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The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945
Author: David P. Chandler
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publishing Date: September 10, 1993
Paperback: 408 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0300057520
ISBN-13: 978-0300057522
Format: Hardcover,
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Book Description
This history of Cambodia from World War II up to the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 focuses on the devastating revolution that convulsed the country under Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979, and the civil war that preceded it. David Chandler offers an analysis of the chaos during the 1970s and an understanding of events in the previous quartercentury. Drawing on vast quantities of primary material (including his own reports for the US embassy while a foreign service officer in Phnom Penh), on interviews, and on the scholarly literature, Chandler considers why the revolution happened, how it related to Cambodia's earlier history and to other events in southeast Asia, why it took the course it did, who was responsible for it, and to what extent its ideology drew on foreign rather than Cambodian elements.

The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War, and Revolution since 1945

By Admin | Sunday, December 18, 2011
Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
Author: David Chandler
Publisher: University of California Press
Publishing Date: 1st Edition, January 7, 2000
Paperback: 251 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9747551152
ISBN-13: 978-0520222472
ASIN: 0520222474
Format: Kindle Edition, Hardcover, Paperback
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Book Description
The horrific torture and execution of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge during the 1970s is one of the century's major human disasters. David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, examines the Khmer Rouge phenomenon by focusing on one of its key institutions, the secret prison outside Phnom Penh known by the code name "S-21." The facility was an interrogation center where more than 14,000 "enemies" were questioned, tortured, and made to confess to counterrevolutionary crimes. Fewer than a dozen prisoners left S-21 alive.

During the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) era, the existence of S-21 was known only to those inside it and a few high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials. When invading Vietnamese troops discovered the prison in 1979, murdered bodies lay strewn about and instruments of torture were still in place. An extensive archive containing photographs of victims, cadre notebooks, and DK publications was also found. Chandler utilizes evidence from the S-21 archive as well as materials that have surfaced elsewhere in Phnom Penh. He also interviews survivors of S-21 and former workers from the prison.

Documenting the violence and terror that took place within S-21 is only part of Chandler's story. Equally important is his attempt to understand what happened there in terms that might be useful to survivors, historians, and the rest of us. Chandler discusses the "culture of obedience" and its attendant dehumanization, citing parallels between the Khmer Rouge executions and the Moscow Show Trails of the 1930s, Nazi genocide, Indonesian massacres in 1965-66, the Argentine military's use of torture in the 1970s, and the recent mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda. In each of these instances, Chandler shows how turning victims into "others" in a manner that was systematically devaluing and racialist made it easier to mistreat and kill them. More than a chronicle of Khmer Rouge barbarism, Voices from S-21 is also a judicious examination of the psychological dimensions of state-sponsored terrorism that conditions human beings to commit acts of unspeakable brutality.

Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison

By Admin | Friday, December 16, 2011
A History of Cambodia
Author: David Chandler
Publisher: Westview Press
Publishing Date: 4th Edition, July 31, 2007
Paperback: 384 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0813343631
ISBN-13: 978-1578566969
Format: Hardcover, Paperback
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Book Description
In this clear and concise volume, author David Chandler provides a timely overview of Cambodia, a small but increasingly visible Southeast Asian nation. Praised by the Journal of Asian Studies as an “original contribution, superior to any other existing work,” this acclaimed text has now been completely revised and updated to include material examining the early history of Cambodia, whose famous Angkorean ruins now attract more than one million tourists each year, the death of Pol Pot, and the revolution and final collapse of the Khmer Rouge. The fourth edition reflects recent research by major scholars as well as Chandler’s long immersion in the subject and contains an entirely new section on the challenges facing Cambodia today, including an analysis of the current state of politics and sociology and the increasing pressures of globalization. This comprehensive overview of Cambodia will illuminate, for undergraduate students as well as general readers, the history and contemporary politics of a country long misunderstood.

A History of Cambodia

By Admin |