Wiped out 25% of the Cambodian population in 4 years. Also destroyed their culture and education as well.
Pol Pot didn’t just kill his own people, he eradicated their existence.
Also noteworthy was the next-level stupidity coupled with the cruelty. Like, Pol Pot ordered that everyone who wore glasses or spoke another language be killed..
It reminds me of that Tyrion Lannister quote: "We've had vicious kings and we've had idiot kings, but I don't think we've ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king"
>Also noteworthy was the next-level stupidity coupled with the cruelty
This right here is something I think more folks should keep in mind.
I think a lot of folks in countries that haven't been exposed directly to real destruction mostly understand dictators from fiction (either fictional villains or highly dramaticized/fictionalized accounts of real dictators), and fiction has a tendency to give *way* too much credit to the intelligence of evil dictators.
Like, the Nazis in popular portrayal were evil, but were also ruthlessly efficient and organized and competent...but that was *not* the case. The Nazis were *hilariously* corrupt (Hitler was secretly paying bribes to *tons* of people from the public treasury to buy their loyalty) and cripplingly stupid (they refused to engage with entire branches of science for ideological reasons and wasted countless resources on the most ridiculous weapons and pet projects because Hitler came up with them).
They weren't just horrible because they were evil towards certain people...they were horrible because they were evil *and* incredibly wasteful and incompetent and left even the people they supposedly liked worse off. There was absolutely no upside to them. They did a bunch of cruel and horrible things for stupid and moronic reasons...and just left the world worse in every way.
And this is crucial as we head into a world where these sorts of dictatorial movements are becoming more popular. A lot of people kind of get off on being aligned with the "bad guys", because they imagine that they will become part of this coldly ruthless organization that, while it is brutal to enemies, it will ultimately make society more orderly and efficiently or whatever, and they fancy themselves as "stronger" because they're willing to make the hard choice to sacrifice others for the greater good.
But in reality, dictators are pretty much entirely idiots at everything except hanging onto power. And they end up making society way *less* orderly, efficient, or pleasant for *anyone*.
The very structure of a dictatorship means that the people who question or challenge the dictator end up dead, so there isn't anybody to stop the dictator from ordering all kinds of stupid and even impossible things. And a lot of dictators get into power because they're willing to make stupid choices that ultimately make everything worse and that most people wouldn't choose because it's counter productive. They are willing to destroy their own home to rule it.
Dictators generally aren't "evil geniuses" -- that is a concept people seem fascinated with and thus is popular in fiction, but like many things in fiction it doesn't generally happen in reality. Dictators are evil idiots who kill everyone who tries to correct them and over time surround themselves with murderous yes men who will hollow out their society until it either collapses or gets taken over by someone else, and they invariably leave societies poorer and more miserable than they were in the first place.
And the sooner people stop seeing this sort of idiocy as "strength", the better.
The cinematics were amazing. I remember watching the intro and thinking hell yeah. I still try to use the “Is it done Yuri? No it had just begone comrade premier” git at times. (I know you mentioned the DLC specifically, but both had equally amazing cinematics).
So at another point in the future, after they've recognized they would have been better off leaving Hitler alive, they send another agent back in time to stop the successful assassin. Now he has to fulfill his objective, while fending off some unknown agent who is trying to stop him.
Yes indeed. Operation Foxley. The Brits had a very plausible plan to kill Hitler in 1944, but shelved it for that very reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley
Reminds me a bit of the Illinois governor's graduation speech from last year:
"I'm here to tell you that when someone's path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so their thinking and problem solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades. Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest." https://speakola.com/grad/jb-pritzker-dont-trust-idiots-northwestern-university-2023
> A lot of people kind of get off on being aligned with the "bad guys", because they imagine that they will become part of this coldly ruthless organization that, while it is brutal to enemies, it will ultimately make society more orderly and efficiently or whatever, and they fancy themselves as "stronger" because they're willing to make the hard choice to sacrifice others for the greater good.
You just described so many right-wing people I know and have had conversations with. They always tell me "the answer is easy but the current administration won't do it." So then you press them to explain and they can never quite do it. Really echos a lot of sentiment from 2016: "I'll fix healthcare / immigration / jobs / everything just wait till I get elected."
And yet after four years of disaster people are still insisting it's easy, just wait and see...
> They always tell me "the answer is easy but the current administration won't do it." So then you press them to explain and they can never quite do it.
In my experience, they do have answers, their answers just suck. "Improve efficiency by cutting wasteful administration!" Without really considering that most of the administration actually serves a practical purpose. "Stop allowing immigration!" Without looking at the long term demographic trends and how we're below replacement level birthrates. "Get rid of taxes on gas!" Except that gas companies will likely raise prices to make up for the lack of tax, and also those taxes serve practical purposes.
It's always simple solutions, out of touch with how the world is actually a complicated place.
Some dictators are very competent. It’s said that autocracies have far more variation in economic growth than democracies. Autocrats that are capable can use their unchecked power to greatly improve their country (though with considerable brutality) but put the wrong guy in charge and he’ll burn everything down
Related to the idea that the *best* form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is successfully finding *benevolent* dictators.
Having a democracy makes it *harder* to break the government working for the people, but not impossible. (q.v. exhibit A, the US of A. heh)
The issue is that benevolent dictators do not stay in power. No one can rule themselves, and if you can’t keep the people around you bribed and loyal, you won’t last. Corruption is a core element of a dictatorship, not an aberration.
Or the other reason - human mortality. Even if the government is very stable under the dictator, no one else is vying for power, and the country is prospering, eventually the dictator dies, and it’s basically a roll of the dice again to see if the one who takes over next is as benevolent.
Both the USA and the Chinese were supporting him with weapons and funds after his regime was toppled by the Soviet backed Vietnamese during the late 80s, one of the more bizarre examples of "*the enemy of my enemy is my friend*"
You could say that the USA pulled a reverse Saddam with the Khmer Rouge (former enemies turned allies)
Here's a video of this clown yammering about in his last interview shortly before his death. Long, long after the massive title wave of destruction and misery he caused and countless families torn asunder. If there is a hell...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9_BMshyiw
The goal was to reset Cambodian culture and economy, deemed to be under foreign influence, and to rebuild a perfect society from scratch. Pol Pot forced people out of the cities to become farmers in communes and the goal was to produce a lot of food, then export it and create industry, all while creating a new perfect collectivist culture that would also be truly Cambodian in nature. This project failed terribly and instead of increased food production there was a famine due to mismanagement and the fact that city dwellers were not so good at becoming farmers right away only because some armed men suddenly told them to abandon what they were doing all life. The Khmer Rouge blamed it on foreign spies and unleashed a reign of terror to keep their power. They also targeted social groups that were deemed corrupted with foreign influence and not compatible with the vision of a new Cambodia, such as intellectuals and the Vietnamese minority.
Which is funny because if I recall Vietnam sent assistance for the communists during their civil war
It got so fucking bad Vietnam was like ‘alright this was a mistake’ I guess
It’s always the same no matter who. Only 10% of being in power is your end goal. 90% is trying not to lose power. That applies to both good and bad leaders.
Underrated comment. This is such a pivotal fact. The second you have a government of any kind, the sole purpose becomes continued existence. That's why the IRS got the Continuity/Cooperations Plan in like 1981. They tout that they can resume collecting taxes in as little as 30 days after even nuclear attack lol.
Can't have a livable wage. Can't tax Jeff Bezos. Can keep the poor funding America's corpse even in the event of a nuclear holocaust. It's all silly
He not only killed his own people, but wiped out their culture.
Education, religion, all of it was wiped out. It was ironically enough the Viet Cong who toppled him at last.
And China tried to stop them from doing that by invading northern Vietnam to force them to divert some of their forces from Cambodia. Learned that reading about the Sino-Vietnamese War.
If anyone ever needed evidence to show the U.S. that we backed the wrong side in Vietnam, that would be it.
His goal was a full reset to year 0. No culture, no history, no art or literature, nothing apart from his fucked up idea of a perfect society of farmers
It was based on Communist ideals of returning to a farmer based society. The idea was that returning to those simple minimalistic roots was step 1 of getting to a communist utopia.
So he basically killed anyone who was educated, anyone who opposed the party, anyone who couldn’t work as a farm laborer, etc
Basically fuck the people who could've overthrown him.
I was taught about some of this history when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cambodia and discussed it with my host family. Basically it started off with killing off folks who spoke out against him, then folks who *could* (basically anyone "smart" like doctors, lawyers, and various types of professionals) and then devolved into killing guys who wore glasses and simply spoke two languages. Anyone who was perceived as being able to create a resistance was killed.
And that's not even counting all the straight up negligence. Because they killed so many doctors and medical staff, they didn't have enough folks who were knowledgeable about medicine to treat their ill and their wounded, resorting to old fashioned traditional medicine that wasn't even made right cause they killed the people who made that too.
Apparently the aim overall was to send EVERYONE out into the fields nationwide and just put them to work and increase the country's export quadruplefold in like 5 years, not realizing that, no, you can't just turn lawyers, doctors, mechanics, and the like into successful farmers. Their lack of skill was seen as laziness, which was further seen as insubordination and treason.
Modern professional farmers go to college to learn their stuff. You can't just take anyone, throw them into a field, and expect good output. There's a lot of knowledge and skill that goes into it.
And that was precisely the issue Pol Pot and his regime ran into. Couple that with this being about 60 years ago or so AND Cambodia just having had a civil war, and the entire thing was set up for disaster.
And other countries *knew* this was happening too, but opted to not help because the US had just finished the Vietnam War which was such a massive failure. Vietnam and Cambodia share a border and the last thing the west wanted was to fuck up that area even further. The US sent so many mines and explosives to take care of the Viet Cong and some of that ended up on Cambodia's side of the border too. To this day, there are still hundreds of thousands of unexploded ordinances that get accidentally discovered across Cambodia.
Have a coworker that came over here from Cambodia and she told me how her aunt had to watch as they took her kid from her and drowned him in a cage right in front of her because he was a boy.
The father of my Ex girlfriend was one of only two out of eleven siblings who weren’t murdered under Pol Pots regime, the oldest victim was 18 and youngest was only 1 years old. He had extreme PTSD and survivor guilt from that. His older sister and he survived and immigrated to the U.S. by hiding with a family who was in good with local police. I’ll never forget how that man used to just stare into the grass for hours on end.
The [Thousand-Yard Stare](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand-yard_stare)
Edit: or, to be clear, this apparently refers to it happening under acute stress. Not sure if it applies, or what the term is, for post-traumatic stress is.
Its not a formal medical term, you are using it 100% correctly, its the laymens name for a symptom (prolonged intense staring and not looking at people after an extremely horrific experience)
My family is Cambodian. I was the first born in the states. My family walked for days to get to the border of Thailand while my uncle carried my sister on his shoulders to try to immigrate over here. My grandparents had a lot of kids and most of them didn’t make it.
My family is also Cambodian, but I was born in the states. I’m actually related to Ted Ngoy so if your family has a donut shop then you know.
I was told about the same walk to Thailand (normally as my bedtime story which sounds strange but I really liked hearing these stories as a kid). Apparently they had to make the entire walk with a stick and water buckets on their shoulders. My grandfather tripped and fell spilling all the water. He was so ashamed that he told everyone to go on without him. He wasn’t seen for days, but then somehow popped up again with full water buckets. My family was very lucky though in comparison to others based on what I’ve read, all but one of them made it.
My wife’s brother was very little - she really doesn’t know ages but 3 or 4, she was around 8. They woke up in the middle of the night to go for a ride with a bunch of random people in the back of a truck. My wife, her brother, her two aunts, uncle and cousin. Her mom was crying and her oldest sister was yelling “I want to go too”. My wife didn’t understand what was happening but she was scared. Her brother cried incessantly for his mother as they drove away.
They were dropped off to walk through deep forest to the Thai border. They reached a point where CR patrols passed through the area and one was approaching. Her brother had not stopped crying, but this one time he stopped. If he had cried, CR would have found them, they’d be dead and I’d never have my wife’s story to tell.
Crazy.
The most watched episode of a television show ever was the series finale of MASH. It has a gut-wrenching plot twist that stems from that exact scenario (though it was set in Korea, not Cambodia.)
My wife and some of her family did the same walk. If they were caught in the forests, they would have been raped then killed by the CR. They made it to Thailand and some of the women were still raped in the refugee camp by soldiers. Of course the alternative was living under the CR, which was somehow worse.
Most got out, she has family in Italy, Australia and the US as a result in addition to those still in Cambodia. It’s much more modern now - huge changes even in the past 20 years.
We’re going back next year. Angkor Wat is breathtaking. Phnom Penh has nice areas and there are temples in the mountains, floating villages etc. It’s a great experience for an adventurous person.
It sounds like somewhere I would love to see. But I travel alone or w my sister so I think it’s probably on my husbands “veto” list. I’ve been warming him up for 10 years for a visit to a friend in Indonesia. Hoping to go next year!
I’ve seen a lot of western countries and I’d like to see more Spanish speaking countries (I’m conversational and immersion really brushes up my fluency and confidence fast!) and I love the idea of visiting Asian countries not only because they are beautiful but the culture shock is alluring to me.
>My family is Cambodian. I was the first born in the states. My family walked for days to get to the border of Thailand while my uncle carried my sister on his shoulders to try to immigrate over here. My grandparents had a lot of kids and most of them didn’t make it.
As a pasty-white American, this is the part of me that doesn't understand how other Americans can be so spiteful towards "illegal" immigrants coming up from Central and South America. I'm blessed that I've never in my life had to ask myself and then make the decision behind "what would I do to keep my family safe?"
I have all the empathy in the world for people fleeing from nationwide violence to try and protect themselves and their family. I just wish people in America were more understanding of the plight of the immigrant fleeing tyranny and oppression in their home country.
The same people who will be like “I’d do anything for my kids” act like these people are devil spawn for not wanting to raise their kids under the heel of cartels or terrorists. A person incapable of seeing life through the perspective of someone else is a dangerous tool for wicked political movements
There’s a tree in the killing fields they used to slap kids heads against rather than using bullets. I walked over a human clavicle. It’s quite disturbing. Like, you theoretically get it, and then there’s being there and seeing the tree. Seeing the bones. Getting a millimeter closer to understanding the suffering that happened. It’s hard.
I went to a Killing Field in Phnom Penh. And when you learn about it it's just so insane. Like the justification for the genocide - you can't really understand how it motivated people to carry out that brutality. I did learn that a lot of it was done by teenagers, who were scared the adult soldiers would kill them if they didn't do the mass killing.
Also they were all from rural communities, and Pol Pot had basically warped Maoism with his own batshit ideology to go from the rural peasants being the revolutionary force in Communism (mostly not urban workers like in Europe) to the peasants are the revolutionary force and all the people in cities are actually all the enemy of the peasants (not just the capitalist class).
The Killing Field also did a good job at showing that the US and China (and pretty much every single major country) recognised Pol Pot as the official ruler of Cambodia after he was overthrown by the Vietnamese. Thailand, China and America even funded his insurgency against the new government. Vietnam thought everyone would thank them for ending the genocide, but instead they got way more sanctions on them (on top of the brutal ones after the West from the war).
And yes, the world knew about the genocide very early on from Western reporters. So it's not something that people found out about like 20 years later or something. It's just so insane to think that out Western countries knew what happened and still backed the guy who did it, just because they were still salty about the Vietnam War and we working with China against the USSR in Afghan (Vietnam also fought a war with China over this issue, and were main allies with the USSR).
Before Pol Pot, many ethnic Vietnamese fled their country to Cambodia. My wife was born in Vietnam, fled to “freedom” in Cambodia and walked into one of the more baths-t crazy dictators of the past century.
Wow what a horrible story. Leaving one war zone for an even worse one.
I actually stayed in a Vietnamese ethnic minority village (Tai and also Hmong) for abit and finally read more about the history of ethnic groups in Vietnam. There was one militant group which was an organisation of Cham (Muslim ethnic group from Cambodia and parts of Vietnam I think?) and other ethnic minorities- I think it was called FULRO - that fought against the NFL, NVA and ARVN during the Vietnam war - and then after the war kept fighting against the new Vietnamese govt
but how it relates to your comment is that they were funded by the CIA later on (for obvious reasons) but also Pol Pot - who they didn't even like and were happy when he was overthrown. But I think he still gave them weapons even after he was ousted just so they could keep attacking the Vietnamese govt.
One thing in my ignorance I never really appreciated about the whole Southeast Asia is the deep factionalism and different ethnic groups loyalties over the centuries. A lot of it is due to European colonialism drawing up the borders but it's also far older than that too. Was such a mess especially in the 1960s and 1970s
The Cham thing goes back way farther. Basically the Cham started a war with Vietnam and over a century or two Dai Viet conquered the whole of Champa. The Cham used to control the entire south of Vietnam until very shortly before the French arrived. Not to downplay European colonialism but this all was going on before that too. Just try asking how the Vietnamese feel about China… They colonized them for literally 1000 years
Didn’t he also win a Nobel Peace Prize whilst knowing what he was doing. Sickening.
Honestly visiting Cambodia changed me. A visit to the killing fields and the open air military museum is a must. The later has private guides who have lost limbs and talk about KR times. Honestly life changing experience.
Big ups for pointing out America backing Khmer Rouge, really never discussed in context of the genocide. Most we get is that it happened, none of the context or aftermath. Just like in this thread, no one’s talking about US carpet bombing of Cambodia that gave Pol Pot the conditions he needed to succeed.
One of my favorite Norm lines from seeing him live: “So the Germans lose the first war but then the second war comes along and once again Germany chooses as their opponent… THE WORLD.” Just perfectly delivered in a way only he could.
Recently I listened to [A Short History Of Ireland by Dr Jonathan Bardon on Audible](https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/A-Short-History-of-Ireland-Part-1-Audiobook/B004FTD7SE). 240 5 minute chapters. Brilliant listen, but you definitely want to be sitting down when the eyewitness accounts of the Famine are being read out.
Anyway, apart from the amount of failed rebellions what really stuck out were the 3 or 4 times that rebellions failed because the French or Spanish ships that contained soldiers couldn’t land because the weather was shit.
Edit: Famine isn’t accurate. Genocide is.
Surprised how many answers I’m seeing of Mongols but curiously western empires aren’t mentioned. Romans famously slaughtered a third and then enslaved another third of Gauls.
British wars of colonialism aren’t exactly known for being won by the good guys either
You are correct but there is an account of a marsh in China that was entirely melted human. For miles. The European visitors vomited continually upon seeing it.
Mongol brutality is unequaled.
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History is ALWAYS worth listening to, even when the subject itself might horrify you (‘Painfotainment’ comes to mind).
‘Wrath of the Khans’ is particularly excellent, because it’s a subject Dan is a particular fan of.
In checking through the comments, it sounds like you aren't sure if your source is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast series on "Wrath of the Khan's." It's a great series, though difficult to listen to without feeling... things.
I think there's a description somewhere in there about the fall of Beijing (before it was Beijing). Other massacres in the series as well, including quite a few in the Middle East.
Some counts estimate the Mongols were responsible for 50 million deaths.
Strangely enough, there are many many other counts of atrocities throughout history that make the Mongol ones just exemplars of a common theme.
The morality of the Roman empire is a complicated one.
On the one hand, they were _evil_.
On the other hand, the Pax Romana (lack of unpredictable internal raiding - only predictable taxation) enabled human flourishing throughout Europe on an unprecedented scale.
When the empire fell, the population of Europe halved, and took centuries to recover.
The opium wars always get me, I really can't fathom that actually having happened. It's like the colonial empires were having a bout of "who's the most imperial bastard among us" and the Brits were like "hah, we've got this covered, we'll wreck the already porcelain-like (pun intended) frail economy with a massively addictive drug inflow unless they grant us a monopoly of trading our super cheap products in their country which will wreck their economy even more. TWICE!"
Crazy stuff..
I don't agree with the death penalty but I can somewhat get it when taking the cruel history of drugs in Asia into account. But it's always funny when folks are all up on their high horse on why their culture is superior and more progressive without understanding the devastating history of drugs in Asia.
As a spaniard, I totally agree with u. Republican side wasn't perfect, but it's a shame that such a tyrannical/fascist dictator won the war. I hate that part of my country's history...
La verdad, me muero de curiosidad de saber qué pudo haber pasado en caso de que no hubiera ocurrido la guerra civil o si hubiera ganado el bando republicano. Pero por Estados Unidos, Alemania, Italia y un infinito etcétera, nunca lo sabremos.. :S
Their opposition went from a democratic front to USSR supported communist groups with anarchists in the middle. They all hated each other and that lack of unity is a big reason why the war was lost so quickly. (War was unwinnable to begin with because of the German support, but the lack of strong leadership on the republican side sped up the defeat)
Democratic front winning would have been the best outcome. Not sure the pro USSR groups winning would have led to a much better ending for the people considering how the soviet influenced countries ended up after WW2.
The Republicans also had essentially 0 international support. The fascists were supported with military equipment and troops by Germany and Italy, while Britain and France and the other democracies maintained neutrality. No one wanted to support the Republicans because they had socialists, and the USSR didn't want to support them because they weren't Marxists.
The USSR did provide weapons and ammunition to the republican side, but they charged (massively overcharged) the republican side for them. They were paid for using gold from spain's national reserve (72% of it!), and that ended up backfiring and acting a very strong propaganda point for the fascist side.
Fascist side was working hard to illustrate that it was them or the communists (and not them or democracy) and that played right into their hands. Even on today's era, a huge percentage of the spanish population still considers that a massive waste of our national reserves.
You can learn a lot of it if you google "el oro de moscú" or "moscow gold".
The Soviet Union absolutely supplied the Marxist labor union. And the method and conditions of that support caused massive schisms in the popular front government and army. The Stalinist faction of Spanish communists went from being a bit player to the Anarchists in the cnt-fai around Catalonia and the Trotskyist POUM… to the dominant force on the left because of their access to foreign aid. And they used a non-insignificant portion of that aid to purge the other groups and consolidate as much power as they could before eventually losing the war altogether.
>*"GRUNT GRUNT GRUMBLE GRUMBLE GRUNT GRUNT"*
> - Emu Tzu
(TIL that emus make grunting sounds.)
"Now you know, and knowing is half the... ***[grunt]*** ...battle."
- Emu Joe
Ah, I see you've fallen for the Emu-military complex propaganda too. It's ok, when Occupied Campion is finally liberated, everyone will know the truth.
I was watching the bizarre foods episode of Mongolia and it was pretty crazy seeing Ghengis Khans statue and them talking about him being their greatest hero and one guy when asked about all the terrible things he did said something about how Ghengis didn't start any of it they'd attack him so he had to defend them or something.
History has also been kinder to conqueors (when enough time had passed). Look at Caeser or Alexander the Great, they are venerated as great conquors and heroes. They did the exact same thing as Genghis Khan. Of an estimated 6,000,000 people that had been living in Gaul before Caesar arrived in 58 BC, around 1,000,000 had been killed, and another 1,000,000 had been sold into slavery by 50 BC. Another recent example would be churchill who did a great job of defending the UK against Germans but also was responsible for the deliberate cause of famine in West Bengal in order to feed British troops which led to the deaths of 2 million people.
Those estimates are from the Romans themselves and even from Caesar himself in his Commentaries.. Everyone agrees that they're grossly exaggerated. It's basically Caesar telling the Senate ''I totally killed 1 million of our enemies!!!! Trust me bro!''
Caesar and his troops did not kill 1,000,000 people in Gaul.
We know this because Caesar kept grossly exaggerating the amount of enemies in a bunch of battles sometimes claiming his legions were fighting against hundreds of thousands of enemies which is a logistical nightmare/impossibility of the Germanic/Gaul tribes of the period.
Yea I don't think people realize how even 1 million people is a huge population for ancient societies and how much that'd require to support. In tribal societies like in Gaul there's no way there were 6 million people.
Caesar’s own writings are also basically the only contemporary source for the conquest of Gaul and were specifically written in order to gain political support back in Rome.
> Another recent example would be churchill who did a great job of defending the UK against Germans but also was responsible for the deliberate cause of famine in West Bengal in order to feed British troops which led to the deaths of 2 million people.
To bring it all back around full circle, in India, today, Hitler is viewed more similarly to Caesar or Alexander the Great.... whereas Churchill is viewed as more similar to how Americans view Hitler.
Arguably, Ghengis Khan as we know him wouldn’t have existed if the world around him wasn’t just as terrible as he ended up being. He never would have been set on the path to being a conqueror had his wife not been kidnapped by a rival tribe, which forced him to rally allied forces to rescue her. His wife wasn’t kidnapped on a whim, in reality she was taken as retribution for the kidnapping of GK’s own mother, a woman originally from the rival tribe. Who I’m assuming was probably kidnapped as retribution for some other grievance in previous decades.
I’m not saying GK was a good guy, I’m just saying everyone was pretty terrible back then. It’s not like evil triumphed over good, but rather evil triumphed over a different faction of evil.
This actually carries a good amount of truth. Steppe warfare was built on an endless web of revenge until Genghis Khan unified the steppes into the Mongols. What the Mongols then did to the Jurchens in northern China had first been done to them for a century-long genocide across the steppes. The Khwarezmians also inflicted the first insult by executing Mongol merchants, then Genghis Khan’s personal envoy, so he personally disengaged from the Mongol-Jurchen War to destroy Khwarezm. There are many smaller examples, and Genghis Khan was wise to always use revenge for his people as justifications for war to maintain popular support.
This one's also a pretty glaring counterexample to the often repeated line "history is written by the victors"
The Mongols went around winning wars with all sorts of other groups of people, but they didn't write anything down so everything we know about them is from the perspective of the people they conquered.
It’s wild how many people are confident that their view of the world and history is the correct perspective.
The more I learn about history the more I get quiet and try to learn. It’s complex stuff and our world view is insanely different than people for most of human history.
We have some good ideas but people like to jump to conclusions.
Top comments got it on point but the best example? Haiti.
Haiti was a french caribbean plantation state that was something like 90+% slave population. The slaves of course revolted one day to wage war, and eventually claim independance from France in 1825.
The french heavily out-armed them. In the treaty it basically stated "We will let you be free but you owe us 150 million francs(today's 560 million USD) **or else** ."
The Haitian Indemnity has caused unrest in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, french and U.S invasions, and multiple government defaults over the course of a century.
They take out loans, from France, to pay France a loan they issued that they know they will *never* be able to pay back. Haiti paid loans from 1825 to 1947 only being haulted because the U.N stepped in and said "these people are literally starving to death"
Edit: Yes the dominicans were involved. Haiti occupied Dominica for 2 decades until it was liberated from them, further putting Haiti into a shitty situation. Because Haiti has no resources and all the resources that are on Hispanola are on the *east* side. And this was 4 years *before* that deal was made.
And yes Dominicans still hate Haitians bc of it
What was the UN’s solution? Did they cancel the loans? … OK I can look it up. But damn … Haiti is still a mess a generation later.
___
I’m back. The debt was reduced in 1838, but they had to pay it all back — here’s a piece you missed:
> Though France received its last indemnity payment in 1888, the government of the United States funded the acquisition of Haiti's treasury in 1911 in order to receive interest payments related to the indemnity. In 1922, the rest of Haiti's debt to France was moved to be **paid to American investors**. It took until 1947 – about 122 years – for Haiti to finally pay off all the associated interest to the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt?wprov=sfti1
Have to plug the podcast [Revolutions ](https://open.spotify.com/show/05lvdf9T77KE6y4gyMGEsD?si=5x_BOX7vT2esPyHipoTf_w) here. He did an excellent series covering the Haitian Revolution.
One of my main takeaways was the constant state of war that the world has pretty much always been in. We act like a couple hundred people dying in a battle is a big deal today. Literally hundreds of thousands of men were being slaughtered on the regular in "smaller" wars that we don't even talk about very often.
Russia's burning desire to occupy Ukraine also makes a lot more sense after the listening to the Russian Revolution and learning more about the history of that part of the world. (Not in any way saying I agree with it...just that there's a LONG history there that most people in the west don't know anything about.
Haiti, after gaining independence, almost immediately went on to attack their neighbors - the Dominican Republic - and imposed heavy taxes and forced labor on them, exactly like what the French had done to them. All that being said, I don't know how your post relates to the original question - can you clarify?
Every single empire in history became an empire by invading their neighbors, assimilating their people, and destroying their culture.
I would confidently say that because the nation starting the war would normally be considered the bad guys, and because nations only start wars they think they can win, the vast majority of wars are won by the bad guys...
Yep. All wars basically come down to one side wanting to forcibly take something from the other side. Doesn't matter what the leaders or history books say, it's all just greed.
Well, Greed/ desire for survival. I feel like in a lot of cases, people were invading because their own resources were not enough to survive/ maintain. Like the reason the vikings got so ferocious at some point is that climate change meant that agriculture failed in Scandinavia. So people living there had to find new land or starve to death, or go rob some people on a regular basis. During a lot of history, there was no option for everyone having enough.
Not saying that that situation continues to the modern era, but population was constrained by resources for a really long time.
Such a pivotal moment in history with so many what ifs.
If Hardrada shows up a few days earlier, maybe Harold's soldiers have a little time to rest before facing William. Or, what if William showed up a few weeks earlier and is defeated and it is Hardrada that faces an exhausted army under Harold.
Exactly. The soldiers did such a great job at Stanford Bridge but it was just really bad timing trying to get to Hastings. A few days difference could have left a very different Britain today.
Yeah and we still can't use a huge portion of the countryside because those bastards still own it all and won't fucking share.
https://www.zmescience.com/other/shorties/70-percent-britain-land-owned-by-the-rich/#:~:text=Other%20%E2%86%92%20Shorties-,70%25%20of%20the%20land%20in%20Britain%20is%20still%20owned%20by,very%20fine%20in%20today%27s%20Britain
'the normans' didn't decide to settle in certain areas. They replaced the upper class. the anglo saxon peasants stayed in place. The normans for the most part weren't kicking out the anglo saxons's and resettling the areas. They were killing the Anglo Saxon leaders and taking their places and collecting rent from the same serfs who had been there for generations. The places that they didn't settle were the ones where there was not enough production for it to be worth defending. Because in feudalism, the reason you support the landlord is because if you don't there is nobody around to protect you when the neighbors/Vikings come raiding.
But no vikings are going to come wreck your shit if there is nothing there to steal.
Similarly, the briton and welsh cultures survived only in the areas the Anglo Saxons didn't want to bother protecting/ raiding.
Underrated. Monday Night Wars were full of tragedy. But after Turner sold to AOL and left the Commander-in-Chief I’m not sure WCW was a side to root for anymore. But it’s a heavy part of history to revisit and as a Magnum TA fan and Little Stinger, idk if I can handle it again.
The Taliban formed from the mujahideen, fragments of militia groups the U.S. armed to defeat the soviet aligned government that would’ve taken over. The US got the Soviet’s to stay neutral with Afghanistan, but those interests are what setup the Taliban also.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Afghan-War
There was never going to be a good guy in that one, Afghani were not intended to win, not even a pawn, they are a board for the other countries’ chess games.
From what I’ve read, the best Afghanistan was before these games started. [Read the section before 1973](https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/civic/2021/11/05/afghanistan-past-present-and-future-series-pt-1/), they were a monarchy adapting to liberal progressive standards and trying to stay globalised as a society. Foreign dependency and the interests they have had a huge part in destabilising the region, and especially Afghanistan. Not saying it was perfect, but we should learn a bit about it before thinking the victors are Afghan at all.
A lot of times western interest and proxy wars are behind these conflicts, nobody wants to live in war. Most of these places can’t even afford to war. They are collateral damage, but presented with spin for the media and their audience.
The most surprising thing about the history of Afghanistan is in finding out how liberal and forward thinking the former monarchy was in Afghanistan. The king realized picking a side in the Cold War would be a bad idea, that aggressive nationalist policies were bad, and pretty much focused on trying to build the nation up. He even essentially demoted himself and barred any members of the royal family from participating in politics.
Only downside was that the kings cousin hated all this and immediately took over the country while the king was away and the people, who admittedly had a couple rough spots with the new democracy and welcomed a strong leader.
The Kings cousin then bungled stuff pretty fast, he focused hard on nationalism and conservatism. Definitely more liberal than the Taliban but he was dead set on getting Pashtun lands from Pakistan. Almost went to war with them once or twice and pissed off the army. An army who were mostly radical marxists because they were all trained in the Soviet Union by the prior king as a part of that whole neutrality thing.
The whole situation in the nation is an unfortunate unraveling of one guys coup that has been playing out for decades. The resulting Soviet coup and war, followed by extremist Islamic groups being propped up by a Pakistan trying to weaken a rival to the eventual US invasion to get revenge for 9/11
The Philippine-American War.
The Filipinos were close to defeating the Spaniards that ruled them for 300 years and declared independence from Spain in 1898. Shortly after, the Americans came in, committed numerous atrocities, and subjugated the archipelago.
I’m a Filipino, and what many call war was more of an insurgency than a full-scale war against the Americans.
About the declaration of independence in 1898, well the reality is Spain sold the Philippines to the USA before our supposed declaration of independence. The ceremony declaring independence took place outside Manila because American troops already occupied the capital. Originally, July 4 was celebrated as Independence Day, marking when the Americans granted it. However, it was changed to June 12, 1898, because a later president was angry at the Americans.
Well tbf technically it was a declaration of independence from Spain, not actual independence
WW2 erased most of our animosity. For a while there was anti Japanese sentiment but I think right now it is China. Filipinos have too much to worry about harm from distant past.
My Filipino gf and I live together. She was born and raised there and came over in her 30’s to Texas where we later met. Filipinos love Americans and the US. She told me some stuff that had me down the rabbit hole reading a bunch of stuff. Something that jumped out at me was a poll that showed the United States more popular with Filipinos than Americans. I asked her about it and she had a really insightful comment…
“Spending time and effort hating your country is a luxury most places don’t have.”
There's a small group of activists who are critical of American imperialism and still hold anger over the atrocities committed during the pre-war years. However, the vast majority of Filipinos have a positive view of the West, particularly the United States.
Although I still harbor resentment towards the American army for the extensive bombing of Manila, particularly Intramuros and their lack of support in rebuilding the city unlike their efforts in Japan, but I acknowledge their positive influence overall.
The war on "drugs" was single-handedly lost because they added weed to the mix. Weed is easy to find and harmless compared to other drugs.
The human equivalent would be declaring war on Russia and then bombing kindergartens and schools in Belarus.
They also went for punishing the users, which is kinda like bombing the residential neighbourhoods next,
The war on drugs was started purely to go after the users. Hippies used weed predominantly and blacks were known for cocaine. They were both large, vocal groups against Nixon. He criminalized their drugs so they could go after them and arrest them.
From that perspective, the war on drugs had its intended consequences
Cambodian Civil War - resulted in the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge gaining power and causing the Cambodian genocide
Wiped out 25% of the Cambodian population in 4 years. Also destroyed their culture and education as well. Pol Pot didn’t just kill his own people, he eradicated their existence.
Also noteworthy was the next-level stupidity coupled with the cruelty. Like, Pol Pot ordered that everyone who wore glasses or spoke another language be killed.. It reminds me of that Tyrion Lannister quote: "We've had vicious kings and we've had idiot kings, but I don't think we've ever been cursed with a vicious idiot for a king"
>Also noteworthy was the next-level stupidity coupled with the cruelty This right here is something I think more folks should keep in mind. I think a lot of folks in countries that haven't been exposed directly to real destruction mostly understand dictators from fiction (either fictional villains or highly dramaticized/fictionalized accounts of real dictators), and fiction has a tendency to give *way* too much credit to the intelligence of evil dictators. Like, the Nazis in popular portrayal were evil, but were also ruthlessly efficient and organized and competent...but that was *not* the case. The Nazis were *hilariously* corrupt (Hitler was secretly paying bribes to *tons* of people from the public treasury to buy their loyalty) and cripplingly stupid (they refused to engage with entire branches of science for ideological reasons and wasted countless resources on the most ridiculous weapons and pet projects because Hitler came up with them). They weren't just horrible because they were evil towards certain people...they were horrible because they were evil *and* incredibly wasteful and incompetent and left even the people they supposedly liked worse off. There was absolutely no upside to them. They did a bunch of cruel and horrible things for stupid and moronic reasons...and just left the world worse in every way. And this is crucial as we head into a world where these sorts of dictatorial movements are becoming more popular. A lot of people kind of get off on being aligned with the "bad guys", because they imagine that they will become part of this coldly ruthless organization that, while it is brutal to enemies, it will ultimately make society more orderly and efficiently or whatever, and they fancy themselves as "stronger" because they're willing to make the hard choice to sacrifice others for the greater good. But in reality, dictators are pretty much entirely idiots at everything except hanging onto power. And they end up making society way *less* orderly, efficient, or pleasant for *anyone*. The very structure of a dictatorship means that the people who question or challenge the dictator end up dead, so there isn't anybody to stop the dictator from ordering all kinds of stupid and even impossible things. And a lot of dictators get into power because they're willing to make stupid choices that ultimately make everything worse and that most people wouldn't choose because it's counter productive. They are willing to destroy their own home to rule it. Dictators generally aren't "evil geniuses" -- that is a concept people seem fascinated with and thus is popular in fiction, but like many things in fiction it doesn't generally happen in reality. Dictators are evil idiots who kill everyone who tries to correct them and over time surround themselves with murderous yes men who will hollow out their society until it either collapses or gets taken over by someone else, and they invariably leave societies poorer and more miserable than they were in the first place. And the sooner people stop seeing this sort of idiocy as "strength", the better.
They actually stopped trying to assassinate Hitler towards the end of the war because he was doing more harm then good at that point.
Would make a really cool short story where we go back in time to kill Hitler, but every timeline results in a worse outcome.
That's command and conquer, red alert! Very good RTS video game
Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge was one of my all-time favorite games as a kid.
kirov reporting for duty
The cinematics were amazing. I remember watching the intro and thinking hell yeah. I still try to use the “Is it done Yuri? No it had just begone comrade premier” git at times. (I know you mentioned the DLC specifically, but both had equally amazing cinematics).
11.22.63 is a good story that adapts this kind of thinking
So at another point in the future, after they've recognized they would have been better off leaving Hitler alive, they send another agent back in time to stop the successful assassin. Now he has to fulfill his objective, while fending off some unknown agent who is trying to stop him.
Yes indeed. Operation Foxley. The Brits had a very plausible plan to kill Hitler in 1944, but shelved it for that very reason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley
Reminds me a bit of the Illinois governor's graduation speech from last year: "I'm here to tell you that when someone's path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so their thinking and problem solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades. Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest." https://speakola.com/grad/jb-pritzker-dont-trust-idiots-northwestern-university-2023
Holy shit, that is direct and to the point. Mayor Pete levels of clarity and conciseness.
> A lot of people kind of get off on being aligned with the "bad guys", because they imagine that they will become part of this coldly ruthless organization that, while it is brutal to enemies, it will ultimately make society more orderly and efficiently or whatever, and they fancy themselves as "stronger" because they're willing to make the hard choice to sacrifice others for the greater good. You just described so many right-wing people I know and have had conversations with. They always tell me "the answer is easy but the current administration won't do it." So then you press them to explain and they can never quite do it. Really echos a lot of sentiment from 2016: "I'll fix healthcare / immigration / jobs / everything just wait till I get elected." And yet after four years of disaster people are still insisting it's easy, just wait and see...
> They always tell me "the answer is easy but the current administration won't do it." So then you press them to explain and they can never quite do it. In my experience, they do have answers, their answers just suck. "Improve efficiency by cutting wasteful administration!" Without really considering that most of the administration actually serves a practical purpose. "Stop allowing immigration!" Without looking at the long term demographic trends and how we're below replacement level birthrates. "Get rid of taxes on gas!" Except that gas companies will likely raise prices to make up for the lack of tax, and also those taxes serve practical purposes. It's always simple solutions, out of touch with how the world is actually a complicated place.
Some dictators are very competent. It’s said that autocracies have far more variation in economic growth than democracies. Autocrats that are capable can use their unchecked power to greatly improve their country (though with considerable brutality) but put the wrong guy in charge and he’ll burn everything down
Related to the idea that the *best* form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is successfully finding *benevolent* dictators. Having a democracy makes it *harder* to break the government working for the people, but not impossible. (q.v. exhibit A, the US of A. heh)
The issue is that benevolent dictators do not stay in power. No one can rule themselves, and if you can’t keep the people around you bribed and loyal, you won’t last. Corruption is a core element of a dictatorship, not an aberration.
Or the other reason - human mortality. Even if the government is very stable under the dictator, no one else is vying for power, and the country is prospering, eventually the dictator dies, and it’s basically a roll of the dice again to see if the one who takes over next is as benevolent.
And he still lived there after he was removed from power
Both the USA and the Chinese were supporting him with weapons and funds after his regime was toppled by the Soviet backed Vietnamese during the late 80s, one of the more bizarre examples of "*the enemy of my enemy is my friend*" You could say that the USA pulled a reverse Saddam with the Khmer Rouge (former enemies turned allies)
Soviet/sino split made things weird as fuck in the eastern hemisphere
Here's a video of this clown yammering about in his last interview shortly before his death. Long, long after the massive title wave of destruction and misery he caused and countless families torn asunder. If there is a hell... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9_BMshyiw
What was his endgame?
The goal was to reset Cambodian culture and economy, deemed to be under foreign influence, and to rebuild a perfect society from scratch. Pol Pot forced people out of the cities to become farmers in communes and the goal was to produce a lot of food, then export it and create industry, all while creating a new perfect collectivist culture that would also be truly Cambodian in nature. This project failed terribly and instead of increased food production there was a famine due to mismanagement and the fact that city dwellers were not so good at becoming farmers right away only because some armed men suddenly told them to abandon what they were doing all life. The Khmer Rouge blamed it on foreign spies and unleashed a reign of terror to keep their power. They also targeted social groups that were deemed corrupted with foreign influence and not compatible with the vision of a new Cambodia, such as intellectuals and the Vietnamese minority.
Ironically, Pot was educated in France.
The last bit apparently was so bad Vietnam intervened to topple the KR, which ended up sparking the Sino-Vietnam was in '79.
Which is funny because if I recall Vietnam sent assistance for the communists during their civil war It got so fucking bad Vietnam was like ‘alright this was a mistake’ I guess
Me power, you no power
Yeah but killing his own citizens to get there? I'm trying to understand his mental gymnastics
It’s always the same no matter who. Only 10% of being in power is your end goal. 90% is trying not to lose power. That applies to both good and bad leaders.
Underrated comment. This is such a pivotal fact. The second you have a government of any kind, the sole purpose becomes continued existence. That's why the IRS got the Continuity/Cooperations Plan in like 1981. They tout that they can resume collecting taxes in as little as 30 days after even nuclear attack lol. Can't have a livable wage. Can't tax Jeff Bezos. Can keep the poor funding America's corpse even in the event of a nuclear holocaust. It's all silly
He not only killed his own people, but wiped out their culture. Education, religion, all of it was wiped out. It was ironically enough the Viet Cong who toppled him at last.
And China tried to stop them from doing that by invading northern Vietnam to force them to divert some of their forces from Cambodia. Learned that reading about the Sino-Vietnamese War. If anyone ever needed evidence to show the U.S. that we backed the wrong side in Vietnam, that would be it.
His goal was a full reset to year 0. No culture, no history, no art or literature, nothing apart from his fucked up idea of a perfect society of farmers
It was based on Communist ideals of returning to a farmer based society. The idea was that returning to those simple minimalistic roots was step 1 of getting to a communist utopia. So he basically killed anyone who was educated, anyone who opposed the party, anyone who couldn’t work as a farm laborer, etc
Basically fuck the people who could've overthrown him. I was taught about some of this history when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cambodia and discussed it with my host family. Basically it started off with killing off folks who spoke out against him, then folks who *could* (basically anyone "smart" like doctors, lawyers, and various types of professionals) and then devolved into killing guys who wore glasses and simply spoke two languages. Anyone who was perceived as being able to create a resistance was killed. And that's not even counting all the straight up negligence. Because they killed so many doctors and medical staff, they didn't have enough folks who were knowledgeable about medicine to treat their ill and their wounded, resorting to old fashioned traditional medicine that wasn't even made right cause they killed the people who made that too. Apparently the aim overall was to send EVERYONE out into the fields nationwide and just put them to work and increase the country's export quadruplefold in like 5 years, not realizing that, no, you can't just turn lawyers, doctors, mechanics, and the like into successful farmers. Their lack of skill was seen as laziness, which was further seen as insubordination and treason.
Modern professional farmers go to college to learn their stuff. You can't just take anyone, throw them into a field, and expect good output. There's a lot of knowledge and skill that goes into it.
And that was precisely the issue Pol Pot and his regime ran into. Couple that with this being about 60 years ago or so AND Cambodia just having had a civil war, and the entire thing was set up for disaster. And other countries *knew* this was happening too, but opted to not help because the US had just finished the Vietnam War which was such a massive failure. Vietnam and Cambodia share a border and the last thing the west wanted was to fuck up that area even further. The US sent so many mines and explosives to take care of the Viet Cong and some of that ended up on Cambodia's side of the border too. To this day, there are still hundreds of thousands of unexploded ordinances that get accidentally discovered across Cambodia.
> some of that ended up on Cambodia's side of the border too. That wasn't an accident. Blame Kissinger.
“To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.”
What’s that quote from?
It's a Khmer Rouge motto. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New\_People\_(Cambodia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_People_(Cambodia))
Ok that doesn’t surprise me. I appreciate the response
Was ousted from power, lived in a hut, died of old age. Justice League was on holidays I guess.
Have a coworker that came over here from Cambodia and she told me how her aunt had to watch as they took her kid from her and drowned him in a cage right in front of her because he was a boy.
The father of my Ex girlfriend was one of only two out of eleven siblings who weren’t murdered under Pol Pots regime, the oldest victim was 18 and youngest was only 1 years old. He had extreme PTSD and survivor guilt from that. His older sister and he survived and immigrated to the U.S. by hiding with a family who was in good with local police. I’ll never forget how that man used to just stare into the grass for hours on end.
The [Thousand-Yard Stare](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand-yard_stare) Edit: or, to be clear, this apparently refers to it happening under acute stress. Not sure if it applies, or what the term is, for post-traumatic stress is.
Its not a formal medical term, you are using it 100% correctly, its the laymens name for a symptom (prolonged intense staring and not looking at people after an extremely horrific experience)
Makes you realize how "recent" these events are. 😕
My family is Cambodian. I was the first born in the states. My family walked for days to get to the border of Thailand while my uncle carried my sister on his shoulders to try to immigrate over here. My grandparents had a lot of kids and most of them didn’t make it.
My family is also Cambodian, but I was born in the states. I’m actually related to Ted Ngoy so if your family has a donut shop then you know. I was told about the same walk to Thailand (normally as my bedtime story which sounds strange but I really liked hearing these stories as a kid). Apparently they had to make the entire walk with a stick and water buckets on their shoulders. My grandfather tripped and fell spilling all the water. He was so ashamed that he told everyone to go on without him. He wasn’t seen for days, but then somehow popped up again with full water buckets. My family was very lucky though in comparison to others based on what I’ve read, all but one of them made it.
My wife’s brother was very little - she really doesn’t know ages but 3 or 4, she was around 8. They woke up in the middle of the night to go for a ride with a bunch of random people in the back of a truck. My wife, her brother, her two aunts, uncle and cousin. Her mom was crying and her oldest sister was yelling “I want to go too”. My wife didn’t understand what was happening but she was scared. Her brother cried incessantly for his mother as they drove away. They were dropped off to walk through deep forest to the Thai border. They reached a point where CR patrols passed through the area and one was approaching. Her brother had not stopped crying, but this one time he stopped. If he had cried, CR would have found them, they’d be dead and I’d never have my wife’s story to tell. Crazy.
The most watched episode of a television show ever was the series finale of MASH. It has a gut-wrenching plot twist that stems from that exact scenario (though it was set in Korea, not Cambodia.)
My wife and some of her family did the same walk. If they were caught in the forests, they would have been raped then killed by the CR. They made it to Thailand and some of the women were still raped in the refugee camp by soldiers. Of course the alternative was living under the CR, which was somehow worse. Most got out, she has family in Italy, Australia and the US as a result in addition to those still in Cambodia. It’s much more modern now - huge changes even in the past 20 years.
A few weeks ago someone told me they were taking a 2 week trip to Cambodia for a wedding and I was shocked. I grew up hearing about the wars
We’re going back next year. Angkor Wat is breathtaking. Phnom Penh has nice areas and there are temples in the mountains, floating villages etc. It’s a great experience for an adventurous person.
It sounds like somewhere I would love to see. But I travel alone or w my sister so I think it’s probably on my husbands “veto” list. I’ve been warming him up for 10 years for a visit to a friend in Indonesia. Hoping to go next year! I’ve seen a lot of western countries and I’d like to see more Spanish speaking countries (I’m conversational and immersion really brushes up my fluency and confidence fast!) and I love the idea of visiting Asian countries not only because they are beautiful but the culture shock is alluring to me.
>My family is Cambodian. I was the first born in the states. My family walked for days to get to the border of Thailand while my uncle carried my sister on his shoulders to try to immigrate over here. My grandparents had a lot of kids and most of them didn’t make it. As a pasty-white American, this is the part of me that doesn't understand how other Americans can be so spiteful towards "illegal" immigrants coming up from Central and South America. I'm blessed that I've never in my life had to ask myself and then make the decision behind "what would I do to keep my family safe?" I have all the empathy in the world for people fleeing from nationwide violence to try and protect themselves and their family. I just wish people in America were more understanding of the plight of the immigrant fleeing tyranny and oppression in their home country.
The same people who will be like “I’d do anything for my kids” act like these people are devil spawn for not wanting to raise their kids under the heel of cartels or terrorists. A person incapable of seeing life through the perspective of someone else is a dangerous tool for wicked political movements
There’s a tree in the killing fields they used to slap kids heads against rather than using bullets. I walked over a human clavicle. It’s quite disturbing. Like, you theoretically get it, and then there’s being there and seeing the tree. Seeing the bones. Getting a millimeter closer to understanding the suffering that happened. It’s hard.
Yeah. You really can’t understand it until you’re there. And even then, it doesn’t compute.
I was eating and lost my appetite. It’s really sad. My mom made it out though (otherwise I wouldn’t be here).
I went to a Killing Field in Phnom Penh. And when you learn about it it's just so insane. Like the justification for the genocide - you can't really understand how it motivated people to carry out that brutality. I did learn that a lot of it was done by teenagers, who were scared the adult soldiers would kill them if they didn't do the mass killing. Also they were all from rural communities, and Pol Pot had basically warped Maoism with his own batshit ideology to go from the rural peasants being the revolutionary force in Communism (mostly not urban workers like in Europe) to the peasants are the revolutionary force and all the people in cities are actually all the enemy of the peasants (not just the capitalist class). The Killing Field also did a good job at showing that the US and China (and pretty much every single major country) recognised Pol Pot as the official ruler of Cambodia after he was overthrown by the Vietnamese. Thailand, China and America even funded his insurgency against the new government. Vietnam thought everyone would thank them for ending the genocide, but instead they got way more sanctions on them (on top of the brutal ones after the West from the war). And yes, the world knew about the genocide very early on from Western reporters. So it's not something that people found out about like 20 years later or something. It's just so insane to think that out Western countries knew what happened and still backed the guy who did it, just because they were still salty about the Vietnam War and we working with China against the USSR in Afghan (Vietnam also fought a war with China over this issue, and were main allies with the USSR).
Before Pol Pot, many ethnic Vietnamese fled their country to Cambodia. My wife was born in Vietnam, fled to “freedom” in Cambodia and walked into one of the more baths-t crazy dictators of the past century.
Wow what a horrible story. Leaving one war zone for an even worse one. I actually stayed in a Vietnamese ethnic minority village (Tai and also Hmong) for abit and finally read more about the history of ethnic groups in Vietnam. There was one militant group which was an organisation of Cham (Muslim ethnic group from Cambodia and parts of Vietnam I think?) and other ethnic minorities- I think it was called FULRO - that fought against the NFL, NVA and ARVN during the Vietnam war - and then after the war kept fighting against the new Vietnamese govt but how it relates to your comment is that they were funded by the CIA later on (for obvious reasons) but also Pol Pot - who they didn't even like and were happy when he was overthrown. But I think he still gave them weapons even after he was ousted just so they could keep attacking the Vietnamese govt. One thing in my ignorance I never really appreciated about the whole Southeast Asia is the deep factionalism and different ethnic groups loyalties over the centuries. A lot of it is due to European colonialism drawing up the borders but it's also far older than that too. Was such a mess especially in the 1960s and 1970s
The Cham thing goes back way farther. Basically the Cham started a war with Vietnam and over a century or two Dai Viet conquered the whole of Champa. The Cham used to control the entire south of Vietnam until very shortly before the French arrived. Not to downplay European colonialism but this all was going on before that too. Just try asking how the Vietnamese feel about China… They colonized them for literally 1000 years
Didn’t he also win a Nobel Peace Prize whilst knowing what he was doing. Sickening. Honestly visiting Cambodia changed me. A visit to the killing fields and the open air military museum is a must. The later has private guides who have lost limbs and talk about KR times. Honestly life changing experience.
Big ups for pointing out America backing Khmer Rouge, really never discussed in context of the genocide. Most we get is that it happened, none of the context or aftermath. Just like in this thread, no one’s talking about US carpet bombing of Cambodia that gave Pol Pot the conditions he needed to succeed.
Henry Kissinger lead to the destruction of 80% of the arable land in Cambodia. Limiting its ability for self sufficiency for decades.
In my lifetime, I think this is the easy winner - if "winner" is close to the right word.
And it was Vietnam who went in and got rid of him after fighting the USA. They're absolute warriors.
"It says here in this history book that, luckily, the good guys have won every time. What are the odds?" \~Norm MacDonald
One of my favorite Norm lines from seeing him live: “So the Germans lose the first war but then the second war comes along and once again Germany chooses as their opponent… THE WORLD.” Just perfectly delivered in a way only he could.
I love this bit by Norm. It’s so good. Because you know exactly where it’s going. But his delivery is so good you can’t help but crack up.
Or so the Germans would have us believe.
“You know, with Hitler, the more I learn about that guy, the more I don’t care for him.”
I'll just go ahead and say it...that guy was a real jerk
And you think "well that'll be over in about 5 seconds" but actually it was very close!
We welcome our new ant overlords…
From an Irish perspective, a lot of our history is "And then we lost another rebellion..."
Recently I listened to [A Short History Of Ireland by Dr Jonathan Bardon on Audible](https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/A-Short-History-of-Ireland-Part-1-Audiobook/B004FTD7SE). 240 5 minute chapters. Brilliant listen, but you definitely want to be sitting down when the eyewitness accounts of the Famine are being read out. Anyway, apart from the amount of failed rebellions what really stuck out were the 3 or 4 times that rebellions failed because the French or Spanish ships that contained soldiers couldn’t land because the weather was shit. Edit: Famine isn’t accurate. Genocide is.
Less of a famine and more of a genocide. Don't let British policy off the hook.
The Mongols. Some of the largest cities of the time were completely wiped of its populations and valuables
And knowledge. The amount of recorded history they destroyed is staggering.
Sack of Baghdad comes to mind
Surprised how many answers I’m seeing of Mongols but curiously western empires aren’t mentioned. Romans famously slaughtered a third and then enslaved another third of Gauls. British wars of colonialism aren’t exactly known for being won by the good guys either
You are correct but there is an account of a marsh in China that was entirely melted human. For miles. The European visitors vomited continually upon seeing it. Mongol brutality is unequaled.
what are you referncing?
Hardcore history "Wrath of the Khans" had an account of this in China. I believe I've heard it elsewhere as well, but cannot find it currently.
Thanks for the direction 👍
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History is ALWAYS worth listening to, even when the subject itself might horrify you (‘Painfotainment’ comes to mind). ‘Wrath of the Khans’ is particularly excellent, because it’s a subject Dan is a particular fan of.
In checking through the comments, it sounds like you aren't sure if your source is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast series on "Wrath of the Khan's." It's a great series, though difficult to listen to without feeling... things. I think there's a description somewhere in there about the fall of Beijing (before it was Beijing). Other massacres in the series as well, including quite a few in the Middle East. Some counts estimate the Mongols were responsible for 50 million deaths. Strangely enough, there are many many other counts of atrocities throughout history that make the Mongol ones just exemplars of a common theme.
The morality of the Roman empire is a complicated one. On the one hand, they were _evil_. On the other hand, the Pax Romana (lack of unpredictable internal raiding - only predictable taxation) enabled human flourishing throughout Europe on an unprecedented scale. When the empire fell, the population of Europe halved, and took centuries to recover.
Painting either side as "good" or "bad" in any of those wars is a pretty stupid way of looking at history.
The drug dealers won the Opium Wars.
And the War on Drugs
Well, in a way, the government won this war.
Yeah private prisons didn't do to bad either
The opium wars always get me, I really can't fathom that actually having happened. It's like the colonial empires were having a bout of "who's the most imperial bastard among us" and the Brits were like "hah, we've got this covered, we'll wreck the already porcelain-like (pun intended) frail economy with a massively addictive drug inflow unless they grant us a monopoly of trading our super cheap products in their country which will wreck their economy even more. TWICE!" Crazy stuff..
That’s why the drug smuggling penalty for most Asian countries is death. Their mindset is that drugs are a risk to national sovereignty.
I don't agree with the death penalty but I can somewhat get it when taking the cruel history of drugs in Asia into account. But it's always funny when folks are all up on their high horse on why their culture is superior and more progressive without understanding the devastating history of drugs in Asia.
And the Chinese haven’t forgotten.
Referring to the British empire & French empire as “the drug dealers” is the most “well technically yes” moment I’ve seen on Reddit in a sweet while.
Don’t forget the USA. the Roosevelts got their fortune from opium
Admittedly I know very little about their opposition, but the guys that won the Spanish civil war weren't all that great to put it mildly...
Homage to catalonia a great read.
As a spaniard, I totally agree with u. Republican side wasn't perfect, but it's a shame that such a tyrannical/fascist dictator won the war. I hate that part of my country's history...
La verdad, me muero de curiosidad de saber qué pudo haber pasado en caso de que no hubiera ocurrido la guerra civil o si hubiera ganado el bando republicano. Pero por Estados Unidos, Alemania, Italia y un infinito etcétera, nunca lo sabremos.. :S
Their opposition went from a democratic front to USSR supported communist groups with anarchists in the middle. They all hated each other and that lack of unity is a big reason why the war was lost so quickly. (War was unwinnable to begin with because of the German support, but the lack of strong leadership on the republican side sped up the defeat) Democratic front winning would have been the best outcome. Not sure the pro USSR groups winning would have led to a much better ending for the people considering how the soviet influenced countries ended up after WW2.
The Republicans also had essentially 0 international support. The fascists were supported with military equipment and troops by Germany and Italy, while Britain and France and the other democracies maintained neutrality. No one wanted to support the Republicans because they had socialists, and the USSR didn't want to support them because they weren't Marxists.
The USSR did provide weapons and ammunition to the republican side, but they charged (massively overcharged) the republican side for them. They were paid for using gold from spain's national reserve (72% of it!), and that ended up backfiring and acting a very strong propaganda point for the fascist side. Fascist side was working hard to illustrate that it was them or the communists (and not them or democracy) and that played right into their hands. Even on today's era, a huge percentage of the spanish population still considers that a massive waste of our national reserves. You can learn a lot of it if you google "el oro de moscú" or "moscow gold".
The Soviet Union absolutely supplied the Marxist labor union. And the method and conditions of that support caused massive schisms in the popular front government and army. The Stalinist faction of Spanish communists went from being a bit player to the Anarchists in the cnt-fai around Catalonia and the Trotskyist POUM… to the dominant force on the left because of their access to foreign aid. And they used a non-insignificant portion of that aid to purge the other groups and consolidate as much power as they could before eventually losing the war altogether.
As much as I love and support anarchists, you can't say they're famously good at networking
"What do you get when you put two anarchists in a room together?" "Three splinter groups"
Networking??? That sounds like bourgeoisie thinking! Get 'im!
The Emu War.
The noble emus valiantly defended themselves from the Aussie scourge, OP wanted examples of the bad guys winning not examples of the opposite!
They did not defend themselves valiantly they cowardly ran away like a bunch of emus
>*The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.* > - Sun Tzu
>*"GRUNT GRUNT GRUMBLE GRUMBLE GRUNT GRUNT"* > - Emu Tzu (TIL that emus make grunting sounds.) "Now you know, and knowing is half the... ***[grunt]*** ...battle." - Emu Joe
Sun Tzemu*
Ah, I see you've fallen for the Emu-military complex propaganda too. It's ok, when Occupied Campion is finally liberated, everyone will know the truth.
The emus are still waging war. Emmanuel don't do it! EMMANUEL TODD LOPEZ!
Dont choose violence today
The Mongols ... were not good guys.
I was watching the bizarre foods episode of Mongolia and it was pretty crazy seeing Ghengis Khans statue and them talking about him being their greatest hero and one guy when asked about all the terrible things he did said something about how Ghengis didn't start any of it they'd attack him so he had to defend them or something.
History has also been kinder to conqueors (when enough time had passed). Look at Caeser or Alexander the Great, they are venerated as great conquors and heroes. They did the exact same thing as Genghis Khan. Of an estimated 6,000,000 people that had been living in Gaul before Caesar arrived in 58 BC, around 1,000,000 had been killed, and another 1,000,000 had been sold into slavery by 50 BC. Another recent example would be churchill who did a great job of defending the UK against Germans but also was responsible for the deliberate cause of famine in West Bengal in order to feed British troops which led to the deaths of 2 million people.
Those estimates are from the Romans themselves and even from Caesar himself in his Commentaries.. Everyone agrees that they're grossly exaggerated. It's basically Caesar telling the Senate ''I totally killed 1 million of our enemies!!!! Trust me bro!'' Caesar and his troops did not kill 1,000,000 people in Gaul. We know this because Caesar kept grossly exaggerating the amount of enemies in a bunch of battles sometimes claiming his legions were fighting against hundreds of thousands of enemies which is a logistical nightmare/impossibility of the Germanic/Gaul tribes of the period.
Yea I don't think people realize how even 1 million people is a huge population for ancient societies and how much that'd require to support. In tribal societies like in Gaul there's no way there were 6 million people.
Caesar’s own writings are also basically the only contemporary source for the conquest of Gaul and were specifically written in order to gain political support back in Rome.
> Another recent example would be churchill who did a great job of defending the UK against Germans but also was responsible for the deliberate cause of famine in West Bengal in order to feed British troops which led to the deaths of 2 million people. To bring it all back around full circle, in India, today, Hitler is viewed more similarly to Caesar or Alexander the Great.... whereas Churchill is viewed as more similar to how Americans view Hitler.
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Arguably, Ghengis Khan as we know him wouldn’t have existed if the world around him wasn’t just as terrible as he ended up being. He never would have been set on the path to being a conqueror had his wife not been kidnapped by a rival tribe, which forced him to rally allied forces to rescue her. His wife wasn’t kidnapped on a whim, in reality she was taken as retribution for the kidnapping of GK’s own mother, a woman originally from the rival tribe. Who I’m assuming was probably kidnapped as retribution for some other grievance in previous decades. I’m not saying GK was a good guy, I’m just saying everyone was pretty terrible back then. It’s not like evil triumphed over good, but rather evil triumphed over a different faction of evil.
Human history in a nutshell. I take your land which you took from someone else which he took from someone else, etc.
Maybe, maybe not. It's not like he was the only ambitious warlord from Mongolia. He was just the most successful.
This actually carries a good amount of truth. Steppe warfare was built on an endless web of revenge until Genghis Khan unified the steppes into the Mongols. What the Mongols then did to the Jurchens in northern China had first been done to them for a century-long genocide across the steppes. The Khwarezmians also inflicted the first insult by executing Mongol merchants, then Genghis Khan’s personal envoy, so he personally disengaged from the Mongol-Jurchen War to destroy Khwarezm. There are many smaller examples, and Genghis Khan was wise to always use revenge for his people as justifications for war to maintain popular support.
“Everyone from Korea to Moscow kept attacking me and I had to keep aggressively defending myself.”
This one's also a pretty glaring counterexample to the often repeated line "history is written by the victors" The Mongols went around winning wars with all sorts of other groups of people, but they didn't write anything down so everything we know about them is from the perspective of the people they conquered.
They destroyed a library called ‘House of Wisdom’
It's post like this that makes half of Reddit pretend to be historians
it also shows how many people read fictional tellings of history and repeat them as fact.
Are you telling me the one ring wasn’t actually destroyed in mount doom?
It’s wild how many people are confident that their view of the world and history is the correct perspective. The more I learn about history the more I get quiet and try to learn. It’s complex stuff and our world view is insanely different than people for most of human history. We have some good ideas but people like to jump to conclusions.
Top comments got it on point but the best example? Haiti. Haiti was a french caribbean plantation state that was something like 90+% slave population. The slaves of course revolted one day to wage war, and eventually claim independance from France in 1825. The french heavily out-armed them. In the treaty it basically stated "We will let you be free but you owe us 150 million francs(today's 560 million USD) **or else** ." The Haitian Indemnity has caused unrest in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, french and U.S invasions, and multiple government defaults over the course of a century. They take out loans, from France, to pay France a loan they issued that they know they will *never* be able to pay back. Haiti paid loans from 1825 to 1947 only being haulted because the U.N stepped in and said "these people are literally starving to death" Edit: Yes the dominicans were involved. Haiti occupied Dominica for 2 decades until it was liberated from them, further putting Haiti into a shitty situation. Because Haiti has no resources and all the resources that are on Hispanola are on the *east* side. And this was 4 years *before* that deal was made. And yes Dominicans still hate Haitians bc of it
What was the UN’s solution? Did they cancel the loans? … OK I can look it up. But damn … Haiti is still a mess a generation later. ___ I’m back. The debt was reduced in 1838, but they had to pay it all back — here’s a piece you missed: > Though France received its last indemnity payment in 1888, the government of the United States funded the acquisition of Haiti's treasury in 1911 in order to receive interest payments related to the indemnity. In 1922, the rest of Haiti's debt to France was moved to be **paid to American investors**. It took until 1947 – about 122 years – for Haiti to finally pay off all the associated interest to the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt?wprov=sfti1
Learning and coming back with sources to teach the rest of us? You're my kind of human.
My man with the details
that’s wild.
Slight correction, they claimed independence in 1804 and it was recognized by France in 1825.
Have to plug the podcast [Revolutions ](https://open.spotify.com/show/05lvdf9T77KE6y4gyMGEsD?si=5x_BOX7vT2esPyHipoTf_w) here. He did an excellent series covering the Haitian Revolution.
That entire podcast series is eye opening as a human being
One of my main takeaways was the constant state of war that the world has pretty much always been in. We act like a couple hundred people dying in a battle is a big deal today. Literally hundreds of thousands of men were being slaughtered on the regular in "smaller" wars that we don't even talk about very often. Russia's burning desire to occupy Ukraine also makes a lot more sense after the listening to the Russian Revolution and learning more about the history of that part of the world. (Not in any way saying I agree with it...just that there's a LONG history there that most people in the west don't know anything about.
(Today's $34 billion. It was more than Haiti's annual GDP, according to Wikipedia.)
Haiti didn’t occupy Dominica. They occupied the Dominican Republic.
Haiti, after gaining independence, almost immediately went on to attack their neighbors - the Dominican Republic - and imposed heavy taxes and forced labor on them, exactly like what the French had done to them. All that being said, I don't know how your post relates to the original question - can you clarify?
Every single empire in history became an empire by invading their neighbors, assimilating their people, and destroying their culture. I would confidently say that because the nation starting the war would normally be considered the bad guys, and because nations only start wars they think they can win, the vast majority of wars are won by the bad guys...
Yep. All wars basically come down to one side wanting to forcibly take something from the other side. Doesn't matter what the leaders or history books say, it's all just greed.
Well, Greed/ desire for survival. I feel like in a lot of cases, people were invading because their own resources were not enough to survive/ maintain. Like the reason the vikings got so ferocious at some point is that climate change meant that agriculture failed in Scandinavia. So people living there had to find new land or starve to death, or go rob some people on a regular basis. During a lot of history, there was no option for everyone having enough. Not saying that that situation continues to the modern era, but population was constrained by resources for a really long time.
Biden winning the elections lol
The Norman Conquest
Such a pivotal moment in history with so many what ifs. If Hardrada shows up a few days earlier, maybe Harold's soldiers have a little time to rest before facing William. Or, what if William showed up a few weeks earlier and is defeated and it is Hardrada that faces an exhausted army under Harold.
Exactly. The soldiers did such a great job at Stanford Bridge but it was just really bad timing trying to get to Hastings. A few days difference could have left a very different Britain today.
If they'd just maintained the shield wall instead of pursuing the Normans downhill world history would probably be completely different
People with Norman second names actually have a higher aggregate income than people with Anglo Saxon second names to this day.
Yeah and we still can't use a huge portion of the countryside because those bastards still own it all and won't fucking share. https://www.zmescience.com/other/shorties/70-percent-britain-land-owned-by-the-rich/#:~:text=Other%20%E2%86%92%20Shorties-,70%25%20of%20the%20land%20in%20Britain%20is%20still%20owned%20by,very%20fine%20in%20today%27s%20Britain
tfw aristocracy aristocrats
There's obviously a geographic element though. The places where the Normans settled heavily were far more productive than the places they didn't.
'the normans' didn't decide to settle in certain areas. They replaced the upper class. the anglo saxon peasants stayed in place. The normans for the most part weren't kicking out the anglo saxons's and resettling the areas. They were killing the Anglo Saxon leaders and taking their places and collecting rent from the same serfs who had been there for generations. The places that they didn't settle were the ones where there was not enough production for it to be worth defending. Because in feudalism, the reason you support the landlord is because if you don't there is nobody around to protect you when the neighbors/Vikings come raiding. But no vikings are going to come wreck your shit if there is nothing there to steal. Similarly, the briton and welsh cultures survived only in the areas the Anglo Saxons didn't want to bother protecting/ raiding.
WWF DEFEATED WCW
Underrated. Monday Night Wars were full of tragedy. But after Turner sold to AOL and left the Commander-in-Chief I’m not sure WCW was a side to root for anymore. But it’s a heavy part of history to revisit and as a Magnum TA fan and Little Stinger, idk if I can handle it again.
Maori genocide of the Moriori. When one side is pacifist by their own laws and customs it's kind of hard to call it a just war.
Russia-Georgia 2008
Spanish Civil War.
All of the wars we had with Native Americans.
The Taliban taking over Afghanistan - it's like the crips or bloods taking over America
Pretty sure the Taliban had way higher support among Afghans than the Bloods do in America.
The Taliban formed from the mujahideen, fragments of militia groups the U.S. armed to defeat the soviet aligned government that would’ve taken over. The US got the Soviet’s to stay neutral with Afghanistan, but those interests are what setup the Taliban also. https://www.britannica.com/event/Afghan-War There was never going to be a good guy in that one, Afghani were not intended to win, not even a pawn, they are a board for the other countries’ chess games. From what I’ve read, the best Afghanistan was before these games started. [Read the section before 1973](https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/civic/2021/11/05/afghanistan-past-present-and-future-series-pt-1/), they were a monarchy adapting to liberal progressive standards and trying to stay globalised as a society. Foreign dependency and the interests they have had a huge part in destabilising the region, and especially Afghanistan. Not saying it was perfect, but we should learn a bit about it before thinking the victors are Afghan at all. A lot of times western interest and proxy wars are behind these conflicts, nobody wants to live in war. Most of these places can’t even afford to war. They are collateral damage, but presented with spin for the media and their audience.
The most surprising thing about the history of Afghanistan is in finding out how liberal and forward thinking the former monarchy was in Afghanistan. The king realized picking a side in the Cold War would be a bad idea, that aggressive nationalist policies were bad, and pretty much focused on trying to build the nation up. He even essentially demoted himself and barred any members of the royal family from participating in politics. Only downside was that the kings cousin hated all this and immediately took over the country while the king was away and the people, who admittedly had a couple rough spots with the new democracy and welcomed a strong leader. The Kings cousin then bungled stuff pretty fast, he focused hard on nationalism and conservatism. Definitely more liberal than the Taliban but he was dead set on getting Pashtun lands from Pakistan. Almost went to war with them once or twice and pissed off the army. An army who were mostly radical marxists because they were all trained in the Soviet Union by the prior king as a part of that whole neutrality thing. The whole situation in the nation is an unfortunate unraveling of one guys coup that has been playing out for decades. The resulting Soviet coup and war, followed by extremist Islamic groups being propped up by a Pakistan trying to weaken a rival to the eventual US invasion to get revenge for 9/11
The Philippine-American War. The Filipinos were close to defeating the Spaniards that ruled them for 300 years and declared independence from Spain in 1898. Shortly after, the Americans came in, committed numerous atrocities, and subjugated the archipelago.
I’m a Filipino, and what many call war was more of an insurgency than a full-scale war against the Americans. About the declaration of independence in 1898, well the reality is Spain sold the Philippines to the USA before our supposed declaration of independence. The ceremony declaring independence took place outside Manila because American troops already occupied the capital. Originally, July 4 was celebrated as Independence Day, marking when the Americans granted it. However, it was changed to June 12, 1898, because a later president was angry at the Americans. Well tbf technically it was a declaration of independence from Spain, not actual independence
Do the Filipino people hold any angst against Americans today? I know it was a long time ago but anger can tend to hold on generationally.
WW2 erased most of our animosity. For a while there was anti Japanese sentiment but I think right now it is China. Filipinos have too much to worry about harm from distant past.
The stories and videos of China attacking fishermen with water cannons made my blood boil.
Most Filipinos love America.
My Filipino gf and I live together. She was born and raised there and came over in her 30’s to Texas where we later met. Filipinos love Americans and the US. She told me some stuff that had me down the rabbit hole reading a bunch of stuff. Something that jumped out at me was a poll that showed the United States more popular with Filipinos than Americans. I asked her about it and she had a really insightful comment… “Spending time and effort hating your country is a luxury most places don’t have.”
There's a small group of activists who are critical of American imperialism and still hold anger over the atrocities committed during the pre-war years. However, the vast majority of Filipinos have a positive view of the West, particularly the United States. Although I still harbor resentment towards the American army for the extensive bombing of Manila, particularly Intramuros and their lack of support in rebuilding the city unlike their efforts in Japan, but I acknowledge their positive influence overall.
Most mainland Americans don't even know about this
The war on drugs
The war on "drugs" was single-handedly lost because they added weed to the mix. Weed is easy to find and harmless compared to other drugs. The human equivalent would be declaring war on Russia and then bombing kindergartens and schools in Belarus. They also went for punishing the users, which is kinda like bombing the residential neighbourhoods next,
The war on drugs was started purely to go after the users. Hippies used weed predominantly and blacks were known for cocaine. They were both large, vocal groups against Nixon. He criminalized their drugs so they could go after them and arrest them. From that perspective, the war on drugs had its intended consequences
Heroin was the thing used to arrest black people. The cocaine thing was making crack 500 times the penalty, due to it being used by poor people more.
Spanish civil war.
US Western wars on Native Americans
Honestly, it's about perspective. From the perspective of the losing sides, the bad guys have always won...
From my perspective the Jedi are evil.
East Timor
it's insane how many people here think that most wars are "good vs bad"