[Buddha-l] Was Mr. Pol Pot a Buddhist?

[Jo]

One also wonders what it was that converted Pol Pot into a mass murderer along the lines of a Stalin or Hitler. Was it simply a question of choosing a role model? 
Joanna
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One wonders when he would have done that. He was born into an ethnic Chinese family that had fully assimilated to Khmer culture. It is not unreasonable to suppose the family had Buddhist roots, but as Dan Lusthaus has already said, Saloth Sar attended a Catholic school, École Miche, in Phnom Penh when he was ten years old. In his early twenties he won a scholarship to study radio electronics at  École Française d'Électronique. While in France he joined a Marxist society, and from that point on was pretty consistently anti-religious. He failed out of school in France and had to return to Cambodia. He eventually abandoned classical Marxism in favor of agrarian socialism with a Maoist flavor. In 1975 he took on the nom de guerre Pol Pot, an abbreviation of Politique potentielle.

There was nothing in the least unreasonable or offensive about Artur Karp's question. Asking questions is not a bad way to learn, and no one should be chastised for asking an honest question.

Richard Hayes
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