Blowback - S5 Episode 1 - "The Wolves Are Closing In"

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

A prelude and a primer to this season's story: the tragedy of Cambodia.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

My fellow Americans. August 1964. President Lyndon Johnson announces to the world that the United States will engage in military action against North Vietnam. As president and commander-in-chief, it is my duty to the American people to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas and the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces

of the United States to take action and reply. Privately, Johnson doubts that the inciting attack by Vietnamese forces had happened at all. And I just say that you want to be sure before you tell me that we were fired upon, that we were fired upon, because you just came in a few weeks ago, I said that damn they launch an attack on us, they're firing on us. We got through all the firing, and we concluded, baby, they hadn't fired at all. March, 1969. In order to strike at so-called sanctuaries of Vietnamese forces,

National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon inaugurate a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. Spring 1970, the United States begins an air and ground invasion of Cambodia after a right-wing coup against the country's ruler. The next morning, Bravo Company has hardly moved more than a few hundred yards when it runs into an enemy ambush. April 1975, 1975,

Communist insurgents known as the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia. They institute a nationwide program of forced labor, mass executions, and extermination of ethnic minorities. All the civilians living in town were sent out into the countryside. It's just a dead city and a dead country. December, 1978. After nearly four years of Khmer Rouge rule, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam invades Cambodia

to oust Paul Potts government. The United States condemns the action and begins a decade-long policy of support for the Khmer Rouge. Why does the United States have anything to do whatsoever with the Khmer Rouge? We're still fighting the Vietnam War, and this is the last battle of that war, and if we have to use the Khmer Rouge as a pun in that, we'll use them. Welcome to Blow Back Disclosure

Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 5, Episode 1. The Wolves are closing in. Hello, everyone. We are back again for another season. A very exciting one for us, and hopefully for all of you out there listening.

As always, we want to say thank you. you to everyone who tuned in last season and listeners new and old tuning in this time around. And as always, this first episode will be free for everybody. And we hope you join us for the rest of the season, which you can do by going to blowback. Show and hitting the big button that says subscribe. You'll also get 10 more bonus episodes, an ad-free back catalog, and other treats that we'll discuss at the end of this episode. Now, what are we up to this time? While this season, we are finally confronting a subject, people have been demanding for a very long time,

but not perhaps in the way that people expect it. It's the story of how a small, neutral country at the height of the Cold War got fed to the meat grinder as a matter of political expediency. It is the story of Cambodia. All of that begins, of course, with the Vietnam War, perhaps the most infamous example of American hubris in the 20th century. And we have avoided going for Vietnam in the past because, quite frankly, there is no shortage of movies, books, documentaries, and I'm sure podcasts, which cover that story. But what we call the Vietnam War was not just a war in Vietnam.

It was in fact a constellation of conflicts, a chain reaction that shot through Southeast Asia, China, Thailand, Laos, and especially Cambodia. It's the chain reaction that we're interested in this season, which resulted in several wars after the one that we all know. What happened in Cambodia, first some shadowy special forces operations, then secret bombing raids, then a coup, and then a full-blown invasion, all led to a takeover by a gang now synonymous with the phrase killing fields. The Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot's seizure of power in 1975 culminates in one of the great human catastrophes of modern history, and a new war, one that many

Americans today have probably never even heard about. The war in which the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, America's enemy, toppled Pulpot and stopped what is now known as the Cambodian genocide. And behind the scenes, you may just be surprised to find out who ends up working with whom. This will be a story about Cambodia. But it is also about Vietnam. Not only during the American war, but in its exhilarating and troubled aftermath, it's about China and its rivalry with the Soviet Union, it's about the crack-up of communism in Asia, the less popular counterpart to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. We'll spend time with the Titanic figure of Ho Chi Minh, the manic yet cunning President Richard Nixon, the cryptic and fanatical

Pulpott, the insatiable Dr. Henry Kissinger, the judicious Chinese premiere, Joen Lai, and perhaps the most enigmatic character that we've ever featured on this program. The Cambodian prince, Nurudam, Sianuk. What's most important was the fact that we had the opportunity to have talks with Chairman Mao, with Prime Minister Joan Lai. with the foreign minister and other people in the government. With Chairman Mao, with the Prime Minister, and with others with whom we have met,

our talks have been characterized by frankness, by honesty, by determination, and above all, by mutual respect. This season is also a tale about an historic shift in what is, nowadays, perhaps America's most important relationship. China. China. China. China. China. In the 2020, China. at the time of this recording, the United States pursues an aggressive policy against a rising

China, accusing it of everything from imperial ambition to genocide to infiltrating the tender minds of Americans through TikTok. Despite a symbiotic trading relationship, U.S. government agencies and think tanks propagandize against China, and, most significantly, a network of American military bases surrounds the People's Republic. Beijing, by comparison, has opted to spread its influence largely through business dealings, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, a self-proclaimed socialist state outwheeling and out-dealing the capitalist West. And by the way, the largest Belt and Road project to date is a major expressway in Cambodia. But in this season, we'll see a period of time when the U.S.

U.S. and China would meet in an embrace, thanks to the canny calculations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who today remain officially celebrated in China. In fact, in his later years, Henry Kissinger urged the U.S. to do business with rather than attack China's Belt and Road. However, at odds the U.S. and China are now. Back in the 1970s and 80s, there was a moment in which the interests of Washington and Beijing came together, and it came at the expense of what some called Red Brotherhood in Asia. This season is also a kind of sequel to our second series about the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs, and the Missile Crisis.

In his book, The Yankee Cowboy War, the American writer Carl Oglesby sketches two distinct camps in the American ruling class. The Yankees and the Cowboys The Yankees are generally the liberal-minded pro-Nado Eastern establishment types Believers in a strong Europe Supportive of containment over confrontation And only as pro-war as the markets dictate

The Cowboys, on the other hand, are the tycoons, the hyper-nationalists, The frontier types Who want that American frontier To keep expanding into Latin America, into China, into Vietnam. Yankee, Oglesby writes, is the Council on Foreign Relations, Kennedy, and, at a certain point, the Dulles brothers, and the doctrine of massive retaliation.

Cowboy is Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon, the city slicker, Howard Hunt, and the Bay of Pigs team, end quote. This season, with the Cuban fiasco in the rear. view mirror, we'll see the Yankee Cowboy Palace struggle continue, spilling out of Washington, out of the Western Hemisphere, and into Southeast Asia, where an even bloodier and more fateful war spreads across the region, not at the ends of communist bayonets, but American bombs. Cambodia in particular was, in many different ways, and for many different parties, a kind of human sacrifice.

As one senior American general put it, when the wolves are closing in, you throw them something off and let them chew it. I was fighting against the U.S. at the Cambodian border. In 1970, there was a campaign to sweep through the area, so our troops fled to Cambodia. After the liberation,

of the South, in 75, I came back to this land. In March 2024, we visited Cambodia in Vietnam. In Cambodia, we traveled to see Killingfields firsthand, as well as the Khmer Rouge Torture Center in the capital city, Phnom Penh. We also drove west across the country to see the millennium-old temple complex, Angkor Wat, and ate lunch in a town once famous for catastrophic America. American bombing. In Vietnam, beyond Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, we traveled to villages near the Cambodian border, home to massacres that precipitated the war between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge.

All the while, we met with people and conducted interviews. In the Cambodian village of Neck Long, along the Mekong River, one man walked us across a field. He informed us it had once been a military base. When we reached the far side of the field, he pointed out a crater that had been filled in, like a small pond. Inside that pond, he told us, was an unexploded bomb buried in the water, a simple way to mark the spot and keep people away. Another resident of Necklung, nickname Auntie, made us lunch and told us about how, even when things became normal in the 1980s, there were still explosives buried all across Cambodia. For a long time, they produced thousands of casualties across the country each and every

year. We were no longer terrified of everything. We enjoyed seeing our family. I would say our lives were good. We were no longer scared of war. The war was over. But there were plenty of landmines around here. In Necklong, it was normal to hear landmines explode and people die. We spoke to people about war, wars against the French, wars against the Americans, and the lesser-known war between Vietnam and what villagers in that country called the Pol Potts. In southern Vietnam, one woman, Mrs. True, told us the story of a massacre committed by the Khmer Rouge against her village. At midnight, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered everyone.

They told the villagers that they should leave and they would die if they stayed home. But actually, they led the villagers into the forest and massacred them. We spoke to people about the years under Poulpot. At the grounds of Toul Sleng, the torture center of the Khmer Rouge, we interviewed some of the handful of survivors of the prison,

including one man who was liberated from it as a young boy by Vietnamese forces. The place was chaotic. It was crowded. The guards ran around the area. The guards shouted at each other over and over to bring all the prisoners outside because the Vietnamese soldiers and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front brought the fight into Tulsa. slang. And we spoke about the aftermath as a new Cambodia has struggled to be born. One Cambodian man in his 50s, also from the town of Necklung, and a mechanic at an ice factory, spoke to us about the country's contemporary problems. In the past, one person could make money and they could raised the whole family. These days, the economy's been bad, so 10 people need to work to support a family. He's a liar. The demon is a liar. He will like to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological.

in the opening pages of William Peter Blatty's classic novel, The Exorcist, published in 1971, within the first year of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, there is an epigraph about the nature of evil, one passage from the Bible, another from an FBI mafia wiretap, and a striking quotation from one Dr. Tom Dooley, a Catholic physician who, in the late 1950s and early 60s, became America's poster boy for humanitarian missions in Southeast Asia. Before reading on about Father Karras and the Demon Pazuzu, Blatty prepped readers with Dr. Dooley's account of Asian communism. There's no other explanation for some of the things the communists did.

There were the seven little boys in their teacher. They were praying the Our Father when soldiers came upon them. One soldier whipped out his bayonet and sliced off the teacher's tongue. The other took chopsticks and drove them into the ears of the seven little boys. How do you treat cases like that? Duley, a Notre Dame grad turned Navy doctor, penned best-selling books about his medical missions in Indochina and the clear moral case for U.S. aid. A gallop poll from the early 60s ranked Dooley third on its list of the ten men most admired by Americans.

Behind President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Pope reported the L.A. Times. It was only later that people learned the good Dr. Dooley had been a CIA asset. His sensational reports of pure commie evil, such as the passage in Bladdy's classic novel, were fabricated, part of a propaganda. campaign. Agency chief Alan Dulles and Colonel Edward Lansdale, whom listeners may remember from our second season, utilized Dooley for his prestige and popularity, not only for domestic propaganda, but also as a conduit of intelligence inside Indochina itself. This strategy of smuggling agency work through religious philanthropy arguably began in the Korean War, it only grew in Vietnam and soon spread to Cambodia. In this season, we dug into

the archives and found reports of a massive Christian CIA collaboration in Cambodia that would have made Dr. Dooley proud. Perhaps, you know, your government and the CIA are not cooperating with it. order. We've covered some basket case governments on this program before, but the pro-American regime installed in Cambodia following the U.S. invasion might be the most dysfunctional of all time. If Italy can be described as a state with a mafia, Cambodia in those years was a mafia with a state. Officers would pilfer freely from the trenches of cash sent from Uncle Sam, sending fake invoices and even running the old mob scam of no-show jobs.

Salaries for fictional commanders and soldiers that ended up lining the pockets of the clever devils making the claims. It wasn't just the Kasa Nostra of it all. Some of America's go-to guys in Cambodia were positively Strange Lovian. One commander purposely filled his office with miniature furniture and decor in order to make himself appear larger and more imposing.

Another, who was almost always liquored up, One day demanded that a subordinate place a cat on his head, then back off several yards to shoot it off. The poor soldier tried to say no, but orders are orders. Of course, the cat jumped off, and the soldier instead blew a chunk of the commander's head clear off. The commander survived, though, and was subsequently placed in charge of the most important campaign against the communists. Today the nation paused to remember on this national prisoners of war and missing in action recognition day. The defense P-O-W-M-I-A accounting agency, the P-O-W-M-I-A flag, a P-O-W-M-I-A bracelet. The President and First Lady have restored the P-O-WMIA flag to its original location on top of the White House residents.

One of the intrigues of this season is the diplomatic war between the U.S. and Vietnam that came after the military saga. itself. You see, in a private letter, Richard Nixon, as it turns out, promised Vietnam what amounted to reparations for the American war. That money, which amounted to an entire year's worth of GDP for the struggling Vietnamese government, became one of the biggest priorities for Hanoi in normalizing relations with the U.S. But by the time the war was over, Nixon, who had made the offer, was out. And no one in the American government, government wanted to pay the bill. Many problems were suddenly invented to deny Vietnam this money.

And perhaps no other trick in the bag worked as well is the invention of a cause. The P.O.W.M.I.A. cause. The term MIA, or missing in action, had itself been invented by the Nixon administration. In an effort to demonize the Vietnamese and stoke the hopes of American military families, the White House took an old category, that of soldiers killed in action, body unrecovered, and gave it a very different name, missing in action, and or P.O.W. Prisoner of war. This meant that American soldiers who were all dead were now, in the minds of people at home in America, hostages waiting to be found and rescued from the dastardly clutches of the duplicitous Vietnamese

communists. In fact, writes historian Rick Pearlstein, The wars in Indochina saw fewer American prisoners taken than any previous war. No matter, on came the POW MIA flags, pins, T-shirts, and lobby campaigns, which, despite their cause having been debunked by the U.S. Congress itself, all live on to this day. A headline from an op-ed in the New York Times, August 17th, 1990, quote, Paul Pot, brutal, yes, but no mass murderer. The pull quote, Vietnam is the real threat to Cambodia.

Many Americans may not know that there was another war in Vietnam after the U.S. one, and yet another only shortly after that. Many may not know that it was a communist army that drove out the ultimate communist boogeyman, Paul Pot, and his Khmer Rouge. We'll see this season how these things happened and why. But perhaps the most shocking, isolated fact of the story is that when the Vietnamese did put an end to the Khmer Rouge,

they suffered international condemnation and sanctions led by the United States of America. Not only that, but this international campaign came just as a famine loomed in Cambodia, and the West actively blocked humanitarian and food aid from entering the country. President Jimmy Carter soon invoked the word we now associate with Cambodia's history, genocide. But not toward the Khmer Rouge. He instead threw the charge at the Vietnamese, who had invaded to kick out Pol Pot. And at the United Nations, it was the Vietnamese, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern bloc who fought to unseat the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia's official spot at the table.

The U.S. made sure this did not happen. After one of the U.N. votes, writes one reporter, an American delegate found someone shaking his hand with great enthusiasm. He looked up and saw that it was a Khmer Rouge leader, Yangtari, grinning broadly. They publicly voted for the Khmer Rouge to keep their seat at the UN because they considered the Vietnamese occupation worse than what the Khmer Rouge did.

Now, nowadays, it's appalling, and it was very hard to get people to understand how awful that was. This season, we shall meet and bond with everyone from Pulpott's personal cook to Admiral Jack McCain, father of John, whose breathless rants on the communists in Cambodia would literally cause him to pass out.

But there are certain figures who will form what we can call the main cast of our story. I've been watching your political style. You'll have a very popular style of speaking. Is it something you've learned from somebody or is it something that is yours? As you can see, you know, we are one family and they are always close to me. You make a lot of jokes? Yes, yes. Because here we like a joke. Here we like jokes, you know, otherwise we are not Cambodian. King, politician, filmmaker, recording artist.

Prince Noradam Sianuk was first and foremost, and by his own account, a naughty boy. Cambodia's head of state for most of the 20th century, albeit sometimes in exile or just on vacation, switches sides in this season so many times, you may need to pause the show. He was originally installed to the throne. by Vichy France, as a young man who loved ice cream and going to the movies. But a few years later, his natural cunning and charisma were on display as he wrapped up a deal with France to get Cambodia's independence and eliminate all his rival power bases. When it looked like Cambodian politics might get out of his control, he abdicated the throne and became a politician. For many

years, his canny opportunism served Cambodia well as the U.S. Vietnam War. spun outwards. When the Vietnamese looked poised to win, Sianuk railed against U.S. imperialism. With the tide turned the other way, he appeared in Washington, hat in hand. It was Sianuk who coined the term for Cambodia's communists, Khmer Rouge. He cracked down on the young radicals, that is, when he wasn't co-opting them and appointing them as potted plants in his government. Yet he was lifelong friends with communist China's premier Joe in and North Korean President Kim Il-sung, and he often enjoyed time

at guest mansions in Beijing and Pyongyang. It's hard not to take a shine to Sianuk, whether he's forcing his cabinet to act in his homemade movies, or forcing the prudish leaders of the Khmer Rouge to join him in watching porno. But most of all, I am enraptured by a clip of Prince Sianuk in which, with his vocal cadence, he presages the viral rant of Australian politician Bob Kata.

I mean, you know, people are entitled to their sexual proclivities. You know, I mean, let there be a thousand blossoms, blooms, blooms, far as far as I'm concerned. I don't want you to be involved again in the government of, governmental affairs of my country. But I ain't spend it any time on it because in the meantime, every three months, a person is taught a piece by a crocodile in North Queensland. But as a citizen, as a patriot, I will speak out against the Vietnamese aggressive. There has never been anyone in the American government quite like Henry Kissinger. Looking back, as you wrote your memoirs, would you have done what differently?

In Cambodia? A German Jew who fled the Nazis for America as a teenager, Kissinger made the jump from Harvard professor to national security advisor under President Richard Nixon. Quickly fashioning himself into a celebrity diplomat with a celebrity dating life, Kissinger wasn't just Nixon's right-hand man on foreign affairs. He was a kind of spiritual partner. When it came to the Nixon White House, almost no one had a good reputation with the press and the Washington elite, except for Henry.

And Kissinger used his power publicly, and especially privately, to remake American foreign policy in an age of crises. He could be cunning and ruthless, disposing of small countries like Paysenger. meant for the trash. He could also be gutsy and visionary, steering the most powerful country on earth into, quite literally, a new world order. We shall see all these qualities on full display, as he and Nixon prolonged the Vietnam War and bring in Cambodia, all while making peace with communist China. Was it unforgiving, did this government, the government that you served, other Western

governments bear some responsibility for Paul Pot coming to power and having the opportunity. Well, you know, this is the year of apologies and of self-laculation. America's man in Cambodia was the right-wing general, Lawn Knoll. A devout Buddhist and a Khmer supremacist, he told everyone to call him Black Papa, proud as he was of his dark skin that to him proved he was a racially pure Khmer. At first, Launal was an imposing figure, a blunt instrument that Sianuk allowed into his government to beat back left-wing opposition. During one of Sianuk's crackdowns, a Communist Party secretary came home one day, only to be snatched up by the secret police. Journalist Philip Short reports that they took him directly

to La Nall's own home, where he was tortured. tortured, killed, and buried on a piece of wasteland. One French advisor to Sienouk called L'Anal a fascist scarecrow. La Nalle joined up with a bitter prince, a rival of Sianooks, to execute a coup and institute a religious, traditional, and pro-American Khmer Republic. But there were some problems. For one, his virulent anti-Vietnamese racism kicked off pogroms, mass deportations, and mass executions of Cambodia's ethnic Vietnamese population, a human catastrophe, and not

very helpful to the Americans' plans for their new strongman to play nice with their other strong men in South Vietnam. Also, Lonnall's military was a disaster. The aforementioned corruption was made worse by negative morale among a scared mass of soldiers who, taking religious cues from their leader, sucked Buddhist icons as they marched up against the black-clad Khmer Rouge fighters, whom they began to believe were cannabis-fueled demons from hell. Then there was the fact that, beyond his demented worldview, by the end, La Nalle was simply not well.

Kissinger's National Security Council had obtained a psychiatrist's assessment. It found that their man in Phnom Penh was suffering neurological decline thanks to a stroke which could spiral at any moment. Certain envoys to Cambodia, like Kissinger's right-hand man, Alexander Haig,

caught a taste of this side of Lawnall when, for example, the dictator collapsed into tears in his office, requiring the ice-chewing American, Haig, to cheer the man up with a cold and awkward there, there. Well, I know there are those who totally would disagree with this and say, gee,

boy, if I could just be a millionaire, that would be the most wonderful thing. If I could just not have to work every day, if I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world. They don't know life. because what makes life mean something is purpose, a goal, the battle, the struggle. Richard Milhouse Nixon has been a supporting character on this show before as a congressman and then vice president beating the drum of anti-communism

and anti-China anti-Castro Hawk defeated by Jack Kennedy in the 1960 election. Now we shall see what Nixon does with the power of the presidency that he has sought all his life. Always seeing himself as the outsider to the Eastern elites game, Nixon's administration will be a uniquely paranoid place, even by the standards of White Houses. And this president had much to be paranoid about. With Kissinger as his enforcer,

Nixon began remapping American power around the world, almost entirely in secret, cutting out the State Department and other pencil pushers at every turn. In Pakistan, the president backed up the dictator Yaya Khan in his bloody campaign against Bangladesh. Over in Chile, the Nixonites supported the successful CIA effort to overthrow the democratically elected socialist Salvador Aende. And, through his war on drugs, Nixon turned America's sleepy, boy. border with Mexico into a narcotics conflict zone, and so on, and so on. But Nixon's ultimate puzzle was Indochina. Unable to smash the communists into submission, he doubled down, expanding the war, ramping up the bombing. Nixon's failure stoked his paranoia

and his rage. After delivering one televised speech on the war in April 71, Nixon's, Nixon rang up Kissinger to vent, and, of course, to receive his subordinates praise. But did that come across? I mean, it was... It was the president I had, I had all heard it before. I had a lump in my throat and I heard. Well, you know what? You brought a lump to mine. That's strangely enough. I always did. When I saw the little kid, I almost broke up, you know, in the room that day, and I'll never forget. I watched it with Haig and Lord and Daisy. What do they think?

Absolutely move. They said this was tremendous. Well, it's a goddamn good little sweet, actually. Well, deep down, they all know you and I. That's the hell of this. And they know the other people are just, that's right. And the others are a bunch of goddamn cowards. And they know that's a publicity seekers.

That's right. And there isn't... Well, I'll tell you this, though, Henry. You've convinced me the staff, except for Halliman and one or two others. Willingman has been. Hallam and Erutman. Well, Schultz is fine, but he's in another league. But the staff generally screw them, and they can do their jobs, but no more, nothing more.

And as far as the cabinet, except for Conley, the hell with them. I mean, that's all there's to it. Well, Mr. President, you've done this one. And if it doesn't work, I don't care. I mean, right now, if it doesn't work, then let me say, though, I'm going to find out soon, and then I'm going to turn right to goddamn hard, it will make your heads from. Well, Mom, those bastards right out of the, off the earth. I really mean it.

Well, I... And I think you agree, don't you? I think, Mr. President, we have to make fundamental decisions. That's right. The man that history knows as Pol Pot went by many names in his life. His original name was Salath Saar. He was born in a village 90 miles north of Phnom Penh. To a prosperous family with connections to the royal palace,

writes his biographer David Chandler. Several girls in the family ended up as dancers in the Royal Ballet, giving Tsar a relative glamour and privilege for a young boy in Cambodia in the 1920s. He was, by all accounts, a shy and polite boy. In 1949, he scored a scholarship to Paris, and a few years later returned to his country and immersed himself in clandestine left-wing politics. By the late 60s, Sarr and his friends fled into the jungles of Cambodia with the resistance, the maquis.

In those jungles, Sarr adopted the moniker, Paul Pot, which, according to Chandler, was a common name in rural Cambodia, but with no independent meaning. Even his cipher was a cipher. We will see him rise to the top of the Khmer Rouge, and smile. through criticism from his communist allies. We'll see him and his comrades cut their nation off from the rest of the world in an almost baffling attempt to create a renaissance per Khmer civilization. And we will see them drop their Mao jackets for safari suits and khakis,

taking help from their one-time enemies in America to destroy their one-time allies in Vietnam. all the while, smiling, quiet and polite smiles. We'll begin the French cruiser, fire on the town as colonial extremists decide to teach the Vietnamese a lesson. We'll begin this story by going back to tell a brief history of Indochina. how the action begins with the advent of French colonialism in the 19th century. From there, we'll trace the rise of Cambodian and Vietnamese nationalism and resistance to French rule, up to the all-important Geneva Conference in 1954.

It was there that Vietnam was divided into communist north and the U.S. supported South, while Prince Sianuk snagged Cambodia its independence. But rather than commence a peace, Geneva was a prelude to more war, specifically the second Indochina War, which Americans call the Vietnam War, and which picks up in the 1960s. Now, the first couple episodes you'll probably find are Vietnam heavy, and that's because at first it's where the action is, the catalyst for our chain reaction. So if you want your Vietnam fixed from blowback, here is where you will likely get it. it. But the focus will soon shift to the little country next door, which everyone thought would

stay neutral. In an attempt to destroy supposed communist strongholds and supply lines, Nixon had Henry Kissinger arrange the secret bombing of Cambodia, which soon escalated to a full-blown invasion. And a coup oust Sienuk for the violent mystic general Law Nall and opens up a whole bloody Cambodian civil war. The victors of that war with a Khmer Rouge insurgents, just as the Vietnamese communists take Saigon. In Cambodia, now called Democratic Campuchia, three and a half years of darkness begin.

The country's ruling gang, led by the mysterious Pol Pot, enforces an agrarian slave state, emptying the cities and piling up body. in the killing fields. And so when the Khmer Rouge were finally kicked out of power by Vietnamese troops in 1979, we shall see the emergence of new friends of these radical one-time communists,

including the United States. Through the 80s, the Khmer Rouge put the screws to America's primary Cold War nemeses, Vietnam, and its benefactor, the Soviet Union. The snake eats its teeth. tale once again. Kill or be killed, Jack.

Phenompant told me that. As always, this season you'll hear from a wonderful array of guests, whose work formed the essential research of this story. We speak with journalist Elizabeth Becker, historian Vuman Huang, returning champion the Muckraker Sy Hirsch, scholar Ben Kiernan, and of course, course, all the people we met in Cambodia and Vietnam during our travels. So, if you want to join us, head over to blowback.combeck. Show and hit the big button that says subscribe. You will also get 10 bonus episodes, consisting of full interviews with guests, a dive

into the looting of art and antiquities from Cambodia, a look at the American-backed drug networks in Southeast Asia from this period, and the story of Vietnam-era racism against black sailors on the USS Kitty Hawk. And as a subscriber, you'll get discount codes for t-shirts, hats, and posters that are available at blowbackshop.com. Our metal gear-themed stuff from last year is also still available, and keep an eye out for this season's soundtrack coming later in the fall. Get to it, folks.

Head to Blowback.com, show, and hit the big button that says subscribe. And we'll see you on the other side. You know what I'm going to be. I don't know. Thank you.