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

Oh,

welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about really our first genocidal bastard who is legitimately considered a nice guy,

which is a nice reminder to everybody that nice does not mean good.

Lots of nice people who are evil.

That is so good.

So, I was gonna say, yeah, that's also a reminder, of course, you know, you don't have to be an asshole to be the top of your field.

So,

no, no, no.

You don't have to be an asshole to be the top of your field.

Yeah, Robert.

What?

I don't know.

Why do you say that to me?

I'm still mad about last episode.

You're still mad about the fact that I want to see what Pol Pot looks like producing a podcast.

What if we just put him on 16th minute for a week?

No, I would never replace Jamie Loftus.

Maybe Pol Pot and Jamie will find out that they're like a Fleetwood Mac deal, like just like perfect, perfect musical partners, you know, like just a historic talent match.

You've watched that Silver Springs video one time.

I've been watching the 1997 performance of Silver Springs a million times.

I know you have.

Honestly, what if Pol Pot had been in Fleetwood Mac, you know?

Could that have been good?

Stevens would

have come out on top just like she did in real life.

I'm just imagining Pol Pot sitting down all a Fleetwood Mac and being like, guys, this is way too toxic.

You need to learn how to have healthier interpersonal boundaries.

I learned this one at my time at the temple.

Yeah.

Let me tell you.

So one time we were shooting 20,000 people to death, and I got angry at my friends.

That's not what it's about.

It's not what it's about.

Speaking of shooting 20,000 people to death.

Our guest Andrew T never did that.

I said he did.

Yeah.

Probably.

I can't prove he did.

I knew.

No, you would know.

That's

a thing.

For one thing, that 20,000 bullets, that's not cheap these days, right?

Like, you're talking several months even of LA rent, you know?

So, yeah, with the tariffs.

My God.

Yeah, that cheap Turkish ammo is going to be a lot more expensive.

So you're going to have to shoot people with homegrown American bullets, which, you know, anyway, Andrew, how are you doing today?

Okay.

I'm alive.

I'm alive.

Yeah, you're alive.

And we're talking about the Doge of Indochina, the Khmer Rouge,

which is not as far from the truth as it would be comforting for it to be.

It's closer to the truth than we want it to be, but by a lot.

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Specifically, we're talking about Saloth Tsar, the man who would become Pol Pot, who at this point is living in Paris, and he is a bon vivant whose purpose in life is to have a good time.

He's drinking the wine, he's reading lots of books, and he's not doing a whole lot of radio technician school, which is why he is ostensibly in Paris in the first place.

He would later recall spending all of his spare money on French language books during this period of time.

He is a real hound to the used bookstore crowd.

He shows a particular interest in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau is, among other things, like the big idea from Rousseau that seems to have left the primary mark on Sarah's psyche is this concept of the noble savage, right?

This almost idealized human that lives close to nature and hasn't been polluted by these concepts of modernity, right?

This is a big idea for Rousseau, obviously influenced by, you know, European colonialism in the Americas.

And it's going to have a big mark on Pol Pot.

He's not in the least bit interested in the Americas, but there's this idea he starts to get in his head of idealizing the Khmer peasantry, who he was technically born into, but not really.

Like

technically born just above.

Just above and immediately bounced to go hang out with the royal family, right?

Right.

But he's really going to like,

and this, it's not just, he's not doing this in isolation.

They're all reading guys like Rousseau.

They're all getting involved and knowledgeable of these French thinkers.

And so this would not, he would have been having conversations about these, these concepts with his friends at the time, right?

He also, one thing I learned in the interview he did with Nate Thayer later in life, and this is not in his earlier biographies, they talk a lot.

He reads Mao, he reads Stalin, we'll talk about that.

He's also, for a period of time, really interested in Mahatma Gandhi.

Like he kind of keeps up obsessively with the story of Gandhi and the successful fight to decolonize India.

Not a Gandhi figure,

Pol Pot, you could say, but he's very, and it makes sense that he's interested in it because India is a colonized country that throws off the shackles of its colonial oppressor, and that's what he's going to want to do, right?

He does reject the Gandhi route.

Well, you know,

it's about that, the ends justifying the means, right?

This is where this goes, right?

Now, and, you know, here's the difference.

Pol Pot, I do think, could have been a pretty good podcaster.

Gandhi, terrible podcaster, absolutely dog shit.

Could have had a YouTube channel, could have been pretty good on YouTube, you know?

He's more of a Twitch.

Instead of freeing India, he would have gotten really successful on Patreon and then he was a Twitch guy,

a Twitch streamer.

He'd be more of a shooter.

Gandhi playing Gears of War, but just refusing to shoot the whole time.

Yeah, doing the pacifist, doing the pacifist run of Cyberpunk 2077.

So much funnier than it should be.

Yeah.

So Pol Pot would later say of his time and like the impact that all this reading had on him.

I started as a nationalist and then patriot and then I read progressive books.

Before that time, I had never read La Humanité, the French Communist Party newspaper.

It scared me, but I got used to it because of the student movement.

So he describes kind of being initially frightened of like communism and some of these ideas.

And I wonder how much much of that has to do with the fact that very clearly his family and background is like

the enemy as often described in like a lot of communist writing right like people like him are not who you're messaging to primarily right

um like he is there's not much of a bourgeoisie in cambodia but he definitely is part of it right

yeah he's sort of like the yeah get him and then melting yeah slowly out of the back of the craft yeah and he says that like basically just like the fact that it is so, not just among, but by the way, when we say the student movement, he's not just socializing with other Khmer, he's socializing with a lot of young French radicals, right?

And so he just kind of through immersion gets more comfortable with socialism and then communism.

But he was also very engaged with the non-educational opportunities afforded to him, including a free work trip to war-ravaged Yugoslavia.

Now, he actually had two different options for a vacation during this first year that he's in France.

One was a month-long backpacking trip in Switzerland, which cost $70.

And boy, if I could get that deal today, I'd be gone a fucking heartbeat.

But that is a lot of money for the time, and he has no money, right?

So he picks a labor trip to go help rebuild Yugoslavia, which had just become a thing.

If you think about Yugoslavia, it is the Balkans.

It's the Balkans all being a state that's an independent state for basically the first time.

And it's like the least governable territory on earth is finally being governed by a guy.

But it's all been blown to fuck by World War II.

So you can come here for free and we'll kind of feed you, even though we don't have much food, but it'll be free if you help rebuild.

And so that's what he does, right?

This was not a political thing.

He doesn't go to Yugoslavia because they're communist.

He later wrote, I didn't have money, so I couldn't do as the others and go to Geneva or to the sea or to the mountains and have a holiday there.

A group of us poorer students went instead to Zagreb.

Now, this is a seminal moment for Salath Tsar.

Tito, who is the dictator of Yugoslavia, was a communist who had been, who had fought as an insurgent against the Nazis.

Tito, we'll talk about him one day.

He's one of these guys where I can't say he's not a bastard because he's a dictator.

He does some bad stuff.

He's also like the best case scenario for a dictator.

If you're going to live under a dictator in the 20th century, you fucking want it to be Tito, right?

He does know what he's doing, which is extremely rare.

And he's also legitimately like the hardest son of a bitch alive in his day.

Like he fights the Nazis.

And then my favorite Tito's story, because he breaks away from the USSR, because Stalin obviously wants Yugoslavi to basically be an extension of the USSR.

And Tito is like, yeah,

the Balkans have had enough being other people's property.

We're going to be the bulk, you know, we're going to be our own thing for a while.

And Stalin keeps sending guys to kill him.

And finally, Stalin, like, or Tito, like, sends back, I think it's a piece of one of the assassins with a note that's like, you can keep sending guys and I'll keep killing them.

but if you do, I'm going to send one guy and you're not going to send him back, right?

Like he's going to get you, right?

Like Tito is legitimately one of the scariest dudes who ever lived and also shockingly competent at what he does because like Yugoslavia collapses immediately after his death into a hard into a hideous civil war, right?

But it's like the only time the Balkans is a unified, peaceful thing, more or less, while Tito's in charge.

And again, he has, he runs, he has a police staff.

He's not a nice man.

but you can't help but be like, well, shit, that motherfucker knew what he was doing, right?

Good at his job, at least.

He's like Tom Cruise, right?

I'm not going to say Tom Cruise is a good man, but the son of a bitch loves cinema, right?

I'm definitely not going to say Tom Cruise is a good man.

And he cares about COVID policy.

Look, Sophie, beggars can't be choosers anymore.

I don't like that man.

No, no, no.

But he's the Tito of movies.

We can all agree on that.

I think that's a fair way to look at him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is good.

This is good.

Historians will agree with me.

He's a Stannis Baratheon of

movies.

Yes, yes, he's our stannis.

Yes.

These are all Stannis, except for Stannis, again, loses.

Tito never fucking does.

Right.

So at this point, though, Tito is in charge.

And the Soviet Union really doesn't like that like young kind of socialist, lefty-inclined kids in France because the Communist Party still does try to, and to a degree exercises a lot of control over these like like national western communist parties and like Paris and stuff they think that Tito is a traitor to the cause right and so they there's like an effort among French socialists to discourage young people from volunteering in Yugoslavia but for whatever reason Tsar does not get the memo um or he just doesn't give a shit um so he goes Saloth and a bunch of his friends they go in there you know at this point the whole population of Yugoslavia is basically organized into these these massive labor brigades that are rebuilding the part of the country that had been ruined in the war, which was all of the country.

It's the least covered

theater of war in World War II.

The shit that went on in the Balkans in World War II is

nuts by Eastern front standards.

Like,

there were like SS guys who tried to go to the East because the Balkans was so fucked up.

Like,

I cannot exaggerate how bad World War II was for the Balkans.

Sar's particular crew helped to rebuild a motorway, and the impression he took away from the experience was stirring.

This powerful sensation of being engaged in a great real-time task of building a modern nation from the ground up, using only the raw human material of its populace.

As Pol Pot, years later, he was emphatic that he had no political interest in planning the trip.

It was purely for pleasure, but the experience left an impact anyway.

Short quotes from one of his friends at the time who wrote about the experience highlights kind of the impact we can assume this probably had on Pol Pot.

Quote, everywhere, this guy wrote, the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia resembles an enormous work site where factories, roads, railways, and hydraulic centers are being built.

This effort is also worthy of praise because strength of all the people united around their leaders gives them the chance of gaining successive victories, knowing that it is a question of national survival.

And the post-war rebuilding of Yugoslavia has a lot of successes, right?

And obviously, there's more to it than just throwing together huge work gangs, and that's kind of going to be lost on Salath Tsar and his comrades, right?

But

this idea of mobilizing a nation to remake a country from the ground up, and that's very much what it would have, that's not accurate to literally what was going on in Yugoslavia, but that's accurate to what they would have been aware of as foreigners coming in.

That leaves a mark.

And

they were at the forefront of seeing that in action.

Yes.

Salat Tsar and his friends, as I said, represented a sizable chunk of the entire educated adult Khmer population at this point in time, right?

But due to the isolation of Cambodia and some of the cultural realities inherent to having your education conducted entirely in a second language, most of these guys arrive in Paris with no real understanding of Marxism or communism, and they never get a very good one.

These guys are not.

what a Marxist today would call super educated Marxists in that a lot of them are kind of bored of Marx.

And a lot of them are like, in part because like, I don't really get this.

This is not, this has like been translated several times.

Marx is not the communist who speaks to them the most, right?

And that's not primarily what they're going to base.

Stalin and Mao are going to be the communist writers who have the biggest direct impact on this crew, right?

So after getting back from Yugoslavia, Tsar increasingly falls in with his friend Yang Seri and Seri's friends.

And these guys are better students.

They're at more prestigious schools, getting more prestigious degrees and like the humanities and stuff.

Seri introduced Tsar to a guy named Keng Van Sack, who was one of the most, probably the most senior Khmer student in France.

He'd been there the longest.

At 25, he is the old man of the Cambodian expat community, right?

And Van Sac was, as a result, one of the executive committee members of the student union.

So there's like this Khmer student union that he is helping to run.

And the way the organization works is you've got this central union, and then there's a bunch of what are called circles.

And each circle is a kind of, initially, at least, there's not really a hierarchy in each circle.

It's a student discussion group based around a specific topic.

So you might have a circle for the kids who are doing radio stuff, or a circle for the kids who are into French literature, a circle for the poetry students, right?

And you kind of like meet ad hoc and you do, you know, stuff that way.

These are, I think, the best, these are the analog version of how things get done today for most young people, right?

Imagine this is a bunch of different signal loops or Discords, right?

That's what these are, except for you have to like meet up in person, right?

Yeah.

But that's basically what's happening here.

So a month or so after meeting Saar, Van Sac convened a private gathering to create a new circle dedicated to discussing Cambodia's future.

By this point, the Viet Minh were escalating their war for independence against the French.

And there was widespread interest in what this might mean for Cambodians.

And also because the Viet Minh are communist and because Mao has just announced the start of the People's Republic, all these guys are being like, shit, you know, there might be this co-like global communist uprising that we could be a part of that could like free us from the shackles of French domination while still like being a part of this greater international community.

And that sounds kind of dope, right?

It is so funny to actually hear like the other side of domino theory.

Yeah, and it's interesting because what the correct, like the thing about domino theory that was kind of accurate is that

other people in other countries in Asia were influenced by communism taking off in Vietnam and China, and it made them think about the things that were possible.

The thing that we're wrong about is that all of these guys, as soon as they're in power, wind up primarily hating other countries near them, including communist countries, right?

It's how, like, oh God, obviously, communist China and the USSR are going to form a unified block.

Oh, no, they nearly nuked each other.

They're literally shooting each other on the border.

China is inviting Nixon over because of how pissed they are at the Soviet Union, right?

Like, all of this shit is very wrong in that regard.

If you knew anything about the left, you'd knew that the left was never going to get along with each other.

I mean, that's the whole problem.

They know nothing about the left.

No.

So, Van Sachs starts this circle, which is initially about

the future of Cambodia and maybe independence.

And they start talking about Marx communism a lot, too.

Yang Seri attends, as does a number of future influential Khmer politicians, including Saloth Tsar.

So, they are beginning to talk more about communism, and again, mostly focused around Mao and Ho Chi Minh.

In January of 1950, China became the first country to recognize North Vietnam, which was still a couple of decades away from just being Vietnam.

The USSR followed, and this prompted an equal but opposite reaction from the U.S.

and her capitalist allies, who then in turn recognized Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam as part of the so-called French Union.

Maybe not the wisest move.

All these guys want to be independent, and that seems to be a big part of the appeal of communism is getting getting a pen.

Let's recognize them as part of France.

That'll stop this, nip this in the bud.

Oh, God.

Classic, I guess.

Yeah.

So everyone in the area is increasingly prodded to choose sides.

Thailand, for example, picks the U.S., right?

In part because the U.S.

is like, we will give you guys so many fucking guns.

So many fucking guns.

France controls the Union for a while.

And Vietnamese leaders, as a result, see a strategic benefit in starting to seed allied communist movements in these neighboring countries, right?

Because these places are part of the French Union, these Viet Minh leaders are like, okay, so we should start sending some like cadre leaders to Cambodia and Lao, maybe with some weapons, and see if we can start making local communist movements in the imitation of the Viet Minh so that they can start their own uprisings, which will overall help us in our goal and just getting the fucking French out of this goddamn place, right?

So from the outset of this, you know, know, the Vietnamese communists coming into Cambodia and trying to start their own communist organizations, it was understood by the Vietnamese that Cambodians were incapable of generating their own autonomous communist party, as Vietnam had.

There was no proletariat, right?

Which is the idea, the Marxist idea is that is where

a communist like movement comes from, right?

Everyone is the peasantry, basically,

within Cambodia.

And that means there's no base of education or convenient way to reach and organize large numbers of Khmer in any reasonable timeframe.

So a decision is made.

These are their conclusions.

And by the way, they're not going to prove broadly accurate, but this is how the Vietnamese are thinking.

And this is a very chauvinistic, paternalistic attitude, which is exactly how everyone in Cambodia feels about the Vietnamese.

They're arrogant, they don't think we're really people, and they don't listen to us.

And the Vietnamese are like, well, yeah, we can't let these people make any decisions, right?

Like, so this is, they're not wrong.

History never changes, is the important thing yeah oh god people are always the biggest dicks to their neighbors um so a decision is made that these vietnamese leaders are going to build communism in cambodia from the top down which is not how it generally works the khmer national united front is the result this organization was patterned off of the viet men but it had some local characteristics including an embrace of the king who it argued must be liberated from French territory.

And that doesn't really fit with traditional communist ideology, right?

The fact that we actually love the king, but the king is super fucking popular with the regular people of Cambodia, right?

And so this is one of the wiser things.

The Vietnamese are like, well, we can't just like shit talk the king because they will immediately stop listening to us.

We have to do this thing.

And they're kind of, I think, recognizing a lot of what people said about the czar pre-revolution and even Hitler, where it's like, well, he must not know about all the shitty stuff his dudes are doing.

Right.

And so I think the Vietnamese are like, let's just say the king's really good and the French are the ones making him make make bad, making things suck, right?

Fuck it, right?

This doesn't hurt us.

The first Khmer Vietnamese Communist Party member, Nguyen Thanh Song, was put in charge of this party in May, and he issues a proclamation of independence.

That means absolutely nothing at the time because they controlled no real territory.

There is an actual Cambodian Communist Party started a year later.

This is eventually going to be the Khmer Rouge, but it's not right now.

Vietnamese fighters liberate a few small border areas, and again, because there's a lot of strategic benefit in them having this area to like retreat to, right?

And to hold supplies and stuff.

And they set up in these areas, they quote unquote liberate a system that imitates the Viet Minh People's Committees that are run by Vietnamese revolutionaries.

Every decision made by Cambodian assemblies and committees in these territories has to be approved by the Vietnamese.

You cannot join the Cambodian Communist Party without Vietnamese approval, right?

So this is is very centralized and very much not something in which the Cambodians have a lot of say, even though it's their communist organization.

A lot of Khmer nationalists do not like this.

And a lot of Khmer who are butting communists are like, all right, like, I agree with the basic idea, but like, why the fuck are we listening to these goddamn Vietnamese people, right?

Like, why do they get to be in charge of our communist revolution?

We're Khmer, right?

Like, Salat Tsar and his comrades know very little about what's going on in this regard at the time.

According to Van Sack, Tsar spent, quote, most of his time reading or going out to the movies.

Very relatable.

But then he falls in love with a history of the French Revolution, which he reads cover to cover, even though his French isn't great.

And he admits, I didn't get a lot of it, but I felt compelled to read through it, right?

And there are a few things that really stick in his mind, right?

One of them is the concept of a revolution as a historical reset, as in once you

succeeding in a revolution means you can you can break history, right?

In 1792, the French revolutionaries had instituted a new calendar, right?

And this was them attempting to be like, the past is done.

We are never going back.

This is a totally new world that we are creating and a new kind of human being that we are creating in this new world.

And obviously,

Napoleon comes around not that long later.

They didn't create a new world, right?

Like no one creates a new man.

People will always be people.

This ideology that you can like, we're fundamentally broken with the past.

Things will never go back.

Things will never change.

We have heralded in a new world and it's always going to be this way.

Everyone who thinks that is always wrong.

Change is the only guaranteed constant.

You can't stop it.

But that's the idea that some of these French revolutionaries have.

And that's the idea Saar comes away with, right?

And one big thing he takes away from the history is that what doomed the French Revolution is that it didn't go all the way.

It didn't tear down every structure of the previous old world.

It kept too much alive from the old days of the king, and that's why it eventually failed.

So you do want to have a total break with the past.

A revolution should be that, but you have to destroy absolutely everything that had existed previously.

Right.

And this is a common, he's not coming up to this on his own.

This is a lot of stuff that he and his circle are talking about.

This is their, they are more influenced in a lot of ways by the French Revolution than what's happening in Vietnam because they're in France, right?

They're studying in French schools, you know?

Now, over the course of 1951, the circle Van Sac had started turned into a Marxist circle, which itself began to exert direct control on the rest of the student union.

And they kind of turned this student union into a stealth communist vanguard party, right?

Like that's the goal.

And they're executing, they're kind of secretly planning it from this circle, but exerting control over the other circles in order to get them in line, right?

In his book on Pol Pot, Brother Number One, Chandler writes, Recollections about Salath Tsar's behavior at the meetings are contradictory.

In several interviews in the 1980s, after Pol Pot had been identified as Salath Tsar, Keng Van Sack recalled that Tsar attended irregularly, kept in the background, and made little impression on his colleagues.

In 1975 to 76, an unnamed source spoke with journalist François Debre.

The source, who had attended the discussion groups, remembered that Salath Tsar was the most intelligent, the most convinced, the most intransigent.

It was he who animated the debates and most impressed the newcomers.

Now,

there's some evidence that this unnamed source mixed up Pol Pot with a different kid and was actually talking about someone else.

We really don't know.

The guy, Deborah, basically claims that this dude he talked to stated that, like, I knew immediately this guy was going to wind up leading the Communist Party in Cambodia.

And that Pol Pot even said at the meeting, I will direct the revolutionary organization.

I will be its secretary general.

I will hold the dossiers.

I will control the ministers.

And I will see to it that they don't deviate from the line fixed in the people's interests by the central committee.

I don't think this is likely.

I'm bringing it up because it's one of the reports.

Most of the people who survived from these days were like, yeah, he was like a part of it.

He was there.

He was engaged.

He was pretty quiet.

He was always happy to do work and like help, but he wasn't like.

a big

that reminds me of a lot of guys right we talk about like chechescu who like if there's ever a guy in your revolutionary organization who's like really quiet really friendly and always doing to do willing to do bullshit work.

You need to kill that man immediately because he's going to murder all of you and take power once the revolution's over.

That's the way these things go, right?

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Oh,

and we are returned

back.

Returned back.

So, yeah, most of the accounts of Sarr during this period, again, he's a quiet, friendly, easygoing dude.

But as Short notes, Philip Short notes in his book on Pol Pot, Sarr did start reading a lot of Stalin around this time.

And that's because he and his circle, there's a lot of Stalin going around, particularly there's a history of the Communist Party in Russia that Stalin wrote, right?

And this is, it's a Stalin book, right?

So we could assume, like, there's a couple of things you can just infer, even if you haven't read it.

It's very paranoid.

It is very focused on the internal enemies, right?

His history of the Russian is very focused on the need to, like, how necessary it was for him to get rid of internal enemies within the party who were counter-revolutionary, right?

Who were dangers to the success of the revolution because he was Joseph Stalin, right?

And this, the fact that this book is seen as like very inspirational to Salath Tsar and a lot of his young people, not great.

Not going to end well.

Not going to end well.

Now, Tsar also becomes very acquainted with Mao's writings, which are the most directly relevant both to the kind of communism he's going to preach and to the kind of war he's going to orchestrate.

Because Mao, unlike Stalin and unlike a lot of other communists, Mao runs a peasant insurgency, right?

Because that's how things go in China, right?

It is a peasant uprising, you know, in a lot of ways.

That's a big part of what's going on.

And so Mao is really really relevant for what Saloth Tsar is going to be doing not too long from now, right?

And there's also a lot that Mao writes about theorizing about how to remake a society from the bottom up.

And as we know from the Great Leap Forward,

not always a great idea.

Maybe backyards shouldn't be where we make steel, you know?

Maybe factories are better for that.

I don't know.

Maybe we need sparrows.

I don't know.

I mean,

your big society remaking ideas tend not to be good.

No, it's yeah, it's like what we're trying to do now.

Like, what if we get rid of everyone who researches how to stop diseases and instead make them build iPhones?

I feel like we're all going to have a lot more diseases and probably less iPhones, like,

which might work out for us.

Maybe the less iPhones will eventually lead us back to having people who learn how to cure diseases.

There's a lot of silver lining, but we don't cash that in for a couple of decades.

So,

yeah, it's going to take a little while.

So, in late 1951, there was a huge Marxist gathering in East Berlin.

It's like this big burning man for Marxists in the 50s.

Tsar does not attend, but several of his Khmer comrades do.

And for the very first time, they meet with this Marxist group and they are told about the establishment of the Khmer Communist Resistance in Cambodia, right?

So, this is the first time, and they bring this back to their circle.

So, now everyone knows there is a communist movement in Cambodia that is organizing and arming, and they've taken some territory, even, right?

So for, you know, a year or so after this point, these kids are going to continue reading books and discussing their ideas and making plans for how they're going to get involved in the revolution.

That becomes the focus.

Now we know it started.

We are the educated, you know, Khmer.

We need to figure out how we're going to help direct and lead this, right?

Now, what we've got here is a group of people who are isolated within Paris because they're Khmer.

French is not their first language.

They're even isolated from a lot of their fellow Khmer Khmer students because they see themselves as in charge of radicalizing them and directing them.

And they see themselves as engaged in a dangerous, clandestine effort, right?

So they're isolated socially and they're all constantly talking about their beliefs and reading radical politics.

And the same thing happens to them that happens to similar groups of people on, let's say, Twitter, which is that they make each other more and more extreme and less and less rational, right?

They're only going to get crazier.

And one thing that a lot of them, them, including Saar, become obsessed with is this idea that will eventually become known as Year Zero, which is the concept that we can, with a revolution, force a clean break with history that creates a new kind of human, right?

This is not limited to Cambodian communists.

This is not limited to communists because there's some, you can find some stuff that the Nazis were talking about that's not all that different, but there's this concept of the new Soviet man that's less eugenic for the communists.

But like there's this idea that if we if we remake society radically enough and break what had existed radically enough, we can make fundamentally different people that way.

It really is like, these people just simply cannot hear themselves.

Well, it's

look, I think everyone believes a degree of this, which is one of the reasons why nobody should ever get the power to try, right?

Yes, yes.

Like when I'm watching Star Trek,

we just did it my way.

When I and others watch Star Trek and and are like, oh, what if we could be like that?

You're not thinking people can be radically remade.

And I'm not saying I don't think people can be made better, but it doesn't happen like this.

It happens very slowly and carefully.

And if you want them to add, if you want to actually improve the quality of people, you improve their quality of life, and you don't do that by shattering everything that makes it possible for them to survive at the jump, right?

Like,

it's people do can be, can get better, both as individuals and as societies.

But the most important thing is not to kill them all while you're doing that.

The means create a different end than you think.

Yes, yes.

And these, this is going to like the idea that's going to be

particularly prevalent is that like, because of the danger of Vietnam,

we're going to have to do this very quickly, right?

Once we get independence, we have to remake ourselves into a society that can withstand our foreign aggressors as quickly as possible, right?

In a paper on the subject, historian Andrus Ayers writes, Maoism also provided the Khmer Rouge with an activist perspective on history, something that sheds considerable light upon their own year zero.

This activist perspective, as opposed to the orthodox Marxist representation of history as a rational process of necessary advances, emphasized human will and the triumph of determination over material conditions.

Put differently, not so much learning from history as overcoming it, diverting history in the right direction, as it were, by means of superior will and resolution.

The French Revolution, as already noted, had met with failure by stopping halfway.

Yet even Mao, argued Q Sam Fan, the movement's chief theoretician, had not been radical enough to overcome history by definitively abolishing private property, the family, received knowledge, and traditional teaching.

So again, this is where we see like the real dangerous thing is there's like, number one, you're never going to learn from history.

It's like, no, we're going to transcend it.

Not possible.

No one ever has.

And you really should pay attention to the shit people try to do in history.

Like, for example, every time in the past, when someone's decided I, a guy who's never farmed, is going to remake how my entire country grows food, that only ends one way, and it's with everyone starving to death, right?

Yeah.

Like,

whether it's the fucking East India Company governing in Bengal, whether it's fucking Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union and China, it always ends in mass starvation.

Don't do it.

I mean, listen, we're on the A side of this proposition with you know, guys that don't know what the fuck they're talking about deciding how social security should be distributed.

Yeah, we can fix all this because I'm good at video games.

Yeah.

It's, it's fucking every people, a lot of people, this is a very attractive thing to think that you can do, right?

Yeah.

So for Sam Fan, who's again, he's, he's one of, you know, Pol Pot's peers in this period of time, and he's like kind of the chief theoretician of what becomes the Khmer Rouge, the task of making communism a reality entail an ideological zero point, zero for him and zero for you.

That is true equality, right?

And this is zeroing in the sense that you like zero a rifle, right?

We're zeroing

to a point where everyone is in the same place and then we can build up, right?

Now, to be clear, these conclusions I just related aren't all fully sketched out during the years they're in Paris, right?

But this is, they start on that road in Paris.

And as these guys filter back into Cambodia, they're going to continue working to that point, right?

Paris starts the process that ends in the ideology of what we now know as the Khmer Rouge.

As things actually stood in 1952, Saar and his comrades were committed communists, but not particularly well-read ones.

And his writings from this period don't sound like what you would get from an avowed Marxist.

In fact, one of the weird things is that, like, Pol Pot's first political obsession seems to be with democracy, which he called, quote, incomparable and as beautiful as a diamond.

And democracy and communism, in his eyes, are very not just compatible, they're the same thing.

And they're the same thing in that they stand in opposition to the monarchy.

He published his first political article, the first thing we know he wrote, was called Monarchy or Democracy.

And it was a strident argument against the king in favor of a democratic system.

And he gives examples of democratic systems that Cambodia should be made in the image of.

And his examples are China, France, and the USSR.

All classically democracies.

Well, when you've been looking at a king, you know, everything looks like democracy.

Comparatively, right?

And

his actual knowledge of what's going on in China and the USSR, and to be honest, like France is not perfect, right?

But this is how he's thinking at the time.

So while they're reading and talking, events back home have continued to evolve.

Sun Ngok Than, the nationalist leader, got allowed back into Cambodia by the king in the hope that he could be used as a figurehead, right?

The king is like, I think that, you know, there's a lot to say of this nationalist thing because maybe that's going to work out better for me, you know, having more power as the king.

So I'll bring this guy in who was popular, you know, after the Japanese got kicked out.

But Than is a very smart guy who really believes in something and he realizes the king's just using me.

So he fucks off into the jungle to fight with the guerrillas.

And again, he's not an ideologue.

His goal is to unite the communists and the nationalists of other stripes into a broad anti-French coalition, right?

Again, he's a, let's get our independence from these fuckers, and then I don't care.

We'll figure it out.

Whatever works, we'll do.

You know,

King Sahanek responded by the big 10 theory of getting our freedom.

Yeah.

So Sahanek responds by carrying out a coup against the Democratic Party when it wins the elections that year.

And backed by the French, he sets him up as the absolute ruler, right?

The French begin conducting pacification campaigns against the Viet Men and fans rebels, who had not yet managed to agree on the whole coalition thing.

The circle back in Paris only learned what was going on in snatches of brief conflicted reports.

It was unclear which groups were doing what and who was who, and who this circle of educated young communist radicals could support, right?

It's very hard for them to tell who's actually fighting, what do they actually hold.

You know, they don't have great info.

It's not like they can look at like the Telegram chats for these different groups in the jungle, right?

Like they have very little

telegrams.

Or even the Telegram telegrams, right?

So they're like, we need on-the-ground intelligence.

One of us needs to go there and figure out who we should be backing.

And Salath Tsar, this is really the first time he identifies himself as special and not just another dude sitting around bullshitting.

It's like, I'll go.

Right.

And let that be a lesson to you, kids.

If you want to one day kill a third of the people in your country, you got to start by volunteering.

You know, no one ever got anywhere sitting on their butt, right?

Get out, be active, starve your entire country to death.

I probably, probably bad things to encourage people to do.

Get out there in the community, you know, make a difference.

Make a difference.

He made a difference.

You can't say Pol Pot didn't make a difference.

He left a very different Cambodia.

Yeah, the make a difference part of just get involved really, I feel like the public messaging, we should be concentrating more on the direction you make a difference.

That is one of like my big issues with like a lot of the stuff we we were raised with as kids in like the 90s and early 2000s is like anyone can make a difference.

That's true.

We should have higher standards than just difference.

Different.

Yeah, I can leave ground beef out overnight and it's different, but that doesn't mean it's better.

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Oh,

boy howdy.

We are back and we're talking about eating rancid ground beef because, look, the FDA is no longer going to be,

you know, and Andrew, it's actually good that you're back because you're the person I first told on the air my story about eating dozens and dozens of rancid mussels at a Vegas buffet and getting horribly ill with my friend in a muscle-eating competition.

Forgot about that.

Yeah.

Well,

who's the smart one now?

Who's getting ready for the RFK Jr.

future now, baby?

It's me.

I got an iron stomach.

i don't care how bad our food gets you know you can live through we don't uh-huh uh-huh i've been i was molded by this you know yeah

i've had gardia i don't give a fuck anymore a lot of kids are gonna die anyway back to the podcast

so robert It's important to note that Salath Tsar's back, the reason, part of the reason why

he volunteers to go travel back home and make contact.

And part of why everyone agrees he's a good guy to do it is he's got the contacts, the widest, he's got the widest breadth of contacts because his dad is a farmer.

He did grow up in a rural villages.

He knows rural people.

He's able to talk to rural Khmer people.

He also is able to talk to urban people.

He was educated in the city, but he also spent a lot of time in the palace.

So he can talk to that chunk of the population.

He's really good at talking to everybody.

Right.

Like that's a big thing.

He's charismatic.

And he's charismatic in the way that matters, which means he can, within seconds of meeting someone new, figure out the best way to communicate with them, right?

Like that's the kind of skill that he has.

And you can't teach that.

Almost you can't learn it after a certain point in your life.

It really is just a product of during your formative years running into enough different kinds of people that you can get very good at that, right?

And Salath Tsar has that ability.

And I think that's why everything else that happens to him happens to him, right?

So on December 15th, 1952, Salath Tsar left Paris just as things in Cambodia reached a boil.

Several assassinations and grenade attacks in the provinces provided the pretext for King Sahanuk to announce a rule by decree and the suspension of civil liberties.

His French backers expressed their hope that Cambodia's pacification will make continued progress.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's going to work out great for you guys.

So, decades later, Pol Pot would claim that his real political awakening came not as a result of anything that had happened in the reading circle in Paris, but what he experienced after he returned home to Cambodia during this tumultuous period.

And I want to quote from an article by journalist Nate Thayer here.

Before I went to France, my relatives, they lived comfortably.

They were middle peasants.

When I came back, I went to my village by bus.

When I got off the bus, I met someone with a wagon.

He asked my name and he said, Ah, you've come back.

And I look at him and see he's my uncle.

And he asks me, Do you want to go home?

I was shocked.

Before, he had a piece of land and a buffalo.

Now he had become a rickshaw puller.

I met and talked with the relatives who used to have land and buffaloes and had nothing now.

What influenced me most was the actual situation in Cambodia.

And

I don't think that's untrue, but it does make me think of

that.

Is not a,

I reckoned with the suffering of the common man, and it allowed me to realize that, like, I had grown up in a privileged position.

That is, my family are supposed to be doing better than this, and they're not, which is really familiar to like modern conservative radicalism in a lot of ways.

I find that interesting.

Yeah, it's the me of it, not the like us of it.

Right.

And it also is worth noting in terms of how accurate is this to what really radicalized him.

This is Pol Pot near the end of his life in the late 90s talking to journalist Nate Thayer, who also, by the way, passed pretty recently, about a year and a half ago.

Interesting guy, but a really groundbreaking.

He was the only guy who got in to do this, right?

So we'll be quoting from Nate quite a bit here.

Over the next eight years,

Sar

is often in the provinces.

He's moving around.

He's connecting these different groups as the rebellion against the king and then the prince, Sihanuk, goes through several stages.

The Red Khmer or Khmer Rouge proved to be the most resilient of kind of the different nationalist rebel groups against the repeated pacification campaigns.

Salat Tsar rose through the ranks for the same reason.

He was hard to fucking kill.

And he was hard to kill because from the beginning, he's really, he's the first of the guys in his circle who's like, well, I'm not going to ever go by my real name.

I'm going to start.

Like, from that first article he writes, he picks a fake name and he picks fake names as he's doing this on the groundwork, meeting these rebels.

He doesn't call himself Salat Tsar.

Pol Pot's one of the names he uses, but like he has a couple of different nicknames.

We'll go over them later.

And this, this means he's anonymous, and he's good at being anonymous.

He's one of these guys who's kind of forgettable.

That's what everyone in Paris talks about: you don't notice him in a room, and that means he doesn't get spotted and killed by the security forces.

be kind of blending in and being forgettable great asset for a guy who's trying to build a revolutionary movement under like constant bombardment from the french right

yeah

you blend in you blend i mean that's the spy thing that's the real life spy thing i guess but yeah and and again folks if you're trying to overthrow the government and there's a guy in your cell and you can never remember his name you need to murder him immediately he's going to wind up taking power right i mean the problem is it's it's always one of those guys, but not all of those guys is going to become the problem.

Some of those guys are just really good at like keeping their mouths shut.

It's done.

Yeah.

Or they just have nothing to say.

Or they just got nothing to say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're just vibing.

So

Sar was amongst the first Khmer revolutionary leaders to take pains to keep himself anonymous.

As a result, nobody realizes that he's steadily moving up the ranks of the insurgency.

In 1960, he is added to the Communist Party's standing committee.

Now, in the same interview I just quoted quoted from with Pol Pot near the end of his life, Nate Thayer writes, and this is Nate Thayer quoting Pol Pot, the secrecy that made the Khmer Rouge show so effective was, Pol Pot said, second nature to him.

Since my boyhood, I never talked about myself.

That was my nature.

I was taciturn.

I'm quite modest.

I don't want to tell people that I'm a leader.

I didn't tell anybody, not my brother, not my sister, because I didn't want to worry them.

If anything happens to me, I didn't want them to have any connection to it.

So some people think that I don't care about them, but on the contrary, I respect, I love my relatives, but I never revealed my political thinking to them.

And I got to say, Obsec King here,

you can't take that away from Polpot.

This motherfucker would have been incredible at using Signal.

Like, nobody would have known this son of a bitch's name.

He would have had burner phones for his fucking burner phones.

This guy is really good at staying secret.

Oh, my God.

Imagine having that discipline.

He's very disciplined, right?

Like, he doesn't, this isn't an accident that he winds up where he is.

He's smart.

He continues to live, he has a, in addition to this private, hidden revolutionary life, he has a very public life and career.

He is a teacher at a private school.

Like he's like a high school teacher during this period of time.

And he's a pretty good teacher.

I'm going to quote from Chandler's book here.

As a teacher, he was remembered as calm, self-assured, smooth-featured, honest, and persuasive, even hypnotic when speaking to small groups.

Among his students and his colleagues in the clandestine communist movement he seemed in these years to have gained some of the moral authority and stature he enjoyed among his followers up to 1997 a man who met him in the late 50s for example said i knew immediately that i could become his friend for life

yeah by the way

yeah that's what they say about presidents and dictators alike and there are people he kills who like that is their recollection is like i knew he was my friend and they die at being like wait this can't happen no i know i know pole bot you gotta let me you gotta let me talk to him and pobot doesn't give a fuck.

Now, what is interesting to me about Salatzar is that these recollections of him as a kindly, decent, sweet man aren't a product of later propaganda.

Like most revolutions, the Khmer Rouge heavily attacked their own people, which caused a lot of Khmer Rouge to defect.

And like when these guys were interviewed later, basically none of them said Pol Pot was why they left, right?

And in fact, even after the extent of his crimes were known, most of the people who had defected from the Khmer Rouge, according to Chandler,

described Pol Pot as, quote, a man they regarded almost as a saint.

So they're like, oh yeah, I mean, the regime killed all these people and like, I had to leave.

It was so fucked up.

But that Pol Pot,

basically Jesus.

Yeah.

Man, it's so weird.

He's really good at this, right?

Like,

you can't take that away from him.

The motherfucker knew his business, right?

Now, as I noted, Pol Pot made it to the standing committee in 1960.

The party leader was a guy he'd known from the Paris days called Samouth, who was assassinated probably by the king's security services in 1963, although a lot of people theorize Pol Pot did it because Polpot succeeds Samouth as the leader of the party in 1963.

And now he's in charge of the Khmer Rouge, right?

This is how he rises to run things, and he will retain that position for more than 30 years.

He is now in sole command of the communist revolution.

Later in life, Pol Pot spoke of this rise to the peak of power as a chance accident of history.

There was nobody else to become secretary of the party.

So I had to take charge, right?

Like, what else was I going to do?

You know, like, I didn't have a choice.

I had to be in charge.

Someone had to do it.

And Nate Fayer, I really recommend, we'll have it in the links there because Nate posts both the article he wrote about his interview and the raw interview transcript.

And Pol Pot's like, Samuth was my best friend.

I loved him.

Why would I have had him killed?

And I think the broad agreement is it was probably the French security services, but I can't not be suspicious because Pol Pod talks about a bunch of people he loves.

And then

there will be like, but you had his entire family killed, including his like infant grandchildren.

And he'd be like, well, yeah, like,

yeah, well, yeah.

That's just how things go sometimes here in the Khmer Rouge, right?

You're going to kill someone's whole family.

Sure.

Doesn't mean I didn't love him.

That's right.

Imagine getting like,

yeah, the genocide conducted by like, not, I was going to say Ned Flanders, but not even that.

Just like a Mr.

Rogers ass.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was getting up there and being like, you guys are my best friends.

I can't tell you enough how grateful I am.

Now you're all going to be machine gunned in a second, right?

But don't think that means I don't love you.

Yeah.

Right.

That has nothing to do with me.

It has nothing to do with me.

This has just got to happen for reasons I can't really explain.

Anyway, I'm going to go bounce.

I got to change the way we farm so everyone starves to death.

Jesus Christ.

Oh.

Well, I think that's a good place to end for part two.

We're going to just run all three parts this week because it was a longer script, but not quite enough for a four-parter.

So you fuckers are getting a bonus.

But, you know, as we end, Pol Pot has really

listened to the leader of the Khmer Rouge.

And I think it's going to go well.

You know, I know I wrote another nine pages, but my guess right now is everything's good.

You know,

Cambodia becomes the world's greatest industrial and agricultural power.

Nobody dies.

In fact, they invent the cure to immortality.

That's my assumption.

We'll see how it bears out.

Yeah.

Anything can happen.

That's the important thing.

Finally, I got this book next to me called The Killing Fields.

And I think it's because they made a killing in the biotech sector.

Yeah, they're killing it.

The show is called Chuck's notes behind the bastards.

Oh, no.

Is that what we call the show?

Oh, fuck.

Oh, no.

Andrew, how are you feeling?

Oh, man.

I mean, you know, we're still still positive still positive is the important thing yeah yeah so far great guy yeah great good dude wow this is so bizarre truly i never i guess i i my knowledge of pole pot not sufficient because this is fascinating yeah yeah he is a really interesting monster yeah um the the degree of agreement that like yeah he was really chill as far as i knew him he was nice

there's a lot of people who like when they finally see him on tv are are like, wait a second, that guy has been killing everybody?

Like,

yeah, it'd be like if you had like a friend that you like smoked weed with and played Grand Theft Auto when you were like 19.

And then like 40 years later, he winds up killing a million people.

Like

him?

But that is most of those guys.

Right, right, right.

Or most of the, yeah, most of that situation.

Yeah.

You never know.

He was always nice to me.

He was always so nice to me.

He seemed chill.

I don't know, man.

We didn't ever talk about how many people he wanted to kill.

Yeah.

How many people do you want to kill, Andrew?

Less than 20K.

Which was where we left.

Listen, that's where we left at some point.

I can't remember if it was last episode or.

No one's in the position of, I don't want anyone to be killed.

Exactly.

If you say zero, it's more suspicious than if you say that zero is suspicious.

Yeah, less than 20K.

I'd say that's very, very,

you know, that's not, that's minimalist, right?

Yeah, yeah, that qualifies you as a good person.

I bet the pope would want to kill less than 20k people if he had his choice.

Oh, my God.

Well, you know, popes

probably

still on the lower end of pope body counts.

Pope means the pope would say, I would love to only have to kill 20,000 people.

See, that's the great thing about being a pope is you're grading on a curve where if you were to kill 20,000 people as a pope today, you're you're still in like the upper 20% of popes in terms of not killing people.

That's right.

Yeah.

It's like being the leader of Germany.

There's a lot of room where you can like, yeah, I fucked up on some things, but no one's going to remember me as the worst.

I mean, or owning an American auto manufacturer makes you like more Nazis than not.

Not more Nazis.

In the future, if we have

Nazis.

Being the president of the United States.

Yeah, we'll see.

Or whatever the position is called after this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.

Anyway, Andrew T, where can people find you?

Yeah, I was just racist, Andrew T on whatever social media.

I'm not looking at it that much.

Yeah, well, do that.

And

let's all

go

not.

Well, you know what?

If you know somebody who's quiet and nice and

that's the episode

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