Althouse: Dith Pran "saw his country descend into a living hell" and "survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation."

March 30, 2008

Dith Pran "saw his country descend into a living hell" and "survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation."

Dith Pran has died.

See the slideshow, which includes many of his photographs.

11 comments:

vet66 said...: Dith Pran is a hero and has an honored place among the 'Band of Brothers' who reported on the khmer Rouge and the fall of Cambodia.

With his help, an intrepid few forced Americans to experience the hell that was created in southeast
Asia as the vacuum of our unforgivable retreat from our allies in South Vietnam played out to it's predictable and preventable genocidal end.

Dith Pran truly represented Cambodia as the Pearl of Asia.; 3/30/08, 9:11 AM
Anonymous said...: Hmmmmm.

Contrast these photos with the shrill claims of white oppression by race baiters like Rev. Wright.

What absurdities!; 3/30/08, 11:09 AM
dick said...: I wonder if Noam Chomsky ever responded to Dith Pran on the subject of genocide in Cambodia. I know that Noam has claimed for years that it never happened.

Truly he was one of the best and we are lucky to have the works he did.; 3/30/08, 12:02 PM
George M. Spencer said...: Tens of thousands arbitrarily detained. Sold into coal mines, lumber camps, railroad camps. Welded into ankle shackles. Fed rancid, rotting food. 200 to 300 floggings a month. Patients dragged out of hospitals, whipped, and left to die in the fields. Waterboarding. Dogs eating the corpses of teenage victims shot in the woods. Men whipped for singing and laughing. Physical disfigurement from beatings with chains.

In Saturday's Wall Street Journal.; 3/30/08, 12:55 PM
reader_iam said...: Great eye. Great spirit. Remarkable man. R.I.P.; 3/30/08, 1:14 PM
reader_iam said...: For years and years, I kept (my parents') copy of the NYT magazine that contained Schanberg's story about Dith Pran and reread it numerous times in the '80s. I might still have it tucked away in a box of clippings in the attic somewhere.; 3/30/08, 1:17 PM
Kirby Olson said...: The worst story about Cambodia was on TV about a month ago. In some prison they had 17,000 prisoners. Only two survived.

Auschwitz had a better survival rate!

One of the things you could be killed for was rolling over in your sleep without permission. The crime was called "Individualism."; 3/30/08, 3:38 PM
Tibore said...: It is hard to conceive of a regime that makes Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union seem almost human, but the Khmer Rouge managed to do it.

Anyone who resisted that horrific regime is a hero. And anyone who somehow managed to keep their humanity while doing so is someone I just cannot describe with words.

Dith Pran and Haing Ngor: Two incredible gentlement that I'm sorry to have never met.; 3/30/08, 4:22 PM
Christy said...: The eyes are glistening.

I remember reading that the wearing of eyeglasses was enough to get one executed.; 3/30/08, 4:57 PM
blake said...: Tens of thousands arbitrarily detained. Sold into coal mines, lumber camps, railroad camps. Welded into ankle shackles. Fed rancid, rotting food. 200 to 300 floggings a month. Patients dragged out of hospitals, whipped, and left to die in the fields. Waterboarding. Dogs eating the corpses of teenage victims shot in the woods. Men whipped for singing and laughing. Physical disfigurement from beatings with chains.

A virtual mirror of the Bush administration.; 3/30/08, 6:23 PM
Freder Frederson said...: I wonder if Noam Chomsky ever responded to Dith Pran on the subject of genocide in Cambodia. I know that Noam has claimed for years that it never happened.

You are simply wrong about this. He never denied this. He did claim wrongly that the CIA denied the genocide and laid the fault of the genocide to the machinations of the U.S. But he acknowledged the genocide.

Noam Chomsky says enough outrageous things, including what he did actually say about the Cambodian genocide, that you don't have to make extra stuff up.; 3/31/08, 9:30 AM