Leadership Quote by Sydney Schanberg

Inevitability is doing a lot of work here: Schanberg frames Pol Pot's fall not as a twist of history but as the natural endpoint of a regime built on fear, purges, and internal suspicion. Coming from a journalist who reported firsthand on Cambodia's catastrophe, the line has the cool distance of someone refusing melodrama. It's not moral absolution; it's a diagnostic.

The phrasing "from a distance" is an ethical tell. Schanberg signals both the limits and the burdens of retrospection: he is wary of the false omniscience that can creep in once the violence is safely in the past. Yet that distance also lets him make a structural claim. Totalitarian movements that feed on secrecy and loyalty tests eventually turn inward. When he says Pol Pot's "own paranoia did him in", he's offering a grimly elegant causality: the same machinery that enabled terror also corrodes leadership. Paranoia isn't a personality quirk here; it's a governing principle that produces isolation, bad intelligence, and preemptive violence against perceived rivals.

There's also a subtle rebuke embedded in "as much as anything else". It denies the comforting story that villains are defeated primarily by external heroism. In Cambodia, geopolitics mattered - Vietnam's intervention, Cold War maneuvering, the Khmer Rouge's post-1979 survival in the borderlands - but Schanberg insists on the self-destructive logic of the project itself. The line works because it refuses spectacle and instead points to the banal, lethal feedback loop of power: rule by terror eventually makes even the ruler ungovernable.