Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a charismatic film director who produced over 50 movies, enabled the Khmer Rouge regime that killed 1.5 to 3.5 million Cambodians. By purging political rivals, allowing secret U.S. bombing raids, and later allying with communists after his 1970 coup overthrow, he facilitated a genocide while remaining in house arrest complaining about dessert shortages. Despite directing films about landmine victims until the early 2000s and dying of cancer in 2012, millions still honor him today, illustrating how complex leadership can inadvertently unleash historical horrors that persist decades later. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hello, friends.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
This is part two of our episode on Prince Norodom Sehanuk, the man who made Pol Pot possible, which I am very proud of myself for saying properly.
My guest, as with the last episode, is Caitlin Gill.
That is I. Comedian writer, and possibly third gunman on the grassy knoll.
There's no way to prove that one.
The Man Who Made Pol Pot Possible00:14:43
Speaking of the 1960s, Prince Noradom Seyhanuk starts the 1960s as president and head of state for life of Cambodia.
He has purged the left wing in his own country, the Democratic Party, who threatened to overwhelm Cambodia with moderate liberal votes.
So he's gotten rid of those guys and he's down in charge.
And Sihanuk, let's get into his personality a little bit, because he's the sort of monarch who thinks being king should be a good time.
He throws ridiculous, gigantic parties, and he would often help cook the meals.
He was a gourmet cook, really good at throwing foods together.
He also liked to provide most of the entertainment.
One of his relatives at the time described him as, quote, an artist lost in politics.
An Australian diplomat who met him in 1959 said, Sihanouk was one of the few people I have ever encountered who deserves to be described as charismatic.
On an individual basis, he radiated charm, and for Cambodians in particular, he had a striking capacity to enthrall a crowd for good or ill.
The king was famous for performing elaborate song and dance numbers at his parties, including one reported double act with the Indonesian dictator, Sukarno.
So wouldn't you want to see that?
Wild.
Yeah.
Can you fucking oh man?
Oh man.
Have you ever seen the movie White Christmas?
Yeah.
You know that song that the two ladies do?
Yeah.
Sisters.
Uh-huh.
That they have to be sisters.
I imagine it being that.
Of course.
With these two guys who have millions of deaths on their hands.
Yeah.
It's just fun to think about.
He contained multitudes.
People are amazing.
He's also in a jazz band.
Like Bill, like Bill Clinton.
He was not on Arsenio, but he probably could have been.
But he would have charmed.
I bet he would have fucking killed him.
Really slayed him.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Here's another quote from that Australian diplomat.
At a Soire de Dansante, which I'm going to guess is a dance party.
I was lucky to attend at around 1.30 a.m.
And after the king and queen had left, he, the prince, beamed at the rest of us and said, well, their majesties have gone, and I suppose the rest of you can go now too.
But I am going to play until dawn, and I do hope you will stay.
And of course we all did.
Hell yeah.
So he's fucking charming.
He's great at playing.
And that's the thing.
Like you hear about a dictator who makes everyone listen to his music and you assume it would be a nightmare.
But every report is that he was actually a really talented musician and great at entertaining people and a great cook.
So he's like the guy you want to party with.
He's just also made himself absolute ruler of his country through max executions and violence.
But yeah, but he's a charming guy.
And his art wasn't limited to weird dances with other dictators.
He also produced and starred in dozens of movies.
So director President Prince Sihanuk got his start in the 1940s when he made two films called Tarzan Among the Khoi and Double Crime on the Maginot Line, which is a solid name.
Yeah, both of those are strong.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's great at titles.
From 1960 to 70, he produced 21 films, including nine documentaries, which is a pretty incredible rate for a guy who's also the prince and the president.
Yeah.
So these were not just show products like the North Korean film industry where the king gets credit, but really other people do all the work.
He seems to have spent substantially more time making movies than actually running his country.
He writes and directs almost all of his movies, and he stars in something like half of them.
So yeah.
Real triple threat.
We're up to like eight types of threats.
So many threats.
I found a paper from the University of Leeds that analyzed his filmography.
I think he made over 50 films by the time he died, and it argues that he used movies as a way to communicate directly with the peasant masses.
So Donald Trump has Twitter, Prince President Sihanuk had a weird ass movies.
Quote from that University of Leeds paper.
Sihanuk took the starring role in his films, depicting as many fictional characters as he had official roles throughout his political life.
This enabled Sihanuk to inhabit multiple roles and personas while still maintaining the integrity of the monarch.
So the points made in his movies are not subtle.
In 1967, he was having a spat with the Americans, who wanted Cambodia to stop it with all their damn neutrality, and who had tried to have him kill it a couple of times.
Sure, sure.
Yeah, the CIA was never good at that part of their job.
It's harder than it looks.
It is harder than it looks.
We'll give the CIA credit.
He was also having major domestic troubles.
He nationalized all trade and all of the banks, which caused a bunch of people to just smuggle their rice to Vietnam where they'd get more money for it anyway and could avoid giving the king a cut.
When the king realized what was going on, he sent in the army to force the peasants to sell their rice to him at the price he'd set.
This did not make the peasants happy.
And at a place called Samlaut, they revolted.
The king ordered mass beheadings and something like 10,000 people were dead by the time it was all over.
This was bad for the king's image, as you might imagine.
So he decided to make a movie, Shadows over Angkor, where he plays a heroic admiral who discovers an international plot to overthrow Cambodia's government.
At one point, he winds up with the American ambassador, played by his wife.
He takes her on a walk and explains how hard it is to be king of Cambodia.
They bond over this and fall in love, but then she gets sent away from Cambodia because the U.S. is mean.
Oh.
That's a sad one, right?
Yeah, that's pretty sad.
You can really feel the tragedy.
I saw that I would forget the death of my uncle and nephew I saw dangling from the hillside that they were hung from.
He cut my family's heads off, but I really believe him when he looks into the eyes of his wife playing an American diplomat.
Yep, yeah, I'm feeling that.
Yeah.
I told you he's got those bedroom eyes.
He does have those bedroom eyes.
We'll put some pictures of those up on the website.
He's a handsome man.
So a number of his films follow the same basic pattern.
The king and his wife playing basically the king and some broad go to Angkor Wat and the king gives a monologue.
Sihanook was able to spend so much time directing because he'd effectively outsourced all the hard work to the elected officials of Cambodia.
So when shit would go bad, rather than take the blame himself, he'd just scream at some of the Democrats in office and maybe throw a few of them in jail.
So there were still some liberals and left-wingers in his political party that he kept there so that whenever anything went bad, like when he massacred 10,000 peasants, he could have them arrested and be like, it was these guys.
These guys fucked it up.
That's handy.
Yeah.
I mean, there's never been another politician who's kept a bunch of people around him just so he could fire them to deflect blame from his family.
No, I feel like, yeah, Trailblazer.
And then when he needed violent deeds done, he would have the conservatives do it.
And then he would fire them after they massacred too many people.
So he's really like making the most out of democracy.
Yeah, he's dancing.
Just doing exactly what he wants and firing whoever he has to fire when people get angry at him for what he's doing.
So this story from 1957 is kind of typical of the way he liked to play local politics.
This is a quote from that book, Anatomy of Terror.
In August 1957, he summoned the leaders of the Democratic Party, whose continued existence afforded a kind of vicarious protection for all of the left-wing views, to a debate at the Royal Palace before an audience packed with his own supporters, which was broadcast over loudspeakers to a crowd of several thousand outside.
As they left, after five hours of public humiliation, they were dragged from their cars and beaten with rifle butts by palace guards.
So, this is Prince President Director King.
That sounds like a director.
I've been on set.
There's a little bit of Uwe Bole in him.
As the 60s start up, the Vietnam War does what the Vietnam War did, and suddenly both the U.S. and Vietnam are asking more of Prince Sihanuk.
He works at a great solution, though, where the Vietnamese can hide whole armies in his country and the U.S. can bomb them at the same time.
He manages to sort of keep a lid on things and dance from fire to fire while making tens of movies until January of 1968, when the communists launch the start of a revolutionary war.
This prompts C. Hannock to bring back one of those right-wing politicians he'd previously fired, a guy named Lon Nol.
So Lon Nol calls in the Air Force to bomb rebel areas and cut off their food supplies.
Rural citizens are resettled en masse to cut off any source of supply to the communists.
See Hannock starts handing out bounties to his soldiers for every rebel they kill.
This backfires because the king's soldiers just start decapitating.
Yeah, he says, I'll give you a bounty for every head of every rebel you bring me.
So they just start decapitating random villagers and bring them in for quick cash.
So maybe the king could have thought that went out better, but he was busy making his magnum opus, a film called Twilight.
Oh yeah.
Now this Twilight is not about a teenage girl and a vampire pedophile.
This Twilight is the love story of a prince played by the prince who hosts an Indian princess played by his wife.
He falls in love with her and the main conflict comes from the fact that the prince's nurse is also in love with him.
Aww.
Yeah, it's rough.
I found a review of it online with Letterbox D, this website, by someone named Matt Key, who gave it three stars.
Okay, all right.
Interesting, not too long film.
It's a simple drama about an elderly prince who falls in love with a guest.
Because of this, her nurse, who has been in love with him for years, begins to feel jealous.
It features a demonstration of nationalist propaganda in the middle that doesn't add up to the plot.
I'm going to say the three stars was generous.
That's what I'm going to say.
I told you before that the king's movies had a way of sending subtle messages to his people.
The message of this one was, I love you no matter how brutal my murder campaign looks.
So he's gaslighting his whole country through film, which is amazing.
During the movie, the prince realizes he has to dump both women.
He can't be defended the woman who loves him because his duty's to his country.
So there's this monologue at Angkor Wat, and here the prince tells the princess about another king of Cambodia who, quote, suffered the illness of his subjects more than his own and that their pain was the pain of the king.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's really feeling each and every decapitation.
Yeah.
Every decapitation of a peasant is a decapitation of his heart.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Anyway, he awards himself an Oscar for this film.
Shoot for the egot.
Am I.
Yeah.
He's always aiming high.
So this plays great for the peasants out in the country, but the educated middle-class people in Nam Penh have access to Hollywood movies.
They recognize this stuff as garbage, and they regularly cursed their president prince for, quote, his damn film shows and endless radio speeches.
Some conservatives were also angry that Prince Sahanek had kind of sort of maybe turned Cambodia from a country with almost no communists to a country that was full of them.
One of the things that the book Pol Pot points out is that there's a word in the Khmer language, the word for to reign, for like to be the king of a country, translates literally as to eat the kingdom, which is more or less what Sahanek does.
So his mom and his consort and his relatives are all incredibly corrupt, and they're all grafting the country for shitloads of money.
And the whole country basically runs on graft and bribery under Sahanek.
There's no real rule of law for people connected in any way to the royal family.
He recognizes that the corruption is going to bring him down as early as 1962, but he doesn't do anything about it.
Instead, he does stuff like spend a fifth of the yearly budget preparing for the Southeast Asian Games, which are supposed to be held in the capital.
The games got canceled anyway due to what Wikipedia calls unsettling circumstances in country.
Oof.
Like all of the civil war that had to start.
Yeah, yeah.
Like all the heads in the rivers and the heads in the rivers.
Exactly.
So thanks to the king's reforms, he'd done a great job of reforming education.
So hundreds of thousands of people now had educations in Cambodia, but the only jobs available to them were positions in the royal ministry, basically squeezing peasants for the government.
So he wound up with 100 unemployed students for every actual job and a peasant class who are being shafted off their farms by the corrupt government.
So he's pissed off all of the peasants by taking away their source of livelihood, and he's created a vast class of hundreds of thousands of educated kids with no jobs.
Oops.
How do you think that ends?
Slaves!
I'm sorry.
I just am going to keep coming back to that.
It's amazing.
Call back to last week, everybody.
Yeah.
So the president prince grows increasingly brutal as resistance to his reign intensifies.
He turned to a series of bloody PR stunts in order to distract the populace from his rampant corruption, the fact that living standards had fallen for everybody and the fact that a tiny amount of the country is getting ridiculously wealthy while most of the country suffers and starves.
In the 1960s, his security forces, quote-unquote, turn a captured young member of the Viet Minh cell.
They have him go to the U.S. Embassy and ask the Americans for help assassinating the prince.
Obviously, the Americans turn him into the police because they're not dumb.
But it made for a big flashy news story that implicates the Americans, the communists, and the Vietnamese.
This is all to distract from, you know, the fact that the war isn't going super well and that he's massacring people.
The captured Vietnamese kid, who'd been told he'd be released if he cooperated, was instead executed on the prince's orders.
So he's a great guy.
He regularly referred to Cambodia during the 60s as an oasis of peace.
Foreigners at the time remember Cambodia as a paradise of excess and tropical splendor.
This was all true if you never left the capital and were white or rich.
But things were bad outside the city, and they rapidly got worse after 1968.
So like I said, the communists, who are known as the Khmer Rouge now, which is a nickname actually the king came up with for them, launched the revolution in 1968.
It gets really bloody, and Sahanek is forced to cede more and more control to the conservatives so that they can fight.
And the entire world was turning over in 1968.
You had student revolutions in France and Mexico.
Nobody was looking.
Like, it was a good time if you wanted to turn things over to do it really fast and hard because it was happening kind of everywhere.
Yeah, and that's his hope, that he can turn over power for a little while.
It just seems like you have like 1919, 1945, 1968, and then like 2012, where everything flips over on these kind of predictable every 34-year clocks.
And that was just one of those years.
Yeah, exactly.
So things, you know, after 68 start to go worse and worse for him, and he gives more and more power to the conservatives so that they can fight this war against the communists.
There's no longer any kind of a left wing in Cambodian politics because by the late 60s, he'd had most of them executed, imprisoned, or exiled in various fits of rage.
So he'd use them as scapegoats until there were no goats left to escape.
So now the only people left are the communists out in the jungle and the right wing and the prince at home.
And as the right gains power, they start to get more uppity.
So, you know, the right, they sort of liked the king at first, but he doesn't prove to be super competent.
And they can see that his family is basically squirreling away all the country's wealth and he's letting the communists take over.
So yeah, the right wing is not a big fan of him.
So the king's...
He's also been blaming them for stuff.
And he's been blaming them for stuff and firing their elected leaders every time they do what he tells them to do.
And keeping leftists around for his own purposes.
Yeah.
Which, you know, has to bother a true believer who's more conservative.
Exactly.
So he's not doing great right now.
This is like that moment during the movie where our hero's at his lowest point.
Keeping Leftists for His Own Purposes00:03:14
Yeah, we are at the end of the second act here.
Exactly.
But I do want you to know that when our president prince director King is at his lowest point, he does have his best friend at his side.
And you want to guess who his best friend is?
A tub of ice cream.
Kim Il-sung.
Okay.
Yeah, dictator of North Korea, father of Kim Jong-il.
The pair met in 1965 at a conference hosted by Sukarno, the leader of Indonesia.
According to an article from the World Tribune, the Indonesian leader put them both in adjoining rooms because he thought they might be buddies.
That is so funny.
When one dictator looks at two other dictators and is like, you know who you should be?
You guys are going to be friends.
I'm going to do a little Cupid thing here and I'm going to shoot my arrow.
And it works.
And missile.
And it works for 30 years.
They're the best buddies.
This Mel Brookson and Karl Reinering.
That would be a great pair to have play them in the movie about this.
I mean, that's technically white.
That's definitely Whitewater.
He is a filmmaker.
He made a film called Blazing Saddles, but it was just putting a peasant on a horse that was actually on fire.
So it's a little rough.
It's not the same.
Three stars, though.
I give it three stars.
Yeah, solid, solid.
The propaganda reel in the middle is a little bit weird.
Yeah, it was jarring.
You know, push the plot forward.
Yeah, so despite being a pair of polar opposites, because Kim Il-sung is kind of a quieter, more introspective sort of dude.
He's not really much for talking to the press or performing in front of people.
And obviously, Sihanuk's, you know, an extrovert.
But despite this, they get along.
Kim Il-sung gives the prince a giant mansion compound in North Korea.
Sick.
And they hung out regularly for 30 years.
Prince Sahanuk always called him my best friend, the great leader.
But even with his friends at his back, by the late 60s, things are starting to get really bad in Cambodia.
Sihanouk's government is ordering mass executions and purging villages every day.
At one point, after ordering 200 dissidents murdered, Sihanouk said, I do not care if I am sent to hell.
I will submit the relevant documents to the devil himself.
The prince's iron-fisted repression of any dissent did more to encourage the Khmer Rouge than it did to scare them.
So basically, he's doing things like having captured rebels' severed heads displayed in the centers of towns and putting photographs of piles of their heads in the Khmer language press.
He's having Khmer Rouge cadres disemboweled by government soldiers.
They're mass executing leftists in one incident near the capital.
Troops take two children who are alleged to be messengers for the Khmer Rouge and cut their heads off with jagged palm tree fronds.
Jeez.
Which I didn't know you could do with palm tree fronds.
If one of those ever hit your car, it'll dent it.
Those things are serious.
And it'll cut a kid's head off if you try to head hard enough.
Yeah.
So even people on the right wing start to complain about how fucking brutal the army's getting.
Cienek tells these people who complain on the right that he'll send them to the next world if they keep up complaining.
So he's basically threatening everybody now because that's kind of always been his only tactic, but now there's not that many people left to threaten.
Right.
So up until this point, he had been very prophetic in seeing the U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam as doomed.
He'd been making his foreign policy calculations based on that.
This is why he'd kept friendly with Vietnam and China.
But in 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, and the U.S. beats them badly.
In America, the Tet Offensive is seen as proof that the war is a quagmire, but Prince Cihanok saw it as a huge win for America.
So he now thinks that the U.S. is in it for the long haul, which...
A Big Mistake in Vietnam00:02:51
Yeah.
If you're ever basing your policies off the U.S. being in anything for the long haul, you are not making the right decision.
Oh, I don't know.
In military conflict?
I mean, that's why we still have the longest wars going on.
Yeah, but that's only long by our standards.
Fair, not long by our.
We're going to leave like we did in Iraq.
Yes.
I mean, did we?
Did we?
We had to come back.
Yes.
But it didn't go well for the people who trusted us.
Well, that's where this story started with the French trying to prop up a Cambodian dictator to preserve their own interests.
And we have been doing the same.
Because what I learned from history when we can just do it again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, if there's one summary of American history, it's we don't learn things.
That is our national motto in terms of intervention, at least.
So we're going to get back to Prince Sihanuk's big mistake and spoiler alert, a coup.
Ooh.
Yeah.
Everybody loves a good old-fashioned coup.
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Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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He related to the Phantom at that point.
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Madness of the Khmer Rouge00:16:05
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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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.
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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.
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There's a lot of luck.
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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.
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Boy, those ads were great.
Some quality ads for them.
So many products.
And they were good.
Now we're talking about Cambodia again and Prince Sahanu.
So, Prince Sahanuk basically changes his calculus after the Tet Offensive and is like, no, I think the U.S. is in this for the long haul, and maybe they are a reliable country to be allied with.
Never a good decision.
So he starts trying to curry favor with the Americans.
He gets his chance in March of 1969 when President Nixon orders the U.S. Air Force to start bombing Cambodia to get at the Vietnamese troops hiding there.
The prince doesn't make a fuss.
And since these are meant to be secret bombing raids, the fact that he obliges means that Nixon gets to bomb Cambodia 3,000 times without, you know, making a big fuss about it.
So Nixon, being a good quid pro quo guy, extends Cambodia final recognition of her borders as her award.
So that's a sweet trade.
Yeah, I guess so.
You would let America bomb your country 3,000 times for recognition of your borders, right?
Yeah, totally.
I guess you could bomb my guest room if I got to define my fence line.
You have a good job.
You know, why not?
Well, I would in the house if I was willing to let it get bombed.
That's where the rebels are.
I'm saying that's how you get the good shit.
It's to let part of it get destroyed so you get rewarded somehow.
Yeah, that always works out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I'm just jealous of you for having a guest room.
No, I don't have a guest room.
I'm speaking proverbially about a fake house and a metaphor for Cambodia being a house where you destroyed part of your own home so you could keep a bigger part of it.
Never mind.
Leave my analogy behind.
I'm still jealous.
So, obviously, this bombing pisses off a lot of Cambodians, and it also hurts the prince among the Cambodian right-wing because they'd wanted to work with the U.S. to exterminate the communists from the beginning.
So, they saw this as the prince admitting that he'd been wrong to turn down America before.
So, the book, Pol Pot, The Anatomy of Terror, basically says that this was the point when the Prince's strategies finally failed him.
He'd wiped out the left wing of his own party, so he couldn't throw them under the bus.
Instead, he took the hits and saw his power erode.
Parliament refused to drop a corruption inquiry involving a member of his entourage, and he wound up losing face in public, which is a big deal in that part of the world.
So, in addition to all this, the prince is trying to figure out how to balance the budget.
Rampant corruption and a war had not been kind to Cambodia's finances.
Fortunately, he found a quick, easy fix.
You want to guess what it is?
Slaves!
Man, you are, you keep calling slaves, not yet, it's gambling.
Oh, dang it, gambling, sweet lady gambling.
So, Prince Zihanek sells gambling licenses to two casinos for a fee of 80 million francs per year each.
This made up a huge chunk of the budget shortfall and was exactly the wrong thing to do while fighting a civil war against communists who claim that you're letting the elite suck poor people dry.
Yeah.
So, here's a quote from that book, The Anatomy of Terror.
Nam Pen was soon alive with stories of people committing suicide after losing their life savings.
Business activity slumped as factory owners, government officials, shopkeepers, and laborers spent their days and nights courting ruin at the betting tables.
So, the right wing takes all of this as evidence that the prince should not be in power anymore.
They start stripping away the things he controls over the next year, boxing him out of decisions and overruling him.
He becomes openly hostile to the parliament.
At one point, he makes fun of the right-wing leader, Lon Nol, for being out of the country while he was receiving major surgery in Switzerland.
Immediately after making fun of Lon Nol for this, Prince Dehanek goes on vacation for a few months in the Mediterranean and in Europe.
Yep, yeah, he goes to Fat Camp.
So, this was a strategy of his.
When things got hot politically, he would just leave and go to Fat Camp or go on vacation for a couple of months.
And if things got better when he was away, then hey, things were better.
And if they got worse, then he would just blame whoever was in charge while he was away.
He hadn't been here, so it wasn't his fault.
But this time, while he's away, Parliament votes to withdraw confidence from the prince and demand that he relinquish his office as head of state.
So, in March of 1970, while he's fucking around in Europe, he gets cooed out of power.
Now, at this point, he had a number of options.
He did have a palace on the French Riviera.
He could have just retired, flown there, and hung out between there and with his homeboy, Kim Il-sung, and just kind of enjoyed life.
Or he could try to get back into power.
He just chills, right?
He just kicks it at the French Riviera?
Oh, no.
He decides that he still wants to be the king of, well, the Prince of Cambodia.
He still wants to be, you know.
Yeah.
He wants revenge, actually.
It's kind of more what he's going for.
Because he does not decide to fly back and fight, you know, in the city, you know, at the ballot box to try to regain his position from the people who'd overthrown him.
He brokers or gets a meeting set up between himself and the Khmer's Rouges.
And he agrees that he will support them now if they will back him as being the head of state once they take power.
So the king, who has spent most of the last decade fighting the communists, is now supporting the communists and is a king that is the figurehead of a communist revolution trying to overthrow the country of Cambodia.
Dance, dancing.
So he has really just kept swinging around here.
So what's interesting to me about this is that at no point does he think he's going to actually be in real power again.
The king knows from the get-go that the communists aren't going to let him actually rule the country.
He's going to be a figurehead and he's like, he's open about the fact they're going to spit him out as soon as they're done with him.
So he backs his former enemies not because he's going to get to be in charge again, but because fuck the right wing for throwing him out of power.
It's just about spite.
I love it.
So.
Petty.
Yeah.
Back in Cambodia, the right wing is finding out that kicking the prince out was not necessarily a great move because while he had lost the support of the people in the cities, the peasants don't know how to deal with the fact that the prince, who was to them still the king, had been fired.
One Catholic missionary at the time recalls being asked, how shall we tend our rice patties now that the king is not here to make it rain?
So maybe not a great decision.
on behalf of the Cambodian right wing.
Although if you're them, what do you do with this fucking guy?
Yeah, yes.
There's no win for anybody but exactly.
So the popularity of the Khmer's Rouges explodes now that they've got Sihanouk as a figurehead.
A writer from the New Yorker at the time noted, his name became the Khmer Rouge's greatest recruitment tool and the most extreme communist movement in history swept to power on royal coattails.
The civil war lasted five years and killed at least half a million people.
So it's on par with the Syrian civil war in terms of bloodiness already and in a shorter period of time.
It had been bad before, but the coup ramped things up to nightmare dimensions.
What kind of warfare is this that's killing so many people?
Because there's not, this isn't like, it wasn't like there were 20 million soldiers.
I really recommend giving a read to the book Pol Pot, The Anatomy of a Nightmare, because he talks a lot about Khmer culture.
But basically, things are very black and white in sort of the cultural's view on good and evil.
So there's not like in Maoist China, when the communists won, there were people who were executed.
But more often than not, they try to sort of reform people and make them, get them to work within the new system.
They don't really do that here.
So it's like a take-no-prisoners thing.
Exactly.
Is this like straight up machete de body, or is this, are there chemical weapons?
Are there...
Because there's bombs in the country that have been traveling to and fro.
There's so many people's weapons.
And you have your own weapons that you're making.
So we drop something like I had this written down at some point before, but we drop almost as many bombs as we dropped on Europe and World War II, on the U.S. does, just on Cambodia during this period.
So that's a big part of it.
And there's stories from like American military planners at the time who they would have, you know, they had B-52s flying over the country, and they would have like a map of Cambodia that laid out where all the villages they knew existed were.
And they would have this little box that they would place on the map that would show this is what one B-52 will destroy.
And it's noted that like you can't put them anywhere on the map without hitting villages.
So the bombing wipes out hundreds of thousands of people.
And in general, just the war, it's unspeakably brutal.
So there's both uprisings that are suppressed by soldiers massacring people.
The Khmer's Rouges passed after 1973, start massacring people too.
Like at the beginning of the war, it just turns into madness.
This is like people dying in all of these fights happening.
Because there are several wars bubbling in Cambodia at this time.
And the prince had kind of established the precedent of massacring the communists anywhere you found them.
There was never any sort of reform or just putting people in jail or whatever.
It was we capture them, we massacre them in public.
And so that kind of raised the stakes for everybody, and it just turned Into a fucking bloodbath.
There's a number of stories of people having their livers cut out and eaten in front of crowds because that becomes a thing or had been a thing for a while, but it like especially becomes a thing now.
The liver is a mysterious and powerful organ.
Yeah, exactly.
I understand its mystical power.
It's unbelievably brutal.
And it's made worse by the fact that a lot of the Khmer Rouge soldiers are like peasants who, before the war had started, had like didn't have electricity and like didn't use money and just lived like a peaceful pastoral life.
And then fire starts falling from the sky and they blame it all on the people in the fucking cities who are the center of the government forces.
And so it's horrible.
The war is horrible.
That is a civil war.
Yeah.
Eventually the government loses.
The Khmer Rouges win.
And the prince is back in his kingdom.
He had succeeded in creating the conditions for and then bringing to power the most radical unhinged communists in world history.
So we'll do a whole podcast in the Khmer Rouge at some point.
But to give you an idea of how nuts things are from the get-go, like the first big thing they do when they're in power is make everybody leave the cities.
Like the Nam Pen, the capital had swelled to like 2.2 million people by the time they took over, mostly from like rural people fleeing in the wake of this war to try to get somewhere safe.
So they take all of these city people and all the people who'd lived in towns, people who were like middle-class factory workers, people who were educated people, all those people, they make leave the city and march out into the country and start farming.
So the death toll from the Khmer Rouge is usually put anywhere between 1.5 million to 3.5 million.
At most half a million to a million of those were executions from the government where actually Pol Pot and his cronies saying, we need to kill these people and these people.
They did a lot of that.
But the vast majority of people who died just starved to death.
Not because they were trying to starve people to death, but because they just had no idea what they were doing and had these crazy theories about what would make the country most productive, that we could make Cambodia into like this engine of agricultural production if we throw everyone out of the cities and make them farm.
And there's stories of them like taking a bunch of former diplomats and stuff and making them like try to grow crops in a basketball court.
Like it's fucking batshit crazy.
But these people only get into power because the king first took his country from a place where there was no sort of foothold for the communists and did everything that you'd want to do to encourage the movement and then backed them and helped them recruit an army so they could take over the country just for his own petty sense of vengeance.
So it's a nightmare.
It's possible that as many as three and a half million out of a population of seven million Cambodians died.
It's probably the highest proportion of a country ever murdered by their own government.
Yeah, when you asked me at the top of the last episode what I knew about this era in history, it's like it's hard to jump in cold and be like, well, isn't that where half of a country died?
That's what we're talking about.
Yeah, Killed like intellectual, but it was more of a like anyone who just disagreed with them thing.
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.
Well, it wasn't like that's not even the like that's what gets like that's a thing that they killed a lot of intellectuals, but most of the deaths are again just because they had no idea what they were doing.
Like it was people who and like some of it like it well also when you do end up killing your intellectuals whether or not it's because they are intellectual because they disagree with you it is difficult to make new plans.
Yeah, it's difficult to make things work.
They do stuff like try to make everybody eat their meals communally in order to encourage a lot of the like they make it illegal to hunt and to forage for food so like people starve even more.
It's just a nightmare and it's like the last people who should be in charge of a country wind up in charge of a country.
But this whole time the prince is writing out his time in a mansion.
You know, he's not given any real power and he's not allowed to leave, so he's kind of on house arrest.
But in like a sick house, bro.
But in a sick house.
He has it hard too, and he complains during this time that he regularly is not given enough bananas to make Bananas Foster.
So everyone is suffering in Cambodia right now, is the point, okay?
The suffering of his people.
Enough bananas.
You only need one.
Bananas Foster is just basically banana flame, but you can do one banana.
What if you want to cook a lot of Bananas Foster?
Too bad.
You get one banana.
I'm just saying he's suffering as I'm feeling his pain.
Yeah, he's suffering a lot too.
You know, one of the things that the Khmer Rouge did at this point in time was because there was a blood shortage.
They would suck the blood out of living people until they died.
But the king is suffering too, okay?
Suffering and One Banana00:10:51
So the Khmer Rouge is in power for three and a half years before they provoke an invasion from Vietnam.
The Vietnamese invasion goes well in terms of kicking the Khmer Rouge out of power because they're not great at defending the country.
Sure.
But the occupation turns into a long, bloody ordeal.
And through like basically the whole 80s, it's Vietnam's Vietnam.
Only unlike us, they arguably won because the government that they sort of backed and set up is pretty much still in power today.
Sihanouk backs the new government.
You know, he eventually escapes the Khmer Rouge.
He backs the new government, which quickly turns into a dictatorship, which Sihanouk spends the rest of his life complaining about because they very effectively managed to sideline him from any real power.
And take away all his bananas.
And take away all his bananas.
In 2005, he started a blog so that he could complain about corruption.
Yeah.
No!
That bitch had a blog?
That bitch had a blog.
I already did not like him.
He had a blog.
It was like a live journal or some shit, 2005?
It's on his personal website.
And it's from long enough ago that the news coverage refers to it as a web blog.
You might say that the prince was insulated from most of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime that he helped bring to power.
But in 1992, he makes a movie about a love triangle in a hospital filled with landmine victims.
So he couldn't.
Oh, my God.
He clearly understood someone.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
So yeah, in 2006.
Can you imagine being like a background actor, like in the Prince's movie?
Like you just get, you're a background actor.
You get paid whatever you get paid a day to go sit in the back of a set.
And that day it happens to be the prince's set.
Yeah.
And you have to go pretend to be a bomb victim?
Well, no, you're not pretending.
Yeah, he's probably playing a victim.
You know, yeah, you're probably a bomb victim.
You're right.
It's true because half the population died, and that does not account the wounded who survived.
So there's a huge community of people who are limbless and would be excellent extras for such a, you know.
I'll say it right now.
It's an easy gig to be the casting director in that movie.
Yeah, you know, you're not going to have to look as hard as you probably should.
No, you just walk down the street and you're...
Look for someone who can't walk down the street and your job is done.
Oh, boy.
So here's how the website Genocide Watch, who wrote about the Prince's blog, described it.
He posts sharp opinions on what he considers the deplorable state of Cambodian society and politics, highlighting corruption, deforestation, and injustice.
As often as not, he blames Hun Sen, who's the guy he initially backed into power, in a diplomatically indirect manner that does little to disguise his target.
So the prince continued to direct movies through until the early 2000s.
In 1997, this man, who previously had had thousands of people beheaded, directed and wrote a movie called Apostle of Nonviolence.
I found a plot synopsis.
A Buddhist monk preaches nonviolence and forgiveness to rural villagers, rebels and national army soldiers in the recent civil war.
After the rebels destroy a village, the monk enlists the help of a government official who sends troops to attack the rebels.
So even his movie about non-violence is sending troops in to attack the rebels.
He's a piece of work.
Yeah, it's impressive.
His last four movies were released in 2006.
I'm going to read their titles in order.
Oh, man.
Commander of the Royal Order of Ka Dong, which is fine.
Four Wives Are Not Such Fun.
Oh, man.
I just pictured Steve Martin and Queen Latifah on the cover of that one for some reason.
How did you guess the cast?
Who doesn't have a mistress?
And then Miss Asina, which I'm guessing is about his mistress.
I don't know.
He died.
Does his wife play his mistress?
I'm not able to find any real information about this one.
So I'm sorry about that.
I'm also curious about his wife.
What's her deal?
She sticks around the whole time.
She's here through the ship.
She died at some point.
I didn't take notes on that because I'm a hack and a fraud.
But he does die of cancer in 2012.
So now he's dead, which is good because he's a monster.
Yeah, not a good guy.
Here's a picture of him in the 40s.
Damn it, still handsome.
Still handsome.
Still handsome.
You can tell from those little cheeks that he's about to head off to France and cry in a bathroom while he doesn't eat for three days.
I don't know.
He looks good.
I'm just saying he wears it well.
Yeah, but you have to see what he sees in the mirror, which is the kid his mom always called Tubby.
Yes.
We'll post this picture on.
He's wearing what I hate to say is a fantastic shirt.
It is.
And a really great sash.
Human biology is so weird.
Because I know what this man has done.
You just spent a good deal of time explaining to me how truly terrible he is.
Yeah, he's terrible.
And yet at the end of that time, you showed me a picture of him.
And I'm like, yeah.
I get it.
I get it.
Who doesn't have a mistress?
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And when he died, millions of people showed up in Cambodia to honor him.
Pictures of him went up everywhere.
I'm going to guess there's still a lot of pictures of him all around the country.
He's still beloved by large chunks of the population today.
Although there are obviously people who also recognize he kind of contributed heavily to, you know, the worst political disaster maybe in all of history.
In terms of like one nation's life.
Modern history.
It is tough to duplicate.
Yeah.
A few places are really trying.
Like, it's amazing.
Even Hitler didn't succeed in getting that large a percentage of his country wiped out.
And he was close.
I will say, if we actually looked at our own history and were honest about who was actually here and who we killed.
Oh, well.
We're pretty.
Our numbers are ugly.
It starts before we existed, which is the tough thing.
But yes, but that's a distinction that's, you know, doesn't.
Human lives don't.
They were just there.
But then you got...
Yeah.
Yeah, there were like 100 million people in the Americas, and then, no, not so much.
I just couldn't help it.
So it is easy to look somewhere else and be like, can you believe it?
And then you have to look back in the mirror and be like, yeah, yeah, I guess I can.
We've also, yeah.
Crazy how weird it can get.
Yeah.
Boy, things get.
Where it's just normal to go fishing and move heads out of the way.
Things get out of hand fast.
Yeah, well, that escalated quickly.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's weird how that's like, that is the way mass killings always kind of work.
And in the book I was reading for the podcast we recorded a little earlier about King Leopold of Belgium.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
That guy.
That guy's a fucker.
But it's just talking about how mass killings start, and it's a little bit like how the flu spreads, where one group of people decides, okay, we're going to massacre anyone to try to get this finished quickly.
We're just going to kill everyone who disagrees with us.
And then suddenly everybody's murdering everybody.
Like it just spreads like a fucking virus.
It's slippery.
Yeah.
And that's really like Sihanouk wasn't the architect of the Khmer Rouge's disastrous policies, but he was the guy.
He was an architect to anything.
No, he just wanted to stay in power and he was willing.
He's the guy who escalated the violence to the point where past a certain point, even if Pol Pot had died in 1950 and never got, someone would have wound up doing terrible shit in his place because the king had just stacked all these dominoes up.
Like, he guaranteed something terrible was going to happen.
Maybe Pol Pot made it a lot worse.
Maybe only 30% of Cambodia dies if someone else is in charge.
But because of what the prince had done, something fucking bad was going to happen.
I feel like we've all done this to ourselves with, you know, ice cream and Taco Bell.
It's Oreos.
Six pieces of pizza and then a hot dog.
And you're like, each of these things individually might have been okay if just one had happened.
If only just one had happened.
But no, you've...
No, no.
I was talking a little earlier about I ate hundreds of rancid mussels recently.
And if I had stopped at one, I would have been fine.
That's a rough sound.
But instead, I ate 250, and it was a disaster.
And that's, you know, life's like that sometimes.
Yes.
And in this message, yeah, yes.
Yeah.
A message to all of you kings and princes out there.
Stop after the first rancid muscle.
Yes.
Don't let the Khmer Rouge take power.
Don't let your rancid muscle be a massacre.
Work it back from there.
I feel like we've landed on some wisdom that everyone can benefit here.
Yeah, I think we fixed everything.
No massacres.
No, it's a good place to start.
No massacres.
It's a good place to start and end.
Let's just avoid massacres.
Yeah.
Good.
That's my question.
You know what?
I'm going to do that.
I had different plans for my day, but now I'm going to avoid it.
Were you going to massacre?
I'm not going to.
No, come on.
It's a Friday.
You got me.
No, I'm not.
You go out to Pyramid Lake.
You cut 10,000 people's heads off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then when you fish, you got to move them out of the way.
I'm really stuck on that imagery.
Yeah.
It's fucked up, right?
Fishing is, it's supposed to be boring and relatively peaceful.
There is a calm you need to have about you to fish.
And if you had to summon that calm while just moving heads out of the way.
That's a lot.
That's a lot.
I got to feel like, though, you get some really fat fish in that lake.
And they're probably easy to catch.
Yeah.
You know, I did eat a fish once that had eaten people.
And it was a good, it tasted good.
It was a good fish.
Like, it didn't.
Yeah, biology's weird.
Yeah.
It turned it into something else.
It was such a tasty fish.
Yeah.
But yeah, it had definitely been eating people.
I ate niguana once.
Is that what we're doing?
Are we just trading?
Are we trading now?
What have the iguana been eating?
Why did you eat niguana?
Because there's at least you just eat, but there's too fucking many of them.
They are just meat.
They're just like a bad thing.
Once you've seen 15 in one hoad, like once you've seen them on one beach, you understand how many there are.
They're like, yeah, okay.
Why raise a chicken?
There's lots of cats and we don't eat cats.
I love iguanas.
I've done so cute.
I'm cats personally.
They're cute.
They're delicious meat.
Chickens are cute.
No, they're not.
Yes, they are.
Chickens are assholes.
Chickens are definitely cute.
Chickens are assholes.
Did you just see a goose and think it was a big chicken?
Every goose is soft.
You know what?
Every chicken is Hitler.
If I may, before we conclude this episode.
Okay.
I would like to, maybe it's a new tradition.
A guest gets to suggest a bastard for the future.
Okay.
No, I'm a very lazy man, so I currently geese.
Fucking geese.
Fucking geese.
Try to find me a goose that somebody's like, that goose was my best friend.
I liked that goose.
It never chased me or tried to peck me in the face.
Okay.
And they're delicious.
I could just have a goose line as a guest.
Half the episode is like, you know, why goose are evil.
And then the other half is like, why geese are delicious?
Well, that's Caitlin's advice for the week.
Take a gander at a goose.
Take it or leave it, I recommend leaving it.
Thank you so much.
Well, I have learned only some of the things I wish I didn't know.
Finding a Safe Goose00:03:33
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Well, don't thank me.
Thank Prince Noradom Sahanek.
Thanks, Prince Noradom Sahanek.
Isolate that audio.
Yeah, pretty sure we're pronouncing it right some of the times.
I am not sure.
I trust you on this one.
I apologize to the Khmer people listening.
I don't apologize to the prince.
Yes.
He was a dick.
But we got to plug your pluggables.
Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.
You can find me at CaitlinGillComedy.com or at RobotCaitlin on Twitter or at CaitlinIstall on Instagram.
And you can find me in your heart where I love you.
This has been Behind the Bastards.
I've been Robert Evans.
You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
I will be listing the sources for this podcast, including the book that was a big part of the research and all the different websites where I learned about his filmography and stuff.
That'll all be up there.
A bunch of pictures will be up there.
It's going to be great.
You can also find us on social media at BastardsPod.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
Two letters there.
And yeah, next week we will be back with another bastard.
So tune in then, folks.
Until then, I love like 40% of you.
Bye, Bastards.
I love you all.
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