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July 16, 2001
I've been reading a bit
I've been reading a bit today about Cambodia and the massacres of 1975-79. Just the beginning part so far, but it was worse than I thought. I'd never before heard the real impact of the American bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973. Aimed at hitting villages that allegedly harbored "communists", American planes in effect levelled entire communities, killing children, destroying lives and property, and putting a huge propaganda weapon in the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The KR themselves started out as a diverse group. In 1969 Pol Pot was a comparatively minor figure in the Cambodian rebel hierarchy; the leaders were mostly Vietnamese-trained, educated in traditional Buddhist schools, and from a rural background. Pol Pot was the opposite of this; he was educated in France and had a deep hostility towards the Vietnamese and, indeed, every ethnic group except his own Khmers.
It turns out that Pol Pot's massacres were in quite different character than what I had supposed. For starters, racism was a major part. Twenty percent of Cambodia's population in 1975 was made up of ethnic minorities - mostly Vietnamese, but some Laotian and Thai as well. These were singled out for especially brutal treatment. Indeed, in many ways Pol Pot's ideology was almost the exact opposite of classical Marxism. Marx believed in the inevitability of historical progression; Pol Pot believing in rolling back time, of returning to the time of the medieval Angkor kingdom. Marx believed in the unity of the proletariat around the world; Pol Pot believed only in his Khmer people. Marx believed that technology would eventually lead to a workers' revolution; Pol Pot wanted nothing to do with technology (except, of course, military technology) but only wanted to return to a mythical, autarkic past.
Why am I so fascinated with genocide? I watch Holocaust movies compulsively (Judgment at Nuremberg was on TV this weekend), I have obsessed for years about the 1994 Rwanda massacres. I suppose something in me is fascinated by cruelty, as if I want to horrify myself with the utmost depravity the human soul is capable of.
I'd also read a bit of an academic book that attempts to explain the causes of the mass participation in the Rwanda massacre of 1994. How could ordinary people, farmers, merchants, teachers, clergy, even children willingly participate in brutal murders, sometimes of their own neighbors, friends, even spouses? The book goes into history on that. Along the way it points out some facts I didn't know. In 1904, for instance, German troops in Namibia (then called South West Africa) massacred the Herero people who refused to accept their rule. The Herero were wiped out; genocide. A precursor to the Holocaust.
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Posted by Tyrone at July 16, 2001 12:02 AM