The Holocaust and the US Bombing of Cambodia: Similar Results for Different Causes

When many people think of the word “Genocide” they think of Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust. They don’t usually think that any leader of the US could stoop so low to do anything remotely close to it. That’s why when people hear of how Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, killed 600,000 Cambodians when they bombed it in 1969, they don’t believe it. It couldn’t possibly be like the Nazi extermination of the Jews, which killed up to 7 million people across Europe from 1933 to 1945, right? Although the US bombing of Cambodia and the Holocaust have different in the reasons why it happened and the methods of killing; it had similar effects on the people that were killed and both including something called, “desk murdering.”

The reasons why both of the genocides happened vary greatly as the leaders of the countries had different agendas. In an attempt to make the “superior race” Jews were targeted by the Nazis through propaganda and the Nuremberg Laws (“Holocaust”). Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party aimed to exterminate the Jews and all other minorities, so they made them outcasts in society so nobody would want them around; so no one would turn a blind eye while he carried out his plans. Hitler said in a speech before WWII that in the coming war he predicted the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” implying that he knew that something was going to happen or that he was already in the motions of planning his extermination (Holocaust 30-31). Nixon, Kissinger, and their acquaintances weren’t planning to wipe the Cambodians off the map; they had completely different reasons. As long as the Vietcong could supply its troops through Cambodia the US was not going to get any foothold in the Vietnam War, so a secret b...

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