July 5, 2018 • 45 mins
In Part Two of Episode 10, Robert is joined again by comedian Caitlin Gill and they continue to discuss the life of the crazy King of Cambodia who made terrible movies and influenced Pol Pot to do terrible things.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
H Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind
the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you
don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
This is part two of our episode on Prince Notre
Dame say Hannac, the man who made poll pot possible,
which I am very proud of myself for saying properly.
My guest, as with the last episode, is Caitlin Gill,
(00:24):
comedian writer and possibly third gunmen on the grass Nal.
There's no way to prove that one, even because it's
speaking of the nineteen sixties. Prince nor Dam sat Hanno
starts the nineteen sixties as President and head of State
for life of Cambodia. He has purged the left wing
(00:44):
in his own country, the Democratic Party, who threatened to
overwhelm Cambodia with moderate liberal votes. So he's he's getting
rid of those guys and he's down in charge. And say, Hannah,
let's get into his personality a little bit, because he's
the sort of monarchy thinks being king should be a
good time. Ah. He throws ridiculous gigantic parties and he
would often help cook the meals. He was a gourmet cook,
(01:06):
really good at throwing foods together. Ah. He also liked
to provide most of the entertainment. One of his relatives
at the time described him as quote an artist lost
in politics. An Australian diplomat who met him in nineteen
fifty nine said, was one of the few people I
have ever encountered who deserves to be described as charismatic.
On an individual basis, he radiated charm and four Cambodians
(01:27):
in particular, he had a striking capacity to enthrall a
crowd for good or ill. The King was famous for
performing elaborate song and dance numbers at his parties, including
one reported double act with the Indonesian dictator Sukarnod Wouldn't
you want to see that? While? Yeah? Can you fucking
Matt oh Man? Have you ever seen the movie uh
(01:48):
White Christmas? Yeah? You know that song that the two
ladies do, Sisters that they the sisters, And then I
imagine it being that with these two guys who have
like come millions of deaths on their Yeah, it's just
it's just fun to think about so contained multitudes. People
are amazing. He's also in a jazz band like Bill,
(02:12):
Like Bill Clinton. Uh, he was not on our sineo,
but he probably could have been, but he would have
charmed he I bet he would have killed Yeah. Absolutely. Uh.
Here's another quote from that Australian diplomat at a sa
don sante, which I'm gonna guess is a dance party.
I was lucky to attend at around one thirty am,
(02:32):
and after the King and Queen had left, he the
Prince beamed at the rest of us and said, well,
their majesties have gone, and I suppose the rest of
you can go now too, but I am going to
play until dawn, and I do hope you will stay.
And of course we all did. So he's fucking charming.
He's great at playing like and that that's the thing.
Like you hear about a dictator who makes everyone listen
to his music and you assume it would be a nightmare,
(02:55):
But every report is that he was actually a really
talented musician and great it entered hating people, and a
great cook. So he's like the guy you want to
party with. He's just also made himself absolute ruler of
his country through uh max executions and violence. But yeah,
but he's a charming guy and his art wasn't limited
(03:15):
to weird dances with other dictators. He also produced and
start in dozens of movies. So director President Prince Siena
got his start in the nineteen forties when he made
two films called Tarzan among the Koi and Double Crime
on the Magino Line, which is a solid name. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he's great at titles. Uh. From nineteen sixty to seventy
(03:36):
he produced twenty one films, including nine documentaries, which is
a pretty incredible rate for a guy who's also the
Prince and the president. Yeah. Uh, so these were not
just show products like the North Korean film industry where
the king gets credit, but really other people do all
the work. He seems to have spent substantially more time
making movies and actually running his country. He writes and
(03:57):
directs almost all of his movies, and he stars something
like half of them. So yeah, real triple threat. We're
up to like eight types. I found a paper from
the University of Leads that analyzed his filmography. I think
he made over fifty films by the time he died,
and it argues that he used movies as a way
to communicate directly with the peasant masses. So Donald Trump
(04:17):
has Twitter. Prince President Sihannock had a weird ass movies. Uh,
quote from that University of Leads paper. Sianna took the
starring role in his films, depicting as many fictional characters
as he had official roles throughout his political life. This
enabled Shannock to inhabit multiple roles in personas while still
maintaining the integrity of the monarch, so the points made
in his movies are not subtle. In nineteen sixty seven,
(04:39):
he was having a spat with the Americans, who wanted
Cambodia to stop it with all their damn neutrality, and
who had tried to have him killed a couple of times. Uh. Yeah,
the CIA was never good that part of their job.
Than it looks, it is harder than it looks. We'll
give the CIA credit. Uh. He was also having major
domestic troubles. Uh. He nationalized all trade and all of
the banks, which caused a bunch of people to just
smuggle their rise to be a no'm where they'd get
(05:00):
more money for it anyway and could avoid giving the
king a cut. When the king realized what was going on,
he sent in the army to force the peasants to
sell their rise to him at the price he had set.
This did not make the peasants happy, and at a
place called Samlout they revolted. The king ordered mass beheadings,
and something like ten thousand people were dead by the
time it was all over. This was bad for the
king's image, as you might imagine, so he decided to
make a movie, Shadows of her Anchor, where he plays
(05:22):
a heroic admiral who discovers an international plot to overthrow
Cambodia's government. At one point, he winds up with the
American ambassador played by his wife. He takes her on
a walk and explains how hard it is to be
king of Cambodia. They bond over this and fall in love,
but then she gets sent away from Cambodia because the
US is mean. Oh yeah, that's pretty sad. You can
(05:42):
really feel the tragedy. If I saw that, I would
forget the death of my uncle and nephew I saw
dangling from the hillside that they were hung from. He
cut my family's heads off. But I really believe him
when he looks into the eyes of his wife playing
an American diplomat. Yeah, I'm feeling that. Yeah, those bedroom ice,
(06:03):
he does have those bedroom ice. We'll put some pictures
of those up on the website. He's a handsome man.
Uh So a number of his films followed the same
basic pattern, the King and his wife playing basically the
King and some broad go to angkor Watt and the
King gives a monologue. Uh was able to spend so
much time directing because he'd effectively outsourced all the hard
work to the elected officials of Cambodia. So when ship
(06:23):
would go bad, rather than take the blame himself, he
just scream at some of the Democrats in office and
maybe throw a few of them in jail. So there
were still some liberals and left wingers in his political
party that he kept there so that whenever anything went bad,
like when he massacred in thousand peasants, he could have
them arrested and be like, it was these guys, these
guys up. Yeah. I mean, there's never been another politician
(06:44):
who's kept a bunch of people around him just so
he could fire them to deflect blame from him. No no, no, no,
no no no, I feel like, yeah, trail Blazer. And
then when he needed violent deeds done, he would have
the conservatives to it, and then he would fire them
after they massacred too many people. So he's he's really
like making the most out of democracy, just doing exactly
what he wants and firing whoever he has to fire
(07:05):
when people get angry at him for what he's doing.
So this story from nineteen fifty seven is kind of
typical the way he liked to play local politics. Uh.
This is a quote from that book, Anatomy of Terror. Uh.
In August ninety seven, he summoned the leaders of the
Democratic Party, whose continued existence afforded a kind of vicarious
protection for all of the left wing views, to a
debate at the Royal Palace before an audience packed with
(07:26):
his own supporters, which was broadcast over loudspeakers to a
crowd of several thousand outside. As they left after five
hours of public humiliation, they were dragged from their cars
and beaten with rifle butts by palace guards. So this
is Prince President, Director King. It sounds like a director
I've been on set. There's a little bit of uva
bowl in him. Uh. As the sixties start up, the
(07:48):
Vietnam War, does what the Vietnam War did, and suddenly
both the US and Vietnam are asking more of Prince Hannock.
He works at a great solution though, where the Vietnamese
can hide whole armies in his country and the US
can bomb them at the same time. Uh. He manages
to sort of keep a lid on things and dance
from fire to fire while making tens of movies until
January of nineteen, when the Communists launched the start of
a revolutionary war. This prompts the Hannock to bring back
(08:10):
one of those right wing politicians he'd previously fired, a
guy named law Knell. So law Knell calls in the
Air Force to bomb rebel areas and cut off their
food supplies. Rural citizens are resettled on mask to cut
off any source of supply to the Communists. See, Hannock
starts handing out bounties to his soldiers for every rebel
they kill. This backfires because the King's soldiers just start decapitating. Yeah,
he says, I'll give you a bounty for every head
(08:31):
of every rebel you bring me, So they just start
decapitating random villagers, uh and bring them in for quick cash.
So maybe the King could have thought that went out better,
but he was busy making his magnum opus, a film
called Twilight. Oh yeah, Now, this Twilight is not about
a teenage girl and a vampire pedophile. This Twilight is
the love story of a prince played by the Prince
who hosts an Indian princess played by his wife. He
(08:54):
falls in love with her, and the main conflict comes
from the fact that the prince's nurse is also in
love with him. Yeah, it's rough, um. I found a
review of it online um with letterbox d this website
by by someone named Matt Key, who gave it three stars. Interesting,
not too long film. It's a simple drama about an
elderly prince who falls in love with a guest. Because
(09:16):
of this, her nurse, who has been in love with
him for years, begins to feel jealous. It features a
demonstration of nationalist propaganda in the middle that doesn't add
up to the plot. I'm gonna say the three stars
was generous, and that's what I'm gonna say. I told
you before the King's movies had a way of sending
subtle messages to his people. The message of this one
was I love you, no matter how brutal my murder
campaign looks. So he's gaslighting his whole country through film,
(09:39):
which is amazing. Uh. During the movie, the Prince realizes
he has to dump both women, like he can't be
defend the woman who loves him because his duties to
his country. So there's this monologue at anchor Watt and
here the Prince tells the princess about another king of
Cambodia who quote suffered the illness of his subjects more
than his own, and that their pain was the pain
(09:59):
of the king. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's really feeling each
and every decapitation. Yeah, every decapitation of a peasant is
a decapitation of his heart. Yeah, definitely. Anyway, he awards
himself an Oscar for this film shoot for the ego
and here, Yeah, he's he's always aiming high. So this
(10:21):
play is great for the peasants out in the country,
but the educated, middle class people in non pen have
access to Hollywood movies. They recognize this stuff as garbage,
and they regularly cursed their president prince for quote his
damn film shows and endless radio speeches. Uh. Some conservatives
were also angry that Prince Shannah could kind of sort
of maybe turned Cambodia from a country with almost no
communists to a country that was full of them. One
(10:42):
of the things that the book poll Pot points out
is that there's a word in the commerce language um,
the word for toter reign for like to be the
king of a country, translates literally as to eat the kingdom,
which is more or less what Sahannak does. So his
mom and his consort, his relatives are all incredibly corrupt
and they're all grafting the country for shiploads of money. Um.
(11:05):
When the whole country basically runs on graft and bribery
under Shanna, there's no real rule of law for people
connected in any way to the royal family. Uh. He
recognizes that the corruption is going to bring him down
as early as nineteen sixty two, but he doesn't do
anything about it. Instead, he does stuff like spend a
fifth of the yearly budget preparing for the Southeast Asian Games,
(11:25):
which are supposed to be held in the capitol. Uh.
The game's got canceled anyway, due to what Wikipedia calls
unsettling circumstances in country, like all of the civil war.
That yeah, like all the heads in the rivers exactly.
So thanks to the King's reforms. Uh, he'd done a
great job of reforming education. So hundreds of thousands of
people now had educations in Cambodia, but the only jobs
(11:48):
available to them were positions in the royal ministry, basically
squeezing peasants for the government. So he wound up with
a hundred unemployed students for every actual job, and a
peasant class who are being shared afted off their farms
by the corrupt government. So he's piste off all of
the peasants by taking away their source of livelihood, and
he's created a vast class of hundreds of thousands of
(12:10):
educated kids with no jobs. How do you think that
ends slaves? I'm sorry, I just I'm gonna keep coming
back to that. It's amazing everybody. Yeah. Uh, So the
President Prince grows increasingly brutal resistance to his reign intensifies. Uh.
He turned to a series of bloody pr stunts in
order to distract the populace from his his rampant corruption.
(12:33):
The fact that living standards have fallen for everybody, in
the fact that a tiny amount of the country is
getting ridiculously wealthy while most of the country suffers and starves. Uh.
In the nineteen sixties, his security forces quote unquote turn
a captured young member of the Vietnam's cell. They have
him go to the U. S. Embassy and asked the
Americans for help assassinating the prince. Obviously, the Americans turned
(12:53):
him into the police because they're not dumb. But it
made for big, flashy news story that implicates the Americans
the commune in the Vietnamese. This is all the distract from,
you know, the fact that the war isn't going super
well and that he's he's massacring people. The captured Vietnamese
kid who had been told to be released if he cooperated,
wasn't said, executed on the Prince's orders. So he's a
great guy. Uh. He regularly referred to Cambodia during the
(13:16):
sixties as an oasis of peace. Foreigners at the time
remember Cambodia as a paradise of excess and tropical splendor.
This was all true if you never left the capital
and we're whier rich. But things were bad outside the
city and they rapidly got worse after nineteen sixty eight. So,
like I said, the communists who are known as the
Khmer Rouge now, which is a nickname actually the king
came up with for them. Uh, launched their revolution in
(13:36):
nineteen sixty eight. It gets really bloody, and Sahanna is
forced to seed more and more control to the conservatives
so that they can fight. The entire world was turning
over in nineteen sixty You had student revolutions in France
and Mexico. There nobody was looking like it was a
good time if you wanted to turn things over to
do it really fast and hard, because it was happening
kind of everywhere. Yeah, and that's his hope that he
(13:57):
can turn over power for a little while. It just
seems like you have like nine nineteen sixty eight and
then like two thousand and twelve where everything flips over
on these kind of predictable every thirty four year clocks,
and that that was just one of those years. Uh yeah, exactly.
So things, you know after sixty eight start to go
worse and worse for him, and he gives more and
more power to the conservatives so that they can fight
(14:18):
this war against the communists. Um, there's no longer any
kind of a left wing in Cambodian politics because by
the late sixties, he'd had most of them executed and
prisoner exiled in various fits of rage, so he'd used
them escape goats until the right no goats left escape.
So now the only people left are the communists out
in the jungle and the right wing and the prince
at home. And as the right gains power, they start
(14:39):
to get more uppitty. So, you know, the right they
sort of liked the king at first, but he doesn't
prove to be super competent, and they can see that
his family is basically squirreling away all the country's wealth
and he's letting the communists take over. So yeah, the
right wing is not a big fan of him. So
the king has also been blaming them for stuff, and
he's been blaming them for stuff and firing their elected
(15:01):
leaders every time they do what he tells them, and
keeping leftists around for his own purposes, which you know
has to bother a true believer who's more conservative exactly,
So he's not doing great right now. This is like
that moment during the movie where like, you know, our
heroes at his lowest point. Yeah, we are at the
end of the second act here exactly, But I do
want you to know that when our President, Prince Director
(15:24):
King is at his lowest point, he does have his
best friend at his side. You want to guess who
his best friend is? A tub of ice cream? Kim
Il Sung Okay, yeah, Dictator of North Korea. The pair
met in nineteen sixty five at a conference hosted by Sukarno,
the leader of Indonesia. According to an article from the
World Tribune, the Indonesian leader put them both in adjoining
(15:46):
rooms because he thought they might be buddies. That is
so funny. And one dictator looks at two other dictators
and it's like, you know who you should? You guys
are gonna be friends. I'm gonna do a little cupid
thing here and I'm gonna shoot my arrow and it
wand missile and it works for thirty years. They're the
best buddies. Smell Brooks and Carl Reinering. That would be
(16:07):
a great pair to have play them in the movie
about this. I mean that's technically white, that's definitely white.
Wall is a filmmaker. He made a film called Blazing Saddles,
but it was just putting a peasant on a horse
that was actually on fire. So it's a little rough.
It's not the same three stars though I have a
three stars. Yeah, solid, solid, The propaganda real in the
middle is a little bit weird. Yeah, it was jarring
to push the plot forward. But yeah, so despite being
a pair of polar opposites, because Kim Il Sung is
(16:29):
kind of a kind of a quieter, more introspective sort
of dude, He's not really much for talking to the
press or performing in front of people, and obviously see
Hannock's you know, an extrovert. But they despite this, they
get along there. The Kim Il Sung gives the Prince
a giant mansion compound in North Korea, and they hung
out regularly for thirty years. Prince to Hannock always called
him my best friend, the great leader. But even with
(16:51):
his friends at his back, by the late sixties, things
are starting to get really bad in Cambodia, next government
dis ordering mass executions and purging villages every day. At
one point, after ordering two hundred dissidents murdered, Sano said,
I do not care if I am sent to Hell.
I will submit the relevant documents to the devil himself.
The Prince's iron fisted repression of any descent did more
to encourage the camer Rouge than it did to scare them.
(17:14):
So basically he's doing things like having captured rebels separate
heads displayed in like the centers of towns and putting
photographs of like piles of their heads and the camer
language press. Uh. He's having camer Rouge cadres disemboweled by
government soldiers um their mass executing leftists. Uh. In one
incident near the capital, troops take two children who are
(17:36):
alleged to be messengers for the camer Rouge and cut
their heads off with jagged palm tree fronds, which I
didn't know you could do with palm tree frons, one
of those. Ever hit your car, it'll dentisty and it'll
cut a kids had hard enough. Yeah, So even people
on the right wing start to complain about how fucking
brutal the army is getting. Um. Sianic tells these people
who complain on the right that will send them to
(17:56):
the next world if they keep up complaining. So he's
basically threat everybody now, um, because that's kind of always
been his only tactic, but now there's not that many
people left to threaten. Uh. So up until this point,
he had been very prophetic in seeing the US is
involvement in Vietnam is doomed. He'd been making his foreign
policy calculations based on that. This is why he kept
friendly with Vietnam and China. But in nineteen sixty the
(18:19):
North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive and the US beats
them badly. In America, the Tet Offensive has seen as
proof that the war is a quagmire, but Prince Sanna
saw it as a huge win for America, so he
now thinks the US is in it for the long haul. Which, yeah,
if you're ever basing your policies off the US being
in anything for the long haul, you are not making
(18:39):
the right decision. Oh, I don't know. In military conflict.
I mean that's why we still have the longest wars
going on. Yeah, but that's only long by our standards.
I'm gonna leave like you didn't. Yes, we had to
come back, yes, but it didn't go well for the
people who trusted us. Well, that's where this story started,
(19:01):
with the French trying to prop up a Cambodian dictator
to preserve their own interests, and we have been doing
the same because I learned from history when we can
just do it again. Yeah. Yeah, No. If there's one
like summary of American history, it's we don't learn things.
That is. That is our national motto in terms of
intervention at least. Uh. So we're going to get back
(19:23):
to Prince s Hannah's big mistake and uh spoiler alert,
a coup. Yeah, everybody loves a good old fashioned coup.
But first, grab you a pile of coins and credit
cards products. I want to build a website on a mattress.
(19:48):
We're back, boy. Those ads were great. There were some
quality as so many products. Now we're talking about Cambodia
again and Prince Hannah. So Prince Hannah basically changes his
calculus after the tet offensive and it's like, no, I
think the US is in this for the long haul,
and maybe they are a reliable country to be allied with.
(20:11):
Never a good decision. Um, so he starts trying to
curry favor with the Americans. He gets his chance in
March of nine, when President Nixon orders the U. S.
Air Force to start bombing Cambodia to get at the
Vietnamese troops hiding there. The Prince doesn't make a fuss,
and since these are meant to be secret bombing raids.
The fact that he obliges means that Nixon gets to
bomb Cambodia three thousand times without you know, making a
(20:32):
big fuss about it. So Nixon, being a good quid
pro quo guy, extends Cambodia final recognition of her borders
as a reward. So that's a sweet trade. Yeah, I mean,
so you would let America bomb your country three thousand
times for recognition of your borders, right, yeah, totally. I
guess you could bomb my guest room if I got
to define my fence line. Why, well, I was in
(20:55):
the house, if I was willing to let it get bombed,
that's where the rebels. That's how you get the good ship,
to let part of it get destroyed so you get
rewarded somehow. Yeah that always works out. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'm just jealous of you for having a guest room. No,
I don't have a guest from us speaking proverbially about
a fake house and a metaphor for Cambodia being a
house where you destroyed part of your own home so
you could keep a bigger part of it. Never mind,
(21:16):
leave my analogy behind. I'm still jealous. Uh So, Obviously,
this bombing pisces off a lot of Cambodians, and it
also hurts the Prince among the Cambodian right wing because
they wanted to work with the US to exterminate the
Communists from the beginning. So they saw this as the
Prince admitting that he had been wrong to turn down
America before. Uh So. The book pole Pot The Anatomy
of Terror basically says that this was the point when
(21:38):
the Prince's strategies finally failed him. He'd wiped out the
left wing of his own party, so he couldn't throw
them under the bus. Instead, he took the hits and
saw his power a road. Parliament refused to drop a
corruption inquiry involving in a member of his entourage, and
he wound up losing face in public, which is a
big deal in that part of the world. Uh So,
In addition to all this, the Prince is trying to
figure out how to balance the budget. Rampant corruption and
a war had not been kind to Cambodia's finances. Fortunately,
(22:01):
he found a quick, easy fix. And then I guess
what it is, slaves man? You are? You keep calling slaves?
Not yet it's gambled, dang it. Gambling, sweet lady gambling.
Uh so, Prince Hannox sells gambling licenses to two casinos
for a fee of eighty million francs per year each.
This made up a huge chunk of the budget shortfall
(22:23):
and was exactly the wrong thing to do while fighting
a civil war against communists, who claim that you're letting
the elite suck poor people dry. Uh yeah, so here's
a quote from that book of the Enemy of Terror.
Non pen was soon alive with stories of people committing
suicide after losing their life savings. Business activity slumped as
factory owners, government official, shopkeepers, and laborers spent their days
(22:44):
and nights courting ruin at the betting tables. So the
right wing takes all of this is evidence that the
Prince should not be in power anymore. They start stripping
away the things he controls. Over the next year, boxing
amount of decisions and overruling him, he becomes openly hostiles
to the parliament. At one point, he makes fun of
the right leader Lawnnell, for being out of the country
while he was receiving major surgery in Switzerland. Immediately after
(23:05):
making fun of lawn null for this, Prince Hannet goes
on vacation for a few months in the Mediterranean in Europe. Yep, yeah,
he goes to fat Camp. Uh. So this was a
strategy of his when things got hot politically, he would
just leave and go to fat Camp or go on
vacation for a couple of months and if things got
better when he was away, and then hey, things were better,
and if they got worse than he would just blame
(23:27):
whoever was in charge while he was away. He hadn't
been here, so it wasn't his fault. But this time,
while he's away, Parliament votes to withdraw confidence from the
Prince and demand that he relinquishes off as his head
of state. So in March of nineteen seventy, while he's
fucking around in Europe, he gets cooed out of power. Now,
at this point he had a number of options. He
did have a palace on the French Riviera. He could
(23:47):
have just retired, flown there and you know, hung out
between there and with his homeboy Kim Il Sung and
just kind of enjoyed life. Or he could try to
get back into power. He just chills, right, he just
kicks it at the French rivierea. No, he decides that
he still wants to be the king of well, the
prince of Cambodia. He still wants to be you know, yeah,
(24:09):
he wants revenge actually is kind of more what he's
going for, because he does not decide to fly back
and fight, you know, in the city, you know, at
the ballot box to try to to regain his position
from the people who had overthrown him. He brokers or
gets a meeting set up between himself and the Camers
rouges Uh and he agrees that he will support them
(24:30):
now if they will back him as being the head
of state once they take power. So the king who
has spent most of the last decade fighting the communists
is now supporting the communists and is a king that
is the figurehead of a communist revolution trying to overthrow
the country of Cambodia. Um, so he has he has
(24:51):
really just kept swinging around here. So what's interesting to
me about this is that at no point does he
think he's going to actually be in real power again.
The king knows from the get go that the communists
aren't going to let him actually rule the country. He's
going to be a figurehead, and he's like, he's open
about the fact they're going to spit him out as
soon as they're done with him. So he backs his
former enemies, not because he's going to get to be
(25:12):
in charge again, but because fuck the right wing for
throwing him out of power. It's just about spite. Um.
So yeah, back in Cambodia, the right wing is finding
out that kicking the prince out was not necessarily a
great move because while he had lost the support of
the people in the cities, the peasants don't know how
to deal with the fact that the prince, who was
(25:33):
to them still the king, had been fired. One Catholic
missionary at the time recalls being asked, how shall we
tend our rice patties now that the king is not
here to make it rain? So? Uh maybe not a
great decision on behalf of the Cambodian right wing. Although
if you're them, what do you do with this fucking guy? Yeah, yes,
there's no win for anybody but him, exactly. Uh So,
(25:56):
the popularity of the Khmers Rouges explodes now that they've
got Sienook as a your head. A writer from The
New Yorker at the time noted his name became the
camer Rouge's greatest recruitment tool, and the most extreme communist
movement in history, swept to power on royal coat tails.
The civil war lasted five years and killed at least
half a million people, So it's on par with the
Syrian Civil War in terms of bloodiness already and in
(26:19):
a in a shorter period of time. Um, it had
been bad before, but the coup ramped things up to
nightmare dimensions. What kind of warfare is this that's killing
so many people because there's not This isn't like it
wasn't like there were twenty million soldiers. I really recommend
giving a read to the book pulp At the Anatomy
of a Nightmare, because he talks a lot about Camar culture.
But basically things are very black and white and sort
(26:39):
of the culturals view on good and evil. So there's
not like in Maoice China when they would when the
communists one, there were people who were executed, but more
often than not they try to sort of reform people
and make them get them to work within the new system.
They don't really do that here. So it's like I
take no prisoners thing exactly Is this like straight up
(27:00):
machete to body or is this are there chemical weapons?
Are there because there's bombs in the country that have
been traveling to and fro. There are so many people's weapons,
there's weapons that you're making. So we drop something like
I had this written down at someone before, but we
dropped almost as many bombs as we dropped on Europe
(27:20):
and World War two on the U S does just
on Cambodia during this period. So that's a big part
of it. And there's stories from like American military planners
at the time who they would have you know, they
had be fifty twos flying over the country and they
would have like a map of Cambodi that laid out
where all the villages they knew existed were, and they
would have this little box that they would place on
the map that would show this is what one B
(27:41):
fifty two will destroy. And it's noted that like you
can't put them anywhere on the map without hitting villages.
So the bombing wipes out hundreds of thousands of people,
and in general, just the war it's unspeakably brutal. Um
So there's both uprisings that are suppressed by soldiers massacring people. Um,
the Khmers rouges passed after like nineteen seventy three start
massacring people to like at the beginning of the war. That, yeah,
(28:04):
it just turns into madness. This is like people dying
in all of these fights happening because there are several
wars bubbling in Camboi at this time, and the prince
had kind of established the precedent of massacring the Communist
anywhere you found them. There was never any sort of
reform or just putting people in jail or whatever it was.
We capture them, we massacre them in public, and so
(28:25):
that kind of raised the stakes for everybody, and it
it just turned into a fucking blood bath. Um, there's
a number of stories of people having their livers cut
out and eaten in front of crowds, because that becomes
a thing, or had been a thing for a while,
but it like especially becomes a thing now is a
mysterious and powerful organ. Yeah, it's mystic power. It's unbelievably brutal,
(28:50):
and it's made worse by the fact that a lot
of the Camerorou soldiers are like peasants who before the
war had started had like didn't have electricity and like
didn't use money and just lived like a peaceful pastoral life.
And then fire starts falling from the sky and they
blame it all on the people in the fucking cities
who are the center of the government forces. And so
(29:11):
it's it's horrible. The war is horrible. Yeah, Eventually the
government loses the commers, rouges Win and the princes back
in his kingdom. He had succeeded in creating the conditions
four and then bringing to power the most radical, unhinged
communists in world history. So we'll do a whole podcast
in the camar Rouge at some point, but to give
you an idea of how nuts things are from the
(29:32):
get go, Like, the first big thing they do when
they're in power is make everybody leave the cities, Like
the non pin The capital had swelled like two point
two million people by the time they took over, mostly
from like rural people fleeing in the wake of this
war to try to get somewhere safe. So they take
all of these city people and all the people who
lived in towns, people who are like middle class factory workers,
(29:54):
people who are educated people. All those people they make
leave the city and march out into the country and
start farming. Um. So the death toll from the Khmer
Rouge is usually put anywhere between one point five million
to three and a half million. At most half a
million to a million. Of those were executions from the government,
were actually pole Pot and his cronies saying we need
(30:15):
to kill these people, and these people they did a
lot of that, but the vast majority of people who
died just starved to death, not because they were trying
to starve people to death, but because they just had
no idea what they were doing and had these crazy
theories about what would make the country most productive, that
we could make Cambodia into like this engine of agricultural
production if we throw everyone out of the cities and
(30:36):
make them farm. And there's stories of them like taking
a bunch of former diplomats and stuff and making them
like try to grow crops in a basketball court, like
it's it's it's fucking batshit crazy. But these people only
get into power because the king first took his country
from a place where there was no sort of foothold
for the communists and did everything that you'd want to
(30:57):
do to encourage the movement, and then backed them and
help them recruit an army so that they could take
over the country, just for his own petty, uh sense
of vengeance. So, uh, it's a nightmare. It's possible that
as many as three and a half million out of
a population of seven million Cambodians died. It's probably the
highest proportion of a country ever murdered by their own government. Uh. Yeah.
(31:20):
When you asked me at the top of the last
episode what I knew about this year in history, it's
like it's it's hard to jump in cold and be like, well,
isn't that where half of a country died? That's what
we're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
killed like intellectual but it was more of a like
anyone who just disagreed with them thing. Yeah yeah, okay, okay,
Well it wasn't like that's not even the like that's
(31:43):
what gets like, that's a thing that they killed a
lot of intellectuals, but most of the deaths are again
just because they had no idea what they were doing
with all that, Like it was people who and like
some of it. Like well, also, when you do end
up killing your intellectuals, whether or not, it's because they
are intellectual because they just agree with you. It is
difficult to make new plants. Yeah, it's difficult to to
(32:04):
make things work. They do stuff like try to make
everybody eat their meals communally in order to encourage a
lot of it. Like they make it illegal to hunt
and to forage for food, so like people starve even more.
It's just a nightmare. And it's like the last people
who should be in charge of a country wind up
in charge of a country. But this whole time, the
prince is is writing out his time in a mansion. Um.
(32:27):
You know, he's not given any real power and he's
not allowed to leave, so he's kind of on house arrest.
But but in a sick house, he has it hard
to and he complains during this time that he regularly
is not given enough bananas to make bananas foster. So
everyone is suffering in Cambodia right now is the point? Okay,
(32:48):
the suffering of bananas. You only need one bananas foster
is just basically banana flame. But you can do one banana.
What if you want to cook a lot of bananas foster?
Too bad, you get one banana. I'm just saying he's suffering,
is he's suffering a lot to uh you know. One
of the things that the camer Rouge did at this
point in time was because there was a blood shortage,
(33:08):
they would suck the blood out of living people until
they died. But the king is suffering too, okay. Uh
So the camer Rouge is in power for three and
a half years before they provoke an invasion from Vietnam.
The Vietnamese invasion goes well in terms of kicking the
camer Rouge out of power because they're not great at
defending the country, but the occupation turns into a long,
(33:30):
bloody ordeal and if through like basically the whole eighties,
it's Vietnam's Vietnam, only unlike us, they arguably one because
the government that they sort of backed and set up
is pretty much still empowered today. Um Siena backs the
new government. Uh you know, he eventually escapes the camar Rouge.
He backs the new government, which quickly turns into a dictatorship,
(33:52):
which Sen spends the rest of his life complaining about
because they very effectively managed to sideline him from any
real power and take away and take awayal has bananas.
In two thousand and five, he started a blog so
that he could complain about corruption. No, that bitch had
a blog, had a blog. I already did not like him.
He had a blog, like a live journal or some
two thousand five. It's on his personal website, and it's
(34:15):
from long enough ago that the news coverage refers to
it as a web blog. You might say that the
Prince was insulated from most of the horrors of the
Camarouge regime that helped bring to power. But in nine
two he makes a movie about a love triangle in
a hospital filled with land mine victims. So he, oh
my god, he clearly understood. Yeah. Yeah, And you imagine
(34:41):
being like a background actor like in the Prince's movie.
Like you just get your background actor, you get paid whatever,
You get paid a day to go sit in the
back of the set, and that day it happens to
be the Prince's set and you have to go pretend
to be a blomb victim. Well, no, you're not pretending, yeah,
he probably, Yeah, you're probably bomb victim. You're right, it's
(35:01):
true because half the population died, and that does not
account the wounded who survived. So there's a huge community
of people who are limbless and would be excellent extras
for such a You know, I'll say it right now,
it's an easy gig to be the casting director in
that movie. Yeah, you know, you're not going to have
to look as hard as you probably should know that.
You just walk down the street and you're look for
someone who can't walk down the street, and your job
(35:23):
is done. Oh boy. So here's how the website Genocide Watch,
who wrote about the Prince's blog, described it. He posts
sharp opinions on what he considers the deplorable state of
Cambodian society and politics, highlighting corruption, deforestation, and injustice. As
often as not, he blames Hansen, who's the guy he
initially backed into power, in a diplomatically indirect manner that
(35:44):
is little to disguise his target. Uh So the Prince
continued to direct movies through until the early two thousands.
This man, who previously had had thousands of people beheaded,
directed and wrote a movie called Apostle of Non Violence.
I found a plot synopsis. A Buddhist monk preaches non
violence and forgiveness to rural villagers, rebels, and national army
(36:05):
soldiers in the recent civil war. After the rebels destroy
a village. The monk enlists the help of a government
official who sends troops to attack the rebels. So even
his movie about non violences troops and to attack the rebels.
He's a piece of work. Yeah, it's impressive. Yeah. His
last four movies were released in two thousand six. I'm
(36:27):
going to read their titles in order. Commander of the
Royal Order of Kodong, which fine. Four wives are not
such fun? Oh man? I just pictured like Steve Martin
and Queen Latifa on the cover of that one. For
some reason, How did you guess the cast who doesn't
have a mistress? And then Mississina, which I'm guessing is
(36:54):
about his mistress. I don't know, Um he died? Does
his wife play his mistress? I'm not able to find
any real information about this one, so I'm sorry about that.
I'm also curious about his wife. What's her deal? She
sticks around the whole time she's here. She died at
some point. Yeah, everybody didn't take notes on that because
I'm a hack in a fraud. But he does die
(37:15):
of cancer in two thousand twelve. Uh So now he's dead,
which is good because he's a monster. Yeah, not not
not a good guy. Here's a picture of him in
the forties. Dam it's still handsome, Still handsome, still handsome.
You can tell from those little cheeks that like he's
about to head off to France and like cry in
a bathroom while he doesn't eat for three days. I
don't know, he looks good. I'm just saying he wears it. Well, yeah,
(37:36):
but you have to see what he sees in the mirror,
which is the kid his mom always called Tubby. Yes,
we'll post this picture on He's wearing what I hate
to say is a fantastic shirt. It is in a
really great sash. Human biology is so weird because I
know what this man has done. You've just spent a
good deal of time explaining to me how truly terrible
he is. And yet at the end of that time
(37:57):
you showed me a picture of him, and I'm like, yeah,
I get it, I get it. Who doesn't have a mistress,
you know what I mean? And when he died, millions
of people showed up in Cambodia to honor him. Pictures
of him went up everywhere. I'm gonna guess there's still
a lot of picture of him all around the country. Uh,
He's still beloved by large chunks of the population today,
although there are obviously people who also recognize he uh
(38:21):
kind of contributed heavily to, you know, the worst political
disaster maybe in all of history. In terms of one
nation's modern history. It is tough to duplicate. A few
places are really trying, Like it's amazing even Hitler didn't
succeed in getting that larger percentage of his country wiped out,
(38:42):
and he was close. I will say, if we actually
looked at our own history and we're honest about who
was actually here and who we killed, we're pretty our
numbers are it starts before we existed, which is the
tough thing. But yes, yeah, yeah, that's but that's a distinction.
That's you know, doesn't he when lives don't they were
all they were, They were just there. But then he
(39:03):
got yeah, yeah, they were like a hundred million people
in the America's and then no, not so much. I
just couldn't help it. So it is easy to look
somewhere else and be like, can you believe it? You
have to look back in the you know, mirror and
be like, yeah, yeah, I guess I can. We've also, yeah, crazy,
how weird it can get where it's just normal to
(39:24):
go fishing and move heads out of the way, that
things get out of hand fast. Yeah, well that escalated quickly. Yeah,
it's weird. How that's like that is the way mass
killings always kind of work. And in the book I
was reading for the podcast we recorded a little earlier
about King Leopold of Belgium. Oh man, that guy, that guy.
(39:46):
But it's it's just talking about how mass killings start,
and it's a little bit like how the flu spreads,
where one group of people decides, Okay, we're going to
massacre anyone to try to get this finished quickly. We're
just going to kill everyone who disagrees with us, and
then suddenly everybody's murdering everybody, like it just spreads like
a flippery Yeah, And that's really like se A. Nook
(40:11):
wasn't the architect of the Khmer Rouge's disastrous policies, but
he was the guy an architect to anything. No, he
just wanted to stay in power, and he was willing.
He's the guy who escalated the violence to the point
where past a certain point, even if pol Pot had
died in nineteen fifty and never got someone would have
wound up doing terrible ship in his place, because the
(40:32):
king had just stacked all these dominoes up like he
guaranteed something terrible was going to happen. Maybe Poulpot made
it a lot worse. Maybe only thirty percent of Cambodia
dies if someone else is in charge. But because of
what the prince had done, something fucking bad was going
to happen. I feel like we've all done this tour
ourselves with you know, ice cream and taco bell. It's
oreos and like each of these things individually might have
(40:57):
been okay if just one had happened, if only just
wanted happen. But no, if you've no no. I was
talking a little earlier about I ate hundreds of rancid
muscles recently, and if I had stopped at one, I
would have been fine. But instead I ate two fifty
and it was a disaster. And that's you know, life's
(41:17):
like that sometimes, yes, and in this yeah, yes, yeah.
A message to all of you kings and princes out there,
stop after the first rancid muscle. Yes, don't let the
camar rouge take power. Don't let your rancid muscle be
a massacre. Work it back from there. I feel like
we've landed on some wisdom that everyone can benefit here.
I think we fixed everything. No, massacres a good place
(41:40):
to stare. It's a good place to start and end.
Let's just avoid massacres. Yeah, good, that's yes, that's you
know what I'm going to do that. I had different
plans for my day, but now I'm gonna avoid. But
I'm not. We go out to Pyramid Lake, you cut
(42:00):
ten thousand people's heads off. Yeah, and then when you fish,
you got to move them out of the way. I'm
really stuck on that imagery. Yeah, fishing is it's supposed
to be boring and relatively peaceful. There's a calm you
need to have about you to fish. And if you
had to summon that calm while just moving heads out
of the way, that's a lot. That's a lot. I
gotta feel like though. You get some really fat fish
(42:23):
in that like, and they're probably easy to catch. Yeah.
You know. I did eat a fish once that had
eaten people, um, and it was a good It tasted good,
it was a good fish like it didn't yeh. Biology
is weird turned it into something else it was such
a tasty fish. Yeah, but yeah, it had definitely been
eating people. An iguana wants is that what we're doing?
(42:45):
Are we just trading? Are we trading? Now? What had
the iguana been eating? Why did you eat an iguana?
Because there's there's too fucking many of them. They're just
meat for sure. They're just like fisteen in one Like,
once you've seen them on one beach, you understand how
many of you are. They're like, Okay, I raise a chicken.
There's lots of cats, and we don't need cats personally.
(43:10):
They're cute, they're delicious meat. Chickens are cute. No they're not,
Yes they are. Chickens are definitely cute. Chickens are assholes.
Did you just see a goose and think it was
a big chicken? Every goose, every every goose is every
chicken head, if I may. But that's where we conclude
this episode. Okay, um, I would like to maybe this
new tradition, a guest gets to suggest a bastard for
(43:31):
the future. Okay, No, I'm a very lazy man, so
I curate geese fucking geese to find me a goose
that somebody's like that goose was my best friend. I
like that it never chased me or tried to peck
me in the face. And theus I could just have
a goose. Half the episode is like, you know, white
goose are evil, and then the other half is like,
(43:51):
white geese are delicious. Well that's Caitlin's advice for the
week at a goose, take it or leave it. I
recommend leaving it. Thank you so much. Uh, well that
I have learned, it's only some of the things I
wish I didn't know. Um, yeah, thank you. Yeah, well,
don't make me thank Prince Nora dam Shanna, thanks Prince
Noradam Sahanak isolate that audio. Yeah pretty sure we're pronouncing
(44:17):
it right some of the times. Uh, I am not
sure I trust you on this one. I apologize to
the camer people listening. I don't apologize to the Prince. Yes,
he was a dick, um, but we gotta plug your plugles.
Oh yeah, yeah, of course. You can find me at
caitlyn gil Comedy dot com or at robot Caitlin on
Twitter or at Caitlin is Tall on Instagram. Uh, and
(44:39):
you can find me in your heart where I love you.
This has been behind the Bastards. I've been Robert Evans.
You can find us on the internet at behind the
Bastards dot com. I will be listing the sources for
this podcast, including the book that was a big part
of the research, and all the different websites where I
learned about his filmography and stuff. That'll all be up there.
A bunch of pictures will be up there. It's gonna
be great. You can also find us on social media
(45:00):
at at Bastards pod. You can find me on Twitter
at I write okay to letters there and uh yeah.
Next week we will be back with another Bastard, So
tune in then, folks. Until then, I love like you
five bastards. I love you all. H
H Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind
the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you
don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
This is part two of our episode on Prince Notre
Dame say Hannac, the man who made poll pot possible,
which I am very proud of myself for saying properly.
My guest, as with the last episode, is Caitlin Gill,
(00:24):
comedian writer and possibly third gunmen on the grass Nal.
There's no way to prove that one, even because it's
speaking of the nineteen sixties. Prince nor Dam sat Hanno
starts the nineteen sixties as President and head of State
for life of Cambodia. He has purged the left wing
(00:44):
in his own country, the Democratic Party, who threatened to
overwhelm Cambodia with moderate liberal votes. So he's he's getting
rid of those guys and he's down in charge. And say, Hannah,
let's get into his personality a little bit, because he's
the sort of monarchy thinks being king should be a
good time. Ah. He throws ridiculous gigantic parties and he
would often help cook the meals. He was a gourmet cook,
(01:06):
really good at throwing foods together. Ah. He also liked
to provide most of the entertainment. One of his relatives
at the time described him as quote an artist lost
in politics. An Australian diplomat who met him in nineteen
fifty nine said, was one of the few people I
have ever encountered who deserves to be described as charismatic.
On an individual basis, he radiated charm and four Cambodians
(01:27):
in particular, he had a striking capacity to enthrall a
crowd for good or ill. The King was famous for
performing elaborate song and dance numbers at his parties, including
one reported double act with the Indonesian dictator Sukarnod Wouldn't
you want to see that? While? Yeah? Can you fucking
Matt oh Man? Have you ever seen the movie uh
(01:48):
White Christmas? Yeah? You know that song that the two
ladies do, Sisters that they the sisters, And then I
imagine it being that with these two guys who have
like come millions of deaths on their Yeah, it's just
it's just fun to think about so contained multitudes. People
are amazing. He's also in a jazz band like Bill,
(02:12):
Like Bill Clinton. Uh, he was not on our sineo,
but he probably could have been, but he would have
charmed he I bet he would have killed Yeah. Absolutely. Uh.
Here's another quote from that Australian diplomat at a sa
don sante, which I'm gonna guess is a dance party.
I was lucky to attend at around one thirty am,
(02:32):
and after the King and Queen had left, he the
Prince beamed at the rest of us and said, well,
their majesties have gone, and I suppose the rest of
you can go now too, but I am going to
play until dawn, and I do hope you will stay.
And of course we all did. So he's fucking charming.
He's great at playing like and that that's the thing.
Like you hear about a dictator who makes everyone listen
to his music and you assume it would be a nightmare,
(02:55):
But every report is that he was actually a really
talented musician and great it entered hating people, and a
great cook. So he's like the guy you want to
party with. He's just also made himself absolute ruler of
his country through uh max executions and violence. But yeah,
but he's a charming guy and his art wasn't limited
(03:15):
to weird dances with other dictators. He also produced and
start in dozens of movies. So director President Prince Siena
got his start in the nineteen forties when he made
two films called Tarzan among the Koi and Double Crime
on the Magino Line, which is a solid name. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he's great at titles. Uh. From nineteen sixty to seventy
(03:36):
he produced twenty one films, including nine documentaries, which is
a pretty incredible rate for a guy who's also the
Prince and the president. Yeah. Uh, so these were not
just show products like the North Korean film industry where
the king gets credit, but really other people do all
the work. He seems to have spent substantially more time
making movies and actually running his country. He writes and
(03:57):
directs almost all of his movies, and he stars something
like half of them. So yeah, real triple threat. We're
up to like eight types. I found a paper from
the University of Leads that analyzed his filmography. I think
he made over fifty films by the time he died,
and it argues that he used movies as a way
to communicate directly with the peasant masses. So Donald Trump
(04:17):
has Twitter. Prince President Sihannock had a weird ass movies. Uh,
quote from that University of Leads paper. Sianna took the
starring role in his films, depicting as many fictional characters
as he had official roles throughout his political life. This
enabled Shannock to inhabit multiple roles in personas while still
maintaining the integrity of the monarch, so the points made
in his movies are not subtle. In nineteen sixty seven,
(04:39):
he was having a spat with the Americans, who wanted
Cambodia to stop it with all their damn neutrality, and
who had tried to have him killed a couple of times. Uh. Yeah,
the CIA was never good that part of their job.
Than it looks, it is harder than it looks. We'll
give the CIA credit. Uh. He was also having major
domestic troubles. Uh. He nationalized all trade and all of
the banks, which caused a bunch of people to just
smuggle their rise to be a no'm where they'd get
(05:00):
more money for it anyway and could avoid giving the
king a cut. When the king realized what was going on,
he sent in the army to force the peasants to
sell their rise to him at the price he had set.
This did not make the peasants happy, and at a
place called Samlout they revolted. The king ordered mass beheadings,
and something like ten thousand people were dead by the
time it was all over. This was bad for the
king's image, as you might imagine, so he decided to
make a movie, Shadows of her Anchor, where he plays
(05:22):
a heroic admiral who discovers an international plot to overthrow
Cambodia's government. At one point, he winds up with the
American ambassador played by his wife. He takes her on
a walk and explains how hard it is to be
king of Cambodia. They bond over this and fall in love,
but then she gets sent away from Cambodia because the
US is mean. Oh yeah, that's pretty sad. You can
(05:42):
really feel the tragedy. If I saw that, I would
forget the death of my uncle and nephew I saw
dangling from the hillside that they were hung from. He
cut my family's heads off. But I really believe him
when he looks into the eyes of his wife playing
an American diplomat. Yeah, I'm feeling that. Yeah, those bedroom ice,
(06:03):
he does have those bedroom ice. We'll put some pictures
of those up on the website. He's a handsome man.
Uh So a number of his films followed the same
basic pattern, the King and his wife playing basically the
King and some broad go to angkor Watt and the
King gives a monologue. Uh was able to spend so
much time directing because he'd effectively outsourced all the hard
work to the elected officials of Cambodia. So when ship
(06:23):
would go bad, rather than take the blame himself, he
just scream at some of the Democrats in office and
maybe throw a few of them in jail. So there
were still some liberals and left wingers in his political
party that he kept there so that whenever anything went bad,
like when he massacred in thousand peasants, he could have
them arrested and be like, it was these guys, these
guys up. Yeah. I mean, there's never been another politician
(06:44):
who's kept a bunch of people around him just so
he could fire them to deflect blame from him. No no, no, no,
no no no, I feel like, yeah, trail Blazer. And
then when he needed violent deeds done, he would have
the conservatives to it, and then he would fire them
after they massacred too many people. So he's he's really
like making the most out of democracy, just doing exactly
what he wants and firing whoever he has to fire
(07:05):
when people get angry at him for what he's doing.
So this story from nineteen fifty seven is kind of
typical the way he liked to play local politics. Uh.
This is a quote from that book, Anatomy of Terror. Uh.
In August ninety seven, he summoned the leaders of the
Democratic Party, whose continued existence afforded a kind of vicarious
protection for all of the left wing views, to a
debate at the Royal Palace before an audience packed with
(07:26):
his own supporters, which was broadcast over loudspeakers to a
crowd of several thousand outside. As they left after five
hours of public humiliation, they were dragged from their cars
and beaten with rifle butts by palace guards. So this
is Prince President, Director King. It sounds like a director
I've been on set. There's a little bit of uva
bowl in him. Uh. As the sixties start up, the
(07:48):
Vietnam War, does what the Vietnam War did, and suddenly
both the US and Vietnam are asking more of Prince Hannock.
He works at a great solution though, where the Vietnamese
can hide whole armies in his country and the US
can bomb them at the same time. Uh. He manages
to sort of keep a lid on things and dance
from fire to fire while making tens of movies until
January of nineteen, when the Communists launched the start of
a revolutionary war. This prompts the Hannock to bring back
(08:10):
one of those right wing politicians he'd previously fired, a
guy named law Knell. So law Knell calls in the
Air Force to bomb rebel areas and cut off their
food supplies. Rural citizens are resettled on mask to cut
off any source of supply to the Communists. See, Hannock
starts handing out bounties to his soldiers for every rebel
they kill. This backfires because the King's soldiers just start decapitating. Yeah,
he says, I'll give you a bounty for every head
(08:31):
of every rebel you bring me, So they just start
decapitating random villagers, uh and bring them in for quick cash.
So maybe the King could have thought that went out better,
but he was busy making his magnum opus, a film
called Twilight. Oh yeah, Now, this Twilight is not about
a teenage girl and a vampire pedophile. This Twilight is
the love story of a prince played by the Prince
who hosts an Indian princess played by his wife. He
(08:54):
falls in love with her, and the main conflict comes
from the fact that the prince's nurse is also in
love with him. Yeah, it's rough, um. I found a
review of it online um with letterbox d this website
by by someone named Matt Key, who gave it three stars. Interesting,
not too long film. It's a simple drama about an
elderly prince who falls in love with a guest. Because
(09:16):
of this, her nurse, who has been in love with
him for years, begins to feel jealous. It features a
demonstration of nationalist propaganda in the middle that doesn't add
up to the plot. I'm gonna say the three stars
was generous, and that's what I'm gonna say. I told
you before the King's movies had a way of sending
subtle messages to his people. The message of this one
was I love you, no matter how brutal my murder
campaign looks. So he's gaslighting his whole country through film,
(09:39):
which is amazing. Uh. During the movie, the Prince realizes
he has to dump both women, like he can't be
defend the woman who loves him because his duties to
his country. So there's this monologue at anchor Watt and
here the Prince tells the princess about another king of
Cambodia who quote suffered the illness of his subjects more
than his own, and that their pain was the pain
(09:59):
of the king. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's really feeling each
and every decapitation. Yeah, every decapitation of a peasant is
a decapitation of his heart. Yeah, definitely. Anyway, he awards
himself an Oscar for this film shoot for the ego
and here, Yeah, he's he's always aiming high. So this
(10:21):
play is great for the peasants out in the country,
but the educated, middle class people in non pen have
access to Hollywood movies. They recognize this stuff as garbage,
and they regularly cursed their president prince for quote his
damn film shows and endless radio speeches. Uh. Some conservatives
were also angry that Prince Shannah could kind of sort
of maybe turned Cambodia from a country with almost no
communists to a country that was full of them. One
(10:42):
of the things that the book poll Pot points out
is that there's a word in the commerce language um,
the word for toter reign for like to be the
king of a country, translates literally as to eat the kingdom,
which is more or less what Sahannak does. So his
mom and his consort, his relatives are all incredibly corrupt
and they're all grafting the country for shiploads of money. Um.
(11:05):
When the whole country basically runs on graft and bribery
under Shanna, there's no real rule of law for people
connected in any way to the royal family. Uh. He
recognizes that the corruption is going to bring him down
as early as nineteen sixty two, but he doesn't do
anything about it. Instead, he does stuff like spend a
fifth of the yearly budget preparing for the Southeast Asian Games,
(11:25):
which are supposed to be held in the capitol. Uh.
The game's got canceled anyway, due to what Wikipedia calls
unsettling circumstances in country, like all of the civil war.
That yeah, like all the heads in the rivers exactly.
So thanks to the King's reforms. Uh, he'd done a
great job of reforming education. So hundreds of thousands of
people now had educations in Cambodia, but the only jobs
(11:48):
available to them were positions in the royal ministry, basically
squeezing peasants for the government. So he wound up with
a hundred unemployed students for every actual job, and a
peasant class who are being shared afted off their farms
by the corrupt government. So he's piste off all of
the peasants by taking away their source of livelihood, and
he's created a vast class of hundreds of thousands of
(12:10):
educated kids with no jobs. How do you think that
ends slaves? I'm sorry, I just I'm gonna keep coming
back to that. It's amazing everybody. Yeah. Uh, So the
President Prince grows increasingly brutal resistance to his reign intensifies. Uh.
He turned to a series of bloody pr stunts in
order to distract the populace from his his rampant corruption.
(12:33):
The fact that living standards have fallen for everybody, in
the fact that a tiny amount of the country is
getting ridiculously wealthy while most of the country suffers and starves. Uh.
In the nineteen sixties, his security forces quote unquote turn
a captured young member of the Vietnam's cell. They have
him go to the U. S. Embassy and asked the
Americans for help assassinating the prince. Obviously, the Americans turned
(12:53):
him into the police because they're not dumb. But it
made for big, flashy news story that implicates the Americans
the commune in the Vietnamese. This is all the distract from,
you know, the fact that the war isn't going super
well and that he's he's massacring people. The captured Vietnamese
kid who had been told to be released if he cooperated,
wasn't said, executed on the Prince's orders. So he's a
great guy. Uh. He regularly referred to Cambodia during the
(13:16):
sixties as an oasis of peace. Foreigners at the time
remember Cambodia as a paradise of excess and tropical splendor.
This was all true if you never left the capital
and we're whier rich. But things were bad outside the
city and they rapidly got worse after nineteen sixty eight. So,
like I said, the communists who are known as the
Khmer Rouge now, which is a nickname actually the king
came up with for them. Uh, launched their revolution in
(13:36):
nineteen sixty eight. It gets really bloody, and Sahanna is
forced to seed more and more control to the conservatives
so that they can fight. The entire world was turning
over in nineteen sixty You had student revolutions in France
and Mexico. There nobody was looking like it was a
good time if you wanted to turn things over to
do it really fast and hard, because it was happening
kind of everywhere. Yeah, and that's his hope that he
(13:57):
can turn over power for a little while. It just
seems like you have like nine nineteen sixty eight and
then like two thousand and twelve where everything flips over
on these kind of predictable every thirty four year clocks,
and that that was just one of those years. Uh yeah, exactly.
So things, you know after sixty eight start to go
worse and worse for him, and he gives more and
more power to the conservatives so that they can fight
(14:18):
this war against the communists. Um, there's no longer any
kind of a left wing in Cambodian politics because by
the late sixties, he'd had most of them executed and
prisoner exiled in various fits of rage, so he'd used
them escape goats until the right no goats left escape.
So now the only people left are the communists out
in the jungle and the right wing and the prince
at home. And as the right gains power, they start
(14:39):
to get more uppitty. So, you know, the right they
sort of liked the king at first, but he doesn't
prove to be super competent, and they can see that
his family is basically squirreling away all the country's wealth
and he's letting the communists take over. So yeah, the
right wing is not a big fan of him. So
the king has also been blaming them for stuff, and
he's been blaming them for stuff and firing their elected
(15:01):
leaders every time they do what he tells them, and
keeping leftists around for his own purposes, which you know
has to bother a true believer who's more conservative exactly,
So he's not doing great right now. This is like
that moment during the movie where like, you know, our
heroes at his lowest point. Yeah, we are at the
end of the second act here exactly, But I do
want you to know that when our President, Prince Director
(15:24):
King is at his lowest point, he does have his
best friend at his side. You want to guess who
his best friend is? A tub of ice cream? Kim
Il Sung Okay, yeah, Dictator of North Korea. The pair
met in nineteen sixty five at a conference hosted by Sukarno,
the leader of Indonesia. According to an article from the
World Tribune, the Indonesian leader put them both in adjoining
(15:46):
rooms because he thought they might be buddies. That is
so funny. And one dictator looks at two other dictators
and it's like, you know who you should? You guys
are gonna be friends. I'm gonna do a little cupid
thing here and I'm gonna shoot my arrow and it
wand missile and it works for thirty years. They're the
best buddies. Smell Brooks and Carl Reinering. That would be
(16:07):
a great pair to have play them in the movie
about this. I mean that's technically white, that's definitely white.
Wall is a filmmaker. He made a film called Blazing Saddles,
but it was just putting a peasant on a horse
that was actually on fire. So it's a little rough.
It's not the same three stars though I have a
three stars. Yeah, solid, solid, The propaganda real in the
middle is a little bit weird. Yeah, it was jarring
to push the plot forward. But yeah, so despite being
a pair of polar opposites, because Kim Il Sung is
(16:29):
kind of a kind of a quieter, more introspective sort
of dude, He's not really much for talking to the
press or performing in front of people, and obviously see
Hannock's you know, an extrovert. But they despite this, they
get along there. The Kim Il Sung gives the Prince
a giant mansion compound in North Korea, and they hung
out regularly for thirty years. Prince to Hannock always called
him my best friend, the great leader. But even with
(16:51):
his friends at his back, by the late sixties, things
are starting to get really bad in Cambodia, next government
dis ordering mass executions and purging villages every day. At
one point, after ordering two hundred dissidents murdered, Sano said,
I do not care if I am sent to Hell.
I will submit the relevant documents to the devil himself.
The Prince's iron fisted repression of any descent did more
to encourage the camer Rouge than it did to scare them.
(17:14):
So basically he's doing things like having captured rebels separate
heads displayed in like the centers of towns and putting
photographs of like piles of their heads and the camer
language press. Uh. He's having camer Rouge cadres disemboweled by
government soldiers um their mass executing leftists. Uh. In one
incident near the capital, troops take two children who are
(17:36):
alleged to be messengers for the camer Rouge and cut
their heads off with jagged palm tree fronds, which I
didn't know you could do with palm tree frons, one
of those. Ever hit your car, it'll dentisty and it'll
cut a kids had hard enough. Yeah, So even people
on the right wing start to complain about how fucking
brutal the army is getting. Um. Sianic tells these people
who complain on the right that will send them to
(17:56):
the next world if they keep up complaining. So he's
basically threat everybody now, um, because that's kind of always
been his only tactic, but now there's not that many
people left to threaten. Uh. So up until this point,
he had been very prophetic in seeing the US is
involvement in Vietnam is doomed. He'd been making his foreign
policy calculations based on that. This is why he kept
friendly with Vietnam and China. But in nineteen sixty the
(18:19):
North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive and the US beats
them badly. In America, the Tet Offensive has seen as
proof that the war is a quagmire, but Prince Sanna
saw it as a huge win for America, so he
now thinks the US is in it for the long haul. Which, yeah,
if you're ever basing your policies off the US being
in anything for the long haul, you are not making
(18:39):
the right decision. Oh, I don't know. In military conflict.
I mean that's why we still have the longest wars
going on. Yeah, but that's only long by our standards.
I'm gonna leave like you didn't. Yes, we had to
come back, yes, but it didn't go well for the
people who trusted us. Well, that's where this story started,
(19:01):
with the French trying to prop up a Cambodian dictator
to preserve their own interests, and we have been doing
the same because I learned from history when we can
just do it again. Yeah. Yeah, No. If there's one
like summary of American history, it's we don't learn things.
That is. That is our national motto in terms of
intervention at least. Uh. So we're going to get back
(19:23):
to Prince s Hannah's big mistake and uh spoiler alert,
a coup. Yeah, everybody loves a good old fashioned coup.
But first, grab you a pile of coins and credit
cards products. I want to build a website on a mattress.
(19:48):
We're back, boy. Those ads were great. There were some
quality as so many products. Now we're talking about Cambodia
again and Prince Hannah. So Prince Hannah basically changes his
calculus after the tet offensive and it's like, no, I
think the US is in this for the long haul,
and maybe they are a reliable country to be allied with.
(20:11):
Never a good decision. Um, so he starts trying to
curry favor with the Americans. He gets his chance in
March of nine, when President Nixon orders the U. S.
Air Force to start bombing Cambodia to get at the
Vietnamese troops hiding there. The Prince doesn't make a fuss,
and since these are meant to be secret bombing raids.
The fact that he obliges means that Nixon gets to
bomb Cambodia three thousand times without you know, making a
(20:32):
big fuss about it. So Nixon, being a good quid
pro quo guy, extends Cambodia final recognition of her borders
as a reward. So that's a sweet trade. Yeah, I mean,
so you would let America bomb your country three thousand
times for recognition of your borders, right, yeah, totally. I
guess you could bomb my guest room if I got
to define my fence line. Why, well, I was in
(20:55):
the house, if I was willing to let it get bombed,
that's where the rebels. That's how you get the good ship,
to let part of it get destroyed so you get
rewarded somehow. Yeah that always works out. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'm just jealous of you for having a guest room. No,
I don't have a guest from us speaking proverbially about
a fake house and a metaphor for Cambodia being a
house where you destroyed part of your own home so
you could keep a bigger part of it. Never mind,
(21:16):
leave my analogy behind. I'm still jealous. Uh So, Obviously,
this bombing pisces off a lot of Cambodians, and it
also hurts the Prince among the Cambodian right wing because
they wanted to work with the US to exterminate the
Communists from the beginning. So they saw this as the
Prince admitting that he had been wrong to turn down
America before. Uh So. The book pole Pot The Anatomy
of Terror basically says that this was the point when
(21:38):
the Prince's strategies finally failed him. He'd wiped out the
left wing of his own party, so he couldn't throw
them under the bus. Instead, he took the hits and
saw his power a road. Parliament refused to drop a
corruption inquiry involving in a member of his entourage, and
he wound up losing face in public, which is a
big deal in that part of the world. Uh So,
In addition to all this, the Prince is trying to
figure out how to balance the budget. Rampant corruption and
a war had not been kind to Cambodia's finances. Fortunately,
(22:01):
he found a quick, easy fix. And then I guess
what it is, slaves man? You are? You keep calling slaves?
Not yet it's gambled, dang it. Gambling, sweet lady gambling.
Uh so, Prince Hannox sells gambling licenses to two casinos
for a fee of eighty million francs per year each.
This made up a huge chunk of the budget shortfall
(22:23):
and was exactly the wrong thing to do while fighting
a civil war against communists, who claim that you're letting
the elite suck poor people dry. Uh yeah, so here's
a quote from that book of the Enemy of Terror.
Non pen was soon alive with stories of people committing
suicide after losing their life savings. Business activity slumped as
factory owners, government official, shopkeepers, and laborers spent their days
(22:44):
and nights courting ruin at the betting tables. So the
right wing takes all of this is evidence that the
Prince should not be in power anymore. They start stripping
away the things he controls. Over the next year, boxing
amount of decisions and overruling him, he becomes openly hostiles
to the parliament. At one point, he makes fun of
the right leader Lawnnell, for being out of the country
while he was receiving major surgery in Switzerland. Immediately after
(23:05):
making fun of lawn null for this, Prince Hannet goes
on vacation for a few months in the Mediterranean in Europe. Yep, yeah,
he goes to fat Camp. Uh. So this was a
strategy of his when things got hot politically, he would
just leave and go to fat Camp or go on
vacation for a couple of months and if things got
better when he was away, and then hey, things were better,
and if they got worse than he would just blame
(23:27):
whoever was in charge while he was away. He hadn't
been here, so it wasn't his fault. But this time,
while he's away, Parliament votes to withdraw confidence from the
Prince and demand that he relinquishes off as his head
of state. So in March of nineteen seventy, while he's
fucking around in Europe, he gets cooed out of power. Now,
at this point he had a number of options. He
did have a palace on the French Riviera. He could
(23:47):
have just retired, flown there and you know, hung out
between there and with his homeboy Kim Il Sung and
just kind of enjoyed life. Or he could try to
get back into power. He just chills, right, he just
kicks it at the French rivierea. No, he decides that
he still wants to be the king of well, the
prince of Cambodia. He still wants to be you know, yeah,
(24:09):
he wants revenge actually is kind of more what he's
going for, because he does not decide to fly back
and fight, you know, in the city, you know, at
the ballot box to try to to regain his position
from the people who had overthrown him. He brokers or
gets a meeting set up between himself and the Camers
rouges Uh and he agrees that he will support them
(24:30):
now if they will back him as being the head
of state once they take power. So the king who
has spent most of the last decade fighting the communists
is now supporting the communists and is a king that
is the figurehead of a communist revolution trying to overthrow
the country of Cambodia. Um, so he has he has
(24:51):
really just kept swinging around here. So what's interesting to
me about this is that at no point does he
think he's going to actually be in real power again.
The king knows from the get go that the communists
aren't going to let him actually rule the country. He's
going to be a figurehead, and he's like, he's open
about the fact they're going to spit him out as
soon as they're done with him. So he backs his
former enemies, not because he's going to get to be
(25:12):
in charge again, but because fuck the right wing for
throwing him out of power. It's just about spite. Um.
So yeah, back in Cambodia, the right wing is finding
out that kicking the prince out was not necessarily a
great move because while he had lost the support of
the people in the cities, the peasants don't know how
to deal with the fact that the prince, who was
(25:33):
to them still the king, had been fired. One Catholic
missionary at the time recalls being asked, how shall we
tend our rice patties now that the king is not
here to make it rain? So? Uh maybe not a
great decision on behalf of the Cambodian right wing. Although
if you're them, what do you do with this fucking guy? Yeah, yes,
there's no win for anybody but him, exactly. Uh So,
(25:56):
the popularity of the Khmers Rouges explodes now that they've
got Sienook as a your head. A writer from The
New Yorker at the time noted his name became the
camer Rouge's greatest recruitment tool, and the most extreme communist
movement in history, swept to power on royal coat tails.
The civil war lasted five years and killed at least
half a million people, So it's on par with the
Syrian Civil War in terms of bloodiness already and in
(26:19):
a in a shorter period of time. Um, it had
been bad before, but the coup ramped things up to
nightmare dimensions. What kind of warfare is this that's killing
so many people because there's not This isn't like it
wasn't like there were twenty million soldiers. I really recommend
giving a read to the book pulp At the Anatomy
of a Nightmare, because he talks a lot about Camar culture.
But basically things are very black and white and sort
(26:39):
of the culturals view on good and evil. So there's
not like in Maoice China when they would when the
communists one, there were people who were executed, but more
often than not they try to sort of reform people
and make them get them to work within the new system.
They don't really do that here. So it's like I
take no prisoners thing exactly Is this like straight up
(27:00):
machete to body or is this are there chemical weapons?
Are there because there's bombs in the country that have
been traveling to and fro. There are so many people's weapons,
there's weapons that you're making. So we drop something like
I had this written down at someone before, but we
dropped almost as many bombs as we dropped on Europe
(27:20):
and World War two on the U S does just
on Cambodia during this period. So that's a big part
of it. And there's stories from like American military planners
at the time who they would have you know, they
had be fifty twos flying over the country and they
would have like a map of Cambodi that laid out
where all the villages they knew existed were, and they
would have this little box that they would place on
the map that would show this is what one B
(27:41):
fifty two will destroy. And it's noted that like you
can't put them anywhere on the map without hitting villages.
So the bombing wipes out hundreds of thousands of people,
and in general, just the war it's unspeakably brutal. Um
So there's both uprisings that are suppressed by soldiers massacring people. Um,
the Khmers rouges passed after like nineteen seventy three start
massacring people to like at the beginning of the war. That, yeah,
(28:04):
it just turns into madness. This is like people dying
in all of these fights happening because there are several
wars bubbling in Camboi at this time, and the prince
had kind of established the precedent of massacring the Communist
anywhere you found them. There was never any sort of
reform or just putting people in jail or whatever it was.
We capture them, we massacre them in public, and so
(28:25):
that kind of raised the stakes for everybody, and it
it just turned into a fucking blood bath. Um, there's
a number of stories of people having their livers cut
out and eaten in front of crowds, because that becomes
a thing, or had been a thing for a while,
but it like especially becomes a thing now is a
mysterious and powerful organ. Yeah, it's mystic power. It's unbelievably brutal,
(28:50):
and it's made worse by the fact that a lot
of the Camerorou soldiers are like peasants who before the
war had started had like didn't have electricity and like
didn't use money and just lived like a peaceful pastoral life.
And then fire starts falling from the sky and they
blame it all on the people in the fucking cities
who are the center of the government forces. And so
(29:11):
it's it's horrible. The war is horrible. Yeah, Eventually the
government loses the commers, rouges Win and the princes back
in his kingdom. He had succeeded in creating the conditions
four and then bringing to power the most radical, unhinged
communists in world history. So we'll do a whole podcast
in the camar Rouge at some point, but to give
you an idea of how nuts things are from the
(29:32):
get go, Like, the first big thing they do when
they're in power is make everybody leave the cities, Like
the non pin The capital had swelled like two point
two million people by the time they took over, mostly
from like rural people fleeing in the wake of this
war to try to get somewhere safe. So they take
all of these city people and all the people who
lived in towns, people who are like middle class factory workers,
(29:54):
people who are educated people. All those people they make
leave the city and march out into the country and
start farming. Um. So the death toll from the Khmer
Rouge is usually put anywhere between one point five million
to three and a half million. At most half a
million to a million. Of those were executions from the government,
were actually pole Pot and his cronies saying we need
(30:15):
to kill these people, and these people they did a
lot of that, but the vast majority of people who
died just starved to death, not because they were trying
to starve people to death, but because they just had
no idea what they were doing and had these crazy
theories about what would make the country most productive, that
we could make Cambodia into like this engine of agricultural
production if we throw everyone out of the cities and
(30:36):
make them farm. And there's stories of them like taking
a bunch of former diplomats and stuff and making them
like try to grow crops in a basketball court, like
it's it's it's fucking batshit crazy. But these people only
get into power because the king first took his country
from a place where there was no sort of foothold
for the communists and did everything that you'd want to
(30:57):
do to encourage the movement, and then backed them and
help them recruit an army so that they could take
over the country, just for his own petty, uh sense
of vengeance. So, uh, it's a nightmare. It's possible that
as many as three and a half million out of
a population of seven million Cambodians died. It's probably the
highest proportion of a country ever murdered by their own government. Uh. Yeah.
(31:20):
When you asked me at the top of the last
episode what I knew about this year in history, it's
like it's it's hard to jump in cold and be like, well,
isn't that where half of a country died? That's what
we're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
killed like intellectual but it was more of a like
anyone who just disagreed with them thing. Yeah yeah, okay, okay,
Well it wasn't like that's not even the like that's
(31:43):
what gets like, that's a thing that they killed a
lot of intellectuals, but most of the deaths are again
just because they had no idea what they were doing
with all that, Like it was people who and like
some of it. Like well, also, when you do end
up killing your intellectuals, whether or not, it's because they
are intellectual because they just agree with you. It is
difficult to make new plants. Yeah, it's difficult to to
(32:04):
make things work. They do stuff like try to make
everybody eat their meals communally in order to encourage a
lot of it. Like they make it illegal to hunt
and to forage for food, so like people starve even more.
It's just a nightmare. And it's like the last people
who should be in charge of a country wind up
in charge of a country. But this whole time, the
prince is is writing out his time in a mansion. Um.
(32:27):
You know, he's not given any real power and he's
not allowed to leave, so he's kind of on house arrest.
But but in a sick house, he has it hard
to and he complains during this time that he regularly
is not given enough bananas to make bananas foster. So
everyone is suffering in Cambodia right now is the point? Okay,
(32:48):
the suffering of bananas. You only need one bananas foster
is just basically banana flame. But you can do one banana.
What if you want to cook a lot of bananas foster?
Too bad, you get one banana. I'm just saying he's suffering,
is he's suffering a lot to uh you know. One
of the things that the camer Rouge did at this
point in time was because there was a blood shortage,
(33:08):
they would suck the blood out of living people until
they died. But the king is suffering too, okay. Uh
So the camer Rouge is in power for three and
a half years before they provoke an invasion from Vietnam.
The Vietnamese invasion goes well in terms of kicking the
camer Rouge out of power because they're not great at
defending the country, but the occupation turns into a long,
(33:30):
bloody ordeal and if through like basically the whole eighties,
it's Vietnam's Vietnam, only unlike us, they arguably one because
the government that they sort of backed and set up
is pretty much still empowered today. Um Siena backs the
new government. Uh you know, he eventually escapes the camar Rouge.
He backs the new government, which quickly turns into a dictatorship,
(33:52):
which Sen spends the rest of his life complaining about
because they very effectively managed to sideline him from any
real power and take away and take awayal has bananas.
In two thousand and five, he started a blog so
that he could complain about corruption. No, that bitch had
a blog, had a blog. I already did not like him.
He had a blog, like a live journal or some
two thousand five. It's on his personal website, and it's
(34:15):
from long enough ago that the news coverage refers to
it as a web blog. You might say that the
Prince was insulated from most of the horrors of the
Camarouge regime that helped bring to power. But in nine
two he makes a movie about a love triangle in
a hospital filled with land mine victims. So he, oh
my god, he clearly understood. Yeah. Yeah, And you imagine
(34:41):
being like a background actor like in the Prince's movie.
Like you just get your background actor, you get paid whatever,
You get paid a day to go sit in the
back of the set, and that day it happens to
be the Prince's set and you have to go pretend
to be a blomb victim. Well, no, you're not pretending, yeah,
he probably, Yeah, you're probably bomb victim. You're right, it's
(35:01):
true because half the population died, and that does not
account the wounded who survived. So there's a huge community
of people who are limbless and would be excellent extras
for such a You know, I'll say it right now,
it's an easy gig to be the casting director in
that movie. Yeah, you know, you're not going to have
to look as hard as you probably should know that.
You just walk down the street and you're look for
someone who can't walk down the street, and your job
(35:23):
is done. Oh boy. So here's how the website Genocide Watch,
who wrote about the Prince's blog, described it. He posts
sharp opinions on what he considers the deplorable state of
Cambodian society and politics, highlighting corruption, deforestation, and injustice. As
often as not, he blames Hansen, who's the guy he
initially backed into power, in a diplomatically indirect manner that
(35:44):
is little to disguise his target. Uh So the Prince
continued to direct movies through until the early two thousands.
This man, who previously had had thousands of people beheaded,
directed and wrote a movie called Apostle of Non Violence.
I found a plot synopsis. A Buddhist monk preaches non
violence and forgiveness to rural villagers, rebels, and national army
(36:05):
soldiers in the recent civil war. After the rebels destroy
a village. The monk enlists the help of a government
official who sends troops to attack the rebels. So even
his movie about non violences troops and to attack the rebels.
He's a piece of work. Yeah, it's impressive. Yeah. His
last four movies were released in two thousand six. I'm
(36:27):
going to read their titles in order. Commander of the
Royal Order of Kodong, which fine. Four wives are not
such fun? Oh man? I just pictured like Steve Martin
and Queen Latifa on the cover of that one. For
some reason, How did you guess the cast who doesn't
have a mistress? And then Mississina, which I'm guessing is
(36:54):
about his mistress. I don't know, Um he died? Does
his wife play his mistress? I'm not able to find
any real information about this one, so I'm sorry about that.
I'm also curious about his wife. What's her deal? She
sticks around the whole time she's here. She died at
some point. Yeah, everybody didn't take notes on that because
I'm a hack in a fraud. But he does die
(37:15):
of cancer in two thousand twelve. Uh So now he's dead,
which is good because he's a monster. Yeah, not not
not a good guy. Here's a picture of him in
the forties. Dam it's still handsome, Still handsome, still handsome.
You can tell from those little cheeks that like he's
about to head off to France and like cry in
a bathroom while he doesn't eat for three days. I
don't know, he looks good. I'm just saying he wears it. Well, yeah,
(37:36):
but you have to see what he sees in the mirror,
which is the kid his mom always called Tubby. Yes,
we'll post this picture on He's wearing what I hate
to say is a fantastic shirt. It is in a
really great sash. Human biology is so weird because I
know what this man has done. You've just spent a
good deal of time explaining to me how truly terrible
he is. And yet at the end of that time
(37:57):
you showed me a picture of him, and I'm like, yeah,
I get it, I get it. Who doesn't have a mistress,
you know what I mean? And when he died, millions
of people showed up in Cambodia to honor him. Pictures
of him went up everywhere. I'm gonna guess there's still
a lot of picture of him all around the country. Uh,
He's still beloved by large chunks of the population today,
although there are obviously people who also recognize he uh
(38:21):
kind of contributed heavily to, you know, the worst political
disaster maybe in all of history. In terms of one
nation's modern history. It is tough to duplicate. A few
places are really trying, Like it's amazing even Hitler didn't
succeed in getting that larger percentage of his country wiped out,
(38:42):
and he was close. I will say, if we actually
looked at our own history and we're honest about who
was actually here and who we killed, we're pretty our
numbers are it starts before we existed, which is the
tough thing. But yes, yeah, yeah, that's but that's a distinction.
That's you know, doesn't he when lives don't they were
all they were, They were just there. But then he
(39:03):
got yeah, yeah, they were like a hundred million people
in the America's and then no, not so much. I
just couldn't help it. So it is easy to look
somewhere else and be like, can you believe it? You
have to look back in the you know, mirror and
be like, yeah, yeah, I guess I can. We've also, yeah, crazy,
how weird it can get where it's just normal to
(39:24):
go fishing and move heads out of the way, that
things get out of hand fast. Yeah, well that escalated quickly. Yeah,
it's weird. How that's like that is the way mass
killings always kind of work. And in the book I
was reading for the podcast we recorded a little earlier
about King Leopold of Belgium. Oh man, that guy, that guy.
(39:46):
But it's it's just talking about how mass killings start,
and it's a little bit like how the flu spreads,
where one group of people decides, Okay, we're going to
massacre anyone to try to get this finished quickly. We're
just going to kill everyone who disagrees with us, and
then suddenly everybody's murdering everybody, like it just spreads like
a flippery Yeah, And that's really like se A. Nook
(40:11):
wasn't the architect of the Khmer Rouge's disastrous policies, but
he was the guy an architect to anything. No, he
just wanted to stay in power, and he was willing.
He's the guy who escalated the violence to the point
where past a certain point, even if pol Pot had
died in nineteen fifty and never got someone would have
wound up doing terrible ship in his place, because the
(40:32):
king had just stacked all these dominoes up like he
guaranteed something terrible was going to happen. Maybe Poulpot made
it a lot worse. Maybe only thirty percent of Cambodia
dies if someone else is in charge. But because of
what the prince had done, something fucking bad was going
to happen. I feel like we've all done this tour
ourselves with you know, ice cream and taco bell. It's
oreos and like each of these things individually might have
(40:57):
been okay if just one had happened, if only just
wanted happen. But no, if you've no no. I was
talking a little earlier about I ate hundreds of rancid
muscles recently, and if I had stopped at one, I
would have been fine. But instead I ate two fifty
and it was a disaster. And that's you know, life's
(41:17):
like that sometimes, yes, and in this yeah, yes, yeah.
A message to all of you kings and princes out there,
stop after the first rancid muscle. Yes, don't let the
camar rouge take power. Don't let your rancid muscle be
a massacre. Work it back from there. I feel like
we've landed on some wisdom that everyone can benefit here.
I think we fixed everything. No, massacres a good place
(41:40):
to stare. It's a good place to start and end.
Let's just avoid massacres. Yeah, good, that's yes, that's you
know what I'm going to do that. I had different
plans for my day, but now I'm gonna avoid. But
I'm not. We go out to Pyramid Lake, you cut
(42:00):
ten thousand people's heads off. Yeah, and then when you fish,
you got to move them out of the way. I'm
really stuck on that imagery. Yeah, fishing is it's supposed
to be boring and relatively peaceful. There's a calm you
need to have about you to fish. And if you
had to summon that calm while just moving heads out
of the way, that's a lot. That's a lot. I
gotta feel like though. You get some really fat fish
(42:23):
in that like, and they're probably easy to catch. Yeah.
You know. I did eat a fish once that had
eaten people, um, and it was a good It tasted good,
it was a good fish like it didn't yeh. Biology
is weird turned it into something else it was such
a tasty fish. Yeah, but yeah, it had definitely been
eating people. An iguana wants is that what we're doing?
(42:45):
Are we just trading? Are we trading? Now? What had
the iguana been eating? Why did you eat an iguana?
Because there's there's too fucking many of them. They're just
meat for sure. They're just like fisteen in one Like,
once you've seen them on one beach, you understand how
many of you are. They're like, Okay, I raise a chicken.
There's lots of cats, and we don't need cats personally.
(43:10):
They're cute, they're delicious meat. Chickens are cute. No they're not,
Yes they are. Chickens are definitely cute. Chickens are assholes.
Did you just see a goose and think it was
a big chicken? Every goose, every every goose is every
chicken head, if I may. But that's where we conclude
this episode. Okay, um, I would like to maybe this
new tradition, a guest gets to suggest a bastard for
(43:31):
the future. Okay, No, I'm a very lazy man, so
I curate geese fucking geese to find me a goose
that somebody's like that goose was my best friend. I
like that it never chased me or tried to peck
me in the face. And theus I could just have
a goose. Half the episode is like, you know, white
goose are evil, and then the other half is like,
(43:51):
white geese are delicious. Well that's Caitlin's advice for the
week at a goose, take it or leave it. I
recommend leaving it. Thank you so much. Uh, well that
I have learned, it's only some of the things I
wish I didn't know. Um, yeah, thank you. Yeah, well,
don't make me thank Prince Nora dam Shanna, thanks Prince
Noradam Sahanak isolate that audio. Yeah pretty sure we're pronouncing
(44:17):
it right some of the times. Uh, I am not
sure I trust you on this one. I apologize to
the camer people listening. I don't apologize to the Prince. Yes,
he was a dick, um, but we gotta plug your plugles.
Oh yeah, yeah, of course. You can find me at
caitlyn gil Comedy dot com or at robot Caitlin on
Twitter or at Caitlin is Tall on Instagram. Uh, and
(44:39):
you can find me in your heart where I love you.
This has been behind the Bastards. I've been Robert Evans.
You can find us on the internet at behind the
Bastards dot com. I will be listing the sources for
this podcast, including the book that was a big part
of the research, and all the different websites where I
learned about his filmography and stuff. That'll all be up there.
A bunch of pictures will be up there. It's gonna
be great. You can also find us on social media
(45:00):
at at Bastards pod. You can find me on Twitter
at I write okay to letters there and uh yeah.
Next week we will be back with another Bastard, So
tune in then, folks. Until then, I love like you
five bastards. I love you all. H
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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