CIVIL RESISTANCE
My TREASON & INCITEMENT MASS TRIAL (Initial Page on Trial Matters) TUESDAY, 14 JUNE 2022 VERDICT ANNOUNCEMENT Court Statement: Concluding Remarks ការការពារ ផ្លូវច្បាប់ របស់ខ្ញុំ [ ... ] |
CIVIC EDUCATION
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Mom's Brother Ani
With Uncle Ani, his wife Chanseda (at the Elephant Bar), and their youngest son Michel (dinner at my apartment). February 2020
Kerala God's Own Country Land of Coconuts
Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala | 30 Jan. - 3 Feb. 2020
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01/01/20/20
Wishing you 20/20 vision in the new year-decade from our family to yours. (On second thought, 2020 is yet to be a new decade!) The last time I celebrated a birthday, thanks to friends, was in college! Using my documentary birthdate of 10 Nov. 1973. It’s mainly because I don’t know my real birth day. However, I have pinpointed—after sorting through the various memories of aunts and uncles—a birth month (and birth year)—January 1971. So, I think I will start celebrating again, not a birthday but a birthmonth! When better to start than the very beginning of a brand new year, the eve of a new decade! So I’m turning 2—, I mean, 49 all month this month! You can buy me a drink if you want (just kidding!—half)... Cheers to turning 49! Oh, btw, Lady Delilah is also turning 49 (7 x 7).
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By Theary Seng, January 11, 2012 January 7 is indeed a significant day for survivors of the Khmer Rouge. It arrested the macabre convulsions that would have swallowed all of us into a hellish hole if the Vietnamese military had not intervened. It is a bittersweet day of commemoration through invasion. And now, unfortunately, it is a day propagandised to be solely the Day of Liberation, neatly sweeping away the equally important fact of it being simultaneously the inaugurating day of an occupation that would last for the next decade. That occupation began with the barricading of Phnom Penh to facilitate the plundering of its wealth by convoys of trucks heading to Vietnam and the mass crimes of the K5 plan. My hairdresser remembers returning from Battambang to his home in Boeung Keng Kang I on February 3, 1979, only to find that all the wealthy neighbourhoods of villas and jewellery stores were still barricaded off. It was an occupation cut short only by the meltdown of the Cold War – specifically, the break-up of the Soviet Union, which funded the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. The rewriting of history in this manner by the current regime is fraught with danger for the longevity of Cambodian stability and peace. Cycles of past grievances that touch on national identity and humiliation run deep in any society, and no less in Cambodia. Think of the Khmer Kampuchea Kroms and their current suffering and struggles. Think of the underpinnings for the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia. It’s not only on January 7 that the regime is revising history to fit its narrow political agenda. The political interference in the Khmer Rouge tribunal speaks to the same dangers. This regime never wanted the KRT, but once it was inevitable and the regime was confident of its control over the mechanisms of the process, it did everything to achieve and protect its twin goals: to go down in history as the government that put the Khmer Rouge on trial and, concurrently, to erase its own Khmer Rouge history and crimes. With the United Nations’ stamp of approval, the CPP regime is achieving exactly that. No counterbalancing, competing narratives are permitted or have the resources and official, institutional dissemination systems to match it. Thus, January 7 is paradoxical for Cambodians who are simultaneously survivors of the Khmer Rouge, survivors of the K5 plan under the Vietnamese occupation, and continuing survivors of a regime that desperately needs to whitewash its history of the Khmer Rouge and has indebted political ties to Vietnam – a dangerous liaison, in light of the two countries’ historical enmity over territorial annexation. Stated differently, January 7 is a paradoxical and conflicting date for us who are Cambodian victims of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian victims of the Vietnamese occupation and Cambodian victims of a regime with unhealthy political and historical ties to both the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese military. January 7 initially made us deliriously grateful, then wearily suspicious. That is the tension. Theary C. Seng
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Palindrome
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The Donation of Constantine "Ah, Constantine, how much evil was born, not from your conversion, but from that donation that the first wealthy Pope received from you!" - Dante, Inferno, XIX (The Divine Comedy) The sin of simony (eponym) is the act (like Simon in the Acts of the Apostles) who wanted to buy the gift of prophecy... making commerce of sacred things; blasphemy. "...one great event known in the Middle Ages as the the Second Sin of Adam ...confusion of orders, confusion between the secular and the sacred, the profane and the sacred.” “...refers to 4th century when the emperor Constantine gave land to the pope; made the pope ruler of the secular domain. To Dante, it was a confusion of registers, a confusion of responsibilities, that the pope should only engage in spiritual pursuits, in spiritual matters. He however became involved in secular matters.” The issue was clarified in the 15th century when the philologist Lorenzo Valla proved the forgery of the document of the so-called Donation of Constantine to Pope Sylvester to justify temporal/secular power of the pope.
See also cooptation of "Third-Party Spokespersons" by the Hun Sen regime.
Read both editorials in Facebook.
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Treachery!
The Wonder Kingdoom begets much treachery, in the betrayal of family (Cain), of nation (Antenora), of God (Judas). Dante reserves the heart of hell for these damned, with Lucifer (Satan) iced in the center of it all, that is Cocytus. Excerpts from Dante's The Inferno (of the Divine Comedy). - Theary, 22 Dec. 2019
See Vietnamization: List of Characters
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The Christmas Story
(L) ជាភាសា ខ្មែរ; (R) In English
Prayer Meetings or Gossip Sessions?
It’s a bit naughty but a Christian friend expressed regularly a sentiment that I don’t necessarily disagree with: how these small groups and prayer breakfasts can easily turn into gossip sessions (see Virgil's Aeneid on Rumors). An added complication: it’s really difficult to have exchanges with self-righteous people, which Christians, particularly some missionaries, with an added layer of evangelical zeal, fall victim. Again my spot-on cynical Christian friend pointed out and I witnessed and experienced. But recently it was mentioned in a more general context by my very gay friend, artist Chath, how self-righteous people—religious and otherwise—are the most hypocritical and mean, many times. I would add that any group of people who gives more value to appearance, is under stress, feels under siege, and/or inclines toward judgmentalism, watch them and be amused. We—both Cambodians and visitors—speak of ignorance of Cambodians. I say, foreign visitors should also be under similar scrutiny, both religious and otherwise, as I have yet to encounter. - Theary, 8 Dec. 2019
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