More then 300 people died in a stampede at a water festival in Phnom Penh tonight, according to Cambodia's prime minister.Hundreds more were hurt at the event, on a small island, as the crowd panicked and pushed over a bridge to the mainland. Authorities had estimated that more than 2 million people could descend on the capital for the three-day event, whose main attraction is a traditional boat race along the Tonlé Sap river.
The last race ended in the early evening. Panic broke out later on Koh Pich island, where a concert was being held. So Cheata, a soft drinks vendor, said the trouble began when 10 people in the crowd fell unconscious. She said that set off a panic, which then turned into a stampede in which many people were trampled.
During the morning of the second day of this weekend, I happened to read this passage in a short but packed book, Capital and Langauge, by the Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi:
When one is prey to panic he flees to no place in particular, to wherever, looks for shelter in the world as a whole. It is this mass escape to a formless world that jams the escape routes, demonstrating how little room there is when everyone belongs to the same linguistic context, when everyone has the same fear of being deprived of the same property, of the same language faculty...In a panic situationâa fire in a movie theater, for exampleâthe other suddenly becomes a real enemy; amid the risk of being trampled, of suffocating, every movement of his becomes an attack on my body. As if to say that the private use of the general intellect clashes with its social nature, the individual body which incarnates the division of linguistic labor sees the body of the other as an obstacle. Only apparently was the movie theater the space in which the many were exercising their language faculty.
With panic, everyone feels the same thing, fearâthis is a unity. But there's no coordination or cooperation in this unity. It's a negative unity; a oneness of confusion. Because there is no cooperation, no communication, panic soon breaks with its cause and becomes only itself. Panic ignites a panic that ignites more panic. It's a pure radiation across the population. Everyone just does what everyone else is doing, which is treating everyone as an enemy, a danger to their body. In a panic, the layer of humanity evaporates and people turn into a bolting of beasts, a wall of water, an avalanche of rocks.
