Hacker Cinema
The Killing Fields
1984 · Film · 142 min
Directed by Roland Joffé
New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg is on assignment covering the Cambodian Civil War, with the help of local interpreter Dith Pran and American photojournalist Al Rockoff. When the U.S. Army pulls out amid escalating violence, Schanberg makes exit arrangements for Pran and his family. Pran, however, tells Schanberg he intends to stay in Cambodia to help cover the unfolding story — a decision he may regret as the Khmer Rouge rebels move in.
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There is a long history of marxist groups trying to destroy the family by forcibly removing children and making them live in various communal camps. For example this was done in forced collectivization projects in the USSR and China, and also by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
I really recommend watching the film "The Killing Fields", in order to see this in action.
Both the USSR and China ended up abandoning these efforts and now acknowledge them as terrible failures. The Khmer Rouge had to be forced out via military invasion.
Always the justification is the fact that smarter parents tend to have smarter kids, patient parents tend to have patient kids, etc. E.g. most things in life are at least half heritable, and so you will see both competency and dysfunction cluster in families. This offended the levelers greatly and so they decided that families need to be broken up and the kids randomized in order to achieve a Great Leveling.
The result has always been catastrophic, not to mention a gross human rights violation.
Come and See remains the most horrific film I've seen. Critically important how it shows the brutality of that war.
The Act of Killing is the most brutal documentary I've seen and in fact could not finish it. On Indonesia's executioners of communists.
For a take on the Cambodian travesty see The Killing Fields.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Gods_and_Men_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields_(film)
Showing these kind of things has always been against the ethical standards of journalism and exceptions to it used to be discussed intensively by editors - excluding the tabloid yellow press who make their living from this trash, of course. I guess some of the more recent American TV channels realized at some point, after they had gained fame for showing everything, that quotas are not everything and that relatives usually don't want the death of their beloved ones displayed all across the Internet without their consent.
Sites like Liveleaks are very hypocritical, they pretend to show videos for "freedom of speech" while instead their main purpose is simply to satisfy their viewers' voyeurism. Cheap thrills are the main reason for viewing this kind of material - and don't pretend to be someone better, you've looked up that kind of stuff yourself for precisely that reason just like I have. People who watch this material only want to satisfy their curiosity and get the thrills from it.
That's also why Truffault once said "There’s no such thing as an anti-war film." (There are exceptions, like "Taxi Driver", and perhaps also "Deer Hunter" and "Killing Fields", but these are rare.)
For anyone who hasn't seen it, I recommend watching The Killing Fields. Obviously it's from a very British/American perspective. Since I doubt that the film production companies that made it are earning much, if any revenue from it these days, I don't feel bad about linking to a torrent of it:
https://rarbg.to/torrent/cbm3x4z
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields_(film)
> Since reading here I've done some research and learned the Cambodian Genocide claimed around 1/3 the death toll of The Holocaust, yet I'd bet most people haven't heard much, or anything, about it. Could you name the leader in charge of it, or how it came about?
Pol Pot? This was something that was literally covered in my World History class in high school. I remember that mostly because we watched "The Killing Fields" and I was happy to have what I assumed would be an easy week, but that movie is pretty profoundly impressive.
We also covered Native American atrocities and read "A People's History of the United States", which at the time (20 some years ago) might have been out of the norm but now seems relatively common.
None of this is to condescend to you or to suggest you are uneducated generally, but rather to point out that something you are extrapolating as systematic in education is not. And for what it's worth I went to public high schools and public college in a not too progressive place.
I also didn't mean to imply you were aligned with anti-semitic groups, rather that anti-semitic groups use that misunderstanding as propaganda and you should probably be aware of that.
By percentage, those guys are minor league. Pol Pot caused the death of approximately 25% of the Cambodian population.
Today you can take a tour to see "The Killing Tree", an actual tree that kids heads were smashed against. There is a movie called "The Killing Fields" that does a decent job of conveying the suffering under Pol Pot. Pol Pot was so horrible that even the Vietnamese communists were disgusted enough to invade.
I posted this before: Clearly the Cambodian and Indochina people went through an awful period. Pol Pot did extreme things as a leader but the alternative of leaving Lon Nol in power who had people starving was not good either. Whether communism or Islamic fundamentalism, anti-colonialism wars are not fun to live through. Here is a perspective I picked up from the Internet.
"A Finnish inquiry commission concludes that 1 million or fewer people died in the Pol Pot period. The commission documented that at least several thousand of those were because of direct military battles with Vietnam. Part of the discrepancy in death figures comes from those who fail to account for the decrease in births that inevitably happens when a population is lacking adequate food and fighting a war. These missed births get counted as deaths in population projections that assume the birth rate did not change."
"The United States war in Southeast Asia killed 600,000 people in Cambodia according to the Finnish Inquiry Commission. The total U.S.-caused deaths in Indochina run into the millions."
"By 1975, an estimated 10 percent of the Kampuchean population -- 600,000 -- had already died as a result of the Vietnam War. Those 600,000 deaths were caused by U.S. efforts to track down Vietnamese communists. According to the Peter Jennings documentary "The Killing Fields", Cambodia specifically absorbed 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs in the early 1970s."
"The U.S.-instigated war -- and the bombings in particular -- also caused the creation of 2 million refugees, who flooded the cities. The cities then came to depend on the U.S. food aid to live because of the war and the inefficiency of the right-wing Lon Nol regime."
"Hence, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power from Lon Nol in 1975 in the worst possible situation: The people were starving, Kampuchea was the poorest country in the world and one-third of its people were refugees."
"Executions and other deaths"
"The Boston Globe coverage of Pol Pot's death contained this characterization of the Khmer Rouge: "When the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital on April 17, 1975 to establish their agrarian society, they chased out city dwellers at gunpoint, killed anyone suspected of being an intellectual, forced millions into labor camps, and demanded that children inform on their parents. People were often arrested simply for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language. Money and private property were abolished, schools and temples were shuttered, and medicine and food became scarce. During a nearly four-year reign, as many as 2 million people died of starvation, execution illness or overwork."
"Pol Pot did execute between 75,000 and 150,000 people between 1975 and 1979. Most of those executions took place in the context of war between Vietnam and Cambodia.Vietnam invaded in 1978 and threw the Khmer Rouge out of power.The famous skull-pile pictures from Kampuchea come from a policy especially aimed at the Vietnamese.Serious famine followed again after the final Vietnamese invasion of December 1978, and by the time international aid started it was too late for many. A total of 2 million, or 30 percent of the population, died in the 1970s from the U.S. war, the Pol Pot period and Vietnamese invasions."
"The United States aided the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, because they were enemies of U.S. foes, the Vietnamese, who had invaded and ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979."
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