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The Absurd Double Life:

Professor Saloth was the leader of Cambodia's underground Communist party, and spent every day after class actively plotting the Communist takeover of his country. After his government started cracking down on Communists, Saloth disappeared into the jungle and became a guerrilla leader for a group known as Khmer Rouge. He then changed his name to Pol Pot in preparation of his graduation to the upper echelon of history's greatest monsters.

The former professor began surrounding himself with layers of mystery and secrecy. He cut ties with everyone in his former life and actually used a stand-in to pose as the leader of his rebel group. Pol Pot's army stormed the capital in 1975, but his rule got pretty dark pretty fast. He immediately death-marched the entire population of Phnom Penh into the countryside, turned the national library into a literal pigsty (perhaps because of years of built-up resentment after working as a literature professor), and then executed about 2 million Cambodians, a full quarter of the country's population. That's right -- Professor Saloth went from teaching Cambodian students about The Three Musketeers to murdering one out of every four people in the country. And he had been so careful about concealing his identity that no one had any idea who was responsible.

Romanian National Archives

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Pol was especially concerned with killing all of Cambodia's academics, eventually getting to the Kafkaesque point of macabre wackiness that people were executed just for wearing glasses. He also threw his entire family in a concentration camp -- and they were completely unaware that their supposedly long-dead relative was actually the genocidal dictator of their corpse-strewn country.

So the lesson here is, if your teacher suddenly starts missing a lot of school, they're either wrestling the Undertaker on Monday Night Raw or plotting the extermination of half the country.

You know who else was doing some amazing moonlighting? Audrey Hepburn, who was a spy for the Allies in World War 2. And there was Billy Tipton, the famous jazz musician who was biologically a woman. See that and more in 11 Celebrities Who Were Secretly Total Badasses and The 6 Biggest Badasses Who Lived As The Opposite Sex.

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Check out Robert Evans' A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time.