An obituary for innocence: Revisiting the trauma during the Khmer rouge years in Cambodia through children's narratives

Abstract

The totalitarian regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia under the dictatorship of Pol Pot initiated a saga of brutal mass genocide that exterminated millions and completely upended the social and political machinery of the country with its repressive policies. One of the most atrocious aspects of the regime was the deployment of tens of thousands of children as child soldiers through the indoctrination of the ideologies of the state as well as through coercion and intimidation. This paper intends to study the impact of child soldiering on child psyche through an analysis of two texts- Luong Ung's First They Killed My Father and Patricia McCormick's Never Fall Down. The paper shall explore how militarization and authoritarian rule dismantles commonly held perceptions about childhood as a period of dependency and vulnerability, where instead, children become unwitting perpetrators of horrible crimes that ultimately triggers trauma and disillusionment. In its analysis of the texts, the paper shall attempt to use Hannah Arendt's concept of the 'banality of evil' in the context of the child soldiers whose conformation to the propaganda of the Khmer Rouge lacked any ideological conviction.