A dictatorship is a government or a social situation where one person implies absolute power or, when one person takes control. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge will be broken down and analysed as to why and how they did what they did to the Cambodian People. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge led a forbidding regime that subjugated the Cambodian people, killing around one-quarter of the Cambodian population in the process. Pol Pots’ totalitarian and brutal leadership of the regime was, by definition, a dictatorship and not at all, a benevolent dictatorship.
The main reason why Pol pot and the Khmer Rouge came to power was because of the US carpet bombings of Cambodia to emigrate the North Vietnamese. Pol Pot was born into a farming family in central Cambodia in 1925. In 1949 at the age of 20 he travelled to Paris on a scholarship to study radio electronics. However during his scholarship he started to become involved heavily in Marxism and neglected his studies. When he finally lost his scholarship four years later and returned to Cambodia, Pot joined the underground Communist Movement. The Infamous Khmer Rouge was formed in 1963 when Pol Pot became leader of the Communist Party and was forced to flee into the jungle by the leader of Cambodia, Prince Nordom Sihanouk. Six years later the American Military began carpet bombing Cambodia to eliminate the North Vietnamese. Although it was indigenous, Pol Pot would not have gotten the support he had from the Cambodian people without US economic and military destabilisation Many Cambodians were traumatized from the bombings, which drove a great majority of them into the hands of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. However, even with the Khmer Rouge growing rapidly the bombings of Cambodia intensified i...
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... to an international tribunal. Despite this, Pol Pot died in his bed later in the night while waiting to be moved to another location. Ta Mok claimed that his death was due to heart failure however most people believe that it was a suicide and he passed away from an over dosage of drugs. Some people say that it was very fortunate that Pol Pot became more and more paranoid about the North Vietnamese and without this; he could have still been in power for many years to come.
After the brutal regime of Pol pot and the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia was not and never will be, the same country as it once was. Once Cambodia was considered safe, the new government officials boarded jeeps and entered the deserted Phnom Penh. The scene described by Hun Sen was that it was “bleak and dull”. As the officials inspected their capital, block after block was passed with no signs of life.
From the 17th century on, Vietnam had never had a steady period of peace or prosperity. Vietnam fell into a civil war between the 16th to early 19th century between three powerful lords, Trinh and Nguyen, and the Tay Son brothers. Next, French influence and invasions took over Vietnam and established Fre...
Imagine yourself in a world where you are constantly having to fear not being able to ever be free from this cage that you've been wanting to get out of for so long. Now imagine that suddenly just being your real life and not just a world that was just imagined, it’s almost too unbearable to think about but this happens. The book “Before We Were Free is a good example of that. The books takes place in the Dominican Republic in the 20th century, when the Dictator at the time was Rafael Trujillo, or in other words El Jefe. Dictators are a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained power by force. Till this day there are countries that are still ruled by dictators, for example, North Korea However, having a dictator
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
“The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s Regime”. Mtholyoke.edu. 11 May 2005. Web. 7 May 2014.
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. .
A dictator is a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained power by force, and generally not liked by the community. The major dictators of the 20th century left an infamous legacy behind them, all using similar tactics during their reign. Mussolini, dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1942, used his power to abolish all other political parties in Italy, thus making him superior. Hitler gained dictatorship in the 1930’s. In that time, he purged opposition and used his newly confiscated power to create his definition of superior humans, annihilating entire groups due to them not meeting his criteria for appropriate human value. Stalin exterminated millions who opposed them and expelled all free expression. The leaders had similar rises to power and methods of that assumed power.
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...
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 bones cannot find peace until the truth they hold in themselves has been revealed” This quote, said by Deputy Military Police Chief Nhim Seila, means that the deceased persecutors of the Cambodian Genocide cannot rest well until the reason for their actions has been told to the public. On April 17, 1975, soldiers of a communist group known as the Khmer Rogue, stormed into the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, and attacked the city, forcing all the citizens into the countryside to work vigorously for the Khmer Rouge. The stories of Samnang Shawn Vann and Sisowath Doung Chanto paint a picture of what it was like to live under this cruel group.
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...
Cambodia is a small country located in in south-east Asia. In 1975 president Lon Nol of Cambodia was overthrown by the Khmer Rouge (a group of teenage guerrillas), which was led by Pol Pot, in a military coup. Within a matter of days of overthrowing the previous government Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge on a prepared mission: they brutally imposed an idea that stated that Cambodia (now under its Khmer Rouge Name Kampuchea) was to be reconstructed The Same way Tsung Tse did china. The people were forced to leave the cities and to be moved to farms to work as unpaid labourers. Those refused to take part in the exodus or did not move fast enough were eliminated on the spot. Even the young, old and sickly were forced to take part in the exodus. All intellectual men or women or professional men were killed (even those who worked in the army). Civilian deaths during this period of time caused by execution, starvation disease and exhaustion are estimated to be well over two million, this is estimated to be twenty five percent of the population.
“How many people did Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Leng Sary kill? Tens of thousands? You tell the Cambodians, I the Khmer Rouge, that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs but we won’t let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part but don’t tell them what I said before.”
The dictatorship also manages to keep its subjects in line through brainwashing. As Prometheus writes, "Everything which comes from the many is good. Everything which comes from the one is evil. Thus have we been taught with our first breath." Also, as children, the ruled are forced to recite, "By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers," meaning that the only moral justification they have for living is service. By imbuing each subject with the moral premise that the "many" is always good and the "one" is always bad, the dictatorship manages to virtually eliminate any thought of opposition. In opposing the dictatorship, one is opposing the will of all people with one's singular will, and thus is evil. The moral creed that the dictatorship inculcates gives it a moral s...
Society of southeast Asia came to ruins during the Khmer Rouge. One of these problems involve the population of Cambodia. Due to the Khmer Rouge, there was a massive decrease in population. This was caused by either mass killings or the large numbers of immigration (Carney). The population that remained were obligated to work in labour camps, in hopes of fulfilling Pol Pot’s dream of a farming community. This is stated in an internet article known as “Cambodia’s history and the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge”, by Susana Maldonado. Her article says, “[w]ithin days of Phnom Penh’s fall, the entire population of the city was forced at gunpoint into forced labour camps in the countryside in order to create a completely agrarian society.” (Maldonado) A third problem set on society for Cambodia is how the regime u...