Frightening! ---- The banality of evil remains a classic of totalitarian
regimes. However, one question constantly arises. How could women andmen commit such atrocities through psychological and physical torture?
Anne-Laure Porée, a freelance journalist, covered the trial of Duch, the
leader of the Khmer Rouge torturers in Cambodia. A dull math teacher, he
was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in S21, the detention
and execution center in Phnom Penh, but he seems to have no regrets
about his past. He was obeying the orders of Angkar, the organization,
that is, Pol Pot's party, which intended to bring a country and a
population into line through collectivization. One doubt about a person
and they are labeled an enemy. They must confess.
A starting point: a black notebook hidden among others with an equally
banal title: List of Statistics from Santebal S:21. Curiously, it
contains no statistics. "Let's open this notebook. Throughout its 53
pages, a careful handwriting has transcribed the instructions given by
Duch to the interrogators tasked with torturing enemies of the regime,
compiling files of their confessions, and identifying networks." Placed
in front of this document, Duch admitted to having made these remarks
during his trial.
"Dissecting the Language of the Torturers"
Relying on a wealth of testimonies, Anne-Laure Porée adopts Victor
Klemperer's working method on the LTI, the language of the Third Reich.
"I strive to understand the ground in which the proponents of the
doctrine root it; I explore why or how they distort words, reappropriate
them, redefine them." The instructions explain how to think and act.
"Dissecting the language of the executioners requires us to examine what
it does to the bodies of both the detainees and the interrogators," the
undeniable constraint of ideology, of genocidal logic. Words are used
and repeated, chanted as if in a cult. Gestures and phrases are used to
become pure revolutionaries. You will read excerpts from this notebook:
"Let us be absolute."
"Kill then erase all traces."
Thus, Anne-Laure Porée's analysis of the term "insert" reveals the
violence in interrogations and torture techniques. But it is probably
psychological torture that reflects the interrogators' cruelty. Be
careful, one must not kill before the enemy has confessed everything.
The interrogator, most often a young, uneducated peasant, is a fighter,
hence a military vocabulary, a combat discipline for a work discipline.
And when the work is done, the person is simply annihilated by the
Angkar's decision. Duch explains: "It's killing and then erasing all
traces, reducing them to dust so that nothing remains" of the enemy, the
intellectuals, the opponents, the internal enemies, "the forest
bandits." This is reminiscent of the behavior of other totalitarian
states. Since they are enemies, contempt and humiliation must help break
the person; it's a matter of time. The interrogator decides whether the
detainee has followed through with their confessions, the ultimate goal
of good work.
Following the national narrative, the interrogators purify society. They
control their emotions: "the awareness of being sovereign, of knowing
how to solve all problems concerning the moral and material life of the
people." Note the similarity with North Korea.
As usual, after the fall of such a regime, survivors, both victims and
interrogators, coexist in society. A Tuol Sleng genocide museum
preserves the memory of the victims, the torture chambers, and the
archives, including this small notebook. Cambodians associate the end of
the Khmer Rouge and the return to a sense of security with the death of
Pol Pot in 1998.
* Anne-Laure Porée
The Language of Angkar
Khmer Rouge Lessons of Annihilation
Published by La Découverte, coll. A la Source, 2025
https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8300
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