The Killing Fields.

What do you even say about a place where hundreds of thousands of people were bludgeoned to death, stripped, and dumped into mass graves? The juxtaposition of its current tranquility with the horror of its past is striking. In the middle of it all stands a stupa filled with the skulls of the dead—acting at once as a memorial to the slain and a warning to future generations.

For those of you who, like me, didn’t learn much (or anything) about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Regime in school, here are some of the basics of what I gleaned from today’s visit to The Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum:

Pol Pot was a homicidal maniac bent on creating what he called an “agrarian utopia.” An agrarian utopia is basically Communism on steroids. He and his followers imagined a world where everyone was the equivalent of a worker bee—owning nothing, wanting nothing, and doing everything for the collective good. There would be no individuals. Just cogs in the wheel of the greater machine. He wanted to do away with money. With education. With cities. With love and familial bonds. Everything was for The Party, and dissent—real or imagined—was punishable by death.

The first victims of the Khmer Rouge were intellectuals, professionals, and anyone with ties to the West. The scope of his brutality quickly spread to include anyone with ties to anyone else outside of Cambodia, anyone of Vietnamese or Chinese descent, and anyone remotely associated with the former government. And then it just became anyone at all. You could be in one of his trusted cadres one day, and horrifically tortured the next for suspicions of disloyalty. And if you had children, they’d die too because The Party feared the thought of them seeking revenge as adults.

The politics around his rise to power are still pretty murky in my mind. Alliances with Vietnam were created and later broken—in fact, the Vietnamese were the ones who finally toppled the Khmer Rouge Regime in the end. And for this, the Americans and numerous other members of the UN decided to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia for over 15 years. Just to stick it to Vietnam. No biggy that anywhere from 1.7 to 3 million people were exterminated under its reign.

I feel ashamed that I know so little about world history and America’s part in it. To me, this stuff is far more important and relevant to current events than memorizing the names of Columbus’s ships (the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria) or the date the Magna Carta was signed (1215 A.D.). How can we ever hope to ensure something so horrible as the genocide in Cambodia never happens again, when we don’t even acknowledge that it happened in the first place?

Anyway, I don’t intend for my light and fluffy travel blog to take a dark and heavy turn toward the geopolitical. But I do hope that this may spark some interest in others to learn more about recent world history. I promise I will be doing my part as well.