BIG BROTHER 1975
I was reading Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize book A Problem From Hell. The chapter on Cambodia is really quite chilling. The fact that any chapter in a book about genocide can be more chilling than the others is something! According to the book*, life under the Khmer Rouge (1975-79) entailed:

-Citizens could not move. Travel passes were required even to cross town. Cities were evacuated at gunpoint.

-They could not learn what they chose. Only KR [Khmer Rouge] tracts were permitted. Libraries were ravaged. And speaking foreign-languages signaled 'contamination' and earned many who dared to do so a death sentence.

-They could not reminisce. [!!!] Memories of the past life were banned. Familles were separated. Children were 're-educated' and induced to inform on parents who might be attempting to mask their 'bourgeois' pasts. 'Cambodia,' a colonial term, was replaced by 'Democratic Kampuchea.'

-'They could not flirt. Only Angkar [term meaning roughly The System] could authorize sexual relations. The pairings for weddings were announced en masse at the commune assemblies.

-They could not pray. Chapels and temples were pillaged. Devout Muslims were often forced to eat pork. Buddhist monks were defrocked, their pagodas converted into grain silons.

-They could not own private property. All money and property were abolished. The national bank was blown up. Radios, televisions, telephones, cars and books gathered in the central squares were burned.

-And they could not make contact with the outside world. Foreign embassies were closed; telephone, telegraph and mail service suspended.

Incidentally, reports of such atrocities were rubbished at the time by many prominent figures on the left including Noam Chomsky (who I'm not a huge fan of, even if he occassionally makes cogent observations). At the time, they assumed that such reports were the sort of anti-communist propaganda so thoroughly discredited by the Vietnam-era lying. I guess this is an example of why it's important not to sacrifice your principles at the altar of your ideology.

*-A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power, 2002, paperback version, pp. 117-118.