More than distance

I went to Tuol Sleng this afternoon. Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was labelled by the Khmer Rouge, used to be a school. When the revolution came it was turned into a detention and torture centre through which people would pass on their way to Pol Pot’s killing fields.

The building has been preserved largely in the state in which it was found, a reminder to new generations of the genocide that between 1975 and 1978 eliminated a fifth of the country’s population.

The buildings have that corroded air about them  typical of concrete buildings in the tropics that have not been recently painted. Wooden doors rest wide open now, while the louvered and barred windows stay firmly shut.

Building A, the ground floor, was reserved for senior officials and their special, solitary treatment. You can still see the empty bed frame in the middle of the floor of each room. On each bed lies the steel bar and leg irons used to keep each person immobile. Photos on the wall show the bodies of the last fourteen inmates found dead in the rooms of S-21 when Phnom Penh was liberated. In what are now sun and time bleached prints you can see their bodies twisted into unnatural shapes, the lake of blood beneath the bed frame, limbs battered out of shape. Some bodies have a glazed look, as if they had been burned. But I think it was just the blood caked to their flesh reflecting the light.

In other rooms there are displays of thousands of photos of the newly admitted prisoners. Their numbers are pinned to their shirts or in at least one case to the man’s chest. They are taken sitting bolt upright. Many look simply serious; others look frightened. In some you see the petrification of the most profound fear imaginable. In one I detected a smile of defiance.

One particularly haunting image is an admission photo of a woman posing stiffly upright with her baby on her lap apparently asleep. Whether it was asleep then or not it is difficult to say. In any event, it would not have outlived its mother. Apparently, babies were killed in front of their mothers by being bashed against trees, or dropped from a high balcony.

A further room contains an assortment of torture apparatuses. A large tank that would contain water. The prisoner would first lie down on his or her front in the tank and the feet would be cuffed to the bottom. The prisoner’s wrists would then be cuffed to the rim of the tank, and the tank filled with water. Drowning – real or simulated makes little odds – seemed to feature heavily in the contraptions present.

Pervading everything is an air of intimacy. Tuol Sleng is human scale; it was a school, after all, before it was turned over to detention and torture, and no doubt the kind of school where the teachers all knew all the children. The classrooms would have been small enough to  manage the attention of a huddle of twenty or thirty young children against the noises competing from other classes. Now they stand divided into multiple cells by low cheap earthenware brick walls. Where teachers would have kept an eye on children playing on the ropes suspended from a high wooden frame, fellow prisoners would have been able to hear the screams and eventual silence of their fellow inmates suspended by their wrists with their hands tied behind their backs.

It is a big leap from financial malfeasance to torture, even if the outcomes can both be tragic. But they both raise questions about human nature. NOTHING PERSONAL is premised on the idea that if only those who took the actions that ultimately led to the financial crisis could see the faces and learn the stories of the human tragedy they had provoked, they would be deterred from taking such actions again.

But in Tuol Sleng – as in the concentration camps behind the Nazi genocide against the Jews – proximity and an intimate understanding of the pain being caused to others was not enough to stop them inflicting that pain or eventual death.

There is clearly something else in play in that situation, something that overrides our empathy-driven natural moral sense. It seems to me to be ideology - a mental cage, containing the arguments and assumptions that justify the end regardless of the means. When we accept such cages they constrain our awareness of our own individual ability to think and to choose to act differently. We may be motivated to accept them out of fear, of the need to survive or even flourish within a given reality; a desperation to reach the top of the pile of humanity.

For many of those we are trying to reach through NOTHING PERSONAL, helping them learn about the stories we are finding may prove to be enough to motivate them to change the way they do business. For others we may need to dismantle the ideological lens through which they see the world and justify their actions. That would be a book in itself – one that this financial crisis is helping to write.