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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Cambodia prison photos remind me of man’s inhumanity to man

By David McElroy · June 26, 2012

In 1975, Chao Ponhea Yat High School in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was converted into a prison. The communist Khmer Rouge had just overthrown the previous government, and the regime led by the murderous Pol Pot spent the next four years torturing and murdering people in this place. Although nobody knows for sure, it’s thought that somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000 men, women and children were brought here. Only seven of those are known to have lived.

We have roughly 35 years between today and the horrors of what happened at the place known at the time as Security Prison 21 (S-21). The complex is now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. That’s one of the buildings of S-21 above just a few weeks ago, seen through the barbed wired that helped keep desperate people from getting out. What lessons can we draw from S-21?

The comfortable lesson is that there was something uniquely evil about communism or the Khmer Rouge regime that took over there. Maybe it’s something unique to Cambodians or to Asians in general. But those sorts of explanations don’t hold up. You can find similar torture and murder in many places around the globe. We certainly saw vicious inhumanity in Nazi Germany, not just from highly trained SS killers, but from ordinary people. When almost 2,300 Jews were killed in 1941, one of the killers was a police secretary back home in Vienna. Walter Mattner described the killings to his wife in a letter:

“My hand was shaking a bit with the first cars. By the tenth car, I was aiming calmly and shooting dependably at the many women, children and babies. Bearing in mind that I have two babies at home, I knew that they would suffer exactly the same treatment, if not ten times as bad, at the hands of these hordes.”

We saw similar atrocities from the Soviets, from Uganda’s Idi Amin and from Japan during WW II. The list goes on and on and on. Look at this list for yourself. Most ominously for most of us reading this, the CIA has built secret prisons in other countries to torture those who the U.S. government suspected of being terrorists.

We like to believe today that we’re civilized. We like to believe we’ve risen above the torture that happened at S-21 or in German death camps or the various genocide factories around the world. But we’re not. That urge to kill is built into human beings — and it’s lurking just beneath the surface.

I started thinking about all of this Monday because of some sobering pictures from S-21 that were taken just a few weeks ago. I was looking at pictures of skulls and bones of thousands of people killed there. I saw pictures that showed blood stains still on the floors from where tortured people screamed in pain in their final hours. This picture — of a bed in a room — was one of the torture chambers, where car batteries were used to shock people. You might notice the blood stains on the floor.

I realize that humans have always been terribly inhuman to each other, but it’s still sobering to see the evidence of this brutal torture at what had been a high school. The worst is that I see no reason to believe it couldn’t happen here.

It terrifies me to realize how thin a layer separates modern humans from that ugly base part of us that could do the same things. Ordinary people can sometimes do horrible things when ordered to do so by authority figures. We like to think we’re different from the Cambodians and the Germans and the Russians and the Ugandans and on and on. But we’re not really that different.

We’re terribly flawed human beings who have a long history of torture and murder in our DNA. Some of us believe it stretches back to something called original sin.

That doesn’t mean we have to kill or torture or do other terrible things. I don’t believe in the perfectibility of human beings in this world, but we do have free will. Some of us can choose not to do evil. We can choose not to hurt people. We can choose not to kill. Not today, anyway.

There’s a thin veneer that separates modern Americans from the specter of this evil, for the most part. We just need to be aware that it’s hidden there and acknowledge that the veneer might be stripped away at almost any time. That’s terrifying, but we need to think deeply about it. That might be our best shot at avoiding an American version of Security Prison 21.

Note: Thanks to Lydia for letting me use a couple of her excellent photos here and for sharing all of the pictures from her recent trip to Cambodia.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

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