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

Pol Pot and his friends are now in charge of Cambodia and in a remarkably short period of time they manage to kill two million people. Including a leftist academic from the UK who thought the Khmer Rouge was rad. Here's how!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Holy crap, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
a rare three part episode. You motherfuckers, you lucky sons
of bitches and rat Bastards are getting three episodes this week.
I am now legally your father. You're welcome. Hi Sophie,

(00:25):
Hi andrew T. How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Guys?

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Did that interest you?

Speaker 3 (00:27):
You don't need to be responsible for people? We are?

Speaker 2 (00:32):
I like that. That's like episode's three. I'm your father.

Speaker 4 (00:38):
I don't think you're I don't.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
I'm going to say something, really, I don't think you're
their father.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
I think you're their dad.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
Dy No, that feels a lot worse for me, actually.

Speaker 4 (00:47):
Yeah, but I think that's what that legally means is
you're not father your dad.

Speaker 1 (00:51):
D I'm like, I'm like one of those dads that
like should pay child support but instead I live on
a boat in the harbor of fucking New Orleans.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
And are you a library a libertarian in this scenario?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:06):
No, no, But I definitely don't believe in the moon landing.
This is Behind the Bastards again, a podcast you're enjoying
part three of our pole pot episodes and basically the
way it goes here this folks. We have a massive audience,
and I'm always trying to like do the most I
can to like please the most people, which you can't
do with every episode. You know, some people don't like

(01:27):
certain kits, some people don't like the cult leaders, some
people don't like the dictators, some people only want the dictators,
and likewise, you know, we've started doing a lot more
four parters over the last couple of years, in part
because there were guys where I felt like I'm kind
of doing a disservice to try to limit this to
two episodes, and a lot of people really like the
four parts and say this is my favorite part of

(01:49):
the show, and a lot of people say I don't like,
I prefer the two parters. So we try to like
go with variety rights that everybody's regularly getting what they want.
And I didn't so I didn't want to do a
four part for pole Pot And then I wrote fourteen
thousand words on him and was like, God, damn it, Robert,
because there is really that much to say. So this
is all to say I didn't want to break this

(02:10):
up over two weeks for the people who are tired
of four partis. So I just we're just giving you
three episodes this week, so you're fucking welcome. Open done.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
Would you say we're not like all the other girls.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
We're a lot like all the other girls.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
I'm not also going to be and that.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
All girls are beautiful. Okay.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
To get through the words, we're going to be talking
super fast. So if you put this on like zero
point six y six speed, you can make yourself a
fourth episode.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
I'm actually going to slow down a lot.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Just yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
No, I was gonna say, hey, Robert, yes, did you
know that Better Offline and Weird Little Guys won their
webby categories?

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Did they did? They did? Better Offline and Weird Little Guys,
two new weekly podcasts launch by cool Zone last year,
both won Webbys in their first year.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yes, yes they did.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
That's astonishing. Yeah, you know, uh, I'm very proud of
our of our little team who, despite being very very
small in terms of you know, the broader podcasting universe,
has way more listeners than most of the other podcast
networks out there and actual fans because we don't just

(03:28):
buy a bunch of downloads like some people I'm not
going to name, but we could just like bleep Out
and pretend that I accused whoever the fuck doing that? So, yeah,
you know, we're uh, we're we're the We're the we're
the Vietnam and you know, let's say our enemies and
the pod Save Guys or the Khmer Rouge of podcasts.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Right, they also they also want I saw.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
I know, I don't know why. It's literally just like
the only other podcast network I can remember off the
top of my head usually, So we shot on.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Those lot, I don't know, Empires go podcast Empire a
lot lot smaller body count than yes, Empires.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yeah, well, the exception of the Joe Rogan podcast, which
he actually might wind up creeping up on old Pollpots members.
You give him some time and some more testosterone shots. Yeah, yeah, So,
as I noted at the end of the last episode,
Pulpot had made it to the Standing Committee in nineteen
sixty and then the party leader of the Communist Party

(04:27):
of Cambodia, a guy named Samouth, was assassinated three years later,
probably by the King's security services, although we don't know
so some people think maybe Polepod orchestrated it. But anyway,
he winds up in charge as a result of this,
And yeah, initially the people that he's fighting against as
he's like leading this increasingly large and capable communist insurgency

(04:51):
is King Sahannock's monarchy, right, which he battled out of
a headquarters named Office one hundred, and this is a
mobile headquarters. Right, We're talking about a jungle insurgency. So
he's moving constantly to stay ahead of the King's intelligence,
which is in a large part provided by his American allies. Right,
Because for the US, his fighting against the Khmer Rouge

(05:15):
is kind of part of the broader struggle against communism
in Vietnam. And you know, to be fair, the Vietnamese
are still running a decent amount of what the Cambodian
communists are doing even in this period, and like the
mid sixties, they hold a lot of sway because they
have a lot, they're a major source of weapons, right,
they're more organized. But the Cambodian Party is getting a

(05:37):
lot more independent during this period of time, and Salatsar
is kind of making it his business to both increase
that independence and to make friends with the people. He
needs to beg for guns because they're not really capable
of manufacturing weapons in the jungle.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Sure, yeah, that's a very very vivid setup.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
What was the name of the headquarters again, Office one hundred.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
That fucking rules.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
Yeah, it's very cool stuff. I mean, it's always when
you're talking about like an underground insurgent, you've got this
secret leader nobody knows his name. Again, it's a real bummer.
From a narrative standpoint, I would have had him born
Polepot and switched to Salathsar because that's such a cool name,
Like that's such a scary name. But whatever, that's how

(06:26):
they change it up. He's subverting expectations and.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, yeah, exactly a few further dominos will fall.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Just like Ryan Johnson's Star Wars movies, And like Ryan
Johnson's Star Wars movies, Salassar travels to Beijing in order
to beg for weapons. Uh, And to that is that
is partly true? Yes, And so he is like he is,
and he's talking with obviously with with with Ho Chi
min Sti or with the you know, with with the

(06:54):
the Vietnamese Communists, and they are coordinating, but never to
the extent that the kind of imagines, right, even though
they're very dependent on the Vietnamese for a while, they
never like it. And there is absolutely no desire among
the Cambodian communists or among polepot to be tightly aligned

(07:15):
with Vietnam. This like fantasy that the US has that
China and all the Southeast Asian states are going to
form like one unified communist block is just absolutely anyone
with the slightest degree of a knowledge of any of
these people be like, the fucker, No, they hate each other.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
I mean, it's just even meeting four different Asian people. Anyway, Yeah,
you could probably see, like you could probably some of
this shit.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Talk to a Vietnamese dude about China, like seriously, have
a conver fucking station. In nineteen seventy, Sahanok's regime is
overthrown because again, the war is not going well for him,
He's not particularly good at running Cambodia, and a bunch
of these kind of right wing leaders in the military
with the backing of the United States gets pissed off.

(08:02):
So when when the king, like I think he's actually
technically calling himself the prince because he gives up his
royal title to quote unquote run for office whatever, Sahanak
leaves the country on like a diplomatic visit, and there's
a coup and the coup is headed by this guy
called lawn noleh lawn Nole is actually the brother of
Salathsar's childhood best friend, and obviously, like because of that,

(08:25):
lawn Nole's brother is a major part of the regime.
Lawn Nole sets up and he's like, yeah, probably if
Salas if the if the communists win, my friendship with
you know, salat Sar will protect me. It doesn't, by
the way, this guy gets the fucking shit Liq were
dated out of him. And the fact that there's a
family connection, you know, or a deep connection between between
Salatsar who's leading the communists, and you know, the family

(08:48):
of lawn Nole does nothing to temper the brutality of
the conflict that follows. Now, a lot of this comes
directly as a result of law Nole's policies, right, this
is not just Polepod is running a very brutal insurgency,
but it's brutal in response to the sheer violence unleashed
by Nol in order to try to maintain control. As

(09:08):
soon as the monarchy is abolished, the so called Khmer
Republic begins calling on the US to continue and extend
their bombing campaign in Cambodia, which had started clandestinely and
very illegally in nineteen sixty nine under Nixon as a
way to try and stop Vietnamese Communists from being able
to supply themselves. Right, there's this idea, it's accurate idea

(09:30):
that Cambodia is a big part of how the Vietcong
are like supplying and this is where they're retreating to
in order to regather their strength. That is essentially accurate.
And we are bombing them for years and pretending not to.
And now when law Nol is in power, we don't
have to like lie because we're being invited right now,
we're being invited by this coup that we set up. Right,

(09:52):
the US would ultimately drop more than half a million
tons on Cambodia in a four year period of time.
And for an idea of how many explosives that is,
I mean that sounds like our lot, right, five hundred
thousand tons is a lot of weight. That's more than
the total weight of bombs dropped on the Empire of
Japan during all of World War two. And right, here's

(10:16):
the thing. These bombs are being dropped both to deal
with like Vietcong. You know, tunnel complexes and some of
their bases, and to stop the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer
Rouge has no industrial base. Their weapons have to be
smuggled in. They are not like building tanks. They don't
have cities that are like functioning as part of an

(10:40):
industrial core. The Empire of Japan was one of the
most powerful industrialized states on the planet. And we drop
more bombs on Cambodia than we did on them, right, Like, right,
that's Jesus Christ, it's fucking and we nuked Japan famously, right,
Like the degree of force that we deploy on these

(11:02):
guys is outrageous and we get fuck all for it.
Like this could not have been a less useful use
of force, not that that would have made it like
moral if like it had won us the war, it
wouldn't be Okay, I'm not saying that, but it like
this is just like the biggest l A military one

(11:22):
of the biggest l's A military ever took, is.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
Not but also somehow extreme, even more pointless than some
of the other wars.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
And that's the thing. I tried to make this clear
in the Kissinger episodes, Like it's not just how evil
he is because he gets depicted as like this evil
genius a lot. He sucked so much shit at a
lot of what he was doing. Right, between one hundred
and fifty thousand, three hundred Cambodians probably died. That's a
credible death toll, although there's a lot of arguments that

(11:53):
both of those numbers either is much too low, right,
that it's significantly higher than three hundred thousand. You can
find some lower estimates. One fifty to three is kind
of you know somewhere, that's close enough for what we're
talking about here. It's a crime. It's a historic crime
against humanity. Right. Most of those dead are civilians, including

(12:15):
a shitload of little kids who are just incinerated from
the sky by the United States Air Force. So the
fact that we're doing this, the fact that we are
incinerating entire villages, we're just lighting little kids on fire
from the sky, makes people angry. The folks who don't die,
and who previously had had their ambition in life had

(12:36):
been to like, you know, be a peasant, feed my family,
live a life, you know, like be a normal Cambodian person,
their ambitions changed after their families get incinerated and suddenly
They're like, you know, what would be cool killing a
bunch of people in revenge, you know, getting my vengeance,
And so a lot of peasants start flocking to the

(12:57):
banner of the Khmer Rouge, which had not been super
popular previously, right, it had been growing before this bombing
campaign escalates, but not massively. The bombing campaign's primary result
is to supercharge support for the Khmer Rouge, because wouldn't
you want to shoot somebody?

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yeah? That is it is. I mean, that's eternally the
best recruiting tool.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Yes, And I'll never say anything to mitigate or reduce
the complicity and the responsibility of Polepot and the leaders
for the crimes that are about to happen. But the
crimes are being committed directly on the ground by a
lot of these young people from the jungle who grow
up under this bombing campaign and then join the gorilla.

(13:41):
And I can't, no matter how hideous things are, I
can't really blame them. Which isn't saying that it's okay
or justified. It's just saying that, like you, you ruined
people and they went insane, Like no one's capable of

(14:02):
acting rationally with the damage that you have done to them,
you know, with the exception again of these people at
the top, guys like pole Pot who do not grow up,
are not raised, being bombed or you know, living under
these horrible conditions in the jungle. These are people of
privilege of education who had the opportunity to pick a

(14:23):
different path and did choose horror, right, And that's where
my blame lies here. I want to quote from an
article for the Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network by
David Chandler. Next quote, and this is kind of describing
how the Khmer rouge develops as a result of all this.
The small scale guerrilla movement which he had launched against
the Henex's government in the late nineteen sixties developed with

(14:44):
Vietnamese and Chinese backing into a full scale resistance arvey
fighting the American backed Long Nul regime and Nom Pen.
At the same time, Sara developed the distinctive ideology which
made the CPK that's the Communist Party of Cambodia very
different from other Marxist Leninists parties. He mistrusted the working class,
relying instead on the poor peasantry, whom he saw as

(15:05):
the incarnation of Rousseau's noble savage. His party functioned like
a sect, and some authors underlined that his communism was
colored by Cambodian Buddhist structures. Its members were required to
renounce not only material possessions but also spiritual ties. The
ultimate goal was to crush individual personality and replace it
by unquestioning adherence to the collectivity. Discipline was ferocious security, omnipresent.

(15:31):
Saw abhorred the limelight, preferring to operate from the shadows
and using multiple aliases poke hey, eighty seven, Pole, grand uncle,
elder brother, first brother, and in later years ninety nine
or pim. Yet his fanaticism was marked masked by great
personal charisma. People who met him remembered his winning smile
and considerable talent as an orator.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
I mean a sick, athletic list of nicknames. It is
pretty cool. I know I'm fixating. I'm fixating on all
the names, but they're fucking rad.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
Yeah, it's hard not to write like that. For whatever reason,
I think eighty seven is my pick.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is eighty seven based off? Did
you find that out?

Speaker 1 (16:19):
Actually no, I probably could have figured it out, but
I didn't come across that in my reading. Now, because
this is the yeah yeah now, because this isn't a
military history podcast, and the overall story of Cambodia during
this period is so much more detailed than we can
get into. I'm going to have to YadA YadA a
lot of how how the rebellion you know, succeeds.

Speaker 3 (16:41):
I love when YadA YadA, please YadA yadda ya yaada.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
The gist of it is, Londol's government was only capable
of holding the line against the communists with US backing,
and even then not all that well. By the early
nineteen seventies, it had become clear that there was an
expiration date on that assistance. The Khmayer Rouge grew large
with each atrocity by the right wing government and their allies.
In areas where the Rouge took power, everyone old enough
to fight was drafted into the military, and everyone else

(17:08):
was put to work. The all black garb of the peasantry,
which had just kind of been a traditional thing in Cambodia,
became the only acceptable outfit to wear. You're literally not
allowed to dress differently. Those who refused to serve were executed.
By nineteen seventy three, most of rural Cambodia was in
rouge hands, and I got to say, the one aspect
of the Khmer Rouge I could have done great with

(17:30):
is just kind of wearing black pajamas all the time,
Like I got that shit on the lock, baby, Like
I'm wearing this like sport coat thing, but it's just
black pajamas under this.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
This is this is the tragedy of the YouTube era. Yeah,
is this fucking sport coat? When you know Robert could
just be full jammed out.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Yeah, yeah, and I am. This thing doesn't reduce the comfort,
It's fine, don't worry. Don't worry. I'm pole Potting under this.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
That's what he says. That's every episode, It's not just
this one.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
The final straw for lon Nole's regime is when Prince Sahanna,
hiding in exile, announced his support for Polepot's rebels. Now
we've done. We did a two part or one of
our very first episodes on Notre Dame Sahanak. He sucks ass.
Listen to those episodes as to why. But the reason
he does this is he believed that, like you know,
he thought this might give him a shot at returning
to power. Right if I back these guys. Clearly they

(18:25):
won't last, and eventually I'll be able to make my
way back in. Right. What really happens is he strengthens
the Khmer Rouge at a critical moment because again, people
the peasantry feel very strongly about the royalty, right, and
that still has not been busted, even though he really
sucked ass when he was actually running things. He does
this right as the US is starting to pull out

(18:45):
their assets and things fall very quickly. Think about kind
of how long the government of Afghanistan lasted as the
US pulled out, right, that's kind of what we're seeing here.
On April seventeenth, nineteen seventy five, Lon Nole's army collapsed
entirely and the Khmer Rouge entered Nom Penn. Now you
got to remember at this point, you know, when they

(19:06):
take the capital, the fighting has been going on in
parts of Cambodia for twenty years or more. People are
fucking exhausted, and is always the case in times like this.
There was an optimism among like a lot of regular
people that like, look, I don't know so much about
these Khmer Rouge guys, but the war's over. Maybe things
will get better, right, there's this hope, and that hope

(19:27):
is crushed very quickly because Polepot and his comrades, it's
not even that they don't want to go back to
normal and their minds going back to normal is a
death sentence, right. And again this is kind of what
messes with a lot of people's casual understanding of what's happening,
because you would think, well, obviously, these guys have to
hate the US more than anybody else, right, not at

(19:49):
all the cases. The people the Polepot's obsession is Vietnam.
That is the real enemy, not capitalism, not the United States,
the West Vietnam. Saigon fell to the NVA not far
from when Nam Pen did, right. And because of this,
because Vietnam has won its War two, there's this immediate

(20:13):
widespread paranoia among the Khmer Rouge leadership that the Vietnamese
are going to digest their meal of southern Vietnam and
then they're immediately going to take this big army they've
got with tanks and aircraft and all sorts of modern
weapons that the Khmer Rouge does not really have access to,
and they're going to cross the border and they're going
to invade Cambodia. And they're going to take us out

(20:35):
and make us nothing but a tribute state, right like
that is the immediate fear, and the only way to
resist this future, to have a chance of defeating Vietnam
and maintaining Khmara autonomy is to rapidly change the country,
both in terms of how food is produced and how
like to and to do this kind of they're very
motivated by these ideas they'd taken from Mao. That kind

(20:58):
of became the great leap for word in China of
like what if we do industrialism? But it's like everybody's
backyard is helping to like make different sort of industrial products, right.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, the I guess it's just DIY
approach to making you know your aks and your plate armor.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
Yes, and you can with guns, but not like the
guns you need to win a modern right, You're not
gonna be like making an SBG nine in your backyard
or whatever. Fucking shit speaking of making recoilist rifles in
your backyard. Our sponsors will teach you how they love

(21:41):
helping people maintain modern I don't know whatever. Their freedom
yeah freedom fuck ah and I'm bad. Okay, So cities

(22:03):
like the Capital have no place in Polepot's radical view
of the future of the country, which needs to be
immediately changed on a fundamental level in order to survive
and defeat the Vietnamese. So there's this plan that's hatched
by Polepot in the leadership of the party to completely
reform Cambodian society in order to make it capable of surviving.

(22:26):
And Polepot names this plan year zero. In April of
nineteen seventy five, they declare this openly, and this Year
zero concept. We talked about this in the earlier episodes.
It's based in part on Polepot's understanding of the French
revolution right as well as reading from guys like Thomas Paine,
because he does read like American revolutionaries too, And in

(22:48):
seventeen seventy six pain had published this quote, we have
it in our power to begin the world over again,
a situation similar to the present. Hath not happened since
the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a
new world is at hand. And this is the kind
of thing you hear in some like optimistic revolutionary tracts,
especially in the headiness of like we've defeated the regime,

(23:11):
we have this chance for a total break with history. Right,
there's even you can you can think about kind of
the whole the end of history stuff that was being
said at the when the Soviet Union fell. There's this
headiness of like, well, maybe maybe we're done competing with
like what kind of systems are going to work? Maybe

(23:31):
we've maybe we can. We're entering into this fundamentally new
world that's like represents this real break of continuity, and
that means we're never going to have to worry about
like going back to any of the bad old days
or the problems that we had struggled to know back. Yeah,
there's no way of going back.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (23:48):
We finally did it?

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Oh man, I mean obviously in hindsight, but like, never
has that sentiment been expressed and had not been a
true psycho saying.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Right right right, I mean I love me some Thomas Paine,
but you should look at the rest of his life.
This wasn't I mean, obviously we the US became a
slave state, right yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to quote
from an article written by Adris ayres here. Quote it
is evident that the Khmer Rouge, in deliberate and skillful fashion,
drew on history for political INDs. Their leadership made repeated

(24:21):
reference to the importance of grasping the wheel of history
and how history would crush those who stood in the
way of development. I've heard Musk say some similar things.
In nineteen seventy six, as part of Polpot's consolidation of
personal power, official party historiography was revised with an eye
to the older Indo Chinese guerrilla fractions within the movement
by moving the date of the parties founding from nineteen

(24:42):
fifty one to nineteen sixty and a meeting of the
Central Committee in March nineteen seventy six, it was noted,
with regard to historiography, that we must rearrange the history
of the party into something clean and perfect. Do not
use nineteen fifty one, make a clean break. So again
there's this even our re history of our real movement,
that one isn't good enough. We have to like And

(25:06):
if if you're ever in a if're ever finding your movement,
is needing to like alter the very basic foundation of
reality for your ideas to work.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Maybe bounce, I mean the b side of all the
cool names is like a sort of juvenile relationship to
like your own story, which is right, kind of weirdly
an evident here in evidence. Here we're like, why.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yeah, this is and this is why, like we talk
about the reason why I identify more as an anarchist
than anything else. Isn't because like I have some great
plan based on some thinker, for like, this is the
perfect way to reorder society, and if we did this
exact thing, based on this exact book, it would clearly
work without any problems. I feel that way because like,
anarchists have diagnosed the problem in a way that I'd

(25:55):
never seen be wrong. And the problem is if you
give people lots of power, Yeah, they do horrible things. Yeah, right,
Like that's that's that's kind of where I get into
it from. Right.

Speaker 2 (26:07):
And then every conceivable war, yeah, every conceivable dimension that
that power can be gained from. Yeah, still bad.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yes, And when you have all of the power and
you have this very strict idea of this, we need
to do this exact thing, and this exact thing is
the only thing that can save us, and then the
world doesn't sort of change the way you think it
ought to based on your political beliefs, Well, you're just
going to start killing people and that's sure enough. What's
going to happen here?

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Yeah, so the.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Project to make a clean break with history, this whole
Year zero thing is urgent, right because unless they can
do this before Vietnam swallows them up, they're fucked. The
internal Marxist analysis also indicated that Cambodia had to proceed
directly from feudalism to communism within four years, which they
called the super great leap forward. We already know this

(27:00):
can work for Mao, and we're like, but when we
make it like a super greatly for it's like Mario
Brothers suck edd ass. But once we ded a super,
it was finally good.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Just do the thing that already didn't work, but more.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah, Mao was just sitting there like, God, damn it,
Why didn't I put a super in front of it? Fuck?
The backyard furnaces would have worked, super sparrow murdering. In
policy terms, Year zero had a fairly narrow meaning the
cities which were dominant. As I stated in earlier episodes,
the cities have a like they're not like overwhelmingly Khmer

(27:35):
like the rest of the country is. They have a
lot of Vietnamese and Chinese traders and a lot of
the Khmer that lived there are the new people, right,
They are educated Khmer who come from families with money,
who have gone through Western education, who have often been
educated overseas and have thus been unforgivably tainted by foreign influence.
Now you may also notice these new people that he's

(27:57):
saying we need to expel from the cities are Polepot
and his friends right right, Still, the new people have
to either assimilate to the base people, and the base
people are Khmer peasant farmers, or die. And the distinct
preference of the Khmer rus is that they die. Andres
Airs describes how jarringly rapid this process is. Quote. Money

(28:22):
markets and private properties, schools, institutes of higher education, newspapers,
and religious institutions all were immediately abolished after the seizure
of power. Early eyewitness accounts relate how the hospital and
non pen was emptied of patients, how the national bank
was set on fire, money burned in the streets. Immediately
after the victory proclamation, book burnings were orchestrated in front

(28:43):
of the National Library and the School of Renee Descartes.
The country's borders were closed immediately, and the cleansing of
the country from foreign influences began by deporting foreigners and
domestic minorities such as Vietnamese Muslim Khmer, Chinese Khmer ties,
and Europeans. It was also so officially announced that the
individual would be abolished the traditional family would be replaced

(29:05):
by the movement in order to create a completely conflict
free society. Revolutionaries were officially instructed not to have a personality.
The individual was continually counterposed to the people, with the
former representing division, factionalism, inequality, bourgeoisie values, and foreign influence.
The people meanwhile embodied its polar opposite, something entirely pure redemption,

(29:30):
the extermination of particularity and contingency and the realization of
absolute freedom, equality and fraternity through complete absorption into the
ang Car. And that's the people. That's the Vulk, right,
you know, the Nazi said the Vulcan. The ang Car
is that for the Khmer rouse It's close enough at least, right,
And yeah, revolutionaries are not allowed to have personalities.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
I mean, I know we're coming at this from a
different time and hindsight, but I it's so hard for
me to even hear the version of that speech that's
stirring or less motivating it's really wild.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
And it's motivating to the people who have been drinking
the kool aid, because again, they've been in these They
started out in these circles where it's just them and
their friends, continually radicalizing each other further and not really
listening to outside people, right, and then they moved to
the jungle and become so not only are they all
like trauma bonding getting bombed together, but they're continuing to

(30:31):
talk out these ideas and just take themselves like. This
isn't for other people, right. The point is not to
inspire other people, right, right, And it is this you get.
This is an issue I have with like some other
people that I otherwise agree with a lot. There's talk
among certain left inst tendencies about the concept of the

(30:53):
abolition of the family and what they tend to mean
in the modern era is looking at a lot of
how much of right wing policy is based upon the
idea that parents own their children, right, and that literally,
like anything a parent wants for their kid, that's all
that should matter, right, which leads to a lot of
heinous Some of the worst things that happen in our

(31:14):
society is because of our conception of the family. As
this thing in which the parents, primarily the father, possesses
everyone else, right, and wanting to abolish that idea of
the family is good, But when you start framing it
as family, it's going to bring this up. People are
going to think about what the Khmayer Rouge did as
opposed to being like, I don't think parents should be

(31:35):
allowed to poison their kids because they have autism, right right, right,
you know, but anyway get.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
Into it absolute power and within the family, and this
is not a unit that should exist. Yeah, yeah, it's
this is not good.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Yeah, yeah, it's this optic it's an optical issue, I think.
But that's not you know, the Khmyre rouges not wanting
to abolish the family because there's anything similar to the
issue we have with the parental rights movement in the US, right,
the Khmayer Rouge wants to abolish the family because all
they want to exist is the party and this idea
of almost like a collective consciousness. If we can wipe

(32:15):
out enough individualism, then like we will have this kind
of pure individual close to nature, this like idolized everyone
will be the idolized Khmer peasant farmer who, by the way,
Polpot's parents had fought tooth and nail to make sure
he never had to.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
Be Yeah, yeah, don't worry about that.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
So as soon as they start doing all of this stuff,
people begin to starve. Right There's so much disruption. There's
disruption to the way food has grown and the way
it's transmitted, all of these networks that had existed. It's
one thing if you're like, we want to get rid
of capitalism, and we want to get rid of things
being entirely governed by the financial motive, but you have
to account for the fact that, like, well, but that's

(32:56):
how all of the food gets places right now, and like,
do you not have a You have to have a
real granular plan for how you're going to make sure
food keeps getting to people. They're why is everyone's going
to die? And that's what starts to happen, and people
also start to starve to death as they are forced
at gunpoint out of the cities. Non pen had flooded
to significantly higher than its pre war population because of

(33:19):
the war going on, and now these people are being
marched out and no one's allowed to take anything. People
are being dragged out at gunpoint in some cases, their
houses are being burnt down. They don't have a lot
of baggage, right, and it's not like people had a
lot we're keeping like food on hand. This isn't like
a prepper culture. Folks don't have like freeze dried shit
in their houses. So people are just being forced to

(33:39):
walk a lot of a number of them have been
pulled out of hospitals and they're just dying. They're dying
by the tins of thousands alongside the road, and as
people march out, they're just seeing these piles of corpses
of their neighbors and family members bloating in the sun.
It's just a really hideous like nightmare for all of
these people. And they're you know, these fighters that they're

(34:01):
meeting are folks largely who'd come from like rural areas
in the jungle. They're very young. A lot of them
are teenagers who have been raised on this war, and
they number one, don't have a lot of sympathy for
these people in the cities, who they've seen as the enemy.
The capital is what they've been fighting, if you want
to think it, like hunger games, derroty. And also they've

(34:22):
been told these are the new people. Right, These are
the enemy. We do have to get rid of them,
one way or another. So if you kill these people,
if you shoot them by the side of the road,
if they starve to death, you're helping to bring about that.
You're helping to save the Khmer people. Right. While most
of the deaths under the new regime are caused by
diseaser famine, they're all intentional. These are all the results

(34:44):
of policies set by Polpot and his comrades, and the
expectation of these policies was mass dying. The stage had
been set for this in the years leading up to
the capital's fall by a process of what is called
by genocide scholars toxification, specifically toxification through Khmer rouge propaganda toxification.

(35:05):
This is a process you can watch happen right now
in your very own country, presuming you live in the
United States. But well other countries, Yeah, but a few
other countries. We can talk about some recent Supreme Court
rulings in the UK. Toxification is a process often seen
in genocide, whereby groups of people are depicted as inherently
poisonous to the well being of the body politic. The

(35:27):
real people of a community. Soldiers are not, in general,
born willing to fill mass grapes or to march an
entire city out of their homes and die right. They
are there, They're pushed there, They're gotten to that point
when they have been convinced that doing so is either
a form of self defense or a way to fight
their enemy, or both right, And that's what toxification does.

(35:50):
There's a very good article on this process called toxification
and the Khmer Rouge genocide or autogenocide you'll hear both terms,
published in the Journal of Terror and Political Violence by
Timothy Williams and Rhianna Nielsen. I recommend reading the whole thing.
It's a very good article, and it's very important article.
It will be kind of chilling and light of things

(36:11):
happening in our present world, but it ought to be,
and it details how the messaging from Polepot on down
through the Khmer Rouge hierarchy seeded the militant population with
the kind of toxic attitudes that are a necessary precursor
to mass killing. The first people targeted specifically for mass
execution were those who had bought into and succeeded under

(36:33):
the capitalist system. These were the budding intelligencia, of whom
Polepot himself had been a member, professors, lawyers, business owners,
government officials. Polepot called them the internal enemy or super traders.
You really like super You hear a lot of that. Obviously,
this includes people who had been in the military, of

(36:55):
law and nol.

Speaker 4 (36:55):
Right.

Speaker 1 (36:56):
And the idea was that in this is Polepot's writing,
anyone with money quote owed the Communist Party a blood debt. Right,
So this is the first stage, and it's pretty easy
to get people on board with killing a lot of
these folks, right. That said, there's not many of them, right,
and once you start mass killing, you don't tend to stop.
So next, in nineteen seventy six, Polpot turned the eyes

(37:17):
and guns of his men on the quote unquote treacherous
elements he accused of causing sickness within the party. These
ugly microbes had to be destroyed before they rotted democratic Campuccia,
which is what they're calling Cambodia now, right, like once
the Moors takes over, it becomes goes from the Khmer
Republic to Democratic Campuccia. And Polepot writes of these ugly microbes,

(37:40):
quote what is infected must be cut, What is rotten,
must be removed. It isn't enough to cut down a
bad plant, it must be uprooted. And you see this
a lot in genocidal language, right, you know, this is
like Hitler calling the Jews the syphilitic bacillus, right.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah, or you know any Fano slide.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
Any fantastic line.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
It's like, again, it's just so hard to put myself
in the mindset where you hear this and you're like,
let's go yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
And it's you also get this is something we're hearing
right now with the way mental illness and things that
are called mental illness is. This is being discussed by
the right, and it's there's big news right now about
the fact that RFK Junior is putting trying to get
trying to use government databases put together a list of
everyone with autism. That's how it's being spread on social media.

(38:33):
The actual story is even I would argue even a
little worse than that, which is that they're attempting to
put together a database of everybody who has been diagnosed
with any kind of mental health condition, who is on
any kind of medication. It's even broader than just that,
and part of what's going on here is that, like
there's a big right wing campaign to like blame gun
violence on the mentally ill right. And another part of

(38:55):
it is that there's a desire to reclassify being transgender
and eventually even being LGBT is a mental illness, in
part because those people can be disarmed, in part because
then you can put those people in you know, yeah,
facilities or whatever. I tend to think that the goal
that a lot of these people are thinking towards is
less Nazi style death camps and gas fans and more

(39:18):
a Judge Rotenberg Center on every corner if you want
to go back to our Judge Rotenberg Center episodes. But
we'll be talking about that in other days. But I
bring this up to say this is a constant when
regimes begin the process that can end in mass killing.
And I don't think that that's an inevitable state of
affairs for us here, but I think people need to
be very aware of that because the similarities between these

(39:41):
situations are not inconsequential.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
It's it's necessary but not sufficient, but it is necessary.

Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah, for the.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
Death camps version.

Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah. So Polepot argued that these diseased elements of the
populace had to be purified. Year zero could ensure a
maoist elimination of contradiction. Turning in counter revolutionary elements became
a way to get ahead or to protect yourself. Cadras,
which are like members of the party, are rewarded for
their ability to purge the enemy within. Per that article

(40:16):
by Williams and Nielsen, violence became a part of everyday life,
and punishment for infringence of the minutely planned details of
society were draconian, often costing people their lives, particularly as
most mistakes such as foraging for food or not eating
with the collective were immediately interpreted as evidence of counter
revolutionary tendencies. Although anyone could fall victim of the system,

(40:37):
prime targets for elimination were ethnic Cham and Vietnamese minorities,
former soldiers or officials under the Londol regime, intellectuals or
others deemed not to fit into a peasant society, as
well as any person whom the regime believed to be
an internal enemy, mostly associated with being an agent of
the CIA, KGB or the Vietnamese secret service. And I
think it's so interesting part of this is there's such

(40:59):
a hatred of this concept of being an individual that
even if you're like foraging for food to stop you
and your family from starving, that's individualist behavior and you
have to be killed for it, right.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
God yeah, I mean. But also it's like all those
rules I feel like most of those times are asymmetrically
applied for you know, whatever means want to be accomplished.

Speaker 1 (41:22):
And that's key. And a lot of the people being
who these rules are being applied to, it's not even
necessarily that they did the thing, or that they were
the only person doing the thing. A lot of people
do the same stuff and get away with it. It's that
they had missed someone else up for another reason, someone
wanted their stuff. There's a lot of score settling that
happens anytime this kind of shit's going down. And this
gets me to an important side of fact about what

(41:43):
happened in Cambodia. You will usually see the mass killing
in Cambodia referred to either as the Cambodian genocide or
the Khmer Rouge genocide. This term is not I think
accurate to describe most of what happened, because the vast
majority of the people who were or you know, as
a part of these year zero policies were Khmer and

(42:05):
the goal of the regime was not to wipe out
the Khmer, right, it was to make them stronger and
ultimately more numerous. And it was just a disastrous failure. Right. Yeah,
The term autogenocide which was coined by author Jean lac
Lacutre something like that, Jeane Lacuter and the autogenocide was

(42:27):
coined by this French author in order to separate the
unique circumstances of mass killing and Cambodia from the Holocaust
and other traditional genocides. I again, there's some issues with that,
even because genocide is is not fully the right term
for what pol Pot and his peers are trying to
do to the Khmer people, right, because their goal is

(42:49):
to ensure the survival of their race. Right. You can
come down on however you like on what we should
call this right, but I should note that while what
the most of the killing the regime does, and most
of who the regime kills are Khmer, While I don't
know that it's right to say that like genocide is
just strictly textually the right way to describe that, there

(43:12):
are genocides that are being committed by the regime Khmer
rouge like normal, like straight up dictionary genocides, right.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
I mean, I wonder if it's it just comes down to,
like it's sort of functionally the same type of murder.
And I wonder if the argument is sort of like
every genocide is actually politically motivated, like Shelly, somewhat external
to the stated aims of the genocide, So like, yeah,
what does it really matter?

Speaker 1 (43:38):
That's absolutely the case. I think kind of the issue
comes down to is like, well, they weren't trying to
wipe out the Khmer, right, Like they just thought that
wiping out these people, which wound up being a huge
junk of the Khmer, would strengthen things like what do
you call that? You know, to a degree doesn't matter.
It's certainly not to the dead. But I do want
to make a point that there were us straight up

(44:00):
normal genocides occurring too in this mass killing. That paragraph
I read a little earlier mentioned both the Cham and
the Vietnamese ethnic minorities in Cambodia being targeted. And I
think all of these different kind of non Khmer people
are like five to ten percent maybe of the total
number of dead but when you look at these as populations,

(44:22):
these different ethnic populations that are being targeted, are are
killed in a way that makes them some of the
most total genocides I've ever studied. Roughly fifty percent of
Chinese Cambodians and these are not like necessary. Some of
them are Chinese immigrants, but these are just these are
people who are ethnically Chinese and live in Cambodia. Right,
fifty percent of the pre war population is executed or

(44:44):
starved in a three year period, and they got off
light compared to the ethnically Vietnamese Cambodians. I'm going to
quote from that article again. In particular, the Khmer Rouge
propaganda organs described the Vietnamese as toxic to Democratic Campuccia
by state that their goal is to swallow Cambodia's territory
and force Cambodia into an Indo Chinese federation under its control.

(45:07):
Vietnamese were portrayed as quintessentially evil and lethal to the
Democratic Campuccia. Radio broadcasts described the Vietnamese as living concealed
among the population, infiltrating, sabotaging, and destroying the communist regime,
therefore being toxic to the ideal. Further broadcast spoke of
the need to weed out and exterminate the enemy planted
within the cooperatives, and reminded civilians you are not fighting

(45:30):
only against Vietnamese soldiers, but the whole of Vietnam, so
spare nothing and no one. According to Polpot, the Vietnamese
are a black dragon that spits its poison. The overall
death toll for Vietnamese Khmers was nearly one hundred percent
of the population.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
Jesus, yes, yeah, yeah, I mean like.

Speaker 1 (45:52):
That this is about the most total genocide I've ever
heard of, the Vietnamese khmar in particular.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Right, right, Yeah, I mean that's like yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean, I guess. I still I'm just like not still,
but like like it is like it's hard.

Speaker 1 (46:09):
To wrap your head around.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
Yeah, it's hard to wrap my head around, and but
also like hard to like be like this can't be
the I mean, it just feels like the stated goal
can't be the actual goal, I guess, but like I
don't I don't know what I think the actual goal
is anyway, But you know what I mean, I'm just
like it has to just be sort of a vague

(46:30):
notion of power it.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Feels like it's it's.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
One of these killing your enemies like that.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
For well, because the people at the top giving the
orders live these lives of the mind where their whole
ego is in I am, I am, I am intelligent,
I understand how things really work, and I have this
plan right, and everything about their personalities wrapped up in
that plan. So it has to work, and they simply
can't accept. They can't even let themselves look at a

(46:59):
reality that would that would lead to that being questioned.
But then they're passing these orders down to people who
number one. Just the desperation of their life, the violence
they've seen, makes certain things just less abhorrent to them.
But also there's room for them to advance. The more
of these people they kill, the more stuff they get,
the more they move up, the safer they are, the

(47:20):
more food they get, right, and that.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yes, that's yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
And the incentives come because of the fucked up beliefs
of the leaders and the desperation of the people doing
a lot of the killing makes them respond better than
the incentives, you know, right, right, which is by the way,
this is not every genocide. For example, I wouldn't talk
about the members of the s s this way because
they're not right. But this is what's happening in Cambodia.

(47:49):
Speaking of what's happening in Cambodia, presumably someone in Cambodia
is listening to this podcast.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
And if say, look, hi, Hi, you didn't say speaking
off mass killing or anything like that. So this is
one of the better adrows.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, visit Cambodia or not. I don't know.
I haven't been. I hope I hear. It's nice and
we're back. So the Cham were another non Khmer ethnic
group that was targeted by the regime. And to make
matters worse, the Chams are Muslim, right and Polpot considered

(48:29):
Islam to be inherently reactionary, right, a fundamental enemy of communism.
The large part of the reason why is that Muslims
pray five times a day, right, and Polepot describes this
as them shirking their responsibility to work. Right, this is
an individualist thing, and it's also stopping you from participating
in the national project as much as everyone else. Right,

(48:51):
the Chams are just thus a drain on the ideal
communist state that he wanted to form. So Polpot sent
his men to wipe out every Cham village they could find,
and roughly fifty percent of Cham Cambodians had been killed
by the late nineteen seventy nine. Now what's interesting to
me is that he also targets the Buddhists, or at
least the Buddhist clergy. And this is interesting. This is

(49:12):
kind of weird because like, he had a really good
time at the monastery, he described it his whole life
as a positive experience, but as leader of Democratic Campucia,
he describes Buddhist monks as quote parasites who eat the
rice of the people. Monks are ordered to carry out
hard labor, and the vast majority of monks who had
existed pre war are killed by the Khmer rouge. Williams

(49:33):
and Nielsen site an internal rouge document that brags a
ninety to ninety five percent success rate in wiping out
the Buddhist monk population. So again almost totally takes out
the Buddhist clergy within like the Theravada Buddhist clergy within Cambodia.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
Yeah, it just feels like it's also like does this
sort of thing snowball, Like once you get started with
the mass killing, then your life on the list. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
Yeah, once you pop, the fun don't stop right right
popping here is putting people on us graves. Yeah now,
and this is so important to start it, to stop
it from starting.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
You know.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Again, ninety percent or so of the people killed by
the Khmer Rouge are Khmer. Most die is a result
of these kind of insane agricultural and land reform policies,
the mass to population, all the starvation and stuff that
goes along with it. But as time goes on, an
increasing number of people are being tortured and killed by
the regime. And past the initial point where they're like

(50:33):
punishing the capitalists and the members of Law and Nole's government,
most of the people being tortured and killed directly are
like former party members and like communists and stuff. Right,
A lot of them are people who had been part
of Polpot's old reading circle back in Paris. Right, they
are wiping out you know, every revolution devours it's young.

(50:54):
But they are doing that in like famous time. Here
for an idea of how it was to have agreed
with Polepot back when he was Salath Czar, or even
during the victory of the Khmer Rouge over the Lawndol government.
Of the original twenty two members of the Central Committee
for the Democratic Campuccia Party, which is who officially governed

(51:14):
after the end of the war, six lasted to the
end of the regime without being killed or tortured, and
the vast majority of them those were killed. The very
few people who survived owed their lives to their sworn enemies,
the Vietnamese army who eventually liberated Toul Slang which was
the prison for specifically like after a point, it's specifically

(51:36):
the prison four party members who were disloyal to eliminate confusion.
Tool slang is more commonly known as Security Prison twenty
one or S twenty one. Right, And this is in
terms of its like level of fame to people who
read about this tool slang or S twenty one is
the Auschwitz of Cambodia, right, Right. It's not on that scale,

(51:59):
it's not that big a camp, but it's death toll
is is Yeah, is.

Speaker 2 (52:04):
That like sort of I mean, I know, it's like
as you just said, like you know, every revolution devours
it's young, but that still feels like a high percentage
of like yeah, energies, yeah, like getting got.

Speaker 1 (52:21):
I think part of it's just because none of this
is working and someone has to pay and part of
it again just because once you start killing like this, yeah,
you keep you can't stop, right, in part because stopping
then you have to deal with the fact that nothing worked,
that everything was a failure, that your whole life and
all of your beliefs are wrong and no one at

(52:41):
the top can take So there must be someone, There
must be a trail, there must be somebody's fucking yeah,
fucking with us?

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Right? Is that like unique ish to as far as
like yeah, right, that's just how it goes sometimes because
like the Nazis don't really like the Nazis target other Nazis.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
You know, there's not the Night Long Knives, but that
was more of like a centralizing even more power and
dealing with like a chunk of the movement that didn't
really agree with with Hitler anymore. Not every this is
pretty it's not unique, but it's not common for it
to be like this, right, Obviously, in the French Revolution,
stuff like this happens, But the swiftness and the centrality

(53:21):
with which loyal members of the party are targeted and
that tortured and executed is yeah, like you know, you
can't be.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
If you can't be one of the boys, then yeah,
well who can you be?

Speaker 1 (53:33):
There's really no safety here.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Ryeah yeah. Yeah. So it was.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
Between one of like S twenty one, This prison that's
kind of the most famous of the prisons here, was
between a one of between one hundred and fifty and
a little less than two hundred torture and execution centers
built on Polepot's orders by the Centibal the secret police.
Roughly twenty thousand people were imprisoned in S twenty one
over the course of the regime. There's some debate on

(53:57):
this number of between twelve and twenty thousand, and there's
never more than about one thousand to fifteen hundred people
at a time, though, And S twenty one is built
out of a former school, which I guess extra chilling
given that Pop Pop was a school teacher. And when
I say a thousand to fifteen hundred at a time,
twenty thousand total people aren't released alive from S twenty one.
This is a death camp. And while it started by

(54:20):
going after again like agents of the old regime, YadA YadA, YadA,
its prime purpose for most of its history is purging
members of the leadership cast as well as like members
of the party alongside their entire families. If you are
like somebody, a mid level guy in the Khmer rouge
who gets targeted and put in S twenty one, your
kids and your wife are going to even if they're babies, right,

(54:43):
they'll take your infant in there and kill them and
torture them. Right, and again, it's just like, well, we
really have to make a statement, you know, the stakes
are so high. We really have to scare people away
from not being loyal members of the party. Now, we're
not going to be dealing with S twenty one in
as much length as we ought to, or the prison
system in general. This is because it really does deserve

(55:04):
its own episodes. Our friend Joe Kissabian of The Lions
Led by Donkey's podcast has covered at length. I recommend
his work given that I'm trying to focus this on
pole Pot, who was a maide that your architect of
this prison system. I hope you'll forgive my brevity as
I quote from a detailed fact sheet put together by
the Documentation Center of Cambodia for the Cambodia Tribunal quote,

(55:25):
and this is talking about the people who were sent
to S twenty one. They were accused of collaborating with
foreign governments, spying for the CIA and the KGB, and
hence betraying Ankar. Prisoners were also believed to have conspired
with others, and thus were forced to reveal their strings
of traders, which sometimes included over one hundred names. The
interrogators at S twenty one base their technique on a
list of ten security regulations, which included while getting lashes

(55:48):
or electrification, you must not cry at all. Although prisoners
often had no idea why they had been arrested, interrogators
forced them to confess their crimes. If they did not confess,
they would be subjected to physical and psychological torture. However,
after having confessed, they were marked for execution. Initially, prisoners
were killed on the grounds of the prison, but as
the volume and stinch of the corpses rapidly increased and

(56:09):
became unbearable, prisoners were then trucked and mossed to an
open field located fifteen kilometers away known as Crow's Feet
Pond to be killed. Waiting at the field was a
group of about ten young men led by Tang Tang
in his early twenties and his team of teenagers lived
in a two story house that was built on the
field in nineteen seventy seven. They were informed ahead of
time of the number of prisoners that would arrive, so

(56:31):
that they could dig the graves in advance. The shocking
figures commonly associated with the prison fourteen thousand killed and
seven survivors ranked the prison is one of the most
lethal in the twentieth century.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Jesus. Yeah. Also, I mean the detail. Obviously, every atrocity
has someone actually doing it, but like just this dude's job. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Yeah, every day you get told how many corpses you
got to dig holes for, and you and your fellow
teenagers get out of Yeah, the I guess early twenties. Yeah,
and his team was teenagers.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
I'm just doing it every day. It's like, yeah, you know,
it's so hard to fathom for me as a lazy person.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
He's probably like, well, this is pretty good job. Given things,
I'm probably not going to get targeted. They're not going
to go after the grave digger, right, the graves.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:20):
Now, while S twenty one was operating, Polepot himself made
regular statements and writings to Western supporters, and this is
a key to aspect of what's happening. While all this
nightmare is unfolding in Cambodia, there's not a there's not
there's stuff getting out, but not a lot of it, right,
at least initially. You know, as time goes on, more
does start to get out about how horrifying what's happening is.

(57:43):
But the first stuff that gets out is propaganda from
Polepot and the regime to Western supporters, where they're talking
about the utopia that we're building. We are finally creating
the communist, the agrarian, peasant, communist utopia that everyone's hoped
would happen. We've made a totally equal society here it
is and democratic Campuccia. We've done it right. And there

(58:08):
were a not insignificant number of Western leftists who believed
this bullshit right, and who would argue that any evidence
to the contrary is the evidence of how hideous what's happening.
Of the killing fields as they're called, start to comes out,
come out. There's a lot of folks who are like, well,
that's just capitalist propaganda, that's the CIA, right, Nothing bad's
happening in Cambodia, right. One of the organizations that Polepot

(58:32):
spread his propaganda towards was the Belgian Campuccia Society, who
interviewed Polepot in nineteen seventy eight. He told them, we
don't have prisons, and we don't even use the word prison.
Bad elements in our society are simply given productive tasks
to do, you know. Dipshits by this stuff right, as

(58:56):
they always do, as they do in the present day.
By all accounts, the most famous of these dipshits was
an English writer and professor named Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell had
been a significant figure on the British left in the
sixties and seventies. He spends two years as the chair
of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He is an avid
anti Vietnam War protester, and in that regard his actions

(59:18):
were admirable because the Vietnam War deserved protesting. He wrote
regularly for Piece News and support of different anti colonial movements,
and a number of them he was very right to support.
Caldwell is a figure who in some ways resembles a
lot of modern genocide denier types on the left, although
I think he was a much better person because again
he's not comprehensively that and he's not being like paid

(59:41):
by anybody. Yeah, this is a true believer who lacks
a tremendous degree of judgment in a very key area.

Speaker 2 (59:49):
But also, like you know, from his perspective, you kind
of imagine, like you're largely right. I mean, in this case,
you're wrong about the CAA propaganda, but.

Speaker 1 (59:59):
Up in until Cambodia you're largely right. Yeah, most like
in the US is doing Hella war crimes and being
supported by a lot of people in Vietnam and doing them.
And yeah, so like you know, like, yeah, it's like
you see the leg he has a stand on even
though he's rong, it is one of it's very tempting,
And there's a degree to which you should compare him
to folks like the people who write for the Gray Zone,
which is a faux journalistic institution that spent years arguing

(01:00:22):
Bashar al Asad never gassed its own people made fun
of anyone who was saying Russia was about to invade Ukraine. Right,
they're those motherfuckers, Caldwell. There's a degree to which you
should compare to them. But also people who knew him
said he was kind and empathetic, and he was in
a lot of cases on the right side of things,
and he gets into Cambodian politics for a sympathetic reason,

(01:00:44):
which is that he's arguing against this nightmarish US bombing campaign,
which is a war crime. And on the other side
of this. By the way, I found a fucking Washington
Post column looking writing about this in which the author
was like, Oh, it's you know, what's really fucked up
is the people who who slandered the US for bombing
Cambodia to try to stop the Khmer Rouge from coming

(01:01:05):
into being. That's not why we fucking did it, you
dip shit, Like fuck you for one thing, that's part
of what made them possible. For the other thing that
we didn't give up. That was never the fucking goal, Like,
fuck you, fuck you. I just so many people I
fucking hate On'm both like yeah, anyway, Yeah. Caldwell was
loved by his students, and it was recalled even by

(01:01:27):
people who disagreed with him, as a gentle person who
was tolerant of opposing views. So he was not the
kind of guy who was like maybe he would have
been if he'd had Twitter, but like was a guy
who was willing to talk about his unhinged beliefs about
Cambodia with you in a polite manner. So I don't
want to depict him as a caricature right now. Because
the Khmer Rouge beat the US back law nole government,
and because their claims of agrarian equality and an idealized

(01:01:50):
socialist society gelled with Caldwell's own hope of where the
world might go, he came to support them to the hilt.
His friends, who at the same time saw him as
a brilliant economist, also rude his startling naivete. One peer said, quote,
he was a man with very clear theoretical and ideological views,
and the empirical basis didn't seem to worry him hugely,

(01:02:11):
always a big warning signs about how should should work.
So why bother looking at what's happening now? Caldwell did
visit a lot of the regimes that he extolled and supported.
He took regime sponsored to tours of places like the USSR.
And you know, that's one of those things where it's

(01:02:31):
like you are going to miss a lot of the
bad stuff the USSR is doing. But the Soviet Union
is like a state that functions right, and there's things
that did that were good. It got the first person
into space, there were massive improvements in you know, literacy
and whatnot, in addition to horrifying and awful things done
by their It's an actual state, right, and so it's

(01:02:52):
understandable that you could go there and see take this
sponsored tour and just see the good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
That's not really possible in Cambodia because there's no good stuff, right,
there's nothing positive happening under the Khmer route.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
Yeah, the silver lining is hard to I mean you
truly have to be a blind believer to just crime there.

Speaker 1 (01:03:15):
Right per the Guardian quote. Three days before Christmas in
nineteen seventy eight, Malcolm Caldwell received an early present. On
the final day of a two week tour of Cambodia,
he was told that he would meet with Polepot. This
was indeed a rare privilege. Unlike most other Communist leaders,
Pole had not created a personality cult. There were no
posters of him, he was seldom seen or quoted. Many

(01:03:35):
Cambodians had not even heard of him. Only seven Westerners
were ever invited to what had been renamed Democratic Campuccia,
and Caldwell was the first and only Britain. So the
fact that he's invited at all is this huge honor.
So he comes and he shows up at this place
where there are other journalists, as we'll talk about with him,
there's people with him, and they're all immediately like in
non pen being like where are all the people because

(01:03:57):
some of them had been prior to the khmarre route
taking over, and they're horrified. They're like, where are the
fucking human beings?

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
Everyone's gone. Something's horribly wrong here. And Caldwell is just
like so honored that, like they didn't pick any other
British people. Poulpot wants to talk to me, just me,
you know. So there are a few reasons why he
was taken in and received so well. For one thing,
he had been to China. He was on good terms
with the Chinese Communist government and that was Cambodia's main

(01:04:27):
ally at the time. He was also Polepot was kind
of in this period. This is after there had been
a series of provoked border conflicts with Vietnam provoked by
the Khmer Rouge, and it was becoming increasingly clear that
Vietnam was going to invade, and so Polepot was really
trying to burnish his international support, so he suddenly wanted
Westerners in, right, and he's like, well, this guy's probably

(01:04:49):
like blind enough to ignore all the horrible shit going on, right, Yeah.
And Caldwell had just a few months before he came
to Cambodia written an article in The Guardian in which
he had basically said, like, all these reports that the
khmaier Rus are killing people are nonsense. One of his
main sources was the Campuccine information minister, a guy named

(01:05:12):
Hugh Nim, who blamed the deaths on America, right, basically
like the bombing that the like all of these people
that you're saying have died, this is due to the
bombing campaign the US had executed.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:24):
Now, by the time he shows up in Cambodia, this
guy that his whole article denying the Khmer Rouge genocide
is based on, Hugh Nim, has already been executed and
tortured to death by Paul Pott. So not a great sign.
But even so, he was aware to an extent that

(01:05:44):
the Khmer Rouge was killing people, and he had described
them as quote arch quislings who knew well what their
fate would be, were they to linger in Campuccia. So well,
I don't want a caricature this guy. You shouldn't pretend
that like that. This dude was finding reasons to justify
the killings that he knew about, right, including the guy
who was the source of his stupid article. So crazy, yes, nuts.

(01:06:09):
Now there are real journalists on this trip, and one
of them Elizabeth Becker. She had been to Cambodia before things,
you know, the Khmer sho had taken over, and she
was a very courageous and talented war correspondent, right, she
was good at her job, and she argued with Caldwell
constantly while they're talking, like she's one of the people,
being like there's supposed to be people in this city,

(01:06:29):
like I've seen it before, something's really bad here. And Caldwell's,
you know, giving the same lie, putting out a bunch
of nonsense about like, you know, the the bold reformation
of society along these utopian lines and whatnot. But she
still liked him, like he was a very pleasant man.
She called him a kind and tolerant and just deeply

(01:06:51):
naive quote. He didn't want to know about problems with
the Khmer rouge, and that carried over to not wanting
to know about problems between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was
stuck in nineteen sixty eight or something. Now there's a
book out by this point, by the time that Caldwell
comes to Cambodia about the early stages of the Cambodian
the autogenocide, whatever you want to call it, called year zero.

(01:07:13):
Caldwell could have read this book, and if he had,
he'd have learned, for example, that one Khmer rouge saying
expressed the regime's goal as quote, to completely annihilate diseases
of consciousness that got in the way of their goals.
Doing this meant getting rid of hidden enemies who, as
Polepot put it, had sicknesses of revolutionary consciousness. Now Philip

(01:07:35):
Short goes into more detail here, summarizing information that should
have been available to Caldwell how he had he done this.
Reading quote Satirama meant an individual who failed to focus
on the communist cause and was therein portrayed as toxic
to its realization. Even without considerable evidence or proof, individuals
could suddenly be classified as toxic to the super great

(01:07:56):
leap forward and accused of being class enemies with a
sickness of consciousness. Enemies were depicted as pervasive and infecting
the pure Khmer ideal. The desire to exterminate enemies grew,
as did the intoxication of doing so with impunity. Purging
these contaminants was discussed as crucial to the survival of
the regime. According to propaganda, enemies were likened to an

(01:08:17):
impurity that threatened the well being of revolutionary society. These
groups were portrayed as a lethal source of pollution that
needed to be eliminated. A sort of madness had taken
over the country at this point, particularly among the rouge
cadras doing the hand to hand slaughtering, and for an
idea of just how de range this gets, several militia
who were interviewed later claimed that they would eat the

(01:08:39):
livers of their victims and the belief that it would
give them extra power and probably because they are also
starving to death. One of these yeah, one of these
guys as cited later as saying they ate human liver
because they wanted to prevent themselves from being shocked by
killing people. Then they could kill people. They wanted to
change themselves to be able to kill people without pity.

Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
Oh god, Yeah, I mean there's probably some level of
like just pry on disease that can take over, Like
there's got to be.

Speaker 1 (01:09:12):
With livers, you're okay with livers.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):
Yeah, I mean, if you're trying to like like lose
lose your conscience, yeah, probably giving yourself a brain disease
is not the worst way to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:25):
You're generally safe if you want to eat human beings safely,
like a liver, the livers that like are reasonably okay
to go for, Sophie. I don't want people to get
fucking pre on diseases.

Speaker 2 (01:09:36):
Don't know, no spine, no bone, bone.

Speaker 1 (01:09:39):
No brain, right, you know, we all folks, Sophie, A
lot of people.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
What.

Speaker 1 (01:09:46):
I'm a believer in harm reduction. Okay, you know, all right,
test your fentanyl, don't eat people's spines, or test your
drugs for finnel, don't eat the spines, don't test your
final don't do fentanyl.

Speaker 3 (01:09:59):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):
Caldwell could have had access to a lot of this information,
and he rejected it largely on the basis that year
zero had been pillaried by a critique published by Noam Chomsky.
Now this is contentious, people, Oh boy, the arguing about
whether or not Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge or was
just like, given the information available at the time, it's
hard to tell what is true. I'm not gonna this

(01:10:22):
is not going to be a lengthy dissection of that,
but there are arguments that he would denied a number
of the crimes being committed by the Khmer Rouge. He
certainly argued that Ponchard, the author of Year Zero, had
exaggerated the horror of what was occurring on the ground.
Chomsky described it as what people were saying about the

(01:10:44):
Khmer Rouge as quote, an unprecedented propaganda campaign to slander
democratic Campuccia via systematic distortion of the truth. Right now,
Chomsky preferred a different book. He compared Ponchad's work unfavorably
with another book called Cambodia, Starvation and Revolution written by
George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which is basically is taking

(01:11:06):
Khmer Rouge propaganda and like being like, hey, everything's great
over there, actually, and like what the stuff that's bad
is not their fault, right right?

Speaker 2 (01:11:15):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:11:15):
There was another book written by two readers Digest writers
called Murder of a Gentle Land that Chomsky also went after,
which you know, it was not perfect. None of the
claims about what none of the none of the critiques
and the people talking about the autogenocide are perfectly accurate
because it's still going on, right, But they are broadly accurate.
And and Chomsky is certainly in the wrong about what

(01:11:39):
books about Cambodia to trust during this period.

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
Right. But but also if we hadn't you know, we
the United States and the West, hadn't put out so
much like there's a CIA propaganda like this, would it
wouldn't be it would be less possible for for this,
for this to it like work.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
Yeah, And this is also why I have I have
a degree more of sympathy to cald Well and to
other people who doubted this in this period of time
because it was such a different information environment. Yeah, and
there had been there was just so much disinformation that
been put out about Vietnam, that'd been put out about
what the US was doing in Cambodia that didn't put

(01:12:21):
it about what the US was doing in parts of
Latin America. So again, these people are wrong, and that
should be stated. But it's I do have less condemnation
than I do about like the stuff going on in
the twenty first century that right viewers this, right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:36):
Yeah, there wasn't there wasn't Twitter and there wasn't like
yeah they you know, it's just it's more reasonable to
be skeptical.

Speaker 1 (01:12:45):
Yes, and there it's certainly reasonable to initially be skeptical.
Now again by the point time kol Wol was on
the ground and these other people with them are like,
this city used to have people. It's no longer like
you should have known, right, right, So it's generally considered
or argued at least that Chomsky is a big part
of why Caledwell doesn't like trust. You know, punch Od's

(01:13:10):
book about the atrocities going on in Cambodia. You know, whatever,
the truth, whoever you're going to blame for it called
Well at age forty seven shows up in Cambodia as
a pretty much a true believer, right, And in fact,
he had finished a book before he goes there called Campuccia,
A Rationale for Rural Policy, in which he had written
that the Khmer Rouge had quote opened vistas of hope

(01:13:32):
not only for the people of Cambodia, but also for
the people of other peoples, of all the other poor
third world countries. We'll come back to that book in
a second. So called Well, along with these journalists, is
escorted around the country. They see some like staged scenes,
and again Becker is gets aggressive, very brave woman with
these Khmaer Rouge guards, being like, I can I can

(01:13:55):
see what you're not showing us, like where you're blocking
us from going. I can see evidence of clear problems
because I've been here before. What the and she's like
arguing with them, she said later it was so clearly awful.
One of the problems was the absence of what I saw,
the absence of people. And that's a different kind of
proof too. I don't see any people being executed. Caldwell

(01:14:18):
was not concerned. Quote. He preferred to stay in the
car and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunities prepared for us,
Becker wrote in her book on Cambodia. Now at the
very end of the tour, they all go back to
Nonpen and they you know, they're hanging out for a
little bit. They're not all that far from the S
twenty one center, right, this is where Caldwell's going to

(01:14:38):
finally have his interview with pol Pott, and I'm going
to quote from the Guardian. Again, Caldwell remained ignorant on
the Friday morning and non pen that he was taken
in a Mercedes limousine to see pole Pot. The setting
for the meeting was the former Governor's palace on the waterfront,
built during the French colonial period. In a grand reception
room replete with fans and billowing white curtains, the two
men sat down and discussed revolutiontionary economic theory. Becker had

(01:15:02):
met Polepot earlier the same day, and in When the
War was Over That's her book, she writes he was
actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome, but attractive.
His features were delicate and alert, and his smile nearly endearing.
The perennially shally at shabby academic and the fastidious dictator
must have made for an odd couple. In any case,
Caldwell left the meeting a happy man. He returned to

(01:15:22):
the guest house he was sharing with Becker and Dudman
full of praise for Polepot and his political outlook. We
went over stuff, says Becker. He thought he had a
good conversation he had avoided at all costs in a
discussion of Vietnam, and he was looking forward to going home.
So that night they have another argument, you know, Becker
and Caldwell about Cambodia. You know, they have dinner and

(01:15:42):
they go to bed, and as far as she can tell,
he remained completely convinced that the revolution was a good
thing and that Campodi was headed in a good direction.
She goes to bed at around eleven pm, and in
the middle of the night she is woken up by
what she eventually realizes our gut is gunfire, and she
comes out of her room. She sees a young man
pointing a handgun at her. He's wearing he's got bands

(01:16:04):
of ammunition on his body, he's got a rifle on
his back. She flees back into her room and locks
herself in the bathroom, and eventually, what you know, when
they come out when this ends, the Dudman, the other
guy there sees like a bunch of guys running along
the street and they find Caldwell in his room and
he's been shot repeatedly. He's dead. Right. It's still to

(01:16:28):
this day not perfectly clear. Yeah, definitely was. I mean it,
it's generally pretty clear Polepot ordered it. We don't really
know why. What about this guy triggered him. Why specifically
it happened, They the Khmer rouge doesn't admit to it,
but yeah, this guy gets killed, and it's just kind

(01:16:49):
of it's one of these very famous moments because he's
such he's one of these like guys who had really
been willing to go to bat for democratic Campuccia and
then finds himself yet another corpse in the killing field,
so to speak.

Speaker 2 (01:17:03):
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, the other
side is like we're also living through a moment where
like everyone will cozy up to the dictator who demonstrably
will stab you in the back and any given opportunity,
and they still mine up.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean people, people
are really like Caldwell. Above all else is a reminder
of how easy it is to blind yourself to obvious reality,
even at your own peril, because because seeing the reality
is not even that you don't want to see it,
it's at seeing the reality would mean taking a hit
to your ego. It's the same thing why you've got

(01:17:39):
there's a lot of people being like, oh well, once
these tariffs start to hit, once the economy collapses, all
of these Trump supporters will realize, yeah, you'll and like
a significant chunk of Trump's voters who are not hardcore supporters,
who are the people who voted for Biden and twenty
you know, who go back and forth or who like
made their decision day of Sure, they'll change their mind,
they'll get angry. But the heart and core of his

(01:18:01):
supporters recognizing that they've been fucked means recognizing they're not
as smart as they think they are, and again called well,
that's a big part of it for him. He's a scholar,
he's a smart man. He couldn't be this wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:18:14):
Yeah, m hm, So, I mean, you know they could.
And those people are also the ones doing the worst
stuff when the time comes to do the worst stuff unfortunately, so.

Speaker 1 (01:18:26):
Yes, because again they've bought in. Now, while all this
is going on, the end of the regime is getting
nearer and nearer because Poulpot's also not as smart as
he thinks he is. Right, he had directed his forces
in what began as a series of border skirmishes against
the newly unified Vietnamese state. This was a sensible decision
based on their obsessive hatred and paranoia of Vietnam, but

(01:18:48):
given the comparative state of the militaries of the two countries.
It was basically suicidal and in short order, this is
what brings an end to democratic Campuccia. Vietnam invades Cambodia
in December of nineteen seven eight, and what follows was
not close to a fair fight. By January, they had
taken the capitol and put an end to Polepot's reign
sort of, so he has to flee, right, he has

(01:19:12):
to like leave non pen and Vietnam takes over and administers,
you know, for a while and Cambodi and eventually Cambodia
becomes independent again under a government that is not the
Khmer Rouge. But the Khmer Rouge doesn't go away, and
Polepot remains the head of the Khmer Rouge as they

(01:19:35):
like go and hide in the jungle. They've got like
some villages and stuff. This like little weird fortified section
of the country, tiny section of the country that they're
able to like manage along. I think it's like the
Thai border there. And and in fact this like government
because like in eighty two, China and the Association of

(01:19:55):
Southeast Asian Nations kind of pressures the Khmer Rouge to
ally with Sahanak's forces and some like republican forces led
by a guy called Sonsan along the Thai border and
create this thing called the Coalition Government of Democratic Campuccia,
and that remains in the UN the legitimate Government of
Cambodia until nineteen ninety one, even though like they're not

(01:20:17):
actually in power. The government of power is like the PRK,
but they're only recognized by Vietnam Lao and the Soviet Union.
And so that's kind of like Polepots where he is.
For the eighties, you know, into the nineties, there is
a lot of guerrilla warfare. Polepot continues to lead the
Khmer Rouge to fight against the Vietnamese backed Government of Cambodia,

(01:20:40):
and this continues massively the suffering of the Cambodian people
who do never get nearly enough international aid. And this
situation doesn't really start to end until the Paris Peace
Agreement assigned in October of nineteen ninety one, the Vietnamese
withdraw from Cambodia and things slowly start to calm down.

(01:21:01):
There's a UN peacekeeping force that kind of enters in
nineteen ninety three, and there's like a free and fair
election you know that. Yeah, things start to get better.
At this point, the Khmer Rouge never disarms, right, They
continue to hold their tiny little chunk of the country
and argue that there's Vietnam is still secretly running things.

(01:21:22):
There's camouflage Vietnam, Vietnamese soldiers you know that are behind
the regime.

Speaker 3 (01:21:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:21:27):
They boycott the nineteen ninety three election and they basically
hole up in western and northern little bits of Cambodia.
They're outlawed in nineteen ninety four, and when the Cold
War ends, they don't really have any of them, even
minimal support that they had previously had at long, long length.

(01:21:47):
Jang Seri, who's the Foreign minister, who is again one
of Polpot's friends from Paris, as well as a number
of other high ranking official surrender along with the bulk
of what had remained of the military of the Khmer Rouge,
and they are eventually incorporated into the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. Polepot,
though stays free for quite a while until he is

(01:22:09):
basically there's this shit that goes down in nineteen ninety eight.
I think it is where one of his few remaining
friends running the Khmer Rouge this guy, Sonsen, does something
that Polepot considers treason, and so he massacres Sonsen along
with fourteen of his family members, including his like grandkids. Now,

(01:22:32):
Polepot would argue for the other people, the babies, the
young ones, I did not order them to be killed.
For Sonsen and his family, Yes, I feel sorry about that.
That was a mistake that occurred when we put our
plan into practice. I feel sorry. This is when he's
questioned by a journalist Nate named Nate Thayer, who does
like his last interview, and this is kind of what
brings an end to him leading the Khmer Rouge finally

(01:22:55):
after thirty seven years, because for whatever reason, this is
a step too far to the left, asked people who
had stuck around him, and one of his like his
commander in chief, a guy named Tom Mauk, puts him
on house arrest, right and yeah, and that's kind of
the end of Polepot of having even a sliver of power. Eventually,

(01:23:15):
Polepot is brought before a people's tribunal. He's sentenced to
life imprisonment for Sonsen's murder, but he never really faces
any actual like justice, right, Like there's there's there's nothing like.

Speaker 2 (01:23:31):
Right, there's no way you can pay for this anyway.
But he doesn't even not even close.

Speaker 3 (01:23:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:23:36):
No, he dies under house arrest in nineteen ninety eight,
and uh story.

Speaker 2 (01:23:43):
Yeah, it's one of those like like whatever belief you
may have in some sort of cosmic justice, this will
this should tip the scales in the other direction.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
Yeah, Like he is ultimately not punished by the New
Cambodian State or the u WIN. He's punished by the
Khmer Rouge for killing another Khmer Rouge guy. In his
very last interview after he has been arrested again, there's
this guy Nate Thayer who comes in and does this
final interview with Paul Pot. And Nate does a very

(01:24:15):
good job of this, Like he really presses Polepot on
the stuff that he did, on all of the killings.
And this is I want to read this quote from
one of Nate's last articles with Poulpot, where he's trying
to get him to acknowledge anything about what he did.
I came to carry out the struggle not to kill people.
He rasps, his voice almost a whisper. He pauses, fixing

(01:24:36):
his interviewer with an almost pleading expression, even now and
you can look at me, am I a savage person.
My conscience is clear. I do not reject responsibility. Our
movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world,
but there was another aspect that was outside our control,
the enemy's activities against us. I want to tell you,
I'm quite satisfied with one thing. If we had not

(01:24:57):
carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have been another Campuchia crumb.
In nineteen seventy five, he says, referring to the Mekong
Delta region seized by Vietnam from the Khmer Empire in
the seventeenth century, and that I think says a lot
that the end of this guy's life, two million deaths,
maybe on his conscience, the absolute destruction of his country

(01:25:20):
in such a way that it still has not recovered.
And he's like, well, look, if I hadn't ha done that,
it could have wound up like this time Vietnam took
the Mekong Delta region from US in the sixteen hundreds.
You know you wouldn't want that, would you. Like he's
still he's such like it's this this fucking academic brain shit,
where like all that matters to him. Is this idea

(01:25:42):
he's cooked up about how the world ought to work
when he was like a young student with his friends,
that he never gets over. His ego won't let him
no matter how many fucking people it leads him to kill.

Speaker 2 (01:25:52):
It's like such a like holding onto that delusion till
the end is so amazing. I mean, I just you know,
it's so hard for me to understand that brain yep,
like like rationalizing to that degree like total I don't know,
or just you got to put on a show all
the way to your last interview, you know, keep the

(01:26:12):
keep the k fave up. Yep, fucking grim.

Speaker 1 (01:26:17):
Anyway, it's a lot time yep.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
Just my plug is just go go go sit by
yourself for a second and just think about, you know
the world and what you can do to help someone.

Speaker 1 (01:26:34):
And don't don't take the books you read when you
were fucking too seriously.

Speaker 2 (01:26:42):
Right, look, we're living through the same version of that,
but just the book is fucking autless shrugs exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:26:49):
That that's that is like why I bring this up
in the context of like Doge and all of these
young people who have like fucking reading goddamn Curtis Jarvin
and ship on the Internet and convinced themselves the ship
they read when they're young and like talk with their
friends about obsessively and these discord chats and signal loops,
and you know, there are the people who are willing
to make Polepot style decisions. And no number of deaths,

(01:27:10):
how many many tens of millions of fucking people die.
If they get the chance, it won't. They will not
for a second doubt themselves or change their minds. And
that's why literally anything that can be done to stop
the process that is attempting to be underway is like justified,
because these people are going they they they have to

(01:27:32):
be edged out right, And I'm optimistic at least about
the fact that Musk, who's one of these people who
has the same kind of Polepot brain damage seems to
have seems to be pulling back because of how angry
he's made. He's just not built for criticism, right, Yeah,
but there's more of these guys.

Speaker 2 (01:27:51):
And these guys he's delusional, but he's tooth, thin skinned
and thankfully largely incompetent. Although inc has never stopped so
many of these folks the past, so.

Speaker 1 (01:28:00):
No, it hasn't no, they just fail upwards, cold, just
fail hold comfort.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):
But yeah, maybe that's at least a weakness to exploit anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:28:09):
I don't know, hard to know when it's good to
read books or not.

Speaker 2 (01:28:15):
Oh my god, no, this is This is the lesson
for these three episodes. Don't read books kids, podcasts. Not
that podcast. Yeah, no, not that podcast either.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):
Podcasts have never led anyone to support horrible things to
get people killed, Just like, don't ever believe your own
bullshit or anyone else is too strong. Keep an eye
out for what's going on in the world, and talk
to people. Goodbye, goodbye.

Speaker 4 (01:28:43):
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(01:29:04):
at Behind the Bastards