It's frustrating to me that my potential enjoyment of this piece, lauded as it is by several of the comments that are already here, was poisoned by the introduction. I imagine that
>I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parents’ house in Battambang, Cambodia.
will come off as innocuous to many, but my immediate impression was, "Wait... like a plantation?". I'm not intimately familiar with Cambodian history, but I had some understanding of it having been a French colony. With that colonization must have come a sharpening of class lines, as in many Western colonies, like Cuba, and the American South. Some quick research confirmed that. And then, after independence, a coup, with alleged but unconfirmed American backing; and then, after that, a vicious response by radicalized communist entities. Familiar trappings of the first tumultuous global century.
...I'm trying to figure out how to articulate this feeling. It's a sort of anger at the lionization of Western, Capitalist claims and ideals, at the whitewashing of the means by which they were asserted, at the implacable sneers towards anything in opposition to this story of glory. Not because I myself dislike freedom, and variety, and eating; but because the movements that rise up to challenge that status quo rise out of the muck-like detritus it generates and then plops right onto the heads of the poor and marginalized. I skim this piece and see not any sort of understanding of how the French Indochina, as a tentacle of the Western imperialism kraken, that produced the things the author lauds also sowed the seeds of its destruction; I see almost a willful and zealous blindness to this, in fact. When I talk to Castro's diaspora, same thing. When I talk to Lost Cause pushers, same thing.
All of this scares the sh*t out of me. It's yet another example of how suffering - true agony as far as the eye can see - can come from and produce the same sort of skewed priorities and world-view, over and over again, all around the world. When the world has wronged us so utterly - at least from our perspective - we're unable to see the wrongs we participated in, and how they could have contributed to the slow gestation of our despair. You see shades of it even here, today. I want us to get it right for once and this essay is stealing hope from me.
If you'd read it, you'd have found that the blindness is not there. But I don't think it's the piece you would have wanted either way. Willful zealotry is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I see it in your comment, fwiw.
This is a first person recollection of a nine year old girl's experience surviving two revolutionary civil wars and a genocide. Not incidentally, the sentiments you express were the precise sentiments weaponised to fuel and justify this bloodbath.
Stopping at paragraph one to "yeah but she's a bouge...." is a mark of zealotry.
As to "sightedness," which I take as meaning obligatory mentions of class issues, imperialism and foreign cultural influences... it's sprinkled liberally throughout the piece. Even the title. The "softness" she's talking about is bourgeois softness, compared to peasants who had been living almost as hard before.
Here's one passage: "It would be tempting to affect a survivor’s bravado, as if I had achieved my continued existence through will and wit. But my chief survival advantage was being born to a family that could afford to fly to Saigon. We used our dwindling gold to flee to a place where wearing eyeglasses did not put our lives in immediate danger."
I suspect this does not suffice, given my first paragraph. This is not an essay about how capitalist greed and imperialist arrogance are the ultimate culprits. This is a story where ideological zealots play the roles of crusader, conquistador and slaver.
The willful element is turning the story around. Capitalism and Imperialism the root cause, even if the actual atrocities were committed by anticapitalist anti-imperialists. This is always true and if it isn't, just "dig deeper" and find that it is true. That sounds like willful zealotry to me.
It's equivalent to blaming the caliphate for the inquisition, berating a muslim or jewish victim for blindness to the true underlying cause... Also, refusing to read something because it doesn't start with a declaration that ideologically conforms to your position is willful.
"This is not an essay about how capitalist greed and imperialist arrogance are the ultimate culprits."
My contention is that this is a problem, given what we know about the history of Capitalism and Western imperialist arrogance and its direct and deleterious effects on many (most) of the 3rd world countries these principles touched during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ways in which those effects (predictably) hardened the hearts and ways of dissenters. Even in, as an adult, remarking on one's experience as a nine-year-old girl suffering at the hands of anti-Capitalist regimes. Maybe especially so, in an essay about survival being predicated on the weathering away of comfort(able biases). Maybe even more so, if the goal is to not have anti-Capitalist backlash repeat itself.
With that in mind, if you came away from my comment with the impression that I believe that a violent class purge, let alone the institution of capital-C Communism, is the answer, I have to think that you did not read very carefully.
I know, and that is precisely the problem. The zealot perspective is that every story is the same story. It's always a story about capitalist greed or always story about moral impurity or always a story about market interventions going awry. It's beyond bias. It's total tunnel vision.
In any case, this is her story, her perspective. Write your own story, and it'll be the story you want.
Meanwhile, how dare you, who wrote what you wrote demand that others read your comment carefully and generously for nuance... especially when you are taking the position of the kmer rouge yourself.
There is a reason that my issue with the essay is presented as one that maps to rhetorical phenomena similar to the one specifically in question. It's because the central issue is the repetition - the ubiquity - of Capitalism and Western imperialism's apparent innocence in regards to suffering in the world that it largely shaped. No story that perpetuates this falsehood can be called beautiful; it can't be called truth, or even helpful. Every story like this recreates it's own cruel circumstances for posterity. And to say so is the opposite of tunnel vision; it's to acknowledge on multiple levels that meaning is half-formed without consideration of context, even if that context damns one's sentiments.
>Meanwhile, how dare you, who wrote what you wrote demand that others read your comment carefully and generously for nuance...
Because.
I may be a hypocrite, but I'm not wrong.
And in any case, our circumstances are different: I'm not misrepresenting her words; you're misrepresenting mine.
What apparent innocence? No one has argued anything like this. Not the author. Not me. The thing you are objecting to isn't apparent innocence of western imperialism. The thing you are objecting to is the existence of a story that is about something else... to the point of historical denialism in all but the most technical sense.
It also happens to be true that the particular atrocities this story was about were committed by anti-western, anti-capitalists. The events she is describing really did happen... to her. That is the context. Preceding these events were other events. The story isn't about those.
Your comments are whataboutism.
And yes, it is tunnel vision. It is essentialism and it is zealotry. It is having one story in your mind that explains anything and everything. Everything boils down to capitalism and western colonialism. Any telling of events that doesn't conform to your one and only allowable story is rejected without inspection. As you said, you can't get past the first paragraph is it's not a simple anti capitalism/colonialism narrative. Who here is the one avoiding challenges to their comfortable biases? Who is the reactionary here?
In this case, it happens to be particularly awful, given that the perpetrators shared your specific tunnel vision. Even if the atrocities are committed by anticapitalists, an author has exactly one paragraph to clarify that colonialism that is the true culprit. It's like telling responding to a victim of fascism with a "but what about communism." There are parallels to every argument you bring up.
> My contention is that this is a problem, given what we know about the history of Capitalism and Western imperialist arrogance and its direct and deleterious effects on many (most) of the 3rd world countries these principles touched during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ways in which those effects (predictably) hardened the hearts and ways of dissenters. Even in, as an adult, remarking on one's experience as a nine-year-old girl suffering at the hands of anti-Capitalist regimes.
This argument doesn't make any sense: "$FOO is bad because the anti-$FOO people are violent madmen"
You can't always shift blame away from the violent madmen.
$FOO is bad because $FOO's faults have tended to create anti-$FOO people.
Further: these faults also tend to drive anti-$FOO people to violence - often not even simply as a matter of course, but as an explicit strategy. In almost every case, the first to violence is $FOO. $FOO then encourages violence from the other side, to legitimize a crackdown. When anti-$FOO survives this crackdown, their behavior has been altered forever by their initial experience with $FOO.
In fairness, it's hard to blame a 9yo for colonialism. The author's family might have benefited a bit from it, in the sense that they lived over their own shop instead of on dirt between rice paddies. One suspects that good fortune could be overstated, especially when weighed against that family's extinction and her own travails.
Nguon's hatred for Khmer Rouge is genuine. However, she isn't foolish enough to consider herself a capitalist. The work she does now is simply unrelated to authoritarians, whether of the communist or the capitalist variety. The women's development center is more authentically anarchist than anything else.
It doesn't seem charitable to compare her either to idiot Confederacy buffs or to Miami Cubans. I understand where you're coming from, but keep in mind that her enterprise is selling scarves and purses to rich Westerners. There's only so much she can say without upsetting the customers.
I'm still not convinced of the wisdom of carrying water for these things which ultimately triggered catastrophe, through the backlash to their excesses. It's not a matter of there being no virtue in one side and no fault in the other; it's a matter of honoring the ambivalence so that one isn't caught off guard by earnest dissent. If your story is, "The evil authoritarians who destroyed my life, specifically, ruined everything," you're missing the military-industrial complex for the SCUDs; and there is an executive somewhere very happy about that, and also very happy to elevate your narrative which pretends that he doesn't exist.
My concern is that pride in the "greatness" of what civilization has become blinds people to the discontent which could rock everything we hold dear. Again.
Re-reading your original comment, I think your "like a plantation" impression was mistaken. In southeast Asia, even today, even in the countryside, the population is really dense. It isn't a sign of prosperity to have a village behind an auto shop. Everything has a village out back. Remember, western countrysides used to be more densely populated as well, before mechanization obviated all the farmhand jobs. Rural Cambodia was even more like that, fifty years ago.
But sure, colonization. USA ultraviolent body-count military colonization was in a sense a continuation of French opportunistic get-rid-of-the-king-and-install-his-half-brother colonization, but it is more properly considered an escalation. Similarly, Khmer Rouge "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss" dictatorship was in a sense a continuation of Angkor-era feudalism, but it was really an escalation.
Lots of humans are tired of the escalation. You have fallen for the armaments manufacturers' narrative, so you can't hear an old woman cursing her persecutors without finishing her curse with "...and this is why capitalism is great". She didn't say that. "America" or "USA" or "capital" are strings that do not appear in TFA. Nguon DGAF which flavor of authoritarianism we prefer. She wants to enjoy traditional Cambodian crafts, and also French food, and also a bit of peace. Why should she care to follow idiotic USA "security" policy? She doesn't get a vote on that question, and the votes we get don't make a difference anyway. Every authoritarian system feeds on human blood; that isn't up to a vote.
It is tempting to try to preempt the "USA #1 always right!" bullshit, but I don't think you've accomplished that ITT. In future, focus on the truth, and don't worry about correcting old people on what they should really think about their most harrowing experiences.
Your comment is amazing. You read that article written by someone that narrowly escaped genocide and your mind immediately goes to what is essentially communist propaganda. You don't express anger once at the people involved in orchestrating the killing, you don't assign any blame to the actual ideology that was used to justify mass slaughter. Instead you just spout a programmed response.
You have a curious definition of the words "vicious" and "radicalized". Would you agree or disagree that characterizing Communist regimes as such, within a Communist regime, would have gotten me killed?
The real "break with tradition" was America and the CIA ousting Prince Sihanouk, who had been fighting militant communists, but was in dialog with the non-militant Cambodian left. A puppet Lon Nol was put at the helm, and the US then invaded eastern Cambodia (and shot Kent State students protesting that invasion) and carpet bombed the Cambodian countryside. This is what began the destabilization of Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk in exile allied with anyone against Lon Nol, which included the communists, and he supported the Cambodian People's National Liberation Armed Forces, which liberated Phnom Penh in the spring of 1975, right around the same time Saigon was liberated from western colonialism.
The implementation of the leftist utopian visions that torture and murder and silence and "re-educate" millions and send millions more desperate refugees fleeing out to die at sea in little, overloaded boats trying to escape is not usually described as "liberation" by those, such as my family and many friends, who managed to survive these visionaries.
> It's a sort of anger at the lionization of Western, Capitalist claims and ideals, at the whitewashing of the means by which they were asserted, at the implacable sneers towards anything in opposition to this story of glory.
Alas, capitalism isn't all that popular in the west anymore. Perhaps you need to look further afield to find its champions.
Not "in the West" but rather "in Western media and universities, especially outside STEM". By no coincidence, these are the most vocal minorities.
Capitalism is not cool with novelty-seeking intellectual elites anymore. But nothing established is; the purpose of these elites is to look for and research alternative ways. Most if these ways are detrimental or are dead ends. But so are most mutations that drive evolution forward.
>I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parents’ house in Battambang, Cambodia.
will come off as innocuous to many, but my immediate impression was, "Wait... like a plantation?". I'm not intimately familiar with Cambodian history, but I had some understanding of it having been a French colony. With that colonization must have come a sharpening of class lines, as in many Western colonies, like Cuba, and the American South. Some quick research confirmed that. And then, after independence, a coup, with alleged but unconfirmed American backing; and then, after that, a vicious response by radicalized communist entities. Familiar trappings of the first tumultuous global century.
...I'm trying to figure out how to articulate this feeling. It's a sort of anger at the lionization of Western, Capitalist claims and ideals, at the whitewashing of the means by which they were asserted, at the implacable sneers towards anything in opposition to this story of glory. Not because I myself dislike freedom, and variety, and eating; but because the movements that rise up to challenge that status quo rise out of the muck-like detritus it generates and then plops right onto the heads of the poor and marginalized. I skim this piece and see not any sort of understanding of how the French Indochina, as a tentacle of the Western imperialism kraken, that produced the things the author lauds also sowed the seeds of its destruction; I see almost a willful and zealous blindness to this, in fact. When I talk to Castro's diaspora, same thing. When I talk to Lost Cause pushers, same thing.
All of this scares the sh*t out of me. It's yet another example of how suffering - true agony as far as the eye can see - can come from and produce the same sort of skewed priorities and world-view, over and over again, all around the world. When the world has wronged us so utterly - at least from our perspective - we're unable to see the wrongs we participated in, and how they could have contributed to the slow gestation of our despair. You see shades of it even here, today. I want us to get it right for once and this essay is stealing hope from me.