In 1984—my sophomore year of high school—the movie The Killing Fields changed my world. Thanks to a brilliant mom, I had been raised in a very pro-Goldwater and pro-Reagan household, and I already wore my conservative libertarianism rather blatantly and, at times, obnoxiously, on my sleeve. Even at age 16, I was a deeply committed anti-Communist. I devoured anti-totalitarian novels, works, and essays by Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Leon Uris, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, and Robert J. Ringer. Even my music tastes reflected my anti-totalitarianism as the rock band Rush had also just released its brilliant anti-dystopian album, Grace Under Pressure. At the time, I was just encountering William F. Buckley, Jr., and his National Review cohort as well as Reason magazine. On top of it all, my hero Ronald Reagan was at the height of his abilities and popularity as he challenged the inhumanity of the Soviet Union.

　　As much as I had read by the fall of 1984, however, nothing prepared me for the visual brilliance and brutality of Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields, a film that surprisingly won three Academy Awards despite its anti-Communist message. It follows the true story of the Cambodian New York Times journalist and photographer, Dith Pran, 1973-1979, and his intensely isolated struggle against the communist overseers, the Khmer Rouge. Indeed, except for its truly wretched ending and a slightly confusing last act, The Killing Fields is pretty much a perfect film. To this day, I always show my Hillsdale College sophomores the twenty-minute segment of the Cambodian gulag to remind them that communism, along with Nazism, was the greatest evil of the twentieth century.

　　The Genocide

　　As far as we know (and historians are still trying to document these things), there was no more intense genocide in the twentieth century than that committed by the Khmer Rouge. Though reported numbers vary, the Khmer Rouge murdered anywhere from 25% to 47% of the seven million-strong Cambodian population in the three years it ruled. As the Khmer Rouge openly stated: “All we need to build our country is a million good revolutionaries. No more than that. And we would rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live.”

　　Officially possessing no prisons, the entire country of Cambodia became a gulag, a death camp, between 1975 and 1979. One Cambodian witness explained: “There was no spare moment in the twenty-four-hour day. Daily life was divided up as follows: twelve hours for physical labor, two hours for eating, three hours for rest and education, and seven hours for sleep. We all lived in an enormous concentration camp. There was no justice. The Angkar [meaning simply “The Organization”; this was the name the Khmer Rouge took for themselves] regulated every moment of our lives.”

　　What Mao tried to accomplish over decades, the Khmer Rouge tried to accomplish in days.

　　As one demographer, R.J. Rummel, put it in his 1994 magnum opus, Death by Government, “These communists turned Cambodia into a gulag of nearly 7 million people, each a prisoner and a slave.” Rummel struggled to find a label for Communist Cambodia’s evil. “The closest I can come to describing the conditions and suffering of the Cambodian people under the Khmer Rouge is ‘hell state.’”

　　Some groups within Cambodia were especially targeted. The Khmer Rouge probably murdered 86% of the Buddhist monks, half of Cambodian Muslims, half of Cambodian Catholics, 89% of the medical doctors, and 75% of the teachers. Anyone who had any pre-revolutionary education, especially in French and English, was systematically murdered, and the Catholics and Muslims were both seen as anti-Khmer.

　　Many of those systematically killed were actually members of the Khmer Rouge, one communist turning on another. Between 1976 and 1977, for example, internal purges were so common that many villages saw leadership change six times during those two years. The regime’s wicked leader, Pol Pot, saw this as a critical part of the Khmer Rouge’s success. “Our greatest achievement,” he said in an interview, “is having defeated all the plots and conspiracies, the sabotage, the attempted coups, and all other acts of aggression carried out by enemies of all types hostile to the regime.” The Khmer Rouge would accuse its own members of being CIA operatives and of being “Vietnamese in Khmer bodies.” In 1978, the party newspaper claimed: “There are enemies everywhere within our ranks, in the center, at headquarters, in the zones, and out in the villages.” As the magisterial conservative Russell Kirk frequently reminded us, revolutionaries have a way of eating their own children.

　　And, the murdering—the creation of The Killing Fields themselves—was not by the Nazi mass method of gas chambers or ovens, but, more often, performed with simple blunt instruments. As the Black Book of Communism reports, around 64 percent of the Khmer Rouge’s victims died from blows to the head, asphyxiation, cut throats, or hanging. The executioners wanted to save bullets and satisfy their “sadistic instincts.” Truly, few things in life could match their brutality.

　　The Khmer Rouge especially hated pregnant women, doing things to them and their fetuses that should not enter our soulful utterances and imaginings at all.

　　The national anthem of the Khmer Rouge, “The Glorious Victory of 17 April,” commemorating the takeover of the capital, Phnom Penh, is especially telling:

　　Bright red blood that covers towns and plains

　　Of Kampuchea, our motherland,

　　Sublime blood of workers and peasants,

　　Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!

　　The blood, changing into unrelenting hatred

　　And resolution struggle

　　On 17 April, under the flag of revolution,

　　Frees us from slavery!

　　Long live, long live, Glorious 17 April,

　　Glorious victory, with greater significance

　　Then the age of Angkor Wat

　　Somewhat surprisingly to westerners, many of the Khmer Rouge’s soldiers were pre-teens and young teens, ranging from age 12 to 15. They had been peasants taken from their parents and taught nothing but brutality by the Khmer Rouge. They even experimented viciously on animals, thus desensitizing them to violence against human beings. When the soldiers moved into Phnom Penh, New York Times reporter, Sydney Schanberg, noted, “Most of the soldiers were teenagers, which is startling. They were universally grim, robot-like, brutal. Weapons drip from them like fruit from trees—grenades, pistols, rifles, rockets.”

　　Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

　　The leader of the Khmer Rouge was the elusive and strange Pol Pot, the revolutionary name of the Cambodian Saloth Sar. Sar had been raised in an upper-middle class landowning family with strong connections to the Cambodian king. Not a particularly good student, he went to France in the 1940s. Though he had once loved the writings of Thomas Jefferson (especially Jefferson’s dislike of urban areas), he became enamored with Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and the French Communist Party’s Marxism while in French.

　　Sar and 19 other Cambodians eventually formed The Khmer Rouge, disaffected political intellectuals radicalized in the aftermath of World War II. Paul Johnson, that great English journalist turned historian, noted that “while this group of ideologues preached the virtues of rural life, none had in fact ever engaged in manual labour or had any experience at all of creating wealth.” For Johnson, the Khmer Rouge’s leaders represented the immense danger of fanatic ideologues in roles of political leadership.

　　In addition to Sartre and Marxists, the Khmer Rouge was inspired by the French Revolution and the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. Adding to their violent frenzy, the Khmer Rouge were also intensely nationalist and racist, believing the lighter-skinned peoples of Indo-China, especially the Vietnamese, to be inferior. Rousseau, Robespierre, Fanon, Sartre, and intense racism proved to be the horrific blend that constituted Khmer Rouge thought. 

　　They also loved Chairman Mao. Indeed, Pol Pot was convinced that he would be to the twenty-first century what Stalin and Mao were to the twentieth century. He believed himself the very manifestation and definition of “revolution.” Pol Pot went so far as to believe that all future Marxist revolutionaries, the world over, would speak Khmer.

　　Founded as a part of the Indo-China Communist Party in 1951, the Cambodian Communists (the Khmer Rouge), more or less, declared their independence in the early 1960s (rewriting history to claim that Cambodian communism originated with them) and warred against the Cambodian kingdom throughout that decade. Eventually, the Cambodian monarchy was overthrown by a military coup—possibly backed by the CIA.

　　The United States became deeply embroiled in Cambodia’s misfortunes. As part of the expanding Vietnam War, the U.S. military dropped nearly 540,000 tons of explosives on the beleaguered country. All this was done without informing the American people—a breach of the law and the Constitution.

　　While one could never logically blame the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge on U.S. intervention in the region, it would be equally a mistake to dismiss what the U.S. did to the region in the years leading up to the Watergate crisis. A country wrecked by internal division became radicalized against the West, driving many who would have otherwise been neutral into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge.

　　The United States ended its mass bombings in 1973 and abandoned its Cambodian embassy on April 12, 1975. The Khmer Rouge conquered Phnom Penh five days later. Schanberg wrote:

　　This surrealism is to come to an end on the morning of April 17, a Thursday, when the new rulers march into the city. The night of April 16 it is clear that the collapse of the capital is only hours away. Enormous fires from the battles that ring the very edge of the city turn the night sky orange. Refugees by the thousands swarm into the heart of the city, bring their oxcarts, their meager belongings, and their frightened bedlam. Deserting Government soldiers are among them. Pran turns to me and says, “It’s finished, it’s finished.”

　　At the moment they entered the city—their ideology claiming that all urban areas were cancers—the Khmer Rouge ordered the immediate evacuation of its population into the countryside. Without mercy, the Khmer Rouge depopulated all urban areas, even forcing hospitals and the critically and mortally wounded to evacuate.

　　What Mao tried to accomplish over decades, the Khmer Rouge tried to accomplish in days.

　　The Movie

　　One of the myriad of persons caught up in the insanity was Dith Pran, a Cambodian journalist and photographer for the New York Times. He had evacuated his family to the United States days before the Khmer Rouge takeover, and he, himself, could have escaped, but instead he and his NYT partner, Schanberg, decided to chance it and hopefully weather the takeover.

　　It turned out to be a horrendous mistake, and Dith Pran, evacuated into the countryside along with all other Cambodians, spent 1975 to 1979, simply trying to survive. Throughout his four years, he had to hide the facts that he worked for the New York Times, that he knew English and French, and that he was educated. Meanwhile, Schanberg, though frantic about his decisions, especially regarding Pran, was back in the United States, reporting from the safety of America.

　　Pran went through hell in his life under the Khmer Rouge. A man of deep Buddhism, only his abiding faith and profound wits allowed him to survive.

　　The best part of The Killing Fields, a twenty-minute scene in the countryside under the Khmer Rouge, reveals nearly everything about communism and its inherent horrors.

　　Throughout this part of the movie, much like a 1940s noir film, Pran narrates his story for Sydney as scenes reveal not only miserable back-breaking labor, but also a communist liturgy, as well as a reeducation camp in which children erase the images of their parents on black boards.

　　Sydney, I think of you often and often of my family. They tell us that God is dead and that the party that they call the “Angkor” will provide everything for us. He says Angkor has identified and proclaims the existence of a bad new disease—a memory sickness—diagnosed as thinking too much about pre-revolutionary Cambodia. He says we are surrounded by enemies. The enemy is inside us. No one can be trusted. We must be like the ox and have no thought except for the party. No love except for the Angkor. People starve but we must not grow food. We must honor the comrade children whose minds are not corrupt by the past.

　　Sydney, Angkor says, that those who were guilty of soft living in the years of the great struggle and did not care for the peasants’ sufferings must confess, because now is the year zero, and everything is to start anew.

　　I’m full of fear, Sydney. I must show no understanding, not of French or English. I must have no past, Sydney. This is the year zero, and nothing has gone before. The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love, Sydney. And, those who confess to the Angkor vanish, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive.

　　In early October, 1979, Pran escaped into Thailand and was soon reunited with Schanberg. The two returned to the United States and continued to work for the New York Times. Pran died in 2008, and Schanberg died in 2016. Both died of natural causes.

　　The actor who plays Dith Pran, Dr. Haing Ngor, had experienced almost the exact same persecution and escape from his native country, while also experiencing the death of his pregnant wife en route to freedom. Ironically, Haing Ngor escaped from Communist Cambodia only to be mugged and murdered in the driveway of his Chinatown-Los Angeles home in 1996. Whether the killings were planned revenge by Khmer Rouge loyalists or by simple street muggers remains unclear to this day.

　　As an anti-war war movie, the visuals and audio of The Killing Fields account for much. Though this was Joffe’s first major film, he captured human relations, as well as the landscape, beautifully. In particular, Joffe captured the sultry colors of humid southeast Asia, while never neglecting the dirt, smoke, and dust of war and the grime, blood, and muck of the country-wide gulag. The 30th anniversary Blu-Ray version reveals the depths, nuances, and layers of Joffe’s artistry in ways that VHS and DVD simply could not. Best of all, though, the Blu-ray includes Joffe’s commentary on the movie. He discusses its strengths as well as its weaknesses (really, only one major flaw—ending the movie with the John Lennon diabolic anthem, “Imagine”). He also reveals the secret to the movie’s long and now timeless success as a work of art: Whatever the backdrop, The Killing Fields is really a movie about two things—the human condition and the essence of love.