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The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) has recently announced that it will hold three major meetings in Turkey's three biggest cities, Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir. Turkey's communists have called on the working people of Turkey to attend the gatherings "calling for hope, organizing, celebrating to win 2020."

The major event in Izmir will be held December 21, in Istanbul on December 22 and in Ankara on January 4.

In its statement calling for the events, under the slogan "To win 2020" (2020' yi kazanmak iin),TKP said "We will change this country we love, we are determined."

The full statement is as follows:

People have to work for a pittance. They are dismissed without compensation pays.Our forests are being destroyed. The prices ofelectricity, natural gas, water, public transportation areconstantly rising.Education and health systems arecollapsed.The most basic human rights are suspended.Our women are being killed. Our children are being raped.

Of course, we do not want to live in such a country. We do not want and we arenot going anywhere!

We will change this country we love, we are determined.

Nobody is going to touch women, children. We will not leave nature and our historical heritage at the mercy of corporations who see nothing but money in them. Education and health services will be provided equally and free for all and our schools will be in control of reason and science, not of dark minds and bigotry. Basic requirements such as heating, housing, and water will be provided free of charge. Since no one can exploit the workers, everyone will live humanely. Everyone will be employed. Our industry and agriculture will be re-planned in line with the interests of the country and society. An egalitarian and emancipatory order will be established.

For this, we are thrusting out our friendly hand. To share our words, our songs, our hearts, and our minds, to share our goal of a bright future for Turkey...

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"To win 2020": Communist Party of Turkey to hold gatherings in Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir - In Defense of Communism

The science fiction writer H G Wells, in his socialist blueprint A Modern Utopia (1905), envisaged the construction of a new world by a cadre of chosen volunteers collaborating in mans struggle with the elements a thousand men at a thousand glowing desks. Encouraged by the development of technical science over the previous decade, Wells whose other principal interests were Fabianism and philandering prophesised the creation of a fair and great and fruitful global state in which women are to be as free as men. It would be universalist in outlook with a great number of common public services, including energy and transport, in citizens hands.

In the 1922 and 1923 elections, Wells stood as the Labour candidate for the London University constituency, coming last on each occasion. He had to wait until the end of his life, with the United Nations Charter and the nationalisations of Clement Attlees post-war Labour government, to witness the first signs of his dream becoming reality.

Two descendants of Wells utopian tradition are Paul Mason and Aaron Bastani, whose respective books Clear Bright Future and Fully Automated Luxury Communism explore their wish to socialise technological advances as the basis of a flourishing society.

Both hold radical credentials: Mason, once a journalist at Computer Weekly and best known as the former economics editor for the BBCs Newsnight, agitated in Trotskyist groupuscule Workers Power during the 1980s a time when his future employers at the BBC were meticulously vetting Marxist sympathisers at the behest of MI5.

Bastani cut his teeth in the student protest movement around University College London in 2010, which was sparked by austerity policies implemented under the newly-elected Conservative-led government. The following year, he co-founded the insurgent comment and broadcast platform Novara Media, beginning on community radio before cultivating a devoted audience online.

Two of the most pugnacious public voices on the left, Mason and Bastani found themselves in high demand following Jeremy Corbyns election as Labour leader in 2015. British broadcasting, having spent years interrogating ever more triangulated, milquetoast political tendencies (Blue Labourism, Red Toryism), had missed the groundswell of support for socialist alternatives to yet more of the same. Casting aside a youthful disdain for staid parliamentarism, both figures became active in south London constituency Labour parties, their informal advice sought by Labour shadow ministers.

As commentators, they advocate the revolutionary potential of technology, championing the digital sphere as a possible agent of political change Bastanis Novara was sufficiently established by 2018 to offer Mason a continuation of his column after his contract with the Guardian newspaper was abruptly terminated. Aware that constant, dizzying advances in artificial intelligence can cause societal instability and existential malaise, they argue for citizens to check the rise of the machines and urgently take back control.

Mason believes that humanity may be hopeful for a hi-tech, automation-driven, green future but technological euphoria is tempered by geopolitical despair governments and corporations hold all the power, exerting control over us via algorithms. Though he thinks that somehow democratising information technology makes Utopian Socialism possible, currently our behavioural and intellectual defences are weak. This makes us easy prey for a nefarious (and rather broad) coalition incorporating ethnic nationalists and woman-haters, not to mention the Nietzscheans of Silicon Valley, Vladimir Putins online troll army and the Chinese Communist Party. Their single project: technologically empowered anti-humanism which Mason claims has been theorised in advance must be ideologically defeated for us to ever reach a clear bright future (the book title derives from Leon Trotsky).

Short on practical examples of how the reader should go about this, Mason promotes the creation of clear safety codes around AI and tiny acts of rebellion such as refusing to use automated checkout machines thereby forcing supermarkets to employ humans.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism goes one step further, mapping out Bastanis alternative post-scarcity eventuality for a finite world fast approaching its limits. The author believes that mankind, having enjoyed the bounteous benefits gifted by agriculture and industry, is now in the opening decades of the Third Disruption, marked by an ever-greater abundance of information with machines performing cognitive as well as physical tasks.

He proposes the popular embrace of exclusive, datadriven technologies that have appeared in recent years from synthetic meat to devices mapping the human genome. As capitalism is about to end, FALC will sweep to the rescue, harnessing the mining potential of near Earth asteroids, renewable energy and bioengineering to counter the civilisational threats of climate change, resource shortages and an ageing population. Chastising us for an absence of collective imagination, Bastani conceives a world where work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and labour and leisure blend into one.

Though evidently future-focused, Mason and Bastani argue for revisiting the 19th-century theories of Karl Marx. Indeed Marxs spectre haunts both titles, with the authors mounting a spirited defence of his philosophy and its centrality to todays challenges. Unsurprisingly given their subject matter, they are stimulated most by The Fragment on Machines from the Grundrisse (Bastani adding, irritatingly, youve likely never heard of either before). Mason, mangling a mechanical metaphor, makes the case that Marx cannot be uninstalled from western thinking, his outlook boiled down to having believed that, There is nobody coding the great computer of the world nobody to press the start button.

For British authors, writing with a global audience in mind produces mixed results. Masons scrutiny of Donald Trumps election, though briefly acknowledging the complacency of Hillary Clintons campaign, mostly emphasises the role played by tech giants. He implicates Google, Facebook and Twitter as forging an alliance with a mob denigrated as whey-faced Christian fundamentalists living in deadbeat towns, or porn-addicted right-wing bigots spending time leering at the waitresses in the Hooters fast-food chain.

Extended passages on the influence of virtual communities composed of technoliterate fascists the Gamergate fringe and the digital realm of Kekistan populated by alt-right shitposters and Pepe the Frog avatars suggest he has been spending too long in his own online bubbles. Both he and Bastani blunder on Europe, the latter claiming UKIP and Frances Front National made big gains in the continent-wide elections of 2009, when in fact they lost support on their previous showings in pre-crash 2004.

Mason insists that hard right-led administrations in Hungary and Italy are copycat projects inspired by Trump, ignoring the fact that both Fidesz and Legas presence in government pre-date Trumps win by a number of years, as does that of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO), which first entered a government coalition two decades ago hardly, as the author believes, occurring overnight. Brexit, the most pressing and paralysing issue their country has faced for a generation, is considered fleetingly and only then coupled with Trumps victory as, in Masons words, tsunamis to hit the liberal political centre.

At least Bastani acknowledges initiatives in the global south, including meanderings around East Asian rice production and mobile phone schemes in Africa. Masons inordinate focus on wealthy countries reduces analysis of developing nations to imagining what life might be like in a Rio favela : Once you had bought your gun, looked after your family and paid for sex, what else was there to spend your money on but branded sports shoes and cheap jewellery?

Attempts to bring together disparate events under a unifying historical narrative invariably fall flat. Era-defining moments offered up by our authors Fukuyamas end of history, the fashionable nonsense of postmodernism, Moores Law on the exponential growth rate of microprocessing capacity, the advent of the Anthropocene geological era are well worn and pedestrian, more elegantly executed elsewhere. Clichs abound as they fail to agree whether the dawning of a new technological age was announced when a computer beat the world champion at chess in 1997 (Bastani) or an entirely different board game, Go, in 2016 (Mason).

Fleshing out their arguments, Bastani favours a pop-anthropologist style (during this period the human animal asserted its mastery above all others, he says of neolithic times), while Mason makes do with bland film theory. A pound-shop Zizek, he declares that almost all the ethical questions raised by the philosophy of post-humanism were explored in Blade Runner and at one point informs us of the existence of a 2010 Japanese movie called Big Tits Zombie.

Inspirational figures cited in Fully Automated Luxury Communism tend to be, surprisingly, CEOs of private companies or scientists, although in its closing chapter Bastani tries aligning himself with 14th-century English theologian John Wycliffe, whose bible translations were widely distributed a century before Martin Luther was born. (The author believes certain visionaries have such powers of foresight that their ideas arent consonant with the times in which they live.) Mason, too, concerns himself with the theories of long-dead thinkers, putting on trial everyone from Hannah Arendt (the patron saint of liberal angst) to Louis Althusser.

Though Clear Bright Future is pitched as a radical defence of the human being, only a handful of living humans are quoted. Figurative individuals abound the transgender activist in London, the female factory worker in Guangdong, the Kanak teenager fighting for independence on New Caledonia though none is offered a direct voice. The reader is left unaware whether the author has encountered them in real life.

Utopian tracts invariably see the present moment as a turning point or fork in the road. Bastani informs us, however, that fully automated luxury communism will require decades to play out. Rousing in its expression (You can only live your best life under FALC and nothing else, so fight for it), his manifestos promise of a luxurious, technophoric future is tempered by its championing of the think tank-tested policy of universal basic services. This has been seriously considered by Labours shadow chancellor John McDonnell. He may not agree with Bastani, however, that UBS begins the work of communism in the present.

For Mason, we cannot afford to wait for a radical administration to take the reins our digital overlords in Moscow, Beijing or California are already preparing software that will ultimately allow them to exercise mind control. To resist the looming threats, we are told to begin at the level of the self, not waste time building grassroots alternatives to a world in crisis.

Whereas a global mass of downtrodden workers, exploited for hundreds of years, emerged as a political force to spearhead moves towards decolonisation, universal rights and benefits, Mason thinks their successors will be a scattered, social media-wielding precariat of networked individuals very much a millennial revolutionary subject. I want to defend human beings against algorithms that predict and dictate our shopping choices, our voting patterns and our sexual preferences, he assures us, dignifying a popular platform whose time has yet to arrive.

Paul Masons Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being is published by Penguin; Aaron Bastanis Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Verso.

K. Biswas is a member of the Red Pepper Editorial Collective.

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Book review essay: 'Clear Bright Future' and 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' - Red Pepper

Whilethe EU celebrates the 10thanniversary of the Lisbon Treaty and the EU Charter of FundamentalRights, the people not only have no reason to celebrate but theydraw valuable conclusions for the anti-people EU one-way street thathas been built at their expense. The discussions regarding the 10thanniversary of these reactionary treaties do not focus in the pastbut mainly towards an even more reactionary future that they areplanning for the people.

Theexperience of the people in the last 10 years totally vindicates thepredictions and the substantiated critique of the KKE, which pointedout in time that the Lisbon Treaty would strengthen even further theanti-people and reactionary nature of the EU against them. The CommomDefense Policy, the enhanced military co-operation (PESCO), the newintervention funds strengthened the militarization of the EU and theaggression of european monopolies in their fierce confrontation withthe other imperialist centers and powers. This is evidenced by the EUimperialist interventions, all these years, for the interests of theEU business groups, in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Mali, in CentralAfrical Republic, in the broader region of SE Mediterranean andNorthern Africa.

Thepolicy of the EU and its economic military relations with Turkeyreinforce Turkish aggression, as it is expressed by the dangeroussituation that has been formed for the people in the Aegean and EastMediterranean, with the repeated violations and provocations in theAegean, the transgression of the Cypriot EEZ and the maintenance ofoccupation in Cyprus.

Atthe same time, the Treaty of Lisbon equipped the EU and thegovernments with new, more barbaric means and mechanisms of promotionof the anti-people policy: State budget control, the EU Semester andlong-term memorandums, reforms support programme, enhancedsurveillance and mandatory cutters of social spending for theslashing of wages and pensions. It enlarged the existing ones andcreated new mechanisms of repression (Europolice, European Border andCoastal Guard, EU prosecutor, etc), made even more stifling therestriction of people's freedoms and rights by multiplying of bodiesand tools of electronic profiling, strengthening of anti-communismand persecutions against Communist Parties. It transformed theMediterranean into a watery grave for thousands of displaced refugeesand immigrants and its member-states, especially Greece, intocontentration camps and mass entrapment of inhumane conditions.

Inall its member-states, the EU and the governments demolish workers'rights, public Social Security and Welfare, every social right suchas free public Education and Health. Basic social goods and services(Energy, Transporation, Communications) are converted into expensivecommodities and handed over to monopolies.

Theeuro-treaties are nothing but shackles, with which the EU and thegovernments chain the working people to the chariot of the capital'sinterests. The growing mistrust towards the EU [] can strengthen,deepen and target its very nature as a union of capital that cannotbe improved and become pro-people.

Whenthe people decide, they have the power to free themselves from thetyranny of the monopolies, with disengagement from the alliances,such as EU and NATO, taking the power and the economy in their ownhands, in order to buld another Europe of peace, friendship, for themutually beneficial cooperation of the people, a Europe of people'sprogress and prosperity, of socialism.

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KKE on Lisbon Treaty's 10th anniversary: "The people of Europe have no reason to celebrate" - In Defense of Communism

Romanian flag with Communist emblem removed was symbol of the 1989 Romanian Revolution (courtesy of the Michelson Collection)

Previously trashed items that offer insight into Romanian life during the overthrow of its totalitarian dictatorship in 1989 are on display at the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, thanks to the family of faculty member David Michelson.

The exhibition Scrounging through the Trash Heap of History: 30 Years since the Fall of Communism in Romania is displayed in six cases: two outside of the Divinity Librarys reference room and other four in the rotunda next to the office suite.

Michelson, who is an associate professor of the history of Christianity and classical and Mediterranean studies at Vanderbilt, was 14 when his father, Paul, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1989. The Michelson family relocated from the United States to Bucharest for the academic year, where they observed firsthand the violent collapse of the Communist government of Nicolai Ceauescu. The protests began on Dec. 15, 1989, in the city of Timioara, and spread to Bucharest on Dec. 21.

As anti-Communist demonstrators ransacked the partys headquarters, protestors burned and trampled propaganda and paraphernalia of the Ceauescu regime. With help from friends, the Michelson family scavenged these memorabilia as evidence of the repressive regime and the difficulty of everyday life.

The exhibit uses these discarded materials not only to tell the story of the dramatic events of 1989, but also to shed light on repression under the Ceauescu dictatorship, said David Michelson. Items in the exhibition include spent ammunition from the fighting, Romanian flags with their Communist emblems torn out, and a single shoe from a protestor believed to have been killed by the feared Securitate secret police.

We also collected books and medals that illustrate the absurd extremes of propaganda in the Golden Epoch of Ceauescu, the younger Michelson said.

Looking back, Michelson recalls watching with his father as history unfolded on the streets of Bucharest. Harrowing images from those events of 1989-90 remain vivid in my mind, he said. Seeing the violence of political repression up close has driven my interests in history and made me curious about politics, religion and how human beings treat each other in society.

He noted that while other nations behind the Iron CurtainPoland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germanytoppled oppressive regimes in 1989, the Romanian experience both before and during 1989 was particularly marked by state violence. Thirty years after the fall of the Romanian Socialist Republic, it is important to preserve the memory of its atrocities and to recognize its victims, he said.

The exhibit has been created through the work of multiple generations of the Michelson family including Anna and Joel Michelson, two of Paul Michelsons grandchildren. The curators are also grateful for the assistance of the late Sanda Romaan, a woman who never gave up hope in freedom and collected many of the discarded items.

The exhibition, which recently opened with a lecture by Paul Michelson, Distinguished Professor of History at Huntington University, will be on display through May 31, 2020. It is co-sponsored by the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries and Vanderbilt Divinity School.

For more information, email David Michelson or call Divinity Library Exhibit Curator Charlotte Lew at 615-322-2566.

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Trash Heap of History exhibit spotlights 1989 fall of Communism in Romania - Vanderbilt University News

The U.S. bombing of Laos (1964-1973) was part of a covert attempt by the CIA to wrest power from the communist Pathet Lao, a group allied with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union during the Vietnam War.

The officially neutral country became a battleground in the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, with American bombers dropping overtwo million tons of cluster bombsover Laosmore than all the bombs dropped during WWII combined. Today, Laos is the most heavily bombed nation in history. Here are facts about the so-called secret war in Laos.

Laos is a landlocked country bordered by China and Myanmar to the North, Vietnam to the East, Cambodia to the South and Thailand and the Mekong River to the West.

Laos' proximity to China made it critical to President Eisenhower to defend against communism.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Its proximity to Mao Zedongs China made it critical to Dwight D. Eisenhowers Domino Theory of keeping communism at bay. If Laos were lost, the rest of Southeast Asiawould follow,Eisenhower told his National Security Council. On the day of his farewell address in 1961, President Eisenhower approved the CIAs training of anti-communist forces in the mountains of Laos. Their mission: To disrupt communist supply routes across the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Vietnam.

Eisenhowers successors in the White House: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, all approved escalating air support for the guerrilla fighters, but not publicly. The 1962 International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos, signed by China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, the United States and 10 other countries, forbid signees from directly invading Laos or establishing military bases there. The secret war in Laos had begun.

Long before the Cold War, Laos had a history of interference from its neighbors. Fa Ngum founded the first recorded Lao state of Lan Xang, or The Kingdom of a Million Elephants, in 1353. From 1353-1371, Fa Ngum went on to conquer most of todays Laos and parts of what is now Vietnam and Northeast Thailand, bringing Theravada Buddhism and Khmer culture from the kingdom of Angkor (in todays Cambodia) with him.

Over the centuries, his conquered neighbors fought back, and the Thai people dominated large swaths of Laos from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. What we know as Laos today was built from an assemblage of different ethnic groups with distinct languages and cultures.

A man walks past a 30+ year-old bomb crater in the middle of a village in Laos. Decades-old craters are all over the village.

Jerry Redfern/LightRocket/Getty Images

Europeans entered the fray in 1893, when France declared Laos part of French Indochina. To the French, having Laos as a protectorate was a means to control the Mekong River, a valuable trade route through Southeast Asia.

Frances grasp on Laos first slipped in 1945, when the Japanese occupied Laos in the closing days of World War II. When atomic bombs fell on Japan, Laos declared its independence under the short-lived Lao Issara (Free Laos) government of Prince Phetsarath in 1945. The French regained power the following year.

Laos achieved full independence in 1954 following the victory of communist Vit Minh leader Ho Chi Minh over the French at the bloody Battle of in Bin Ph. The ensuing Geneva Accords split Vietnam into North and South Vietnam and stipulated that the French relinquish their claims in Southeast Asia. The agreement was not signed by the United States, who feared that in the absence of French influence, Southeast Asia would fall to communist forces.

The United States watched closely as the Pathet Lao gained popularity in newly-independent Laos. The Pathet Lao was a communist group founded at Viet Minh headquarters in 1950 during the French war. Largely dependent on Vietnamese aid, their leader was Prince Souphanouvong, the Red Prince. Born to a prince of Luang Prabang and a commoner, his education in Vietnam led him to become a disciple of Ho Chi Minh and, later, to lead the opposition against his half-brother, Souvanna Phouma, who was Prime Minister of Laos five different times (from 1951-1954, 1957-1958, in 1960 and again from 1962-1972) and preferred a coalition government balancing the Pathet Lao with more conservative forces.

An armed guard (far right) standing next to (L-R)Souvanna Phouma, Neutralist Premier of the Laotian Coalition Government, his pro-communist, half-brother, Souphanouvong, and General Singkapo, commander-in chief of the Pathet Lao Army, 1963.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Phoumas hold on power was tenuous at best. Under his rule, government troops and the Pathet Lao began to clash in the Northeast along the border of Vietnam. Publicly, President Kennedy announced his support for neutralizing Laosthough what neutralization looked like on paper was far different from what it was in practice.

In 1960, the CIA approached Vang Pao, a major general in the Royal Lao Army and a member of the Hmong minority in Laos, to be the chief of their secret army to push back the communist Pathet Lao. The Hmong made up an ethnic group that had originated in China and lived in the remote mountains of Laos, often in extreme poverty, and had a history of evading authority. They had been at odds with the lowland Lao majority for centuries, and the CIA exploited this history of conflict to their benefit.

Charismatic and prone to pacing while he talked, Vang Pao had experience fighting both the French and the Japanese. His followers praised him for his bravery in fighting alongside his men. The CIAs Operation Momentum armed and trained the Hmong to take on the Pathet Lao in the growing proxy war.

A ground war in Laos with U.S. forces was not on the table. President Kennedy wrote as early as 1961 that, Laosis a most inhospitable area in which to wage a campaign. Its geography, topography, and climate are built-in liabilities. Bombing Laos was seen as a safer means of cutting off communist supply lines into Vietnam before they could be used against American troops.

The U. S. and Laotian governments permitted newsmen a rare glimpse of a military base in Laos with 250-pound bombs used to fight against the North Vietnamese in northern Laos.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The U.S. Air Force began bombing targets in Laos in 1964, flying planes like AC-130s and B-52s full of cluster bombs on covert missions based out of Thailand. The United States eventually dropped the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years, according to Al Jazeera.

The bombing focused on disrupting communist supply chains on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and Sepon (also spelled Xpn), a village near a former French air base now controlled by North Vietnam. In 1971, Sepon was the target of the failed Operation Lam Son, when the U.S. and South Vietnam attempted to block access to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Dave Burns, a member of the U.S. Air Forces 16 Special Operations Squadron, flew missions over Laos out of Ubon, Thailand. He recalls, Sepon was the one place in Laos that we did not want to fly into. The village was at a crossroads of three highways leading in from Vietnam: the Mu Gia Pass, the Ban Karai Pass, and the Barthelme Pass. The highways then headed south to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was highly defended with all sorts of anti-aircraft guns. Going there was a guarantee of being hit or being shot down.

Air America was the lifeblood of the CIAs Laos operation, transporting personnel, food and supplies to and from remote bases. As a former CIA officer explained: Wed negotiate with the tribal groups. If you dont make a deal with them, give them aid, the communists will do it, and then theyll join with the communists. The CIA set up medical facilities with doctors, started schools and offered protection from rivals.

Air America was also transporting more illicit goods. In the 1979 book Air America by Christopher Robbins, later immortalized in the fictional "Air America" movie starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr., Robbins reports on how opium from Lao poppies was transported on American planes.

By 1975, one-tenth of the population of Laos, or 200,000 civilians and members of the military, were dead. Twice as many were wounded. Seven hundred and fifty thousand, a full quarter of the population, had become refugeesincluding General Vang Pao himself. Declassified documents show that 728 Americans died in Laos, most of whom were working for the CIA. The secret war in Laos, or the Laos Civil War to many who lived through it, set a precedent for a more militarized CIA with the power to engage in covert conflicts around the world.

Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise (also known as COPE) is a learning center where visitors can inform themselves about the UXO problem in Laos.

John S Lander/LightRocket/Getty Images

In Laos, the legacy of U.S. bombs continues to wreak havoc. Since 1964, more than 50,000 Lao have been killed or injured by U.S. bombs, 98 percent of them civilians. An estimated 30 percent of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to explode upon impact, and in the years since the bombing ended, 20,000 people have been killed or maimed by the estimated 80 million bombs left behind.

In 2016, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos. He pledged an additional $90 million in aid to remove unexploded ordnance on top of the $100 million that had been spent previously. The work of cleaning out unexploded bombs from the soil continues.

Jessica Pearce Rotondi is the author of What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Familys Search for Answers.

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Why Laos Has Been Bombed More Than Any Other Country - History