A potent mix of communism, nationalism, racialism, imperialism, and violence resulted in the Khmer Rouge coming to power in Cambodia in 1975. Led by a man going by the name of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge orchestrated the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians in a genocide that has become known to history simply as the killing fields. In only four years of chaos, Pol Pot's reign of terror ranks among the most brutal regimes in all history. This is Part I in a series on the Cambodian Genocide. It goes over...
A potent mix of communism, nationalism, racialism, imperialism, and violence resulted in the Khmer Rouge coming to power in Cambodia in 1975. Led by a man going by the name of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge orchestrated the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians in a genocide that has become known to history simply as the killing fields. In only four years of chaos, Pol Pot's reign of terror ranks among the most brutal regimes in all history.
This is Part I in a series on the Cambodian Genocide. It goes over some background causation that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and their initial act of emptying out Cambodia's cities. Future episodes will discuss ordinary life in Cambodia under Pol Pot, genocide, as well as first hand accounts from Loung Ung and other children of Cambodia.
I relied heavily on Ben Kiernan's "The Pol Pot Regime," Loung Ung's "First They Killed My Father," and Dith Pran's "Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields."
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