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The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79
by Ben Kiernan
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Yale University Press (1996-01-24)
ISBN: 0300061137
EAN: 9780300061130
Dewey Decimal #: 959.604
Hardcover: 492 pages
SKU: 4AB2-115-7-0908
Condition: G G
Comments: EX-LIBRARY with typical stickers and markings; In protective mylar cover; Clean body of text; Very little age-toning; Spine slightly rolled; Corners and ends of spine bumped; A very serviceable reading copy. *International Buyers Welcome!* (except for prohibitively heavy items, as noted) - Satisfied customers in over 40 countries! We ship quickly and guarantee satisfaction. Your purchase helps support a U. Chicago student
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
The Khmer Rouge revolution turned Cambodia into killing fields, as the Pol Pot regime murdered or starved to death a million and a half of Cambodia's eight million inhabitants. This book - a comprehensive study of the Pol Pot regime - describes the violent origins, social context and course of the revolution, providing an answer to the question of why a group of Cambodian intellectuals imposed genocide on their own country. Ben Kiernan draws on more than 500 interviews with Cambodian refugees, survivors and defectors, as well as on a collection of previously unexplored archival material from the Pol Pot regime (including Pol Pot's secret speeches). He recounts how in the first few days after Cambodia became Democratic Kampuchea in 1975, authorities evacuated all cities, closed hospitals, schools, monasteries, and factories, and abolished the use of money. For nearly four years, the country was a prison-camp state, the countryside was "cleansed" of minorities and a war was fought against Vietnam. Exploring the nature of the regime that enforced such a revolution, Kiernan shows that its atrocities - the widespread massacres, forced assimilation of minorities, and foreign alliances and wars - can be explained by its ideological preoccupation with racist and totalitarian policies. Kiernan concludes with a description of the resistance movements that sprang up and the destruction of the regime by Vietnamese forces in 1979.
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Amazon.com Review
"I first visited Cambodia in 1975," Ben Kiernan writes. "None of the Cambodians I knew then survived the next four years." In The Pol Pot Regime, Kiernan presents the first definitive account of the four-year reign of terror known as "Democratic Kampuchea." Working very closely with Cambodian sources, including interviews with hundreds of survivors and the archived "confessions" extracted by the Khmer Rouge from political prisoners just before their execution, Kiernan depicts the horrific nature of Pol Pot and his thugs with chilling specificity, and his historical analysis makes a valuable contribution to understanding how they were able to come to power in the wake of the Vietnam War.
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Customer Reviews
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How Much Does Vietnam Pay Kiernan?
Rating  (1)
Date: 2007-07-09
0 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Kiernan has made a small fortune writing lies and half-truths on behalf of his masters, the Vietnamese revisionists, who subjugated Kampuchea and reduced it to a colony of Vietnam. Take anything Kiernan says with a huge grain of salt, providing you can wade through his turgid writing style. Much, much better for info on this period is Phillip Short's bio of Pol Pot which is also available at Amazon.
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Important But Not Written Well
Rating  (4)
Date: 2006-01-29
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
I wish this book were written better. I'm awarding 4 stars on the basis of the importance of the topic and the enormous amount of valuable data collected by the author. This is a very detailed attempt to reconstruct the experience of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period. This is difficult because of the paranoid secrecy of the regime and lack of much formal documentation. A great deal of the primary data for reconstructing the history of Cambodia during this period comes from interviews with survivors, a large number of them collected by the author. Kiernan's efforts to collect data and to assemble it into a reasonable narrative are admirable. A defect of this book, however, is that Kiernan seems to be writing primarily for his fellow Cambodia specialists, not for a general audience. You really need to already know at least the basic narrative history to get the most out of this book. Kiernan proceeds through the tragic history of the Khmer Rouge period with a detailed effort to reconstruct events at the center of power and in all the provinces. This is admirable and the level of detail is convincing but to be really effective in terms of increasing reader understanding, it is necessary to regularly take a step back, provide a narrative summary, and also to give readers some understanding of the relevant regional and international context for these events. Kiernan also scants analysis in favor of his fine grained narrative. Important points like the importance of Cambodian nationalism and the putative role of racism emerge almost implicitly. Kiernan would have done better to discuss these issues and the evidence for and against his interpretations explicitly. In some ways, this book is an effort to write political history as social history. This history from below aspect makes this book an excellent source for other scholars in this and related fields. This is admirable and Kiernan's scholarly dedication deserves respect, but this book could have been much more than what it is.
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Hypocrite historian... beware and read below!
Rating (1)
Date: 2005-12-31
11 out of 26 customers found this reveiw helpful
"Ben Kiernan, a leftist Ausrtalian academic and former apologist for the Khemer Rouge [...] in 1977 declared, 'There is ample evidence in Cambodia and other sources that the Khmer Rouge is not the monster that the press have recently made it out to be.' After renouncing this view, Kiernan was appointed director of the Cambodian Genocide Program, a tax-payer funded institute located at Yale University (it is as though a former Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier had been appointed to direct Washington's Holocaust museum.)"
"Notwithstanding the attempt of Kiernan and others to turn the Red (communist) Khmer into the Brown (fascist) Khmer, the origins of Khmer Rouge policies are easily traced to the Marcist ideology of the chinese Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s."
These are extracted from pgs. 170-171 of Michael Lind's 'The Necessary War. Lind is a an anti-Bush democrat, by the way.
People must know what kind of people they are putting their money on when they buy. If you want to know about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot there's no better (and more honorable) place than the books of (real intellectuals, not intellectual-prostitutes) Philip Short or Karl D. Jackson.
You are very welcome.
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The reference work on the khmer rouge
Rating  (5)
Date: 2005-10-22
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Quite simply the most authoritative work on the pol pot led khmer rouge. If planing a visit to Cambodia Kiernan's book will provide excellent background and explain much of what you see today in rural Cambodia. Further details can be obtained from the website of Sage Insights who support local disadvantaged children by their work in tourism.
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Atrocities in Cambodia
Rating (4)
Date: 2005-09-17
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book are outstanding as one that explained the Cambodian war and its atrocities. It explained the rise of the Pol Pot's party and much of the atrocities in detail.One must be able to stomach its atrocities which is quite mind-boggling as inhuman treatment are occured around the country.For a number of times,i'd got to stop reading halfway because of its Holocaust-like atrocities.Its ideology of Marxism madness are spread thru' out its regime.
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