Saturday, November 25, 2006

Philip Short's Pol Pot

I finished Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. A while ago, I had seen a very positive review in The Economist, and finally got around to reading it. It is a bit slow, but very compelling. The magnitude of killing and starvation in Khmer Rouge Cambodia is staggering, and Short does a good job of detailing how it came about.

Ultimately, though, it isn’t really a biography per se. The first half does discuss Pol’s exposure to Marxism, especially in Paris, but the latter half focuses on the regime itself. There is a missing connection there—what transformed the quiet, polite student into a killing machine? Murder was indiscriminate, based on Pol’s paranoia and his everchanging view of Marxism (so, for example, you might be tortured and killed if you foraged for food, because that is selfish, and your family would then also be tortured and killed).

Mostly, Short comes back to Khmer culture, combined with the fact that Cambodia was caught in a dispute between Vietnam/USSR and China/U.S., all of which were aware of and mostly unconcerned with the massive and unnecessary loss of life taking place. Once Vietnam had invaded Cambodia, both China and the U.S. wanted everyone there to suffer, as that would weaken Vietnam and by extension also the Soviet Union. But this seems to make Pol Pot just a cog in a machine, and suggests that anyone else would’ve done the same. Maybe we can never really know.

4 comments:

Anonymous,  11:11 PM  

I really enjoyed this book. I read it about a year ago and felt a little cheated on why/how Pol Pot's transformation took place. Did you enjoy the movie, "The Killing Fields"? If you know of any other movie's on or about Pol Pot please let me know.

M.Sharpe

Anonymous,  11:56 PM  

Short Pol Pot interview clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0DD4NKcnk


M.Sharpe

Greg Weeks 9:09 AM  

Reading the book reminded me that I had not seen that movie for years, and barely remember it. I need to rent it.

Anonymous,  3:02 AM  

My father read the book. This book closely relates the events and situation my family and I went through. Pol Pot's transformation was due to the country's corruption and bribery. No matter how highly one is educated, your chance of being hired was slim unless you are willing to give them enough money for the position you are interested in. When you are poor, you don't have the money to buy the position you have studied and worked so hard for. The things people did to him after his return from being educated in France, pushed him to planned the events that followed. It was the kind of nightmare that after 24 years I can still see everything clearly in my mind and remembered every detail.

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