Part One: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country

Robert sits down with Andrew Ti for three episodes in one week about the bizarre life of Pol Pot, a man who spent too much time reading books and bullshitting with his friends and for convinced he could save his country by destroying it.

(3 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Oh my goodness, gracious, jimminy Christmas. Welcome back
to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert Evans is
using the phrase jimminy Christmas. For some goddamn reason, we're
allowed to curse on this. I don't get it your

(00:22):
Boston accent to you that. I don't know you're gonna do?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
What?

Speaker 1 (00:26):
What? What does the Sophie roberts, it's terrible. No, you
got it.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
That's you.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Gotta put more Boston, rob.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
For wash.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
You gotta put like you gotta put more of like
a like a spit, like like rhyme on it, Sophie.
It's got to sound like it's got to sound like
you're you're screeching it over a bunch of wet rocks,
just like the Pilgrims did yes when they landed in Boston.
I just think that's something that only you can do.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
I don't know what about Jimmy Cricket was like, I
want to do Robert's Boston.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Yeah, we were there. Neither do I? Neither do I?
Andrew t what do you think of Ben Affleck's back tattoo?

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Oh, Ben Affleck's back tattoo.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
I think it's actually pretty pleasant commitment to It's like
the most authentic thing he has going on.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Yeah yeah, Like he he is just a Boston guy.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
See I think he is. I think he's he's our
most one of our most authentic male celebrities that we've
ever had. That doesn't mean, like I'm not saying he's
a good person. He's obviously not. But you can tell
in his face that he knows that and hates himself,
which is what I love about Ben Affleck.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
He is keeping it real. He's keeping it indisputably real.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah. Yeah, when that that picture of him like looking
at j Lo's butt and just being having the look
on his face like he's just watched fucking Dresiden go
up in flames, is like it's because he's thinking, like,
obviously I'm going to cheat on her. Like I'm Ben Affleck,
I have no choice in them. I simply can't be
a scumbat and not be a scumbat the beloved tattoo.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
I personally enjoy the video of Ben Affleck putting Jennifer
Lopez in the car and then slamming the door and
then realizing the paparazzi caught him.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Being like Christmas.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
I have no idea what's what mood I'm in, but
this is how we're starting the.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Fun I had a friend of mine made me rewatch
Gone Girl recently. He's likening himself. I'm just like, oh yeah.
Ben Affleck didn't even know they were filming, Like he
was pleasantly surprised to realize he wasn't in trouble for
murder at the end of this movie.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Fun fact about Gone Girl is he had to stop
production for multiple days because he was refusing to wear
I think it was like a Yankees hat that they
wanted him to wear, but he's like, I'm from Boston,
I can't wear perfect perfect He ended up that they
ended up like settling on him wearing.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
A Mets hat, and it's like it's like, come the
fuck on, Come the fuck on. Incredible stuff. Clearly was
a Yankee fan, like literally here.

Speaker 4 (03:11):
I think that also means he possibly didn't really he
didn't read that movie the same way the rest of
us read that movie.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
No, No, Yeah podcast has literally nothing to do with Boston,
the Yankees, Ben Affleck back tattoos.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Well, you know this hit. We're talking about a guy
who you could call the Ben affleck of Cambodian revolutionaries
because this week we're finally doing pole Pot. That's right, everybody.
Oh yeah, and we're brought you up getting a pole
position here, baby, yeah, thank you. Well, when we're going
for the big guns andrew t, you can't do better.

(03:51):
And this is this is also unfortunately, like we did.
King Nordom Sahannak, who was the King of Cambodia and
also a massive piece of shit, had a lot to
do with how the Khmer Rouge got in power and
why they killed so many fucking people. And he's also
a lot less known. Like I think generally people who

(04:11):
have any kind of reasonable education are aware of Paul Pot,
whereas like King sah not nearly as well known. So
I thought it was important to start with him years ago.
I think Polepot is really relevant now. I think, actually
right now might be the most relevant he has been
since the horrible crimes against humanity he was committing because,
at least from a perspective of a podcast that is

(04:33):
primarily speaking to listeners in the United States, and it
is because the way in which he and his comrades
orchestrated the deaths of roughly between a quarter and a
third of their country something like that. We're talking a
death toll of about somewhere in between like one and

(04:57):
a half to three million. I think probably two million
is probably is generally kind of like the hedging your
guess estimate out of a pre war population of maybe
six million Cambodians.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
Right.

Speaker 1 (05:08):
And the reason I'm saying that this is extra relevant
right now is that what essentially happened is in Cambodia
is you had this cadra of guys who started as
young men hanging out in reading groups, talking about politics
and making plans for how they would like to rebuild
their country and reorganize their country starting from this position
they called year zero, right like, We're going to totally

(05:30):
totally strip down everything that had existed before and start
new based on these ideas we had in our weird
little friend groups. Right. Well, that's essentially what's happening with
guys like Elon Musk and Peter Teel and the cadra
of fanatic young doge kids, right yeah, who are disassembling
the administrative state for fun and trying to rebuild it
based on a bunch of shit that they discussed on

(05:52):
four chan and eight chan over the years.

Speaker 4 (05:53):
Right, there's the difference is the these motherfuckers have.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Never read a book. But otherwise yeah, pretty yes.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
And the command and the Khmer Rouge guys both read books.
And also, one thing you can't take away from Polepot
and the other Khmer Rouge guys, they were hard as
fuck by the time they got in charge. They spent
twenty years fighting in the jungle. So right, we have
that going for us. But I do think there's a
lot relevant here in the story of how how a
group of people, and particularly the dude at the head,

(06:22):
come to believe a set of things about how the
world should be remade and then pursue those goals no
matter the cost. And that's kind of the story we're
going to be telling this week. So I hope you're excited.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
I hope you.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Jesus, Chris, So let's fucking go and talk about the
man who, well, one of the men who really fucked
up Cambodia. It's it's yeah, I gotta say, their strong
competition for being the dude who was worse to Cambodia

(06:57):
in the twentieth century. You got Kissinger, you got Nixon,
you got King Sahannock, you got lawn Noll, who will
talk about later. But Polepot probably still does win the crown,
which which is hard being the worst guy for Cambodia
in the twentieth century, crowded ass field.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
He's I mean, he's also just like he's got the
name recognition, and he didn't have a massive whitewashing campaign
waged on his behalf.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
So no, no, he didn't have that. So the first
thing you need to know about Polepot is that Polepot's
not his name, right, Like this is a nom de revolution.
You know, you get this with all of these guys.
Joseph Stalin wasn't born Joseph Stalin. That he literally just
picked the name Joe Steele because it sounded cool, right,
And a lot of these guys do that because, for

(07:42):
one thing, it's just smart if you're planning to overthrow
your government to work under a fake name. And for
another thing, usually your fake name sounds cooler than your
real name. And one of the first thing that makes
Polepot unique is that Polepot is not a cool name
and it was never meant to be. It doesn't sound
it's not cooler. In Cambodian, it basically means like Joe Khmer,
like the Khmara or the ethnic people that are the

(08:03):
majority of Cambodia. Like he's basically Polepot is the Khmer
equivalent of calling yourself like Joe America almost right, Like
I'm the average man, right right, That's basically what he
was saying. Or like John Doe, sort of yeah, like
John Doe. His real name sounds like a fucking like
Marvel villain. He was born Saloth Sar, which is like

(08:26):
such a cool name like that. That is the name
of a guy who fist fights Batman like I'm sorry
and has done well. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. He
breaks Batman Batman's spine at one point, right, Saloth Sar,
it goes by Polpot. Now this name goes too hard.
Nobody will believe that Salad Sar was born in a

(08:49):
village called Prekshaw, a couple of miles west of the
capital of his province and about ninety miles north of Nompen,
which is the capital of Cambodia. For decades, there was
consider debate as to the precise year of his birth,
and we don't have perfect knowledge of when he was born.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Just beyond
the general fact that record keeping and impoverished rural Cambodia

(09:11):
wasn't great in the twenties. People were not like keep
it did. No one was digitizing anything right, and Cambodia's
educational system hinged a lot on your birth date because
the central administration was lacking a culture that sorry this
the central administration. Basically, if you had if you wanted

(09:35):
your kid to kind of get into the best kind
of school that they could get into, if you came
from a prosperous family, and Saloth does, it was common
to alter your kid's birthday to maximize which school they
would get into. And that was as easy as literally
just changing markings on a piece of paper, because there
wasn't anything like centrally kept right. So there was a
strong culture of changing your kid's birthday at least by

(09:58):
a but sometimes by a couple of years, in order
to get them where you wanted them to go. Bigrapher
Philip Short says that salath Czar's real birthday was probably
March of nineteen twenty five. Others will say May of
nineteen twenty seven. Polpot himself told journalist Nate Thair that
he'd been born in January of nineteen twenty five. But
he just recalled that because he saw like basically a

(10:19):
post it note, not it was a literal posted, but
like a note that was like posted on top of
like a cabinet in their kitchen. And this would be
him memory remembering it as like a five year old.
So we don't know when he was born, but somewhere
in that period.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
My grandparents literally also had this. I wonder if now
I'm realizing they did this for the same reason. But
they were very, very squarely about what their actual birthdays were.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, I knew someone had interviewed someone once who had
grown up as a like hunter gatherer in the highlands
of Vietnam. They were a Montagnard and like, didn't they
were like sixteen or seventeen the first time they heard
music that wasn't being played in front of them. They
didn't know what electric lights were for a while and yeah,
and then yeah, we're like, yeah, I have no idea
what it was born. I'm probably twenty six. I think

(11:05):
at the time.

Speaker 4 (11:06):
It's like if I really sat down, I could maybe
make an educated guest. Yeah. Yeah, my grandparents were like
it was a it was a war records got lost.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
We don't know.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
Well, we had a lot of other priorities.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, birthday, Yeah, birthdays were at high even for.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah Salas Star's family was upper middle class, right. He
came from about as much privilege as a non noble
member of camp of Cambodia of Khmer society could in
this period of time. His father, Pin Salaf owned a
lot of land. Now how much a lot, Like, I
think something like two to three hectares would be like

(11:41):
a normal amount for a peasant farmer to own. Biographer
David Chandler says that Penn owned about nine hectares, but
Philip Short, whose book is more recent and I think
works off of better information, says that it was more
like fifty hectares, so about ten times the average. And
their house was probably the largest of the twenty or
so houses in the village. So they're not rich as like,

(12:01):
they're not one of the people who run the country,
but they're they're they're the wealthiest guy in town. Rights,
that's his dad, you know, Pennsaloth was prosperous enough to
hire his neighbors to help out during harvest time, So
like that's the kind of money he had where like
I am paying my neighbors to do my harvest for me, right,
as opposed to like.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
They just can't do that. Right.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
He also owned multiple oxen, which was like that's like
having like a sports car or something in other day. Right,
if you've got your own oxen and more than one,
you're like, that's a sign of wealth. His wife, Salathsar's mother,
came from a prominent family and was well known as
a humanitarian and a pious Buddhist. The two had nine children.
I think five of them survived into like the nineties,

(12:43):
so like pretty good record for you know, as a
mom and dad. Saloth was number eight, so he comes
near the end. And he and his two siblings, like
around his age, were very close short rights, they played
and swam in the river to other and in the evenings,
by the light of a rush lamp, listened to the
old people of the village recounting stories and legends from

(13:05):
the days before the French established the protectorate in the
eighteen sixties. And if you'll remember back to our Napoleon
the third episodes, like right while France was getting ready
to lose a bunch of territory in a major war
to what became Germany. The Navy was largely kind of
put carrying out, to some extent on its own recognizance,

(13:27):
the conquest of a sizable chunk of Indo China, right
of what came to be known as French Indo China.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
And this is why France is running Vietnam, and it's
also why France is running Cambodia. Right. So they have
this dominion in Cambodia, and that for about a century
Cambodia is governed by the French. In the capital, which
is the primary place you would see the white French colonizers.
They were a tiny minority whose control was so great

(13:52):
that they were people who were young Cambodians in this period,
like Gung Khmer described French like white French residents of
the cap is almost deities, right, because they were untouchable.
You did not have social contact with them, and they
had access to like resources that were almost unimaginable to
regular people.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Right.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
And again, despite this being the capital of Cambodia, it
has the lowest Khmer population of any part of the country.
The entire like business class, the people who are handled
running companies and who are doing trading and thus have
the most money outside of the white French class are
primarily Vietnamese and Chinese khmre right. And these are in

(14:32):
a lot of cases still people who were born in Cambodia,
but they are ethnically Chinese and ethnically Vitmes. And this
is this is because Cambodia for most of its history
has been for large chunks of its history has been
the property of either like China or Vietnam or Thailand,
like bits and pieces of it. Right, there's been constant
it's in the middle of everything, right, It's like Poland,

(14:55):
It's like the Southeast Asian Poland and that like, yeah,
you guys are usually like under but he's thumb right.

Speaker 4 (15:01):
Well, and yeah, that's also just like like as much
as like the French colonialism, you know bad obviously, it's
like a should just be doing that.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
And China's probably the biggest culprit.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Well. And that's the one of the initial surprises that
the Communists have that kind of slows down them getting
off the board, is they initially expect, well, everyone must
hate the French, and the regular Khmer people don't hate
the French as much as they hate the Vietnamese, and
in fact, it's going to be true even with the
Khmer Rouge gets in power, Like, even with all the
horrible shit the US does, for the Khmer Rouge and Polepot,

(15:36):
Vietnam is always the enemy, right, and it's because they've
got a thousand years of shit, but it's always the
last war. Yeah, it's just like that's the one that sticks. Yeah,
It's like, no matter how racist Americans get about a
foreign country, Texans will always hate Oklahomans more, right, and
vice versa. So the fact that the people with money

(15:58):
in the capitol and running these businesses, the kind of
saying capitalist class isn't super useful in this sense, but
that's kind of our closest thing. The fact that their
Vietnamese and Chinese contributes to a long standing cultural grievance
among the majority Khmer population who see themselves they have
an inferiority complex. And this is something that is written
about extensively by Khmer people, right that there is within

(16:20):
the culture and within like even a lot of like
the Buddhist kind of writings at the time, there's this
discussion of like the Khmer we're fundamentally good people, were
humble but we're also kind of like naive and easy
to be taken advantage of by these kind of savvier
foreign peoples around us. Right, This is the way they
talk about themselves to a sizeable extent, right.

Speaker 4 (16:42):
Sure, although how much there's a question, I guess I'm
asking more than like poking at this, but it's like
that is also exactly the type of thing that like
a broad multinational religion could start to spread well, right,
Right in terms of supporting imperialism.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
Yeah, yeah, And there's there's some I mean that this
is I'm not I'm certainly not qualified to give you detail,
but I think it's there's there's plenty of evidence that
a lot of the way they discuss themselves is in
sort of this context of we are we really need
to get our shit together and stop being ruled by
these people, right, Like that's kind of the attitude, And

(17:20):
it depends with the Chinese Khmer. There's this mix of
like respect with kind of some jealousy and some anger.
Vietnam is seen almost into Vietnamese people are seen almost
entirely as imperialists, right, as like this arrogant force that
has continually dominated us over our history. And again Khmer
people often have friends who are Vietnamese Cambodians and Chinese Cambodians.

(17:42):
But this is this idea of like this is what
this race is done to our race, right, Like that's
really common. A very like popular story that would be
told to children at the time when Salasar was a kid,
described three Cambodian prisoners being buried up to their necks
around a fire so their heads could be used as
a tripod to hold their Vietnamese master's teapot. And it's

(18:05):
like a joke that like this is what they think
we're good for, is like you know, like that that's
the bit. Now, when it came to like the looking
back at periods of time in which things were different,
the real one period of like glory that educated Cambodians
in particular would think back to was the time of
the An Korean Empire, which had ruled northwest Cambodia from

(18:27):
the nine hundreds eighty to about fourteen hundred eighty and
included parts of modern day Lao, Thailand and Vietnam as well. Right,
this is the Ang Korean Empire, and Sala Tsar and
his peers would have seen themselves as being raised in
the ruins of a once great culture. The attitude these
people have is almost we're growing up in a post
apocalyptic empire, right, And this was not far from the truth.

(18:50):
By the twelve hundreds, which is right around if you've
heard of angkor Watt, it's still to this day the
largest surviving religious complex on the world. And it's this massive,
incredibly complex, beautiful like temple complex that was part of
the heartland of this empire. And while it was at
its height around the twelve hundreds, the in Korean Empire

(19:11):
contained a higher population than lived in all of Cambodia
in the thirties. So if you're looking at like the
degree to which things got worse, there are in the thirties,
this area is capable of supporting fewer people than it's
supported in the twelve hundreds, right, right, right, So they
are really living in a post apocalypse in a lot
of ways. Now, some of the first stories Sar would

(19:33):
have heard would have been tales of his grandfather Fem,
who came up during one of the many periods of
domination by Vietnamese and Thai invaders. Cambodia came close to
being destroyed as an independent culture and Sar would have
been raised on tales of Vietnamese soldiers gouging the eyes
out of captives and salting their wounds before burying them alive.
And this is a thing that happened. We are talking

(19:53):
about really hideous wars that happened between these people in
these periods, and I mean in every period of time.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Right, these are.

Speaker 1 (20:01):
Ugly conflicts, and he grows up with stories about like
this is what war is like. It's not just fighting
and killing do gain territory. It is like torturing and
destroying your enemy, and like that is the norm. Right.
The French, by comparison, would have seemed benign to him
as a child, in large part because the French were
the backers of the royal family. That was like, because

(20:23):
there's still a king in Cambodia and he's a useful
figurehead for the French. And Salatsar's family is really close
to the royal family, and so they kind of owe
their privileges and their good position two in part to
the French occupiers, right, just like the king does. Salot's
early childhood then was mild. His father was noted for

(20:44):
being less strict and for beating out leading, he didn't
beat his kids as much as most fathers did. Right.
This is a culture where strict parenting is the norm,
and where children it's believed that you need to be
you need to use violence very strictly to maintain the
behavior of your children. Right. And this was not just
common with parents, it was extremely common with teachers.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
These are like the like the strain of Buddhism that
is dominant in Cambodia is called Theravada Buddhism, and this
is a faith that has an incredibly sharp delineation between
good and evil. There's not really shades of gray, right,
and so if you're doing the wrong thing, you need
to be punished very severely. Right. This is like a

(21:25):
very black and white faith in a lot of ways.
At least that's the way it's interpreted at this period
of time. One common punishment from school masters was to
make a disobedient child lie down on an ant's nest.
That's like if you fuck up in school, they make
you light out on.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Our red ant torture.

Speaker 4 (21:43):
Yeah, I just want to point out Robert, of course,
is not saying that if you don't beat your kids enough,
they will become polepot but it is not.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Saying that.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Look, there's obviously an amount of beating your kids that
will turn them into polepot, right, But there's an amount
of beating your kids will turn them into polepot, not
polepot too, So you.

Speaker 2 (22:04):
Know it's a five line.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
I don't know. Maybe don't punish your kids with ants?
Can we see? Can we agree on that? Quotes one
of Polpot's peers, King von Sack as saying this about
discipline in schools. At the time, I didn't like arithmetic
and I hadn't learned my multiplication table. So every time
we were going to have a lesson, I said that
I had a stomach ache and wanted to go home.

(22:28):
The third time I did that, the teacher said, all right,
you may go, but first recite the seven times table.
Of course I didn't know it. How he beat me
kicks and punches. He was brutal. Then he took me
outside and put me under a grapefruit tree full of
red ants. After that I knew my times tables. Oh
my god, Well, I guess if it works. No, I

(22:50):
don't guess that at all.

Speaker 4 (22:54):
You know, in general philosophy, I think held on for
quite some time.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
If my parents are any education.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
And like, yeah, there's unique Cambodian. The whole ant thing
pretty unique to Cambodia. But the whole you beat the
shit out of a kid if they're not learning, right,
that's more normal than not. In the twenties, you gotta oaklow.
I got beat as a kid in Oklahoma by my principle,
So like not trying to like but yeah, what's really

(23:20):
interesting to me though, is that Vansak recalls this teacher
who like beat him and then tied him to an
auntrey as a saintly man who was adorable, Like, yeah,
this was my nicest teacher.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Oh, kicking a kid is really nuts.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
That's nuts. That's wild.

Speaker 4 (23:38):
Yeah, yeah, like truly, Yeah, it just requires so much
intention and preparation.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
Yeah, it does. It says a lot that like and
that's your good teacher, Like, that's the guy that you're like,
can you know what? You really really straightened me out?

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (23:55):
They say you never forget your teachers or how many
aunts they tort you you with, And it's true.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
See why you wouldn't forget that teacher. If anybody kicked
the shit out of me and tied me to an antry,
I would remember that motherfucker. Uh speaking of beating Nope,
speaking of not amusing children. Jesus products. And we're back. So,

(24:27):
as I've established, we're not talking about a society. This
is a Khmer society is in a lot of ways,
and I don't there's other aspects of it, but there's
a lot of brutality here, right, and this is not
unique among the Khmer. But this is a black and
white society, and it's going to be meaningful in terms
of how the Khmer rouge act in power that punishments

(24:48):
like this are very normal when they're kids, right, There
is already a high level. It's just like you, the
ultra violence of the Nazis is not detached from the
fact that the initial group of the Nazis all spent
four years in the trenches, you know, Like you can't
separate those things, and you can't separate what the Khmer
rouge does from the fact that this kind of stuff

(25:09):
is normal when they're kids, right, And the legends that
we're told often in Khmer society, because this is a
group of people who have been constantly conquered and beaten
and massacred by their neighbors, and of course done a
little bit done some of that themselves. To be fair,
it does not be the stories. The fairy tales one
that they grow up on don't depict a just world,

(25:31):
right they are. Instead of like you know, happy endings
in the Good Guy Winning, there's a lot more stories
of murderers going free and honorable men being hideously executed
by the king. Right, that's a lot a very common
kind of thing. This is the lore of a culture
formed through centuries of domination, defeat and murder. Right, that's
the result. Right, There's a lot of trauma in the

(25:52):
collective history of the Khmer, and it comes through in
their legends. Salat Sar's cousin Meek joined the Royal Ballet
Corps in the nineteen twenties. Now that sounds nice, right, Ah,
ballet good way to express yourself. Great, we love the arts.
This is not that kind of ballet troop. The ballet
troop is primarily a feeder organization for the king's harem. Right.

(26:16):
That is the reason why you collect all these ballet artists, right.
This makes it easier for the king to pick out
who he wants to make a cortissan. Right. David Chandler
in the book brother number one, which is a biography
of Polepot writes quote. Each dance involved thousands of movements,
each keyed to moments in a particular story and in
the mythological character being portrayed. None of the gestures was improvised.

(26:36):
Although some dancers might be more beautiful or more graceful
than others, their movements depended on memory, tradition, and practice,
in other words, on what they had been taught, rather
than on what the individual wanted to express. The dancers
were vehicles for tradition rather than its interpreters. So while
this is an art form, it is not one in
which self expression is prized. It is how can you
ab exactly recreate this right.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
Do the thing that as I was done before and again?

Speaker 1 (27:03):
This whole Ballet Corps, its primary audience is the royal family,
and the royal family within Khmer society is it's so
high above everything else, right. The Khmer word that like
people who are high level advisors and counselors for the
king would use for themselves literally translated to something like
we who keep the king shit in our heads, like

(27:25):
our brains are his shit.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Right?

Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah? And as I said, the Ballet Corps existed in
large part to provide raw material for the royal harem,
but it was traditional for kings and princes to have
eyes bigger than their heads in this regard, and especially
once kings got old, they would pick a lot of
concubines that they wouldn't really get around to having sex
with because they're like old and sish, and these women

(27:49):
are untouchable to any other men, but often also untouched themselves,
and they're kept prisoner in a network of huts in
the palace and are forbidden from contact with non royal
bays over a certain age right, so most of their
time was spent arguing and gossiping among each other. Raising
the few kids that they have, there's a lot of
gambling and when at the few outsiders who are allowed

(28:12):
to visit, obviously they socialize with as much as possible
because they live in such a closed little society, and
soon enough Salatsar would be one of those visitors. His
older brother. They was the first to be sent to
the capital to attend one of the few Western style
schools in the country. And these are schools the French
have started, and they're often sometimes they're run by Khmer

(28:33):
educated Khmer, but they're like patterned off of French schools. Right,
and Saloth followed into the capital in nineteen thirty four
at age nine, and the plan was he's going to
start attending one of these proper Western schools. But as
is not uncommon for a lot of Khmer, his parents
don't want him to go fully western, right, They still
do want him to be Khmer. So he spends a

(28:54):
year in a Buddhist monastery just south of the palace
before he goes to school. Right, This is a really
common experience, and in fact the princes all do this too, Right,
like the guy who's going to become the king nor
Dam Sahanak spends like a year or some amount of
time as in this monastery, because it's a thing that
you do in part to like show I'm authentically.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Of this culture.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
And this is also going to be the only education
that Polpot ever gets in his native language. This is
the only the rest of his schooling he'll be taught
in French. So this is the only time he's being
taught like in Khmer.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Sure, now, about one hundred kids a year had this experience,
and the accounts that we get make it sound pretty
miserable to me, Like the worst summer camp you can imagine.
There is no room in this for personal creativity or expression.
Every single person has a strictly delineated role in stepping
out of it was met with traditionally brutal punishments. One

(29:48):
of Sar's contemporaries later explained, you were given a thrashing
if you didn't do as they said. If you didn't
walk correctly, you were beaten. You had to walk quietly
and slowly, without making any sound with your feet, and
you weren't allowed to swing your arms to move serenely.
You had to learn by heart the rules of conduct
and the Buddhist precepts so that you could recite them
without hesitation. If you hesitated, you were beaten. And I

(30:11):
think I encountered a whole lot, especially as like an
angry young atheist. This idea is you here? This I
think more common among liberals that like, uh, you know,
these Christians and Muslims, and like all the violence that
comes out of these these Western like Judeo Christian religions,
why can't we all be like the Buddhists. They never
have Tons of Buddhist terrorist groups plenty of Buddhist genocides.

(30:33):
Every religion has it, and also non religions have it.
People love committing genociside. It's not no, no culture has
a fucking lock on that.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Religion is a handy tool, but it's not the only
hand It's not.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
The only tool. Get that out of you again. If
you blame genocide fundamentally and the fact that people can
be pieces of shit, that's that's what's to blame.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
The real genocide juice is in here.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
Yeah, it's in here. If you to understand how a
person can be moved to genocide driving traffic for twenty
two minutes, that's the most I'm ever like, Yeah, we
just got to start killing people.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
If no one was here, I'd be home.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
I no, no, no, I'm three more, but still three
minutes away from the fucking burger risk. God damn it.
So the religious texts that they were made to memorize
were rooted in a rigid respect for hierarchy and Theravauta Buddhism.
Children were treated almost as robots, right, They are the
product of cause and effect that accumulate rather than people
in their own right. And so what matters is modifying

(31:35):
what goes into them, right, in order to produce the
desired outcome. There's almost again, this is very mechanical understanding
of like, this is how you make a good person.
Right now, Their holy book was the Spop's pap. It's CPAP.
It's like spelled like a c pat machine. Right, And
it's basically a collection of morality plays and anecdotes which

(31:55):
reinforce the sense of Khmer inferiority next to their neighbors.
One relevant portion reads, learn arithmetic with all your energy,
lest the Chinese and Vietnamese cheat you. The Khmers are
lacking in judgment. They eat without giving thought for what
is proper and right. Each season they borrow from the Chinese,
and the Chinese gained control of the inheritance their parents
have bequeathed. So again, this is.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
The hell.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
There's a lot of racism in this upbringing, and it's
racism against these ethnic minorities in the country who have
also periodically controlled the country.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Right, reasonable, yeah, of course, like.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
Yeah, it would be pissed. But as a spoiler in
part two, this is going to lead to a bunch
of genocides.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, that's how it goes. The resentment turns into the
worst thing.

Speaker 1 (32:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:47):
Now, by the time star I finished his year at
the monastery, and I've heard nine months, I've heard a year.
I don't know that they were keeping that good attrack.
He will often lie about having spent longer time there
because he's kind of proud of this period in his life.
By the time Sala Czar finished his time in the monastery,
his cousin had become the highest ranking woman at the palace.
She was like in charge of the harem basically, and

(33:09):
this was in part because she had borne the prince regent,
and that's the prince who's going to become the king
when the king dies a son right before he was
made the new king, so obviously that elevates her in
his eyes. His older brother, loth Swung had started working
as a clerk in the palace in the late nineteen twenties,
and it was decided that he would taken his younger
brother Sar and raise him with his wife, so that

(33:29):
Salasar could live in the capitol and attend a modern
French style school. David Chandler writes that lost Song considered
his younger brother quote an even tempered, polite, unremarkable child
as a primary student, Sammy told the Australian journalist James
Jerrand Sar had no difficulties with the other students, no
fights or quarrels, and examining his early years, I found

(33:50):
no traumatic events and heard no anecdotes that foreshadow his
years in power. People who met him as an adult
found his self effacing personality, perhaps a carryover from the
image he projected as a child and laf Swung's words,
the contemptible Polepot was a lovely child. And this is
the weirdest thing about him. Almost every source agrees he
was an incredibly nice, like polite, pleasant guy to be around,

(34:13):
which you don't most dictators. You really do get like,
oh yeah, there's hints of the megalomania. Maybe they can
be nice to some people. But there's other people who
are like, oh yeah, I got a sign of the
crazy Polepot. Everyone's just like, yeah, he was pretty cool.
He seemed nice, and this is so weird.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
I did not know that. That's yes, he's like so bizarre.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
Even after like when Nate Thayer, who's like the last
journalist to talk to him when he's like in hiding
eighteen or so years after leaving power is like, yeah,
he was like a really very polite man. You know,
it's very odd.

Speaker 4 (34:47):
On that score, you know, the like the modern day
version of that is prior to now most US presidents
like yeah, Trump, at least you're clear like, Okay, this
guy's a fucking like guy's exactly what you've seen. Yeah,
but like, yeah, truly people, well, you know, there's no
amount of jedicide George Bush could commit that. People would
you know, be like I'd drink with him.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
No, And he's absolutely a monster. Absolutely should be in
the Hague. I was in a room with him once
and like, get I get why people were loyal to him.
He's very charming in person or even if you know
what he's done, it's just skills, like yeah, a fucking Obama,
right exactly. People who have done a horrible things are
often deeply likable, which is how they get in position

(35:30):
to do horrible things. And Sar appears to be that
kind of guy.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
So Yeah, that said, he's also described as a pretty
boring dude.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
Right.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
He is not political at all, and he's not political
until very late in this story. His schooling at the
monastery would mark the only time he was educated in
his native language once he starts at the French style.
At col Miche, Sar was taught in French by Catholic
fathers who were either French or Vietnamese. So these are
Catholic priests who are French and Vietnamese. Remains a Buddhist,

(36:00):
but he's being taught every day in Catholicism, right, And
if this produced any sense of whiplash and the young boy,
we don't have any evidence of it, but it must
have been weird. I have to imagine. When he wasn't
in class, Sar had be rare freedom to visit his
sister in the ballet harem section of the palace. And
again not a lot of people are allowed here. This
gave him number one. He would run into the Queen

(36:22):
mother pretty regularly and like you have to bow when
you see her and stuff. And interestingly enough, even afterwards
as a hardcore communist revolutionary, he remembered her with like
a sense of awe and reverence. Now this also put
him in a very vulnerable position, the fact that he's
one of the few young men boys allowed in this harem.

(36:42):
As I stated earlier, this group of women who were
like officially the king's consorts and potential consorts were bored
all the time, and they were forbidden to be touched
by anyone else right. And as a result, when a
kid like Sar comes in, this is the closest they
can get to going after a man right right, And

(37:04):
this leads to some profoundly abusive experiences for young Saloth Sar.
As Philip Short writes, at fifteen, Sar was still regarded
as a child, young enough to be allowed into the
women's quarters. Decades later, two of the palace women, living
out their old age on a French government stipends in Paris,
remembered little Sar, who used to come to visit them
wearing his school uniform, a loose white shirt with baggy

(37:26):
trousers and wooden shoes. The young women would gather around,
teasing him, they remembered. Then they would loosen his waistband
and fondle his genitals, masturbating him to a climax. He
was never allowed to have intercourse with them, but in
the frustrated hot house world of the Royal Pleasure House,
it apparently afforded the women of a curious satisfaction. Jesus Christ, Yeah,

(37:46):
and fuck this does not come out until fairly late,
like the first the Chandler biography and the earliest biographies
you're going to read about Polepot. Don't talk about this,
Nate Thayer. I don't know if I think it may
have been known when they are talk to him, but
there is in like a khmer Roue stronghold, So maybe
you're just not going to bring up like, hey, so
let's talk about you getting molested, Like I'm not gonna

(38:08):
blame Nate for that, right, he was in a very
dangerous position, you know, and exercised a lot of courage
within that position, But we just don't he never talked
about this, so we can only kind of speculate like,
oh wow, I mean this has to have had some impact,
right right, right, right right, this didn't help, But you know,

(38:29):
anything beyond that is going to be peer speculation, right
because they just didn't. This is the only these are
the only people who talked about it, right.

Speaker 4 (38:36):
Right, right, And it's not like this is coming up
in you know, therapy notes that we can.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
Find right right, right, And while it is certainly not
wrong to like be like, well this is pretty poisonous,
I bet it had an impact on the kind of
guy he was as an adult. I want people to
also keep in mind this passage from Chandler's book quote,
Cambodians attached to the Palace in the nineteen thirties and forties,
like Salasar and his relations, were insulated from the Chinese
and so I know Khmer commercial sector of non pen

(39:03):
from the worldwide economic depression, and from the need to
grow their own food. Salatsar inhabited this elaborate, safe, safe,
entirely Cambodian world for many years. So whatever impact this has,
he is also one of the only Khmer people in
the society who grows up feeling safe and secure. He's
never worried about food. And these are the starving times.

(39:23):
These are and this is a horrible depression for the country.
Most people are short on food. That's not a thing
for him. He lives in abundance as a kid, right,
yeah for her, yeah.

Speaker 4 (39:35):
So yeah, yeah, But it's also like like having that
I mean, you know, fifteen is old enough to kind
of realize like.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
This probably shouldn't be happening. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (39:43):
Yeah, This abundance is conditional upon some of the other
maybe horrible things that are having.

Speaker 1 (39:47):
Maybe the fact that these old ladies keep on yeah yeah.
For her part, his sister recalled his visits fondly, and
she primarily remembered her brother as a funny kid.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
Whenever he had something serious to say, he would make
a joke of it. This was another common recollection shared
by his classmates in primary school. Salot Tsar was funny,
he was easy to be around, and he was most
particularly gentle, a child who one friend described as not
being willing to hurt a chicken, which I guess is
like not, you wouldn't hurt a fly at Cambodia. I
don't know.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
You know, we're coming off a time.

Speaker 4 (40:20):
We're just anything that's considered violence, you could societally ramp
it up from what US soft Americans are used to.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
And to be fair, as an adult, maybe he wouldn't
hurt a chicken, but he was willing to hurt a
lot of people, you know, exactly. He was not a
good student. Again, throughout his educational career, he showed a
capability to learn and study, but no inclination to do it.
He did not graduate primary school until age eighteen, two
years after that would have been customary. Now I should
note that this is the general stance taken by Chandler

(40:48):
and other biographers, including Short, that like he's not great
in school, he's kind of lazy. Polpot rebutted these claims
in the last interview he ever gave, saying that Chandler
was not entirely accurate.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
I was not a bad student. I was average. I
studied just enough to keep my scholarship. The rest of
the time, I just read books. And you know what,
Sae bestie for most of I should call Polepot bestie.

Speaker 4 (41:14):
You're heading in that direction from most Again, it's just
refreshing to hear about a murderer's dictator who reads books.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Yeah, ah, you would have loved.

Speaker 1 (41:22):
Yeah, yeah, you would have loved the Hunger Games Polepot
for most of the big Dub Dub dose. And again
we're talking about like his education, like he's like the
school years that he's going to remember the most are
during World War Two, right, like he is kind of
entering adolescents in like the forties, and for most of
that war, life for Cambodians like Sar in the rarefied

(41:45):
air of the Capitol went by relatively unchanged. The VC
government takes over in France, right, so it for Cambodians.
It's still French people running Canada, but it's a slightly
different group of French people, right, who are basically fascist collaborators.
But you're not going to notice much different as a Cambodian.

Speaker 4 (42:06):
Right, Yeah, the non fascist collaborators still not such great dudes.

Speaker 1 (42:14):
Yeah, The main difference would be that Sar would start
learning in school songs about the glory of Marshall Pataine
and the like. But I don't know that much of
this stuck. Thailand invades and conquers several border provinces during
this time, which is a deep shame to the king
who is dying in a deep shame to Cambodia. But
Sar is not a political kid, and we have no

(42:35):
evidence that this particularly impacted him. Short does theorize, Philip
Short does theorize that some of the fascist propaganda brought
into the schools during this period did impact Sar, particularly
the fact that the propaganda of the vch era romanticizes
peasants like poor farmers as the true embodiment of the nation.
And that's really going to be a big sticking point

(42:56):
for him as an adult. And so maybe there's a
line there, right, right, The propaganda of the Potanist era
also depicts the city as an inherently decadent and unnatural thing,
like a break from the righteous path of subsistent assistance
farming under a dictator, and that probably leaves a mark
right now. In the summer of nineteen forty two, the

(43:17):
capitol saw its first major protests against French control. A
group of Cambodian monks began preaching anti French sermons. This
was an escalation of what was at this point a
slowly developing sense of Cambodian nationalism that had been supercharged
by the fact that France had collapsed under the Nazi
boot heel. Two of these monks are arrested by vishi
French police, who do so in a way that defaces

(43:40):
a religious shrine, and this sparks more extensive protests right
and these protests terminate in a march on the French
administrator's office. Now, the main leader of the nationalist movement
in the country at this time is a guy named
Sun nach Than who he had some kind of lefty inclinations.
He was not anti socialist, but he's not a communist.

(44:02):
He's not really a socialist. He is a big popular front,
big tent. Let's free Cambodia and then we could figure out,
like politically what we want to do. Right. That's his
kind of deal, right, and so he's broadly popular with
kind of everyone who wants an independent Cambodia. He's a
very heroic figure during these times, this time, and he
starts organizing demonstrations against the French. They do what regimes do,

(44:25):
and they crack down. They imprison all his friends and
he's forced to go on the run, where he eventually
asks the Emperor of Japan for asylum and gets it. Now,
Sar would have been aware of all of this. He
probably would have admired than but there's not much evidence
that this takes up a lot of bandwidth in his brain.
Like most of his classmates who go on to become communists,

(44:45):
he was focused at the time on his own educational career.
As a student, Sar loved French poetry and sports. He
loved all kinds of sports. He was an avid soccer
player who was known for kicking the ball behind his
head with stunning accuracy. He also played This shocked me.
He's on the school basketball team, and Sophie I looked

(45:06):
it up, and since Polepot died in nineteen ninety eight,
sadly there is no way he ever saw Lebron play,
which is a real tragedy because Lebron does. Lebron goes
straight into the NBA two thousand and three, I think
so one of the.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Great hoping history.

Speaker 4 (45:21):
Some some stats on Poulpot's numbers, but he.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
Must have known about Michael Jordan's, so at least there's
that composition. I don't know. I looked, Sophie, I looked.
I don't know. These are the great mysteries of history.
I'm only it's.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
Really proud that you're you take the time to look
up stuff about you know, Lebron, Ramon James.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
I did it for you. I did it for you. Yeah.
What if Polepot had gotten to play a pickup game
with Kareem Abdul Jabbar. You know that's the I'm working
on a novel right way. Not that tall. Look, I'm
gonna be honest, Khmer basketball could not have been the
most Like these are not tall people's protein. I was
gonna say, like Lebron six nine. Yeah, no, these Lebron

(46:05):
alone probably could have taken on the whole team. I
mean on him every time. Yeah, like, oh god. So
while several of his friends went off to a prestigious
secondary school, salatsar barely eked by. He does horrible in
his exams, and so he's not able to go to
like the Humanities school, which is really progressive. So he

(46:26):
goes to like a much worse boarding school, which is
still vastly better than ninety nine percent of the population. Again,
we're talking a chunk of one percent who gets any
kind of education like this, right, So the fact that
he's like at the bottom of the educlated class still
means that he is almost unfathomably privileged by the standards
of average mayor. So he starts this school in nineteen

(46:47):
forty three. In nineteen forty five, Japan seized Tarot seized
Cambodia from VC France for a variety of complex reasons
that all boiled down to they were losing the war
and they were trying every hail Mary they could, right,
They're like, look, these French guys, they don't have a
good hold on things. What don't we just arrest them
all and make Cambodia Japan for a little while. Will
that help us beat the Americans? No, turns out, turns out,

(47:12):
Cambodia not really that useful in fighting the United States
in this period.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
It will be later, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
The Vietnamese are going to make some real hay out
of having a Cambodia in their back pocket.

Speaker 4 (47:25):
But right piece, wrong time, you know. Yeah, that's like
it's like any risk game.

Speaker 1 (47:30):
It's like any risk game, right, yeah. So they arrest
all of the French people basically in France, and Japan
is in trouble, in touch for a while. Japan is
pretty brutal in a lot of areas they govern. They
really aren't in Cambodia to the Khmer because like why
would they be, right like, and they don't have the time,
you know, it's nineteen forty five. But the main impact

(47:54):
this has on people like Salassar and his peers is
that they see all of these French administry, all of
these French teachers and priests get arrested and locked up.
And these people had been untouchable previously. They were very
similar to the king in that like you just can't
even comprehend the idea of laying a hand on them.

(48:14):
And they see these people forced from power and locked
up by people who aren't white, and that has a
huge impact, right, And the thing it teaches them is that,
like the power of the French is not inevitable or immovable,
it can be pushed aside. And if the Japanese could

(48:35):
do it, maybe we could. Right. One of Sar's friends
later recalled, we saw that a yellow and this is
his words, we saw that a yellow race. The Japanese
had gotten the better of the white colonialists the French.
That awakened something in us. It made us start thinking.
And as far as propaganda goes, we're going to talk
about all the reading that these kids do, and you know,

(48:56):
reading Mao, reading Stalin, that all has an impact. I
don't know of anything has a bigger propaganda impact than
seeing these Japanese soldiers locking up French imperialists.

Speaker 2 (49:06):
And that is the power of representation.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
There we go, right, Yeah, obviously the Empire of Japan
is no less imperialist than the French empire, right, But
that's immaterial in discussing how it influenced people like Salasar
and these the future Khmer's Rouge. Now, for the immediate moment, though,
the biggest change brought on by Japan's brief conquest is

(49:30):
that everybody kind of got a case of senioritis because
all their teachers get arrested, right should you hear? When
you read about them talking about this period, it reminds
me most of that like week after you take your
AP exam while they're still school but like no one's
doing anything in class. That's kind of what these kids
all go through. Like their French teachers get replaced by
some Vietnamese teachers, but the substitutes don't really know it

(49:52):
a handle shit as well, so like they're kind of
fucking off for a little while. Some Nochtan returns to
agitate for independence and even manages to briefly run Cambodia
as an independent country after Japan, you know, collapses, right,
And so he's running Cambodia is independent under this broadly
popular nationalist for about two months, which is just enough

(50:15):
that everyone really likes this guy and feels really good
about it, but not so long that like maybe some
of the problems that he might have managed, right, Yeah,
there's nothing not that I'm not saying. He actually seems
like he was pretty competent, but like it it's going
to it's going to stick in people's minds as a
golden period.

Speaker 4 (50:32):
Because you don't you don't have to the consequences of
your tough decisions. Yeah, you don't spend enough time in
office for them to come back.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this this lasts about two months
and then the French show back up with their tanks
and are like, actually, we still feel like Cambodia is
natural French territory. Yeah, they arrest Pan, they call him
a trader and to what again, you guys weren't even
there anymore. Like, but by this point he was universally beloved,

(51:02):
particularly by young educated Khmer like Siloth Sar and his friends.
Now Sar again has no real political beliefs at this point,
beyond a growing endorsement of populis nationalism. He continues to
be a mid student. He fails to get into an
educational program that would have gotten him a prestigious degree
and instead settles to go to a technical school. And

(51:22):
he picks the easiest degree plan at the technical school, carpentry,
because the Khmer professor was known for giving everyone good grades,
no matter how well they did, so he's like a
carpenter for a little while in school, and he's doing
this because there's like a there's like a study abroad
program that gets given to the best students, and there's
a number of slots, and like he figured, basically the

(51:44):
easiest thing for me to be the best at his
carpentry because it's like the blowoff class, and that'll be
my best shot at getting into this program.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
You know.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
Oh yeah, grab a wildcard slot anyway you can.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Yeah. Yeah, what a very very that's a very modern
attitude towards it. Honestly, I have a lot of friends
in school who made similar calls. Nineteen forty seven is
the first year we have evidence for Sar getting directly
involved in politics. That year, the newly found Democratic Party,
which advocated for replacing French and absolute monarchical rule with
a democracy, or at least like a hybrid democracy when

(52:18):
there's a king but he's limited constitutionally and we have
like this parliament type deal. They win fifty four seats
in the national elections. King Vansak, an older student who
is something of a mentor to Sar and his friends,
claims that Sar, along with several of his friends, including Jangsari,
who's going to also help run the Khmaer rouge volunteer
for the Democratic Party during the elections. Right, And when

(52:39):
I say Democratic Party here, it's literally like the party
that thinks we should have a democracy. Yeah, right, And
this is and this is kind of this is a
melting pot. A lot of future communists and socialists are
in the Democratic Party, as well as a lot of
guys who are like going to wind up more and
the like, well, I want to be aligned with the Americans, right,
This is just kind of where a lot of them
are at this stage. In nineteen forty nine, Salat Sar

(53:02):
gets picked for that Study Abroad program and he becomes
one of the first one hundred Khmer male and female
students to win a scholarship to go study in Paris.
They leave on a steamship that they actually go through
Saigon and they arrive in Paris on the same day
Mauzi Dung announces the founding of the People's Republic of China.
So a lot is happening, and this is going to

(53:23):
increasingly make discussions of like communism a lot more relevant
to these kids who it really hadn't been all that
much up to this point. Now, nearly all of the
students that he goes to Paris with wind up being
prominent political figures. A lot of them are are leaders
within the Khmer Rouge. A lot of them get killed
by the Khmer Rouge because they're leaders of the Khmer Rouge,

(53:46):
and the Khmer Rouge loves murdering the Khmer Rouge. Right Like,
this is primarily because almost no one else in the
country had access to educational opportunities or the free time
necessary to learn about radical politics. So obviously the people
who are dominant in the radical political sect are the
only ones with the time to read. Right, it's not

(54:06):
that shocking. Speaking of things that aren't shocking, these products,
I'm going to be surprised. We're back. And actually it
turns out several of our sponsors might electrocute you. But
you know, some people called getting electrocuted. I call it

(54:27):
getting free electricity, you know, and that shit's expensive these days.
If you looked at your power bill, can you afford
to turn down getting electrocuted?

Speaker 3 (54:35):
You know?

Speaker 1 (54:36):
Maybe speaking I know, I shouldn't use electrocuted because that
only means you've been killed shocked, I guess an electrician
friend explained that to me once. Anyway, whatever fucking power
power cops. So where are we here? Yeah, So Sar

(54:56):
gets into this program to study abroad despite his unimpressive grade,
not just because there's not a lot of kids in
this program, but because even among the ones who do
better than him, most of them don't want to like
leave Cambodia for years, right, because they got like families
and shit.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
You know.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
His fellow students are guys like Jang Seri, who later
becomes the co founder of the Khmayer Rouge. Chandler summarizes
his early life this way. Sari was born and raised
upon among the Cambodian minority of Coach in China. His father,
Kim Reem, was a prosperous landowner. When Riim died, Sari,
still a young boy, was sent to live with relatives
in the Cambodian province of pre Vang. He was given

(55:33):
the name Yng Seri, which sounded more Khmare than his
real name Kim Trang. And that's not an uncommon story,
is like, especially among these guys. Paul Pot's gonna do
the same thing where it's like, Eh, my original name
not quite as good as I want it to be.
Let me, let me, kimare this fucker up a little bit, right.

Speaker 4 (55:50):
It's all very WWF. I like it, just like, yeah,
that's get a populous name going. Look, I think one
thing we've all learned from the last decade of American
politics is that the Rosetta stone for understanding all of
human behavior, culture, and history is professional wrestling.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Yeah yeah, yeah, if you get pro wrestling, you understand
the whole swap of human achievement.

Speaker 4 (56:12):
You thought it was, you thought it was gladiatorial combat,
but that wasn't nearly campinof.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
No, no, no, not nearly campinoff. So, as you can see,
the reason I bring up Sary's background is it's not
all that different from Salat Sar, right, and most of
these Paris kids are going to become like the core
of this like educated revolutionary class, have similar stories. Right,
they are intellectuals. They're going to target and annihilate the

(56:38):
intellectual class in Cambodi once they get in power. But
they're intellectuals, right, that's the class they come from. It's
not not that different from how Stephen Miller's background goes. Actually, right,
So salots Star and most of Salastar starts off his
time in Paris living in a dormitory complex. He would
later claim that in the first year he was a
fairly good student, and this is true enough, but his

(57:01):
studies quickly slipped. Part of this is because his middling
grades meant that he had to go to a technical
school rather than get a degree in like the humanities,
which was a lot sexier for these people who are
going to wind up being future revolutionaries. And the degree
plan he's working on for his years in Paris is
as a radio technician. Chandler suggests that this is because
he kind of befriends the King's nephew, Prince Song Pon,

(57:24):
who lives in Paris at the time, and Prince Somong
Pon is also studying to be a radio technician. We
know the Prince helps him find an apartment with a
couple of friends, which is, you know, the place he
moves out of that dormitory to live in Polpot will
deny this for the rest of his life. He denied.
He would lie a lot about his connections to the
royal family, which are deep. As we've established, he gets

(57:47):
a lot out of his family's connections to the royal family,
but in the future he's going to be like no
when I was in Paris, I lived with a cousin.
You know, it's like friends with the prince.

Speaker 4 (57:58):
Come on, let's not let it go, and said that
he was obviously studying to be the twentieth century version
of a podcast.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
Yes, that's right, that's right, Pot one coming for my job.
That's right. Oh, Sophie, I gotta I gotta say. I
give him a shot. Look, nothing against you. I just
want to see how Polepot produces a podcast. How fucking
dare you? You know what dare you don't tell me
you don't want to see it.

Speaker 2 (58:20):
I would die for you.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
You're gonna give me, Sophie Pot. It gets in the operation.
We're all dying.

Speaker 4 (58:30):
The important thing is Sophie could organize a genocide. Poulpot
could never produce a podcast.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
That's that's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
Yeah, it's gonna sting for a little while.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
And I didn't say. I didn't say i'd like it.
I said it up.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
With a lebron stat And then you kick me to
the curve for fucking polepought.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
Look he could he could have been a podcaster, you know,
could have been a podcaster. He was known as having
a nice voice, you know, he could have had my
job maybe behind.

Speaker 2 (58:58):
The means and guess the po podcast and my boys.

Speaker 1 (59:02):
I have a Pole podcast. I wouldn't choose you. I
might I might prefer to listen to the Pole podcast, honestly,
Like that sounds that sounds fascinating. So Sar joins the
Khmer Student Union, which at that time was in the
process of morphing into a semi covert communist youth league.
He attended his first protest the next year for a
radical member of the Democratic Party who was assassinated by

(59:25):
right wingers using a hand grenade. Still, at this point
in his political involvement, it seems to have been a
byproduct of a social life. Right, He's at this protest
because like his friends are doing stuff like this, and
this is where you like go to hang out with people, right,
and he is he is kind of a hedonist at
this phase of his life. Philip Short writes, Sar's friends

(59:45):
regarded him as a bon vivant whose purpose in life
was to have a good time. So that's a I
think where we're going to end for part one. We're
at about an hour. Uh, We've got a lot more
polepot here, so we'll see how long it takes to
get through all of this. I really did try to
cut this fucker down because I wanted to deliver this
all in one week. But there's this guy's life. See fascinating. Yeah,

(01:00:10):
but there we are part one. How are you feeling
about Polepot so far?

Speaker 4 (01:00:13):
Andrew t I mean so far sounds fucking dope. What
could possibly go wrong? What could possibly change? What could
possibly go wrong?

Speaker 1 (01:00:19):
This is like that first Star Wars prequel where it's like, hey, kids,
he's kind of an annoying kid, but you know whatever,
how could things go badly? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
He likes the party, but he's a kid, come on.

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
Yeah, Yeah, it's got a weird crush on a lady
who's visibly like fifteen years older than him. That's a
little off, but.

Speaker 4 (01:00:37):
Whatever, Like, you know, he doesn't realize it's abuse, and
that's the important thing.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Yeah, I don't know, I mean, it is weird. They
then paired Hayden Christensen with Natalie Portman. Toby, we were
clearly the same age, after establishing that, like, she was
a mature adult ruling a country when he was a
small boy.

Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
It's just why why would you write that?

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
In Look?

Speaker 4 (01:01:02):
You know, it's the power of shooting your shot. I
guess that's what the force is, is just shooting.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
Your shot, shooting your shot. The Star Wars version of
Behind the Bastards probably does talk a lot about and
then Darth Vader is this weird relationship with this woman's
like twenty years older than him. So who knows how
this abuse affected you know, the things that he did
when he was in Bauer, right, he never wrote about this. Well,
we am as this interview with Watto, and that guy's

(01:01:26):
not really super reliableenda his own agenda. Now, I'm pretty
sure he murdered Watto if I'm remembering my expanded universe sh.

Speaker 2 (01:01:37):
Yeah, no, I think primary universe.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Primary universe, Yeah yeah, yeah, Sorry, where's that legends? I
don't know, fucking Disney.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
Goddamn you know what?

Speaker 1 (01:01:45):
Yeah, I like it anyway, everybody please join me from
my Behind the Bastard's Star Wars focused podcast, which is
actually entirely about Kathleen Kennedy. I don't have any issue
with Kathleen kid any It's all about George Lucas.

Speaker 4 (01:02:03):
Yeah, well, it's all about a bunch of anonymous money guys.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
Okay, yeah, all right, Well, like George Lucas. I hope
you all have a good day eating in a food
court and being photographed like a Yetti andrew T Jetty
pluggables to plug.

Speaker 4 (01:02:18):
I mean my podcast is yeoways as racist. I don't
know that's keeping it real.

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
Keep it real all right, everybody, YouTube, Keep it real
until next day or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Go to help.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
I love you.

Speaker 3 (01:02:34):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(01:02:55):
at behind the Bastards