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

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about really our first genocidal bastard who is legitimately considered a nice guy,

Speaker 1 which is a nice reminder to everybody that nice does not mean good. Lots of nice people who are evil.
That is so good.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 no, no, no. You don't have to be an asshole to be the top of your field.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Robert.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What if we just put him on 16th minute for a week?

Speaker 3 No, I would never replace Jamie Loftus.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 4 You've watched that Silver Springs video one time.

Speaker 1 I've been watching the 1997 performance of Silver Springs a million times. I know you have.

Speaker 1 Honestly, what if Pol Pot had been in Fleetwood Mac, you know?

Speaker 1 Could that have been good? Stevens would

Speaker 4 have come out on top just like she did in real life.

Speaker 1 I'm just imagining Pol Pot sitting down all a Fleetwood Mac and being like, guys, this is way too toxic.

Speaker 1 You need to learn how to have healthier interpersonal boundaries.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's not what it's about.

Speaker 1 It's not what it's about. Speaking of shooting 20,000 people to death.
Our guest Andrew T never did that.

Speaker 1 I said he did.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Probably. I can't prove he did.
I knew. No, you would know.
That's

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 So, yeah, with the tariffs. My God.
Yeah, that cheap Turkish ammo is going to be a lot more expensive.

Speaker 1 So you're going to have to shoot people with homegrown American bullets, which, you know, anyway, Andrew, how are you doing today?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm alive. I'm alive.
Yeah, you're alive. And we're talking about the Doge of Indochina, the Khmer Rouge,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 5 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 6 The busiest time of the year, it's here between parties, shopping, and decorating.

Speaker 1 Who has time?

Speaker 8 With Airtasker, you can get anything done, cleaning, wrapping, even someone to build a gingerbread house that doesn't collapse.

Speaker 1 Download the Airtasker app or go to airtasker.com. Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 2 There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anibay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

Speaker 2 Anibay has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

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 washablesofas.com to upgrade your home.

Speaker 2 Sofas start at just $699 and right now, get early access to Black Friday savings, up to 60% off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washablesofas.com.
Add a little

Speaker 2 to your life. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 1 Season three of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions is here.

Speaker 1 Hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are going deeper than ever with bold new conversations, fresh guests, and unfiltered takes on queer sex and cruising.

Speaker 1 This season, they're also looking out for the community, covering smart cruising in a chaotic world, including information on prep.

Speaker 1 And yes, their call-in segment is getting even hotter and they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air. No pressure.

Speaker 1 Tune into Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, with new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 You're juggling snacks, nap time, and everything else.

Speaker 9 Well, Gerber can help create a more parent-friendly game day because they have the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand.

Speaker 9 So you can feel good about what you're feeding your little ones. I mean, Mac loves them.
You can't go wrong with the little crunchies.

Speaker 9 You just put him in a little bag or you put him in a little container and he's good to go. Make sure to pick up your little ones' favorite Gerber products at a store near you.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He's drinking the wine, he's reading lots of books, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He shows a particular interest in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Speaker 1 Rousseau is, among other things, like the big idea from Rousseau that seems to have left the primary mark on Sar's psyche is this concept of the noble savage, right?

Speaker 1 This almost idealized human that lives close to nature and hasn't been polluted by these concepts of modernity, right?

Speaker 1 This is a big idea for Rousseau, obviously influenced by European colonialism in the Americas. And it's going to have a big mark on Pol Pot.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like, he was 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so this would not, he would have been having conversations about these, these concepts with his friends at the time, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 Popot, 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.

Speaker 1 And that's what he's going to want to do, right?

Speaker 1 He does reject the the Gandhi route. Well, you know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Gandhi, terrible podcaster, absolutely dog shit.

Speaker 1 Could have had a YouTube channel, could have been pretty good on YouTube, you know? He's more of a Twitch.

Speaker 1 Instead of freeing India, he would have gotten really successful on Patreon and then started this guy,

Speaker 1 a Twitch streamer? He'd be more of a shooter. Gandhi playing Gears of War, but just refusing to shoot the whole time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, doing the pacifist, doing the pacifist run of Cyberpunk 2077.

Speaker 1 So much funnier than it should be.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So he describes kind of being initially frightened of like communism and some of these ideas.

Speaker 1 And I wonder how much of that has to do with the fact that very clearly his family and background is like the enemy as often described in like a lot of communist writing, right?

Speaker 1 Like people like him are not who you're messaging to primarily, right?

Speaker 1 Like he is, there's not much of a bourgeoisie in Cambodia, but he definitely is part of it, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. He's sort of like the, yeah, get him, and then melting slowly out of the back of the craft.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And so he just kind of through immersion gets more comfortable with socialism and then communism.

Speaker 1 But he was also very engaged with the non-educational opportunities afforded to him, including a free work trip to war-ravaged Yugoslavia.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And boy, if I could get that deal today, I'd be gone to fucking heartbeat.

Speaker 1 But that is a lot of money for the time, and he has no money, right?

Speaker 1 So he picks a labor trip to go help rebuild Yugoslavia, which had just become a thing. If you think about Yugoslavia is the Balkans.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so that's what he does, right? This was not a political thing. He doesn't go to Yugoslavia because they're communist.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And he's also legitimately like the hardest son of a bitch alive in his day. Like he fights the Nazis.

Speaker 1 And then my favorite Tito 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you can keep sending guys, and I'll keep killing them. But if you do, I'm gonna send one guy, and you're not gonna send him back, right? Like, he's gonna get you, right?

Speaker 1 Like, Tito is legitimately one of the scariest dudes who ever lived, and also shockingly competent at what he does.

Speaker 1 Because, like, Yugoslavia collapses immediately after his death into a hard into a hideous civil war, right?

Speaker 1 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 state.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This is good. This is good.
Historians will agree with me. He's the Stannis Baratheon of

Speaker 1 movies.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes, he's our stannis. Yes.

Speaker 1 These are all Stannis, except for Stannis again, loses. Tito never fucking does.
Right.

Speaker 1 So at this point, though, Tito is in charge.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 national Western communist parties and like Paris and stuff. They think that Tito is a traitor to the cause, right?

Speaker 1 And so 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 or he just doesn't give a shit.

Speaker 1 So he goes, Saloth and a bunch of his friends, they go in there.

Speaker 1 You know, at this point, the whole population of Yugoslavia is basically organized into 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.

Speaker 1 The world,

Speaker 1 it's the least covered

Speaker 1 theater of war in World War II. The shit that went on in the Balkans in World War II is it's nuts by Eastern front standards.

Speaker 1 Like, there were, there were, like, SS guys who tried to go to the East because the Balkans was so fucked up. Like,

Speaker 1 I cannot exaggerate how bad World War II was for the Balkans.

Speaker 1 Sar's particular crew helped to rebuild a motorway, and the impression he took away from the experience was stirring.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the post-war rebuilding of Yugoslavia has a lot of successes, right?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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, Yugoslavia, but that's accurate to what they would have been aware of as foreigners coming in.

Speaker 1 That leaves a mark. And

Speaker 1 they were at the forefront of seeing that in action. Yes.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Marx is not the communist who speaks to them the most, right? And that's not primarily what they're going to base.

Speaker 1 Stalin and Mao are going to be the communist writers who have the biggest direct impact on this crew, right?

Speaker 1 So after getting back from Yugoslavia, Sar increasingly falls in with his friend Yang Seri and Seri's friends. And these guys are better students.

Speaker 1 They're at more prestigious schools, getting more prestigious degrees and like the humanities and stuff.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 At 25, he is the old man of the Cambodian expat community. right

Speaker 1 um and van sack was as a result one of the executive committee members of the student union So there's like this Khmer student union that he is helping to run.

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 additionally 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?

Speaker 1 Imagine this is a bunch of different signal loops or Discords, right?

Speaker 1 That's what these are, except for you have to like meet up in person, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that sounds kind of dope, right?

Speaker 1 It is so funny to actually hear like the other side of domino theory.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If you knew anything about the left, you'd knew that the left was never going to get along with each other.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's the whole problem.

Speaker 1 They know nothing about the left.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 So Van Sachs starts this circle, which is initially about like

Speaker 1 the future of Cambodia and maybe independence. And they start talking about Marx communism a lot, too.

Speaker 1 Yang Seri attends, as does a number of future influential Khmer politicians, including Saloth Tsar.

Speaker 1 So they are beginning to talk more about communism, and again, mostly focused around Mao and Ho Chi Minh.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The USSR followed, and this prompted an equal but opposite reaction from the U.S.

Speaker 1 and her capitalist allies, who then turned recognized Cambodia, Lao, and South Vietnam as part of the so-called French Union.

Speaker 1 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 a pen.
Let's recognize them as part of France.

Speaker 1 That'll stop this, nip this in the bud.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 is like, we will give you guys so many fucking guns. So many fucking guns.

Speaker 1 France controls the Union for a while.

Speaker 1 And Vietnamese leaders, as a result, see a strategic benefit in starting to seed allied communist movements in these neighboring countries, right?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 So, from the outset of this, you know, the Vietnamese communists coming into Cambodia and trying to start their own communist organizations, it was understood by the Vietnamese that Cambodians were incapable of generating their own autonomous communist party, as Vietnam had.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 These are their conclusions. And by the way, they're not going to prove broadly accurate, but this is how the Vietnamese are thinking.

Speaker 1 And this is a very chauvinistic, paternalistic attitude, which is exactly how everyone in Cambodia feels about the Vietnamese. They're arrogant.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 History never changes is the important thing. Yeah.
Oh, God. People are always the biggest dicks to their neighbors.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This organization was patterned off of the Viet Minh, but it had some local characteristics, including an embrace of the king, who it argued must be liberated from French territory.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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 bad, making things suck, right? Fuck it, right? Like,

Speaker 1 this doesn't hurt us. The first Khmer Vietnamese Communist Party member, Nguyen Than Song, was put in charge of this party in May, and he issues a proclamation of independence.

Speaker 1 That means absolutely nothing at the time because they controlled no real territory.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 So this is very centralized and very much not something in which the Cambodians have a lot of say, even though it's their communist organization.

Speaker 1 A lot of Khmer nationalists do not like this.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like, why do they get to be be in charge of our communist revolution? We're Khmer, right? Like, Salath Tsar and his comrades know very little about what's going on in this regard at the time.

Speaker 1 According to Van Sack, Tsar spent, quote, most of his time reading or going out to the movies. Very relatable.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And he admits, I didn't get a lot of it, but I felt compelled to read through it, right?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 succeeding in a revolution means you can make a you can break history right 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They didn't create a new world, right? Like

Speaker 1 no one creates a new man. People will always be people.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Everyone who thinks that is always wrong. Change is the only guaranteed constant.
You can't stop it.

Speaker 1 That's the idea that some of these French revolutionaries have. And that's the idea Saar comes away with, with, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 this on his own.

Speaker 1 This is a lot of stuff that he and his circle are talking about.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And they kind of turned the student union into a stealth communist vanguard party, right? Like that's the goal.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 In his book on Pol Pot, Brother Number One, Chandler writes, Recollections about Salath Tsar's behavior at the meetings are contradictory.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 In 1975 to 76, an unnamed source spoke with journalist François Debra.

Speaker 1 The source who had attended the discussion groups remembered that Salath Tsar was the most intelligent, the most convinced, the most intransigent.

Speaker 1 It was he who animated the debates and most impressed the newcomers. Now,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The guy, Debra 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.

Speaker 1 And that Pol Pod even said at the meeting, I will direct the revolutionary organization. I will be its secretary general.
I will hold the dossiers.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like he was always happy to do work and like help, but he wasn't like a big,

Speaker 1 that reminds me of a lot of guys, right?

Speaker 1 We talk about like Cchescu, 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 he's going to murder all of you and take power once the revolution's over.

Speaker 1 That's the way these things go, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, speaking of murder,

Speaker 1 so no,

Speaker 1 no,

Speaker 1 instead of killing anyone, no, kill your

Speaker 1 with these products. Wow.

Speaker 10 Holidays with kids and family?

Speaker 2 Magical, but let's be honest, overwhelming.

Speaker 10 Between hanging lights, cleaning, wrapping gifts, and prepping for the in-laws, the list never ends. That's why I use Air Tasker.

Speaker 10 With a few taps, I found local taskers to decorate, organize, and even assemble that toy castle Santa, aka grandma, is bringing. I also got someone to play our family elf for photos because why not?

Speaker 10 Airtasker saves me time so I can actually enjoy the season and the people I love.

Speaker 5 Download the Airtasker app or go to Airtasker.com.

Speaker 10 Airtasker. Get anything done.

Speaker 2 Time for a sofa upgrade. Introducing Anibay sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.
Every Anibay sofa is modular, allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Speaker 2 Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Speaker 2 Liquids simply slide right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in-feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Speaker 2 Plus, our pet-friendly, stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price.
Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your living space today.

Speaker 2 Sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get early access to Black Friday now.
The biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off.

Speaker 2 Plus, free shipping and free returns. Shop now at washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 13 The world is buzzing with AI tools, but instead of making things easier, they've made things overwhelming.

Speaker 1 There's a better way.

Speaker 11 Meet Superhuman, the AI productivity suite that gives you superpowers so you can outsmart the work chaos.

Speaker 13 With Grammarly, Mail, and Coda working together, you get proactive help across your workflow, no matter how you work. Experience AI that meets you right where you are.

Speaker 13 Unleash your superhuman potential today.

Speaker 11 Learn more at superhuman.com slash podcast.

Speaker 13 That's superhuman.com slash podcast.

Speaker 1 Managing multiple accounts and logins for your marketing needs is like managing multiple announcers for one ad. Confusing.

Speaker 14 But with MailChimp's new SMS features, you can reach all your customers in over 10 countries all from one account, giving you more time, driving more conversions, and improving campaign performance.

Speaker 14 One platform, many audiences, endless possibilities. That's how you mailchamp your marketing with SMS.
Tap the banner to learn more.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 and we are returned.

Speaker 1 Back. Returned back.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, most of the accounts of Saar during this period, again, he's a quiet, friendly, easygoing dude.

Speaker 1 But as Short notes, Philip Short notes in his book on Pol Pot, Saar did start reading a lot of Stalin around this time.

Speaker 1 And that's because he and his circle, there's a a lot of Stalin going around, particularly there's a history of the Communist Party in Russia that Stalin wrote, right?

Speaker 1 And this is, it's a Stalin book, right?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Who were dangers to the success of the revolution because he was Joseph Stalin, right?

Speaker 1 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 getting in well, not going to end well.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It is a peasant uprising, you know, in a lot of ways. That's a big part of what's going on.
And so Mao is really relevant for what Saloth Tsar is going to be doing not too long from now, right?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 not always a great idea. Maybe backyards shouldn't be where we make steel, you know?

Speaker 1 Maybe factories are better for that. I I don't know.
You know,

Speaker 1 maybe we need sparrows. I don't know.
I mean, your big, your big society remaking ideas tend not to be good. No, it's, yeah, it's, it's like what we're trying to do now.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 which might work out for us. Maybe the less iPhones will eventually lead us back to having people who learn how to cure the size of the side.

Speaker 1 This is a silver lining, but we don't cash that in for a couple of decades.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Tsar does not attend, but several of his Khmer comrades do.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 So, this is the first time, and they bring this back to their circle.

Speaker 1 So, now everyone knows there is a communist movement in Cambodia that is organizing and arming, and they've taken some territory, even, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They're even isolated from a lot of their fellow Khmer students because they see themselves as in charge of radicalizing them and directing them.

Speaker 1 And they see themselves as engaged in a dangerous, clandestine effort, right?

Speaker 1 So they're isolated socially, and they're all constantly talking about their beliefs and reading radical politics.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 They're only going to get crazier.

Speaker 1 And one thing that a lot of 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?

Speaker 1 This is not limited to Cambodian communists.

Speaker 1 This is not limited to communists because there's some, you can find some stuff that the Nazis are 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it really is like, these people just simply cannot hear themselves.

Speaker 1 Well, it's it's look, I think everyone believes a degree of this, which is one of the reasons why nobody should ever get the power to try, right? Yes, yes. Like, when I watch Star Trek,

Speaker 1 we just did it my way.

Speaker 1 And when I and others watch Star Trek and are like, oh, what if we could be like that? You're not thinking people can be radically remade.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And if you want them to add, if you want to actually improve the quality of people, you improve their quality of life.

Speaker 1 And you don't do that by shattering everything that makes it possible for them to survive at the jump right like like it it it's 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

Speaker 1 the 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 like particularly prevalent is that like because of the danger of vietnam we're going to have to do this very quickly, right?

Speaker 1 Once we get independence, we have to remake ourselves into a society that can withstand our foreign aggressors as quickly as possible, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The French Revolution, as already noted, had met with failure by stopping halfway.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So again, this is where we see like the real dangerous thing: 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.

Speaker 1 No one ever has. And you really should pay attention to the shit people try to do in the history.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 whether it's, 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 we're on the a side of this proposition with you know guys that don't know what the 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

Speaker 1 every people a lot of people this is a very attractive thing to think that you can do, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So for Sam Fan, who's again, 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.

Speaker 1 That is true equality, right?

Speaker 1 And this is zeroing in the sense that you like zero a rifle, right? We're zeroing

Speaker 1 to a point where everyone is in the same place and then we can build up, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 As things actually stood in 1952, Saar and his comrades were committed communists, but not particularly well-read ones.

Speaker 1 And his writings from this period don't sound like what you would get from an avowed Marxist.

Speaker 1 In fact, one of the weird things is that, like, like Pol Pot's first political obsession seems to be with democracy, which he called, quote, incomparable and as beautiful as a diamond.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 All classically democracies. Well,

Speaker 1 when you've been looking at a king, you know, everything looks like democracy. Comparatively, right? And

Speaker 1 his actual knowledge of what's going on in China and the USSR, and to be honest, like France is not perfect, right?

Speaker 1 But this is how he's thinking at the time.

Speaker 1 So while they're reading and talking, events back home have continued to evolve.

Speaker 1 Sun Nok Than, the nationalist leader, got allowed back into Cambodia by the king in the hope that he could be used as a figurehead, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So he fucks off into the jungle to fight with the guerrillas.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 King Sahanek responds to the Big Ten theory of getting our freedom. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 The French begin conducting pacification campaigns against the Viet Men and Thans rebels, who had not yet managed to agree on the whole coalition thing.

Speaker 1 The circle back in Paris only learned what was going on in snatches of brief conflicted reports.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What do they actually hold? You know, they don't have great info. It's not like they they can look at like the Telegram chats for these different groups in the jungle, right?

Speaker 1 Like they have very little

Speaker 1 telegrams. Or even the Telegram telegrams, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He left a very different Cambodia.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That is one of like my big issues with like a lot of the stuff we were raised with as kids in like the 90s and early 2000s. It's like anyone can make a difference.
That's true.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Speaking of rancid ground beef, here's our sponsors.

Speaker 1 The busiest time of the year?

Speaker 6 It's here. Between parties, shopping, and decorating.

Speaker 1 Who has time?

Speaker 8 With Airtasker, you can get anything done, cleaning, wrapping, even someone to build a gingerbread house that doesn't collapse.

Speaker 1 Download the Airtasker app or go to airtasker.com. Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 2 Time for a sofa upgrade. Introducing Anibay sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.
Every Anibay sofa is modular, allowing you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Speaker 2 Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Speaker 2 Liquids simply slide right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink and feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Speaker 2 Plus, our pet-friendly, stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price.
Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your living space today.

Speaker 2 Sofas start at just $699 with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get early access to Black Friday now.
The biggest sale of the year can save you up to 60% off.

Speaker 2 Plus, free shipping and free returns. Shop now at washablesofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 1 Managing multiple accounts and logins for your marketing needs is like managing multiple announcers for one ad. ad.
Confusing.

Speaker 14 But with MailChimp's new SMS features, you can reach all your customers in over 10 countries, all from one account, giving you more time, driving more conversions, and improving campaign performance.

Speaker 14 One platform, many audiences, endless possibilities. That's how you MailChimp your marketing with SMS.
Tap the banner to learn more.

Speaker 3 Looking for a fantasy that will keep you up all night? From Blood and Ash isn't just a story, it's the beginning of an obsession.

Speaker 3 From Blood and Ash launches you into a world where forbidden desire collides with deadly secrets, and every choice could ignite a war.

Speaker 3 Expect heart-pounding romance, fierce battles, and a heroine who refuses to be caged. If you crave danger, passion, and twists you'll never see coming, start the journey today.

Speaker 3 Grab From Blood and Ash available in print, e-book, and audiobook, and enter a series you'll never want to leave.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 boy howdy.

Speaker 1 We are back, and we're talking about eating rancid ground beef because, look, the FDA is no longer going to be,

Speaker 1 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 a horribly ill with my friend in a muscle-eating competition.

Speaker 1 I forgot about that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 who's the smart one now? Who's getting ready for the RFK Jr. future now, baby? It's me.

Speaker 1 I got an iron stomach. I don't care how bad our food gets.
You know you can live through it. We don't.
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
I've been, I was molded by this, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've had GRD. I don't give a fuck anymore.
A lot of kids are going to die. Anyway, back to the podcast.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 Robert. It's important to note that Salath Tsar's back.

Speaker 1 Part of the reason why

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 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.

Speaker 1 Almost, you can't learn it after a certain point in your life.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I think that's why everything else that happens to him happens to him, right?

Speaker 1 So on December 15th, 1952, Salath Tsar left Paris just as things in Cambodia reached a boil.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 His French backers expressed their hope that Cambodia's pacification will make continued progress.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's going to work out great for you guys.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I want to quote from an article by journalist Nate Thayer here.

Speaker 1 Before I went to France, my relatives 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 I don't think that's untrue, but it does make me think of

Speaker 1 that. Is not a,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 is 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Interesting guy, but a really groundbreaking. He was the only guy who got in to do this, right?

Speaker 1 So we'll be quoting from Nate quite a bit here. Over the next eight years, Sar is...

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Salat Tsar rose through the ranks for the same reason. He was hard to fucking kill.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 Salath Tsar.

Speaker 1 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 means he's anonymous, and he's good at being anonymous.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You blend in.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's the spy thing. That's the real life spy thing, I guess.
But yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He's going to wind up taking power, right? I mean, the problem is

Speaker 1 it's always one of those guys, but not all of those guys is going to become

Speaker 1 the problem.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 Sarr 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.

Speaker 1 In 1960, he is added to the Communist Party's standing committee.

Speaker 1 Now, in the same interview I just 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 obsec king here what that you can't take that away from bolpot 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 burner phones this guy is really good at staying secret oh my god imagine having that discipline He's very disciplined, right?

Speaker 1 Like he doesn't, this isn't an accident that he winds up where he is. He's smart.
He continues to live.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like he's like a high school teacher during this period of time. And he's a pretty good teacher.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 A man who met him in the late 50s, for example, said, I knew immediately that I could become his friend for life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, by the way.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's what they say about presidents and dictators alike.
And there are people he kills who, like, that is their recollections. Like, I knew he was my friend.

Speaker 1 And they die of being like, wait, this can't happen. No, I know, I know Polbot.
You gotta let me, you gotta let me talk to him.

Speaker 1 And Polbot doesn't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 Now, what is interesting to me about Salat Tsar is that these recollections of him as a kindly, decent, sweet man aren't a product of later propaganda.

Speaker 1 Like most revolutions, the Khmer Rouge heavily attacked their own people, which caused a lot of Khmer Rouge to defect.

Speaker 1 And like when these guys were interviewed later, basically none of them said Pol Pot was why they left, right?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But that Pol Pot, like, basically Jesus. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Man. It's so weird.

Speaker 1 He's really good at this, right? Like,

Speaker 1 you can't take that away from him. The motherfucker knew his business, right?

Speaker 1 Now, as I noted, Pol Pot made it to the standing committee in 1960.

Speaker 1 The party leader was a guy he'd known from the Paris days called Samoth, who was assassinated probably by the King's 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And Nate Thayer, I really recommend, we'll have it in the links there because he Nate posts both the article he wrote about his interview and the raw interview transcript.

Speaker 1 And Pol Pot's like, Samuth was my best friend. I loved him.

Speaker 1 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 Pot talks about a bunch of people he loves.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 there will be like, but you had his entire family killed, including his like infant grandchildren. And he'd be like, well, yeah, like,

Speaker 1 yeah, well, yeah.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 God, imagine getting like,

Speaker 1 yeah, the genocide conducted by like, not, I was going to say Ned Flanders, but not even that. Just just like a like a mr rogers ass yeah yeah

Speaker 1 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 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.

Speaker 1 I got to change the way we farm so everyone starves to death.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So you fuckers are getting a bonus. But, you know, as we end, Pol Pot has really

Speaker 1 been 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, possibly go wrong.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 section.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're killing it.

Speaker 1 The show is called Chuck's notes behind the bastards. Oh, no.
Is that what we called the show? Fuck. Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Andrew,

Speaker 1 how are you feeling? Oh, man. I mean, you know, we're still positive.
Still positive is the important thing. Yeah.
Yeah. So far, great guy.
Yeah, great, good dude. Wow, this is so bizarre.

Speaker 1 Truly, I never, I guess I, I, my knowledge of Pol Pot not sufficient because this is fucking fascinating. Yeah, yeah.
He is a really interesting monster.

Speaker 1 The degree of agreement that like, yeah, he was really chill. As far as I knew him, he was nice.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of people who like, when they finally see him on TV, are like, wait a second, that guy has been killing everybody?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 him,

Speaker 1 but that is most of those guys, like, right, right, right. Or most of the, yeah, the most of that situation.
Yeah. You never know.
He was always nice to me. He was always so nice to me.

Speaker 1 He seemed chill. I don't know, man.
We didn't ever talk about how many people he wanted to kill. Yeah.

Speaker 1 How many people do you want to kill, Andrew?

Speaker 1 Less than 20K.

Speaker 1 Which was where we left. Listen, that's where we left at some point.
I can't remember if it was last episode or.

Speaker 1 No one's in the position of, I don't want anyone to be killed. Exactly.

Speaker 1 If you say zero, it's more suspicious than if you say

Speaker 1 zero is suspicious. Yeah, less than 20K.
I'd say that's very, very,

Speaker 1 you know, that's not, that's, that's minimalist, right? Yeah, yeah, that qualifies you as a good person. I bet the pope would, would want to kill less than 20k people if he had his choice.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, popes

Speaker 1 probably

Speaker 1 still on the lower end of pope body count.

Speaker 1 Pope means a pope would say, I would love to only have to kill 20,000 people.

Speaker 1 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 still in like the upper 20% of popes in terms of not killing a person.

Speaker 1 quartile pope. 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, or owning an American auto manufacturer. Right.
Makes you like more Nazis than not. Not

Speaker 1 in the future if we have

Speaker 1 Nazis. Being the president of the United States.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we'll see. Or whatever the position is called after this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Anyway, Andrew T, where could people find you? Oh, you always racist Andrew T on whatever social media.

Speaker 1 I'm not looking at it that much.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, do that.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 let's all

Speaker 1 go

Speaker 1 not.

Speaker 1 Well, you know what? If you know somebody who's quiet and nice and

Speaker 4 that's the episode.

Speaker 12 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 4 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 12 Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

Speaker 2 New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

Speaker 5 Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at behind the bastards.

Speaker 10 The holidays with family and kids? Magical, but let's be honest, a little chaotic. That's why I use AirTasker to find local help for decorating, cleaning, and wrapping gifts.

Speaker 10 I even booked someone to play our family elf.

Speaker 5 Download the Air Tasker app or go to AirTasker.com.

Speaker 10 Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 9 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.

Speaker 9 You're juggling snacks, nap time, and everything else.

Speaker 9 Well, Gerber can help create a more parent-friendly game day because they have the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand.

Speaker 9 So you can feel good about what you're feeding your little ones. I mean, Mac loves them.
You can't go wrong with the little crunchies.

Speaker 9 You just put him in a little bag or you put him in a little container and he's good to go. Make sure to pick up your little ones' favorite Gerber products at a store near you.

Speaker 15 Scent the season with Pura. Take up to 30% off site-wide during Pura's Black Friday sale, the biggest sale of the year, for a limited time only.

Speaker 15 Shop premium, long-lasting single fragrances, curated gift sets for for everyone on your list, and sleek modern diffusers for home and car, all at exclusive discounts.

Speaker 15 Head to Pura.com to unwrap the savings and upgrade your space just in time for the holidays.

Speaker 3 Looking for a fantasy that will keep you up all night? From Blood and Ash isn't just a story, it's the beginning of an obsession.

Speaker 3 From Blood and Ash launches you into a world where forbidden desire collides with deadly secrets, and every choice could ignite a war.

Speaker 3 Expect heart-pounding romance, fierce battles, and a heroine who refuses to be caged. If you crave danger, passion, and twists you'll never see coming, start the journey today.

Speaker 3 Grab From Blood and Ash available in print, e-book, and audiobook, and enter a series you'll never want to leave.

Speaker 14 This is an iHeart podcast.