book
The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79
Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79. 3rd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Why this matters here
Kiernan’s study of Democratic Kampuchea after April 1975 documents how the Khmer Rouge emptied cities, abolished ordinary economic life, and produced mass death through execution, forced labor, starvation, and disease—estimates he and other historians commonly place on the order of roughly 1.5 to 2 million. When Interpretation No Longer Matters cites that scale to keep the chapter’s colder question historical rather than schematic: recognition of suffering did not restore offices through which recognition becomes repair. The source establishes the regime’s methods and demographic toll; the book asks what judgment can still do when accurate naming has nowhere institutional to go.
