Pol Pot's Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar

Locard provides a valuable, if flawed, service here for students of the Khmer Rouge, with his presentation of the slogans of "Angkar". This is not a scholarly book by any means, and his contextualization of Democratic Kampuchea is extremely shallow. Having read Philip Short's excellent biography of Pol Pot immediately prior to this book, I find Locard's writing to be near tabloid-calibre by comparison. He is certainly not hesitant to editorialize and promote his own rightist political views and ideologically biased interpretations of late-20th century Cambodian history. With a high school level of sophistication and an incessant stream of sometimes almost histrionic denunciations (frequently emphasized with the use of exclamation points), he spends a great deal of the book ridiculing (what he thinks is) Marxism in general, lumping the backwards-looking and organizationally psychotic Khmer Rouge with "all Communist and tyrannical regimes" everywhere, and bascially implying that any movement or group calling itself Marxist, including reform socialists, is basically a Khmer Rouge just waiting to happen, if ever given the chance. Poppycock! On the other hand, the translated slogans give the reader a unique and and often disturbing view into many aspects of life in Democratic Kampuchea -- I, for one, always wondered what they were saying in those black-and-white films from the Khmer Rouge years where everyone is standing, fists clenched in the air, yelling revolutionary slogans. Now, it seems, we know.I give this book an "A" for the material directly related to the translation of the slogans, and a "D-" for interpretation and contextualization, thus two-and-a-half stars.

This book is a valuable resource in that it compiles the many Orwellian slogans of Angkar and the Khmer Rouge. However, it should not be used as anything more than a supplementary source of knowledge. Henri Locard's writing is completely lacking in subtlety, and he has no qualms about making judgments and assumptions without much at all in the way of supporting evidence. He uses Khmer Rouge ideology as a means to attack Maoism and Marxism in general, when most would agree that Khmer Rouge communism is, at best, a bastardization of communism. Others would argue that Pol Pot's totalitarianism was not communism at all - and they have a legitimate argument. But Locard is hearing none of it as he saturates his pages with personal opinion and unnecessarily flowery, pretentious prose. If you want to learn about the history of the Khmer Rouge, then read Chandler, Vickery, or Kiernan; these three are each very good. If you already have some understanding of the history of the Khmer Rouge, but you want to learn specifically about the sayings of Angkar, then this book is a solid resource. Just be sure to ignore the annotation. I'm honestly surprised David Chandler was willing to write the foreword.

Fascinating look into the rape of a culture through manipulation of the language by ruthless, CIA-funded Marxists as they impose their communist nightmare on the ancient Cambodian people. Locard shows us that, despite the Orwellian horror the Cambodians endured at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, their spirit of resistance endured.

Interesting, but lots of repetitive narration

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that this book is outstanding. The bad news is that it is NOT for everyone. From my perspective as a former Khmer linguist with the US Military I remember the beginning of the Pol Pot era, the "strange" messages we began to intercept from the mysterious and scarry "ankar," and most of all, I remember following the genocide in the news during the '70's and wondering "how could this happen in such a gentle society as Theravada Buddhist Cambodia?"This book, which lists hundreds of Khmer sayings during the Pol Pot era in both English and in Khmer, is like an injection of ice-water. I read and shivered. There are several editorial mistakes but remember that the original was written in French and translated into English with the Khmer equivalent also provided. The book took me back 30 years. I believe this book will prove to be a valuable source far into the future despite its niche appeal.

I am currently working with a Cambodian to write his memoirs as a young teenager under the Khmer Rouge regime. He was twelve when he and his family were evacuated from Battambang City, and sixteen when the Khmer Rouge were finally defeated. His experiences differ from most of the other personal accounts coming out of this war as he spent most of this time in traveling workgroups, about half of which were in the jungle. He remembers many of the sayings in Pol Pot's Little Red Book. This book is a valuable resource when used with other scholarly studies of that time.

This book has to be seen, to be believed. It's extraordinary. Anyonesceptical of the paranoia, propaganda, winner-takes-all, ends-justifying-the-mean psychology behind the Leader of State in Cambodia, Pol Pot, merely has to read this book.There's an index, at the beginning, of various topics.Each quote has an explanation, the original language and alphabetical letters of the local language. Therefore, the context is given, as wellas a translation into English.At 336 pages, it's more than generous. It's comprehensive, as comparedto Mao Tse Tung's own Little Red Book, which is 30% of the size of thisone, although with as many pages, roughly.The power of slogans, the effectiveness of soundbites for bull hornand graffiti repetition is clearn, with this book.A must have.

Interesting, but certainly neither scholarly/academic nor unbiased - and I don't mean regarding the Communist Party of Kampuchea (a.k.a Khmer Rouge) -which is to be expected- but regarding communism. This is not actually a collection of "sayings of the Angkar" as such, but rather a collection of what the author collected second hand from people who lived through that period which, while in itself of interest given the dearth of first-hand Khmer Rouge publications, is not exactly the same thing. This is why the title in itself is misleading, inasmuch as "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung" (better known as "The Little Red Book") is actually a compilation of extracts from texts actually produced by Mao and officially endorsed as such.But that all pales into insignificance when compared with the huge doses of self-righteous anti-communist diatribe liberally sprinkled throughout the pages, which are worth a commentary in their own right.Makes you wonder what the books says more about: the Khmer Rouge or the author an his constant need to appeal to the atrocities of this regime to lash out at what he believes Communism to be.Here are a few choice examples (please feel free to find more of your own).Page 5: "they tried to plant the parasitic plant of Maoism on Cambodian soil" (Had they `planted the capitalist plant", as in modern-day Cambodia, no doubt that would not have been at all "parasitic")...Page 13: "It is important to remember that mass killings in all Communist regimes mainly have social and ideological causes, not racial, and thus have to be distinguished from Nazism" (All communist regimes? Also a grossly over-simplified definition of Nazism as merely racist mass murder)Page 21: "The twice-failed recycles Maoist formulae" (if you say so... Terrible bloke, that Mao. They were obviously so much better off with the bound feet and serfdom in Imperial China)Pages 180-181: "They killed for ideological motives [...] as was generally true in Communist countries"Page 260: "Note that in all Communist regimes the strategy of the one-party state is to collectivize not only society and the economy [... ] so that every political force, every individual is at one with their leader" (Makes you wonder where he got his information from - probably from reading the novel 1984, which, if I'm not mistaken, he quotes as a source at one point...)Pages 260-261: "Contrary to democratic societies that believe in differences, disagreements and a balance of power that checks one another, the Communist regimes tend to become totalitarian states [etc.] (Wasn't the USA a democracy then when they went hunting for reds and persecuting them? Dearie me, this all sounds soooo one-sided and biased).

Essential reading before voting for any kind of Marxist! Pol Pot was a pure bred red. Barking mad ideological terror exposing the double think and double speak used by the ideologically brainwashed believers. ISIS must have used this as a source for their insanities!