Sihanouk’s coup d‘état inspired Saloth Sar’s first known political writing. An eight-page essay titled “Monarchy or Democracy?” was published in a special issue of the Khmer students’ magazine, Khmer Nisut, under the pseudonym Khmer daom (“Original Khmer”), a term associated by French ethnographers with the Samre and Porr people inhabiting parts of Saloth Sar’s native Kompong Thom. Keng Vannsak rushed the issue into print to protest Sihanouk’s actions in Phnom Penh.23 Khmer daom’s handwritten article opened by asserting that only the National Assembly and democratic rights “gave the Cambodian people a chance to breathe a little—as in the time of Prince Yuthevong, for example.” Khmer daom accused Sihanouk of being an absolute monarch and defined monarchy as “a doctrine which bestows power on a small group of men who do nothing to earn their living so that they can exploit the majority of the people at every level. Monarchy is an unjust doctrine, a malodorous running sore that just people must eliminate.”24

It is tempting to trace the ferocity of this passage to Saloth Sar’s childhood spent among palace dancers exploited by the king and perhaps suffering from venereal infection. In the article Sar went on to say that monarchy was friendly to imperialism but inimical to the people, to Buddhism, and to knowledge. To back up these accusations, he pointed out that Cambodia’s recent kings had been appointed by the French, while throughout Cambodia’s history the people were “like animals, kept as soldiers (pol) or slaves (knjom ke), made to work night and day to feed the king and his entourage”—an eerie foreshadowing of conditions when Saloth Sar himself came to power. To show that the monarchy was the enemy of Buddhism, Sar wrote that Cambodia’s kings had placed themselves above religion, but he added that “enlightened monks” had composed a folktale in which Tmenh Chey, a “child of the people,” outwits a king. A similar spirit of enlightenment and a hatred of his father’s injustice had led the Buddha to desert his own noble family, Sar suggested, so that Buddha could be a “friend to all men, and to teach people to love one another.” Sar drew a parallel here to Prince Yuthevong’s distancing himself from the royal family so he could “instill democracy in the hearts of the Khmer people.”25

Turning to a discussion of democracy, Saloth Sar cited revolutions in France, Russia, and China, where the monarchy had been abolished. These movements had been led, he noted, by Robespierre and Danton, Stalin and Lenin, and Sun Yat Sen (intriguingly, not Mao Zedong). In Russia, the “monarchy disappeared without a trace.” In France, China, and the Soviet Union the democracy that replaced the kings was a doctrine followed by “people everywhere in the world; it is incomparable and as beautiful as a diamond.” Twenty-four years later, as prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea, Saloth Sar’s peculiar vision of democracy remained unshaken.