Word: potful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pot is visibly weak now, suffering from recurrent bouts of malaria and, reportedly, a bad heart condition. But even so, there was something unreal about the televised jungle trial. When the rehearsed ranting of his accusers was finished, young soldiers respectfully guided the vilified leader to a waiting vehicle, which took him to a house in the jungle, possibly the last time the outside world will ever see him. Gone too was any likelihood that he will ever be brought to real justice for instigating some of this century's most unspeakable crimes...
...away charmed by the lush beauty of the countryside and the smiling people. But the violent side of Cambodian life can manifest itself almost without warning. "Cambodians have this darkness, which is part of the shadow of their sweetness," says David Chandler, who has written a biography of Pol Pot and several histories of the country. "Many of us who keep going there still find it hard to understand." Chandler observes that Pol Pot, with his gentle voice, never failed to charm those he met. He liked to quote French poetry. This was the same man who had his staff...
When the Vietnamese communists took Saigon in 1975, they put their "class enemies" into re-education camps. In neighboring Cambodia, Pol Pot built extermination camps. Teachers, doctors, people who could speak a foreign language, even people who wore glasses, were purged as he sought to reduce all of Cambodia to the level of the peasant class. The Vietnamese could be cruel captors, but their Confucian heritage left them open to educational reform. In Cambodia, by contrast, Buddhism encouraged a belief in the ineluctability of karma and the idea that evil suffered is evil deserved. "The idea of karma goes very...
...weak, make yourself pitied. Cambodians are deeply insecure, aware that the proud temple-building empire of Angkor, which covered much of Southeast Asia in the 12th century, has shrunk to the small area of today's Cambodia. This insecurity has prompted much irrational aggression. In 1978 Pol Pot launched attacks on Vietnam, bragging that one Cambodian soldier could kill eight Vietnamese. It is a behavior pattern that is deeply rooted in the national psyche: to hold power one must show the utmost ferocity and single-mindedness and never reveal weakness...
...arresting Pol Pot and staging the subsequent trial, the Khmer Rouge were hoping to sanitize themselves so they can move from their futile armed resistance into the political game. In the past two years, a steady stream of people, tired of the deprivations of life in jungle villages like Kdep Tmar, have been defecting from Khmer Rouge control. Pol Pot may even have tacitly approved his trial for the sake of the survival of his movement...