Pol Pot

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short, 449 pages

When the Khmer Rouge captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Phen in 1975, no one - not even the revolutionaries themselves - knew exactly what would happen next.  Indeed, at that time the identity of the communists' ultimate leader was unknown to any outside of their own innermost circle.  Saloth Sar, who took the revolutionary name Pol Pot, had been content to be a face in the crowd of Khmer Rouge officials, but he now held the power of life and death over seven million people.  For at least a fifth of that population, that power would be death.

Jacob Burckhardt famously declared that "the essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity."  It may be significant, then, that Pol Pot's brother-in-law once described him as having "a very simplistic vision of things."  It is not a mistake that Philip Short repeats in his study of the Cambodian dictator, rather, he provides detailed intersecting accounts of the breakdown of Cambodian politics, the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and the making of the man Pol Pot.  Unfortunately, this sometimes suggests obfuscation rather than accuracy, as the author seems to be at pains to highlight just about any negative influence on the Khmer Rouge other than progressive dogma, primarily blaming various elements of the Khmer national character for the regime's policies - an absurd explanation given the poverty of the Khmer precedents when contrasted with the rich global pattern of Marxist mass murder.  It is distasteful for other reasons as well, as Short confesses when he notes that his description of the Khmer as a uniquely lazy people "will raise hackles."