Dave, dmb says: > > Your reasoning here is a bit wacky. Depopulating the cities and sending > everyone out to live in the jungle is an act of killing social and > intellectual values.
You are right, of course. Here the point was, I think, to kill the social and intellectual values so that the entire matrix could be shifted. Erase the board and start over. > Except for the fact that these people took their language and memories with > them, he practically reduced thing to a biological level. Seems pretty > obvious to me that the whole thing was motivated by some profoundly > anti-intellectual attitudes. To say those views were intellectual just > because he "thought" it was a good idea to kill a ton of people is more than > a little ridiculous. That IS ridiculous. You're right again. I feel something else must have been at play. Such elaborate schemes had to have instigated on more than a mere whim. He must have imagined a good outcome in the end. "The phenomenon of this torture prison (S-21 in Phnom Penh) is a testament to human depravity, because the vast majority of the men, women and children were brought here had done absolutely nothing wrong and were as mystified by their imprisonment as you or I would be if someone dragged us out of bed tonight and charged us with bogus crimes. Hearsay, suspicion and paranoia led the Khmer Rouge's Security Office, Central commitee and minister of defense to descend violently upon innocent farmers, engineers, students, workers and whole families, accusing them of being enemies of the revolution." And how did it get to this place? Stephen Asma in his book The Gods Drink Whiskey outlines the genesis: "The Cambodian scholar John Raston points out that when Angkar (sort of a term for a Big Brother - type authority) was intoned in the many horrible commands and demands that the Khmer Rouge made on the general public and on themselves, sometimes it was used to imply a personified authority - like brother # 1, Pol Pot- and sometimes it represented the patently false "will of the people". In either case, it usually allowed the perp to torture, murder and escape responsibility and to assign it "higher authority. Brother number one, Pol Pot, argued that there had been five social classes in prerevolutionary Cambodia. These were feudalists, capitalists, bourgeoisie, workers, and peasants. Trying to eliminate what he saw as "social parasites", Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge articulated constituted a "Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea" in 1976 and in it reduced all classes to workers and peasants. King Sihanouk remembers that in 1975 he and the revolutionaries Khieu Samphan and Khieu Thirith visited Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai, who warned Cambodians to develop their social revolution slowly. Cambodia should not make China's mistakes and "leap forward" without intermediate phases. But as Sihanouk remembers, the revolutionaries were smug and superior and suggested after the meeting that they would be the first nation to build a communist society without wasting time and energy on intermediate stages. The results of that arrogance were disastrous." ---------- So DMB, I agree. Intellectual patterns alone do not do the job. Its intellect with the all-important self-importance, smug superiority of being, you know, the hierarchical top o' the heap that creates disasters. You're so right. John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
