"Mao glasses" video and excerpt from "Pol Pot's Smile" by Peter Fröberg Idling

Excerpt from "Pol Pot's Smile" by Peter Fröberg Idling:

"12

Aftonbladet's Sven-Oskar Ruhmën found himself in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. The following day he described the entry of the Khmer Rouge into the city:

>>For a Swedish onlooker it was a fantastic sight. Personally, I have never before seen anything so beautiful. I felt so happy and such a sense of relief that I couldn't help
crying at what I saw.<<

That was the last telegram sent from Phnom Penh before all the telephones, radio transmissions and teleprinters fell silent. (...)

15

On a bookshelf in my parents' home I find a familiar book. Its front cover has been lost, but it used to have >>The History Book<< written on it. Apparently it is quite common for copies of this particular book to fall to pieces. It was printed in an old farm building in 1970 by a new publishing company called Word Front. The glue that was used to stick it together froze the previous winter and this made the books brittle. The History Book was its publishers' first great sales success and I remember often reading it as a child. It is a mainly pictorial account of history. Instead of kings and wars it tells of the conditions in which ordinary people lived, from the Ice Age to the present.

Or rather, till that time.

The final pages concentrate on colonialism and the revolutions of the sixties. There is a banner draped across a double-page spread. On it is written >>Korea Cuba Vietnam China Albania.<<

Under it is an idyllic picture of people working together in the fields.

I read: >>The whole population had joined together to free their country. Now they had to make sure that no bureaucrats, party bigwigs or technocrats took away their power! So that the office workers and civil servants do not come to think that they are better than the workers, they must experience working in a factory or on the land for a period every year. The university and other higher education is open to workers and peasants. The peasants are not forced into huge industrial cities as they are in the Soviet Union. Instead factories are built in villages and small towns where people are already living.<<"

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-pol-pots-smile/#ixzz16Bl5zS5U