Postdoctoral Fellow writes series for Victims of Communism blog

Throughout the series, Dr. Johnson explores assertions that the killings were caused by things other than the ruling ideology of the Khmer Rouge party. 

In Part I, he debunks the notion that the United States’ attempts to eliminate the Khmer Rouge precipitated the genocide. In Part II, Dr. Johnson discredits the theory that the cause of the genocide was from broad social, cultural and political forces. He writes definitively, “these sources make it plain that the mass murder of Cambodia’s population was driven from above, not from below…The stimulus for the mass killing was Communism.” And finally, in Part III, Dr. Johnson concludes that the communist ideology was the true catalyst of the Cambodian genocide, an attempt by Pol Pot to build communism following the Soviet and Chinese models.

Read Dr. Johnson’s series in Dissident here.