A NATION REBUILDING

I don't remember my history like I should.  Cambodia was a country bordering Vietnam while I learned about the first war America ever lost.  Little was said about the Khmer Rouge.  Pol Pot was granted maybe a few pages in my high school books, compared to Hitler, and then passed on.  I will read more about this atrocity and the people who have overcome mass oppression and genocide.  Books like They Killed my Father and The Killing Fields I hope will broaden my understanding.  

     When the word genocide is used the Western world conjures up images of Hitler and the second World War.  We think of a time now long gone, indeed seventy years have passed since the Third Reich came to power and began to carry out there vision of the supreme race.  Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot came to power in 1975 when I was two years old.  My father came home from the war to my mother and his children. Life slowly carried on.  For Cambodia the nightmare was just beginning.  Pol Pot created the Khmer Rouge, a self developed metamorphosis of the Marxist ideology now known as extreme Maosim.  Under his rule the banks were destroyed, capitalism and any form of free trade other than agriculture ceased to exist.  Any man, woman or child with education be it of the scholarly nature, science, medicine, law, religion or philosophy were sent to re-education camps.  There they were tortured for confessions and immediately put to death.  Wearing glasses or speaking a foreign language was cause enough for execution.  It was a cleansing of a country few had even heard of in the western world and on a scale never seen before appropriated upon its own people by its own people.  Cambodia was transformed into a mass slave labor camp.  Bewilderingly the UN allowed the Khmer Rouge to occupy a seat at the UN General Assembly until 1991.  This meant the murderers represented their victims for twelve years.  Pol Pot died under house arrest in relative luxury and was cremated upon his death.  

     Why do I take so many pictures of young children here?  Every day I eat a meal or have a coffee I am out numbered by Cambodia's youth begging for money or selling black market items to tourists.  The Lonely Planet book I payed $29 for is a mere $3 here.  They speak better English than there parents and hold a glimmer of innocence mixed with a street smarts unparalleled.  They beg and play in the streets unaware of what their parents have endured in the last few decades.  If they still have parents.  The best estimates are that 1.7 million men, women and children were executed.  At the Killing Fields I saw a tree where children were taken by the legs and bashed upon the trunk in order to save bullets.  At S.21 which at one time was a high-school, an exercise post was used to draw people up until they lost consciousness.  Then putrid water was doused on their bodies to awaken them and the lashes would begin.  They were led to a cell, shackled to metal beds, tortured and killed.  I could see the blood stains on the yellow and white checkered flooring.  Meticulous documentation was taken of every person wiped out and the photos line the rooms and haunt you while you try and take it all in.  I couldn't bring myself to take pictures of some of what I saw.  
      In spite of this, under the thumb of such recent history, the Cambodian people have made the best of recent years and seem to be adapting and finding progress.  I am nothing but a tourist but I have never seen such warm and friendly people.  It is not uncommon to be stopped in a plaza and asked, "Where are you from?  How old are you?  How much money do you make?"  I have found myself watching the shadows change while I engage in lazy conversation over nothing in particular.  I'd like to think I am slowly gaining the right to call myself a world traveler, but I have never experienced anything quite as remarkable, quite as beautiful as I've witnessed here.  


      In all my adventures there is one consistent.  People don't generally like Americans or trust them.  From Peru to Baja Mexico, Bolivia, Thailand, Argentina, Chile, or Cambodia we are not always the beloved people we think we are.  Our government is meddlesome and manipulative.  We support whatever regime will keep our prices low meanwhile preaching from the mount about freedom and democracy.  Disagree?  Let me ask you this.  Do you think we were unaware of the atrocity taking place in Cambodia?  Or was it simply not profitable enough to get involved?  I don't have the answers to these questions but when an American gets outside their bubble, when they abandon FOX News and the Washington Post there seems to be an immense amount of data that is general knowledge to the rest of the world and simultaneously lacking in our own papers.  Who freed the Cambodians of Pol Pot?  The Vietnamese.  Remind me but weren't we at war with them?  

      I love my country and I defend it the best I can as an individual.  At times I get angry with the anti-american rhetoric but I politely listen.  Listen.  Listen, listen and listen more.  I think we Americans could do a lot more listening and less speaking.  I don't want to be forced to wear this, do you?  But are we really so far away from it?  Ideology is a powerful and persuasive tool.  The farther away I get from the America I love, the more I see how brainwashed we are by corporate advertising, poor food production, political injustices, lobbying powers and a general idea that our ignorance, not our thought is our freedom.