe regime of
retraining in a village where conditions were even
worse."[37]
The conditions in Cambodias overcrowded
"re-education" centers were horrific: inmates
received miniscule food rations and had no access
to medical care, wash water, or toilets. Their
ankles were chained to an iron bar fixed to the
floor, and their elbows were tied behind their
backs. The average life expectancy in such places
was about three months.[38] Notwithstanding these
horrors, Pol Pot boasted that his country was
entirely without a single officially designated
"prison." "We dont have prisons," he explained,
"and we dont even use the word prison. Bad
elements in our society are simply given
productive tasks to do."[39]
Pol Pot and his fellow Khmer Rouge leaders spoke
passionately of the blissful future that
presumably lay just ahead for Cambodias people.
In August 1976 Pol Pot unveiled the roadmap by
which he hoped to arrive at his utopia his Four
Year Plan whose objective was to dramatically
increase agricultural production and thereby raise
capital, through exports, for the further
cultivation of his dream. The short-term goal was
the industrialization of agriculture and the
development of diversified light industry, to be
followed shortly thereafter by the development of
heavy industry.[40] All this would be accomplished
by the toil of Pol Pots vast network of slaves.
Giving motivational talks to the very people he
had turned into destitute, dispirited creatures,
Pol Pot said in a long 1977 speech, "Because we
are the race that built Angkor [the capital of the
ancient Khmer empire], we can do anything."[41]
The specifics of the Four-Year Plan called for the
tripling of Cambodias rice production (without
any improvement in agricultural equipment or
methods). The people were put to work on the
daunting task of tripling the surface area of the
rice fields in the countrys northwest, a project
that involved clearing vast tracts of land and
massive irrigation projects. Pol Pots goal was to
have two and eventually three harvests per
year.[42] The average workday for his slaves was
11 to 12 hours, but sometimes went as long as 19
hours. In some places workers were given no days
of rest; every day was a workday; in other places,
one day in ten was a day of rest but that day
was filled with long, mandatory indoctrination
meetings the workers were obliged to attend.[43]
One survivor of Pol Pots regime recalls life in
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: "[T]here were no
prisons, no courts, no universities, no schools,
no money, no jobs, no books, no sports, no
pastimes . . . There was no spare moment in the
twenty-four-hour day. Daily life was divided up as
follows: twelve hours for physical labor, two
hours for eating, three hours for rest and
education, and seven hours for sleep. We all lived
in an enormous concentration camp. There was no
justice. The Angkar [Angkar Padevat, or
Revolutionary Organization, the semisecret cover
for the CPK] regulated every moment of our lives.
. . The Khmer Rouge . . . would compare people to
cattle: Watch this ox as it pulls the plow. It
eats when it is ordered to eat. If you let it
graze in the field, it will eat anything. If you
put it into another field where there isnt enough
grass, it will graze uncomplainingly. It is not
free, and it is constantly being watched. And when
you tell it to pull the plow, it pulls. It never
thinks about its wife or children."[44]
In short, people were turned into beasts of
burden; the idea that human life had any special
value distinguishing it from that of a goat or a
spider was dismissed as a sentimental absurdity.
"Losing you is not a loss," went one popular
adage, "and keeping you is no specific gain."[45]
People were forced to repress their personalities
entirely; their individual character traits were
deemed inconsequential. Their only duty was to
blindly obey the authority of Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge. In a manner reminiscent of Stalinist
Russia, people were forced to attend long rallies
during which they were obliged to look alert,
shout praise or disapproval on demand, and voice
public criticism of themselves or others.[46]
All traces of human creativity, ingenuity, and
individualism utterly vanished from the country.
Education, freedom of movement, trade, medicine,
religion, and writing disappeared. Strict dress
codes were put in place, requiring everyone to
wear black, long-sleeved shirts buttoned up to the
neck. The range of acceptable public behaviors
became exceedingly narrow: public displays of
affection were outlawed, as were arguments,
insults, complaints, and tears.[47] People were
drilled to become automatons bereft of all
emotion; such creatures, of course, would be well
suited to obey orders even those requiring them
to crush another mans skull.
The inhabitants of Pol Pots Cambodia were further
demoralized by the hunger from which they
constantly suffered. Since the 1920s, Cambodia had
regularly exported hundreds of thousands of tons
of rice each year while simultaneously feeding its
own population. But after the collective canteens
of Pol Pot became the norm in 1976, the average
Cambodians daily diet consisted of only thin rice
soup containing about for teaspoons of rice. To
supplement these meager rations, people foraged
for anything they might be able to swallow:
snails, frogs, rats, crabs, lizards, snakes, red
ants, spiders, mushrooms, and roots. Some were
reduced to stealing food from the troughs of farm
pigs. In many cases, these desperate, starving
wretches had no choice but to steal from one
another.[48]
Dehumanized by this miserable existence, the
Cambodian people underwent a profound loss of
moral values. Cheating, stealing, and lying became
survival mechanisms and drastically altered the
character of Cambodian culture.[49] Barbaric
practices like cannibalism became commonplace.
Cambodians lost entirely their traditional
Buddhist compassion.[50] The Black Book of
Communism recounts an incident where one
individual demonstrated empathy for another who
was suffering greatly. He was harshly reproved by
a Khmer Rouge soldier, who told him: "You dont
have a duty to help these people. On the contrary,
that proves you still have pity and feelings of
friendship. You must renounce such sentiments and
wipe all individualism from your mind." [51]
The peoples hunger served the political ends of
Pol Pot; the less they ate, the more their bodies
wasted away; this in turn diminished the amount of
food their bodies could store, thereby diminishing
the possibility that they might try to run
away.[52] Still, many did try to escape. So
profound was their despair, that tens of thousands
of refugees braved terrible dangers, often
wandering for weeks through deep and perilous
jungles in search of freedom, knowing that if they
were captured they would be instantly put to
death.[53]
In this land of want and starvation, Pol Pot
presented his grand agricultural schemes as
precisely what would ultimately lift the people
out of their misery. But it was not to be. In
practice, Pol Pots agricultural projects proved
to be poorly planned, inadequately coordinated,
and in many cases colossal failures. One reason
for this was the Khmer Rouges intransigent
rejection of technology and technicians. The
partys leaders, convinced of their own
omniscience, generally dismissed the notion that
they needed anyone to advise them in the science
of building dikes, dams, and canals.[54] "To build
dams," said the Khmer Rouge, "all you need is
political education."[55] With this mindset, the
leaders dictated unchangeable and in many cases
nonsensical orders, resulting in the
construction of inadequate dams and canals that
were washed away by floods which sometimes
engulfed hundreds of workers at a time. Other
projects resulted in water flowing in the wrong
direction or ponds silting up. Hydraulic engineers
in the workforce who could foresee these disasters
were obligated to remain silent, lest their
warnings be perceived as evidence that they were
questioning the authority and wisdom of the
Angkar;[56] this would only gain them a round of
barbaric torture, or possibly execution.
Notwithstanding the many setbacks and tragedies,
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge stubbornly refused to
acknowledge any need for education or specialized
knowledge to guide their development projects.
Because life was so cheap in their eyes, they were
quite willing to squander the toil, the health,
and even the lives of millions of people whom they
considered utterly expendable, no more
intrinsically valuable than oxen. "We dont need
the technology of the capitalists," said one Khmer
Rouge leader defiantly. ". . . . Under our new
system, we dont need to send our children to
school. Our school is the farm. We will write by
plowing. We dont need to give examinations or
award certificates. Knowing how to farm and how to
dig canals those are our certificates. We dont
need doctors any more. They are not necessary. If
someone needs to have their intestines removed, I
will do it [he made the motion of carving an
imaginary knife against his stomach]. We dont
need any of the capitalist professions! We dont
need doctors or engineers! We dont need
professors telling us what to do. They were all
corrupted. We just need people to work hard on the
farm!"[57]
There were also tragic consequences resulting from
the massive, forced population movements of the
Cambodian people to regions where they were put to
work on Pol Pots land-clearing and irrigation
projects. With so many people displaced from their
homes, fully 80 percent of Cambodias
already-existing farmland became depopulated and
went untended. Meanwhile, starving, underfed
workers struggled to be productive on the projects
they had been assigned. As one eyewitness
describes: "The spectacle was frightening:
indescribable human misery, total disorganization,
and appalling waste."[58]
As Cambodian life and culture collapsed under the
weight of Pol Pots disastrous policies, a key
tactic of the Khmer Rouge was to keep people
ignorant of all ideas contrary to its own dogmas.
Consequently, education was all but eliminated
throughout the country. In those locales where
schooling still existed, it amounted to nothing
more than an hour per day devoted to teaching
revolutionary songs to young children (ages 5 to
9); the instructors were frequently barely
literate themselves.[59] Literacy was immaterial
to the Khmer Rouge; in fact, it was seen as
something negative. Pol Pot and his henchmen
preferred to lord over a population of
simple-minded folk who had never been taught to
question anything; who had never been exposed to
ideas about freedom or human dignity. The only
knowledge the Khmer Rouge countenanced was of a
practical, rather than a scholarly or
philosophical, nature: "[O]ur children in the
rural zones . . . know a calm cow from a nervous
one. They can stand both ways on a buffalo. They
are masters of the herd. . . . They know all the
different varieties of rice like the back of their
hands. . ."[60]
Foreign influences in general were cast out of the
country by the Khmer Rouge. All publications
containing "imperialist writing" French or
English were destroyed. Capitalism was vilified
as an evil system whose every last vestige needed
to be obliterated. "No more capitalistic books
now," was a popular slogan spoken by Khmer Rouge
soldiers to Cambodian children. ". . . Why do you
have foreign books? Are you CIA? No more foreign
books under the Angkar."[61]
Virtually all Cambodians who had received even
moderate levels of formal education prior to the
revolution, such as civil servants and
intellectuals, were eliminated in stages in a
series of purges. Each successive purge called for
the slaughter of those further down the
hierarchy.[62] Among those specifically targeted
were people who wore eyeglasses, which were
symbols of reading and learning; Pol Pot perceived
such individuals as threats because they were
carriers of the ideas of the pre-revolutionary
culture. As one Khmer Rouge leader said in 1975,
"We have some people among us who still wear
eyeglasses. And why do they use eyeglasses? Cant
they see me? If I move to slap your face and you
flinch, then you see well enough. People wear them
to be handsome in the capitalist style. They wear
them to be vain. We dont need people like that
any more."[63] In time, educated people were
virtually nonexistent in Cambodia.
While Pol Pot was carrying out his genocide,
numerous American leftists functioned as his
apologists. Notable among these was the
American-hating MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who
viewed Pol Pot as a revolutionary hero. When news
of the "killing fields" became increasingly
publicized, Chomskys faith in Pol Pot could not
be shaken. He initially tried to minimize the
magnitude of Pol Pots atrocities (saying that he
had killed only "a few thousand people at
most").[64] He suggested that the forced expulsion
of the population from Phnom Penh was most likely
necessitated by the failure of the 1976 rice crop.
Wrote Chomsky, "the evacuation of Phnom Penh,
widely denounced at the time and since for its
undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many
lives."[65] In a 1977 article in The Nation,
Chomsky attacked those witnesses and writers who
were shedding ever-brighter rays of light on Pol
Pots holocaust; he accused them of trying to
spread anti-communist propaganda. In 1980, when it
was indisputable that a huge proportion of
Cambodias population had died at the hands of the
Khmer Rouge, Chomsky again blamed an unfortunate
failure of the rice crop rather than systematic
genocide. He also quibbled about the number of
dead, saying that most estimates were inflated,
and that the actual number could not have exceeded
a million. Finally, he concluded that whatever had
in fact occurred in Cambodia, the U.S. was to
blame.[66]
Members of the middle class were also targets of
Pol Pots purges, as were all people with any
degree of social standing. In addition, Pol Pot
ordered the execution of all members of the Lon
Nol government (including thousands of politicians
and bureaucrats alike), and all those suspected of
being loyal to the Sihanouk regime. In these
executions, which were generally preceded by
torture, there were never any trials or clear
charges brought. The aim was to crush anyone with
an independent spirit, with an educated mind, with
an ethical or religious value system, and with any
quality that might threaten Pol Pots preeminence.
Pol Pots paranoia about suspected enemies was
reminiscent of Stalins. All that was required for
an arrest was three allegations that a suspect was
a "CIA agent."[67] To satisfy their bosses,
interrogators extorted confessions from such
people by any means necessary; in one particular
district, fully 40,000 of the 70,000 inhabitants
were put to death as "traitors collaborating with
the CIA."[68]
The Khmer Rouge also exterminated large
proportions of various ethnic minority groups,
including about half of the 400,000 Chinese, and
an even higher percentage of the Vietnamese who
had stayed in Cambodia after 1975 (lowball
estimates of the death rates for both groups hover
around 37 to 38 percent).[69] After mid-1976, all
Vietnamese people in Cambodia were forbidden to
leave the country. An April 1977 directive
required that all Vietnamese be arrested and
turned over to security forces. Also to be
arrested were their friends and anyone who spoke
Vietnamese.[70]
Among the particularly notable victims of Pol
Pots wrath were the Cham, the largest indigenous
minority in Cambodia, who numbered some 250,000 in
1970. They were Muslims who made their living
mostly as farmers and fishermen. In 1975 the Khmer
Rouge, demanding that the Cham take new names that
resembled Khmer names, decreed: "The Cham
mentality is abolished forthwith. Anyone who does
not conform to these orders will be punished
accordingly."[71] Thereafter, merely speaking the
Cham language was an offense punishable by
death.[72] After mid-1978, the Khmer Rouge began
systematically exterminating Cham communities.[73]
By the end of Pol Pots regime, 40 to 50 percent
of all Cham in Cambodia had perished.[74]
Contemptuous of religion in general, Pol Pot and
the Khmer Rouge targeted people of faith
aggressively. During Pol Pots reign, more than 48
percent of Cambodian Catholics disappeared;[75]
the number of monks living in the country dwindled
from approximately 60,000 to 1,000.[76] The
cathedral in Phnom Penh was razed to the ground.
Nor were Catholics the only religious group whose
ranks were decimated. Muslim clerics were put to
death as well. Mosques were razed or converted
into buildings dedicated to other purposes;
prayers were banned; and Korans were burned.
Muslims were often forced to choose between
raising pigs and eating pork [acts forbidden by
their traditions], or being killed.[77]
Notably, Pol Pot chose not to cultivate, for his
own self-aggrandizement, a cult of personality
like that of Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Instead
knowing that phantoms in the dark may inspire
greater fear than those revealed in the light of
day he deliberately sought to terrorize the
population by making himself mysterious. His
fearsome presence loomed everywhere, but few had
ever seen his face. He never once appeared in
public until after the 1976 "elections." He
authorized no official portraits or statues made
in his likeness; he authorized no official
biography; he published no compendium of his
thoughts or philosophy; and few photos of him
existed anywhere.[78] To further create an
atmosphere of terror, Pol Pot ordered landmines to
be set around the countryside; these were, like
him, invisible but deadly. Pol Pot referred to
landmines as his "perfect soldiers" who
discouraged attempted escapes.[79]
Under Pol Pot, Cambodians lives always hung by
the barest thread; people were at all times just a
single minor mistake or accident away from the
torture chamber or the executioners rifle.
Between 1975 and 1979, hundreds of thousands of
Cambodians were executed by Khmer Rouge henchman.
A popular Khmer Rouge slogan was, "All we need to
build our country is a million good
revolutionaries. No more than that. And we would
rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to
live."[80] Among the offenses punishable by death
in the work camps were: not working hard enough,
wearing jewelry, stealing food, drinking an
alcoholic beverage, making a secret visit to a
family member in another camp, having sexual
relations, grieving over dead relatives, losing or
striking a cow, failing to control an ox, plowing
a crooked furrow, failing to complete ones
assigned work, making a negative comment or a joke
about the regime, complaining about conditions,
saying that one was hungry, taking part in
religious trance ceremonies, and expressing
religious beliefs generally. Even exhibiting
emotional closeness to ones family members was a
serious transgression; though the first offense
was generally not grounds for execution, the
second often was.[81]
But specified offenses were by no means
prerequisites for execution. Khmer Rouge guards
murdered many Cambodians merely because they
could. In some cases, people were killed to make
fertilizer; their corpses were buried in mass
graves situated near crop fields.[82]
Records from the Tuol Sleng interrogation center
in Phnom Penh indicate that from 1975-1978, some
14,499 Cambodians were tortured and executed
there; only seven survived the interrogation
process.[83] At least twenty other such camps
operated in the country during the Khmer Rouge
reign of terror. In each of the twenty provinces
that have been investigated to date, more than
1,000 mass burial grounds have been found.[84]
The most popular method by which the Khmer Rouge
put people to death was by blows to the head,
which scholars say accounted for about 53 percent
of all executions; gunshots accounted for another
29 percent; 6 percent were hanged or asphyxiated;
and 5 percent had their throats slit. Another 2
percent were executed publicly; their deaths were
generally extremely gruesome so as to serve as a
warning to onlookers; they were often buried up to
their chest in a ditch filed with firebrands, or
their heads were doused with gasoline and set
ablaze.[85]
But even such awful forms of execution did not
mark the end of Pol Pots complete control over
the fate of every Cambodian. His assault on his
countrymens traditional values followed them even
beyond the grave. In Cambodia, longstanding custom
called for the cremation of the remains of the
dead; survivors were comforted by their possession
of even a few ashes of their departed loved ones.
But Pol Pot refused to show respect for such
"primitive" practices. He banned cremations and
instituted, in their stead, simple, unceremonious
burials. In Cambodians traditional belief system,
consigning the body of a loved one in the earth
without traditional rites was not only
disrespectful, but also compromised the
possibility of the dead persons
reincarnation.[86] Such things counted for nothing
in Pol Pots Cambodia, where the dead were
considered useless cowards who, by dying, had
robbed the Angkar of manpower.[87] As a logical
extension of this outlook, Pol Pot forbade people
to even speak of the dead. The very word "death"
became taboo; people were required instead to
refer to a dead person as "a body that has
disappeared."[88]
The exact extent of the genocide wrought by Pol
Pot and the Khmer Rouge has defied calculation.
1.2 million dead is the low estimate, from U.S.
officials; the Vietnamese-sponsored government,
the PRK (Peoples Republic of Kampuchea), claimed
3 million; Amnesty International claims 1.4
million, and the Yale Genocide Project claims that
the final tally was 1.7 million. Whatever the
precise figure may be, it is clear that between
one-seventh and one-fourth of Cambodias
population was exterminated by Pol Pot.[89]
In 1978 the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and
quickly overthrew the Khmer Rouge, causing Pol Pot
to flee into Thailand. The following year, a
peoples tribunal in Phnom Penh sentenced Pol Pot
to death for genocide.[90] For the next 18 years,
Pol Pot maintained an army on the Thai-Cambodian
border; he yielded military command of the Khmer
Rouge to his brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, in 1985.
The Vietnamese-backed government was overthrown in
1989. Refusing to recognize the new coalition
government that emerged in 1993, Pol Pot continued
to order arrests, purges, and murders within the
ranks of the Khmer Rouge. His influence was
steadily eroding, however. In 1997 Khmer Rouge
leader Ta Mok had Pol Pot arrested for a
particular series of murders he had ordered. Pol
Pot died in April 1998, shortly after learning
that he was to be handed over to the Americans for
trial. In an interview given shortly before his
death, Pol Pot claimed that he had never intended
to kill so many people; that the calamities
brought about by his regime were the result of his
inexperience in government and his inability to
rein in the zealous movement that he had started;
and that all his actions had been "[f]or the love
of the nation and the people."[91]
Today millions of Cambodians bear deep physical
and mental scars from the reign of Pol Pot. A host
of social evils such as violent crime and
corruption plague present-day Cambodia at rates
that are exceedingly high for a Southeast Asian
country. Cambodian refugees now living abroad are
frequently haunted by nightmares and suffer from
the highest rate of depression of any Indochinese
group.[92]
It should be noted that the atrocities of Pol Pot
were not at all unique among Communist
revolutions. His extermination campaign had many
parallels with those of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao,
who between them may have killed 100 million
people who stood between them and the progressive
future. In each case, there was the systematic
extermination of the class enemy as they sought to
wipe clean the slate of the past and usher in the
dawn of the new; in each case there was the
creation of vast slave networks and concentration
camps; the widespread use of torture; the
implementation of crackpot economic theories
inspired by Marx, the paranoid perception that
enemies of the regime lurked everywhere; the
determination to stamp out every last dissident,
both real and imagined, the designation of
particular classes as being "enemies of the
people," unworthy of the most rudimentary human
rights; the complete subjugation of the
individual; and an omnipotent state that sought to
control every imaginable aspect of peoples lives;
and the banishment of all spiritual rites and
beliefs, effectively making the dictator the only
"deity." In short, the abominations of Pol Pot
were not an aberration, but a culmination of the
Communist fantasy, the fulfillment of long,
grotesque tradition of the movement for "social
justice."
--
Jim
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Western_Nationalist
Union Against Multi-culty
"Abolish Multi-Culty and String Up The Traitors!"