The Killing Fields

Since Amanda and I are going to Cambodia next month and spend a few days in Phnom Penh, we decided to rent the 1984 movie The Killing Fields, about the American bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s and the subsequent Khmer Rouge revolution in the late 1970s.

If you are like me you have a passing knowledge of this conflict but not any in depth knowledge. After all, Cambodia is a tiny insignificant country in comparison to where other atrocities have taken place in, say, Asia and Eastern Europe in World War II or the Balkans and Iraq/Afghanistan in recent years.

After learning a bit more about the horrors of the rule under the Khmer Rouge I think I can say now that it was probably the worst genocide in modern human history. The regime put the clock back to year 0, transformed the country to an agrarian collective, brainwashed all children to believe they had no parents and only loyalty to the party, and most famously of all killed almost all the countries intellectuals after forcing them to work in the killing fields and then subsequently blugoning them to death and burying them in mass graves. You cant make stuff that terrible up, and it really has no equal. In Germany during World War II you had a regime try to eliminate a group of people that were for the majority foreigners...In Cambodia you had a regime try to eliminate its own people.

So yeah, it doesnt exactly make positive material for a movie or a fun summer trip. But the movie was excellent, many of you have probably seen it but if you havent its probably one of the best movies about war ive ever seen, and balances the seemingly endless amounts of movies that are produced about World War II and Vietnam.

Were still trying to decide whether to actually go visit the Killing Fields and the matching Torture Museum once we get to Phnom Penh...theyre generally among the only tourist sites in Phnom Penh. Ive already been to some pretty terrible places: Aushwitz, Dachau, and Hiroshima to name a few. But the image from the movie of the main character running away from the Khmer Rouge only to find himself in an abandoned killing field with nothing but skeletons and skulls was pretty morbid and maybe well just take their word for the horrors and skip it.