Clarifications
Andrew Charles Kennis (holden@escape.com)
Sun, 21 Jun 1998 19:10:26 -0400 (EDT)
On Sun, 21 Jun 1998, J J R wrote:
>
> ........saying Pol Pot was a murderer because the Capitalist Pigs made
> him that way is a Bit Much.
>
J J R, if you think that my post was positing that Capitalist Pigs, aka
the U.$. of AmeriKKKan government, made Pol Pot murder people than I
would have to regrettably say that you missed much of the point of my
post. The post was meant to point out several important facts,
that are largely unknowns to the general public. I'll try and make it
simple by posting those purposefully underpublicized events in a clear
and concise manner, with my sound byted postulates following 'em:
1) From 1969 to 1975, the secret Nixon administration bombings of inner
Cambodia killed over 600,000 innocent civilians. 1 million more have been
estimated to have died in the aftermath of these genocidal killings. Both
of these estimates, are according to our OWN (i.e. CIA) calculations (so,
they're probably *conservative estimates*).
My postulate, concerning my knowledge of that event and the events
following (i.e. Pol Pot's rise to power and the ensuing genocide) was
that without our involvement in laying the traumatic conditions that were
present during Pol Pot's rise, it is very possible if not probable that
a killer of the likes of him, would never have gotten the chance to rise
to power. Ya know, when you leave a country in carnage as we did, by
killing 600,000 people directly, and 1 million extra indirectly, it is
more likely to be helpless in the face of genocidal and murderous
military dictators. So no, of course we didn't *make* Pol Pot kill his
own countrymen, but we certainly didn't help avoid such an occurrence
with our OWN genocidal acts of mass and indiscriminate killing. ONCE
AGAIN, if you want to read about this in greater detail, feel free to
check out an article by one of the two scholars (Edward Herman is the
one, Noam Chomsky the other) who have informed me of these events:
'Pol Pot And Kissinger: On war criminality and impunity' by Edward Herman
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hermansept97.htm
<a clip from the article is pasted at the bottom of this post>
2) The next great AmeriKKKan move in foreign policy, was then to support
the ongoing genocide of the indigenous populated island off the coast of
Australia called East Timor. The U.$. supported this invasion, by arming,
funding, and training Indonesian soldiers (Indonesia, which many of you
may now know about in detail thanks to the courage of student organizers
and demonstrators resulting in Suharto's resignation, is a military
dictatorship). This genocide is unfortunately still going on today. ONCE
AGAIN, I beg any and all of you who are interested in learning about the
ongoing atrocities concerning East Timor to check out their web site at:
http://www.etan.org
On Sun, 21 Jun 1998, J J R wrote:
> I think you know from some of my later posts that I agree that capitalism
> can be an oppressive system.
>
On this point, it is good to know that somebody out there on this list at
least thinks that capitalism 'can' be an oppressive system. Perhaps there
is even somebody who also agrees with me that it 'is' an oppressive
system, period. I suppose I can always take heed in Holden's quote, about
how money always makes him blue. Well, he isn't the only one out there that
feels as much. Most of us working stiffs, are constantly down about money
and are own individual struggles to make ends meet (and its natural
extension and system, capitalism).
--AK
p.s. the snippet I promised from Herman's article:
* Quote from Edward Herman's article:
The Times, along with everybody else in the mainstream media, also
fails to mention that before Pol Pot came to power in 1975, the United
States had devastated Cambodia for the first half of what a Finnish
government's study referred to as a *decade* of genocide (not just the
four years of Pol Pot's rule, 1975-78). The 'secret bombing' of Cambodia
by the Nixon-Kissinger gang may have killed as many Cambodians as were
executed by the Khmer Rouge and surely contributed to the ferocity of
Khmer Rouge behavior toward the urban elite and citizenry whose leaders
had allied themselves with the foreign terrorists.
The U.S.-imposed holocaust was a 'sideshow' to the Vietnam War,
the United States bombing Cambodia heavily by 1969, helping organize the
overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970, and in collaboration with its puppet Saigon
government making period incursions into Cambodia in the 1960s and later.
'U.S. B-52s pounded Cambodia for 160 consecutive days [in 1973], dropping
more than 240,000 short tons of bombs on rice fields, water buffalo,
villages (particularly along the Mekong River) and on such troop
positions as the guerrillas might maintain,' a tonnage that 'represents
50 percent more than the conventional explosives dropped on Japan during
World War II.' This 'constant indiscriminate bombing' was of course
carried out against a peasant society with no airforce or ground
defenses.