Friday, December 09, 2005

A brief note on December 7

I realize this is a couple days late, but I didn't get around to posting it on December 7th.

That afternoon I spent some time in my office, hitting the "next blog" button on the top of Blogger pages, to get an unscientific survey of what's out there. I kept coming across references to Pearl Harbor, since, of course, it was December 7th, the anniversary of the attack in 1941. But I didn't come across any references to December 7, 1975, which is the date of the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia, and the start of a campaign that killed, conservatively, over a hundred thousand East Timorese. The invasion is subject of media criticism controversy, since the story was barely covered in US news media, while the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia were covered extensively. The key difference in the two stories, according to many media critics, was that Indonesia was a client nation of the US, and incidentally a major trading partner, and Cambodia was a communist bloc nation.

Anyway, here's a piece from Democracy Now about December 7.

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