Denise
"I was just in one of those refugee camps along the Cambodian border a few weeks ago. The stories you hear are terrible. Unimaginable! Not since World War II. Looking at those poor people. God! What America has done to that part of the world."
"America?" questioned Derek. "Look, there are five interzones and one special zone, each with a party committee, each committee with a security section. Pol Pot controls all of this directly. He makes the decisions; the security apparatus carries them out."
"But I'm not talking about how it's being done; I'm talking about why, about what drove those people to this extremity."
"Hmmmm." What approach could be more unAmerican?
"You think these mass killings would have been taking place had America not supplied and then conducted the thirty year-long Viet Nam war, had it not supported Cambodian opposition groups over a decade and more, had it not had its Cambodian invasion, had it not bombed those people beyond belief, had it not supported Lon Nol to the bitter end? Why, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the U.S. made an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Sihanouk."
"Hmmmm." She just ain't got da least reeee-spect!
"You think a whole society goes berserk without reason? You believe -- with the REALLY INTELLIGENT PEOPLE serving in the American media moguls' press corps -- that the decision of a few idiots on the Khmer Rouge Central Executive Committee to return the society to a pre-urban, agrarian basis is what has caused all this killing? that these people are simply extremely misguided idealists? SHIT! am I sufficiently a goddamned imbecile to buy an explanation like that for mega-mass murder? The whole society has lapsed into a psychotic state, and the Khmer Rouge leadership is simply the agent effectuating the psychosis. It's hardly surprising that since the heart of French and especially American strategy for murdering the cultures of Laos, Viet Nam, and Cambodia was forced deruralization, that when hysteria finally overcame one of the victimized population groups, it should have taken the compensatory form of forced deurbanization. The psyche does have a tendency to mirror -- as we so readily see in the imagery of dreams. But what caused this mass sickness? Thirty years of American cultural aggression in Indochina stacked on top of decades of French capitalism's 'civilizing mission' -- both making absolutely every effort to assassinate indigenous cultural values and social forms under the barrel of a gun -- are the responsible agencies of the psychosis driving the holocaust."
On the walk over, Derek had learned that Denise was an expatriot American from Iowa, currently splitting her time between Chiang Mai, Thailand and Ubud, Bali.