Imagine sitting across from one of history’s most notorious mass murderers, watching him shuffle slowly toward you, physically diminished but still mentally sharp enough to defend his legacy.
That’s exactly what journalist Nate Thayer did when he interviewed Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, the man behind one of the bloodiest regimes of the 20th century. What’s truly wild is Pol Pot, even after overseeing the deaths of somewhere between 1.5 to 3 million people, wasn’t seeking redemption. He wasn’t even looking to explain his actions. He was there to *defend* them.
Pol Pot’s take on the Khmer Rouge regime years later is nothing short of staggering. You’d think someone who led a movement responsible for the deaths of a massive portion of the population—through starvation, forced labor, and outright execution—might show some semblance of regret, or at least an acknowledgment of the suffering they caused. But Pol Pot? He sat there, old and frail, and insisted that his conscience was clear. Not only did he refuse to apologize, but he also made it clear that he believed his actions had been necessary for the survival of Cambodia. In his mind, the Khmer Rouge didn’t commit genocide—they *saved* the country from Vietnamese domination.
This is where it gets dark. Pol Pot’s view on the mass killings—whether it was the forced evacuations of cities or the brutal "purges" of suspected enemies—was that these were unfortunate consequences, but unavoidable ones. He didn’t deny that mistakes were made. In fact, he used that word a lot: *mistakes*. But in his view, those "mistakes" were part of a much larger, righteous struggle. The price paid was steep, sure. But for him, the alternative—allowing Cambodia to fall under Vietnamese control—was even worse. It’s like trying to rationalize the destruction of an entire village because you feared a fire might one day break out.
What’s almost harder to believe is the casual way Pol Pot dismissed the atrocities at places like Tuol Sleng prison, where 16,000 people were tortured and executed. When pressed about the notorious prison, his response was straight-up Orwellian. He didn’t deny that people died there, but he *did* try to twist the narrative, claiming that the prison was a piece of Vietnamese propaganda set up after the Khmer Rouge was driven from power. According to him, it wasn’t his regime’s brutality on display, but the Vietnamese manipulating the facts to discredit him. This is the kind of historical revisionism that turns your stomach. The man was, even after all those years, rewriting history in real-time, as if he could somehow wash the blood off his hands with a story that made him look like a victim of foreign manipulation.
So, how did Pol Pot deal with the fact that his regime murdered millions? He didn’t. At least not in the way most of us would expect someone to confront that level of guilt. He compartmentalized it, distanced himself from it, and shifted the blame. In his version of events, he wasn’t a tyrant but a *patriot*. The mass graves? Those were the unfortunate byproducts of a noble fight against imperialism. The starved and beaten Cambodians? They were collateral damage in a war that, in his eyes, had to be fought.
And here’s where it gets truly haunting: Pol Pot didn’t see himself as evil. He didn’t even see himself as misguided. In his mind, the bloodshed was justified. He didn’t lose sleep over the mountains of skulls or the rivers of tears his regime caused. Instead, he seemed to believe that history had simply misunderstood him. In the end, his greatest crime wasn’t the murder of millions—it was that the world refused to see the *necessity* of those deaths through his eyes.
Pol Pot died unrepentant, his warped view of history intact. And that, right there, is one of the most chilling parts of his legacy. He represents a type of moral blindness so profound, so absolute, that even when faced with the magnitude of the horrors he caused, he felt nothing but self-assured righteousness. In his mind, those millions of deaths weren’t atrocities—they were *footnotes* in the story of a hero who fought to save his country. That’s what’s truly terrifying about Pol Pot’s perspective. He believed, to his dying day, that he was the good guy.