DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: How we forgot about Pol Pot.
In 1975, the ancient monarchy of Cambodia was roiled by the troubles shaking all of Indochina. Vietnam was at the end of its long war for independence, led by the communist Viet Cong. The USA was bombing, often with bestial inaccuracy, Vietnam’s neighbours like Laos and Cambodia (used as supply lines by the VC). Cambodia was thus semi-involved in the war.
[In 1975], a groupuscule of Paris-educated Cambodian ultra-Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, was rising to power. They started by radicalising and arming the peasantry, firing them with violent passion. Eventually they seized the capital (that terrible day witnessed by Roland Neveu). They then set about enforcing their crazed belief in an agrarian paradise, with everyone labouring like oxen in the rice-fields. A Maoist autarky. A place without money (they literally blew up the national bank, scattering now-worthless banknotes into the jacaranda trees). A place without religion, hierarchy, social class, intellectuals.
To do this, they killed all the middle classes. Everyone. If you had an education, you were killed. If you spoke a foreign language, you were killed. If you were a monk, a teacher, a lawyer, you were killed. People wearing spectacles were killed. Anyone who could dance was killed; ancient and exquisite Cambodian dance was a tradition handed on orally and practically – this meant that the nation of Cambodia forgot how to dance.
When the KR ran out of obvious bourgeoisie to kill, they killed each other. For any reason. People caught with snails in their pockets were killed. People were killed for having sex, or being happy, or laughing. In the end it is estimated the Khmer Rouge slaughtered about 2-3 million people in a population of 8 million. Cambodia is the nation that crucified itself.
Why? Why was this regime so mad? This is the question many have asked. After this latest visit, finally going to Choeung Ek, I think I perhaps have an answer. In his fine, troubling book – The Elimination – about his interviews with Duch, Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh quotes Duch saying that in his world ‘there is no place for the individual’, and ‘beauty is an obstacle’.
This is important because it reveals the insane yet inexorable logic of the Khmer Rouge. If Marxism means enforced equality, its ultimate endpoint is this. Individuals cannot be ‘allowed’ as they might be ‘different’, they might laugh or be happy, unlike others. Beauty – physical, artistic, sexual, spiritual, intellectual – must likewise be ruthlessly extinguished, because it too prevents a Marxist Utopia. Beauty is unfair. It must be eliminated.
Does this matter? Yes, because we live in a time when kids think Marxism is cool again. When self-confessed Marxist Jeremy Corbyn is seen as an amusing old uncle.
“Cambodian genocide denial” has its own Wikipedia page; not least of which was practiced by Noam Chomsky in the 1970s.