💾 Archived View for the-brannons.com › cambodia captured on 2024-12-17 at 09:48:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I wrote this a bit less than two weeks after the 2024 election. It went up on blog.the-brannons.com. I wasn't active in geminispace at the time, so it didn't end up here. Now is just as good a time as any to post it.
I’m going to put on my prophet’s hat for a moment.
I think that if everything does not fall apart before 2028, we will have elections. But I also think there’s a pretty good chance that things will fall apart. That cold civil war we’ve been fighting since April 14 of 1865 might very well turn hot before 2028.
I’ve been reading Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor. Essentially this is a memoir of life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
Thus far, I’ve had a few take-aways.
It is easy, and I mean super fucking easy, for one’s humanity to be stripped away. I generally have an optimistic view of human nature. But take a person and put them in hellish conditions, and oftentimes you will see the bestial aspects of human nature appear in short order. It’s not that humans are evil. We’re fragile.
Do read Ngor’s book, because he makes this whole human fragility point well and clearly. For that matter, I’ve read some memoirs of World War II concentration camp survivors and they make the same point. Anyway reading Ngor has me really rattled right now. So much so that I’m barely coherent.
Another take-away from Ngor is just how fucking quickly a place can turn from relatively normal to hell on earth. I say relatively because pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia had its share of problems, including a military dictatorship under General Lon Nol, following a coup against Prince Sihanouk. Oh, and it was also getting bombed by the USA during the Vietnam War. But compared to the hell instigated by the Khmer Rouge, it must’ve been paradise.
I can hope that if we do have a civil war here in the US, it won’t be anything like what happened in the Cambodian killing fields.
After all, there is an aspect of Cambodian culture that directly contributed to the situation. Here’s Ngor:
All that beauty and serenity was visible to the eye. But inside, hidden from sight the entire time, was kum. Kum is a Cambodian word for a particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge – to be precise, a long-standing grudge leading to revenge much more damaging than the original injury. If I hit you with my fist and you wait five years and then shoot me in the back one dark night, that is kum. Or if a government official steals a peasant’s chickens and the peasant uses it as an excuse to attack a government garrison, like the one in my village, that is kum. Cambodians know all about kum. It is the infection that grows on our national soul.
And here’s Ngor again, many pages later, telling us about the "Communism" of the Khmer Rouge:
I said, 'But you make a mistake if you think the communists control their own revolution. Look at all the confusion when everybody had to leave Phnom Penh. All the unnecessary suffering, like the patients having to leave the hospitals. That costs the Khmer Rouge popular support. So does the lying. I tell you, the people at the top of the Khmer Rouge, like Khieu Samphan, are highly educated, but the people under them cannot even read and write. They don’t know where their revolution is going. They don’t even know they are communists.'
'Of course they do.'
'No they don’t,' I said flatly. 'When have you ever heard them mention the word "communist"?'
'That’s true,' said the paediatrician after a moment’s thought. 'But then what are they?'
‘ Kum-monuss ,’ I said, and they all laughed. It was a play on words: kum, a long-standing grudge that finally explodes in disproportionate revenge, and monuss, meaning people. 'That’s what they are at the lower level,' I said, ‘ "revenge-people." ’ All they know is that city people like us used to lord it over them and this is their chance to get back. That’s what they are, communist at the top and kum-monuss at the bottom.’
I have the impression that the inequality in pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia was at levels that my readers and I could barely fathom. Here’s Ngor once more:
The purpose of our outing was to gather wild foods. In Cambodia we have a humorous saying about food: 'Eat anything with two legs except a ladder, anything with four legs except a table, and anything that flies except an airplane.' The point is that when you live off the land you cannot be particular. The Cambodian peasants, who are geniuses at living off the land, sometimes eat termites for protein, though there are many other foods they prefer. Until the rains came – the rains arrived later in Battambang than in eastern Cambodia – there were no termites above ground anyway.
The mention of peasants who were geniuses at living off the land is, of course, a reference to the living situation of pre-Khmer Rouge peasants. At this point, Ngor – who was relatively well-off before 1975 – has been forced to adopt some of the survival strategies of those pre-Khmer Rouge peasants.
The USA isn’t Cambodia. But I’m sure we could make our very own hell.