Reflection of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Perhaps one of the most disturbing place I’ve been to has been the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.  I visited there many years ago.

Here’s a bit about it:

Tuol Svay Pray High School sits on a dusty road on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In 1976, the Khmer Rouge renamed the high school S-21 and turned it into a torture, interrogation and execution center. Of the 14,000 people known to have entered, only seven survived. Not only did the Khmer Rouge carefully transcribe the prisoners’ interrogations; they also carefully photographed the vast majority of the inmates and created an astonishing photographic archive. Each of the almost 6,000 S-21 portraits that have been recovered tells a story shock, resignation, confusion, defiance and horror. Although the most gruesome images to come out of Cambodia were those of the mass graves, the most haunting were the portraits taken by the Khmer Rouge at S-21.

At least 14,000 victims.  I’ve seen other numbers up to 20,000.  20,000 in such a small area, over a period of 3 three years.  Yet only 7 survivors.

I was struck at how it was a school before it was converted to a torture camp.  Our image of schools are often of children and happiness; yet the fact that this was converted into a torture camp makes it even all the more sinister.

Here’s a short video:

 

It is one of those places that you can feel the evil.

What blows me away is how recent these atrocities took place.  It wasn’t 1940s.  It was the late 70s before the dawn of the 80s.

I’m haunted by the thousands of pictures that the perpetrators took of their victims.  The expressions are haunting.  I’m horrified how many of the victims and prisoners are children.  We see their faces, but no names, just numbers, if that.  It is disturbing to see how well the atheist communists kept organized photographic records of their torture and evil deeds.  It’s like they enjoy it and relish the sickness.  They aren’t the only ones who have done evil deeds that document their depravity. Think of the Nazis.  Think of USSR. You get the idea that human sinful nature like to have monuments to their evil.

The picture that I spent the longest staring at was this one.

A mother with child.  A young baby at that.  She probably looks older than she really was.  You see cruel instruments and also her prison ID.  And you see the ID.  I look at that picture and wonder what they labeled her: Capitalist pig, international spy, fascists?  I just see an ordinary mother with faceless evil forces taking her picture and who knows her life is going to be short though she has a baby.

I don’t know why, but that picture hit me more than the skulls laying around in the Museum that had bullet holes.  For other pictures on Google Image click here.

So much I can say but two thoughts stood out to me.

First it seems my generation idealized socialism and even communism.  But we must see communism as the evil that it is.  Uncensored, un-sanitized and its fruit.  Its tryannical.  Its capable of causing some of the greatest evils we have seen on earth.  It promises so much but deliver the least than any other ideology and isms.  It promises so much because it assumes the state has the power of a god, capable of fixing everything and coercing others to follow one’s social agenda.  But that all encompassing power means the ones having it become corrupt or they become paranoid that someone will want their power.  Either way through paranoia or intent incredible evil against dissidents (real or imagine) takes place, all under the justification of ensuring a political agenda not be stopped.

Secondly sometimes you hear people say religion causes suffering and evil in this world.  But organized secularism has a history of doing the same thing if not at a scale more horrifying than most leftists college in a “safe space” university can imagine.  I’m thinking of purposeful mass starvation, genocide and tryanny over the people.  The irony of some organized secular humanistic worldview with a political ideology is that historically speaking from the 20th century once they are in charge that are the biggest jihadist in imposing upon others their own blasphemy codes.  You have Tuol Sleng become a temple offering sacrifices to the state and Marx is the prophet of their utopia.  But their utopia is hell on earth.