S2 Ep12: The Cambodian Civil War Begins - Part Two: A Revolution Waged With Empty Hands
On January 17th, 1968, the Khmer Rouge attacked a military post at Bay Damram in Battambang province. It was the official beginning of their armed struggle, launched by a movement with almost no weapo...
26 Nov 20231h 51min
S2 Ep11: Mao's Cultural Revolution: Red Guards and a Model for the Khmer Rouge
Between 1966 and 1969, teenagers with armbands beat their teachers to death in Chinese schoolyards, and roughly a million people died at the hands of their own countrymen. Mao had asked for it. Less t...
1 Okt 20231h 11min
S2 Ep9: Interview: "Son Ngoc Thanh, a Khmer Nationalist" with Matthew Jagel
Special guest Matthew Jagel joins Lachlan to talk about his new book: Khmer Nationalist. The book is an exploration of Cambodian history using Son Ngoc Thanh as the central focus, and they join up to ...
3 Aug 202351min
S2 Ep10: The Cambodian Civil War Begins (Part One): The Samlaut Rebellion and the Three Ghosts
On April 2nd, 1967, in the Samlaut district of Battambang province, a group of villagers killed two soldiers collecting rice. What followed was not a rebellion so much as a reprisal, and Sihanouk deci...
10 Jul 20231h 34min
S2 Ep8: Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, Clouds Over Cambodia
In March 1965, American aircraft began a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam that would run for three and a half years. In the same period, Pol Pot walked out of the jungle to Hanoi and B...
2 Mar 20232h
S2 Ep7: Khmer Rouge Ideology: Nuon Chea, Buddhism and Sihanouk Breaks with America
The Khmer Rouge did not sell communism to Cambodian peasants in the language of Marx. They sold it in the language of Theravada Buddhism, using its grammar, its vocabulary and its habits of thought, t...
15 Nov 20221h 36min
S2 Ep6: The Path to the Second Indochina War (Part Three): Agent Orange, Kennedy and the Buddhist Crisis
On June 11th, 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc sat down at a Saigon intersection, was doused in petrol, and set himself alight without moving or making a sound. The photograph went around t...
7 Jul 20221h 47min
S2 Ep5: The Path to the Second Indochina War (Part Two): The CIA, the NLF and Ngo Dinh Diem
In 1954 a CIA officer named Edward Lansdale arrived in Saigon to help build a country. What he helped build was a police state run by one Catholic family in a Buddhist nation, and within a decade the ...
27 Mai 20221h 20min
