How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism In Cambodia, 1930-1975

by Ben Kiernan

How did Pol Pot, a tyrant comparable to Hitler and Stalin in his brutality and contempt for human life, rise to power? This authoritative book explores what happened in Cambodia from 1930 to 1975, tracing the origins and trajectory of the Cambodian Communist movement and setting the ascension of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in the context of the conflict between colonialism and nationalism. A new preface bring this edition up to date.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Asia, Politics

488 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1984

About the author

Dr. Benedict F. Kiernan is an American academic and historian. He obtained his PhD from Monash University, Australia in 1983 under the supervision of David P. Chandler. He joined the Yale History Department in 1990, and founded the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies in 1994, and the comparative Genocide Studies Program in 1998. He is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. His previous books include How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975 and The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979, published by Yale University Press.

Reviews

[Paul]

it seems like its going to be hard to read. especially as i like to drink a lot, but i hope to read it soon. sometimes i wish you could sleep with a book under your pillow and osmosis would just let all the knowledge sort of seep in....

[emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars
NB: there is nothing factually incorrect in this book.
I chose to read this book as soon I will be studying Cambodia in my History class. The quotes and excerpts my textbook gave from this book were good and conclusive making me very interested in what else Kiernan had to write. In hindsight, I probably should have waited to study the topic in full before reading this book. My main problem with reading this book was that the time period covered 1930-75 is such a large time period that with so much going on within Cambodia and surrounding nations meant that there was simply too much information to handle. Half way through the book I felt as if it lost relevance to Pol Pot and spent more time analysing other political leaders and parties. When I picked up this book I also knew Kiernan was a strong supporter of the idea that Pol Pot would not have come to power if it was not for the incessant bombing campaigns of the US. When I got to this part of the book there was such so much information and evidence that the argument and reasoning got lost in between.

I would like to revisit this book in a few months after finishing my Cambodia and Pol Pot unit at school.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, it's filled with some excruciatingly detailed details, so they could probably make a version half the size with the important stuff still intact, but yeah I kinda blurred over the names and some of the locations and really got a lot out of it

[Jane Griffiths · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because I was making a six-week trip to Cambodia. In another life, at the BBC, I used to edit monitored transcripts from Cambodian media.That was in the 1980s, after the Vietnamese had booted out the Khmer Rouge, but before Cambodia became the constitutional monarchy it is now. There have been a lot of books about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and I chose this one because it was in the bibliography for Margaret Drabble's masterwork 'The Gates of Ivory', published in 1991, when the Khmer Rouge were still in the jungle guerrilla-fighting the Vietnamese - who had rescued Cambodia from the teenage thug regime of Pol Pot and his henchpeople, and who got no thanks for it at the time, nor do they to this day.

Kiernan has made an academic history, covering the period up to 1975, when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, which is readable and interesting. It's been intelligently updated, but is necessarily of its time (published in 1985) - a time when Kiernan was still able to interview survivors and perpetrators and collaborators. Not many if any of those left now. I'll read some more of his work. It's especially interesting on Sihanouk, crowned King by the French colonial power in 1941, but who took an anti-colonial stance from 1953 (the French in any case more or less left in 1954) and who was variously deposed (by the palindromic leader Lon Nol, installed by the US in 1970 after they had started carpet bombing Cambodia) and abdicated, to become King again and to die in 2012 as the revered "King Father". One of the most interesting leaders of the 20th century. His son, in whose favour he abdicated in 2004, is a trained ballet dancer, who remains King.

[Andrew Tattersall · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, thorough and well-written and researched book which fills in gaps for me about the past of Cambodia, 1930's - 1975 to be precise. Learning about the way Sihanouk and then Lon Nol behaved threw interesting shadows over the present. It is as if some of the way Hun Sen is behaving to the opposition was taken from the way Sihanouk and Lon Nol treated the opposition themselves in this book. So much so that sometimes it read as if I was reading contemporary reports. So, this is how the Khmer Rouge came to pass. Guess I have to read the next one about how they cam eto be the past and the Vietnamese invasion they so opposed came to pass and we have the politicians in Cambodia we have now.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing because it was little more than an agglomeration of gossip intended to prove the evil that was Pol Pot rather than an honest to goodness investigation on why their revolutionary experiment went awry.