Customer Reviews

Cambodia Year Zero

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This writer was the first really able literary whistleblower to take after the Pol Pot government. What was going on was widely suspected. In a little remembered outcry, Senator George McGovern (remember him?) publicly called for international intervention in 1978 to save Cambodia from barbarism. But most on the left were ambiguous (the stories beggar belief...give the revolutionaries time...they will grow out of their wildness). Cambodia was invisible in the world consciousness at the time - the west wanted nothing but peace and quiet after the Vietnam tumult. Then came Monsiieur Ponchard's book.

In the decades of films and commentary since, this book holds up extremely well. Considering the deadly walls of silence thrown up by the Khmer Rouge regime after 1975 (they even banned telephones as part of their total Maoist re-fit) the author penetrated with considerable accuracy and sure footedness into the operation of this most murderous regime. The factual accuracy with which the power structure is described is surprising. He gets the personnel right, the utopianism of the leading players, and their influences - Maoist in economics, Stalinist in rejecting any possibility of "re-education" in creating the new society. The author's clinical style of writing takes us through the establishment of the terror state, and disentangles the knottiest part of the story - how did the Khmer Rouge make their pitch so successfully to the peasantry even granted the US bombing from 1969? THere were other players and resistance groups. The author excells at showing the KR's usurpation of Sihanouk's authority following his overthrow by Lon Nol, and how his call for the "brothers and sisters" to go into the forest and resist lead the peasantry straight into the arms of Pol Pot, until then a deadly but marginal figure. The author's chilling treatise on how a peasantry who believed in forest spirits were sold on a crusade to re-start history and re-capture their long lost Angkorean glory is one of the most important stories of history. This is a superb telling and a powerful warning.

I first read Ponchaud's work some 25 yrs. ago. I was shocked, devastated, angry and stunned. As a university student I naively thought that this sort of thing ended during the Second War. Sadly, the years have taught me that this is not the case. I think in our current state of affairs that this study should be re-read before we (the USA) set up other nations for failure as we did in Cambodia and seem intent on doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Those who forget the past are condemed to repeat its mistakes." Let us not forget. Ponchaud's work must be kept alive.

Unlike today , genocide was not that hard to conceal in the 1970's. In fact the world was unaware pretty much of it and although the state department knew about it , the general public had no idea. Today monsters like osama bin laudin, (he lead the massacres in afganistan before 9/11) , the congo and the sudan are a cell phone signal or sat phone signal away. But not back in the 70's. And this book unleashed the story on the world back then. Of course , you can get a later book from another author but this was the first to do it.

Year Zero is a very well put together book about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1974 to 1977.The book is in great shape as advertised. Like new. The story is very graphic and intense.The Cambodian people were herded out of their cities and villages, and forced to work in the rice fields with no to little food from sun up to sun set.Millions were killed or died under the brutal treatment of the Khmer Rouge.Families were split up in many cases never to see each other again.This is a story of the tragedy of the Cambodian people. A very good read from an inside perspective.

This author wrote a devastating account of the first years of the Khymer Rouge. While the left wing complained about the dictatorships in Chile and Nicaragua, a communist dictatorship was literally killing millions of its own people, and the world said nothing. In fact, the PRC was actually supporting this murderous regime. In the book, you will find out how the KR or Angkar emptied out the cities and sent people to the countryside to found new villages and plant new rice paddies. Thousands died in the process. Angkar didn't care. Nobody in the West cared.

Some of the authors of this genocide are still around. I'm not sure why the U.N. doesn't capture them and send them to the Hague. These guys are killers. Ponchaud also details that most of these people were intellectuals and teachers, but the results of their leadership in the hell house of Cambodia in the seventies. Ponchaud wrote this account of the decline of Cambodia in the late seventies when much was not known of the happenings in this country. Most of what he wrote proved all too true and Cambodia is still suffering.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure at the time of the book's publication during the 1970's this was an invaluable text when little was known of the genocide in Cambodia. The author, Francois Ponchaud offers a detailed account of the Khmer Rouge takeover and subsequent political experiment that included horrific violence and totalitarian levels of state control. Ponchaud's book is mostly comprised of Cambodian refugee accounts recorded in Thailand once they escaped from the Khemer Rouge's brutal grasp. The accounts are extremely detailed and tragic, and I'm sure they were extremely informative at the time. However, Ponchaud's scholarship is not beyond reproach. For instance, he frequently tosses around numbers of refugees and Khemer militants, and there's little that can be verified from the refugee accounts, many of which are recorded second-hand. I'm afraid the vast majority of the sources that Ponchaud cites are just references to Cambodian radio broadcasts that cannot today be confirmed. Additionally, the entire last section of the book is given over to the background history of Pol Pot and his legions, tracing the origins of socialist thought in them, and bogusly arguing that the Khemer Rouge's ideology was the logical conclusion of all socialist thought. Unfortunately, there is barely a single source cited in this entire section! It really cannot be relied on. I'm not saying that the contents of this book aren't correct or that they're not worth reading, I'm just saying there is very little that can be verified. Still I'm sure the book was quite an eye-opener at the time, but you should really check out the more serious scholarship on this subject that was printed after the atrocities for they are far more professional and are backed up with a wealth of resources. I recommend to all readers interested in the topic to read the articles produced by Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program, a thorough study of the history and results of the Khemer Rouge's disastrous and barbaric reign.