Return to the Reap

On February 18 2008 · 2 Comments · In Cambodia, Diary, Travel

Bad sleep, a rubbish shower, permanently dirty feet, inbred lunatic dogs tearing chunks out of each other and being laughed at by strangers on motorbikes. Yep. I must be back in Siem Reap.

I watched Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia this morning because I couldn’t sleep – it’s a documentary filmed by John Pilger in Pnohm Penh in 1979, Cambodia just having been liberated from the Khmer Rouge. Interviews with survivors, captured Khmer Rouge executioners, aid workers and others all showed the blank faces of people utterly in shock. The whole thing didn’t have to happen. The US first created the environment in which the Khmer Rouge could thrive by bombing and killing thousands in nothing more than a muscle-flexing exercise, then the world ignored Cambodia while it self-destructed, and finally did nothing to help after the Vietnamese invaded, choosing instead to continue recognising the Khmer Rouge as the de facto government and refusing to offer aid to millions of people starving to death unless their killers, hiding near the Thai border, also received aid. In the UK, only Oxfam provided aid without a raft of conditions attached.

Fast forward thirty years, Cambodia is still struggling, and the West, led by the Pea-Brain in Chief, is now buggering up and destabilising a different part of the world. You’d have to laugh if it wasn’t so bloody tragic.

Khmer people crack me up. They are a constant source of amusement, and barangs (foreigners) are a constant source of amusement to them. We seem to spend the whole time laughing at each other, but there is rarely if ever a malicious feel to it. Khmers are, generally speaking, good-humoured and kind people, and several of them are just a little bit insane. Never was the idiom ‘still waters run deep’ more appropriate than when used to describe Khmers – the placid appearance and sweet smile, while mostly genuine, seem to conceal something else beneath, like a good poker face. In Ray Zepp’s book Experiencing Cambodia, he describes Cambodia as being like a Russian doll. Just when you think you understand it, out pops another doll to confuse you, then another and another. This place does keep you guessing, not least because you can’t help but try and understand how a country that collectively went through one of the most brutal genocides ever can continue to function at all. I suppose the answer is, because it had to. I’m no expert on Cambodia, and I don’t think I’ll ever have this place sussed, so rather than try and analyse it, I’m going to carry on entertaining the locals and being entertained.

On a related but separate subject, last night I got into a conversation with a friend along the lines of ‘how come everyone in the UK is so pissed off, people are terrified of children, children are unhappy, everyone’s drinking themselves to death and no-one trusts anyone else?’, then it moved on to comparing the situation in the UK with the situation here, before naturally reaching the conclusion that if people in the UK just had a bit of perspective they might pull their heads out of their backsides and feel better about their lives. Of course, the whole conversation was a waste of time, but the one question that cropped up was ‘when did it all start going wrong?’. Was it Thatcher or something else? Is the UK really that screwed up, or am I being a bit Daily Mail about it?


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  • http://theanswers42.blogspot.com/ Margaret

    Feminist bloggers in the US are keen to stress the possibility of the first woman president, but we had Thatcher, and what good did she do us? To a large extent, that’s when the rot set in.

    I agree with Oliver James about a lot of things. I’ve yet to read his book – Affluenza – but I’ve read a lot of his articles. He says (and I agree) that there’s too much emphasis on owning “things”, including expensive homes, forcing both parents to work full-time and leave their kids in day care when they’re far too young, so they can go out and earn money to pay for their increasingly expensive lifestyles. He says (and I agree) that children are under pressure at school to do tests when they’re too young – they should be playing, not doing tests.

    He wrote, ‘True, Labour has raised 700,000 children out of poverty, but that is not nearly enough. It has failed to reverse the trend, started under Margaret Thatcher, towards what I call “affluenza virus” values — placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances (physical and social) and fame.’

    British children are developing all sorts of psychological problems due to a lack of one-to-one care. Many are starting school without having learnt how to dress themselves properly, or go to the loo, or string a sentence together.

    UNICEF reported that British children are the unhappiest in industrialised countries. I’m not surprised.

  • http://mrsdanvres63livejournal.com Liz

    My theory is it all went wrong when we became frightened to let our children out of our sight.

    I grew up in the Sixties, spending all day riding my back in a 10 mile radius of where I lived, walking in the fields and woods, playing on pit heaps and being out all day. I went to primary school, three miles away on a public bus, with the other kids from our village, without adult supervision, apart from the fact that every adult on that bus would step in if we got out of order. From the age of 7, I was responsible for getting my 5 year old brother there and back.
    Yes, we had some scares – playing in rivers, tree-swings and pit heaps aren’t safe. Neither was coming into contact with the local hard lads who’d threaten us with pen-knifes to scare us off or the old bloke who tended horses and liked to touch-up young girls. But, I suspect few of us are mentally scarred from our childhoods.
    However, we seem to be the generation that started to wrap our children in cotton-wool. Too much information is available on what could go wrong, via 24 hour rolling news and the internet, we are too worried to live and let our children have a normal childhood. Our boundaries in terms of information have expanded and consequently where we feel safe has shrunk.

    Today’s children are given everything, except freedom and a sense of the responsibilities that go with it. They have all the things they can wish for, in most homes, but no regard for the cost of acquiring them. To use an old phrase “they know the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

    Was it Thatcher? Possibly: the 80′s were very unpleasant; greed was good, and the decline of nationalised industries and the big share sales at the time made capitalists out of “the little man”.