The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields - Softcover

Panh, Rithy; Bataille, Christophe

 
9781590516751: The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1590516753 ISBN 13: 9781590516751
Verlag: Other Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

From the internationally acclaimed director of S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a survivor’s autobiography that confronts the evils of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship

Rithy Panh was only thirteen years old when the Khmer Rouge expelled his family from Phnom Penh in 1975. In the months and years that followed, his entire family was executed, starved, or worked to death. Thirty years later, after having become a respected filmmaker, Rithy Panh decides to question one of the men principally responsible for the genocide, Comrade Duch, who’s neither an ordinary person nor a demon—he’s an educated organizer, a slaughterer who talks, forgets, lies, explains, and works on his legacy. This confrontation unfolds into an exceptional narrative of human history and an examination of the nature of evil.
 
The Elimination stands among the essential works that document the immense tragedies of the twentieth century, with Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and Elie Wiesel’s Night.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rithy Panh is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known for S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. His documentary The Missing Picture, which was inspired by The Elimination, won the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2013 Cannes International Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His recent documentaries include Graves Without a Name, which was submitted as the Cambodian entry for the 2018 Oscars, and Irradiated, which competed for the Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.
 
Christophe Bataille is a French novelist. His works include the award-winning Annam, Hourmaster, and Absinthe. He has been an editor at Editions Grasset since 1997.

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In the interviews we often bring up the works of Karl Marx, which Duch knows and admires.
Me: “Mr. Duch, who are the closest followers of Marxism?” Duch: “The illiterate.”
People who can’t read are the “closest” followers of Marxism. They’re the ones who are in arms. And, I may add, they’re the ones who obey.
Those who read have access to words, to history, and to the history of words. They know that language shapes, flatters, conceals, enthralls. He who reads reads language itself; he perceives its duplicity, its cruelty, its betrayal. He knows that a slogan is just a slogan. And he’s seen others.
'
In 1975, I was thirteen years old and happy. My father had been the chief undersecretary to several ministers of edu­cation in succession; now he was retired, and a member of the senate. My mother cared for their nine children. My parents, both of them descended from peasant families, be­lieved in knowledge. More than that: they had a taste for it. We lived in a house in a suburb close to Phnom Penh. Ours was a life of ease, with books, newspapers, a radio, and eventually a black-and-white television. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were destined to be designated— after the Khmer Rouge entered the capital on April 17 of that year—as “new people,” which meant members of the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, landowners. That is, oppres­sors who were to be reeducated in the countryside—or exterminated.
Overnight I become “new people,” or (according to an even more horrible expression) an “April 17.” Millions of us are so designated. That date becomes my registration number, the date of my birth into the proletarian revolu­tion. The history of my childhood is abolished. Forbidden. From that day on, I, Rithy Panh, thirteen years old, have no more history, no more family, no more emotions, no more thoughts, no more unconscious. Was there a name? Was there an individual? There’s nothing anymore.
What a brilliant idea, to give a hated class a name full of hope: new people. This huge group will be transformed by the revolution. Transmuted. Or wiped out forever. As for the “old people” or “ordinary people” they’re no longer backward and downtrodden, they become the model to follow—men and women working the lands their ances­tors worked or bending over machine tools, revolutionar­ies rooted in practical life. The “old people” are the heirs of the great Khmer Empire. They are ageless. They built Angkor. They threw its stone images into the jungle and into the water. The women stoop in the rice fields. The men build and repair dikes. They fulfill themselves in and by what they do. They’re charged with reeducating us and they have absolute power over us.
The flag of Democratic Kampuchea (the country’s new name) bears not a hammer and sickle but an image of the great temple of Angkor. “For more than two thousand years, the Khmer people have lived in utter destitution and the most complete discouragement. . . . If our people were capable of building Angkor Wat, then they are capable of doing anything.” (Pol Pot, in a speech broadcast on the radio.)
How many people died on the building sites of the twelfth century? Nobody knows. But what they built ex­pressed a spiritual power and elevation utterly absent from the creations of the Khmer Rouge.
'
A few days before April 17, 1975, one of my father’s friends came to our house to warn him, “The Khmer Rouge are getting closer. You and your wife and children should leave. There’s still time. We’ll find a solution for you—a plane to Thailand, for example. You must flee.” My imperturb­able father refused to budge. He wasn’t afraid. A man de­voted to education, he was a servant of the state and had always worked for the general good. Once a month, in his spare time, he’d meet with some friends—professors, school inspectors—and proofread translations of foreign books into the Khmer language. He didn’t want to leave his country.
And he didn’t think he was in any danger, even though he’d worked for every government through the years.
Using the sequence of events in China as an example, he assured us he would no doubt be sent to a reeducation camp for a while; such an outcome seemed to him to be practically in the natural order of things. Then conditions would start to improve. He believed in his usefulness to the country, and in social justice. As for my mother and us, the children, the Khmer Rouge wouldn’t consider us important. That, then, was the analysis of an educated, well-informed man, a man with peasant origins to boot. In retrospect it’s easy to see the naïveté in his assessment. His viewpoint was, first and foremost, that of a humanist, a progressive who envisioned a humanistic revolution.
However, my father knew that some acts of violence had already occurred. Around the end of 1971 a schoolteacher had explained to him that teaching in the zones occupied by the Khmer Rouge insurgents was almost impossible. He spoke of extortion, torture, murder. They were piti­less, he said, and most of all there seemed to be nothing in their organization that was either egalitarian or free.
The popular revolution was cruel, but on the other hand Lon Nol’s regime was no better, with its trail of dis­appearances and arbitrary executions. The peasants would no longer put up with destitution and servitude. Their misery was increased by the American bombardments in the hinterlands. In the towns, too, the ruling power was loathed; in a climate of penury, corruption had reached intolerable levels. It was on this fertile ground of anger that the Khmer Rouge, with their discipline, their ideology, and their dialectics, had prospered.
My father had met Ieng Sary after his return from France in the mid-1950s. Ieng Sary had gone on to be­come an important Khmer Rouge leader, and then in 1963 he’d disappeared into the jungle with Pol Pot. At that time my father had helped his wife. Their children were in the same school as we were. My father couldn’t imagine this former pupil in the Lycée Condorcet, this student of Marx, this professor of history and geography, participating in an inhuman or criminal enterprise. He figured that the new regime would make educating the masses a priority. Basi­cally he had faith in his own program.
The French protectorate of Cambodia had come to an end in 1953, but true independence is not so easily ob­tained. Under Lon Nol’s regime propaganda was every­where. A climate of violence prevailed. Like all boys of my age I was fascinated by the rifles and the uniforms. Whenever a military truck approached our house, I’d sta­tion myself outside with a wooden gun. I drew tanks in my notebooks.
When I reflect on the situation, I feel certain that chil­dren in the countryside must have shared the same fas­cination, but the Khmer Rouge took them in hand very early, at eleven or twelve years old. They were given a uniform—black shirt, black pants, a traditional checkered scarf (a krama), a pair of sandals cut from tire rubber—a rifle, and, above all, an ironclad ideal and an iron disci­pline. What would I have thought if someone had con­signed a weapon to me and promised a people’s revolution that would bring equality, fraternity, justice? I would have been happy, as one is when he believes.
'
The fighting was getting closer to Phnom Penh. We could feel the earth shaking from the American bombard­ments: the famous “carpet bombing” strategy already em­ployed in Vietnam. My country cousins...

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Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1590516753
ISBN 13 
9781590516751
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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