BOOK REVIEW: A portrait of Pol Pot, unrepentant tyrant
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BOOK REVIEW: A portrait of Pol Pot, unrepentant tyrant
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By CLAYTON JONES, The Christian Science Monitor
(AP) - Reading the biography of a 20th-century tyrant takes courage.
The tales of atrocities can be numbing, the motives unclear, and the
lessons uncertain. Evil seems like a lurking character in such books,
either in one man, the body politic, or foreign players, and is
eventually exposed as, well, a rather stupid mistake.
British journalist Philip Short has already led readers through the
prickly thicket of one tyrant's murderous story with his acclaimed 1999
biography of Mao Tse-tung. In "Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare" (Henry
Holt, 672 pages, $32.50) he probes deeply into the background of a man
who launched the world's most radical modern revolution by taking the
tiny nation of Cambodia where "no country in history has ever gone
before."
>From 1975, when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge rebels emptied Cambodia's capital
of its residents and declared the nation's history at "Year Zero,"
until he himself fled before invading Vietnamese troops in 1979, the
outside world knew little of what horrors he had wrought on the
nation's estimated 7 million residents. The global silence over what
was happening was similar to that during the Jewish holocaust.
While the 1984 movie "Killing Fields" and previous books on the Khmer
Rouge have kept memories of those horrors before the world's
conscience, nothing compares to the journalistic detail that Short
provides here in 446 pages of narrative and some 200 more of footnotes.
Compared with Mao, Hitler, Stalin, and other 20th-century tyrants, Pol
Pot comes out the worst in causing the most deaths in proportion to his
controlled population. He was impatient to impose a weird sense of
social justice and to regain the nationalist grandeur of ancient
Angkor. His harsh rule led to the deaths of an estimated one in five
Cambodians, either through execution, illness, overwork, or starvation.
He tried quickly to impose a communist rural utopia that excluded
money, religion, property, cities, law, even romantic marriage.
Children were taken from their parents at age seven. Anyone caught
reading or wearing glasses was considered an intellectual and probably
killed.
The author pins much of Pol Pot's actions on his warped notions of
Buddhist austerity, detachment, and the suppression of individuality,
combined with his ill-formed study of Marx in Paris as a young man and
as a follower of Mao and Stalin. Born with the name of Saloth Sar and
later called Brother No. 1 by his comrades, he was also jilted in an
early love affair that may have left him bitter.
Relying on interviews with former Khmer Rouge leaders and the
translation of thousands of documents, Short's psycho-bio also tries to
pin much of the blame on Cambodian culture, where both peasants and
kings have been historically brutal, where the folk tales are grim and
menacing, and where the people suffer from a national inferiority
complex.
He also explains how Pol Pot's cause was helped along by the actions of
French colonizers, Vietnamese communists, United States bombing,
Chinese meddling, and former King Sihanouk. Much of this analysis
echoes the explanations given by recent scholars for the rise of Hitler
within a German and international context. It doesn't always succeed
but, like geologists looking for roadcuts that expose different strata
of meaning, it's a search for patterns that might be useful to prevent
future tyranny.
The illogical can't always be made logical, however, and the book
falters in overreaching generalizations such as this: "Like a cornered
animal, which turns instinctively to confront pursuing predators, Pol
Pot viewed policy in terms of a fight to the death. The alternative was
to be devoured."
Still, Short's contribution is in describing Pol Pot's Cambodia as a
modern slave state, as North Korea still is. Even today, Cambodia is
ruled autocratically by former minor Khmer Rouge leaders, despite the
efforts of the United Nations to bring democracy there. (Pol Pot's top
men may face trial next year.)
Much like slavery's demise, the Khmer Rouge's downfall was due largely
to its internal contradiction in denying each person's basic humanity.
Its leaders eventually turned on themselves in a paranoid purge that
provided an opening for Vietnam to invade Cambodia.
Just before he died in 1998 in a jungle hideout - unrepentant and
unpunished - Pol Pot claimed in an interview that his conscience was
clear and that he had done it all for his country. Like other tyrants
of his century, we may never know enough about him to draw the right
conclusions. Short's book, however, takes us more than half way there.
Clayton Jones is the Monitor's chief editorial writer. He covered
Cambodia for the paper as the Southeast Asia bureau chief from
1986-1990.
Posted on 02/01/05 07:40:00
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