Today we went to a genocide museum called “The Killing Fields.” It’s located right outside the capital. This is a place where enemies of the state during Pol Pots’ regime were taken and killed, then buried in mass graves. It’s actually a really beautiful piece of land. There’s a large structure that houses all of the bones, and a small lake with lotus flowers and a fishing boat floating lazily on it. There are no grizzly, dilapidated buildings. No trucks or tools. Nothing except the bones and dozens of holes in the ground to indicate what had happened in this place.
If you’re not familiar with what happened in Cambodia 35 years ago, I will tell you. A man named Pol Pots came into power. He was educated in France, where he became familiar with the Communist movement. He decided that, in order for Cambodia to become a self-sufficient, non-imperialized nation, the country needed to purified. These enemies of the state included anyone who was educated: teachers, doctors, lawyers, monks and nuns, people who wear glasses. He recruited poor young men from the incredibly rural parts of Cambodia to be the enforcers of his ideas. They were promised food, and revenge on those who had kept the poor people poor for their whole lives (again, the educated fall into this category). In a period of three years, 3 million Cambodians were killed. They were either brutally murdered (bullets were too expensive, so they were beaten to death), or they died in the rice fields. Here was Pol Pots’ brilliant plan (sarcasm): Cambodia must become self-sufficient, and in order for this to happen, he decided that they needed to triple the amount of rice they were producing. This is a completely unrealistic goal, but he went for it. Everyone was forced from the cities and relocated into rural villages to work in the rice fields. To this day, the majority of Cambodia is made up of rice fields. People were separated from their families and made to work in the rice fields from dawn until well into the night. Most of these people had come from the cities, and therefore didn’t know the first thing about planting rice. They were fed by the government, but, predictably, the food quickly ran out. We heard a story of one woman who lost her eight-month-old child. She was out working all day, and so could only feed her baby once a day. However, she was so malnourished that her body stopped producing breast milk, and she couldn’t feed her baby.
We heard so many stories about those terrible three years. But for some reason, the survivor stories weren’t what stuck out to me. It was the fact that all of the buildings were gone. They weren’t taken down by the government or anything like that. They were taken apart piece by piece once the fields closed down when the regime fell. People were so poor that they took pieces of these buildings to use on their own houses. They also stole the tools that the soldiers had used to kill their fellow Cambodians. I can’t imagine getting to the point of desperation that I would be ok with recycling the remnants of a place where 9,000 people not very different from me were murdered. I’m not saying this from a place of judgment. The thought of humanity being pushed to a place where that was done makes me incredibly sad.
When confronted with something like genocide, the average person will ask, “How does someone get to a place where they decide that killing a group of people is the best way to solve a problem? And how do they get people to go along with that?” I would love to hear y’all’s input on this, because I don’t think there is one answer. Here’s my opinion. As far as issues of morality go, I feel that if one isn’t being held to a higher standard than what they themselves determine as right or wrong, it is probably quite easy for their ideas to get corrupted. If someone, Pol Pots, for example, lives in an isolated place of defining morality, I believe that we have an Enemy in this world who loves to manipulate people like this. It might even so gradual that the person doesn’t notice the transition in their beliefs. If there isn’t a higher power or truth that they believe in, someone like Pol Pots could be easily deceived. In John 8:44, Jesus says to the Pharisees who were living the deception of a purely legalistic, self-righteous religion, “You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” He says in John 10:10, “The thief comes only to kill, steal, and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
I don’t have a neat little point with which to wrap up this blog. I don’t want to try and solve this. I want you to wrestle with it. I’ve offered my opinion, but now I want to hear yours. I want you to react. I want this to ruin your day. Three million innocent people died. Thinking about the injustice of it should ruin your day. But more than that, it should inspire something. I want you to react, even if you have to imagine your own family in the same situation to make that happen. But this kind of event demands you react. So react.
This is the beautiful stupa that houses all of the bones found in the mass graves.
These are some of the skulls that are in the stupa.
This is one of the mass graves.
This is the beautiful lake that was one of the boundaries of the killing fields.
