Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 135 - The Khmer Rouge Part 3: S21 and the Killing Fields.

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow today.ocide cast or donkeys. I'm Joe. Go ahead and tune out now. Yeah, and with me today is Nick. How you doing, man? You've already sat through two hours of the grimmest fucking series that we've ever done. How you holding together?

Well, I'm going to assume we need the fact sheet up, ready to go. Yeah, so for people who missed the first two episodes of this series, and why would you start at part three? I have a policy. Whenever we do horrible episodes, Nick can say a safe word. I don't know what it is. Pineapples or something. Pineapples.

Whoa. See? See? One mind baby. I have the 11 amazingly cute animal facts sheet from stuff.co.nz. I really like the rat tickle. The rat tickle is very good. That one was actually really adorable. So I'm going to start this episode with an animal fact

because this shit's rough. Nice. I'm not going to start this episode with an animal fact because this shit's rough. Nice. All right. I'm not going to do a content warning. This whole episode is just terrible. It's so bad. So honeybees can communicate through dance. Huh?

University of Munich professor Carl von Frisch explained that honeybees talk through dancing. Cool. That's fucking awesome. Do you realize if we were able to communicate through dance, we would not get a lot. I would be mute. So also, before we get started, our first episode came out today.

We're recording a lot of these before they come out so we could all take some time off over the holidays. And part one came out today. And someone recommended that I watch the documentary Enemies of the People. It's a very good documentary, though I haven't learned anything new from it because Michael Vickery's book about Cambodia is so incredibly thorough.

However, this documentary is really fucking good. It's deeply troubling because the whole premise of the documentary is the filmmaker is a genocide survivor, and his family was all killed by the Khmer Rouge. And he's interviewing people who were Khmer rouge fighters um like he interviews nuan che who's brother number two uh right underneath pol pot um for like hours at a time um and like nuan che is pretty much blind and crippled at this point of his life uh he's dead now but this is recorded i think they'd made the documentary about a decade ago um so like when he is coming up to the table to record with this guy he has to be assisted by him

like the like this is like a jewish man helping you know uh fucking gobles sit down at a table to be interviewed and not just immediately spiking his head into the earth and killing him. Um, not that, you know, goblins survived world war two, but like hypothetically, uh, and like the man is like the, the filmmaker is very, very gentle with this old man who's in his fucking nineties at this point,

uh, like sits him down and talks to him. And, and the whole time he never tells new on Shay that his family was killed during the genocide. Um, so like, and also like he interviews like just normal people who had to take part in

the killings. Uh, like there's a, there's a guy who explains how he had to beat a woman to death because he was told to, otherwise he would be beaten to death. Fuck. Uh,

yeah. Like, and like, it's very, very jarring hearing this shit from their mouths. Um, now nuance, you don't learn anything new from Nuanche

because he refuses to make he did anything wrong. He blames everything on spies, which tracks with everything we're about to talk about and why they end up killing so many people for thinking they were spies. Really? Yes. Now, the reason why I'm so intrigued by this

is obviously my family survived the genocide. And it speaks volumes to the depth of human forgiveness that this guy's able to do this. And the simple humanity of an old man who did horrible things. We like to frame people like Talaat Pasha as being soulless monsters or Adolf Hitler as being psychopaths. When in reality, they're fucking people who had horrible fucking ideas that led to

the deaths of millions of people. And that's what this is. This is a brittle, fragile old man. He's not a psychopath. He's not a monster. He's a person. And I don't mean to say that like i don't i would rather see him strung up from a tree than in this documentary um i i fully believe in capital punishment the situation however i it's an interesting framing that makes everything

significantly more jarring than anything i'm going to tell you over the the next proceeding two and a half hours uh that's left of the series. So with that, we'll move on to some of the grimmest shit I've ever researched. Are you excited, Nick? I know I am. No, but I can only imagine that the old man's defense game isn't that good. If at any point that filmmaker's

like, I'm going to kill this guy, there's absolutely nothing that Nuanche was going to do to stop him. It'd be great if he went into guard. Just immediately pulls guard. Yeah. Does a fucking triangle choke on his ass. That's one of the unique things that you see in genocides that take place in one country,

like Cambodia or Rwanda, that you end up living next to the people who probably killed your family. So a scorched earth policy like you saw in a lot of places uh just doesn't take place um not sure how i feel about that i think my my feelings on uh fixing genocide of violence is pretty well known at this point um but you know i am not cambodian so like props to them for having the the the deepest pool of human forgiveness that I've ever fucking seen in my life. You're Armenian. Yeah, but, like, I don't live in Turkey.

Also, I would be in prison if I lived in Turkey. And then I would be murdered in prison in Turkey. It looks good for you. Like, that's why when we did the episode on Sogaman Tetlerian, I was like fucking fist pumping the whole time. Because like if I was around in 1920, I obviously I like to think that's what I would do is immediately go seek vengeance upon the people who killed my people. I don't know if I would do it.

None of us know if we would do that, but like that we would all like to picture ourselves as being that guy. Absolutely. And this filmmaker is just like... I'd like to think that Jason Bourne's loosely based on my life story, but... It's just going after the Spaniards. But it's not.

Like, I would... Like, yeah, I would like to think that I'm going to be Sogamon Tetlerian or, like, at the very least, someone adjacent to him. But, like, I probably wouldn't. And I know, like,

it requires to be... It requires to be a much better person, I think, to be this filmmaker than it is to be Sogamon Tetlerian. And that's not to take away from anything that, especially the Jewish Avengers, strangling vengeance out of Nazis post-World War II. Fucking awesome. But in my opinion, it does require you be a a better human being to not do that

does that make that wrong nah let you be the judge um i think vengeance is a is a pretty base human instinct doesn't always make it right um so when we left you last week we told you to be diving into the grimmest of the grim, S21. Nick, have you ever heard of S21? You talked about it. So this is probably the one thing that jumps into people's minds when they think of the Khmer Rouge or the Cambodian genocide. And so a lot of people have said that it's pronounced Khmer Rouge. I have heard Cambodians pronounce it the Khmer Rouge.

I'm going to go with Khmer Rouge. I've always heard Khmer Rouge. I've never heard of Khmer Rouge. I have heard Cambodians pronounce it the Khmer Rouge. I'm going to go with Khmer Rouge. I've always heard Khmer Rouge. I've never heard Khmer. I've heard both. I'm going to go with the one I've been saying since I've already been doing it for two hours. But I've heard your complaints and I'm disregarding them. I just want everybody to know that if you wanted a podcast

where you pronounce everything correctly, this ain't it. This definitely ain't it. So S21 stands for Security Prison 21. And there was like 200 different prisons that the Khmer Rouge ran during this time, though pretty much everybody knows about

S21. It helped thousands of people, as well as there was smaller communal prisons that targeted individual Kroms, which is the family unit. But S-21 is by far the most infamous. And I should strain out some terminology here. We've talked about this before, I believe.

The Khmer Rouge and other people called these facilities prisons. That is not their function. So in America or most other nations, you are held in a jail until you are sentenced for your crimes, at which point you spend your sentence for those crimes in a prison, at which point, hypothetically, you will be released, depending on what your crimes are. Right. That is not my defense of the American prison system. That's just simply how it's supposed to work. It doesn't always.

Moving on. prison system, that's just simply how it's supposed to work. It doesn't always. Moving on. So a prison means that you will eventually get out or maybe, in very rare instances, you'll be executed. Prisons are not death camps. Those are death camps. There's a reason why that term exists. And death camps are not concentration camps. A death camp, in many situations, is a very specific version of a concentration camp. So these prisons are death camps in the Khmer Rouge. They use the terminology prison. I will not because it's incorrect.

They ran death camps. Oh, I, I believe definitions are important because history. Also, it's one of those things that, especially when people actually decided they cared about ICE putting immigrants in prison, in concentration camps on the border, because Trump was in charge and they won't care anymore in January. I argue they are concentration camps because they're targeting a very specific group of people and segregating them without charge for simply being immigrants. And people really didn't like that terminology because they're like, well, it's not like it was Auschwitz. Well, Auschwitz was a death camp. They also had concentration camps

that were not specifically meant to kill people. However, ICE killed a lot of people in those camps. So, fuck you. Anyway, the reason why I bring that up is because these are death camps they're not prisons nobody leaves this place purposefully alive the only people who survive survive through guile and kind of a hustle which i am not here to shame uh nobody's released from this place you do not like go to s21 by ah turns out you're innocent go home that never fucking happens not a single time because remember Because remember, what their mantra is,

they'd rather arrest 10 people than let one innocent person go free. This is the physical embodiment of that Khmer Rouge mantra, is S21. S21 began its life as Tulsfei Prey High School, which is now known as

Tulslang. Tulslang generally means Strychnine Hill. Faye Prey High School, which is now known as Toll Slang. Toll Slang generally means Strychnine Hill, because of all the people who have died there. But it was originally a high school. It was built by, it seemed like some kind of, it was originally named after a member of the royal

family, which is weird, because remember the prince is still involved, and this is being turned into a death camp. But remember when the Khmer Rouge came to power, schools are illegal now. It's closed down. All the teachers are dead. Remember, learning is kind of revolutionary, as is

everything that's ever brought you joy at this point. But by around 1976, the Khmer Rouge had turned it into a prison known as S21 because it's the 21st prison in the Phnom Penh area which at this point originally had

a population of like over a million now down to about 25,000 yeah and they're all Khmer Rouge cadre high ranking people or members of the Santa Ball but yeah the city's empty Khmer Rouge cadre, high-ranking people, or members of the Santa Ball. But yeah, the city's empty.

If there's one thing that the Khmer Rouge really liked more than working people to death, it was just murdering them for invented reasons. And that's what this place was for. Now, obviously, that wasn't their mission goal, to just figure out invented reasons to kill people

but it was to find anybody who might be a enemy of the revolution or the an enemy of the state which if you remember was pretty much everyone nick you and i are both dead i'm going to assume everybody listening to this is dead unless you happen to be a cambodian living in a rice field in cambodia and you don't own anything in which case congratulations on maybe surviving until you starve to death um and again i'm going to try and figure out how we can survive this episode uh i look forward to how you think that we can uh and we didn't survive the last two so no we did and this is an important thing to point out nobody escapes

from this place so simply escaping from s21 is not an option for us nobody ever escaped um so also if you do happen to be a a cambodian listener cool uh hopefully you survive um now individual classrooms of the school were divided with like really shitty brickwork because remember everyone of a skilled profession is now dead oh yeah so we built it yeah well so i i would think that we might do a slightly better job if you want to see pictures i'll post some of what the s21 prison looks like it's still up it's a genocide museum to this day they is left virtually untouched from the day the vietnam looks like. It's still up. It's a genocide museum to this day. It is left virtually untouched from the day the Vietnamese found it.

Really? It's incredibly creepy and I really hope I can see it at least once before I die. There's nothing like it really in the world. Obviously, I got to visit some concentration camps when I was in Germany going over to Poland. There was a certain amount of

restructuring going on. Some of it was destroyed by the Nazis when they ran. You can't go into a lot of it for very good reasons. Admittedly, those are much older, like from the 40s or whatever. This was from the late 70s, 80s. So it's very much the exact way it was you know the year i was born wow yeah so um it's still there i really like to go see it i agree i think it'd be new

patreon goal send us to cambodia once uh covid's figured out now um, a lot of these cells would be divided up into very, very small places. Purposely designed so an adult could not sit down, lay down, or stand up comfortably. So you're like, you have to put yourself in a stress position. Kind of like bent

over, fucking with your knees, constantly shifting around, trying to get comfortable. And other places, there's just a metal bench with a bar where dozens of people would just be handcuffed to it, and that's where you'd stay until the guards came for you. This prison was ran, or death camp, was ran by the Santa Ball under the command of Comrade Dutch.

We talked a little bit about him last episode. under the command of Comrade Dutch. We talked a little bit about him last episode. Over a thousand people worked within these walls of this revolutionary Auschwitz. However, the Santebals were the only... The Santebals would find the best soldiers to become guards for this facility. The best, of course, not being skill,

but rather being politically pure. Okay, I was about to ask, what is considered the best, of course, not being skill, but rather being politically pure. Okay, I was about to ask, what is considered the best? Yeah, so only peasants from loyal families could become guards, which is weird because if you remember, the Khmer Rouge long ago broke apart traditional family units

and technically everyone now was a peasant. Right. So what they really wanted was someone they considered politically pure even though they didn't they didn't follow their own ideology obviously because at this point everybody had become forcefully a peasant um but they also thought the older the person was even if they were like a loyal soldier to the Khmer Rouge and had fought in like the so-called forest army they're old they have. We need people who are young because they haven't been alive long enough

to, I don't know, accidentally rub shoulders with a Chinese person and become infected with dumb racism. So the guards of S-21 were almost uniformly child soldiers. Yay! Really? Because this can't get worse, right? Let's put

child soldiers in here. They were mostly between the ages of 15 and 19, though mostly between 15 and 17. They would be selected and sent to the capital to undergo the strictest kind of training the government of democratic

Kampuchea had to offer. They would be forced to disown their mother and father and recognize only Ankar, the organization, as their parents. They were forced to memorize long screeds of things written by Pol Pot, though they probably had no idea they were written by

him or have ever even heard of him. I'd be fucked. I can't memorize shit. Yeah. Remember, he's brother number one, if you've ever heard of him at all they were told instead what they were memorizing was just from Ankar they're like you know it's not from

Comrade Pol Pot it's from Ankar he's completely like it's weird it's so strange the titles that they use instead of they don't they build obviously there's some attempts at at cult behavior like personality cultism but it's almost like a state cultism because no real attempt except towards the very end is made to make pol pot like the guy it's always anchor right so the people are just like terrified of this faceless organization

that just haunts them from the forest that's so weird it's very strange this training went on for months during this time the rations consisted of little more than banana stalks papaya roots and bugs what

and remember all of the normal rules of like if you're with your cram uh uh applied so if like fuck i'm hungry i'm gonna go eat some grass boom that's penalty like you better fucking eat those bugs and be happy about it any deviation from these rules which there were many uh like normal stuff from like don't talk unless you're ordered to talk um you know, no having sex with anybody in your class, because remember, you only can have sex with your revolutionary wife. And since these people are all like fucking 16 years old, they don't have one. And she's not here or he's not here or whatever. You would immediately be punished by the rest of the group.

The punishment for most infractions is what else? But being beat to death by your fellow trainees. Oh, so no like strike one strike two strike three now hypothetically there is um most of the time there was not uh there there was like a warning process involved where it's like ah we think that you might be you know you've done some things against the revolution, you need some further education, which means being sent away for re-education, which generally means being sent to S21. Ew. Yeah, it's normally

a death sentence. These kids would end up serving in something close to what could be considered an elite unit of the Khmer Rouge inside the Santa Ball. This is the dream that the Ankar had for the entire nation. These children no longer had parents or family.

Those connections had been severed. The only connection they needed to have was to Ankar. Only Ankar deserved to be the parents of the nation, and to its ends you will live, you will kill, and you will die. Most likely you'll die. Sounds like some toxic parenting.

I've never heard it. And this is where it stops being a government. This is a cult. Now, obviously, there can be a state cult. Quite literally, there was state cults in Rome. But unlike anything else, because it's not a personality cult. Those are very specific um this is they're they're using cult tactics right like this is a tactic that is favored by

cults which is like disconnection right um now obviously they don't do it like this um most cults aren't fueled by murder though obviously some of them do end up going that way, and suicide and things like that. But one of the most important things they can do is disconnect you from your traditional power structure and support networks. So you have no one to lean on with the exception of them. So they already did the mass disconnection when they forced everyone away from their traditional family unit.

So now you don't have any friends, you don't have any family. You might make some friends within whatever farm you're put on, but at the same time, you can't get that close to them because you might have to snitch on them in order to survive. But you can rely on Ankar. Ankar's not going

anywhere, baby. Ankar loves. Ankar is life. That's the only support they have left. That's one of the things that I've kind of the theory that I've gradually got towards is this is just a self-destructive cult because it's not a

state. You know what I'm saying? Obviously, it has the trappings of a state. It is democratic Kampuchea. The government is led by Pol Pot. They have embassies. You have the trappings of a state. However, you have none of the things that a state makes. There's technically an official army, but not really.

There's technically an official air force, but not really. You're not going to go to a state-run hospital. They're illegal. You're not going to go to school. That's illegal too. The only thing you're allowed to do is go work and listen to struggle sessions or the self-criticism session that is your life so like yeah like they even have everybody dressing the same they have everybody talking the same way using the same titles and honorifics and all of this is upon pain of death so like you but there's no state function here the state only exists as

far as to collect rice and then kill you there's no like function here. The state only exists as far as to collect rice and then kill you. There's no infrastructure. They're not building fucking roads. There's nothing here. Jonestown was a more effective government than the Khmer Rouge. And obviously we know how both these things end.

But that's why they have more in common with what we think of as common suicide or destructive apocalyptic cults like Aum Shinrikyo or whatever than they do with an actual state, say, in Vietnam or Laos right next door. Those are actual functioning states at this point. But even Somalia in its most lawless was more of a state than the Khmer Rouge. It's incredible stuff. So anyway. I'm not understanding how they can... It's weird.

It's just weird to me. It's something that you really... I think that's something that... One of the reasons why the West shies away from studying the Cambodian genocide all that much is when it's hard to understand. You can't just be like, Yeah, Nazis are bad. They have to understand. You can't just be like, Nazis are bad. They have no shit.

You can't say, the Ottoman Empire killed the Armenians and the Assyrians. No shit. All of the normal trappings of mass murder, genocide, and crimes against humanity are gone. You have to pick up the pieces

and figure out how you got there. Because normally there's an othering, there's propaganda, there's all this buildup. You don't see that. Like even the Rwanda genocide had propaganda and othering and buildup, which I mean, that was an orgy of violence over a hundred days,

but you don't have any of that here. It's just like from day one, we've taken a Panampan boom, everybody out in the fields and this shit's on. People are dying by the tens of thousands by day one. Yeah. It seemed like it was pretty quick like it just happened like snap boom yeah and that could be one of the reasons why there's

no organized defense against it like nobody has any kind of time like oh fuck I have to walk now or I'm gonna die but I don't know man it's very very strange so the prison staff in S21 were split up into three different groups or departments, interrogation, documentation, and security.

Now, interrogation is a little self-explanatory, but we'll talk a little bit more about that later on. But documentation is probably one of the weirdest. The Khmer Rouge, despite them being uneducated and illiterate, meticulously documented everything about their prisoners. That meant they were totally willing to backtrack on their own rules when they thought they needed to. Well, you said that you wanted to kill all the academics, and now we don't have anybody that could type. Well, don't kill that one. Okay. Well, if any normal people did the same

thing, they would get thrown an S21. Or not even make it to S21 normally. So as soon as someone was brought into the prison, their picture was taken. The vast majority of which still exists to this day. You can see them if you look up S21 or Tol Slang Genocide Museum, the whole

walls are lined with black and white pictures of people who are dead. They're alive in the pictures, but there's only seven people in those pictures that made out the other side alive. Really? Yep. Holy fuck. All of them are staring dead ahead with

their names and their crimes written under them. Now, these crimes were generally grand terms like treason or counter-revolutionary behavior, but it could be virtually anything. I was clipping my toenails and... One got up into my eye. Hit a guard in the eye. So in one case, a man was charged with kind of revolutionary behavior because he had forgotten to water some plants he died real oh fuck he was murdered for not watering plants yeah hey we'd be

fucked yeah we were already dead at this point um i mean i have a college education i'm dead on day one you wear glasses you may be dead on day two you're in the army you're fucked so what you'd get through the pictures and the processing at this point which is largely painless they're just talking to you at this point so a lot of people in the pictures don't look terrified they're like well whatever it's just another step I have to take you know

serve my time yeah they're like maybe I'll just tell them some shit and I'll move on with it. This place is secret, which is one of the reasons why innocent people didn't get out. It's like, even if they thought that someone might be innocent, like, well, we can't let them go. They'll tell someone about this place.

So you were fucked from the second you stepped in the door. Right. And once you got through the picture taking process, you were forced to read the 10 rules of the prison that were posted upon the wall. Full disclosure, though, this is contested.

Some people say that these rules are fake and were put there by the Vietnamese when they liberated the prison in order to make the Khmer Rouge look worse. A crisis actor's sign,

if you will. Now, I'm going to put on my historian goggles and should point out that all of this is being said is being faked by people who worked for the Khmer Rouge and there's no evidence of it being faked because when you have a building

that is so full of suffering and death that could be clearly smelled by Vietnamese soldiers when they come into your city to be liberated you hardly need to fake a sign in order to make somebody look bad you need to allow that legwork yourself this is a lot of the same arguments that you see from other various genocide denial circles like they do they pick one thing and say well that was faked yeah like um like a

lot of holocaust deniers talk about like shoes because there's a lot of shoes left over oh they just planted those or the prussian blue on gas chambers there's no prussian. They pick out one little thing because if they can pull a thread loose, they might be able to pull you in, right? It's that shred of denial. It's wrong, and you should tell them they're stupid. There's no reason to believe that these signs are faked. However, the sign still stands, though translated and put into a bigger sign on the outside, no longer on the inside in a small piece of paper.

You can see it if you Google the Toll Slang Genocide Museum, the former site of S21. Now, the imperfect grammar that I will read is a faulty translation from the original Khmer into Vietnamese and into English. So it's kind of fucked up, but also slightly more terrifying that these things are being screamed at you by a 15 year old with a Kalashnikov. Number one, you must answer accordingly to my questions.

Do not turn them away. Number two, do not hide the facts by making pretext this or that you are strictly prohibited to contest me. Number three, don't be a fool. You're a chap who dared to thwart the revolution. That one's kind of like what they use chap in common. I don't know a fool you're a chap who dare to thwart the revolution that one's kind of like what they use chap in common i don't know enough about the queer language yeah number four you must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect number five don't tell me either about you or your immoralities or the essence of the revolution number six while being

lashed or electrified you must not cry at all. What? Yep. Number seven, do nothing. Sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no orders, keep quiet. When I ask for you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting. Number eight, do not make pretexts about Kampuchea crime in order to hide your secrets or traitor.

Kampuchea crime as Ankar, effectively. Number nine. If you do not follow the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire. Number ten. If you disobey me at any point of my regulations, you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of an electric discharge. As you can tell, they

really like electrocuting people and lashing them. Sometimes at the same time. Yeah. Now, obviously, from other episodes, the people you would expect ended up within the walls of S21. Teachers, the educated, and various people who worked for Law and Knoll at some point, or any connection to the old government was a death sentence. And if you were lucky, you were just taken out back and murdered. If you were unlucky, you ended up here. Prisoners were given a ladle

full of watery porridge a day to eat, which is not enough to survive on. For a bathroom, they're given an old ammo box to be emptied out weekly. If you spilled a drop of it, you'd be forced to lick it up from the floor. No fucking way.

Yep. Do you need a fact? Yeah, I'll take one. Calling pineapples on this one? Yeah. Number five. Every cow has a best friend and they hang out with them every day. Really? Yep. That's really

nice. Christina McLean made this discovery when she observed that pairs of cows within a herd became stressed when they are separated. Being separated from their best pal can impact a cow's heart rate. It may affect how much milk they make. Adorable. Cows have

friends. So, like we said, we're definitely, both of us are ending up in this prison. Yeah, you're like five times there. This is where things are bad, though. It wouldn't just be us. Anyone connected to us is where things are bad, though. It wouldn't just be us. Anyone connected to us would end up in there, too. Because remember, they believe in some weird pseudoscientific idea that you're able to literally be tainted by counter-revolutionary ideas

just by being around me. So anybody who's ever appeared on this podcast, you're going to S21. Which, I mean, surprise, Honestly, you probably figured that anyway. But that isn't just it. Like I said, anybody connected to us. I just don't mean professionally. I mean, like, literally. I mean, your relatives, your children, and your coworkers.

You're all guilty just for daring to know me. Or being related to me. We heard Joe Kasabian looked at you the other day. Jimmy Dye contact. Yeah. Now they probably don't know anything about you at first. They kept records. Not about you though.

Like you'd come in and there's a meticulous records about the other side of that conversation. But when you sit down, they don't know anything about you. You're going to fill in those blanks and they would force you to do it. Which brings about the interrogation teams. The interrogators worked in three-man teams composed of a transcriber, normally using a typewriter, an interrogator, and a torturer. At no point would they confront you with your charges, no matter what they were. Instead, they would get you to admit to something. Your charges weren't important. You're going to tell me why I'm going to kill you. We just haven't gotten to that point yet.

They would get you to admit to something. Anything. How would they do that? Different teams specialized in different ways of torture and interrogation. There is mild interrogation, sometimes is mild interrogation, sometimes called cold interrogation,

which is what Comrade Dutch called it. There was hot interrogation and there are chewing interrogations. Those are their terms, not mine. It's weird that we rolled from temperatures to somebody chewing on you. And what's honestly kind of surprising, it's not literally chewing on someone at this point

or a giant chewing machine of some kind. According to Comrade Dutch himself, the cold method employed propaganda without the use of torture or insults. Which is like, are you a true revolutionary? Do you really care about communism, hearing democratic conversation? If you did, you'd tell me everything. Because not telling me is kind of revolutionary. And you're not kind of revolutionary, are you? You're a true member of the cause.

Now, if that didn't work, the HOP method would be used, which included insults, beating, and torture authorized by regulations. That is a direct quote from Comrade Dutch. He leaves out what that torture could be. However, because they kept their own records, we know what those regulations were. Torture came in a variety of forms. Beating with fists, feet, and sticks, or electric wire.

Burning with cigarettes, electric shocks. Being forced to eat your own shit. Jabbing with needles, ripping out your fingernails or toenails. Suffocating with plastic bags, waterboarding, and being covered with angry centipedes and scorpions. And that's only some of them.

In one situation, they made someone forcefully drink a ton of water and then jumped on their stomach, which I'm pretty sure will just kill you. There's also vivisection, which is the surgical dissection of living people with no anesthetic. And there's also medical

experiments. Now, these weren't experiments so much as just really creative ways to kill people. And one thing that they did was just drain you of blood so they could use it for their soldiers. But they wouldn't kill you first. Now, the chewing method consisted

of, in Dutch words, of quote, dental explanations in order to establish confidence, followed by prayers to the interrogated person, continually inviting them to write a confession. So this is like being guilt-tripped into a confession. If you were ever guilt-tripped to go into a Catholic confession, it sounds like the same thing. Another witness... Yeah, I remember when we all got in a line when they'd ask you like when's the last time you've confessed do you have anything to confess when's the last time you confessed i feel like mormons probably do that more than catholics i

don't know um so if that didn't work after a couple days uh you'd be moved to a more torture-inflicted realm of interrogation. So it was a gradual ramp up. And this could take anywhere... Your time in S21 could be anywhere from a couple weeks to two months. Not many people made it past two months. And interrogations followed a schedule. In case you thought that this was all willy-nilly, interrogations followed a schedule of 7am

to 11am, 2pm to 5pm, and 7pm to 11pm. But they could, in reality, last long past midnight. The indictment said they could go on for days, and were considered complete only when a confession was obtained.

Now, a manual found at S-21 discouraged torture that would end in death, what was considered a loss of mastery, which is a weird way of putting that. I assume they mean that the torturers are supposed to be masters at inflicting pain without killing people and therefore killing people is a loss of that mastery. The objective was, quote, to do politics to extract all information possible before killing the prisoner. The goal of the torture was,

according to Brother Dutch, to loosen memories. Quote, beat until he tells everything. Beat him to get at all the deep things. Yeah. Like, killing you without a confession was considered bad because that would make it seem like illegitimate,

which is very strange because they're killing people left and right. Like, no, in this prison, we only do bureaucratic murder. We need a confession first. That's very stupid. Throughout all this, the transcriber would record everything taking place.

Unfortunately, we also have their notes record everything taking place. Unfortunately, we also have their notes of which thousands still survive. And you can see today at the genocide museum, one, I was able to get my hands on through an email. Um, now, uh,

this is a typical session quote in the afternoon of the evening of seven 21, 1977. So that is, you know, July 21st, 1977, I pressured him again using electric cord and shit. On this occasion, he insulted the person who was beating him. He said, you people are beating me. You'll kill me, he said. He was given two or three spoonfuls of shit to eat. And after that, he was able to answer questions about the contemptible Hing, Chow, Sack, and Va. I assume these are names of people he is giving them in order to stop the torture.

I don't know for sure. That's given without context, but it sounds like names. That night, I beat him with electric cord again. That was the notes. If they thought you were lying, the torture would be ramped up how could you tell they were lying well they had a lie detector nick did they it's even dumber than you could imagine obviously like a polygraph is not an actual lie detector it's pseudoscience but is this like some la noir shit where you just they're just looking at you uh well i'll see if

you think that this is la noir shit shit So they would put a plastic bag Over your head And strangle you with it Or suffocate you with it And if they felt your carotid artery And if it began to pulsate Because you know You're being suffocated with a plastic bag

That meant you were lying What? If that sounds like a test that you can't pass It's because it is and also they don't care oh he's suffocating we got a liar pants on yep this carotid is sure is pulsing because remember they killed all the fucking doctors like yeah it sucks how you came to that confession or what the confession was did not matter if If you caved another chewing method, like I probably would have,

uh, before, like if you just threatened me with torture, I'm telling you everything you need to know. I'm huge pussy. Yeah. I'm not going to get tortured. No,

of course not. Like there's a reason why, like the CA hypothetically, technically, supposedly does not use it anymore because not they never got anything from it because it turns out when you inflict a massive amount of pain and suffering on someone they'll tell you

anything you need to know in order to make it to stop like I would if you just threaten me with it like no I'm good like you don't need to go through that yeah I'll snitch yeah that's too easy you need to know how a radio works I got you

I mean like it doesn't matter if you got tortured or you caved under like them telling you like to believe in the revolution and tell me the confession was the important part and after that the result was the same you would sign a confession almost

always saying you worked for the CIA or the KGB or you're plotting to destroy the revolution that's almost universal across all of these people really um after that uh they would demand the names of everyone you know uh before long that person any of those names that you put down would be sitting in that exact spot that you were and there's a very good chance you knew at that point, but it didn't matter. Comrade Dutch himself said that he knew most of the people coming through the doors were innocent, but he knew keeping the prison a secret

was an important thing and function of the state, so anybody who came through the doors had to die, regardless of what happened. Between 12,000 and 15,000 people came through the doors of S-21, but not everyone who came through the doors was a rando. Eventually, S-21 became a destination for other members of the Khmer Rouge because the natural paranoia that comes with forcing everyone

to rat against everyone else eventually turns upon you. Before long, even loyalist family members were ending up there in the prison, feeding that feedback loop they created by making you give up every name that you've ever known. Right. They were followed by party members, military commanders, and everyone in between. But more than anyone else, the prison guards themselves would find themselves in the prison they used to work at. Really? All it took was one guard to break the rules, and they would have to sell out the other guards while under torture.

All it took was one guard to break the rules and they'd have to sell out the other guards while under torture. Other guards attempting to head that off by ratting out their coworkers as soon as they saw them stepping out of line for fear of somebody else saw them, saw somebody step out of line and not say something and then rat it on them. It could be like this was from breaking any rule in the prison. Things like talking to prisoners or accidentally killing a prisoner while torturing them. One guard was killed because he was stung by a wasp and then he set the wasp nets on fire. Really? Yeah. Which like setting wasp nets on fire is a very good

way of getting rid of them. As long as you're not a prison guard S21 apparently. Another guard was killed for shouting something in his sleep for speaking out of turn. What? Yep. Outside of party cadres is used for anyone that was considered an important prisoner.

That's how almost all of the foreigners snatched by the government ended up there. Now, most of these guys, a lot of foreigners from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, or sorry, Thailand, were lost fishermen that strayed just a little bit too close to Cambodia while trying to catch some fish and got captured by Khmer gunboats. That happened a lot. Really? Yeah, they were by far the most likely people, most likely foreigners to end up here. Though, over the Khmer era, at least nine Westerners also fell into their grasp. These included Americans James William

Clark and Lance McNamara, Scott Michael Deeds and Christopher DeLance, as well as Canadian Stuart Glass. What were their reasons? Oh, it's... They were almost all uniformly drug smugglers.

It's a popular drug smuggling route uh especially with thailand right there um and it is easy to smuggle drugs to australia and also mainland china um but yeah there's also australians and a new zealander and also um uh a few other people. But unfortunately for them, this was right after the Mayaguez incident. Now, a lot of people have asked if I'm ever going to do a whole episode about this. Probably not. There's actually not a whole lot of content on it.

But what happened was the Mayaguez was a civilian merchant ship flagged as American. So, legally an American ship with an American flag flag and it ran aground or was captured otherwise captured by the

Khmer Rouge some gunboats and it was detained on an island and so the US sent special forces and Marines to raid the island Tang Island to free the crewmen they succeeded

kind of but they also succeeded in losing around 20 men before they even landed and another 15 being killed in fighting as well as three of them being left behind to be captured and murdered by the Khmer Rouge not a great look I think all three were marines yeah now

there's after this little flare-up, the Khmer Rouge assumed that any Americans or pretty much anyone from an American allied power they captured must have been spying or scouting for some huge American invasion to finish the job. Because they saw that as an American invasion of Cambodia, which I suppose is technically true. That's one of those fuck-around-find- like one of the america like one of the americans that was captured

was captured by like some khmer rouge gunboats and they turned him over thinking like it wasn't that big of a deal like they all just get released after like a week right because he's american and then he's like then i learned that uh he got killed and i was like okay now uh it was like i said before it's pretty common for these guys to break under torture like anybody would um two of the americans deeds and delance eventually broke under torture and claimed they were in the cia one of the and when uh like it was some of this huge fanciful bullshit situation that obviously someone that's talking with his brain is broken from torture and sleep deprivation and hunger. It's very

easy to point out why he's very obviously not a CIA operative because he's a drug smuggler, but also because he gave his social security number as his CIA roster number. Really? Yeah. It was very common for most of these.

I can't say for sure all of them were drug smugglers, but it's very likely most of them were. DeLance and Deeds definitely were by their own family's admission. The rest of the Westerners that got captured all pretty much suffered the same fate. There was a separate annex for them at S21 for VIP prisoners because the Khmer Rouge didn't want to be known for capturing and torturing Westerners to death.

That's bad PR. That's how you get bombs dropped on you. And they already went through that. They don't need that again. So it was under intense amounts of secrecy after each one of these people were broken, um, and they signed their confessions or whatever. Um,

and it's like most of these Westerners are the only ones whose pictures don't survive and as 21 either. So that's also telling. Okay. Um, they would be, they would be murdered and they're, instead of the remains being thrown in the Chon at killing fields,

if we'll talk about it a little bit, um, their bodies were burned to nothing. So like nobody could ever identify them like it was the it was the one amount of secrecy they actually cared about okay but like so like what we're saying is like i keep saying that this is a death camp a lot of people died there however none of the murders at the prison occurred there on purpose um because remember, killing someone before they could be... They can confess. It's bad for business. Right.

But the entire purpose of this camp was to eventually kill someone. So after this, you'd be sent somewhere where that would happen. Prisoners by the thousands would be loaded up in the back of a truck and driven to what became known as the killing fields. The most popular, most infamous one being Chuan Ek.

The killing fields are, in reality, just a broad term for a series of over 20,000 mass graves across Cambodia. Jesus. Within them are hundreds of thousands of bodies. If you go to, say, Chuan Ek or any of the other killing fields, there's some human remains that just remain out in the open bones and stuff like

that because it's purposely left there as remembrance to let you know that so this never fucking happens again hence the term never again though that seems to have more and more of an asterisk next to it but

people from S21 made their 17 kilometer journey crammed into the back of trucks um once there they'd find mass graves had been dug uh and they were blindfolded and because once again they didn't want to waste bullets soldiers smashed pickaxes into their heads before pushing them into pits containing hundreds of thousands of bodies. Ready for that fact. At Chuanak, at least 20,000 men, women, and

children were killed at the site. Animal fact! Yeah. Cats will headbutt you to show their affection. Is that true? I remember reading, yeah, one of their scent glands is on their side of their face i guess so they like rub their head against you to show that they love you does

the poignant usually occasionally headbutt you he headbutts me a lot um but also he bites me a lot so it's kind of a toss-up oh okay but does that show is there a fact about cats biting you mean that they like you i think he actually just likes the taste ah yes he's prepping for the time he'll be big enough to kill me in my sleep training for some reason i yeah he's just every night he just has that one claw up against your neck like i'll do it right now soon so we talked about before about the survival rate of s21 um now it's arguable how many people survived um well detailed records were kept in the prison there is somewhat of debate if some of the people were lying or not or assuming other people's um identities but it has been confirmed at least seven people survived and and i'm willing to

bet it might be up to 12 but most of these people are dead now today only a few are still alive but at least seven people survived s21 this gave s21 a survival rate of 0.06 percent for comparison auschwitz while killing significantly more people than s21, has a survival rate of about 10. So it is one of the most deadly death camps per capita of people who have gone in it in human history. But some of these people that are alive today, and some of them actually work at the museum, which is... Really?

Props to them, I suppose. I don't know if I could do that. Right? One of them is a guy named Chum May. He's one of at least, I think, four that are still alive. He recounts that he had no idea who the CIA was, but willingly admitted

to being a spy. And he still has no idea why he was arrested. On the 4th March from Phnom Penh... No. So remember how we talked about the 4 forced March from Phnom Penh. No. So remember how we talked about the forced March on the episode too? Yeah. He was part of that. He lived in Phnom Penh.

Uh, both of his wife and son were killed by the Khmer Rouge. He was the only member of his family to survive. Jesus. This is from a BBC article where he, when he was interviewed, uh, two guards took, took turns beating him with a stick covered in twisted wire.

I assume this means barbed wire of some kind. Eventually, they decided to pull out his big toenail. He said he looked down at his feet and explained in unflinching detail about how the guard tugged and twisted at the nail until it came out. Quote, I could tolerate the pain of being beaten

and even having my toenail pulled out, but it was the electric shocks that terrified me. He said, tapping this out of his head. These were administered by electrodes placed inside your ears. Chumay is deaf in one ear as a result, and says he hears the sound of rushing water when he moves his head. It felt like my eyes were on fire and my head was inside of a machine. After that, they started telling them whatever they wanted to hear.

I didn't know or care what was right or wrong anymore. Chu Mei almost certainly would have been killed, but instead the commandant, Comrade Dutch, learned he was a mechanic and a lot of their typewriters had broken because they were using them so often while they were killing people.

So he was put to work fixing broken typewriters and it saved his life. Oh. Another survivor was Bong Meng, who was originally So he was put to work fixing broken typewriters and it saved his life. Oh. Yep. Another survivor was Bong Meng, who was originally a Khmer Rouge supporter in From the Sticks. So like he was someone that the Khmer Rouge absolutely would have loved. Yeah, he's all for it.

Yep. Like Chu Mei, he has no idea why he was arrested, but he was arrested with his wife who did not survive S21. Mei almost certainly would have died too until the prison commander learned that he was arrested, but he was arrested with his wife who did not survive S-21. May almost certainly would have died too until the prison commander learned that he was an artist and ordered men to paint a black and white portrait of Pol Pot. And he had no

idea what Pol Pot looked like and had to be given a photo for reference. I thought they were going to say, alright, guess what he looks like. Yeah, better guess right or it's kind of revolutionary. Joe, we found out that you wrote a book yeah oh no yeah yep meng's like i painted you pull pot and i gave him a baby dick too fuck you um and so he wanted to be 100 sure he got this right so he literally took months painting it uh and that was good enough afterwards

he was turned into an artist while still having to live on the compound and he was forced to paint propaganda paintings for Ankar and he survived as well Chu Mei I know at least while he's alive I believe he's still alive sells his life story for

only a couple dollars outside of the Toll Slangaying genocide museum and will tell you everything uh that i just did and more um so yeah life hasn't been great to him right so obviously this episode's been pretty fucking dark i think we can all agree on that absolutely there's not even been a lot of dark humor which is normally our brand uh so we'll talk about something that we can kind of darkly laugh at. So before I get into this, I need to make something abundantly clear. The crimes and brutality of the Khmer Rouge were definitely known while they were happening.

Not places like S21, mind you. Not yet, anyway. But the mass killings, the evacuation of Phnom Penh and other cities, the mass starvation. It was all being reported in some degree. Much like we were seeing coming out of North Korea, it kind of trickled. There's a lot of rumors, and the stories that you heard were secondhand or from survivors themselves. But you knew whatever happening was bad, right? I don't know the full picture, but the half picture I have fucking sucks. So this is the story of Malcolm Caldwell. He's a British academic who I assume was one of the regime's loudest defenders.

And by regime, I mean Khmer Rouge. He loved the Khmer Rouge. Really? Yeah, he had something of a part-time job saying the stories of atrocities coming out of the country were lies over exaggerated or propaganda of some kind. what was his reasoning

uh he was really into communism uh and that led him to put blinders on to everything um because when you get deep enough into theory and politics you end up becoming a fucking weird person um

he was a guy who supported every government that called itself communist or revolutionary without criticism regardless of how much criticism they rightfully deserved like there's a lot of people today and diseased corners of the internet that will defend North Korea with a straight face so like

this is one of the reasons why I brought this up they're generally known on the internet as tankies and not to be I brought this up. They're generally known on the internet as tankies. Aren't you a tanker? I'm a tanker, not a tankie. Okay, gotcha.

Some of these people are ironically supporting some of the worst governments that still survive on this earth. Some people are so deeply poisoned by hating America. They assume that everything America stands against is good. Actually. Um, I think it is a symptom of someone being deeply enamored with an aesthetic and they'd never have to deal with the aftermath of actually having to live or visit one of these places.

Um, and that's who Malcolm Caldwell is, really. His friends have since opined that he's a bit of an idiot, which I can't disagree with. He's an idiot regarding the safe movements he defended. Caldwell was a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War, which I shouldn't have to point out is a good thing, actually, to be an opponent of, and we are as well. But during the war and during the opponent of the Vietnam War, which I shouldn't have to point out, is a good thing, actually, to be an opponent of, and we are as well. But during the war

and during the Cambodian Civil War, he saw that Khmer Rouge is just another liberation group like the Viet Cong, which is weird. I'll give him a pass at that point because the Khmer Rouge aren't in power yet. And remember, they did have a very close working relation with the

Viet Cong, so you don't have to do much of a stretch of an imagination to be like yeah same thing different clothes right right but then the Khmer Rouge came into power and then most of the news coming out about them was coming from Vietnam and Thailand because remember that's where the

refugees are going so like he was a staunch supporter of Vietnam all the way until vietnam was like yo those guys next door are fucking insane yeah and then he was like vietnam sucks really yeah and i'm not here to say like vietnam in the late 1970s is a good country actually they did a lot of fucked up shit when they took over the south but But I support a unified Vietnam. However, if you're Malcolm Caldwell and you're not a hypocritical dickhead, you listen to Vietnam saying Cambodia is bad, actually.

Because Vietnam had to put up with almost all of Pol Pot shit outside of Cambodia. Through all of this, remember, Khmer Rouge fighters are raiding across the border and burning Vietnamese villages down and murdering civilians. So, like, Vietnam is sick of their shit. And Caldwell's like, actually, turns out Vietnam's kind of revolutionary now. Yeah, he didn't believe any of it.

The rest of the news that came from refugees who ran to Thailand, like I talked about. But apparently their accounts were not good enough for a historian like Caldwell credit where credit is due however and I don't need to hand it to him I suppose but unlike a lot of people like him today he visits most of the countries that he supports like he went to the

Soviet Union he went to North Korea though during the time North Korea wasn't the despotic hellhole that it is today a little bit different given the historical lens but still he went but he believed that the refugees coming out of the place that he supported were

their accounts were could be disregarded entirely because they were bourgeoisie or whatever fuck he's gonna go isn't he he's gonna go to Cambodia Nick oh fucking idiot yep I believe the guy who believes everything Fuck, he's gonna go, isn't he? He's gonna go to Cambodia, Nick. Oh, fucking idiot. Yep. I believe the guy who believes everything uncritically and refuses to look further into it

and stands people like this, we normally just call those fucking bootlickers. So I feel comfortable calling him a bootlicker. So he submitted paperwork to visit Pol Pot's democratic Campuchea in 1978. And he was probably pretty fucking hyped. It was approved. He was only one of seven Westerners who ever invited to the country. Apparently one of which was like the head of the Norwegian communist party at

some point. It's all very weird. Yeah. Um, uh, the reason for this was not that Pol Pot was open to Western intellectuals. Not at all. This is late stage Kampuchea status now.

So tensions are rising between Vietnam and Cambodia. And he this is that. Remember how I just said towards the end, they're going to try to ramp up the personality cultism. This is part of that where this western this white dude's gonna come in he obviously loves us he's a fucking idiot he'll believe anything we say like look at what he said about kim il-sung he'll say the same thing about me um so like he they figured that it would be a good outside voice and especially out like his the only other supporter of cambodia is China which the West also hates at

this point so like we'll have a white guy say Cambodia is good and be able to wave the flag against Vietnam so like yeah this this is a flex that might work for them right okay yeah so this is like a doomed PR run the problem was is that there was other Western Cambodia supporters, but they distanced themselves by the late 70s because, you know, like all the murder.

But Caldwell refused to do so. In fact, only a few months before, he had written a genocide denial article, which was published in The Guardian. Wow. Yeah, fuck you, The Guardian published in the guardian. Wow. Yeah. Fuck you. The guardian,

you giant pieces of shit. Um, and the, you know, the source that he used to, to, to write that article. You want to guess who it was?

The Cambodian minister of information. I wouldn't have amazing stuff in my head. Like he was fully bought in but why the why the fuck would the guardian publish that like I know the guardians terrible but they're generally considered like a normal functioning news source with half

of a brain publishing genocide denial while a genocide is actually taking place that's mind-blowing so what's actually the dark most darkly hilarious part about all of this so the man that caldwell quoted the minister of information was a guy named who nim by the time that caldwell got to democratic campuchia who man had been tortured and executed in s21 really yep yep he sure fucking did uh so when caldwell went to the country he took two journalists with him to record his adventure the journalists who survived

spoiler alert uh caldwell doesn't uh said that caldwell was nice enough but he was completely uneducated in the country he defended. And neither one of these journalists were bought in. They saw an end to get into this country that nobody fucking could. So they're like, if we have to go with this idiot, I guess this is the price we have to pay. The first accounts of the genocide

is a book called Year Zero. It had already been published and is one of the sources we use on the show. It's very highly regarded and is considered kind of like required reading on the subject. Especially if you're

going to Cambodia at this point, you want to read the thumb through it before you go while the Khmer Rouge are in power. He disregarded it entirely, calling it propaganda, which astonished the journalists who were with him that he could be so stupid.

Don't need it. Though I do have to point out, Caldwell was not alone in his thoughts on this. There's other prominent voices on the American left who also believe that the refugee stories were exaggerations or fabrications designed for western media involved

in a quote vast and unprecedented camp uh propaganda campaign against the khmer rouge government including systematic distortion of the truth that guy who said that was gnome chomsky so fuck you old man yeah so and also um caldwell was a huge chomsky guy so there's a very good chance that he formed his belief that eventually led to his death because he really loved reading noam chomsky stuff not saying noam chomsky is like responsible for this man's eventual death but almost like almost like he's in the he's in the in we're not like a blue to red scale red being death he's like dark purple um anyway fuck nom chomsky moving on so while in the country the group was taken to a few stage scenes which pissed off the journalists uh because like if you've ever seen

any documentaries about people visiting nations on incredible amounts of government oppression, like Turkmenistan, North Korea, Eritrea, any of these places, it's like a government tour of a minder that takes you to, like, surprise, this village just happens to be having a dance competition for you. And they all have very nice things to say about the government. In fact, that's all they'll talk about. This is all normal stuff for anybody who's traveled to these countries. So it should be normal stuff for Caldwell. But according to the journalist, he was totally oblivious that this was a setup, which is amazing. They spent time in Phnom Penh, which remember, was almost completely

empty. It had been evacuated for years at this point, and the population had only dropped. Remember what I said, it was called a Hiroshima without the destruction and a Pompeii without the ashes. When the journalists brought this up to Caldwell, like,

hey, where the fuck is everyone? Caldwell didn't see much of a problem with it this place is hustling and bustling no traffic isn't this great like that that's what I see happening is he immediately goes like the good sides of an entire population being destroyed

there's no line at the supermarket as the tour was ramping up, a messenger came to Caldwell and gave him the invite of a lifetime. Pol Pot himself would like to meet. What? Yep. Obviously, he agreed.

And why would he turn that down? And he was whisked away through the dead capital in a Mercedes limo to the meeting, which is... Fuck yeah, fucking limo. Yeah, but that's part of the problem, right?

Like, if you're standing year zero Cambodia, which is the Cambodia that he is in favor of, that he writes an entire book about, which is posthumously published because remember, they kill him. Wouldn't you have a problem with the fact that this

agrarian classless revolution suddenly has a spotless Mercedes limo to send you with a fucking jacuzzi inside yeah like I'm like this is sus but okay like I would have a problem with this like I'm not saying like obviously I'm a left wing guy

and nice things exist in leftist countries as well but this one is like purposefully based upon uprooting all of civilization and forcing them to toil at rice fields but oh also we have a limo okay anyway uh he meets polpot and they have a conversation regarding economic theory and by all accounts Caldwell left the meeting a very happy and even more sold over puppet of Pol Pot which is incredible

how did he kill himself we'll get to that point because nobody's really sure what happened he went back to the house he was staying with with the journalists and gushed about his new friend and like they like the journalist said like the last thing we said to him was telling him that you're being lied to and like having a debate over it like dude this guy is clearly lying to your fucking face

where are all the people how come we're only the only people we're seeing are secret police with rifles why do we need a bodyguard like things like that uh and he's not hearing any of it uh that same night while asleep the santa ball burst into the house and shot caldwell and only caldwell in the face before leaving afterwards the journalists were escorted out of the country unharmed and they were allowed to leave gladly yep i'm sure they were at that point i just busted freeze Sadly. I'm sure they were at that point. They just bust in. Freeze! He's coming right for us!

There's some theories behind why he got murdered, but nobody's entirely sure why Caldwell got killed, especially in the way he was killed, because it was all very out of character. Yeah, they shot him

um there's no doubt that the gunman were the santa balvo um the reason why we know that a dead body yeah um everyone in the detachment uh around him was thrown into s21

uh where they all confess the various crimes like people tend to do when they're being horribly tortured for weeks at a time. To me, the situation was fuck around and find out. Right. He was a pampered Western person who stand a despotic genocidal

maniac and then actually went there and found out what it's like to live in that country. He got the true kamer rouge experience maybe you want to stand year zero he fucking got year zeroed you know i'm saying like obviously i wish he didn't die but he wrote that fucking check himself that's like me going like i would really like to i don't know go on vacation to istanbul i'm probably gonna get fucking got i'm armenian and i don't shut up and i'm on various watch lists not to mention have passport stamps that will absolutely get me green lighted so i'm going to end up in prison and it's one of those things like auto warm beer the guy who went to north korea then got killed right you went to north korea for vacation you fucking idiot you went for the north korean experience

and you fucking got it it's not a good vacay spot i mean it's hard for me because like i like to go vacation to places where like kind of out the way but also i wouldn't go to fucking north korea it's dangerous one i, I'm American. Two, anything will get you thrown in prison and killed there. He went to prison for 12 years for stealing a picture. Yeah. A dumb thing to do. Not a death sentence.

But he died. He was absolutely murdered. I mean, he was at least indirectly murdered through inhumane prison conditions which you know the same people who defend them will say that happens in america which they're right about but like he was murdered by the state for stealing a poster that he he got the north korean the only thing that would have made that more of a north korean experience is if like some weird south korean article about him being torn apart by a dog came out about it um but yeah, I mean, Caldwell got the Khmer Rouge experience. He's Stan the Khmer Rouge, and he died like a Cambodian.

Now, I have a hard time explaining why he was murdered, because nobody's entirely sure. Pol Pot obviously didn't leave any cliff notes. But one of the journalists explains it pretty well. Quote, don't apply irrational thinking to the situation. It was crazy. Crazy. Malcolm's murder is no less rational than the tens of thousands of other murders which Malcolm defended.

Malcolm Caldwell's death was caused by the madness of regime he openly admired. Yep. Yeah. Yep. But the Khmer Rouge were not long for this world. While the international community did nothing to stop the genocidal maniacs destroying the people of Cambodia, one nation decided they had seen enough.

And soon, soon soldiers of the newly unified socialist Republic of Vietnam would storm across the border and depose them. And that is where we will pick up next week. All right. We get to talk about them getting owned. I'm excited for it. Yeah, this episode sucked.

In my defense, I warned you. Not that you had anywhere to go, but... Yeah, let's not do that again. Yeah, so no more episodes about S21. Got it. All right, cool. That's something we can both agree on. Also, I don't know if a second one will ever be needed.

Yeah, I don't think so. I don't know if there's going to be anybody like, yeah, go into more detail, please. Yeah. And, you know, there is more. There's tons of accounts of, you know, the interrogation notes and stuff like that. I picked one because they're all horrifying. You can read them. A lot of them are available on the internet.

They're all equally terrible. But yeah, part three, baby. Thank God. Everybody take a knee, drink some water, and think of happy thoughts as we go into part four and we talk about how they all get curb stomped by Vietnam. I guess until now, there's no cute quips here. Normally at the end of our episodes,

we're like, don't do this. Don't get thrown in prison by the Khmer Rouge. Don't do that. And we'll talk to you next week.