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Investigates why Vietnam was so heavily sanctioned for its use of force against the murderous regime of Pol Pot. The reactions of other states reflected the domination of a pluralist conception of international society. However, I argue that Vietnam's use of force should have been legitimated on solidarist grounds as humanitarian.

Examines why Tanzania's overthrow of the Ugandan Government of Idi Amin was greeted with almost tacit approval compared to Vietnam's reception in overthrowing Pol Pot. International society did not endorse the principle of humanitarian intervention in this case, but it did show by its reaction that it understood the moral context in which Tanzania had acted.

This chapter studies the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, which greatly desacralized and overturned all aspects of social life, such as gender relations and family. It looks at a Buddhist-Khmer culture that was based on ritual and political subordinated tempered by the Khmer-Buddhist emphasis on kindness, mutuality, and compassion. The first section is on refugee studies and the concept of the human, while the second section looks at the air attacks during the 1970s and the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the armed forces of Pol Pot. A description of Cambodia before and during the Pol Pot regime is also provided in this chapter.

This chapter continues the ongoing narrative of Buddhist participation in Cambodian politics, this time by examining the Buddhist angle in the story of the rise of communism in Cambodia. It also discusses the roles of certain Buddhist monks who had become involved in the fledgling communist party, as well as the lives of certain key players in the Khmer Rouge (including Pol Pot himself) who have surprisingly Buddhist backgrounds. Tracing the nation's communist lineage to the old Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) of the 1930s to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) of the 1960s, the chapter explores the intertwined relationships between Cambodian Communism and the Khmer Rouge.

This chapter focuses on the Hitler and the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Stalin’s Bolshevik regime and the Gulag camps, and Pol Pot’s rule in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. It also includes consideration of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Its aim, as in Chapter 3, is to explain how persecution became so extreme, violent, and bloody in these regimes. An explanation is offered of how the concept of ‘political religion’ has been defended as a means of explaining these regimes. The foregoing argument about the relationship between fear, paranoia, and dystopian groups is then used to extend and refine this analysis.

This chapter examines the thoughts and political practices of other revolutionaries, namely Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot. Lenin is considered the greatest purifier of the world known to history. He achieved power and set about regenerating humanity. His political actions have enabled the effects of the gnostic recipe to be verified “in the field.” The Bolshevik Revolution also demonstrates what happens when professional revolutionaries gain power. Mao Tse-tung was one of the staunchest critics of bureaucracy, the new state bourgeoisie, corruption, and betrayal. Similar to Robespierre, Mao stood for radical catastrophism, the binary-code mentality, the obsession with purity, the identification of the Devil, and the doctrine of purification, according to which your enemies can only be exterminated. Pol Pot was a firm supporter of the Leninist organization of the Khmer Rouge. He was convinced that only a political party based on a rigid hierarchy and a fierce ideological determination would be able to transform the present world.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Khmer Rouge regime, which pursued an untenable agricultural revolution and which was also determined to eradicate any signs of a Western influence. The Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge renamed Cambodia, Democratic Kampuchea and dismantled centuries-old traditions and prerevolutionary socioeconomic infrastructures. This book focuses on both collected and collective memorialization, beginning with author James Young’s examination of Holocaust memorials and remembrance. It investigates how Cambodian American cultural producers have rearticulated and reimagined the Killing Fields era using three distinct and unfixed modes of negation: dominant-held erasures, refugee-oriented ruptures, and juridical open-endedness.

Should we compare the Terror with other episodes of communist violence, see it as ideologically inspired, driven by the desire to create a pure utopia of new socialist people? Should we see it in the context of wartime practices of mass deportation and killing, which became common during and after the First World War? Or should we avoid comparisons, seeking the causes in Stalin's own peculiar personality, or in the patrimonial court politics which he sought to create? The chapter develops some of the comparative arguments he briefly explored in Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization. It defends the value of comparisons with other episodes of communist violence (such as Mao's Cultural Revolution, or Pol Pot's ‘killing fields’). But he argues that we need a more sophisticated view than the old ‘utopia in power’ approach, by distinguishing between different forms of communist violence, and between the disparate elements of Stalin's Terror.

This introductory chapter is concerned with Asian immigrants, specifically Cambodians, Mien, and Laotians. It first discusses the debate surrounding American citizenship before looking at the various concepts of political identity. This is followed by a section on gender differentiation and racial bipolarism. It then discusses the techniques the text uses to examine citizenship and other techniques for self-making and subject-making. The chapter ends with a section on the transition of the Cambodians from the utopian communism introduced by Pol Pot to the advanced liberalism of the United States. A summary of the other chapters is included.

This introductory chapter offers a multifaceted historical perspective on Buddhism in Cambodia under Pol Pot's regime. At the same time it cautions against any one-sided views of the events that had taken place during this period. It is important to recognize that Buddhism in Southeast Asia has never been a disembodied conceptual system devoid of purchase on historical and political reality. When we look at Buddhism, we tend to focus on its philosophical and scholastic superstructure while ignoring the ways in which it has operated on a far wider level to sustain and inform the cultures with which it formed a whole. It has achieved its sociocultural character by the provision of educational and welfare facilities, certainly. But it has also acted through more direct involvement in the apparatus of state. Additionally, the chapter reviews the sources that inform the study in this volume.

In this chapter, the author talks about the O'Thmaa village harvest festival called Bon Dalien. In 2003, the author had the opportunity to observe and participate in three Bon Dalien festivals in Prei Phnom Commune, including one in O'Thmaa. Here she reflects on her experiences and how she was able to gain a degree of understanding of the festival's composition and an appreciation of its variation across villages. In particular, she explains how Bon Dalien challenged a number of assumptions she had made about the effects of the Khmer Rouge civil war on social moral cohesion and order within the village. She also considers the nature of ritual and its persistence through periods of radical social change, along with the extent to which communal relations and institutions have been restored or remain in a state of disintegration in the wake of the war and the Pol Pot regime.

This book examines the impacts of the Khmer Rouge revolution and civil war on O'Thmaa and its surrounding communities, which served as “base areas” that provided the group with the human and material support crucial to their success in seizing control of the nation in 1975. Drawing on fieldwork conducted by the author in September 2001–August 2002 and in September 2002–October 2003, the book investigates how communities negotiate the memories associated with difficult pasts and come together again to rebuild their lives. Using morality and “social memory” as framing devices, it considers the ways that the people of O'Thmaa try to recover from the destruction wrought by nearly thirty years of war and genocide during the Pol Pot era. This introductory chapter provides an overview of ethnographic studies that were mostly undertaken in Cambodia beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It also discusses the preparation, fieldwork, and research methodology employed for this book.