Cambodian children and mother protesting in 1975 outside Los Angeles U.N. policies, for intervention in Cambodia to stop the nascent Khmer Rouge, an extreme communist dictatorship that killed 2.2 million people by the time it fell in 1979, about one out of every four Khmers.
Support for the Khmer Rouge was fed by Operation Menu, a covert illegal bombing of Eastern Cambodia by the Unites States of America during the Vietnam War, supposedly to wipe out Vietnamese resistance.
This image is of my friend’s mother, drop dead center, at age fifteen or sixteen. She was a refugee from just outside of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and had been lucky enough to leave before the Khmer Rouge came to power.
(also, if y’all see images on tumblr of people of color (there was one of a woman recently) standing in rice paddies with checkered bandanas on (especially red ones) holding rifles, that may be a Khmer Rouge pic. I know it may seem awesome to see a third-world woman looking militant, but you might wanna check the source just to be sure you aren’t glorifying murderous dictatorships.)
This breaks my heart, especially thinking back on my time in that incredible country. Most people I talked to really did see the U.S. as creating an unnecessary power vacuum that fed the Khmer Rouge rise to power.
(Source: rosas--sylvestres)
