My last boss is probably one of the few people I know I would consider an actual genuine hero. He singlehandedly rescued his family from the Khmer Rouge and smuggled them out of the country through China, then to Britain and finally Canada. He started a business from nothing here and is probably the best employer i've ever had. His nephew was the manager while I worked there and is one of the greatest people i've met and became a good friend. Him and the rest of my boss' family wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for him. He lost a lot of friends and family because of the genocides.
Yeah, I didn't appreciate this until I read about the survivors, but it's freaky to imagine that one day you go from living relatively normally, to being marched out of Phenom Penh at gunpoint by teenagers, separated from your family, and forced to become rice farming slaves.
And they were slaves, one story is about a person who was starving, just like everyone else, who dared to catch a fish that swam between their legs to eat. They were shot for that.
They also practiced eating the rich in the literal sense. For whatever odd cultural reason, they enjoyed eating human livers from people who were executed.
When the civil war ended, the king asked the people to return their guns. The Khmer Rouge kept theirs and intercepted shipments thereof, easily taking over the disarmed areas.
I grew up in a town that received many Cambodian people displaced by this from Thai refugee camps. It's hard to imagine what my friends parents went through to keep their children alive. I have fond memories of their temple festivals and foods. I'm so grateful for societies that can include refugees and let people live a peaceful life.
>As described in PBS’s Frontline documentary series,
“Instead of becoming pariahs, the Khmer Rouge continued to play a significant role in Cambodian politics for the next two decades.The Khmer Rouge would likely not have survived without the support of its old patron China and a surprising new ally: the United States. Norodom Sihanouk, now in exile after briefly serving as head of state under the Khmer Rouge, formed a loose coalition with the guerillas to expel the Vietnamese from Cambodia. The United States gave the Sihanouk-Khmer Rouge coalition millions of dollars in aid while enforcing an economic embargo against the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government. The Carter administration helped the Khmer Rouge keep its seat at the United Nations, tacitly implying that they were still the country’s legitimate rulers."
For me this comment has no up vote or down vote button, and I have not already up/down voted it (there is no unvote/undown button) . Is this the result of moderator action?
As a Vietnamese, one of the sad thing about this whole ordeal was how Vietnam's involvement in this was viewed under a very negative light by the world.
The year was 1978. Vietnam had just came out of the country's great war 3 years earlier, and was extremely exhausted to put it lightly. The last thing it wanted was getting in another war. But it had no choice. The Khmer Rouge crossed the Cambodian - Vietnamese border, looted nearby villages and massacred the people. You can read up on the details, but be warned the atrocities will ruin your day.
Under the circumstances which can be argued as an existential threat, Vietnam had no choice but to launch attack on the Khmer Rouge and swiftly got rid of them and liberated the Cambodian people, ending the genocide.
Yet the world's view on this has been incredibly negative. Even now, Vietnam is often seen as the invader, the aggressor in the conflict instead of the Cambodian people's liberator.
Vietnam's removal of the Khmer Rouge was certainly necessary and ultimately spared a lot of people further suffering, but Vietnam's 'good guy' status in the conflict is somewhat dented by the fact that they'd provided the military support to help install the Khmer Rouge in the first place [see also a lot of other 'world policing' actions...] before the Khmer Rouge decided that Vietnam was an enemy due to a mix of ethnic and ideological hatred and being on different sides of the Sino Soviet split.
The Sino Soviet split was also a big deal for international and especially Western perceptions of Vietnamese involvement at the time: China at the time not only viewed Vietnam as an enemy but also the Khmer Rouge as an ally, and even pressured other anti-Vietnamese Cambodian exile factions to involve the defeated Khmer Rouge in their government in exile.
The regime the Vietnamese installed was less spectacularly genocidal but certainly very dubious, although it says a lot about the weirdness of Cambodian realpolitik that Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge cadre the Vietnamese installed as deputy PM, has held continuous office since then through years of decreasing Vietnamese influence and then a transition to notional multiparty democracy and capitalist oligarchy including coalitions with his former enemies. And that's even before we get into how many times the Cambodian king switched sides...
I can tell you that from at least this Canadian's perspective, using military force to eliminate the Khmer Rouge was no less necessary than using military force to eliminate the Nazi control of Germany. I think you'll find that among people who have extensively studied asian and southeast asian history and military topics, it's almost universally agreed upon how evil their regime was.
The full weight of the evidence for how many people they killed, which only surfaced by the mid to late 1980s, only further reinforces this.
Mind you, the Vietnamese government went to war with the Khmer Rouge because the latter attacked Vietnam, not because the killing fields became unacceptable.
As I'm sure you know, there is a lot of history between the Vietnamese and Cambodians. I understood that Cambodians hold a lot of animosity when the Vietnamese took the Mekong delta from Cambodia in 1698. They ended up as 2nd class citizens and the Khmer Rouge figured it was a good time to take it back.
And one can't ignore North Vietnam's support of the Khmer Rouge early on.
On 29 March 1970, North Vietnam launched an offensive against the Cambodian army. Documents uncovered from the Soviet Union's archives reveal that the invasion was launched at the Khmer Rouge's explicit request after negotiations were held with Nuon Chea.[33] A North Vietnamese force quickly overran large parts of eastern Cambodia reaching within 15 miles (24 km) of Phnom Penh before being pushed back....After defeating those forces, the North Vietnamese turned the newly won territories over to the local insurgents.[1]
About North Vietnam's support of the Khmer Rouge early on, it's worth viewing things in historical context. During the Cambodian coup of 1970, Vietnamese ethnic was massacred:
> Paranoia flourished and this set off a violent reaction against the nation's 400,000 ethnic Vietnamese.
> Lon Nol hoped to use the Vietnamese as hostages against PAVN/Viet Cong activities, and the military set about rounding them up into detention camps. That was when the killing began. In towns and villages all over Cambodia, soldiers and civilians sought out their Vietnamese neighbors in order to murder them. On 15 April, the bodies of 800 Vietnamese floated down the Mekong River and into South Vietnam. [1]
Under the circumstances, the North Vietnamese allied with the Khmer Rouge and the ousted Sihanouk to take back the government from Lon Nol. In the beginning there was no sign of a genocidal regime, and the Khmer Rouges were just "comrades" supported by the Cambodian prince trying to take back his government. It was not until later that ethnic and ideological hatred turned the Khmer Rouge against their Vietnamese allies.
You gotta see it from the other sides too. Vietnam had a strong standing army and took over a sovereign country, not that they had many choices, but that made the whole South East Asia uncomfortable. Who would be next? Thailand? Malaysia? Singapore? In fact, ASEAN was formed originally to fight communism.
I attended a university-based martial arts class in the late 1990s. A somewhat-elderly Asian lady (probably mid-50's) began attending classes and progressing through the ranks. She was kind of. . . well, a goofball. Transgressive sort of humor. Made jokes about people's girlfriends. Laughed through demos.
The only time I saw her utterly serious is when the instructor showed off some knife-defense techniques he learned at a seminar. She got a weird look on her face at the overly-styled techniques we were being show and very clearly said, "We did it like this in Cambodia." She grabbed the rubber knife from the sensei, seemingly teleported behind his back, clamped a hand over his mouth, and drew the knife across his throat. "So they no hear any noise," she explained. As a bunch of 20-something kids, we looked on in horror. She seemed to remember herself and looked embarrassed. Left early from class and never came back.
My parents survived this awful tragedy. They shared stories of how they dealt with the intense hunger, exhaustion, and living in a state of perpetual terror. More often, they'd speak of the family that were taken from them-- uncles, aunts, and grandparents that I'll never meet. My grandpa was a musician that composed much of the popular Khmer music of the 60s influenced by American rock. Nothing has been more devastating than not knowing the whereabouts of loved ones. One of the most brutal legacies of the Khmer Rouge is the separation and destruction of families and communities.
Through a DNA testing site, we recently matched with an unknown relative, leading to a joyful reunion between my mom and an aunt who cared for her before the war.
DNA analysis has helped identify the unknown remains of Pearl Harbor service members[1], bringing closure for families. I'm certain this technology could do the same for many Cambodian families.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, I recommend watching The Killing Fields. Obviously it's from a very British/American perspective. Since I doubt that the film production companies that made it are earning much, if any revenue from it these days, I don't feel bad about linking to a torrent of it:
Highly recommended. Haing Ngor won the Best Supporting Academy Award for his portrayal which also may have offended Pol Pot/the Khmer rouge enough to get him killed. [0]
"Defense attorneys suggested the murder was a politically motivated killing carried out by sympathizers of the Khmer Rouge, but offered no evidence to support this theory.[13] Kang Kek Iew, a former Khmer Rouge official on trial in Cambodia, claimed in November 2009 that Ngor was murdered on Pol Pot's orders, but U.S. investigators did not find him credible."
My grandfather was a victim (he was educated and a well-to-do farmer). They beheaded him in front of the village. My mother and her family were forced to watch and clap.
My mother-in-law lost her parents and six siblings all on the same day... she was the oldest and the only one to have moved out of the family home already. She had also recently had a baby and lost the child, because she herself was starving from the forced labor and could not produce breast milk.
It's enlightening to contemplate the impact of such a thing, all the way out to the song "Holiday in Cambodia." Imagine seeing a tree with a plaque on it stating that this was the place where they used to smash infants' heads against the trunk. They were always just one murder away from achieving perfection, and in light of such a goal, what is a single life?
I was recently remarking to someone on their Year Zero, their willful destruction of all that had gone before. Certainly we have seen it with ISIS and Mao encouraged it for that revolution, but this was much more thorough. Pagodas were turned into warehouses and statues were of course destroyed. It certainly seem to be a common thread in communist revolutions: all that has gone before must be destroyed.
Now I am going to see if I cannot find Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia.
History is a series of bad remakes that should never have been made. The US seem to be going on a very good direction, toppling Washington and Jefferson's statues lately.
I take the Spike Lee approach, if people are going to violently vent their anger its better they destroy some object than end someones life. We can always make another statue.
Readit News
And they were slaves, one story is about a person who was starving, just like everyone else, who dared to catch a fish that swam between their legs to eat. They were shot for that.
They also practiced eating the rich in the literal sense. For whatever odd cultural reason, they enjoyed eating human livers from people who were executed.
When the civil war ended, the king asked the people to return their guns. The Khmer Rouge kept theirs and intercepted shipments thereof, easily taking over the disarmed areas.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2003/5/the-hypocrisy-of-noam...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
Which is the problem of just learning factoids and just stating them. In this case he was horrifically incorrect with his conclusion.
Perhaps due to his left wing bias, that's the part that's hard to know, but I guess what we really are asking.
The year was 1978. Vietnam had just came out of the country's great war 3 years earlier, and was extremely exhausted to put it lightly. The last thing it wanted was getting in another war. But it had no choice. The Khmer Rouge crossed the Cambodian - Vietnamese border, looted nearby villages and massacred the people. You can read up on the details, but be warned the atrocities will ruin your day.
Under the circumstances which can be argued as an existential threat, Vietnam had no choice but to launch attack on the Khmer Rouge and swiftly got rid of them and liberated the Cambodian people, ending the genocide.
Yet the world's view on this has been incredibly negative. Even now, Vietnam is often seen as the invader, the aggressor in the conflict instead of the Cambodian people's liberator.
The Sino Soviet split was also a big deal for international and especially Western perceptions of Vietnamese involvement at the time: China at the time not only viewed Vietnam as an enemy but also the Khmer Rouge as an ally, and even pressured other anti-Vietnamese Cambodian exile factions to involve the defeated Khmer Rouge in their government in exile.
The regime the Vietnamese installed was less spectacularly genocidal but certainly very dubious, although it says a lot about the weirdness of Cambodian realpolitik that Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge cadre the Vietnamese installed as deputy PM, has held continuous office since then through years of decreasing Vietnamese influence and then a transition to notional multiparty democracy and capitalist oligarchy including coalitions with his former enemies. And that's even before we get into how many times the Cambodian king switched sides...
The full weight of the evidence for how many people they killed, which only surfaced by the mid to late 1980s, only further reinforces this.
And one can't ignore North Vietnam's support of the Khmer Rouge early on.
On 29 March 1970, North Vietnam launched an offensive against the Cambodian army. Documents uncovered from the Soviet Union's archives reveal that the invasion was launched at the Khmer Rouge's explicit request after negotiations were held with Nuon Chea.[33] A North Vietnamese force quickly overran large parts of eastern Cambodia reaching within 15 miles (24 km) of Phnom Penh before being pushed back....After defeating those forces, the North Vietnamese turned the newly won territories over to the local insurgents.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide
> Paranoia flourished and this set off a violent reaction against the nation's 400,000 ethnic Vietnamese.
> Lon Nol hoped to use the Vietnamese as hostages against PAVN/Viet Cong activities, and the military set about rounding them up into detention camps. That was when the killing began. In towns and villages all over Cambodia, soldiers and civilians sought out their Vietnamese neighbors in order to murder them. On 15 April, the bodies of 800 Vietnamese floated down the Mekong River and into South Vietnam. [1]
Under the circumstances, the North Vietnamese allied with the Khmer Rouge and the ousted Sihanouk to take back the government from Lon Nol. In the beginning there was no sign of a genocidal regime, and the Khmer Rouges were just "comrades" supported by the Cambodian prince trying to take back his government. It was not until later that ethnic and ideological hatred turned the Khmer Rouge against their Vietnamese allies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_Civil_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASEAN_Declaration
The only time I saw her utterly serious is when the instructor showed off some knife-defense techniques he learned at a seminar. She got a weird look on her face at the overly-styled techniques we were being show and very clearly said, "We did it like this in Cambodia." She grabbed the rubber knife from the sensei, seemingly teleported behind his back, clamped a hand over his mouth, and drew the knife across his throat. "So they no hear any noise," she explained. As a bunch of 20-something kids, we looked on in horror. She seemed to remember herself and looked embarrassed. Left early from class and never came back.
Dead Comment
Through a DNA testing site, we recently matched with an unknown relative, leading to a joyful reunion between my mom and an aunt who cared for her before the war.
DNA analysis has helped identify the unknown remains of Pearl Harbor service members[1], bringing closure for families. I'm certain this technology could do the same for many Cambodian families.
[1] https://www.dpaa.mil/News-Stories/Recent-News-Stories/Articl...
https://rarbg.to/torrent/cbm3x4z
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields_(film)
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haing_S._Ngor
More likely just murder and theft, it seems.
Deleted Comment
My mother-in-law lost her parents and six siblings all on the same day... she was the oldest and the only one to have moved out of the family home already. She had also recently had a baby and lost the child, because she herself was starving from the forced labor and could not produce breast milk.
I was recently remarking to someone on their Year Zero, their willful destruction of all that had gone before. Certainly we have seen it with ISIS and Mao encouraged it for that revolution, but this was much more thorough. Pagodas were turned into warehouses and statues were of course destroyed. It certainly seem to be a common thread in communist revolutions: all that has gone before must be destroyed.
Now I am going to see if I cannot find Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia.