1. Pol Pot Used To Be a Kindly and Highly Regarded Professor
In 1975, Cambodian communist revolutionary Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge into seizing power. As depicted in the 1984 movie The Killing Fields, Cambodia was then transformed into a nightmarish dystopia. Pol Pot and his fanatical followers carried out a genocide that killed a quarter of Cambodia’s population. In a batty attempt at social engineering, the cities were evacuated, and the urban masses were forcibly converted into peasants, to toil on poorly run collective farms. Roughly three million were murdered or starved to death before the nightmare ended when the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979.
Pol Pot’s background gave little to indicate just how much of a monster he would become. Born Saloth Sar into a prosperous family, he had received an elite education in Cambodia’s best schools, before moving to Paris, where he joined the French Communist Party. Pol Pot eventually returned to Cambodia, where he became a college professor who frequently spoke about kindness and humanity. He was beloved by his students, who remembered him as “calm, self-assured, smooth featured, honest, and persuasive, even hypnotic when speaking to small groups“. Many of those students followed him into the Khmer Rouge, and became the most ruthless executioners of what came to be known as the Cambodian Genocide.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Ancient Origins – Exploring the Little Known History of Celtic Warriors in Egypt
BBC, December 21st, 2009 – Reindeer‘s Wartime Submarine Trip
Cracked – 6 Crazy Facts You Didn‘t Know About Famous Historical Events
Encyclopedia Britannica – Gavrilo Princip
English Monarchs – Hengist and Horsa
First Battalion, 24th Marines – Underwood v. Klonis
Historic UK – Britain‘s Retreat From Kabul
History Today – Victory on Lake Nyasa
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Empedocles
Kakanomics, February 2nd, 2017 – The History of Drugs and War
Kansas Historical Society – Mary A. “Mother” Bickerdyke
Listverse – 10 Incredibly Bizarre Ways People Died in Ancient Greece
New York Times, May 16th, 1971 – GI Heroin Epidemic in Vietnam
Patton, George S. – War as I Knew It (1995 Edition)
Ranker – The Most Bizarre Deaths in the Ancient World
Short, Philip – Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (2006)
Spectator, The, December 18th, 2012 – An Assassination at Christmas
Telegraph, The, March 12th, 2017 – Mutiny on the Bounty: The True Story of Captain Bligh‘s Mutineers
