WEBVTT - Part Three: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country 0:00:01.760 --> 0:00:09.120 Also media, Holy crap, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, 0:00:09.160 --> 0:00:14.120 a rare three part episode. You motherfuckers, you lucky sons 0:00:14.120 --> 0:00:20.320 of bitches and rat Bastards are getting three episodes this week. 0:00:20.760 --> 0:00:25.360 I am now legally your father. You're welcome. Hi Sophie, 0:00:25.400 --> 0:00:26.239 Hi andrew T. How are you? 0:00:26.280 --> 0:00:26.520 Guys? 0:00:26.760 --> 0:00:27.400 Did that interest you? 0:00:27.760 --> 0:00:31.000 You don't need to be responsible for people? We are? 0:00:32.400 --> 0:00:37.960 I like that. That's like episode's three. I'm your father. 0:00:38.320 --> 0:00:39.519 I don't think you're I don't. 0:00:39.600 --> 0:00:41.760 I'm going to say something, really, I don't think you're 0:00:41.840 --> 0:00:42.280 their father. 0:00:42.440 --> 0:00:43.360 I think you're their dad. 0:00:43.400 --> 0:00:47.680 Dy No, that feels a lot worse for me, actually. 0:00:47.400 --> 0:00:49.879 Yeah, but I think that's what that legally means is 0:00:49.920 --> 0:00:51.519 you're not father your dad. 0:00:51.600 --> 0:00:54.800 D I'm like, I'm like one of those dads that 0:00:54.840 --> 0:00:57.680 like should pay child support but instead I live on 0:00:57.720 --> 0:01:01.520 a boat in the harbor of fucking New Orleans. 0:01:01.640 --> 0:01:05.080 And are you a library a libertarian in this scenario? 0:01:05.720 --> 0:01:06.000 No? 0:01:06.000 --> 0:01:08.800 No, no, But I definitely don't believe in the moon landing. 0:01:10.400 --> 0:01:13.520 This is Behind the Bastards again, a podcast you're enjoying 0:01:13.520 --> 0:01:16.440 part three of our pole pot episodes and basically the 0:01:16.480 --> 0:01:19.520 way it goes here this folks. We have a massive audience, 0:01:19.640 --> 0:01:21.640 and I'm always trying to like do the most I 0:01:21.680 --> 0:01:24.320 can to like please the most people, which you can't 0:01:24.360 --> 0:01:26.840 do with every episode. You know, some people don't like 0:01:27.200 --> 0:01:29.320 certain kits, some people don't like the cult leaders, some 0:01:29.400 --> 0:01:33.120 people don't like the dictators, some people only want the dictators, 0:01:33.480 --> 0:01:35.920 and likewise, you know, we've started doing a lot more 0:01:35.959 --> 0:01:38.479 four parters over the last couple of years, in part 0:01:38.520 --> 0:01:40.560 because there were guys where I felt like I'm kind 0:01:40.560 --> 0:01:43.200 of doing a disservice to try to limit this to 0:01:43.240 --> 0:01:46.880 two episodes, and a lot of people really like the 0:01:46.880 --> 0:01:49.000 four parts and say this is my favorite part of 0:01:49.040 --> 0:01:51.280 the show, and a lot of people say I don't like, 0:01:51.360 --> 0:01:53.840 I prefer the two parters. So we try to like 0:01:54.400 --> 0:01:58.200 go with variety rights that everybody's regularly getting what they want. 0:01:58.240 --> 0:01:59.480 And I didn't so I didn't want to do a 0:01:59.480 --> 0:02:02.400 four part for pole Pot And then I wrote fourteen 0:02:02.440 --> 0:02:05.400 thousand words on him and was like, God, damn it, Robert, 0:02:05.720 --> 0:02:08.400 because there is really that much to say. So this 0:02:08.560 --> 0:02:10.440 is all to say I didn't want to break this 0:02:10.520 --> 0:02:12.760 up over two weeks for the people who are tired 0:02:12.760 --> 0:02:14.880 of four partis. So I just we're just giving you 0:02:14.919 --> 0:02:18.920 three episodes this week, so you're fucking welcome. Open done. 0:02:19.080 --> 0:02:22.600 Would you say we're not like all the other girls. 0:02:22.120 --> 0:02:24.040 We're a lot like all the other girls. 0:02:24.960 --> 0:02:26.520 I'm not also going to be and that. 0:02:26.680 --> 0:02:28.720 All girls are beautiful. Okay. 0:02:28.760 --> 0:02:30.519 To get through the words, we're going to be talking 0:02:30.720 --> 0:02:32.880 super fast. So if you put this on like zero 0:02:32.880 --> 0:02:36.280 point six y six speed, you can make yourself a 0:02:36.320 --> 0:02:37.279 fourth episode. 0:02:37.360 --> 0:02:39.000 I'm actually going to slow down a lot. 0:02:39.120 --> 0:02:39.800 Just yeah. 0:02:40.440 --> 0:02:48.480 No, I was gonna say, hey, Robert, yes, did you 0:02:48.560 --> 0:02:52.160 know that Better Offline and Weird Little Guys won their 0:02:52.160 --> 0:02:53.079 webby categories? 0:02:53.720 --> 0:02:57.880 Did they did? They did? Better Offline and Weird Little Guys, 0:02:58.080 --> 0:03:01.679 two new weekly podcasts launch by cool Zone last year, 0:03:01.800 --> 0:03:03.800 both won Webbys in their first year. 0:03:05.520 --> 0:03:06.600 Yes, yes they did. 0:03:07.080 --> 0:03:12.280 That's astonishing. Yeah, you know, uh, I'm very proud of 0:03:12.280 --> 0:03:15.760 our of our little team who, despite being very very 0:03:16.240 --> 0:03:20.280 small in terms of you know, the broader podcasting universe, 0:03:21.200 --> 0:03:24.079 has way more listeners than most of the other podcast 0:03:24.160 --> 0:03:28.280 networks out there and actual fans because we don't just 0:03:28.320 --> 0:03:30.720 buy a bunch of downloads like some people I'm not 0:03:30.720 --> 0:03:32.520 going to name, but we could just like bleep Out 0:03:32.560 --> 0:03:37.160 and pretend that I accused whoever the fuck doing that? So, yeah, 0:03:37.280 --> 0:03:40.200 you know, we're uh, we're we're the We're the we're 0:03:40.240 --> 0:03:43.920 the Vietnam and you know, let's say our enemies and 0:03:44.080 --> 0:03:47.720 the pod Save Guys or the Khmer Rouge of podcasts. 0:03:47.200 --> 0:03:51.640 Right, they also they also want I saw. 0:03:51.800 --> 0:03:54.960 I know, I don't know why. It's literally just like 0:03:55.080 --> 0:03:57.520 the only other podcast network I can remember off the 0:03:57.520 --> 0:03:59.840 top of my head usually, So we shot on. 0:03:59.760 --> 0:04:03.440 Those lot, I don't know, Empires go podcast Empire a 0:04:03.480 --> 0:04:06.400 lot lot smaller body count than yes, Empires. 0:04:06.480 --> 0:04:09.000 Yeah, well, the exception of the Joe Rogan podcast, which 0:04:09.000 --> 0:04:12.240 he actually might wind up creeping up on old Pollpots members. 0:04:13.080 --> 0:04:18.120 You give him some time and some more testosterone shots. Yeah, yeah, So, 0:04:18.640 --> 0:04:20.680 as I noted at the end of the last episode, 0:04:20.680 --> 0:04:23.279 Pulpot had made it to the Standing Committee in nineteen 0:04:23.400 --> 0:04:27.400 sixty and then the party leader of the Communist Party 0:04:27.400 --> 0:04:31.280 of Cambodia, a guy named Samouth, was assassinated three years later, 0:04:31.400 --> 0:04:34.440 probably by the King's security services, although we don't know 0:04:34.760 --> 0:04:38.040 so some people think maybe Polepod orchestrated it. But anyway, 0:04:38.200 --> 0:04:40.320 he winds up in charge as a result of this, 0:04:41.160 --> 0:04:45.480 And yeah, initially the people that he's fighting against as 0:04:45.480 --> 0:04:50.640 he's like leading this increasingly large and capable communist insurgency 0:04:51.640 --> 0:04:54.880 is King Sahannock's monarchy, right, which he battled out of 0:04:54.880 --> 0:04:58.440 a headquarters named Office one hundred, and this is a 0:04:58.480 --> 0:05:01.760 mobile headquarters. Right, We're talking about a jungle insurgency. So 0:05:01.800 --> 0:05:05.840 he's moving constantly to stay ahead of the King's intelligence, 0:05:05.839 --> 0:05:10.000 which is in a large part provided by his American allies. Right, 0:05:10.120 --> 0:05:15.040 Because for the US, his fighting against the Khmer Rouge 0:05:15.120 --> 0:05:18.000 is kind of part of the broader struggle against communism 0:05:18.080 --> 0:05:21.200 in Vietnam. And you know, to be fair, the Vietnamese 0:05:21.240 --> 0:05:25.360 are still running a decent amount of what the Cambodian 0:05:25.400 --> 0:05:28.360 communists are doing even in this period, and like the 0:05:28.400 --> 0:05:31.360 mid sixties, they hold a lot of sway because they 0:05:31.360 --> 0:05:33.680 have a lot, they're a major source of weapons, right, 0:05:33.839 --> 0:05:37.680 they're more organized. But the Cambodian Party is getting a 0:05:37.720 --> 0:05:41.120 lot more independent during this period of time, and Salatsar 0:05:41.640 --> 0:05:44.680 is kind of making it his business to both increase 0:05:44.720 --> 0:05:48.599 that independence and to make friends with the people. He 0:05:48.680 --> 0:05:51.000 needs to beg for guns because they're not really capable 0:05:51.000 --> 0:05:53.080 of manufacturing weapons in the jungle. 0:05:53.839 --> 0:05:58.240 Sure, yeah, that's a very very vivid setup. 0:05:58.279 --> 0:06:01.359 What was the name of the headquarters again, Office one hundred. 0:06:01.560 --> 0:06:02.960 That fucking rules. 0:06:03.040 --> 0:06:05.240 Yeah, it's very cool stuff. I mean, it's always when 0:06:05.240 --> 0:06:08.919 you're talking about like an underground insurgent, you've got this 0:06:09.080 --> 0:06:13.719 secret leader nobody knows his name. Again, it's a real bummer. 0:06:13.720 --> 0:06:16.640 From a narrative standpoint, I would have had him born 0:06:16.800 --> 0:06:20.920 Polepot and switched to Salathsar because that's such a cool name, 0:06:21.279 --> 0:06:26.560 Like that's such a scary name. But whatever, that's how 0:06:26.600 --> 0:06:29.440 they change it up. He's subverting expectations and. 0:06:29.440 --> 0:06:33.159 Yeah, yeah, exactly a few further dominos will fall. 0:06:33.480 --> 0:06:37.159 Just like Ryan Johnson's Star Wars movies, And like Ryan 0:06:37.240 --> 0:06:40.880 Johnson's Star Wars movies, Salassar travels to Beijing in order 0:06:40.920 --> 0:06:44.120 to beg for weapons. Uh, And to that is that 0:06:44.240 --> 0:06:48.000 is partly true? Yes, And so he is like he is, 0:06:48.040 --> 0:06:52.200 and he's talking with obviously with with with Ho Chi 0:06:52.279 --> 0:06:54.240 min Sti or with the you know, with with the 0:06:54.240 --> 0:06:58.680 the Vietnamese Communists, and they are coordinating, but never to 0:06:58.760 --> 0:07:02.680 the extent that the kind of imagines, right, even though 0:07:02.680 --> 0:07:05.839 they're very dependent on the Vietnamese for a while, they 0:07:05.880 --> 0:07:10.000 never like it. And there is absolutely no desire among 0:07:10.040 --> 0:07:15.040 the Cambodian communists or among polepot to be tightly aligned 0:07:15.240 --> 0:07:18.640 with Vietnam. This like fantasy that the US has that 0:07:19.120 --> 0:07:21.720 China and all the Southeast Asian states are going to 0:07:21.760 --> 0:07:26.760 form like one unified communist block is just absolutely anyone 0:07:26.760 --> 0:07:28.800 with the slightest degree of a knowledge of any of 0:07:28.800 --> 0:07:31.440 these people be like, the fucker, No, they hate each other. 0:07:32.040 --> 0:07:36.680 I mean, it's just even meeting four different Asian people. Anyway, Yeah, 0:07:36.800 --> 0:07:39.200 you could probably see, like you could probably some of 0:07:39.200 --> 0:07:39.640 this shit. 0:07:40.040 --> 0:07:43.720 Talk to a Vietnamese dude about China, like seriously, have 0:07:44.360 --> 0:07:50.040 a conver fucking station. In nineteen seventy, Sahanok's regime is 0:07:50.160 --> 0:07:53.400 overthrown because again, the war is not going well for him, 0:07:53.440 --> 0:07:57.320 He's not particularly good at running Cambodia, and a bunch 0:07:57.400 --> 0:07:59.840 of these kind of right wing leaders in the military 0:08:00.040 --> 0:08:02.360 with the backing of the United States gets pissed off. 0:08:02.400 --> 0:08:04.880 So when when the king, like I think he's actually 0:08:04.920 --> 0:08:07.520 technically calling himself the prince because he gives up his 0:08:07.640 --> 0:08:10.600 royal title to quote unquote run for office whatever, Sahanak 0:08:10.720 --> 0:08:14.000 leaves the country on like a diplomatic visit, and there's 0:08:14.040 --> 0:08:16.400 a coup and the coup is headed by this guy 0:08:16.480 --> 0:08:20.240 called lawn noleh lawn Nole is actually the brother of 0:08:20.320 --> 0:08:25.320 Salathsar's childhood best friend, and obviously, like because of that, 0:08:25.480 --> 0:08:27.800 lawn Nole's brother is a major part of the regime. 0:08:27.880 --> 0:08:31.120 Lawn Nole sets up and he's like, yeah, probably if 0:08:31.160 --> 0:08:34.000 Salas if the if the communists win, my friendship with 0:08:34.160 --> 0:08:36.760 you know, salat Sar will protect me. It doesn't, by 0:08:36.800 --> 0:08:38.760 the way, this guy gets the fucking shit Liq were 0:08:38.800 --> 0:08:40.760 dated out of him. And the fact that there's a 0:08:40.800 --> 0:08:44.880 family connection, you know, or a deep connection between between 0:08:44.920 --> 0:08:48.160 Salatsar who's leading the communists, and you know, the family 0:08:48.200 --> 0:08:50.720 of lawn Nole does nothing to temper the brutality of 0:08:50.720 --> 0:08:54.760 the conflict that follows. Now, a lot of this comes 0:08:54.800 --> 0:08:57.400 directly as a result of law Nole's policies, right, this 0:08:57.480 --> 0:09:01.240 is not just Polepod is running a very brutal insurgency, 0:09:01.720 --> 0:09:05.800 but it's brutal in response to the sheer violence unleashed 0:09:05.800 --> 0:09:08.839 by Nol in order to try to maintain control. As 0:09:08.880 --> 0:09:11.680 soon as the monarchy is abolished, the so called Khmer 0:09:11.800 --> 0:09:15.320 Republic begins calling on the US to continue and extend 0:09:15.360 --> 0:09:19.640 their bombing campaign in Cambodia, which had started clandestinely and 0:09:19.960 --> 0:09:23.320 very illegally in nineteen sixty nine under Nixon as a 0:09:23.360 --> 0:09:26.680 way to try and stop Vietnamese Communists from being able 0:09:26.679 --> 0:09:30.080 to supply themselves. Right, there's this idea, it's accurate idea 0:09:30.080 --> 0:09:33.760 that Cambodia is a big part of how the Vietcong 0:09:33.920 --> 0:09:36.320 are like supplying and this is where they're retreating to 0:09:36.480 --> 0:09:39.440 in order to regather their strength. That is essentially accurate. 0:09:39.640 --> 0:09:42.440 And we are bombing them for years and pretending not to. 0:09:42.600 --> 0:09:45.199 And now when law Nol is in power, we don't 0:09:45.200 --> 0:09:48.840 have to like lie because we're being invited right now, 0:09:48.880 --> 0:09:51.640 we're being invited by this coup that we set up. Right, 0:09:52.360 --> 0:09:55.400 the US would ultimately drop more than half a million 0:09:55.520 --> 0:09:58.679 tons on Cambodia in a four year period of time. 0:09:59.040 --> 0:10:02.960 And for an idea of how many explosives that is, 0:10:03.000 --> 0:10:05.040 I mean that sounds like our lot, right, five hundred 0:10:05.040 --> 0:10:08.680 thousand tons is a lot of weight. That's more than 0:10:08.720 --> 0:10:11.520 the total weight of bombs dropped on the Empire of 0:10:11.600 --> 0:10:16.240 Japan during all of World War two. And right, here's 0:10:16.280 --> 0:10:20.320 the thing. These bombs are being dropped both to deal 0:10:20.360 --> 0:10:23.679 with like Vietcong. You know, tunnel complexes and some of 0:10:23.720 --> 0:10:27.880 their bases, and to stop the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer 0:10:27.960 --> 0:10:31.280 Rouge has no industrial base. Their weapons have to be 0:10:31.360 --> 0:10:35.959 smuggled in. They are not like building tanks. They don't 0:10:36.080 --> 0:10:40.439 have cities that are like functioning as part of an 0:10:40.440 --> 0:10:43.840 industrial core. The Empire of Japan was one of the 0:10:43.840 --> 0:10:47.200 most powerful industrialized states on the planet. And we drop 0:10:47.320 --> 0:10:51.880 more bombs on Cambodia than we did on them, right, Like, right, 0:10:52.080 --> 0:10:57.760 that's Jesus Christ, it's fucking and we nuked Japan famously, right, 0:10:58.040 --> 0:11:02.040 Like the degree of force that we deploy on these 0:11:02.120 --> 0:11:07.640 guys is outrageous and we get fuck all for it. 0:11:07.800 --> 0:11:11.240 Like this could not have been a less useful use 0:11:11.320 --> 0:11:13.160 of force, not that that would have made it like 0:11:13.320 --> 0:11:15.520 moral if like it had won us the war, it 0:11:15.559 --> 0:11:18.160 wouldn't be Okay, I'm not saying that, but it like 0:11:18.800 --> 0:11:22.480 this is just like the biggest l A military one 0:11:22.520 --> 0:11:25.319 of the biggest l's A military ever took, is. 0:11:25.240 --> 0:11:29.280 Not but also somehow extreme, even more pointless than some 0:11:29.360 --> 0:11:30.199 of the other wars. 0:11:30.679 --> 0:11:32.680 And that's the thing. I tried to make this clear 0:11:32.679 --> 0:11:35.480 in the Kissinger episodes, Like it's not just how evil 0:11:35.520 --> 0:11:38.000 he is because he gets depicted as like this evil 0:11:38.080 --> 0:11:42.040 genius a lot. He sucked so much shit at a 0:11:42.040 --> 0:11:45.600 lot of what he was doing. Right, between one hundred 0:11:45.600 --> 0:11:49.840 and fifty thousand, three hundred Cambodians probably died. That's a 0:11:50.480 --> 0:11:53.400 credible death toll, although there's a lot of arguments that 0:11:53.880 --> 0:11:57.360 both of those numbers either is much too low, right, 0:11:57.440 --> 0:12:00.320 that it's significantly higher than three hundred thousand. You can 0:12:00.360 --> 0:12:03.800 find some lower estimates. One fifty to three is kind 0:12:03.800 --> 0:12:07.920 of you know somewhere, that's close enough for what we're 0:12:07.960 --> 0:12:10.800 talking about here. It's a crime. It's a historic crime 0:12:10.800 --> 0:12:15.360 against humanity. Right. Most of those dead are civilians, including 0:12:15.360 --> 0:12:18.199 a shitload of little kids who are just incinerated from 0:12:18.280 --> 0:12:21.200 the sky by the United States Air Force. So the 0:12:21.200 --> 0:12:23.000 fact that we're doing this, the fact that we are 0:12:23.040 --> 0:12:27.480 incinerating entire villages, we're just lighting little kids on fire 0:12:27.640 --> 0:12:32.400 from the sky, makes people angry. The folks who don't die, 0:12:33.040 --> 0:12:36.520 and who previously had had their ambition in life had 0:12:36.520 --> 0:12:39.680 been to like, you know, be a peasant, feed my family, 0:12:40.600 --> 0:12:44.720 live a life, you know, like be a normal Cambodian person, 0:12:45.080 --> 0:12:48.640 their ambitions changed after their families get incinerated and suddenly 0:12:48.679 --> 0:12:51.040 They're like, you know, what would be cool killing a 0:12:51.040 --> 0:12:54.680 bunch of people in revenge, you know, getting my vengeance, 0:12:55.400 --> 0:12:57.440 And so a lot of peasants start flocking to the 0:12:57.440 --> 0:13:00.000 banner of the Khmer Rouge, which had not been super 0:13:00.120 --> 0:13:03.880 popular previously, right, it had been growing before this bombing 0:13:03.880 --> 0:13:09.080 campaign escalates, but not massively. The bombing campaign's primary result 0:13:09.280 --> 0:13:14.480 is to supercharge support for the Khmer Rouge, because wouldn't 0:13:14.480 --> 0:13:15.760 you want to shoot somebody? 0:13:16.240 --> 0:13:20.160 Yeah? That is it is. I mean, that's eternally the 0:13:20.200 --> 0:13:21.240 best recruiting tool. 0:13:21.440 --> 0:13:25.480 Yes, And I'll never say anything to mitigate or reduce 0:13:25.559 --> 0:13:28.880 the complicity and the responsibility of Polepot and the leaders 0:13:28.880 --> 0:13:31.120 for the crimes that are about to happen. But the 0:13:31.200 --> 0:13:33.560 crimes are being committed directly on the ground by a 0:13:33.600 --> 0:13:36.880 lot of these young people from the jungle who grow 0:13:36.960 --> 0:13:41.840 up under this bombing campaign and then join the gorilla. 0:13:41.960 --> 0:13:48.440 And I can't, no matter how hideous things are, I 0:13:48.480 --> 0:13:52.240 can't really blame them. Which isn't saying that it's okay 0:13:52.400 --> 0:13:56.439 or justified. It's just saying that, like you, you ruined 0:13:56.480 --> 0:14:02.360 people and they went insane, Like no one's capable of 0:14:02.400 --> 0:14:05.320 acting rationally with the damage that you have done to them, 0:14:05.440 --> 0:14:08.080 you know, with the exception again of these people at 0:14:08.120 --> 0:14:10.520 the top, guys like pole Pot who do not grow up, 0:14:10.559 --> 0:14:13.880 are not raised, being bombed or you know, living under 0:14:13.920 --> 0:14:17.120 these horrible conditions in the jungle. These are people of 0:14:17.200 --> 0:14:23.560 privilege of education who had the opportunity to pick a 0:14:23.560 --> 0:14:26.320 different path and did choose horror, right, And that's where 0:14:26.320 --> 0:14:29.160 my blame lies here. I want to quote from an 0:14:29.240 --> 0:14:32.360 article for the Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network by 0:14:32.440 --> 0:14:36.360 David Chandler. Next quote, and this is kind of describing 0:14:36.600 --> 0:14:38.880 how the Khmer rouge develops as a result of all this. 0:14:39.600 --> 0:14:41.920 The small scale guerrilla movement which he had launched against 0:14:41.920 --> 0:14:44.400 the Henex's government in the late nineteen sixties developed with 0:14:44.480 --> 0:14:47.600 Vietnamese and Chinese backing into a full scale resistance arvey 0:14:47.640 --> 0:14:50.320 fighting the American backed Long Nul regime and Nom Pen. 0:14:50.880 --> 0:14:53.920 At the same time, Sara developed the distinctive ideology which 0:14:53.960 --> 0:14:58.440 made the CPK that's the Communist Party of Cambodia very 0:14:58.440 --> 0:15:02.400 different from other Marxist Leninists parties. He mistrusted the working class, 0:15:02.400 --> 0:15:05.360 relying instead on the poor peasantry, whom he saw as 0:15:05.360 --> 0:15:09.880 the incarnation of Rousseau's noble savage. His party functioned like 0:15:09.960 --> 0:15:13.520 a sect, and some authors underlined that his communism was 0:15:13.640 --> 0:15:17.400 colored by Cambodian Buddhist structures. Its members were required to 0:15:17.440 --> 0:15:21.400 renounce not only material possessions but also spiritual ties. The 0:15:21.520 --> 0:15:25.200 ultimate goal was to crush individual personality and replace it 0:15:25.280 --> 0:15:31.240 by unquestioning adherence to the collectivity. Discipline was ferocious security, omnipresent. 0:15:31.640 --> 0:15:34.640 Saw abhorred the limelight, preferring to operate from the shadows 0:15:34.640 --> 0:15:40.160 and using multiple aliases poke hey, eighty seven, Pole, grand uncle, 0:15:40.360 --> 0:15:44.080 elder brother, first brother, and in later years ninety nine 0:15:44.320 --> 0:15:47.840 or pim. Yet his fanaticism was marked masked by great 0:15:47.880 --> 0:15:50.960 personal charisma. People who met him remembered his winning smile 0:15:51.080 --> 0:15:52.880 and considerable talent as an orator. 0:15:56.920 --> 0:16:00.320 I mean a sick, athletic list of nicknames. It is 0:16:00.360 --> 0:16:05.520 pretty cool. I know I'm fixating. I'm fixating on all 0:16:05.560 --> 0:16:07.840 the names, but they're fucking rad. 0:16:08.080 --> 0:16:12.960 Yeah, it's hard not to write like that. For whatever reason, 0:16:13.120 --> 0:16:14.760 I think eighty seven is my pick. 0:16:15.360 --> 0:16:18.520 Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is eighty seven based off? Did 0:16:18.520 --> 0:16:19.120 you find that out? 0:16:19.240 --> 0:16:22.360 Actually no, I probably could have figured it out, but 0:16:22.520 --> 0:16:26.360 I didn't come across that in my reading. Now, because 0:16:26.400 --> 0:16:31.640 this is the yeah yeah now, because this isn't a 0:16:31.640 --> 0:16:34.680 military history podcast, and the overall story of Cambodia during 0:16:34.720 --> 0:16:36.480 this period is so much more detailed than we can 0:16:36.520 --> 0:16:38.680 get into. I'm going to have to YadA YadA a 0:16:38.680 --> 0:16:41.640 lot of how how the rebellion you know, succeeds. 0:16:41.800 --> 0:16:46.320 I love when YadA YadA, please YadA yadda ya yaada. 0:16:46.880 --> 0:16:49.400 The gist of it is, Londol's government was only capable 0:16:49.440 --> 0:16:52.160 of holding the line against the communists with US backing, 0:16:52.160 --> 0:16:54.240 and even then not all that well. By the early 0:16:54.320 --> 0:16:56.720 nineteen seventies, it had become clear that there was an 0:16:56.760 --> 0:16:59.960 expiration date on that assistance. The Khmayer Rouge grew large 0:17:00.160 --> 0:17:02.880 with each atrocity by the right wing government and their allies. 0:17:03.200 --> 0:17:05.760 In areas where the Rouge took power, everyone old enough 0:17:05.760 --> 0:17:08.359 to fight was drafted into the military, and everyone else 0:17:08.480 --> 0:17:11.639 was put to work. The all black garb of the peasantry, 0:17:11.640 --> 0:17:14.119 which had just kind of been a traditional thing in Cambodia, 0:17:14.240 --> 0:17:17.879 became the only acceptable outfit to wear. You're literally not 0:17:18.000 --> 0:17:21.960 allowed to dress differently. Those who refused to serve were executed. 0:17:22.200 --> 0:17:25.159 By nineteen seventy three, most of rural Cambodia was in 0:17:25.240 --> 0:17:27.720 rouge hands, and I got to say, the one aspect 0:17:27.760 --> 0:17:29.879 of the Khmer Rouge I could have done great with 0:17:30.080 --> 0:17:32.240 is just kind of wearing black pajamas all the time, 0:17:32.520 --> 0:17:35.080 Like I got that shit on the lock, baby, Like 0:17:35.560 --> 0:17:39.240 I'm wearing this like sport coat thing, but it's just 0:17:39.320 --> 0:17:41.760 black pajamas under this. 0:17:41.760 --> 0:17:45.560 This is this is the tragedy of the YouTube era. Yeah, 0:17:45.720 --> 0:17:48.680 is this fucking sport coat? When you know Robert could 0:17:48.760 --> 0:17:50.480 just be full jammed out. 0:17:50.720 --> 0:17:54.080 Yeah, yeah, and I am. This thing doesn't reduce the comfort, 0:17:54.119 --> 0:17:58.240 It's fine, don't worry. Don't worry. I'm pole Potting under this. 0:17:58.640 --> 0:18:01.479 That's what he says. That's every episode, It's not just 0:18:01.480 --> 0:18:02.280 this one. 0:18:02.640 --> 0:18:05.960 The final straw for lon Nole's regime is when Prince Sahanna, 0:18:06.119 --> 0:18:10.040 hiding in exile, announced his support for Polepot's rebels. Now 0:18:10.040 --> 0:18:11.720 we've done. We did a two part or one of 0:18:11.760 --> 0:18:15.320 our very first episodes on Notre Dame Sahanak. He sucks ass. 0:18:15.640 --> 0:18:18.440 Listen to those episodes as to why. But the reason 0:18:18.480 --> 0:18:20.439 he does this is he believed that, like you know, 0:18:20.480 --> 0:18:22.320 he thought this might give him a shot at returning 0:18:22.359 --> 0:18:25.080 to power. Right if I back these guys. Clearly they 0:18:25.119 --> 0:18:27.080 won't last, and eventually I'll be able to make my 0:18:27.119 --> 0:18:30.159 way back in. Right. What really happens is he strengthens 0:18:30.160 --> 0:18:33.199 the Khmer Rouge at a critical moment because again, people 0:18:33.840 --> 0:18:37.640 the peasantry feel very strongly about the royalty, right, and 0:18:37.680 --> 0:18:40.119 that still has not been busted, even though he really 0:18:40.160 --> 0:18:43.760 sucked ass when he was actually running things. He does 0:18:43.840 --> 0:18:45.760 this right as the US is starting to pull out 0:18:45.760 --> 0:18:49.040 their assets and things fall very quickly. Think about kind 0:18:49.080 --> 0:18:52.840 of how long the government of Afghanistan lasted as the 0:18:52.960 --> 0:18:55.200 US pulled out, right, that's kind of what we're seeing here. 0:18:55.640 --> 0:18:59.480 On April seventeenth, nineteen seventy five, Lon Nole's army collapsed 0:18:59.680 --> 0:19:03.440 entirely and the Khmer Rouge entered Nom Penn. Now you 0:19:03.520 --> 0:19:06.040 got to remember at this point, you know, when they 0:19:06.080 --> 0:19:09.080 take the capital, the fighting has been going on in 0:19:09.160 --> 0:19:12.560 parts of Cambodia for twenty years or more. People are 0:19:12.680 --> 0:19:15.800 fucking exhausted, and is always the case in times like this. 0:19:15.960 --> 0:19:18.720 There was an optimism among like a lot of regular 0:19:18.720 --> 0:19:20.960 people that like, look, I don't know so much about 0:19:20.960 --> 0:19:24.560 these Khmer Rouge guys, but the war's over. Maybe things 0:19:24.600 --> 0:19:27.360 will get better, right, there's this hope, and that hope 0:19:27.440 --> 0:19:32.040 is crushed very quickly because Polepot and his comrades, it's 0:19:32.040 --> 0:19:33.679 not even that they don't want to go back to 0:19:33.800 --> 0:19:36.919 normal and their minds going back to normal is a 0:19:37.119 --> 0:19:41.199 death sentence, right. And again this is kind of what 0:19:41.400 --> 0:19:44.119 messes with a lot of people's casual understanding of what's happening, 0:19:44.119 --> 0:19:46.320 because you would think, well, obviously, these guys have to 0:19:46.359 --> 0:19:49.919 hate the US more than anybody else, right, not at 0:19:49.960 --> 0:19:54.560 all the cases. The people the Polepot's obsession is Vietnam. 0:19:54.960 --> 0:19:59.560 That is the real enemy, not capitalism, not the United States, 0:20:00.119 --> 0:20:05.639 the West Vietnam. Saigon fell to the NVA not far 0:20:05.680 --> 0:20:08.800 from when Nam Pen did, right. And because of this, 0:20:08.960 --> 0:20:12.640 because Vietnam has won its War two, there's this immediate 0:20:13.080 --> 0:20:17.359 widespread paranoia among the Khmer Rouge leadership that the Vietnamese 0:20:17.400 --> 0:20:20.840 are going to digest their meal of southern Vietnam and 0:20:20.880 --> 0:20:23.600 then they're immediately going to take this big army they've 0:20:23.640 --> 0:20:26.720 got with tanks and aircraft and all sorts of modern 0:20:26.760 --> 0:20:29.760 weapons that the Khmer Rouge does not really have access to, 0:20:30.119 --> 0:20:32.280 and they're going to cross the border and they're going 0:20:32.320 --> 0:20:35.040 to invade Cambodia. And they're going to take us out 0:20:35.160 --> 0:20:37.879 and make us nothing but a tribute state, right like 0:20:38.000 --> 0:20:40.960 that is the immediate fear, and the only way to 0:20:41.000 --> 0:20:44.160 resist this future, to have a chance of defeating Vietnam 0:20:44.440 --> 0:20:49.040 and maintaining Khmara autonomy is to rapidly change the country, 0:20:49.080 --> 0:20:51.800 both in terms of how food is produced and how 0:20:52.320 --> 0:20:54.640 like to and to do this kind of they're very 0:20:54.760 --> 0:20:58.440 motivated by these ideas they'd taken from Mao. That kind 0:20:58.440 --> 0:21:01.159 of became the great leap for word in China of 0:21:01.280 --> 0:21:04.320 like what if we do industrialism? But it's like everybody's 0:21:04.320 --> 0:21:08.320 backyard is helping to like make different sort of industrial products, right. 0:21:10.200 --> 0:21:14.200 Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, the I guess it's just DIY 0:21:14.320 --> 0:21:18.679 approach to making you know your aks and your plate armor. 0:21:19.040 --> 0:21:23.199 Yes, and you can with guns, but not like the 0:21:23.359 --> 0:21:26.320 guns you need to win a modern right, You're not 0:21:26.359 --> 0:21:29.200 gonna be like making an SBG nine in your backyard 0:21:29.280 --> 0:21:36.000 or whatever. Fucking shit speaking of making recoilist rifles in 0:21:36.040 --> 0:21:41.440 your backyard. Our sponsors will teach you how they love 0:21:41.640 --> 0:21:46.840 helping people maintain modern I don't know whatever. Their freedom 0:21:47.119 --> 0:22:02.960 yeah freedom fuck ah and I'm bad. Okay, So cities 0:22:03.240 --> 0:22:06.760 like the Capital have no place in Polepot's radical view 0:22:06.840 --> 0:22:09.040 of the future of the country, which needs to be 0:22:09.119 --> 0:22:12.880 immediately changed on a fundamental level in order to survive 0:22:12.960 --> 0:22:17.119 and defeat the Vietnamese. So there's this plan that's hatched 0:22:17.119 --> 0:22:21.040 by Polepot in the leadership of the party to completely 0:22:21.160 --> 0:22:26.040 reform Cambodian society in order to make it capable of surviving. 0:22:26.400 --> 0:22:30.879 And Polepot names this plan year zero. In April of 0:22:31.000 --> 0:22:35.160 nineteen seventy five, they declare this openly, and this Year 0:22:35.280 --> 0:22:38.320 zero concept. We talked about this in the earlier episodes. 0:22:38.359 --> 0:22:41.040 It's based in part on Polepot's understanding of the French 0:22:41.080 --> 0:22:45.120 revolution right as well as reading from guys like Thomas Paine, 0:22:45.160 --> 0:22:48.679 because he does read like American revolutionaries too, And in 0:22:48.720 --> 0:22:52.040 seventeen seventy six pain had published this quote, we have 0:22:52.160 --> 0:22:54.960 it in our power to begin the world over again, 0:22:55.320 --> 0:22:58.520 a situation similar to the present. Hath not happened since 0:22:58.560 --> 0:23:01.320 the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a 0:23:01.359 --> 0:23:03.959 new world is at hand. And this is the kind 0:23:04.000 --> 0:23:07.919 of thing you hear in some like optimistic revolutionary tracts, 0:23:08.040 --> 0:23:10.840 especially in the headiness of like we've defeated the regime, 0:23:11.359 --> 0:23:14.840 we have this chance for a total break with history. Right, 0:23:15.520 --> 0:23:17.840 there's even you can you can think about kind of 0:23:18.600 --> 0:23:22.040 the whole the end of history stuff that was being 0:23:22.080 --> 0:23:24.600 said at the when the Soviet Union fell. There's this 0:23:24.680 --> 0:23:29.080 headiness of like, well, maybe maybe we're done competing with 0:23:29.119 --> 0:23:31.359 like what kind of systems are going to work? Maybe 0:23:31.400 --> 0:23:34.520 we've maybe we can. We're entering into this fundamentally new 0:23:34.560 --> 0:23:38.760 world that's like represents this real break of continuity, and 0:23:38.920 --> 0:23:40.840 that means we're never going to have to worry about 0:23:40.840 --> 0:23:43.400 like going back to any of the bad old days 0:23:43.480 --> 0:23:46.320 or the problems that we had struggled to know back. Yeah, 0:23:46.359 --> 0:23:47.600 there's no way of going back. 0:23:47.720 --> 0:23:47.880 Right. 0:23:48.160 --> 0:23:49.040 We finally did it? 0:23:50.080 --> 0:23:54.720 Oh man, I mean obviously in hindsight, but like, never 0:23:54.880 --> 0:23:58.600 has that sentiment been expressed and had not been a 0:23:58.720 --> 0:24:00.040 true psycho saying. 0:24:00.240 --> 0:24:02.800 Right right right, I mean I love me some Thomas Paine, 0:24:02.880 --> 0:24:04.639 but you should look at the rest of his life. 0:24:04.880 --> 0:24:08.080 This wasn't I mean, obviously we the US became a 0:24:08.119 --> 0:24:11.760 slave state, right yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to quote 0:24:11.800 --> 0:24:15.280 from an article written by Adris ayres here. Quote it 0:24:15.359 --> 0:24:18.439 is evident that the Khmer Rouge, in deliberate and skillful fashion, 0:24:18.480 --> 0:24:21.680 drew on history for political INDs. Their leadership made repeated 0:24:21.680 --> 0:24:24.280 reference to the importance of grasping the wheel of history 0:24:24.280 --> 0:24:26.760 and how history would crush those who stood in the 0:24:26.800 --> 0:24:30.040 way of development. I've heard Musk say some similar things. 0:24:30.440 --> 0:24:33.679 In nineteen seventy six, as part of Polpot's consolidation of 0:24:33.720 --> 0:24:37.359 personal power, official party historiography was revised with an eye 0:24:37.359 --> 0:24:40.439 to the older Indo Chinese guerrilla fractions within the movement 0:24:40.680 --> 0:24:42.879 by moving the date of the parties founding from nineteen 0:24:42.920 --> 0:24:45.800 fifty one to nineteen sixty and a meeting of the 0:24:45.800 --> 0:24:48.520 Central Committee in March nineteen seventy six, it was noted, 0:24:48.560 --> 0:24:51.840 with regard to historiography, that we must rearrange the history 0:24:51.840 --> 0:24:54.199 of the party into something clean and perfect. Do not 0:24:54.320 --> 0:24:57.840 use nineteen fifty one, make a clean break. So again 0:24:58.320 --> 0:25:01.679 there's this even our re history of our real movement, 0:25:01.720 --> 0:25:05.760 that one isn't good enough. We have to like And 0:25:06.080 --> 0:25:10.040 if if you're ever in a if're ever finding your movement, 0:25:10.119 --> 0:25:13.199 is needing to like alter the very basic foundation of 0:25:13.280 --> 0:25:15.520 reality for your ideas to work. 0:25:16.080 --> 0:25:19.600 Maybe bounce, I mean the b side of all the 0:25:19.640 --> 0:25:23.679 cool names is like a sort of juvenile relationship to 0:25:23.880 --> 0:25:27.520 like your own story, which is right, kind of weirdly 0:25:27.560 --> 0:25:31.640 an evident here in evidence. Here we're like, why. 0:25:32.040 --> 0:25:33.920 Yeah, this is and this is why, like we talk 0:25:34.000 --> 0:25:37.120 about the reason why I identify more as an anarchist 0:25:37.200 --> 0:25:40.399 than anything else. Isn't because like I have some great 0:25:40.440 --> 0:25:42.840 plan based on some thinker, for like, this is the 0:25:42.880 --> 0:25:45.320 perfect way to reorder society, and if we did this 0:25:45.480 --> 0:25:48.399 exact thing, based on this exact book, it would clearly 0:25:48.480 --> 0:25:51.320 work without any problems. I feel that way because like, 0:25:51.480 --> 0:25:55.200 anarchists have diagnosed the problem in a way that I'd 0:25:55.240 --> 0:25:57.760 never seen be wrong. And the problem is if you 0:25:57.800 --> 0:26:03.560 give people lots of power, Yeah, they do horrible things. Yeah, right, 0:26:03.960 --> 0:26:06.960 Like that's that's that's kind of where I get into 0:26:07.000 --> 0:26:07.680 it from. Right. 0:26:07.720 --> 0:26:11.639 And then every conceivable war, yeah, every conceivable dimension that 0:26:11.640 --> 0:26:15.160 that power can be gained from. Yeah, still bad. 0:26:15.720 --> 0:26:17.840 Yes, And when you have all of the power and 0:26:17.880 --> 0:26:20.240 you have this very strict idea of this, we need 0:26:20.280 --> 0:26:22.600 to do this exact thing, and this exact thing is 0:26:22.640 --> 0:26:25.080 the only thing that can save us, and then the 0:26:25.119 --> 0:26:28.680 world doesn't sort of change the way you think it 0:26:28.720 --> 0:26:31.480 ought to based on your political beliefs, Well, you're just 0:26:31.520 --> 0:26:34.120 going to start killing people and that's sure enough. What's 0:26:34.160 --> 0:26:35.040 going to happen here? 0:26:35.280 --> 0:26:36.240 Yeah, so the. 0:26:36.280 --> 0:26:38.720 Project to make a clean break with history, this whole 0:26:38.800 --> 0:26:42.040 Year zero thing is urgent, right because unless they can 0:26:42.320 --> 0:26:46.040 do this before Vietnam swallows them up, they're fucked. The 0:26:46.040 --> 0:26:50.000 internal Marxist analysis also indicated that Cambodia had to proceed 0:26:50.040 --> 0:26:54.200 directly from feudalism to communism within four years, which they 0:26:54.280 --> 0:26:59.760 called the super great leap forward. We already know this 0:27:00.080 --> 0:27:02.159 can work for Mao, and we're like, but when we 0:27:02.160 --> 0:27:05.439 make it like a super greatly for it's like Mario 0:27:05.560 --> 0:27:07.879 Brothers suck edd ass. But once we ded a super, 0:27:07.960 --> 0:27:08.960 it was finally good. 0:27:10.880 --> 0:27:14.480 Just do the thing that already didn't work, but more. 0:27:15.040 --> 0:27:16.920 Yeah, Mao was just sitting there like, God, damn it, 0:27:16.920 --> 0:27:18.920 Why didn't I put a super in front of it? Fuck? 0:27:18.960 --> 0:27:26.040 The backyard furnaces would have worked, super sparrow murdering. In 0:27:26.160 --> 0:27:29.000 policy terms, Year zero had a fairly narrow meaning the 0:27:29.080 --> 0:27:31.760 cities which were dominant. As I stated in earlier episodes, 0:27:31.800 --> 0:27:35.359 the cities have a like they're not like overwhelmingly Khmer 0:27:35.840 --> 0:27:37.359 like the rest of the country is. They have a 0:27:37.400 --> 0:27:40.600 lot of Vietnamese and Chinese traders and a lot of 0:27:40.800 --> 0:27:43.360 the Khmer that lived there are the new people, right, 0:27:43.480 --> 0:27:47.200 They are educated Khmer who come from families with money, 0:27:47.240 --> 0:27:49.719 who have gone through Western education, who have often been 0:27:49.840 --> 0:27:54.480 educated overseas and have thus been unforgivably tainted by foreign influence. 0:27:54.560 --> 0:27:57.760 Now you may also notice these new people that he's 0:27:57.760 --> 0:28:01.480 saying we need to expel from the cities are Polepot 0:28:01.520 --> 0:28:07.439 and his friends right right, Still, the new people have 0:28:07.560 --> 0:28:10.000 to either assimilate to the base people, and the base 0:28:10.040 --> 0:28:13.800 people are Khmer peasant farmers, or die. And the distinct 0:28:13.960 --> 0:28:17.720 preference of the Khmer rus is that they die. Andres 0:28:17.720 --> 0:28:22.359 Airs describes how jarringly rapid this process is. Quote. Money 0:28:22.440 --> 0:28:26.439 markets and private properties, schools, institutes of higher education, newspapers, 0:28:26.440 --> 0:28:30.320 and religious institutions all were immediately abolished after the seizure 0:28:30.320 --> 0:28:33.720 of power. Early eyewitness accounts relate how the hospital and 0:28:33.840 --> 0:28:36.960 non pen was emptied of patients, how the national bank 0:28:37.040 --> 0:28:40.360 was set on fire, money burned in the streets. Immediately 0:28:40.400 --> 0:28:43.840 after the victory proclamation, book burnings were orchestrated in front 0:28:43.840 --> 0:28:47.480 of the National Library and the School of Renee Descartes. 0:28:47.800 --> 0:28:50.600 The country's borders were closed immediately, and the cleansing of 0:28:50.640 --> 0:28:53.800 the country from foreign influences began by deporting foreigners and 0:28:53.840 --> 0:28:58.280 domestic minorities such as Vietnamese Muslim Khmer, Chinese Khmer ties, 0:28:58.360 --> 0:29:01.360 and Europeans. It was also so officially announced that the 0:29:01.480 --> 0:29:05.560 individual would be abolished the traditional family would be replaced 0:29:05.560 --> 0:29:08.760 by the movement in order to create a completely conflict 0:29:08.800 --> 0:29:13.720 free society. Revolutionaries were officially instructed not to have a personality. 0:29:14.120 --> 0:29:18.440 The individual was continually counterposed to the people, with the 0:29:18.520 --> 0:29:24.440 former representing division, factionalism, inequality, bourgeoisie values, and foreign influence. 0:29:24.720 --> 0:29:30.280 The people meanwhile embodied its polar opposite, something entirely pure redemption, 0:29:30.720 --> 0:29:34.960 the extermination of particularity and contingency and the realization of 0:29:35.080 --> 0:29:40.240 absolute freedom, equality and fraternity through complete absorption into the 0:29:40.320 --> 0:29:43.680 ang Car. And that's the people. That's the Vulk, right, 0:29:43.920 --> 0:29:46.040 you know, the Nazi said the Vulcan. The ang Car 0:29:46.240 --> 0:29:49.360 is that for the Khmer rouse It's close enough at least, right, 0:29:49.600 --> 0:29:54.240 And yeah, revolutionaries are not allowed to have personalities. 0:29:54.480 --> 0:29:57.160 I mean, I know we're coming at this from a 0:29:57.240 --> 0:30:01.239 different time and hindsight, but I it's so hard for 0:30:01.280 --> 0:30:04.720 me to even hear the version of that speech that's 0:30:04.760 --> 0:30:09.520 stirring or less motivating it's really wild. 0:30:09.560 --> 0:30:12.520 And it's motivating to the people who have been drinking 0:30:12.600 --> 0:30:14.880 the kool aid, because again, they've been in these They 0:30:14.880 --> 0:30:16.920 started out in these circles where it's just them and 0:30:16.920 --> 0:30:20.880 their friends, continually radicalizing each other further and not really 0:30:20.920 --> 0:30:25.480 listening to outside people, right, and then they moved to 0:30:25.560 --> 0:30:27.800 the jungle and become so not only are they all 0:30:27.800 --> 0:30:31.240 like trauma bonding getting bombed together, but they're continuing to 0:30:31.320 --> 0:30:34.480 talk out these ideas and just take themselves like. This 0:30:34.640 --> 0:30:38.040 isn't for other people, right. The point is not to 0:30:38.120 --> 0:30:45.080 inspire other people, right, right, And it is this you get. 0:30:45.120 --> 0:30:47.360 This is an issue I have with like some other 0:30:47.360 --> 0:30:49.720 people that I otherwise agree with a lot. There's talk 0:30:50.640 --> 0:30:53.040 among certain left inst tendencies about the concept of the 0:30:53.080 --> 0:30:55.479 abolition of the family and what they tend to mean 0:30:55.520 --> 0:30:58.400 in the modern era is looking at a lot of 0:30:58.600 --> 0:31:02.680 how much of right wing policy is based upon the 0:31:02.720 --> 0:31:07.120 idea that parents own their children, right, and that literally, 0:31:07.440 --> 0:31:10.280 like anything a parent wants for their kid, that's all 0:31:10.320 --> 0:31:12.640 that should matter, right, which leads to a lot of 0:31:12.680 --> 0:31:14.880 heinous Some of the worst things that happen in our 0:31:14.880 --> 0:31:18.320 society is because of our conception of the family. As 0:31:18.360 --> 0:31:22.120 this thing in which the parents, primarily the father, possesses 0:31:22.240 --> 0:31:25.720 everyone else, right, and wanting to abolish that idea of 0:31:25.760 --> 0:31:28.680 the family is good, But when you start framing it 0:31:28.680 --> 0:31:31.320 as family, it's going to bring this up. People are 0:31:31.320 --> 0:31:33.160 going to think about what the Khmayer Rouge did as 0:31:33.160 --> 0:31:35.160 opposed to being like, I don't think parents should be 0:31:35.160 --> 0:31:39.080 allowed to poison their kids because they have autism, right right, right, 0:31:39.160 --> 0:31:42.520 you know, but anyway get. 0:31:42.360 --> 0:31:48.640 Into it absolute power and within the family, and this 0:31:48.720 --> 0:31:52.080 is not a unit that should exist. Yeah, yeah, it's 0:31:52.120 --> 0:31:53.480 this is not good. 0:31:53.720 --> 0:31:56.960 Yeah, yeah, it's this optic it's an optical issue, I think. 0:31:58.080 --> 0:32:00.440 But that's not you know, the Khmyre rouges not wanting 0:32:00.480 --> 0:32:03.200 to abolish the family because there's anything similar to the 0:32:03.240 --> 0:32:06.240 issue we have with the parental rights movement in the US, right, 0:32:06.320 --> 0:32:09.080 the Khmayer Rouge wants to abolish the family because all 0:32:09.120 --> 0:32:11.840 they want to exist is the party and this idea 0:32:11.920 --> 0:32:15.000 of almost like a collective consciousness. If we can wipe 0:32:15.000 --> 0:32:18.200 out enough individualism, then like we will have this kind 0:32:18.240 --> 0:32:23.320 of pure individual close to nature, this like idolized everyone 0:32:23.360 --> 0:32:26.680 will be the idolized Khmer peasant farmer who, by the way, 0:32:27.120 --> 0:32:29.880 Polpot's parents had fought tooth and nail to make sure 0:32:29.880 --> 0:32:30.680 he never had to. 0:32:30.600 --> 0:32:34.120 Be Yeah, yeah, don't worry about that. 0:32:34.400 --> 0:32:37.560 So as soon as they start doing all of this stuff, 0:32:37.680 --> 0:32:41.640 people begin to starve. Right There's so much disruption. There's 0:32:41.640 --> 0:32:43.520 disruption to the way food has grown and the way 0:32:43.560 --> 0:32:47.440 it's transmitted, all of these networks that had existed. It's 0:32:47.440 --> 0:32:49.000 one thing if you're like, we want to get rid 0:32:49.000 --> 0:32:51.440 of capitalism, and we want to get rid of things 0:32:51.480 --> 0:32:54.280 being entirely governed by the financial motive, but you have 0:32:54.320 --> 0:32:56.520 to account for the fact that, like, well, but that's 0:32:56.520 --> 0:32:59.000 how all of the food gets places right now, and like, 0:32:59.240 --> 0:33:00.480 do you not have a You have to have a 0:33:00.520 --> 0:33:03.120 real granular plan for how you're going to make sure 0:33:03.240 --> 0:33:06.640 food keeps getting to people. They're why is everyone's going 0:33:06.720 --> 0:33:10.120 to die? And that's what starts to happen, and people 0:33:10.160 --> 0:33:12.520 also start to starve to death as they are forced 0:33:12.560 --> 0:33:15.880 at gunpoint out of the cities. Non pen had flooded 0:33:15.880 --> 0:33:19.160 to significantly higher than its pre war population because of 0:33:19.200 --> 0:33:21.400 the war going on, and now these people are being 0:33:21.400 --> 0:33:24.280 marched out and no one's allowed to take anything. People 0:33:24.280 --> 0:33:26.640 are being dragged out at gunpoint in some cases, their 0:33:26.640 --> 0:33:28.680 houses are being burnt down. They don't have a lot 0:33:28.680 --> 0:33:31.400 of baggage, right, and it's not like people had a 0:33:31.440 --> 0:33:33.880 lot we're keeping like food on hand. This isn't like 0:33:33.920 --> 0:33:36.600 a prepper culture. Folks don't have like freeze dried shit 0:33:36.640 --> 0:33:39.440 in their houses. So people are just being forced to 0:33:39.600 --> 0:33:41.560 walk a lot of a number of them have been 0:33:41.600 --> 0:33:44.840 pulled out of hospitals and they're just dying. They're dying 0:33:44.920 --> 0:33:48.400 by the tins of thousands alongside the road, and as 0:33:48.440 --> 0:33:51.200 people march out, they're just seeing these piles of corpses 0:33:51.200 --> 0:33:53.720 of their neighbors and family members bloating in the sun. 0:33:54.240 --> 0:33:58.520 It's just a really hideous like nightmare for all of 0:33:58.560 --> 0:34:01.560 these people. And they're you know, these fighters that they're 0:34:01.600 --> 0:34:05.200 meeting are folks largely who'd come from like rural areas 0:34:05.240 --> 0:34:07.240 in the jungle. They're very young. A lot of them 0:34:07.240 --> 0:34:10.279 are teenagers who have been raised on this war, and 0:34:10.960 --> 0:34:13.960 they number one, don't have a lot of sympathy for 0:34:14.000 --> 0:34:16.480 these people in the cities, who they've seen as the enemy. 0:34:16.560 --> 0:34:19.040 The capital is what they've been fighting, if you want 0:34:19.080 --> 0:34:22.680 to think it, like hunger games, derroty. And also they've 0:34:22.719 --> 0:34:25.040 been told these are the new people. Right, These are 0:34:25.080 --> 0:34:27.200 the enemy. We do have to get rid of them, 0:34:27.200 --> 0:34:29.960 one way or another. So if you kill these people, 0:34:30.200 --> 0:34:32.000 if you shoot them by the side of the road, 0:34:32.040 --> 0:34:35.640 if they starve to death, you're helping to bring about that. 0:34:35.800 --> 0:34:39.640 You're helping to save the Khmer people. Right. While most 0:34:39.640 --> 0:34:41.520 of the deaths under the new regime are caused by 0:34:41.520 --> 0:34:44.720 diseaser famine, they're all intentional. These are all the results 0:34:44.719 --> 0:34:48.200 of policies set by Polpot and his comrades, and the 0:34:48.360 --> 0:34:52.600 expectation of these policies was mass dying. The stage had 0:34:52.640 --> 0:34:54.360 been set for this in the years leading up to 0:34:54.400 --> 0:34:56.880 the capital's fall by a process of what is called 0:34:57.200 --> 0:35:05.440 by genocide scholars toxification, specifically toxification through Khmer rouge propaganda toxification. 0:35:05.560 --> 0:35:07.759 This is a process you can watch happen right now 0:35:07.760 --> 0:35:09.840 in your very own country, presuming you live in the 0:35:09.920 --> 0:35:14.120 United States. But well other countries, Yeah, but a few 0:35:14.160 --> 0:35:16.080 other countries. We can talk about some recent Supreme Court 0:35:16.160 --> 0:35:20.000 rulings in the UK. Toxification is a process often seen 0:35:20.040 --> 0:35:23.759 in genocide, whereby groups of people are depicted as inherently 0:35:23.880 --> 0:35:27.160 poisonous to the well being of the body politic. The 0:35:27.200 --> 0:35:31.160 real people of a community. Soldiers are not, in general, 0:35:31.200 --> 0:35:33.640 born willing to fill mass grapes or to march an 0:35:33.800 --> 0:35:36.839 entire city out of their homes and die right. They 0:35:36.880 --> 0:35:40.000 are there, They're pushed there, They're gotten to that point 0:35:40.239 --> 0:35:43.080 when they have been convinced that doing so is either 0:35:43.200 --> 0:35:46.399 a form of self defense or a way to fight 0:35:46.560 --> 0:35:50.319 their enemy, or both right, And that's what toxification does. 0:35:50.920 --> 0:35:54.000 There's a very good article on this process called toxification 0:35:54.120 --> 0:35:58.320 and the Khmer Rouge genocide or autogenocide you'll hear both terms, 0:35:58.560 --> 0:36:01.279 published in the Journal of Terror and Political Violence by 0:36:01.280 --> 0:36:04.920 Timothy Williams and Rhianna Nielsen. I recommend reading the whole thing. 0:36:05.000 --> 0:36:08.080 It's a very good article, and it's very important article. 0:36:08.200 --> 0:36:11.400 It will be kind of chilling and light of things 0:36:11.440 --> 0:36:13.799 happening in our present world, but it ought to be, 0:36:15.040 --> 0:36:17.719 and it details how the messaging from Polepot on down 0:36:17.800 --> 0:36:21.360 through the Khmer Rouge hierarchy seeded the militant population with 0:36:21.440 --> 0:36:25.080 the kind of toxic attitudes that are a necessary precursor 0:36:25.120 --> 0:36:29.600 to mass killing. The first people targeted specifically for mass 0:36:29.640 --> 0:36:33.040 execution were those who had bought into and succeeded under 0:36:33.040 --> 0:36:36.480 the capitalist system. These were the budding intelligencia, of whom 0:36:36.520 --> 0:36:39.880 Polepot himself had been a member, professors, lawyers, business owners, 0:36:39.960 --> 0:36:44.800 government officials. Polepot called them the internal enemy or super traders. 0:36:45.040 --> 0:36:52.560 You really like super You hear a lot of that. Obviously, 0:36:52.640 --> 0:36:55.160 this includes people who had been in the military, of 0:36:55.239 --> 0:36:55.719 law and nol. 0:36:55.840 --> 0:36:56.040 Right. 0:36:56.400 --> 0:36:58.960 And the idea was that in this is Polepot's writing, 0:36:58.960 --> 0:37:02.600 anyone with money quote owed the Communist Party a blood debt. Right, 0:37:02.640 --> 0:37:05.200 So this is the first stage, and it's pretty easy 0:37:05.200 --> 0:37:06.719 to get people on board with killing a lot of 0:37:06.719 --> 0:37:10.919 these folks, right. That said, there's not many of them, right, 0:37:11.600 --> 0:37:14.560 and once you start mass killing, you don't tend to stop. 0:37:14.719 --> 0:37:17.920 So next, in nineteen seventy six, Polpot turned the eyes 0:37:17.960 --> 0:37:20.879 and guns of his men on the quote unquote treacherous 0:37:20.920 --> 0:37:24.879 elements he accused of causing sickness within the party. These 0:37:25.120 --> 0:37:29.480 ugly microbes had to be destroyed before they rotted democratic Campuccia, 0:37:29.680 --> 0:37:32.160 which is what they're calling Cambodia now, right, like once 0:37:32.239 --> 0:37:34.880 the Moors takes over, it becomes goes from the Khmer 0:37:34.960 --> 0:37:40.680 Republic to Democratic Campuccia. And Polepot writes of these ugly microbes, 0:37:40.760 --> 0:37:44.320 quote what is infected must be cut, What is rotten, 0:37:44.440 --> 0:37:46.920 must be removed. It isn't enough to cut down a 0:37:46.920 --> 0:37:51.000 bad plant, it must be uprooted. And you see this 0:37:51.080 --> 0:37:54.200 a lot in genocidal language, right, you know, this is 0:37:54.200 --> 0:37:58.120 like Hitler calling the Jews the syphilitic bacillus, right. 0:37:59.000 --> 0:38:01.960 Yeah, or you know any Fano slide. 0:38:01.880 --> 0:38:03.000 Any fantastic line. 0:38:03.160 --> 0:38:06.960 It's like, again, it's just so hard to put myself 0:38:06.960 --> 0:38:09.040 in the mindset where you hear this and you're like, 0:38:09.880 --> 0:38:11.120 let's go yeah. 0:38:11.120 --> 0:38:14.160 And it's you also get this is something we're hearing 0:38:14.239 --> 0:38:17.600 right now with the way mental illness and things that 0:38:17.640 --> 0:38:20.359 are called mental illness is. This is being discussed by 0:38:20.360 --> 0:38:23.520 the right, and it's there's big news right now about 0:38:23.719 --> 0:38:26.680 the fact that RFK Junior is putting trying to get 0:38:26.840 --> 0:38:29.080 trying to use government databases put together a list of 0:38:29.120 --> 0:38:33.560 everyone with autism. That's how it's being spread on social media. 0:38:33.680 --> 0:38:36.200 The actual story is even I would argue even a 0:38:36.200 --> 0:38:37.920 little worse than that, which is that they're attempting to 0:38:37.920 --> 0:38:40.759 put together a database of everybody who has been diagnosed 0:38:40.800 --> 0:38:43.920 with any kind of mental health condition, who is on 0:38:43.960 --> 0:38:46.600 any kind of medication. It's even broader than just that, 0:38:48.120 --> 0:38:49.719 and part of what's going on here is that, like 0:38:49.760 --> 0:38:52.480 there's a big right wing campaign to like blame gun 0:38:52.560 --> 0:38:55.319 violence on the mentally ill right. And another part of 0:38:55.360 --> 0:38:58.839 it is that there's a desire to reclassify being transgender 0:38:59.000 --> 0:39:02.000 and eventually even being LGBT is a mental illness, in 0:39:02.000 --> 0:39:04.760 part because those people can be disarmed, in part because 0:39:04.880 --> 0:39:07.719 then you can put those people in you know, yeah, 0:39:08.520 --> 0:39:12.560 facilities or whatever. I tend to think that the goal 0:39:12.640 --> 0:39:14.759 that a lot of these people are thinking towards is 0:39:14.840 --> 0:39:18.040 less Nazi style death camps and gas fans and more 0:39:18.200 --> 0:39:20.560 a Judge Rotenberg Center on every corner if you want 0:39:20.560 --> 0:39:22.680 to go back to our Judge Rotenberg Center episodes. But 0:39:22.840 --> 0:39:25.000 we'll be talking about that in other days. But I 0:39:25.080 --> 0:39:29.560 bring this up to say this is a constant when 0:39:29.680 --> 0:39:33.480 regimes begin the process that can end in mass killing. 0:39:33.480 --> 0:39:36.040 And I don't think that that's an inevitable state of 0:39:36.040 --> 0:39:38.080 affairs for us here, but I think people need to 0:39:38.120 --> 0:39:41.560 be very aware of that because the similarities between these 0:39:41.600 --> 0:39:44.520 situations are not inconsequential. 0:39:45.320 --> 0:39:50.560 It's it's necessary but not sufficient, but it is necessary. 0:39:50.320 --> 0:39:53.280 Yeah, for the. 0:39:52.400 --> 0:39:53.400 Death camps version. 0:39:53.920 --> 0:39:58.440 Yeah. So Polepot argued that these diseased elements of the 0:39:58.440 --> 0:40:01.680 populace had to be purified. Year zero could ensure a 0:40:01.719 --> 0:40:06.839 maoist elimination of contradiction. Turning in counter revolutionary elements became 0:40:06.840 --> 0:40:09.880 a way to get ahead or to protect yourself. Cadras, 0:40:09.920 --> 0:40:12.719 which are like members of the party, are rewarded for 0:40:12.760 --> 0:40:16.320 their ability to purge the enemy within. Per that article 0:40:16.360 --> 0:40:19.799 by Williams and Nielsen, violence became a part of everyday life, 0:40:19.800 --> 0:40:22.719 and punishment for infringence of the minutely planned details of 0:40:22.719 --> 0:40:26.600 society were draconian, often costing people their lives, particularly as 0:40:26.680 --> 0:40:29.760 most mistakes such as foraging for food or not eating 0:40:29.800 --> 0:40:33.040 with the collective were immediately interpreted as evidence of counter 0:40:33.120 --> 0:40:37.120 revolutionary tendencies. Although anyone could fall victim of the system, 0:40:37.200 --> 0:40:40.920 prime targets for elimination were ethnic Cham and Vietnamese minorities, 0:40:40.960 --> 0:40:44.480 former soldiers or officials under the Londol regime, intellectuals or 0:40:44.480 --> 0:40:47.359 others deemed not to fit into a peasant society, as 0:40:47.400 --> 0:40:49.200 well as any person whom the regime believed to be 0:40:49.200 --> 0:40:52.279 an internal enemy, mostly associated with being an agent of 0:40:52.320 --> 0:40:55.920 the CIA, KGB or the Vietnamese secret service. And I 0:40:55.920 --> 0:40:59.239 think it's so interesting part of this is there's such 0:40:59.280 --> 0:41:01.279 a hatred of this concept of being an individual that 0:41:01.320 --> 0:41:03.719 even if you're like foraging for food to stop you 0:41:03.760 --> 0:41:07.680 and your family from starving, that's individualist behavior and you 0:41:07.840 --> 0:41:10.080 have to be killed for it, right. 0:41:10.080 --> 0:41:14.440 God yeah, I mean. But also it's like all those 0:41:14.520 --> 0:41:18.400 rules I feel like most of those times are asymmetrically 0:41:18.440 --> 0:41:22.960 applied for you know, whatever means want to be accomplished. 0:41:22.400 --> 0:41:24.480 And that's key. And a lot of the people being 0:41:24.560 --> 0:41:26.440 who these rules are being applied to, it's not even 0:41:26.480 --> 0:41:28.560 necessarily that they did the thing, or that they were 0:41:28.600 --> 0:41:30.440 the only person doing the thing. A lot of people 0:41:30.480 --> 0:41:32.560 do the same stuff and get away with it. It's that 0:41:32.800 --> 0:41:35.000 they had missed someone else up for another reason, someone 0:41:35.000 --> 0:41:38.120 wanted their stuff. There's a lot of score settling that 0:41:38.239 --> 0:41:41.719 happens anytime this kind of shit's going down. And this 0:41:41.800 --> 0:41:43.840 gets me to an important side of fact about what 0:41:43.920 --> 0:41:48.320 happened in Cambodia. You will usually see the mass killing 0:41:48.520 --> 0:41:52.360 in Cambodia referred to either as the Cambodian genocide or 0:41:52.400 --> 0:41:56.200 the Khmer Rouge genocide. This term is not I think 0:41:56.280 --> 0:41:58.719 accurate to describe most of what happened, because the vast 0:41:58.760 --> 0:42:02.640 majority of the people who were or you know, as 0:42:02.680 --> 0:42:05.319 a part of these year zero policies were Khmer and 0:42:05.400 --> 0:42:08.239 the goal of the regime was not to wipe out 0:42:08.400 --> 0:42:11.480 the Khmer, right, it was to make them stronger and 0:42:11.680 --> 0:42:17.480 ultimately more numerous. And it was just a disastrous failure. Right. Yeah, 0:42:17.560 --> 0:42:21.200 The term autogenocide which was coined by author Jean lac 0:42:21.640 --> 0:42:27.920 Lacutre something like that, Jeane Lacuter and the autogenocide was 0:42:27.960 --> 0:42:30.560 coined by this French author in order to separate the 0:42:30.640 --> 0:42:34.520 unique circumstances of mass killing and Cambodia from the Holocaust 0:42:34.560 --> 0:42:39.680 and other traditional genocides. I again, there's some issues with that, 0:42:39.920 --> 0:42:44.440 even because genocide is is not fully the right term 0:42:44.560 --> 0:42:46.880 for what pol Pot and his peers are trying to 0:42:46.880 --> 0:42:49.640 do to the Khmer people, right, because their goal is 0:42:49.680 --> 0:42:53.480 to ensure the survival of their race. Right. You can 0:42:53.520 --> 0:42:56.240 come down on however you like on what we should 0:42:56.280 --> 0:43:00.600 call this right, but I should note that while what 0:43:00.680 --> 0:43:03.160 the most of the killing the regime does, and most 0:43:03.160 --> 0:43:06.080 of who the regime kills are Khmer, While I don't 0:43:06.080 --> 0:43:08.279 know that it's right to say that like genocide is 0:43:08.320 --> 0:43:12.040 just strictly textually the right way to describe that, there 0:43:12.080 --> 0:43:15.200 are genocides that are being committed by the regime Khmer 0:43:15.280 --> 0:43:19.359 rouge like normal, like straight up dictionary genocides, right. 0:43:19.920 --> 0:43:22.440 I mean, I wonder if it's it just comes down to, 0:43:22.560 --> 0:43:25.400 like it's sort of functionally the same type of murder. 0:43:25.440 --> 0:43:27.759 And I wonder if the argument is sort of like 0:43:27.840 --> 0:43:33.440 every genocide is actually politically motivated, like Shelly, somewhat external 0:43:33.480 --> 0:43:36.840 to the stated aims of the genocide, So like, yeah, 0:43:37.040 --> 0:43:38.200 what does it really matter? 0:43:38.719 --> 0:43:40.759 That's absolutely the case. I think kind of the issue 0:43:40.760 --> 0:43:43.040 comes down to is like, well, they weren't trying to 0:43:43.040 --> 0:43:45.840 wipe out the Khmer, right, Like they just thought that 0:43:45.920 --> 0:43:48.719 wiping out these people, which wound up being a huge 0:43:48.800 --> 0:43:52.160 junk of the Khmer, would strengthen things like what do 0:43:52.200 --> 0:43:55.960 you call that? You know, to a degree doesn't matter. 0:43:56.160 --> 0:43:58.319 It's certainly not to the dead. But I do want 0:43:58.360 --> 0:44:00.799 to make a point that there were us straight up 0:44:00.920 --> 0:44:06.440 normal genocides occurring too in this mass killing. That paragraph 0:44:06.480 --> 0:44:08.560 I read a little earlier mentioned both the Cham and 0:44:08.600 --> 0:44:13.120 the Vietnamese ethnic minorities in Cambodia being targeted. And I 0:44:13.160 --> 0:44:15.360 think all of these different kind of non Khmer people 0:44:15.360 --> 0:44:17.640 are like five to ten percent maybe of the total 0:44:17.719 --> 0:44:21.680 number of dead but when you look at these as populations, 0:44:22.320 --> 0:44:25.560 these different ethnic populations that are being targeted, are are 0:44:25.840 --> 0:44:28.200 killed in a way that makes them some of the 0:44:28.200 --> 0:44:32.279 most total genocides I've ever studied. Roughly fifty percent of 0:44:32.360 --> 0:44:35.200 Chinese Cambodians and these are not like necessary. Some of 0:44:35.200 --> 0:44:37.160 them are Chinese immigrants, but these are just these are 0:44:37.160 --> 0:44:40.600 people who are ethnically Chinese and live in Cambodia. Right, 0:44:41.800 --> 0:44:44.680 fifty percent of the pre war population is executed or 0:44:44.719 --> 0:44:48.000 starved in a three year period, and they got off 0:44:48.120 --> 0:44:51.880 light compared to the ethnically Vietnamese Cambodians. I'm going to 0:44:51.960 --> 0:44:55.439 quote from that article again. In particular, the Khmer Rouge 0:44:55.440 --> 0:44:59.520 propaganda organs described the Vietnamese as toxic to Democratic Campuccia 0:44:59.560 --> 0:45:02.920 by state that their goal is to swallow Cambodia's territory 0:45:03.000 --> 0:45:06.800 and force Cambodia into an Indo Chinese federation under its control. 0:45:07.280 --> 0:45:11.040 Vietnamese were portrayed as quintessentially evil and lethal to the 0:45:11.080 --> 0:45:16.239 Democratic Campuccia. Radio broadcasts described the Vietnamese as living concealed 0:45:16.239 --> 0:45:20.400 among the population, infiltrating, sabotaging, and destroying the communist regime, 0:45:20.480 --> 0:45:23.759 therefore being toxic to the ideal. Further broadcast spoke of 0:45:23.760 --> 0:45:26.960 the need to weed out and exterminate the enemy planted 0:45:27.000 --> 0:45:30.200 within the cooperatives, and reminded civilians you are not fighting 0:45:30.239 --> 0:45:33.719 only against Vietnamese soldiers, but the whole of Vietnam, so 0:45:33.880 --> 0:45:38.239 spare nothing and no one. According to Polpot, the Vietnamese 0:45:38.239 --> 0:45:41.880 are a black dragon that spits its poison. The overall 0:45:41.920 --> 0:45:44.800 death toll for Vietnamese Khmers was nearly one hundred percent 0:45:44.880 --> 0:45:45.680 of the population. 0:45:46.760 --> 0:45:52.759 Jesus, yes, yeah, yeah, I mean like. 0:45:52.840 --> 0:45:56.040 That this is about the most total genocide I've ever 0:45:56.120 --> 0:45:58.960 heard of, the Vietnamese khmar in particular. 0:45:58.719 --> 0:46:04.560 Right, right, Yeah, I mean that's like yeah, yeah, yeah, 0:46:04.680 --> 0:46:07.920 I mean, I guess. I still I'm just like not still, 0:46:08.040 --> 0:46:09.720 but like like it is like it's hard. 0:46:09.520 --> 0:46:10.319 To wrap your head around. 0:46:10.400 --> 0:46:12.040 Yeah, it's hard to wrap my head around, and but 0:46:12.080 --> 0:46:15.759 also like hard to like be like this can't be 0:46:15.960 --> 0:46:18.960 the I mean, it just feels like the stated goal 0:46:19.320 --> 0:46:22.239 can't be the actual goal, I guess, but like I 0:46:22.280 --> 0:46:24.640 don't I don't know what I think the actual goal 0:46:24.719 --> 0:46:27.839 is anyway, But you know what I mean, I'm just 0:46:27.880 --> 0:46:30.560 like it has to just be sort of a vague 0:46:30.600 --> 0:46:32.359 notion of power it. 0:46:32.280 --> 0:46:34.640 Feels like it's it's. 0:46:35.440 --> 0:46:37.000 One of these killing your enemies like that. 0:46:37.200 --> 0:46:40.040 For well, because the people at the top giving the 0:46:40.200 --> 0:46:43.800 orders live these lives of the mind where their whole 0:46:43.880 --> 0:46:47.320 ego is in I am, I am, I am intelligent, 0:46:47.360 --> 0:46:49.239 I understand how things really work, and I have this 0:46:49.320 --> 0:46:52.560 plan right, and everything about their personalities wrapped up in 0:46:52.560 --> 0:46:55.320 that plan. So it has to work, and they simply 0:46:55.400 --> 0:46:59.239 can't accept. They can't even let themselves look at a 0:46:59.320 --> 0:47:02.480 reality that would that would lead to that being questioned. 0:47:02.960 --> 0:47:05.120 But then they're passing these orders down to people who 0:47:05.239 --> 0:47:08.200 number one. Just the desperation of their life, the violence 0:47:08.200 --> 0:47:12.040 they've seen, makes certain things just less abhorrent to them. 0:47:12.040 --> 0:47:15.480 But also there's room for them to advance. The more 0:47:15.480 --> 0:47:17.720 of these people they kill, the more stuff they get, 0:47:17.880 --> 0:47:20.239 the more they move up, the safer they are, the 0:47:20.239 --> 0:47:22.160 more food they get, right, and that. 0:47:24.320 --> 0:47:25.440 Yes, that's yeah. 0:47:25.960 --> 0:47:28.400 And the incentives come because of the fucked up beliefs 0:47:28.400 --> 0:47:32.120 of the leaders and the desperation of the people doing 0:47:32.160 --> 0:47:35.000 a lot of the killing makes them respond better than 0:47:35.000 --> 0:47:38.600 the incentives, you know, right, right, which is by the way, 0:47:38.800 --> 0:47:41.359 this is not every genocide. For example, I wouldn't talk 0:47:41.360 --> 0:47:43.919 about the members of the s s this way because 0:47:43.920 --> 0:47:48.879 they're not right. But this is what's happening in Cambodia. 0:47:49.520 --> 0:47:53.520 Speaking of what's happening in Cambodia, presumably someone in Cambodia 0:47:53.560 --> 0:47:55.439 is listening to this podcast. 0:47:56.680 --> 0:48:00.160 And if say, look, hi, Hi, you didn't say speaking 0:48:00.239 --> 0:48:02.920 off mass killing or anything like that. So this is 0:48:02.960 --> 0:48:05.080 one of the better adrows. 0:48:05.160 --> 0:48:09.480 Yeah, yeah, yeah, visit Cambodia or not. I don't know. 0:48:10.200 --> 0:48:19.160 I haven't been. I hope I hear. It's nice and 0:48:19.320 --> 0:48:22.960 we're back. So the Cham were another non Khmer ethnic 0:48:23.000 --> 0:48:24.960 group that was targeted by the regime. And to make 0:48:25.000 --> 0:48:29.480 matters worse, the Chams are Muslim, right and Polpot considered 0:48:29.600 --> 0:48:34.399 Islam to be inherently reactionary, right, a fundamental enemy of communism. 0:48:34.960 --> 0:48:37.480 The large part of the reason why is that Muslims 0:48:37.480 --> 0:48:40.600 pray five times a day, right, and Polepot describes this 0:48:40.640 --> 0:48:43.840 as them shirking their responsibility to work. Right, this is 0:48:43.880 --> 0:48:47.600 an individualist thing, and it's also stopping you from participating 0:48:47.920 --> 0:48:50.759 in the national project as much as everyone else. Right, 0:48:51.400 --> 0:48:53.960 the Chams are just thus a drain on the ideal 0:48:53.960 --> 0:48:56.680 communist state that he wanted to form. So Polpot sent 0:48:56.719 --> 0:48:59.520 his men to wipe out every Cham village they could find, 0:48:59.760 --> 0:49:02.600 and roughly fifty percent of Cham Cambodians had been killed 0:49:02.600 --> 0:49:06.920 by the late nineteen seventy nine. Now what's interesting to 0:49:06.920 --> 0:49:09.600 me is that he also targets the Buddhists, or at 0:49:09.640 --> 0:49:12.080 least the Buddhist clergy. And this is interesting. This is 0:49:12.280 --> 0:49:13.919 kind of weird because like, he had a really good 0:49:13.960 --> 0:49:16.279 time at the monastery, he described it his whole life 0:49:16.320 --> 0:49:20.480 as a positive experience, but as leader of Democratic Campucia, 0:49:20.640 --> 0:49:23.640 he describes Buddhist monks as quote parasites who eat the 0:49:23.719 --> 0:49:26.879 rice of the people. Monks are ordered to carry out 0:49:26.880 --> 0:49:29.880 hard labor, and the vast majority of monks who had 0:49:29.920 --> 0:49:33.680 existed pre war are killed by the Khmer rouge. Williams 0:49:33.680 --> 0:49:37.279 and Nielsen site an internal rouge document that brags a 0:49:37.440 --> 0:49:40.439 ninety to ninety five percent success rate in wiping out 0:49:40.440 --> 0:49:45.640 the Buddhist monk population. So again almost totally takes out 0:49:45.680 --> 0:49:50.879 the Buddhist clergy within like the Theravada Buddhist clergy within Cambodia. 0:49:51.280 --> 0:49:53.719 Yeah, it just feels like it's also like does this 0:49:53.760 --> 0:49:58.239 sort of thing snowball, Like once you get started with 0:49:58.280 --> 0:50:01.359 the mass killing, then your life on the list. Yeah. 0:50:01.440 --> 0:50:03.880 Yeah, once you pop, the fun don't stop right right 0:50:04.160 --> 0:50:09.239 popping here is putting people on us graves. Yeah now, 0:50:09.239 --> 0:50:11.640 and this is so important to start it, to stop 0:50:11.640 --> 0:50:12.720 it from starting. 0:50:13.120 --> 0:50:13.279 You know. 0:50:13.320 --> 0:50:15.040 Again, ninety percent or so of the people killed by 0:50:15.080 --> 0:50:19.280 the Khmer Rouge are Khmer. Most die is a result 0:50:19.360 --> 0:50:22.560 of these kind of insane agricultural and land reform policies, 0:50:22.600 --> 0:50:25.120 the mass to population, all the starvation and stuff that 0:50:25.160 --> 0:50:27.480 goes along with it. But as time goes on, an 0:50:27.480 --> 0:50:30.440 increasing number of people are being tortured and killed by 0:50:30.480 --> 0:50:33.600 the regime. And past the initial point where they're like 0:50:33.640 --> 0:50:36.600 punishing the capitalists and the members of Law and Nole's government, 0:50:37.239 --> 0:50:40.960 most of the people being tortured and killed directly are 0:50:41.080 --> 0:50:44.959 like former party members and like communists and stuff. Right, 0:50:45.440 --> 0:50:47.359 A lot of them are people who had been part 0:50:47.360 --> 0:50:50.600 of Polpot's old reading circle back in Paris. Right, they 0:50:50.600 --> 0:50:54.120 are wiping out you know, every revolution devours it's young. 0:50:54.160 --> 0:50:57.640 But they are doing that in like famous time. Here 0:50:58.800 --> 0:51:01.520 for an idea of how it was to have agreed 0:51:01.560 --> 0:51:04.520 with Polepot back when he was Salath Czar, or even 0:51:04.600 --> 0:51:07.560 during the victory of the Khmer Rouge over the Lawndol government. 0:51:07.840 --> 0:51:10.880 Of the original twenty two members of the Central Committee 0:51:10.880 --> 0:51:14.160 for the Democratic Campuccia Party, which is who officially governed 0:51:14.200 --> 0:51:16.880 after the end of the war, six lasted to the 0:51:17.000 --> 0:51:20.319 end of the regime without being killed or tortured, and 0:51:20.360 --> 0:51:23.359 the vast majority of them those were killed. The very 0:51:23.360 --> 0:51:27.080 few people who survived owed their lives to their sworn enemies, 0:51:27.120 --> 0:51:31.800 the Vietnamese army who eventually liberated Toul Slang which was 0:51:32.040 --> 0:51:36.000 the prison for specifically like after a point, it's specifically 0:51:36.000 --> 0:51:41.120 the prison four party members who were disloyal to eliminate confusion. 0:51:41.400 --> 0:51:44.440 Tool slang is more commonly known as Security Prison twenty 0:51:44.440 --> 0:51:47.880 one or S twenty one. Right, And this is in 0:51:47.960 --> 0:51:50.879 terms of its like level of fame to people who 0:51:50.960 --> 0:51:53.840 read about this tool slang or S twenty one is 0:51:54.160 --> 0:51:58.960 the Auschwitz of Cambodia, right, Right. It's not on that scale, 0:51:59.000 --> 0:52:01.279 it's not that big a camp, but it's death toll 0:52:01.480 --> 0:52:04.479 is is Yeah, is. 0:52:04.400 --> 0:52:07.840 That like sort of I mean, I know, it's like 0:52:08.200 --> 0:52:11.360 as you just said, like you know, every revolution devours 0:52:11.400 --> 0:52:15.799 it's young, but that still feels like a high percentage 0:52:16.000 --> 0:52:21.360 of like yeah, energies, yeah, like getting got. 0:52:21.480 --> 0:52:22.960 I think part of it's just because none of this 0:52:23.080 --> 0:52:25.560 is working and someone has to pay and part of 0:52:25.600 --> 0:52:30.719 it again just because once you start killing like this, yeah, 0:52:31.080 --> 0:52:34.760 you keep you can't stop, right, in part because stopping 0:52:34.880 --> 0:52:36.760 then you have to deal with the fact that nothing worked, 0:52:37.000 --> 0:52:39.279 that everything was a failure, that your whole life and 0:52:39.320 --> 0:52:41.560 all of your beliefs are wrong and no one at 0:52:41.600 --> 0:52:44.040 the top can take So there must be someone, There 0:52:44.120 --> 0:52:46.560 must be a trail, there must be somebody's fucking yeah, 0:52:46.600 --> 0:52:47.319 fucking with us? 0:52:47.360 --> 0:52:51.640 Right? Is that like unique ish to as far as 0:52:51.719 --> 0:52:55.520 like yeah, right, that's just how it goes sometimes because 0:52:55.520 --> 0:52:58.520 like the Nazis don't really like the Nazis target other Nazis. 0:52:58.520 --> 0:53:00.160 You know, there's not the Night Long Knives, but that 0:53:00.239 --> 0:53:02.520 was more of like a centralizing even more power and 0:53:02.600 --> 0:53:04.920 dealing with like a chunk of the movement that didn't 0:53:04.920 --> 0:53:09.360 really agree with with Hitler anymore. Not every this is 0:53:09.440 --> 0:53:13.000 pretty it's not unique, but it's not common for it 0:53:13.040 --> 0:53:16.640 to be like this, right, Obviously, in the French Revolution, 0:53:16.760 --> 0:53:21.440 stuff like this happens, But the swiftness and the centrality 0:53:21.880 --> 0:53:25.239 with which loyal members of the party are targeted and 0:53:25.239 --> 0:53:28.680 that tortured and executed is yeah, like you know, you 0:53:28.719 --> 0:53:29.120 can't be. 0:53:29.440 --> 0:53:31.920 If you can't be one of the boys, then yeah, 0:53:32.040 --> 0:53:32.960 well who can you be? 0:53:33.280 --> 0:53:35.080 There's really no safety here. 0:53:34.960 --> 0:53:36.920 Ryeah yeah. Yeah. So it was. 0:53:36.920 --> 0:53:40.440 Between one of like S twenty one, This prison that's 0:53:40.480 --> 0:53:43.080 kind of the most famous of the prisons here, was 0:53:43.120 --> 0:53:45.440 between a one of between one hundred and fifty and 0:53:45.480 --> 0:53:48.120 a little less than two hundred torture and execution centers 0:53:48.120 --> 0:53:51.440 built on Polepot's orders by the Centibal the secret police. 0:53:52.640 --> 0:53:55.480 Roughly twenty thousand people were imprisoned in S twenty one 0:53:55.480 --> 0:53:57.799 over the course of the regime. There's some debate on 0:53:57.840 --> 0:54:00.799 this number of between twelve and twenty thousand, and there's 0:54:00.800 --> 0:54:03.120 never more than about one thousand to fifteen hundred people 0:54:03.200 --> 0:54:05.200 at a time, though, And S twenty one is built 0:54:05.239 --> 0:54:08.080 out of a former school, which I guess extra chilling 0:54:08.120 --> 0:54:11.080 given that Pop Pop was a school teacher. And when 0:54:11.080 --> 0:54:13.160 I say a thousand to fifteen hundred at a time, 0:54:13.200 --> 0:54:17.200 twenty thousand total people aren't released alive from S twenty one. 0:54:17.600 --> 0:54:20.799 This is a death camp. And while it started by 0:54:20.920 --> 0:54:25.040 going after again like agents of the old regime, YadA YadA, YadA, 0:54:25.120 --> 0:54:27.719 its prime purpose for most of its history is purging 0:54:28.040 --> 0:54:31.360 members of the leadership cast as well as like members 0:54:31.400 --> 0:54:35.279 of the party alongside their entire families. If you are 0:54:35.400 --> 0:54:37.759 like somebody, a mid level guy in the Khmer rouge 0:54:37.760 --> 0:54:40.200 who gets targeted and put in S twenty one, your 0:54:40.320 --> 0:54:43.799 kids and your wife are going to even if they're babies, right, 0:54:43.840 --> 0:54:46.000 they'll take your infant in there and kill them and 0:54:46.080 --> 0:54:49.120 torture them. Right, and again, it's just like, well, we 0:54:49.160 --> 0:54:51.600 really have to make a statement, you know, the stakes 0:54:51.600 --> 0:54:53.960 are so high. We really have to scare people away 0:54:54.000 --> 0:54:56.719 from not being loyal members of the party. Now, we're 0:54:56.760 --> 0:54:58.880 not going to be dealing with S twenty one in 0:54:58.960 --> 0:55:01.800 as much length as we ought to, or the prison 0:55:01.840 --> 0:55:04.200 system in general. This is because it really does deserve 0:55:04.239 --> 0:55:06.920 its own episodes. Our friend Joe Kissabian of The Lions 0:55:06.960 --> 0:55:10.000 Led by Donkey's podcast has covered at length. I recommend 0:55:10.000 --> 0:55:12.239 his work given that I'm trying to focus this on 0:55:12.320 --> 0:55:14.640 pole Pot, who was a maide that your architect of 0:55:14.680 --> 0:55:17.719 this prison system. I hope you'll forgive my brevity as 0:55:17.800 --> 0:55:20.680 I quote from a detailed fact sheet put together by 0:55:20.760 --> 0:55:24.600 the Documentation Center of Cambodia for the Cambodia Tribunal quote, 0:55:25.000 --> 0:55:26.719 and this is talking about the people who were sent 0:55:26.760 --> 0:55:29.560 to S twenty one. They were accused of collaborating with 0:55:29.600 --> 0:55:32.480 foreign governments, spying for the CIA and the KGB, and 0:55:32.600 --> 0:55:36.520 hence betraying Ankar. Prisoners were also believed to have conspired 0:55:36.560 --> 0:55:38.640 with others, and thus were forced to reveal their strings 0:55:38.680 --> 0:55:41.880 of traders, which sometimes included over one hundred names. The 0:55:41.880 --> 0:55:44.319 interrogators at S twenty one base their technique on a 0:55:44.320 --> 0:55:48.080 list of ten security regulations, which included while getting lashes 0:55:48.160 --> 0:55:52.200 or electrification, you must not cry at all. Although prisoners 0:55:52.280 --> 0:55:55.319 often had no idea why they had been arrested, interrogators 0:55:55.360 --> 0:55:58.040 forced them to confess their crimes. If they did not confess, 0:55:58.080 --> 0:56:01.280 they would be subjected to physical and psychological torture. However, 0:56:01.360 --> 0:56:04.960 after having confessed, they were marked for execution. Initially, prisoners 0:56:04.960 --> 0:56:06.680 were killed on the grounds of the prison, but as 0:56:06.680 --> 0:56:09.279 the volume and stinch of the corpses rapidly increased and 0:56:09.320 --> 0:56:12.359 became unbearable, prisoners were then trucked and mossed to an 0:56:12.360 --> 0:56:16.160 open field located fifteen kilometers away known as Crow's Feet 0:56:16.200 --> 0:56:18.600 Pond to be killed. Waiting at the field was a 0:56:18.640 --> 0:56:21.680 group of about ten young men led by Tang Tang 0:56:21.800 --> 0:56:24.279 in his early twenties and his team of teenagers lived 0:56:24.280 --> 0:56:26.000 in a two story house that was built on the 0:56:26.000 --> 0:56:28.799 field in nineteen seventy seven. They were informed ahead of 0:56:28.800 --> 0:56:31.200 time of the number of prisoners that would arrive, so 0:56:31.239 --> 0:56:33.920 that they could dig the graves in advance. The shocking 0:56:33.960 --> 0:56:37.759 figures commonly associated with the prison fourteen thousand killed and 0:56:37.960 --> 0:56:40.719 seven survivors ranked the prison is one of the most 0:56:40.800 --> 0:56:42.160 lethal in the twentieth century. 0:56:43.080 --> 0:56:49.480 Jesus. Yeah. Also, I mean the detail. Obviously, every atrocity 0:56:49.520 --> 0:56:54.960 has someone actually doing it, but like just this dude's job. Yeah. 0:56:55.160 --> 0:56:57.000 Yeah, every day you get told how many corpses you 0:56:57.000 --> 0:56:58.840 got to dig holes for, and you and your fellow 0:56:58.880 --> 0:57:03.120 teenagers get out of Yeah, the I guess early twenties. Yeah, 0:57:03.120 --> 0:57:04.440 and his team was teenagers. 0:57:05.120 --> 0:57:08.040 I'm just doing it every day. It's like, yeah, you know, 0:57:08.560 --> 0:57:11.720 it's so hard to fathom for me as a lazy person. 0:57:12.000 --> 0:57:14.000 He's probably like, well, this is pretty good job. Given things, 0:57:14.040 --> 0:57:15.640 I'm probably not going to get targeted. They're not going 0:57:15.680 --> 0:57:19.320 to go after the grave digger, right, the graves. 0:57:19.760 --> 0:57:20.800 Yeah. 0:57:20.920 --> 0:57:24.080 Now, while S twenty one was operating, Polepot himself made 0:57:24.120 --> 0:57:27.320 regular statements and writings to Western supporters, and this is 0:57:27.360 --> 0:57:29.440 a key to aspect of what's happening. While all this 0:57:29.760 --> 0:57:33.480 nightmare is unfolding in Cambodia, there's not a there's not 0:57:34.560 --> 0:57:37.400 there's stuff getting out, but not a lot of it, right, 0:57:37.480 --> 0:57:39.960 at least initially. You know, as time goes on, more 0:57:40.000 --> 0:57:43.000 does start to get out about how horrifying what's happening is. 0:57:43.680 --> 0:57:46.920 But the first stuff that gets out is propaganda from 0:57:47.040 --> 0:57:51.040 Polepot and the regime to Western supporters, where they're talking 0:57:51.080 --> 0:57:54.280 about the utopia that we're building. We are finally creating 0:57:54.760 --> 0:58:00.320 the communist, the agrarian, peasant, communist utopia that everyone's hoped 0:58:00.360 --> 0:58:03.640 would happen. We've made a totally equal society here it 0:58:03.680 --> 0:58:08.400 is and democratic Campuccia. We've done it right. And there 0:58:08.440 --> 0:58:12.520 were a not insignificant number of Western leftists who believed 0:58:12.520 --> 0:58:15.760 this bullshit right, and who would argue that any evidence 0:58:15.800 --> 0:58:18.960 to the contrary is the evidence of how hideous what's happening. 0:58:18.960 --> 0:58:21.800 Of the killing fields as they're called, start to comes out, 0:58:22.000 --> 0:58:23.560 come out. There's a lot of folks who are like, well, 0:58:23.560 --> 0:58:27.640 that's just capitalist propaganda, that's the CIA, right, Nothing bad's 0:58:27.680 --> 0:58:32.560 happening in Cambodia, right. One of the organizations that Polepot 0:58:32.680 --> 0:58:36.880 spread his propaganda towards was the Belgian Campuccia Society, who 0:58:36.920 --> 0:58:40.600 interviewed Polepot in nineteen seventy eight. He told them, we 0:58:40.680 --> 0:58:43.560 don't have prisons, and we don't even use the word prison. 0:58:43.920 --> 0:58:47.760 Bad elements in our society are simply given productive tasks 0:58:47.800 --> 0:58:56.000 to do, you know. Dipshits by this stuff right, as 0:58:56.040 --> 0:58:58.240 they always do, as they do in the present day. 0:58:58.800 --> 0:59:01.680 By all accounts, the most famous of these dipshits was 0:59:01.720 --> 0:59:06.160 an English writer and professor named Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell had 0:59:06.200 --> 0:59:08.200 been a significant figure on the British left in the 0:59:08.240 --> 0:59:11.240 sixties and seventies. He spends two years as the chair 0:59:11.360 --> 0:59:14.680 of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He is an avid 0:59:14.720 --> 0:59:18.000 anti Vietnam War protester, and in that regard his actions 0:59:18.040 --> 0:59:22.200 were admirable because the Vietnam War deserved protesting. He wrote 0:59:22.240 --> 0:59:26.000 regularly for Piece News and support of different anti colonial movements, 0:59:26.000 --> 0:59:28.400 and a number of them he was very right to support. 0:59:29.240 --> 0:59:32.280 Caldwell is a figure who in some ways resembles a 0:59:32.320 --> 0:59:35.520 lot of modern genocide denier types on the left, although 0:59:35.520 --> 0:59:37.680 I think he was a much better person because again 0:59:37.720 --> 0:59:41.040 he's not comprehensively that and he's not being like paid 0:59:41.120 --> 0:59:45.160 by anybody. Yeah, this is a true believer who lacks 0:59:45.240 --> 0:59:49.560 a tremendous degree of judgment in a very key area. 0:59:49.840 --> 0:59:53.320 But also, like you know, from his perspective, you kind 0:59:53.320 --> 0:59:57.040 of imagine, like you're largely right. I mean, in this case, 0:59:57.080 --> 0:59:59.240 you're wrong about the CAA propaganda, but. 0:59:59.680 --> 1:00:02.600 Up in until Cambodia you're largely right. Yeah, most like 1:00:02.760 --> 1:00:05.200 in the US is doing Hella war crimes and being 1:00:05.240 --> 1:00:07.480 supported by a lot of people in Vietnam and doing them. 1:00:07.920 --> 1:00:11.640 And yeah, so like you know, like, yeah, it's like 1:00:11.680 --> 1:00:13.360 you see the leg he has a stand on even 1:00:13.360 --> 1:00:15.680 though he's rong, it is one of it's very tempting, 1:00:15.680 --> 1:00:17.320 And there's a degree to which you should compare him 1:00:17.320 --> 1:00:19.200 to folks like the people who write for the Gray Zone, 1:00:19.200 --> 1:00:22.200 which is a faux journalistic institution that spent years arguing 1:00:22.280 --> 1:00:25.160 Bashar al Asad never gassed its own people made fun 1:00:25.200 --> 1:00:28.640 of anyone who was saying Russia was about to invade Ukraine. Right, 1:00:28.680 --> 1:00:33.240 they're those motherfuckers, Caldwell. There's a degree to which you 1:00:33.240 --> 1:00:35.640 should compare to them. But also people who knew him 1:00:35.680 --> 1:00:39.000 said he was kind and empathetic, and he was in 1:00:39.040 --> 1:00:41.120 a lot of cases on the right side of things, 1:00:41.360 --> 1:00:44.479 and he gets into Cambodian politics for a sympathetic reason, 1:00:44.520 --> 1:00:48.480 which is that he's arguing against this nightmarish US bombing campaign, 1:00:48.520 --> 1:00:50.600 which is a war crime. And on the other side 1:00:50.600 --> 1:00:52.320 of this. By the way, I found a fucking Washington 1:00:52.400 --> 1:00:56.400 Post column looking writing about this in which the author 1:00:56.560 --> 1:00:59.720 was like, Oh, it's you know, what's really fucked up 1:00:59.760 --> 1:01:02.760 is the people who who slandered the US for bombing 1:01:02.760 --> 1:01:05.400 Cambodia to try to stop the Khmer Rouge from coming 1:01:05.400 --> 1:01:08.120 into being. That's not why we fucking did it, you 1:01:08.400 --> 1:01:11.919 dip shit, Like fuck you for one thing, that's part 1:01:11.920 --> 1:01:14.760 of what made them possible. For the other thing that 1:01:14.840 --> 1:01:17.200 we didn't give up. That was never the fucking goal, Like, 1:01:17.280 --> 1:01:20.360 fuck you, fuck you. I just so many people I 1:01:20.400 --> 1:01:25.240 fucking hate On'm both like yeah, anyway, Yeah. Caldwell was 1:01:25.280 --> 1:01:27.520 loved by his students, and it was recalled even by 1:01:27.560 --> 1:01:30.000 people who disagreed with him, as a gentle person who 1:01:30.080 --> 1:01:32.560 was tolerant of opposing views. So he was not the 1:01:32.640 --> 1:01:34.880 kind of guy who was like maybe he would have 1:01:34.880 --> 1:01:36.480 been if he'd had Twitter, but like was a guy 1:01:36.480 --> 1:01:39.400 who was willing to talk about his unhinged beliefs about 1:01:39.440 --> 1:01:41.720 Cambodia with you in a polite manner. So I don't 1:01:41.720 --> 1:01:44.680 want to depict him as a caricature right now. Because 1:01:44.720 --> 1:01:47.480 the Khmer Rouge beat the US back law nole government, 1:01:47.480 --> 1:01:50.520 and because their claims of agrarian equality and an idealized 1:01:50.520 --> 1:01:53.440 socialist society gelled with Caldwell's own hope of where the 1:01:53.440 --> 1:01:56.040 world might go, he came to support them to the hilt. 1:01:56.400 --> 1:01:58.640 His friends, who at the same time saw him as 1:01:58.680 --> 1:02:04.120 a brilliant economist, also rude his startling naivete. One peer said, quote, 1:02:04.240 --> 1:02:07.600 he was a man with very clear theoretical and ideological views, 1:02:07.640 --> 1:02:10.480 and the empirical basis didn't seem to worry him hugely, 1:02:11.160 --> 1:02:15.600 always a big warning signs about how should should work. 1:02:15.680 --> 1:02:21.120 So why bother looking at what's happening now? Caldwell did 1:02:21.240 --> 1:02:24.080 visit a lot of the regimes that he extolled and supported. 1:02:24.480 --> 1:02:28.440 He took regime sponsored to tours of places like the USSR. 1:02:29.720 --> 1:02:31.320 And you know, that's one of those things where it's 1:02:31.360 --> 1:02:33.040 like you are going to miss a lot of the 1:02:33.080 --> 1:02:35.479 bad stuff the USSR is doing. But the Soviet Union 1:02:35.560 --> 1:02:38.200 is like a state that functions right, and there's things 1:02:38.200 --> 1:02:40.560 that did that were good. It got the first person 1:02:40.560 --> 1:02:44.200 into space, there were massive improvements in you know, literacy 1:02:44.280 --> 1:02:48.640 and whatnot, in addition to horrifying and awful things done 1:02:48.640 --> 1:02:52.080 by their It's an actual state, right, and so it's 1:02:52.160 --> 1:02:55.160 understandable that you could go there and see take this 1:02:55.240 --> 1:02:57.360 sponsored tour and just see the good stuff. 1:02:57.440 --> 1:02:57.640 Right. 1:02:58.840 --> 1:03:03.520 That's not really possible in Cambodia because there's no good stuff, right, 1:03:04.560 --> 1:03:08.200 there's nothing positive happening under the Khmer route. 1:03:08.280 --> 1:03:11.320 Yeah, the silver lining is hard to I mean you 1:03:11.720 --> 1:03:15.040 truly have to be a blind believer to just crime there. 1:03:15.120 --> 1:03:18.720 Right per the Guardian quote. Three days before Christmas in 1:03:18.800 --> 1:03:21.880 nineteen seventy eight, Malcolm Caldwell received an early present. On 1:03:21.920 --> 1:03:24.200 the final day of a two week tour of Cambodia, 1:03:24.400 --> 1:03:26.560 he was told that he would meet with Polepot. This 1:03:26.760 --> 1:03:29.840 was indeed a rare privilege. Unlike most other Communist leaders, 1:03:29.840 --> 1:03:32.240 Pole had not created a personality cult. There were no 1:03:32.320 --> 1:03:35.200 posters of him, he was seldom seen or quoted. Many 1:03:35.280 --> 1:03:38.400 Cambodians had not even heard of him. Only seven Westerners 1:03:38.440 --> 1:03:41.480 were ever invited to what had been renamed Democratic Campuccia, 1:03:41.760 --> 1:03:44.480 and Caldwell was the first and only Britain. So the 1:03:44.480 --> 1:03:46.920 fact that he's invited at all is this huge honor. 1:03:47.360 --> 1:03:49.439 So he comes and he shows up at this place 1:03:49.480 --> 1:03:52.560 where there are other journalists, as we'll talk about with him, 1:03:52.560 --> 1:03:54.880 there's people with him, and they're all immediately like in 1:03:55.160 --> 1:03:57.760 non pen being like where are all the people because 1:03:57.760 --> 1:04:00.000 some of them had been prior to the khmarre route 1:04:00.120 --> 1:04:03.080 taking over, and they're horrified. They're like, where are the 1:04:03.120 --> 1:04:04.400 fucking human beings? 1:04:04.840 --> 1:04:05.080 Right? 1:04:05.320 --> 1:04:10.000 Everyone's gone. Something's horribly wrong here. And Caldwell is just 1:04:10.040 --> 1:04:13.120 like so honored that, like they didn't pick any other 1:04:13.120 --> 1:04:15.720 British people. Poulpot wants to talk to me, just me, 1:04:16.320 --> 1:04:19.200 you know. So there are a few reasons why he 1:04:19.280 --> 1:04:22.000 was taken in and received so well. For one thing, 1:04:22.240 --> 1:04:24.360 he had been to China. He was on good terms 1:04:24.360 --> 1:04:27.640 with the Chinese Communist government and that was Cambodia's main 1:04:27.680 --> 1:04:31.840 ally at the time. He was also Polepot was kind 1:04:31.880 --> 1:04:33.920 of in this period. This is after there had been 1:04:33.920 --> 1:04:38.080 a series of provoked border conflicts with Vietnam provoked by 1:04:38.120 --> 1:04:40.800 the Khmer Rouge, and it was becoming increasingly clear that 1:04:40.880 --> 1:04:43.880 Vietnam was going to invade, and so Polepot was really 1:04:43.920 --> 1:04:47.480 trying to burnish his international support, so he suddenly wanted 1:04:47.520 --> 1:04:49.840 Westerners in, right, and he's like, well, this guy's probably 1:04:49.920 --> 1:04:56.400 like blind enough to ignore all the horrible shit going on, right, Yeah. 1:04:56.640 --> 1:04:59.000 And Caldwell had just a few months before he came 1:04:59.000 --> 1:05:02.919 to Cambodia written an article in The Guardian in which 1:05:02.920 --> 1:05:04.920 he had basically said, like, all these reports that the 1:05:05.000 --> 1:05:08.800 khmaier Rus are killing people are nonsense. One of his 1:05:08.920 --> 1:05:12.520 main sources was the Campuccine information minister, a guy named 1:05:12.600 --> 1:05:16.440 Hugh Nim, who blamed the deaths on America, right, basically 1:05:16.480 --> 1:05:18.480 like the bombing that the like all of these people 1:05:18.480 --> 1:05:20.760 that you're saying have died, this is due to the 1:05:21.120 --> 1:05:23.080 bombing campaign the US had executed. 1:05:23.480 --> 1:05:23.640 Right. 1:05:24.000 --> 1:05:27.320 Now, by the time he shows up in Cambodia, this 1:05:27.360 --> 1:05:30.360 guy that his whole article denying the Khmer Rouge genocide 1:05:30.400 --> 1:05:33.560 is based on, Hugh Nim, has already been executed and 1:05:33.600 --> 1:05:37.880 tortured to death by Paul Pott. So not a great sign. 1:05:41.560 --> 1:05:44.200 But even so, he was aware to an extent that 1:05:44.200 --> 1:05:47.560 the Khmer Rouge was killing people, and he had described 1:05:47.600 --> 1:05:50.800 them as quote arch quislings who knew well what their 1:05:50.840 --> 1:05:54.280 fate would be, were they to linger in Campuccia. So well, 1:05:54.280 --> 1:05:56.320 I don't want a caricature this guy. You shouldn't pretend 1:05:56.360 --> 1:06:00.200 that like that. This dude was finding reasons to justify 1:06:00.240 --> 1:06:04.080 the killings that he knew about, right, including the guy 1:06:04.120 --> 1:06:08.480 who was the source of his stupid article. So crazy, yes, nuts. 1:06:09.240 --> 1:06:12.120 Now there are real journalists on this trip, and one 1:06:12.160 --> 1:06:15.520 of them Elizabeth Becker. She had been to Cambodia before things, 1:06:15.600 --> 1:06:17.440 you know, the Khmer sho had taken over, and she 1:06:17.520 --> 1:06:20.360 was a very courageous and talented war correspondent, right, she 1:06:20.480 --> 1:06:24.480 was good at her job, and she argued with Caldwell 1:06:24.560 --> 1:06:27.000 constantly while they're talking, like she's one of the people, 1:06:27.000 --> 1:06:29.520 being like there's supposed to be people in this city, 1:06:29.800 --> 1:06:34.160 like I've seen it before, something's really bad here. And Caldwell's, 1:06:34.240 --> 1:06:37.760 you know, giving the same lie, putting out a bunch 1:06:37.760 --> 1:06:41.200 of nonsense about like, you know, the the bold reformation 1:06:41.320 --> 1:06:45.040 of society along these utopian lines and whatnot. But she 1:06:45.160 --> 1:06:47.760 still liked him, like he was a very pleasant man. 1:06:47.880 --> 1:06:51.080 She called him a kind and tolerant and just deeply 1:06:51.200 --> 1:06:54.520 naive quote. He didn't want to know about problems with 1:06:54.560 --> 1:06:57.040 the Khmer rouge, and that carried over to not wanting 1:06:57.080 --> 1:07:00.200 to know about problems between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was 1:07:00.240 --> 1:07:03.520 stuck in nineteen sixty eight or something. Now there's a 1:07:03.560 --> 1:07:06.040 book out by this point, by the time that Caldwell 1:07:06.080 --> 1:07:10.000 comes to Cambodia about the early stages of the Cambodian 1:07:10.240 --> 1:07:13.440 the autogenocide, whatever you want to call it, called year zero. 1:07:13.960 --> 1:07:16.640 Caldwell could have read this book, and if he had, 1:07:16.680 --> 1:07:20.040 he'd have learned, for example, that one Khmer rouge saying 1:07:20.400 --> 1:07:24.400 expressed the regime's goal as quote, to completely annihilate diseases 1:07:24.400 --> 1:07:27.080 of consciousness that got in the way of their goals. 1:07:27.440 --> 1:07:29.960 Doing this meant getting rid of hidden enemies who, as 1:07:30.040 --> 1:07:35.320 Polepot put it, had sicknesses of revolutionary consciousness. Now Philip 1:07:35.360 --> 1:07:38.800 Short goes into more detail here, summarizing information that should 1:07:38.840 --> 1:07:41.400 have been available to Caldwell how he had he done this. 1:07:41.520 --> 1:07:46.480 Reading quote Satirama meant an individual who failed to focus 1:07:46.520 --> 1:07:49.320 on the communist cause and was therein portrayed as toxic 1:07:49.400 --> 1:07:53.240 to its realization. Even without considerable evidence or proof, individuals 1:07:53.240 --> 1:07:56.120 could suddenly be classified as toxic to the super great 1:07:56.200 --> 1:07:59.040 leap forward and accused of being class enemies with a 1:07:59.080 --> 1:08:03.000 sickness of consciousness. Enemies were depicted as pervasive and infecting 1:08:03.040 --> 1:08:06.640 the pure Khmer ideal. The desire to exterminate enemies grew, 1:08:06.760 --> 1:08:10.520 as did the intoxication of doing so with impunity. Purging 1:08:10.520 --> 1:08:13.240 these contaminants was discussed as crucial to the survival of 1:08:13.360 --> 1:08:17.640 the regime. According to propaganda, enemies were likened to an 1:08:17.640 --> 1:08:21.360 impurity that threatened the well being of revolutionary society. These 1:08:21.400 --> 1:08:24.120 groups were portrayed as a lethal source of pollution that 1:08:24.240 --> 1:08:28.599 needed to be eliminated. A sort of madness had taken 1:08:28.640 --> 1:08:31.840 over the country at this point, particularly among the rouge 1:08:31.880 --> 1:08:34.519 cadras doing the hand to hand slaughtering, and for an 1:08:34.560 --> 1:08:36.919 idea of just how de range this gets, several militia 1:08:37.160 --> 1:08:39.840 who were interviewed later claimed that they would eat the 1:08:39.920 --> 1:08:42.240 livers of their victims and the belief that it would 1:08:42.240 --> 1:08:44.800 give them extra power and probably because they are also 1:08:44.920 --> 1:08:49.519 starving to death. One of these yeah, one of these 1:08:49.560 --> 1:08:52.120 guys as cited later as saying they ate human liver 1:08:52.200 --> 1:08:54.840 because they wanted to prevent themselves from being shocked by 1:08:54.920 --> 1:08:58.080 killing people. Then they could kill people. They wanted to 1:08:58.200 --> 1:09:01.280 change themselves to be able to kill people without pity. 1:09:02.000 --> 1:09:07.559 Oh god, Yeah, I mean there's probably some level of 1:09:07.640 --> 1:09:11.280 like just pry on disease that can take over, Like 1:09:11.320 --> 1:09:11.880 there's got to be. 1:09:12.280 --> 1:09:13.839 With livers, you're okay with livers. 1:09:14.680 --> 1:09:18.240 Yeah, I mean, if you're trying to like like lose 1:09:18.439 --> 1:09:22.040 lose your conscience, yeah, probably giving yourself a brain disease 1:09:22.120 --> 1:09:23.320 is not the worst way to do it. 1:09:25.520 --> 1:09:28.240 You're generally safe if you want to eat human beings safely, 1:09:28.320 --> 1:09:30.559 like a liver, the livers that like are reasonably okay 1:09:31.200 --> 1:09:34.439 to go for, Sophie. I don't want people to get 1:09:34.600 --> 1:09:35.799 fucking pre on diseases. 1:09:36.200 --> 1:09:39.519 Don't know, no spine, no bone, bone. 1:09:39.760 --> 1:09:44.120 No brain, right, you know, we all folks, Sophie, A 1:09:44.160 --> 1:09:44.839 lot of people. 1:09:45.800 --> 1:09:45.880 What. 1:09:46.240 --> 1:09:50.120 I'm a believer in harm reduction. Okay, you know, all right, 1:09:50.760 --> 1:09:54.640 test your fentanyl, don't eat people's spines, or test your 1:09:54.680 --> 1:09:57.479 drugs for finnel, don't eat the spines, don't test your 1:09:57.479 --> 1:09:58.479 final don't do fentanyl. 1:09:59.720 --> 1:09:59.960 Okay. 1:10:01.280 --> 1:10:03.839 Caldwell could have had access to a lot of this information, 1:10:03.880 --> 1:10:06.320 and he rejected it largely on the basis that year 1:10:06.400 --> 1:10:09.840 zero had been pillaried by a critique published by Noam Chomsky. 1:10:10.280 --> 1:10:13.840 Now this is contentious, people, Oh boy, the arguing about 1:10:13.880 --> 1:10:17.240 whether or not Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge or was 1:10:17.320 --> 1:10:20.200 just like, given the information available at the time, it's 1:10:20.200 --> 1:10:22.800 hard to tell what is true. I'm not gonna this 1:10:22.880 --> 1:10:25.960 is not going to be a lengthy dissection of that, 1:10:27.160 --> 1:10:31.639 but there are arguments that he would denied a number 1:10:31.680 --> 1:10:34.160 of the crimes being committed by the Khmer Rouge. He 1:10:34.360 --> 1:10:37.760 certainly argued that Ponchard, the author of Year Zero, had 1:10:37.760 --> 1:10:40.400 exaggerated the horror of what was occurring on the ground. 1:10:41.040 --> 1:10:43.920 Chomsky described it as what people were saying about the 1:10:44.000 --> 1:10:48.240 Khmer Rouge as quote, an unprecedented propaganda campaign to slander 1:10:48.280 --> 1:10:52.760 democratic Campuccia via systematic distortion of the truth. Right now, 1:10:52.880 --> 1:10:57.120 Chomsky preferred a different book. He compared Ponchad's work unfavorably 1:10:57.160 --> 1:11:01.439 with another book called Cambodia, Starvation and Revolution written by 1:11:01.479 --> 1:11:06.679 George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which is basically is taking 1:11:06.760 --> 1:11:10.799 Khmer Rouge propaganda and like being like, hey, everything's great 1:11:10.920 --> 1:11:13.280 over there, actually, and like what the stuff that's bad 1:11:13.400 --> 1:11:14.920 is not their fault, right right? 1:11:15.080 --> 1:11:15.400 Right? 1:11:15.720 --> 1:11:18.280 There was another book written by two readers Digest writers 1:11:18.320 --> 1:11:22.040 called Murder of a Gentle Land that Chomsky also went after, 1:11:23.080 --> 1:11:25.120 which you know, it was not perfect. None of the 1:11:25.200 --> 1:11:27.560 claims about what none of the none of the critiques 1:11:27.560 --> 1:11:30.919 and the people talking about the autogenocide are perfectly accurate 1:11:31.000 --> 1:11:35.000 because it's still going on, right, But they are broadly accurate. 1:11:35.200 --> 1:11:38.920 And and Chomsky is certainly in the wrong about what 1:11:39.000 --> 1:11:41.879 books about Cambodia to trust during this period. 1:11:42.120 --> 1:11:45.599 Right. But but also if we hadn't you know, we 1:11:45.800 --> 1:11:48.360 the United States and the West, hadn't put out so 1:11:48.560 --> 1:11:52.960 much like there's a CIA propaganda like this, would it 1:11:53.000 --> 1:11:57.920 wouldn't be it would be less possible for for this, 1:11:58.160 --> 1:12:00.639 for this to it like work. 1:12:00.760 --> 1:12:04.360 Yeah, And this is also why I have I have 1:12:04.439 --> 1:12:07.519 a degree more of sympathy to cald Well and to 1:12:07.720 --> 1:12:10.040 other people who doubted this in this period of time 1:12:10.160 --> 1:12:13.920 because it was such a different information environment. Yeah, and 1:12:13.960 --> 1:12:16.920 there had been there was just so much disinformation that 1:12:17.040 --> 1:12:19.040 been put out about Vietnam, that'd been put out about 1:12:19.040 --> 1:12:21.400 what the US was doing in Cambodia that didn't put 1:12:21.439 --> 1:12:22.920 it about what the US was doing in parts of 1:12:23.000 --> 1:12:27.760 Latin America. So again, these people are wrong, and that 1:12:27.840 --> 1:12:32.120 should be stated. But it's I do have less condemnation 1:12:32.200 --> 1:12:33.960 than I do about like the stuff going on in 1:12:34.000 --> 1:12:36.639 the twenty first century that right viewers this, right. 1:12:36.680 --> 1:12:40.120 Yeah, there wasn't there wasn't Twitter and there wasn't like 1:12:41.080 --> 1:12:44.280 yeah they you know, it's just it's more reasonable to 1:12:44.280 --> 1:12:45.639 be skeptical. 1:12:45.479 --> 1:12:48.720 Yes, and there it's certainly reasonable to initially be skeptical. 1:12:48.800 --> 1:12:51.080 Now again by the point time kol Wol was on 1:12:51.120 --> 1:12:53.040 the ground and these other people with them are like, 1:12:53.080 --> 1:12:56.640 this city used to have people. It's no longer like 1:12:56.840 --> 1:13:02.559 you should have known, right, right, So it's generally considered 1:13:02.640 --> 1:13:04.800 or argued at least that Chomsky is a big part 1:13:04.800 --> 1:13:10.000 of why Caledwell doesn't like trust. You know, punch Od's 1:13:10.000 --> 1:13:13.679 book about the atrocities going on in Cambodia. You know, whatever, 1:13:13.880 --> 1:13:15.720 the truth, whoever you're going to blame for it called 1:13:15.760 --> 1:13:18.800 Well at age forty seven shows up in Cambodia as 1:13:18.800 --> 1:13:22.200 a pretty much a true believer, right, And in fact, 1:13:22.240 --> 1:13:26.240 he had finished a book before he goes there called Campuccia, 1:13:26.320 --> 1:13:29.920 A Rationale for Rural Policy, in which he had written 1:13:29.960 --> 1:13:32.719 that the Khmer Rouge had quote opened vistas of hope 1:13:32.760 --> 1:13:34.800 not only for the people of Cambodia, but also for 1:13:34.840 --> 1:13:36.920 the people of other peoples, of all the other poor 1:13:37.120 --> 1:13:41.640 third world countries. We'll come back to that book in 1:13:41.680 --> 1:13:45.600 a second. So called Well, along with these journalists, is 1:13:45.720 --> 1:13:48.519 escorted around the country. They see some like staged scenes, 1:13:48.560 --> 1:13:52.599 and again Becker is gets aggressive, very brave woman with 1:13:52.640 --> 1:13:55.519 these Khmaer Rouge guards, being like, I can I can 1:13:55.560 --> 1:13:58.599 see what you're not showing us, like where you're blocking 1:13:58.680 --> 1:14:01.839 us from going. I can see evidence of clear problems 1:14:01.840 --> 1:14:05.080 because I've been here before. What the and she's like 1:14:05.280 --> 1:14:08.639 arguing with them, she said later it was so clearly awful. 1:14:08.760 --> 1:14:10.720 One of the problems was the absence of what I saw, 1:14:10.800 --> 1:14:13.160 the absence of people. And that's a different kind of 1:14:13.160 --> 1:14:17.280 proof too. I don't see any people being executed. Caldwell 1:14:18.040 --> 1:14:20.960 was not concerned. Quote. He preferred to stay in the 1:14:20.960 --> 1:14:24.160 car and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunities prepared for us, 1:14:24.479 --> 1:14:28.080 Becker wrote in her book on Cambodia. Now at the 1:14:28.200 --> 1:14:30.320 very end of the tour, they all go back to 1:14:30.520 --> 1:14:33.920 Nonpen and they you know, they're hanging out for a 1:14:33.960 --> 1:14:35.400 little bit. They're not all that far from the S 1:14:35.479 --> 1:14:38.320 twenty one center, right, this is where Caldwell's going to 1:14:38.360 --> 1:14:40.240 finally have his interview with pol Pott, and I'm going 1:14:40.240 --> 1:14:43.960 to quote from the Guardian. Again, Caldwell remained ignorant on 1:14:44.000 --> 1:14:46.360 the Friday morning and non pen that he was taken 1:14:46.400 --> 1:14:49.840 in a Mercedes limousine to see pole Pot. The setting 1:14:49.880 --> 1:14:52.400 for the meeting was the former Governor's palace on the waterfront, 1:14:52.439 --> 1:14:55.280 built during the French colonial period. In a grand reception 1:14:55.439 --> 1:14:58.200 room replete with fans and billowing white curtains, the two 1:14:58.280 --> 1:15:02.280 men sat down and discussed revolutiontionary economic theory. Becker had 1:15:02.320 --> 1:15:04.920 met Polepot earlier the same day, and in When the 1:15:04.920 --> 1:15:07.120 War was Over That's her book, she writes he was 1:15:07.160 --> 1:15:10.320 actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome, but attractive. 1:15:10.560 --> 1:15:13.759 His features were delicate and alert, and his smile nearly endearing. 1:15:14.479 --> 1:15:17.879 The perennially shally at shabby academic and the fastidious dictator 1:15:17.960 --> 1:15:20.000 must have made for an odd couple. In any case, 1:15:20.040 --> 1:15:22.439 Caldwell left the meeting a happy man. He returned to 1:15:22.479 --> 1:15:24.559 the guest house he was sharing with Becker and Dudman 1:15:24.640 --> 1:15:27.320 full of praise for Polepot and his political outlook. We 1:15:27.400 --> 1:15:29.640 went over stuff, says Becker. He thought he had a 1:15:29.640 --> 1:15:32.120 good conversation he had avoided at all costs in a 1:15:32.160 --> 1:15:35.080 discussion of Vietnam, and he was looking forward to going home. 1:15:36.400 --> 1:15:38.880 So that night they have another argument, you know, Becker 1:15:38.960 --> 1:15:42.200 and Caldwell about Cambodia. You know, they have dinner and 1:15:42.720 --> 1:15:44.720 they go to bed, and as far as she can tell, 1:15:44.800 --> 1:15:48.719 he remained completely convinced that the revolution was a good 1:15:48.800 --> 1:15:51.080 thing and that Campodi was headed in a good direction. 1:15:51.640 --> 1:15:53.880 She goes to bed at around eleven pm, and in 1:15:53.880 --> 1:15:56.000 the middle of the night she is woken up by 1:15:56.040 --> 1:15:59.680 what she eventually realizes our gut is gunfire, and she 1:15:59.760 --> 1:16:01.960 comes out of her room. She sees a young man 1:16:02.040 --> 1:16:04.719 pointing a handgun at her. He's wearing he's got bands 1:16:04.720 --> 1:16:06.760 of ammunition on his body, he's got a rifle on 1:16:06.840 --> 1:16:10.360 his back. She flees back into her room and locks 1:16:10.360 --> 1:16:13.760 herself in the bathroom, and eventually, what you know, when 1:16:13.760 --> 1:16:16.439 they come out when this ends, the Dudman, the other 1:16:16.439 --> 1:16:19.639 guy there sees like a bunch of guys running along 1:16:19.680 --> 1:16:23.720 the street and they find Caldwell in his room and 1:16:23.760 --> 1:16:28.880 he's been shot repeatedly. He's dead. Right. It's still to 1:16:28.920 --> 1:16:32.640 this day not perfectly clear. Yeah, definitely was. I mean it, 1:16:32.800 --> 1:16:36.599 it's generally pretty clear Polepot ordered it. We don't really 1:16:36.640 --> 1:16:40.480 know why. What about this guy triggered him. Why specifically 1:16:40.560 --> 1:16:44.320 it happened, They the Khmer rouge doesn't admit to it, 1:16:44.439 --> 1:16:49.360 but yeah, this guy gets killed, and it's just kind 1:16:49.360 --> 1:16:51.479 of it's one of these very famous moments because he's 1:16:51.479 --> 1:16:54.040 such he's one of these like guys who had really 1:16:54.080 --> 1:16:57.280 been willing to go to bat for democratic Campuccia and 1:16:57.320 --> 1:17:02.240 then finds himself yet another corpse in the killing field, 1:17:02.320 --> 1:17:02.960 so to speak. 1:17:03.320 --> 1:17:06.280 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, the other 1:17:06.320 --> 1:17:08.559 side is like we're also living through a moment where 1:17:08.760 --> 1:17:12.439 like everyone will cozy up to the dictator who demonstrably 1:17:12.479 --> 1:17:15.440 will stab you in the back and any given opportunity, 1:17:15.520 --> 1:17:16.599 and they still mine up. 1:17:17.040 --> 1:17:20.559 Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean people, people 1:17:20.600 --> 1:17:24.240 are really like Caldwell. Above all else is a reminder 1:17:24.240 --> 1:17:27.440 of how easy it is to blind yourself to obvious reality, 1:17:27.520 --> 1:17:32.640 even at your own peril, because because seeing the reality 1:17:33.000 --> 1:17:34.320 is not even that you don't want to see it, 1:17:34.320 --> 1:17:36.360 it's at seeing the reality would mean taking a hit 1:17:36.400 --> 1:17:38.639 to your ego. It's the same thing why you've got 1:17:39.520 --> 1:17:40.960 there's a lot of people being like, oh well, once 1:17:41.000 --> 1:17:43.639 these tariffs start to hit, once the economy collapses, all 1:17:43.640 --> 1:17:48.120 of these Trump supporters will realize, yeah, you'll and like 1:17:48.720 --> 1:17:52.080 a significant chunk of Trump's voters who are not hardcore supporters, 1:17:52.080 --> 1:17:54.040 who are the people who voted for Biden and twenty 1:17:54.080 --> 1:17:55.680 you know, who go back and forth or who like 1:17:55.720 --> 1:17:59.000 made their decision day of Sure, they'll change their mind, 1:17:59.040 --> 1:18:01.720 they'll get angry. But the heart and core of his 1:18:01.760 --> 1:18:06.840 supporters recognizing that they've been fucked means recognizing they're not 1:18:06.880 --> 1:18:09.679 as smart as they think they are, and again called well, 1:18:09.680 --> 1:18:11.639 that's a big part of it for him. He's a scholar, 1:18:11.680 --> 1:18:13.639 he's a smart man. He couldn't be this wrong. 1:18:14.320 --> 1:18:19.360 Yeah, m hm, So, I mean, you know they could. 1:18:19.800 --> 1:18:22.679 And those people are also the ones doing the worst 1:18:22.840 --> 1:18:26.000 stuff when the time comes to do the worst stuff unfortunately, so. 1:18:26.120 --> 1:18:29.559 Yes, because again they've bought in. Now, while all this 1:18:29.720 --> 1:18:32.960 is going on, the end of the regime is getting 1:18:32.960 --> 1:18:36.080 nearer and nearer because Poulpot's also not as smart as 1:18:36.080 --> 1:18:38.799 he thinks he is. Right, he had directed his forces 1:18:38.800 --> 1:18:41.360 in what began as a series of border skirmishes against 1:18:41.400 --> 1:18:45.080 the newly unified Vietnamese state. This was a sensible decision 1:18:45.200 --> 1:18:48.760 based on their obsessive hatred and paranoia of Vietnam, but 1:18:48.840 --> 1:18:51.559 given the comparative state of the militaries of the two countries. 1:18:51.600 --> 1:18:54.120 It was basically suicidal and in short order, this is 1:18:54.120 --> 1:18:59.040 what brings an end to democratic Campuccia. Vietnam invades Cambodia 1:18:59.040 --> 1:19:01.439 in December of nineteen seven eight, and what follows was 1:19:01.479 --> 1:19:04.320 not close to a fair fight. By January, they had 1:19:04.320 --> 1:19:07.040 taken the capitol and put an end to Polepot's reign 1:19:08.240 --> 1:19:12.680 sort of, so he has to flee, right, he has 1:19:12.720 --> 1:19:18.200 to like leave non pen and Vietnam takes over and administers, 1:19:18.320 --> 1:19:22.720 you know, for a while and Cambodi and eventually Cambodia 1:19:22.960 --> 1:19:26.360 becomes independent again under a government that is not the 1:19:26.439 --> 1:19:30.559 Khmer Rouge. But the Khmer Rouge doesn't go away, and 1:19:30.680 --> 1:19:35.519 Polepot remains the head of the Khmer Rouge as they 1:19:35.600 --> 1:19:38.000 like go and hide in the jungle. They've got like 1:19:38.080 --> 1:19:41.639 some villages and stuff. This like little weird fortified section 1:19:41.880 --> 1:19:45.439 of the country, tiny section of the country that they're 1:19:45.479 --> 1:19:48.640 able to like manage along. I think it's like the 1:19:48.720 --> 1:19:52.599 Thai border there. And and in fact this like government 1:19:52.640 --> 1:19:55.800 because like in eighty two, China and the Association of 1:19:55.800 --> 1:19:58.360 Southeast Asian Nations kind of pressures the Khmer Rouge to 1:19:58.360 --> 1:20:03.120 ally with Sahanak's forces and some like republican forces led 1:20:03.160 --> 1:20:05.760 by a guy called Sonsan along the Thai border and 1:20:05.760 --> 1:20:08.800 create this thing called the Coalition Government of Democratic Campuccia, 1:20:09.240 --> 1:20:12.760 and that remains in the UN the legitimate Government of 1:20:12.760 --> 1:20:17.040 Cambodia until nineteen ninety one, even though like they're not 1:20:17.240 --> 1:20:20.679 actually in power. The government of power is like the PRK, 1:20:21.080 --> 1:20:24.320 but they're only recognized by Vietnam Lao and the Soviet Union. 1:20:24.680 --> 1:20:27.240 And so that's kind of like Polepots where he is. 1:20:27.520 --> 1:20:32.760 For the eighties, you know, into the nineties, there is 1:20:32.800 --> 1:20:35.800 a lot of guerrilla warfare. Polepot continues to lead the 1:20:35.880 --> 1:20:40.720 Khmer Rouge to fight against the Vietnamese backed Government of Cambodia, 1:20:40.760 --> 1:20:44.920 and this continues massively the suffering of the Cambodian people 1:20:45.439 --> 1:20:49.640 who do never get nearly enough international aid. And this 1:20:49.760 --> 1:20:52.439 situation doesn't really start to end until the Paris Peace 1:20:52.479 --> 1:20:56.160 Agreement assigned in October of nineteen ninety one, the Vietnamese 1:20:56.200 --> 1:21:00.280 withdraw from Cambodia and things slowly start to calm down. 1:21:01.240 --> 1:21:04.320 There's a UN peacekeeping force that kind of enters in 1:21:04.400 --> 1:21:06.639 nineteen ninety three, and there's like a free and fair 1:21:06.720 --> 1:21:11.200 election you know that. Yeah, things start to get better. 1:21:11.320 --> 1:21:15.559 At this point, the Khmer Rouge never disarms, right, They 1:21:15.560 --> 1:21:18.439 continue to hold their tiny little chunk of the country 1:21:19.120 --> 1:21:22.000 and argue that there's Vietnam is still secretly running things. 1:21:22.040 --> 1:21:25.599 There's camouflage Vietnam, Vietnamese soldiers you know that are behind 1:21:25.640 --> 1:21:26.160 the regime. 1:21:26.360 --> 1:21:26.559 Right. 1:21:27.600 --> 1:21:30.960 They boycott the nineteen ninety three election and they basically 1:21:31.040 --> 1:21:34.640 hole up in western and northern little bits of Cambodia. 1:21:35.040 --> 1:21:38.759 They're outlawed in nineteen ninety four, and when the Cold 1:21:38.760 --> 1:21:41.559 War ends, they don't really have any of them, even 1:21:41.600 --> 1:21:47.200 minimal support that they had previously had at long, long length. 1:21:47.960 --> 1:21:50.920 Jang Seri, who's the Foreign minister, who is again one 1:21:51.000 --> 1:21:54.040 of Polpot's friends from Paris, as well as a number 1:21:54.080 --> 1:21:57.240 of other high ranking official surrender along with the bulk 1:21:57.320 --> 1:22:00.439 of what had remained of the military of the Khmer Rouge, 1:22:00.439 --> 1:22:04.960 and they are eventually incorporated into the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. Polepot, 1:22:05.000 --> 1:22:08.559 though stays free for quite a while until he is 1:22:09.720 --> 1:22:15.639 basically there's this shit that goes down in nineteen ninety eight. 1:22:15.680 --> 1:22:18.719 I think it is where one of his few remaining 1:22:18.800 --> 1:22:23.160 friends running the Khmer Rouge this guy, Sonsen, does something 1:22:23.200 --> 1:22:27.840 that Polepot considers treason, and so he massacres Sonsen along 1:22:27.880 --> 1:22:32.519 with fourteen of his family members, including his like grandkids. Now, 1:22:32.520 --> 1:22:35.720 Polepot would argue for the other people, the babies, the 1:22:35.760 --> 1:22:37.840 young ones, I did not order them to be killed. 1:22:38.280 --> 1:22:41.559 For Sonsen and his family, Yes, I feel sorry about that. 1:22:41.560 --> 1:22:43.439 That was a mistake that occurred when we put our 1:22:43.520 --> 1:22:47.200 plan into practice. I feel sorry. This is when he's 1:22:47.280 --> 1:22:49.639 questioned by a journalist Nate named Nate Thayer, who does 1:22:49.720 --> 1:22:52.080 like his last interview, and this is kind of what 1:22:52.160 --> 1:22:55.400 brings an end to him leading the Khmer Rouge finally 1:22:55.479 --> 1:22:58.560 after thirty seven years, because for whatever reason, this is 1:22:58.600 --> 1:23:00.880 a step too far to the left, asked people who 1:23:00.960 --> 1:23:04.360 had stuck around him, and one of his like his 1:23:04.400 --> 1:23:07.240 commander in chief, a guy named Tom Mauk, puts him 1:23:07.240 --> 1:23:10.400 on house arrest, right and yeah, and that's kind of 1:23:10.400 --> 1:23:15.320 the end of Polepot of having even a sliver of power. Eventually, 1:23:15.960 --> 1:23:19.439 Polepot is brought before a people's tribunal. He's sentenced to 1:23:19.479 --> 1:23:25.320 life imprisonment for Sonsen's murder, but he never really faces 1:23:25.479 --> 1:23:31.320 any actual like justice, right, Like there's there's there's nothing like. 1:23:31.360 --> 1:23:33.320 Right, there's no way you can pay for this anyway. 1:23:33.360 --> 1:23:35.759 But he doesn't even not even close. 1:23:36.400 --> 1:23:36.639 Yeah. 1:23:36.760 --> 1:23:39.400 No, he dies under house arrest in nineteen ninety eight, 1:23:40.160 --> 1:23:42.559 and uh story. 1:23:43.000 --> 1:23:47.559 Yeah, it's one of those like like whatever belief you 1:23:47.600 --> 1:23:50.360 may have in some sort of cosmic justice, this will 1:23:50.560 --> 1:23:52.599 this should tip the scales in the other direction. 1:23:52.920 --> 1:23:56.160 Yeah, Like he is ultimately not punished by the New 1:23:56.200 --> 1:23:58.960 Cambodian State or the u WIN. He's punished by the 1:23:59.040 --> 1:24:04.600 Khmer Rouge for killing another Khmer Rouge guy. In his 1:24:04.840 --> 1:24:08.880 very last interview after he has been arrested again, there's 1:24:08.880 --> 1:24:11.040 this guy Nate Thayer who comes in and does this 1:24:11.280 --> 1:24:15.479 final interview with Paul Pot. And Nate does a very 1:24:15.479 --> 1:24:18.439 good job of this, Like he really presses Polepot on 1:24:18.479 --> 1:24:20.479 the stuff that he did, on all of the killings. 1:24:20.800 --> 1:24:22.519 And this is I want to read this quote from 1:24:22.520 --> 1:24:25.280 one of Nate's last articles with Poulpot, where he's trying 1:24:25.320 --> 1:24:29.000 to get him to acknowledge anything about what he did. 1:24:30.040 --> 1:24:33.160 I came to carry out the struggle not to kill people. 1:24:33.280 --> 1:24:36.639 He rasps, his voice almost a whisper. He pauses, fixing 1:24:36.760 --> 1:24:39.960 his interviewer with an almost pleading expression, even now and 1:24:40.000 --> 1:24:42.280 you can look at me, am I a savage person. 1:24:42.680 --> 1:24:46.519 My conscience is clear. I do not reject responsibility. Our 1:24:46.560 --> 1:24:49.400 movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world, 1:24:49.640 --> 1:24:51.960 but there was another aspect that was outside our control, 1:24:52.160 --> 1:24:54.800 the enemy's activities against us. I want to tell you, 1:24:54.960 --> 1:24:57.599 I'm quite satisfied with one thing. If we had not 1:24:57.680 --> 1:25:01.599 carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have been another Campuchia crumb. 1:25:01.600 --> 1:25:04.679 In nineteen seventy five, he says, referring to the Mekong 1:25:04.760 --> 1:25:07.800 Delta region seized by Vietnam from the Khmer Empire in 1:25:07.840 --> 1:25:11.920 the seventeenth century, and that I think says a lot 1:25:12.000 --> 1:25:15.000 that the end of this guy's life, two million deaths, 1:25:15.000 --> 1:25:20.320 maybe on his conscience, the absolute destruction of his country 1:25:20.360 --> 1:25:22.960 in such a way that it still has not recovered. 1:25:23.560 --> 1:25:26.040 And he's like, well, look, if I hadn't ha done that, 1:25:26.160 --> 1:25:28.599 it could have wound up like this time Vietnam took 1:25:28.640 --> 1:25:31.479 the Mekong Delta region from US in the sixteen hundreds. 1:25:31.520 --> 1:25:33.439 You know you wouldn't want that, would you. Like he's 1:25:33.439 --> 1:25:37.920 still he's such like it's this this fucking academic brain shit, 1:25:38.080 --> 1:25:42.479 where like all that matters to him. Is this idea 1:25:42.600 --> 1:25:44.639 he's cooked up about how the world ought to work 1:25:44.680 --> 1:25:47.080 when he was like a young student with his friends, 1:25:47.360 --> 1:25:49.960 that he never gets over. His ego won't let him 1:25:50.000 --> 1:25:52.240 no matter how many fucking people it leads him to kill. 1:25:52.360 --> 1:25:54.920 It's like such a like holding onto that delusion till 1:25:54.960 --> 1:25:58.000 the end is so amazing. I mean, I just you know, 1:25:58.880 --> 1:26:03.360 it's so hard for me to understand that brain yep, 1:26:03.920 --> 1:26:07.960 like like rationalizing to that degree like total I don't know, 1:26:08.320 --> 1:26:09.920 or just you got to put on a show all 1:26:09.960 --> 1:26:12.479 the way to your last interview, you know, keep the 1:26:12.640 --> 1:26:17.280 keep the k fave up. Yep, fucking grim. 1:26:17.640 --> 1:26:22.400 Anyway, it's a lot time yep. 1:26:25.360 --> 1:26:28.880 Just my plug is just go go go sit by 1:26:28.920 --> 1:26:31.040 yourself for a second and just think about, you know 1:26:31.120 --> 1:26:34.679 the world and what you can do to help someone. 1:26:34.880 --> 1:26:39.240 And don't don't take the books you read when you 1:26:39.280 --> 1:26:41.960 were fucking too seriously. 1:26:42.560 --> 1:26:46.000 Right, look, we're living through the same version of that, 1:26:46.080 --> 1:26:49.479 but just the book is fucking autless shrugs exactly. 1:26:49.520 --> 1:26:51.519 That that's that is like why I bring this up 1:26:51.560 --> 1:26:53.439 in the context of like Doge and all of these 1:26:53.479 --> 1:26:56.679 young people who have like fucking reading goddamn Curtis Jarvin 1:26:56.760 --> 1:26:59.360 and ship on the Internet and convinced themselves the ship 1:26:59.400 --> 1:27:01.720 they read when they're young and like talk with their 1:27:01.720 --> 1:27:04.880 friends about obsessively and these discord chats and signal loops, 1:27:04.880 --> 1:27:07.719 and you know, there are the people who are willing 1:27:07.760 --> 1:27:10.800 to make Polepot style decisions. And no number of deaths, 1:27:10.800 --> 1:27:13.479 how many many tens of millions of fucking people die. 1:27:13.840 --> 1:27:16.400 If they get the chance, it won't. They will not 1:27:16.520 --> 1:27:19.479 for a second doubt themselves or change their minds. And 1:27:19.520 --> 1:27:23.320 that's why literally anything that can be done to stop 1:27:23.520 --> 1:27:27.679 the process that is attempting to be underway is like justified, 1:27:27.720 --> 1:27:32.439 because these people are going they they they have to 1:27:32.479 --> 1:27:37.200 be edged out right, And I'm optimistic at least about 1:27:37.200 --> 1:27:39.360 the fact that Musk, who's one of these people who 1:27:39.400 --> 1:27:42.920 has the same kind of Polepot brain damage seems to 1:27:43.000 --> 1:27:46.839 have seems to be pulling back because of how angry 1:27:46.880 --> 1:27:49.720 he's made. He's just not built for criticism, right, Yeah, 1:27:49.920 --> 1:27:51.600 but there's more of these guys. 1:27:51.320 --> 1:27:54.479 And these guys he's delusional, but he's tooth, thin skinned 1:27:54.520 --> 1:27:59.120 and thankfully largely incompetent. Although inc has never stopped so 1:27:59.200 --> 1:28:00.760 many of these folks the past, so. 1:28:00.920 --> 1:28:04.200 No, it hasn't no, they just fail upwards, cold, just 1:28:04.320 --> 1:28:05.360 fail hold comfort. 1:28:05.640 --> 1:28:09.160 But yeah, maybe that's at least a weakness to exploit anyway. 1:28:09.960 --> 1:28:13.080 I don't know, hard to know when it's good to 1:28:13.160 --> 1:28:13.920 read books or not. 1:28:15.200 --> 1:28:17.639 Oh my god, no, this is This is the lesson 1:28:17.720 --> 1:28:22.920 for these three episodes. Don't read books kids, podcasts. Not 1:28:23.040 --> 1:28:25.639 that podcast. Yeah, no, not that podcast either. 1:28:25.760 --> 1:28:29.400 Podcasts have never led anyone to support horrible things to 1:28:29.479 --> 1:28:32.200 get people killed, Just like, don't ever believe your own 1:28:32.240 --> 1:28:35.200 bullshit or anyone else is too strong. Keep an eye 1:28:35.240 --> 1:28:37.200 out for what's going on in the world, and talk 1:28:37.240 --> 1:28:42.720 to people. Goodbye, goodbye. 1:28:43.840 --> 1:28:46.800 Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. 1:28:46.920 --> 1:28:49.519 For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool 1:28:49.600 --> 1:28:53.559 Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, 1:28:53.640 --> 1:28:56.800 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the 1:28:56.840 --> 1:29:00.880 Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday 1:29:01.000 --> 1:29:04.639 and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash 1:29:04.840 --> 1:29:06.320 at Behind the Bastards