Pol Pot..

Another such ‘genius’ was pol pot..



Saloth Sar, best known as Pol Pot was the leader of the communist movement called Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Cambodia.
He initially won a scholarship to study in France, but was forced to return to Cambodia after he successively failed in his exams for three years.. However, he sure must’ve passed his history exams, as he was apparently a history-buff. This can be seen in the gr8 idea he had..


THE IDEA:

He intended to relocate the whole of the city-dwelling population into the countryside. He conceived ‘restarting of the civilization’ in the ‘year zero’.. he started a version of land-reform, in which he reorganized peasant villages into cooperatives where all the lands were of a uniform size and collectively owned.

He had a freak notion that intellectuals were a threat to the society and hence ordered the execution of all the educated people, govt employees and anybody who appeared to be an intellectual. And by intellectuals, he meant all the people who wore glasses!! (and those were times when contact lenses hadn’t been invented)

THE RESULT:

During his regime, the combined effect of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions had an estimated death toll from 750,000 to 1.7 million people all over Cambodia.

mad ideas can ruin lives....

AND if any powerful person wielding influence over large groups of people gets these mad ideas….they can take lives....millions of them!!



MAO Zedong.
was a Chinese military and political leader, who led the Communist Party of China and was the leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. now this man is still highly venerated by the Chinese for being a gr8 revolutionary and strategist. He dreamed of transforming the country into a major power through his policies.

But then..he had this idea..which gave him the honour of being the first instance in my blog to perceive the effects of mad ideas..

The idea:
Mao wanted to revolutionize the agriculture and steel industry in china. He ordered all the small , privately owned farms to be grouped under collective ownership and ordered the implementation of a variety of unproven and unscientific new agricultural techniques.

Result: as labour was also diverted into the production of steel, there was a steady drop in the agricultural produce. but scared of their superiors, every level in the party hierarchy exaggerated the amount of grain produced under them. So the state officials ordered grain to be exported!.. The net result was that the rural peasants were not left enough to eat and many millions starved to death in what is thought to be the largest famine in human history.

Also, he initiated the small-scale production of iron and steel. This led people to melt down all the pots and pans and furniture in their houses to get the required metal. Although the steel quotas were officially reached, almost all of it made in the countryside was useless lumps of iron, as it had been made from assorted scrap metal in home made furnaces with no reliable source of fuel.

So what he intended to be a “great leap forward” ended in a catastrophe, exemplifying the effects of a mad idea!!