[local politics] hahaha wow.

I'm kinda sad I missed this one

So Lowell is home to a lot of Cambodian Americans. I think second in the nation

A lot of it had to do with the Khmer Rouge and refugees needing a place to stay in the 70s at the same time as the mill towns going under and needing more money and people to keep sustaining themselves

So now it's 40-50 years later and the first Cambodian-American mayor in the country just got elected here

and a lot of Lowellians are first-generation Cambodians who have parents who were massacred in the killing fields

and so fucking Cambodian Hun Manet who is the son of people who murdered Lowell citizens and who doesn't have a fantastic track record of his own is trying, multiple times, to come to Lowell and have it be a sister city to Phnom Penh

So there was a fucking outrage because of course there was

And Sen. Kennedy was all like "Cambodian politics was very complex and not understood by everyone" and I'm like

fuck you??

It's like inviting a son of a Nazi general over in the 1960s to Brooklyn to make it a sister city to Munich

"Manet is the son of former Khmer Rouge commander and current Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, head of the Cambodian People’s Party. Throughout his nearly 40 years in power, Hun Sen has been accused of violence, corruption and human rights violations including kidnappings and killings, torture, censorship and other extralegal and judicial abuses."

yeah that sounds like an amazing person to have show up and talk about bridging the gap

well u see “it’s complicated” on his facebook status

This isn't 'complicated cambodian politics'

omg

“A proposal that Lowell be a sister city of Battambang and Phnom Penh, Cambodia is not a politically neutral one. It is designed to camouflage a range of human rights abuses, which take place in Cambodia on near normality. Battambang is a city where critics of the government have been killed notoriously in broad daylight with complete immunity.”

that's from school committee member Susie Chhoun

like yeah absolutely Lowell should be a fucking sister city. Give me a break. .-.

oh man, we had a ton of Cambodian immigrant families in Amherst when I was growing up, too. so much so that we celebrated Cambodian New Year in elementary school

what an outrageous attempt this bs is

Lowell becoming a sister city to them feels like a power move on behalf of the Cambodian government. "you thought you left? well, we can follow you anywhere. you're still part of us, think about what that means"

right??? holy shit