The direct American genocide of the Cambodian people lasted from 1969 to 1973. After that the Khmer Rouge, covertly supported by the U.S. government, continued the genocide.
Estimated civilian deaths: 2,000,000 — 2,500,000 people
from U.S. Air Force carpet-bombing and the Khmer Rouge combined.
From
Derailing Democracy
by Dave McGowan:
United States Air Force B-52 bomber crew
butchering Asian women and childrenNot content with the destruction being wrought upon [the rest of] Southeast Asia, the U.S. began a massive covert bombing campaign against Cambodia, resulting in famine, economic chaos, and a staggeringly high death toll.
The desperate conditions created by the bombing set the stage for the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge, resulting in yet another round of death and destruction for the besieged country.
“You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing. It’s not bombing, it’s air support.”
— Colonel David Opfer
United States Air Force
air attaché in Cambodia
complaining to news reporters
about their coverage of the genocide
From
Rogue State
by William Blum:
Cambodian Prince Sihanouk was yet another leader who did not fancy being an American client. After many years of hostility toward his regime, including assassination plots and the infamous Nixon/Kissinger secret “carpet bombings” of 1969-70, Washington finally overthrew Sihanouk in a coup in 1970.
This was all that was needed to impel Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces to enter the fray. Five years later, they took power. But the years of American bombing had caused Cambodia’s traditional economy to vanish. The old Cambodia had been destroyed forever.
Incredibly, the Khmer Rouge were to inflict even greater misery upon this unhappy land. And to multiply the irony, the United States supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge after their subsequent defeat by the Vietnamese.
Related pages
American Genocide of the Vietnamese people
Book review:
The Phoenix Program
The Phoenix Program, My Lai and the “Tiger Cages”
American Genocide of the Laotian people
Neighborhood Bully: American Militarism
interview with Ramsey Clark
Maps:
Southeast Asia during the Vietnam Genocide
South Vietnam during the American Occupation and Genocide
Related sites
Writings by Peace Activist S. Brian Willson
http://www.brianwillson.com/
Brian Willson is a courageous Vietnam vet who was wounded in combat — but not during the Vietnam Genocide. He was fighting a war of conscience. In 1987 a military train at a U.S. Navy munitions base intentionally ran over him and severed his legs as he and two other veterans sat on the tracks to block it. The train was carrying weapons to be used in America’s ongoing holocaust of innocent civilian people in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.
His autobiography is heartfelt, utterly unself-pitying and very instructive, particularly his experiences from Vietnam onward. Brian Willson’s writing is extremely valuable, being from a deeply intelligent and genuinely moral man who has witnessed firsthand the horrors of American state terrorism around the world.
From the site:
“THIS SITE CONTAINS essays describing the incredible historic pattern of U.S. arrogance, ethnocentrism, violence and lawlessness in domestic and global affairs, and the severe danger this pattern poses for the future health of Homo sapiens and Mother Earth. Other essays discuss revolutionary, nonviolent alternative approaches based on the principle of radical relational mutuality. This is a term increasingly used by physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists to describe the nature of the omnicentric*, ever-unfolding universe. Every being, every aspect of life energy in the cosmos, is intrinsically interconnected with and affects every other being and aspect of life energy at every moment.”
*everything is at the center of the cosmos at every moment
Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist — VVAW-AI
http://www.oz.net/~vvawai/
“Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti-Imperialist is part of a network of anti-imperialist veterans who are proud of our resistance to U.S. aggression around the world. In the 1970s, to be a Vietnam veteran was to be against the war. That proud legacy must be carried forward through the 1990s and into the next millennium. As veterans, we have been to the edge and seen the viciousness of Amerikkka unmasked. We have no doubt that the bastards who sent us to war will use their nuclear arsenal, along with unspeakably cruel conventional weapons, to maintain their empire — and after the Gulf War, do you?”
Vietnam Veterans Against the War — VVAW
http://www.vvaw.org/
VVAW was founded in 1967 by vets who realized that what we were doing in Vietnam was a monstrous evil. Through courageous political activism and grassroots organizing the VVAW helped to awaken the heavily brainwashed American people to the horrible reality of America’s greatest campaign of racist genocide in the 20th century.
Veterans For Peace
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/
“We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause of world peace.
"To this end we will work, with others:
- Toward increasing public awareness of the costs of war;
To restrain our government from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations;
To end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons; and
- To abolish war as an instrument of international policy.
“We urge all veterans who share this vision to join us.”
WAR is HELL
http://www.warishell.com/warishell/index.htm
This is the website for book Bloody Hell: The Price Soldiers Pay, which provides “a platform for veterans to speak for themselves. Page after page of searing testimony to the brutal, bloody, unmerciful, dehumanising, haunting, destructive, grim black void of war. The pain. The lies. The reality. The aftermath.”
Bibliography
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia
by William Shawcross
Simon & Schuster, 1979
The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
“One of the best books ever written on the secret history of the Vietnam war. Valentine presents an unsparing account of the Phoenix Program, the CIA/US Army ‘pacification’ program in Vietnam that practiced plunder, torture and widespread assassination.”
Apocalypse 1945:
The Destruction of Dresden
by David Irving
Killing Hope:
U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
by William Blum
Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum
The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark
Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by Noam Chomsky
The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee
Blackshirts and Reds:
Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
by Michael Parenti
Against Empire
by Michael Parenti
The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti
Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others
Terrorizing the Neighborhood:
American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
by Noam Chomsky
Pressure Drop Press, 1991
Pirates and Emperors, Old and New:
International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky
The Culture of Terrorism
by Noam Chomsky
Derailing Democracy:
The America the Media Don’t Want You to See
by David McGowan
A People’s History of the United States:
1492 — Present
by Howard Zinn
Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
by Ralph W. McGehee
War At Home:
Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It
by Brian Glick
Inventing Reality:
The Politics of News Media
by Michael Parenti
War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors
On Killing:
The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
by Dave Grossman
published by: Little, Brown
Examines the consequences of the U.S. military’s conditioning of American soldiers to overcome the instinctive loathing of murdering fellow human beings. Shows how it has increased post-combat stress disorder and how contemporary society — especially the American media — replicates the U.S. Army’s conditioning techniques, resulting in increased violence in American society.
Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War
by William M. Hammond
published by: UPKs
Uses classified documents as well as extensive interviews to examine the bitter animosity that developed between the U.S. government and the news media during the genocidal Vietnam war. Tells how they first shared a common vision, but as the war dragged on, the truth fell victim to the U.S. government’s “management” of the press.
Nowadays, of course, the mainstream press wouldn’t dream of reporting the latest American military atrocities. The U.S. Corporate Mafia Government has gotten much better over the years at “managing” the press and all the mass-media.
The two books immediately above are available from:
Edward R. Hamilton, Bookseller
Falls Village, CT 06031-5000
First They Killed My Father:
A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
by Loung Ung
The story of a young girl and her family’s suffering during the genocide by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. It was only the Vietnamese Army that finally rescued the Cambodian people from the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge in 1979.
After that the United States military/government, ever vengeful toward the peoples it had savaged with military invasion and carpet-bombing for years, covertly supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Hey, whatever it takes to defeat those Godless Commies, eh? Even if it means we make a pact with the Devil. Gotta kill ’em to save ’em, you know!
Ah yes, there’s nothing quite like the demented “logic” of American patriots.
