When a regime decides that “true equality” means everyone should be equally hungry, the word stops sounding so noble. Cambodia’s killing fields aren’t a history‑class detour; they’re the extreme endgame of the same fairness language we toss around in staff meetings and school newsletters. If you’ve ever argued about equity over lattes, this is the uncomfortable, oddly hopeful story you can’t afford to skim.
Rules, Posters, and Other Lies
The rules at Tuol Sleng are still on the wall: no talking, no crying, no asking why. Somewhere in your inbox, a school newsletter is promising a “more equal learning environment” with new dress codes and rubric tweaks. Same word, wildly different stakes. This isn’t a “Cambodia is just like your kid’s school” piece; it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when equality stops being a dream and starts acting like a predator. And look out, it’s as real today as it was ever.
How Equality Became a Weapon
In the Khmer Rouge Cambodia, under the rule of Pol Pot, the slogan was simple: everyone must be equal, especially in hunger. This was not a figure of speech or sarcasm, it was the rule of law. Private food was treason; one man in Loung Ung’s village was disappeared for eating a stray dog alone instead of “sharing” it with the community. Jewelry could buy a handful of rice on the black market—until bartering itself was branded a crime against the revolution. If one person starved, then all should starve; differences between people wasn’t a problem to solve, it was an enemy to eliminate.
From a distance, the logic sounds almost tidy, but then again, so did facism, and then communism, to a few countries in the years before the Khmer Rouge. But this twisted plot stated flatly: No rich, no poor, no city privilege, no rural neglect. Again, sounds like the promises of pretty much every dictator in history who didn’t have to adhere to their own rules and laws. However, the reality was that a six‑year‑old child chewed charcoal on New Year’s Day for sustenance, while her neighbours swelled and died from famine, because having “more” than the person beside you was framed as a moral failure, not a policy choice. Under the Angkar, equality didn’t mean widening the table so all could dine together; it meant flipping the table like a mad man and calling the rubble “fairness.”
Our Buzzwords, Their Killing Fields
Back home, we throw “equality” and “equity” around at staff meetings where the coffee is fair‑trade and the Wi‑Fi never buffers. We stress about whether an 89 should be rounded to a 90, parents will go to the wall over that 1% for their kids. We will question whether a new admissions policy is “fair” to high achievers or just lip service for the university counselling page. But NONE of that is genocide, obviously; and the irony is that word too is commonly misused as well. But look closely, our arguments sometimes act as a Trojan Horse, smuggling in a lighter version of the same evil instinct: it’s better to drag the outliers down than rebuild the system around them. Make them all pay and suffer rather than work for change so we all flourish together.
The Khmer Rouge made that reflex explicit. Educated people, city people, anyone who might disrupt the fantasy of a perfectly level peasant utopia—out. But literally; go before it’s too late because too late was defined as immediate execution…or worse. Ung’s father tells his children to “act stupid” because intelligence has become a liability, not a path to a better life. In today’s secondary and post-secondary schools, we’re not executing top students in their fields for fear that they will find that there is a better life that they can achieve and then go on to do better than us; instead we are taught to always strive to do our absolute best because we all have the same opportunity.
Instead we talk the opposite: “do not intimidate others,” “tone it down,” “don’t flaunt what you have in front of those who do not”. Of course we do not have to look further than the news on a daily basis to watch a world of high achievers doing exactly the opposite, but this is not about them, this is about us. And as part of “Team Us”, it’s about smoothing the sharp edges of talent so the group photo looks more uniform.
If / Then: Building Better Equalities
The point isn’t to scold you for your kid’s GPA. It’s to notice how quickly noble words can be rewired when order feels more comfortable than truth. In Harari’s terms, every society runs on shared stories, and “we’re all equal here” can be a promise or a threat depending on who’s holding the pen. Angkar wrote one version and enforced it with rice rations, rifle butts, and gardening tools for torture. We are NOT that; we strive to write another story with policies, platforms, and polite silence.
If we teach our kids anything in places like Phnom Penh, maybe it’s this: equality worth fighting for lifts people up; equality that demands everyone be equally small will eventually pick a scapegoat and call it justice. History is littered with instances where this was tried and failed so spectacularly that we still teach it in schools today. If we stay awake to that difference—at the dinner table, in curriculum meetings, on application committees—then the same word that turned Cambodia into a horror movie might, in our hands, finally learn how to feed people instead.
