If we cannot recognize our ability to use and abuse power, then we make it easier to see ourselves purely as victims. Even more, we are able to justify vengeance against those who we believe have done harm to us. It is no coincidence that Kundera makes his claim in a Cold War environment, where his anticommunist statement circulates as cliché in an anticommunist world that cannot see itself as able to abuse power, unlike the communist world. The stereotypical, reassuring dynamic of memory and forgetting, of (free) man against the amnesiac state and its abuse of power, is inseparable from the Cold War climate, where trite claims make us feel warm and fuzzy about how we are on the side of memory and liberation, incapable of victimization. The War on Terror inherits these claims and the associated logic of seeing ourselves only as victims, as Americans did after 9/11. In one frame, it is true that Americans were victims. In another frame, as Butler argues, this point of view isolated 9/11 from the complicated history preceding it and justified unleashing inhuman acts of war by the United States on those deemed as enemies. But an ethics of recognition should apply not only to Americans; it should also apply to America’s enemies or perceived enemies, who also see themselves as victims. Any side in a conflict needs the optical character recognition provided by this ethics, the ability to see not only the flaws of our enemies and others but our own fundamentally flawed character. Without this mutual recognition, a genuine reconciliation will be difficult to achieve.
Perhaps such an ethics of recognition would lead only to retribution or resignation. Retribution can be seen in how some Americans in the postwar era learned that what they needed to do was to “empathize with the enemy,” in the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.23 The implication is that such a mode of empathy helps us understand our other better in order to control him (or kill him). Thus, the counterinsurgency field manual for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was written by General David Petraeus, who drew on his experiences from the war in Vietnam to refine military techniques and to encourage greater cultural sensitivity among American forces toward the peoples of the lands they occupied. For Americans, multiculturalism at home finds an overseas corollary via culturally sensitive warfare. In both cases, studying difference and understanding the other are instrumentaclass="underline" they serve the purpose of domesticating others and rendering them harmless. As for resignation, it is the sense that if we are indeed human and inhuman, then nothing can be done about the inhumanities we commit. Resignation takes the form of inaction, which is the most common way by which those who see themselves as human condone inhuman behavior.
Retribution and resignation can be found in the Khmer Rouge era of Cambodia and its aftermath, but we also find here an ethics of recognition and a struggle to see the face of the Other. This ethics is exemplified in the work of filmmaker Rithy Panh, the most important artist to confront the genocide. For him and many others, the policies and horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime are symbolized in S-21, the infamous prison and death camp located in the capital of Phnom Penh.24 During the Khmer Rouge reign of 1975 to 1979, some seventeen thousand men, women, and children entered S-21, where they were photographed, interrogated, tortured, and killed. Seven survived by one count, a dozen by another, perhaps a couple hundred at most (as is usually the case in a poor country, the bureaucracy has yet to catch up with the disaster). S-21 was the most extreme manifestation of an extreme regime whose policies of execution and forced labor led to the death, through murder, starvation, and illness, of approximately 1.7 million Cambodians out of a population of about 7 million. During this time, the Khmer Rouge created the faceless Angkar, or Organization, that ruled all of Cambodian society, mandating uniform haircuts and clothing, eliminating family relations and human affections, and transforming the entire population into a compulsory labor force. Khmer Rouge policies were retribution against an entire society and the “new people,” a population who embodied Western influence and class inequality (in contrast to the “base people,” the peasantry).25 “Only the deaf, the dumb, and the mute would survive,” becoming faceless parts of a revolutionary society, a utopia that would erase the unequal past and begin anew from Year Zero.26 This was the drive for totality of which Levinas speaks, the impulse to subsume everything, all difference, all others, into the same. Colonialism was also an expression of this drive for totality. What the French did to the Khmer foreshadowed the extermination that the Khmer would do to themselves and any others they found in Cambodia.
The United Nations refuses to use genocide to describe what happened to the Cambodian people, reasoning that it was Khmer killing Khmer in most instances, while a genocide is one ethnic group singling out another. Rithy Panh refuses this bureaucratic interpretation when he (along with cowriter Christophe Bataille) says that “the invention of a group within a larger group, of a group of human beings considered different, dangerous, toxic, suitable for destruction — is that not the very definition of genocide?”27 Panh calls this culling “the elimination,” the title of his powerful, spare, unsentimental memoir of having survived the genocide as a teenager and ultimately confronting the only Khmer Rouge official convicted at that time of any crimes against humanity, the commandant of S-21, Duch. The Elimination is a meditation on the effects of the genocide and the psychology of the perpetrators, represented by Duch, who allows Panh to interview him repeatedly, face to face. “He’s a man who searches out and seizes upon the weaknesses of others. A man who stalks his humanity. A disturbing man. I don’t remember that he ever left me without a laugh or a smile.”28 Duch’s defense lawyer, Kar Savuth, himself a genocide survivor, said
when he first met Duch, the former Khmer Rouge commandant had cried, overwhelmed by guilt, then gathered himself, pointing out that the first commandant of S-21 had been killed and that he knew it was only a matter of time before he himself would have been killed, too. Duch asked Kar Savuth a question: If they told you they were going to kill your family, what would you have done? And Kar Savuth said, “I would have done exactly what you did.”29
Duch tries to impress on Panh that he, too, would have done the same, an implication that Panh refuses. While Duch says he convinced Kar Savuth that he might have done the same things, Panh tries to convince Duch that he must take responsibility for his actions. Both are versions of this ethical need to recognize the inhuman within the human, and vice versa. “He’s human at every instant,” Panh says of Duch. “That’s the reason why he can be judged and condemned. No one can rightly authorize himself to humanize or dehumanize anyone. But no one can occupy Duch’s place in the human community. No one can duplicate his biographical, intellectual, and psychological trajectory.”30 Duch is both man and human and someone outside of the human community. He is an other even as he eliminated others, a creature who can only reclaim his humanity through acknowledging what he has done.