Movie Review: Enemies of the People (2009)

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Enemies of the People (2009) is a documentary about the Cambodian genocide by the communist Khmer Rouge. I recommend it highly. It is in English and Khmer with English and Thai subtitles.
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In the late 1970s the Khmer Rouge took their version of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology and tried to out-do Mao. They abolished city life, herded everyone into the jungles at gunpoint and forced them to be peasant farmers. “Enemies of the people” were thought to be everywhere, and they killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of those they identified as middle class Cambodians, e.g., students, teachers, professionals, and even “middle peasants” who husbanded small plots of land. Money and markets were abolished, so death by starvation resulted, and it is hard to sort famine deaths from murders. Estimates vary, but around 2 million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge regime, perhaps 21% of the population.
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The filmmaker, Thet Samboth, one of today’s leading news journalists in Cambodia, lost his family during the killings. His father, a Khmer Rouge member, was purged during the madness, his brother was killed later, and his mother died soon after. But he said he doesn’t seek revenge. He just wanted to understand it all and to record this history as a lesson for future generations before it is forgotten. He took 10 years to make the film, slowly gaining the confidence of many former Khmer Rouge killers including one of the former top two leaders of the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea, former Brother Number Two (to the late Pol Pot’s Number One). Nuon Chea is now 82 and facing a criminal justice tribunal.
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Lower in the ranks of the Khmer Rouge were the actual killers out in the provinces, the people who had to slit the throats of countless “enemies of the people” on the orders of those higher up. (The orders were to “save bullets” and thus kill in a more personal face-to-face manner with knives or iron bars.) Khoun was one of them, and he points out where in his rural neighborhood the killing fields and burial grounds were, pointing in all directions around them. Neighbors passing by confirm it.
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Suon was a bit higher in rank and ordered Khoun and others to kill, as well as himself taking part in the killing of many. Today both of them are very remorseful that they blindly followed such orders. Suon, referring to traditional Theravada Buddhist beliefs, asks: How many rebirths in how many holes in hell must I endure to wash away my evil karma? He is in absolute despair.
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Sister “Em” is interviewed, an even higher ranking Khmer Rouge official at their local level. She had ordered Suon and Khoun to kill. She is reluctant to have her face filmed, so all we see is her back-lit outline. She is not as forthright as Suon and Khoun, seemingly not admitting her own guilt so much as it just being a case of
“following orders from above.” The higher we go in the Khmer Rouge hierarchy, the less we find the acceptance of responsibility. The higher we go, the more they remain True Believers in their holy struggle.
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I wished that there had been more analysis of the ideology motivating the leaders. The closest we get is when Brother Number Two Nuon Chea still insisted that it was, after all, right to value (an abstraction called) “the people” over “individuals” – somehow justifying the killing of maybe 2 million of these individuals. Rationalizing to the bitter end, he said they were “enemies of the people.” 20% of the population?!?
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Who really were the Enemies of the People? Individual Cambodians who just wanted to pursue life, liberty and happiness with their families? Or self-anointed intellectual leaders such as Pol Pot and Nuon Chea? This is classic Collectivism, where the abstract good of the collective group, e.g., variously called the “people,” “nation,” “community,” “society,” “tribe,” “race,” or “gang,” somehow justifies sacrificing the actual real-life individual members of those collective groups. As Ayn Rand and other libertarians have reminded us, a collective is nothing but an arbitrary grouping of individuals. It is the individual person that lives, feels, thinks and aspires, and who suffers and dies at the hands of the political True Believers (be those politicians self-labeled as “brothers,” “comrades,” “conservatives,” “progressives,” etc.). In Cambodia’s case, multiply that individual’s pain, suffering and death by 2 million.
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Nuon Chea seems unrepentant. Yet when filmmaker Thet Samoth finally did tell him at the end of the film that his own family was killed by the Khmer Rouge, Nuon Chea did say that he felt very sorry. Perhaps this one concrete example of the personal tragedy of an individual, Samoth, who had befriended him and talked to him for many years made some kind of connection to reality in the mind of Brother Number Two. A bit too late, I think.
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-Zenwind.
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