The Cambodian genocide was not necessarily an event, but a prolonged period of time that heavily disturbed the citizens of that country and resulted in a lot of loss of property and lives. I have previously learned about the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the genocide in Lithuania through books, memoirs, and the media. I know even more about the old and ongoing Burmese crisis and genocide through stories of torture, terror, separation and relief, refuge and reunion. While the loss, economically, will vary in all of these times in history, the loss, emotionally, is incomparable.
In Loung’s case, this story was beautifully crafted because it not only explained the physical torture and injustice, but also the abuse done to the mind and wellbeing of a little child. I have recently read Between Shades Of Gray, a story from the point of view of a teenage girl, Lina, as she becomes a part of the genocide in Lithuania, written in past tense. In both cases, since the narrator was a relatively young person, the naive tone of the texts made the story more emotional and authentic. The conditions of both the survivors, physically, were very similar - starved, sick, and suffering. Additionally, both were suffering with and for their families, both were abused mentally and emotionally, both were also rescued. The mental state of both the protagonists were however different. Since Loung was so young, her story seemed more authentic. Moreover, since the author wrote the story in present tense, her story (like the author said), impacted the reader more as the child did not ‘filter’ or ‘rethink’ about the events she was going through unlike someone who would be describing events in retrospect.
Overall, the ‘conducting’ of a genocide is very manipulative, propagandistic, and complex, however such acts can be simply classified as acts committed to spread fear and propagated through stigma or prejudice. As a society, we are very much capable of committing such horrific acts, intentionally or otherwise. A genocide is not always a product of a powerful force evicting or abusing a stigmatized minority, the bystanders are also equally to be blamed. As fictional or dystopian as it may seem, as we run out of villains, we start to find them in ourselves.
As Rod Serling, very accurately put it in the making of The Twilight Zone, “For the record, suspicion can kill, and prejudice can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own, for the children and the children yet unborn” (Serling). While, in the US, a genocide is not anticipated by the public in the near future, the prejudice against minorities such as, “aliens” or undocumented immigrants, muslims, the LGBTQ+ community, specifically those transgender, can lead to fatal consequences for the minority and for the nation as a whole. A genocide or a national crisis is never anticipated, something as small as normalization of racist slurs, catcalling, jokes can ultimately fuel dangerous crimes, and maybe even a genocide which is nothing but a mass killing of people (of usually the same group) done solely out of something as ridiculous as prejudice.
