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Originally Posted by jviehe
Yes, they would probably have still existed.
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No, I don't think so. Remember what they were -- the words "authoritarian and abusive practices" don't even begin to encompass the reality. You used the words "the killing fields" in the title to this thread, but do you really understand what those words mean, and what they apply to? Understand, this is not a Vietnamese thing, nor is it typical of Communist or fascist or any other sort of authoritarian regime; this happened ONLY in Cambodia.
Here, read up:
The Killing Fields - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Communist Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979. Estimates of the number of dead (execution, disease and starvation together) range from 1.4 to 2.2 million out of a population of around 7 million.
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That's between 20% and 30% of the entire population! If that happened in America, it would mean between
60 million and 90 million killed! That's not just horrible, it's almost
unimaginably horrible! That the Vietnamese invaded and toppled the regime to stop the slaughter shows clearly enough that they viewed it with horror, too.
Now think for a moment about just what kind of situation a country has to be in to allow monsters like that to come to power. This can
only happen as a result of a war, because only in the kind of national emergency war provides are people willing to follow extremists.
The Khmer Rouge would never have come to power if the U.S. had not gone to war in Vietnam, because Cambodia would have been too much at peace to follow crazies like that.