Username Taken wrote:Yeah, welll that's all very well, but, WTF has that got to do with the KR. (Not sure that KR communism and Cuban are comparable anyway).

Glad someone got at least one of the points I was making, even if he appears not to have noticed.

The reason why the US didn't mind supporting the PDK was not only that they were anti-Vietnam/ Russia, but also because they were another bunch of fascists. Anybody read the Bush Family History?

Was trying to find the book mentioned above to post. No luck so far.
But here's a link to a Guardian article on granpappy Bush and Hitler. You should really check the book out for a fuller picture.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/s ... ndworldwar

JB showed us a tragic picture of youngsters - the sons of the poor -
about to be sent to the front line
to fight for the Khmer Republic at a time when the sons of the rich were playing
tennis and swimming at the Cercle Sportif

Gunnar Bergstrom talks about his visit in support of the Khmer Rouge with today's Cambodian youth:

Former Khmer Rouge supporter gives talk to students
Tue, 13 September 2016
Andrew Nachemson

Gunnar Bergstrom, the Swede who was once one of the Khmer Rouge’s most ardent supporters, told a gathering of high-school students in Phnom Penh yesterday how his infamous 1978 visit to Pol Pot’s Cambodia had been a mistake.

Bergstrom, who met Pol Pot and returned to Sweden praising the Democratic Kampuchea government, admitted to having misgivings that he didn’t voice when he saw the abandoned city of Phnom Penh.

“We wanted to believe in the Khmer Rouge,” he said, confessing that he was blinded by “Maoist glasses” and a desire for a successful communist nation to exist in the world.

“It was a propaganda tour,” Bergstrom recalled of his two-week-long visit as a representative of the communist Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association.

“They must have taken us to the one cooperative where people actually had food,” he said, describing seeing healthy-looking workers.

Just months after Bergstrom returned home, Pol Pot’s regime collapsed, and the scale of the cruelties people had suffered compelled the Swede to reverse his previous support – to the dismay of his communist colleagues.

He has spent many of the years since 1979 atoning for his error; that culminated in his 2008 return to Cambodia, when he apologised for his previous support, and visited sites of mass killings and torture...

http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/f ... k-students

Gunnar Bergstrom, the Swede who was once one of the Khmer Rouge’s most ardent supporters,
now occupies a unique* ecological niche.

Like the reformed God-scoffing inebriate of Mark Twain's boyhood in Missouri, brought out at
every revivalist meeting to tell a tent congregation of open-mouthed rural simpletons how low he had sunk
before he repented and flung himself into the Bosom of Jesus, Bergstrom (we may reasonably guess
that he has at least a basic Swedish state pension) can now spend many happy days telling Cambodians
about his ideological folly before he became a repentant sinner.

There were other Swedes in the photo but we have yet to hear from them