Monday, October 15, 2012

Phnom Penh Ultimate

Norodom Sihanouk, the Sacred Compassionate Foot Lord Sacred Best Jaws of the Lion Sacred Great Brave Warrior of Cambodia, has died at the age of 89. When Sihanouk was first crowned in 1941, his contemporaries on the world stage included Franklin D. Roosevelt, George VI, Haile Selassie, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco. Over the next 6 decades, like a Southeast Asian Sam Drucker, Sihanouk served at varying times as monarch, prime minister, Communist puppet, leader in exile, monarch again, and, after abdicating in 2004, composer, filmmaker and Internet troll. He won independence from French colonial rulers in 1953, relying on diplomacy, rather than armed conflict as had occurred in Vietnam. Surprisingly, his Buddhist socialist agenda was not as effective in sustaining economic growth. He tried to keep Cambodia neutral during the Vietnam War, but his ignoring Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger’s secret bombing campaign along the country’s border led to his ouster in a coup. He sided with the ruthless Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to return to power, lending his prestige and popularity to a regime that would kill 1.7 million people over the next 4 years. He was restored to a figurehead position with the end of the civil war to oust the Khmer Rouge, and had spent most of the last decade traveling to China for treatment of various ailments, lead paint and melamine-tainted milk apparently being secret remedies for hypertension and diabetes.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Powered by counter.bloke.com