An ordinary monster

While studying Buddhist trance in Cambodia in 1971 the ethnologist François Bizot was ambushed and imprisoned by Khmer Rouge rebels. In his previous much lauded and horrifying book, The Gate, he described his interrogation by the prison commandant known as Comrade Duch. In a variation on the Stockholm syndrome (in which captive grows attached to captor), Bizot and Duch developed, if not a friendship, then an intimacy. Duch, persuaded that Bizot was not a CIA agent, had him released, thereby saving the Frenchman’s life. Duch acted at no little risk to himself in so doing. Bizot was the only westerner to survive incarceration by the Khmer Rouge.

Subsequently, with the triumph of the rebellion, Duch became the Khmer Rouge’s head of internal security and personally oversaw the Tuol Sleng extermination camp in Phnom Penh. Here inmates were first tortured to confess crimes against the revolution (whether real or imagined was neither here nor there) and then taken away to be bludgeoned to death, bullets being too expensive to waste. A hundred inmates died having their blood extracted for battlefield transfusions. Autopsies were performed on the living. Some 16,000 people were murdered at Tuol Sleng. Seven survived.

Bizot never denies that what Duch did was monstrous, but, in what is a meditation on original sin and the banality of evil, with a nod to the Sermon on the Mount, maintains that Duch was a man as ordinary as any other. The reader is asked — urged — to recognise that we are each born with the potential for extreme evil. Certainly the author believes it of himself.

The book is in two parts. The first charts the development of Bizot’s idea of human monstrosity, through self-examination (he once killed a pet by smashing it repeatedly against a wall) and through consideration of the nature of his relationship with Duch.