Milwaukee mother deported to Laos, a country she has never been to
‘The United States sent me back to die,’ Ma Yang, a mother of five, said
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Maybe I miss something, but why Laos of all places? I didn't get what connects her to that particular counrty, could it be her ethnicity as a person who was actually born in another country? Why not Tai? Like, I miss a lot of questions to ask before that, why she's even deported in the first place, but the seemingly random choice of the country is what surprised me and the article's writer the most.
Easy answer:
Doesn't really work with a lot of Asian people. Needs an additional eye diagram.
Maybe I miss something, but why Laos of all places?
Seems like Trump just randomly picked a nation that Hmong live in.
The modern Hmong reside mainly in Southwestern China and Mainland Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar.
Weren't those the people from that one Clint Eastwood film a few years ago?
Because he wasn't sure if she is Chinese or Japanese
Hank Hill's Dad would have known where she is from.
Racism.
Asian kind of eyes? Laos is an Asian city? There you go, send her to Laos, it's all the same
(Severe /s if that wasn't clear)
You’re being sarcastic, but I bet this is the logic. Terrifying watching what is happening in the USA at the minute.
Trump thinks Asians are lousy, so they must all come from Laos.
I’m far from an expert and only know what I know from a short story.
But the Hmong people are from Laos but many of them fled to Thailand as refugees I think it was from some military action.
I’m not sure, but it might have been the US military. I read somewhere that Laos had the most bombs dropped on it or something.
Again, this info could be off, so please double check if you want to learn more, but this might get you started.
IIRC, the CIA convinced the Hmong to fight for them against the communists in southeast Asia, and promised to take care of them if it all went south. Well, we all know how the Vietnam war went, and while a government that was very unhappy with the Hmong for siding with the CIA was taking over, the CIA basically threw deuces and vanished on them. So shocking and uncharacteristic of the US to betray an ally, I know. So, the Hmong fled to Thailand and begged the US for aid. I'm sure we'll get the duality of tankie responses (nobody was treating them badly but if they were they deserved it), but the gist is that they were seeking refuge. A few years later, the US granted it. Now, bear in mind, originally they'd been told they were going to be able to have their own farms and fuck off to nowhere and mind their own business. Uncle Sam basically dumped them in Merced, California, patted himself on the back, and walked away. There was a lot of drama about it for a while, because the locals got real upset that this entire population just showed up basically overnight and seemed to resist integration, and the Hmong were upset because they just wanted to fuck off and mind their own farms. Fifty years later, though, the Hmong are a pretty big deal (in a good way) in the community, so that's cool.
It's a testament to Kurdish military prowess that the same story with different details didn't happen to them
*Kurdish military prowess and the sheer military incompetence of Middle Eastern dictatorships.
Oof, what we did in Vietnam to the Vietnamese people was already unbelievably evil and unforgivable, but we even betrayed people that risked everything to help us? Wow.
My heart breaks for all the people who died in that terrible war: the innocent Vietnamese who merely wanted to be free to self determine and also the young boys that the US sent to their death for absolutely no good reason.
You missed the carpet bombing part.
Care to elaborate? We weren't (explicitly, anyway) bombing the Hmong when that fuckhead Kissinger decided to pave Laos. The Hmong were recruited to our side by the CIA. We certainly weren't bombing them after we pulled out of Vietnam.
(explicitly, anyway)
The US wasn't doing anything to Laos explicitly. The carpet bombing was covert.
I think perhaps you are forgetting that the CIA didn't recruit every single Hmong person in Laos and somehow keep them safe from its illegal bombing campaign. There were still plenty of non aligned civilians, women and children etc.
Take a look at a map of "Operation Barrel Roll" etc you will see at a glance that most of the 250 million cluster bombs were deployed in the same highland part of Laos where the Hmong predominantly lived. The target was Vietnamese fighters sure but it recklessly affected everyone. Unexploded ordinance is a problem there even to this day.
Jesus, man, one wonders if the Romans would have been as fucked up as us if they also had B-52s.
America secretly carpet bombed Laos when Laos wasn't even at war.
They dropped 2 MILLION tons of bombs onto it and somehow kept it a secret from the American people for multiple years. One of Henry Kissingers ideas.
One of Henry Kissingers ideas.
Yep. He was an absolute monster. This quote by Anthony Bourdain always comes to mind when he gets brought up:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
Instead he got given a Nobel Peace Prize and went on to help more people commit genocides in other countries. An incredibly evil person.
The fact that Bourdain died young and Kissinger lived to be 100 proves that the world is not a just place.
That’s so crazy, the US did all this dark stuff and no one knows or really cares.
I don’t blame people for not caring as there is so much, “US is the shining beacon of freedom and justice in the world” propaganda.
But it’s just crazy how these things happen and a few years later the world acts like it didn’t.
Everyone I know who is my age knows about it. If you have heard of "Manufacturing Consent" that's one of the things Noam Chomsky writes about in that book.
The carpet bombing of Laos and covert support of Pol Pot is also one of the many reasons we all celebrated when Henry Kissinger died.
I think Americans probably know less about it than people outside the US. The US does a lot of awful stuff. We do care, it's just the US is so powerful there's nothing the rest of us can do about any of it.
One of the most outrageous things I learned was that when the communist Vietnamese government learned of what the Khmer Rouge has been doing, they swept in and deposed them from power over Cambodia. The Carter administration was one of I think like two governments that insisted on recognizing the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia at the UN after the Vietnamese kicked them out. IIRC, we were fully aware of what had been happening in Cambodia by that point.
This is true. The full horror of the Killing Fields and the Cambodian Genocide was reported in 1989.
For the next 14 years the US insisted that the genocidal Khmer Rouge and their allies were the "legitimate" rulers of Cambodia and the rest of the world had to witness the actual Cambodian government shut out of the United Nations while the Khmer Rouge occupied their seat there. This went on until 1993.
Pol Pot was never held to account for his crimes against humanity and died a free man.
It's hard to put into words how angry all this made everyone I knew. Newspapers were running photos of piles of skulls and talking about the tree they used to kill babies in S21. And the perps were attending the UN, bolstered by US support.
More than likely her parents were from Laos. Despite being born in Thailand, she is probably considered a Laotian citizen. It's very unlikely they would have accepted her back otherwise.
