The Khmers Rouges and the Final Solution

Beyond visual marks for targeting enemies, the language employed by the Khmers Rouges to refer to politically undesired elements resembles the degrading language used by the Nazis to depict the Jews. Expressions such as "parasites" and "microbes" circulated widely among the party leadership and were frequently used by [Pol Pot] himself: "Now 1976 was a year of furious, diligent class struggle inside our Party. Many microbes emerged."(31) This language extended further to external enemies, principally the Vietnamese, usually referred to as "the contemptible Vietnamese enemy" (over sixty times in a twenty-page document from 1986)(32) or simply Yuon, a Khmer derogative for "Vietnamese." City dwellers were anoupracheachon, i.e. "subhuman" -- analogous to the Untermenschen of the Slavic east. Together with the "microbes" and the "Yuon," they formed part of a spectrum of mostly imaginary "enemies" by which the CPK saw itself surrounded. It is noteworthy, however, that these Untermenschen were Khmer and not, like the Slavs, foreigners. The CPK's plans for them were nevertheless similar to those the NSDAP had had for the occupied masses of the east (excluding Volksdeutsche): rudimentary education -- with the distinction that this applied to everyone in Cambodia, not just the anoupracheachon -- and slave labor. The Khmers Rouges' terminology stopped short of an equivalent to the Nazis' notion of "life unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben);(33) but, just as the Jews were seen as non-human by the Nazis -- as opposed to subhuman -- the Vietnamese were regarded as "animals" by the Khmers Rouges who until today would walk into a village somewhere in Cambodia and murder its Vietnamese inhabitants.
The atrocities committed by the Khmers Rouges have been given a variety of names, and "Cambodian Holocaust" is one of them. The term is not undisputed, but neither is the use of "Holocaust" for the annihilation of European Jewry. As [Elie Wiesel] has remarked: "May I confess to you that I am afraid I am the one who introduced the word into this framework [sic], and I am not proud of it. I cannot use it anymore.... A commentator describing the defeat of a sports team, somewhere, called it a 'holocaust'.... So, I have no words anymore."(52) How then shall it be named? The "Event," as Omer Bartov would have it? Bartov sees in the use of the word "Holocaust" an "overlap between history and myth, the rational and the metaphysical," yet employs the term himself.(53) The fundamental problem behind the notion of "Holocaust" seems to be the religious connotation of sacrifice. While most Jewish scholars would concur in the assessment that "Holocaust" lends a meaningful explanation to an otherwise senseless orgy of carnage and slaughter, this cannot be said of the Hebrew term "Shoah" (catastrophe) which, as Bartov notes, is used in other contexts as well.(54) At least since 1989, when Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah was released, this appellation has been added as yet another designation of the Final Solution outside the Jewish community. In relatively wide use among the Jewish community before 1989, it became part and parcel of the international Holocaust vocabulary and, like the latter, is used for any major catastrophe. Interestingly, it owes its modest popularity in Germany to the same factors as the name "Holocaust." Both were introduced by films, one as the title of a Hollywood series screened on German TV in early 1979, the other as the title of a documentary ten years later. Both carry an aura of moral "righteousness," since they are used by the Jewish community itself, both in Israel and abroad. However, only the English word has been applied to Cambodia, whereas the Hebrew term appears to have been successful in erecting around itself a barrier against profanization, at least impeding its "misuse" when speaking about something specifically Southeast Asian.