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CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
gives us the "New China" without illusions: from the
"millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes
to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn
on What's wrong with the U.S. left.
They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies
about 9/11; they're blogging; they're confusing a medium with
a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq.
John Ross
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Now!
On July 4, 2006, the Palestinian Centre
for Human Rights issued a press release: An Israeli helicopter
gunship had fired a second rocket on the Islamic University campus
in Gaza; Atfaluna institute for children with hearing disabilities
was damaged due to sonic booms earlier in the week; and two bombs
had been dropped on Dar Al-Aqram School.
It is easy enough to view the
damage to these structures as something that can be rebuilt if
all we see is the physical; it is far more difficult to grasp
the unmistakably metaphor of such destruction. The metaphor is
a calculated strategy that has been employed repeatedly over
centuries by forces seeking dominance: "Destroy cultural
continuity and you can destroy the community; strike the repositories
of learning and culture; break the thread." One of the most
unfathomable aspects of recent events is why the U.S. does not
call out these crimes against humanity as the unmistakable metaphors
present themselves.
I can't help thinking about
my dear friend in Gaza who recently received her MBA in library
science. Last year in August, she sent me pictures of herself
along with other members of the library staff. There they were,
smiling, calmly cataloguing and shelving books in preparation
for the opening of the new learning facility for the children
of Gaza. I have thought back on those pictures on many occasions.
It is hard to image the type of unshakable courage and persistence
of vision a person would have to maintain in order to go to work
every day, submitting one's self to the precision of the Dewey
Decimal System, all the while, everything around you is in militaristic
upheaval with no apparent end in sight.
Cambodia
Then
Two decades ago, I sat on a
plane headed for Ithaca, New York. I was on my way to Cornell
University to view Cambodian palm-leaf manuscripts with Sos Kem.
The manuscripts had been rescued following the genocidal rampage
and the attempted cultural cleansing of the Cambodian people
by the Khmer Rouge in the mid-70s.
Cornell has played an instrumental
role in rehabilitating Cambodia's library and archival infrastructures.
When the outside world arrived in Phnom Penh to assess the destruction,
the National Library of Cambodia was being used as a piggery,
and its courtyard, a place to raise chickens. Of the books that
remained on the library shelves, pages had been torn out to help
fuel indoor cooking fires and to fashion cigarettes. After 1979,
the end of Year Zero, only two of the original forty staff members
returned to the Library.
A little boy was sitting next
me on the plane and he was very curious about my reading materials.
He ask me where I was going and why; he was going to see his
grandparents. I wanted to be honest but not shocking. I slowly
slid into the story of genocide in Cambodia during the reign
of the Khmer Rouge. I told him a group of people led by a man
named Pol Pot decided to reverse everything in the Cambodian
people's lives. To do this, they attempted to destroyed all the
objects, artifacts, forms of entertainment, social services,
and other privileges a culture collectively enjoys. I told him
that it was a concerted effort to disconnect the people; if they
could disconnect the people by the very things that provided
them continuity, the Khmer Rouge believed they could control
them.
I showed him what I had with
me: pictures of the library in disarray (he was visibly upset
by the sight of pigs running through a library; he attended a
private school and this was not how they treated rooms where
their books were kept). I explained to him how even the publishing
houses were destroyed so that new information couldn't be produced.
People who wore glasses and/or who spoke other languages were
killed because these characteristics were thought to signify
formal education and intelligence . He sat silent for a very
long time and then replied, "Oh, I think I know why this
man Pol Pot did this." I ask, "Why?" The boy answered,
"He wasn't very smart and so he didn't want other people
in his country to be smart either."
His mother, who was sitting
in the row in front of us and who had been listening the whole
time, twisted around to hear what might be said next. The boy's
conclusions made sense, as far as crimes against humanity can
ever make sense to the historical mind, and yet this was a vital
juncture in the telling of the facts that make such occurrences
more hideous and unfathomable to the human heart.
"Yes," I said, "that
would make sense but this is not the case. Pol Pot spoke fluent
French and was educated by a Catholic college in Cambodia before
studying in France. He read Verlaine and Nietzsche, in short,
he knew better. And this makes it all the more inexcusable; Pol
Pot tried to take away the people's cultural continuity; he destroyed
their books so they could never return to the place they had
been for thousands of years."
Laray Polk is an artist, activist and founder
of the Dallas chapter of Women in Black. She can be contacted
at laraypolk@earthlink.net.
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