Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

"This is an interesting book. Short’s account of the French period in Pol Pot’s life is very good. I must say that Short tends to view the whole picture through the lens of French, or Gallicised Khmer intellectuals who were able to give him the kind of narrative he was happy with. I’m not sure if this narrative has led him into the proper places. When he tries to look for causes he starts saying the Cambodians are these dark primitive people, which is not true and is very disdainful. His book is very valuable for sources even though I don’t think his interpretations are that valid in terms of the Khmer. Many writers about the Khmer Rouge, and I’m not criticising individuals, search for intellectual elements that don’t exist. If you go looking for intellectuals in Cambodia you are not going to find them. Intellectuals are one of the things they don’t have. The French don’t really have pub-crawlers; people don’t do certain things in certain cultures. There is no Cambodian Rousseau. In Cambodia it is about power and injustice. The Khmer are very interested in injustice. In the 1970s, enough people were converted into the idea that society was unjust, which it has always been and still is. They would take sides to undo this. That rhetoric worked really well. He admired it, but he wasn’t told what to do. He was quite a disobedient child in a way. He worked it all out for himself. He wasn’t going to be under Vietnamese influence, he liked what the Chinese had done and the Chinese quite cleverly said: anybody who does their own thing is doing the right thing. It wasn’t a case of following a manual, although he tried to follow a precise manual by making his four year plan, putting everyone in those Maoist clothes, three tons of rice per hectare- all this was borrowed from China. But the Chinese did not control Pol Pot, he did it all himself, and with his circle. The Chinese told him- the revolution hasn’t worked that well in our country, our country is too big, but in your country a real revolution might work, in which case you can get rid of money and everything else that we didn’t abolish; you can be a pilot programme for the rest of the world. I think that’s what happened. Yes, of course. They were going to do this in the wake of the civil war, with no animals, poor labour; a crippled country and grow hundreds of thousands of tons of rice! They were cuckoo. They were completely crazy but they aimed to build a perfect Autarky. (an entirely self-sufficient economy that does not take part in international trade) T.S Eliot, Stalin and Mussolini all believed in autarky at one stage in the 1920’s. It was a matter of self-sufficiency as opposed to being part of the world community. Autarky is now very trendy, for certain people who dream of getting out of globalisation. In Cambodia, pointing the mid 1970s, the Khmer Rouge thought they could do this. Technologically at that point they could do it, by cutting Cambodia off from the outside world. They wanted to jump off the world for a few years and try and prove themselves in this new way."