“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.” – V for Vendetta
“Ideas are more powerful than guns.” – Joseph Stalin
“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” – Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
A Shitty Bus Ride
Some people, whom I hate, can sleep on buses. Being not among their number, it may seem strange to you that I would be talked into an overnight bus from Siem Reap in Cambodia to Phnom Penh, and yet there I was. Wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts, huddled beneath a beach towel on a reclined bus seat at 2 in the morning, I thought of all the decisions in my life that I’d made that had led me to this point of total discomfort. As the countryside rolled by in the darkness, the only dream I had was of sleep itself. If my eyes so much as drifted shut for a second, if any hope seeped into my bones along with the chill of the air-conditioning, it would be obliterated by the fierce laying-on of the horn by the bus driver as a tuk-tuk or motorbike wandered into our path. I’d made a mistake, clearly.
When I arrived in Phnom Penh it was 4:30 in the morning, and I didn’t believe that we were actually there. Not that I knew what to expect from the place. But after several cajolings from the bus driver I emerged in front of a 7-11 surrounded by people who wanted nothing more than to drive me to my hotel. If only I had one. “My kingdom for a bed!”, I could have cried.
Eventually, despite my protestations, one man managed to convince me to load myself and my lone bag onto his vehicle and depart to my first destination of the day: Choeung Ek, the famous killing field where thousands of people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge to usher in a new utopia.
The Power of Ideas
The former first lady’s quote, above, is obviously false and self-congratulatory (does anyone believe that she humbly saw herself as one who discussed people?), and it’s in this sense that I’ve heard it most often. We love to congratulate ourselves on our own cleverness. The truth is that all minds discuss ideas, events, and people (with the exception perhaps of solipsistic individuals, who don’t believe there are people) and all have their own ideas of what ideas are worthy of discussion. What separates the great minds from the meager ones is not the fact that one is discussing ideas, but the nature of that discussion, and the conclusions one reaches.
Ideas penetrate every aspect of our existence. They are all around us. Plato, writing more than two thousand years ago, imagined that the world actually existed as perfect ideas floating through space, the flawed shadows of which comprised our “reality”. In Plato’s conception, there were perfect versions of all kinds of things, from chairs and forks to democracy and loyalty. What Roosevelt was referring to, of course, and also Stalin and “V”, were a set of ideas that Richard Dawkins would invent the term “meme” to describe. Though the meaning of the term has hilariously or pitifully (I can’t decide) degraded to refer to captioned online pictures that often provoke tears (either of laughter or of a profound sadness at the total lack of critical thought of most people), the original meaning is still relevant. Dawkins was attempting to describe the way that ideas, like the genes he spent his career studying, replicate, mutate, and spread.
Our relationship to ideas is somewhat confusing. In one sense, we own ideas; in another sense, they own us. They are in our brain, but they are also “in the air”. Ideas become political movements, religious fervor, and social revolution. Like the organisms from which the term is derived, they “go viral”, spreading like a plague through a mass of people, transforming them into ardent free-market capitalists, religious zealots, lynch mobs, or extrajudicial executioners.
When an idea takes root in a person, or more dangerously (but I’m getting ahead of myself) in “a people”, it can remind one (if one is aware of such things) of the fungus Ophiocordyceps. This unique species infects the brain of a carpenter ant, assumes control of its motor functions, and marches the ant to the summit of a nearby branch, where it dies and grows a stalk that will sprout spores to infect new ants. And so the species propagates.
This unique and horrifying example from nature actually bares a close resemblance to the way ideas can capture us. There is a slavish way in which we become “enthralled” with ideas. And they certainly use us as outlets by which to spread themselves.
In the modern American political discourse there are plenty of such fungal ideas spreading their spores. Conservatives march about mechanically repeating mantras about free markets, deregulation, gun rights, and the murder of unborn children. Liberals, in a similar way, clamp their mandibles on notions of social justice and equality, health care reform, climate change, and gun control. Groups march in the streets while writers fill the web space with scathing op-eds and trolls churn out the most potent spores of all, the aforementioned internet memes, which capture hundreds of thousands of unthinking ants with their polarizing and often weakly-sourced (in most cases simply wrong) arguments.
What ideas are important to you? Social justice? The rule of law? Combating racism? Creating wealth?
Have you ever felt that the ideas important to you are under attack? That they are threatened by the ludicrous notions of the other side? What would you do to protect the idea that matters most to you?
Let’s take racism, for example. What do you think you’d give to end racism forever? Perhaps some of you, not really thinking about it, would say “any price”. Well, let’s go down that rabbit hole. How about every cent you own? Seems like a noble sacrifice. Let’s take it a step further. Would you be willing to give all the money that someone else, say, your neighbor, owned? Not as selfless, perhaps, but this is for the common good. If your neighbor is too short-sighted to see that, maybe they don’t deserve that money of theirs.
Some of you are starting to feel resistance now, but bear with me. Let’s put things into perspective. Think of the millions of lives that have been ruined, that continue to be ruined, because of racism. Racism justified the institution of slavery, which separated millions of human beings from their families and native cultures to be brutally forced into labor and torture at the hands of humans who saw them as property. When slaves were finally freed, racism justified their continued subjugation under archaic Jim Crow laws, laws which allowed otherwise rational people to believe that it was necessary, even proper, to have separate bathrooms, drinking fountains, and restaurants for “colored” people and “white” people. Racism continues to plague us, limiting opportunities for (the number must be getting repetitive at this point) millions of human beings around the world. This idea is so bad, so toxic, that surely we can justify the confiscation of the property of a few well-to-do individuals to end it.
What if we took it a step further? What if these well-to-do individuals resisted? It is, of course, their property. Or what if they did give it up, but you couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t try to get it back? How pointless would the whole project become if we ended racism, only to have it return to plague us in the next generation? No, for our campaign against racism to be effective, to finally end this cancerous human thought for good, we must be thorough. The only way to know for sure would be to kill your neighbors.
Now most of you are saying it’s too much. The thought of killing our neighbors grinds against our intuition. It seems impossible. I’d like to challenge you a bit and say that you’re simply not using your imagination. In your head you’re thinking: killing my neighbors wouldn’t fix racism. I’m telling you that, for the purposes of this thought experiment: it definitely would. Others object for a different reason. Even if it would end racism, it is morally abhorrent to kill someone as a means to an end. Well what if you knew your neighbors were racists? What if you knew that they had killed people who they saw as racially inferior? Or if they hadn’t killed anybody, that they’d at least supported people who did?
What if they deserved it?
Perhaps there are some of you who say that there is simply no point at which you’d kill your neighbor. To those of you I ask, perhaps with a sinister overtone, do you imagine you are in the majority? Or maybe I take it a step further. Perhaps, in your recalcitrance, in your willingness to abet racists, you will simply become our hypothetical “neighbor.”
When taking the measure of the bad ideas of history, alongside racism must surely stand the institution of Communism. In fact, going by numbers alone, Communism stands out as possibly the worst single idea that has ever been generated by a human being. As Harvard scholar Steven Pinker points out in his newest book Enlightenment Now, “of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.” This is leaving aside the millions who were killed after being labeled “counterrevolutionaries”, the title that would have been applied to you had you held out in our little thought experiment.
The Khmer Rouge had a saying: “If you wish to live as you please, the Angkar will put aside a small piece of land for you.” This seems innocuous, perhaps even mildly generous, until you stand in front of the piece of land they were referring to.
The Killing Field
It was still early, about 6 in the morning, when I arrived at Choeung Ek. The museum was not yet open, but my driver knew the guard, and a bribe later I had what could have been called a VIP experience: a walk through the killing fields with not a single other tourist at the location. As if it wasn’t creepy enough walking through this burial ground by myself, the sky was overcast and the lone Khmey guard walked behind me at just the right distance so that I couldn’t talk with him, but also couldn’t escape the feeling that he was there watching me.
The fields themselves are eerily banal. Were it not for the giant monument filled with the skulls of more than 5,000 slaughtered innocents, it could have been any field that I’d driven by in the darkness on my uncomfortable bus ride, which I now felt ridiculous for lamenting so much. In fact, I thought shuddering, it was possible that some of those fields were killing sites. There are thousands of such throughout the country.
In total, at least 1.3 million human lives were ended in the killing fields of Cambodia. In Choeung Ek, at least 8,895 individuals lost their lives for crimes ranging from “contact with a foreign government” to “economic sabotage”, a term invented to prosecute city-dwellers with no agricultural experience who, not surprisingly, failed to meet the quotas for the land they were forced to farm. By the end of the barbarity, of the estimated 8 million Khmey people who lived in Cambodia as the Angkar assumed power, somewhere between 1.7 and 2.5 million people were killed or died of starvation. One of every four people, killed for an idea that produced nothing in return.
Rouge
For most of us in the American zeitgeist, the French language has what we could euphemistically call a “pacifistic” air. When we think of things in French, we think of fatty, delicious foods and wine: croissants, brie, and merlot. Or we think of beauty products like eau de cologne, actually a German product which uses its French moniker in a deliberate attempt to seem more sophisticated and luxurious.
In a similar vein, when we think of the word “rouge”, we mostly think of makeup, a technology which, ruminations of heartbroken men aside, doesn’t seem to hurt anybody. For the Khmey people in Cambodia, Rouge does not literally mean death, but it is a word that has been twisted to exist in the same region of the mind as death. In the way that words like “brother”, “citizen”, “council” (the literal translation of the term “soviet”), and “utopia” have been perverted by the actings of twentieth century revolutionary movements, rouge has taken on an aura of its own. It means suffering, insanity, the chaos and failure of misplaced ideals and the murderous effects of ideological extremism. It is the ant that breaks off from the pack to climb to the greatest height imaginable, only to close its pincers and die at the hands of its infection.
I thought of this fact as I walked through the silent fields in which the dead lay. My father was born in 1963. When the Khmer Rouge wrested control of Cambodia from the monarchy that existed before, he would have been 12 years old. For no other reason than sheer luck, he was born and lived in the United States, while across the world another boy had the misfortune of being born in a world that would be overcome by the worst sort of disease: an idea ravenous for blood.
Would he have died? He had a one in four chance. He has five siblings. Statistically, at least one of them would be dead, though perhaps they would all be dead. The Angkar had a policy of killing families as a unit, so that the relatives of slaughtered innocents would not grow up and seek revenge.
What does the ant think as the fungus takes over its insect brain? Does it understand that it is being subordinated to a cause that helps it in no way at all? Or does the ant become convinced in some strange way that what it is doing, climbing to the top of this branch, clamping its mandibles down and dying (sacrificing itself?) is in some way correcting some ancient wrong? We may never know, and anyway I’m stretching the metaphor to its breaking point. What we do know is that when people become infected with bad ideas, they almost always believe that what they are doing is noble and good.
The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, and in that time period they killed nearly a quarter of the citizens of their own country. Their killing was so indiscriminate that, despite the gymnastics done by some statisticians, it cannot even properly be called a genocide (the technical definition of which demands that the act be an effort directed against a minority group). It was in the most unarguable way simply indiscriminate slaughter. People were forcibly moved from the cities in which they lived to agrarian areas to become farmers, while Angkar, “the organization”, the name of the faceless government, worked them as slaves for the common good. It’s hard to look at such an act and see what it was that Pol Pot and his lieutenants imagined would come out of this. Was there a point that they imagined on the distant horizon at which it would all be justified? As they studied Marx in the best universities of Paris, did the leaders of the revolution feel the spores taking root?
Luck
In his collection of essays titled “Mortal Questions”, philosopher Thomas Nagel discusses the idea of what he terms “moral luck”. Moral luck is the idea that most of the events in our lives that define us as “good” or “bad” people are out of our control. We are simply lucky, or unlucky, to be placed into situations in which we show our moral fiber. Are we born in Germany in 1919, so that we will be forced to make the decision to become a guard in a concentration camp? Or are we born in the born in Germany in 1999, so that we will learn about the Holocaust and then enjoy our gap year in Australia, partying with Americans who have just left the US military? We all operate under the assumption that we are good people, but the reality is that none of us know for sure until we are faced with a situation that puts us to the test. Are we heroes or villains? We don’t know, Nagel argues. Not until we are there. And hopefully we won’t be put there, because what history tells us is that except for rare exceptions, we become villains.
It is an uncomfortable thought that residing within us is the potential for unspeakable evil. But this is the power of ideas. Nagel writes (his italics), “to create understanding, philosophy must convince. That means that it must produce or destroy belief, rather than merely provide us with a consistent set of things to say. And belief, unlike utterance, should not be under the control of the will, however motivated. It should be involuntary.”
This is the reality of our lives. We are ants with fungal ideas implanted in our brains. This may seem a pessimistic view. If we aren’t in control, if we’re just marching to the top of a stalk to die and spread our ideas to the next generation of ants, equally powerless, then what comfort is there? Simply this: we are lucky. The twentieth century could be looked at through a narrow lens as among the worst centuries of mankind. The cataclysmic failure of the communist idea led to the slaughter of millions of innocent humans by other humans who were, on inspection, no more evil or sinister than the most average among us. Indeed, Nagel shows us that if we were in their shoes, we probably would have done the same thing. Thankfully, we are not in their shoes. The great fortune of our lives is that the ideas that infect us are the ones that lead us, in the words of the lord’s prayer, “not to temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
S-21
I left Choeung Ek and rode back into Phnom Penh for my second and final stop, the political prison known as S-21. Formerly a schoolhouse, the site had been taken over by Angkar and hastily made into a place of torture and death. From lighting the fires of young minds to snuffing them out. It made for an uncomfortable juxtaposition. As I walked through the buildings, I was struck by the similarity in construction to my own high school. The staircase could have been familiar to me, the site of a daily journey to a classroom filled with familiar faces.
I imagined my high school being made into this hellscape of barbed wire and medieval torture. The room where I spent third grade, emptied of desks and filled with hastily constructed prison cells, made of red bricks and cheap cement slapped together with a lack of precision that simply adds to the terror of the place. It was as if they couldn’t wait to begin. And I couldn’t decide which was worse, if the regime had taken the time to make a quality prison for their victims, or rushed through it as they had so that they could commence as soon as possible.
All manner of torture was utilized. Men and women were hung by their arms for hours until they passed out, to be resuscitated by being dunked in human waste. Beatings were expected daily, along with electrocutions, all to elicit a confession of guilt. Not surprisingly, prisoners admitted to all sorts of affiliations. While it’s obviously inappropriate to joke about such events, it seems inept not to point out the absurdity of the number of CIA contacts that suddenly seemed to spring up during these times. What the US interest was in Cambodia at the time is hard to determine, but it seems they’d infiltrated every level of society.
Like all such cases of atrocity, though, there were stories to inspire and reassure one of the strength of humanity. For all our depravity and weakness, we are also capable of nobility and courage. There’s the story of a Kiwi named Kerry Hamill, who confessed under torture that he was a CIA agent whose commanding officer was Colonel Sanders. Other stories are mostly impressions, given in the form of a single picture. Proud of their clerical exactitude (as if it would save them from historical condemnation) the Angkar photographed every incoming prisoner and documented their presence at S-21. Though many of these documents were destroyed along with the Khmer Rouge, many also survived the demolition. Hundreds of these photos are displayed on massive walls in one of the buildings. They capture every possible human reaction to such imprisonment. Anger. Terror. Shockingly, a few seem to find the situation humorous, or perhaps it’s simply their own effort to shake off the chains of fear their captors had foisted on them.
One woman caught my eye immediately. She has no name, and no special status among the pictures. There’s no story written about her, and it could be that other visitors walk by her face without a second glance. But to me she was special. The overwhelming majority of the individuals around her have faces that betray naked fear – not that I blame them. I can’t imagine what it must be like to know the fate that awaits you, or torture and certain death at the hands of merciless zealots. It is even more impressive, then, her face. A mask of total defiance. Her chin is raised and her mouth set in a calm challenge. Her eyes glow with both anger and disappointment. It is as if she is telling the photographer, “I can’t believe you’ve sunk so low, but we’re here, so get on with it. Do your worst, coward.”
The poetic idea of her resistance is wilted by the fact that her captors did do their worst to her, almost certainly. And almost certainly, she broke under their control. And most of the men and women who committed these crimes were never brought to justice, if there even is justice for such events. For what punishment can truly set the scales back in order when 2 million lives have been lost? In the face of such human shortcoming, as we watch ourselves become the demons of hell, punishment becomes meaningless. Nothing that could be done to her torturers, after all, would bring her back, or her family. We must simply seek to learn from these colossal errors, and improve our software for future generations.
In S-21, only 7 of roughly 20,000 prisoners escaped death. None of them were guilty of a crime more heinous than having a university degree. An exception could be granted to a few prisoners who were former leaders of the Angkar, sent to S-21 as traitors, demonstrating the Communist tendency to eat its own. The overwhelming majority, though, were simply born in the wrong place at the wrong time. The crime that we commit is in forgetting that this awful event took place. Or how it came to an end.
The Enemy of My Enemy…May Still Be My Enemy
After the Holocaust the group of Western nations stood together at the Geneva convention and declared in solemn impotence, “never again.” Since that declaration we’ve stood idly by as Cambodians, Ukranians, Rwandans, Rohingyans, and others have been slaughtered for the crime of being alive. Of the many uses to which the United States military has been directed, it has failed to act in a single instance to forcibly halt the destruction of a civilization as it is caught in the jaws of an awful idea. Who, after all, stopped the Khmer Rouge? Who ended their reign of terror?
The Vietnamese Communists. And after they took over, Western nations maintained the Khmer Rouge spokesperson in their seat at the United Nations. When the Vietnamese negotiated with the UN to return control of Cambodia to the Cambodian people, they stated as one of the conditions that the Khmer Rouge should have no role in the new government.
The UN declared that condition to be unacceptable.
This is the idiocy of bad ideas. Are bad ideas, after all, confined to communists? Of course not. In our own zeal to rid the world of communism, and with our wounded pride fresh after losing a war to the Vietnamese communists, we failed in our greatest moral mission: to defend the lives of innocents, and instead insisted on propping up a regime bent on death and destruction because “the enemy of our enemy is our friend”. How many lives have been cut short because of that piece of political filth masquerading as wisdom.
I left Phnom Penh the same way I’d arrived: an overnight bus. My second bus was a considerable upgrade, though, it having a bed to sleep on rather than a chair. Still, when I arrived back in Siem Reap I felt more tired than I would have liked. It had never been more obvious to me, though, that things could have been worse.