Thirty years ago today, the Khmer Rouge lost control of Phnom Penh to the Vietnamese army. After 4 years of the most extreme form of social 'creative destruction' i.e. mass butchery in the name of 'progress', 2million or more people were dead. Combining the extremities of extreme Marxist tradition with savage notions of blood and racial purity, the killers and 'builders' of Angka brought about the triumph of death. Theirs was a program to rid Cambodia of some mythical parasite, made up of innocents and their bodies, to become a modern industrail state via mass effort and mass suffering. The calculation of such thinking is horrendous, but it remains to this day as part of our condition. Catharsis and solution comes not from cutting out utopias, but accepting and rejoicing the limitations of mortality.
Under Vietnamese control, the mass killings ended to be replaced by mass repression and imprisonment. As I have mentioned on HP, this was to moved from the seventh to the first circle. There are no heroic state actors in the story of the Khmer Rouge, just heartlessness and endless suffering
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