Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Ancient Chinese wisdom already expounded this notion; there is in the book of Lie Zi (third century BC) a parable about a man whose particular talent enabled him to identify thieves at first sight: he only needed to look at a certain spot between the eye and the brow, and he could recognise instantly whether a person was a thief. The king naturally decided to give him a position in the Ministry of Justice, but before the man could take up his appointment, the thieves of the kingdom banded together and had him assassinated. For this reason, clear-sighted people were generally considered cripples, bound to come to a bad end; this was also known proverbially in Chinese as “the curse of the man who can see the little fish at the bottom of the ocean.”

Yet sometimes — as we have just witnessed in Peking — truth breaks free. Like a river that ruptures its dams, it overwhelms all our defences, violently erupts into our lives, floods our cosy homes, and leaves high and dry in the middle of the street, for all to see, the fish that used to dwell in the deep.

Such tidal waves can be very frightening; fortunately, they are relatively rare and do not last long. Sooner or later, the waters recede. Usually, brave engineers set to work at once and start rebuilding the dykes. The latest attempts by the communist propaganda organs to explain that “no one actually died in Tian’anmen Square” may betray a slightly excessive zeal (one is reminded of the good souls who, probably wishing to restore our faith in human nature, insisted that, in Auschwitz, gas was used only to kill lice), but if we give them enough time, in due course their ministrations will certainly succeed in healing the wounds that the brutal dumping of raw and untreated truth inflicted upon our sensitivities.

Whenever a minute of silence is being observed in a ceremony, don’t we all soon begin to throw discreet glances at our watches? Exactly how long should a “decent interval” last before we can resume business-as-usual with the butchers of Peking? The senile and ferocious despots who decided to slaughter the youth, the hope and the intelligence of China may have made many miscalculations — still, on one count, they were not mistaken: they shrewdly assessed that our capacity to sustain our indignation would be very limited indeed.

The businessmen, the politicians, the academic tourists who are already packing their suitcases for their next trip to Peking are not necessarily cynical — though some of them have just announced that, this time, the main purpose of their visit will be to go to Tian’anmen Square to mourn for the martyrs! — and they may even have a point when they insist that, in agreeing once more to sit at the banquet of the murderers, they are actively strengthening the reformist trends in China. I only wish they had weaker stomachs.

Ah humanity! — the pity of us all!…

1989

*Tian’anmen, 4 June 1989.

ONE REMEMBERS the last lines of Kafka’s Trial : Josef K., an innocent citizen who fell into an incomprehensible and endless web of judicial proceedings for reasons that will never be revealed to him, is in the end taken by two official-looking gentlemen to a deserted quarry; there, with a sort of stupid bureaucratic formality, without violence, without anger and without a single word, they undertake to execute him. As one of the two gentlemen turns a knife twice in his heart, K. has one last conscious feeling: “It was as if the shame would outlive him.”

Many readers have experienced perplexity on encountering this last sentence. Yet Primo Levi, who wrote a short essay on Kafka, was puzzled by their puzzlement. He explained:

This last page takes my breath away. I, who survived Auschwitz, would never have written it, or not in this way: out of inability, or insufficient imagination, certainly, but also out of a sense of decency in the face of death (which Kafka either ignored or rejected); or perhaps simply out of lack of courage. The famous phrase — source of so much discussion — which closes the book like a gravestone (“It was as if the shame would outlive him”) presents no enigma to me at all. What should Josef K. be ashamed of? He is ashamed of many contradictory things… Still, I feel there is, in his shame, another element which I know well. At the end of his harrowing journey, the fact that such a corrupt tribunal does exist and spreads its infection to all its surroundings causes him shame… After all, this tribunal was made by man, not by God, and K. with the knife already stuck in his heart experiences the shame of being a man.

The horrors of the twentieth century were to confirm Kafka’s prophetic intuition. At the end of that same century, the Cambodian genocide stands as a most extreme and most grotesque epilogue: it was not only a monstrous event, it was also the caricature of a monstrosity.

By simplifying forms and amplifying lines, a caricature can reveal the inner essence of its subject. In this sense, Khmer Rouge propaganda, in its primitive crudity, grasped a central reality:

The whole world keeps its eyes on Democratic Kampuchea, for Khmer Revolution is the most beautiful and the most pure.

Khmer Revolution is without a precedent in world history. It resolved the eternal contradiction between city and country. It develops Lenin and goes beyond Mao Zedong .

This is quite true, in fact; in the light of the Khmer Rouge experiment, one can see more clearly the fundamental dynamics that informed the great Hitlero — Lenino — Stalino — Maoist tradition. Twentieth-century totalitarianism wore a variety of cultural garbs, with different degrees of sophistication, yet its basic elements remained fairly simple and never greatly varied. A quarter of a century ago, Kazimierz Brandys summed it up neatly (with the clear-sightedness that characterises so many Polish intellectuals, who on this subject have acquired a bitter expertise): “Contemporary history teaches us that all you need is one mentally sick individual, two ideologues and three hundred murderous thugs in order to take power and gag millions of people.”

The Cambodian terror offers a perfect illustration of this outline, as shown in Francis Deron’s monumental work Le Procès des Khmers rouges: trente ans d’enquête sur le génocide du Cambodge (The Trial of the Khmer Rouge: A Thirty-year Investigation of the Cambodian Genocide, Paris: Gallimard, 2009), which analyses the ascent of the Khmer Rouge movement, its victory, its brief and bloody reign, its downfall, its lengthy artificial survival (thanks, among others, to the culpable collusion of the West!) — and, at long last, its approaching punishment, as justice is finally catching up with a handful of still-surviving, semi-senile criminals.

It is a cliché to say that journalists are the historians of the present time — but it is true. For his entire journalistic career, Deron was an influential and respected correspondent, covering China at first, and then South-East Asia. In his latest book he tackles thirty years of the Cambodian tragedy; he unravels its complex threads, outlines the biographies of the main protagonists, clarifies and interprets the sequence of events; now and then he intersperses his historical narrative with vivid vignettes drawn from his old reporter’s notebooks. The architecture of the book is composite, but it is organised with method and clarity.

Deron benefited from his in-depth experience of Maoist China; his two earlier books on the “Cultural Revolution” and its aftermath superbly prepared him to grasp the nature and significance of the Khmer Rouge phenomenon. What Maoism took twenty years to achieve in China — the great purges of intellectuals (“The Hundred Flowers” movement), the enforced lowering of the entire nation to the primitive level of the countryside (the “Great Leap” backward, with its makeshift village blast-furnaces, peasants confined to “People’s Communes” dormitories — and the gigantic famine which ensued), and finally the “Cultural Revolution” and the murderous savagery of the Red Guards — all these initiatives were to be found again in the brief experiment of “Democratic Kampuchea,” but they were recycled and compressed within a period of only three years and ten months. The imitation was therefore grossly simplified and exaggerated; the objectives were the same, but they were pursued by means even more ferocious — and more dreadfully stupid .