The Rise of the Khmer Rouge The Cambodian communist movement emerged from the country's struggle against French colonization 1940s, and was influenced by the Vietnamese. “Why did they have to kill so many?” As a boy, Leng Maly did hard labor under the Khmer Rouge. During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups (including intellectuals) and killing many others for even minor breaches of rules."

Anyone who tried to eat fruits or seafood was subject to the death penalty.

Then the Khmer Rouge turned on civilians, driving the people into the countryside and killing thousands in the process.

Pol Pot’s attempts to create a

Every form of education was outlawed.

There is a rather cogent analysis of the "why and how" of this genocide written by Alexander Hinton called "Why Did They Kill: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide."

I would strongly agree with /u/Donald224's analysis.

The only thing that people were allowed to … The history of the Khmer Rouge will show they considered intellectuals an enemy. The Khmer Rouge was a brutal regime that ruled Cambodia, under the leadership of Marxist dictator Pol Pot, from 1975 to 1979. Soon after seizing power, they arrested and killed thousands of soldiers, military officers and civil servants from the Khmer Republic regime led by Marshal Lon Nol, whom they did not regard as “pure.” The fighters who had stood up against the Khmer Rouge were executed en masse. This is consistent with the fact that Democratic Kampuchea was a communist-inspired regime that looked to the policies of communist revolutions elsewhere for models of reorganizing society. Given the legions of scholars, intellectuals and artists who were killed during the Khmer Rouge's genocidal rule of Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, it …

The history of the Khmer Rouge will show they considered intellectuals an enemy. Upon seizing power in 1975, the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot began a murderous regime that lasted until 1979.

Every form of education was outlawed. The Khmer Rouge, in their attempt to socially engineer a classless communist society, took particular aim at intellectuals, city residents, ethnic Vietnamese, civil servants and religious leaders. He and his two sisters were kept separated from their father and mother. Fueled by the first Indochina War in the 1950s, and during the next 20 years, the movement took roots and began to grow. Soon, the Khmer Rouge was rounding up anyone who did … Keywords: Khmer Rouge, Hutu, Tutsi, genocide, child soldiers Introduction At the end of the 20th century one of history’s most brutal genocides took place in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, then in 1994, the Hutu regime in Rwanda, together murdered approximately 2.5 million people.3 The only thing that people were allowed … That's the long and the short of it. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labour camps. The notion that the Khmer Rouge, or the ideologues and leaders of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) ‘decided to kill anyone who wore glasses’, (or that this is simply what happened) is commonly shared when relaying some of the horrors associated with life in Cambodia during the revolutionary period (1975-1979).

Anyone who tried to eat fruits or seafood was subject to the death penalty. All books were burned. In the four years that the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century. All books were burned. I had an entire class on the Khmer Rouge both before, during, and in the post-conflict "justice" period of the Cambodian Genocide. The brutal regime, in … Not only did the Khmer Rouge produce thousands of pages of written documents, but they also intended to develop an educational system to teach literacy.