The Killing Fields

Remembering a menace that far too many are inclined to forget.

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Atlanta, GA

August 19, 2026

Bright red blood that covers towns and plains
Of Kampuchea, our motherland,
Sublime blood of workers and peasants,
Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!
The blood, changing into unrelenting hatred
And resolution struggle
On 17 April, under the flag of revolution,
Frees us from slavery!

- from the national anthem of the Khmer Rouge

Of more than 14,000 captives, Cambodian artist Bou Meng was among only seven adults who survived the Tuol Sleng torture prison in Phnom Penh. While there, his wife was tortured to death and their children died of starvation at another center.

Meng’s ability to paint propaganda portraits of Pol Pot kept him alive, and he survived almost fifty years after he escaped. He died last week, cutting another personal link to communism’s atrocities.

Forty years ago I saw a remarkable movie. At the time I couldn’t comprehend the story. I still can’t. Nor can anyone who wasn’t there, or who hasn’t survived similar horrors, of which the 20th century featured far too many.

I watched The Killing Fields again last night, which prompted me to write this essay. As Hillsdale professor Brad Birzer put it in a wonderful review a couple years ago, the (true) story “made the horrors of communism palpable in ways even the greatest books could not.”

Overture

The French Revolution was the modern impetus for these unspeakable barbarities, which were replicated with sadistic depravity in Soviet Russia, Eastern Europe, Castro’s Cuba, Mao’s China, and throughout East Asia, Latin America and the continent of Africa. They were particularly pronounced in Cambodia.

By 1970, the Vietnam War seeped across the western frontier. Cambodia was officially neutral in the neighboring conflict. But it was deeply engulfed in its own civil war. This made it an attractive base for the Viet Cong to launch attacks over the border (and within Cambodia itself).

Richard Nixon wanted out of Vietnam. His plan was to strengthen South Vietnamese forces so they could take up the fighting borne by American troops. But to do so, the cross-border threat had to be eliminated.

Cambodia had begun to unravel. With the blessing (if not active participation) of the CIA, Prince Sihanouk was deposed by commander Lon Nol. Rival gangs began hacking each other to pieces, and slaughtering anyone who happened to be in the way.

Pogroms were unleashed against the Vietnamese minority. And the North Vietnamese began arming the Khmer Rouge.

Unbeknownst to the American public… and, like the entire war, in defiance of the Constitution… the Nixon Administration began heavy bombing of eastern Cambodia.

The U.S. dropped more than half a million tons of explosives, which slowed martial progress of the Khmer Rouge. But it likely accelerated its recruitment.

Its leaders asserted they’d “rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live.” They got their wish. In the late 70’s, their entire country became a gulag… and a morgue.

The Khmer Rouge thought Stalin too subtle and Mao too moderate. The carnage those savages inflicted over years and decades, the Khmer Rouge unleashed in days, weeks, and months.

Slicing, Strangling, Shooting, and Hanging

Barely a hundred hours after the US Embassy was abandoned, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. The atrocities began immediately.

Hordes of ruthless peasant soldiers emptied the cities. Over three million people were literally pushed into the countryside.

Or else.

Unlike the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge didn’t use gas chambers. They opted instead for slicing, strangling, shooting, and hanging.

Many victims were evicted from hospitals. Those who remained were stabbed, shot, or clubbed in their beds. Beyond infirmary walls, invalids, teachers, and students were massacred with the indifference of exterminators eradicating roaches.

Any who resisted (or merely appeared befuddled or frightened) were shot dead in the street. Bazookas fired at businesses and houses where human presence was seen or suspected. Before long, there wouldn’t be any.

The Khmer Rouge cut off the water supply its first day in Phnom Penh. After a week, money was abolished and all currency incinerated. Identities were stripped and private property prohibited. Total collectivization was complete in less than two years.

Historian Paul Johnson noted married couples being killed merely for conversing. Orphans and the elderly were abandoned to the whims of famine and disease. Relatives were forced to watch their children, siblings, and parents decapitated, bludgeoned, garroted, or axed in endless orgies of public executions, which were often preceded by horrific mutilation.

Johnson recalled a colonel having his eyes gouged, nose removed, and ears cut off before spending three days dying while crucified on a tree. A teacher who taught unapproved ideas was ordered hanged and hacked, with his eight year-old students forced to carry-out the sentence.

Birzer elaborates on the scope of the depravity:

“The Khmer Rouge probably murdered 86% of the Buddhist monks, half of Cambodian Muslims, half of Cambodian Catholics, 89% of the medical doctors, and 75% of the teachers. Anyone who had any pre-revolutionary education, especially in French and English, was systematically murdered, and the Catholics and Muslims were both seen as anti-Khmer.”

But the worst, as Birzer said, must remain unstated.

“The Khmer Rouge especially hated pregnant women, doing things to them and their fetuses that should not enter our soulful utterances and imaginings at all.”

Many Khmer Rouge soldiers were pre-teens who’d been ordered to brutalize animals to desensitize them to killing. Unfortunately, it worked.

Fanatical Intellectuals

As was common under twentieth century Communism, these sickening cruelties were orchestrated by fanatical intellectuals who were “educated” in the West. Pol Pot was no exception. Like many deranged ideologues of Cambodia’s Angka Loeu, he had a bourgeois background.

These revolutionary leaders were teachers, professors, economists, and bureaucrats. Many were schooled in France and likely influenced by Sartre. As Johnson noted, they detested cities, yet never sullied their hands with manual labor or the creation of wealth.

By 1976, the Angka Loeu controlled Cambodia, and imposed their plans to remake the world. In the first year after the fall of Phnom Penh, up to a half million Cambodians died by execution, famine, and forced evacuation. Many who survived probably envied those who died.

As agents of social engineering and radical disruption, the Khmer Rouge made the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward look like a Sunday stroll. In a matter of weeks, said Jean-Louis Margolin, “the country was razed to the ground and plunged back into a prehistoric era.” It would get worse.

Like the French Revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge discarded the conventional calendar and centered a new one around themselves. They were now living in “Year Zero”.

“Re-education” camps were established. Memories were to be erased. Under threat of execution, parents and children were ordered to forget each other. Prior education or acquaintances could get you killed. Knowledge of foreign languages was a death sentence.

Everyone who wasn’t a corpse, as RJ Rummel relayed, “was a prisoner or a slave.” Birzer quotes a Cambodian witness:

“There was no spare moment in the twenty-four-hour day. Daily life was divided up as follows: twelve hours for physical labor, two hours for eating, three hours for rest and education, and seven hours for sleep. We all lived in an enormous concentration camp. There was no justice. The Angkar [meaning simply “The Organization”; this was the name the Khmer Rouge took for themselves] regulated every moment of our lives.”

Saner Shores

As happened in Revolutionary France and Soviet Russia, many of the insurgents turned on each other. Purges proliferated, and the uprising eventually ate its own… as Bou Meng (who joined the movement during the war against Lon Nol) would attest.

The regime’s deadliest year was its last, not its first. By mid-1978, half the high officials and most regional secretaries had been executed. These purges grew hungrier as they ate. Eventually, wives and kids of victims and targets were added to the menu.

Up to a quarter of Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge, victims of an intentional effort to be rid of “useless mouths.” And many who remained (especially including most of the kids) were coldly programmed to kill.

The carnage continued into 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded. To outsiders, these “saviors” seemed like cool comfort. But relative to the current regime, they were warm relief.

By the time the liberators arrived, bones filled the Mekong, flesh fertilized Cambodian fields, and cannibalism sustained many who’d managed to survive. Common decency, human dignity, and Buddhist compassion had long since disappeared.

The Khmer Rouge seeded the Thai border with landmines to discourage escape. Revealing how horrible Cambodia was, escapees fled to hostile Vietnam. And hundreds of thousands endured horrific conditions as “boat people” trying to reach saner shores.

Those who did were eager to share their stories. Like survivors of the Holocaust or the Soviet gulags, they made it their mission to tell their tales of terror under the Khmer Rouge. Bou Meng’s death silences another witness.

Few remain. Chum Mey is Tuol Sleng’s only adult survivor still alive. What he and others endured under communism must be remembered. Especially since the ideology that inflicted such suffering still attracts too many adherents.

JD