Brother No. 2 ...

 

'Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.'

George Santayana

Another day in the pleasant and surprisingly cosmopolitan Siem Reap, another visit to the Helen Guesthouse and Cafe. It is a few blocks from where I am staying but worth the trip for the generous continental breakfast served there. I have made this something of a habit over the last week and have much enjoyed both the food and the pleasant ambience of the place. So far, this reflects my experience of Cambodia and Cambodians in general; they seem invariably polite, gentle and friendly. So strange that here, of all places, such an awful catastrophe took place not forty years ago.
My original intention in coming to this place was to enjoy several days surveying the massively impressive Angkor Wat, but in practice I have become more and more fascinated with the nature of the tragedy that took place in this land in the 1970s than the more ancient history of the Angkor civilization. The obvious thought, given the nature of the people, is that if such a thing can happen here it can happen essentially anywhere. Mankind can be cruel and violent, but the extremes that they will go to in the name of an ideal, in this case Marxism, are truly shocking. Any individual is capable of some very dark acts, but genocide on this scale needs organisation and a rationale, at least of sorts.
Strangely, many of those who perpetrated these crimes escaped punishment for years. Most actually died before having to face any kind of court. Perhaps the most famous besides Pol Pot himself, the notorious Nuon Chea, otherwise known as Brother No. 2, was only recently convicted (in 2014) for his crimes against humanity. He is still alive today, having been given a life sentence at the end of the trial. I personally have always been against capital punishment, but such people as Nuon Chea make me question my own judgement on the matter.

Until near the very end of his trial he was both in denial about his guilt and seemingly unrepentant, saying that the actions he took were for the good of his country. Watching videos of the man giving interviews in the years before the trial, one gets the impression of someone who, even now, feels the ends justified the means. One question dealt with the killing of innocent people, which clearly happened countless times during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and his response seemed to imply that it was OK to kill any number of people who may be innocent as long as you were sure to eliminate a possible threat amongst them.

Chea denied his links to actual killings until evidence emerged of his very direct involvement with the infamous S21 prison in the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The building formerly known as Tuol Svay Pray High School was co-opted by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and became a centre for the interrogation, torture  and elimination of those who the Khmer Rouge considered to be a threat. As the chaos of their economic mismanagement became more and more apparent (unbelievably, they actually chose to follow Mao’s model from ‘The Great Leap Forward’ - something that had already lead to millions of deaths and mass starvation), they looked for the explanation in paranoid fantasies about saboteurs, agents of the KGB and CIA and, finally, defectors from within the ranks of the Khmer Rouge itself.
There were, alas, painfully few eye witness accounts to go on. Of the thousands of people who were sent to S21 only a handful survived (7 out of 12,000 according to one estimate). Oft times, people were picked up on the flimsiest of suspicions. These people were then tortured and interrogated. Reading a transcript from a survivor, the interrogation seemed to consist of the interrogator making an accusation that the bemused and confused prisoner was a spy working for the CIA or the KGB and being tortured in the most crude way until he not only confessed but also named everyone he knew as co-conspirators in the plot. These people were then picked up and the same process repeated.

It didn’t matter to the Khmer Rouge if those named were children, they still tortured and murdered them much the same as anyone else. The images that survive of frightened and confused kids taken before their execution are harrowing to this day. Even the babies of accused mother’s were summarily executed. The extent and depth of evil perpetrated under the Marxist Khmer Rouge and their banal ideology is hard to believe.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/correspondent/transcripts/1874949.txt

When one hears the likes of Pol Pot or Nuon Chea elucidating their ideology one is struck by its similarities not only to the communism of Mao Tse Tung that had brought such calamity to China but also to the National Socialism of Adolf Hitler. There was a large element of racism added to the underlying communism and this proved a particularly toxic mix. They hated the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the native Cham muslims and basically, any foreigner or foreign influence. An odd corrolary to this is that Brother No.2 himself was actually at least a quarter Chinese. This is strikingly similar to the oft stated possibility that Hitler himself was part Jewish.
For such stark and ongoing evil to exist it really seems to take an idealist, one that believes that the utopian ends justifies the inhumane means. National Socialist Hitler dreamed of a Reich that would last a thousand years, Mao Tse Tung and Lenin thought they were guiding their countries down the road to a not too distant Marixist utopia, Pol Pot and Nuon Chea dreamed of an agrarian communist Cambodia free of outside influence. They all were responsible for some of the worst genocides experienced by man in the whole of human history. The lesson is to beware of the true believers, the idealists, those convinced of the desirability of their dream and perhaps particularly those who wish to shape society to what they feel it should be. All such systems involve coercion and force eventually, no matter how ‘good’ the leaders seem to appear beforehand, how righteous, how filled with passion to impove society.
They are the really dangerous ones.

Back at Helen’s the day has become a lot warmer now as I sit here contemplating just how terrible such people can be. If we are honest, I think we all have to acknowledge that each of us is capable of doing terrible things. Individuals do commit such acts all the time, but for evil on a such a vast scale as that produced in Cambodia, in China, in Russia and in Germany it takes a state and usually a state with an idealistic vision of how society, and the people within that society, should be.
Usually, when I write these blogs I do so with a certain amount of pleasure. The process of sitting in a cafe contemplating, researching and writing is almost always a pleasant one. With this particular blog the feeling is a whole lot more negative. There was much I didn’t include as the details are just too awful, too unpleasant, even too shocking to want to expose my readers to. At the end of the process I just felt angry, angry for what had happened, angry that people still advocate similar systems, angry that the whole thing could happen again.
One final thought that struck me: given the history of communism and the number of times it has lead to such abject behaviour and awful atrocities, one would have thought that by now the symbol of the hammer and sickle should be held in the same low regard as the swastika - it is hard to see why we should differentiate between these two totalitarian and violent systems given their very similar results.
Enough now, time to go out into the sunshine once more and forget, just for the time being at least, that there are still people gullible enough to want to repeat such historical mistakes and who thereby risk repeating the same mistakes in the future.

Heaven protect us from idealists!

Purification...

"Death is the solution to all problems - no man, no problem."
Joseph Stalin

Today I find myself enjoying the somewhat noisy pleasures of the Bon Cafe in Phnom Penh. The cafe itself is rather pleasant; the staff friendly; the Americano and home-made soda good; the building, French Colonial, interesting. The noise comes from more sources than I care to name, a hodge-podge of kids, drills, motorbikes and aircraft taking off at the nearby airport. Still, despite all this, I admit to being rather fond of the place. It has an old-world charm that was sadly lacking from the Cafe Amazon chain I visited earlier today.
Two days in Cambodia and the abiding impression so far is of a failing economy with little or no infrastructure to speak of. The intention is to fly down to Siem Reap next Saturday where, hopefully, the influx of tourist money will have created a more comfortable lifestyle for the locals. One cannot help but wonder if this country has ever recovered from the Communist revolution of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. As with most Communist revolutions, it led to repression, economic failure and genocide, perhaps it has the distinction though of achieving these in somewhat less time than its rivals for the prize.

Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, managed to oversee the elimination of some 200,000 people whilst a million more starved due to his economic policies. Reports say that he particularly held a strong dislike for ‘intellectuals’ (again a common problem for Communist systems it seems, could it be that the intelligensia of a country are that big a threat to those in charge of such states?). Weirdly,  Pol Pot even went so far as advocating the killing of people who wore glasses at one stage, this on the rather feeble grounds that it proved they must have read too many books!
Once he established the ‘Democratic Republic of Kampuchea’ Pol Pot decided that history needed to start again and declared year zero before ‘purifying’ society. What this meant in practice is getting rid of anyone he even vaguely disapproved of. This was rather a long list: anyone following a religion, city dwellers, foreigners, the aforementioned ‘intellectuals’, etc.
(Odd how Communist despots seem so fond of  including such words as ‘Democratic’ and ‘Republic’ into the names of their country, usually when democratic is one thing they are not and some after effectively assuming King-like hereditary powers, such as the Kim family in North Korea)

All businesses were closed, schools and universities shut down, the mail and the phone system halted, health care stopped and any foreign economic or medical assistance prohibited. One can imagine the chaos that immediately ensued. Phnom Penh in particular suffered when the entire population was forced to leave for labour camps where they were to be ‘re-educated’ (The Communists do seem to have a particularly chilling knack when it comes to creation of euphemisms, do they not? Purifying and re-education are impressive for their creativity yet chilling for their reality).
Much to China’s ongoing shame in these matters, they were one of the few countries to offer support to Pol Pot. This continued even after they were well aware of what was going on on the ground.
Personally, seeing the state of the streets around me, I cannot help but wonder if this country has ever really recovered from those terrible times four decades ago. As the Soviets and the Communists in China discovered, if you eliminate the talented, the intelligent and the qualified from common affairs you eliminate much of what keeps a country civilised. In all three cases mass starvation and economic chaos followed.
On the positive side (!), one has to admit that a certain degree of the cherished ‘equality’ (another euphemism!) was achieved. The people were equally starving, equally suffering, equally terrified. I think I prefer a little old-fashioned inequality myself.

Friends ask me why, over the last few years, I have made a journey from being broadly left-wing in outlook to being virulently against such system. In a word: travel. Go and see these systems first hand, or at least the results of them. Read up on the realities of the atrocities, the brutality, the smothering of the individuals within these ill-begotten places but, most of all, visit them if you can. Any notion of the righteousness of Communist or left-wing dogma in general will soon be left far behind as the bitter reality is revealed in all its naked horror.
Back in the cafe I find myself alone as the light starts to fade. Sometimes the writing of these things takes a while as one searches for inspiration. Sometimes they write themselves. This has been one of the latter. The boy who served me originally smiles down patiently at me. The people here seem quite remarkably freindly, despite the horrors of their recent past and the suffering of today. One cannot help but like them.

No Marx out of ten....

"If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist."

Karl Marx

My last week in China, at least for the foreseeable future, and it seems to be an unhappy combination of cold, frequent wet spells and poor air quality. It can be very beautiful here at times, certainly there are many really quite incredible and visually stunning places to visit which can be a wonderful experience if... if the local area is not continuously swathed in a thick and sickly cloud of smog. I was told recently that the city of Zuzhou is an interesting place to see. I spent five days there two years ago and in the whole time was not able to see more than a couple of hundred metres. China could and should be beautiful, but they really need to get their act together as far as pollution goes or fewer and fewer people will want to come (not to mention the effects on the resident population).
I am back in the Cochan today, for the simple reason of the enforcement of the smoking ban in this particular establishment. Tis bad enough that one has to spend every moment of one’s outdoor existence breathing in the smog, not to wish to add to that sad state of affairs by inhaling in the more or less ubiquitous cigarette smoke in the cafes and restaurants here in China.
To be fair, in the five years I have been coming back to China, much progress has been made in many areas. The infrastructure constantly improves, the standard of driving, although awful by any objective standard, is considerably better than when I first came, the generally cleanliness of facilities just keeps getting improving year on year. On pollution though, despite the odd proclamation of intent by the Government, the reality is that it is still as bad as ever, if not worse.
Economically though, it has to be admitted, things are going well. In fact, it would seem evident that they have been going well for something like forty years now. The key event that seems to have allowed this progress to be made was the demise of the much admired Mao Tse Tung and the re-arising of Deng Xiao Ping. With Mao out of the way, Deng was free to turn his back on the truly awful failed economics of Marxism and embrace the dynamism of the free market.
The various Marxist experiments of the Maoists had wreaked huge havoc upon China for nigh on thirty years before Deng took control. True, there was a certain equality but, as some wit put it, though Capitalism may lead to an uneven distribution of wealth, Socialism tends to lead to an even distribution of poverty!

For some strange reason, in a time when dead white men are much decried, especially in the universities of the US and the UK, one dead white man remains sacrosanct. Karl Marx and his political and economic prognostications have arguably been responsible for more death and destruction, more violence and totalitarianism, than any other thought system that the human race has so far produced. Yet, very oddly, he seems to be the one thinker that remains almost immune to criticism, despite the results of his thinking and despite his own, rather sordid personal example (To give just one instance: he routinely cheated on his wife and managed to foster his own illegitimate offspring via coupling with the housemaid on his hapless friend, Friedrich Engels).

Marx’ predictions in relation to the rise of the proletariat invariably proved mistaken. Any revolutions that took place were invariably lead by intellectuals or other members of the bourgeoisie. The historical overhaul of Capitalism never took place (although, of course, history never ends whilst we still have a human race to experience and record it). The free markets, far from collapsing, went on to take over the World.
Also the notion of centralised control of prices and wages has proven to be horrendously flawed, implying as it does the threat of force. It stands in opposition to Adam Smith's ideas about the free market, as expressed in The Wealth Of Nations, where all transactions are essentially a negotiation between a buyer and a seller. If the two do not agree that the price is right for them then they do not transact - in this sense it is an expression of the freedom of choice of the two parties involved and would seem, in that way as least, a far pleasanter way to conduct human affairs and commerce than the coercion inherent within Marxism.

Marx’ racism is also, rather strangely, completely overlooked. For example, he referred to the half Creole husband of his niece as “a gorilla offspring.” Although of rabbinical descent himself, he was also an anti-semite of fearsome proportions. He even wrote a book with the blatant title World without Jews. Some even consider it to be the precedent for another eminent’s anti-semite contribution; ‘Mein Kampf’. (Rather oddly, it has been advanced that Hitler himself may also have had Jewish ancestry). He seems to have considered Asians to have been something of a sub-culture too, being, in his view, incapable of proper development without the assistance of European imperialism. The list goes on and on, but these few examples should suffice.

Marx’s views on slavery in the US also seem rather abhorrent from today’s perspective. A direct quote is perhaps the best way to demonstrate this point: “Without slavery, North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world and you will have anarchy, the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Abolish slavery and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”
All very strange, but really hardly surprising considering just how much Marx managed to get wrong in his analysis and approach to a political and economic philosophy. With some justification, many have criticised Marxism as essentially envy dressed up in fine rhetoric. Although perhaps not completely fair, there is at least some merit to this view. His notion that all property should, essentially, belong to ‘the state’ is perhaps one of the clearest indications of the attitude. Again I quote, this time from the communist manifesto co-authored by Marx in 1844: “The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.”
Exactly what gives the Marxist state the right to own the property of private individuals is another matter. When such approaches have been tried, such as in Soviet Russia and Communist China, great suffering ensued in the first stages, transferring property from the capable to the incapable, followed by huge economic mismanagement of the transferred resources in the second, usually leading to mass starvation.

One could go on and on with this stuff, the list of Marxian unpleasantness is long and damning, but the examples I have given up to now should be clear enough. Karl Heinrich Marx was not a pleasant man, either in his political philosophy or in his private life. The attitudes he possessed to women, racial groups, slavery and even people themselves were pretty abhorrent at the time; with the benefit of hindsight (the kind of mayhem that we now know his views lead to) they are even more so.
Tis strange indeed, that such an obnoxious and odious figure should somehow retain a hero’s status to left-wing thinkers who purport to have a strong distaste for racism, misogyny and slavery but, que sera...at times the World will live in does seem to be both mad and, unfortunately, getter madder by the day!
Oh well, twas a nice rant while it lasted. Time to wrap up in scarf and wooly hat and once more brave the endless pollution of the streets of Dongguan. Hopefully, if all goes well, maybe a somewhat less intense rant will follow from the warmer climes of Cambodia next week.