What was the slogan of the Khmer Rouge?

The official slogan of the Khmer Rouge was: “To destroy you is no loss, to preserve you is no gain…” This is the ultimate manifestation of the famous expression coined by Hannah Arendt, “The banality of evil.” Banal evil is characterized by a belief that what one is doing is not evil.

What was life like under the Khmer Rouge?

Under the Khmer Rouge, family life was outlawed. Children were separated from their families. Husbands were removed from their wives. People were forced into communal dining halls and barracks, where men and women were segregated and slept in 45 foot collective beds.

What is Khmer Rouge known for?

Contents. The Khmer Rouge was a brutal regime that ruled Cambodia, under the leadership of Marxist dictator Pol Pot, from 1975 to 1979. Pol Pot’s attempts to create a Cambodian “master race” through social engineering ultimately led to the deaths of more than 2 million people in the Southeast Asian country.

How were families treated by the Khmer Rouge?

Family life was discouraged and repressed. Everyone was forced to live in communal work camps, but at the age of eight most children were sent away to live with other children under two or three senior Khmer Rouge officials.

What did the Khmer Rouge do to kids?

Most victims were tortured before they were taken outside the capital Phnom Penh and clubbed to death in the Cheoung Ek “Killing Fields.” During Monday’s hearing, the Cambodian prosecutor asked Duch who ordered guards to kill babies by smashing them against trees.

Did North Vietnam support the Khmer Rouge?

The Khmer Rouge army was slowly built up in the jungles of eastern Cambodia during the late 1960s, supported by the North Vietnamese army, the Viet Cong, the Pathet Lao, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

What did the Khmer Rouge say?

Few phrases illustrate this more vividly than the most widely-known Khmer Rouge saying: No gain in keeping, no loss in weeding out. (p. 210) This adage was often expressed even more bluntly: To destroy you is no loss, to preserve you is no gain.

What is the best book on Khmer Rouge Cambodia?

Khmer Rouge Cambodia is a case in point. This is what makes Henri Locard’s Pol Pot’s Little Red Book such a valuable contribution to the study of Cambodian history, and to the study of genocide in general. Locard examines an extensive collection of commonly repeated sayings from the Pol Pot time, and the picture they paint is chilling.

How is the Khmer Rouge totalitarianism different from Orwell’s 1984?

Locard notes that the totalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge differed from the model presented in Orwell’s 1984 in one very significant aspect: Khmer Rouge totalitarianism was anonymous. In Orwell’s Oceania, the image of Big Brother was omnipresent: Big Brother’s face stared out from posters on every streetcorner.

What are some of the most famous quotes from the warpath?

“Our policy was to provide an affluent life for the people. There were mistakes made in carrying it out. Several thousand people may have died” “Whoever wishes to blame or attack me is entitled to do so. I regret I didn’t have enough experience to totally control the movement” “We want only peace, to build up our country.