Dead inside or professional detachment?

I have received some very complimentary feedback on my blog so far, so merci beaucoup for that. Luckily it was all digitally so no-one saw me blush. Being the British born lad that I am, it’s not easy to take a compliment. However, I also got one comment from one of my very best friends that he feels I am a little disrespectful in some parts. What he meant was that I am not sensitive enough about what the words I write could mean to people who read this considering the issues I am writing about. Short and simple, yes, this is probably true. I could end the blog response here, but I feel it wouldn’t be doing the issue justice. So here is a slightly longer retort.

Educated in the German school system and with a history teacher for the last three years who took our Holocaust education very seriously, by the time I received my Abitur I felt pretty much desensitised to the whole issue. I had heard so much about it; and yet six months later when I was auditioning for drama schools in Munich (yes, a long time ago!!) I was staying with acquaintances of the family in Dachau, just outside the city, and so I took the chance to look around the concentration camp there. And of course that experience made me pensive; I wasn’t dead inside.

And yet two years ago I went round Auschwitz when visiting a friend in Krakow. Nothing. Here in Cambodia on my preparatory visit I looked at the former Security Prison Tuol Sleng and the Killling Fields Choeung Ek. Nothing. And this July I visited Potocari Memorial Centre in Srebrenica, Bosnia, on an excursion with students. Again nothing. ‘What is the matter with me?’ I thought, ‘Am I dead inside?’ And this wouldn’t have surprised me considering that I spend literally all day every day reading, writing or discussing mass killing in general and in particular individual people who do it. But an esteemed colleague of mine said that she doesn’t think I’m desensitised or dead inside, but that I just have a different pair of glasses on through which I am viewing the world. When I visit these places I am there in academic interest mode, not in human Tim mode. And yes, this thought really resonated with me.

And here in Cambodia I am in permanent academic interest mode overdrive – everything I see, hear and experience I am trying to process for my understanding of what happened here, why people did what they did and for understanding what it has done to today’s society. That is what I am paid to be here for (tax payers’ money!) and that is what I raised money to pay my translator for by crowdfunding. I am here, most narrowly, to understand why people killed other people under the cloak of genocidal ideology and orders three and a half decades ago. And I am doing that with my academic pair of glasses glued to my face.

I do not condone in the least what my interviewees have done – neither the killing of which one man has spoken, nor other people’s participation in a totalitarian system of oppression, hate and murder. Naturally, also, all people who have lost loved ones during the killings here, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, have my heart-felt condolences and my sympathy. But I am not here as an activist, much less to judge the people I am interviewing, I am here as a researcher who wants to understand them. I talk to them at face level, and try to build their trust. And I am pleased if they are honest with me. I am pleased if they open up. I am pleased if they admit the things they have done. Because it doesn’t change the past, whether they talk to me about it or not. That has happened and cannot be unchanged. But for my research, it is pivotal that people open up and talk. So in my mind a good day in the field is a day when people talk to me about killing.

It may be macabre and it maybe won’t always stay as easy for me as it has been visiting memorials when I am talking to live people, but that is what I am here to do. And it is why you are reading this blog, dear reader. I apologise in advance if I sometimes tread too heavy-footedly when I write these blogs. I am giving you a slice of my impressions here in Cambodia. And those impressions are tainted by who I am and why I am here. I don’t make light of genocide on this blog – such humour, although pervasive amongst genocide scholars and within my circle of friends, does indeed appear a little out of place in a blog such as this – but equally this blog is about the search for why people kill. It is a blog on perpetrators, not on victims. It is a blog on killing, not on surviving. So please excuse the odd faux-pas along the way.  Maybe I am wrong or too blasé about it all – if so (or even if I’m right!) leave a comment below.

Oh and the picture has nothing to do with the blog - but I like it and  I bet it made you click on the article in the first place!