This is Jockel podcast number 348 with echo Charles and me jockel willing good evening echo good evening

We are turning our society upside down one premiere rouge officer told a newsweek reporter in the weeks after the revolution

The people of Panam pen will grow rice. He said and

Almost as an afterthought added they will work or starve

By early May 1975 their premiere rouge were implementing one of the most radical political plans of the 20th century a

peasant revolution with a punitive edge Buddhist monks were made to plow fields

Pagotas were turned into killing centers. Cham Muslims a religious minority were forced fed pork

Cambodia's national library was converted into a pigstie

In Paul Potts Democratic, Camp Ruchia books were used to start fires

It was more about revenge recalled one Cambodian

All private property even money was abolished in this ultra great leap forward

The early accounts of life under the premiere rouge came from Cambodian refugees who escaped to Thailand

At first they sounded too bizarre to be true as if George Orwell had written them to

Saturize life under a dictatorship of the proletariat a place where parents feared their children and civilians were slaughtered in numbers and for reasons

Unimagin since Stalin's purges or Hitler's third Reich

Survivors described a system of slave labor

Commune's where men, women and children toiled like human water buffalo under the watchful eye of the mysterious and all powerful

Leadership cabal known only as angar

They lived in perpetual fear

The CIA held little hope for America's former allies and

Educated Cambodians quote executions are reported widespread and in many cases members of the entire

Family of former government officials or soldiers are executed along with the heads of the family

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