Us Carpetbombing And The Khmer Rouge

Discussion in 'Politics & Government' started by Frank Sanoica, Sep 5, 2019.

  1. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
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    I remember hearing versions of what was going on newscast daily; much of it was false, I now learned.

    "U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger told his military assistant, General Alexander Haig, that U.S. President Richard Nixon "wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”[20] The U.S. dropped some 540,000 tons of bombs, an amount almost equal to what the United States dropped in the entire Pacific theater of World War II; most of the bombing occurred in the last part of the bombing campaign.[20] The U.S. government concealed the bombings from the U.S. public and succeeded for several years in doing so. "The bombing was not merely concealed; the official secret records showed that it had never happened."

    The increase in intensity and scale of U.S. bombing between 1969 and 1973 was nearly simultaneous with the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge. Ben Kiernan, Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, has observed that:
    "Apart from the large human toll, perhaps the most powerful and direct impact of the bombing was the political backlash it caused ... The CIA's Directorate of Operations, after investigations south of Phnom Penh, reported in May 1973 that the communists there were successfully 'using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda' ... The U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia was partly responsible for the rise of what had been a small-scale Khmer Rouge insurgency, which now grew capable of overthrowing the Lon Nol government ..."

    So, U.S. was indirectly responsible for the deaths by torture and execution of 1/4 of the Cambodian population.

    "According to Kiernan, the Khmer Rouge "would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilization of Cambodia. ... It used the bombing's devastation and massacre of civilians as recruitment propaganda and as an excuse for its brutal, radical policies and its purge of moderate communists and Sihanoukists." For this see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide#U.S._carpet_bombing

    How the children were killed: The "Chankiri", or "Killing Tree":
    "A Chankiri Tree or Killing Tree is a tree in the CambodianKilling Fields against which children and infants were smashed because their parents were accused of crimes against the Khmer Rouge. It was so the children "wouldn't grow up and take revenge for their parents' deaths".[1] Some of the soldiers laughed as they beat the children against the trees, as not laughing could have indicated sympathy, making oneself a target."

    Thousands of children were bashed to death thusly, as history subsequently erased the books on the Khmer Rouge, but unsuccessfully. One man, a medical doctor there, was caught up in it, his wife dying during childbirth due to his being withheld from treating her. He was a Gynecologist. He escaped, found his way to America, and became famous portraying mainly himself in several films about Viet Nam/Cambodia. If you like, I will try to find the article I had about him.

    We the unscathed will never in our most horrible dreams imagine the suffering those people underwent.
    Frank

     
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