The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979

We are rounding out our journey through communism with The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 by Ben Kiernan.

First off, this book is a detailed overview of the regime as a whole, not a biography of any one member of the regime. Pol Pot is recognized as the leader of the regime, and his adopted name, Pol Pot, means brother number one. Pol Pot himself was born Saloth Sar on May 19, 1925. And like so very many communists before him, he was raised in a comfortable middle-class family, although unlike many other communists before him, his family was royalty adjacent, one of his sisters was a royal consort and a brother was a palace protocol officer.

The entire leading cadre of the Regime, so Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen, all met and studied together at the Sorbonne in Paris. That’s right…these poor communists were all foreign exchange students to France in the late 1940’s early 1950’s, before returning to Cambodia and plotting their eventual takeover. Now, the actual events that led to the takeover are not discussed in as much detail as the four years the regime was in power. But broadly, what happened is the war in Vietnam had the Cambodian side of the border being bombed quite extensively as well. See, here’s the relevant area of the global map.

The US bombing runs were used as propaganda by The Regime to initially garner support for them with the people in the countryside. So, before the official 1975 takeover, they were propagandizing the Cambodian countryside with the “see how evil the US imperialists are? They are bombing our brothers in Vietnam and us too!” And as part of this, they initially worked with the royal family against the opposing political side, Lon Nol, who deposed the king when the king was out of the country. As Lon Nol and his followers were acknowledged to be right of Mao Zedong, the Chinese of course recommended that the king side with the Khmer Rouge, who would restore him to the throne. Spoiler alert: That is not what happened.

The king DID initially back the Khmer Rouge, who succeeded in defeating Lon Nol and his cadre over several years, with Vietnam backing the Khmer Rouge and the US backing Lon Nol. And during these years of civil war, the Khmer Rouge were more or less decent to the people in the country, who they referred to as “base” people, which more or less means, country peasant class. This designation is important, or it will be.

Once the civil war was over, Khmer Rouge turned to the king and was like “that whole deposed thing Lon Nol did? Yeah, we’re gonna make that permanent. So buh bye.” And then they proceeded to drain the cities. Like, every major population center, starting with the capital Phnom Penh, they made all the residents leave. Not for any particular reason, just to drain the cities, while they created a new state, the Democrat Kampuchea (DK). Cambodia, at this time in history, had a reverse Pareto distribution. In most regions, countries, states, 80% of the population live in 20% of the cities. This is literally a natural law. Cambodia, 80% of the population were rural, farmers, fisherman, peasant class. The Khmer Rouge forced the city people to leave and go to the country. And on their way out, they started pulling aside anyone known or suspected of supporting Lon Nol. The executions had begun.

If you were an intellectual, sometimes only determined to be such because you were wearing glasses, you were executed. One former teacher survived because she lied about her profession. When asked what she did, she said she was a fruit seller. When the Khmer Rouge commented on how pale she was, meaning they thought for sure she had an inside job, like a teacher, and not an outside job like a fruit seller, she improvised and said her stand had been in the shade, and that she supplemented her income by cleaning house for a rich Chinese family.

During this forced evacuation of the city, some escaped by just running into the jungle and across the nearest border. Some survived by playing dead in the body pit during mass shootings and crawling out when night fell.

Once they were relocated to the country the “new” people were forced to pick or plant rice all day, and ever decreasing rations. They started out with almost enough food. But, through having to meet export obligations to Japan and the Khmer Rouge wanting to make sure The Regime didn’t starve, by the end of the four years, a group of 10 people might have to share a half can of rice per day. The survivors agree there wasn’t much famine at the end of year one. But by the end of year two, everyone was hungry. Year one, if you met your work quota for the day, you might be allowed to forage extra food from the surrounding jungle. At the end of year two, the permission to forage was universally revoked.

Everyone who could jump ship…did. There was a mass exodus across the borders into Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The eastern region of the country, right up next to the Vietnamese border, was the hardest to suppress for the regime. That area had been hardest hit with the US Bombing raids, and those Cambodians truly got on well with the Vietnamese just across the river. When the regime ultimately decided they were stable enough to start conquering territory, they attacked Vietnam first, on January 6, 1978. When Vietnam counterattacked, over 100,000 Cambodians followed the Vietnamese back across the border into Vietnam, sort of a wait, take me with you!

Now, Cambodia was by no means a rich country. 80% of the population lived in the country and were peasants, mostly poor peasants. When the regime was leveling the playing field, if a family had two oxen to everyone else’s one oxen, then that family was “rich” comparatively speaking, and would likely be exterminated. There was definitely a racists element to their extermination, one of the single largest non-Cambodian populations hit was the Cham population. The Cham were Muslims living in the Buddhist culture of Cambodia, and their flavor of Islam had adopted elements of Buddhist thought, but one of the things they retained from the original Islam is the prohibition against pork. So, the Khmer Rouge made pork a requirement of the Cham diet. And ONLY of the Cham diet. Everyone else in a village might have a selection to go with their gruel. If Cham refused to eat the pork, they were executed.

Refusal to do anything…whether you were base or new person, Cham, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Cambodian, would get you executed. So would complaining about anything. The prison at Tuol Sleng, S-21, run by infamous Comrade Duch, aka Kaing Guek Eav, is best known for the horrors and excesses of the Khmer Rouge, and I get it…of 21,000 inmates imprisoned there from 1975 to 1979, 7 lived. That’s a death rate of 99.96%. But the vast majority of the genocide occurred in the countryside, where the Khmer Rouge troopers in charge of overseeing production had carte blanche from The Regime to do whatever they liked.

Part of the reason we know so very much about what happened in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 is survivor stories, and the records left behind by the regime itself. See, when Vietnam got sick of Cambodia’s shit and invaded, the regime panic fled, leaving behind detailed records. One such record was a notebook, found at a house near Tuol Sleng prison that had such charming notes as “Human Experiments” and begins with “1. A 17-year-old girl, with her throat cut and stomach slashed, put in water from 7:55pm until 9:20am when the body begins to float slowly to the top, which it reaches by 11:00am.

2. A 17-year-old girl bashed to death, then put in water as before, for the same period, but the body rises to the top by 1:17pm.”

Ben Kiernan notes “Similar details were recorded for “a big woman, stabbed in the throat, her stomach slashed and removed.” And “a young male bashed to death,” then “four young girls stabbed in the throat,” and “a young girl, still alive, hands tied, placed in water…”

The killings in the countryside are, to a degree, extrapolated data, based on known population count prior to 1975, and known population count after 1979. And from interviews with hundreds of survivors, detailed accounts of entire families wiped out. There was at least one Cham village of 500 where there was only 1 survivor…and that one because he ran away, I think it was to Thailand. Seeking Asylum.

We will probably never actually know the death count of the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, but it is estimated at 1.6 to 1.7 million in just 4 years. I daresay the only reason it wasn’t more is that they lacked the machinery to mechanize death the way the Nazis did in Germany.

So, January 6, 1978, the Cambodians invaded Vietnam. Pol Pot was busy doing arithmetic, justifying the invasion, pointing out how if each Cambodian soldier killed 30 Vietnamese, they could take the whole country in just a few months. He did not factor into his arithmetic that the Vietnamese would fight back. And that, having just fought a long, 20-year conflict, with global superpowers, the Vietnamese had become quite skilled in warfare themselves. The Vietnamese gave them one chance at peace, said basically, we don’t want to fight you, we just want to be your neighbors. Pol Pot took this as proof they lacked the fighting spirit and would be easy to subdue. Exactly one year later, Vietnam decided they were sick of Cambodia’s shit, and invaded the country.

The regime fled. Some of them were eventually tried by the UN for war crimes. The war crimes were mentioned in the preface to the book, I had to Google search the following, but the book itself ended with the estimated final body count, and the conclusion that quite a bit of the genocide was racially motivated. And I needed closure, so here’s what Google provided.

Pol Pot was not tried by the UN, because he died in 1998. However, he WAS tried by the remaining Khmer Rouge….my my my how the turn tables. This was due to having ordered the death of fellow leader Con Sen in June 1997. This made the remaining cadre members nervous, and so they acted first, placing him under arrest and sentencing him to life in prison in July 1997. Pol Pot died April 15, 1998, in his sleep of a heart attack. One journalist, Nate Thayer, who was present for all of this, having been granted permission to interview and follow Pol Pot, believes Pol Pot ingested poison due to a rumor the Khmer Rouge were going to hand him over to the United States. But the official cause of death is heart attack.

Chairman of the state under the regime was Khieu Samphan. According to Cambodian custom, the last name is first, then the first name, so Khieu is the last name, Samphan is the first name, just for clarification. In 2007 Samphan wrote a book to get his side of the story out. It is, the author assures us in the preface, a self-serving piece of garbage. On November 13, 2007, Samphan had a stroke. After being released from the hospital, he was arrested by a Cambodian Tribunal and charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes. In April 2008 he appeared at the Cambodian genocide tribunal. Not sure how the court system works over there, but he was not found guilty until August 7, 2014, for crimes against humanity. The Genocide charges were a separate trial, but he was found guilty there as well on November 16, 2018, for the crime of genocide against the Vietnamese people…they were as mistreated as the Muslim Cham population. He is currently serving life in prison.

Ieng Sary was the minister of foreign affairs. He was arrested on November 12, 2007, along with his wife Ieng Thirith. He was charged on December 16, 2009. He died on March 14, 2013, at the age of 87 before the case against him could be brought to verdict. His wife, Ieng Thirith, was the minister of social affairs under the regime. She was found mentally unfit to stand trial on December 13, 2011, and died on August 22, 2015.

Son Sen was the minister of national defense. He, as stated above, was murdered on Pol Pot’s orders on June 15, 1997, along with 13 members of his family who were with him at the time.

Comrade Duch, the guy who ran Tuol Sleng, hid from everyone for 20 years before being tracked down in a remote region of Cambodia by a journalist. He asked for forgiveness, publicly, before being tried and was serving life in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity, when he was found dead in his cell on September 2, 2020.

So, this book was not the easiest to read, and not just because of the horrifying subject matter. The author was seeking to correct the record that had been written and published by Michael Vickery, while telling the true story of what happened. So, there were quite a lot of threads to weave together into a cohesive tale of tragedy. Vickery tried to say that it was not the communist ideal that had failed, that the Khmer Rouge was not that bad…at least this is what’s indicated in the book, I have not read Vickery’s take to see if this assessment is accurate. But Vickery tried to say the peasant class was in full support of the rebellion and they were the ones actually responsible for killing, because the new people, vs the base people, were the capitalist scum the peasants had spontaneously risen up against.

Kiernan does an excellent job refuting these ideas. Although, as you learn at the very end of the book, he had personal reasons for doing so. He had friends in Cambodia…or had had before the genocide. None of his friends or family survived the regime, which was made known to Kiernan by friend Professor Malcolm Caldwell of London University, who, along with Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dudman and Elizabeth Becker of the Washington Post, were given permission by the regime to visit Cambodia and report on it, in October 1978. So, Kiernan gave Caldwell a list of contacts to inquire after, and it turned out all of them were dead. The entire trip was heavily curated by the Khmer Rouge, and any questions asked were sidestepped. While in Cambodia, Malcolm Caldwell was shot and killed when a gunman broke into their house. We only know about the friends all being dead due to the journals Caldwell kept of his visit.

So, Kiernan tears apart Vickery’s contentions that this was a peasant supported uprising and that the peasants did all the killing. And brings it back to the most interesting point, and a moment where another piece of the puzzle falls into place. See, James Lindsay has reiterated over and over again on his podcast that the ideologues are coming for the children to destroy the family unit. This is relevant, I promise.

Because you see, the peasant class of Cambodia are smarter by far than any of the highly educated western leftists sitting in their ivory towers and defending pedophilic attempts at children. And here’s why I say this.

When the Khmer Rouge first took over, and even during the initial stages of famine, when yes, necrophagy was practiced, the peasant class basically just went along to get along. Because, as has been true of peasant classes globally for thousands of years, it generally doesn’t matter what the people in power are doing. They just want to raise their family and have enough food on the table. And they can deal with less food, because hey, drought happens, famine happens, even war happens…these are parts of the life cycle, especially in third world countries. It is a miserable part of life, but it’s one that can, to a degree, be planned for. The farmers know this and know how to supplement their diet. But the family unit remained solid. Until it wasn’t. In 1976/1977, the Khmer Rouge tried to force collectivization on the rural villages, taking away family time in the villages, and forcing communal eating. THIS is the point where the villages started to rebel, sometimes killing the Khmer Rouge commanders, other times just taking their families and fleeing for the neighboring countries. Because the peasant class is smart enough to know that family is what connects you to life. And so, they don’t throw their children away in the name of political correctness or for fear of being “canceled” on social media. Or out of general indifference to the fact that they brought a life they are responsible for into this world. And so, I say the “peasants” who are looked down on by the intellectual elites in the west, are smarter by far than those so-called intellectuals.

Overall, the book was good. It provided a broad overview of a very short period of time where true horror rained down on a country and bathed it in blood. The story is constructed from firsthand primary accounts of survivors who were interviewed directly by the author, who learned the language and conducted the interviews himself, so there’s no misunderstanding what a translator is saying. Primary accounts are best accounts from a historical research perspective. But because he laid out what was happening in each region as it happened, it made the story a little disconnected. For example, instead of saying in the eastern region in 1975, this happened, then this, then this, then in 1979 here we are, it would be in 1975 in the east this happened, in the west this happened…then in 1976 in the east this happened, in the west this happened… so it was a little hard to track the whole story as it unfolds, because there were so many moving parts. But overall, this is a respectable telling of what happened to the Cambodian people during an awful four-year period, and an important lesson to learn for all those who are going along to get along because they don’t want to be canceled on social media. Because if they win the idea war online, they will cancel you in real life. And the Cambodians are aware of what that means to the core of their DNA. At least, the survivors are.

This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on June 18, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.