khmer-rouge
The Cambodian communist movement that seized power in 1975 and governed Cambodia until 1979, implementing a radical agrarian utopia that emptied the cities, abolished money, and killed between 1.5 and 2 million people — between 20 and 25 percent of Cambodia’s entire population.
The Khmer Rouge — Red Khmers — under Pol Pot came to power on 17 April 1975, two weeks before the fall of Saigon. Their revolution was the most radical attempt at total social transformation in the twentieth century: within days of taking Phnom Penh, they forced the entire urban population — including hospitals full of patients — into the countryside to work as agricultural labourers in a vast forced collectivisation. Year Zero had been declared: the calendar was reset, cities were emptied, money abolished, family ties severed, religious practice outlawed, and a regime of total surveillance and denunciation imposed on the country. The killing proceeded through multiple mechanisms: execution of the educated, the former military, and urban professionals; death from starvation and overwork in the agricultural camps; torture and execution of suspected enemies at the S-21 detention centre in Phnom Penh; and periodic purges of the regime’s own cadres consumed by paranoia. The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, which ended the Khmer Rouge’s national rule in January 1979, was not an international humanitarian intervention but a Vietnamese strategic decision — the Khmer Rouge had been conducting cross-border raids into Vietnam — that had the incidental effect of stopping the genocide. A Khmer Rouge remnant continued armed resistance from the Thai border until 1999.
The Khmer Rouge presents history with a particular horror: the genocide was carried out not by a right-wing authoritarian regime claiming racial superiority but by a movement of university-educated Maoist idealists, many of them trained in France, who believed they were building a peasant utopia. The gap between the intellectual formation of the leadership — Pol Pot studied in Paris, Khieu Samphan wrote a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne — and the agrarian primitivism they imposed on Cambodia illustrates the danger of ideologies that can accommodate any level of violence in pursuit of historical necessity. The international response is also troubling: the United States, having contributed to the Khmer Rouge’s rise through the bombing of Cambodia and its support for Lon Nol, then supported the Khmer Rouge diplomatically after the Vietnamese invasion, because a Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government was considered geopolitically worse than the perpetrators of a genocide.
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