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Speaker 2: I believe an understudied aspect not just of the Cold War,
but in twentieth century studies and Marxist Leninist studies as
well as disciplines tending towards scaled sociopolitical behavior. There's a
general neglect of democratic Campuccia, which existed from nineteen seventy
five ninety seventy nine, that was the Khmer Rouge regime.
It's invoked by a lot of these midwid academics as
some cautionary tale from history, and these people, part of
it's born of ignorance, part of it's born of commitment
to an ideological narrative. They assigned these arbitrary criteria, you
categorical categorical criteria to what they call genocides. Conspicuously, of course,
the Soviet Union during the phase or epoch when America
was allied with the Soviet State is conspicuously redacted. But
they'll they'll lump together Rwanda, democratic Campuccia, the Third Reich
sometimes Idia means Uganda and declare that these are instances
of genocide. You know, again according to arbitrary metrics, a
combination of what they perceive of as the moral depravity
of the government in question and the scale of attrition.
That doesn't really tell us anything. Don't get me wrong.
One of the reasons I evokers Nulty, which is he's
one of the most important gaily and theorists whoever lived.
But he had certain insights into the the way political
power is expressed in the late modern period, with a
particular attention of the twentieth century. And there was a
severity to political affairs and an intensity to violence that
really isn't precedented before. And so although I'd argue that
some of the excesses of the Jacobin regime were comparable,
and I discussed that in my book or my manuscript
that's not published yet. Also, so there's that and really
such I remember that when you if you'd read the
National Review where the American Spectator in the nineties when
they were short on a on a boogeyman to talk
about obviously the Cold War was over. It was around
that time. I Paul Pott aka salath Star, which was
his actual name. He passed away in ninety eight, and
that's when there was this ad hoc tribunal that was
bringing Premier Rouge leaders up on charges, and there was
this tendency of neo coons to burn Paul Pott and
Effigy as sort of a lesser satan. The contra, Adolf
Hitler is a greater satan, and this man is a monster,
and he's a perfect example of the evils that were
left all this kind of breathless condemnation. But that doesn't
suggest any sort of insight into the character of the
regime and the historical processes the creator. That quite the contrary.
But other than that, you know, you never really heard
about the regime. There was there's a series of sort
of pop history books by journalists that were full of
lurid stuff, casting Paul Pott, salath Tsars sort of an
Ediamine figure, this figurative and then, according to some apocryphal stories,
literal cannibal who was the phase sort of a post
colonial savagery when the shackles are thrown off the colored world.
I mean, it's obviously couched and sort of boilerplate liberal
moralizing nobody actually believes in. But that was the guts
of it. But then there's other people too, particularly people
who have a sympathy for the orthodox Marxist Leninists perspective.
There's a few of them left anymore, but in the
eighties and nineties, I mean, they were very much around,
especially an academ they'd sort of just avoid the issue,
where they'd cast Paul Pott as some sort of dictator
strong man of a secular nature who didn't really understand
Marxist Leninism and who only was able to capitalize on
conditions of chaos and punctuated disruption owing to the Cold
War proxy conflict emerging in Southeast Asia. Then there's a
Maoist type schismatics and they just sort of avoid the
subject matter. And there's a reason for that, and there's
a few reasons for that, and it's not just for
the sake of appearances. Paul pat Zealavsar was very educated
and he was something of the counterpart to Ho Chi
Minh in various respects, and he he had a deep
understanding of Marcist Leninism, far more i'd say than most
of the Soviet client apparatics in Eastern Europe. And what
happened in Cambodia. It's a pure example of historical processes,
and the communist Zeitgeid is taking hold with Hellvish consequences
only as symboled and reduces these things to the machinations
of individual men. And that's just not the way human
affairs develop. Cambodia also is a very very strange society.
I don't mean that pejoratively. I find it incredibly fascinating.
It's not. It's far more like India than it is
like China, and it's more like subser in Africa than either. Okay,
there was a very racially coded aspect to the Khmer
Rouge Revolution. There was a horrible racial animis between them
and the Vietnamese, and that's one of the things that
Kissinger recognized in Nixon's foreign policy and national security team,
capitalized on and exploited. One of the things, you know,
as we talked about Kissinger for arbitrary reasons, is one
of is like some boogeyman and armies for no apparent
reason is I think people know well. One of the
many alleged sins of Kissinger was after when not on Sahanok,
who was the king of Cambodia, who'd been ousted by
lawn Noall, who was an American client, sort of right
wing military type. After nineteen seventy it was lawn Nall
who was in the seat of government. The Khmer Rouge
conquered Phenomen Penn in April seventy five. That was the
end of the Lawnonoul regime. During this time, Sahanik was
in exile and holding himself out as the government in exile.
America recognized the Khmer Rouge regime at the UN as
the seat of government obviously because they were at war
with Vietnam, and the Khmer Ruse regime went down when
the People's Army of Vietnam assaulted and occupied the country,
and they occupied until nineteen ninety because something that's also
not really understood, I don't think by most people, including casual.
As soon as the Cold War, after the Son of
Soviets split, a genuine proxy war broke out between the
Communists Juggernauts, culminating in the war between the Khmer Rouge
and Hanoi and then between Hanoi and China, and America
obviously backed the Khmuir Rouge against the Vietnamese, who were
a very very strong client of Moscow, and this all
this had dramatic ripple effects. Okay, I argue, and I'm
sure people would take exception of this because they think
it's a Neo Connage point. It's not. It's people like Lutfact,
like Richard Pearl, like from like Schlessinger. They were speaking
of them in the whole team b Caadre. They were
speaking of of a strategic reality. How they interpreted that
is questionable, but I think it's indisputable. The Communists were
winning the Cold War in military terms. It didn't matter
that their political societies were basket cases, because if they won,
it wouldn't have mattered because then there'd be no alternative.
But Nixon and Kissinger were able to neutralize the fall
of self Vietnam by decoupling pet King from Moscow and
then back in Camp Buccia against Vietnam and the Soviets.
And like I said before, in my opinion, the shadow
executive of the Soviet Union during the bresion of Era
was and drop of Ustinov and Gramco. With a drop
off being out front as it were, the Soviets managed
to flip India to the Soviet camp. So Washington in
turn was able to convert Pakistan into a client regime
which remains to this day, and the India Pakistan War
owed it that which led to the Soviets insinuating a
communist regime into Kabul, which then after the Iranian Revolution,
they feared was going to pivot to the West under
domestic auspices of fealty to an is lonist ideology. And
like we've talked about before, that would have been catastrophic
because Afghanistans within decapitation range of what was Star City, Kazakhstan,
which constituted the Warsaw Pax command and control capability in
the Pacific theater. So the event of nuclear war, they
would have been annihilated. And thus you have the Soviet
intervention in Afghanistan. Okay, So this was not a minor thing.
This is all related and the late Cold War there
was this endless standoff in stalemate in Europe. Obviously, even
when the air of strategic parody made conventional force structure
relevant again the stalemate in Gordon. So Asia became the
primary theater at geostrategic competition, and owing to things like
the promisee of maritime strategic platforms, World War III was
gonna be when it went in nuclear was gonna be
one or lost in Asia. That's what underlay a lot
of this decision making. But the personage of Paul Pott,
it was incredibly enigmatic. Even his name, Paul Pott had
something like eighteen different names. He'd gone under. People weren't
even sure he existed, and then when it became clear
who he was, people thought he was some kind of cipher,
when in reality that meant out front of the Khmer
Rouse movement were the ciphers, and he was the he was.
He was the leneen figure of the movement. He gave
very few interviews, one of which he gave an interview
in nineteen seventy seven to Yugoslavian state television. The Yugoslavs
never fully hedged by alliing with the Maoist camp because
obviously that would have reignited hostilities with Moscow. They always Tito,
until the end of his life, tried to tread this
sort of middle road, at least after Stalin was out
of the picture. But they were always like the Romanians
were they always they were always looking for good offices
with communist regimes outside of Moscow's orbit. So Paul Pott
goes on Yugoslavian television and he gives this whole narrative
of how he was this poor peasant boy who was allterate,
that was a lie sala Tsar his name even Sara
means pale or white, because Salasar was Chinese with some
camere blood. Kamiers are a dark skinned people. They probably
call themselves black camere Okay, sealeth Star was a lesser aristocrat.
One of his female cousins became a concubine to the
then king. There's this uh sort of sanguinary and libertine
sensibility to the royal houses in old Cambodia. A lot
of these kings and princes had dozens of wives and
hundreds of concubines, like a great con or something. And
Sealeth Star's female cousin became one of these concubines, and
then ultimately his older sister did too. And his father
had been a wealthy landowner, and owing to his cousins
and his sisters, owing to sell Asar, his cousins and
his sister's position at court, a bunch of his other
relatives became royal officers at the palace and there's this
kind of lurid story that apparently is true. When Salasar
was thirteen or fourteen, he was still young enough to
be allowed into harem quarters and people didn't worry about it.
And one of his elder brothers or cousins was a
palace guard of the women's quarters, and he'd let him
go in there and want to sell. Assar's boyhood friends
would say, salisard go in there and be with the
girls sexually, because the king was this elderly man and
who was by that point probably pause like dementa, and
he certainly wasn't having sex with these women. So they
literally had nothing to do, and some teenage boy coming
to visit him made them really happy. But the point
is not to regale people with some kind of pornographic story.
But young Zelasar was literally in the lap of royal decadence.
You know. He wasn't no, he was not a poor peasant.
He was the opposite. And that seems very odd. But
outsiders on the periphery of the core national racial ethnic
population that comes to animate the historical process in the
country in question, that seems to be the norm, not
the exception. Where they're talking about Adolf Hitler earlier talking
about Napoleon or even Cromwell to some degree, and I
still I speculate, although I'm sure the man himself and
his apologies, such as they still exist in Cambodia, would
never acknowledge this. His mixed cello stars, mixed blood, his
education literally at court and in some of the best
schools in Phant and pen but his relative proximity to
peasant life and real poverty, if only by observation that
coupled with his instinct and intelligence for power political affairs,
it situated him in a way that was uniquely advantageous
As for a revolutionary career, I don't think he. I
don't think he was particularly committed to Mercus Leninism, and
the way Lenin was or Stalin was. He wasn't a
man living as an outlaw who developed a Parsian sensibility.
I think he looked around him and saw the perobial
writing on the wall, and like many people, particularly in
the colored world as it was called in a less
delicate epuck, he thought that Moscow was going to win
the Cold War, so this was the path he chose.
One of the premier rouge field commanders who was very
close to Cellar, he said subsequently, long after the Khmer
Rouge had been deposed, but we're still carrying on military
activity on the periphery of the country, he relayed. I
was in command of tens of thousands of men, and
I had no real authority. We were all just trying
to ride a proverbial beast that was out of control
and desperately trying to direct it towards some sort of
constructive or at least less catastrophic purpose. And that that's
not an alibi. If you've got millions of bodies on
you at least, and he has the world, you're not
gonna drop alibis. That's something that's something a myth enormy.
It's the same sensibility when people claim, oh, everyone in
prison claims they're innocent. No, they don't, because there's no
reason to anymore. If you were in the if you
were in the proverbial court of Paul pot and this
planet and the dominant our political cadre is declaring you
killed two million people, what are you gonna say, Sorry, No,
You're gonna describe what conditions were as you experienced them.
People who claim otherwise don't understand the human mind. It's
not a matter of conscience or anything like that, or
feeling worse. There's just no percentage in it. And standing
on ceremony is something people do who have normal liars
that aren't impacted by apocaal events the and interestingly, but
when Penn fell on April seventeenth, you know, weeks before
the fall of Saigon, and that was great to find
both the Pig King and the khmure Rus themselves. US
officials claimed that the final assault on the Cambodian capital
was spearheaded by People's Army of Vietnam units backed by
combined arms. That's not true remotely, but I don't think
that was propaganda. A lot of comminators subsequently said that
was US propaganda aimed to effuse kid the situation, as
well as to mitigate the perceived and ability of American
impact outcomes. I don't. I think people believe that because
they had no understanding of Cambodia, they had no understanding
khmir Ru's movement, they had no understanding what was developing
in brass tacks terms between the Soviets and the Chinese.
They didn't understand the depth of hostility between the camera
and the Vietnamese. There was a handful of people who understood,
at least in broad conceptual terms, some of the concrete
particulars here, and I believe Kissinger was one of them.
But I don't think that was disinformation. And that's one
of the things that brought attention particularly of what was
then called the Second World as well as a lot
of non state actors who were engaged in the service
that communists cause. That's something that brought their attention to
Southeast Asia. Obviously, victory by the People's Army Vietnam was
imminent then, but that was a massive proxy conflict. The
Khmer Rouge had no outside assistance really. They got some
small arms from China, but even China's attention primarily was
on Vietnam, where they shared a border, and China had
a bizarre relationship with the Vietnamese. It's one characterized for
all time, including today, by hostility. But before the Sino
Soviets split, there was an effort by the Chinese to
steer hand Oi away from the Soviet orbit, with you know,
the incentive being material military support and owing to the
shared border. There was a handful of American servicemen who
were shut down need in proximity to the Sino Vietnamese border,
but who crashed over Vietnamese territory and were captured by
People's Liberation Army forces who were manning the Triple A batteries,
and they spent years in Chinese captivity. So it was
a complicated convergence of military intrigues and overlapping spheres of control.
In reality, no Vietnamese force other than special operations than
you know, capable elements and non conventional, non uniform forces
and fought on the ground of Vietnam since nineteen seventy three.
And obviously there's another myth that won't die, this idea
Nixon is responsible for the disaster of democratic Campacchia because
invading Cambodia stabilized it and this gave rise to an
opportunity that came here Rouge to capture the capital. That's asinine,
and it's it's more of this idea that nothing in
the world is approximately caused by anything other than America's
decision to intervene or not by way of hard power elements.
That's incredibly ignorant because it may the widening of the
war to Cambodia was essential if America intended to finally
obviate the ability of Hanoi to arm and equip na
say elements in the south that were largely wiped out
by the Tet offensive. But the supply lines along what
is called colloquily the Hochim and trail were obviously going
to be used to reinforce whatever conventional element assaulted across
the seventieth parallel. So it was the right play. Lan
Nall was not the right man to be installed after
the removal of Sahanak, but beggars can't be choosers. You
work with the mentioned material you have, including the leadership element,
and of course then Saigon fell on April thirtieth, seventy five,
the upon Khmieru's victory. A man named Ang Sorry born
Kim Tran. He was one of six members of the
Standing Committee of the Communist Party at Tampluchia. He was
the spokesman for all practical purposes of the Communist Party
at Tampluchia, and as of April seventeenth and seventy five,
he was held out by Western observers, media personage, diplomats,
American military official dumb as the leader of the Khmer rouge,
which is fascinating, and he was cast as a sort
of grotesque villain, you know, in reality. Well I did
to give you an idea. It was some years later
this one British diplomat, So I think I think he's
a guy who'd been the ambassador briefly. He talked about
having lunch with Sorry and Sorry's wife, and he likened
the man to Fred West and his wife, these two
sex deviants who were serial killers in England. That the
hyperbole was just ridiculous. But I think this is interesting
because this was before you know, the the identity of
the true control group of the the Pomers, Perdy Campucci
was even known. Then later, when Paul Pott was sort
of insinuated into the role in Western narratives and everybody
had forgotten about everybody'd forgotten about being Sorry, this diplomat
was still holding him out as his bugeyman, replete with
this lurid history onic narrative of him being no different
than a serial killer, because they say, what a lazy
script there is for these Anglo American government types. But
moving on the true depth of Paul Pott Salad Star's secrecy.
Really the only intelligence record of him at all came
from Stahano secret police. He'd been identified in a dossier
along with dozens of other communist intellectuals, identifying him as
a former school teacher, and in nineteen seventy two even
identified by US intelligence as chief of the Military director
to the Khmer Rouge front, alongside non Cha, who is
chief of the political Directorate. And what's fascinating is when
Sahanok was desperately trying to manage a collapsing situation placating
the Camier Rouge, the United States and Hanoi, he took
to visiting Camier Rouge held areas to try and negotiate
some sort of concord. And there's there's photographs of Sahannah
talking to these random Camuer Rouge officers who are obviously
being held out as the local commander. And you'll see
Paul Pott sitting in the corner and assumingly observing things,
you know, obviously totally invisible to the royal entourage. There's
a certain brilliance to that. There's other times where during
official Camier Rouge awards, ceremonies or victory celebrations during the
struggle years, he'll be sitting literally in the back row
of the theater or the assembly area, essentially totally invisible.
He stands out again because it is pale complexion. But
that's only stands out going to hindsight, you know, Otherwise
it would just be an oddity. The people believe too,
at least throughout the first U several years. But what
came to call the Cambodian Civil War, which pitted Lawn
Knowle's government, you know, which again was this client regime
of Washington against the Khmier Rouge. The leading Cambodian commress
intellectual with Q Sampan he went proud to support against
the Hanouk in the sixties as being this sort of
social justice advocate and you had to hit a reputation
for not being corrupt, which was remarkable among any political
figure then, especially as the war heated up and he
was viewed as other than Ho Chi Minh, Sampan was
viewed as the most significant Southeast Asian communist intellectuals. He
was technically defensive minister, even though it was generally recognized
that it was men commanding forces in the field who
had real authority in their regard. But this ruse was
so convincing. Sampan was invited to Beijing to meet Mao,
And when communicates were issued not just to not just
to Mao and the Chinese pollet Bu, but across the
communist world, they were signed by Sampan. And if you
wanted to meet with formal comuirus representation, because you'd earned
that clout by contributing arms, advisors money, you want an
audience with Sampan. But that was a smoke screen. The
Sampan had no real power in the movement. I don't
even think people in Cambodia committed to the cause. We're
reading what he was producing, but I mean that itself
is brilliant because in a scaled down way, he was
performing the function of the common turn or later it
became common form for the East Block. He was putting
on a civilized, lucid, intellectually articulate and doctrinally sound within
the parameters of Marxist Lennonist ideology face for the outside world,
with a particular eye to courting the resources and assistance
of sympathetic actors, both nonstate and and and states alike.
Somebody liking Paul Pott to a Hollywood director, he has
a master at creating appearances and assigning people rolled within
these artificial paradigms. It was tannel into creating a Potemkin
village of human beings and confatuated personages and doing it
utterly convincingly. Paul Pott said, after the revolution, or after
the conquest at Penpen, he said, the CIA, the KGB
Sahani's police, the Vietnamese knew who I was, but they
did not know what I was, And I think that's true. Interestingly, too,
there was the CIA, apparently at least by nineteen seventy four,
owing to one of Lan Knowl's Intelligence Service agents, he'd
gotten close to Paul Pott, and he related that Paul
Pott had some significance with the party apparatus of significance.
So after early nineteen seventy four there'll be references in
CIA memos to a mysterious Paul who the agency had
identified as a person of significance within the premier communist movement.
But to them he was just some mid level functionary.
And it really wasn't until probably a year after the
fallow Penn Penn, when the Megacittle Praxis was fully underway,
that it became clear to the intelligence services, which back
in those days were actually reasonably confident, if not the
world at large, who, if not what Paul Pott formally
selloth Sar was was significant to Like I said, I'm
jumping around a bit. Zelosar's upbringing. His father owned a
plantation of approximately fifty acres, and he was by far
the wealthiest man in the village. The acres of rice
Patty was about ten times what the average freehold farmer
owned in those days. That's pretty remarkable. And it's all
a little more remarkable, I mean even in the obviously
in those days there was it was more difficult to
track and identify people. But owing to the prestige and
notoriety of the man's family, it's pretty amazing he could
just disappear the way that he did and manipulate perceptions
in that way. That again, that suggests a real brilliance
quite literally for political soldiery, especially that sort. But again,
owing to the fact that he was born to a
land aristocracy, he was the equivalent of a lesser Mandarin.
He had Chinese blood, his family was racially different from
the population at large. He was inevitably inundated with a
strong historical consciousness. And then when his young female cousins
and sister sort of becoming concubines with the king, his
first sexual experiences were literally with Harem girls of the
royal palace. You know, how could you not, if you
had the mind for it, develop an aptitude for deep history,
and coupled with that the aggressiveness and the fearlessness and
the ruthlessness for political soldiery. It's sort of a perfect
biography for a man to get a revolutionary cadre or
a splendid convergence of psychological traits rather well within historical memory,
if not direct living memory, then too the Vietnamese sense.
Even sometime after the French established to protectorate in the
eighteen sixties, the Vietnamese came to feature as a boogeyman
within the camera cultural mind, and not entirely without cause.
There was this a powable story at all. Camer kids
learned about a Vietnamese warlord who'd invaded Khmer Land and
then he buried three men in the triangle configuration up
to their necks, and every night he'd stoke a fire
between them and balance a rice pot on their heads.
And that was supposed to be a metaphor for the
relationship of the Vietnamese the Camere. They're this hated racial overlord,
and French missionaries relaid that during times of rebellion Vietnamese
constabularies they'd take people suspected a partisan activity and blind
them and bury them alive. So this wasn't just a
fantasy or some sort of mythology built of racial animis,
you know, such as crazy sort of shit lives going
around believing that you know, white people are going to
go around and like hang black people at a moment's
notice about hegitation if you know, they cease worrying about
being picked up by the FBI. This wasn't like bougie
fantasy stuff. I mean, there was a reason the Vietnames
were hated and feared, and racial warfare and the specter
of it tends to have a brutalizing effect. This is
a fact. Interestingly, the Ties had perennially been brutalizing premiere
within coveted territories, and there wasn't the same sort of
fear and animus, which can go to a few different things.
I the Ties are less alien to the Camere than
the Vietnamese. I think and again I'm not some regional
studies got and I'm not an expert on Asian ethnicities.
But if we're gonna adopt the sort of French cultural
anthropology anthropological paradigm of South, they stags are literally being
into China with these two civilizational tendencies meet. All right, Well,
there's as much of India in Thailand as the risk China. Okay,
the Vietnamese are very different when you think of freedom.
This is too colloquial or simple minded, but drawing in
very basic broad strokes, when you think of gung ho
industrious Asians, you think of your thinking of people like
the Vietnamese. I think that goes without saying. And the
Vietnamese this much as they have this deep hostility to
the Han, they're very much alike. The Vietnamese are far
more of a martial race, which is fascinating. But that's
a discussion for another time. Cambodia, however, and again I'm
not saying this pejoratively at all, and I'm not just
making this observation from some diletons, understanding people who've lived
and labored there for decades and have made a study
of the culture over a lifetime. They insist Cambodia is
more like Africa than like China, from the fact that
it was characterized by these kings who would take literally
dozens of wives and hundreds of concubines who would be
bound to them because the king's virility, literally the ability
of the king to impregnate hundreds of women, that's a
sign from the heavens that the land is fertile. You know,
this idea of the camer viewing themselves as black quite
literally contra enemies from without who exploit them, which isn't untrue.
These extended kinship networks at tribal level that determine outcomes
in the social strata, all these things, and in contrast
to those tendencies, you know, young Salasar brothers and sisters,
they were inundated with Buddhism. And there's something fascinating. I'm
not at all a religious studies expert or anything. I
know something about Islam other than that I can't really
speak to other people's confessional heritage other than mine own
and Bible prosism. But this odd nihilism that came to
characterize the premier rouge attitude towards homicide at massive scale.
There's something of a Buddhist stamp on that. I'm not
saying Buddhism is evil or tends towards megacide at all,
but there's if you read Schopenhauer in the World as
Will in Representation, and if you read Julius Evela's book
on Buddhism well in which are really interesting. I mean, obviously,
I mean the World's will representation is essential reading the
eve them and Buddhism. I find that stuff interesting, but
it's probably not for everybody, but both make a reference.
There is primarily an e vetic concept, I believe, correct
me if I'm wrong. In the comments meditative and spiritual
practice called tapas. It's usually associated with a sort of
extreme and deep as seam, but topass literally means burning,
burning away, not just of impure thoughts and desires, but
of desire itself and connection to the world, and release
from all things corporeal and related to appetite and passions.
And there is precedent for pious Buddhists literally burning themselves alive,
you know, and I know that this has been held
out as an example of Hindu savagery and what have you.
I'm not even saying that's incorrect. I know in one
of those Mando films, it might be shocking in Asia,
which interestingly was held out as a legit documentary despite
the fact like Gorgon, you know, this isn't gonna mean
anything good youngsters, but the footage and it's not like
face is a death and Iman's real footage. You know,
there's these people, and this is in the mid seventies,
when India is even more of a backwater than today.
There's some poor people. They'll they'll find a holy man
to cremate their loved ones when they're dead, and then
they pour the ashes in the Ganges because they can't
afford a proper, you know, mausoleum or whatever. But then
there's people obviously bathing in the Ganges, which is full
of human detritus. It's fetted, and this footage was exhibited.
I mean, I believe that the guys who shot it,
they probably had this passionate view, which you'd have to
if you're gonna immerse yourself that way primitive cultures. But
it was obviously being showcased for kind of lurid reasons.
And I mean, I'm not gonna lie like I find
that revolting. I'm I'm Anglo teutonic, I'm a clean freak.
I find that gross to the million fucking degrees. But obviously,
aside from the kind of mysterial grossness of it, it
bespeaks of a lack of concern, not just with human
remains and proper disposal of these things, but a total
lack of or little apathy about death. Okay, the sort
of rationalist perspective and the perspective of people like Burnham,
James Burnham, I mean was well and the orient life
is abundant and cheap. Yeah, that's part of it, but
that's not the whole story. There's something about that Hindu
and original Buddhist conception about life and death being basically synonymous,
and they're not being anything to lament about an individual
losing their life and there being nothing to fear about
losing one's own life because it represents a sort of
final release into this collective element that sustains all things
until all becomes ash. And I really believe that. I
know that evil had a sense of early Buddhism and
Hinduism being aryan, and that's not incorrect, but it's a
totally different conceptual orientation about the process of death than
what it represents and filtered down after that racial overcast,
who was the progenitor of these theological orientations is long gone.
It takes on a certain casual banality that habituates people
to certain excesses that I do not think would be
realizable in other kinds of societies. That's probably what I've
said the scope, But that's another thing that's neglected about it,
in part because I mean, in the twentieth century, even
as theological impulses were quite literally tearing down the vessige
of legitimacy of communist governments, people in academ and what
have you still hadn't put together that the hard materialism
and the atheist sensibility of the twentieth century was disappearing.
So this wasn't talked about in the era. I mean,
people are uncomfortable with that sort of subject matter anyway.
But that's one of the reasons I've been researching this
a lot in my fiction The camer Rouge, and it's
a plot device. It's an important aspect of the narrative.
Billy Wam's father is killed by the Khmer Rouge when
he's on the ground fighting as a mercenary of sorts
and the service of Warsaw Pact, and that haunts Billy Wang,
And you know, that's it's gone along in a fascination
of mine. Since I was a kid, I thought the
whole thing frightening, but it's there's something that movie. I
like the new twenty eight years later movies, even though
a bunch of people currently don't, but you know, the
most recent ones twenty eight years later. And then the
Seagull was literally called the Bone Temple. This massive bone
cathedral is a is a major set piece and aspect
of it, and there's a very Buddhist sensibility around it.
The guy who builds it a white man. He's this
English doctor who lives among the infected because he's trying
to find a way to cure them so that something,
you know, approaching civilized life can be restored. But he's
taken on this momento Moory sensibility. So when people die,
whether they're infected or whether they're you know, a human,
he uh, he takes their remains and gives them a
proper burial. Then he boils down their skull and polishes it,
and he adds it to this massive structure and it's
it's profound, and you know, to this day, there's there's
this whole uh monument of skulls in Cambodia. I mean
he will burn incense and stuff. And obviously it's one
part monument to the the victims, but it's also there's
something totemic about it that you wouldn't find in the
in the West that would upset people like reliquary. It's
literally like skulls upon skulls. You know. The only thing
conval of that is there's the there's the Bone Cathedral
in the Czech Republic. I guess I've only seen photos.
I think that's incredibly cool, but at the same time
it's also really creepy. I wouldn't want to go to
church there, okay, but that that's also it was built,
I believe during the height of the the thirteen eighty
nine plague, which I think was the worst, so it
you know, it makes sense, is in that capacity when
death is most approximate. Look, yeah, that's that's all I got. Man.
We'll get into the killing fields in the next episode.
That not I mean, I'll mention the film. I mean
the actual killing fields and deal bit more with the
brass tacks of the of the communist mega side that
happened there. I just thought some biographical information was imperative
way the foundation. Well that's all I got.
Speaker 1: All right, good stuff, thank you. I'm going to point
everybody over to Thomas's substack real Thomas seven seven seven
dot substack dot com and thomas His website is Thomas
seven seven seven dot com. The t is a seven
and Thomas has started uploading some stuff to his YouTube channel,
so go check that out too. Yeah, thank you, body,
I appreciate it. Talk to you on the next one.
Speaker 2: Thank you.