Bulletins and News Discussion from December 4th to December 10th, 2023 - The Legacy of Kissinger - COTW: Laos

Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.

After the United States withdrew from Laos, the Pathet Lao took power and abolished the monarchy. Kaysone Phomvihane became a dominant figure in Laotian politics, keeping the course on Marxism-Leninism and implementing the first Five Year Plan in 1981. The second Five Year Plan in 1986 was modelled on Lenin's NEP, and this doubled rice production and significantly increased sugar production. After the fall of the USSR, Laos allowed a small capitalist class to exist, with similar control over them as in China. Laos maintains a 48-hour work week with paid sick leave, vacation time, and maternity leave, and workers are well-represented in trade unions. They faired relatively well during coronavirus from a social standpoint due to quick and efficient action to lock down the country, experiencing ~750 deaths out of a population of over 7 million.

There is hope even after utter destruction by genocidal oppressors.

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Due to American cluster bombing campaigns advised by Kissinger during the Vietnam War to damage supply lines, over 2 million tonnes of ordinance were dropped on Laos over about a decade, averaging a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. Laos is thus the most bombed country on the planet up to this point. 80 million bombs failed to explode - the cleanup operation is expected to take centuries, and 25,000 people have been killed and injured by bombs in the last 50 years. About 50 people are killed or injured every year to this day.
Holy shit.
- Yeah, when I was looking around for information, there were these articles about villagers who were afraid to go out and farm or garden their fields because of the potential that they could accidentally unearth a cluster bomblet and be severely injured or killed. So you have these bomb disposal experts who go around from field to field with metal detectors, and many of these people came into the profession because somebody they knew was injured or killed by a bomblet and wanted to help. Living there must feel a little like living in a radioactive exclusion zone - an explosive exclusion zone, perhaps. It makes sense that Laos was outspoken in opposing the US giving cluster bombs to Ukraine once they ran out of artillery shells to give. Ukraine will be littered with these things for centuries too, now.
  
  Sad thing is they don't even seem to work that well from a military perspective. Here's a graph showing Russian casualties per week and you can see it falls off pretty sharply when Ukraine ran out of unitary shells and began using the old American cluster munitions as replacements:
  https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
  38,000 Russian military deaths since the start of the war (compared to about 300-600k on the Ukraine side). Highest Russian losses were at the beginning of the operation and during the Bakhmut offensive
  
  Sad thing is they don't even seem to work that well from a military perspective. Here's a graph showing Russian casualties per week and you can see it falls off pretty sharply when Ukraine ran out of unitary shells and began using the old American cluster munitions as replacements:
  I think it's worth noting that the goal of the cluster munitions isn't to cause casualties it's to cause a saturation problem that prevents advances. They intentionally saturate areas with them as a means of making it impossible to advance without clearing lanes through them, which takes considerable time.
  I think it's hard to say from our position whether it is successful in halting various russian advances long enough for ukraine to reinforce.
  With that said, this shit will kill countless children and adult civilians after the war.
- I remember reading a few years ago, as China's rail project in Laos was nearing completion in 2021, the initial project was delayed by almost a year literally due to the project sites being littered with American bombs, which of course China is the one to clean up. Says quite a lot about how the two powers operate.
- Kissinger deserved to be skinned alive. Now that he’s gone, someone get John Yoo
- I always believe that a fitting punishment for the warhawks and chickenhawks is for them to spend the rest of their lives demining Laos.

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