Khmer New Year
Khmer New Year and the stifling heat of mid-April have conspired to cast a smothering blanket over Phnom Penh. Just about everything is shut: even the roadside barbers have folded up their chairs, unhooked their mirrors, and scattered back to the provinces to pursue the cycle of binge-eating, Buddhist offerings and family activities that marks...
Censorship of Farrago
‘A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged . . . [it is] the skin of a living thought that may vary in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.’ — US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. I’ve been dismayed to hear, even amongst the distractions...
Time running out for Khmer Rouge justice
THE crimes of the Khmer Rouge are well known. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot’s regime of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ turned Cambodia into a ‘land of blood and tears’ — a vast agrarian social experiment that enslaved the population and led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians. After nearly three decades of legal...
Porn: Why Censorship Won’t Work
While I was in Saigon I found the time to write an opinion piece about censorship of internet pornography, which has now been published at Online Opinion and has sparked some interesting debate that has helped me to clarify my views on the issue. My article — which has also cropped up in The Nation,...
