J
Jerry Kraus
Guest
http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=135454
Fate of American Indians awaits the Ukraine
Cyril Vyshinsky
22.08.2007 20:39
A museum has been opened in the Crimea dedicated to the victims of
American Wars. Only American Wars. Ukrainian Communists have set out
to prove, in one collapsable tent, that NATO is not the place for the
Ukraine. Neither in political nor in military alliance. The tent
will be moved from one Crimean city to the next to make sure everyone
gets the message.
"The United States of America has conducted more than 350 wars,
aggressions, attacks, and other forms of interference in the affairs
of other states. The methods of genocide varied - systematic
killings, poisoning water in reservoirs, destruction of food supplies,
mass migrations, mass destruction etc. ..." says the museum guide.
So now, among the many tourist sights and museums in the Crimea we
have one more- a museum dedictated to the memory of the victims of
American imperialism. It is situated in downtown Simferopol, in the
best traditions of Ukrainian protest architecture - in a protest tent.
The walls of tent are hung with anti-NATO posters, and stalls there
tell of the genocide of the indigenous population of America -
Indians, about the slave trade and the racial oppression of the 19th
century, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about Vietnam, burnt
and razed to the ground by American napalm.
The creators of this unique museum? - Ukrainian Communists. "This is
totally unique, as you know, a political response to American
critiques of Communism: when Bush in Washington created a museum of
Soviet occupation, and Yushchenko chimed in approvingly, I said that
we would respond with exactly the same kind of museum. Today, we have
given our response ", say Leonid Grach, chairman of the Crimean branch
of the Communist Party of the Ukraine.
Yushchenko's idea for the creation in the Ukraine of a museum of
Soviet occupation, which he got from a visit to a museum on the same
theme in Tbilisi, is called by Communists "blasphemy" and a systematic
distortion of history. However, the main threat to the future of the
Ukraine is American aggression. His country survived their "Orange
Revolution" - in which Crimean Communists played a role. Now they
fight attempts to draw the Ukraine into NATO. The museum tent is
packed with exhibits, and there are plenty of visitors there. Among
the visitors - the leader of Russia's Communists Gennadi Zyuganov, who
was on a vacation to the Crimea. "One must always remember that
attempts by the Americans to build a 'military hegemony of peace' in
the world is, in reality, a direct threat to world peace: to Russia
and to the Ukraine, to a United Europe, and to China. Practically all
countries on the planet came out against the Iraq war. We are
obliged to pursue a policy so to ensure that American and NATO
troops are neither in Russia nor in the Ukraine nor in Belorussia ",
he stated.
The Museum is open around the clock - twenty-four hours a day - and
can be moved easily to other locations: they will be seeing it in
cities all over Crimea. Soon it will transfer its anti-imperialist
crusade to the city of heroes -- Kerch, Ukraine.
translated by Jerome Raymond Kraus (2007)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The death of Pol Pot
By Peter Symonds and Martin McLaughlin
18 April 1998
The death of former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot on April 15 in the
Thai-
Cambodian border area brings to an end one of the most chilling and
bloody chapters of the twentieth century. During Pol Pot's three and
a
half years of rule over Cambodia, from 1975 to 1978, the Khmer Rouge
killed as many as two million people through mass executions,
starvation and slave labor.
The genocide in Cambodia was the outcome of a complex historical
development in which the pernicious ideological influence of
Stalinism
came together with the military bloodbath carried out by American
imperialism against the people of Indochina. Little of this history
can be gleaned from the commentaries in the corporate-controlled
media, which used the occasion to rehash old anticommunist myths and
whitewash the US role in the Cambodian tragedy.
The political activity of Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) began in post-World
War
II France, which ruled Cambodia as part of its Indochina colony. The
son of a relatively well-off peasant family, he received a government
scholarship in 1949 to study in Paris, where he gravitated with a
number of his friends to the Stalinist circles around the French
Communist Party.
He returned to Phnom Penh in 1953, worked as a teacher and was
involved in the establishment of the embryonic Communist Party in
Cambodia. Faced with police repression under the government of Prince
Norodom Sihanouk, the country's first post-colonial ruler, the party
leaders fled the capital in 1963, seeking sanctuary in the remote
rural areas of the country.
It was here that Pol Pot, heavily influenced by the Chinese
Stalinists, devised the political perspective of what was to become
the Khmer Rouge--an extreme form of Mao Zedong's eclectic mixture of
Stalinism, nationalism and peasant radicalism.
It is characteristic of the ideological falsification produced by
Stalinism that the label of Marxism has been placed upon social and
political phenomena which have nothing whatsoever to do with the
ideas
of Marx, Engels or Lenin.
Classical Marxism envisioned a new society, democratically controlled
by the working class, which would take as its point of departure the
highest level of the productive forces developed under capitalism.
This presupposed the widest possible scope for the development of
industry, science and technique, all of them bound up with the growth
of cities, the urban proletariat and the cultural life of the
population as a whole.
No more grotesque distortion can be imagined than to categorize as
"Marxist" the ideas of Pol Pot and his cohorts. As early as the 1950s
Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's closest aide, had outlined a perspective of
creating a primitive peasant-based society in which money, culture
and
all other facets of urban life would be abolished.
Like the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge appealed not to the working class
but to the peasantry, and especially to the most backward and
impoverished layers of the peasantry, who became the backbone of its
guerrilla army units. In its parochialism and nationalism, its anti-
intellectualism, and its hostility to urban life, the Khmer Rouge
reflected the outlook of this social stratum.
The American role
The responsibility for the rising popularity of the Khmer Rouge
rested
with the successive US administrations which prosecuted a protracted
and brutal imperialist war throughout Indochina in the 1960s and
1970s, destroying millions of lives and devastating industry and
agriculture.
Prince Sihanouk had sought to maintain his country's distance from
the
war in Vietnam through a policy of neutralism. He refused to act
against Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh trail, which
ran
through eastern Cambodia. At the same time he kept silent about US
military actions against Vietnamese forces operating on Cambodian
soil.
The Nixon administration finally broke with Sihanouk in April 1970,
backing a CIA-directed military coup that installed General Lon Nol
and sent Sihanouk into exile in Beijing. One month later Nixon
announced the invasion of Cambodia by 20,000 US and Vietnamese
troops.
Cambodia was transformed into a battlefield with Lon Nol's troops
fighting the Khmer Rouge and American and Saigon troops in combat
with
NLF and regular North Vietnamese forces. The country's population
experienced the most intensive saturation bombing in world history.
During nearly five years of bombing raids, from 1969 to 1973, some
532,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia, more than three times
the tonnage dropped on Japan in all of World War II.
Under the impact of the bombing and widening warfare, Cambodian
society disintegrated. By 1974, 95 percent of Cambodia's national
income came from US aid, much of it siphoned off into the pockets of
corrupt military officers. Two million out of the seven million
people
were homeless. Annual rice production had plunged from 3.8 million
tons to only 655,000 tons. Much of Cambodia's farmland remains even
today untillable because of bomb craters and unexploded ordnance.
The major responsibility for this social catastrophe lay with Nixon
and his principal foreign policy aide, National Security Adviser
Henry
Kissinger. The bombing of Cambodia was carried out as a secret and
illegal operation--secret, at least, from the American people, if not
from the victims in Cambodia, or the thousands of American military
personnel who participated in the attacks, or the American reporters
in Vietnam who knew of the bombing raids but kept silent.
There was no constitutional authority for the Nixon administration to
wage war against a peaceful and neutral country. The White House did
not even notify Congress of the bombing until April 1973, after the
last American ground troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam and the
war had been all but lost.
The Khmer Rouge in power
It was only after the American intervention in Cambodia that Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge began to win wider support. From a badly
organized
and poorly equipped force of less than 5,000 men in 1970, it grew to
be an army of around 70,000 when, in April 1975, the Lon Nol
dictatorship finally collapsed.
The shattering, not only of urban economic life but even of
traditional peasant agriculture, led the Khmer Rouge to rely more
heavily on the most culturally and socially primitive layers of the
peasantry, those living an essentially tribal existence, with little
or no connection to the money economy and urban life. In this they
resemble such contemporary groups as the Sendero Luminoso in Peru and
the JVP in Sri Lanka, originating as movements led by radicalized
middle class intellectuals, which have evolved in the direction of
fascism.
Certainly once it came to power at the head of a peasant-based army,
the Khmer Rouge leaders carried out policies of a profoundly anti-
working-class character, which had far more in common with fascism
than socialism. Faced with an economy in shambles, unable and
unwilling to organize the feeding of the cities, they ordered the
evacuation of Pnomh Penh and other towns. The entire urban
population--
workers, intellectuals, civil servants, small shopkeepers and
others--
were driven into the countryside to labor under very harsh conditions
on irrigation schemes and other grandiose projects aimed at elevating
agricultural production to unattainable levels.
Hundreds of thousands died of overwork, hunger and disease. Many more
were executed in the course of the pogroms launched against all forms
of culture and intellectual life. Others died in the vicious
factional
disputes that erupted within the Khmer Rouge as its economic plans
fell to pieces, and its grip on political power became more tenuous.
The nationalist xenophobia of the Cambodian leadership led to a
series
of clashes with Vietnam, as Khmer Rouge forces staged bloody attacks
on ethnic Vietnamese living along the Cambodia-Vietnam border. After
nearly a year of such raids, the Hanoi government ordered a full-
scale
Vietnamese invasion in December 1978, which rapidly overwhelmed the
Khmer Rouge forces and led to the installation of the current ruler
in
Phnom Penh, Prime Minister Hun Sen.
A mass murderer under US protection
If the Khmer Rouge did not disintegrate completely after this
debacle,
it was largely because it had the support of powerful backers. China
launched a military assault on Vietnam in retaliation for its
invasion
of Cambodia, with the tacit backing of the Carter administration in
the United States.
Deng Xiaoping visited Washington in January 1979, in the midst of the
Vietnamese offensive in Cambodia, which both China and the US
condemned. Less than two months later, nearly a million Chinese
troops
carried out attacks along Vietnam's northern border, where they
suffered a bloody repulse.
The most critical role was played by the United States government,
which saw Pol Pot as a useful Cold War ally, since he was at war with
Vietnam, which was allied to the Soviet Union. With US backing, China
supplied the Khmer Rouge with military equipment and the right-wing
military regime in Thailand, a US client state, allowed free flow of
supplies to Pol Pot's guerrillas in their base camps along the Thai-
Cambodian border.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, later
admitted, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The question
was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We
could never support him, but China could."
Equally important was the diplomatic support from the United States
and other imperialist powers, which recognized the Khmer Rouge as the
legitimate government of Cambodia and backed the seating of Pol Pot's
representative as the Cambodian delegate to the United Nations for
more than a decade. Throughout the 1980s the Reagan administration
blocked international efforts to characterize the events of 1975-78
in
Cambodia as genocide or to hold the Khmer Rouge leadership
responsible
for mass murder, since it would undercut the American alliance with
Pol Pot.
The final collapse of the Khmer Rouge and its disintegration into
rival factions was bound up with the imposition of a new imperialist
settlement on Cambodia under the UN's auspices in 1993. The aim of
this UN intervention was to open up the country as a source of cheap
labor for international investors. Since then, key Khmer Rouge
groupings have formally surrendered and been integrated into the army
and official political life in Cambodia. The remnants are fighting a
rearguard action on the Thai-Cambodian border.
Only last year, after an internal split in the remnants of the Khmer
Rouge led to Pol Pot's arrest, did the United States withdraw its
objections to his trial as a war criminal. But there was no mistaking
the sigh of relief in Washington after the Khmer Rouge leader died,
apparently of natural causes.
As one Cambodia scholar, Stephen Heder, a lecturer at London's School
of oriental and African Studies, told the New York Times: "There's
certainly a major American responsibility for this whole situation. A
war-crimes trial could have posed a problem for the US because it
could have raised questions about US bombing from 1969 through 1973."
With its typical indifference to history, the American media carried
interviews with Henry Kissinger after the death of Pol Pot in which
there was no mention of the US contribution to the tragedy of
Cambodia. The principal architect of Nixon's Cambodia policy
pontificated about Pol Pot's bloody crimes and discussed the
prospects
of a war crimes trial for the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. If the
truth be told, Kissinger would deserve his own place in the dock at
any such tribunal.
Fate of American Indians awaits the Ukraine
Cyril Vyshinsky
22.08.2007 20:39
A museum has been opened in the Crimea dedicated to the victims of
American Wars. Only American Wars. Ukrainian Communists have set out
to prove, in one collapsable tent, that NATO is not the place for the
Ukraine. Neither in political nor in military alliance. The tent
will be moved from one Crimean city to the next to make sure everyone
gets the message.
"The United States of America has conducted more than 350 wars,
aggressions, attacks, and other forms of interference in the affairs
of other states. The methods of genocide varied - systematic
killings, poisoning water in reservoirs, destruction of food supplies,
mass migrations, mass destruction etc. ..." says the museum guide.
So now, among the many tourist sights and museums in the Crimea we
have one more- a museum dedictated to the memory of the victims of
American imperialism. It is situated in downtown Simferopol, in the
best traditions of Ukrainian protest architecture - in a protest tent.
The walls of tent are hung with anti-NATO posters, and stalls there
tell of the genocide of the indigenous population of America -
Indians, about the slave trade and the racial oppression of the 19th
century, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about Vietnam, burnt
and razed to the ground by American napalm.
The creators of this unique museum? - Ukrainian Communists. "This is
totally unique, as you know, a political response to American
critiques of Communism: when Bush in Washington created a museum of
Soviet occupation, and Yushchenko chimed in approvingly, I said that
we would respond with exactly the same kind of museum. Today, we have
given our response ", say Leonid Grach, chairman of the Crimean branch
of the Communist Party of the Ukraine.
Yushchenko's idea for the creation in the Ukraine of a museum of
Soviet occupation, which he got from a visit to a museum on the same
theme in Tbilisi, is called by Communists "blasphemy" and a systematic
distortion of history. However, the main threat to the future of the
Ukraine is American aggression. His country survived their "Orange
Revolution" - in which Crimean Communists played a role. Now they
fight attempts to draw the Ukraine into NATO. The museum tent is
packed with exhibits, and there are plenty of visitors there. Among
the visitors - the leader of Russia's Communists Gennadi Zyuganov, who
was on a vacation to the Crimea. "One must always remember that
attempts by the Americans to build a 'military hegemony of peace' in
the world is, in reality, a direct threat to world peace: to Russia
and to the Ukraine, to a United Europe, and to China. Practically all
countries on the planet came out against the Iraq war. We are
obliged to pursue a policy so to ensure that American and NATO
troops are neither in Russia nor in the Ukraine nor in Belorussia ",
he stated.
The Museum is open around the clock - twenty-four hours a day - and
can be moved easily to other locations: they will be seeing it in
cities all over Crimea. Soon it will transfer its anti-imperialist
crusade to the city of heroes -- Kerch, Ukraine.
translated by Jerome Raymond Kraus (2007)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The death of Pol Pot
By Peter Symonds and Martin McLaughlin
18 April 1998
The death of former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot on April 15 in the
Thai-
Cambodian border area brings to an end one of the most chilling and
bloody chapters of the twentieth century. During Pol Pot's three and
a
half years of rule over Cambodia, from 1975 to 1978, the Khmer Rouge
killed as many as two million people through mass executions,
starvation and slave labor.
The genocide in Cambodia was the outcome of a complex historical
development in which the pernicious ideological influence of
Stalinism
came together with the military bloodbath carried out by American
imperialism against the people of Indochina. Little of this history
can be gleaned from the commentaries in the corporate-controlled
media, which used the occasion to rehash old anticommunist myths and
whitewash the US role in the Cambodian tragedy.
The political activity of Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) began in post-World
War
II France, which ruled Cambodia as part of its Indochina colony. The
son of a relatively well-off peasant family, he received a government
scholarship in 1949 to study in Paris, where he gravitated with a
number of his friends to the Stalinist circles around the French
Communist Party.
He returned to Phnom Penh in 1953, worked as a teacher and was
involved in the establishment of the embryonic Communist Party in
Cambodia. Faced with police repression under the government of Prince
Norodom Sihanouk, the country's first post-colonial ruler, the party
leaders fled the capital in 1963, seeking sanctuary in the remote
rural areas of the country.
It was here that Pol Pot, heavily influenced by the Chinese
Stalinists, devised the political perspective of what was to become
the Khmer Rouge--an extreme form of Mao Zedong's eclectic mixture of
Stalinism, nationalism and peasant radicalism.
It is characteristic of the ideological falsification produced by
Stalinism that the label of Marxism has been placed upon social and
political phenomena which have nothing whatsoever to do with the
ideas
of Marx, Engels or Lenin.
Classical Marxism envisioned a new society, democratically controlled
by the working class, which would take as its point of departure the
highest level of the productive forces developed under capitalism.
This presupposed the widest possible scope for the development of
industry, science and technique, all of them bound up with the growth
of cities, the urban proletariat and the cultural life of the
population as a whole.
No more grotesque distortion can be imagined than to categorize as
"Marxist" the ideas of Pol Pot and his cohorts. As early as the 1950s
Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's closest aide, had outlined a perspective of
creating a primitive peasant-based society in which money, culture
and
all other facets of urban life would be abolished.
Like the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge appealed not to the working class
but to the peasantry, and especially to the most backward and
impoverished layers of the peasantry, who became the backbone of its
guerrilla army units. In its parochialism and nationalism, its anti-
intellectualism, and its hostility to urban life, the Khmer Rouge
reflected the outlook of this social stratum.
The American role
The responsibility for the rising popularity of the Khmer Rouge
rested
with the successive US administrations which prosecuted a protracted
and brutal imperialist war throughout Indochina in the 1960s and
1970s, destroying millions of lives and devastating industry and
agriculture.
Prince Sihanouk had sought to maintain his country's distance from
the
war in Vietnam through a policy of neutralism. He refused to act
against Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh trail, which
ran
through eastern Cambodia. At the same time he kept silent about US
military actions against Vietnamese forces operating on Cambodian
soil.
The Nixon administration finally broke with Sihanouk in April 1970,
backing a CIA-directed military coup that installed General Lon Nol
and sent Sihanouk into exile in Beijing. One month later Nixon
announced the invasion of Cambodia by 20,000 US and Vietnamese
troops.
Cambodia was transformed into a battlefield with Lon Nol's troops
fighting the Khmer Rouge and American and Saigon troops in combat
with
NLF and regular North Vietnamese forces. The country's population
experienced the most intensive saturation bombing in world history.
During nearly five years of bombing raids, from 1969 to 1973, some
532,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia, more than three times
the tonnage dropped on Japan in all of World War II.
Under the impact of the bombing and widening warfare, Cambodian
society disintegrated. By 1974, 95 percent of Cambodia's national
income came from US aid, much of it siphoned off into the pockets of
corrupt military officers. Two million out of the seven million
people
were homeless. Annual rice production had plunged from 3.8 million
tons to only 655,000 tons. Much of Cambodia's farmland remains even
today untillable because of bomb craters and unexploded ordnance.
The major responsibility for this social catastrophe lay with Nixon
and his principal foreign policy aide, National Security Adviser
Henry
Kissinger. The bombing of Cambodia was carried out as a secret and
illegal operation--secret, at least, from the American people, if not
from the victims in Cambodia, or the thousands of American military
personnel who participated in the attacks, or the American reporters
in Vietnam who knew of the bombing raids but kept silent.
There was no constitutional authority for the Nixon administration to
wage war against a peaceful and neutral country. The White House did
not even notify Congress of the bombing until April 1973, after the
last American ground troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam and the
war had been all but lost.
The Khmer Rouge in power
It was only after the American intervention in Cambodia that Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge began to win wider support. From a badly
organized
and poorly equipped force of less than 5,000 men in 1970, it grew to
be an army of around 70,000 when, in April 1975, the Lon Nol
dictatorship finally collapsed.
The shattering, not only of urban economic life but even of
traditional peasant agriculture, led the Khmer Rouge to rely more
heavily on the most culturally and socially primitive layers of the
peasantry, those living an essentially tribal existence, with little
or no connection to the money economy and urban life. In this they
resemble such contemporary groups as the Sendero Luminoso in Peru and
the JVP in Sri Lanka, originating as movements led by radicalized
middle class intellectuals, which have evolved in the direction of
fascism.
Certainly once it came to power at the head of a peasant-based army,
the Khmer Rouge leaders carried out policies of a profoundly anti-
working-class character, which had far more in common with fascism
than socialism. Faced with an economy in shambles, unable and
unwilling to organize the feeding of the cities, they ordered the
evacuation of Pnomh Penh and other towns. The entire urban
population--
workers, intellectuals, civil servants, small shopkeepers and
others--
were driven into the countryside to labor under very harsh conditions
on irrigation schemes and other grandiose projects aimed at elevating
agricultural production to unattainable levels.
Hundreds of thousands died of overwork, hunger and disease. Many more
were executed in the course of the pogroms launched against all forms
of culture and intellectual life. Others died in the vicious
factional
disputes that erupted within the Khmer Rouge as its economic plans
fell to pieces, and its grip on political power became more tenuous.
The nationalist xenophobia of the Cambodian leadership led to a
series
of clashes with Vietnam, as Khmer Rouge forces staged bloody attacks
on ethnic Vietnamese living along the Cambodia-Vietnam border. After
nearly a year of such raids, the Hanoi government ordered a full-
scale
Vietnamese invasion in December 1978, which rapidly overwhelmed the
Khmer Rouge forces and led to the installation of the current ruler
in
Phnom Penh, Prime Minister Hun Sen.
A mass murderer under US protection
If the Khmer Rouge did not disintegrate completely after this
debacle,
it was largely because it had the support of powerful backers. China
launched a military assault on Vietnam in retaliation for its
invasion
of Cambodia, with the tacit backing of the Carter administration in
the United States.
Deng Xiaoping visited Washington in January 1979, in the midst of the
Vietnamese offensive in Cambodia, which both China and the US
condemned. Less than two months later, nearly a million Chinese
troops
carried out attacks along Vietnam's northern border, where they
suffered a bloody repulse.
The most critical role was played by the United States government,
which saw Pol Pot as a useful Cold War ally, since he was at war with
Vietnam, which was allied to the Soviet Union. With US backing, China
supplied the Khmer Rouge with military equipment and the right-wing
military regime in Thailand, a US client state, allowed free flow of
supplies to Pol Pot's guerrillas in their base camps along the Thai-
Cambodian border.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, later
admitted, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. The question
was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We
could never support him, but China could."
Equally important was the diplomatic support from the United States
and other imperialist powers, which recognized the Khmer Rouge as the
legitimate government of Cambodia and backed the seating of Pol Pot's
representative as the Cambodian delegate to the United Nations for
more than a decade. Throughout the 1980s the Reagan administration
blocked international efforts to characterize the events of 1975-78
in
Cambodia as genocide or to hold the Khmer Rouge leadership
responsible
for mass murder, since it would undercut the American alliance with
Pol Pot.
The final collapse of the Khmer Rouge and its disintegration into
rival factions was bound up with the imposition of a new imperialist
settlement on Cambodia under the UN's auspices in 1993. The aim of
this UN intervention was to open up the country as a source of cheap
labor for international investors. Since then, key Khmer Rouge
groupings have formally surrendered and been integrated into the army
and official political life in Cambodia. The remnants are fighting a
rearguard action on the Thai-Cambodian border.
Only last year, after an internal split in the remnants of the Khmer
Rouge led to Pol Pot's arrest, did the United States withdraw its
objections to his trial as a war criminal. But there was no mistaking
the sigh of relief in Washington after the Khmer Rouge leader died,
apparently of natural causes.
As one Cambodia scholar, Stephen Heder, a lecturer at London's School
of oriental and African Studies, told the New York Times: "There's
certainly a major American responsibility for this whole situation. A
war-crimes trial could have posed a problem for the US because it
could have raised questions about US bombing from 1969 through 1973."
With its typical indifference to history, the American media carried
interviews with Henry Kissinger after the death of Pol Pot in which
there was no mention of the US contribution to the tragedy of
Cambodia. The principal architect of Nixon's Cambodia policy
pontificated about Pol Pot's bloody crimes and discussed the
prospects
of a war crimes trial for the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. If the
truth be told, Kissinger would deserve his own place in the dock at
any such tribunal.