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Hi Mark,<br><br>
Thanks for your comments. I am aware of some of these facts, but
did not know that Sihanouk has resigned. I hold no brief for him
(his past cozy relations with Beijing was nauseating) or the current
leader. <br><br>
All that I'm saying is that the U.S. is very much responsible for the
chaos that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and nothing you've said
disputes that.<br><br>
Nick<br><br>
At 12:37 PM 12/15/2006 -0800, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Nick,<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The best in-country source of news I know of is Khmer
Intelligence:<font size=4>
<a href="http://www.khmerintelligence.org/3Q2004.html" eudora="autourl">http://www.khmerintelligence.org/3Q2004.html</a></font><br><br>
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.<br><br>
Mark S.<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
At 10:17 AM -0800 12/15/06, <nickgier@adelphia.net> wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Greetings:<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Yours for accurate history,<br><br>
Nick Gier</blockquote><br>
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<font size=2>"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the
application of it to human affairs."<br>
--Ralph Waldo Emerson<br><br>
"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings
who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."<br>
--Mohandas Gandhi<br><br>
"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot
be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each
part by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on
the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our
intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science,
religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its
various parts." --Ma</font><font size=1>x Planck<br><br>
</font>Nicholas F. Gier<br>
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho<br>
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843<br>
<a href="http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm" eudora="autourl">http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm</a><br>
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950<br>
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO<br>
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