Brother Number One
It has been a good 3 weeks since I was back from Cambodia but I still can’t wipe the vivid images from my mind. It’s eating me inside-out. I’m not gonna blog about the whole trip trip coz it’s all over my facebook d so go there and have a look. Instead, I’m gonna give my 2 sen about the whole Pol Pot-Khmer Rouge political scene and what I observed in Pnom Penh.
Pol Pot is a deluded, self-glorified, power-hungry, trigger-happy maniac. Communist leaders will tell you everything they do is for the people, but surely causing the death of 1.7 million by slave labour, malnutrition, starvation, torture and mass execution is not ‘for’ the people. Bullying and scaring people out of their wits to obey to your whims and wishes is not ‘for’ anyone. D-uh. The scars left by ‘Year Zero’ are still healing some 28 years later. Pick up any books on Pol Pot regime to feel the aftermath. Today, Cambodians still live in fear as some Khmer Rouge is believed to have escaped authorities and are now residing in the jungles. Cambodians gravely brave themselves should there be another take over. Pol Pot claims to promote equality in order to end poverty is a freaking joke. He admired Hitler and wanted to copy his success to purge the nation of all capitalist and imperialist, but he is not a Fascist like Hitler. The Germans do not kill themselves, only Jews and Poles. Hitler deliberated genocide and Mr. Pot, auto-genocide because he kills everyone, especially his own. Typical small dick syndrome. His government the Angkar (pronounced as ong-kah) are headless chickens with herd mentality. No brains so can’t use any. Monkey see monkey do oni so the entire organisation is like a freak show circus.
I can afford to say this not because I existed during the civil war, thank God no, but I visited the Killing Fields and Toul Sleng museum in Pnom Penh. Photographs and paintings captions were vivid, descriptive and graphic. In the quiet, breezy classrooms of Toul Sleng, hundreds and thousands of photographs of KR soldiers and victims were exhibited, including pictures of carcasses still chained to the original metal bed, window sills, the beige and black chequered floor tiles, metal shackles to chain prisoner's legs to the bed, wire cords used to tie the victims hands together, ammunition boxes that the prisoners defecated in, torture equipment, etc. Nobody says a word while browsing but somehow I can hear the painful screams and anguish cries. I can taste the salty tears and metallic zing of blood droplets as if time froze. Skulls is self-explanatory of how the victims were murdered; gunshot, hammered or decapitated. A tour guide was explaining to a female French tourist how babies were killed and she ran out of the room weeping. No, it’s not that bad. Imagine WORSE and multiply it by 100 folds.
I never liked politics, but like the Khmers, that doesn’t mean I can avoid it like the plague and have a choice when I live my everyday life. Politics is everywhere. And by being part of the community, I am part of the it somehow. But we can learn from it, can’t we? Dictatorship doesn’t work. Oppression sucks. Grow up, be a man, do the right thing.
Such, is life.
