Pol Pot: The Teacher Who Turned a Country into a Killing Field (The Dictator’s Burden) (English Edition)

He began as a teacher.

He ended as the architect of one of the twentieth century’s most devastating regimes.

When the Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia did not merely change governments. It was dismantled. Cities were emptied. Money was abolished. Religion was suppressed. Families were separated. Intellectuals were executed. Within four years, nearly a quarter of the population was dead.

In Pol Pot: The Teacher Who Turned a Country into a Killing Field , GORDON J. MACKENZIE examines how Saloth Sar transformed from Paris-educated revolutionary into the leader of Democratic Kampuchea — a regime built on secrecy, ideological purity, and total social control.

This is not a sensational account. It is a structured historical examination of:

• Pol Pot’s intellectual formation
• The underground construction of Angkar
• The evacuation of Phnom Penh
• The abolition of money and markets
• The machinery of purges and internal terror
• The war with Vietnam and the regime’s collapse
• The long shadow left over Cambodia

Part of THE DICTATOR’S BURDEN series, this book explores not only what Pol Pot did, but the burden his rule left behind — for Cambodia and for history.

A disciplined political biography of power without restraint.