Word: cambodias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Everyone in Cambodia, Schanberg wrote, "looked ahead with hopeful relief to the collapse of the city [Phnom Penh], for they felt that when the Communists came and the war finally ended, at least the suffering would largely be over. All of us were wrong. That view of the future of Cambodia--as a possibly flexible place even under Communism, where changes would not be extreme and ordinary folk would be left alone--turned out to be a myth...
Schanberg was rightfully a little contrite, since he had painted a fairly glowing picture of the KhmerRouge as a nationalist, humane group fighting for its country's independence. It all seemed to fit together perfectly--the United States had been destroying Cambodia for five years for little apparent reason other than the support of an unpopular government that was now being over-thrown by one well aware of its national identity and interested in establishing freedom for its people. The stories from American-occupied Phnom Penh were horrible ones, full of corrupt war profiteers, and the Khmer Rouge always seemed...
What was happening in Vietnam and Cambodia meant a lot to us at The Crimson; for us it seemed to be the first good news from Indochina in years. Since late in the 60s we had editorially supported the Khmer Rouge and National Liberation Front in Vietnam, both nationalist groups affiliated with foreign Communist parties, and both of those characteristics--the independence and the socialist egalitarianism--appealed to us. When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, a Crimson editorial said, "The capture of Phnom Penh last week by the Khmer Rouge is a victory for the Cambodian people over...
...PROBLEM in considering Cambodia is the problem of people who in their early years at Harvard were strongly influenced by older people who were part of a dimly-remembered time when students were more radical than they are now. The Crimson's sympathies were passed on to us in a way that seems now more felt than understood; we continued with a legacy tied not only to values but to an emotional climate. And we attempted to express the same sympathies in a time when every situation--Cambodia is only the clearest example--seems infinitely complex, full of competing values...
...With Cambodia it's an old dilemma--do we look at events in Indochina as Americans with liberal values or as the Indochinese must look at them? The Khmer Rouge can certainly no longer meet with our approval on our own terms, because they violate our feeling that anything worthy need not be accomplished through violence and cruelty. On their own terms they continue to be most of what we supported them for--staunch nationalists, socialists, remakers of their own society. It is a conflict that I am not ready to resolve. Although The Crimson has yet to commit itself...