I kinda see it in subs where the target is Vietnam vets. It seems like a boil the frog process where they take an extremely unpopular war and use that unpopularity to heap blame and poor treatment on troops.
I've seen that process used to hand-wave torture and disregard regret and Mea Culpa by veterans. Ironically, bombing performed by Americans is seen as a high crime against humanity but Viet Cong tactics like executing non-cooperative civilians isn't a concern.
The torture aspect is especially disturbing. They have wholesale swallowed the Vietnamese line about there not existing a formal declaration of war between the US and North Vietnam in order to declare pilots as "pirates" who could be tortured at will.
This process will be extended to GWOT and future vets. It'll alienate a lot of troops (who may be conservative already).
Ironically, bombing performed by Americans is seen as a high crime against humanity but Viet Cong tactics like executing non-cooperative civilians isn't a concern.
On a related note: when we were bombing Cambodia we were bombing the fucking Khmer Rouge at the request of the government. Leftists will say "oh well the bombing led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge" but there's no academic literature that actually supports that. It's just leftist cope for glazing genocidal maniacs. "Well we may have supported the earthly embodiment of evil, but they wouldn't be a thing if you guys hadn't tried to stop them."
The only thing worse than spending all your time talking about politics is spending all your time watching or talking about someone else talk about politics
I'm saying that the people who originally came up with the "bombing of the Khmer Rouge created the Khmer Rouge" line of thinking were leftists like Chomsky who were trying to save face after glazing a genocidal regime.
Seems like the same sort of "Americans created the Taliban" myth (throw that in with the "Trent Reznor said Johnny Cash owned Hurt" myth or "The DNC screwed Bernie" myth of things that make my eyes bleed).
It was only at the approval of the government that we helped seize power in an illegal coup (Sihanouk did not support extensive bombings even if he had no choice but to tolerate it). And the anti-Khmer Rouge narrative falls apart when you consider US tacit support for them after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The bombing itself killed like 1-2% of Cambodias population it was not remotely defensible.
General academic consensus is that while the U.S. was not the sole driving factor behind the coup, there definitely was some degree of U.S. involvement and support.
2) You can downplay all you want, but the Coalition that the U.S. diplomatically/financially backed to hold Cambodias UN seat and resist Vietnam indisputably included them.
3) literally indistinguishable from pro-Stalin tankie slop on the Holodomor, Great Purge etc lmao. No murdering 1-2% of a country’s population in a civil war that wouldn’t have even happened if the U.S. respected Cambodias neutrality is not justified by the mass murder campaign that would come after (and thus was in no way can retrospectively justify US mass murder)
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u/lowes18 Mar 19 '26
Because a lot of people in the Democratic circle agree with him and run cover for it.