i'm going for the hat trick

Three consecutive posts.

I'd better watch myself; my reader (hi Mom) might get the idea that my thoughts are disjointed and disorganized. Horrors.

Several posts ago I mentioned that I am now reading a book about the Khmer Rouge. Generally I expect that as I learn more about a subject, I begin to understand it. Not so with this one. The more I learn about these people, the more confounded I become.

How could they have believed that building a dam without the input of an engineer was a good idea?

How could they have believed that millions of miserable people working to produce very little rice was better than far fewer people working to produce considerably more rice?

And the million-dollar question, of course: how can a person decide that another person deserves to die? How can a person decide that thousands of other people deserve to die? I can't even comprehend the reality, which was MILLIONS. One fourth of the population of Cambodia was murdered by the Khmer Rouge. One fourth of the population.

This happened in the 1970s. The human race had managed to put people on the moon. Smallpox was being eradicated (or had been already--I'm a little fuzzy on the chronology of that).

And yet some people still thought it was OK to knock MILLIONS of their countrymen on the head.

I don't think I'll ever understand that.