KAMPUCCINO? ESPRESSO?

I have just come back from Cambodia (please take a look in the Photos section), which is not as much a country any more as it is a statement. The statement of a successful Satanist experiment. Steven King's scripts will hardly ever impress me again. Neither will Kafka and Orwell, I'm afraid. In that little country where fiction was forbidden, reality overcame any most perverted fiction in the scale of symbolic violence and utopia.

I have returned from the land of children. Half of the country's population is under 17. The rest are largely under 30. The few people I have met older than myself were peasants, who don't talk much, and of course don't read and write. I have also met the magnificent people of Angkor , the capital of the vast Khmer Empire, but they were made of stone. Their features were exactly like those of the more recent Cambodians I saw staring at me from the photographs at the country's Genocide Museum . Staring from the day when they were murdered by children soldiers, sometimes even their own children. And that was the day that Cambodia 's history stopped.

Not paused, like it did in Nazi Germany or, hopefully, Stalinist Russia, but stopped completely. Cambodia is the living example of eradicated cultural continuity. It is the Marxist idea taken to the degree of absolute purity, where even the Chinese Great Leap was not swift enough.

I have studied in several high schools, in Russia and the US . We did not study the example of Cambodia . In the country itself, the children don't study the Khmer Rouge period. Meanwhile, this biggest genocide on earth (if calculated in percentage of people killed) is also an example of a small country dragged into a nearby larger scale war. It was directly because of the US bombings of the Cambodian-Vietnamese border in the end of the 1960's and beginning of the 1970's that the extreme ignorance outweighed in Cambodia and their own radical communists, not popular in the past, quickly gained in popularity.

As other bombings, now in a different ancient civilization, continue boosting the popularity of another organization of ignorant radicals, I wonder: In America's new Vietnam , who will be the new Cambodia ?