Pol Pot: Anatomy Of A Nightmare (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Dont Buy Philip Shorts Books Read why and what you are funding.>>>Philip Short has writen Books mostly upon reading other peoples books likeDavid Chandler. Philip short takes several books sorts them out, gatherspictures. Philip makes his own theory about culture. I see many men and womenchallange him in colleges. Although Philip Short has the right idea's becausehow could he not, he read the books of David Chandler. Mr Short makes falseclaims. No one can back up his storys. Philip Short picks a time in history thatis hard to chalange. Don't Take philips words to the bank. Where are the recoredinterviews of his claims?> > >> > > Most of the time philip is chalanged he resorts to "one could onlythink it to be" He says amazing thing about others.> > >> > > Philip Short says he was fasinated that Pol Pot was allowed inwomens quarters at age 15 and was fondled.> > >> > > Philip Short says if a cambona man was not 5'4" high he was killed.I never heard of such crap. If I was building a army of men to fight for me asPol Pot was doing. How could this be possible. Philip Short to me is a fake. Toput together a book on other books he read and come up with his own conclusions.A former BBC Philip Short. He stumbled on history that has be covered up by itscountry. Very difficult to find out facts. I have yet to see any proof thatPhilip Short interviewed anyone. Philip has collected pictures tells the story,and includes his own idea's which could be made up. Not facts of people'sinterview.> > >> > > All in all Philip Short is good lier and places himself into thisbook. "Mao The Life" I see him studder when he is really pressed to his answer.I thank C-Span for the insight of his interview.> > >> > > Philip Short was in Asian country's for other reasons than Mao.Reason's that soon will be reveal of the true life of Philip Short. He happenedto have a little knowledege from reading books of David Chandler, and otherrespectable people. Philip did gain pictures and interviews. All giving to himby women. Philip Short actully was in cambona after his retirement to takeadvatage of poor asian women. While on his adventures he collects the thought ofwomen and their Memorabilia. He still doing this Today as of April 9, 2011.> > >> > > Philip did attened college no doubt. Philip is good in english, andexpresses himself well. He earn a good living most of his carrer as a BBC.Philip is a excellect speaker, and can speak his way out of anything. Philip hasa weakness. It is the attraction to asian women.> > >> > Philip Short being a Former BBC correspondent has givin him the opertunity.speaking for free to colleges and in interviews in C-Span hoping to promote hisbooks. He looks like a respectable person, but in fact he is not. Philip'sVideo's on the internet gives him the exposure of a rich man. When in fact he isnot. Philip is now using this as a way to lurer women.> >> Philip Short is by far not a rich man.>> That there is a steady migration of journalists and producers from commercialradio to the BBC may not come as a surprise to some. What does raise an eyebrow,even amongst those working in the industry, is the marked lack of parity insalaries. Saul earned £13,000 a year when he left Rock FM in 2001 to join alocal BBC station in Yorkshire, where his salary jumped to £22,000. With theagreement of his manager, Saul continued to freelance at Rock FM until 2005,working eight hours in the newsroom every Sunday, for just £50 a shift.>Philip Short is not a rich man. What Women see in internet makes you think he isrich. Free public speeches. Free College Speakings. Those free speaches are topromote his book, which most people are not even interested in. Philip had tofund some of the books cost, as has not recoved the expenses of the books yet. Iam big on the internet too, but I dont boost about it. The fact that PhilipShort gives free lextures on C-Span and in colleges give great exposer. C-Spanhas a great host on the web, which means Anything pertaining to C-Span or otherBroadcasters has high rank in searches on the internet. Its still dosen't makehim rich. A women who traded Her loved one for this Philip would a huge mistake.Philip has no more money than a ordinary man. Women are so fooled by men like ishis demeanor.In one interview Philip Short says: Mr. SHORT: The fourth wife, Chiang Ch'ing, he started living with ..... year atIowa, which I found very rewarding, and then moved to France. ...www.booknotes.org/Watch/155775-1/Phil...It was rewarding because he used her to translate a language, SO he could write a book. Once he published the book he abandon his wife and son. Titles: Mao, Pol Pot: The History of a NightmareCategory: Non-FictionAgent: Veronique BaxterFilm Agent: Nicky LundPhilip Short was born in Bristol in 1945 and was educated at CambridgeUniversity.He became a journalist and worked for the BBC for 25 years as a foreigncorrespondent, contemplating the lunacies of politics in many different culturesfrom Sihanouk to Brezhnev and Clinton to Deng Xiaoping.In 1997 he finished his final stint as BBC Washington correspondent and spent ayear teaching journalism at the University of Iowa. He lives in Provence withhis wife and son.Now Philip Short has found a new Woman Ethel Daguyo. I guess he intenteds to write a book in philippines, and needs her to translate so he can conduct interviews. Mr Short will get her pregnate and after he publish his book Ethel will be the 5 wife he took advatage of. Mr Short Funded Ethel money for sex in webcam. The funds were made through Western Union which Mr. Short cannot denie, Transaction #. Mr Short also has archives that can be furnished of his Chat to Ethel in her webcam. He saw her for 3 weeks and HE went out of his mind. He flew to philippines and took advatage of her for 2 months. Taking her to hotels visiting all the island. I have the interary of their trip. Search Googel Ethel Daguyo and see what he saw in webcam. Than you will see what kind of man is Philip Short. Dont buy his books and help him fund these terrible acts agaist women.
Philip Short refers to his book on Mao in his preface to "Pol Pot:Anatomy to a Massacre" and, while acknowledging Mao's extraordinary beastliness (the man was probably responsible for over 50 million deaths) he highlights Mao's pretentions to greatness not unlike Napoleon's or Alexander's. That is not the case with Pol Pot. He did not fight an honorable war against a brutal invader, like Mao did with the Japanese. Instead, he led to his Cambodia's occupation by the hated Vietnamese, who had been his paymasters for a long time. Pol Pot did not succeed in brutally modernizing his country's industry, like Stalin in the Soviet Union or Mao in China. Instead, he pulled it right back into the stone age. Like his worst predecessors in genocide, he never learned from his mistakes. Instead, he kept his habit of ordering executions, a habit which eventually led to his imprisonment by his surviving henchmen (who feared for their lives) and some sort of trial. And his corpse was not preserved like Mao's or Lenin's. Instead, it was burnt with old tires and mattresses.Short's book would have been very short (and uninteresting) indeed if he had confined himself to Pol Pot. Instead, he wrote a veritable tableau of Cambodian history from WWII to our days. 1950s Cambodia comes across as a Ruritarian kingdom ruled by the beguiling Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk is one of history's true survivors (the man is still around!). One would need to look to Mitterrand or Fidel Castro for equivalent types who were able to survive and even thrive in impossible conditions, turning their alliances as they saw fit with no sense of shame. Sihanouk is in a fact a much more attractive character than Pol Pot, who is opaque, a mere cypher in some ways.Saloth Sar, who would later become Pol Pot, came from what might be regarded as the upper middle class (his sister was a concubine to a Cambodian king- not Norodom), although his family wasn't rich. He was a mediocre student, and in many ways he would be a mediocrity all his life. His strength was his inscrutability. He kept a constant Buddha-like smile, and he never lifted his voice even when ordering the execution of close associates. The Cambodian Communist Party (later known as the Khmer Rouges) was fostered by Vietnamese logistical support, although Pol Pot's career was a long attempt to break free of the control of this "fraternal" party. The Communists' goals were fostered by the incompetent intervention of greater powers, some colonial, like France, some regional like Thailand and Vietnam, some global, like the US, the Soviet Union and China. Virtually all of them (most without realizing it) did their utmost to help Pol Pot reach power and wreck Cambodia. Particularly obtuse was American intervention in helping strongman Lon Nol in overthrowing Sihanouk. This threw the mercurial Sihanouk into Chinese hands and then turned him into Pol Pot's associate, helping to legitimize Khmer Rouge presence among royalist and superstitious peasants.Short writes that Pol Pot's brutality was purely Cambodian (which should be annoying to all armchair Buddhists in the US and Europe) and that his actions were not caused in any meaningful way by the American intervention. Be that as it may, it is hard to image Cambodia falling to Pol Pot's disorganized hordes if Sihanouk had remained in power. Short also writes that the Khmer's millennial dictatorship, which was much more extreme than anything seem previously, except perhaps the Paris commune in 1870-1871 or Münster under Jan van Leiden in 1535, was also quite chaotic. Brutality was entirely random and without reason or rhyme. For all Pol Pot's paranoia and total disregard for human niceties, he was unable to turn the Khmer Rouge into a unified iron-clad party, like Stalin did with the Soviets. Even after his brutal purges, the party presence was highly regional. Also, the Khmer's racial policies against the Cham (muslim Cambodians) and the Vietnamese were worthy of Milosevic or Saddam Hussein. Pol Pot truly married the worst in both communist and nazi rules.Pol Pot's life was unmarred by honor or greatness. Short brings to life the extraordinary circumstances that allowed this ordinary man to unleash the hounds of hell among his countrymen. I only regret that he wasn't tried like a war criminal and hanged from the tallest steeple in Angkor Vat. And some of his associates (like Hun Sen) are still in power.
What do You think about Pol Pot: Anatomy Of A Nightmare (2006)?
Whenever a new friend is perusing my bookshelves, I always find myself mentally cringing when they reach a certain point awaiting the persistent judgment-laced query: "why do you have so many biographies on dictators and mass murderers?" It's a hard question to answer, if only because it means I have to unpack nearly a decade's worth of my own jumbled thoughts on idealism, social upheaval, human fallibility, and the inevitability of revolution; a task which often leaves the questioner glassy-eyed and drooling as their thoughts turn toward more comfortable musings. That's no fault of the listener though, but more a reflection of my own imprecise grasp of my own ideas. I don't have a fully formed ideology of any sort, but rather a hodgepodge of ideas that I weave together and take apart with the tenacity of an obsessive-compulsive arachnid. This rejection of dogma is, I think, rooted in the lessons learned from the chronicles on my Shelf of Tyranny- our history is chock full of recent examples illustrating the power of an idea to cause much upheaval and while I make ample time to read of success stories (my Shelf of Liberation is directly above my Shelf of Tyranny) I feel that there are more lessons to be learned through the failures. In the case of the Cambodian revolution and the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge, there are learning opportunities by the score.Chronicling the rise of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) through, first, the struggle to end French colonialism, then to overthrow the monarchy of Prince Sihanouk, and finally to oust the military junta that took control following Sihanouk's abdication, author Philip Short places the revolution firmly in the context of a national history of struggle against outside invaders and the historic distrust for its Vietnamese and Thai neighbors. Likewise, he traces the evolution of the CPK's ideology back to its historical root in the French Revolution, by illustrating the commonalities between those two bloody epochs- the lack of an industrial class of workers made organizing the proletariat impossible so most of the organizing work was shifted onto the illiterate peasants in the countryside who were taught that they did not need to know the particulars of communism but merely needed to adopt the revolutionary struggle into their hearts, entrenching ignorance into the party platform, the struggle was primarily against the monarchy and the corrupt advisers and hangers-on who had found ways to enrich themselves at the expense of the peasantry. Most interesting to me, though, is Short's analysis on how Therevada Buddhism and its emphasis on the abnegation of personal desire and the self created the environment that would allow hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, mainly those forced to evacuate Phnom Penh after its capture by the CPK, to starve to death as they were forced into the countryside to work in the rice paddies as penance for their privileged lives under the old regime. Put together from dozens of interviews with surviving CPK members, unprecedented access to historical archives, and news sources of the day, Short also does an amazing job at illustrating Cambodia's delicate position as a pawn between the Sino-Soviet struggle to control the Communist International, as well the love-hate relationship with its communist neighbor, Vietnam, a mercurial relationship that could flare into shootings and cross-border raids even as the two countries were working together to throw out American forces. All in all, this was a highly worthwhile read that served to broaden my understanding of modern Cambodian history. If Short gives short shrift to examples of the genocide, it is only because most books on the era already focus primarily on the atrocities and not the events that made such atrocities inevitable. For those who seek information on the genocide, the amazing 1984 film The Killing Fields has already said all that needs to be said on the subject, and if the enigmatic Pol Pot never steps from the shadows to be analyzed as thoroughly as I had hoped, Short makes clear that this is due to Pol's obsession with secrecy and his desire to never be the face of the party, just the man pulling the strings from behind the curtain. There are tantalizing bits of biography that enter the text, such as the schizophrenia that plagued his wife, but throughout the book the Pol we are treated to is devoid of personality and is shown to be a leader with one goal in mind- revolution at all costs- a singular focus that would allow much to be done in its name.
—Chloe
This book it isn't a Pol Pot biography. Its scope is the communist revolution in Cambodia from its origins to final throes-and it encompasses all players on the domestic and international stages. It is a political history. It is a detailed chronology, with some analysis, and not much pathos. The author writes in a level-headed, impartial manner, often putting the Cambodian tragedy into perspective by comparison to other revolutions. It is unexpectedly dull, zoomed-out reading for the topic. However, it answered my big questions and gave me more to think about. I wasn't expecting to enjoy a book about this subject in any case.I understand the politics- but am still left with questions about human nature, sociology, psychology and Cambodia itself. (And these were more the questions I hoped to have addresses in a Pol Pot biography- which this apparently is not.) I am still very confused about modern Cambodia. I was shocked to read words that I had heard from Cambodians just a few months ago- accusations that a person has a "Vietnamese head, Khmer body" were the same as those used by Khmer Rogue to justify purges. I was shocked also to learn that Cambodians didn't know that the regime was communist until long after its take over. How is this possible? Crazy.I picked up this book after a trip to Cambodia. I wanted to understand how the genocide could have happened. This book helped me to understand what made the Communist organization and revolution unique, especially compared to China and Vietnam's. It helped me understand the conditions that the organization was formed in, every step of the way, and how the ideals of the Khmer Rogue leadership were formed, and how they attempted to enact their vision on Cambodia- and why it went to drastically wrong, yet in many ways also according to plan. It also firmly disagrees with the use of the word "genocide" to describe the deaths under the Khmer Rogue.I almost gave up on it about 15% of the way in. Early 1950's Cambodian communism is really dull reading. There is a lot of information about various Cambodian and Khmer Rogue leaders, and its difficult to keep track of who is who and why they matter among the communists and the right wing government. Cambodian names are difficult for Westerners unused to them, and who have little frame of reference. But writing a large foreign cast well isn't impossible if the author takes the effort to show that these people are more than just names, comma, their position in the government/communist party. Anecdotes, personal quirks, foreshadowing later importance all would have been helpful to turn names into people. The author's focus is not really on biography, there is far far more information and insight into Prince Sihanouk than there is into Pol Pot, for example. There is also detailed discussion of various student meetings, then communist party reorganizations and political recitations on the evolving web of Vietnamese, Chinese and American foreign policies. All of which are very dull reading and told in a very matter-of-fact manner. Like reading a timeline. Its pacing is unfortunate, because you know horrible things are happening, and reading hints about them makes your heart race...The contrast of small doses of horror with large swathes of dry political history is not easy reading.The words that have the most impact are quotations. Those excerpts show the horror and mindset of the Khmer Rogue and the people in Cambodia at that time.
—Jedi Kitty
I should probably stop reading books as informative and depressing as this one. I had started this biography of Pol Pot about a month ago and it has been my bedside companion since then, to be read about 10 pages at a time if I wake up at night & have trouble falling back to sleep quickly. When I was about 2/3 of the way through it, I read Samantha Power's book (A Problem From Hell: American And The Age Of Genocide) on my Kindle, one chapter of which addressed the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. That spurred me to finish this biography much more quickly than I otherwise would have.Philip Short has thoroughly researched the life and rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge cohorts. Pol's approach to power -- and the millions of deaths that resulted -- is an abject lesson in how pure ideology trumps human life at every turn. The "purity" of the communism to which Pol and the Khmer Rouge aspired is ultimately why 20% of the population of Cambodia died during his reign as supreme leader. Unfortunately, Pol had the assistance of China and the US in causing that massive loss of life. Under the precept that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the United States was still reeling from its losses in Vietnam, and the enmity between Vietnam and Cambodia made Pol Pot our friend. Since the US also befriended Saddam Hussein, funded the mujahadin in Afghanistan, and aided Manuel Noriega (among others) at various times, Pol Pot was not such a strange bedfellow for America. It finally took Vietnam's army overrunning Cambodia, and producing photographs and leading tours of the "killing fields" in Cambodia (images closely resembling those from the Holocaust) for the US to wake up and assert moral high ground. By then it was too late.Perhaps most disheartening is that Cambodia is still ruled today by leaders who were high ranking Khmer Rouge officials, and that virtually no one has been punished for the genocide that took place there.
—Sheri
