My Family Fled Cambodia as the Americans Evacuated. Here's What I Hope for Afghan Refugees.

[geovalin]

For Cambodians who escaped the Khmer Rouge and Afghans who fled the Taliban, leaving home is just the beginning.

 

Putsata Reang is a journalist and author of “Ma and Me,” a memoir forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Spring 2022 that explores the experience of being children of refugees.

My mother called on Monday to ask if I was watching the news.

“It’s so scary,” she said, her voice specked with sadness. “All the Afghan people fleeing, running this way and that way. Everyone so desperate to escape. That was us.”

 

Kabul had fallen and the images that vibrated from my mother’s television screen thrust her backwards into the past. Even though it hurt to watch, she couldn’t look away: scenes of Afghans so desperate to escape the certain brutality of reinvigorated Taliban rulers that they clung to the landing gear of an American military plane, as hundreds of others raced down the runway, shalwar kameezes flapping in the draft as the plane took off, canting skyward away from war and the ruins of another bungled American nation-building project.

 

 

As we watch the tragedy of Afghanistan continue to unfold, thousands of Cambodian refugees in America and across the globe are freshly triggered by scenes of Taliban fighters toting AK-47s in truck beds, victorious smiles etched on their faces, and of over 800 terrified Afghans crouching elbow-to-elbow in an American C-17 meant to transport less than a quarter of that number.

 

read more https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/22/cambodia-refugee-afghanistan-khmer-rouge-taliban-506480

 

 

[unblocktheplanet]

America's useless wars always leave disaster in their wake. Think they weren't in the Middle East for the oil, Afghanistan for mineral resources. Big payday plus US arms sales, greasy lobbyists. It's always about money not "democracy".

[rudi49jr]

48 minutes ago, unblocktheplanet said:

It's always about money not "democracy".

The military-industrial complex has been calling the shots for decades now in the US. They don’t give two hoots about democracy, just about making as much money as possible in any way possible, and they really don’t care one iota about anything else. 

[WebGuy]

And now they will come and say: "We can't help the world anymore. It's been enough of us helping everyone". 

 

But the reality is "Please don't help anyone anymore and the world will be much happier place to be".