Pol Pot was deeply inspired by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of communist China, and he wanted to build his own utopia. The first thing he did was create his own personal army called the Khmer Rouge, a deadly group that could be compared to a secret police, if the secret police were the size of an army. After that, he made a plan to break the class systems and build the perfect communist country. He started by renaming Cambodia the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. He then began to “purify” society by expelling western influences (such as capitalism), banning all religion and foreign languages , shutting down embassies, not allowing any media or news, limiting communication through mail or phone, closed businesses, shut down school and education, taking away health care, and rejected any foreign economic or medical assistance. Because of this, Cambodia was now sealed off from the outside world.
Then, every city in Cambodia was evacuated by force, and two million people in Phnom Penh had to leave the city on foot at gunpoint and walked to the countryside. During that journey, an estimated 20,000 people died.
Now, millions of the Cambodian city folk were forced to engage in manual slave work in rural areas. They were fed very sparingly, and they quickly began to die from disease, being overworked, and malnourished. This act was nicknamed the “killing fields”.
Meanwhile, many people were being killed to rid the city of the “old society”. People were executed for various reasons, such as being wealthy, their occupation (usually anyone who had anything to do with government, education, or health), and anyone that seemed against this new way of life. They also terrorized minorities, and would torture or kill anyone that was Vietnamese, Chinese, or Cham Muslim.
All of this was because Pol Pot and his followers believed that this was the heart of capitalism, and therefore it had to be eliminated. They felt that to have a perfect communist country, everyone had to be weak and uneducated so that no one could rebel. People who lived in cities were immediately dubbed as an enemy and would be killed.
In the end, his plan failed, but he refused to blame himself. He and his supporters believed that his failure was because of secret spies in his following, or because there were still classes and occasional cities that had wealthy habitants.
