Category Archives: philosophy

by Joel | 20 November 2024 · 5:43 pm

Antifascists in 1930s Bulgaria

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 428-430:

Fascists in Bulgaria faced a distilled concentration of all the problems that handicapped counterparts in Yugoslavia or Poland: a native strongman, a native national movement that valued democracy, and an agricultural societal structure. In Bulgaria, fascism lacked the disorientated and enraged middle- and working-class constituencies that allowed it to flourish farther west. Still, like everywhere else, a native version did emerge, and it did so from the top of the political elite. After Stamboliiski’s murder in 1923, the economics professor Aleksandar Tsankov became prime minister and vigorously suppressed the Bulgarian left. He fell from power in 1926 because his rule involved brutalities that shocked European opinion, causing London bankers to threaten the withholding of loans. After that, a moderate government took office under the centrist Andrey Lyapchev (1866–1933), and the country again managed to secure international financing.

Tsankov did not fade from the scene entirely, however, and became increasingly attracted to fascist politics. In May 1934 he called for a rally ahead of Nazi leader Hermann Goering’s visit to Sofia. Some 50,000 supporters were expected. Yet three days before Goering’s visit, the Bulgarian military (“Military League”) stepped in and seized power from a weak assemblage of mainstream parties. The army officers were supported by the civilian association Zveno (“The Link”), which held that Bulgaria must be modernized from above by the enlightened few because parliaments were a thing of the past. Under Zveno’s rule, Bulgaria conformed to regional patterns: increasing dependence on the German economy, nationalist chauvinism—reflected, for example, in the changing of Turkish to Bulgarian place names—and central rule. Zveno believed the state bureaucracy had to be streamlined and rationalized, and it reduced the ranks of the civil service by one-third.

Zveno is yet another case of the terminological confusion of that period surrounding the word fascism. Although Zveno was not a paramilitary, radical nationalist, or a mass mobilization regime, the US newsweekly Time called it “fascist.” In fact Zveno was moderate in foreign policy and sought better relations with Belgrade rather than a violent seizure of disputed territory. As in Marshall Piłsudski’s Sanacja, prominent leaders were military men (Damyan Velchev, Pencho Zlatev, Kimon Georgiev), and like Sanacja, they vowed to undo the corruption of public life. Yet unlike Polish counterparts, they did not establish a government party (like BBWR) or mass movement (like OZON), although they did abolish the political parties. The National Parliament (subranie) and local governments continued, but candidates had to run as individuals. Still, most successful candidates for office had belonged to the old parties and were recognized as such. Subranie elections in early 1938 netted the opposition one-third of the votes despite the sort of harassment and manipulation seen in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.

In early 1935, King Boris III, concerned about republican sentiment in the government, disbanded the Military League and appointed a civilian prime minister loyal to himself (he maintained the ban on parties). From that moment until his death in 1943, the king controlled Bulgarian politics, appointing prime ministers as he saw fit, yet acting as a benign dictator, maintaining peace with totalitarian Germany and Russia while trying to associate Bulgaria with democratic France. As far as possible, he suppressed the terrorist IMRO. Calling himself a “democratic monarch,” Boris stayed in touch with Bulgarians by touring the country in his own locomotive, occasionally stopping to visit with villagers, to whom he dispensed trinkets and other small gifts. Several right-wing associations emerged in the late 1930s that admired Nazism, but Boris kept them in check.

Yet he also adopted certain popular fascist appearances. Given his impressive record as field commander in World War I, Boris wore a uniform with some justification, and his regime formed corporatist organizations like a state-run “patriotic” union, through which, one Communist asserted, the “fascists buried the class struggle.” Again we see the period’s flexible understanding of “fascist.” For Communists, the authoritarian antisocialist regimes were fascist by definition. In 1936 Zveno created a “Bulgarian Workers’ Union” that attempted to usurp the workers’ cause in order to strengthen the state (again very reminiscent of Italy). May Day parades continued, but red flags were replaced by Bulgarian tricolors that were blessed by priests. As we will see in Chapter 17, Boris supported the rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews when they were threatened by Germany.

Like Hungarian and Romanian authoritarians, Boris suppressed fascism yet expended much less energy for similar results. His country, even more rural and with rampant illiteracy, featured few large towns in which people might be mobilized for fascist causes. In addition, Bulgarian politics offered other options to absorb radical energies. There was Stamboliiski’s mass agrarian movement in the 1920s as well as a potent military ultra-right, and there was IMRO, the Macedonian separatist movement, which featured a strong Bulgarian irredentist faction. All of this meant that Tsankov’s followers had little chance in the urban spaces where fascism thrives. And much more successfully than Horthy or Carol, Boris III, a popular and uniformed war hero, appeared to embody the national cause. It was easy for his police to identify and arrest the relatively few fascists, especially at the universities, which served as hothouses for radical ideologies.

Leave a comment

Filed under Bulgaria, democracy, economics, labor, military, nationalism, philosophy, religion

by Joel | 15 September 2024 · 6:31 am

Boundaries of Eastern Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 25-26:

This book ascribes no stereotypes to Eastern Europe beyond saying that it is an anti-imperial space of small peoples. In the corners of its political nightmares dwells this indistinct fear of being absorbed into larger powers. The anti-imperial struggle kept ethnic cultures alive, but it also promoted ideologies of exclusion that can become racist. The old empires, especially the Habsburg empire, inspire nostalgia, because they protected human rights and indeed nations and peoples better than did many nation-states that came later. This book uses “Eastern Europe” interchangeably with “East Central Europe” to cut down verbiage, but also because both terms are understood to refer to a band of countries that were Soviet satellites not in control of their own destinies. It denotes not so much a space on the map as shared experience, such that peoples from opposite ends of the region, despite all cultural or linguistic differences, employ a common narrative about the past. When he made his odd invocation of national survival, Viktor Orbán used words that would resonate not only in Hungary and Slovenia but also in Poland, the Czech Republic, or Serbia.

The former western republics of the Soviet Union—the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belarus—are not included, because they formed a separate story throughout much of the period studied, subject to Sovietization that tested local cultures to a degree not seen in East Central Europe. For the same reason, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is included: this small country shared the destiny of being controlled by a superpower without being absorbed into it. But the GDR was also special. The East German regime eagerly took part in efforts to crush dissent in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980, home to small-time co-imperialists with enough hubris to tell the Motherland of socialism what socialism was really about.

The inclusion of the GDR underscores the fact that Germans cannot be thought to be outside East Central Europe, and not only because millions have lived in this space for centuries. The question of how Germany would form a nation-state after the Holy Roman Empire became defunct in 1806 has shaped the region’s fortunes and misfortunes. Bismarck’s supposed resolution of the question in the “second empire” of 1871 only exacerbated the German question by provoking a sense of abandonment among the Habsburg Germans, one in three of the total number. It was no coincidence that the original Nazi Party was founded in Bohemia in 1903. What happened when German nationalism entered Eastern European space in a time of imperial decline—first of the Holy Roman Empire, then of the Habsburg monarchy—was that it gradually moved from the old practice of absorbing Slavs into German culture to a new one of displacing them from a vast supposedly German space.

Leave a comment

Filed under Eastern Europe, economics, Germany, migration, nationalism, philosophy, USSR

by Joel | 14 September 2024 · 6:41 am

East European Communist Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 17-19:

What Hitler, the “Bohemian corporal” (he was actually Austrian) achieved through his war was to make northern parts of Eastern Europe much simpler. With the aid of local collaborators, his regime segregated and then killed the overwhelming majority of East European Jews. But when the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht back to Vienna and Berlin in 1945, millions of Germans fled Eastern Europe as well, never to return. At the war’s conclusion, as a result of allied decisions, Polish and Czech authorities placed the remainder of Germans from Bohemia and eastern Germany in railway cars and deported them to a Germany that was much smaller than Bismarck’s Reich, let alone the Holy Roman Empire.

The most avid ethnic cleansers among the East Europeans were Polish and Czech Communists, and indeed, Communists everywhere proved enthusiastic nationalists. This is astounding for two reasons. First, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had little concern for national identity: workers had no fatherland. Nationhood was not a lasting site of human subjectivity but something ephemeral, which diminished in importance as capitalism advanced. They had little but derision for East Europeans wanting to create their own nation-states. Engels called the small peoples to Germany’s east “relics.” Czechs were destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” slotted for assimilation included Serbs, Croats, and Slovaks. In 1852, Engels blithely predicted that the next world war would cause entire reactionary peoples to “disappear from the face of the earth.”

Second, when the world divided into two camps, appearances suggested that there was little room for East European nationalism. By 1949, every state in the region seemed to be a miniature USSR, with the same sort of ruling Communist Party, five-year plan, economy based on heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and socialist realism. Few Poles or Hungarians, even within the Party, doubted that the annual pageant in red of May Day reflected doctrines and practices whose nerve center was in Moscow. For the first time, millions of East Europeans learned Russian, and many became as proficient in copying Soviet reality as they could. Hundreds of thousands became “self-Sovietizers,” even holding their cigarettes the Russian way, or dressing in the militaristic style of the Bolshevik party. The Yugoslav Communists, with red stars on their caps, went so far that the Soviets tried to hold them back.

But these states were not Soviet replicas, nor were they (unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Belorussia) actual parts of the Soviet Union. Beyond the façades of May Day processions in Warsaw in 1949, one saw banners in Polish, not Russian, and placards honoring Polish heroes. A few blocks from the parade route the Polish socialist state, governed by a Marxian party, was lovingly resurrecting old Warsaw, razed by the Nazis in 1944. This included rebuilding many of its churches, according to plans from the eighteenth century, with attention to the details of a saint’s halo. Bookstores across the state socialist world stocked romantic authors like Jan Kollár, but also the Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian national bards Adam Mickiewicz, Sándor Petofi, and Vasile Alecsandri; the philologists Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić; and the ethnographer Pavel Šafárik, who had studied theology with Kollár in Jena. In Poland’s west, the state fostered the destruction of all signs of the German past, including cemeteries, and proclaimed the new territories Polish to the core, though they had been German for centuries.

Leave a comment

Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, language, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, USSR, war

by Joel | 13 September 2024 · 6:50 am

What Unites East Central Europe?

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 3-4:

What unites this dramatic and unsettling history is a band of countries that runs from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic and Black Seas, between the much larger, historically imperial Russia and Turkey in the east, and Prussian and Austrian Germany in the west. These small countries constitute East Central Europe, a space where more of the twentieth century happened—for good and for bad—than anywhere else on the planet.

If one seeks a simple explanation for the energies that caused this area to produce so much drama and so many new concepts, a glance at the map suggests nationalism: no other region has witnessed such frequent, radical, and violent changing of borders to make nations fit states. Two maps, one from 1800, one from 2000, tell the basic story: a shift from simplicity to complexity, from one small and three large multinational powers to more than twenty national states.

The story was carried forward by the demands of East European nationalists to control territory, demands that triggered resistance, because they contested imperial power and the European order. Since the 1820s, the work of nationalists has brought independent states into being in three stages: the first in 1878, when the Congress of Berlin produced Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; the second, in 1919, when revolution and peace making generated Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland; and most recently, in the 1990s, when Czechoslovakia broke peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Yugoslavia fragmented violently into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, two entities in Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Hungary became de facto independent in 1867, when the Austrian Empire divided into Austria-Hungary; after 1920, it emerged much reduced from World War I, two-thirds of its territory going to its neighbors.

What can be debated is whether the degree of violence, especially in World War I, was necessary to break loose the nation-states that now constitute the map of Eastern Europe. Austria-Hungary was more resilient than critics gave it credit for and only began unraveling in the final year of a war that had been costly beyond any expectations. And there was little relation between intention and outcome: World War I did not begin as a war of national liberation. Yet by 1917, as the causality lists soared and any relation between intention and outcome was lost, it was interpreted to be one. It was a war for democracy—for Wilson’s national self-determination—and that helped spawn the new nation-states.

At the same time, without the cause Gavrilo Princip claimed to represent (that South Slavs should live in one state), there would have been no assassination, no Habsburg ultimatum to Serbia (which had trained Princip and supplied him with his pistol) in July 1914, and no war. Seen in rational terms, the Habsburgs’ belief that Serbia, a state of three million, represented a challenge requiring a full-scale military assault launched from their state of fifty-two million, seems one of history’s great overreactions. But Princip, the frail eighteen-year-old rejected from the Serb army for his small stature, embodied the challenge of an idea, the idea of ethnic nationalism, and the Habsburg monarchy had no response other than naked force.

Leave a comment

Filed under Eastern Europe, education, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, war

by Joel | 6 August 2024 · 5:58 am

Reporting Corruption: All Sides Bad

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 196-198:

There are many different lessons to be learned from everything that happened in Chongqing. I learned mine. In reporting on what seemed like an isolated case of land auction manipulation, I’d failed to discover its deeper roots, which only became clear to me later.

I should have reached back all the way to the 1950s, when the planned economic system was established in China, purging capitalism and centering economic control with the state. Private property rights were soon abolished, all resources were nationalized, and the Chongqing Cosmetics Factory was founded under collective property rules rather than private ownership for the sake of idealistic utopian ideals.

The experiment failed; the factory encountered operational difficulties. After the reform of the market economy had begun, factory leadership established a new brand, Olive, in a joint venture with a Hong Kong company in 1991. Olive grew rapidly to become the only enterprise in China that could compete with Procter & Gamble, but collective property rights hobbled the company. External market competition was fierce, and everyone’s decision being counted at Olive equaled no one’s decision being enacted. It was yet another failure of the government-monopoly style of managing supply, as well as the marketing model on which it relied. Despite strong performance in the nineties, the company eventually ended up on the verge of bankruptcy due to internal leadership struggles. The government had no reform program for companies with this type of ownership.

The owners in Hong Kong finally left the enterprise. They wanted to sell the land they had bought for the factory, so as to recoup what was owed to them by the leadership in Chongqing, but because the land had been registered collectively in the factory’s name, there was a long dispute over whether they had the right to do this. The former manager from the Hong Kong company told Mr. Wu, one of their debtors, to find a buyer who would purchase the land cheaply, then resell it at market value, so as to generate proceeds that would be passed along to the Hong Kong leadership in the form of agency fees that would repay the outstanding debts.

Wu had to take this route, because he had already been borrowing money just to maintain Olive, and he couldn’t get another loan from the bank. Private companies, which contribute over 50 percent of Chongqing’s tax revenue and support over 80 percent of its employment, can use only one-third of the credit resources available to them. So Wu ended up borrowing money from Chen Kunzhi, whose loan shark resources exceeded four hundred million yuan. With an enormous amount of money coming to him from state-owned institutions as well as black market enterprises involving court presidents, police officers, and government officials, he could get loans at very low interest rates.

In short, unclear property rights and unfair financial policies gave Chen Kunzhi room to manipulate the eventual land auction through underground operations. With his connections to those in power, the big fish ate the small fish in a continuous cycle. In countries that have transitioned from a traditional planned economy to a market economy, there is often serious organized criminal activity. The absence of the rule of law stems from a government that is failing to fulfill its role as the guardian of a functional market economy.

But without sufficient analysis of these root causes, pathos and righteous indignation encourage people to pursue simple solutions with a black-or-white moralistic mentality: removing all the “bad guys” at the expense of the justice system and demonizing the privatization process in favor of a state-owned economy is a nostalgia for utopia, to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

In Chongqing, during the ten years between 1997 and 2007, the private economy rose from 22.64 percent of GDP to 45.5 percent, an average annual increase of over two percentage points; but in the four years between 2008 and 2011, when the “crackdown” was at its worst, the private economy grew by less than 1 percent per year. Many private enterprises began to flee Chongqing, taking capital along with them.

Bo [Xilai] and Wang [Lijun] were punished as “bad guys.” But it did not solve the problem. Among their successors, another Chongqing municipal party secretary and two police chiefs were jailed, all involved in corruption. If the world is divided into only two camps, black and white, moral and immoral, it becomes like a cube. Once you roll it over, it’s still the same, just with a different side facing up.

Leave a comment

Filed under China, economics, nationalism, philosophy, publishing

by Joel | 5 August 2024 · 6:07 am

The Gangster Boss of Chongqing

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 181-182:

“He had a gun,” said Mr. Wu, a key witness in the investigation of Chen Kunzhi. “He put it to my head and made me sign a contract.”

After Wu had borrowed ten million yuan from Chen and couldn’t repay it, Chen had locked Wu up in a hotel for twenty days, then seized the company’s official seal and used it to sign a collusive auction contract with COFCO, a large state-owned enterprise in China. Mr. Wu said he had been in hiding for the two years since the incident. He warned me that interviewing Chen would put everyone in danger. “He would have killed me. I don’t know if CCTV can handle this.”

The judge who’d overseen the land auction also refused to show his face on camera, fearing for his safety. When more companies had tried to bid, some men had stopped them from entering the auction site and dragged them away. The judge brought in six police officers, but Chen Kunzhi countered with six times as many, and each one had a knife. These gangsters called the judge’s superiors in front of him to put on the pressure. “You’re just a minor figure,” they told him. “Who do you think you are?”

In a last-ditch attempt to save his integrity, the judge called off the auction. But his superiors demanded that he start it again ten days later. When he acquiesced, it was the same situation as before: the other companies set to participate in the bidding didn’t show up, because they were afraid of the “complications.” The only two companies that took part in the auction were Chen’s company and COFCO. After four bids, the land was finally sold to COFCO for 37.1 million yuan. A year later COFCO announced it would offer the land up for 140 million.

I wanted to interview Chen myself. But my boss knew it would be dangerous. He asked me and each member of my team to use disposable phone cards to avoid being followed in retaliation. He said, “If you don’t interview Chen, will the story still stand?”

“The basic evidence is already there,” our producer, Jian Feng, said. “Then the interview might not be necessary. We have to think about security first,” the boss said.

I worried that security would be the least of our problems. If the interview went poorly, the whole show might be endangered. Chen Kunzhi was not a traditional street thug. He’d been a police officer for fifteen years, and after being removed from the force for assault, he’d started running a casino. After escaping a homicide charge, he went into the loan shark business. As China’s urbanization continued to speed up, Chongqing’s real estate industry was desperate for capital, financing some 90 percent of its expansion with funds borrowed from loan sharks. Chen Kunzhi had already made over a million yuan in profits, according to Mr. Wu.

Unlike any gangsters I had interviewed before, Chen was one of those men who controlled the economic lifeline of the city through the underground economy, armed with ties to the entire judicial system, which allowed him to escape justice despite obvious evidence of lawbreaking.

My fear was that once I interviewed Chen, the huge forces behind him would stop the episode from airing. It would be like a cigarette dropped into a toilet—a soft hiss and the flame would go out, only to be flushed away, worthless. So we decided to leave without the interview.

Leave a comment

Filed under China, economics, industry, nationalism, philosophy, publishing

by Joel | 1 August 2024 · 10:15 am

Cambodian Liberation Day, 1979

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 605-607:

The sun has set over the horizon, leaving behind scattered patches of light in the gaps between the trees, and a red light in the western sky. As we walk along, dragging our feet, carrying our bundles of rattan on our shoulders, trudging sluggishly along the sandy path, we are still about a kilometer away from Moung Thmey. Suddenly a cloud of dust rises before us and moves closer, growing larger and blocking out the rays of light from the sun. It is a group of several oxcarts galloping and racing one another, as though celebrating some joyous occasion.

The riders cry out, “Hooray! We are free! Hooray! We are free! Hooray! Hooray!”

When the oxcarts draw near to us, some motherly women shout out, “Boys! The Front [see note below] has liberated us! Drop your rattan, boys, and go back to your home villages! We are free!”

This is an odd message that we have never heard before, that we have never even imagined. These several oxcarts appear to be returning from the rice-harvesting worksite. They drive past us with sounds of laughter, while we are left puzzled, wondering if there is really anything to be happy about. We return to camp, eat our food, and go to bed quietly. Nobody seems to know anything about freedom as the villagers seemed to.

…

10 January 1979

Today we have to remain in camp and work, twisting ropes and weaving bangky baskets. Starting at dawn, on Route 68, a strange thing happens that we have never seen since arriving here: a sporadic stream of vehicles is driving north, sometimes one, sometimes two or three, at fairly slow speeds. As we weave baskets, we glance at the vehicles driving along the road. I see a bus painted red from the windows down and white from the windows up, which I used to ride from Phsar Daeum Thkov to Phsar Thmey [Phnom Penh’s domed, art deco “New Market” built in 1937]. Men and women dressed in black sit quietly on the bus with serious, somber faces. Where are they going? Perhaps they are going to attend a meeting in Samraong.

…

11 January 1979

We rise in the dark and eat our porridge, as usual. After eating, the economy team informs us that the situation is tense, and the unit leaders and brigade chairman have all fled the camp. We all divide up the remaining uncooked rice, salt, and prahok [fermented fish paste] to go our own separate ways.

The sun rises over the trees, and we have finished dividing up the food supplies, and now we pack up our clothing bundles to leave camp. We walk to Moung Thmey, then suddenly we hear the sounds of gunfire. The villagers conclude that there must be fighting at Spean Moung. I am not familiar with the place, but by the sound of the gunfire, it is maybe only two or three hundred meters from the village.

The sound of gunfire increases in frequency and volume. The villagers run in panic to find hiding places. We start to scatter. Some of us are trying to find a way back to Region Five because their parents and siblings are there. Some seek refuge with the villagers to await an opportunity to continue their journey to Region Five. I have no doubts: we will not be returning to Region Five; my brother and I are going to get away. Four or five young men from the mobile brigade travel with us. We escape into the forest area, toward the villages in the forest, where surely there is no fighting going on.

Farewell, Moung Thmey, Srey Snom! Farewell, collecting camp!

Farewell, criminal prison! Farewell! Farewell!

[Note, p. 729:]

The Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (a.k.a. Salvation Front), a politico-military organization formed of Khmer Rouge defectors that united with the Vietnamese army to overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime. The Vietnamese army, along with the Salvation Front, invaded Cambodia on 25 December 1978, reaching Phnom Penh and driving out senior Khmer Rouge leaders on 7 January 1979 (a day now celebrated as a day of national liberation.) These forces continued to advance through the rest of the country in the following days, gradually taking over the country and driving the Khmer Rouge out of populated areas and into the jungles along the Thai frontier. The Salvation Front’s members would form the core of the post-Khmer-Rouge government in Phnom Penh, and the Vietnamese army would continue to occupy Cambodia for another decade.

Leave a comment

Filed under Cambodia, labor, military, nationalism, philosophy, slavery, Vietnam, war

by Joel | 30 July 2024 · 9:15 am

Mind Control Under Khmer Rouge

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 507-508:

Living among the general population is quite different from living in the society of young people. The youth are not very heavily influenced by the corruption of the old society. They are purer and more in harmony with one another. In general-population society, everything that used to happen in the old society still happens, and it is vicious. The youth engage in the Revolution for the sake of the Revolution, while the general population engage in the Revolution to get away with things. Oppression, extortion, and exploitation, the soul of a corrupt regime, occur in the general population from the top down to the bottom. The cadres don’t just exercise their influence over us to fulfill our revolutionary work; they dominate us even in the petty things of this rice-by-the-can life, and we live without freedom. Although, as for those who have little fear of death; who are willing to react, willing to object and resist; who are stubborn and defiant of procedure: they don’t dare to oppress or compel them as much.

Comrade Mol is a young-man-in-hiding, like me. He is older and more knowledgeable than me. He is a man of few words, and always accepts every task the group leader gives him without question, complaint, or objection. We are on Comrade Dy’s team together. Comrade Mol once tells me, “Anybody who doesn’t steal from me can live with me.”

We have similar sentiments, but I have a different philosophy from Comrade Mol’s: I can live with any type of person, but it is rare to find a person who can live with me.

Because we talk little and carry out our tasks diligently, Comrade Mol and I are instructed by the team leader to mind the oxen nearly every day, whether it is our turn or not. The others spend only an hour or two fishing and foraging for frogs, crabs, and edible plants, and then return to camp to take a nap. We cowherds, on the other hand, can only sit or walk around collecting and counting the oxen, protecting them from getting lost, and preventing them from mixing with other herds or eating cooperative crops—without ever daring to take a rest or lie down for a nap or even close our eyes a moment, from noon until near sunset, when we have to collect the oxen and herd them back into camp.

While it’s true that I am a man of few words like Comrade Mol, unlike him I am a person who tends to react. I try to control myself and suppress my emotions to avoid pain, turmoil, and a preoccupation with the worthlessness of living.

Oh, my eyes! Don’t see anything that is crudeness or exploitation or oppression!

Oh, my ears! Don’t hear anything that is disdain, contempt, or reproach.

Oh, my heart! Remain neutral and don’t give in to feelings of hatred, love, sorrow, or joy. If you can’t restrain yourself, if you can’t take it, if your chest is too tight, then go head and explode; explode now, while out herding the oxen, while far away from everyone else. Explode in the fields, under the sky. No matter how upset you feel, however agitated by hatred toward this person, or in love with that person, you are completely free to unfurl it and release it from your head and your chest. All of nature will never condemn you, nor hold these things against you, nor use them to stir up trouble with anybody else.

Leave a comment

Filed under Cambodia, economics, labor, military, philosophy, slavery

by Joel | 27 July 2024 · 3:47 pm

Khmer Rouge Cadres

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 511-512, 514-515:

My unit is a brigade with unusual structure and characteristics among all the brigades of the men’s regional mobile units. This brigade is commanded by Comrade Ron, a young man, along with Mea Pov and Mea Chout, who are middle-aged men. These three cadres are base people from Paoy Char subdistrict. This brigade is divided into two regiments: the young men’s regiment and the general-population regiment. (Other brigades do not have these sub-units.)

Mea Pov is the former head of Phnom Srok district’s special unit, which was the strongest unit during the Trapeang Thmor Reservoir offensive. This was a unit of middle-aged men and women with robust health, distilled from the mobile units of all the subdistricts in Phnom Srok district. In late 1977, the regional Organization permitted the special unit to break ranks and return to live with their families in the cooperatives. Unwilling to relinquish his position or his influence, Mea Pov would not allow the middle-aged men from Paoy Char subdistrict to return to their villages, but instead combined them with the young men’s mobile unit of Paoy Char subdistrict to create the Fourth Brigade, a.k.a. Bong Ron’s and Mea Pov’s Brigade.

In his leadership of the special unit, Mea Pov was very mean and strict, which made that unit the most productive unit in terms of both labor and of killing people. The unit members feared Mea Pov, not daring to look him in the face or displease him. If anyone dared to say that the rice was sour or too raw, they would certainly end up stinking themselves, as a vulture played the flute [a metaphor for death].

These days, Mea Pov is not as mean or strict as he once was, but he is still feared by the members of his unit. Mea Pov uses his old influence to create a manner of living that I would call exploitative, oppressive, and a betrayal of the people. Life for the valueless class (the evacuees) [the “new people”] both in the cooperatives as well as the mobile units, must remain under the dominion of the base people, who are the class of Life Masters. These base people, especially those who were born to be cadres, exploit us and oppress us until we scarcely have room to move, like slaves and masters.

After the revolutionary cadres from the Southwestern and Western Zones came to take control and lead the work here in the Northwestern Zone, they largely reined in and put an end to the excessive killings. This was a wake-up call for those cadres who survived, and they made some changes to their behavior. When that happened, life for us was like a dead leaf being exposed to morning dew, and things got a little bit better. In most cooperatives and mobile units there was now a cadre from the Southwestern or the Western Zone serving as either a counselor or a direct leader. Unfortunately, my brigade remained an unaffected unit, without any of those cadres in positions of leadership. So the things that had happened before began to happen again, and worse than before, like a sickness that was treated with the wrong medicine.

…

The general-population regiment contains 125 men, who eat separately from the young men’s unit. In this general-population unit there are ten Big Brothers. Not only do they support themselves, but their families, wives, and children back at the cooperative must also grow fat. A portion of the rations of food, uncooked rice, fish, meat, salt, prahok [fermented fish paste], and kerosene find their way to the cooperative through these men. They divide up the spoils and take turns visiting their families: one Big Brother comes, and another goes.

Because of this, the rations for the rest of us are short, much different from the rations given to members of other brigades. On days when we eat our midday meal in a rice paddy near the young women transplanting rice, or other young men units, we nudge each other and watch their rice rations, which are more abundant than ours. Even the food is different: smoked fish, dried fish, duck eggs, and oil are given only to the Big Brothers and consumed only by the Big Brothers, while the rest of us only sip boiled prahok or cloud soup to which is added some sour flavoring and some slightly wormy prahok.

When we are given clothing rations from time to time, we receive either a shirt with no trousers or trousers with no shirt. They write down our names to remember to complete the outfit next time. As for the Big Brothers, each of them gets one or two complete outfits, and they select the nicest ones. There is no mistaking them: if you see someone with a black shirt, black pants, and a silk krama around his neck, it must be one of the Big Brothers. The economy team belongs to the Big Brothers and supplies the Big Brothers. The rest of us have a saying: “If it’s small, it’s for the people. If it’s heavy, it’s for the cooks. And if it’s as big as your thigh [considered the largest part of the body], it’s for the Big Brothers.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Cambodia, democracy, economics, food, labor, migration, military, philosophy, slavery

by Joel | 23 July 2024 · 12:07 pm

Khmer Rouge vs. Religion

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 411-412:

Every aspect of faith—religion, neak ta [tutelary deities], ghosts, demons—has been erased. The monks have all been defrocked and forced out of the priesthood to live as laymen. All wats and temples have been abandoned and converted into pig farms, warehouses, and granaries, or torn down completely in some cases, like the temple in Wat Trapeang Thmor.

But some temples possess great power and cause peril for those who tear them down. I hear that this was the case when the Organization ordered the tearing down of the temple in Wat Chey in the town of Phnom Srok.

A story is told: One day Comrade Hat, the chairman of Phnom Srok district, ordered someone to tear down a neak ta shrine. The man was hesitant because he had known the power of the neak ta, but he did not dare to argue with the decision of the Organization. Perceiving the reticence of the man, Comrade Hat secretly followed him and spied on his activities. Carrying a hatchet and a crowbar, the man walked to the neak ta shrine, knelt down, placed his palms together and reverenced the neak ta, and said out loud, “Comrade Hat has ordered me to take down your shrine. If you are displeased, please take it out on him!”

Understanding the mindset of the people, Comrade Hat showed himself before the neak ta and stopped the man from tearing down the shrine. In fact, during the war, the Khmer Rouge soldiers all followed gurus and carried protective magic amulets such as chae kach [small elephant tusk embedded in a tree], khnay tan [boar’s tusk], katha [prayer scroll] necklaces, yoant [magical drawing] scarves, etc. That is to say, they also believed in and reverenced supernatural objects. Now the senior levels of the Organization have given them orders to erase these beliefs, and they have to comply, but in their feelings they are still uneasy, still frightened, especially when they hear that the people who follow their orders place the responsibility for it on them.