Free General Vang Pao, Hero of the Hmong People!

I am taking time out tonight ot write about the plight of the Hmong people being persecuted by rape, torture, and murder by the Laotian armed forces. Recently, General Vang Pao and several other Hmong leaders, veterans of the "Secret War in Laos from 1961 to 1975, were arrested for attempting to recruit mercenaries for the overthrow of the Laotian government. Several of these brave men now reside in Sacramento County Jail on federal charges. Once again, we, the government AND the people of the USA, have betrayed the Hmong people.

For decades, the activist corps of the Hmong community in the United states has petitioned the US government and the United Nations to sanction Laos for the continued repression of the Hmong people remaining in their mountain homeland, to no avail.

This is a travesty of justice if there ever was one! Once upon a time, the Hmong were the most feared warriors in Southeast Asia, and served the CIA during the secret war with valor the likes of which are legend. Upon the retreat of the USA from Vietnam, the Hmong people were abandoned and left to the depredations of the Kmer Rouge and the Communist government that followed. Those that escaped had to flee on foot hundreds of miles to the squalor of refugee camps in Thailand, and then made their way to the USA. But many were unable to flee, and are still subject to the most horrible retribution from the Laotian government even now, 30 years later.

General Vang Pao has been fignting for 50 years for the good of the Hmong people and has trusted the USA to finally make good on their promise to the Hmong "We will win or lose, together."

Now he sits in jail, for love of his country. He has been betrayed most grievously by every government apparatus and entity, and his people are crying for justice!

From Sacbee.com:

"The hopes, dreams, achievements and fears of America's Hmong surfaced at a Sacramento banquet Thursday night -- along with a sense that the U.S. government, their greatest benefactor, had betrayed them again.

The man who guided the Hmong journey from the mountains and jungles of Laos to a new life of opportunity in America, Gen. Vang Pao, sits in the Sacramento County jail on charges of plotting a violent overthrow of communist Laos.

Vang, 77, is one of 10 men arrested and charged in Sacramento federal court last week with plotting a full-scale coup against Laos that would have included AK-47 assault rifles, ground-to-air Stinger missiles, anti-tank weapons and a mercenary army. The older members of the alleged conspiracy include Hmong men -- Laotian mountain tribesmen -- who followed Vang Pao as he waged war under the CIA's direction against Southeast Asian communists between 1961 and 1975.

Vang, 77, has survived a stroke and heart bypass surgery in recent years and suffers from diabetes and high cholesterol. But many still consider him the heart and soul of America's 250,000 Hmong and the thousands of others still trapped in Thailand and the jungles of Laos, where Amnesty International reports they have been assaulted and murdered by the Laotian military."


Read more here: Hmong sense new betrayal

35 views total at 10:45;m Sunday night.

Lt. Col. Harrison Ulrich Jack, a 1968 West Point graduate, Vietnam War veteran, and former officer in the California National Guard was arrested with the others. General Vang Pao was nothing but a footnote in the story. :shrug:

The enormous sacrifices of the Hmong people on behalf of the United States mean nothing to the comfortably ignorant, lazy citizens of the USA.

Obiviously the members of DU do not know and don't give a fucking god-damn about the Hmong people - they care about skinny rich white biches and big studly West Point graduates. Raped women and dead babies are second-class citizens.

And try as they might, the local Hmong leaders have failed to mend the problems.

The Hmong were literally thrown at ouw doorstep in Sacramento - relegated to the squalor of run-down apartment complexes in Lemon Hill and Parkway, bereft of education or even the faintest idea of how to survive, let alone prevail, in the dog-eat-dog capitalist pig-pile that is life in the United States.

Is it any wonder that the old folks fell into depression, lost their spirit and their influence over their children? Is it any wonder that the children, looking toward the future, found little or no hope of attaining some level of parity with the rest of the society? Is it any wonder that, without a concerted effort to pro-actively assimilate these people, many of their youth have fallen into the vicious cycle of poverty, drug use, and gang activity.

You blame the Hmong leaders. Where is your outrage toward the Federal Government, or the State of California, or the civic leaders of the City of Sacramento?

With good reason. I bet the Anti Castro terrorists in Miami would take a liking to him though.

That you would draw a parallel between the Hmong and the Anti Castro faction in South Florida reveals a genuine lack of knowledge of the Hmong people and the history of their involvement in the Vietnam war.

They were a truly "aboriginal" culture (for want of a better term). Hunter-gatherers and warriors in the protection of their territory in the mountains of eastern Laos. They never heard the term "communist" before the CIA recruited them - the relationship developed through personal loyalty, and was not idealogically driven.

Get thee to Google, and then come back and apologize for your insult.

"“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part II.

"The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed."

(Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German-born U.S. political philosopher. The Origins of Totalitarianism, pt. 3, ch. 12, sct. 3 (1951).)

I fail to see how the jungles, deltas, paddies, and mountains of "Indochina" have been any different...

Still, are you advocating that the United States actually tolerate what Vang Pao was engaged in doing?




Do you really think we should allow that sort of thing? Really?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZUQI1yTPeI


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcxo8BwwURU&mode=related&search=
http://us10.pixagogo.com/S5zbTG1dgOCeCFGwDXVKYFnjhE!E5NzwRoQ8gZfrYlB0Hc7R4X90AuvOo6OxIW5HkHCnv5SP8xv1QxbCO65VUtM3GK!odnswADJl00ZzRA2vFE0biNImXgBQ__/Little_Admiral.jpg




http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1947980&mesg_id=1948306





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoxfhfHCzb8&mode=related&search=

"HUNTED LIKE ANIMALS" Hmong Hunted and tortured -merciless!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmSWXk1nFRc&mode=related&search=