Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy by Hughes Ian

Author:Hughes, Ian [Hughes, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2018-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

The most profound purpose of history is to reveal something of the nature of humanity in all its extremes.

Ian Mortimer

Poland and Cambodia today are both stained by sites of mass execution – the death camps of Hitler and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot. Seen by us now as places of unspeakable horror, they were viewed in the minds of their psychologically disordered creators as places of purification, places where society was being cleansed of parasites. In Cheong Ek, the killing field outside Phnom Penh, there is a tree against which Pol Pot’s teenage executioners would smash the heads of infants before tossing their shattered bodies into a mass grave. In Warsaw, at the Umschlagplatz, German soldiers too murdered children, seizing them by their legs and smashing their heads violently against walls. That is what the cleansing of parasites means to the psychopathic mind.

Today Warsaw and Phnom Penh have become phoenix cities – bustling capitals risen from the ashes. Warsaw’s Old Town Square, the remnants of which are seen in the foreground of the photograph from decades ago, has been painstakingly rebuilt and is lined with bustling cafes once again. The area of complete desolation, seen in the background of the old photograph, was once the Warsaw ghetto. It is now home to the city’s premier hotels and nightclubs, and the Stalinesque skyscraper which has become the city’s icon. The Umschlagplatz, the point of departure for Treblinka, is now marked by a cold marble monument on a nondescript roadside, its suburban surroundings conveying little of the terror and bloodshed that happened there. Phnom Penh’s central Wat Bottom Square too is bustling with life once again. As evening falls, groups gather in front of loudspeakers to meet with friends and to dance. A group of older women move gracefully to the sounds of traditional Khmer songs, another younger group bops along to Asian pop ballads. In yet another group, lines of teenagers, some wearing glasses, can be seen dancing in unison to the sounds of Miley Cyrus, every child moving in perfect synch. Tuol Sleng, now a museum, is hidden among the chaos of Phnom Penh’s teaming traffic.

Poland and Cambodia, to different degrees, have both taken steps to defend themselves from ever again falling prey to the predators that ravaged their societies. Since its independence from Soviet influence in 1989, Poland has built institutions of social democracy, including a multiparty system, free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary. It has joined the European Union and has signed all of the major United Nations and European human rights treaties that protect its citizens from discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, and gender. Cambodia too is making progress, even if it still has much farther to go. Successive elections are widely seen as having been rigged in favor of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been in power for almost 4 decades. Despite increased oppression of dissent, ongoing street demonstrations attest to growing civil society demands for greater protection for individual rights and freedoms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.