Cambodia Trip
Day 5 (27/9) - Genocide Day - Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (Part 1)


My roommate had bought some fruit chips, and looking at the label to find out what fruits were in the packet, I reassuringly found that the the main ingredient was "Some kinds of fruits"

I didn't buy any snacks back because the packaged food (except Amok Fish) was all Vietnamese or Thai.

The previous day, in my search for pretentious T-shirts (ie those not saying "Cambodia" in English) at the market I'd found one design with a bulldog wearing a blue beret and the word "UNTAC". Unfortunately they didn't have it in my size.


At first I was quite disappointed that we didn't get a room with a river view, but not only did the corridors open out onto balconies, the river also looked like this:


So it wasn't much of a loss


Another river scene while I was being ASAP when the others were breakfasting where we had lunch the previous day. It had been opened by the Singapore ambassador - no wonder we went there to dine.

For breakfast there was this interesting yogurt with corn and what the packet said was lotus nuts but seemed more like large red beans to me. It wasn't very popular with the girls, who were culinarily conservative (even if not in other aspects).


Street outside hotel and along river


Cavorting in the bus


Entrance to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum


Museum rules. I liked "Please sit in an appropriate manner" (presumably for the ladies) and "Please be concentrated (sic) spiritually and physically in order to pay respect to the souls of victims who died unjust (sic) at the place"


No laughing


Graves of the last 13 victims of the place. In the last days of the regime, the Khmer Rouge were killing each other.

Most people at the facility died of starvation.


Original bed of one of the last 13 victims. When the Vietnamese soldiers came in a week after the person's death, 2 birds and a pig were eating his body. The flower on the bedframe is a frangipani - it would seem that it has the same meaning here as in Malaysia (which makes that Frangipani massage parlour even weirder). The box you see on the bedframe was the prisoner's toilet. My notes also read "pour alcohol in" so I assume that's how the box has been sanitised for display.


Liberation photo


Camp rules. You will notice they're longest in French.


Another bed, and the corresponding photo. The guy was killed with the shovel blade which was found embedded in his head when the Viets came.
The doors and windows were closed so that people outside wouldn't hear the noise. Considering that this was in the tropics, you can see how that would make the suffering even worse.


Another bed and photos


The Gallows


8-14 year old Khmer Rouge interrogators who were brainwashed.

Many Khmer Rouge people executed people because if not, they themselves would be executed and indeed some were.


Victims who were meticulously given serial numbers. Those with the same serial numbers were arrested at the same time. Fortunately they weren't as efficient as the Nazis.


Victims' clothes


Kid victims


Victims and their many ways of dying

Foreigners who lost their passports were also brought here and killed.



In all, the detention centre had 7 survivors, but they survived only because they escaped when they were brought out to the Killing Fields.

Our guide said that as a young girl she had escaped to Vietnam with her mother and sister. Living near there, they'd walked over over a week.


You can see that some skulls are still blindfolded.


The death smirks are morbid.


Barbed wire outside building to prevent suicide.


Moving to another building


Cells. They had no doors because prisoners were chained to them. They were also not allowed to talk to each other.


I found this morbid and bizarre.


Chair used to photograph the victims

Any attempt to divine the feelings of the Cambodian people on this matter is problematic; if you speak to people you will get an unrepresentative sample and a referendum can be manipulated (the framing of the questions, a skewed campaign to influence the elctorate and preventing some people from voting and the like), so we can't say anything about it.




The Green Revolution


This photographer proclaimed that by taking photos of photos, he would present them in a new light. Bah.

All in all, I'm glad the Cambodian genocide happened. God would be less than perfectly good if he had restricted human free will, preventing us from being autonomous moral agents with moral responsibility for our fellows, and prevented the Khmer Rouge from doing all these horrible things. Furthermore, the sympathy, compassion and moral condemnation generated in people not just in the past and now but also in future generations more than outweighs the suffering of the victims.


Torture implements


Plucking out someone's fingernails and pouring alcohol on the raw flesh


Plucking out a woman's nipples. If no one had told me, I'd have thought it was a man but extreme skinniness probably accounts for this.

I shall segue slightly at this point to note that since Cambodian women were generally dressed conservatively, I was unable to confirm some suspicions I had. I could've looked at the local equivalents of SPGs, but here I would run into the problem of selection bias.


Creation of a Communist Paradise - Phnom Penh

Theodicies could be adapted to justify the extents the Khmer Rouge went to in their attempt to create a Communist Paradise, with their being substituted for God. Indeed, in many ways theodicy becomes easier since Communism is neither perfect nor omnibenevolent (and doesn't claim to be), and no humans can be omnipotent or omniscient. Also, since most of the deaths were not deliberate but rather the result of starvation or hardship, and that in pursuit of an ultimate good (the radical transformation of the country into a Communist Paradise) the Khmer Rouge weren't actually that bad.

Indeed, one could say that genocide is none of our business and that it is an ethnocentric act of neo-Imperialism and an unacceptable breach of sovereignty to condemn (yet alone to intervene in) the country's internal affairs (I was trying to look for a quote from China I remember about wishing a country going through some political turmoil happiness, but can't find it).


Skulls


Skull pit


Killing fields


Map of Cambodia made from skulls. Apparently it used to hang here, but no more. Oh well.


Map showing detention centres and killing fields. There were 343 killing sites (red) and 167 prisons (yellow - but this was the largest). There're 77 stupas and genocide memorials.




Politicised casualty figures - They arrived at a figure for the number of deaths (3 million - the highest estimate among the lot) during the period after a petition from one million survivors. Maybe every survivor knew 3 people who died, so they multiplied the number of survivors by 3 to get this figure.


Anthropomorphising and mystifying bones


Notice the missing language. Damn French. This given how many exhibits were not bilingual (let alone trilingual) but only in English.


Another back shot. I was curious why there was no VPL since these pants were being raved about as being extremely thin, but apparently they weren't tight enough.


I liked this shirt, though I disagreed with the last version of "missionary" (supposedly - spreading Democracy with a gun; common Iraqis have taken pretty enthusiastically to it, and sectarian killings aside I'm sure everyone prefers it to dictatorship)

There wasn't as much moralising or politicising of the tragedy as in Dachau - the good and bad guys weren't identified or even mentioned; there was some accusation of the Khmer Rouge leaders, but this was in small print on the wall in interviews with victims, rather than presented as part of the museum's narrative (through the guides and the scarce information panels). In some ways, this made the exposition more effective.

Yet, the museum also did not give a clear narrative - who were the Khmer Rouge and why did they do all of this? This would've confused many visitors who did not know much about this period of Cambodian history even if the visual impact remained. One reason for the lack of a narrative might be that they were wary of critics problematising any narratives they came up with, and decided to save themselves the effort. Another might be difficulties in coming to terms with their recent past, especially given how many ex-Khmer Rouge have been rehabilitated (if they tried everyone including accomplices, maybe 10% of the country would be behind bars).

Interestingly, while there was almost no information on the ground floor (very few photographs were captioned, and even then it was just a few words in Khmer) the upper floor had slightly more information (eg the politicised casualty figures. See also the next 2 photos). Maybe they were done by different people.


Defaced Khmer Rouge leader, Son Sen. (our tour had ended on the floor below, which explains the implied license given to vandalise)


For some reason Pol Pot's portrait is gone. Either it got defaced they had to remove it or someone carted it away as a souvenir.

Someone was telling me that Slavery had deadened his emotions. It would be interesting to compare the emotional reactions to traumatic stimuli of males and females before slavery and after, and see if there was a significant difference in the difference.


Quotes:

My friends and I always like to talk about our shit.

"Biography lends to death a new terror." - Oscar Wilde

***

The Evidential Problem of Evil [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

"[Sue] is an actual event in which a five-year-old girl in Flint, Michigan was severely beaten, raped and then strangled to death early on New Year’s Day in 1986...

Beginning with Alston’s first group of analogies, where a noseeum inference is unwarranted due to a lack of expertise, there is typically no expectation on the part of the neophyte that the reasons held by the other party (e.g., the physicist’s reasons for drawing conclusion x, Kasparov’s reasons for making move x in a chess game) would be discernible to her. If you have just begun to study physics, you would not expect to understand Einstein’s reasons for advancing the special theory of relativity. However, if your five-year-old daughter suffered the fate of Sue as depicted in E2, would you not expect a perfectly loving being to reveal his reasons to you for allowing this to happen, or at least to comfort you by providing you with special assurances that that there is a reason why this terrible evil could not have been prevented? Rowe makes this point quite well:

Being finite beings we can’t expect to know all the goods God would know, any more than an amateur at chess should expect to know all the reasons for a particular move that Kasparov makes in a game. But, unlike Kasparov who in a chess match has a good reason not to tell us how a particular move fits into his plan to win the game, God, if he exists, isn’t playing chess with our lives. In fact, since understanding the goods for the sake of which he permits terrible evils to befall us would itself enable us to better bear our suffering, God has a strong reason to help us understand those goods and how they require his permission of the terrible evils that befall us. (2001b: 157)

There appears, then, to be an obligation on the part of a perfect being to not keep his intentions entirely hidden from us. Such an obligation, however, does not attach to a gifted chess player or physicist – Kasparov cannot be expected to reveal his game plan, while a physics professor cannot be expected to make her mathematical demonstration in support of quantum theory comprehensible to a high school physics student."


Theodicies about the lack of theodicies - gotta love it!

"Only fools are positive." - Moe Howard

***

More apologist idiocy:


"Evolutionism v. Intelligent Design
A Christian perspective on where we came from

Dr. Dave Geisler
Friday, 12 Oct 07, 115-245pm (Refreshments Provided)

The ‘Theory of EvoLution’ may be just that. It is not the Fact of evolution, nor the Science of evolution, but the Theory of evolution. For years, students in schools have been taught that evolution is a fact. From Peppered Moths to the Galapagos Finches, students have been quoted these “proofs” as being corroborative of the theory of evoLution. At best, these “proofs” are scientific postulations.

This Friday, 12 October 2007, 1:15pm, the Law Christian FeLLowship invites you to come for a talk by an expert in this field, Dr. Dave Geisler. Dr. Geisler will be speaking on intelligent design and on why the theory of evolution is not good science.

Rev Dr Dave Geister received his Th.M. and M.A.B.S. from DalLas TheologicaL Seminary, and Doctor of Ministry in Apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary. He is currently the founder and President of Meekness and Truth Ministries based here in Singapore. Dave, is married to Chartene, a Singaporean, and they have two children, Kristina and Jonathan."


(Un)Fortunately I am (and will be) too busy to show up this rubbish, but readers who are free are solicited to counter this nonsense.

"A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child." - H. L. Mencken


***

750-1000 words. The introduction is already more than 10% already.

Wow, I haven't done such short essays since Year 1 (and then they were appropriately called 'short essays').

"Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it." - Jules Renard

***

"Hi,

Is it true that someone can explode when he is really angry? My physics teacher in secondary school once told us that this happened before, but i can't seem to find any information about the incident. She told us that it will happen if the pressure within accumulates and overshoots the mark."


Wth.

"Why be a man when you can be a success?" - Bertolt Brecht

***



"Proton Waja crash test by Top Gear

NCAP 3-star Proton Waja (Impian) crash test by Top Gear. Compared to 5-star Toyota Aventis and 4-star Ford Fiesta.

Suffice to say, don't buy Proton."


What I'd *really* be interested in seeing is a Perodua crash test.

Hurrah for tissue boxes on wheels!

Why we shouldn't campaign for 377A's repeal

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death." - Joan D. Vinge

***

Why we shouldn't campaign for 377A's repeal

I have come to the conclusion that we should not campaign to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code, which criminalises homosexual sex.

At first glance, it is truly shocking that I would espouse such a seemingly regressive view. After all, does not Section 377A read:

"Unnatural offences.

Outrages on decency.
377A. Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or abets the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 2 years."?

Such a law is startling in a place which, in the early 21st century, aspires to be serious competition for the title of Asia's World City.

Yet, it seems that in Alabama it is against the law for a man to seduce "a chaste woman by means of temptation, deception, arts, flattery or a promise of marriage" (I tried to verify this, but Singapore is the only state I know of that puts its laws online in full). While no one would call Alabama the most enlightened place in the world (or even the US), this law nonetheless is shocking and regressive. More such examples of archaic and antediluvian laws can be found in other US states, and indeed around the world.

Closer to home, we have Section 294 of the Penal Code:

"Obscene songs.

294. Whoever, to the annoyance of others —

(a) does any obscene act in any public place; or
(b) sings, recites or utters any obscene song, ballad or words in or near any public place,

shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to 3 months, or with fine, or with both."

Clearly, all SAF camps must be shut down forthwith.

Of course, what this and the Alabama law have in common is that neither is enforced. All countries have stupid laws - what matters is if the police and judiciary are stupid enough to enforce them.

In the case of 377A, there have been proclamations that the law will not be enforced. Even if one is suspicious about the claim that it will not be enforced proactively, a look at cases from November 1988 to January 2003 shows that in this time period, it was only used in cases involving minors, non-consensual sexual activity and public play (similar conclusions can be drawn about the cases under Section 377).

In other words, just like the symbolic list of 100 banned Internet websites, it remains as a signpost and a declaration of societal morals. Assuming that the proclamations about non-enforcement are credible (and any prosecutions carried out from now onwards would seriously dent governmental credibility), there really is no reason for practising homosexuals to fear for their (sex) lives.

Of course, in an ideal world I would like Section 377A to be repealed, but as it is repealing 377A has purely symbolic value; if you leave it there you keep the homophobes happy while homosexuals don't suffer. In reality, time, political capital and activists' energy are all limited, so instead of wasting time on symbolic measures, we should focus instead on changing things that matter.

Some examples of better directions for activists' efforts would include the laws on Illegal Assembly, allowing protests without permits (or even granting such permits in the first place, since I don't know of any applications which have ever succeeded), having a rolling age of consent, having more sensible and clearly demarcated laws on racial/religious discussion and not selling weapons and landmines to Burma (so Burmese, like gays here, will not have to fear for their lives or liberties).

On the other hand, campaigning for 377A's repeal gives the lie to claims that there is no gay agenda (it may be a good agenda, but it is an agenda nonetheless). It makes it easy to portray the gay community as some Fifth Column bent on undermining the moral fibre of society and invites reactionary forces to press down harder on it. As the Dear Leader himself noted, "we will not reach consensus however much we discuss it. The views are passionately held on both sides. The more you discuss it, the angrier they become. The subject will not go away". A parallel may be drawn with Gay Marriage in the US - the public backlash against this in the 2004 elections resulted in 11 states voting to ban Gay Marriage (even if an attempt to extend it on a federal level was shot down). Lastly, the very act of repeatedly drawing attention to Section 377A reminds homosexuals and homophobes alike of its existence, intensifying the former's sense of persecution and discrimination and the latter's homophobia.

Of course, we are left with the symbolic value of having Section 377A on the books. I am usually skeptical of arguments about symbolism, because it is very easy to assign improbably large weights to the value of symbolism, due to its unquantifiable nature. Indeed, sometimes the effects of 'symbolism' may not even exist - I think even many feminists would agree that the Constitution's failure to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of gender does not result in discrimination on said grounds. There is also the legal technicality that it might be better for people to be charged under existing laws covering underage sex, public play and the like, but I will leave this minor point for legal academics to fight over.

All in all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there is no point risking a conservative backlash for gains of negligible utility. A better path of action would probably be to reach out to people on the ground to change hearts and minds, and wait for globalisation, education and rising living standards to make Singaporeans more tolerant.

"It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it." - Henry Allen

***

A few weeks ago, I was at a seminar on Malayness organised by the Asia Research Institute (ARI) (available as a podcast).

One of the speakers, A/P Syed Farid Alatas (from NUS's Department of Malay Studies), was lamenting that Muslims in Singapore don't take a critical approach to their holy texts and history. This is not just an academic way of how the community thinks of itself and others, but has serious implications.

Muslims in Singapore accept the dominant interpretation, but there is no critical discussion of problematic aspects of their faith. They accept as true Hadith and Sunna which go against common sense and logic; one story has the Prophet massacring 600-900 Jews when only <300 people were killed over 2 decades of his life, and is resulting in growing anti-Semitism in Singapore.

Another dubious story goes that in one night the Prophet visited and had sex with all his wives in a few hours, since Allah gave him the strength of 17 or 30 men. This despite the fact that it is unlikely that friend, Companion or wife of the Prophet would repeat this story, and the Koran saying the Prophet was an ordinary man blessed with revelation but not a superman.

The Muslim community in Singapore doesn't discuss these things, even behind closed doors, and this leads to problems in contemporary society.

These problems can be seen in Indonesia also, but at least there there is debate and discussion. In Singapore and Malaysia these issues are not discussed; they're swept under the rug and not seen as problems.

A/P Alatas concluded that this imbalance of law, spirituality and an uncritical approach to religion, then are problems that define the Malay community.

During the Question and Answer session, one person said that he/she was more worried about extremism in Malaysia/Singapore than Indonesia because there is no debate in the former countries. In Indonesia there is a sophisticated debate going on, and even Malaysia has more debate than Singapore, though it's not sophisticated.

I think it is uncontroversial to note that the public paranoia about religious discussion in Malaysia (and even more so in Singapore) is why we see these problems, and the lack of discussion means no one knows what Muslims here are thinking. The very laws and public paranoia meant to protect certain religious communities actually ends up harming and impoverishing them. Even if one were to avoid the traditional free speech angle, this is a compelling realpolitik argument for, even if not giving religious discussion the same restrictions that other forms of speech have (ie less than at present), then at least clearer signposting about governmentally-declared "acceptable" forms and modes of religious discussion and debate.