Speaker 1: H Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you
Speaker 1: don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Speaker 1: This is part two of our episode on Prince Notre
Speaker 1: Dame say Hannac, the man who made poll pot possible,
Speaker 1: which I am very proud of myself for saying properly.
Speaker 1: My guest, as with the last episode, is Caitlin Gill,
Speaker 1: comedian writer and possibly third gunmen on the grass Nal.
Speaker 1: There's no way to prove that one, even because it's
Speaker 1: speaking of the nineteen sixties. Prince nor Dam sat Hanno
Speaker 1: starts the nineteen sixties as President and head of State
Speaker 1: for life of Cambodia. He has purged the left wing
Speaker 1: in his own country, the Democratic Party, who threatened to
Speaker 1: overwhelm Cambodia with moderate liberal votes. So he's he's getting
Speaker 1: rid of those guys and he's down in charge. And say, Hannah,
Speaker 1: let's get into his personality a little bit, because he's
Speaker 1: the sort of monarchy thinks being king should be a
Speaker 1: good time. Ah. He throws ridiculous gigantic parties and he
Speaker 1: would often help cook the meals. He was a gourmet cook,
Speaker 1: really good at throwing foods together. Ah. He also liked
Speaker 1: to provide most of the entertainment. One of his relatives
Speaker 1: at the time described him as quote an artist lost
Speaker 1: in politics. An Australian diplomat who met him in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine said, was one of the few people I
Speaker 1: have ever encountered who deserves to be described as charismatic.
Speaker 1: On an individual basis, he radiated charm and four Cambodians
Speaker 1: in particular, he had a striking capacity to enthrall a
Speaker 1: crowd for good or ill. The King was famous for
Speaker 1: performing elaborate song and dance numbers at his parties, including
Speaker 1: one reported double act with the Indonesian dictator Sukarnod Wouldn't
Speaker 1: you want to see that? While? Yeah? Can you fucking
Speaker 1: Matt oh Man? Have you ever seen the movie uh
Speaker 1: White Christmas? Yeah? You know that song that the two
Speaker 1: ladies do, Sisters that they the sisters, And then I
Speaker 1: imagine it being that with these two guys who have
Speaker 1: like come millions of deaths on their Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: it's just fun to think about so contained multitudes. People
Speaker 1: are amazing. He's also in a jazz band like Bill,
Speaker 1: Like Bill Clinton. Uh, he was not on our sineo,
Speaker 1: but he probably could have been, but he would have
Speaker 1: charmed he I bet he would have killed Yeah. Absolutely. Uh.
Speaker 1: Here's another quote from that Australian diplomat at a sa
Speaker 1: don sante, which I'm gonna guess is a dance party.
Speaker 1: I was lucky to attend at around one thirty am,
Speaker 1: and after the King and Queen had left, he the
Speaker 1: Prince beamed at the rest of us and said, well,
Speaker 1: their majesties have gone, and I suppose the rest of
Speaker 1: you can go now too, but I am going to
Speaker 1: play until dawn, and I do hope you will stay.
Speaker 1: And of course we all did. So he's fucking charming.
Speaker 1: He's great at playing like and that that's the thing.
Speaker 1: Like you hear about a dictator who makes everyone listen
Speaker 1: to his music and you assume it would be a nightmare,
Speaker 1: But every report is that he was actually a really
Speaker 1: talented musician and great it entered hating people, and a
Speaker 1: great cook. So he's like the guy you want to
Speaker 1: party with. He's just also made himself absolute ruler of
Speaker 1: his country through uh max executions and violence. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but he's a charming guy and his art wasn't limited
Speaker 1: to weird dances with other dictators. He also produced and
Speaker 1: start in dozens of movies. So director President Prince Siena
Speaker 1: got his start in the nineteen forties when he made
Speaker 1: two films called Tarzan among the Koi and Double Crime
Speaker 1: on the Magino Line, which is a solid name. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's great at titles. Uh. From nineteen sixty to seventy
Speaker 1: he produced twenty one films, including nine documentaries, which is
Speaker 1: a pretty incredible rate for a guy who's also the
Speaker 1: Prince and the president. Yeah. Uh, so these were not
Speaker 1: just show products like the North Korean film industry where
Speaker 1: the king gets credit, but really other people do all
Speaker 1: the work. He seems to have spent substantially more time
Speaker 1: making movies and actually running his country. He writes and
Speaker 1: directs almost all of his movies, and he stars something
Speaker 1: like half of them. So yeah, real triple threat. We're
Speaker 1: up to like eight types. I found a paper from
Speaker 1: the University of Leads that analyzed his filmography. I think
Speaker 1: he made over fifty films by the time he died,
Speaker 1: and it argues that he used movies as a way
Speaker 1: to communicate directly with the peasant masses. So Donald Trump
Speaker 1: has Twitter. Prince President Sihannock had a weird ass movies. Uh,
Speaker 1: quote from that University of Leads paper. Sianna took the
Speaker 1: starring role in his films, depicting as many fictional characters
Speaker 1: as he had official roles throughout his political life. This
Speaker 1: enabled Shannock to inhabit multiple roles in personas while still
Speaker 1: maintaining the integrity of the monarch, so the points made
Speaker 1: in his movies are not subtle. In nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: he was having a spat with the Americans, who wanted
Speaker 1: Cambodia to stop it with all their damn neutrality, and
Speaker 1: who had tried to have him killed a couple of times. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the CIA was never good that part of their job.
Speaker 1: Than it looks, it is harder than it looks. We'll
Speaker 1: give the CIA credit. Uh. He was also having major
Speaker 1: domestic troubles. Uh. He nationalized all trade and all of
Speaker 1: the banks, which caused a bunch of people to just
Speaker 1: smuggle their rise to be a no'm where they'd get
Speaker 1: more money for it anyway and could avoid giving the
Speaker 1: king a cut. When the king realized what was going on,
Speaker 1: he sent in the army to force the peasants to
Speaker 1: sell their rise to him at the price he had set.
Speaker 1: This did not make the peasants happy, and at a
Speaker 1: place called Samlout they revolted. The king ordered mass beheadings,
Speaker 1: and something like ten thousand people were dead by the
Speaker 1: time it was all over. This was bad for the
Speaker 1: king's image, as you might imagine, so he decided to
Speaker 1: make a movie, Shadows of her Anchor, where he plays
Speaker 1: a heroic admiral who discovers an international plot to overthrow
Speaker 1: Cambodia's government. At one point, he winds up with the
Speaker 1: American ambassador played by his wife. He takes her on
Speaker 1: a walk and explains how hard it is to be
Speaker 1: king of Cambodia. They bond over this and fall in love,
Speaker 1: but then she gets sent away from Cambodia because the
Speaker 1: US is mean. Oh yeah, that's pretty sad. You can
Speaker 1: really feel the tragedy. If I saw that, I would
Speaker 1: forget the death of my uncle and nephew I saw
Speaker 1: dangling from the hillside that they were hung from. He
Speaker 1: cut my family's heads off. But I really believe him
Speaker 1: when he looks into the eyes of his wife playing
Speaker 1: an American diplomat. Yeah, I'm feeling that. Yeah, those bedroom ice,
Speaker 1: he does have those bedroom ice. We'll put some pictures
Speaker 1: of those up on the website. He's a handsome man.
Speaker 1: Uh So a number of his films followed the same
Speaker 1: basic pattern, the King and his wife playing basically the
Speaker 1: King and some broad go to angkor Watt and the
Speaker 1: King gives a monologue. Uh was able to spend so
Speaker 1: much time directing because he'd effectively outsourced all the hard
Speaker 1: work to the elected officials of Cambodia. So when ship
Speaker 1: would go bad, rather than take the blame himself, he
Speaker 1: just scream at some of the Democrats in office and
Speaker 1: maybe throw a few of them in jail. So there
Speaker 1: were still some liberals and left wingers in his political
Speaker 1: party that he kept there so that whenever anything went bad,
Speaker 1: like when he massacred in thousand peasants, he could have
Speaker 1: them arrested and be like, it was these guys, these
Speaker 1: guys up. Yeah. I mean, there's never been another politician
Speaker 1: who's kept a bunch of people around him just so
Speaker 1: he could fire them to deflect blame from him. No no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no no, I feel like, yeah, trail Blazer. And
Speaker 1: then when he needed violent deeds done, he would have
Speaker 1: the conservatives to it, and then he would fire them
Speaker 1: after they massacred too many people. So he's he's really
Speaker 1: like making the most out of democracy, just doing exactly
Speaker 1: what he wants and firing whoever he has to fire
Speaker 1: when people get angry at him for what he's doing.
Speaker 1: So this story from nineteen fifty seven is kind of
Speaker 1: typical the way he liked to play local politics. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is a quote from that book, Anatomy of Terror. Uh.
Speaker 1: In August ninety seven, he summoned the leaders of the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party, whose continued existence afforded a kind of vicarious
Speaker 1: protection for all of the left wing views, to a
Speaker 1: debate at the Royal Palace before an audience packed with
Speaker 1: his own supporters, which was broadcast over loudspeakers to a
Speaker 1: crowd of several thousand outside. As they left after five
Speaker 1: hours of public humiliation, they were dragged from their cars
Speaker 1: and beaten with rifle butts by palace guards. So this
Speaker 1: is Prince President, Director King. It sounds like a director
Speaker 1: I've been on set. There's a little bit of uva
Speaker 1: bowl in him. Uh. As the sixties start up, the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War, does what the Vietnam War did, and suddenly
Speaker 1: both the US and Vietnam are asking more of Prince Hannock.
Speaker 1: He works at a great solution though, where the Vietnamese
Speaker 1: can hide whole armies in his country and the US
Speaker 1: can bomb them at the same time. Uh. He manages
Speaker 1: to sort of keep a lid on things and dance
Speaker 1: from fire to fire while making tens of movies until
Speaker 1: January of nineteen, when the Communists launched the start of
Speaker 1: a revolutionary war. This prompts the Hannock to bring back
Speaker 1: one of those right wing politicians he'd previously fired, a
Speaker 1: guy named law Knell. So law Knell calls in the
Speaker 1: Air Force to bomb rebel areas and cut off their
Speaker 1: food supplies. Rural citizens are resettled on mask to cut
Speaker 1: off any source of supply to the Communists. See, Hannock
Speaker 1: starts handing out bounties to his soldiers for every rebel
Speaker 1: they kill. This backfires because the King's soldiers just start decapitating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he says, I'll give you a bounty for every head
Speaker 1: of every rebel you bring me, So they just start
Speaker 1: decapitating random villagers, uh and bring them in for quick cash.
Speaker 1: So maybe the King could have thought that went out better,
Speaker 1: but he was busy making his magnum opus, a film
Speaker 1: called Twilight. Oh yeah, Now, this Twilight is not about
Speaker 1: a teenage girl and a vampire pedophile. This Twilight is
Speaker 1: the love story of a prince played by the Prince
Speaker 1: who hosts an Indian princess played by his wife. He
Speaker 1: falls in love with her, and the main conflict comes
Speaker 1: from the fact that the prince's nurse is also in
Speaker 1: love with him. Yeah, it's rough, um. I found a
Speaker 1: review of it online um with letterbox d this website
Speaker 1: by by someone named Matt Key, who gave it three stars. Interesting,
Speaker 1: not too long film. It's a simple drama about an
Speaker 1: elderly prince who falls in love with a guest. Because
Speaker 1: of this, her nurse, who has been in love with
Speaker 1: him for years, begins to feel jealous. It features a
Speaker 1: demonstration of nationalist propaganda in the middle that doesn't add
Speaker 1: up to the plot. I'm gonna say the three stars
Speaker 1: was generous, and that's what I'm gonna say. I told
Speaker 1: you before the King's movies had a way of sending
Speaker 1: subtle messages to his people. The message of this one
Speaker 1: was I love you, no matter how brutal my murder
Speaker 1: campaign looks. So he's gaslighting his whole country through film,
Speaker 1: which is amazing. Uh. During the movie, the Prince realizes
Speaker 1: he has to dump both women, like he can't be
Speaker 1: defend the woman who loves him because his duties to
Speaker 1: his country. So there's this monologue at anchor Watt and
Speaker 1: here the Prince tells the princess about another king of
Speaker 1: Cambodia who quote suffered the illness of his subjects more
Speaker 1: than his own, and that their pain was the pain
Speaker 1: of the king. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's really feeling each
Speaker 1: and every decapitation. Yeah, every decapitation of a peasant is
Speaker 1: a decapitation of his heart. Yeah, definitely. Anyway, he awards
Speaker 1: himself an Oscar for this film shoot for the ego
Speaker 1: and here, Yeah, he's he's always aiming high. So this
Speaker 1: play is great for the peasants out in the country,
Speaker 1: but the educated, middle class people in non pen have
Speaker 1: access to Hollywood movies. They recognize this stuff as garbage,
Speaker 1: and they regularly cursed their president prince for quote his
Speaker 1: damn film shows and endless radio speeches. Uh. Some conservatives
Speaker 1: were also angry that Prince Shannah could kind of sort
Speaker 1: of maybe turned Cambodia from a country with almost no
Speaker 1: communists to a country that was full of them. One
Speaker 1: of the things that the book poll Pot points out
Speaker 1: is that there's a word in the commerce language um,
Speaker 1: the word for toter reign for like to be the
Speaker 1: king of a country, translates literally as to eat the kingdom,
Speaker 1: which is more or less what Sahannak does. So his
Speaker 1: mom and his consort, his relatives are all incredibly corrupt
Speaker 1: and they're all grafting the country for shiploads of money. Um.
Speaker 1: When the whole country basically runs on graft and bribery
Speaker 1: under Shanna, there's no real rule of law for people
Speaker 1: connected in any way to the royal family. Uh. He
Speaker 1: recognizes that the corruption is going to bring him down
Speaker 1: as early as nineteen sixty two, but he doesn't do
Speaker 1: anything about it. Instead, he does stuff like spend a
Speaker 1: fifth of the yearly budget preparing for the Southeast Asian Games,
Speaker 1: which are supposed to be held in the capitol. Uh.
Speaker 1: The game's got canceled anyway, due to what Wikipedia calls
Speaker 1: unsettling circumstances in country, like all of the civil war.
Speaker 1: That yeah, like all the heads in the rivers exactly.
Speaker 1: So thanks to the King's reforms. Uh, he'd done a
Speaker 1: great job of reforming education. So hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: people now had educations in Cambodia, but the only jobs
Speaker 1: available to them were positions in the royal ministry, basically
Speaker 1: squeezing peasants for the government. So he wound up with
Speaker 1: a hundred unemployed students for every actual job, and a
Speaker 1: peasant class who are being shared afted off their farms
Speaker 1: by the corrupt government. So he's piste off all of
Speaker 1: the peasants by taking away their source of livelihood, and
Speaker 1: he's created a vast class of hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: educated kids with no jobs. How do you think that
Speaker 1: ends slaves? I'm sorry, I just I'm gonna keep coming
Speaker 1: back to that. It's amazing everybody. Yeah. Uh, So the
Speaker 1: President Prince grows increasingly brutal resistance to his reign intensifies. Uh.
Speaker 1: He turned to a series of bloody pr stunts in
Speaker 1: order to distract the populace from his his rampant corruption.
Speaker 1: The fact that living standards have fallen for everybody, in
Speaker 1: the fact that a tiny amount of the country is
Speaker 1: getting ridiculously wealthy while most of the country suffers and starves. Uh.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen sixties, his security forces quote unquote turn
Speaker 1: a captured young member of the Vietnam's cell. They have
Speaker 1: him go to the U. S. Embassy and asked the
Speaker 1: Americans for help assassinating the prince. Obviously, the Americans turned
Speaker 1: him into the police because they're not dumb. But it
Speaker 1: made for big, flashy news story that implicates the Americans
Speaker 1: the commune in the Vietnamese. This is all the distract from,
Speaker 1: you know, the fact that the war isn't going super
Speaker 1: well and that he's he's massacring people. The captured Vietnamese
Speaker 1: kid who had been told to be released if he cooperated,
Speaker 1: wasn't said, executed on the Prince's orders. So he's a
Speaker 1: great guy. Uh. He regularly referred to Cambodia during the
Speaker 1: sixties as an oasis of peace. Foreigners at the time
Speaker 1: remember Cambodia as a paradise of excess and tropical splendor.
Speaker 1: This was all true if you never left the capital
Speaker 1: and we're whier rich. But things were bad outside the
Speaker 1: city and they rapidly got worse after nineteen sixty eight. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, the communists who are known as the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge now, which is a nickname actually the king
Speaker 1: came up with for them. Uh, launched their revolution in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight. It gets really bloody, and Sahanna is
Speaker 1: forced to seed more and more control to the conservatives
Speaker 1: so that they can fight. The entire world was turning
Speaker 1: over in nineteen sixty You had student revolutions in France
Speaker 1: and Mexico. There nobody was looking like it was a
Speaker 1: good time if you wanted to turn things over to
Speaker 1: do it really fast and hard, because it was happening
Speaker 1: kind of everywhere. Yeah, and that's his hope that he
Speaker 1: can turn over power for a little while. It just
Speaker 1: seems like you have like nine nineteen sixty eight and
Speaker 1: then like two thousand and twelve where everything flips over
Speaker 1: on these kind of predictable every thirty four year clocks,
Speaker 1: and that that was just one of those years. Uh yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So things, you know after sixty eight start to go
Speaker 1: worse and worse for him, and he gives more and
Speaker 1: more power to the conservatives so that they can fight
Speaker 1: this war against the communists. Um, there's no longer any
Speaker 1: kind of a left wing in Cambodian politics because by
Speaker 1: the late sixties, he'd had most of them executed and
Speaker 1: prisoner exiled in various fits of rage, so he'd used
Speaker 1: them escape goats until the right no goats left escape.
Speaker 1: So now the only people left are the communists out
Speaker 1: in the jungle and the right wing and the prince
Speaker 1: at home. And as the right gains power, they start
Speaker 1: to get more uppitty. So, you know, the right they
Speaker 1: sort of liked the king at first, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: prove to be super competent, and they can see that
Speaker 1: his family is basically squirreling away all the country's wealth
Speaker 1: and he's letting the communists take over. So yeah, the
Speaker 1: right wing is not a big fan of him. So
Speaker 1: the king has also been blaming them for stuff, and
Speaker 1: he's been blaming them for stuff and firing their elected
Speaker 1: leaders every time they do what he tells them, and
Speaker 1: keeping leftists around for his own purposes, which you know
Speaker 1: has to bother a true believer who's more conservative exactly,
Speaker 1: So he's not doing great right now. This is like
Speaker 1: that moment during the movie where like, you know, our
Speaker 1: heroes at his lowest point. Yeah, we are at the
Speaker 1: end of the second act here exactly, But I do
Speaker 1: want you to know that when our President, Prince Director
Speaker 1: King is at his lowest point, he does have his
Speaker 1: best friend at his side. You want to guess who
Speaker 1: his best friend is? A tub of ice cream? Kim
Speaker 1: Il Sung Okay, yeah, Dictator of North Korea. The pair
Speaker 1: met in nineteen sixty five at a conference hosted by Sukarno,
Speaker 1: the leader of Indonesia. According to an article from the
Speaker 1: World Tribune, the Indonesian leader put them both in adjoining
Speaker 1: rooms because he thought they might be buddies. That is
Speaker 1: so funny. And one dictator looks at two other dictators
Speaker 1: and it's like, you know who you should? You guys
Speaker 1: are gonna be friends. I'm gonna do a little cupid
Speaker 1: thing here and I'm gonna shoot my arrow and it
Speaker 1: wand missile and it works for thirty years. They're the
Speaker 1: best buddies. Smell Brooks and Carl Reinering. That would be
Speaker 1: a great pair to have play them in the movie
Speaker 1: about this. I mean that's technically white, that's definitely white.
Speaker 1: Wall is a filmmaker. He made a film called Blazing Saddles,
Speaker 1: but it was just putting a peasant on a horse
Speaker 1: that was actually on fire. So it's a little rough.
Speaker 1: It's not the same three stars though I have a
Speaker 1: three stars. Yeah, solid, solid, The propaganda real in the
Speaker 1: middle is a little bit weird. Yeah, it was jarring
Speaker 1: to push the plot forward. But yeah, so despite being
Speaker 1: a pair of polar opposites, because Kim Il Sung is
Speaker 1: kind of a kind of a quieter, more introspective sort
Speaker 1: of dude, He's not really much for talking to the
Speaker 1: press or performing in front of people, and obviously see
Speaker 1: Hannock's you know, an extrovert. But they despite this, they
Speaker 1: get along there. The Kim Il Sung gives the Prince
Speaker 1: a giant mansion compound in North Korea, and they hung
Speaker 1: out regularly for thirty years. Prince to Hannock always called
Speaker 1: him my best friend, the great leader. But even with
Speaker 1: his friends at his back, by the late sixties, things
Speaker 1: are starting to get really bad in Cambodia, next government
Speaker 1: dis ordering mass executions and purging villages every day. At
Speaker 1: one point, after ordering two hundred dissidents murdered, Sano said,
Speaker 1: I do not care if I am sent to Hell.
Speaker 1: I will submit the relevant documents to the devil himself.
Speaker 1: The Prince's iron fisted repression of any descent did more
Speaker 1: to encourage the camer Rouge than it did to scare them.
Speaker 1: So basically he's doing things like having captured rebels separate
Speaker 1: heads displayed in like the centers of towns and putting
Speaker 1: photographs of like piles of their heads and the camer
Speaker 1: language press. Uh. He's having camer Rouge cadres disemboweled by
Speaker 1: government soldiers um their mass executing leftists. Uh. In one
Speaker 1: incident near the capital, troops take two children who are
Speaker 1: alleged to be messengers for the camer Rouge and cut
Speaker 1: their heads off with jagged palm tree fronds, which I
Speaker 1: didn't know you could do with palm tree frons, one
Speaker 1: of those. Ever hit your car, it'll dentisty and it'll
Speaker 1: cut a kids had hard enough. Yeah, So even people
Speaker 1: on the right wing start to complain about how fucking
Speaker 1: brutal the army is getting. Um. Sianic tells these people
Speaker 1: who complain on the right that will send them to
Speaker 1: the next world if they keep up complaining. So he's
Speaker 1: basically threat everybody now, um, because that's kind of always
Speaker 1: been his only tactic, but now there's not that many
Speaker 1: people left to threaten. Uh. So up until this point,
Speaker 1: he had been very prophetic in seeing the US is
Speaker 1: involvement in Vietnam is doomed. He'd been making his foreign
Speaker 1: policy calculations based on that. This is why he kept
Speaker 1: friendly with Vietnam and China. But in nineteen sixty the
Speaker 1: North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive and the US beats
Speaker 1: them badly. In America, the Tet Offensive has seen as
Speaker 1: proof that the war is a quagmire, but Prince Sanna
Speaker 1: saw it as a huge win for America, so he
Speaker 1: now thinks the US is in it for the long haul. Which, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're ever basing your policies off the US being
Speaker 1: in anything for the long haul, you are not making
Speaker 1: the right decision. Oh, I don't know. In military conflict.
Speaker 1: I mean that's why we still have the longest wars
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah, but that's only long by our standards.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna leave like you didn't. Yes, we had to
Speaker 1: come back, yes, but it didn't go well for the
Speaker 1: people who trusted us. Well, that's where this story started,
Speaker 1: with the French trying to prop up a Cambodian dictator
Speaker 1: to preserve their own interests, and we have been doing
Speaker 1: the same because I learned from history when we can
Speaker 1: just do it again. Yeah. Yeah, No. If there's one
Speaker 1: like summary of American history, it's we don't learn things.
Speaker 1: That is. That is our national motto in terms of
Speaker 1: intervention at least. Uh. So we're going to get back
Speaker 1: to Prince s Hannah's big mistake and uh spoiler alert,
Speaker 1: a coup. Yeah, everybody loves a good old fashioned coup.
Speaker 1: But first, grab you a pile of coins and credit
Speaker 1: cards products. I want to build a website on a mattress.
Speaker 1: We're back, boy. Those ads were great. There were some
Speaker 1: quality as so many products. Now we're talking about Cambodia
Speaker 1: again and Prince Hannah. So Prince Hannah basically changes his
Speaker 1: calculus after the tet offensive and it's like, no, I
Speaker 1: think the US is in this for the long haul,
Speaker 1: and maybe they are a reliable country to be allied with.
Speaker 1: Never a good decision. Um, so he starts trying to
Speaker 1: curry favor with the Americans. He gets his chance in
Speaker 1: March of nine, when President Nixon orders the U. S.
Speaker 1: Air Force to start bombing Cambodia to get at the
Speaker 1: Vietnamese troops hiding there. The Prince doesn't make a fuss,
Speaker 1: and since these are meant to be secret bombing raids.
Speaker 1: The fact that he obliges means that Nixon gets to
Speaker 1: bomb Cambodia three thousand times without you know, making a
Speaker 1: big fuss about it. So Nixon, being a good quid
Speaker 1: pro quo guy, extends Cambodia final recognition of her borders
Speaker 1: as a reward. So that's a sweet trade. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: so you would let America bomb your country three thousand
Speaker 1: times for recognition of your borders, right, yeah, totally. I
Speaker 1: guess you could bomb my guest room if I got
Speaker 1: to define my fence line. Why, well, I was in
Speaker 1: the house, if I was willing to let it get bombed,
Speaker 1: that's where the rebels. That's how you get the good ship,
Speaker 1: to let part of it get destroyed so you get
Speaker 1: rewarded somehow. Yeah that always works out. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just jealous of you for having a guest room. No,
Speaker 1: I don't have a guest from us speaking proverbially about
Speaker 1: a fake house and a metaphor for Cambodia being a
Speaker 1: house where you destroyed part of your own home so
Speaker 1: you could keep a bigger part of it. Never mind,
Speaker 1: leave my analogy behind. I'm still jealous. Uh So, Obviously,
Speaker 1: this bombing pisces off a lot of Cambodians, and it
Speaker 1: also hurts the Prince among the Cambodian right wing because
Speaker 1: they wanted to work with the US to exterminate the
Speaker 1: Communists from the beginning. So they saw this as the
Speaker 1: Prince admitting that he had been wrong to turn down
Speaker 1: America before. Uh So. The book pole Pot The Anatomy
Speaker 1: of Terror basically says that this was the point when
Speaker 1: the Prince's strategies finally failed him. He'd wiped out the
Speaker 1: left wing of his own party, so he couldn't throw
Speaker 1: them under the bus. Instead, he took the hits and
Speaker 1: saw his power a road. Parliament refused to drop a
Speaker 1: corruption inquiry involving in a member of his entourage, and
Speaker 1: he wound up losing face in public, which is a
Speaker 1: big deal in that part of the world. Uh So,
Speaker 1: In addition to all this, the Prince is trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to balance the budget. Rampant corruption and
Speaker 1: a war had not been kind to Cambodia's finances. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: he found a quick, easy fix. And then I guess
Speaker 1: what it is, slaves man? You are? You keep calling slaves?
Speaker 1: Not yet it's gambled, dang it. Gambling, sweet lady gambling.
Speaker 1: Uh so, Prince Hannox sells gambling licenses to two casinos
Speaker 1: for a fee of eighty million francs per year each.
Speaker 1: This made up a huge chunk of the budget shortfall
Speaker 1: and was exactly the wrong thing to do while fighting
Speaker 1: a civil war against communists, who claim that you're letting
Speaker 1: the elite suck poor people dry. Uh yeah, so here's
Speaker 1: a quote from that book of the Enemy of Terror.
Speaker 1: Non pen was soon alive with stories of people committing
Speaker 1: suicide after losing their life savings. Business activity slumped as
Speaker 1: factory owners, government official, shopkeepers, and laborers spent their days
Speaker 1: and nights courting ruin at the betting tables. So the
Speaker 1: right wing takes all of this is evidence that the
Speaker 1: Prince should not be in power anymore. They start stripping
Speaker 1: away the things he controls. Over the next year, boxing
Speaker 1: amount of decisions and overruling him, he becomes openly hostiles
Speaker 1: to the parliament. At one point, he makes fun of
Speaker 1: the right leader Lawnnell, for being out of the country
Speaker 1: while he was receiving major surgery in Switzerland. Immediately after
Speaker 1: making fun of lawn null for this, Prince Hannet goes
Speaker 1: on vacation for a few months in the Mediterranean in Europe. Yep, yeah,
Speaker 1: he goes to fat Camp. Uh. So this was a
Speaker 1: strategy of his when things got hot politically, he would
Speaker 1: just leave and go to fat Camp or go on
Speaker 1: vacation for a couple of months and if things got
Speaker 1: better when he was away, and then hey, things were better,
Speaker 1: and if they got worse than he would just blame
Speaker 1: whoever was in charge while he was away. He hadn't
Speaker 1: been here, so it wasn't his fault. But this time,
Speaker 1: while he's away, Parliament votes to withdraw confidence from the
Speaker 1: Prince and demand that he relinquishes off as his head
Speaker 1: of state. So in March of nineteen seventy, while he's
Speaker 1: fucking around in Europe, he gets cooed out of power. Now,
Speaker 1: at this point he had a number of options. He
Speaker 1: did have a palace on the French Riviera. He could
Speaker 1: have just retired, flown there and you know, hung out
Speaker 1: between there and with his homeboy Kim Il Sung and
Speaker 1: just kind of enjoyed life. Or he could try to
Speaker 1: get back into power. He just chills, right, he just
Speaker 1: kicks it at the French rivierea. No, he decides that
Speaker 1: he still wants to be the king of well, the
Speaker 1: prince of Cambodia. He still wants to be you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: he wants revenge actually is kind of more what he's
Speaker 1: going for, because he does not decide to fly back
Speaker 1: and fight, you know, in the city, you know, at
Speaker 1: the ballot box to try to to regain his position
Speaker 1: from the people who had overthrown him. He brokers or
Speaker 1: gets a meeting set up between himself and the Camers
Speaker 1: rouges Uh and he agrees that he will support them
Speaker 1: now if they will back him as being the head
Speaker 1: of state once they take power. So the king who
Speaker 1: has spent most of the last decade fighting the communists
Speaker 1: is now supporting the communists and is a king that
Speaker 1: is the figurehead of a communist revolution trying to overthrow
Speaker 1: the country of Cambodia. Um, so he has he has
Speaker 1: really just kept swinging around here. So what's interesting to
Speaker 1: me about this is that at no point does he
Speaker 1: think he's going to actually be in real power again.
Speaker 1: The king knows from the get go that the communists
Speaker 1: aren't going to let him actually rule the country. He's
Speaker 1: going to be a figurehead, and he's like, he's open
Speaker 1: about the fact they're going to spit him out as
Speaker 1: soon as they're done with him. So he backs his
Speaker 1: former enemies, not because he's going to get to be
Speaker 1: in charge again, but because fuck the right wing for
Speaker 1: throwing him out of power. It's just about spite. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, back in Cambodia, the right wing is finding
Speaker 1: out that kicking the prince out was not necessarily a
Speaker 1: great move because while he had lost the support of
Speaker 1: the people in the cities, the peasants don't know how
Speaker 1: to deal with the fact that the prince, who was
Speaker 1: to them still the king, had been fired. One Catholic
Speaker 1: missionary at the time recalls being asked, how shall we
Speaker 1: tend our rice patties now that the king is not
Speaker 1: here to make it rain? So? Uh maybe not a
Speaker 1: great decision on behalf of the Cambodian right wing. Although
Speaker 1: if you're them, what do you do with this fucking guy? Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: there's no win for anybody but him, exactly. Uh So,
Speaker 1: the popularity of the Khmers Rouges explodes now that they've
Speaker 1: got Sienook as a your head. A writer from The
Speaker 1: New Yorker at the time noted his name became the
Speaker 1: camer Rouge's greatest recruitment tool, and the most extreme communist
Speaker 1: movement in history, swept to power on royal coat tails.
Speaker 1: The civil war lasted five years and killed at least
Speaker 1: half a million people, So it's on par with the
Speaker 1: Syrian Civil War in terms of bloodiness already and in
Speaker 1: a in a shorter period of time. Um, it had
Speaker 1: been bad before, but the coup ramped things up to
Speaker 1: nightmare dimensions. What kind of warfare is this that's killing
Speaker 1: so many people because there's not This isn't like it
Speaker 1: wasn't like there were twenty million soldiers. I really recommend
Speaker 1: giving a read to the book pulp At the Anatomy
Speaker 1: of a Nightmare, because he talks a lot about Camar culture.
Speaker 1: But basically things are very black and white and sort
Speaker 1: of the culturals view on good and evil. So there's
Speaker 1: not like in Maoice China when they would when the
Speaker 1: communists one, there were people who were executed, but more
Speaker 1: often than not they try to sort of reform people
Speaker 1: and make them get them to work within the new system.
Speaker 1: They don't really do that here. So it's like I
Speaker 1: take no prisoners thing exactly Is this like straight up
Speaker 1: machete to body or is this are there chemical weapons?
Speaker 1: Are there because there's bombs in the country that have
Speaker 1: been traveling to and fro. There are so many people's weapons,
Speaker 1: there's weapons that you're making. So we drop something like
Speaker 1: I had this written down at someone before, but we
Speaker 1: dropped almost as many bombs as we dropped on Europe
Speaker 1: and World War two on the U S does just
Speaker 1: on Cambodia during this period. So that's a big part
Speaker 1: of it. And there's stories from like American military planners
Speaker 1: at the time who they would have you know, they
Speaker 1: had be fifty twos flying over the country and they
Speaker 1: would have like a map of Cambodi that laid out
Speaker 1: where all the villages they knew existed were, and they
Speaker 1: would have this little box that they would place on
Speaker 1: the map that would show this is what one B
Speaker 1: fifty two will destroy. And it's noted that like you
Speaker 1: can't put them anywhere on the map without hitting villages.
Speaker 1: So the bombing wipes out hundreds of thousands of people,
Speaker 1: and in general, just the war it's unspeakably brutal. Um
Speaker 1: So there's both uprisings that are suppressed by soldiers massacring people. Um,
Speaker 1: the Khmers rouges passed after like nineteen seventy three start
Speaker 1: massacring people to like at the beginning of the war. That, yeah,
Speaker 1: it just turns into madness. This is like people dying
Speaker 1: in all of these fights happening because there are several
Speaker 1: wars bubbling in Camboi at this time, and the prince
Speaker 1: had kind of established the precedent of massacring the Communist
Speaker 1: anywhere you found them. There was never any sort of
Speaker 1: reform or just putting people in jail or whatever it was.
Speaker 1: We capture them, we massacre them in public, and so
Speaker 1: that kind of raised the stakes for everybody, and it
Speaker 1: it just turned into a fucking blood bath. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a number of stories of people having their livers cut
Speaker 1: out and eaten in front of crowds, because that becomes
Speaker 1: a thing, or had been a thing for a while,
Speaker 1: but it like especially becomes a thing now is a
Speaker 1: mysterious and powerful organ. Yeah, it's mystic power. It's unbelievably brutal,
Speaker 1: and it's made worse by the fact that a lot
Speaker 1: of the Camerorou soldiers are like peasants who before the
Speaker 1: war had started had like didn't have electricity and like
Speaker 1: didn't use money and just lived like a peaceful pastoral life.
Speaker 1: And then fire starts falling from the sky and they
Speaker 1: blame it all on the people in the fucking cities
Speaker 1: who are the center of the government forces. And so
Speaker 1: it's it's horrible. The war is horrible. Yeah, Eventually the
Speaker 1: government loses the commers, rouges Win and the princes back
Speaker 1: in his kingdom. He had succeeded in creating the conditions
Speaker 1: four and then bringing to power the most radical, unhinged
Speaker 1: communists in world history. So we'll do a whole podcast
Speaker 1: in the camar Rouge at some point, but to give
Speaker 1: you an idea of how nuts things are from the
Speaker 1: get go, Like, the first big thing they do when
Speaker 1: they're in power is make everybody leave the cities, Like
Speaker 1: the non pin The capital had swelled like two point
Speaker 1: two million people by the time they took over, mostly
Speaker 1: from like rural people fleeing in the wake of this
Speaker 1: war to try to get somewhere safe. So they take
Speaker 1: all of these city people and all the people who
Speaker 1: lived in towns, people who are like middle class factory workers,
Speaker 1: people who are educated people. All those people they make
Speaker 1: leave the city and march out into the country and
Speaker 1: start farming. Um. So the death toll from the Khmer
Speaker 1: Rouge is usually put anywhere between one point five million
Speaker 1: to three and a half million. At most half a
Speaker 1: million to a million. Of those were executions from the government,
Speaker 1: were actually pole Pot and his cronies saying we need
Speaker 1: to kill these people, and these people they did a
Speaker 1: lot of that, but the vast majority of people who
Speaker 1: died just starved to death, not because they were trying
Speaker 1: to starve people to death, but because they just had
Speaker 1: no idea what they were doing and had these crazy
Speaker 1: theories about what would make the country most productive, that
Speaker 1: we could make Cambodia into like this engine of agricultural
Speaker 1: production if we throw everyone out of the cities and
Speaker 1: make them farm. And there's stories of them like taking
Speaker 1: a bunch of former diplomats and stuff and making them
Speaker 1: like try to grow crops in a basketball court, like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's fucking batshit crazy. But these people only
Speaker 1: get into power because the king first took his country
Speaker 1: from a place where there was no sort of foothold
Speaker 1: for the communists and did everything that you'd want to
Speaker 1: do to encourage the movement, and then backed them and
Speaker 1: help them recruit an army so that they could take
Speaker 1: over the country, just for his own petty, uh sense
Speaker 1: of vengeance. So, uh, it's a nightmare. It's possible that
Speaker 1: as many as three and a half million out of
Speaker 1: a population of seven million Cambodians died. It's probably the
Speaker 1: highest proportion of a country ever murdered by their own government. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When you asked me at the top of the last
Speaker 1: episode what I knew about this year in history, it's
Speaker 1: like it's it's hard to jump in cold and be like, well,
Speaker 1: isn't that where half of a country died? That's what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Speaker 1: killed like intellectual but it was more of a like
Speaker 1: anyone who just disagreed with them thing. Yeah yeah, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: Well it wasn't like that's not even the like that's
Speaker 1: what gets like, that's a thing that they killed a
Speaker 1: lot of intellectuals, but most of the deaths are again
Speaker 1: just because they had no idea what they were doing
Speaker 1: with all that, Like it was people who and like
Speaker 1: some of it. Like well, also, when you do end
Speaker 1: up killing your intellectuals, whether or not, it's because they
Speaker 1: are intellectual because they just agree with you. It is
Speaker 1: difficult to make new plants. Yeah, it's difficult to to
Speaker 1: make things work. They do stuff like try to make
Speaker 1: everybody eat their meals communally in order to encourage a
Speaker 1: lot of it. Like they make it illegal to hunt
Speaker 1: and to forage for food, so like people starve even more.
Speaker 1: It's just a nightmare. And it's like the last people
Speaker 1: who should be in charge of a country wind up
Speaker 1: in charge of a country. But this whole time, the
Speaker 1: prince is is writing out his time in a mansion. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, he's not given any real power and he's
Speaker 1: not allowed to leave, so he's kind of on house arrest.
Speaker 1: But but in a sick house, he has it hard
Speaker 1: to and he complains during this time that he regularly
Speaker 1: is not given enough bananas to make bananas foster. So
Speaker 1: everyone is suffering in Cambodia right now is the point? Okay,
Speaker 1: the suffering of bananas. You only need one bananas foster
Speaker 1: is just basically banana flame. But you can do one banana.
Speaker 1: What if you want to cook a lot of bananas foster?
Speaker 1: Too bad, you get one banana. I'm just saying he's suffering,
Speaker 1: is he's suffering a lot to uh you know. One
Speaker 1: of the things that the camer Rouge did at this
Speaker 1: point in time was because there was a blood shortage,
Speaker 1: they would suck the blood out of living people until
Speaker 1: they died. But the king is suffering too, okay. Uh
Speaker 1: So the camer Rouge is in power for three and
Speaker 1: a half years before they provoke an invasion from Vietnam.
Speaker 1: The Vietnamese invasion goes well in terms of kicking the
Speaker 1: camer Rouge out of power because they're not great at
Speaker 1: defending the country, but the occupation turns into a long,
Speaker 1: bloody ordeal and if through like basically the whole eighties,
Speaker 1: it's Vietnam's Vietnam, only unlike us, they arguably one because
Speaker 1: the government that they sort of backed and set up
Speaker 1: is pretty much still empowered today. Um Siena backs the
Speaker 1: new government. Uh you know, he eventually escapes the camar Rouge.
Speaker 1: He backs the new government, which quickly turns into a dictatorship,
Speaker 1: which Sen spends the rest of his life complaining about
Speaker 1: because they very effectively managed to sideline him from any
Speaker 1: real power and take away and take awayal has bananas.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and five, he started a blog so
Speaker 1: that he could complain about corruption. No, that bitch had
Speaker 1: a blog, had a blog. I already did not like him.
Speaker 1: He had a blog, like a live journal or some
Speaker 1: two thousand five. It's on his personal website, and it's
Speaker 1: from long enough ago that the news coverage refers to
Speaker 1: it as a web blog. You might say that the
Speaker 1: Prince was insulated from most of the horrors of the
Speaker 1: Camarouge regime that helped bring to power. But in nine
Speaker 1: two he makes a movie about a love triangle in
Speaker 1: a hospital filled with land mine victims. So he, oh
Speaker 1: my god, he clearly understood. Yeah. Yeah, And you imagine
Speaker 1: being like a background actor like in the Prince's movie.
Speaker 1: Like you just get your background actor, you get paid whatever,
Speaker 1: You get paid a day to go sit in the
Speaker 1: back of the set, and that day it happens to
Speaker 1: be the Prince's set and you have to go pretend
Speaker 1: to be a blomb victim. Well, no, you're not pretending, yeah,
Speaker 1: he probably, Yeah, you're probably bomb victim. You're right, it's
Speaker 1: true because half the population died, and that does not
Speaker 1: account the wounded who survived. So there's a huge community
Speaker 1: of people who are limbless and would be excellent extras
Speaker 1: for such a You know, I'll say it right now,
Speaker 1: it's an easy gig to be the casting director in
Speaker 1: that movie. Yeah, you know, you're not going to have
Speaker 1: to look as hard as you probably should know that.
Speaker 1: You just walk down the street and you're look for
Speaker 1: someone who can't walk down the street, and your job
Speaker 1: is done. Oh boy. So here's how the website Genocide Watch,
Speaker 1: who wrote about the Prince's blog, described it. He posts
Speaker 1: sharp opinions on what he considers the deplorable state of
Speaker 1: Cambodian society and politics, highlighting corruption, deforestation, and injustice. As
Speaker 1: often as not, he blames Hansen, who's the guy he
Speaker 1: initially backed into power, in a diplomatically indirect manner that
Speaker 1: is little to disguise his target. Uh So the Prince
Speaker 1: continued to direct movies through until the early two thousands.
Speaker 1: This man, who previously had had thousands of people beheaded,
Speaker 1: directed and wrote a movie called Apostle of Non Violence.
Speaker 1: I found a plot synopsis. A Buddhist monk preaches non
Speaker 1: violence and forgiveness to rural villagers, rebels, and national army
Speaker 1: soldiers in the recent civil war. After the rebels destroy
Speaker 1: a village. The monk enlists the help of a government
Speaker 1: official who sends troops to attack the rebels. So even
Speaker 1: his movie about non violences troops and to attack the rebels.
Speaker 1: He's a piece of work. Yeah, it's impressive. Yeah. His
Speaker 1: last four movies were released in two thousand six. I'm
Speaker 1: going to read their titles in order. Commander of the
Speaker 1: Royal Order of Kodong, which fine. Four wives are not
Speaker 1: such fun? Oh man? I just pictured like Steve Martin
Speaker 1: and Queen Latifa on the cover of that one. For
Speaker 1: some reason, How did you guess the cast who doesn't
Speaker 1: have a mistress? And then Mississina, which I'm guessing is
Speaker 1: about his mistress. I don't know, Um he died? Does
Speaker 1: his wife play his mistress? I'm not able to find
Speaker 1: any real information about this one, so I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 1: I'm also curious about his wife. What's her deal? She
Speaker 1: sticks around the whole time she's here. She died at
Speaker 1: some point. Yeah, everybody didn't take notes on that because
Speaker 1: I'm a hack in a fraud. But he does die
Speaker 1: of cancer in two thousand twelve. Uh So now he's dead,
Speaker 1: which is good because he's a monster. Yeah, not not
Speaker 1: not a good guy. Here's a picture of him in
Speaker 1: the forties. Dam it's still handsome, Still handsome, still handsome.
Speaker 1: You can tell from those little cheeks that like he's
Speaker 1: about to head off to France and like cry in
Speaker 1: a bathroom while he doesn't eat for three days. I
Speaker 1: don't know, he looks good. I'm just saying he wears it. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you have to see what he sees in the mirror,
Speaker 1: which is the kid his mom always called Tubby. Yes,
Speaker 1: we'll post this picture on He's wearing what I hate
Speaker 1: to say is a fantastic shirt. It is in a
Speaker 1: really great sash. Human biology is so weird because I
Speaker 1: know what this man has done. You've just spent a
Speaker 1: good deal of time explaining to me how truly terrible
Speaker 1: he is. And yet at the end of that time
Speaker 1: you showed me a picture of him, and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I get it, I get it. Who doesn't have a mistress,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean? And when he died, millions
Speaker 1: of people showed up in Cambodia to honor him. Pictures
Speaker 1: of him went up everywhere. I'm gonna guess there's still
Speaker 1: a lot of picture of him all around the country. Uh,
Speaker 1: He's still beloved by large chunks of the population today,
Speaker 1: although there are obviously people who also recognize he uh
Speaker 1: kind of contributed heavily to, you know, the worst political
Speaker 1: disaster maybe in all of history. In terms of one
Speaker 1: nation's modern history. It is tough to duplicate. A few
Speaker 1: places are really trying, Like it's amazing even Hitler didn't
Speaker 1: succeed in getting that larger percentage of his country wiped out,
Speaker 1: and he was close. I will say, if we actually
Speaker 1: looked at our own history and we're honest about who
Speaker 1: was actually here and who we killed, we're pretty our
Speaker 1: numbers are it starts before we existed, which is the
Speaker 1: tough thing. But yes, yeah, yeah, that's but that's a distinction.
Speaker 1: That's you know, doesn't he when lives don't they were
Speaker 1: all they were, They were just there. But then he
Speaker 1: got yeah, yeah, they were like a hundred million people
Speaker 1: in the America's and then no, not so much. I
Speaker 1: just couldn't help it. So it is easy to look
Speaker 1: somewhere else and be like, can you believe it? You
Speaker 1: have to look back in the you know, mirror and
Speaker 1: be like, yeah, yeah, I guess I can. We've also, yeah, crazy,
Speaker 1: how weird it can get where it's just normal to
Speaker 1: go fishing and move heads out of the way, that
Speaker 1: things get out of hand fast. Yeah, well that escalated quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's weird. How that's like that is the way mass
Speaker 1: killings always kind of work. And in the book I
Speaker 1: was reading for the podcast we recorded a little earlier
Speaker 1: about King Leopold of Belgium. Oh man, that guy, that guy.
Speaker 1: But it's it's just talking about how mass killings start,
Speaker 1: and it's a little bit like how the flu spreads,
Speaker 1: where one group of people decides, Okay, we're going to
Speaker 1: massacre anyone to try to get this finished quickly. We're
Speaker 1: just going to kill everyone who disagrees with us, and
Speaker 1: then suddenly everybody's murdering everybody, like it just spreads like
Speaker 1: a flippery Yeah, And that's really like se A. Nook
Speaker 1: wasn't the architect of the Khmer Rouge's disastrous policies, but
Speaker 1: he was the guy an architect to anything. No, he
Speaker 1: just wanted to stay in power, and he was willing.
Speaker 1: He's the guy who escalated the violence to the point
Speaker 1: where past a certain point, even if pol Pot had
Speaker 1: died in nineteen fifty and never got someone would have
Speaker 1: wound up doing terrible ship in his place, because the
Speaker 1: king had just stacked all these dominoes up like he
Speaker 1: guaranteed something terrible was going to happen. Maybe Poulpot made
Speaker 1: it a lot worse. Maybe only thirty percent of Cambodia
Speaker 1: dies if someone else is in charge. But because of
Speaker 1: what the prince had done, something fucking bad was going
Speaker 1: to happen. I feel like we've all done this tour
Speaker 1: ourselves with you know, ice cream and taco bell. It's
Speaker 1: oreos and like each of these things individually might have
Speaker 1: been okay if just one had happened, if only just
Speaker 1: wanted happen. But no, if you've no no. I was
Speaker 1: talking a little earlier about I ate hundreds of rancid
Speaker 1: muscles recently, and if I had stopped at one, I
Speaker 1: would have been fine. But instead I ate two fifty
Speaker 1: and it was a disaster. And that's you know, life's
Speaker 1: like that sometimes, yes, and in this yeah, yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: A message to all of you kings and princes out there,
Speaker 1: stop after the first rancid muscle. Yes, don't let the
Speaker 1: camar rouge take power. Don't let your rancid muscle be
Speaker 1: a massacre. Work it back from there. I feel like
Speaker 1: we've landed on some wisdom that everyone can benefit here.
Speaker 1: I think we fixed everything. No, massacres a good place
Speaker 1: to stare. It's a good place to start and end.
Speaker 1: Let's just avoid massacres. Yeah, good, that's yes, that's you
Speaker 1: know what I'm going to do that. I had different
Speaker 1: plans for my day, but now I'm gonna avoid. But
Speaker 1: I'm not. We go out to Pyramid Lake, you cut
Speaker 1: ten thousand people's heads off. Yeah, and then when you fish,
Speaker 1: you got to move them out of the way. I'm
Speaker 1: really stuck on that imagery. Yeah, fishing is it's supposed
Speaker 1: to be boring and relatively peaceful. There's a calm you
Speaker 1: need to have about you to fish. And if you
Speaker 1: had to summon that calm while just moving heads out
Speaker 1: of the way, that's a lot. That's a lot. I
Speaker 1: gotta feel like though. You get some really fat fish
Speaker 1: in that like, and they're probably easy to catch. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know. I did eat a fish once that had
Speaker 1: eaten people, um, and it was a good It tasted good,
Speaker 1: it was a good fish like it didn't yeh. Biology
Speaker 1: is weird turned it into something else it was such
Speaker 1: a tasty fish. Yeah, but yeah, it had definitely been
Speaker 1: eating people. An iguana wants is that what we're doing?
Speaker 1: Are we just trading? Are we trading? Now? What had
Speaker 1: the iguana been eating? Why did you eat an iguana?
Speaker 1: Because there's there's too fucking many of them. They're just
Speaker 1: meat for sure. They're just like fisteen in one Like,
Speaker 1: once you've seen them on one beach, you understand how
Speaker 1: many of you are. They're like, Okay, I raise a chicken.
Speaker 1: There's lots of cats, and we don't need cats personally.
Speaker 1: They're cute, they're delicious meat. Chickens are cute. No they're not,
Speaker 1: Yes they are. Chickens are definitely cute. Chickens are assholes.
Speaker 1: Did you just see a goose and think it was
Speaker 1: a big chicken? Every goose, every every goose is every
Speaker 1: chicken head, if I may. But that's where we conclude
Speaker 1: this episode. Okay, um, I would like to maybe this
Speaker 1: new tradition, a guest gets to suggest a bastard for
Speaker 1: the future. Okay, No, I'm a very lazy man, so
Speaker 1: I curate geese fucking geese to find me a goose
Speaker 1: that somebody's like that goose was my best friend. I
Speaker 1: like that it never chased me or tried to peck
Speaker 1: me in the face. And theus I could just have
Speaker 1: a goose. Half the episode is like, you know, white
Speaker 1: goose are evil, and then the other half is like,
Speaker 1: white geese are delicious. Well that's Caitlin's advice for the
Speaker 1: week at a goose, take it or leave it. I
Speaker 1: recommend leaving it. Thank you so much. Uh, well that
Speaker 1: I have learned, it's only some of the things I
Speaker 1: wish I didn't know. Um, yeah, thank you. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: don't make me thank Prince Nora dam Shanna, thanks Prince
Speaker 1: Noradam Sahanak isolate that audio. Yeah pretty sure we're pronouncing
Speaker 1: it right some of the times. Uh, I am not
Speaker 1: sure I trust you on this one. I apologize to
Speaker 1: the camer people listening. I don't apologize to the Prince. Yes,
Speaker 1: he was a dick, um, but we gotta plug your plugles.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, of course. You can find me at
Speaker 1: caitlyn gil Comedy dot com or at robot Caitlin on
Speaker 1: Twitter or at Caitlin is Tall on Instagram. Uh, and
Speaker 1: you can find me in your heart where I love you.
Speaker 1: This has been behind the Bastards. I've been Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: You can find us on the internet at behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards dot com. I will be listing the sources for
Speaker 1: this podcast, including the book that was a big part
Speaker 1: of the research, and all the different websites where I
Speaker 1: learned about his filmography and stuff. That'll all be up there.
Speaker 1: A bunch of pictures will be up there. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be great. You can also find us on social media
Speaker 1: at at Bastards pod. You can find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at I write okay to letters there and uh yeah.
Speaker 1: Next week we will be back with another Bastard, So
Speaker 1: tune in then, folks. Until then, I love like you
Speaker 1: five bastards. I love you all. H