Philip Short's Pol Pot

I finished Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. A while ago, I had seen a very positive review in The Economist, and finally got around to reading it. It is a bit slow, but very compelling. The magnitude of killing and starvation in Khmer Rouge Cambodia is staggering, and Short does a good job of detailing how it came about.

Ultimately, though, it isn’t really a biography per se. The first half does discuss Pol’s exposure to Marxism, especially in Paris, but the latter half focuses on the regime itself. There is a missing connection there—what transformed the quiet, polite student into a killing machine? Murder was indiscriminate, based on Pol’s paranoia and his everchanging view of Marxism (so, for example, you might be tortured and killed if you foraged for food, because that is selfish, and your family would then also be tortured and killed).

Mostly, Short comes back to Khmer culture, combined with the fact that Cambodia was caught in a dispute between Vietnam/USSR and China/U.S., all of which were aware of and mostly unconcerned with the massive and unnecessary loss of life taking place. Once Vietnam had invaded Cambodia, both China and the U.S. wanted everyone there to suffer, as that would weaken Vietnam and by extension also the Soviet Union. But this seems to make Pol Pot just a cog in a machine, and suggests that anyone else would’ve done the same. Maybe we can never really know.