Politics
Out of context: Reply #9950
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"There’s a book, The Gate, by Francois Bitz, who was in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge took power. He was captured by the Khmer Rouge and held prisoner in the jungle. Bitz was an anthropologist but the Khmer Rouge was convinced he was a spy. It turned out his captor was this man called Douch who later ran Tuol Sleng, the school in Phnom Penh that Pol Pot turned into a torture chamber and slaughterhouse.
Duoch was a mathematics teacher, but he was also a full blown Khmer Rouge ideologue and sociopath. Every couple of days this French man, while chained to a tree, would see the revolutionaries take Cambodian prisoners to the jungle. There they killed them with a shovel. Ammunition, you see, was not to be wasted on such counter-revolutionary scum.
Bitz said Douch could talk to him about all kinds of things. They were two human intelligent beings. He spoke Khmer, Douch spoke French. But every now and again Bitz would cross some ideological line and Douch then became a raving lunatic. He would spout what were essentially slogans at him. At that point the exchange between two human beings stopped. One human being became a monster. And Bitz knew that he was a moment away from having the shovel brought down on the back of his head.
That is the ultimate offence of modern political language. When you write or speak in jargon – in slogans - you stop having a human exchange."