I took pictures at the sites of some of the grisliest scenes of mass murder and torture in Cambodia and posted them on Twitter. Some of the photographs on display in Pnomh Penh were so gruesome that I could not look at them, other than to recognize what they were and look away. Nor did I enter the glass-walled monument at the Killing Fields, about 20 miles from Phomn Penh, stacked high with skulls, arrayed by age and gender. I couldn’t.
The Cambodian genocide is especially puzzling because it was directed by Cambodians against Cambodians, not against a particular religion or ethnic group. Pol Pot wanted to abolish all religions, all educated people. He wanted to reduce the country to an agrarian society, with no engineers or teachers or doctors. He came from a privileged family. He had a good education. He went to Paris and was influenced by the radical Communists he met. He went to China and met Mao at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao was persecuting teachers and other educated people and sending them to the countryside to force them to work as peasants. When PolPot took power in 1975, he drove everyone out of the cities within days by warning that American B-52s were about to bomb then. The cities were completely empty. Then he began a systematic campaign to wipe out every vestige of modernity. He killed between 1/3 and 1/4 of the entire population between 1975 and 1979.
Cambodians are a Buddhist people. Thousands of Buddhist monks were executed. Pol Pot was a madman but he found followers to do his bidding. He killed most of his top advisors , convinced that they were conspiring against him.
How does a country recover from a tragedy of this magnitude? As our guide explained, people with any education taught those with less. Those with a twelfth grade education taught thise with an 11th or 10th grade education. So on down the line. Those with only a sixth grade education taught the youngest children. And that s how the next generation was educated in a country where most of the teachers were killed.
There was no punishment for Pol Pot or his henchmen. In his paranoia, he sent troops into Vietnam, convinced that Vietnam was conspiring against him. The Vietnamese retaliated and deposed him. He died of natural causes while hiding out in the jungle in Thailand.
Cambodia decided not to prosecute the mass murderers. They wanted reconciliation, or retribution. No one was punished for the mass murders of more than a million people.
The crimes of the Pol Pot regime are acknowledged. There is no denial or obfuscation. Just a stark reminder of brutality and madness.
Our tour guide’s family did not suffer. They were poor farmers, Pol Pot’s ideal. But he hates Pol Pot, and he hates Communism, which he associates with mass murder.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Perhaps the Pol Pot saga is a cautionary tale warning us to never follow a mad man. Never follow a mass murderer like sheep jumping over a cliff. People should resist oppressors since absolute power is dangerous power.
Thank you, Diane, for a sober but necessary blog posting. I say “necessary” because all of us—every single human being—must always know of the horrible history of genocide, whenever and wherever it occurs and whether it is carried out against people on the basis of their religion, nationality, race, sexual orientation, or in the case of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, class, education and perceived social and economic status.
All mass killings begin by the dehumanization of “the other,” accompanied by a propaganda campaign to make the people you dislike appear as something other than people. Once you’ve made other people into “things” that are supposedly your enemies, it’s a short distance to then convincing yourself and others that these “things” must be eliminated for your own survival.
My 13 year old’s class was recently shown a documentary film on the genocide in Rwanda against the Tutsi. It was difficult for some of the students to see, but they all agreed that they needed to understand how and why this happened.
I can’t help but reflect on our own society and the vicious attacks on our educators, undocumented workers, immigrants, Muslims, people of color, the LGBTQ community and “the liberals” in general, by people who encourage hatred and fear of anyone who is a member of those groups. that are verbal and legislative, mainly, for now, and I hope they never go beyond that. It’s up to all us to see that they never do.
But what you’ve witnessed in Cambodia, and that horrific period in the 1970’s should serve as a specific reminder of what can happen in any nation when those who are the intellectuals, the well-educated, the teachers, and the post-secondary students are demonized, stereotyped, castigated, and blamed for any and all social and economic ills.
I look forward to your next posting on what must be a truly fascinating and enriching journey.
I want to draw attention to your use of the word “know”. I am not exaggerating when I say that many teachers don’t think teaching knowledge is important anymore. You hear them say, “Oh, now that we have Google, we don’t need to teach facts.” Or they echo the overrated Brazilian pedagogue Paolo Freire and say that the “banking model of education has been discredited.” They disparage all efforts to see if kids have learned any particular knowledge as “having kids regurgitate facts” –yes, showing knowledge = vomiting. In our own way, America is undergoing a Cultural Revolution, an radical anti-intellectual sea change in how we view education. Empty heads are good. Just make sure they have sharp thinking skills (which we claim to be imparting instead of knowledge, but really aren’t; it’s a fraud).
I completely agree with you: we must teach these genocides and we must teach them well. Knowing, not the nebulous skill building curriculum that dominates our schools, is the key to sharp thinking. But there’s so much else kids ought to know too, and we’re neglecting that because our misguided faith in Google and the alleged teaching of skills.
JB Bury famously suggested that “a theologian on the throne is a public danger.” Since Mao style communism supplanted traditional religion with a worship of the state, Bury seems to explain Pol Pot.
What is profoundly amazing is the decision to put the carnage behind, creating closure with a focus away from the past. Is this possible? I know a woman who completely forgave the boy who shot and killed her daughter. She did it with her own brand of faith. But I know of no other examples of countries that decided to end a tale of carnage with societal reconciliation. Amazing.
“Mao was persecuting teachers and other educated people and sending them to the countryside to force them to work as peasants.”
Mao only launched the Cultural Revolution by putting school children and teenagers in charge of it. Mao then stepped back for a few years and let the insanity spread until he felt it was time to stop it and sent millions of the teenage Red Guard to labor camps to stop all the damage, torture, suicides, deaths.
When some teenage Red Guard member or group would do something horrible (mostly on their own), Mao would give them medals and call them heroes. This just increased the frenzy.
Mao didn’t persecute the teachers. The children and teens did.
To understand the insanity that swept China during the Cultural Revolution, I suggest you read my former wife’s first memoir, “Red Azalea” by Anchee Min. That memoir that covers her growing up during the Cultural Revolution and becoming a member of the teenage Red Guard was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in the early 1990s and won the Carl Sandburg Award. It’s still in print and many if not all Asian Studies departments in the U.S. use it as a text. It’s been translated into more than thirty languages around the world but is banned in China except in English or Mandarine black market copies.
Anchee was one of those teenage Red Guards and she was also sent to labor camps when Mao wanted to end the damage being caused by the rampaging teens during the Cultural Revolution.
My wife and I were reading different books about the Cultural Revolution years ago. I don’t know how it happened but it was during this sort of span in time. I think we have/had the one you mention. My wife is still at work and I can’t find it. But thanks for getting me up out of this chair and looking through the bookshelves, Lloyd. If anything it reminds me how much time I’m now spending in front of a computer screen these days.
Regarding that computer screen when it is linked to the internet. I have deliberately written goals to drastically cut back on that time because I want my life back. :o)
I’ve joined Meetup groups and force myself out of the house to join these like-minded people.
I’m renovating the house I bought early in 2016 and I’m doing most of the work on my own by myself. For instance, I did all the work to build a back fence and that took almost 300 hours away from the screen.
I’m reading more books, tree books, not e-books, because e-books come with a screen, have to be recharged and the software has to updated regularly — what a total waste of time that was when I was reading e-books.
Tree books don’t need batteries and don’t come with software to work.
That’s just a sample of what I’m doing to take my life back from all the internet crap and there is a lot of crap on the internet. Diane’s blog is one of the few sites that’s worth reading and sticking with.
Funny thing is my computer locked up on me not long after writing on here. I think it was a technical glitch. I was using my son’s old laptop.
I envy your ability to work on your home. I do a lot but not to your extent.
Older computers ten to “time out” and/or “freeze” (I think one of the two is the proper term) when there isn’t enough RAM and older chips aren’t as fast.
Here’s a piece that covers several reasons. Insufficient RAM is #6.
https://www.stellarinfo.com/blog/top-10-reasons-computer-freezing/
Good article. Thanks.
I remember reading about trials that were done in Cambodia but never read what the results of the trials were. [This article is 3 years old]
………………….
Cambodia court begins genocide trial of Khmer Rouge leaders
Cambodia’s UN-backed Khmer Rouge court has begun a second trial of two former regime leaders on charges including genocide of Vietnamese people and ethnic Muslims, forced marriages and rape.
The complex case of the regime’s two most senior surviving leaders has been split into a series of smaller trials, initially focusing on the forced evacuation of people into rural labour camps and related crimes against humanity.
The first trial against the most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Nuon Chea, 88, known as Brother Number Two, and former head of state Khieu Samphan, 83, was completed late last year, with the verdict – and possible sentences – due to be delivered on 7 August.
At the opening hearing of the second trial on Wednesday, judge Nil Nonn read out the charges against both suspects as more than 300 people watched the proceedings from the court’s public gallery…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/30/cambodia-court-begins-genocide-trial-khmer-rouge-leaders?CMP=share_btn_link
The verdict: life sentence.
From Wikipedia
On 7 August 2014, Nuon Chea received a life sentence for crimes against humanity, alongside another top-tier Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan.[7] At age 91, Nuon Chea is the oldest living former Prime Minister and the oldest of the last surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.
Mate Wierdl: Thanks. I was hoping someone could find the results of the trial.
That’s the full consequence of a regime that slaughtered 1-2 Million people.
“Cambodia decided not to prosecute the mass murderers. They wanted reconciliation, or retribution. ”
This is always a big question and debate, what to do: punish or not.