Khmer Rouge Killing Intellectuals

SternAAlbifrons · Post by **SternAAlbifrons** » Sun Sep 06, 2020 10:49 pm

bong.kuit wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 10:05 pm
SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 2:35 am For a thousand years the God-kings did not want Khmers to develop logic or think for themselves.
The KR did not want people who had the ability to critically think.

"Thank the stars things are all different now"
Following your statement, how do you explain a highly sophisticated project like the "hydraulic city" Angkor?

I should have said "almost 1000 years".
Achievements seem to have halted about then. Immediately post Angkor - the start of Cambodias long "Dark Age"

amatuertrader · Post by **amatuertrader** » Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:11 pm

SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:47 am
The Khmer Rouge leaders were the very definition of the Cambodian “Intelligentsia” (Intellectuals or highly educated people as a group, especially when regarded as possessing culture and political Influence)

Comrade Duch of S-21 can still quote Balzac and Alfred De Vigny and it would not surprise me if he were able to beat the majority of the members of this forum on a Physics exam. I’d also bet that Ieng Thirith who was the minister of Social affairs could quote more Shakespeare than most members of this forum.

The history of Cambodia that has been presented in news articles has been disingenuous. The casual visitor to Cambodia or reader of a BBC article will often assume that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were illiterate peasants targeting the Intellectuals. They were not. They were the intellectuals of their time, the professors and educators of the country.

A prime example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399 “Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed.”

“Duch’s teacher at the National Institute of Pedagogy in Phnom Penh, Duch joined the revolution as part of what he identified as a group of intellectuals. Indeed, many of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, including Pol Pot, were intellectuals who had been teachers.” - The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer by Alexander Hinton

Maybe you smart guys have already explained this but I still don't understand this part:
If Duch was well educated, what explains his cold blooded brutal atrocities?
He was even torturing and killing little kids, hardly any threat to his utopian ideals.
That's just plain insanity.
It's easy to compare to Hilter killing little jews, but his excuse was they would grow up into big jews.
Couldn't those little Cambodian kids be simply shown how to be farmers and not be allowed to grow up to be teachers?
Why did he have to kill them?

SternAAlbifrons · Post by **SternAAlbifrons** » Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:45 pm

amatuertrader wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:11 pm Maybe you smart guys have already explained this but I still don't understand this part:
If Duch was well educated, what explains his cold blooded brutal atrocities?
He was even torturing and killing little kids, hardly any threat to his utopian ideals.
That's just plain insanity.
It's easy to compare to Hilter killing little jews, but his excuse was they would grow up into big jews.
Couldn't those little Cambodian kids be simply shown how to be farmers and not be allowed to grow up to be teachers?
Why did he have to kill them?

"smart guys"??
We are all just stumbling around trying to make sense of it too.
Sharing views, sharing tit-bits of clues, odd scraps of random fact that might shine some light - for ourselves and for those who are tuning in.

The kids Duch killed were the kids of his particular prisoners - and as JB pointed out previously, the prisoners at Toul Sleng were almost all KR who were accused of being conspirators against the revolution. Hence those little kids could grow up to be big conspirators. Similar to the german/jews thing.
I am not aware that children were killed as a matter of course in other situations. The "new people's" kids, eg, were just separated from their parents and taught the ideals of the revolution. Generally.

But it was a form of insanity for sure - He tortured the prisoners to write out confessions of conspiracy that he himself composed, or shaped. That was supposed to prove the revolution was in clear and present danger.
This wound-up cycle of manufactured paranoia caused the revolution to self destruct in just 5 years.

(nb, not stated as fact, IMO only, caveat emptor, 'just stumblin' around too. as always)

John Bingham · Post by **John Bingham** » Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:50 pm

Children were incarcerated with their parents and executed, but I never heard of any suggestion that they were tortured. Killing entire families and extinguishing blood-lines seems to be a common undercurrent in wars.
Even the popular folk tale Tum Teav, which is a favorite among children here, brings up local concepts of revenge:

Tum gets drunk, announces he is Teav's husband and kisses her in public. Enraged, Archoun commands his guards to kill Tum, who is beaten to death under a Bo tree. Grief-stricken, Teav slits her own throat and collapses on Tum's body. When Rama hears of the murder, he descends upon Archoun's palace, ignores the governor's pleas for mercy, and orders Archoun's entire family—including seven generations worth of relatives—be taken to a field and buried to their necks. An iron plow and harrow are then used to decapitate them all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tum_Teav

The Division 703 guards at S21 and other Khmer Rouge detention centers were mostly very young themselves, they lived in constant terror, sleep and food deprivation. A huge proportion of them ended up as prisoners for minor infractions and were consequently executed.

amatuertrader · Post by **amatuertrader** » Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:02 am

A heartbreaking but interesting first hand account. (one page article)

Worms from Our Skin
TEEDA BUTT MAM

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes ... ml?mcubz=1

John Bingham · Post by **John Bingham** » Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:13 am

These two studies go a log way in explaining the apparent contradiction in how such seemingly placid and friendly people can act in extremely violent ways in certain circumstances:

To outsiders, and often to ourselves, Cambodia looked peaceful enough. The farmers bound to their planting cycles. Fisherman living on their boats.. .. The wide boulevards and the flowering trees of our national capital, Phnom Penh. All that beauty and serenity was visible to the eye. But inside, hidden fromsight 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... .
Cambodians know all about kum.
It is the infection that grows on our national soul.
Haing Ngor

https://www.academia.edu/5661565/Why_Di ... f_Genocide

https://www.academia.edu/5661563/A_Head ... n_Genocide

bong.kuit · Post by **bong.kuit** » Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:29 am

amatuertrader wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:11 pm
SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2020 7:47 am
The Khmer Rouge leaders were the very definition of the Cambodian “Intelligentsia” (Intellectuals or highly educated people as a group, especially when regarded as possessing culture and political Influence)

Comrade Duch of S-21 can still quote Balzac and Alfred De Vigny and it would not surprise me if he were able to beat the majority of the members of this forum on a Physics exam. I’d also bet that Ieng Thirith who was the minister of Social affairs could quote more Shakespeare than most members of this forum.

The history of Cambodia that has been presented in news articles has been disingenuous. The casual visitor to Cambodia or reader of a BBC article will often assume that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were illiterate peasants targeting the Intellectuals. They were not. They were the intellectuals of their time, the professors and educators of the country.

A prime example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399 “Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed.”

“Duch’s teacher at the National Institute of Pedagogy in Phnom Penh, Duch joined the revolution as part of what he identified as a group of intellectuals. Indeed, many of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, including Pol Pot, were intellectuals who had been teachers.” - The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer by Alexander Hinton
Maybe you smart guys have already explained this but I still don't understand this part:
If Duch was well educated, what explains his cold blooded brutal atrocities?
He was even torturing and killing little kids, hardly any threat to his utopian ideals.
That's just plain insanity.
It's easy to compare to Hilter killing little jews, but his excuse was they would grow up into big jews.
Couldn't those little Cambodian kids be simply shown how to be farmers and not be allowed to grow up to be teachers?
Why did he have to kill them?

A good formal education, especially in fields not related to morals, does not make you a "better" person, I'd say.

There was also this discussion about how in the 20th century, the "century of modernity", atrocities like the holocaust could happen. Zygmunt Baumann argues that modernity is bringing 'order' into the world, and genocide is an attempt at ordering society. http://www.soc.duke.edu/~jmoody77/Theor ... _hol_1.htm

SternAAlbifrons · Post by **SternAAlbifrons** » Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:31 am

SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:45 pm This wound-up cycle of manufactured paranoia caused the revolution to self destruct in just 5 years.

Well... not entirely manufactured.

It became apparent to me, over time, that there was in fact more internal resistance than is commonly accepted.
And indeed, Vietnamese influence in this resistance is not entirely just an unfounded excuse for bad behaviour by Nuon Chea, et al
(he is the one who most forcefully made that argument in his trial)

IMO, there was probably some basis for these fears, but they were blown up into something much more than they actually were.

amatuertrader · Post by **amatuertrader** » Mon Sep 07, 2020 10:27 am

John Bingham wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:13 am These two studies go a log way in explaining the apparent contradiction in how such seemingly placid and friendly people can act in extremely violent ways in certain circumstances:

Cambodians know all about kum.
It is the infection that grows on our national soul.
Haing Ngor

I couldn't download the two linked articles without agreeing to let them see all my downloads and contact list.

Anyway, how do you explain that after all these years PolPot and his cohorts were never found and tortured and killed by the survivors?
Sure, that's kinda revenge, but more like justice and a long way from "kum" which would suggest they get tortured much worse than the torture they inflicted.

It sounds more like it was a weak defense justification.
I can't come to any other conclusion but that the khmer rouge were simply cold blooded psychos.

amatuertrader · Post by **amatuertrader** » Mon Sep 07, 2020 10:49 am

All these psychological and intellectual theories of why the Khmer Rouge killed all the educated people is better explained by the simple bargirl saying to foreigners:

"You think too mut"

I can hear Duch saying to the university student who he is about to kill:

"You think too mut"

Khmer Rouge Killing Intellectuals

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