In the Khmer Rouge’s last stronghold, myths from the Cambodian genocide still reign
Near Cambodia’s border with Thailand, in a two-story home, a group of teenagers watched a black-and-white video projected onto a screen. It was only 8 a.m. on a gray Sunday morning, but the kids, clad in flip-flops and jeans, were rapt with attention.
The video flashed images of the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed during the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. The classroom walls were decorated with photos of figures from the era. A row of filing cabinets held thousands of pages of Khmer Rouge documents from the surrounding district.
The Big Idea: Age of nostalgia
Infatuation with a mythologized history has overtaken communities, cultures, entire regions, sending society and identity into a fun-house mirror of nostalgic reflections. This special issue brings you stories of people finding solace in pasts imagined and grieving for futures foreclosed in a time of existential threats.
Nostalgia has both been harnessed for political ends and become its own political force, electrifying powerful currents of populism, jingoism, and longing for dynastic rule. It also reaches deep into the crevices of human feeling — in kitchen table conversations and on TikTok alike — leading to a thickening of anger, loss, and sadness.
In Anlong Veng, it is widely understood that Vietnamese people — not the Khmer Rouge — were behind the worst violence that devastated Cambodia and that Khmer Rouge war heroes tried to stop them.
When the video ended, the soft-spoken workshop leader Ly Sok Kheang asked the kids: “Do you think Cambodian people could have killed other Cambodians?”
In the Khmer Rouge’s last stronghold, myths from the Cambodian genocide still reign
Near Cambodia’s border with Thailand, in a two-story home, a group of teenagers watched a black-and-white video projected onto a screen. It was only 8 a.m. on a gray Sunday morning, but the kids, clad in flip-flops and jeans, were rapt with attention.
The video flashed images of the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed during the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. The classroom walls were decorated with photos of figures from the era. A row of filing cabinets held thousands of pages of Khmer Rouge documents from the surrounding district.
The Big Idea: Age of nostalgia
Infatuation with a mythologized history has overtaken communities, cultures, entire regions, sending society and identity into a fun-house mirror of nostalgic reflections. This special issue brings you stories of people finding solace in pasts imagined and grieving for futures foreclosed in a time of existential threats.
Nostalgia has both been harnessed for political ends and become its own political force, electrifying powerful currents of populism, jingoism, and longing for dynastic rule. It also reaches deep into the crevices of human feeling — in kitchen table conversations and on TikTok alike — leading to a thickening of anger, loss, and sadness.
In Anlong Veng, it is widely understood that Vietnamese people — not the Khmer Rouge — were behind the worst violence that devastated Cambodia and that Khmer Rouge war heroes tried to stop them.
When the video ended, the soft-spoken workshop leader Ly Sok Kheang asked the kids: “Do you think Cambodian people could have killed other Cambodians?”
