The 20th century produced many political monsters, and the public has largely been happy to account for them simply in terms of "evil," Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot are frequently written off as deranged individuals out of a horror movie who somehow managed to obtain real power. But they too had their ideals. Hitler dreamed of a Germany populated by flaxen-haired vegetarians in rose-covered cottages who painted landscapes and listened to Wagner. And Pol Pot was a mild-mannered man with a winning smile who first wanted independence from France, then came to believe in a fundamentalist Marxism rooted in the soil as the only way to recover the greatness that had produced Angkor Wat.
Philip Short's qualities are a lack of dogmatism and a sage international perspective. He points out, for instance, that after the fall of the pro-German Vichy government in France in 1945, the number of revenge killings of collaborators was proportionally similar to those in Cambodia after the fall of Lon Nol. All totalitarian regimes torture and kill their opponents, he writes elsewhere, and all soldiers are trained to ignore pity. If he has a general theory, it is that Cambodia was not an aberration, but rather a society where malign forces present in other places collided with particular intensity.
Pol Pot is both comprehensive and highly readable. Experts in the field point to earlier works on Pol such as Nyan Chander's Brother Enemy (1986), but Short's humane account looks set to stand close to the cutting-edge in this daunting, but inevitably thought-provoking, historical territory.
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