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.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts