The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1357: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Pt. 3 - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

54 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.

With election time approaching, political ads will be inserted into the episode along with other ads that, frankly, I'm not going to like and you aren't going to like. So please ignore them, skip by them, whatever you have to do. I don't endorse any of the ads that are inserted, but it is another way for me to generate income. So I appreciate you guys putting up with them. If you don't want to deal with them, go to the Picanuona Show.com. can subscribe through Patreon. You can subscribe through Substack, which is my preferred one. Because with both of those, you get an RSS feed, only Patreon and only Substack give you an RSS feed. There's also a link to my website, Gumroad, and SubscribeStar, where you will get

the audio files that you can download and listen to or you can stream in most cases through those locations as well. So if you want to avoid the ads, consider supporting the show if not, just know none of these ads get any endorsement from me, skip by them, do what you need to do. I appreciate all of you. Head on over to the Picanionos Show.com. You can get the show early and ad free over there. If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. Thomas is back. And we're going to continue this series, possibly conclude this series, on Pult Pot. and Democratic Campuccios. So, hey, Thomas, it's been a while since we recorded.

How are you doing? Well, except for me in the car on the live stream and everybody complaining about the audio quality. No, I appreciate you doing that. I mean, I always appreciate you contributing to the streams because your contributions are an essential aspect of it. But particularly, I realize, you know, being on the road, I don't expect you to drop everything and participate. So, yeah, thank you for doing.

doing that and despite the audio issues which obviously you know was out of your hands people really got a kick out of the conversation so you know once again thanks for um participating well it made it i'll just say it made car talk is always fun to me and it made the um it made a a long drive a little bit shorter no that's great I'm very happy to hear that. I've got a discreet research interest in the Khmer Rouge and Democratic Camp of Chia for a few different reasons. And people tend to emphasize the wrong things. They view it as some sort of outlier incident.

Or there's just these simpletons who've devised this a historical. and arbitrarily categorical discussion of it as an example of genocide, which is, in their little minds, there's some sort of conspiratorial enterprise that just periodically emerges. And presumably the defining characteristic of it or what defines the category arbitrarily assigned is the volume of the body count or some such thing that's patently moronic

like make no mistake the concept of annihilation therapy is in it's a real phenomenon it was a real phenomenon in the 20th century and it touched in concern every aspect of warfare in conceptual capacities as well as

as well as actual war fighting praxis but it owed to the it owed to a historical process by which politics became total and that's a different question because that's historically contingent you know we're discussing the instrumentality as if it's some evil one to itself and that that's what is the defining trait of the phenomenon, you know, again, that's moronic, but it it's unsurprising. People approach it that way.

Or, you know, you get a lot of people, particularly these kinds of national review types. They, they like to hold out Democratic Cambuchia as a unique example of communist evil and

engage in this kind of shrill polemic about, you know, human rights and what have you. I mean, don't get me wrong. What happened in Cambodia was horrific, but it wasn't particularly remarkable for the 20th century. And I, it's an interesting case because, especially if you're somebody who's basically a Hegelian

in terms of their disposition and their analytical methodology, about historical phenomena I take an interest in it particularly because it's an example of how Zygoyce framed all political behavior

in the 20th century so it was somewhat incidental that the Camer Rouge found themselves solidly aligned with the communist world

but at the same time they very much internalized a communist praxis and the way that they pursued annihilation therapy and realizing an ideological program and that's the distilled essence of the dialectical process

at scale and how it has a formative effect on revolutionary politics and Paul Pot himself is a misunderstood person I mean, he's mischaracterized. You know, like I got into last time he discussed his subject matter.

He actually had an aristocratic background. He wasn't some barefoot peasant, like Mao. He was a lot more interesting, intelligent, and sophisticated than Mao, frankly. But he was far less of an ideologue than, say, Ho Chi Men. What he was is he was an arch Stalinist, and that's important. And part of that's because the Communist Party of France, there were still strains of Orthodox Stalinism that endured after the 1968 split or schism. But prior to that, they were one of the most solidly Stalinist cadres in the developed world. Paul Pot, he was the first ethnic commier to attend the Polytechnic Institute in France, the Ecole Polytechnique, I think it's called.

So he was very much marinated in French intellectual culture and really sort of at ground zero of where these ideas were emergent. Paris, in the de Gaulle years, particularly as, you know, they were actively waging war against the Vietnam, and then in Algeria. There was a hotbed of dialectical activity and political violence. I mean, de Gaulle almost got whacked, as, you know, is commonly known, I would imagine, the people even today. but anybody wanted to accomplish anything they had to

find a way to insinuate that into the into the Cold War paradigm there weren't any true neutralists yeah the concept of a third position absolutely had momentum and context during the Cold War but even that wasn't truly a neutralist stance

you know it was a way of manipulating the realities of the extent paradigm that was all consuming in localized theaters, you know, based on the relative state of tension at any given moment, you know, that's why it makes no sense to talk about a third position today. There is, you know, today there's only globalism and the resistance. But, you know, in any event, I... So the case of the Cameroon is instructive, not unlike the case of the Roeth Army fraction and people like Horace de Moeller was instructive. Obviously, people like Moeller have a more sophisticated perspective on these things than

somebody like Paul Pot. I'm not saying Paul Pot was stupid, but there was a, you know, I don't think the Orient ever truly grasped Marxist Leninism just because there was there was no context to it

you know and it was a fundamentally it was a fundamentally continental discourse and these things as much culturally and racially contingent as they are

historically. But there's basically two opposing tendencies from inception with the Cambodian communists. You know, and obviously these guys were living in an actual exile, haven't been banished by Sahanuk from the

kingdom, or they were in constructive exile, because they were students like Paul Pot, Salosar, you know, rather, and some of his fellows who were studying in France. They were very much in this sort of insular environment. That was a hot, but a political activity. But what was fascinating is one of these factions of which Salosart found himself

solidialite, they're guiding a white, their sort of ideological guru, was a partisan name Sonnok Than. And Sonok Than, he was this arch commier nationalist, and he was actually a racialist. And

he'd agitated for independence from France his entire life. And he found himself at Oz with the authorities in 1942.

So he fled to Japan and he joined the Japanese Imperial Army. It was commissioned as an officer. And he wrote extensively on what he viewed as the fascist tendency in Imperial Japan. Very much stuff that was in line with the Imperial Way faction and things. And he began saying that the path to national salvation is

something like the Japanese are accomplishing, but with a national socialist structure and ethic. And those were his work. as he said national socialism. And he became a very powerful man in Cambodia in terms of the following that he cultivated

and the respect he commanded. So Sajanuk ended up exiling him because he knew that he couldn't have him whacked because that that would have made him a martyr and that would have catastrophically backfired no probability. But Sunnok Thon was more than anybody, you know, the primary influence on Salafsar in his worldview. There was a whole faction around him.

And the alternative sort of tendency, you know, were pretty much these orthodox Marxists and this type intellectuals and this tension developed with this. in this, you know, commier expat community. And, you know, it's, uh,

but even for these guys who represented the left wing faction, a commier um, revolutionary, uh, um, sympathies. You know,

it was independence and, uh, not, not communism. That was sort of the overriding imperative. but they were they were starting to become intertwined you know and uh stalin had uh recognized hocheemen's government

um as early as uh 1951 you know and and moscow began championing the vietnam cause and the message that that sent to people really across the colored world, as it was called, was that the communists were the only ones who would support you if you were trying to throw off the yoke of domination from without. You know, everybody else was basically against you. You know, the plutocratic capitalist were against you. You know, the Trotscate internationalists were against you.

You know, America was against you. The Americans had armed and pay you for limited purposes such that it served their ends. If, you know, people that they considered a greater threat were down range from, you know, the business end to your rifles, but, you know, that, that was a, that was very cynical and that could just, that apparatus could turn on you just as easily. But, uh, at the same time, what a lot of, a lot of this early cadre reported was that, you know, as we began studying Marxist Leninism, even if we felt that it lacked a complete trajectory in terms of our own racial destiny, it seemed scientific in terms of how it described processes of history.

So it insinuated itself into our thinking, even if we didn't view ourselves as doctrine or communist beyond the fact that we respected Stalin and viewed Stalinism as an animating catalyst and a path forward. And I think you know

despite the secularization that impacted East Asia just like it did everywhere else in the 20th century there's very much a Buddhist overlay to a lot of this and an ancestral memory of the great con. It all sort of conspired to create this actually fairly cohesive,

ideological framework for how to resist the Western, or at least the American-led view of globalism or the intended, you know, configuration of globalism. And it's so resisting, create an alternative conceptual paradigm. And that's what's important about the entire, the ideological culture of the Warsaw Pact and other aligned countries and parties and non-state actors. there was something coherent about it. It was its own tenancy.

And that really can't be denied. And the Sino-Soviet split, shattered that. Because, you know, again, I think Stalin was really holding it all together. And the international situation had changed as well. And obviously, Nixon and Kissinger exploited this. very adeptly, but this wasn't just superficial. You know, it was a real thing. And the idea of, the idea of communism becoming this sort of oriental tendency of revolt,

I think there's a lot to that. You know, and it's interestingly, you know, Stalin was an opponent to the common turn. He was careful about how he proceeded in that regard during the war years for political reasons. But he abolished the common turn essentially at earliest opportunity to do so. And what replaced it was a, was a, kind of alternative internationalism that very much sort of seceded from the West and the desire to impact Western discourse. You know, and for people, you know, for context, I mean, yeah, like the, the jewel

and the crown of the second world was the DDR and East Berlin. But, you know, you could travel at a zenith of communist power you know which I I put at 1975 um yeah

you could you could you could travel over the road from Berlin to Saigon and everywhere you traveled through would be under communist rule you know that's

that's a massive percentage of this planet and you know there there was something to the socialist community of nations it wasn't premised on the same sorts of principles as the common turn and purported to be although the gobbledy-gook language of Marxist Leninism remained but again I mean that that owed the zeitgeist more than It did dogmatic belief in the strictures of Marxist's historiography. But this is important, and that's essential to understanding the Khmer Rouge.

But to drive the point home in terms of how this sort of yon left and right, Higalian dialectic, inform the Cambodian situation. Yeah, son, Nakhthan, he was actually, his mother was Chinese and Vietnamese, and his father was Khmer. He had been educated in Saigon and Paris. He was deeply involved in the Buddhist Institute of Phnom Pen, which of this day remains the primary apparatus of government

that deals with Buddhist heritage and posterity therein in Cambodia he established the first Khmer language newspaper called Nagravada in 1936 and

it was a it was very very pro-Japanese it was pro-fascist this is where this is where Than first invoke the term national socialism to discuss

you know his ideology and I mean obviously it was there was very much like a heavy dose of communist nationalism

present but the outlook was pan Asian you know and it was you know and again it viewed the Japanese

empire as sort of the racial loci of of the new Asian politics you know shorn of domination from without and that was

congruous and in in line with presumably the racial destiny of East Asian peoples to realize you know an alternative mode of

modernity, you know, employing Western techniques towards that end, but without adopting the political forms of, so, you know, derived from that same creative nexus. You know, and he, towards that end, he advocated teaching Vietnamese and in Cambodian schools. people who've people to become politically engaged people to develop at least a working understanding of Japanese you know and again this this developed enough momentum

that Sahanna viewed him as an adequate threat to warrant his exile what ultimately happened was Than formed this militia, this anti-communist, anti-royalist militia. And they assisted in the overthrow of Hanuk.

And a lot of these people ended up filling out the ranks of Lonnell's security forces, ultimately. And U.S. Special Forces pumped a lot of money and small arms into into their coffers, which is really interesting. But as it became clear that there's a basic instability to the regime that replaced

Sahanuk. I mean, this gets really complicated, the intrigues involved in things. The militia that the commiereret, I think is how it's pronounced. I think it means free Khmer, or like free Cambodians. The writing was on the wall that Khmer Rouge victory was imminent, and also people under arms generally realize that if the civil war continued, the only winners would be the Vietnamese,

who were always chomping the bit to invade. so a lot of these guys ended up taking up with the Khmer Rouge and eager to beef up their ranks and not being at all averse to assimilating right-wingers into their ranks, they basically amnestied them, which is really interesting. And like I said, I think one of the key takeaways, the Khmer Rouge it's it's an example of pure communist praxis but with a highly malleable conceptual and ideological doctrine and posture and there's something there's something profound about that that um is instinctively apparent i think but it's somewhat

difficult to flesh out in terms of concrete particulars. But yeah, the, and there's actually a 1959, Fan published The Manifesto of the Camer Saray. That's what it was titled, quite literally. And one of the major points of attack of the monarchy and Sahanoke specific, was the allegation that Sahanuk was supporting the quote communization of Campocia,

not just because he was viewed to be in bed with the Vietnamese and and overly friendly with Beijing. But, you know, the opposition to doctrine or communism was very strongly felt. by a substantial proportion of the body politic. And most significantly, you know, of that percentage of the body politic that was actively under arms, you know, and this validates a lot of what, you know, people like Otto Remmer, like H. Keith Thompson, like Francis Yaki, obviously.

and, you know, James Maddell were saying in the era. And Kerry Bolton, though I have a lot of respect for. I think he's great. I don't know the guy, but I cite him frequently, and I avidly consume what he produces. He wrote this really great. It's a thin volume. I think it's under 200 pages.

The book on Stalin, and specifically about you know the probably like the last the last five or eight years of Stalin's life is the main focus what it's called Stalin the enduring legacy and it deals with a lot of this subject matter where particularly if Stalin was the standard

bearer of these things you know to be clear it's not it's not some epilogia for Stalinism at all and nor do I don't people get the impression that that's something I have some fetish for or anything at all. But that's not the point. We're talking about how the 20th century conceptual paradigm and the extent zeitgeist was

dispositive in terms of what, in terms of political potentialities, and in practice therein, it framed everything. Today, everything is framed by globalism and resistance to it. You know, and that's important. And it's important in understanding what the structure is, conceptually and ideologically of the current regime. and the paradigm that it's situated within. But also, I don't think people understand what happened in the 20th century.

I know they don't. And they don't understand how the Cold War resolved either. They don't understand the left won the Cold War. The Stalinists lost the Cold War. And Stalinism's not left-wing in the sense people think of it. That doesn't mean it's good, but that's not the point. and, you know, even the people who had, even people like Horst Mahler who had a pro-Soviet disposition vis-à-vis the Cold War, and specifically as regards to European liberation,

they viewed the second world as an essential resistance element to, you know, the globalist, Zionist faction, led by America and it was imperative that you know neither side be able to become totally dominant

but such that you know but such that liberation as tendencies were possible you know obviously it was it was the communist world that was going to facilitate that and ultimately

you know communism had an expiration date because the context from which it derived its credibility and intelligible

parameters you know O'Doo an epoch that was already passed by the middle of the 20th century with the exception of the developing world in the global south but you know and the way this ties together for me and terms of some of my kind of grand theories of

history if you will is um you know in a couple of ways i like i said i think even though the camere rouge were not a doctrinaire communist movement i their their praxis was in some ways very purely communistic and that always involves annihilation therapy at mass scale for conceptual reasons and the need to eradicate all competing modalities of conceptual organization in order for communism to flourish that's essential to its realization and that's why there was such a horrific body count that attended

communist regimes in the 20th century and that puts in context everything that happened that was in dialogue with Marxist Leninism first among them obviously first among those

events and aspects you know the Second World War so that completely rebuts what's the claimed causative variables were for, you know, annihilation therapy as perpetuated by the German Reich and other non-communist societies. But also, it tells us something about how political ontology,

it went from being really only within a couple of centuries. It went from being something that didn't touch and concern the only majority of human beings' lives to being existentially central to their entire conscious existence. And that's fascinating. There was precursors to that in the 30 years' war. And there were three kingdoms and things. But it wasn't the same. And when the catalyzing crisis abated, so did that all-consuming ontological reality. So this looms large in a lot of the long-form stuff I've been working on.

You know, and I wanted that to be clear, because I don't want people just thinking that I'm employing it as some cheap polemical device, you know, like in the way that our in the way that our conservative enemies do. But when, you know, let me see what else I got on my outline here.

Yeah, and I mean, for context, I realize this is a lot more about fan than about Salafsar, aka Paul Pot, but this I think this was important to explicate. Eventually, Sahanup, he allowed Thand to return from exile around October in 1951, which is a very calculated play. When Than arrived in Phelham Penn,

there was an estimated 100,000 people who showed up to breed him and lined the route from the airport. you know the five miles into the city that his caravan was traveling you know and it was it gave Sahanuk pause because frankly that

those kinds of crowds it only turned out you know for for him himself you know and that was largely derived not from the charisma charisma of Sahanuk

which really was non-existent but reverence for the monarchy itself and within Khmer Buddhism which I don't claim to have any meaningful knowledge of but superficially I do know that the monarchy looms large within its metaphysics you know so the course that this took Zahannock what he lacked in charisma he made up for in conniving political instincts. His recognizing the male ability of the body politic, you know, Sahanuk not just survived, he survived the overthrow of the monarchy by Law and Null.

you know, in the clientage of the United States. He survived the Khmer Rouge Revolution. He survived the Vietnamese occupation and actually profited from it. And he died as a wealthy old man. So he was doing something right. I think he took steps to curate what happened between Thans, people and the Camero Rouge

and the reconciliation is not really the right term because they weren't at odds in conventional war and peace terms but you know I think there's something there

because otherwise I don't see how this could develop the way it did is splendidly in favor of the the monarchy um but it's also when fan returned to cambodia that removed the political center of gravity of the paris commier communist subculture that had you know sustained the the right wing among it within it, you know, among whose ranks, of course, was Salasar. So the Khmer student movement from then on began skewing very sharply to the left.

But this was tempered because, again, the French Communist Party was solidly Stalinist. So when some of these commier students started making contact with French communists, they became very close to institutions, such as the French National Students Union and the ISU, the International Students Union, and these were very Stalinist organizations. So any sort of internationalist or Trotskyite tenancy was being shorn from this remaining corpus of the uh... commier student cadre and from these europeans including you know east germans obviously the the commier communists became very sophisticated

they started organizing themselves and uh they began calling themselves the the marxist circle and it was built up of individual cells each compresses between three and six men. And it was compartmentalized, deliberately, and rigidly. One member of each cell was in contact with a single member of the central committee, which was the leadership element. And no cell member knew who belonged to the other cells or how many cells existed. You know, everybody had their stance.

orders and it was understood not to seek information about the structural aspects of the wider cadre beyond an individual cell and that's the rote army fraction that was something that they were very big on as well. Okay, so this was what the Camir were learning about political warfare, which is really interesting.

And, you know, this also allowed them to, the Vietnamese had a tense relationship with the French communists, because on the one hand, they were nominally on the same side, obviously, despite the

despite you know the supposed uh disinterest of communist partisans to matters of national or racial or ethnic

um loyalty you know there were tangible divisions and tensions between the the VFs and the

French owing to the war and owing to the fact that the you know the Vietnamese are far more interested in a throwing off the yoke of French nomination and they were arguing about the finer points of the workers revolution but the Khmer yeah the Khmer obviously that was their primary impetus also but they weren't they weren't actively fighting a war against the French you know and again they saw their primary enemy as the vietnamese you know and there's an ancestral racial animus there that was very powerful and um so really you know the the the commier looking for ideological patrons despite their racialism despite their sympathy for you know um fans model of of racialized uh politics, which was sincerely felt. You know, they, they felt a lot more comfortable having patrons in the, in the, in the, in the French, in terms of how to build a cadre that being subordinate to the Vietnamese.

So they didn't trust and were convinced look, look down on them. So this is really sort of the DNA of the Khmer Rouge and how, again, it, they developed really this sort of this sort of splendid praxis, while at the same time not abiding nor being particularly interested in the doctrinaire aspects of Marxist-Leninism as a historical process and beyond what they viewed as the inherently scientific aspects of it, which owing to the zeitgeist and owing to a certain fascination with Western techniques and perceived advanced modes of life, you know, held a certain fascination over them. But, yeah, it's a really fascinating phenomenon. And it's, there's an outsized significance owing to these facts I enumerated in terms of understanding. understanding sort of the wider process of development of revolutionary communism in what was then the third world. You know, I'm making a point a lot, and I'm sure people think I'm being panicked, but there is no third world anymore.

You know, it's a, it's a Cold War paradigm that described a very real and specific thing. you know and it's uh the commier cells would meet once a week usually for two hours in the evening and they'd study communist texts but increasingly these sessions were apparently devoted to self-criticism and analyzing their own shortcomings as political soldiers and you know discussing the practical business of armed revolution. And increasingly, there was less and less discussion of, you know, of Marxist Leninism or Mao Zedong's theory on, you know,

what he called New Democracy. It, you know, became very much a sort of tactical college of revolutionary praxis and but that also owed to why the regime was short lived

there was a chaotic aspect to it beyond the fact that they went kill crazy but you know it was the shortcomings of that the sort of intellectual posture

became evident when this same cadre 20 years on fell after a little over three years. Yeah, that's all I've got for this for today. We can talk about this

another episode if you want. Specifically, I was thinking about maybe discussing the film The Killing Fields, which for a Hollywood movie is actually really, really great. And as far as my research indicates, it's

actually very, very accurate. And a death pran who's now deceased. But he was the subject, you know, the guy was the subject matter of it. He validated it. He signed off on it. But we don't have to do that if people are weary of this subject matter. I think we can run, we can do a movie review.

or at least in an episode where dedicated to the film and it yeah that would help too because it as a sort of visual narrative aid in the things yeah I think yeah all right we'll come back for a part four I want to encourage everybody to go over to Thomas a substack

real Thomas 777.substack.com where we are streaming at one central the only time zone on Thursdays 1 p.m. And you can support Thomas there and you can connect to him there. It also is website Thomas 777.com where the T is a 7. And yeah, go support Thomas.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you, buddy.