Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Film Directing Playboy King Who Handed His Country to Pol Pot

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

Pol Pot is an evil bastard who had half his country killed, but he isn’t an interesting bastard, that title belongs to the man who enabled him, King Norodom Sihanouk. In Episode 10, Robert is joined by comedian, Caitlin Gill and they discuss the monarch who destroyed half of Cambodia and made some of the worst films ever.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends, and welcome again to Behind the Bastards. I'm Robert Evans, your host on yet another journey into the life and mind of one of the worst people in all of history. My guest today is Caitlyn Gill. Hey, that's me. Caitlyn Gill is a comedian. Yeah, presumably. Some would argue that. And you're involved in a talent show.

So watch it when it's on. So on this episode of the show, I will be talking to a vastly more accomplished comedian and reading a story about a bad person in history. I live in a backyard. Don't worry about it. We all live in yards. We live in yards. We live in yards. We live in yards.

We all live in yards. Let's not just brag in the ears as a backyard. It's true. I have moved back from the front yard. That feels good. I've been living on a porch for a while and it is not ideal. Speaking of porches, what do you know about the Cambodian mass killings in the 1970s? I know that it is one of the most brutally depressing aspects of history you can look at. Wasn't it like 50s forward? It was long and really bad. There was a lot of shit going on from the 50s forward.

It's like a million plus. The mass killing started in 1975, went through to like 78 or 79. About three and a half years, the Khmer Rouge was in power. What do you know about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot? I have a political science degree and I paid attention in those classes, but that was 15 years ago. My updated history, not so great, but in the past I was disgustingly fascinated. It seems like one of the most cruel regimes that has ever gotten to spend some time in power. Real bad.

Real bad people. It was one of those things. When we started this podcast, I had some people that I clearly had plans for. I wanted to talk about Hitler's favorite young adult novels and Saddam Hussein's erotic memoirs and all that sort of stuff. Then there were people who were like, yeah, we're probably going to do a Pol Pot episode at some point. I didn't really know anything more than what I'd learned in high school about him. He killed like a million and a half people. They had people with glasses murdered for some reason. That's the end of the...

You figure it's like the same story with a guy like Hitler or Stalin, where it was just some asshole who wound up in charge and just started murdering the groups of people they hated. I didn't really know much about Pol Pot. I started reading into the story recently. I read a great book called Pol Pot, The Anatomy of Terror, and then that sent me down a whole reading hole. Anyway, I wound up realizing that the most interesting character, the most terrible person behind all of this, is not Pol Pot himself. Instead, it's a different guy, a different person entirely, Prince Nooridam Sehanouk.

Have you ever heard of that? I have not heard of this prince. Well, Samedesh Priya Nooridam Sehanouk was born in Nampen, Cambodia on October 31, 1922. He was a member of both of Cambodia's two leading royal families, the Sisawaths and the Nooridams. But he was not born as the heir apparent. So, Cambodia has like a different sort of way of appointing their kings. Nowadays, there's like a royal council that sort of is a mix of elected and unelected people who votes on the new king. Back when he was born, the French were in charge of Cambodia, and so they would appoint new kings when the king died.

Isn't it? Yeah, so Nooridam was an only child, and since this was the 20s, his parents were terrified he was going to die on them. They consulted an astrologer, which was a normal thing to do at the time, like everybody in Cambodia consulted an astrologer. This would have been like right after the Russians thought it was a good idea to talk to a respite. Yeah, this is within five years of that. Medicine is almost happening, but mystics are still like, maybe I'm medicine. You get a flu and your family's like, well, I guess that's it for you. And a single prince and only child prince can't have any appearance of injury or illness anyway.

So, you get real creepy about how, you know, it's a lot of secrets really early. Especially if you're talking to mystics, something's wrong with that kid. I don't know, he bleeds a lot, or it like can't breathe good, or I don't know. They were just worried. Was he a lumpy baby? You have to assume. They're all lumpy babies. Every baby is lumpy.

How are you the only child and not in line for a throne? Well, he was in line for it, but it wasn't a guarantee. So, he was like, you know, you've got a certain number of kids who could be. Okay, all right, all right, all right. Because there's like, the royal families are big, and so the prince are like, okay, well, there's like nine or ten kids we get to pick from. And he was obviously like, it wasn't guaranteed, but he was in the running. So, his parents were very concerned about him.

And they had taken him to an astrologer. And the astrologer warned that if he was raised by his mom and dad, he would die early. So, as a young boy, Nooridam was raised by his grandmother. Madam Chaochun Pat, she was- I feel like you're describing a very bleak version of the movie Big. Yes, that's this entire story. There is a giant. Oh, good. Yeah, yeah, it's going to be great.

Oh, wait, no, I'm thinking about Big Fish. Oh, Big Fish? Yeah. Very different films. Yeah, I just like that, like, I don't let him grow up with my parents anymore. I want to be a big kid right now, only a very dark evil version. Yeah. No, Zoltan, it's like a source of, you know, an astrologer screaming at your parents.

Boy, I really got that movie wrong, because you're talking about the Tom Hanks film. Oh, yeah, I'm talking about the piano. I'm talking about a Cambodian dictator dancing on a piano. You did bring up another one of history's great monsters, but we haven't done our Tom Hanks. But he definitely belongs to the show. Oh, the tea you could spill, running. So, his grandmother's really religious. She's a Buddhist known for giving a lot of money to monks, which was, you know, pretty popular at the time.

She dies when he's a young boy, and immediately after she dies, he's ordained as a monk for exactly 24 hours. That was like a thing in Cambodian culture where everybody was, and it was really common for, like, if your family had any money at all, they'd send you away to learn how to be a monk for a little while. So, it's not like the universal church that you sign up for, just to marry your friends or whatever? It is for him. So, for the prince, because he might be the king, anytime you might be a leader, they send you off to be a monk for exactly a day. Just so he can say, like, no, he's enlightened. He's been a monk, like, he's a monk-king sort of thing.

That was important. If you were a normal Cambodian who was, like, middle-class or up, you'd also be a monk, but you'd be there for months. And the training for non-king monks was brutal. Here's how a normal Cambodian at the time explained, like, what the actual monks went through. If you came to the Watt as a novice, you had to study for three months before you were allowed to wear the robe. You were taught the etiquette of a monk, how to put on the robe, how to speak, how to walk, how to put your palms together to show respect, and you were given a thrashing if you didn't do as they said. If you didn't walk correctly, you were beaten.

You had to walk quietly and slowly, without making any sound with your feet, and you weren't allowed to swing your arms. You had to move serenely. You had to learn by heart in Pali the rules of conduct and the Buddhist precepts that you could recite them without hesitation. If you hesitated, you were beaten. Man. Yeah. That's like getting an honorary degree from, like, the worst university. Yeah.

Everybody's getting beaten except for the prince who shows up for one day, and he gets to be a monk straight away. So as a young child, the prince goes to school in Saigon over in Vietnam, and then he goes to France. He gets a really nice Western education. He develops a love for the arts and for French cooking. His mother nicknames him Tool or Tubby. At this point, I'm on his side. I get it. France is pretty irresistible.

France is irresistible, and your mom calls you fat. If you're just like a portly, rich Cambodian prince, honestly, just kick it in France, baby. Like, if that's what you're into, then be there. The food is great in both places, but so different. Go be a Tubby in France. Yeah. So he spends a lot of time as a young man being a fat kid in France while other young Cambodian kids are getting beaten to learn how to be monks. So far, I'm just jealous.

Everybody's probably jealous. So, in 1941, his grandfather, who was the current king, dies, and the French, you know, have to pick from the options in the royal families. And in 1941, they decide to bet on Noradom Sehanouk, because he seemed like the choice who'd give them the least grief. This is what he looked like on the day he was ordained. And we'll have these pictures up on the Behind the Bastards website. Oh, he's not Tubby. There's no reason to shame him. Yeah, you see, I feel like this is what makes me feel like his mom is probably giving him a complex, because that's not a fat kid.

He does have evil eyes. When you look at the picture, it looks like, even just printed out on computer paper, I feel like he is across a bar and like raising his eyebrow at me. He's been staring at you for a while. Yeah, it's like a painting that looks at you when you move across the room. This is the guy that leers at you from across the bar, only in photograph form. But he's kind of hot, like I'm not mad he's looking at me, except I know he's trouble, you know? Yeah, and if you knew that his mom had called him fat his old childhood, you'd probably assume like, oh, there's some darkness going on. Yes, there's issues.

I don't want, I mean, this is a good time for me to assess that he's kind of handsome and say that out loud before I hear about all the horrible things that he did. He is kind of handsome. Just remember handsome people can be really bad, bad people. Handsome people with, it has to be said, fabulous. Beautiful people are evil. Never forget. Yeah, you can tell by his cheekbones that he's dangerous. So in 1941, the French government that appoints him isn't really France, it's Vichy France, you know, the Germans had conquered them.

So he was appointed king by the puppet government for the Nazi occupiers. Their leader, Marshal Patain, became the leader of Cambodia as well. The children who grew up in Cambodia's public schools at the time were educated to patainist standards, which emphasized unity, order, and labor. The city was seen as the incarnation of all evil, and peasant life was highlighted as the soul of the nation. One of the children in these schools was a guy named Saloth Sahr, who would grow into a guy named Pol Pot. Just a little bit of foreboding there. So Cambodia is in an awkward position during World War II. Pol Pot came from a much different social status, not a prince.

Not a prince, kind of upper middle class. Not rich, but his family was doing okay. Yeah, he comes from a pretty bougie little background. But he had to do the full monk training too. So he's the guy getting the shit kicked out of him by monks and learning about how cities are evil in school. While the actual king is flying to France and developing a complex because his mom calls him fat. So Cambodia is in an awkward position during World War II. France is technically an Axis ally at this point, like Vichy France.

But the Japanese eventually went up conquering Cambodia just a couple of months after the prince gets coronated. So Sehanouk now becomes Japan's puppet and proclaims Cambodian independence. Obviously that didn't last longer than 1945. As soon as the war's over, Sehanouk starts advocating for more independence from France. He introduced universal male suffrage to his country and press freedom, and he establishes an elected parliament. So so far, he seems pretty enlightened for a king in Cambodia in the 40s. If you're a Cambodian dude. If you're a Cambodian dude.

Well, you can't just go from zero to letting women vote. You can't just go from zero to human rights for humans. Sorry, I know I'll go. Bleeding rag feminist over here. What are you? I mean, this was 25 years after we decided women could vote in America. I just love the phrase universal male suffrage. Like you don't get to universal and then immediately qualify universal to specifically what it's just a funny.

Universal people I like suffrage. All the people I like get to vote. You're all universally invited to my birthday party except only 10 of you can come. But he's woke by 40 standards. Yes, he is woke if you lower the bar. So our 40s woke king is a lot of Cambodians at the time. The ones who were living in like cities and towns who were educated and kind of plugged into the world. It probably seemed like they were slowly sort of joining modernity and heading towards the kind of system England has where you get a king.

But the king's kind of a just a figure to look pretty. We care about their weddings and shit. But like that's kind of what people were hoping for what a lot of people were hoping for. But it's very different outside of the cities. So in rural Cambodia, probably about a quarter of Cambodian peasants of the country, like the real deep peasants, had never used money at all in their lives. Burning Man, I'm just, that was terrible. Yeah, it's kind of like Burning Man, but with subsistence farming.

But if you don't farm enough rice, you starve. Yeah, and you didn't spend $7,000 to get there and you don't have like a dust mask and there's no glow sticks. Otherwise totally Burning Man. We have to assume there's glow sticks. I love it if somebody who's never used currency in their entire life and has just lived from the land that they're on for generations and you happen to be passing by and they're just glow sticking with like a silent rave that's been going on for millennia that we just didn't know about. It's a thousand year old rave. It's like the thousand year old egg, only so much more fun.

So the king's not a figurehead to the peasants. He's seen a sort of figurehead in the cities. To the peasants, he's semi-divine. I'm going to read a description of royal court life from that book, Pol Pot, The Anatomy of Terry, that I think sort of sets up kind of how the king is seen by the country people. Each spring, crowds gathered to watch the royal oxen plow the sacred furrow, and all of those things are capitalized, from which the king's astrologer would divine whether or not there would be plenty or famine in the year ahead. And at tank talk, the king's birthday, the provincial governors came to pay homage. Royal protocol was draconian. In his palace, if no longer in the colonized state over which he reigned, the king was still an absolute ruler, the master of life, venerated by the populace as a sacred, quasi-divine figure.

At royal audiences, the princes, mandarins, and other dignitaries crouch on all fours with their knees and elbows on the floor and their hands raised together before their heads. The king sits above them, enthroned on a dais, sitting cross-legged like an Indian idol when he enters or leaves, all present, prostrate themselves three times. No one has the right to speak unless the king addresses him, and no one may publicly disagree with anything the king says. So, you're already seeing sort of a disconnect between you've got the people in the cities who are like, listen to the radio, they're watching TV, they're getting the newspapers, and then you've got the people who... Yeah, they're on Room Springer, and then there's people still on the farm. Yeah, the king makes the rain come, which is not like a joke. That's like a widespread belief. So there's already a big disconnect here. So the Khmer language, and the Khmer are like the majority people of Cambodia, has its own special sub-language for how to talk to the king.

So there's like a separate dictionary of words you just used to refer to the king and his family. The king was seen as impossibly high above even his high ministers, who are known non-jokingly as, quote, we who carry the king's excrement on our heads. So that's... I mean, it's jokingly. Come on, that is a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Like, yeah, we got your shit on our head, buddy. Like, this is a little bit. I'm going to ask you in a few more pages if you think that was joking or if you think that's just... I'm not saying it wasn't literal, even, but it's got a... There's a wink in there somewhere. There's a jester in the court.

Yeah, there might be a couple of winks. I'll eat my words later. I won't eat the king's feces, but I will. I'll be happy to eat my words. Yeah, so this is... You can imagine, you know, a guy grows up with his mom calling him Tubby, and now nobody's allowed to argue with him, and he's philosophically shitting on everyone's head. I was a Tubby kid. We do not deserve power until we go through and unpack our trauma. You can't hand... You know, you can take the fat off the kid. You can't take the fat kid out of the fat kid. No. Just because there's... I'm an only child who was Tubby. Trust. Trust. Trust.

Yeah, I grew up as a fat kid, and, you know, it's one of those things where when you see a fat kid who loses weight, that's someone who didn't deal with their trauma, who's just, like, trying to control themselves and their body through, like... There's something dark in there, is all I'm saying. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You have to shine the light in your own darkness. Yeah. And, you know, whatever happened to you in the bathroom, in the locker room, or on the playground, eventually you have to shine a little light on it, or you become a dictator if you happen to be a prince.

Yeah. Well, what he... I just became, like, a bad assistant manager. You know, I think that's what most people do, but it depends on your access. That's where you start from. Usually you go for a tiny amount of power. Yeah. But he kind of got on the... God, that was my moderate amount of power. So, we're talking old-fashioned kings here.

Notre Dame's grandfather was famous for having a gigantic harem made up of beautiful local ladies. In the late 30s, he was too old and sickly to make use of them, so these ladies weren't allowed to go out and live their own lives. They got frustrated, and things got weird. One of the ladies, courted by the old king, was a girl named Ryeong. She was the older sister to Saloth Tsar, the guy who became Pol Pot. He was about 15 at this point in time, and his sister's position meant he got to spend some time hanging around the royal palace. Since he was just 15, he was even allowed to hang out with the king's courtesans, and they would fondle him. So that's Pol Pot's 15-year-old childhood, is like hanging out in the royal palace and getting, like, literally masturbated by the king's...

Bored, horny courtesans. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, just trying to keep in mind... You're describing, like, a very high-class Charles Manson existence. Yeah, yeah. That's Charles Manson's mom, you know, bit of a... She is a girl about town, I think that's actually how he described her. Ah, boy.

And, you know, he got traded for beer, but, you know, the man who became Pol Pot just got jerked off by a bunch of royal courtesans. It's the same but different. Yeah, it is the same but different, ain't it? Apparently, that's my job here today. Here's something that's like what you're talking about, but not... Well, no, but it's good to point out that this story that starts with... Yeah, started in a different country and a different class level and it's also a bad ending.

This is not a good jump. It's not a good thing to do to a 15-year-old. 15-year-olds maybe should get... Like, if you happen to get rubbed off when you were 15, congratulations and I bet you're fine. I hope for most of you it is a positive memory. If you were a 15-year-old being jerked off by a royal harem, that is going to change your path. It's all. It's gonna change your path.

That's different than you're dating somebody in high school. Right. Yeah. You're either going to be an interesting sex educator or apparently a dangerous dictator. Yeah. Yeah. And probably the second. So, yeah, this is the sort of environment, cultural environment Nooridam Sahenak comes to power in.

You know, he's the king and so he's dealing with both like you've got these people in the cities who they're supposed to treat him like a god but they don't because he's just this... They know he's just like this guy and they're trying to be like, well, let's be a normal country that doesn't worship the king. But then he's got these people in the sticks to whom he's literally a deity. So, you can see how this would cause some conflicts within the king and within the country. I feel like for any crafty con man, crisis is opportunity. This is a great... You know, you wink and nod on one side and you get to grease the other wheels.

Well, speaking of crisis, by the time the king comes to power in the late 40s, well, he comes to power in 41, but the time he's really getting used to things, the Cold War starts kicking off. And his neighbors are all dealing with, you know, communism. You've got Vietnam with this communist revolt against the French going on right now. And at first it seemed like Cambodia was immune to communism. So in traditional Marxist theory, the revolution begins within the laboring class, right? You know, the factory workers who get fed up with serving the needs of capital. In the 40s and 50s, Cambodia had like a couple of thousand actual laborers in the whole country.

Most countries subsistence farmers. They didn't really give a fuck about capitalism or socialism. This is because neither had anything to do with their lives. They worked at most about six months a year to cover their basic needs. And they were all Theravada Buddhists. And Theravada Buddhism places no value on acquiring wealth. And therefore, number one, there was no cultural need to acquire wealth. And there just wasn't a lot to buy.

King Sienok liked to tell a story about an American aid expert who visited Cambodia in the 50s and convinced some villagers to start using modern fertilizer. They doubled their harvest yields in a year. And the aid worker came back the next year and was surprised to see that each farmer had only grown half as many crops this the next year. He didn't understand why they wouldn't want to produce twice as much. But clearly the Cambodians were like, no, we can farm half as much and make the same amount of food and work even less.

So basically, they're the smartest people in the world. They're really nailing it in the late 40s. Can I ask a dumb historical question for a little bit farther back? I feel like I should know, in terms of the Silk Road and the spice trade, Cambodia has always been in a significant position for colonizers. But is there a product that everybody was hungry for from the outside? Like, why did my people, the Scots, get on a boat to go there? I come from thieves and plunderers.

Scots went to Cambodia. I'm not aware of this part. No, no, no. I mean, I'll take a step. In the broader sense of why people leave the tiny rock that they were on to go get something better from outside, pepper or a spice or a mineral, why were people coming from places in the West to Cambodia? What were they plundering? What were they taking? I mean, so it's one of those things. Cambodia, most of what they produced was rice.

Yeah, exactly. So Cambodia's history is heavily based on sort of conflicts between Vietnam, like Vietnam is their traditional enemy, because Vietnam's like the big regional power. And so there's been a lot of more or less constant sort of power struggles between China and Vietnam and Cambodia kind of winds up in the middle. And of course, during World War II, they wound up in the middle between everybody and the Japanese. But like, they're never, nobody...

More about position on the map than resources within. Exactly, because they're not like a major industrial power, obviously. There's not like giant gold mines or anything. It's a country of like small farmers who just want to make enough food to keep their families alive. I just know that by the 40s, a bunch of economies were kind of closing up to do that. Most of their people would have been subsistence farmers, so it made sense for the economy to stay more closed than to invite in trade,

since there would always be such an imbalance that... Yeah. And it's, there's an interesting period of history when countries were more isolated and fascinating things happen in their history within that bubble because Cambodians weren't out buying risk crackers. They were, you know, everything that happened is internally. Their history is inside the bubble along with their economy. Yeah.

So it's just kind of interesting to pick out and figure out what people were busy doing, and it's things like growing less crops because you didn't need to grow as many. Because you don't need it. Which is fucking great. But one of the things they also have going on is Encore Wat is in Cambodia, which is this crazy, gigantic, beautiful, like complex of massive buildings that was built during the Khmer Empire, which had fallen hundreds of years before this point.

But so that's, King Sienok's looking at that and saying like, our people used to be great and build great, gigantic things, and I have to figure out some way to make us into a significant power. Slaves. The answer is always slaves. Slaves are always the answer to why people made big, cool stuff. It's always slaves. It's always the terrible answer.

You just spoiled a lot of the story. I don't know. That is not a spoiler. No, it's not a spoiler. How could that be a spoiler? Hmm. Evil King wants to build something big. There's no gap here.

That is a straight line. So we're going to get back to what exactly this not yet evil, but definitely Evil King is going to do later. So we're going to continue talking about this evil or not yet Evil King in a minute, but right now we have to advertise some products because... He is the capitalist gods. Yeah, yeah. None of us are Cambodian people.

We will all work much harder in order to purchase things which we can fill our homes with. So grab a box of money and a bag of money and a suitcase of money. And some dum-dums. And some dum-dums. Buy some dum-dums. This shows official sponsor is not dum-dums, but we're advertising them anyway. And now some other things. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah, we're back and we're talking about Cambodia and its culture at the time when a King Noodom Sahanuk is sort of coming into power in the late 40s, the early 50s. And he's frustrated because he wants to modernize his country, he wants to make it great again, and the people just kind of want to farm and not get involved in any of the conflicts raging around them. So there's sort of this little, like it's not really a huge conflict yet, but you can see some groundwork laid where the King wants to open things up more to the world and the people are just sort of like, you know, we've got rice, like I feel fine. So yeah, there was a communist movement afoot in Cambodia in the late 40s and early 50s, but it was dominated by the Vietnamese, by the Vietnamese, who you might guess from the name, were Vietnamese and not Cambodian.

Yeah, this made them not super popular among the Cambodians, because again, there's this history of Vietnam being sort of this domineering power over Cambodia. So, so far, it doesn't look like the communists are going to gain a big foothold in Cambodia. The problem is that the country occupies a really sweet position from the point of view of someone trying to smuggle weapons into Vietnam in order to fight the French. So it was important to Vietnam to have backing in Cambodia. They weren't really successful in spreading communism, but they had some success working with an anti-colonial rebel movement called the Khmer Isorac. And the Isorac aren't really communists, they're more Democrats, they want Cambodia to vote for leaders, and they don't want the French to be in their fucking country anymore. And they're not super communists, but they're willing to take guns from the communists in order to try to kick out the French. So from a fighting standpoint, the Isorac look a lot like our conception of the Viet Cong.

They're jungle warriors who carry out hit-and-run attacks against the military and wage an endless guerrilla war. I'm not going to try to bog you down in details of Cambodian politics at this time, although they are fascinating. What's important for the story is that the Khmer Isorac are the guys trying to uproot the French and thus King Sihanouk. They call him a traitor and a collaborationist for sort of working with the French. What era, how far have we moved in history? We're in the early 50s, 51, 52. And this is the point at which the conflict between the Isoracs and the French starts to really get bloody. There's a quote in the book Pol Pot that I mentioned earlier from a Shang Tsung who is a Cambodian senator today

who remembered how in his village in the Takeo province the Isoracs would decapitate victims and stuff their stomachs with grass. When we as children were fishing in the ponds, he remembered, we would find severed heads in the water. It didn't bother us. We were used to it. We'd yank them out by the hair and throw them aside. That was around 1949. We had Arby's deal with it. Yeah. So things are getting, Cambodia in the late 40s to early 50s is transitioning from like this mostly peaceful place to being sort of increasingly wracked with civil conflict. The Isorac are pretty brutal guys. Many of their leaders wore what were known as Khun Krak or Smoke Children, which are amulets made from mummified fetuses that were said to stop bullets.

The colonial soldiers were no better. One former government soldier, these are like local Cambodian soldiers recruited from the cities, but fighting under French command. One former government soldier described his unit's work as, quote, we would move into villages, kill the men and women who had not already fled, and then engage in individual tests of strength, which consisted of grasping infants by the legs and then pulling them apart. So things are getting bad in Cambodia in the early 50s. And the king sees the writing on the wall, which is that this rebel movement, like he's a smart guy. He's already guessed from the start of the fighting between the French and the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese are going to kick the French out. And he knows that the Vietnamese are also going to continue funding the rebels in Cambodia to kick the French out, which means that he's going to get overthrown and probably ripped apart by a mob

if he doesn't figure out some cunning way to get his country free of France without letting the rebels win. Now that is a dilly of a pickle. That is a dilly of a pickle. How would you solve that problem? Well, slaves. I'm just kidding. You're just always dropping back to slaves. Well, nationalism is a pretty easy trick at that stage for something like it. Really? You have the former loyalty of those who are worshiping you and you've got the up-and-coming, gleaming cities that are looking to build and grow, close the ranks and make it about being Cambodia and not French or Vietnamese.

You know what you would have made? Pretty good dictator. You would have made a great king of Cambodia in the 1950s. You would have nailed being king of Cambodia in the 1950s. Oh, no, that is a pretty delicate dance. That's some tough marketing. You need the right people. This is a delicate dance. And so, spoiler alert, King Nordam Sahannuk, as I think people will agree. You can't spoiler alert history. It's just like, hey, you didn't read this yet.

Spoiler alert for a thing that millions of people know. He's definitely a bastard like he belongs on the show, but he's kind of, it's one of those like, he is a dancer. This whole story is him dancing around. Yeah. There's an aspect of it where you're like. I feel like this entire era of like, up until like, well, right now, up until the 50s, he's like, from the 1900 to 1950, there are a whole bunch of royal courts. Yeah. Just like, whipping and dodging.

Yeah. Like just did like, oh, God, we don't know how to, oh, boy. It's like a stupid gift for kids on a like, you know, in a playground, a little whirly gig thing where everybody's spinning too hard and everybody's trying to hold on. They all know what happened in Russia. They all fly off, fat kid goes last, but you know he's going to go, you know he's going to go. But this fat kid's going to hang on. They hang on tight and some are still clinging, but it's, it's just a period. No time in monarchal history is boring.

They're weird. Monarchies are very weird, but there's that period in history seems to be so volatile where they just couldn't keep up with the pace of social change everywhere, either backwards or forwards. Yeah. And I'm sure he's dancing along with the rest. He's dancing. So you remember when he comes to power, one of the first things he does is he lets the men vote and he establishes a parliament that has, you know, some power. So he's basically, he's sharing power with the parliament and he has a lot of power. Like he's not like the King of England is now where there's no, or I guess they haven't had, you know, he's not, he's not just a figurehead, but there's a parliament.

They have power and they're right now dominated by the Democratic Party, which was kind of like the Democratic Party here. Kind of a general liberal-ish party who included just sort of a melange of left-wing and centrist people. And their big thing is they want to be an actual democracy. So they're kind of ideologically more or less in line with the ISRAC, but they don't want to do it violently. They want to peacefully sort of proceed to being decolonized and whatnot. So the ISRACs, meanwhile, are a little bit further to the left. Some of them are outright communists. The most popular leader is a guy named Sun Noctan whose goal was to get the Democrats to back him in pushing the French authorities out of Cambodia.

So he's trying to get his rebel movement to ally with the people in power and sort of force a coup against the government. And he's one of the guys attacking the King for being a puppet of the French. So this all comes to a head in June of 1952 when the King aged 30 decides it's time for him to jump into politics for the first time. Because he'd sort of tried to be above factional politics. You've got the Cambodian right wing and you've got the Democrats and he doesn't really weigh in. So he finally decides to weigh in and he gave a speech attacking the Democrats and whining that people had dared to say that collaborating with the French wasn't cool. This prompts an uprising of right-wing Cambodians in the city who take to the streets and advocate for the destruction of the current Democrat-dominated party in power. See who calls up French troops, Moroccans actually.

In the middle of the night on June 9th, he dissolves the government, assumes emergency powers, and declares himself prime minister. Well, there you go, I forgot I'm out of emergency powers. Don't manipulate your public, look inside. Every now and then you create an emergency that you then have to assume emergency powers for. Well, yeah. And it was just a coincidence that... Why is that dog, baby? Yeah, yeah.

So he announces that he's launching a royal crusade to gain Cambodian independence within three years. He bans all political meetings in Nampen and he has French soldiers and armored vehicles fill the streets to make sure nobody talks about politics other than the politics that he wants to talk about. Honestly, that sounds refreshing. Yeah, yeah. No more just armed men stopping you from talking about the government. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Yeah, so the French, in spite of the fact that he says Cambodian needs to be independent from France, the French are more or less on his side because their basic idea is that democracy in Cambodia was a mistake. Cambodians aren't ready to be voting because they're going to vote to kick the French out and only a king can keep things peaceful.

The Republicans in the capital, and by that I mean people who won a republic, not the conservatives, because the conservatives are all about this. The Republicans in the capital aren't happy. CNX cracked down, inspires protests. In November of 1952, there's a big strike by students in Nampen and several towns. King CNX tells them all to get back to class, but instead a bunch of them hole up in the National Assembly, which is the parliament building. Monks came out to protest and argue that the king was in fact a dick. In January of 53, there are some grenade attacks on schools in Nampen. Philip Short, author of Anatomy of a Nightmare, says that these attacks were either from the rebels to provoke the king into brutal reprisals, or just ordered by the king so that he could justify a crackdown.

And it seems like it's probably the second one. So he has some people start throwing grenades into political gatherings so that he can basically crack down on everybody. So he gives a speech and says, from now on, any individual or political party that opposes my policies will be declared a traitor to the nation and punished accordingly. The king is supported in this by his mom, who'd once called him tubby. She hated democracy and thought the idea of people voting was a deliberate insult to her personally. That is hilarious. Oh my God, that is some serious malignant narcissism. That is mental illness combined with power.

That is so funny. The personal insult that people would want to vote. That's like that they might want to decide the path of their country in life is like them shitting on you. There's also just so many crooked democracies. Like sure 98% of the populace voted for this one person. Like just assume that you could set that up. I love it. I love it.

It's great. My tubby son is letting people vote again. They're letting? No. You don't get to choose. So the French are still on board at this point. They want a strong man in Cambodia who can keep a lid on the communists. So they support King Sehanouk while he arrests nine members of the Democratic Party and imprisons them without trial for plotting against the state.

I mean for a colonial power, the more brutal your dictator, the better. You don't really give a shit what happens on the ground. 100% of the time that's worked. I can't think of a single time where a colonial power backed a dictator and didn't have things work out great. Well, it works for the colonial power. I'm not saying it works in the sense that's like, yeah, a knife works for a murderer. Murder's not cool. That's not what I'm saying.

It worked for us in Vietnam. I'm saying that if you are France, it makes sense to prop up a brutal dictator because that prevents anything from changing, period. You don't care how brutal it is. You just don't want it to change. And that right there is why all of the colonial powers are still in charge of their colonies. Well, that's... I didn't say it works in the long term. There is no long term success.

There's no long gone for colonies. That's why it doesn't work. No. Yeah, so you're right, the French are doing exactly what you'd expect the French to do. Sienoc disbands student organizations that had any kind of political bent. He also attacks the heads of the two Buddhist monastic orders who had protested against him for sympathizing with the rebels. He says, quote, So when you read about this guy in any of the history books, it'll regularly talk about him leaving for France to his house in the Riviera to take what's called a rest cure or a dietary cure,

which I thought it was because you hear like terms like that a lot with old timey leaders where they're taking a rest cure. Would you just like taking a vacation? Yeah. But they don't want to say they're taking a vacation, so it's like a cure. For him, it was a weight loss clinic. So he would go to France regularly throughout his reign when he got too fat to go to a French weight loss clinic and drop pounds. That's basically what he's doing. Like he cracks down on all political dissent.

He arrests a bunch of people and then he goes to that camp. Yeah. So he's a great, he's a great, great guy. This would be a pattern. Yeah, for the king for his entire life. So after that camp, the king flies over to Paris and he meets with the French president and gives him a list of demands. He wants full control of the Cambodian military. He wants French people in Cambodia to be subject to Cambodian law and he wants a guarantee of eventual independence for his country,

all of which those are reasonable things for the head of state of a country to ask of another country who just took them over to get cheap rice, I guess. Yeah. Well, again, it's for a strategic cult like a position. Yeah. They wanted to, yeah. They have so much more than right. They're really good at, you know, part of the reason that they're satisfied is because what they have is really good. Yeah.

The people there are satisfied, the French are not satisfied because colonialism isn't working out for them. It's one of those things you'd think, like, after they stopped being in constant conflict with Britain and, like, Germany, got sort of cut down to size by the Second World War and they'd stop, like, what do we have all these colonies? Like, what about this, like, everyone else has stopped playing the game. The game's not going on. It's a different world now. That process all started after World War I, when at the end of World War I, they rewrote the lines to figure out how to share stuff because they had spent centuries taking it over and what they learned is you don't get to let it go.

You can't, like, it's all over your hands. It's not, you're grabbing a gel, not a solid, you don't get to pull it away. So they were stuck with it and they propped up all these dictators that we're talking about now and sham governments and it's just a plan that, there was no option other than for it to fail. Yeah. There's no way to end the history that started evil, not evil. Yeah. So you're watching the gasps of colonialism, you know, fade away, but why were they doing this?

They already answered that question. They shouldn't, you know, they were trying to not do it. There's just no way to undo it once you start fucking the whole world. Once you conquer the whole world for 150 years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, France. France, I think, had been in control of this part of the world since, like, the 1860s.

So, yeah, they've been here a little while, which is why all of their government documents at this time are in, like, French and stuff. But to his credit, King Siena, at no point, thinks that colonialism is anything but fucked. Like, when the French are fighting against the Vietnamese, he's like, you guys are going to get your butts kicked. And when the Americans get involved, he's like, this is not going to work for anybody. Like, he knows that from the get-go. So credit where it's due, he is smarter than all of the Europeans in this story, which maybe isn't the highest bar in the world. Because they're not sending their best people to run their countries anymore. So, yeah, he goes to the French president, and he's like, I want, you know, my country's independence and full control of the military, et cetera, et cetera.

The French president's like, LOL, no. So Siena flies to the U.S. to see if we would back him in his quest for independence. He meets with the Secretary of State, Alan Dulles, who is like, if the French army leaves, you're going to all be taken over by communists. And we can't have that, so just be cool with the French being there. The president refused to meet with him, but White House officials coordinating his trip did offer to take the king to the circus, which he took as an insult. Which wouldn't you? I mean, honestly, yeah. The president can't hang with you, and we're not inviting you to dinner, which we always do with heads of state.

But there's a circus in town. Have you ever seen elephants? I guess you have. We stole these elephants from you. Come look at our carnies. Yeah, we stole these elephants. Look at these elephants we took from you and some carnies. Elephants just telegraphing, take me home.

It would be great if he stole carnies and brought carnies back to Cambodia. Just that's the cultural exchange he wants to make. We steal the elephants, they steal carnies. That is not an even trade. No, but that's a solid screenplay. Okay, so yeah, this made Siena angry. The French and the Americans both ignoring him. He gives an explosive interview to the New York Times where he threatens America that Cambodia will go communist if it's not given its independence.

He repeated the basic idea a few months later in a memorandum he sent to both the Americans and the British. I am asking the USA and Great Britain if, just for once, they will kindly consider the problem of Cambodia from the viewpoint of the Khmeres instead of that of the French. My people will tell you we don't know what communist slavery means, but the slavery imposed by the French we know well for we are now living under it. So one of the weird things about this guy is when you read the things that he says to his people, he comes across as a total dick. And when you read everything he's saying to the colonial powers in the US, he's like totally reasonable. You guys are ignoring what everybody here wants and just trying to do your own thing and it's going to be a fucking disaster. He's like, yeah, right. But then when he talks to his own people, it's like, dissent will be crushed.

So in June of 1953, Siena makes his play for Cambodian independence in absolute power. He secretly goes to Bangkok and he announces that he won't return to the capital or talk to French officials again until they agree to set his country free. If we cannot obtain what we want peacefully, the entire Khmer people are resolved to obtain their freedom by other means and are ready to sacrifice their lives. So a few days later, this prompts the two largest Buddhist orders in Cambodia to call for a holy war against the French. The next day, Siena calls for Khmer units in the French army to desert. At the end of the month, he called for all citizens between 20 and 35 years of age to join the fight for independence. So the French military in Cambodia basically dissolves overnight because the king told them to leave and he's like a fucking semi-divine figure. So the French realize that they just can't hold the country without this guy, who they'd basically been treating as a big toddler the entire time. So by October, they've had enough and they agree to relinquish all military control of Cambodia to the king.

It'll take another year for France to totally pull out of their former colony, but King Siena had done it. In November of 1953, the French handed over total control in a dumb and self-aggrandizing ceremony. Basically, they frame it as a graduation ceremony like, you people are finally ready to control your own country. That you ran for thousands of years before we came in here. But yeah, all's well. Cambodia's independent. The yoke of colonialism has been cast off and the communists are not in charge. So it seems like things are going great for Siena now and probably nothing terrible will happen in this story. Yeah, that's the end of the podcast. This was really fun. I'm not sure why this guy was such a bastard. I mean, it started kind of bad. That crushing dissent was kind of rude. Anyway, thanks.

Yeah, all right. But no, actually, that is a lie. Oh, it didn't go good. It didn't go good after that? Well, we'll get into that after we sell some products and or see. Do you like products and or services? I love both products and services. And you know what else I love exchanging money for them. Oh, yeah. You know what I love is producing value for shareholders, which is then handed to me in a fraction that I can spend on my own products and services, which create value for other shareholders. What do you know? So let's all do that right now. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup.

Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

We are talking about King Noradam Sienak, who has just succeeded in wangling freedom for his country from the French colonial oppressor, Pig Dogs. So it seems like all is great, except for everything isn't great. Sienak's triumph led to an immediate and bloody escalation of the fighting in Cambodia. The rebels, under that thangai we talked about earlier, argued that the prince was basically a slave of the French. They claimed that his friendly relations with them were proof that he was just a figurehead, and he was going to send Cambodians over to die in Vietnam. So yeah, the fighting continued and it turned out that Sienak wasn't all that good at war. By the middle of 1954 he'd lost about 40% of his territory to the rebels. The fighting was bloody enough that nobody wanted to really keep killing.

And in May, rebel representatives in the king traveled to Switzerland to talk it out with a bunch of other countries, including Vietnam, the US, and for some reason Canada. There's other countries there too. Canada was just the one that made, what is Canada doing? Really good at apologies. Yeah. So this is right around the time, you had North Vietnam and North Korea had already been established at that point. And so the Khmer rebels in the north are like, we want our own separate country. We don't want to be ruled by the king. We want our own like legit democracy and stuff where we can, you know, choose our own path without this king doing whatever the hell he wants. And yeah, so that's their hope going into this, going into the session. The rebels begged the Soviet Union and China to stick up for them, but the US did not want what they assumed would just become a separate communist Cambodia above regular Cambodia.

And the Soviet Union and China weren't willing to fight for the Cambodians. So everybody works out an agreement where the rebels will lay down their arms and elections will be held in 1955. It sounds like Sienok wins this one, but everybody knew that once the elections were held, the Democrats, which were, you know, heavily backed by the rebels, would win. And their most popular candidate would be Than, the guy who had been leading the rebels. So this would have left Sienok as the constitutional monarch of a government that hated him and was definitely going to do whatever it could to turn him into just a figurehead. So the US is happy with this because it means that unlike everywhere else in Southeast Asia, a country was about to happily vote for a democratic government. They actually liked Than. He was pro-US, so they're like, this is a great thing for us. You know, we've established a democracy in Southeast Asia. Let's wash our hands and walk away.

But Sienok is not happy, letting people choose who they wanted to lead them basically ran against all of his deeply held convictions, most of which were that he should be the guy in charge of Cambodia. So in February of 1955, after this agreement is made and the rebels lay down their arms, the king calls a referendum on his royal crusade, you know, the thing that freed Cambodia from the French. And he's basically asking the whole kingdom to vote, do you like me? Yes or no? Voters were told, quote, if you love the king, choose a white ballot. If you don't love the king, a black ballot. Of those voting, 99.8% chose white ballots, saying they loved the king. But the turnout was really low. Not a lot of people super care to vote. 100% of he and his mom. Yeah. 100% of him and his mom calls him fat. 98. Yeah.

So a few days later, you know, he's kind of fuming over the low turnout and he's fuming over the fact that all the polls are saying the Democrats and this guy he doesn't like then are going to win the election. And he winds up renting a house next to a big gathering for the Democratic Party and like listening into one of their speeches and it ends and there's this huge eruption of applause. And according to people who were there with him at the time, he starts weeping with rage when he hears how popular the Democrats are. So he's desperate in his fragile ego. That's some more schoolyard shit. Yeah. Hearing people cheering for like someone else on the dodgeball court. They're not even angry at you. It's like it's not enough to be a beloved king. Like the fact that anybody else is liked is just burning him alive. Yeah. So yeah, he's desperate and his fragile ego can't take being sidelined by some popularly elected politicians. So on March 21st, the king makes a surprise broadcast. Surprise. Oh, yeah.

Oh, not like a fun one, though. It's not like a birthday party. You tell me. I'm going to read the broadcast. My enemies work against me ceaselessly and I should note that anytime there's a me in here, it's spelled with the M capitalized. Oh, royals. Nothing like that will ever happen again and certainly not in our own country. I will say this could almost be a tweet from our current president. Yes, close your eyes and listen and just pretend. Certain of our students who love injustice are determined to serve the Democrats and son Noc Than, the educated, the highly placed and the rich spend their time throwing up obstacles to my work for the sake of their own interest and ambitions. All of this has completely discouraged me and prevents me continuing to reign. If I remain on the throne, I will be unable to work in your interests. My poor and humble subjects freed from my golden cage in the royal palace. I offer my life and my strength to my people. For though I leave the throne, I shall not shirk my duty to serve.

So the king abdicated. He throws down his office. You can't fire me. I quit. Well, the king abdicates. He has his dad become the new king after him because, you know, kings and shit. Yes, I guess that's usually how they do that. So now he's a prince and a private citizen and he's free to run for election against the Democrats. So he creates his own political party. He calls it the people's community. So it would sound like a socialist party, even though it wasn't. All the conservative Cambodians instantly dropped their parties and they flocked to the prince's banner, along with more than a few of the Democrats, because hey, the prince is popular. The prince's party, Senkum, makes a formidable rival to the Democrats, but the king had misjudged a little. His party had no policies and no plans. Its only stated goal was blind support of Prince Sianic. I love that you go, like, as a leader of the party, you go from, like, being actually king, and then when you're running for office to be essentially a king, or like, you know, an executive leader, you get up to make a speech and you're like, I don't know, my plan?

Don't you just call me king or prince? Doesn't it just become prince? I still just go to fat camp, right? I want to be president. My plan is to go back to fat camp, just like it was. It's eerie how well you've predicted this. He's probably stress eating a lot right now, I'm just saying. Oh, God, he must be. Just baguettes all day long. Oh, man. Just pouring chocolate on them and crying. Amazing sandwiches. How could you not? If I was literally, if I was like a Cambodian king, I would be like a feudal lord just walking from street food cart to street food cart. Like, I've come for my offerings, chicken and rice and tea immediately. I will have the duck as well.

This is a mark of the kind of man he is, because he could have legitimately lived that life where he just is rich and beloved and gets fed forever and he could just walk around letting people give him things. That could be his whole life, but instead he wants to be in charge, which only crazy people want. That's true. Only crazy people actually want paperwork. Yes, so the king's party has no policies and no plans, and even with the king's popularity, the Democrats are still slated to win a lot of the seats, and so he's not going to be in absolute power. He's going to have to do a coalition government and be a democracy. The king wants no part in that. So five weeks before the vote, he uses his control of the police and military to launch a massive intimidation campaign against the Cambodian left wing. King Sienek uses the authors of communist and lefty journals and newspapers imprisoned. Several far left candidates are outright murdered.

King Sienek uses the unrest from his repressive tactics to justify a heavy police presence at the voting stations. So he starts arresting people. That leads to protests, which he then uses as evidence that he needs to fill the polling locations with police and soldiers. Left wing voters who were brave enough to go vote were handed colored voting slips, each color representing a party, and they didn't have to put the slip into an urn while officials, police and soldiers watched them. So voter turnout was not great among the Cambodian left wing, but the king still did not do very well. So he had his minions just lie about the vote count in constituencies where his party's candidate finished second. They just outright destroy all the voting slips and murder the winner. Very simple. So there's a lot of, like when the king spoiler alert died in 2012, I think, and when you read the obituaries about him, they're mostly positive in like Western newspapers, and they'll all talk about like, none of them are even consistent about how much he won by.

They'll all say between 84 and 99% of the vote. But nobody, it's frustrating because like the telegraph or something will be like reporting on this and say like, and he won election with 99% of the vote. No, he didn't. He murdered people. Well, the journalism in colonizers nations have a really hard time actually reporting on why. Like the who, what, when, and where is not that hard. But why these things are happening kind of eludes, even still. But I imagine especially the reporting at the time is a little clueless about the why. The weird thing is the reporting at the time when he wins this election, the foreign journalists who are in Cambodia cry foul at the obvious cheating. Like they're like, this is clearly fucked up. Here's all of the different like things that went wrong that were wrong. But the international community sticks their fingers in their ears to the Americans and the French are just happy Cambodia didn't go communist.

And they're kind of like, don't like, who gives a fuck? Who gives a fuck of this country that's not America has a prince dictator now. So the whole mess led one Cambodian voter to conclude taking part in elections is just for propaganda. An election is a power struggle. The one who has power in his hands is the one who controls the outcome. You want to guess who said that? Oh, come on. That's our little buddy. One guess. That's a little, he's got a pot and a pole. That's our little buddy pole pot. That's about as cute as I could make a pole pot reference.

So this is kind of his little origin story. You can't get a fun name if you're a dictator. You shouldn't get something fun to say. It should be clunky. It's hard. I am already ashamed. I keep calling the prince the prince because I am intimidated about getting names wrong. Period. And I apologize. I've written it down phonetically all over my note card, but I'm still going to call him the prince. And pole pot is just so it shouldn't be fun to say. No, it shouldn't. And he has the cutest name of any person who's killed millions of people. Yes. I mean, this list is pretty short.

Chairman Mao, pretty cute name because it makes me think of cats. Sure, yeah, but the chairman part, real heavy. Yeah, the chairman is not a cute name. Pole pot branding is real sharp. Clean. And that's, you got to give credit to the communists. Their branding was on point at this period of time. In this period of time, but that slipped. They paid less attention to the aesthetic as time went on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's very true. So yeah, pole pot at the time of this election is working for the Democratic Party. So he's working for the Democratic Party, but he's also an officer in a secret underground Cambodian Communist Party.

Pole pot and his fellow communists did want to change Cambodia's system of government, but prior to the election, they hadn't wanted a violent war and overthrow or anything. So Mao Zedong, who was basically like the most respected sort of communist philosopher in Asia, had laid out a theory of how to flip countries like Cambodia, who were feudal or colonized nations that didn't have a big labor in class. And he was like how to flip them the communism without bloodshed. So first you needed a democratic revolution where peasants and workers in the bourgeoisie all worked together to supplant the king, kick out the colonizers and gain a democracy. And then Mao said you'd have a normal democracy for decades probably for a very long time and it would be capitalist and that would be that would be fine. And basically the left would gain power gradually over time as people saw the flaws in capitalism until everyone just agreed that communism was a swell idea and you had a peaceful transition to communism.

Well, that worked, right? Well, that's what these guys were wanting to do. So Pol Pot as a young man, right up until this election happens, believes in the democratic process, thinks it's a necessary step on the way towards making a country the way he wants to be, and doesn't want there to be any fighting in his country. You know, they would have been happy with the Democrats winning power and, you know, then just voting for a while. But when Siena cramps, yeah, yeah. Just before I hear about the rest of this, I'm going to say that if you are a guy who kills a million and a half people, be you a prince or fighting against a prince in a democratic party, that's in you before you get that power.

You don't care how you get it. You're a sociopath, so you don't have any moral connection to what you're actually spewing. You just collect and want power, influence, whatever it is. If you, this guy would have, you know, again, if he was just a bad assistant manager, he would have killed everyone in his Arby's. Like, it's, yeah, I feel like these seeds were already planted. Pol Pot and the prince are the same evil born in different soil. I feel like the seeds are there, but I don't feel like they're necessarily getting watered. Like, you've got, I think Pol Pot, for one thing, he's a little different than, like, he's not like a guy like Hitler.

So you get a guy like, like, you've got kind of these two different theories of how to look at history. There's trends and forces, and then there's, like, the great man theory. And, like, it's probably a mix of the two. But you look at, like, in Germany after World War I, there was going to be another fight between France and Germany, because it just howled the whole thing fucking in. Yes. Somebody who was, some strong man asshole was going to take charge of Germany. But because it's Hitler, you have the Holocaust and the invasion of, like, Russia and whatnot.

And I think Pol Pot is more like George W. Bush. Interesting. Well, he kind of, he, like, certain things, like, there was, because of the shit the prince is doing, because he's clamping down on oppression, because he's, he's giving the left no legitimate way to win power, there was going to be a left-wing revolution in Cambodia. And it was worse than it would have been because Pol Pot is the man he is. But I think the prince made it inevitable that this was going to happen. I think him crushing all dissent and, because, like, maybe Pol Pot always would have been an asshole,

but there's, like, it's, I don't know, it's hard to say. Because, like, before this time, he's, like, driving around in a nice car and he's, like, dating, like, rich ladies and, like, wants to be, like, it doesn't seem to want to murder three million people at this point in his life. And I guess, you know, it's debatable as to what would happen. But I don't know. I don't know. If you're the person who can do that, that is in you. And no moral compass, no philosophy you espouse is greater than whatever Synapse fires that lets you kill a million people. But I, I feel like that Synapse is there. You're absolutely right. But I don't know that it necessarily leads to you, because there's got to be, we've probably all worked with someone

who, if they gained power, could kill a million and a half people or whatever. But instead they're a stand-up comedian, because that's just the way life goes. I just think of Jim Jones, who was, like, you know, his politics, if all you did was list out Jim Jones' politics, you'd be like, well, this sounds like a person I probably agree with on most things. And then you're like, oh, but cult leader who killed, who just killed, who killed everyone. Because it's the, you're, you know, it's interesting when the, you agree with the shell of someone and then on the inside is this horrible evil thing. So I feel like even if Pol Pot was like, no, I'm a good guy. I don't believe in colonial power.

I want justice. It's, no, you're somewhere in you. Someone is going to kill a million people. Yeah, that guy was always in here. But. I do, I take your point. Yeah. Because, you know, the prince said in motion something that, you know, you couldn't stop. And Pol Pot is who he is, so it was that.

Well, and you're looking at Cambodia prior to this. It's not a country where most people are biting at the whip to like revolt against the system that exists. But, uh, that starts to change after the prince, you know, brutally suppresses the left wing and essentially makes himself president prince. Which is, you know. Oh, president prince is like an alternate universe. I would love to live in. Exactly. We both pictured exactly what that would be.

Yeah, exactly. Like capitalist purple pants. It would be amazing. And like the white house is like all technicolor because it's like white. But you put the colors laser showing shit. You know what? No one would have died in the war for Afghanistan and it would be so much more colorful. Everyone could dance so well.

Oh, man. Woo. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you for taking me there. Okay, please continue. President, yeah, yeah, yeah. God.

Can you imagine the things he would have done to the white house bowling alley? Oh my goodness. Yeah. It would have been a disco tack and it would have been fucking incredible. God, that cabinet. Yeah. Fire. Okay.

Well, now that we're all happy. Let's get back to talking about Cambodia in the mid fifties. Pol Pot decides that democracy is bullshit and shortly thereafter takes to the jungle with all of his friends and comrades to do a jungle communist shit. So yeah. Sehanok is largely backed by conservatives, but he himself is not a conservative or a leftist. He is a hemmist.

His only guiding moral principle is that he should be in charge of Cambodia. So he doesn't really give a shit about politics. He just wants to be the guy. He's a smart guy. He knows that Cambodia is going to eventually go full communist. He knows the number one power in the region, China is already communist and he knows the United States is going to eventually get fed up with sticking their dick in the whole area and leave Vietnam.

So he figures that his main worry is the Vietnamese. They have a history of bullying Cambodia and they're the main backers of the Cambodian communist movement. So Sehanok comes up with a pretty clever plan. He will let the Vietnamese use his country as a highway for their guns and money first to fight against the French and the U.S. He'll even let tens of thousands of them hide in Cambodia when the fighting isn't going their way.

But they have to stop giving guns to and training the local Cambodian communists. Obviously, this pisses off the United States. So Sehanok's promise to them is that he'll brutally repress the communists in Cambodia. There you go. One hand washes the other. Exactly. That's how you do it. That's how you brutally dictate.

Exactly. So in foreign policy terms, he's in lockstep with the USSR and China. But domestically, he's doing like a triple McCarthy and like everything, like killing all the communists in his own country. So Norodom Sehanok is the only guy who is simultaneously on both sides of the Cold War, for the entirety of the Cold War. Like dancing and dancing and dancing and dancing and dancing. Watch the royal court fall down.

Yeah. Yeah. So the prince's father served as king when the prince first abdicated. When he died in 1960, the Sehanok's mom, Queen Kosimak, wanted to be crowned. But his mom had spent his whole life calling him fat. So the king flips the script on his mom and makes her guardian of the throne, which is a position with no power and instead pushes through a constitutional amendment to make himself head of state for life.

So now by 1960, he is the president and the head of state for life. And that is where we are going to end the podcast for today. And we will be back on Thursday to talk about the rest of Sehanok's wacky career, which is, I mean, it's going to get dark. I bet we're going to hear about some infrastructure improvement. I bet we're going to hear a lot about like Robert's rules and how it was implemented. Are you calling water filtration plants because I got nine pages of water filtration plants to talk about.

I am still looking forward to that. Beer, rock, grassy, beer, rock. That's what's coming, right? That's a good chant. That's a good chant. It's definitely not like death, destruction and horror. I mean, see you next time. Not yet.

See you next time because we have a, we, you should plug some things before we, we roll out for the day and a half between the next podcast. I am Caitlyn Gill and I have a website. It is called CaitlynGillComedy.com and you can go there and then you can see my schedule. It's the tab, you click it and then there'll be a little calendar. You get tickets to any of my live shows. Also July 11th. Miss With Some Monsters comes out on True TV.

Watch it. I'm Robert Evans. I don't have any live shows, but I have a book you can buy it on Amazon. It's called A Brief History of Vice. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK, the two letters, and this show behind the bastards is also on the internet, www.behindthebastards.com. You can also find us on social media at BastardsPod. So check us out, we'll be putting sources and images up so that you can sort of follow

along and get the visual picture of the story. And we will be back on Thursday with part two of this particular bastard's tale. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.