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149 When Cambodians talk about Democratic Kampuchea (DK), the genocidal period of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia when up to two million of Cambodia’s eight million inhabitants perished from April 1975 to January 1979, they recall many paths of ruin, the memories breaking light into this time of shadows, when memory itself became a crime. Chlat, a low-ranking provincial government official who was a student prior to DK, recalled one such path: the death of his brother Sruon. Sharp and pensive, Chlat was one of those people who might have gone far if the trajectory of his life had not been broken by the Khmer Rouge revolution. His smile echoed his life, struggling to blossom and always taut, as if about to recoil. We spoke many times about his life, including the period when memory itself became a crime. For, in their radical experiment in social engineering, the Khmer Rouge launched an assault on the past, seeking to obliterate everything that smacked of capitalism, “privatism,” and class oppression.1 This attack ranged far and wide. Broadly, the Khmer Rouge targeted Buddhism, the family, village structure, economic activity, and public education—key sociocultural institutions through which memory was ritually, formally, and informally transmitted. More specifically , they assaulted social memory by burning books and destroying libraries; banning popular music, movies, media, and styles; destroying temples; truncating communication; terminating traditional holidays and ritual events; separating family members; homogenizing clothing; and eliminating private property, including photos, memorabilia, and other mementos. This onslaught on the past was dramatically signified by the first significant act the Khmer Rouge took upon attaining power: rusticating the entire urban population. Ordered to evacuate their homes with little notice, hundreds of thousands of people clogged the arteries leading out of Phnom Penh and the 8 Genocide and the Politics of Memory in Cambodia ALEXANDER LABAN HINTON 150 ALEXANDER LABAN HINTON other provincial capitals. As they shuffled toward an unknown beginning, past the pagodas, schools, cinemas, restaurants, parks, streets, and homes that landscaped their past, the urbanites discarded a trail of memories: wads of nowworthless bank notes blowing in the wind, luxury sedans that had run out of fuel, food that had rotted in the blazing heat, books too heavy to carry, and, most tragically, the bodies of the old and the infirm unable to survive the journey . And still they would bear the stain of their past. In the new revolutionary society, each person had to be reworked, like hot iron, in the flames of the revolution. The Khmer Rouge called this “tempering ” people (luat dam, literally “to harden by pounding”). One urban evacuee explained, “The dreaded phrase was lut-dom. Lut is the part of metal processing in which a rod of metal is placed in a fire until it is red-hot and pliable. Dom means the hammering—when the hot metal is put on the anvil and pounded into shape. Lut-dom described the way people were expected to be molded by Angka (“the Organization”) into the pure Communists of the future.”2 Memory was to be reshaped during this process until it aligned with the party line, which colored the past in revolutionary red. Borrowing a Maoist metaphor that resonated with Buddhist conceptions of the wheel of life and the two wheels of dhamma, the Khmer Rouge spoke of “the Wheel of History” (kang brâvattesas )3 that, powered by natural laws that had been discerned by the “science” of Marxist-Leninism, had and continued to move Cambodia inexorably toward communism, crushing everything in its path. This vision of the past was clearly laid out in a landmark speech given by Pol Pot on September 29, 1977, to celebrate the seventeenth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Not only did the speech announce publicly for the first time the very existence of the CPK and Pol Pot’s leadership of it, but it also laid out the history of revolutionary struggle in Cambodia, which had faltered in “slave,” “feudal,” and “feudo-capitalist” stages because of the lack of a proper “political line.”4 This line only began to be ascertained, Pol Pot proclaimed, at the CPK’s First Party Congress, held from September 28–30, 1960, by twenty-one revolutionaries who locked themselves into a secret room in the rail yard of Phnom Penh. Having discerned through “scientific analysis” the key contradictions in Cambodian society (between “the Kampuchean nation and imperialism, especially...

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