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discuss the cambodian genocide
discuss the cambodian genocide
pol pot and the rise of the khmer rouge
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Genocide is the mass slaughter of a certain type of people because of who they are. The Cambodian Genocide was the mass slaughtering of people who were foreign, educated people, not Khmer (the native race in Cambodia), as well as other people the Khmer Rouge considered to be enemies. It was one of the most horrific events in modern history, and it was discovered years after it began. It took place over a four-year period, from 1975-1979, and left a profound impact on not only Cambodia, but also the world.
Pol Pot, the leader of the Cambodian Genocide, sought to impose his view of a perfect communist society throughout Cambodia, with everyone completely equal in economic status, class, and job. Pol Pot believed that the only way to create this society was to force everyone in the country to be rural peasants. To do this, he considered everyone who was not a rural peasant working in the fields to be an enemy to him and to the well-being of the country. The Khmer Rouge, the organization headed by Pol Pot, killed or kicked out all of the foreigners and many other types of people the Khmer Rouge believed were their enemies. Millions of people were put in labor camps and were forced to work for hours upon hours with insufficient food and water, and little healthcare.
The Cambodian Genocide started because the Khmer Rouge wanted to create a pure Communist society in Cambodia. In order to do this, they decided to deconstruct the entire country back to its peasant beginnings and eliminate anyone who was above the status of a peasant or was not Cambodian. The Khmer Rouge’s dream of perfect communism ultimately failed, however, because it was impossible for a society to succeed with only one profession. Even rural peasants needed doctors an...
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... working in poor conditions with no medicine, and there were no doctors to help with the sickness. Without trained professionals, a country will fall into ruin, like Cambodia did. What happened in Cambodia clearly shows that it is impossible to impose a utopian view on millions of people in a country today. For a country to flourish, it needs people in many different types of roles, including doctors to cure illness, teachers to educate the next generation of citizens, merchants to buy and sell the products created by other citizens, and many more professions. A country today cannot survive if it just has 100% peasants, seeking to survive on their crop production. The Cambodian Genocide also shows the dangers of any government trying to impose racial purity, which has been shown only to lead to many deaths and inhumane acts of cruelty, without any resulting benefit.
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot-the leader of the Khmer Rouge followed Maoist communism, which they thought they could create an agrarian utopia. Agrarian means that the society was based on agriculture. They wanted all members of society to be rural agricultural workers and killed intellectuals, who had been depraved by western capitalist ideas. A utopia means a perfect society. This idea went to extremes when The Khmer Rouge resumed that only pure people were qualified to build the revolution. They killed Cambodians without reasons by uncivilized actions such as: cutting heads, burying alive… There were about 1.7 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge.
Compared to Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot looks like the good guy! Even though both dictators were incredibly bad Hitler takes the cake for managing to kill and torture over 6 million people. On the other hand Pot wanted to make everyone work on one huge federation of collective farms. The Holocaust was an attempt by Hitler and the Nazi party to take over Europe and create a “Master Race” (“Holocaust,” “Some”). The Holocaust lasted from 1933 to 1945, when Hitler finally committed suicide in fear of being captured by American troops. This genocide took place all throughout Europe. It started in Germany and spread all the way to Great Britain. (“Some”). The Cambodian Genocide was an attempt by the Khmer Rouge to take over and centralize all Cambodian farmers (“Cambodian”). This genocide lasted from 1975 to 1978 when the Khmer rouge was finally overthrown by the Vietnamese (“Cambodian”). The Cambodian genocide happened in Cambodia, a country in south-east Asia. Khmer Rouge, started in 1960 and their leader Pot are the reason for the horrible genocide (“Cambodian”). Both Genocides are different in there own ways. The goal of the Cambodian genocide was to revert back to “year zero” and to make everyone work on a huge collection of farms. Whereas the goal of the Holocaust was to create a “master race” which ended up killing over 6 million people. These genocides are also similar in many ways, two of which are their government overthrows and who they killed.
Ung (2000) mentions that the Cambodian genocide is a product of a perfect agrarian vision that can be built by eliminating Western influence. More specifically, the Angkar perceives peasants and farmers as “model citizens” because many have not left the village and were not subjected to Western influence (Ung 2000:57). Moreover, the Khmer Rouge emphasized the ethnic cleansing of individuals from other races who were not considered “true Khmer” and represented a “source of evil, corruption, [and] poison” (Ung 2000:92). Lastly, the ideology centered on obtaining lost territory was based on a “time when Kampuchea was a large empire with territories” (Ung 2000:78). In essence, Ung successfully demonstrates that multiple causes encouraged the Cambodian
Evil doesn’t even begin to cover it. The mass murder of millions of people. The complete obliteration of an entire society. Each and every genocide has the same core principles, but a distinct face. A dictator takes over a weak country with promises of returning it to its former glory, once he has everyone’s support, he implements extremely discriminatory laws and finds reasons to kill anyone who dares oppose him. The Holocaust and the Cambodian genocides are remarkably similar, and yet strikingly different. The Holocaust was an attempt to wipe out all Jews and other minorities such as gypsies and handicapped people. The Cambodian genocide, led by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, was in some ways a mirror image of the Holocaust, but it happened forty-two years later. On the other hand, there are many more that one distinction that sets Cambodia apart from all other genocides.
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.
In 1975, The Khmer Rouge became the ruling political party of Cambodia after overthrowing the Lon Nol government. Following their leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society. They wanted to form an anti-modern, anti-Western ideal of a restructured “classless agrarian society'', a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. The Khmer Rouge revolutionary army enforced this mostly with extreme violence. The book “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers”, written by Luong Ung, is the author’s story of growing up during this time period. She was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came into power. As stated in the author’s note, “From 1975 to 1979, through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labor, the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country’s population.”
"Pol Pot in Cambodia 1975-1979." The History Place : Genocide in the 20th Century: Pol Pot in Cambodia 1975-1979. The History Place, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014. .
The Khmer Rouge years was a period of time that devastated all of the small country Cambodia, a story that was so well told by Loung Ung about the Pol Pot regime. The Khmer Rouge years was from 1975 to 1979 (http://www.cambodiatribunal.org). The Khmer Rouge, otherwise known as Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), conquered Cambodia for four years. The Khmer Rouge forced people to work in the fields including children. To make matters worse, the people that were forced to work were also malnourished and were living in grim conditions (http://www.wcl.american.edu).
The Communist Party of Kampuchea, also known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of Cambodia on April 17, 1975, which lasted until January 1979. For their three-year, eight-month, and twenty-one day rule of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge committed some of the most heinous crimes in current history. The main leader who orchestrated these crimes was a man named Pol Pot. In 1962, Pol Pot had become the coordinator of the Cambodian Communist Party. The Prince of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, did not approve of the Party and forced Pol Pot to flee to exile in the jungle. There, Pol formed a fortified resistance movement, which became known as the Khmer Rouge, and pursued a guerrilla war against Sihanouk’s government. As Pol Pot began to accumulate power, he ruthlessly imposed an extremist system to restructure Cambodia. Populations of Cambodia's inner-city districts were vacated from their homes and forced to walk into rural areas to work. All intellectuals and educated people were eradicated and together with all un-communist aspects of traditional Cambodian society. The remaining citizens were made to work as laborers in various concentration camps made up of collective farms. On these farms, people would harvest the crops to feed their camps. For every man, woman, and child it was mandatory to labor in the fields for twelve to fifteen hours each day. An estimated two million people, or twenty-one percent of Cambodia's population, lost their lives and many of these victims were brutally executed. Countless more of them died of malnourishment, fatigue, and disease. Ethnic groups such as the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham Muslims were attacked, along with twenty other smaller groups. Fifty percent of the estimated 425,000 Chinese living in Cambod...
During the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia was turned into a giant labor 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.
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.
Genocide is “the deliberate systematic murder of a certain race, ethnic group, or even a nation.” To a very high extent the mass killings in Cambodia can be considered as genocide because the Khmer Rouge deliberately and systematically attempted to destroy the people of Cambodian people. After the deposition of Cambodian president Lon Nol the Khmer Rouge wasted no time in imposing their will on the country. Within days of overthrowing the previous government the Khmer rouge forced the civilians of Cambodia to leave their homes to go and work as unpaid labourers on a collection of farms. No one was shown mercy upon; the very old, sickly and very young were all sent. If they failed to move quickly e...
Pol Pot shut the country off from all outside influences such as newspapers, radio, television, mail, and even money. This was Pol Pot’s attempt to go back in time and have a higher control over the people. Human rights were revoked, no more free speech, religion was forbidden when 90 percent of the people were Buddhists. There was no traveling was permitted and the whole community was put on schedules and have strict rules. People who broke even the smallest rule were killed. People who were inhabitants were forced out of the cities by the Khmer Rouge army. Two million people had to leave Phnom Penh and travel to the countryside to be under complete Pol Pot control. Approximately twenty thousand died while traveling to the countryside. The individuals, who admitte...
The genocide in Cambodia was a result of the Khmer rouge guerrilla force that seized power over the Lon Nol government in 1975. Their leader, Pol Pot, was an admirer of Chinese communism and wanted to make Cambodia a place in which all citizens were to participate in agricultural activities and all western innovations were to be removed. Pol Pot then proposed that to create the ideal communist nation, all Cambodians must all work as labourers on collective farms, and anyone who opposed this was to be eliminated. However during this time Cambodia was involved in the Vietnam War due to the fact that the old government leader, Lon Nol, was helping the U.S.A backed South Vietnam forces to conquer North Vietnam, backed by Pol Pots’ forces. Before Pol Pots took over the Cambodian government, the Americans, already fighting in Vietnam, thought that it was ok to also invade the capitalistic Cambodia. During this time the guerrilla forces ruled by Pol Pots, were fighting a civil war against Lon Nol, who was allowing the Americans to harbour troops, airbases, barracks and weapon caches. When Pol Pots’ forces won the civil war, he started supporting the North Vietnamese army. Thus Pol Pots showed his true anger towards the capitalistic countries and passion for communism.
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 believed, 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, beside all un-communist aspects of traditional Cambodian society.