by Philip Short
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Product Description
A gripping and definitive portrait of the man who headed one of the most enigmatic and terrifying regimes of modern times
In the three and a half years of Pol Pot's rule, more than a million Cambodians, a fifth of the country's population, were executed or died from hunger. An idealistic and reclusive figure, Pol Pot sought to instill in his people values of moral purity and self-abnegation through a revolution of radical egalitarianism. In the process his country descended into madness, becoming a concentration camp of the mind, a slave state in which obedience was enforced on the killing fields.
How did a utopian dream of shared prosperity mutate into one of the worst nightmares humanity has ever known? To understand this almost inconceivable mystery, Philip Short explores Pol Pot's life from his early years to his death. Short spent four years traveling throughout Cambodia interviewing the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement, many of whom have never spoken before, including Pol Pot's brother-in-law and the former Khmer Rouge head of state. He also sifted through the previously closed archives of China, Russia, Vietnam, and Cambodia itself to trace the fate of one man and the nation that he led into ruin.
This powerful biography reveals that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were not a one-off aberration but instead grew out of a darkness of the soul common to all peoples. Cambodian history and culture combined with intervention from the United States and other nations to set the stage for a disaster whose horrors echo loudly in the troubling events of our world today.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
One Death is a Tragedy; A Million a Statistic , 2008-08-28
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
"The evacuation of Phnom Penh was a shambles. To move more than two and a half million people out of a crowded metropolis at a few hour's notice, with nowhere for them to stay; no medical care; no government transport and little or nothing to eat, was to invite human suffering on a colossal scale.
`The... defining features of the evacuation - the systematic stripping away of the possessions of the rich and not-so-rich; the writing and rewriting of autobiographies to identify potential opponents; the summary executions; the near total absence of resistance by millions of people, uprooted from their homes and going like sheep to the slaughter - were equally a foretaste of the regime to come." Philip Short; Anatomy of a Nightmare, P. 283
Thirty years after the end of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, many of the leading players like Pol Pot are dead. Others, like Ieng Sary and his wife face war crimes charges in international courts. Sary was granted amnesty by former King Sihanouk but still faces charges in The Hague.
The country remains one of the poorest in Asia: per capita income is about $300 US, and most of the country's inhabitants exist on subsistence farming. One of its growth industries, tourism, ironically is straining the fragile Angkor Wat Temples.
Like many of history's worst villains, Pol Pot was a self-made man who was constantly reinventing himself. After losing his engineering scholarship in Paris in the early 1950's, he began his political ascent as a guerilla fighter. As Cambodia was targeted for US bombing strikes during g the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge used the threat of bombing as an excuse for the massive, involuntary relocation of the millions of urban residents to the countryside, where they were placed in collective labor camps and deprived of all private property.
Conservative estimates of the death toll from starvation, disease, torture and murder are at 1.7 million. But as Stalin, one of history's most notorious exterminators, said: "One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic."
Pol Pot not only rewrote history, he obliterated it. He declared the start of the Khmer Rouge Regime as "Year Zero," effectively beginning all over again. "Communist regimes everywhere have sought to level income disparities; to make law an instrument of policy; to monopolise the press; and to control postal and telecommunications links with the rest of the world. But Cambodians chose more radical, more insane solutions.
Money; law courts; newspapers; the postal system and foreighn communications -- even the concept of the city .. were all simply abolished." (Short, Introduction P.12)
Short, a British journalist, lived in Cambodia for many years. He has prepared a scrupulously researched and evenly written history of one of this generation's worst nightmares.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Humans as oxen, 2008-04-23
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (John MacRae Books)
This study deserves to be another documented remainder of the practical and , unfortunately , logical consequences of what began as a humanistic idea about equality and sameness and ended in its consequent and tragic equation , cca at least half a billion unmarked graves stretching from the revolutionary France up to the bloodiest of all eras , the 20th century with communisms of different ' denominations '( e.g. stalinism , titoism ,Pol - potism ... ) . If we could dare calculate the percentage of people murdered in a time unit , then Cambodia is probably at the top of the saddest scale imaginable ,as 2 million people , a third of population , were starved and butchered on the infamous killing fields . Mr. Short's analysis is a hard core scientific work which tries to minutely describe and explain the history of Cambodia before the WWII , before the arrival of Khmer Rouges and the creation of the real Hell on Earth in the mid70s, the period of its 'great' leap forward and its quick demise , succeeding perfectly in illustrating the mindset behind Pot Pol and his clique , that was fatally influenced , which Mr Short repeats on numerous occasions , by at that time fashionable , e.g. progressive ideas , which were a) French b) marxist c) nihilistic . All these ideas were combined with the pre-existing Cambodian traditions and psychological mindsets , where violence in its most bizzare and brutal form ( according to one of the interviewees in the book , it was nothing unusual for children ,while swimming in a local river, to find severed human heads floating around , special forms of torture where a torturer is dancing around a helpless victim with a machete before hacking him to pieces and drinking his blood, etc. ) co-exists with the image of the most peaceful people in the world . All these , as well as the opposition against the king , poor management by the colonial master France , senseless interparty bickering, and war in the neighbouring Vietnam were factors that inescapably led to the final stage - red inferno with the secret sect first called Angkar to which virtually everything had to be sacrificed ( not only material objects, cars , tv sets ,etc. ) but specially human , individual characterictics , the very feelings , the soul itself , where the greatest sin was , simply , to have a thought! This study is another document of the 'usefulness'of radical ideas , where it is impossible to remain untouched , and a document which must serve as a perennial warning of how evil a man can be ! It is first and foremost a tribute to all the innocent Cambodians that were massacred en masse because of a psychopatic idea in psychopatic minds .
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
The biography of Brother Number One and Cambodia., 2008-01-10
As some of the previous reviewers have already stated, this is not your typical biography. Short shows the life of Pol Pot and the history of Cambodia at the same time. Short shows how an evil man such as Pol Pot could rise to the top of the Khymer Rouge, and the eventual downfall of both the country and his evil regime. At close to 500 pages of reading, this biography and the accompanying history is pretty heavy reading.
Pol Pot was the Angkar of this regime. He was secretive, vindictive, and a self serving. He thought he was the brains of the Khymer Rouge, and everybody else was the follower. Any threat to his leadership was met with death by his opponents. It was too bad he died in his old age. He needed to meet the same fate as Saddam Hussein. As it was, 1 1/2 million Camdodians died because of his rule. Some of his fellow monsters are still around and should br tried for crimes against humanity.
What is also striking is the self serving nature of Pol Pot. He killed people who were foreign trained, even though he went to a French college.
His banned a personal life, even though he selected a young women to have a family with. He was your typical hippocrit, do as I say, not as I do.
This is probably the best book on the Cambodian Holocaust. This mass killing should never have happened. Hopefully, Pol Pot is burning in his afterlife.
1 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
 Yawn, 2007-02-03
I am sorry but this book was boring. I think it took a special kind of writer to make something as seemingly interesting/horrific as the Khmer Rouge so dull. This book is overloaded with details upon details that do not really give any real insights into what happened in Cambodia or upon Pol Pot.
This is not the first book someone should read to get a strong understanding of Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge. Instead it should be read by people that are serious students of this subject otherwise you will just get bogged down with names and the little bureaucratic nuances of the Khmer Rouge step by painful step.
This book has taken me a long time to read through and I generally read pretty quickly. I would find myself cleaning my house or doing laundry to avoid finishing. I am one of those people that feels they need to finish a book once they started it and this one made me seriously reconsider.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Better History Than Biography, 2006-09-21
I read this book knowing virtually nothing of Pol Pot or the history of the Cambodian revolutionary movement. Having read the book I feel it works far better as a history of modern Cambodia and the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge than it does as a biography of Pol Pot, hence my rating. My expectations of Short's work are high having greatly enjoyed his biography of Mao which is overflowing with the kind of personal detail and insight that is absent from this work. I would speculate that this may have something to do with the availability of source material and perhaps with the cultural issues around the definition of truth in Cambodian culture which Short alludes to in the book.
Despite this I came away far more knowledgeable than I arrived and Short is an excellent writer with a knack for making his material easily digestible.
Good history, but only an average biography.
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