The Duality of Humanity: Pol Pot as a Lens for Understanding Evil

I’ve been trying to write this answer for about five years. I have a lot of thoughts on it but they’re hard to organise. I was reading a book recently that brought them back to me despite the book having nothing to do with Pol Pot or Cambodia.

The book I was reading is called Salt to the Sea by Lithuanian-American author Ruta Sepetys, and it follows the journey of three teenage refugees – one Prussian, one Lithuanian, one Polish but pretending to be Latvian – and one teenage Nazi as they flee Prussia and Stalin's army for what they hope will be the protection of Nazi Germany. They board the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, which is then sunk by Russian missiles, with around 9,400 lives lost.

This is an intriguing book, doubly so because it was recommended to me by my 13-year-old neighbour. The teenagers in it are ostensibly on different sides. Florian is a Prussian who hates Hitler but hopes to find refuge in Germany. Emilia, a Pole almost as reviled by the Nazis as Jews, has been gang raped and is pregnant by Russian soldiers and finds herself travelling with Florian and using the identity of a dead Latvian woman after she saves his life. Joana is a Lithuanian nurse with permission to come to Germany and become Germanified but seems to have very little patience for either Hitler or Stalin and wants to help treat the wounded from either side.

For the most part, they are fleeing the Russians and hoping Nazi Germany will give them refuge. Yet the book is very definitely not pro-Nazi or pro-Hitler. Of the three, two of them end up in America in the epilogue.

I was startled and a little uncomfortable when I started reading it because I had actually forgotten that for a time Stalin was our ally. Nobody behaves well in wartime. No country, anyway. The question of whether some wars need to be fought is a separate one; I personally believe sometimes they do, but it’s almost beyond question that war shows a lot of us at our cruellest. Germany, Russia, Japan, the UK, and the US all behaved abominably during WWII.

In British and American schools, we’re taught – or were taught in my day and I have little hope that it’s changed – that Britain and America were the shining beacons of honour who saved the world from the evil Nazis and never put a foot wrong. But I could never quite buy into that. Perhaps because one of my childhood best friends was from Nagasaki.

I am not suggesting that everyone behaved as badly as each other or that there were no villains and no heroes. Simply that few, if any, people come out of a war with clean hands.

I asked my Japanese friend’s grandfather once why he thought WWII happened, and he just shook his head. He was there, and yet it was beyond comprehension to him, though he said it seemed to make sense at the time. I asked if he resented America for the bombs. He did not. Tojo was mad, he said, and the madness seemed to rapidly spread, infecting everyone. Looking back, it had to be stopped. The bombs were inevitable.

I am not sure that I could have been so calm were it my hometown. And yet, it did stop. The two bombs that were dropped on Japan took perhaps as many as a quarter-million lives – even now, numbers are impossible to estimate – and stopped a war that killed an estimated 70–85 million.

It’s hard not to be horrified by man’s inhumanity to man. Even when we do our best as individuals to treat others kindly, as groups, none of us are clean.

I read another interesting book recently. Caroline B. Cooney’s The Ransom of Mercy Carter published in the UK simply as Mercy. This is a work of fiction based on a real event: the kidnapping of 120-odd English settlers, mostly women and children, from Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704 by Kahnawake Indians and French soldiers. 80-some people survived a 300-mile march north in the dead of winter, and many were later ransomed back to the US in exchange for French prisoners, but several dozen, all children, refused ransom, having come to accept their new Indian or French families. They almost all lost family: parents, siblings, cousins, some of whom were murdered in front of them. Yet they came to love their captors and they stayed.

This is a fascinating book. Brutal, painful, but fascinating. We hear much these days about the atrocities that white men committed against Indians, but rarely hear stories of the reverse unless they’re some kind of pro-white propaganda. Cooney has long been one of my favourite authors in large part because of her ability to write about morally ambiguous situations with little to no judgement, though she usually writes YA horror. Her author’s voice is at once both incredibly empathetic towards people and their pain and incredibly detached, and I have never quite been able to figure out whether her approach to humanity simply mirrors my own or whether it actively shaped my own. Regardless, her ability to write about horrors with sensitivity, love, and detachment has always been something I find both appealing and inspiring. Like Doctor Manhattan: without condoning or condemning, she understands.

What does all this have to do with Pol Pot, you’re asking? Nothing and everything.

In a fundamental way, Pol Pot was the same as all dictators. There have always been men like him. There will always be men like him. Yet he was different. While he attended elite schools, he was from a family of farmers. He was an agrarian. Outwardly at least, a simple man. His ideology wasn’t religious – indeed, he sought to abolish religion – and any time a militant atheist friend tells me that religion is the source of all evil, I point them towards Pol Pot. On the surface at least, he sought egalitarianism. Before he was a dictator, he was a farmer and a teacher. Ostensibly, he supported and worked for the peasants. He was considered to be modest and introspective and a generally pleasant person. In short, he was all the things that so many of us today like to think of as good and true and wholesome. And he killed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people, around a quarter of his country’s population.

What good things did Pol Pot do?

He provided a lesson.

Two of the human tendencies that concern me most are tribalism and complacency. My side is good. I am good, therefore the people like me are good. We get comfortable with our own goodness and the perceived goodness of the people in our groups and we pretend that evil is other. Evil is racists, it’s religious nuts, it’s elites, it’s cops, it’s the rich. It’s the liberals or it’s the conservatives. It’s the Blacks or the Whites or the Mexicans, it’s the homophobes or the gays, it’s the Christians or the Muslims or the Jews, it’s the billionaires, it’s the royals, it’s the people with power, the hegemony, it’s the oppressors. But it’s not the simple peasants and farmers. It’s not us.

No one who has studied history beyond the soundbites in school textbooks can retain much complacency about the goodness and rightness of their country or their group. Even a work of Young Adult fiction can carry that lesson if it needs to be learned or relearned. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews, Stalin’s Red Army raped teenage farm girls and bombed a refugee ship killing 9,000 people, the Americans bombed Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands as well as locking their own citizens up in internment camps if they had the wrong ancestry. The Kahnawake Indians kidnapped children and murdered their families, the British decimated the American Indian population and took their lands, and have hundreds of years of colonial horrors on their hands. While the books I read are fiction, the acts in them are real. But Pol Pot. His acts, his existence, make it impossible to be complacent about the inherent goodness of ideals, and that’s something unusual, perhaps even unique, among evil men.

Evil is not other. It is not something distant that we do not need to worry about because our ideals are inherently good. The potential for evil is in our neighbours, our peers, our families, ourselves. A simple farmer who speaks of egalitarianism has the potential for evil every bit as much as a painter who wants to exterminate the Jews, a child of two teachers who grows up to attempt to exterminate the Rohingya Muslims, or a president who signs an order forcing 60,000 people off their lands. Evil is here. It is present in all of us and we all have the choice to resist or succumb. To choose to harm or to heal. To discard people or to treat them like they matter.

This answer is still not fully formed and may be edited and added to in future. For that reason, I’ve chosen to close comments at least for now.