it's strange to have a single place to go to to take in all of what happened, since it was nation-wide and most people were never conventionally tortured or executed... they were mostly worked to death and starved. Like genocide without bullets. i still can't wrap my mind around the enormity of the situation, either here or in rwanda... to have all hell break loose and nowhere to go. In the immortal words of The Onion: 'holy fucking shit!'
I went back and looked at my photos from visiting one of the churches in Rwanda where people sought refuge and then were attacked. There were some grenades used, but most of the genocide was crude weaponry. I have a photo of a table full of skulls, one of which still has a scarf on the head and a knife sticking out. It's horrific, but kind of a must to go see it and know what happened. Same thing in Nagasaki, the museum is only one place to represent a number of events, but it sure fed my imagination enough to picture it fairly vividly.
It puts a strange perspective on arms races and proliferation and all that... that even if weapons aren't so readily available, people will just pick up a rock or a hatchet and do things the stone age way. Not that it makes a nuclear free for all any more appealing than it already is...
i guess the scariest thing about it is that it wasn't the first time something like this happened, and that similar things continue even now. there's a huge memorial at auschwitz that has 'never again' inscripted in dozens of languages down the side... it's a compelling thing to see when you're actually there but at this point it's not much more than an empty pep-talk for people who can't be bothered to speak out. i mention this because one of the scholars going through all the documents found at S-21 (everything was documented) made a comment that the fact people are capable of mass murder isn't so surprising... that the real horror in all this was that we are capable of allowing it to happen again. it made me think of the euro camps, and the bitch has a point. word.
So many of these things have been secret till years later (not an excuse of course), like the Cultural Revolution under Mao, and the gulags in North Korea.
It's horrifying, and I am pessimistic enough to say it will always happen again, because people + power = greedy leaders who do crazy shit.
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It's horrifying, and I am pessimistic enough to say it will always happen again, because people + power = greedy leaders who do crazy shit.
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