Paterniti, in a project for Ira Glass, in the NYT Mag (thanks, Dan Stockman):
If you’d been born to farmer parents in Battambang province, in the country of Cambodia, and been given the name Vann Nath (pronounced van NAT), you would have spent four years as a young man in a pagoda, carefully etching calligraphy on a palm leaf, and through that task, learned the Buddhist concepts that were meant to guide your life: a belief in nonviolence, truth-telling and mindfulness. After leaving the monkhood and taking up work as a commercial painter, you would have found yourself as a young husband and father, on the precipice of that April day in 1975 when the Lon Nol regime fell to the jungle forces of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
What follows is nearly incomprehensible: Millions are driven from their homes in a forced exodus from the cities; doctors, teachers and factory workers are summarily executed, as is anyone who wears glasses, speaks a foreign language or possesses a university degree. Money, religion, schools, sports, even love — all abolished. Words like “beauty,” “colorful” and “comfort” are banned from the radio. The idea of happiness becomes anathema, as it is the supreme belief of Angkar — the mysterious entity in charge — that in order to purge individuality, the people must be made to suffer, and having suffered, will remain void of dreams and expectations. That is, without minds of their own, they’ll be perfect revolutionary workers.
Leave a comment