Massacre of Innocents in Cambodia
Cambodia was subjected to the brutal dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Pol Pot rose to power following the escalation of American bombing campaigns during the Vietnam War. In 1970s, American bombings had spilled over into Cambodia, galvanizing hatred towards to west and an embrace of The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s anti-imperialist rhetoric. Pol Pot’s dictatorship was marked by mass killings, starvations, imprisonments, and torture. The dictator’s wrath was mostly directed at racial minorities such as Chinese and Vietnamese, as well as intellectuals, of whom Pol Pot was distrustful. Others who were targeted for killing included businessmen, artists, professionals, Buddhist monks, former government employees, and anybody accused of “economic sabotage.” Most victims of the regime were not shot, but were beaten to death savagely with tools such as shovels and pickaxes in order to save bullets.[13] All this bloodshed was an effort by Pol Pot’s communist government to establish a radical agrarian socialism, where former city-dwellers were forced to work in the fields for long hours each day. For those who dared criticize the regime, prisons such as Tuol Sleng were established where inmates would be starved and brutally tortured for months before being executed. Estimates range about how many were killed by The Khmer Rouge, but the figure is generally accepted to be in the millions, possibly as high as three million.[14] The systematic effort by the Khmer Rouge to murder its own people goes to show the true face of socialism. As with most collectivist states that commit genocide, most of those executed are innocent—their lives completely disposable, extinguished on a whim by a sociopathic dictator. So many of those who were exterminated were intelligent and productive people, and would have worked to make the world a better place had their lives not been wasted in the pursuit of a twisted socialist utopia.
