Human kind can achieve great heights when they set their mind to do anything. There are various examples of individuals achieving the impossible like Dr Martin Luther King Jr. achieving gender equality and an end to racial discrimination for the black, Albert Einstein defeated the disease of dyslexia to become the father of mathematics, Barrack Hussein Obama defeated the social barriers of a Muslim name and a black ethnicity to become America’s first non-white president and there are hundreds more of such outstanding individuals who have achieved the impossible. However, human kind has performed the most atrocious crimes to date. People who have no reason and no justification whatsoever have committed the most heinous crimes just for their benefits. When there exist hundreds of examples of amazing individuals then there also exist hundreds of examples of people, societies and nations as a whole committing the most terrible acts of injustice. Examples could include what the Nazi Germans did to the Jews, what happened in the Vietnam War or the daily onslaught of innocent children, females and older citizens in the disputed areas like Kashmir and Palestine.
The atrocities committed in Cambodia shows how much evilness can be committed by the human race. According to estimates around 2 million people were killed when a revolution took place when Pol Pot rose the Cambodian dictator came into power in 1975 and he asked that there occurs a communist overhaul of the Southeast Asian nation immediately. Khmer Rouge henchmen forced people to evacuate the Pnormh Penh’s area and to go into the jungles surrounding the area. The henchmen had forcefully ensured that nobody brings any supplies and the citizens were promised that they would be free to go back home after three days. They forcefully separated the whites from the dark ones and the educated from the non-educated. Children were made to work without food or rest on a twin roadway. The educated children were killed and thrown into ponds and only those who could not read and write were allowed to live. Horrible crimes were committed to get rid of the educated class of the nation by the dictator Khmer Rouge who despised educated people. Thousands of children were killed due to malnourishment, starvation, diarrhea, malaria and exhaustion. Women were raped and the intellectuals were killed in horrible manners in front of their families. After the defeat of the dictator by the Vietnamese military forces which resulted in a little time of peace but then soon the army recruiters would forcefully ensure that even young women, reaching their maturity were traitors if they did not join the Vietnamese occupied Cambodian army. People fled to refugee camps where they were incidents of individuals including women living in make shift graves so as to avoid being discovered and tortured or worse killed by the army.
The world class movie The Killing Field is also a British drama film set which was shot in 1984 and is about the Democratic Kampuchea and of the experiences of 2 journalists one of them a Cambodian Dith Pran and the other was an American Sydney Schanberg. It won various awards and has been awarded with a 91% rating at Rotten tomatoes, which includes notable publications reviews. Critic Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times "The film is a masterful achievement on all the technical levels -- it does an especially good job of convincing us with its Asian locations -- but the best moments are the human ones, the conversations, the exchanges of trust, the waiting around, the sudden fear, the quick bursts of violence, the desperation." The movie has narrated the incidents faced by these journalists and how much trouble they afced after they covered the US bombing and how they survived the various atrocities. It also talks about the Khmer Rouge era and how the torture affected not just the locals but especially the Americans and how much trouble the people went to save their skin. The movie highlights the troubles that were faced by the intellectuals of that time and how simple acts of performing duties assigned in their job descriptions could lead people to so much trouble that it would put not just themselves but their entire family at risks.
Movies like these and historical accounts of acts of atrocities committed in areas like Cambodia, Rwanda, Serbia and the Sudan make a normal human tremble with the level of evilness that can be achieved by a normal human mind and the various justifications like giving up their own humanity to save humanity in the future and acts being for the greater good are the reasons why the evilness of mankind continues with grow with time.
Works Cited
Brown, FZ and DG Timberman. "Cambodia and the international community: The quest for peace, development, and democracy." Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (1998).
Idling, Peter Fröberg. Pol Pot's Smile. 1972.
Schabas, WA. "Problems of International Codification–Were the Atrocities in Cambodia and Kosovo Genocide?'." New England Law Review (2000-2001).
The Killing Fields. Dir. Pat Golden. Perf. Haing S Ngor. 1984.
