Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's "Playboy King," manipulated factions from his 1941 coronation under Vichy France to his 1953 independence victory, which relied on a fraudulent 99.8% referendum. By abdicating in 1955 to run for office, he rigged elections and suppressed dissent, alienating democrats while allowing Vietnamese forces to use Cambodian soil against the French and later U.S. interests. This authoritarian consolidation, driven by his obsession with remaining in charge, arguably made Pol Pot's eventual genocide inevitable, illustrating how colonial failures and local autocracy fueled the region's catastrophic civil war. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Guaranteed Human Podcast Intro00:02:07
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
Reading a Story About Pol Pot00:03:00
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, friends, and welcome again to Behind the Bastards.
I'm Robert Evans, your host on yet another journey into the life and mind of one of the worst people in all of history.
My guest today is Caitlin Gill.
Hey, that's me.
Caitlin Gill is a comedian.
Yep, presumably.
Some would argue that.
And you're involved in a television production that's happening now?
It happened, and it's about to come out July 11th.
Tune in to True TV's Misfits and Monsters.
Bobcat Goldwyn made a fun TV show, and I bet you're going to like it.
So watch it when it's on.
So on this episode of the show, I will be talking to a vastly more accomplished comedian and reading a story about a bad person in history.
I live in a backyard.
Don't worry about it.
We all live in yards.
Okay.
Let's not bragging that yours is a backyard.
It's true.
I have moved back from the front yard.
That feels good, you know?
Yeah.
I've been living on a porch for a while, and it is not ideal.
Speaking of porches, what do you know about the Cambodian mass killings in the 1970s?
I know that it is one of the most brutally depressing aspects of history you can look at.
Wasn't it like 50s forward?
It was long and really bad.
There was a lot of shit going on from the 50s forward.
It's like a million plus.
Yeah, yeah.
The mass killing started in 1975, went through to like 78 or 79.
About three and a half years, the Khmer Rouge was in power.
What do you know about the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot?
I mean, some.
I have a political science degree and I paid attention in those classes, but that was 15 years ago.
So my updated history, not so great.
But in the past, I was disgustingly fascinated.
Seems like one of the most cruel regimes that has ever gotten to spend some time in power.
Real bad, real, real bad.
Real bad people.
And it was one of those things.
So when we started this podcast, you know, I had some people that I clearly had plans for.
I wanted to talk about Hitler's favorite young adult novels and Saddam Hussein's erotic memoirs and all that sort of stuff.
And then there were people where it was like, yeah, we're probably going to do a Pol Pot episode at some point.
But I didn't really know anything more than what I'd learned in high school about him, which is like, yeah, he killed like a million and a half people.
They had people with glasses murdered for some reason.
And that's the end of the...
And you figure it's like the same story with a guy like Hitler or Stalin, where it was just some asshole who wound up in charge and just started murdering the groups of people they hated.
And so I didn't really know much about Pol Pot.
And I started reading into the story recently.
And I read a great book called Pol Pot, The Anatomy of Terror.
And then that sent me down a whole reading hole.
And anyway, I wound up realizing that the most interesting character, the most terrible person behind all of this is not Pol Pot himself.
The Monk King's Parents Worry00:14:14
And instead, it's a different guy, a different person entirely, Prince Norodom Sehanuk.
Have you ever heard of that?
I have not heard of this prince.
Well, Samdetch Priya Norodom Sahanuk was born in Nampenham, Cambodia on October 31st, 1922.
He was a member of both of Cambodia's two leading royal families, the Sisawaths and the Norodoms.
But he was not born as the heir apparent.
So Cambodia has like a different sort of way of appointing their kings.
Nowadays, there's like a royal council that sort of is a mix of elected and unelected people who votes on the new king.
Back when he was born, the French were in charge of Cambodia.
And so they would appoint new kings when the king died.
Isn't that cute?
Yeah.
So Norodom was an only child.
And since this was the 20s, his parents were terrified he was going to die on them.
They consulted an astrologer, which was a normal thing to do at the time.
Like everybody in Cambodia consulted him.
This would have been like right after the Russians thought it was a good idea to talk to Rasputin.
Yeah, like right in that area.
This is within five years of that.
Medicine is almost happening, but mystics are still like, maybe I'm medicine.
Yeah, it's like you get a flu and your family's like, well, I guess that's it for you.
And a single prince, an only child prince, can't have any appearance of injury or illness anyway.
So you get real creepy about how, you know, it's a lot of secrets really early.
Yeah.
Especially if you're talking to mystics.
Something's wrong with that kid.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It bleeds a lot or it like can't breathe good or I don't know.
They were just worried.
And the astrologer.
You have to assume.
Yeah.
They're all lumpy babies.
Every baby is lumpy.
How are you the only child and not in line for a throne?
Well, he was in line for it, but it wasn't a guarantee.
So he was like, you know, you've got a certain number of kids who could be.
Okay.
The royal families are big.
And so the prince are like, okay, well, there's like nine or ten kids we get to pick from.
And he was obviously like, it wasn't guaranteed, but he was in the running.
So his parents were very concerned about him.
And I took him to an astrologer.
And the astrologer warned that if he was raised by his mom and dad, he would die early.
So as a young boy, Noradom was raised by his grandmother, Madame Chow Hun Pat.
She was.
I feel like you're describing a very bleak version of the movie, Big.
Yes.
That's this entire story.
There is a giant.
Oh, good.
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be great.
Oh, wait, no, I'm thinking about Big Fish.
Oh, Big Fish is.
Very different films.
Yeah, I just like that, like, I don't let him grow up with my parents anymore.
I want to be a big kid right now.
Only a very dark evil version.
Yeah.
No Zoltan.
It's like a source of, you know, an astrologer screaming at your parents.
Boy, I really got that movie wrong.
Because you're talking about the Tom Hanks film.
Oh, yeah.
I'm talking about the piano.
I'm talking about a Cambodian dictator.
You did bring up another one of history's great monsters, but we haven't done our Tom Hanks.
But he definitely belongs to that.
Oh, the tea you could spill.
So his grandmother's really religious.
She's a Buddhist known for giving a lot of money to monks, which was pretty popular at the time.
She dies when he's a young boy.
And immediately after she dies, he's ordained as a monk for exactly 24 hours.
That was like a thing in Cambodian culture where everybody was, and it was really common for like, if your family had any money at all, they'd send you away to learn how to be a monk for a little while.
So it's not like the universal church that you sign up for just to marry your friends?
It is for him.
So for the prince, because he might be the king, anytime you might be a leader, they send you off to be a monk for exactly a day.
Just so he can say, like, no, he's enlightened.
He's been a monk.
Like, he's a monk king sort of thing.
That was important.
If you were a normal Cambodian who was like middle class or up, you'd also be a monk, but you monk, but you'd be there for months.
And the training for non-king monks was brutal.
Here's how a normal Cambodian at the time explained like what the actual monks went through.
If you came to the wad as a novice, you had to study for three months before you were allowed to wear the robe.
You were taught the etiquette of a monk, how to put on the robe, how to speak, how to walk, how to put your palms together to show respect.
And you were given a thrashing if you didn't do as they said.
If you didn't walk correctly, you were beaten.
You had to walk quietly and slowly without making any sound with your feet, and you weren't allowed to swing your arms.
You had to move serenely.
You had to learn by heart in Pali the rules of conduct and the Buddhist precepts that you could recite them without hesitation.
If you hesitated, you were beaten.
Man.
Yeah.
That's like getting an honorary degree from like the worst university.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like Cobra Kai University.
Everybody's getting beaten except for the prince who shows up for one day and he gets to be a monk straight away.
So as a young child, the prince goes to school in Saigon over in Vietnam and then he goes to France.
He gets a really nice Western education.
He develops a love for the arts and for French cooking.
His mother nicknames him Toul or Tubby.
At this point, I'm on his side.
I get it.
France is pretty irresistible.
France is irresistible.
And your mom calls you fat.
If you're just like a portly, rich Cambodian prince, honestly, just kick it in France, baby.
Like if that's what you're into, then be there.
The food is great in both places, but so different.
Go be a tubby in France.
Yeah.
So he spends a lot of time as a young man being a fat kid in France while other young Cambodian kids are getting beaten to learn how to be monks.
So so far I'm just jealous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everybody's probably jealous.
So in 1941, his grandfather, who was the current king, dies.
And the French, you know, have to pick from the options in the royal families.
And in 1941, they decide to bet on Noradam Sahanouk because he seemed like the choice who'd give them the least grief.
This is what he looked like on the day he was ordained.
And we'll have these pictures up on the behind the bastard's website.
There's no reason to shame him.
I feel weight on him.
This is what makes me feel like his mom is probably giving him a complex because that's not a fat kid.
He does have evil eyes.
When you look at the picture, it looks like, even just printed out on computer paper, I feel like he is across a bar and like raising his eyebrow at me.
There's something in his eyebrows.
He's staring at you for a while.
Yeah, it's like a painting that looks at you when you move across the room.
This is the guy that leers at you from across the bar, only in photograph form.
But he's kind of hot.
Like, I'm not mad he's looking at me, except I know he's trouble, you know?
Yeah, and if you knew that his mom had called him fat his whole childhood, you'd probably assume like, oh, there's some darkness going on.
Yes, there's issues.
I don't want, I mean, this is a good time for me to assess that he's kind of handsome and say that out loud before I hear about all the horrible things that he did.
He is kind of.
Because remember, handsome people can be really bad.
Bad people.
Handsome people with, it has to be said, fabulous handsome people.
Beautiful people are evil.
Never forget.
Yeah, you can tell by his cheekbones that he's dangerous.
So in 1941, the French government that appoints him isn't really France.
It's Vichy France.
You know, the Germans had conquered them.
So he was appointed king by the puppet government for the Nazi occupiers.
Their leader, Marshal Petain, became the leader of Cambodia as well.
The children who grew up in Cambodia's public schools at the time were educated to patain as standards which emphasized unity, order, and labor.
The city was seen as the incarnation of all evil, and peasant life was highlighted as the soul of the nation.
One of the children in these schools was a guy named Saloth Tsar, who would grow into a guy named Pol Pot.
Just a little bit of foreboding there.
So Cambodia is in an awkward position during World War II.
Pol Pot came from a much different social status, not a prince.
Not a prince, kind of upper middle class.
Okay, right.
Yeah, not rich, but his family was doing okay.
Yeah.
He's the whiniest.
Yeah, he comes from a pretty bougie little background.
But he had to do the full monk training, too.
So he's the guy getting the shit kicked out of him by monks and learning about how cities are evil in school.
Yes.
While the actual king is flying to France and developing a complex because his mom calls him fat.
So Cambodia is in an awkward position during World War II.
France is technically an Axis ally at this point, like the Vichy France, but the Japanese eventually wound up conquering Cambodia just a couple of months after the prince gets coronated.
So Sihanouk now becomes Japan's puppet and proclaims Cambodian independence.
Obviously, that didn't last longer than 1945.
As soon as the war is over, Sihanouk starts advocating for more independence from France.
He introduced universal male suffrage to his country and press freedom, and he establishes an elected parliament.
So far, he seems pretty enlightened for a king in Cambodia in the 40s.
If you're a Cambodian dude.
If you're a Cambodian dude.
Well, you can't just go from zero to letting women vote.
You can't just go from zero to human rights for humans.
Sorry, I know.
I'll go.
Bleeding rag feminist over here.
What are you, huh?
Sorry.
I mean, this was 25 years after we decided whether it was a family.
I just love the phrase universal male suffrage.
Like, you don't get to universal and then immediately qualify universal to specifically want.
It's just a funny turnover.
People I like suffer.
Yes.
All the people I like get to vote.
Yes.
Yeah.
You're all universally invited to my birthday party, except only 10 of you can come.
Yeah.
But he's woke by 40s standards.
Yes.
Yeah.
He is woke if you lower the bar.
Yes, correct.
So our 40s woke king is a lot of Cambodians at the time, the ones who were living in cities and towns who were educated and kind of plugged into the world, it probably seemed like they were slowly sort of joining modernity and heading towards the kind of system England has, where you've got a king, but the king's kind of just a figure to look pretty.
We care about their weddings and shit, but like that's kind of what people were hoping for, what a lot of people were hoping for.
But it's very different outside of the cities.
So in rural Cambodia, probably about a quarter of Cambodian peasants of the country, like the real deep peasants, had never used money at all in their lives.
Burning Man.
I'm just, that was terrible.
Yeah, it's kind of like Burning Man, but with subsistence farming.
Yeah, but yes.
But if you don't farm enough rice, you starve.
Yeah.
And you spend $7,000 to get there and you don't have like a dust mask and there's no glow sticks.
Yeah, well, otherwise totally Burning Man.
We have to assume there's glow sticks.
But yeah.
I would love it if somebody who's never used currency in their entire life and has just lived from the land that they're on for generations and you happen to be passing by and they're just glow, sticking with like where did you get those silent Rave that's been going on for millennia, that we just didn't know about?
A Thousand Year Old Rave?
Um, it's like the Thousand Year Old Egg, only so much more fun.
So the king's not a figurehead to the peasants, he's.
He's kind of he's seen.
He's seen as sort of a figurehead in the cities to the peasants.
He's semi-divine.
Sure, i'm gonna read a description of royal court life from that book, Pole Pot, The Anatomy Of Terror.
That I think sort of sets up kind of how the king is seen by the country people Each spring, crowds gathered to watch the royal oxen plow the sacred furrow, and all of those things are capitalized, from which the king's astrologer would divine whether or not there would be plenty or famine in the year ahead.
And at Tang Tok, the king's birthday, the provincial governors came to pay homage.
Royal protocol was draconian.
In his palace, if no longer in the colonized state over which he reigned, the king was still an absolute ruler, the master of life, venerated by the populace as a sacred, quasi-divine figure.
At royal audiences, the princes, mandarins, and other dignitaries crouch on all fours with their knees and elbows on the floor and their hands raised together before their heads.
The king sits above them, enthroned on a dais, sitting cross-legged like an Indian idol.
When he enters or leaves, all present prostrate themselves at three times.
No one has the right to speak unless the king addresses him, and no one may publicly disagree with anything the king says.
So you're already seeing sort of a disconnect between you've got the people in the cities who are like listening to the radio, they're watching TV, they're getting the newspapers, and then you've got the people who...
Yeah, they're on Roomspringer, and then there's people still on the farm.
Yeah, yeah, the king makes the rain come.
Which is not like a joke.
That's like a widespread belief.
So there's already a big disconnect here.
So the Khmer language, and the Khmer are like the majority of people of Cambodia.
It has its own special sub-language for how to talk to the king.
So there's like a separate dictionary of words you just use to refer to the king and his family.
The king was seen as impossibly high above even his high ministers, who are known non-jokingly as, quote, we who carry the king's excrement on our heads.
So that's...
I mean, it's jokingly.
Come on.
That is a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
Like, yeah, we got your shit on our head, buddy.
Like, yeah, this is a little bit more.
I'm going to ask you in a few more pages if you think that was jokey or if you think that's...
I'm not saying it wasn't literal even, but it's got a...
There's a wink in there somewhere.
There's a jester in the court.
Yeah, there might be a couple of winks.
I'll eat my words later.
I won't eat the king's feces, but I will.
I'll be happy to eat my words.
Yeah, so this is, you can imagine, you know, guy grows up with his mom calling him tubby, and now nobody's allowed to argue with him, and he's philosophically shitting.
I was a tubby kid.
We do not deserve power until we go through and unpack our trauma.
You can't, you can't hand, you know, you can take the fat off the kid.
You can't take the fat kid out of the fat kid.
No.
There's this like, I'm an only child who was tubby.
Trust, trust.
Yeah.
Trust.
No, yeah.
I grew up as a fat kid.
And, you know, it's one of those things where when you see a fat kid who loses weight, like, that's someone who didn't deal with their trauma, who's just like trying to control themselves and their body through like...
There's something dark in there is all I'm saying.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You have to shine the light in your own darkness.
Yeah.
And, you know, whatever happened to you in the bathroom, in the locker room, or on the playground, eventually you have to shine a little light on it or you become a dictator if you happen to be a prince.
Yeah.
Well, what he had to do.
I just became like a bad assistant manager.
You know, I think that's what most people do.
But it depends on your access.
It's where you start from.
Usually you go for a tiny amount of power.
Yeah.
But he kind of got on the...
I'm mad with my moderate amount of power.
So we're talking old-fashioned kings here.
Noradom's grandfather was famous for having a gigantic harem made up of beautiful local ladies.
By the late 30s, he was too old and sickly to make use of them.
So these ladies weren't allowed to go out and live their own lives.
They got frustrated and things got weird.
One of the ladies courted by the old king was a girl named Ryung.
She was the older sister to Saloth Tsar, the guy who became Pol Pot.
He was about 15 at this point in time, and his sister's position meant he got to spend some time hanging around the royal palace.
Since he was just 15, he was even allowed to hang out with the king's courtesans, and they would fondle him.
Oh, wow.
So that's Pol Pot's 15-year-old childhood is like hanging out in the royal palace and getting like literally masturbated by the king's board horny courtesans.
Evil King Wants to Build Big00:06:54
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So just trying to...
You're describing like a very high-class Charles Manson existence.
Yeah.
That's Charles Manson's mom, you know, bit of a...
She is a girl about town.
I think that's actually how he described her.
Boy.
And, you know, he got traded for beer, but the man who became Pol Pot just got jerked off by a bunch of royal courtesy.
It's the same, but different.
It is the same but different.
Apparently, that's my job here today.
Here's something that's like what you're talking about, but not good to point out that this story that starts with a different class level, and it's also a bad ending.
This is not a good jump.
It's not a good thing to do to a 15-year-old.
15-year-olds maybe should get, like, if you happen to get rubbed off when you were 15, congratulations, and I bet you're fine.
I hope for most of you, it is a positive memory.
If you're a 15-year-old being jerked off by a royal harem, that is going to change your path.
Yeah, it's going to change your path.
That's different than like you're dating somebody in high school.
Right.
Yeah.
You're either going to be an interesting sex educator or apparently a dangerous dictator.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And probably the second.
So yeah, this is the sort of environment, cultural environment Noradam Sahanek comes to power in.
You know, he's the king, and so he's dealing with both like you've got these people in the cities who they're supposed to treat him like a god, but they don't because he's just this, they know he's just like this guy, and they're trying to be like, well, let's be a normal country that doesn't worship the king.
But then he's got these people in the sticks who, to whom he's literally a deity.
So you can see how this would cause some conflicts within the king and within the country.
I feel like for any crafty con man, crisis is opportunity.
This is a great, you know, you wink and nod on one side and you get to grease the other wheels.
Well, speaking of crisis, by the time the king comes to power in the late 40s, well, he comes to power in 41, by the time he's really getting used to things, the Cold War starts kicking off.
And his neighbors are all dealing with, you know, communism.
You've got Vietnam with this communist revolt against the French going on right now.
And at first, it seemed like Cambodia was immune to communism.
So in traditional Marxist theory, the revolution begins within the laboring class, right?
You know, the factory workers who get fed up with serving the needs of capital.
In the 40s and 50s, Cambodia had like a couple of thousand actual laborers in the whole country.
Most countries' subsistence farmers.
They didn't really give a fuck about capitalism or socialism.
This is because neither had anything to do with their lives.
They worked at most about six months a year to cover their basic needs.
And they were all Theravada Buddhists.
And Theravada Buddhism places no value on acquiring wealth.
And therefore, number one, there was no cultural need to acquire wealth, and there just wasn't a lot to buy.
King Sihanuk liked to tell a story about an American aid expert who visited Cambodia in the 50s and convinced some villagers to start using modern fertilizer.
They doubled their harvest yields in a year, and the aid worker came back the next year and was surprised to see that each farmer had only grown half as many crops this the next year.
He didn't understand why they wouldn't want to produce twice as much, but clearly the Cambodians were like, no, we can farm half as much and make the same amount of food and work even less.
So basically they're the smartest people in the world.
Yes, yeah, they really got it right.
They're really nailing it in like the late 40s.
Can I ask a dumb historical question from a little bit farther back?
For sure.
I feel like I should know in terms of like the Silk Road and the spice trade.
Cambodia has always been in a significant position for colonizers, but what is there a product that everybody was hungry for from the outside?
Like, why did my people, the Scots, get on a boat to go there?
I come from Thieves and Plunders.
So I always say to Cambodia, I'm not aware of this part.
I mean, I'll take a step.
In the broader sense of why people leave the tiny rock that they were on to go get something better from outside.
Pepper or a spice or a mineral.
Why were people coming from places in the West to Cambodia?
What were they plundering?
What were they taking?
I mean, so it's one of those things.
Cambodia, most of what they produced was rice.
Yeah, exactly.
So Cambodia's history is heavily based on sort of conflicts between Vietnam, like Vietnam is their traditional enemy because Vietnam's like the big regional power.
And so there's been a lot of like more or less constant sort of power struggles between China and Vietnam and Cambodia kind of winds up in the middle.
And of course, during World War II, they wound up in the middle between everybody and the Japanese.
But like they're never, nobody more about position on the map than resources within the world.
Exactly.
Because they're not like a major industrial power, obviously.
There's not like giant gold mines or anything.
Like it's a country of like small farmers who just want to make enough food to keep their families alive.
I just know that by the 40s, a bunch of economies were kind of closing up to do that.
Most of their people would have been subsistence farmers, so it made sense for the economy to stay more closed than to invite in trade since there would always be such an imbalance.
Yeah.
And there's an interesting period of history when countries were more isolated and fascinating things happened in their history within that bubble because Cambodians weren't out buying ritzcrackers.
They were, you know, everything that happened is internally.
Their history is inside the bubble along with their economy.
So it's just kind of interesting to pick out and figure out what people were busy doing.
And it's things like growing less crops because you didn't need to grow anything.
Who's going to need it?
Which is fucking great.
But one of the things they also have going on is Angkor Wat is in Cambodia, which is this crazy, gigantic, beautiful, like complex of massive buildings that was built during the Khmer Empire, which had fallen hundreds of years before this point.
But so that's King Sihanouk's looking at that and saying like our people used to be great and build great gigantic things.
And I have to figure out some way to make us into a significant slaves.
The answer is always slaves.
Slaves are always the answer to why people made big, cool stuff.
It's always slaves.
Slaves are always the terrible answer.
You just spoiled a lot of the story.
I don't know.
That is not a spoiler.
Could that be a spoiler?
Evil King wants to build something big.
There's no gap here.
That is a straight line.
So we're going to get back to what exactly this not yet evil, but definitely evil king is going to do later.
So we're going to continue talking about this evil or not yet evil king in a minute.
But right now, we have to advertise some products because the capitalist gods.
Yeah, yeah.
None of us are Cambodian people.
We will all work much harder in order to purchase things which we can fill our homes with.
So grab dum dums.
Grab a box of money and a bag of money and a suitcase of money and some dum dums.
And some dum dums.
Buy some dum dums.
This show's official sponsor is not dum-dums, but we're advertising them anyway.
And now some other things.
Capitalist Gods and Dum Dums00:03:18
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Mental Illness Combined With Power00:15:51
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So yeah, we're back and we're talking about Cambodia and its culture at the time when King Noadom Sahanuk is sort of coming into power, the late 40s, the early 50s.
And he's frustrated because he wants to modernize his country.
He wants to make it, you know, great again.
And the people just kind of want to farm and not get involved in any of the conflicts raging around them.
So there's sort of this little, like, it's not really a huge conflict yet, but you can see some groundwork laid where the king, you know, wants to open things up more to the world.
And the people are just sort of like, but, you know, we got rice.
Like, I feel fine.
So yeah.
There was a communist movement afoot in Cambodia in the late 40s and early 50s, but it was dominated by the Vietnam, by the Viet Minh, who you might guess from the name were Vietnamese and not Cambodian.
Yeah, this made them not super popular among the Cambodians because again, there's this history of Vietnam being sort of this domineering power over Cambodia.
So so far, it doesn't look like the communists are going to gain a big foothold in Cambodia.
The problem is that the country occupies a really sweet position from the point of view of someone trying to smuggle weapons into Vietnam in order to fight the French.
So it was important to Vietnam to have backing in Cambodia.
They weren't really successful in spreading communism, but they had some success working with an anti-colonial rebel movement called the Khmer Isserak.
And the Israak aren't really communists.
They're more Democrats.
They want Cambodia to vote for leaders, and they don't want the French to be in their fucking country anymore.
And they're not super communist, but they're willing to take guns from the communists in order to try to kick out the French.
So from a fighting standpoint, the Issarak look a lot like our conception of the Viet Cong.
They're jungle warriors who carry out hit and run attacks against the military and wage an endless guerrilla war.
I'm not going to try to bog you down in details of Cambodian politics at this time, although they are fascinating.
What's important for the story is that the Khmer Isserak are the guys trying to uproot the French and thus King Sihanouk.
You know, they call him a traitor and a collaborationist for sort of working with the French.
What era, how far have we moved in history?
We're in the early 50s, 51, 52.
And this is the point at time at which the conflict between the Israels and the French starts to really get bloody.
There's a quote in the book Pol Pot that I mentioned earlier from Shang Sung, who is a Cambodian senator today, who remembered how in his village in the Takeo province, the Issiraks would decapitate victims and stuff their stomachs with grass.
When we as children were fishing in the ponds, he remembered, we would find severed heads in the water.
It didn't bother us.
We were used to it.
We'd yank them out by the hair and throw them aside.
That was around 1949.
You had Arby's deal with it.
Yeah.
So things are getting...
Cambodia in the late 40s to early 50s is transitioning from like this mostly peaceful place to being sort of increasingly racked with civil conflict.
The Isirak are pretty brutal guys.
Many of their leaders wore what were known as kunkrok or smoke children, which are amulets made from mummified fetuses that were said to stop bullets.
The colonial soldiers were no better.
One former government soldier, these are like local Cambodian soldiers recruited from the cities, but fighting under French command.
One former government soldier described his unit's work as, quote, we would move into villages, kill the men and women who had not already fled, and then engage in individual tests of strength, which consisted of grasping infants by the legs and then pulling them apart.
So things are getting bad in Cambodia in the early 50s.
And the king sees the writing on the wall, which is that this rebel movement, like he's a smart guy.
He's already guessed from the start of the fighting between the French and the Vietnamese that the Vietnamese are going to kick the French out.
And he knows that the Vietnamese are also going to continue funding the rebels in Cambodia to kick the French out, which means that he's going to get overthrown and probably ripped apart by a mob if he doesn't figure out some cunning way to get his country free of France without letting the rebels win.
Now that is a dilly of a pickle.
That is a dilly of a pickle.
That is a dilly.
How would you solve that problem?
Well, slaves.
I'm just kidding.
Always dropping back to slaves.
Well, nationalism is a pretty easy trick at that stage or something like it.
Really?
Where, you know, you've got the former loyalty of those who are worshiping you, and you've got the up-and-coming, gleaming cities that are looking to build and grow.
You know, close the ranks and make it about being Cambodian, not French or Vietnamese.
You know what you would have made?
Pretty good dictator?
You would have made a great king of Cambodia in the 1950s.
You would have nailed being king of Cambodia in the 1950s.
I don't know.
That is a pretty delicate dance.
That's some tough marketing.
You'd need the right people.
This is a delicate dance.
And so, spoiler, King Noradom Sahanuk, as I think people.
This is spoiler alert history.
It's just like, hey, you didn't read this.
Spoiler alert for a thing that millions of people know.
He's definitely a bastard.
Like, he belongs on this show.
But he's kind of, it's one of those, like, he is a dancer.
This whole story is him dancing around.
And there's an entire era of like up until like, well, right now, up until the 50s, he's like, from the 1900 to 1950, there are a whole bunch of royal courts just like whipping and dodging.
Like, just dance, like, oh, God, we don't know how to do it.
Oh, boy.
It's like a stupid gif of kids on a like, you know, in a playground, a little whirligig thing where everybody's spinning too hard and everybody's trying to hold on.
They don't know what happened to them.
One by one, they all fly off.
Fat kid goes last, but you know he's going to go.
You know he's going to go.
But this fat kid's going to hang on.
They hang on tight, and some are still clinging, but it's just a period.
No time in monarchical history is boring.
They're weird.
Monarchies are very weird.
But there's that period in history seems to be so volatile where they just couldn't keep up with the pace of social change everywhere, either backwards or forwards.
And I'm sure he's dancing along with the rest.
He's dancing.
So you remember when he comes to power, one of the first things he does is he lets them in a vote and he establishes a parliament that has some power.
So he's basically sharing power with the parliament.
And he has a lot of power.
Like he's not like the king of England is now where there's no, or I guess they have an attack.
He's not just a figurehead.
But there's a parliament.
They have power.
And they're right now dominated by the Democratic Party, which was kind of like the Democratic Party here, kind of a general liberal-ish party who included just sort of a melange of left-wing and centrist people.
And their big thing is they want to be an actual democracy.
So they're kind of ideologically more or less in line with the Issarak, but they don't want to do it violently.
They want to peacefully sort of proceed to being decolonized and whatnot.
So the Isiraks, meanwhile, are a little bit further to the left.
Some of them are outright communists.
Their most popular leader is a guy named Sun Nok Than, whose goal was to get the Democrats to back him in pushing the French authorities out of Cambodia.
So he's trying to get his rebel movement to ally with the people in power and sort of force a coup against the government.
And he's one of the guys attacking the king for being a puppet of the French.
So this all comes to a head in June of 1952 when the king, aged 30, decides it's time for him to jump into politics for the first time because he'd sort of tried to be above factional politics.
You know, you've got the Cambodian right wing and you've got the Democrats and he doesn't really weigh in.
So he finally decides to weigh in and he gave a speech attacking the Democrats and whining that people had dared to say that collaborating with the French wasn't cool.
This prompts an uprising of right-wing Cambodians in the city who take to the streets and advocate for the destruction of the current Democrat-dominated party in power.
Sihunuk calls up French troops, Moroccans actually, in the middle of the night on June 9th, he dissolves the government, assumes emergency powers, and declares himself prime minister.
Oh, there you go.
I forgot about emergency powers.
Don't manipulate your public on the inside.
Every now and then you create an emergency that you didn't have to, you then have to assume emergency powers for.
Well, yeah.
And it was just a coincidence.
Why that done, baby?
Yeah, yeah.
So he announces that he's launching a royal crusade to gain Cambodian independence within three years.
He bans all political meetings in Nom Penh, and he has French soldiers and armored vehicles fill the streets to make sure nobody talks about politics other than the politics that he wants to talk about.
Honestly, that sounds refreshing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No more just armed men stopping you from talking about the government.
I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
Yeah.
So the French, in spite of the fact that he says Cambodia needs to be independent from France, the French are more or less on his side because their basic idea is that democracy in Cambodia was a mistake.
Cambodians aren't ready to be voting because they're going to vote to kick the French out.
And only a king can keep things peaceful.
The Republicans in the capital, and by that I mean people who want a republic, not the conservatives, because the conservatives are all about this.
The Republicans in the capital aren't happy.
Sihanouk's crackdown inspires protests.
In November of 1952, there's a big strike by students in Nam Penh in several towns.
King Sihanouk tells them all to get back to class, but instead a bunch of them hole up in the National Assembly, which is the parliament building.
Monks came out to protest and argue that the king was in fact a dick.
In January of 53, there are some grenade attacks on schools in Nam Penh.
Philip Short, author of Anatomy of a Nightmare, says that these attacks were either from the rebels to provoke the king into brutal reprisals or just ordered by the king so that he could justify a crackdown.
And it seems like it's probably the second one.
So he has some people start throwing grenades into political gatherings so that he can basically crack down on everybody.
So he gives a speech and says, from now on, any individual or political party that opposes my policies will be declared a traitor to the nation and punished accordingly.
The king is supported in this by his mom, who'd once called him tubby.
She hated democracy and thought the idea of people voting was a deliberate insult to her personally.
That is hilarious.
Oh my God, that is some serious malignant narcissism.
Yeah.
That is mental illness combined with power.
That is so funny.
The personal insult that people would want to vote.
Yeah.
That's like that they might want to decide the path of their country and life is like them shitting on you.
There's also just so many crooked democracies.
Like, yeah, sure, 98% of the populace voted for this one person.
Like, just assume that you could set that up.
I love it.
I love it.
That's so funny.
It's great.
My tubby son is letting people vote again.
They're letting no.
You don't get to choose.
So the French are still on board at this point.
They want a strong man in Cambodia who can keep a lid on the communists.
So they support King Sihanouk while he arrests nine members of the Democratic Party and imprisons them without trial for plotting against the people.
I mean, for colonial power, the more brutal your dictator, the better.
You don't really care what happens on the ground as long as there's only one thing happening.
I can't think of a single time where a colonial power backed a dictator and didn't have things work out great.
Well, it works for the colonial power.
I'm not saying it works in the sense that's like, yeah, a knife works for a murderer.
Murder's not cool.
That's not what I'm saying.
It worked for us in Vietnam.
If you are France, it makes sense to prop up a brutal dictator because that prevents anything from changing, period.
You don't care how brutal it is.
You just don't want it to change.
And that right there is why all of the colonial powers are still in charge of their colonies.
Well, I didn't say it works in the long term.
There is no long-term success.
There's no long con for colonies.
That's why it doesn't work.
No.
Yeah, so you're right.
The French are doing exactly what you'd expect the French to do.
Sihanouk disbands student organizations that had any kind of political bent.
He also attacks the heads of the two Buddhist monastic orders who had protested against him for sympathizing with the rebels.
He says, quote, for the first time in my life, I have to grab the monks by the throat.
Me, the most religious man in the kingdom, because I've had enough, more than enough.
My subjects and the elite among my subjects must obey.
So shortly thereafter, right after this, with his kingdom in a state of unrest and outright civil war in some sections, Sihanouk flies to France to drop some pounds.
So when you read about this guy in any of the history books, it'll regularly talk about him leaving for France to his house in the Riviera to take what's called a rest cure or a dietary cure, which I thought it was, because you hear terms like that a lot with old-timey leaders where they're taking a rest cure, which is just like they're taking a vacation.
Yeah.
But they don't want to say they're taking a vacation, so it's like a cure.
For him, it was a weight loss clinic.
So he would go to France regularly throughout his reign when he got too fat to go to a French weight loss clinic and drop pounds.
So that's basically what he's doing.
Like he cracks down on all political dissent.
He arrests a bunch of people and then he goes to Paris.
He's just a fat camp here.
Yeah.
So he's a great, great guy.
This would be a pattern, yeah, for the king for his entire life.
So after Fat Camp, the king flies over to Paris and he meets with the French president and gives him a list of demands.
He wants full control of the Cambodian military.
He wants French people in Cambodia to be subject to Cambodian law.
And he wants a guarantee of eventual independence for his country.
All of which, those are reasonable things for the head of state of a country to ask of another country who just took them over to get cheap rice, I guess.
Yeah.
Well, again, it's for a strategic cult, like a physician.
Yeah, yeah.
They wanted to, yeah, what they had.
They have so much more than rice.
They're really good at.
You know, part of the reason that they're satisfied is because what they have is really good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The people there are satisfied.
The French are not satisfied because colonialism isn't working out for them.
It's one of those things.
You'd think like after they stopped being in constant conflict with Britain and like Germany got sort of cut down to size by the Second World War and they'd stop like, what do we have all these colonies?
Like what's what is it?
What about this?
Like everyone else has stopped playing the game.
The game's not going on.
It's a different world now.
That process all started after World War I when at the end of World War I they rewrote the lines to figure out how to share stuff because they had spent centuries taking it over and what they learned is you don't get to let it go.
You can't like it's all over your hands.
It's not it you're grabbing a gel not a solid.
You don't get to pull it away.
So they were stuck with it and they propped up all these dictators that we're talking about now and sham governments and it's just a plan that there was no option other than for it to fail.
Yes.
No way to end the history that started evil, not evil.
So you're watching the gasps of colonialism, you know, fade away.
But why were they doing this?
They already answered that question.
They shouldn't have, you know, they were trying to not do it.
There's just no way to undo it once you start fucking the whole world.
Once you conquer the whole world for 150 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, France.
France, I think, had been in control of this part of the world since like the 1860s.
So yeah, they've been here a little while, which is why all of their government documents at this time are in like French and stuff.
France Dissolves Overnight Suddenly00:04:30
But to his credit, King Sihanouk at no point thinks that colonialism is anything but fucked.
Like when the French are fighting against the Vietnamese, he's like, you guys are going to get your butts kicked.
And when the Americans get involved, he's like, this is not going to work for anybody.
Like, he knows that from the get-go.
So credit where it's due, he is smarter than all of the Europeans in this story, which maybe isn't the highest bar in the world.
They're not sending their best people to run their countries anymore.
So yeah, he goes to the French president and he's like, I want my country's independence and full control of the military, yada, yada, yada.
The French president's like, lol, no.
So Sihanouk flies to the U.S. to see if we would back him in his quest for independence.
He meets with the Secretary of State, Alan Dulles, who is like, if the French army leaves, you're going to all be taken over by communists, and we can't have that.
So just be cool with the French being there.
The president refused to meet with him, but White House officials coordinating his trip did offer to take the king to the circus, which he took as an insult, which wouldn't you?
I mean, honestly, yeah.
The president can't hang with you, and we're not inviting you to dinner, which we always do with heads of state.
But there's a circus.
Have you ever seen elephants?
I guess you have.
We stole these elephants from you.
Look at our carnies.
Yeah, we stole them.
Look at these elephants we took from you and some carnies.
Elephants just telegraphing, take me home.
It would be great if he stole carnies and brought carnies back to Cambodia.
Just that's the cultural exchange he wants to make.
We steal the elephants, they steal carnies.
That is not an even trade.
No higher.
That's a solid screenplay.
Yeah.
Okay.
So yeah.
This made Sihanouk angry.
The French and the Americans both ignoring him.
He gives an explosive interview to the New York Times where he threatens America that Cambodia will go communist if it's not given its independence.
Dun dun dun.
He repeated the basic idea a few months later in a memorandum he sent to both the Americans and the British.
I am asking the USA and Great Britain if just for once they will kindly consider the problem of Cambodia from the viewpoint of the Khmers instead of that of the French.
My people will tell you, we don't know what communist slavery means, but the slavery imposed by the French we know well, for we are now living under it.
So one of the weird things about this guy is when you read the things that he says to his people, he comes across as a total dick.
And when you read everything he's saying to the colonial powers in the U.S., he's like, totally reasonable.
Like, you guys are ignoring what everybody here wants and just trying to do your own thing, and it's going to be a fucking disaster.
He's like, yeah, right.
But then when he talks to his own people, it's like, dissent will be crushed.
So in June of 1953, Sihanouk makes his play for Cambodian independence and absolute power.
He secretly goes to Bangkok and he announces that he won't return to the capital or talk to French officials again until they agree to set his country free.
If we cannot obtain what we want peacefully, the entire Khmer people are resolved to obtain their freedom by other means and are ready to sacrifice their lives.
So a few days later, this prompts the two largest Buddhist orders in Cambodia to call for a holy war against the French.
The next day, Sihanouk calls for Khmer units in the French army to desert.
At the end of the month, he called for all citizens between 20 and 35 years of age to join the fight for independence.
So the French military in Cambodia basically dissolves overnight because the king told them to leave and he's like the fucking semi-divine figure.
So the French realize that like they just can't hold the country without this guy who they'd basically been treating as a big toddler the entire time.
So by October, they've had enough and they agree to relinquish all military control of Cambodia to the king.
It'll take another year for France to totally pull out of their former colony, but King Sihanouk had done it.
In November of 1953, the French handed over total control in a dumb and self-aggrandizing ceremony where they like, basically they frame it as like a graduation ceremony.
Like, you people are finally ready to control your own country.
Yeah, it's the cue.
That you ran for thousands of years before we came in here.
But yeah, all's well.
Cambodia is independent.
The yoke of colonialism has been cast off and the communists are not in charge.
So it seems like things are going great for Sihanouk now.
And probably nothing terrible will happen in this story.
Yeah, that's the end of the podcast.
This was really fun.
I'm not sure why this guy was such a bastard.
I mean, it started kind of bad.
That crushing dissent was kind of rude.
Anyway, thanks.
Yeah.
All right.
But no, actually, that is a lie.
Oh, it didn't go good?
It didn't go good after that?
Well, we'll get into that after we sell some products and or...
Do you like products and or services?
I love both products and services.
Cambodia Independence Seems Great Now00:04:37
And you know what else I love?
Exchanging money for them.
Oh, yeah.
You know what I love is producing value for shareholders, which is then handed to me in a fraction that I can spend on my own products and services, which create value for other shareholders.
What do you know?
So let's all do that right now.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games.
You get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Motor.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Left-Wing Revolution Inevitable Coming00:14:41
And we're back.
We are talking about King Noradam Sihanouk, who has just succeeded in wangling freedom for his country from the French colonial oppressor, Pig Dogs.
So it seems like all's great, except for everything isn't great.
Sihanouk's triumph led to an immediate and bloody escalation of the fighting in Cambodia.
The rebels, under that Than guy we talked about earlier, argued that the prince was basically a slave of the French.
They claimed that his friendly relations with them were proof that he was just a figurehead and he was going to send Cambodians over to die in Vietnam.
So yeah, the fighting continued and it turned out that Sihanouk wasn't actually all that good at war.
By the middle of 1954, he'd lost about 40% of his territory to the rebels.
The fighting was bloody enough that nobody wanted to really keep killing.
And in May, rebel representatives and the king traveled to Switzerland to talk it out with a bunch of other countries, including Vietnam, the U.S., and for some reason, Canada.
There's other countries there too.
Canada was just the one that may be like, what is Canada?
Really good at apologies.
Yeah.
So this is right around the time, you know, you had North Vietnam and North Korea had already been established at that point.
And so the Khmer rebels in the north are like, we want our own separate country.
We don't want to be ruled by the king.
We want our own legit democracy and stuff where we can, you know, choose our own path without this king doing whatever the hell he wants.
And yeah, so that's their hope going into this going into this session.
The rebels begged the Soviet Union and China to stick up for them, but the U.S. did not want what they assumed would just become a separate communist Cambodia above regular Cambodia.
And the Soviet Union and China weren't willing to fight for the Cambodians.
So everybody works out an agreement where the rebels will lay down their arms and elections will be held in 1955.
It sounds like Sihanouk wins this one, but everybody knew that once the elections were held, the Democrats, which were heavily backed by the rebels, would win.
And their most popular candidate would be Than, the guy who'd been leading the rebels.
So this would have left Sihanouk as the constitutional monarch of a government that hated him and was definitely going to do whatever it could to turn him into just a figurehead.
So the U.S. is happy with this because it means that, unlike everywhere else in Southeast Asia, a country was about to happily vote for a democratic government.
They actually liked Than.
He was pro-U.S.
So they're like, this is a great thing for us.
We've established a democracy in Southeast Asia.
Let's wash our hands and walk away.
But Sihanouk is not happy.
Letting people choose who they wanted to lead them basically ran against all of his deeply held convictions, most of which were that he should be the guy in charge of Cambodia.
So in February of 1955, after this agreement is made and the rebels lay down their arms, the king calls a referendum on his royal crusade, you know, the thing that freed Cambodia from the French.
And he's basically asking the whole kingdom to vote, do you like me?
Yes or no?
Voters were told, quote, if you love the king, choose a white ballot.
If you don't love the king, a black ballot.
Of those voting, 99.8% chose white ballots, saying they loved the king.
But the turnout was really low.
Not a lot of people.
It's like 98% of he and his mom.
Yeah, yeah.
100% of him and his mom calls him.
Oh, 98.
Yeah, mom.
So a few days later, you know, he's kind of fuming over the low turnout, and he's fuming over the fact that all the polls are saying the Democrats and this guy he doesn't like Than are going to win the election.
And he winds up renting a house next to a big gathering for the Democratic Party and like listening into one of their speeches.
And it ends and there's this huge eruption of applause.
And according to people who were there with him at the time, he starts weeping with rage when he hears how popular the Democrats are.
So he's desperate and his fragile ego.
That's some more schoolyard shit.
Yeah.
Hearing people cheering for like someone else on the dodgeball court.
They're not even angry at you.
It's like it's not enough to be a beloved king.
Like the fact that anybody else is liked is just burning him alive.
Yeah.
So yeah, he's desperate and his fragile ego can't take being sidelined by some popularly elected politicians.
So on March 21st, the king makes a surprise broadcast.
Surprise.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, not like a fun one, though?
It's not like a birthday party?
You tell me.
I'm going to read the broadcast.
My enemies work against me ceaselessly.
And I should note that anytime there's a me in here, it's spelled with the M capitalized.
Oh, royals.
Nothing like that will ever happen again, and certainly not in our own country.
I will say this could almost be a tweet from our current president.
Yes, close your eyes and listen and just pretend.
Certain of our students who love injustice are determined to serve the Democrats and Sun Nok Than.
The educated, the highly placed, and the rich spend their time throwing up obstacles to my work for the sake of their own interest and ambitions.
All of this has completely discouraged me and prevents me continuing to reign.
If I remain on the throne, I will be unable to work in your interests.
My poor and humble subjects, freed from my golden cage in the royal palace, I offer my life and my strength to my people.
For though I leave the throne, I shall not shirk my duty to serve.
So the king abdicated.
He throws down his office.
Yeah.
Well, the king abdicates.
He has his dad become the new king after him, because, you know, kings and shit.
Yes, I guess.
That's usually how they do that.
So now he's a prince and a private citizen, and he's free to run for election against the Democrats.
So he creates his own political party.
He calls it the People's Community, so it would sound like a socialist party, even though it wasn't.
All the conservative Cambodians instantly dropped their parties and they flocked to the Prince's banner, along with more than a few of the Democrats, because, hey, the Prince is popular.
The Prince's party, Senkum, makes a formidable rival to the Democrats, but the king had misjudged a little.
His party had no policies and no plans.
Its only stated goal was blind support of Prince Sihanuk.
So.
I love that you go, like, as a leader of the party, you go from like being actually king, and then when you're running for office to be essentially a king, or like, you know, an executive leader, you get to the...
You get up to make a speech and you're like, I don't know my plan.
Don't you just call me king or print?
Doesn't it just become present?
I still just go to fat camp, right?
I want to be president.
My plan is to go back to fat camp, just like it was.
It's eerie how well you've predicted this.
So Cambodia.
He's probably stress eating a lot right now.
I'm just saying.
Oh, God, he must be.
Just baguettes all day long.
Oh, man.
Just pouring chocolate on them and crying.
How could you not?
If I was literally...
If I was like a Cambodian king, I would be like a feudal lord just walking from like street food cart to street food cart.
Like, I've come for my offerings.
Chicken and rice and tea immediately.
I will have the duck as well.
This is a mark of the kind of man he is because he could have legitimately lived that life where he just is rich and beloved and gets fed forever and he could just walk around letting people give him things.
That could be his whole life.
But instead, he wants to be in charge, which only crazy people want.
That's true.
Only crazy people actually want power.
Yeah, so the king's party has no policies and no plans.
And even with the king's popularity, the Democrats are still slated to win a lot of the seats.
And so he's not going to be in absolute power.
You know, he's going to have to do a coalition government and be a democracy.
The king wants no part in that.
So five weeks before the vote, he uses his control of the police and military to launch a massive intimidation campaign against the Cambodian left wing.
He has the authors of communist and lefty journals and newspapers imprisoned.
Several far-left candidates are outright murdered.
King Sienak uses the unrest from his repressive tactics to justify a heavy police presence at the voting stations.
So he starts arresting people.
That leads to protests, which he then uses as evidence that he needs to fill the polling locations with police and soldiers.
Left-wing voters who were brave enough to go vote were handed colored voting slips, each color representing a party, and they didn't have to put the slip into an urn while officials, police, and soldiers watched them.
So, voter turnout was not great among the Cambodian left-wing.
But the king still did not do very well.
So, he had his minions just lie about the vote count.
In constituencies where his party's candidate finished second, they just outright destroy all the voting slips and murder the winner.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very simple.
Yeah.
Very simple.
So there's a lot of, like, when he, the king, spoiler alert, died in 2012, I think.
And when you read the obituaries about him, they're mostly positive in like Western newspapers.
And they'll all talk about like that.
None of them are even consistent about how much he won by.
They'll all say between 84 and 99% of the vote.
But nobody, it's frustrating because like the Telegraph or someone will be like reporting on this and say like, and he won election with 99% of the vote.
No, he didn't.
He murdered people.
The newspapers and like the, well, the journalism in colonia, like colonizers nations have a really hard time actually reporting on why.
Like the who, what, when, and where is not that hard.
But why these things are happening kind of eludes, like, you know, even still.
But I imagine, especially the reporting at the time is a little clueless about the why.
The weird thing is the reporting at the time, when he wins this election, the foreign journalists who are in Cambodia cry foul at the obvious cheating.
Like they're like, this is clearly fucked up.
Here's all of the different things that went wrong that were wrong.
But the international community sticks their fingers in their ears.
So the Americans and the French are just happy Cambodia didn't go communist.
And they're kind of like, don't, like, who gives a fuck?
Who gives a fuck if this country that's not America has a prince dictator now?
So the whole mess led one Cambodian voter to conclude: taking part in elections is just for propaganda.
An election is a power struggle.
The one who has power in his hands is the one who controls the outcome.
You want to guess who said that?
Oh, come on.
That's our little buddy.
One guess.
That's little, he's got a pot and a pole.
That's our little buddy Pol Pot.
Paul's about as cute as I could make it.
That's our little buddy.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is kind of his little original.
You shouldn't get a fun name if you're a dictator.
You shouldn't get something fun to say.
It should be clunky.
It's hard.
I am already ashamed.
I keep calling the prince the prince because I am intimidated about getting names wrong.
And I apologize.
I've written it down phonetically all over my note card, but I'm still going to call him the prince.
And Pol Pot is just so, it shouldn't be fun to say.
No, it shouldn't.
And he has the cutest name of any person who's still millions of people.
Yes.
I mean, the list is pretty short.
Yeah.
But Chairman Mao, pretty cute name, because it makes me think of cats.
Sure, yeah, but the chairman part, real heavy.
Yeah, the chairman is not a cute name.
Pol Pot branding is real sharp.
Yeah, yeah.
Clean.
You know, and that's you got to give credit to the communists.
Their branding was on point at this period of time.
In this period of time, but that slipped.
Yeah.
They paid less attention to the aesthetic as time went on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's very true.
So yeah, Pol Pot at the time of this election is working for the Democratic Party.
So he's working for the Democratic Party, but he's also an officer in a secret underground Cambodian Communist Party.
Pol Pot and his fellow communists did want to change Cambodia's system of government, but prior to the election, they hadn't wanted a violent war, an overthrow or anything.
So Mao Zedong, who was basically like the most respected sort of communist philosopher in Asia, had laid out a theory of how to flip countries like Cambodia, who were feudal or colonized nations that didn't have a big laboring class.
And it was like how to flip them to communism without bloodshed.
So first you needed a democratic revolution where peasants and workers and the bourgeoisie all worked together to supplant the king, kick out the colonizers, and gain a democracy.
And then Mao said you'd have a normal democracy for decades, probably, for a very long time, and it would be capitalist, and that would be fine.
And basically, the left would gain power gradually over time as people saw the flaws in capitalism until everyone just agreed that communism was a swell idea and you had a peaceful transition to communism.
Well, that worked, right?
Well, that's what these guys were wanting to do.
So Pol Pot, as a young man, right up until this election happens, believes in the democratic process, thinks it's a necessary step on the way towards making the country the way he wants to be, and doesn't want there to be any fighting in his country.
You know, they would have been happy with the Democrats winning power and, you know, then just voting for a while.
But when Sihanouk cramps, just before I hear about the rest of this, I'm going to say that if you are a guy who kills a million and a half people, be you a prince or fighting against a prince in a Democratic Party, that's in you before you get that power.
You don't care how you get it.
You're a sociopath.
So you don't have any moral connection to what you're actually spewing.
You just collect and want power, influence, whatever it is.
If you, this guy would have, you know, again, if he was just a bad assistant manager, he would have killed everyone in his Arby's.
Like, it's, yeah.
I feel like these seeds were already planted.
Pol Pot and the prince are the same evil born in different soil.
I feel like the seeds are there, but I don't feel like they're necessarily getting watered.
Like, you've got, I think Pol Pot, for one thing, he's a little different than, like, he's not like a guy like Hitler.
So you get a guy like, like, you've got kind of these two different theories of how to look at history.
There's trends and forces, and then there's like the great man theory.
And like, it's probably a mix of the two.
But you look at like in Germany after World War I, there was going to be another fight between France and Germany because of just how the whole thing fucking ended.
Somebody was, some strongman asshole was going to take charge of Germany.
But because it's Hitler, you have the Holocaust and the invasion of like Russia and whatnot.
And I think Pol Pot is more like George.
Right sociopath, right time.
Interesting.
Well, he kind of, like certain things, like there was because of the shit the prince is doing, because he's clamping down on oppression, because he's giving the left no legitimate way to win power, there was going to be a left-wing revolution in Cambodia.
And it was worse than it would have been because Pol Pot is the man he is.
But I think the prince made it inevitable that this was going to happen.
I think him crushing all dissent and me, because like a guy, like maybe Pol Pot always would have been an asshole, but there's like it, it's, it's, I don't know, it's hard to say because like before this time, he's like driving around in a, in a nice car and he's like dating like rich ladies and like wants to be like he doesn't seem to want to murder three million people at this point in his life.
And I guess, you know, it's it's debatable as to what would happen, but.
Prince Made Pol Pot Inevitable00:03:50
I don't know.
I don't know.
If you're the person who can do that, that is in you.
And no moral compass, no philosophy you espouse is greater than whatever synapse fires that lets you kill a million people.
But I feel like that synapse is there.
You're absolutely right.
But I don't know that it necessarily leads to you because there's got to be, we've probably all worked with someone who, if they gained power, could kill a million and a half people or whatever.
Yes.
But instead they're a stand-up comedian because that's just the way life goes.
I just think of a Jim Jones who was like, you know, his politics, if all you did was list out Jim Jones' politics, you'd be like, well, this sounds like a person I probably agree with on most things.
And then you're like, oh, but cult leader who killed, who just killed, who killed everyone.
Because it's the, you're, you know, it's interesting when you agree with the shell of someone and then on the inside is this horrible evil thing.
So I feel like even if Pol Pot was like, no, I'm a good guy.
I don't believe in colonial power.
I want justice.
It's like, you know, you're somewhere in you.
Someone is going to kill.
Yeah, that guy was always in here.
But I take your point that because the prince set in motion something that you couldn't stop and Pol Pot is who he is, so it was that.
Well, and you're looking at Cambodia prior to this.
It's not a country where most people are biting at the whip to like revolt against the system that exists.
But that starts to change after the prince, you know, brutally suppresses the left wing and essentially makes himself president-prince, which is, you know.
Well, president-prince is like an alternate universe I would love to live in.
Exactly.
We both pictured exactly what that would be.
Like Chapless Purple Pants and like the White House is like all technicolor because it's like white, but he put the colors laser show and shit.
You know what?
No one would have died in the war for Afghanistan and it would be so much more.
No one could dance so well.
Oh man.
Woo.
Sorry.
Thank you.
Thank you for taking me there.
Okay, please continue.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
God.
Can you imagine the things he would have done to the White House bowling alley?
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, it would have been a disco tech and it would have been fucking incredible.
God, that cabinet.
Yeah.
Fire.
Okay.
Well, now that we're all happy, let's go.
I felt good, right?
Okay, yeah.
Let's get back to talking about Cambodia in the mid-50s.
Pol Pot decides that democracy is bullshit and shortly thereafter takes to the jungle with all of his friends and comrades to do a jungle communist shit.
So yeah, Sahanuk is largely backed by conservatives, but he himself is not a conservative or a leftist.
He is a hymnist.
His only guiding moral principle is that he should be in charge of Cambodia.
So he doesn't really give a shit about politics.
He just wants to be the guy.
He's a smart guy.
He knows that Cambodia is going to eventually go full communist.
He knows the number one power in the region, China, is already communist, and he knows the United States is going to eventually get fed up with sticking their dick in the whole area and leave Vietnam.
So he figures that his main worry is the Vietnamese.
They have a history of bullying Cambodia, and they're the main backers of the Cambodian communist movement.
So Sihanuk comes up with a pretty clever plan.
He will let the Vietnamese use his country as a highway for their guns and money, first to fight against the French and then the U.S. He'll even let tens of thousands of them hide in Cambodia when the fighting isn't going their way.
But they have to stop giving guns to and training the local Cambodian communists.
Obviously, this pisses off the United States.
So Sihanouk's promise to them is that he'll brutally repress the communists in Cambodia.
There you go.
One hand washes the other.
That's how you do it.
That's how you brutally dictate.
Exactly.
So in foreign policy terms, he's in lockstep with the USSR and China.
But domestically, he's doing like a triple McCarthy and like everything, like killing all the communists in his own country.
So Noradam Sahanuk is the only guy who was simultaneously on both sides of the Cold War for the entirety of the Cold War.
Dancing, dancing, dancing and dancing and dancing and dancing.
Watch a royal court fall down.
Dancing While Royal Court Falls00:04:19
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we are, yeah.
So the prince's father served as king when the prince first abdicated.
When he died in 1960, the Sihanouk's mom, Queen Cosimak, wanted to be crowned, but, you know, his mom had spent his whole life calling him fat.
So the king flips the script on his mom and makes her guardian of the throne, which is a position with no power, and instead pushes through a constitutional amendment to make himself head of state for life.
So now, by 1960, he is the president and the head of state for life.
And that is where we are going to end the podcast for today.
And we will be back on Thursday to talk about the rest of Sihanouk's wacky career, which is, I mean, it's going to get dark.
I bet we're going to hear about some infrastructure improvement.
I bet we're going to hear a lot about like Robert's rules and how it was implemented.
Are you calling water filtration plants?
Oh, heck.
Because I got nine pages of water filtration plants.
I am so looking forward to that.
Beer rock, russie, beer rock.
That's what's coming, right?
That's a good chant.
That's a good chant.
It's definitely not like death, destruction, and horror.
I mean...
See you next time.
Not yet.
See you next time because you should plug some things before we roll out for the day and a half between the next podcast.
I am Caitlin Gill, and I have a website.
It is called CaitlinGillComedy.com.
And you can go there and then you can see my schedule.
It's the tab.
You click it and then there'll be a little calendar.
You can get tickets to any of my live shows.
Also, July 11th, Miss Witson Monsters comes out on True TV.
Watch it.
I'm Robert Evans.
I don't have any live shows, but I have a book.
You can buy it on Amazon.
It's called A Brief History of Vice.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK, Two Letters.
And this show, Behind the Bastards, is also on the internet: www.behindthebastards.com.
You can also find us on social media at BastardsPod.
So check us out.
We'll be putting sources and images up so that you can sort of follow along and get the visual picture of the story.
And we will be back on Thursday with part two of this particular Bastard's Tale.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
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