Why Did You Kill?: The Cambodian Genocide and the Dark Side of Face and Honor

Abstract

Why did you kill?From the first day I arrived in Cambodia to conduct ethnographic research, I had wanted to pose this question to a Khmer Rouge who had executed people during the genocidal Democratic Kampuchea regime (April 1975 to January 1979)- When the Khmer Rouge—a radical group of Maoist-inspired Communist rebels—came to power after a bloody civil war in which 600,000 people died, they transformed Cambodian society into what some survivors now call “the prison without walls”(kuk et chonhcheang). The cities were evacuated; economic production and consumption were collectivized; books were confiscated and sometimes burned; Buddhism and other forms of religious worship were banned; freedom of speech, travel, residence, and occupational choice were dramatically curtailed; formal education largely disappeared; money, markets, and courts were abolished; and the family was subordinated to the Party Organization,Ângkar. Over one and a half million of Cambodia's eight million inhabitants perished from disease, over-work, starvation, and outright execution under this genocidal regime (Kiernan 1996).

When death is not the end

“…The central pillar of this indoctrination was the subordination of the notion of war to religious principles. Intransigent Catholicism functioned, as part of this indoctrination, as a pre-existing cultural model -in line with Hinton's analysis of genocide in Cambodia 18 -that belonged to the nineteenth century, but was successfully adapted to the context of the Cold War in Argentina. The Argentine military sphere was a social space in which Catholicism had a significance of its own, 19 which went beyond its own particular domain 20 (namely a belief in the supernatural).…”

Obedience and Evil: From Milgram and Kampuchea to Normal Organizations

“…Rather than individuals, they were anonymous members of a revolutionary army that was radically transforming an entire society in which there were several layers of anonymity that facilitated the creation of anomic personalities (Hinton, 1998a) that in turn facilitated ''heartless'' behavior (Goffman, 1967).…”

“…In the case of DK, the combination of a culture of ''natural inequality,'' the experience of fear and survival together with the need to show one's loyalty in order to keep face and gain honor, as well as ''role narcissism'' (Hinton, 1998a), all reveal how unconditional obedience may actually involve a dimension of agency and a space for the expression of individual dispositions (Blass, 1991). In fact, the Khmer Rouge ideology glorified violence, daring, and role narcissism, and comrades expressed their loyalty by showing these attributes.…”

Hannah Arendt, evil and the eradication of thought

“…The anthropologist, Alexander Laban Hinton, writing about the Khmer Rouge, links the occurrence of genocide to socio‐political transformations that revamp the structure of society. Hinton stresses that these socio‐political changes “must be accompanied by a violent ideology … that adapts traditional knowledge to its lethal purposes” (Hinton, 2004, in Scheper‐Hughes & Bourgois, 2004, p. 167). The prevalent slogan within the Democratic Kampuchea regime was “Destroy the garden of the individual; build a united garden” ( ibid ., p. 165).…”