Speaker 1: Also media, Holy crap, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: a rare three part episode. You motherfuckers, you lucky sons
Speaker 1: of bitches and rat Bastards are getting three episodes this week.
Speaker 1: I am now legally your father. You're welcome. Hi Sophie,
Speaker 1: Hi andrew T. How are you?
Speaker 2: Guys?
Speaker 1: Did that interest you?
Speaker 3: You don't need to be responsible for people? We are?
Speaker 2: I like that. That's like episode's three. I'm your father.
Speaker 4: I don't think you're I don't.
Speaker 3: I'm going to say something, really, I don't think you're
Speaker 3: their father.
Speaker 4: I think you're their dad.
Speaker 1: Dy No, that feels a lot worse for me, actually.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I think that's what that legally means is
Speaker 4: you're not father your dad.
Speaker 1: D I'm like, I'm like one of those dads that
Speaker 1: like should pay child support but instead I live on
Speaker 1: a boat in the harbor of fucking New Orleans.
Speaker 4: And are you a library a libertarian in this scenario?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: No, no, But I definitely don't believe in the moon landing.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards again, a podcast you're enjoying
Speaker 1: part three of our pole pot episodes and basically the
Speaker 1: way it goes here this folks. We have a massive audience,
Speaker 1: and I'm always trying to like do the most I
Speaker 1: can to like please the most people, which you can't
Speaker 1: do with every episode. You know, some people don't like
Speaker 1: certain kits, some people don't like the cult leaders, some
Speaker 1: people don't like the dictators, some people only want the dictators,
Speaker 1: and likewise, you know, we've started doing a lot more
Speaker 1: four parters over the last couple of years, in part
Speaker 1: because there were guys where I felt like I'm kind
Speaker 1: of doing a disservice to try to limit this to
Speaker 1: two episodes, and a lot of people really like the
Speaker 1: four parts and say this is my favorite part of
Speaker 1: the show, and a lot of people say I don't like,
Speaker 1: I prefer the two parters. So we try to like
Speaker 1: go with variety rights that everybody's regularly getting what they want.
Speaker 1: And I didn't so I didn't want to do a
Speaker 1: four part for pole Pot And then I wrote fourteen
Speaker 1: thousand words on him and was like, God, damn it, Robert,
Speaker 1: because there is really that much to say. So this
Speaker 1: is all to say I didn't want to break this
Speaker 1: up over two weeks for the people who are tired
Speaker 1: of four partis. So I just we're just giving you
Speaker 1: three episodes this week, so you're fucking welcome. Open done.
Speaker 3: Would you say we're not like all the other girls.
Speaker 1: We're a lot like all the other girls.
Speaker 2: I'm not also going to be and that.
Speaker 1: All girls are beautiful. Okay.
Speaker 2: To get through the words, we're going to be talking
Speaker 2: super fast. So if you put this on like zero
Speaker 2: point six y six speed, you can make yourself a
Speaker 2: fourth episode.
Speaker 1: I'm actually going to slow down a lot.
Speaker 2: Just yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I was gonna say, hey, Robert, yes, did you
Speaker 3: know that Better Offline and Weird Little Guys won their
Speaker 3: webby categories?
Speaker 1: Did they did? They did? Better Offline and Weird Little Guys,
Speaker 1: two new weekly podcasts launch by cool Zone last year,
Speaker 1: both won Webbys in their first year.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes they did.
Speaker 1: That's astonishing. Yeah, you know, uh, I'm very proud of
Speaker 1: our of our little team who, despite being very very
Speaker 1: small in terms of you know, the broader podcasting universe,
Speaker 1: has way more listeners than most of the other podcast
Speaker 1: networks out there and actual fans because we don't just
Speaker 1: buy a bunch of downloads like some people I'm not
Speaker 1: going to name, but we could just like bleep Out
Speaker 1: and pretend that I accused whoever the fuck doing that? So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we're uh, we're we're the We're the we're
Speaker 1: the Vietnam and you know, let's say our enemies and
Speaker 1: the pod Save Guys or the Khmer Rouge of podcasts.
Speaker 3: Right, they also they also want I saw.
Speaker 1: I know, I don't know why. It's literally just like
Speaker 1: the only other podcast network I can remember off the
Speaker 1: top of my head usually, So we shot on.
Speaker 2: Those lot, I don't know, Empires go podcast Empire a
Speaker 2: lot lot smaller body count than yes, Empires.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the exception of the Joe Rogan podcast, which
Speaker 1: he actually might wind up creeping up on old Pollpots members.
Speaker 1: You give him some time and some more testosterone shots. Yeah, yeah, So,
Speaker 1: as I noted at the end of the last episode,
Speaker 1: Pulpot had made it to the Standing Committee in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty and then the party leader of the Communist Party
Speaker 1: of Cambodia, a guy named Samouth, was assassinated three years later,
Speaker 1: probably by the King's security services, although we don't know
Speaker 1: so some people think maybe Polepod orchestrated it. But anyway,
Speaker 1: he winds up in charge as a result of this,
Speaker 1: And yeah, initially the people that he's fighting against as
Speaker 1: he's like leading this increasingly large and capable communist insurgency
Speaker 1: is King Sahannock's monarchy, right, which he battled out of
Speaker 1: a headquarters named Office one hundred, and this is a
Speaker 1: mobile headquarters. Right, We're talking about a jungle insurgency. So
Speaker 1: he's moving constantly to stay ahead of the King's intelligence,
Speaker 1: which is in a large part provided by his American allies. Right,
Speaker 1: Because for the US, his fighting against the Khmer Rouge
Speaker 1: is kind of part of the broader struggle against communism
Speaker 1: in Vietnam. And you know, to be fair, the Vietnamese
Speaker 1: are still running a decent amount of what the Cambodian
Speaker 1: communists are doing even in this period, and like the
Speaker 1: mid sixties, they hold a lot of sway because they
Speaker 1: have a lot, they're a major source of weapons, right,
Speaker 1: they're more organized. But the Cambodian Party is getting a
Speaker 1: lot more independent during this period of time, and Salatsar
Speaker 1: is kind of making it his business to both increase
Speaker 1: that independence and to make friends with the people. He
Speaker 1: needs to beg for guns because they're not really capable
Speaker 1: of manufacturing weapons in the jungle.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, that's a very very vivid setup.
Speaker 1: What was the name of the headquarters again, Office one hundred.
Speaker 2: That fucking rules.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very cool stuff. I mean, it's always when
Speaker 1: you're talking about like an underground insurgent, you've got this
Speaker 1: secret leader nobody knows his name. Again, it's a real bummer.
Speaker 1: From a narrative standpoint, I would have had him born
Speaker 1: Polepot and switched to Salathsar because that's such a cool name,
Speaker 1: Like that's such a scary name. But whatever, that's how
Speaker 1: they change it up. He's subverting expectations and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly a few further dominos will fall.
Speaker 1: Just like Ryan Johnson's Star Wars movies, And like Ryan
Speaker 1: Johnson's Star Wars movies, Salassar travels to Beijing in order
Speaker 1: to beg for weapons. Uh, And to that is that
Speaker 1: is partly true? Yes, And so he is like he is,
Speaker 1: and he's talking with obviously with with with Ho Chi
Speaker 1: min Sti or with the you know, with with the
Speaker 1: the Vietnamese Communists, and they are coordinating, but never to
Speaker 1: the extent that the kind of imagines, right, even though
Speaker 1: they're very dependent on the Vietnamese for a while, they
Speaker 1: never like it. And there is absolutely no desire among
Speaker 1: the Cambodian communists or among polepot to be tightly aligned
Speaker 1: with Vietnam. This like fantasy that the US has that
Speaker 1: China and all the Southeast Asian states are going to
Speaker 1: form like one unified communist block is just absolutely anyone
Speaker 1: with the slightest degree of a knowledge of any of
Speaker 1: these people be like, the fucker, No, they hate each other.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just even meeting four different Asian people. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you could probably see, like you could probably some of
Speaker 2: this shit.
Speaker 1: Talk to a Vietnamese dude about China, like seriously, have
Speaker 1: a conver fucking station. In nineteen seventy, Sahanok's regime is
Speaker 1: overthrown because again, the war is not going well for him,
Speaker 1: He's not particularly good at running Cambodia, and a bunch
Speaker 1: of these kind of right wing leaders in the military
Speaker 1: with the backing of the United States gets pissed off.
Speaker 1: So when when the king, like I think he's actually
Speaker 1: technically calling himself the prince because he gives up his
Speaker 1: royal title to quote unquote run for office whatever, Sahanak
Speaker 1: leaves the country on like a diplomatic visit, and there's
Speaker 1: a coup and the coup is headed by this guy
Speaker 1: called lawn noleh lawn Nole is actually the brother of
Speaker 1: Salathsar's childhood best friend, and obviously, like because of that,
Speaker 1: lawn Nole's brother is a major part of the regime.
Speaker 1: Lawn Nole sets up and he's like, yeah, probably if
Speaker 1: Salas if the if the communists win, my friendship with
Speaker 1: you know, salat Sar will protect me. It doesn't, by
Speaker 1: the way, this guy gets the fucking shit Liq were
Speaker 1: dated out of him. And the fact that there's a
Speaker 1: family connection, you know, or a deep connection between between
Speaker 1: Salatsar who's leading the communists, and you know, the family
Speaker 1: of lawn Nole does nothing to temper the brutality of
Speaker 1: the conflict that follows. Now, a lot of this comes
Speaker 1: directly as a result of law Nole's policies, right, this
Speaker 1: is not just Polepod is running a very brutal insurgency,
Speaker 1: but it's brutal in response to the sheer violence unleashed
Speaker 1: by Nol in order to try to maintain control. As
Speaker 1: soon as the monarchy is abolished, the so called Khmer
Speaker 1: Republic begins calling on the US to continue and extend
Speaker 1: their bombing campaign in Cambodia, which had started clandestinely and
Speaker 1: very illegally in nineteen sixty nine under Nixon as a
Speaker 1: way to try and stop Vietnamese Communists from being able
Speaker 1: to supply themselves. Right, there's this idea, it's accurate idea
Speaker 1: that Cambodia is a big part of how the Vietcong
Speaker 1: are like supplying and this is where they're retreating to
Speaker 1: in order to regather their strength. That is essentially accurate.
Speaker 1: And we are bombing them for years and pretending not to.
Speaker 1: And now when law Nol is in power, we don't
Speaker 1: have to like lie because we're being invited right now,
Speaker 1: we're being invited by this coup that we set up. Right,
Speaker 1: the US would ultimately drop more than half a million
Speaker 1: tons on Cambodia in a four year period of time.
Speaker 1: And for an idea of how many explosives that is,
Speaker 1: I mean that sounds like our lot, right, five hundred
Speaker 1: thousand tons is a lot of weight. That's more than
Speaker 1: the total weight of bombs dropped on the Empire of
Speaker 1: Japan during all of World War two. And right, here's
Speaker 1: the thing. These bombs are being dropped both to deal
Speaker 1: with like Vietcong. You know, tunnel complexes and some of
Speaker 1: their bases, and to stop the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer
Speaker 1: Rouge has no industrial base. Their weapons have to be
Speaker 1: smuggled in. They are not like building tanks. They don't
Speaker 1: have cities that are like functioning as part of an
Speaker 1: industrial core. The Empire of Japan was one of the
Speaker 1: most powerful industrialized states on the planet. And we drop
Speaker 1: more bombs on Cambodia than we did on them, right, Like, right,
Speaker 1: that's Jesus Christ, it's fucking and we nuked Japan famously, right,
Speaker 1: Like the degree of force that we deploy on these
Speaker 1: guys is outrageous and we get fuck all for it.
Speaker 1: Like this could not have been a less useful use
Speaker 1: of force, not that that would have made it like
Speaker 1: moral if like it had won us the war, it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be Okay, I'm not saying that, but it like
Speaker 1: this is just like the biggest l A military one
Speaker 1: of the biggest l's A military ever took, is.
Speaker 2: Not but also somehow extreme, even more pointless than some
Speaker 2: of the other wars.
Speaker 1: And that's the thing. I tried to make this clear
Speaker 1: in the Kissinger episodes, Like it's not just how evil
Speaker 1: he is because he gets depicted as like this evil
Speaker 1: genius a lot. He sucked so much shit at a
Speaker 1: lot of what he was doing. Right, between one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand, three hundred Cambodians probably died. That's a
Speaker 1: credible death toll, although there's a lot of arguments that
Speaker 1: both of those numbers either is much too low, right,
Speaker 1: that it's significantly higher than three hundred thousand. You can
Speaker 1: find some lower estimates. One fifty to three is kind
Speaker 1: of you know somewhere, that's close enough for what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here. It's a crime. It's a historic crime
Speaker 1: against humanity. Right. Most of those dead are civilians, including
Speaker 1: a shitload of little kids who are just incinerated from
Speaker 1: the sky by the United States Air Force. So the
Speaker 1: fact that we're doing this, the fact that we are
Speaker 1: incinerating entire villages, we're just lighting little kids on fire
Speaker 1: from the sky, makes people angry. The folks who don't die,
Speaker 1: and who previously had had their ambition in life had
Speaker 1: been to like, you know, be a peasant, feed my family,
Speaker 1: live a life, you know, like be a normal Cambodian person,
Speaker 1: their ambitions changed after their families get incinerated and suddenly
Speaker 1: They're like, you know, what would be cool killing a
Speaker 1: bunch of people in revenge, you know, getting my vengeance,
Speaker 1: And so a lot of peasants start flocking to the
Speaker 1: banner of the Khmer Rouge, which had not been super
Speaker 1: popular previously, right, it had been growing before this bombing
Speaker 1: campaign escalates, but not massively. The bombing campaign's primary result
Speaker 1: is to supercharge support for the Khmer Rouge, because wouldn't
Speaker 1: you want to shoot somebody?
Speaker 2: Yeah? That is it is. I mean, that's eternally the
Speaker 2: best recruiting tool.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I'll never say anything to mitigate or reduce
Speaker 1: the complicity and the responsibility of Polepot and the leaders
Speaker 1: for the crimes that are about to happen. But the
Speaker 1: crimes are being committed directly on the ground by a
Speaker 1: lot of these young people from the jungle who grow
Speaker 1: up under this bombing campaign and then join the gorilla.
Speaker 1: And I can't, no matter how hideous things are, I
Speaker 1: can't really blame them. Which isn't saying that it's okay
Speaker 1: or justified. It's just saying that, like you, you ruined
Speaker 1: people and they went insane, Like no one's capable of
Speaker 1: acting rationally with the damage that you have done to them,
Speaker 1: you know, with the exception again of these people at
Speaker 1: the top, guys like pole Pot who do not grow up,
Speaker 1: are not raised, being bombed or you know, living under
Speaker 1: these horrible conditions in the jungle. These are people of
Speaker 1: privilege of education who had the opportunity to pick a
Speaker 1: different path and did choose horror, right, And that's where
Speaker 1: my blame lies here. I want to quote from an
Speaker 1: article for the Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network by
Speaker 1: David Chandler. Next quote, and this is kind of describing
Speaker 1: how the Khmer rouge develops as a result of all this.
Speaker 1: The small scale guerrilla movement which he had launched against
Speaker 1: the Henex's government in the late nineteen sixties developed with
Speaker 1: Vietnamese and Chinese backing into a full scale resistance arvey
Speaker 1: fighting the American backed Long Nul regime and Nom Pen.
Speaker 1: At the same time, Sara developed the distinctive ideology which
Speaker 1: made the CPK that's the Communist Party of Cambodia very
Speaker 1: different from other Marxist Leninists parties. He mistrusted the working class,
Speaker 1: relying instead on the poor peasantry, whom he saw as
Speaker 1: the incarnation of Rousseau's noble savage. His party functioned like
Speaker 1: a sect, and some authors underlined that his communism was
Speaker 1: colored by Cambodian Buddhist structures. Its members were required to
Speaker 1: renounce not only material possessions but also spiritual ties. The
Speaker 1: ultimate goal was to crush individual personality and replace it
Speaker 1: by unquestioning adherence to the collectivity. Discipline was ferocious security, omnipresent.
Speaker 1: Saw abhorred the limelight, preferring to operate from the shadows
Speaker 1: and using multiple aliases poke hey, eighty seven, Pole, grand uncle,
Speaker 1: elder brother, first brother, and in later years ninety nine
Speaker 1: or pim. Yet his fanaticism was marked masked by great
Speaker 1: personal charisma. People who met him remembered his winning smile
Speaker 1: and considerable talent as an orator.
Speaker 2: I mean a sick, athletic list of nicknames. It is
Speaker 2: pretty cool. I know I'm fixating. I'm fixating on all
Speaker 2: the names, but they're fucking rad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard not to write like that. For whatever reason,
Speaker 1: I think eighty seven is my pick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is eighty seven based off? Did
Speaker 2: you find that out?
Speaker 1: Actually no, I probably could have figured it out, but
Speaker 1: I didn't come across that in my reading. Now, because
Speaker 1: this is the yeah yeah now, because this isn't a
Speaker 1: military history podcast, and the overall story of Cambodia during
Speaker 1: this period is so much more detailed than we can
Speaker 1: get into. I'm going to have to YadA YadA a
Speaker 1: lot of how how the rebellion you know, succeeds.
Speaker 3: I love when YadA YadA, please YadA yadda ya yaada.
Speaker 1: The gist of it is, Londol's government was only capable
Speaker 1: of holding the line against the communists with US backing,
Speaker 1: and even then not all that well. By the early
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, it had become clear that there was an
Speaker 1: expiration date on that assistance. The Khmayer Rouge grew large
Speaker 1: with each atrocity by the right wing government and their allies.
Speaker 1: In areas where the Rouge took power, everyone old enough
Speaker 1: to fight was drafted into the military, and everyone else
Speaker 1: was put to work. The all black garb of the peasantry,
Speaker 1: which had just kind of been a traditional thing in Cambodia,
Speaker 1: became the only acceptable outfit to wear. You're literally not
Speaker 1: allowed to dress differently. Those who refused to serve were executed.
Speaker 1: By nineteen seventy three, most of rural Cambodia was in
Speaker 1: rouge hands, and I got to say, the one aspect
Speaker 1: of the Khmer Rouge I could have done great with
Speaker 1: is just kind of wearing black pajamas all the time,
Speaker 1: Like I got that shit on the lock, baby, Like
Speaker 1: I'm wearing this like sport coat thing, but it's just
Speaker 1: black pajamas under this.
Speaker 2: This is this is the tragedy of the YouTube era. Yeah,
Speaker 2: is this fucking sport coat? When you know Robert could
Speaker 2: just be full jammed out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and I am. This thing doesn't reduce the comfort,
Speaker 1: It's fine, don't worry. Don't worry. I'm pole Potting under this.
Speaker 2: That's what he says. That's every episode, It's not just
Speaker 2: this one.
Speaker 1: The final straw for lon Nole's regime is when Prince Sahanna,
Speaker 1: hiding in exile, announced his support for Polepot's rebels. Now
Speaker 1: we've done. We did a two part or one of
Speaker 1: our very first episodes on Notre Dame Sahanak. He sucks ass.
Speaker 1: Listen to those episodes as to why. But the reason
Speaker 1: he does this is he believed that, like you know,
Speaker 1: he thought this might give him a shot at returning
Speaker 1: to power. Right if I back these guys. Clearly they
Speaker 1: won't last, and eventually I'll be able to make my
Speaker 1: way back in. Right. What really happens is he strengthens
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge at a critical moment because again, people
Speaker 1: the peasantry feel very strongly about the royalty, right, and
Speaker 1: that still has not been busted, even though he really
Speaker 1: sucked ass when he was actually running things. He does
Speaker 1: this right as the US is starting to pull out
Speaker 1: their assets and things fall very quickly. Think about kind
Speaker 1: of how long the government of Afghanistan lasted as the
Speaker 1: US pulled out, right, that's kind of what we're seeing here.
Speaker 1: On April seventeenth, nineteen seventy five, Lon Nole's army collapsed
Speaker 1: entirely and the Khmer Rouge entered Nom Penn. Now you
Speaker 1: got to remember at this point, you know, when they
Speaker 1: take the capital, the fighting has been going on in
Speaker 1: parts of Cambodia for twenty years or more. People are
Speaker 1: fucking exhausted, and is always the case in times like this.
Speaker 1: There was an optimism among like a lot of regular
Speaker 1: people that like, look, I don't know so much about
Speaker 1: these Khmer Rouge guys, but the war's over. Maybe things
Speaker 1: will get better, right, there's this hope, and that hope
Speaker 1: is crushed very quickly because Polepot and his comrades, it's
Speaker 1: not even that they don't want to go back to
Speaker 1: normal and their minds going back to normal is a
Speaker 1: death sentence, right. And again this is kind of what
Speaker 1: messes with a lot of people's casual understanding of what's happening,
Speaker 1: because you would think, well, obviously, these guys have to
Speaker 1: hate the US more than anybody else, right, not at
Speaker 1: all the cases. The people the Polepot's obsession is Vietnam.
Speaker 1: That is the real enemy, not capitalism, not the United States,
Speaker 1: the West Vietnam. Saigon fell to the NVA not far
Speaker 1: from when Nam Pen did, right. And because of this,
Speaker 1: because Vietnam has won its War two, there's this immediate
Speaker 1: widespread paranoia among the Khmer Rouge leadership that the Vietnamese
Speaker 1: are going to digest their meal of southern Vietnam and
Speaker 1: then they're immediately going to take this big army they've
Speaker 1: got with tanks and aircraft and all sorts of modern
Speaker 1: weapons that the Khmer Rouge does not really have access to,
Speaker 1: and they're going to cross the border and they're going
Speaker 1: to invade Cambodia. And they're going to take us out
Speaker 1: and make us nothing but a tribute state, right like
Speaker 1: that is the immediate fear, and the only way to
Speaker 1: resist this future, to have a chance of defeating Vietnam
Speaker 1: and maintaining Khmara autonomy is to rapidly change the country,
Speaker 1: both in terms of how food is produced and how
Speaker 1: like to and to do this kind of they're very
Speaker 1: motivated by these ideas they'd taken from Mao. That kind
Speaker 1: of became the great leap for word in China of
Speaker 1: like what if we do industrialism? But it's like everybody's
Speaker 1: backyard is helping to like make different sort of industrial products, right.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, the I guess it's just DIY
Speaker 2: approach to making you know your aks and your plate armor.
Speaker 1: Yes, and you can with guns, but not like the
Speaker 1: guns you need to win a modern right, You're not
Speaker 1: gonna be like making an SBG nine in your backyard
Speaker 1: or whatever. Fucking shit speaking of making recoilist rifles in
Speaker 1: your backyard. Our sponsors will teach you how they love
Speaker 1: helping people maintain modern I don't know whatever. Their freedom
Speaker 1: yeah freedom fuck ah and I'm bad. Okay, So cities
Speaker 1: like the Capital have no place in Polepot's radical view
Speaker 1: of the future of the country, which needs to be
Speaker 1: immediately changed on a fundamental level in order to survive
Speaker 1: and defeat the Vietnamese. So there's this plan that's hatched
Speaker 1: by Polepot in the leadership of the party to completely
Speaker 1: reform Cambodian society in order to make it capable of surviving.
Speaker 1: And Polepot names this plan year zero. In April of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, they declare this openly, and this Year
Speaker 1: zero concept. We talked about this in the earlier episodes.
Speaker 1: It's based in part on Polepot's understanding of the French
Speaker 1: revolution right as well as reading from guys like Thomas Paine,
Speaker 1: because he does read like American revolutionaries too, And in
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six pain had published this quote, we have
Speaker 1: it in our power to begin the world over again,
Speaker 1: a situation similar to the present. Hath not happened since
Speaker 1: the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a
Speaker 1: new world is at hand. And this is the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you hear in some like optimistic revolutionary tracts,
Speaker 1: especially in the headiness of like we've defeated the regime,
Speaker 1: we have this chance for a total break with history. Right,
Speaker 1: there's even you can you can think about kind of
Speaker 1: the whole the end of history stuff that was being
Speaker 1: said at the when the Soviet Union fell. There's this
Speaker 1: headiness of like, well, maybe maybe we're done competing with
Speaker 1: like what kind of systems are going to work? Maybe
Speaker 1: we've maybe we can. We're entering into this fundamentally new
Speaker 1: world that's like represents this real break of continuity, and
Speaker 1: that means we're never going to have to worry about
Speaker 1: like going back to any of the bad old days
Speaker 1: or the problems that we had struggled to know back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no way of going back.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: We finally did it?
Speaker 2: Oh man, I mean obviously in hindsight, but like, never
Speaker 2: has that sentiment been expressed and had not been a
Speaker 2: true psycho saying.
Speaker 1: Right right right, I mean I love me some Thomas Paine,
Speaker 1: but you should look at the rest of his life.
Speaker 1: This wasn't I mean, obviously we the US became a
Speaker 1: slave state, right yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from an article written by Adris ayres here. Quote it
Speaker 1: is evident that the Khmer Rouge, in deliberate and skillful fashion,
Speaker 1: drew on history for political INDs. Their leadership made repeated
Speaker 1: reference to the importance of grasping the wheel of history
Speaker 1: and how history would crush those who stood in the
Speaker 1: way of development. I've heard Musk say some similar things.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy six, as part of Polpot's consolidation of
Speaker 1: personal power, official party historiography was revised with an eye
Speaker 1: to the older Indo Chinese guerrilla fractions within the movement
Speaker 1: by moving the date of the parties founding from nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty one to nineteen sixty and a meeting of the
Speaker 1: Central Committee in March nineteen seventy six, it was noted,
Speaker 1: with regard to historiography, that we must rearrange the history
Speaker 1: of the party into something clean and perfect. Do not
Speaker 1: use nineteen fifty one, make a clean break. So again
Speaker 1: there's this even our re history of our real movement,
Speaker 1: that one isn't good enough. We have to like And
Speaker 1: if if you're ever in a if're ever finding your movement,
Speaker 1: is needing to like alter the very basic foundation of
Speaker 1: reality for your ideas to work.
Speaker 2: Maybe bounce, I mean the b side of all the
Speaker 2: cool names is like a sort of juvenile relationship to
Speaker 2: like your own story, which is right, kind of weirdly
Speaker 2: an evident here in evidence. Here we're like, why.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is and this is why, like we talk
Speaker 1: about the reason why I identify more as an anarchist
Speaker 1: than anything else. Isn't because like I have some great
Speaker 1: plan based on some thinker, for like, this is the
Speaker 1: perfect way to reorder society, and if we did this
Speaker 1: exact thing, based on this exact book, it would clearly
Speaker 1: work without any problems. I feel that way because like,
Speaker 1: anarchists have diagnosed the problem in a way that I'd
Speaker 1: never seen be wrong. And the problem is if you
Speaker 1: give people lots of power, Yeah, they do horrible things. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's that's kind of where I get into
Speaker 1: it from. Right.
Speaker 2: And then every conceivable war, yeah, every conceivable dimension that
Speaker 2: that power can be gained from. Yeah, still bad.
Speaker 1: Yes, And when you have all of the power and
Speaker 1: you have this very strict idea of this, we need
Speaker 1: to do this exact thing, and this exact thing is
Speaker 1: the only thing that can save us, and then the
Speaker 1: world doesn't sort of change the way you think it
Speaker 1: ought to based on your political beliefs, Well, you're just
Speaker 1: going to start killing people and that's sure enough. What's
Speaker 1: going to happen here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the.
Speaker 1: Project to make a clean break with history, this whole
Speaker 1: Year zero thing is urgent, right because unless they can
Speaker 1: do this before Vietnam swallows them up, they're fucked. The
Speaker 1: internal Marxist analysis also indicated that Cambodia had to proceed
Speaker 1: directly from feudalism to communism within four years, which they
Speaker 1: called the super great leap forward. We already know this
Speaker 1: can work for Mao, and we're like, but when we
Speaker 1: make it like a super greatly for it's like Mario
Speaker 1: Brothers suck edd ass. But once we ded a super,
Speaker 1: it was finally good.
Speaker 2: Just do the thing that already didn't work, but more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Mao was just sitting there like, God, damn it,
Speaker 1: Why didn't I put a super in front of it? Fuck?
Speaker 1: The backyard furnaces would have worked, super sparrow murdering. In
Speaker 1: policy terms, Year zero had a fairly narrow meaning the
Speaker 1: cities which were dominant. As I stated in earlier episodes,
Speaker 1: the cities have a like they're not like overwhelmingly Khmer
Speaker 1: like the rest of the country is. They have a
Speaker 1: lot of Vietnamese and Chinese traders and a lot of
Speaker 1: the Khmer that lived there are the new people, right,
Speaker 1: They are educated Khmer who come from families with money,
Speaker 1: who have gone through Western education, who have often been
Speaker 1: educated overseas and have thus been unforgivably tainted by foreign influence.
Speaker 1: Now you may also notice these new people that he's
Speaker 1: saying we need to expel from the cities are Polepot
Speaker 1: and his friends right right, Still, the new people have
Speaker 1: to either assimilate to the base people, and the base
Speaker 1: people are Khmer peasant farmers, or die. And the distinct
Speaker 1: preference of the Khmer rus is that they die. Andres
Speaker 1: Airs describes how jarringly rapid this process is. Quote. Money
Speaker 1: markets and private properties, schools, institutes of higher education, newspapers,
Speaker 1: and religious institutions all were immediately abolished after the seizure
Speaker 1: of power. Early eyewitness accounts relate how the hospital and
Speaker 1: non pen was emptied of patients, how the national bank
Speaker 1: was set on fire, money burned in the streets. Immediately
Speaker 1: after the victory proclamation, book burnings were orchestrated in front
Speaker 1: of the National Library and the School of Renee Descartes.
Speaker 1: The country's borders were closed immediately, and the cleansing of
Speaker 1: the country from foreign influences began by deporting foreigners and
Speaker 1: domestic minorities such as Vietnamese Muslim Khmer, Chinese Khmer ties,
Speaker 1: and Europeans. It was also so officially announced that the
Speaker 1: individual would be abolished the traditional family would be replaced
Speaker 1: by the movement in order to create a completely conflict
Speaker 1: free society. Revolutionaries were officially instructed not to have a personality.
Speaker 1: The individual was continually counterposed to the people, with the
Speaker 1: former representing division, factionalism, inequality, bourgeoisie values, and foreign influence.
Speaker 1: The people meanwhile embodied its polar opposite, something entirely pure redemption,
Speaker 1: the extermination of particularity and contingency and the realization of
Speaker 1: absolute freedom, equality and fraternity through complete absorption into the
Speaker 1: ang Car. And that's the people. That's the Vulk, right,
Speaker 1: you know, the Nazi said the Vulcan. The ang Car
Speaker 1: is that for the Khmer rouse It's close enough at least, right,
Speaker 1: And yeah, revolutionaries are not allowed to have personalities.
Speaker 2: I mean, I know we're coming at this from a
Speaker 2: different time and hindsight, but I it's so hard for
Speaker 2: me to even hear the version of that speech that's
Speaker 2: stirring or less motivating it's really wild.
Speaker 1: And it's motivating to the people who have been drinking
Speaker 1: the kool aid, because again, they've been in these They
Speaker 1: started out in these circles where it's just them and
Speaker 1: their friends, continually radicalizing each other further and not really
Speaker 1: listening to outside people, right, and then they moved to
Speaker 1: the jungle and become so not only are they all
Speaker 1: like trauma bonding getting bombed together, but they're continuing to
Speaker 1: talk out these ideas and just take themselves like. This
Speaker 1: isn't for other people, right. The point is not to
Speaker 1: inspire other people, right, right, And it is this you get.
Speaker 1: This is an issue I have with like some other
Speaker 1: people that I otherwise agree with a lot. There's talk
Speaker 1: among certain left inst tendencies about the concept of the
Speaker 1: abolition of the family and what they tend to mean
Speaker 1: in the modern era is looking at a lot of
Speaker 1: how much of right wing policy is based upon the
Speaker 1: idea that parents own their children, right, and that literally,
Speaker 1: like anything a parent wants for their kid, that's all
Speaker 1: that should matter, right, which leads to a lot of
Speaker 1: heinous Some of the worst things that happen in our
Speaker 1: society is because of our conception of the family. As
Speaker 1: this thing in which the parents, primarily the father, possesses
Speaker 1: everyone else, right, and wanting to abolish that idea of
Speaker 1: the family is good, But when you start framing it
Speaker 1: as family, it's going to bring this up. People are
Speaker 1: going to think about what the Khmayer Rouge did as
Speaker 1: opposed to being like, I don't think parents should be
Speaker 1: allowed to poison their kids because they have autism, right right, right,
Speaker 1: you know, but anyway get.
Speaker 2: Into it absolute power and within the family, and this
Speaker 2: is not a unit that should exist. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 2: this is not good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's this optic it's an optical issue, I think.
Speaker 1: But that's not you know, the Khmyre rouges not wanting
Speaker 1: to abolish the family because there's anything similar to the
Speaker 1: issue we have with the parental rights movement in the US, right,
Speaker 1: the Khmayer Rouge wants to abolish the family because all
Speaker 1: they want to exist is the party and this idea
Speaker 1: of almost like a collective consciousness. If we can wipe
Speaker 1: out enough individualism, then like we will have this kind
Speaker 1: of pure individual close to nature, this like idolized everyone
Speaker 1: will be the idolized Khmer peasant farmer who, by the way,
Speaker 1: Polpot's parents had fought tooth and nail to make sure
Speaker 1: he never had to.
Speaker 2: Be Yeah, yeah, don't worry about that.
Speaker 1: So as soon as they start doing all of this stuff,
Speaker 1: people begin to starve. Right There's so much disruption. There's
Speaker 1: disruption to the way food has grown and the way
Speaker 1: it's transmitted, all of these networks that had existed. It's
Speaker 1: one thing if you're like, we want to get rid
Speaker 1: of capitalism, and we want to get rid of things
Speaker 1: being entirely governed by the financial motive, but you have
Speaker 1: to account for the fact that, like, well, but that's
Speaker 1: how all of the food gets places right now, and like,
Speaker 1: do you not have a You have to have a
Speaker 1: real granular plan for how you're going to make sure
Speaker 1: food keeps getting to people. They're why is everyone's going
Speaker 1: to die? And that's what starts to happen, and people
Speaker 1: also start to starve to death as they are forced
Speaker 1: at gunpoint out of the cities. Non pen had flooded
Speaker 1: to significantly higher than its pre war population because of
Speaker 1: the war going on, and now these people are being
Speaker 1: marched out and no one's allowed to take anything. People
Speaker 1: are being dragged out at gunpoint in some cases, their
Speaker 1: houses are being burnt down. They don't have a lot
Speaker 1: of baggage, right, and it's not like people had a
Speaker 1: lot we're keeping like food on hand. This isn't like
Speaker 1: a prepper culture. Folks don't have like freeze dried shit
Speaker 1: in their houses. So people are just being forced to
Speaker 1: walk a lot of a number of them have been
Speaker 1: pulled out of hospitals and they're just dying. They're dying
Speaker 1: by the tins of thousands alongside the road, and as
Speaker 1: people march out, they're just seeing these piles of corpses
Speaker 1: of their neighbors and family members bloating in the sun.
Speaker 1: It's just a really hideous like nightmare for all of
Speaker 1: these people. And they're you know, these fighters that they're
Speaker 1: meeting are folks largely who'd come from like rural areas
Speaker 1: in the jungle. They're very young. A lot of them
Speaker 1: are teenagers who have been raised on this war, and
Speaker 1: they number one, don't have a lot of sympathy for
Speaker 1: these people in the cities, who they've seen as the enemy.
Speaker 1: The capital is what they've been fighting, if you want
Speaker 1: to think it, like hunger games, derroty. And also they've
Speaker 1: been told these are the new people. Right, These are
Speaker 1: the enemy. We do have to get rid of them,
Speaker 1: one way or another. So if you kill these people,
Speaker 1: if you shoot them by the side of the road,
Speaker 1: if they starve to death, you're helping to bring about that.
Speaker 1: You're helping to save the Khmer people. Right. While most
Speaker 1: of the deaths under the new regime are caused by
Speaker 1: diseaser famine, they're all intentional. These are all the results
Speaker 1: of policies set by Polpot and his comrades, and the
Speaker 1: expectation of these policies was mass dying. The stage had
Speaker 1: been set for this in the years leading up to
Speaker 1: the capital's fall by a process of what is called
Speaker 1: by genocide scholars toxification, specifically toxification through Khmer rouge propaganda toxification.
Speaker 1: This is a process you can watch happen right now
Speaker 1: in your very own country, presuming you live in the
Speaker 1: United States. But well other countries, Yeah, but a few
Speaker 1: other countries. We can talk about some recent Supreme Court
Speaker 1: rulings in the UK. Toxification is a process often seen
Speaker 1: in genocide, whereby groups of people are depicted as inherently
Speaker 1: poisonous to the well being of the body politic. The
Speaker 1: real people of a community. Soldiers are not, in general,
Speaker 1: born willing to fill mass grapes or to march an
Speaker 1: entire city out of their homes and die right. They
Speaker 1: are there, They're pushed there, They're gotten to that point
Speaker 1: when they have been convinced that doing so is either
Speaker 1: a form of self defense or a way to fight
Speaker 1: their enemy, or both right, And that's what toxification does.
Speaker 1: There's a very good article on this process called toxification
Speaker 1: and the Khmer Rouge genocide or autogenocide you'll hear both terms,
Speaker 1: published in the Journal of Terror and Political Violence by
Speaker 1: Timothy Williams and Rhianna Nielsen. I recommend reading the whole thing.
Speaker 1: It's a very good article, and it's very important article.
Speaker 1: It will be kind of chilling and light of things
Speaker 1: happening in our present world, but it ought to be,
Speaker 1: and it details how the messaging from Polepot on down
Speaker 1: through the Khmer Rouge hierarchy seeded the militant population with
Speaker 1: the kind of toxic attitudes that are a necessary precursor
Speaker 1: to mass killing. The first people targeted specifically for mass
Speaker 1: execution were those who had bought into and succeeded under
Speaker 1: the capitalist system. These were the budding intelligencia, of whom
Speaker 1: Polepot himself had been a member, professors, lawyers, business owners,
Speaker 1: government officials. Polepot called them the internal enemy or super traders.
Speaker 1: You really like super You hear a lot of that. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this includes people who had been in the military, of
Speaker 1: law and nol.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: And the idea was that in this is Polepot's writing,
Speaker 1: anyone with money quote owed the Communist Party a blood debt. Right,
Speaker 1: So this is the first stage, and it's pretty easy
Speaker 1: to get people on board with killing a lot of
Speaker 1: these folks, right. That said, there's not many of them, right,
Speaker 1: and once you start mass killing, you don't tend to stop.
Speaker 1: So next, in nineteen seventy six, Polpot turned the eyes
Speaker 1: and guns of his men on the quote unquote treacherous
Speaker 1: elements he accused of causing sickness within the party. These
Speaker 1: ugly microbes had to be destroyed before they rotted democratic Campuccia,
Speaker 1: which is what they're calling Cambodia now, right, like once
Speaker 1: the Moors takes over, it becomes goes from the Khmer
Speaker 1: Republic to Democratic Campuccia. And Polepot writes of these ugly microbes,
Speaker 1: quote what is infected must be cut, What is rotten,
Speaker 1: must be removed. It isn't enough to cut down a
Speaker 1: bad plant, it must be uprooted. And you see this
Speaker 1: a lot in genocidal language, right, you know, this is
Speaker 1: like Hitler calling the Jews the syphilitic bacillus, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or you know any Fano slide.
Speaker 1: Any fantastic line.
Speaker 2: It's like, again, it's just so hard to put myself
Speaker 2: in the mindset where you hear this and you're like,
Speaker 2: let's go yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's you also get this is something we're hearing
Speaker 1: right now with the way mental illness and things that
Speaker 1: are called mental illness is. This is being discussed by
Speaker 1: the right, and it's there's big news right now about
Speaker 1: the fact that RFK Junior is putting trying to get
Speaker 1: trying to use government databases put together a list of
Speaker 1: everyone with autism. That's how it's being spread on social media.
Speaker 1: The actual story is even I would argue even a
Speaker 1: little worse than that, which is that they're attempting to
Speaker 1: put together a database of everybody who has been diagnosed
Speaker 1: with any kind of mental health condition, who is on
Speaker 1: any kind of medication. It's even broader than just that,
Speaker 1: and part of what's going on here is that, like
Speaker 1: there's a big right wing campaign to like blame gun
Speaker 1: violence on the mentally ill right. And another part of
Speaker 1: it is that there's a desire to reclassify being transgender
Speaker 1: and eventually even being LGBT is a mental illness, in
Speaker 1: part because those people can be disarmed, in part because
Speaker 1: then you can put those people in you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: facilities or whatever. I tend to think that the goal
Speaker 1: that a lot of these people are thinking towards is
Speaker 1: less Nazi style death camps and gas fans and more
Speaker 1: a Judge Rotenberg Center on every corner if you want
Speaker 1: to go back to our Judge Rotenberg Center episodes. But
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about that in other days. But I
Speaker 1: bring this up to say this is a constant when
Speaker 1: regimes begin the process that can end in mass killing.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that that's an inevitable state of
Speaker 1: affairs for us here, but I think people need to
Speaker 1: be very aware of that because the similarities between these
Speaker 1: situations are not inconsequential.
Speaker 2: It's it's necessary but not sufficient, but it is necessary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for the.
Speaker 2: Death camps version.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Polepot argued that these diseased elements of the
Speaker 1: populace had to be purified. Year zero could ensure a
Speaker 1: maoist elimination of contradiction. Turning in counter revolutionary elements became
Speaker 1: a way to get ahead or to protect yourself. Cadras,
Speaker 1: which are like members of the party, are rewarded for
Speaker 1: their ability to purge the enemy within. Per that article
Speaker 1: by Williams and Nielsen, violence became a part of everyday life,
Speaker 1: and punishment for infringence of the minutely planned details of
Speaker 1: society were draconian, often costing people their lives, particularly as
Speaker 1: most mistakes such as foraging for food or not eating
Speaker 1: with the collective were immediately interpreted as evidence of counter
Speaker 1: revolutionary tendencies. Although anyone could fall victim of the system,
Speaker 1: prime targets for elimination were ethnic Cham and Vietnamese minorities,
Speaker 1: former soldiers or officials under the Londol regime, intellectuals or
Speaker 1: others deemed not to fit into a peasant society, as
Speaker 1: well as any person whom the regime believed to be
Speaker 1: an internal enemy, mostly associated with being an agent of
Speaker 1: the CIA, KGB or the Vietnamese secret service. And I
Speaker 1: think it's so interesting part of this is there's such
Speaker 1: a hatred of this concept of being an individual that
Speaker 1: even if you're like foraging for food to stop you
Speaker 1: and your family from starving, that's individualist behavior and you
Speaker 1: have to be killed for it, right.
Speaker 2: God yeah, I mean. But also it's like all those
Speaker 2: rules I feel like most of those times are asymmetrically
Speaker 2: applied for you know, whatever means want to be accomplished.
Speaker 1: And that's key. And a lot of the people being
Speaker 1: who these rules are being applied to, it's not even
Speaker 1: necessarily that they did the thing, or that they were
Speaker 1: the only person doing the thing. A lot of people
Speaker 1: do the same stuff and get away with it. It's that
Speaker 1: they had missed someone else up for another reason, someone
Speaker 1: wanted their stuff. There's a lot of score settling that
Speaker 1: happens anytime this kind of shit's going down. And this
Speaker 1: gets me to an important side of fact about what
Speaker 1: happened in Cambodia. You will usually see the mass killing
Speaker 1: in Cambodia referred to either as the Cambodian genocide or
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge genocide. This term is not I think
Speaker 1: accurate to describe most of what happened, because the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the people who were or you know, as
Speaker 1: a part of these year zero policies were Khmer and
Speaker 1: the goal of the regime was not to wipe out
Speaker 1: the Khmer, right, it was to make them stronger and
Speaker 1: ultimately more numerous. And it was just a disastrous failure. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: The term autogenocide which was coined by author Jean lac
Speaker 1: Lacutre something like that, Jeane Lacuter and the autogenocide was
Speaker 1: coined by this French author in order to separate the
Speaker 1: unique circumstances of mass killing and Cambodia from the Holocaust
Speaker 1: and other traditional genocides. I again, there's some issues with that,
Speaker 1: even because genocide is is not fully the right term
Speaker 1: for what pol Pot and his peers are trying to
Speaker 1: do to the Khmer people, right, because their goal is
Speaker 1: to ensure the survival of their race. Right. You can
Speaker 1: come down on however you like on what we should
Speaker 1: call this right, but I should note that while what
Speaker 1: the most of the killing the regime does, and most
Speaker 1: of who the regime kills are Khmer, While I don't
Speaker 1: know that it's right to say that like genocide is
Speaker 1: just strictly textually the right way to describe that, there
Speaker 1: are genocides that are being committed by the regime Khmer
Speaker 1: rouge like normal, like straight up dictionary genocides, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, I wonder if it's it just comes down to,
Speaker 2: like it's sort of functionally the same type of murder.
Speaker 2: And I wonder if the argument is sort of like
Speaker 2: every genocide is actually politically motivated, like Shelly, somewhat external
Speaker 2: to the stated aims of the genocide, So like, yeah,
Speaker 2: what does it really matter?
Speaker 1: That's absolutely the case. I think kind of the issue
Speaker 1: comes down to is like, well, they weren't trying to
Speaker 1: wipe out the Khmer, right, Like they just thought that
Speaker 1: wiping out these people, which wound up being a huge
Speaker 1: junk of the Khmer, would strengthen things like what do
Speaker 1: you call that? You know, to a degree doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: It's certainly not to the dead. But I do want
Speaker 1: to make a point that there were us straight up
Speaker 1: normal genocides occurring too in this mass killing. That paragraph
Speaker 1: I read a little earlier mentioned both the Cham and
Speaker 1: the Vietnamese ethnic minorities in Cambodia being targeted. And I
Speaker 1: think all of these different kind of non Khmer people
Speaker 1: are like five to ten percent maybe of the total
Speaker 1: number of dead but when you look at these as populations,
Speaker 1: these different ethnic populations that are being targeted, are are
Speaker 1: killed in a way that makes them some of the
Speaker 1: most total genocides I've ever studied. Roughly fifty percent of
Speaker 1: Chinese Cambodians and these are not like necessary. Some of
Speaker 1: them are Chinese immigrants, but these are just these are
Speaker 1: people who are ethnically Chinese and live in Cambodia. Right,
Speaker 1: fifty percent of the pre war population is executed or
Speaker 1: starved in a three year period, and they got off
Speaker 1: light compared to the ethnically Vietnamese Cambodians. I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from that article again. In particular, the Khmer Rouge
Speaker 1: propaganda organs described the Vietnamese as toxic to Democratic Campuccia
Speaker 1: by state that their goal is to swallow Cambodia's territory
Speaker 1: and force Cambodia into an Indo Chinese federation under its control.
Speaker 1: Vietnamese were portrayed as quintessentially evil and lethal to the
Speaker 1: Democratic Campuccia. Radio broadcasts described the Vietnamese as living concealed
Speaker 1: among the population, infiltrating, sabotaging, and destroying the communist regime,
Speaker 1: therefore being toxic to the ideal. Further broadcast spoke of
Speaker 1: the need to weed out and exterminate the enemy planted
Speaker 1: within the cooperatives, and reminded civilians you are not fighting
Speaker 1: only against Vietnamese soldiers, but the whole of Vietnam, so
Speaker 1: spare nothing and no one. According to Polpot, the Vietnamese
Speaker 1: are a black dragon that spits its poison. The overall
Speaker 1: death toll for Vietnamese Khmers was nearly one hundred percent
Speaker 1: of the population.
Speaker 2: Jesus, yes, yeah, yeah, I mean like.
Speaker 1: That this is about the most total genocide I've ever
Speaker 1: heard of, the Vietnamese khmar in particular.
Speaker 2: Right, right, Yeah, I mean that's like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess. I still I'm just like not still,
Speaker 2: but like like it is like it's hard.
Speaker 1: To wrap your head around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard to wrap my head around, and but
Speaker 2: also like hard to like be like this can't be
Speaker 2: the I mean, it just feels like the stated goal
Speaker 2: can't be the actual goal, I guess, but like I
Speaker 2: don't I don't know what I think the actual goal
Speaker 2: is anyway, But you know what I mean, I'm just
Speaker 2: like it has to just be sort of a vague
Speaker 2: notion of power it.
Speaker 1: Feels like it's it's.
Speaker 2: One of these killing your enemies like that.
Speaker 1: For well, because the people at the top giving the
Speaker 1: orders live these lives of the mind where their whole
Speaker 1: ego is in I am, I am, I am intelligent,
Speaker 1: I understand how things really work, and I have this
Speaker 1: plan right, and everything about their personalities wrapped up in
Speaker 1: that plan. So it has to work, and they simply
Speaker 1: can't accept. They can't even let themselves look at a
Speaker 1: reality that would that would lead to that being questioned.
Speaker 1: But then they're passing these orders down to people who
Speaker 1: number one. Just the desperation of their life, the violence
Speaker 1: they've seen, makes certain things just less abhorrent to them.
Speaker 1: But also there's room for them to advance. The more
Speaker 1: of these people they kill, the more stuff they get,
Speaker 1: the more they move up, the safer they are, the
Speaker 1: more food they get, right, and that.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's yeah.
Speaker 1: And the incentives come because of the fucked up beliefs
Speaker 1: of the leaders and the desperation of the people doing
Speaker 1: a lot of the killing makes them respond better than
Speaker 1: the incentives, you know, right, right, which is by the way,
Speaker 1: this is not every genocide. For example, I wouldn't talk
Speaker 1: about the members of the s s this way because
Speaker 1: they're not right. But this is what's happening in Cambodia.
Speaker 1: Speaking of what's happening in Cambodia, presumably someone in Cambodia
Speaker 1: is listening to this podcast.
Speaker 2: And if say, look, hi, Hi, you didn't say speaking
Speaker 2: off mass killing or anything like that. So this is
Speaker 2: one of the better adrows.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, visit Cambodia or not. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I haven't been. I hope I hear. It's nice and
Speaker 1: we're back. So the Cham were another non Khmer ethnic
Speaker 1: group that was targeted by the regime. And to make
Speaker 1: matters worse, the Chams are Muslim, right and Polpot considered
Speaker 1: Islam to be inherently reactionary, right, a fundamental enemy of communism.
Speaker 1: The large part of the reason why is that Muslims
Speaker 1: pray five times a day, right, and Polepot describes this
Speaker 1: as them shirking their responsibility to work. Right, this is
Speaker 1: an individualist thing, and it's also stopping you from participating
Speaker 1: in the national project as much as everyone else. Right,
Speaker 1: the Chams are just thus a drain on the ideal
Speaker 1: communist state that he wanted to form. So Polpot sent
Speaker 1: his men to wipe out every Cham village they could find,
Speaker 1: and roughly fifty percent of Cham Cambodians had been killed
Speaker 1: by the late nineteen seventy nine. Now what's interesting to
Speaker 1: me is that he also targets the Buddhists, or at
Speaker 1: least the Buddhist clergy. And this is interesting. This is
Speaker 1: kind of weird because like, he had a really good
Speaker 1: time at the monastery, he described it his whole life
Speaker 1: as a positive experience, but as leader of Democratic Campucia,
Speaker 1: he describes Buddhist monks as quote parasites who eat the
Speaker 1: rice of the people. Monks are ordered to carry out
Speaker 1: hard labor, and the vast majority of monks who had
Speaker 1: existed pre war are killed by the Khmer rouge. Williams
Speaker 1: and Nielsen site an internal rouge document that brags a
Speaker 1: ninety to ninety five percent success rate in wiping out
Speaker 1: the Buddhist monk population. So again almost totally takes out
Speaker 1: the Buddhist clergy within like the Theravada Buddhist clergy within Cambodia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it just feels like it's also like does this
Speaker 2: sort of thing snowball, Like once you get started with
Speaker 2: the mass killing, then your life on the list. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, once you pop, the fun don't stop right right
Speaker 1: popping here is putting people on us graves. Yeah now,
Speaker 1: and this is so important to start it, to stop
Speaker 1: it from starting.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Again, ninety percent or so of the people killed by
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge are Khmer. Most die is a result
Speaker 1: of these kind of insane agricultural and land reform policies,
Speaker 1: the mass to population, all the starvation and stuff that
Speaker 1: goes along with it. But as time goes on, an
Speaker 1: increasing number of people are being tortured and killed by
Speaker 1: the regime. And past the initial point where they're like
Speaker 1: punishing the capitalists and the members of Law and Nole's government,
Speaker 1: most of the people being tortured and killed directly are
Speaker 1: like former party members and like communists and stuff. Right,
Speaker 1: A lot of them are people who had been part
Speaker 1: of Polpot's old reading circle back in Paris. Right, they
Speaker 1: are wiping out you know, every revolution devours it's young.
Speaker 1: But they are doing that in like famous time. Here
Speaker 1: for an idea of how it was to have agreed
Speaker 1: with Polepot back when he was Salath Czar, or even
Speaker 1: during the victory of the Khmer Rouge over the Lawndol government.
Speaker 1: Of the original twenty two members of the Central Committee
Speaker 1: for the Democratic Campuccia Party, which is who officially governed
Speaker 1: after the end of the war, six lasted to the
Speaker 1: end of the regime without being killed or tortured, and
Speaker 1: the vast majority of them those were killed. The very
Speaker 1: few people who survived owed their lives to their sworn enemies,
Speaker 1: the Vietnamese army who eventually liberated Toul Slang which was
Speaker 1: the prison for specifically like after a point, it's specifically
Speaker 1: the prison four party members who were disloyal to eliminate confusion.
Speaker 1: Tool slang is more commonly known as Security Prison twenty
Speaker 1: one or S twenty one. Right, And this is in
Speaker 1: terms of its like level of fame to people who
Speaker 1: read about this tool slang or S twenty one is
Speaker 1: the Auschwitz of Cambodia, right, Right. It's not on that scale,
Speaker 1: it's not that big a camp, but it's death toll
Speaker 1: is is Yeah, is.
Speaker 2: That like sort of I mean, I know, it's like
Speaker 2: as you just said, like you know, every revolution devours
Speaker 2: it's young, but that still feels like a high percentage
Speaker 2: of like yeah, energies, yeah, like getting got.
Speaker 1: I think part of it's just because none of this
Speaker 1: is working and someone has to pay and part of
Speaker 1: it again just because once you start killing like this, yeah,
Speaker 1: you keep you can't stop, right, in part because stopping
Speaker 1: then you have to deal with the fact that nothing worked,
Speaker 1: that everything was a failure, that your whole life and
Speaker 1: all of your beliefs are wrong and no one at
Speaker 1: the top can take So there must be someone, There
Speaker 1: must be a trail, there must be somebody's fucking yeah,
Speaker 1: fucking with us?
Speaker 2: Right? Is that like unique ish to as far as
Speaker 2: like yeah, right, that's just how it goes sometimes because
Speaker 2: like the Nazis don't really like the Nazis target other Nazis.
Speaker 1: You know, there's not the Night Long Knives, but that
Speaker 1: was more of like a centralizing even more power and
Speaker 1: dealing with like a chunk of the movement that didn't
Speaker 1: really agree with with Hitler anymore. Not every this is
Speaker 1: pretty it's not unique, but it's not common for it
Speaker 1: to be like this, right, Obviously, in the French Revolution,
Speaker 1: stuff like this happens, But the swiftness and the centrality
Speaker 1: with which loyal members of the party are targeted and
Speaker 1: that tortured and executed is yeah, like you know, you
Speaker 1: can't be.
Speaker 2: If you can't be one of the boys, then yeah,
Speaker 2: well who can you be?
Speaker 1: There's really no safety here.
Speaker 2: Ryeah yeah. Yeah. So it was.
Speaker 1: Between one of like S twenty one, This prison that's
Speaker 1: kind of the most famous of the prisons here, was
Speaker 1: between a one of between one hundred and fifty and
Speaker 1: a little less than two hundred torture and execution centers
Speaker 1: built on Polepot's orders by the Centibal the secret police.
Speaker 1: Roughly twenty thousand people were imprisoned in S twenty one
Speaker 1: over the course of the regime. There's some debate on
Speaker 1: this number of between twelve and twenty thousand, and there's
Speaker 1: never more than about one thousand to fifteen hundred people
Speaker 1: at a time, though, And S twenty one is built
Speaker 1: out of a former school, which I guess extra chilling
Speaker 1: given that Pop Pop was a school teacher. And when
Speaker 1: I say a thousand to fifteen hundred at a time,
Speaker 1: twenty thousand total people aren't released alive from S twenty one.
Speaker 1: This is a death camp. And while it started by
Speaker 1: going after again like agents of the old regime, YadA YadA, YadA,
Speaker 1: its prime purpose for most of its history is purging
Speaker 1: members of the leadership cast as well as like members
Speaker 1: of the party alongside their entire families. If you are
Speaker 1: like somebody, a mid level guy in the Khmer rouge
Speaker 1: who gets targeted and put in S twenty one, your
Speaker 1: kids and your wife are going to even if they're babies, right,
Speaker 1: they'll take your infant in there and kill them and
Speaker 1: torture them. Right, and again, it's just like, well, we
Speaker 1: really have to make a statement, you know, the stakes
Speaker 1: are so high. We really have to scare people away
Speaker 1: from not being loyal members of the party. Now, we're
Speaker 1: not going to be dealing with S twenty one in
Speaker 1: as much length as we ought to, or the prison
Speaker 1: system in general. This is because it really does deserve
Speaker 1: its own episodes. Our friend Joe Kissabian of The Lions
Speaker 1: Led by Donkey's podcast has covered at length. I recommend
Speaker 1: his work given that I'm trying to focus this on
Speaker 1: pole Pot, who was a maide that your architect of
Speaker 1: this prison system. I hope you'll forgive my brevity as
Speaker 1: I quote from a detailed fact sheet put together by
Speaker 1: the Documentation Center of Cambodia for the Cambodia Tribunal quote,
Speaker 1: and this is talking about the people who were sent
Speaker 1: to S twenty one. They were accused of collaborating with
Speaker 1: foreign governments, spying for the CIA and the KGB, and
Speaker 1: hence betraying Ankar. Prisoners were also believed to have conspired
Speaker 1: with others, and thus were forced to reveal their strings
Speaker 1: of traders, which sometimes included over one hundred names. The
Speaker 1: interrogators at S twenty one base their technique on a
Speaker 1: list of ten security regulations, which included while getting lashes
Speaker 1: or electrification, you must not cry at all. Although prisoners
Speaker 1: often had no idea why they had been arrested, interrogators
Speaker 1: forced them to confess their crimes. If they did not confess,
Speaker 1: they would be subjected to physical and psychological torture. However,
Speaker 1: after having confessed, they were marked for execution. Initially, prisoners
Speaker 1: were killed on the grounds of the prison, but as
Speaker 1: the volume and stinch of the corpses rapidly increased and
Speaker 1: became unbearable, prisoners were then trucked and mossed to an
Speaker 1: open field located fifteen kilometers away known as Crow's Feet
Speaker 1: Pond to be killed. Waiting at the field was a
Speaker 1: group of about ten young men led by Tang Tang
Speaker 1: in his early twenties and his team of teenagers lived
Speaker 1: in a two story house that was built on the
Speaker 1: field in nineteen seventy seven. They were informed ahead of
Speaker 1: time of the number of prisoners that would arrive, so
Speaker 1: that they could dig the graves in advance. The shocking
Speaker 1: figures commonly associated with the prison fourteen thousand killed and
Speaker 1: seven survivors ranked the prison is one of the most
Speaker 1: lethal in the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: Jesus. Yeah. Also, I mean the detail. Obviously, every atrocity
Speaker 2: has someone actually doing it, but like just this dude's job. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, every day you get told how many corpses you
Speaker 1: got to dig holes for, and you and your fellow
Speaker 1: teenagers get out of Yeah, the I guess early twenties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and his team was teenagers.
Speaker 2: I'm just doing it every day. It's like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: it's so hard to fathom for me as a lazy person.
Speaker 1: He's probably like, well, this is pretty good job. Given things,
Speaker 1: I'm probably not going to get targeted. They're not going
Speaker 1: to go after the grave digger, right, the graves.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, while S twenty one was operating, Polepot himself made
Speaker 1: regular statements and writings to Western supporters, and this is
Speaker 1: a key to aspect of what's happening. While all this
Speaker 1: nightmare is unfolding in Cambodia, there's not a there's not
Speaker 1: there's stuff getting out, but not a lot of it, right,
Speaker 1: at least initially. You know, as time goes on, more
Speaker 1: does start to get out about how horrifying what's happening is.
Speaker 1: But the first stuff that gets out is propaganda from
Speaker 1: Polepot and the regime to Western supporters, where they're talking
Speaker 1: about the utopia that we're building. We are finally creating
Speaker 1: the communist, the agrarian, peasant, communist utopia that everyone's hoped
Speaker 1: would happen. We've made a totally equal society here it
Speaker 1: is and democratic Campuccia. We've done it right. And there
Speaker 1: were a not insignificant number of Western leftists who believed
Speaker 1: this bullshit right, and who would argue that any evidence
Speaker 1: to the contrary is the evidence of how hideous what's happening.
Speaker 1: Of the killing fields as they're called, start to comes out,
Speaker 1: come out. There's a lot of folks who are like, well,
Speaker 1: that's just capitalist propaganda, that's the CIA, right, Nothing bad's
Speaker 1: happening in Cambodia, right. One of the organizations that Polepot
Speaker 1: spread his propaganda towards was the Belgian Campuccia Society, who
Speaker 1: interviewed Polepot in nineteen seventy eight. He told them, we
Speaker 1: don't have prisons, and we don't even use the word prison.
Speaker 1: Bad elements in our society are simply given productive tasks
Speaker 1: to do, you know. Dipshits by this stuff right, as
Speaker 1: they always do, as they do in the present day.
Speaker 1: By all accounts, the most famous of these dipshits was
Speaker 1: an English writer and professor named Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell had
Speaker 1: been a significant figure on the British left in the
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies. He spends two years as the chair
Speaker 1: of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He is an avid
Speaker 1: anti Vietnam War protester, and in that regard his actions
Speaker 1: were admirable because the Vietnam War deserved protesting. He wrote
Speaker 1: regularly for Piece News and support of different anti colonial movements,
Speaker 1: and a number of them he was very right to support.
Speaker 1: Caldwell is a figure who in some ways resembles a
Speaker 1: lot of modern genocide denier types on the left, although
Speaker 1: I think he was a much better person because again
Speaker 1: he's not comprehensively that and he's not being like paid
Speaker 1: by anybody. Yeah, this is a true believer who lacks
Speaker 1: a tremendous degree of judgment in a very key area.
Speaker 2: But also, like you know, from his perspective, you kind
Speaker 2: of imagine, like you're largely right. I mean, in this case,
Speaker 2: you're wrong about the CAA propaganda, but.
Speaker 1: Up in until Cambodia you're largely right. Yeah, most like
Speaker 1: in the US is doing Hella war crimes and being
Speaker 1: supported by a lot of people in Vietnam and doing them.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so like you know, like, yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you see the leg he has a stand on even
Speaker 1: though he's rong, it is one of it's very tempting,
Speaker 1: And there's a degree to which you should compare him
Speaker 1: to folks like the people who write for the Gray Zone,
Speaker 1: which is a faux journalistic institution that spent years arguing
Speaker 1: Bashar al Asad never gassed its own people made fun
Speaker 1: of anyone who was saying Russia was about to invade Ukraine. Right,
Speaker 1: they're those motherfuckers, Caldwell. There's a degree to which you
Speaker 1: should compare to them. But also people who knew him
Speaker 1: said he was kind and empathetic, and he was in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases on the right side of things,
Speaker 1: and he gets into Cambodian politics for a sympathetic reason,
Speaker 1: which is that he's arguing against this nightmarish US bombing campaign,
Speaker 1: which is a war crime. And on the other side
Speaker 1: of this. By the way, I found a fucking Washington
Speaker 1: Post column looking writing about this in which the author
Speaker 1: was like, Oh, it's you know, what's really fucked up
Speaker 1: is the people who who slandered the US for bombing
Speaker 1: Cambodia to try to stop the Khmer Rouge from coming
Speaker 1: into being. That's not why we fucking did it, you
Speaker 1: dip shit, Like fuck you for one thing, that's part
Speaker 1: of what made them possible. For the other thing that
Speaker 1: we didn't give up. That was never the fucking goal, Like,
Speaker 1: fuck you, fuck you. I just so many people I
Speaker 1: fucking hate On'm both like yeah, anyway, Yeah. Caldwell was
Speaker 1: loved by his students, and it was recalled even by
Speaker 1: people who disagreed with him, as a gentle person who
Speaker 1: was tolerant of opposing views. So he was not the
Speaker 1: kind of guy who was like maybe he would have
Speaker 1: been if he'd had Twitter, but like was a guy
Speaker 1: who was willing to talk about his unhinged beliefs about
Speaker 1: Cambodia with you in a polite manner. So I don't
Speaker 1: want to depict him as a caricature right now. Because
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge beat the US back law nole government,
Speaker 1: and because their claims of agrarian equality and an idealized
Speaker 1: socialist society gelled with Caldwell's own hope of where the
Speaker 1: world might go, he came to support them to the hilt.
Speaker 1: His friends, who at the same time saw him as
Speaker 1: a brilliant economist, also rude his startling naivete. One peer said, quote,
Speaker 1: he was a man with very clear theoretical and ideological views,
Speaker 1: and the empirical basis didn't seem to worry him hugely,
Speaker 1: always a big warning signs about how should should work.
Speaker 1: So why bother looking at what's happening now? Caldwell did
Speaker 1: visit a lot of the regimes that he extolled and supported.
Speaker 1: He took regime sponsored to tours of places like the USSR.
Speaker 1: And you know, that's one of those things where it's
Speaker 1: like you are going to miss a lot of the
Speaker 1: bad stuff the USSR is doing. But the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: is like a state that functions right, and there's things
Speaker 1: that did that were good. It got the first person
Speaker 1: into space, there were massive improvements in you know, literacy
Speaker 1: and whatnot, in addition to horrifying and awful things done
Speaker 1: by their It's an actual state, right, and so it's
Speaker 1: understandable that you could go there and see take this
Speaker 1: sponsored tour and just see the good stuff.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's not really possible in Cambodia because there's no good stuff, right,
Speaker 1: there's nothing positive happening under the Khmer route.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the silver lining is hard to I mean you
Speaker 2: truly have to be a blind believer to just crime there.
Speaker 1: Right per the Guardian quote. Three days before Christmas in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, Malcolm Caldwell received an early present. On
Speaker 1: the final day of a two week tour of Cambodia,
Speaker 1: he was told that he would meet with Polepot. This
Speaker 1: was indeed a rare privilege. Unlike most other Communist leaders,
Speaker 1: Pole had not created a personality cult. There were no
Speaker 1: posters of him, he was seldom seen or quoted. Many
Speaker 1: Cambodians had not even heard of him. Only seven Westerners
Speaker 1: were ever invited to what had been renamed Democratic Campuccia,
Speaker 1: and Caldwell was the first and only Britain. So the
Speaker 1: fact that he's invited at all is this huge honor.
Speaker 1: So he comes and he shows up at this place
Speaker 1: where there are other journalists, as we'll talk about with him,
Speaker 1: there's people with him, and they're all immediately like in
Speaker 1: non pen being like where are all the people because
Speaker 1: some of them had been prior to the khmarre route
Speaker 1: taking over, and they're horrified. They're like, where are the
Speaker 1: fucking human beings?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Everyone's gone. Something's horribly wrong here. And Caldwell is just
Speaker 1: like so honored that, like they didn't pick any other
Speaker 1: British people. Poulpot wants to talk to me, just me,
Speaker 1: you know. So there are a few reasons why he
Speaker 1: was taken in and received so well. For one thing,
Speaker 1: he had been to China. He was on good terms
Speaker 1: with the Chinese Communist government and that was Cambodia's main
Speaker 1: ally at the time. He was also Polepot was kind
Speaker 1: of in this period. This is after there had been
Speaker 1: a series of provoked border conflicts with Vietnam provoked by
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge, and it was becoming increasingly clear that
Speaker 1: Vietnam was going to invade, and so Polepot was really
Speaker 1: trying to burnish his international support, so he suddenly wanted
Speaker 1: Westerners in, right, and he's like, well, this guy's probably
Speaker 1: like blind enough to ignore all the horrible shit going on, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And Caldwell had just a few months before he came
Speaker 1: to Cambodia written an article in The Guardian in which
Speaker 1: he had basically said, like, all these reports that the
Speaker 1: khmaier Rus are killing people are nonsense. One of his
Speaker 1: main sources was the Campuccine information minister, a guy named
Speaker 1: Hugh Nim, who blamed the deaths on America, right, basically
Speaker 1: like the bombing that the like all of these people
Speaker 1: that you're saying have died, this is due to the
Speaker 1: bombing campaign the US had executed.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Now, by the time he shows up in Cambodia, this
Speaker 1: guy that his whole article denying the Khmer Rouge genocide
Speaker 1: is based on, Hugh Nim, has already been executed and
Speaker 1: tortured to death by Paul Pott. So not a great sign.
Speaker 1: But even so, he was aware to an extent that
Speaker 1: the Khmer Rouge was killing people, and he had described
Speaker 1: them as quote arch quislings who knew well what their
Speaker 1: fate would be, were they to linger in Campuccia. So well,
Speaker 1: I don't want a caricature this guy. You shouldn't pretend
Speaker 1: that like that. This dude was finding reasons to justify
Speaker 1: the killings that he knew about, right, including the guy
Speaker 1: who was the source of his stupid article. So crazy, yes, nuts.
Speaker 1: Now there are real journalists on this trip, and one
Speaker 1: of them Elizabeth Becker. She had been to Cambodia before things,
Speaker 1: you know, the Khmer sho had taken over, and she
Speaker 1: was a very courageous and talented war correspondent, right, she
Speaker 1: was good at her job, and she argued with Caldwell
Speaker 1: constantly while they're talking, like she's one of the people,
Speaker 1: being like there's supposed to be people in this city,
Speaker 1: like I've seen it before, something's really bad here. And Caldwell's,
Speaker 1: you know, giving the same lie, putting out a bunch
Speaker 1: of nonsense about like, you know, the the bold reformation
Speaker 1: of society along these utopian lines and whatnot. But she
Speaker 1: still liked him, like he was a very pleasant man.
Speaker 1: She called him a kind and tolerant and just deeply
Speaker 1: naive quote. He didn't want to know about problems with
Speaker 1: the Khmer rouge, and that carried over to not wanting
Speaker 1: to know about problems between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was
Speaker 1: stuck in nineteen sixty eight or something. Now there's a
Speaker 1: book out by this point, by the time that Caldwell
Speaker 1: comes to Cambodia about the early stages of the Cambodian
Speaker 1: the autogenocide, whatever you want to call it, called year zero.
Speaker 1: Caldwell could have read this book, and if he had,
Speaker 1: he'd have learned, for example, that one Khmer rouge saying
Speaker 1: expressed the regime's goal as quote, to completely annihilate diseases
Speaker 1: of consciousness that got in the way of their goals.
Speaker 1: Doing this meant getting rid of hidden enemies who, as
Speaker 1: Polepot put it, had sicknesses of revolutionary consciousness. Now Philip
Speaker 1: Short goes into more detail here, summarizing information that should
Speaker 1: have been available to Caldwell how he had he done this.
Speaker 1: Reading quote Satirama meant an individual who failed to focus
Speaker 1: on the communist cause and was therein portrayed as toxic
Speaker 1: to its realization. Even without considerable evidence or proof, individuals
Speaker 1: could suddenly be classified as toxic to the super great
Speaker 1: leap forward and accused of being class enemies with a
Speaker 1: sickness of consciousness. Enemies were depicted as pervasive and infecting
Speaker 1: the pure Khmer ideal. The desire to exterminate enemies grew,
Speaker 1: as did the intoxication of doing so with impunity. Purging
Speaker 1: these contaminants was discussed as crucial to the survival of
Speaker 1: the regime. According to propaganda, enemies were likened to an
Speaker 1: impurity that threatened the well being of revolutionary society. These
Speaker 1: groups were portrayed as a lethal source of pollution that
Speaker 1: needed to be eliminated. A sort of madness had taken
Speaker 1: over the country at this point, particularly among the rouge
Speaker 1: cadras doing the hand to hand slaughtering, and for an
Speaker 1: idea of just how de range this gets, several militia
Speaker 1: who were interviewed later claimed that they would eat the
Speaker 1: livers of their victims and the belief that it would
Speaker 1: give them extra power and probably because they are also
Speaker 1: starving to death. One of these yeah, one of these
Speaker 1: guys as cited later as saying they ate human liver
Speaker 1: because they wanted to prevent themselves from being shocked by
Speaker 1: killing people. Then they could kill people. They wanted to
Speaker 1: change themselves to be able to kill people without pity.
Speaker 2: Oh god, Yeah, I mean there's probably some level of
Speaker 2: like just pry on disease that can take over, Like
Speaker 2: there's got to be.
Speaker 1: With livers, you're okay with livers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, if you're trying to like like lose
Speaker 2: lose your conscience, yeah, probably giving yourself a brain disease
Speaker 2: is not the worst way to do it.
Speaker 1: You're generally safe if you want to eat human beings safely,
Speaker 1: like a liver, the livers that like are reasonably okay
Speaker 1: to go for, Sophie. I don't want people to get
Speaker 1: fucking pre on diseases.
Speaker 2: Don't know, no spine, no bone, bone.
Speaker 1: No brain, right, you know, we all folks, Sophie, A
Speaker 1: lot of people.
Speaker 2: What.
Speaker 1: I'm a believer in harm reduction. Okay, you know, all right,
Speaker 1: test your fentanyl, don't eat people's spines, or test your
Speaker 1: drugs for finnel, don't eat the spines, don't test your
Speaker 1: final don't do fentanyl.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: Caldwell could have had access to a lot of this information,
Speaker 1: and he rejected it largely on the basis that year
Speaker 1: zero had been pillaried by a critique published by Noam Chomsky.
Speaker 1: Now this is contentious, people, Oh boy, the arguing about
Speaker 1: whether or not Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge or was
Speaker 1: just like, given the information available at the time, it's
Speaker 1: hard to tell what is true. I'm not gonna this
Speaker 1: is not going to be a lengthy dissection of that,
Speaker 1: but there are arguments that he would denied a number
Speaker 1: of the crimes being committed by the Khmer Rouge. He
Speaker 1: certainly argued that Ponchard, the author of Year Zero, had
Speaker 1: exaggerated the horror of what was occurring on the ground.
Speaker 1: Chomsky described it as what people were saying about the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge as quote, an unprecedented propaganda campaign to slander
Speaker 1: democratic Campuccia via systematic distortion of the truth. Right now,
Speaker 1: Chomsky preferred a different book. He compared Ponchad's work unfavorably
Speaker 1: with another book called Cambodia, Starvation and Revolution written by
Speaker 1: George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which is basically is taking
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge propaganda and like being like, hey, everything's great
Speaker 1: over there, actually, and like what the stuff that's bad
Speaker 1: is not their fault, right right?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: There was another book written by two readers Digest writers
Speaker 1: called Murder of a Gentle Land that Chomsky also went after,
Speaker 1: which you know, it was not perfect. None of the
Speaker 1: claims about what none of the none of the critiques
Speaker 1: and the people talking about the autogenocide are perfectly accurate
Speaker 1: because it's still going on, right, But they are broadly accurate.
Speaker 1: And and Chomsky is certainly in the wrong about what
Speaker 1: books about Cambodia to trust during this period.
Speaker 2: Right. But but also if we hadn't you know, we
Speaker 2: the United States and the West, hadn't put out so
Speaker 2: much like there's a CIA propaganda like this, would it
Speaker 2: wouldn't be it would be less possible for for this,
Speaker 2: for this to it like work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this is also why I have I have
Speaker 1: a degree more of sympathy to cald Well and to
Speaker 1: other people who doubted this in this period of time
Speaker 1: because it was such a different information environment. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there had been there was just so much disinformation that
Speaker 1: been put out about Vietnam, that'd been put out about
Speaker 1: what the US was doing in Cambodia that didn't put
Speaker 1: it about what the US was doing in parts of
Speaker 1: Latin America. So again, these people are wrong, and that
Speaker 1: should be stated. But it's I do have less condemnation
Speaker 1: than I do about like the stuff going on in
Speaker 1: the twenty first century that right viewers this, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there wasn't there wasn't Twitter and there wasn't like
Speaker 2: yeah they you know, it's just it's more reasonable to
Speaker 2: be skeptical.
Speaker 1: Yes, and there it's certainly reasonable to initially be skeptical.
Speaker 1: Now again by the point time kol Wol was on
Speaker 1: the ground and these other people with them are like,
Speaker 1: this city used to have people. It's no longer like
Speaker 1: you should have known, right, right, So it's generally considered
Speaker 1: or argued at least that Chomsky is a big part
Speaker 1: of why Caledwell doesn't like trust. You know, punch Od's
Speaker 1: book about the atrocities going on in Cambodia. You know, whatever,
Speaker 1: the truth, whoever you're going to blame for it called
Speaker 1: Well at age forty seven shows up in Cambodia as
Speaker 1: a pretty much a true believer, right, And in fact,
Speaker 1: he had finished a book before he goes there called Campuccia,
Speaker 1: A Rationale for Rural Policy, in which he had written
Speaker 1: that the Khmer Rouge had quote opened vistas of hope
Speaker 1: not only for the people of Cambodia, but also for
Speaker 1: the people of other peoples, of all the other poor
Speaker 1: third world countries. We'll come back to that book in
Speaker 1: a second. So called Well, along with these journalists, is
Speaker 1: escorted around the country. They see some like staged scenes,
Speaker 1: and again Becker is gets aggressive, very brave woman with
Speaker 1: these Khmaer Rouge guards, being like, I can I can
Speaker 1: see what you're not showing us, like where you're blocking
Speaker 1: us from going. I can see evidence of clear problems
Speaker 1: because I've been here before. What the and she's like
Speaker 1: arguing with them, she said later it was so clearly awful.
Speaker 1: One of the problems was the absence of what I saw,
Speaker 1: the absence of people. And that's a different kind of
Speaker 1: proof too. I don't see any people being executed. Caldwell
Speaker 1: was not concerned. Quote. He preferred to stay in the
Speaker 1: car and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunities prepared for us,
Speaker 1: Becker wrote in her book on Cambodia. Now at the
Speaker 1: very end of the tour, they all go back to
Speaker 1: Nonpen and they you know, they're hanging out for a
Speaker 1: little bit. They're not all that far from the S
Speaker 1: twenty one center, right, this is where Caldwell's going to
Speaker 1: finally have his interview with pol Pott, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to quote from the Guardian. Again, Caldwell remained ignorant on
Speaker 1: the Friday morning and non pen that he was taken
Speaker 1: in a Mercedes limousine to see pole Pot. The setting
Speaker 1: for the meeting was the former Governor's palace on the waterfront,
Speaker 1: built during the French colonial period. In a grand reception
Speaker 1: room replete with fans and billowing white curtains, the two
Speaker 1: men sat down and discussed revolutiontionary economic theory. Becker had
Speaker 1: met Polepot earlier the same day, and in When the
Speaker 1: War was Over That's her book, she writes he was
Speaker 1: actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome, but attractive.
Speaker 1: His features were delicate and alert, and his smile nearly endearing.
Speaker 1: The perennially shally at shabby academic and the fastidious dictator
Speaker 1: must have made for an odd couple. In any case,
Speaker 1: Caldwell left the meeting a happy man. He returned to
Speaker 1: the guest house he was sharing with Becker and Dudman
Speaker 1: full of praise for Polepot and his political outlook. We
Speaker 1: went over stuff, says Becker. He thought he had a
Speaker 1: good conversation he had avoided at all costs in a
Speaker 1: discussion of Vietnam, and he was looking forward to going home.
Speaker 1: So that night they have another argument, you know, Becker
Speaker 1: and Caldwell about Cambodia. You know, they have dinner and
Speaker 1: they go to bed, and as far as she can tell,
Speaker 1: he remained completely convinced that the revolution was a good
Speaker 1: thing and that Campodi was headed in a good direction.
Speaker 1: She goes to bed at around eleven pm, and in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night she is woken up by
Speaker 1: what she eventually realizes our gut is gunfire, and she
Speaker 1: comes out of her room. She sees a young man
Speaker 1: pointing a handgun at her. He's wearing he's got bands
Speaker 1: of ammunition on his body, he's got a rifle on
Speaker 1: his back. She flees back into her room and locks
Speaker 1: herself in the bathroom, and eventually, what you know, when
Speaker 1: they come out when this ends, the Dudman, the other
Speaker 1: guy there sees like a bunch of guys running along
Speaker 1: the street and they find Caldwell in his room and
Speaker 1: he's been shot repeatedly. He's dead. Right. It's still to
Speaker 1: this day not perfectly clear. Yeah, definitely was. I mean it,
Speaker 1: it's generally pretty clear Polepot ordered it. We don't really
Speaker 1: know why. What about this guy triggered him. Why specifically
Speaker 1: it happened, They the Khmer rouge doesn't admit to it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, this guy gets killed, and it's just kind
Speaker 1: of it's one of these very famous moments because he's
Speaker 1: such he's one of these like guys who had really
Speaker 1: been willing to go to bat for democratic Campuccia and
Speaker 1: then finds himself yet another corpse in the killing field,
Speaker 1: so to speak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, the other
Speaker 2: side is like we're also living through a moment where
Speaker 2: like everyone will cozy up to the dictator who demonstrably
Speaker 2: will stab you in the back and any given opportunity,
Speaker 2: and they still mine up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean people, people
Speaker 1: are really like Caldwell. Above all else is a reminder
Speaker 1: of how easy it is to blind yourself to obvious reality,
Speaker 1: even at your own peril, because because seeing the reality
Speaker 1: is not even that you don't want to see it,
Speaker 1: it's at seeing the reality would mean taking a hit
Speaker 1: to your ego. It's the same thing why you've got
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people being like, oh well, once
Speaker 1: these tariffs start to hit, once the economy collapses, all
Speaker 1: of these Trump supporters will realize, yeah, you'll and like
Speaker 1: a significant chunk of Trump's voters who are not hardcore supporters,
Speaker 1: who are the people who voted for Biden and twenty
Speaker 1: you know, who go back and forth or who like
Speaker 1: made their decision day of Sure, they'll change their mind,
Speaker 1: they'll get angry. But the heart and core of his
Speaker 1: supporters recognizing that they've been fucked means recognizing they're not
Speaker 1: as smart as they think they are, and again called well,
Speaker 1: that's a big part of it for him. He's a scholar,
Speaker 1: he's a smart man. He couldn't be this wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, m hm, So, I mean, you know they could.
Speaker 2: And those people are also the ones doing the worst
Speaker 2: stuff when the time comes to do the worst stuff unfortunately, so.
Speaker 1: Yes, because again they've bought in. Now, while all this
Speaker 1: is going on, the end of the regime is getting
Speaker 1: nearer and nearer because Poulpot's also not as smart as
Speaker 1: he thinks he is. Right, he had directed his forces
Speaker 1: in what began as a series of border skirmishes against
Speaker 1: the newly unified Vietnamese state. This was a sensible decision
Speaker 1: based on their obsessive hatred and paranoia of Vietnam, but
Speaker 1: given the comparative state of the militaries of the two countries.
Speaker 1: It was basically suicidal and in short order, this is
Speaker 1: what brings an end to democratic Campuccia. Vietnam invades Cambodia
Speaker 1: in December of nineteen seven eight, and what follows was
Speaker 1: not close to a fair fight. By January, they had
Speaker 1: taken the capitol and put an end to Polepot's reign
Speaker 1: sort of, so he has to flee, right, he has
Speaker 1: to like leave non pen and Vietnam takes over and administers,
Speaker 1: you know, for a while and Cambodi and eventually Cambodia
Speaker 1: becomes independent again under a government that is not the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge. But the Khmer Rouge doesn't go away, and
Speaker 1: Polepot remains the head of the Khmer Rouge as they
Speaker 1: like go and hide in the jungle. They've got like
Speaker 1: some villages and stuff. This like little weird fortified section
Speaker 1: of the country, tiny section of the country that they're
Speaker 1: able to like manage along. I think it's like the
Speaker 1: Thai border there. And and in fact this like government
Speaker 1: because like in eighty two, China and the Association of
Speaker 1: Southeast Asian Nations kind of pressures the Khmer Rouge to
Speaker 1: ally with Sahanak's forces and some like republican forces led
Speaker 1: by a guy called Sonsan along the Thai border and
Speaker 1: create this thing called the Coalition Government of Democratic Campuccia,
Speaker 1: and that remains in the UN the legitimate Government of
Speaker 1: Cambodia until nineteen ninety one, even though like they're not
Speaker 1: actually in power. The government of power is like the PRK,
Speaker 1: but they're only recognized by Vietnam Lao and the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: And so that's kind of like Polepots where he is.
Speaker 1: For the eighties, you know, into the nineties, there is
Speaker 1: a lot of guerrilla warfare. Polepot continues to lead the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge to fight against the Vietnamese backed Government of Cambodia,
Speaker 1: and this continues massively the suffering of the Cambodian people
Speaker 1: who do never get nearly enough international aid. And this
Speaker 1: situation doesn't really start to end until the Paris Peace
Speaker 1: Agreement assigned in October of nineteen ninety one, the Vietnamese
Speaker 1: withdraw from Cambodia and things slowly start to calm down.
Speaker 1: There's a UN peacekeeping force that kind of enters in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, and there's like a free and fair
Speaker 1: election you know that. Yeah, things start to get better.
Speaker 1: At this point, the Khmer Rouge never disarms, right, They
Speaker 1: continue to hold their tiny little chunk of the country
Speaker 1: and argue that there's Vietnam is still secretly running things.
Speaker 1: There's camouflage Vietnam, Vietnamese soldiers you know that are behind
Speaker 1: the regime.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: They boycott the nineteen ninety three election and they basically
Speaker 1: hole up in western and northern little bits of Cambodia.
Speaker 1: They're outlawed in nineteen ninety four, and when the Cold
Speaker 1: War ends, they don't really have any of them, even
Speaker 1: minimal support that they had previously had at long, long length.
Speaker 1: Jang Seri, who's the Foreign minister, who is again one
Speaker 1: of Polpot's friends from Paris, as well as a number
Speaker 1: of other high ranking official surrender along with the bulk
Speaker 1: of what had remained of the military of the Khmer Rouge,
Speaker 1: and they are eventually incorporated into the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. Polepot,
Speaker 1: though stays free for quite a while until he is
Speaker 1: basically there's this shit that goes down in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 1: I think it is where one of his few remaining
Speaker 1: friends running the Khmer Rouge this guy, Sonsen, does something
Speaker 1: that Polepot considers treason, and so he massacres Sonsen along
Speaker 1: with fourteen of his family members, including his like grandkids. Now,
Speaker 1: Polepot would argue for the other people, the babies, the
Speaker 1: young ones, I did not order them to be killed.
Speaker 1: For Sonsen and his family, Yes, I feel sorry about that.
Speaker 1: That was a mistake that occurred when we put our
Speaker 1: plan into practice. I feel sorry. This is when he's
Speaker 1: questioned by a journalist Nate named Nate Thayer, who does
Speaker 1: like his last interview, and this is kind of what
Speaker 1: brings an end to him leading the Khmer Rouge finally
Speaker 1: after thirty seven years, because for whatever reason, this is
Speaker 1: a step too far to the left, asked people who
Speaker 1: had stuck around him, and one of his like his
Speaker 1: commander in chief, a guy named Tom Mauk, puts him
Speaker 1: on house arrest, right and yeah, and that's kind of
Speaker 1: the end of Polepot of having even a sliver of power. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Polepot is brought before a people's tribunal. He's sentenced to
Speaker 1: life imprisonment for Sonsen's murder, but he never really faces
Speaker 1: any actual like justice, right, Like there's there's there's nothing like.
Speaker 2: Right, there's no way you can pay for this anyway.
Speaker 2: But he doesn't even not even close.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, he dies under house arrest in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: and uh story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of those like like whatever belief you
Speaker 2: may have in some sort of cosmic justice, this will
Speaker 2: this should tip the scales in the other direction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like he is ultimately not punished by the New
Speaker 1: Cambodian State or the u WIN. He's punished by the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge for killing another Khmer Rouge guy. In his
Speaker 1: very last interview after he has been arrested again, there's
Speaker 1: this guy Nate Thayer who comes in and does this
Speaker 1: final interview with Paul Pot. And Nate does a very
Speaker 1: good job of this, Like he really presses Polepot on
Speaker 1: the stuff that he did, on all of the killings.
Speaker 1: And this is I want to read this quote from
Speaker 1: one of Nate's last articles with Poulpot, where he's trying
Speaker 1: to get him to acknowledge anything about what he did.
Speaker 1: I came to carry out the struggle not to kill people.
Speaker 1: He rasps, his voice almost a whisper. He pauses, fixing
Speaker 1: his interviewer with an almost pleading expression, even now and
Speaker 1: you can look at me, am I a savage person.
Speaker 1: My conscience is clear. I do not reject responsibility. Our
Speaker 1: movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world,
Speaker 1: but there was another aspect that was outside our control,
Speaker 1: the enemy's activities against us. I want to tell you,
Speaker 1: I'm quite satisfied with one thing. If we had not
Speaker 1: carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have been another Campuchia crumb.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy five, he says, referring to the Mekong
Speaker 1: Delta region seized by Vietnam from the Khmer Empire in
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century, and that I think says a lot
Speaker 1: that the end of this guy's life, two million deaths,
Speaker 1: maybe on his conscience, the absolute destruction of his country
Speaker 1: in such a way that it still has not recovered.
Speaker 1: And he's like, well, look, if I hadn't ha done that,
Speaker 1: it could have wound up like this time Vietnam took
Speaker 1: the Mekong Delta region from US in the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: You know you wouldn't want that, would you. Like he's
Speaker 1: still he's such like it's this this fucking academic brain shit,
Speaker 1: where like all that matters to him. Is this idea
Speaker 1: he's cooked up about how the world ought to work
Speaker 1: when he was like a young student with his friends,
Speaker 1: that he never gets over. His ego won't let him
Speaker 1: no matter how many fucking people it leads him to kill.
Speaker 2: It's like such a like holding onto that delusion till
Speaker 2: the end is so amazing. I mean, I just you know,
Speaker 2: it's so hard for me to understand that brain yep,
Speaker 2: like like rationalizing to that degree like total I don't know,
Speaker 2: or just you got to put on a show all
Speaker 2: the way to your last interview, you know, keep the
Speaker 2: keep the k fave up. Yep, fucking grim.
Speaker 1: Anyway, it's a lot time yep.
Speaker 2: Just my plug is just go go go sit by
Speaker 2: yourself for a second and just think about, you know
Speaker 2: the world and what you can do to help someone.
Speaker 1: And don't don't take the books you read when you
Speaker 1: were fucking too seriously.
Speaker 2: Right, look, we're living through the same version of that,
Speaker 2: but just the book is fucking autless shrugs exactly.
Speaker 1: That that's that is like why I bring this up
Speaker 1: in the context of like Doge and all of these
Speaker 1: young people who have like fucking reading goddamn Curtis Jarvin
Speaker 1: and ship on the Internet and convinced themselves the ship
Speaker 1: they read when they're young and like talk with their
Speaker 1: friends about obsessively and these discord chats and signal loops,
Speaker 1: and you know, there are the people who are willing
Speaker 1: to make Polepot style decisions. And no number of deaths,
Speaker 1: how many many tens of millions of fucking people die.
Speaker 1: If they get the chance, it won't. They will not
Speaker 1: for a second doubt themselves or change their minds. And
Speaker 1: that's why literally anything that can be done to stop
Speaker 1: the process that is attempting to be underway is like justified,
Speaker 1: because these people are going they they they have to
Speaker 1: be edged out right, And I'm optimistic at least about
Speaker 1: the fact that Musk, who's one of these people who
Speaker 1: has the same kind of Polepot brain damage seems to
Speaker 1: have seems to be pulling back because of how angry
Speaker 1: he's made. He's just not built for criticism, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there's more of these guys.
Speaker 2: And these guys he's delusional, but he's tooth, thin skinned
Speaker 2: and thankfully largely incompetent. Although inc has never stopped so
Speaker 2: many of these folks the past, so.
Speaker 1: No, it hasn't no, they just fail upwards, cold, just
Speaker 1: fail hold comfort.
Speaker 2: But yeah, maybe that's at least a weakness to exploit anyway.
Speaker 1: I don't know, hard to know when it's good to
Speaker 1: read books or not.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, no, this is This is the lesson
Speaker 2: for these three episodes. Don't read books kids, podcasts. Not
Speaker 2: that podcast. Yeah, no, not that podcast either.
Speaker 1: Podcasts have never led anyone to support horrible things to
Speaker 1: get people killed, Just like, don't ever believe your own
Speaker 1: bullshit or anyone else is too strong. Keep an eye
Speaker 1: out for what's going on in the world, and talk
Speaker 1: to people. Goodbye, goodbye.
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