Word: pols
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...Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge sent to the killing fields all who spoke French or wore glasses or had soft hands. The Khmer Rouge aimed to cancel all previous history and begin at Year Zero. Utopia, this century has learned the hard way, usually bears a resemblance to hell. An evil chemistry turns the dream of salvation into damnation...
There is reason for doubt. In the 1970s Pol Pot slaughtered as many as 2 million Cambodians. But he was a stay-at-home Hitler, so the world merely tut- tutted. When Vietnam finally invaded Cambodia in 1978 and evicted the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, the United Nations in effect judged intervention to be an evil greater than genocide. During the cold war, geopolitics often overrode morality and common sense alike. Vietnam was a Soviet ally; therefore its thrust into Cambodia was perceived, and condemned, as part of the Kremlin's global offensive...
...MACGUFFIN by Stanley Elkin (Simon & Schuster; 283 pages; $19.95). Bobbo Druff, 58, is a washed-up pol serving time as city commissioner of streets in a minor-league U.S. metropolis. His wife of 36 years is going deaf; his son Mikey, 30, still lives at home; and his health -- after a heart bypass, four instances of a collapsed lung and extensive circulatory problems in his legs -- is not robust. Understandably he concludes that the "world is getting away from me, I think...
...Almost. I don't think really, but I hope we came close. Something like "The One Bullet Manager," which we claim we got Pol Pot to write for us--that's not too far from a book that has a management theory that I could think of. And if somebody came in there and said that they killed their employee to scare them into performing better...Well, not quite, but almost. There are books, like Winning Through Intimidation, and how far is that from ours...
Fifteen years ago, this peasant-based, uneducated Maoist group committed some of the worst human rights atrocities in recent (and long-term) history. Led by the radical Pol Pot, they overran the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975 and proceeded to slaughter one in seven of their fellow citizens. Most city dwellers were herded into concentration camp-like "reeducation" communes in the countryside, better known as the killing fields...