We went to the S21 Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields yesterday in Phnom Penh. This is one of those places that everyone should see in their lifetime. It made me feel sad that humans could be capable of such terrible things. The Khmer Rouge killed a quarter of the population (over 2 million people), most of them brutally and violently. We saw where they tortured them and where they dumped their bodies in mass graves. We saw their bones.
This happened in our lifetime(1975-1979) and their leader, Pol Pot, walked on this earth until he died in 1998. He never saw any consequences.
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| Memorial at the Killing Fields. If you look close you can see skulls inside the windows. |
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| S21 Prison |
The Prison and the Fields are about 30 minutes apart but doable in one day. Best to go to S21 first for some context. Separate entrance fees for each and we paid for the audio tours which was worth it. Neither museum is the kind of place you want to take photos. There were some survivors inside the prison grounds selling books about their experience. A solemn experience.
The human race needs to figure out how monsters like this can short circuit the minds of others to commit such atrocities. Stalin did it, Hitler did it, Pol Pot did it, but these guys didn’t do it alone. In Cambodia, there were 72,000 other humans who were like, “yeah, let’s brutally kill a bunch of people!” WTF?!?
Look around. Is this happening today? If you can’t see that it is, then maybe that’s part of the problem.
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