Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 by Ben Kiernan
Review by: Douglas Pike
Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 112, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 349-350
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2657976
Accessed: 21-03-2024 00:15 +00:00

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 BOOK REVIEWS | 349

enhanced, Britain's ability to resist a common threat was strengthened, and by besting their
long-standing rival and former colonial master, Americans could don a self-satisfied smile.
But what about the president's torturous avoidance of the law and of Congress by using
an executive agreement, the legality of which depended to a degree on the placement of a
comma? By every calculus and calculation, a declaration of war would not have passed
Congress in summer 1940. A premature public debate would almost certainly have brought
the wrong answer-wrong as far as Roosevelt was concerned, wrong as far as Britain was
concerned, wrong as far as history is concerned.
Opponents of presidential action in foreign policy have always complained that the
White House exceeded its authority. Given the American political system, the alternative
to presidential leadership lies at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue -Capitol Hill. (That
alternative would be elevated during the anti-Vietnam War debates into an accepted truth.)
But arguments that the destroyer-bases deal led inevitably to the Imperial Presidency ignore
the way Congress plays the game. Since sheer practicality places the making of foreign policy
primarily with the executive branch, Congress is able to sit back and play dog-in-the-manger-
carping, criticizing, and playing to the voters. Congress reflects public perceptions far more
accurately and with a crude broadness that goes beyond any opinion poll or pundit. Yet, for
the crucial stages of America's "neutrality," whether before Pearl Harbor or, for that matter,
before the mid-1960s "intervention" in Indochina, Congress felt no overwhelming public
pressure to restrain presidential actions or change U. S. foreign policy.
Shogan quotes the book of Psalms -"Put not your trust in princes." That is always good
advice but begs the question. Where should trust be placed? The Psalmist meant God, but
that too begs the question. In the American democratic republic, the alternatives are Congress
and the courts. No one in Congress introduced legislation to nullify the destroyer-bases deal.
No one filed charges against the president or his cabinet for violating the law. Public opinion -
created and expressed in polls, print, and radio -supported the arrangement, as did the bulk
of White House mail, to Roosevelt's surprise. One hundred seventy-five years earlier, James
Madison had argued that the prince, in this case the president, could be restrained only by
politics - not by law. Perhaps the reason FDR could manipulate the politics and even dissemble
and lie is that the "people" did not disagree. That's how politics works.
A clear indicator of public concern for the nation's security came shortly after the de-
stroyer-bases deal when, on 16 September 1940, Roosevelt signed into law the first peacetime
draft in American history, a law that passed Congress with solid margins.
To picture the destroyer-bases deal as what "changed the role of the American presidency"
is a gross and silly exaggeration. But, that transparent salesmanship aside, this is a solid,
well-researched study of an important episode.

WARREN F. KIMBALL
Rutgers University

The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,
1975-79, by Ben Kiernan. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996. 478 pp. $35. 00.

This work reports on what must surely be the most bizarre political science experiment of
the century. The gruesome events it recounts seem to belong only in a Friday night horror
movie.

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350 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

Ben Kiernan, an Australian academic specialist on Cambodia, researched his book for
two decades. He is now at Yale University as director of the Cambodian Genocide Program,
a quasi-legal investigation, funded largely by the U.S. government, to gather evidence of
the Khmer Rouge crimes against humanity.
His book is in three parts following a brief introductory chapter on the formation and
wartime years of the Khmer Rouge: "Wiping the Slate Clean" contains three chapters on
"cleansing" Cambodia's cities, countryside, and frontiers; "Writing on the Slate" describes
the installation of what is termed an indentured agrarian state; and "The Slate Crumbles" is
four chapters on the convolutions of power holding, foreign policy, and the final destruction
of Khmer Rouge rule by Vietnamese invaders. There are photographs, maps, a select bibliog-
raphy, and a whopping 2,991 footnotes.
The operative question to be answered here is this: What was the nature of the regime
known as the Khmer Rouge which briefly ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s and did its level
best to expunge the existing culture at a cost of the lives of perhaps 20 percent of eight
million persons?
Were government and politics in Phnom Penh simply sheer madness, as seemed to be
the evaluation by foreign ministries, including the U.S. State department? Or were they, as
apologists abroad professed to discern, a rational construct in governance characterized by
a brave new social vision? At this late date, with our increased knowledge, madness vs.
utopianism no longer satisfies. But the question remains. Starkly it stands there: What was
the existential nature of the Khmer Rouge during those five years in power.
Kiernan skirts the question, apparently because he sees his research as an exercise in
racist historical chronology rather than as political science conceptualization. He seems chiefly
interested in savaging Pol Pot's political science experiment-and well it deserves-not in
seeking to explain it. He answers the question what and how? But not why? It is the book's
chief weakness.
To the first explanation-ideological madness-we have since added an apologist ad-
dendum, namely that the Khmer Rouge were driven to madness by U.S. B-52 bombing. The
second thesis -it was a utopian dream -continues to be espoused by some: eliminate modern
Cambodia and return it to the glory days of Angkor. A third major thesis now exists, what
might be called the nominal explanation. It argues that what prevailed in Cambodia during
those years was anarchy-using the simple dictionary definition-absence of government.
The place was run, if that be the word, by teenage barbarians with AK-47 rifles. There is
evidence in the Kiernan work to support all three explanations, but not enough to convince
us of any one. Kiernan suggests that the Khmer Rouge were driven by ideological impulses
which might be Marxist or fascist or of some indigenous totalitarian meaning, and by racism
(which may explain killing minorities but not Cambodians).
Perhaps to delineate and analyze the existential nature of the Khmer Rouge is an academic
Mission Impossible. As with the other major unbelievable acts of inhumanity -Hitler and
six million Jews; Stalin and ten million kulaks; Mao and fifteen million landlords -we can
search but we will never find an answer to the question, Why? The best we can do is to
treat these as cautionary warnings. They, and Cambodia under Pol Pot, are a rebuke to all
of us in this century for allowing collectivist politics to corrupt us into indifference to man's
inhumanity to man and for accepting the notion there need be no fixed limit to political action
so long as it is pursued in the name of social perfection.

DOUGLAS PIKE
University of California, Berkeley

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