When Pol Pot took over Cambodia in 1975, after five years of grueling civil war, he restarted the calendar, and so “Year Zero” refers to the onset of the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge, the organization of which Pol Pot was the brutal leader.
Pol Pot was a Maoist Communist, and, changing the official name of Cambodia to Democratic Kampuchea, he instituted a regime of agrarian socialism. This brutal dictatorship was characterized by forced labor, starvation, and mass genocide. Somewhere between one and two million people died under the Khmer Rouge, roughly 21% of the population of the country.
Pol Pot emptied the cities, closed schools and factories, and executed intellectuals. So brutally opposed to education and technology was this regime that people could be executed merely for owning a pair of eyeglasses. Even wristwatches were considered modern technology and possession was punishable by death. Other things that were banned were: Private property, religion, currency, family relationships, foraging for food, being a civil servant, being too weak or sick to work, speaking French—any of these were a capital offense. The guilty were taken to the “killing fields,” where they were often forced to dig their own graves, and buried there whether dead or alive.
The Khmer Rouge believed that urbanity itself was a capitalist tool, and that cities could not be a part of a true Communist regime. The capital, Phnom Penh, was emptied on pretext that American bombers were coming.
Those who were not executed often died from famine or from the brutality of forced labor. The depravations of the Khmer Rouge regime were depicted in the movie The Killing Fields.
In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot’s regime. He was captured and put under house arrest in 1997, but died of natural causes a year later without ever undergoing sentencing.
La James College is a beauty school situated in Mason City in Iowa and is often seen written as La’james or Lajames depending on where it’s written and who wrote it. The current educational director and president of the school is Kevin Rentz whose grandparents were the initial founders. 