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A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives
Author: Michael H. Hunt (Editor)
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publishing Date: January 21, 2010
Paperback: 256 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0807859915
ISBN-13: 978-0807859919
Format: Kindle Edition, Hardcover, Paperback
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Book Description
An essential new resource for students and teachers of the Vietnam War, this concise collection of primary sources opens a valuable window on an extraordinarily complex conflict.

The materials gathered here, from both the American and Vietnamese sides, remind readers that the conflict touched the lives of many people in a wide range of social and political situations and spanned a good deal more time than the decade of direct U.S. combat. Indeed, the U.S. war was but one phase in a string of conflicts that varied significantly in character and geography. Michael Hunt brings together the views of the conflict's disparate players--from Communist leaders, Vietnamese peasants, Saigon loyalists, and North Vietnamese soldiers to U.S. policymakers, soldiers, and critics of the war. By allowing the participants to speak, this volume encourages readers to formulate their own historically grounded understanding of a still controversial struggle.

A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives

By Admin | Tuesday, December 27, 2011
The Killing of Cambodia: Geography, Genocide and the Unmaking of Space
Author: James A. Tyner
Publisher: Ashgate
Publishing Date: July 29, 2008
Hardcover: 228 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0754670961
ISBN-13: 978-0754670964
Format: Hardcover
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Book Description
Between 1975 and 1978, the Khmer Rouge carried out genocide in Cambodia unparalleled in modern history. Approximately 2 million died - almost one quarter of the population. Taking an explicitly geographical approach, and a starting point that 'geo-graphy' concerns the writing of space, this book suggests that the Khmer Rouge's activities not only led to genocide, but terracide - the erasure of space.In the Cambodia of 1975, the landscape would reveal vestiges of an indigenous precolonial Khmer society, a French colonialism and American intervention. The Khmer Rouge, however, were not content with retaining the past inscriptions of previous modes of production and spatial practices. Instead, they attempted to erase time and space to create their own utopian vision of a communal society. The Khmer Rouge's erasing and reshaping of space was only a part of a consistent ignorance, neglect and sacrifice of Cambodia and its people - each previous foreign influence also is seen to have attempted not only to rewrite history, but reproduce geography.While focussing on Cambodia, the book provides a clearer geographic understanding to genocide in general and insights into the importance of spatial factors in geopolitical conflict.

The Killing of Cambodia: Geography, Genocide and the Unmaking of Space

By Admin |
Getting Away With Genocide: Cambodia's Long Struggle Against the Khmer Rouge
Author: Tom Fawthrop, Helen Jarvis
Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Pluto Press (October 12, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0745320279
ISBN-13: 978-0745320274
Format: Hardcover, Paperback
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Book Description
This book covers the history of Cambodia since 1979 and the various attempts by the US and China to stop the Cambodian people from bringing the Khmer Rouge to justice. After Vietnam ousted the hated Khmer Rouge regime, much of the evidence needed for a full-scale tribunal became available. In 1979 the US and UK governments, rather than working for human rights justice and setting up a special tribunal, opted instead to back the Khmer Rouge at the UN, and approved the re-supply of Pol Pot's army in Thailand. Tom Fawthrop and Helen Jarvis reveal why it took 18 years for the UN to recognise the mass murder and crimes against humanity that took place under the Killing Fields regime from 1975-78. They explore in detail the role of the UN and the various countries involved, and they assess what chance still remains of holding a Cambodian trial under international law - especially in the light of the recent development of International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia.

Getting Away With Genocide: Cambodia's Long Struggle Against the Khmer Rouge

By Admin | Monday, December 26, 2011
Facing Death in Cambodia
Author: Peter Maguire
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publishing Date: 2nd Edition, March 23, 2005
Hardcover: 280 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0231120524
ISBN-13: 978-0231120524
Format: Paperback, Hardcover
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Book Description
The Khmer Rouge regime took control of Cambodia by force of arms, then committed the most brazen crimes since the Third Reich: at least 1.5 million people murdered between 1975 and 1979. Yet no individuals were ever tried or punished. This book is the story of Peter Maguire's effort to learn how Cambodia's "culture of impunity" developed, why it persists, and the failures of the "international community" to confront the Cambodian genocide. Written from a personal and historical perspective, Facing Death in Cambodia recounts Maguire's growing anguish over the gap between theories of universal justice and political realities.

Maguire documents the atrocities and the aftermath through personal interviews with victims and perpetrators, discussions with international and NGO officials, journalistic accounts, and government sources gathered during a ten-year odyssey in search of answers. The book includes a selection of haunting pictures from among the thousands taken at the now infamous Tuol Sleng prison (also referred to as S-21), through which at least 14,000 men, women, and children passed -- and from which fewer than a dozen emerged alive.

What he discovered raises troubling questions: Was the Cambodian genocide a preview of the genocidal civil wars that would follow in the wake of the Cold War? Is international justice an attainable idea or a fiction superimposed over an unbearably dark reality? Did issues of political expediency allow Cambodian leaders to escape prosecution?The Khmer Rouge violated the Nuremberg Principles, the United Nations Charter, the laws of war, and the UN Genocide Convention. Yet in the decade after the regime's collapse, the perpetrators were rescued and rehabilitated-even rewarded-by China, Thailand, the United States, and the UN. According to Peter Maguire, Cambodia holds the key to understanding why recent UN interventions throughout the world have failed to prevent atrocities and to enforce treaties.

Facing Death in Cambodia

By Admin |
Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia
Author: Arnold R. Isaacs
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Publishing Date: New Ed edition, December 30, 1998
Paperback: 576 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0801861071
ISBN-13: 978-0801861079
Format: Hardcover, Paperback
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Book Description
A gripping account of one of the century's most harrowing human catastrophes—the fall of South Vietnam— Without Honor captures the tragedy and the irony of the Vietnam War's last days and examines the consequences of the American military and political decisions that had sustained the war effort for a generation only to lead to the worst foreign policy failure in the nation's history. Arnold Isaacs, who spent the final years of the war in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, describes his firsthand observations of the collapse of Cambodia and South Vietnam—from the 1973 Paris peace agreement to the American evacuation of Saigon and its aftermath—with heartbreaking detail, from the devastated battlefields and villages to the boats filled with terrified refugees. He also provides an historical record of unparalleled accuracy and depth about the strategic decisions made during the war's end game and the intelligence failure that led Americans and their Southeast Asian allies to underestimate the strength and perseverance of the enemy. Drawing on previously classified military documents, field reports from American advisors, eyewitness accounts by soldiers and civilians, and North Vietnamese propaganda broadcasts, Isaacs offers a compelling and compassionate portrait of the impact of America's "Vietnamization" of the conflict and a bracing indictment of political and military leaders in the United States and both Vietnams for the massive human suffering that accompanied the end of the war.

Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia

By Admin | Sunday, December 18, 2011
Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors
Author: Dith Pran
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publishing Date: April 10, 1999
Paperback: 224 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0300078730
ISBN-13: 978-0300078732
Format: Kindle Edition, Hardcover, Paperback
Series: Southeast Asia Studies
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Book Description
This extraordinary book contains eyewitness accounts of life in Cambodia during Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, accounts written by survivors who were children at the time. The book has been put together by Dith Pran, whose own experiences in Cambodia were so graphically portrayed in the film The Killing Fields.

The testimonies related here bear poignant witness to the slaughter the Khmer Rouge inflicted on the Cambodian people. The contributors -- most of them now in the United States and pictured in photographs that accompany their stories -- report on life in Democratic Kampuchea as seen through children's eyes. They speak of their bewilderment and pain as Khmer Rouge cadres tore their families apart, subjected them to harsh brainwashing, drove them from their homes to work in forced-labor camps, and executed captives in front of them. Their stories tell of suffering and the loss of innocence, the struggle to survive against all odds, and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors

By Admin | Saturday, December 17, 2011