William Shawcross wrote in his book '' The Quality of Mercy : Cambodia , Holocaust and Modern Conscience '' ( 1984 ) about Pilger 's series of articles about Cambodia in the '' Daily Mirror '' during August 1979 : A rather interesting quality of the articles was their concentration on Nazism and the holocaust . Pilger called Pol Pot ' an Asian Hitler ' — and said he was even worse than Hitler ... Again and again Pilger compared the Khmer Rouge to the Nazis . Their Marxist-Leninist ideology was not even mentioned in the '' Mirror '' , except to say they were inspired by the Red Guards . Their intellectual origins were described as ' anarchist ' rather than Communist . Ben Kiernan , in his review of Shawcross 's book , notes that Pilger did compare Pol Pot 's Khmer Rouge to Stalin 's terror , as well as to Mao 's Red Guards . Kiernan notes instances where other writers ' comparisons of Pol Pot to Hitler or the Vietnamese to the Nazis are either accepted by Shawcross in his account , or not mentioned
Stalin 's terror
Great Purge
Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia