The Mass Executions Under Pol Pot’s Regime

The 20th century was a time of terrible bloodshed and extreme ideas. Millions of people died in Poland under Nazi rule, in Soviet Russia’s gulags, and all over China during Mao Dong’s Great Leap Forward. But it could be said that none of these events quite matched Paul Pot’s Cambodia in terms of self-destructive crazy.

 On April 17th, 1975, Paul Pot and the Cimeair Rouge rule overthrew General Lon Null’s military government. For the next four years, Pot tried to change the country to fit his extreme communist ideas, which were a mix of Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, and Mauism. People everywhere in Cambodia were killed in a very violent campaign, not just political enemies and people who were seen as others.

 This made the Cambodian genocide stand out. It was also different from Mao’s crazy great leap forward which killed millions of people from 1958 to 1962 through famine. The Camair Rouge killed a lot of their own people. So when the Vietnamese army overthrew the government in 1979, they came up with a new grim term for it, autogenocide.

The following video includes descriptions of torture and genocide. Paulot was secretive and enigmatic. Paulpot was born Salath Sar on May 19th, 1925, but not many people knew this while he was in power because the tyrant was determined to hide who he was. Philip Short’s book Paul Pot: The History of a Nightmare says that Pot told a friend, “If you keep quiet, half the battle is already won.

” In the 1960s and 1970s, Sar was a rebel who went by many names, including Puke, 87, Grand Uncle, and first brother. This made both Cambodians and people from other countries, so confused that Salothar was just one of many famous patriotic thinkers. In 1971, just four years before the Camair Rouge took power, people in Cambodia were told who Sar was in 1976.

But as David Chandler wrote in Paulpot, brother number one, a political biography of Paul Pot, the tyrant didn’t tell them anything else besides his name, Paul Pot. We still didn’t know who Paul Pot was, Long said. We didn’t know what kind of a man he was. We didn’t know what he looked like. Not even Pot’s brothers knew who he was.

 They found out when they saw a picture of Pot in the middle of 1978. During his time in hiding in the Cambodian wilderness, Pot’s personality became clear, but people were still not sure how old he was until he died. Journalists and historians used to look at records from the French colony that said Pot was born on May 25th, 1928.

But Pot and his siblings claimed he was three years older, which led Chandler and other historians to change the historical record. His communist posturing belied a privileged upbringing. Paul Pot presented himself as a modest communist hero, but the reality was far more bourgeois. He was born into a farming family, although his father, Penn Saloth, was wealthy enough thanks to his sizable and profitable riceand holdings, to afford a home with roof tiles rather than the thatched, perishable construction known to most

Cambodians at the time. The family also had connections to the royal palace in Penom Pen, especially Pot’s cousin Meek, who had a son with Prince Sisawath Monivong, and remained a palace fixture until the 1970s. Years later, when Salothsar had become Pulp Pot, this millu of privilege was buried under communist mythologizing at home and abroad.

 According to Ppot, brother number one, a political biography of Polepot. North Korea was the first country to broadcast a polepot narrative to the outside world and it was replete with falsehoods and disingenuous omissions. It presented the Cambodian leader as a simple farm worker who developed revolutionary zeal as a college student, neglecting to mention that the farm was familyowned and the education was received not in provincial Cambodia but in the heart of Imperial Paris.

He was amiable and well-liked. Paul Pot was a teacher in phenom pen in the 1950s. His students remembered him as an honest and friendly person who could communicate well. One friend even said, “I saw immediately that I could become his friend for life.” Pulpot brother number one, a political biography of Pulpot.

 Pot had this charm the whole time he was ruler and even people who left his party didn’t blame him for their loss of faith. Some pictures of Pot with a big toothy smile can give you an idea of how he behaved, like the ones where he is dressed up in a uniform and looking like the perfect Camair citizen via Associated Press.

 This was just propaganda, but scholars have been wondering for decades about Pot’s general friendliness. Was the tyrant genuinely kind, or did he use kindness to weaken people and trick them? These kinds of questions make people wonder even more about those four terrible years. In other words, did Pot really believe in his ideas? Or was he just a bitter egotist who didn’t care about other people’s pain? In his attempt to understand this aspect of Pot, David Chandler wrote, “It has been impossible for me to penetrate what may be a

facade, a series of masks, or a chosen repertoire of skills.” and stated that even after Pot gave a rare two-hour interview to journalist Nate Thea, the dictator remained an inscrable figure. He was inspired by Joseph Stalin. Ppot got ideas from Joseph Stalin who was one of the worst dictators of the 20th century.

 Salar was influenced by him when he was young and studied in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This made him want to join Marxist groups and maybe even the French Communist Party. Pot met Yangsari and Insan through Marxist socializing. Yangsari and Inskan were both Cambodian and devoted Stalinists who had pictures of the tyrant on their walls.

 According to Polepot, the history of a nightmare. Many extreme books like The Communist Manifesto and Vladimir Lenin’s ABC of Communism were read together. But Stalin’s The History of Communism was the most important in shaping Pot’s ideas. It didn’t seem to matter that Stalin had written the book during the Great Terror, a sweeping political purge that killed an estimated 750,000 people.

 In fact, given what Pot and his men would turn into, they likely viewed the great terror as an appropriate response to those Stalin termed the doubters, opportunists, capitulationists, and traitors within the leading headquarters of the working class. Saloths Sar followed the Soviet dictator in adopting a moniker, Stalin, derived from the Russian word for steelstall, was born yashvilli.

Sar’s choice of Paul Pot was much less macho and arandizing for the name was typical of the Cambodian agrarian class according to Paul Pot brother number one a political biography of Polepot. The Cimeair Rouge announced year zero. Paul Pot came back to Cambodia in 1953 after going to school in Paris.

 He was determined to turn his country into a Marxist Leninist utopia and he was ready to take his time doing it. Pot worked as a teacher for a few years while also organizing with the Camair People’s Revolutionary Party, KPRP. But this balance fell apart in 1963 when Pot and his friends were forced by the government to hide in the woods of northern Cambodia.

 This is where the Cime Rouge became a real military power. They got stronger and more control over northern Cambodia during an uprising in 1968. But it wasn’t until General Lon Nol’s coup d’etar in March 1970 that they quickly gained more land. The fighting between Lon Nol’s forces and the Kair Rouge lasted more than 5 years.

It was helped by things left over from the Vietnam War, like a huge US bombing campaign over Japan during World War II. Around January 1975, when the United States was pulling out of Southeast Asia for good, the Cimeair Rouge began their attack on Phenom Pen. After 3 months of constant gunfire, the city and country fell on April 17th.

 Now the Camair Rouge could carry out their plan for year zero, which was to erase Cambodia’s past, culture, and all modern infrastructure. John Biler said in 1979 that things like money, medicine, school, church, and even family and friends were not allowed. In Cambodia, under Paul Pot, there was nothing to do but work until you died.

Cambodian towns and cities were forcibly evacuated. Once Phenom Pen was safe, the Cime Rouge didn’t waste any time killing everyone who lived there. The exodus happened to French author Francois Poncho and he wrote about it in the scary book Cambodia Year Zero. He saw soldiers going doortodoor and telling people to leave because the US Air Force was about to attack. Go 10 or 12 m away.

 The unformed men would say, “Don’t take much with you. Don’t bother to lock up. We’ll take care of everything until you get back.” There was no US strike and there was no way to go back. The Cime Rouge were able to get all 2 million people out of the city in just 72 hours. They sent huge crowds of people to live in simple huts spread out across Cambodia’s central plane.

 It was unbearably hard to live in the fields, and there were a lot of new rules, some of which were strange and painful. One thing that workers couldn’t do was say the word sleep. They could only rest instead. It’s likely that to sleep was seen as lazy, self-indulgent, and against the change. But the rationing of marriage was much worse than oppressive semantics.

Husbands and wives could only see each other once a month, which was a compromise made because of the need to have children. The ensuing genocide killed 1.5 to 2 million people. When a lot of people left on April 17th, 1975, violence happened for no reason. In Cambodia, year zero, Franco Poncho wrote about soldiers brandishing assault rifles and stealing anything they could find, like watches, motorcycles, and weirdly enough, a ballpoint pen, which meant Poncho was almost killed.

 This kind of greed was just the beginning of the cruelty that would rule Cambodian life for the next four years. The first people to be killed were public servants. After a little more than a month, on May 20th, the Cime Rouge turned their attention to the people. People who were thought to be not conforming were put to death.

 Not conforming could mean speaking a different language or even having glasses because the Cime Rouge thought these things were intellectual. Buddhist teachers, charm Muslims, and people from Thailand, China, and Vietnam were also targeted. But while the Camair Rouge was especially hostile toward these groups, the Cambodian genocide was more of a general killing spree.

 If you fit the Cimeair Rouge’s vague ideas of disobedience, you were killed. Our world in data shows that between 1975 and 1976, Cambodians could expect to live only 12 years instead of 39.8 years. This number went up to 28.9 years in 1977, but the Camair Rouge kept killing people in what writer Dith Pan called the killing fields, as described in Sydney Shanberg’s book, The Death and Life of Dith Pan.

 Around two million people, mostly professionals and technicians, were killed when Vietnamese troops overthrew the government in January 1979. Hot oversaw the notorious S21 detention center. A lot of the Camair Rouge’s worst crimes happened in security prison 21, S21, which used to be a high school, but was now used as a torture cell.

 Only seven of the 20,000 people who were held at S21 made it out alive. Someone named Mr. Peg told director John Pilgar that he was hit over the head with a piece of wood about 50 times and then had his hand clamped in a vice, his fingernails cut off and alcohol poured all over it. In a place where electrocution and disembowelment were routine, this kind of sadism was not noticed.

 The brutality of S21 was different from the dictatorship in China and Vietnam because those groups saw violence as a necessary evil. But the Camar Rouge absolutely loved it. Finally, Pulpot mixed the bad economic management of Mao’s great leap forward with the cruel treatment of animals during the Spanish Inquisition.

 The Camair Rouge’s national anthem which exalts bright red blood covers the towns and plains of Kampuchea and blood changes into unrelenting hatred and resolute struggle which frees us from slavery. He was an ally of China and North Korea. As Cambodia fell further into chaos, Paul Pot and his group went on a political tour of China and North Korea, which were two of the worst dictatorships of the 20th and 21st centuries.

 Cambodians in general were not allowed to use modern technology. But when the Camair representatives arrived at Beijing airport on September 28th, 1977, they were greeted by about 100,000 people. Mao Zidong, Pot’s hero, had died a year before the trip. But the Cambodian leader was friendly with China’s new premere, Huang Guang. Huang praised Pot’s leadership, saying it was relying on the masses, upholding independence, and persisting in armed struggle.

 A few days later, the silly praise kept going on in North Korea, where President Kim IlSung decorated Pot and praised him on state TV as a good farm hand dedicated to the patriotic fight. By the way, the pictures of Pot’s meeting with Huaguang were the first pictures of Pot that were shown to the public, which helped people from other countries recognize him as Saloth Sar.

He expressed no remorse. Nate Theer, an American journalist who spoke to Radio Free Asia, said that Paul Pot was strikingly charming when he went into his jungle property near the Thai border. In late 1997, the former tyrant was living in his own home and was only a few months away from death, but he still had his friendly personality.

 But Pot’s crazy lack of shame for killing a quarter of the Cambodian people made people feel that way. When asked if he was responsible for a lot of deaths, the rebels said that even though he had done some bad things, he didn’t feel bad about them because he thought the Camair Rouge had been a good force in general.

Thia tried many ways to get Pot to say something that would have fit with any reasonable person’s view of the killing, but Pot was hard to find and dishonest. The dictator said he didn’t know about S21, the renowned death prison. When asked to explain why Cambodia’s villages, towns, and cities were empty, Pot said that the Camair Rouge were protecting themselves from their enemies, the Vietnamese.

 The crazy old man never realized that he was the one who had done the most damage to Cambodia. Pulpot was never brought to justice. In 1979, Paulot hid from the Vietnamese army in the jungles near the Thai border. There he and his Camair Rouge colleagues fought a guerilla war for 20 years until the tyrant died in 1998. Paul Pot died just as the world finally seemed to be serious about bringing him to justice.

 The New York Times wrote about the dictator’s death 18 months earlier in 1997. The Cime Rouge publicly accused their scenile leader and began a trial that led to Pot’s sentence of life in jail. Pot’s health got worse after he lost his power and freedom to move. On April 15th, 1998, he allegedly died of heart failure.

 Nate Theer told the BBC that Pot had taken a mix of drugs because he was afraid that American troops would catch him. However, the US State Department said they had no plans to capture Pot. Pot’s cause of death probably will never be known for sure, but the funeral was definitely a mess. Pot’s body was preserved in formaldahhide and examined by Thai detectives.

 His coffin was then lifted onto a bed of car tires and other trash where it burned in a cloud of thick foul smoke. We hope you like this video. Watch another video here.