What Do Camelot and Hell Have in Common?

Camelot was the court of King Arthur, but it also was term given to the Kennedy White House. The knights in shining armor were of course Jack, Bobby and Teddy and there were a cast of characters that included the Harvard professor, Arthur Schlesinger who might be equivalent of Merlin, the press secretary Pierre Salinger, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara with his signature rimless glasses and off-center part and advisors like Ted Sorensen. But what would the opposite of Camelot be? Inferno? “Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate” (“abandon all hope, ye who enter here”) were the words above the entrance to hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. "Arbeit macht frei" were the words that greeted the unfortunates who entered Auschwitz. The Times recently ran the obituary of Ieng Thirith (“Ieng Thirith, Khmer Rouger Minister in Cambodia, Dies at 83,” NYT, 8/22/15). If nothing else the piece will disabuse you of the idea that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was at least a meritocracy. Reigns of terror have their own blue bloods, their own best and brightest. According to the Times, Thirith “was the most powerful woman in the Khmer Rouge.” Her husband was Iang Sary the foreign minister and deputy prime minister and most remarkably “she graduated from the Sorbonne, majoring in Shakespearean studies.” As anyone who studied Shakespeare will tell you, it’s hard to get a job in that area, even with a degree from a good school and that may have radicalized Thirith. It wouldn’t be surprising if she hadn’t done some of her scholarship on Titus Andronicus which was one of the bard’s bloodiest plays. But getting back to aristocracy, according to the obit, her sister, Khieu Ponnary, was married to Mr. Big himself, Pol Pot. Well there’s not really much to say. “The rest is silence” are  Hamlet’s last words. But one thing that Camelot (the Kennedy White House) and Hell (Cambodia under the the Khmer Rouge) had in common was this: they were both run by a clubby little group of people who were either related or met at elite institutions like Harvard or the Sorbonne.

Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock And Roll

Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man and John Pirozzi's Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll are documentaries about music that became contraband during two repressive regimes, South Africa’s Apartheid and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge era. That’s about where the similarity ends. Searching for Sugar Man concentrated on Sixto Rodriguez, an American singer and Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, currently playing at Film Forum, deals with an idyllic period of Cambodia’s early independence from French rule when Western influences from France’s Johnny Hallyday, to Afro-Cuban, Santana and even Wilson Picket intermingled with a burgeoning Cambodian pop culture. That culture produced crooners with names like Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, Pan Ron and Mao Sereth  who dominated the Pnom Penh musical scene. King Norodom Sihanouk, who ruled the country during those alternately repressive but culturally halcyon times, was the Maecenas of Cambodian art and created an atmosphere which allowed Cambodian music to move away from its purely traditional roots and  participate in the tidal wave of 60’s rock. “When we were young we loved being modern,” is one of the first testimonies of the film which highlights a music that was characterized by a realism extraordinary even in the age of rock. “Please stop asking about your father,” begins one lyric, ‘he’s a womanizer and an embarrassment.” The Radio Diffusion Nationale Khmere which had broadcast Cambodian rock silenced it when the Khmer Rouge came to power in l975. Searching for Sugar Man was also different from Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten in that the form it took was that of a mystery circling around the whereabouts of the elusive Sixto Rodriguez. There’s no mystery about what happened to Sinn Sisamouth and his pals. Most of them were murdered.

Cambodia Journal III: Alas Poor Yorick Two Million Times

Photograph: Francis Levy

In America we have the Civil War battlefields and then there are the graves of the soldiers who died in the invasion of Normandy (where the interments are now computerized). In Cambodia you have the Killing Fields. There are approximately 200 of them representing the 2 million Cambodians who died during Pol Pot’s reign of terror. Since bullets were being saved for more important things like fighting the Vietnamese who eventually defeated the Khmer Rouge, blunt instruments like axe heads were one of the major weapons of murder. Oftentimes the victims dug their own graves before being murdered. Pol Pot is not a real name. It’s shorthand for Politique potentielle and the politics of the region was one in which the embattled King Sihanouk first undertook a policy of appeasement towards the Vietcong and then went on to provide the very name, Khmer Rouge, for extremists who would unseat him. When they invaded Phnom Penh, they placed him under house arrest and marched the population out to the countryside, supposedly to protect them from the impending American bombing. Most never returned. In Siem Reap, a Buddhist Temple, Wat Thmei, memorializes the killing field that was discovered by a rice farmer in the l990’s.

Excerpted from the 2011 Commencement Address, College of Tyranny

Here is a tip for the class of 2011 at the College of Tyranny: You can’t have WikiLeaks if you don’t have Internet. As the Times reported on Wednesday, “In a span of minutes just after midnight on January 28th, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet” (“Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet,” NYT, 2/16/11). According to the Times, China has also created “an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project,” which enabled it in 2009 to “shut down cell phone and Internet service amidst unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjian.” In effect, the Internet has become a legislative body and news organization rolled into one, and you need a certain degree of freedom—say the equivalent of the conventional bomb that detonates a nuclear device—in order to pave the way for a full blown explosion of liberty. Now, letting a country roll back into darkness is not a terribly bad idea from a strategic point of view. Pol Pot did precisely that when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, and North Korea is almost Internet-free (although Kim Jong-il himself, according to his Wikipedia citation, loves “surfing the net”). A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a lot of knowledge is virtually useless if there is no one there to receive it. There would be something innocent and almost Rousseauesque about a world without leaks or pornography, a world where Eve was too afraid to reach for the forbidden fruit, if it weren’t for the fact that such a world could only be attained through the repression of thought.