The Chin, Hmong, and Lao are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, too.
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.
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.
Well, they're working on that one...
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.
See a discussion of “proximate cause.”[1]
[1] https://legalclarity.org/what-is-the-difference-between-dire...
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.
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.
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.
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.