Brother Number One: A Political Biography

Rating:
Summary: best source of pol pot information
Review: ...such as it is. The few known details of Pol POt's life can be found in this slim biography. Chandler's _The Tragedy of Cambodian History_ has better information on the Democratic Kampuchea movement in general, but if you're looking for the nitty gritty on this one person, this (to my knowledge) the only place to find it.

Unfortunately, _Brother Number One_ was written before the capture of Pol Pot and Nate Thayer's subsequent interview. Hence the modern period is neglected and a conscientious reader will have to seek out that information on his own.

Rating:
Summary: Pol Pot - still hard to grasp
Review: I salute David Chandler for finding as much information on Pol Pot as he did. There just isn't much out there, which is a great shame.

Chandler does a good job with what he's got. I can't fault the guy for his research or his conclusions. However, I never got any kind of sense of Saloth Sar/Pol Pot. What were his interests? What really motivated him? We'll never know.

The version of this book that I read was updated to include Nate Thayer's interview and the last years of Pol Pot's life (to the extent that anyone knows about it). I'm eager to read Thayer's book (which is nearly impossible to get ahold of).

I'm afraid that this is as good as there's going to be until a scholar in a Cambodian university takes on this project. There's way more information here than anywhere else that I've seen, but it's still pretty thin. I hope more comes to light on this important historical figure.

Rating:
Summary: Brother Number One
Review: I thought that this book was extremely well written and intellectually stimulating. While providing as many details about Pol Pot's life as can be found, Chandler also integrates this information into the recent history of Cambodia. He seems to believe that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge can only be understood in the context of the times, and this definitely rings true after reading the book. True, he does offer a lot of interpretation and conjecture on Pol Pot's life and motives, but this is the job of the historian. Rarely do historical documents, especially documents about the Khmer Rouge, provide such information. Those who intend to understand and write about these events, are therefore forced to do this kind of interpretive work. So do not listen the first review given on this page. This book is awesome.

Rating:
Summary: Brother Number One
Review: I thought that this book was extremely well written and intellectually stimulating. While providing as many details about Pol Pot's life as can be found, Chandler also integrates this information into the recent history of Cambodia. He seems to believe that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge can only be understood in the context of the times, and this definitely rings true after reading the book. True, he does offer a lot of interpretation and conjecture on Pol Pot's life and motives, but this is the job of the historian. Rarely do historical documents, especially documents about the Khmer Rouge, provide such information. Those who intend to understand and write about these events, are therefore forced to do this kind of interpretive work. So do not listen the first review given on this page. This book is awesome.

Rating:
Summary: Pol Pot - still hard to grasp
Review: If you are looking for a history of the Khmer Rouge regime, I'd rather recommend one of Ben Kiernan's books. If you are looking for a well-documented biography of Pol Pot, you are not going to like this book.
True, the author has gathered as much information on Pol Pot as possible, but that amount of information could be summarised on just a few pages. To make it into a book, you get a history of Cambodia - and there are better ones around than this one -, and lots of speculation about Pol Pot's psychology, which I found annoying.

Rating:
Summary: The way to make friends is not to kill people
Review: Prof. Chandler discovered the real face behind Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), the initially enigmatic leader of the Red Khmer in Cambodia. He wrote a hallucinatory and tragic biography.

The background of Pol Pot is common for many Communist Party (CP) members. He was recruited by the local CP when he studied in a foreign country. For Pol Pot, it was in France where the CP was totally controlled by the USSR and her Stalinist doctrine. The USSR recruited foreign members everywhere in order to use them as antennas all over the world.

When Pol Pot took power in Cambodia, he applied the Stalinist doctrine ruthlessly.
The similarities with Stalin are eminently striking: power struggle at the top of the party and liquidation of the old fellows, savage party purges, murderous goulags, indiscriminate collectivization, ethnic cleansing, deportation, show trials, forced confessions under torture, affectionate with little daughter, considering as enemies of the State those Khmer who came from a foreign country, fear of assassination, suspicious, dictatorial (didn't accept the slightest form of criticism).
Under Pol Pot, it went even so far that people who 'knew' an enemy where executed. The result: a genocide. Even children and BABIES were put to death.

David Chandler shows us that Pol Pot was really a dedicated communist, a party man, an organization man, a utopian thinker who believed in his killer's utopia till the end: "I did everything for my country".
A blatant lie: he did it only for his Khmer country and only for those Khmer who (were forced to) agree(d) with him. In other words, his utopia was more than nationalism, it was racism. For Pol Pot knew that 'Class and hatred had produced the victory. So hatred had to be maintained'.

This book contains excellent explanations of the background of the Cambodian conflict with Vietnam, and how Cambodia became a chess piece in a world conflict between the US, China and the USSR. Pol Pot's regime was supported by the US, because Cambodia was an enemy of Vietnam, who was an ally of the USSR.
This book stresses also the disastrous role of the feudalist king Norodom Sihanouk and the decisive influence of the US bombings of Cambodia, which turned part of the Khmer peasantry in favour of the Red Khmer.

Pol Pot's regime is a shame for Western intelligentsia, because some of his cronies (Khieu Samphan) studied like Pol Pot at Western universities.

This terrible biography is a reminder of the deadly dangers of utopian doctrines, if they can be implemented by a totally convinced individual who possesses a dictatorial power in a single ountry. As David Chandler states: the genocide would have continued, if Pol Pot had stayed in power.

A must read.