Counter-culture Journals (文革)

Counter-culture Journals (文革)

Friday, June 02, 2006

New book coming: The Pol Pot Journals



I’m working on a new book and this is an excerpt from the rough draft.


From: The Pol Pot Journals


The stench was overwhelming. It smelled like a slaughter house for animals. I was on a road in Kampuchea. It was barely a road. Im not sure a large car could make it over the dirt pathway and there were ruts that could easily trap a car. Green foliage of all types grew along the side. This is Kampuchea, a hot humid jungle filled country.
It was not dead animals I smelled. It was people. They had been cadre of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. They werent just killed. Some had their stomachs slit and their intestines pulled out. They were covered in a hallo of flies, swarming all over them. Some hung from trees, others lie in ditches. They were captured by government troops and then savagely killed. And who lead this viscous government that would allow such brutality? It was none other than Norodom Sihanouk. He had been a king, but he abdicated the thrown to run for office and become prime minister of Cambodia. It was he who always used the European term Cambodia. I always called our country Kampuchea or .. But inside the country, he was no different than Adolf Hitler when he rounded up the Communist Party members and sympathizers of his country and put them in concentration camps, most of whom were destined to die. And as with Hitler, the middle classes of the city, the petite bourgeois and other conservatives not only didnt care, they cheered him on for his brutality. It was the same thing here in Kampuchea all over again.

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