“The Killing Fields” and the Fight Against Dehumanization

Here is a video essay of the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields” about the Khmer Rouge’s rein of terror in the 1970s and instigated the killings of 2 million Cambodians.

I just encountered on Netflix the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields” about the Khmer Rouge rein of terror in the 1970s that instigated the killing of 2 million Cambodians. I hadn’t seen the movie since the 1980s and forgot how brutal the movie is. At a time of growing authoritarianism and wars around the world, movies like “The Killing Fields”, “Schindler’s List”, “Missing”, “Salvador” and “Romero” try to remind viewers of the dangers of how war and extreme ideologies can tempt people to dehumanize those who are immigrants or vulnerable minorities or different religions or those who just disagree.

I’ve been seeing this more and more. In 2016, I got into a few debates with a few Filipino leftists who were trying to justify then President Rodrigo Duterte’s use of extrajudicial killings in his war on drugs. I had to leave a few Facebook pages because of that. When peace talks broke down between the Duterte government and communist insurgents in 2017 and Duterte began targeting leftists, I’m hoping that the leftists whom I debated in 2016 learned that you can’t oppose extrajudicial killings when right wing forces are guilty of it but turn a blind eye when your own side is guilty of it.

My politics is generally to the Left of the political spectrum and I think these leftists do important work fighting for the poor and indigenous people against exploitation by the government and by multinational corporations. But I strongly believe that leftists need to oppose both left wing and right wing authoritarianism, just as I think conservatives need to oppose both right wing and left wing authoritarianism. Authoritarianism, whether it is left wing or right wing, eventually destroys everyone.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said that oppression dehumanizes both the oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressor become callous to the sufferings they inflict on those whom they oppress. And the oppressed stop seeing their oppressors as human. This process of dehumanization makes possible systemic discrimination, mass killings and rape, and genocide. We’re seeing this in the genocide in Sudan, the war against the Ukrainians, Hamas’s brutal attack on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7, and Israel’s indiscriminate bombings in Gaza that have killed countless innocent Palestinian civilians.

In fighting monsters, we have to be careful not to become monsters ourselves. In fighting oppression, we have to be careful not to become oppressors ourselves.

King adopted the strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience because he wanted to find a way of saving both the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

We’re seeing this here in the U.S. as it’s become more polarized. I’m liberal, but I used to have close conservative friends. I knew these friends more than just their political affiliations and saw their complex humanity. They were good friends who were there for me at times when I really need a friend.

Over the past 2 decades, something changed. My former conservative friends gradually stopped seeing me as a human being and they just saw me as a caricature of what Fox News painted all leftists as being. I learned to really despise Fox News.

I hate Trump, but I don’t hate Trump supporters. But I am worried about how Trump can manipulate his supporters into doing dangerous things. The Nation Magazine has been doing a series of articles detailing the right wing Project 2025 if Trump regains the presidency. Coupled with the right wing propaganda emanating from Fox News, I worry that a second Trump term will instigate another Red Scare like the McCarthy era of the 1950s.

I’m frequently tempted to dehumanize Trump supporters. But I know a few of them before they got caught up in the Trump cult and remember the friends that they used to be. Those former friends have become too toxic to remain friends. But I’m hoping at some point that they snap out of the spell that they are in and realize how they were suckered into supporting a wanna-be dictator.

That’s my hope around the world, that those Duterte and Marcos supporters, Netanyahu supporters, Sinwar supporters, Putin supporters, and supporters of autocrats around the world will eventually snap out of it and realize the dangerous path that these leaders are taking the world to. The only thing we can do in the meanwhile is to resist those leaders in a way where we don’t lose our humanity.

Costa-Gavras 1982 film “Missing” examines the disappearance of American journalist Charles Horman in the aftermath of the United States-backed Chilean coup of 1973, which deposed the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende .

Here is a trailer for Oliver Stone’s 1986 movie “Salvador”, which focuses on an American journalist who is covering the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s between the left wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and the right wing military government.

In this Cinebinge reaction video, George and his father react to watching Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie “Schindler’s List” about Oskar Schindler’s efforts to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. George’s father compares the Holocaust in Europe with the Nanking Massacre and the cruelties of Japanese occupation of China during World War II.

Here is the 1989 movie “Romero” about the El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who organized peaceful protests against the violent right wing military dictatorship in El Salvador.