Sub­ject: Don’t laugh, It’s not funny

 
Here we see a sign on the side of the gen­o­cide museum in Phnom Penh. The ex school build­ing was renamed S-21 and pro­cessed ‘trait­ors’ to the cause of the Khmer Rouge. Pro­cessing was tor­ture, rape and death of the most hor­rific kind. Over 8000 people came through here, only 7 sur­vived. Dur­ing my visit I met one of these 7 — he smiled and greeted us and I could not see any­thing in his eyes to show the hor­rors he suffered.

Among the tor­tures was the sim­u­lated drown­ing prac­tice known as “Water­board­ing”, which us still in use today by the Amer­ic­ans aginst their trait­ors (now called Ter­ror­ists or Insur­gents). How slow we
are to learn the les­sons of history.

The nor­mal­ness of the killers and vic­tims hand the fact that all this happened in my life­time is for me more har­row­ing than the images of the dead, which are hung up here in their hun­dreds. My nat­ural reac­tion is not to cry or get anguish but in fact to feel a kind of cold rage. I would die before I would let my coun­try do these things. After a few moments reflec­tion I worry that this is the sort of feel­ing that the killers felt, or how else could they do it? The fact of the mat­ter is that they had no choice. That is what the KR took from the Cam­bod­ian people. Once that ‘free­dom’ is gone all hor­rors become pos­sible. The most import­ant right is the right to say ‘no’. Without that men will kill, rape and tor­ture without remorce, as is shown here by the nor­mal­ness of the guards and their stories.

Many of those guards were even­tu­ally sent here them­selves and had their fin­ger­nails pulled out, chil­dren raped and killed in front of them, bod­ies beaten and elet­ro­cuted and finally their throats cut.

So, the sign says not to laugh…

- abso­lutely god damn right -

it’s not funny.

Related Posts

• No Related Posts