The Power of Song: How the Khmer Rouge Used Music to Normalize Conflict and Maintain Support of the Cambodian 'People'

Author:

• Elise Scioscia (Villanova University)

Abstract:

This paper seeks to explore ways in which the Khmer Rouge used music as a legitimate form of rhetorical strategy to gain the support of the war-torn Cambodian people during the Cambodian Genocide of 1975. Through an examination of Maurice Charland's three ideological effects of constitutive rhetoric, it is possible to begin to understand the process necessary to answer fundamental questions of genocide such as, how the Cambodian people "let" this genocide occur.