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Milwaukee mother deported to Laos, a country she has never been to
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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IIRC, the CIA convinced the Hmong to fight for them against the communists in southeast Asia, and promised to take care of them if it all went south. Well, we all know how the Vietnam war went, and while a government that was very unhappy with the Hmong for siding with the CIA was taking over, the CIA basically threw deuces and vanished on them. So shocking and uncharacteristic of the US to betray an ally, I know. So, the Hmong fled to Thailand and begged the US for aid. I'm sure we'll get the duality of tankie responses (nobody was treating them badly but if they were they deserved it), but the gist is that they were seeking refuge. A few years later, the US granted it. Now, bear in mind, originally they'd been told they were going to be able to have their own farms and fuck off to nowhere and mind their own business. Uncle Sam basically dumped them in Merced, California, patted himself on the back, and walked away. There was a lot of drama about it for a while, because the locals got real upset that this entire population just showed up basically overnight and seemed to resist integration, and the Hmong were upset because they just wanted to fuck off and mind their own farms. Fifty years later, though, the Hmong are a pretty big deal (in a good way) in the community, so that's cool.
Oof, what we did in Vietnam to the Vietnamese people was already unbelievably evil and unforgivable, but we even betrayed people that risked everything to help us? Wow.
My heart breaks for all the people who died in that terrible war: the innocent Vietnamese who merely wanted to be free to self determine and also the young boys that the US sent to their death for absolutely no good reason.
It's a testament to Kurdish military prowess that the same story with different details didn't happen to them
*Kurdish military prowess and the sheer military incompetence of Middle Eastern dictatorships.
You missed the carpet bombing part.
Care to elaborate? We weren't (explicitly, anyway) bombing the Hmong when that fuckhead Kissinger decided to pave Laos. The Hmong were recruited to our side by the CIA. We certainly weren't bombing them after we pulled out of Vietnam.
The US wasn't doing anything to Laos explicitly. The carpet bombing was covert.
I think perhaps you are forgetting that the CIA didn't recruit every single Hmong person in Laos and somehow keep them safe from its illegal bombing campaign. There were still plenty of non aligned civilians, women and children etc.
Take a look at a map of "Operation Barrel Roll" etc you will see at a glance that most of the 250 million cluster bombs were deployed in the same highland part of Laos where the Hmong predominantly lived. The target was Vietnamese fighters sure but it recklessly affected everyone. Unexploded ordinance is a problem there even to this day.
Jesus, man, one wonders if the Romans would have been as fucked up as us if they also had B-52s.