Pol Pot

Product Description

Pol Pot was an idealistic reclusive figure with great charisma & personal charm. He initiated a revolution whose radical egalitarianism exceeded any other in history. But in the process Cambodia desended into madness & his name became a byword for oppression. In the three-&-a-half years of his rule more than a million people a fifth of Cambodias population were executed or died from hunger & disease. A supposedly gentle carefree land of slumbering temples & smiling peasants became a concentration camp of the mind a slave state in which absolute obedience was enforced on the killing fields. Why did it happen? How did an idealistic dream of justice & prosperity mutate into one of humanitys worst nightmares? Philip Short the biographer of Mao has spent four years travelling the length of Cambodia interviewing surviving leaders of Pol Pots Khmer Rouge movement & sifting through previously closed archives. Here the former Khmer Rouge Head of State Pols brother-in-law & scores of lesser figures speak for the first time at length about their beliefs & motives.