Learning to Live with the Killing Fields: Ethics, Politics, Relationality

The Killing Fields call into question my very being. How are we to live in and with the aftermath of an estimated 1.7 million people perishing? How are we, the survivors of this calamity, to discern our family (hi)stories and ourselves in the face of these irreparable genealogical fractures? This paper begins with stories—co-constructed with my father—about the Killing Fields, a genocide orchestrated by the Khmer Rouge and from which humanity appears to suffer a collective amnesia. The latter half of this paper turns to my engagements with ethical-political philosophy as a means to comprehend and make meaning of the atrocities described by my father. Drawing principally on the Yin-Yang philosophy and Thai considerations of the face, I respond to keystone Khmer Rouge ideas and strategies that “justified” the murder of over one million people. Philosophy teaches me to learn from and how to live with the Killing Fields. It offers me routes to make sense of my roots in the absence of treasure troves that would typically inform the writing of genealogies and family (hi)stories. This paper gives testimony to a tragedy of the past that is inscribed in the present and in the yearning for a better tomorrow.

Conformally Killing Fields on 2-Symmetric Five-Dimensional Lorentzian Manifolds

The papers of many mathematicians are devoted to the study of conformally Killing vector fields. Being a natural generalization of the concept of Killing vector fields, these fields generate a Lie algebra corresponding to the Lie group of conformal transformations of the manifold. Moreover, they generate the class of locally conformally homogeneous (pseudo) Riemannian manifolds studied by V.V. Slavsky and E.D. Rodionov. Ricci solitons, which R. Hamilton first considered, are another important area of research. Ricci solitons are a generalization of Einstein's metrics on (pseudo) Riemannian manifolds. The Ricci soliton equation has been studied on various classes of manifolds by many mathematicians. In particular, a general solution of the Ricci soliton equation was found on 2-symmetric Lorentzian manifolds of low dimension, and the solvability of this equation in the class of 3-symmetric Lorentzian manifolds was proved. The Killing vector fields make it possible to find the general solution of the Ricci soliton equation in the case of the constancy of the Einstein constant in the Ricci soliton equation. However, the role of the Killing fields is played by conformally Killing vector fields for different values of the Einstein constant. In this paper, we investigate conformal Killing vector fields on 5-dimensional 2-symmetric Lorentzian manifolds. The general solution of the conformal analog of the Killing equation on five-dimensional locally indecomposable 2-symmetric Lorentzian manifolds is described in local coordinates, discovered by A.S. Galaev and D.V. Alekseevsky.

Rituals of Humiliation

This chapter evaluates the significance of ritual and symbolism to the construction and manifestation of power under National Socialism. It underlines the importance of practices such as the mammoth party rallies at Nuremberg, the universal displays of the swastika on flags, pins, and armbands and the ubiquitous use of “Heil Hitler” as the standard greeting of the Third Reich under the Nazi regime. The chapter also contends that the creation of Nazi power was accomplished in no small measure by the use of ritual, and, in fact, ritual in the Third Reich served as an expression of “social power” that extended into virtually all aspects of German society. These celebratory events of Nazi power involved daily acts of verbal or physical humiliation of Jews, communists, and socialists, as well as organized and exemplary episodes of abusive behavior. Ultimately, the chapter studies the symbiotic relationship between violence, competition, and male comradeship and how it became manifest in the actions, rituals, and celebratory practices of Nazi paramilitary organizations through acts of humiliation by SS and policemen on the streets, in the concentration camps, and in the killing fields.