In the Shadows of Utopia: The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Nightmare

On April 2nd, 1967, in the Samlaut district of Battambang province, a group of villagers killed two soldiers collecting rice. What followed was not a rebellion so much as a reprisal, and Sihanouk decided he knew exactly who was behind it. He was, for the most part, wrong.

Time Period Covered: 1967

What was the Samlaut Rebellion, and how did it start? Who was responsible for this outbreak of violence? What leads to Khieu Samphan disappearing overnight?

In the first part of an explanation of how the Cambodian Civil War begins, Lachlan looks into the circumstances that lead to an outbreak of violence in the province of Battambang. Then, on April 2nd, 1967, a series of murders turns into a genuine eruption of peasant unrest and government reprisal: the Samlaut Rebellion. But who started it? Was it the Khmer Rouge, as Sihanouk thinks, and just who are these Cambodian communists in his eyes?

We also explain the roles of three Cambodian intellectuals that will play a prominent role in the Khmer Rouge, but a tactical decision to put them as the 'face' of the movement rather than the 'actual' leadership: "The Three Ghosts". Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim and Huo Yuon.

Sources

Philip Short Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare
David Chandler The Tragedy of Cambodian History & Brother Number One
Ben Kiernan How Pol Pot Came to Power and Peasants & Politics in Kampuchea
Milton Osbourne Sihanouk
Steve Heder Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model
Elizabeth Becker When the War was Over
Nic Dunlop Lost Executioner
ECCC Case 001 Witness Testimony 2009

In March 1965, American aircraft began a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam that would run for three and a half years. In the same period, Pol Pot walked out of the jungle to Hanoi and Beijing, and came back with a different idea of what Cambodian communism was for.

Time Period Covered: 1964 to 1967

How does the 'Vietnam War' begin? How did the Communist Party of Kampuchea get its name? Why did Sihanouk start making so many movies in the 1960s?

In this episode, Lachlan revisits Vietnam as LBJ wages war upon the North and the Viet Cong. Pol Pot leaves the jungle to visit Hanoi and Beijing, and changes the direction of Khmer communism. Meanwhile, in Cambodia, Sihanouk begins losing his magic touch as various quarters become less enamoured with his policies. The Cambodian Civil War approaches, as the war in Vietnam begins to spread.

Sources
Philip Short Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare
David Chandler The Tragedy of Cambodian History & Brother Number One
Ben Kiernan How Pol Pot Came to Power
Milton Osbourne Sihanouk
Steve Heder Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model
Edward Miller The Vietnam War
Mark Atwood Lawrence A Concise History of the Vietnam War
Democratic Kampuchea Livre Noir

The Khmer Rouge did not sell communism to Cambodian peasants in the language of Marx. They sold it in the language of Theravada Buddhism, using its grammar, its vocabulary and its habits of thought, to carry ideas that had nothing to do with it. That translation is one of the most under-examined reasons the revolution worked.

Time Period Covered: 1963 to 1965

Who was Nuon Chea? What does Buddhism have to do with Khmer Rouge ideology? Why did Sihanouk sever ties with the United States?

In this episode we explore the impact of the fateful year of 1963 in Cambodia, as well as the circumstances the new Cambodian communist leadership were dealing with in the Vietnamese jungle. We also look at the difference between two influential future leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, as they play quite different roles for the organisation.

This episode also explores the relationship between Theravada Buddhist language, grammar and thought, and the way this was used by the Khmer Rouge to transplant communist ideas into Cambodian minds.

Finally, the episode concludes by explaining the reasons surrounding Sihanouk's distancing from the US and eventual cutting off of aid and relations between the two countries.

Sources

Philip Short Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare
David Chandler The Tragedy of Cambodian History & Brother Number One
Ben Kiernan How Pol Pot Came to Power
Milton Osbourne Sihanouk
Steve Heder Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model
Norodom Sihanouk My War with the CIA
Alex Hinton Why Did They Kill?

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On June 11th, 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc sat down at a Saigon intersection, was doused in petrol, and set himself alight without moving or making a sound. The photograph went around the world. Five months later Ngo Dinh Diem was dead, and three weeks after that, so was John F. Kennedy.

Time Period Covered: 1961 to 1963

What is Agent Orange, and why did the Kennedy Administration decide to use it? How did Diem's regime collapse? What was the Buddhist Crisis?

In the final part of our exploration into the beginnings of the 'Vietnam War', we look at the circumstances surrounding the early Kennedy years and how a 'prudent' approach to South Vietnam resulted in a number of problems, both immediate and in the future. We look in depth at Operation Ranch Hand, the decision to use defoliants in South Vietnam, and how the Diem regime becomes a no longer viable partner for the US and their wider strategic interests. We explain the Buddhist Crisis and the self-immolation of Quang Duc, and the competing visions of a new South Vietnam. Finally the coup against Diem, Kennedy's assassination, and the return of Pol Pot to the jungles of Vietnam represent a new chapter in the coming historical hurricane.

Sources

Christopher Goscha Vietnam: A New History
Fredrick Logevall The Embers of War
Edward Miller The Vietnam War & Reinterpreting the Buddhist Crisis (Modern Asian Studies November 2015)
Neil Sheehan The Pentagon Papers
Geoffrey Warner The United States and Vietnam 1945-1965 (International Affairs October 1972)
William Buckingham The US Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia


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In 1954 a CIA officer named Edward Lansdale arrived in Saigon to help build a country. What he helped build was a police state run by one Catholic family in a Buddhist nation, and within a decade the United States would arrange its destruction.

Time Period Covered: 1954 to 1961

How did a succession of US administrations become stuck in Vietnam? How did Diem's policies create the conditions for insurgency? What did the early activities of the NLF look like?

In part two of our exploration of the path to the Second Indochina War, we focus on early American efforts to create a stable regime in South Vietnam. The activities of the CIA and Edward Lansdale in the aftermath of Geneva introduce this relationship, as well as the growing realisation in some quarters that perhaps Diem was not the best person for the job of leading the country. We look at the 'paradox' of Vietnam, why escalation slowly continued in the face of private doubts. NLF operations in the Mekong Delta are discussed from the point of view of those staging these actions, as well as those civilians affected by the authoritarianism of Diem and the intimidating tactics of those who wished to overthrow him. 

Sources

Christopher Goscha Vietnam: A New History
Fredrick Logevall The Embers of War
Edward Miller The Vietnam War
Neil Sheehan The Pentagon Papers
Geoffrey Warner The United States and Vietnam 1945-1965 (International Affairs October 1972)

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The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel and promised elections within two years. The elections never happened. Instead, two states set about building themselves in opposite directions, and both killed a great many of their own people doing it.

Time Period Covered: 1954 to 1963

What occurred in a divided Vietnam in the aftermath of the Geneva Accords? How did so many die during the North Vietnamese 'Land Reform Campaign'? Why was South Vietnam described as an 'emerging fascist state'?

In this first part of a mini-series on the origins of the Vietnam War, Lachlan investigates state building in the divided Vietnam. Exploring the ideology and benefactors of the separate regimes, we touch upon the thousands who died during the efforts to revolutionise the North, as well as similarly draconian methods to consolidate power in the hands of one family in the South.

Sources

Christopher Goscha Vietnam: A New History
Ben Kiernan Viet Nam
Edward Miller The Vietnam War
Alec Holcombe Mass Mobilisation in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

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In July 1962, the secretary of the Cambodian communist party, Tuo Samouth, left his house in Phnom Penh at night and never came back. Nobody has ever established with certainty who killed him. What is certain is who replaced him.

Time Period Covered: 1960 to 1963

How did Pol Pot become leader of the Khmer Rouge? What did prominent communists like Khieu Samphan do in Sihanouk's Cambodia? Were there limits to Sihanouk's power and tightrope act?

We begin with a reflection on how Cambodian history can permeate even seemingly mundane spaces, before looking in on a secret communist seminar led by the new leader of the Khmer Rouge. This episode revisits some loose ends left as the Cambodian communists began taking their own steps toward a movement independent of the Vietnamese, as well as how the roles in that party began taking shape. We learn about the mysterious death of Tuo Samouth, and the circumstances that precede the vitally important year of 1963.

Sources

Philip Short Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare
David Chandler The Tragedy of Cambodian History, Brother Number One, A History of Cambodia
Ben Kiernan How Pol Pot Came to Power
Milton Osbourne Sihanouk
Elizabeth Becker When the War was Over
Norodom Sihanouk My War with the CIA

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One of the Khmer Rouge's central slogans called for a 'super great leap forward'. The original had killed somewhere in the order of forty-five million Chinese people less than two decades earlier, and the Cambodians knew that. They intended to do it faster.

Time Period Covered: 1949 to 1962

Why was one of the most prominent slogans of the Khmer Rouge about a 'super great leap forward'? What is Maoism, and why did the People's Republic of China provide a new ideological source for the world? Why did the USSR and the PRC split in the 1960s?

This episode could be considered the third instalment in the history of communist ideology in the series. Lachlan discusses the Chinese Civil War, the People's Republic of China, Mao, Maoism, and the circumstances surrounding the Great Leap Forward and its terrible consequences. The Chinese communists will provide the Khmer Rouge not only with material and economic aid once they come to power, but also with an ideological framework, a program, that the Cambodians will seek to recapitulate. This is an explanation of that program, as well as another hugely important factor in the coming chaos in Indochina: the ideological schism between the USSR and the PRC known as the Sino-Soviet Split.

Sources

Philip Short Mao
Julia Lovell Maoism: A Global History
Richard Baum The Fall and Rise of China
Frank Dikotter Mao's Great Famine

The Communist Party of Kampuchea was founded in 1960 at a secret congress held in a room above Phnom Penh's railway station. Among the men who came out of it with senior positions were a schoolteacher named Saloth Sar and a man who would later be known as Nuon Chea. In public they were teachers, students and clerks. The party's very existence was a secret, and would stay one for another seventeen years.

Time Period Covered: 1955 to 1960

How does the Communist Party of Kampuchea form? How does Saloth Sar become a married man and teacher? What are the consequences of Sihanouk's neutral foreign policy?

As peace broke out over Cambodia in the wake of the First Indochina War, the fledgling communist movement had to learn to survive in a newly independent country under the rule of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Numbers dwindling and unable to openly resist the government, the 'revolutionary organisation', as they began calling themselves, found an avenue for recruits in the schools of Phnom Penh. The man who would become Pol Pot became a teacher.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to navigate a neutral path for Cambodia in the Cold War era, Sihanouk opens relations with China as well as the United States. This agenda will have consequences, as the CIA begins trying to undermine his government and even seek his removal. The resulting 'Bangkok Plot', a series of conspiracies against him, will be explained.

Sources

Philip Short Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare
David Chandler The Tragedy of Cambodian History, Brother Number One
Ben Kiernan How Pol Pot Came to Power
Milton Osbourne Sihanouk
Elizabeth Becker When the War was Over
Norodom Sihanouk My War with the CIA
Peter Froberg Idling Song for an Approaching Storm
Craig Etcheson Overview of Hierarchy of Democratic Kampuchea

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