She was accused by United Nations-backed tribunal "of overseeing the killing of tens of thousands of people as a Khmer Rouge official in northwestern Cambodia in 1977 and 1978." Last Wednesday, the charges were dropped on the theory that she was "neither a senior leader nor otherwise one of the most responsible officials of the Khmer Rouge regime."
Did she know all the crimes she was accused of: the murder, the slavery, the extermination?
“You don’t need to ask me. You know it,” she shot back. “If you know it, you know it.”
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48 comments:
If you want responsibility, get a guy. Women have only needs.
Buddhists don't care about mere ethnic mass murder. It gets the cycle of death and reincarnation a kick start. It's karma.
Planned Parenthood does its part in the cycle. Relax and meditate. Everyone dies.
Just another pathetic failure in bringing former Kmer Rouge murderers to justice. Pretty sure she wasn't referencing Buddha in the old days.
The current government has many former Kmer communists in power, the ones that had a later falling out with Pol Pot. They aren't interested in drudging up the past.
"She said she spent most of her time at the compound, cultivating cucumbers and melons, contemplating the scriptures and waiting to die."
It turns out she and I are very much alike, except for the cucumber, melon and scriptures part.
At what point does one become culpable for following orders? You can make an argument that legal culpability should have a lower standard than moral culpability, at least within the context of a Jude's-Christian tradition. I am not sure how Buddhists handle the concept of sin.
Only a God that cares for us and promises us a full life span can conceive the concept of Justice. Culture is upstream of politics.
Don't hide your light under a bushel, Grandma Chaem.
At what point does one become culpable for following orders?
Ever see Stanley Kramer's "Judgment At Nuremberg"? That was a movie that, however awkwardly, posed the question: How far down the chain of command do you go in determining responsibility for the Third Reich and the Nazi Holocaust? There are characters in the movie whose attitude seems to be, "Sure, go after the top guys, but you can't realistically punish everyone." The movie seems to say: Oh yes, you can.
Ah, yes. Marxism strikes another blow for the good of humanity and especially for the powerful.
"Prosecutors estimated that 40,000 people had died at the largest prison in the district that Ms. Im Chaem ran.."
Well she had no trouble breaking the glass ceiling, did she?
"of overseeing the killing of tens of thousands of people as a Khmer Rouge official in northwestern Cambodia in 1977 and 1978."
I guess I'm confused about why we jailed or shot Nazi Camp Guards then...
This post is the second highest in Google results if you search for "Buddha" and "holiness".
"I guess I'm confused about why we jailed or shot Nazi Camp Guards then..."
we DIDN'T jail or shot many FEMALE Nazi Camp Guards.
"Having the holiness in myself makes me good."
Well. you can tell yourself that, Grandma, but I think you are kidding yourself, you monster. You aren't even saying that you were following orders.
On a brighter note, in a another universe, where God separates the just from the unjust, you will burn in hell for all eternity.
The Rwanda genocide was followed by a long painful formalized reconciliation and forgiveness in which the Christian and political leadership of the country were involved. The process has involved a decision not to prosecute or persecute many people well known to have participated in atrocities. This effort has been generally deemed to be quite successful. As in all things though, time will tell.
Buddhism can be so convenient.
Re Rwanda: a "success" only because the former victims prevailed, and their leader was a tough bastard who kept a tight lid on things.
Buddhism is a religion about nothing.
Even tiny, peaceful 74-year-old ladies can be repositories of evil. I think a slow, humiliating, agonizing death would be a fitting end for the murder of 40,000 souls.
Buddhism is a religion about nothing.
No, that's Seinfeld.
On a brighter note, in a another universe, where God separates the just from the unjust, you will burn in hell for all eternity.
But in our universe, apparently, she can be unrepentant and still live out the full and peaceful life that she denied thousands of others.
Nice trick if you can get away with it. Murder thousands and skate.
There was a very cute moment in "Captain Fantastic" when the dad goes up into the 8 year old's tree house, notices some apparently new decorations, and mutter's "Jesus!". He's looking at a picture of a face and some piles of skulls. The little girl shakes her serious head and says "Pol Pot." The dad climbs back down. Quite a chuckle, no? In the alternate version, where the dad's a far right survivalist, they'd only have to change the pictures to Hitler or maybe Eichmann and piles of bodies. This version though gets an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes "Top Critics".
lgv: Pretty sure she wasn't referencing Buddha in the old days.
She probably was.
The lesson here is: never trust people who use "I" or "me" and words like "holiness", "compassionate", "empathetic", "caring", "sensitive", etc. in the same sentence.
I once represented a man who escaped Cambodia in the 70s. His family - wife and kids - did not escape and were among the piles of bodies.
gilbar said... [hush][hide comment]
"I guess I'm confused about why we jailed or shot Nazi Camp Guards then..."
we DIDN'T jail or shot many FEMALE Nazi Camp Guards.
Pussy Pass...The phenomenon that female criminals get off with a lighter sentence than males.
"
On a brighter note, in a another universe, where God separates the just from the unjust, you will burn in hell for all eternity."
I don't think Buddhists have a hell. Maybe she'll come back as a cockroach.
Metamorf said...
There was a very cute moment in "Captain Fantastic" when the dad goes up into the 8 year old's tree house, notices some apparently new decorations, and mutter's "Jesus!". He's looking at a picture of a face and some piles of skulls. The little girl shakes her serious head and says "Pol Pot."
And the family celebrates "Noam Chomsky Day." Paul Johnson on Chomsky's take on the Cambodian massacres:
"The response of Chomsky and his associates thus moved through four phases:
1) There were no massacres, they were a Western propaganda invention. 2) There may have been killings on a small scale; but 'the torment of Cambodia has been exploited by cynical Western humanitarians' 3.) The killings were more extensive than at first thought,and were the result of the brutalization of the peasants by American war crimes. 4) Chomsky was finally driven to quoting "one of the handful of authentic Cambodian scholars ' who, by skillful shifting of the chronology, was able to 'prove' that the worst massacres occurred not in 1975 but in mid-1978 and took place not for Marxist, but for "traditionalist, racist, anti-Vietnamese reasons.' ....As such, it won the approval of the CIA, which moved from exaggerating the massacres for propaganda reasons to actively perpetuating them. In short, Pol Pot's crime was in fact America's,quod erat demonstrandum.
Roughcoat said...
Buddhism is a religion about nothing.
This is true of American Buddhists because they are generally wannabes. My wife's family are real buddhists. It is a lot more pagan than most americans realize.
True about Buddhism. It can be a bit confusing in a Christian society because of its analogous system of values and ethics (compassion and etc.) but under the surface its a very different thing indeed, and this has social consequences.
@gilbar, Irma Grese would like to debate you about that, but she can't -- the Brits hanged her. The infamous Ilsa Koch got off on a technicality -- she was the wife of the camp commandant and not herself a member of the SS.
What happened to WWII female camp guards seems to have depended on which sector the guards fell into. The Americans seem to have been very lenient towards female guards, while the Brits and French, who had seen women of their own nationalities killed during the war, were more apt to resort to the noose or guillotine after a fair trial. The Russians reportedly shot camp guards of either gender out of hand.
I fully expect the campus lefties to put her pic in their t shirts.
Leftist totalitarian? Check
Wanted to create utopia on Earth? Check
Mass murderer? Check
"She Persisted"? Check
Sorry irma, I shouldn't have generalized.
Only a fraction of those Nazis who committed war crimes were ever convicted. Even so that number is astronomically higher than those who committed war crimes for other causes in other places. The Japanese were no slouches when it came to committing war crimes. Even so, MacArthur was remarkably lenient. He only hanged six Japanese for their crimes and gave a complete pass to all Filipinos who had collaborated with the Japanese. He was criticized for this, but the US occupation of Japan went smoothly because of his leniency........As a general rule, if your tastes run to genocide, Communism offers free reign to your impulses and there's never a day of reckoning, neither in this life, nor in posterity. I would guess the number of people killed on collective farms must be in the millions. Can anyone here name a single person who died on a collective farm or a single bureaucrat who engineered such deaths......I can name lots of people who perished in concentration camps and a few who died in gulags, but the collective farms are a forgotten crime.
John LeCarre wrote this after a visit to Rwanda. This was a few years after the genocide:
An hour short of the Congolese border we turned off the road and climbed a hill in order to take a look at a few of the génocidaires’ victims. A former secondary school looked down on lovingly tended valleys. The curator, himself an improbable survivor, led us from one classroom to another.
The dead – hundreds of them, whole families, tricked into assembling for their own protection and every one of them hand-killed – had been laid out in fours and sixes on wooden pallets and coated with what looked like congealed flour and water. A lady with a facemask and bucket was giving them an extra coat.
For how long would she go on painting them? How long would they last? Many were children. In a country where farmers do their own slaughtering, the technique had come naturally: first cut the tendons, then take your time. Hands, arms and feet were stored separately in baskets. Torn clothing, brown with blood and mostly children’s sizes, hung from the eaves of a cavernous assembly hall.
‘When will you bury them?’
‘When they have done their work.’
Their work as the proof that it had really happened.
Start reading this book for free: http://a.co/7S0Pg76
++++++++++++++++++++
This is one of the most chilling things I've ever read about a genocide.
This is from John LeCarre's excellent autobiographical book The Pigeon Tunnel. A series of essays on his life and writing. Lots of great anecdotes about where his story ideas came from.
John Henry
Sebastian,
Rwanda may be a "success" by some measures.
The Congo is not. Many of the Hutus (or Tutsis? I can't keep them straight) moved over into adjoining Congo where they have been continuing the genocide but also against Congolese of varying tribes.
6 million dead in the past 10 years in the Congo. More than the Jews murdered in the German camps.
How many people have heard about this war? How many people have heard of the 6,000,000?
Maybe 1 person out of 10?
The fact that Congo in particular and that section of Africa in general has always been perceived as a shithole may have something to do with it.
The fact that they are black may also have something else to do with it. Do Black (African) Lives Matter? Apparently not.
John Henry
The Russians reportedly shot camp guards of either gender out of hand.
That was apparently Churchill's preferred solution. Not sure about the guards but about the top National Socialists at least.
His thinking was, what if there is a fair trial, in accord with law and they are able to be found not guilty? Yes, of course they were guilty, but many say the same thing of OJ Simpson and he walked.
Or, if they wanted to be sure that they were found guilty, it would be necessary to have a sham trial or else disregard any not-guilty finding.
He didn't want to risk the first and felt that the idea of a sham trial made a mockery of the entire war effort.
I understand his point entirely and probably would have agreed with him at the time. We killed millions of Germans in the war, with no trial. Bomber Command and 8th USAF killed hundreds of thousands of civilians via area bombing. Who were arguably "innocent" of any crime.
Why not a few more?
John Henry
If she was Serbian she wouldn't be walking away. The Left expects POCs to act like barbarians and readily excuses it. Partly because the lives of their victims are of negligible value to the unconsciously, yet viciously, racist White Liberal.
As a general rule, if your tastes run to genocide, Communism offers free reign to your impulses
Actually, not just free reign, it pretty much requires it of anyone who believes in Marxist communism/socialism.
Marx makes a fundamental error on about page 4 (or so depending on edition) that leads pretty much directly to a choice of abandoning communism/socialism or implementing it by mass murder.
You can't make the "new socialist man". Not in large numbers, anyway. Some people will be dumb enough to believe in it. You have to terrify most people into pretending to believe in socialism and kill those who won't pretend.
Ideally, you get people to the point where Winston doesn't just pretend to see 5 fingers. He actually believes that he sees them. Of course it may take a facemask full of rats. A small price to pay for the glories of socialism.
John Henry
The Cracker Emcee
Cruely neutral - and accurate - comment. Brutally correct.
Ahhh, the Khmer Rouge - another episode of 20th Century Communist genocide.
Don't hear too much about them, though.
Bay Area Guy: "Ahhh, the Khmer Rouge - another episode of 20th Century Communist genocide.
Don't hear too much about them, though."
If the left can't blame the west or transform the mass murderers into western conservatives then, no, you don't hear anything about them at all.
At all.
John said...
The Russians reportedly shot camp guards of either gender out of hand.
That was apparently Churchill's preferred solution. Not sure about the guards but about the top National Socialists at least.
John Henry, allow me to invite you to document that with a site or link. That seems like something Churchill would have not said historically.
In Buddhism there's no there there.
See what I did . . . there?
And in my previous post, "Buddhism is a religion about nothing".
Come on, people.
Practically no one was ever punished for the mass murders of the Killing Fields. It's the same in China where no one - apart from the Gang of Four - was ever punished, or even named and shamed, for the mass murders of the Cultural Revolution. I guess they meant well, they were killing for equality after all, so what the hell.
Hey Roughcoat -ç„¡ to you, too!
Case 1: Kurt Waldheim was demonized, declared 'persona non grata' in the USA, his political career ended. His sin? He was part of the Wehrmacht in Yugoslavia during WWII. There's no evidence of his participation in any war crimes, but someone accused him of "doing nothing" to prevent executions of partisans.
Case 2: Giorgio Napolitano, two times President of the Italian Republic (2006-2015), lifelong member and official of the Communist party (since 1945), applauds Hungary's invasion by the USSR in 1956 for bringing peace and order to the country, avoiding the "counter-revolutionary chaos" brought by the "white fascists". For this man, always loyal to the Communist line, nothing if not honors.
"we DIDN'T jail or shot many FEMALE Nazi Camp Guards."
Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS got off scot free. She did have great tits, though.
I guess I'm confused about why we jailed or shot Nazi Camp Guards then...
I doubt we would have bothered if they hadn't invaded Poland.
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