Monday, July 23, 2007

Well, it didn't happen in Vietnam, did it?

John Kerry has experience of genocide in the aftermath. Well, he has experience of a "lack-of-genocide" in the aftermath. As he said on the Senate floor.

We heard that argument over and over again about the bloodbath that would engulf the entire Southeast Asia [after 1975], and it didn't happen.

James Taranto begs to differ.

An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned without formal charges or trials.

165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps, according to published academic studies in the United States and Europe.

Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed.

Prisoners were incarcerated for as long as 17 years, according to the U.S. Department of State, with most terms ranging from three to 10 years.

At least 150 re-education prisons were built after Saigon fell 26 years ago.

One in three South Vietnamese families had a relative in a re-education camp.

And then there was Cambodia.

And Laos.

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