Read Online When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker - Free Book Online

outlawed for all but the privileged people.
    Cambodia’s communist leaders so distrusted foreigners that they cut off the country from the rest of the world to build their revolution. This need to pull away, to be the best in the world, the best in Cambodian history, the best communists, was the result of particular strains in Cambodian history and the twists and turns of communist revolution in Asia. Cambodians felt they had been pushed to the bottom by friends who turned out to be enemies. They felt so threatened they set out to prove they were one of the superior races and nations in order to save themselves from extinction.
    Retracing that history can begin to explain this extreme psychology as well as the ideas, myths, fears, and events that ultimately—but not inevitably—led to the tragic revolution of the Khmer Rouge.

    French descriptions of the ancient water empire of Angkor, which flourished from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries, provided the god-king inspiration for Cambodia’s rulers, the country’s cultural pride, and a particularly Khmer view of the world that has lasted to this day. The purported ways
of that empire provided a model not only for the modern deva-raj, Prince Sihanouk, but for those who challenged him for the right to govern.
    Colonial accounts of Angkor’s decline, feuds within the royal family that facilitated foreign conquest of Cambodia, combined with the realities of ninety years of French colonial rule, added bitterness to the legacy. By the time Cambodia won its independence in this century, its people believed its national pride had been severely wounded, neighboring Siam and Vietnam had grabbed their territory, nearly always with the aid of a Khmer prince, and the French had declared Cambodians unfit for the modern era. Whenever a leader rose to challenge the French as occurred during the Second World War, he was done in as often by his fellow Khmer as any foreign figure.
    Kingship and Buddhism were said to have survived through the centuries of upheaval. After independence, however, pressures created by Sihanouk’s attempt to insulate his country, his version of the monarchy and its culture from his notions of limiting modernity from versions advocated by other Cambodians merged with pressures from the Vietnam War to help create the Khmer Rouge and eventually usher in their revolution.

    The touchstone of Cambodian history, of Cambodia’s identity, is the temple complex at Angkor. Those massive stone wonders are to modern Cambodians what the Parthenon is to today’s Greeks—architectural masterpieces and solid, visible reminders that Cambodia was once the premier state and culture of the region.
    The early Khmers who built the Angkor kingdom and society were people with boundless ambition and a robust attitude toward culture. They had a natural bent toward borrowing and adapting ideas whether on a spiritual or a practical plane. And they were artists. There was a strong sense of beauty and grace, balance and proportion to their irrigation systems as well as to their delicate carvings.
    Accomplishments in architecture and irrigation engineering are the foundation of Angkor’s impressive reputation. In both endeavors, the Khmers borrowed ideas from other cultures and transformed them. By the sixth century they inherited the rudiments of hydraulic engineering from earlier peoples of the lower Mekong valley who had learned how to drain their delta swamplands, controlling the monsoon deluge as well as retaining water for irrigation in the dry season. The style of Angkor architecture owes a large debt to Champa, Angkor’s rival state to the east. The Khmers borrowed
the forms of Champa as well as its technique for wood carving, which the Khmers used on their soft stone.

    India made the greatest contribution to the Angkor society. The Indian culture—its religion, philosophy, political beliefs, and language—gave the Khmers the