Background for anyone following along: if the Kymer Rouge gives you glasses you better pretend you don’t need them because they were torturing then executing everyone with glasses. Because obviously glasses = intelligencia = elite. And there can be no elite in utopia.
In the countryside where the civil war began there wouldn’t have been many people rich enough to have glasses but once they captured the capital city with all the public servants, businesses, schools, university, etc it got real dark. The kind of dark that permanently lowers the floor of what we think the depths that humanity can fall into.
It got so bad that the Vietnamese army (who were also communists so they weren’t getting involved for funsies) had to invade to stop the chaos from leaking over the border. They had just beaten France then USA so were pretty on top of their game. China attacked north Vietnam to support the Kymer Rouge but were beaten back within a month. The Viet Cong were hard. core.
Vietnam occupied Cambodia for a decade after that while the Kymer Rouge held on in remote areas. Large parts of Cambodia and Laos are still covered in landmines and unusable as a result. People with missing limbs are a common sight. To this day I still occasionally assume something horrible happened when I see a stranger positioned in such a way that I can’t see all of their leg or arm. That’s how much maiming I’ve seen.
If you haven’t walked over the broken bones and rotting clothes of what were bodies in the killing fields to visit the tower of skulls, you haven’t viscerally felt how bad things can get. It changes you.
POV: You are nearsighted in 1970s Cambodia
Hah yeah
Background for anyone following along: if the Kymer Rouge gives you glasses you better pretend you don’t need them because they were torturing then executing everyone with glasses. Because obviously glasses = intelligencia = elite. And there can be no elite in utopia.
In the countryside where the civil war began there wouldn’t have been many people rich enough to have glasses but once they captured the capital city with all the public servants, businesses, schools, university, etc it got real dark. The kind of dark that permanently lowers the floor of what we think the depths that humanity can fall into.
It got so bad that the Vietnamese army (who were also communists so they weren’t getting involved for funsies) had to invade to stop the chaos from leaking over the border. They had just beaten France then USA so were pretty on top of their game. China attacked north Vietnam to support the Kymer Rouge but were beaten back within a month. The Viet Cong were hard. core.
Vietnam occupied Cambodia for a decade after that while the Kymer Rouge held on in remote areas. Large parts of Cambodia and Laos are still covered in landmines and unusable as a result. People with missing limbs are a common sight. To this day I still occasionally assume something horrible happened when I see a stranger positioned in such a way that I can’t see all of their leg or arm. That’s how much maiming I’ve seen.
But I digress.