Red disaster

Jean 2022-09-29 17:26:45

After Cambodia occupied Phnom Penh in 1976, the story of a mass murder was launched.

I have watched this movie before. The only memorable scene is that Pran walks alone across a ridge full of human bones. Looking at it now, it seems very likely that this lens will still be the most impressive in the future.

Sometimes I wonder how unreliable my brain is. Many movies are forgotten after they have been watched. The speed of forgetting far exceeds the speed of watching them. Some films are classics and not bad, but they seem to be the same after watching them the second time.

Actually, I have always been so comforting and encouraging myself. With a bad memory, it is fortunate to be able to forget some people and things.

But people in Cambodia should not forget this history. There are some pains. One time is enough. It is necessary to remember it.

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Extended Reading

The Killing Fields quotes

  • Dith Pran: [voiceover in Khmer Rouge reeducation camp] I'm full of fear, Sydney. I must show no understanding. Not of French or English. I must have no past, Sydney. This is the year zero and nothing has gone before.

  • Sydney Schanberg: As they pondered their options in the White House, the men who decided to bomb and then to invade Cambodia concerned themselves with many things: great power conflicts and collapsing dominoes, looking tough and dangerous to the North Vietnamese, relieving pressure on the American troop withdrawal from the South. They had domestic concerns, as well, which helps explain why they kept the bombing of Cambodia a secret for as long as they could. And they may be assumed not to have ignored self-interest in their own careers. But they specifically were not concerned with, were the Cambodians themselves. Not the people, not the society, not the country. Except in the abstract as instruments of policy. Dith Pran and I tried to record and bring home here the concrete consequences of these decisions to real people - to human beings, the people left out of the Administration's plans, but, who paid the price and took the beating for them.