The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide (and Donald Trump)

In Phnom Penh, the Killing Fields (Choeung Ek Genocidal Center) and the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide share an uneasy space where tourist attraction and monument to evil overlap. Some tuk tuk drivers even carry a laminated card with pictures of local sites that they're happy to take you to, including an image of a mound of skulls from the Killing Fields.

In general, Cambodians tend to tamp down their memories of loss and survival under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. At times, though, an innocuous conversation about flowers, for example, can pivot without warning and then unfathomable horrors come gushing out, according to Jen Hardy, a Baltimorean based in Phnom Penh for Catholic Relief Services, with whom we had lunch one day.

Cambodian students, including his son and daughter, don't learn about their country's holocaust, our taxi driver told us on the way to the Killing Fields. His father never came home and his older brother starved to death. They were among the three million, or one out of four Cambodians, who were annihilated. Because he was only five, our driver remained with his mother and managed to survive.

National trauma didn't lead to enlightenment. Cambodia remains oppressed under Prime Minister Hun Sen, in office for 35 years and still going strong. The taxi driver said that no one can have an honest discussion about Sen in public for fear of being reported. The driver said he can only speak openly with foreigners while driving to and from the airport and the Killing fields.

Scraps of cloth and fragments of bone still surface in the Killing Fields, about 20 minutes from our hotel in Phenom Penh. Of course, this is just one of many killing fields across the country. At the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide housed in a Khmer Rouge prison, we walked through the cells where prisoners were held, tortured and killed. Hundreds of portraits give a face to the victims. Other photographs document their suffering while chained to beds and being tortured.


A Khmer Rouge saying, “When you weed the field, you must pull out the roots," is frequently cited to explain Pol Pot's strategy for ridding the country of artists, intellectuals and any semblance of Cambodia's cultural riches. In order to return the country to the Year 0, the roots of civilization had to come out. These words reminded me of Donald Trump's call to banish illegal immigrants and Muslims. He wants to reset the clock in the USA to a mythical time when the country as a whole prided itself on its ignorance and homogeneity and painted the rest of the world with a broad, hateful brush.

Pol Pot's paranoia has parallels in Trump's fear mongering, too. The leading Republican candidate might seem like a big, ugly joke now, but it's a slippery slope from demagoguery to evil.