"There was, to be sure, a great deal to regret about the Cold War: the running of risks with everyone's future; the resources expended for useless armaments; the environmental and health consequences of massive military-industrial complexes; the repression that blighted the lives of entire generations; the loss of life that all too often accompanied it. No tyrant anywhere had ever executed a fifth of his own people, and yet the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot did precisely this in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The future will surely remember that atrocity when it has forgotten much else about the Cold War, and yet hardly anyone outside of Cambodia noticed at the time. There was no trial for crimes against humanity: Pol Pot died in a simple shack along the Thai border in 1998, and was unceremoniously cremated on a heap of junk and old tires. At least there was no mausoleum."
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John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2005), p. 266
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
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Pol Pot
Pol Pot (19 May 1925 – 15 April 1998), born Saloth Sar, was the General Secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party (Khmer Rouge) and the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 to 1979. He presided over a totalitarian dictatorship which made urban dwellers move to the countryside to work in collective farms and on forced labour projects. The combined effects of executions, strenuous working conditions, malnutrition and poor medical care caused the deaths of approximately 25 percent of t
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