Cambodian communist leader who led the Khmer Rouge to power in 1975 and oversaw the Cambodian genocide — the killing of approximately 1.7 million people (25% of Cambodia's population) — in an attempt to create an agrarian utopia, often cited as the reductio ad absurdum of Rousseau's back-to-nature ideology.
Represents the most extreme historical case of Rousseau's idealization of nature and denunciation of civilization weaponized into totalitarian policy — the Khmer Rouge's evacuation of cities, abolition of money, and Year Zero were ideologically motivated attempts to return to an agricultural state of nature.
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