Pol Pot: The Man Behind the Khmer Rouge

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two things before we get started today one there are weird pronunciations in this one I'm looking them up when I can I have a laptop right here sometimes it doesn't exist sometimes there just aren't the pronunciations available I'm doing my best but have a go me in the comments if you want second thing this video is brought to you by Squarespace whether you need a domain website or online store make it with Squarespace check out Squarespace comm for a free trial find a link below alright so for three years and eight months Pol Pot ruled over Cambodia with an iron fist the legacy that he left is horrific millions of families were torn apart hundreds of thousands were terribly tortured and 1.7 million of his own people were put to death so how did it end this way well in this week's biographic s-- we attempt to seek answers as we delve into the life of Pol Pot [Music] the man knew the world would come to know his Pol Pot was borned Saloth SAR on January the 25th 1925 in the small village of prax above in Cambodia his was a peasant family and from an early age he found himself working long hours in the rice fields the Salaf clan were better off than many being landowners who worked their own rice fields Tsar's father loth owns nine hectares and would employ local workers at harvest time his mother sock nem was a devoutly religious woman who brought up her children as Theravada Buddhists saw was the second to youngest of nine children however three of them died early according to his brother nap Tsar was a considerate kind and hardworking child during the day he and his brothers would work in the fields then play in the rivers and on the outskirts of the jungle in the evening they would gather around an open fire and sing the teachings and histories of a local religious leader for the vast majority of rural Cambodians life revolved around the rice fields in the village if you ever traveled beyond the borders of their birthplace however loft wanted his sons to experience more from life so when he was six tsar and his older brother were sent to the cambodian capital but on pen loth had a cousin by the name of meek who was employed as a consort to the king of Cambodians the boys were sent to live with him no longer considered as peasants Tsar and his brother were now among the privileged as such they were educated by the French colonial rulers in a school where the teaching was done in the French language Tsar studied a French literature and history filling his head with the events of the 1789 French Revolution and the reign of terror that followed under the orchestration of maximilien robespierre former schoolmates rather that saw was a quiet introspective young man who kept his thoughts to himself he was an average student at best apparently being held back two years most of his classmates were the children of French officials or Catholic Vietnamese Cambodia was officially a monarchy but the king he ruled in name only with the real power lying with the French colonial government at this time the French were tied up in a bitter struggle to hold on to their power in neighboring Vietnam there the communist army under Ho Chi Minh was leading the struggle for independence the Vietnamese revolutionaries had started to Train small groups of Cambodians and infused them with the desire for independence from this European rule this was a movement that was spreading throughout all of Indochina at this time at the age of 20 Sur traveled with some friends on a pilgrimage to the famous temples at Angkor Wat this site was the rallying point for Cambodian nationalistic pride the trip left a lasting impression on the young man in 1977 he stated if our people could build an co-wash they could do anything we must revive on national soul and pride in order to defend the nation builds the country well and preserve it forever the trip marked the awakening of SARS political consciousness and his drive for independence in 1947 he passed the exams and gained entrance into the CC sawara Secondary College and pnom pen the following year he failed the entry exam into the upper classes and he had to leave the school with his academic career seemingly at a standstill he began to study carpentry then in 1949 he won a scholarship to study at an elite engineering school in Paris [Music] for the first few months he indulged in the excesses that Parisian social life had to offer but things changed when he came into contact with some fellow Cambodians who had views that built upon the spark of nationalist pride that had been ignited at ankor wat the great began meeting at Tsar's apartment and discussions soon led to the formation of two groups one who advocated working peacefully towards independence from the French and the other who were in favor of armed resistance from the very start Saab was in the latter camp he and his like-minded friends they pointed to other countries around the world where armed overthrow was working and they noticed they all had one thing in common the rebels were all communists there was a vibrant communist movement in Paris at the time and sirens those of his group who worked for armed rebellion began attending meetings saw began studying the teachings of Karl Marx but found them difficult to understand however he readily cottoned on to the writings of Joseph Stalin and became a lifelong advocate of Stalinism with his emphasis on rapid industrialization totalitarian government and the cult of personality in 1951 he joined the Communist Party and by the time that he returned to Cambodia in 1953 he had committed himself to the cause of the Cambodian Revolution once back on Cambodian soil sir journeyed north to join up with cambodian forces who had attached themselves to the Vietnamese communists in their fight for independence from the French he now lived in the jungle as a prospective guerrilla fighter but first he had to do an apprenticeship for the first few months its duties consisted of maintaining the group's vegetable patch he later recalled most everyone there was Vietnamese there were very few Cambodians for a long time there was nothing for me to do after a while they let me work in the kitchen but really the Cambodians were there in name only [Music] victory was achieved by Vietnamese communists in 1953 following the French disaster at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu the French pulled out of not a severe Nam but Cambodia also however the new nationalist Cambodian government was headed not by a communist by the King Norodom Sihanouk still the top third of Cambodia was under the control of Viet Minh sarens other local communists urged the Viet Minh to continue pushing south until the entire country was communist but the leadership of the Viet Minh resisted their surgeons a truce was arranged with the king sir now return to / phnom penh where he continued to work for the political Underground's his day job was as a school teacher where he taught history by night however he worked to establish contacts with every strata of society from intellectuals to peasants in order to garner support for the coming communist revolution around this time sir met the man who would become his closest political associate and second-in-command nuan chair chair later recalled that sir had an innate ability to charm people and bring them into the party having the ability to explain things in a way that simple people were able to understand sir also met up with a revolutionary students who he had worked with in Paris by the name of King van sack together they worked on plans for the country's first free and open political elections sir winter vans ax house for breakfast every morning to work on their party's manifesto however their work did not come to fruition king sia nukid renounced his throne and formed his own political party the sangkum he threw his hat into the 1955 general election and won becoming Cambodia's new prime minister see anouk had achieved this victory though by throwing his political rivals into prison for serb the sham election marked the end of any hopes he may have had for a democratic means to bring about change in his country he confirmed his commitment to violent overthrow and threw himself towards working toward that goal in july of nineteen fifty-six sir married a fellow communist party member by the name of coupon re like sir she had been educated in france and was equally committed to the revolutionary cause they soon became the power couple of the under and communist movement life was increasingly dangerous for the Communists under the rule of C Anouk he had outlawed the Communist Party and given them a new name the Khaimah Rouge the pace of imprisonments killings and general terror was stepped up as the Prime Minister sought to stamp out any and all opposition to his rule the Communist Party secretary a close friend of Sir was taken to the outskirts have been on pen and killed is during this climate of fear that sir accepted the leadership of the Khmer Rouge it was constantly followed by the police who knew who he was but not his position in the party by 1963 things had gotten too hot for sir in the capital city and he left to dwell in the jungle in the north here he was taken in by the Viet Minh who had set up camps on the Vietnam Cambodia border they were now focused on a new enemy within their country that's of course the United States from there Cambodian bases they would regularly travel into Vietnam to make lightning strikes before retreating back over the border in response the Americans dropped hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs in North Cambodia in an attempt to kill the Viet Minh in the process they killed over the course of the war nearly a hundred and fifty thousand Cambodians the American bombing had the effect of drawing more and more people to the Chi LaRue's and soon served no longer had to rely only on the Viet Minh he now had his own guerrilla camps stretched out along the border and he himself he had transformed himself in the mould of his hero Joseph Stalin he was the unquestioned party leader and he now went by the name Pol Pot he lived apart from the rank-and-file of his army and only allowed a select few the privilege of having an audience with him Paul believed that the lifeblood of his revolutionary forces would come from the peasantry but he also believed that they needed to be molded so their sole allegiance was to the party new recruits would undergo an intense period of initiation where they would be locked in a Cell until they were proven to be obedient Paul instead uses a rigid disciplinary structure which included group meetings where members had to confess their weaknesses and seek forgiveness [Music] in 1970 Prime Minister C Anouk was overthrown by a military dictatorship he escaped to the north and sought to establish an alliance with his former enemy the Khmer Rouge bolstered by the supporters of C Anouk the Khmer Rouge numbers rose by 64,000 by the spring of 1964 many of them were now armed with Chinese supplied rifles Pol Pot's army had gradually filtered down from the border area and now controlled two-thirds of Cambodia by December of 1974 Pol felt in a strong enough position to make an assault on the capital the crime Eruzione circle / Phnom Penh and began to close in those who could fled the city as the streets became war zones within five days the military government was overpowered and the revolution was over April the 17th 1975 was day zero in the life of a new Cambodia Cambodia was now called Kampuchea and it was under the control of its Stalinist leader Pol Pot now just before we get into the really really dark part of this video Pol Pot's reign of terror I do want to thank today's sponsor I know ads in the middle of these videos are a little bit disruptive but these sorts of videos I think they're important to make and they would be impossible without our sponsors so I really do hope in exchange for 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hospitals and their homes many died in the streets in the melee that followed the reality was that there was no threat of an American air raid Pol Pot's simply wanted to get the people out of the way so that he could concentrate on rebuilding his new society he told his aides that they must use cutting-edge violence in order to build a socialist system from the ground up the 2 million people who were forced out of a Phnom Penh had to pass through Khmer Rouge checkpoints on the outskirts of the city there they were assigned to districts for re-education as field laborers the policy of equality was strictly enforced with any possessions that set city folk apart from the peasantry being taken off them Khmer Rouge soldiers went through the now deserted capital and destroyed any of the trappings of modern civilization that they could find any people who were found to be hiding were taken into the street and shot under Pol Pot's regime communist equality meant that everyone was to be a peasant as a result all of the modern advances of the last 100 years they were rejected and even though former city dwellers and peasants were now working in the fields side by side their Chi Minh rouge overseers held a special hatred for the former urbanites who were considered to be capitalists they were given only half of the food rations of the peasants the Equality policy included children he had to live with Khmer Rouge teachers from the age of 7 onwards private thoughts and feelings were considered to be evil with uniformity the only acceptable way of life the state would choose which people got married and anyone who was suspected of falling in love out this arrangements were beaten to death in public the khaimah rouge regime outlawed any form of entertainment including sports with former sports fields and basketball courts being planted as rice fields the feeling of terror that had been generated reached into the astral anse of power with members of Paul's government's eager to prove that they too were peasants and they worked in the fields as a result there was no real government Paul instituted a rice harvesting quota on the people which was three tons of unhusked rice per hectare but less than a third of this was actually being produced meanwhile the people were suffering physically disease was rife and millions suffer from malnutrition hundreds of people were dying every single day Paul blames the lack of success of his great vision on infiltrators and enemies of the party he devised a great purge to weed out those non conformists a state secret interrogation center was set up to imprison and torture those who were expected of being traitors the families of those arrested would also be taken to the prison and tortured if a child was too young to be interrogated it would be taken away and simply killed immediately any adults who survived their torture were taken out to the killing fields and beaten to death of the 14 thousand prisoners who passed through the gates of the main interrogation Center in Panem pen only seven survived many of those killed were loyal Khmer Rouge supporters who were falsely accused of treason Pol Pot's had succeeded in imposing his ruthless iron-fisted control within the borders of Cambodia but there was a new threat to his regime just over the border the Vietnamese having seen off the Americans now turned their attention on Cambodia a border dispute threatened to bring these two countries to war as the tensions were rising Pollard of his latest purge right on the border zone he suspected his defensive forces in that area of colluding with the Vietnamese after being viciously interrogated more than a hundred thousand soldiers and party officials along with their wives and their children were executed as a result of this wholesale massacre of his own defense forces po left his eastern border with Vietnam opened to invasion and that invasion came on Christmas Day 1978 taking just 13 days for the capital of the Phnom Penh to fall Pol Pot managed to slip away and escape into the Jang but at least his three-and-a-half year reign of terror was over in total it had cost the lives of nearly two million people the Khmer Rouge may have been over at the party persisted for nearly twenty years a remnant continued to wage guerrilla warfare from its jungle bases Pol Pot set up a base near the Thai border and rebuilt his military force with the aid of the Chinese and Thai governments meanwhile the Vietnamese had installed a new government made up of Khmer Rouge supporters who had escaped Paul's purges from his base in the northern part of the country Paul gave occasional interviews to reporters in which he would invariably accuse those who opposed him of being traitors in 1985 it was announced that he was retiring from the leadership of the Khmer Rouge shortly thereafter the Vietnamese clamped down on the Khmer Rouge moving into their stronghold and decimating their bases Paul managed to escape into Thailand where he remained for the next few years in 1988 he went to China to undergo treatment for cancer the venom YZ withdrew from Cambodia in 1988 prompting Paul to return from Thailand for the next eight years the Khmer Rouge ran guerrilla operations against government forces in 1996 the government began engaging in peace negotiations with individual Khmer Rouge leaders leading many of them to defect away from the organization meanwhile Pollard suffered a stroke and was paralyzed down the left side of his body but this didn't stop him from handing out death sentences when he heard that his longtime right-hand man Sampson was negotiating with the government he ordered his arrest and execution around this time 11 members of Paul's family were also killed though it is unclear whether he ordered those killings on June the 19th 1997 pol was arrested by the head of the Chi Minh military who had had enough of his murderous ways a show trial was conducted for the ordering of the execution of sun-sin and Paul was confined to house arrest for the rest of his life [Music] in his final years Paul had become an avid listener to The Voice of America radio show on the night of April the 17th 1998 he was surprised to hear that the Khaimah Rouge had agreed to hand him over to an international tribunal for crimes against humanity later that night he died him Abed Pol Pot's body was requested by the Cambodian government for inspection however he was cremated by his followers before the government could get their hands on it this has led people to speculate that he actually committed suicide rather than being handed over to the court as a result neither he nor anyone else has ever faced justice for the horror of Cambodia's killing fields so I'm not going to ask whether you enjoyed that video but I do hope you found it informative and maybe brought this part of history to light for you if you did like it please do give us a thumbs up below and don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell if you do want to hear about our videos just hitting subscribe doesn't do what it used to on YouTube so do hit that Bell as well so you find out when we put out new videos and if you're looking for something else to watch right now why not check out some other bios linked to on the screen now and as always thank you for watching [Music]

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Channel: Biographics

Views: 258,518

Rating: 4.9217634 out of 5

Keywords: pol pot, who was pol pot, who were the khymer rouge, pol pot biography, cambodian genocide, pol pot life, pol pot death, what happened to pol pot, pol pot cambodia, pol pot genocide, worst dictators, worst genocides, simon whistler, biographics

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Length: 20min 35sec (1235 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018

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