Mainly just to give Hitler a rest, I decided to read about Pol Pot instead. Haven't heard Pol Pot's number called in a while. What's he been up to these days? On the gridiron of hell, is he still being flagged for excessive brutality? Wait a minute: even in life, he didn't draw that much attention. There was some awareness of the horrors of Kampuchea, yet for reasons which went something like "we're out of Vietnam now and what happens next door to it is of even lower interest" there was scant desire to intervene. Or even have an opinion. The place was obscure. And so was its leader. "Pol Pot" was by the way a pseudonym. He was a real person, though, with a real history. Which with difficulty I have attempted to apprehend. It's not that there's nothing available to learn. It's that what's there is boring.

Hitler was the far more interesting person. Certainly outgoing, possibly even charming, depending on whom you ask. Pol Pot was secretive in his rebel-on-the-run days, and even after he took power, he was anything but showy. When he wasn't totally invisible, he was certainly dull. And that was his fault, not onlookers'. And so I got the idea that maybe the best way to learn about him and his country would be to read about some of those onlookers: people who encouraged him, or competed with him, or did his dirty work for him. Some or all of them might say more about the darker side of the Khmer people than he ever did.

If I had to guess right now, based on what is so far the only book I've read on the subject, I'd pick either Norodom Sihanouk or just about any Cambodian born in the early 1960s. Mushing through Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (David P. Chandler, 1992), I made a tentative list of the guy's contemporaries, ones who, quite unlike him, were very active, one way or another. Not just the prince, or the prince's main enforcer Lon Nol, but Brothers #2 and #3. It is possible that their tales would function as what I'll call allobiographies for Pol Pot. Reading about them, you at last learn more about him. (One guy whose story wouldn't teach much of anything was Lon Nol's biological brother, Lon Non. He knew Pol Pot from school days and expected that he'd get some clemency. Nope: 48 hours after his capture, he was executed.)

From what we do know of Pol Pot himself, I think we can state he hung around, punched the clock, and was often just in the right place at the right time. His upbringing was fairly comfortable and he was given or at least pointed at a lot of education. Which he scarcely finished. He got enough to catch on much later as a teacher in private schools – without a sheepskin, he'd never land anything official. More immediately, he got enough to qualify for a scholarship in France. It was still more than what most Cambodians ever had. He'd been in a carpentry school briefly in Phnom Penh; he'd be just as briefly in a radio-electricity school in Paris; he blew off both. He lost that stipend, dithered a while, then took the slow boat back home.

His life was far from being full of interest. But he always managed to keep just busy enough. In 1950, he went from France to Yugoslavia for a summer political expedition, and by the greatest good luck he was not kicked out of the French Communist Party (CP)...because he hadn't been admitted to it yet! It was as Stalinist as Stalin himself – or maybe as Stalinist as Albania's CP – the book doesn't say – and it was displeased at any of its acolytes' helping out that renegade Tito. But by 1952, I guess feelings had softened and Pol Pot was forgiven his youthful indiscretion and let in. Which was opportune because the Indochina CP, which was mostly Vietnamese, decided to stand up a specifically Cambodian CP. Without this, Pol Pot might never have got anywhere. As it was, his membership in the French CP was so prestigious he got plum assignments back home. Those were mostly study sessions. Lots of 'em. Pol Pot seems to have had a flair for talking to small groups. Bigger groups, not so much!

In 1963, Lon Nol, overreacting to some unrest, on general principles put various teachers and semi-public figures like Pol Pot on a list of potential troublemakers, though Pot's actual Communist sympathies were likely unknown or undistinguished. Whatever the level of personal hazard, the guy fled. He languished outside Phnom Penh and then mostly in Vietnam and China. This ultimately helped his career – he was lucky enough to get sent from Hanoi to Beijing when Sihanouk was there, en route from his annual French vacation but hurrying back home because of still more unrest. Pol Pot's advice to the guy was likely retrospective, to make him look good, and if it really had been volunteered to an intermediary at the time, there is no evidence it was even passed along. What certainly happened was the Vietnamese prime minister himself gave the same advice: he urged Sihanouk to fight Lon Nol, who besides being uppity – which Sihanouk hated – was too pro-American. Pol Pot may simply have tried to take credit for this. Anyway, Khmer Rouge had just enough prestige thanks to this timeserver to be considered a player. Which was about time, because by 1968 it still hardly had weapons. In the near term, though, the effects of Pol Pot's exile were not merely to cut him off from most Cambodians but to leave him to deal solely with a small number of apparatchiks he technically outranked. He therefore always got his way!

Reading about these hapless or fortuitous career moves actually made the book pretty interesting. The author is no admirer of the guy and he states frankly that Pol Pot had "certainly reached the limit of his abilities" when he at last took over the country. But my question remains: how? In high office his actions were a muddle. Pol Pot refused Sihanouk's offer to resign because the move was voluntary and the Khmer Rouge had to be seen as demanding it – Sihanouk resigned a month later anyway – and he also refused to go along with China's suggestion that he formally announce that Cambodia was Communist even though it was obvious anyway. At last, he did reveal the truth, in a 5-hour speech preceding a trip back to China to request arms to fight Vietnam. The guy was a knucklehead. But even knuckleheads can give orders, which are obeyed. So to rephrase my question: why?

He may have given orders, on April 17, 1975, to sweep into Phnom Penh if not also to sweep everybody out of it. The "Central Committee" – all three Brothers? – get the overall credit. Pol Pot did seem to have commanded, for the first and possibly last time in his long life, a military operation, at least taking the capital, for once working under the conditions and with the resources given him rather than pontificating in a classroom. But the miseries of Kampuchea were really just beginning, I remain uncertain of his supervision of those, and here I return to my alternate allobiographical proposal: young people.

The book mentions them frequently while hardly going into detail but it seems teenagers were not merely foot soldiers (and very strange-seeming ones – the author says, and I do not doubt, that civilians viewed the Phnom Penh vanguard as if they were from another planet) but tank drivers, pilots, and doctors. At all these trades, they were bad. And yet obviously they were enthusiastic. Or, applied themselves furiously. There sure were lots of 'em. Telling their story, such as it was, may reveal far more about what's inside the Khmer soul. Maybe Pol Pot didn't need to issue many orders at all.

Meanwhile, a few more items to wrap up. Pol Pot wasn't even positively identified until after he was in office. Some folks back in France, and some long-abandoned relatives right in Cambodia, recognized him as one Saluth Sar. He'd last in office not quite four years; Vietnam would rout him out. Whether there was irony in that, I remain unsure, because Cambodia and Vietnam seem to have long had a relationship that wasn't always good but wasn't always bad either. Vietnam was the one more irritated by French colonialism. Cambodia seems to have been more philosophical, or quietly fuming, or serenely helpless. It was a country with a lot of contending interests, not just of France and China and even Japan and North Korea – none of which borders it – but of Thailand and Vietnam, which do. For some reason, at least in this book Laos is not much of a factor, though the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through it as well as through Cambodia. It appears that these other nationalities were the resident go-getters, with Cambodians themselves drifting (that's the author's word) into government, farming, or religion. Vietnamese considered themselves culturally superior, the more energetic and individualistic. And maybe Cambodians themselves agreed. Pol Pot's exile in Vietnam had been okay but he was plainly a tool. In world revolution! Hey, it's a living. It better be, after you come home and abolish money.

___

I have no plans to visit Cambodia, indeed hardly any to revisit Asia. I'm just not learning any new languages at this point in my life. I might go back to Turkey, to see how much Turkish I remember – it won't be much! – and if I'm really ambitious, I might at least memorize the Georgian or Hebrew alphabet, so as not to be utterly illiterate should I choose to take a train across one border or a ferry across another. Be those projects as they ever may, I do think now that if I ever did go to Southeast Asia, I would inspect its frontiers. I got the impression from this book that they are all quite porous.

As for Cambodia in particular, I wonder if it was or still is as crazy as another country I've never seen, Cuba. (Or Rwanda. Let's not forget that one.) I guess I am still trying to figure out why Pol Pot had some kind of popularity. The author said his "half-warm, half-cool impersonal style was recognizably Khmer. His assaults on 'individualism,' with their unspoken undertones of Buddhist teaching, were probably sincere." I sense that by Khmer standards, his having any bonhomie at all was amazing. People who remembered him – from seminar rooms – were quite taken by him. Well, I don't ever expect to learn about that. But I might visually confirm that Cambodia has "accessibility, low population, and resources." Compared to its envious neighbors.

(9/22/25)