It is funny that you call me dense but cannot seem to absorb information that you do not already believe in. Both of the articles that follow are by a respectable and notable journalist, John Pilger. Here is his biographical information:
John Pilger
John Pilger, born in Sydney, Australia, is the author of nine books including Aftermath: The Struggle of Cambodia and Vietnam (1981), Hidden Agendas (1998) and most recently, The New Rulers of the World.
His expansive career in documentary film making, completing 51 films to date, includes The Quiet Mutiny (1970), which broke the story of the insurrection of drafted soldiers in Vietnam; Thalidomide: The Children We Forgot (1974); Palestine Is Still The Issue (1974); Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1994); and most recently, The New Rulers of the World.
An accredited war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh, and Biafra, his reports have been featured frequently in The Daily Mirror, London; The Guardian, London; The Independent, London; The New York Times; The Los Angeles Times, The Nation among many other international publications. Mr. Pilger is also a regular contributor to BBC Television, BBC Radio, BBC World Service, London Broadcasting, ABC Television, ABC Radio, and 2GB Sydney.
This one gets garbled if I copy it; perhaps you could click on it:
users.bigpond.com
JOHN PILGER| WORDS AGAINST WARPol Pot: His terror and his backersTHE GUARDIAN, JANUARY 30, 2004“
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difficult to confirm because the killers photographed their victims before andafter they tortured and killed them at mass graves on the edge of the city. Namesand ages, height and weight were recorded. One room was filled to the ceilingwith victims’ clothes and shoes, including those of many children.Unlike Belsen or Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng was primarily a political death centre.Leading members of the Khmer Rouge movement, including those who formedan early resistance to Pol Pot, were murdered here, usually after “confessing”that they had worked for the CIA, the KGB, Hanoi: anything that would satisfy theresiding paranoia. Whole families were confined in small cells, fettered to asingle iron bar. Some slept naked on the stone floor. On a school blackboard waswritten:1. Speaking is absolutely forbidden.2. Before doing something, the authorisation of the warden must be obtained.“Doing something” might mean only changing position in the cell, and thetransgressor would receive 20 to 30 strokes with a whip. Latrines were smallammunition boxes labelled “Made in USA”. For upsetting a box of excrement thepunishment was licking the floor with your tongue, torture or death, or all three.This is described, perhaps as never before, in a remarkable documentary, S21:The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, by Tuol Sleng’s few survivors. The work ofthe Paris-based Khmer director Rithy Panh, the film has such power that, morethan anything I have seen on Cambodia since I was there almost 25 years ago, itmoved me deeply, evoking the dread and incredulity that was a presence then.Panh, whose parents died in Pol Pot’s terror, succeeded in bringing togethervictims and torturers and murderers at Tuol Sleng, now a genocide museum.Van Nath, a painter, is the principal survivor. He is grey-haired now; I cannot besure, but I may have met him at the camp in 1979; certainly, a survivor told me hislife had been saved when it was found he was a sculptor and he was put to workmaking busts of Pol Pot. The courage, dignity and patience of this man when, inthe film, he confronts former torturers, “the ordinary and obscure journeymen ofthe genocide”, as Panh calls them, is unforgettable.The film has a singular aim: a confrontation, in the best sense, between thecourage and determination of those like Nath, who want to understand, and thejailers, whose catharsis is barely beginning. There is Houy the deputy head ofsecurity, Khan the torturer, Thi who kept the registers, who all seem detached asthey recall, almost wistfully, Khmer Rouge ideology; and there is Poeuv,JOHN PILGER| POL POT: HIS TERROR & HIS BACKERS
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indoctrinated as a guard at the age of 12 or 13. In one spellbinding sequence, hebecomes robotic, as if seized by his memory and transported back. He shows us,with moronic precision, how he intimidated prisoners, fastened their handcuffsand shackles, gave or denied them food, ordered them to piss, threatening to beatthem with “the club” if a drop fell on the floor. His actions confront all of us withthe truth about human “cogs” in machines whose inventors and senior managerspolitely disclaim responsibility, like the still untried Khmer Rouge leaders andtheir foreign sponsors.Panh, whose film-making is itself an act of courage, sees something positive inthe mere act of bearing witness and, speaking of the prisoners, in “the resistance[that is] a form of dignity that is profoundly human”. He refers to the “littlethings, these unsubstantial details, so slight and fragile, which make us what weare. You can never entirely ‘destroy’ a human being. A trace always remains, evenyears later ... a refusal to accept humiliation can sometimes be conveyed by a lookof defiance, a chin slightly raised, a refusal to capitulate under blows ... Thephotographs of certain prisoners and the confessions conserved at Tuol Slengare there to remind us of it.”It seems almost disrespectful to take issue at this point; but one must. For toolong Pol Pot and his gang have been an iconic horror show in the west, strippedof the reasons why. And this extraordinary film, it has to be said, adds little to thewhy. When Pol Pot died in his bed a few years ago, I was asked by a featureseditor to write about him. I said I would, but that the role of “civilised”governments in bringing him to power, sustaining his movement andrejuvenating it was a critical component. He wasn’t interested.The genocide in Cambodia did not begin on April 17 1975, “Year Zero”. It beganmore than five years earlier when American bombers killed an estimated 600,000Cambodians. Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and dump bombs that leftvast craters were dropped on a neutral country of peasant people and straw huts.In one six-month period in 1973, more tons of American bombs were dropped onCambodia than were dropped on Japan during the second world war: theequivalent of five Hiroshimas. The regime of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissingerdid this, secretly and illegally.Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the bombing was the catalyst for PolPot’s fanatics, who, before the inferno, had only minority support. Now, a strickenpeople rallied to them. In Panh’s film, a torturer refers to the bombing as hisreason for joining “the maquis”: the Khmer Rouge. What Nixon and Kissingerbegan, Pol Pot completed. And having been driven out by the Vietnamese, whoJOHN PILGER| POL POT: HIS TERROR & HIS BACKERS
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came from the wrong side of the cold war, the Khmer Rouge were restored inThailand by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher government,who invented a “coalition” to provide the cover for America’s continuing waragainst Vietnam.Thank you, Rithy Panh, for your brave film; what is needed now is a work ashonest, which confronts “us” and relieves our amnesia about the part played byour respectable leaders in Cambodia’s epic tragedy. JPS21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is released on Friday, February 6.JOHN PILGER| POL POT: HIS TERROR & HIS BACKERS
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