The Phantom Menace
My wife watched a play this week chronicling some of the goings on under Pol Pot in Cambodia. The play mixed in music in a creative way of telling the story. It essentially, followed a man who was in a rock band before the revolution and what had happened to him. Like most productions it included plenty of literary devices we teach our students. In this case, it including foreshadowing when the band was discussing what they would do if the worst occurred. Some discussed fleeing Cambodia. Others discussed hiding in the countryside. One essentially said he was in favor of Cambodia and would fly whatever flag or do whatever was asked to get by.
As you might have predicted, he ended up doing horrible things so he could stay on the “right” side. It was a singular moment in an otherwise poignant play about a very dark time in history. It is these stand alone moments that seem to grab my attention more than anything. One of the principle characters in the play was a math teacher and family man before he turned into the administrator of a prison camp. The prison camp ended up being more of a death camp than a prison camp. Naturally, the character justified himself by saying that he did not personally beat or kill any prisoners. The guards had done that.
Fascism never begins with the horrible. Decent people never do the horrible at the outset. They convince themselves they are for the state. They love the state. Their belief system gets coopted with the state where we start calling it “Christian nationalism” as if that’s even a thing. You are either for the state or against the state, so we should be for the state. That’s of course until the state begins to do terrible things. By then it’s too late. Decent people have begun to do very indecent things because the country demanded it. The signs were all there. Some out in the wilderness even said it was coming, but they didn’t listen. They allowed their focus to be on the team instead of the ideals that team was supposed to represent.
Orthodoxy in all of its forms is a dangerous thing. It requires strict adherence that is all-consuming until it is too late. The band mate that became a tool of the state really wasn’t a bad guy at heart. The math teacher turned monster wasn’t a bad guy to begin with. Yet, they became the very worst version of themselves. If we pay close enough attention it could be a cautionary tale for all of us.
History repeats. I remember growing up in Vienna in the 50’s and my mother and grandparents telling me what it was like under Hitler.
1My younger brother (a history teacher with a PhD, no less) is a right-winger who routinely spouts a lot of the echo-chamber talking points. But, he’s a bit of a dichotomy, and it’s difficult to get a handle on him and reconcile exactly why he holds some of his views.
While he supports a lot of the positions of our illustrious politicians who have the (R) behind their names, he isn’t exactly a supporter of the government, itself. In fact, he’s a bit of a “prepper” and believes there’s a good chance that one side or the other of the government is likely to do something and go too far, and cause society to break-down and become something potentially resembling a Mad Max scenario. So, he’s expecting us to eventually be in an “every man for himself” situation at some point.
He’s also a fairly generous person, the kind of “shirt off his back” guy who was helping a friend of a friend (i.e. not family or even people he’s necessarily met before) to rescue them from a flooding apartment after the last hurricane, and provide a spare generator to other friends of friends after a previous hurricane. Yet, he’s willing only to help people who he thinks deserves the help, so his generosity doesn’t extend to things like welfare recipients, or a desire for universal healthcare.
And though he doesn’t revel in being knee-jerk and narrow-minded over social issues like many hard-line right-wingers, and in fact, has both a gay older brother (myself) and a gay child, he still seems to go along with many of the specific right-wing social positions du jour. Including, surprisingly, supporting DeSantis’ so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation for school curriculum. His justification: the legislation is needed push-back against years of pressure from liberal groups who’ve been going against what most parents want to be taught in classrooms (and, he doesn’t think such issues are appropriate to be in the classroom, anyway). Of course, he’s missing the point that the legislation is really intended to suppress and even erase anyone or the history of those who aren’t straight and cis-gendered, and when I challenged him saying that “If a teacher can mention a mommy and daddy but can’t mention a mommy and mommy or daddy and daddy, then it’s discrimination, period” he didn’t have much of a response.
So, the best I can make of the situation is that the right-wing propaganda machine must really be doing a bang-up job, if an educated, thoughtful person like my brother can be made to buy into their positions, and they’ve become adept at crafting their message to make it sound like they’ve already thought-out the whole issue so that when folks like my brother hear it, they’re willing to accept what’s being said as fact.
2Very few terrible leaders could ever get elected or rise to power if they started out at their worst. 1934 Hitler was not 1942 Hitler. Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
They know to start small, see what works, then little by little their followers will willingly join in with the atrocities they wish to pursue.
3Hitler was already bad in ’34. He was preaching to the choir.
Mao was a victim in ’34; the already bad guy then was Chiang, mass murderer of the Communists in ’27.
Fascism bad. Pretending your side was not also fascist, also bad.
American free-fire zones preceded Pol Pot.
4Harry Eagar says:
Hitler was already bad in ’34.
Yes.
5I should have said – – 1934 Hitler was terrible, but he got even worse and by 1942 Hitler was a monster.
Nick, et al, y todos, I’m really disappointed, even astounded, that in this entire treatise centered on Cambodia, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge [did you mention them? nooo!], you NEVER ONCE mentioned the world-class American war criminal who played a MAJOR role in the entire series of Cambodian atrocities:
Mr. Henry Fucking KISSINGER!!! Nor his Puppet-in-Chief Ronnei Raygun.
WTF?
Kissinger’s diabolical and Machiavellian machinations, particularly with the Red Chinese, doomed many millions of innocent people to horrific deaths; probably even much larger numbers than perished in the Nazi Holocaust. There’s some contorted, but valid, equivalence for you.
Did you forget too, that most of these despicable, murderous actions were driven by the purely –commercial– motives of “opening up China” to pump up Raygun’s ‘image’, and in the dastardly interests of American businesses.
With all the detrimental results that have flowed from that for American working people and our economy for the last forty years [and debt, since Kissinger posed us as mercenaries without pay for the Chinese].
Read it and repent, or weep:
https://www.bing.com/search?q=kissinger+and+cambodia&form=OSASSB&pc=OSAS
[I don’t like getting on your ass all the time, but you really should research and analyze your material at a deeper level before publishing]
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