Where Cambodia chose the difficult, winding road of national healing, Israel spurred a suicidal treadmill of retribution in the Middle East, writes Laurent Evrard.
Phnom Penh Skyline from the Toul Kork area. (Looppty /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Laurent Evrard
in Phnom Penh
Special to Consortium News
History is written in blood, but it is redeemed by choice. Across the theater of human suffering, few nations have stared into the abyss of total annihilation quite like Cambodia.
Under the psychotic agrarian utopia of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, nearly a quarter of the country’s population of eight million people was systematically starved, worked to death, or executed in the Killing Fields. It was a mechanized madness intended to reset human civilization to year zero. [The Khmer Rouge’s rise in 1975 was aided by years of secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and only ended with the 1979 Vietnamese invasion, which saved Cambodia, though the U.S. and Britain continued supporting the ousted genocidal regime.]
Yet, out of those pulverized skulls and mass graves emerged something miraculous: a profound, defiant capacity for resilience and reconciliation.
Compare this monumental human triumph with the tragic, blood-drenched labyrinth of the Middle East — specifically the ongoing devastation in Gaza, the West Bank and the wider web of hostilities involving Israel and its Arab and Iranian neighbors.
Where Cambodia chose the difficult, winding road of national healing, Israel spurred a suicidal treadmill of retribution in the Middle East, proving that while war is easy to start, vengeance is an eternity that devours its own children.
While Cambodians forgave their killers, the Israelis have exacted revenge — not against their executioners — but against an innocent people whom Israel victimized by ethnically cleansing and seizing their land to create the settler colony of Israel.
The Cambodian Miracle: Forgiveness as a Revolutionary Act
Memorial stupa at the Choeung Ek Killing Fields Genocidal Center in Phnom Penh. (Joe Lauria)
How does a society rebuild when neighbor killed neighbor and children were brainwashed to turn on their own parents?
Instead of plunging into an endless cycle of multi-generational blood feuds, Cambodia engineered a masterpiece of pragmatic peace. Through a combination of legal accountability — symbolized by the hybrid tribunal that brought surviving architects of the Khmer Rouge regime to justice — and the visionary Win-Win Policy, the Cambodian people achieved the impossible.
The state chose national integration over eternal ostracization. Former combatants and even lower-level cadres were folded back into society, stripped of their weapons but granted dignity, land, and a future.
The Khmer spirit recognized a harrowing truth: if you live by the shovel of the mass grave, you will eventually bury your entire nation. By choosing coexistence over total extermination, Cambodia transformed fields of bones into foundations of a booming, peaceful society. They stopped counting bodies and started counting tomorrows.
Wisdom of the Lotus
A cell at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, an extermination camp in a former high school where as many as 20,000 people were tortured and killed. There were only 12 known survivors. (Joe Lauria)
To understand Cambodia’s miracle of reconciliation, one must look to its spiritual bedrock: Theravada Buddhism.
Unlike the rigid, legalistic retributive justice encoded in ancient Abrahamic traditions — exemplified by the Mosaic law of Lex Talionis (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”) — Buddhist philosophy teaches radical impermanence (Anicca), non-harming (Ahimsa) and the total liberation from the poisons of hatred.
Where a warrior-like ethos demands proportional vengeance and keeps historical trauma alive through sacred memory and divine scorekeeping, Buddhism offers a profound humanism: hatred ceases not by hatred, but by love alone.
This philosophical divergence carries a heavy historical cost. The relentless eye-for-an-eye paradigm — deeply embedded in the cultural and geopolitical survival mechanisms of modern Israel — has blinded its leadership to the universal suffering of others.
By adopting the very mechanisms of disproportionate destruction that once sought to annihilate them, the moral credit and universal compassion earned by the Jewish people during the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust have been tragically squandered on the smoking ruins of Gaza.
Geometry of Absolute Destruction
Gaza under Israeli attack, 2023-2025. (Jaber Jehad Badwan /Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
Turn your gaze westward, and the contrast is as blinding as it is heartbreaking. In Gaza and the West Bank, the landscape is once again choked with the dust of collapsed apartment blocks and the silent grief of parents holding lifeless infants.
Israel’s military doctrine — driven by an existential trauma that demands absolute security through absolute dominance — has devolved into a murderous frenzy. In flattening Gaza and suffocating the West Bank, it treats entire civilian populations as acceptable collateral damage.
But physical walls, blockades and iron domes cannot quarantine a people from the blowback of despair. Every child buried under concrete in Gaza is a seedbed for tomorrow’s resistance, ensuring that the trauma of today becomes the terrorism of tomorrow.
Simultaneously, the surrounding Arab dynamics and regional proxy wars have long treated the Palestinian cause not as a human reality to be rescued, but as a perpetual political currency.
This is the architecture of eternal hatred. Israel pounds populations into submission under the illusion of “crushing” an enemy, oblivious to the fact that you cannot bomb a people into loving you or securing your borders.
The Palestinians and regional actors, trapped in a fatalistic script of perpetual victimhood and resistance, too often romanticize struggle without a horizon of coexistence. It is a symmetrical dance of death where both sides believe that if they just kill enough of the “other,” peace will magically appear on the smoking ruins.
The Lesson of the Century
The Khmer Rogue kept meticulous records of their victims at the Tuol Sleng extermination camp. (Joe Lauria)
The juxtaposition of Cambodia and the Middle East lays bare a stark moral lesson for humanity: Genocide and mass violence can either be treated as a terminal disease or a catalyst for profound reinvention.
The Khmer people proved that humanity can metabolize even the most horrific industrial-scale trauma, look the executioner in the eye and decide that the chain of blood must break here. They understood that true victory is not the eradication of the enemy, but the eradication of enmity itself.
Until leaders in Tel Aviv, Gaza, and across the Middle East look at the ruins of their own making and realize that absolute military victory is a delusion — and that collective punishment only breeds collective doom — they will remain prisoners of their own history.
Cambodia rose from the ashes because it chose the courage of pardon. The Middle East continues to burn to the ground because it insists on the cowardice of endless revenge.
Mass graves at Killing Fields of Choeung Ek in Cambodia, 2011. (Jwslubbock / Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Laurent Evrard is a Belgian finance and wealth management professional with 30 years of experience in the Luxembourg financial sector (1991–2021). Currently based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, he divides his time between managing hospitality ventures, lecturing on financial analysis and international strategy at the university level, and writing on global financial and strategic matters
The views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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As right as the author likely is about Cambodia-
…”of modern Israel — has blinded its leadership to the universal suffering of others.”…
The zionists, just pretending to be religious/ jewish to abuse it for their purpose, of what is still called ‘israel’ are not blinded.
They openly enjoy the mass murder of totally help- and defenseless children, women and men of Palestine.
Daily, since at least 8 decades already!
Just as a reminder- the zionists don’t even have any problems also mass murdering truly jewish people.
See ‘hannibal directive’.
Palestine was and is the only legitimate state there!
Excellent points that deserve to be elucidated and corrected. The well-intentioned author of the main article clearly failed to distinguish between Zionists and Jews broadly and between imperialism-driven Zionism and sacredness-based Judaism more topically !
En mi opinión, contrastar: malo, bueno, la Lex Talionis con la filosofía budista es reinterpretar erróneamente el principio de justica que promulgaba la Lex Talionis. Su primigenia intención era erradicar la venganza y el odio in eternum.
In my opinion, contrasting the *Lex Talionis* with Buddhist philosophy—labeling one “bad” and the other “good”—misinterprets the principle of justice that the *Lex Talionis* promulgated. Its original intent was to eradicate vengeance and hatred once and for all.
¿Podría profundizar en eso?
Can you elaborate on that?
The responsible, if debatable, execution of “Lax Talionis” pre-requires high degree of dominance and application of overwhelming power. There have been many “successful” cases throughout human history to date. Even the U.S. atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be represented as a validating case of that doctrine ; at least capitalistic Japanese have come to terms with it and accepted it peacefully !
The comparison is not valid, IMO. Israel is not interested in retribution, it is only interested in ridding Palestine of all the Palestinians, aka genocide.
The Killing started before 1948, accelerated after 1967 and continues unabated with the active participation of the USA, UK, EU and their puppets. As long as it exists Israel will never apologise or admit it did wrong, it is evil incarnate, there is only one solution … a fully democratic Palestine and a nuremberg style reckoning.
You are ABSOLUTELY TRUE. But forget about replicating Nuremberg just restoring One pluralism-based Palestine wherein every citizen is equal should do !
Israelis are not killing because they feel traumatized or existentially afraid of Palestinians. They are trying to eradicate Palestinians to take the land. This is one difference between the two genocides. Another is that their religion tells them they are superior to the native (ironically, more semitic) people. Israel is now a brand-new culture of western imperialism populated by incoming white supremacist testosterone tainted half-wits. The odds of them seeing Palestinians as their brothers are zero.
One similarity is the funding by the US. Maybe that is the only thing that can end it.
The article makes that very point: “While Cambodians forgave their killers, the Israelis have exacted revenge — not against their executioners — but against an innocent people whom Israel victimized by ethnically cleansing and seizing their land to create the settler colony of Israel.”
Sorry, my point is not clear: The article appears to lament that the Abrahamic middle east is not like Buddhist Cambodia, and that it will not heal itself into coexistence as Cambodia has, because Israel (“driven by an existential trauma” that has “devolved into a murderous frenzy”) and Palestinians (“without a horizon of coexistence” also fight a “symmetrical dance of death”) both think “peace will magically appear” if they “just kill enough of the ‘other'”.
The piece literally sums it up: “Cambodia rose from the ashes because it chose the courage of pardon. The Middle East continues to burn to the ground because it insists on the cowardice of endless revenge.”
My point is, it’s an ethnic cleansing, not a civil war. The colonization intends to eradicate a population and take their land. White people immigrate there for that purpose, and those who oppose it are not allowed in. Coexistence did exist until the zionists took over, and now we support them to the point where Palestinians (and anti-zionist Jews) have no voice, let alone weapons. So, I don’t see how this can be boiled down to a symmetry of blind hatred. The project is to exterminate the previous population, take their land, and become a superpower. Israel is NOT wishing for peace until the last one is gone, and expansion has continued all the way to Turkey. To say that Palestinians can’t imagine coexistence is weird considering that they signed up for a two-state solution, and the one-state solution is considered the death of Israel. Israel’s very “existence” means the non-existence of Palestine (and parts of Lebanon, Syria, etc). Furthermore, if Palestinians can be dragged to prison for merely holding on to what’s left of their West Bank homes, and preparations are being made to openly exterminate them.
The article appears to agree with zionists that Palestinians simply want to kill all the Jews and thus deserve their fate. I just disagree. It’s not Cambodia, and zionism is not even Judaism. It is not Abrahamic vs Buddhist. It’s settler colonialism vs survival.
The piece does nothing of the kind. It names and condemns’ Israel’s ethnic cleansing. It is well known that the way to bring about a one-state democratic Palestine is for the US to end its military and political support for Israel and not through killing enough Israelis. Your comment is way off base.
Religion has the capacity for both great good and great evil.
In a land steeped in centuries of Buddhist culture how did something like the Khmer Rouge arise? What was its appeal?
The Khmer Rouge promised power to the peasantry. US bombs raining on the countryside, with the blessing of a regime that came to power in a US-backed coup, added to their appeal.
What arise was human nature. Humans are made in the image of the Godhead, but BORN in Sin.
Buddhism has not inhibited Buddhist nations from going to war. Buddhist monasteries in Tibet used to have armies of monks doing battle on one another. Tibet invaded both Nepal and Bhutan.
You are right. Further, even contemporarily Buddhism-linked Myanmar drove out the Rohingyas also with genocidic features !
There are 60 thousand B52 bomb craters in Cambodia, many of those bombs dropped during US support of their imposed dictator Lon Nol.
Please read “Sideshow- Nixon and Kissinger and the destruction of cambodia” by William Shawcross.
“Under the psychotic agrarian utopia of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, nearly a quarter of the country’s population of eight million people was systematically starved, worked to death, or executed in the Killing Fields. It was a mechanized madness intended to reset human civilization to year zero.”
The author makes no mention of the 2.75 million tonnes of bombs dropped on Cambodia by the United States. That bombing helped ensure that the Khmer Rouge came to power.
The article explicitly refers to “years of secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia”.
What are you talking about? It is mentioned literally at the end of the same paragraph from which you pulled that quote.
Amen.
“Declassified United States government documents leave little doubt that the secret and illegal bombing of then neutral Cambodia by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger between 1969 and 1973 caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power. […] In dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a peasant society, Nixon and Kissinger killed an estimated half a million people. Year Zero began, in effect, with them; the bombing was a catalyst for the rise of a small sectarian group, the Khmer Rouge, whose combination of Maoism and medievalism had no popular base [NOTE: ]. […] After two and a half years in power, the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by the Vietnamese on Christmas Day, 1978. In the months and years that followed, the US and China and their allies, notably the Thatcher government, backed Pol Pot in exile in Thailand. He was the enemy of their enemy: Vietnam […] Although the Khmer Rouge government (‘Democratic Kampuchea’) had ceased to exist in January 1979, its representatives were allowed to continue occupying Cambodia’s seat at the UN; indeed, the US, China and Britain insisted on it. Meanwhile, a Security Council embargo on Cambodia compounded the suffering of a traumatised nation, while the Khmer Rouge in exile got almost everything it wanted. In 1981, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said: ‘I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.’ The US, he added, ‘winked publicly’ as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge. In fact, the US had been secretly funding Pol Pot in exile since January 1980. The extent of this support – $85m from 1980 to 1986 – was revealed in correspondence to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. […] By 1981, a number of governments had become decidedly uneasy about the charade of the UN’s continuing recognition of the defunct Pol Pot regime. Something had to be done. The following year, the US and China invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was neither a coalition nor democratic, nor a government, nor in Kampuchea (Cambodia). It was what the CIA calls ‘a master illusion’. Prince Norodom Sihanouk was appointed its head; otherwise little changed. The two ‘non-communist’ members, the Sihanoukists, led by the Prince’s son, Norodom Ranariddh, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, were dominated, diplomatically and militarily, by the Khmer Rouge. One of Pol Pot’s closet cronies, Thaoun Prasith, ran the office at the UN in New York. [… In 1989, Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, a diplomatic and defence correspondent with close professional and family contacts with the SAS] revealed that the SAS was training the Pol Pot-led force.”
Source:
John Pilger, “How Thatcher Gave Pol Pot a Hand,” The New Statesman, Apr. 17, 2000
Thank you for providing the much needed missing context in this article.
The US has yet to atone for its own genocide of indigenous on this continent which explains its willingness to support Israel’s. Genocide is baked into the cake of capitalist empire.
It didn’t matter, if the cake was Kissinger-flavoured, many Asian leaders loved getting addicted to to it. What those leaders seemingly missed noticing was, Kissinger was sprinkling both sides of the genocidal cake, including via proxies as alluded to in earlier comments !
The note that I mistakenly omitted from the quoted excerpts of John Pilger’s New Statesman article was a reference to a Henry Kissinger quote brought to my attention by Brett S. Morris in his article “Kissinger in Cambodia,” which later appeared as a chapter in the edited essay collection “The Good Die Young” (2024):
“In November 1975, Kissinger explained to the Thai foreign minister that he ‘should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.’ The geopolitical chessboard was in flux with the conclusion of the Vietnam War.
Kissinger wanted to use Cambodia as a counterweight to the victorious North Vietnamese, who were allied with the Soviet Union. At the same time, China also allied with the Khmer Rouge against its historical enemy, Vietnam. With the opening of relations between China and the United States, and the deteriorating relationship between the Soviet Union and China, a unique alliance was born: the United States and China both sought to bolster the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam (and, by extension, the Soviet Union).
Kissinger’s desire for closer relations with the Khmer Rouge foreshadowed policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations. After Vietnam invaded Cambodia in late 1978 and ousted the Khmer Rouge in response to repeated incursions into Vietnamese territory, the Khmer Rouge turned to guerrilla fighting against the Vietnamese-installed government in Phnom Penh.”
Source:
Brett S. Morris, “Kissinger in Cambodia,” Jacobin, Nov. 29, 2023
Thanks for the detail. IIRC, there have been widespread efforts to blame US bombing casualties on the Khmer Rouge, especially in Eastern Cambodia where over a million were killed in US saturation bombings of the Ho Chi Minh trail. The casualties known to be caused by KR were largely in taking the capital city and pursuing the monarchists NW. No doubt Cambodia has a more accurate study now.
Several scholars including Gareth Porter, Noam Chomsky, and Ben Kiernan, who were reflexively critical of the magnitude and even existence of many atrocities attributed to state-aligned forces in Democratic Kampuchea while they were contemporaneously occurring, later came around to acknowledging that the Khmer Rouge were almost certainly responsible for a substantial portion of the combined misery wrought upon Cambodia by domestic and foreign actors. That being said, they were not wrong to adopt a posture of skepticism at that time or since, much less to elaborate a “worthy and unworthy victims” thesis that showed the contrast in Western coverage of mass killings in Indochina perpetrated by communist forces compared to, e.g., those perpetrated by the US/Australia-aligned Suharto regime in Indonesia from 1965-66 and later in East Timor, West Papua, etc. in the following decades, or those committed directly by Western forces themselves in Southeast Asia
“In proportion to its population, Cambodia underwent a human catastrophe unparalleled in this century. Out of a 1970 population of probably near 7,100,000, Cambodia probably lost slightly less than 4,000,000 people to war, rebellion, man-made famine, genocide, politicide, and mass murder. The vast majority, almost 3,300,000 men, women, and children (including 35,000 foreigners), were murdered within the years 1970 to 1980 by successive governments and guerrilla groups [including forces associated with Prince Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Pol Pot, Heng Samrin, and foreign interventionists such as the United States and Vietnam]. Most of these, a likely near 2,400,000, were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge. […] While there are estimates of those killed in the American bombing campaign in Cambodia, there are none of how many of these were democidal. That is, what proportion of the deaths were due to intentional attacks on civilian targets or the result of an utterly reckless disregard of civilian casualties. Many of the sources bear on this, in particular [William] Shawcross’s revised ‘Sideshow’ and the critiques of his arguments included therein. Taking these materials into account and the reports of survivors that are scattered throughout the literature, I believe that from 10 to 25 percent of the deaths, perhaps most likely 15 percent, were probably democidal. […] In sum, then, 3,944,000 Cambodians were killed in war, or from famine, disease, execution, torture, massacres, and the like (line 448); 3,151,000 of them were murdered (line 417a). Although I consider this overall total prudent, it is much beyond the consensus of scholars, journalists, and officials. However, as mentioned it is virtually the same as the mid-population net deficit calculated from the diverse population estimates. And this I consider conservative because of the way the population estimates were transformed and calculated.”
Source
“Chapter Four – Statistics of Cambodian Democide: Estimates, Calculations, and Sources,” in R.J. Rummel, “Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900” (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia School of Law, 1997), available at the University of Hawai’i website for “Power Kills”
Professor, we appreciate these details but want to point out to our readers that the focus of this article was not on the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the secret US bombing and to have focused on that would have been a diversion from the theme of the piece. The author is extremely well-versed in that history and did not go into for no other reason than that it was not central to his argument.
Not true. There were 300-400 Khmer Rouge killing fields scattered all over Cambodia, not just in Phnom Penh. Over 20,000 mass graves were found across the country.
“Eastern Cambodia where over a million were killed in US saturation bombings of the Ho Chi Minh trail”
Where does that number come from?
“With the U.S. government keeping the bombings secret at the time, comprehensive data and documentation are limited. But estimates on the number of deaths range from as few as 24,000 to as many as a million. Most estimates put the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.”
Source:
Sophal Ear, “Henry Kissinger’s Bombing Campaign Likely Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Cambodians ? And Set Path for the Ravages of the Khmer Rouge,” The Conversation, Nov. 29, 2023