Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

Evil at its most mysterious and incomprehensible and vile. Imagine if somebody like him had gained control of a larger more industrialized nation. One shudders to think. ( )

An excellently written biography of Pol Pot, the chilling despot who ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s as head of the Khmer Rouge. As with the biography I recently read of Ho Chi Minh, there is not much to say about Pol's personality, his likes and dislikes, and his passions- he never wrote them down or revealed much of anything about himself to anyone, especially scholars or journalists. But he was ruthless and pitiless, in the vein of Stalin or Hitler, eating well while the Cambodian people in the countryside starved to death or were executed for things like foraging in the jungle for fruit or knowing French. It is also as much a history of Cambodia in the latter half of the 20th century, not to mention a commentary on a culture in which anyone with a certain amount of power or authority can act with impunity. Pol was never punished, in part because when the iron was hot, he was playing the US, China, and Thailand off against the USSR and Vietnam- a Cold War game in which the Cambodian people suffered horrifically. Highly recommended for those with an interest in the region and in what happened in the inner sanctum of the Khmer Rouge during this country's great tragedy. ( )