Monday, January 02, 2017

So this has been making the rounds on twitter.  Several people I follow have been tweeting it.  For example Phil:




Funny, I thought this was confirmed as official history back in 2008 when the audiotapes were declassified.  Or back in 2013 when the BBC was reporting it as established fact.

But now we've found notes from Nixon's aide.  And the New York Times is reporting it.  So now it has moved from officially confirmed to super-super officially confirmed now I guess.

I don't like to go into conspiracy theory land, but this is not a conspiracy theory.  The historical records confirm it, and the BBC and the New York Times have reported it.

Nixon really really did sabotage the 1968 peace talks.  It's like super official now.

In my private conversations with people, however, I find that most people don't know this fact.

And I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that this will never make it into high school history curriculums in the United States.

2 comments:

Whisky Prajer said...

"Conspiracy" no - Realpolitik, yes. And we're still feeling its after-effects.

Joel Swagman said...

Oh yeah, the after-effects on this are huge.

It's not guaranteed the 1968 peace talks would have succeeded even without Nixon sabotaging them, but if they had, that would have been huge. No invasion of Cambodia, no 1970 coup, no Khmer Rouge, no years of instability in this region, no lost generation in Cambodia....it's staggering to imagine