Dear Marion,

Thank you very, very much for your letter, so fertile of further
ethical and epistemologic consideration that I quote it in full.
Rather than stating my own "views" or "opinions", which are in fact 
non-existent, I shall content myself with intercalated questions.
I hope my diabolical wit is not so offensive to you as to put an
end to our correspondence.

> To me the main feature of Holocaust Denial is the forceful attempt
> to falsify history. 
> Falsifications of history are done for political purposes;
> in the case of Holocaust Denial the effort is directed at undermining
> Jewish claims of entitlement to compensation, and to make Jews
> out to be manipulative liars rather than sympathetic victims.

It occurs to me that the "truth" or "falsity"s of history is invariably
relative.  No  verbal account of events can do justice to "what really
happened," wie es eigentlich gewesen. (If at all, only art can do that.)
All exchanges about "history" are motivated by the expectation of
establishing a consensus about the social order. All history has an
ideological purpose, recognized or not. Consider the pervasive Holocaust
Denial in the history fundamental to both Jewish and Christian theology.
If unsure, google "Genocide in the Bible". In 0.12 seconds you will be
apprised of 1,800,000 citations. It won't take you long to realize that
you've opened a can of worms, impossible ever to close. They'll be all
over you, before you know it.

> I see little relationship between Holocaust Denial and the
> friendship that a victim of persecution may develop for someone
> he knows was instrumental in designing the persecution his family
> fell victim to.  Thet Sambath consecrated hundreds and hundreds
> of hours and reels of audio and video tape to getting Nuon Chea
> to explain on tape why he ordered the mass murder, starvation,
> torture, destruction of 1.5 million Cambodians.  This is the
> opposite of denial.

Instead of writing: "This is the opposite of denial",
why not write: "This is the essence of denial".
If "the mass murder, starvation,
torture, destruction of 1.5 million Cambodians"
had been real to him, could Sambath have 
"consecrated hundred and hundreds of hours"
to recapitulating the horror?
Doesn't the fact that he spent the "hundreds and hundreds
of hours" recapitulating the horror,
prove that the horror was unreal to him,
and if, at the beginning, the horror was unreal,
would his having "consecrated hundred and hundreds of hours"
to contemplating the horror have made the horror real?
Isn't, moreover, the very process of purporting to affirm the horror,
denial of its reality; while the inability to contemplate the
horror, i.e. "denying" the horror, would be
compellingly to transpose it into the immediate present,
and thus the ultimate validation of its reality?
In other words: the concepts of denial and reality are mutually
incompatible. 
(Parenthetically: The Holocaust Deniers who are objectionble to 
both you and myself are in fact not _denying_ the Holocaust,
but affiriming it most forcefully,
by striving to revive the Holocaust or to perpetuate it.)
> 
> I surmise that even as he developed his empathy and friendship for Chea,
> Sambath remained conscious of Chea's monstrous past. 
> The thing is that having designed and promoted this monstrosity did not
> prevent Chea from appearing human, gentle, kind, thoughtful, caring. 

Why not reverse the grammar and write instead:
>> The thing is that having (apparently) designed and promoted this
>> monstrosity did not prevent Chea from (in fact being)  human, gentle,
>> kind, thoughtful, caring. 
Isn't it incongruous for you to deny the immediacy of the compelling
humanity of Chea's relationship to his family and to Sambath and instead
assign to him "responsibility" for the "unintended" consequences of 
ideological decisions. And once you start blaming "well-intentioned"
ideology for its catastrophic implementation,
why not go back one stage and blame the "well-intentioned"
Parisian theoreticians who were Chea's teachers;
why not go back a second stage and blame Karl Marx
whom the theoreticians parrotted, 
or go back a third stage, and blame the Cambodian massacres
on Georg Friedrich Hegel who taught that logic and rhetoric,
"Geist", spirit, i.e. language, was the ultimate reality.
And don't stop there, blame Martin Luther, who claimed that
"das Wort" was God's truth, and while you're in the blaming
mode, blame Saint John, who wrote En arche en ho logos, -
in the beginning was the word, or go back one more step
and blame Saint John's preceptor Plato, who was the first to
recognize the power and primacy of the idea. The chain of blame
has now come full circle, because what Chea and his comrades were
consciously and deliberately trying to accomplish was to found
an agrarian Utopia, cleansed of intellectuals and intellect,
and of contemplation such as Plato engendered. What absurdity!

Blame is tricky. Consider what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasacki?
were those "natural" disasters? Was God to blame. Was it Hirohito's
fault? Was it the fault of the militarists who plotted Pearl Harbor?
Was it the fault to the crew of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped
the bomb which, in order to inspire "shock and awe", killed hundreds of
thousands of "innocent" civilians?  Was it the fault of the Los Alamos
scientists (among them my foster father Donald Flanders) who built the
bomb? Robert Oppenheimer is quoted as he observed the initial detonation:
"Now we are all bastards." (My father attributed Flanders' subsequent
suicide to guilt for having participated in the project.) Was it the fault
of Harry Truman who ordered the bomb to be dropped? (My sister-in-law Janet
with whom we are having Thanksgiving Turkey, and her husband Robert, were so
admiring of Harry Truman that they named their first-born after him:
Thomas Truman Bingham. Was it Franklin Roosevelt who ordered the bomb
to be built? Was it Albert Einstein, who used his prestige as the world's
most venerated "scientist" to suggest to Roosevelt that it should be done,
suspecting that if "we" didn't get there first, Werner Heisenberg would
see to it that Hitler would get the bomb, and that Hitler rather than his
adversaries would then rule the world. The blame game has no end.

> He is shown conversing in a calm, reflective manner, being attentive
> and open to his interlocuter, sharing meals, cradling a grandchild
> (or great grandchild).  These strands of human possibility all coexisted
> in him, as did Sambath's thirst for a father-substitute and anger
> and despair at what Chea allowed to happen to his family and
> so many others. This should be entirely familiar to you of all
> people, since you insist that we are all capable of the profoundest
> evil even when we seem like we're good as gold. 

Thank you for the compliment. Your account is indeed the most persuasive
corroboration of the ethical theories I've been trying to peddle,
with no success at all, for the past several decades.

> Of course Sambath had to be capable of this sublimation in order
> to carry out his subterfuge.  Perhaps, too, getting Chea to accept him
> and care for him was a way Sambath could overcome his fears and
> revulsion about the past. (somewhat analogous to Stockholm Syndrome)
> 
> Had it been otherwise, had Sambath been concealing bitterness
> and rage throughout the time he spent with Chea, he would have
> had to maintain a bifurcated consciousness, in which he continually
> discounted and reinterpreted Chea's words, manner, body language,
> apparent intentions, cancelling the humane signals of friendship
> and caring and replacing them with imagined thunderbolts and
> threats, reaching down repeatedly inside himself to reconnect
> with his simmering rage.

You've put your finger on what strikes me as an issue of great
importance and a scenario of unlimited artistic possibilities.
I can't begin to do justice to it now. But if I live long enough,
it will surface in a novel ...


> I wonder if evolution designed us for this sublimation. 
> In inter-tribal conflicts it seems a common pattern that the victors,
> after killing many of the enemy, take the surviving enemy widows as wives,
> and may adopt some of the enemy children to serve and follow them,
> or even as family members.
> To survive, the victims must disguise and swallow their feelings
> about what has happened.

Evolution, Darwinism, which you mention, raises the interesting question
of whether the Cambodian peasants who slit the throats of the manacled
intellectuals delivered to them, as if humans were just another animal
species, in the course of Chea's and Pol Pot's "final solution",
had they been Jews or Christians or Moslems, would have been merciful
and followed the injunction: Love thy neighbor as thyself, or Do unto
others as you would have them do unto you.  I doubt it, but it's worth
a thought.

Such an argument is somewhat more relevant to Chea himself,
to his Comrade Pol Pot and to the other Parisian students
who were beneficiaries of French 20th century enlightenment.
Their minds were shaped in a Darwinian world in which the
notion of "God" is irrelevant, where man is not the creation
by God of a semi-divine creature in God's own image, but
the product of evolution by natural selection from other animals.
I'm not persuaded by the argument that Chea and Pol Pot would have
behaved differently had they been Jews, or Catholics or Lutherans
or Quakers ...; but you and I must understand that the adherents
of those religions attribute their "morality" to their religion,
and are consequently afraid of a world governed by random mutations.
I do not endorse the opinions of such ignorant boors, but by the same
token, you and I should be tolerant of the backward souls whom we
disparage as "creationists."
Jochen