In the Shadows of Utopia: The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Nightmare cover image

S2 Ep2: Maoism, the Great Leap Forward / Famine and the Sino-Soviet Split

In the Shadows of Utopia: The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Nightmare

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The Tragic Element of Collectivization

When parents were too busy working in fields or in backyard steel furnaces, children necessarily became the family's way of retrieving the allocated ration from the communal canteen. Frank Dakota states that many alive today who lived through this carry guilt for having let their families down as they engaged in this role. Ding Kiha was eight years old when she had to take care of her entire family of six. Her father was sick, her mother had kidney stones and injuries relating to her bound feet. Both could not work and therefore deemed more or less useless by the state. Imagine a child as young as four, sent to walk, sometimes a considerable distance perhaps kilometers to then have to wait in line with adults

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