How many people will the peace movement kill this time?
Don Surber
Last time out, Cindy Sheehan and her ilk led to the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Michael Dickey put the carnage since 1975 by the North Vietnamese government and its proxies at 7.5 million people including up to 3 million in the killing fields of Cambodia.
The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam also cleared the way for the Hanoi-backed Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces to win a 5-year civil war against a military coup.
Peace Pledge Union also put the Cambodian carnage at 3 million and noted:
“Under Pol Pot’s leadership, and within days of overthrowing the government, the Khmer Rouge embarked on an organised mission: they ruthlessly imposed an extremist programme to reconstruct Cambodia (now under its Khmer name Kampuchea) on the communist model of Mao’s China. The population must, they believed, be made to work as labourers in one huge federation of collective farms. Anyone in opposition - and all intellectuals and educated people were assumed to be - must be eliminated, together with all un-communist aspects of traditional Cambodian society.“So, at short notice and under threat of death, the inhabitants of towns and cities were forced to leave them. The ill, disabled, old and very young were driven out as well, regardless of their physical condition: no-one was spared the exodus. People who refused to leave were killed; so were those who didn’t leave fast enough, and those who wouldn’t obey orders. ...
Back in the United States in the 1970s, the hippie movement gave way to disco and cocaine. Jane Fonda received a 2nd Oscar for “Coming Home,” about a disabled Vietnam veteran coping with, well, coming home. In her 2005 autobiography, she wrote:
“The suggestion is that because of my actions against the war my career had been destroyed … But the truth is that my career, far from being destroyed after the war, flourished with a vigor it had not previously enjoyed.”
I point this out not to demonize her, but to show that those who professed to care so much about the Vietnamese during the war could not give a twit about them once they got what they wanted: The defeat of the American military.
So what will the price be this time and who will pay it? ...
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