Two of Many Liberal Lies Exposed
Two very different stories surfaced this week that add to the hundreds of examples we have of liberalism’s failures and lies. The first involves southeast Asia. Those who lived through the Vietnam War and its aftermath remember how often the left-wing politicos and supporters constantly ridiculed the idea of a domino effect (mass murders throughout southeast Asia) if we left Vietnam abruptly – and have spent the last 32 years denying the killing fields of Cambodia, Laos and Thailand – as well as in Vietnam itself. It is the current generation of these same liars who are calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and castigating General Petraeus before he even gives his latest scheduled report.
Killing Fields' survivor Dith Pran dies
By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer Sun Mar 30,2008
NEW YORK - Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday. He was 65.
Dith died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago.
Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.
Schanberg helped Dith's family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times.
It was Dith himself who coined the term "killing fields" for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.
The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million people.
The second story is closer to home and exposes liberalism’s oft-repeated lies about the wonderful progress of the socialist government of Cuba, whose attempts to collectivize Cuban agriculture have gone the same route as in Soviet Russia – disaster and starvation for the people involved.
Communist Cuban solution: private farms
By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ and WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press Writers, April 5, 2008 (Excerpt)
UIRA DE MELENA, Cuba (AP) -- "In a country where almost everyone works for the communist state, dairy farmer Jesus Diaz is his own boss. He likes it that way - and so does the government.
Living on a plot of land just big enough to graze four dairy cows, Diaz produces enough milk to sell about four quarts a day to the state.
This is independent production on a tiny scale, but it has proved so efficient that Cuba has decided on a major expansion of its program to distribute underused and fallow farmland to private farmers and cooperatives.
"It's a way for the land to end up in the hands of those who want to produce. I see it as a very good thing," said Diaz, 45. He received his land and cows from the state in 1996, and now hopes to get access to more property.
The government is preparing for a "massive distribution of land," Orlando Lugo, president of Cuba's national farming association, said last week. Private farmers have begun receiving land for the cash crops of coffee and tobacco, and will soon be able to lease state land for other crops.
The idea is to revolutionize farming, one tiny plot at a time.
While attention has focused on President Raul Castro's crowd-pleasing moves to allow any Cuban who can afford it to buy a cell phone or stay in a luxury hotel, farmland distribution has been less noticed and is potentially much more important for easing chronic food shortages.
The bet is that independent farmers will do better on their own than toiling for state-run agricultural enterprises, which suffer from red tape, bad planning and lack of funding."
So far, the looney ideas of the left have not led to mass starvation and widespread violence here in the USA; that’s because there are still enough conservatives in the population who understand the lessons of history and the faith in God that led to the structure put in place by our Founding Fathers.
Labels: Liberals and Conservatives
posted by RussWilcox @ 6:37 AM
9 comments
9 Comments:
Russ, you know better. The domino effect did not refer to "mass murders throughout southeast Asia."
Britanica: "the domino theory in U.S. foreign policy after World War II stated that the “fall” of a noncommunist state to communism would precipitate the fall of noncommunist governments in neighbouring states. The theory was first proposed by President Harry S. Truman to justify sending military aid to Greece and Turkey in the 1940s, but it became popular in the 1950s when President Dwight D. Eisenhower viewed the [Indochinese]insurgency as part of the worldwide Communist campaign and at first propounded the theory that if Indochina went Communist other Southeast Asian countries would also fall “like dominoes.” Eisenhower, however, was reluctant to send U.S. troops to Asian jungles, to arrogate war-making powers to the executive, or to sully the anti-imperialist reputation of the United..."
It was a Liberal, JFK, who thrust the U.S. into that particular hornets' nest. We failed, but I haven't noticed that SE Asia has become a Communist Bloc.
Ike was right is so many ways, and JFK was foolish. And Bush II will be judged the same in respect to foreign adventuring and posturing.
Dave
Dave, Just what do you think happened in Cambodia? Just who do you think Pol Pot was, and have you forgotten the boat people? Do you not also remember Pathet Lao of Laos? Both countries went communist with the slaughter of millions taking place right after the fall of Saigon.
Splitting hairs is no way to make an argument, although it is a common technique used by liberals to obfuscate an issue. The domino effect happened as predicted, and chaos in the middle east will follow a similar precipitous withdrawal from Iraq.
Russ,
To discuss the meaning of terms used in political discourse is not to split hairs, but to establish the basis of a reasoned discussion. See any Philo. 101 curriculum guide.
To return to your argument, your reliance on "post hoc, ergo prompter hoc" is too simplistic.
Analogy: If I were to plunge a sharpened stick into your gut, you would bleed, but only seeping out around the stick. If I pull the stick out, would you ascribe the resulting massive hemmorrage to the withdrawal of the stick? Ridiculous!
"By 1962, Pol Pot had become leader of the Cambodian Communist Party and was forced to flee into the jungle to escape the wrath of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia. In the jungle, Pol Pot formed an armed resistance movement that became known as the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) and waged a guerrilla war against Sihanouk's government.
In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was ousted, not by Pol Pot, but due to a U.S.-backed right-wing military coup. An embittered Sihanouk retaliated by joining with Pol Pot, his former enemy, in opposing Cambodia's new military government. That same year, the U.S. invaded Cambodia to expel the North Vietnamese from their border encampments, but instead drove them deeper into Cambodia where they allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge.
From 1969 until 1973, the U.S. intermittently bombed North Vietnamese sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia, killing up to 150,000 Cambodian peasants. As a result, peasants fled the countryside by the hundreds of thousands and settled in Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh.
All of these events resulted in economic and military destabilization in Cambodia and a surge of popular support for Pol Pot.
By 1975, the U.S. had withdrawn its troops from Vietnam. Cambodia's government, plagued by corruption and incompetence, also lost its American military support. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, consisting of teenage peasant guerrillas, marched into Phnom Penh and on April 17 effectively seized control of Cambodia." BTW, Pol Pot was overthrown by "Communist" Vietnam in 1979.
Again, as in Indo-China and the Middle East, CIA meddling and U.S. adventurism has much to answer for.
And to be called a liberal obfuscater by a right-wing disciple of Rush is astounding! Keep it civil.
Dave
Dave, I see you can look up some history on the internet. Nothing you have said counters the fact that Cambodia and Laos went communist after Vietnam fell resulting in the slaughter of millions of people, and that the warnings of what would happen in that area were ridiculed by the left-wing in this country. I do not need to look up this history; I lived it and remember it well.
Russ,
"Dave, I see you can look up some history on the internet." is a bit smug and condescending. What does it mean? That I am young? Stupid? You know that I was born during WWII, did my military service during the Vietnam era, and am fairly well educated. I, too, lived through those times and remember them well. Should I have leafed through my library, instead of the 'net, to quote the history to you?
History does not consist merely of a chain of "first that, then this"
events; it is a tangled web. You know this; you have degrees from Northeastern and Harvard and a great deal of experience.
Do you attribute the prolonged agony of Africa to the end of European Colonialism? If the French, Belgians, Italians, British etc. maintained rule would all be calm?
If the French had retained control over what you and I learned in school as "French Indo-China," would SE Asia have been spared the blood-letting? If the U.S. had not installed the Shah of Iran, would the area be calm?
I do admire your blog-I enjoy getting the views from the right, but your friends Hannity, Coulter and Limbaugh are so shrill and condescending, and you provided something more reasonable. But less and less. I'll have to re-read William F. Buckley columns for reasonable discourse. BTW, how did the late WFB regard the Iraq debacle?
Dave
Dave, What you regard as a debacle I see as a noble attempt to save western civization from a religious-based fascism that has been trying to conquer the civilized world. That the war has not gone perfectly to plan is true of all wars. If I seem less reasonable as time goes by, it is a reaction to death threats, obscenities and outright treason from those on the far left and to the unmistakeable evidence that many of them hate their country - most recently evidenced by the Rv. Wright.
As far as southeast Asia is concerned, things are never simple, but events can not be denied because they do not conform to a liberal's world view.
Russ,
Not even you believe that rubbish about "a noble attempt...." You yourself have said that this war was about oil, about ensuring the health of a carbon-based economy.
The Muslims have good reason to be suspicious of Westerners bearing Chalices and swords who have for five hundred years tortured and slaughtered the savages in every continent who bow to other gods.
You remember the song from years ago: The whole world is festering with unhappy souls/ The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles/ Italians hate Yugoslavs/ South Africans hate the Dutch/ And I don't like anybody very much."
And so it goes. Anyone can make the argument that they are fighting to preserve their superior way of life. REF: See Dr. Seuss's "The Star-Bellied Sneeches."
The Prince of Verona said it best: "A plague on both your houses."
You can't say with one mouth that you fight for economic reasons and with the other that it is a matter of culture. And of this many Liberals AND Conservatives are guilty. And to quote the good Prince once more, for this "All are punished."
And if the war-mongerers really believed their own rhetoric about "saving western civilization," they would invest their own money and grandchildren in the fight, and not leave the battle to other people's children and their grandchildren's wallets.
Dave
I do believe it is a noble attempt, and also a matter of our own defense and self-preservation.
Of course it is also about assuring long term access to the life blood of our economy and the basis for all of the improvements in man's welfare - oil! Now, does that make you feel any better, Dave?
Does your disagreement and inability to understand make it right to subvert the policies of a twice elected president? Who elected Valerie Plame?
As a (hopefully) final comment, it is interesting from this dialogue just how far a liberal will go to split hairs, obfuscate and twist facts in order to deny historical events of communist takeovers and mass murders that followed the greatest disgrace in the hstory of this country's politics - the betrayal of the South Vietnamese and of the Kissinger mission by the Democrat Congress of 1973-74 when it abruptly shut off all funding.
The reason for this denial. of course, is that we are faced with a similar situation in Iraq, where another abrupt defunding of the military effort will lead to similar disasters.
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