The Cultural Revolution using Mao’s modus operandi arrived in Cambodia during the seventies. Using the exact same methods, the Khmer Rouge set about not only terrorising its population, inflicting collectivisation on its peasants, removing children from their parents to be brought up and indoctrinated by the Khmer Rouge but also dismantling the “bourgeois” culture and all references or visible signs of Cambodia’s historical past. The true face of Marxism and how it repeats the mistakes of the past become ever more apparent in light of the current “culture wars” in this country and others in the present day.
Owing to the onslaught and pure whirlwind of destruction which took place during that era, even today traditional art and music in Cambodia is struggling. Many of the Cambodians involved in the arts depend on tourism or NGOs to support their efforts. Which must surely lead to shrill cries of Colonialism by some of our more enlightened critics on the Marxist left. One feels like saying, you broke it, so you can fix it. Very unlikely.
Vann Nath was a prominent artist and writer who chronicled the abuse and torture he and other artists received under the regime of the Khmer Rouge. In 1998, he wrote a memoir about his imprisonment in the notorious S-21 prison. Fortunately, he was spared from death as his captor Comrade Duch who went on trial a few years ago for his genocidal crimes, decided that he should be put to work sculpting and painting portraits of Pol Pot. A few years earlier, Jewish inmates of Nazi concentration camps who had artistic or musical talents, were similarly employed. After the war, his paintings recorded the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in their torture cells and Killing Fields and served as an important document to remind Cambodians that never again should such crimes against humanity be allowed to be repeated in the name of a political ideology.
He was also active in the revival of the arts and crafts which had been so violently destroyed by the Communist activists. Originally, he wanted to pursue an artistic career but instead served as a monk from the age of 17 to 21. Like other poor peasant societies, it was common for at least one son from a family to enter the priesthood. He soon had to leave the monkhood in order to provide for his family. This didn’t stop him from enrolling at an art school in 1965 to study French Impressionism, even though it was an arduous undertaking. The school permitted him to work there while not charging him the tuition fee. He was shortly able to sell his work as a professional artist.
Forced by the Khmer Rouge to move to an agricultural commune as were so many Cambodians, he came to the attention of the authorities and was sent to the prison already mentioned. His artistic talent not only saved his life but enabled him to record what was going on about him as did so many Jewish inmates incarcerated in concentration camps. For a long time after his release, Vann Nath painted the barbaric occurrences at the prison as a painful and pitiless record of what had happened to him and others but gradually found peace and began depicting scenes of his childhood in better times.
In 2009, Comrade Duch was brought to justice in Phnom Penh for his crimes. As a key witness, Vann Nath commented: “I have waited 30 years for this. I never imagined that I would be able to sit in this courtroom today to describe my plight, my experience. I hope that justice can be tangible, can be seen by everybody.” Regrettably, he did not live to see Comrade Duch convicted, passing away from kidney disease in 2011.
I feel that what happened in Cambodia is often forgotten or overlooked in the wake of Communist China under Mao but it truly represents the barbarism and devastation that Marxism, supposedly in the name of the common good, inflicts on society and humans. One mustn’t forget of course that US policy in this region destabilised those societies but this does not in any way excuse Communist barbarity. Now, more than ever, we must pay serious attention to what the current ideologues are saying and doing in the West. Today, it’s a few statues being knocked down, or “decolonisation” of a library. Tomorrow, it’s mass incarceration, torture, brainwashing, indoctrination of children and especially targeting professors, intellectuals and artists. This is how all inhuman, fascist or communist dictatorships begin. They spare nobody, including their fellow travellers.
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Art history Unchained. 