The background of the genocide that would take place in Cambodia and the events that would eventually lead to it being carried out are multifaceted and complicated. At the time Pol Pot and his revolutionary communist group, the Khmer Rouge, were taking power in Cambodia during the late 1970s, the nation and its people were in a time of war as well as political and economic strife. The Khmer Rouge has its origins rooted in violence and conflict, being founded in the late 1960s with the onset of the Cambodian Civil War. The group found early support in its communist neighbors China, North Vietnam and the Vietnamese guerilla group, the Viet Minh, which Pol Pot was an active member of during the 1950s and who greatly assisted the group in their war effort and further ingrained communist ideology in both Pol Pot and his revolutionaries. It was during this same conflict that the Khmer Rouge would begin to find an ideological enemy in the West, and the US in particular. This was due to the United States’ support of the existing government with which the Khmer Rouge and other communist groups in Cambodia found itself at war with, and the extensive bombing campaign the US would launch would drive many formally unaligned Cambodians into the Khmer Rouge’s ranks (Kiernan 23). Without the US bombing of rural Cambodia, Pol Pot would have found it much more difficult to take power, as it solidified the idea of a hostile and uncaring capitalist power in the eyes of many poor peasants.
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