Americans for UNFPA Leadership Trip to Cambodia
January 2006

Thoughts on choosing between good and evil

Rules for interrogation at Tuol Sleng Prison

When the Khymer rouge captured Phnom Pehn in 1975 they turned the Tuol Sleng school into a prison. This sign list the rules for prisoners during interrogation in the prison. It's the scariest thing I saw in Cambodia.

The Khymer Rouge was a peasant army led by a madman, Pol Pot. He set out to destroy Cambodian society because he wanted to build his idea of a better Cambodia, a state organized according to his socialist or communist dogma that was called Angka.

Pol Pot's soldiers, and the guards at Tuol Sleng, were mostly poorly educated young people from the countryside. The prisoners were college-educated professionals - doctors, lawyers, government officials, diplomats, engineers and other representatives of the society that was to be destroyed. Most of the guards at Tuol Sleng were between 10 and 15 years old.

Look at the second rule. "Don't try try to hide facts by making pretexts...You are strictly prohibited to contest me." This means that the prisoner's answer to the interrogator's question doesn't matter. The prisoner was guilty no matter what evidence the prisoner brought forward, what facts supported the prisoner's claim of innocence, what chain of reasoning linked facts to innocence. None of this mattered.

The prisoner was guilty of crimes against the state, or put another way, they were guilty of being who they were, which cannot be a crime in the usual sense that a crime is an act that a person chooses to perform.

Forbidding any dialog based on facts and reason was certainly necessary when the interrogators were uneducated teenagers, the prisoners were educated adults who were facing a meaningless accusation and likely to make a powerful case for their innocence, but their guilt was a foregone conclusion.

About 1.5 million Cambodians died because of this way of thinking during the Kymer Rouge years.

The Hammer of the Witches

When I stood in front of this sign and read Rule Two I was reminded of a medieval document - Malleus Mallificarum (The Hammer of the Witches), an Inquisition manual written by two Dominican priests for finding, trying, convicting and executing witches. (Published in 1486, this document was the second most popular document in print, after the Bible, in several countries in western Europe for many years.)

In the chapter on the use of evidence against witches, the Malleus said that if someone was accused of being a witch then their confession (even a confession obtained by torture) was proof they were a witch. The punishment for witchcraft and other kinds of heresy was death by fire - burning alive at the stake.

But everyone knows that witches always lie so a woman who denies being a witch to avoid the stake must be a witch. (Here is the section of the Malleus with this particularly exquisite demonstration of irrational thinking.)

In this way the accusation itself becomes proof. No evidence, no facts, nor reasoning are needed. The accusation itself, unrelated to any material fact or logic, proves witchcraft and heresy. This legal process, completely separated from reason, led to deaths of between 500,000 and 9,000,000 women, men and children during the 250 years of the madness of witch hunts in Europe.

The Kymer Rouge and the Inquisition: Same faulty reasoning

The Inquisition and the Khymer Rouge accused people of crimes that have no basis in reason and convicted them by a pseudo-logic that also has no basis in reason. The accusation was irrational in the first place, and could be dismissed in an instant if exposed to reason, and therefore reason was excluded from process of trial and conviction.

For example, women accused of witchcraft were publically examined for marks on their skin which were supposed to be evidence of their pact with the devil. If any mark was found, it was proof of guilt - a devil's mark.

Most people have blemishes somewhere on their skin, more so as they get older. Now suppose not only the accused witch, but everyone in the courtroom had been required to expose their skin and have it examined for blemishes... Or that the skins of the accuser, judge and accused were examined by someone who didn't know who was the accused, who was the accuser and who was the judge...These simple procedures would have shown the unreason of saying that blemishes on the skin were marks of the devil, assuming the accuser and judge were not themselves witches!

Apply the same rational approach to all the other things that witches were supposed to do, and belief in witchcraft itself would disappear, which is what happened once the ideas of the Renaissance spread and rational thinking really took off in western society.

No one has ever gone to war to prove that two plus two equals five

I stood in the yard of the Tuol Sleng prison and realized that the thinking of the Khymer Rouge was the same as the thinking of the Inquisition. Sadly, irrational faith-based thinking is as alive today as it was in the Middle Ages.

The mistake of both the Inquisition and the Khymer Rouge was to abandon reason because they thought they already knew what was true.

When you already know the truth, facts and reason questioning that truth are worse then irrelevant. They are the biggest threat possible because, if allowed to see the light of day, the facts will destroy your truth.

Truth that is based on reason cannot be threatened by reason and facts, it can only be improved by them. But if your truth is not based on reason then facts and reason are your constant enemy, creating doubt. Doubt is the supreme enemy of faith and the best friend of reason.

Once reason is abandoned, thought becomes more and more disconnected from reality, and the over time the struggle to make reality fit with dogma becomes more desperate, and then more violent. This is why wars are fought over theories of religion, politics, economics and race, but no one has ever gone to war to prove that two plus two equals five.

The grace of Aquinas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This conflict between reason and dogma was identified by St. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar struggling to accommodate the rational thinking of ancient Greece with the faith-based thinking of Christian Europe. He lived when the philosophical and scientific thinking of the Greeks, proudly based on reason, was seeping into Europe through Moorish Spain, challenging the ideas of a Europe where thought had been dominated by the Christian faith for a thousand years.

Aquinas' solution to the problem of conflicting ideas, some based on faith and some on reason, was simple. He said that when there is conflict between the evidence of the senses and the beliefs of faith, which by definition are beliefs in things for which there is no reason to believe, reason always trumps faith. When faith and reason are in conflict, Aquinas said, reason must prevail.

Those who reject reason can silence their opponents with bread and circuses, censorship, street violence, or imprisonment and execution. But in the end the facts always surface. They always do, no matter how many people you execute. In the end, the truth will prove the irrational fanatics wrong.

The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the few German churchmen who opposed Hitler in the 1930's (and for this was executed on the personal vindictive order of Hitler in 1945 two days before Hitler committed suicide at the end of the war), said that the will of God has to be discovered and rediscovered by each of us every minute of every day.

It doesn't matter if you believe in God or not, or which god you believe in. As we face the endlessly changing complexity of life there is no fixed dogma that will help invariably help us decide what is the good thing to do next, what is the best choice right now, this very minute. We constantly have to look at the facts of the situation we find ourselves in, apply our principles and our reason as best we can to achieve a good outcome, then we must act, and then we must immediately question ourselves all over again.

Bonhoeffer, like Aquinas, is saying that reason with good intent trumps blind faith.

Two ways of thinking

Unfortunately, millions have to suffer and die when irrational belief flourishes at the expense of reason. Some of these people suffered at Tuol Sleng prison and died in the killing fields of Cambodia. The guards at the killing fields who killed small children by smashing their heads against the trunk of a tree before throwing them into mass graves was not looking inside themselves and asking, "Is this really the will of God?"

I cannot believe that anyone would answer "Yes" to this question, pick up another small child and smash that child's head against the tree. The Khymer Rouge principle of Angka, like all dogma, was a substitute for reason and conscience.

Each of us has the choice between thinking based on the best we can do with facts and reason, or we can insist that whatever prejudice we hold is the only right answer.

We can participate in dialog to improve our understanding, and be willing to change our ideas when faced with facts or better thinking that proves us wrong, or we can insist that we are right and silence our opponents.

At the end of the path of reason is the smiling little girl, at the end of the path of dogma is a pile of skulls beside a bloodstained tree.