Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia

John Pilger is now my favorite documentarian. Werner Hertzog is good, Michael Moore has some great stuff, and Alex Gibney was my guy until I discovered John Pilger. He will never let you rest, he will never let you claim ignorance, he will never let you down. His documentaries bring human suffering at the hands of other humans right into your face.

In "Year Zero" he is showing the world the soul crushing sadness that is Cambodia in 1979. After the U. S. carpet bombed Cambodia in a secret mission meant to break the backs of the Vietnamese, it made way for the Khmer Rouge to come through and finish destroying whatever was still standing.

The Kmer Rouge are a most mercurial and dangerously strange bunch. They are enemies of progress and development. I've heard of war mongers killing and destroying due to race, ethnicity, religion, and even class, but never due to progress and development. The Kmer Rouge hate and oppose anything that resembles modern civilization. They destroyed and disavowed money, hospitals, schools, libraries, churches, and temples, while they killed doctors, nurses, teachers, architects, and anyone else who had a skill they had to go to school for. It is a very bizarre position that proved deadly to Cambodians. The result was a death toll in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. And those were the lucky ones. Those who remained of the hapless men, women, and children were weak, emaciated, and sickly due to the extreme lack of food and medicine.

John Pilger goes to Cambodia to bring proof to the world of Cambodia's suffering while also exposing and shaming the U. S. and British governments as only he can.