<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt;color:#000000;"><DIV><SPAN class=dropcap>P</SPAN>HILOSOPHER and linguist Noam Chomsky says the United States owes Cambodia not only an apology but massive reparations for the B-52 bombing campaign called Operation Menu that killed up to a million people.<BR><BR>The campaign lasted from March 18, 1969, to May 26, 1970, destroyed an estimated 1,000 towns and villages, displaced 2 million people and, Chomsky says, and helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power.<BR><BR>Chomsky’s comments come after the US last week ruled out a plea from Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to forgive a US$317 million debt to the US accrued by the Lon Nol regime during the 1970s. .....</DIV>
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<DIV><STRONG>In your reading of history, why do leaders of states go so terribly wrong as to slaughter anyone who had ever been to school or who wore glasses? Can you imagine the intellectual or emotional basis for how perpetrators of mass killings are able to blithely live with themselves as instruments of mass killing?</STRONG></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><BR></STRONG>It’s a good question. We can also ask similar questions about our own society, which we should be able to understand better. Just keep to Cambodia. The intense bombing began under President Nixon’s orders, which Kissinger loyally transmitted to the US military with these words: “Massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. <STRONG>Anything that flies on anything that moves</STRONG>.” That’s the kind of call for genocide that one rarely finds in the archival record of any state. The statement was published in The New York Times, and there was no reaction among its mostly liberal intellectual readers, few of whom even remember it. <BR><BR></DIV>
<DIV><A href="http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2010100543793/National-news/noam-chomsky-maintains-the-rage.html">http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2010100543793/National-news/noam-chomsky-maintains-the-rage.html</A></DIV></div><br>
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