A little odd, as the Vietnamese were allied to teh Khmer Rouge before tehy felt the need to depose them - and at teh end of the war, accepted the Khmer Rouge as allies again. The dictator they imposed on Cambodia was himself a leader of teh Khmer Rouge.
And tell me, why did they need to also "liberate" Laos while they were at it?
This is not an endorsement of the Vietnamese communist regime or of its general policies. The VPA was the lesser of two evils, literally. In many ways like the Red Army in ww2.
@TheTollundWoman Hard to say. The Vietnamese have been very open abou the millions of people the Khmer Rouge killed before the Vietnamese invasion. They've been more reticent about the civilians they killed after they crossed the border.
I knew a Cambodian friend who had relatives living in camps inside Thailand. He said the Vietnamese would regularly mortar these camps.
It doesn't sound like the PAVN were on a "liberation" mission to me. This had more to do with Vietnamese imperialism.
The Vietnamese army was very blunt about its intentions, they invaded Cambodia for defensive reasons after Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnamese border towns. It was only when their own security was threatened that they bothered to do anything. The same is true of both Soviet and American intervention in ww2, D-Day wasn't a "liberation mission" either but the *effect* was the same- the end of the third reich
@TheTollundWoman ( ... incidentally, I think your comparison of the liberation of Cambodia by the Vietnamse to teh liberation of Eastern Europe by the Red Army is very close to the mark. The Baltic countries and Poland are particularly incensed by the idea that they were "liberated" by the Bolsheviks. There seems to be a similar sense in Cambodia about the Vietnamese.
And then, there's the fact that many Khmer Rouge united with the pro-Vietnamese CCP in 1998 ...)
No the forced imposition of communism on eastern europe wasn't a genuine liberation- but it did bring an end to the Nazi genocide. the red army committed countless atrocities in poland, the czech republic, east germany etc. but they did not commit genocide. i despise communism in any form. but there is such a thing as the lesser of two evils
Yes, Vietnam is unique (in my eyes, at least). Just think about: small & relatively undeveloped country defeated 3 great powers one by one - first France, then USA and finally China.
@AtollRu Don't forget, they also crushed the elected government of South Vietnam too. And massacred the people of Hue. And ran a genocide of the Hmong.
@DrCruel Unique, not in the sense of humanism or altruism. I meant their permanent military success, regardless of who were their enemies. This "elected government of South Vietnam" was nothing but American puppet. Hmong? I never heard this... unlike My Lai, for example.
@AtollRu Of course not. The massacre of 500 civilians at My Lai was highly publicized, and the people responsible were punished. The massacre of 6000 civilians at Hue by the Vietnamese communists is barely known about. As for the Hmong people, the Vietnamese and Laotian communists have been steadily "disappearing" these people since the end of the Vietnam war.
Marxists are formidable and utterly ruthless combatants, regardless of nationality. They're also brilliant propagandists.
@DrCruel Yeah, "the people responsible were punished" by... 3,5 years of house arrest for ONE guy (William Calley). It's very, very good punishment for mass murder & excellent example of American fairness. Not to mention the simple fact: the only reason of why he was punished at all, it's because this event was really "highly publicized" unlike many other "MyLai's".
So Vietnam intervened for selfish strategic reasons? Not going to argue with that. The US is often accused of invading Iraq "for their oil"...the result was still positive- the end of Saddam's regime.we agree that the CPV regime was and is abhorrent, but the fact it was the PAVN that ended the genocide in Cambodia. Now, why didn't "the free world" intervene before the PAVN?
@TheTollundWoman My point being, the Khmer Rouge were murdering people in Cambodia while the Vietnamese communists murdered people in Vietnam and Laos. There was a falling out amongst these two mafias, the PAVN then being used to invade Cambodia and murder Cambodian civilians too. Eventually the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese communists made up and became friends again.
There's really nothing here for the Marxist hypocrites of Hanoi to be proud of, outside of some brilliant PR on their part.
Well, in that case there's also nothing for the Marxist hypocrites of Stalingrad to be proud of, even though despite their truly evil ideology, they did manage to stop the Nazis. Personally I regard the Red Army as heroes. Their leaders were heartless bastards, their ideology was insane, but at the end of the day they stopped Hitler.
@TheTollundWoman You're right. Stalin and Hitler were both socialist monsters. At Stalingrad, Russian soldiers were forced into suicidal battles with Nazi soldiers to preserve an equally ruthless and vicious Bolshevik state. Sometimes these Russians were forced into combat without weapons. Any who tried to escape their fate were shot by socialist agents of the NKVD, stationed to their rear. In the end, for many and their families, it didn't matter which side ultimately won.
@TheTollundWoman Stalinism was arguably worse. More people in the Soviet Union were killed by the Bolsheviks before the Nazis invaded than were killed by the Nazis during the war.
As for being on the "right side", are you referring to the Soviet Union before or after Operation Barbarossa? To borrow from John Kerry, remember that they were with the Nazis before they were against them.
@TheTollundWoman ( ... incidentally, I really should use the term "Bolshevism" rather than "Stalinism". The latter term is a Bolshevik invention of the Khruzchev era, meant to separate what transpired during the Stalin era from what took place before. That there was an ideological difference is so much nonsense - Stalin's policies were no more than a continuation of policies already well established by his predecessors, Lenin and Trotsky. Stalin was just another Bolshevik, nothing more or less.)
Both ideologically and in terms of its brutal tactics, Stalin's regime was simply a logical continuation of Lenin's. It was Lenin, not Stalin, that established the one-party state to begin with. But while there is little meaningful difference between lenin and stalin, there IS an enormous difference between Lenin and Khruschev.
@DrCruel OMG, what are you talking about here: "In the end, for many and their families, it didn't matter which side ultimately won"? For ordinary Russians (like my grandpa, for example) it was the GREATEST matter which side won. It wasn't "Hitler vs Stalin", it was "will Russian nation exist in future, or not" matter.
I'm not going to argue with you (we are too different, i know). But, honestly, some Americans and their crazy "logic" amazes me over and over again...
@AtollRu For many Ukrainians, it was very much worse that Stalin won. For many Russians too, who were deemed to have been "traitors" during the war (for example, because their units were surrounded because of Stalin's stupidity and they were forced to surrender), the fact that the Bolsheviks won made no difference - they were still criminals, and they and their families would be made to pay for their "crimes".
Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks intended to reduce the Russian people to slaves.
@AtollRu It's not the Soviet people who were better off because of Bolshevism's victory over Hitler. It's western Europe and the US that profited by far the most. In fact, if the Red Army had not done the lion's share of fighting on the Eastern Front, the Allies might not have been able to liberate France for years or even decades afterwards - if at all.
For the West, it meant freedom. For the US, it meant prosperity. But for the Eastern Europeans, it was simply a difference between fascists.
@DrCruel As you wish... as I said before, I see no point to argue with you. But If you'll ever visit Russia, be very carefull to share your thoughts with locals. For example, don't even try to call our war veterans as "the same fascist", because I don't even dare to predict the effects.
@AtollRu Honestly, when I was in the US Army we never planned to visit Russia unless we were fully armed. Actually we figured they'd come over to visit us, through the Fulda Gap.
But I'll give you the same advice. If you ever visit Poland or the Baltic States, I'd keep that "valiant Red Army veterans liberated your sorry arses" crap to yourself. You'll find the Ukrainians are still a bit touchy about the Holodomor too.
@TheTollundWoman Incidentally ... are you asking why the Carter administration, after losing the most humiliating war in US history, did not return to Indochina three or four years later to start a new one?
One might as well ask why we left Vietnam in the first place - letting the NVA murder thousands of helpless civilians in South Vietnam. Indeed, during this period millions were dying of starvation in mainland China. Should we have "intervened" there too?
No, I'm asking why the US actually defended the Khmer Rouge in the UN, just to contradict the Soviet Union. and why Nixon was idiotic and/or evil enough to carpet bomb a neutral country. and no, we shouldn't have "intervened" in China, but we also shouldn't have become strategic allies with Deng Xiaoping again just to piss off the Soviets
@TheTollundWoman Pilger often makes this accusation - mainly in response to US efforts that refused to accept the establishment of the pro-Vietnamese Khmer Rouge despot, Hun Sen, as dictator of Cambodia.As for why we bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam war, tat's easy - we did so for the same reasons that we bombed France to get at the Germans during WW II. What I don't understand is why we didn't send troops in to rout the North Vietnamese terrorists out.
South Vietnam was far from a model of democracy, it was certainly much less repressive than the Communist regime that followed it, but to call it an "elected government" is absurd. The use of napalm and "carpet bombing" of civilian areas is indisputably a war crime. The communist atrocities after the war were equally reprehensible.
A little odd, as the Vietnamese were allied to teh Khmer Rouge before tehy felt the need to depose them - and at teh end of the war, accepted the Khmer Rouge as allies again. The dictator they imposed on Cambodia was himself a leader of teh Khmer Rouge.
And tell me, why did they need to also "liberate" Laos while they were at it?
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel
This is not an endorsement of the Vietnamese communist regime or of its general policies. The VPA was the lesser of two evils, literally. In many ways like the Red Army in ww2.
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
@TheTollundWoman Hard to say. The Vietnamese have been very open abou the millions of people the Khmer Rouge killed before the Vietnamese invasion. They've been more reticent about the civilians they killed after they crossed the border.
I knew a Cambodian friend who had relatives living in camps inside Thailand. He said the Vietnamese would regularly mortar these camps.
It doesn't sound like the PAVN were on a "liberation" mission to me. This had more to do with Vietnamese imperialism.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel
The Vietnamese army was very blunt about its intentions, they invaded Cambodia for defensive reasons after Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnamese border towns. It was only when their own security was threatened that they bothered to do anything. The same is true of both Soviet and American intervention in ww2, D-Day wasn't a "liberation mission" either but the *effect* was the same- the end of the third reich
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
@TheTollundWoman ( ... incidentally, I think your comparison of the liberation of Cambodia by the Vietnamse to teh liberation of Eastern Europe by the Red Army is very close to the mark. The Baltic countries and Poland are particularly incensed by the idea that they were "liberated" by the Bolsheviks. There seems to be a similar sense in Cambodia about the Vietnamese.
And then, there's the fact that many Khmer Rouge united with the pro-Vietnamese CCP in 1998 ...)
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel
No the forced imposition of communism on eastern europe wasn't a genuine liberation- but it did bring an end to the Nazi genocide. the red army committed countless atrocities in poland, the czech republic, east germany etc. but they did not commit genocide. i despise communism in any form. but there is such a thing as the lesser of two evils
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
Yes, Vietnam is unique (in my eyes, at least). Just think about: small & relatively undeveloped country defeated 3 great powers one by one - first France, then USA and finally China.
AtollRu 5 months ago
@AtollRu Don't forget, they also crushed the elected government of South Vietnam too. And massacred the people of Hue. And ran a genocide of the Hmong.
Unique? Odd word to use.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel Unique, not in the sense of humanism or altruism. I meant their permanent military success, regardless of who were their enemies. This "elected government of South Vietnam" was nothing but American puppet. Hmong? I never heard this... unlike My Lai, for example.
AtollRu 5 months ago
@AtollRu Of course not. The massacre of 500 civilians at My Lai was highly publicized, and the people responsible were punished. The massacre of 6000 civilians at Hue by the Vietnamese communists is barely known about. As for the Hmong people, the Vietnamese and Laotian communists have been steadily "disappearing" these people since the end of the Vietnam war.
Marxists are formidable and utterly ruthless combatants, regardless of nationality. They're also brilliant propagandists.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel Yeah, "the people responsible were punished" by... 3,5 years of house arrest for ONE guy (William Calley). It's very, very good punishment for mass murder & excellent example of American fairness. Not to mention the simple fact: the only reason of why he was punished at all, it's because this event was really "highly publicized" unlike many other "MyLai's".
AtollRu 5 months ago
@DrCruel
So Vietnam intervened for selfish strategic reasons? Not going to argue with that. The US is often accused of invading Iraq "for their oil"...the result was still positive- the end of Saddam's regime.we agree that the CPV regime was and is abhorrent, but the fact it was the PAVN that ended the genocide in Cambodia. Now, why didn't "the free world" intervene before the PAVN?
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
@TheTollundWoman My point being, the Khmer Rouge were murdering people in Cambodia while the Vietnamese communists murdered people in Vietnam and Laos. There was a falling out amongst these two mafias, the PAVN then being used to invade Cambodia and murder Cambodian civilians too. Eventually the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese communists made up and became friends again.
There's really nothing here for the Marxist hypocrites of Hanoi to be proud of, outside of some brilliant PR on their part.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel
Well, in that case there's also nothing for the Marxist hypocrites of Stalingrad to be proud of, even though despite their truly evil ideology, they did manage to stop the Nazis. Personally I regard the Red Army as heroes. Their leaders were heartless bastards, their ideology was insane, but at the end of the day they stopped Hitler.
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
@TheTollundWoman You're right. Stalin and Hitler were both socialist monsters. At Stalingrad, Russian soldiers were forced into suicidal battles with Nazi soldiers to preserve an equally ruthless and vicious Bolshevik state. Sometimes these Russians were forced into combat without weapons. Any who tried to escape their fate were shot by socialist agents of the NKVD, stationed to their rear. In the end, for many and their families, it didn't matter which side ultimately won.
I entirely agree.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel
It did matter which side won. Stalinism was not as evil as Naziism. Both were unspeakably brutal. but the Soviets were on the right side in ww2.
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
@TheTollundWoman Stalinism was arguably worse. More people in the Soviet Union were killed by the Bolsheviks before the Nazis invaded than were killed by the Nazis during the war.
As for being on the "right side", are you referring to the Soviet Union before or after Operation Barbarossa? To borrow from John Kerry, remember that they were with the Nazis before they were against them.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@TheTollundWoman ( ... incidentally, I really should use the term "Bolshevism" rather than "Stalinism". The latter term is a Bolshevik invention of the Khruzchev era, meant to separate what transpired during the Stalin era from what took place before. That there was an ideological difference is so much nonsense - Stalin's policies were no more than a continuation of policies already well established by his predecessors, Lenin and Trotsky. Stalin was just another Bolshevik, nothing more or less.)
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel
Both ideologically and in terms of its brutal tactics, Stalin's regime was simply a logical continuation of Lenin's. It was Lenin, not Stalin, that established the one-party state to begin with. But while there is little meaningful difference between lenin and stalin, there IS an enormous difference between Lenin and Khruschev.
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
@DrCruel
because Khruschev denounced the worst aspects of Leninism, he just referred to them as "stalinism" to make it politically acceptable
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
@DrCruel OMG, what are you talking about here: "In the end, for many and their families, it didn't matter which side ultimately won"? For ordinary Russians (like my grandpa, for example) it was the GREATEST matter which side won. It wasn't "Hitler vs Stalin", it was "will Russian nation exist in future, or not" matter.
I'm not going to argue with you (we are too different, i know). But, honestly, some Americans and their crazy "logic" amazes me over and over again...
AtollRu 5 months ago
@AtollRu For many Ukrainians, it was very much worse that Stalin won. For many Russians too, who were deemed to have been "traitors" during the war (for example, because their units were surrounded because of Stalin's stupidity and they were forced to surrender), the fact that the Bolsheviks won made no difference - they were still criminals, and they and their families would be made to pay for their "crimes".
Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks intended to reduce the Russian people to slaves.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@AtollRu It's not the Soviet people who were better off because of Bolshevism's victory over Hitler. It's western Europe and the US that profited by far the most. In fact, if the Red Army had not done the lion's share of fighting on the Eastern Front, the Allies might not have been able to liberate France for years or even decades afterwards - if at all.
For the West, it meant freedom. For the US, it meant prosperity. But for the Eastern Europeans, it was simply a difference between fascists.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel As you wish... as I said before, I see no point to argue with you. But If you'll ever visit Russia, be very carefull to share your thoughts with locals. For example, don't even try to call our war veterans as "the same fascist", because I don't even dare to predict the effects.
AtollRu 5 months ago
@AtollRu Honestly, when I was in the US Army we never planned to visit Russia unless we were fully armed. Actually we figured they'd come over to visit us, through the Fulda Gap.
But I'll give you the same advice. If you ever visit Poland or the Baltic States, I'd keep that "valiant Red Army veterans liberated your sorry arses" crap to yourself. You'll find the Ukrainians are still a bit touchy about the Holodomor too.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@TheTollundWoman Incidentally ... are you asking why the Carter administration, after losing the most humiliating war in US history, did not return to Indochina three or four years later to start a new one?
One might as well ask why we left Vietnam in the first place - letting the NVA murder thousands of helpless civilians in South Vietnam. Indeed, during this period millions were dying of starvation in mainland China. Should we have "intervened" there too?
DrCruel 5 months ago
@DrCruel
No, I'm asking why the US actually defended the Khmer Rouge in the UN, just to contradict the Soviet Union. and why Nixon was idiotic and/or evil enough to carpet bomb a neutral country. and no, we shouldn't have "intervened" in China, but we also shouldn't have become strategic allies with Deng Xiaoping again just to piss off the Soviets
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
@TheTollundWoman Pilger often makes this accusation - mainly in response to US efforts that refused to accept the establishment of the pro-Vietnamese Khmer Rouge despot, Hun Sen, as dictator of Cambodia.As for why we bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam war, tat's easy - we did so for the same reasons that we bombed France to get at the Germans during WW II. What I don't understand is why we didn't send troops in to rout the North Vietnamese terrorists out.
DrCruel 5 months ago
@AtollRu
South Vietnam was far from a model of democracy, it was certainly much less repressive than the Communist regime that followed it, but to call it an "elected government" is absurd. The use of napalm and "carpet bombing" of civilian areas is indisputably a war crime. The communist atrocities after the war were equally reprehensible.
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago
I like this video
MrReco12 5 months ago
@MrReco12
Thanks.
TheTollundWoman 5 months ago