I just finished Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, an excellent biography of the crazed Khmer Rouge leader.
I’ve been fascinated by Cambodia’s nightmare since the mid-’80s, when the first survivor accounts started trickling out. I read several, including To Destroy You Is No Loss. I also read Elizabeth Becker’s very good When the War Was Over. I watched the Killing Fields and Swimming to Cambodia. I read extensively about Angkor Watt and ancient Khmer civilization. One of my travel goals is to one day visit Angkor Watt. And then I moved on to other things ….
But when I saw a review of Short’s book, I couldn’t resist. It’s fantastic and gets a lot closer to why this happened. How the fuck does a smiling, amiable guy named Saloth Sar go from getting handjobs from old King Monivong’s concubines to laying waste to an entire nation? It just seems inconceivable that something like this could happen.
Piece by piece, Short shows the roots of this horror, from the seething violence the simmers beneath the friendly face of Cambodian culture to the Theravada Buddhist rejection of the individual to the world politics that were playing out in Southeast Asia.
Pol Pot’s wfe, Ponnary, dissolves into a paranoid schizophrenic haze, fearing Vietnamese conspiracies in every corner. Odd the way her affliction serves as metaphor for the Cambodian-Vietnamese relationship.
Other interesting points in the Short biography:
- He argues, compellingly, I think, that this wasn’t genocide. The goal wasn’t to wipe out the Cambodian people. It really was more a program of systematic slavery.
- The complexities of Cold War politics are brought startlingly to light. Even after the Khmer Rouge have been run off, the United States backs them, working in league with China to keep Soviet expansionism (via Vietnam) in check.
- Cool quote: “Pol Pot has died like a ripe papaya (falling from a tree). No one killed him, no one poisoned him. Now he’s Wnished. He has no power, he has no rights, he is no more than cow shit. Cow shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertilizer.” Mok, another worthless piece of cow shit who was one of Pol Pot’s two main military supporters.
- I took particular interest in Laurence Picq, one of two non-Asians to live though Pol’s reign of terror. She was a Frenchwoman married to one of the Khmer Rouge officials. Strange. Very strange. I’ve already Googled her and intend to read her book about the experience. Apparently, she came into it a believer. I wonder what she’s thinking now …