springer is an idiot

he has a freeper on the line saying that millions died when we pulled out of Nam because of pol pot

wasn't pol pot Cambodian???

Not saying that caller wasn't wrong; but to write it off as "well that's combodia not vietnam" is just as stupid.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

stopped pol pot and the Khmer Rouge?

Viet Cong were South Vietnamise. Who is enemy

In reality, Viet Nam was about their independence from foreign control, NOT only the west, but also China

Our bombings in Cambodia (which helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power) were done as part of our stupid strategy to win the war in vietnam.

we can thank Nixon for that

how does that make Springer an idiot? Did he agree with the freeper? Springer is not as well informed as some AAR hosts, I agree.

he knows Vietnam history. I don't know why he puts this Freeper guy Ed on all the time, but Springer can hold his own on this issue (like all who lived it). I did too, but was pretty darned youhg, so I still defer to others who know more details that were but a blur to me.

misinformation at him, and he doesn't refute it. The guy who sometimes subs for him doesn't stand for any of that nonsense

Perhaps I should NOT have used the word idiot, but I get frustrated when these freepers call in, and throw all kind of crap, and it doesn't get refuted

I am changing subjects, but that is what essentially happened with the swift puke vets. Kerry did not stand up to defend himself, and the issue just hung there.

If he didn't refute it, shame on him. I didn't listen to him today, but many times he does a pretty good job. Sometimes he doesn't.

and I wish Jerry was a little tougher on him

Anything that happens in the world can be "our" fault for not stopping it, or zigging when we should have zagged. We could have prevented the holocaust, or this, or that.

"allowed" the holocaust to happen because we did not get into WWII sooner.

It is that "policeman of the world" argument, that the RW argues is "wrong" but then continually uses to defend staying in needless wars.

We could have stopped a lot of the Holocaust and chose not to. Look up the 1943 Bermuda Conference sometime.

The Bermuda conference, as I know it, involved taking in refugees. However, at that point, I don't beleive that the holocaust, or death camps, were recognized.

But, like I said above, hindisght is 20/20/

that Jews (or anyone else for that matter) would be systematically executed in death camps. I think there was a feeling of "well, we know the Jews are being treated like shit by the Germans, but there are a lot of opressed people around the world, so it's not like theirs is a special case." Of course, we know now that the Jews faced a particularly awful fate back in Germany that was far beyond mere opression.

I don't think we really expected Hitler to do what he did.

Not really. By that point in time it wasn't a matter of expectations. It was already known. This is late 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was in progress. The existance of extermination programs had already been sent through resistance and intel channels and was known in both government and public circles.

The results of the Bermuda Conference were known and it was estimated in the New York Times that it could costs 5 Million Jews their lives.

One of the internal papers at the time expressed a worry that Hitler would switch his "Jewish policy" back from extermination to extrusion and that we'd lose PR points if Hitler offered to send Jewish refugees to the West again and the West again refused to take them. It had happened before and Hitler got lots of propaganda value out of "we offered to send the Jews to England and the US and they didn't want them either".

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Lets agree on a few things. Hitler, and Nazi Germany, were responsible for the holocaust. Not the US, not England.

Also, the fact that a paper suspected or reported that there was an "extermination" does not mean that it was widely known or believed. Look at the modern media. No matter what happens, you can find some source that will say the opposite. There is a lot of information out there. Besides, if it was widely known and believed, the holocaust would have been stopped.

As far as the New York Times estimate, see above. Hitler is responsible for those five million lives. Not the US, or England. We didn't put them in danger, in death camps, or anything else. By your logic, anyone who didn't prevent the holocaust is responsible for it. And yes, predictably, you'll say we did "know" about it, and therefore. we're responsible. I disagree.

No question that Hitler, the Nazi party and complicit Germans were responsible for the Holocaust and not the US or England. There is a vast, vast difference between the levels of responsibility between those who cause mass murder and those who could have done more to stop it. Even mentioning the two in the same breath is flat out wrong.

That said, we DID know a lot more about it than is admitted now. Go back to the sources at the time. The US government knew. We'd been told by solid sources. The reports on mass murders were reported and reported in mainstream mass media.

The Bermuda conference DID happen. The public DID know what was resolved and what action was and wasn't taken. Most ignored it but that doesn't mean they didn't know.

We could have done more and should have.

people knew, but they didn't KNOW.

kinda like the way we all know the oil companies were in on the iraq war planning or much of the other nefarious stuff the bushies have done. we basically know what they're doing, but we can't PROVE it.

just doing some basic math about how many square feet they had to put jews in and it should have been obvious that they were killing them. the mystery was in were they merely putting them in horrific circumstances and letting them die of "natural" causes or were they killing them directly (zyclon-b, ovens, etc.).

honestly, the horrific discovery was that they were killing them directly rather than merely putting them in circumstances sure to kill them.

your statement "honestly, the horrific discovery was that they were killing them directly rather than merely putting them in circumstances sure to kill them," is exactly what I meant when I wrote "no one believed the Jews would be systematically executed in death camps." I wasn't saying no one believed people were dying in concentration camps or that being sent to a "work camp" was a de facto death sentence, but rather that no one truly believed (or wanted to believe) there would be camps whose sole purpose was to exterminate prisoners as efficiently as possible. Many people of course knew about the concentration camps as far as their being "work and re-education camps," but the idea that they would just kill their prisoners outright was out of the question.

Even many devout Nazis were shocked when they learned of the details of the Final Solution, if for no other reason than it seemed incredibly stupid to kill all these people off without at least getting some free slave labor out of them. It's like if two people had a box of oranges and one squeezed every last drop of juice out of each one before tossing it in the garbage, while the other just threw the whole box in the trash and said, "Done!" The first thing that would come to the other's mind would be "what kind of idiot wastes all that juice?"

So, a whole swath of the population on both sides were shocked at the systematic killings, whether from not believing someone (let alone a whole government) could be so evil or from not believing that Hitler's hatred of the Jews went so deep that he'd hobble the German war machine if need be in order to wipe them from the Earth.

to be made that Cambodia's genocide might have been delayed/temporarily mitigated by HEAVY presence of troops in Cambodia. But, we were already loosing to the endless supply of Communist reenforcements in Vietnam, so, at what cost? I'm not debating that, but rather bringing up the fact that we (even as the supposed last remaining superpower) can not police the world. Now, don't misunderstand. I'm not a Pat Buchanan isolationist and I think it is quite plausible to argue we were wrong to delay getting into WWII prior to Pearl Harbor. At the same time, using this argument so selectively so as to argue our continued presence in Iraq (while ignoring the active genocide in Darfur and other repressive regimes) is disingenuous IMO.

We can't police everywhere, but we CAN establish policy that openly undermines repressive regimes. Most importantly, we can set an EXAMPLE compatible with democracy and respect of human rights. This is our biggest failure to the world, IMO

I'm a bit iffy on the exact history, but let me see if I can lay out what the connection would be.

In 1969, Nixon expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia with the secret bombing of VC camps in Cambodia.

The following year and I think due to the instability caused by the bombing campaigns, Prince Sihanouk was deposed by the PM, General Lon Nol.

Sihanouk set up a government-in-exile in China, providing support to the Khmer Rouge and the VC in Camodia.

Lon Nol proceeded to try to wipe out the Khmer Rouge with US help but the US was more focused on Vietnam, so he was basically alone/weakly supported. The Khmer, with help from the North Vietnamese forces, defeated him instead and his government collapsed, replaced by the Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot.

So, I think the idea is that if we had stayed longer in Vietnam or increased troop presence, we could have wiped out the Khmer before they took power. Or something like that. (Of course, this is ignoring that we couldn't even handle the VC, let alone having to then deal with Khmer forces in Cambodia as well....)

and we sent 3 Battalions or so of Marines to "pacify" Pol Pot, catch him and stop the killing.

I was in one of those battalions. It was pathetic. We could no more stop that than change the course of rivers.

Imagine drunk teenage boys armed with machine guns and absolute power, sitting on piles of dead bodies fashioned into road blocks everywhere. If they liked you you passed.

If not.

You died.

Stop that. Come one, what's your plan? Even if we knew what was coming, which I am not sure we did, it was hopeless.

Asking the impossible of our Marines and troops when the writing is on the wall for any who care to look up.

and a good review of the history, the specifics of whch, I'd forgotten.

I heard that call, and Jerry wasn't endorsing what the caller said.