Holiday in Cambodia

… It’s tough, kid, but it’s life …

Some time has passed since the album of the Dead Kennedys came out and not much noticeable remains of the Khmer Rouge era. The mine victims playing music in front of the temples in Angkor or begging on the beach in Sihanoukville recall of the many unmarked minefields; the shocking images in S-21 prison are reminders like the stacked skulls at the Killing Field. I notice that there are damn few people my age. All the more children…

It is inconceivable what madness the idea of a liberated humanity can mutate into by way of Mao: while Marx at least conceded to the bourgeoisie that he had torn humanity out of the idiocy of rural life (sorry to all rural commune romantics), Pol Pot wanted to build the ideal peasant society and therefore forced all city dwellers to slave away in the fields to “learn to work”. Phnom Penh became a ghost town, intellectuals and academics (it was enough to wear glasses) were killed just like the pillars of the old society. And ultimately, on suspicion, also their own cadres – often in a cruel, ammunition-saving way. There was mass torture and rape and the food rations were tiny because the rice produced was used to buy weapons from China….

The original struggle for equality of pleasures for all individuals turned into total egalitarianism and uniformity and the struggle against all pleasures. At the same time, the mania to expand the country to the size of the historical Khmer Empire inevitably led to war with socialist Vietnam … (and already 1000 years ago China was allied with the Khmer in war against a kingdom in central Vietnam …). The Vietnamese soldiers eventually put an end to the spook, but in the meantime about 2 million have died from starvation or murder – about 1/4 of the population! (Of course, the numbers tell you nothing, just the horrible individual details). Socialist China, which had supported the Khmer Rouge, later invaded socialist Vietnam to “teach a lesson”. And in Cambodia’s hinterland, the Khmer Rouge continue to fight for some years, armed by China and Thailand (and indirectly the US), who in turn want to limit Vietnam’s influence by doing so … History is sometimes complicated and usually bloody!


Read on