The Pete Quiñones Show - Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge - Complete - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

4 Hours and 42 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.This is the complete series 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.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano 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 an understudy 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 the 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, the categorical criteria to what they call genocides. Conspicuously, of course, the Soviet Union during the phase or epoch when America was allied with the Soviet 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 Ernstinole

so much is he's one of the most important gaily 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. 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. It's not published yet. Also, so there's that and really such that I remember that 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, 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 Camer 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. the historical processes that created it, 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-Seleth-Sars, sort of an Ediamine figure, this figurative, and then according to some apocryph.

story's literal cannibal who was the face sort of post-colonial savagery when the shackles are thrown off the colored world I mean it's obviously couched in 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 marx's 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 Pot 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, Sal of Sarr, 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 the 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 like India than is like China. And it's more like sub-Saharan 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 one of it, is like some boogeyman in armies for no apparent reason. As I think people know, well, one of the many alleged sins of Kissinger was after, when, when Noem Saanuk, who was the king of Cambodia who'd been ousted by Law and Nahl, who was an American client, sort of right-wing military type, after 1970 it was Law and Null, who was in the seat of government.

The Khmer Rouge conquered Phnom Pen in April 75. That was the end of the Law and Null 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 UN 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 suits in 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 from Schlesinger, they were speaking of a, them and the whole team be cadre, they were speaking of a, of a strategic reality. How they interpreted that is questionable. But I think what's indisputable, the communists were winning the Cold War in military terms. It didn't. 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 Soviets, 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 come.

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 fieldtee 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 Aerostrategic 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 Khmer Rouge movement were the ciphers and he was the lenient figure of the movement he gave very few interviews one of which he gave an interview in 977 to Yugoslavian state television

and 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. 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 Sar, his name even, Tsar means pale or white, because Salazar was Chinese with some Khmer blood. Cameras are a dark-skinned people. They probably call themselves black commier. Okay.

Salath-Sar was a lesser aristocrat. One of his female cousins became a concubine to the then king. There's this sort of sanguineary and libertine sensibility to the royal high. 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 Salazar'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 selisar's cousins and his sisters position at court a bunch of his other relatives got became royal officers at the palace and uh there's this kind of lurid story that apparently is true when cellar was uh 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 and he'd let him go in there. And when Salazar's boyhood friends would say Salazar'd go in there and be with the girls

sexually because the king was this elderly man and 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 not to regale people with some kind of pornographic story, but young Selif Tsar 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. You know, whether you're talking about Adolf Hitler, or you're talking about Napoleon or even Cromwell, to some degree. And I speculate, although I'm sure the man himself and his apollo. 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 him 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,

he said subsequently long after the Khmer Rouge had been deposed, but we're still carrying on military activity on the periphery of 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's not an alibi. If you've got millions of buyers, on you, at least in the eyes of the world, you're not going to drop alibis. That's something, there'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 liars that aren't impacted by apoccal events. And interestingly, Bonhpent fell on April 17th, weeks before the fall of Saigon.

And that was gratifying both the Peking and the Cameroos 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 disinformed. information. 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 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, you know, 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... the disaster of Democratic Campania because invading Cambodia destabilized it and this gave rise

to an opportunity to Cameroos to capture the capital. That's asinine 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. 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. Law and all was not the right man to be installed after the removal of Sahanuk, but beggars can't be choosers. You work with the mentioned material you have, including the leadership element. And, of course, since Saigon fell on April 30th, the 75, the, 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 Ocea. He was the spokesman, for all practical purposes of the Communist Party of Camp Lucia, and as of April 17, 1975, he was held out by Western observers, media personage, diplomats, American military officialdom, as the leader of 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's a guy who's been the ambassador briefly. He talked about having lunch with Sari and Sari's wife. And he likened the man to Fred West and his wife, these two sex deviants 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 had forgotten about, But, I'm sorry. This diplomat was still holding him out as this buggy man, replete with this lurid historiotic narrative of him being no different than a serial killer. It goes to say what a lazy script there is for these Anglo-American government types.

But moving on, the true depth of Paul Potts Salad Starr's secrecy, Really the only intelligence record of him at all came from Sajano up 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, he'd been identified by U.S. 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, placating the Khmer Rouge, the United States, and Hanoi, he took to visiting Khmer Rouge held areas

to try and negotiate some sort of concord. And there's photographs of Sahana talking to these random Cameroos 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 Cameroon, 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. Jim of Washington against the Khmer Rouge.

The leading Cambodian communist intellectual was Q Sampan. He won't probably 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 men, Sempan 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 communicators were issued not just to 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 Cameru's representation because you'd earn that clout by you contribute arms,

advisors, money, you want an audience with Sampan. But that was a smoke screen. 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 a 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 Marxist learning this 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 tantalong to creating a potent village of human beings and confagulated personages and doing it utterly convincingly. Paul Potts said after the revolution, or after the Congress of Penel Penn, he said the CIA, the KGB, Sahanax 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 the CIA apparently, at least by 1974, owing to one of of Lon Nall'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 commie communist movement but to them

he was just a mid-level functionary and it really wasn't until probably a year after the fall of

Pannon Penn when the megasidal 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 Seloth Sar, was. What's significant to, like I said, I'm jumping around a bit, Celestar'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 paddy was about 10 times with the average free. hold 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, there was, 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 he was born to a land of 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 then when his young female cousins and sisters 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?

And 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 sense. 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 apograble story that all Khmer kids learned about a Vietnamese warlord who'd invaded Khmer land. And then he buried three men in a 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 relayed that during times of rebrand, rebellion, Vietnamese constabulary, they'd take people suspected of 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 white people are going to go around and like hang black people

at a moment's notice about 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. This is 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 I 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, okay? 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 and 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. This, these extended kinship networks at tribal level that determine outcomes in the social strength, 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 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 my 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 megal. side at all. But there's,

if you read Schopenhauer in the world as well in 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 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 Vedic concept, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, 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 corporal 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 Mando 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. It 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, I'm Anglo-Titanic. 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 the sort of rationalist perspective and the perspective of

people like Burnham, James Burnham I mean, was, well, in the Orient life is abundant in 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 evil 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. It's probably what I said to 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 vestige of illegitimate, of communist governments, people in academia 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 recent. searching this a lot. And in my fiction, the Khmer Rouge, and it's a plot device. It's an important aspect of the narrative. Billy Wong's father is killed by the Khmer 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 and a fascination of mine since I was a kid. I thought the whole thing frightening. But it's just something, that movie, I like the new 28 years later movies, even though a bunch of people currently don't. But you know, the

most recent ones, 28 years later, and then the sequel was literally called the Bone Temple. This massive Bone Cathedral is a major said 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 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 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

there's this whole monument of skulls in Cambodia. I mean, people burn incense and stuff. And 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 that's also it was built i believe during the height of the the the 1389 plague which i think was the worst so it you know it makes sense is in that capacity when death is most proximate but yeah that's that's all i got man we'll get into the killing fields in the next episode that not i mean i'll mention the film 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 the way the foundation but that's all i got all right good stuff thank you i'm going to point everybody over to thomas's substack real thomas seven seven seven dot substack.com and um thomas's website is thomas seven seven dot com the t is a seven and thomas has started uploading some stuff to his youtube channel so uh go check that out too yeah thank you buddy i appreciate it talk to you on the next one thank you i want to welcome everyone back to the pecaniano show thomas is here and we're going to pick up where he left off talking about Cameroge and Pulpit.

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 Ernsternity refer 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 stakes were in existential terms, as well as rebutting the dominant myths of the prevailing system that was established in the aftermath of the 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 Marxist-Lennus 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 this mission in 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 malabal, really the only way that could be incentivized is through violence. And if the subject population, in categorical terms, proved to be uneducable, 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,

a 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 boundy rationality of political objectives there. And the person of Salafsar, who can't even 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 person. He was not at all. He was the equivalent of a lesser aristocrat. And he developed a very deep understanding of Marcos Leninist theory. It's misguided would people claim otherwise. Salazar was very, very intelligent. And he had a very, he was every cosmopolitan person. As a young man, he went to France to study at the Ecole Francaise,

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 of the palace court and things. Well, owing to King Monavon'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 very important. 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, the girl's name was Son Mali. And she and her family lived in Gentile,

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, Salazar, 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, I, a princely type being educated in the west to become, you know, worldly and to receive a princely education in the Machiavellian sense. It was really in 1950s, El Sars got a true education in 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 where we were a great power proxy conflict between you know three the two superpowers plus

you know the other communist juggernaut and the feels probably in China but it's it's a it has key maritime significance just on its own terms, and particularly as the, as naval platforms became, you know, acquired an outside strategic significance in terms of capabilities on the final few decades of the Cold War, you know, that was a real consideration. plus there's 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 have spit off another tangent but the French effective having no cloud in Africa anymore is remarkable. I mean, I realize I'm getting old. And so even somebody who spends this time studying history and historical phenomena, these sorts of shifts in conceptual horizon

are, it remains striking nonetheless. It's not just advancing age, but 1950, that was a critical year in the course, World 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 discreet entity into itself that wasn't active in what, you know, south of the 17th parallel, part of that owed to the, you know, a propaganda fiction of presenting the NLF as a purely spontaneous phenomenon. But part of it also had to do with this sort of fiction that even when the

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 Sino-Soviet split as well. But to bring us back in the summer 1950, Salazar had the opportunity, as did all freshmen, foreign, freshman students who were, you know, studying abroad at the French, at the Ecole

France, say 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, where actively engaged in this kind of outreach with the Indianist cadre building,

in part because, you know, of 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. You know, 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 communist was that they were protecting the Balkans from both the Soviets and the Americans. 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 Yugoslav 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 within the Cold War paradigm, if you followed him saying. and the cultivation of these commier students was no exception. So Salazar took a train to Zagreb, and 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 Zagreb, and 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 feminism,

but he said that the fortitude of the people and the zealousness with 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 obviously what he had in mind was how this applied to the Cambodian situation and to be clear too this is when the Stalinism had real clout I mean the East German situation was always complicated for example um in a hungry there was this ongoing memory of uh what amounted to

the rosson creg against bellic coon and his cadre versus you know the magyar majority but elsewhere communism had a great deal of momentum and specifically of uh an orthodox perspective that held out the 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, 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 Salafsar, I believe, I mean, as I'll, to reiterate, as I just said a minute ago, it's misguided when he's cast as this cynic or as some sort of politically illiterate.

He was neither those things. And, you know, I think he understood Marx's Leninism with a great deal of intellectual depth. and rigorous perception but 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 you know Cambodia would either remain under the boot of the white man

you know I mean it was clear that the French were going down but you know they they'd remain under the boot of the Americans, or they'd, you know, be able to liberate themselves from Occidental domination with revolutionary communism as the praxis. You know, ultimately, Democratic Campocia found itself in the 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-cirnard of Africa that gravitated towards the the Chinese orbit after the Sino-Sovia split they viewed the Soviet Union as just another white Western power. You know, they viewed it as just a sort of newfangl iteration of the Russian Empire, the sort of mass of Central Asian and poor Slavic people with a European overcast managing it. And we were these people being, you know, Varangians or Baltic or Germanic oristic, 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 specifically dedicated capacity. That's the true that's the true truly significant racial aspect of the Cold War in the

in the Vatant phase and beyond, rather the post-Vietnam phase and beyond, I believe. But yeah, it was October 1st, 1949 is when

Salazar arrived in Paris, which was the day when Mao stood at the 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 on. of but I'm sure most people have seen it who you know done any study of the Cold War even a perfunctory one um and of course when Celasor arrived in Paris you know it'd be a Diem Ben Fu was still five years away but the French were already well into the the quagmire um 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, Bigal 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 player not is arguable. De Gaulle was a perfectest 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 a hoci man 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, what 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 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, 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 Campo-Cjew.

Shia is the legitimate government to be seated at the UN in lieu of a Zahanook'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 became clear that French defeat was imminent, you know, even well before the Umbun Fu, the Indo-Chinese 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 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 Min, 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 mirror. opposite to the view from the view of the Khmer. But I go as far as the Ho Chi Minh was one of the best men that the communists had. And Jop is, along with Ferdinand Shorner, Jop, I think, is probably the most criminally underrated 20th century commander.

But Tom was up there too. But, you know, the Vietnamese were, I mean, obviously Vietnam was highly underdeveloped, even by the standards of the mid-20th century. But the areas that were built up like Canoy and like Saigon, and to a less degree, like Hui, you did have a cosmopolitan class of people, which does develop. under you know conditions of traditional mercantilist colonialism because you have to you have to curate 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 trust Sunak I mean he's uh 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? And I mean, in his case, that's not a particularly good thing. But in the case of Ho Chi 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 people don't understand colonialism anymore. It's some sort of stand-in for bad things or things I think are mean. You know, it doesn't have a parallel in the 21st century.

But it's fascinating because by necessity, a native element needs to be created in one's own image, yet also guaranteed to remain subservient by way of structural mechanisms that make itself defeating to revolt. And obviously, one of the reasons the Cold War was so firmly destabilizing is because the ascendancy of Moscow, the superpower status, removed those structural incentives to not disturbed 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 at 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, for a time, was North Vietnam's primary patron. On January 18,

1950, China became the first uh they've been the first government to recognize ho chieman's regime in north vietnam but moscow followed suit immediately you know as did uh the eastern block um and it was uh after um the french defeat the chinese trained um armed and equipped at least six division 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 who 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, 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 word 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. He was embedded in Hanoi before Tet, and his book mostly deals with 1966 into early 67, I believe. But there was a couple of constant fears he relayed of the North Vietnamese of the North Vietnamese, as well as Western journalists on the ground and as Soviet advisors and everybody else. Those were that the Chinese were gonna intervene directly as they had in Korea when UN forces

cross the Yellow River. And then there's gonna 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 honchos

were going to die in a bombing raid. You know, God forbid, Brezhnev would be on the ground in Hanore or something, and U.S. Intel would have flubbed, 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 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, a confrontation on the ground with U.S. forces thus deployed. And by 1969, I mean, that really was unthinkable. You know, and that owes to the real power political brilliance of Kissinger and Richard Nixon. But, you know, the Vietnamese were in an odd.

They were being called. cultivated by both Moscow and Peking, you know, at this time that Ho Chi Minh was trying to placate all these discrete elements, both, you know, within the Southeast Asian theater and without. And the fact of, I make a point a lot that Mao would some

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, uh, he, uh, thought that he that enmity between the Khmer and the Vietnamese was so great and that uh 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 uh you know the racial enemy in the minds of the Khmer well at the same time not catastrophically alien

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 most of the relevant players representing the engaged actors lacked And it was, as time went on, the situation sort of took care of itself, because as Hoccheman 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 at least a formal and cosmetic belief in the monarchy and things. Plus, they were geographically distant enough that even if America could base forces there in a prerineal capacity, it wouldn't constitute a catastrophic threat, or it's no greater a threat than, you know,

surface warfare vessels in the South China Sea 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 cito superficial as that alliance proved to be in terms of its military capabilities and political will therein it had it had significance in terms of what was viewed as a legitimate application of of force

by America in a theater that theredefore had not been viewed as within its precedent and 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 as Beijing gravitated towards Washington and 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 Hanoi's welcoming of Moscow's patronage. You know, 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, and the Vietnam,

which culminating the Vietnamese assault at Democratic Camp of Chia was 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 Khmer Rouge, 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 one thing I found really interesting, I made the point before, in my opinion, was the shadow president, at least on. foreign policy and more in peace matters. You know, it was Gates, you know, through, you know,

Obama, because Obama was, you know, formerly the president. You know, we armed and equipped Vietnam with some pretty serious hardware, especially cutting-edge command and control stuff. And, you know, the Vietnamese wear American helmets now. You know, they ditch those pith helmets that were so iconic. Like now they, now the People's Army 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 arm-like platform, but it's some kind of H&K or, pseudo or some sort of like knock off European rifle. One of the one of the gun guys in the comments will know. But, you know, I found that fascinating. 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.

America should be cultivating. in Hanoid. And they're and Vietnam's a really big country. I think people have this idea 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. By the way,

I looked it up. I actually kind of knew this. Vietnam uses the STV. All it is. It's just a, it's a K 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 Giaup, and Jop had gone as far as to place him in charge of Cambodian affairs. And the subject of his speech, he made form.

points. The first being that there wasn't, that a Cambodian proletariat did not exist. So the Khmer Revolution, it had to be based on the peasantry as the, 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 commier masses and educate them adequately to support a communist party at Campo Tia

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, you know, 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 some by 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 for forward-looking, the Vietnamese idea of 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 sahanox bizarre relationship with the kameer ruse 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 who identified the king as an enemy or as an obstacle of national liberation would jop and his delegation and his um and is uh And the Vietnamese cadre representatives at this conference said the correct slogan needs to be something on order of, 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, if that's beyond nonsense, it's preposterous and 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's primiveness 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 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 Pulpac. it was a central 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

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

are, you know, benefiting from this. So I worry sometimes that 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 there were, if they were, 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 fair point. All right. Go to Thomas's Substack, RealThomas-777.com. Go to his website, Thomas-Tem77.com. It's easy seven.

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. You're welcome. Thank you, man. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingona show. Thomas is back. And we're going to continue the series, possibly conclude this series, on Pulpot and Democratic Campuchio.

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 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 participating. Well, it made, I'll just say, it made, car talk is always fun to me, and it made the, it made 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 Camer 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 devised this a historical and arbitrarily categorical discussion of it as an example of genocide which is in their little minds 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 actual warfighting 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's unsurprising. People approach it that way. Or, you know, you get a lot of people, particularly these kinds of national review types. They like to hold out Democrat at Cambuchia as a unique

example of communist evil and engage in this kind of shrill polemic about 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. You know, I take an interest in it particularly because it's an example of how zeitgeist framed all political behavior. in the 20th century. So it was somewhat incidental that the Khmer Rouge found themselves solidly aligned with the communist world. But at the same time, they very much internalized the 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 uh paul pot himself is a misunderstood person 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 for 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. And 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. It was a hotbed of

of dialectical activity and political violence. I mean, the gall 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 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 that the case, the case of the Cameroon is instructive, not unlike the case of the Roe-Dermy fraction and people like

Khorstamah was instructive. Obviously, people like Moller had 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 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 uh it was a fundamentally uh continental discourse. And

these things was 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 the kingdom or they were in constructive exile because they were students like paul pot cello sar you know um rather um and uh some of his fellows who were studying in france they were very much in this sort of insular environment that was a hop out of political

activity but what was fascinating is um one of these factions of which cellosart found himself Saudi alight, they're guiding a light, their sort of a ideological guru, was a partisan name Son Noct Than. And Son Noct Than, he was this arch-commier nationalist, and he was actually a racialist. And he'd agitated for independence from France his entire life. he found himself at Oz with the authorities in 1942. So he fled to Japan and he joined the Japanese Imperial Army and 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, is something like the Japanese are accomplishing but with a national socialist structure and ethic and those were his words. 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 Sahanuk ended up exiling him because he He knew that he couldn't have him whacked because that would have made him a martyr and that that would have catastrophically backfired, no probability.

But Sunnachthan was more than anybody, you know, the primary influence on Salafsar in his worldview. And 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 within this, you know, commier expat community. And, you know, it's,

but even for these guys who represented the left-wing faction, a commier, revolutionary sympathy. You know, it was independence and not communism that was sort of

the overriding imperative. But they were starting to become intertwined. You know, and Stalin had recognized Ho Chi Men's government

as early as 1991 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 you know 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 the the the plutocratic capitalists were against you you know the the the trotscated internationalists were against you um you know uh america was against you they had uh the americans 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 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 doctrinaire communists, 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 was very much a Buddhist overlay to a lot of this and an ancestral memory of the great Khan. 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 Senate of 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 that very adeptly.

But this wasn't just superficial. You know, it was a real thing. And 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 that. so. And what replaced it 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 jewel and the crown of the 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'd put at 1975. Yeah, 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 that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's a massive um

percentage of this planet and uh you know there there was something to the socialist community of nations it wasn't premised on the same sorts of principles as as the common turn and purported to be

although the gobbledygote language of Marxist Leninism remained. But again, I mean, that owed the zeitgeist more than it did dogmatic belief in the strictures of Marxist historiography. But this is important, and that's essential to understanding the Camer Rouge. but to drive the point home in terms of how this sort of of yon left and right, Higalian dialectic, informed the Cambodian situation. Yeah, son, Nakh Thin, he was actually,

his mother was Chinese and Vietnamese, and his father was Khmer. He'd been educated in Saigon and Paris. He was deeply involved in the Buddhist Institute of Phnom Penh, which to this day remains the primary apparatus of government that deals with Buddhist heritage and posterity therein in Cambodia. He established the first commier 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 then first invoked 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 commier nationalism present, but the outlook was pan-Asian. You know, and again, it viewed the Japanese Empire as sort of the racial loci of the new Asian politics, you know, shorn of domination from without, and that was congruous and in, in one, 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, they're derived from that same creative nexus. And he, towards that end, he advocated teaching Vietnamese and in Cambodian schools. He behooved people to become, you know, politically engaged people to develop at least a working understanding of Japanese. You know, and again, this, this developed enough momentum that Sahana 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 Sihannock. And a lot of these people ended up filling out the ranks of Lon Null's security forces ultimately.

And U.S. Special Forces pumped a lot of money and small arms into their coffers, which is really interesting. But as it became clear that there's a basic instability to the regime that replaced Sahanauk. I mean, this gets really complicated, the intrigues involved in things. the militia that the Camer Surrey, I think it's how it's pronounced. I think it means free Camer, or like free Cambodians. The writing was on the wall that Camer 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 amnestyed them, which is really interesting. You know, so it's, and like I said, I think one of the key takeaways of the Cameroon, it's an example of pure communist praxis, but with a highly malleable conceptual and ideological doctrine and posture. and there's something profound about that that 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 commierre. That's what it was titled, quite literally. And one of the major points of attack of the monarchy

and Sahanuk specifically was the allegation that Sahanuk was supporting the quote communization of Campuchiya, not just because he was viewed to be in bed with the Vietnamese and overly friendly with... Beijing, but, you know, the opposition to doctrinaic 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 Auto Remmer, like H. Keith Thompson, like Francis Yaki, obviously. And, you know, James Maddo were saying in the era. And Kerry Bolton, who 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, 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, particularly if Stalin was the standard bearer of these things. You know, to be clear, it's not some epilogia for Stalinism at all. And nor do I want 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. just as today, everything is framed by globalism

and resistance to it. You know, um, and that's, that's important. And, uh, it's important in understanding what the, what, 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 that 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 um but such that um but such that liberationist

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 to from which it derived its credibility

and intelligible parameters you know O'Doo an epoch that was already passed by the 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 in terms of some of my kind of grand theories of history, if you will, is, you know, in a couple of ways. Like I said, I think even though the Camero Rouge were not a doctrinaire communist movement, Their practice 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 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 the War and the War 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. 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, to, for context, I realize this is a lot more about Than than about Salafsar, aka Paul Pot, but 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 Tom Penn, there was an estimated 100,000 people who, 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 Sahan a pause because, frankly, that those kinds of crowds that only turned out, you know, for, for him himself. you know and that was largely derived not from the charisma of sahannuk which really was not existent but you know 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 malability of the body politic, you know, Sahanuk not just survived.

he survived the overthrow of the monarchy by Lawn Knoll 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 fans, 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 monarchy. But it's also when Fan returned to Cambodia that removed the political center of gravity of the Paris Camere

communist subculture that had sustained the right wing among it within it. Among whose ranks, of course, was Salazar. So the Camer 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 Khmer student cadre. And from these Europeans, including, you know, East Germans, obviously, the Khmer communists became very sophisticated. They started organizing themselves into, they began calling themselves the Marxist circle. And it was built up of individual cells, each comprising 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 standing orders. And it was understood not to seek information about the structural aspects of the wider cadre. beyond an individual cell and uh that's uh the the rote army fraction that i that was something that they were very big on as well okay so this was what the uh camere were learning about critical warfare which is really interesting and um 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. But despite the supposed dissentress of communist partisans to matters of national or racial or ethnic. ethnic loyalty, you know, there were tangible divisions and tensions between the Vietz and the French owing to the war and owing to the fact that the Vietnamese are far more interested in

throwing off the yoke of French nomination than 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 actively fighting a war against the French. You know, and again, they saw their primary enemy as the Vietnamese. You know, there's an ancestral racial animus there that was very powerful. And so really, you know, the Khmer looking for ideological patrons, despite their racialism, despite their sympathy for, you know,

Dan's model of racialized politics, which was sincerely felt. You know, they felt a lot more comfortable having patrons 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 down on them. So this is really sort of the DNA of the Khmer Rouge and how, again, they developed really 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 there's an outsized significance owing to these facts I enumerated in terms of understanding sort of the wider process of development of revolutionary communism in what was then the third world. You know, I think of the 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 Cold War paradigm

that described a very real and specific thing. You know, and it's, the Khmerer 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 self-criticism and analyzing their own shortcomings as political soldiers and, you know, discussing the practical business of armed revolution. You know, and increasingly there was less and less discussion of, you know, 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 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, you know, fell after a little over three years. But, 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 it's actually very very accurate

and a death pran who's now deceased but he was the subject the 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 an episode where. Yeah, dedicated to the film. Yeah, that would help too because it has 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 seven seven seven dot substack.com where we are streaming at one central the only time zone um on thursdays one p m and um you can support thomas there and you can connect to him there um and also is website uh thomas seven seven seven dot com where the t is a seven and uh yeah go support thomas thank you yeah thank you buddy I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cagnos show. Thomas is back and it's going to continue talking about the Camer Rouge today. How are you doing, Thomas?

I'm doing well. Something that I spent a lot of time with in terms of, you know, I'm not a regional studies guy, but I'm definitely a, you know, my subject theory is the 20th century. with a I have a strong interest in the later Cold War um detente through uh

it's you know the conclusion of hostilities on November 9th 1989 and I've been that way since I was a kid and the first time I visited the Vietnam War Memorial was in 1990 on a school trip you know um and i i knew quite a bit about the war because of my dad and also legacy media was

saturated with vietnam war content and you know i took a strong interest in it you know i'd watch tv shows on prime time like china beach and tour of duty i'd read everything i could about the war so and i knew a bunch of older guys who I looked up to who'd been in combat and stuff. So it was a big deal to me to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. And I think it's a dignified memorial in like a lot. But, you know, it's, for those who I've been to the Vietnam War Memorial, it's organized by year that, you know, it's not alphabetical.

It's by the names are organized. Each panel represents a year. And it's organized by the month and day that they were KIA. But so I'm looking at the wall and I get to the final panels. And I'm assuming, you know, okay, maybe, you know, maybe the final casualties count. It'll be, you know, some one-off casualty during the evacuation of Saigon or something. but as it turns out there's a bunch of names

from the Battle of Kotang and I'm like, what is this? And I think this is a I think this is really awful. The Battle of Kotang was when the U.S. Marines who were part of this ad hoc task force they got into this heavy

they got into this heavy they got it, they were engaged very heavy combat with the Khmer Rouge on Kotaing Island. And there were heavy casualties. Three men were accidentally left behind, and they suffered a horrible fate. It was really the last truly open-ended combat operation. U.S. forces were committed to prior to the Gulf War. And it's simply called, oh, this was the last battle of the Vietnam War.

nonsense. It had nothing to do with the Vietnam War. Why? Because it was approximately in theater. So it's this forgotten event that had profound implications in policy terms, as well as in forced structural terms. This was one of the things that led to the creation of Joint Special Operations Command about a decade later. Kotang Desert One, which was the disaster, the disastrous efforts, to rescue the U.S. Embassy hostages and Iran. It was aborted because these two helicopters crashed into each other,

you know, both killing some people and giving away the position. And then in Grenada, a bunch of Navy SEALs drowned because there was these competing command elements and the right hand, proverbially didn't know what the left hand was doing. And Kotang also indicated that there, There needed to be some sort of standing direct action element to deal with exigencies such as that. And it also, it was a real, Henry Kissinger had stayed on from the Nixon administration. This was post-Watergate.

The military was in a real crisis because South Vietnam was going down and defeat. Gerald Ford was a president who had no mandate. you know because initially when spiro agnew had resigned under cloud of indictment because people forget that agnew was targeted and he was targeted by the by the same people who facilitated the coup against Nixon but he was targeted for an for corruption basically so agnew resigns Gerald Ford's appointed as you know vice president um And then when Nixon resigns, Ford becomes the president. You know, he literally was like an appointed president.

And he wasn't really respected within the chain of command. You had these very strong personages around him, like Kissinger, who was Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. You had James Schlesinger, who I think was a real snake and just a terrible human being. But, you know, he was a very ambitious personality. you know, Rumsfeld's White House chief of staff. The media treated Ford like a buffoon, you know, and so there was already this credibility gap vis-a-vis the Warsaw Pact in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that, you know, detente was was

you know what was being floated as the status of relations in the Cold War you know there was all in military terms the Soviets were winning the Cold War

on basically all fronts and despite the fact of the Sino-Soviet split had been realized that that didn't mean that Peking was America's friend and

proceeding from a position of a parent strength, especially in the Far East, was essential. So that's the context here. Okay. And plus, too, like, it showed, the Cameroos showed how game and savage they were and tactically sophisticated. You know, they really, they really put a herd on the U.S. Marines. And some real firepower was deployed there.

The Air Force was dropping 15,000. pound bombs, which is the largest conventional ordinance in the U.S. arsenal at that time. I mean, this was real war. And undoubtedly, U.S. forces had engaged the Khmer Rouge before, you know, particularly on the Vietnamese border where two-core was situated. But, I mean, that that was mostly special operations elements and things. it wasn't at scale. You know, so this is fascinating. I'm not a military hound,

but I find incidents like this to be really compelling, and there's things to learn from them. And the Khmer Rouge are an interesting phenomenon. And they were some of the hardest cadres that the communists had, in my opinion. You know, like the Vietnamese and, like, the Cubans

and, like, the National Vokes Army. plus there's parallels with USS Pueblo incident and I'll get into that too and what the implications for that for that for that for that for that for because that wasn't just a humiliating incident for America

but it came out later as to why the Pueblo was seized and it was seized at the behest of the Soviet Union and that the North Koreans had always been a reliably dedicated proxy for the Soviets you know and

um There was this American naval cryptologist named John Walker. And he was a spy for the Warsaw Pact for decades. And he'd been feeding cryptographical data to the KGB and the GRU. But they needed an encryption machine to interpret these signals. and the Pueblo was an intelligence ship. So it had the encryption machine. And Walker had relayed to the Soviets

who related to Pyongyang that this ship was within striking distance of North Korean territorial water. So they captured it. You know, it's... And that seriously compromised American... American nuclear strategy.

and the ability to hide intentions vis-a-vis command and control. That neutralized a lot of the advantages conferred by the SOS mechanism. That's an acronym S-O-S-U-S, which were these listening cables on the ocean floor that

neutralized a lot of Soviet countermeasures to detection. But if so, if, if, Soviet Submariners could listen in on American codes you know

encrypted communication you know presumably they could react to an intended first strike before you know weapons were deployed and essentially neutralize it even if they have to

eat a counter value strike of substantial destruction destructive power, and so to give them the advantage, where, you know, particularly under conditions of parity where literally seconds matter. So this was a very complicated affair, and it's essential to understanding what developed subsequently in all kinds of aspects.

So, I mean, it basically breaks down into two aspects. There's the capture of the Mayegas and what was happening on board there. There's actually three aspects. What was happening on the Mayaguez, what was happening on Kotang, which turned into this huge battle, and what was happening in the White House Situation Room. And George Herbert Walker Bush was doing this shuttle diplomacy with Peking and the Chikoms, because America America had no

diplomatic relations with Democratic Campoichi at that time that later changed. But the military government of La Nol who had overthrown that was the American proxy and the Camer Rouge overthrew

overthrew Lan Nol and they began executing everybody in any way connected to that government. You know, it was a bloodbath. And so America was done an enemy footing with Democratic Campuchia and Salafsar and the entire leadership element of the Khmer Rouge.

But at that time also, America didn't know about Salafsar, Al Pot. They had no idea who the leadership element was even. But so Kissinger, when the Mayagas was seized, Kissinger tried to go through diplomatic channels you know, and communicate to the Chinese American demands. Chinese diplomatic representation refused to accept any memos or communications from Kissinger or from anybody in the State Department.

So Bush, who had these good offices personally with the Chinese government, became the point of contact with them, which is really interesting. I mean, that's significant, too, because this further solidified his role as somebody who, the Chikoms and particularly Deng Xiaoping himself, who's the most significant Chinese personage, other than Mao, I believe. So there's a lot here. It's almost like a Frederick Forsyth story or something. But that this ensued, the Mayagos was captured on May 12th, 1975. It was a merchant ship. It wasn't done, and I mean, it actually was.

It wasn't under some kind of cover or anything, or it wasn't deployed as part of some sort of ruse. It was a merchant ship carrying standard commercial cargo. And it got seized and boarded and contested waters. It was approached by Khmer Rouge gunboats. The same kinds of brown water, I mean, they're conventionally brownwater craft with a mounted 50-Cal. You know, like the boat, like the boat in apocalypse now. you know, but they can still function in territorial and littoral waters, you know.

By territorial waters, I mean, you know, some distance out from the coast, say like 100 nautical miles or something, you know, but ironically, these were American boats that had been furnished to the Navy under the military hoot of La Null. And, you know, for little boats, like a 50 caliber, that's heavy furtied. firepower, you know, and a merchant ship that it doesn't have any mounted armaments. I mean, a couple of 50 cows, you can tear that boat apart and turn everybody on at the hamburger, you know. So the Camer Rouge being constitutionally paranoid and being convinced, too, that they were

eminently going to be attacked by the Vietnamese. you know, they were happy on the trigger. So this was a very volatile situation. The Camero Rouge, I believe, didn't, they didn't know what the Mayagas was. I think they assumed it was a listening ship. You know, that's why they boarded it. And I'm sure that they were acting under orders

to seize any ship that, wasn't, you know, flagged as friendly. You know, in other words, like, any, anything that wasn't Chinese or Thai or La Ocean. But even in the case of La, someone would have been dubious. Oh, I don't, I don't think Laos had a Navy to speak of. But, um, it was a 40-man crew. Um, highly experienced, uh, sailors. a couple who were ex-military, one of whom had been in the Marine Corps infantry in heavy combat in Vietnam.

And that added to the potential volatility situation, too, like the third mate, his last name was English, the Vietnam vet. mechanic were both ex-military and they were convinced that Cameroos were going to slaughter them third made English relayed that in the wake of the Tet Offensive when he and the the Marine element he was attached to liberated a village near the DMZ they found 19 Americans with their hands bound behind their backs who'd been beheaded and english relayed that him and his uh squad had had to untie them and you know and um properly see to it that these mutilated bodies are medevac then english relayed to his crewmates that i'm not i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go to my slaughter you know um i if these

gooks trying to take us off this ship i you know i'm gonna go down killing as many of them as i can and so the captain, his name was Miller. He had experience in the World War II Navy, and he was a man in his mid-50s. He was quite a bit older than the crew. He seemed to realize that these Cameroos fighters were young guys, and they were not remotely afraid of violence, but they were obviously scared.

So Miller took the tack of trying to show them some kind of hospitality, you know, and so he started giving him fresh fruit. And apparently, he had the mess cook make up a big thing of Kool-Aid. And at first, the Kamirooos didn't trust it. But then Miller started drinking in and, like, see, like, I'm not trying to poison you. So then the Kermir-Rooch tried the Kool-Aid and they became obsessed with it and, like, asked him to make more. They thought it was, like, the greatest thing.

I mean, there's nothing funny about that situation. But the thing about these, like, a hard commier Rouge fighter is, like, slurping up Kool-Aid and thinking it's, you know, like, the greatest thing is kind of funny. And to be fair, people make fun of me, especially youngsters who, uh, yeah, man, and there's nothing wrong with this. They're kind of put off by processed food, which is actually a positive, but I love Sunny D and I love Tang. Like, Tang is awesome, and I'll die in that hill, so I understand why the Khmer Rouge, we're, like, digging on Kool-Aid, especially if they'd never had it in. you know, I would do on the same thing. But, you know, it, and to set the, to set the tone of the strategic situation, by the time President Ford got news of what was underway, you know, this was,

U.S. forces in theater were very scattered. You know, having, they'd obviously, they'd had to redeploy from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, you know, owing to the, you know, the fact that, you know, Saigon was going down in flames, literally the path that Laos had conquered Laos. Cambodia, obviously, had fallen to the Khmer Rouge. the military was drawing down across the board and such that any command was given a priority

it was in the Bundes Republic because that was the main line of resistance the Cold War despite the relative stability compared to the Far East but there wasn't you know so it was presumed that any

any military operation would have to be staged from Thailand. And Thailand had been a major base of air operations during the Vietnam War. But as Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos fell to the communists, Thailand found itself in a very difficult position. And those good offices began to dissipate. you know, because the ties weren't going to avail their air bases to American elements that were then going to strike, you know, their neighbors on three sides, obviously. So there was the challenge of where it even deploy from and how to base forces.

Once forces are identified and, you know, that are mission appropriate and corralled and constituted, you know, to affect the deployment. And, you know, there's tremendous confusion as well over command and control. And especially in those days, Nixon and Creighton Abrams and the Joint Chiefs that somewhat mitigated this, but, you know, the Johnson administration was notorious for micromanagement. And Johnson said a lot of stupid things, but this actually had some merit, not merit in terms of any sort correctness or or inherent value but in terms of its accuracy of the situation you know he bragged around the time of the first operation linebacker i think that uh you know i like not a single bomb you know is deployed over vietnam without my say so you know and that that's a

that's a disaster situation i mean mission oriented tactics could carry the day anyway whether you're talking about air combat, ground combat, or naval warfare, you know, the Vermeck and the Kriegsmarine and the Lufa thought us that, if we didn't already know. But there was all these, there's this, even a president who wasn't prone to that kind of micromanagement, there was this long and confused chain of command originating with the White House down to the joint chiefs of staff, which could almost be considered as a state. It's a single entity by virtue of what was designated the National Command Authority. You know, then there was Commander-in-Chief Pacific region, you know, and from the days of

MacArthur, you know, the Commander-in-Chief Pacific acted sort of as Lord of his own fiefdom. You know, you had the Marine Corps who, as much as a... Marine brass and some support it to anybody. It was Sync Pack and the president. They did not coordinate well with the Air Force. And increasingly the Air Force, based on its heavy strike capability and its diverse litany of platforms was edging out the Navy in some ways in the Pacific. You know, and then on the scene, you had defense intelligence, which I make this point a lot,

had really edged out CIA as sort of the spearpoint of U.S. intelligence, you know, and then you had Navy intelligence, and you had these, this moldedal layers of the Department of State and the NSA, and then you had President's cabinet of these guys like Schlesinger and Kissinger. I mean, Kisner was a great man. I'm not suggesting that he was the Creighton that Schlesinger was, but he had a tremendous ego. And Kissinger believed he should be giving orders as the most qualified man on deck.

Schlesinger, who's secretary of defense, resented the national security advisor in the Department of State anyway. He personally hated Kissinger. And he viewed his president, Ford, as a moron. You know, he had Ford was totally out of his element and realized that he wasn't being respected like he felt he should be. So, you know, he was operating with an eye to proceed with a show of force,

you know, not just because there was tremendous pressure to, in the wake of American defeats in theater, but also just as a matter of masculine pride and things, you know, the whole thing was a mess. it was a convergence of kind of the worst possible circumstances for something like that. But back to my ag as it had been commissioned 31 years before, it was what you'd think of as sort of like a rusted Hulk, like not quite a tramp steamer, but, you know, it shipped at the end of its active service life. it had around 275 shipping containers

filled a general cargo bound for Thailand um it's when it was captured it was traveling at 12 and a half knots um about 60 miles in the Cambodian coast and it's a little farther from Thailand um

And Vietnam was to its east. And again, the Cambodians were patrolling these avenues of maritime ingress because they were anticipating an assault by the Vietnamese. It was at that point, as they were rounding an adolph an adolph an atoll or probably like this, this compared to a tiny atoll or land spit called Polo Y. As they rounded it, the first Khmer Rouge boat emerged.

And several crewmates began like squeezing off rounds and their Klashtikovs. And then one man trained an RPG on the Mayegas. And then the second boat, both of which were PCF designated, or that was their designation, which is an acronym for patrol craft fast, colloquially swift boats. You know, and again, they were designed basically for river patrol duty, but they were seaworthy. And several of these boats had fallen in the Camer Rouge hands as the Law and Null government went down. and again generally these PCF boats are mounted with 50 Kells and

as the second boat emerged the 50 KEL was trained on the MAGAS You know so the Miller was the captain Immediately you know Raise his hands made it clear that this was a civilian vessel

The community Rue's commander was the first of board, as is generally the case with communist navies. The implication being, you know, the captain goes first. He doesn't send enlisted men, you know, that's part of the egalitarian sensibility. Technically, the Khmer Rouge elected their officers, like the early People's Republic, the People's Liberation Army did. in actual fact, you know, these decisions came from above, but this was the mythology that reign.

The Cameroge Battalion Commander, who was, you know, the officer in command, who boarded was a man by the name of Samien. He was in his mid-30s, which was somewhat old for a Cameroge combat commander. the rank and file tended to be teenagers platoon leaders and company commanders and battalion commanders tended to be men in their mid-20s

Samin didn't speak English or French something getting into the movie the killing fields even Cameroos troopers who did speak French would claim they didn't because that could get you shot you know because that could potentially categorize as one of the old people who couldn't be reeducated in the new ways,

you know, and whose mind had been corrupted by the colonial element. So Miller had taken to basically communicating with Samian by, you know, pantomime, adding to the tension. When Samian inspected the radar, the telemotor, the gyropilot and then the engine room you know he has to see the chart room he had his man effective search of the ship and once he

looked at the navigation chart and the manifest he became convinced there was a civilian ship but he was under orders to hold it until you know it was clear what its true mission orientation was so Samien took the navigation shirt

and he pointed to Polo Y which was that atoll I just mentioned and they indicated to Miller that that's where they were going and one of the gunboats was tethered to the Mayagus

and they were instructed to follow to Paulo White. Thirdmate David English at this point, David C. English. He was the Marine veteran that I mentioned. He was 28 years old. He'd been wounded twice, so being shot in Vietnam. He was a muscular 250 pounds, like just a real badass. He managed to get off an SOS.

because the radio man by a sale of the name of Sparks suggested that he sent out an SOS by way of the telegraph unit so as not to alert the Cambodians. English pressed his luck, went down to the radio shack, and sent out an SOS in SOS. and as a as a as a

subtle voce as he could um and the the May day went out and it was it was received by um first by a a

Philippine tugboat which was then relayed to an Australian vessel um when the Australians responded English replied, call the American authorities,

call anywhere you can. You know, we've been hijacked. And English said, you may be the last English voice I hear for a long time. Apparently the Australian said, things can't be that bad, mate. And English, like, said, like, look, you know, a pair of thing, look, motherfucker,

would be captured by the Camero Rouge. I'm probably going to be dead within hours. You know, fuck you. But, um, ultimately the message was relayed um it bounced around until it finally reached an outpost at a direct line um the commander-in-chief pacific which was then relayed to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon. And the NMCC, for those that don't know, it took on more important during the Carter administration as continuity of government measures were implemented, and we talked about what those entailed before.

but the NCC, obviously, its primary role was always nuclear command and control of strategic forces and evented general war with the Soviet Union. But crisis response was part of its core mission. And the red phone of myth and lore you see in the movies, the line between Washington and Moscow, that was in the NMCC compound in the Pentagon. And so the message that MAG is being hijacked was related to the NMCC, which was appropriate. And then, you know, the president and the joint chiefs of staff, who for a practical purposes are one command element in terms of, you know, the designated national command authority. and that becomes important,

where the river meets the road under conditions like this. As the Cameroos and the Miagas, Tetherdue them made their way, you know, again, the Camer Rouge didn't realize that an SOS had gone out. They had no idea. Anybody knew that the Mayagus had been captured.

And presumably, too, you know, again, the Khmer Rouge really weren't sophisticated on their understanding of how American commanding control worked. You know, considering that they'd been fighting in theater, but, I mean, Cambodia was a backwater, frankly. And they didn't have the experience of fighting the Americans that Hanoi did and the NLF did. you know so they would have been they would have been ignorant about the immediacy of a response even in those days the initial message that the nmcc got was you know my i guess have been fired upon and bordered by cambodian forces at nine degrees 48 minutes north 102 degrees 53 minutes east ship is being towed when I'm on a Cambodian port. When the situation room at the White House convened

what amounted to an emergency war cabinet, the first briefing was by Brent Skowcroft, who was then the acting deputy assistant for national security affairs. But Skowcroft, he had outsized clout because he was a very serious guy you know and he that remained in national security circles until the bush 41 administration so essentially uh scowcroft had first crack at the president to steer uh decisionism as in in terms of

the response um scowcroft uh he'd been an air force lieutenant general he came through west point and then and then came up on his actual career through the Army Air Forces because there was no Air Force Academy then. You know, the Air Forces were part of the Army. Skowcroft had a very up-to-the-minute conceptual horizon of strategic situation pretty much always. He ran out before that there'd been recent Cambodian incidents at sea before the present situation that this was becoming a pattern

in assessing the mood of the Cambodians. Skokroft said that he couldn't comment conclusively for various reasons, including fact that, again, the identities of the Khmer Rouge leaders weren't even, hadn't even been verified. But what was clear was that the Khmer Rouge were killing huge numbers of people. They'd expelled Westerners from Phnom Penh.

immediately, a huge percentage of the population, the commier population was being forced out of the city and to the countryside. And pretty much everybody who'd been in any way affiliated with the law and all government, including their families, were being shot. You know, so Skowcroft said, you know, we can, we can assume that these men are going to be murdered. You know, and it's imperative, uh, especially considering the state of American credibility and theater that we not let this stand. Even if these men are already dead, we've got to retaliate. We've got to retaliate with extreme force. Kissinger over at Department of State, here out of the office at 8 a.m., on grounds that there was a twice weekly staff meeting.

Kissinger hadn't yet been advised of what was underway because pretty much nobody had been outside of the National Military Command Center so Kissinger arrives Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Jay Owen Zerlin Jr. advises them that an American ship has been captured

about 100 miles off the coast it's proceeding into Sahanukville under Cameroo's guard Kissinger was astonished apparently he exclaimed how can that be you know and why isn't anything being done about it you know and

Zahirland said that he this is one of the few times he saw Kissinger's team genuinely frazzled, like almost panicked. He started to excoriate Zerhellen, and he was informed that, you know, he himself had only been advised of what was going on, you know, two minutes previously. Kissinger immediately called Skokroft

and closed the meeting that he was providing over. He told Skowcroft, you damn well cannot leave Cambodia capture. ship 100 miles at sea and do nothing. Because it was emphatic from jump that there needed to be a general assault on Cambodia with maximum

forces available to impose as much attrition as possible. And frankly, I think that was the correct call. What happened was disastrous. But the forces deployed although they should have

been far more overwhelming, even though that wasn't possible vis-a-vis forced structure and basing options in theater. I mean, thankfully, a lot of hurt was put on the Camero Rouge, but Kissinger was absolutely right. And one of the many things that people burn Kissinger and effigy over is, I found out lately because in the very early 2000s, the number of books got written about the Kotang incident. and some guy claims incredibly that it's Kissinger's fault that these men were left behind because he ordered them be left behind because I guess Kissinger just does mean things in his spare

time and like rubs his hands together like I you know um well I'm pretty sure he probably rubbed his hands together a few times considering his heritage but you know and like look I'm not going to say that like Kissinger was like was a nice guy or that you know people should you know consider him some great humanitarian but, you know, he was a brilliant Cold War strategist. He was a great national security advisor. And, I mean, look, like, if the

criticisms of his character and of his policy dispositions, particularly in his crisis, if they were grounded in reasonable in metrics, okay, fine, you can criticize if you want, you know, as long as you make the argument correctly. But there's a, but there's a, there's really,

derangement syndrome around Kissinger. You know, and that's, and like I said, when I met the guy, you know, I didn't know it. My dad did, but, you know, I met him. I don't know. I had a lot of respect for him because he was on the warpath in 1999, you know, against the Clinton administration and the unprovoked assault in Serbia. You know, he, he was a, and he was a voice in the wilderness then because

nobody listened to people like us who had a sensible view of these things. You know, so I had respect for him anyway because I had read his books and stuff. But I developed, you know, even more respect for him on account of that. And he, I mean, by that point, he had plenty of money. And, you know, he wasn't doing that for cloud. He already had clout. You know, he was doing it out of principle. You know, like I said, it's like, okay, it's like a big deal.

you know, he was criticizing an unprovoked war, but it's like, but 26 years ago, people didn't do that. You know, it was, you were, you looked at at some sort of crank or, you know, some,

or somebody who wasn't with the program or, you know, you were shouted down and called names, you know, that wasn't something that was acceptable. So I, I, I mean, not, not that I ever weighed my own conclusions against what the consensus was,

but I did feel validated when guys like Kizinger started coming out and saying, like, no, this is this is not just ethically indefensible, but it's strategically irrational and it's going to result in a disaster because, you know, and that was the moment at which all of the goodwill that have been, accrued by bush and baker was was destroyed then you know that's when that that's that's that's that's that's that's when um america totally completely pissed away its victory dividend in the cold war it was indefensible you know so i'll i'll die in that peribial hill um you know kisinger did a lot of good things and even if he was a total son of a bitch okay fine but he you know he was a um

He was a great geostrategic thinker. And the son of Soviet split, which was absolutely critical, would not have been possible without Kissinger. I mean, Kissinger and Nixon collaboratively facilitated debt. But, you know, Kissinger was an essential element. but yeah moving on the and at the same time the National Military Command Center as soon as you know like I said they they were the first point of contact really as was part of the course in those days in a crisis they weren't resting on their laurels Admiral Norrell Gaylor He was commander-in-chief

He was Pacific Command based in Hawaii He immediately began launching reconnaissance flights In order to locate the Mayegas The planes deployed with these With these surveillance TurboProp planes That I believe were unarmed I think they might have had some kind of strikes

That could divert heat-seeking Sam's and some type of air-air missiles but it was but they were you know

a surveillance aircraft and this is at the same time Ford he convened an emergency meeting of the National Security Council at 1205 p.m. with

the kind of the, this was the entire sort of A-team on deck of the Ford cabinet. It was Kissinger Skowcroft, Nelson Rockefeller who was vice president. Schlesinger was Secretary of Defense, Deputy Defense Secretary, William

Clements, William Colby, who was CIA director, assistant secretary of state, Ingersoll, and the NSC staff member, who was the East Asia expert was at W. Richard Smycer.

And of course, Rumsfeld was sort of presiding with things because he was the White House chief of staff at the time. And they had an Air Force General in deck too whose name alludes me

because the understanding was, you know, again, that Air Force firepower needed to be brought to bear and the Air Force had a lot more cloud in those days I mean they were that huge cloud because of strategic air command and things but

you know they had the the truly heavy conventional capability remained in the hands of the Air Force you know and air operations generally you know what you

you wouldn't Naval aviation always had a say and combined arms operation but you know Air Force the Air Force brass was king in terms of devising air operations

especially in those days Kissinger and Schlesinger began budding heads with what to what should be done to free the crew you know Kissinger said look we need to make a strongest statement as possible you know and it was Kissinger's idea to go through the Chinese and he's like and Kissinger realized the political implications he's like look we got to do this now and he said even even if it's a fool's errand it needs to be on record that we communicated

to the Chinese that there'll be dire consequences that the crew's not released and then he's like you know the Chinese totally snub us it'll be on record that this communication was issued and then we can get some credit

even if um you know they're even if they're released you know completely spontaneously and the message is even delivered and Kedinger further said like we need some kind of show of force you know he's like even if the crew's already been

released you know he's like He's like, maybe we can seize the Cambodian ship on the high seas. We've got to punish them somehow. Schlesinger's retort was, I don't even think that they came home. He's having high seas ships. Kissinger then said, well, we at least got to, you know, mine the harbor at Kumpong Sam. Finally, Schlesinger realized he was going to be upstage. If he didn't push for a military solution of equal severity.

since Schlesinger began pulling metaphorical rank and the secret defense role and said, I can get, I can get, you know, I can get mines in the harbor within 24 hours. The, uh, then the Navy in the Air Force started budding heads because the nearest Navy aircraft carrier wouldn't be near the scene, um, of Kampong Somme for 24 hours. Air Force General Jones then weighed in and said, yeah, well, B-52s can deliver mines just as well,

and there's B-52s in Thailand. You know, the Navy retorted, yeah, well, the mines were in Subic. And this went on. And the inner service rivalry and the confusion over command and control and integration of operations became a huge shit show. But Kizinger, correctly, pegged Schlesinger, among other things, in addition to being a weasel, Schlesinger was kind of a pussy.

Schlesinger was repulsed politically at the idea of re-engaging in Indochina in a substantial military capacity so soon after the Vietnam disaster. Kissinger was disturbed by this because not only the said the second offense, obviously in those they set the tenor for the pace of operations at command authority level. And on top of it at the Pentagon at this time was a mess. And the entire military was a mess. Like Kissinger feared that the Pentagon being less than enthusiastic anyway, he was going to drag their feet. And Kissinger also, uh, Kisinger had been in the army during World War II.

in an intelligence role, in part because of his linguistic fluency in German, but also because of his Jewish heritage. That's who they favored. But he was not, he was a very unmilitary person. You know, the best of times, he didn't have great offices with the military. You know, so this was, aside from the intrinsic hazards of the, a hostage situation and the volatility in theater if America found itself in a general war with the Khmer Rouge and God forbid, you know, finding itself engaged once again with, you know, the people's army of Vietnam.

there was also this in-house hostility within the presidential cabinet itself. And if a real executive, like a Nixon or an Eisenhower or a Kennedy, who whatever is false, like proved to have brass balls in a crisis, an executive like that would have been able to quash these tensions and generate a quorum and build confidence they're in. but I mean, Ford was not the man to do that. You know, he was the worst, he was kind of the worst possible man to having the role. You know, I mean, I, I said, I'm that stupid aircraft carrier being named after Ford.

Like, Ford's real legacy is, you know, how, like, I said at live Chevy Chase would play Gerald Ford. And you always be doing, like, dumb slapstick shit. Just falling down the stairs. Yeah, like, and, like, Ford actually did, like, trip down the stairs of Air Force One. And, like, he'd mispronounced words. And, like, he, and Chevy Chase kind of looked like him.

Something like that doesn't, that, that, that didn't help, man. You know, like, um, my earliest memories as a little kid, um, you know, like, very early 80s. Remember, Saturday, like, reruns. And in my mind, like, like, Ford's associated with Chevy Chase. And, like, that's about it. I mean, obviously, I don't really remember Ford as a president, but the point being, and it's not that that that kind of speaks for itself but um but yeah we'll we'll stop there and then we'll

in part two we'll deal with the battle of kotang and then we'll we'll wrap on our our cambodia series with that all right man everyone go over to thomas's substack real thomas seven seven seven seven out substack.com. Check out his website, Thomas 777.com. The T is a 7. You can connect with Thomas there and think Thomas drops all of everything he does. Everything he appears on is on the website.

So go check that out. Yeah. And I've been uploading about this stuff to my YouTube channel too. And I'm making use of the Rumble platform. And I'm home in a, it's a mirror basically on my YouTube. But I'm going to start dropping fresh stuff there too. So yeah, that's. That's what I got. Yeah, thank you, man.

Awesome. Thank you, Thomas. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana show. Thomas is back and good chance. We're going to finish up the talk on the Camer Rouge today. Thomas, how are you doing today? I'm doing well. Thank you for hosting me. Of course.

Something that what really stands out in the public mind about the Battle of Kotang, like I said, it's misguided that it's just associated as this sort of addendum to the Vietnam War when it was a totally different conflict paradigm. The tragedy of the three men were left behind, that's a truly horrifying incident. That's sort of what people associate, first and foremost, with the conflict.

Secondly, it, like I said, it's become yet another pretext for torching Kissinger and peribial effigy. If there's a villain here, It really is Rumsfeld, who proved himself to be a real Creighton late in his career, but he was White House chief of staff. It became a controversy after the battle because casualties were severe. There was, first of all, a majority of the choppers either went down or were too damaged to land,

the infantry element, and then to reinforce some of the surviving men, one of the choppers that crashed, drowned, and others were killed by small arms fire as they tried to swim to shore. There was over 40 KIA. The Ford White House and the Pentagon insisted that there was only one KIA, which is preposterous. And Rumsfeld in his autobiography, decades after the fact, stuck to that story, you know, which is the one of the media that the man was just a constitutional liar. that that's just what he did. He just lied about everything constantly. But there's a complex confluence of events.

You know, like I indicated, what made the situation very difficult in political and strategic terms, not only was the military drawing down, but its force structure was not suited to this kind of operation. There'd been great success in some direction.

direct action missions of an unconventional sort, the Sontay rate in 1970, where although the objective was to liberate the Sontay POW camp, the prisoners have been moved, but it was a tactical victory because the people's army of Vietnam, they really got massacred. And there was probably Soviet advisors on the ground

because the men who were there said that they were engaged by tall Caucasians among the Vietnamese forces which was kind of fascinating but any you can't really train for these kinds of direct action missions

like Sontay it was planned for months beforehand and a dedicated special forces element trained for that purpose. They created a mock-up of the prison based upon you know, spy plane flyovers and things

and they had good intel onto what the imposing force would constitute and its capabilities and things. If you're talking about a spontaneous crisis, like the seizing of a ship, you can't really train for that. You can't really train for rescuing hostages on an aircraft. You know, I don't like people claim that something Delta Force does, but it's really not because every situation

different. It's always going to be ad hoc. And I believe that's one of the reasons why these days Special Operations Command, it's become this sort of like kill force where they kick in people's doors and shoot them in the face on their sleeve. I mean, part of that's the Israelization of the U.S. military and it just does grimy stuff.

But also, that's something you're going to actually train for. And if you're in the business and make work, you can get it done. You know, when the, when the Mayagos was seized, the U.S. Marine Corps hadn't done a shipboarding rescue since the war between the states. It's not something that happens. You know, and there's instances sure where, I mean, to this day, where, you know, Navy SEALs will board some Somali pirate vessel and blast everybody, but that's totally different, you know.

So not only was it not an integrated command structure, it wasn't even clear how this should be done. You know, and the conventional military was drawing down owing to the end of the Vietnam War and detente. But the problem is, even though this wasn't the true strategic parity wasn't accomplished until probably 1976, 77, but it was approximate enough that there was a, a real stalemate and strategic forces setting in, coupled with detente, and, of course,

dramatically exacerbated by the fact that the communists were winning on the military front in essentially every relevant battle theater. Conventional forces and credibility therein took on a real significance that hadn't been the case probably since the Eisenhower era. So America had to do something. It wasn't just a question of rescuing the Miyagas crew, which in a lot of ways, calism might sound,

it brought strategic and political terms, was secondary to the question of sustaining credibility. This is one of the reasons people villainize Kissinger, because as I'll get to, as was decided, Ford was, President Ford was by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by Brent Skowcroft,

and by Schlesinger, he was basically presented with five different scenarios and potential assault packages. But everyone assumed that, every one of those options assumed that the Mayaga's crew, some of the hostages were still on the Mayas itself, and some of them were on the island of Kotang. That wasn't true. So Kissinger was in Missouri at the time. he double-timed back to the White House and he said,

and he was savagely criticized for this at the time and later. He said, look, he's like, if these men are on Kotang or any other island, they're probably dead, okay, because the Khmer Rouge isn't going to keep them alive because they're savages and they kill people, which was reasonable to assume. He's like, so that said, Kessinger's like, we've got to assault with everything we have in theater. And we got to start pounding the Cambodian mainland with Arklight. Because he's like, otherwise it's going to happen again and again.

And he's like, I'm not worried about the Khmer Rouge. I'm worried about what the Soviet Union is thinking. I'm worried about what the Chinese are thinking. You know, because he's like, we've basically just disengaged from the Cold War with the Chinese. And if we appear weak right now, you know, they're going to walk all over us. And on top of that, Ford's rebuttal was the Chinese were refusing to convey messages to the government of Democratic Campo Chia. So George Herbert Walker Bush was sent as an unofficial liaison. They read the note that he delivered but refused to take receipt of it.

But the point is that they were aware of the situation. And what they conveyed to Bush was that within reason, they'll tell. an American response that's proportionate. Or it said, look, if we start bombing Cambodia back to the Stone Age, you're going to outrage the Chinese. And then we're going to be in a general war with Cambodia. And then we're going to find ourselves potentially at war with the Chikoms after we just decoupled, after your mission to Beijing just decoupled them from the socialist community and nations in military terms.

you know and that was a fair point but from her kisinger was sitting what he was saying made sense and um you know he uh he was national security advisor so he was basically reliant though on on the secretary defense and the jcs and uh the intelligence community for what the situation was on the ground which was not at all what they were conveying you know so what was underway as these as these um can that meetings were happening f4s and f11 ardvarks were buzzing the mayegas um which was then within proximity to kotang and uh they started strafing uh they started strafing uh they started strafing uh the water in in front of the bow and the stern with uh 30 millimeter uh vulcan fire you know and terrifying the the Khmer Rouge you were shipboard and um from that point

onward the Khmer Rouge were looking for a way out of this you know and uh when they tried to disembark at Kotang the commander on the ground there who's a hardened Khmer Rouge battalion commander is only 23 years old but that was pretty common for commier Rouge officers he said under in Norway shape or form are you going to drop Americans on this island? You know, and if you try you, I'm going to fire on you, which was the correct play, because he said, you had a foresight to realize, look, if they're, if they're already deploying aircraft like this, you know, they're, they're going to launch a general assault of the island if they believe that there's American hostages here.

And also his orders, the reason why Kotang was so fortified, was because it was an anticipation of a Vietnamese assault. You know, so the potential worst case scenario would be that Cotan comes under general assault by American combined arms

while the Vietnamese also decided to assault it you know, to kill the Khmer Rouge and then to try and prevent the Americans from landing. You know, and then and then the Cameroos joined a general war with the People's Army, Vietnam and the United States of America.

You know, um, so, uh, as it were, the Mayaga's crew disembarked on an island uh,

in proximity to Hanukville, about 30 miles from the coast. And they were informed by, the garrison commander there, you said, Ken, is there any way that you can get your radio to work and

contact either the embassy or the United States Air Force or Navy or any military element attached to the commander in chief of the Pacific? And they said, yeah.

So he's like, okay, you're going to do that. You're going to say that we're, you know, essentially begging them to stop assaulting the meagas and uh you're going to be released in 24 hours and you know one of the conditions is that please convey that you have not been harmed or in any way mistreated and that the commie ruse not want war with the united states you know so that should have uh that that should have been it um and under normal conditions i mean normal conditions for the cold war like this probably would

have been a wait and see, at least for the next 48 hours, that would have been the posture of the White House. But, you know, again, it was a constellation of elements. It was the fact that Ford didn't have, the Ford didn't really have any mandate to be president. It was the situation vis-à-vis de Tant. It was the fact that, you know, Saigon had just gone down in flames. There was a push by communist elements in, you know, in Africa, India had been brought into the Warsaw Pact camp for all practical purposes. It was all those things. And just bad intelligence. I mean, this was really, when I point out to people that the CIA is a joke and has been for a long time.

I mean, this is another example of that. you know and and the the church committee hearings got the nail in the coffin but you know the the CIA produces bad intel basically 100% of the time you know and then of course subsequent there's the Aldrich Ames thing and everything so it's it's it's this sort of a bogeyman of the ignorant that the CIA is this shadow government sinister thing that is pulling strings like that's that that's really preposterous beyond all belief.

And this is yet another example of that, you know, and also a course if the Camer Rouge are fairly predictable. And you know, like I said, I tend to similar to anything to Kissinger

than most people, and I acknowledge that. But he was absolutely right in his assessment. You know, that what an amount to do was that these men are already dead or the Camer Rouge are planning to release them. You know, and we need further accurate intel to determine which way it's going, but, you know, they're not, they're not going to use them as a bargaining ship. This isn't the Pueblo,

although I was on the mind of the civilian authorities. And so it initially, the assault package that was initially being contemplated, this Air Force General said, He wanted to call from volunteers from these Air Force MPs and ground defense elements, which made no sense whatsoever because, like, how are these guys suited, you know, a hostage rescue situation on a ship? And the idea was that we're going to try and land. First, he said we're going to, like, repel the assault force down. And then a civilian staffer who was in the situation room spoke up. And he's like, if you repel these men down,

the Cameroos are going to open up on them with Soviet SMGs and turn them into hamburger. What are you talking about? So then he says, well, we're going to land the choppers on the containers and rapidly disembark and do it that way. And one of a Navy man who was a liaison to the, you know, admiralty representation on the JCS said, those containers can't handle the way to a chopper.

They're going to crumble like cardboard. What are you talking about? You know, so even, even back then with some exception, it's like William Odom and honestly, I think like Creighton Abrams, you know, the, the U.S. officer corps was not fantastic. You know, it's become catastrophically comically bad these days. It's become, you know, Fauci with guns. But even back then, it wasn't stellar. And I, I know people think I just hate on the military and the police and stuff. I mean, whatever. But I don't think that can be disputed in this case. But what, ultimately, it was Admiral Noel Gaylor. And he was, and he was,

was the commander, he was the, it was the sync pack commander, you know, and he reassured the White House that, you know, a substantial naval force was already on the way, but a carrier couldn't, the nearest carrier in Brexsum was used as Coral Sea, and it couldn't, it would be at least 48 hours and we're going to reach the crisis area. And several hours before that aircraft could be launched, you know, from the deck. But Gailor had the wherewithal to realize that, you know, there had to be, there had to be some sort of infantry assault element. And if there was going to be a landing on Kotang Island, it had to be substantial.

Ultimately, it was decided a combination, a combined marine assault force. consisting of the 2nd Battalion 9th Marines at Okinawa and another element at Subic Bay was going to be utilized. And when these available force elements were relayed to the White House, that's when Ford decided. He decided to combine basically two potential assault packages and divide the attack between the Mayagas and Kotang Island, where he became convinced based on faulty intelligence reporting that the hostages were divided between.

And he refused to. to abide Kissinger's recommendation, which interestingly, Vice President Rockefeller was very hoggish on this. He agreed with Kissinger. He said that there's got to be a punitive assault on the mainland. And, you know, there's got to be a display of overwhelming force. But that was kind of Ford's middle of the road compromise. but again, too, in Ford's defense, he was getting bad intelligence. And he was painfully aware of that because the third candidate meeting, he was on record.

It's in the minutes of the meeting saying that, you know, every couple of hours were being told different things. And every time the communication includes with a guarantee that, you know, that this is a fact, an accurate sit-rep. So the whole thing was kind of, the whole thing was kind of doomed from inception, in my opinion. The three men who were left behind, and we'll get into that, they were part of a machine gun crew.

And despite the way things shook out in Nam, as I'm sure the military type guys among the subs, will, you know, substantiate. An M60 was intended to be a crew-served weapon. It was supposed to be a three-man machine gun team. And, you know, you had machine gunners humping the big gun and as many animal belts

that get carried by themselves and usually the tripod, you know, and other, you had other, platoon mates of theirs who would, you know, hump extra belt of ammo as needed. But it was intended to be a crew served weapon. And the men

who went missing were left behind were a NM60 machine gun team. The force structure was strange in 1975, both the army and the Marines because it was between it was this post-viewed. Vietnam drawdown where

at least the Army and in NATO forces in Europe and to be clear this is back when NATO actually had a plausible military mission and a purpose and it actually made sense the way it was structured this is when the Army first did

it came to be known as Air Land Battle and the Marines were on a different tip obviously because they had a different mission orientation and and plus their their theater of operations was totally different but uh they too it was a combination of stuff we'd associate with the remit era and um some uh holdover stuff from the old uh army that was sustained by the draft so it was uh it was odd um

But, yeah, the three men who were left behind were Joseph and Hargrove, who was a corporal, and he was the machine gun team leader, Gary L. Hall and Danny G. Marshall. Hargrove, tragically, he was this poor kid from the Carolinas who really came from the dirt. His older brother had been killed in Vietnam in 1968, you know, and then, and that devastated the family, of course. and lo and behold, Joseph Hargrove, he goes missing and it's decades before his surviving mom, like even found out what had happened to him. You know, just awful stuff. Not only were the Marines of 2-9, you know, not, you know, they had no reason to believe they'd be imminently going into action. but they'd been on training maneuvers for the preceding 24 hours in the field.

You know, I mean, all the inventory does is train. So they were exhausted, you know, and they got orders to deploy to the crisis area. You know, these men were deprived of sleep. Both the riflemen and the machine gunners, they'd had I guess I've never fired blanks before and I don't know much about military

small arms but I guess if you're running blanks through a rifle or through an M60 you've got to fit the muzzle with something you know that can you know allow for those

you know dud low to be run through. And you're supposed to, once you remove those modifications, you're supposed to run live ammo through, like at least a magazine,

is that you can, you know, battle sight your rifle. They didn't have a time to do that. You know, so this was, you had this exhausted element that hadn't even had time to properly maintain their rifles for going into battle. You know, just really inexcusable stuff

that never should have even been an issue. I mean, and this is the idea of the Cold War. You know, it's not, you know, you're not talking about the makework army that is in constant search of, you know, a raison d'etre. That's really inexcusable. I mean, I say nothing in the fact that, you know, you never send people into combat without, you know, the stuff they need. And there was only a handful of men in this element, too, who had combat experience.

A company commander, a captain James Davis, he'd been in action in Vietnam. A gunnery sergeant had similar experience. There was a couple other officers, one of whom at an Audi Murphy like resume, you had a Navy Cross and something like five Purple Hearts and stuff. But, you know, it was only, it was less than 10 men who'd ever heard a shot fire into anger, too. You know, so it's not these guys were, these guys were busting their cherry, as it were, going into combat against the very seasoned commuterge element. And that, I mean, that's absurd, too.

Yeah, the blank adapters, I guess, is what they used in those days. I think later the military switched at some, like, laser tag, like actually was a training device used by the army. I don't know about the Marines. And I know, you know, some innovating capitalist that worlds of wonder, the toy company realized, hey, you can market this to kids and stuff. But I guess in those days, like using blanks is what they did for realism or an attempt at realism. You know, it's the, the Vaf and SS and the Vermacht, believe live fire was essential, but it's interesting. That hadn't really occurred to me that blanks would be used outside of Hollywood,

but, you know, apparently that was a thing. But moving on. And yeah, the C-141s that landed to convey the men to Thailand, where they would then, you know, depart by helicopter for the LZ. They hadn't even been purposed for, like the Ford cargo space hadn't been purpose, purpose for passengers. So these guys were sitting on the hard floor, which was freezing, you know, no seatbelts, using only their combat packs for back support.

you know, just, and again, these guys, these guys were going on no sleep, and it's, you know, I'm sure you don't get restful sleep on a starlifter anyway, but, you know, especially not if you're, you're just sitting on a cold aluminum floor. The Air Force element in attempting to deploy as a contingency, um, to, uh, northern Thailand, their helicopter crashed on route and a bunch of men died. That's another thing that was redacted. And when it came out, the statement from the Pentagon in the White House was that, you know, well, these men weren't part of the operation, I mean, which was another lie.

You know, these guys from the 56 security police. squadron, you know, just, which again was just a ridiculous suggestion to begin with. You know, but by this time, by the night of the 14th, the crew of the Mayages was already on, you know, an island north of Kotang. So it was the nominal reason for the operation was that already resolved hours before

as it happened on May 15th at 612 a.m. 8 helicopters disembarked It was five CH-53s and three H-H-53s, constituting the first wave of the KOTANG assault force. There have been two landing zones designated.

Kotang's a tiny island. There were two beaches, identified as the West Beach and the East Beach. That were natural landing zones. The rest of the island was a very, very dense jungle. But the problem is that, you know, these are also natural kill zones. And Marine chopper pilots generally, and they learn this in Nam, they generally hover in an LZ with the nose pointed towards the main line of resistance. so that the Marines could disembark and use the fuselage for cover.

Naval pilots weren't really wise to this. So the side of the chopper was flush to the mainline of resistance. And as they were approaching, they weren't taking any fire. and then immediately when they got within range and began their descent, like the entire jungle opened up, you know, and they started getting hit with heavy automatic weapons fire. The first chopper in, which was designated in Knife 21, it actually landed, but when the Marines were disembarking,

a bunch of them got hit. Knife 21 itself was severely damaged. One of its engines was taken out, but it managed to take off because the second CH53 designated knife 22 was coming in and it was opening up with its mini guns. So there was enough suppressive fire

that it could get away. It ditched about one and a half kilometers offshore. Knife 21 did. Knife 22 was so badly damaged that it had to turn back. So, I mean, that meant that the first wave of the assault was missing a substantial component of its element anyway. Surviving passengers and Knife 21 were picked up, but a bunch of men drowned. and some were killed by Kalashnikov fire as they tried to stay afloat.

At 6.30 on the East Beach, it was the same deal. The CH 53's were approaching, and they immediately started getting hit by B40 rockets. Knife 31, as it was called. It was hit by two RPGs, which is, ignited the fuel tank on the left-hand side and ripped away the nose of the helicopter. So it exploded in a fireball and crashed 50 meters offshore. Killing five Marines, two Navy corpsmen, the co-pilot. Three more Marines were killed trying to reach the beach.

A couple of Marines burned to death while clinging to their. wreckage, which is just awful to think about. Ten men survived and three Air Force crewmen did too. They were floating in the water

for two hours. And the Henry B. Wilson, which is one of the vessels that was en route from Subic, was able to pick them up. So this was a skeleton crew that was landing on

landing on the beach in the first wave, both beaches in the first wave. One of the, thankfully one of the Marines who survived the crash on the east beach, he was the battalion's

forward air controller and he had his Air Force survival radio in his pack. So while he was floating, he was able, to call an airstrikes from some A7s

that were in the region and uh so they started they started pounding um the main line of resistance to try and you know bring fire support to the Marines that were you know now in this desperate fight on both beaches

um you know so this was just uh this was just a disaster finally the second wave was able to break through with support from an AC130 gunship you know that's spooky that started uh it was able to penetrate Cameru's fire after five attempts and ultimately all told on the west beach 81 Marines were landed and a further 29 Marines from the Battalion Command Post,

plus a mortar platoon, were able to land also. And the 81 millimeter mortar is proved essential in preventing a route. So by 7 a.m., May 15th, there was 109 Marines and five Air Force crewmen on Kotang, but they were in three isolated beach areas, two of the designated LZs,

and then another one where, you know, surviving choppers had to emergency land, you know, and then reinforce those men so that they didn't, you know, get wiped out. The Marines at the West Beach tried to move southward and eastward to try and link up with this

isolated element, which incidentally was, you know, the battalion command element. But they were beaten back by heavy Camero fire. And to be clear, as this came out later, including because the battalion, the commierers battalion commander, this one American, like, lay historian took his oral history around between like 1996 and 2000. and what he relayed was he said that he said we were convinced we were under general assault you know and that this was the the the americans marines were going to conquer ko tang and then used it as a staging area to assault the mainland you know so he's like we had

orders to fight to the last man you know and uh obviously you know there's only two ways home of your serving in the Khmer Rouge as an officer, you know, it's either victory or death. You know, there's not, there's not a third alternative. You know, so he said, we were convinced, you know, this is it.

You know, he's like, that's why we, he's like, that's, that's why we resisted so hard, you know, because, um, we, we were convinced that you were, invading us as, as part of a general,

you know, assault operation. which was a reasonable which was a reasonable conclusion you know as it the second

the five ultimately ultimately I'm still service about helicopters were able to pick up the remainder of what was to be the second wave and finally able to stage a landing at the East Beach to relieve beleaguered forces there.

But once again, one of those helicopters, they're in a night 52, its fuel tanks were ruptured, and the pilot had to abort. Two more chopped. had to abandon their landings and assume a holding pattern owing to impenetrable groundfire. Finally, Word got to the CIA station in Thailand in Bangkok proper, the communication from the Liyah's crew that they were going to be released. this was transmitted to the White House um Ford told the JCS

you know to you know of effect a fighting withdrawal you know of these Marines ASAP you know and get the hell out of there

so this chaotic withdrawal ensued the Marines to their credit, they said, we're not, we're not even going to think about withdrawing these men until we can reinforce them so that they're not, you know, massacred and in trying to, you know, scrambled to an extraction site, you know, which was the right call. Some more mortars were landed on the three choppers that were still operational. And within, range, but

there was a constant shifting of orders as to where the Marines should go for extraction. And the machine gun team that was left behind, they were hearing conflicting things. And on both beaches, there was basically like a loose horseshoe perimeter

that had been established opposite the Cameroo's main line of resistance. and on what would have been the furthest flank of the horseshoe is where these guys were entrenched. And there was a number of KIA who were left behind on the island pending retrieval. And owing to a combination of conflicting orders and a... the miscommunication to the, you know, the pilots within the extraction element, you know, they were told that, you know, there's no, there's no living left behind on the island. And when it became clear that there were, you know, it was, it was several hours before they realized that, um, these men were unaccounted for. and the Marines wanted to immediately go back in.

This one admiral who was a liaison to Commander-in-Chief Pacific, he came up with this absurd idea of, well, you know, we should send an unarmed contingent under a white flag with a commier interpreter and explain that we're only there to retrieve our people living and dead. So this Marine lieutenant said, I'm not going anywhere near that island unarmed, fuck you, basically. And one of the senior men at the Thai air base, he said, you know, we can get a team of Navy SEALs here probably within, you know, 12 hours. Let's put an assault package together with them, you know, with some of the surviving Marines who know the terrain of the island and let's get our people out.

The Ford White House was adamantly opposed to reengaging, especially because Kissinger was being shadowed by the national media because he wasn't in Washington when the crisis broke. He was in Missouri. So as you trail back to Washington, everybody from Time magazine to, you know, the big three television networks, you know, and, you know, both the Washington major papers were, you know, kind of waiting with bated breath to find a way to report a disaster and, you know, a totally Fubar resolution and hanging on Kissinger and the kind of failing Ford White House. So they wanted to break with this as much as possible and, you know, essentially declare victory. And when it went over the AP wire, like, you know, this lie of, oh, you know, there was, that the crew has safely been rescued. And we only took, you know, we, you know, we only took one, one fatality, you know, suddenly Ford became the man of the hour, you know, and all this kind of praise was lavished upon him. especially because nothing but bad news have been coming in, you know, from Southeast Asia. So it became very politically untenable to admit that, yeah, you know, we got our asses kicked and we left people behind.

You know, I mean, the guys who fought a Kotang were hard as nails. Like, those guys did great. It wasn't their fault that they got creamed by, you know, being sent into action with shit intel and not the, you know, without the equipment they needed and, you know, well, well, being outnumbered and, as it were, you know, outgunned because a, you know, without, that, I mean, honestly, you don't need to be, you don't need to be some sort of military savant to realize. I mean, that island should have been being pounded with with airstrikes, you know, beforehand. They should have been, they should have been leveling it, you know, before any infantry element set foot on it.

You know, like those B-50, that arc light should have been hitting Kotang, not the mainland, to some punitive gesture. But, you know, that's what happened. And as it turned out, and this wasn't known for decades, how it resolved until some Camer Rouge veterans who were witnesses and parties to the events, you know, proffered their testimony as to what happened. After the Battle of Cotang, the Camer Rouge element remained on alert because they didn't know if there was a, going to be another assault. But the next day, about 24 hours later, a Cameroo's patrol came under fire, and they recognized

the report as, you know, coming from an armolite. So eventually, you know, they close with whoever was shooting at him. It was Joseph Harborough, who'd been wounded in the leg. So he couldn't walk. and Hargrove had, you know, he was trading fire with him until he ran out of ammo from his M-16. And he was taken prisoner. And then about a week later, and this was horrible to think about.

So Hargrove because Hargrove because he was wounded, he got separated from the rest of his machine gun team. And then as this chaotic extraction was underway, Gary Hall and Danny Marshall got separated from him, you know, and couldn't fight their way back, owing to the fact that, you know, the beach had by that point had been cut in half by the advancing Cameroon. But a week after the fact, the Cameroge noticed that Rice from the... their food stores was missing. And the first night had happened, they didn't really think anything of it.

But then, as it continued to happen, they set in the ambush. And as it turned out, Gary Hall and Danny Marshall, you know, trapped on Kotang a week after the, the withdrawal,

you know, we're surviving on a food they were stealing and then Khmer Rouge camp. So they were captured, too. They were taken to the mainland and imprisoned in this Buddhist temple that had been repurposed as a prison and a death house. They'd been locking prisoners and what had been the monks' quarters. And Hargrove Hall and Marshall had been, they remained there for another five days. and then the order came down from

Cameroos command to execute them and as part of the course the Camer Rouge didn't waste bullets they were beat the death with a B-40 rocket launcher you know just like pummel to death which is horrific but

you know that's that's that's how it resolved as it were you know and like I said. This wasn't even really spoken of. You know, and after

I mean, in those days, too, I mean, stuff obviously remained in the public mind for longer. There wasn't this news cycle where things just immediately left people's awareness. But, you know, no scandal ensued from it. And it was reported as this great victory

of the Ford administration and then quickly forgotten about. And the casualties, you know, which, which were many, they're just an afterthought on the Vietnam War Memorial. Like, oh, this was the last battle of the Vietnam War, which makes no sense whatsoever. And then a couple of very dedicated historians, as well as Kotang veterans, who were pushing for decades to get some recognition for this and what happened. You know, it finally became known and some recognition was afforded.

And I guess that the, there's some kind of memorial now on Kotang. And I guess some guys at the Cambodian embassy, which is guarded by Marines, like all embassies are. They, after relations normalized, you know, with Vietnam, with Vietnam, Vietnam was occupying in Cambodia until 90. Like they never left after they took out the Khmer Rouge, you know. I guess there was some sort of memorial erected there. But pretty grim stuff, but important, not just because, you know, we should honor the dead, especially young guys or basically just kids

who were literally abandoned by their government to a horrible, horrible face. but militarily it was highly significant. You know, so it's not, I realize I've got some kind of esoteric areas of concentration of my research, but I don't think this is just reducible to that. It's actually a very important subject matter for the era. But that's all I have on this subject for today. No, I think it's important to people hear that in the context of this. series. So, yeah, thank you for that.

Yeah, of course. I appreciate you hosting me as always. Go over to Thomas a substack, real Thomas 777.com. Go to his website, Thomas 777.com. The T is a 7. And you can hook up with Thomas there, support him on the substack. And Thomas will interact with you on the substack. He may even be nice. I think you're always nice. We're just, you know, every once in a while. Every once in a while. No, and then sometimes, like, lately, there's been, like, a glut of fools,

but I've, like opted to ignore them. And, you know, I, I'm playing with the idea of at least when I recorded kind of, like, rebranding the Inquisition thing because it seems to be like a magnet for, like, mental defectives who are, are, it's, I don't get it, man. I don't get why that particular brand just like attracts like total fucking idiots, but they need to be purged. And that, yeah, I found that profoundly irritating, but I bought it to do ignore them. I'm just ignore them.

Best to do. Block and move on. All right, Thomas, talk to you. Thank you very much for this. Appreciate it. Until the next one. Yeah, man.