Half a century after United States B-52 bombers dropped more than 500,000 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia's countryside Washington wants the country to repay a $US500 million ($662 million) war debt.
The demand has prompted expressions of indignation and outrage from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh.
Over 200 nights in 1973 alone, 257,456 tons of explosives fell in secret carpet-bombing sweeps – half as many as were dropped on Japan during the Second World War.
The pilots flew at such great heights they were incapable of discriminating between a Cambodian village and their targets, North Vietnamese supply lines – nicknamed the "Ho Chi Minh Trail."
The bombs were of such massive tonnage they blew out eardrums of anyone standing within a 1-kilometre radius.
War correspondent James Pringle was two kilometres away from a B-52 strike near Cambodia's border.
"It felt like the world was coming to an end," he recalls.
According to one genocide researcher, up to 500,000 Cambodians were killed, many of them children.
The bombings drove hundreds of thousands of ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, an ultra-Marxist organisation which seized power in 1975 and over the next four years presided over the deaths of more than almost two million people through starvation disease and execution.
The debt started out as a US$274 million loan mostly for food supplies to the then US-backed Lon Nol government but has almost doubled over the years as Cambodia refused to enter into a re-payment program.
William Heidt, the US's ambassador in Phnom Penh, said Cambodia's failure to pay back the debt puts it in league with Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe.
"To me, Cambodia does not look like a country that should be in arrears…buildings coming up all over the city, foreign investment coming in, government revenue is rapidly rising," Mr Heidt was quoted as saying by the Cambodia Daily.
"I'm saying it is in Cambodia's interest not to look to the past, but to look at how to solve this because it's important to Cambodia's future," he said, adding that the US has never seriously considered cancelling the debt.
Cambodia's strongman prime minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander who defected to Vietnam, hit back, saying "The US created problems in my country and is demanding money from me."
They dropped bombs on our heads and then ask up to repay. When we do not repay, they tell the IMF (International Monetary Fund) not to lend us money," he told an international conference in early March.
"We should raise our voices to talk about the issue of the country that has invaded other (countries) and has killed children."
Mr Pringle, a former Reuters bureau chief in Ho Chi Minh City, said no-one could call him a supporter of Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia with an iron-fist for three decades.
But he said on this matter he is "absolutely correct."
"Cambodia does not owe a brass farthing to the US for help in destroying its people, its wild animals, its rice fields and forest cover," he wrote in the Cambodia Daily.
American Elizabeth Becker, one of the few correspondents who witnessed the Khmer Rouge's genocide, has also written that the US "owes Cambodia more in war debts that can be repaid in cash."
Mr Hun Sen pointed out that craters still dot the Cambodian countryside and villagers are still unearthing bombs, forcing mass evacuations until they can be deactivated.
"There are a lot of grenades and bombs left. That's why so often Cambodian children are killed, because they don't know that they are unexploded ordnance," he said.
"And who did it? It's America's bombs and grenades."
A diplomat posted in Phnom Penh between 1971 and 1974 told Fairfax Media the food the US supplied Cambodia came from excess food stocks.
"I remember well that shipments of maize were made," he said.
"Cambodians do not eat maize so it was fed to the animals."
He pointed out that the US refused to normalise relations with Vietnam until it accepted to take on the US debt of the former southern regime.
Just arrived: my review of three books concerning democracy in world history. The point I make is that all three touch on interesting facets of democratic history, but none of them are successful at looking at the big picture. But truth be told two of the three aren't intended to deal with the big picture. At least, not the big, big picture.
Journal of World History, 27:4, pp.692-8
Temma Kaplan, Democracy: A world history. Oxford University Press. 2015.
Armin Mattes, Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: The transatlantic origins of American democracy and nationhood. University of Virginia Press. 2015.
Christopher Meckstroth, The Struggle for Democracy:Paradoxes of Progress and the Politics of Change. Oxford University Press. 2015.
Dana Kramer-Rolls says on Facebook: Dr. Ben Carson got into some trouble by saying that black slaves were immigrants, too. But I heard poetry and wondered what Maya Angelou would have made of it. I'm not her, but here is my take.They came as immigrants, Stolen by invaders, sold by their kings.They came as immigrants, Chained in the holds of ships, the living and the dead.They came as immigrants, Sold, beaten, families torn apart.They came as immigrants,The religion of their mothers mocked and forbidden.They came as immigrants,Now the chains were broken, but they were still lynched, shot.And then it began again.They come as immigrants.Fleeing invaders, fleeing the bombs.They come as immigrants, Washed up on shores, the living and the dead.They come as immigrants,Their religion mocked, families torn apart.They come as immigrants,They think they are safe, but still they are beaten and shot.Will it ever end?
Today's Globe and Mail has an article by two Canadian professors, Aisha Ahmad and Minelle Mahtani, who say that the "Trump immigration ban ushers in an age of academic darkness. If you are an academic yourself and your research has an important international dimension (meaning that you work with and communicate with scholars in many countries) some of the stories they tell are enough to send cold shivers up and down your spine. Some stories:
For Canadian academics, attending academic conferences and events in the United States is an important part of our work. As Canadian Muslim scholars, however, this political and legal upheaval south of our border has forced both of us to pull out of our professional conferences. Our withdrawal was not intended as a political protest. The truth is, we were both very excited about attending our conferences. Our flights and hotels were booked... Aisha Ahmad, an international security specialist ...was to receive a distinguished prize for her scholarship on the economic origins of modern jihadi groups. Her scholarship, which involves tracking conflict processes in some of roughest war zones on the planet, won the award for best security article of the year. Her scholarship speaks directly to the exact security crises that these faulty immigration bans have falsely claimed to solve. For Minelle Mahtani, an Iranian-Canadian, had arranged a roundtable with other scholars at the Critical Mixed Race Studies conference in Los Angeles to speak about what it means to be mixed race in a Trump era. Her research would have provided essential context into the pressing problems of xenophobia, racism, and anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic violence that have worsened since the U.S. election. Neither of us wanted to withdraw. But we felt the situation was out of control. Consider that several ordinary Canadian Muslims, who were not from banned countries, have already been improperly detained and denied entrance by zealous U.S. border agents who clearly didn’t understand the parameters of the original immigration order. ... As immigration chaos spirals in the United States and these bizarre episodes escalate, there are serious, long-term consequences. Border officials have an enormous amount of discretion in detaining travellers and denying entrance, and denial of entrance taints a travel record. So, one dysfunctional interaction with an aggressive border official can actually impede a traveller’s freedom around the world for years. [I]it is impossible for any of us to properly calculate the risks of travelling. For academics who are principal investigators in large global projects, this is a very serious cost calculation. One unlucky meeting with a careless border guard can jeopardize the ability of a researcher to complete their fieldwork, and thus risks their commitments made to both funding agencies and global research teams. As targeted racialized academics, we knew we were being forced to accept loss and indignity. In response to our withdrawal, several of our colleagues have started lobbying for future conferences to be held in more neutral locations. Until then, as we reflect on our own exclusion, we cannot help but think of our colleagues overseas who are explicitly barred from participation, and those like Mr. Rousso, who may not be willing to subject themselves to future humiliations. This is the greatest loss of all.
These stories are paralled by others from post-Brexit Britain, where immigration officials have in many cases notified "foreign" (EU-citizen) scholars that they will be deported, for the most arbitrary reasons. The authorities seem to no concept of how great a soft-power resource these people are. One wonders how many such purges (Nestorians chased from Syria to farther Asia?) may have taken placed in the later years of the Roman Empire. It seems to me that both profit and duty should motivate advanced countries to invite and support as many scholars as they can manage, if not more. Image:The library of Alexandria burns.
Brexit threatens the welfare of 3 million EU citizens resident in Britain, and the government refuses to protect them from disruption. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian:
The Lords debate exposed the prime minister’s contradictory and deceitful arguments against protecting EU citizens living here. If, on this most popular and painfully human question, she will give no inch, that’s a terrible augury for how she intends to conduct these negotiations, opening with a war cry to all 27 countries: we hold your people hostage. The Mail says: “It’s the bloody-minded Brussels bureaucracy, not her, that is bargaining with family lives and happiness.” Because, of course, she is “pushing hard for a deal that upholds the rights of all expats”. This is just a “remoaner” wrecking tactic, “a naked bid to sabotage Brexit by creating difficulties for Mrs May”. As the Guardian reports heart-rending cases of threats to longtime EU residents with British spouses and children born here, Helena Kennedy gave the shocking statistic that a third of all their applications for residency are being turned down by the Home Office. Whoever knew that if they hadn’t had private health insurance in the past they could be cast out for all time? Yet one Brexit peer after another rose to swear there was never any question of expelling them. Ministers, including the foreign secretary, have assured the TV cameras it will never happen. But if so, why not accept this amendment with good grace when it returns to the Commons? No, they say: these 3 million people must be used as hostages – though representatives of the 1.2 million Britons in the EU say they want this amendment passed, as an act of goodwill. You can’t bargain unless you sincerely mean to carry out the threat. So which is it? Mass expulsions would be unthinkable – May as the new Idi Amin? Besides, for a depleted police, border force and administrators, it would be a crippling near-impossibility. Are we really to say goodbye to 55,000 doctors and nurses, a million care workers and prized university students while devastating industries from agriculture to car-washing, hi-tech IT to finance, catering and tourism? Forget tourism entirely – we would become pariahs.
So which is it: they can definitely stay – in which case just accept that amendment and tell the world – or rattle a sabre you may then be forced to use, whatever the self-harm?
Americans have made quite a cult of the Founding Fathers, the political and military leaders who led the Atlantic colonies to throw off British rule – a remarkable achievement that often is used to support the similar idea of American exceptionalism: that America is a country unlike any other, thanks in large part to the wise choices made by the equally exceptional Fathers.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that at least some of the Fathers were pretty amazing. George Washington, for instance, had exactly the aristocratic character that was needed to lead a new republic in the 18thcentury. But his ability to charm and impress his contemporaries is now entirely mysterious to us. If he showed up in modern America he would have no hope of a political career. It's hard to imagine what kind of role he could find in public affairs. Aristocratic, eccentric rich guy, perhaps a shadowy investor in cutting edge tech firms?
An amazing FF that we can partially understand is Thomas Jefferson. He gets credit for a wide selection of contributions to the American character and American institutions over more than 50 years of public life. We appreciate and praise his constructive efforts, the importance of which is pretty obvious (freedom of religion); what we wonder is how he addressed all of those issues.
Kevin Gutzman may not have an answer to this question, but he gives a pretty good analysis of what he considers Jefferson's key achievements. This is not a full biography – there are good biographies and they are massive –it's a portrait. Gutzman compares Jefferson to a pointillist painter who created a political philosophy by dealing with one issue at a time. Gutzman himself has a pointillist approach in describing Jefferson, and it works for him.
Gutzman identifies five areas that Jefferson dealt with in the course of his career: Federalism (his opposition to centralized power), Freedom of Conscience (his opposition to established churches), Colonization (what might be better called Deportation, meaning the elimination of racial conflict by eliminating the slaves), Assimilation (of the Native population) and "Mr. Jefferson's University" (the most important piece in Jefferson's desire for public education). Put those 5 issues together and you find yourself treading surprisingly familiar paths through a political landscape that maybe has changed less in the past 200+ years than we might first think. I am particularly thinking of the issue of "federalism," meaning not centralism (as it does in Canada) but quite the opposite, which Jefferson supported because he believed in the legitimacy of the separate states, with their differing institutions and "values" as people say today.
One issue that Gutzman says little about is Jefferson's relationship with his slave mistress, Sally Hemmings. It's a tough question for an alumnus of Jefferson's own university, but I do have to wonder if she would have been deported, if colonization of slaves and ex-slaves had ever taken place. Is this so ridiculous a question? I think this is just one way that the contradictions of the Founding Fathers' position can be expressed.
So: a book of reasonable length, well-written, with the power to inspire serious contemplation about both Jefferson's time and America's present.
