On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Read Free

torture compound in Cambodia. It took months for me to get up the nerve to visit. Pierrot, the Swiss owner of my guesthouse, told me that he still refused to go after ten years in Phnom Penh. “You will not get me in that place, mon ami.” He explained, “It is the maker of bad dreams, and I wish to sleep well.” Like Pierrot, I didn’t want to go to S21 either. But S21 was a place of monsters, real monsters and real victims, and I could not altogether leave it alone.
    Over and over again one hears the same story of torturers—whether Nazis, Pinochet lackeys, American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, or Khmer Rouge teenagers at S21—the story that they were just “following orders.” But before we dismiss these people as demons that bear no resemblance to us, we should remember Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on the psychology of obedience to authority, in which average Americans were made to believe they were shocking other average Americans with lethal doses of electricity simply because a man in a white lab coat insisted that they do so. 12
    Most people who hear about Milgram’s study ask themselves what they would do as a test subject. Or we wonder how we would respond if we were told that prisoner
X
is an enemy of freedom and that we must pressure him to give up information about an imminent terrorist plan. Or worse yet, we wonder what we would do if someone held a gun to our head and told us to cut someone else’s throat. That’s what happened at S21, over and over again. If we were in that situation, would we become monsters? Or does such heinous action require freewill agency in order to qualify the perpetrator as monstrous?

     
    A torture bed in the Khmer Rouge prison S21. Seventeen thousand Cambodians lost their lives in this monstrous place. The building is now a memorial museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photo by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.
    The term
monster
is often applied to human beings who have, by their own horrific actions, abdicated their humanity. In
The Fragility of Goodness
Martha Nussbaum makes the Aristotelian argument that our humanity is indeed a fragile mantle, one that can be corrupted by forces internal and external to us. 13 Like Hecuba in the Greek tragedy, who finds her child dead, a human being can lose so much that is precious to her, through war or persecution or chance, that she sinks to the level of an animal, or worse. Everyone has the potential to become monstrous. 14
    In Cambodia I walked the dusty dirt roads to the uneventful-looking compound S21. It looked uneventful because before 1975 it was simply known as the Tuol Svay Prey High School. It was converted into Security Prison 21 by Pol Pot’s security forces, and it became the central detention center for suspected enemies of Angkar, the mysterious and authoritative higher organization or party of the Khmer Rouge. 15 By 1976 approximately twenty-five hundred prisoners had passed through the bloody corridors of S21, and each year that followed saw increased numbers of tortured prisoners, until they totaled around seventeen thousand by 1979, when the Vietnamese Army liberated Phnom Penh. When Vietnamese soldiers stormed S21 they were horrified by the carnage they discoveredthere. Only seven survivors were found alive in the compound; no one else who entered S21—not one of the seventeen thousand people—made it out alive.
    My guide for the tour was Ladin, a small woman in her thirties with a broad and somewhat sad face. She smiled and gestured for me to walk with her across a small field of dust and burned grass. We were the only people moving through the compound. All the classrooms of this former high school had been converted into prison cells and torture chambers. Iron bars were installed over the windows and doors and barbed wire snaked everywhere. On the ground floor little brick cells had been fabricated to hold one prisoner each, with not even enough space to lie down. Larger rooms held hundreds of prisoners chained