The Khmer Rouge & Pol Pot's Reign of Terror

When the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh in April, 1975, they immediately declared 'Year Zero' - a ruthless ideological crusade to reset history, and forge Pol Pot's vision for a communist utopia. Over the next four years, the regime carried out a genocide that killed nearly two million people - almost a quarter of Cambodia's population. Dan Snow is joined by Ben Kiernan, author of 'How Pol Pot Came to Power' and 'The Pol Pot regime'. Together, they trace how the turmoil of the Vietnam War fuelled the rise of the Khmer Rouge, detailing the horror of their reign and their eventual downfall in 1979. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Tim Arstall. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Lunchbox from the Bobby Bones Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features in tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or an adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops, while Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in. Get a deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  You know that feeling. Too many updates, too many meetings, too many things falling through the cracks? Monday.com was built for that gap. The AI work platform designed from the ground up for people and agents to work side by side and deliver more together. Drafting the brief, flagging risks, running a competitive scan, your agent can do it all. And the best part? Anyone can build one. Even you. Try it. Create your first Monday agent today at monday.com.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Do you snore? Did somebody hand you a CPAP and did you quietly stop using it? The mask that never quite seals? The hose tugging at you every time you roll over? A machine sitting abandoned in a closet? Excite OSA works a different way. It treats a root cause instead of managing the noise, and you use it while you're awake. 20 minutes a day, while the coffee brews, while you set your fantasy lineup. An FDA-cleared prescription device for primary snoring and mild obstructive sleep apnea. Then you go to bed like a person. Nothing strapped on, nothing plugged in. In clinical studies, 90% of patients saw a reduction in snoring.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  No sleep study required. Prescribed online, shipped to your door. Excite OSA at springsleep.com/sleep20. Code SLEEP20 for 20% off. Excite OSA is an FDA-cleared, prescription-only device for primary snoring and mild obstructive sleep apnea. Not for everyone. Individual results vary. Risks and benefits at springsleep.com.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  On April 17, 1975, the city of Phnom Penh awoke to the end of a war, the beginning of something even more cataclysmic. For five years, Cambodia had been consumed by conflict. It had been unable to resist the lunar pull of the extraordinary violence of neighboring Vietnam. And in Cambodia itself, there'd been a brutal struggle between the US-backed government of General Lon Nol and the insurgent forces of the Khmer Rouge, led by the communist revolutionary Pol Pot, supported by China. By that spring, 1975, the capital was overflowing with refugees.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Its resources were stretched thin, its people exhausted by bombardment and hunger and uncertainty. Khmer Rouge forces finally entered the city that morning. They weren't just conquering soldiers, they were the victors in a long and traumatizing, destabilizing conflict that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. They had an agenda. At first, though, their arrival seemed to carry the fragile promise of peace. Residents lined the street, some of them cheered, others watched, hoping that the fighting would finally be over. Khmer Rouge fighters, many of them strikingly young, spread out through the city on tanks and trucks and Jeeps. And over loudspeakers, there were reassuring words.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  The war had ended, order would be restored, and for that brief moment, it seemed possible the country might be able to rebuild. But within hours, that sense of relief was utterly shattered. Soldiers with bullhorns moved through neighborhoods issuing a new, urgent command. The entire population must leave the city immediately. It was presented as a temporary evacuation. It was necessary, they claimed, to avoid a possible American bombing. But actually, it was quickly clear there was a more sinister logic. Hospitals were emptied, patients pushed into streets, schools, homes, markets abandoned at gunpoint. Families gathered what they could carry, often only minutes ahead of armed men who

• 5:10Speaker 00

  swept up any stragglers under threat of death. Phnom Penh, a city of roughly 2 million people, was emptied with astonishing speed. Roads clogged with civilians moving in every direction. Many were unsure where they were being sent or why. In the chaos, as you can imagine, families were separated, children lost sight of parents, the elderly lagged behind. Witnesses recalled gunfire used to hurry the crowds along. There was constant pressure to keep people moving, no matter what the cost. And so along those jammed highways, leading out of the capital, thousands collapsed from exhaustion and illness, injury, bodies left behind.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Foreign nationals gathered in embassy compounds, and they watched what one observer would describe as a death march. There's one harrowing account of families throwing babies over the walls of those compounds, knowing that even that terrible risk was safer than the fate that awaited those children at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The entire city was in motion, stripped of its homes, institutions, its continuity. Within days, even these last outside foreign witnesses would be expelled, leaving Cambodia increasingly sealed off from the rest of the world. This was more seismic than a change of government.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  This was the deliberate first strike of a radical, sweeping transformation. It was Pol Pot's so-called Year Zero. Cambodia's existing society would be completely eradicated. A new communist agrarian utopia would be built from the ashes. What followed, in fact, is now known as the Cambodian genocide. A period marked by the excess death of one, perhaps two million people, as many as a quarter of Cambodia's population. In this episode of Dan's Notes History, we're going to try and find out how and why this happened. We're going to explore how the Khmer Rouge came to power.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  We're going to look at the roots of the regime and the turmoil of World War II, decolonization, war, revolution. We're going to dig into the brutal policies of the Khmer Rouge and consider how this dark chapter continues to shape the country, the region, to this day. This is a bit of a personal one for me, because I convinced my wife. We went for a brief honeymoon, and we went to Southeast Asia, and we spent some time, at my urging, looking at some of the sites at which that genocide had taken place, the sites known as Cambodia's Killing Fields. And the descriptions of the violence, of the barbarity, the brutality to men, women, and infants was deeply harrowing.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  For this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Ben Kiernan, the Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History at Yale, and the founding director of the Cambodian Genocide Programme and the Genocide Studies Programme. He's the author of lots and lots of acclaimed books. How Pol Pot Came to Power, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. He really is one of the most foremost experts on this topic. We're very lucky to have him today with us. Now, let's get into it.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Ben, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  My pleasure.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Tell me just briefly, in the era of mighty European empires, Cambodia, what we now know as Cambodia is part of the roughly speaking French Indochina, is it? What's the nature of that colonial rule?

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right. Cambodia was integrated into French Indochina colonial possession in the late 19th century and only became independent after the Geneva Conference in 1954. So when Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia obtained their independence.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Had there been fighting in Cambodia as there had been in Vietnam next door?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Yes, there had been sporadically in the late 1940s and more intensively in the early 50s. A communist movement was founded in 1951 in Cambodia. And it fought mostly alongside the Vietnamese communists against the French until 1954. There were also other nationalist movements fighting against the French and some Cambodians on the French side as well.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  And what was the condition then of Cambodia when it achieves independence? Is it, it sounds to me like there's going to be a scramble in that vacuum left by French power. Who's best placed to try and get control of the country?

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Well, it wasn't exactly a vacuum. Cambodia had been a kingdom for many centuries. It goes back to the Angkor period of the medieval times. It had been quite a powerful kingdom, but then it had been suffering intrusions from both Thailand in the west and Vietnam in the east and had lost a lot of its original territory. But it was a discreet kingdom. At the time, it was taken over by the French in the 19th century. And the king of Cambodia at the time of the French withdrawal in 1954 was Norodom Sienhuk. And he then stood down from the monarchy and became the chief of state instead. But it was still a kingdom.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  His father briefly, until his death, served as king. And Norodom Sienhuk was now a prince, but chief of state of Cambodia in the late 50s and early 60s and through the, until his overthrow in 1970. Now Cambodia was independent in the late 50s and early 60s and it was a neutral kingdom. It was fairly small, about five to six million people by the mid 60s. It was an agricultural kingdom, not industrial in many ways at all. But most peasants owned some land. And by the mid 60s, it was doing quite well agriculturally and economically

• 11:16Speaker 04

  and growing a lot of rice by the mid 60s and exporting quite a lot of rice. And the Cambodian government got most of its income from taxing rice exports.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  And what was the first sign of, sign of trouble then in the mid 60s?

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Well, there were some countervailing factors, both negative and positive, I guess, that were influencing Cambodia. The first, I think, would be the fact that it was a one-party state. Prince Sienhuk's kingdom slowly banned opposition parties and kept a close watch on opposition press. But at the same time, it was doing very well economically. And Cambodian peasants, being mostly landowners, were not susceptible to communist revolution. The Communist Party, as I mentioned, had been founded as the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party. It changed its name to the Workers' Party after independence.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  And it was not very effective. And indeed, it supported Cambodia's neutrality in the Vietnam War and supported Sienhuk's neutrality. And other leftists were also in support of the neutral aspect of Cambodia's foreign policy under Prince Sienhuk. And so there was some unity in Cambodia, there was some success economically. On the other hand, there was the divisive insurgency and trouble, the war that was building up in Vietnam, particularly the United States intervention, which built up strongly from 65 onwards, which had a countervailing effect on Cambodia's economic prosperity.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  The, the way this happened was that the destruction that both sides in the war in Vietnam caused to the rice-growing productivity of the Vietnamese farmland meant that rice productivity fell enormously in Vietnam and both armies needed rice. And so a lot of the Cambodian rice, which was very productively produced, was smuggled across the border into Vietnam to feed both armies and the Saigon Army and the Vietcong, the Vietnamese Communist Army. And what happened was the Cambodian government was now, because of the smuggling,

• 13:40Speaker 04

  which was out of its control, Cambodian government was no longer able to tax rice exports, which was the main source of the Cambodian government's income. It had lost control and it plunged towards bankruptcy in the mid to late 60s.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  Even though it sounds like it's boom times for rice farmers?

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Exactly. Well, it was, but a lot of the profits were being taken by smugglers. Both the government and the peasants were finding conditions quite difficult. And the effect on the Cambodian economy and then on the Cambodian politics, which although it was already a one-party state, it was not particularly oppressive. But by 1966, Sienhuk appointed the general of the army, Lon Nol, as prime minister and cracked down on the left and the leading left-wing parliamentarians, who were elected in the 66 elections, one of them with 78% of the vote. But they felt they had, were in danger and they had to flee.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  In 67, all three of them disappeared and became known as the Three Ghosts. And then a small rebellion began in 1967, which slowly built up, but not on a large scale, by 1969, 70. Now, this rebellion was begun not by those three formerly elected parliamentarians of Cambodia, who were Marxists, but it was begun by a group of formerly Paris-trained intellectuals led by Pol Pot. Now, Pol Pot himself was not a peasant activist. He had grown up in the royal palace himself. His sister was a concubine of the king of earlier days.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  And Pol Pot himself was not really acquainted with peasant conditions, but he saw his future in the communist movement. And he took it over when his predecessor as leader of what was then the Workers' Party of Cambodia was killed mysteriously, I suspect by Pol Pot's actions. He was handed over to the police of Lon Nol and was killed in 1962. Pol Pot immediately seized leadership of the communist movement and took to the forest and begun preparations for the uprising that started in 1967.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  And so this uprising, is it, is it being supported now by, by, you know, the Vietnamese Communist Party is obviously adept, knows what it's doing by this point? They're, they're fighting the world's great superpower in just this way? Is the support coming from China? Is Pol Pot sensing here which way the wind is blowing?

• 16:23Speaker 04

  No, because the Vietnamese supported Sienhuk's neutrality in the Vietnam War. And the Khmer communists, or the Khmer Rouge, Sienhuk dubbed them, led by Pol Pot, were very suspicious of the Vietnamese for supporting Sienhuk's neutrality. Pol Pot was starting a rebellion against Sienhuk. So a split began, which was probably dateable much earlier because although Pol Pot had been in the French Communist Party, he was not particularly Marxist. He, I think he admired Lenin and Mao for their close control of the communist parties they led. But he also was very anti-Vietnamese.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  He told Nguyen Chi, his number two, that he was, hated Vietnamese youths from the time he was young. He didn't have a very strong working class identification because he was brought up in the palace. And I think he was rather racist towards Vietnamese. And so that split began in the late 60s when the Vietnamese were hoping to support Sienhuk's neutrality and Pol Pot was hoping to overthrow it.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  So there's a rural insurgency that begins, but it's leading people to join this. Is there, is there ideology here? Is there, is there coercion? Is it cash or what, what's, what do you think is, and how quickly does it spread?

• 17:45Speaker 04

  It didn't spread very quickly. It was probably in the numbers of three to four to five thousand by 1969, 70. Pol Pot and his small group of, I would say extremist leaders who began this revolt in 1967 had been joined by the three, if you like, exiled parliamentarians. But they, those three didn't get much power in the movement. As far as peasant support, some of the peasants were driven into support for an insurgency by the army, which went around rounding up rice harvests and trying to take control of the rice harvest. That did happen

• 18:26Speaker 04

  in the northwest of the country. And so there was some support, but it wasn't very significant, and it was not likely to overthrow the Sienok regime. What made the big difference was the war next door in Vietnam, not only economically, as I've mentioned, but also militarily. By 1965, a number of Vietnamese communists had taken refuge from the Vietnam War inside the Cambodian border, setting up what the Americans called sanctuaries, where they could escape the attacks of the Americans by hiding in Cambodia. The Americans began bombing with fighter bombers,

• 19:06Speaker 04

  those sanctuaries, and also sending in special forces units to attack the Vietnamese communists. So the war was now spreading to Cambodia from as early as 65 and 66. And the Cambodian peasants in the countryside were slowly becoming affected quite strongly militarily by the war that was spreading to their country.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  And becoming sort of radicalized. I mean, are they sympathizing with the Vietnamese communists? Is the American bombing enraging Cambodians?

• 19:38Speaker 04

  I think it did. Another prince in the Sienok government said that hundreds of people have already been killed by US bombs as early as 1966. I think he made that complaint to the Americans. But of course, not many peasants joined. I think it was in the small numbers of thousands by 1969. But in 1969 itself, in March of 1969, the US began a much more serious bombing campaign of B-52s, high-flying heavy bombers, which started bombing Cambodian

• 20:17Speaker 04

  areas from, in fact, the last year of the Sienok regime for a full year. It was called Operation Meneu, and the various targets were called snack, lunch, breakfast, dinner, and so on. And these did take a number of lives of Cambodian peasants in the countryside, although they were targeted at the Vietnamese communist sanctuaries along the border. And then Lon Nol, who was the general who'd become prime minister in 66, overthrew Sienok while he was on a visit to Europe and Moscow. And Sienok's neutrality was ended by the new Lon Nol regime. A new name for the country, the Khmer Republic, was established. Sienok took

• 21:02Speaker 04

  up exile in China. And he then put his full support behind the communist rebellion, the insurgency that Pol Pot had begun. And this led a lot of peasants who were loyal to the prince, just ideologically and traditionally, to join the communists.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  That is an unholy alliance, crikey.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Yes, it was part of a traditional loyalty of peasants to the prince. But also, the bombing spread now. With Lon Nol in power, the United States spread its B-52 bombing across Cambodia in 1970. The coup was in March 18, 1970, exactly a year since the start of the B-52 bombing, which was secret. But now it became public and much more extensive across the breadth of Cambodia.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  With the acquiescence of this new leader, yeah.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Lon Nol felt that this bombing would help him. And the South Vietnamese government, as well as the Vietnamese communists, both invaded Cambodia. All sides in the Vietnam War spread to Cambodia to fight their war there, as well as in South Vietnam. And so Cambodia was in chaos, and war spread on the ground and in the air. And the effect on Cambodian peasants was enormous, terrifying. And there was recruitment for the Khmer Rouge insurgency, which began to really spread. And by 1973, the bombing had doubled. Just

• 22:32Speaker 04

  in the year 1973, in fact, only from January to August, the US dropped 250,000 tonnes of B-52 bombs on Cambodia. That doubled the total tonnage that had previously been dropped on Cambodia in the four years since 69. And that was across the width of Cambodia, nearly except for the northwest of the country. And so huge numbers of peasants were killed. Many more joined the Khmer Rouge insurgency because their families were killed or their homes were bombed and destroyed. Their villages were wiped out. And the Khmer Rouge found

• 23:11Speaker 04

  it much more easy to recruit supporters. And their numbers increased from a few thousand in 69 to more than 200,000 by the end of 1973. And so they were in a position to really challenge the Lon Nol government by the time the US bombing reached its height and ended in August of 1973.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  So 1973, interesting year, because then the Americans are disengaging from Vietnam at that point. They're pulling out troops. They're obviously still supplying the South Vietnamese, and there's air support. But so, having exacerbated this problem, the Americans now slightly exiting stage right, but the Khmer Rouge and the communists generally are on the march in Cambodia.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  That's right. They refused to take part in the Paris negotiations that led to the cease, what was supposed to be a ceasefire in Vietnam that led to the American withdrawal from South Vietnam. The US bombing stopped in August 15, 1973. But the insurgency in Cambodia continued. The South Vietnamese troops pulled out of Cambodia. The Vietnamese communist troops pulled back to the, pretty much to the border. And so it was a fight between the Lon Nol government, which was depleted in its forces, and the rising Khmer Rouge forces.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  And if Lon Nol turns to the US for support, the US is like, we are trying to get out of Southeast Asia, presumably, right? So they're not about to try and prop up another government in Southeast Asia.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, they continued to supply weapons, but no longer troops to the Lon Nol government. And it was eventually defeated by the Khmer Rouge, who surrounded Phnom Penh in 74 and early 75, and eventually took over the capital city. Lon Nol fled to America, and some of his bravest ministers stayed behind, and they were murdered.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Interesting timing. People will be familiar with the fall of Saigon, the photographs of the helicopters on the embassy and things. That was a month or two later in 1975. So interesting.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Two weeks later.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Two weeks later, okay, wow. Tell me about the entry of the Khmer Rouge. It's the subject of so many astonishing history books and novels. But as the Khmer Rouge enter the city, did they enter like an invading army? Would you have been able to tell immediately that everything had changed? What was their, and what was their intent when they entered the city, the capital?

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Well, most of the Khmer Rouge units that entered came from different regions or zones, as the Khmer Rouge called them. They had armies that were made up of different zone forces. And most of them were under orders to immediately evacuate the entire population of Phnom Penh. And so that's what happened. They came into the city, and they told everybody to leave, all 2 million.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  And why is that? Is that ideologically driven or military? What's going on with that?

• 26:08Speaker 04

  Well, what they told the people was that the Americans were going to bomb the city, and that they'd better get out and they'd be safer in the countryside. But of course, that was a clear lie. The Americans were no longer engaged in Southeast Asia and were not going to bomb the city. But they wanted to destroy urban life. They wanted to turn the country into an agrarian, what they called a classless society. But although they talked about equality and abolishing classes, what they actually did was divide the country into the people who had lived in Khmer Rouge zones until victory, whom they called the base people, the people of the Khmer Rouge bases, and the new people, two and a half million people

• 26:53Speaker 04

  from the cities and the northwest, where the Khmer Rouge had not been able to take over until the very end. And so these populations were basically new classes created by the Khmer Rouge of the base people and the new people. They later applied Leninist categories for party members, full rights party members, and candidate party members in the communist ideology of describing ranks within the party. They applied those categories to the whole population of Cambodia. So they talked about full rights people and candidate people,

• 27:33Speaker 04

  rather than the base people and the new people. So they did establish classes in the society of Cambodia. They talked about equality, but they established inequality in Cambodia.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  What was Pol Pot on? He was not a rural person, and yet he's developed this fantasy of a communal rural community with no troublesome journalists, lawyers, civil servants. Where does this come from?

• 27:59Speaker 04

  I think it comes from a very top-down view of the society. Having grown up in the palace, he was born in a village, but his, as I mentioned, his sister was a princess or a concubine of the palace. His cousin was actually a princess. And he grew up as a young boy in the palace, brought up by his brother who lived there, and served as director of protocol in the palace. He then went to Paris to study, and he failed his radio electricity course two years in a row, so he was sent back to Cambodia. He didn't participate in the war against the French in any significant way. He was only there for the last six or eight months of the war. He came back in 1953 from Paris.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  And his main interest was taking control of what was then called the People's Revolutionary Party, or later called the Workers' Party. And he rose within that after his predecessor leader, Tsimut, was mysteriously killed. In my view, he handed him over to the police through his own methods, because he did have police who were on his side or sympathetic police. And so he used his position, I think, to rise within the communist movement. He pretty much excluded the three intellectual former parliamentarians that I mentioned before from real power. And he was very suspicious of the 1,000 or so Cambodian communists

• 29:29Speaker 04

  who had fought the French and then went to North Vietnam for further training after independence. When they came back after victory in 1975, they were called to meetings one by one and assassinated, nearly all, 1,000 of them. So Pol Pot was very quiet, secretive and brutal in his methods of controlling the communist movement. And he did the same with the population in general.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  So, within hours of taking the capital city, he's enacting, I mean, it's one of the few places where he looked at the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 60s and thought, yeah, let's have a bit of that. So he's trying to do a version of that kind of radical de-urbanisation, sending people out to work on collective farms for re-education and sort of restructuring society itself.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  I think there's something of that too, but there's more of the Great Leap Forward in China from 1958 to 60, when nearly 35 or 40 million people died of the huge economic catastrophe that Mao had caused by establishing what he called the Great Leap Forward. The Pol Pot regime established what they called a super Great Leap Forward. They were going to outdo Mao. They had talked about excelling Lenin and outstripping Mao, in another quote from their documents. I think the word is extremist, but it's also, they didn't believe in an equal communist international movement. They were very extremist in the sense that they didn't believe

• 31:06Speaker 04

  in communist equality on the international level. And as I've explained, they didn't really believe in it within their country and the national level as well. They thought they could do better than China. They thought they could do better than the Soviet Union, whom they regarded as an enemy, by the way. Many people within the communist movement, Pol Pot's group, of himself and Nguyen Chi and Yang Suri, they called them KGB CIA Yuan, Yuan meaning a dice logistic insult for Vietnamese. They killed them all, sometimes alleged that they were working for all three of those enemy groups.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 32:40Speaker 05

  This is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross or a Corolla sedan with the latest features and tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  You know that feeling. Too many updates, too many meetings, too many things falling through the cracks. Monday.com was built for that gap. The AI work platform designed from the ground up for people and agents to work side by side and deliver more together. Drafting the brief, flagging risks, running a competitive scan, your agent can do it all. And the best part, anyone can build one, even you. Try it. Create your first Monday agent today at monday.com.

• 33:51Speaker 06

  Losing weight can feel like a rollercoaster, full of ups, downs and being thrown for loops, like when someone brings donuts into the office or your kids' dino nuggets start giving you that look again. That's why there's Noom. They combine GLP-1s to quiet the food noise with healthy habits that help you keep it quiet, even if you get off the meds. Their program is designed to make weight loss a smooth ride, helping you understand what drives you, so you can build better habits to not just lose weight, but keep it off. Noom, lose for keeps. Get started at noom.com. Not all customers will clinically qualify for medications. Individual results may vary.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Okay, so it is not the correct word, but it's a deeply eccentric use of a twisting of communist, nationalist, conspiracy sort of thinking. Fascinating. So, did they empty the city? Where are people being sent to? Are they being sent to these collective farms?

• 34:57Speaker 04

  Two million people that lived in Phnom Penh were sent in all directions, to the eastern zone, to the southwest zone, to the northern zone and into what became the western zone. But then, there were two more major relocations of hundreds of thousands of people. This was the first one, April 1975, immediately on capturing Phnom Penh. But later in the year, September, October, November, a lot of those people who had been expelled from Phnom Penh were regathered again, rounded up in all those zones that they'd been sent to, and sent to the northwest zone, which the Pol Pot regime regarded as the most fertile and underpopulated zone on the Thai border.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  And so 800,000 people of those original expellees from the cities were rounded up and sent again, for a second time, to the northwest zone. And that was causing, it was way too many people. They were sent after the planting zone, but before the harvest, so that they were not able to contribute to the productivity of the northwest zone. They weren't there in time to plant more rice for themselves. They had to then rely on the northwest zone's smaller planting season. When it was harvested, it wasn't enough to feed them. And so there was huge starvation in the northwest zone in 1976,

• 36:23Speaker 04

  after the harvest came in late in the year 1975. And that was because there were 800,000 extras people to feed in that zone who were not native to that zone. And then there was a third major deportation of people in 1978, when the regime was at the height of its brutality. It turned on the eastern zone, which was, in many ways, the most moderate zone and had been targeted as the most dissident zone of the Khmer Rouge regime. On the Vietnamese border in the eastern zone, they tried to empty out the entire eastern zone

• 37:04Speaker 04

  and they evacuated about 250,000 people in 1978 after trying to wipe out the entire official class, the Communist Party in the eastern zone, and evacuate all of those population that lived in the eastern zone to the northwest again. And then they killed them once they got there. And then there are huge mass graves left in the north and northwest and western zone of people wearing blue scarves, because they were marked on their way through Phnom Penh from the eastern zone to the northwest with blue scarves, which were a sign that they were supposedly Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  It was the slogan used to criticise them. And once they got to the northwest, then they were rounded up and killed en masse. And that was the third of the major population deportations, which ended in mass murder in 1978, as the regime was disintegrating.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  So, we've got, what other reforms were there as far as people being moved, the capital city being emptied, money and private property eliminated?

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right. They thought that money and property were contradictory to their goals. They wanted people to have no personal property at all. And so they abolished money. They abolished private ownership of land and even private family meals. By 1977, after two years, they were introducing on a national scale communal eating, where people would eat in mess halls. Not in family meals. And of course, that meant that they got rations. They had no other access to food. And the rations were dealt out according to the officialdom who ruled over them.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  And that was, again, another deep attack on personal liberties.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  The religion banned?

• 39:05Speaker 04

  Yes, religion was considered to be another anti-communist and anti-Khmer rouge activity. And so the most of the population, eighty percent of the population, were Buddhist. And Buddhist monks were disrobed, forcibly disrobed, and forced to become ordinary civilians. But many of them were killed of the entire abbot group of monks who were leading abbits. Nearly all of those were murdered. And many Buddhist monks were killed, even though they weren't leading abbits. And in fact, it's been very difficult to track down the numbers.

• 39:46Speaker 04

  But people who survived, who were monks, know how many others didn't survive from their monastery. And it's astonishing just how large the proportion of Buddhist monks who were killed is.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Is it an urban myth, but there's the old story that even wearing spectacles was regarded as a sort of unacceptably bourgeois thing to do, and that could get you targeted?

• 40:09Speaker 04

  That's right. People with education, that was considered Western education. And therefore, they looked like they'd had such an education if they wore spectacles. It wasn't always true. I think in some parts of the country, under some leaderships, such as in the eastern zone and in other places, wearing spectacles wasn't a sign of future execution. But it did happen a lot. People were killed because they were doctors, because they had a medical education. The attack on professionals, on the educated class, was quite severe.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  I wouldn't say all encompassing, but it was quite severe in the sense that people who had an education that the Khmer Rouge leadership at Pol Pot's level and their trusted zone chiefs, particularly Mok, the chief of the southwest zone, and Polk of the northern zone, those two were particularly active in purging other zones, including the east, and destroying the Khmer Rouge officialdom who didn't carry out those extreme orders. They went after people with spectacles and so on.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  So we've got massive starvation from people being moved around the country in unrealistic sort of agricultural quotas and planting and harvesting. We've got brutality, people being killed, executed, persecuted. If doctors are being targeted, healthcare collapses.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  Yes. And there was very little that the regime did. You know, hospitals were barely operating. Many of the hospitals in Phnom Penh were just closed down. Certainly, the people who'd been expelled to the countryside didn't have access to those hospitals that might still be functioning in Phnom Penh. There was some form of international aid coming from China and North Korea, but virtually that's all. And it focused on agriculture rather than on spreading medical aid to the countryside where it was most needed. And so there was a great deal of neglect.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Sometimes it could be called deliberate neglect of the healthcare needs of the population.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  What are your best estimates of casualties in these terrible years?

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Well, there are different kinds of casualties, of course. There's people who are directly murdered, killed on the spot, or taken to prison and then killed, or taken to mass graves, or to places that became mass graves by the institution of mass killings in the individual locations, as well as individual murders, people just being called away from work sites and quietly murdered. It's been stated by the people who were investigating for the Khmer Rouge tribunal, which was supported by the UN and sponsored by the UN, that around a million people were directly killed. I think it may be that high, it may be slightly less high, but it's in that range of many

• 43:22Speaker 04

  hundreds of thousands of people were directly killed. The total number of deaths in the Pol Pot regime for years, or slightly less, three years and eight months, from April seventy-five to January seventy-nine, I estimate at 1.7 million. And that is, you know, about half murdered and approximately half died of starvation, disease, or overwork. That would be my estimate.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  And what's the total population before?

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Well, the population was nearly eight million after population growth in the sixties and seventies, early part of the seventies. In nineteen seventy-five, I estimate the population was about eight million, or seven point eight or nine million. By the time the regime was overthrown in January seventy-nine, it was, I'm not sure of the exact number, but I think it's five point seven million. I can't give you the exact number in my memory, but I believe that 1.7 million died.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  That's approaching twenty percent of the population.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  It's about twenty percent, twenty-one percent, something like that, yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  You've mentioned the mass killings. We can't skate over the story without mentioning the killing fields. People will be familiar with that expression. Tell me about those. Those are places of deliberate murder, even genocide, are they?

• 44:41Speaker 04

  Yes, and it's just surprising, even to me now, just how many cases there are of hundreds of people, or a hundred or more people being killed in one space, in one place, at a time. There were many, many individual killings where people, like I mentioned, the one thousand or so returnees from North Vietnam, who would, you know, they all went to different places, and they were selectively called aside and murdered. Only a small number of them survived. They saw what was happening to the others, and they fled. But it's in the dozens who survived. But there were also, you know, huge numbers of cases where a village population was actually

• 45:26Speaker 04

  taken to what you would now call a killing field and just slaughtered en masse. There are numbers and numbers of these cases where this happened, particularly if they were associated with dissident cadre, or officials, or people who the regime distrusted. And entire local populations were just murdered in the hundreds.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  And examples of sexual assaults and brutality as well on us?

• 45:57Speaker 04

  And this isn't, this is without mentioning the ethnic mass killings that took place. There were minorities in the Cambodian population, about twenty percent were non-Khmer, khmer being the Cambodian majority. There were Muslims who were known as Chams, as the Charm ethnic group. And there were ethnic Vietnamese, and there were a number of other minorities, Thai, ethnic Chinese, there were about half a million ethnic Chinese in Cambodia. Half of those died in the Khmer Rouge less than four years.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  And the Charm population, their numbers, about forty percent, or slightly under forty percent, died. That's about double the population who died of the Khmer majority, or of the national population of twenty-one percent. Twice as many Chams proportionally died or were killed. And that's because they were singled out as minorities, as non-Khmer ethnicities. The same for the ethnic Vietnamese. They suffered genocide like the Chams did because they were singled out. They were people who were, ethnic Vietnamese were killed down to the last couple of dozen, or even fewer than that.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  I think people have finally found examples, or they did finally found examples. I was unable in my research in the eighties to find a single ethnic Vietnamese who had survived. And Michael Vickery, who worked on the border amongst refugees in Thailand from Cambodia, he was unable to find a single ethnic Vietnamese. But since then, about six, I believe, have been found who survived the Khmer Rouge. And that's of about twenty thousand, or at least ten to twenty thousand, who were not expelled, but tracked down and killed by the Khmer Rouge during nineteen seventy-seven and seventy-eight.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  You mentioned a lot of the killing was around internal sort of power struggles or purges and paranoid purges. Is that something that gets worse as those years go on? Does the Khmer regime start to destroy itself with a vast amount of attendant violence?

• 49:27Speaker 04

  It depends on what level you're looking at. At the, what was called the party centre, the Communist Party of Kampuchea was ruled by what was called the centre or the machin. That was headed by Pol Pot, of course, and his number two was Nguon Chia, number three was Yang Sari. That was Pol Pot's brother-in-law. There was about eight of them in the party centre. And that pretty much survived intact until the last month of the Pol Pot regime, when Vaughn Veidt, who was the deputy prime minister for the economy, one of three deputy prime ministers, he was purged and killed in December of 78. But he's the only one, and it's only in the last month

• 50:11Speaker 04

  before the regime fell, that any one of the party centre, those eight top people, was suspected or purged or killed. But of the party central committee, a much larger group, and party members more generally, huge numbers were purged and killed. And the process was accelerating as the regime went on. So that in 75 and 76, the two of the three intellectuals who'd been parliamentarians in the Sienoc regime, they were both assassinated. And then in 77, a number of other more moderate communists

• 50:52Speaker 04

  were rounded up and killed. But by 77 and 78, the purges got much more widespread. And for instance, the leader of the eastern zone found his subordinates being rounded up and killed. And finally, the attention came to him, and he was surrounded and about to be murdered when he killed himself. That was in May of 1978, just before the regime took over his zone then. And as I mentioned, expelled and killed 250,000 or so of the population of the eastern zone. And so the purges did accelerate over time. They started, I would say, in the 60s,

• 51:33Speaker 04

  when the party was very small and Pol Pot was installing himself as leader and exerting control over the party bodies. But once they took power, then when Hu Yuen, for instance, one of the three former parliamentarians, spoke out and said, "You shouldn't have evacuated the cities. You can't do that. You shouldn't abolish money. You shouldn't abolish religion." Now, he was a candidate member of the central committee, but soon after that, he was shot dead and his body thrown in the Mekong in August of 1975. And then the purges just accelerated from there.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  There's a temptation, isn't there, with Hitler and Stalin to sort of talk about, it's easier perhaps to, some people like to just reach for sort of mental derangement, the sort of paranoia, the madness. Can you get inside Pol Pot's head? Can you understand what he is trying to do? Is this just a product of power corrupting someone so completely? Or is there any sort of method here? What's happening?

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's a mixture of dictatorial instincts, although the fact that he did not begin to purge the rest of the party centre, the other seven members of the party centre, until the very end of the regime, although he didn't expect it to be the very end of the regime. But I think that they were a quite tightly knit group of Pol Pot, Nguon Chia, Yang Sari, Sun Sen and others, Cusumpon. Many of them survived. Nguon Chia and Cusumpon survived to be brought to trial by the UN-sponsored tribunal in the 2000s. And both of them were found guilty of extermination as a crime against humanity

• 53:21Speaker 04

  and of genocide against the Chams and the Vietnamese. So I think they were well part of the, not just Pol Pot was dictating the policies, they were part of it. But I think a lot of the initiative came from Pol Pot. And I think he was probably the most racist of all of them and was responsible for initiating the genocidal campaigns. He was probably the most distant from ordinary Cambodians' lives and values. And I think that's because he grew up in the palace. I think that his extreme

• 54:01Speaker 04

  distance from Cambodians generally, as well as his policy, as he wrote at the time in documents that survived, of keeping secrecy as the basis of the operations. And so everything that he did, he tried to keep secret. And so many, even of his colleagues, I think, probably people even in the party centre, didn't always know what orders he might have sent out to the countryside.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  It's just a terrifying case study in megalomaniacal, fundamental breakdown and ever-spiraling tyrannical urges that result from that kind of power, I guess, being concentrated. What happens to end this regime?

• 54:46Speaker 04

  Well, I think in a way, the regime's extreme policies brought about their own destruction, as well as the destruction of 2 million or 1.7 million Cambodians. But also, they attacked not only their own people, but all three of their neighbours. In 1977, as the regime became much more radical and started purging their own party much more, and as well as that intensifying the demands on the population of Cambodia, they also attacked Vietnam, Thailand and Laos in early 1977, attacking all three of Cambodia's neighbours with military force.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  Now, they didn't attack Thailand and Laos with the same degree of extreme military force that they did against Vietnam, but they did start round about the same time, January 1977, a big incursion into Thailand slaughtering villagers across the border in Thailand. They also sent from December 76, a number of military units against Laos. But from about March or April 1977, they sent troops across the border into South Vietnam's Mekong Delta and slaughtered civilians there on a very large scale. And they continued to do that,

• 56:12Speaker 04

  even though the Vietnamese asked them for, they had already asked them in 1976, for negotiations in June. And the Cambodians, Pol Pot himself, said, "No." We have this, the transcript of a Cambodian Communist Party meeting where he said, "No, we're not going to have negotiations with the Vietnamese in June of 76." The Vietnamese then asked again, after the attacks began, negotiations in June of 77. And the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot refused. And then again, when the Vietnamese responded at the end of 77 with an incursion of their own into Cambodia,

• 56:54Speaker 04

  and then asked for negotiations in February 78, the Khmer Rouge regime even refused to accept the proposal for negotiations in February 78. And so eventually, the Vietnamese government decided that there was nothing that would stop these attacks into Vietnam, which slaughtered many thousands of ethnic Vietnamese citizens of Vietnam, except an invasion that would come and overthrow the Pol Pot regime, which they did in December, January 1978, 79.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  It's terrifying to think what would have happened if the Vietnamese had not done that, because presumably that regime might have survived and gone on killing its own people in enormous numbers.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  And I think that was the goal of the Chinese, who immediately invaded North Vietnam to try to get the pressure off the Pol Pot regime. And the Chinese sent 200,000 troops across the border from China into North Vietnam. And the Vietnamese had to fight that invasion off, as well as take over from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia on their southern border. So the Vietnamese could easily have been defeated in either of those theatres, but they were not. And that meant that the Khmer Rouge were driven into Thailand, the Chinese retreated from North Vietnam, and the new regime was set up in Cambodia, mostly of eastern zone rebels,

• 58:25Speaker 04

  who had, after So Prem's suicide, the head of the eastern zone, other members of his eastern zone forces fled to Vietnam, and they started a rebellion.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  On the coattails, yeah.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, they actually started a rebellion in May 78. And after several months, they were driven into Vietnam. And then they came back again with the Vietnamese army in December of 78. So there was, it wasn't the only rebellion, by the way. There were two others inside Cambodia against the Pol Pot regime that the regime put down. But this was the most serious and significant one in the eastern zone.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  I mean, the Vietnamese, you don't want to mess with the Vietnamese in the late 70s. I mean, those guys, those guys are match fit. They've been, they've been fighting on and off since they're not well, since the 1940s. I imagine that the Vietnamese knew what they were about and I'm not surprised they beat the Chinese off in the north and at the same time captured Cambodia. That's the interesting thing. So the new government of Cambodia, actually, they are complicit, they were complicit in many of the crimes of the previous regime. And that has been, when you go to Cambodia today, a lot of people speak quietly about the rage that they feel that despite some truth reconciliation justice, actually, so many people responsible for monstrous crimes walk free and indeed have thrived since.

• 59:45Speaker 04

  Well, it's certainly true that many of the leaders of the new regime were former Khmer Rouge, but most of them were, I think, rebels against the Khmer Rouge or had been refugees. Hun Sen, for instance, is now the head of state and his son is the prime minister. Hun Sen fled from the eastern zone in 1977, long before the rebellion. Chia Sim and Hang Som Rin were leaders of the rebellion against the Khmer Rouge. It's not been clear whether they participated in any atrocities. And as I mentioned, the eastern zone was certainly the most moderate of the zones under Saipem and it was the one that had the most, according to refugees from that

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  zone, it was the most moderate, living standards were better than in other zones. So it's possible that they committed crimes, but I don't think it's been proven beyond a doubt. But certainly there is much suspicion of them because they were Khmer Rouge. On the other hand, there is relief that the Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown, both by the Vietnamese and by the rebels who joined the Vietnamese or rebelled against them first. And on the other hand, they've established pretty much a one-party state. Cambodia is pretty much back to what it was under Xi Anok in the mid 60s. There has been a lot of economic growth, as there was under Xi Anok in the mid 60s,

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  but there's been a lot of repression of freedom and human rights and freedom of speech that many people complain about.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  And in terms of that justice process, you've mentioned that there was UN-supported process. Have people got to prison? Is it more like South Africa where there's been a mechanism for airing and to a certain extent, sort of a certain amount of restorative justice? What's actually taken place in terms of accounting for those monstrous crimes?

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Well, I think the major problem has been that it took so long that it wasn't until 2007, I think, that the UN-sponsored tribunal got going. And that's 30 years nearly after the Khmer Rouge were in power and 28 years after they were overthrown. I think the reason for that is surprisingly, given the UN's history, is that when they were overthrown and from, is it 15 years after they were overthrown? They retained Cambodia's UN seat in the United Nations General Assembly.

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  And so the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, were still on the Thai border with their army, threatening to return to power with the support of Thailand and China and in the United Nations with the support of the United States of America. That's how the Khmer Rouge managed to prevent a tribunal from being established until the 2000s. It was only when Pol Pot died in 1998 and the UN held elections in Cambodia in 1993, which were jointly won by the Xi Anokists and Hun Sen's State of Cambodia party.

• 1:03:05Speaker 04

  Xi Anokists actually won slightly more votes, but Hun Sen eventually took over from them and remains in power today. But the UN did establish a tribunal in conjunction with the Cambodian government of Hun Sen. It got going in around about 2009 and it brought to trial, Pol Pot had died, but it brought to trial the surviving top leaders of the Khmer Rouge government, which had been overthrown 30 years before. They included Nuen Chia, Pol Pot's number two, Khu Seng Phan, the head of state of the democratic Cambodia regime headed by Pol Pot.

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  Mok, the military commander, who had probably killed more people than all of them, had died just before he'd been in jail in Cambodia under Hun Sen, waiting trial. He'd been captured by the Hun Sen government, but he died before the tribunal was up and running. So he was never put on trial. Pol Pot was never put on trial. But Nuen Chia and Khu Seng Phan, Yang Sarree, the number three of the Pol Pot regime, he was put on trial, but he died during his trial. His wife, Yang Taret, who was Pol Pot's sister-in-law, she was found unfit, mentally unfit to face trial, so she was not put on trial.

• 1:04:30Speaker 04

  But Nuen Chia and Khu Seng Phan, Pol Pot's number two and the head of state of Pol Pot's regime, were both found guilty in 2014 of crimes against humanity, including extermination. And then in 2018 and 19, they were both found guilty of genocide against the Cham population, the minority Cham Muslim group and the ethnic Vietnamese. So in some sense, justice was done, but not to Pol Pot or Mok, the military commander of the Pol Pot regime. And Yang Sarree managed to avoid a judgment by dying during his trial.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  However, there were many second-ranked Khmer Rouge, whom the Hun Sen government refused to allow to be put on trial. And there was some injustice about that, I think. People who had not been at the top level of the Khmer Rouge regime, but who had committed major crimes, but they were never brought to trial.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Must be just an extraordinary legacy for those living in Cambodia at the moment. Tell everyone what your book is called.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  Well, I wrote a series of two books, one called How Pol Pot Came to Power and a sequel called The Pol Pot Regime.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  Well, Ben Kinnon, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking all about it.

• 1:05:54Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Well, that's it, folks. Thank you very much for listening. I certainly learnt a lot in that podcast. I guess I'd underappreciated the extent to which the wider regional picture is so important. Khmer Rouge didn't happen in isolation. It's a culmination of years of regional, global, regional civil war, profound social and economic dislocation in Cambodia. Amazing. The scale of that devastation was mind-blowing. It's just a terrible example of a mindset, of a system that treats human life as expendable in the service of radical ideological transformation. Terrifying what unyielding ideological absolutism can do when it's combined with unchecked

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  authority, unchecked power in a society like that. Thank you very much to Nathan Rothery for suggesting that we cover this. Really important bit of history, very grateful. If there are any other topics like us to cover, remember to please reach out an email. It's all in the show notes. Our vultureine producers spend their time scavenging that for good ideas. Fun word. Who knows? Maybe your ideas will make it onto the podcast. Until then, folks, till next time.

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  I'm Hannah. I've lost 75 pounds in 20 months with GLP-1s, plus diet and exercise. On Row, I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can access FDA-approved GLP-1s online. Get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to row.co/weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid Row partner. 20% average weight loss in one year in non-diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight-related medical condition versus 3.1% in placebo arm. RX only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to row.co/safety. This message is brought to you by Apple Card.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving tables been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end-of-year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.