Deluded to the End

Pol Pot, who gave the orders that led to the slaughter of as many as 2 million Cambodians in the late 1970s, says his conscience is clear. The former Khmer Rouge leader, now a captive of associates over whom he once exercised life and death control, concedes that “mistakes” were made after he and his followers seized power, but he insists the mass killings he directed were necessary to save Cambodia from the clutches of Vietnam, its ancient enemy. Samuel Johnson famously remarked that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Genocidal paranoiacs find comfort in it as well.

This will probably be Pol Pot’s last word on the calamity he unleashed. Now apparently dying, he was interviewed at a Khmer Rouge jungle camp by Nate Thayer of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Thayer writes that the 72-year-old revolutionary looked genuinely puzzled when asked if he wanted to apologize for the suffering he caused. Pol Pot saw nothing to apologize for. “We had no other choice. Naturally we had to defend ourselves.”

Self-defense, as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge understood it, meant that the whole of Cambodia’s middle class had to be killed. Evidence of opposition to the regime was not required, though meticulously kept records show that thousands were tortured to extract confessions of guilt. The killing fields ranged over most of Cambodia. People died from torture, from starvation, from disease due to deprivation, from overwork, by having their heads bashed in with shovels.

The destruction wrought by the Khmer Rouge grew out of a revolutionary romanticism that was carried past the point of madness. Pol Pot gave the orders, but like Hitler and Stalin he found willing hands to help in his monstrous work. Now Pol Pot says he is dying with a clear conscience. The awful thing is he probably believes it.