The Myth of Angkor as an Essential Component of the Khmer Rouge Utopia

Abstract

One of the reasons the Democratic Kampuchea regime was more brutal than other communist regimes may partly originate from the grandeur of the Angkorian era in the Khmer Rouge’s (KR) megalomaniac, utopian imagination. Was this modelled on an illusory future or on an imagined past? Even before the KR seized power, they managed to fashion a bizarre amalgam of royalty, revolution, and past glory through the propaganda trip made by Norodom Sihanouk to Angkor in March 1973. Soon after seizing power on April 17, 1975 they organized a three-day victory celebration within the precincts of Angkor Wat temple and spared the conservation team in the evacuation of Siem Reap. Angkor and the greatness of its past civilization entered the revolutionary rhetoric and fed the megalomania of the leaders. More specifically, the revolutionaries were convinced that Angkor owed its prosperity to the achievements of their forebears who were believed to have blanketed the entire territory with an intricate irrigation network. The “hydraulic city”––a term introduced in the 1960s by the French archaeologist at Angkor, Bernard-Philippe Groslier––had become a hydraulic country. During the KR foreign visitors were granted visits to Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, as well as visits to some of the grand reservoirs and dams built during the regime. These, along with the Potemkin villages erected in the area, served to eclipse the immense suffering of the populace. Democratic Kampuchea became a laboratory experiment for a form of revolutionary neo-colonialism that has its roots in the West––a Marxism-Leninism revised by Lenin, Stalin, and later, Mao. The KR period became an ugly caricature of the “civilizing mission” and used an incoherent jumble of ideas borrowed from the West.