14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

130 Harun Farocki
4. In1970, a Vietnam War opponent might have said, ‘The answer is that the Vietcong
may have dropped a bomb on these children, but it isn’t their policy to drop bombs
on children. This US soldier is torturing a farmer, and that is the policy of the US.’
On being reproached in 1979 for failing to acknowledge the millions killed under
Pol Pot’s regime, Jan Myrdal observed: ‘The interesting thing is that the American
journalists who reported Vietcong atrocities were right. You could just as well describe
Africa. You could ask, “Who ate Lumumba’s Liver?” It was probably
Tschombe. At least that’s what Indira Gandhi says. You then take the next picture,
this one showing a Tanzanian soldier happily saying, “When we catch Amin we
will eat his flesh.” And you then build on this. By doing this, you are doubtlessly
showing facts, but giving a rather unsystematic version of reality.
‘I don’t think that you are lying, but that you work in the same shoddy, unstructured
way as the others. You pose two questions: Vietnam’s invasion and the genocide,
but because the genocide comes across better, you go on to show the
genocide on television three times and to emphasise only this point in interviews.
[...]
I did not say that this was a peasant war without first considering the matter. I am
referring back to our own history as well as that of Asia. There is a strange conception
that peasant wars are beautiful. They aren’t at all. Peasant wars have been
among the bloodiest wars we have ever had, have now, or will ever have. Within
the next forty, fifty, sixty years we will see developments similar to those in Kampuchea
occurring in many places. Many cities will be emptied. Then it won’t be so
much a question of whether one likes peasant wars or not, but only of stating that
this is what is happening. What frightens people in our countries is the cities being
emptied. That has to be scary here. It scares the left wing whose social basis is in
the urban middle classes. It doesn’t really frighten the farmers in Bihar. They aren’t
scared at all.
‘The propaganda against Kampuchea speaks about children no longer there – we
saw masses of children; of women who can’t have babies – it was obvious that a lot
had had children; of families not allowed to live together – they obviously lived together;
of parents who were gotten rid of – but they were walking on the street, we
saw them. In the entire, vast area we travelled through there was obviously food,
but no soldiers. The soldiers were away at the fronts. Everyone said so. They were
at the fronts of a new war. I don’t say there was nobody on guard nearby, but we
couldn’t see them. I believe that behind the Vietnamese occupation, you have to
see the Vietnamese tradition of seeking to dominate Indochina’s smaller nations,
but also their rice fields. Kampuchea is a rich – potentially rich – country. The Vietnamese
need empty land. They need three million to be dead so they can get their
rice. As I understand it, that’s what it’s about.
The great genocide, which was a real genocide, was the war fought against the US.
We can argue whether it was 500,000 or a million who lost their lives. One can
never know precisely. The second genocide is happening right now. The Vietnamese
are emptying the country of Kampucheans. In-between there was a bloody uprising
which I believe – although I didn’t see it, we saw no sign of it where we
travelled – was not organised violence which got out of control, but rather a normal
commotion which one was attempting to bring under control. [...]