Cambodia: The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

The Killing Fields are a dismal and raw reminder of the Khmer Rouge's social engineering and rule in Cambodia.  Led by Pol Pot, who envisioned an agrarian-based communist society which devoted its human resources to agricultural output, particularly a massive increase in rice production, the Khmer Rouge carried out a massive genocide mainly between 1975 and 1978.  This was inspired by Pol Pot's ideology of self reliance, similar sounding to the juche philosophy which is idealized by North Korea.  In this new agrarian-based society, individuals educated in any kind of Western or non-agricultural practice, such as the doctors and lawyers in Cambodia at that time, were summarily rounded up and executed at killing fields like Choeung Ek, which I visited outside Phnom Penh.  Many were kept and tortured first in the Tuol Sleng center, now the Genocide museum.

Though today the number killed is debated, most estimates put it somewhere between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, or, as the audio guide we were given at Choeung Ek said: think of your own country, and imagine if one and every five people in it were murdered.