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

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

the show, and a lot of people say I don't like, I prefer the two parters. So we try to like go with variety rights that everybody's regularly getting what they want. And I didn't so I didn't want to do a four part for pole Pot And then I wrote fourteen thousand words on him and was like, God, damn it, Robert, because there is really that much to say. So this is all to say I didn't want to break this up over two weeks for the people who are tired of four partis. So I just we're just giving you

three episodes this week, so you're fucking welcome. Open done.

and pretend that I accused whoever the fuck doing that? So, yeah, you know, we're uh, we're we're the We're the we're the Vietnam and you know, let's say our enemies and the pod Save Guys or the Khmer Rouge of podcasts.

so some people think maybe Polepod orchestrated it. But anyway, he winds up in charge as a result of this, And yeah, initially the people that he's fighting against as he's like leading this increasingly large and capable communist insurgency is King Sahannock's monarchy, right, which he battled out of a headquarters named Office one hundred, and this is a mobile headquarters. Right, We're talking about a jungle insurgency. So he's moving constantly to stay ahead of the King's intelligence,

which is in a large part provided by his American allies. Right, Because for the US, his fighting against the Khmer Rouge is kind of part of the broader struggle against communism in Vietnam. And you know, to be fair, the Vietnamese are still running a decent amount of what the Cambodian communists are doing even in this period, and like the mid sixties, they hold a lot of sway because they have a lot, they're a major source of weapons, right,

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

never like it. And there is absolutely no desire among the Cambodian communists or among polepot to be tightly aligned with Vietnam. This like fantasy that the US has that China and all the Southeast Asian states are going to form like one unified communist block is just absolutely anyone with the slightest degree of a knowledge of any of these people be like, the fucker, No, they hate each other.

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

Lawn Nole sets up and he's like, yeah, probably if Salas if the if the communists win, my friendship with you know, salat Sar will protect me. It doesn't, by the way, this guy gets the fucking shit Liq were dated out of him. And the fact that there's a family connection, you know, or a deep connection between between Salatsar who's leading the communists, and you know, the family of lawn Nole does nothing to temper the brutality of

the conflict that follows. Now, a lot of this comes directly as a result of law Nole's policies, right, this is not just Polepod is running a very brutal insurgency, but it's brutal in response to the sheer violence unleashed

by Nol in order to try to maintain control. As soon as the monarchy is abolished, the so called Khmer Republic begins calling on the US to continue and extend their bombing campaign in Cambodia, which had started clandestinely and very illegally in nineteen sixty nine under Nixon as a way to try and stop Vietnamese Communists from being able

to supply themselves. Right, there's this idea, it's accurate idea that Cambodia is a big part of how the Vietcong are like supplying and this is where they're retreating to in order to regather their strength. That is essentially accurate. And we are bombing them for years and pretending not to. And now when law Nol is in power, we don't have to like lie because we're being invited right now,

we're being invited by this coup that we set up. Right, the US would ultimately drop more than half a million tons on Cambodia in a four year period of time. And for an idea of how many explosives that is, I mean that sounds like our lot, right, five hundred thousand tons is a lot of weight. That's more than the total weight of bombs dropped on the Empire of Japan during all of World War two. And right, here's the thing. These bombs are being dropped both to deal

with like Vietcong. You know, tunnel complexes and some of their bases, and to stop the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge has no industrial base. Their weapons have to be smuggled in. They are not like building tanks. They don't have cities that are like functioning as part of an industrial core. The Empire of Japan was one of the

most powerful industrialized states on the planet. And we drop more bombs on Cambodia than we did on them, right, Like, right, that's Jesus Christ, it's fucking and we nuked Japan famously, right, Like the degree of force that we deploy on these guys is outrageous and we get fuck all for it.

Like this could not have been a less useful use of force, not that that would have made it like moral if like it had won us the war, it wouldn't be Okay, I'm not saying that, but it like this is just like the biggest l A military one of the biggest l's A military ever took, is.

find some lower estimates. One fifty to three is kind of you know somewhere, that's close enough for what we're talking about here. It's a crime. It's a historic crime against humanity. Right. Most of those dead are civilians, including a shitload of little kids who are just incinerated from the sky by the United States Air Force. So the fact that we're doing this, the fact that we are incinerating entire villages, we're just lighting little kids on fire

from the sky, makes people angry. The folks who don't die, and who previously had had their ambition in life had been to like, you know, be a peasant, feed my family, live a life, you know, like be a normal Cambodian person, their ambitions changed after their families get incinerated and suddenly They're like, you know, what would be cool killing a bunch of people in revenge, you know, getting my vengeance, And so a lot of peasants start flocking to the

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

or justified. It's just saying that, like you, you ruined people and they went insane, Like no one's capable of acting rationally with the damage that you have done to them, you know, with the exception again of these people at the top, guys like pole Pot who do not grow up, are not raised, being bombed or you know, living under

these horrible conditions in the jungle. These are people of privilege of education who had the opportunity to pick a different path and did choose horror, right, And that's where my blame lies here. I want to quote from an article for the Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network by David Chandler. Next quote, and this is kind of describing how the Khmer rouge develops as a result of all this.

The small scale guerrilla movement which he had launched against the Henex's government in the late nineteen sixties developed with Vietnamese and Chinese backing into a full scale resistance arvey fighting the American backed Long Nul regime and Nom Pen. At the same time, Sara developed the distinctive ideology which made the CPK that's the Communist Party of Cambodia very

different from other Marxist Leninists parties. He mistrusted the working class, relying instead on the poor peasantry, whom he saw as the incarnation of Rousseau's noble savage. His party functioned like a sect, and some authors underlined that his communism was colored by Cambodian Buddhist structures. Its members were required to renounce not only material possessions but also spiritual ties. The ultimate goal was to crush individual personality and replace it

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

was put to work. The all black garb of the peasantry, which had just kind of been a traditional thing in Cambodia, became the only acceptable outfit to wear. You're literally not allowed to dress differently. Those who refused to serve were executed.

By nineteen seventy three, most of rural Cambodia was in rouge hands, and I got to say, the one aspect of the Khmer Rouge I could have done great with is just kind of wearing black pajamas all the time, Like I got that shit on the lock, baby, Like I'm wearing this like sport coat thing, but it's just black pajamas under this.

way back in. Right. What really happens is he strengthens the Khmer Rouge at a critical moment because again, people the peasantry feel very strongly about the royalty, right, and that still has not been busted, even though he really sucked ass when he was actually running things. He does this right as the US is starting to pull out

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

parts of Cambodia for twenty years or more. People are fucking exhausted, and is always the case in times like this. There was an optimism among like a lot of regular people that like, look, I don't know so much about these Khmer Rouge guys, but the war's over. Maybe things will get better, right, there's this hope, and that hope is crushed very quickly because Polepot and his comrades, it's not even that they don't want to go back to normal and their minds going back to normal is a

death sentence, right. And again this is kind of what messes with a lot of people's casual understanding of what's happening, because you would think, well, obviously, these guys have to hate the US more than anybody else, right, not at all the cases. The people the Polepot's obsession is Vietnam. That is the real enemy, not capitalism, not the United States, the West Vietnam. Saigon fell to the NVA not far

from when Nam Pen did, right. And because of this, because Vietnam has won its War two, there's this immediate 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 Khmara autonomy is to rapidly change the country, both in terms of how food is produced and how like to and to do this kind of they're very motivated by these ideas they'd taken from Mao. That kind of became the great leap for word in China of

like what if we do industrialism? But it's like everybody's backyard is helping to like make different sort of industrial products, right.

yeah freedom fuck ah and I'm bad. Okay, So cities like the Capital have no place in Polepot's radical view of the future of the country, which needs to be immediately changed on a fundamental level in order to survive and defeat the Vietnamese. So there's this plan that's hatched by Polepot in the leadership of the party to completely reform Cambodian society in order to make it capable of surviving.

And Polepot names this plan year zero. In April of nineteen seventy five, they declare this openly, and this Year zero concept. We talked about this in the earlier episodes. It's based in part on Polepot's understanding of the French revolution right as well as reading from guys like Thomas Paine, because he does read like American revolutionaries too, And in seventeen seventy six pain had published this quote, we have it in our power to begin the world over again,

a situation similar to the present. Hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand. And this is the kind of thing you hear in some like optimistic revolutionary tracts, especially in the headiness of like we've defeated the regime, we have this chance for a total break with history. Right, there's even you can you can think about kind of the whole the end of history stuff that was being

said at the when the Soviet Union fell. There's this headiness of like, well, maybe maybe we're done competing with like what kind of systems are going to work? Maybe we've maybe we can. We're entering into this fundamentally new world that's like represents this real break of continuity, and that means we're never going to have to worry about like going back to any of the bad old days or the problems that we had struggled to know back. Yeah, there's no way of going back.

drew on history for political INDs. Their leadership made repeated reference to the importance of grasping the wheel of history and how history would crush those who stood in the way of development. I've heard Musk say some similar things.

In nineteen seventy six, as part of Polpot's consolidation of personal power, official party historiography was revised with an eye to the older Indo Chinese guerrilla fractions within the movement by moving the date of the parties founding from nineteen fifty one to nineteen sixty and a meeting of the Central Committee in March nineteen seventy six, it was noted, with regard to historiography, that we must rearrange the history of the party into something clean and perfect. Do not

use nineteen fifty one, make a clean break. So again there's this even our re history of our real movement, that one isn't good enough. We have to like And if if you're ever in a if're ever finding your movement, is needing to like alter the very basic foundation of reality for your ideas to work.

give people lots of power, Yeah, they do horrible things. Yeah, right, Like that's that's that's kind of where I get into it from. Right.

Brothers suck edd ass. But once we ded a super, it was finally good.

like the rest of the country is. They have a lot of Vietnamese and Chinese traders and a lot of the Khmer that lived there are the new people, right, They are educated Khmer who come from families with money, who have gone through Western education, who have often been educated overseas and have thus been unforgivably tainted by foreign influence.

Now you may also notice these new people that he's saying we need to expel from the cities are Polepot and his friends right right, Still, the new people have to either assimilate to the base people, and the base people are Khmer peasant farmers, or die. And the distinct preference of the Khmer rus is that they die. Andres

Airs describes how jarringly rapid this process is. Quote. Money markets and private properties, schools, institutes of higher education, newspapers, and religious institutions all were immediately abolished after the seizure of power. Early eyewitness accounts relate how the hospital and non pen was emptied of patients, how the national bank

was set on fire, money burned in the streets. Immediately after the victory proclamation, book burnings were orchestrated in front of the National Library and the School of Renee Descartes. The country's borders were closed immediately, and the cleansing of the country from foreign influences began by deporting foreigners and domestic minorities such as Vietnamese Muslim Khmer, Chinese Khmer ties,

and Europeans. It was also so officially announced that the individual would be abolished the traditional family would be replaced 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 ang Car. And that's the people. That's the Vulk, right, you know, the Nazi said the Vulcan. The ang Car is that for the Khmer rouse It's close enough at least, right, And yeah, revolutionaries are not allowed to have personalities.

isn't for other people, right. The point is not to inspire other people, right, right, And it is this you get. This is an issue I have with like some other

people that I otherwise agree with a lot. There's talk among certain left inst tendencies about the concept of the abolition of the family and what they tend to mean in the modern era is looking at a lot of how much of right wing policy is based upon the idea that parents own their children, right, and that literally, like anything a parent wants for their kid, that's all that should matter, right, which leads to a lot of heinous Some of the worst things that happen in our

society is because of our conception of the family. As this thing in which the parents, primarily the father, possesses everyone else, right, and wanting to abolish that idea of the family is good, But when you start framing it as family, it's going to bring this up. People are going to think about what the Khmayer Rouge did as opposed to being like, I don't think parents should be allowed to poison their kids because they have autism, right right, right, you know, but anyway get.

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, Polpot's parents had fought tooth and nail to make sure he never had to.

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. They're why is everyone's going

to die? And that's what starts to happen, and people also start to starve to death as they are forced at gunpoint out of the cities. Non pen had flooded to significantly higher than its pre war population because of the war going on, and now these people are being marched out and no one's allowed to take anything. People are being dragged out at gunpoint in some cases, their houses are being burnt down. They don't have a lot of baggage, right, and it's not like people had a

lot we're keeping like food on hand. This isn't like a prepper culture. Folks don't have like freeze dried shit in their houses. So people are just being forced to walk a lot of a number of them have been pulled out of hospitals and they're just dying. They're dying by the tins of thousands alongside the road, and as people march out, they're just seeing these piles of corpses of their neighbors and family members bloating in the sun. It's just a really hideous like nightmare for all of

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

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

expectation of these policies was mass dying. The stage had been set for this in the years leading up to the capital's fall by a process of what is called by genocide scholars toxification, specifically toxification through Khmer rouge propaganda toxification. This is a process you can watch happen right now in your very own country, presuming you live in the United States. But well other countries, Yeah, but a few other countries. We can talk about some recent Supreme Court

rulings in the UK. Toxification is a process often seen in genocide, whereby groups of people are depicted as inherently poisonous to the well being of the body politic. The real people of a community. Soldiers are not, in general, born willing to fill mass grapes or to march an

entire city out of their homes and die right. They are there, They're pushed there, They're gotten to that point when they have been convinced that doing so is either a form of self defense or a way to fight their enemy, or both right, And that's what toxification does. There's a very good article on this process called toxification and the Khmer Rouge genocide or autogenocide you'll hear both terms, published in the Journal of Terror and Political Violence by

Timothy Williams and Rhianna Nielsen. I recommend reading the whole thing. It's a very good article, and it's very important article. It will be kind of chilling and light of things happening in our present world, but it ought to be, and it details how the messaging from Polepot on down through the Khmer Rouge hierarchy seeded the militant population with the kind of toxic attitudes that are a necessary precursor

to mass killing. The first people targeted specifically for mass execution were those who had bought into and succeeded under the capitalist system. These were the budding intelligencia, of whom Polepot himself had been a member, professors, lawyers, business owners, government officials. Polepot called them the internal enemy or super traders. You really like super You hear a lot of that. Obviously, this includes people who had been in the military, of law and nol.

elements he accused of causing sickness within the party. These ugly microbes had to be destroyed before they rotted democratic Campuccia, which is what they're calling Cambodia now, right, like once the Moors takes over, it becomes goes from the Khmer Republic to Democratic Campuccia. And Polepot writes of these ugly microbes, 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.

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

violence on the mentally ill right. And another part of it is that there's a desire to reclassify being transgender and eventually even being LGBT is a mental illness, in part because those people can be disarmed, in part because then you can put those people in you know, yeah, facilities or whatever. I tend to think that the goal that a lot of these people are thinking towards is less Nazi style death camps and gas fans and more a Judge Rotenberg Center on every corner if you want

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

their ability to purge the enemy within. 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 of the system, prime targets for elimination were ethnic Cham and Vietnamese minorities, former soldiers or officials under the Londol regime, intellectuals or others deemed not to fit into a peasant society, as well as any person whom the regime believed to be an internal enemy, mostly associated with being an agent of

the CIA, KGB or the Vietnamese secret service. And I think it's so interesting part of this is there's such 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.

happened in Cambodia. You will usually see the mass killing in Cambodia referred to either as the Cambodian genocide or the Khmer Rouge genocide. This term is not I think accurate to describe most of what happened, because the vast majority of the people who were or you know, as a part of these year zero policies were Khmer and the goal of the regime was not to wipe out the Khmer, right, it was to make them stronger and

ultimately more numerous. And it was just a disastrous failure. Right. Yeah, The term autogenocide which was coined by author Jean lac Lacutre something like that, Jeane Lacuter and the autogenocide was coined by this French author in order to separate the unique circumstances of mass killing and Cambodia from the Holocaust

and other traditional genocides. I again, there's some issues with that, even because genocide is is not fully the right term for what pol Pot and his peers are trying to do to the Khmer people, right, because their goal is

to ensure the survival of their race. Right. You can come down on however you like on what we should call this right, but I should note that while what the most of the killing the regime does, and most of who the regime kills are Khmer, While I don't know that it's right to say that like genocide is just strictly textually the right way to describe that, there are genocides that are being committed by the regime Khmer rouge like normal, like straight up dictionary genocides, right.

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

most total genocides I've ever studied. Roughly fifty percent of Chinese Cambodians and these are not like necessary. Some of them are Chinese immigrants, but these are just these are people who are ethnically Chinese and live in Cambodia. Right, fifty percent of the pre war population is executed or starved in a three year period, and they got off light compared to the ethnically Vietnamese Cambodians. I'm going to

quote from that article again. In particular, the Khmer Rouge propaganda organs described the Vietnamese as toxic to Democratic Campuccia by state that their goal is to swallow Cambodia's territory and force Cambodia into an Indo Chinese federation under its control. Vietnamese were portrayed as quintessentially evil and lethal to the

Democratic Campuccia. Radio broadcasts described the Vietnamese as living concealed among the population, infiltrating, sabotaging, and destroying the communist regime, therefore being toxic to the ideal. Further broadcast spoke of the need to weed out and exterminate the enemy planted within the cooperatives, and reminded civilians you are not fighting only against Vietnamese soldiers, but the whole of Vietnam, so spare nothing and no one. According to Polpot, the Vietnamese

are a black dragon that spits its poison. The overall death toll for Vietnamese Khmers was nearly one hundred percent of the population.

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.

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, the Chams are just thus a drain on the ideal communist state that he wanted to form. So Polpot sent his men to wipe out every Cham village they could find, and roughly fifty percent of Cham Cambodians had been killed

by the late nineteen seventy nine. Now what's interesting to me is that he also targets the Buddhists, or at least the Buddhist clergy. And this is interesting. This is kind of weird because like, he had a really good time at the monastery, he described it his whole life as a positive experience, but as leader of Democratic Campucia, he describes Buddhist monks as quote parasites who eat the rice of the people. Monks are ordered to carry out hard labor, and the vast majority of monks who had

existed pre war are killed by the Khmer rouge. Williams and Nielsen site an internal rouge document that brags a ninety to ninety five percent success rate in wiping out the Buddhist monk population. So again almost totally takes out the Buddhist clergy within like the Theravada Buddhist clergy within Cambodia.

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

But they are doing that in like famous time. Here for an idea of how it was to have agreed with Polepot back when he was Salath Czar, or even during the victory of the Khmer Rouge over the Lawndol government. Of the original twenty two members of the Central Committee for the Democratic Campuccia Party, which is who officially governed after the end of the war, six lasted to the end of the regime without being killed or tortured, and

the vast majority of them those were killed. The very few people who survived owed their lives to their sworn enemies, the Vietnamese army who eventually liberated Toul Slang which was the prison for specifically like after a point, it's specifically the prison four party members who were disloyal to eliminate confusion. Tool slang is more commonly known as Security Prison twenty

one or S twenty one. Right, And this is in terms of its like level of fame to people who read about this tool slang or S twenty one is the Auschwitz of Cambodia, right, Right. It's not on that scale, it's not that big a camp, but it's death toll is is Yeah, is.

really agree with with Hitler anymore. Not every this is pretty it's not unique, but it's not common for it to be like this, right, Obviously, in the French Revolution, stuff like this happens, But the swiftness and the centrality with which loyal members of the party are targeted and that tortured and executed is yeah, like you know, you can't be.

over the course of the regime. There's some debate on this number of between twelve and twenty thousand, and there's never more than about one thousand to fifteen hundred people at a time, though, And S twenty one is built out of a former school, which I guess extra chilling given that Pop Pop was a school teacher. And when I say a thousand to fifteen hundred at a time, twenty thousand total people aren't released alive from S twenty one.

This is a death camp. And while it started by going after again like agents of the old regime, YadA YadA, YadA, its prime purpose for most of its history is purging members of the leadership cast as well as like members of the party alongside their entire families. If you are like somebody, a mid level guy in the Khmer rouge who gets targeted and put in S twenty one, your kids and your wife are going to even if they're babies, right, they'll take your infant in there and kill them and

torture them. Right, and again, it's just like, well, we really have to make a statement, you know, the stakes are so high. We really have to scare people away from not being loyal members of the party. Now, we're not going to be dealing with S twenty one in as much length as we ought to, or the prison system in general. This is because it really does deserve its own episodes. Our friend Joe Kissabian of The Lions

Led by Donkey's podcast has covered at length. I recommend his work given that I'm trying to focus this on pole Pot, who was a maide that your architect of this prison system. I hope you'll forgive my brevity as I quote from a detailed fact sheet put together by the Documentation Center of Cambodia for the Cambodia Tribunal quote, and this is talking about the people who were sent to S twenty one. They were accused of collaborating with foreign governments, spying for the CIA and the KGB, and

hence betraying Ankar. Prisoners were also believed to have conspired with others, and thus were forced to reveal their strings of traders, which sometimes included over one hundred names. The interrogators at S twenty one base their technique on a list of ten security regulations, which included while getting lashes or electrification, you must not cry at all. Although prisoners often had no idea why they had been arrested, interrogators

forced them to confess their crimes. If they did not confess, they would be subjected to physical and psychological torture. However, after having confessed, they were marked for execution. Initially, prisoners were killed on the grounds of the prison, but as the volume and stinch of the corpses rapidly increased and became unbearable, prisoners were then trucked and mossed to an open field located fifteen kilometers away known as Crow's Feet

Pond to be killed. Waiting at the field was a group of about ten young men led by Tang Tang in his early twenties and his team of teenagers lived in a two story house that was built on the field in nineteen seventy seven. They were informed ahead of time of the number of prisoners that would arrive, so

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

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

is and democratic Campuccia. We've done it right. And there were a not insignificant number of Western leftists who believed this bullshit right, and who would argue that any evidence to the contrary is the evidence of how hideous what's happening. Of the killing fields as they're called, start to comes out, come out. There's a lot of folks who are like, well, that's just capitalist propaganda, that's the CIA, right, Nothing bad's

happening in Cambodia, right. One of the organizations that Polepot spread his propaganda towards was the Belgian Campuccia Society, who interviewed Polepot in nineteen seventy eight. He told them, we don't have prisons, and we don't even use the word prison. Bad elements in our society are simply given productive tasks to do, you know. Dipshits by this stuff right, as they always do, as they do in the present day. By all accounts, the most famous of these dipshits was

an English writer and professor named Malcolm Caldwell. Caldwell had been a significant figure on the British left in the sixties and seventies. He spends two years as the chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He is an avid anti Vietnam War protester, and in that regard his actions were admirable because the Vietnam War deserved protesting. He wrote regularly for Piece News and support of different anti colonial movements, and a number of them he was very right to support.

Caldwell is a figure who in some ways resembles a lot of modern genocide denier types on the left, although I think he was a much better person because again he's not comprehensively that and he's not being like paid by anybody. Yeah, this is a true believer who lacks a tremendous degree of judgment in a very key area.

And yeah, so like you know, like, yeah, it's like you see the leg he has a stand on even though he's rong, it is one of it's very tempting, And there's a degree to which you should compare him to folks like the people who write for the Gray Zone, which is a faux journalistic institution that spent years arguing Bashar al Asad never gassed its own people made fun of anyone who was saying Russia was about to invade Ukraine. Right,

they're those motherfuckers, Caldwell. There's a degree to which you should compare to them. But also people who knew him said he was kind and empathetic, and he was in a lot of cases on the right side of things, and he gets into Cambodian politics for a sympathetic reason, which is that he's arguing against this nightmarish US bombing campaign, which is a war crime. And on the other side

of this. By the way, I found a fucking Washington Post column looking writing about this in which the author was like, Oh, it's you know, what's really fucked up is the people who who slandered the US for bombing Cambodia to try to stop the Khmer Rouge from coming into being. That's not why we fucking did it, you dip shit, Like fuck you for one thing, that's part of what made them possible. For the other thing that we didn't give up. That was never the fucking goal, Like,

fuck you, fuck you. I just so many people I fucking hate On'm both like yeah, anyway, Yeah. Caldwell was loved by his students, and it was recalled even by people who disagreed with him, as a gentle person who was tolerant of opposing views. So he was not the kind of guy who was like maybe he would have been if he'd had Twitter, but like was a guy who was willing to talk about his unhinged beliefs about Cambodia with you in a polite manner. So I don't

want to depict him as a caricature right now. Because the Khmer Rouge beat the US back law nole government, and because their claims of agrarian equality and an idealized socialist society gelled with Caldwell's own hope of where the world might go, he came to support them to the hilt. His friends, who at the same time saw him as

a brilliant economist, also rude his startling naivete. One peer said, quote, he was a man with very clear theoretical and ideological views, and the empirical basis didn't seem to worry him hugely, always a big warning signs about how should should work. So why bother looking at what's happening now? Caldwell did visit a lot of the regimes that he extolled and supported. He took regime sponsored to tours of places like the USSR.

And you know, that's one of those things where it's like you are going to miss a lot of the bad stuff the USSR is doing. But the Soviet Union is like a state that functions right, and there's things

that did that were good. It got the first person into space, there were massive improvements in you know, literacy and whatnot, in addition to horrifying and awful things done by their It's an actual state, right, and so it's understandable that you could go there and see take this sponsored tour and just see the good stuff.

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

taking over, and they're horrified. They're like, where are the fucking human beings?

of in this period. This is after there had been a series of provoked border conflicts with Vietnam provoked by the Khmer Rouge, and it was becoming increasingly clear that Vietnam was going to invade, and so Polepot was really trying to burnish his international support, so he suddenly wanted Westerners in, right, and he's like, well, this guy's probably like blind enough to ignore all the horrible shit going on, right, Yeah.

And Caldwell had just a few months before he came to Cambodia written an article in The Guardian in which he had basically said, like, all these reports that the khmaier Rus are killing people are nonsense. One of his main sources was the Campuccine information minister, a guy named Hugh Nim, who blamed the deaths on America, right, basically like the bombing that the like all of these people that you're saying have died, this is due to the bombing campaign the US had executed.

that like that. This dude was finding reasons to justify the killings that he knew about, right, including the guy who was the source of his stupid article. So crazy, yes, nuts. Now there are real journalists on this trip, and one

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

like I've seen it before, something's really bad here. And Caldwell's, you know, giving the same lie, putting out a bunch of nonsense about like, you know, the the bold reformation of society along these utopian lines and whatnot. But she still liked him, like he was a very pleasant man. She called him a kind and tolerant and just deeply naive quote. He didn't want to know about problems with the Khmer rouge, and that carried over to not wanting

to know about problems between Cambodia and Vietnam. He was stuck in nineteen sixty eight or something. Now there's a book out by this point, by the time that Caldwell comes to Cambodia about the early stages of the Cambodian the autogenocide, whatever you want to call it, called year zero.

Caldwell could have read this book, and if he had, he'd have learned, for example, that one Khmer rouge saying expressed the regime's goal as quote, to completely annihilate diseases of consciousness that got in the way of their goals. Doing this meant getting rid of hidden enemies who, as Polepot put it, had sicknesses of revolutionary consciousness. Now Philip Short goes into more detail here, summarizing information that should have been available to Caldwell how he had he done this.

Reading quote Satirama meant an individual who failed to focus on the communist cause and was therein portrayed as toxic to its realization. Even without considerable evidence or proof, individuals could suddenly be classified as toxic to the super great 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. A sort of madness had taken over the country at this point, particularly among the rouge cadras doing the hand to hand slaughtering, and for an idea of just how de range this gets, several militia who were interviewed later claimed that they would eat the livers of their victims and the belief that it would give them extra power and probably because they are also

starving to death. One of these yeah, one of these guys as cited later as saying they ate human liver because they wanted to prevent themselves from being shocked by killing people. Then they could kill people. They wanted to change themselves to be able to kill people without pity.

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 Campuccia via systematic distortion of the truth. Right now,

Chomsky preferred a different book. He compared Ponchad's work unfavorably with another book called Cambodia, Starvation and Revolution written by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which is basically is taking Khmer Rouge propaganda and like being like, hey, everything's great over there, actually, and like what the stuff that's bad is not their fault, right right?

should be stated. But it's I do have less condemnation than I do about like the stuff going on in the twenty first century that right viewers this, right.

book about the atrocities going on in Cambodia. You know, whatever, the truth, whoever you're going to blame for it called Well at age forty seven shows up in Cambodia as a pretty much a true believer, right, And in fact, he had finished a book before he goes there called Campuccia, A Rationale for Rural Policy, in which he had written that the Khmer Rouge had quote opened vistas of hope not only for the people of Cambodia, but also for the people of other peoples, of all the other poor

third world countries. We'll come back to that book in a second. So called Well, along with these journalists, is escorted around the country. They see some like staged scenes, and again Becker is gets aggressive, very brave woman with these Khmaer Rouge guards, being like, I can I can see what you're not showing us, like where you're blocking us from going. I can see evidence of clear problems

because I've been here before. What the and she's like arguing with them, she said later it was so clearly awful. One of the problems was the absence of what I saw, the absence of people. And that's a different kind of proof too. I don't see any people being executed. Caldwell was not concerned. Quote. He preferred to stay in the car and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunities prepared for us,

Becker wrote in her book on Cambodia. Now at the very end of the tour, they all go back to Nonpen and they you know, they're hanging out for a little bit. They're not all that far from the S twenty one center, right, this is where Caldwell's going to finally have his interview with pol Pott, and I'm going to quote from the Guardian. Again, Caldwell remained ignorant on the Friday morning and non pen that he was taken

in a Mercedes limousine to see pole Pot. The setting for the meeting was the former Governor's palace on the waterfront, built during the French colonial period. In a grand reception room replete with fans and billowing white curtains, the two men sat down and discussed revolutiontionary economic theory. Becker had met Polepot earlier the same day, and in When the War was Over That's her book, she writes he was actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome, but attractive.

His features were delicate and alert, and his smile nearly endearing. The perennially shally at shabby academic and the fastidious dictator must have made for an odd couple. In any case, Caldwell left the meeting a happy man. He returned to the guest house he was sharing with Becker and Dudman full of praise for Polepot and his political outlook. We

went over stuff, says Becker. He thought he had a good conversation he had avoided at all costs in a discussion of Vietnam, and he was looking forward to going home. So that night they have another argument, you know, Becker and Caldwell about Cambodia. You know, they have dinner and they go to bed, and as far as she can tell, he remained completely convinced that the revolution was a good thing and that Campodi was headed in a good direction.

She goes to bed at around eleven pm, and in the middle of the night she is woken up by what she eventually realizes our gut is gunfire, and she comes out of her room. She sees a young man pointing a handgun at her. He's wearing he's got bands of ammunition on his body, he's got a rifle on

his back. She flees back into her room and locks herself in the bathroom, and eventually, what you know, when they come out when this ends, the Dudman, the other guy there sees like a bunch of guys running along the street and they find Caldwell in his room and he's been shot repeatedly. He's dead. Right. It's still to this day not perfectly clear. Yeah, definitely was. I mean it, it's generally pretty clear Polepot ordered it. We don't really

know why. What about this guy triggered him. Why specifically it happened, They the Khmer rouge doesn't admit to it, but yeah, this guy gets killed, and it's just kind of it's one of these very famous moments because he's such he's one of these like guys who had really been willing to go to bat for democratic Campuccia and then finds himself yet another corpse in the killing field, so to speak.

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, you'll and like a significant chunk of Trump's voters who are not hardcore supporters, who are the people who voted for Biden and twenty you know, who go back and forth or who like made their decision day of Sure, they'll change their mind,

they'll get angry. But the heart and core of his supporters recognizing that they've been fucked means recognizing they're not as smart as they think they are, and again called well, that's a big part of it for him. He's a scholar, he's a smart man. He couldn't be this wrong.

It was basically suicidal and in short order, this is what brings an end to democratic Campuccia. Vietnam invades Cambodia in December of nineteen seven eight, and what follows was

not close to a fair fight. By January, they had taken the capitol and put an end to Polepot's reign sort of, so he has to flee, right, he has to like leave non pen and Vietnam takes over and administers, you know, for a while and Cambodi and eventually Cambodia becomes independent again under a government that is not the Khmer Rouge. But the Khmer Rouge doesn't go away, and Polepot remains the head of the Khmer Rouge as they like go and hide in the jungle. They've got like

some villages and stuff. This like little weird fortified section of the country, tiny section of the country that they're able to like manage along. I think it's like the

Thai border there. And and in fact this like government because like in eighty two, China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations kind of pressures the Khmer Rouge to ally with Sahanak's forces and some like republican forces led by a guy called Sonsan along the Thai border and create this thing called the Coalition Government of Democratic Campuccia, and that remains in the UN the legitimate Government of Cambodia until nineteen ninety one, even though like they're not

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

who do never get nearly enough international aid. And this situation doesn't really start to end until the Paris Peace Agreement assigned in October of nineteen ninety one, the Vietnamese withdraw from Cambodia and things slowly start to calm down. There's a UN peacekeeping force that kind of enters in nineteen ninety three, and there's like a free and fair election you know that. Yeah, things start to get better.

At this point, the Khmer Rouge never disarms, right, They continue to hold their tiny little chunk of the country and argue that there's Vietnam is still secretly running things. There's camouflage Vietnam, Vietnamese soldiers you know that are behind the regime.

Jang Seri, who's the Foreign minister, who is again one of Polpot's friends from Paris, as well as a number of other high ranking official surrender along with the bulk of what had remained of the military of the Khmer Rouge, and they are eventually incorporated into the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. Polepot, though stays free for quite a while until he is basically there's this shit that goes down in nineteen ninety eight.

I think it is where one of his few remaining friends running the Khmer Rouge this guy, Sonsen, does something that Polepot considers treason, and so he massacres Sonsen along with fourteen of his family members, including his like grandkids. Now, Polepot would argue for the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed. For Sonsen and his family, Yes, I feel sorry about that. That was a mistake that occurred when we put our

plan into practice. I feel sorry. This is when he's questioned by a journalist Nate named Nate Thayer, who does like his last interview, and this is kind of what brings an end to him leading the Khmer Rouge finally after thirty seven years, because for whatever reason, this is a step too far to the left, asked people who had stuck around him, and one of his like his commander in chief, a guy named Tom Mauk, puts him on house arrest, right and yeah, and that's kind of

the end of Polepot of having even a sliver of power. Eventually, Polepot is brought before a people's tribunal. He's sentenced to life imprisonment for Sonsen's murder, but he never really faces any actual like justice, right, Like there's there's there's nothing like.

And this is I want to read this quote from one of Nate's last articles with Poulpot, where he's trying to get him to acknowledge anything about what he did. I came to carry out the struggle not to kill people. He rasps, his voice almost a whisper. He pauses, fixing 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 been another Campuchia crumb.

In nineteen seventy five, he says, referring to the Mekong Delta region seized by Vietnam from the Khmer Empire in the seventeenth century, and that I think says a lot that the end of this guy's life, two million deaths, maybe on his conscience, the absolute destruction of his country in such a way that it still has not recovered. And he's like, well, look, if I hadn't ha done that, it could have wound up like this time Vietnam took the Mekong Delta region from US in the sixteen hundreds.

You know you wouldn't want that, would you. Like he's still he's such like it's this this fucking academic brain shit, where like all that matters to him. Is this idea 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.

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 Polepot brain damage seems to have seems to be pulling back because of how angry

he's made. He's just not built for criticism, right, Yeah, but there's more of these guys.