“Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books,” – Walt Whitman.

Path to Destruction
In 1973, America had begun pulling her troops out of Vietnam. After many long years of fighting, the Americans had begun to smell defeat – The North Vietnamese would rather die on their feet then live on their knees meaning that defeating and ruling the Communists would be impossible.

Meanwhile, just over the border in Cambodia, socio-political turmoil was erupting. Cambodians were fighting against the North and South Vietnamese over land and political control. During this time a movement known as the Khmer Rouge came about with their sadistic leader Saloth Sar a.k.a Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge later became known as The Cambodian Communist Party.

The Khmer Rouge began to overrun Cambodia by late 1973. One of their first initiatives was to move people from urban areas back out to the countryside. The city people were considered like a disease that needed to be contained so that it would not infect areas run by the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot then came up three main courses of action. The first one was that after their victory, the main cities of the country would be evacuated with the population moved to the countryside. The second was that money would cease to be put into circulation and quickly be phased out. The final decision was to agree to Pol Pot’s dictatorship which included ideas of killing top intellectuals, all current government officials, and anyone who spoke out against him.

Worse than Hitler
"To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss” – a banner of the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge overtook the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, April 17 1975. From here Pol Pot took charged. He officially changed his name from Saloth Sar to Pol Pot, declared himself “brother number one”, officially changed the name of Cambodia to Democratic Kampuchea and reset the Cambodian calendar to a “Year Zero” (similar to what happened in the French Revolution).

Pol Pot believed in the Maoist idea that the farmer peasants were the true working class, so as a result he mass evacuated all major urban areas and relocated his people to the countryside. He also stopped the majority of the population voting and quashed all religious and ethnic groups.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians were then taken out in shackles to dig their own mass graves. Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars and hoes or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, "Bullets are not to be wasted." These mass graves are often now referred to as The Killing Fields.
It wasn’t until 1978, that anybody actually did anything about Pol Pot. Conflicts between Vietnam and Cambodia continued throughout this time and as a result Vietnam attacked Cambodia in 1978 in self-defence and won. Pol Pot then fled to the Thailand border where he died on April 15 1998. He was never trialed for his war crimes.

As a result of the Pol Pot regime, 2.5 million or 21% of the Cambodian population had been massacred by the Khmer Rouge. Anyone who was said to have intellectual superiority at the time of Pol Pot was ordered to death. Pol Pot himself was educated in France but returned to Cambodia because he failed his grades numerous times. This period in history has never been given its due recognition, until now. Forever in history this event will be known as the Cambodian Genocide, The Cambodian Massacre, or the Pol Pot Regime.