Oh boy howdy, this is a long one.
Ok, so this has been brewing for a while, and I think it's more or less crystalized into a proper, if rambling, argument so here goes.
This example was the incitement of this argument, but the problem is really much bigger than just this. So . . .
The United States did not commit the Cambodian Genocide. The United States is not responsible for the Cambodian Genocide.
Pol Pot, and the Khmer Rouge he commanded, were responsible for the conception, planning, and execution of the Cambodian Genocide. Nobody was twisting their arm. No one was ordering them around. They, independently, made the incomprehensibly evil choice to commit genocide, and the ultimate responsibility for that genocide lies on their shoulders alone.
The United States was responsible for an illegal (both internationally and domestically) and grossly immoral bombing campaign that killed an unconscionable number of Cambodian civilians, and directly contributed to destabilizing Cambodia and driving recruitment for the Khmer Rouge. The United States is partially responsible for fueling the Khmer Rouge's conquest of Cambodia.
But the United States is not responsible for the Cambodian Genocide, and anyone saying otherwise is engaging in genocide denialism and absolving by omission the true perpetrators of one of the most brutal and comprehensive genocides in human history.
The men who ordered the bombing of Cambodia were criminals. Their actions are, to me, incomprehensibly immoral. And yet the decision to commit genocide, especially to commit it in the most brutal and actively tortuous ways, ways that make mass rape and gas chambers seem tame (I am not fucking kidding DO NOT LOOK UP THE DETAILS OF THE CAMBODIAN GENOCIDE unless you are prepared to have a really bad day), is a decision that would be as alien to those men as their decisions are to me. For a human being to do such a thing . . . responsibility for that kind of act cannot be transferred lightly.
And to those who hold out and maintain that creating the conditions that allowed the Khmer Rouge to commit genocide gives the United States primary responsibility for the genocide, I'll note that none of you have ever blamed Osama bin Laden for the Iraq War.
And while we're at it . . .
If we do want to talk about international responsibility for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and/or the Cambodian Genocide, we should probably start with, you know, the nations that funded, supplied, armed, and militarily assisted the Khmer Rouge's insurgency.
Pol Pot didn't conquer Cambodia with American weapons. He conquered Cambodia with Soviet, Chinese, and North Vietnamese weapons. Between 40,000 and 60,000 Viet Cong fighters directly engaged in military action against the Sihanouk and Lon Nol governments (not to imply that either were anything other than thug rule of different shades) in alliance with the Khmer Rouge. If we're going to point fingers at the international community, I'm afraid the US doesn't even podium at this competition.
To reiterate, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were solely responsible for the Cambodian Genocide. Not the United States, not the Soviet Union, not China, not Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge, and the Khmer Rouge alone. You can litigate responsibility for who helped the Khmer Rouge rise to power, and YOU CAN AND SHOULD acknowledge American responsibility for our bombing campaigns in Cambodia (which has left the country littered with unexploded bombs that regularly kill random unfortunate civilians btw). But for years and years I have seen American bombing seated center stage while never once has the responsibility of Pol Pot's actual military allies been mentioned or even alluded to.
And this extends far beyond Cambodia. The 'America bad' crowd consistently overstate the degree of American involvement in our sordid interventionist history.
The United States provided limited support for the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, and deliberately and directly tried to destabilize the Allende regime in years prior, but it was Augusto Pinochet and his fellow Chilean Army officers who independently planned the coup because they wanted to, and because it furthered their own political aims, and they would have attempted such a coup without any American intervention, if or when the proper circumstances presented themselves.
The United States almost certainly facilitated the supplying of Saddam Hussein with dual-use chemical precursors to chemical weapons under the guise of agricultural aid, which helped prop up Ba'athist Iraq's existing chemical weapons program. The United States was attempting to maintain Iraq's ability to engage in chemical warfare against Iran in the ongoing Iran-Iraq War.
Subsequently, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons to carry out the genocidal Halabja Massacre, as well as in the wider genocidal Anfal Campaign. It is basically unconfirmable, but likely, that some of the chemical weapons used in these attacks were created from US-supplied chemical precursors. The United States did knowingly lie and blame Iran for these massacres to protect Iraq and hobble Iran on the international stage. But it was Saddam Hussein, and Saddam Hussein alone, that committed these genocides.
Small diversion, but Saddam Hussein also carried out a genocide of the Marsh Arabs (despite the name, Marsh Arabs are ethnographically and ethnically distinct from Arabs) by draining the Mesopotamian Marshes (thus making this an ecocide as well as a genocide), forcing the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Marsh Arabs from their indigenous homeland. For those in the 'America bad' camp who still lionize Saddam Hussein and violent, genocidal dictators like him just because of their opposition to the United States, fuck you.
Real responsibility . . .
None of this is intended to minimize the United States' involvement in these and other horrible events, because it's not minimization to correctly characterize the nature of US involvement in them. It's being historically accurate. We can do that and acknowledge the things America is directly responsible for.
The United States was directly responsible for the 1915 invasion and subsequent occupation of Haiti until 1934 by US military forces under direct orders from Woodrow Fucking Wilson, which resulted in thousands of Haitian deaths and likely strongly contributed to the ascension of Papa Doc to power two decades later.
The United States was directly responsible for atrocities committed by United States forces in Vietnam, including massacres and bombing of civilians and the ecological devastation of enormous parts of the country with extremely carcinogenic pesticides that continue to cause cancer and birth defects in Vietnam today at a nearly incomprehensible rate.
And finally, the United States is and was directly responsible for our support for brutal regimes across the world, regardless of whether we were directly responsible for the crimes perpetrated in the affected nation.
That the United States is or is not directly involved in a particular incident has no bearing on how seriously our actions should be taken. To knowingly support and defend brutal dictatorial regimes is just as immoral as directly perpetrating the crimes of those regimes.
But I rarely have I seen a mention of Pinochet or Cambodia that doesn't center the United States' involvement, which flattens the crimes that took place and reduces them to rhetorical ammunition to use against America.
If your accounting of these events talks more about America's role than the actions of the perpetrators, then you aren't telling the story of these events properly. If one is telling these stories properly and centering the victims and their experiences, the perpetrators are impossible to miss because they are in the fucking room. America's role in these events must be included in a full retelling. It should have its own dedicated chapter or two or the story isn't complete. But it shouldn't be the whole damn book.
The Sorry State of Leftism
There is an infuriating kind of infantilization inherent to this kind of thinking. It is partially a result of the moralization of oppressor-oppressed dynamics where evil is solely the product of the imagined cohesive, organized oppressive 'system', and that implies or outright states that without the interference of the 'American empire' oppression, state violence, racial strife, indigeneity conflicts, and economic exploitation will greatly diminish or outright cease to exist. It denies entire races and ethnicities their fundamental humanity, which includes their extremely human ability to commit atrocities without direction from an outside force.
The United States is not an incorporeal devil planting foul thoughts into the minds of dictators and plotters. Far more often than not, the United States encourages and supports what is already there. American involvement in regime change and national destabilization in Latin America should be a topic of great discussion, but far too often these discussions omit the actual perpetrators of the crimes attributed to the United States, nor acknowledge that many of these coups and massacres and genocides around the world probably would have happened whether the United States was involved or not.
There is in addition a profound double-standard to which the United States (and Israel) is held; not one where the United States is extraordinarily and unfairly maligned, but one where the opponents of the United States are absolved, either by trivialization, omission, denialism, or apologism, of their actions, systemic inequalities, and unjust histories.
Frequently is the real, oppressive, colonial history of the United States with regard to native American Indians spoken of. Yet rarely do I see the same standard applied elsewhere.
Have you ever wondered why there are so many ethnic minorities in Russia, or in China? Did you know that, on the whole, minority communities in Russia and China are poorer and less developed than those of the majority ethic group? Have you ever noticed that many of the neighbors of both nations are both historically and currently extremely wary of them?
Have you ever wondered how the world's four largest countries, Russia, Canada, the United States, and China, all got that big? Could there, perhaps, be something they have in common?
Isn't it odd that Arab culture and ethnicity, originating from one little peninsula in the Middle East, achieved hegemony over more than a dozen states as distant as Morocco and Indonesia? I guess it's only cultural genocide when white people do it.
American military support for Israel become a global cause célèbre, yet I have not seen mention Saudi Arabia's ongoing war in Yemen outside of token lists of "Eyes on . . . so and so" in years.
As I am writing, Greta Thunberg's little PR stunt with her dumb empty aid yacht is front and center on every corner of this accursed website, and yet not once in the year-and-a-half since October 7 have I seen mention of the years-long ongoing Saudi blockade of Yemen. Not. Fucking. Once.
So many here cheer on Russia and call Ukrainians Nazis. They ignore or, worse, deny the Uyghur genocide because it is inconvenient for their anti-American agenda. They hyper-focus on the violence Israel is committing in Gaza, and ignore every other brutal or genocidal conflict on the planet except to virtue-signal their moral correctitude by reblogging meaningless lists of who to 'keep your eyes on' compiled by people who obviously know fuck-all about the actual conflicts they list except that they are useful for their own projection of personal righteousness.
The historical imperialism of the Soviet Union is ignored because it is inconvenient to the historical narrative of 'America bad'. The current imperialism of China and Russia are ignored because it is inconvenient to the current narrative of 'America bad'.
Long lists of books on the history of Israel and Palestine are presented everywhere as essential reading, but memory of the crimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the twin perpetrators of the two largest sets of atrocities and genocides in human fucking history which continue to have lasting repercussions on the contemporary world are not considered important. The crimes of the Soviet Union, a strong contender for a not-so-distant silver medal in that competition, are not merely ignored, but often denied.
Hamas, a brutal regime that executes queer people, murders political opponents and journalists, commits war crimes and terror attacks on civilians, deprives the people it rules over of liberty, steals aid from the mouths of Palestinian children, and commits all manner of other horrors universal among authoritarian regimes against the people of Palestine is hailed as a revolutionary liberator. Fuck. Off.
I am not saying and will never say that we shouldn't talk about America's very real crimes. Concerning our initial example, I think the story of the US bombing campaign in Cambodia, and Indochina more broadly, deserves far more attention than it currently gets. I think especially that comparatively much is said but not much is done. If I were president, one of the many things I would do would be to send over the US army or UN peacekeepers or whoever the fuck I can get and have them doing nothing but bomb disposal for the next half-century.
The point of this post is not to downplay American crimes, nor is it an attempt at whataboutism. It is to hopefully push back a bit of the blindness brought on by this 'America bad' obsession and get more people to acknowledge the reality of our history, and perhaps open some people's perspectives a little bit to get them to subject America's opponents to a great deal more scrutiny. Us-vs-them can be hard to fully overcome. I sure as hell haven't, but I like to think I'm making progress.
The potential to create and maintain oppressive systems, commit genocide, conduct imperialism, obliterate or assimilate foreign cultures, exploit the labor of others, excuse systemic and literal violence for the sake of personal profit, is universal. We are all capable of it; many nations and peoples, around the world and throughout all of human history, have done so.
Stop infantilizing and sanitizing the oppressed peoples of the world. As humans they are just as capable of committing all of the evils of the world as today's oppressors. By that same token, they are also capable of joining hands with those of us who are fighting for a better world for all people, without exception.
In plain English:
America did bad things in Cambodia, but the genocide was Pol Pot’s doing.
Blame the killers, not just America.
Everyone can do good or evil—not just Americans.