Pol Pot: A Despot Who Destroyed His Country
He slaughtered millions of his fellow countrypeople
Pol Pot spent just four years on the world stage, as the shadowy leader of Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia) after the overthrow of President Lon Nol in 1975.
Yet in that short period he virtually destroyed a nation — all for the sake of an unworkable creed that he imposed unyieldingly on a starving and terrorized population. Under his rule, a once-beautiful country became known as “The Land of the Walking Dead.”
Little is known of Pol Pot’s background, and what is known could easily have been the invention of his propaganda machine. It is said that he was brought up in a peasant community in Cambodia’s Kampong Thom province and was educated at a Buddhist temple where, for two years, he was a monk. In the 1950s he won a scholarship to study electronics in Paris where, like so many other students at the time, he found it fashionable to espouse left-wing causes.
Also in Paris in the 1950s was another left-wing Cambodian student, Khieu Samphan, who used his political science courses to formulate an extraordinary philosophy of rural revolution. His theory was that to rid itself of the vestiges of colonial rule and to avoid capitalist exploitation, Cambodia must regress to a peasant economy without towns, without…
