The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1334: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Pt. 1 - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

62 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas begins a series talking about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. Radio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas' WebsiteThomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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And yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank you enough. So thank you. The Pekingona Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino Show. Thomas is back and we're going to start a new series today. So I'm going to let Thomas take it away. Thank you, Thomas.

How are you doing? Well, I believe, um, an understudied aspect, not just of the Cold War, but in 20th century studies and Marxist-Leninist studies, as well as disciplines tending towards scaled sociopolitical behavior. There's a general neglect of Democratic Campuchia, which existed from 1975, 1999. That was a Khmer Rouge regime. It's invoked by a... lot of these midwit academics as some cautionary tale from history.

And these people, part of it's born of ignorance, part of it's born of commitment to an ideological narrative. They assign these arbitrary criteria, categorical criteria to what they called genocides. Conspicuously, of course, the Soviet Union during the phase or epoch when America was allied with the Soviet Union. state is conspicuously redacted. But they'll lump together, Rwanda,

Democratic Campocia, the Third Reich, sometimes Edia means Uganda, and declare that these are instances of genocide. You know, again, according to arbitrary metrics, a combination of what they perceive of as the moral depravity of the government in question

and the scale of attrition. That doesn't really tell us anything. Don't get me wrong. One of the reasons I invoke Ernst & Lutti so much is he's one of the most important, healy and fierce whoever lived. But he had certain insights into the way political power is expressed in the late,

modern period with a particular attention of the 20th century and there was a severity to political affairs and an intensity to violence that really isn't precedented before sense so although I'd argue that some of the excesses of the Jacobin regime were comparable and I discussed that in my book or my manuscript this not published yet. Also, so there's that and really such that I remember that when you, if you'd read the National Review or the American Spectator in the 90s, when they were short on a bogeyman to talk about, obviously because the Cold War was over, it was around that time. I, Paul Pot, aka Saleth Sar, which was his actual name, he passed away in 98.

and that's when there was this ad hoc tribunal that was bringing Khmer Rouge leaders up on charges. And there was this tendency of neocons to burn Paul Pot and effigy as sort of a lesser Satan. Contra, Adolf Hitler, is a greater Satan. And this man is a monster. And he's a perfect example of the evils of the left. all this kind of breathless condemnation, but that doesn't suggest any sort of insight into the character of the regime and the historical processes that created quite the contrary.

But other than that, you never really heard about the regime. There was a series of sort of pop history books by journalists that were full of lurid stuff casting Paul Potts-Selleth-Sars sort of an Ediamine figure this figurative

and then according to some apocryphal stories literal cannibal who was the phase sort of post-colonial savagery when the shackles are thrown off the colored world I mean it's obviously couched and

sort of boilerplate liberal moralizing nobody actually believes in but that was the guts of it But then there's other people, too, particularly people who have a sympathy for the Orthodox Marxist-Leninist perspective, there's few of them left anymore. But in the 80s and 90s, I mean, they were very much around, especially in academia. They sort of just avoid the issue, or they'd cast Paul Pott as some sort of dictator-strongman of a secular nature who didn't really understand Marxist Leninism.

and who only was able to capitalize on conditions of chaos and punctuated disruption owing to the Cold War proxy conflict emerging in Southeast Asia. Then there's Maoist-type schismatics, and they just sort of avoid the subject matter. And there's a reason for that. I mean, there's a few reasons for that. And it's not just for the sake of appearances. Paul Pah Salafsar was very educated. And he was something of a counterpart to Ho Chi Minh in various respects.

And he had a deep understanding of Marxist Leninism. Far more, I'd say, than most of the Soviet client apparatchiks in Eastern Europe. And what happened in Cambodia, it's a pure example of historical processes. and a communist zeitguides taking hold with hellish consequences only as simple and reduces these things to the machinations of individual men and that's just not the way human affairs develop. Cambodia also is a very, very strange society. I don't mean that pejoratively.

I find it incredibly fascinating. It's not, it's far more than, like India than is like China and it's more like sub-serran Africa than either. Okay, there was a very racially coded aspect to the Khmer Rouge revolution. There was a horrible racial animus between them and the Vietnamese. And that's one of the things that Kissinger recognized and Nixon's foreign policy and national security team capitalized on and exploited. one of the things you know as we talked about Kissinger for arbitrary reasons is is one of it is like some bogeyman in normies for no apparent reason as i think people know well one of the many alleged sins of Kissinger was after when uh when noem'sahannock who was the king of cambodia who'd been ousted by law and knoll who was an american client

sort of right-wing military type. After 1970, it was Lonnell, who was in the seat of government. The Khmer Rouge conquered Phnom Pen in April 75. That was the end of the Lawn-N-Nal regime. During this time, Sahanuk was in exile, and holding himself out as the government in exile. America recognized the Khmer Rouge regime at the U.N. as the seat of government, obviously because they were at war with Vietnam.

And the Khmer Rouge regime went down when the people's army of Vietnam assaulted and occupied the country. And they occupied until 1990 because something that's also not really understood, I don't think, by most people, including casual students to the Cold War. after the Senate of Soviet split a genuine proxy war broke out between the communist juggernauts culminating in the war between the Khmer Rouge and Hanoi and then between Hanoi and China and America obviously backed the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese who were a very, very strong client of Moscow and this had dramatic ripple effects, okay? I'd argue, and I'm sure some people would take exception to this because they think it's a neo-connish point. It's not.

It's people like Lutfack, like Richard Pearl, like Schlesinger, they were speaking of a, them and the whole team B cadre, they were speaking of a, of a strategic reality. How they interpreted that is questionable. But I think it was indisputable. The communists were winning the Cold War in military terms. It didn't matter that their political societies were basket cases. Because if they won, it wouldn't have mattered. Because then there'd be no alternative. But Nixon and Kissinger were able to neutralize the fall of South Vietnam

by decoupling Beijing from Moscow, and then back in Camp Ocea against Vietnam. And the Soviet. And like I said before, in my opinion, the shadow executive of the Soviet Union during the Brezhnavera was in drop off. Ustinov and Grameko, with a drop off being out front, as it were. The Soviets managed to flip India to the Soviet camp. So Washington, in turn, was able to convert Pakistan into a client regime, which remains to this day. and the India-Pakistan war owed to that, which led to the Soviets insinuating a communist regime into Kabul,

which then after the Iranian revolution, they feared was going to pivot to the West under domestic auspices of fealty to an Islamist ideology. and like we've talked about before, that would have been catastrophic because Afghanistan's within decapitation range of what was Star City, Kazakhstan, which constituted the Warsaw Pax, command and control capability in the Pacific Theater. So an event of nuclear war, they would have been annihilated. And thus you have the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Okay, so this was not a minor thing. this is all related.

And the late Cold War, there was this endless standoff and stalemate in Europe, obviously. Even when the era of strategic parity made conventional force structure relevant again, the stalemate gourd. So Asia became the primary theater at Geostrategic competition. And owing to things like the primacy of maritime, strategic platforms, World War III was going to be, when it went nuclear, was going to be one or lost in Asia. That's what underlay a lot of this decision making. But the personage of Paul Pot was incredibly enigmatic.

Even his name, Paul Pot had something like 18 different names he'd gone under. People weren't even sure he existed. And then when it became clear who he was, people thought he was some kind of cipher. When in reality, the men out front of the Cameroos movement were the ciphers. And he was the linean figure of the movement. He gave very few interviews, one of which he gave an interview in 1977 to Yugoslavian state television. The Yugoslavs never fully hedged. by a lying with the Maoist camp, because obviously that would have reignited hostilities with Moscow. They always, Tito, until the end of his life, tried to tread this sort of middle road,

at least after Stalin was out of the picture. But they were always, like the Romanians were, they were always looking for good offices with communist regimes outside of Moscow's orbit. it. So Paul Pot goes on Yugoslavian television and he gives this whole narrative of how he was this poor peasant boy who was illiterate.

That was a lie. Salaf Tsar, his name even Saar means pale or white because Salasar was Chinese with some Khmer blood.

Camirs are a dark-skinned to people. They probably call himself black commier. Okay. Celeth Star was a lesser aristocrat. One of his female

cousins became a concubine to the then king. There's this sort of sanguinary and libertine sensibility to the royal houses in old

Cambodia. A lot of these kings and princes had dozens of wives and hundreds of concubines, like a great con or something. And Salasar's female cousin became one of these concubines. And then ultimately his older sister did too. And his father had been a wealthy landowner. And owing to his cousins and his sisters, owing to Salasaurus, cousins and his sisters,

position at court, a bunch of his other relatives became royal officers at the palace. And there's this kind of lurid story that apparently is true. When Salazar was 13 or 14, he was still young enough to be allowed into harem quarters, and people didn't worry about it. And one of his elder brothers or cousins was a palace guard of the women's quarters. let him go in there. And when Salazar's boyhood friends would say Salazar go in there and be with the girls sexually.

Because the king was this elderly man who was by that point probably quasi-demented and he certainly wasn't having sex with these women. So they literally had nothing to do. And some teenage boy coming to visit him made them really happy. But the point is, is not to regale people with some kind of pornographic story, but young Selif Sar was literally in the lap of royal decadence. You know, he wasn't, no, he was not a poor

peasant, he was the opposite. And that seems very odd, but outsiders on the periphery of the core national, racial, ethnic population that comes to animate the historical process in the country in question, that seems to be the norm, not the exception. Whether you're talking about Adolf Hitler,

whether you're talking about Napoleon or even Cromwell, to some degree. And I speculate, although I'm sure the man himself and his apologies, such that they still exist in Cambodia,

would never acknowledge this. Salazar's mixed blood, his education, literally at court, and in some of the best schools in Phnom Pen, but his relative proximity

to peasant life and real poverty, if only by observation, that coupled with his instinct and intelligence for power political affairs. It situated them in a way that was uniquely advantageous for a revolutionary career. I don't think he was particularly committed to Marxist Leninism and the way Lenin was or Stalin was.

He wasn't a man living as an outlaw who developed a partisan sensibility. I think he looked around him and saw the proverbial writing on the wall. And like many people, particularly in the colored world, as it was called, and a less delicate epoch, he thought that Moscow was going to win the Cold War. So this was the path he chose. One of the Khmer Rouge field commanders, who was very close to Salafs, are, he said subsequently, long after the Khmer Rouge had been deposed, but we're still carrying on military activity on the periphery in the country. He relayed, I was in command of tens of thousands of men, and I had no real authority. We were all just trying to ride a proverbial beast that was out of control

and desperately trying to direct it towards some sort of constructive or at least less catastrophic purpose and that that's not an alibi. If you've got millions of bodies on you, at least in the eyes of the world, you're not going to drop alibis. That's something about myth and normies. It's the same sensibility when people claim, oh, everyone in prison claims they're innocent. No, they don't. Because there's no reason to anymore.

If you were in the, if you were in the proverbial court of Paul Pot and this planet and the dominant power political cadre is declaring you killed two million people, what are you going to say? Sorry? No. You're going to describe what conditions or as you experience them. People who claim otherwise don't understand the human mind. It's not a matter of conscience or anything like that or feeling remorse. There's just no percentage in it.

Standing on ceremony is something people do who have normal lives that aren't impacted by apoccal events. The, and interestingly, but when Penn fell on April 17th, you know, weeks before the fall of Saigon, and that was gratifying both the Pei-King and the Khmeros themselves. U.S. officials claimed that the final assault on the Cambodian capital was,

spearheaded by people's army of Vietnam units backed by combined arms. That's not true, remotely. But I don't think that was propaganda. A lot of commentators subsequently said that was U.S. propaganda aimed to obfuscate the situation as well as to mitigate the perceived inability of America impact outcomes. I don't, I think people believe that because they had no understanding of Cambodia. They had no understanding the Khmer Rouge movement. They had no understanding what was developing in brass tax terms between the Soviets and the Chinese. They didn't understand the depth of hostility between the Khmer and the Vietnamese. There was a handful of people who understood, at least in broad conceptual terms,

some of the concrete particulars here, and I believe Kissinger was one of them. But I don't think that was disinformation. And that's one of the things that brought attention, particularly of what was then called the Second World, as well as a lot of non-state actors who were engaged in the service of the communist cause. That's something that brought their attention to Southeast Asia. Obviously, victory by the People's Army of Vietnam was imminent then, but that was a massive proxy conflict. The Khmer Rouge had no outside assistance, really. They got some small arms from China, but even China's attention primarily was on Vietnam, where they shared a border. And China had a bizarre relationship with the Vietnamese.

It's one characterized for all time, including today, by hostility. But before the Sino-Soviet split, there was an effort by the Chinese to steer Hanoi away from the Soviet orbit with the incentive being material military support. And owing to the shared border, there was a handful of American servicemen, who were shut down in proximity to the Sino-Vietnamese border, but who crashed over Vietnamese territory and were captured by People's Liberation Army forces

who were manning the AAA batteries, and they spent years in Chinese captivity. So there was a complicated convergence of, military intrigues and overlapping spheres of control. In reality, no Vietnamese force other than special operations and cable elements and non-conventional, non-uniform forces that fought on the ground of Vietnam since 1973. And obviously, that's another myth that won't die.

This idea, Nixon is responsible for the disaster of Democratic Camp of Chia because invading Cambodia destabilized it and this gave rise to an opportunity to Cameroos to capture the capital. That's assonine and it's more of this idea that nothing in the world is approximately caused by anything other than America's decision to intervene or not. by way of hard power elements that's incredibly ignorant. Be as it may, the widening of the war to Cambodia was essential if America intended to finally obviate the ability of Hanoi to arm and equip Nazi elements in the South that were largely wiped out by the Tet Offensive, but the supply lines along what was called colloquially, the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

were obviously going to be used to reinforce whatever conventional element assaulted across the 17th parallel. So it was the right play. Lawn Null was not the right man to be installed after the removal of Sahanog. But beggars can't be cheap. users. You work with the mentioned material you have, including the leadership element. And of course, since Saigon fell on April 30th, the 75, upon Camero's victory, a man named Ing Sari, born

Kim Trang. He was one of six members. of the standing committee of the communist party at camp lucia he was the spokesman for all practical purposes of the communist party of camp lucia and as of april 17th in 75 he was held out by western observers media personage diplomats american military officialdom as the leader of the the Khmer Rouge, which is fascinating. And he was cast as this sort of grotesque villain. You know, in reality, well, to give you an idea, it was some years later, this one British diplomat.

So I think he, I think he's a guy had been the ambassador briefly. He talked about having lunch with Sari and Sari's wife. And he likened the man to, to Fred West and his wife, these two sex deviance who were serial killers in England, that the hyperbole was just ridiculous. But I think this is interesting because this was before, you know, the identity of the true control group of the, the Congress Party of Campo Chia was even known.

Then later, when Pulpott was sort of insinuated into the role in Western narratives and everybody had forgotten about everybody'd forgotten about um ain't sorry this diplomat was still holding him out

as this boogeyman replete with this lurid histrionic narrative of him being no different than a serial killer because they're saying what a lazy script there is for these Anglo American government

types. But moving on, the true depth of Paul Potts Salad Stalot's secrecy, really the only intelligence record of him at all came from Sahanop's secret police. He'd been identified in a dossier along with dozens of other communist intellectuals, identifying him as a former school teacher and in 1972 even identified by US intelligence as chief of the military director to the Khmer Rouge front alongside Nonche who was chief of the political directorate and what's fascinating is when Sahanuk was desperately trying to manage a collapsing situation and placating the Cameroge, the United States, and Hanoi, he took to visiting Camer Rouge held areas to try and negotiate some sort of concord.

And there's photographs of Sahanuk talking to these random Camer Rouge officers who are obviously being held out as the local commander, and you'll see Paul Pot sitting in the corner, unassumingly observing things. You know, obviously, totally invisible to the royal entourage. There's a certain brilliance to that. There's other times where during official Camerooges award ceremonies or victory celebrations during the struggle years,

he'll be sitting literally in the back row of the theater or the assembly area, essentially totally invisible. He stands out again because of his pale complexion, but that only stands out, owing to hindsight. You know, otherwise it would just be an oddity. The people believed to, at least, throughout the first several years, of what can we call the Cambodian Civil War, which pitted Law and Null's

government, you know, which again was this client regime of Washington against the Cameroogh. The leading Cambodian communist intellectual was Q Sampan. He went progues of support against Sahanuk in the 60s as being this sort of social justice advocate. And he had a reputation for not

being corrupt, which was remarkable among any political figure then, especially as the war heated up. And he was viewed as, other than Ho Chi Minh, Sampan was viewed as the most significant Southeast Asian communist intellectuals. He was technically defense minister, even though it was generally recognized that it was men commanding forces in the field who had. real authority in that regard. But this ruse was so convincing Sampan was invited to Beijing to meet Mao. And when communiques were issued, not just to Mao and the Chinese Politburo, but across the communist world, they were signed by Sampan. And if you wanted to meet with formal Cameroo's representation

because you'd earn that clout by contributing arms advisors, money, you want an audience with Sampan but that was a smokescreen.

Sampon had no real power in the movement. I don't even think people in Cambodia committed to the cause were reading when he was producing. But I mean, that itself is brilliant because in a scaled down way, he was performing the function of the common turn or later what became common form for the East Block. He was putting on a civilized, lucid, intellectually articulate, and doctrinally sound within the

parameters of marvellous linensist ideology face for the outside world with a particular eye to courting the resources and assistance of

sympathetic actors both non-state and states alike somebody likened Paul Pot to a Hollywood director He was a master at creating appearances and assigning people

roles within these artificial paradigms. It was tantalact to creating a Potemkin village of human beings and confagulated personages and doing it utterly convincingly. Paul Potts said after the revolution, or after the Congress of Penelope, he said, the CIA, the KGB,

Sahanix police, the Vietnamese knew who I was, but they did not know what I was. And I think that's true. Interestingly, too, there was, um, the CIA apparently, at least by 974, owing to one of Lon Null's

intelligence service agents, he'd gotten close to Paul Pot, and he relayed that Paul Pot had some significance in the party apparatus of significance. So after early 1974, there'll be references and CIA memos to a mysterious Paul, who the agency had identified as a person of significance within the commere communist movement. But to them, he was just some mid-level functionary and

it really wasn't until probably a year after the fall of Pan Penn when the meacetyl praxis was fully

underway that it became clear to the intelligence services, which back in those days were actually reasonably competent, if not the world at large, who, if not what Paul Pot formerly Saloth Sar was. What's significant to, like I said, I'm jumping around a bit, Celosar's upbringing, his father owned a plantation of approximately 50 acres,

and he was by far the wealthiest man in the village. 50 acres of rice petty was about 10 times what the average freehold farmer owned in those days. That's pretty remarkable. And it's a little more remarkable. I mean, even in the, obviously in those days, it was more difficult to track and identify people, but owing to the prestige and notoriety of the man's family it's pretty amazing he could just

disappear the way that he did and manipulate perceptions in that way that again that suggests a real brilliance quite literally for political soldiery especially of that sort but again on to the fact that that he was born to a landed aristocracy. He was the equivalent of a lesser Mandarin. He had Chinese blood. His family was racially different from the population at large. He was inevitably inundated with a strong historical consciousness. And when his young female cousins and sister sort of becoming concubines of the king,

his first sexual experiences were literally with harem girls of the royal. palace, you know, how could you not, if you had the mind for it, develop an aptitude for deep history, coupled with that, the aggressiveness and the fearlessness and the ruthlessness for political soldiery, it's sort of a perfect biography for a man to lead a revolutionary cadre, or a splendid convergence of psychological traits, rather. Well within historical memory, if not direct living memory, then too. The Vietnamese, since, even sometime after the French, established a protectorate in the 1860s,

the Vietnamese came to feature as a boogeyman within the Khmer cultural mind, and not entirely without cause. There was this a powerful story that all Khmer kids learned about a Vietnamese, warlord who'd invaded Khmer land and then he buried three men in the triangle configuration up to their necks and every night he'd stoke a fire between them and balance a rice pot on their heads and that was supposed to be a metaphor for the relationship of the Vietnamese that come here they're this hated racial overlord.

And French missionaries were laid that during times of rebellion, Vietnamese constabulary, they'd take people suspected a partisan activity

and blind them and bury them alive. So this wasn't just a fantasy or some sort of mythology built of racial animus, you know, such as crazy sort of shitwibs going around

believing that, you know, white people are going to go around and, like, hang black people at a moment's notice without hesitation if, you know, they cease worrying about being picked up by the FBI. This wasn't like, boogie fantasy stuff. I mean, there was a reason the Vietnamese were hated and feared. And racial warfare and the specter of it tends to have a brutalizing effect. That's just a fact.

Interestingly, the ties had perennially been brutalizing Khmer within coveted territories. And there wasn't the same sort of fear and animus, which can owe to a few different things. The ties are less alien to the Khmer than the Vietnamese, I think. And again, I'm not some regional studies guy,

and I'm not an expert on Asian ethnicities. But if we're going to adopt the sort of French cultural anthropological paradigm of Southeast Asia, literally being Indo-China, where these two civilizational tendencies meet, all right, well, there's as much of India in Thailand as there is China. the Vietnamese are very different. When you think of to

forgive me this is too colloquial or simple-minded, but drawing in very basic broad strokes, when you think of gung-ho industrious Asians, you think of your thinking of people like the Vietnamese. I think that goes without saying. And the Vietnamese,

as much as they have this deep hostility to the Han, they're very much alike. The Vietnamese are far more of a martial race, which is fascinating, but that's a discussion for another time. Cambodia, however, and again, I'm not saying this pejoratively at all, and I'm not just making this observation from some dilettance understanding, people who've lived and labored there for decades and have made a study of the culture over a lifetime,

they insist Cambodia is more like Africa than like China from the fact that it was characterized by these kings who would take literally dozens of wives or hundreds of concubines who would be bound to them because the king's virility, literally the ability of the king to impregnate hundreds of women. That's a sign from the heavens that the land is fertile. You know, this idea of the Khmer viewing themselves as black, quite literally.

Contra enemies from without who exploit them, which isn't untrue. These extended kinship networks at tribal level that determine outcomes in the social strata, all these things. And in contrast to those tendencies, you know, young Salazar and brothers and sisters, they were inundated with Buddhism. And there's something fascinating. I'm not at all a religious,

studies expert or anything. I don't something about Islam. Other than that, I can't really speak to other people's confessional heritage other than mine own and Bible Protestantism. But this odd nihilism that came to characterize the Khmer Rouge attitude towards homicide at massive scale, there's something of a Buddhist stamp on that. I'm not saying Buddhism is evil or tends towards Megaside at all. But there's, if you read Schopenhauer and the world as a willing representation,

and if you read Julius Evela's book on Buddhism, both of which are really interesting. I mean, obviously, I mean, the world is willing representation as a essential reading. The Evela book in Buddhism, I find that stuff interesting, but it's probably not for everybody. But both make reference, this is primarily an event. concept I believe, correct me if I'm wrong in the comments, a meditative and spiritual practice called tapas. It's usually associated with a sort of extreme and deep aceticism, but tapas literally means burning, burning away, not just of impure thoughts and desires, but of desire itself and connection to the world.

and release from all things corporeal and related to appetites and passions. And there is precedent for pious Buddhists literally burning themselves alive. You know, and I know that this has been held out as an example of Hindu savagery and what have you. I'm not even saying that's incorrect. I know in one of those Mondo films, it might be shocking Asia, which interestingly was held out as a legit

documentary, despite the fact that it's not like Gorgon video. This isn't going to mean anything to youngsters, but the footage and it's not like faces of death, and that means real footage. You know, there's these people, and this is in the mid-70s, when India was even more of a backwater

than today, there's some poor people, they'll find a holy man to cremate their loved ones when they're dead. And then they pour the ashes in the Ganges because they can't afford a proper, you know, mausoleum or whatever. But then there's people obviously bathing in the Ganges, which is full of human detritus. It's fetid. And this footage was exhibited. I mean, I believe the guys who shot it,

they probably had this passionate view, which you'd have to if you're going to immerse yourself that way, in primitive cultures. But it was obviously being showcased for kind of lurid reasons. And, I mean, I'm not going to lie. Like, I find that revolting. I'm Anglicat. I mean, I'm a clean freak.

I find that gross. to the millionth fucking degree. But obviously aside from the kind of visceral grossness of it

it speaks of a lack of concern not just with human remains and proper disposal of these things

but a total lack of a total apathy about death. Okay? This sort of rationalist perspective and the perspective of people like Burnham, James Burnham I mean, was, well, in the Orient life is abundant and cheap. Yeah, that's part of it, but that's not the whole story. There's something about that Hindu and original Buddhist conception about life and death being basically synonymous. And they're not being anything to lament about an individual losing their life and there being nothing to fear about losing one's own life

because it represents a sort of final release into this collective element that sustains all things until all becomes ash and i really believe that i know that ever had a sense of early Buddhism and Hinduism being Aryan, and that's not incorrect. But it's a totally different conceptual orientation about the process of death and what it represents. And filtered down after that racial overcast, who is the progenitor of these theological orientations, is long gone. it takes on a certain casual banality that habituates people to certain excesses that I do not think would be realizable in other kinds of societies. I, this is probably what I've said, the scope, but that's another thing that's neglected about it.

In part because, I mean, in the 20th century, even as, theological impulses were quite literally tearing down the vestigial legitimacy of communist governments. People in academe and what have you still hadn't put together that the hard materialism and the atheist sensibility of the 20th century was disappearing. So this wasn't talked about in the era. I mean, people are uncomfortable with that sort of subject matter anyway. But that's one of the reasons I've been researching this a lot. And in my fiction, the Camero Rouge, and it's a plot device. It's an important aspect of the narrative.

Billy Wong's father is killed by the Camer Rouge when he's on the ground fighting as a mercenary of sorts. and the service of Warsaw Pact. And that haunched Billy Wong. And, you know, that's, it's kind of long been a fascination of mine since I was a kid. I found the whole thing frightening.

But it's, there's something, that movie, I like the new 28 years later movies, even though a bunch of people apparently don't. But you know, the most recent ones, 28 years later, and then the sequel was literally called the Bones. temple, this massive bone cathedral is a major set piece, an aspect of it. And there's a very Buddhist sensibility around it. The guy who builds it's a white man, he's this English doctor

who lives among the infected because he's trying to find a way to cure them so that something you know, approaching civilized life can be restored. But he's taken on this memental mori sensibility. So when people die, whether they're infected or whether they're, you know, a human, he takes their remains and gives them a proper burial, and he boils down their skull and polishes it and he adds it to this massive structure. And it's profound. And you know, to this day, there's this whole monument of skulls in Cambodia. I mean, people burn incense and stuff. Obviously, it's one part monument to the victims, but it's also there's something totemic about it that you wouldn't find in the West. That would upset people.

It's not a reliquary. It's literally like skulls upon skulls. You know, the only thing carnival of that is there's the bone cathedral in the Czech Republic, I guess. I've only seen photos. I think that's incredibly cool. But at the same time, it's also really creepy. I wouldn't want to go to church there. Okay.

But that's also, it was built, I believe, during the height of the 1389 plague, which I think was the worst. So it, you know, it makes sense in that capacity when death is most approximate. Yeah, that's all. I got. We'll get into the killing fields in the next episode. I mean, I'll mention the film, but I mean the actual killing fields and deal a bit more with the brass tacks of the, of the communist megicide that happened there. I just thought some biographical information was imperative to lay the foundation. That's all I got. All right. Good stuff. Thank you. I'm going to point everybody over to Thomas's

substack, real Thomas 777.substack.com and Thomas' website is Thomas 777.com. The T is a 7. Thomas has started uploading some stuff to his YouTube channel, so go check that out too. Yeah, thank you, buddy.

I appreciate it. Talk to you on the next one. Thank you.