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Kissinger gets a lot of flak for the bombings in Cambodia and Vietnam, but... I mean, it was awful when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, and it was also awfu
by warbaker 3y ago
Kissinger gets a lot of flak for the bombings in Cambodia and Vietnam, but... I mean, it was awful when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, and it was also awful when the Viet Cong took over Vietnam.
The Khmer Rouge murdered 25% of the country! 2 million people!! https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/cambodian-genocide https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/cambodian-genocide
The Viet Cong were also horrible (excepting, of course, their intervention in Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge!) and devastated Vietnam, and the CPV rules it with an iron fist to this day.
Communism really is and was extremely, horribly bad.
In South Korea, the seemingly insane plan of the US (install a pro-Western dictator as a bulwark against Communism, and eventually transition to a liberal democracy) eventually worked. The Korean War pre-dates Kissinger's rise to power, but his overall principle of oppose-Communism-no-matter-what seems kind of reasonable, even in hindsight.
Anti-communist dictatorships and militias were often terrible, too, but it is really hard to be worse than Communists.
- skrebbel 3y agoIt worked in South Korea and it failed everywhere else. Everything this man did was extremely short-sighted and had cause widespread mistrust of America in the majority of the world.
- glompers 3y agoThat's readily disproven by example. https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/opinion/editorial/guest-column-as-heinz-and-henry-kissinger-brought-germany-redemption/article_18fcecf0-90b4-11ee-9b38-e38662896e74.html https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/opinion/editori...
- grimmx 3y agoHis own biographer credited Kissinger with killing 3 million people, those numbers make the Khmer Rouge blush, but your bias against communism makes you see Kissinger as some sort of hero? That's morally fascinating.
- tgv 3y agoI don't think there's any evidence that Allende was worse than the regime that took over. You might argue Allende wasn't a communist (which would be true), but the coup was of Kissinger's making. Cuba was communist, and was absolutely not the hell-hole that Cambodia was or North-Korea is.
- warbaker 3y agoCan't say I'm surprised that this is my most downvoted post! HN, classy as ever.
- acdha 3y agoBinary thinking will do that - you’re making a very sweeping claim without acknowledging that not everything fits cleanly into it. Even if we accept for the sake of argument that, say, the North Vietnamese government was terror on earth justifying any possible action against it, Allende wasn’t a Communist and nor were East Timor, Bangladesh, Cambodia, etc. so this is effectively arguing that you let someone be shot because you thought they might grow up to be a murderer.