Confession: Saving Souls or Stealing Them?

Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, was a former high school in Phenom Phen, used by the Khmer Rouge as a prison processing center for its political enemies. Nearly everyone taken to S-21 were tortured, interrogated, and then sent to the Choeung Ek Extermination Center, also known as the Killing Fields, for execution.  More than 20,000 individuals perished by way of S-21.  It’s an enormous number, but a pittance compared to the two million men, women and children slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot during five years of rule (1975 to 1979).

In 2000, Blake Kerr, an American physician, visited Cambodia and S-21 for the first time to see how people were fairing two decades after Pol Pot’s genocide.  He did not expect to meet Khat Mann who, as a child soldier for the Phnom Vor Gang, had killed thousands of people.  Wanting to see for himself what really happened during the Khmer Rouge’s short but terrifying reign, Dr. Kerr started a clinic with the Phnom Vor Gang’s surgeon and risked his life embedding with a renegade gang of Khmer Rouge soldiers to meet the architects of Pol Pot’s communist revolution and administrators of his atrocities. Khat Mann was a killing machine, describing with chilling calm the evil that occurred in S-21, adding, perhaps to legitimatize the carnage, or brag about their efficiency and organization, that meticulous records were kept on every person detained and executed, including signed confessions acknowledging their “crimes.”

This horrific history was shared by Dr. Kerr at a recent talk and slide-show presentation coordinated by Canio’s Cultural Cafe and hosted at LTV Studios in Wainscott, New York.  He was there to promote The Angry Skies, his new book chronicling his experiences in Cambodia.  In many ways, The Angry Skies is a compendium to Sky Burial,  his earlier published book recounting his witnessing the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal 1987 crackdown in Tibet.  The connective tissue between the books is the CCP, which sponsored the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power from the ashes of the Vietnam War.  But each book is also a dissection of why and how such things happen – the genesis of genocide, so to speak, and the inhuman behavior that follows.  As such, they serve as wake-up-calls and warnings to all of us living in a world where governments and their “leaders” are determined to foment a forever-cycle of death and destruction.

The large crowd in attendance at LTV, owing to interest in the subject matter, and to Dr. Kerr’s deep community connection to the Eastern End of Long Island, where he built a long career tending to the medical needs of countless patients before retiring this year, gasped often as he spoke in concert with the images (photos he had taken or obtained while in Cambodia and Tibet) on a large screen behind his lectern.  After so many years, Dr. Kerr was still overtaken with emotion when describing what we were seeing: a serene monk, who only hours later would be felled by machine gun fire; a sweet-faced woman, who because she hadn’t gotten permission to have a child, had her baby aborted alive and her reproductive organs sterilized; the diabolical Khat Mann lazing like an innocent bystander in a field.

These images and many more landed hard, but the one of Khat Mann struck me the deepest.  His banal posture, seemingly untroubled by the trouble and suffering he caused so many, made me angry.  Where was the justice?  Where was his public admission of crimes against humanity and an appropriate punishment?

But something else bothered me.  As a Catholic, I remember at the age of eight taking the Sacrament of Confession.  While the chance to “cleanse oneself of sin” and reconcile with God can certainly be an empowering, life-affirming and life-changing moment, as a young boy, looking back, in church, waiting my turn to meet inside a darkened confessional with a priest, just the two of us, and share with him my wrongdoings, was terrifying.   My friends and I were equally scared, and hurriedly tried to come up with the “right” things to say in order to appear sincere and not get in real trouble, such as “fought with a sibling”, or “sassed a parent.”  Once done, the “verdict” was given by the priest, not advice, but an ordered number of prayers to recite to seal the penance deal.  It felt controlling, formulaic, and unsettling.  I did not feel rejuvenated.  Or closer to God.  Rather, I felt removed from my spirituality, that I was guilty of hiding something, even if that something was not much of anything.

This childhood memory caused me to wonder more about the confessions elicited at S-21.  Were they merely, as I first suspected, a way for the Khmer Rouge to cover their tracks and justify their injustice?  Or was it more a humiliating ritual, a mental form of torture, breaking down their victims minds and bending their souls before taking them forever?  When I asked Dr. Kerr about this, he agreed those motives played a role, but another factor was the extreme level of paranoia that existed throughout the regime.  He explained that for years leading up to the Vietnam War, and during and after the conflict, American and Soviet spies abounded, the CIA and the KGB, vying for influence and influencing the viable to sow discord and spread disinformation, to sell each other out, to shape opinion and steer power toward their larger geopolitical ambitions.  Virulent distrust was the result of this cult of deception.  It made the innocent appear guilty, and the guilty appear even worse.

While there is a stark contrast in the Catholic Sacrament and how confession was used by the Khmer Rouge, what does strike me as similar is the aspect of control.  It doesn’t matter if it’s true. What matters is that they can make you say it.  When you confess your sins to a priest, or really to anyone, you give them the power to judge you.  This power is what the Cambodians used against their “enemies.”

But the prevailing thing about confession, or so they say, is that it is good for the soul.  When I asked Jason Kurtz, a leading psychotherapist in New York City if this is true, he responded: “Perhaps in it’s purest form, it’s a form of unburdening.”  He continued:

“When you do something that you know is wrong, you’ll feel a sense of guilt.  The larger the betrayal of your values, the larger the guilt.  As long as you carry around this guilt, you will feel the weight of it.  Keeping painful secrets has been known to drive people to drink, drugs, suicide, etc.  There is no way out without facing the painful truth.  By admitting our culpability, we begin the process of unburdening yourself.  The first step often begins in therapy, where the client admits their shameful secrets.  It doesn’t matter if those secrets are something that everyone would feel embarrassed about, or something more personal that no one else would judge.  We are all our own judge and jury, and if we feel ashamed of something, it weighs us down.  Just speaking the words out loud, confessing in front of another what the we have done, can be tremendously freeing.  Once we have admitted our wrong, it’s often easier to take the next step, which is telling the person we’ve wronged what we’ve done.  When done with humility and sincerity, it can provide clarity and healing for both parties.”

This was not the case at S-21.  Certainly none of the incarcerated felt an unburdening through confession.  It was just another indignity to endure, another forced step forward toward the end of their life.  And so what arises in me again is the conviction that what is good can be made bad by the bad.  In the minds of those riddled with rage, thirsting for power, and devoid of compassion, confession is nothing more than a weapon to sate their sadism and elevate their status.  For those who practice unconditional love, who believe in the goodness of people and their right to live openly and freely, confession is a powerful way to bring about healing, relief, and growth.  The choice, as always, is ours.

The philosopher George Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”  Don’t let what happened in Tibet, in Cambodia, happen again.  Don’t let institutions and governments and those seeking power at any cost steal confession or manipulate anything else that is inherently good for our souls. I recommend reading Dr. Kerr’s books.  Learn this history.  Then see what you can do to help.

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