[Vision2020] Mass Slaughter in Vietnam?

[Donovan Arnold]

Mark,
   
  So I take it you are ignoring my question about Moscow water?
   
  Donovan J Arnold

Mark Solomon <msolomon at moscow.com> wrote:
        Nick,
  

  Cambodia has been changing rapidly, for the worse, in the past few years. Sihanouk resigned as King in an attempt to force political reform. He has been replaced as King by one of his sons who spent most of his life in Paris and is a creature of the Prime Minister. The PM, Hun Sen, is a former Khmer Rouge thug who "saw the light" as the Vietnamese Armies were crossing the border and switched allegiances. As partial payback for being given a country to own, Hun Sen recently "negotiated" a new border with Vietnam which of course gives a good chunk of the highlands where the Montagnard tribe lives to Vietnam. Needless to say, given the Montagnard/American history of the Vietnam War, the Montagnards are in deep #$@%. The theoretical democracy is only that, a theory. Hun Sen rules with absolute power, including its corollary, absolute corruption. Opposition political leaders either are in exile or dead at Hun Sen's hand. Until the foreign donor countries that prop up Hun Sen
 pull the foreign aid plug, it will only get worse. China and Vietnam are now the largest donor countries followed by the EU.
  

  It's very sad. I spent several months there two years ago working/teaching metal sculpture techniques to Khmer artists using decommissioned weapons, mostly AK47s, for our raw material. A life changing experience for them, and me.
  

  The best in-country source of news I know of is Khmer Intelligence: http://www.khmerintelligence.org/3Q2004.html
  

  the website is only sporadically maintained but you can subscribe to their yahoo news group for periodic messages of the low down in Cambodia. Link to subscribe from their website.
  

  Mark S.
  

  

  

  

  At 10:17 AM -0800 12/15/06, <nickgier at adelphia.net> wrote:
  Greetings:

Some more really wild claims from down the hill, this time about Vietnam.  Where is the evidence for mass slaughter in Vietnam after we left?  Yes, many were sent to reeducation camps, and many of those fleeing lost their lives to pirates in the South China Sea.

More people are being killed, maimed, and born malformed by leftover munitions and Agent Orange than ever lost their lives at the hands of the Communist regime.  I would also hazard to guess that we killed more Vietnamese (at least one million) than the Viet Cong ever would have killed if we had not intervened.

Before we invaded Cambodia, the country was stable and ruled by Prince Sihanouk, who, along with his wife, are now King and Queen of Cambodia.  (When I was there in 2002, their pictures were everywhere.) Our invasion, plus support for right-wing thugs, alienated the people and forced them right into the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

The Killing Fields are just as much our responsibility as theirs.  The great irony of course is that Communist Vietnamese troops defeated the Khmer Rouge, and the UN had one of greatest successes in making elections possible there.

The Johns Hopkins report on Iraqi causalities, which looked at every single death certificate (90 percent of households surveyed produced one), showed that a majority of deaths occurred by coalition air strikes.  This survey was done before the upsurge in sectarian killings, mainly in Baghdad.  Taking the low end of their estimates at 400,000 dead, it would take Shias and Sunnis a very long time to top Bush's slaughter.

Yours for accurate history,

Nick Gier  

=======================================================
List services made available by First Step Internet, 
serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994. 
http://www.fsr.net 
mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================

 __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20061215/8fde872b/attachment.html