YOU NEED TO WATCH IT
(https://www.ted.com/talks/sophal_ear_escaping_the_khmer_rouge#t-341871)
This was interesting for me because I had to do my history sock puppet show on the rise of Pol Pot the leader of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia so it was crazy to hear other stories and things along that line.
Summary Guy.
So my Ted talk doesn't really have a purpose that is super IB. I mean it is a very interesting story. So this young man who is giving the speech is living in Cambodia with his mom and dad and little sisters and brother. So the Khmer rouge a communist regime takes over the city their living in and forces them out into the countryside because Pol Pot the leader wants to make a perfect communist utopia of agriculture. So out in the rice fields, his parents are forced to work and get very little rations of porridge and few a grains of rice every day. Sophals's father died due to malnutrition and left the family in a bad spot. So the mother took a gamble and declared that she was Vietnamese's, doing this would allow them to extradited out of Cambodia and into Vietnam because the Khmer rouge wanted only Cambodians in Cambodia. The mother spoke very little Vietnamese but she was tutored intensely for 2 days by some clutch Vietnamese lady somewhere. Just some facts for you... if Sophals mom fails the test her whole family is executed right there. I know crazy right. So after 2 days of intensive training, she goes and takes the test and... she passes and they get to leave the Regime of the Kumher rouge who at the time had already killed 1 1/2 million people in Cambodia.
As you can see this doesn't really have a purpose, it shows the extent that a mother will go to make a better life for her children. He's really hoping to show off his mom, like wow my mom won't even remember to get me peach sweet tea when she goes to the groceries store but this lady had 2 DAYS of class on a subject then went and aced the damn final like its no big deal I do this kinda stuff every day. At the end, he said the filed a letter of grievance to the UN who are holding a tribunal to prosecute the Khmer Rouge leaders who are still alive. He uses family pictures to really show the audience how young his family all of his siblings had to be under 5 years old. He used grotesque pictures to show how horrible life is under the regime these are more helpful than just describing what life was.
LOGOS: During his talk, he threw out some crazy numbers such as 1 1/2 million people died because they were murdered by their government. He also then mentions that there are only 7 million people in the country. The Audience can derive from this is that Pol Pot killed 25% of the country's population. That would be about 83 Million people in the United States would be dead. The use of these numbers adds a reality check to his story that he could've ended up as a statistics if his mother didn't have balls of steel.
