Part Three: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
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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. Hi, Andrew T. How are you guys doing? Did that intro work? Are we good? You don't need to be responsible for people. We already did. I like that. That's like Leprechaun rules. Like, episode three, I'm your father for me. I don't think you're... I'm going to say something really... I don't think you're their father. I think you're their daddy. No, no. That feels a lot worse for me, actually. Yeah, but I think that's what that legally means is you're not father, you're daddy. Daddy.

I'm like one of those dads that should pay child support, but instead I live on a boat in the harbor of fucking New Orleans. Are you a libertarian in this scenario? No, no, no, but I definitely don't believe in the moon landing. Okay.

This is Behind the Bastards. Again, a podcast. You're enjoying part three of our Pol Pot episodes. And basically the way it goes here, folks, we have a massive audience and I'm always trying to do the most I can to please the most people, which you can't do with every episode. Some people don't like certain kinds. Some people don't like the cult leaders. Some people don't like the dictator. Some people only want the dictators.

And likewise, 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-parters and say this is my favorite part of the show. And a lot of people say I prefer the two-parters. So we try to go with variety. We mix it up. So everybody's regularly getting what they want. So I didn't want to do a four-parter for Pol Pot. And then I wrote 14,000 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 up over two weeks for the people who are tired of four parters. So I just we're just giving you three episodes this week. So you're fucking welcome. Robert, would you say we're not like all the other girls?

We're a lot like all the other girls. I'm not. We're also going to be... In that all girls are beautiful. Okay. To get through the words, we're going to be talking super fast. So if you put this on like 0.66 speed, you can make yourself a fourth episode. I'm actually going to slow down a lot just to... Yeah. No.

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I was going to say, hey, Robert. Yes? Did you know that Better Offline and Weird Little Guys won their Webby categories? Did they? Did they? Did Better Offline and Weird Little Guys, two new weekly podcasts launched by Cool Zone last year, both won Webbys in their first year? What?

Yes. Yes, they did. That's astonishing. Yeah. You know, 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, is

has way more listeners than most of the other podcast networks out there and actual fans because we don't just 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 of doing that. So, yeah, you know, we're 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 are the Khmer Rouge of podcasts. Right. They also they also want a Webby. I saw. I know. 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 as far as we shit on them a lot, I don't know. Empires go podcast empire. A lot, lot smaller body count than most empires. Yeah. Well, the exception of the Joe Rogan podcast.

which he actually might wind up creeping up on Opal Potts numbers. You give him some time and some more testosterone shots. Yeah. Yeah.

So as I noted at the end of the last episode, Pol Pot had made it to the standing committee in 1960. And then the party leader of the Communist Party 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 Pol Pot 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 leading this increasingly large and capable communist insurgency is King Sehanouk's monarchy, which he battled out of a headquarters named Office 100.

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 is kind of part of the broader struggle against communism in Vietnam. And to be fair, the Vietnamese are still

running a decent amount of what the Cambodian communists are doing even in this period. In the mid-60s, they hold a lot of sway because they're a major source of weapons. They're more organized. But the Cambodian party is getting a lot more independent during this period of time. Salah Sarr is making it his business to both increase that independence and

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. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a fucking very, very vivid setup. What was the name of the headquarters again? Office 100. That fucking rules. Yeah, it's very cool stuff. I mean, it's always cool 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 Pol Pot and switched to Salah Tsar because that's such a cool name. Like it's such a scary name. Yeah.

But whatever. That's how they change it up. He's subverting expectations. Yeah, exactly. A few further dominoes will fall. Just like Rian Johnson's Star Wars movies. And like Rian Johnson's Star Wars movies, Salazar travels to Beijing in order to beg for weapons. That is true, actually. That is partly true, yes.

And so he is like, and he's talking with, obviously, with Ho Chi Minh City or with the Vietnamese communists. And they are coordinating, but never to the extent that the West 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 Pol Pot to

to be tightly aligned with Vietnam. This like fantasy that the US has that China and all these Southeast Asian states are going to form like one unified communist bloc is just absolutely anyone with the slightest degree of knowledge of any of these people would be like, what the fuck are you? No, they hate each other.

I mean, just even meeting four different Asian people anywhere, you could probably extrapolate some of this shit. Talk to a Vietnamese dude about China. Like, seriously, have a con for fucking Sajan.

In 1970, Sehanouk'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. 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. Sehanouk leaves the country on like a diplomatic visit. And there's a

coup. And the coup is headed by this guy called Lon Nol. Lon Nol is actually the brother of Salah Sarr's childhood best friend. And obviously, because of that, Lon Nol's brother is a major part of the regime Lon Nol sets up. And he's like,

Yeah, probably if the communists win, my friendship with Salah Sarr will protect me. It doesn't, by the way. This guy gets the fucking shit liquidated out of him. And the fact that there's a family connection or a deep connection between Salah Sarr, who's leading the communists, and the family of Lon Nol does nothing to temper the brutality of the conflict that follows.

Now, a lot of this comes directly as a result of Lon Null's policies, right? This is not just the Pol Pot is running a very brutal insurgency, but it's brutal in response to the sheer violence unleashed by Null in order to try to maintain control.

As soon as the monarchy is abolished, the so-called Khmer Republic begins calling on the U.S. to continue and extend their bombing campaign in Cambodia, which had started clandestinely and very illegally in 1969 under Nixon as a way to try and stop Vietnamese communists from being able to supply themselves, right? There's this idea, this accurate idea that Cambodia is a big part of

how the Viet Cong are 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 La Nol is in power, we don't have to lie because we're being invited, right? Now we're being invited by this coup that we set up, right?

the U.S. would ultimately drop more than half a million tons on Cambodia in a four-year period of time. And for an idea of like how many explosives that is, I mean, that sounds like a lot, right? 500,000 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 II. And here's the thing.

These bombs are being dropped both to deal with like Viet Cong, you know, tunnel complexes and some of their bases and to stop the Khmer Rouge, which

The Khmer Rouge has no industrial base. Their weapons have to be smuggled in. They are not building tanks. They don't have cities that are functioning as part of an industrial core. The Empire of Japan was one of the most powerful industrialized states on the planet, and we dropped 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 guys is...

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 of the biggest L's a military ever took.

Not just evil, but also somehow extreme, even more pointless than some of the other wars. 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 150,000 and 300 Cambodians probably died. That's a credible death toll, although there's a lot of arguments that both of those numbers either is much too low, right? That it's significantly higher than 300,000. You can find some lower estimates.

One fifty to three is kind of, you know, somewhere that that's close enough for what we're talking about here. It's a crime. It's a it's a historic crime against humanity. Right. Right. Most of those dead are civilians, including 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 won

their ambition in life had 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? Cambodians.

Killing a bunch of people in revenge, you know, getting my vengeance. And so a lot of peasants start flocking to the 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 they're

wouldn't you want to shoot somebody? Yeah, that is, it is. I mean, that's eternally the best recruiting tool. Yes. And, and,

I'll never say anything to mitigate or reduce the complicity and the responsibility of Pol Pot 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 guerrilla. 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 ruined people and they went insane. It's explainable. It's extremely explainable. Like no one's capable of acting rationally with the damage that you have done to them, you know? Right. With the exception, again, of these people at the top, guys like Pol 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, right?

who had the opportunity to pick a different path and did choose horror, right? And that's where my blame lies. 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 Hennix government in the late 1960s, developed with Vietnamese and Chinese backing into a full-scale resistance army fighting the American-backed Long Nol regime in Phnom Penh. At the same time, Saar developed the distinctive ideology which made the CPK, that's the Communist Party of Cambodia, very different from other Marxist-Leninist parties. He mistrusted the working class, relying instead on the poor peasantry, whom he saw as the incarnation of Rousseau's noble sabbath.

His party functioned like a sect, and some authors underline 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. Saar abhorred the limelight, preferring to operate from the shadows and using multiple aliases. Polk, Hay, 87, Pole, Grand Uncle, Elder Brother, First Brother, and in later years, 99 or Pym. Yet his fanaticism was masked by great personal charisma. People who met him remembered his winning smile and considerable talent as an orator.

I mean, a sick ass list of nicknames. It is pretty cool. I know I'm fixating on all the names, but they're fucking rad. Yeah, it's hard not to, right? For whatever reason, I think 87 is my pick. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What is 87 based off of? Did you find that out? I don't actually know. I probably could have figured it out, but I didn't come across that in my reading.

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. I love when you yada yada. Please. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The gist of it is Lon Nol's government was only capable of holding the line against the communists with U.S. backing, and even then, not all that well. By the early 1970s, it had become clear that there was an expiration date on that assistance. The Khmer Rouge grew larger 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 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 1973, 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 is just kind of wearing black pajamas all the time. Like, I got that shit on lock, baby. Like, I'm wearing this like...

sport coat thing, but it's just black pajamas under this motherfucker. I was going to say, this is the tragedy of the YouTube era. Yeah. Is this fucking sport coat when you know Robert could just be full jammed out. 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. Jesus Christ. That's what he says. That's what he says every episode. It's not just this one.

The final straw for Lon Nol's regime is when Prince Sahanak, hiding in exile, announced his support for Pol Pot's rebels. Now, we did a two-parter, 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 won't last and eventually I'll be able to make my way back in, right? 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 U.S. is starting to pull out their assets and things fall very quickly. Think about kind of how long the government of Afghanistan lasted as the U.S. pulled out. Right. That's right. What we're seeing here on April 17th, 1975, Lon Nol's army collapsed entirely and the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh.

Now, you got to remember, at this point, you know, when they take the capital, the fighting has been going on in parts of Cambodia for 20 years or more. People are fucking exhausted. And it's 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 is crushed very quickly because Pol Pot and his comrades, it's not even that they don't want to go back to normal. In 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 all the case. Pol Pot's obsession is Vietnam. That is the real enemy. Not capitalism. Not the United States. Not the West. Vietnam.

Saigon fell to the NVA not far from when Nam Penh did, right? And because of this, because Vietnam has won its war too, there's this immediate 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 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 Khmer autonomy is to rapidly change the country, both in terms of how food is produced and

And to do this kind of – they're very motivated by these ideas they'd taken from Mao that kind of became the great leap forward in China of like, well, what if we do industrialism? But it's like everybody's backyard is helping to make different sort of industrial products, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess it's just DIY approach to making –

you know, your AKs and your plate armor. Yeah. And you can kind of do that with guns, but not like the guns you need to win a modern war, right? You're not going to be like making an SBG nine in your backyard or whatever fucking shit. Speaking of making recoil, this rifles in your backyard,

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And I'm...

Okay, so cities like the capital have no place in Pol Pot'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 Pol Pot and the leadership of the party to completely reform Cambodian society in order to make it capable of surviving. And Pol Pot names this plan Year Zero. Okay.

In April of 1975, they declare this openly. And this year zero concept, we talked about this in the earlier episodes. It's based in part on Pol Pot'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 1776, Paine had published this, quote,

Right.

And this is the kind of thing you hear in some optimistic revolutionary tracks, especially in the headiness of like, "We've defeated the regime. We have this chance for a total break with history." Right? There's even, you can think about kind of the whole, the end of history stuff that was being said when the Soviet Union fell. There's this headiness of like,

Well, maybe we're done competing with like what kind of systems are going to work. Maybe 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 against. There's no way of going back, right? We finally did it. Oh, man. Yeah.

I mean, obviously, in hindsight, but like never has that sentiment been expressed and it not been a true psycho saying it. 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, the US became a slave state, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to quote from an article written by Idris Ayers here. Quote,

I've heard Musk say some similar things.

In 1976, as part of Pol Pot'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 party's founding from 1951 to 1960. At a meeting of the Central Committee in March 1976, it was noted with regard to historiography that, "...we must rearrange the history of the party into something clean and perfect. Do not use 1951. Make a clean break."

So again, there's this, even our real history of our real movement that one isn't good enough, we have to like, and if you're ever finding your movement is needing to like alter the very basic foundation of reality for your ideas to work, 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 kind of weirdly in evident here in evidence here. We're like, why?

Yeah, and this is why we talk about ... The reason why I identify more as an anarchist than anything else isn't because 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 anarchists have diagnosed the problem in a way that I'd never seen be wrong. And the problem is, if you give people lots of power, they do horrible things. Yeah, yeah. Right? That's kind of where I get into it from, right? And now Polbot has all the power. Yeah, every conceivable dimension that that power can be gained from. Yeah.

Still bad. 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.

So the 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. Yeah.

We already know how this fucking works for Mao and we're like, but what if we made it like a super great leap forward? It's like, you know, Mario Brothers sucked ass, but once we added a super, it was finally good. Just do the thing that already didn't work, but more.

Yeah. Mao's 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 the earlier episodes, the cities have a ... They're not overwhelmingly Khmer like the rest of the country is. They have a lot of Vietnamese and Chinese traders.

And a lot of the Khmer that live 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 saying we need to expel from the cities are Pol Pot 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 Rouge is that they die.

Andrus Ayers describes how jarringly rapid this process is. Quote, "'Money, markets, and private property, "'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 in Phnom Penh 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 of the National Library and the school of Rene 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, Thais, and Europeans. It was also officially announced that the individual would be abolished

The traditional family would be replaced 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, the extermination of particularity and contingency and the realization of absolute freedom, equality, and fraternity through complete absorption into the Ankar. And that's the people. That's the Volk, right? You know, the Nazis said the Volk, the Ankar is that for the Khmer Rouge. It's close enough at least, right? And yeah, we're...

revolutionaries are not allowed to have personalities. I mean, I know we're coming at this from a different time and hindsight, but it's so hard for me to even hear the version of that speech that's stirring or motivating. Yes.

It's really wild. 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 move to the jungle and become – so not only are they all like trauma bonding, getting bombed together, but they're continuing to 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, right. And it is this –

You get – this is an issue I have with like some people that I otherwise agree with a lot. There's talk among certain leftist tendencies about the concept of the 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 –

Right. Right.

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 Khmer Rouge did as opposed to being like, I don't think parents should be allowed to poison their kids because they have autism. Right. Right. Right. Right. You know, but anyway, we need to get into like absolute power and within the family. And yeah,

This is not a unit that should exist. Yeah, yeah. Optics is not good. Yeah, yeah. It's an optical issue, I think. But that's not, you know, the Khmer Rouge is 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 Khmer 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 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, Pol Pot's parents had fought tooth and nail to make sure he never had to be. Yeah.

Yeah, don't worry about that. 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 is 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 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? Otherwise, 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. Phnom Penh had flooded to significantly higher than its pre-war population because of 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. Right.

So people are just being forced to walk. A lot of a number of them have been pulled out of hospitals and they're just dying. They're dying by the tens 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 nightmare for all of these people.

And these fighters that they're meeting are folks largely who'd come from 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 in Hunger Games terms here. Right, right.

And also they've 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, you're helping to save the Khmer people, right?

While most of the deaths under the new regime are caused by disease or famine, they're all intentional. These are all the result of policies set by Pol Pot 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 Capitol's fall by a process of what is called by genocide scholars, toxification, and specifically toxification through Khmer Rouge propaganda.

Toxification, this is a process you can watch happen right now in your very own country, presuming you live in the United States, but well, we're not the only one. A couple other countries, yeah. Quite a few other countries. We could 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 real people of a community.

soldiers are not in general born willing to fill mass graves or to march an entire city out of their homes and die, right? 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. 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 Terrorism and Political Violence by Timothy Williams and Rhiannon Nielsen. I recommend reading the whole thing. It's a very good article and it's a very important article. It will be kind of chilling in light of things happening in our present world, but it ought to be.

And it details how the messaging from Pol Pot 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 the capitalist system. These were the budding intelligentsia of whom Pol Pot himself had been a member. Professors, lawyers, business owners, government officials. Pol Pot called them the internal enemy or super traitors. He really likes super. You hear a lot of that.

Obviously, this includes people who had been in the military of law and all, right? And the idea was that, and this is Pol Pot'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 1976, Pol Pot turned the eyes 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 Kampuchea, which is what they're calling Cambodia now, right? Like once the ruse takes over, it goes from the Khmer Republic to democratic Kampuchea.

And Pol Pot writes of these ugly microbes, 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? Yeah.

Yeah. Or, you know, any Thanos line. Any Thanos line. 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. You also get, this is something we're hearing right now with the way mental illness and things that are called mental illness is being discussed by the right. And it's

There's big news right now about the fact that RFK Jr. is trying to use government databases to put together a list of everyone with autism. That's how it's being spread on social media. The actual story is even, I would argue, even a little worse than that, which is that they are 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 it is that there's a desire to reclassify being transgender and eventually even being LGBT as a mental illness, in part because those people can be disarmed. Disgusting. In part because then you can put those people in jail.

you know, facilities or whatever. I tend to think that the, the, the goal that a lot of these people are thinking towards is less Nazi style death camps and gas fans and more 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, to, to say this, the,

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 situations are not inconsequential. It's necessary but not sufficient, but it is necessary. Yeah. For the death camps version. Yeah. Yeah.

So Pol Pot argued that these diseased elements of the populace had to be purified so that year zero could ensure a Maoist elimination of contradiction. Turning in counter-revolutionary elements became a way to get ahead or to protect yourself. Cadres, which are like members of the party, are rewarded for their ability to purge the enemy within. Per

Per that article 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 to the system, prime targets for elimination were ethnic, cham, and Vietnamese minorities, former soldiers or officials under the La Null 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. Like part of this is there's such 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? Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, but also it's like all those rules I feel like most of those times are –

It's asymmetrically applied for whatever means want to be accomplished. 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 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 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 died as a part of these year zero policies were Khmer. And 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 auto-genocide, which was coined by author Jean Lacoutre, something like that, Jean Lacouter, auto-genocide was coined by this French author in order to separate the unique circumstances of mass killing in Cambodia from the Holocaust and other traditional genocides. Again, there's some issues with that even because –

Genocide 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 to ensure the survival of their race, right? You can come down on however you like on what we should call this, right? 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 are genocides that are being committed by the Khmer Rouge. Like normal, like straight up dictionary genocides, right? Right.

I mean, I wonder if 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 at least somewhat external to the stated aims of the genocide. So like...

Yeah. What does it really matter? 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 chunk of the Khmer, would strengthen things. Like, what do you call that? You know, to a degree, does it matter? It's certainly not to the dead. But I do want to make a point that there were just straight up normal genocides occurring too in this mass killing. Yeah.

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-Kammer people are like 5% to 10% maybe of the total number of dead. But when you look at these as populations, these different ethnic populations that are being targeted are killed in a way that makes them some of the most total genocides I've ever studied.

Roughly 50% of Chinese Cambodians, and these are not like necessary. Some of them are Chinese immigrants, but these are people who are ethnically Chinese and live in Cambodia, right? 50% of the pre-war population is executed or 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 Kampuchea by stating that their goal is to swallow Cambodia's territory and force Cambodia into an Indo-Chinese federation under its control. Vietnamese were portrayed as quintessentially evil and lethal to the democratic Kampuchea.

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 broadcasts spoke of the need to weed out and exterminate the enemy planted within the cooperatives, and reminded civilians, you are not fighting only against Vietnamese soldiers, but the whole of Vietnam, so spare nothing and no one.

According to Pol Pot, the Vietnamese are a black dragon that spits its poison. The overall death toll for Vietnamese Khmers was nearly 100% of the population. Jesus. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean... This is about the most total genocide I've ever heard of the Vietnamese Khmers in particular. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, that's like...

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess I still, I'm just like, not still, but like, it is like... It's hard to wrap your head around, yeah. It's hard to wrap my head around, but also hard to 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 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 notion of power, it feels like. It's... Like, what is killing your enemies like that 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 intelligent. I understand how things really work, and I have this plan, right? And everything about their personality is 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 reality 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 more food they get. Right. And that just creates fucked up incentives. Yes. Yeah, of course. And the incentives come because of the fucked up beliefs of the leaders. Right. And the desperation of the people doing a lot of the killing and,

makes them respond better than the incentives, you know? Right, right, right. Which is, by the way, this is not every genocide. For example, I wouldn't talk about the members of the SS this way because they're not. Right. Right? Right, right, right. But this is what's happening in Cambodia. Speaking of what's happening in Cambodia, presumably someone in Cambodia is listening to this podcast. And if so, hi. Hi.

You didn't say speaking of mass killing or anything like that. So this is one of the better ad throws. Yeah. Visit Cambodia. Or not. I don't know. I haven't been. I hope. I hear it's nice.

Thank you.

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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 Pol Pot considered 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 Pol Pot 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? Okay.

The Chams are just thus a drain on the ideal communist state that he wanted to form, so Pol Pot sent his men to wipe out every Cham village they could find, and roughly 50% of Cham Cambodians had been killed by the late 1979.

Now, what's interesting to me is that he also targets the Buddhists, or at least the Buddhist clergy. And this is kind of weird because he had a really good time at the monastery. He described it his whole life as a positive experience. But as leader of Democratic Kampuchea, 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 and Nielsen cite an internal Rouge document that brags a 90 to 95% 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. 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 you're like who else can we throw on the list yeah yeah once you pop the fun don't stop right right popping here is putting people in mass graves yeah um now and this is why it's so important to start it to stop it from starting

Now, again, 90% or so of the people killed by the Khmer Rouge are Khmer. Most die as a result of these insane agricultural and land reform policies, the mass depopulation, 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. Past the initial point where they're punishing the capitalists and the members of Lannul'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 Pol Pot's old reading circle back in Paris. Right. They are wiping out, you know, every revolution devours its young, but they are doing that in like famous time here. Right.

Right.

The very few people who survived owed their lives to their sworn enemies, the Vietnamese army, who eventually liberated Tual Slang, which was the prison for specifically like after a point. It's specifically the prison for like party members who were disloyal.

To eliminate confusion, Troll Slang is more commonly known as Security Prison 21 or S21, right? And this is, in terms of its level of fame to people who read about this, Troll Slang or S21 is the Auschwitz of Cambodia, right? Right, right, right. It's not on that scale. It's not that big a camp, but its death toll is...

Is that like sort of, I mean, I know it's like, as you just said, like, you know, every revolution devours its young, but that still feels like a high percentage of like, oh geez. Yeah. Like getting got.

I think part of it's just because none of this is working and someone has to pay. And part of it is, again, just because once you start killing like this, 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 the top can take. So there must be a traitor. There must be somebody fucking with us, right? Is that like...

unique ish to Pol Pot as far as like, yeah, right. It's just how it goes. Of course. Well, it's how it goes sometimes. Cause like the Nazis don't really like the Nazis target other Nazis, you know, there's the night along 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, with Hitler anymore. Um,

Not every – this is pretty – it's not unique, but it's not common for it to be like this. Obviously, in the French Revolution, stuff like this happens, but the swiftness and the centrality with which loyal members of the party are targeted and tortured and executed is –

Yeah. Like noteworthy here. If you can't be one of the boys, then who can you be? There's really no safety here, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was between one of – like S21, this prison that's kind of the most famous of the prisons here, was one of between 150 and a little less than 200 torture and execution centers built on Pol Pot's orders by the Santebal, the secret police organization.

Roughly 20,000 people were imprisoned in S-21 over the course of the regime. There's some debate on this number between 12 and 20,000. There's never more than about 1,000 to 1,500 people at a time though. And S-21 is built out of a former school, which is I guess extra chilling given that Pol Pot was a school teacher. Right. And when I say 1,000 to 1,500 at a time, 20,000 total, people aren't released alive from S-21. This is a death camp.

And while it started by 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 an S-21, your kids and your wife are going to, even if they're babies, right? They'll take your infant in there and kill them and torture them, right? And again, it's this like, well, we really have to make a statement. The stakes are so high. We really have to scare people away from not being loyal members of the party, right?

Now, we're not going to be dealing with S-21 in as much length as we ought to or the prison system in general. This is because it really does deserve its own episodes. Our friend Joe Kasabian of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast has covered it at length. I recommend his work. Given that I'm trying to focus this on Pol Pot, who was a major 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,

And this is talking about the people who were sent to S-21. 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 traitors, which sometimes included over 100 names. The interrogators at S-21 based their technique on a list of 10 security regulations, which included, while getting lashes 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 stench of the corpses rapidly increased and became unbearable, prisoners were then trucked en masse to an open field located 15 kilometers away, known as Crow's Feet Pond, to be killed.

Waiting at the field was a group of about 10 young men led by Tang. Tang, in his early 20s and his team of teenagers, lived in a two-story house that was built on the field in 1977. They were informed ahead of time of the number of prisoners that would arrive so that they could dig the graves in advance. The shocking figures commonly associated with the prison, 14,000 killed and seven survivors, ranked the prison as one of the most lethal in the 20th century. Jesus.

Yeah. Also, I mean, the detail, obviously every atrocity has someone actually doing it, but like...

just this dude's job. Yep. Yep. Every day you get told how many corpses you got to dig holes for and you and your fellow teenagers get out of the house until I guess early 20s. Yeah. And his team was teenagers. Yeah. And just doing it every day is like, you know, it's so hard to fathom for me as a lazy person. He's probably like, well, this is a pretty good job giving things. I'm probably not going to get targeted. They're not going to go after the grave digger, right? Yeah. They need me digging graves. Yeah.

Now, while S-21 was operating, Pol Pot himself made regular statements and writings to Western supporters. And this is a key 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. As time goes on, more does start to get out about how horrifying what's happening is. But the first stuff that gets out is propaganda from Pol Pot and the regime to Western supporters where they're talking about the utopia that we're

building. We are finally creating the, the communist, the agrarian peasant communist utopia that everyone's hoped would happen. We've made a totally equal society. Here it is in democratic Campuchia. We've done it right. Um,

And there 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 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? Right.

One of the organizations that Pol Pot spread his propaganda towards was the Belgian Campuchia Society, who interviewed Pol Pot in 1978. 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. Yeah.

And, you know, dipshits buy this stuff, right? As 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 60s and 70s. 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 were admirable because the Vietnam War deserved protesting.

He wrote regularly for Peace News in 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 by anybody. This is a true believer who lacks a tremendous degree of judgment in a very key area. 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 CIA propaganda, but... Up until Cambodia, you're largely right. You're mostly right. Fucking US is doing hella war crimes and being supported by a lot of people in Vietnam and doing them. And...

Yeah. So like – you're like – yeah. Like you see the leg he has to stand on even though he's wrong. It is one of – it's very tempting and there's a degree to which you should compare him to folks like people who write for the Gray Zone, which is a faux journalistic institution that spent years arguing Bashar al-Assad, never gassed its own people, made fun of anyone who was saying Russia was about to invade Ukraine, right? They're those motherfuckers. Right. 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, which is that he's arguing against this nightmarish U.S. bombing campaign, which is a war crime. And on the other side of this, by the way, I found a fucking Washington Post column saying,

writing about this in which the author was like, oh, it's, you know, what's really fucked up is the people who slandered the US for bombing Cambodia to try to stop the Khmer Rouge from coming into being. That's not why we fucking did it, you dipshit. Like, fuck you. For one thing, that's part of what made them possible. For the other thing, that we didn't give, that was never the fucking goal. Like, fuck you, fuck you. I just, so many people I fucking hate. Yeah.

Anyway, Caldwell was loved by his students and it was recalled even by 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 the 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-backed law and no government and because their claims of agrarian oppression

Always a big warning sign.

Well, my idea is about how shit 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 tours of places like the USSR. That's one of those things where it's 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 it did that were good. It got the first person into space. There were massive improvements in literacy and whatnot.

In addition to horrifying and awful things done by there, it's an actual state, right? And so it's understandable that you could go there and see, take this sponsored tour and just see the good stuff, right? That's not really possible in Cambodia.

because there's no good stuff, right? There's nothing positive happening under the Khmer Rouge. Yeah, the silver lining is hard to find. I mean, you truly have to be a blind believer to just go in there. Right. Per The Guardian, quote, three days before Christmas in 1978, 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 Pope

This was indeed a rare privilege. Unlike most other communist leaders, Pol had not created a personality cult. There were no posters of him. He was seldom seen or quoted. Many Cambodians had not even heard of him. Only seven Westerners were ever invited to what had been renamed Democratic Kampuchea, and Caldwell was the first and only Brit

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 Phnom Penh being like –

Where are all the people? Because some of them had been prior to the Khmer Rouge taking over and they're horrified. They're like, where are the fucking human beings? Right? 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. Pol Pot 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 ally at the time. He was also – Pol Pot was kind of in this period. This is after there had been a series of protests.

provoked border conflicts with Vietnam, provoked by the Khmer Rouge. And it was becoming increasingly clear that Vietnam was going to invade. And so Pol Pot was really trying to burnish his international support. So he suddenly wanted Westerners in, right? And he's like, well, this guy's probably like –

blind enough to ignore all the horrible shit going on. Right. This guy will do. 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 Khmer Rouge are killing people are nonsense. Right.

One of his main sources was the Campuchian information minister, a guy named 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 U.S. had executed.

Right now, by the time he shows up in Cambodia, this guy that his whole article denying the Khmer Rouge genocide is based on, Hu Nim, has already been executed and tortured to death by Pol Pot. So not not a great sign. Yeah.

But even so, he was aware to an extent that the Khmer Rouge was killing people and he had described them as, quote, arch-quizlings who knew well what their fate would be were they to linger in Kampuchea. So, well, I don't want to caricature this guy. You shouldn't pretend that like this dude was finding reasons to justify the killings that he knew about, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Including the guy who was the source of his stupid article. It's so crazy. Yeah, it's nuts. 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 Rouge 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. She's like, she's one of the people being like, there's supposed to be people in this city. Like I've seen it before. Something's really bad here. And Caldwell's, you know, giving the same lie. This is,

putting out a bunch of nonsense about like, you know, 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 kind and tolerant and just deeply 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 1968 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 auto-genocide, whatever you want to call it, called Year Zero. 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 goal.

Doing this meant getting rid of hidden enemies who, as Pol Pot put it, had sicknesses of revolutionary consciousness. Now, Philip Short goes into more detail here, summarizing information that should have been available to Caldwell had he done this reading. Quote,

Satyarama 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 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 impurity that threatened the well-being of revolutionary society. These groups were portrayed as a lethal source of pollution that needed to be eliminated.

Yeah. Yeah.

One of these guys is 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. Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, there's probably some level of like just prion disease that can take over. Like there's got to be someone who- You're okay with livers. You're okay with livers.

Oh yeah. Oh no, no. I mean, if you're, if you're trying to like, like lose, lose your conscience, um, probably giving yourself a brain disease is not the worst way to do it. Um, you're generally safe. If you want to eat human beings safely, like a liver, the liver is like a reasonably okay spot to go for. Well,

Sophie, I don't want people to get fucking prion diseases. No spine, no bone marrow, no brain. No spine, no bone marrow, no brain, right? We all know this. Folks, Sophie, a lot of people, I'm a believer in harm reduction, okay? All right. Test your fentanyl. Don't eat people's spines.

Or test your drugs for fentanyl. Don't eat people's spines. Don't test your fentanyl. Don't do fentanyl. Okay. Caldwell could have had access to a lot of this information, and he rejected it largely on the basis that Year Zero had been pilloried 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 going to this is not going to be a lengthy dissection of that. But there are arguments that 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 Khmer Rouge as, quote, an unprecedented propaganda campaign to slander democratic Kampuchea 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 basically is a

taking Khmer Rouge propaganda and like being like, hey, everything's great over there, actually. And like the stuff that's bad is not their fault. Right. Right. Right. There was another book written by two Reader's 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 auto genocide are perfectly accurate because it's still going on. Right. But they are broadly accurate.

And Chomsky is certainly in the wrong about what books about Cambodia to trust during this period. Right. But also, if we hadn't, you know, we, the United States and the West, hadn't put out so much lying CIA propaganda, like this would, it wouldn't be, it would be less possible for- For this-

For this disinformation to have spread. To like work. Yeah. And this is also why I have a degree more of sympathy to Caldwell 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 had been put out about Vietnam, that had been put out about what the US was doing in Cambodia, that had been put out about what the US was doing in parts of Latin America. So –

Again, these people are wrong and that should be stated, but I do have less condemnation than I do about the stuff going on in the 21st century that mirrors this, right? Yeah. There wasn't Twitter and there wasn't like –

Yeah. You know, it's just it's more reasonable to be skeptical. Yes. And it's certainly reasonable to initially be skeptical. Now, again, by the point time Caldwell was on the ground and these other people with him 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 Caldwell doesn't like trust, you know, Punchod's book about the atrocities going on in Cambodia. Yeah.

you know, whatever the truth, whoever you're going to blame for it, Caldwell at age 47 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 Kampuchea, a Rationale for Rural Policy, in which he had written that the Khmer Rouge had, quote, opened vistas of hope, not only for the people of Cambodia, but also for the people of other, peoples of all other poor third world countries. Yeah.

We'll come back to that book in a second. Yeah. So Caldwell, 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 Khmer Rouge guards being like, I can I can 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.

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 to I don't see any people being executed.

Caldwell 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 Phnom Penh and they're hanging out for a little bit. They're not all that far from the S-21 center, right? This is where Caldwell's going to finally have his interview with Pol Pot. And I'm going to quote from The Guardian again.

Caldwell remained ignorant on the Friday morning in Phnom Penh that he was taken in a Mercedes limousine to see Pol 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 revolutionary economic theory.

Becker had met Pol Pot 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 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 the guesthouse he was sharing with Becker and Dudman, full of praise for Pol Pot and his political outlook. We went over stuff, says Becker. He thought he had a good conversation. He had avoided at all costs any 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 they go to bed. And as far as she can tell, he remained completely convinced that the revolution was a good thing and that Cambodia was headed in a good direction. She goes to bed at around 11 p.m. And in the middle of the night, she is woken up by what she eventually realizes 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 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, 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.

It's still to this day not perfectly clear. It's generally...

Pretty clear Pol Pot 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 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 Campuchia and then finds himself yet another, uh,

corpse in the killing field, so to speak. 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 at any given opportunity and they still line up. 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 like,

Because seeing the reality, it's not even that you don't want to see it. It's that seeing the reality would mean taking a hit to your ego. It's the same thing why you've got...

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, they'll see the light. And like a significant chunk of Trump's voters who are not hardcore supporters, who are the people who voted for Biden and, 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 supporters are.

recognizing that they've been fucked means recognizing they're not as smart as they think they are. And again, Caldwell, that's a big part of it for him. He's a scholar. He's a smart man. He couldn't be this wrong. Yeah. Mm-hmm. 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. 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 Pol Pot's also not as smart as he thinks he is. 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 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 Campuchia.

Vietnam invades Cambodia in December of 1978, and what follows was not close to a fair fight. By January, they had taken the capital and put an end to Pol Pot's reign. Sort of. So...

He has to flee, right? He has to like leave Phnom Penh and Vietnam takes over and administers, you know, for a while Cambodia and eventually Cambodia becomes independent again under a government that is not the Khmer Rouge.

But the Khmer Rouge doesn't go away, and Pol Pot remains the head of the Khmer Rouge as they go and hide in the jungle. They've got some villages and stuff, this little weird fortified section of the country, tiny section of the country, that they're able to manage along the

I think it's like the Thai border there. And in, in fact, this like government, cause like in 82 China and the association of Southeast Asian nations kind of pressures the Khmer Rouge to ally with Prince Sahanak's forces and some like Republican forces led by a guy called San San along the Thai border and create this thing called the coalition government of democratic Kampuchea. And that remains in the UN, the legitimate government of Cambodia until 1991. Um,

Even though like they're not actually in power, the government in power is like the PRK, but they're only recognized by Vietnam, Lao and the Soviet Union. And so that's kind of like Pol Pot's where he is for the 80s, you know, into the 90s.

There is a lot of guerrilla warfare. Pol Pot continues to lead the Khmer Rouge to fight against the Vietnamese-backed government of Cambodia. 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 is signed in October of 1991. The Vietnamese withdraw from Cambodia and things slowly start to calm down.

There's a UN peacekeeping force that kind of enters in 1993. And there's like a free and fair election, you know, that, that, yeah, things start to get better at this point. The,

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. There's camouflaged Vietnamese soldiers that are behind the regime, right? They boycott the 1993 election and they basically hole up in Western and –

northern little bits of Cambodia. They're outlawed in 1994. And when the Cold War ends, they don't really have any of the even minimal support that they had previously had.

long, long length. Yang Seri, who's the foreign minister, who is again one of Pol Pot's friends from Paris, as well as a number of other high-ranking officials, 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. Pol Pot, though, stays free for quite a while until he is

Basically, there's this shit that goes down in 1998, I think it is, where one of his few remaining friends running the Khmer Rouge, this guy, Son Sen, decides

does something that Pol Pot considers treason. And so he massacres Son Sen for, along with 14 of his family members, including his like grandkids. Um, now Pol Pot would argue for the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed.

For Sansan 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 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 after 37 years because for whatever reason, this is a step too far to the last people who had stuck around him. And one of his like his commander in chief, a guy named Tom Mock,

puts him on house arrest, right? And yeah, and that's kind of the end of Pol Pot of having even a sliver of power. Eventually, Pol Pot is brought before a people's tribunal. He's sentenced to life imprisonment for Sanson's murder. But he never really faces any actual, like, justice, right? Like, there's nothing... Right, there's no way you can pay for this anyway, but he doesn't even...

Not even close. Yeah, no. He dies under house arrest in 1998. And that's the story. Yeah. It's one of those like, like whatever, whatever belief you may have in some sort of cosmic justice, this should tip the scales in the other direction. Yeah. Like he is ultimately not punished by the new Cambodian state or the UN. He's punished by the Khmer Rouge for killing another Khmer Rouge guy. Yeah.

In his very last interview after he has been arrested, again, there's this guy, Nate Thayer, who comes in and does this like final interview with Pol Pot. And Nate is a very does a very good job of this. Like he really presses Pol Pot 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 Pol Pot, 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 to 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 carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have become another Kampuchea Krom in 1975, he says, referring to the Mekong Delta region seized by Vietnam from the Khmer Empire in the 17th century. And that, I think, says a lot, that the end of this guy's life

2 million deaths maybe on his conscience, the absolute destruction of his country in such a way that it still has not recovered. And he's like, well, look, if I hadn't have done that, it could have wound up like this time Vietnam took the Mekong Delta region from us in the 1600s. You wouldn't want that, would you? He's such like, it's this fucking academic brain shit where all that matters to him is

Is these this idea 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. It's like such a like holding on to that delusion till the end is so amazing. I mean, I just you know, I it's so hard for me to understand that brain.

Yep. Like like rationalizing to that degree. Like totally. I don't know. Or just you got to put on a show all the way to your last interview, you know, keep the keep the kayfabe up. Yep. Fucking Graham. Anyway, it's time. Yep. 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. Yeah.

And don't,

Don't take the books you read when you were fucking 20 too seriously. I mean, look, we're living through the same version of that, but just the book is fucking Atlas Shrugged. Exactly. 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 Yarvin and shit on the internet and convince themselves the shit they read when they're young and like talk with their friends about obsessively in these discord chats and signal loops and whatever.

You know, there are the people who are willing to make Pol Pot style decisions and no number of deaths, how many, no matter how 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 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 Pol Pot brain damage, 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 and these guys he's delusional but he's too thin skinned and thankfully largely incompetent although incompetence has never stopped so many of these folks in the past so no it hasn't no they just fail upwards cold comfort but yeah maybe that's at least a weakness to exploit anyway I don't know hard to know when it's good to read books or not

Oh my God, no. This is the lesson for these three episodes. Don't read books, kids. Listen to podcasts. Not the podcast. No, not that podcast either. Podcasts have never led anyone to support horrible things that get people killed. Just don't ever believe your own bullshit or anyone else's too strong. Keep an eye out for what's going on in the world and talk to people. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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