Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (13824)	8/24/2007 5:42:09 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224706

The conversion of the author of the Killing Fields Power Line looks at how William Shawcross came to see his original blaming of the US for the Killing fields was wrong and how he now sees the US as the one agent for good in the area. He now supports the mission in Iraq and believes that our departure would create a new killing field. ... Shawcross's second thoughts about American foreign policy in southeast Asia were briefly intimated in his Times column, which applied lessons learned to the challenge before us in Iraq. In his Boston Globe column "Why we fought," Jeff Jacoby quoted from a 1994 Times column by Shawcross: Those of us who opposed the American war in Indochina should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking back on my own coverage for The Sunday Times...,I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future. But after the Communist victory came the refugees to Thailand and the floods of boat people desperately seeking to escape the Cambodian killing fields and the Vietnamese gulags. Their eloquent testimony should have put paid to all illusions. As Jeff commented in a message to us last year: "Whatever else he may believe or advocate, Shawcross seems clearly to be a man of intellectual integrity. That makes his thoughts on the current crisis all the more valuable." ... There is much more and it is worth reading in full. In short he obliterates the John Kerry school of blaming America for the atrocities of the communists. Kerry's willingness to claim that there was no bloodbath following our departure shows his lack of intellectual honesty. Shawcross has no such affliction. POSTED BY MERV prairiepundit.blogspot.com