I finished reading a proper book on Pol Pot yesterday. It was a very interesting and unpleasant read. I was so eager to believe that Pol Pot was a bad person demonised by the West until everyone thought he was completely evil. We like to do that with communist leaders, while glossing over all the things right-wing leaders do wrong. But this time, I don't think that it is true. It's hard to explain why Pol Pot is so much worse than the regimes that came before and after him. They all abused their power and used obscene violence. But the Khmer Rouges promised such a great improvement in Cambodian's lives and ended up making them so much worse.
Pol Pot was a narcisstic fool. Yet thousands of people supported him without question. By the end of his regime he had tortured and executed nearly every friend he had ever had. People he had known and trusted since he was in his early 20s he suddenly concluded were insufficiently communist and had them killed.
I don't really think the Khmer Rouges knew what they believed, except that anyone who disagreed with whatever it was had to be killed. They didn't even annouce they were a communist organisation until a couple of years after they were in power. None of them seemed to have even seriously read and understood Marx. Pol Pot admitted that he had tried but didn't really understand any of it. They seemed to have ended up being mostly inspired by Mao, but I think that even Mao was pretty disgusted by them.
Perhaps it feels like that in 30 years of existence their organisation didn't really make a single good decision. They seemed to have survived purely on Pol Pot's charisma. They had no greater goal in mind. The organisation existed purely to preserve its own existence. Pol Pot "converted" to liberal capitalism in the 1990s claiming that he was a pragmatist and would pursue the most productive route to national reconstruction. But he was never a pragmatist. No one could ever tell him anything. People who told him the truth were killed. People who suggested they pursue anything other that the most severe communism were killed, no matter how logical their compromises might have been. Pol Pot formally abolished families during his reign (seriously), but 15 years later he retired (temporarily) so that he could raise his own families. He appointed one of his most trusted commanders, Son Sen, to be in charge of the Khmers Rouges. A while later he took control again and had Son Sen and his extended family shot.
More recently Pol Pot seems to have realised that his regime messed things up. He blamed it on his followers claiming they had failed him.
I think Pol Pot is so uniquely repulsive because he had so much goodwill. He had enormous support from the Chinese and the Vietnamese which he used purely to make war (and eventually kill a lot of Vietnamese). When he took power the Cambodian people loved him. But in those three years he did more harm to the Cambodian people and more harm to the socialist ideology than I would have thought possible. His regime caused all the effects of an enormous genocide while believing it was helping the same people it killed.
