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Series Sends Norwegian Fashion Bloggers To Observe Cambodian Garment Industry

By Robert Barsocchini

28 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org

This  series, “Sweatshop: Dead Cheap Fashion”,  consists of four episodes, ten to twelve minutes each, and is well worth watching.  It chronicles the reactions of three young Norwegian fashion bloggers when they go to Cambodia to see who is making the clothing they love to buy and talk about.

They are initially shocked and uncomfortable with the poverty, but fall back to the position that it is normal for Cambodians, so it is therefore fine and the workers are happy (or so the kids assume).  And at least, the Norwegians say, they have jobs.

But as the bloggers spend more time with the workers, talking to them and living just one short day in their shoes, things change fairly dramatically.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Along the way, the Norwegian kids get a firsthand look at the dynamic the USA worked to create in Indochina a few decades earlier: when starving workers try to organize protests for living wages, they are beaten by shock troops working de facto for international oligarchs.

The thinking behind such ideas as living-wages  was  the “virus”, the “rot”, that the USA went to great lengths to try to inoculate, dropping more bombs on Cambodia alone than the US side dropped in all of World War II combined.

The Yale University website  documents  that the bombing was begun by Johnson and escalated by Nixon, with Nixon's lackey Henry Kissinger relaying, down the chain of command, Nixon's call for genocide: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything. It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”  To this day, Kissinger, as is said of petty criminals who pale in comparison, is out there walking the streets.

The US thus planted and detonated “2,756,941 tons” of bombs in Cambodia, a terrorist operation perhaps unprecedented in history, as Yale notes:

To put 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the [US side] dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II. Cambodia may be the most heavily bombed country in history.

It was initially “estimated that between 50,000 and 150,000 Cambodian civilians were killed” by the US terror campaign.  However, that was when the tonnage of bombs detonated was thought to be five times less than it was later discovered to be.  It follows that the actual “number of casualties is surely higher”, perhaps, as logic might suggest, five or more times higher.

Alternet  notes :

Mr. Kissinger's most significant historical act was executing Richard Nixon's orders to conduct the most massive bombing campaign, largely of civilian targets, in world history. He dropped 3.7 million tons of bombs between January 1969 and January 1973 – nearly twice the two million dropped on all of Europe and the Pacific in World War II. He secretly and illegally devastated villages throughout areas of Cambodia inhabited by a U.S. Embassy-estimated two million people…

His aerial slaughter helped kill, wound or make homeless an officially-estimated six million human beings…

The Yale website further documents that the US bombing led directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime:

…the bombs drove ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, a group that seemed initially to have slim prospects of revolutionary success. Pol Pot himself described the Khmer Rouge during that period as “fewer than five thousand poorly armed guerrillas . . . scattered across the Cambodian landscape, uncertain
about their strategy, tactics, loyalty, and leaders.”

And a former Khmer Rouge officer reported (depicting a scenario being created constantly by Obama's executions of suspects by cruel and unusual means):

The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on co-operating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them…. Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.

Once the Khmer Rouge seized power, Vietnam intervened to try to stop them, but the US  teamed up with the Khmer Rouge .  Henry Kissinger  called  the Khmer Rouge “murderous thugs”, and said the US “will be friends with them.”

The general problem in Indochina (specifically Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) was that  indigenous movements with overwhelming popular support  (Ch. 18) would  not  “cede control to the local oligarchy”.

The “rot” of such thinking had to be, and was, inoculated, with results the Norwegian kids encountered, to their shock.

If only on a visceral and not an historical level (one of the bloggers deftly notes that “we are rich because they are poor”), the kids learn that the comfortable beds on which they sleep in the West, surrounded by luxuries, lie on the rotting corpses and hunched, aching backs of unknown millions of people with “as much value” as them.

Also see:

“WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 per Day”

Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi's worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere,  according to secret State Department cables .

Ultra-cheap labor is desired, sought, and maintained by massive violent force for the benefit and luxuriation of a few  oligarchs .

The US and West developed by  radically violating  the arrangements they force on others.  These arrangements de-develop, drain, and hold down the victim countries as the dominant countries profit off them.  For example, India, before the British de-developed and set it up as a cheap labor/resource camp, was more developed and prosperous than Britain ( 271 ).  The victim countries finally begin to re-develop once they are able to throw off the yoke.

As The Guardian  reports :

…the  US lost most of its influence in Latin America  over the past 15 years, and the region has done quite well, with a sharp reduction in poverty for the first time in decades . The Washington-based International Monetary Fund has also lost most of its influence over the middle-income countries of the world, and these have also done  remarkably better  in the 2000s.

Robert Barsocchini  is an internationally published researcher and writer who focuses on global force dynamics and writes professionally for the film industry.  He is a regular contributor to  Washington's Blog.  Follow Robert and his UK-based colleague, Dean Robinson,  on Twitter .

 





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