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Cambodian Genocide Causes

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Causes of the Cambodian Genocide
The Cambodian genocide took place from 1975 to 1979; it is estimated that some two million Cambodians were systematically murdered by the Khmer Rouge and its followers (Power 90). In Alexander Hinton’s article, “A Head for an Eye” he recounts in details the experience of Gen, a survivor of the Cambodian Genocide. After the Lon Nol government was overthrown by the Khmer Rouge, the Communists began their witch-hunt in an attempt to identify and kill anyone who was associated with the former regime, as well as the educated, the Vietnamese, the Muslim Cham, the Buddhist monks, and other “bourgeois elements” (Power 101). During the investigation, it was revealed that Gen’s father was a teacher–this fact alone was …show more content…

Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, is no ordinary dictator; he was highly driven by the ideology of total revolution which had four separate, but related components. First, and most important of all, is the push for total independence and self-reliance, second, the dictatorship of the proletariat, third, total and immediate economic revolution, and lastly, a complete transformation of Khmer social values (Jackson 135). To implement this ideology of total revolution, the Khmer Rouge had to resort to permanent purges in order to eliminate all potential competitors and to “create a society with no past and no alternatives” (Jackson 137). Pol Pot divided Cambodian society into five classes: the working, the peasants the bourgeoisie, the capitalist, and the feudal class. However, in an effort to create an egalitarian society, the only acceptable classes were the “workers, peasants, and the revolutionary army” (Jackson 136). In April of 1975, the Communist party had gained enough power to capture the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. Once capturing the city, the communists began emptying it of its inhabitants and replacing them with peasants. Along with the inhabitants, the communists destroyed Western consumer goods, burned books and libraries, severed most of its diplomatic relations, abolished money, and markets. Evidently, the ideology of total revolution could only be carried out through mass bloodshed and destruction; in the words of Franz Fanon: “true liberation cannot come without violence and that the only true revolutionaries are those who participate directly in the shedding of blood” (Jackson

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Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father is a vivid, detailed memoir of a young girl’s experiences in Cambodia throughout the Khmer Rouge era. It records in expressive detail the horrors suffered by the Ung and her family while living under the oppressive rule of the insane Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, First They Killed Her Sister by Soneath Hor, Sody Lay and Grantham Quinn is a lengthy criticism in direct opposition to the aforementioned memoir. Although the authors of First They Killed Her Sister made some excellent points throughout their assessment of First They Killed my Father such as showing how Ung having misrepresented some aspects of Khmer culture and history, they completely and utterly failed in their attempt to discredit her based on the claims that she perpetuated racial tension and distorted what really happened in 1970s Cambodia, which breaks down the few good points they did have. The critics correctly assert and prove that Ung misrepresented certain aspects of Khmer culture and history, showing that at times, Ung’s description of what had happened was distorted or partially fabricated.

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“Torture and execution were frequent in the collective farms. The majority of the victims of the regime were killed in the farms giving rise to the phrase, ‘the killing fields.’” ( Terror, Museum of Communist), The killing fields are notorious in the Cambodia, similar to the Holocausts death marches, they both are exhausting systematic labour which resulted in

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They also shut down factories, schools, universities, hospitals, and all other private institutions because the Khmer Rouge considered it western advances. The Khmer Rouge also killed different The Khmer Rouge killed approximately one and a half to three million Cambodians lost their lives at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.   On July 25, 1983, the Research Committee on Pol Pot’s Genocidal Regime issued its final report, including detailed province-by-province data.   The data showed that the number of deaths was 3,314,768.   About 25 percent of the population died because of the Khmer Rouge idea of relocating the people to

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Both of the genocides mainly involved similarities between people and society. In both genocides the people were starved almost to death they were extremely skinny and very weak. “Once the Khmer Rouge took power, they instituted a radical reorganization of Cambodian society. This meant the forced removal of city dwellers into the countryside, where they would be forced to work as farmers, digging canals and tending to crops. Gross mismanagement of the country’s economy led to shortages of food and medicine, and untold numbers of people succumbed to disease and starvation.

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Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge which is responsible for the deaths of 25 percent of the country 's population from starvation, overwork, and executions. Pol Pot was born in 1925 to a farming family in Cambodia, a country formerly part of French Indochina. At the age of 20, Pot studied radio electronics in Paris but soon became occupied in Marxism resulting in him leaving his studies. Losing his scholarship, he returned to Cambodia and joined a secret Communist movement in 1953. In 1954, one year after Pot became committed to the Communist movement, Cambodia gained its independence from France.

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The impact of Lenin’s victory over a capitalist monarchy defines an important change in the way Sino-Vietnamese relations would occur, since the focus on nationalism would slowly convert to communism as the dominant ideology to resist western capitalism. The rise of the communist resistance Ho Chi Minh in the early 20th century defines the overarching influence of Chinese/Soviet communist policies, which he followed by building a military force on the northern border of China and Vietnam in the 1920s: “By late 1924, Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh) was in southern China, building a new revolutionary organization meant to operate inside Indochina. These efforts culminated in 1930 with the establishment of the Vietnamese Communist Party” (Ward 45). In this historical perspective, it is imperative to understand the impact that the Soviet Union had on Chinese Communism, which had been steadily growing as a counter-ideology to the capitalist nationalism of Sun Yat-sen.

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The Khmer Rouge was a totalitarian communist government that gained power after rising victorious in a civil war. This later allowed the Khmer Rouge to gradually expand and gain power and to eventually rise and establish themselves as a national government in Cambodia after a successful invasion of Phnom Phen. Although the Cambodian Genocide initially significantly damaged the health of the country, the lasting effects were more catastrophic, leading to decades of unforgotten memories and trauma. During the Cambodian Genocide, Cambodian citizen’s rights were severely strained, as they were stripped of religious beliefs and were unable to develop a sympathetic relationship with their families.

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When describing the Kuomintang regime, Chang writes of how things such as harassment, corruption, greed were rampant. (82) In the next chapter Chang describes the Communist forces as helpful, disciplined, and as demonstrating exemplary behavior. (100-101) This comparison isn’t made haphazardly.

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Hannah Arendt one of the most influential scholars who defines Nazism as totalitarianism and describes totalitarianism as a novel form of government and domination (Arendt, 1953 : 303). Arendt explains how totalitarianism operates to transform the society into a total domination as follows, Wherever it rose to power, it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country... totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed towards world domination (Arendt, 1953 : 303). Thus, according to Arendt, totalitarianism is “a chaotic, non-utilitarian, manically dynamic movement of destruction” (Canovan, 1999 : 26).

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The Cambodian Genocide lasted until Khmer Rouge was overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1978. It only lasted three years, but over 1.7 million people were killed by means of torture, starvation or being overworked.  It left lasting impacts on many of the countries around the world. Khmer Rouge was the communist group responsible for the Cambodian Genocide. The Khmer Rouge guerrilla movement

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