This whole conflict started with the defeat of Japan in 1945, and is luckily over with today.

But the goofball squad is of course coming around to promote their various wares, in the light of how brutal this regime was.

I would also consider it brutal to be bombing the shit out of a country with napalm, and spraying it with agent orange so bad, that dusins of innocent people including countless of kids, still die every day in this region, from leftover shrapnel or chemically induced disease.

juansweetpotato wrote:

Samouth wrote:

prahkeitouj wrote:Many people almost forget 17 April but they remember 7 January .

because we don't really talk about it. What did you see on those stupid TV channels on 17 April. Plus, we have never learned about it at school.

I heard they introduced a book into the schools about 5 or 6 years ago? Do most kids not read it or is the book really terrible?

I don't have a TV, what were they showing? or do you mean they weren't showing anything?

I always presumed that it was still too early to talk about it for most people, but then I heard that the Germans started talking about WW2 and the extermination camps after only after about 20-25 years iirc. Do you think the CPP don't want people to talk about it? Or is it maybe that the war didn't really end until the mid 90's ?

I think the recent curriculum, they kinda let people to learn a little of Khmer Rouge. i am not really sure how much they allow people to know about khmer Rouge.

However during my time at school, i didn't learn anything about Khmer Rouge and Vietnam War. I didn't realise that we were the victim of Vietnam war too and was heavily bombarded by American. Wait, i didn't hate American for that reason. I don't think people to have hold accountable for what their country did. I have a lot of American friends.

About 17 April, we don't see anything about it on TV, unlike 7 January, you should see all those old videos and celebrations about it. I actually was born on 7 January and i am not proud of it while many people think it is the best day.

franzjaeger wrote:This whole conflict started with the defeat of Japan in 1945, and is luckily over with today.

But the goofball squad is of course coming around to promote their various wares, in the light of how brutal this regime was.

I would also consider it brutal to be bombing the shit out of a country with napalm, and spraying it with agent orange so bad, that dusins of innocent people including countless of kids, still die every day in this region, from leftover shrapnel or chemically induced disease.

Lets add firebombing (Dresdden) and Someone actually dropped a nuke? no, they dropped 2. to the list as well.

Now they got ED 109 flying in the sky over your head.

Smash the machines! before they killus all. Time for a nice rural OOP relationship.

Samouth wrote:

juansweetpotato wrote:

Samouth wrote:

prahkeitouj wrote:Many people almost forget 17 April but they remember 7 January .

because we don't really talk about it. What did you see on those stupid TV channels on 17 April. Plus, we have never learned about it at school.

I heard they introduced a book into the schools about 5 or 6 years ago? Do most kids not read it or is the book really terrible?

I don't have a TV, what were they showing? or do you mean they weren't showing anything?

I always presumed that it was still too early to talk about it for most people, but then I heard that the Germans started talking about WW2 and the extermination camps after only after about 20-25 years iirc. Do you think the CPP don't want people to talk about it? Or is it maybe that the war didn't really end until the mid 90's ?

I think the recent curriculum, they kinda let people to learn a little of Khmer Rouge. i am not really sure how much they allow people to know about khmer Rouge.

However during my time at school, i didn't learn anything about Khmer Rouge and Vietnam War. I didn't realise that we were the victim of Vietnam war too and was heavily bombarded by American. Wait, i didn't hate American for that reason. I don't think people to have hold accountable for what their country did. I have a lot of American friends.

About 17 April, we don't see anything about it on TV, unlike 7 January, you should see all those old videos and celebrations about it. I actually was born on 7 January and i am not proud of it while many people think it is the best day.

Wait, i didn't hate American for that reason. I don't think people to have hold accountable for what their country did. I have a lot of American friends.

Yes, any reasonable person could see it was the government that people hate and not all Americans. Now put reasonable and American together. The patriotism shown in the US reminds me of small, uneducated, third world countries.

About 17 April, we don't see anything about it on TV, unlike 7 January, you should see all those old videos and celebrations about it. I actually was born on 7 January and i am not proud of it while many people think it is the best day

Yes, but thank god the Viets invaded eh? Otherwise there may have not been too many people left to liberate. Perhaps the Viets saved Cambodia?

juansweetpotato wrote:Now put reasonable and American together.

phuketrichard wrote:

About 17 April, we don't see anything about it on TV, unlike 7 January, you should see all those old videos and celebrations about it. I actually was born on 7 January and i am not proud of it while many people think it is the best day


Yes, but thank god the Viets invaded eh? Otherwise there may have not been too many people left to liberate. Perhaps the Viets saved Cambodia?

Quite easy to see where the Cambodians ( HE) loyalty lies,
April 17th, they want it forgotten,
Jan 7th they celebrate, then but at the same time many hate the Youns and blame them for everything bad.

The government is made-up of so many KR/ex KR/pro KR that it is not surprising they don't want anything but the briefest of descriptions around. Definitely no mentioning of any contemporary names linked to the KR. In part it is to do with stability of course, but mostly just greed and tyranny. Al Capone comes to mind.

John Bingham wrote:

ot mien kampf wrote:

juansweetpotato wrote:

ot mien kampf wrote:

Bitte_Kein_Lexus wrote: The vast majority were not "trained soldiers", but teenagers with little to lose. Still dangerous though...

Child soldiers are more dangerous than anything else. Sociopathic, emotionally undeveloped, indoctrinated and with absolutely nothing to lose in the way of money or families. These are the kind of people entering Europe from ISIS controlled areas as "refugees".

On the US side you had young adults far from home, relatively well paid and restrained by RoE. That last one is most important. I can't imagine these kids were chewed out about how to engage the enemy, they probably went on suicidal missions and slaughtered any surviving opposition at a whim. Lon Nol's army likely resembled the US model.

Lon Nol's army likely resembled the US model.

Excuse me? Isn't that when wide spread liver eating started again? I have read they were incredibly brutal.

In the later years when all was lost and they knew that they were all likely to die, yes.

The problem is that leftist academia felt that it needed to demonize the US-supported side to justify the socialist experiment (which failed dismally) and you get them searching for justification for the KR's brutality by scouring for brutality committed by Lon Nol's side. From what I read, in the late 60s Lon Nol's army was a copy of the South Vietnamese one. The KR was obviously like the VC. One had the trappings of a real army, the other was pure insurgency.

At some point around 1971-73, Lon Nol would have realized that the US was on the way out and the KR, who were at that stage supported by the VC and NVA, were going to be in a significantly better position, so the generals must have presumed that shifting to more insurgent-styled tactics would be better. Loses on the battlefield and the knowledge that they were all dead once the KR took control would have created incredible brutality.

This history-rewriting is being borne out in Syria too. People scour history for crimes by Assad to justify the fact that the left wing has supported brutal rebel groups (including Jihadists) with arms.

That's just complete bullshit which bears no relation to any actual reports. You complain about re-writing history while doing the exact same thing yourself.
Lon Nol was put in charge of the brutal repression of the 1967 Samlaut uprising. Ten's of thousands were massacred and truckloads of heads were sent back to the capital. Even Sihanouk, who was commander in chief at the time, acknowledged this. After the March 1970 ouster of Sihanouk, one of Lon Nol's first actions was to attack Vietnamese communities around Cambodia. I'm sure we've all seen the footage of bodies with organs missing being tossed into trucks and floating down the river. Why were the organs missing? Because they were eaten. In 1970.
Lon Nol's Republican army was nothing like the US Army. You obviously know nothing about the South Vietnamese Army either if you think you can compare them.
The Khmer Republic Army were decimated early on due to bad leadership, went on to conscript increasingly young people, gave them little training or equipment, had thousands of ghost soldiers on the payrolls so couldn't meet any expectations on the battlefield, sold equipment to the enemy, etc. They never used insurgency-style tactics either, that's just more nonsense you made up.

No, you're just spewing the exact leftist bullshit I was talking about. "Tens of thousands massacred" was a leftist meme to defend the KR coming to power. The "heads in trucks" story comes from a single unsourced rumor in the 1979 Dr. Osbourne book Before Kampuchea: Preludes to Tragedy. Later books are less fantastical about the numbers and gore. In fact, most of the wild numbers and stories come solely from Osbourne.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=vg ... ng&f=false

Page 166-167, once the KR had been proven to be a failure, the death toll from the Samlaut uprising was revised to around 100. And then Sihanouk announced a program of government aid and resettlement about the time it subsided. Of course in the 70s they were repeating the 10,000 number because academia loved the KR.

Anyway, you're simply falling for the knuckle-dragging interpretation that "teh ebil right wing caused this" when the truth was Battambang had structural issues with landlordism and stagnant rural productivity that were conducive for an uprising and the rebels moved to violence first by killing a number of government officials. From Kiernan's account, the government massacres and aerial attacks on rebel camps only began months into the uprising.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=M8 ... ng&f=false

Read those stats on page 87-88, the problem with Cambodian peasantry was a fall in rural productivity coupled with a rising population. Sihanouk's Buddhist socialism failed, only to be replaced by the greater failure of communism.