Cambodia

By Brian Fawcett

In this disturbing collection of investigative fictions, Brian Fawcett asserts that the informational white noise of the Global Village is creating a cultural and intellectual breakdown that will eventually lead to the disappearance of local and individual identity. He argues that under the glitzy surfaces of television and the information revolution” lie the same intentions that ran amok in Khmer Rouge Cambodia: the extermination of memory and imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Jan 1, 1986
• ISBN: 9781772013290

Brian Fawcett

Born in 1944 in Prince George, B.C., Brian Fawcett has written poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He has been an urban planner and a journalist. Talonbooks has published My Career With the Leafs & Other Stories (1992), The Secret Journal of Alexander MacKenzie (1985), Capital Tales (1984) and Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (1986) by Brian Fawcett.

Book preview

On the Difficulties of Crowd Control

On a sunny morning at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, militiamen of the Ohio National Guard open fire on a crowd of students protesting the invasion of Cambodia by American troops five days before. By the time the guardsmen stop firing their weapons, four students are dead and nine more are wounded. The date is May 4th, 1970.

It happens that a television crew from one of the local stations is present at the scene, and within hours the footage the crew shoots of the incident is being broadcast on nearly every television station in North America. The camerawork isn’t the sort that wins prizes, but it has a peculiar spontaneity about it, perhaps because the shootings were as much a surprise to the cameramen as they were to the demonstrating students.

The public outcry over the next several days is loud, long and indignant: these innocent, brave students are victims of outright murder. They are Americans, after all, exercising their God-given right to freedom of expression. Such atrocities of authority should not be possible in the United States of America.

Eventually the furore dies down without a clear public assignation of who or what was responsible. Later, cynics will note that the four Kent State killings cause the virtual collapse of the American student movement as a tool for social change. Real life, they sneer, has visited itself upon the theoretical realities of academia—a little napalm found out what the student movement is really made of.

It is true that after the incident there are fewer campus protests by students, and that when protests take place, the crowds are smaller and much more wary. But while that may be true, it is also true that the movement to stop the undeclared war in Vietnam and Cambodia, in which students form at least a substantial part of the front line, has succeeded in hamstringing American military ambitions in Southeast Asia, probably to the point of preventing the use of tactical nuclear weapons there. Others will say it was Watergate and the general indecision created by the revelations of Presidential lying and corruption that ultimately force the American withdrawal from Southeast Asia.

All such speculations, however, are now antiquarian. It all happened a long time ago. And who really cares? Ask your best friend or your spouse how many students died at Kent State, and why. Few will remember the details. The students, they will muse, must have had reasons for being out there that day. Maybe it was a nice day for a protest march against the Fascist authorities. The National Guardsmen likewise: bullets in their guns, repressed homosexual leanings hidden beneath their patriotic militarism. They were thumping a few Commie Pinko Radicals, that’s all. Or maybe it was all a mistake, a stupid misunderstanding. A crowd, given the right camera perspective and angle, can be mistaken for a mob, and in the right circumstance, anyone with a little military training can become a killer—that’s what they’re trained to be, after all.

There are reasons why so few can remember what happened. Since 1970 everyone has seen hundreds—no, thousands—of people die. Most days you can see death on the evening news, occasionally quite graphically. Some of the death scenes show the corpses of those who have starved, or are about to starve to death. Every once in a while there will actually be some falling bodies, or film of people who lie twisted and broken and dead in the rubble and wreckage of some far-off terrorist bombing or military skirmish. You see the corpses, but the television news never seems to be quite clear about who or what is responsible for creating those corpses. Then the prime time programs come on, and you can see more deaths—usually highly dramatic, but fictional ones. You know they’re just actors pretending to get killed. And the reason why they’re dead is explained by the plot of the program, sort of.

On an average day, violence and killing are going to be the fundamental content of television. Or if you think that overstates it a little, I can put it another way. Violence is the content that solves most of the problems that do get solved, whether you are watching the evening news or prime time dramatic programming. And in the welter of actual or stunt/illusion death and violence even those of us who care about far-off events like Kent State are unable to keep track of the exact details. The students were protesting something, and some of them were killed for it.

So now, sixteen years later, also a sunny morning in May, after the uncounted, unaccountable and largely untelevised deaths of several million more human beings, I try to imagine the last hours of those four students who died at Kent State, to try to learn what I can from them about the deaths that have followed.

The Kent State students were ordinary people. What I mean is that, for example, they probably ate breakfast before coming to the demonstration. Okay, I ask myself, what did they have? Did they have cold cereal and milk, or was it toast, bacon and eggs? Coffee, tea or milk? Perhaps, at the moment the firing began, one of the victims was wondering about lunch. Hamburgers? A milkshake? Was another student worried about a bad grade recently received for a carelessly written English paper?

I discover myself cringing at such speculations. They are brutal and invasive, because they reveal the structure of the Kent State victims’ innocence. It is one thing to be in a war zone, a voluntary belligerent, but the Kent State students aren’t in a war zone, and they aren’t really belligerents. They’re similar, in a sense, to the Cambodian peasants who looked up into the suddenly clamouring skies and discovered that American B-52 bombers were dropping bombs on them. Their crimes are the same. Both appeared to be threatening violence to American imperial consciousness. It is hard for an American bomber pilot looking down through his bombsight to see that there is a difference between Cambodian peasants and the Viet Cong soldiers he is trying to kill. A poorly trained and nervous National Guardsman likewise might have trouble seeing the difference between what he suspects are dangerous Commie Pinko Radicals and these nice American students who are thinking about what they’ll have for lunch after the demonstration, or if they might want to date the person they’ve just handed an anti-war placard to. You don’t see what people are thinking when you’re staring at them down a bombsight or the barrel of a rifle.

The television cameras intrude right here. The television cameras are supposed to establish the facts about our world, to tell us who is who and what is what. So what’s wrong with these cameras? Isn’t this the era of total information? Or is the mission of television different than announced?

•

Someone once wrote that the only thing that all human beings respond to alike is slapstick. In 50 A.D. for instance, a light-hearted Roman centurion is said to have lifted his tunic and farted loudly into the Jerusalem Passover crowd. Certain zealous celebrants in the crowd took exception to this show of disrespect for their institutions and rituals, and attacked the centurion. A riot ensued, and according to Josephus, who wrote a history of the period and location, by the time Roman troops regained control of the situation, 30,000 people were dead.

Sober-minded interpreters have since removed a zero from Josephus’ estimate, thus restoring 27,000 persons to life. It’s a strange variety of arithmetic. 30,000 people being killed in a riot over a matter of etiquette is funny in an uncomfortable sort of way. Removing the extremity of the numbers turns the event into something less—just another riot, and history is full of them. And in case you were wondering, it isn’t known if the centurion survived his attempt at cultural witticism. Josephus, a Jew who wrote his history in Rome under the supervision of the Emperor, wasn’t inclined to indulge in human interest items. And anyway, he may not have thought the centurion was very witty.

How about another one? This one occurred in sixth-century Roman Constantinople. While the city was under siege by a horde of Bulgarians, an argument broke out in the Hippodrome between the two chief political factions, the Blues and the Greens. The argument was not over the best method to defend the city, as might have been expected in the circumstances, but over the nature of Christ. The Blues believed that Christ had a single nature—that he was wholly divine—citing as evidence the fact that his body had not suffered corruption within the sepulchre. The Greens believed that Christ’s nature was dual—that he was the son of God, and therefore divine, and the son of Mary, and therefore human. The argument got out of hand, and by the time the fighting had ceased, half the city had been burned, and close to 40,000 people were dead.

These non-strategic anecdotes have survived because they contain a powerful, if slightly sickening element of slapstick. Each tells us something about the nature of the times. First-century Jerusalem apparently didn’t have much of a sense of humour, and sixth-century Constantinople didn’t have much of an instinct for self-preservation. The anecdotes may also have a warning to deliver to those who insist on the pragmatic nature of political reality. But the point I get from them is that crowd control obviously hadn’t been honed to the fine science it is today.

•

With these two incidents in mind, let’s go forward to the semi-present of Kent State to ask a few questions. For me, the questions that arise from all three events have to do with staging, and with crowd control. I seem to recall that the television cameramen who filmed the events at Kent State had initially set up their cameras midway between the demonstrators and the National Guardsmen, almost as if they were about to film a battle between approaching armies. Such scenes were common then—long-haired demonstrators meeting with armed soldiers and placing flowers into the barrels of the rifles under the watchful lens of the television cameras.

But at Kent State there is no such peaceful congress at the midpoint of the battlefield. When the National Guardsmen start firing at the students, there is confusion. The cameras swing first to the source of the shots, then to the recipients. A student, hit by a bullet, falls, and a second student rushes to his aid, shielding his comrade from further violence with his own body. Most of the rest of the crowd scatters.

The cameras swing back to the Guardsmen. They also are in disarray. Backs are turned, there are accusatory gestures.

An interval—in real time, but not in the always sequential reality of television. The wounded are being attended to. The dead or dying students are shielded from the camera lenses, bodies are covered by coats. A female student screams at a cameraman, tries to put her hands in front of the prying lens.

Repeat this sequence several million times.

•

Now the ideological question: what is in control? It is now twenty-four hours after the event. The film has been edited into a more coherent package. The first thing to note is that the action sequence has been rearranged and cut back. The guardsmen are seen firing their rifles, mostly into the air. A very quick and blurry clip depicts one of the students falling. An even briefer clip shows a body being placed in an ambulance. The confusion of the National Guardsmen that was so evident in the initial film has been edited out, along with the irate female student who screamed at the cameraman. A National Guard spokesman with brass buttons and medals states with great gravity that an investigation is underway.

The television reporter, with the empty green lawns and genteel buildings of Kent State University as his backdrop, reports a rumour currently circulating that the first shots came from the direction of the demonstrating students, and that the guardsmen were responding to that. Police are said to be investigating the possibility of a sniper located in the nearby buildings. The camera duly pans to an open second floor window. The final images return us to the scene of the event. It is empty of National Guardsmen and students, and of the realities of death and slapstick. Order has been imposed.

But four students are dead, their families and friends are grieving, and American combat troops and equipment are moving forward through the jungles of Cambodia, trying to find Viet Cong who are going to be somewhere else when the bombs drop or the troops arrive.

There’s no slapstick in any of this, right? These are all facts, a matter of historical documentation. Yet the message television delivers doesn’t contain those facts. Instead, it tells us that the authorities are on top of the situation, and that everything being done is fine and orderly and rational. It doesn’t tell us what is in control. That question has been atomized by implied conspiracies, allegations, rumours, technically opaque editing. Don’t ask.

I’m not quite convinced. The atomized particles regroup in my mind, and create more questions. Where does television stand on the question of crowd control? Which crowd is being controlled? Axe all of us walking with the students at Kent State, or standing armed with the National Guardsmen? Or are we all looking through the camera lens? Which part of this tableau are you in? Where will you be when the firing starts? Is violence inevitable? Where are we all now, sixteen years later, when the slapstick of ordinary life is almost entirely invisible? Can we allow our utopian dreams of a just world to be an uncomfortable memory we avoid as we try to hang onto our personal possessions in a slowly shrinking economy and quickly diminishing public reality? Is our desire to be told the truth going to become a side-screen evanescence as we click off the television set and go about the strange lives we are left with?

---

1

We think we know what went on in Cambodia. An article has now appeared in National Geographic, with photographs of the piles of whitening skulls fouling the rice paddies, and the walls covered with photographs of some of those who were tortured, made to write confessions and then killed—along with their families—because they could read and write, wore glasses, spoke foreign languages or erred in their interpretation of Khmer Rouge doctrine.

Most of the victims of the Khmer Rouge were killed merely because they could remember a different kind of world than the one the Khmer Rouge were attempting to recreate out of the rubble of the Vietnam War. Others were killed because they imagined a different kind of world. Memory and imagination were both capital offences in Khmer Rouge Cambodia.

Statistical estimates of the number of people who died are unreliable and they will remain so. Statistics were not a high priority for Cambodians in the time between the departure of the Americans in April 1975 and the invasion by Vietnamese troops that toppled the Khmer Rouge government less than four years later. The American bombing and subsequent invasion of Cambodia that began in 1969 were indifferent to the existence of the Cambodian peasants whose lives were disrupted or ended. For the Americans, body counts of the non-existent were likewise not a priority.

What happened in Cambodia between 1969, when the Americans began to bomb the country in an attempt to capture or kill those in the headquarters of the National Liberation Front and the Provisional Revolutionary Government, and to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and 1979 when the Vietnamese invaded, is beyond the grasp of statistics. You will understand why if you try to imagine a war in your own country or city or neighbourhood which kills one out of three. A third of your family strangled by a neighbour made psychotic by having been given the power of life and death over everyone he knows, or shot down in the street by a group of adolescents who have replaced the police. Most of your neighbours similarly executed for criminal tendencies that are the primary political and social virtues of Western Civilization: religious and political tolerance, loyalty to family and friends, liberality in the face of work-related errors, even simple curiosity. Those who could not hide these criminal tendencies have been exterminated. And if you are alive, what is it that you have had to do that has enabled you to survive?

When the National Geographic Society gets around to something it should be possible to take it on faith that the subject is approaching common knowledge. Twenty years ago that might have been true. Most North Americans with an interest in what rose to the undulating surface of public consciousness probably did read the magazine every month. ‘Isn’t that interesting,’ they could say to one another. They might have discussed the details of whatever quaint and picturesque nation was being featured, nodding with a small degree of official and mutual sagacity before they passed on to the next topic of conversation.

But this is the 1980s. That same demographic sector has lost interest in public consciousness and has given up on conversation. People watch television instead, dispensing with the need for either of those. All that is required for social life now is to pass the cans of Pepsi or Coke seen in competing ads, and to repeat something heard or read or seen on television in the last twenty-four hours. In the face of incoming information, citizens take on whatever expression of concern, sagacity or fashionable amusement is appropriate. Sure, there might be a small disquisition over which cola is the better product, or which ad campaign is the more convincing. Citizens may even wonder if they are aligned with the correct consumer faction, certain only that the shareholders on both sides are going to be winners.

For North Americans living in the 1980s, memory is not yet a crime, and imagination, particularly if it has some entrepreneurial panache, is sometimes rewarded. But within a culture that is attempting to make individual memory and imagination superfluous, both are becoming political acts. God help us.

This isn’t a God-help-us story. Invoking a divinity isn’t going to work. If there are omniscient beings in the universe, they aren’t guiding us. They might be scientists, and this might be an experiment. If it is, it is clearly going to be left alone to run its course.

Even that’s too easy. This isn’t a story about being alone or one about being left alone to fend for ourselves. This is a story about memory and imagination, and about the reorganizations of human intelligence that are about to leave us all in a new—or a very ancient—kind of darkness. It is a story about what Cambodia means, and about why Cambodia is not an isolated historical aberration suitable for sentimental speculation and pictorial depiction. Cambodia is as near as your television set.

This is a century in which the lives of at least 100 million of us have ended prematurely: by war, civil violence, or by the disease and famine that usually accompany war or civil disruption. All 100 million deaths were avoidable, given the wealth and technological capability of human civilization. They weren’t avoided.

The dominant political and social facts of our century are contradictory. Radically so. We have experienced unprecedented levels of social control, both benevolent and/or authoritarian. But we have also seen unprecedented levels of social and political violence. Governments, which are supposed to protect us from violence, have been intervening in social and economic activities more and more in order to make the world safe. More and more as the century has progressed. In fact, the continuous growth of authority and bureaucracy is a universal phenomenon of modern political life. But bureaucratic authority has a most unexpected twin: genocide.

I suppose this is also a story about me, which is to say, about private authority. In specific terms, that will be a story about what it means to be intellectually and artistically adrift in North America in the 1980s, a hostile in the Global Village, and about what must be remembered by private authors in the years after history has ceased, for the first time in three hundred years, to provide form to public reality.

I don’t trust any authority, and that is a problem. Not a unique problem for an author these days. I see bureaucracy and genocide infecting every human act, the one destroying productivity and memory, the other undermining the ability to imagine a future. Yet to be an author involves exerting authority over one’s subject matter. How do I write without falling into the enemy camp?

The surface of public consciousness in the 1980s has been made astonishingly difficult to penetrate because of the massive array of covertly-interpreted data and propaganda thrown into the path of the contemporary investigator. The ugly truths of our time are neither dark nor silent. They have been rendered opaque by full-frequency light that admits neither definition nor shadows, and they are protected from the voices of the suffering and the disaffected by an accompanying wall of white noise.

At first, Cambodia appears to be an exception to the currents of modern political history. The Khmer Rouge administrative massacres were perpetrated by Asian Marxists on other Asians; the apparatus and

Reviews for Cambodia

[grbeer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book has probably had a greater impact on my understandings of history and how popular culture shapes/obscures the public perception of events than all other books combined.

[sa54d · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After I added this book I re-assigned all of my star ratings to make sure that only a few books receive 5 stars. This book had a profound effect on me and changed my thinking about most everything. I learned or, or at least more of importance, from this one book than from some college courses. I continue to read parts of this book every now and then. Fawcett arranges the book in a very unique manner: a set of 13 short stories runs along the top half of the page and a single essay runs along the lower half. It sounds like an affectation, but it works and so effectively that the book would not make as great an impression if it were layed out in the traditional style. In this time of short attention spans Fawcett has devised a way to make separate "inputs" into your brain, causing you to "multi-task" and thereby think about the ideas in the essay and in the stories in relation to each other. I found insights in these pages I have never come upon ever before or since.