Leaving Year Zero: Stories of Surviving Pol Pot's Cambodia. "Return to Year Zero: The Cambodian Genocide". ^ a b c "Khmer Rouge: Cambodia's years of brutality"."Cambodian Khmer Rouge's chief ideologist, 'Brother Number Two', dead at 93". " John Gfroerer: Moving to Year Zero." Concord Monitor. "KHMER ROUGE YEAR ZERO: THE EMPTYING OF PHNOM PENH | Facts and Details". ^ "Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia".Crimes against humanity under Communist regimes.Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979 documentary film).
Year one french revolutionary calendar series#
The Khmer Rouge's takeover was rapidly followed by a series of drastic revolutionary de-industrialization policies which resulted in a death toll that vastly exceeded the toll that resulted from the French Reign of Terror. So-called New People-members of the old governments and intellectuals in general, including lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy, and qualified professionals in all fields-were thought to be a threat to the new regime and were therefore especially singled out and executed during the purges accompanying Year Zero. Centuries of Cambodian culture and institutions were thereby eliminated-shutting down factories, hospitals, schools, and universities-along with anyone who expressed interest in their preservation. ) In Democratic Kampuchea, the only acceptable lifestyle was that of peasant agricultural workers. (Wearing glasses was also criminalized as it was taken to indicate that one might habitually read books. To ensure that there was no recorded memory of a pre-Year Zero society, books were burned. Knowledge of anything pre-Year Zero was prohibited. Similar evacuations occurred at Batdambang, Kampong Cham, Siem Reap, Kampong Thom, among others. The people of Phnom Penh, in particular, were forced immediately to "return to the villages" to work. To build the new Cambodian society, the inhabitants of the depopulated cities were sent to labour camps. He isolated his people from the global community established rural collectives dismantled the social fabric and infrastructure of Cambodia and set about the emptying of cities, as well as the abolition of money (thus also destroying banks), private property, families, and of religion. In other words, this was to be a complete and thorough reset (or even cleansing) of Cambodian society. He declared that the nation would start again at "Year Zero," and everything that existed before Year Zero was to be eradicated. Hoping to transform the nation into an agrarian utopia, communist leader Pol Pot set out to reconstruct the country into a pre-industrial, classless society by attempting to turn all citizens into rural agricultural workers rather than educated city dwellers, whom Pot and his regime believed to have been corrupted by western, capitalist ideas. Upon seizing power, Year Zero was decreed. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge forces took over Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia (subsequently renamed Democratic Kampuchea, 1975-79). All of the history of a nation or people before Year Zero would be largely deemed irrelevant, because it would ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up. The idea behind Year Zero was that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded, and a new revolutionary culture must replace it, starting from scratch. The French "Year One" came about during the French Revolution when, after the abolition of the French monarchy on 20 September 1792, the National Convention instituted a new calendar and declared that date to be the beginning of Year I. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, most of whom were French-educated communists, took inspiration from the concept of " Year One" in the French Revolutionary Calendar.