They Took Pictures Of Thousands Before They Murdered Them
And their weapon of choice was a wooden club
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl in his classic Man’s Search For Meaning once summed up the dual nature of humanity brilliantly in only a few words. His method of description was something familiar: a gas chamber.
Frankl pointed out that man is both the terrible creature that operated it, and the helpless victim that walked inside praying for mercy. But add one thing. We’re also a creature which can’t fathom the past.
Although you can read much about the Holocaust and other genocides, they’re hard to wrap your mind around. There’s a separation of sorts. Mainly because it’s so alien to where we stand today, and the numbers are so large.
I remember a school collecting six million paperclips. Each were a representation of a person murdered during the Holocaust to give it gravity a person today could understand — a physical image for the number.
Now, what if it was more personal? Imagine if the Nazis not only kept records of the death camps, but a picture of every single inmate they killed. Each photo neatly filed away, like tax returns.
Well, you don’t have to imagine. This happened. But on the other side of the globe at a prison camp called Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, not so long ago.
But unlike Germany, this civilization didn’t descend into chaos gradually. It was almost overnight.
Cambodia Becomes Kampuchea
“By early May 1975, the Khmer Rouge were implementing one of the most radical political plans of the twentieth century, a peasant revolution with a punitive edge, Buddhist monks were made to plow fields; pagodas were turned into killing centers; Cham Muslims, a religious minority, were force-fed pork; Cambodia’s National Library was converted into a pigsty. In Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea, books were used to start fires. ‘It was more about revenge,’ recalled one Cambodian.” — Peter Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia
Author Peter Maguire personally visited Cambodia, helping preserve evidence for a future war crimes trial. He also spoke with survivors. In his book he puts together a geo-political and ground-level view of the Khmer Rouge’s take over, which is startling to say the least.
Maguire notes the original king of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, was overthrown by his military commander Lon Nol and his cousin Prince Sirik Matak in a “bloodless coup” in 1970. The new government went to war with Viet Kong forces encamped within their country.
Of course this attracted American money and military help. But the former king didn’t sit idle. He reached out to another communist group operating in the shadows of Cambodia — the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk encouraged his citizens to back this group and force out the pro-American government.
The American’s bombing campaign didn’t help either. While it did hit Vietnamese insurgents, it also killed many Cambodians. This aided Sihanouk’s propaganda campaign, and Maguire explains the Khmer Rouge masterfully used him.
The heads of this group had a Western Marxist education, but their leader Pol Pot claimed, “his true political inspiration came from Mao’s China.” According to Maguire, Pot learned much from the head of Mao’s secret police, K’ang Sheng. Although Sihanouk and Western media didn’t realize it.
Pressure began to mount against the Nixon administration. The media and protestors railed against the secret war in Cambodia, so the American soldiers packed up and went home. It left a void. And the Khmer Rouge took advantage of this.
An army of child-soldiers and young peasants appeared from villages. Most didn’t know what they were fighting for. Maguire quotes Ieng Thirith, the Khmer Rouge Minister of Culture:
“Only children can purely serve the revolution and eliminate reactionism, since they are young, obedient, loyal, and active.”
The survivors told Maguire stories of unimaginable chaos. Evacuations of cities where child-soldiers randomly slaughtered people and drove left behind Mercedes into walls, mothers giving birth on the sides of the road and dying, plus twenty-thousand hospital patients forced out of their beds on a “march of death.”
There was also widespread cannibalism between government and Khmer Rouge soldiers. Former fighters told tales of “man soup.”
With no American support, the government quickly fell. Many former officials were turned away from American and French embassies and publicly executed. Although it may be hard to imagine, things deteriorated further.
The Frozen Faces Of The Condemned
“Most shocking to me was Tuol Sleng prison (also referred to as S-21) — a former high school in Phnom Penh that was transformed into the regime’s primary interrogation and torture center. Approximately 14,000 men, women, and children entered the prison between 1976 and 1978. In 1979, less than a dozen were still alive. Before the prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed, they were carefully photographed.” — Peter Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia
In 1994, Peter Maguire was contacted by friends working in Cambodia, preserving photos taken in Tuol Sleng prison and sent him samples. They wanted help.
Maguire showed them to his graduate school teacher in Columbia law, Telford Taylor — a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. According to Maguire:
“The eighty-five-year-old lawyer studied each image. He pointed to a very young Khmer girl, who probably wasn’t ten years old, ‘Why?’ he asked with incredulity. I had heard that the photos had been taken to prove to Khmer Rouge leaders that their orders — to interrogate and eventually kill — were being followed.”
Maguire would learn, almost half the interrogators and guards eventually became inmates themselves. Anything could make you look guilty. And the revolution was in process of changing reality as Cambodia knew it. Anyone who had knowledge or experience of the world before was to be destroyed.
“Not only did the Khmer Rouge eliminate family life, they made sex before marriage a capital offense. Khmer Rouge survivor Youk Chhang remembered watching two young lovers beaten to death in front of an entire commune.”
Maguire found the expression of love itself threatened the Khmer Rouge greatly. So they fought to extinguish it in a “George Orwell” type dictatorship, which made its people live in “perpetual fear.”
Parents feared their children
Civilians toiled day and night like “human water buffalo,” or died
Mass slaughters were conducted purposefully in front of children so they could learn the new ways of Democratic Kampuchea
So, the pictures were of the utmost importance, to quell the paranoia of a regime which saw everyone as an enemy.
Also, their method of killing was ideologically driven. The Nazis killed with gas chambers and bullets, but not the Khmer Rouge. Remember, this was a peasant revolution. Bullets were expensive and gas involved capitalist technology.
The Khmer Rouge killed millions with clubs to the back of the head. In Tuol Sleng, the weapon of choice was an ox cart axle. Maguire interviewed their main executioner, who numbly declared, “It was death either way.”
This is the world Maguire entered. One endless soul-crushing shock after another, which included finding pictures of men who were members of the surfing community he grew up in. Their sailboat passed too close to Cambodia, and they died in Tuol Sleng.
But there was a bigger shock to come, and it’ll challenge every thought going through your mind right now.
Just Bury It All In A Big Hole
“This is a cautionary tale: good intentions are never enough, and war crimes trials cannot be relied upon to teach historical lessons. The decade I spent coming and going to Cambodia has been humbling. It has forced me to perceive and to acknowledge things as they really are, not as I would like them to be. Never again will I ignore the limits of the possible and never again will I confuse what should be with what is.” — Peter Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia
During his interview on the Jocko Willink Podcast, Maguire reveals a sobering conversation with one of the few Tuol Sleng survivors, a man named Im Chan.
The young author happily told Chan, he and the world would bring “justice” for the survivors. But Chan winced and looked at the prison, now turned into a museum.
He told Maguire the only reason he spoke with him was because the museum director of the Tuol Sleng memorial told him to. The human rights crusaders were taking his remaining life away. If they wanted to relieve his suffering, the best thing they could do was to tear down the museum and bury it all in a big hole in the ground.
This memory and “justice” only created a desire for vengeance, which will create an endless cycle of killing. Chan didn’t want their “justice.” He just wanted to forget, and for his nation and family to live a normal life.
Maguire saw this sentiment over and over from survivors. He soon questioned everything.
We Have A Useless Approach To Genocide
“My graduate school teacher Telford Taylor taught me that war crimes prosecutions — under any circumstances — signified failure: failure to act, failure to deter, and finally failure to prevent.” —Peter Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia
In his interview with Jocko Willink, Maguire refers to the “human rights industry,” which are multi-million-dollar organizations with beautiful buildings at the Hague. They use the UN as a mobile force but really do nothing.
In Cambodia, this international tribunal convicted a few old men, using countless millions of dollars, and brought no one peace. The tribunal only empowered themselves.
Maguire says there’s no such thing as “closure” through a UN court proceeding.
It’s total garbage. Genocides can best be remedied by stopping them in process. Also, white knights from the Hague dropping in to offer “justice” is completely misguided. Maguire learned the Hague’s version of justice and the Cambodian form differed dramatically.
Plus, the UN had forces in Cambodia. So did France, the United States, and China, but all worked to their own geopolitical benefit instead of stopping mass slaughters.
In his book, Maguire expresses rage that “civilians who had never been in a fistfight” had such a “condescension for all things military.” Quick military action could have saved millions, instead of relying on useless courts.
The UN also allowed the Khmer Rouge to run as a political party in elections they conducted, after they were overthrown.
Maguire saw a better alternative to the trials: ask the Cambodians what they wanted. Most were Buddhist. They believed karma dished out justice. Pol Pot and his buddies will spend the next fifteen-hundred years being reincarnated as cockroaches.
In the end, this is a story with no “closure,” just endless failures on many fronts. While the Cambodians try and forget and move on, it’s a piece of history the world should keep on par with the Holocaust.
It’s a warning to revolutionaries. Also, a reminder to peacekeepers that force must be occasionally used to keep peace. Otherwise, your only option is pointless prosecutions which don’t bring back the dead.
-Originally posted on Medium 10/11/22