The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1337: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Pt. 2 - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

60 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues 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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Subscribe Star. And if you do that, you will get access to the audio file. So head on over to the Pekino Show.com. You'll see all the ways that you can support me there. And I just want to thank everyone. It's because of you that I can put out the amount of material that I do. I can do what I'm doing with Dr. Johnson on 200 years together and everything else. the things that Thomas and I are doing together on continental philosophy.

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Take it away. Yeah, one of the reasons why I think this is an important area of study. It's not just because of the obvious factors that it was an incredibly brutal catastrophe and tremendous loss of human life. And that the praxis of annihilation therapy, as Ernstownoldi referred to this phenomenon, mass homicide at scale, you know, derivative of categorical criteria. in the course of political praxis or ideological warfare, that's key to understanding the 20th century

and the conflict paradigms therein, and it's key to understanding what the states were in existential terms, as well as rebutting the dominant myths of the prevailing system that was established in the aftermath of, war by the international military tribunal but also people have a misunderstanding of marxist leninism and the peculiar situation that its standard bearers and partisans found themselves in and this is very much laid bare by the situation in cambodia i've made the point and i make it in my manuscript that marxas leninous praxis is intrinsically homicidal at massive scale that's not some

cheap talking point or some sort of moral posture. What I mean is that the place in territorial and spatial terms that communism took root and where these revolutionary enterprises were successful were places that lacked a scaled industrial proletariat and revolutionary conditions were present because cadres were able to sufficiently mobilize to force outcomes and create regimes with exclusive access to power according to the revolutionary model that they favored. But the historical conditions weren't present to facilitate the realization of, of this mission in a deep material and sociological capacities. So there came to be an over-reliance on the application of naked, violent force.

Because material shortages hadn't been overcome. Prosperity wasn't taken for granted owing to a highly developed production schema that rendered means of exchange and privately held productive means obsolete. These were conditions very much of deprivation. And that meant that in order to educate the body politic and render it malleable, really the only way that could be incentivized is through violence. and if the subject population in categorical terms proved to be in educable, they had to be exterminated. And this is what happened again and again.

And that's why it's misguided, although this is tangential, not in terms of significance, it's tangential to this particular discussion. It's misguided when people discuss equivalence between the German Reich and the Soviet Union, because the causal nexus is interrelated, but the prime move-on was the Soviet Union. And every political act within that conflict paradigm was in response to the Soviet application of power, according to the conceptual parameters that they had devised and that their proxies and clients had devised within their own respective territories and Cambodia was particularly

primitive so that meant that there was a reliance on annihilation therapy above and beyond even that which was characteristic of the Russian situation or called for within the bounderationality of political objectives there. And the person of Salafsar, who can't be known as Paul Pot, his conceptual horizon and his personality and his psychological makeup, was also an essential component of how these things developed. And what I started getting into last time was, you know, he held himself out as a self-educated poor peasant.

He was not at all. He was the equivalent of a lesser aristocrat. And he developed a very deep understanding of Marcos Lenin's theory. It's misguided when people claim otherwise. Salazar was very, very intelligent. And he was a very cosmopolitan person. As a young man, he went to France to study at the Ecole Francaire, their technical program.

They had a radio electronics and communications program. He had some of his friends ended up studying there. And as we discussed, Sal of Sar, some of his female relatives were royal concubines. And some of his male relatives were officers in the palace court and things. Well, owing to King Monavong's affinity for Salafsar, and the fact of Salazar being friends with some of the king's nephews, he had a leg up and getting admittance to the cold front city. I believe he actually arrived there on the day of the successful ascendancy

of the Chinese Communist Party to absolute power in Beijing, which is remarkable for a few different reasons. And Salazar, he fit in very well in France and among Westerners. He became fluent in French, although he always seemed somewhat ill at ease with the French language. I don't know how much of that was an affectation under the nationalistic trappings that the Communist Party, Campo Chia, outwardly exhibited, which was a substantial aspect of their mandate, was as an ethno-nationalist force of racial defense. And we'll get into that.

But he also, he picked up an aristocratic girlfriend. Her mother was literally a Cambodian princess. her name was the girl's name was son Mali and she and her family lived in genteel poverty because despite their noble title and her great beauty her father was a degenerate gambler who squandered the family fortune but apparently unlike some of these liaisons with palace concubines as a teenager selassar he took this very seriously and quite clearly wanted to marry this woman so his life in Paris was very much that of you know a a a a a a a a a a a a pretty tight being educated in the West to become you know worldly and to receive a princely education in the Machiavillian sense um it was really in 1950s cell of star

got a true education and communism. There was an active commier student life in Paris, which makes sense, obviously, considering that, you know, Indochina was an important battle theater, not just because it became the forum, by, for a great power proxy conflict between, you know, three, the two superpowers,

plus, you know, the, the other communist juggerna out of the fuels well like in China but it's it's a it has key maritime significance um just on its own terms and particularly as the as naval platforms became developed you know acquired an outside strategic significance in terms of capabilities on the final few decades of the cold war you know that that that was was a real consideration. Plus there was the prestige factor. Indochina is something of the jewel of Asia, as it was historically viewed. And the Europeans were reluctant to sacrifice that prestige in the early Cold War. And to some degree even in the late Cold War, and to some degree

even today, depending on who we're talking about, that's changing. And I don't want to spit off another tangent but the French effectively having no cloud in Africa anymore is is remarkable when I realize I'm being old and so it even somebody who spends this time studying history and historical phenomena these sorts of shifts in conceptual horizon are remain striking nonetheless it's not it's not just advancing age but um 1950, that was a critical year in the Cold War, particularly in Asia, but the Khmer students in France, they were very much under the authority of Vietnamese that dominated academic culture, and we'll get into what the implications that were. particularly the Indo-Chinese Communist Party,

which technically represented Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the entirety of Vietnam, which is interesting, because later the fiction of the Vietnamese Communist Party being a discrete entity into itself that wasn't active and south of the 17th parallel, part of that owed to the, you know, a propaganda fiction of presenting the NOF as a purely spontaneous phenomenon. But part of it also had to do with this sort of fiction

that even when the Indo-Chinese Communist Party was no longer the formal organizational mechanism, the Vietnamese were sensitive to sustaining this illusion that there was equal representation, as a matter of fact, as well as charter. within the fraternal socialist parties of Southeast Asia. That was not true. They were Vietnamese dominated.

And that had implications for the conflict between the superpowers and ultimately the Sanosoviet split as well. But to bring us back in the summer 1950, Salazar had the opportunity, as did all freshmen students, who were, you know, studying abroad at the French, at the Ecole Francie, the opportunity to study in another country. There was an entire list where they could choose to spend a summer semester.

Most of these were very costly, the most prestige of which was traveling to Switzerland. but the Yugoslavian communists were engaged in a, we're actively engaged in this kind of outreach with the Indianian cadre building, in part because, you know, of the, the Titoist animosity towards Moscow, but part of it was Yugoslavia never had a particularly strong ideological mandate

and such that the main three ethnicities backed the party state. Tito was a Croatian, but the security apparatus was dominated by Serbs. Bosniaks fell somewhere

in between, but they were afforded a substantial degree of cultural liberty in areas where they were the majoritarian population. But essentially, the real source of the mandate of the Yugoslavian communists was that they were protecting the Balkans from both the Soviets and the Americans. There was sort of a deep freeze on power political activity and a garrison sensibility. but Tito was very aware of the fact that there needed to be more depth and relevance to the U.S. Slav Communist Party, at least superficially speaking, less that, you know, become dust in the proverbial wind.

And so they began a lot of outreach to try and build cadres, particularly with students from Asia, students from Africa, places that were the revolutionary conditions on the ground, had more to do with anti-colonialism and nationalist sentiment, and heterodox motivations in the Cold War paradigm, if you followed what I'm saying. And the cultivation of these commier students was no exception. So Salazar took a train to Zagreb. And, uh, He got put to work with all these other international students building up infrastructure that had been damaged or wiped out during the war, you know, literally building roads and stuff and wiring up electricity and things into tenements.

And this is kind of where his political education began in concrete, practical. terms and he relayed that the stunning difference you know you'd ride just for two days on a train from paris to zagra when it was it was like night and day and in eastern europe the people were very very impoverished and one wouldn't think that you know a partisan culture would take root there that was oriented towards revolutionary marxist women and but he said that the fortitude of the people and the zealowness of which they were willing to sustain ongoing deprivation for the promise of future liberation was he viewed it as a you know as a force multiplier essentially which contained certain discrete potentialities in and of itself and And obviously what he had in mind was how it's applied to the Cambodian situation. And to be clear, too, this is when Stalinism had real clout.

I mean, the East German situation was always complicated, for example. In Hungary, there was this ongoing memory of what amounted to the Rossen Creek against Belakoon and his cadre versus, you know, the Magyar majority. But elsewhere, communism had a great deal of momentum, and specifically of an orthodox perspective that held out the Moscow model of political organization and revolutionary praxis as being the only revolutionary modality. And by the post-Vietnam war era, you know, there was still a great deal of momentum, but it was basically restricted to the global south, you know, which is one reason why Africa and Latin America became these key battle spaces.

But the world of 1950 was very, very, very different, you know, and Salaf Tsar, I believe, I mean, as, to reiterate, as I just said a minute ago, it's misguided when he's cast as this cynic or as some sort of political illiterate. He was not only those things. And, you know, I think he understood Marx's Leninism with a great deal of intellectual depth and rigorous perception. But he's not as, he didn't come to this, he didn't come to the conclusion based on some revolutionary awakening. He wasn't somebody like Che Guevara. He viewed, uh, you know, Cambodia would either remain under the boot of the white man. I mean, it was clear that the French were going down, but they either remain under the boot of the Americans

or they'd be able to liberate themselves from Occidental domination with revolutionary communism as the praxis. Ultimately, Democratic Campocia found itself in the general. Chinese camp solidly in substantial measure because they were totally incompatible with the Vietnamese for reasons we got into the last time we convened in this for this discussion. But also a lot of a lot of these profoundly primitive societies like Cambodia and like some of these countries in sub-Saharan Africa that gravitated towards the the Chinese orbit after the

the center of Soviet split they they viewed the Soviet Union as just another white Western power you know they they viewed it as just a sort of newfangled iteration of the Russian Empire the sort of mass of Central Asian and poor Slavic people with a with a European over overcast managing it. And in lieu of these people being, you know, Varangians or Baltic or Germanic aristocrats,

you know, they were, they were Belarusian and Ukrainian party functionaries. You know, and that's something that's kind of under-emphasized, even in serious treatments of the Cold War after 1972 or so. I hope to do some more writing on that in the future in a more dedicated capacity. That's the true, that's the true, truly significant racial aspect of the Cold War. in the in the um de taut phase and beyond or rather the post vietnam phase and beyond i believe um but yeah it was uh october 1st nineteen forty nine is when cellisar arrived in paris which was the day

when Mao stood at the gate of heavenly peace in Beijing, I guess which is outside or the entrance to the forbidden city. I've seen paintings of it. I'm sure there's got to be a photograph of it that these portraits

are based off of, but I'm sure most people have seen it to, you know, done any study of the Cold War, even a perfunctory one. And of course, when Salasor arrived in Paris, you know, it would be a, Diem Ben-Fu was still five years away, but the French were already well into the quagmire that developed in Vietnam. And they were fighting in Algeria.

you know, the war didn't kick off officially until 1954 and then, you know, the French pulled out, Big Gaule pulled out in 62, but the low-intensity conflict cycle was already underway in earnest. I mean, it was true that, you know, this was the twilight of the French Empire. And even more so than in other theaters, part of it was because the French were refusing to. let go and there wasn't a nuanced model of establishing a proxy political culture that would be willing to accept you know French patronage in return for client fealty the French were going to fight it out

you know whether that was the right play or not is arguable um the gall was a perfect as bastard, and arguably a race trader. That's not debatable. But this made it all the more imperative for these revolutionary cadres in the colored world to frame the political struggle in nakedly anti-colonial terms. And Ho Chi men had to tread a very... delicate path. I mean, he'd always been at pains to obscure the reality that, again, the Indo-Chinese Communist Party,

which was really the Southeast Asian representation within the common turn, you know, going way back. You know, he tried to present this as an equal partnership between, you know, it became the path that Lao, the Khmer, and the Vietnamese. and part and parcel of that was presenting his own struggle as a nationalist struggle against the colonial oppressor, even though I don't think he really believed that. But it wasn't just because that's what the conceptual literacy of the body politic would abide. It was also essential to assuaging what seemed to be insurmountable obstacles to the diplomatic situation particularly vis-a-vis the Khmer.

And they weren't they weren't fooling anybody on the Cambodian side. You know, and that was, I think we got into briefly at least, and we conclude this series. I'll explicate this further because it's important. that America never really understood this degree of emity and distance between the Khmer and the Vietnamese. And I think Kissinger did. I know he did. And that's, you know, I talked about how one of the many things that people like to claim is evidence of Kissinger being this boogeyman is that he recognized the Communist Party of Campocia is,

as the legitimate government to be seated at the UN in lieu of a Zahannock's government in exile, which was the correct play, and that was political reality anyway. But, you know, it, an interesting dynamic came to pass, too, as it began clear that French defeat was imminent, you know, even well, before the imbin fu the indo-chinis communist party they outlined the statement of purpose and their core principles and it was the vietnamese delegation that was essentially responsible for devising all the substantive aspects of it it declared openly that moscow is the leader of the communist world and the social and they lead the way of the socialist community and nations and that

the Indochinese Communist Party is unconditionally subservient to Moscow's position, essentially, which is fascinating. And that doesn't just owe to the fact that there's profound enmity between the Chinese and the Vietnamese. But it was very clear that Ho Chi Minh, Jop, their entire cadre, who were very sophisticated politically, they had no confidence in Mao or in the Chinese regime. And they had absolute confidence in the Russians. You know, it was something of a mere opposite to the view from the view of the Khmer.

But I mean, I'd go as far as the... Ho Chi Minh was one of the, was one of the best men that, um, the communists had. Like, and Jop is, uh, along with Ferdinand Shorner, Jopp, I think, is probably the most criminally underrated 20th century commander, but Tom was up there too, but, you know, the, the Vietnamese were, uh, I mean, obviously Vietnam was highly underdeveloped, even, um, by the standards of the mid-20th century, but the areas that were built up like Hanoi and like Saigon, and to a less degree like Hui,

you did have a cosmopolitan class of people, which does develop under conditions of traditional mercantilist colonialism, because you have to curate that. that you know um you're still seeing the effects of this to this day like in in the UK um that that goof who succeeded Liz Truss Sunak I mean he's a I realize he married into some royal family or something in the old country but you know guys like him he's the product of the British Raj okay um and I mean in his case

that's not a that's not a particularly good thing but uh in the case of hochi men it was an example of the kind of effective political soldier that that system is capable of producing which is one of the reasons why colonialism is a dangerous game and it people don't understand colonialism anymore it's some sort of stand-in for bad things or things i think are mean you know they it doesn't have a parallel in the in the 21st century but it's fascinating because the by necessity a native element needs to be created in one's own image yet also guaranteed to remain subservient by way of a structural mechanisms that make itself defeating to revolt.

And obviously, one of the reasons the Cold War was so profoundly destabilizing is because the ascendancy of Moscow, the superpower status, removed those structural incentives to not disturb the

extant order. But, you know, the sociological aspect of this stuff is one of the few ways. the Soviets consistently beat United States, NATO. But I mean, that's the intelligence game is the other area,

both which are derivative of deep sociological aptitude and understanding, which tells us something about the Slavic character, obviously. But that's a discussion for another day. Interestingly, however, China, China was a, for a time, was North Vietnam's primary patron. On January 18th, 1950, China became the first, they became the first government to recognize Ho Chi Men's regime in North Vietnam. Moscow followed suit immediately, you know, as did the Eastern Bloc. And it was after the French defeat, the Chinese trained, armed and equipped at least six divisions of the people's army of Vietnam. And like we talked about the other week, if memory serves, I made the point that three of the long-term POWs who,

were freed, you know, after the Paris Peace Accords, and it came home during Operation Homecoming in 73. Three of those guys had been held in China because they'd been shot down, you know, well north of the 17th parallel, where AAA was manned by the People's Liberation Army. You know, and just a few years later, you know, half a decade later,

it would have been unthinkable for an armed Chinese element to be in North Vietnam without being treated as a, you know, a hostile and engaged appropriately. There's a really great book that I highly recommend to people who've got interested in the subject matter and the Vietnam more generally. It's by this, it's called Report from Hanoi. This guy Harrison Salisbury, as you can probably tell from his name, he was one of these old wasp newsman types, you know, kind of like a, he was sort of like a moderate liberal version of Lothrop Stoddard, like that same kind of guy, you know. He was embedded in Hanoi before Tet,

and his book mostly deals with 1966 in the early 67, I believe. But there was a couple of constant fears he relayed of the North Vietnamese as well as of Western journalists in the ground

and as Soviet advisors and everybody else. Those were that the Chinese were going to intervene direct as they had in Korea when UN forces cross the Yellow River. And then there was going to be a state of general war, which very probably would escalate to general nuclear war.

The other fear was that because at that time, that was before the moratorium on bombing the North, was implemented by executive order. There's this big fear that some Soviet hanchos were going to die in a bombing raid. You know, God forbid, Brezhnev would be on the ground in Hanoy or something, and U.S. Intel would have flubbed it, and, you know, the Soviet general secretary gets blown up by an F4. But I raised that, not just because it's interesting, and it's just, shows the real stakes that were involved. But really until Nixon took the oath of office,

there was grave concern that, you know, the Chinese were going to force a confrontation on the ground with U.S. forces thus deployed. You know, and by 1969, I mean, that really was unthinkable. You know, and that owes to the real power political brilliance, a Kissinger and Richard Nixon. But, you know, the Vietnamese were in an odd, they were being cultivated by both Moscow and Peking, you know, at this time that Hocci Men was trying to play.

placate all these discrete elements, both within the Southeast Asian theater and without. And the fact of, I make a point a lot that Mao was something of an idiot, and he was, but there were some cunning aspects to what he did, particularly on the military side of things. I mean, which is how we, I realize that Chang's forces were catastrophically weakened by combat with the Japanese Imperial Army, but it's not the whole story. But he, it's pretty obvious that he thought that he, that enmity between the Khmer and the Vietnamese was so great, and that the Khmer were so hostile to both the Vietnamese. and suspicious of the Soviets that he could exploit this enmity by arming and equipping Vietnam to stoke the fears of

the racial enemy and the minds of the commier while at the same time not catastrophically alienating them because there was really no chance of the commier being driven into the hands of the Soviets that suggests real sophistication that not just the American military and intelligent establishment lacked,

but I mean, most of the relevant players representing the engaged actors lacked. You know, and it was, as time went on, the situation sort of took care of itself, because as Ho Chiman realized that Vietnam would stand or fall based on how events resolved in Laos and Cambodia, he'd given up on Thailand. And in the view of the Vietnamese, the Thais were just basically a corrupt mercantile race, who'd never give up at least a formal and cosmetic belief in the, the monarchy and things. Plus, they were geographically distant enough that even if America could base forces there

in a prerunial capacity, it wouldn't constitute a catastrophic threat. Or it's no greater a threat than, you know, surface warfare vessels in the South trying to see and what have you. But the way, as America took on the role of, you know, as per the Truman Doctrine, of holding the line of the 17th parallel to preserve the status quo. And, you know, getting commitments from the Republic of Korea as well as CETO, superficial, is that a long, proved to be in terms of its military capabilities and political will therein, it had significance in terms of what was viewed as a legitimate application of force by America in a theater that there to for had not been viewed as within its precedent sphere of influence.

you know this delicate minuet was something that ho didn't really have to continue because by default you were in the soviet camp if you were resisting the united states and you didn't need to really declare allegiance to commitments beyond that and you as a peking gravitated towards Washington and uh as early as 68 late 68 early 69

there have been skirmishes between the people's liberation army and Soviet forces on the frontier it was no longer a concern of trying to rationalize

hanoys welcoming of Moscow's patronage. And that's a fascinating aspect to this, which as we talked about last time led to what amounted to a proxy war between the communist juggernauts in the

Vietnam, which culminating the Vietnamese assault at Democratic Camp of Chia, which the people's army of Vietnam occupied until 1990. and an attempt to mitigate the strategic loss they absorbed in 79 owing to the defeat of the Cameroos, obviously China assaulted Vietnam, and Vietnam really broke their face, which is remarkable. You know, the Vietnamese are a genuine martial race, in my opinion. and uh one thing i found really interesting um i made the point before in my opinion robert gates

was the shadow was the shadow president at least on foreign policy and and and more in peace matters you know it was gates you know through you know uh obama because obama was you know formerly the president you know uh we armed and equipped um vietnam with some pretty serious hardware especially cutting edge command and control stuff and uh you know the the vietnamese wear american helmets now you know they they they ditch those pith helmets that were so iconic like now they now the people's army of Vietnam looks like the South Korean Army or something. And I don't even think they pack AK-74s anymore. They don't use an armolite platform,

but it's some kind of H&K or pseudo-or some sort of knockoff European rifle. One of the gun guys in the comments will know. but you know i i found that fascinating but and that's actually that's one of i can count in the last 30 years i can count the number of rational things that the u.s. defense establishment has done literally on one hand that's one of them um america should be cultivating henloid you know and they're uh and vietnam's a really big country. I think people have this idea. Oh, and it's something of polemic

around the war when they read history books. Or because it's remote and people don't know much about it, they have this idea of something like little country. It's not. It's huge. You know? And I think a population now is about 100 million people.

Oh, by the way. Yo. I looked it up. I actually kind of knew this. Vietnam uses the STV. What is that? All it is. It's just a It's a AK platform, 762 by 39. Okay, okay.

But something really interesting happened, too, in 1950. This was the final sort of formal meeting of the Indo-Chinese Communist Party where all factions were represented, you know, the Vietnamese, the Khmer and the Laotians. It was a 10-day meeting near the Cambodian border. in a town called Highten. The Vietnamese delegation dominated the proceedings. The keynote speech

was by a man named Nguyen Fanzan, who was a close comrade of General Gioap, and Giaup had gone as far as the place him in charge of Cambodian affairs. And the subject of his speech, he made four main points. The first being that,

that a Cambodian proletariat did not exist. So the Khmer Revolution, it had to be based on the peasantry as the partisan element. And the overriding priority, the second point, had to be to train Cambodian cadres to carry out political action among the Khmer masses and educate them adequately to support a Communist Party at Campoosia

such that the party can move within the population according to Maoist doctrines of asymmetrical warfare. He made the point that the Vietnamese could help and will arm and equip these cadres, but ethnic Khmer need to take the lead. Otherwise, there will be no legitimacy. And the third point is really fascinating. He said the best way to win Khmer sympathy, the hearts and minds, was through Buddhist monks.

Because Buddhist monks, after the king, wielded the most authority in the minds of Khmer villagers. So by some, by some, some means or some combination of incentivization and threats and cajoling, the Buddhist monasteries had to be brought in line with the revolutionary cause. That had mixed success as the situation resolved. And finally, and this was actually very forward-looking, the Vietnamese idea of Congress, communism and the Soviet idea of Marxist-Lenin's practice for that matter, it had to be dramatically modified to make it conceptually intelligible to the Khmer.

And it had to be tailored to reflect Cambodian political and social reality. There's a particular emphasis on not attacking the king. and Sahanoke's bizarre relationship with the Khmer Rouge as well as the Vietnamese, as well as the Americans, as well as Beijing, is a testament to this. Cambodians wouldn't follow anybody who identified the king as an enemy or as an obstacle to national liberation. What Jop and his delegation and the Vietnamese cadre representatives at this conference, said the correct slogan needs to be something on order of we must we must liberate our king from the colonial yoke you know because the king our king has been maimed for all practical purposes by the occidental oppressor and that suggests a very very deep insight into the reality of revolutionary praxis in theater And I believe, look, I mean, one of the things that separates me from court historians, it's not just the fact that they're ideologically compromised and they're not really studying history, they're just presenting political narratives. But this idea that historical occurrences are derived from intentional conspiracies, and I mean, that's nonsense.

I mean, that's beyond nonsense. It's preposterous. It suggests a total conceptual illiteracy, but the way that political warfare is pursued and developed and implemented as

praxis absolutely owes to discrete decision making by command and control elements. And that malability that was taken for granted or that need for unconventional solutions to exigencies presented by the unique situation of Cambodia and frankly supremableness and the lack of educability of the body politic owing to the absence of a proletariat that was whose lives

and conceptual horizon was being molded and informed by historical forces. I think this was a perfect storm of factors that made possible homicide in an absolutely massive scale. That in percentage terms, obviously not in raw numbers, but as attrition as a percentage, as a percentage of the overall population. What happened in Cambodia in three short years, I mean, it dwarfed even the Soviet megicide from 1917 until 1933, approximately. I realized I talked more about the Vietnamese and the Ho Chi Men than I did Pulpott.

It was a central of the foundation, I believe, in context. I'll conclude next episode and I promise we'll get into the nitty gritty of the killing fields and and the Battle of Kotang and these things. The feedback on the first episode was very positive, at least from what the subs relate to me. I mean, I'm very honored by that, but also I want to make sure that people are, you know, benefiting from this. So I worry sometimes that I, I, I'm not emphasizing the subject matter adequately because I get bogged down in foundational aspects. You know, that's kind of the, that's something that I think a lot of historical writers fall prey to. But yeah, that's all I got.

Well, knowing the subs, I think that if they were displeased with anything you were presenting, they would certainly let us know. Yeah, they'd probably come me up and say I'm a faggot or something. I want to yeah, it's a third point. All right. Go to Thomas's substack,

roll Thomas 7777.com. Go to his website, Thomas 777.com. That's he's a 7. Check out everything Thomas has got there. You'll be able to click with them there. And yeah, until the next time, Thomas.

Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you, man.