Grim things happening in places you've just seen

[ursus arctos]

This is very true.

A counterpart is that atrocities that occur in a familiar location tend to resonate with us in a way that is fundamentally different from what we experience with those that happen "elsewhere".

Sarajevo was the first example of this that I will never forget. It was at once surreal and heartbreaking to see a place that I felt I knew quite well turned into a war zone.

[seand]

Grim things happening in places you've just seen

Thanks Lodzubelieveit. The Balkan situation was so recent and so close to home (geographically and culturally) that it feels like there's a concerted effort to ignore it, and I'm as guilty as most. It's relatively easy for us to ignore the excesses of a small group of fanatics in our midst (IRA, ETA etc) or a large culturally different group far, far away (Africa, Middle East) but the Balkan mess showed man's unimaginable capacity for inhumanity right on our doorstep.

edit: and a bit of cross-posting with ursus there

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Grim things happening in places you've just seen

Lodzubelieveit wrote: God help us

I'm not sure that's going to help, given the track record.

I commented on a recent visit to the Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali - a place I've been to four times and still shakes me to my bones. You know, 800,000 people killed in 100 days. With clubs and machetes. Here's the stained glass memorial window.

[Crusoe]

Grim things happening in places you've just seen

In 2005 I was on a package holiday in Croatia and it didn't really strike home how recent the bloodshed was until we were driving through the south on the way to a national park where some of the early fighting had started. There were houses pockmarked with bullets and shell holes, all visible from the nice little tour bus on its way to the hotel in the resort town up the coast. The contrast was eye-opening.

[linus]

Grim things happening in places you've just seen

I've visited Cambodia nearly 10 years ago, and was fairly well-informed on its recent history. People there were remarkably resilient, given the extent of the horror. I've never been in such a young country. Half the population having been decimated in the 70s. There were few remaining French speakers among the dwindling older generations, as the middle class and white collars who were more likely to speak it were particularly targeted.



In Phnom Penh, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is the site of the former S21 prison, featured in a documentary by Rithy Panh. It's a fairly beautiful site of a former school converted to a torture and execution center, one of over 150 in the country under the Khmer Rouge. You could at once picture smiling schoolkids playing in the nice yard under palm trees, and the horror that took place in the mid-70s. The events were particularly well-documented, with the prisoners photographed before their execution. The film ("S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine") is a harrowing watch, along with Panh's other documentary focusing on Duch, one of the most notorious KR leaders, who might be the most evil person alive, serving a life sentence.





Panh's most recent film, The Missing Picture, is the one I would recommend, it's of course very sad, but also beautifully done, and literally hand-crafted in a very creative and personal manner with wooden figurines in stop-motion animation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tZL5S5thvs