Pol Pot by Philip Short Read Free Book Online

most other Asian countries, being rooted in respect for parents, for elders and for hierarchy — and, in the case of women, for men. But it was notably more rigid, more intransigent. Where the Confucian primers treat children as individuals, with personalities of their own and talents to be encouraged and drawn out, the
    cpap
    view them as objects — as ‘aggregates of cause and effect’, in Buddhist terms — whose behaviour must be moulded to ensure the faithful transmission of immutable values. The
    cpap
    for boys were stern enough — ‘Do not destroy the tradition that your parents pass on to you! Do not oppose their advice!’ Those for girls — inevitably, in the feudal scheme of things — were still more stiff-necked and dehumanised:
    Never turn your back
    to your husband when he sleeps and never touch his head without first bowing in his honour . . . Respect and fear [his] wishes and take his advice to heart . . . If [he] gives an order, don’t hesitate a moment in responding . . . Avoid posing as an equal to your husband — and never above he who is your master. If he insults you, go to your quarters and reflect, never insult or talk back to him . . .
    The
    cpap,
    at least in the form in which Sâr would have learnt them, had another particularity. They portrayed the Khmers as honest and sincere but ‘foolish and ignorant’, constantly being duped by their smarter Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours:
    Your eyes
    are open and can see,
     
    But see only the surface of things . . .
     
    Learn arithmetic . . . with all your energy
     
    Lest the Chinese and Vietnamese cheat you . . .
     
    The Khmers are lacking in judgement
     
    They eat without giving thought for what is proper and right, Each season they borrow from the Chinese,
     
    And the Chinese gain control of the inheritance their parents have bequeathed.
    If the
    cpap
    were a practical code of conduct to regulate life in the world beyond the monastery walls, the monks also sought to inculcate in their young charges a spirit of detachment. Nhun Nhget remembered that as the hardest thing to accept. ‘
    They taught us
    to renounce worldly desires, not to covet material things. If you are an ordinary person, you can [behave normally], you can have nice meals, you can marry . . . When you become a monk, you have to forgo all that.’
    One wonders whether Sâr, as a child, was also struck by this emphasis on detachment. There is no way of knowing. But subconsciously it must have registered, for in later life the abandonment of personal ties and the suppression of individuality — in both thought and behaviour — would become key elements of his political credo.
    In the summer of 1935, at the age of ten, Sâr left Wat Botum Vaddei and went to live with his brother Suong, his wife and their baby son, in a large, rambling wooden house, built on wooden pillars, with a spacious front veranda overlooking a small courtyard planted with trees and tubs of flowers. His older brother Chhay was already staying with them, and soon afterwards Nhep, the youngest, arrived too.
    That September, Sâr joined Chhay at the Ecole Miche, named after a nineteenth-century missionary bishop. The lessons were in French, dispensed by Vietnamese and French Catholic fathers, and each day’s classes began with an hour spent learning the
    catechism
    , followed by a collective recitation of the Lord’s Prayer or one of the Psalms. At first sight it might seem an odd choice. Sâr’s family had no connection with the Catholic Church. But the school had a good reputation and, catechism apart, the curriculum was the same as at the other main primary school in Phnom
    Penh, which was run by the protectorate authorities and catered exclusively for Europeans and a handful of assimilated Khmers from aristocratic families, like Thiounn Thioeunn and his brothers. Even primary schooling was hard to come by in the Cambodia of the 1930s, and the fees at the Ecole Miche, modest though they were, were