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!