|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Behalf Of Dennis
|| The 1 million plus Vietnamese immigrants in the US and Canada regularly
|| send hundreds of millions of dollars to their families, which
|| is a sort of
|| unofficial form of reparations. The US workingclass has a fine tradition
|| of regarding the US government as something between ringworm and foot
|| fungus, and for all the racism and xenophobia in US society, there's
|| remarkable tolerance and multicultural solidarity, too -- something the
|| EU, for all its good points, still has a long way to go to match.
||
|| The translations are important, because all sorts of academic links and
|| funding gets kicked back to Vietnam, and the multicultural
|| university, for
|| all its limitations, is the crucial spawning-grounds for the
|| multinational
|| Left.
||
|| -- Dennis
||
How proportional is this alleged American generosity to the objective destruction of Vietnam's infrastructure and ecology, the massacre of 3 million Vietnamese, the killing and destruction in Laos and Cambodia, and the US responsibility for the Khmer Rouge holocaust? How far does giving green cards to a few South Vietnamese collaborators go in terms of war reparations, and how far does it compensate for the betrayal of the collaborators kicked off the fleeing US choppers? How much do we have to discount American "generosity" in view of the looting of Vietnamese-owned establishments in the LA riots and the attacks on Vietnamese fishermen? What is your estimate of the parity between the human toll of European imperialism and US imperialism, before we start comparing xenophobias? Who exactly are you making these feeble excuses for?
As for Blum's piece: He's probably right that the US won't chip in for the reconstruction of Afghanistan, but it's a pretty sure bet that _somebody_ will, otherwise there wouldn't be a bunch of firms bidding for contracts in Karachi at the reconstruction conference hosted by the UNDP & the World Bank. Saudi and Japan will probably foot a large part of the bill. www.globalinfo.org/eng/reader.asp?ArticleId=11019
Hakki