p The Maoists’ aims are being implemented by the Pol Pot authorities in all spheres. Like during the Chinese “cultural revolution”, the policy being pursued in Kampuchea today is one of the cruellest oppression of intellectuals, the education system is being eliminated and the ancient culture of the country destroyed.

p It is hard even to imagine the enormous power wielded by the Kampuchean rulers with the help of total terror and absolute dictatorship.

p Their “achievement” of totally erasing and destroying the old social system of the country, its economy, culture, and customs, of uprooting any intimation of free thought, of independent thinking and all in less than two years, is truly unprecedented. Books and archives were burned. Pagodas, statues of Buddha and museums were all destroyed and trampled under foot. With the cold-bloodedness of a surgeon, the authorities are trying to erase all traces and all memory of the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. Even the famous ancient temples were razed to the ground to remove any recollection of the past.

p “Soon after the new authorities took hold of the capital,” one refugee, a former student from Pnom Penh, recounts, “students and teachers, and my friends began to disappear. I realised they had decided to exterminate all intellectuals, all educated people. At that time I was working in the countryside and pretended to be an illiterate peasant, for they had decided that all those ’infected’ by culture were to be killed.”

From the American magazine National Review