Imagenes pol pot biography book

Pol Pot, one of the world's most infamous dictators, rose to power in the s in the Southeast Asian country of Cambodia. In the mids, Cambodia had been chafing for centuries under Thai, Vietnamese, and French control. As leader of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's communist rebel movement, Pol Pot won control of Cambodia in He intended to establish a farming utopia. Declaring that society needed purification, he set out to extinguish capitalism, non-Cambodian culture, city life, tro, and all foreign influences. But instead of building a strong, just nation, Pol Pot engineered a genocide. During his regime, almost two million Cambodians died from overwork, starvation, disease, and execution. Creating a harsh climate of fear, brutality, misery, and intolerance, Pol Pot's rule drained a once prosperous country of its economic and human resources. Read this book to learn more about the internal workings of one of the world's most devastating dictatorships.

Pol Pot was an idealistic, reclusive figure with great charisma and personal charm. He initiated a revolution whose radical egalitarianism exceeded any other in history. But in the process, Cambodia desended into madness and his name became a byword for oppression.

In the three-and-a-half years of his rule, more than a million people, a fifth of Cambodia's population, were executed or died from hunger and disease. A supposedly gentle, carefree land of slumbering temples and smiling peasants became a concentration camp of the mind, a slave state in which absolute obedience was enforced on the 'killing fields'.

Why did it happen? How did an idealistic dream of justice and prosperity mutate into one of humanity's worst nightmares? Philip Short, the biographer of Mao, has spent four years travelling the length of Cambodia, interviewing surviving leaders of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge movement and sifting through previously closed archives. Here

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Pol Pot

Cambodian communist leader (–)

In this Cambodian name, the surname is Pol. In accordance with Cambodian custom, this person should be referred to by the given name, Pot.

Pol Pot
In office 22 February &#;– 6 December
Deputy	Nuon Chea
Preceded by	Tou Samouth ()
Succeeded by	Position abolished (party dissolved)
In office 25 October &#;– 7 January
President	Khieu Samphan
Deputy
Preceded by	Khieu Samphan (acting)
Succeeded by	Nuon Chea ()
In office 14 April &#;– 27 September
President	Khieu Samphan
Deputy
Preceded by	Khieu Samphan (acting)
Succeeded by	Nuon Chea (acting)
In office –
In office –
Preceded by	Himself (as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea)
Succeeded by	Khieu Samphan
Born	Saloth Sâr ()25 May Prek Sbauv, Kampong Thom Province, Cambodia, French Indochina
Died	15 April () (aged&#;72) Choam, Trapeang Prei&#;[km], Anlong