Cambodian Genocide Rough Draft The Cambodian Genocide occurred between 1975 and 1979. Pol Pot began with isolating Cambodia, and deporting all of the foreigners. The Cambodian Genocide was not only an attack on the people, but Cambodia’s pride, because there was no valid reason for doing this, the amount of people who were killed is ghastly, and how Cambodia looked after the genocide is horrendous. The Khmer Rouge was a murderous group, and their plan was to change the Cambodian society. On April 17 of 1975, the group marched into Phnom Penh, and forced all residents to evacuate into the country side. The members of the Khmer Rouge were mostly uneducated boys who had no idea what they were doing. Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, sent these people Hitler executed around 1 billion people, and Pol Pot executed 3,314,768! “To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss,” Pol Pot said. How can someone live with themselves after doing such a thing? I guess nobody really can, because some of the members of the Khmer Rouge were diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after the years of execution. Unfortunately, there was no treatment for this disorder. Thirty years after the violence ended, a tribunal was set up to investigate those responsible for the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia was formed in 2003, and they were empowered to prosecute leaders of the Khmer Rouge who committed the mass crimes. Even years after the Khmer Rouge, there were still consequences for their actions. In the early 1990s, mass graves were uncovered throughout Cambodia. Each held hundreds of skeletal remains from Khmer Rouge execution grounds. The remains are now piled in barns that the Khmer Rouge has once used. “The skulls speak to us,” villagers said.
The Cambodian Genocide and the Holocaust are unique in the areas of reason and aftermath effect. Hitler wanted to create a “Master Race” (“Holocaust”), also he wanted to exterminate the Jewish population because he believed they “hindered” population growth (“Some”). Pot wanted to deconstruc...
Pol Pot had many ways of getting what he wanted. He used multiple forms of propaganda in his piece The Little Red Book. "I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country." ("The State of Mind of State"). Pol Pot fooled Cambodians with the thought of him doing everything for the citizens, when in reality...
Daniel Goldhagen (2009) states that in less than four years, Cambodia’s political leaders induced their followers to turn Cambodia’s backwards and regressing society into a massive concentration camp in which they steadily killed victims. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of the Cambodian genocide is provided within Luong Ung’s personal narrative, “First They Killed My Father” (2000). Ung’s memoir is a riveting account of the Cambodian genocide, which provides readers with a personalized account of her family’s experience during the genocide. She informs readers of the causes of the Cambodian genocide and she specifies the various eliminationist techniques used to produce the ideological Khmer vision. Nonetheless, she falls short because
"Pol Pot vs Hitler." Killing in the Name of. N.p., 26 Jan. 2012. Web. 27 Apr. 2014. .
During the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia was turned into a giant labour camp creating a system of terror, genocide, and attempted cultural annihilation, a series of drastic events that the country is still recovering from. The years contained within this regime were devastating for the nation of Cambodia, with the establishment of the Khmer Rouge, a left-wing Communist political party whose actions have had an overwhelmingly detrimental effect on the political, economic and social structure of Cambodia, ruining the lives of millions.
Over the years, there have been several horrible genocides. One of the most infamous genocides occurred in Rwanda in 1994. Within three months, approximately 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus were slaughtered. Beginning in April of 1994 a group called the Hutus began to slaughter the Tutsis without any remorse. The genocide was a result of high tensi...
The junta imprisoned, killed and tortured its opponents; dissolved congress; put limitations on the press; and banned political parties. An intelligence service known as DINA was established shortly after the coup. They kept secret detention centres where political prisoners were tortured, murdered or brutalised. A private enterprise economy was installed.
A similarity between the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide is the social killing technique. This is the perpetrators’ strategy used to eliminate people who could stand up against them by killing the educated and intelligent people and religions of their targets. When the Nazis seized Poland and Slovenia, they tried to murder intelligentsia or deported them into slave labor in Germany, as way to dismantle their enemies’ resources to create opportunities and operate rebellion. Under control of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, they also deliberately adjudicated deaths to whom they believed that had potential to disobey Pol Pot. In the article “ The History Place - Genocide in the 20th Century: Pol Pot in Cambodia 1975-1979”, the author informed,
Pol Pot was born in May 19, 1925 in Kampong Thom Province, French Indochina. Pol joined the Democratic Party of Cambodia in 1954. Then, with the independence of Cambodia took control of the popular revolutionary party in early 1960. This party he renamed as Khmer Rouge with which decided to start a revolt against the Government of Cambodia. In 1970, when he started to fight against US imperialism, he won broad popular support. In 1975, the Civil War ended and Pol Pot began to call himself "number one brother '. His regime banned religion and many educated people were arrested and imprisoned. In 1976, he carried people from Phnom Penh for rural areas, and in this place, he killed about 2 to 3 million people from starvation or executions. In
Walker, Luke. "Cambodian Genocide." World Without Genocide. William Mitchell College of Law, 2012. Web. 15 Apr. 2014. .
The Cambodian Genocide has the historical context of the Vietnam War and the country’s own civil war. During the Vietnam War, leading up to the conflicts that would contribute to the genocide, Cambodia was used as a U.S. battleground for the Vietnam War. Cambodia would become a battle ground for American troops fighting in Vietnam for four years; the war would kill up to 750,00 Cambodians through U.S. efforts to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines. This devastation would take its toll on the Cambodian peoples’ morale and would later help to contribute that conflicts that caused the Cambodian genocide. In the 1970’s the Khmer rouge guerilla movement would form. The leader of the Khmer rouge, Pol Pot was educated in France and believed in Maoist Communism. These communist ideas would become important foundations for the ideas of the genocide, and which groups would be persecuted. The genocide it’s self, would be based on Pol Pot’s ideas to bring Cambodia back to an agrarian society, starting at the year zero. His main goal was to achieve this, romanticized idea of old Cambodia, based on the ancient Cambodian ruins, with all citizens having agrarian farming lives, and being equal to each other. Due to him wanting society to be equal, and agrarian based, the victims would be those that were educated, intellectuals, professionals, and minority ethnic g...
Marks, Stephen P. "Elusive Justice For The Victims Of The Khmer Rouge." Journal Of International Affairs 52.2 (1999): 691. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. .
Under Pol Pot's leadership, and within days of overthrowing the government, the Khmer Rouge launched themselves into an organized mission: they ruthlessly imposed an extremist programme to reconstruct Cambodia on the communist model of Mao's China. The population should, they believe, be forced to work as labourers in one vast federation of collective farms. Anyone in opposition - as intellectuals and educated folks were assumed to be - must be eliminated, along with all un-communist aspects of traditional Cambodian society. So, at short notice and with threat of death, the inhabitants of towns and cities were forced to depart with them. The ill, disabled, old and extremely young were driven out too, no matter their physical condition: no-one was spared the exodus.
The question of moral validity has plagued societies for millennia. Unsurprisingly, this question afflicted Indonesia between 1965 and 1966. In the early days of October 1965, a group of conspirators took and killed six generals. The disagreement of whom caused this coup caused the killing of more than 80,000 (1,000,000 in some areas) people. This caused a social change from aristocrats to an Indonesian business class. For other peoples around the world, the view of this genocide was a victory over communism. While these killings were clearly morally deplorable, the result was an improved and restructured government; a victory for capitalism at the height of the Cold War.
Some leaders of the Khmer Rouge still to this day deny guilt of the Cambodian genocide. Almost 40 years later they still deny responsibility for the deaths of millions of people. It is a crime in Cambodia to deny that atrocities were committed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. "Not recognizing the crimes constitutes an insult to the souls of those who died during the [Khmer Rouge] regime, and brings suffering to the surviving family members of the victims," Says government lawmaker Cheam Yeap (The