Word: bizot
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...Bizot's account of the fall of Phnom Penh draws its power from an accretion of appalling images, coolly observed: the pavement before the National Bank of Cambodia strewn with bales of newly worthless bank notes; a former Prime Minister's wife trying to throw her baby over the embassy fence, before she is led away to be executed; a prince of the ancien r?gime, wearing his Legion of Honor medal, being turned away from the gate...
...forget that those responsible for the madness were themselves human, albeit tragically flawed. In the first part of the book, Bizot's portrait of Ta Douch, his jailer at Anlong Veng, provides unique insight into the single-mindedness that is often the wellspring of genocide. Douch later presided over Tuol Sleng, the regime's most infamous prison, now a museum, in Phnom Penh. The horror of the tortures and murders committed there, the sheer accumulation of human gore, leads many contemporary visitors to conclude that it must have been the work of monsters. Yet in fact it was the work...
...book's transcriptions of the philosophical discussions between prisoner and jailer about Buddhism and revolution offer an unprecedented opportunity to peer into the origins of mass dementia. Even as his minions are starving and bludgeoning their prisoners to death, Douch tells Bizot, "The revolution wishes nothing for (the people) besides simple happiness: that of the peasant who feeds himself from the fruits of his labors, with no need for the Western products that have made him a dependent consumer." When Bizot points out that Cambodian peasants are destitute of almost everything, including imports, Douch is deaf to him: years before...
...Bizot is also an unsparing observer of the regime's victims, particularly the foreigners who sought refuge at the embassy. When a group of them are finally given safe passage to Thailand, one American journalist fills his only bag with silver plate stolen from the embassy dining room. At the final checkpoint, within sight of freedom, a French radio announcer, hysterical with fear, renounces his Khmer bride and allows her and her child to be dragged away...
...Although it is written in an extravagantly emotional style and is at times deeply moving, The Gate is ultimately more historical document than literary memoir. Bizot assumes that his readers have a thorough knowledge of modern Cambodian history, sometimes identifying even obscure figures by surname only. Although future historians may not find in The Gate the definitive history of Cambodia's genocide, as a witness to that terror, Bizot's account will surely inspire an enduring fascination...