Rehumanising the 'enemy'

The first and most effective tactic used by warmakers to justify their actions is dehumanisation. We will always be reluctant to accept the killing of real people on a mass scale. When the enemy is constantly reduced to a single entity about which we only hear awful things then we have a much better time supporting war. I'll talk about exactly how this is done later on.

I want to start by sharing something that I found myself doing recently. Then I'll talk about my first hand encounters with ex-members of the totalitarian regime in Cambodia.

I saw a picture similar to this one in the newspaper, full of black-clad men with balaclavas and AK-47s. Typical stuff, stuff that we see every day. In fact, we see it so often that we stop noticing it.

I became very curious and thought, let's pick out someone from this picture. The guy second to the left, maybe.

What's his name? Where was he born? Does he have any brothers or sisters? What's his favourite food? Who was his best childhood friend?

And the obvious: what made him join this group of people?

These questions are reasonable questions, things which we'd feel very happy asking one of 'our own' when we meet them the first time.

You could do that for anyone of these men in the picture, in fact you could do it for all of them. I thought at the end, if I was told to drop a bomb on all of these people, could I do it having just considered seriously who they actually are?

Who people are is very different to what they do. I personally believe that we are all good people inside. We should approach every interaction with this assumption in mind. Human society has for a long time chosen to ignore this when it is convenient. It's very easy with the advent of 'terrorist groups' (defined by whom, exactly?). We keep getting told that we are fighting organisations, like ISIS, or Al-Qaeda or whoever. We're fighting the idea of terror. But who are we killing in order to do this? We're killing our fellow humans who have the same frailties as we do. They are casualties of these frailties.

Of course, the people in ISIS think the same of 'us'. Their leaders paint the West as a single entity, made up of faceless parts who spread its depravity and 'terror' towards innocent people. That's what makes these kinds of conflict so easy to justify, because by God, they did it first! Did they?

Now I want to share some experiences I had in Pailin during which these lessons present themselves all too frequently.

Pailin was the last bastion of the Khmer Rouge regime and as such it is probably the poorest place in Cambodia. This is the place I go every time, and I'm very close to the people there.
Here's the thing. Considering its history, you will run into people who used to be KR soldiers. Yep. The ones who caused all the trouble. I don't think about it any more but it took a while for me to get to that point.

Lots of ex-soldiers work with us and are part of the community. They help us and are just as poor as anyone else. Here, the two men standing with us helped build a house for a family with two children who had muscular dystrophy. It's a testament to the unextinguishable compassion that resides in all of us.

 It was easy to get used to these guys and others who work closely with us because we see them every day, but something happened on my gap year in 2012 which punched me in the gut and took a long time to learn.

One night, Br Francis invited me to join him at dinner with a casino owner and his colleagues on the Thai border. Another Brother, Brian, said that he wasn't going to go because it gets rowdy. I was almost about to pass on the offer but something made me tag along.

The guy's nickname is 'No. 2*' because he is very close to Hun Sen and is his personal musician. He and his 10 mates were all in the Khmer Rouge in some capacity. Considering their wealth it's likely that they were moderately high up in the Pailin cadre. There I was, eating their food, listening to their music, watching Francis chatting to them and watching as they downed four bottles of VSOP brandy. It was chaotic to watch as someone who doesn't drink and who didn't know the language at all at the time.

Afterwards I asked Francis: "Why on Earth would you even consider having dinner with these guys? Why aren't you getting them to help you with their obscene wealth? Don't you know that they probably are the cause of the poverty you're trying to cure?"

He said something like this: "Pat, we have to be friends first before we can ask them for help. If we demand money from them they'd probably kick us out. We have to see them as fellow brothers first."

He also promised me: "When I do get them to give back to us, I won't let go of them."

I was indignant and sulky for a while. It took several months for that to sink in. A similar thing happened the next year when we invited the Department of Education for a Christmas function. I was very grumpy and annoyed that we were spending this money to feed corrupt and incompetent 'teachers'. Francis sensed this and answered to the same effect as when we dined with No. 2.

Damn fine food it is too, trust me.

It's not every day that you get to mix with people who were part of terrible regimes every day, let alone work alongside them. I see it as a blessing that I can experience their humanity. Francis has kept true to his promise and now I see that the help we get from the influential people in Pailin is too great to turn down.

So to conclude, we don't actually have to stand face to face with the 'enemy' to rethink our antagonism. It's not our fault though. We need to deprogram ourselves from the mentality that our 'enemy' is faceless, merciless and truly evil. I think we just have to imagine talking to them and really think about the things we'd say. From my experience it causes both parties to grow immensely.



* Not to be confused with Nuon Chea, 'brother No. 2' who was Pol Pot's second in command.