It was indeed a fine evening, packed to the rafters. Nice to put faces to a bunch of folks I hadn't metandyinasia wrote:A good evening and great presentation - here are some of his soundbites in tweets
https://storify.com/john_weeks/book-lau ... y-pingback
For those of you with less-refined tastes and are always asking where to find clever birds, the place with packed with hot Khmer and Barang totty. Get cultured up, geezers!
Now, how to find the time to read the damn thing????
H*n S*n's Cambodia
Don't blame me I voted for Sanders
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An extensive article by Strangio that starts with repeating elements of the book but goes on to provide an update of sorts.
http://cambodialpj.org/article/cambodia ... an-rights/
http://cambodialpj.org/article/cambodia ... an-rights/
I came, I argued, I'm out
andyinasia wrote:An extensive article by Strangio that starts with repeating elements of the book but goes on to provide an update of sorts.
http://cambodialpj.org/article/cambodia ... an-rights/
I must say he does seem to have it spot on apart from the world riots.In 1989, Francis Fukuyama had famously proclaimed the “end of history,” arguing that communism’s collapse heralded “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
For Hun Sen, who came of political age during this decade of Cold War double standards, all this imparted a pointed lesson: when superpowers invoke high-minded principles like democracy or justice or universal rights, they are often a cover for political interests. Powerful states such as China, the US, and the Soviet Union had stoked the Cambodian conflict for decades in pursuit of wider strategic objectives; at Paris, they suddenly decided that peace should prevail. Hun Sen and his government had different ideas. They saw no reason to give up power just because the “international community” demanded it. This was the same “international community,” after all, that had helped keep Pol Pot’s men in the UN since 1979. As a result, the CPP saw the Paris Agreements and the coming of democratic elections not as an end to the civil war and a chance for democratic government, but as a new and more sophisticated way of unseating it from power. The NGOs, newspapers and civil society groups that sprung up under UNTAC’s protective umbrella were not the advance guard of a new global order; they were the fifth column of a hostile West. The end of the Cold War and the political transition it heralded was not a revolutionary change; it was an obstacle to be overcome.
Hun Sen’s particular political genius was to see that by aping the language of the new world order, and by permitting a limited degree of pluralism, his party could navigate the period of pluralism and successfully maintain its grip on power. In the late 1980s, as the prospects for peace improved, he emerged as a key proponent of cosmetic reform — of exchanging of a “red” shirt for a “blue” one.[18] Between 1989 and 1991, his party jettisoned communism, released political prisoners, abolished the death penalty, reinstated private property rights, committed itself to “pluralism,” and redefined itself as a party of Buddhist-inflected populists: the “Cambodian People’s Party.” The old posters of Lenin and Marx came down. The party’s socialist insignia was thrown out in favor of a devada, a Buddhist angel, sprinkling divine blessings. Party leaders soon began patronizing temples and taking part in traditional religious ceremonies, as the old monarchs had once done.[19] Despite excoriating Prince Sihanouk for years as a “feudal reactionary,” the party positioned itself as the heir and “younger brother” of his royalist regime of the 1950s and 1960s.[20] In due course, the party — and Hun Sen himself — had undergone a thorough rebranding.
K440 : Lucky cheese for the gentry; poultry and death for the peasants.
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."
- ali baba
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I don't think this book is good value for money. I'm half way through and most of the content I am already familiar with. The few stories and details that are new to me I could have read for free on The Phnom Penh Post's website where Strangio used to work.
It's a good book, just overpriced.
It's a good book, just overpriced.
C'mere c'meye
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An academic I know with a research background in Khmer politics is critical of some of the sweeping statements this book contains. Some of his associates with a deeper understanding of the recent history of this country are also less than blown away by it.
Personally haven't read it and can only pass on hearsay.
Personally haven't read it and can only pass on hearsay.
Which is less than enlightening absent any specifics. It's a reporter's view, not an insider's, and I think quite good for what it is.Just Robbed wrote:An academic I know with a research background in Khmer politics is critical of some of the sweeping statements this book contains. Some of his associates with a deeper understanding of the recent history of this country are also less than blown away by it.
Personally haven't read it and can only pass on hearsay.
Don't blame me I voted for Sanders
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Agreed. And Ali B, I'd also say that no one piece of evidence he gives blows me away and something I never knew, but he put the whole tapestry together in a way that clarifies the whole picture. I also baulked at the price, but it's the first new book I've bought legally in years and I'm glad I paid the money.jm wrote:Which is less than enlightening absent any specifics. It's a reporter's view, not an insider's, and I think quite good for what it is.Just Robbed wrote:An academic I know with a research background in Khmer politics is critical of some of the sweeping statements this book contains. Some of his associates with a deeper understanding of the recent history of this country are also less than blown away by it.
Personally haven't read it and can only pass on hearsay.
I came, I argued, I'm out
Could just have consulted ricecakes before buying, next time you know who to askali baba wrote:It's a good book, just overpriced.
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Well that's alright then so long as people are aware of what they're reading ain't necessarily the true story.
Ah, so it's little more than journalistic puffery then?jm wrote:
Which is less than enlightening absent any specifics. It's a reporter's view, not an insider's, and I think quite good for what it is.
Well that's alright then so long as people are aware of what they're reading ain't necessarily the true story.
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Huh? There are journalists and then there are "journalists". Don't tar them all with the same brush.Just Robbed wrote:]Ah, so it's little more than journalistic puffery then?jm wrote:
Which is less than enlightening absent any specifics. It's a reporter's view, not an insider's, and I think quite good for what it is.
Well that's alright then so long as people are aware of what they're reading ain't necessarily the true story.
I came, I argued, I'm out
It would be great if you could ask your academic friend for a couple of examples so we could discuss them on here?Just Robbed wrote:An academic I know with a research background in Khmer politics is critical of some of the sweeping statements this book contains. Some of his associates with a deeper understanding of the recent history of this country are also less than blown away by it.
Personally haven't read it and can only pass on hearsay.
K440 : Lucky cheese for the gentry; poultry and death for the peasants.
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."
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I don't see why, you'd just miss the point anyway.SCC wrote:It would be great if you could ask your academic friend for a couple of examples so we could discuss them on here?Just Robbed wrote:An academic I know with a research background in Khmer politics is critical of some of the sweeping statements this book contains. Some of his associates with a deeper understanding of the recent history of this country are also less than blown away by it.
Personally haven't read it and can only pass on hearsay.
Romantic Cambodia is dead and gone. It's with McKinley in the grave.
page 237: "At the crux of the dispute were widely divergent conceptions of justice—of why the tribunal was set up and what it aimed to achieve. The international courts that had been set up after the Cold War to try the perpetrators of atrocities committed in places like Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia all blended justice and politics in sometimes uncomfortable measures.
But the Cambodia tribunal stood apart as a product of pure political expediency. Its fraught and tangled history represented in concentrated miniature the fraught and tangled relationship between Cambodia and the “international community.” Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal began in politics. In all likelihood that’s also where it would end."
Hun Sen's Cambodia by Sebastian Strangio published by Yale Press 2014
Relax! It's only politics.
You can have your passport back now Seb.
But the Cambodia tribunal stood apart as a product of pure political expediency. Its fraught and tangled history represented in concentrated miniature the fraught and tangled relationship between Cambodia and the “international community.” Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal began in politics. In all likelihood that’s also where it would end."
Hun Sen's Cambodia by Sebastian Strangio published by Yale Press 2014
Relax! It's only politics.
You can have your passport back now Seb.
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Read some of it, and to be honest, I don't think most of the things people are accused of stand out any more than some of the acts perpetrated by US soldiers in Vietnam or Thai soldiers in Myanmar, or in many other war zones in the world.
ירי ילדים והפצצת אזרחים דורש אומץ, כמו גם הטרדה מינית של עובדי ההוראה.
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