Year Zero
Cities emptied in three days, money abolished, ended only by invasion.
Contested figures. Deaths are generally estimated at 1.5–2 million out of a population of roughly 7.9 million, from execution, starvation, overwork and disease. Kiernan's demographic work is the standard reference; the composition of the total is still debated.
This is the limit case. It belongs in the record for one reason: it shows what the design does when nothing at all restrains it.
What happened
Within days of taking Phnom Penh in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities at gunpoint, abolished money, markets, schools, religion and private property, and reset the calendar to Year Zero. At the S-21 prison some 15,000 people were processed, with only a handful of survivors.
The results
Roughly a fifth of the population — commonly estimated at 1.5 to 2 million people — died in forty-four months from execution, starvation, overwork and disease. The regime documented its own interrogations, which is why the archive exists at all.
Why it happened
The destruction of every corrective institution — money, markets, schools, law, the family itself — was not a side effect of the program; it was the program. This was pure ideology pursued by a dictatorship that had abolished, in its first week, everything that could have reversed it. It ended only because a foreign army invaded, because nothing inside the country was left standing to stop it.
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