The Butcher Of Cambodia

Now we will never know why. Yet who can ever fathom the evil that men do. We stand disbelieving before genocide, when women's throats are slit with sharp palm leaves, when children's heads are smashed against tree trunks, when men are slaughtered with the crack of a hoe. These things happened every day in Cambodia for 3 1/2 terrible years, and when the world learned of it, people could only respond with dumb horror.

All Pol Pot ever said was that he was creating a "pure" communist society and whatever he did was done for his country. "My conscience is clear,"...