Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The place

I didn't know what to expect. This is a very attractive city, with its wide riverside street lined by restaurants and bars on one side and a long promenade on the other. The exemplary National Museum and the golden-roofed Royal Palace are a stone's throw away. You can walk from this area, passing though the markets and old Colonial style streets, to a Wat on top of the only hill in town, thereby strolling through the whole city centre in a couple of hours.

The people are very friendly and like to laugh a lot. It's now a boom town, not as big as Bangkok, nor as mad as Hanoi, nor as smelly as Penang. The King just died, and the Royal Palace is closed to visitors. which is a minor inconvenience for the tourists, of whom there are plenty - though few of them are Brits.

If you want to keep this image of Phnom Penh, read no further.

Cambodia has its problems, so the locals say. They don't just mean the death of the King, and I'm left unsure about how much they include the lingering effects of events several decades ago (see Footnote.for more history).

Before I start on all of the Dark Stuff, I should mention that Cambodia is a Buddhist country. Again.

Genocide museums

A short distance from Phnom Penh's centre is the S-21 detention centre, used to torture and murder 20,000 people between 1975 and 1979, when Cambodia was a communist country. Only 7 of those prisoners were alive when the city was liberated by Vietnamese and rebel Cambodian troops in 1979. If you come to Phnom Penh you feel almost obliged to go to S-21, which is a school building much like any other constructed in the 60s or early 70s. A bit like the school I went to, but a bit bigger, more urban. Two of those 7 prisoners were there, in person this morning when I went to S-21, which is now a museum of genocide. There were scores of similar torture centres across the country.

In case you're wondering why anyone would go to such a place on New Year's Day, it's actually Jan 2nd here.

Erm, yesterday I went another museum, 15km out of town - the killing fields. Or rather, just one of dozens of killing fields spread about the land. This is now a peaceful cemetery, and although there is a modern stupa (think pagoda) piled with skulls, forming the centrepiece of an otherwise unremarkable area. There are a few semi-gruesome reminders of events here, laid out in the grassy landscape.

All this is rather difficult to take in. Looking at Phnom Penh today, you would never guess that this genocide happened as little as 35 years ago. A bland statement, but what can you say.

Which leads into a rather rather sombre What Afterlife column. I'm going to attempt to connect a few themes here, and if it seems tenuous let me say I'm not the first to have a go.  

What Afterlife 

An occasional look at our species' ludicrous belief systems and what they have to offer if you're about to pop your clogs.

Part 19: Communism

Christopher Hitchens has managed, in his incredibly effective diatribe against religion 'God is not Great' (ahem, 'reviewed' below) to make a reasonable case that communism should be viewed not as a political system so much as a religion. This seems at first to be stretching things, but when you consider the parallels (mass belief, centralised power, unverifiable claims and creeds, rejection and defamation of all other religious beliefs), it's quite a helpful way of thinking about how, under the name of communism, such barbaric acts of genocide and mass torture were carried out by ordinary people against their fellow citizens. Substitute the State for the Church, and the head of the Party for the Archbishop, Pope, Imam, Llama or whoever, and there's your system.

In some ways the communist State was (is) like a vengeful God. In Communist countries, life itself could or can be forfeit to the State for any reason the State chose or chooses. As Hitchens points out, an extreme form of religious insanity is still with us, in communist North Korea, where the Head of State (Kim Il Sung, despite being dead) is also a God. North Korea is a cheerless concrete 'workers paradise', just about the worst country on the planet in which to be alive in 2013 - even counting Scotland. (I think that's the only joke in today's blog - sorry everybody.)

In communism, all the people are devoted to the State. There is no afterlife in Communism.

Footnote

So what happened here in Cambodia? In his early years, Pol Pot, a failed student educated in Paris, returned to Cambodia as a Communist Party member and school teacher. In 1975, as head of the Communist Party in Cambodia, he became head of state as the old regime was toppled by the Khmer Rouge, effectively becoming dictator.

Now comes the Inquisition. Money was abolished. Education was abolished. The rural peasants were held up as examples of the cause of collective food production, while all other skills or trades were considered worthless. Within 3 days the cities and towns had been emptied, all the townsfolk being evacuated to the countryside to work on the land, effectively as slaves.  All the teachers and professionals were arrested, along with their families. If you were taken to S-21, or any of the other security centres, you were tortured until you confessed. It didn't matter whether you were innocent - no-one was 'innocent', no-one was released. When you confessed you were killed, or taken to a killing field where you were executed and your body dumped in a mass grave.

Between 1975 and 1979, 3 million people, almost 1/4 of the Cambodian population, were killed under the Pol Pot regime. There is, conspicuously, no mention of ethnicity or religious motive - it was, it seems, pure 'class cleansing', though nobody here seems to use the phrase. Children, babies. the lot. It's hard to think about this in any sensible way at all, you just have to accept that in a regime of terror, fear and under threat of death, people will torture and kill whoever they are told to torture and kill. There was this ideology called Communism that became a religion, and it poisoned everything. Prior to 1075, and again now, Cambodia was a Buddhist country. 

Does Buddhism poison everything? I'm not sure about Hitchens' view, he dodges the issue a bit in God is not Great (as Dawkins does in The God Delusion) - they are way off their home turf, and they admit it. In any case, Buddhism claims no god. But, it does seem very strange that genocide of this sort could have happened here. Buddhists are normally very tolerant people, you know. 

All of which leads, I hope...

into a quick Two Line Review of the Hitchens book, which I read a few weeks ago when I was back in Thailand.

God is not Great ( How Religion Poisons Everything) by Christopher Hitchens *****

Picks up where mere atheism (and even the scorn of Dawkins) leaves off - with a scholarly dissection and condemnation of the texts, claims, and indeed crimes of organised religion - thus Hitchens invents 'anti-theism'. It's almost too easy to for him to fight these beliefs on on their own terms - he's  totally devastating, and, where he allows himself to lighten up, very funny too.