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Prayer Wheels: Set 1
River
I didn't bury him, a woman said of her husband two days later, tears welling in her eyes. The river took him away.
Wondering
Even I don't know why I was detained. I am wondering.
Rubber Man
We were beaten until we fell over. It was best to stay up as long you could. It was easier to take body blows than to be kicked. One prisoner got the nickname "Rubber Man" because he never let himself be knocked down.
Ventilation Holes
You could only see the hands of the people in the tiny ventilation holes.
Fresh air
There was no food, no water and no fresh air. There was no toilet, just holes in the floor.
Electric Drills
They took electric drills and bored them into their chest. The three children, ages 1, 3 and 5, were impaled. We saw it with our own eyes.
A Row
The very worst day–and I saw it with my own eyes-was when I saw 10 young men laid out in a row. They had their throats slit, their noses cut off and their genitals plucked out. It was the worst thing I saw.
Daytime
They usually beat us during the daytime, sometimes in the room where we housed and sometimes in the yard.
Night
Special forces would beat us during the day outside in the yard. Police guards usually beat us at night.
Name and Occupation
I know that in the second round he asked everybody their name and occupation, and then he made his choice on those grounds, and then shot the people.
Sand
In their torture they went so far as to make prisoners eat sand. And forced one prisoner to swallow his own feces, another to perform sex acts on a fellow prisoner.
Undress
Eight of them came. I was alone. I was trying to open the rooms to show them there was no in the house, and then one of them said, "Undress yourself." He attacked me from behind.
Flash lights
At night there were rapes. Guards entered with flashlights looking for young women, whom they took away for the night, If anyone resisted, they were killed. Only a few did.
Eyebrows
They were all under 18 or over 60. For the first few days they had to be kept separate. They had lice, even on their eyebrows. They were completely exhausted and very thin.
Bananas
We were beaten with iron bars, baseball bats, and truncheons, but we called the truncheons "bananas," for they represented a kind of relief.
Baseball
They removed four baseball bats from a leather bag and began beating me. I have watched baseball on TV, and they swung them as if they were hitting a ball, with both hands.
Towel
Everyone was given a towel and a piece of soap, as though they were about to take a shower. Then they entered the gas chamber. Over the entrance was written "shower".
Such and Such
It was merely an administrative problem involving so many corpses on such and such morning and for which certain number of men had to be detailed.
Economizing
Those who are dissatisfied with the new regime are being eradicated along with their families, by disembowelment, by beating to death with hoes, by hammering nails into the backs of their heads and by other cruel means of economizing on bullets.
Prayer Wheels: Set 2 there is no generally accepted definition of genocide it's difficult to draw the line between genocide and what might be described as pogroms or communal massacres the deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group by killing members of the group or deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life inimical to survival under present conditions of polarized international relations, there is almost invariably an international component to domestic genocides as the result of the intervention of superpowers or their surrogates or neighboring states enemies of the revolution, the hierarchy of the defeated regime, police and military figures, the political and bureaucratic elite, feudalists, teachers, engineers and doctors, Buddhist priests, peasants, and workers there are four kinds of genocide: the endemic, the ethnocratic, the theocratic, and the marginal the genocidal state in continuous murderous motion is relatively rare where rivers of blood flow and a ruthless and systematic policy of genocide is being carried out the speed and urgency of radical revolutionary change inevitably result in destructive violence the regime greatly magnified the death toll from disease and starvation by the imposition of life-threatening conditions of work, purificatory purges, and total terror it seems that the revolution was impelled by its own inherent logic to a continuity of murderous violence, a routinization of genocide ideological legitimation for genocide–it was based on an idealization of the race and the need for purification from corrupting influences, with the consequent duty to eradicate the polluting elements once fully launched, the regime engaged simultaneously in annihilatory warfare and exterminatory genocide, with the imperative of genocide prevailing in the end over military needs it was murder in continuous motion, with special institutions for annihilation by procedures offering the gratifications of intimate involvement in the anguish of the victims the imposition of representative government based on the western democratic model, as it invites the cultivation and manipulation of ethnic divisions, may be the catalyst of genocide major targets of genocide are elite and potential leaders, reaching down to children in the schools some genocides defy easy classification–indeed, the whole procedure of categorizing a type of genocidal state and filing genocides under it is decidedly cavalier one cannot say that any particular level of technology is required for genocide an increasing use of technology helps eliminate the impediment of empathy there may be a specific theological warrant for genocide it is in the conjunction of religion and power in the theocratic state that the potential for the theologically legitimated genocide can be most readily realized charges of international conspiracy, incitement of mobs with license for atrocity, dismissals from government employment, exclusion from schools, desecration and destruction of holy places, expropriation of property, and judicial murder directed against the leaders colonialization has established one of the preconditions for internal genocidal conflict in the post-colonial plural societies the revolutionary rulers, in the application of the ideology and in the search for a secure monopoly of power, restructure social relations by eliminating some groups and transforming others
(inspired by the writings of Leo Kuper)