Probing Evil

Perhaps the hardest part about writing while on the road is realising that, about some things, there’s nothing original to say. Not only have countless before you tried to pen elegant prose on the very same subject, and not only will others follow after, but they’ll observe and write the very same things, the same impressions. Some experiences are so powerful, some glimpses back into history so clear that the feelings they elicit can seldom be parsed by words.

It’s not true of everything, naturally. One person will see in architecture one thing; and she’ll draw impressions from the people she meets that may be in stark contrast to what another concludes. If that weren’t true, what would be the point in travel at all? Wouldn’t we all just read someone else’s book while getting brown on a coconut-strewn beach?

Occasionally, though, you’re stuck. You see something you came a long way to see, and your impressions are so predictably orthodox you wonder if there’s anything to do but just to snap away some photographs and tick it off your list of things to do before you die. Any effort to describe the experience to those who didn’t share it is pointless. Because it’s the experience itself, the sight and smell and sound and taste, which transcends what mere words can express. Background, context and descriptive prose cannot, I’m saying, describe S-21 in Phnom Penh.

S-21 is also known as Tuol Sleng. It’s where the Democratic Kampuchea regime – known to everyone outside as the Khmer Rouge – set up a prison to detain individuals accused of, well, pretty much anything. They could’ve used a hospital or a military barracks or a food market for this purpose. And in a parallel world, visiting such a place would still be a bitterly upsetting and frightening experience. But the Khmer Rouge – in an acted of calculated malice – used a high school previously called Ponhea Yat to torture and execute anyone who could pose any threat to the regime, and its pursuit of ultra-communist, agrarian collectivisation.

There’s something almost wantonly cruel about using a high school. I suppose they had other reasons besides its almost poetic nastiness: the convenient location, the many small classrooms on different floors well suited for separating people from their families. But visiting this place, you’re struck, floored, dumbfounded, heartbroken by the juxtaposition of innocence and evil, of warmth and coldness, of the rampant destruction of what is good and its replacement with all that is bad.

S-21 is located in south Phnom Penh, and covers an area 600 by 400 metres. During the late-70s regime, it was enclosed by two folds of corrugated iron sheets, all covered with electrocuted barbed wire. The houses around the four school buildings were used as administration, interrogation and torture offices. All the classrooms were converted to prison cells. All the windows had bars. The ground floor classrooms were divided into individual cells of 80 by 200cm – roughly the size of a small single bed or a large beach towel. The most miserable part of visiting, though, is when you walk in the front gate. You’re walking into any high school in the world. It’s a place where kids ought to have been running around the playground, screaming and giggling, learning, flirting, reading and playing music. Superimposing pitch-black brutality onto a place of youth and optimism seems like a bad dream from which you can’t wake.

At first, interrogations were conducted in the houses surrounding the prison. But the interrogators seemed unable to help themselves from raping all the women and children they were interrogating, so in 1978, the chief of S-21, a former teacher himself, converted building B into an interrogation office for women and girls. Because the gang raping of 7-year old girls was an inefficient use of time and resources. This way, the interrogators would have more time for electrocuting them, burning them, drowning them and lashing them with electrical wire.

The number of workers – employees – totalled 1,721. These included 1,377 “general” workers, which in themselves included sub-units of male and female children aged ten to fifteen. These children were selected and trained by the Khmer Rouge to act as guards. Without going into unnecessary detail here, these children were exceptionally, wantonly cruel and violent to the prisoners.

Approximately 10,500 people were held at this high school. 2000 of these were young children, all tortured and killed, according to the various archives available now. I want to reproduce in full the regulations, (translated with world-class almost comic incompetence from the original Khmer) which were posted in each cell:

1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Do not turn them away.
2. Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to protest me.
3. Do not be a fool for you are a [I love this] chap who dares to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you do not follow all of the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

I won’t bother going into the idiotic repetition and intellectual emptiness of these rules: they speak for themselves. But reading them, as I did while sitting in the corner of a dark classroom on the top floor, I pondered – as often before – the nature of evil. And how the various evils of history compare, how they sit together. If Time or Letterman did a Top Ten Evils in History, what would be on the list and why?

Evil is a concept that always used to sit uneasily with me. It’s not that I’m not horrified when I see it on a screen, read about it on a page, or stand on blood-stained earth where it has taken place. I feel the horror as much as anyone who approaches the concept with ease and confidence. It’s that, overwhelmingly, those who commit what we call evil acts don’t believe themselves or their acts to be evil. History’s dictators have always had a lofty objective which they were convinced was virtuous every bit as much as everyone else is convinced it was not. Mugabe, Amin, Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Kahn, Mussolini, Bush (let’s not go there right now), Kim Jong-Il, Mao, and of course that bloated toad Pol Pot: what they share is both the fanatical belief of the zealot and a self-assured faith in the maxim that the Ends justify the Means. Serial killers only seldom consider their actions evil; usually they are proud to be cleaning the earth of some disease – prostitutes, homosexuals, immoral women. The percentage of serial killers who are devoutly religious might surprised any neophyte. Often, they’re doing God’s work.

The fanatics kidnapping Iraqi men and their families and drilling their eyes out while raping their daughters in front of them believe it too. Whether it’s the reestablishment of a global caliphate or the eradication of a different sectarian group or the approval of a deity or ultimate executive power through which their noble ends can be achieved, they all, they all believe that the Ends justify the Means and that consequently the means are – far from being evil – in fact virtuous.

It’s the fact that they believe this so unblinkingly which always made me uneasy. To import John Rawls – in my opinion the greatest thinker of the past half-century – how much of our revulsion is conditioned by our upbringing, by context, by culturally-specific values and circumstances? Had I been born an impoverished and devout Sunni man in Tikrit and had sectarian nonsense and hatred pummelled into me every day while seeing those I loved suffer, would I be the one with the power drill and the knife, raping the Shia women? When the ‘Veil of Ignorance’ is allowed to fall over our eyes, can we say with certainty what our actions would be when everything we know and have experienced is taken away? What is left of a man when all that is gone?

This is cultural relativism, and I’m pretty sure every humanities class at every university in the developed world teaches it to some degree or another. In other words, you don’t need to condone repulsive actions, and you are permitted to feel revulsion, but you have to temper your disgust and moral outrage. You must filter it through the prism of context, and hold back on untrammelled judgment.

This left-leaning orthodoxy has always outraged the Right, and because the Right has always outraged me, I’ve found some sympathy with the orthodoxy. Or rather, I did until 2004. August 2004, to be specific – and perhaps you’ll remember something that captured the world’s attention at the time: Beslan.

There’s something about the 24-hour news media. It conveys horror in a way no textbook ever can. For a couple of days that month the world was glued to its screens, waiting, hoping, for resolution of the hostage crisis. Because it was children this time, not theatre-goers in Moscow, or bankers and fund managers in the Towers, or even commuters on the Madrid rail system. These parasites, vermin masquerading as humans, went with automatic weapons into a school full of children. And everything got worse and worse.

When it ended, after the trigger-happy Russian troops stormed in and the ensuing firefight was over, there were hundreds of bloodied and naked children carried limp by inconsolable, broken men. Fatigued commandos stained indelibly with misery. Four-foot corpses festering in the Caucasian summer sun. More than three hundred children were dead, all of whom must have been frightened stiff like we will never know, and suddenly, immediately, totally, I understood the face of evil. It really shouldn’t have taken me so long, but it did.

What I’m saying is, I’d always struggled through the murky waters of tolerant relativism, grabbing in vain at the very existence of evil but it was a flapping fish that kept slipping away. But now I’m unshackled, and can look at a place like S-21, and allow the hatred to course freely through my veins. It’s cleansing, somehow.

Anyway, I was sitting there in the corner of the classroom, heartbroken at the awfulness of it all – something which can never be expressed in words even though everyone’s impression who visits there will be exactly the same – and I thought about the comparative nature of evil. Mugabe’s pernicious avarice and heartless disregard for his people will be remembered, but he’s not in the top tier. Hitler is usually invoked as the archetype of modern evil, for reasons that are probably self-evident to everyone. Stalin was ruthless – and killed perhaps more people than anyone in history – but he wasn’t genocidal per se. Mao maybe caused the death of even more than Stalin, and I think it’s unarguable that he caused the most misery, if such things are quantifiable. But even Red China recognised that in a collectivised agrarian society, you still need something approximating a pyramidal social structure. You still need the teachers and doctors and engineers and – some – intellectuals. As objectionable as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were, they made some, very limited sense on paper. You can understand at least what Mao was trying to do. I hope that statement is not too much of a stretch.

But Brother One and his Khmer Rouge: I think there’s a perfectly good case to be made that Cambodia 1975-79 represents humanity’s worst ever time and place. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing at all which is intellectually defensible about what this zealot group of murderers, torturers and rapists sought to accomplish. My heart aches for this crippled and tortured country. Perhaps two million people out of a population of seven million were killed because of the regime. Which is not only, in percentage terms, a loss of life probably unprecedented; but the people they killed – not that any lives are worth more than others – but the people they killed were the very people the country would have to rely upon to get back onto its feet. The thinkers, the professionals: those who would be needed to counsel the millions of traumatised orphan children, to rebuild an economy, to teach the skills and to take down history for posterity. A whole generation of the best and brightest was lost, and everyone lost someone they loved. So, I think: c’mon down, a big round of applause please for the Khmer Rouge: in my opinion the worst group of people ever to walk this bloodstained planet; the most evil, execrable and indefensible thugs and rapists of them all. And friends, bearing in mind the competition, I think we can all agree – that is really saying something.

But back in that same week of August 2004, my own watershed in shedding the shackles of relativism, two other things happened. The first was that Hicham El Guerrouj collapsed after his Olympic 1500m gold medal win at Athens, having finally secured the sporting immortality that had eluded him for years. He fell to the ground beyond the finishing line, spent, and tears of relief streamed down his pumping cheeks. He sat on the track, propped up by one arm like a dropped doll, as eighty thousand roaring spectators savoured a balmy night in the birthplace of western civilisation. Two of the other runners came up to him, they dropped to their knees next to a good and gracious man who deserved the gold so much. They smiled and embraced him through the dizzy cloud of fatigue, and – ignoring their own disappointment - cupped his exhausted face in their hands, an image for the pantheon of what’s great about sport; of life’s wondrous capacity to dazzle in a joyous snapshot for all time. I don’t know how everyone else watching felt. I can only speak for me. But time stopped still for that moment and I was flooded with love and admiration for my species.

The second other thing which happened during that eventful week was the launch of the Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn and Titan. Sending probes to the other bodies of the solar system is commonplace enough now that people rarely get too excited. But this one was really special. Because while the Cassini probe would spend years to come photographing Saturn, the Huygens probe would descend to the surface of Titan – the mysterious Saturnian moon which is continually blanketed with an organic atmospheric carbon sludge that no telescope can look beneath. Scientist have been fascinated by the mysteries of Titan for decades, because it resembles most closely what earth would’ve been like during the primordial soup. It’s a glimpse back to our very beginnings.

And so I watched, jaw-agape, the launch of this remarkable vessel. Giddy with enthusiasm, I was so impressed at the acceleration of progress which allows, within fifty years, evolution from a cylindrical Soviet beeping satellite in low earth orbit, to a vessel which can plunge into a strange land billions and billions of miles away and send back what it sees. Months later, it did so, and surpassed the expectations of all the waiting scientists. I remember hearing the whooshing audio track as it plunged through the frozen sky of Titan. I remember seeing the first photographs of the surface, lakes and coastlines and boulders and a horizon. After an hour, the probe died of cold – as it was expected to do – but that hour of life down there was worth the millions of man hours and the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in it. Even aside from the scientific value, millions of children around the world watched it on the Internet, as excited as I was, and some of them will have picked up a science book that very evening, planning to become explorers themselves when they grow up. And this is the only way we move forward.

If there’s one thing about people and about the world which strikes me more strongly and more often than anything else, it’s the cavernous gap, the desperate disconnect between our good and our evil. And although I now accept that unqualified evil exists, and it was given a human face in the administrators, guards and conceivers of S-21, and I loathe them more than I can loathe anything, I find myself flabbergasted at how one species – for most of the time so remarkably alike – can be at once so good and so bad. What can you say about a species that kills its children in the same week as exploring other worlds for their future? What can you say about a species that tortures and burns people alive for nothing more than having an education, in the very same country that once built the magnificent temples of Angkor? What can you possibly, possibly say?

Which brings me back to the start: there are some things which have to be experienced to be experienced. You need to sit in the courtyard of S-21 and hear the crying ghosts of murdered children so young they should’ve been playing together in the streets. You need to visit the Angkor temples to appreciate their majesty and the ingenuity behind their conception. You need to watch Hicham El Guerrouj get embraced by his competitors after winning gold. And you need to listen to the wind rushing past the plummeting Huygens probe as it descends to Titan (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEM85Q71Y3E_0.html). Because it’s every bit humanity’s soundtrack as the crying ghosts of Cambodian schoolchildren.