A few days ago, our group was brought to one of the mass graves where thousands of Cambodians were slaughtered by Pol Pot’s troops. They had committed no crime. They were teachers, doctors, engineers, mothers, children, people who wore glasses, people with metal in their teeth, people whose hands had no calluses..
What follows are some of the photos I took there.
A mass grave for 450 people.
Another mass grave
Rags of victims clothes
Rags exposed by torrential rains in 2011
A mass grave of women and children
A tree where small children were killed by their heads being bashed against the tree. Mourners left mementoes on the tree.
This tree had a loudspeaker to drown out sounds of suffering
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I will never understand why humanity is so cruel to its members. We are so destructive to those who are slightly different. In Cambodia, there was a necessity to get rid of those with any education.
Life on earth is made so much more horrible because we cannot, at this time, accept those who don’t seem to be exactly the same. This doesn’t apply to everyone since most of the readers of this blog are willing to reach out to others and see our common humanity. But, look at the hatred Trump is showing towards immigrants. Look at the hatred that the Evangelicals have for fetuses once they are born. Look at the inequality of living standards that exist and continue to get worse just because the wealthy mostly look down upon those who haven’t been as enriched. When will it end?
I believe the destiny of humanity depends upon our learning to get along much better than what exists today.
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Homo Sapien is a very mixed bag genetically; they can do the most beautiful and noble things, and they can turn on a dime and commit horror or atrocity. They can nurture, and they can weaken. They can construct, and they can destroy. They can strengthen, and they can disable.
They can heal, and they can kill.
They can use their god-like and god-given powers to do good or evil. But they also decide, for the most part, how they conduct themselves.
That’s life as we know it.
We can always learn from it and act upon our knowledge if we choose . . .
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I had a few Cambodian students early in my career. They were refugees from the war. One little boy whose entire family was killed moved to New York with his aunt, uncle and their two children. He kept bringing me pictures of guns and knives , and he kept saying,”Cambodia” over and over. He was trying to tell me about the war. He would get so upset sometimes he would have an epileptic seizure. With time, medication and TLC, his episodes diminished. War scars children, not only with weapons, but with trauma. My heart goes out to the children in Syria as the amount of physical and mental devastation is unfathomable.
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Retired teacher: The US is the biggest cause of killings on earth. We supply 57% of the worlds military hardware and spend more on the military than the next 7 countries combined.
I wish we’d put more thought into helping people than destroying in the name of “peace’. The US needs to recognize that we can never kill our way to peace. Each person killed is one person who has family members and friends. They will remember from whom those rockets and drones came. The fear and hatred grows with each person who is killed.
Imagine how we would feel if an outside country was ‘saving us’ by bombings for 16+ years. Wouldn’t we begin to wonder about that amount of help?
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You’re right. The US and other countries supply weapons to the rest of the world. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex that profitizes destruction. Maybe we need to start voting for people that actually respect life more than profit
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Still have no words.
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Thank you for sharing with us. Sigh.
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As a Holocaust and genocide educator, may I use these pictures? EIther way, thank you for them, Diane.
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There is nothing to say except what a terrible thing to do to people. This morning on NPR, I heard more of the story of the African girls who had disappeared and what (I guess it was ISIS) did to certain people particularly Christians. The young woman who was speaking had written a book and was pregnant when she escaped. She said if her captors knew she was pregnant they would cut the baby out of her and kill them both. She also spoke of her captors using cannibalism in the camp.
For every good, how many bad are out there?
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I trust that the folks you met in Cambodia explained to you how the U.S. with its fear of communism and its bombing of Cambodia along and beyond the Ho Chi Minh trail help to make Pol Pot’s regime the powerful regime that it became.
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Cambodians complain that US abandoned them and allowed Pol Pot to come to power. They expressed wish that US had stayed to protect them.
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Tell them about the US “anti-war movement”. The US failed to win in VietNam, by not destroying the communist ability to wage war. The US had a treaty commitment to the Republic of Vietnam(south), through the S.E.A.T.O.
The US never had a defense treaty with Cambodia, the nation was “neutral”. When the US Army invaded Cambodia in 1970, the anti-war movement protested, and four students were killed at Kent State.
After the VietNam debacle, there was no way that the USA was going to get involved in another SouthEast Asian nation.
The Cambodian people were slaughtered due to indifference.
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