Like all totalitarian regimes, the government of Pol Pot intimidated, tortured, maimed, maligned, harassed, and ultimately destroyed the lives of almost everyone it touched.

Today we visited S 21 Prison in Phnom Penh. It made me cry.

But I should back up a bit.

Even though people want easy answers, when it comes to warfare, asking “who started it” and “who won” are usually not easily answered questions.

In war, things become very convoluted. Each of the sides tells it’s version of the story. The people at the top making the decisions aren’t experiencing the horrors of what’s happening on the ground on a personal level. The people on the ground are doing what they’ve been trained to do, which almost always is to follow orders.

Sometimes people work to tell the truth, and sometimes people work to hide the truth.

I don’t have simple answers for you.

Because I didn’t understand anything about the history of Cambodia (and understood very little about Vietnam) before coming here, I’m going to attempt to summarize what I’ve learned very quickly.

Note: I may not have this all correct. It’s quite convoluted, even on Wikipedia and other “more reputable” sources of information.

I’m also sticking to just a few years in recent history.

For those not familiar with the geography, Vietnam is next to Cambodia.

Vietnam has its own history, but it’s inexorably tied with Cambodian history, going back thousands of years.

During the 1950’s and through 1970, Cambodia was (and is once again), a monarchy.

In Vietnam, from 1950-1975, the Viet Cong (a separate organization from the North Vietnamese government, but basically one which became a fighting arm of the North Vietnamese), while fighting the French and Americans in Southern Vietnam, ran supply routes through Cambodia.

Cambodia didn’t like this.

Also during the time, the King of Camobdia wasn’t very nice to those who opposed him (killing or sending up to 50,000 people to concentration camps).

Sometime in the late 60’s, the king went on a foreign relations trip, telling the government of Cambodia to stage protests against Vietnam in his absence.

The protesters went crazy and looted the embassies of both the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese governments.

Even though he had ordered the protests, the king, while in Paris, blamed the protests on others.

A coup took place with the government officially removing the king.

By 1970, civil war had erupted in Cambodia.

In an effort to reclaim the country, the king encouraged people to join in the fight against the government, by joining a new communist movement (supported by the North Vietnamese and Chinese), known as the Khmer Rouge.

As part of this effort and during this time (1970-1975) Vietnam also was making forays into Cambodia, trying to replace the government for one more friendly to the Vietnamese version of Communism.

Bear in mind, this is all during the Vietnam/American war.

While all of that was going on, America, in an effort to push north in Vietnam and also to stop the Viet Cong from pushing south, began carpet bombing (as official policy) much of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to the north (despite treaties from all parties saying Laos would remain neutral).

Over 2.8 million tons of bombs are estimated to have been dropped over Cambodia. No one knows the exact number of people who died as a result. Numbers vary.

America also never declared war.

From the numbers I’ve read though, everyone seems to agree that at least 200,000 people died in Cambodia as a result of the carpet bombing campaigns.

The Khmer Rouge used the massive bombings of in Eastern Cambodia to aid in their propaganda and recruitment of members.

Keep in mind that Cambodia only had 7 million people at the time. 200,000 people being killed meant losing 3% of their population.

(By way of comparison, that would be the equivalent of 9 million people being bombed in the US.)

By 1975, the Khmer Rouge (headed by Pol Pot) eventually gained control of Cambodia. Because they initially said they were there to defend people against America and Vietnam, and because the king had told people to join them, the Khmer Rouge took power with the support of much of the population.

They got people to move out of the cities by saying that America and/or Vietnam were coming to bomb the cities.

Within weeks, millions of people had been moved to the countryside of Cambodia, to what are known as “the killing fields”.

This was an area where people (men, women, and children) were worked to death.

It was the educated people who were most likely to be forced to work.

The plan was to put the peasant class into positions of power, while putting the educated class to death, building the new future of the country based on an agrarian model.

It’s got lots of twists and turns, but that’s the gist. For the next 4 years, the Khmer Rouge destroyed anything and everything it didn’t agree with.

By 1979 (when the Vietnamese finally ousted Pol Pot militarily), 1.5 million to 3 million Cambodians had been killed.

In 4 years, as many as 3 million people were annihilated.

There is no one in this country today whose life was not forever changed because of those four years in the history of Cambodia.

Our tour guide today for the S21 prison was alive to give us our tour only because she escaped one of the work camps at the killing fields, and fled to Vietnam.

She was 10.

Her father and siblings did not survive the Khmer Rouge takeover of the country.

And that brings us to S 21 prison, one of many buildings used to torture and destroy people before ultimately killing them.

S 21 had been a school.

Under Pol Pot, schools were banned and viewed as negative relics of the old regime.

So were movie theaters, music not approved by the political party, dancing, relationships, procreating, the ownership of personal property, books not approved by the political party, etc.

The school was turned into a prison, and re-named S21 Prison, for the district where it was housed.

The houses around the prison had been homes. They became places for military offers and political cadres to occupy.

Over 20,000 people came to S 21 prison over 4 years.

Only 7 made it out alive.

Fingernails removed by pliers,
People hung upside down and waterboarded until they confessed to anything they were told to confess to (and then killed through starvation or beatings anyway),
Metal boxes people were forced to carry with them as their place to go to the bathroom
2×3 cells where people were chained to the floor
Blood stains that remain on the floors and walls

It’s an example of a place where humans do to one another all the things we think humans shouldn’t do to one another.

Being here made me cry.

Being here made me angry.

Being here made me think about atrocities continuing to be committed today at places like Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay.

Being here made me think a lot about North Korea and the atrocities that continue there today.

How long? How long must we sing this song?

I believe that we are awakening as a species. I believe that we are connecting better and relating more and generally (and rapidly) improving.

But experiencing the heights of our abilities as a species has also brought with it the depth of our destructive capability.

The images I saw of the torture committed at S 21 are the images of people living in a time and place when they were consumed by their own fear of themselves and their fellow man.


This was an official policy of evil, created to destroy for the gain of a few, not to build and advance humanity as a whole.

That is regression, not human advancement.

There is a common thread of thought in America today that torture is warranted in some situations.

I disagree.

In the depth of human emotion and experience, torturing another human being for information or intimidation results in what I will refer to for lack of a better word, as splatter.

This may not be true at the individual level, but every example I know of makes it true at the societal level.

Torture is like wanting to harvest fruit from an orchard of trees by lighting a stick of dynamite (with a short fuse) while holding it in your hand.

Your intention is to blow up the orchard so that you can harvest the remaining fruit.

If you are a torturer, will you be able to throw the dynamite into the orchard before it blows up in your hand and face?

More importantly, why are you using dynamite when there are significantly more effective (if more time consuming) methods for getting infinitely better results?

The greatest benefit of the other methods for gaining a harvest is that you gain the ability to produce fruit again.

I don’t know if this analogy will make sense to others, and it’s probably philosophy better suited for my site at Strive4impact.com rather than here on our travel site. So unless someone asks for it here, I will leave it for now.

Suffice it to say that I was incredibly saddened by what I saw here today.

And yet still remain hopeful about the future.

It’s important in travel (and life) to be open enough to let a place or experience change you.

When you are in Phnom Penh, you probably won’t want to visit this place.

But you should visit S21.

It’s important for humanity to understand itself, if we are to work toward a more peaceful, practical, and powerful future.

Thank you to those who keep these places alive with their stories, their contribution, and their bravery in being willing to share their experience. As in the concentration camps in Germany, these awful legacies of the past serve to remind us of our rights and responsibilities as self-aware beings growing ever closer all the time.

1.5 million to 3 million people (over 1/4 of all Cambodians at the time) were killed between 1970-1979, either by Vietnamese guns, United States bombs (the US is estimated to have dropped over 2 BILLION POUNDS of bombs over Cambodia during the Vietnam war), or at the hands of their own authoritarian governments. (4 governments in 10 years).