Pol Pot - The History of a Nightmare

Pol Pot - The History of a Nightmare

by Philip Short

John Murray $150

The secret of any regime is to make everyone complicit in its actions, effectively spreading the guilt for crimes committed in its name and lessening the desire to bring about its downfall. Myanmar does this well. And it's not hard to see why Cambodia is so reluctant to properly address its Khmer Rouge past. Much easier to blame everything on Pol Pot or, as Philip Short posits, some brutal aspect of Khmer culture dating back 500 years. Short writes a clear history of Cambodia from the 1950s and uncovers the shadowy Solath Sar, the smiling executioner better known as Pol Pot. A man of mediocrity, he nonetheless created the conditions in which millions of people died. Why this was possible is left largely unresolved. Short's last book, Mao: A Life, similarly declined to apportion blame. What brings down such regimes is the weight of infallibility, the need to keep defending the indefensible. Vietnam, acting largely alone, brought an end to Cambodia's nightmare. Short concludes, however, that 'trying the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for past crimes offers an alibi for doing nothing about the present ones'.