The plan embodied four of Pol Pot’s idées fixes—collectivism, revolutionary will, autarky, and the empowerment of the poor. Pol Pot saw the document as the means by which Cambodia could accelerate toward socialism. The unreality and sloppiness of most of its proposals reveal a blind faith in the possibilities of success. When these proposals were applied at great speed by a self-absorbed regime, they led to the deaths of tens of thousands of citizens. As lower ranking cadre and officials, fearful of reprisals, struggled to apply what they took to be the exigencies of the plan, they made unworkable demands on the people under them on whose behalf the revolution was ostensibly being waged.

The plan’s database derived from the 1960s. No attention had been paid to demographic or ecological changes since then or to the devastations of the civil war. The plan owed nothing to sustained research. Instead, it seemed to reflect the remark of a Cambodian official in late 1975: “When a people is awakened by political consciousness, it can do anything.... Our engineers cannot do what the people can do.” Achieving the plan’s goals would be easy, its implementers believed, for a people who had defeated American imperialism. One “storming attack” was as good as another.5

After April 1975 Cambodians were repeatedly encouraged to “build and defend” (kosang nung kapea) their country. The word “independence” (aekareach) was often coupled with “mastery” (mochaskar) to form a phrase that constituted a national ideal. To tens of thousands of Cambodians under thirty the notions of “independence-mastery”—taking charge of their future and renouncing the past—were undoubtedly appealing. So was Cambodia’s new sense of dignity and importance. With its overwhelming victory, Cambodia had become incomparable and foreign models inappropriate. Speaking to a Lao delegation in December 1975, Ieng Sary remarked pointedly, “At present our Cambodian people control their own destiny, firmly grasping in their own hands the revolutionary administration and building a new society.” Cambodia’s superiority to Laos, which was linked closely with Vietnam and Vietnamese communism, was clear.6

In Pol Pot’s view, independence-mastery would grow out of economic independence. This would come, he thought, from earning foreign exchange by selling agricultural products overseas. To cynics this might seem like the colonial prescription without the material incentives connected with profit, markets, land ownership, and money. The difference in theory was that the transactions would not benefit oppressive merchants and landlords, as in the past, but the poor and landless peasants who grew the crops and had become the masters of the country. Because money had been abolished, all foreign exchange, it was thought, would directly benefit the people. The “vestiges of capitalism” (and inequality) would not survive without money in circulation.7