Raymond Trinh
Emmanuel Capua
Daphne Lun
ASA 150E
Prof. Valverde
March 1, 2020
Post War Criticism and the Viet Nam Syndrome as Praxis
Introduction: Battling the “Cambodian Syndrome” (pp. 1-26)
The Khmer Rouge Reign of Terror began at approximately 7:30am on April 17, 1975, when black-uniformed soldiers marched into the nation’s capital Phnom Penh during the Cambodian New Year. The Khmer Rouge grounded in untenable agricultural revolution and determined to eradicate Western influence by any means necessary, the Khmer Rouge regime systematically evacuated Cambodia cities and forcibly relocated residents to countryside labor camps. The Khmer Rouge’s wheel of history fulfilled its promise, crushing virtually all facets of pre revolutionary Cambodian society. The Khmer Rouge prohibited religion, outlawed education, disallowed currency, proscribed private property, and forbade the use of affective family names.
Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, dismantled by way of totalitarian repudiation the principal pillars of Cambodian society: centuries old tradition, pre revolutionary socio economic infrastructures and Khmer familian affiliation. Between 1975 and 1979, over the course of three years, eight months, and twenty days, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 millions Cambodians due to execution, tortue, starvation, overwork, and disease. This period was known as the era of the “Killing Fields” to those outside of Cambodia and Pol Pot’s time. With the passage of more than thirty years since Democratic Kampuchea’s dissolution, only one Khmer Rouge official has been tried and convicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in an international court of law.
Kathy Vials define Cambodian Syndrome, as a transnational set of amnesiac politics revealed through hegemonic modes of public policy and memory. Built on the deliberately incomplete acknowledgement that the genocide was somehow linked to the Vietnam Conflict, the Cambodian Syndrome in part encompasses the paradoxical nonadmission of U.S. culapbility before, during, and after the Democratic Kampuchean era. Furthermore, the ability of the nation-state to negotiate such trauma and its capacity to mediate dramatic episodes of state-authorized violence is perhaps most recognizable by way of international tribunals.
Chapters 1: Atrocity Tourism: Politicized Remembrance and Reparative Memorialization (pp. 27-70)
The chapter begins with a description of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, then dives into the events that took place in Tuol Sleng Prison, where it served as “not only a detention center for so-called enemies of the people. It was also a torture facility, repository complex and execution site” (Schlund-Vials pg.28). The motivations were painted as ridding enemies of the state, but through extensive records that were kept on-site, including confessions, prisoner portraits, internal memos, etc., it was quickly found that other activities were occuring at this prison.
Schlund-Vials continues, stating, “a central S-21 objective was the extraction of confessions… this ruthless nationalist agenda included the detention, torture, and execution of entire families making visceral the Khmer Rouge saying that ‘To dig up grass, one must also dig up the roots’” (Schlund-Vials pg. 28-29). The chapter later dives into the Choeung Ek Killing field, another site of mass violence during the Vietnam-Cambodian War. Schlund states, “they systematically unearthed 129 mass graves filled with bleach bone, tattered clothing, and fractured skulls. Choeung Ek killing field at present contains the remains of an estimated 8,985 regime victims” (Schlund-Vials pg. 29).
Towards the middle of the chapter, Schlund-Vials provides written descriptions and visuals of each sites’ exhibits, providing some visuals and interpretations of some of the major exhibits. Each site has an exhibit that entices locals and tourists alike to visit. Tuol Sleng’s Genocidal Museum includes a map of Cambodia composed of three hundred skulls and bones, primarily constructed from victim remains found in each of the Khmer Rouge Provinces. Choeung Ek Center includes a stupa, or a tall building built like a Buddhist Shrine, displays the skeletal remains of its victims. The construction of both the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Center for Genocidal Crimes became more of political rather than a recollection of the events that took place in these locations, and with that came many critique that address some of the shortcomings and issues with both sites.
The latter parts of the chapter, Schlund and many others had their general critiques and/or feedback for both sites. Some of the more prominent ones include: “each site’s focus on atrocity labored to produce a clear yet opaque ‘master narrative of the successor state’ grounded in the story of ‘glorious revolution stolen and perverted by a handful of sadistic, genocidal traitors who deliberately exterminated three million of their countrymen,” “Such ‘remaking,’ predicated on the supposed commemorative reconstruction of Khmer Rouge history, is presently driven by the market desires of an atrocity tourist economy,” “This is not to suggest that these locations do not have other agendas (memorial, contemplative, or educational). Instead, the presence of individuals not intimately connected to specific histories of loss necessarily obscures site purpose, blurs intentionality, and obfuscates impact,” and ““Cambodia has become a place where they use the bones of the dead to make business” (Schlund-Vials pg 49-64). Most of the critiques are centered around the notion that the original intent of commemoration and memorial became a place for commodity and monetization. Schlund also provides a suggestion, using Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial as an example, as it remembers the events that took place but also celebrates the “renewal of Cambodian community and culture here in the United States” (Schlund-Vials pg. 67).
Chapter 4: Lost Chapters and Invisible Wars: Hip-Hop and Cambodian-American Critique (pp. 149-180)
Chapter 4 first notes the large population of Cambodians in LA. Long Beach’s business district holds the largest population of Cambodian-Americans with a total of 50,000 individuals (Schlund 150). The rest of the chapter discusses the impact of Khmer American rapper praCha on the past, present, and future generations of Cambodian Americans. His music highlights the opportunity gap, violence, and racism Cambodians face in America, something that is widely unacknowledged. With gang violence and a lack of resources to help empower Cambodians, Cambodian-Americans fall behind in education rates and exceed the poverty rates of the average US family according to the 2000 Census. praCha’s album “The Endin’ Is Just the Beginnin” plays a huge role in the “transnational, transgeneration memory to create Cambodian American selfhood” (Schlund 156). Through his songs, he provides accounts of first generation survivors living under the Khmer Rouge to remember cultural facts and truths. At the same time, his music recognizes the prominence of gang violence and the struggles present day Cambodian-Americans face. praCha’s music not only influences those in America, but also creates deep connections to youth in Khmer who are not taught about the genocide in Cambodia.
The music praCha uses is Ayai, which is like traditional Cambodia rap music. It “memorializes the past while reconstructing Cambodia-American present-day identity” (Schlund 176). The balance between old and new themes supports the utilization of folklore tradition of storytelling. Just like African American and Latin rap, music can link to political agendas as a form of “street ethnography” (Schlund 163). Concurrently, samples and critical lyrics act as remembrance to cultural facts and truths and facilitate reparations and rehabilitation, creating an outlet to respect the past but also to move on and establish an identity independent of the past.
Epilogue: Remembering and Forgetting
Although the United States military and the Republic of Vietnam lost the protracted civil war in the Indochinese Peninsula, the Americans seems to have won the second war, the memory war. Viet Thanh Nguyen elaborates on the memory war, which is in fact fought after any war, and may continue for decades upon decades after the original conflict has ended. It involves the the transformation of gravesites into memorials, the construction of monuments, the building of museums, the creation of photography and history exhibits, the publication of works of literature and production of films. Viet Thanh Nguyen argued throughout his book, that memory proceeds from three things.
- First, an ethical awareness of our simultaneous humanity and inhumanity, which leads to a more complex understanding of our identity, of what it means to be human and to be complicit in the deeds that our side, our kin, and even we ourselves commit.
- Second, equal access to the industries of memory, both within countries and among countries, which will not be possible without a radical transformation, even a revolution, in the distribution of wealth and power.
- And third, the ability to imagine a world where no one will be exiled from what we think of as the near and the dear to those distant realms of the far and the feared.
Nguyen argues “If we repeat a history of violence, then we have not addressed the root causes of that violence”. Therefore, this leads to our current predicament in America: we are caught in a time warp of perpetual violence. America’s wars have seemed to go on forever, at least for Americans, who live eternally in the present. The wars in the Middle East are known as “The Forever War”.
Pure forgiveness arises from the paradox of forgiving the unforgivable. The act of forgiving is compromised, as it is between Vietnam and America. Nguyen states, “Vietnam will forgive America, so long as America invests in it and offers protection against China. America will forgive Vietnam, so long as Vietnam allows itself to be invested in and permits the use of its territory-land, sead, or air-for America’s fight against China” (Nguyen, 287). However, Americans who return to Vietnam were bewildered by how the Vietnamese seem to forgive them but do not understand that such forgiveness is conditional. While the Vietnamese extend their generosity with Americans, Vietnamese at home hold against the Vietnamese overseas, whose returns to the homeland can be ambivalent or even fraught.
The communists in Vietnam and Laos have never apologized for reeducation camps and the persecutions of people who turned into refugees. The Cambodian government is reluctant to acknowledge the widespread, complicity of many people, including its own politicians and leaders, in the Khmer Rouge. A list of sensible things that people and governments could do to admit to the errors and horrors of the past include: truth and reconciliation commission to encourage face to face dialogue between enemies, trials of war criminals, or at least offers of amnesty which acknowledge that certain people committed criminal acts. Any of these would be enormously difficult but would help to heal the wounds of the past and encourage people and governments to move forward without denying the past. However, instead we have flawed efforts such as the United Nations sponsoring the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia. This trial was to mandate and prosecute only five high-ranking individuals for the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. This trial is a result of political theater and the guaranteed convictions that will result from this trial, will only lead to a pseudo-reconciliation with the past. The inequality and injustice that lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge still remains, and the unforgivable will not be forgiven.
Sources:
Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
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