Status Updates From The Pol Pot Regime: Race, P...

"I suggested Malcolm Caldwell [who later disappeared in Cambodian custody] get a list of members of the CPK Central Committee, and asked him to enquire about the whereabouts of my Cambodian in-laws.*

*All nine members of my wife's family, we later discovered, had already been killed."

It's not unusual for communists to die at the hands of their own state, but Cambodia was by far the most wanton self-destruction.

The more I read, the less I understand. Michael Vickery embedded the Khmer revolution in a history of rural jacqueries; Kiernan goes out of his way to debunk this interpretation. Successfully so, but he puts nothing in place. Persecution and murder seem like the only actionable courses that made sense to Angkar. But why? No clue.

I have definitvely lost track of who is killing who here. Even in the early days of Nazi Germany, you have a sense that there is a plan the killers have to take into account; here, there isn't. City people, former soldiers, peasants, communists of a different denomination, communists from the same party ...