Weaponized Read Online Free
the infants running around bottomless, reminding everyone that diapers are in short supply. All of it has the tint of gold left at the bottom of the sea.
No real pedestrian space. Bob-and-weave walking, like Sok moving through the traffic, and instead of horns, there’s the squawk of loudspeakers, the pitch and pluck of Khmer music, the cacophony of commerce.
Kyle walks on. He scans faces, goes through his mental Rolodex, marks anyone who looks out of place. Distinct scents of stale urine, barbecue, fresh fish. Shadows with no source. “Want to drink blood?” someone asks. God, I hope it’s snake, Kyle thinks, although you never know.
He passes a row of stands selling Chinese electronics; disposable cell phones; bootleg DVDs; computer software; wall outlets; pop-music CDs with no covers, just the artist’s name and the album title written in mangled English.
Kyle points to a cell phone with prepaid minutes. He’s out of minutes and doesn’t like the feeling, even if he hasn’t called anyone in weeks. The owner slides it off the rack and pulls a price out of thin air. Jacked up a few dollars for the color of Kyle’s skin.
Although the globalized economy is starting to crack open the city, it’s still free of occidental ornament. If all cities are whores, this is still Phnom Penh’s first week working the corner. In 1975, she had been more than your common streetwalker, but Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took care of that.
Pol’s was the pinnacle of the revolutionary ladder that started with the Soviets or, some would argue, with Robespierre. For all the zealots who wondered whether the great social revolution had failed on its prior attempts because it didn’t go far enough, because of internal ossification, because the people lost their nerve and harbored secret bourgeois sympathies, Pol Pot provided the answer.
What would it look like if the revolution went all the way?
There would be no one left.
No one was loyal enough to survive. No one was worthy enough to live in paradise.
Extermination was the sole area in which Pol excelled. A failed technical student and a piss-poor electrician, capable of only a rudimentary understanding of Marxism—forget Hegel or Feuerbach—and an uninspired military leader who wasted thousands of troops in misguided offensives. Mao may have been the century’s biggest butcher, but there are a billion people in China. We wouldn’t talk of Pol Pot today if he hadn’t killed off a quarter of all Cambodians. And Phnom Penh bore the brunt of it.
One of the first things Kyle noticed when he got here was the lack of middle-aged and elderly people. Pol and his Khmer Rouge had made sure of that: liquidate the cities, the intellectual classes, and then, as is de rigueur for all revolutions, liquidate yourselves. A country of orphans, average age of seventeen.
The UN wouldn’t call what happened genocide because Pol Pot wasn’t looking to exterminate a specific group of people.
He wanted to kill everyone.
The Cambodians put up monuments, counted the bones, and wanted to move on. You had to.
Kyle slows down, and the beggars and hustlers surround him. Some offer newspapers to rent so you can read while you eat, some a chance to squeeze off shotgun rounds at chickens, some visas for a hundred American dollars, some close-up views of skin diseases and the ravages of dengue fever, and some nothing but a glimpse of devastation.
He loses his bearings, loses track of the faces.
The girl is the victim of an acid attack, a frequent denouement to lovers’ quarrels in this part of the world. Kyle’s seen girls like her before, but this one has suffered horribly. Half her face has been scorched off—lips and one eye—and her arms and legs bear tremendous scars, tortured terrain. He figures she must have been wearing a sundress on the day of the attack. He tries to avoid looking at her mouth, a corrugated pinpoint, a scream that closed in around itself.
He swallows hard and drops a
No real pedestrian space. Bob-and-weave walking, like Sok moving through the traffic, and instead of horns, there’s the squawk of loudspeakers, the pitch and pluck of Khmer music, the cacophony of commerce.
Kyle walks on. He scans faces, goes through his mental Rolodex, marks anyone who looks out of place. Distinct scents of stale urine, barbecue, fresh fish. Shadows with no source. “Want to drink blood?” someone asks. God, I hope it’s snake, Kyle thinks, although you never know.
He passes a row of stands selling Chinese electronics; disposable cell phones; bootleg DVDs; computer software; wall outlets; pop-music CDs with no covers, just the artist’s name and the album title written in mangled English.
Kyle points to a cell phone with prepaid minutes. He’s out of minutes and doesn’t like the feeling, even if he hasn’t called anyone in weeks. The owner slides it off the rack and pulls a price out of thin air. Jacked up a few dollars for the color of Kyle’s skin.
Although the globalized economy is starting to crack open the city, it’s still free of occidental ornament. If all cities are whores, this is still Phnom Penh’s first week working the corner. In 1975, she had been more than your common streetwalker, but Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took care of that.
Pol’s was the pinnacle of the revolutionary ladder that started with the Soviets or, some would argue, with Robespierre. For all the zealots who wondered whether the great social revolution had failed on its prior attempts because it didn’t go far enough, because of internal ossification, because the people lost their nerve and harbored secret bourgeois sympathies, Pol Pot provided the answer.
What would it look like if the revolution went all the way?
There would be no one left.
No one was loyal enough to survive. No one was worthy enough to live in paradise.
Extermination was the sole area in which Pol excelled. A failed technical student and a piss-poor electrician, capable of only a rudimentary understanding of Marxism—forget Hegel or Feuerbach—and an uninspired military leader who wasted thousands of troops in misguided offensives. Mao may have been the century’s biggest butcher, but there are a billion people in China. We wouldn’t talk of Pol Pot today if he hadn’t killed off a quarter of all Cambodians. And Phnom Penh bore the brunt of it.
One of the first things Kyle noticed when he got here was the lack of middle-aged and elderly people. Pol and his Khmer Rouge had made sure of that: liquidate the cities, the intellectual classes, and then, as is de rigueur for all revolutions, liquidate yourselves. A country of orphans, average age of seventeen.
The UN wouldn’t call what happened genocide because Pol Pot wasn’t looking to exterminate a specific group of people.
He wanted to kill everyone.
The Cambodians put up monuments, counted the bones, and wanted to move on. You had to.
Kyle slows down, and the beggars and hustlers surround him. Some offer newspapers to rent so you can read while you eat, some a chance to squeeze off shotgun rounds at chickens, some visas for a hundred American dollars, some close-up views of skin diseases and the ravages of dengue fever, and some nothing but a glimpse of devastation.
He loses his bearings, loses track of the faces.
The girl is the victim of an acid attack, a frequent denouement to lovers’ quarrels in this part of the world. Kyle’s seen girls like her before, but this one has suffered horribly. Half her face has been scorched off—lips and one eye—and her arms and legs bear tremendous scars, tortured terrain. He figures she must have been wearing a sundress on the day of the attack. He tries to avoid looking at her mouth, a corrugated pinpoint, a scream that closed in around itself.
He swallows hard and drops a
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