The Diabolic Sweetness of Pol Pot

Abstract

At the time that Pol Pot was teaching me Verlaine, I had not yet learned to distrust sweet things. In 1957, he was my French teacher, though later he claimed to have been a history teacher, in order not to appear to have been an advocate of the colonialists' culture. We knew him by the name of Saloth Sar, and nothing he said to us betrayed his engagement in politicsuntil the day in 1962 when he left for the resistance. I need to revise my memory of that school year: Pol Pot was not just the disciple of Verlaine who, as a good philologue, knew how to win over his students with his explications de texte: "It rains in my heart as it rains on the city. From whence comes this languor thatpierces my heart... " The consequences of the phantasmagoric catastrophe of human judgment that was the Khmer Rouge regime are now widely known, and it is time to take a closer look at the means by which they established themselves. Clearly, there were political and economic causes, but a cultural factor also played an important role, and until now it has been rather neglected: the use of the Cambodian language for propaganda, lie, and illusion. The word, particularly the spoken word, assumes great importance and prestige in countries with an oral tradition. In Cambodia, broadcasts by radio thus dominated the long workday. Before Phnom Penh fell, the radio transmitted Prince Sihanouk's interminable harangues; once the regime was installed, it broadcast the orders of the new masters, descriptions of an ideal society, and edifying biographies of the heroes of the revolution. Paradoxically, these broadcasts also found an avid audience over the border, in Bangkok, for they constituted the most reliable source of information about a country otherwise completely cut off from the world. The method of the Khmer Rouge was to force together irreconcilable opposites. They presented rigidity as softness. They tangled sweetness and cruelty together until they could not be told apart. The verb to request, for example, became terrifying. You were never ordered, never forced to do