Someone like us

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Evil is banal: it does not dress up different from us- it is us with a different colour, and greater certainties.

A brilliant piece of writing-

Over the next few years, I worked in Bangkok as a photographer, making trips back to Cambodia, always carrying a photo of Duch to show defected Khmer Rouge members. I never believed I'd find him. But in 1999 I made a breakthrough. By chance, on another assignment, I travelled to a nearby Khmer Rouge area that had just opened up. I was wandering around when a small, wiry man in an African Refugee Committee T-shirt came and introduced himself as Hang Pin.

I knew immediately who he really was. It was the same face I'd been carrying around with me for more than a decade. Duch was a little bit greyer, but there was no doubt in my mind. We had a fairly banal conversation – he was interested in my camera, and I tried to appear as nonchalant as I could. This was no ranting, cold-eyed madman; he was garrulous, friendly, disarming. He told me he was a humanitarian aid worker and lay-preacher, converting Cambodians to Christianity. Surreptitiously I took a photograph, but it didn't seem the right time to confront him. I wondered if he might still be a killer.
Later, I returned to the village with Nate Thayer – the last western journalist to have interviewed Pol Pot. We talked to Duch about land mines and his planned church, but he dodged any leading questions about his past. It was only when he asked to see Nate's business card that we realised Duch had suspicions of his own.
"Nic," he said, "I believe your friend has interviewed Pol Pot."
"That's right," I said.
Duch gave a deep sigh: "I believe it is God's will you are here," he said. It was almost as if he'd always expected this day to come.

Experience: I tracked down a man who killed 14,000 people | khmer rouge | Life and style | The Guardian

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• Khmer Rouge prison chief to face sentencing Monday (ctv.ca)

Nothing to be afraid of

A damning indictment of the consequences of unthinking ideological justification of personal infamies-

Until recently, Dikötter states, most accounts of the famine have been based on central government sources that are often incomplete or untrue. What he found during his years rummaging in archives throughout China was that such central documents were transmitted in fuller, less censored versions to the provinces and below. In addition, the archives he saw contained letters of complaint or justification from local officials and even ordinary people, minutes from local and even central meetings, and statistics which were either falsified to hoodwink Mao or local superiors, or were subtle enough to reveal that awful things were happening. For example, in 1960 in the 'model province' of Henan, in Xinyang alone 'over a million people died ... Of these victims 67,000 were clubbed to death with sticks'. When this came to Mao 'he blamed the trouble on class enemies'. On another occasion, when the Chairman learned that there had been terrible deaths in one town he had hitherto admired, 'Mao simply switched his allegiance to the next county down the road willing to outdo others in extravagant production claims.' Mao and his cronies insisted, as one of them put it as reports of deaths rolled in, that 'This is the price we have to pay; it's nothing to be afraid of. Who knows how many people have been sacrificed on the battlefields and in the prisons [for the revolutionary cause]? Now we have a few cases of illness and death; it's nothing!' Every detail was locally recorded and explained - or obscured. Take this report from 25 February 1960 in Yaohejia village: 'Name of culprit: Yang Zhongsheng ... Name of victim: Yang Ecshun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother ... Manner of Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.

-Literary Review - Jonathan Mirsky on 'Mao's Great Famine' by fFrank Dikotter

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• Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter | Book review (guardian.co.uk)

The attraction of evil

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Not very attractive, but even though totally wrong about it, cleverness has its pull: I am fascinated with Zizek-

"His repertoire is a mix of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegel's idealist philosophy -- of film analysis, criticism of democracy, capitalism and ideology, and an occasionally authoritarian Marxism paired with everyday observations. He explains the ontological essence of the Germans, French and Americans on the basis of their toilet habits and the resulting relationship with their fecal matter, and he initially reacts to criticism with a cheerful 'Fuck you!' -- pronounced in hard Slavic consonants. He tells colleagues he values but who advocate theories contrary to his own that they should prepare to enter the gulag when he, Zizek, comes into power. He relishes the shudder that the word gulag elicits.

'Take my friend Peter, for example, fucking Sloterdijk. I like him a lot, but he'll obviously have to be sent to the gulag. He'll be in a slightly better position there. Perhaps he could work as a cook.'

One could say it's funny, especially the way Zizek delivers it, in his exaggerated and emphatic way. But one could also think of the more than 30 million people who fell victim to Soviet terror. Those who find Zizek's remarks amusing could just as easily be telling jokes about concentration camps.

'But you know?' Zizek says in response to such criticism. 'The best, most impressive films about the Holocaust are comedies.'

- 'The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West': Welcome to the Slavoj Zizek Show - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

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• Re-used text in Zizek's How to Read Lacan (ask.metafilter.com)