Banality of Evil

I don't think I ever really understood what Hannah Arendt meant by the "banality of evil" until I came to Cambodia. This weekend, we visited Tuol Sleng, also known as S21, which was a school that the Khmer Rouge used as a prison, and Chueng Ek, which is the site of the Killing Fields. As we approached Tuol Sleng through the neighborhood, it looked like any other school in Cambodia -- a pale yellow three-story building with blue-grey shutters surrounded by a high wall. When you enter in, it also seems perfectly ordinary. There is little signage and no offer of guided tours. It seems like you'd just wandered into a school after class hours. There are children and tuktuk drivers mulling about in the center grassy playground.

As you wander from building to building, thing are left almost exactly as the Vietnamese found them. In one building, where interrogations were conducted, rusted metal bed frames and chains on the floor remain. On the wall, in each classroom is a photo of the last victims, just as they were when they were discovered. The yellow and white floor tiles are dingy, and you can almost make out what one imagines to be bloodstains.

Rooms in other buildings were carved into tiny wooden or brick-walled cells. There is nothing preventing you from stepping inside one of these tiny spaces to feel exactly as those imprisoned did. Perhaps what made it all so chilling was the immediacy of it -- you could reach out and touch it all. In another building, photos of the Khmer Rouge victims processed at Tuol Sleng are posted on row after row of bulletin boards and in room after room. What is striking is the variety of facial expressions on their faces. Some are filled with terror, some resigned, other smiling, as if unaware of their fates. Some were children and some were mothers with babies.

And yet, what is most striking about the place is how completely ordinary it seems -- as if it could be any school in any town. It became apparent to me how completely mundane the nature of evil is -- often so prevalent and ordinary as to disappear in plain sight. It seems that to the Cambodians who survived that period, like the tuktuk drivers on the playground, that the evil of the Khmer Rouge has disappeared before them -- it has become a part of their ordinary lives.

The tuktuk ride to Cheung Ek was rather long and bumpy. Fortunately, our driver, Rotha, is very conscientious and safe. This was the location where prisoners from Tuol Sleng were taken to be killed. All of the structures from the 1975-79 period have been torn down and replaced by a stupa filled with bones and an information pavilion.

At the entry, a sign displaying the rules requests that you not remove bones from the site. At first, this seemed to be an odd request, until you realize the access that you have to the remains. Just as at Tuol Sleng, the immediacy is unprecedented. At the stupa, you could reach right in and touch whatever you like – it was just open to the air. From that spot, it all appears to be a large grassy field. As you start to walk along the dirt paths, you begin to notice deep depressions in the ground. These are the mass graves that have been exhumed. But, not all of the graves have been.

Wandering along the dirt paths, there are bits of cloth emerging from the matted soil. Initially, I refused to believe that these could be the clothes of the victims of Chueng Ek. Proceeding further, more of the scraps appeared – in some cases whole sleeves. There were so many of these rising bits of cloth, that it became apparent that they couldn’t be any thing other than the clothes of the dead. In some areas, dull white bits that seemed to be rocks were also emerging from the soil. Again, my mind refused to believe the truth of what these were. However, it became impossible to deny that it was anything other than bones. The Khmer Rouge were obviously not as neat as I’d thought with their mass graves, and indeed the whole space is one giant mass grave, with only 43 pits dug to exhume remains.

It was only after realizing that all the while, I’d been walking over the bones of the victims of terrible violence that I began to understand what Arendt meant by the “banality of evil.” By my very presence, wandering about this site, it was being treated like another other ordinary tourist attraction – so mundane a place where such tremendous, unimaginable evil occurred.