“To destroy you is no loss, to preserve you is no gain.”
genocide (noun): the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group
The term genocide is one I did not often think of before the race. It has not directly affected me, but to some, it’s shaped their entire life. I remember visiting the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali, Rwanda and it having a big impact on me. It was so heavy for my team that we stopped and prayed immediately after walking through the entrance. Genocide became for me no longer a term in a history textbook – it was a word I intentionally avoided in all conversations and one that I also saw visibly still wounding.
South East Asia Genocide
The Khmer Rouge formed in 1968 as the Community Party in Cambodia as an offshoot of the Vietnam People’s Army. Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge and in 1975 it was victorious in the Cambodian Civil War by overthrowing the Khmer Republic.
In 1975, Tuol Svay Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot’s security forces and turned into a prison known as Security Prison 21 (S-21). It was the largest detention and torture center in the country until 1979. This location played an important role in the Khmer Rouge Genocide that killed between 1.5 to 3 million.
“You can arrest someone by mistake; never release him by mistake.”
Declaring that the nation would start again at “Year Zero”, Pol Pot isolated his people from the rest of the world and set about emptying the cities, abolishing money, private property and religion, and setting up rural collectives.
The Khmer Rouge’s social policy focused on working towards a purely agrarian society. Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed. In power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from all foreign influences, closing schools, hospitals, and factories, abolishing banking, finance, and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread.
In 1979, Vietnam invaded Phnom Penh and liberated the seven remaining prisoners at S-21. These survivors had used their skills, like painting and photography, to stay alive.
“He who protests in an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.”
What I found most interesting about all the information I learned during the Khmer Rouge and genocide, is that during this time Pol Pot hosted only a handful of Western visitors. In 1978, Gunnar Bergstrom and three colleagues were invited to visit Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge regime.
After a two-week tour filled with official propaganda, stage-managed encounters with ‘ordinary people’ and denials by senior officials that anything was amiss in Democratic Kampuchea, the group returned to Europe to contradict accounts by Cambodian refugees of mass killing, torture and wide spread starvation.
“Hunger is the most effective disease.”
Bergstrom and his colleagues had influence. When they returned to Sweden and declared the conversations of genocide as false, people believed them. Scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand claimed there was nothing terribly wrong in Cambodia during the regime.
influence (noun): the capacity to have an effect on the character, development or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.
These people had influence. Their words had impact on people’s lives. People listened to them. If these individuals had found out the truth about Pol Pot’s genocide and then shared that information with the world, there could have potentially been thousands of lives saved. Maybe people would have listened. Maybe people would not have listened.
My point in all this is for you to know that you also have influence. Maybe you’re a parent and have influence in your household with your words. Maybe you’re a teacher and influence your students daily. Maybe you’re a lawyer and influence your clients. Maybe you’re a nurse and influence your patients. Wherever you are in your life, whoever you are surrounded by, YOU HAVE INFLUENCE. Your words matter and they can impact lives.
So, how are you influencing people? What words are you speaking out? The reality is we probably will not see the full picture of influence we have in this life. There are not many people who read my blogs, and even fewer people who comment. Yet, I will continue to blog because even if it only influences one person, and I’m able to encourage one person, that is completely worth it to me. How are you using your voice, your actions, and your life to influence people?
