Summary of Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
Overview
I’ve decided to start a reading project on genocides and violent totalitarian dictators. Most education about these topics in the US is focused around Nazi Germany, or occasionally the Soviet Union under Stalin. 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.
First 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. It’s a particularly strange case of different cultural, political, and historic influences converging in a disastrous way. 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. 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.
This post is based on the book Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare Continue reading
