Been trying to stay off the Internet for awhile but got absorbed in sections of the Guardian this weekend, in particular this piece on a murder in Cambodia in the dying days of the Pol Pot era. It gave me the shivers at some points and brings out the lunacy and evil of governments based on ideology. Though by any standards, the Pol Pot regime seems unrivalled in its insanity and cruelty. Also pertinent points at the end on the need to still cling to the ideas that formed the beginnings of some of these regimes.
great article. vivek and i went to the tuol sleng musuem, where one of those 7 western visitors, a swede has exhibited his photos from his visit during the pol pot years... his photos show smiling women in the khmer rouge costume of black pants and shirt with a checkered scarf working in the rice fields, in hospitals, children in classrooms at schools - along with comments from then and now. then he wonders how they could look so happy if it were true that they were being starved so cambodia could export rice, that children were also forced to work in the fields, that people from phnom penh were driven out and all intelligentsia were killed since the khmer rouge wanted an agrarian country with no cities...now of course he realises that it was all staged and feels guilty for being part of the pr machinery of the regime then. the place was really really shocking - the entire genocide museum's first building is just faces of all those executed or tortured at S21(they converted a school into the tuol sleng/ S21 prison btw!)... in a bizarre way, pictures of those people taken just before they were led to be killed were even more shocking than the killing fields themselves at cheong ek...
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