• Harsh and sometime acrimonious exchanges between some of the authors of the posted reviews provide an interesting glimpse of the complexity of interpreting developments in the history of contemporary Cambodia:

  Introduction: One of the purposes of this site is to provide the most up-to-date information on recently published books on Cambodia. Along with the information of these books, this site also provides their related reviews by different experts in Cambodian affairs. It is very instructive to read these reviews as they reflect the complexity of the Cambodian contemporary history and politics. At the same time, the content of these reviews clearly reflected the reviewer's ideological background and orientation. Similarly, the content of the books reflects the authors 's ideological background and orientation.

  Historians have to interpret facts at their disposal to come up with any analysis of a given situation or event. The same facts can give way to totally different interpretations of an event. Facts can also be tailored to support the authors' argument in their books. For instance, the question whether the Khmer Rouge did massacre all the Vietnamese and the Chams who were then living in Cambodia during their rule from 1975-1978, as some authors stated in their books (M. Vickery or B. Kiernan) is a case in point. On this issue, other reviewers (Philip Short, Gottesman) came up with a totally opposite conclusion. More serious though are the misinterpretations of the facts by some of these authors. Again, regarding the supposedly massacres of the Vietnamese and the Chams by the Khmer Rouge, some reviewers showed that most of the Vietnamese were already evacuated to Vietnam at the beginning of the Pol Pot era.

  Regarding the supposedly Chams massacre, one can ask the question as to why there are so many Chams still living in Cambodian today, if they were supposedly all massacred in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge as some authors implied in their books. On the other hand, there is hardly any Chams left in Vietnam where the Chams used to live in their country of birth named Champa (Central Vietnam)? Perhaps, more importantly, one also can debate on the issue of whether the Khmer Rouge mass killing was uniquely Cambodian as many authors implied in their books reviewed here, or whether there is something to do with Communism and its well know method of wholesale killing by class instead of by individual, as suggested by Stephane Courtois in his book entitled "The Black Book of Communism."

  "Demonizing the demons" was certainly part of these authors intention to make the Khmer people, as a whole look so bad that all attention was only concentrated on the mass murderers perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, while the other perpetrators against the Cambodian people, such as the Vietnamese and their proteges (Hun Sen and the CPP), not to mention the silent invasion (illegal immigration) of Cambodia by the Vietnamese with Hun Sen's approval and help - were intentionally left out of any serious analysis by these same authors (More on this controversies, please, see Marie Alexandrine Martin's book entitled 'Cambodia: A Shattered Society).

  This imbalanced analysis of contemporary Cambodia, in turn, does a great deal of harm to the Cambodian people, as a whole, who by the way are the greatest victim of Pol Pot's insanity, dark and murderous mind.

  These reviews clearly show a fair amount of open discord and recrimination among these reviewers who are also, whether one likes it or not, opinion-shapers and image-makers on Cambodia:

  The reviews that are posted here by different scholars or experts in the Cambodian affairs, provided a very interesting but disturbing and unclear picture of the Khmer Rouge and their impact on Cambodian history for most Cambodians who have been looking for the truth about this black chapter of their long and tragic history, for the last 25 years.

  The varied, contrasting, sometime even acerbic exchanges of views between these reviewers (Michael Vickery vs. Luke Hunt on Gottesman's book, or Craig Etcheson vs. Philip Short on Short's book) complicated further the already confusing and murky picture of this troubled period under a brief but bloody Khmer Rouge rule (1975-1978), and the period immediately after their fall from power following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia on December 25, 1978.

  In these debates between these experts, the Cambodian people are no more no less than a bystander. Their voice is not being heard because by tradition, Cambodians are totally unaccustomed to open debate and dislike criticism, whether from a foreigner or from fellow Cambodians. Thus, by habit and tradition, they have lost the control of their destiny. Those Cambodian leaders such as Sihanouk, Ranariddh, Hun Sen, Sam Rainsy who still have some voice are so busy in defending themselves for their past crimes or mistakes that they are swamped by the opinions expressed by these so-called experts in Cambodian affairs. This, in turn, has led to a long and protracted search for a lasting peace and justice for the much-deserved Cambodian people. Without peace and justice, there would not be any chance to return to normalcy in the life for almost all the Cambodian people who now are living either in Cambodia or abroad. Until such time when a real Cambodian voice can be heard, the destiny of the Cambodian people will always be threatened, and their life will remain traumatized.

  Washington DC, June 2004

• Naranhkiri Tith, Ph.D

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• Recently Published Books and Reviews:
• Recently Published Books:

1. Osborne, Milton; Phnonm Penh: a Cultural and Literary History; (Signal Books, Oxford, UK. 2008)

2. Hinton, Alexander Laban; Why Did They Kill?; (University of California Press, Berkley, 2005)

3. Short, Philip; Pol Pot: the History of a Nightmare; (John Murray Publishers, London, 2004)

4. Fawthrop Tom and Helen Jarvis; Getting way with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal; (Pluto Press, London, UK, 2004)

5. Gottesman, Evan R; CAMBODIA AFTER THE KHMER ROUGE INSIDE THE POLITICS OF NATION BUILDING (Yale University Press; New Haven, 2003)

6. Linton Suzannah B.; RECONCILIATION IN CAMBODIA; (Documentation Series number 5 -- Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2004)

7.  Wynne Cougill with Pivoine Pang, Chhayran Ra, and Sopheak Sim; Stilled Lives: Photographs from the Cambodian Genocide (Document Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh Cambodia, 2004)

8. Ramji, Jaya , & Van Schaack, Beth; Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence before the Cambodian Courts; (The Edwin Mellen Press, New York, 2005)

9. Benny Widyono; Dancing in Shadows; (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. October 28, 2007)

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Forever linked in the public mind with the Pol Pot tyranny, Phnom Penh only became Cambodia's permanent capital in 1866. Long neglected by Western travellers, in the sixteenth century it was home to Iberian missionaries and freebooters who briefly held Cambodia's fate in their hands. It faded in significance until France established a colonial protectorate over Cambodia in 1863. As the colonialists robbed the Cambodian king of his temporal power, their protection enhanced his symbolic importance, setting the scene for the emergence of one of the most intriguing rulers of the twentieth century, King Norodom Sihanouk.

The city Sihanouk ruled from 1941 to 1970 was a mix of traditional palaces, Buddhist temples and transplanted French architecture. In the 1960s Phnom Penh deserved its reputation as the most attractive city in Southeast Asia. But after 1970 all this was to change, and a terrible civil war was followed by the Khmer Rouge's capture of the city in 1975. Since the defeat of Pol Pot in 1979, Phnom Penh has slowly recovered, once again attracting perceptive travellers.

• CITY OF ROYALTY AND COLONIZERS: Kings, courts and battles with French administrators; royal ceremonies, dancers and elephants; foreign intrigue and carpetbaggers who sought and failed to find riches.
• CITY OF CULTURE: A rich local culture that became a headache for French officials; traditional architecture and colonial buildings that remain today; notable literary visitors from Somerset Maugham to André Malraux.
• CITY OF EVIL AND REBIRTH: The terrible rule of Pol Pot; the Tuol Sleng extermination centre where 17,000 men, women and children were tortured and killed as "enemies of the state"; the return to a fragile normality.

MILTON OSBORNE first lived in Phnom Penh in 1959-61 and has continued to return regularly to the city. The author of nine books on the history and politics of Southeast Asia, he is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra.

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Friday, February 15, 2008

Osborne's Phnom Penh

A veteran of no less than nine books on Southeast Asian history and politics, Canberra professor Milton Osborne has this month delivered his latest book, Phnom Penh - A Cultural and Literary History, published by Signal Books. The author first lived in the city in 1959 and knows his stuff. He puts into context the birth of the capital in the 1800's and the Sihanouk years when Phnom Penh deserved its reputation as the most attractive city in Southeast Asia but all that changed during the Pol Pot tyranny. Now the city is recapturing its vibrancy and Osborne has been here often enough to be the johnny on the spot to encapsulate that into the 256 pages of his new book. Osborne's previous titles on Cambodia include: Politics and Power in Cambodia: The Sihanouk Years (1973); Before Kampuchea: Preludes to Tragedy (1979); Sihanouk: Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness (1994).

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CITY STUDY: Phnom Penh: A Cultural and Literary History
Milton Osborne
(Signal Books-Unireps, $29.95)
A FORMER diplomat, and an occasional contributor to Travel & Indulgence, Milton Osborne has had a fascination with the Cambodian capital since being posted to the Australian embassy there in 1959.

He has worked with the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, specifically on Cambodian issues, and is an adjunct professor in the faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. So his qualifications to write a scholarly guide to Phnom Penh are without reproach. What may surprise readers is his accessible style and talent for enlivening otherwise dry data.

The book is a mix of personal narrative and a thorough history of Phnom Penh from its days as a 16th-century outpost of "Iberian missionaries and freebooters" and French protectorate to the hideous rule of the Khmer Rouge and the city's revival in the post-Pol Pot era. Osborne obviously loves Cambodia but his glasses are not rose-tinted and this is a diligent addition to British-based Signal Books's fine Cities of the Imagination series. www.unireps.com.au.
Susan Kurosawa

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June 11, 2008

 

Dear Milton:

 

Pat and I were very happy to have you over at our home for dinner, last Monday. It was nice to catch up with you and with more recent developments in Cambodia. Most of all, thank you for a copy of your most recent book on Phnom Penh. I just went through it and enjoyed very much reading it. Although I do have some comments on it in some parts of your assessment of the current situation of Cambodian under Hun Sen. I will write to you later on those, if you are interested to hear my comments.

 

While reading your book, I happened to spot something that you may want to take a look at it. This refers to a sentence in the second paragraph of your book on page 203 which reads as follows:

 

"This is the extent to which the government has co-opted the Buddhist hierarchy which the current Supreme Patriarch of the Mahayana sect occupying a position as a member of the CPP's politburo."

 

I think the word Mahayana should be read Maha Nikaya, instead. Please, for more details on the two main sects of the Cambodian Sangha, see the section extracted from Wikipedia pasted below on the two main sects of Buddhist Sangha in Cambodia.

 

 I hope you don't mind my observation on this word in your great book. Please, accept my apology in case I am totally wrong in this observation. Warm regards. Kiri

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The Cambodian Sangha

Since 1855, the Buddhist monastic community in Cambodia has been split into two divisions, excepting a brief period of unification between 1981 and 1991: the Maha Nikaya and the Dhammayuttika Nikaya. The Maha Nikaya is by far the larger of the two monastic fraternities, claiming the allegiance of a large majority of Cambodian monks. The Dhammayuttika Nikaya, despite royal patronage, remains a small minority, isolated somewhat by its strict discipline and connection with Thailand.

The Maha Nikaya monastic hierarchy- headed by the sanghreach (sangharaja)- has been closely connected with the Cambodian government since its re-establishment in the early 1980s ^[26] High-ranking officials of the Maha Nikaya have often spoken out against criticism of the government and in favor of government policies, including calling for the arrest of monks espousing opposition positions.^[27] Officials from the Maha Nikaya hierarchy appoint members to lay committees to oversee the running of temples, who also act to ensure that temples do not become organizing points for anti-government activity by monks or lay supporters^[28] Nevertheless, divisions within the Maha Nikaya fraternity do exist.

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Dear Kiri,

 

You are absolutely right and I can't explain how I made that mistake. I

feel chagrined.

 

I can only say that after a certain point in reading one's own material you

tend to elude the errors. It will be corrected in what I hope will be a

second edition.

 

More once I'm back in Australia next moth and now engaging in email access

on the run

 

Warmest wishes to you and Pat,

 

Milton

 

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Addtional Selected Reviews of 'DANCING IN SHADOWS'

By Benny Widyono

"Benny Widyono has written a lively, sometimes passionate and controversial book from the perspective of a fellow Southeast Asian who was also a senior UN official through Cambodia's crucial post–Cold War years. His account is rich in detail, from scenes of his own life and work in the devastated country to his insider's analyses of its troubled politics." —Barbara Crossette, Former New York Times correspondent in Southeast Asia and UN bureau chief

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------"Benny Widyono brings us the remarkable inside story of the UNTAC operations in Cambodia after the conclusion of the Paris Peace Agreements, as well as the intrigues, turmoil, and political upheavals of the first years of a reborn Cambodia.

This book will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the often tragic history of Cambodia and the history of big-power intervention in Southeast Asia."

—Ali Alatas, Former foreign minister of Indonesia and co-chairman of the Paris International Conference on Cambodia

------------------------------------------------------------------------------This fascinating book recounts the remarkable tale of a career UN official from Indonesia caught in the turmoil of international and domestic politics swirling around Cambodia during the tumultuous period after the fall of the Khmer Rouge.

Writing from his experience first as a member of the UN transitional authority and then as a personal envoy to the UN secretary-general, Benny Widyono re-creates the fierce battles for power centering on King Norodom Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and Prime Minister Hun Sen. A simultaneous insider and outsider, he also untangles the competing and conflicting agendas of the key international players, especially the United States, China, and Vietnam. He argues that great-power geopolitics throughout the cold war and post–cold war eras triggered and sustained a tragedy of enormous proportions in Cambodia for decades, ultimately leading to a flawed peace process.

Widyono tells the inside story of the massive UN operation in Cambodia, the largest and most challenging in the organization's history to that time and long considered a model for UN operations elsewhere. He draws not only on his vantage point as part of the UN bureaucracy, but also as a local UN official in the rural Cambodian province of Siem Reap, the site of Angkor Wat. As a fellow Southeast Asian with no geopolitical axe to grind, Widyono was able to win the respect of Cambodians, including the once and future king, Norodom Sihanouk, whose decline after fifty years as his country's leading figure is vividly portrayed. Putting a human face on international operations, this book will be invaluable reading for anyone interested in Southeast Asia, the role of international peacekeeping, and the international response to genocide.

About the Author

Benny Widyono, born in Indonesia to ethnic Chinese parents, was a career UN diplomat. He was a peacekeeper with UNTAC from 1992 to 1993 and representative of the UN secretary-general in Cambodia from 1994 to 1997. He holds a Ph.D. in economics and wrote this book while a visiting scholar at the Kahin Center on Advanced Research on Southeast Asia at Cornell University.

Asian Voices series; October 2007 ~ 312 pages

ISBN 0-7425-5553-4 / 978-0-7425-5553-2 $29.95 paper

ISBN 0-7425-5552-6 / 978-0-7425-5552-5 $85.00 cloth

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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15200 NBN Way, P.O. Box 191

Blue Ridge Summit, PA 17214-0191

Description

This book explores the legal issues surrounding accountability for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and crimes of mass violence more generally. Comprising chapters authored by legal academics, lawyers, historians, artists, and others, the volume presents a thorough analysis of the complex problems inherent to such accountability efforts, and novel ideas as how to address them. Three chapters take the important and unusual step of examining aspects of accountability from the Cambodian and/or Theravāda Buddhist perspective, a viewpoint that has rarely been considered before in this context. Other chapters present thoughtful explanations for the failure of past accountability efforts, examine holes in the law authorizing a tribunal for senior Khmer Rouge leaders, and outline the evidence available and how it can be used for such a trial. Thus, the book presents the case for accountability in Cambodia from multiple perspectives.

Table of Contents

Preface (Harold Hongju Koh)

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Prologue (Peter J. Hammer)

1. The Elusive Face of Cambodian Justice (Peter J. Hammer and Tara Urs)

3. Preferences Matter: Conversations With Cambodians On The Prosecution Of The Khmer Rouge Leadership (William W. Burke-White)

4. Cambodia’s Judiciary: Up To The Task? (Brad Adams)

5. An Anatomy Of The Extraordinary Chambers (Scott Worden)

6. Documenting The Crimes Of Democratic Kampuchea (John D. Ciorciari with Youk Chhang)

7. The Cambodian Amnesties: Beneficiaries And The Temporal Reach Of Amnesties For Gross Violation of Human Rights (Ronald C. Slye)

8. The Tribunal and Cambodia’s Transition to a Culture of Accountability (Dinah PoKempner)

9. A Collective Response to Mass Violence: Reparations and Healing in Cambodia (Jaya Ramji)

10. Reassessing the Role of Senior Leaders and Local Officials in Democratic Kampuchea Crimes: Cambodian Accountability in Comparative Perspective (Steve Heder)

Epilogue

Appendices

Bibliography

Index

___________________________________________________________________________

• Reviews

"This book presents fresh insights into the sad failure of accountability for the Cambodian genocide – an ongoing issue that should be central to United States human rights policy. In the wake of the Holocaust, the United States provided ideological, institutional, and financial support to the international movement that arose to hold human rights violators criminally accountable for their abuses ... Current efforts to promote accountability for the Khmer Rouge, including the Tribunal and other institutions proposed in this book, provide a perfect opportunity for the United States government to demonstrate its sustained commitment to a principled human rights society. By embracing the imperative of accountability for mass crimes, along with sensitivity to the needs of local conditions, the United States can at the same time promote global norms of consistency with regard to the past and support future improvement in the domestic rule of law. By sketching where Cambodian justice has been, and where it must go, this book provides both a sobering window into the past and a hopeful guide for a better and more just future in that troubled country."

- (from the Preface) Harold Hongju Koh, Dean of Yale Law School, Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law

"This edited collection on accountability for atrocities in Cambodia provides an extremely provocative and useful series of essays. The impending trials raise important and difficult questions for human rights scholarship and policy. To answer these questions, the editors have assembled an impressive group of contributors, including a number who are leading figures in human rights theory and practice ... the interdisciplinary nature of the collection, which brings together scholars from law, international relations, politics, and religion, as well as leading practitioners and policy makers, adds a distinctive depth and vision to the work."

– (Laura Dickinson, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut School of Law )

"Few events in modern history can match the horror and incomprehensibility of the ‘auto-genocide’ committed in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. Three decades later, the attempt to hold its perpetrators criminally liable is finally beginning, as Cambodia convenes its Extraordinary Tribunal to try the aging architects of the genocide – those, at any rate, who are still alive ... this welcome book takes an important step toward helping us understand what it means to hold radical evil accountable. This book will be indispensable to students of Cambodia and international criminal law."

–( David Luban, Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy, Georgetown University Law Center)

Mellen Books by: Beth Van Schaack; Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence before the Cambodian Courts About Beth Van Schaack

Beth Van Schaack is Assistant Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law where she teaches public international law, international criminal law, and transitional justice. Previously, she was a law clerk with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the Acting Director of the Center for Justice & Accountability. She was also in private practice with Morrison & Foerster LLP. She has been a legal advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia since 1995. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from Stanford University.

Mellen Books by: Jaya Ramji; Bringing the Khmer Rouge to Justice: Prosecuting Mass Violence before the Cambodian Courts About Jaya Ramji

Jaya Ramji is a Clinical Teaching Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Center for Applied Legal Studies at Georgetown University Law Center. Previously, she was a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York and in private practice with Debevoise & Plimpton. She has been a legal advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia since 1997. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley.

______________________________________________________________________________________

• Stilled Lives: Photographs from the Cambodian Genocide
• by Wynne Cougill with Pivoine Pang, Chhayran Ra, and Sopheak Sim; (127 pages, Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2004,),

The Documentation Center of Cambodia's latest contribution on the Pol Pot years forsakes academic debate to reveal the lives of people who could never tell their stories in English. Base people, combatants and cadres

• Review by Allen Myers

Walking among the booksellers on Sisowath Quay in the evening, it would be easy to think that the Cambodian genocide is reasonably well-documented. This book is a reminder of how much more there is still to say.

Most of what has been written about life in Democratic Kampuchea has, inevitably, been written by foreign academics or the members of the small group of survivors from Cambodia's educated class. Stilled Lives is something quite different and a very valuable addition to the existing literature. What we have here is in many respects a report from the other side of the lines, from people who could never have produced an English-language account of their experiences in the DK.

The photographs in this book are intriguing and often extremely moving. Nevertheless, the subtitle doesn't do the book justice. While the content and structure revolve around photographs from the period before or during the Pol Pot regime, the accompanying interviews are of at least equal interest. These are accounts, sometimes from survivors, more often from relatives, of the individual in the photograph. Together, photo and interview produce a total greater than the sum of the parts.

The book presents, in the words of the introduction, "the stories of thirty-five men and sixteen women who joined the Khmer Rouge revolution." But "joining" the KR, as is made clear, had many different meanings in the early 1970s, ranging from enthusiastic acceptance of the KR propaganda, through loyalty to the deposed Prince Sihanouk, to grudging acquiescence in conscription for fear of execution.

The editors help to clarify this reality by dividing the subjects of the stories into "base people", "combatants" and "cadres." Even within those categories, however, a range of motivations and understandings emerge.Frequently, these offer new insights.

For example, while it is not surprising that many whom the KR classified as "base people" found themselves in KR territory more or less by accident, I was struck by the number of KR fighters who had previously been in Lon Nol's forces (usually, but not always, via conscription).

Also noticeable is that significant material privileges for "cadres" were both common and taken for granted, even when most Cambodians did not have enough to eat. This appears to have been the case well before April 17, 1975.

It would, of course, be a mistake to try to draw mathematically precise conclusions from this material, and the editors wisely do not attempt to do so. The data here are necessarily biased in a statistical sense. DC-Cam's researchers had to begin from available records, and most of the surviving records of the KR regime are from prisons, so it was inevitable that the individuals whose stories appear here would mostly be people eventually deemed "hostile" to Democratic Kampuchea by the regime.

But what is striking, reading the interviews, is that the victims of the KR were so often combatants of the revolution or at the least ordinary villagers for whom the KR claimed to fight. Repeatedly, relatives say that KR soldiers, even cadres, warned them not to let other family members "join the revolution." The instructions from even high-ranking cadre were to work hard, ask no questions, and acknowledge no relationships - in case the cadre was arrested and the KR pursued his or her "connections."

I began reading Stilled Lives thinking that the "cadres" section would provide the most interesting information. But while that section was in no sense disappointing, I found the section on "base people" the most helpful in contributing to an understanding of Cambodia's post-independence history. In particular, the arbitrary and frequently changing designation of who was a friend or enemy in Democratic Kampuchea perhaps helps to explain how villagers from both sides seemed to reconcile themselves fairly quickly after January 1979.

This book is also technically well-produced and attractively presented. There is an occasional typo, but that's about all. Among other reader-friendly features, there is a family tree for each subject.

The testimonies in this book come only from Kampong Cham, Kandal, Kampong Thom, and Takeo. Presumably, this has to do with the material available to DC-Cam's researchers. It would be wonderful if DC-Cam were able to produce similar volumes based on other provinces. Buy this book (the real one, not the photocopy), and it may give them the resources to do more.

Book Review. Available at Monument Books at Quai Sisowath, Phnom Penh.Phnom Penh Post, Issue 14/05, March 11 - 24, 2005

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• Yes, indeed! Why did they kill (so many)?

    Hinton's book "Why Did They Kill?" reviewed By Henri Locard

The title of Alexander Hinton's new book, Why did they kill?, commended by some of the best scholars on Democratic Kampuchea (DK), promised much. But although the book does deserve the praise lavished on it, I found the reading somewhat of an uphill struggle.

Perhaps the same interesting points could have been made more succinctly. When we read: "a genocidal regime must localize its ideological pronouncements so that they make sense", in one paragraph [p. 287], and in the next, "genocidal leaders must localize their ideologies in order to make them appeal to their followers," we wonder what the difference is.

Hinton set out to write an ambitious book that would "focus on the cultural dimensions" of the mass killings under DK, and he has given a number of convincing explanations, while others, it seems to me, could be shared by other civilizations or similar political regimes.

In the introductory chapter, Hinton reminds the reader of the main characteristics of the regime, and this sometimes leads him to assert as established fact some aspects about which analysts do not agree. Among the causes of death of a quarter of the population under DK, Hinton lists "outright execution" [1], but not the S-21-type of prolonged agonies that victims went through: arrests, imprisonment, interrogation, torture and finally execution. There were plenty of outright executions, but many too were delayed after days, weeks or months of intense suffering in the chains of Pol Pot-Nuon Chea-Son Sen's prison system.

When describing the purge of the northern and central regions in February 1977, Hinton looks at significant excerpts from the S-21 archives and adds, "These arrests were accompanied by the outright execution of tens of thousands of lower-level cadres, soldiers, and civilians from the Northern Zone [Region] whose allegiance to the Party centre was suspect" [153].

While I quite agree that the arrests and executions in those regions at the time did reach the "tens of thousands," what on earth enables Hinton to declare that they were executed "outright"?

Why should the regional leadership have been less paranoid than the party center?

They were just as persuaded they had to deal with networks of "enemies" and plots to launch local rebellions and they acted according to national directives; that is arrest, interrogate, torture and then execute in the numerous district prisons, being put in khnoh (iron shackles), just as in S-21, but, unlike in S-21, a few accused were sometimes released.

Those victims included some of the truckloads of citizens about to be bashed to death at Phnom Pros near Kampong Cham, the area of Hinton's anthropological investigation.

However, I would have liked to know more about where these people came from and who were their executioners. From testimonies in the province, it appears that some came from the Central Prison of the provincial capital itself, thus showing that too often under DK, there were no "outright" executions. Hinton also mentions [41, 157] that some of those victims had been "previously interrogated and tortured [in...] Kampong Cham city." As to who the dozen or so executioners were, Hinton does not say. I was told they were youthful soldiers in their twenties, exactly as in S-21.

I was recently told by N.S. (born in 1954), who used to be a KR male nurse at the KR hospital in Kampong Cham under DK, that many of those trucks came from the city's old Central Prison.

As in Siem Reap and Kampong Thom (but unlike in Phnom Penh), the old colonial prison was in use under DK and Phnom Pros might have served, for a time at least, as its Choeung Ek. It was the regional prison for party cadres and soldiers and there were hundreds of prisoners in 1976-77.

In fact, the prison was partly destroyed by explosions in September 1977, as Hinton interestingly explains [163], in the course of an abortive rebellion on the part of a soldier identified as Reap and others to free some of their friends who were inside. He was in turn arrested by Ke Pauk and sent to S-21.

N.S. himself had been arrested by the soldiers of Vey Reap (the same man, I assume, as Hinton's), because he was accused of being part of the network of his elder brother, who was a KR medic at the time, and put in Kampong Cham prison. This was in 1977, at the time of the Central region purge under the leadership of Ke Pauk after Koy Thuon's arrest. He was accused of being a CIA-KGB agent and executed.

As to the younger brother, he was put in a truck with some 30 prisoners and taken to a permanent structure near Ampoel commune, very close to Phnom Pros. He remained there for one month during which all were taken out to work in the fields during the day and went through reeducation meetings at night.

There were two spies among them who came out at night to receive supplementary food. One night, the prisoners were told they were to be taken to another place. In actual fact, 28 were massacred at Phnom Pros and two freed as their reeducation was said to have been a success.

Overwhelmed, like every researcher, by the horror of S-21 and its voluminous documentation, Hinton does not mention the zone (dambon) 41 prison that was situated in nearby Prey Chhor district at Takeo village, Kor commune, some 20 kilometers away from the village he investigated. It was known among the local population as "Comrade Sop Security Centre."

Prisoners could also have been brought for execution to Phnom Pros from there.

The prison consisted of several wooden, oblong buildings containing some 30 to 50 prisoners each along two rows of iron bars and sliding khnoh. It was opened during the Republic, as the area was under revolutionary control. For, when in charge, the KR started arrests, imprisonment and killings.

We are told that "already, by 1976, interrogators seem to have been readily using torture" [234]. Obviously Hinton has not read (it is absent from his bibliography) Francois Bizot's The Gate (2000, 2003) that will tell him that the KR prisons (with their accompanying fetters and torture) existed as soon as the revolutionaries controlled a significant portion of national territory.

Bizot was arrested in October 1971 and taken to Omleang prison. There were prisons in every KR controlled sector in the early 1970s, including the Sector 41 prison in Prey Chhor district at Takeo village, Kor commune.

To illustrate his points, Hinton used once again the testimonies of torturer-executioners from S-21 rather than investigating the prison-execution centers in the area of his anthropological inquiry. It would have been more innovative to trace the local Duch and Lor (his Tuol Sleng executioner).

I'm sure some were still alive, and in their prime, in 1994, when the author did his field research. But Hinton claims that in 1994 it was unsafe to live in a Kampong Cham provincial village [16]. Was it, I wonder? If Hinton does mention [20] a local "detention centre", he apparently made no attempt to identify it.

The summarized description of the 1970-75 civil war [8] is somewhat lopsided. The KR would never have spread chaos in the early 70s nor seized power without the context of the 2nd Indochinese War. But the mass of recruits could not have joined the revolutionary camp because of a desire for revenge after the American bombings. First, these certainly did not cause 150,000 deaths. The "perhaps" of page 8 becomes an "up to" on page 58. We are slowly creeping towards a proven fact. Printing again and again mistaken figures does not make them more valid.

First of all we must never forget that the aggressors in the civil war were on the one hand the 60,000 Vietminh troops that occupied the so-called "sanctuaries" inside Cambodia near its eastern border. The Cambodian army was about only half that number in the late 1960s and absolutely unable to face up to the threat. On the other hand, Nuon Chea from Phnom Penh in January 1968 and Saloth Sar from Ratanakkiri in March 1968 had launched their revolutionary struggle to seize power. The Cambodian government was defenseless in front of these two coordinated attackers. Those were the guerilla movements that spread chaos to Cambodia and not the American bombings, however massive and continuous they had been from 1969 to August 1973.

Like most historians, Hinton repeats the figure of 600,000 victims of the civil war that everyone quotes, but this amount has never been the result of a serious demographic investigation that I know of. The number was first launched by Pol Pot himself in the early days of DK and, by the end of his regime, it had grown in his rhetoric to 1.2 million. In other words, Pol Pot, like Stalin, passed on his own victims onto his enemies.

Hinton also repeats that the bombing resulted in roughly two million refugees by the end of the war. But I have never been able to understand why, if people fled the horrors of American bombing, they did not return home after August 1973 when those ceased.

No, the Cambodians were above all fleeing the Khmer Rouge radical collectivization, forced relocations of citizens from, among multitudinous market towns and villages, Kratie, Angtassom or Kampong Cham (when they briefly occupied it in July 1973) and the executions and imprisonment on the part of ruthless revolutionaries.

Hinton prudently puts a "perhaps" in front of the two figures he quotes of the casualties of the civil war - 150,000 deaths for the bombings and 600,000 perished between 1970 and 1975. Well, he can, for, as far as we can know, according to the only published demographic study I know [Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide khmer rouge, Paris, L'Harmattan; 1995, p. 43-48], not mentioned in Hinton's bibliography, some 240,000 died a violent death during the civil war, and the number of the victims of American bombings were less than 50,000 - 50,000 monstrous war crimes, of course, when the victims were innocent civilians.

A similarly controversial view is developed when Hinton bemoans "the international isolation" of the PRK regime [13]. It was an isolation of its own making or one imposed by the Vietnamese Communist Party that was too busy establishing a Soviet-style regime and recycling civilian and military cadres from Democratic Kampuchea.

A host of NGOs and UN agencies would have been willing to help more if the Phnom Penh regime, in actual fact under the final authority of Le Duc Tho (the head of Vietnam's Politburo office of Cambodian affairs) from behind the scenes, had been allowed to have its say. Why again did so many citizens flee the new regime, further bleeding the country's small surviving elite?

Did they not run away from another - if much more humane - communist regime that curtailed most civil liberties? I am sorry, but I am not impressed like Hinton ("an impressive feat" [13], he claims) by a regime that, after one generation, has not been able to restore, for instance, the education and health systems to their pre-1970 level, not to speak of a diversified, budding industrial sector. Where are the Sihanoukville oil refinery, the Takhmau rubber factory, the Stung Mean Chey glass factory, the Chhlong paper mill, the Kampot cement factory etc.... of Sangkum days?

Apart from some of these details, Hinton gives the general reader a very vivid and compact picture of the DK regime.

As to the whys of so many killings, apart from the first chapter about "disproportionate revenge," Hinton's anthropological-psychological analysis goes a long way towards lifting the dark veil of the mystery of man's cruelty to man. But the specialist in so doing should not dismiss as superficial the explanations of historians and political scientists.

Those are valid explanations too. I am thinking of the fact that most of the killers were very young men who had been torn from their families when they were children.

Hinton has nothing to say about the age of the executioners and their youths when drilled. Nor does he sufficiently show, as Philip Short rightly pointed out, that they came from a background steeped in ignorance and above all superstitions.

One would have expected an anthropologist to explore the dark realm of Khmer folklore, as Philip Short had started to do. We would have had a picture of the world vision among young adolescent boys in 1970 in the rural areas of Cambodia.

Similarly, although Hinton does mention the question of totalitarianism, the relish of the pursuit of absolute power is not given the emphasis it deserves. I understand this is not the subject of the book. But one cannot quote Mao only once [144], the arch-model, the guide for the DK leadership. When Pol Pot eulogizes Mao at the time of his death in September 1976, he becomes an apologist for the greatest killer in the 20th century - 70 million deaths, according to his latest biographer, Jung Chang (Mao, the Unknown Story, 2005).

Hinton brushes aside the theory so often put forward that the perpetrators were "ideological automatons" [23] as too easy an explanation, and he wishes to go beyond what he regards as a superficial approach.

"Perpetrators are not automatons who, for identical reasons, blindly carry out the dictates of the State." In other words, Hinton wishes to reintroduce free will and personal responsibility into the criminal behaviors of the perpetrators. I wonder if this is not unconsciously projecting a Western conception of education into the Cambodian hinterland.

Before they fell prey to the KR trainers, these youths had never been educated in expressing their own views or opposing their elders, as in the West. The best proof that they had been turned into killing machines is that, for those who survived the regime, once de-conditioned, they settled down and lead normal family lives. They are among the ones who want a trial for they want to know why and by whom they were made to commit the monstrous acts they were forced to commit.

I would not be quite so certain this is a superficial explanation at all, as we can observe this in all totalitarian regimes. Those, from the Nazi variety to all shades of communist, have created youth movements where they radicalized impressionable adolescents and turned them into enthusiastic automatons ready to blindly obey the most criminal commands of their elders/superiors.

Hinton is right to claim that ideological brainwashing must operate within a favorable cultural background, otherwise the transplant will fail. "By linking their lethal ideologies to preexisting cultural knowledge, genocidal states provide perpetrators with an array of compelling discourses that may be used, consciously or unconsciously, in their genocidal bricolage" [30]. Among the "preexisting cultural knowledge", I would certainly put the superstitions, irrationality and ignorance of most of the younger perpetrators manipulated by semi-intellectuals trained by the Communist Parties of France, Vietnam and China.

In a summary of his main points [32-35], Hinton names disproportionate revenge and a society marked by patronage networks. I would add a slavish mentality or blindly obeying orders of people you regard as your superior. In the end, Hinton does mention the factor of "obedience" [277-280], but does he ascribe it the place it deserves?

The author wants to probe the motivations "beyond" [280] those usually put forward. This is interesting and ambitious, but that should not mean that the obvious explanations are not valid too. Such as the fact that Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Nuon Chea were self-important, narcissistic academic failures, while others, like Ke Pauk or Ta Mok, were nothing but career serial killers. They were all ardent believers in Marxist-Leninism (for it rationalized their totalitarian power) and in a class war that would fuel the great leap forward of Kampuchea into the front line of history.

Some of the most interesting and perceptive pages in this book are those that analyze the perversion of Buddhist beliefs, on the part of revolutionary doctrinaires, lumping revolutionary consciousness and renunciation. Interesting considerations too are those about misguided conception of honor that make the perpetrator kill the enemy "burrowing from within" as a mark of loyalty to the Party and of honor.

There were indeed a certain amount of revenge killings. Some KR cadres took advantage of the sheer violence to settle personal scores, but I am not entirely convinced that this played a very significant role. I am not at all certain that, in pre-revolutionary Cambodia [46], the poorer Khmers were more exploited. They owned their land much more than today. Do we see "disproportionate revenge" today when farmers are deprived of their tiny land or exploited by monopolistic tradesmen or rapacious officials?

I believe the notion that KR leaders, like all fundamentalist ideologues, "had achieved enlightenment" is quite well-perceived, but no more than Mr Vladimir Ilyich who was not a Buddhist [50]. His "omniscience and clairvoyance", like Pol Pot's, enabled him to organize mass murder for the good of humanity, in advance of Hitler.

Similarly, the notion of "independence-mastery" [51] rings of Buddhist philosophy. But it also happened to be Mao's and Kim-Il-sung's refrain as well.

Hinton counts as specifically Khmer revenge killings in the early days of the regime, of all leaders, civilian and military, associated with previous regimes [59]. But Messrs. Robespierre, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung did this too. Is this not a characteristic of all radical revolutionary movements?

In Chapter 3, Hinton looks at the vast amount of power concentrated in Angkar, the arch provider of all patronage. He draws a most interesting parallel between Buddhism and the KR brand of Marxism:

"In both systems of thought, human beings are said to live in a state of ignorance, false consciousness, and suffering. To free oneself from this dismal existence, one must understand certain universal laws (the Four Noble Truths and the Law of Dependent Origination, or class oppression and the Laws of Dialectical Materialism) and use certain methods (the Middle Path, meditation, Buddhist logic, moral discipline or [...] revolutionary ethics. The enlightened one who clearly understands this situation (the Buddha and monks or Angkar and the Party Center) can help lead the populace to salvation (nirvana or communism). By portraying Angkar as an almost divine, "clear-sighted," "enlightened" entity, therefore, the KR were revamping communist ideology in terms of local idioms [...]. Like the Buddha, Angkar was an enlightened and all-knowing center from which power radiated. Like the Bayon, Angkar was an axis mundi that encompassed all lands, seeing everything with its many eyes [...], enlightened with secret knowledge (Marxism-Leninism), to revitalize a degenerate order." [129]

Similarly worth quoting is the reality that "the indoctrination of cadres and soldiers was similarly geared to creating a relationship of personal dependency with the DK regime. Angkar was the parent-patron who did good deeds for cadres and soldiers by giving them rank, prestige, food and guns. In return, KR were expected to loyally support the Party organization and to 'cut off their hearts' from the Angkar's enemies." [131].

Hinton, in Chapter 4, follows up the same argument and adds: "the KR attempted to assume the monk's traditional role as moral instructor (teaching the new brand of 'mindfulness') and the DK regime's glorification of asceticism, detachment, the elimination of [...] desire, renunciation (of material goods and personal behaviors, sentiments and attitudes), and purity parallel prominent Buddhist themes that were geared toward helping a person attain greater mindfulness. [...] The KR blended " high-modernist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist and local Buddhist thought" [197].

Hinton has interesting pages on the eating of human liver and in particular his assertion that "the process of disembowelment mimes the search for 'hidden enemies' and the DK regime's high-modernist attempt to render everything visible and thus subject to State control" [291].

Similarly, Hinton summarizes most of his findings about the motivations of a top leader like Pol Pot. "[His] actions were motivated by local understandings of patronage, the ideological doctrine he helped to formulate, the atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety he helped to create, his group interactions with others, and the narcissistic inflation he achieved through the destruction of impure enemies 'burrowing from within' [297]". Hinton does note indeed the self-aggrandizement that his position gave him, but all it boils to is the supreme relish (probably shared by Stalin, Hitler and Mao) of being in a position atop the pinnacle of the totalitarian state. He killed (or ordered other people to kill), and like his fellow dictators, he enjoyed the trappings of power.

This meant not only the relish in receiving state delegations from all over the world (not to forget his ex-King), but the absolute power of life and death over all his compatriots.

He stripped them of absolutely all their belongings first, but also 25 percent of their lives; no one had done better in modern life. He was the most powerful of the powerful.

Finally, when Hinton again aptly describes how perpetrators had "become increasingly desensitized," he fails to remind the reader of the obvious: that the KR leadership used children massively.

For instance, pp. 199-202 give a lengthy account of Lor, an interrogator at S-21 whose interview and life story is used throughout the book. But he fails to note here the main point: his age at the time of "joining the revolution" on 2nd October 1972.

Like most torturers at S-21, and like the executioners at Phnom Pros, he cannot fail to have been very young, and probably a child. Besides, he probably did not enter the revolution of his own accord, but his parents had been forced at gunpoint by the incoming KR guerrillas to give their son to the revolution.

This is what Norodom Sihanouk saw among the soldiers who were his guardians in the Palace. In War and Hope (1980), he describes the use of children: "once enrolled into the revolutionary army, those children are separated from their families and taken away from their native village. They are molded into the Pol-Potian indoctrination. The recruits start a military career at the age of twelve. As they are taken charge of by their leaders at a very early age, those yothea [soldiers] are soon convinced that they are granted the greatest honour by being appointed 'oppakâr phdach kar robâs pak' that is literally 'the dictatorial instruments of the Party'. [...] Being 'the dictatorial instruments of the Party' means to have the right of life and death over all the herds of slaves of all categories."

This is the kind of testimony from S.N. (born in 1951, interviewed in Kampong Cham on August 20, 1993) one can hear throughout Cambodia: "This is the story of a young orphan boy who has been adopted by the head of the collective. He is being given clothes, food and even a bicycle. In order to become a barbarian, he is asked: 'Do you love your class? Do you love your race? Do you love Angkar? Would you dare to smash the enemy?'

One day he is taken before a prisoner, with his hands tied behind his back. "Here is the enemy in front of you! He is the one who killed your mother and your father."

As it is the first time, the boy does not dare to move and looks down to the ground. The KR cadre adds: "If you dare not kill this enemy, it is because you are the enemy; you are opposing Angkar."

Then the boy looks up to the prisoner and starts to slap him in the face. Then he takes his sandal and bashes the scrawny, chained prisoner on the face until he bleeds.

The next day, the boy is taken to the prisoner again. "If you dare not kill him, it is because you oppose Angkar." And he bashes the prisoner to death.

This is how he started and is later able to kill prisoners every day. If there is none, he is bored and looks for some like a bandit.

In Cambodia, people tend to do what they are told by those in positions of authority.

Today the Ministry of Culture is selling the northern campus of RUFA to a town speculator. This is probably not because people there think it is a good idea to break up a university created in Sangkum days, but because they recognize who is the boss. Ministry of Culture officials are in the government to obey orders, and this is just what they are doing. Similarly, Duch was told by Nuon Chea that every single individual who passed through the gates of S-21 must be put to death - and that is exactly what he did.

Phnom Penh Post, Issue 14/18, September 9 - 22, 2005

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• Another testimony by an expert on Communism on the crimes against Humanity committed under that ideology. Thus, Pol Pot's Killing Fields is not entirely due and specific to the flaws in the Cambodian society, as Hinton has suggested in his book entitled "Why Did They Kill?" 

• From the Gulag to the Killing Fields:  An Interview with the author, Paul Hollander

By Jamie Glazov

FrontPageMagazine.com | June 5, 2006

FrontPage Interview's guest today is Paul Hollander, an expert on anti-Americanism and the author of two masterpiece works on the psychology of the Left: Political Pilgrims and Anti-Americanism. He is the editor of a collection of essays by America's foremost scholars and thinkers, Understanding Anti-Americanism. He has now gathered together an unprecedented volume consisting of more than forty personal memoirs of Communist repression from dissidents across the world in the new book “From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States. “

FP: Paul Hollander, welcome back to FrontPage Interview.

Hollander: Thank you Jamie.

FP: Tell us what motivated you to assemble this new collection.

Hollander: My motivation for putting this book together is quite straightforward and longstanding. I have been impressed (and dismayed) for many years, indeed decades, by the phenomenal and profound Western (esp. American) ignorance of communist systems in general and the deprivations they imposed on their people in particular.

I found especially noteworthy and puzzling the contrast between this ignorance (and the very limited interest) and the lively (and fully justified) preoccupation with the Holocaust. In the introduction to the book, I discussed at some length the differences and similarities between the Holocaust and the communist mass murders and tried to explain the different moral responses in the West.

I should also add here that in a sense the book originated in a 1994 article I wrote about the asymmetrical Western moral responses to these two major outrages of the past century.

More recently I also felt that this anthology may also offer some help for a better general understanding of the relationship between ideas(and ideals) actions, i.e. many forms of political violence and repression connected with the attempt to realize certain ideals, secular or religious, or secular-religious. Most recently this has been connected with Islamic terrorism and I also made some reference to that in the intro.

I decided to use for this anthology memoirs rather than statistics or social scientific discussions intending to capture the personal experiences and dimensions at the receiving end of this violence.

FP: One of the reasons why historical amnesia has been imposed on communist genocide is that the Left still clearly holds onto the dream of earthly redemption and to the faith that human blood can justifiably be shed to achieve it. Holocaust denial is always connected to the craving for the repetition of the Holocaust itself. Can you talk about this a bit? 

Hollander: I would put it somewhat differently, though probably we mean the same thing. Yes, the left - or elements of the Left - find it difficult to admit that Marxism, even (or especially) in its purest forms is unworkable. The Communist mass murders are played down because they were performed in the service of these great, noble ideals. Hobsbawm is a good example of some of these attitudes; he knows full well the horrors and doesn’t deny them but still retained a lingering nostalgia for the good intentions they were supposedly associated with.

But on the other hand many on the Left deny that Marxism had anything to do with the nature of communist systems and if so, they could freely admit or discuss the political violence these systems engaged in. But they don’t.

I am not sure that those on the Left still believe in earthly redemption but they are nonetheless emotionally attracted to past attempts to accomplish this. The good intentions continue to matter a great deal, esp. when there is so much cynicism, scepticism, disillusionment in the contemporary world. (Americans in particular find this painful; this is a very idealistic culture of high expectations).

I am not sure if the Holocaust denial is connected to a craving to repeat it although it may be connected to some sympathy to (another) attempt to purify the world. This would of course never be acknowledged.

FP: Because leftists publicly deny that Marxism inevitably engenders Stalinism does not mean they do not, deep down, know it to be true and that they do not support it for exactly that reason. (It is a given, of course, that I am referring to the hard Left that has represented and made up the Left throughout the 20th century, not to the liberal Left that was marginalized within the movement at large).

I don’t think that there was once a Left that was motivated by earthly redemption and that now there is a Left -- that is still a "Left" -- that doesn’t believe in it. There would be no point for a Left unless there was the ingredient of the Marxist faith that held that certain parts of the human condition needed to be annihilated and a certain world of social justice built on its ashes. A person who accepts that we are flawed human beings who live in world that cannot be made perfect, and that the road toward perfect “social justice” automatically comes with a form of terror, is no longer a part of the Left as we know it. If he thinks he is, then he robs the word of its meaning and imposes historical amnesia on what the Left has always historically been and what it has perpetrated. 

The Nazis who deny the Jewish Holocaust are always the ones who, in private, rub their hands in glee at the reality that it happened and are enthusiastic about how their denial may facilitate the possibility of another one. The leftists who deny the Gulag and all of its forms are the ones who have a vested interested in more gulags being perpetrated to build their vision of a future earthly paradise. We are just using different semantics here. The large-scale attempts to purify the world always entail the mass shedding of human blood, a procedure which has a label: Holocaust.

Hollander: I don’t think, and did not suggest, that the leftists deny the gulag (shorthand for communist violence). They are not as irrational as the Holocaust deniers. Rather, they overlook or deemphasize or minimize the gulag, or see it as flawed means to good ends. 

Communist misdeeds are perfunctorily admitted but they don’t stimulate the same kind of moral indignation as other moral outrages closer to their heart (racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation etc).

In this last comment you speak only about the hard, or more dogmatic and radical left. But there is a more moderate/liberal left with a diminished appetite for the kind of utopia that requires so much repression and regimentation, people like the late Irving Howe or Galbraith or Todd Gitlin; social democrats, non-violent, romantic anti-capitalists. Some people learned something from history.

On the other hand, it is true that at times the more moderate left tolerated ("understood") the radicals (and their "rage") because they seemed more "authentic", "their heart in the right place"  -- as for example liberal academics in the 60s and 70s felt about the SDS/Weathermen types (or Black Panthers) and their misdeeds.    

It is also true -- but again this applies to a minority - (difficult to measure these things) that for some intellectuals on the (radical) left violence was attractive because it proved the seriousness of commitment (Sartre, Mailer, Castro groupies etc)

FP: Fair enough my friend. We are branching out into a dialogue that will have to take place in another forum. And I am not even necessarily in disagreement with you, but just expanding on our discussion.

Just for the sake of crystallizing one main point about the Left: suffice it to say that the Noam Chomskys and Ward Churchills of this world represent the Left as we know it, and they have malicious and destructive intent in their hearts, and their driving impulse is to venerate and submit to our adversarial totalitarian enemies.

To suggest that there are some liberal leftists out there who are not represented by characters such as these is to suggest a given, but within this context it suggests that these lib-leftists somehow once had political influence on the Left as a whole, which they didn’t, and in so doing, it robs the term “Left” of its meaning and imposes historical amnesia on what the Left, as a mass, believes and what it has perpetrated throughout its history.

But let's get back one track. Tell us in what way this new collection represents a landmark.

Hollander: The Anthology may be considered a "landmark" because there is nothing like it; nobody has before brought together such writings in one volume; moreover these writings represent experiences from every single communist system, extinct or surviving, from Albania to Vietnam. Many of the selections are also of considerable literary merit.

Also among the unique features of the volume is the 75 page introduction in which I attempted to systematically examine the distinctive features of communist repression and compare it with the far better known Nazi case.

FP: The personal accounts are truly powerful and also extremely traumatizing. I just finished the book and it just depresses your soul to try to digest the mass genocide and torture along with the vicious brutality and sadism inflicted on millions of human beings for the sake of an idea. It is an idea, as you point out, that many are still in love with.

The memoirs always center on the horrifying reality of torture to extract a confession. Prof. Hollander, why do you think it is so important for communists to get the confession of guilt – even when they know the guilt is imagined and not true?

Hollander: I think that the obsession with the confession had three sources. One was practical: since there was no proof whatsoever of the horrendous, fantastic crimes many were accused of, confession was the only proof and it was easy to extract it under physical and mental pressure. (Of course the confession of those who were subjected to the show trials was far more important and elaborate than those of the anonymous victims).

Second, the confessions, when publicized, were didactic, intended to convey some political lesson: e.g. that the Soviet Union (or some other communist state) was menaced by totally depraved, unscrupulous enemies; the confession also served the purpose of informing the public who the enemies were (sociologically speaking); who was allied with whom. Sometimes the accused were used to explain domestic problems like food shortages (sabotage).

The confessions also served the purpose to discredit particular individuals since they had to confess to general moral failings as well as to particular political acts (dishonesty, treacherous behaviour, greed, being subject to bribes, envy etc)

Third, and perhaps most important, that the confession – although coerced, and as such something of a self-fulfilling prophecy – proved the existence of a certain moral universe: the polarized notions of good and evil. The accused colourfully personified the latter, the accusers the former.

One final reason: the evil attitudes and deeds of the more important victims had to confess to provided further justification for terror.

FP: What distinctive features of communist violence can be crystallized from the accounts?

Hollander: The distinctive features of communist political violence are quite numerous, the most important being that it was "violence of higher purpose" (I considered this for the title of the book). People were killed or mistreated because they were in the way of realizing certain political, economic or social goals or programs, or they were thought to be in the way of these measures and policies.

Also distinctive, that much of the repression and regimentation occurred because of the attempted creation of the "new socialist man". Another important feature was that people were mistreated for the most part not for their actions or behavior, but because they belonged to certain categories which were considered suspect or potentially hostile. Much of the violence thus was prophylactic or preventative. But depending on changing policies anybody could become classified as "the enemy."

Other features:

a) the vast scope of repression was unanticipated since communist theoreticians assumed that their systems will be widely popular, hence the state can "wither away" as Lenin put it;  (unlike in the Holocaust most victims of communist violence perished because of living conditions in the labor camps or were shot; there were no gas chambers)

b) Integration of repression with economic goals; slave labor on a large scale; (these 2 features, a) and b) vastly increased the scope of the repression)

c) Control over population movements both within the countries concerned and across international borders;

d) Elaborate dehumanization and demonization of the potential victims through propaganda and enforced confessions;

e) Lip service paid to the "rehabilitation" of those imprisoned (some variety of what the Chinese called "thought reform"). But these efforts were no consistent or serious.

Of course this is just a very brief summary.

FP: In the end, the lesson of the Left's attempt to remold the human being is that we ultimately cannot change who and what we are – and that the effort to build paradise on earth leads to the creation of hell instead. Can you talk a bit about that?

Hollander: Precisely my conclusions. The kind of social engineering communist systems attempted are inherently impossible to realize, they are also unpopular and the attempted realization produces vast amounts of violence and coercion.

These systems were also rejected by most of their populations because they created a huge, persistent and readily discernible gap between ideals and realities; the notorious theory and practice gap. But certain aspects of the theory (Marxism) itself lent themselves to distortion and were wrongheaded: e.g. the idea that nationalizing the means of production will make the economy more productive AND help to create a sense of community and social solidarity. State control over the economy accomplished neither.

There were many unforeseen results of such policies.

Yes, human nature appears to have certain features which resist the kinds of regimentation these systems attempted. Most people, most of the time, are unwilling to surrender the private/personal to the public/political realm; they put higher value on their family and friends than on imposed, artificial political communities.

Again, a lot more can be said about all this and I have done so in the introduction.

FP: Why do I have a feeling that this text will not be required reading in academia?

Hollander: You may well be right about this mainly because little is being taught about communist systems in general. If they are not taught why would a text focusing on their misdeed be used? Many academics would be concerned that dwelling on these misdeeds would/could divert attention from the misdeeds of their own society, the U.S., and other capitalist systems.

FP: I am always terrified reading texts like this, and we have an obligation to do so, of course, to reach out to the victims, to support them, and to be loyal to the truth and to fight evil. 

I will admit that when I put my feet in these victims’ shoes, I become very frightened and I wonder how I could have possibly survived what they survived. Would I have confessed right away just to avoid the horrifying tortures? Would I have tried to kill myself? Or would I have fought and endured the unspeakable sadism and brutality inflicted by the torturers?

I must say that a book like this reminds us of not only of the evil in life – and in humans (i.e. the sadistic torturers), but also of the heroism and courage and nobility that lurks in man. There are some incredible heroes in this volume that survived against all odds and, with tremendous stamina and courage, against all hope (to borrow the title of Armando Valladares’ memoir).

As you comment in your introduction, this evil experiment on humans also brought out the best in us, and what was also unexpected. And so while it is traumatizing and heart-wrenching to confront the evil of communism and the unspeakable pain it caused its victims, it is inspiring to see the beautiful virtues it brought out of man.

Can you talk about that a bit?

Hollander: I also thought about the matter of resisting torture and found it difficult to imagine how it could be withstood (not many succeeded).

As to what suffering brings out of human beings I don’t think that in most cases it brings out heroism and good qualities but sometimes it does. When people are reduced to concern with the basics of physical survival most of them have little emotional or physical energy left to act selflessly, kindly. But some do.

Of course very good conditions are not necessarily conducive to nurturing virtue either: people with a great deal of wealth, power, fame, comforts etc. often become more mired in selfishness and in self-centered notions of "self-realization" -- we have much of this in this society.

But there is also "noblese oblige" on the part of the rich (esp. the established rich, not the new rich).

It is very hard to know what conditions bring out the best or worst in people.

Most people need a certain level of stability, security and satisfaction of basic needs before they can rise to decent behavior.

FP: Very true. I’ll just say that I have in mind individuals such as Armando Valladares and Vladimir Bukovsky who could have avoided their terrible suffering if they had just recanted their belief in freedom and accepted what the regime wanted them to accept. But they chose unspeakable terror being perpetrated against them for the sake of their commitment to the right of human being to be free. What incredible human beings. Remarkable warriors, soldiers . . . heroes. 

Paul Hollander, thank you for contributing this priceless volume for the sake of keeping the truth alive and to keep alive the memory of the millions of human beings  who lost their lives and suffered unimaginable pain because of the attempt to enforce human redemption on earth. 

Hollander: Let me just say in conclusion that I am very pleased that I managed finally to put together this volume and get it published (after a long search for a publisher). I am far from certain what it will accomplish, how widely it will be read, but I felt strongly that such a volume had to be produced, perhaps for the sake of historical justice. As I also wrote in the introduction, one always hopes that more knowledge leads to better understanding and the latter might eventually make some difference to how people behave.

One final (and far from original point): I think that the main lesson of communist political violence and repression has been that good intentions can produce very bad results. Idealism is attractive but no guarantee of good results.

Of course one should not jump to the conclusion that all idealism is suspect and must lead to unspeakable horrors. The idealism associated with the communist misdeeds was not the only ingredient or precondition of these historic horrors, although a very important one.

Human lives and social systems can and should be improved but we must resist the tempting illusion, that human nature can be radically changed, that all scarcities and injustices can be eradicated, that that the many conflicts of human interest can be wiped out etc., etc. 

FP: Thank you Prof. Hollander.

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Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.

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• Contrary to Alex Hinton's assertion in his book" why Did they Kill?" that the Khmer Rouge genocide was due to a purely Cambodian character, this article article and the following Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe's resolution clearly showed that the Khmer Rouge's crime against Humanity could not have been committed without the devious and misrepresentation of humanism in the ideology of Communism.                 

An Antidote to Moral Blindness
                  By ADAM KIRSCH - Special to the Sun
                  June 14, 2006

http://www.nysun.com/article/34399

             June 14, 2006 Edition > Section:  Arts and Letters

                  In Cuba, a completely sane 16-year-old student named Jose Alvarado Delgado is committed to a mental hospital, given electroshock therapy, and force-fed psychotropic drugs. In the Soviet Union, Evgenia Ginzburg is interrogated by the secret police for seven days straight, without sleep or food. In Vietnam, Doan Van Toai sees a fellow prisoner commit suicide by biting off his own tongue and choking on it. In Cambodia, Haing Ngor witnesses a Khmer Rouge soldier suffocate a pregnant woman with a plastic bag, then rip out the fetus with a bayonet.

                  As I read these accounts of victims of communism collected in "From the Gulag to the Killing Fields" (ISI Books, 760 pages, $35) - an anthology of memoirs from around the world and across the century, including famous writers and anonymous prisoners, ardent revolutionaries and innocent bystanders - I kept thinking of a phrase from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's influential 2000 book, "Empire": "the irrepressible lightness and
joy of being communist." Substitute the word "fascist" in that sentence, and you would have a sentiment that every civilized person would instantly condemn as not just evil, but insane. Yet "Empire," with its eleventh hour attempt to rehabilitate communism as a source of political hope, was widely hailed in the academy as a great achievement. Decades after Stalin's purges, Mao's Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot's genocide, it is still possible for educated people to associate communism with lightness and joy, and to be praised for doing so.

                  The momentary celebrity of Messrs. Negri and Hardt is a
trivial matter. But the moral blindness of which that celebrity is a minor
symptom is anything but trivial. It is, in fact, the reason Paul Hollander,
the eminent scholar of Soviet communism, spent the last decade assembling this large, frightening, and important book. In his brilliant introduction, "The Distinctive Features of Repression in Communist States" - the best brief summary of the nature and crimes of communism that I have read - Mr. Hollander notes:

                  While there is a vast literature on the Holocaust ... and while it has justifiably stimulated a huge and continued outpouring of
research, moral outrage, and soul searching, the mass murders and other atrocities committed in the Soviet Union under (and after) Stalin have inspired little corresponding concern and interest.

                  Stalin, however, is at least recognized as a figure of almost unparalleled evil and cruelty; outside the lunatic fringe, he has as few admirers as Hitler. More perplexing is the continued willingness of Western intellectuals to make cult heroes of other communist despots. It is still not uncommon to find admirers of Lenin, seen as the pristine embodiment of communist virtue, or of Fidel Castro, seen as the daring patriarch of Third World liberation. Other communist regimes are simply missing from our moral radar. For all that has been written about the Vietnam War, most Americans know next to nothing about what happened in South Vietnam after the communist victory. The famine that struck Ethiopia in the 1980s is remembered here as a humanitarian crisis, not as the criminal result of Mengistu's collectivization policies. Finally, and most ominously, there is the People's Republic of China - usually portrayed in the news media these days as an emerging capitalist dynamo, but still governed by the Communist Party that gave its people famine and forced labor, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.

                  In short, while it is common to speak of the defeat of
communism in the Cold War, that defeat has not been total, especially in the way communism is remembered and understood. It is still possible for Western intellectuals to deny the crucial lesson of the 20th century, that utopian politics are shortest route to dystopia. And this denial is all too easy to understand. After all, if the rhetoric and the declared intentions of communism are so good - universal liberation, perfect equality, an end to want - how can the reality be so bad?

                  That is the question raised, again and again, in "From the
Gulag to the Killing Fields." It is one of the common themes running through these eyewitness accounts of every communist regime in the 20th century, from Russia to Cuba, China to Nicaragua, Bulgaria to North Korea. Naturally, the details of what each author experienced - the methods of torture, the inflections of propaganda - vary according to time, place, and cultural background. Witnesses from Vietnam are especially shocked by the communist cadres' rudeness to their elders; in Ethiopia, Mengistu's refusal to allow his victims to be buried is seen as the worst possible outrage.

                  But the disbelief remains constant. Everywhere, the victim
of communism initially finds it impossible to believe that a revolution in the name of the people could oppress and destroy the people. How could it be that, in the words of the Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov, "no other political religion ... has ... a stronger impact on the baser human instincts and passions ... [and] has given such encouragement to human vice generally, as the Communist ideology"?

                  The shock is especially great for true believers, who so
often fall victim to their own revolution. Evgenia Ginzburg, an old
Bolshevik and wife of a high-ranking Soviet official, was shocked that an NKVD interrogator would manipulate her answers: "Why don't we have a stenographer to put them down?" she asks, only to be met with "peals of laughter." Anna Larina was shocked at the fantastic accusations brought by Stalin against her husband, the Soviet leader Nikolai Bukharin: "The sheer mass of crimes ... could not possibly have been committed by one criminal in his entire lifetime." Inevitably, given the audacity of the regime's persecution, the prisoner begins to wonder if he is guilty in some way he never suspected. "Was I a criminal?" Harry Wu wonders after being sent to a forced labor camp. "Perhaps my ideas had brought harm to the majority of the Chinese people."

                  The psychological and material techniques of communist
oppression are not, of course, a secret. They have been plain, for those willing to see, at least since Stalin's show trials of the 1930s. But for scope, comprehensiveness, and direct emotional power, no document of those techniques surpasses "From the Gulag to the Killing Fields." Any reader who begins reading the book with some lingering sympathy for communism will close it with the words of Teeda Butt Mam, a victim of the Khmer Rouge, echoing in his ears: "Silently, I berated myself, tortured myself, for being so gullible. Why had I allowed myself to believe the lies? Would I never learn?"

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• MPs vote to condemn 'evils of communism'