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Year Zero (Khmer:ឆ្នាំសូន្យ,Chhnăm Sony[cʰnamsoːn]) is an idea put into practice byPol Pot inDemocratic Kampuchea that allculture andtraditions within a society must becompletely destroyed or discarded and that a new "revolutionary" culture must replace it starting from scratch. In this sense, all of the history of a nation or a people before Year Zero would be largely deemed irrelevant, because it would ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up.
The first day of "Year Zero" was declared byAngkar and theKhmer Rouge on17 April 1975 upon their takeover ofCambodia in order to signify a rebirth ofCambodian history. Adopting the term as an analogy to the "Year One" of theFrench Revolutionary Calendar, Year Zero was effectually an attempt by the Khmer Rouge to erase history and reset Cambodian society, removing any vestiges of the past.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, most of whose leadership were French-educated communists,[1] took inspiration from the concept of "Year One" in the French Revolutionary Calendar.[2][better source needed] The French "Year One" came about during theFrench Revolution when, after theabolition of the French monarchy on 20 September 1792, theNational Convention instituted a new calendar and declared that date to be the beginning of Year I.[2][better source needed]
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge forces took over Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and subsequently renamed the countryDemocratic Kampuchea.[3] Upon seizing power, Year Zero was decreed. UnlikeNorth Korean labor camps ofKim Il Sung, the Khmer Rouge, led by the organization known asAngkar, was significantly influenced byMaoism and theChinese Great Leap Forward as well as theCultural Revolution.[2][better source needed]
The new rulers of Cambodia call 1975 "Year Zero", the dawn of an age in which there will be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money – only work and death.
Hoping to transform the nation into anagrarian utopia,Pol Pot set out to reconstruct the country into apre-industrial,classless society by attempting to turn all citizens intorural agricultural workers rather than educated city dwellers, whom theKhmer Rouge believed to have been corrupted byWestern,capitalist ideas.[3][5] He declared that the nation would start again at "Year Zero", and everything that existed before Year Zero was to be eradicated. In other words, this was to be a complete and thorough reset (or even cleansing) of Cambodian society. He isolated his people from the global community; established ruralcollectives; dismantled thesocial fabric and infrastructure of Cambodia; and set about the emptying of cities, as well as the abolition of money (thus also destroying banks),private property, families, andreligion.[3]
To build the new Cambodian society, the inhabitants of the depopulated cities were sent tolabour camps.[6] The people ofPhnom Penh, in particular, were forced immediately to "return to the villages" to work. Similar evacuations occurred atBattambang,Kampong Cham,Siem Reap,Kampong Thom, among others. Knowledge of anything pre-Year Zero was prohibited. To ensure that there was no recorded memory of a pre-Year Zero society, books were burned. Wearing glasses was also criminalized, as it indicated that the wearer might habitually read books.[1][better source needed] In Democratic Kampuchea, the only acceptable lifestyle was that of peasant agricultural workers. Centuries of Cambodian culture and institutions were thereby eliminated—shutting down factories, hospitals, schools, and universities—along with anyone who expressed interest in their preservation. So-calledNew People—members of the old governments and intellectuals in general, including lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy, and qualified professionals in all fields—were thought to be a threat to the new regime and were therefore especiallysingled out and executed during the purges accompanying Year Zero.[5]
The Khmer Rouge's takeover was rapidly followed by a series of drastic revolutionaryde-industrialization policies which resulted in adeath toll that vastly exceeded that of theFrench Revolution and theReign of Terror by theJacobin leaderMaximilien Robespierre.[citation needed]
While the phrase "Year Zero" is widely used in Western accounts of Democratic Kampuchea to describe the Khmer Rouge’s attempt to radically reset Cambodian society, there is no evidence that the Khmer Rouge themselves ever employed the term, nor that it was 'declared' on April 17th, 1975. According to Ian Harris, citing political scientist and leading expert on the Khmer Rouge, Steve Heder, the phrase was retrospectively applied by outside commentators rather than by the regime itself.[7]
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