S21 - Tuol Sleng

Below are excerpts from a journal entry I wrote the evening after touring the notorious S21 in Phnom Penh, a school the Khmer Rouge turned into a facility of torture and imprisonment.

Cambodia:  a nation which still lies under the shadow of brutal, systematic torture and murder of her own children.  As I saw hundreds of faces photographed during their imprisonment in S21, one cannot help but be haunted by their vacant, expressionless, almost soulless faces.  The only thing is, their souls were still there.  Their eyes had beheld tortures no created being should see or imagine.  They were unfeeling eyes, detached.  Their ears had heard the screams of the tortured and the dying.  The mind had ample time to play, making every waking moment an exercise in psychological torture and oppression.  When it was inevitably your turn - when it was happening to you - it made even less sense.  Tears were punishable by more pain.

What of the killing fields?  What of the macabre keepsakes of torture, the photographs, the artistic renderings?  Is there a place in this world for them?  Should we instead build picturesque pools for reflection, wiping away the hideous memories?  What of the piles of bones, skulls, and stories recounted in S21?  Cambodia has done well to encapsulate and preserve the incredible brutality of the regime.  The horror, raving madness, carnage and loss should be remembered in graphic terms.  No sanitised art, lilting song, or poetry could be this compelling:  raw, graphic, hell.

Sin constructs hell in the human heart, a raging monster revealed in mad violence.  The killing fields cannot be undone, nor should they be memorialised with songs, smiles, and the release of doves.  Weeping is the only appropriate response.  And if you cannot weep it begs the question:  why not?  These deaths count for something good when we say with conviction, never again!  No more will there be hurt, fear, and killing within our walls - only healing, peace, and joy through Jesus Christ.  We will never forget Pol Pot was a wicked man, but he had a lot of help to initiate and pursue his heinous, demonic, and ruthless ideologies.  There seems to be no shortage of men on earth to willingly do the devil's work:  to steal, kill, and destroy.

There will always be a Pol Pot until Christ binds and throws him into hell.  His name is Satan.  Instead of acquiescing, I will stand and fight against him in the powerful name and authority of Jesus Christ.  He has done worse than any man, though he brutally uses all men who wander from God.  In Christ alone our hope is found and rests!