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Tuol Sleng: Horror on Earth
I’m trying to comprehend
Tuol Sleng (s.21) prison and the killing fields of Phnom Penh - Khmer Rouge
horror. How do you comprehend such an enormous atrocity? How do we, as
sheltered-safe-westerners, begin to put into perspective the horror? Even now,
after seeing the mind-poisoning pictures, sitting in the closet-like cells,
touching the rusted shackles, listening (barely breathing) during the stories, a
sceptical voice quietly says inside me, "this can't be real". Yet I know it is.
I'll attempt to address that scepticism now; it's difficult to figure out the
roots of this scepticism. The key to human sanity is often denial, especially in
the face of gross vulgarity. We turn to denial often in self-defence, when
we hear bad news, our first response is to say, "no". We see an old Woman
begging on the street we turn our face and she disappears. Life beats us
down and we turn to a pillow for dreams and unconscious escape.
Unfortunately I cannot deny s.21's existence, I touched the blood stained
floors; I cannot deny the Killing Fields dusty, bloody reality: I saw the barren
shallow graves.
I believe at one point Pol Pot, Brother One, Leader of the Khmer Rouge,
orchestrate of the evil, had a beautiful Ideology for the Khmer People. He
must've believed thoroughly Maoist teachings that the road he was to take these
wonderful people on was a higher road - a simple Agrarian way of Life. Bringing
his people out of the chaotic ways of the mid 70's the world was traveling to;
away from a fast paced, ever-accelerating, ever moral decaying world. He
would return his people to a quiet simple life of the land and of strict moral
values; instill uneducated ignorant bliss. Ironic that we in this modern dog eat
dog western world can see a certain amount of merit to such a journey of
simplicity. How many of our friends have abandoned the big city for the
peace and tranquility of a natural small town? Dreams and reality couldn’t have
been more polar.
Then Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge disciples went all wrong - The killing fields'
ghostly voices echoing just how extreme that wrong was. The blood stains,
25 years old now, in Tuol Sleng prison still scream out loudly and coherently
with the terror of enforced errant ideologies.
S.21: a former high school turned prison, torture chamber, confessional and
hell. The Killing Fields: the merciless end to an individuals' s21 story,
or was it merciful. A complete statement of the darkest of the darkest side of
human beings. It bears witness to a time when all our inner voices that
whisper do kindness, do right, that's wrong, give sympathy, be moral and give
goodness cease to be heard. When another human being's screams becomes
testament to a job well done, and ending human life becomes a business where
success is judged on the low costs of execution we are at our moral lowest -
do not waste bullets on the enemies of the revolution comrade, too expensive.
I harbour, deep in my soul a belief that I would never succumb to the muteness
of my respected inner voices. Isn't that arrogant of me? To climb on my
moral high horse, I cannot know what these people have been through, on both
sides, and I cannot brag to you now that I would've never taken the life of or
hurt or another - I only cling to it, to be optimistic in myself and other human
beings, because... to think otherwise is crushing. Only look to Vietnam to see
how morally-correct Western Soldiers acted under duress. Moral high ground is
not the real estate human beings find themselves in when situations are as
desperate as the Khmers people’s stories.
I take home this: we are all human animals, huddled together on this planet, and
we human animals have work to do. We have lessons to learn and development
as a race to continue. Only when we don't need moral laws enforced,
when we don't need reminders of the acts of s.21 and other lesser evils are
intolerable under any circumstance - only then do we know we have evolved.
If the final voice we hear in all of us is our inner voice of good: never
quieted, never tempered, but constantly pointing us to that moral true north and
we follow it unquestionably then what a wonderful world we will have evolved to.
Imagine.
A bit of a different update from me, but South East Asia is not all about rice
paddies, beautiful beaches and lovely people. It’s about a people's worst
moments that in the end make the people of Cambodia and all of Asia less
pristine but more like all of us - human.
Greg's painting of S.21:
Cambodian Horror
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