Quotes of the Day

It is 1975 and Khmer Rouge troops are forcibly evacuating Phnom Penh's residents to the countryside—an exodus that will ultimately lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Monitoring events from Beijing, an elderly Mao Zedong asks visiting Vietnamese leader Le Duan whether he could ever mount such a merciless purge. Le Duan shakes his head. "No," marvels Mao. "We couldn't do it either."

Two Asian strongmen, dazzled by the moves of the new despot on the block: it's a bizarre moment, courtesy of Philip Short, a gifted biographer who knows his communists. (His acclaimed Mao: A Life ran nearly 800 pages.) After Mao's banquet of tyrannies—the Great Leap Forward alone killed more than 20 million Chinese—the Khmer Rouge leader should have been a mere after-dinner mint for Short. But Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare, the first biography of the dictator since his death in 1998, weighs in at 650-plus pages, and is the most definitive yet.

Considering his dark contribution, history was remarkably kind to Pol Pot. Born Saloth Sar to a relatively prosperous rice-farming family, he had an eclectic education that included spells as both a Buddhist novitiate and a Roman Catholic schoolboy. A mediocre student, he won a scholarship to study in Paris largely because so few candidates applied. There, the future communist leader read the works of Marx ("I didn't really understand them," he confessed) and, more usefully, a Stalinist political primer that urged "pitiless repression" of all enemies. Inspired in part by the French Revolution, Pol Pot's hotchpotch ideology was grounded in a warped version of Cambodian Buddhist theology and dreams of past national greatness. "If our people can make Angkor," he said, referring to the ancient Khmer empire, "they can make anything."

Pol Pot is an elusive study, returning from Europe in 1953 to live a double life: one Pol Pot holds secret political meetings in a spartan shack in a Phnom Penh slum; the other courts a high-society belle in a black Citroën sedan and "dances very well, in the Western style," a colleague recalled. Short attributes this duality to a "gift for subterfuge"—Pol Pot was so secretive that many mid-level Khmer Rouge officials did not know his real identity until two years after he had seized power. (Pol Pot is a nom de guerre adopted in 1970.) "You could not tell from his face what he was feeling," said Ieng Sary, the former Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister. "Many people misunderstood that—he would smile his unruffled smile, and then they would be taken away and executed."

Short accurately describes Pol Pot's 1975-1979 regime as "a slave state, the first in modern times." His account of those hellish years—1.5 million people murdered, starved or worked to death—is familiar yet shocking. Almost as shocking is the sheer incompetence of Pol Pot's rule. He had barely come to power before initiating the policies that helped him lose it: the evacuation of urban centers, which caused mass rural starvation, and the extermination of the skilled and the educated. In 1978, dimly sensing his reign of terror was collapsing, he issued a belated directive for cadres to ease up on summary executions, yet simultaneously launched a bloody purge of suspected Vietnam sympathizers. And so, with astonishing rapidity, a movement founded on a quest for social justice degenerated into a cruel and self-defeating experiment in social engineering, in which people were, as Short puts it, merely "soulless instruments in the working out of a grand national design."

Short is too good a writer to simply dismiss Pol Pot as an evil aberration. But his alternative argument—that brutality is somehow hardwired into Cambodian society—is not scholarly enough to be convincing. He makes his case largely by an unblinking focus on horror: children decapitated, lynch mobs eating their victims' fried livers, and so on. This attempt to place Pol Pot's wickedness in a wider psychohistorical context feels misguided rather than malicious, although Cambodian readers might feel differently.

Despite the biggest and most costly peacekeeping operation in U.N. history, Cambodia remains a chaotic reminder of the difficulties of successfully imposing democracy through force, a lesson being relearned from scratch in Iraq. If Cambodians are, as Short says, "oddly reluctant" to analyze the violence and corruption that plagues their society, it is because most are still too busy trying to survive it. Pol Pot is gone, but history is a nightmare from which his beleaguered compatriots are still trying to awake.

• Andrew Marshall
• A new biography of Pol Pot reveals the horror—and the incompetence—of his brutal reign