Behind the Bastards
Part One: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
Tue, 29 Apr 2025
Robert sits down with Andrew Ti for three episodes in one week about the bizarre life of Pol Pot, a man who spent too much time reading books and bullshitting with his friends and for convinced he could save his country by destroying it. (3 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and guests discussing Pol Pot?
media oh my goodness gracious Jiminy Christmas welcome back to behind the bastards a podcast where Robert Evans is using the phrase Jiminy Christmas for some goddamn reason we're allowed to curse on this I don't get it I don't get why I did that your Boston accent to you when you did that I don't know what does the Sophie Robert Boston accent sound like Sophie
It's terrible.
That's your Boston accent?
That's Robert's Boston Rob.
You got to put more of like a spit, like some grime on it. It's got to sound like you're screeching it over a bunch of wet rocks.
I just try. Just like the Pilgrims did.
Just like the Pilgrims did, yes, when they landed in Boston.
I just think that's something that only you can do. I don't know what about Jiminy Cricket was like, I want to do Roberts Boston.
Yeah. But we were there. Neither do I. Neither do I. Neither do I. Andrew T!
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Chapter 2: Why is Pol Pot called 'The Ben Affleck of Cambodian revolutionaries'?
We're talking a death toll of about somewhere in between like one and a half to three million. I think probably two million is generally kind of like the hedging your guess estimate out of a pre-war population of maybe six million Cambodians, right? And the reason I'm saying that this is extra relevant right now is that
What essentially happened in Cambodia is you had this cadre of guys who started as young men hanging out in reading groups, talking about politics and making plans for how they would like to rebuild their country and reorganize their country, starting from this position they called year zero, right?
Like we're going to totally, totally strip down everything that had existed before and start new based on these ideas we had in our like weird little friend groups, right? Yeah. Well, that's essentially what's happening with guys like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and their cadre of fanatic young doge kids, right? Yeah.
Who are disassembling the administrative state for fun and trying to rebuild it based on a bunch of shit that they discussed on 4chan and 8chan over the years, right?
The difference is these motherfuckers have never read a book, but otherwise, yeah, pretty close.
Yes. And the Khmer Rouge guys both read books. And also, one thing you can't take away from Pol Pot and the other Khmer Rouge guys, they were hard as fuck by the time they got in charge. They'd spent 20 years fighting in the jungle. Right. We have that going for us.
But I do think there's a lot relevant here in the story of how a group of people, and particularly the dude at the head, come to believe a set of things about... how the world should be remade and then pursue those goals no matter the cost. And that's kind of the story we're going to be telling this week. So I hope you're excited. I hope you all have fun with this one. I can't fucking wait.
Jesus Christ. Let's fucking go.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
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Chapter 3: What was Pol Pot's real name and early life background?
So no, no, he didn't have that. So the first thing you need to know about Pol Pot is that Pol Pot's not his name, right? Like this is a nom de revolution, you know? You get this with all of these guys. Joseph Stalin wasn't born Joseph Stalin. He literally just picked the name Joe Steele because it sounded cool, right?
And a lot of these guys do that because for one thing, it's just smart if you're planning to overthrow your government to work under a fake name. And for another thing, usually your fake name sounds cooler than your real name. And one of the first thing that makes Pol Pot unique is that Pol Pot is not a cool name and it was never meant to be. It doesn't sound it's not cooler in Cambodia.
It basically means like Joe Khmer, like the Khmer or the ethnic people that are the majority of Cambodia. Like he's basically Pol Pot is the Khmer equivalent of calling yourself like Joe America almost. Right. Like I'm the average man. Right. Right. That's basically what he was saying.
Or like John Doe sort of.
Yeah, like John Doe. His real name sounds like a fucking Marvel villain. He was born Saloth Saar, which is like such a cool name. That is the name of a guy who fist fights Batman. I'm sorry. Yeah, he wins for two acts. Yeah, he breaks Batman's spine at one point, right? Salat Sar, it goes by Pol Pot. No, this name goes too hard. Nobody will believe that.
Salat Sar was born in a village called Prekshov, a couple of miles west of the capital of his province and about 90 miles north of Phnom Penh, which is the capital of Cambodia. For decades, there was considerable debate as to the precise year of his birth, and we don't have perfect knowledge of when he was born.
There are a couple of reasons for this, just beyond the general fact that record-keeping in impoverished rural Cambodia wasn't great in the 20s. People were not, like, no one was digitizing anything, right? And Cambodia's educational system hinged a lot on your birth date because the central administration was lacking a culture.
Sorry, the central administration, basically, if you wanted your kid to kind of get into the best kind of school that they could get into, if you came from a prosperous family, and Salaf does, it was common to like alter your kid's birthday. to maximize which school they would get into.
And that was as easy as literally just changing markings on a piece of paper because there wasn't anything like centrally kept, right? So there was a strong culture of changing your kid's birthday at least by a few, but sometimes by a couple of years in order to like get them where you wanted them to go. Biographer Philip Short says that Salazar's real birthday was probably March of 1925.
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Chapter 4: How did French colonialism and ethnic tensions shape Cambodia?
Of course, I didn't know it. How he beat me, kicks and punches. He was brutal. Then he took me outside and put me under a grapefruit tree full of red ants. After that, I knew my times tables. Oh my God. Well, I guess if it works. No, I don't. I don't guess that at all.
You know, that general philosophy, I think, held on for quite some time, if my parents are any indication.
And like, yeah, there's unique Cambodian, the whole ant thing, pretty unique to Cambodia. But the whole you beat the shit out of a kid if they're not learning right. That's more normal than not in the 20s. You go to Oklo. I got beat as a kid in Oklahoma by my principals. So like, not trying to like, but yeah.
And what's really interesting to me though, is that Van Sack recalls this teacher who like beat him and then tied him to an ant tree as a saintly man who was adorable. Like, this was my nicest teacher.
Oh, kicking a kid is really fucking nuts.
That's wild. Yeah. Yeah.
Like, truly. Yeah. It just requires so much intention and preparation.
Yeah. And it just, it says a lot that like, and that's your good teacher. Like, that's the guy that you're like, and you know what? He really, he really straightened me out.
Yeah. I owe a lot to you. They say you never forget your teachers or how many ants they tortured you with, and it's true.
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Chapter 5: What cultural and historical trauma influenced Khmer society?
Plenty of Buddhist genocides. Every religion has it. And also non-religions have it. People love committing genocide. It's not. No, no culture has a fucking lock on that.
Religion is a handy tool, but it's not the only handy tool.
It's not the only tool. Get that out of you. Again, if you blame genocide fundamentally on the fact that people can be pieces of shit, that's that's what's to blame.
The real genocide juice is in here.
You know, it's in here.
Yeah.
If you want to understand how a person can be moved to genocide, drive in traffic for 22 minutes. That's the most I'm ever like, yeah, we just got to start killing people. If no one was here, I'd be home. No, no, no. I'm three more, still three minutes away from the fucking burger rest. God damn it.
So the religious texts that they were made to memorize were rooted in a rigid respect for hierarchy. In Theravada Buddhism, children were treated almost as robots, right? They are the product of cause and effect that accumulate rather than people in their own right. And so what matters is modifying what goes into them, right? In order to produce the desired outcome. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So again... This is a lot of morality play. There's a lot of racism in this upbringing and it's racism against these ethnic minorities in the country who have also periodically controlled the country. Right.
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Chapter 6: How did Pol Pot's upbringing and education influence his beliefs?
Yeah. You would have loved the Hunger Games, Pol Pot. For most of the big dub-dub dose – and again, we're talking about like his education. His like – the school years that he's going to remember the most are during World War II, right? Like he is kind of entering adolescence in like the 40s.
And for most of that war, life for Cambodians like Saar in the rarefied era of the capital went by relatively unchanged. The Vichy government takes over in France, right? So – For Cambodians, it's still French people running Canada, but it's a slightly different group of French people, right, who are basically fascist collaborators.
But you're not going to notice much different as a Cambodian, right? It's not like they're wildly different to you.
Yeah, the non-fascist collaborators are still not such great dudes.
Yeah, the main difference would be that Saar would start learning in school songs about the glory of Marshall Patain and the like, but I don't know that much of this stuck. Thailand invades and conquers several border provinces during this time, which is a deep shame to the king who is dying and a deep shame to Cambodia.
But Saar is not a political kid, and we have no evidence that this particularly impacted him. Short does theorize, Philip Short does theorize that some of the fascist propaganda brought into the schools during this period did impact Saar, particularly the fact that the propaganda of the Vichy era romanticizes peasants like poor farmers as the true embodiment of the nation.
And that's really going to be a big sticking point for him as an adult. And so maybe there's a line there, right?
Right.
The propaganda of the Patanist era also depicts the city as an inherently decadent and unnatural thing, like a break from the righteous path of subsistence farming under a dictator. And that probably leaves a mark, right? Now, in the summer of 1942, the capital saw its first major protests against French control. A group of Cambodian monks began preaching anti-French sermons.
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Chapter 7: What role did Theravada Buddhism and strict discipline play in Khmer culture?
That year, the newly found Democratic Party, which advocated for replacing French and absolute monarchical rule with a democracy, or at least like a hybrid democracy, where there's a king, but he's limited constitutionally, and we have like this parliament-type deal, they win 54 seats in the national elections.
And when I say Democratic Party, it's literally like the party that thinks we should have a democracy, right? Yeah, right. And there's some this is and this is kind of this is a melting pot. A lot of future communists and socialists are in the Democratic Party, as well as a lot of guys who are like going to wind up more on the like, well, I want to be aligned with the Americans. Right.
This is just kind of where a lot of them are at this stage. In 1949, Salazar gets picked for that study abroad program, and he becomes one of the first hundred Khmer male and female students to win a scholarship to go study in Paris. They leave on a steamship.
They actually go through Saigon, and they arrive in Paris on the same day Mao Zedong announces the founding of the People's Republic of China. So a lot is happening. And this is going to increasingly make discussions of like communism a lot more relevant to these kids who it really hadn't been all that much up to this point.
Now, nearly all of the students that he goes to Paris with wind up being prominent political figures. A lot of them are leaders within the Khmer Rouge. A lot of them get killed by the Khmer Rouge because they're leaders of the Khmer Rouge, and the Khmer Rouge loves murdering the Khmer Rouge, right? Right. Yeah.
This is primarily because almost no one else in the country had access to educational opportunities or the free time necessary to learn about radical politics. So obviously the people who are dominant in the radical political sect are the only ones with the time to read, right? It's not that shocking. Speaking of things that aren't shocking, these products.
I'm going to be surprised.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me.
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Chapter 8: How do these historical factors help us understand the Khmer Rouge genocides?
I didn't say I'd like it. I said it would be good content.
You butter me up with a LeBron stat and then you kicked me to the curb for fucking Pol Pot.
Look, he could have been a podcaster, you know? Could have been a podcaster. He was known as having a nice voice, you know? He could have had my job, maybe. Behind the me's. And guess what?
The Pol Pot podcast.
Me and my boys.
The Pol podcast. I would choose you!
I might prefer to listen to the poll podcast, honestly. That sounds fascinating. So Saar joins the Khmer Student Union, which at that time was in the process of morphing into a semi-covert communist youth league. He attended his first protest the next year for a radical member of the Democratic Party who was assassinated by right-wingers using a hand grenade.
Still, at this point in his political involvement, it seems to have been a byproduct of his social life, right? He's at this protest because, like, his friends are doing stuff like this, and this is where you, like, go to hang out with people, right? And he is kind of a hedonist at this phase of his life.
Philip Short writes, Sarr's friends regarded him as a bon vivant whose purpose in life was to have a good time. So that's, uh, I think where we're going to end for part one, we're at about an hour. Uh, we've got a lot more pole pot here, so we'll see how long it takes to get through all of this. I really did try to cut this fucker down.
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