Big, Horrifying Numbers

On This Day In History
1969: U.S. bombs Cambodia for the first time

Quote Of The Day
"One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1,000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War.

"Though they spoke of terrible human suffering, reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types.

"On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western observer commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred towards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge.

"Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.”
(Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century)

There are roughly 4,368 diamonds in my angel painting. If the number of diamonds were increased to 1,000,000 - the number of peasants killed by the American bombing according to some estimates - that would mean making the diamond painting 229 times bigger, with a length of 57.25 metres and a width of 34.35 metres, or roughly the size of two basketball courts joined together. Picture each one of those one million diamonds as a person being burned alive by fire or napalm. Such horror is beyond the ability for the human mind to comprehend.

By contrast, the latest OHCR estimates put the number of civilians killed in the Ukraine at 691, with 1,143 injured. That is less than half the number of diamonds in this diamond painting. As monstrous as he is, and I am making no apologies for Putin or attempting to diminish the dreadful suffering taking place in the Ukraine, compared to Nixon and Kissinger, Putin is a lightweight.

Evacuation: for the horror and the terror.

Etude: for the - if not happiness, then perhaps serenity - that follows extreme horror and terror.