While so much of the country was living in a time of relative peace and prosperity, Pol Pot was plotting in the mountains to end it all. In the years since his return from France, he had become ever more radicalized, building a cadre of likeminded Communists numbering only about 250 at its inception, but exceptional in its zeal. The KR would base their renunciation of the modern world on the example set by Buddhist monks, where everything you owned, even your identity, was abandoned. Pol Pot’s ideal was a class he called “Old People”, a simple peasant race cleansed of all occidental influence, religion, and education. Only by draining the blood out of the nation could new blood- new ideas- HIS ideas- permanently reshape society.