http://www.nate-thayer.com/in-defense-o ... kissinger/


It is past time that someone slapped collective Cambodian political ‘leaders’ upside the head and said: “Get it together, you knuckleheads. This is how the world works. You get the government you deserve. If you don’t like it, do something about it, because no foreign savior is going to intervene and save your butts this time. We don’t care anymore.” Cambodia is of no strategic, political or economic consequence to any other country in the world, including its neighbors.



Cambodian leaders and their apparatchiks are a rapacious and corrupt and incompetent mafia of thugs who subordinate the common good for personal gain. The only time when Cambodia has operated as a functional country in the last umpteen centuries has been when it was controlled by their more properly organized neighbors or larger foreign powers. And every time Cambodia has been controlled by Cambodians, they have spun the country into horrific suffering and deprivation.




Lon Nol was entirely propped up by the Americans, but there is no evidence the Americans engineered the coup. Lon Nol came to power because Cambodia is a country where all the top elite leaders are plotting in the wings to overthrow the leader du jour. There is no such thing as a strategic friend or loyalist in Cambodia. They are short-term tactical allies who are destined to be crushed when the time is right.



The tide of history was unstoppable and two weeks before North Vietnam captured Saigon, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. There were about 7 million people in the country then. Three years, eight months, and twenty days later, Pol Pot’s nauseating experiment with deluded grandeur ended. An estimated 1.8 million people died during that period—not from the policy or actions of Henry “The War Criminal” Kissinger, but precisely as a direct result of the state policies of the very Cambodian Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. Every one of them died from the failed social, economic, and political policies of Cambodia’s rulers.



The country was saved from a Kafkaesque implosion by—and here is the rub—the Vietnamese, who were and are Cambodia’s most historical, hated, and intractable enemies.


There have been numerous governments in Cambodia in the last century. For a half a century, Cambodian governments and leaders have not been overthrown by foreign powers. They have been deposed by the inevitable implosion of their internal Machiavellian client patron relationships that is the superstructure of maintaining power in modern Cambodian political culture.



Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Pol Pot, the Rannariddh/HE government which emerged from UN organized elections, and HE’s dictatorship which seized power in a coup overthrowing it, have all been organized through tenuous, complex, and ever-changing coalitions of disparate internal power bases.



No Cambodian government has had any loyalty to a foreign power or ideology.



They have been and remain driven by the self-delusion that they are a unique political culture who have superior innate abilities which trump having to integrate into, or play by the rules of, how the rest of the rest of the recognized nations and properly organized world operate.

The power elite, in truth, have all failed in attempts to organize what they think is a more-clever-than-anyone-else-grouping of short-term tactical external and internal allies who are invariably permanent strategic enemies.



The result of the collapse of each of these governments is, of course, no surprise—except to Cambodians who are near incapable of taking responsibility for and reflecting upon the failures of their political culture.

The current crop of failed leaders who, like former Khmer Rouge military officer HE, were also Khmer Rouge loyalists to Pol Pot, include most of the current government running Cambodia, including the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Defence Minister, the Interior Minister, the Agricultural Minister, the Culture Minister and so on, as well as thousands of generals in the military, security services, the provincial governors, district leaders, sub-district leaders, and village heads. They were all Khmer Rouge.

Rutiger wrote:It was a fucked up time and there is plenty of blame to go around. So sorry the burden of all that horrendous decision-making had to fall on so many poor and innocent Cambodians who were caught up in twisted geopolitics.

juansweetpotato wrote:
There was a post elsewhere that was commented on where an educated Khmer was saying it was better to have the Khmer Rouge because they were Cambodian than to have the Vietnamese here. I must admit that I struggle to comprehend such comments.

John Bingham wrote:

Nate Thayer wrote:The current crop of failed leaders who, like former Khmer Rouge military officer HE, were also Khmer Rouge loyalists to Pol Pot, include most of the current government running Cambodia, including the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Defence Minister, the Interior Minister, the Agricultural Minister, the Culture Minister and so on, as well as thousands of generals in the military, security services, the provincial governors, district leaders, sub-district leaders, and village heads. They were all Khmer Rouge.

That's bullshit and he knows it. The Prime Minister was never a "Pol Pot loyalist" (it's well known that he defected and went to Vietnam in 1977 and spent most of the next 2 decades fighting Pol Pot's forces), nor was the Foreign Minister Hor Namnong - he was ambassador to Cuba and was incarcerated in Boeng Trabek prison for most of DK. Defense Minister Tea Banh rebelled against the center very early on and spent the DK years in Thailand. Agriculture Minister Ouk Rabun was a university professor in Phnom Penh before the takeover and was never Khmer Rouge at all.
It's ironic that Thayer likes to throw around the accusation that people were "Khmer Rouge"when he has always been one of the organizations greatest defenders.