The 48 Laws Unite

The My Lai massacre - 504 killed. Men, women, children - civilians. The people I meet traveling. The woman and children in the photograph just before the cameraman turns his back to hear the sounds of their demise. Agent Orange and the deformed fetuses at home in the bottles of fermeldahyde. Soldiers with the heads of the decapitated. Wounded. Dying. death.

This is what the war had to offer. This is what the War Remnants Museum, formerly the Museum of American War Crimes, in Saigon has to offer. This is how the winner has written its history.

I walk out, thoroughly disturbed to meet a moto driver with a photo from his war days. "You go to war museum?""Ït very bullshit.""You only see Vietnam people die. Many American die too."

He's right, of course. We weren't fighting nothing. The Viet Cong. The North. And the South Vietnamese, too. They performed the same atrocities - you'd like to say they were worse, but once you cross a certain line it all comes from the fires of hell.

Yet reading the guestbook and talking to former visitors, the prison has its desired effect. "The U.S. will never learn?""Why did the US do this?""Why do we do this in Iraq now?" No mention of the VC's actions. No "Thank God WAR stopped Hitler, though." No "Saddam did it too." "The Angkarians.." just sympathy for the victims of the US opposition to power.

I think a better lesson, though, is the perilous nature of the human condition. We strive to live together. Peacefully. But conflict will always exist. So how do we walk the line between working to stop it, and learning to accept it. The museum on everyone who visits has the same effect as the media in the United States on everyone who tunes in, but reversed. The imaginary people of far away lands are now the Americans, and the real boys with values are Vietnamese.

Power.

The US government tells its citizens Asia is full of rectangular spotted tiles that need propping up. Who better to do it than YOU. Fear. You won't be patriotic if you don't. You're a coward. Why won't you stand up for what's right? Just? You don't buy it? well....McCarthy's coming for you. We'll throw you in prison. Your existence will be meaningless. FIGHT!

Power.

You need independence. Stand up for your country. Are YOU wealthy? Why do you oppose our struggle for equality? We offer justice, happiness, a land of plenty. We MUST unite under one [false] identity, oppose the imperialists, oppose greed," become one in our own right. you will be on the wrong side if you don't. You'll die.

Power.

"He was the man behid the strategy, willing, wisely, to sacrifice thousands of troops for strategic moves."

POWER

So millions died. The USA mourns 58,000 of them. Vietnam mourns many more. And the world goes back to spinning endlessly without them all. Nothing truly changed.

But we were using power to fight something. To fight power.

Mao: The cultural revolution.
Stalin and Lenin's gulags.
Oppression: a condition unique to power.

When they overshadowed us, though, it was not Vietnam that worst tortured, maimed, manipulated its enemies and drove its population into the abyss. The Elephant in the room was Cambodia.

Phnom Penh purged back to year zero. The war against education, knowledge, thoughts, imaginations. Against eyeglasses. Against time. Against LOVE.

The faces peer out from the walls with stoic eyes of normalcy. In the next room, their bodies twisted, flooding the bed with the fluids of life. the silent structure in the courtyard tells nothing of the kids who climbed it for gym class, nor of the humanity hung and tortured from its hooks.

The confessions stacked as though Orwell used them to found the Ministry of Love. At S-21 you stand in the reality of 1984.

Yet its all so imperfect. So sloppy. So human. So avoidable. But in trying to avoid it, we created Vietnam, and then we created Angkar. In letting it be, we created Mao, Stalin, Mugabe. We created Rwanda, Congo, Bosnia, Darfour. All it takes for good to flourish is for good men to do nothing....or something.

POWER.

The brothers convinced people that those as educated as they were the enemy. They inspired so much fear among the ranks by imprisoning, threatening, torturing their own that the cycle turned for 4 long years. They implemented terror with subjects who disagreed with the premise as their tools.

Until Vietnam shut it down.

Power will forever exist. people will fall in line behind their leader and enforce his actions. They will not second guess or, if they do, question only in a whisper. They will do so AFTER flying 200 bombing missions for the cause. AFTER killing hundreds and thousands at Choeng Ek. After the torture is over. After they no longer feel at risk.

After their leaders stop making them fear.
After their leaders lose power.

Where shall the individual grant power over himself, then? Government? teachers? Friends? Lovers? Self? To God? To Nature? To Rationality? To emotion? To Conscience? To nothing? To no one?

Only I can answer....