Behind the Bastards
Part Two: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country
Wed, 30 Apr 2025
Robert continues the story with young Pol Pot's years in France where he and his friends radicalize themselves in what has to have been the deadliest book club of all time.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who is Pol Pot and what was his early life like in France?
It turns out Mary was connected to a very powerful man.
I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression. John F. Kennedy.
Chapter 2: What French philosophers influenced Pol Pot's ideology?
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Specifically, we're talking about Salah Tsar, the man who would become Pol Pot, who at this point is living in Paris. And he is a bon vivant whose purpose in life is to have a good time. He's drinking the wine. He's reading lots of books. And he's not doing a whole lot of radio technician school, which is why he is ostensibly in Paris in the first place.
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Chapter 3: How did Pol Pot's experience in Yugoslavia shape his revolutionary ideas?
Yeah, he's sort of like the, yeah, get him, and then melting slowly out of the back of the craft.
Yeah, and he says that like basically just like the fact that it is so not just among, but by the way, when we say the student movement, he's not just socializing with other Khmer. He's socializing with a lot of young French radicals, right? And so he just kind of through immersion gets more comfortable with socialism and then communism.
But he was also very engaged with the non-educational opportunities afforded to him, including a free work trip to war-ravaged Yugoslavia. Now, he actually had two different options for a vacation during this first year that he's in France. One was a month-long backpacking trip in Switzerland, which cost $70. And boy, if I could get that deal today, I'd be gone in a fucking heartbeat.
But that is a lot of money for the time and he has no money. Right. So he picks a labor trip to go help rebuild Yugoslavia, which had just become a thing. If you think about Yugoslavia is the Balkans. It's the Balkans all being a state that's an independent state for basically the first time. And it's like the least governable territory on Earth is finally being governed by a guy who.
But it's all been blown to fuck by World War Two. So you can come here for free and we'll kind of feed you, even though we don't have much food. But it'll be free if you help rebuild. And so that's what he does. Right. This was not a political thing. It isn't good to Yugoslavia because they're communist.
He later wrote, I didn't have money, so I couldn't do as the others and go to Geneva or to the sea or to the mountains and have a holiday there. A group of us poor students went instead to Zagreb. Now, this is a seminal moment for Salazar. Tito, who was the dictator of Yugoslavia, was a communist who had fought as an insurgent against the Nazis. Tito, we'll talk about him one day.
He's one of these guys where I can't say he's not a bastard because he's a dictator. He does some bad stuff. He's also like the best case scenario for a dictator. If you're going to live under a dictator in the 20th century, you fucking want it to be Tito, right? He does know what he's doing, which is extremely rare. And he's also legitimately like the hardest son of a bitch alive in his day.
Like he fights the Nazis. And then my favorite Tito story, because he breaks away from the USSR, because Stalin obviously wants Yugoslavia to basically be an extension of the USSR. And Tito is like, yeah, The Balkans have had enough being other people's property. We're going to be the bulk. You know, we're going to be our own thing for a while. And Stalin keeps sending guys to kill him.
And finally, Stalin sends back. I think it's a piece of one of the assassins with a note that's like, you can keep sending guys and I'll keep killing them. But if you do, I'm going to send one guy and you're not going to send him back. Right. Like he's going to get you. Right.
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Chapter 4: What was the role of the Khmer student union and communist circles in Paris?
So a month or so after meeting Saar, Van Sack convened a private gathering to create a new circle dedicated to discussing Cambodia's future. By this point, the Viet Minh were escalating their war for independence against the French. And there was widespread interest in what this might mean for Cambodians.
And also because the Viet Minh are communist and because Mao has just announced the start of the People's Republic, all these guys are being like, Shit, you know, there might be this global communist uprising that we could be a part of that could like free us from the shackles of French domination while still like being a part of this greater international community.
And that sounds kind of dope, right?
Yeah.
And it's interesting because what the correct, like the thing about domino theory that was kind of accurate is that other people in other countries in Asia were influenced by communism taking off in Vietnam and China. And it made them think about the things that were possible.
The thing that we're wrong about is that all of these guys, as soon as they're in power, wind up primarily hating other countries near them, including communist countries. Right. It's how like, Oh God, obviously communist China and the USSR are going to form a unified block. Oh no, they nearly nuked each other. Right. They're literally shooting each other on the border.
China is inviting Nixon over because of how pissed they are at the Soviet Union, right? All of this shit is very wrong in that regard. If you knew anything about the left, you'd knew that the left was never going to get along with each other.
I mean, that's the whole problem. They know nothing about the left.
No. So Van Sacks starts this circle, which is initially about like the future of Cambodia and maybe independence. And they start talking about Marxist communism a lot, too. Yang Seri attends, as does a number of future influential Khmer politicians, including Salah Tsar. So they are beginning to talk more about communism. And again, mostly focused around Mao and Ho Chi Minh.
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Chapter 5: How did the Vietnamese Communist Party influence the Cambodian communist movement?
And a lot of Khmer who are budding communists are like, all right, I agree with the basic idea, but why the fuck are we listening to these goddamn Vietnamese people, right? Why do they get to be in charge of our communist revolution? We're Khmer, right? Salah Sarr and his comrades know very little about what's going on in this regard at the time.
According to Van Sack, Sarr spent, quote, most of his time reading or going out to the movies. Very relatable. But then he falls in love with a history of the French Revolution, which he reads cover to cover, even though his French isn't great. And he admits, I didn't get a lot of it, but I felt compelled to read through it. Right. And there are a few things that really stick in his mind. Right.
One of them is the concept of a revolution as a historical reset, as in once you succeeding in a revolution means you can make a you can break history. Right. Right. In 1792, the French revolutionaries had instituted a new calendar, right? And this was them attempting to be like, the past is done. We are never going back.
This is a totally new world that we are creating and a new kind of human being that we are creating in this new world. And obviously... Napoleon comes around not that long later. They didn't create a new world, right? No one creates a new man. People will always be people. This ideology that you can like, we're fundamentally broken with the past. Things will never go back.
Things will never change. We have heralded in a new world and it's always going to be this way. Everyone who thinks that is always wrong. Change is the only guaranteed constant. You can't stop it. But That's the idea that some of these French revolutionaries have, and that's the idea Saar comes away with.
One big thing he takes away from the history is that what doomed the French Revolution is that it didn't go all the way. It didn't tear down every structure of the previous old world. It kept too much alive from the old days of the king, and that's why it eventually failed. You do want to have a total break with the past. A revolution should be that.
But you have to destroy absolutely everything that had existed previously. Right. And this is a – he's not coming up to this on his own. This is a lot of stuff that he and his circle are talking about. This is their – they are more influenced in a lot of ways by the French Revolution than what's happening in Vietnam because they're in France, right? They're studying in French schools, you know?
Now, over the course of 1951, the circle Vansack had started turned into a Marxist circle, which itself began to exert direct control on the rest of the student union. And they kind of turned the student union into a stealth communist vanguard party, right? Like that's the goal.
And they're executing, they're kind of secretly planning it from this circle, but exerting control over the other circles in order to get them in line, right? In his book on Pol Pot, Brother Number One, Chandler writes, Recollections about Salah Tsar's behavior at the meetings are contradictory.
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Chapter 6: What were Pol Pot's views on the French Revolution and Stalinism?
Oh, and we are returned. Back. Returned back. So, yeah, most of the accounts of Saar during this period, again, he's a quiet, friendly, easygoing dude. But as Short notes, Philip Short notes in his book on Pol Pot, Saar did start reading a lot of Stalin around this time. And that's because he and his circle, there's a lot of Stalin going around.
Particularly, there's a history of the Communist Party in Russia that Stalin wrote, right? And this is, it's a Stalin book, right? So... We could assume – like there's a couple of things you can just infer even if you haven't read it. It's very paranoid. It is very focused on the internal enemies, right?
His history of the Russian – is very focused on the need to – like how necessary it was for him to get rid of internal enemies within the party who were counter-revolutionary, right? Who were dangers to the success of the revolution because he was Joseph Stalin, right? Right. And this – the fact that this book is seen as like very inspirational to Salah Tsar and a lot of his young – not great.
Not going to end well. Not going to end well. Now, Saar also becomes very acquainted with Mao's writings, which are the most directly relevant both to the kind of communism he's going to preach and to the kind of war he's going to orchestrate. Because Mao, unlike Stalin and unlike a lot of other communists, Mao runs a peasant insurgency, right? Because that's how things go in China, right?
It is a peasant uprising, you know, in a lot of ways. That's a big part of what's going on. And so Mao is really relevant for what Salah Saar is going to be doing. not too long from now, right? And there's also a lot that Mao writes about theorizing about how to remake a society from the bottom up. And as we know from the Great Leap Forward, not always a great idea.
Maybe backyards shouldn't be where we make steel, you know? Maybe factories are better for that. I don't know, you know? Maybe we need sparrows. I don't know.
I mean, your big society remaking ideas tend not to be good, right?
No, it's like what we're trying to do now. What if we get rid of everyone who researches how to stop diseases and instead make them build iPhones? I feel like we're all going to have a lot more diseases and probably less iPhones, which might work out for us. Maybe the less iPhones will eventually lead us back to having people who learn how to cure diseases.
That'll be the silver lining, but we don't cash that in for a couple of decades.
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Chapter 7: How did Mao's writings impact Pol Pot's revolutionary strategy?
It's not like they can look at like the telegram chats for these different groups in the jungle, right? Like they have very little opportunity. Or the telegram telegrams. Or even the telegram telegrams, right. So they're like, we need on the ground intelligence. One of us needs to go there and figure out who we should be backing.
And Salah Tsar, this is really the first time he identifies himself as special and not just another dude sitting around bullshitting is like, I'll go. Right. And let that be a lesson to you, kids. If you want to one day kill a third of the people in your country, you got to start by volunteering. You know, no one ever got anywhere sitting on their butt.
Right.
Get out. Be active. Starve your entire country to death. probably bad things to encourage people to do.
Get out there in the community, you know, make a difference.
He made a difference. You can't say Pol Pot didn't make a difference. He left a very different Cambodia.
Yeah, the make a difference part of just get involved really, I feel like the public messaging, we should be concentrating more on the direction you make a difference.
That is one of like my big issues with like a lot of the stuff we were raised with as kids in like the 90s and early 2000s is like anyone can make a difference. That's true. We should have higher standards than just difference. Different.
Yeah, I can leave ground to beef out overnight and it's different, but that doesn't mean it's better.
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