External and indigenous sources of Khmer Rouge ideology

The Dutch scholar J.C. Van Leur once remarked that European historians tended to see Southeast Asia “from the deck of the ship, the ramparts of the fortress, the high gallery of the trading house.” Yet, Van Leur argued, the external impact on Southeast Asia had been superficial: “The sheen of the world religions and foreign cultural forms is a thin and flaking glaze; underneath it the whole of the old indigenous forms has continued to exist.”1