Title: Pol Pot and the banality of evil
Product review: This is a great book-- well researched and written by someone who has carefully studied his material. He details not only the history of Cambodia, the role of Buddhism, the influence of Cambodian culture and the impact of Marxism and anticommunism along with US and French imperialism in the rise and fall of Pol Pot, but also how useless it is to make all sorts of moral judgements about the man and his deeds (they were objectively terrible and criminal) without a great deal of knowledge about Cambodian society.Several things stand out: 1. Pol Pot and his followers had about as much to do with Marxism as Jesus had to do with the policies of Nero, 2. that both the US and China have dirty hands in all of this, 3. and that Pol Pot never thought he had ever done anything morally wrong. This book will tell you as much about the human condition as it will about Pol Pot. Read it and weep.
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