Year Zero (political notion)

Summary

Year Zero was an idea put into practice by Pol Pot in Democratic Kampuchea that all cultures and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and a new "revolutionary" culture must replace it, starting from scratch. In this sense, all of the history of the nation or the lives of all of the people before "Year Zero" would largely be deemed irrelevant, because it would ideally be purged and replaced from the ground up in a way which is similar to the way in which North Korean re-education camps are operated by the government of the Kims.