The 20th Century featured many examples of genocide, mass murder, brutality, and other forms of human horror at the hands of totalitarian governments.  Perhaps none was worse — at least in terms of the proportion of the population slaughtered and resulting impact on the survivors — than Cambodia.

The commandant of the notorious S-21, or Tuol Sleng, is currently on trial.  The proceedings offer a stark reminder of what monstrosities cruel social engineers with guns can wreak.  Reports Reuters:

A senior Khmer Rouge prison guard on Thursday told a war crimes tribunal he was forced to send thousands of detainees to an execution site, where they were brutally killed and their bodies thrown into mass graves.

Him Huy, 54, a guard at Phnom Penh’s notorious S-21 prison, said he was ordered by Pol Pot’s chief jailor to transport prisoners to a rice field where they were stripped naked and beaten with clubs as they bled to death.

“All prisoners were blindfolded so they did not know where they were taken and their hands were tied up to prevent them from contesting us,” Huy told the joint United Nations-Cambodian tribunal.

“They were asked to sit on the edge of the pits and they were struck with stick on their necks,” he said, his voice breaking as he gave his harrowing account of the Choeung Ek executions.

“Their throats were slashed before we removed their handcuffs and clothes, and they were thrown into the pits.”

Huy was testifying against S-21 chief Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, the first of the five indicted former Khmer Rouge cadres to face trial.

I’ve visited both Tuol Sleng and the so-called Killing Fields.  The experience is incredibly depressing and moving.  These sites should be mandatory viewing for anyone tempted to surrender his or her liberty, even to the most supposedly well-meaning politicians, bureaucrats, and activists.

(H/t to Paul Chesser, who has been blogging regularly on the trial.)

Remembering Government at Its Worst is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Thus explained Khmer Rouge apparatchiks on why children of perceived regime enemies were killed.

In the midst of America’s political and economic mess, it is worth remembering how blessed we are and how deep humanity can fall.  Cambodia is in the process of trying the former commandant of Tuol Sleng, a prison that specialized in torture and murder, and from which only a handful of prisoners emerged alive.

Reports the Associated Press:

The Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s killed babies and toddlers — sometimes by holding their legs and smashing their heads against trees — so they would not seek revenge later in life, the group’s former chief jailer said Monday.

Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, commanded the Khmer Rouge’s notorious S-21 prison, where as many as 16,000 men, women and children are believed to have been tortured before being sent to their deaths.

Duch, 66, is being tried by a U.N.-assisted genocide tribunal for crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and torture. An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died under the 1975-79 communist Khmer Rouge regime from forced labor, starvation, medical neglect and executions.

…

Duch recounted a Khmer Rouge policy on detained children: “There is no gain to keep them, and they might take revenge on you,” which he said was told to him by the regime’s former defense minister, Son Sen.

Today Tuol Sleng is a museum.  I visited it several years ago, along with the “killing fields,” in which thousands of the Khmer Rouge’s victims were buried.  Seeing the former prison is an experience simultaneously moving, sobering, chilling, and depressing.  It offers a tragic reminder of the horrors that result when sinful human beings take control of powerful state institutions and seek to remake society.  No wonder liberty is so precious.

“There Is No Gain to Keep Them” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog