CAMBODIA
Khmer Times-Mar 12, 2018
The prophets of doom abound, when it comes to Cambodia, and those in the West who are in the chattering class and intellectualize to raise funds for their NGOs – aided by the so-called ‘liberal’ media at home and abroad – are waving the red flag claiming the Kingdom is on the road to hell.
Is Cambodia going to hell? Are we plagued by communal violence as currently witnessed in Myanmar and Sri Lanka? Are Cambodians being threatened by starvation, as in South Sudan where the United Nations and the South Sudan government said 150,000 people could slip into famine this year. A formal famine declaration, according to Reuters, means people have already started to starve to death. Is Phnom Penh an unsafe city, with homicide endemic in every nook and cranny? Is terrorism posing a serious threat to the country’s citizens, at home and abroad?
The obvious answers to the above are a resounding NO! Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts things succinctly in his latest book, ‘Enlightenment Now – The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress’.
“Whether or not the world is actually getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen.
“We never have a journalist saying to the camera, ‘I’m reporting from a country where a war has not broken out’, or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up,” he writes.
Sad to say, negative news just generates an evil viscous cycle that spirals into more negativity about a country.
Now, does this false doomsday portrayal by Western-funded human rights NGOs, development agencies, and certain media outlets at home, give a carte blanche for governments like the US to intervene in Cambodia’s general elections?
Noam Chomsky, the renowned American social critic and political scientist points out that the “US has blatantly interfered in the elections of many other nations, with methods that include not only financial support to preferred parties and the circulation of propaganda but also assassinations and overthrows of even democratically elected regimes. Indeed, the US has a long criminal history of meddling into the political affairs of other nations,” he points out.
Mr Chomsky has written prolifically in the alternate media that the US was directly involved in organizing coups even in advanced industrial democracies, such as in Australia and Italy. “There is evidence of CIA involvement in a virtual coup that overturned the Whitlam Labor government in Australia in 1975, when it was feared that Whitlam might interfere with Washington’s military and intelligence bases in Australia. Large-scale CIA interference in Italian politics has been public knowledge since the congressional Pike Report was leaked in 1976, citing a figure of over $65 million to approved political parties and affiliates from 1948 through the early 1970s. In 1976, the Aldo Moro government fell in Italy after revelations that the CIA had spent $6 million to support anti-communist candidates,” Mr Chomsky told Truth-Out.org.
The current target, Cambodia, is facing the possibility of sanctions simply because the Western world may have probably run out of countries to intervene in terms of elections or regimes as seen in Egypt, Syria, Libya, attempts in Venezuela and other countries in the world.
Why? Because the elected or the incumbent governments simply proved to be too cumbersome or bothersome for the Western world, especially the United States, and the only way for them to have control over these countries is through a civics-class idolization of democracy or in other words – color revolution.
Sam Rainsy, by forming the CNRM in the United States and openly advocating regime change by force rather than the ballot box has become an ardent advocate of this policy. His call for elections is a sham as one does not call for an elected leader to step down when the country being governed is at peace, has economic and social stability and a steady GDP growth and development.
One also does not call for the implementation of law and order when the opposition politicians calling for these want laws and legal decisions reversed to suit their whims and fancies – especially the same laws that benefit them in the form of pardons, etc.
It is indeed strange that the United States has kept relatively silent with the formation of the CNRM in the US. In this particular case, the silence is indeed deafening!
(First published in Khmer Times – http://www.khmertimeskh.com/50113534/the-silence-is-deafening/ )
TAGS: ASEAN, Cambodia, Politics
