2007 books

[peteryoung]

7) Dith Pran, Kim DePaul, eds., Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields, 1997
Dith Pran is the Cambodian photojournalist on whose experiences the film The Killing Fields was based, and these brief memoirs of other survivors is made up mostly of Cambodian immigrants to the US, now in their 30s and 40s. They look at how the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge deliberately focussed on the physical and emotional division of families, with very few surviving intact. The extreme levels of cruelty leave me wondering where and how the dehumanising process actually begins, beyond the Maoist illogic of Pol Pot, having to rely as it did on Pot's henchmen and the manipulation of the many thousands of soldiers who enforced his ideology of fear, with the ultimate aim of cultivating total paranoia in an entire population in the name of an unreachable communist utopia. If there is such a thing as a book of memoirs by various Khmer Rouge militia it will make very interesting reading, but in the meantime, now that the trials of the surviving Khmer Rouge leadership are under way, I expect this useful but ultimately tragic book is currently finding plenty more readers.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram? He did a series of experiments begun by asking the question how could the Nazi guards have done what they did? Why didn't they resist? Here's a wikipedia article on his experiment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

I tried reading his book several years ago. The details of the experimental process bogged me down, and the results of the experiments were depressing, so I didn't get very far. Hah! But this might be an answer to your questions above.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link... I was first made aware of Milgram by Peter Gabriel's track "We Do What We're Told' on his album So.

There's also the book Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, which looks at how a group of ordinary German conscripts were turned into killers in Poland. I've had it on the shelf for years... ’bout time I read it, eh?