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Speaker 1: Also media, Holy crap, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards,

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Speaker 1: a rare three part episode. You motherfuckers, you lucky sons

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Speaker 1: of bitches and rat Bastards are getting three episodes this week.

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Speaker 1: I am now legally your father. You're welcome. Hi Sophie,

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Speaker 1: Hi andrew T. How are you?

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Speaker 2: Guys?

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Speaker 1: Did that interest you?

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Speaker 3: You don't need to be responsible for people? We are?

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Speaker 2: I like that. That's like episode's three. I'm your father.

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Speaker 4: I don't think you're I don't.

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Speaker 3: I'm going to say something, really, I don't think you're

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Speaker 3: their father.

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Speaker 4: I think you're their dad.

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Speaker 1: Dy No, that feels a lot worse for me, actually.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, but I think that's what that legally means is

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Speaker 4: you're not father your dad.

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Speaker 1: D I'm like, I'm like one of those dads that

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Speaker 1: like should pay child support but instead I live on

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Speaker 1: a boat in the harbor of fucking New Orleans.

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Speaker 4: And are you a library a libertarian in this scenario?

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Speaker 2: No?

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Speaker 1: No, no, But I definitely don't believe in the moon landing.

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Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards again, a podcast you're enjoying

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Speaker 1: part three of our pole pot episodes and basically the

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Speaker 1: way it goes here this folks. We have a massive audience,

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Speaker 1: and I'm always trying to like do the most I

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Speaker 1: can to like please the most people, which you can't

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Speaker 1: do with every episode. You know, some people don't like

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Speaker 1: certain kits, some people don't like the cult leaders, some

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Speaker 1: people don't like the dictators, some people only want the dictators,

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Speaker 1: and likewise, you know, we've started doing a lot more

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Speaker 1: four parters over the last couple of years, in part

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Speaker 1: because there were guys where I felt like I'm kind

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Speaker 1: of doing a disservice to try to limit this to

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Speaker 1: two episodes, and a lot of people really like the

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Speaker 1: four parts and say this is my favorite part of

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Speaker 1: the show, and a lot of people say I don't like,

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Speaker 1: I prefer the two parters. So we try to like

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Speaker 1: go with variety rights that everybody's regularly getting what they want.

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Speaker 1: And I didn't so I didn't want to do a

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Speaker 1: four part for pole Pot And then I wrote fourteen

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Speaker 1: thousand words on him and was like, God, damn it, Robert,

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Speaker 1: because there is really that much to say. So this

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Speaker 1: is all to say I didn't want to break this

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Speaker 1: up over two weeks for the people who are tired

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Speaker 1: of four partis. So I just we're just giving you

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Speaker 1: three episodes this week, so you're fucking welcome. Open done.

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Speaker 3: Would you say we're not like all the other girls.

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Speaker 1: We're a lot like all the other girls.

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Speaker 2: I'm not also going to be and that.

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Speaker 1: All girls are beautiful. Okay.

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Speaker 2: To get through the words, we're going to be talking

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Speaker 2: super fast. So if you put this on like zero

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Speaker 2: point six y six speed, you can make yourself a

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Speaker 2: fourth episode.

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Speaker 1: I'm actually going to slow down a lot.

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Speaker 2: Just yeah.

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Speaker 3: No, I was gonna say, hey, Robert, yes, did you

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Speaker 3: know that Better Offline and Weird Little Guys won their

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Speaker 3: webby categories?

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Speaker 1: Did they did? They did? Better Offline and Weird Little Guys,

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Speaker 1: two new weekly podcasts launch by cool Zone last year,

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Speaker 1: both won Webbys in their first year.

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Speaker 3: Yes, yes they did.

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Speaker 1: That's astonishing. Yeah, you know, uh, I'm very proud of

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Speaker 1: our of our little team who, despite being very very

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Speaker 1: small in terms of you know, the broader podcasting universe,

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Speaker 1: has way more listeners than most of the other podcast

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Speaker 1: networks out there and actual fans because we don't just

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Speaker 1: buy a bunch of downloads like some people I'm not

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Speaker 1: going to name, but we could just like bleep Out

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Speaker 1: and pretend that I accused whoever the fuck doing that? So, yeah,

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Speaker 1: you know, we're uh, we're we're the We're the we're

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Speaker 1: the Vietnam and you know, let's say our enemies and

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Speaker 1: the pod Save Guys or the Khmer Rouge of podcasts.

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Speaker 3: Right, they also they also want I saw.

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Speaker 1: I know, I don't know why. It's literally just like

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Speaker 1: the only other podcast network I can remember off the

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Speaker 1: top of my head usually, So we shot on.

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Speaker 2: Those lot, I don't know, Empires go podcast Empire a

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Speaker 2: lot lot smaller body count than yes, Empires.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the exception of the Joe Rogan podcast, which

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Speaker 1: he actually might wind up creeping up on old Pollpots members.

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Speaker 1: You give him some time and some more testosterone shots. Yeah, yeah, So,

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Speaker 1: as I noted at the end of the last episode,

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Speaker 1: Pulpot had made it to the Standing Committee in nineteen

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Speaker 1: sixty and then the party leader of the Communist Party

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Speaker 1: of Cambodia, a guy named Samouth, was assassinated three years later,

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Speaker 1: probably by the King's security services, although we don't know

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Speaker 1: so some people think maybe Polepod orchestrated it. But anyway,

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Speaker 1: he winds up in charge as a result of this,

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Speaker 1: And yeah, initially the people that he's fighting against as

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Speaker 1: he's like leading this increasingly large and capable communist insurgency

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Speaker 1: is King Sahannock's monarchy, right, which he battled out of

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Speaker 1: a headquarters named Office one hundred, and this is a

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Speaker 1: mobile headquarters. Right, We're talking about a jungle insurgency. So

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Speaker 1: he's moving constantly to stay ahead of the King's intelligence,

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Speaker 1: which is in a large part provided by his American allies. Right,

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Speaker 1: Because for the US, his fighting against the Khmer Rouge

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Speaker 1: is kind of part of the broader struggle against communism

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Speaker 1: in Vietnam. And you know, to be fair, the Vietnamese

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Speaker 1: are still running a decent amount of what the Cambodian

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Speaker 1: communists are doing even in this period, and like the

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Speaker 1: mid sixties, they hold a lot of sway because they

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Speaker 1: have a lot, they're a major source of weapons, right,

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Speaker 1: they're more organized. But the Cambodian Party is getting a

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Speaker 1: lot more independent during this period of time, and Salatsar

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Speaker 1: is kind of making it his business to both increase

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Speaker 1: that independence and to make friends with the people. He

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Speaker 1: needs to beg for guns because they're not really capable

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Speaker 1: of manufacturing weapons in the jungle.

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Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, that's a very very vivid setup.

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Speaker 1: What was the name of the headquarters again, Office one hundred.

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Speaker 2: That fucking rules.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very cool stuff. I mean, it's always when

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Speaker 1: you're talking about like an underground insurgent, you've got this

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Speaker 1: secret leader nobody knows his name. Again, it's a real bummer.

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Speaker 1: From a narrative standpoint, I would have had him born

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Speaker 1: Polepot and switched to Salathsar because that's such a cool name,

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Speaker 1: Like that's such a scary name. But whatever, that's how

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Speaker 1: they change it up. He's subverting expectations and.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly a few further dominos will fall.

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Speaker 1: Just like Ryan Johnson's Star Wars movies, And like Ryan

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Speaker 1: Johnson's Star Wars movies, Salassar travels to Beijing in order

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Speaker 1: to beg for weapons. Uh, And to that is that

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Speaker 1: is partly true? Yes, And so he is like he is,

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Speaker 1: and he's talking with obviously with with with Ho Chi

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Speaker 1: min Sti or with the you know, with with the

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Speaker 1: the Vietnamese Communists, and they are coordinating, but never to

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Speaker 1: the extent that the kind of imagines, right, even though

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Speaker 1: they're very dependent on the Vietnamese for a while, they

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Speaker 1: never like it. And there is absolutely no desire among

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Speaker 1: the Cambodian communists or among polepot to be tightly aligned

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Speaker 1: with Vietnam. This like fantasy that the US has that

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Speaker 1: China and all the Southeast Asian states are going to

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Speaker 1: form like one unified communist block is just absolutely anyone

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Speaker 1: with the slightest degree of a knowledge of any of

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Speaker 1: these people be like, the fucker, No, they hate each other.

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Speaker 2: I mean, it's just even meeting four different Asian people. Anyway, Yeah,

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Speaker 2: you could probably see, like you could probably some of

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Speaker 2: this shit.

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Speaker 1: Talk to a Vietnamese dude about China, like seriously, have

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Speaker 1: a conver fucking station. In nineteen seventy, Sahanok's regime is

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Speaker 1: overthrown because again, the war is not going well for him,

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Speaker 1: He's not particularly good at running Cambodia, and a bunch

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Speaker 1: of these kind of right wing leaders in the military

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Speaker 1: with the backing of the United States gets pissed off.

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Speaker 1: So when when the king, like I think he's actually

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Speaker 1: technically calling himself the prince because he gives up his

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Speaker 1: royal title to quote unquote run for office whatever, Sahanak

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Speaker 1: leaves the country on like a diplomatic visit, and there's

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Speaker 1: a coup and the coup is headed by this guy

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Speaker 1: called lawn noleh lawn Nole is actually the brother of

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Speaker 1: Salathsar's childhood best friend, and obviously, like because of that,

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Speaker 1: lawn Nole's brother is a major part of the regime.

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Speaker 1: Lawn Nole sets up and he's like, yeah, probably if

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Speaker 1: Salas if the if the communists win, my friendship with

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Speaker 1: you know, salat Sar will protect me. It doesn't, by

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Speaker 1: the way, this guy gets the fucking shit Liq were

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Speaker 1: dated out of him. And the fact that there's a

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Speaker 1: family connection, you know, or a deep connection between between

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Speaker 1: Salatsar who's leading the communists, and you know, the family

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Speaker 1: of lawn Nole does nothing to temper the brutality of

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Speaker 1: the conflict that follows. Now, a lot of this comes

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Speaker 1: directly as a result of law Nole's policies, right, this

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Speaker 1: is not just Polepod is running a very brutal insurgency,

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Speaker 1: but it's brutal in response to the sheer violence unleashed

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Speaker 1: by Nol in order to try to maintain control. As

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Speaker 1: soon as the monarchy is abolished, the so called Khmer

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Speaker 1: Republic begins calling on the US to continue and extend

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Speaker 1: their bombing campaign in Cambodia, which had started clandestinely and

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Speaker 1: very illegally in nineteen sixty nine under Nixon as a

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Speaker 1: way to try and stop Vietnamese Communists from being able

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Speaker 1: to supply themselves. Right, there's this idea, it's accurate idea

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Speaker 1: that Cambodia is a big part of how the Vietcong

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Speaker 1: are like supplying and this is where they're retreating to

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Speaker 1: in order to regather their strength. That is essentially accurate.

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Speaker 1: And we are bombing them for years and pretending not to.

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Speaker 1: And now when law Nol is in power, we don't

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Speaker 1: have to like lie because we're being invited right now,

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Speaker 1: we're being invited by this coup that we set up. Right,

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Speaker 1: the US would ultimately drop more than half a million

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Speaker 1: tons on Cambodia in a four year period of time.

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Speaker 1: And for an idea of how many explosives that is,

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Speaker 1: I mean that sounds like our lot, right, five hundred

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Speaker 1: thousand tons is a lot of weight. That's more than

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Speaker 1: the total weight of bombs dropped on the Empire of

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Speaker 1: Japan during all of World War two. And right, here's

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Speaker 1: the thing. These bombs are being dropped both to deal

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Speaker 1: with like Vietcong. You know, tunnel complexes and some of

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Speaker 1: their bases, and to stop the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer

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Speaker 1: Rouge has no industrial base. Their weapons have to be

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Speaker 1: smuggled in. They are not like building tanks. They don't

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Speaker 1: have cities that are like functioning as part of an

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Speaker 1: industrial core. The Empire of Japan was one of the

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Speaker 1: most powerful industrialized states on the planet. And we drop

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Speaker 1: more bombs on Cambodia than we did on them, right, Like, right,

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Speaker 1: that's Jesus Christ, it's fucking and we nuked Japan famously, right,

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Speaker 1: Like the degree of force that we deploy on these

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Speaker 1: guys is outrageous and we get fuck all for it.

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Speaker 1: Like this could not have been a less useful use

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Speaker 1: of force, not that that would have made it like

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Speaker 1: moral if like it had won us the war, it

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Speaker 1: wouldn't be Okay, I'm not saying that, but it like

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Speaker 1: this is just like the biggest l A military one

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Speaker 1: of the biggest l's A military ever took, is.

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Speaker 2: Not but also somehow extreme, even more pointless than some

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Speaker 2: of the other wars.

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Speaker 1: And that's the thing. I tried to make this clear

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Speaker 1: in the Kissinger episodes, Like it's not just how evil

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Speaker 1: he is because he gets depicted as like this evil

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Speaker 1: genius a lot. He sucked so much shit at a

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Speaker 1: lot of what he was doing. Right, between one hundred

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Speaker 1: and fifty thousand, three hundred Cambodians probably died. That's a

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Speaker 1: credible death toll, although there's a lot of arguments that

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Speaker 1: both of those numbers either is much too low, right,

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Speaker 1: that it's significantly higher than three hundred thousand. You can

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Speaker 1: find some lower estimates. One fifty to three is kind

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Speaker 1: of you know somewhere, that's close enough for what we're

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Speaker 1: talking about here. It's a crime. It's a historic crime

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Speaker 1: against humanity. Right. Most of those dead are civilians, including

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Speaker 1: a shitload of little kids who are just incinerated from

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Speaker 1: the sky by the United States Air Force. So the

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Speaker 1: fact that we're doing this, the fact that we are

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Speaker 1: incinerating entire villages, we're just lighting little kids on fire

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Speaker 1: from the sky, makes people angry. The folks who don't die,

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Speaker 1: and who previously had had their ambition in life had

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Speaker 1: been to like, you know, be a peasant, feed my family,

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Speaker 1: live a life, you know, like be a normal Cambodian person,

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Speaker 1: their ambitions changed after their families get incinerated and suddenly

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Speaker 1: They're like, you know, what would be cool killing a

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Speaker 1: bunch of people in revenge, you know, getting my vengeance,

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Speaker 1: And so a lot of peasants start flocking to the

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Speaker 1: banner of the Khmer Rouge, which had not been super

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Speaker 1: popular previously, right, it had been growing before this bombing

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Speaker 1: campaign escalates, but not massively. The bombing campaign's primary result

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Speaker 1: is to supercharge support for the Khmer Rouge, because wouldn't

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Speaker 1: you want to shoot somebody?

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Speaker 2: Yeah? That is it is. I mean, that's eternally the

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Speaker 2: best recruiting tool.

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Speaker 1: Yes, And I'll never say anything to mitigate or reduce

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Speaker 1: the complicity and the responsibility of Polepot and the leaders

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Speaker 1: for the crimes that are about to happen. But the

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Speaker 1: crimes are being committed directly on the ground by a

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Speaker 1: lot of these young people from the jungle who grow

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Speaker 1: up under this bombing campaign and then join the gorilla.

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Speaker 1: And I can't, no matter how hideous things are, I

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Speaker 1: can't really blame them. Which isn't saying that it's okay

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Speaker 1: or justified. It's just saying that, like you, you ruined

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Speaker 1: people and they went insane, Like no one's capable of

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Speaker 1: acting rationally with the damage that you have done to them,

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Speaker 1: you know, with the exception again of these people at

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Speaker 1: the top, guys like pole Pot who do not grow up,

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Speaker 1: are not raised, being bombed or you know, living under

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Speaker 1: these horrible conditions in the jungle. These are people of

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Speaker 1: privilege of education who had the opportunity to pick a

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Speaker 1: different path and did choose horror, right, And that's where

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Speaker 1: my blame lies here. I want to quote from an

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Speaker 1: article for the Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network by

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Speaker 1: David Chandler. Next quote, and this is kind of describing

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Speaker 1: how the Khmer rouge develops as a result of all this.

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Speaker 1: The small scale guerrilla movement which he had launched against

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Speaker 1: the Henex's government in the late nineteen sixties developed with

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Speaker 1: Vietnamese and Chinese backing into a full scale resistance arvey

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Speaker 1: fighting the American backed Long Nul regime and Nom Pen.

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Speaker 1: At the same time, Sara developed the distinctive ideology which

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Speaker 1: made the CPK that's the Communist Party of Cambodia very

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Speaker 1: different from other Marxist Leninists parties. He mistrusted the working class,

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Speaker 1: relying instead on the poor peasantry, whom he saw as

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Speaker 1: the incarnation of Rousseau's noble savage. His party functioned like

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Speaker 1: a sect, and some authors underlined that his communism was

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Speaker 1: colored by Cambodian Buddhist structures. Its members were required to

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Speaker 1: renounce not only material possessions but also spiritual ties. The

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Speaker 1: ultimate goal was to crush individual personality and replace it

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Speaker 1: by unquestioning adherence to the collectivity. Discipline was ferocious security, omnipresent.

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Speaker 1: Saw abhorred the limelight, preferring to operate from the shadows

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Speaker 1: and using multiple aliases poke hey, eighty seven, Pole, grand uncle,

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Speaker 1: elder brother, first brother, and in later years ninety nine

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Speaker 1: or pim. Yet his fanaticism was marked masked by great

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Speaker 1: personal charisma. People who met him remembered his winning smile

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Speaker 1: and considerable talent as an orator.

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Speaker 2: I mean a sick, athletic list of nicknames. It is

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Speaker 2: pretty cool. I know I'm fixating. I'm fixating on all

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Speaker 2: the names, but they're fucking rad.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard not to write like that. For whatever reason,

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Speaker 1: I think eighty seven is my pick.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is eighty seven based off? Did

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Speaker 2: you find that out?

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Speaker 1: Actually no, I probably could have figured it out, but

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Speaker 1: I didn't come across that in my reading. Now, because

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Speaker 1: this is the yeah yeah now, because this isn't a

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Speaker 1: military history podcast, and the overall story of Cambodia during

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Speaker 1: this period is so much more detailed than we can

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Speaker 1: get into. I'm going to have to YadA YadA a

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Speaker 1: lot of how how the rebellion you know, succeeds.

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Speaker 3: I love when YadA YadA, please YadA yadda ya yaada.

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Speaker 1: The gist of it is, Londol's government was only capable

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Speaker 1: of holding the line against the communists with US backing,

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Speaker 1: and even then not all that well. By the early

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, it had become clear that there was an

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Speaker 1: expiration date on that assistance. The Khmayer Rouge grew large

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Speaker 1: with each atrocity by the right wing government and their allies.

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Speaker 1: In areas where the Rouge took power, everyone old enough

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Speaker 1: to fight was drafted into the military, and everyone else

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Speaker 1: was put to work. The all black garb of the peasantry,

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Speaker 1: which had just kind of been a traditional thing in Cambodia,

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Speaker 1: became the only acceptable outfit to wear. You're literally not

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Speaker 1: allowed to dress differently. Those who refused to serve were executed.

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Speaker 1: By nineteen seventy three, most of rural Cambodia was in

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Speaker 1: rouge hands, and I got to say, the one aspect

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Speaker 1: of the Khmer Rouge I could have done great with

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Speaker 1: is just kind of wearing black pajamas all the time,

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Speaker 1: Like I got that shit on the lock, baby, Like

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Speaker 1: I'm wearing this like sport coat thing, but it's just

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Speaker 1: black pajamas under this.

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Speaker 2: This is this is the tragedy of the YouTube era. Yeah,

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Speaker 2: is this fucking sport coat? When you know Robert could

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Speaker 2: just be full jammed out.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and I am. This thing doesn't reduce the comfort,

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Speaker 1: It's fine, don't worry. Don't worry. I'm pole Potting under this.

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Speaker 2: That's what he says. That's every episode, It's not just

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Speaker 2: this one.

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Speaker 1: The final straw for lon Nole's regime is when Prince Sahanna,

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Speaker 1: hiding in exile, announced his support for Polepot's rebels. Now

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Speaker 1: we've done. We did a two part or one of

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Speaker 1: our very first episodes on Notre Dame Sahanak. He sucks ass.

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Speaker 1: Listen to those episodes as to why. But the reason

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Speaker 1: he does this is he believed that, like you know,

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Speaker 1: he thought this might give him a shot at returning

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Speaker 1: to power. Right if I back these guys. Clearly they

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Speaker 1: won't last, and eventually I'll be able to make my

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Speaker 1: way back in. Right. What really happens is he strengthens

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Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge at a critical moment because again, people

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Speaker 1: the peasantry feel very strongly about the royalty, right, and

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Speaker 1: that still has not been busted, even though he really

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Speaker 1: sucked ass when he was actually running things. He does

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Speaker 1: this right as the US is starting to pull out

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Speaker 1: their assets and things fall very quickly. Think about kind

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Speaker 1: of how long the government of Afghanistan lasted as the

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Speaker 1: US pulled out, right, that's kind of what we're seeing here.

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Speaker 1: On April seventeenth, nineteen seventy five, Lon Nole's army collapsed

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Speaker 1: entirely and the Khmer Rouge entered Nom Penn. Now you

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Speaker 1: got to remember at this point, you know, when they

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Speaker 1: take the capital, the fighting has been going on in

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Speaker 1: parts of Cambodia for twenty years or more. People are

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Speaker 1: fucking exhausted, and is always the case in times like this.

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Speaker 1: There was an optimism among like a lot of regular

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Speaker 1: people that like, look, I don't know so much about

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Speaker 1: these Khmer Rouge guys, but the war's over. Maybe things

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Speaker 1: will get better, right, there's this hope, and that hope

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Speaker 1: is crushed very quickly because Polepot and his comrades, it's

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Speaker 1: not even that they don't want to go back to

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Speaker 1: normal and their minds going back to normal is a

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Speaker 1: death sentence, right. And again this is kind of what

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Speaker 1: messes with a lot of people's casual understanding of what's happening,

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Speaker 1: because you would think, well, obviously, these guys have to

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Speaker 1: hate the US more than anybody else, right, not at

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Speaker 1: all the cases. The people the Polepot's obsession is Vietnam.

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Speaker 1: That is the real enemy, not capitalism, not the United States,

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Speaker 1: the West Vietnam. Saigon fell to the NVA not far

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Speaker 1: from when Nam Pen did, right. And because of this,

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Speaker 1: because Vietnam has won its War two, there's this immediate

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Speaker 1: widespread paranoia among the Khmer Rouge leadership that the Vietnamese

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Speaker 1: are going to digest their meal of southern Vietnam and

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Speaker 1: then they're immediately going to take this big army they've

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Speaker 1: got with tanks and aircraft and all sorts of modern

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Speaker 1: weapons that the Khmer Rouge does not really have access to,

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Speaker 1: and they're going to cross the border and they're going

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Speaker 1: to invade Cambodia. And they're going to take us out

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Speaker 1: and make us nothing but a tribute state, right like

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Speaker 1: that is the immediate fear, and the only way to

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Speaker 1: resist this future, to have a chance of defeating Vietnam

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Speaker 1: and maintaining Khmara autonomy is to rapidly change the country,

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Speaker 1: both in terms of how food is produced and how

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Speaker 1: like to and to do this kind of they're very

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Speaker 1: motivated by these ideas they'd taken from Mao. That kind

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Speaker 1: of became the great leap for word in China of

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Speaker 1: like what if we do industrialism? But it's like everybody's

379
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Speaker 1: backyard is helping to like make different sort of industrial products, right.

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Speaker 2: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, the I guess it's just DIY

381
00:21:14,320 --> 00:21:18,679
Speaker 2: approach to making you know your aks and your plate armor.

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Speaker 1: Yes, and you can with guns, but not like the

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Speaker 1: guns you need to win a modern right, You're not

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Speaker 1: gonna be like making an SBG nine in your backyard

385
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Speaker 1: or whatever. Fucking shit speaking of making recoilist rifles in

386
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Speaker 1: your backyard. Our sponsors will teach you how they love

387
00:21:41,640 --> 00:21:46,840
Speaker 1: helping people maintain modern I don't know whatever. Their freedom

388
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Speaker 1: yeah freedom fuck ah and I'm bad. Okay, So cities

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Speaker 1: like the Capital have no place in Polepot's radical view

390
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Speaker 1: of the future of the country, which needs to be

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Speaker 1: immediately changed on a fundamental level in order to survive

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Speaker 1: and defeat the Vietnamese. So there's this plan that's hatched

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Speaker 1: by Polepot in the leadership of the party to completely

394
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Speaker 1: reform Cambodian society in order to make it capable of surviving.

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Speaker 1: And Polepot names this plan year zero. In April of

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Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, they declare this openly, and this Year

397
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Speaker 1: zero concept. We talked about this in the earlier episodes.

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Speaker 1: It's based in part on Polepot's understanding of the French

399
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Speaker 1: revolution right as well as reading from guys like Thomas Paine,

400
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Speaker 1: because he does read like American revolutionaries too, And in

401
00:22:48,720 --> 00:22:52,040
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six pain had published this quote, we have

402
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Speaker 1: it in our power to begin the world over again,

403
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Speaker 1: a situation similar to the present. Hath not happened since

404
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Speaker 1: the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a

405
00:23:01,359 --> 00:23:03,959
Speaker 1: new world is at hand. And this is the kind

406
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Speaker 1: of thing you hear in some like optimistic revolutionary tracts,

407
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Speaker 1: especially in the headiness of like we've defeated the regime,

408
00:23:11,359 --> 00:23:14,840
Speaker 1: we have this chance for a total break with history. Right,

409
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Speaker 1: there's even you can you can think about kind of

410
00:23:18,600 --> 00:23:22,040
Speaker 1: the whole the end of history stuff that was being

411
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Speaker 1: said at the when the Soviet Union fell. There's this

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Speaker 1: headiness of like, well, maybe maybe we're done competing with

413
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Speaker 1: like what kind of systems are going to work? Maybe

414
00:23:31,400 --> 00:23:34,520
Speaker 1: we've maybe we can. We're entering into this fundamentally new

415
00:23:34,560 --> 00:23:38,760
Speaker 1: world that's like represents this real break of continuity, and

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Speaker 1: that means we're never going to have to worry about

417
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Speaker 1: like going back to any of the bad old days

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Speaker 1: or the problems that we had struggled to know back. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: there's no way of going back.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: We finally did it?

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Speaker 2: Oh man, I mean obviously in hindsight, but like, never

423
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Speaker 2: has that sentiment been expressed and had not been a

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Speaker 2: true psycho saying.

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Speaker 1: Right right right, I mean I love me some Thomas Paine,

426
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Speaker 1: but you should look at the rest of his life.

427
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Speaker 1: This wasn't I mean, obviously we the US became a

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Speaker 1: slave state, right yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to quote

429
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Speaker 1: from an article written by Adris ayres here. Quote it

430
00:24:15,359 --> 00:24:18,439
Speaker 1: is evident that the Khmer Rouge, in deliberate and skillful fashion,

431
00:24:18,480 --> 00:24:21,680
Speaker 1: drew on history for political INDs. Their leadership made repeated

432
00:24:21,680 --> 00:24:24,280
Speaker 1: reference to the importance of grasping the wheel of history

433
00:24:24,280 --> 00:24:26,760
Speaker 1: and how history would crush those who stood in the

434
00:24:26,800 --> 00:24:30,040
Speaker 1: way of development. I've heard Musk say some similar things.

435
00:24:30,440 --> 00:24:33,679
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy six, as part of Polpot's consolidation of

436
00:24:33,720 --> 00:24:37,359
Speaker 1: personal power, official party historiography was revised with an eye

437
00:24:37,359 --> 00:24:40,439
Speaker 1: to the older Indo Chinese guerrilla fractions within the movement

438
00:24:40,680 --> 00:24:42,879
Speaker 1: by moving the date of the parties founding from nineteen

439
00:24:42,920 --> 00:24:45,800
Speaker 1: fifty one to nineteen sixty and a meeting of the

440
00:24:45,800 --> 00:24:48,520
Speaker 1: Central Committee in March nineteen seventy six, it was noted,

441
00:24:48,560 --> 00:24:51,840
Speaker 1: with regard to historiography, that we must rearrange the history

442
00:24:51,840 --> 00:24:54,199
Speaker 1: of the party into something clean and perfect. Do not

443
00:24:54,320 --> 00:24:57,840
Speaker 1: use nineteen fifty one, make a clean break. So again

444
00:24:58,320 --> 00:25:01,679
Speaker 1: there's this even our re history of our real movement,

445
00:25:01,720 --> 00:25:05,760
Speaker 1: that one isn't good enough. We have to like And

446
00:25:06,080 --> 00:25:10,040
Speaker 1: if if you're ever in a if're ever finding your movement,

447
00:25:10,119 --> 00:25:13,199
Speaker 1: is needing to like alter the very basic foundation of

448
00:25:13,280 --> 00:25:15,520
Speaker 1: reality for your ideas to work.

449
00:25:16,080 --> 00:25:19,600
Speaker 2: Maybe bounce, I mean the b side of all the

450
00:25:19,640 --> 00:25:23,679
Speaker 2: cool names is like a sort of juvenile relationship to

451
00:25:23,880 --> 00:25:27,520
Speaker 2: like your own story, which is right, kind of weirdly

452
00:25:27,560 --> 00:25:31,640
Speaker 2: an evident here in evidence. Here we're like, why.

453
00:25:32,040 --> 00:25:33,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is and this is why, like we talk

454
00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:37,120
Speaker 1: about the reason why I identify more as an anarchist

455
00:25:37,200 --> 00:25:40,399
Speaker 1: than anything else. Isn't because like I have some great

456
00:25:40,440 --> 00:25:42,840
Speaker 1: plan based on some thinker, for like, this is the

457
00:25:42,880 --> 00:25:45,320
Speaker 1: perfect way to reorder society, and if we did this

458
00:25:45,480 --> 00:25:48,399
Speaker 1: exact thing, based on this exact book, it would clearly

459
00:25:48,480 --> 00:25:51,320
Speaker 1: work without any problems. I feel that way because like,

460
00:25:51,480 --> 00:25:55,200
Speaker 1: anarchists have diagnosed the problem in a way that I'd

461
00:25:55,240 --> 00:25:57,760
Speaker 1: never seen be wrong. And the problem is if you

462
00:25:57,800 --> 00:26:03,560
Speaker 1: give people lots of power, Yeah, they do horrible things. Yeah, right,

463
00:26:03,960 --> 00:26:06,960
Speaker 1: Like that's that's that's kind of where I get into

464
00:26:07,000 --> 00:26:07,680
Speaker 1: it from. Right.

465
00:26:07,720 --> 00:26:11,639
Speaker 2: And then every conceivable war, yeah, every conceivable dimension that

466
00:26:11,640 --> 00:26:15,160
Speaker 2: that power can be gained from. Yeah, still bad.

467
00:26:15,720 --> 00:26:17,840
Speaker 1: Yes, And when you have all of the power and

468
00:26:17,880 --> 00:26:20,240
Speaker 1: you have this very strict idea of this, we need

469
00:26:20,280 --> 00:26:22,600
Speaker 1: to do this exact thing, and this exact thing is

470
00:26:22,640 --> 00:26:25,080
Speaker 1: the only thing that can save us, and then the

471
00:26:25,119 --> 00:26:28,680
Speaker 1: world doesn't sort of change the way you think it

472
00:26:28,720 --> 00:26:31,480
Speaker 1: ought to based on your political beliefs, Well, you're just

473
00:26:31,520 --> 00:26:34,120
Speaker 1: going to start killing people and that's sure enough. What's

474
00:26:34,160 --> 00:26:35,040
Speaker 1: going to happen here?

475
00:26:35,280 --> 00:26:36,240
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the.

476
00:26:36,280 --> 00:26:38,720
Speaker 1: Project to make a clean break with history, this whole

477
00:26:38,800 --> 00:26:42,040
Speaker 1: Year zero thing is urgent, right because unless they can

478
00:26:42,320 --> 00:26:46,040
Speaker 1: do this before Vietnam swallows them up, they're fucked. The

479
00:26:46,040 --> 00:26:50,000
Speaker 1: internal Marxist analysis also indicated that Cambodia had to proceed

480
00:26:50,040 --> 00:26:54,200
Speaker 1: directly from feudalism to communism within four years, which they

481
00:26:54,280 --> 00:26:59,760
Speaker 1: called the super great leap forward. We already know this

482
00:27:00,080 --> 00:27:02,159
Speaker 1: can work for Mao, and we're like, but when we

483
00:27:02,160 --> 00:27:05,439
Speaker 1: make it like a super greatly for it's like Mario

484
00:27:05,560 --> 00:27:07,879
Speaker 1: Brothers suck edd ass. But once we ded a super,

485
00:27:07,960 --> 00:27:08,960
Speaker 1: it was finally good.

486
00:27:10,880 --> 00:27:14,480
Speaker 2: Just do the thing that already didn't work, but more.

487
00:27:15,040 --> 00:27:16,920
Speaker 1: Yeah, Mao was just sitting there like, God, damn it,

488
00:27:16,920 --> 00:27:18,920
Speaker 1: Why didn't I put a super in front of it? Fuck?

489
00:27:18,960 --> 00:27:26,040
Speaker 1: The backyard furnaces would have worked, super sparrow murdering. In

490
00:27:26,160 --> 00:27:29,000
Speaker 1: policy terms, Year zero had a fairly narrow meaning the

491
00:27:29,080 --> 00:27:31,760
Speaker 1: cities which were dominant. As I stated in earlier episodes,

492
00:27:31,800 --> 00:27:35,359
Speaker 1: the cities have a like they're not like overwhelmingly Khmer

493
00:27:35,840 --> 00:27:37,359
Speaker 1: like the rest of the country is. They have a

494
00:27:37,400 --> 00:27:40,600
Speaker 1: lot of Vietnamese and Chinese traders and a lot of

495
00:27:40,800 --> 00:27:43,360
Speaker 1: the Khmer that lived there are the new people, right,

496
00:27:43,480 --> 00:27:47,200
Speaker 1: They are educated Khmer who come from families with money,

497
00:27:47,240 --> 00:27:49,719
Speaker 1: who have gone through Western education, who have often been

498
00:27:49,840 --> 00:27:54,480
Speaker 1: educated overseas and have thus been unforgivably tainted by foreign influence.

499
00:27:54,560 --> 00:27:57,760
Speaker 1: Now you may also notice these new people that he's

500
00:27:57,760 --> 00:28:01,480
Speaker 1: saying we need to expel from the cities are Polepot

501
00:28:01,520 --> 00:28:07,439
Speaker 1: and his friends right right, Still, the new people have

502
00:28:07,560 --> 00:28:10,000
Speaker 1: to either assimilate to the base people, and the base

503
00:28:10,040 --> 00:28:13,800
Speaker 1: people are Khmer peasant farmers, or die. And the distinct

504
00:28:13,960 --> 00:28:17,720
Speaker 1: preference of the Khmer rus is that they die. Andres

505
00:28:17,720 --> 00:28:22,359
Speaker 1: Airs describes how jarringly rapid this process is. Quote. Money

506
00:28:22,440 --> 00:28:26,439
Speaker 1: markets and private properties, schools, institutes of higher education, newspapers,

507
00:28:26,440 --> 00:28:30,320
Speaker 1: and religious institutions all were immediately abolished after the seizure

508
00:28:30,320 --> 00:28:33,720
Speaker 1: of power. Early eyewitness accounts relate how the hospital and

509
00:28:33,840 --> 00:28:36,960
Speaker 1: non pen was emptied of patients, how the national bank

510
00:28:37,040 --> 00:28:40,360
Speaker 1: was set on fire, money burned in the streets. Immediately

511
00:28:40,400 --> 00:28:43,840
Speaker 1: after the victory proclamation, book burnings were orchestrated in front

512
00:28:43,840 --> 00:28:47,480
Speaker 1: of the National Library and the School of Renee Descartes.

513
00:28:47,800 --> 00:28:50,600
Speaker 1: The country's borders were closed immediately, and the cleansing of

514
00:28:50,640 --> 00:28:53,800
Speaker 1: the country from foreign influences began by deporting foreigners and

515
00:28:53,840 --> 00:28:58,280
Speaker 1: domestic minorities such as Vietnamese Muslim Khmer, Chinese Khmer ties,

516
00:28:58,360 --> 00:29:01,360
Speaker 1: and Europeans. It was also so officially announced that the

517
00:29:01,480 --> 00:29:05,560
Speaker 1: individual would be abolished the traditional family would be replaced

518
00:29:05,560 --> 00:29:08,760
Speaker 1: by the movement in order to create a completely conflict

519
00:29:08,800 --> 00:29:13,720
Speaker 1: free society. Revolutionaries were officially instructed not to have a personality.

520
00:29:14,120 --> 00:29:18,440
Speaker 1: The individual was continually counterposed to the people, with the

521
00:29:18,520 --> 00:29:24,440
Speaker 1: former representing division, factionalism, inequality, bourgeoisie values, and foreign influence.

522
00:29:24,720 --> 00:29:30,280
Speaker 1: The people meanwhile embodied its polar opposite, something entirely pure redemption,

523
00:29:30,720 --> 00:29:34,960
Speaker 1: the extermination of particularity and contingency and the realization of

524
00:29:35,080 --> 00:29:40,240
Speaker 1: absolute freedom, equality and fraternity through complete absorption into the

525
00:29:40,320 --> 00:29:43,680
Speaker 1: ang Car. And that's the people. That's the Vulk, right,

526
00:29:43,920 --> 00:29:46,040
Speaker 1: you know, the Nazi said the Vulcan. The ang Car

527
00:29:46,240 --> 00:29:49,360
Speaker 1: is that for the Khmer rouse It's close enough at least, right,

528
00:29:49,600 --> 00:29:54,240
Speaker 1: And yeah, revolutionaries are not allowed to have personalities.

529
00:29:54,480 --> 00:29:57,160
Speaker 2: I mean, I know we're coming at this from a

530
00:29:57,240 --> 00:30:01,239
Speaker 2: different time and hindsight, but I it's so hard for

531
00:30:01,280 --> 00:30:04,720
Speaker 2: me to even hear the version of that speech that's

532
00:30:04,760 --> 00:30:09,520
Speaker 2: stirring or less motivating it's really wild.

533
00:30:09,560 --> 00:30:12,520
Speaker 1: And it's motivating to the people who have been drinking

534
00:30:12,600 --> 00:30:14,880
Speaker 1: the kool aid, because again, they've been in these They

535
00:30:14,880 --> 00:30:16,920
Speaker 1: started out in these circles where it's just them and

536
00:30:16,920 --> 00:30:20,880
Speaker 1: their friends, continually radicalizing each other further and not really

537
00:30:20,920 --> 00:30:25,480
Speaker 1: listening to outside people, right, and then they moved to

538
00:30:25,560 --> 00:30:27,800
Speaker 1: the jungle and become so not only are they all

539
00:30:27,800 --> 00:30:31,240
Speaker 1: like trauma bonding getting bombed together, but they're continuing to

540
00:30:31,320 --> 00:30:34,480
Speaker 1: talk out these ideas and just take themselves like. This

541
00:30:34,640 --> 00:30:38,040
Speaker 1: isn't for other people, right. The point is not to

542
00:30:38,120 --> 00:30:45,080
Speaker 1: inspire other people, right, right, And it is this you get.

543
00:30:45,120 --> 00:30:47,360
Speaker 1: This is an issue I have with like some other

544
00:30:47,360 --> 00:30:49,720
Speaker 1: people that I otherwise agree with a lot. There's talk

545
00:30:50,640 --> 00:30:53,040
Speaker 1: among certain left inst tendencies about the concept of the

546
00:30:53,080 --> 00:30:55,479
Speaker 1: abolition of the family and what they tend to mean

547
00:30:55,520 --> 00:30:58,400
Speaker 1: in the modern era is looking at a lot of

548
00:30:58,600 --> 00:31:02,680
Speaker 1: how much of right wing policy is based upon the

549
00:31:02,720 --> 00:31:07,120
Speaker 1: idea that parents own their children, right, and that literally,

550
00:31:07,440 --> 00:31:10,280
Speaker 1: like anything a parent wants for their kid, that's all

551
00:31:10,320 --> 00:31:12,640
Speaker 1: that should matter, right, which leads to a lot of

552
00:31:12,680 --> 00:31:14,880
Speaker 1: heinous Some of the worst things that happen in our

553
00:31:14,880 --> 00:31:18,320
Speaker 1: society is because of our conception of the family. As

554
00:31:18,360 --> 00:31:22,120
Speaker 1: this thing in which the parents, primarily the father, possesses

555
00:31:22,240 --> 00:31:25,720
Speaker 1: everyone else, right, and wanting to abolish that idea of

556
00:31:25,760 --> 00:31:28,680
Speaker 1: the family is good, But when you start framing it

557
00:31:28,680 --> 00:31:31,320
Speaker 1: as family, it's going to bring this up. People are

558
00:31:31,320 --> 00:31:33,160
Speaker 1: going to think about what the Khmayer Rouge did as

559
00:31:33,160 --> 00:31:35,160
Speaker 1: opposed to being like, I don't think parents should be

560
00:31:35,160 --> 00:31:39,080
Speaker 1: allowed to poison their kids because they have autism, right right, right,

561
00:31:39,160 --> 00:31:42,520
Speaker 1: you know, but anyway get.

562
00:31:42,360 --> 00:31:48,640
Speaker 2: Into it absolute power and within the family, and this

563
00:31:48,720 --> 00:31:52,080
Speaker 2: is not a unit that should exist. Yeah, yeah, it's

564
00:31:52,120 --> 00:31:53,480
Speaker 2: this is not good.

565
00:31:53,720 --> 00:31:56,960
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's this optic it's an optical issue, I think.

566
00:31:58,080 --> 00:32:00,440
Speaker 1: But that's not you know, the Khmyre rouges not wanting

567
00:32:00,480 --> 00:32:03,200
Speaker 1: to abolish the family because there's anything similar to the

568
00:32:03,240 --> 00:32:06,240
Speaker 1: issue we have with the parental rights movement in the US, right,

569
00:32:06,320 --> 00:32:09,080
Speaker 1: the Khmayer Rouge wants to abolish the family because all

570
00:32:09,120 --> 00:32:11,840
Speaker 1: they want to exist is the party and this idea

571
00:32:11,920 --> 00:32:15,000
Speaker 1: of almost like a collective consciousness. If we can wipe

572
00:32:15,000 --> 00:32:18,200
Speaker 1: out enough individualism, then like we will have this kind

573
00:32:18,240 --> 00:32:23,320
Speaker 1: of pure individual close to nature, this like idolized everyone

574
00:32:23,360 --> 00:32:26,680
Speaker 1: will be the idolized Khmer peasant farmer who, by the way,

575
00:32:27,120 --> 00:32:29,880
Speaker 1: Polpot's parents had fought tooth and nail to make sure

576
00:32:29,880 --> 00:32:30,680
Speaker 1: he never had to.

577
00:32:30,600 --> 00:32:34,120
Speaker 2: Be Yeah, yeah, don't worry about that.

578
00:32:34,400 --> 00:32:37,560
Speaker 1: So as soon as they start doing all of this stuff,

579
00:32:37,680 --> 00:32:41,640
Speaker 1: people begin to starve. Right There's so much disruption. There's

580
00:32:41,640 --> 00:32:43,520
Speaker 1: disruption to the way food has grown and the way

581
00:32:43,560 --> 00:32:47,440
Speaker 1: it's transmitted, all of these networks that had existed. It's

582
00:32:47,440 --> 00:32:49,000
Speaker 1: one thing if you're like, we want to get rid

583
00:32:49,000 --> 00:32:51,440
Speaker 1: of capitalism, and we want to get rid of things

584
00:32:51,480 --> 00:32:54,280
Speaker 1: being entirely governed by the financial motive, but you have

585
00:32:54,320 --> 00:32:56,520
Speaker 1: to account for the fact that, like, well, but that's

586
00:32:56,520 --> 00:32:59,000
Speaker 1: how all of the food gets places right now, and like,

587
00:32:59,240 --> 00:33:00,480
Speaker 1: do you not have a You have to have a

588
00:33:00,520 --> 00:33:03,120
Speaker 1: real granular plan for how you're going to make sure

589
00:33:03,240 --> 00:33:06,640
Speaker 1: food keeps getting to people. They're why is everyone's going

590
00:33:06,720 --> 00:33:10,120
Speaker 1: to die? And that's what starts to happen, and people

591
00:33:10,160 --> 00:33:12,520
Speaker 1: also start to starve to death as they are forced

592
00:33:12,560 --> 00:33:15,880
Speaker 1: at gunpoint out of the cities. Non pen had flooded

593
00:33:15,880 --> 00:33:19,160
Speaker 1: to significantly higher than its pre war population because of

594
00:33:19,200 --> 00:33:21,400
Speaker 1: the war going on, and now these people are being

595
00:33:21,400 --> 00:33:24,280
Speaker 1: marched out and no one's allowed to take anything. People

596
00:33:24,280 --> 00:33:26,640
Speaker 1: are being dragged out at gunpoint in some cases, their

597
00:33:26,640 --> 00:33:28,680
Speaker 1: houses are being burnt down. They don't have a lot

598
00:33:28,680 --> 00:33:31,400
Speaker 1: of baggage, right, and it's not like people had a

599
00:33:31,440 --> 00:33:33,880
Speaker 1: lot we're keeping like food on hand. This isn't like

600
00:33:33,920 --> 00:33:36,600
Speaker 1: a prepper culture. Folks don't have like freeze dried shit

601
00:33:36,640 --> 00:33:39,440
Speaker 1: in their houses. So people are just being forced to

602
00:33:39,600 --> 00:33:41,560
Speaker 1: walk a lot of a number of them have been

603
00:33:41,600 --> 00:33:44,840
Speaker 1: pulled out of hospitals and they're just dying. They're dying

604
00:33:44,920 --> 00:33:48,400
Speaker 1: by the tins of thousands alongside the road, and as

605
00:33:48,440 --> 00:33:51,200
Speaker 1: people march out, they're just seeing these piles of corpses

606
00:33:51,200 --> 00:33:53,720
Speaker 1: of their neighbors and family members bloating in the sun.

607
00:33:54,240 --> 00:33:58,520
Speaker 1: It's just a really hideous like nightmare for all of

608
00:33:58,560 --> 00:34:01,560
Speaker 1: these people. And they're you know, these fighters that they're

609
00:34:01,600 --> 00:34:05,200
Speaker 1: meeting are folks largely who'd come from like rural areas

610
00:34:05,240 --> 00:34:07,240
Speaker 1: in the jungle. They're very young. A lot of them

611
00:34:07,240 --> 00:34:10,279
Speaker 1: are teenagers who have been raised on this war, and

612
00:34:10,960 --> 00:34:13,960
Speaker 1: they number one, don't have a lot of sympathy for

613
00:34:14,000 --> 00:34:16,480
Speaker 1: these people in the cities, who they've seen as the enemy.

614
00:34:16,560 --> 00:34:19,040
Speaker 1: The capital is what they've been fighting, if you want

615
00:34:19,080 --> 00:34:22,680
Speaker 1: to think it, like hunger games, derroty. And also they've

616
00:34:22,719 --> 00:34:25,040
Speaker 1: been told these are the new people. Right, These are

617
00:34:25,080 --> 00:34:27,200
Speaker 1: the enemy. We do have to get rid of them,

618
00:34:27,200 --> 00:34:29,960
Speaker 1: one way or another. So if you kill these people,

619
00:34:30,200 --> 00:34:32,000
Speaker 1: if you shoot them by the side of the road,

620
00:34:32,040 --> 00:34:35,640
Speaker 1: if they starve to death, you're helping to bring about that.

621
00:34:35,800 --> 00:34:39,640
Speaker 1: You're helping to save the Khmer people. Right. While most

622
00:34:39,640 --> 00:34:41,520
Speaker 1: of the deaths under the new regime are caused by

623
00:34:41,520 --> 00:34:44,720
Speaker 1: diseaser famine, they're all intentional. These are all the results

624
00:34:44,719 --> 00:34:48,200
Speaker 1: of policies set by Polpot and his comrades, and the

625
00:34:48,360 --> 00:34:52,600
Speaker 1: expectation of these policies was mass dying. The stage had

626
00:34:52,640 --> 00:34:54,360
Speaker 1: been set for this in the years leading up to

627
00:34:54,400 --> 00:34:56,880
Speaker 1: the capital's fall by a process of what is called

628
00:34:57,200 --> 00:35:05,440
Speaker 1: by genocide scholars toxification, specifically toxification through Khmer rouge propaganda toxification.

629
00:35:05,560 --> 00:35:07,759
Speaker 1: This is a process you can watch happen right now

630
00:35:07,760 --> 00:35:09,840
Speaker 1: in your very own country, presuming you live in the

631
00:35:09,920 --> 00:35:14,120
Speaker 1: United States. But well other countries, Yeah, but a few

632
00:35:14,160 --> 00:35:16,080
Speaker 1: other countries. We can talk about some recent Supreme Court

633
00:35:16,160 --> 00:35:20,000
Speaker 1: rulings in the UK. Toxification is a process often seen

634
00:35:20,040 --> 00:35:23,759
Speaker 1: in genocide, whereby groups of people are depicted as inherently

635
00:35:23,880 --> 00:35:27,160
Speaker 1: poisonous to the well being of the body politic. The

636
00:35:27,200 --> 00:35:31,160
Speaker 1: real people of a community. Soldiers are not, in general,

637
00:35:31,200 --> 00:35:33,640
Speaker 1: born willing to fill mass grapes or to march an

638
00:35:33,800 --> 00:35:36,839
Speaker 1: entire city out of their homes and die right. They

639
00:35:36,880 --> 00:35:40,000
Speaker 1: are there, They're pushed there, They're gotten to that point

640
00:35:40,239 --> 00:35:43,080
Speaker 1: when they have been convinced that doing so is either

641
00:35:43,200 --> 00:35:46,399
Speaker 1: a form of self defense or a way to fight

642
00:35:46,560 --> 00:35:50,319
Speaker 1: their enemy, or both right, And that's what toxification does.

643
00:35:50,920 --> 00:35:54,000
Speaker 1: There's a very good article on this process called toxification

644
00:35:54,120 --> 00:35:58,320
Speaker 1: and the Khmer Rouge genocide or autogenocide you'll hear both terms,

645
00:35:58,560 --> 00:36:01,279
Speaker 1: published in the Journal of Terror and Political Violence by

646
00:36:01,280 --> 00:36:04,920
Speaker 1: Timothy Williams and Rhianna Nielsen. I recommend reading the whole thing.

647
00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:08,080
Speaker 1: It's a very good article, and it's very important article.

648
00:36:08,200 --> 00:36:11,400
Speaker 1: It will be kind of chilling and light of things

649
00:36:11,440 --> 00:36:13,799
Speaker 1: happening in our present world, but it ought to be,

650
00:36:15,040 --> 00:36:17,719
Speaker 1: and it details how the messaging from Polepot on down

651
00:36:17,800 --> 00:36:21,360
Speaker 1: through the Khmer Rouge hierarchy seeded the militant population with

652
00:36:21,440 --> 00:36:25,080
Speaker 1: the kind of toxic attitudes that are a necessary precursor

653
00:36:25,120 --> 00:36:29,600
Speaker 1: to mass killing. The first people targeted specifically for mass

654
00:36:29,640 --> 00:36:33,040
Speaker 1: execution were those who had bought into and succeeded under

655
00:36:33,040 --> 00:36:36,480
Speaker 1: the capitalist system. These were the budding intelligencia, of whom

656
00:36:36,520 --> 00:36:39,880
Speaker 1: Polepot himself had been a member, professors, lawyers, business owners,

657
00:36:39,960 --> 00:36:44,800
Speaker 1: government officials. Polepot called them the internal enemy or super traders.

658
00:36:45,040 --> 00:36:52,560
Speaker 1: You really like super You hear a lot of that. Obviously,

659
00:36:52,640 --> 00:36:55,160
Speaker 1: this includes people who had been in the military, of

660
00:36:55,239 --> 00:36:55,719
Speaker 1: law and nol.

661
00:36:55,840 --> 00:36:56,040
Speaker 4: Right.

662
00:36:56,400 --> 00:36:58,960
Speaker 1: And the idea was that in this is Polepot's writing,

663
00:36:58,960 --> 00:37:02,600
Speaker 1: anyone with money quote owed the Communist Party a blood debt. Right,

664
00:37:02,640 --> 00:37:05,200
Speaker 1: So this is the first stage, and it's pretty easy

665
00:37:05,200 --> 00:37:06,719
Speaker 1: to get people on board with killing a lot of

666
00:37:06,719 --> 00:37:10,919
Speaker 1: these folks, right. That said, there's not many of them, right,

667
00:37:11,600 --> 00:37:14,560
Speaker 1: and once you start mass killing, you don't tend to stop.

668
00:37:14,719 --> 00:37:17,920
Speaker 1: So next, in nineteen seventy six, Polpot turned the eyes

669
00:37:17,960 --> 00:37:20,879
Speaker 1: and guns of his men on the quote unquote treacherous

670
00:37:20,920 --> 00:37:24,879
Speaker 1: elements he accused of causing sickness within the party. These

671
00:37:25,120 --> 00:37:29,480
Speaker 1: ugly microbes had to be destroyed before they rotted democratic Campuccia,

672
00:37:29,680 --> 00:37:32,160
Speaker 1: which is what they're calling Cambodia now, right, like once

673
00:37:32,239 --> 00:37:34,880
Speaker 1: the Moors takes over, it becomes goes from the Khmer

674
00:37:34,960 --> 00:37:40,680
Speaker 1: Republic to Democratic Campuccia. And Polepot writes of these ugly microbes,

675
00:37:40,760 --> 00:37:44,320
Speaker 1: quote what is infected must be cut, What is rotten,

676
00:37:44,440 --> 00:37:46,920
Speaker 1: must be removed. It isn't enough to cut down a

677
00:37:46,920 --> 00:37:51,000
Speaker 1: bad plant, it must be uprooted. And you see this

678
00:37:51,080 --> 00:37:54,200
Speaker 1: a lot in genocidal language, right, you know, this is

679
00:37:54,200 --> 00:37:58,120
Speaker 1: like Hitler calling the Jews the syphilitic bacillus, right.

680
00:37:59,000 --> 00:38:01,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, or you know any Fano slide.

681
00:38:01,880 --> 00:38:03,000
Speaker 1: Any fantastic line.

682
00:38:03,160 --> 00:38:06,960
Speaker 2: It's like, again, it's just so hard to put myself

683
00:38:06,960 --> 00:38:09,040
Speaker 2: in the mindset where you hear this and you're like,

684
00:38:09,880 --> 00:38:11,120
Speaker 2: let's go yeah.

685
00:38:11,120 --> 00:38:14,160
Speaker 1: And it's you also get this is something we're hearing

686
00:38:14,239 --> 00:38:17,600
Speaker 1: right now with the way mental illness and things that

687
00:38:17,640 --> 00:38:20,359
Speaker 1: are called mental illness is. This is being discussed by

688
00:38:20,360 --> 00:38:23,520
Speaker 1: the right, and it's there's big news right now about

689
00:38:23,719 --> 00:38:26,680
Speaker 1: the fact that RFK Junior is putting trying to get

690
00:38:26,840 --> 00:38:29,080
Speaker 1: trying to use government databases put together a list of

691
00:38:29,120 --> 00:38:33,560
Speaker 1: everyone with autism. That's how it's being spread on social media.

692
00:38:33,680 --> 00:38:36,200
Speaker 1: The actual story is even I would argue even a

693
00:38:36,200 --> 00:38:37,920
Speaker 1: little worse than that, which is that they're attempting to

694
00:38:37,920 --> 00:38:40,759
Speaker 1: put together a database of everybody who has been diagnosed

695
00:38:40,800 --> 00:38:43,920
Speaker 1: with any kind of mental health condition, who is on

696
00:38:43,960 --> 00:38:46,600
Speaker 1: any kind of medication. It's even broader than just that,

697
00:38:48,120 --> 00:38:49,719
Speaker 1: and part of what's going on here is that, like

698
00:38:49,760 --> 00:38:52,480
Speaker 1: there's a big right wing campaign to like blame gun

699
00:38:52,560 --> 00:38:55,319
Speaker 1: violence on the mentally ill right. And another part of

700
00:38:55,360 --> 00:38:58,839
Speaker 1: it is that there's a desire to reclassify being transgender

701
00:38:59,000 --> 00:39:02,000
Speaker 1: and eventually even being LGBT is a mental illness, in

702
00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:04,760
Speaker 1: part because those people can be disarmed, in part because

703
00:39:04,880 --> 00:39:07,719
Speaker 1: then you can put those people in you know, yeah,

704
00:39:08,520 --> 00:39:12,560
Speaker 1: facilities or whatever. I tend to think that the goal

705
00:39:12,640 --> 00:39:14,759
Speaker 1: that a lot of these people are thinking towards is

706
00:39:14,840 --> 00:39:18,040
Speaker 1: less Nazi style death camps and gas fans and more

707
00:39:18,200 --> 00:39:20,560
Speaker 1: a Judge Rotenberg Center on every corner if you want

708
00:39:20,560 --> 00:39:22,680
Speaker 1: to go back to our Judge Rotenberg Center episodes. But

709
00:39:22,840 --> 00:39:25,000
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about that in other days. But I

710
00:39:25,080 --> 00:39:29,560
Speaker 1: bring this up to say this is a constant when

711
00:39:29,680 --> 00:39:33,480
Speaker 1: regimes begin the process that can end in mass killing.

712
00:39:33,480 --> 00:39:36,040
Speaker 1: And I don't think that that's an inevitable state of

713
00:39:36,040 --> 00:39:38,080
Speaker 1: affairs for us here, but I think people need to

714
00:39:38,120 --> 00:39:41,560
Speaker 1: be very aware of that because the similarities between these

715
00:39:41,600 --> 00:39:44,520
Speaker 1: situations are not inconsequential.

716
00:39:45,320 --> 00:39:50,560
Speaker 2: It's it's necessary but not sufficient, but it is necessary.

717
00:39:50,320 --> 00:39:53,280
Speaker 1: Yeah, for the.

718
00:39:52,400 --> 00:39:53,400
Speaker 2: Death camps version.

719
00:39:53,920 --> 00:39:58,440
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Polepot argued that these diseased elements of the

720
00:39:58,440 --> 00:40:01,680
Speaker 1: populace had to be purified. Year zero could ensure a

721
00:40:01,719 --> 00:40:06,839
Speaker 1: maoist elimination of contradiction. Turning in counter revolutionary elements became

722
00:40:06,840 --> 00:40:09,880
Speaker 1: a way to get ahead or to protect yourself. Cadras,

723
00:40:09,920 --> 00:40:12,719
Speaker 1: which are like members of the party, are rewarded for

724
00:40:12,760 --> 00:40:16,320
Speaker 1: their ability to purge the enemy within. Per that article

725
00:40:16,360 --> 00:40:19,799
Speaker 1: by Williams and Nielsen, violence became a part of everyday life,

726
00:40:19,800 --> 00:40:22,719
Speaker 1: and punishment for infringence of the minutely planned details of

727
00:40:22,719 --> 00:40:26,600
Speaker 1: society were draconian, often costing people their lives, particularly as

728
00:40:26,680 --> 00:40:29,760
Speaker 1: most mistakes such as foraging for food or not eating

729
00:40:29,800 --> 00:40:33,040
Speaker 1: with the collective were immediately interpreted as evidence of counter

730
00:40:33,120 --> 00:40:37,120
Speaker 1: revolutionary tendencies. Although anyone could fall victim of the system,

731
00:40:37,200 --> 00:40:40,920
Speaker 1: prime targets for elimination were ethnic Cham and Vietnamese minorities,

732
00:40:40,960 --> 00:40:44,480
Speaker 1: former soldiers or officials under the Londol regime, intellectuals or

733
00:40:44,480 --> 00:40:47,359
Speaker 1: others deemed not to fit into a peasant society, as

734
00:40:47,400 --> 00:40:49,200
Speaker 1: well as any person whom the regime believed to be

735
00:40:49,200 --> 00:40:52,279
Speaker 1: an internal enemy, mostly associated with being an agent of

736
00:40:52,320 --> 00:40:55,920
Speaker 1: the CIA, KGB or the Vietnamese secret service. And I

737
00:40:55,920 --> 00:40:59,239
Speaker 1: think it's so interesting part of this is there's such

738
00:40:59,280 --> 00:41:01,279
Speaker 1: a hatred of this concept of being an individual that

739
00:41:01,320 --> 00:41:03,719
Speaker 1: even if you're like foraging for food to stop you

740
00:41:03,760 --> 00:41:07,680
Speaker 1: and your family from starving, that's individualist behavior and you

741
00:41:07,840 --> 00:41:10,080
Speaker 1: have to be killed for it, right.

742
00:41:10,080 --> 00:41:14,440
Speaker 2: God yeah, I mean. But also it's like all those

743
00:41:14,520 --> 00:41:18,400
Speaker 2: rules I feel like most of those times are asymmetrically

744
00:41:18,440 --> 00:41:22,960
Speaker 2: applied for you know, whatever means want to be accomplished.

745
00:41:22,400 --> 00:41:24,480
Speaker 1: And that's key. And a lot of the people being

746
00:41:24,560 --> 00:41:26,440
Speaker 1: who these rules are being applied to, it's not even

747
00:41:26,480 --> 00:41:28,560
Speaker 1: necessarily that they did the thing, or that they were

748
00:41:28,600 --> 00:41:30,440
Speaker 1: the only person doing the thing. A lot of people

749
00:41:30,480 --> 00:41:32,560
Speaker 1: do the same stuff and get away with it. It's that

750
00:41:32,800 --> 00:41:35,000
Speaker 1: they had missed someone else up for another reason, someone

751
00:41:35,000 --> 00:41:38,120
Speaker 1: wanted their stuff. There's a lot of score settling that

752
00:41:38,239 --> 00:41:41,719
Speaker 1: happens anytime this kind of shit's going down. And this

753
00:41:41,800 --> 00:41:43,840
Speaker 1: gets me to an important side of fact about what

754
00:41:43,920 --> 00:41:48,320
Speaker 1: happened in Cambodia. You will usually see the mass killing

755
00:41:48,520 --> 00:41:52,360
Speaker 1: in Cambodia referred to either as the Cambodian genocide or

756
00:41:52,400 --> 00:41:56,200
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge genocide. This term is not I think

757
00:41:56,280 --> 00:41:58,719
Speaker 1: accurate to describe most of what happened, because the vast

758
00:41:58,760 --> 00:42:02,640
Speaker 1: majority of the people who were or you know, as

759
00:42:02,680 --> 00:42:05,319
Speaker 1: a part of these year zero policies were Khmer and

760
00:42:05,400 --> 00:42:08,239
Speaker 1: the goal of the regime was not to wipe out

761
00:42:08,400 --> 00:42:11,480
Speaker 1: the Khmer, right, it was to make them stronger and

762
00:42:11,680 --> 00:42:17,480
Speaker 1: ultimately more numerous. And it was just a disastrous failure. Right. Yeah,

763
00:42:17,560 --> 00:42:21,200
Speaker 1: The term autogenocide which was coined by author Jean lac

764
00:42:21,640 --> 00:42:27,920
Speaker 1: Lacutre something like that, Jeane Lacuter and the autogenocide was

765
00:42:27,960 --> 00:42:30,560
Speaker 1: coined by this French author in order to separate the

766
00:42:30,640 --> 00:42:34,520
Speaker 1: unique circumstances of mass killing and Cambodia from the Holocaust

767
00:42:34,560 --> 00:42:39,680
Speaker 1: and other traditional genocides. I again, there's some issues with that,

768
00:42:39,920 --> 00:42:44,440
Speaker 1: even because genocide is is not fully the right term

769
00:42:44,560 --> 00:42:46,880
Speaker 1: for what pol Pot and his peers are trying to

770
00:42:46,880 --> 00:42:49,640
Speaker 1: do to the Khmer people, right, because their goal is

771
00:42:49,680 --> 00:42:53,480
Speaker 1: to ensure the survival of their race. Right. You can

772
00:42:53,520 --> 00:42:56,240
Speaker 1: come down on however you like on what we should

773
00:42:56,280 --> 00:43:00,600
Speaker 1: call this right, but I should note that while what

774
00:43:00,680 --> 00:43:03,160
Speaker 1: the most of the killing the regime does, and most

775
00:43:03,160 --> 00:43:06,080
Speaker 1: of who the regime kills are Khmer, While I don't

776
00:43:06,080 --> 00:43:08,279
Speaker 1: know that it's right to say that like genocide is

777
00:43:08,320 --> 00:43:12,040
Speaker 1: just strictly textually the right way to describe that, there

778
00:43:12,080 --> 00:43:15,200
Speaker 1: are genocides that are being committed by the regime Khmer

779
00:43:15,280 --> 00:43:19,359
Speaker 1: rouge like normal, like straight up dictionary genocides, right.

780
00:43:19,920 --> 00:43:22,440
Speaker 2: I mean, I wonder if it's it just comes down to,

781
00:43:22,560 --> 00:43:25,400
Speaker 2: like it's sort of functionally the same type of murder.

782
00:43:25,440 --> 00:43:27,759
Speaker 2: And I wonder if the argument is sort of like

783
00:43:27,840 --> 00:43:33,440
Speaker 2: every genocide is actually politically motivated, like Shelly, somewhat external

784
00:43:33,480 --> 00:43:36,840
Speaker 2: to the stated aims of the genocide, So like, yeah,

785
00:43:37,040 --> 00:43:38,200
Speaker 2: what does it really matter?

786
00:43:38,719 --> 00:43:40,759
Speaker 1: That's absolutely the case. I think kind of the issue

787
00:43:40,760 --> 00:43:43,040
Speaker 1: comes down to is like, well, they weren't trying to

788
00:43:43,040 --> 00:43:45,840
Speaker 1: wipe out the Khmer, right, Like they just thought that

789
00:43:45,920 --> 00:43:48,719
Speaker 1: wiping out these people, which wound up being a huge

790
00:43:48,800 --> 00:43:52,160
Speaker 1: junk of the Khmer, would strengthen things like what do

791
00:43:52,200 --> 00:43:55,960
Speaker 1: you call that? You know, to a degree doesn't matter.

792
00:43:56,160 --> 00:43:58,319
Speaker 1: It's certainly not to the dead. But I do want

793
00:43:58,360 --> 00:44:00,799
Speaker 1: to make a point that there were us straight up

794
00:44:00,920 --> 00:44:06,440
Speaker 1: normal genocides occurring too in this mass killing. That paragraph

795
00:44:06,480 --> 00:44:08,560
Speaker 1: I read a little earlier mentioned both the Cham and

796
00:44:08,600 --> 00:44:13,120
Speaker 1: the Vietnamese ethnic minorities in Cambodia being targeted. And I

797
00:44:13,160 --> 00:44:15,360
Speaker 1: think all of these different kind of non Khmer people

798
00:44:15,360 --> 00:44:17,640
Speaker 1: are like five to ten percent maybe of the total

799
00:44:17,719 --> 00:44:21,680
Speaker 1: number of dead but when you look at these as populations,

800
00:44:22,320 --> 00:44:25,560
Speaker 1: these different ethnic populations that are being targeted, are are

801
00:44:25,840 --> 00:44:28,200
Speaker 1: killed in a way that makes them some of the

802
00:44:28,200 --> 00:44:32,279
Speaker 1: most total genocides I've ever studied. Roughly fifty percent of

803
00:44:32,360 --> 00:44:35,200
Speaker 1: Chinese Cambodians and these are not like necessary. Some of

804
00:44:35,200 --> 00:44:37,160
Speaker 1: them are Chinese immigrants, but these are just these are

805
00:44:37,160 --> 00:44:40,600
Speaker 1: people who are ethnically Chinese and live in Cambodia. Right,

806
00:44:41,800 --> 00:44:44,680
Speaker 1: fifty percent of the pre war population is executed or

807
00:44:44,719 --> 00:44:48,000
Speaker 1: starved in a three year period, and they got off

808
00:44:48,120 --> 00:44:51,880
Speaker 1: light compared to the ethnically Vietnamese Cambodians. I'm going to

809
00:44:51,960 --> 00:44:55,439
Speaker 1: quote from that article again. In particular, the Khmer Rouge

810
00:44:55,440 --> 00:44:59,520
Speaker 1: propaganda organs described the Vietnamese as toxic to Democratic Campuccia

811
00:44:59,560 --> 00:45:02,920
Speaker 1: by state that their goal is to swallow Cambodia's territory

812
00:45:03,000 --> 00:45:06,800
Speaker 1: and force Cambodia into an Indo Chinese federation under its control.

813
00:45:07,280 --> 00:45:11,040
Speaker 1: Vietnamese were portrayed as quintessentially evil and lethal to the

814
00:45:11,080 --> 00:45:16,239
Speaker 1: Democratic Campuccia. Radio broadcasts described the Vietnamese as living concealed

815
00:45:16,239 --> 00:45:20,400
Speaker 1: among the population, infiltrating, sabotaging, and destroying the communist regime,

816
00:45:20,480 --> 00:45:23,759
Speaker 1: therefore being toxic to the ideal. Further broadcast spoke of

817
00:45:23,760 --> 00:45:26,960
Speaker 1: the need to weed out and exterminate the enemy planted

818
00:45:27,000 --> 00:45:30,200
Speaker 1: within the cooperatives, and reminded civilians you are not fighting

819
00:45:30,239 --> 00:45:33,719
Speaker 1: only against Vietnamese soldiers, but the whole of Vietnam, so

820
00:45:33,880 --> 00:45:38,239
Speaker 1: spare nothing and no one. According to Polpot, the Vietnamese

821
00:45:38,239 --> 00:45:41,880
Speaker 1: are a black dragon that spits its poison. The overall

822
00:45:41,920 --> 00:45:44,800
Speaker 1: death toll for Vietnamese Khmers was nearly one hundred percent

823
00:45:44,880 --> 00:45:45,680
Speaker 1: of the population.

824
00:45:46,760 --> 00:45:52,759
Speaker 2: Jesus, yes, yeah, yeah, I mean like.

825
00:45:52,840 --> 00:45:56,040
Speaker 1: That this is about the most total genocide I've ever

826
00:45:56,120 --> 00:45:58,960
Speaker 1: heard of, the Vietnamese khmar in particular.

827
00:45:58,719 --> 00:46:04,560
Speaker 2: Right, right, Yeah, I mean that's like yeah, yeah, yeah,

828
00:46:04,680 --> 00:46:07,920
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess. I still I'm just like not still,

829
00:46:08,040 --> 00:46:09,720
Speaker 2: but like like it is like it's hard.

830
00:46:09,520 --> 00:46:10,319
Speaker 1: To wrap your head around.

831
00:46:10,400 --> 00:46:12,040
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard to wrap my head around, and but

832
00:46:12,080 --> 00:46:15,759
Speaker 2: also like hard to like be like this can't be

833
00:46:15,960 --> 00:46:18,960
Speaker 2: the I mean, it just feels like the stated goal

834
00:46:19,320 --> 00:46:22,239
Speaker 2: can't be the actual goal, I guess, but like I

835
00:46:22,280 --> 00:46:24,640
Speaker 2: don't I don't know what I think the actual goal

836
00:46:24,719 --> 00:46:27,839
Speaker 2: is anyway, But you know what I mean, I'm just

837
00:46:27,880 --> 00:46:30,560
Speaker 2: like it has to just be sort of a vague

838
00:46:30,600 --> 00:46:32,359
Speaker 2: notion of power it.

839
00:46:32,280 --> 00:46:34,640
Speaker 1: Feels like it's it's.

840
00:46:35,440 --> 00:46:37,000
Speaker 2: One of these killing your enemies like that.

841
00:46:37,200 --> 00:46:40,040
Speaker 1: For well, because the people at the top giving the

842
00:46:40,200 --> 00:46:43,800
Speaker 1: orders live these lives of the mind where their whole

843
00:46:43,880 --> 00:46:47,320
Speaker 1: ego is in I am, I am, I am intelligent,

844
00:46:47,360 --> 00:46:49,239
Speaker 1: I understand how things really work, and I have this

845
00:46:49,320 --> 00:46:52,560
Speaker 1: plan right, and everything about their personalities wrapped up in

846
00:46:52,560 --> 00:46:55,320
Speaker 1: that plan. So it has to work, and they simply

847
00:46:55,400 --> 00:46:59,239
Speaker 1: can't accept. They can't even let themselves look at a

848
00:46:59,320 --> 00:47:02,480
Speaker 1: reality that would that would lead to that being questioned.

849
00:47:02,960 --> 00:47:05,120
Speaker 1: But then they're passing these orders down to people who

850
00:47:05,239 --> 00:47:08,200
Speaker 1: number one. Just the desperation of their life, the violence

851
00:47:08,200 --> 00:47:12,040
Speaker 1: they've seen, makes certain things just less abhorrent to them.

852
00:47:12,040 --> 00:47:15,480
Speaker 1: But also there's room for them to advance. The more

853
00:47:15,480 --> 00:47:17,720
Speaker 1: of these people they kill, the more stuff they get,

854
00:47:17,880 --> 00:47:20,239
Speaker 1: the more they move up, the safer they are, the

855
00:47:20,239 --> 00:47:22,160
Speaker 1: more food they get, right, and that.

856
00:47:24,320 --> 00:47:25,440
Speaker 2: Yes, that's yeah.

857
00:47:25,960 --> 00:47:28,400
Speaker 1: And the incentives come because of the fucked up beliefs

858
00:47:28,400 --> 00:47:32,120
Speaker 1: of the leaders and the desperation of the people doing

859
00:47:32,160 --> 00:47:35,000
Speaker 1: a lot of the killing makes them respond better than

860
00:47:35,000 --> 00:47:38,600
Speaker 1: the incentives, you know, right, right, which is by the way,

861
00:47:38,800 --> 00:47:41,359
Speaker 1: this is not every genocide. For example, I wouldn't talk

862
00:47:41,360 --> 00:47:43,919
Speaker 1: about the members of the s s this way because

863
00:47:43,920 --> 00:47:48,879
Speaker 1: they're not right. But this is what's happening in Cambodia.

864
00:47:49,520 --> 00:47:53,520
Speaker 1: Speaking of what's happening in Cambodia, presumably someone in Cambodia

865
00:47:53,560 --> 00:47:55,439
Speaker 1: is listening to this podcast.

866
00:47:56,680 --> 00:48:00,160
Speaker 2: And if say, look, hi, Hi, you didn't say speaking

867
00:48:00,239 --> 00:48:02,920
Speaker 2: off mass killing or anything like that. So this is

868
00:48:02,960 --> 00:48:05,080
Speaker 2: one of the better adrows.

869
00:48:05,160 --> 00:48:09,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, visit Cambodia or not. I don't know.

870
00:48:10,200 --> 00:48:19,160
Speaker 1: I haven't been. I hope I hear. It's nice and

871
00:48:19,320 --> 00:48:22,960
Speaker 1: we're back. So the Cham were another non Khmer ethnic

872
00:48:23,000 --> 00:48:24,960
Speaker 1: group that was targeted by the regime. And to make

873
00:48:25,000 --> 00:48:29,480
Speaker 1: matters worse, the Chams are Muslim, right and Polpot considered

874
00:48:29,600 --> 00:48:34,399
Speaker 1: Islam to be inherently reactionary, right, a fundamental enemy of communism.

875
00:48:34,960 --> 00:48:37,480
Speaker 1: The large part of the reason why is that Muslims

876
00:48:37,480 --> 00:48:40,600
Speaker 1: pray five times a day, right, and Polepot describes this

877
00:48:40,640 --> 00:48:43,840
Speaker 1: as them shirking their responsibility to work. Right, this is

878
00:48:43,880 --> 00:48:47,600
Speaker 1: an individualist thing, and it's also stopping you from participating

879
00:48:47,920 --> 00:48:50,759
Speaker 1: in the national project as much as everyone else. Right,

880
00:48:51,400 --> 00:48:53,960
Speaker 1: the Chams are just thus a drain on the ideal

881
00:48:53,960 --> 00:48:56,680
Speaker 1: communist state that he wanted to form. So Polpot sent

882
00:48:56,719 --> 00:48:59,520
Speaker 1: his men to wipe out every Cham village they could find,

883
00:48:59,760 --> 00:49:02,600
Speaker 1: and roughly fifty percent of Cham Cambodians had been killed

884
00:49:02,600 --> 00:49:06,920
Speaker 1: by the late nineteen seventy nine. Now what's interesting to

885
00:49:06,920 --> 00:49:09,600
Speaker 1: me is that he also targets the Buddhists, or at

886
00:49:09,640 --> 00:49:12,080
Speaker 1: least the Buddhist clergy. And this is interesting. This is

887
00:49:12,280 --> 00:49:13,919
Speaker 1: kind of weird because like, he had a really good

888
00:49:13,960 --> 00:49:16,279
Speaker 1: time at the monastery, he described it his whole life

889
00:49:16,320 --> 00:49:20,480
Speaker 1: as a positive experience, but as leader of Democratic Campucia,

890
00:49:20,640 --> 00:49:23,640
Speaker 1: he describes Buddhist monks as quote parasites who eat the

891
00:49:23,719 --> 00:49:26,879
Speaker 1: rice of the people. Monks are ordered to carry out

892
00:49:26,880 --> 00:49:29,880
Speaker 1: hard labor, and the vast majority of monks who had

893
00:49:29,920 --> 00:49:33,680
Speaker 1: existed pre war are killed by the Khmer rouge. Williams

894
00:49:33,680 --> 00:49:37,279
Speaker 1: and Nielsen site an internal rouge document that brags a

895
00:49:37,440 --> 00:49:40,439
Speaker 1: ninety to ninety five percent success rate in wiping out

896
00:49:40,440 --> 00:49:45,640
Speaker 1: the Buddhist monk population. So again almost totally takes out

897
00:49:45,680 --> 00:49:50,879
Speaker 1: the Buddhist clergy within like the Theravada Buddhist clergy within Cambodia.

898
00:49:51,280 --> 00:49:53,719
Speaker 2: Yeah, it just feels like it's also like does this

899
00:49:53,760 --> 00:49:58,239
Speaker 2: sort of thing snowball, Like once you get started with

900
00:49:58,280 --> 00:50:01,359
Speaker 2: the mass killing, then your life on the list. Yeah.

901
00:50:01,440 --> 00:50:03,880
Speaker 1: Yeah, once you pop, the fun don't stop right right

902
00:50:04,160 --> 00:50:09,239
Speaker 1: popping here is putting people on us graves. Yeah now,

903
00:50:09,239 --> 00:50:11,640
Speaker 1: and this is so important to start it, to stop

904
00:50:11,640 --> 00:50:12,720
Speaker 1: it from starting.

905
00:50:13,120 --> 00:50:13,279
Speaker 3: You know.

906
00:50:13,320 --> 00:50:15,040
Speaker 1: Again, ninety percent or so of the people killed by

907
00:50:15,080 --> 00:50:19,280
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge are Khmer. Most die is a result

908
00:50:19,360 --> 00:50:22,560
Speaker 1: of these kind of insane agricultural and land reform policies,

909
00:50:22,600 --> 00:50:25,120
Speaker 1: the mass to population, all the starvation and stuff that

910
00:50:25,160 --> 00:50:27,480
Speaker 1: goes along with it. But as time goes on, an

911
00:50:27,480 --> 00:50:30,440
Speaker 1: increasing number of people are being tortured and killed by

912
00:50:30,480 --> 00:50:33,600
Speaker 1: the regime. And past the initial point where they're like

913
00:50:33,640 --> 00:50:36,600
Speaker 1: punishing the capitalists and the members of Law and Nole's government,

914
00:50:37,239 --> 00:50:40,960
Speaker 1: most of the people being tortured and killed directly are

915
00:50:41,080 --> 00:50:44,959
Speaker 1: like former party members and like communists and stuff. Right,

916
00:50:45,440 --> 00:50:47,359
Speaker 1: A lot of them are people who had been part

917
00:50:47,360 --> 00:50:50,600
Speaker 1: of Polpot's old reading circle back in Paris. Right, they

918
00:50:50,600 --> 00:50:54,120
Speaker 1: are wiping out you know, every revolution devours it's young.

919
00:50:54,160 --> 00:50:57,640
Speaker 1: But they are doing that in like famous time. Here

920
00:50:58,800 --> 00:51:01,520
Speaker 1: for an idea of how it was to have agreed

921
00:51:01,560 --> 00:51:04,520
Speaker 1: with Polepot back when he was Salath Czar, or even

922
00:51:04,600 --> 00:51:07,560
Speaker 1: during the victory of the Khmer Rouge over the Lawndol government.

923
00:51:07,840 --> 00:51:10,880
Speaker 1: Of the original twenty two members of the Central Committee

924
00:51:10,880 --> 00:51:14,160
Speaker 1: for the Democratic Campuccia Party, which is who officially governed

925
00:51:14,200 --> 00:51:16,880
Speaker 1: after the end of the war, six lasted to the

926
00:51:17,000 --> 00:51:20,319
Speaker 1: end of the regime without being killed or tortured, and

927
00:51:20,360 --> 00:51:23,359
Speaker 1: the vast majority of them those were killed. The very

928
00:51:23,360 --> 00:51:27,080
Speaker 1: few people who survived owed their lives to their sworn enemies,

929
00:51:27,120 --> 00:51:31,800
Speaker 1: the Vietnamese army who eventually liberated Toul Slang which was

930
00:51:32,040 --> 00:51:36,000
Speaker 1: the prison for specifically like after a point, it's specifically

931
00:51:36,000 --> 00:51:41,120
Speaker 1: the prison four party members who were disloyal to eliminate confusion.

932
00:51:41,400 --> 00:51:44,440
Speaker 1: Tool slang is more commonly known as Security Prison twenty

933
00:51:44,440 --> 00:51:47,880
Speaker 1: one or S twenty one. Right, And this is in

934
00:51:47,960 --> 00:51:50,879
Speaker 1: terms of its like level of fame to people who

935
00:51:50,960 --> 00:51:53,840
Speaker 1: read about this tool slang or S twenty one is

936
00:51:54,160 --> 00:51:58,960
Speaker 1: the Auschwitz of Cambodia, right, Right. It's not on that scale,

937
00:51:59,000 --> 00:52:01,279
Speaker 1: it's not that big a camp, but it's death toll

938
00:52:01,480 --> 00:52:04,479
Speaker 1: is is Yeah, is.

939
00:52:04,400 --> 00:52:07,840
Speaker 2: That like sort of I mean, I know, it's like

940
00:52:08,200 --> 00:52:11,360
Speaker 2: as you just said, like you know, every revolution devours

941
00:52:11,400 --> 00:52:15,799
Speaker 2: it's young, but that still feels like a high percentage

942
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:21,360
Speaker 2: of like yeah, energies, yeah, like getting got.

943
00:52:21,480 --> 00:52:22,960
Speaker 1: I think part of it's just because none of this

944
00:52:23,080 --> 00:52:25,560
Speaker 1: is working and someone has to pay and part of

945
00:52:25,600 --> 00:52:30,719
Speaker 1: it again just because once you start killing like this, yeah,

946
00:52:31,080 --> 00:52:34,760
Speaker 1: you keep you can't stop, right, in part because stopping

947
00:52:34,880 --> 00:52:36,760
Speaker 1: then you have to deal with the fact that nothing worked,

948
00:52:37,000 --> 00:52:39,279
Speaker 1: that everything was a failure, that your whole life and

949
00:52:39,320 --> 00:52:41,560
Speaker 1: all of your beliefs are wrong and no one at

950
00:52:41,600 --> 00:52:44,040
Speaker 1: the top can take So there must be someone, There

951
00:52:44,120 --> 00:52:46,560
Speaker 1: must be a trail, there must be somebody's fucking yeah,

952
00:52:46,600 --> 00:52:47,319
Speaker 1: fucking with us?

953
00:52:47,360 --> 00:52:51,640
Speaker 2: Right? Is that like unique ish to as far as

954
00:52:51,719 --> 00:52:55,520
Speaker 2: like yeah, right, that's just how it goes sometimes because

955
00:52:55,520 --> 00:52:58,520
Speaker 2: like the Nazis don't really like the Nazis target other Nazis.

956
00:52:58,520 --> 00:53:00,160
Speaker 1: You know, there's not the Night Long Knives, but that

957
00:53:00,239 --> 00:53:02,520
Speaker 1: was more of like a centralizing even more power and

958
00:53:02,600 --> 00:53:04,920
Speaker 1: dealing with like a chunk of the movement that didn't

959
00:53:04,920 --> 00:53:09,360
Speaker 1: really agree with with Hitler anymore. Not every this is

960
00:53:09,440 --> 00:53:13,000
Speaker 1: pretty it's not unique, but it's not common for it

961
00:53:13,040 --> 00:53:16,640
Speaker 1: to be like this, right, Obviously, in the French Revolution,

962
00:53:16,760 --> 00:53:21,440
Speaker 1: stuff like this happens, But the swiftness and the centrality

963
00:53:21,880 --> 00:53:25,239
Speaker 1: with which loyal members of the party are targeted and

964
00:53:25,239 --> 00:53:28,680
Speaker 1: that tortured and executed is yeah, like you know, you

965
00:53:28,719 --> 00:53:29,120
Speaker 1: can't be.

966
00:53:29,440 --> 00:53:31,920
Speaker 2: If you can't be one of the boys, then yeah,

967
00:53:32,040 --> 00:53:32,960
Speaker 2: well who can you be?

968
00:53:33,280 --> 00:53:35,080
Speaker 1: There's really no safety here.

969
00:53:34,960 --> 00:53:36,920
Speaker 2: Ryeah yeah. Yeah. So it was.

970
00:53:36,920 --> 00:53:40,440
Speaker 1: Between one of like S twenty one, This prison that's

971
00:53:40,480 --> 00:53:43,080
Speaker 1: kind of the most famous of the prisons here, was

972
00:53:43,120 --> 00:53:45,440
Speaker 1: between a one of between one hundred and fifty and

973
00:53:45,480 --> 00:53:48,120
Speaker 1: a little less than two hundred torture and execution centers

974
00:53:48,120 --> 00:53:51,440
Speaker 1: built on Polepot's orders by the Centibal the secret police.

975
00:53:52,640 --> 00:53:55,480
Speaker 1: Roughly twenty thousand people were imprisoned in S twenty one

976
00:53:55,480 --> 00:53:57,799
Speaker 1: over the course of the regime. There's some debate on

977
00:53:57,840 --> 00:54:00,799
Speaker 1: this number of between twelve and twenty thousand, and there's

978
00:54:00,800 --> 00:54:03,120
Speaker 1: never more than about one thousand to fifteen hundred people

979
00:54:03,200 --> 00:54:05,200
Speaker 1: at a time, though, And S twenty one is built

980
00:54:05,239 --> 00:54:08,080
Speaker 1: out of a former school, which I guess extra chilling

981
00:54:08,120 --> 00:54:11,080
Speaker 1: given that Pop Pop was a school teacher. And when

982
00:54:11,080 --> 00:54:13,160
Speaker 1: I say a thousand to fifteen hundred at a time,

983
00:54:13,200 --> 00:54:17,200
Speaker 1: twenty thousand total people aren't released alive from S twenty one.

984
00:54:17,600 --> 00:54:20,799
Speaker 1: This is a death camp. And while it started by

985
00:54:20,920 --> 00:54:25,040
Speaker 1: going after again like agents of the old regime, YadA YadA, YadA,

986
00:54:25,120 --> 00:54:27,719
Speaker 1: its prime purpose for most of its history is purging

987
00:54:28,040 --> 00:54:31,360
Speaker 1: members of the leadership cast as well as like members

988
00:54:31,400 --> 00:54:35,279
Speaker 1: of the party alongside their entire families. If you are

989
00:54:35,400 --> 00:54:37,759
Speaker 1: like somebody, a mid level guy in the Khmer rouge

990
00:54:37,760 --> 00:54:40,200
Speaker 1: who gets targeted and put in S twenty one, your

991
00:54:40,320 --> 00:54:43,799
Speaker 1: kids and your wife are going to even if they're babies, right,

992
00:54:43,840 --> 00:54:46,000
Speaker 1: they'll take your infant in there and kill them and

993
00:54:46,080 --> 00:54:49,120
Speaker 1: torture them. Right, and again, it's just like, well, we

994
00:54:49,160 --> 00:54:51,600
Speaker 1: really have to make a statement, you know, the stakes

995
00:54:51,600 --> 00:54:53,960
Speaker 1: are so high. We really have to scare people away

996
00:54:54,000 --> 00:54:56,719
Speaker 1: from not being loyal members of the party. Now, we're

997
00:54:56,760 --> 00:54:58,880
Speaker 1: not going to be dealing with S twenty one in

998
00:54:58,960 --> 00:55:01,800
Speaker 1: as much length as we ought to, or the prison

999
00:55:01,840 --> 00:55:04,200
Speaker 1: system in general. This is because it really does deserve

1000
00:55:04,239 --> 00:55:06,920
Speaker 1: its own episodes. Our friend Joe Kissabian of The Lions

1001
00:55:06,960 --> 00:55:10,000
Speaker 1: Led by Donkey's podcast has covered at length. I recommend

1002
00:55:10,000 --> 00:55:12,239
Speaker 1: his work given that I'm trying to focus this on

1003
00:55:12,320 --> 00:55:14,640
Speaker 1: pole Pot, who was a maide that your architect of

1004
00:55:14,680 --> 00:55:17,719
Speaker 1: this prison system. I hope you'll forgive my brevity as

1005
00:55:17,800 --> 00:55:20,680
Speaker 1: I quote from a detailed fact sheet put together by

1006
00:55:20,760 --> 00:55:24,600
Speaker 1: the Documentation Center of Cambodia for the Cambodia Tribunal quote,

1007
00:55:25,000 --> 00:55:26,719
Speaker 1: and this is talking about the people who were sent

1008
00:55:26,760 --> 00:55:29,560
Speaker 1: to S twenty one. They were accused of collaborating with

1009
00:55:29,600 --> 00:55:32,480
Speaker 1: foreign governments, spying for the CIA and the KGB, and

1010
00:55:32,600 --> 00:55:36,520
Speaker 1: hence betraying Ankar. Prisoners were also believed to have conspired

1011
00:55:36,560 --> 00:55:38,640
Speaker 1: with others, and thus were forced to reveal their strings

1012
00:55:38,680 --> 00:55:41,880
Speaker 1: of traders, which sometimes included over one hundred names. The

1013
00:55:41,880 --> 00:55:44,319
Speaker 1: interrogators at S twenty one base their technique on a

1014
00:55:44,320 --> 00:55:48,080
Speaker 1: list of ten security regulations, which included while getting lashes

1015
00:55:48,160 --> 00:55:52,200
Speaker 1: or electrification, you must not cry at all. Although prisoners

1016
00:55:52,280 --> 00:55:55,319
Speaker 1: often had no idea why they had been arrested, interrogators

1017
00:55:55,360 --> 00:55:58,040
Speaker 1: forced them to confess their crimes. If they did not confess,

1018
00:55:58,080 --> 00:56:01,280
Speaker 1: they would be subjected to physical and psychological torture. However,

1019
00:56:01,360 --> 00:56:04,960
Speaker 1: after having confessed, they were marked for execution. Initially, prisoners

1020
00:56:04,960 --> 00:56:06,680
Speaker 1: were killed on the grounds of the prison, but as

1021
00:56:06,680 --> 00:56:09,279
Speaker 1: the volume and stinch of the corpses rapidly increased and

1022
00:56:09,320 --> 00:56:12,359
Speaker 1: became unbearable, prisoners were then trucked and mossed to an

1023
00:56:12,360 --> 00:56:16,160
Speaker 1: open field located fifteen kilometers away known as Crow's Feet

1024
00:56:16,200 --> 00:56:18,600
Speaker 1: Pond to be killed. Waiting at the field was a

1025
00:56:18,640 --> 00:56:21,680
Speaker 1: group of about ten young men led by Tang Tang

1026
00:56:21,800 --> 00:56:24,279
Speaker 1: in his early twenties and his team of teenagers lived

1027
00:56:24,280 --> 00:56:26,000
Speaker 1: in a two story house that was built on the

1028
00:56:26,000 --> 00:56:28,799
Speaker 1: field in nineteen seventy seven. They were informed ahead of

1029
00:56:28,800 --> 00:56:31,200
Speaker 1: time of the number of prisoners that would arrive, so

1030
00:56:31,239 --> 00:56:33,920
Speaker 1: that they could dig the graves in advance. The shocking

1031
00:56:33,960 --> 00:56:37,759
Speaker 1: figures commonly associated with the prison fourteen thousand killed and

1032
00:56:37,960 --> 00:56:40,719
Speaker 1: seven survivors ranked the prison is one of the most

1033
00:56:40,800 --> 00:56:42,160
Speaker 1: lethal in the twentieth century.

1034
00:56:43,080 --> 00:56:49,480
Speaker 2: Jesus. Yeah. Also, I mean the detail. Obviously, every atrocity

1035
00:56:49,520 --> 00:56:54,960
Speaker 2: has someone actually doing it, but like just this dude's job. Yeah.

1036
00:56:55,160 --> 00:56:57,000
Speaker 1: Yeah, every day you get told how many corpses you

1037
00:56:57,000 --> 00:56:58,840
Speaker 1: got to dig holes for, and you and your fellow

1038
00:56:58,880 --> 00:57:03,120
Speaker 1: teenagers get out of Yeah, the I guess early twenties. Yeah,

1039
00:57:03,120 --> 00:57:04,440
Speaker 1: and his team was teenagers.

1040
00:57:05,120 --> 00:57:08,040
Speaker 2: I'm just doing it every day. It's like, yeah, you know,

1041
00:57:08,560 --> 00:57:11,720
Speaker 2: it's so hard to fathom for me as a lazy person.

1042
00:57:12,000 --> 00:57:14,000
Speaker 1: He's probably like, well, this is pretty good job. Given things,

1043
00:57:14,040 --> 00:57:15,640
Speaker 1: I'm probably not going to get targeted. They're not going

1044
00:57:15,680 --> 00:57:19,320
Speaker 1: to go after the grave digger, right, the graves.

1045
00:57:19,760 --> 00:57:20,800
Speaker 2: Yeah.

1046
00:57:20,920 --> 00:57:24,080
Speaker 1: Now, while S twenty one was operating, Polepot himself made

1047
00:57:24,120 --> 00:57:27,320
Speaker 1: regular statements and writings to Western supporters, and this is

1048
00:57:27,360 --> 00:57:29,440
Speaker 1: a key to aspect of what's happening. While all this

1049
00:57:29,760 --> 00:57:33,480
Speaker 1: nightmare is unfolding in Cambodia, there's not a there's not

1050
00:57:34,560 --> 00:57:37,400
Speaker 1: there's stuff getting out, but not a lot of it, right,

1051
00:57:37,480 --> 00:57:39,960
Speaker 1: at least initially. You know, as time goes on, more

1052
00:57:40,000 --> 00:57:43,000
Speaker 1: does start to get out about how horrifying what's happening is.

1053
00:57:43,680 --> 00:57:46,920
Speaker 1: But the first stuff that gets out is propaganda from

1054
00:57:47,040 --> 00:57:51,040
Speaker 1: Polepot and the regime to Western supporters, where they're talking

1055
00:57:51,080 --> 00:57:54,280
Speaker 1: about the utopia that we're building. We are finally creating

1056
00:57:54,760 --> 00:58:00,320
Speaker 1: the communist, the agrarian, peasant, communist utopia that everyone's hoped

1057
00:58:00,360 --> 00:58:03,640
Speaker 1: would happen. We've made a totally equal society here it

1058
00:58:03,680 --> 00:58:08,400
Speaker 1: is and democratic Campuccia. We've done it right. And there

1059
00:58:08,440 --> 00:58:12,520
Speaker 1: were a not insignificant number of Western leftists who believed

1060
00:58:12,520 --> 00:58:15,760
Speaker 1: this bullshit right, and who would argue that any evidence

1061
00:58:15,800 --> 00:58:18,960
Speaker 1: to the contrary is the evidence of how hideous what's happening.

1062
00:58:18,960 --> 00:58:21,800
Speaker 1: Of the killing fields as they're called, start to comes out,

1063
00:58:22,000 --> 00:58:23,560
Speaker 1: come out. There's a lot of folks who are like, well,

1064
00:58:23,560 --> 00:58:27,640
Speaker 1: that's just capitalist propaganda, that's the CIA, right, Nothing bad's

1065
00:58:27,680 --> 00:58:32,560
Speaker 1: happening in Cambodia, right. One of the organizations that Polepot

1066
00:58:32,680 --> 00:58:36,880
Speaker 1: spread his propaganda towards was the Belgian Campuccia Society, who

1067
00:58:36,920 --> 00:58:40,600
Speaker 1: interviewed Polepot in nineteen seventy eight. He told them, we

1068
00:58:40,680 --> 00:58:43,560
Speaker 1: don't have prisons, and we don't even use the word prison.

1069
00:58:43,920 --> 00:58:47,760
Speaker 1: Bad elements in our society are simply given productive tasks

1070
00:58:47,800 --> 00:58:56,000
Speaker 1: to do, you know. Dipshits by this stuff right, as

1071
00:58:56,040 --> 00:58:58,240
Speaker 1: they always do, as they do in the present day.

1072
00:58:58,800 --> 00:59:01,680
Speaker 1: By all accounts, the most famous of these dipshits was

1073
00:59:01,720 --> 00:59:06,160
Speaker 1: an English writer and professor named Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell had

1074
00:59:06,200 --> 00:59:08,200
Speaker 1: been a significant figure on the British left in the

1075
00:59:08,240 --> 00:59:11,240
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies. He spends two years as the chair

1076
00:59:11,360 --> 00:59:14,680
Speaker 1: of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He is an avid

1077
00:59:14,720 --> 00:59:18,000
Speaker 1: anti Vietnam War protester, and in that regard his actions

1078
00:59:18,040 --> 00:59:22,200
Speaker 1: were admirable because the Vietnam War deserved protesting. He wrote

1079
00:59:22,240 --> 00:59:26,000
Speaker 1: regularly for Piece News and support of different anti colonial movements,

1080
00:59:26,000 --> 00:59:28,400
Speaker 1: and a number of them he was very right to support.

1081
00:59:29,240 --> 00:59:32,280
Speaker 1: Caldwell is a figure who in some ways resembles a

1082
00:59:32,320 --> 00:59:35,520
Speaker 1: lot of modern genocide denier types on the left, although

1083
00:59:35,520 --> 00:59:37,680
Speaker 1: I think he was a much better person because again

1084
00:59:37,720 --> 00:59:41,040
Speaker 1: he's not comprehensively that and he's not being like paid

1085
00:59:41,120 --> 00:59:45,160
Speaker 1: by anybody. Yeah, this is a true believer who lacks

1086
00:59:45,240 --> 00:59:49,560
Speaker 1: a tremendous degree of judgment in a very key area.

1087
00:59:49,840 --> 00:59:53,320
Speaker 2: But also, like you know, from his perspective, you kind

1088
00:59:53,320 --> 00:59:57,040
Speaker 2: of imagine, like you're largely right. I mean, in this case,

1089
00:59:57,080 --> 00:59:59,240
Speaker 2: you're wrong about the CAA propaganda, but.

1090
00:59:59,680 --> 01:00:02,600
Speaker 1: Up in until Cambodia you're largely right. Yeah, most like

1091
01:00:02,760 --> 01:00:05,200
Speaker 1: in the US is doing Hella war crimes and being

1092
01:00:05,240 --> 01:00:07,480
Speaker 1: supported by a lot of people in Vietnam and doing them.

1093
01:00:07,920 --> 01:00:11,640
Speaker 1: And yeah, so like you know, like, yeah, it's like

1094
01:00:11,680 --> 01:00:13,360
Speaker 1: you see the leg he has a stand on even

1095
01:00:13,360 --> 01:00:15,680
Speaker 1: though he's rong, it is one of it's very tempting,

1096
01:00:15,680 --> 01:00:17,320
Speaker 1: And there's a degree to which you should compare him

1097
01:00:17,320 --> 01:00:19,200
Speaker 1: to folks like the people who write for the Gray Zone,

1098
01:00:19,200 --> 01:00:22,200
Speaker 1: which is a faux journalistic institution that spent years arguing

1099
01:00:22,280 --> 01:00:25,160
Speaker 1: Bashar al Asad never gassed its own people made fun

1100
01:00:25,200 --> 01:00:28,640
Speaker 1: of anyone who was saying Russia was about to invade Ukraine. Right,

1101
01:00:28,680 --> 01:00:33,240
Speaker 1: they're those motherfuckers, Caldwell. There's a degree to which you

1102
01:00:33,240 --> 01:00:35,640
Speaker 1: should compare to them. But also people who knew him

1103
01:00:35,680 --> 01:00:39,000
Speaker 1: said he was kind and empathetic, and he was in

1104
01:00:39,040 --> 01:00:41,120
Speaker 1: a lot of cases on the right side of things,

1105
01:00:41,360 --> 01:00:44,479
Speaker 1: and he gets into Cambodian politics for a sympathetic reason,

1106
01:00:44,520 --> 01:00:48,480
Speaker 1: which is that he's arguing against this nightmarish US bombing campaign,

1107
01:00:48,520 --> 01:00:50,600
Speaker 1: which is a war crime. And on the other side

1108
01:00:50,600 --> 01:00:52,320
Speaker 1: of this. By the way, I found a fucking Washington

1109
01:00:52,400 --> 01:00:56,400
Speaker 1: Post column looking writing about this in which the author

1110
01:00:56,560 --> 01:00:59,720
Speaker 1: was like, Oh, it's you know, what's really fucked up

1111
01:00:59,760 --> 01:01:02,760
Speaker 1: is the people who who slandered the US for bombing

1112
01:01:02,760 --> 01:01:05,400
Speaker 1: Cambodia to try to stop the Khmer Rouge from coming

1113
01:01:05,400 --> 01:01:08,120
Speaker 1: into being. That's not why we fucking did it, you

1114
01:01:08,400 --> 01:01:11,919
Speaker 1: dip shit, Like fuck you for one thing, that's part

1115
01:01:11,920 --> 01:01:14,760
Speaker 1: of what made them possible. For the other thing that

1116
01:01:14,840 --> 01:01:17,200
Speaker 1: we didn't give up. That was never the fucking goal, Like,

1117
01:01:17,280 --> 01:01:20,360
Speaker 1: fuck you, fuck you. I just so many people I

1118
01:01:20,400 --> 01:01:25,240
Speaker 1: fucking hate On'm both like yeah, anyway, Yeah. Caldwell was

1119
01:01:25,280 --> 01:01:27,520
Speaker 1: loved by his students, and it was recalled even by

1120
01:01:27,560 --> 01:01:30,000
Speaker 1: people who disagreed with him, as a gentle person who

1121
01:01:30,080 --> 01:01:32,560
Speaker 1: was tolerant of opposing views. So he was not the

1122
01:01:32,640 --> 01:01:34,880
Speaker 1: kind of guy who was like maybe he would have

1123
01:01:34,880 --> 01:01:36,480
Speaker 1: been if he'd had Twitter, but like was a guy

1124
01:01:36,480 --> 01:01:39,400
Speaker 1: who was willing to talk about his unhinged beliefs about

1125
01:01:39,440 --> 01:01:41,720
Speaker 1: Cambodia with you in a polite manner. So I don't

1126
01:01:41,720 --> 01:01:44,680
Speaker 1: want to depict him as a caricature right now. Because

1127
01:01:44,720 --> 01:01:47,480
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge beat the US back law nole government,

1128
01:01:47,480 --> 01:01:50,520
Speaker 1: and because their claims of agrarian equality and an idealized

1129
01:01:50,520 --> 01:01:53,440
Speaker 1: socialist society gelled with Caldwell's own hope of where the

1130
01:01:53,440 --> 01:01:56,040
Speaker 1: world might go, he came to support them to the hilt.

1131
01:01:56,400 --> 01:01:58,640
Speaker 1: His friends, who at the same time saw him as

1132
01:01:58,680 --> 01:02:04,120
Speaker 1: a brilliant economist, also rude his startling naivete. One peer said, quote,

1133
01:02:04,240 --> 01:02:07,600
Speaker 1: he was a man with very clear theoretical and ideological views,

1134
01:02:07,640 --> 01:02:10,480
Speaker 1: and the empirical basis didn't seem to worry him hugely,

1135
01:02:11,160 --> 01:02:15,600
Speaker 1: always a big warning signs about how should should work.

1136
01:02:15,680 --> 01:02:21,120
Speaker 1: So why bother looking at what's happening now? Caldwell did

1137
01:02:21,240 --> 01:02:24,080
Speaker 1: visit a lot of the regimes that he extolled and supported.

1138
01:02:24,480 --> 01:02:28,440
Speaker 1: He took regime sponsored to tours of places like the USSR.

1139
01:02:29,720 --> 01:02:31,320
Speaker 1: And you know, that's one of those things where it's

1140
01:02:31,360 --> 01:02:33,040
Speaker 1: like you are going to miss a lot of the

1141
01:02:33,080 --> 01:02:35,479
Speaker 1: bad stuff the USSR is doing. But the Soviet Union

1142
01:02:35,560 --> 01:02:38,200
Speaker 1: is like a state that functions right, and there's things

1143
01:02:38,200 --> 01:02:40,560
Speaker 1: that did that were good. It got the first person

1144
01:02:40,560 --> 01:02:44,200
Speaker 1: into space, there were massive improvements in you know, literacy

1145
01:02:44,280 --> 01:02:48,640
Speaker 1: and whatnot, in addition to horrifying and awful things done

1146
01:02:48,640 --> 01:02:52,080
Speaker 1: by their It's an actual state, right, and so it's

1147
01:02:52,160 --> 01:02:55,160
Speaker 1: understandable that you could go there and see take this

1148
01:02:55,240 --> 01:02:57,360
Speaker 1: sponsored tour and just see the good stuff.

1149
01:02:57,440 --> 01:02:57,640
Speaker 2: Right.

1150
01:02:58,840 --> 01:03:03,520
Speaker 1: That's not really possible in Cambodia because there's no good stuff, right,

1151
01:03:04,560 --> 01:03:08,200
Speaker 1: there's nothing positive happening under the Khmer route.

1152
01:03:08,280 --> 01:03:11,320
Speaker 2: Yeah, the silver lining is hard to I mean you

1153
01:03:11,720 --> 01:03:15,040
Speaker 2: truly have to be a blind believer to just crime there.

1154
01:03:15,120 --> 01:03:18,720
Speaker 1: Right per the Guardian quote. Three days before Christmas in

1155
01:03:18,800 --> 01:03:21,880
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, Malcolm Caldwell received an early present. On

1156
01:03:21,920 --> 01:03:24,200
Speaker 1: the final day of a two week tour of Cambodia,

1157
01:03:24,400 --> 01:03:26,560
Speaker 1: he was told that he would meet with Polepot. This

1158
01:03:26,760 --> 01:03:29,840
Speaker 1: was indeed a rare privilege. Unlike most other Communist leaders,

1159
01:03:29,840 --> 01:03:32,240
Speaker 1: Pole had not created a personality cult. There were no

1160
01:03:32,320 --> 01:03:35,200
Speaker 1: posters of him, he was seldom seen or quoted. Many

1161
01:03:35,280 --> 01:03:38,400
Speaker 1: Cambodians had not even heard of him. Only seven Westerners

1162
01:03:38,440 --> 01:03:41,480
Speaker 1: were ever invited to what had been renamed Democratic Campuccia,

1163
01:03:41,760 --> 01:03:44,480
Speaker 1: and Caldwell was the first and only Britain. So the

1164
01:03:44,480 --> 01:03:46,920
Speaker 1: fact that he's invited at all is this huge honor.

1165
01:03:47,360 --> 01:03:49,439
Speaker 1: So he comes and he shows up at this place

1166
01:03:49,480 --> 01:03:52,560
Speaker 1: where there are other journalists, as we'll talk about with him,

1167
01:03:52,560 --> 01:03:54,880
Speaker 1: there's people with him, and they're all immediately like in

1168
01:03:55,160 --> 01:03:57,760
Speaker 1: non pen being like where are all the people because

1169
01:03:57,760 --> 01:04:00,000
Speaker 1: some of them had been prior to the khmarre route

1170
01:04:00,120 --> 01:04:03,080
Speaker 1: taking over, and they're horrified. They're like, where are the

1171
01:04:03,120 --> 01:04:04,400
Speaker 1: fucking human beings?

1172
01:04:04,840 --> 01:04:05,080
Speaker 2: Right?

1173
01:04:05,320 --> 01:04:10,000
Speaker 1: Everyone's gone. Something's horribly wrong here. And Caldwell is just

1174
01:04:10,040 --> 01:04:13,120
Speaker 1: like so honored that, like they didn't pick any other

1175
01:04:13,120 --> 01:04:15,720
Speaker 1: British people. Poulpot wants to talk to me, just me,

1176
01:04:16,320 --> 01:04:19,200
Speaker 1: you know. So there are a few reasons why he

1177
01:04:19,280 --> 01:04:22,000
Speaker 1: was taken in and received so well. For one thing,

1178
01:04:22,240 --> 01:04:24,360
Speaker 1: he had been to China. He was on good terms

1179
01:04:24,360 --> 01:04:27,640
Speaker 1: with the Chinese Communist government and that was Cambodia's main

1180
01:04:27,680 --> 01:04:31,840
Speaker 1: ally at the time. He was also Polepot was kind

1181
01:04:31,880 --> 01:04:33,920
Speaker 1: of in this period. This is after there had been

1182
01:04:33,920 --> 01:04:38,080
Speaker 1: a series of provoked border conflicts with Vietnam provoked by

1183
01:04:38,120 --> 01:04:40,800
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge, and it was becoming increasingly clear that

1184
01:04:40,880 --> 01:04:43,880
Speaker 1: Vietnam was going to invade, and so Polepot was really

1185
01:04:43,920 --> 01:04:47,480
Speaker 1: trying to burnish his international support, so he suddenly wanted

1186
01:04:47,520 --> 01:04:49,840
Speaker 1: Westerners in, right, and he's like, well, this guy's probably

1187
01:04:49,920 --> 01:04:56,400
Speaker 1: like blind enough to ignore all the horrible shit going on, right, Yeah.

1188
01:04:56,640 --> 01:04:59,000
Speaker 1: And Caldwell had just a few months before he came

1189
01:04:59,000 --> 01:05:02,919
Speaker 1: to Cambodia written an article in The Guardian in which

1190
01:05:02,920 --> 01:05:04,920
Speaker 1: he had basically said, like, all these reports that the

1191
01:05:05,000 --> 01:05:08,800
Speaker 1: khmaier Rus are killing people are nonsense. One of his

1192
01:05:08,920 --> 01:05:12,520
Speaker 1: main sources was the Campuccine information minister, a guy named

1193
01:05:12,600 --> 01:05:16,440
Speaker 1: Hugh Nim, who blamed the deaths on America, right, basically

1194
01:05:16,480 --> 01:05:18,480
Speaker 1: like the bombing that the like all of these people

1195
01:05:18,480 --> 01:05:20,760
Speaker 1: that you're saying have died, this is due to the

1196
01:05:21,120 --> 01:05:23,080
Speaker 1: bombing campaign the US had executed.

1197
01:05:23,480 --> 01:05:23,640
Speaker 2: Right.

1198
01:05:24,000 --> 01:05:27,320
Speaker 1: Now, by the time he shows up in Cambodia, this

1199
01:05:27,360 --> 01:05:30,360
Speaker 1: guy that his whole article denying the Khmer Rouge genocide

1200
01:05:30,400 --> 01:05:33,560
Speaker 1: is based on, Hugh Nim, has already been executed and

1201
01:05:33,600 --> 01:05:37,880
Speaker 1: tortured to death by Paul Pott. So not a great sign.

1202
01:05:41,560 --> 01:05:44,200
Speaker 1: But even so, he was aware to an extent that

1203
01:05:44,200 --> 01:05:47,560
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge was killing people, and he had described

1204
01:05:47,600 --> 01:05:50,800
Speaker 1: them as quote arch quislings who knew well what their

1205
01:05:50,840 --> 01:05:54,280
Speaker 1: fate would be, were they to linger in Campuccia. So well,

1206
01:05:54,280 --> 01:05:56,320
Speaker 1: I don't want a caricature this guy. You shouldn't pretend

1207
01:05:56,360 --> 01:06:00,200
Speaker 1: that like that. This dude was finding reasons to justify

1208
01:06:00,240 --> 01:06:04,080
Speaker 1: the killings that he knew about, right, including the guy

1209
01:06:04,120 --> 01:06:08,480
Speaker 1: who was the source of his stupid article. So crazy, yes, nuts.

1210
01:06:09,240 --> 01:06:12,120
Speaker 1: Now there are real journalists on this trip, and one

1211
01:06:12,160 --> 01:06:15,520
Speaker 1: of them Elizabeth Becker. She had been to Cambodia before things,

1212
01:06:15,600 --> 01:06:17,440
Speaker 1: you know, the Khmer sho had taken over, and she

1213
01:06:17,520 --> 01:06:20,360
Speaker 1: was a very courageous and talented war correspondent, right, she

1214
01:06:20,480 --> 01:06:24,480
Speaker 1: was good at her job, and she argued with Caldwell

1215
01:06:24,560 --> 01:06:27,000
Speaker 1: constantly while they're talking, like she's one of the people,

1216
01:06:27,000 --> 01:06:29,520
Speaker 1: being like there's supposed to be people in this city,

1217
01:06:29,800 --> 01:06:34,160
Speaker 1: like I've seen it before, something's really bad here. And Caldwell's,

1218
01:06:34,240 --> 01:06:37,760
Speaker 1: you know, giving the same lie, putting out a bunch

1219
01:06:37,760 --> 01:06:41,200
Speaker 1: of nonsense about like, you know, the the bold reformation

1220
01:06:41,320 --> 01:06:45,040
Speaker 1: of society along these utopian lines and whatnot. But she

1221
01:06:45,160 --> 01:06:47,760
Speaker 1: still liked him, like he was a very pleasant man.

1222
01:06:47,880 --> 01:06:51,080
Speaker 1: She called him a kind and tolerant and just deeply

1223
01:06:51,200 --> 01:06:54,520
Speaker 1: naive quote. He didn't want to know about problems with

1224
01:06:54,560 --> 01:06:57,040
Speaker 1: the Khmer rouge, and that carried over to not wanting

1225
01:06:57,080 --> 01:07:00,200
Speaker 1: to know about problems between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was

1226
01:07:00,240 --> 01:07:03,520
Speaker 1: stuck in nineteen sixty eight or something. Now there's a

1227
01:07:03,560 --> 01:07:06,040
Speaker 1: book out by this point, by the time that Caldwell

1228
01:07:06,080 --> 01:07:10,000
Speaker 1: comes to Cambodia about the early stages of the Cambodian

1229
01:07:10,240 --> 01:07:13,440
Speaker 1: the autogenocide, whatever you want to call it, called year zero.

1230
01:07:13,960 --> 01:07:16,640
Speaker 1: Caldwell could have read this book, and if he had,

1231
01:07:16,680 --> 01:07:20,040
Speaker 1: he'd have learned, for example, that one Khmer rouge saying

1232
01:07:20,400 --> 01:07:24,400
Speaker 1: expressed the regime's goal as quote, to completely annihilate diseases

1233
01:07:24,400 --> 01:07:27,080
Speaker 1: of consciousness that got in the way of their goals.

1234
01:07:27,440 --> 01:07:29,960
Speaker 1: Doing this meant getting rid of hidden enemies who, as

1235
01:07:30,040 --> 01:07:35,320
Speaker 1: Polepot put it, had sicknesses of revolutionary consciousness. Now Philip

1236
01:07:35,360 --> 01:07:38,800
Speaker 1: Short goes into more detail here, summarizing information that should

1237
01:07:38,840 --> 01:07:41,400
Speaker 1: have been available to Caldwell how he had he done this.

1238
01:07:41,520 --> 01:07:46,480
Speaker 1: Reading quote Satirama meant an individual who failed to focus

1239
01:07:46,520 --> 01:07:49,320
Speaker 1: on the communist cause and was therein portrayed as toxic

1240
01:07:49,400 --> 01:07:53,240
Speaker 1: to its realization. Even without considerable evidence or proof, individuals

1241
01:07:53,240 --> 01:07:56,120
Speaker 1: could suddenly be classified as toxic to the super great

1242
01:07:56,200 --> 01:07:59,040
Speaker 1: leap forward and accused of being class enemies with a

1243
01:07:59,080 --> 01:08:03,000
Speaker 1: sickness of consciousness. Enemies were depicted as pervasive and infecting

1244
01:08:03,040 --> 01:08:06,640
Speaker 1: the pure Khmer ideal. The desire to exterminate enemies grew,

1245
01:08:06,760 --> 01:08:10,520
Speaker 1: as did the intoxication of doing so with impunity. Purging

1246
01:08:10,520 --> 01:08:13,240
Speaker 1: these contaminants was discussed as crucial to the survival of

1247
01:08:13,360 --> 01:08:17,640
Speaker 1: the regime. According to propaganda, enemies were likened to an

1248
01:08:17,640 --> 01:08:21,360
Speaker 1: impurity that threatened the well being of revolutionary society. These

1249
01:08:21,400 --> 01:08:24,120
Speaker 1: groups were portrayed as a lethal source of pollution that

1250
01:08:24,240 --> 01:08:28,599
Speaker 1: needed to be eliminated. A sort of madness had taken

1251
01:08:28,640 --> 01:08:31,840
Speaker 1: over the country at this point, particularly among the rouge

1252
01:08:31,880 --> 01:08:34,519
Speaker 1: cadras doing the hand to hand slaughtering, and for an

1253
01:08:34,560 --> 01:08:36,919
Speaker 1: idea of just how de range this gets, several militia

1254
01:08:37,160 --> 01:08:39,840
Speaker 1: who were interviewed later claimed that they would eat the

1255
01:08:39,920 --> 01:08:42,240
Speaker 1: livers of their victims and the belief that it would

1256
01:08:42,240 --> 01:08:44,800
Speaker 1: give them extra power and probably because they are also

1257
01:08:44,920 --> 01:08:49,519
Speaker 1: starving to death. One of these yeah, one of these

1258
01:08:49,560 --> 01:08:52,120
Speaker 1: guys as cited later as saying they ate human liver

1259
01:08:52,200 --> 01:08:54,840
Speaker 1: because they wanted to prevent themselves from being shocked by

1260
01:08:54,920 --> 01:08:58,080
Speaker 1: killing people. Then they could kill people. They wanted to

1261
01:08:58,200 --> 01:09:01,280
Speaker 1: change themselves to be able to kill people without pity.

1262
01:09:02,000 --> 01:09:07,559
Speaker 2: Oh god, Yeah, I mean there's probably some level of

1263
01:09:07,640 --> 01:09:11,280
Speaker 2: like just pry on disease that can take over, Like

1264
01:09:11,320 --> 01:09:11,880
Speaker 2: there's got to be.

1265
01:09:12,280 --> 01:09:13,839
Speaker 1: With livers, you're okay with livers.

1266
01:09:14,680 --> 01:09:18,240
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if you're trying to like like lose

1267
01:09:18,439 --> 01:09:22,040
Speaker 2: lose your conscience, yeah, probably giving yourself a brain disease

1268
01:09:22,120 --> 01:09:23,320
Speaker 2: is not the worst way to do it.

1269
01:09:25,520 --> 01:09:28,240
Speaker 1: You're generally safe if you want to eat human beings safely,

1270
01:09:28,320 --> 01:09:30,559
Speaker 1: like a liver, the livers that like are reasonably okay

1271
01:09:31,200 --> 01:09:34,439
Speaker 1: to go for, Sophie. I don't want people to get

1272
01:09:34,600 --> 01:09:35,799
Speaker 1: fucking pre on diseases.

1273
01:09:36,200 --> 01:09:39,519
Speaker 2: Don't know, no spine, no bone, bone.

1274
01:09:39,760 --> 01:09:44,120
Speaker 1: No brain, right, you know, we all folks, Sophie, A

1275
01:09:44,160 --> 01:09:44,839
Speaker 1: lot of people.

1276
01:09:45,800 --> 01:09:45,880
Speaker 2: What.

1277
01:09:46,240 --> 01:09:50,120
Speaker 1: I'm a believer in harm reduction. Okay, you know, all right,

1278
01:09:50,760 --> 01:09:54,640
Speaker 1: test your fentanyl, don't eat people's spines, or test your

1279
01:09:54,680 --> 01:09:57,479
Speaker 1: drugs for finnel, don't eat the spines, don't test your

1280
01:09:57,479 --> 01:09:58,479
Speaker 1: final don't do fentanyl.

1281
01:09:59,720 --> 01:09:59,960
Speaker 3: Okay.

1282
01:10:01,280 --> 01:10:03,839
Speaker 1: Caldwell could have had access to a lot of this information,

1283
01:10:03,880 --> 01:10:06,320
Speaker 1: and he rejected it largely on the basis that year

1284
01:10:06,400 --> 01:10:09,840
Speaker 1: zero had been pillaried by a critique published by Noam Chomsky.

1285
01:10:10,280 --> 01:10:13,840
Speaker 1: Now this is contentious, people, Oh boy, the arguing about

1286
01:10:13,880 --> 01:10:17,240
Speaker 1: whether or not Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge or was

1287
01:10:17,320 --> 01:10:20,200
Speaker 1: just like, given the information available at the time, it's

1288
01:10:20,200 --> 01:10:22,800
Speaker 1: hard to tell what is true. I'm not gonna this

1289
01:10:22,880 --> 01:10:25,960
Speaker 1: is not going to be a lengthy dissection of that,

1290
01:10:27,160 --> 01:10:31,639
Speaker 1: but there are arguments that he would denied a number

1291
01:10:31,680 --> 01:10:34,160
Speaker 1: of the crimes being committed by the Khmer Rouge. He

1292
01:10:34,360 --> 01:10:37,760
Speaker 1: certainly argued that Ponchard, the author of Year Zero, had

1293
01:10:37,760 --> 01:10:40,400
Speaker 1: exaggerated the horror of what was occurring on the ground.

1294
01:10:41,040 --> 01:10:43,920
Speaker 1: Chomsky described it as what people were saying about the

1295
01:10:44,000 --> 01:10:48,240
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge as quote, an unprecedented propaganda campaign to slander

1296
01:10:48,280 --> 01:10:52,760
Speaker 1: democratic Campuccia via systematic distortion of the truth. Right now,

1297
01:10:52,880 --> 01:10:57,120
Speaker 1: Chomsky preferred a different book. He compared Ponchad's work unfavorably

1298
01:10:57,160 --> 01:11:01,439
Speaker 1: with another book called Cambodia, Starvation and Revolution written by

1299
01:11:01,479 --> 01:11:06,679
Speaker 1: George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which is basically is taking

1300
01:11:06,760 --> 01:11:10,799
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge propaganda and like being like, hey, everything's great

1301
01:11:10,920 --> 01:11:13,280
Speaker 1: over there, actually, and like what the stuff that's bad

1302
01:11:13,400 --> 01:11:14,920
Speaker 1: is not their fault, right right?

1303
01:11:15,080 --> 01:11:15,400
Speaker 2: Right?

1304
01:11:15,720 --> 01:11:18,280
Speaker 1: There was another book written by two readers Digest writers

1305
01:11:18,320 --> 01:11:22,040
Speaker 1: called Murder of a Gentle Land that Chomsky also went after,

1306
01:11:23,080 --> 01:11:25,120
Speaker 1: which you know, it was not perfect. None of the

1307
01:11:25,200 --> 01:11:27,560
Speaker 1: claims about what none of the none of the critiques

1308
01:11:27,560 --> 01:11:30,919
Speaker 1: and the people talking about the autogenocide are perfectly accurate

1309
01:11:31,000 --> 01:11:35,000
Speaker 1: because it's still going on, right, But they are broadly accurate.

1310
01:11:35,200 --> 01:11:38,920
Speaker 1: And and Chomsky is certainly in the wrong about what

1311
01:11:39,000 --> 01:11:41,879
Speaker 1: books about Cambodia to trust during this period.

1312
01:11:42,120 --> 01:11:45,599
Speaker 2: Right. But but also if we hadn't you know, we

1313
01:11:45,800 --> 01:11:48,360
Speaker 2: the United States and the West, hadn't put out so

1314
01:11:48,560 --> 01:11:52,960
Speaker 2: much like there's a CIA propaganda like this, would it

1315
01:11:53,000 --> 01:11:57,920
Speaker 2: wouldn't be it would be less possible for for this,

1316
01:11:58,160 --> 01:12:00,639
Speaker 2: for this to it like work.

1317
01:12:00,760 --> 01:12:04,360
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this is also why I have I have

1318
01:12:04,439 --> 01:12:07,519
Speaker 1: a degree more of sympathy to cald Well and to

1319
01:12:07,720 --> 01:12:10,040
Speaker 1: other people who doubted this in this period of time

1320
01:12:10,160 --> 01:12:13,920
Speaker 1: because it was such a different information environment. Yeah, and

1321
01:12:13,960 --> 01:12:16,920
Speaker 1: there had been there was just so much disinformation that

1322
01:12:17,040 --> 01:12:19,040
Speaker 1: been put out about Vietnam, that'd been put out about

1323
01:12:19,040 --> 01:12:21,400
Speaker 1: what the US was doing in Cambodia that didn't put

1324
01:12:21,439 --> 01:12:22,920
Speaker 1: it about what the US was doing in parts of

1325
01:12:23,000 --> 01:12:27,760
Speaker 1: Latin America. So again, these people are wrong, and that

1326
01:12:27,840 --> 01:12:32,120
Speaker 1: should be stated. But it's I do have less condemnation

1327
01:12:32,200 --> 01:12:33,960
Speaker 1: than I do about like the stuff going on in

1328
01:12:34,000 --> 01:12:36,639
Speaker 1: the twenty first century that right viewers this, right.

1329
01:12:36,680 --> 01:12:40,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, there wasn't there wasn't Twitter and there wasn't like

1330
01:12:41,080 --> 01:12:44,280
Speaker 2: yeah they you know, it's just it's more reasonable to

1331
01:12:44,280 --> 01:12:45,639
Speaker 2: be skeptical.

1332
01:12:45,479 --> 01:12:48,720
Speaker 1: Yes, and there it's certainly reasonable to initially be skeptical.

1333
01:12:48,800 --> 01:12:51,080
Speaker 1: Now again by the point time kol Wol was on

1334
01:12:51,120 --> 01:12:53,040
Speaker 1: the ground and these other people with them are like,

1335
01:12:53,080 --> 01:12:56,640
Speaker 1: this city used to have people. It's no longer like

1336
01:12:56,840 --> 01:13:02,559
Speaker 1: you should have known, right, right, So it's generally considered

1337
01:13:02,640 --> 01:13:04,800
Speaker 1: or argued at least that Chomsky is a big part

1338
01:13:04,800 --> 01:13:10,000
Speaker 1: of why Caledwell doesn't like trust. You know, punch Od's

1339
01:13:10,000 --> 01:13:13,679
Speaker 1: book about the atrocities going on in Cambodia. You know, whatever,

1340
01:13:13,880 --> 01:13:15,720
Speaker 1: the truth, whoever you're going to blame for it called

1341
01:13:15,760 --> 01:13:18,800
Speaker 1: Well at age forty seven shows up in Cambodia as

1342
01:13:18,800 --> 01:13:22,200
Speaker 1: a pretty much a true believer, right, And in fact,

1343
01:13:22,240 --> 01:13:26,240
Speaker 1: he had finished a book before he goes there called Campuccia,

1344
01:13:26,320 --> 01:13:29,920
Speaker 1: A Rationale for Rural Policy, in which he had written

1345
01:13:29,960 --> 01:13:32,719
Speaker 1: that the Khmer Rouge had quote opened vistas of hope

1346
01:13:32,760 --> 01:13:34,800
Speaker 1: not only for the people of Cambodia, but also for

1347
01:13:34,840 --> 01:13:36,920
Speaker 1: the people of other peoples, of all the other poor

1348
01:13:37,120 --> 01:13:41,640
Speaker 1: third world countries. We'll come back to that book in

1349
01:13:41,680 --> 01:13:45,600
Speaker 1: a second. So called Well, along with these journalists, is

1350
01:13:45,720 --> 01:13:48,519
Speaker 1: escorted around the country. They see some like staged scenes,

1351
01:13:48,560 --> 01:13:52,599
Speaker 1: and again Becker is gets aggressive, very brave woman with

1352
01:13:52,640 --> 01:13:55,519
Speaker 1: these Khmaer Rouge guards, being like, I can I can

1353
01:13:55,560 --> 01:13:58,599
Speaker 1: see what you're not showing us, like where you're blocking

1354
01:13:58,680 --> 01:14:01,839
Speaker 1: us from going. I can see evidence of clear problems

1355
01:14:01,840 --> 01:14:05,080
Speaker 1: because I've been here before. What the and she's like

1356
01:14:05,280 --> 01:14:08,639
Speaker 1: arguing with them, she said later it was so clearly awful.

1357
01:14:08,760 --> 01:14:10,720
Speaker 1: One of the problems was the absence of what I saw,

1358
01:14:10,800 --> 01:14:13,160
Speaker 1: the absence of people. And that's a different kind of

1359
01:14:13,160 --> 01:14:17,280
Speaker 1: proof too. I don't see any people being executed. Caldwell

1360
01:14:18,040 --> 01:14:20,960
Speaker 1: was not concerned. Quote. He preferred to stay in the

1361
01:14:20,960 --> 01:14:24,160
Speaker 1: car and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunities prepared for us,

1362
01:14:24,479 --> 01:14:28,080
Speaker 1: Becker wrote in her book on Cambodia. Now at the

1363
01:14:28,200 --> 01:14:30,320
Speaker 1: very end of the tour, they all go back to

1364
01:14:30,520 --> 01:14:33,920
Speaker 1: Nonpen and they you know, they're hanging out for a

1365
01:14:33,960 --> 01:14:35,400
Speaker 1: little bit. They're not all that far from the S

1366
01:14:35,479 --> 01:14:38,320
Speaker 1: twenty one center, right, this is where Caldwell's going to

1367
01:14:38,360 --> 01:14:40,240
Speaker 1: finally have his interview with pol Pott, and I'm going

1368
01:14:40,240 --> 01:14:43,960
Speaker 1: to quote from the Guardian. Again, Caldwell remained ignorant on

1369
01:14:44,000 --> 01:14:46,360
Speaker 1: the Friday morning and non pen that he was taken

1370
01:14:46,400 --> 01:14:49,840
Speaker 1: in a Mercedes limousine to see pole Pot. The setting

1371
01:14:49,880 --> 01:14:52,400
Speaker 1: for the meeting was the former Governor's palace on the waterfront,

1372
01:14:52,439 --> 01:14:55,280
Speaker 1: built during the French colonial period. In a grand reception

1373
01:14:55,439 --> 01:14:58,200
Speaker 1: room replete with fans and billowing white curtains, the two

1374
01:14:58,280 --> 01:15:02,280
Speaker 1: men sat down and discussed revolutiontionary economic theory. Becker had

1375
01:15:02,320 --> 01:15:04,920
Speaker 1: met Polepot earlier the same day, and in When the

1376
01:15:04,920 --> 01:15:07,120
Speaker 1: War was Over That's her book, she writes he was

1377
01:15:07,160 --> 01:15:10,320
Speaker 1: actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome, but attractive.

1378
01:15:10,560 --> 01:15:13,759
Speaker 1: His features were delicate and alert, and his smile nearly endearing.

1379
01:15:14,479 --> 01:15:17,879
Speaker 1: The perennially shally at shabby academic and the fastidious dictator

1380
01:15:17,960 --> 01:15:20,000
Speaker 1: must have made for an odd couple. In any case,

1381
01:15:20,040 --> 01:15:22,439
Speaker 1: Caldwell left the meeting a happy man. He returned to

1382
01:15:22,479 --> 01:15:24,559
Speaker 1: the guest house he was sharing with Becker and Dudman

1383
01:15:24,640 --> 01:15:27,320
Speaker 1: full of praise for Polepot and his political outlook. We

1384
01:15:27,400 --> 01:15:29,640
Speaker 1: went over stuff, says Becker. He thought he had a

1385
01:15:29,640 --> 01:15:32,120
Speaker 1: good conversation he had avoided at all costs in a

1386
01:15:32,160 --> 01:15:35,080
Speaker 1: discussion of Vietnam, and he was looking forward to going home.

1387
01:15:36,400 --> 01:15:38,880
Speaker 1: So that night they have another argument, you know, Becker

1388
01:15:38,960 --> 01:15:42,200
Speaker 1: and Caldwell about Cambodia. You know, they have dinner and

1389
01:15:42,720 --> 01:15:44,720
Speaker 1: they go to bed, and as far as she can tell,

1390
01:15:44,800 --> 01:15:48,719
Speaker 1: he remained completely convinced that the revolution was a good

1391
01:15:48,800 --> 01:15:51,080
Speaker 1: thing and that Campodi was headed in a good direction.

1392
01:15:51,640 --> 01:15:53,880
Speaker 1: She goes to bed at around eleven pm, and in

1393
01:15:53,880 --> 01:15:56,000
Speaker 1: the middle of the night she is woken up by

1394
01:15:56,040 --> 01:15:59,680
Speaker 1: what she eventually realizes our gut is gunfire, and she

1395
01:15:59,760 --> 01:16:01,960
Speaker 1: comes out of her room. She sees a young man

1396
01:16:02,040 --> 01:16:04,719
Speaker 1: pointing a handgun at her. He's wearing he's got bands

1397
01:16:04,720 --> 01:16:06,760
Speaker 1: of ammunition on his body, he's got a rifle on

1398
01:16:06,840 --> 01:16:10,360
Speaker 1: his back. She flees back into her room and locks

1399
01:16:10,360 --> 01:16:13,760
Speaker 1: herself in the bathroom, and eventually, what you know, when

1400
01:16:13,760 --> 01:16:16,439
Speaker 1: they come out when this ends, the Dudman, the other

1401
01:16:16,439 --> 01:16:19,639
Speaker 1: guy there sees like a bunch of guys running along

1402
01:16:19,680 --> 01:16:23,720
Speaker 1: the street and they find Caldwell in his room and

1403
01:16:23,760 --> 01:16:28,880
Speaker 1: he's been shot repeatedly. He's dead. Right. It's still to

1404
01:16:28,920 --> 01:16:32,640
Speaker 1: this day not perfectly clear. Yeah, definitely was. I mean it,

1405
01:16:32,800 --> 01:16:36,599
Speaker 1: it's generally pretty clear Polepot ordered it. We don't really

1406
01:16:36,640 --> 01:16:40,480
Speaker 1: know why. What about this guy triggered him. Why specifically

1407
01:16:40,560 --> 01:16:44,320
Speaker 1: it happened, They the Khmer rouge doesn't admit to it,

1408
01:16:44,439 --> 01:16:49,360
Speaker 1: but yeah, this guy gets killed, and it's just kind

1409
01:16:49,360 --> 01:16:51,479
Speaker 1: of it's one of these very famous moments because he's

1410
01:16:51,479 --> 01:16:54,040
Speaker 1: such he's one of these like guys who had really

1411
01:16:54,080 --> 01:16:57,280
Speaker 1: been willing to go to bat for democratic Campuccia and

1412
01:16:57,320 --> 01:17:02,240
Speaker 1: then finds himself yet another corpse in the killing field,

1413
01:17:02,320 --> 01:17:02,960
Speaker 1: so to speak.

1414
01:17:03,320 --> 01:17:06,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, the other

1415
01:17:06,320 --> 01:17:08,559
Speaker 2: side is like we're also living through a moment where

1416
01:17:08,760 --> 01:17:12,439
Speaker 2: like everyone will cozy up to the dictator who demonstrably

1417
01:17:12,479 --> 01:17:15,440
Speaker 2: will stab you in the back and any given opportunity,

1418
01:17:15,520 --> 01:17:16,599
Speaker 2: and they still mine up.

1419
01:17:17,040 --> 01:17:20,559
Speaker 1: Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean people, people

1420
01:17:20,600 --> 01:17:24,240
Speaker 1: are really like Caldwell. Above all else is a reminder

1421
01:17:24,240 --> 01:17:27,440
Speaker 1: of how easy it is to blind yourself to obvious reality,

1422
01:17:27,520 --> 01:17:32,640
Speaker 1: even at your own peril, because because seeing the reality

1423
01:17:33,000 --> 01:17:34,320
Speaker 1: is not even that you don't want to see it,

1424
01:17:34,320 --> 01:17:36,360
Speaker 1: it's at seeing the reality would mean taking a hit

1425
01:17:36,400 --> 01:17:38,639
Speaker 1: to your ego. It's the same thing why you've got

1426
01:17:39,520 --> 01:17:40,960
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people being like, oh well, once

1427
01:17:41,000 --> 01:17:43,639
Speaker 1: these tariffs start to hit, once the economy collapses, all

1428
01:17:43,640 --> 01:17:48,120
Speaker 1: of these Trump supporters will realize, yeah, you'll and like

1429
01:17:48,720 --> 01:17:52,080
Speaker 1: a significant chunk of Trump's voters who are not hardcore supporters,

1430
01:17:52,080 --> 01:17:54,040
Speaker 1: who are the people who voted for Biden and twenty

1431
01:17:54,080 --> 01:17:55,680
Speaker 1: you know, who go back and forth or who like

1432
01:17:55,720 --> 01:17:59,000
Speaker 1: made their decision day of Sure, they'll change their mind,

1433
01:17:59,040 --> 01:18:01,720
Speaker 1: they'll get angry. But the heart and core of his

1434
01:18:01,760 --> 01:18:06,840
Speaker 1: supporters recognizing that they've been fucked means recognizing they're not

1435
01:18:06,880 --> 01:18:09,679
Speaker 1: as smart as they think they are, and again called well,

1436
01:18:09,680 --> 01:18:11,639
Speaker 1: that's a big part of it for him. He's a scholar,

1437
01:18:11,680 --> 01:18:13,639
Speaker 1: he's a smart man. He couldn't be this wrong.

1438
01:18:14,320 --> 01:18:19,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, m hm, So, I mean, you know they could.

1439
01:18:19,800 --> 01:18:22,679
Speaker 2: And those people are also the ones doing the worst

1440
01:18:22,840 --> 01:18:26,000
Speaker 2: stuff when the time comes to do the worst stuff unfortunately, so.

1441
01:18:26,120 --> 01:18:29,559
Speaker 1: Yes, because again they've bought in. Now, while all this

1442
01:18:29,720 --> 01:18:32,960
Speaker 1: is going on, the end of the regime is getting

1443
01:18:32,960 --> 01:18:36,080
Speaker 1: nearer and nearer because Poulpot's also not as smart as

1444
01:18:36,080 --> 01:18:38,799
Speaker 1: he thinks he is. Right, he had directed his forces

1445
01:18:38,800 --> 01:18:41,360
Speaker 1: in what began as a series of border skirmishes against

1446
01:18:41,400 --> 01:18:45,080
Speaker 1: the newly unified Vietnamese state. This was a sensible decision

1447
01:18:45,200 --> 01:18:48,760
Speaker 1: based on their obsessive hatred and paranoia of Vietnam, but

1448
01:18:48,840 --> 01:18:51,559
Speaker 1: given the comparative state of the militaries of the two countries.

1449
01:18:51,600 --> 01:18:54,120
Speaker 1: It was basically suicidal and in short order, this is

1450
01:18:54,120 --> 01:18:59,040
Speaker 1: what brings an end to democratic Campuccia. Vietnam invades Cambodia

1451
01:18:59,040 --> 01:19:01,439
Speaker 1: in December of nineteen seven eight, and what follows was

1452
01:19:01,479 --> 01:19:04,320
Speaker 1: not close to a fair fight. By January, they had

1453
01:19:04,320 --> 01:19:07,040
Speaker 1: taken the capitol and put an end to Polepot's reign

1454
01:19:08,240 --> 01:19:12,680
Speaker 1: sort of, so he has to flee, right, he has

1455
01:19:12,720 --> 01:19:18,200
Speaker 1: to like leave non pen and Vietnam takes over and administers,

1456
01:19:18,320 --> 01:19:22,720
Speaker 1: you know, for a while and Cambodi and eventually Cambodia

1457
01:19:22,960 --> 01:19:26,360
Speaker 1: becomes independent again under a government that is not the

1458
01:19:26,439 --> 01:19:30,559
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge. But the Khmer Rouge doesn't go away, and

1459
01:19:30,680 --> 01:19:35,519
Speaker 1: Polepot remains the head of the Khmer Rouge as they

1460
01:19:35,600 --> 01:19:38,000
Speaker 1: like go and hide in the jungle. They've got like

1461
01:19:38,080 --> 01:19:41,639
Speaker 1: some villages and stuff. This like little weird fortified section

1462
01:19:41,880 --> 01:19:45,439
Speaker 1: of the country, tiny section of the country that they're

1463
01:19:45,479 --> 01:19:48,640
Speaker 1: able to like manage along. I think it's like the

1464
01:19:48,720 --> 01:19:52,599
Speaker 1: Thai border there. And and in fact this like government

1465
01:19:52,640 --> 01:19:55,800
Speaker 1: because like in eighty two, China and the Association of

1466
01:19:55,800 --> 01:19:58,360
Speaker 1: Southeast Asian Nations kind of pressures the Khmer Rouge to

1467
01:19:58,360 --> 01:20:03,120
Speaker 1: ally with Sahanak's forces and some like republican forces led

1468
01:20:03,160 --> 01:20:05,760
Speaker 1: by a guy called Sonsan along the Thai border and

1469
01:20:05,760 --> 01:20:08,800
Speaker 1: create this thing called the Coalition Government of Democratic Campuccia,

1470
01:20:09,240 --> 01:20:12,760
Speaker 1: and that remains in the UN the legitimate Government of

1471
01:20:12,760 --> 01:20:17,040
Speaker 1: Cambodia until nineteen ninety one, even though like they're not

1472
01:20:17,240 --> 01:20:20,679
Speaker 1: actually in power. The government of power is like the PRK,

1473
01:20:21,080 --> 01:20:24,320
Speaker 1: but they're only recognized by Vietnam Lao and the Soviet Union.

1474
01:20:24,680 --> 01:20:27,240
Speaker 1: And so that's kind of like Polepots where he is.

1475
01:20:27,520 --> 01:20:32,760
Speaker 1: For the eighties, you know, into the nineties, there is

1476
01:20:32,800 --> 01:20:35,800
Speaker 1: a lot of guerrilla warfare. Polepot continues to lead the

1477
01:20:35,880 --> 01:20:40,720
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge to fight against the Vietnamese backed Government of Cambodia,

1478
01:20:40,760 --> 01:20:44,920
Speaker 1: and this continues massively the suffering of the Cambodian people

1479
01:20:45,439 --> 01:20:49,640
Speaker 1: who do never get nearly enough international aid. And this

1480
01:20:49,760 --> 01:20:52,439
Speaker 1: situation doesn't really start to end until the Paris Peace

1481
01:20:52,479 --> 01:20:56,160
Speaker 1: Agreement assigned in October of nineteen ninety one, the Vietnamese

1482
01:20:56,200 --> 01:21:00,280
Speaker 1: withdraw from Cambodia and things slowly start to calm down.

1483
01:21:01,240 --> 01:21:04,320
Speaker 1: There's a UN peacekeeping force that kind of enters in

1484
01:21:04,400 --> 01:21:06,639
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, and there's like a free and fair

1485
01:21:06,720 --> 01:21:11,200
Speaker 1: election you know that. Yeah, things start to get better.

1486
01:21:11,320 --> 01:21:15,559
Speaker 1: At this point, the Khmer Rouge never disarms, right, They

1487
01:21:15,560 --> 01:21:18,439
Speaker 1: continue to hold their tiny little chunk of the country

1488
01:21:19,120 --> 01:21:22,000
Speaker 1: and argue that there's Vietnam is still secretly running things.

1489
01:21:22,040 --> 01:21:25,599
Speaker 1: There's camouflage Vietnam, Vietnamese soldiers you know that are behind

1490
01:21:25,640 --> 01:21:26,160
Speaker 1: the regime.

1491
01:21:26,360 --> 01:21:26,559
Speaker 3: Right.

1492
01:21:27,600 --> 01:21:30,960
Speaker 1: They boycott the nineteen ninety three election and they basically

1493
01:21:31,040 --> 01:21:34,640
Speaker 1: hole up in western and northern little bits of Cambodia.

1494
01:21:35,040 --> 01:21:38,759
Speaker 1: They're outlawed in nineteen ninety four, and when the Cold

1495
01:21:38,760 --> 01:21:41,559
Speaker 1: War ends, they don't really have any of them, even

1496
01:21:41,600 --> 01:21:47,200
Speaker 1: minimal support that they had previously had at long, long length.

1497
01:21:47,960 --> 01:21:50,920
Speaker 1: Jang Seri, who's the Foreign minister, who is again one

1498
01:21:51,000 --> 01:21:54,040
Speaker 1: of Polpot's friends from Paris, as well as a number

1499
01:21:54,080 --> 01:21:57,240
Speaker 1: of other high ranking official surrender along with the bulk

1500
01:21:57,320 --> 01:22:00,439
Speaker 1: of what had remained of the military of the Khmer Rouge,

1501
01:22:00,439 --> 01:22:04,960
Speaker 1: and they are eventually incorporated into the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. Polepot,

1502
01:22:05,000 --> 01:22:08,559
Speaker 1: though stays free for quite a while until he is

1503
01:22:09,720 --> 01:22:15,639
Speaker 1: basically there's this shit that goes down in nineteen ninety eight.

1504
01:22:15,680 --> 01:22:18,719
Speaker 1: I think it is where one of his few remaining

1505
01:22:18,800 --> 01:22:23,160
Speaker 1: friends running the Khmer Rouge this guy, Sonsen, does something

1506
01:22:23,200 --> 01:22:27,840
Speaker 1: that Polepot considers treason, and so he massacres Sonsen along

1507
01:22:27,880 --> 01:22:32,519
Speaker 1: with fourteen of his family members, including his like grandkids. Now,

1508
01:22:32,520 --> 01:22:35,720
Speaker 1: Polepot would argue for the other people, the babies, the

1509
01:22:35,760 --> 01:22:37,840
Speaker 1: young ones, I did not order them to be killed.

1510
01:22:38,280 --> 01:22:41,559
Speaker 1: For Sonsen and his family, Yes, I feel sorry about that.

1511
01:22:41,560 --> 01:22:43,439
Speaker 1: That was a mistake that occurred when we put our

1512
01:22:43,520 --> 01:22:47,200
Speaker 1: plan into practice. I feel sorry. This is when he's

1513
01:22:47,280 --> 01:22:49,639
Speaker 1: questioned by a journalist Nate named Nate Thayer, who does

1514
01:22:49,720 --> 01:22:52,080
Speaker 1: like his last interview, and this is kind of what

1515
01:22:52,160 --> 01:22:55,400
Speaker 1: brings an end to him leading the Khmer Rouge finally

1516
01:22:55,479 --> 01:22:58,560
Speaker 1: after thirty seven years, because for whatever reason, this is

1517
01:22:58,600 --> 01:23:00,880
Speaker 1: a step too far to the left, asked people who

1518
01:23:00,960 --> 01:23:04,360
Speaker 1: had stuck around him, and one of his like his

1519
01:23:04,400 --> 01:23:07,240
Speaker 1: commander in chief, a guy named Tom Mauk, puts him

1520
01:23:07,240 --> 01:23:10,400
Speaker 1: on house arrest, right and yeah, and that's kind of

1521
01:23:10,400 --> 01:23:15,320
Speaker 1: the end of Polepot of having even a sliver of power. Eventually,

1522
01:23:15,960 --> 01:23:19,439
Speaker 1: Polepot is brought before a people's tribunal. He's sentenced to

1523
01:23:19,479 --> 01:23:25,320
Speaker 1: life imprisonment for Sonsen's murder, but he never really faces

1524
01:23:25,479 --> 01:23:31,320
Speaker 1: any actual like justice, right, Like there's there's there's nothing like.

1525
01:23:31,360 --> 01:23:33,320
Speaker 2: Right, there's no way you can pay for this anyway.

1526
01:23:33,360 --> 01:23:35,759
Speaker 2: But he doesn't even not even close.

1527
01:23:36,400 --> 01:23:36,639
Speaker 3: Yeah.

1528
01:23:36,760 --> 01:23:39,400
Speaker 1: No, he dies under house arrest in nineteen ninety eight,

1529
01:23:40,160 --> 01:23:42,559
Speaker 1: and uh story.

1530
01:23:43,000 --> 01:23:47,559
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of those like like whatever belief you

1531
01:23:47,600 --> 01:23:50,360
Speaker 2: may have in some sort of cosmic justice, this will

1532
01:23:50,560 --> 01:23:52,599
Speaker 2: this should tip the scales in the other direction.

1533
01:23:52,920 --> 01:23:56,160
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like he is ultimately not punished by the New

1534
01:23:56,200 --> 01:23:58,960
Speaker 1: Cambodian State or the u WIN. He's punished by the

1535
01:23:59,040 --> 01:24:04,600
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge for killing another Khmer Rouge guy. In his

1536
01:24:04,840 --> 01:24:08,880
Speaker 1: very last interview after he has been arrested again, there's

1537
01:24:08,880 --> 01:24:11,040
Speaker 1: this guy Nate Thayer who comes in and does this

1538
01:24:11,280 --> 01:24:15,479
Speaker 1: final interview with Paul Pot. And Nate does a very

1539
01:24:15,479 --> 01:24:18,439
Speaker 1: good job of this, Like he really presses Polepot on

1540
01:24:18,479 --> 01:24:20,479
Speaker 1: the stuff that he did, on all of the killings.

1541
01:24:20,800 --> 01:24:22,519
Speaker 1: And this is I want to read this quote from

1542
01:24:22,520 --> 01:24:25,280
Speaker 1: one of Nate's last articles with Poulpot, where he's trying

1543
01:24:25,320 --> 01:24:29,000
Speaker 1: to get him to acknowledge anything about what he did.

1544
01:24:30,040 --> 01:24:33,160
Speaker 1: I came to carry out the struggle not to kill people.

1545
01:24:33,280 --> 01:24:36,639
Speaker 1: He rasps, his voice almost a whisper. He pauses, fixing

1546
01:24:36,760 --> 01:24:39,960
Speaker 1: his interviewer with an almost pleading expression, even now and

1547
01:24:40,000 --> 01:24:42,280
Speaker 1: you can look at me, am I a savage person.

1548
01:24:42,680 --> 01:24:46,519
Speaker 1: My conscience is clear. I do not reject responsibility. Our

1549
01:24:46,560 --> 01:24:49,400
Speaker 1: movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world,

1550
01:24:49,640 --> 01:24:51,960
Speaker 1: but there was another aspect that was outside our control,

1551
01:24:52,160 --> 01:24:54,800
Speaker 1: the enemy's activities against us. I want to tell you,

1552
01:24:54,960 --> 01:24:57,599
Speaker 1: I'm quite satisfied with one thing. If we had not

1553
01:24:57,680 --> 01:25:01,599
Speaker 1: carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have been another Campuchia crumb.

1554
01:25:01,600 --> 01:25:04,679
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy five, he says, referring to the Mekong

1555
01:25:04,760 --> 01:25:07,800
Speaker 1: Delta region seized by Vietnam from the Khmer Empire in

1556
01:25:07,840 --> 01:25:11,920
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century, and that I think says a lot

1557
01:25:12,000 --> 01:25:15,000
Speaker 1: that the end of this guy's life, two million deaths,

1558
01:25:15,000 --> 01:25:20,320
Speaker 1: maybe on his conscience, the absolute destruction of his country

1559
01:25:20,360 --> 01:25:22,960
Speaker 1: in such a way that it still has not recovered.

1560
01:25:23,560 --> 01:25:26,040
Speaker 1: And he's like, well, look, if I hadn't ha done that,

1561
01:25:26,160 --> 01:25:28,599
Speaker 1: it could have wound up like this time Vietnam took

1562
01:25:28,640 --> 01:25:31,479
Speaker 1: the Mekong Delta region from US in the sixteen hundreds.

1563
01:25:31,520 --> 01:25:33,439
Speaker 1: You know you wouldn't want that, would you. Like he's

1564
01:25:33,439 --> 01:25:37,920
Speaker 1: still he's such like it's this this fucking academic brain shit,

1565
01:25:38,080 --> 01:25:42,479
Speaker 1: where like all that matters to him. Is this idea

1566
01:25:42,600 --> 01:25:44,639
Speaker 1: he's cooked up about how the world ought to work

1567
01:25:44,680 --> 01:25:47,080
Speaker 1: when he was like a young student with his friends,

1568
01:25:47,360 --> 01:25:49,960
Speaker 1: that he never gets over. His ego won't let him

1569
01:25:50,000 --> 01:25:52,240
Speaker 1: no matter how many fucking people it leads him to kill.

1570
01:25:52,360 --> 01:25:54,920
Speaker 2: It's like such a like holding onto that delusion till

1571
01:25:54,960 --> 01:25:58,000
Speaker 2: the end is so amazing. I mean, I just you know,

1572
01:25:58,880 --> 01:26:03,360
Speaker 2: it's so hard for me to understand that brain yep,

1573
01:26:03,920 --> 01:26:07,960
Speaker 2: like like rationalizing to that degree like total I don't know,

1574
01:26:08,320 --> 01:26:09,920
Speaker 2: or just you got to put on a show all

1575
01:26:09,960 --> 01:26:12,479
Speaker 2: the way to your last interview, you know, keep the

1576
01:26:12,640 --> 01:26:17,280
Speaker 2: keep the k fave up. Yep, fucking grim.

1577
01:26:17,640 --> 01:26:22,400
Speaker 1: Anyway, it's a lot time yep.

1578
01:26:25,360 --> 01:26:28,880
Speaker 2: Just my plug is just go go go sit by

1579
01:26:28,920 --> 01:26:31,040
Speaker 2: yourself for a second and just think about, you know

1580
01:26:31,120 --> 01:26:34,679
Speaker 2: the world and what you can do to help someone.

1581
01:26:34,880 --> 01:26:39,240
Speaker 1: And don't don't take the books you read when you

1582
01:26:39,280 --> 01:26:41,960
Speaker 1: were fucking too seriously.

1583
01:26:42,560 --> 01:26:46,000
Speaker 2: Right, look, we're living through the same version of that,

1584
01:26:46,080 --> 01:26:49,479
Speaker 2: but just the book is fucking autless shrugs exactly.

1585
01:26:49,520 --> 01:26:51,519
Speaker 1: That that's that is like why I bring this up

1586
01:26:51,560 --> 01:26:53,439
Speaker 1: in the context of like Doge and all of these

1587
01:26:53,479 --> 01:26:56,679
Speaker 1: young people who have like fucking reading goddamn Curtis Jarvin

1588
01:26:56,760 --> 01:26:59,360
Speaker 1: and ship on the Internet and convinced themselves the ship

1589
01:26:59,400 --> 01:27:01,720
Speaker 1: they read when they're young and like talk with their

1590
01:27:01,720 --> 01:27:04,880
Speaker 1: friends about obsessively and these discord chats and signal loops,

1591
01:27:04,880 --> 01:27:07,719
Speaker 1: and you know, there are the people who are willing

1592
01:27:07,760 --> 01:27:10,800
Speaker 1: to make Polepot style decisions. And no number of deaths,

1593
01:27:10,800 --> 01:27:13,479
Speaker 1: how many many tens of millions of fucking people die.

1594
01:27:13,840 --> 01:27:16,400
Speaker 1: If they get the chance, it won't. They will not

1595
01:27:16,520 --> 01:27:19,479
Speaker 1: for a second doubt themselves or change their minds. And

1596
01:27:19,520 --> 01:27:23,320
Speaker 1: that's why literally anything that can be done to stop

1597
01:27:23,520 --> 01:27:27,679
Speaker 1: the process that is attempting to be underway is like justified,

1598
01:27:27,720 --> 01:27:32,439
Speaker 1: because these people are going they they they have to

1599
01:27:32,479 --> 01:27:37,200
Speaker 1: be edged out right, And I'm optimistic at least about

1600
01:27:37,200 --> 01:27:39,360
Speaker 1: the fact that Musk, who's one of these people who

1601
01:27:39,400 --> 01:27:42,920
Speaker 1: has the same kind of Polepot brain damage seems to

1602
01:27:43,000 --> 01:27:46,839
Speaker 1: have seems to be pulling back because of how angry

1603
01:27:46,880 --> 01:27:49,720
Speaker 1: he's made. He's just not built for criticism, right, Yeah,

1604
01:27:49,920 --> 01:27:51,600
Speaker 1: but there's more of these guys.

1605
01:27:51,320 --> 01:27:54,479
Speaker 2: And these guys he's delusional, but he's tooth, thin skinned

1606
01:27:54,520 --> 01:27:59,120
Speaker 2: and thankfully largely incompetent. Although inc has never stopped so

1607
01:27:59,200 --> 01:28:00,760
Speaker 2: many of these folks the past, so.

1608
01:28:00,920 --> 01:28:04,200
Speaker 1: No, it hasn't no, they just fail upwards, cold, just

1609
01:28:04,320 --> 01:28:05,360
Speaker 1: fail hold comfort.

1610
01:28:05,640 --> 01:28:09,160
Speaker 2: But yeah, maybe that's at least a weakness to exploit anyway.

1611
01:28:09,960 --> 01:28:13,080
Speaker 1: I don't know, hard to know when it's good to

1612
01:28:13,160 --> 01:28:13,920
Speaker 1: read books or not.

1613
01:28:15,200 --> 01:28:17,639
Speaker 2: Oh my god, no, this is This is the lesson

1614
01:28:17,720 --> 01:28:22,920
Speaker 2: for these three episodes. Don't read books kids, podcasts. Not

1615
01:28:23,040 --> 01:28:25,639
Speaker 2: that podcast. Yeah, no, not that podcast either.

1616
01:28:25,760 --> 01:28:29,400
Speaker 1: Podcasts have never led anyone to support horrible things to

1617
01:28:29,479 --> 01:28:32,200
Speaker 1: get people killed, Just like, don't ever believe your own

1618
01:28:32,240 --> 01:28:35,200
Speaker 1: bullshit or anyone else is too strong. Keep an eye

1619
01:28:35,240 --> 01:28:37,200
Speaker 1: out for what's going on in the world, and talk

1620
01:28:37,240 --> 01:28:42,720
Speaker 1: to people. Goodbye, goodbye.

1621
01:28:43,840 --> 01:28:46,800
Speaker 4: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

1622
01:28:46,920 --> 01:28:49,519
Speaker 4: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool

1623
01:28:49,600 --> 01:28:53,559
Speaker 4: Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

1624
01:28:53,640 --> 01:28:56,800
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the

1625
01:28:56,840 --> 01:29:00,880
Speaker 4: Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday

1626
01:29:01,000 --> 01:29:04,639
Speaker 4: and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

1627
01:29:04,840 --> 01:29:06,320
Speaker 4: at Behind the Bastards