Saturday, November 23, 2013
Political Science 101
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This has been plagiarized and modified from an article that has cruised the Internet for several years. Author unknown.FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all the cows. Only some of you work. The government rations the milk equally.
BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and as many eggs as the regulations say you should need.
FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.
PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You are forced to take care of them, no one works hard and the government rations some of the milk back to you. Everyone is malnourished except for the politicians.
RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.
DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.
SINGAPOREAN DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. The government fines you for keeping two unlicensed farm animals in an apartment and you get caned.
MILITARISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.
PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for it. After the election, the president is impeached for speculating in cow futures. The press dubs the affair "Cowgate".
Obama Democracy: You have two cows. Obama promises you can keep your cows if you vote for him. If you voted for Obama, you get free cows and other people take care of them for you. If you did not vote for Obama, the government spies on and persecutes you, makes you take care of your cows and everyone's cows who voted for Obama.
BRITISH DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. You feed them sheep's brains and they go mad. The government doesn't do anything.
ANARCHY: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbours try to kill you and take the cows.
CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull, milk is plentiful and inexpensive.
HONG KONG CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly-listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows' milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because the fung shui is bad.
ENVIRONMENTALISM: You have two cows. The government bans you from milking or killing them.
FEMINISM: You have two cows. They get married and adopt a veal calf and blame men for cow pies.
TOTALITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: You are associated with (the concept of "ownership" is a symbol of the male-centric, war-mongering, intolerant past) two differently-aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.
COUNTER CULTURE: Wow, dude, there's like... these two cows, man. You got to have some of this milk.
SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
Know Your Communist Genocides...
This organization is remembered especially for orchestrating a Genocide, which resulted from the enforcement of its social engineering policies. Can You guess? No, It is not the Obama genocides (not yet anyways), it's our cute commie friends the Khmer Rouge or Red Khmers. The Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities." Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education. Now who would want lots of people with poor education? Oh, that's right, Democrats.The Khmer Rouge believed that parents were tainted with capitalism, so they separated children from their parents and indoctrinated them in communism. And That would be happening now in where? You got it, common core classrooms, in the good ole USSA.
Anyways, I ran across the below blog post of some travelers touring the killing fields in Cambodia, thought I would re-post:
For the driver, today is just like any other day, and we are just two more tourists who he’ll drive first to the Killing Fields, where over 20,000 Cambodians were brutally murdered and buried in shallow mass graves from 1976-1979. Then the tuk-tuk will sputter over to Tuol Sleng, or S-21, the school which was turned into a prison where those same Cambodians were imprisoned and brutally tortured for days, weeks, months at a time before being transported to the Killing Fields. At the end of this day, he says will also bring us to the Russian Market, a fairly large market area with tourist trinkets, which seems fine at the time.
Before we stepped through the doors, however, we were confronted by a legless blind man begging for money outside. I decide he is, no doubt, a victim of the regime, who now spends his days outside one of the darkest locations in Cambodia’s history.
The hardest moment came at the end, when we were just about to leave. One of the seven survivors was sitting at a table in front of the prison, signing copies of his tale of survival. There was a part in both of us that wanted to run to him, grab his hand, cry with him, buy his book, but something held us both back. The thought of returning, every day, to the place where I was hung from poles by my ankles, with my face hanging in a bucket of water (or worse), electrocuted, cut, beaten and forced to live on rice water for months at a time…this was too shocking.
We walk out with the heaviest of hearts, and limply agree to stop at the Russian Market as planned, though at this point I may have paid him double just to go back to the hotel. We wander through the tourist trinkets and buy a coconut, but don’t last more than twenty minutes at the market. A thought hits me on the ride back…maybe my tuk-tuk driver wasn’t a victim…what if he was a child soldier? What if that beggar out in front of S-21 was, too? In fact, how many people in the Russian Market, selling t-shirts, headphones or perfumes were Khmer Rouge soldiers and how many were victims? Anyone between the age of 40-60 must have been involved one way or the other. There has been hardly any accountability for what happened in the years from 1975-1979. So little, in fact, that Pol Pot himself died safely and peacefully in exile in Thailand in 1998, never brought to trial for his sins. And today, in 2012, the UN tribunal trying the highest Khmer Rouge leaders is still making headlines.
Bargaining for a ride to slaughter
The strangest part about a visit to Phnom Penh takes place right at the start. As you do in most South East Asian cities, the day begins by bargaining with a tuk-tuk driver over the price of a day tour. Except today we are making this driver take us out to visit sites where thousands of people were tortured and murdered.
For the driver, today is just like any other day, and we are just two more tourists who he’ll drive first to the Killing Fields, where over 20,000 Cambodians were brutally murdered and buried in shallow mass graves from 1976-1979. Then the tuk-tuk will sputter over to Tuol Sleng, or S-21, the school which was turned into a prison where those same Cambodians were imprisoned and brutally tortured for days, weeks, months at a time before being transported to the Killing Fields. At the end of this day, he says will also bring us to the Russian Market, a fairly large market area with tourist trinkets, which seems fine at the time.
So how much are we supposed to pay for this? At first he wants $20…but we have been in Cambodia for a few weeks now and know that is far too high. Without much effort, we get him down to $10. While we don’t exactly feel comfortable bargaining down, what comes next truly disturbs us. In order to make an extra $5 our driver attempts to offer an extra element to the day: he wants us to start off the day with a visit to a shooting range.
Do we want to go to a shooting range?
Apparently, the shooting range is one of the ten or so main options offered by all tuk-tuk drivers in Phnom Penh. We are about to go learn about the mass murder of over two million innocent Cambodians. We have a heavy feeling of dread, fear, and sadness about what we are about to go do, and we haven’t even gotten there yet. What kind of person would want to shoot things up after a day like we were about to have (it turns out, plenty of people do).
We politely and incredulously decline, and off we go to the Killing Fields. Roughly 45 years old, the driver would have been a child during the time the Khmer Rouge were in power. He has most likely lost dozens of family members and friends, and now spends every day taking tourists out to where some of the most heinous crimes were committed. Needless to say, we definitely feel uncomfortable thinking about that for too long.
Humbling moments at the Killing Fields
We are not the first to arrive here, and at first I cringe at the bus loads of well-fed tourists mulling about with their headsets on. They are listening to an audio-tour, no different than a day out at an art museum and the contrast to the starvation and suffering on these grounds 30 years ago was too much to handle for me. But within a few minutes of listening in, I realize how important it is for people to come here and learn about the genocide unleashed on Cambodia by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
In school, we learn about Nazi Germany under the pretext that genocide must never happen again, yet no mention was made of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge killed anyone who was educated or spoke foreign languages, while others were forced to work in labor camps. Over 25% of the population, or 2 million people, were killed from 1975-1979, in order to create the all-agrarian society Pol Pot believed was necessary in order to free Cambodia and make it independent of outside influence.
There are moments here that I will never forget.
Visualizing how the ground bubbled up as gasses from the 20,000 buried bodies were released. Seeing the clothes that had rotted off the victims still scattered on the ground, partially exposed by wind and rain. Standing in front of the Killing Tree, against which Khmer Rouge soldiers bashed babies and their mothers like sacks of potatoes until they died; the price of bullets too precious to waste.
Stop 18, the last stop on the walking tour, brings you to the massive pagoda, the center point of what is now a memorial park. Over 9,000 skulls are piled inside this 17-storey structure, along with bones and more piles of clothing. Witnessing this makes the scale of the killing truly tangible. As at other points of the tour, I am immediately sick; nausea mixes with a piercing pain in my temples and an angry fire in my heart and my stomach too hard to explain.
Chances of survival slim to none
We learn at our next stop, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, that of the 20,000 people who were tortured at this former prison, only seven people survived. Around the country there was a much higher rate of survival, but here at S-21, just stepping through the doors meant sentencing to months of torture before eventual death.
Before we stepped through the doors, however, we were confronted by a legless blind man begging for money outside. I decide he is, no doubt, a victim of the regime, who now spends his days outside one of the darkest locations in Cambodia’s history.
Passing through the doors, thousands of fearful eyes stare back at us, in the form of black and white photographs. Head shots of every single man, woman and child brought to this detention center were taken, methodically documented their arrival. I stare at photograph after photograph choking back tears, knowing that if I let one fall, I won’t be able to stop.
The hardest moment came at the end, when we were just about to leave. One of the seven survivors was sitting at a table in front of the prison, signing copies of his tale of survival. There was a part in both of us that wanted to run to him, grab his hand, cry with him, buy his book, but something held us both back. The thought of returning, every day, to the place where I was hung from poles by my ankles, with my face hanging in a bucket of water (or worse), electrocuted, cut, beaten and forced to live on rice water for months at a time…this was too shocking.We walk out with the heaviest of hearts, and limply agree to stop at the Russian Market as planned, though at this point I may have paid him double just to go back to the hotel. We wander through the tourist trinkets and buy a coconut, but don’t last more than twenty minutes at the market. A thought hits me on the ride back…maybe my tuk-tuk driver wasn’t a victim…what if he was a child soldier? What if that beggar out in front of S-21 was, too? In fact, how many people in the Russian Market, selling t-shirts, headphones or perfumes were Khmer Rouge soldiers and how many were victims? Anyone between the age of 40-60 must have been involved one way or the other. There has been hardly any accountability for what happened in the years from 1975-1979. So little, in fact, that Pol Pot himself died safely and peacefully in exile in Thailand in 1998, never brought to trial for his sins. And today, in 2012, the UN tribunal trying the highest Khmer Rouge leaders is still making headlines.
Find out more about Cambodia’s history
If you are interested in finding out more about the Khmer Rouge, please read First They Killed My Father
, the autobiography of Luong Ung, a Cambodian woman who was just five years old when her family and thousands of others were evacuated from Phnom Penh in 1975. Her incredible story of survival takes you on her journey, from near starvation in a labor camp to becoming an orphan to time as a child soldier and on to her new life in the United States. Her second book, Lucky Child,
tells the heartwarming story of the family’s reunion in Cambodia, a country that continues to heal.
, the autobiography of Luong Ung, a Cambodian woman who was just five years old when her family and thousands of others were evacuated from Phnom Penh in 1975. Her incredible story of survival takes you on her journey, from near starvation in a labor camp to becoming an orphan to time as a child soldier and on to her new life in the United States. Her second book, Lucky Child,tells the heartwarming story of the family’s reunion in Cambodia, a country that continues to heal.How to get to Phnom Penh
You can travel to Phnom Penh from Thailand by bus (about 12 hours from Bangkok) or take a cheap flight from Bangkok. If you are coming from Siem Reap, you can either fly or take a bus (5 – 6 hours).
Friday, November 22, 2013
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