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

Robert continues the story with young Pol Pot's years in France where he and his friends radicalize themselves in what has to have been the deadliest book club of all time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
podcast about really our first genocidal bastard who is legitimately
considered a nice guy, which is a nice write at
everybody that nice does not mean good. Lots of nice
people who are evil.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
That is so I was going to say, Yeah, that's
also a reminder.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Of course, you know, you don't have to be an
asshole to be the top of your field.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
So no, no, no, you don't have to be an
asshole to be the top of your field.

Speaker 4 (00:35):
Yeah, Robert, what I don't say that to me. I'm
still mad about last time.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
You're still mad about the fact that I want to
see what Polepot looks like producing a podcast. But what
if we just put him on sixteenth minute for a week?

Speaker 4 (00:51):
No, I would never replace Jamie Loftus.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Maybe maybe Polepot and Jamie will find out that they're
like like a Fleetwood Mac deal, like just like perfect,
perfect musical partners, you know, like just a historic talent match.

Speaker 4 (01:06):
You've you've watched that Spring that that Silver Springs video
one time.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
I've been I've been watching the nineteen ninety seven fans
Silver Springs million times. I know you have Honestly, what
if Polepot had been in Fleetwood Mac? You know, could
that have had Could that have been good? Almost certainly not.

Speaker 4 (01:22):
Stephen X would have come out on top, just like
you didn't realize.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
I'm just imagining Polepots sitting down all of Fleetwood Mac
and being like, guys, this is way too toxic. You
need you need to learn how to have healthier interpersonal boundaries.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
I learned that. I learned this one at my time
at the Temple.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, and let me tell you so one time we
were shooting twenty thousand people to death and I got
angry at my friend.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
That's what it's about.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
It's not what it's about speaking of shooting twenty thousand
people to death. Our guest Andrew T never did that.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
He didn't. Yeah, probably did. I knew, No, you would know,
you would know, you would know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
For one thing, that's twenty thousand bullets. That's not cheap
these days, right, like you're talking several months even of
la rent, you know. So yeah, with the tariffsh my god, Yeah,
that cheap Turkish amo is going to be a lot
more expensive. So you're gonna have to shoot people with
the homegrown American bullets, which you know anyway, Andrew, how
are you doing today?

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Okay, I'm alive. I'm alive.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah, you're alive. And we're talking about the doge of Indo, China,
the Khmer Rouge, which is not as far from the
truth as it would be comforting for it to be.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
It's closer to the truth than we want it to be,
but yeah, by a lot.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Specifically, we're talking about Salothsar, the man who would become Polepot,
who at this point is living in Paris, and he
is a bon vivant whose purpose in life is to
have a good time. He's drinking the wine, he's reading
lots of books, and he's not doing a whole lot
of radio technician school, which is why he is ostensibly
in Paris in the first place. He would later recall

(03:08):
spending all of his spare money on French language books
during this period of time. He is a real hound
to the used bookstore crowd. He shows a particular interest
in the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is, among
other things, like that the big idea from Rousseau that
seems to have left the primary mark on Sar's psyche
is this concept of the noble savage, right, this almost

(03:31):
idealized human that lives close to nature and hasn't been
polluted by these concepts of modernity. Right. This is a
big idea for Rousseau, obviously influenced by European colonialism in
the Americas, and it's going to have a big mark
on Polepot. He's not in the least bit interested in
the Americas, but there's this idea he starts to get
in his head of idealizing the Khmer peasantry who he

(03:55):
was technically born into but not really like he born
just above, just above and immediately bounced to go hang
out with the royal family, right, Right, But he's really
going to like and this it's not just he's not
doing this in isolation. They're all reading guys like Rousseau.
They're all getting involved in knowledgeable of these French thinkers,

(04:18):
and so this would not he would have been having conversations
about these these concepts with his friends at the time.

Speaker 5 (04:23):
Right.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
He Also, one thing I learned in the interview he
did with Nate Thayer later in life, and this is
not in his earlier biographies. They talk a lot. He
reads Mao, he reads Stalin, we'll talk about that. He's
also for a period of time really interested in Mahatma Gandhi,
Like he kind of keeps up obsessively with the story
of Gandhi and the successful fight to decolonize India. Not
a Gandhi figure, po Pot, you could say, but he

(04:48):
is very and it makes sense that he's interested in
it because India is a colonized country that throws off
the shackles of its colonial oppressor, and that's what he's
gonna want to do, right, he does reject the Gandhi route, Well, you.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Know it's about that that ends justifying the means, right,
this is where this goes right now.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
And you know, here's the difference. Polepot. I do think
could have been a pretty good podcaster. Gandhi terrible podcast,
absolutely dog shit. Could have had a YouTube channel, could
have been pretty good on YouTube. You know, he's me
on a Twitch instead of freeing India. He would have
gotten really successful on Patriot. And then he started guy Yeah,
a Twitch streamer, Gandhi playing Gears of War but just

(05:28):
refusing to shoot the whole time. Yeah, doing the pacifist
doing the pacifist run of cyberpunk twenty seventy seven.

Speaker 4 (05:41):
So much funnier than Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
So Poulpot would later say of his time and like
the impact that all this reading had on him. I
started as a nationalist and then patriot, and then I
read progressive books. Before that time, I had never read
The Humanity the French Communist Party newspaper. It scared me,
but I got used to it because of the student movement.
So he describes kind of being initially frightened of like

(06:05):
communism and some of these ideas. And I wonder how
much of that has to do with the fact that
very clearly his family and background is like the enemy
as often described in like a lot of communist writing, right, Like,
people like him are not who you're messaging to primarily,
right like he is. There's not much of a bourgeoisie

(06:27):
in Cambodia, but he definitely is part of it, right.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, he's sort of like that, Yeah, get him and
then melting hi, Yeah, slowly out of the back of
the craft.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah. And he says that like basically just like the
fact that it is so not just among but by
the way, when we say the student movement, he's not
just socializing with other Khmer he socializing with a lot
of young French radicals, right, and so he just kind
of through immersion gets more comfortable with socialism and than communism.
But he was also very engaged with the non educational
opportunities afforded to him, including a free work trip to

(06:58):
war ravaged Yugoslavia. Now, we actually had two different options
for a vacation during this first year that he's in France.
One was a month long backpacking trip in Switzerland, which
costs seventy dollars in Boy, if I could get that
deal today, I'd be gone the fucking heartbeat. But that
is a lot of money for the time, and he
has no money, right, so he picks a labor trip

(07:20):
to go help rebuild Yugoslavia, which had just become a thing.
If you think about Yugoslavia is the Balkans. It's the
Balkans all being a state that's an independent state for
basically the first time, and it's like the least governable
territory on Earth is finally being governed by a guy.
But it's all been blown to fuck by World War Two.

(07:40):
So you can come here for free and will kind
of feed you, even though we don't have much food,
but it'll be free if you help rebuild, and so
that's what he does. Right, This was not a political thing.
He doesn't go to Yugoslavia because they're communist. He later wrote,
I didn't have money, so I couldn't do as the
others and go to Geneva or to the sea or
to the mountains and have a holiday there. A group
of a poor students went instead to Zagreb. Now this

(08:03):
is a seminal moment for Salathsar. Tito, who is the
dictator of Yugoslavia, was a communist who had been who
had fought as an insurgent against the Nazis. Tito, we'll
talk about him one day. He's one of these guys
where I can't say he's not a bastard because he's
a dictator. He does some bad stuff. He's also like
the best case scenario for a dictator. If you're gonna

(08:25):
live under a dictator in the twentieth century, you fucking
want it to be Tito. Right. He does know what
he's doing, which is extremely rare. And he's also legitimately
like the hardest son of a bitch alive in his day,
Like he fights the Nazis, and then my favorite Tito's
story because he breaks away from the USSR because Stalin
obviously wants Yugoslavia to basically be an extension of the USSR,

(08:48):
and Tito is like, yeah, the Balkans have had enough
being other people's property. We're gonna be the bullk you know,
We're going to be our own thing for a while.
And Stalin keeps sending guys to kill him and find
Stalin like Tina like sends back. I think it's a
piece of one of the assassins with a note that's like,
you can keep sending guys and I'll keep killing them.
But if you do, I'm gonna send one guy and

(09:10):
you're not gonna send him back, right, Like he's gonna
get you right right, Like Tito is legitimately one of
the scariest dudes who ever lived, and also shockingly competent
at what he does, because like, Yugoslavia collapses immediately after
his death into a heart into a hideous civil war. Right,
but it's like the only time the Balkans is a unified,

(09:31):
peaceful thing more or less while Tito's in charge, and
again he has he runs, he has a police state,
he's not a nice man, but you can't help but
be like, well, shit, that motherfucker knew what he was doing, right,
good at his job. At least he's like he's like
Tom Cruise. Right, I'm not gonna say Tom Cruise is
a good man, but the son of a bitch loves cinema, right.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
I'm definitely not going to say Tom Cruise is a good.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
Man and he cares about COVID policy. Looks, Sophie, beggars
can't be choosers anymore.

Speaker 4 (10:02):
I don't like that.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
Man, no, no, no, but he's the Tito of movies.
We can all agree on that. I think that's a
fair way.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
To look at him.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Yeah, yeah, this is good. This is good. Historians with me.

Speaker 2 (10:14):
He's a Stanis Barathian.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
Yes, yes, Stantus, Yes, these are all Stanus except for
Stanis again loses. Tito never fucking does.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Right.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
So at this point though, Tito is in charge and
the Soviet Union really doesn't like that like young kind
of socialist lefty inclined kids in France, because the Communist
Party still does try to and into a degree, exercises
a lot of control over these like like national Western
communist parties and like Paris and stuff. They think that

(10:47):
Tito was a traitor to the cause, right, and so
there's like an effort among French socialists to discourage young
people from volunteering in Yugoslavia. But for whatever reason, Sara
does not get the memo, or he just doesn't give
a shit, So he goes Salath and a bunch of
his friends. They go in there. You know, at this point,
the whole population of Yugoslavia is basically organized into these

(11:08):
massive labor brigades that are rebuilding the part of the
country that had been ruined in the war, which was
all of the country. It's the least covered theater of
war in World War Two. The shit that went on
in the Balkans in World War two is it's nuts
by Eastern Front standards. Like there were like SS guys

(11:30):
who tried to go to the East because the Balkans
was so fucked up. Like I cannot exaggerate how bad
World War two was for the Balkans. Sar's particular crew
helped to rebuild a motorway, and the impression he took
away from the experience was stirring, this powerful sensation of
being engaged in a great, real time task of building

(11:52):
a modern nation from the ground up using only the
raw human material of its populace. As Polepot years later,
he was emphatic that he had no political interest in
planning the trip. It was purely for pleasure. But the
experience left an impact anyway. Short quotes from one of
his friends at the time, who wrote about the experience
highlights kind of the impact we can assume this probably

(12:14):
had on Polepot. Quote everywhere this guy wrote, the People's
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia resembles an enormous work site where factories, roads,
railways and hydraulic centers are being built. This effort is
also worthy of praise because strength of all the people
united around their leaders gives them the chance of gaining
successive victories, knowing that it is a question of national survival,

(12:35):
and the post war rebuilding of Yugoslavia has a lot
of successes, right, And obviously there's more to it than
just throwing together huge work gangs, and that's kind of
going to be lost on salath Tsar and his comrades, right,
But this idea of mobilizing a nation to remake a
country from the ground up, and that's very much what

(12:55):
That's not accurate to literally what was going on in Yugoslavia,
but that's accurate to what they would have been aware
of as foreigners coming in. That leaves him mark.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
And they were at the that were there at the
forefront of seeing the that is action.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yes, Salotsar and his friends, as I said, represented a
sizable chunk of the entire educated adult Khmer population at
this point in time. Right. But due to the isolation
of Cambodia and some of the cultural realities inherent to
having your education conducted entirely in a second language, most
of these guys arrive in Paris with no real understanding
of Marxism or Communism, and they never get a very

(13:30):
good way. These guys are not what a Marxist today
would call super educated Marxists, in that a lot of
them are kind of bored of marx and a lot
of them are like in part because like, I don't
really get this. This is not this has been translated
several times. Marx is not the communists who speaks to
them the most, right, and that's not primarily what they're
going to base. Stalin and Mao are going to be

(13:53):
the communist writers who have the biggest direct impact on
this crew.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
So after getting back from Yugoslavia, Sar increasingly falls in
with his friend Yang Seri and Hip Sari's friends, and
these guys are better students, They're at more prestigious schools,
getting more prestigious degrees and like the humanities and stuff.
Seri introduced Sar to a guy named King Bonsak, who
was one of the most probably the most senior Khmer
student in France. He'd been there the longest at twenty five.

(14:20):
He is the old man of the Cambodian expat community, right,
and Van Sack was, as a result, one of the
executive committee members of the student union. So there's like
this Khmer student union that he is helping to run.
And the way the organization works is you've got this
central union and then there's a bunch of what are
called circles, and each circle is a kind of additionally,

(14:41):
at least, there's not really a hierarchy in each circle.
It's a student discussion group based around a specific topic.
So you might have a circle for the kids who
are doing radio stuff, or a circle for the kids
who are into French literature, a circle for the poetry students, right,
and you kind of like meet at hawk and you
do you know stuff that way. These are I think
the best. These are the analog version of how things

(15:02):
get done today for most young people. Right. Imagine this
is a bunch of different signal loops or discords, right, right,
that's what these are, except for you have to like
meet up in person, right, yeah, but that's basically what's
happening here. So a month or so after meeting, sar
Vansach convened a private gathering to create a new circle
dedicated to discussing Cambodia's future. By this point, the vietnam

(15:25):
Men were escalating their war for independence against the French,
and there was widespread and interest in what this might
mean for Cambodians. And also because the Vietmen are communist,
and because Mao has just announced the start of the
People's Republic, all these guys are being like, shit, you know,
there might be this co like global communist uprising that
we could be a part of that could like free
us from the shackles of French domination while still like

(15:47):
being a part of this greater international community. And that
sounds kind of dope, right, It is.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
So funny to actually hear like the other side of
domino theory.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
Yeah, and it's interesting because the correct like the thing
about Domino theory that was kind of accurate is that
other people in other countries in Asia were influenced by
communism taking off in Vietnam and China, and it made
them think about the things that were possible. I think
that we're wrong about is that all of these guys,
as soon as they're in power, wind up primarily hating

(16:18):
other countries near them, including communist countries. Right, it's how like,
oh god, obviously communists China and the USS are going
to form a unified block. Oh no, they nearly nuked
each other. They're literally shooting each other on the border.
China is inviting Nixon over because of how pissed they
are at the Soviet Union. Right, Like, all of this
shit is very wrong in that regard. If you knew
anything about the left, you knew that the left was

(16:40):
never going to get along with each other.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
I mean, that's the whole problem. They know not think
about the left.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
No, so Van sax starts this circle, which is initially
about like the future of Cambodia and maybe independence and
they start talking about communism a lot too. Yengsari attends,
as does a number of future influential Khmer politicians, including Salathsar.
So they're beginning to talk more about communism and again
mostly focused around Maow and Ho Chi Minh. In January

(17:11):
of nineteen fifty, China became the first country to recognize
North Vietnam, which was still a couple of decades away
from just being Vietnam. The USSR followed, and this prompted
an equal but opposite reaction from the US and her
capitalist allies, who then turn recognize Cambodia, Lao, and South
Vietnam as part of the so called French Union. Maybe

(17:32):
not the wisest move. Yeah, all these guys want to
be independent, and that seems to be a big part
of the appeal of communism is getting a pen. Let's
recognize them as part of France. That'll stop this. Nip
this in the.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Bud God classic, I guess.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah. So everyone in the area is increasingly prodded to
choose sides. Thailand, for example, picks the US right in
art because the US is like, we will leave you guys.
So many fucking guns, so many fucking guns. France controls
the Union for a while, and Vietnamese leaders, as a
result see a strategic benefit and starting to seed allied

(18:09):
communist movements in these neighboring countries. Right because these places
are part of the French Union. These Vietnam leaders are like, okay,
so we should start sending some like CADRA leaders to
Cambodia and allow maybe with some weapons, and see if
we can start making local communist movements in the imitation
of the Vietman so that they can start their own
uprisings which will overall help us in our goal and

(18:32):
just getting the fucking French out of this goddamn right.
So from the outset of this, you know, the Vietnamese
communists coming into Cambodia and trying to start their own
communist organizations. It was understood by the Vietnamese that Cambodians
were incapable of generating their own autonomous communist party as
Vietnam had. There was no proletariat, right, which is the idea,

(18:55):
the Marxist idea is that is where a communists like
movement comes from. Right, everyone is the peasantry basically within
within Cambodia, and that means there's no base of education
or convenient way to reach and organize large numbers of
Khmer in any reasonable timeframe. So a decision has made.
These are their conclusions, and by the way, they're not

(19:16):
going to prove broadly accurate. But this is how the
Vietnamese are thinking, and this is a very chauvinistic, paternalistic attitude,
which is exactly how everyone in Cambodia feels about the Vietnamese.
They're arrogant, they don't think we're really people, and they
don't listen to us. And the Vietnamese are like, well, yeah,
we can't let these people make any decisions, right, So
this is they're not wrong.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
History never changes, it's the important Yeah yeah, oh god.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
People are always the biggest dicks to their neighbors. So
a decision is made that these Vietnamese leaders are going
to build communism in Cambodia from the top down, which
is not how it generally works. The Khmer National United
Front is the result. This organization was patterned off of
the Vietna, but it had some local characteristics, including an
embrace of the king, who it argued must be liberated

(20:02):
from French territory, and that doesn't really fit with traditional
communist ideology, right, the fact that we actually love the king,
but the king is super fucking popular with the regular
people of Cambodia, right, And so this is one of
the wiser things. The Vietnamese are like, well, we can't
just like shit talk the king because they will immediately
stop listening to us. We have to do this thing.

(20:24):
And they're kind of, i think, recognizing a lot of
what people said about the Czar pre revolution and even
Hitler where it's like, well, he must not know about
all this shitty stuff. His dudes are doing, right, And
so I think the Vietnamese are like, let's just say
the king's really good and the French are the ones
making him make that making things suck, right, fuck it right,
like this doesn't hurt us. The first Khmer Vietnamese Communist

(20:45):
Party member when Than Song was put in charge of
this party in May, and he issues a proclamation of
independence that means absolutely nothing at the time because they
controlled no real territory. There is an actual Cambodian Communist
party started a year later. This is eventually going to
be the Khmer Rouge, but it's not right Now, Vietnamese

(21:06):
fighters liberate a few small border areas, and again because
there's a lot of strategic benefit in them having this
area to like retreat to, right and to hold supplies
and stuff, and they set up in these areas they
quote unquote liberate a system that imitates the Vietnam People's
committees that are run by Vietnamese revolutionaries. Every decision made

(21:27):
by Cambodian assemblies and committees in these territories has to
be approved by the Vietnamese. You cannot join the Cambodian
Communist Party without Vietnamese approval, right, So these are this
is very centralized and very much not something in which
the Cambodians have a lot to say, even though it's
their communist organize. A lot of Khmer nationalists do not

(21:48):
like this, and a lot of Khmayer who are budding
communists are like, all right, like I agree with the
basic idea, but like, why the fuck are we listening
to these gouy the in Vietnamese people, right, Like why
do they get to be in charge of our communist revolution?
We're Khmer? Right, Like Salatsar and his comrades know very
little about what's going on in this regard at the time.
According to Van sach Sar spent quote most of his

(22:10):
time reading or going out to the movies. Very relatable,
but then he falls in love with a history of
the French Revolution, which he reads cover to cover, even
though his French isn't great, and he admits, I didn't
get a lot of it, but I felt compelled to.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Read through it right.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
And there are a few things that really stick in
his mind.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
One of them is the concept of a revolution as
a historical reset, as in, once you succeeding in a
revolution means you can make a you can break history.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
In seventeen ninety two, the French revolutionaries had instituted a
new calendar, right, and this was them attempting to be like,
the past is done, we are never going back. This
is a totally new world that we are creating, and
a new kind of human being that we are creating
in this new world. And obviously Napoleon comes wrong. Not
that long later. They didn't create a new world, right,

(23:03):
No one creates a new man. People will always be people.
This this ideology that you can like, we're fundamentally broken
with the past. Things will never go back, things will
never change. We have heralded in a new world, and
it's always going to be this way. Everyone who thinks
that is always wrong. Change is the only guaranteed constant.
You can't stop it. But that's the idea that some

(23:24):
of these French revolutionaries have, and that's the idea Sar
comes away with, right. And one big thing he takes
away from the history is that what doomed the French
Revolution is that it didn't go all the way. It
didn't tear down every structure of the previous old world.
It kept too much alive from the old days of
the king, and that's why it eventually failed. So you

(23:47):
do want to have a total break with the past.
A revolution should be that, but you have to destroy
absolutely everything that had existed previously. Right, And this is
a common He's not coming up to this on his own.
This is a lot of stuff that he and Circle
they're talking about. This is there. They are more influenced
in a lot of ways by the French Revolution than
what's happening in Vietnam because they're in France, right, they're

(24:09):
studying in French schools.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
You know.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Now, over the course of nineteen fifty one, the Circle
Vansack had started turned into a Marxist circle, which itself
began to exert direct control on the rest of the
student union. And they kind of turned this student union
into a stealth Communist vanguard party, right, Like, that's the
goal and they're executing. They're kind of secretly planning it
from this circle, but exerting control over the other circles

(24:34):
in order to get them in line.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Right.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
In his book on Polepot Brother Number One, Chandler rights
recollections about Salat Sar's behavior at the meetings are contradictory,
and several interviews in the nineteen eighties, after Polepot had
been identified as Salat Sar, King Vansac recalled that Sar
attended irregularly, kept in the background, and made little impression
on his colleagues. In nineteen seventy five to seventy six,
an unnamed source spoke with journalist Francois Debra, who had

(25:00):
attended the discussion groups. Remember that Salasar was the most intelligent,
the most convinced, the most intransigent. It was he who
animated the debates and most impressed the newcomers. Now there's
some evidence that this unnamed source mixed up Polepot with
a different kid and was actually talking about someone else.
We really don't know the guy. Deborah basically claims that

(25:21):
this dude he talked to stated that like I knew
immediately this guy was going to wind up leading the
Communist Party in Cambodia, and that polepot even set at
the meeting. I will direct the revolutionary organization. I will
be at secretary General, I will hold the dasiers, I
will control the ministers, and I will see to it
that they don't deviate from the line fixed in the
people's interests by the Central Committee. I don't think this

(25:42):
is likely. I'm bringing it up because it's one of
the reports. Most of the people who survived from these
days were like, yeah, he was like a part of it.
He was there, he was engaged, he was pretty quiet,
like he was always happy to do work and like help,
but he wasn't like a big That reminds me of
a lot of guys, right, we talk about like Chichescu,
who like, if there's ever a guy in your revolutionary

(26:03):
organization who's like really quiet, really friendly and always doing
willing to do bullshit work, you need to kill that
man immediately because he's going to murder all of you
and take power once the revolution's over. That's the way
these things go, right, Yeah, speaking of murder, so no, no,

(26:25):
instead of killing anyone, no, kill your wallace with these products.

Speaker 5 (26:30):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
Oh, and we are returned back, returned back. So yeah.
Most of the accounts of Sar during this period, again
he's a quiet, friendly, easygoing dude. But as short notes
Philip short notes in his book on pol Pot, Sar
did start reading a lot of Stalin around this time,

(26:55):
and that's because he in a circle. There's a lot
of Stalin going around. Particularly there's a history of the
Communist Party in Russia that Stalin wrote, right, and this
is it's a Stalin book, right, so we could assume,
like there's a couple of things you can just infer
even if you haven't read it. It's very paranoid. It
is very focused on the internal enemies, right. His history

(27:17):
of the Russian is very focused on the need to
like how necessary it was for him to get rid
of internal enemies within the party who were counter revolutionary, right,
who were dangers to the success of the revolution, because
he was Joseph Stalin, right. And this the fact that
this book is seen as like very inspirational to salath
Tsar and a lot of his young not great, not

(27:38):
getting in well, not gonna in well now. Sar also
becomes very acquainted with Mao's writings, which are the most
directly relevant both to the kind of communism he's going
to preach and to the kind of war he's going
to orchestrate, because Mao, unlike Stalin and unlike a lot
of other communists, Mao runs a peasant insurgency, right, because

(28:00):
that's how things go in China, right, it is a
peasant uprising, you know, in a lot of ways. That's
a big part of what's going on. And so Mao
is really relevant for for what saloths Are is going
to be doing and not too long from now, right.
And there's also a lot that Mal writes about theorizing
about how to remake a society from the bottom up, and,
as we know from the Great Leap Forward, not always

(28:20):
a great idea. Maybe backyards shouldn't be where we make steel,
you know, maybe factories are better for that. I don't know,
you know, maybe we need sparrows. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
I mean, your big society remaking ideas tend not to
be good.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
No, it's yeah, it's it's like what we're trying to
do now, Like, what if we get rid of everyone
who researches how to stop diseases and instead make them
build iPhones. I feel like we're all going to have
a lot more diseases and probably less iPhones, like which
might work out for us. Maybe the less iPhones will
eventually lead us back to having people who learned how
to cure diseases.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
I'll cast that in for a couple of decades.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
So yeah, it's going to take a little while. So
in late nineteen fifty one, there was a huge Marxist
gathering in East Berlin. It's like this big burning man
from Marxists in the fifties. Uh Basar does not attend,
but several of his Khmer comment comrades do. For the
very first time they meet with this Marxist group, and

(29:22):
they are told about the establishment of the Khmer communist
resistance in Cambodia. Right, So this is the first time
and they bring this back to their circle. So now
everyone knows there is a communist movement in Cambodia that
is organizing and arming, and they've taken some territory even right,
So for you know, a year or so. After this point,
these kids are going to continue reading books and discussing

(29:44):
their ideas and making plans for how they're going to
get involved in the revolution. That becomes the focus now
we know it started. We are the educated, you know, Kahmara,
We need to figure out how we're going to help
direct and lead this. Right now, what we've got here
is a group of people who are isolated within Paris
because their Khmer French is not their first language. They're

(30:05):
even isolated from a lot of their fellow Khmer students
because they see themselves as in charge of radicalizing them
and directing them, and they see themselves as engaged in
a dangerous, condestined effort. Right, So they're isolated socially, and
they're all constantly talking about their beliefs and reading radical politics,
and the same thing happens to them that happens to

(30:26):
similar groups of people on let's say Twitter, which is
that they make each other more and more extreme and
less and less rational, right right, They're only going to
get crazier. And one thing that a lot of them,
including Sar, become obsessed with, is this idea that will
eventually become known as Year zero which is the concept
that we can, with a revolution, force a clean break

(30:47):
with history that creates a new kind of human right.
This is not limited to Cambodian communists. This is not
limited to communists, because there's some you can find some
stuff that the note you we're talking about that's not
all that different. There's this concept of the new Soviet Man.
It's less eugenic for the communists, but like, there's this
idea that if we if we remake society radically enough

(31:10):
and break what had existed radically enough, we can make
fundamentally different people that way.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
And it really is like, do these people just simply
cannot hear themselves?

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Well, it's it's Look, I think everyone believes a degree
of this, which is one of the reasons why nobody
should ever get the power to try. Right.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yes, yes, when I'm watching.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Yeah, when I when I and others watch Star Trek
and are like, oh, what if we could be like that?
You're not not thinking people can be radically remade, And
I'm not saying I don't think people can be made better,
but it doesn't happen like this. It happens very slowly
and carefully, and if you want them to add, if
you want to actually improve the quality of people, you
improve the quality of life, and you don't do that

(31:55):
by shattering everything that makes it possible for them to
survive at the jump right right, like it's people can
get better both as individuals and as societies. But the
most important thing is not to kill them all.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
While you're telling that that the means create a different
end than you think.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yes, yes, and these this is going to like the
idea that's going to be like particularly prevalent is that, like,
because of the danger of Vietnam, we're going to have
to do this very quickly. Right, once we get independence,
we have to remake ourselves into a society that can
withstand our foreign aggressors as quickly as possible.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
Right.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
In a paper on the subject, historian Andris ERR's writes,
Maoism also provided the Khmer Rouge with an activist perspective
on history, something that sheds considerable light upon their own
year zero. This activist perspective, as opposed to the orthodox
Marxist representation of history as a rational process of necessary advances,
emphasize human will and the triumph of determination over material conditions.

(33:00):
Put differently, not so much learning from history as overcoming it,
diverting history in the right direction, as it were, by
means of superior will and resolution. The French Revolution is
already noted, had met with failure by stopping halfway. Yet
even maw argued q sum Fan, the movement's chief theoretician,
had not been radical enough to overcome history by definitively

(33:21):
abolishing private property. The family received knowledge and traditional teaching.
So again this is where we see, like the real
dangerous thing is there's like number one, You're never going
to learn from history. It's like, no, we're going to
transcend it. Not possible, No one ever has. And you
really should pay attention to the shit people try to
do in the history. Like, for example, every time in
the past, when someone's decided, I a guy who's never

(33:43):
farmed is going to remake how my entire country grows food,
that only ends one way, and it's with everyone starving
to death, right, Yeah, Like, whether it's whether it's the
fucking East India Company governing in Bengal, whether it's fucking
like the Sanchoism in the Soviet Union and China. Yeah,
it always ends in mass starvation, don't do it?

Speaker 3 (34:03):
I mean Listen, we're on the A side of this
proposition with you know, guys that don't know what the
fuck they're talking about and deciding how social security should
be distributed.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, we can fix all this because I'm good at
video games. Yeah, it's it's fucking every people, a lot
of people. This is a very attractive thing to think
that you can do, right.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
So for sem Fan, who's again he's one of you know,
Polpot's peers in this period of time, and he's like
kind of the chief theoretician of what becomes the Khmer Rouge,
the task of making communism reality entail an ideological zero
point zero for him and zero for you. That is
true equality, right, And this is zeroing in the sense
that you like zero a rifle, Right. We're zeroing right

(34:49):
right to a point where everyone is in the same place,
and then we can build up right now. To be clear,
these conclusions I just related aren't all fully sketched during
the years they're in Paris, right, But this is they
start on that road in Paris, and as these guys
filter back into Cambodia, they're going to continue working to
that point.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
Right.

Speaker 1 (35:09):
Paris starts the process that ends in the ideology of
what we now know as the Khmer Rouge. As things
actually stood in nineteen fifty two. Sar and his comrades
were committed communists, but not particularly well read ones, and
his writings from this period don't sound like what you
would get from an avowed Marxist. In fact, one of
the weird things is that, like Polpot's first political obsession

(35:29):
seems to be with democracy, which he called quote incomparable
and as beautiful as a diamond. And democracy and communism,
in his eyes, are very not just compatible, they're the
same thing, and they're the same thing in that they
stand in opposition to the monarchy. He published his first
political article, the first thing we know he wrote, was
called Monarchy or Democracy, and it was a strident argument

(35:53):
against the king in favor of a democratic system. And
he gives examples of democratic systems that Cambodia should be
made the image of. And his examples are China, France,
and the USS are all classically democracy.

Speaker 6 (36:08):
Well, at a king, you know, everything looks like peratively right,
and his actual knowledge of what's going on in China
and the US s are had to be honest, Like
France is not perfect right, But this is how he's
thinking at the time.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
So while they're reading and talking, events back home have
continued to evolve. Sun Nach Than, the nationalist leader, got
allowed back into Cambodia by the King and the hope
that he could be used as a figurehead. Right, the
King is like, I think that, you know, there's a
lot to say of this nationalist thing, because maybe that's
gonna work out better for me, you know, having more
powers the king. So I'll bring this guy in who

(36:45):
is popular, you know, after the Japanese got kicked out.
But Than is a very smart guy who really believes
in something, and he realizes the king's just using me.
So he fucks off into the jungle to fight with
the guerrillas. And again, he's not an ideolog. His goal
was to unite the communists and the nationalists of other
stripes into a broad anti French coalition.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
Right.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Again, he's a let's get our independence from these fuckers,
and then I don't care, we'll figure it out. Whatever works,
we'll do, you know, King Sahanak respond to getting our freedom. Yeah,
So Sahanak responds by carrying out a coup against the
Democratic Party when it wins the elections that year and
backed by the French, he sets him up as the

(37:26):
absolute ruler. Right the French begin conducting pacification campaigns against
the Vietmen and Fans rebels, who had not yet managed
to agree on the whole coalition thing. The circle back
in Paris only learned what was going on in snatches
of brief, conflicted reports. It was unclear which groups were
doing what and who was who, and who this circle

(37:48):
of educated young communist radicals could support. Right, It's very
hard for them to tell who's actually fighting, what do
they actually hold. You know, they don't have great infants,
not like they could look at like the telegram chats
for these different groups from the jungle, right, Like they
have very little telegrams or even the telegram telegrams. Right,
So they're like, we need on the ground intelligence. One

(38:11):
of us needs to go there and figure out who
we should be backing. And Salothsar this is really the
first time he identifies himself as special and not just
another dude sitting around bullshitting. Is like, I'll go right
and let that be a lesson to you kids. If
you want to one day kill a third of the
people in your country, you gotta start by volunteering. You know,

(38:34):
no one ever got anywhere sitting out there, but right,
get out, be active, starve your entire country to death.
I probably probably bad things to encourage people to do.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Get out there in the community. You know, make a difference.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
He made a difference. You can't say Polepot didn't make
a difference. He left a very different Cambodia.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
Yeah, to make a difference part of just get involved. Really,
I feel like the public messaging we should be concentrated
or in the direction you make a difference.

Speaker 1 (39:04):
That is one of my big issues with like a
lot of the stuff we were raised with as kids
in like the nineties and early two thousands is like
anyone can make a difference. That's true. We should have
higher standards.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
Than just different different.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yeah, I can leave ground to beef out overnight and
it's different, but that doesn't mean it's better. Speaking of
rancid ground beef, here's our sponsors. Oh boy, howdy, we

(39:37):
are back, and we're talking about eating rancid ground beef
because look, the FDA is no longer going to be
you know, and I Andrew, it's actually good that you're
back because you're the person. I first told on the
air my story about eating dozens and dozens of rancid
muscles at a Vegas buffet and harm with my friend
in a muscle eating competition.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
Forgot about that?

Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah, well, who's the smart one now? Who's getting ready
for the RFK future? Now, maybe it's me. I got
an iron stomach. I don't care how we don't uh
huh uh. I've been I was molded by this. You know,
I've had GRT. I don't give a fuck anymore. A
lot of kids are gonna die anyway, back to the podcast,

(40:20):
so it's important to note that Sala Star's back. The reason,
part of the reason why you know he volunteers to
go travel back home and make contact and part of
why everyone agrees he's a good guy to do it
is he's got the contacts, the whitest He's got the
whitest breadth of contacts. Because his dad is a farmer,

(40:41):
he did grow up in a rural village. Is he
knows rural people. He's able to talk to rural Khmer people.
He also is able to talk to urban people. He
was educated in the city, but he also spent a
lot of time in the palace, so he can talk
to that chunk of the popular. He he's really good
at talking to everybody, right Like, that's a big thing.
He's charisma, and he's charismatic in the way that matters,

(41:01):
which means he can, within seconds of meeting someone new,
figure out the best way to communicate with them, right Like,
that's the kind of skill that he has. And you
can't teach that almost you can't learn it after a
certain point in your life. It really is just a
product of during your formative years running into enough different
kinds of people that you can get very good at that, right,

(41:22):
And he salath Tsar, has that ability, and I think
that's why everything else that happens to him happens to him.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
Right.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
So, on Deptember fifteenth, nineteen fifty two, Salasar left Paris
just as things in Cambodia reached a boil. Several assassinations
and grenade attacks and the provinces provided the pretext for
King Sahannock to announce a rule by decree and the
suspension of civil liberties. His French backers express their hope
that Cambodia's pacification will make continued progress. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(41:53):
I think that's going to work out great for you guys.
So decades later, Polpot would claim that his real political
awakening came not as a result of anything that had
happened in the reading circle in Paris, but what he
experienced after he returned home to Cambodia during this tumultuous period.
And I want to quote from an article by journalist
Nate Thayer here. Before I went to France, my relatives,

(42:13):
they lived comfortably. There were middle peasants. When I came back,
I went to my village by bus. When I got
off the bus, I met someone with a wagon. He
asked my name, and he said, ah, you've come back.
And I look at him and see he's my uncle,
and he asks me, do you want to go home?
I was shocked. Before he had a piece of land
in a buffalo. Now he had become a rickshaw puller.
I met and talked with the relatives who used to

(42:33):
have land in buffaloes and had nothing. Now. What influenced
me most was the actual situation in Cambodia. And I
don't think that's untrue, but it does make me think
of that is not a I reckoned with the suffering
of the common man, and it allowed me to realize
that I had grown up in a privileged position, that is,

(42:55):
my family was supposed to be doing better than this
or not, which is a really familiar to like modern
conservative radicalism in a lot of yeah, yea, I find
that interesting.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
Yeah, it's the me of it, not to like us
of it, right, And.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
It also is worth noting in terms of how accurate
is this to what really radicalized him. This is Polepot
near the end of his life in the late nineties,
talking to journalist Nate Thayer, who also by the way,
passed pretty recently about a year and a half ago.
Interesting guy, but a really groundbreaking It was the only
guy who got in to do this right, So we'll
be quoting from Nate quite a bit here. Over the

(43:31):
next eight years, Sar is often in the provinces, he's
moving around, he's connecting these different groups. As the rebellion
against the king and then the Prince Sihannak goes through
several stages. The Red Khmer or Khmer Rouge proved to
be the most resilient of kind of the different nationalist
rebel groups against the repeated pacification campaigns. Salat Sar rose

(43:54):
through the ranks for the same reason. He was hard
to fucking kill. And it was hard to kill because
from the beginning he's really he's the first of the
guys in his circle who's like, well, I'm not going
to ever go by my real name. I'm going to
start like from that first article he writes, he picks
a fake name, and he picks fake names as he's
doing this on the groundwork meeting these rebels. He doesn't

(44:16):
call himself Sala Tsar Polepot's one of the names he uses,
but like he has a couple of different nicknames, will
go over them later. And this this means he's anonymous,
and he's good at being anonymous. He's one of these
guys who's kind of forgettable. That's what everyone in Paris
talks about. Is you don't notice him in a room,
and that means he doesn't get spotted and killed by
the security forces. Be it kind of blending in and

(44:38):
being forgettable. Great asset for a guy who's trying to
build a revolutionary movement under like constant bombardment from the French.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
Yeah, you're blended you, but I mean that's the spy thing,
that's the real life spy thing, I guess.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
But yeah, and again, folks, if you're trying to overthrow
the government and there's a guy in your cell and
you can never remember his name, you need to murder
him immediately. He's going to wind up taking power, right.

Speaker 3 (45:04):
I mean, the problem is it's it's always one of
those guys. But not all of those guys is going
to become noble.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
Some of those guys are just really good at like
keeping their mouths shut.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
It's done. Or they just have nothing to say.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Oh they just got nothing to say. Yeah, yeah, they're
just vibeing. So Sar was amongst the first Khmer revolutionary
leaders to take pains to keep himself anonymous. As a result,
nobody realizes that he's steadily moving up the ranks of
the insurgency. In nineteen sixty, he is added to the
Communist Party's Standing Committee. Now, in the same interview I

(45:36):
just quoted from with Polepot near the end of his life,
Nate Thayer writes, and this is Nate. They are quoting Polepot.
The secrecy that made the Khmer rous show so effective
was Polepot, said second nature to him. Since my boyhood,
I never talked about myself. That was my nature. I
was taciturn. I'm quite modest. I don't want to tell
people that I'm a leader. I didn't tell anybody, not
my brother, not my sister, because I didn't want to

(45:57):
worry them if anything happens to me, I didn't want
them to have any connection to it. So some people
think that I don't care about them, But on the contrary,
I respect, I love my relatives, but I never revealed
my political thinking to them. And I gotta say, obsec
king here that you can't take that away of a bullpot.
This motherfucker would have been incredible at using signal Like

(46:19):
nobody would have known this son of a bitch's name.
He would have had burner phones for his fucking burner phones.
This guy is really good. It's staying secret.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Oh my god, imagine having that discipline.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
He's very disciplined, right like he doesn't. This isn't an
accident that he winds up where he is.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
He's smart.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
He continues to live. He has in addition to this private,
hidden revolutionary life, he has a very public life and career.
He is a teacher at a private school, like he's
like a high school teacher. During this period of time.
And he's a pretty good teacher. I'm going to quote
from Chandler's book here. As a teacher, he was remembered

(46:57):
as calm, self assured, smooth, feature, honest, and persuasive, even
hypnotic when speaking to small groups among his students and
his colleagues in the clandestine communist movement. He seemed in
these years to have gained some of the moral authority
and stature he enjoyed among his followers up to nineteen
ninety seven. A man who met him in the late fifties,
for example, said, I knew immediately that I could become
his friend for life.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
By the way, yeah, that's what they say about presidents
and dictators alike.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
And there are people he kills who like that is
their recollections, like I knew he was my friend, and
they diet being like, wait, this can't happen. No, I know,
I know, Polpot, You've gotta let me, you gotta let
me talk to him.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
And Polbot doesn't give a fuck. Now.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
What is interesting to me about Salatsar is that these
recollections of him as a kindly, decent, sweet man aren't
a product of later propaganda like most revolutions, the Khmer
Rouge heavily attacked their own people, which caused a lot
of Khmer Rouge to defect, and like, when these guys
were interviewed later, basically none of them said Polepot was
why they left, right And in fact, even after the

(48:00):
exten if his crimes were known, most of the people
who had defected from the Khmer Rouge, according to Chandler,
described Polepot as quote a man they regarded almost.

Speaker 2 (48:09):
As a saint. So they're like, oh, yeah, I mean.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
The regime killed all these people, and like I had
to leave it was so fucked up. But that Polepot,
like basically, Jesus.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Man, it's so good.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
He's really good at this, right, Like, you can't you
can't take that away from him. The motherfucker knew his
business right now. As I noted, Polepot made it to
the Standing committee in nineteen sixty The party leader was
a guy he'd known from the Paris days called Samoth,
who was assassinated, probably by the King's security services in
nineteen sixty three, Although a lot of people theorize Polepot

(48:44):
did it. Because Polepot succeeds Sammoths as the leader of
the party in nineteen sixty three, and now he's in
charge of the Khmer Rouge. Right, this is how he
rises to run things, and he will retain that position
for more than thirty years. He is now in sole
command of the Communist revolution. Later in life, Poulpot spoke
of this rise to the peak of power as a

(49:05):
chance accident of history. There was nobody else to become
secretary of the party, so I had to take charge, right,
Like what else was I gonna do? You know, Like
I didn't have a choice. I had to be in
charge someone. And Nate Fair I really recommend we'll have
it in the links there because Nate post about the
article he wrote about his interview and the raw interview

(49:26):
transcript and Poulpot's like, Samoath was my best friend. I
loved him. Why would I have had him killed? And
I think the broad agreement is it was probably the
French security services. But I can't not be suspicious because
Polpot talks about a bunch of people he loves. And
then Nate there will be like, but you had his
entire family killed, including his like infant grandchildren, and he

(49:47):
will be like well yeah, like yeah, well, yeah, that's
just how things go sometimes here in the Khmar Rouge, Right,
you gotta kill someone's own family. Sure, it doesn't mean
I didn't love him, that's.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
Right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
Imagine getting like, yeah, the genocide conducted by like not
I was gonna say ned Flanders, but not even that,
just like a like a mister rogers ass.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Yeah. Yeah. He was getting up there and being like,
you guys are my best friends. I can't tell you
enough how grateful I am. Now you're all going to
be a machine gunned in a second. Right, But don't
think that means I don't love you.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yeah, right, that's nothing. That would mean it has.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Nothing to do with me. This has just gotta happen
for reasons I can't really explain anyway. I'm gonna go bounce.
I got to change the way we farm so everyone
starts to death. Oh well, I think that's a good
place to end for part two. We're gonna just run
all three parts this week because it was a longer
script but not quite enough for a four part er,
So you fuckers are getting a bonus. But you know,

(50:49):
as we end, Polepot his listeners, the leader of the
Khmer Rouge, and I think it's gonna go well, you know,
I know, I wrote another nine pages. But my guess
right now now is everything's good. You know, it could
possibly go wrong and he becomes the world's greatest industrial
and agricultural power. Nobody dies. In fact, they invent the
curreity immortality. That's my assumption. We'll see how it bears out.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah, anything could happen. That's the important thing. Find next to.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
Me called the killing Fields, and I think it's because
they made a killing in the biotech. Yeah, they're killing it.

Speaker 4 (51:23):
Show is called chext notes Behind the Best.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
Oh no, is that what we call the show?

Speaker 2 (51:29):
Fuck?

Speaker 1 (51:30):
Oh no, Andrews, how are you feeling?

Speaker 2 (51:35):
Oh man, I mean you know we're still still positive?
Still positive? It is the important thing.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Yeah, yes, great guy.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
Yeah great, good dude.

Speaker 3 (51:44):
Wow, this is so bizarre, truly, I never I guess
I my knowledge of Pulpot not sufficient because this is
fucking fascinating.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Yeah. Yeah, he is a really interesting monster. The degree
of agreement that like, yeah, he was really chill as
far as I knew him.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
It was nice.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
There's a lot of people who like when they finally
see him on TV, are like, wait a second, that
guy has been killing everybody like, yeah, it'd be like
if you had like a friend that you like, smoked
weed with and played Grand theft Auta when you were
like nineteen, and then like forty years later he winds
up killing a million people like him.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
But that is most of those guys like right, right, right, yeah,
or yeah, most of that situation.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Yeah, you never know. He was always nice to me.
He was always so nice to me. He seemed chill.

Speaker 1 (52:36):
I don't know, man, we didn't ever talk about how
many people he wanted to kill. Yeah, how many people
do you want to kill?

Speaker 3 (52:42):
Andrews less than twenty k?

Speaker 2 (52:49):
Where we left?

Speaker 3 (52:50):
Listen, that's where we left at some point. I can't
remember his last episode or.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
Someone's in the position of I don't want anyone to
be killed exactly.

Speaker 3 (52:59):
If he says, if you say zero, it's more suspicious
than if you say.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Ye, zero is suspicious. Yeah, less than twenty k, I'd
say that's very very you know, that's not that's that's minimalist, right, Yeah, yeah,
that qualifies she was a good person. I bet the
Pope would want to kill less than twenty k people
if he had his choice.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
Oh my god. Well, you know, Pope's.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
That would make it problem still on the lower end
of pope body.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
The pope means pope would say I would love to
only have to kill twenty thousand people.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
But see, that's the great thing about being a pope
is you're grading on a curve where if you were
to kill twenty thousand people as a pope today, you're
still in like the upper twenty percent of popes in
terms of not.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
Killing hortile pope. That's right.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
Yeah, it's like being the leader of Germany. There's a
lot of room where you can like, yeah, I fucked
up on some things, but no one's going to remember
me as the worst.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
I mean, or owning an American auto manufacturer, right, it
makes you like more Nazis than not in.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
The future if we have those Nazis being the president
of the United States.

Speaker 3 (54:04):
Yeah, yeah, we'll see or whatever the position is called
after this.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
Yeah yeah, yeah whatever. Anyway, Andrew T, where could people
find you?

Speaker 3 (54:14):
Uh yeah, it is this racist Andrew T on whatever
social media? I'm not looking at it that much.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
M hmm, yeah, well do that and uh let's all
go not Well, you know what if you know somebody
who's quiet and nice and.

Speaker 4 (54:33):
And that's the episode.

Speaker 5 (54:39):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 (54:51):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot
com slash at Behind the Bastards