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Did the Khmer Rouge Really Kill Everyone With Glasses? A History of Cambodia

In , the Khmer Rouge officially launched a nation-wide insurgency across Cambodia. Even Though the government of North Vietnam had not been informed of the Khmer Rouge's decision, its forces provided shelter and weapons to the Khmer Rouge after the insurgency began. North Vietnamese support for the Khmer Rouge's insurgency made it impossible for the Cambodian military to effectively counter it.

For the next two years, the insurgency grew because Norodom Sihanouk did very little to stop it. As the insurgency grew in strength, the party openly declared itself to be the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Sihanouk was removed as head of state in Although thoroughly aware of the weakness of Lon Nol's forces and loath to commit American military force to the new conflict in any form other than air power, the Nixon administration announced its support for the new Khmer Republic.

On 29 March , North Vietnam launched an offensive against the Cambodian army. Documents which were uncovered from the Soviet Union 's archives reveal that the invasion was launched at the Khmer Rouge's explicit request after negotiations were held with Nuon Chea. By June, three months after Sihanouk's removal, they had swept government forces from the entire northeastern third of the country. After defeating those forces, the North Vietnamese turned the newly won territories over to the local insurgents.

The Khmer Rouge also established "liberated" areas in the south and the southwestern parts of the country, where they operated independently of the North Vietnamese. After Sihanouk demonstrated his support for the Khmer Rouge by visiting them in the field, their ranks swelled from 6, to 50, fighters. Many of the Khmer Rouge's new recruits were apolitical peasants who fought in support of the king, rather than communism , of which they had little understanding. By , with Lon Nol's government running out of ammunition due to its loss of U. Estimates for total civil war deaths vary. Sihanouk used a figure of , civil war deaths, [34] while Elizabeth Becker reported over a million civil war deaths, military and civilian included; [35] other researchers were unable to corroborate such high estimates.

Paige Johnson described , war deaths as "the highest mortality that we can justify". From to a massive United States bombing campaign against the Khmer Rouge devastated rural Cambodia. The number of Cambodian civilian and Khmer Rouge deaths caused by U. The relationship between the United States' massive bombing of Cambodia and the growth of the Khmer Rouge in recruitment and popular support has been a matter of interest to historians. Some scholars, including Michael Ignatieff , Adam Jones [46] and Greg Grandin , [47] have cited the United States intervention and bombing campaign from to as a significant factor that led to increased support for the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry.

It used the bombing's devastation and massacre of civilians as recruitment propaganda and as an excuse for its brutal, radical policies and its purge of moderate communists and Sihanoukists. Pol Pot biographer David P. Chandler writes that the bombing "had the effect the Americans wanted—it broke the Communist encirclement of Phnom Penh", but also accelerated the collapse of rural society and increased social polarization. Since the s, Pol Pot had made frequent visits to the People's Republic of China , where he received political and military training—especially on the theory of the Dictatorship of the proletariat —from the personnel of the CCP.

In alone, the Chinese reportedly gave the United Front tons of military aid. We agree with you! Much of your experience is better than ours. China is not qualified to criticize you. We committed errors of the political routes for ten times in fifty years—some are national, some are local…Thus I say China has no qualification to criticize you but to applaud you.

You are basically correct…During the transition from the democratic revolution to adopting a socialist path, there exist two possibilities: one is socialism, the other is capitalism. Our situation now is like this. Fifty years from now, or one hundred years from now, the struggle between two lines will exist. Even ten thousand years from now, the struggle between two lines will still exist. When Communism is realized, the struggle between two lines will still be there. Otherwise, you are not a Marxist Our state now is, as Lenin said, a capitalist state without capitalists.

This state protects capitalist rights, and the wages are not equal. Under the slogan of equality, a system of inequality has been introduced. There will exist a struggle between two lines, the struggle between the advanced and the backward, even when Communism is realized. Today we cannot explain it completely. Pol Pot replied: "The issue of lines of struggle raised by Chairman Mao is an important strategic issue. We will follow your words in the future. I have read and learned various works of Chairman Mao since I was young, especially the theory on people's war.

Your works have guided our entire party. During the genocide, China was the Khmer Rouge's main international patron, supplying "more than 15, military advisers" and most of its external aid. After Mao's death in September , China went through around two years of transition until Deng Xiaoping became its new paramount leader in December Chen Yonggui , Vice Premier of China and the leader of Dazhai, visited Cambodia in December , commending the achievement of its movement towards communism. In order to counter the power of Soviet Union and Vietnam in Southeast Asia , China officially condemned the Vietnamese invasion and continued its material support to Khmer Rouge. In early , China launched an invasion of Vietnam to retaliate against Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia.

Deng was convinced by a conversation with Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew to limit the scale and duration of the war. Following the one-month war, Singapore attempted to serve as a mediator between Vietnam and China on the Cambodian issue. After the Paris Peace Accords , Thailand continued to allow the Khmer Rouge "to trade and move across the Thai border to sustain their activities Ideology played an important role in the genocide.

Pol Pot was influenced by Marxism—Leninism and he wanted to transform Cambodia into an entirely self-sufficient agrarian socialist society that would be free from foreign influences. Stalin's work has been described as a "crucial formative influence" on his thought. Also heavily influential was Mao's work, particularly On New Democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of his favorite authors, according to historian David Chandler , p.

In the mids, Pol Pot reformulated his ideas about Marxism—Leninism to suit the Cambodian situation with goals such as bringing Cambodia back to an alleged mythic past of the powerful Khmer Empire , eradicating corrupting influences, such as foreign aid and Western culture , and restoring Cambodia's agrarian society. Pol Pot's strong belief that Cambodia needed to be transformed into an agrarian utopia stemmed from his experience in Cambodia's rural northeast—where he developed an affinity for the agrarian self-sufficiency of the area's isolated tribes—while the Khmer Rouge gained power.

A doctoral dissertation written by Kenneth M. Quinn about the "origins of the radical Pol Pot regime" [85] is "widely acknowledged as the first person to report on the genocidal policies of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. State Department in Southeast Asia, Quinn was stationed at the South Vietnamese border for nine months between — While each genocide was unique, they shared certain common features, and racism was a major part of the ideology of all three regimes.

All three regimes targeted religious minorities and they also tried to use force in order to expand their rule into what they believed were their historic heartlands the Khmer Empire, Turkestan , and Lebensraum , respectively , and all three regimes "idealized their ethnic peasantry as the true 'national' class, the ethnic soil from which the new state grew. The Khmer Rouge regime frequently arrested and often executed anyone who it suspected of having connections with the former Cambodian government or foreign governments, as well as professionals, intellectuals, the Buddhist monkhood , and ethnic minorities.

Even those people who were stereotypically thought of as having intellectual qualities, such as wearing glasses or speaking multiple languages, were executed out of fear that they would rebel against the Khmer Rouge. Ethnic Vietnamese , ethnic Thai , ethnic Chinese , ethnic Cham , Cambodian Christians , and other minorities were also targeted. The Khmer Rouge forcibly relocated minority groups and banned their languages. While Cambodians in general were victims of the Khmer Rouge regime, the persecution, torture, and killings committed by the Khmer Rouge are considered an act of genocide according to the United Nations as ethnic and religious minorities were systematically targeted by Pol Pot and his regime. Scholars and historians have varying opinions on whether the persecution and killings under the hands of the Khmer Rouge should be considered genocide.

This is because the earlier scholarship which came about right after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in had claimed that the victims could have been killed due to the circumstances they were in. For instance, Michael Vickery opined that the killings were "largely the result of the spontaneous excesses of a vengeful, undisciplined peasant army. This view was also supported by Alexander Hinton , who related an account by a former Khmer Rouge cadre who claimed that the killings were acts of retribution for the injustices of the Lon Nol soldiers when they killed people who were known to be former Viet Minh agents [] before the rise of Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge to power. Vickery—erroneously, as maintained by the more recent scholarship of Ben Kiernan—argued that the number of Cham victims during the Khmer Rouge regime to be around 20, [] which would rule out the crime of genocide against Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

The killings were a centralized and bureaucratic effort by the Khmer Rouge regime, as recently documented by the Documentation Center of Cambodia DC-Cam through the discovery of Khmer Rouge internal security documents which instructed the killings across Cambodia. David Chandler has argued that, although ethnic minorities fell victim to the Khmer Rouge regime, they were not targeted specifically because of their ethnic backgrounds, but rather because they were mostly enemies of the regime. This indicates that Chandler does not believe in the argument of charging the Khmer Rouge regime with the crime of genocide.

Ben Kiernan makes the argument that it was indeed a genocide and disagrees with these three scholars, by bringing forth examples from the history of the Cham people in Cambodia, as did an international tribunal finding Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan guilty 92 and 87 counts of said crime respectively. The Khmer Rouge initially ordered the expulsion of ethnic Vietnamese from Cambodia but then conducted large scale massacres of large numbers of Vietnamese civilians who were being deported out of Cambodia.

Radio Phnom Penh called on Cambodians to "exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese. Additionally, the Khmer Rouge conducted many cross-border raids into Vietnam where they slaughtered an estimated 30, Vietnamese civilians. This forced an urgent response from the Vietnamese government, precipitating the Cambodian—Vietnamese War in which the Khmer Rouge was ultimately defeated. The state of the Chinese Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge regime was alleged to be "the worst disaster ever to befall any ethnic Chinese community in Southeast Asia.

At the beginning of the Khmer Rouge regime in , there were , ethnic Chinese in Cambodia. By the end of there were just , stuck at Thai refugee camps or Cambodia. According to Ben Kiernan, the "fiercest extermination campaign was directed against the ethnic Chams , Cambodia's Muslim minority. Initially, the Khmer Rouge aimed for the " forced assimilation " of Chams through population dispersal. Pol Pot then began using intimidation efforts against the Chams that included the assassination of village elders but he ultimately ordered the full-scale mass killing of the Cham people. Bartrop estimate that these efforts would have completely wiped out the Cham population were it not for the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in Together, they became the mouthpiece of the CPK to get the Cham people to take part in the revolution.

The Chams were gradually made to abandon their faith and distinct practices as early as in the Southwest. Ten Cham villages were taken over by the CPK in —, where new Cham leaders were instated and led the villagers to work in the fields away from their hometowns. A witness interviewed by Kiernan asserts that they were well-treated by the CPK then, and allowed to return to their homes in Between and , the enforcement of such restrictions was further amplified as the Khmer Rouge found the Cham to be a threat to its communist agenda due to their unique language, culture, belief, and independent communal system. Not only that, the Cham were renamed "Islamic Khmers" to disassociate them with their ancestral heritage and ethnicity and assimilate them into the larger Khmer-dominated Democratic Kampuchea.

The Khmer Rouge believed that the Cham would jeopardize the communist efforts of establishing close-knit communities where everyone could be easily monitored. As such, the regime had decided to disperse the Cham by deporting them from their respective localities to work as peasants across Cambodia, hence contributing directly to the new DK economy. Slowly, those who defied these restrictions were arrested by the regime. Hence in October , Cham Muslims in the Eastern Zone of DK demonstrated their displeasure towards the CPK restrictions by beating the drums—traditionally used to inform locals of the time for daily prayers—at local mosques.

This act of communal defiance prompted the blanket arrest of many Cham Muslim leaders and religious teachers. In February , the Cham in Region 31, which is in the Western Zone of DK, protested the CPK policy which required the fishermen to register their daily catch with the local cooperative and sell them to the cooperative at a low price. At the same time, the locals were also made to buy those fishes from the cooperative at a higher price. This prompted the locals to confront the cooperative to express their discontent, only to be shot at, "killing and wounding more than ", as one account put it.

The rebellion was repressed forcefully by the regime with no records of casualties documented. As much as there are records of these restrictions, resistance, and repressions, there were also accounts from the Cham community which deny the oppression by the regime between and early While restrictions on certain activities like trade and travel were in place during that period, they were understood to be by-products of the ongoing civil war. Moreover, some Cham had also joined the revolution as soldiers and members of the CPK. According to some local accounts, people had confidence in the Khmer Rouge when they first came to the village communities who assisted the locals with food and provisions, and there were no bans on local culture or religion; even if restrictions were imposed, the consequences were not harsh.

As the Cham communities were to be found across DK, various Cham communities might have experienced the effects of the CPK pre differently; some communities experienced the repressions and restrictions while others did not. Only when Pol Pot had consolidated power by the end of that the persecution became more severe and affected all of the Cham people indiscriminately. This could well be one of the simpler factors as to why the Cambodian government and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia ECCC do not prosecute the pre Khmer Rouge perpetrators before Pol Pot consolidated his power.

As such, the accounts of those who experienced the repressions prior to were not considered to be part of the genocide as the case for a systematic annihilation of a people based on ethnic or religious profiling was not concrete enough. In , upon the victory of the CPK over the Khmer Republic forces, two brothers of Cham descent who had joined the Khmer Rouge as soldiers returned home to Region 21 within the Kampong Cham Province , where the largest Cham Muslim community could be found. The brothers then told their father of the adventures they had experienced being part of the revolution which included killing Khmers and consuming pork, in the hopes of convincing their father to join the communist cause. The father who had remained silent, was clearly not intrigued by the accounts related by his sons.

Instead, he grabbed a cleaver, killed his sons, and told his fellow villagers that he had killed the enemy. This prompted a unanimous agreement amongst the villagers to kill all Khmer Rouge soldiers within the area on that night. The next morning, more Khmer Rouge forces descended the area with heavy weapons and surrounded the village, killing every single villager in it. Similarly, in June or July , the CPK authorities in Region 21 of the Eastern Zone tried to confiscate all copies of the Qur'an from the people, while at the same time impose a mandatory short haircut for Cham women.

The authorities were met with mass demonstration staged by the local Cham community who were shot at by the regime soldiers. The Cham retaliated forcefully with swords and blades killing a few soldiers, only to be met with military reinforcement from the regime which annihilated the villagers and their properties. The reasons behind the killings was supposedly because some of them were "leading prayers instead of attending a CPK meeting", while the others were purportedly "petitioning for the permission on marriage ceremonies. Events went from bad to worse in mid due to the rebellion, when the ethnic minorities were obliged to pledge loyalty only to the Khmer nationality and religion: there were to be no other identities besides Khmer.

Consequently, the Cham language were not uttered, communal eating where everyone shares the same food became mandatory, forcing Cham Muslims to raise pigs and consume pork against their religious belief. In , these soldiers were dismissed from the Khmer Rouge forces, deprived of their Islamic practices and robbed of their ethnic identity. The patterns were consistent throughout the killings of the Cham people: first, the dismantling of the communal structure through the murder of Cham Muslim leaders, including muftis, imams, and other learned men of influence. Third, the dispersal of the Cham from their communities, either by forced labour in the fields or by arresting them for alleged plots of resistance or rebellion against the CPK.

According to Cham sources, mosques were destroyed during the Khmer Rouge era, many others were desecrated, and Muslims were not allowed to worship. Muslims were forced to eat pork and murdered when they refused. Whole Cham villages were exterminated. Chams were not permitted to speak their language. Cham children were taken away from their parents and raised as Khmers. Accordingly, Cham nationality, language, customs and religious beliefs must be immediately abolished.

Those who fail to obey this order will suffer all the consequences for their acts of opposition to Angkar. After the end of Khmer Rouge rule all religions were restored. Vickery believes that about , Cham lived in Cambodia in the mids and that the number of mosques was about the same then as it was before In early , there were six mosques in the Phnom Penh area and a "good number" in the provinces, but Muslim dignitaries were thinly stretched; only 20 of the previous most prominent Cham clergy in Cambodia survived the Khmer Rouge period. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, who was an ardent Marxist atheist , [] the Khmer Rouge enforced a policy of state atheism.

According to Catherine Wessinger, "Democratic Kampuchea was officially an atheist state, and the persecution of religion by the Khmer Rouge was only matched in severity by the persecution of religion in the communist states of Albania see Religion in communist Albania and North Korea see Freedom of religion in North Korea. It is estimated that up to 50, Buddhist monks were massacred by the Khmer Rouge. In , in order to purge the Eastern Military Zone of those he perceived to have been contaminated by the Vietnamese, Pol Pot ordered military units from the Southwest Zone to move into eastern Kampuchea and eliminate the "hidden traitors". Unable to withstand an attack from the Kampuchea Government, So Phim committed suicide while his deputy Heng Samrin defected to Vietnam.

The series of massacres in the Eastern Zone were the most serious of all of the massacres which took place during the Pol Pot regime's genocide. The Khmer Rouge exploited thousands of desensitized, conscripted children in their early teens to commit mass murder and other atrocities during and after the genocide. The indoctrinated children were taught to follow any order without hesitation. The organization continued to use children extensively until at least , often forcibly recruiting them.

During this period, the children were deployed mainly in unpaid support roles, such as ammunition-carriers, and also as combatants. Many children had fled the Khmer Rouge without a means to feed themselves, and believed that joining the government forces would enable them to survive, although local commanders frequently denied them any pay. The Khmer Rouge regime is also well known for practicing torturous medical experiments on prisoners. People were imprisoned and tortured merely on suspicion of opposing the regime or because other prisoners gave their names under torture. Whole families including women and children ended up in prisons and were tortured because the Khmer Rouge feared that if they did not do this, their intended victims' relatives would seek revenge.

Pol Pot said, "if you want to kill the grass, you also have to kill the roots". There are many accounts of torture in both the S records and the documents of the trial; as told by the survivor Bou Meng in his book written by Huy Vannak , tortures were so atrocious and heinous that the prisoners tried in every way to commit suicide, even using spoons, and their hands were constantly tied behind their back to prevent them from committing suicide or trying to escape.

When it was believed that they could not provide any further useful information, they were blindfolded and sent to the Killing Fields , which were mass graves where prisoners were killed at night with metal tools such as scythes or nails and hammers since bullets were too expensive. Often times, their screams were covered with loudspeakers playing propaganda music of Democratic Kampuchea and noise from generator sets. Inside S, a special treatment was given to babies and children; they were taken away from their mothers and relatives, and sent to the Killing Fields, where they were smashed against the so-called Chankiri Tree. A similar treatment is supposed to have been given to babies of other prisons like S, spread all over Democratic Kampuchea.

S also had a few Westerners who had been captured by the regime. He said that Pol Pot asked him to burn their corpses after death and that "nobody would dare to violate my order". They feared that they would themselves become prisoners if they treated the prisoners well. The previous doctors were killed or sent to the countryside to work as farmers during the Khmer Rouge and the library of the Medical Faculty in Phnom Penh was set on fire.

The regime then employed child medics, who were just teenagers with no or very little training. They did not have any knowledge of Western medicine which had been forbidden since it was considered a capitalist invention , and they had to practice their own medical experiments and make progress by themselves. They did not have Western medicines since Cambodia, according to the Khmer Rouge, had to be self-sufficient and all medical experiments were systematically conducted without anesthetics.

This procedure was repeated many times and carried out without anesthetics. In a hospital of Kampong Cham province , child medics cut out the intestines of a living non-consenting person and joined their ends to study the healing process. The patient died after three days due to the "operation". The operation resulted in the patient's immediate death. Coconut juice injection is often lethal. Ben Kiernan estimates that 1. Heuveline's central estimate is 2. They were given an American defense lawyer, Hope Stevens , [] and were tried in absentia and convicted of genocide. The United States avoided describing Khmer Rouge atrocities as genocide until and refused to approve capturing and holding a trial for Pol Pot until as late as because the U.

There was also speculation that a trial might examine the legality of the U. In , Duch was interviewed by Nic Dunlop and Nate Thayer and admitted his guilt for crimes carried out in Tuol Sleng prison, where up to 17, political prisoners were executed. He expressed sorrow for his actions, stating that he was willing to stand trial and give evidence against his former comrades. During his trial in February and March , Duch admitted that he was responsible for the crimes carried out at Tuol Sleng. On 26 July , he was found guilty on charges of crimes against humanity , torture, and murder and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He has expressed remorse and accepted moral responsibility for his crimes, stating "I would like to sincerely apologize to the public, the victims, the families, and all Cambodian people.

After being located in an opulent Phnom Penh villa, Ieng Sary was arrested on 12 November and indicted for crimes against humanity, as was his wife Ieng Thirith , who had been an unofficial adviser to the regime. Another senior Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan, was arrested on 19 November and charged with crimes against humanity. At a hearing on 23 June , Samphan stated a desire to bow to the memory of his guiltless victims, while also claiming that he suffered for those who fought for their ideal to have a brighter future. During the interview, he stated that he had a clear conscience and denied being responsible for the genocide.

Pol Pot asserted that he "came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. The legislation was passed despite comments by opposition leader Kem Sokha , who is the deputy president of the Cambodian National Rescue Party. Sokha stated that exhibits at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum were fabricated and that the artifacts had been faked by the Vietnamese following their invasion in Sokha's party has claimed that his comments were taken out of context. In December , while Jiang was visiting Cambodia, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China issued a statement that Beijing never supported the wrong policies of Khmer Rouge while it was governing Cambodia and refused to apologize.

China had never interfered in the internal affairs of another country. Our assistance and support during that certain historical period was to support Cambodia's effort to safeguard its sovereignty and national independence. We never support wrong policies of other countries. Even though the Cambodia government never mentioned the issue of Khmer Rouge during Jiang's visit, protesters asked for apology and even restitution from China, and such request still persists.

China has never admitted or apologized for this. As everyone knows, the government of Democratic Kampuchea had a legal seat at the United Nations, and had established broad foreign relations with more than 70 countries. The Rescuers exhibition, which ran from to , recognized individuals who risked their lives to save others. The Cambodian rescuers are paired alongside similar profiles of courage from other world genocides. Similar recognition to rescuers of the Cambodian Genocide by the Australian social harmony group, Courage to Care , which published an educational resource on the subject.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Mass murder of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the s. Part of a series on the. Main article: History of Cambodia. Main article: Khmer Rouge. Main article: Cambodian Civil War. Main article: Cambodia—China relations. See also: Sino-Vietnamese War. Main article: Eastern Zone massacres. Further information: History of children in the military. Main article: Security Prison Main article: Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Main article: Cambodian genocide denial.

Cambodia portal Communism portal. Forced Migration and Mortality. National Academies Press. ISBN As best as can now be estimated, over two million Cambodians died during the s because of the political events of the decade, the vast majority of them during the mere four years of the 'Khmer Rouge' regime. This number of deaths is even more staggering when related to the size of the Cambodian population, then less than eight million.

Subsequent reevaluations of the demographic data situated the death toll for the [civil war] in the order of , or less. Critical Asian Studies. S2CID We may safely conclude, from known pre- and post-genocide population figures and from professional demographic calculations, that the —79 death toll was between 1. European Review of History. Since , the so-called Pol Pot regime has been equated to Hitler and the Nazis. This is why the word 'genocide' associated with Nazism has been used for the first time in a distinctly Communist regime by the invading Vietnamese to distance themselves from a government they had overturned.

This 'revisionism' was expressed in several ways. The Khmer Rouge were said to have killed 3. In fact, there were more than on the same model, at least one per district. For the United States in particular, denouncing the crimes of the Khmer Rouge was not at the top of their agenda in the early s. Instead, as in the case of Afghanistan, it was still at times vital to counter what was perceived as the expansionist policies of the Soviets. So it became vital, with the military and financial help of China, to revive and develop armed resistance to the Vietnamese troops, with the resurrected KR at its core. In so doing, the international community officially reintegrated some of the worst perpetrators of crimes against humanity into the world diplomatic sphere Yale University.

Archived from the original on 17 December Retrieved 26 November Wilson Center. Asian Survey. ISSN JSTOR Radio Free Asia. The New York Times. Yale University Press. Policy Press. Cannibalism, disembowelment and acts of indescribable ferocity took place here. The Princess. She was dispatched with a pike thrust, her still beating heart was ripped from her body and devoured, her legs and arms were severed from her body and shot through cannon.

The horrors that were then perpetrated on her disemboweled torso are indescribable. It has been loosely assumed. Very few victims were, in fact, of the former nobility—less than thirty out of the fifteen hundred who were killed. Each perpetrated the terror to frighten opponents into abject submission and establish himself more firmly in power. Having secured Paris, in Robespierre appointed commissioners to enforce his interpretation of the Revolution outside the capital. A number of the condemned, then, were executed in mass shootings.

Those who were not killed outright by the fire were finished off with sabers, bayonets, and rifles. By the time that the killings. Holes were punched in the sides of. Prisoners were put in with their hands and feet tied and the boats pushed into the center of the river. Estimates of those who perished in this manner vary greatly, but there were certainly no fewer than two thousand. Women were routinely raped, children killed, both mutilated. At Gonnord. Thirty children and two women were buried alive when earth was shoveled onto the pit. Its enemies had to be exterminated without mercy because they stood in the way. As the ideologues saw it, the future of mankind was a high enough stake to justify any deed that served their purpose.

There is no crime, no murder, no massacre that cannot be justified, provided it be committed in the name of an Ideal. The ideal, however, was simply what Robespierre said it was. And the law was what Robespierre and his followers willed it to be. They changed it at will and determined whether its application in a particular case was just. The justification of monstrous actions by appealing to a passionately held ideal, elevated as the standard of reason and morality, is a characteristic feature of political ideologies in power. For the Communists, it was a classless society; for the Nazis, racial purity; for Islamic terrorists, their interpretation of the Koran. The shared feature is that the ideal, according to its true believers, is immune from rational or moral criticism, because it determines what is reasonable and moral.

What is the remedy? To punish the traitors. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man. Thompson in his biography of Robespierre. To any right-minded or merciful man such procedure must seem a travesty of justice. Empowered by this model republican justice, the Revolutionary Tribunal sent to death 1, people in nine weeks, as many as during the preceding 14 months.

R obespierre was born in in the town of Arras. His father was a feckless lawyer; his mother, the daughter of a brewer, died in childbirth when Robespierre was six. A few months after her death, the father deserted his four young children. Robespierre and his brother went to live with their maternal grandparents. At 11, not an unusual age in those days, Robespierre won a scholarship to the University of Paris. After ten years there, he emerged with a law degree, returned to Arras, and started to practice law. In early , he won election to the Convention as a representative of the Third Estate in Arras. Beginning as a fairly radical democrat, he became, as the Revolution unfolded, more and more radical. Robespierre never married. He was not known to have had any love affairs.

Nor did he have any interest in sex, money, food, the arts, nature, or indeed anything but politics. He was about five feet three inches tall, with a slight build, a small head on broad shoulders, and light chestnut hair. Robespierre made no secret of his convictions. He expressed them in several crucial speeches, of which copies, written in his own hand, remain. In his August speech, Robespierre said that France was living through one of the great events in human history.

But a serious obstacle barred the way. France is the theater of this terrible combat. The object of every political association is to safeguard the natural and imprescriptible rights of men. Freedom is the right of every man to exercise all his faculties at will. Its rule is justice, its limits are the rights of others, its source is nature, its guarantee is the law. Any law which violates the imprescriptible rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical. How did Robespierre actually interpret these principles? T he inconsistency between the Declaration, providing the basis of the constitutional guarantee of equal rights for all citizens, and the actual policies that Robespierre dictated and that his followers enforced, was so blatant as to require an explanation.

This Robespierre provided in a speech in December The first befits a time of war between liberty and its enemies; the second suits a time when freedom is victorious, and at peace with the world. But internal enemies threatened the successful completion of this struggle. There was, therefore, no inconsistency between the Declaration and the Terror. The Terror was merely the means to it, forced on the revolutionary regime by enemies who prevented the realization of the constitutional regime. This piece of sophistry was then new, but to those who look back on the twentieth century it is depressingly familiar from the use that many murderous regimes have made of it. They all claimed that their aim was human well-being, but that incorrigibly wicked enemies, who have disguised their true nature and conspired against the noblest of aims, threatened its achievement.

The supposed threat was so serious, and the aim so important, as to warrant extreme, albeit temporary, measures—to identify enemies, unmask their conspiracies, and exterminate them. To a handful of clear-sighted and courageous heroes of the revolution—like the KGB, the SS, and the Red Guard—falls the duty of performing these necessary tasks. They must harden their hearts and do what needs to be done in the interest of the greater good.

A remarkable feature of the ideological frame of mind is that those in its grip actually believe these justifications for disemboweling, lynching, mutilating, burying alive, drowning, and hacking to pieces their unfortunate victims. In fact, the atrocities only strengthen the utter certainty with which ideologues hold their convictions and impose their aim. A n ideology is a worldview that makes sense of prevailing political conditions and suggests ways of improving them.

This last component—commitment to a political program and its implementation—is what distinguishes ideologies from religious, personal, aesthetic, or philosophical systems of belief. Ideologies aim to transform society. Other systems of belief do not involve such a commitment; if they do, they become ideological. In the course of history, many different and incompatible ideologies have held sway, all of them essentially speculative interpretations that go beyond undeniable facts and simple truths.

Resting on fallible hypotheses about matters that transcend the existing state of knowledge, they are especially prone to wishful, self-deceiving, anxious, or self-serving thinking—to unchecked flights of fantasy and imagination. Reasonable people therefore regard ideologies, including their own, with robust skepticism and demand of them conformity to elementary standards of reason: logical consistency, the explanation of indisputable and relevant facts, responsiveness to new evidence and serious criticism, and recognition that the success or failure of policies derived from them counts as confirming or disconfirming evidence.

Put another way, uncorrupted human beings intuitively recognize and act in the general interest. If any individual fails to see that his true interests are the same as the general interest, he must be forced to act as if he did see it, for his own good. But who are those uncorrupted human beings who know what is in the general interest? There does exist a tender, but imperious and irresistible passion. There does exist a generous ambition to found on earth the first republic in the world. You can feel it, at this moment, burning in your hearts; I can feel it in my own. But he did not leave it at that. He regarded it as his duty to coerce the corrupted population to live according to what he in his purity regarded as virtue.

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