13th Death Anniversary

[Thai Dyed]

[attachment=0:2b0tp8mt]polpot.jpg[/attachment:2b0tp8mt]
Today, the 15th of April, 2011 is the 13th death anniversary of Pol Pot (Saloth Sar).

http://www.robertfulford.com/PolPot.html
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/pol_pot1.htm

"He was actually elegant - with a pleasing smile and delicate, alert eyes. He was much more polished than the mugshot quality photographs I had seen of him.
He was dressed impeccably in a tailored Mao-style grey suit. His hands were especially refined, his gestures nearly dainty.

I watched Pol Pot achieve what had seemed impossible: winning the support of most of the US and Europe against Vietnam."
-Elizabeth Becker of the New York Times, 22 December 1978

[Beachlover]

Thai Dyed... Not doubting what you say about atrocities committed by British and American citizens but why do you keep bringing up Pol Pot and trying to make him look "not so bad"?

You mentioned you were planning a visit to Cambodia some time ago. Did you go yet?

If you went, did you visit the killing fields and see this sign while you were there? When you walk around inside the visitor centre they actually have graphics depicting Khmer Rouge holding babies by their feet and swinging them around to smash their skulls against this very tree.

http://i1100.photobucket.com/albums/g419/beachloversphotos/Trip%20Reports/Phnom%20Penh/Children.jpg

[dab69]

total and horrendous piece of shit,
celebrate this day and the country that he died in.
long may he burn

[elephantspike]

Pol Pot was one of the worst mass-murderers in History. I was hoping this thread was going to be about Kurt Cobain.

http://storage.canalblog.com/93/54/13773/7804653.jpg
S-21 prisoner by Nhem En, a Khmer Rouge photographer. Photographs taken shortly before the execution of prisoners at S-21, also known as Tuol Sleng Prison, during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH_C_MORTACRACIES.GIF
Not in the Champion's League

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_aMaVBt-jT6g/TBrWOSk2GeI/AAAAAAAAB24/udjc9en9AD0/s1600/Nhem.jpg
Nhem En surrounded by the mug-shots he took at S-21

"Nhem En is spouting off again, this time telling everyone that he's begun building his own $15,000 museum, out of his own pocket, to house his memorabilia and photographs of the Khmer Rouge leaders in their last stronghold, Anlong Veng, where he is a deputy governor. I'll believe it when I see it. I've never met the guy but the word obnoxious springs readily to mind whenever I see his name in print. He's displayed a coldness for his actions in interviews and a penchant for self-publicity and financial gain since he resurfaced and admitted that he was the main photographer that took the face portraits of the prisoners as they entered the S-21 (Tuol Sleng) interrogation facility. For that alone he's had more column inches than he deserves. More recently he tried to get cash from the World Monuments Fund for his museum as well as trying to sell Pol Pot's shoes and some of the cameras he used when he was at S-21, and living with the last dregs of the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng. Admittedly, he will have unique photographs that no-one could own as he was in a position of trust that allowed him unrestricted access to the upper echelon of the KR leadership. There was also the documentary by Steven Okaszaki that was up for an academy award last year that carried the photographer's name, The Conscience of Nhem En - or lack of it many would say. There has been a lot of talk about making Anlong Veng a focus of the KR memory that has government support, but as yet, no real action. So Nhem En has decided to kick it off himself."

http://blog.andybrouwer.co.uk/2010_06_01_archive.html

St├йphanie Benzaquen: Remediating genocidal images into artworks: The Case of the Tuol Sleng mug shots
http://www.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/rebus ... zaquen.pdf (http://www.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/rebus/PDFS/Issue%205/Benzaquen.pdf)

http://www.ucpress.edu/img/covers/isbn1 ... 241794.jpg (http://www.ucpress.edu/img/covers/isbn13/9780520241794.jpg)

[Koh Samui Luv]

[attachment=0:2hdv91ne]20TH_C_MORTACRACIES.gif[/attachment:2hdv91ne]


Thanks for that great chart of the worst butchers of the 20th century.

I note with more than passing interest that "colonialism" was responsible for 50,000,000 deaths in the 20th century.

You don't suppose that under that quaint rubric "colonialism" we might find butchers still insisting on calling themselves "heroes" such as England, France, America, Belgium, Germany (aside from the Hitler era which gets its own category in the chart), and so on and so forth?

No... please tell me it doesn't mean these charming gentlemen, the colonists, who have garnered nothing but praise for their beneficent deeds are monsters at least equal to or even greater than the reviled Pol Pot! Chagrin! Chagrin!

Rudolph Joseph Rummel, Exemplifying the Horror of European Colonization: Leopold's Congo

Having just read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, and followed up on its reviews and what I could find about the Congo Free State on the internet (such as this website). I'm aghast at the democide I missed. It is probably over many millions, possibly 10 million murdered or more from 1885 when The Berlin Conference formally recognized the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo-formerly Zaire) to 1908 when Belgium took it over as a colony. The Congo Free State was the private land, not a colony, of King Leopold II of Belgium to do with whatever he wanted.

And the massive killing did not stop when Belgium took it over.

But amazingly, although the death toll is in the many millions, far exceeding what Germany did to the Hereros (I get a toll of 55,000), the incredible terror, slavery, and death imposed on the Congo natives by one man has been virtually ignored in books on genocide. For example, there is nothing on it in Chalk and Jonassohn's The History and Sociology of Genocide, Kuper's Genocide, and Charny's two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide. There is one paragraph without estimates of the toll in Totten, Parsons, and Charny's Century of Genocide.

This neglect cannot be due to lack of historical information. There was a vigorous international movement at the time led by the Congo Reform Movement, and involving many notables of the day, such as Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Booker T. Washington, and Bertrand Russell. Debates over what to do about the Congo involved the legislatures and Presidents, or Prime Ministers of the United States, England, France, and Germany. Yet, this democide far surpassed in human corpses most every democide in the 20th Century except that by Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. This mind-boggling democide has been flushed down the memory hole. Why this should be so is beyond this post, but should be the subject of study in itself.

To add embarrassment to this neglect, the French in their Congo taken over in 1900 (now the Republic of the Congo) copied Leopold's system of rule and exploitation and thus may have murdered several million Africans as well. No work on genocide that I have mentions this.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COMM.7.1.03.HTM

http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w112/Jan-Maarten1/1906LeopoldCaricPunch100dpi.jpg
Leopold II of Belgium

"Leopold was successful with public relations as king. He and his Public Relations Minister had control over much of the European Press Corps. The Minister employed newspaper editors to run articles about the good deeds of Leopold. Leopold himself did interviews talking about his dreams and aspirations for the Congo and its benefit. He knew how to deploy his charm and stop the articles from garnishing any credibility. With threats of taxation and exportation, Leopold put a stop to SheppardтАЩs writing. Afterwards, Leopold demanded that the missionaries direct all concerns to him and not to the press.

One day after the New York Times article, which detailed the allegations, LeopoldтАЩs supporters in America submitted an article that accused Williams of being a fraud. The headline read тАЬHE PROSPERED FOR A TIME, BUT HIS TRUE CHARACTER WAS LEARNED.тАЭ The article accused Williams of living a lie, and accused him of committing adultery. During the late summer of 1891 the Belgian Parliament defended Leopold and gave a forty-five page report to the press circuit, effectively refuting WilliamтАЩs accusations. Before Williams could even defend himself he passed away on August 2 of the same year. His reputation became tarnished, and his humanitarian work became a failure.

The many foreign missionaries, who witnessed the atrocities, had little media savvy or political clout. The public readily dismissed LeopoldтАЩs critics from British humanitarian societies as relics of past battles like Abolitionism. And those critics, like the missionaries, became dismissed as people who were always upset about something in some obscure corner of the world. The use of the media for the missionaries became a backlash that tarnished their reputations. The campaign, however, did not die. It would take one man to fully revitalize the missionariesтАЩ work, and in the process use the media with a better effect."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congo_ ... aganda_War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congo_Free_State_Propaganda_War)

http://24.media.tumblr.com/Y2NA1ciNoqmh44ypWaFozO33o1_500.png
Congolese labourers who failed to meet rubber collection quotas

Aim├й C├йsaire: Discourse on Colonialism (1955)

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: тАЭHow strange! But never mind-itтАЩs Nazism, it will. pass!тАЭ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom,

what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been тАУ and still is тАУ narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist. [тАж]

And this being so, I cannot help thinking of one of his statements: тАЭWe aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law.тАЭ

That rings clear, haughty, and brutal and plants us squarely in the middle of howling savagery. But let us come down a step.

Who is speaking? I am ashamed to say it: it is the Western humanist, the тАЭidealistтАЭ philosopher. That his name is Renan is an accident. That the passage is taken from a book entitled La Reforme intellectuelle et morale, that it was written in France just after a war which France had represented as a war of right against might, tells us a great deal about bourgeois morals.

http://www.bandung2.co.uk/books/Files/P ... ialism.pdf (http://www.bandung2.co.uk/books/Files/Politics/Discourse%20on%20Colonialism.pdf)

Melvin E. Page, ed., Colonialism: An International Social, Cultural, and Political Encyclopedia 2003

Adolf Hitler also was quick to condemn French use of African troops in the occupation of the German Rhineland following the armistice; he called it a "contamination of Negro blood" and stirred fears that German territory might become "the hunting ground of African negro hordes" (his emphasis). In Russia, Leon Trotsky reflected the Bolshevik argument that on the colonial origins of the war, claiming those same African troops were part of a deliberate attempt by France to use colonial forces for the suppression of "the revolutionary masses of Europe." [тАж]

Though in the long run the demise of European colonialism may have been inevitable given the outcomes of the war, during the actual war the mobilization of colonial armies and resources had a profound effect on the Axis powers that were deprived of such resources and strategic advantages. Among several other reasons, a part of the war effort for both Germany and Japan was to conquer territory that they saw as a necessary component for Great Power mobility. Germany had lost its colonies in eastern and southwestern African following World War I; its policy of Lebensraum (living space) provided what Nazi Germany perceived as a necessary area to exercise its power. Japan, too, depended on the resources of East and Southeast Asia for its continued industrial development. The "colonial" ambitions of these two powers directly confronted the European colonial powers in Europe, and in Southeast Asia, Japan conquered most of their colonies. [тАж]

Although the island status of Britain was immediately important and the British were able to resist in the battle of Britain between June and September 1940, in the long run it was Britain's ability to mobilize and utilize the vast resources of its colonial empire that were simply beyond the reach of the Luftwaffe. тАж With the defeat of the continental European powers, Britain alone underwent colonial mobilization.