What was singular in Cambodia was the all-encompassing “year zero” ambition of the Khmer Rouge. Here Communism was reduced to its essentials, as a negation of everything existing, a war of the young on the old, a social leveling of society down to equality in abject poverty and misery. Pin Yathay, a Cambodian engineer whose family was wiped out by the Khmer Rouge before he escaped and staggered on foot across the mountains to Thailand, later recalled of life in “Democratic Kampuchea,” “There were no schools, no money, no communications, no books, no courts.… [S]urveillance was constant and mutual.… [W]e were warned to be vigilant and invited to denounce friends.” Because so many children “denounced their parents, simply in order to ‘purify’ them,” “adults became wary of talking freely in the presence of children.”
– Sean McMeekin, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism
Dr. Sean McMeekin is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College.
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