Product Description

What was the nature of the regime that turned Cambodia into grisly killing fields and murdered or starved to death 1.7 million of the country's eight million inhabitants? In this riveting book, the first definitive account of the Khmer Rouge revolution, a world renowned authority on Cambodia shows how an ideological preoccupation with racist and totalitarian policies led a group of intellectuals to impose genocide on their own country. This edition includes a new preface recounting the fatal disintegration of the Khmer Rouge army, the death of Pol Pot, the United Nations' foray into the struggle to bring his surviving accomplices to justice, and the damning new evidence they could face.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #434730 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.com
"I first visited Cambodia in 1975," Ben Kiernan writes. "None of the Cambodians I knew then survived the next four years." In The Pol Pot Regime, Kiernan presents the first definitive account of the four-year reign of terror known as "Democratic Kampuchea." Working very closely with Cambodian sources, including interviews with hundreds of survivors and the archived "confessions" extracted by the Khmer Rouge from political prisoners just before their execution, Kiernan depicts the horrific nature of Pol Pot and his thugs with chilling specificity, and his historical analysis makes a valuable contribution to understanding how they were able to come to power in the wake of the Vietnam War.

From Library Journal
Pol Pot, the paramount leader of Democratic Kampuchea, trumps Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as the most bloodthirsty ruler of modern history. In fewer than four years, Pol Pot's regime caused the death of 1.7 million people in Cambodia, one-fifth of the population. Using hundreds of interviews with survivors, Kiernan, the leading authority on modern Cambodia, meticulously examines Pol Pot's killing machine and clears up many misconceptions found in earlier studies. In chilling detail, he shows that Pol Pot, obsessed with fantasies of ethnic purity and national grandeur, tried to exterminate the Cham, Vietnamese, Thai, and Lao minorities in his country. Finally, internal revolt supported by Vietnam caused the regime's collapse. An important book for students of genocide as well as scholars of Southeast Asia.?Steven I. Levine, Boulder Run Research, Hillsborough, N.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
As the international community struggles to deal with "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia and brutal massacres in Central Africa, Australian-born Kiernan, controversial head of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University's Center for International and Area Studies, synthesizes a generation of research on the 1975^-79 reign of terror in "Democratic Kampuchea" by the Khmer Rouge, who last year labeled Kiernan an "arch war criminal." Drawing on more than 500 interviews and newly available archival material, Kiernan, author of nearly a dozen studies of Cambodian history, documents the appalling extent of the Cambodian catastrophe; the significant internal resistance to the Khmer Rouge; and the racialist and totalitarian attitudes by which Pol Pot's regime justified the death, by starvation and disease as well as torture and murder, of some 1.5 million of their 8 million countrymen (disproportionately destroying "new people" considered to be influenced by foreign cultures in addition to ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Lao, the Islamic Cham people, and smaller Cambodian minority groups). An essential acquisition. Mary Carroll

Customer Reviews

How Much Does Vietnam Pay Kiernan?
Kiernan has made a small fortune writing lies and half-truths on behalf of his masters, the Vietnamese revisionists, who subjugated Kampuchea and reduced it to a colony of Vietnam. Take anything Kiernan says with a huge grain of salt, providing you can wade through his turgid writing style. Much, much better for info on this period is Phillip Short's bio of Pol Pot which is also available at Amazon.

Important But Not Written Well
I wish this book were written better. I'm awarding 4 stars on the basis of the importance of the topic and the enormous amount of valuable data collected by the author. This is a very detailed attempt to reconstruct the experience of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period. This is difficult because of the paranoid secrecy of the regime and lack of much formal documentation. A great deal of the primary data for reconstructing the history of Cambodia during this period comes from interviews with survivors, a large number of them collected by the author. Kiernan's efforts to collect data and to assemble it into a reasonable narrative are admirable. A defect of this book, however, is that Kiernan seems to be writing primarily for his fellow Cambodia specialists, not for a general audience. You really need to already know at least the basic narrative history to get the most out of this book. Kiernan proceeds through the tragic history of the Khmer Rouge period with a detailed effort to reconstruct events at the center of power and in all the provinces. This is admirable and the level of detail is convincing but to be really effective in terms of increasing reader understanding, it is necessary to regularly take a step back, provide a narrative summary, and also to give readers some understanding of the relevant regional and international context for these events. Kiernan also scants analysis in favor of his fine grained narrative. Important points like the importance of Cambodian nationalism and the putative role of racism emerge almost implicitly. Kiernan would have done better to discuss these issues and the evidence for and against his interpretations explicitly. In some ways, this book is an effort to write political history as social history. This history from below aspect makes this book an excellent source for other scholars in this and related fields. This is admirable and Kiernan's scholarly dedication deserves respect, but this book could have been much more than what it is.

Hypocrite historian... beware and read below!

"Ben Kiernan, a leftist Ausrtalian academic and former apologist for the Khemer Rouge [...] in 1977 declared, 'There is ample evidence in Cambodia and other sources that the Khmer Rouge is not the monster that the press have recently made it out to be.' After renouncing this view, Kiernan was appointed director of the Cambodian Genocide Program, a tax-payer funded institute located at Yale University (it is as though a former Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier had been appointed to direct Washington's Holocaust museum.)"

"Notwithstanding the attempt of Kiernan and others to turn the Red (communist) Khmer into the Brown (fascist) Khmer, the origins of Khmer Rouge policies are easily traced to the Marcist ideology of the chinese Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s."

These are extracted from pgs. 170-171 of Michael Lind's 'The Necessary War. Lind is a an anti-Bush democrat, by the way.

People must know what kind of people they are putting their money on when they buy. If you want to know about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot there's no better (and more honorable) place than the books of (real intellectuals, not intellectual-prostitutes) Philip Short or Karl D. Jackson.

You are very welcome.