ABSTRACT
Ever since, including for the Khmer Rouge, Angkor Wat has served as Cambodia's national symbol. It decided to abandon political activity in the city for armed struggle in remote parts of the countryside, where the Khmer Rouge could nurture its revolution beyond Sihanouk's reach. The primitivist dimension of Khmer Rouge ideology seems to have been influenced by the tribal peoples among whom KR leaders lived in Cambodia's eastern jungles. The countryside thus served as the backdrop for the Khmer Rouge assault on Cambodia's culture and people. In a sense, though, all of Cambodia was new and revolutionary in the Khmer Rouge conception. Throughout the 1980s, in one of the twentieth century's 'more depressing episodes of diplomacy' the Western world moved from branding the Khmer Rouge as communist monsters to embracing them as Cambodia's legitimate representatives. At the United Nations, the United States led a push to grant Cambodia's General Assembly seat to the anti-Vietnamese coalition dominated by the Khmer Rouge.
