Pol Pot

Pol Pot
Personal life
Date and place of birth	May 19,1928 Kampong Thom Province, French Indochina
Parents	Pen Saloth Sok Nem
Claimed religion	Roman Catholic (rejected) Buddism (rejected) Atheism
Education	Wat Botum Vaddei Buddist Monastery, 1934–35 École Miche Catholic School, Phnom Penh 1935-43 Collège Preah Sihanouk at Kampong Cham 1943-47 Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh 1948–49 École Francaise de radio-électricité, Paris, France, 1949–52
Spouse	Khieu Ponnary Mea Son
Children	Sitha (daughter)
Date & Place of Death	April 15, 1998 Northern Cambodia
Manner of Death	Heart failure (official) Suicide (unofficial)
Place of burial	Cremated
Dictatorial career
Country	Cambodia
Military service	n/a
Highest rank attained	n/a
Political beliefs	Communism
Political party	Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge)
Date of dictatorship	January 5, 1976
Wars started	Cambodian civil war (aka "killing fields")
Number of deaths attributed	1,800,000 to 2,500,000 est.

Pol Pot (born Saloth Sar May 19,1928-1998) was the ruthless Cambodian Communist dictator and genocidist responsible for killing 1-3 million Cambodians in the late 1970s (nearly a third of the Cambodian population). Anyone thought to be intellectual was murdered, including the killing of people simply for knowing a foreign language or even merely wearing glasses. Pol Pot held power through a combination of enormous charm and complete ruthlessness. He is infamous for being a communist who apparently did not even like to read the works of Marx.

When Pol Pot took over Cambodia in 1975, he abolished private property, money, schools and religion and converted everything back to an agricultural society. He emptied the cities. His Khmer Rouge government fell in 1979 when the communist country of Vietnam invaded Cambodia after a series of violent border confrontations, and Pol Pot fled to the northern jungle with his forces. Pol Pot was popular in China, because they believed Cambodia would be a counterbalance to Vietnam, which was friendly with the Soviet Union. The Chinese support for Pol Pot was a reason he was not ousted earlier to disowned by the communist movement.

An Oscar-winning film about his dictatorship, The Killing Fields brought a wider knowledge of his atrocities, but only years after they had taken place. The United States and other Asian nations were blamed for once supporting him in order to counter Vietnam next door.

There was a bloody power struggle within the Khmer Rouge in 1997. Pol Pot was then arrested by his former supporters in July 1997. They charged him with treason but a "people's tribunal" merely sentenced him to house arrest for life.

Quotes

• C.S. Lewis wrote:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber baron]]s than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. [1]

• "The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt." - Henry Ford

• "Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson

See also

• Dictatorship
  • Dictator
  • List of dictators
  • Friendly dictator
  • Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, Kim Jong-Il, Pol Pot
  • Dictatorship of the proletariat
  • List of Communist States
  • List of Socialist States
  • Death toll of communism
  • Coup d'etat
• Cult of personality
• Single-party state
• Mobocracy, Social Effects of the Theory of Evolution, Anti-Semitism, Communist Racism, Genocide, Holocaust
• National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi)
• National Socialism - the Nazis were elitist Police state liberals not conservatives
• Big government Welfare state leads to Nanny state, leads to Police state: Globalist-Statist-Socialist-Communist
• Liberal totalitarianism