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"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević."
I had to read up, and...my goodness.
Apparently the US bombed a neutral Cambodia secretly to incite Vietnam's neighboring countries and put pressure on them, killing 30k to 150k civilians.
This caused unrest, and gave way to Khmer Rouge to sieze power, using "defense against the US" as propoganda.
And we dropped more bombs on poor Laos (mostly because pilots weren't supposed to land back at base with bombs still on board) than on Japan and Germany combined... they estimate it will take about 600 years to removed all the unexploded cluster bombs and children regurly get maimed and killed by them (they look like tennis balls).
The Chin, Hmong, and Lao are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, too.
Reading stuff like this and Cambodia, I truly wonder why so many Americans still hide behind "freedom" for every single atrocity their government representatives have done.
Why can't Americans (and to some extent Europeans) just come out and say, "Yea, we are often assholes and we have self interests. That's why we do these atrocities. It's not because of 'freedom'"? At least be honest.
Just because you have freedom of speech doesn't mean you do the right things nor does it mean you are fighting the right cause.
As an American (3rd generation), I assure you that many of us are firmly aware that this nation was built upon violence and committed violence on a grand scale. In my personal opinion, we have done a lot of good, but also a lot of bad. A lot of our statecraft was learned from the British and the French. This did not really change until after the southeast Asia debacle and things started to shift to a less cynical and more nuanced view of the world.
Unfortunately, 9/11 slammed us hard back into being angry and defensive. COVID just made it worse...
It will probably be a generation until we calm back down. Or Putin/Xi dies. Whichever comes first.
It's a giant mess. I don't think Pot would have gained the support/power that he did without the US indiscriminate bombing. Much like the creation of ISIS and the strengthening of the Taliban in Afghanistan, it turns out people don't like the people dropping bombs on them. They'll turn to whoever is fighting the bombers.
The US involvement in Vietnam would have already been over before the uprising of Pot had Nixon and Kissinger not skuttled peace talks to help Nixon get elected.
It’s not like Cambodia was a stable democracy before the bombings.
The Khmer Rouge and other opposition groups were fighting the government in an armed conflict since 1950. The Khmer Rouge controlled almost half of Cambodia’s territory 10 years before the bombing.
In the grand scheme of Cambodias civil war, the US bombing didn’t play that big a role at all.
You can point the fingers everywhere, you can also say the French were at fault because of the core of the Khmer Rouge group were scholarship students who were sent to France to study socialism, came back with that education and used to to establish the Khmer Rouge.
It's not exactly true, Pol Pot went to France on a scholarship to become an electrical engineer. When he came back to Cambodia, he worked as a literature teacher.
The ideological content of the Khmer Rouge is very poor overall, and is a mix between nationalism and communism aiming to "clean" the nation from western influences. Which is kind of ironic given Pol Pot's background.
I know I'm wonderful at parties but I catch so much shit, here but not especially, when I point out the incredible wrongs and the sheer body count of America's colonialist projects here into the modern day.
It really cannot be overstated. The developing world is still developing thanks to it's own institutional issues, to be sure, as everywhere else on the globe struggles with, but America has never had a larger, stronger America come in and just fuck it right up for literally no reason apart from larger geopolitical games.
Early ancestors a few tens of thousands of years ago had a genocide only operating model that wiped out a majority of males for a couple millennia. Crazily enough, apparently Slavery was an innovation in that era.
I had to read up, and...my goodness.
Apparently the US bombed a neutral Cambodia secretly to incite Vietnam's neighboring countries and put pressure on them, killing 30k to 150k civilians. This caused unrest, and gave way to Khmer Rouge to sieze power, using "defense against the US" as propoganda.