You come to discover the darkest despot side of the demons of humanity here in these upturned soils of native Kampuchea. Men, women, and children were taught to forget their past, trust no one, uproot plants, forget the present, and rebuild a Cambodia built on the puritan practice of growing rice and tilling fields as farmers. Kids were trained on the principles of self-hate and family hate in order to sustain the murder of their own peoples.

I am here at the Killing Fields, remnants of the genocide of the 1970s where an estimated 1.5 million people died here under the bloody hands of the Pol Pot regime. This is too much to take in.

People were brainwashed that they had a mental disease called “thinking too much” and that they should release themselves to the free will of Angka, the supreme authority of the land. People were told that God had died and Angka would now sustain their needs. Educated countrymen were summoned forward for their skills in order to rebuild the nation…only to find out they would be the first to be massacred.

It turned out there was not enough fuel, time, or precious ammunition to deal with the thousands of citizens every day that needed to be evacuated from the cities to the countrysides to concentration camps to be murdered. Hateful human torture agents were trained and manufactured as quick as victims were being exterminated who would turn against their own people killing their families and friends for the lords of the land.

Somber, sad, stoic, sedated, sorrowful: this is Cambodian mood. In their Khmer eyes a million untold stories of the past.