For the Sake of All Living Things Read Online Free
Author: John M. Del Vecchio
“foreigners” (the NVA) for the uprisings in the northeastern provinces. At first the Prince called the insurgents Pathet Lao. Later he charged they were Khmer Rouge. In December, Lon Nol was again promoted, now to acting prime minister, but by then the Royal government had lost control of 60 percent of Cambodia’s land to the KK, the KVM or the NVA.
An aside to the Tet offensive: According to KK propaganda, the NVA attempted, even while the KK was launching its most sweeping attacks ever in Cambodia, to assassinate the leaders of the KK and to unite all Khmer Communist activity under Hanoi’s rule.
THE CHINESE INFLUENCE
The significance of Chinese influence on the Krahom cannot be overstated. It is more reasonable to see the Cambodian holocaust of 1975 to 1979 as the culmination and apex of the Chinese Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution than to see it as the result of a society driven insane by American B-52 bombings.
As noted, Pol Pot associated with Mao Zedong during the planning phase for the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward led to approximately 30 million deaths in 1960 alone. Perhaps a million people were killed outright. 29 million were sacrificed to drastic land tenure policies. Essentially, the Chinese were driven from established, fertile fields into forest areas to establish new farmland. Without proper tools, without preestablished, engineered plans, with nothing but their will as decreed from Peking, they were set to work. The first year they cut the forests down but were unable, without established irrigation, to raise a significant crop. They began to starve. Then heavy rains came. The newly stripped lands eroded. Silt clogged established irrigation canals and killed productive paddies downstream. A dry year followed and 29 million people starved to death. Fifteen years later the same policy infected Cambodia.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which began in 1966 was also a model for Cambodia. The policies were less agrarian “reform” than a stripping away of China’s traditional culture. The war on culture envisioned turning traditional allegiances on their head—the primacy of parents, family, village and culture was replaced by the monolithic party-state and its inviolable interpretation of realities. Children became Mao’s political instruments, his foot soldiers in the “Liberation and Struggle.” Indeed, 1966 is considered a “Children’s Crusade.”
Nightly, youth, peasants, anyone that could be coerced, sat through political indoctrination sessions or self-criticism sessions known as “struggles.” In Cambodia such sessions would be called kosangs. To own a book became a crime. To own a Western book was punishable by death. Libraries across the country were ransacked and books burned in huge bonfires. Similar policies, along with mass atrocities, were being used in Cambodia by the KK by 1968.
ANGKAR
In 1968 Krahom yotheas , soldiers, referred to their faction as “the Movement,” or “the Organization.” It was common for Southeast Asian Communists to call their parties “organization” while proselytizing, in order to hide their Communism from the masses. In Khmer, “organization” is angkar or angka.
PART ONE
THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA
If genocide is to be prevented in the future, we must understand how it happened in the past, not only in terms of the killers and the killed but of the bystanders.
— Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died
CHAPTER ONE
W ORRY FURROWS CREASED CAHUOM Chhuon’s forehead. He was trapped, held in an amorphous iridescent blue, almost black, dream. Images parted, blurry, as if he were looking through deep water, as if he were at the bottom of a great basin. To one side a massive fuzzy maw stretched mechanically open, bit down, then slowly opened, rhythmically, like the breathing of a fish in a stream, the mouth pulsing, open closed open closed, not breathing but biting, ingesting all which
An aside to the Tet offensive: According to KK propaganda, the NVA attempted, even while the KK was launching its most sweeping attacks ever in Cambodia, to assassinate the leaders of the KK and to unite all Khmer Communist activity under Hanoi’s rule.
THE CHINESE INFLUENCE
The significance of Chinese influence on the Krahom cannot be overstated. It is more reasonable to see the Cambodian holocaust of 1975 to 1979 as the culmination and apex of the Chinese Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution than to see it as the result of a society driven insane by American B-52 bombings.
As noted, Pol Pot associated with Mao Zedong during the planning phase for the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward led to approximately 30 million deaths in 1960 alone. Perhaps a million people were killed outright. 29 million were sacrificed to drastic land tenure policies. Essentially, the Chinese were driven from established, fertile fields into forest areas to establish new farmland. Without proper tools, without preestablished, engineered plans, with nothing but their will as decreed from Peking, they were set to work. The first year they cut the forests down but were unable, without established irrigation, to raise a significant crop. They began to starve. Then heavy rains came. The newly stripped lands eroded. Silt clogged established irrigation canals and killed productive paddies downstream. A dry year followed and 29 million people starved to death. Fifteen years later the same policy infected Cambodia.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which began in 1966 was also a model for Cambodia. The policies were less agrarian “reform” than a stripping away of China’s traditional culture. The war on culture envisioned turning traditional allegiances on their head—the primacy of parents, family, village and culture was replaced by the monolithic party-state and its inviolable interpretation of realities. Children became Mao’s political instruments, his foot soldiers in the “Liberation and Struggle.” Indeed, 1966 is considered a “Children’s Crusade.”
Nightly, youth, peasants, anyone that could be coerced, sat through political indoctrination sessions or self-criticism sessions known as “struggles.” In Cambodia such sessions would be called kosangs. To own a book became a crime. To own a Western book was punishable by death. Libraries across the country were ransacked and books burned in huge bonfires. Similar policies, along with mass atrocities, were being used in Cambodia by the KK by 1968.
ANGKAR
In 1968 Krahom yotheas , soldiers, referred to their faction as “the Movement,” or “the Organization.” It was common for Southeast Asian Communists to call their parties “organization” while proselytizing, in order to hide their Communism from the masses. In Khmer, “organization” is angkar or angka.
PART ONE
THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA
If genocide is to be prevented in the future, we must understand how it happened in the past, not only in terms of the killers and the killed but of the bystanders.
— Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died
CHAPTER ONE
W ORRY FURROWS CREASED CAHUOM Chhuon’s forehead. He was trapped, held in an amorphous iridescent blue, almost black, dream. Images parted, blurry, as if he were looking through deep water, as if he were at the bottom of a great basin. To one side a massive fuzzy maw stretched mechanically open, bit down, then slowly opened, rhythmically, like the breathing of a fish in a stream, the mouth pulsing, open closed open closed, not breathing but biting, ingesting all which
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