Brendan James (BJ): Yeah, some people might know that the Khmer Rouge were an outgrowth of the Vietnam War, insofar as the Vietnam War eventually sucked in Cambodia and created conditions for this horrible group to carry out one of the great human catastrophes of the 20th century.
But what we wanted to do was start from the top and see how French colonialism, and then US imperialism, set up the events that followed. We discuss how, in the early ’50s, at the onset of the Cold War, Indochina was passed from France to the United States, and then how Vietnam—when it slowly began to mutate from a limited engagement to a military action to a full-blown war—became a vortex that sucked in Laos and Cambodia and, you could argue, China as well.
As is well known, the US eventually withdraws from Vietnam, and surprisingly, the Vietnamese try to make nice with the West, saying, All is forgotten, we just ended the war with you, but we would like to normalize relations, we would like to do diplomacy, we would like to make some common interest happen despite all that you did to us within the past several years. But the US says no to war reparations and no to normalized relations. In many ways, for the US, the Vietnam War is not over.
As we discuss, the US made common cause with the Khmer Rouge specifically in order to crush the Vietnamese. The US was aligned in this with China, which opposed Vietnam for its own geopolitical strategic reasons. Together, they supported the Khmer Rouge’s war against the Vietnamese. In the process, the Khmer Rouge dropped their Communist politics and they made common cause with the West. They stopped doing any lip service to Communism, dropped their Mao jackets, put on safari suits and green fatigues, and they never talked about Communism again. This shows that they were really a nationalist movement first and foremost. Which, of course, you can say about a lot of Third World socialist movements, but these guys, as one sees in our season, were a truly noxious time bomb of xenophobia, directed at minorities in Cambodia.
Perhaps the biggest point we want to make is that the US backed the Khmer Rouge’s war against Vietnam, and in so doing made a willful alliance with genocidaires, which is not something we normally hear about. Put differently, the supposedly liberal democratic West allied with the now globally maligned Khmer Rouge in order to punish Vietnam. It was Vietnamese Communists who defeated Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.