Terror and the Khmer Rouge

There is terror in the world and the only thing that separates us from it is now and later.  There is terror that ruins souls and banishes all sensitivity and peace.  There is terror that rapes the body, explodes the mind and trashes the soul.  We have heard about it, read a book or an article about someone else’s horror or seen a movie on it; we have even had nightmares revealing the essence of terror.  Ten days in Cambodia, one book later, two films, and a few personal accounts and I had put the pink edge of my toe in to the bloody massacre, the holocaust at the hands of the Khmer Rouge between the years of 1975-1979.

Standing in the macabre tourist attraction/pilgrimage sight, I felt for the hairs on my body to rise; I listened for the screams of ghosts and the marching feet covered in rubber slippers of the perpetrators overhead.  I envisioned the abused, sunken flesh back on to the jumbled skeletons in the shrine affront me and closed my eyes to approach the blindness of their misery.  I sniffed at the cool moisture of the cave and drove myself to infuse the smell of death, rotting flesh, ruddy blood and disease. Yet nothing could take me even close to the terror of the mass of human beings left to rot in that cave. I am here  after all, in this flesh, on this day with my life, my loved ones, my comfort and safety, my liberation.  I am here as a touring vibrant young woman, arm in arm with my partner, privileged with love and human rights, all my necessities and many luxuries.  Terror is the last of my worries even as I stare directly at the remnants of one of the most atrocious acts of human kind against human kind, in our history.

I lounge on the bed with a full belly, reading the account of a survivor under the Khmer Rouge as he details the little known facts of what starvation does to the body and mind of a person.  How it drives the body to create pockets in the skin and bloat the stomach and leave a person wasted with exhaustion, how it drives a mind to beat their child for stealing the last of a family’s rations for his own aching tummy or how it calls a woman to eat the flesh of her sister after she has died of starvation herself.  This is true terror!

Oddly however, as I learned more and more about the Khmer Rouge and their platform, without my typical self righteous tone, in an almost whisper, I turned to Dawa and said I kind of understand the original principles and ideals of the Khmer Rouge.  ‘Kind of’ is a huge understatement.  Could I have ended up in that regime of stained hands?  After all it was Cambodians killing Cambodians and family members killing their own family.  Too often we glorify ourselves as the ‘do-gooders’, the benevolent hearts.  Is that what the child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge thought too, that they were exterminating for the betterment of all.  There had to be something that numbed them to the atrocities that they performed.  

No matter your ideals, a fanatic is a fanatic. 

 

Be it a communist pig or a capitalist pig.

To the Khmer Rouge, all signs of the former society were brushed off like infecting pests and deemed imperialist trash.  Currency was not taken by the officials to be used for their own means, but thrown in the dust as another sign of imperialism.  How many times have I cursed a world based on money?  Countless.  They believed in the ‘Ancients’, as they called them and an agrarian society where self sustainability was key.  I am a great admirer of the simple people living out in the bush, in the countryside living off the land, living remotely and cut off from the capitalist cities of today.  I romanticize the lines on their face and the cracked rough skin of their hard working hands, the palm fronds of their roofs and their naked babies brown with the dirt of our earth.  I have spent the past tow years growing less and less dependent on the grocery store and growing a larger and more equipped garden.  Hardly ever will you catch me buying something that is not local.

“Be the change you wish to be in the world.”

~ Ghandi 

I have humbly attempted to live by this notion to the best of my ability in this life.  And my principles on sustainability and simplicity of life, I do agree in.  So at what point can promising positive ideals for the betterment of our planet and brothers and sisters twist in to neurosis, hatred and intolerance.  

There of course were things I could not relate to like the Khmer Rouge’s discounting of religion.  I happen to be a Buddhist, the presiding religion of Cambodia.  I can’t imagine a world where I was not allowed to show love, devotion and respect for the great meditators and Boddhisattvas and even worse, be restricted from practicing meditation and compassion.  Also, they were anti education, culture and art.  That is something I definitely could not understand.  Education is freedom embodied.  Art and culture are the sweet bites of humanity’s ability to reflect the human experience in such extraordinary beauty.

However, truth be truth, myself and many of my like minded friends could easily agree upon many of the regime’s original vision of utopia.  Equally so, myself and these compadres also could say we are against the opposition.

Not saying that we would necessarily come to the point of committing crimes against humanity and unleashing sheer terror on the opposition, but perhaps we are still too close to crossing the line of the middle way.

There is one thing we as the human populace share in common, our goal for happiness.  When you strip away all the dogmas, the paradigms and face that naked soul, each one of us strives for happiness, contentment, satisfaction.  Now some person’s version of happiness could look like the exact opposite of happiness, however we all are here for different purposes and we are all equipped with varying tools.

This secret ingredient for a more placid and serene mind is vital in maintaining equanimity in a complex jungle of various opinions on how to live life and conduct oneself in society.  Without a continually focused awareness, deep understanding and compassion for society’s equal strive for happiness, we move closer and closer to a world of extremism.   This can come in many versions of ignorance that we all know too well. 

As we stand at our pulpit, we must start with humility, a silence; listening for all of the voices, all of the needs, no matter how opposing it may feel from our own.  Then we must remind ourselves to be flexible, patient and understanding.  If someone else’s vision, we are sure is wrong, by the basic laws of nature and karma, then we must expand ourselves with compassion and sympathy for the darkness that a part of their heart and intentions reside in.  And know that they too may have an inner wisdom on where the darkness resides in our path.  Humility!  Humility!  Humility!  We must stay open.  Empty ourselves often for the ability to see and feel with a breadth of wisdom.  Then speak our mind.  Speak from our heart.  Focus on the light of our vision; focus on the positivity of what is our idea of utopia and not on what we find is the negativity of another’s idea of utopia.  In this way, there is space for all 7 billion of us, our mother of green, our father of blue and all of our cousin species.  We have to be the change we want to see in the world and watch others fall beside us in these missions or fulfill their own destinies, creating a lively patchwork of various colors and flavors.

My father once rightly brought me down off of my soap box when I needed it most.  I am quite capable of being a self righteous bitch.  But every day I try a little harder to remind myself of my own strong belief in diversity.  The world would be a bland place if stripped of all of the varying voices, attitudes and ways of being.  Besides, that is an impossible goal.  As we have seen many times in our cyclical history.  Intolerance eventually fails itself.

In the end, by their own hands the Khmer Rouge met their demise.  Growing more and more hateful, inflexible, fanatic and ignorant finally led them to such a rooted paranoia.  They started off killing away the ‘new people’, then they turned against the very model of their original values, ‘the Ancients’ until they ultimately began killing their own ranks.  Hatred and intolerance eventually self destructs and all terrorism eventually ends in bringing terror to itself.  For, we are the other and the other is us.

We should never seize to feel the passion for our values and beliefs, for our hope in the collective.  Let us keep standing up for our dreams.  We need vision!  We need heart and soul in what sometimes can feel like a hopeless world.  Just be wise to smile at the person standing up next to you, across from you, all around you in their own visions.  Let us all meet heart to heart in the united search for sustainable happiness.