The Khmer Rouge | “To Destroy You is No Loss”
“We must be like the ox, and have no thought except for the Party. And have no love, but for the Angkar. People starve, but we must not grow food. We must honor the comrade children whose minds are not corrupted by the past.”
- Dith Pran, The Killing Fields, 1984 -
“I was fifteen years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975. I can still remember how overwhelmed with joy I was that the war had finally ended. It did not matter who won. I and many Cambodians wanted peace at any price. The civil war had tired us out, and we could not make much sense out of killing our own brothers and sisters for a cause that was not ours. We were ready to support our new government to rebuild our country. We wanted to bring back that slow-paced, simple life we grew up with and loved dearly. At the time we didn't realize how high the price was that we had to pay for the Khmer Rouge's peace.
“The Khmer Rouge were very clever and brutal. Their tactics were effective because most of us refused to believe their malicious intentions. Their goal was to liberate us. They risked their own lives and gave up their families for ‘justice’ and ‘equality.’
“Even after our warmest welcome, the first word from the Khmer Rouge was a lie wrapped around a deep anger and hatred of the kind of society they felt Cambodia was becoming. They told us that Americans were going to bomb the cities. They forced millions of residents of Phnom Penh and other cities out of their homes. They separated us from our friends and neighbors to keep us off balance, to prevent us from forming any alliance to stand up and win back our rights. They ripped off our homes and our possessions. They did this intentionally, without mercy.
“They were willing to pay any cost, any lost lives for their mission. Innocent children, old women, and sick patients from hospital beds were included. Along the way, many innocent Cambodians were dying of starvation, disease, loss of loved ones, confusion, and execution.
“We were seduced into returning to our hometowns in the villages so they could reveal our true identities. Then the genocide began. First, it was the men.
“They took my father. They told my family that my father needed to be reeducated. Brainwashed. But my father's fate is unknown to this day. We can only imagine what happened to him. This is true for almost all Cambodian widows and orphans. We live in fear of finding out what atrocities were committed against our fathers, husbands, and brothers. What could they have done that deserved a tortured death?
“Later the Khmer Rouge killed the wives and children of the executed men in order to avoid revenge. They encouraged children to find fault with their own parents and spy on them. They openly showed their intention to destroy the family structure that once held love, faith, comfort, happiness, and companionship. They took young children from their homes to live in a commune so that they could indoctrinate them.
“Parents lost their children. Families were separated. We were not allowed to cry or show any grief when they took away our loved ones. A man would be killed if he lost an ox he was assigned to tend. A woman would be killed if she was too tired to work. Human life wasn't even worth a bullet. They clubbed the back of our necks and pushed us down to smother us and let us die in a deep hole with hundreds of other bodies.
“They told us we were void. We were less than a grain of rice in a large pile. The Khmer Rouge said that the Communist revolution could be successful with only two people. Our lives had no significance to their great Communist nation, and they told us, ‘To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.’”
Teeda Butt Mam’s story of the devastation she witnessed is only one of hundreds of thousands that came out of Cambodia’s brief experiment with communist rule during the 1970s. The Khmer Rouge, the popular name for the Communist Party of Kampuchea, ranks highly among history’s most brutal regimes. Its leader, an ignorant peasant named Pol Pot, murdered nearly a quarter of his country’s population in less than three years in an effort to remake Cambodian society in the image of his god, Karl Marx. The Khmer Rouge’s tactics mirrored those of other collectivist parties during the Cold War like the Soviet Union, and especially Communist China, in which at least fifty million innocent men, women, and children were starved or butchered in Mao Zedong’s horrific Cultural Revolution and “Great Leap Forward.” Cambodia still bears the scars of Pol Pot’s horrors, as do those who survived it.
A Utopian Vision
Cambodia had been a prosperous independent state for over a thousand years when the French colonized it during the 1860s. After its brief rule by Japan, the country received its independence eight years after the Second World War as France withdrew from Southeast Asia. Its leader, Norodom Sihanouk, aligned Cambodia with the United States in the Cold War as communism took root in neighboring Vietnam, but the Cambodian people languished under his neglectful rule. China and the Soviet Union took advantage of this situation by supporting the Khmer Rouge, a communist insurgency led by Pol Pot, and Sihanouk was deposed in 1970 at the start of a civil war. The Khmer Rouge won the war five years later thanks to massive public support and assistance from the communist great powers, and Pol Pot then began to bring his collectivist utopian vision into reality.
The Khmer Rouge was dominated by agrarian socialists, and government policies in the capital, Phnom Penh, ordered Cambodians to leave the cities and return to the land. Those who refused were forced from their homes and sent to work on collective farms, where bureaucrats imposed ridiculously high production quotas and either beat or murdered the poor souls who could not meet them. Labor camps sprang up across the country as well, and the Khmer Rouge separated families by sending men to these camps and women and children to the fields. Conditions in both were abhorrent, with limited shelters and no medical care; as a result, disease and death from exposure became commonplace. Communist officials gleefully ordered workers to eat the remains of their fellows who had perished, claiming that no resource should go to waste. Teeda Butt Mam recounted seeing a bureaucrat force a woman to cook her dead husband’s liver and eat it while he watched.
The dwindling food supply created by collective farming led to harsh rationing orders by Pol Pot’s administration. Cambodians who foraged for food in the wilderness were sent to interrogation centers for “reeducation” or simply murdered where they were found. By 1978, farm workers were receiving only a few ounces of rice each day to feed their entire families—there were even accounts of people getting only a single grain. All the while, Khmer Rouge officials lived in luxury and sometimes discarded half-eaten meals in the mud and filth where their subjects worked, laughing as starving men and women fought over the scraps to fill their distended bellies.
“Cogs in a Wheel”
In a previous episode on this podcast, I described how totalitarians view individuals as “cogs in a wheel” who are only useful if they conformed to edicts from those in power. If they do not, they are simply removed. Concentration camps, gulags, and the “killing fields” of Cambodia are among many tragic examples of this brutal practice. Under Pol Pot, the government viewed Cambodian intellectuals as “useless eaters” and targeted them for forced deportation or execution. University professors were sent to re-education camps, where they read Marx and Mao, learned to become useful to the new agrarian utopia as farm laborers, and were tortured in methods best left to reviews of the Saw movies. Pol Pot, whose education ended in what today we would call middle school, was so vindictive toward teachers of the young that he even looked on those who wore eyeglasses as enemies of the state. An account survived the Khmer regime of him watching as a young professor’s family was taken to a field outside Phnom Penh by Cambodian soldiers. They took off his spectacles, grabbed his infant son by the leg, and bashed the innocent baby’s head against a tree until he died. Then the soldiers shot both the sobbing professor and his wife.
Other “cogs” in Cambodian society that needed reshaping or removing were ethnic and religious minorities. Pol Pot hated the Vietnamese and believed they were foreign invaders, and he relocated the entire population inside Cambodia to prisons on the border. Those who confessed to being agents of the Vietnamese government were hanged on trees outside the camps, while anyone who insisted they were loyal Cambodian comrades were beaten mercilessly and had their throats slit. A small Muslim community call the Cham had lived in Cambodia for centuries, and they too felt the Khmer Rouge’s wrath. They were sent to prisons, where soldiers smeared the blood of pigs on their bodies before murdering them with bamboo spears and farm implements. The larger Christian and Buddhist populations were more fortunate; their churches and shrines were desecrated and closed, and many were waterboarded or branded with hot irons. But only a relatively few number perished at Pol Pot’s hands.
In 1976, the Khmer Rouge decided it needed a new facility in Phnom Penh to purge dissidents in a more effective manner. It took over a former high school and re-purposed it into Tuol Sleng, the “Hill of Poisonous Trees.” Over the next three years, more than twenty thousand Cambodians were imprisoned, tormented, and murdered in classrooms-turned-torture chambers. Of the total inmate population, there are only twelve documented survivors—seven adults and five children. Today, Tuol Sleng is a museum and memorial to the victims, and visitors are horrified to see crude water boards, bamboo stakes, and beds made of razor wire sitting alongside glass cabinets filled with over a thousand human skulls. Outside Phnom Penh is a sister facility called Choeung Ek, today the most famous of Cambodia’s many “killing fields.” Like Tuol Sleng, it is now a memorial, and it once held excess prisoners from the former school. Here, visitors can still see workers sifting through the dirt to find human remains nearly fifty years after the Khmer Rouge’s fall. Inside the main facility are more glass cabinets with more than five thousand skulls, many of which are small and broken as though they were crushed by the butt of a rifle or slammed against a tree.
Communist Against Communist
In December 1978, a simmering border dispute erupted into open war when Pol Pot’s army invaded the neighboring communist country of Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge hoped to seize control of three Vietnamese provinces with majority-Cambodian populations. The attack faltered after only two days, thanks largely to a recent purge of government and military officials by the Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia on Christmas Day. By mid-January, nearly half of Cambodia’s army had been destroyed, and Vietnam controlled a majority of the country. Pol Pot departed Phnom Penh before its fall to the invaders and established a military headquarters in western Cambodia. His government was gone, but the Khmer Rouge continued to fight for another two years. Eventually, though, the Vietnamese completed their conquest and set up a puppet regime in Phnom Penh. Pol Pot resigned his leadership of the Khmer Rouge, which entered into a coalition with other communist groups to rule the country. His influence soon dwindled along with his health, but the people of Cambodia remembered his brutal rule of their country.
The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a rapprochement between the United States and Vietnam, and America ended its protests against the Vietnamese domination of Cambodia. A new government soon came to power in moderately-democratic elections, and the Khmer Rouge was thrown out. Pol Pot, now paralyzed by a stroke and dependent on oxygen, continued to press for resistance to the new democracy and a return to Cambodia’s agrarian roots, but his own party turned against him. In July 1997, he and three other Khmer Rouge generals were seized and placed under house arrest. He gave a final interview to an American journalist, in which he defended his crimes against humanity as an effort to restore Cambodian society to its pre-colonial greatness. Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998, possibly after ingesting a lethal dose of drugs. The former dictator’s guards burned his body on a pile of garbage and rubber tires. The Khmer Rouge soon followed its leader into history as the Cambodian army moved into its territory, with its last guerrilla commander being captured in March 1999.
The “Mirror” of Evil
In last week’s discussion on Vlad the Impaler, Joe and I discussed how evil can be a mirror that we hold up to our own faces. Evil is a choice. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge soldiers did not have to starve innocent farmers in the killing fields. They did not have to butcher dissidents or murder babies as their parents watched. They chose to do it. Their vision of a communist utopia demanded that they do it. With every step into the darkness, they moved closer and closer to the collectivist hell that Cambodia became.
After the Second World War, an American psychologist named Gustave Gilbert interviewed many surviving Nazi leaders during their trials in Nuremberg. He later wrote of that experience, “In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” This was certainly true of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. There is no surviving account of them pausing, even for a moment, to think about their victims in the killing fields or at Tuol Sleng or Cheoung Ek. Their rabid pursuit of a socialist utopia driven by a fanatical devotion to the writings of the unemployed dilettante Karl Marx led them to become stains on the blood-soaked pages of communism’s history. Their end was appropriate, either killed in battle or their bodies burned on a heap of trash. But, honestly, I wonder if they even thought about how history would remember them. Their blindness to humanity seems to place that in doubt; for the brutal Khmer Rouge, all that mattered was an idea—“from each according to his ability, and to each according to his need.”
Image Credit: https://www.dw.com/en/cambodia-will-the-final-khmer-rouge-ruling-close-a-dark-chapter/a-63243079