The Survivor's Paradox: Psychological Consequences of the Khmer Rouge Rhetoric of Extermination

Abstract

From 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia, during the four years of the Pol Pot regime, the rhetoric of extermination that perpetrators used to legitimize mass murder was a powerful instrument to deprive individuals of their humankind before killing them. Because every human community is founded on a metaphor claiming the inalterability of the social bond beyond the dead, the genocide project aims for its obliteration. By breaking the possible representation of a continuity and a social permanence between the dead and the living, the rhetoric of extermination claims, in a terrifying reality, that the only possible connection between the dead and the living concerns an identical physical condition: the living have already died or will pass away. This is the point where the rhetoric of extermination radically subverts one of the major symbolic aspects of the human condition. In the aftermath of extermination, the social existence of the deceased depends on the survivors’ capacity to always carry them with them in a shared destiny. For those who survived, the consequences of this rhetoric may generate a distressful feeling of living in a world of death that conforms to the perpetrator's will. The survivor's paradox is undoubtedly one of the principal consequences of this will to deprive prisoners of their human condition. It is a kind of interiorization of the perpetrator's rhetoric. For the survivor to leave this world of death could mean abandoning the dead without a symbolic place where they could exist. But if he/she keeps them only in his/her own memory, that could signify that the survivor remains captive in the perpetrator's world of death. In both cases, the survivor's attempt to escape this paradox fails with the risk of confirming the abominable claim of the torturers. In this paper, the author emphasizes from an anthropological and psychotherapeutic point of view the dramatic logic of this rhetoric and its consequences long after the fact.