Selling Needs's video: Changiri The Killer Tree in cambodia

This is where you could have died when you were four. Your tiny body smashed against the tree trunk, your back bent into an impossible zigzag of broken bones, your ribs forced in all directions, your kneecaps catapulted to the back of your wriggling legs, your head cracked wide open like a pomegranate, its bloody seeds raining through the fissures of your skull onto the ground. The roots of this tree I stand upon today would have heard you scream as you kicked your legs every time they beat the bark with your body, an internal Hiroshima of gastric juices running down your chin, leaves falling on your forehead as you shook the tree with the fury of your fear. I look at the tree and the thought of you dying right here is unbearable. The unfathomable extent of human cruelty, how men and women forsook their humanity, turned on each other, and high on ganja and empty promises battered children against this very chankiri tree. To ensure the establishment of the UCKMR — Ultra Communist Khmer Rouge Regime — soldiers murdered their prisoners with poison, with bamboo sticks sharpened into spears, with throat-slitting blades made of thorny leaves. They threw their victims off cliffs and dumped their mangled bodies into deep caves. To save ammunition. An extreme measure under an extremely austere war. But children’s skulls are acutely tender, so light, so easily broken when bashed against the trunks of chankiri trees, that after a few blows their eyes popped out of their sockets and their necks hung lifelessly over their chins. When they stopped crying, after the last gulp of tears, snot, and blood went up their nostrils, when they no longer called for their mothers, their little bodies were flung into pits, shallow mass graves filled with twisted bodies and mouths contorted into silent screams. To stop the little bourgeoisies from growing up and taking revenge for their parents’ deaths. To stop another generation of intellectuals from ruining the Khmer Rouge dream of a back-to-the-roots Cambodia; a Shangri-La nation of slaves with no room for education or tolerance for the arts; where no one reads, no one writes, and no one sings; a warped notion of a deaf and mute paradise of illiterate citizens, where the only music allowed was the cacophony of ancient hoes breaking up soil. I try to imagine Cambodia on 17 April 1975, when a man named Pol Pot and his army marched into Phnom Penh. They called themselves the Khmer Rouge — the Red Khmer. Khmer because it is the main ethnic group of Cambodia. And red because they wore the karma, a red-and-white checkered scarf, around their necks. Within 48 hours, the Khmer Rouge had complete control of the capital. Everyone was forced to leave their homes and relocated to work camps called collective farms. In three days every city was empty. Pol Pot believed that city people had been corrupted by capitalism and there was no room for them in his utopian, pure communal society. Therefore, they had to be exterminated. The year 1975 was Year Zero, a historical moment of Cambodia’s new beginning, all under the absolute and unequivocal control of a single man: Pol Pot. In just three years, eight months, and 20 days, his Khmer Rouge had murdered about three million people.