12. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge
Pol Pot, initially a Marxist revolutionary, led the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. His radical social engineering aimed to create an agrarian utopia but resulted in genocide and mass suffering. Under his regime, an estimated 1.5 to 3 million people died due to executions, forced labor, starvation, and disease. This transformation from revolutionary to one of history’s most brutal tyrants serves as a cautionary tale. More information is available at History.com.
