Kambodsja gjennomgikk 25 års fødselsveer

Det gamle kongeriket Kambodsja fikk gjennomgå 25 års fødselsveer før den egentlige oppbyggingen av landet i det hele tatt kunne påbegynnes.

1949. Kongedømmet Kambodsja ble en selvstendig stat innenfor den franske unionen.

1953. De pågående kampene mellom franskmenn og vietnamesere spredte seg inn i Kambodsja. Kambodsjansk gerilja begynte å delta i frigjøringskrigen mot franskmennene.

1954. Genève-konferansen satte stopp for krigen i Indo-Kina. Kampene avtok og franskmennene trakk seg tilbake.

1955. Kambodsja ble helt selvstendig. Kong Norodom Sihanouk frasa seg tittelen, men beholdt posten som statssjef. [..]

1969. General Lon Nol ble utnevnt til statsminister med vidtgående fullmakter.

1970. Fyrst Sihanouk ble styrtet ved et militærkupp ledet av Lon Nol. Statsministeren proklamerte republikk og utnevnte seg selv til marskalk. Sihanouk flyktet til Peking. USAs daværende president Richard Nixon tillot amerikanske og sør-vietnamesiske styrker å invadere Kambodsja i sin kamp mot FNL. I Peking dannet Sihanouk eksilregjeringen GRUNK.

1971. Den nasjonal frigjøringsfronten FUNK hadde stor fremgang og kontrollerte snart den største delen av landet.

1973. USAs mest intense bombing av Indo-Kina ble innledet mot FUNK-geriljaen. I august ble bombingen stanset av den amerikanske kongressen. I Kambodsja proklamerte Lon Nol unntakstilstand.

1974. FUNK rykket inn i den tidligere kambodsjanske hovedstaden Gudong. Byen ble imidlertid gjenerobret av regjeringsstyrkene, men da geriljaen innledet en kraftig offensiv ved årsskiftet, ble Lon Nol-regjeringen tvunget til å overgi den ene viktige stillingen etter den andre. USAs president Gerald Ford krevde ytterligere bevilgninger til Lon Nol-regimet, men fikk avslag av kongressen.  Dermed var også geriljaens seier et faktum.

- Det hendte 75

European communism was already bankrupt when the 1980’s began.  It was morally bankrupt, because everyone knew that something was horribly wrong, that even in “actually existing socialism” there wasn’t supposed to be all this corruption and poverty and lying.  And it was financially bankrupt, because the Soviet satellite states were dependent on subsidies from Moscow and loans from Western banks.

Their leaders were fools, and Gorbachev was the greatest fool of them all: He thought he could make communism work. That, if given a choice, the people would choose a more honest, idealistic form of communism.  He gave them that choice, and they made the wrong choice.

There was nothing new about the unrest that led to the final collapse.  Eastern Europeans had tried to get rid of the communists from the very beginning.  1953. 1956. 1968. What was new was that Gorbachev made a conscious decision not to interfere. Without outside force, the communists were too weak to survive.

I don’t believe the fall of European communism was inevitable.  Communism didn’t work and it couldn’t work, in either the totalitarian or the “human face” variant, but it doesn’t work in North Korea either, and Kim Jong-Il is still in power.  The Party had all the guns.  They could have easily massacred the first protesters, as China did.

Perhaps they didn’t want to abandon the last remains of the illusion that they were the people’s vanguard, given power and legitimacy through people’s revolutions. But the only people’s revolutions in Eastern Europe were the ones that finally kicked them out.

From the late 1920′s to the early 1940′s, Walt Disney did something revolutionary every other year or so.  Sound.  Color.  Feature films.  Stereo.  Characters you could empathize with.  People would watch The Skeleton Dance (1929) or Three Little Pigs (1933) and have their minds blown.

Disney’s ambitions were limitless, and for a few short years after Snow White (1937), his studio was the most creative place on earth, or at least in Hollywood.  Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Dumbo was artistic history.  Disney knew it, viewers knew it, everyone knew it.

Two wars ended the golden age.  One with the Axis powers, which made Disney almost a branch of the government, and another with the unions, whose 1941 strike permanently destroyed the trust and shared sense of mission that made the earlier work possible.  Young Walt was a cult leader, demanding but inspiring.  Old Walt was Uncle Scrooge, an anti-communist who would randomly fire people just to keep everyone on their toes.

Even in the 40′s, Disney did weird and interesting things, such as Victory Through Air Power, but when they returned to real features in 1950, it was not as perfectionists on a holy mission, but as a corporation doing what the public expected of it.

Walt’s attention had shifted elsewhere, to television, and to Disneyland.  Disneyland was not a merchandising opportunity, but a continuation of his vision from the earlier years.  One last holy mission, before he ascended in 1966, and became a secular god – immortal and a little bit frightening.  The god of human emotions, and of an eerily close substitute.

When the Algerian rebellion started in 1954, Algeria had a population of 1 million Europeans, known as the pied-noirs.  France thought of Algeria as France, and the pied-noirs thought of it as home.  To lose it was inconceivable.

The war started because France refused to grant the Algerians political rights.  Even assimilated Algerians were distrusted by the French, who feared the power of the Muslim hordes.

Algerians formed the FLN, which used a combination of guerilla and terrorist tactics.  Their terrorist activity reached a peak in 1957 with the Battle of Algiers, which resulted in a fantastic movie but was a strategic mistake.

Their failure to defeat the FLN caused the fall of multiple governments, and the French political and military elite turned in despair to Charles de Gaulle, who agreed to take over if he could write a new constitution.  This created the Fifth Republic, which is still in place.

His backers expected de Gaulle to continue the war, but de Gaulle didn’t take orders from anyone.  When he began to hint that France would have to let Algeria go, the army attempted a coup in 1961, which failed. Segments of the army and the pied-noirs formed a terrorist organization of their own, the OAS, whose pointless, brutal terrorist campaign alienated the French public, and made it impossible for the pied-noirs to remain after independence.

The second worst outcome of conflict, after genocide, is mass migration, and this is what happened to the pied-noirs after Algeria became independent in 1962: They all emigrated, mostly to France, where they were assimilated.