Isn't Cambodia Near China?

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I often write, somewhat jokingly, about the paranoia that consumes the US capitalist class that the rest of the world is out to destroy us. I say jokingly as I usually include the African Bees scare that some young people might not know about as it was some years ago. The mass media had headlines about this invasion. These bees were bigger and no doubt blacker, being African,  than our native born bees, so naturally they were a threat to our way of life. Big, black, African, that’s enough to scare the US ruling class.

Naturally, this paranoia is used as a propaganda tool as well in order to keep the US masses in a state of fear all the time, a siege mentality similar to the Protestants in Northern Ireland and the Jews in Israel and whites in the US south and in general. But it is also real as US capitalism is in competition with all the advanced capitalist economies and the various formations nation states build to try to compete with its vast economic and military power that has dominated the world since the beginning of the last century.  The EU is one example and Asian bloc (Asean), Latin America and so on. This paranoia has increased since the collapse of Stalinism and the old nuclear powered Soviet Union which acted as a sort of brake on western imperialist expansion, creating a bi-polar world in which Stalinism and US imperialism co-existed to a great degree divvying up the global spoils and maintaining a relative stability.

US Imperialism and its allies wanted capitalism, not democratic socialist states, to replace Stalinism and did everything it could to ensure that with the help of the Vatican and the leaders of the workers organizations in the west. Unfortunately, what was preferred, weak, dependent capitalist states, dependent on the US in particular, somewhat like South Korea that isn’t even in control of its own military, didn’t quite play out. Instead, Russia, but even more so China, are threatening US imperialism’s dominance on the world stage, politically and economically. As part of what we now know as the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, globalization and the entering on to the world market hundreds of millions of workers in China in particular is causing great concern in Washington and the Pentagon.

The reality is that Capitalism is a ruthless competitive system; there is nothing nice about it. The two world wars were capitalist wars, wars of conquest for markets, raw materials, labor forces. The slaughter of some 3 million Vietnamese by US imperialism (a conflict that directly cost 67,000 American lives) was also a war for markets and profit making.

What prompted me to write about this is I see that the US is concerned that the Cambodian government is allowing China to use a naval base there. This is, “…. raising US fears of Beijing’s global ambitions.”, the Wall Street Journal reports.

How dare these Chinese doing such a thing. Why, it’s anti-American.

Where is the US?

But isn’t Cambodia in South East Asia? I think it is. It borders Vietnam to the east and Laos to the north and both border China. Not only that, the US invaded Cambodia and its neighbor Laos in 1970 and as Christopher Hitchens writes, “…without a declaration of war, a notification to Congress or a warning to civilians to evacuate.”  It is estimated that some 350,000 Laotians and 600,000 Cambodians died in US capitalism’s bombing of these two small countries. *

I wonder how the Cambodian and Laotian populations remember this.

That so many Americans are unaware of the role of their own government in these catastrophes blinds them to how so many people in the rest of the world views it. The US has some 800 bases and installations in the world, which is the reason we at home are seeing our wages, benefits, social services and infrastructure deteriorate. But Cambodia is in China’s back yard. The Persian gulf is in Iran’s back yard.

But this is what capitalism is. If you are the one with the big stick, the bully, you fear any competition. But all nation states, certainly those with the resources and size of China and to a lesser extent Russia and India, want control over their resources, the immediate sphere of influence, their economy and so on.

When a dominant world power begins to lose its influence and reach, it becomes more paranoid and ever more violent. That is even the case with smaller oppressive states like South Africa under direct Apartheid. Despite seeing the writing on the wall, the aggressor, rather than beating a hasty retreat or accepting the inevitable and responding passively, has that one last vicious strike at the upstart daring to remove the boot from the neck.

If we look at British colonialism in Kenya and how it responded to the resistance to its

rule there, it knew its time was done yet it ensured the resistance was punished heavily. The British response to the Mau Mau uprising, signifying the end of direct rule, in Africa was brutal, "Between 1953 and 1956 Britain sent over a thousand Kenyans to the gallows, often on trumped up or non-existent charges. Meanwhile 70,000 people were imprisoned in camps without trial for between two and six years."  (source)

In fact, like the US and its western allies today that refers to any force that resists imperial violence as terrorism, insurgents, enemy combatant, militants, anything but a resistance movement, the British called the Kenyan resistance a rebellion, a rebellion in their own country. The Mau Mau and the Kenyan opposition to British rule was a colonial war of liberation. I enjoyed and learned a lot from a book on the Kenyan war of Independence titled, Histories of the Hanged, it’s a good read.

The presence of nuclear weapons has undoubtedly been a deterrent to world war and instead we have seen endless regional wars and wars by great powers like the US against upstarts. The US war against the Afghani population has lasted 17 years. We should not lose track of the fact that up until 1999 every Taliban official was on the payroll of the US government. The conflict in Afghanistan will never end any more than the conflicts in the Middle East will. The struggle of the Irish to evict British occupation has been going on for centuries and the division of the country still exists today. Ireland, Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, Kashmir, Africa in crisis and the refugee situation including the economic refugees fleeing the legacy of US imperialism in Mexico and Central America; these problems are caused by capitalism, they cannot be eliminated by it, only exacerbated.

*Christopher Hitchens, TheTrial of Henry Kissinger