Lon Nol’s violence, and his obsession with racial “purity” and restoring a glorious Angkorian past, augured tyranny and genocide. But as it turned out, he had these tendencies in common with the man who would soon overthrow him: Pol Pot, his Marxist mirror image. And in 1975, after five years of fighting, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge would win the Cambodian civil war and launch a genocide so horrific and vast in scale that Lon Nol would become a historical footnote.
