11. THE 1970s: AMERICA DIVIDED

THE BRIEF FORD PRESIDENCY (1974-1977)

In the meantime, the situation in South Vietnam was worsening drastically.  In early 1975 panic set in among the South Vietnamese soldiers who now saw their cause as lost without further American aid.  And at the end of April the world was treated to the spectacle of the last of the American diplomatic mission beating a cowardly retreat from Saigon – with loyal Vietnamese civilians hanging on to the American helicopters in an effort to get out of the country with them.  The Communists had completely routed the mighty America in Vietnam.  But this also meant that the political status quo in the entire region of Southeast Asia was going to suffer a huge shift.

The Communist "re-education" camps.  Now the Communist victors in the South began to march multitudes (possibly as many as a million) of Vietnamese off to "re-education" camps – to cleanse them of the "capitalist" ways they might have picked up in those years working with the Americans.  Conditions in these camps were so terrible that huge numbers of them died.

And then to make the situation even worse, the new regime seized the small independent farms and local businesses in order to collectivize or bring them under full governmental control – thus crippling further the economy – to the point of human disaster.

The Vietnamese "boat people."  Consequently, millions of Vietnamese attempted to flee the country – by any means possible.  Some fled across the countryside in an attempt to reach Thailand or Malaysia.  Others took to boats – or anything that would float – in the hopes of being picked up by passing Western commercial freighters and thus brought to freedom in the West.  Multitudes simply drowned.  Many were picked up by pirates and raped and killed or sold into slavery.  Even then, if they were somehow able to reach foreign lands in the area (the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand) they would spend months, even years, waiting to receive refugee status in the West.  But ultimately, America took in 800,000 of these refugees – and another 250,000 were settled in Europe or England's Commonwealth countries.

The "Killing Fields" of Cambodia.  One place the Vietnamese were not headed for in their escape from Vietnam was next door in Cambodia – for there the situation turned even uglier than was even the case for poor Vietnam.   With the withdrawal of the American presence in Vietnam, Communists were also emboldened to end the fiction of Cambodian neutrality and simply take over the country.  But this was a different group of Communists – not of the North Vietnamese type – who mostly took their ideological cues from Russia.  These were Maoists, termed the "Khmer Rouge"^[2] under their leader Pol Pot, taking their cues from the zany Mao Zedong – who, like him, held some kind of romantic view about the purity of rural life in contrast to the corruptions of urban life (supposedly too Western or capitalist in style).  Urban Cambodia thus had to be purged of this evil – with those who had come under its influence either marched off to re-education camps of the Maoist variety – or simply executed on the spot.  No one was keeping population statistics at the time – but the best estimates run in the range of 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died from either execution or exhaustion/starvation – this holocaust discovered when multitudes of "killing fields" of thousands of skeletal remains were later uncovered – discovered when the Vietnamese Communists next door finally sent troops into Communist Cambodia to end the slaughter.^[3]