“To the Intellectuals of the West”: Rithy Panh’s <i>The Elimination</i> and Genealogies of the Cambodian Genocide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cambodian filmmaker and writer Rithy Panh arrived in Grenoble, France as a refugee in 1979, returning to Cambodia in 1990 to begin making documentary films. Panh’s 2013 book The Elimination (written with Christopher Bataille and translated by John Cullen) is one of the first memoirs to bear witness to the Khmer Rouge atrocities committed during the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 while also engaging more directly with the question of how the West, ideologically, militarily and juridically, has been complicit in this collective trauma and its aftermath. A work of memoir, essay and reportage, The Elimination chronicles Panh’s face-toface conversations with Kaing Guek Eav (also known as Duch), the first Khmer Rouge official to be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity, torture and murder. We analyze Panh’s memoir as a counternarrative to the ECCC (Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal) in which Panh stages an alternative historical investigation of Cambodia’s past, beyond the limits of the tribunal’s state-sanctioned boundaries. How was the ideology of the Khmer Rouge shaped through Western Marxist intellectual influence? To what extent to did some Western intellectuals politicize the Cambodian genocide as a function of Cold War Realpolitik? We trace these questions through analysis of The Elimination’s sustained meditation on the idea of the intellectual and its problematic place in Cambodia’s modern history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".