It is not Pol Pot chic, exactly

* It is not Pol Pot chic, exactly. But a recent review in the New York Times, of Philip Short's Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by William T. Vollmann, makes for a queasy read. Vollmann and Short agree that Pol Pot was a mass murderer. Yet in the context of Cambodian history, Pol Pot's brutalities do not seem singular; and after all, Vollmann notes, America is responsible for My Lai and Abu Ghraib.

He concludes: "even now you can find poor people in Cambodia who . . . wish for the return of the Khmer Rouge." Where to start? Perhaps with the fall of man. Since we all feel it, evil appears everywhere, and when it does it necessarily acquires local coloring. But--deep breath--the United States has not murdered 1 million-plus people recently (or, indeed, ever). Pol Pot, ruler of a much tinier country, managed to do that in a very short time. A word almost completely missing from Vollmann's piece is "Communism" (he mentions Marx, only to say that Cambodians did not understand him). Pol Pot was empowered by modern totalitarian doctrine, like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler--and even now, you can find poor thinkers in the New York Times who do not understand the century they just lived through.

COPYRIGHT 2005 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning