Forget the Swiss then , and Tibet stands alone as the country with the longest record of peace standing of any country in the last 1000 years.
As for "Bogus History" Nihil, the Japonese Imperial leaders were identified mainly with Samarai and an ancient belief system called Shinto.
The Zen Buddhist had nothing
whatsoever to do with any of the history violence you describe.
As for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge , and one of the worst cases of genocide in centuries , they were not Buddhist, Nihil . And you know that they were not. They were believers in an extremely pernicious form of ideological Stalinism, and were communist . And it is a story that should never be forgotten , and every Christian should know.
To call them Buddhist is no more true than to have called them Christians.
Though the simple average person of Cambodia is/was a Buddhist.
Like the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge appealed not to the working class but to the peasantry, and especially to the most backward and impoverished layers of the peasantry, who became the backbone of its guerrilla army units. In its parochialism and nationalism, its anti-intellectualism, and its hostility to urban life, the Khmer Rouge reflected the outlook of this social stratum.
The responsibility for the rising popularity of the Khmer Rouge rested with the successive US administrations which prosecuted a protracted and brutal imperialist war throughout Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s, destroying millions of lives and devastating industry and agriculture.
Prince Sihanouk had sought to maintain his country's distance from the war in Vietnam through a policy of neutralism. He refused to act against Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh trail, which ran through eastern Cambodia. At the same time he kept silent about US military actions against Vietnamese forces operating on Cambodian soil.
The Nixon administration finally broke with Sihanouk in April 1970, backing a CIA-directed military coup that installed General Lon Nol and sent Sihanouk into exile in Beijing. One month later Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia by 20,000 US and Vietnamese troops.
Cambodia was transformed into a battlefield with Lon Nol's troops fighting the Khmer Rouge and American and Saigon troops in combat with NLF and regular North Vietnamese forces. The country's population experienced the most intensive saturation bombing in world history. During nearly five years of bombing raids, from 1969 to 1973, some 532,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia, more than three times the tonnage dropped on Japan in all of World War II.
Under the impact of the bombing and widening warfare, Cambodian society disintegrated. By 1974, 95 percent of Cambodia's national income came from US aid, much of it siphoned off into the pockets of corrupt military officers. Two million out of the seven million people were homeless. Annual rice production had plunged from 3.8 million tons to only 655,000 tons. Much of Cambodia's farmland remains even today untillable because of bomb craters and unexploded ordnance.
The major responsibility for this social catastrophe lay with Nixon and his principal foreign policy aide, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. The bombing of Cambodia was carried out as a secret and illegal operation--secret, at least, from the American people, if not from the victims in Cambodia, or the thousands of American military personnel who participated in the attacks, or the American reporters in Vietnam who knew of the bombing raids but kept silent.
There was no constitutional authority for the Nixon administration to wage war against a peaceful and neutral country. The White House did not even notify Congress of the bombing until April 1973, after the last American ground troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam and the war had been all but lost.
It was only after the American intervention in Cambodia that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began to win wider support. From a badly organized and poorly equipped force of less than 5,000 men in 1970, it grew to be an army of around 70,000 when, in April 1975, the Lon Nol dictatorship finally collapsed.
The most critical role was played by the United States government, which saw Pol Pot as a useful Cold War ally, since he was at war with Vietnam, which was allied to the Soviet Union. With US backing, China supplied the Khmer Rouge with military equipment and the right-wing military regime in Thailand, a US client state, allowed free flow of supplies to Pol Pot's guerrillas in their base camps along the Thai-Cambodian border.
And Vietnam is another issue too long to discuss here. But a war that was prosecuted , and resulted in th deaths of over 2 million of the Vietnamese and 60,000 of our own men. A war as it turns out needn't have ever been fought.
The Vietnamese didn't turn out to be the Demons we were told they would be. And actually it was the Vietnamese , after we left that invaded Cambodia , and finally drove Pol Pot back into weakness....while for years we let him continue and actually supplied him.
Sri Lanka is another issue ....but granted one that is heart breaking, and is a great sadness to witness. |
