Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

Pol Pot (a title rather than a name meaning brother number one) has the reputation of commiting genocide against his own people. After his overthrow museums were opened celebrating his infamy. This book gives his history against that of Cambodia and the region as a whole. The author Short makes the case that Pol Pot (real name Saloth Sar) rather than trying to commit genocide against his people introduced a slave state and the deaths were a side product. Pol Pot was a person of medicore talents. He repeatedly failed his teacher training exams and came to run what became the Cambodian Communist Party because of the unexpected deaths of those above him. His organisation was a small one which was run as a puppet organisation by the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese had a de-facto agreement with Shinouk the head of state of Cambodia that they could occupy parts of the eastern provinces of Cambodia so that they could supply their forces fighting in what was South Vietnam. For this freedom of movement the Vietnamese did not try to oust Shinouk. Nixon the US president widened the war by bombing eastern Cambodia and then later invading it. The aim was to restrict the movement of arms and supplies to the Vietnamese forces fighting in the south and to prop up the American backed government. In addition the US supported a coup to oust Shinouk and he was replaced by Lon Nol who with US support started a campaing against the Vietnamese forces in Cambodia. The initial bombings and invasion by the American backed South Vietnamese forced the communist forces deep into Cambodia. The Vietnamese also had to fight against the attacks of Lon Nol. The bombings led to plentiful recruits for the Cambodian Communists and the North Vietnamese armed them to safeguard their flank. Lon Nol was an incompetent leader and the Cambodian communists with huge numbers of recruits armed by the Vietnamese were able to achieve power. Nothing in achieving power suggested that Pol Pot had any real ability. Once in power he started to show how stupid and how brutal he was. His first move was to empty the cities. Short suggests that this stupid move costs the deaths of around 20,000. This figure includes the killing of what could be seen as class enemies. Army officers, government officials. Whilst Pol Pot faced a real problem, Phnompen had been swelled by refugees and it would have been difficult to feed them his solution was moronic and the product of a simple ideology. He wanted everyone to become peasants. Short shows that aid would have been available and closing down the cities of Cambodia was simply lunacy. However lunacy followed lunacy. Money was abolished and a barter economy was put in place. All citizens were forced to work on the land and to produce rice. As there was no money this policy was backed up by brutality. If anyone disagreed they were killed. Very large numers of people died as a result. In his second year in power Pol Pot decided to impr

It may be impossible to explain why Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge government caused the deaths of more than one million -- possibly two million --Cambodians during their 4 year rule (1975-1979) The author, Philip Short, made an effort to do so in this book. I didn't find his theory -- that the mass-murder was consistent with Khmer culture and history -- very persuasive, but I don't have a better one to offer in its place. Perhaps, insane outbreaks are hot-wired in the human psyche to occur now and then -- in the same way that lemmings commit mass suicide by running over cliffs. The Khmer Rouge was a movement that ran amok. "Pol Pot" is a thorough, readable, and well-researched account of Cambodian politics from about 1950 until the death of Pol Pot in 1998. The writer avoids polemics and gave me a sense of confidence that he is presenting the ghastly story of Pol Pot and Cambodia as objectively as possible. Short's account may be too dispassionate for many people as he focuses on Khmer Rouge philosophies and programs, rather than recounting endless atrocity stories. Those stories are readily available elsewhere. In this book, I appreciated the author's search for the root causes of the Khmer Rouge's inhumanity. The most interesting part of the book to me was the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975 and the subsequent forced evacuation of that city and other Cambodian cities by the Khmer Rouge. Short has a detailed account of that event, the philosphy behind it and the human consequences. Pol Pot himself seems an unremarkable person. It is fitting that after he died his body was burned on a funeral pyre comprised of old tires and broken furniture. Evil is banal. Smallchief

Philip Short refers to his book on Mao in his preface to "Pol Pot:Anatomy to a Massacre" and, while acknowledging Mao's extraordinary beastliness (the man was probably responsible for over 50 million deaths) he highlights Mao's pretentions to greatness not unlike Napoleon's or Alexander's. That is not the case with Pol Pot. He did not fight an honorable war against a brutal invader, like Mao did with the Japanese. Instead, he led to his Cambodia's occupation by the hated Vietnamese, who had been his paymasters for a long time. Pol Pot did not succeed in brutally modernizing his country's industry, like Stalin in the Soviet Union or Mao in China. Instead, he pulled it right back into the stone age. Like his worst predecessors in genocide, he never learned from his mistakes. Instead, he kept his habit of ordering executions, a habit which eventually led to his imprisonment by his surviving henchmen (who feared for their lives) and some sort of trial. And his corpse was not preserved like Mao's or Lenin's. Instead, it was burnt with old tires and mattresses. Short's book would have been very short (and uninteresting) indeed if he had confined himself to Pol Pot. Instead, he wrote a veritable tableau of Cambodian history from WWII to our days. 1950s Cambodia comes across as a Ruritarian kingdom ruled by the beguiling Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk is one of history's true survivors (the man is still around!). One would need to look to Mitterrand or Fidel Castro for equivalent types who were able to survive and even thrive in impossible conditions, turning their alliances as they saw fit with no sense of shame. Sihanouk is in a fact a much more attractive character than Pol Pot, who is opaque, a mere cypher in some ways. Saloth Sar, who would later become Pol Pot, came from what might be regarded as the upper middle class (his sister was a concubine to a Cambodian king- not Norodom), although his family wasn't rich. He was a mediocre student, and in many ways he would be a mediocrity all his life. His strength was his inscrutability. He kept a constant Buddha-like smile, and he never lifted his voice even when ordering the execution of close associates. The Cambodian Communist Party (later known as the Khmer Rouges) was fostered by Vietnamese logistical support, although Pol Pot's career was a long attempt to break free of the control of this "fraternal" party. The Communists' goals were fostered by the incompetent intervention of greater powers, some colonial, like France, some regional like Thailand and Vietnam, some global, like the US, the Soviet Union and China. Virtually all of them (most without realizing it) did their utmost to help Pol Pot reach power and wreck Cambodia. Particularly obtuse was American intervention in helping strongman Lon Nol in overthrowing Sihanouk. This threw the mercurial Sihanouk into Chinese hands and then turned him into Pol Pot's associate, helping to legitimize Khmer Rouge presence among royalis

I approach this review with a background of five years of volunteer work in Cambodia (1995-2000) and marriage into a Khmer family. This is the best book I have yet read on the entire history of the Khmer Rouge years. It is more (fortunately) than a biography of Pol Pot -- it is just as much a history of Cambodia and and examination of its peoples' character, and shorter biographies of other prominent Khmer figures, especially King Sihanouk. The author scrupulously avoids the oversimplifications and falso moralizing of most books about Cambodia -- the ones that say either (1) the Khmer Rouge were entirely America's fault, (2) entirely Nixon's fault, or (3) entirely Kissinger's fault -- choose one. He carefully explores, among other things, American policy toward and conduct in Cambodia in the period leading up to 1975 in a thorough and neutral manner, with interesting suggestions on the significance of this and many other topics. In addition, the author's style is fluid and transparent, and he has done his homework. This is the best book about Cambodia I have ever read, and I have read all the ones I have been able to lay my hands on. Buy it even if you think you have no interest in the subject, or know it too well already -- you will be pleasantly surprised and will enjoy the book immensely.

Having travelled throughout Cambodia this past fall I visited many sites that involved Pol Pot from the Killing Fields, S-21, etc. I found it interesting to learn more about this man and what made him seem so sane to many even though he was so insane as well as inhumane. This book is very very detailed, and not a short read. It is very difficult to follow due to the Khmer names and some words, however stick with it and you will be rewarded with an indepth look at how this man became what he was. I would recommend this to anyone interested in SE Asia history since it deals with so much that occured in this region at many different periods of time.