Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 134 - The Khmer Rouge Part 2: Year Zero

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

Episode 134 - The Khmer Rouge Part 2: Year Zero by

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Legion of the Old Crow today Donkeys podcast, part two of our Khmer Rouge series. Nick, how are you holding up, man? Yeah, you know, preparing for these facts that I'm honestly going to hear. I imagine they're going to be worse than the episode. No big deal. Every episode gets worse until the end. So again, I will start by saying content warning.

Everything. And while I didn't get into too many horrible things last episode, Again, I will start by saying content warning, everything. And while I didn't get into too many horrible things last episode, I certainly will this one. And I can't content warning at all by subject. So I'll just say, turn it off. I wish I could. Yeah, I have roped it.

I think this is the first time that we've recorded a series back to back before. And you picked a hell of a one to do it. I tricked you completely, but it's not like I didn't tell you what this is about. I mean, I kind of have an obligation at this point. We've already started recording. You can't back out now. It's in too deep.

So before, as in part one, Nick has the ability at any point if he thinks that we are talking about something too horrible for him or the audience, he can request one animal fact. I can't necessarily tap out, because that would mean it'd be done. Yeah, he can't tap out. You can,

but he cannot. Nick suffers for your sins. Yeah, your brain's already fucked. Yeah, I mean, I researched this and I've said it last episode, but this is probably the only time that I've actually had to put a book down and take a couple days off. That's why this took so long to write this series. Do you think your brain sends you messages by you losing hair and just basically telling you to stop?

I think that might be the high blood pressure I now have. I'm just as healthy as i was when we started this podcast my health has gone down completely it's great like my my my lifestyle hasn't changed i exercise every day i eat very well in comparison to most people but like i have like high blood pressure like my joints hurt like oh that's great So, when we left you last week, the pajama death cult known as the Khmer Rouge had stormed the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, ending the Cambodian Civil War

and deposing the American puppet known as Law Nol, who would go on to... Whenever you say Phnom Penh, I think Hunger Games. Oh, Phnom. Yeah. Oh, man. I'm really unhappy that you just said Hunger Games

anyway this is the Khmer Rouge Hunger Games and it's terrible well you know at the end of the Hunger Games like you have a champion they just like go home and they're like famous yeah I totally would like to be Woody Harrelson the Khmer Rouge is that but nobody wins and nobody goes home and is treated as a champion

it's at the end if PETA killed Khmer Rouge is that, but nobody wins. And nobody goes home and is treated as a champion. It's at the end if PETA killed Katniss for being kind of revolutionary. Not a fan of PETA. At all. He's a terrible name. I know how to decorate a cake so I can camouflage myself into the woods

like an expert. Fuck it, we'll find whatever. A cool specialty. It'd be cooler if you knew how to use a gun, but whatever. I can bake pita bread. We get it. You're named after bread. Jesus Christ.

Anyway, the people of the capital hardened through years of war while scared of their new rulers at first, were just happy the war was over. Fuck, sorry. Lenny Kravitz was in the movie. He was. Lenny Kravitz was not in Cambodia, otherwise he'd be dead.

No, he wasn't. He'd be the first to go. He'd fly away. Boo. Great song. This means I can leave now. No, that's not true. I get booed all the time

and I get to leave now outside of the leadership that being the organization remember almost everyone under arms and what they considered their army was like a team

like very very young child soldier type shit uneducated and mostly illiterate uh most of them had never even been near a big city let alone met the people within it with that live within it which remember they've been being told while out in their jungle camps that you see these motherfuckers in the city all of them are your enemy like they're your blood fucking enemy you cannot like these people they're they're like the great satan right i mean that's how it is anywhere when people look at big city people that's fair i mean that's a that's a traditional divide that you see in a lot of shit and it's because they're so much easier to hate like they're the other you don't see them you don't

intermingle with them you know um so it's easier to blame those people in the city for all of your problem like you would have more rights if wasn't for those people in phnom penh you'd be wearing shoes if it wasn't for them i wouldn't have forced you to wear car tires on your feet if it was you'd be able to jerk off we didn't have to fight those people yeah um so at this time uh people had been pressed into service a lot especially most of these kids it's not like they enlisted uh so uh and some were willing to volunteer like there's some hardline believers in pol pot or the organization they didn't know who pol pot was hey is this where i could join the funk i'm here to to like it's someone with like big hair and platform shoes

or whatever like i'm here for the funk. Yeah. You're in the wrong place, motherfucker. And they were... Some were hardline total believers, but many weren't. When they were busy fighting, they would... Or when they weren't busy fighting, they'd spent their free time doing those criticism sessions and then getting hit with hours of political education. It's not a great life, but they have

been told this entire time, this city is your main enemy. Now they're in the city. Pol Pot saw the city as being full of enemies. After all the people who lived in the city had been Law and Law loyalists, right? Or they fled his

army's advance, so they clearly could not be trusted. Like he had done in the countryside, he needed to destabilize this population so he could control them better. Because remember, out in the villages, he's moving people around, he's splitting up families, he's

just mixing people around just so they can be disorganized and afraid and dependent on them. So that's what he wanted to do, which is not great. This is a plan called Year Zero. Now, an easy way to understand the idea of Year Zero is to think of

the Chinese Cultural Revolution if instead of it ending and then them realizing it didn't work, they just started banging steroids into its veins to make it even more powerful. Pol Pot thought the Chinese Cultural Revolution was a good start, but not extreme enough. He not only wanted to destroy anything resembling Cambodian tradition and history, he also wanted to destroy anything connected to modern life. Remember, his favorite Soviet leader was Joseph Stalin,

who rapidly industrialized the USSR with an iron fist. Pol Pot wanted to do the opposite. He went to de-industrialize Cambodia and do it in such a way that probably J. Stahls would respect it, which I think this is the first time that anybody ever tried to de-industrialize a nation certainly quit like this but in order to

launch his plan he'd have to get rid of all these fucking city folk bastards the Khmer Rouge warned everyone that an American bombing raid was coming targeting the capital specifically to punish the Khmer Rouge for winning. And in order to protect its civilian population, he ordered the entire population of the city

to be evacuated. Now, there was no bombing. He just wanted to evacuate the city. He knew at this point, people would be fucking terrified of this. Because remember, we bombed the shit out of Cambodia. If somebody said they were going to bomb the capital at this point people like oh shit they're going to bomb the capital like this is a hundred percent a believable lie but nobody need to bring anything we just need to evacuate for a couple days and then we'll come back

just like run out with the clothes on your back walk down the road start following everybody because it's like a human chain of millions of people fleeing the city right and I think they said it was for like a grand total of three days so don't worry about it um within 24 hours about 80 percent of the city's 2.5 million people were expelled wow this was not always voluntary people were forced out of their homes at gunpoint by teenage Khmer Rouge fighters. And if people still refuse,

they were shot or beaten to death. They were forced out into the roads towards a government run farms that had been kind of sort of set up. Not really. The idea of farms was there. Like there wasn't housing for these people. There wasn't food for these people anywhere that they're going. If you happen to be young or old or otherwise could not keep up you're allowed to drop dead on the side of the road if anyone's allowed to yeah it was like it's the we allow

this one thing um if anybody stopped to help you you'd be. If anybody stopped at all, to slow the flow of human traffic in any way, they would also be killed. Normally, again, by having your head caved in. Nobody was allowed to keep anything. If you brought something with you, like a lot of people brought food, that'd be stolen from you. At best case scenario, it would just

be taken. Worst case scenario, they'd kill you for not listening to them. During the evacuation of phnom penh at least 20 000 people died holy shit yeah um forcing the the city population not just phnom penh but other cities as well out into the countryside was a huge part of that so-called year zero idea. It forced people to abandon all aspects of modern life and submit completely to the Khmer Rouge. The government soon followed suit by abandoning what could be considered the most ways of governing that most countries govern with. The country was officially renamed Democratic Kampuchea, and most links to the outside world were completely

and totally severed. All foreigners were expelled or killed. And this includes Vietnamese troops. They pulled back to what they considered their border, which included a large chunk of what Cambodia considered Cambodia. But everybody was pulling out. There's constant firefights between both sides. And those would not stop. I'm not going to talk about them until just about the fourth episode.

But just throughout all of this, Vietnam and Cambodia are pretty much at war. They're shooting at each other openly, ra each other's uh like uh borders though the like the khmer rouge is just randomly invading vietnam in some points um it's very very weird um at this point the only real connection that anybody has with what was cambodia is china uh so like i just said the only country that have routine communications with them was china but it wasn't like you would expect like you know i said that china's setting them up to be a proxy government like you're gonna you can do whatever you want this campachea shit but you work for us right it wasn't like that um they tried and then pol pot kind of just ignored them um since the

sino-soviet split and the end of the Vietnam War, China had been looking for a way to counteract Soviet influence over Vietnam, who had kind of told China to go fuck himself. I'll go into more on the history of the Sino-Soviet split in episode four. But it was... China and Vietnam also have historical animosity.

This isn't just a communist based beef here. There's a lot of hate between the two nations. But what was easier and a better way to pressure them was not only having China on their border, but also having a pliant Cambodian regime right on their border as well. So they could use them as like a thorn in the side. And, you know, China is giving them a fucking ton of military equipment they know is just gonna be fired across the border at vietnam and also into the heads of cambodians um now while china originally intended to use pol pot to run a nation dominated by their larger partner china quickly lost control of pretty much everything pole pot would be unfazed by any chinese objections to his insane uh his

weird fucking plans and eventually china would just stop objecting like yeah you do you bro like this wasn't like no you please stop killing people uh no they didn't care in 1975 pole pot and the rest of his inner circle or the organization or whatever the fuck they're calling themselves, the supervillains of, of Kampuchea went to China and talked to Zhao Enlai. Uh, Enlai was sick at the time, but was pretty fucking worried about Pol Pot's plans in Cambodia. plans in Cambodia. He was worried that Pol Pot was going to do and kind of recreate their own mistakes, which Enlai

was kind of sort of trying to fix, you could call that. It was a warning. He said that Pol Pot shouldn't attempt to create communism in one step without a transitional step, which is kind of a foundational idea of communist thought of that transitional step of socialism. kind of a foundational idea of communist thought of that transitional

step of socialism. In China, they consider this the era of new democracy, or when they allowed things like landlords and other semi-bougie aspects to take part in the economy to ease things into what they could consider a socialist system. China yeeted that idea into the sky

and then they did their great leap forward with horrible outcome so in line knew a thing or two about fucking up the game plan the cambodian leadership completely ignored them uh and like like i said everybody kind of figured pol pot was kind of dumb and again like he's breaking it down very very easy like if you do this you're gonna kill so many people um and that leads to like uh one like one of the kamir ruj's most important sayings which kind of frames their entire existence it's like to keep you as to is no gain and to lose you is no loss yeah it pretty much just means you can do what the fuck you want great so like you couldn't warn them like this like if Zhao

is like you're gonna kill like half of your fucking population he's like okay didn't need him work before they die so it's all good so as far as Pol Pot was concerned society only consisted of four classes peasants workers

bourgeoisie capitalists and feudalists his idea was to force everyone into the peasant class or destroy them the word they use a lot is smash them like it's a very powerful word

that the camaraderie like they say smash your enemies smash it always just means kill. Uh, there, there, there's no, they're not very reform minded people. Um,

and because he kicked everybody out of the cities, the only industrialized working class of the country in, in their few factories had been forced out into the fields. Um, the only pre-industrial working class of any real strength were rubber farmers who were mostly vietnamese therefore already dead or running for their lives so he he's killing a lot of different classes uh it's almost like he's really fucking bad at this um and what class you happen to be really didn't matter much.

If you're a poor rice farmer, but also didn't like the Khmer Rouge, you're as much as enemy of the state as a capitalist or a feudalist for that matter. It didn't fucking matter. Their ideas were based on consciousness. So I need to make this very clear. This is not the modern idea of consciousness. Not like class consciousness. Not like being aware of something, of a struggle.

Like you could be infected by a foreign soul. Almost like Law and Noel would be rolling chicken bones and trying to fucking figure out what was going on. He thought the same thing right like that the idea of classes was just more of like a woo vibe to him it was very

very weird in short all of this happened because china couldn't control her own fucking boy that they sent out there now something could be said that china couldn't control him because pol pot didn't know how to govern so he didn't know what he was doing and he largely made no real attempt to do so it's one of those situations where you go into uh you know a problem situation whatever and you go into that talking to

them like they're a rational person. I'm speaking to another adult. We're going to handle this like rational adults. And maybe guide them the right way. Only to recognize that even their base ideas are so separated from reality that you kind of can't. It's one of those... If you were to talk to someone about... I've actually had this

conversation before someone was very into um very into like activism against like human trafficking um which is like something that most people are against but like as you talk to them more and more in like how you would talk to anybody you realize that they're a q anon guy. So it's like, oh, okay. Like, you know, China got involved with Pol Pot because he's a communist. He's a communist revolutionary. And then they talk to him more and more and they're like, oh, fuck.

You know, like that's the relationship that I see. But they don't break it off. Now, during some of this government, that's the relationship that I see, but they don't break it off. Um, now during some of this government, uh, this governance, if you want to call it that they did publish a constitution that included elections.

Their only elections were held in 1979 with a magical voter turnout number of 98%. Um, yeah, it's that now that 98% number must have been very hard to hit as anybody who is considered a new person or new people that was being city dwellers we're not allowed to vote or take part it's almost like they're fake um though none of this matters because the body of government they were elected to had no actual powers to do anything. I believe they were called the Supreme Soviet

or the Supreme Constitutional Assembly. That is completely pointless. It was not a job. It's not a real position. Everything was decided by dictate by Pol Pot. They tossed aside the entire legal system of old Cambodia, saying they'd have to start their own based around the people's courts.

People's courts were never made, however. They also had to throw out their old police forces, never really establishing anything that you would consider to be called police. Instead, they formed the Santibal. Or the Santibal. I'm not entirely sure

which one it is. It meant Keepers of the peace and they fell eventually under the command of king keck lou otherwise known as comrade dutch um we'll talk much more about him next episode um now the santa ball had no real training other than political ideology and while they were supposed to act as police they were pretty much the Gestapo their power came from abject

fear but also a massive massive system of snitches that included men women and children remember how we talked about that self-criticism thing oh that but at a national level because remember it's considered unclean to have uh kind of revolutionary

thoughts or even so much as to witness something that's kind of revolutionary and not talk about it so yeah um it's like they bred untrustworthiness and snitching into a new society um there would be multiple snitches in the same family groups, all of them ratting on one another. At first, many people used this newfound power to settle old scores, getting people they didn't like hauled away. But soon, all those people

were gone because the Santa Paul wasn't investigating people. So much as being denounced, which is as easy as like, I denouncedounced nick he's kind of revolutionary that's as good as fucking you're as good as guilty you're dead people are being sent to fucking prison i mean they were but that's also a death sentence um there was something of a system in place where like you'd be warned and you'd be almost like a three-strike system you'd

be given a warn a warning and a second warning, third warning, you're gone. They didn't say it that way. It's like, you'll be reeducated. But re reeducation is a death sentence. Um, but most of the time what happened is you got accused of something.

You'd be fucking gone. Um, but remember you've, you've created a, a self fulfilling cycle here, right? Once you've gotten rid created a a self-fulfilling cycle here right once you've gotten rid of all those people right you can't stop snitching on people

real or imagine whatever these crimes may be uh because then the santa ball would assume that now you're hiding something leading you to be hauled away so it was in your best interest to just make shit up in order to save yourself. Did you imagine the guy that was there for the first struggle meeting? He's like,

Yeah, I've been here six times. Still alive. Grand champion baby. Oh, actually, hubris is counter-revolutionary. Fuck. I noticed that you're wearing airwalks, comraderade where are your sandals

he stole them deflect attention now when you worked for the Santa ball not that like you had a choice it was like you work for the Santa ball now and you're like okay because like not wanting to work for the Santa ball was also

a crime? Say when you work for them, there was something of a quota to meet. And Santa Ball agents themselves were not immune to falling for this trap. Their superiors never accepted the idea that their agents weren't fighting enough people because maybe they could have killed

all the theorized enemies of the people. That was never thought of. Instead, you sucked at your job or you were an enemy, which would cause other agents to make shit up to get them arrested in order to make them look good. In short, they had not only turned an entire society into snitches who would rat each other out in a never-ending Ouroboros, but also the government.

Their own government began consuming itself almost immediately they're like there's so many people who are part of the quote organization there were almost immediately disappeared because somebody accused them of a coup right or like saying something against pol pot or you know hoarding rice or whatever like almost immediately with the exception of like four dudes pretty much everybody gets fucking annihilated at one point. It almost makes the East German Stasi look tame in comparison, which is world-renowned for the

amount of snitches they had on their payroll. It fucking sucks. Now, Nick, this is where I get to say, wait, it gets worse. I'm still trying to wrap my head around all these snitches. I just can't believe it. Like, at this point, like, you could... We'll talk about it a little bit more,

but, like, you couldn't, like, confide in anyone. Like, nobody had friends, because everybody that you confided in was like, man, I'm fucking tired. Like, oh, God, I'm getting drunk. Being tired is kind of revolutionary. You couldn't hold water and tell somebody some shit. No, you just had to sit down and all, like,

so, Nick, I see that you're starving. I can see your ribs through your back. You're limping from some horrible, untreated malady. And I just killed your brother. How's everything going? Oh, I'm fine. Everything's great. I love it here.

Now, if you happen to be one of the people i got read it on you get some bad news like i said there's no burden of evidence here other than someone accusing you of doing something and the santa paul would just vanish you into a death camp which we will talk about at length next episode now we've already talked about one kamar rouge philosophy that is to lose you is no loss to keep you is no gain um there's another philosophy that makes a lot of sense when you think of the Santa ball. And that is, quote, it is better to arrest 10 people by mistake than let one guilty person go free. Which is like the exact opposite of how that's supposed to be. We'd rather kill 90% of people.

we'd rather kill 90% of people and looking at that slogan you have to assume arrest means murder because you do not see many accounts of someone being arrested by the Santa ball and then the Santa being like oh shit my B dude I just imagine turns out you're a good dude everybody's just dying pretty much yeah this is the whole

is this this the Khmer Rouge killed a country they killed a country more thoroughly than the nazis did um as for running the country there was no real governing body once in charge the communist party then known as the communist party of campuchea or cpk didn't make themselves publicly known okay just. Just like the idea of there being a communist party like nope can't talk about it. Top secret shit. Try not to die around here.

At this point anybody that did know about them existing simply still call them the organization. Though at what they eventually started going in and out between like calling themselves the organization and calling themselves in car because they wanted to make themselves like,

like they didn't want to like consider themselves the government. They want to consider themselves like quite literally Cambodia embodied because like ain't car watt and ain't car are pretty much like interchangeable for Cambodia. Right. Um, and so they're like, no,

no, no, we're not the communist party. We're not the organization. We are Cambodia. and so they're like no no no we're not the communist party we're not the organization we are cambodia all decisions were made by pol pot or his second in command uh now and che who was now known as brother number two and uh pol pot known as brother number one um some people were brought uh in to make choices well. There's like brothers up to like brother number four. The group called now call themselves the center organization was better.

The organization is much better. Yeah. Whatever they came up with was immediately considered law by decree. And this is generally like they didn't keep a lot of internal files. It was mostly like they didn't. We know a lot of the most evil shit the Nazis did because they kept meticulous notes.

And the Khmer Rouge did a lot of that as well, especially in S21 and stuff. But when it comes to official documents from the center or the organization, not a lot survived. They just wrote it on their hand. Just Snapchat to one another. But it's generally considered

while the center came up with almost everything in any way that ran the government, it was mostly just Pol Pot. And those were considered his advisors. There's no voting going on here. It was only two years later, in 1977, that the Communist Party would admit that it simply exists and that pol pot was its leader oh nice a good reveal they've been in charge for two years imagine if we had no idea who the president was

oh that's illegal no uh yeah you can't can't have parades. Parades aren't happening. Imagine we didn't know who Congress was or the president. I mean, granted, that would be better in some ways. But like, oh, something happened in the country. Who did it? Just some dude comes up. Oh, hey, by the way, I'm in charge. What's up? Just as some dude comes out, oh, hey, by the way, I'm in charge.

What's up? And also, like, most people, about 99% of people, still had no fucking idea who Pol Pot was. Even though that's not his name, he would just go by Brother Number One if you knew anything at all about him. There wasn't even a picture until the last year of the Khmer Rouge's existence. Do you think, uh, he ever,

somebody ever saw him just walking around, whatever. Hey, you're the idiot that kept failing the test back in school. Uh, pointing out my personality flaws, kind of revolutionary. And like,

you know, they evacuated Phnom Penh, but that's where the government's ran by. So it's not like nobody ever sees him do anything. He's walking around an abandoned city. I did this? Somebody called Phnom Penh

Hiroshima without the destruction and Pompeii without the volcano. Like, just completely fucking empty. That's fucking crazy. Yeah. It was a city for millions of people now suddenly like a couple thousand khmer rouge soldiers and like party functionaries living in now i wouldn't be able to imagine that at all it's fucking creepy um and some of the decisions at that the center

put into place were beyond comprehension for first of all all ideas of modern life were done away with. There'd be no more school, no more hospitals. Even borders of their providences were done away with. Instead, they divided the country up into exact squares on a map, like a chessboard, without

taking into account what was actually in those plots of land. Now, there's a reason for this that's so incredibly dumb. So the Khmer Rouge's logo, more specifically the People's Assembly logo, happens to have perfectly square rice fields in the background of it. That being like the seal, right? Like this is a cartoon, effectively. It's art.

But they figured, well, if it's on the People's Assembly logo, that's how the country should look. This being something that someone fucking drew. And they're like, yep, make it look like squares. That's not how the real world works.

That's why sometimes, like, you know, people have a tendency to consider people insane when they make very bad decisions. I'm willing to give them this one. This is fucking nuts. Imagine being the one farm that just isn't perfectly square. You're fucked. Oh shit,

my corner's rounded. Corner's rounded? That's kind of revolutionary. It just didn't grow in right. Now, within the Constitution allowed uh there was no allowance given for a regional government of any kind so like what we would affectionately be like there's no county or state governments now all of it's good there's only an car only the organization can be in charge where do you reside in um uh square one kind of yeah um like or like all of those um administration names gone that like they completely redesigned the country and seemingly overnight

uh because they didn't think that the regional governments would be important um they were they they thought it'd be pointless because everybody's living on their farms that we've created for you. Why would you need a local government? So outside of this small, outside of this government, which remember, you have no fucking idea what it is. Because if you lived in Phnom Penh, where the government is located, you now don't. And there's no news anywhere because radios are fucking illegal. There's no TV. Cell phones haven't been invented yet.

So like, and you're certainly not getting any newspapers. So like, you're just like this weird fucking 15 year old with an AK forced me out in this farm. Who's making these choices? But yeah, they didn't think that there would be any need for any kind of government. Because what are you gonna do go petition them for grievances or something like the most that you would like the first line of government you'd see was

like a Khmer Rouge soldier who's probably a teenager threaten you with a fucking at Maddox pick handle or whatever to farm harder or whatever though in charge of all these government farms there be be a three-person committee that would take the face of the khmer rouge government up to the point that their powers were absolute within that farm um like and that's this decentralization kind of happens at all

layers of cambodian society to include the military now known as the revolutionary army of Campuchia. Uh, once they take out, once they've taken over, one of the first things they did was kill everybody who had any connection to the old army as one does when they end up on this podcast. Normally, um,

the command of the army was never truly centralized though. Technically it fell under the command of Pol Pot and they had a minister of defense. Not really. During the Civil War, branches of fighters just kind of operated out on their own with no input whatsoever in any kind of overall command structure. Now, during the revolution, this had a benefit that nobody really thought of because it made the

insurgency impossible to stop it was effectively a leaderless resistance right it's like uh people generally think of like the taliban as being like this rigid structured control thing but it's not it's like very regionalized people are fighting like with an hour from where they live type shit. Feasibly, if your village wanted to join the Khmer Rouge, but the Khmer Rouge was not there yet, you could just be like, we're Khmer Rouge now. It's impossible to end, but eventually that ended and they took over

and now they needed an army. You effectively created a weird and now they need an army. Well, you effectively created weird, a weird fiefdom of an army with like different warlords in charge. Uh, so that, that was a problem. Um, it worked for the insurgency,

but as a standing army, it was completely counteractive. Um, now there, the, the country was split off into like military zones with the little chunks of the the Campuchian army stuck out there in order to watch over it, mostly to guard communal farms from itself, mostly being executions and things like that, because the army also did a lot of that. Um, now since they didn't have a command structure to follow, um, every army's zone of control was in control by a three man team to what they considered military officers, which were not actual military officers cause they shot all that.

Oh, okay. And one political officer. Now, if you remember from our, uh, winter war series, which one of these group of people do you think had more power? The military officers or the political one? I imagine the political. Yep! Nice! Technically, they were supposed to vote on all of their decisions. However, the political

officer could outrule them by themselves. Now, these groups would run their zones of control as faces of the government, which meant they had total power. That means they can make their own choices, do their own things. Occasionally, one zone's military unit would be sent to invade another because Pol Pot would accuse that military zone's commander to being counter-revolutionary or disloyal.

Really? So it was very common for different groups of the army to be regularly going to war against one another because one group had been accused of something. So they effectively created an institutional civil war to keep the military in check.

This fucking sucks. I have never seen anything like that before in any period of history I've ever fucking studied. No. These aren't power struggles. This isn't like... Now, eventually, there was people who may or may not have been attempting coups.

They were accused of attempting coups, whatever. Nobody's marching on Phnom Penh to depose Pol Pot, but he's ordering one random group of soldiers to invade the other. It's kind of incredible. I think a lot of it was power checks. Most tyrants end up starting a very top-heavy army because they just promote loyal people to generals and field marshals and stuff. Right. And that has a side effect of making a very incompetent

military because nobody who's actually good ever gets promoted like look at the iraqi army under saddam hussein or you know uganda under edie amin any of those people um generally dictatorships have shit armies for that exact reason so instead to not do that because remember they're supposed to be strictly year zero communists and giving you the rank of field marshals counter-revolutionary, I'll just make you constantly fight one another so nobody's truly powerful.

Right? That's what I get out of it. How is he doing this faceless? You get orders from the organization. Fuck. I wonder if it came in a cool envelope. Envelopes? Kind of revolutionary.

Oh, sorry. It's the only effective way to send a letter in the Khmer Rouge. You actually have to write it on somebody's chest and then just walk over to them and show them because owning like paper kind of revolutionary um it almost is believable from everything you tell me i mean like we'll talk about it a little bit more but like quite honestly being someone who is educated enough to be literate was suspicious like they didn't like you that much which remember like pol pot's a fucking teacher so was like uh comrade dutch i believe sansen is a fucking teacher as well like almost all these fucking people are teachers but remember they just made school illegal yeah very weird

stuff um so let's talk a little bit more about these farms right i said families i don't mean families um these areas would be farmed by a group of 15 to 20 groups these are generally in most uh like the book i used uh michael vickery's cambodia called them families but that's more of a term, not an actual thing. They're called a crumb. Um, while some of these families did manage to stay together, most were just simply random groupings of people.

Um, because when the means of control they did was splitting up families, um, people tended to not, um, like stand up against people beating the shit out of people if they weren't family. People weren't going to risk their lives or whatever for people they didn't know.

And also, this is also communal. Families weren't considered families anymore. That was considered a hierarchical fucking part of society is having a family with a mom and a dad and a kid or whatever. You know what I mean? Um, these were like just groups like you would be taking, say you're married and you have a kid,

um, and you lived in Phnom Penh and you didn't just get murked when you're leaving. Like, okay, come with us, get on the back of this fucking truck. Your wife and kids are going that way.

And you just go out to a cram or whatever, meet with 15 other groups of random people I'd be like you live together now make it work I wonder if there was like the Joker who was like well guard if you knew my wife this is a blessing and then he just gets got probably yeah on that time

I'd be like thank you Santa ball thank you for that yeah and like you know it wasn't that there was like some commune out there for what uh for wives and mothers and kids or whatever then they would be further separated uh and then like your wife would be sent to a different farm with a different group of men and women and children would all be sent somewhere else like they didn't they didn't care about where you ended up and it was just another level of control um i mean that was

another tradition that they wanted to smash which is the term that they used and that is a family that's all like they wanted to smash the concept of a family um children were separated from their parents husbands from wives um i quite literally they didn't want children to have parents the only person that was allowed to raise their kid was Ankar the organization nice alright the children would be separated into communes of their own where they'd spend their time doing

back-breaking labor as well as forced political education from father and mother Ankar if children refused well you already know how that ends. There's no discrimination if they're kids or not. They actually had a specific tree that they'd grab children by their ankles

and swing their heads into until they died. Yep. Thanks for that. Yeah. It's one of those facts that most people know about the Khmer Rouge. They had a very specific child-killing tree. They did. those facts that most people know about like the Khmer Rouge like they had a very specific child killing tree they did and sometimes it wasn't even the

fact that your kid who is now stripped from you refused to learn Pol Pot thought or whatever sometimes say like they know that they killed like they killed you and your wife and your kid is survived like well now the kid might grow up swear vengeance against Khmer Rouge gotta kill the kid too oh yeah like those movies yeah we

can't have fucking cambodian batman in here you gotta kill him um now also your traditional marriage illegal you're not married anymore gone um because remember gotta smash tradition instead you'd be forced into a revolutionary marriage on your farm with your new family. And no, you didn't have a choice in who that was. Like, eh, that one. That one's your wife. Oh, it's like when the teachers pick your partner for projects. Fuck, I hated that.

Now, they also believe that a higher birth rate than what was normal in Cambodia for the time would be important for their year zero plan. Because remember, they need Cambodian kids who are born into Ankar, not raised by their parents and to work the fields. Cause they believe like, um, going back to the Khmer empire,

which is historically known to be very, very rich. They believe the reason why it was very, very rich is because it had a lot of rice. So they believed to become very, um, very, uh,

prosperous. Cause obviously communists don't want to be rich, hypothetically. They just needed a lot of rice. In order to make a lot of rice, got to have a lot of field hands. So our new generation of kids, which are notoriously not great at manual labor, but whatever. But they also wanted a new group of children. Quite honestly, they consider this entire generation group of children quite honestly they this they consider

this entire generation of cambodians awash because they're already contaminated even the peasants aren't peasant enough because they weren't raised by mother ankar okay so their plan was for all of these new revolutionary marriages to fuck constantly and give them plenty of kids which could then be snatched away and raised by Ankar. But because this birthright was very important, it meant they had to be sure that you was fucking. And they did this by forcing you to consummate your marriage

the same night you were forced to be married while someone watched. Oh. It was institutional revolutionary rape because neither one of these two people can consent to this. Oh. It was institutional revolutionary rape. Because neither one of these two people can consent to this. Right. And if you didn't, you know how that ends. Was there a tree for that?

No, adults are harder to swing. You just get the pickaxe. Jason found a way. Okay, at this point, I'm calling animal fact time. Jesus Christ. All right. Rats laugh when tickled. That's kind of adorable.

Yeah, a study was conducted at the University of Berlin to explore what happens in the human brain when we're tickled. National Geographic wrote that the testing on rats showed that they, in fact, love to be tickled, especially on their backs. Oh, fuck, that's cool. When tickled, rats let out an extremely high-pitched sound, which is now associated

with laughing. They even began to search for the experimenter's hand and when they stopped to ask for more. That's adorable. I love that. You can't do that to certain rats, though. I wouldn't go around

trying to tickle strange rats. Not around here, anyway. You can't go to L.A. rats and try to tickle. Try to tickle the back of a New York rat. Hey! I'm fucking ratting you!

Fuck off, you cunt! It gets on its fucking two legs. Takes your wallet. Pulls a knife out and starts stabbing you in the chin. So, I personally knew that. You haven't tapped out yet. I tapped out first and I wrote these

fucking words. Jesus Christ. That's probably why. You've been exposed to it longer. I had to revisit this. So, we also have a net gun just in case Joe gets out of hand. You get pinned into a corner, shot with a net gun just in case joe gets out of hand you get pinned into a corner shot with a net gun and given a tranquilizer yeah just in case you lose it so no matter your age education or position no matter what it had been uh when you were um in phnom penh or whatever

your city was or even some of these fucking farmers like it's not like when all this revolution happened, they're like, oh, well, you were farming this land before. You can just keep on farming it. You're good. Absolutely not. That didn't happen. You got fucking shuffled up in this as much as everybody else. You were put to work on these farms, no matter what you did beforehand.

We make jokes about the Great Leap leap forward in the cultural revolution where like chinese attempted to make um like steel smelting or iron smelting fucking uh furnaces and peasants backyards making pig iron despite they have no idea what they're doing right and how dumb of an idea that was they tried to do this with farmers i don't know how to fucking farm but they're like i would be the worst fucking farmer i i would just be like you know just fucking kill me dude like we both already know that's how this ends my output wouldn't be good like i would i'd come up with one grain of rice didn't meet the quota oh yeah we'll talk they did have quotas that we'll talk about but yeah yeah spoiler alert the real high

unreasonable yes like and nobody knows how to farm at this point because like the urban population is massive and they're definitely imagine going out to your communal farm like okay which one of you guys is a farmer

like I work in IT I had a podcast could you imagine us on a fucking square all right get to farming yeah all right i'll make a podcast about farming uh also things get worse because remember the de-industrialization of everything this is that that means the death of large-scale machining and factories. So there's no way to repair any farm equipment.

Because they were fine using farm equipment. However, they shot themselves in the dick because they destroyed all the ways to repair and produce farm equipment by getting rid of all the people who knew how to repair and fucking manufacture farm equipment. Do you think behind closed doors?

You're like, fuck shouldn't have done that. I'm starting to think, uh, we should have started at year five. Um, furthermore, like I said in the last episode,

uh, no preparation was made for this. Nothing like nobody's like, Hey, this farm land that normally had a couple of families working on it. We're going to stuff like 10,000 dudes on Nothing. Nobody's like, hey, this farmland that normally had a couple families working on it, we're going to stuff like 10,000 dudes on it.

Nobody made it. Yeah, nobody had any preparation for this at all. So all these people just forcing the countryside to farm. And you know, at first there's some farm equipment

that could be repaired, but there's not nearly enough of it to go around, which would then break down. So almost all work was done by hand. So that's great. So remember, as I've said, Pol Pot is not a deep thinker. He thought of an idea and just kind of did it.

They had the force of a dictator behind it now. They had the force of a dictator behind it now. He forced millions of people into the countryside, vastly changing the demographics of a country seemingly overnight, quite literally in 24 hours. One of the oversights there was there's no food stockpiled in any of these new areas for the quote unquote new people where they were being sent to. So people began to starve immediately. We'll talk a little bit more about the famine that he caused in a minute money was now illegal um what surprise more things are illegal right um he's shooting from the hip at this point yeah he's like how can we make how can i fuck things up worse i saw someone exchange five dollars for a hamburger. It's illegal.

Which part? I was waiting in line behind somebody who was waiting for their change. Pissed me off. And I had to wait 10 whole seconds. You know what? Change. It's illegal now. Bartering and exchange. We should make writing checks.

That takes too long. I get in line. I don't like seeing that come out. You know what? Let's make the money illegal, but let's also make all the things that we were in line for illegal as well. Everybody's like, ah, yes, good idea. Now, barter and exchange

would be the only method of any kind of economy. And also, certain aspects of their own language, like titles and honorifics, like calling you Sergeant illegal. Grand chancellor is what I like to tell my soldiers to call me also illegal.

Um, the con, even the concept of ethnic minorities and religion was officially illegal. Now, more into that, the ethnic minorities and religions were made illegal because this sounds crazy, because it is. But the government would just force various ethnic groups to becoming Khmer, the dominant group of Cambodia, by changing their names,

making their own languages illegal, making their their own language is illegal and also their own religions um afterwards any hint of those things yeah so like chams uh which is a uh muslim minority within cambodia have their own language that's illegal as is islam as is being a cham so if they can't speak that's fucked yeah that's literally a genocide so like there's a lot there's many different steps of genocide some of them is like destroying targeted things like places of worship

like mosques and buddhist temples they did that some of them is targeting clergy and the young they did that destroying cultural heritage like your fucking language like what we did to native Americans, you're going to go to boarding schools where you have a biblical name and

only speak English, or, you know, we'll send you back to the reservation, which is functionally a concentration camp full of starving people. And you can't grow food or hunt there. Like those things are all, those,

those things all are parts of a genocide, which is what the khmer rouge did to cham muslims um like uh another part children being forcefully taken from them either to be smashed quote unquote or to be turned into good khmers as they consider them um but for the most part chams specifically a lot of mass killings um there wasn't a lot of they'd break up the communities because they all mostly live together as most minorities do generally stay around one another because of shit like this um yeah but that's how they destroyed the Muslim population of Cambodia. And a lot of them were killed.

I believe it was something like 80%, 90%. It was an incredible number. So that is the aspect of the Cambodian genocide that most people don't know about. They assume that the genocide is just the millions of people that the Khmer Rouge killed. And while targeting people that you consider to be enemies of the people and counter-revolutionary or non-communist or whatever is a crime against humanity, it does not make a genocide. But targeting people and doing what they did to the muslims buddhists um buddhist clergy specifically uh the the vietnamese the thai and the chinese that were all in cambodia those make a genocide so this is like a horrible despotic crime against humanity

machine of human suffering on top of a genocide. Great, huh? Yeah. I don't know why I do this podcast. I'm going to hit you with animal fact. Ducks love to surf. Really? Ducks love to go catch a wave or two in the deep blue sea. They've been observed riding the waves of the ocean to shore and then swimming

back out again to do it all over. That's fucking awesome. Yeah, I'm a fan. I like the waves. I like swimming in swimming waves i don't know how to surf um i'm being outsmarted by a duck i don't know how to surf either so i i don't have the the coronation to make me think that'd be successful at that so i don't even bother trying uh okay yeah i see that yeah i mean you know me well enough to yep watch you tripped over your own feet probably not gonna do great in the ocean um stepped on my toes before yeah yeah so back to

that barter system you're probably wondering well what the fuck are they bartering they don't have anything well because remember they weren't allowed to bring anything from their homes they're all stripped of everything people don't have food anymore so bottle caps huh like fallout shit uh it's actually it's actually worse than that so everyone got a government mandated uh daily ration of a few tins of rice meaning like a tin cup not very big it's i think it might be about one literal cup like a measurement cup oh wow um at least at first that number would go down uh because they would run out of food uh but you'd get a couple of these tins of rice every day meaning that that's one thing that everybody has which means soon that rice became the most valuable thing that anybody had because of all the like the starving that's already happening so people would literally have to barter

with their own food if you needed anything like some fucking clothes which would not be provided for you or even some over-the-counter medicine that somebody had smuggled because remember that's illegal rubber sandals shoes fucking

a belt like literally any whatever you needed the only thing that you could do is barter your own meal for it which by the way is already a fucking starvation ration so you better like think long and hard do i really need this um like hospitals and schools were shut down like i said um this had something to do with pol pot's deep hatred for anybody who could be be considered a professional class that being teachers doctors nurses and other people uh and you know pol pot was a private school teacher so he should have hit him he hated every he obviously he hated himself too like how yeah like nobody knows how many

teachers he personally knew he ended up killing because he was a teacher for years. So he had to have ended up killing a lot of his former co-workers. Like thousands of teachers are murdered. Doctors are massacred in large numbers. This soon blossomed into something of a blood orgy of anybody who even happened to look educated. Now, there's something famous about the Khmer Rouge that said, they'll kill you just for wearing glasses. That's kind of true. But that's more of a misconception. There was no rule saying that having glasses means you're going to be killed. It was that the idea they believed wearing glasses made you smart. So if you're smart,

you're going to be professional class. If you're professional class, you're a bougie enemy of the people you must die so like a lot of people began like just not wearing their glasses so Nick we're both dead we both wear glasses I'm wearing mine right now there's someone there's a

13 year old Cambodian child with an AK coming up my stairs to fuck my shit up I just broke mine so oh see see you're blending in. You're good. I don't need to see. Fuck it. It was like mass-scaled paranoia at this point.

The criminal elements of society are professional capitalists and those people tend to look a certain way. One of the ways that they look is they wear glasses. So sometimes people would get their name sent to the Santa ball with the only bit of information like he wears glasses.

And that would be enough. That fucking sucks. Yeah, I'd be so fucked. Yeah, you would. Now, you're probably wondering like, how the fuck does a country survive without, you know, medicine? I would say how a country survives without healthcare, but America's still around.

Ooh. Like, the official government stance was to encourage the use of traditional medicine, meaning, in effect, healthcare had kind of just become illegal and remained completely useless like imagine like you pretty much just boil down to like uh home remedies for everything which sure like soup is great when you have a cold but now you have no fucking soup or like in michigan that is drinking ginger ale for pretty much everything i thought it was just

sprite for you guys now we got ginger ale we got we everything. I thought it was just Sprite for you guys. Now we got ginger ale. We got, we got spicy water. Uh, but like, you know, ginger ale is great for stomach aches, but like,

you don't have any of that anymore because like you have rice and some contaminated water. Mexicans have Vaseline for everything. Vaseline. Really? Sorry. Vicks vapor rub. My bad.

The Greeks have a, a glass cleaner Windex. Oh yeah. The Greeks have a glass cleaner, Windex. At least according to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It's a documentary. I used to put sugar on Vicks Vaporub and make us eat it. You ate Vicks Vaporub? You're not supposed to

eat that. She'd grab a spoon and put a little bit of sugar on top and be like, here you go. Don't worry, little Nick. It's good on the outside, which means it only can be better on the in. It went on our feet, it went on our chest, and it went on our stomach. I think that's why I could eat what I could eat.

I could eat whatever I want. Your insides are just covered in a very thin layer of Vicks Vapor up to this day. Was it the mentholated kind, so it burned? I don't know. To be honest, All I know is there was sugar on top And my grandma was fucking curing me She's curing you of a terminal illness

And it's living But also I didn't know what the fuck she was saying So she probably was just telling me to put it on my chest And I was like oh eat it Because obviously she doesn't know English He is the dumb one we'll keep giving him fixed paper rep he seems to love it i definitely wouldn't have been executed for being

smart yeah unfortunately you have the facade of being smart which is having a title of wearing glasses damn it but one of the major downsides like remember cambodia is tropical they have tropical related diseases right like things that just come with living in that environment um one of those things is malaria now you've gotten rid of all modern medicine and which means malaria uh drugs so this

led to a malaria rate of 80% of the entire population, which has to be some kind of fucking high score. I could not find anything that was remotely close to this. And remember, in this situation, if you

catch malaria, you're gonna fucking die. You need medical intervention, which is now illegal. so a lot of fucking people died from untreated malaria now you're sending the entire population of the country to go out and farm that means people might be miserable but at least they have enough to eat right like you're working on a farm all day my back hurts my knees hurt i have fucking malaria but at least i have rice because i work on a rice farm right like of one thing that i have should not be a deficit of rice wrong um now the government

seemingly did everything they could to ensure that people working in the fields were going to be fucked now remember when they said that i said that they divvied up the fields with no thought, like in squares or whatever? Yeah. Each plot of land was equally sized, farmed by equal groups of farmers, and it was expected to produce the same amount of food.

Now, that sentence I just told you, even people who's never worked on a farm, is probably saying like, well, that doesn't make any sense, Joe. And you're right, which also means you're more intelligent than the Democratic Kampuchean government, because that was their policy. Which means you're getting

executed. Which means I am fucked. Yeah. Knowing a little bit about farming, kind of revolutionary. Now, this all sounds very, very stupid. And I assure you it is that stupid so I'll point out a little bit more not all land is created

equal neither are farmers when it comes to millions of them who aren't farmers being forced to become farmers most of the new people new people being the city folk had no idea what they're doing causing massive crop failures as they attempted to grow rice in the middle of a parking lot or whatever

this is on top of a parking lot or whatever. This is on top of a food shortage and famine that the country was already dealing with from the Civil War. And like this whole time, so remember how I said China was like supporting them? Yeah. China was sending them tons of fucking rice too. Really? Tons of food, tons of military supplies. 90% of all of Cambodia's

government was China just giving them stuff. That other 10% is the real motherfucker of the whole thing. So let's say we do have rice, which they did. They did have rice. They didn't have a surplus, but these farms were

creating rice they sold it they sold it so you'd have you have millions of people starving busting their ass farming um and it would all be centralized and then it would just be sold some of it would be given out but some of it would be given out, but some of it would be sold. Even though they were in the middle of the tin cups. Yeah. And even then, that ration would go down. And it was being sold right back to China. In some cases, they were selling them their own rice back. Really?

Because they didn't have enough. So it's. That's and this is this is the weird part. Even though China is propping up their entire economy at this point this country only survived this long because of china they began slaughtering cambodians of chinese descent to the point that it was another genocide so a three faceted genocide now nearly all of them would be killed or forcefully displaced, which again, you don't see those numbers in other genocides. It's kind of hard to explain.

Now, if you haven't caught on from everything that I've said so far, it should not be much of a surprise. And I tell you, soon people begin stuttering by the hundreds of thousands. When this happened, the government did not take a good hard look at their ideas and realize that they had screwed up instead crop failures would be the fault of the farmers if they believe in the revolution hard enough food would happen and because they didn't farm hard enough and make food happen they became enemies of the people starving to death it's kind of revolutionary but the new people were not the only ones suffering even the farms ran by people who knew what they were doing crops were failing and people were

starving that's because everyone was given two food rations a day one some rice and some salt and the other that had some kind of soup that may or may not have fish in it depending on the day if that sounds like not enough food for 18 hours of work every day there's no way that these people are going to be able to survive this they're being it's a death it's a countrywide death camp

right and if you don't work 18 hours sometimes it was 12 on days where you have like political education. You'd just be executed. Oh, and like falling asleep during that political education, which I definitely know I would have. That's revolutionary, my man. The dude's definitely not saying, hey, Mr. Xavier, stand up.

Stand up in the back. Yeah, I feel like it just hit me in the back of the fucking Mac. Yeah. This is normal. people get desperate, start foraging for food, eating grass, weeds, rats, whatever the hell they can get their hands on. Oh, they're not tickling rats. The tickling rat boat has

sailed and they've eaten the boat as well. But that's also illegal. Even eating grass is illegal and would get you killed. Christ. When crops didn't fail, they were centralized and passed upwards into the government. Many of the people working the fields noted that none of the soldiers nor

members of the Santa ball ever looked hungry. However, most of the people would be starving to death as they worked. Also, there's only a couple of pictures of Pol Pot that exists, but he looked like he rarely missed a meal. And remember, if there's any surplus after this,

it'd be sold. The people in command of these farms had the power to stop sending so much food towards the government, but in doing so, would admit that their farm is failing. If their farm was failing, the Santa ball would come for them. So they took every last bit of food

that was produced in some places, dooming their own workers to die and only preserving their own life for as long as it took them to all starve to death. But the demands from the rice fields would not go down. Pol Pot thought that the harvesting of rice was just about the most important thing they could do. And I guess credit where

credit is due, if they had any idea of what they were doing, it would have turned out okay, I guess. In a best-case scenario, sure, you wouldn't be able to jerk off, drink, gamble, or do anything fun, but at least you wouldn't starve to death.

As farming declined, the government turned it into something of a military campaign uh one of the um their propaganda lines was quote strike crush and win absolutely the production goal of three tons per hectare um now that is the that's uh that is the amount of rice that they wanted that's three tons per hectare. Now, a hectare is about two and a half acres of land. I had to look that up. I don't have farm on my brain.

I honestly didn't know either, so thank you. That's the amount of food that the government decided that they needed every year in order to make year zero truly complete and sustainable. Fuck, they're still in year zero? Yeah uh year zero truly complete and and and sustainable fuck they're still in year zero yeah year zero is the philosophy you don't get past year zero like best case scenario here if everything worked out and there wasn't genocides and mass starvation this is just your existence now as you're just farming constantly forever yeah go ahead and just give me the pickaxe yeah small problem though that amount of pickaxes they never unfortunately they never ran out of pickaxes okay that's the one thing they seemingly had a fucking surplus of this is more rice that cambodia has ever produced even with modern farming equipment and international

support, which they no longer had. So Pol Pot was effectively hemming his entire civilization's existence on rice magic. There's no way this is ever going to happen. Right.

Instead, what they had was a bunch of half-dead dudes from the city attempting to will rice from the earth also attempting like changing the country like they did like they like re-zoning i guess all the farmland um required building new dams and irrigation canals to feed all of these farms. So the Khmer Rouge forced some people who had no idea how to farm to, and also had no idea how to work construction, build incredibly hard things to build,

like irrigation systems and dams, which all immediately failed and caused more farming shortages. Like, weird. I made that elementary school build me this fucking aqueduct and it doesn't work. I can't believe it. So, we have talked a little bit about the impromptu executions that might occur. But one thing that the Khmer Rouge became notorious for

was the bureaucratic death machine that they created within the walls of their death camps. The most well-known being S-21, or Toll Slang. And that is where we'll pick up next week. And guys, if this shit is too grim for you already, just do not listen to the next episode. I don't know any other day. Like, obviously, thank you for supporting this show,

but don't listen to that. Stop listening to us. If this is already bothering you, the next episode is quite legitimately the worst podcast episode I've ever written. This already kind of sucks. Yeah. And I have scripted hours worth of human misery.

Now it's been almost three years of this podcast. I've written about the Holocaust. I've written about the Armenian genocide. I've written about the fucking Belgians in the Free Congo State. Unit 731. Fucking what else? The next episode is the worst podcast episode I've ever fucking written. So I hope you enjoy that one, Nick.

How are you feeling, bud? I'm just not understanding the logic behind it yet. It fucking sucks. It's hard, man. Like, it's one of those things that's like, what was their end game here? You know, like. I'm not understanding his strats. I think what it comes down to is kind of what I talked about earlier,

is that he saw this entire generation, all of these people in Cambodia, as disposable to get to the next stage, which is like the kids that they were stealing from people to raise on their own. I legitimately think that he thought that

all of the people on these farms were like, you know, you shovel coal into a fire to make a train go faster. He's burning them up to get to where his like his true year zero, which is like these kids who, you know, it's like fucking ISIS kids, like ideologically pure raised within the system, and like fucking

effectively suicide machines. The only thing they know is Incar. And we don't really talk about what happens to Pol Pot in depth at the end of this, but he always says up and down that he had no

idea any of this was going on, which is just so deeply untrue. I mean, mean like their propaganda set up all of this like if you read it like all of this is making more sense of how this would occur which is like everyone was expendable in order to for their goals

right I mean it's exactly like what we're seeing like not exactly obviously but a good way to rationalize this in my opinion is look at what the united states is doing right now um in the middle of a pandemic we still have people at work that will that will we know will kill them so they can keep the economy going but you know so like. So we don't have a full depression or whatever, hypothetically, if you believe in this sort of thing. But at the end of the day,

if this keeps growing more and more out of control because we keep spreading, because people keep going to work and interacting with one another, it's going to happen anyway. People are eventually going to fucking die. Nobody's going to want to do these jobs anymore. And the economy is going to collapse. So it's...

I don't know. You've made an engine that burns people for survival. Now, obviously, I talked about it a little bit, but the American bombing campaign against Cambodia helped create a horrible famine. But I think we can safely say that even if that famine wasn't already happening it would have been created by this right so they're only making us like this is not a situation that ever would have worked um and you know whenever we see like we talked about during our sovietAfghan war series, I believe we've talked about a few others.

I think we see this dumb idea of giving land to people who have no idea what to do with it as so badly thought out. All like, weird, start another famine. Whoops. Yeah, it's because you just have some dude that used to work as a mechanic trying to make rice or whatever um like but i think when the things that stuck out to me is like what is the rationale behind all this i think we fucked up and that we're looking at a rationale we're looking we're desperately looking for a rationale. Yeah. The Nazis are easy to figure out.

Joseph Stalin is easy to figure out. Pol Pot is always a lot more questionable because he didn't rule like a personality cult guy. He didn't want people to know about him. Nothing like that. But he had certain ideas that were obviously just as destructive as anybody with a personality cult.

It's all very, very weird. He's a dictator unlike any other I've ever fucking heard of or ever read about. I've never heard of a fucker that's like this. And even the culture of fear and snitching, it broadly is much worse than anything I've ever heard of before. Like people always talk about how deeply entrenched the Stasi was in East

Germany, or like the KGB is another great example. But like the Santa ball is so far beyond that to the point that like one prisoner, one of like seven who escaped this camp ever alive was like i don't blame them for what they did uh you know if if i they they you know all the people killing people also had a gun to their heads if they didn't kill someone they would die so if that guy wasn't killing me i would kill him if it meant staying alive so like it's all very weird stuff um yeah

because like in uh the book ordinary men which covers the holocaust you have stuff like people given an out like you do not have to kill these innocent civilians you can just hang out in the back it won't be held against you people will still still do it. It's like unit cohesion, peer pressure type situation there. But here, everything's on the threat of death. Absolutely everything. Nobody was safe.

So it's very, very different stuff. Everybody is operating through a culture of fear that which was created and foisted upon them very successfully. And they're still dealing with the aftermath of it today. Oh, I believe it. It's a very different kind of genocide and a very different kind of regime,

which is why I... This is at first just going to be about S21, about our next episode. Then I realized I kind of can't make a single episode about that. I kind of just have to make a series about the khmer rouge as a whole to make it to make more sense um and i don't know if by the end it's gonna make sense i really don't insane um trying to wrap my head around it it's fucking not happening but that is uh part two uh well until next time nick thanks for joining us yeah and i don't i don't have

a quip for this one don't do anything that we just talked about ever i guess later