Thread: Rant Thread II
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Old 01-25-2012, 10:50 PM   #6847
Saya
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 9,548
I'd really recommend this book to you, dude. Its A People's History Of The Vietnam War by Jonathan Neale and has a whole chapter on what happened on Cambodia and Vietnam after the Americans left Vietnam.

Firstly, the American government was very bitter about losing the Vietnam War. It was very embarrassing that a powerful country couldn't defeat a country of rice farming peasants, and the American soldiers had rebelled and refused to fight, which made the powers that be afraid to fight a land war again for a long time. So America wanted to punish Vietnam for the humiliation. In the peace talks Americans promised to pay five billion dollars in reparations, but never did pay up. It claimed Hanoi was keeping American soldiers as prisoners of war, despite insistance from the Vietnamese that those MIA were dead. They were determined that Vietnam stayed poor and miserable. China allied itself with the US on that one, as it had developed a rivalry with the Soviet Union and the Vietnamese refused to side with China. It just goes to show how pissed the American government was, during the Vietnam War and during the uprising, they bombed the shit out of Cambodia to try and prevent another communist governement. According to Neale, "In six months in 1973, they dropped one and a half times the tonnage of all the bombs dropped on Japan in the whole of World War Two. Cambodia was a small country, with 4 or 5 million people...several hundred thousand people died in those six months, perhaps a tenth of the population, perhaps more. No country before or since has been subjected to bombing of that scale and intensity." So for them to suddenly side with the people they were so determined to wipe off the map just a few years before, its really telling of how much they hated Vietnam.

Pol Pot's reign of terror angered many Cambodians, but he was very racist against Vietnamese, and assumed it was all their fault, so he commited genocide against ethnic Vietnamese and would raid against the border. So when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, they expected stiff resistance, but Cambodians were so fed up with Pol Pot it was very easy for them to push back Pol Pot's group (Khmer Rouge) and they would have done away with them easily. But the Chinese, Thai and American government decided to back them. They were allowed to rest in Thailand and return to Cambodia under the guise of humanitarian aid, supplied with food, money and arms. The US fought to keep the UN seat for Pol Pot instead of the Vietnamese backed government. It wasn't until the Vietnamese had to withdraw that they seemed to feel embarrassed about supporting a mass murderer.
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