![]() ![]() Cambodia held a cultural memory of greatness that hearkened back to the 12th century, when the lost kingdom of Angkor Wat was the jewel of southeast Asian civilization. The hereditary monarch, King Sihanouk, ruled in name only. BackgroundĬambodia entered the post-WW2 era chafing under a century of French colonialism. The book is exhaustively detailed and very well-written I highly recommend it if you want to learn more. This post is based on the book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short. While there were certainly elements of this – as I’ll discuss – Pol Pot’s regime was more about brutal slavery and vicious punishment of any deviance, regardless of the person. The term “genocide” has been controversial with reference to the Khmer Rouge regime: while they systematically murdered or starved somewhere between 1.7 and 2.3 million people, for the most part the killings didn’t target a specific racial, ethnic, or religious group. It’s a particularly strange case of different cultural, political, and historic influences converging in a disastrous way. While I’d like to come back to those events if I can endure the topic that long, I’m starting with non-Western events.įirst up is Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, partly because I grew up in the 1980s around a lot of first or second-generation Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants, but never knew much about the politics behind their flight from Southeast Asia. Most education about these topics in the US is focused around Nazi Germany, or occasionally the Soviet Union under Stalin. ![]() I’ve decided to start a reading project on genocides and violent totalitarian dictators. ![]()
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