Me. Finally.
Wasn't easy, either. Like I said, it's an hour long. No transcript.
My machine first had a problem shifting from one segment to the next one. If I paused it too long, it would start again, and I'd have to find my place. The subtitles made it impossible to listen while I was doing something else.
One comment:
The almost pure capacity for ruthlessness on the part of the young is not new. Most of the Khmer Rouge were young. From this article (boldface mine):
...one of my former students recognised me in front of a Khmer Rouge soldier and addressed me as neak kroo (teacher). She quickly realised that she had made a terrible mistake. The soldier looked me up and down. A thousand thoughts crossed my mind in an instant. I needed to react very quickly. In that moment, I recalled that the Khmer word neak kroo can also mean “wise womanâ€. I pretended to be quite calm and started to address the Khmer Rouge soldier, smiling: “Now what do you think of this? My profession was to be a fortune-teller, and I was one of the best clairvoyants in my villageâ€.
When he heard this, the soldier asked me to read his palm and predict his future. “My Godâ€, I told myself, “help me!†Then I remembered what my mother had once said to me: peasants in Cambodia can be credulous…you have learn a little of their mentality. Almost all Khmer Rouge had been young peasant boys and girls – some of them so young that they could not even carry their rifle properly. I drew on my experiences at parents’ evenings, where I met parents of all social classes, on my studies of psychology at the Phnom Penh’s faculty of pedagogy, and on some books of astrology I had read, to mislead this Khmer Rouge soldier sufficiently to convince him that I was really a fortune-teller.
I read a book years ago by a street preacher (can't remember the name any more). He said the young children, the 12-year-olds and younger, were the ones to fear in the gangs. They would kill without a second thought.
A few more random comments:
--My heart broke for the mothers in this film. They know the talking points, but they just wish they had their children back.
--If a child firing a rifle at the Israeli Army is shot, the Israelis are monsters.
--Hitler was a rank amateur at honing a culture into living weapons. This kind of education, this kind of indoctrination, is NOT confined to the Palestinians. There are people learning this kind of thinking right now in schools in Europe, England, and even the U.S.
At some point, someone who thinks like this is going to get an atomic bomb to play with. In this context, the idea of "deterrence" is meaningless.
Yet I submit that had everyone here watched this whole film, they would still declare that the worst threat humanity is facing right now is George W. Bush.
--Collectivist thinking kills.
--Modern enlightened Western culture has nothing to deal with this kind of single-minded ruthlessness.