nda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia, 1996).
And from the website Asia Pacific Curriculum:
By 1977, the distrust on the part of the leadership had reached paranoiac heights and the purges of suspected traitors increased. Even the ranks of the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves were purged, sending increasingly larger numbers of them and their families to prisons where they were tortured and then murdered. The most notorious of these prisons was S-21, a high school in Phnom Penh that was converted into a prison and torture centre run by Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch. Out of an estimated 15,000 prisoners who were sent to S-21, only seven survived.
Prisoners housed there were photographed and tortured to produce confessions. When the interrogators were finished, the prisoners’ corpses were carried by truck to the “killing fields” outside of Phnom Penh. There are approximately 20,000 of these mass graves in various locations in the country.
The relatively short time that Pol Pot ruled — approximately four years — was a living nightmare. An estimated one-quarter of the Cambodian population was killed. I ask you to please pause for a moment and process that.
These were each individual human beings, like you and me, with individual human lives and loves and passions and dreams and problems and sadnesses and joys, and their individual lives were real and important. Yet they were murdered as if they were nothing — nothing but cogs in a collectivist machine which in reality existed only inside the warped and grotesque mind of a dictator.
The Cambodian people who survived survived only on “a ladle of watery rice gruel a day.” They were forced into back-breaking labor most of their waking hours – separated from their families (families do not matter in the Communist ideology, if you don’t know, since all humans are comrades equally — your parents and siblings and children supposed to me the same to you as parents, siblings, and children of all other people, even if you’ve never seen any of these other people in your life, nor they you).
Pol Pot’s regime forced the Cambodian people to eat in spectacularly unsanitary cooperatives, treating them worse than the poorly treated farm animals. They lived under incessant terror of being reported, even for minor acts “such as taking a coconut from a tree or allowing cattle to graze in the wrong field.”
And incalculable number of people died as a direct result of these filthy, terror-stricken conditions.
Vietnamese minority groups in particular were singled out for persecution and annihilation. So were the Cham Muslim minorities.
Survivors report that urbanites suffered harder work and even greater suspicion than the peasantry.
Virtually the entire population labored on farms, and do you know why? Because the ideology of egalitarianism decrees that all humans do everything the same. Thus, since the government could neither force people into instant expertise and specialization, which takes time and study and practice, nor the comparatively luxurious standards of urban living, which must come from a level of wealth and production they could not come close to affording, the government went for the opposite: evacuating the cities overnight and forcing everyone, no matter their knowledge and training, into impoverished subsistence agriculture — abolishing, with astonishing speed and extreme force, all specialization and the division of labor, which is, of course, hierarchical and therefore regards by all egalitarian standards as “bad.”
In terms of the sheer numbers of individual lives taken, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin killed far more people than Pol Pot, and yet Pol Pot and his genocidal regime stands out among them all — for being, in my opinion, the most horrific and evil-perfect-practitioner of this ideology: an ideology that regards individuality as non-existent, people only worth anything to the extent that they help produce food “collectively.” Thus the Khmer Rouge slogans, written and posted where the Cambodian people could read them, contained a disgusting and shocking murderous disregard f