How is the war happen?

What is war?
by Harry Browne
The politicians' stirring phrases are meant to keep our eyes averted from the reality of war -- to make us imagine heroic young men marching in parades, winning glorious battles, and bringing peace and democracy to the world.
But war is something quite different from that.
It is your children or your grandchildren dying before they're even fully adults, or being maimed or mentally scarred for life. It is your brothers and sisters being taught to kill other people -- and to hate people who are just like themselves and who don't want to kill anyone either. It is your children seeing their buddies' limbs blown off their bodies.
It is hundreds of thousands of human beings dying years before their time. It is millions of people separated forever from the ones they loved.
It is the destruction of homes for which people worked for decades. It is the end of careers that meant as much to others as your career means to you.
It is the imposition of heavy taxes on you and on other Americans and on people in other countries -- taxes that remain long after the war is over. It is the suppression of free speech and the jailing of people who criticize the government.
It is the imposition of slavery by forcing young men to serve in the military.
It is goading the public to hate foreign people and races -- whether Arabs or Japanese or Cubans. It is numbing our sensibilities to cruelties inflicted on foreigners.
It is cheering at the news of foreign pilots killed in their planes, of young men blown to bits while trapped inside tanks, of sailors drowned at sea.
Other tragedies inevitably trail in the wake of war. Politicians lie even more than usual. Secrecy and cover-ups become the rule rather than the exception. The press becomes even less reliable.
War is genocide, torture, cruelty, propaganda, dishonesty, and slavery.
War is the worst obscenity government can inflict upon its subjects. It makes every other political crime -- corruption, bribery, favoritism, vote-buying, graft, dishonesty -- seem petty.
Government's Role
If government has a role to play in foreign affairs, it isn't to win wars, to assure that the right people run foreign countries, to protect innocent foreigners from guilty aggressors, or to make the world safe for democracy -- or even a safer place at all.
If government has a role, it can be only to keep us out of wars -- to make sure no one will ever attack us, to make certain you can live your life in peace, to assure you the freedom to ignore who is right and who is wrong in foreign conflicts.
The only reason for military power is to discourage attackers, and -- if they come anyway -- to repel them at our borders. Such things as stationing troops in far-off lands, meddling in foreign disputes, and sending our children to foreign countries as "peacekeepers" only encourage war.
To make America safer and to assure that we stay at peace, we don't need to put more weapons in the hands of government employees, or to reform military purchasing methods, or to make more treaties with other governments, or to increase the military budget.
In fact, we need just the opposite of these things. We need to make it as hard as possible for politicians to involve us in war. And we need to create a defense system that relies as little as possible on the normal workings of government.

The Killing Fields

“The dead bodies of men will lie like refuse on the open field, like cut grain
behind the reaper, with no one to gather them” Jeremiah 9:22
It was estimated that out of the population of 7 million Cambodians,2 million died from execution and starvation in the 1970’s. The fall of Cambodia, with the capture of the capital city of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975 by the Khmer Rouge Communist, led by the ruthless dictator Pol Pot, finally ended the cruel five-years of civil war. But contrary to what the celebrating crowds on the street of Phnom Penh had hoped for that April morning, it was far from the end of Cambodia’s suffering.
It was a revolution so horrific, so inhumane, and so radical. The cost of human lives is incalculable resulting in a devastated nation of with by and large surviving widows, orphans and primarily farmers to rebuild the nation. The long-term physical, emotional and spiritual ravages that laid waste on an entire generation will never be comprehended.

In April 17, 1975, the Communist party marched into Phnom Penh victoriously with tanks and armed soldiers. Two hours later, Communist soldiers spread throughout every street of the city, cruelly forcing two million civilians to abandon their homes and flee to villages; they used the excuse that the American B52 Bombers were going to bomb the city. Those who hesitated to abandon their homes were shot and in two weeks the city was left empty.

For four years every business closed, the monetary system was destroyed. The Communist announced everywhere that all soldiers, government officials, doctors, professors, teachers, lawyers, high school and college students as well as business men, should register to return to the city so they could work for the new Communist government and those who believed their lie and identified themselves were carried off in trucks and were all killed, leaving behind thousands of widows and children who gradually died from illness and starvation.

Everyone became slave workers in the rice fields and on farms. The Communist gave only 3 days off a year to celebrate the Communist Victory Day. The policy of Communist is: No Work, No Food. Sick people were considered unproductive parasites. The penalty for fornication, adultery, divorce and disobedience of any of the Communist’s orders was death.

Children were separated from parents to be brainwashed. Young people were sent to Youth Brigade to be disciplined to do hard labor work. All freedom was lost. Life was considered the property of the Communist Party. They decide how long each person should live and what they should eat, where they should go, who they should marry, etc.
Survival through 4 years of hunger caused the break down of mental and physical health. People ate anything that they could swallow. At that point, everyone’s focus in life changed from “how could I have a better life on earth” to “how can I have enough food to survive”. Since no doctors and medications were available, learning to use natural herbs to treat sickness was not an option. Many preferred death to the sufferings that seemed to have no end……..

However, contrary to the thoughts of the afflicted, it did have an end. The brief summary of the closing stages of Cambodia’s horrendous past is as follows

In 1979, The Vietnamese Communist party invaded Cambodia and took control of Cambodia for 10 years; millions of survivors returned to Phnom Penh and thousands of people escaped across the Thai border to refugee camps.

In 1991, Paris Peace Accords. The United Nation had brought the 4 fighting factions together to talk about peace which set up the framework for the 1993 elections.

Prime Minister Hun Sen was re-elected in 1998 and in 2003. Praise God that Hun Sen continues to give religious freedom to Cambodia.

Khmer Rouge tribunal holds town hall meeting

Officials and judges from the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal for former members of the Khmer Rouge traveled to one of the disposed regime’s villages to hold a town hall meeting for local residents. Five senior members of the Khmer Rouge were arrested in 2007 and charged with a variety of atrocities, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. It’s estimated than nearly 2 million people died in a quasi-eugenics campaign backed by the Khmer Regime to form an ultra-communist agrarian utopia through forced labor camps.

The senior members included 66-year old “Duch”, a former math teacher who lead the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, or S-21, where more than 14,000 people were tortured under his strict authority.

“Justice is not only for the victims, but also for those who have been charged. For truth to be found, your participation is needed,” said Cambodian tribunal judge, You Bunleng.

Villagers sat on a tile floor thumbing through a brochure titled “An Introduction to the Trial of Khmer Rouge Leaders” whose cover depicted villagers in the 1980s discovering the skulls of victims.

“I can’t read,” said one 50-year-old woman. “But this picture shows the killing during the Khmer Rouge era.”

The audience also watched a 25-minute film explaining how the tribunal process works.

Several members of the audience expressed outrage of the alleged unbalanced portrayal of the Khmer Rouge as the sole party responsible for the millions of deaths in Cambodia. The United States heavily bombarded Cambodia during the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia after toppling the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.
“The Khmer Rouge is the victim,” one man declared to thunderous applause.
You know what? Good for him! Last year, this tribunal was on the verge of collapse. I remember studying this one in grad school and there was a boat load of criticism heaped on the tribunal’s hybrid system of justice for allowing undue Khmer Rouge sympathy to influence the legislative outlines of the tribunal. It’s refreshing to see such a transparent, grass-roots system emerging out of this one. It’s frustrating to see the opaque trials, such as the Iraqi Tribunal and some of the more sterile prosecutions, like the Yugoslavian examinations, take place without this sort of community town-hall effort. The tribunal examining Liberian President Charles Taylor is okay at this too. In that system, the heavy-hitters are being prosecuted in a hybrid system seated at the Hague because the domestic systems simply can’t handle that level of examination for several reasons. I’m a big fan of this bubble-up type of system … it seems to be helping things along in Iraq for whatever that’s worth. It’s striking how many lessons the Big Bad West can learn from countries typically seen as bass-ackwards. Let’s hope the Khmer Rouge system keeps this momentum up, albeit 30 some years after the atrocities were committed.

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