5march2006 1824 Vietnam time, Ho chi minh city

Reached ho chi minh city at 1400hrs, the road is much much better, and prices are fairer here. At least not as cunning as the khmers, over charging even for a single loaf of bread. Ok so the story goes, I was not very clear about the pol pot regime, so the whole killing field thing just seemed like a huge dusty side show. So I bought an entire historical account of the ideologies and situations in the Indochina wars from the 70s and began to get a clearer view of things.What is this evil, interpreted communism and socialism? I understood from the original manifesto by Marx to be something empowering and spartan in nature. But the nature of the human soul is not what he imagined. Demons of desire and lust for an endless list of things ride us, so the interpretation and implementation is a little different.Apparently the regime destroyed infrastructure to its very core, its aftereffects can still be seen today.

The brief political background:In 1976 people were reclassified as full rights (base) people, candidates, and depositees -- so called because they included most of the new people who had been deposited from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to two bowls of rice soup, or "juk" per day. This led to widespread starvation amongst the depositees.The Khmer Rouge leadership boasted over their radio station that only one or two million people out of the population were needed to build the new agrarian communist utopia. As for the others, as their proverb put it, "if they survive, no gain; if they die, no loss. "Hundreds of thousands of the new people, and later the depositees, were taken out, shackled, to dig their own mass graves. Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars and hoes or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, "Bullets are not to be wasted."In 1976 people were reclassified as full rights (base) people, candidates, and depositees -- so called because they included most of the new people who had been deposited from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to two bowls of rice soup, or "juk" per day. This led to widespread starvation amongst the depositees.The Khmer Rouge leadership boasted over their radio station that only one or two million people out of the population were needed to build the new agrarian communist utopia. As for the others, as their proverb put it, "if they survive, no gain; if they die, no loss. "Hundreds of thousands of the new people, and later the depositees, were taken out, shackled, to dig their own mass graves. Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars and hoes or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, "Bullets are not to be wasted."

Property became communal, and education was dispensed at communal schools. Pol Pot's regime was extremely harsh on political dissent and opposition. Torture was widespread. In some instances, throats were slit as prisoners were tied to metal bed frames.Thousands of politicians and bureaucrats accused of association with previous governments were killed, while Phnom Penh was turned into a ghost city with many dying of starvation, illnesses, or execution. Land mines, which Pol Pot praised as his "perfect soldiers," were widely distributed around the countryside. The casualty list from the civil war, Pol Pot's consolidation of power, and the invasion by Vietnam is disputed. Credible Western and Eastern sources [1] put the death toll of the Khmer Rouge at 1.6 millionPol Pot espoused a radically revised variant of Maoism, the so-called "Anka" Doctrine, adapted to Khmer nationalism. Envisaging a perfectly egalitarian agrarianism, the Khmer Rouge favored a completely agrarian society to the point that all modern technological contrivances were banned. Pol Pot was quite the opponent of Soviet orthodoxy. Because he was anti-Soviet, the People's Republic of China considered him preferable to the pro-Vietnamese (therefore pro-Moscow) government. The Western powers took more or less the same line, offering diplomatic support to the Khmer Rouge after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979.The discoveries by the centre cause experts to revise upward the estimated number of victims of the Khmer Rouge from 1.7 million to 2.2-2.5 millionHenceforth, highly disturbing, not that pol pot missed his trial appointment, but that a thousand deaths could not yield to compensate for his killings. A visit to the towers of skulls and the torture class rooms at the Toul Sleng S21*not S11 museum and you instantly get the picture. Can you imagine killing children? I can't. Maybe mr pot can, and I imagine now his soul must be grappled by approx. 3million demons in the echelons of vast eternity.