S2 Ep4: The Path to the Second Indochina War (Part One): The Two Vietnams
The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel and promised elections within two years. The elections never happened. Instead, two states set about building themselves in opposite dire...
1 Mai 20221h 14min
S2 Ep3: The Khmer Rouge's New Vanguard: How Pol Pot Took Over
In July 1962, the secretary of the Cambodian communist party, Tuo Samouth, left his house in Phnom Penh at night and never came back. Nobody has ever established with certainty who killed him. What is...
6 Feb 20221h 23min
S2 Ep2: Maoism, the Great Leap Forward and the Sino-Soviet Split
One of the Khmer Rouge's central slogans called for a 'super great leap forward'. The original had killed somewhere in the order of forty-five million Chinese people less than two decades earlier, and...
5 Des 20212h 43min
S2 Ep1: Les Khmers Rouges: Double Lives in Sihanouk's Golden Era
The Communist Party of Kampuchea was founded in 1960 at a secret congress held in a room above Phnom Penh's railway station. Among the men who came out of it with senior positions were a schoolteacher...
23 Jul 20212h 7min
S1 Ep15: Season One Recap: Cambodian History from Angkor to Independence
This bonus episode covers roughly two thousand years of Cambodian history in a single sitting, from the Khmer Empire through to independence from France in 1953. It is a summary of everything in Seaso...
5 Jun 20211h 6min
S1 Ep14: The End of French Indochina: Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Accords and Sihanouk's "Election"
On May 7th, 1954, a French garrison in a remote valley in northwest Vietnam surrendered to the Viet Minh after fifty-six days under siege. Dien Bien Phu ended French Indochina. It also set the terms o...
17 Apr 20212h 37min
S1 Ep13: Cambodian Independence! The End of the First Indochina War, while Pol Pot Joins the Maquis
In 1953, King Norodom Sihanouk launched a one-man international campaign to force France out of Cambodia, a performance one French general described as 'that of a madman, but a madman of genius'. By N...
16 Jan 20211h 37min
S1 Ep12: Pol Pot in Paris and the Khmer Issarak (Part Two): The Students Become Communists
In 1951, on Vietnamese initiative, the Indochinese Communist Party was dissolved and reorganised along national lines. Among its successors was a small, obscure organisation called the Khmer People's ...
9 Nov 20202h 35min
