Hollywood and TV depictions of baddies have accustomed us to think that horrible people are horrible all the time, and are cartoonishly evil 24/7 and thus easy to spot. In reality, many of history’s worst people were actually nice and charming most of the time – until they weren’t. Take Pol Pot, one of the twentieth centuries worst tyrants, who started off as a beloved and inspirational professor.
Saloth Sar
Little in his background for or how he lived most of his life indicated that Saloth Sar, born in 1925 in Cambodia’s Kompong Thom province, would become infamous someday as Pol Pot, one of the twentieth century’s worst monsters. He is better known to history as Pol Pot, the politician and revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s communist party. Pol Pot led a totalitarian regime that seized power in 1975, and plunged the country into unimagined horrors. Cambodia was renamed Democratic Kampuchea, and subjected to a nightmarish ideological tyranny, depicted in the 1984 movie, The Killing Fields.
Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge imposed severe hardships upon the population, a quarter of whom perished in a horrific genocide. The mass slaughter was made even worse by the fact that it was irrational by any objective measure. The new regime sought to socially engineer – or reengineer – the country. The cities were evacuated, and the urban population was forcibly converted into peasants. Without a clue about how to go about it, they were made to toil on badly run collective farms. About three million Cambodians were killed outright, or starved to death in the chaos. The nightmare went on for years, until a 1979 Vietnamese invasion toppled the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot Was Often Described as a “Very Kind Man”
The Khmer Rouge leader was an undoubted monster, but few could have predicted it. Before he became the infamous Pol Pot, Saloth Sar was a charming intellectual who gave little sign of the horrors to come. Born into an affluent family, he attended the country’s best schools, then travelled to France on an academic scholarship. He joined the French Communist Party, and became a French and geography university professor when he returned to Cambodia. His students loved him, and described him as a “very kind man”.
As a university professor, Saloth Sar often lectured on the themes of human decency and kindness. He was said to be “an attractive figure. His deep voice and calm gestures were reassuring. He seemed to be someone who could explain things in such a way that you came to love justice and honesty and hate corruption”. Many recalled that he was “calm, self-assured, smooth featured, honest, and persuasive, even hypnotic when speaking to small groups”. Sadly, quite a few of those he taught became his most enthusiastic followers when he led the Khmer Rouge. The kindly professor’s former students became the deadliest executioners of what came to be known as the Cambodian Genocide.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Hinton, Alexander Laban – Why Did They Kill: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (2005)
History Halls – Vlad the Impaler, the Real Life Dracula
