It would be a shame if war criminal Kissinger died in his bed, as my series of articles on the Vietnam War makes clear.
The US certainly did not support the Khmer Rouge , whose leaders got their political education from the French Communist Party in the 1930s and 1950s, during the genocide of 1975-79. US support for Cambodia started after the Vietnamese invaded. Classic enemy of my enemy is my friend--for now--cold war geopolitics. Once the cold war ended so did US support for the Khmer Rouge insurgency against the Vietnam-installed government.
Indonesia: The ethnic tensions that led to the massacre of 500000 mostly ethnic Chinese in Indonesia were home grown. Did the US support Suharto's coup against the crumbling Sukarno government in 1965? Certainly. So did Australia. Cold war geopolitics at work. Was the result better than a Maoist cultural revolution regime in power in Indonesia? Certainly. Was the Suharto regime a corrupt military mafia with a flag? Certainly. Another bad vs worse choice.
The other Indonesian case is US indifference during Indonesia's genocidal occupation of East Timor, treated with studious silence by most American media.
None of this nullifies one simple fact: informal American empire through alliance networks is far less bad than retrograde Bushido Japan's medieval violence and far more extractive, famine-yielding empire. That's the point of my list, which you've yet to respond to or even acknowledge that you didn't know about most of it before I sent it. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Both empires are amnesiac about their crimes. But in Japan there are no equivalents to the movies Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and Stanley Karnow's and Frances Fitzgerald's books about the Vietnam War. Therein lies the difference. The nationalist right in Japan silences such voices through assassination or intimidation (the assassination of the mayor of Nagasaki, for example). If you think Florida's censorship of real history is bad, go to Japan. I co-taught a US history course at Riga Business School with a Japanese professor living in Latvia and this is a constant topic of conversation--and why she feels like an internal exile in her native country.
