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Where I stand
Where I stand After my comments in the previous posts on the Fall of man and Redemption of man, you may like to know where I stand. Well, I’m standing here under this tree and look up and think it’s beautiful. Through our observations of nature, and our thoughts and studies, we have come to…
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Redemption of man
Redemption of man or the cross in the mountains If God is in the details (“Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail”, Aby Warburg), then He is more present in the fly on the cross than in the man nailed to it. In any case, I have always admired the fly resting for a moment on…
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Fall of man
Fall of man Adam and Eve, driven out of paradise by an angry god. What had they done wrong? They had committed the first, original sin. They had eaten the fruit of ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’, which God had expressly forbidden. As a result, the first man and woman lost…
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Silent witnesses
Silent witnesses As I walked amongst the thousand-year-old Khmer monuments, with the guardian deities on the gopuras gazing out over the land in all four directions with their inward-turned faces, I could not help but see them as silent witnesses to the horrors that had ravaged Cambodia only a few decades ago. They had all…
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New life, new hope
New life, new hope What does the boy in the photograph see, what does he feel, and what associations does the image of the woman evoke in him? His apparently intense gaze and the way he is holding the woman by the arm suggest that she reminds him of his mother or another close relative.…
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Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation
Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation With the defeat of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, the survivors of four years of terror were gradually able to rebuild their lives. As a quarter of the population had perished, almost every family had lost several loved ones. Some people were…
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Derailment of the mind
Derailment of the mind This is how I tend to look at people who are guided in their thinking and actions by extreme fanaticism. But one might as well say that the fanatic mind is not derailed; on the contrary, it perceives only one rail, only one track to a certain end which it follows…
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Killing Fields
Killing Fields Chamkar Krauch30 burial pits 450 bodies Me Chbar 1 prison burial pit 300 bodies Veal Batt Kanga rice field 500 bodies Tuol Roung Chrey 1 mass grave 400 bodies Banteay O Ta Krey 35 burial pits 4000 bodies Phlauv Meas30 burial pits 200-250 bodies Wat Samdech Muny 6 mass graves 5-6000 bodies Chumnik5-6…
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Democratic Kampuchea
Democratic Kampuchea or the invention of hell Angkar, the mysterious name (meaning ‘the Organisation’) behind which Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime hid, had changed the name of Cambodia to Democratic Kampuchea. During their four-year totalitarian rule, the population was forcibly ‘re-educated’ and indoctrinated according to Angkar’s radical communist ideology. A collection of slogans and orders…
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Angkar, Angkor
Angkar, Angkor Two similar images, two similar words, but referring to two very different memorable episodes in the history of Cambodia. Angkar (“the organisation”), being the name the Khmer Rouge used for its own leadership. Between 1975 and 1979, Angkar’s regime of terror caused the death of approximately one quarter of the total population of…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
καιρός remembered 