The Cambodian Genocide: The Ideology Of Pol Pot

The Cambodian Genocide and Holocaust are two significant events remembered in history. During the Cambodian Genocide and the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot targeted minorities that had unique identities that would put them in danger and make them weak to resist. There were several planned events that led up to the occurrence of both genocides. Both Hitler and Pol Pot aimed to take control of their country by organizing ways to kill off multiple people at once. Hitler created concentration and extermination camps while Pol Pot had killing fields. These two leaders killed millions of lives because they practiced a religion that was disliked or had a job that made too much money for the leader’s liking.

The killing of so many Cambodian people fueled the Khmer Rouge to begin a power grab, where they staged a coup to take control of the government. They succeeded and

The Cambodian genocide occurred in the late twentieth century in Cambodia; the Holocaust took place in the beginning of the twentieth century in Germany and Eastern Europe. In the Cambodian Genocide and the Holocaust, individuals experienced a lack of allies because people were more concerned about self-preservation than they were about the other party. Bystanders, such as the United States and characters in Night, did not help because they valued their own safety over the safety of others. Allies were only motivated to help if they were sure it would disadvantage them.

The Cambodian Genocide took place from 1975 to 1979 in the Southeastern Asian country of Cambodia. The genocide was a brutal massacre that killed 1.4 to 2.2 million people, about 21% of Cambodia’s population. This essay, will discuss the history of the Cambodian genocide, specifically, what happened, the victims and the perpetrators and the world’s response to the genocide.

Later that same year, Pot and the Khmer Rouge took control over Cambodia. Pot wasted no time in starting his mission to reconstruct Cambodia. He thought that all the educated people needed to be killed (Melicharova). Also he thought that all noncommunist aspects of Cambodia needed to be wiped out. All rights you had were now gone. Religion was banned and if you were any kind of leader among the Buddhist monks, you were killed instantly (Melicharova). All kids were taken away and sent to work in the fields (Melicharova). If anyone was currently working and had a job, they were immediately killed along with their family members. It got so bad that you could be killed for just laughing, crying, and knowing another language. The Khmer Rouge motto was “To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss” (Melicharova). If you were lucky enough to escape death, you were put into the fields working usually from 4am to 10pm unpaid (“Pol”). From lack of food and sleep, people often became very ill which sadly led to death.

In the late 70’s, nearly 2 million Cambodians died of overwork, starvation, torture, and execution in what became known as the Cambodian genocide. A group known as the Khmer Rouge took control of the country in April 1975. Over the course of

The Cambodian Genocide happened between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge, a guerrilla group, over threw the government and started a regime to bring Cambodia back to year zero . The Khmer Rouge called this the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea . Their aim was to purify society from the influence of the west, and to create a communist country . The Khmer Rouge started this by destroying what was left of the old society and executing the wealthy, educated and military people. They banned all outside languages and religion. An estimated figure of 1.7 million Cambodians where killed during this period by the Khmer Rouge .

In Democratic Kampuchea, in 1975, the radicalistic Khmer Rouge party formed under the communist leader Pol Pot, who was inspired to create a political nation that followed the footsteps Stalinism and Maoism. Compared to the Holocaust, which was singlehandedly the worst genocide in the 20th century in my opinion, Pol killed a believed 1.7-3.0 million Cambodians.

During times of trouble it is the structure of families which bring stability and fuel resilience. Families often support each other to survive a trauma because they are support systems. The Cambodian genocide led by the Khmer Rouge regime attempted to tear apart families and exploit their special bond. The Khmer Rouge soldiers took towns captive or burned them, and recruited youths to join their cause (Pran IX). From 1975 to 1979, all Cambodians were forced to live in labor camps and were forced to work fourteen to eighteen hours a day with only a single bowl of rice to eat. Family members were separated from one another purposefully to lower morale. During this period an estimated one-third of Cambodian’s population died due to malnutrition, illness, and execution (Pran X). Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors compiled by Dith Pran is important because it confirms the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime, explains how the Khmer Rouge gained power, and how the Khmer Rouge attempted to indoctrinate young children against their parents.

Cambodia is a small country of Southeast Asia, less than half the size of the state of California (“World Without Genocide: Cambodian Genocide”). The Cambodian government in the mid 1970’s was unstable as Lon Nol, the Cambodian prime minister, and his forces were being stretched dealing with conflicts of Vietnamese communists, and a rising group of Cambodian communists called the Khmer Rouge Party. (Peace Pledge Union) As the government grew weaker and began to loose control, The Khmer Rouge Party overthrew the country. They began killing for their cause in 1975. The Khmer Rouge Party, under the rule of a man called Pol Pot, enforced a new way of life following values and rules similar to Maoist-Communism (“World Without Genocide: Cambodian Genocide”). The Khmer Party attempted, in simplistic terms, to nationally centralize the middle or farming class of Cambodia (“World Without Genocide: Cambodian

Webster Dictionary defines the word genocide as; the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. Cambodia was a mostly peaceful, small country in South Asia with a population of about 7 million.

Cambodia, my small country bordering Thailand, has recently descended into a grisly crisis of outright genocide of innocent citizens, my innocent neighbors. This genocide is very different from any other genocide because it isn't driven by racial or religious reasons, but by poisonous ideology, the ideology of my own neighbors. As of today a little less than a million Cambodians have died either from starvation, torture, disease, execution, and even exhaustion from hard labor carried out by their own families, by my own neighbors.

There have been several genocides in the past century. The Cambodian Genocide and the Holocaust are two of the great tragedies of the twentieth century. The Holocaust occurred in Germany and Eastern Europe. The Cambodian genocide took place in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was an overwhelming communist force that took Phnom Penh by surprise. In Cambodia, “21% of the population was killed. That is about 1.7 million people that lost their lives” (“Past Genocides”). There was little commotion or outcry from the world after Cambodia, but after the Holocaust, there were museums and memorials built, and extensive integration into the curriculum of students everywhere. The methods, persecutions of certain groups, and the prohibition of

Genocides are defined as a large group of killings often of a specific ethnic group or nation. Genocides targeting specific groups happen all over the world. Sometimes they are well known, while in other cases they are hidden and not published as much. Unlike the Holocaust, The Khmer Rouge Regime caused a smaller scale genocide in the heart of Cambodia. Beginning in the late 1960s the Khmer Rouge Regime came into power. Their leader Pol Pot committed atrocities, killing a little over two million innocent people. Pol Pot believed that this new society was becoming evil. He decided to bring the city of Phnom Penh back to the middle ages with communal farming. He murdered every “intellectual” of the country. He killed anyone who had any education, or even worse, glasses. He isolated the city and everybody in it. There are many stories coming from the victim's point of view and how they felt as 2.2 million of their own were killed. There are also reasons of why the Cambodian government's committed this atrocity. Finally, there are the views from America and its feelings towards watching the genocide go down from outside the country. Looking through all of these different lenses of this genocide help get a big picture of how and why something so horrific could have happened.

Ever since the actions in Cambodia occurred, it has been debated whether it was an actual genocide. The general definition of genocide is the purposeful and methodical execution of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia demonstrated that a government can be guilty of genocide against its own nation. The radical communist party led by Pol Pot took over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. After 1979, the Khmer Rouge left a traumatized Cambodian culture that continues to undergo the repercussions of the genocide. People over the age of forty in Cambodia have stories to tell of fear, cruelty, hunger and the loss of family members. However, the Cambodian government is not making an effort to recognize the negative occurrences that have posed itself in the history of their culture.