ABSTRACT
This is not to say that “a tradition of violence” determined that the Khmer Rouge (KR) would rule. In fact, until relatively late in the process, the movement was a marginal presence. Neither, though, was the Khmer Rouge an outright aberration. Certainly, the KR’s emphasis on concentrating power and wielding it in tyrannical fashion was in keeping with Cambodian tradition. “Absolutism . . . is a core element of authority and legitimacy in Cambodia,” wrote David Roberts.3 As for the supposedly pacific nature of Buddhism, the religion that overwhelmingly predominated in Cambodia, Vickery denounced it as “arrant nonsense.” “That Buddhists may torture and massacre is no more astonishing than that the Inquisition burned people or that practicing Catholics and Protestants joined the Nazi SS.”4
