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USEFUL IDIOTS #1 Malcolm Caldwell Meets Pol Pot And Then Ceases To Exist · Radio Baloney - The Richie Baloney Show!

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Well, they say, never meet your heroes, and that's doubly true.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: If your heroes are psychopathic mass murderers, never meet them.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: And I guess thus begins our tale of useful idiot
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Malcolm Caldwell. That's him right there, This is him here,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: this is him in Cambodia prior to meeting Paul Pott.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Malcolm Calledwell James Alexander Malcolm Caldwell nineteen thirty one to
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight was a Scottish academic and a prolific
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Marxist writer. He was a consistent critic of American foreign policy,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: a campaigner, a campaigner for Asian communist and socialist movements,
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: and a supporter of the Kabert Rouge. Caldwell was murdered
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: a few hours after meeting Paul Pot in Cambodia, though
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: who was responsible for the murder remains debated. Well, it
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: actually doesn't, but this is Wikipedia. So first we're going
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: to talk a little bit about this man, Malcolm Caldwell,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: and we'll just get a sense of who he was,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: and then we're going to get into what was the
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge. We're going to talk a little bit about
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: communist apologetics. In the academy. Then we're going to get
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: to Paul Pott himself and then the endgame for Malcolm Caldwell.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: It did not go well for him. Let's see about
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: as not well as you can go. Malcolm Caldwell was
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: born in Sterling, Scotland, the son of an architect. My
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: point is is that this guy had a nice, you know,
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: at least middle class, upper middle class background, as Champagne
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: socialists usually do, yes, and he did not come from
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: a line of coal miners. He joined the in nineteen
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: fifty nine. He joined the School of Oriental and African
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Studies at the University of London as a research fellow.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: As well as being an academic, he was an energetic
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: and committed radical political activist. He was chair of the
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from nineteen sixty eight. In
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: eighteen seventy, he was dedicated to criticizing Western foreign policy
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: and capitalist economics. Let's see, let's take a look at
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: some of his books, The Wealth of Some Nations, Socialism
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: and the Environment. I mean it all sounds like kind
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: of boilerplate calming bullshit right, Oil and imperialism in East Asia, Thailand,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: towards the revolution. Let's see Campuccia Rationale, Rationale, Rationale, Campuccia
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: rationale for a rural policy. Campuccia is what Cambodia was
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: called by the Khmer Rouge. By Paul Pott, the rural
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: policy there that he's advocating for had killed a quarter
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: of the population. Let's see planning and urbanism in China.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: So it's all kind of exactly what you would expect.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Let's take a look at his book, The Wealth of
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Some Nations. Wealth of Some Nations, so clever a provocative
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: introductory texts the first to integrate the Western energy crisis
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: with third world food shortage, analyzing the history and politics
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: which have led to this explosive situation. So this was written.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: This was first published in nineteen seventy seven. Why are
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: two thirds of the world impoverished? Have we exhausted the
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: soil's capacity to feed our present world population? What part
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: does food production play in the generation of national wealth?
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: And should we knowingly destroy our natural energy resources? A
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Coal and Oil Caldwell examines both the scientific and socio
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: political principles governing food production and energy usage in the
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: world today. It's just again, it's all kind of boilerplate
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: COMI bullshit, right, but it's very dated. Obviously, have we
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: exhausted the soil's capacity to feed our present world population?
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: People were worried about that. Let's see nineteen seventy seven.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: So he wasn't about there or there we go nineteen
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: seventy he was about there. You can see here this
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: is agricultural output nineteen sixty one to twenty nineteen. As
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: you can see, it's gone up sharply. It turns out
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: that we were able to produce more than enough food
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: for the world, and already it was on the way up.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: While while he was still a lot well he was
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: writing that book. But it's the sort of thing that
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Commi's ignored. They ignore reality every single time. They're just
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: not interested in it. They're interested in the in the
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: ideology and the dream of the utopia. As you can see,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: it's all very dated. Oh. The other thing is too
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: that for commies talking about they like to talk about
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: poverty a lot. Here's world poverty. So this is people
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: making the equivalent of about two dollars a day. Right,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: you can see, Well, since the industrial revolution and global capitalism,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: you can see it's just gone off a cliff right,
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: even like here when he was writing it was sharply
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: off of a cliff right. This is a kind of
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: this is it should be like the final evidence needed
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: for the entire world to turn away from ridiculous utopian
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: ideals like Marxism, like communism, because I mean, it's all
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: right here. Communism didn't do this to global poverty. Communism didn't.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: This is capitalism. Capitalism did this. I mean you can't.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine a sharper improvement globally. But he
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: did not live long enough to see that, because he
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: went to go visit his hero in Cambodia. Not a
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: great idea, Not a great idea, useful stooge, hall of fame.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: I found this medium. This is from at twenty fifteen.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: In a recent and fascinating piece for The Spectator, James
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Bartholomew bemoaned what he called the socialist indoctrination provided by
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: British universities to foreign students, who then return home, rise
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: to positions of power, apply what they've learned, and as
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: a result, do a lot of damage to their nation's economies.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: A current example Yannis Verufacus, who as Greece's financial Minister
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: earlier this year turned what had actually been an expanding
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: economy into a total disaster. I remember this was written
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen. In passing, Bartholomew noted that while most
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: of the British professors reptile for converting foreign students to
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: bad economics, in other words, Marxism remained comfortably in the UK,
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: uninvolved in the misery they have sown overseas. There has
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: been one striking example to the contrary, Malcolm Caldwell. He's
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: somebody who had to well not live with the consequences
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: of his ideology. He died with it. In the nineteen seventies.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Caldwell a lecture at the School of Oriental and African
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Studies at the University of London, was a prominent British
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: voice against US involvement in Vietnam. An open communist, he
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: chaired the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and despised America. Caldwell,
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Michael Ezra has written, quote was most in his element
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: when writing about the demonstrated strengths of the communist system.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: Just pure delusion. Five years ago and an article for
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: The Guardian Andrew Antony provided a glimpse into Caldwell's politics,
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: it's all just you know, in the seventies writing about
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: the strengths of the communist system. It's just wilful ignorance
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Kim Il Sung. It is not that Caldwell was lost
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: in bookish abstraction, for he did visit the various communist
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: regimes he extolled. It was more that it was more
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: that when he got there he was all too willing
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: to accept state propaganda as verified fact. Yes, the various
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: you know, kind of potempkin villages they set up which
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: are not for regular people, and they're not real life
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: of the population. It's just for useful idiots, for foreign
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: sympathetic journalists and the like, or academics and the like.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: For example, he praised the magnitude of the economic achievements
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: of Kim Il Sung's impoverished North Korea, and returning from
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: a trip to the highly secretive state, he wrote that
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: the country was quote an astonishing tribute not only to
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: the energy initiative and create a creativeness of the Korean people,
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: but also to the essential correctness of their line, of
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: the Jeuche line. I don't know about the totalitarian surveillance
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: and ruthless political repression. Caldwell said nothing about the about
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: the totalitarian surveillance and ruthless political repression, Caldwell said nothing,
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: of course not. They ignore it. It's just wilful ignorance.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: It's ideological capture. They don't care. Caldwell wasn't just a
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: fan of the North Korean regime. He also admired Paul Pott,
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: the communist ruler of Cambodia, whom he apparently viewed as
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: having devised a new and wonderful form of totalitarianism. As
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Ezra puts it, Caldwell quote shamelessly regurgitated the propaganda provided
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: by Paul Pott's regime. Caldwell was, of course, far from
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: alone in this enthusiasm. Most Western experts are. Most Western experts,
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: in quotes in Southeast Asia cheered the rise of Poulpot's
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: vicious and violent Khmer Rouge, which ran Cambodia from nineteen
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: seventy five to nineteen seventy nine. During those four years,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: about two million of that country seven million people died,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: a million in executions, and another million from starvation, forced labor,
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: and other such causes. Yet most Western experts, Caldwell included,
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: strenuously denied reports that Paul Pott was committing atrocities because
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: they don't want to believe it. It's called wilful ignorance.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: There's a long, long history, going back one hundred years
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: of far leftist propaganda, of Marxist propaganda. To propagandize the West,
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Lenin recruited a corpse of useful idiots. This was written
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: in twenty thirteen. Contrary to what you may have heard,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: there really was a world communist conspiracy. Yes, its purpose
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: was not just agitation, but propaganda to bring it about.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: V I Lenin recruited a special core of propagandists for
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: what has for what was to become the Communist International
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: or common Turn. For a fanatic like Lenin, it wasn't
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: enough merely to have a communist revolution in Russia. He
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: wanted communism to take over the world, the fulfillment of
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Marxi's exhortation Workers of the World Unite. Lenin also feared
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: that unless other countries went communist, his own revolution would
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: be doomed to collapse under economic failure. Because yet it
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: doesn't really work, it doesn't make for a wealthy country. Unfortunately,
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: this drove him to try something new. At the time,
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: a special core of useful idiots. The term is not
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: actually Lenin's, but that of economist Ludwig von Meses. These
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: foot soldiers would push his revolution in every country, co
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: opting and subverting democratic processes, fomenting strikes, installing secret armies,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: and above all, propagandizing according to Moscow's dictates. Now keep
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: in mind this is all happening over one hundred years ago.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: From its inception, the Corps became a cover and a
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: tool of the Russian Communist Party's activities in the international arena,
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: also known as the common Tern. Communist International was convened
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: as the Third International in March nineteen eighteen, with all
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: the known Communist parties of Europe and Asia useful idiots
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: of being around more than a century. That's the point
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: I want to show you this. So this is from
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: a book called in Denial. In Denial, in fact, i'll
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: show you the I own this book, a hard copy,
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: a hard copy of this book, and I have read it.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: It's a little dry, but it goes. It talks about
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: apologetics and covering and basically propaganda in American academia around
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: the UH Communist Party of the USA. In Denial, historians
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: communism and espionage, and it, you know, it goes into
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: quite a bit about the you know, the United States
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: Communist Party and all the relationship, the deep relationship obviously
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: to the Soviet Union espionage control from Moscow. It's actually
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: interesting book. It's a little dry, but I want to
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: show you just a little a little part of it
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: because it's never really ended. Let's see, it has only
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: been a little more than a decade since the collapse
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: of the Soviet Union and the meltdown of the communist
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: world it once led. Communist regimes survived for much longer
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: than Nazi Germany, and their combined victims vastly outnumbered those
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: murdered by European fascism. Yet very few people seem to
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: know this. Why is that, Well, it's because of subversion, subversion,
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: Marxist subversion in academia. Yet the enormous human cost of
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: communism barely registers an American intellectual life. Worse, a sizable
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: American higher education and cultural life. How is it possible
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: that the memory of Communist crimes could have vanished so swiftly. Well,
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: the memory of Nazi crimes remains so fresh because there's
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: an awful lot of Marxism in the academy. And that's
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: across the Western world, whether it's the United States, Canada
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: or France or the UK or Germany or wherever. There's
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: an awful lot of Marxism, an awful lot of Communists
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: and it's totally acceptable. So this is the world of
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: the Malcolm Caldwell. Now also, sorry for this. This was
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: written in the early two thousands, so this was about Yeah,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: it's I mean little more than a decade since the
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: collapse in sul of unions, So this would have been
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: you know, two thousand and two or two thousand and one,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: something like that. But that's the world of Malcolm Caldwell academia.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: So it's gotten worse over time. It's worse now. I
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: mean there were people in faculty that disagreed with him,
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: at least in the seventies. There were still some people
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: who disagreed with him in the seventies. Now I think
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: you'd have very few. So now we get to the
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge. So they're bad now. He they were really,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: really bad. So this guy was a big fan of
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: these guys. He was a champion for them. The Khmer
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: of the Communist Party of Campuchia and by extension, the
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: Demo to Democratic Campuchia, which ruled Cambodia between nineteen seventy
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: five and nineteen seventy nine. So Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: regime was highly autocratic, totalitarian, and repressive. Many deaths resulted
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: from the regime's social engineering policies and the Moha laut Plow,
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: an imitation of China's Great Leap Forward, which had caused
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: the Great Chinese Famine. The Khmer Rouge's attempts at agricultural
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: reform through collectivisation similarly led to widespread famine, while its
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: insistence on absolute self sufficiency, including the supply of medicine,
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: led to the death of many thousands from treatable diseases
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: such as malaria. The Khmer Rouge regime murdered hundreds of
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: thousands of their perceived political opponents, and their racist emphasis
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: on national purity resulted in the genocide of Cambodian minorities.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: It's cadres summarily executed and tortured perceived subversive elements, or
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: they killed them during genocidal purges of their own ranks
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: between nineteen seventy five and nineteen seventy eight. Ultimately, the
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: Cambodian genocide, which took place under the Khmer Rouge regime,
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: led to the deaths of one point five to two
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: million people, around twenty five percent of Cambodia's population. Yes,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: you see numbers around from one point five to about
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: two million people. Generally, it's agreed it's about a quarter
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: one in every four people. So think about where you
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: live and one out of four of those people is
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: dead and why are they dead? Why are they gone?
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: Was needlessly so why for an ideology? For the ideology
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: championed by this guy living in comfort in Scotland and
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: by other Champagne socialists, So you know, before you start
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: feeling too sorry for this guy from Britannica. Cambodian genocide
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: systemic murder of up to three million people in Cambodia
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: from nineteen seventy six to nineteen seventy eight that was
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: carried out by the Khmer Rouge government under Paul Pott.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: So Paul Pott, leader of the Khmer Rouge, declared nineteen
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: seventy five to be year zero when Cambodia was to
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: be isolated and its society remade in accordance with communist ideals.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: This stuff goes all the way back to the French
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Revolution where they readd the calendar. They just tried to reset.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: They always want to do this, reset society. This is,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: you know, the Cultural revolution in China. They always want
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: to do this. They did similar things in the Soviet
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: Union as well. They always want to just reset. They
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: want to break that bond with the past, with your heritage,
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: with your history. They deem it, and I think they
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: rightly deem it necessary to break a people, to turn
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: them into slaves, into sheep, just give them nothing to
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: believe in, essentially, other than what you offer them communist bullshit.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Civil rights and property rights were immediately eliminated, and any
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: public expressions of religious belief was forbidden. Again, it's another
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: one of those roots that they have to dig up,
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: that they have to sever so that you'll do what
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: you're told. Taking the view that Cambodian society had been
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: corrupted by exposure to the world beyond Cambodia's borders. The
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: new regimes start destroying evidence of Western influence, emptying cities,
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: and force marching the urban population into the countryside to
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: engage in hopelessly inadequate agricultural projects. As starvation and disease
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: set in. These actions alone would have created a significant
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: humanitarian disaster, and of course there was the famous film
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: made about it in the eighties called The Killing Fields.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Wasn't called The Killing Fields for nothing? So Paul Pott so,
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: this guy's hero, Paul Pott. He wanted to meet this man.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: He admired him greatly. Poulpot So the leader of the
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge in Cambodia that Malcolm Caldwell had been talking
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: up and supporting. Paul Pott was Cambodian politician, revolutionary and
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: dictator who ruled the communist state of Democratic Campuccia from
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy six until his overthrow in nineteen seventy nine.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: During his reign, his administration oversaw mass atrocities, and he
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: is widely believed to be one of the most brutal
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: death spots in modern world history. Ideologically, a Maoist and
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Khmer ethno nationalist. Pott was a leader of Cambodia's communist
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: movement known as the Khmer Rouge from nineteen sixty three
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: to nineteen ninety seven. So one of the most brutal
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: death spots in modern world history. And this guy liked him,
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: It liked it. Seemed like a good guy to this guy. Now,
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: of course he would say, well, you know, the claims
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: are exaggerated. Well, how exaggerated were they? Like, how exaggerated?
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Exactly did he think the claims were? Obviously you have
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: to be at least somewhat in support of slaughter, right,
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: slaughter for the sake of ideological purity, you have to
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: be somewhat I mean, what did he say, Well, I mean,
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: he didn't kill two million people. I mean it was
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: really only like maybe eight hundred thousand at most. That's max.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: It shows you the deep moral failings of these people
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: that are motivated ideologically, that are just ideologically captured. All right, Well,
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: you get the point. Really bad guy, really really bad guy,
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: really terrible person, somebody you should not admire at all.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Terrible person, even if you thought ninety nine percent of
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: what you heard about him was all bullshit. Still an
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: awful human. Just that one percent would make him by
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: far the worst person that you'd ever met, or ever
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: would meet. So this was published in twenty twenty five
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: April fifteenth, twenty twenty five, and it is titled three
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: Murders in a Million, The killings that launched Pulpot's rise, silence,
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: tiss regimes, leading dissident, and marked its end. Well, we're
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: gonna be just concerned with the last one here, the
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: third of these three murders in a million, although you know,
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: was really more like in two million or maybe three million.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: Among the million people killed, three specific murders provide insight
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: into the methods and motivations of the Khmer rouge leaders,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: as well as into Paulpot's documented policy of imposing secrecy
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: as the basis secrecy. Finally, December nineteen seventy the December
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight assassination of visiting Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: revealed Polepot's continuing dedication to impose secrecy as the basis
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: of his regime, as does his subsequent cover up of
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: all three murders. So the first two might have informed
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: Malcolm Caldwell to not go see Paul Pott. Not go
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: and hang out with one of history's worst mass murderers.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: Maybe I shouldn't hang out with them. I don't know.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: He seemed like a good in that interview. On December ninth,
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, Malcolm Caldwell of the University of London
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: began a two week guided tour of democratic Campuccia during
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: what was to be its final month. And of course
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: that's Cambodia. Two American journalists, Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Becker
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: and Richard Dudman of the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, accompanied
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: Caldwell on the visit. And there he is there, I'm
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: guessing that's in London, as saying, I don't know why
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: they'd murdered. That was going to murder me, that psychopathic
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: mass murderer is I'll be fine. Unlike his journalist companions,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: Caldwell was a leftist, an economic historian, an author of
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: the Wealth of Some Nations. He favored autarchy. He favored
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: autarchy for rural, undeveloped countries, urging them to withdraw from
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: the international capitalist system and to rely on their own
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: economic resources. Caldwell had co authored books on the US
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: in Southeast Asia and on Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Now, this,
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: what was happening in the killing fields of Cambodia was
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: just this was autarchy, was withdrawing from the world economy.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: He also had written articles defending the DKA regime, especially
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: its policies that favored a rural that favored rural areas,
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: and argued that the Khmer rouge evacuation of Cambodia's cities
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: and its focus on rural labor and autonomous development made
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: economic sense, at least in the interests of the peasantry.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: So if that makes sense to you, emptying out the
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: cities and forcing everybody to be farm laborers and killing
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: all of like the doctors and engineers and everybody who
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: knows how to do anything, if you're this guy, if
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: you're this guy and you advocate for that right, and
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: you know, you know that even even if the claims
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: of the massacres are greatly exaggerated, it's still hell on earth.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: I feel it's hard to feel sorry for somebody like that,
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: which I'd see is deeply immoral. No record has survived
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: of the two men's conversation. This is Paul Pott's and
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: Caldwell right. So we went to Cambodia. He had a
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: meeting with Paul Pott. No record has survived of the
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: two men's conversation. Caldwell wrote nothing in his diary about it.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: After his one on one meeting with Paul Pott, he
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: returned to the guest house where they were staying for
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: dinner with Becker and Dudman. Becker wrote that Caldwell was
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: delighted with his time with Cambodia's leader. The two had
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: spent most of the interview discussing revolutionary economic theory, the
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: topic of choice for Caldwell throughout the trip. So he's
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: loving Paul Pot here, he's loving him. At dinner that evening,
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: we went over stuff, Becker recalled later. So these were
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: the two Becker and the other one were the American journalists.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: Caldwell quote thought he had a good conversation with Paul Pott.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: He had avoided at all costs any discussion of Vietnam
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: because there was a war with Vietnam and he was
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: looking forward to going home. Elizabeth Becker was staying in
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: a room one floor below Caldwell's in the guesthouse, when
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: he was shot. She saw the armed attacker and quickly
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: hid in her room. After this attacker had shot Caldwell,
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: a second intruder immediately shot the killer dead. Becker wrote,
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: keep on, this is just a few hours after Caldwell
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: has had his conversation with his hero, Paul Pott. I
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: waited by myself in the dark for several fearful hours
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: before we were rescued. Dudman was safe, I was told,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: but Caldwell had been murdered. The Khmer Rouge Foreign minister
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Lang Seri blamed the Vietnamese for Caldwell's murder. Still traumatized,
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: I said no, the gunmen was Cambodian. I knew a
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: regime that controlled our every move could have protected us
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: from that assassin. I had to conclude that they wanted
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: Caldwell dead and to frighten Dudman and me. Years later,
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: a scholar found documents in the Khmer Rouge archives showing
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: that several low level Khmer Rouge figures were tortured and
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: executed for killing Caldwell. These low level Khmer Rouge had
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: in fact received their orders from Paul Pot and Lang Seri.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: In two thousand and three, Blake Kerr and cinematographer Alan
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Scott Moncrieff released their film The Angry Skies at Cambodian
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: Journey This film. This film reveals for the first time
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: evidence from a ranking Khmer Rouge commander that the meeting
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: between Caldwell and pol Pott had been recorded and when
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: it was over lang Sorry came into the room and
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: told pole Pott that too much had been said and
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: that Caldwell had to be eliminated. Caldwell had to be eliminated.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: According to Scott Montcrieff, a high ranking official called Commander
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Mout told his camera who it was who had ordered
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: and carried out the murder. The guy confirmed absolutely that
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: it came from Polpott, and I went down through two
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: other high ranking officials, one of whom was his right
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: hand man at the time and who encouraged Polpot to
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: make the decision. So was it the correct decision for
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: Malcolm Caldwell to meet with psychopath mass murderer Paul Pott. No,
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: it was a wrong choice, definitely the wrong choice. He
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: shouldn't have done it, should not have done it. But
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: it shows you where you know ideological capture can take you.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: It was all there for him to see, like, this
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: is one of history's great monsters, and it was all
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: there for him to see, but just willful ignorance. He
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: just didn't want to believe it. He was so committed
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: to this ideol, to his Marxism, he just didn't want
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: to accept that. And so he goes and meets psychopath
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: mass murderer, and a few hours later is dead because
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: somebody says, I think he might have told him too much,
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: and he goes, yeah, yeah, let's just kill him because
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: the mass murderer thing, the mass murdering thing, you know.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: So that's it. That's the end of the story for him.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: So ends the sad tale of Western Marxist, the useful
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: idiot Malcolm Caldwell reality. He tried to warn him, as
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: it had so many others, and he had refused to
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: listen right up to the moment that his ideology gave
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: him no further choice of the matter. Anyway, that's all
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: I'm going to say about that. Please like, share and subscribe.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: Subscribing really helps me out. I thank you for that.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: I will see you next time.