The Master of Confessions by Thierry Cruvellier

Author:Thierry Cruvellier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

The terror that took hold of Bizot when Duch admitted that he beat recalcitrant “spies” was so great it changed Bizot forever.

Your Honor, I should say that until then, I had felt reassured. I believed that we were—that I was—on the right side of humanity; that some men were monsters and, thank heaven, I could never be one of them. I believed that this was a state of nature, that some of us were born evil while the rest of us could never be. But that evening, Duch’s response, combined with my perception of him throughout the course of various interrogation episodes, opened my eyes. That Christmas Eve, I had expected to encounter someone inhumane, as we are accustomed to think of such monsters. But I realized that this was far more tragic and infinitely more terrifying, because in front of me stood a man who looked like many friends of mine: a Marxist who was prepared to die for his country and for the Revolution. The ultimate goal, for him, was the welfare and well-being of the inhabitants of Cambodia; he was fighting against injustice and inequity. And even if there was something insidious in the naiveté of the typical Khmer peasant, there was also a fundamental sincerity in his beliefs, as is the case with many revolutionaries. I myself had many friends in Paris at the time who were committed to this Communist revolution and they were looking at events in Cambodia with an outlook that, to me, was horrifying. But in their eyes, the ends justified the means—in this case, Cambodia’s independence, Cambodia’s right to self-determination, the end to its citizens’ misery, and so on. The Cambodians are not the only people that have killed in the name of fulfilling a dream. So here I was, looking for the first time behind the mask of the monster in front of me. His job was to write up reports on the people sent to him to be executed, and I saw that this monster was, in fact, human, which was just as disturbing and terrifying. I was no longer sheltered from this knowledge—we are no longer sheltered—and the worst mistake we could make would be to separate such monsters into a different category of being.

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