"Yes, sorry, very sorry."
Date tie-ins in the Boidem don't have a fully defined purpose. They originally
grew out of my semi-obsession with dates as a basis for organizing information.
I'm fascinated with this organizing principle precisely because there's a large
degree of chance inherent in it. The fact that something happened on a particular
day doesn't in any logical way connect it to another event that took place on
that same day but in a different year, or an entirely different epoch. And perhaps
that's precisely what makes it interesting.
Whenever possible, I've used these date tie-ins as a way of shedding a bit of
light on forgotten technologies, or on predecessors to today's technologies that
don't seem to have earned their day in the sun. Sometimes I have to stretch things
to find something interesting, and sometimes I find something that isn't connected
to technology, but seems to yell out at us that it just has to be noted. And so
it is with this month's tie-in.
While searching various almanac-like sites, I learned that it
was on this day, in 1998, that two Khmer Rouge officials apologized for the
genocide of their own people.
Even the mere use of this particular incident in these rather off-the-cuff tie-ins gives me the distressing feeling of becoming
a participant in the banalization of evil. Without a doubt the business of reconciliation
in a civil-war-torn country is a difficult one. And this is particularly so
in a country whose leaders seemed, for a generation, to be waging war on its citizens.
And yet even if we accept the fact that revenge achieves very little, if anything
at all, there's something terribly distressing in realizing that the best that
these two important leaders of the Khmer Rouge were able to bring themselves to
do was utter incredibly limited expressions of remorse. One of the two, Nuon Chea,
is reported to have said:
We are very sorry, not just for the human lives but
also animal lives that were lost in the war
thus giving the impression that perhaps his pets meant more to him than this fellow
Cambodians. The other, Khieu Samphan, in a round-about sort of way actually expressed
remorse. CNN reported
that when asked if he was sorry declared:
Yes, sorry, very sorry. We would like to apologize and ask our compatriots to forget the past so our nation can concentrate on the future. Let bygones be bygones.
Strange how an estimated 1.7 million people are so easily categorized as "bygones".
Then again, in today's world there are those who apparently find the idea of returning
Cambodia to the stone age both logical and justifiable. While looking for more
information on this topic I stumbled across a Yahoo Group that goes by the name
of Democratic Kampuchea.
The group was founded in May of 2005 and has only 28 people listed as members.
The description of the group, however, is fascinating:
Group for the historical and ideological reclamation of Democratic Kampuchea, Comrade Pol Pot, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, etc.
From the discussions of the group, when these take place, it's easy to get the
impression that this is the Pol Pot fan club.
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