This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 at 7:10 am	and is filed under Cambodia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Good to talk yesterday, looking forward to seeing you both next Friday.
What kind of madness in Cambodia?
Looks like you are going to Australia. Have a great time there and best wishes to all of them.
I read this blog several days ago. what can one say? Not really any adequate comments come to mind. As Mary says, sobering thoughts. Haunting. Cambodia’s holocaust. Much as the capacity for sheer evil is utterly sickening, what is astounding is the resilience of the human character in the face of unspeakable atrocities.
What always puzzled me about cambodia’s appalling history is how little the average person knows of what went on there. I don’t know how much press it recieved in the West at the time, but as a holocaust, it certainly wasn’t on my high school history syllbus. Same could be said about Dafur and Congo I guess.
We’re all more interested in hearing about Bin Laden assassination.
btw – i wonder how close you guys rode to Abbottabad (where his compound was raided)??
saw Massimo and Alex at Motovarese the other day, they send their best wishes and Alex was saying how he reads your blog…..but has to limit himself to avoid too much jealousy!
I totally understand where you’re coming from Jackson. We’ve all been made aware of The Holocaust but I doubt many are ‘au fait’ with the Killing Fields’ atrocities. And the sad fact is that this crap stuff is still going on somewhere in this ‘small world’ of ours.
Jack, you’re absolutely right. It seems that because it’s not an issue that directly affected western countries it, like elsewhere, gets ignored. The Cambodians’ cause wasn’t helped by a few additional factors – namely that western powers and particularly the USA were a tad traumatized so had no wish to get involved in a conflict in SE Asia so soon after the Vietnam War. Worse than that, and something you’ll struggle to find much information about; the Khmer Rouge were actually supported with money and equipment for more than 10 years after they were ousted by the vietnamese by Thailand, China and the USA, all of whom were more concerned with curtailing communist Vietnam’s influence in the region.
As for Bin Laden – we had a good look at the map after we heard the news – we actually rode right past the compound (we remember passing the military academy) and actually spent the night at a guesthouse in Abottabad about 500 metres from him!!! If only we’d known – we could have done with the $25 million reward!
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