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

Speaker 2 Cool zone media.

Speaker 1 Oh my goodness gracious, Jiminy Christmas. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert Evans is

Speaker 1 using the phrase Jiminy Christmas for some goddamn reason. I almost were allowed to curse on this.
I don't get it. I almost

Speaker 2 didn't get your Boston accent to you when you did that. I don't know.
Are you going to do it?

Speaker 1 What does the Sophie Robert Boston accent sound like?

Speaker 1 No, it's terrible. No.
You got it. That's your Boston accent? That's

Speaker 1 a Boston Rob.

Speaker 1 Boston. See,

Speaker 1 you got to put more of like a spit, like

Speaker 1 rhyme on it, Sophie.

Speaker 1 It's got to sound like you're screeching it over a bunch of wet rocks. I just turned it off.
Just like the Pilgrims did. Just like the Pilgrims did.
Yes, when they landed in Boston.

Speaker 2 I just think that's something that only you can do. I don't know what about Jiminy cricket was like i want to do roberts boston yeah we were there neither do i neither do i neither do i andrew t

Speaker 2 andrew what do you think of uh ben affleck's back tattoo

Speaker 1 oh ben affleck's back tattoo i i think it's a actually pretty pleasant commitment to it's like the most authentic thing he has going on yeah yeah like he he is just a boston guy see i i think he is he's I think he's, he's one of our most authentic male celebrities that we've ever had.

Speaker 1 That doesn't mean, like, I'm not saying he's a good person. He's obviously not.
But you can tell in his face that he knows that and hates himself, which is what I love about Ben Affleck.

Speaker 1 He is keeping it real. He's keeping it indisputably real.
Yeah. Yeah.
When that picture of him, like, looking at J-Lo's butt and just being, having

Speaker 1 the look on his face like he's just watched fucking Dresden go up in flames is like, it's because he's thinking, like, obviously I'm going to cheat on her. Like, I'm Ben Affleck.

Speaker 1 I have no choice in the matter.

Speaker 1 I simply can't be a scumbat, not be a scumbag.

Speaker 2 Besides the beloved tattoo, I personally enjoy the video of Ben Affleck putting Jennifer Lopez in the car and then slamming the door and then realizing the paparazzi caught him and

Speaker 1 being like

Speaker 1 Jiminy Christmas.

Speaker 2 I have no idea

Speaker 1 what mood I'm in, but this is how we're starting the fucking.

Speaker 1 I had a friend of mine made me re-watch Gone Girl recently. Oh,

Speaker 2 he's like playing himself.

Speaker 1 I'm just like, oh, yeah. Ben Affleck didn't even know they were filming.
Like,

Speaker 1 he was pleasantly surprised to realize he wasn't in trouble for murder at the end of this movie.

Speaker 2 Fun fact about Gone Girl is he had to stop production for multiple days because he was refusing to wear, I think it was like a Yankees hat that they wanted him to wear, but he's like, I'm from Boston.

Speaker 1 I can't wear that. Perfect, perfect.

Speaker 2 So I think he ended up, they ended up like settling on him wearing a Mets hat.

Speaker 1 And it's like, it's like, come the fuck on. Come the fuck on.

Speaker 2 The farmer clearly was a Yankee fan.

Speaker 1 Like, what are you doing here?

Speaker 1 I think that also means he possibly didn't really, he didn't read that movie the same way the rest of us read that movie. No, no.

Speaker 1 This podcast has literally nothing to do with Boston, the Yankees, Ben Affleck, back tattooing. Well, you know,

Speaker 1 we're talking about a guy who you could call the Ben Affleck of Cambodian revolutionaries, because this week we're finally doing pole pot. That's right, everybody.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, Andrew, we brought you on the bottom. Getting in pole position here, baby.
Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1 Well, when we're going for the big guns, Andrew T, you can't do better.

Speaker 1 And this is... This is also unfortunately like we did King Nordam Sahanek, who was

Speaker 1 the king of Cambodia, and also a massive piece of shit. Had a lot to do with how the Khmer Rouge got in power and why they killed so many fucking people.
And he's also a lot less known.

Speaker 1 Like, I think generally, people who have any kind of reasonable education are aware of Pol Pot, whereas King Sahanek, not nearly as well known.

Speaker 1 So I thought it was important to start with him years ago. I think Pol Pot is really relevant now.

Speaker 1 I think, actually, right now, might be the most relevant he has been since the horrible crimes against humanity he was committing, because,

Speaker 1 at least from a perspective of a podcast that is primarily speaking to listeners in the United States, and it is because the way in which he and his comrades orchestrated the deaths of roughly between a quarter and a third of their country,

Speaker 1 something like that, we're talking a death toll of

Speaker 1 about

Speaker 1 somewhere in between like one and a half to three million.

Speaker 1 I think probably two million is probably is generally kind of like the hedging your guess estimate out of a pre-war population of maybe six million Cambodians, right?

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

Speaker 1 Like we're going to totally, totally strip down everything that had existed before and start new based on these ideas we had in our like weird little friend groups, right?

Speaker 1 Well, that's essentially what's happening with guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and their cadre of fanatic young doge kids, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, who are disassembling the administrative state for fun and trying to rebuild it based on a bunch of shit that they discussed on 4chan and 8chan over the years, right?

Speaker 1 The difference is

Speaker 1 these motherfuckers have never read a book, but otherwise, yeah, pretty cool. Yes.
And the Khmer Rouge guys both read books.

Speaker 1 And also, one thing you can't take away from Pol Pot and the other Khmer Rouge guys, they were hard as fuck by the time they got in charge. They'd spent 20 years fighting in the jungle.
So

Speaker 1 we have that going for us. But I do think there's a lot relevant here in the story of how

Speaker 1 a group of people and particularly the dude at the head come to believe a set of things about how the world should be remade and then pursue those goals no matter the cost.

Speaker 1 And that's kind of the story we're going to be telling this week. So I hope you're excited.
I hope you all have fun. I can't fucking wait.
Jesus Christ. Fucking go.

Speaker 2 This is an iHeart podcast.

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Speaker 5 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 7 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 6 Season 0 of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch. Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com.

Speaker 12 Com, com. Global, double, global, global, global, global, double, global, double, double, global, double, global, double.

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Speaker 1 So let's fucking go and talk about the man who, well, one of the men who really fucked up Cambodia.

Speaker 1 I got to say, there's strong competition for being the dude who was worst to Cambodia in the 20th century.

Speaker 1 You got Kissinger, you got Nixon, you got King Sahanuk, you got Lon Noll, who we'll talk about later, but Pol Pot probably still does win the crown,

Speaker 1 which is hard. Being the worst guy for Cambodia in the 20th century.
crowded ass field. It's a crowder.

Speaker 1 He's, I mean, he's also just like, he's got the name recognition and he didn't have a massive white washing campaign waged on his behalf.

Speaker 1 No, no, he didn't have that. So the first thing you need to know about Pol Pot is that Pol Pot's not his name, right? Like this is a nom de revolution, you know? You get this with all of these guys.

Speaker 1 Joseph Stalin wasn't born Joseph Stalin. He literally just picked the name Joe Steele because it sounded cool, right?

Speaker 1 And a lot of these guys do that because for one thing, it's just smart if you're planning to overthrow your government to work under a fake name.

Speaker 1 And for another thing, usually your fake name sounds cooler than your real name.

Speaker 1 And one of the, the first thing that makes Pol Pot unique is that Pol Pot is not a cool name and it was never meant to be. It doesn't sound, it's not cooler in Cambodian.

Speaker 1 It basically means like Joe Khmer, like the Khmer are the ethnic people that are the majority of Cambodia.

Speaker 1 Like he's basically, Pol Pot is the Khmer equivalent of calling yourself like Joe America almost, right? Like I'm the average man, right?

Speaker 1 That's basically what he was saying, or like John Doe, sort of. Yeah, like John Doe.
His real name sounds like a fucking like Marvel villain. He was born Saloth Tsar, which is like

Speaker 1 such a cool name. Like, that's that is the name of a guy who fistfights Batman.
Like, I'm sorry. And has

Speaker 1 two acts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, he breaks

Speaker 1 Batman's spine at one point, right?

Speaker 1 Saloth Tsar,

Speaker 1 I think goes by Polpot.

Speaker 1 No, this name goes too hard. Nobody will believe that.

Speaker 1 Salath Tsar was born in a village called Prekshov, a couple of miles west of the capital of his province and about 90 miles north of Nampen,

Speaker 1 which is the capital of Cambodia. For decades, there was considerable debate as to the precise year of his birth, and we don't have perfect knowledge of when he was born.

Speaker 1 There are a couple of reasons for this, just beyond the general fact that record-keeping in impoverished rural Cambodia wasn't great in the 20s.

Speaker 1 People were not like keeping, did no one was digitizing anything, right?

Speaker 1 And Cambodia's educational system hinged a lot on your birth date because the central

Speaker 1 administration was lacking a culture.

Speaker 1 Sorry, the central administration

Speaker 1 basically

Speaker 1 if you wanted your kid to kind of get into the best kind of school that they could get into, if you came from a prosperous family and Saloth does, it was common to like alter your kid's birthday to maximize which school they would get into.

Speaker 1 And that was as easy as literally just changing markings on a piece of paper because there wasn't anything like centrally kept, right?

Speaker 1 So there was a strong culture of changing your kid's birthday, at least by a few, but sometimes by a couple of years, in order to like get them where you wanted them to go.

Speaker 1 Biographer Philip Short says that Salath Tsar's real birthday was probably March of 1925. Others will say May of 1927.

Speaker 1 Pol Pot himself told journalist Nate Thayer that he'd been born in January of 1925. But he just recalled that because he saw like basically a post-it note.

Speaker 1 Not, it wasn't a literal post-it, but like a note that was like posted on top of like a cabinet in their kitchen.

Speaker 1 And this would be him

Speaker 1 remembering it as like a five-year-old. So we don't, we don't know when he was born, but somewhere in that period.

Speaker 1 My grandparents literally also had this. I wonder if now I'm realizing they did this for the same reason, but they were very, very squirrely about what their actual birth dates were.

Speaker 1 I knew someone and interviewed someone once who had grown up as a like hunter-gatherer in the highlands of Vietnam.

Speaker 1 They were a Montagnard and like didn't, they were like 16 or 17 the first time they heard music that wasn't being played in front of them. They didn't know what electric lights were for a while.

Speaker 1 And then, yeah, we're like, yeah, I have no idea what I was born. Like, I'm probably 26, I think, was what they told me at the time.

Speaker 1 It's like, if I really sat down, I could maybe make an educated guess, but I do not know. Yeah, my grandparents were like, there was a war.
Records got lost. We don't know.

Speaker 1 We had a lot of other priorities than other shit was happening.

Speaker 1 Birthdays weren't high, even for kids. Salath Tsar's family was upper middle class, right? He came from about as much privilege as a non-noble member of

Speaker 1 Cambodia, of Khmer society could in this period of time. His father, Pin Saloth, owned a lot of land.

Speaker 1 Now, how much a lot? Like, I think something like two to three hectares would be like a normal amount for a peasant farmer to own.

Speaker 1 own biographer david chandler says that penn owned about nine hectares but philip short whose book is more recent and i think works off of better information says that it was more like 50 hectares so about 10 times the average um and their house was probably the largest of the 20 or so houses in the village so they're not rich as like they're not one of the people who run the country but they're they're the they're the wealthiest guy in town right that's that's his dad you know um penn saloth was prosperous enough to hire his neighbors to help out during harvest time.

Speaker 1 So like, that's the kind of money he had, where like, I am paying my neighbors to do my harvest for me, right? As opposed to like, they just can't do that, right?

Speaker 1 He also owned multiple oxen, which was like, that's like having like a sports car or something in a day, right? If you've got your own oxen and more than one, you're like, that's a sign of wealth.

Speaker 1 His wife, Salath Tsar's mother, came from a prominent family and was well known as a humanitarian and a pious Buddhist. The two had nine children.
I think five of them survived into like the the 90s.

Speaker 1 So, like, pretty good record for, you know, as a mom and dad.

Speaker 1 Saloth was number eight, so he comes near the end. And he and his two, the two siblings, like around his age, were very close.

Speaker 1 Short writes: they played and swam in the river together, and in the evenings, by the light of a rush lamp, listened to the old people of the village recounting stories and legends from the days before the French established the protectorate in the 1860s.

Speaker 1 And if you'll remember back to our Napoleon III episodes, like right while France was getting ready to like lose a bunch of territory in a major war to what became Germany, the navy was largely kind of

Speaker 1 carrying out

Speaker 1 to some extent on its own recognizance, the conquest of a sizable chunk of Indochina, of what came to be known as French Indochina, right? And this is why France is running Vietnam.

Speaker 1 And it's also why France is running Cambodia, right? So they have this dominion in Cambodia.

Speaker 1 And for about a century, Cambodia is governed by the French.

Speaker 1 In the capital, which is the primary place you would see, the white French colonizers, they were a tiny minority whose control was so great that they were people who were young Cambodians in this period, like young Khmer, described French, like white French residents of the capital as almost deities, right?

Speaker 1 Because they were untouchable. You did not have social contact with them.
And they had access to like resources that were almost unimaginable to regular people, right? And again,

Speaker 1 despite this being the capital of Cambodia, it has the lowest Khmer population of any part of the country.

Speaker 1 The entire like business class, the people who are handle running companies and who are doing trading and thus have the most money outside of the white French class are primarily Vietnamese and Chinese Khmer, right?

Speaker 1 And these are, in a lot of cases, still people who were born in Cambodia, but they are ethnically Chinese and ethnically Vietnamese. And this is because Cambodia, for most of its history, has been,

Speaker 1 for large chunks of its history, has been the property of either like China or Vietnam or Thailand, like bits and pieces of it, right? There's been constant, it's in the middle of everything, right?

Speaker 1 It's like Poland. It's like the Southeast Asian Poland.
And that, like, yeah, you guys are usually like under somebody's thumb, right?

Speaker 1 Well, and yeah, and that's also just like, like, as much as like the French colonialism, you know, bad, obviously, it's like Asia just be doing that. And China's probably the biggest culprit.

Speaker 1 Well, and that's one of the initial surprises that the communists have that kind of slows down them getting off the board is they initially expect, well, everyone must hate the French.

Speaker 1 And the regular Khmer people don't hate the French as much as they hate the Vietnamese. And in fact, it's going to be true even when the Khmer Rouge gets in power.

Speaker 1 Like, no matter even with all the horrible shit the U.S. does for the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, Vietnam is always the enemy, right?

Speaker 1 And it's because they've got a thousand years of shit. It's always always the last war.
Yeah. It's just like that's the one that sticks.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's like no matter how racist Americans get about a foreign country, Texans will always hate Oklahomans more.

Speaker 1 Right. And vice versa.

Speaker 1 So the fact that the people with money in the capital and running these businesses, the kind of saying capitalist class isn't super useful in this sense, but that's kind of our closest thing.

Speaker 1 The fact that they're Vietnamese and Chinese contributes to a long-standing cultural grievance among the majority Khmer population who see themselves, they have an inferiority complex.

Speaker 1 And this is something that is written about extensively by Khmer people, right?

Speaker 1 That there is within the culture and within like even a lot of like the Buddhist kind of writings at the time, there's this discussion of like the Khmer, we're fundamentally good people, we're humble, but we're also kind of like

Speaker 1 naive and easy to be taken advantage of by these kind of savvier foreign peoples around us, right? This is the way they talk about themselves to a sizable extent, right? Sure.

Speaker 1 Although, how much

Speaker 1 there is a question, I guess I'm asking more than like poking at this, but it's like, that is also exactly the type of thing that like a broad multinational religion could start to spread

Speaker 1 in terms of supporting imperialism.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and there's, there's some, I mean, this is not, I'm not, I'm certainly not qualified to give you detail, but, but I think it's, there's, there's plenty of evidence that A lot of the way they discuss themselves is in sort of this context of we are, we really need to get our shit together and stop being ruled by these people.

Speaker 1 Like that's kind of the attitude.

Speaker 1 And it depends with the Chinese Khmer, there's this mix of like respect with kind of some jealousy and some anger.

Speaker 1 Vietnam is seen almost, Vietnamese people are seen almost entirely as imperialists, right? As like this arrogant force that has continually dominated us over our history.

Speaker 1 And again, Khmer people often have friends who are Vietnamese Cambodians and Chinese Cambodians, but this is this idea of like, this is what this race has done to our race, right?

Speaker 1 Like that's really common.

Speaker 1 A very like popular story that would be told to children at the time when Salath Tsar was a kid described three Cambodian prisoners being buried up to their necks around a fire so their heads could be used as a tripod to hold their Vietnamese master's teapot.

Speaker 1 And it's like a joke that like, this is what they think we're good for is like, you know, like that, that's the bit. Right.

Speaker 1 Now, when it came to like the looking back at periods of time in which things were different, the real one period of like glory that educated Cambodians in particular would think back to was the time of the Angkorian Empire, which had ruled northwest Cambodia from the 900s AD to about 1400 AD and included parts of modern-day Lao, Thailand, and Vietnam as well.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 This is the Angkorian Empire. And Salath Tsar and his peers would have seen themselves as being raised in the ruins of a once great culture.

Speaker 1 The attitude these people have is almost, we're growing up in a post-apocalyptic empire, right?

Speaker 1 And this was not far from the truth. By the 1200s, which is right around, if you've heard of Angkor Wat, it's still to this day the largest surviving religious complex on the world.

Speaker 1 And it's this massive, incredibly complex, beautiful temple complex that was part of the heartland of this empire.

Speaker 1 And while it was at its height around the 1200s, the Angkorian Empire contained a higher population than lived in all of Cambodia in the 30s.

Speaker 1 So if you're looking at like the degree to which things got worse, there are the in the 30s, this area is capable of supporting fewer people than it supported in the 1200s. Right, right, right.

Speaker 1 So they are really living in a post-apocalypse in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 Now, some of the first stories Saar would have heard would have been tales of his grandfather Phm, who came up during one of the many periods of domination by Vietnamese and Thai invaders.

Speaker 1 Cambodia came close to being destroyed as an independent culture.

Speaker 1 And Tsar would have been raised on tales of Vietnamese soldiers gouging the eyes out of captives and salting their wounds before burying them alive. And this is a thing that happened.

Speaker 1 We are talking about really hideous wars that happened between these people in these periods. And I mean, in every period of time, right?

Speaker 1 These are ugly conflicts. And he grows up with stories about like, this is what war is.
Like, it's not just fighting and killing to gain territory. It is like torturing and destroying your enemy.

Speaker 1 And like, is, that is the norm, right? The French, by comparison, would have seemed benign to him as a child, in large part because the French were the backers of the royal family.

Speaker 1 That was like, because there's still a king in Cambodia and he's a useful figurehead for the French. And Salath Tsar's family is really close to the royal family.

Speaker 1 And so they, they kind of owe their privileges and their good position to, in part, to the French occupiers, right? Just like the king does. Salath's early childhood then was mild.

Speaker 1 His father was noted for being less strict and for beating out,

Speaker 1 he didn't beat his kids as much as most fathers did, right?

Speaker 1 This is a culture where strict parenting is the norm and where children, it's believed that you need to be, you need to use violence very strictly to maintain the behavior of your children, right?

Speaker 1 And this was not just common with parents, it was extremely common with teachers.

Speaker 1 These are like the like the strain of Buddhism that is dominant in Cambodia is called Theravada Buddhism. And this is a faith that has an incredibly sharp delineation between good and evil.

Speaker 1 There's not really shades of gray, right? And so if you're doing the wrong thing, you need to be punished very severely, right? This is like a very black and white faith in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 At least that's the way it's interpreted at this period of time. One common punishment from schoolmasters was to make a disobedient child lie down on an ant's nest.
That's like

Speaker 1 if you're if you fuck up in school, they make you lie down on a red ant nest. That's straight up torture.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just want to point out, Robert, of course, is not saying that if you don't beat your kids enough, they will become Pol Pot, but he's not

Speaker 1 saying that. Look, there's obviously an amount of beating your kids that will turn them into Pol Pot, right? But there's an amount of beating your kids that will turn them into,

Speaker 1 I don't know,

Speaker 1 not Pol Pot, too. So, you know,

Speaker 1 it's a fine line. I don't know.
Maybe you don't punish your kids with ants. Can we say, can we agree on that?

Speaker 1 Philip Short quotes one of Pol Pot's peers, Keng von Sack,

Speaker 1 as saying this about discipline in schools at the time. I didn't like arithmetic and I hadn't learnt my multiplication table.

Speaker 1 So every time we were going to have a lesson, I said that I had a stomachache and wanted to go home.

Speaker 1 The third time I did that, the teacher said, all right, you may go, but first recite the seven times table. Of course, I didn't know it.
How he beat me, kicks and punches. He was brutal.

Speaker 1 Then he took me outside and put me under a grapefruit tree full of red ants. After that, I knew my times tables.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Well, I guess if it works. No, I don't guess that at all.

Speaker 1 You know, that general philosophy, I think, held on for quite some time, if my parents are any indication.

Speaker 1 And like, yeah, there's unique Cambodian, the whole ant thing, pretty unique to Cambodia. But the whole, you beat the shit out of a kid if they're not learning right.

Speaker 1 That's more normal than not in the 20s. You go to Oklahoma.
I got beat as a kid in Oklahoma by my principal. So, like,

Speaker 1 not trying to like, but yeah, what's really interesting to me, though, is that Van Sack recalls this teacher who like beat him and then tied him to an ant tree as a saintly man who was adorable.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, this was my nicest teacher. Oh, kicking a kid is really fucking nuts.

Speaker 1 That's wild. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 truly, yeah. It just just requires so much intention and preparation,

Speaker 1 yeah. And it just says a lot that, like, and that's your good teacher, like, that's the guy that you like.
And you know what? He really, he really straightened me out. Yeah, hell a lot.

Speaker 1 They say you never forget your teachers or how many ants they tortured you with. And it's I can see why you wouldn't forget that teacher.

Speaker 1 If anybody kicked the shit out of me and tied me to an ant tree, I would remember that motherfucker.

Speaker 1 Speaking of beating, nope. speaking of not amusing children,

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Speaker 2 Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Speaker 2 Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Annabe has you covered. Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your home.

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Speaker 5 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 7 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 6 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch. Head over to globalgamingleague.com.

Speaker 12 Com, com.

Speaker 1 And we're back.

Speaker 1 So, as I've established, we're not talking about a society. This is a Khmer society is in a lot of ways.
And I know there's other aspects of it, like, but there's a lot of brutality here, right?

Speaker 1 And this is not unique among the Khmer, but this is a black and white society, and it's going to be meaningful in terms of how the Khmer Rouge act in power that punishments like this are very normal when they're kids, right?

Speaker 1 There is already a high level. It's just like the ultra violence of the Nazis is not detached from the fact that the initial group of Nazis all spent four years in the trenches.

Speaker 1 You know, like you can't separate those things and you can't separate what the Khmer Rouge does from the fact that this kind of stuff is normal normal when they're kids, right?

Speaker 1 And the legends that were told often in Khmer society, because this is a group of people who have been constantly conquered and beaten and massacred by their neighbors.

Speaker 1 And of course, done a little bit, done some of that themselves, to be fair. It does not, the stories, the fairy tales and whatnot they grow up on don't depict a just world, right?

Speaker 1 They are instead of like, you know, happy endings and the good guy winning, there's a lot more stories of murderers going free and honorable men being hideously executed by the king right that's a lot a very common kind of thing this is the lore of a culture formed through centuries of domination defeat and murder right that's that's the result right there's a lot of trauma in the collective history of the khmer and it comes through in their legends salath tsar's cousin meek joined the royal ballet corps in the 1920s now that sounds nice right ah ballet Good way to express yourself.

Speaker 1 Great. We love the arts.
This is not that kind of ballet troupe.

Speaker 1 The ballet troupe is primarily a feeder organization for the king's harem, right?

Speaker 1 That is the reason why you collect all these ballet artists, right? Because it makes it easier for the king to pick out who he wants to make a chorus on, right?

Speaker 1 David Chandler in the book Brother Number One, which is a biography of Pol Pot, writes, quote, Each dance involved thousands of movements, each keyed to moments in a particular story and to the mythological character being portrayed.

Speaker 1 None of the gestures was improvised. Although some dancers might be more beautiful or more graceful than others, their movements depended on memory, tradition, and practice.

Speaker 1 In other words, on what they had been taught rather than on what the individual wanted to express. The dancers were vehicles for tradition rather than its interpreters.

Speaker 1 So while this is an art form, it is not one in which self-expression is prized. It is how can you

Speaker 1 exactly reflect,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 Do the thing as it was done before.

Speaker 1 And again, this whole ballet corps, its primary audience is the royal family. And the royal family within Khmer society is,

Speaker 1 it's so high above everything else, right?

Speaker 1 The Khmer word that, like, people who are high-level advisors and counselors for the king would use for themselves literally translated to something like, we who keep the king's shit in our heads.

Speaker 1 Like, like, our brains are his shit, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And as I said, the ballet court existed in large part to provide raw material for the royal harem.

Speaker 1 But it was traditional for kings and princes to have eyes bigger than their heads in this regard.

Speaker 1 And especially once kings kings got old they would pick a lot of concubines that they wouldn't really get around to having sex with because they're like old and sick and these women are untouchable to any other men but often also untouched themselves and they're kept prisoner in a network of huts in the palace and are forbidden from contact with non-royal boys over a certain age right so most of their time was spent arguing and gossiping among each other raising the few kids that they have there's a lot of gambling And

Speaker 1 the few outsiders who are allowed to visit, obviously, they socialize with as much as possible because they live in such a closed little society.

Speaker 1 And soon enough, Salath Tsar would be one of those visitors. His older brother, Thay, was the first to be sent to the capital to attend one of the few Western-style schools in the country.

Speaker 1 And these are schools the French have started.

Speaker 1 And they're often sometimes they're run by Khmer, educated Khmer, but they're like patterned off of French schools, right? And Salath followed into the capital in 1934 at age nine.

Speaker 1 And the plan was he's going to start attending one of these proper Western schools. But as is not uncommon for a lot of Khmer, his parents don't want him to go fully Western, right?

Speaker 1 They still do want him to be Khmer. So he spends a year in a Buddhist monastery just south of the palace before he goes to school, right? This is a really common experience.

Speaker 1 And in fact, the princes all do this too, right? Like the guy who's going to become the king, Notre Dame Sahanek, spends like a year or

Speaker 1 an amount of time

Speaker 1 in this monastery because it's a thing that you do in part to like show I'm authentically of this culture.

Speaker 1 And this is also going to be the only education that Pol Pot ever gets in his native language. This is the only, the rest of his schooling, he'll be taught in French.

Speaker 1 So this is the only time he's being taught like in Khmer, right? Sure.

Speaker 1 Now, about 100 kids a year had this experience and the accounts that we get make it sound pretty miserable to me, like the worst summer camp you can imagine.

Speaker 1 There is no room in this for personal creativity or expression. Every single person has a strictly delineated role, and stepping out of it was met with traditionally brutal punishments.

Speaker 1 One of Sar's contemporaries later explained: You were given a thrashing if you didn't do as they said. If you didn't walk correctly, you were beaten.

Speaker 1 You had to walk quietly and slowly without making any sound with your feet, and you weren't allowed to swing your arms. You had to move serenely.

Speaker 1 You had to learn by heart the rules of conduct and the Buddhist precepts so that you could recite them without hesitation. If you hesitated, you were beaten.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think I encountered a whole lot, especially as an angry young atheist, this idea, you hear this, I think, more common among liberals that like,

Speaker 1 you know, these Christians and Muslims and like all the violence that comes out of these Western like Judeo-Christian religions. Why can't we all be like the Buddhists?

Speaker 1 They never have terrorist groups. Tons of Buddhist terrorist groups.
Yeah, yeah. Plenty of Buddhist genocides.
Every religion has it. And also non-religions have it.
People love committing genocide.

Speaker 1 It's not, no, no culture has a fucking lock on that. Religion is a handy tool, but it's not the only handy.
It's not the only tool. Get that out of you.

Speaker 1 Again, if you blame genocide fundamentally on the fact that people can be pieces of shit, that's what's to blame. The real genocide juice is in here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's in here.

Speaker 1 If you want to understand how a person can be moved to genocide, drive in traffic for 22 minutes.

Speaker 1 Because that's the most I'm ever like, yeah, we just got to start killing people.

Speaker 1 If no one was here, I'd be home. No, no, no.
I'm three more, still three minutes away from the fucking burger rest. God damn it.

Speaker 1 So the religious texts that they were made to memorize were rooted in a rigid respect for hierarchy. In Theravada Buddhism, children were treated almost as robots, right?

Speaker 1 They are the product of cause and effect that accumulate rather than people in their own right. And so what matters is modifying what goes into them, right? In order to produce the desired outcome.

Speaker 1 There's almost, again, this very mechanical understanding of like, this is how you make a good person, right?

Speaker 1 Now, their holy book was the SPAP, SPAP. It's C-P-A-P.
It's like spelled like a C-PAP machine, right?

Speaker 1 And it's basically a collection of morality plays and anecdotes, which reinforce the sense of Khmer inferiority next to their neighbors.

Speaker 1 One relevant portion reads, learn arithmetic with all your energy, lest the Chinese and Vietnamese cheat you. The Khmers are lacking in judgment.

Speaker 1 They eat without giving thought for what is proper and right. Each season, they borrow from the Chinese, and the Chinese gain control of the inheritance their parents have bequeathed.

Speaker 1 So, again,

Speaker 1 this is a hell of a morality play.

Speaker 1 It's a hell of a there's a lot of racism in this upbringing, and it's racism against these ethnic minorities in the country who have also periodically controlled the country, right?

Speaker 1 So, it's a lot of people. Well, sort of like reasonable resentment.

Speaker 1 Yeah, of course. Like, yeah, you would be pissed.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But as a spoiler, in part two, this is is going to lead to a bunch of genocides yeah

Speaker 1 that's how it goes the resentment turns into the worst thing yeah quickly yeah now by the time tsar finished his year at the monastery his and it's it's i've heard nine months i've heard a year I don't know that they were keeping that good a track.

Speaker 1 He will often lie about having spent longer time there because he's kind of proud of this period in his life.

Speaker 1 By the time Salath Tsar finished his time in the monastery, his cousin had become the highest ranking woman at the palace. She was like in charge of the harem, basically.

Speaker 1 And this was in part because she had born the Prince Regent, and that's the prince who's going to become the king when the king dies, a son right before he was made the new king.

Speaker 1 So obviously that elevates her in his eyes.

Speaker 1 His older brother, Loth Suang, had started working as a clerk in the palace in the late 1920s, and it was decided that he would take in his younger brother Tsar and raise him with his wife so that Sala Tsar could live in the capital and attend a modern French-style school.

Speaker 1 David Chandler writes that Loth Suang considered his younger brother, quote, an even-tempered, polite, unremarkable child.

Speaker 1 As a primary student, Sammy told the Australian journalist James Gerand, Sarr had no difficulties with the other students, no fights or quarrels.

Speaker 1 In examining his early years, I found no traumatic events and heard no anecdotes that foreshadow his years in power.

Speaker 1 People who met him as an adult found his self-effacing personality perhaps a carryover from the image he projected as a child. In Loth Swang's words, the contemptible polepot was a lovely child.

Speaker 1 And this is the weirdest thing about him.

Speaker 1 Almost every source agrees, he was an incredibly nice, like polite, pleasant guy to be around, which you don't, most dictators, you really do get like, oh yeah, there's hints of the megalomania.

Speaker 1 Maybe they can be nice to some people, but there's other people who are like, oh yeah, I got a sign of the crazy. Pol Pot, everyone's just like, yeah, he was pretty cool.

Speaker 1 He seemed nice.

Speaker 1 And this is. That's so weird.
I did not know that. That's

Speaker 1 like so bizarre.

Speaker 1 Even after, like when Nate Thayer, who's like the last journalist to talk to him when he's like in hiding hiding 18 or so years after leaving power, is like, yeah, he was like a really very polite man.

Speaker 1 You know, it's, it's very odd. On that score, you know, the, the, like the modern day version of that is prior to now most U.S.
presidents.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, Trump, at least you're like clear, like, okay, this guy's a fucking, like, he's exactly who he seems. Yeah.
But like, yeah, truly, people,

Speaker 1 you know, there's no amount of genocide George Bush could commit that people wouldn't, you know, be like, I'd drink with him. No, and he's absolutely a monster, absolutely should be in the Hague.

Speaker 1 I was in a room with him once, and like, I get, I get why people were loyal to him. He's a very charming person.
Or

Speaker 1 even if you know what he's done, you're just skilled. Like, yeah, a fucking Obama, right? Exactly.

Speaker 1 People who have done horrible things are often deeply likable, which is how they get in position to do horrible things. And Saar appears to be that kind of guy, right?

Speaker 1 So yeah,

Speaker 1 that said, he's also described as a pretty boring dude, right? He is not political at all, and he's not political until very late in this story.

Speaker 1 His schooling at the monastery would mark the only time he was educated in his native language.

Speaker 1 Once he starts at the French-style École Miché, Sar was taught in French by Catholic fathers who were either French or Vietnamese. So these are Catholic priests who are French and Vietnamese.

Speaker 1 He remains a Buddhist, but he's being taught every day in Catholicism, right?

Speaker 1 And if this produced any sense of whiplash in the young boy, we don't have any evidence of it, but it must have been weird. I have to imagine.

Speaker 1 When he wasn't in class, Tsar had the rare freedom to visit his sister in the ballet harem section of the palace. And again, not a lot of people are allowed here.

Speaker 1 This gave him semi-number one, he would run into the queen mother pretty regularly, and like you have to bow when you see her and stuff.

Speaker 1 And interestingly enough, even afterwards, as a hardcore communist revolutionary, he remembered her with like a sense of awe and reverence.

Speaker 1 Now, this also put him in a very vulnerable position. The fact that he's one of the few young men, men, boys, allowed in this harem.

Speaker 1 As I stated earlier, this group of women who were like officially the king's consorts and potential consorts were bored all the time and they were forbidden to be touched by anyone else. Right.

Speaker 1 And as a result, when a kid like Sar comes in, this is the closest they can get to going after a man. Right.
Right.

Speaker 1 And this leads to some profoundly abusive experiences for young Salath Tsar, as Philip Short writes.

Speaker 1 At fifteen, Tsar was still regarded as a child, young enough to be allowed into the women's quarters.

Speaker 1 Decades later, two of the palace women, living out their old age on a French government stipends in Paris, remembered little Tsar, who used to come to visit them wearing his school uniform, a loose white shirt with baggy trousers and wooden shoes.

Speaker 1 The young women would gather round, teasing him, they remembered. Then they would loosen his waistband and fondle his genitals, masturbating him to a climax.

Speaker 1 He was never allowed to have intercourse with them, but in the frustrated hothouse world of the royal pleasure house, it apparently afforded the women a vicarious satisfaction.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And fuck.

Speaker 1 This does not come out until fairly late. Like the first, the Chandler biography and the first, the earliest biographies you're going to read about, Pol Pot, don't talk about this.
Nate Thayer.

Speaker 1 I don't know if I, I think it may have been known when Thayer talked to him, but Thayer is in like a Khmer Roo stronghold.

Speaker 1 So maybe you're just not going to bring up like, hey, so let's talk about you getting molested. Like,

Speaker 1 I'm not going to blame Nate for that, right?

Speaker 1 he was in a very dangerous position you know um and exercised a lot of courage within that position but we just don't he never talked about this so we can only kind of speculate like oh wow i mean this has to have had some impact right right right right like this didn't help

Speaker 1 um but you know in anything beyond that is going to be pure speculation right because they just didn't this is the only these are the only people who talked about it right right right right and it's not like it's not like this is coming up in you know therapy notes that we can find, right?

Speaker 1 Right, right. And while it is certainly not wrong to like be like, well, this is pretty poisonous, I bet it had an impact on the kind of guy he was as an adult.

Speaker 1 I want people to also keep in mind this passage from Chandler's book: quote, Cambodians attached to the palace in the 1930s and 40s, like Salath Tsar and his relations, were insulated from the Chinese and Sino-Khmer commercial sector of Nam Penh, from the worldwide economic depression, and from the need to grow their own food.

Speaker 1 Salath Tsar inhabited this elaborate, safe, entirely Cambodian world for many years.

Speaker 1 So whatever impact this has, he is also one of the only Khmer people in the society who grows up feeling safe and secure. He's never worried about food.
And these are the starving times.

Speaker 1 And this is a horrible depression for the country. Most people are short on food.
That's not a thing for him. He lives in abundance as a kid.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 For her. Yeah.
So. Yeah, yeah.
But it's also like having that. I mean, you know, 15 is old enough to kind of realize like this probably shouldn't be happening.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this, this abundance is conditional upon some of the other maybe horrible things that are happening. Yeah, maybe the fact that these, these old ladies keep on,

Speaker 1 yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 For her part, his sister recalled his visits fondly, and she primarily remembered her brother as a funny kid. Quote, whenever he had something serious to say, he would make a joke of it.

Speaker 1 This was another common recollection shared by his classmates in primary school. Salath Tsar was funny.

Speaker 1 He was easy to be around, and he was most particularly gentle, a child who one friend described as not being willing to hurt a chicken,

Speaker 1 which I guess is like not, you wouldn't hurt a fly in Cambodia. I don't know.

Speaker 1 You know, we're coming off a time where just anything that's considered violence, you could societally ramp it up from what us soft Americans are used to.

Speaker 1 And to be fair, as an adult, maybe he wouldn't hurt a chicken, but he was willing to hurt a lot of people, you know? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 He was not a good student. Again, throughout his educational career, he showed a capability to learn and study, but no inclination to do it.

Speaker 1 He did not graduate primary school until age 18, two years after that would have been customary.

Speaker 1 Now, I should note that this is the general stance taken by Chandler and other biographers, including Short, that like he's not great in school. He's kind of lazy.

Speaker 1 Pol Pot rebutted these claims in the last interview he ever gave, saying that Chandler was not entirely accurate. Quote, I was not a bad student.
I was average.

Speaker 1 I studied just enough to keep my scholarship. The rest of the time, I just read books.
And you know what? Same, bestie.

Speaker 1 For most of, I shouldn't call Pol Pot Bestie.

Speaker 1 She's a little fries, Robert. You're heading in that direction.
For most of us. Listen, again, it's just refreshing to hear about a murderous dictator who reads books.
Yeah. Oh, you would have loved.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You would have loved the Hunger Games, Pol Pot.

Speaker 1 For most of the big dub-dub dose, and again, we're talking about like his education, his like.

Speaker 1 His like the the the school years that he's going to remember the most are during World War II, right? Like he is kind of entering adolescence in like the 40s.

Speaker 1 And for most of that war, life for Cambodians like SAR in the rarefied era of the capital went by relatively unchanged. The Vichy government takes over in France, right? So

Speaker 1 for Cambodians, it's still French people running Canada, but it's a slightly different group of French people, right?

Speaker 1 Who are basically fascist collaborators, but you're not going to notice much difference

Speaker 1 as a Cambodian, right? You know,

Speaker 1 like it's not like they're wildly different from you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the non-fascist collaborators, still not such great dudes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the main difference would be that Saar would start learning in school songs about the glory of Marshall Petain and the like, but I don't know that much of this stuck.

Speaker 1 Thailand invades and conquers several border provinces during this time, which is a deep shame to the king who is dying and a deep shame to Cambodia.

Speaker 1 But Sar is not a political kid, and we have no evidence that this particularly impacted him.

Speaker 1 Short does theorize, Philip Short does theorize that some of the fascist propaganda brought into the schools during this period did impact Tsar, particularly the fact that the propaganda of the Vichy era romanticizes peasants, like poor farmers, as the true embodiment of the nation.

Speaker 1 And that's really going to be a big sticking point for him as an adult. And so maybe there's a line there, right? Right.

Speaker 1 The propaganda of the Patanist era also depicts the city as an inherently decadent and unnatural thing, like a break from the righteous path of

Speaker 1 subsistence farming under a dictator? And that probably leaves a mark, right?

Speaker 1 Now, in the summer of 1942, the capital saw its first major protests against French control. A group of Cambodian monks began preaching anti-French sermons.

Speaker 1 This was an escalation of what was at this point a slowly developing sense of Cambodian nationalism that had been supercharged by the fact that France had collapsed under the Nazi boot heel.

Speaker 1 Two of these monks are arrested by Vichy French police, who do so in a way that defaces a religious shrine. And this sparks more extensive protests, right?

Speaker 1 And these protests terminate in a march on the French administrator's office. Now, the main leader of the nationalist movement in the country at this time is a guy named

Speaker 1 Sun Nok Than, who

Speaker 1 he had some kind of lefty inclinations. He was not anti-socialist, but he's not a communist.
He's not really a socialist. He is a big popular front, big tent.

Speaker 1 Let's free Cambodia and then we can figure out like politically what we want to do, right? That's his kind of deal, right?

Speaker 1 And so he's broadly popular with kind of everyone who wants an independent Cambodia. He's a very heroic figure during these time, this time.
And he starts organizing demonstrations against the French.

Speaker 1 They do what regimes do and they crack down. They imprison all his friends.
And he's forced to go on the run where he eventually asks the Emperor of Japan for asylum and gets it.

Speaker 1 Now, Tsar would have been aware of all of this. He probably would have admired Than, but there's not much evidence that this takes up a lot of bandwidth in his brain.

Speaker 1 Like most of his classmates who go on to become communists, he was focused at the time on his own educational career. As a student, Sarr loved French poetry and sports.
He loved all kinds of sports.

Speaker 1 He was an avid soccer player who was known for kicking the ball behind his head with stunning accuracy. He also played, this shocked me, he's on the school basketball team.

Speaker 1 And Sophie, I looked it up. And since Pol Pot died in 1998, sadly, there is no way he ever saw LeBron play, which is a real tragedy.

Speaker 1 Because LeBron does, LeBron goes straight into the NBA in 2003, I think. So

Speaker 1 one of the things

Speaker 1 I have to do is some stats on Pol Pot's numbers. He must have known about Michael Jordan.
So at least there's that to come up. What position did he play? I don't know.

Speaker 1 I looked, Sophie. I looked.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 These are the great mysteries of history.

Speaker 2 Really proud that you take the time to look up stuff about, you know, LeBron, Ramon James.

Speaker 1 I did it for you. I did it for you.
Yeah. What if Pol Pot had gotten to play a pickup game with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? You know, that's the

Speaker 1 novel right now. By the way, not that tall.
Look, I'm going to be honest. Khmer basketball could not have been the most impressive.
Like, these are not tall people.

Speaker 1 There's not a lot of protein.

Speaker 2 I wasn't going to say, because, like, LeBron's 6'9, 250.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, these LeBron alone probably could have taken on the whole team.

Speaker 2 I mean, I bet on him every time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, God. So, while several of his friends went off to a prestigious secondary school, Salath Tsar barely eked by.
He does horrible on his exams.

Speaker 1 And so he's not able to go to like the humanities school, which is really progressive.

Speaker 1 So he goes to like a much worse boarding school, which is still vastly better than 99% of the population. Again, we're talking a chunk of 1% who gets any kind of education like this, right?

Speaker 1 So the fact that he's like at the bottom of the educated class still means that he is almost unfathomably privileged by the standards of average Khmer.

Speaker 1 So he starts this school in 1943. In 1945, Japan

Speaker 1 seized Cambodia from Vichy France for a variety of complex reasons that all boil down to they were losing the war and they were trying every Hail Mary they could, right?

Speaker 1 They're like, look, these French guys, they don't have a good hold on things. What if we just arrest them all and make Cambodia Japan for a little while? Will that help us beat the Americans? No.

Speaker 1 Turns out no.

Speaker 1 Turns out Cambodia, not really that useful in fighting the United States in this period.

Speaker 1 It will be later. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Vietnamese are going to make some real hay out of having a Cambodia in their back pocket.

Speaker 1 Right piece, wrong time.

Speaker 1 It's like any risk game. It's like any risk game, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So they arrest all of the French people, basically, in France, and Japan is in trouble in touch for a while. Japan is pretty brutal in a lot of areas they govern.

Speaker 1 They really aren't in Cambodia to the Khmer, because like, why would they be? Right. Like,

Speaker 1 and they don't have the time. You know, it's 1945.

Speaker 1 But the main impact this has on people like Salazar and his peers is that they see all of these French administrators, all of these French teachers and priests get arrested and locked up.

Speaker 1 And these people had been untouchable previously. They were very similar to the king in that like you just can't even comprehend the idea of laying a hand on them.

Speaker 1 And they are, they see these people forced from power and locked up by people who aren't white. And that has a huge impact.
Right.

Speaker 1 And the thing it teaches them is that like the power of the French is not inevitable or immovable. It can be pushed aside.
And if the Japanese could do it, maybe we could, right?

Speaker 1 One of Tsar's friends later recalled, we saw that a yellow, and this is his words: we saw that a yellow race, the Japanese, had gotten the better of the white colonialists, the French.

Speaker 1 That awakened something in us. It made us start thinking.

Speaker 1 And as far as propaganda goes, we're going to talk about all the reading that these kids do, and you know, reading Mao, reading Stalin, that all has an impact.

Speaker 1 I don't know if anything has a bigger propaganda impact than seeing these Japanese soldiers locking up French imperialists. And that is the power of representation.

Speaker 1 There we go, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Obviously, the Empire of Japan is no less imperialist than the French Empire, right?

Speaker 1 But that's immaterial in discussing how it influenced people like Salath Tsar and the future Khmer's Rouge.

Speaker 1 Now, for the immediate moment, though, the biggest change brought on by Japan's brief conquest is that everybody kind of got a case of senioritis because all their teachers get arrested, right?

Speaker 1 When you read about them talking about this period, it reminds me most of that like week after you take your AP exam while they're still school, but like no one's doing anything in class.

Speaker 1 That's kind of what these kids all go through. Like their French teachers get replaced by some Vietnamese teachers, but the substitutes don't really know how to handle shit as well.

Speaker 1 So like they're kind of fucking off for a little while.

Speaker 1 Sun Ngok Than returns to agitate for independence and even manages to briefly run Cambodia as an independent country after Japan, you know, collapses, right?

Speaker 1 And so he's running, Cambodia is independent under this broadly popular nationalist for about two months, which is just enough that everyone really likes this guy and feels really good about it, but not so long that, like, maybe some of the problems that he might have managed.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's nothing, not that I'm not saying he actually seems like he was pretty competent, but like it's, it's going to, it's going to stick in people's minds as a golden period because of how.

Speaker 1 And you don't, you don't have to, the consequences of your tough decisions. Yeah.
You don't spend enough time in office for them to come back. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 So, this lasts about two months, and then the French show back up with their tanks and are like, actually, we still feel like Cambodia is natural French territory. Yeah.
So,

Speaker 1 they arrest Than.

Speaker 1 They call him a traitor. And to what?

Speaker 1 Again, you guys weren't even there anymore.

Speaker 1 But by this point, he was universally beloved, particularly by young educated Khmer like Siloth Tsar and his friends.

Speaker 1 Now, Tsar, again, has no real political beliefs at this point beyond a growing endorsement of populist nationalism. He continues to be a mid-student.

Speaker 1 He fails to get into an educational program that would have gotten him a prestigious degree and instead settles to go to a technical school.

Speaker 1 And he picks the easiest degree plan at the technical school, Carpentry, because the Khmer professor was known for giving everyone good grades, no matter how well they did.

Speaker 1 So he's like a carpenter for a little while in school. And he's doing this because there's like a

Speaker 1 study abroad program that gets given to the best students. And there's a number of slots.

Speaker 1 And like, he figured basically the easiest thing for me to be at the best at is carpentry because it's like the, the, the blow-off class. Right.

Speaker 1 And that'll be my best shot at getting into this program, you know? Oh, yeah. Grab a wild card slot any way you can.
Yeah, yeah. Whatever.

Speaker 1 Very, very, that's a very modern attitude towards it, honestly. I have a lot of friends in school who made similar calls.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 1947 is the first year we have evidence for Saar getting directly involved in politics.

Speaker 1 That year, the newly found Democratic Party, which advocated for replacing French and absolute monarchial rule with a democracy, or at least like a hybrid democracy, where there's a king, but he's limited constitutionally and we have like this parliament type deal.

Speaker 1 They win 54 seats in the national elections.

Speaker 1 Keng Van Sak, an older student who was something of a mentor to Saar and his friends, claims that Saar, along with several of his friends, including Yang Sari, who's going to also help run the Khmer Rouge, volunteer for the Democratic Party during the elections, right?

Speaker 1 And when I say Democratic Party here, it's literally like the party that thinks we should have a democracy.

Speaker 1 And there's some, this is a, and this is kind of, this is a melting pot.

Speaker 1 A lot of future communists and socialists are in the Democratic Party, as well as a lot of guys who are like going to wind up more in the like, well, I want to be aligned with the Americans, right?

Speaker 1 This is just kind of where a lot of them are at this stage.

Speaker 1 In 1949, Salat Tsar gets picked for that study abroad program, and he becomes one of the first 100 Khmer male and female students to win a scholarship to go study in Paris. They leave on a steamship.

Speaker 1 They actually go through Saigon

Speaker 1 and they arrive in Paris on the same day Mao Zedong announces the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Speaker 1 So a lot is happening. And this is going to increasingly make discussions of like communism a lot more relevant to these kids, who it really hadn't been all that much up to this point.

Speaker 1 Now, nearly all of the students that he goes to Paris with wind up being prominent political figures. A lot of them are leaders within the Khmer Rouge.

Speaker 1 A lot of them get killed by the Khmer Rouge because they're leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and the Khmer Rouge loves murdering the Khmer Rouge, right?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 this is primarily because almost no one else in the country had access to educational opportunities or the free time necessary to learn about radical politics.

Speaker 1 So, obviously, the people who are dominant in the radical political sect are the only ones with the time to read, right? It's not that shocking.

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Speaker 1 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

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But you know, some people call it getting electrocuted.

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Speaker 1 so uh where are we here yeah uh so sar gets into this program to study abroad despite his unimpressive grades not just because there's not a lot of kids in this program but because even among the ones who do better than him most of them don't want to like leave Cambodia for years, right?

Speaker 1 Because they got like families and shit, you know.

Speaker 1 His fellow students are guys like Yang Seri, who later becomes the co-founder of the Khmer Rouge. Chandler summarizes his early life this way.

Speaker 1 Seri was born and raised among the Cambodian minority of Cochin China. His father, Kim Reem, was a prosperous landowner.

Speaker 1 When Reem died, Seri, still a young boy, was sent to live with relatives in the Cambodian province of Pre Vang. He was given the name Yang Seri, which sounded more Khmer than his real name, Kim Trang.

Speaker 1 And that's not an uncommon story, is like, especially among these guys, Pol Pot's going to do the same thing where it's like, eh, my original name, not quite as good as I want it to be.

Speaker 1 Let me Khmer this fucker up a little bit, right? It's all very WWF. I like it.

Speaker 1 Just like, yeah. Let's get a populist name going.

Speaker 1 Look, I think one thing we've all learned from the last decade of American politics is that the Rosetta Stone for understanding all of human behavior, culture, and history is professional wrestling.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you get pro wrestling, you understand the whole swap of human achievement.

Speaker 1 You thought it was gladiatorial combat, but that wasn't nearly camp enough. No, no, no, not nearly camp enough.

Speaker 1 So as you can see,

Speaker 1 The reason I bring up Sari's background is it's not all that different from Saloth Tsar, right?

Speaker 1 And most of these Paris kids who are going to become like the core of this like educated revolutionary class have similar stories, right?

Speaker 1 They are intellectuals. They're going to target and annihilate the intellectual class in Cambodia once they get in power, but they're intellectuals, right? That's the class they come from.

Speaker 1 It's not that different from how Stephen Miller's background goes, actually. Right.

Speaker 1 So, Salat Star and most of

Speaker 1 Salath Star starts off his time in Paris living in a dormitory complex. He would later claim that in the first year, he was a fairly good student.

Speaker 1 And this is true enough, but his studies quickly slipped.

Speaker 1 Part of this is because his middling grades meant that he had to go to a technical school rather than get a degree in like the humanities, which was a lot sexier for these people who are going to wind up being future revolutionaries.

Speaker 1 And the degree plan he's working on for his years in Paris is as a radio technician.

Speaker 1 Chandler suggests that this is because he kind of befriends the king's nephew, Prince

Speaker 1 Somongpon, who lives in Paris at the time. And Prince Somongpon is also studying to be a radio technician.

Speaker 1 We know the prince helps him find an apartment with a couple of friends, which is, you know, the place he moves out of that dormitory to live in. Pol Pot will deny this for the rest of his life.

Speaker 1 He denied, he would lie a lot about his connections to the royal family, which are deep. As we've established, he gets a lot out of his family's connections to the royal family.

Speaker 1 But in the future, he's going to be like, no, when I was in Paris, I lived with a cousin. It's like, right, right.
No, you didn't. Also, we're friends with the prince.
Come on.

Speaker 1 Let's not let it go unsaid that he was obviously studying to be the 20th century version of a podcast producer. Yeah, that's right.
That's right. Polpot wanted my job coming for my job.
That's right.

Speaker 1 Oh, Sophie, I got to say, I'd give him a shot. Look, nothing against you.
I just want to see how Pol Pot produces a podcast.

Speaker 2 How fucking dare you?

Speaker 1 You know what?

Speaker 1 Don't tell me you don't want to see it. I would die for you.
You're going to give me up for Pol Pot. Sophie, if Pol Pot gets in the operation, we're all dying.

Speaker 1 The important thing is, Sophie could organize a genocide. Pol Pot could never produce a podcast.
That's right. That's right.
Yeah. It's going to sting for a little while.

Speaker 1 That's about race.

Speaker 1 I didn't say I'd like it.

Speaker 1 You butter me up with a LeBron stat and then you kicked me to the curb for fucking Pol Pot. Look,

Speaker 1 he could have been a podcaster, you know, could have been a podcaster. He was known as having a nice voice, you know? He could have had my job maybe.

Speaker 1 Behind the meast,

Speaker 1 the Pol Pot podcast. Guess what? Me and my boys.
The pole podcast. I would choose you.

Speaker 1 I might prefer to listen to the poll podcast, honestly. Like that sounds, that sounds fascinating.

Speaker 1 So Sar joins the Khmer Student Union, which at that time was in the process of morphing into a semi-covert communist youth league.

Speaker 1 He attended his first protest the next year for a radical member of the Democratic Party who was assassinated by right-wingers using a hand grenade.

Speaker 1 Still, at this point in his political involvement, it seems to have been a byproduct of his social life, right? He's at this protest because like his friends are doing stuff like this.

Speaker 1 And this is where you like go to hang out with people, right?

Speaker 1 And he is, he is kind of a hedonist at this phase of his life. Philip Short writes, Sar's friends regarded him as a bon vivant whose purpose in life was to have a good time.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 that's, I think, where we're going to end for part one. We're at about an hour.
We've got a lot more pole pot here. So we'll see how long it takes to get through all of this.

Speaker 1 I really did try to cut this fucker down because I wanted to deliver this all in one week, but there's this, this guy's life

Speaker 1 fascinating. Yeah.
But there we are, part one. How are you feeling about Pol Pot so far, Andrew T? I mean, so far, sounds fucking dope.
What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly change?

Speaker 1 What could possibly go wrong? This is like that first Star Wars prequel where it's like, hey, kids, he's kind of an annoying kid, but you know, whatever. How can things go badly? Yeah.

Speaker 1 He likes to party, but he's a kid. Come on.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. He's got a weird crush on a lady who's visibly like 15 years older than him.
That's a little off, off, but whatever. Like,

Speaker 1 you know, he doesn't realize it's abuse, and that's the important thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I mean, it is weird that they then paired Hayden Christensen with Natalie Portman, two people who are clearly the same age after establishing that like she was a mature adult ruling a country when he was a small boy.

Speaker 1 It's just...

Speaker 1 Why would you write that in? Look, you know, it's the power of shooting your shot, I guess. That's what the force is, is just shooting your shot.
Shooting your shot.

Speaker 1 The Star Wars version of Behind the Bastards probably does talk a lot about. And then Darth Vader has this weird relationship with this woman who's like 20 years older than him.

Speaker 1 So who knows how this abuse affected, you know, the things that he did when he was in power, right? He never wrote about this.

Speaker 1 What we have is this interview with Watto, and that guy's not really super reliable.

Speaker 1 Watto had his own agenda. Watto had his own agenda.
No, I'm pretty sure he murdered Watto, if I'm remembering my expanded universe shit. Yeah.
No, I think primary universe. Primary universe?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry.
Or is that Legends? I don't know. Fucking Disney.
God damn it. You know what? Yeah.
I like it.

Speaker 1 Anyway, everybody,

Speaker 1 please join me for my Behind the Bastards Star Wars Focus podcast, which is actually entirely about Kathleen Kennedy. I don't have any issue with Kathleen Kennedy.

Speaker 1 It's all about George Lucas. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, it's all about a bunch of anonymous money guys. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, like George Lucas, I hope you all have a good day eating in a food court and being photographed like a Yeti.
Andrew T., you got any pluggables to plug?

Speaker 1 I mean, my podcast is always this racist. I don't know.
Let's keep it real. Keep it real.

Speaker 1 All right, everybody. You too keep it real.
Until next day or whatever, go to hell. I love you.

Speaker 2 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 2 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa. So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

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Speaker 5 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 7 It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Track Mania, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 Plus 4, and Tekken 8.

Speaker 6 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch. Head over to globalgaming league.com.

Speaker 13 Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP.

Speaker 13 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 13 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 1 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

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Speaker 2 This is an iHeart podcast.