Tonight, after taking time to make two loaves of bread, I watched a documentary my friend Gwen Sun loaned me, encouraging me to understand what had happened in a country she loves.

The documentary, made by a British journalist named John Pilger, was filmed in 1979, four years after America’s withdrawal from Cambodia allowed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to have complete control and a terrorizing reign over that country for those years. The film is called “Year Zero”, which refers to the Khmer’s declaration in 1975 that the Cambodian clock was going to be reset to year 0, and that anything and everything from or related to the past was going to be eradicated.

Upon seizing power, the Khmer Rouge went through cities in Cambodia and expelled their occupants, relocating them to undeveloped agrarian swaths of land. Education was discarded. Hospitals were shuttered. Libraries were burned. History was deleted. Cities were emptied. Modern conveniences were shunned. Essentially, the Khmer turned Cambodia into a family-less, institution-less, urban-less work camp where the educated, the religious, the skilled, and the talented were killed. Known as a rich, beautiful, and peaceful nation before its entanglement with Vietnamese politics and its consequent razing by American bombers, Cambodia became a massive death camp under Pot, the former Buddhist monk, and the Khmer’s Marxist-based “utopian” ideology- an ideology which led to the decimation of the country’s material wealth, its cultural history, its middle and upper classes, and its moral and spiritual faculties.

What the film led me to see, though, besides the utter, grotesque evil that possessed Cambodia during the Pot years, was also a realization of the West’s culpability for the destruction of that country. Pot’s regime arose as a response to America’s secret agenda to try and punish the Vietnamese by firebombing their neighbor, a country they feared the Vietnamese were annexing, a country they feared was harboring Vietnamese rebels. Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided to unload planeload after planeload of bombs on the neutral country simply to try and destroy an imaginary enemy they were sure existed there. What the carpet bombings did in Cambodia was destroy significant places and the spirit of a nation who had limited association with the Vietnamese conflict, foment the development of a people’s army that inculcated its young soldiers to be fearless and brutal, incited civil war in the nation, and then upon American withdrawal, let this army literally seize and decapitate its populous.

Oddly enough, after the Khmer Rouge fled Cambodia in 1979, delays in international recognition of its new government (or abandonment by its old one) left the destroyed nation on a blacklist to receive international aid, and lack of food and medical supplies meant hundreds of thousands of people continued to die due to starvation and generally treatable maladies. America and other Western countries failed to intervene in Cambodia because doing so might appear to be a capitulation to Vietnam, Cambodia’s neighbor and America’s enemy in the undeclared and unfinished war. What the international community could not see was that a sea of forcibly displaced, socially seared and physically starved people were at a stage they could no longer do anything to help themselves. Ironically, the bulk of any food or medicine that came into the country for relief came from south Vietnam, collected by beleaguered communities across their border that felt compelled to share what little they had to try and help their neighbors who had largely become a displaced and walking dead.

Cambodia spent nearly 20 years trying to find stability and identity after the Rouge disappeared as its overlord, before in 1993 it returned to a monarchy. The after effects of the Khmer Rouge years and of the material and spiritual poverty created by their genocidal policies remain yet today. Cambodia is near the bottom of the Corruption Perceptions Index, which ranks countries according to their perceived tolerance or support of corrupt activities. Cambodia is ranked 164 out of 182 countries, with a score of 2.1 in the 2011 survey (in which a ranking of 0 is highly corrupt, and a ranking of 10 is very clean). Cambodia is today recognized as a chief destination for sex tourism, and as a primary hub in international human trafficking, which essentially is, in this case, the enslavement of women and children for use in prostitution.

This video was important for me to see because my friend Thearith and his wife Daing are both from Cambodia, and this history is part of the story of their lives, and where they have come from.

Today, Cambodia is a democracy, but it is still fighting for its life to recover its civility and its identity as a nation of people burdened and burned by internal strifes, international neglect, and uninvited antagonisms that ushered it into destruction some 40 years ago. Parts of it remain in need of food and medicine still, although its collective standard of living has risen in recent years.

The film reminded me how lucky I am and have been, living where I do, having what I have.

The film reminded me how valuable the most basic things in life really are.

Like two loaves of bread.