Review by Choice Review
As difficult as genocide is to comprehend, the case of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79), which exterminated more than a fifth of Cambodia's population, is especially vexing, since most victims were ethnic Khmers no different from the regime's masterminds or henchmen. Rejecting the excuse that perpetrators were not culpable since they simply obeyed orders, Hinton (anthropology, Univ. of Rutgers-Newark) analyzes cultural themes that might explain how the regime could induce its cadres to partake in the annihilation of their fellow Cambodians. The book concentrates on Cambodian cultural values (as distinct from explicit ideology) expressed in keywords, metaphors, and imagery used in propaganda, coerced confessions of prisoners at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, and autobiographical statements that prison guards and interrogators were required to write. Disloyalty was conceived as an interior state of being that could be inferred from subtle, almost unknowable, signs. Given the prevailing climate of terror and suspicion, no one was immune from exposure as a traitor to the revolution. Hinton does not claim his book to be ethnography or ethnohistory, but his valuable and sophisticated lexical, semantic, and psychological analyses must be read in conjunction with works listed in the excellent bibliography; these provide a backdrop to the social and political history of democratic Kampuchea. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty. J. H. Bernstein CUNY Kingsborough Community College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
