RIP, Dith Pran
The name may not be familiar to some, but the gruesome legend of The Killing Fields sure is.
The photographer Dith Pran has passed away today.
Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J. The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.
Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.
More background at the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project.
Some interesting correspondence and artifacts there, including a letter from Senator John McCain.
Slideshow of photos here. More here and here.
Cross-posted from JWF.
JammieWearingFool
in Dith Pran, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge
|
6 Comments
View Printer Friendly Version
Reader Comments (6)
I've been thinking of Dith Pran since last night. What unimaginable, awful things the man saw, and yet he emerged with such a happiness in life. From everything I've seen, he was a gentle and good soul, who did so very much to bring the terrible story to light.
It was he who coined the terribly accurate term "The Killing Fields"
I saw that film when it came out. It affected me greatly. A few rows in front of us there were a group of Asians, who I think were Cambodian. They were very emotional as they discussed the movie.
Thanks to a few dedicated souls like Dith Pran, the story was told to the world.
God bless you, Dith Pran.
Nice tribute, if anyone here hasn't seen The Killing Fileds, they should.
The killing fields - from the 'year zero' theory. Was that not thought up in the Parisian cafe scene by the usual rag-tag bunch of leftist 'intellectuals'?
>>Thanks to a few dedicated souls like Dith Pran, the story was told to the world.<<
Hear, hear. Let's hope his death will at least lead to a few re-runs of the film on TV
A@A,
Was that not thought up in the Parisian cafe scene by the usual rag-tag bunch of leftist 'intellectuals'?
French leftists invented the atrocities of "Democratic Kampuchea?" Boy, I'm glad to hear that didn't really happen after all! Thank you for single-handedly saving the lives of 3 milllion people, Allan.
The 'year zero' theory was inspired by the French left.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200506/ai_n14903049
An extract:
"It is fair to say that Sartre's anti-bourgeois rhetoric changed the language and the agenda of post-war French philosophy, and was the original inspiration for Barthes, Foucault and the phoney psychotherapies of Lacan and R.D. Laing. It was translated into street theatre in May 1968, and fired the revolutionary ambitions of students who had come to Paris from the former colonies. One of those students was later to return to his native Cambodia and put into practice the 'totalising' doctrine (expressed in Critique de la raison dialectique, 1960, and in Situations VIII and Situations IX, 1972) that has as its targets the 'seriality' and 'otherness' of the bourgeois class. And in the purifying rage of Pol Pot it is not unreasonable to see the contempt for the ordinary and the actual that is expressed in almost every line of Sartre's demonic prose."
The French leftist 'intellectuals' are a dangerous bunch of useless pillocks, as are those who fail to see them for what they are. These bastards initiated 'year zero'.