History Lessons
Written in transit, and in Hoi An, Vietnam -- prior to the previous post about censorship. Posted from Hue, Vietnam.
As I write, Bella and I have just boarded a Pacific Airlines flight from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to Danang, both in Vietnam. We’ve squeezed into the seats – there is less room here between the seats than any other airline I’ve been on. It is good to be short!
Bella and I visited two intense historical sites and museums within a few days: a Khmer Rouge detention center (Tol Sleng) in Phnom Penh and the associated killing field at Choeng Ek, and the “War Remnants” (formerly War Crimes) museum in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). This all in the unintentional backdrop of the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The Killing Fields
Aside from the photos and memorials, the Tol Sleng detention center (now a museum) and the Choeng Ek killing fields are jarringly pleasant. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge chose a local high school for their detention center, and palm trees dot the grassy courtyard. Choeng Ek sits a few miles away on the shore of the Bassac River. Oxen roam freely through the bucolic site, butterflies twitter among the trees, and fuzzy ducklings glide along the shore.
The Khmer Rouge used the Tol Sleng detention center to extract confessions from suspected enemies. Graphic photos show mutilated bodies shackled to bed frames, and photos of thousands of victims stare out from rows of displays. Those who confessed and survived torture were transported to the killing fields, where Khmer Rouge soldiers shot them, beat them to death, or slit their throats. The killing fields at Choeng Ek contained more than a hundred mass graves. Bones and bits of clothing still litter the site.
The 20th century offers too many examples of this kind of mass murder: the Holocaust, Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia. But what is inexplicable about the killing fields is that there is no clear “other”. As the regime wore on, the Khmer Rouge killed indiscriminately. Jailers became prisoners, and torturers were tortured and killed. One of the museum’s current exhibits tells of a dozen men and women who believed in Pol Pot’s Maoist revolution, left their families to join the Khmer Rouge, and now stare out from the wall of victim’s photographs. Each served and was then betrayed. All told, some 3 million Cambodians died from 1975 to 1978 (when Vietnam invaded Cambodia), 2 million killed directly by the hand of the Khmer Rouge. One of the exhibits suggests a “base population” in the north west that was afforded some protection as original agrarians, but the Khmer Rouge never articulates any rationale for their crimes. There is massive paranoia, but no description of who or what is the enemy.
Guilt
Bella and I visited these sites with Sharad, Minaxi, and Deval, and we reflected as we drove back to town. Bella spoke with confusion and anguish about the physicality of the murders. In order to conserve ammunition, the Khmer Rouge bludgeoned many of their victims to death. Many used palm fronds to slit prisoners’ throats. Bella could believe that a soldier could flip a switch, or pull a trigger to kill, but the up-close hands-on brutality of the murders at Choeng Ek pushed the limits of what she believed possible.
I, on the other hand, did not feel shocked. Nazi Germany and concentration camps appeared throughout my childhood. I have visited the Holocaust museums in Israel, DC, Manhattan, and Miami; attended speeches by Elie Wiesel and Yitchak Rabin; watched Schindler’s List with my siblings, parents, and grandparents. Antisemitism drove my family from Europe a century ago, and Nazis murdered those who remained, like David Hirsh Becker my great great grand uncle killed near the Becker farm in Oshmana, Poland. As a Jew, I am a student of genocide. So while the killing fields represent the very worst of human behavior, it is an evil I have grown up with, the Khmer Rouge a familiar demon with a different face.
To my surprise, however, I felt guilt. I thought maybe I felt guilt as a member of a species capable of these crimes. But although there is an impulse to imagine the circumstances that would lead me to join in these crimes, killing is so opposed to my moral framework, especially as a physician, that I automatically label the perpetrators “other” and believe myself incapable of participating. No, I felt guilt because I have not visited Auschwitz. I claim in one breath to be a student of genocide, and I admit in the next that I am a bad one. I will go, I must go – this part of me is unresolved.
War Remnants, Vietnam
We left Phnom Penh for Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, and on our first full day we visited the War Remnants Museum, formerly the War Crimes Museum. I have been reading a book called Patriots, by Christian G Appy, which chronicles the war as a series of oral histories from participants on all sides: soldiers, politicians, protesters, reporters, and ordinary citizens. The museum and my book tell similar stories, and the museum was much less politicized than I would have thought. Whereas Cuba’s National History Museum in Havana features a wall sized cartoon of George Bush (the first) as Julius Caesar, Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum begins with a extended tribute to photographers who died during the war, including several Americans. The museum focuses more on the long term effects (birth defects etc) of Agent Orange than I had expected, and the visitor’s guest book contains a surprising amount of anti American sentiment from Europeans and Australians – but the exhibits refrain from accusation or distortion. My Lai and other massacres of Vietnamese civilians feature prominently, as expected. In criticism, the museum fails to put the war in the larger context of the Cold War, and the agent orange exhibitions are heavy on photos of disfigured children and light on statistics.
Ho Chi Minh City buzzes outside the museum. After 10 years of a command economy, the Vietnamese government instituted broad economic reforms in the mid 80s, unleashing the current sea of motorbikes that zip around the city in capitalist fervor.
As we walked out, one pair of images in the museum stayed with me. Nick Ut won a Pulitzer prize for his photograph of children running from a village sprayed with napalm. The young girl, Kim Phuc, featured prominently in the photo survived her burns, and the museum displays a current photo of her beneath Ut’s. She turns her head over her left shoulder, showing the extensive scar across her back. In her arms, facing the camera, she holds her infant son. Vietnam is alive and thriving.
Written in transit, and in Hoi An, Vietnam -- prior to the previous post about censorship. Posted from Hue, Vietnam.
As I write, Bella and I have just boarded a Pacific Airlines flight from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to Danang, both in Vietnam. We’ve squeezed into the seats – there is less room here between the seats than any other airline I’ve been on. It is good to be short!
Bella and I visited two intense historical sites and museums within a few days: a Khmer Rouge detention center (Tol Sleng) in Phnom Penh and the associated killing field at Choeng Ek, and the “War Remnants” (formerly War Crimes) museum in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). This all in the unintentional backdrop of the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The Killing Fields
Aside from the photos and memorials, the Tol Sleng detention center (now a museum) and the Choeng Ek killing fields are jarringly pleasant. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge chose a local high school for their detention center, and palm trees dot the grassy courtyard. Choeng Ek sits a few miles away on the shore of the Bassac River. Oxen roam freely through the bucolic site, butterflies twitter among the trees, and fuzzy ducklings glide along the shore.
The Khmer Rouge used the Tol Sleng detention center to extract confessions from suspected enemies. Graphic photos show mutilated bodies shackled to bed frames, and photos of thousands of victims stare out from rows of displays. Those who confessed and survived torture were transported to the killing fields, where Khmer Rouge soldiers shot them, beat them to death, or slit their throats. The killing fields at Choeng Ek contained more than a hundred mass graves. Bones and bits of clothing still litter the site.
The 20th century offers too many examples of this kind of mass murder: the Holocaust, Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia. But what is inexplicable about the killing fields is that there is no clear “other”. As the regime wore on, the Khmer Rouge killed indiscriminately. Jailers became prisoners, and torturers were tortured and killed. One of the museum’s current exhibits tells of a dozen men and women who believed in Pol Pot’s Maoist revolution, left their families to join the Khmer Rouge, and now stare out from the wall of victim’s photographs. Each served and was then betrayed. All told, some 3 million Cambodians died from 1975 to 1978 (when Vietnam invaded Cambodia), 2 million killed directly by the hand of the Khmer Rouge. One of the exhibits suggests a “base population” in the north west that was afforded some protection as original agrarians, but the Khmer Rouge never articulates any rationale for their crimes. There is massive paranoia, but no description of who or what is the enemy.
Guilt
Bella and I visited these sites with Sharad, Minaxi, and Deval, and we reflected as we drove back to town. Bella spoke with confusion and anguish about the physicality of the murders. In order to conserve ammunition, the Khmer Rouge bludgeoned many of their victims to death. Many used palm fronds to slit prisoners’ throats. Bella could believe that a soldier could flip a switch, or pull a trigger to kill, but the up-close hands-on brutality of the murders at Choeng Ek pushed the limits of what she believed possible.
I, on the other hand, did not feel shocked. Nazi Germany and concentration camps appeared throughout my childhood. I have visited the Holocaust museums in Israel, DC, Manhattan, and Miami; attended speeches by Elie Wiesel and Yitchak Rabin; watched Schindler’s List with my siblings, parents, and grandparents. Antisemitism drove my family from Europe a century ago, and Nazis murdered those who remained, like David Hirsh Becker my great great grand uncle killed near the Becker farm in Oshmana, Poland. As a Jew, I am a student of genocide. So while the killing fields represent the very worst of human behavior, it is an evil I have grown up with, the Khmer Rouge a familiar demon with a different face.
To my surprise, however, I felt guilt. I thought maybe I felt guilt as a member of a species capable of these crimes. But although there is an impulse to imagine the circumstances that would lead me to join in these crimes, killing is so opposed to my moral framework, especially as a physician, that I automatically label the perpetrators “other” and believe myself incapable of participating. No, I felt guilt because I have not visited Auschwitz. I claim in one breath to be a student of genocide, and I admit in the next that I am a bad one. I will go, I must go – this part of me is unresolved.
War Remnants, Vietnam
We left Phnom Penh for Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, and on our first full day we visited the War Remnants Museum, formerly the War Crimes Museum. I have been reading a book called Patriots, by Christian G Appy, which chronicles the war as a series of oral histories from participants on all sides: soldiers, politicians, protesters, reporters, and ordinary citizens. The museum and my book tell similar stories, and the museum was much less politicized than I would have thought. Whereas Cuba’s National History Museum in Havana features a wall sized cartoon of George Bush (the first) as Julius Caesar, Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum begins with a extended tribute to photographers who died during the war, including several Americans. The museum focuses more on the long term effects (birth defects etc) of Agent Orange than I had expected, and the visitor’s guest book contains a surprising amount of anti American sentiment from Europeans and Australians – but the exhibits refrain from accusation or distortion. My Lai and other massacres of Vietnamese civilians feature prominently, as expected. In criticism, the museum fails to put the war in the larger context of the Cold War, and the agent orange exhibitions are heavy on photos of disfigured children and light on statistics.
Ho Chi Minh City buzzes outside the museum. After 10 years of a command economy, the Vietnamese government instituted broad economic reforms in the mid 80s, unleashing the current sea of motorbikes that zip around the city in capitalist fervor.
As we walked out, one pair of images in the museum stayed with me. Nick Ut won a Pulitzer prize for his photograph of children running from a village sprayed with napalm. The young girl, Kim Phuc, featured prominently in the photo survived her burns, and the museum displays a current photo of her beneath Ut’s. She turns her head over her left shoulder, showing the extensive scar across her back. In her arms, facing the camera, she holds her infant son. Vietnam is alive and thriving.
posted by backandzella at 10:20 AM
1 Comments:
this is a response to the section labeled "guilt," and more specifically to bella's shock and disbelief of the physical brutality of the murders committed by the Khmer Rouge. but bell, this sort of brutal genocide has also appeared in our own childhood, our own culture. think of the riots in gujarat - in ahmedabad to be most (and ashamedly) specific. right outside our families' homes, hindus, muslims, sikhs, and probably tons of others were massacred with ppl's bare hands. and this is all in our lifetime. we even visited india in the same year! anyways, just saying. and feeling so upset just thinking how widespread intolerance and injustice and straight-up inhumanity - inhumanness - is in this piece that even when we think we're so far from all of the atrocities as to be in disbelief of their happening, they're actually occurring in our own backyard.
no wonder it's still raining even when the monsoons were meant to end almost a month ago. the gods are obviously pissed off by this century's (and others before it too i guess) history of killing.
it sounds like a really emotional visit. i'm glad you guys are writing about it.
rediscovered wireless internet today and started reading the blog again. looks like you guys are seeing a ton and having a great time. miss you and hopefully will see you soon! stay safe!
Post a Comment
<< Home