Cambodia: a country of idiots.

I never assumed they were stupid. And it’s not even a stereotype. It’s actually a fact that the Khmer Rouge spent the later part of the seventies throwing all Cambodians into camps and brutally killing off anyone with a seed of intelligence. Led by Pol Pot, meaning ‘Brother Number One,’ their goal was to make ‘1984’ a reality. This required murdering anyone smart enough to revolt or think for himself. And they succeeded in doing so for four years!

In April, 1975, The Khmer Rouge started by tearing everyone from their homes in cities and thrusting them into rural villages. They cut everyone’s hair into the same style and forced the entire country into the same outfit. The educated people from cities were presumed second class citizens and given much less food and harder work than the villagers who were thought to be pure. If anyone was suspected of having a grain of independent thought, they were led into the forest and bludgeoned to death. Bullets were expensive and rarely wasted. You could also forget about living if you wore glasses, had previously been a teacher or part of the government, or had eyes that even remotely resembled those of the Chinese or Vietnamese. At first, Pol Pot was in favor of the Vietnamese, both governments working towards Communism. But then one day he changed his mind and decided to kill anyone who might even have a great great granny from Saigon.

It is estimated that way over 2 million people died between 1975-1979, if not by murder by starvation. Food rations were scarce and the entire country was starving. But if you asked for another cup of rice because your son was on the brink of death, you were considered anti-communist for requesting more for yourself than anyone else was getting. Immediate death or torture. Lots of torture.

In Phnom Penh, I nearly vomited at the images of all the horrific crimes of humanity. It took me a while to get to S-21, the actual prison where the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed over 17,000 people. I procrastinated all morning, having breakfast and then having brunch. But I made myself go, figuring that, as an American who barely learned world history in high school, it’s my duty to learn as much as I can now.

I walked through the eerie halls of the building that was a high school before it turned into a gruesome place (although some might argue it was a gruesome place as a high school). Building ‘A’ is room after room of lone iron beds, rusty with shackles replacing mattresses. On the wall is a tattered poster showing the death found in the room when the prison was freed. Most posters elicited gasps, all demonstrating the streams of blood that once stained the floor where I was now standing. One man’s lower torso had been twisted so that his butt resided in front. He was naked and barely more than a skeleton.

Sometimes humans aren’t funny at all. I cannot understand how we can murder animals, let alone other humans. But they did it, killing 4-10 people a night in that prison.

Unfortunately, an air of melancholy still bobs above the country. Every single citizen over 35 fought through those horrifying years. They each lost at least a parent, siblings, or children, often in front of their own eyes. All of them. One man, Pin Yathay, lost 17 members of his family including his 3 sons, both parents, and his wife. Awesome.

It is not the most uplifting country to be in. Especially with the countless disfigured beggars who lost arms, legs, and eyes to the many landmines left by the Khmer Rouge in an attempt to punish those who chose food and life over big brother. (I think the US is also partly responsible for some of the mines, but let‘s talk about that later.)

Thankfully, many of the smart people had enough brains to escape to Thailand, lie about their previous professions, or spend the years pretending to see without glasses (I cannot believe people with glasses were thought to be smart. I thought people with glasses had a curve in their eyeball. It seems like Pol Pot himself was pretty stupid.) I thought the country was rebuilding itself well. The Khmers have definitely grasped the idea of tourism and are fully comfortable with sucking the tourists dry.

After some weeks in Cambodia, I had given all my savings to amputees, and I’d only seen two signs of stupidity:

1. One waiter needed a calculator to add my bill of $2.75 and $1.

2. The two big competing beers are Angkor and Anchor. It seems if you were to come out with a new brand to really give the monopoly a run for its money, you might want to make the name sound a little different. Or perhaps making the competition sound exactly the same is brilliant. I don’t know.

This is the “bed.”

This is the torture that took place in the “bed.”

I walked past wall after wall of victim photos. So many were children.

This is a skull of someone bludgeoned to death.

This is the culprit.

This guy smiled before dying. Why not?

For a great read that you can finish in a few days, try ‘First They Killed my Father’ by Loung Ung. SPOILER ALERT: It’s depressing.

The good news is that one of the main dudes in charge of the Khmer Rouge, Duch, is set to head to trial within the next 2 years. Pol Pot died without punishment in ’98.

More good news: My blue period is over. My mom won’t let me write anything else that is anti-Communist (and thus depressing) for fear of my capture. This is the last one.