The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately wicked....
Jeremiah 17:9
Q: What led to the pseudo-intellectual path to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) Killing Fields of Cambodia where nearly a fourth of the nation's population were slaughtered or starved 
to death?
Starting with Marxism, there were two major Communist philosophies competing during the Cold War. Those of the Lenin/Soviet Model (a class based struggle of the urban labor union proletariat) and the Mao/Chinese Model (a more rural peasant based one).
Enter the warped thinking from the faculty lounge of the mind of Pol Pot, who had been educated within the western halls and walls of 
academia. He eventually blended the two types of Leninism and Maoism with a heavy dose of Albania's Hoxha. (Hoxhaism was the Communist view of Albania's Communist dictator that the brutal regime of Stalin was real Communism and that the new crop of Communist leaders in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were going soft). Eventually as for Lenin vs. Mao, Pol Pot leaned toward Mao with Pol Pot's focus on the rural idyll....accompanied by Hoxhaism on Steroids.
It became an extreme for of Communism that regulated forced labor, hair cuts, where you lived, what and when you ate and who you married. Children were taken from their parents and taught that the state was their parent. It took Communism to it's ultimate Logical Conclusion.
*From the Faculty Lounge of the mind of Pol Pot came forth the referring to himself as "Brother Number 1" as he restarted the calendar with Year Zero.
*All those not useful to the Revolution should be eradicated.
*The Khmer Rouge portrayed themselves as the Messianic figures of Marxism.
*The Khmer Rouge believed in the purification of the masses via massacre.
A secret clique, a faceless regime, ran the country known as the 
Angka (the organization) which included Khieu Samphan who had been educated in Paris. Ieng Sary. Chhit Chhoeunn, a Bhhudist Monk known as Ta Mok the Butcher. Nuon Chea, the mastermind of Khmer Rouge philosophy of isolating Cambodia from the world stage and eliminating money. And finally, Saloth Sar, educated in Paris and known by the name Pol Pot. The Angka was talked of in spiritual terms as an omnipresent entity. The one time that atheistic Communism tried to set itself up openly as a deity. People feared the Angka could read their minds. People were taught to pray to the Angka for the blessings they received in food and clothes.
A Khmer slogan sums up their worldview: “It is better to arrest ten people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free.”
So basically what led to the Horror of the Killing Fields of Cambodia
was Pol Pot sitting around in the Academic Faculty Lounge of his own head debating the Marxist philosophies of Lenin, Mao and Hoxha.....and for a moment got to play a man-made deity.
