(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[story] It feels almost unreal to read about the horrors of the Red Khmer regime in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978. It was absurd, irrational and totally idiotic. But most of all: the sheer madness. Pol Pot's quasi-Marxist, semi-metaphysical "theories" were brought out alive by hordes of fellow conspirators. The result is known: according to cautious estimates, 1,7 millions were killed as a result of the "promising experiment", which our domestic "radicals" also embraced as blind chickens.
As with all "evil," they could argue that nothing arises in a vacuum: The peculiar revolution in Cambodia had to be understood against the background of both the long and the short lines of development. Of course, the United States bombed parts of the country to pieces. We know that, and it's way too damn good. And, of course, Lon Nol's reactionary government was violent out of another world. But – and this I actually think apologists and cold explanatory artists as the political riddle Jan Myrdal should read: Nothing of the context can justify the madness under the rule of Marxist-Leninist Saloth Sars (aka Pol Pots). Perhaps Pol Pot was illiterate in the classics of Marxism, and perhaps much of his policy was directly "heresy" in relation to the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Nevertheless, he represented the revolutionary left – and led an organization that usurped full control over all the nooks and crannies of society.
Anyone who defends restrictions on democratic rights and freedoms – again because of the context, must know – should learn from the following little sentence by Philip Short: "Hybris can become an obsession for all despots." Or as one of the Khmer Rouge village leaders said of the revolution: “The train went too fast. No one could turn it around. "
AKP and history's trains
The train metaphor is often used on the left side. Dag Solstad wrote about his AKP adventure that it was about throwing himself on the train of history. The world was in motion, and then petty-bourgeois or sentimental assessments could not stand in the way of the Train. This is, so to speak, the core of all revolutionary movements: They have History on their side. The direction is given. It's just seizing the moment. Perhaps Pol Pot and his black-clad companions were utopians rather than dialectical materialists, but all revolutions are based on a utopian vision, characterized by religiosity – a belief in the millennial kingdom.
This is not the place to look at Pål Steigan's, Tron Øgrim's and Elisabeth Eide's 1970s delusions again. But the image of a smiling Steigan on a Khmer Rouge tank – reproduced in historian Nik Brandal's article on the AKP's Cambodia adventure in the latest issue of Syn og Segn – is almost touching in all its horror. Steigan was so happy with what he saw in old Angkor: It was the people themselves who, in line with the Text, had thrown Lon Nol and his American supporters on the rubbish heap of history. But did he believe what he saw? Was there a nasty feeling behind the smile?
I think – hope – that.
Essentialist
Philip Shorts' wide-ranging biography of Pol Pot is truly a fantastic achievement. The journalist Short knows the material inside and out, and the book is already a reference work for most people who study Cambodia's bloody history. His detailed knowledge is impressive, and he is able to draw the main lines in a virtuoso way. Like most British history writing, Shorts' book is beautifully written. It is almost as if one would rather encourage people to read the original version than Poul Henrik Poulsson's otherwise fine translation.
Nevertheless, he is wonderfully essentialist in his interpretation of the Pol Pot era. In the introduction, we are presented with a rather cruel poisonous attack, carried out by a jealous wife against the man's young mistress. In this connection, Short claims, in an unconvincing way, that cruelty and contempt for the individual lies so deep in Cambodian culture that Pol Pot is almost only one in the line of Cambodian villains. According to Short – and Pål Steigan has been through the same thing – the Cambodians sought "their own, intuitive path to communism", with an "almost mythical approach". This breaks the ties between Lenin / Mao and Pol Pot, and the theoretical left can once again explain away the madness as a kind of deviation. Like the Nazi scholar Daniel Goldhagen, who believed that Nazism was latent in the German soul, Short also asks what it is about Cambodian society that constantly allows "repulsive atrocities". Short knows Cambodia and the country's history very well, but still this view is very problematic. It weakens an otherwise unique power performance of a book.
Exciting journey
Swedish Jesper Huor has also written about Cambodia. The recent trip to Phnom Penh has been a success in Sweden. Humanist publishing house has published the small book in an ok Norwegian version, although the language is a bit jarring here and there. Young Huors' (b. 1975) account of his father Someth is in any case very moving. Someth, like Pol Pot, was a student in the West and in the early 1970s became a convinced socialist in step with the student uprising and the violent events in Indochina. Someth wanted to travel home to his "Democratic Kampuchea" to rebuild the country after the revolution, but the regime's boundless paranoia forced the idealistic man to end his days in the infamous S21 prison in Phnom Penh. We follow our son Jesper's search for knowledge about what really happened to his father – and his family. Huor also takes a mild stand against her mother Marita and her support for Pol Pot's policies, although he writes that he can understand what she and other "truth seekers" in the West were looking for. Huor himself has a left-wing radical background, and perhaps takes a little lightly on some of the nasty issues we all have to address. But for the most part, he is sober and wise – in the face of a system whose brutality the world has hardly seen before.
