Against the City

(Cambodia before the fall. A drive through Phnom Penh in 1965)
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, marking the beginning of one of the twentieth century's most cruel regimes. Although in the next four years there were to be some two million deaths from execution, starvation, imprisonment and other atrocities, one of the more remarkable actions to be taken by the Khmer Rouge was also one of their first. They forcibly removed the population of Phnom Penh, some three million people, into the countryside for "reeducation". This arbitrary removal of an entire city reflected one of the base agendas of the new regime: Urbanity reflected capitalism and decadence, and anyone deemed as a city dweller was suspect. The long entrenched peasant class inhabiting the countryside were deemed the "Old People", to be trusted and the bulwark of the future agriculturally based Marxist state. The former city inhabitants were now classified as "New People", to be suspected of disloyalty and in need of either execution or forced labor.
For the next few years, basically the duration of the Khmer Rouge's rule, Phnom Penh, which up until 1975 had been one of the more vibrant and multicultural Asian capitals, was to remain in effect a ghost town, a shell of former metropolitan grandeur and stripped to its official essentials. A dusty, de-peopled facade for a fratricidal junta.
When I was visiting the Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh, I was struck by this largely forgotten "war on the city" aspect of the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps my observations would not have been as pronounced had I not just finished reading "Pure War" by Paul Virilio, in which, in a series of conversational asides, he links his theory of the development of the city to the modernization of war. In Virilio's mind, the city is inextricably linked to war, and war's preparation. The "city state" of antiquity served as the role model of the nation, the fortified castle led to what we would consider the "urban environment" and so on. In reexamining the brutal logic of the Khmer Rouge, I couldn't help but notice a touch of potential Utopianism in wanting to extinguish the very concept of the city. In their minds, and in the minds of many Agrarian communists, the city was the symbol of capitalist depravity, and wiping it away was the first step to creating the new man.
There has been, in the last part of the twentieth century, an attempt by certain scholars to reclaim the dignity of the Paleolithic era, especially in works like "Stone Age Economics" by Marshall Sahlins and "Crops and Man" by Jack Harlan. Contrary to what we may think of the perceived "savage" nature of pre-agricultural humans, there is quite an amount of evidence to the effect that early, nomadic man was well nourished and enjoyed a degree of freedom unknown to the later slaves of the Neolithic era of city building. Not Utopia of course, but not savagery either.
At any rate, the era of agriculture brought about an array of lasting hierarchies that while pre-urban in their formative stages, were very much post-nomadic. The individual and the family began to disappear into the structure of the larger farming community, which then by necessity gravitated towards the formation of the city as we know it.
Agrarian philosophy, and its Utopian undertones, have enjoyed a unique place in our history for some time. In essence they have sought to reclaim the dignity of the life of the soil from the life of the city and industry. To return to the moment of schism between an idealistic farm life and the seizure of agriculture by the nascent city state.
In America, there has always been a strong Agrarian movement, although it curiously has had tinges of classism and racism at times, especially in regarding a movement like the Southern Agrarians of the early twentieth century. While very much opposed to the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization, the Southern Agrarians were also apologists for the decadence of the old South, the plantation life, in a sense an argument for a return to a time when a few (white) landowners were able to dominate an economy. This was usually more implicit than explicit in their writings but nonetheless borne out by the sympathies of many in the movement.
In the nineteenth century the New England transcendentalist movement took on an Agrarian streak, and this was a true repudiation of the evils of urbanity and industry. This was an earnest desire to return to a perceived era of harmony of the small farmer at one with his environment, and this strain of agrarianism has led quite directly to the many schools of environmentalism we see today.
In socialism, the worship of the land and the attempt to reclaim it have occupied an interesting position. In pre-1948 Palestine, the kibbutz was a formative, essential stage of taking the land of Israel back. And lest it be forgotten, it was an entirely socialist concept. Similarly, in the east, Marxism and agrarianism have continually occupied the same stage, since the attempt to reclaim the land is so often the most necessary step against colonialism or rigid feudalism.
In Western Europe and the United States, socialism has enjoyed a platform largely among industrial workers. This should come as no surprise when we consider that feudalism in Europe was largely dead when the era of Marx arrived, and in America there has always been a fiercely individual stripe to the farmer. The fact that a large scale socialist agrarian movement never arose amongst sharecropper African American farmers is interesting, while it had much more potential with Latin American farmers in the western part of the country.
Yet for Russia, Asia, Latin America, and other former colonial territories of Europe, the appeal of Marxism to the rural peasant has always been forceful and direct. The redistribution of land, and the concept of the collective farm, is as essential of an aspect of Communism to the non-Western world as the collectivization of the industrial Proletariat is to the Western. (In Russia of course, these objectives intersected.)
Land redistribution was a crucial political tactic for the Bolsheviks in winning the support of Russian peasants, many of whom were initially skeptical of this atheistic, largely middle class band of revolutionaries. The horrific consequences of Stalinist land reform would of course be borne out, but the garnering of support amongst the rural class was to be a pattern with Marxist movements from now on, the more organic, the more fruitful.
The extreme irony of having Parisian educated intellectuals of fairly comfortable backgrounds like Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh heading up rural guerrilla movements and repudiating the life of the European city for the noble farm life of the rice paddies was still a very persuasive factor in winning support for the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese respectively. During the early stages of the Viet Minh revolt against the French, it was said that the French controlled the cities but the Viet Minh controlled the countryside. This was to remain true for most of the war. Not only was the countryside easy to disappear into, rural farmers and villagers were much more willing to assist the Viet Cong than the urban population of South Vietnam.
In Cambodia, it was the very "cosmopolitan" nature of the city that the Khmer Rouge was so intent on eradicating. To turn back the clock to Year Zero, to remake the land of the Khmers up from a blank slate, it was obvious in a ruthless rationale that the cities themselves were the enemies. They were the centers of capitalism, the nexus points of cultural (foreign) exchange, decadence, etc. It was harder to control the city, whereas the farm represented a return to the timeless life of the Khmer worker; unsullied by European thought and capitalist theory.
There was some substance to this; throughout French Indochina, the French colonizers had done their best to recreate a sense of French culture in the major cities. Hanoi and Vientiane especially reflect the guiding hand of French colonial urban planning, and the aesthetic of these environments must still be something of comfort to visiting Europeans.
In Cambodia, the French had certainly been brutal landlords as well, but they had a great to deal do with archaeological excavation and restoration, as in the work done to the temples at Angkor. Not surprising that these timeless sites were left to rot by the Khmer Rouge, then fortified for defense when the Vietnamese invaded in 1979. Like the giant Buddhas exploded by the Taliban, the Khmer Rouge had no regard for the sacred historicity of Angkor, and even today the walls bear marks of vandalism and bullet holes.
Phnom Penh is again an electric series of crowded streets, cassette and clothing kiosks, cafes, bars, ancient temples and wide parks. It is still at about a third of its population size in 1975, and as documentarian John Pilger showed in his 1979 film "Year Zero", shot right after the city's liberation, it was a ghost town even after the Khmer Rouge fled to the hills. Like Beirut or Sarajevo, it may never regain the luster of its seminal years, although there are plenty of echoes of it, in the packed street markets and the manic radio airwaves emanating Sin Sisamouth, Pan Ron, and other golden stars of the Khmer pop renaissance. The presence of ghosts is still very heavy here though; it's easy to ignore in the smell and the noise and motion, especially as the sun takes its leave behind the Mekong. There is a horror that this land still carries, few talk of it, most of the people on the street are thirty and younger. But popular belief here holds that without a proper burial, the soul is doomed to walk the earth in exile. If so, this is a city and a nation of thousands of such sad spirits. I had to keep them in mind while there.
Returning to Virilio, he ends "Pure War" by noticing that the city itself has become the new battlefield. Not just Beirut, Belfast, Bogota, Sarajevo, Baghdad, Grozny, but also New York and London. The heavy urban concentration of course provides tempting targets for messianic terrorists (or urban guerrillas if you wish), but in the instance of the World Trade Center, the targets represent something very essential about what needs to be destroyed in order to remake the world in the image of the assailants. To stand against the city is the new mantra of the fundamentalist warrior, be they in Indochina or the Middle East.