Quote: (04-12-2017 08:09 AM)Lunostrelki Wrote:
yeah—I always thought the "being carpet-bombed led to Pol Pot" line of thinking was bollocks. If it were that easy to destabilize a regime why didn't Britain and China succumb after the Axis bombed London and Chongqing?
Yes, like most leftist narratives, it falls apart the moment you take an independent look at the facts and avoid the BS spin.
The only halfway decent argument to be made regarding the US "creating" the Khmer Rouge is that US bombing helped grow their numbers by displacing rural Cambodians.
And while this is certainly true to a certain extent, it wasn't nearly as much of a factor as they'd like you to believe.
First of all, the US bombing began with Sihanouk's approval before the coup, but it was after he was voted out of power and lent his name to the Khmer Rouge that they gained much-needed legitimacy in the eyes of the people, since Sihanouk was considered like a god-king by the lower classes.
And communism was nothing new to Cambodia. The early iterations of the Khmer Rouge were started by the North Vietnamese prior to the Vietnam War as a way of both fighting the French and destabilizing Cambodia's government.
In fact, N. Vietnam's willingness to use and discard Cambodia's communist groups is one of the main reasons there was so much animosity from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam and Vietnamese-Cambodians.
But of course, they had an alliance of necessity until 1975, and it would NOT have been possible for the Khmer Rouge to take the country nor the capital, Phnom Penh, without the North Vietnamese.
They launched an invasion in Cambodia in 1970 and controlled about 1/4 to 1/3 of the country at that point, turning it all over to the Khmer Rouge.
But even after the US had removed itself from the equation following the '73 Paris Peace Accord, the Khmer Rouge STILL could not take Phnom Penh and again relied on N. Vietnamese assistance to finally take the city in '75.
Not only did the N. Vietnamese directly help the Khmer Rouge into power, they were the entire reason the US bombed Cambodia in the first place.
They were using eastern Cambodia both to transport troops/supplies and as a base to launch attacks on South Vietnam. This happened for years with Sihanouk's support, until the pushback from right-wing factions in Cambodia's government caused him to try to shift away from the left and renew relations with the US, calling them in to bomb the N. Vietnamese bases and transport lines.
But wait, we're still not done. We still have to talk about the Khmer Rouge's other benefactor, China, who supplied the majority of their weapons and training BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER the Khmer Rouge came to power.
Yes, not only did China provide the Khmer Rouge with their arms, starting at least as early as '67 or '68 (which was before the US' main bombing campaigns), they were directly involved in the Khmer Rouge's actual reign from 1975 to 1979, including in the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where something like 15,000+ political prisoners, including men, women, and children, were tortured and executed.
They didn't just provide money. They trained the Tuol Sleng guards, built airstrips, maintained power grids, etc.
And when the North Vietnamese invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge in '78/'79, China immediately invaded Vietnam in revenge. Yes, the Sino-Vietnam War started a month after Vietnam took Cambodia. Weird coincidence, huh?
Oh, and regarding the narrative set forth in another thread that portrayed the N. Vietnamese as "liberators", they installed a puppet regime headed by former Khmer Rouge and occupied the country for decades afterwards.
To be clear, the US also had a hand in funding the Khmer Rouge AFTER they had been overthrown and were nothing but a fringe group fighting the Vietnamese occupation and their Khmer Rouge-led puppet regime from the Thai border.
To summarize, we have a communist group that was funded, trained, supported, and directly brought into power by a combination of the Chinese and the North Vietnamese. They were then overthrown by the North Vietnamese, who installed a former Khmer Rouge and pro-Vietnam prime minister while occupying the country for the next decade.
Not only that, North Vietnam had been supporting communists in Cambodia before the Vietnam War even started, while China funded communist rebels in nearly every country in Southeast Asia.
But somehow it is US bombing that caused the Khmer Rouge. It's an absurd piece of revisionism that completely ignores the pivotal role of the "anti-imperialist" Chinese and Vietnamese.
Of course, China denies all of this to this day, as they deny everything else for hundreds of years.