English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
A question about the Khmer Rouge and the record of democracies 0:00 The point of the question, that is, what is the Sik'a-Kandou? Good evening everyone, I'll move straight on without taking more time to a session answering questions, but this time it's going to focus on one question, I'm giving it priority because it connects, as to substance, as to content, with the cycle on evil. It's a question from, I quote his username of course, Alain Jette Kandou. "I didn't know that the Khmer Rouge were communists, but refractory to the Soviets."
0:31 On this point, you see, I am grateful to Alain Jette Kandou, not only for admitting his ignorance on this point, which is always a source of progress, but also for revealing it on this subject of the Khmer Rouge, this Khmer Rouge factor. He reacted well to perhaps the most sensitive part of the references I had developed last time.
1:05 So, I seem quite mysterious right now, but it's going to become much clearer. And the clarification is going to be my answer to Alain Jette Kandou's question. First of all, let him be reassured, he is far from being the only one who doesn't know. Because oddly, this should be the thing best learned. I'll be clear right away, we are talking about the greatest genocide of the postwar era. So really, we are supposed to be the democracies facing the dictatorships.
1:38 That's what I hear in the media. We are democracies — you see my slip of the tongue — we are rather bloody democracies, since I believe no other regime since the end of the world war, the last world war, has produced the equivalent of… I'll go in chronological order quickly, the 1950s, the 3 million dead in Korea, the roughly 2,800,000 dead in Vietnam. I'm not counting the appalling massacres following a string of coups, of "pronunciamentos" as they say, in South America, in Latin America, because there's also Central America.
2:20 I remind you that El Salvador is a country that should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of victims of anti-guerrilla repression per capita. You see? And if there's a country that could somewhat rival it, mainly in the 60s and 70s to put it plainly, it would be Guatemala. But there you go, I mean, that's Uncle Sam's private hunting ground, all of that of course.
2:50 And then afterward, it's a period you know better, afterward there are the interventions in Iraq, in Libya. You see what state Libya is in now? You can't even move around Tripoli without getting sprayed with automatic weapons fire in the capital. We don't even know what's happening in the regions. Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon are in a state of chaos.
3:26 I'm not even talking about the economic effects induced by these acts of aggression. In short, that's the record of the democracies. And I'm going quickly, I'm going quickly — if only that were all. I'm not talking about… actually I'm not even going to talk about the African continent, apart from Libya, let's say sub-Saharan Africa. I do remind you, though, since we're lining up staggering figures, that the record-breaking figure remains this one.
4:02 That's why I was alluding to sub-Saharan Africa. There remains the one from what is called the African Great Lakes region, I'm speaking geographically so this is clear, and the former Belgian Congo, that is, the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, and, adjoining it, if I may say so, depending on which side of the lakes you're on, of the lakes, Ubangi, Ubangi everywhere, excuse me, Burundi, I'm getting old, Rwanda, Rwanda, the second-largest carnage of the postwar era.
4:43 So I say right away to Alain Jette Kandou, who has after all heard of the Khmer Rouge, he must know it's linked to an appalling massacre, and for him — I don't understand how — "they were communists, but refractory to the Soviets," how is that even possible, since all this is bundled together in our media as communists, pro-Chinese, all that, it's just "the reds." And so here, I'm trying to correct, to rearrange — I'll cite the title of the work I often refer to in cases of maintained collective amnesia, I'm not talking about pathological amnesia of this or that individual, I'm not dealing with Alzheimer's, I'm dealing with the absence of relay, through communication, through the public media, of the news of this world.
The social frameworks of memory and the Sino-Soviet conflict 5:40 So obviously, inevitably, memory gets lost. I'm alluding to The Social Frameworks of Memory, an admirable work, written in the [1920s], published in the 1950s, by Maurice Halbwachs. You see, I'm trying to rearrange these frameworks so that, despite everything, we can bring back to the surface everything that is quite inconvenient for today's dominant discourse, isn't that so? Well, if that were all, you know, I'd need a lot more time.
6:11 But at least, as far as this particular file is concerned, which is not the least significant, since once again it is the greatest genocide, along with Rwanda, of the entire postwar period. So, someone might say, yes, that shows the infamy of communism. Sure, sure, sure. So now, let's get to my answer. I'll explain to Alain Jette Kandou why he has reason both to be ignorant of this and even to have retained only a vague, blurry knowledge of this file. The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, roughly — precisely, actually — they already had a guerrilla movement inside Cambodia before that, and all this was contemporary with the war in Vietnam.
7:00 That is to say, while we speak, while what I'm about to recall was happening in Cambodia, let's not forget that at the same time, simultaneously, there was the largest American mobilization in the world at that moment, in open war — I mean, aside from the bulk of it, the radars, the equipment, the nuclear alert systems, that was aimed at the Soviet Union and China, but mainly the Soviet Union at the time.
7:31 So, namely the Vietnam War, it's simultaneous. And so I begin to answer very precisely, taking into account the exact wording of the engineer's [Alain Jette Kandou's] question when he says "they were communists but refractory to the Soviets." So, not so fast — the Khmer Rouge were above all refractory to the Vietnamese, to the Vietnamese who were, at that very moment, taking the greatest deluge of bombs ever dropped on a country — I include here Vietnam, Laos, in short what was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in the border region between these countries and Vietnam — which the Americans were bombing because they knew the Vietnamese were sending weapons south along this trail, light weapons; you have to picture the average Vietnamese fighter, he doesn't have the logistics of the US Army, and imagine people on bicycles with a disassembled machine gun on the bike, all this in the mud and in the jungle, not on asphalt, and with rugged terrain because this border zone is very mountainous,
8:41 and with, as their only food, a vague handful of rice in their pocket. So, in order to counter this guerrilla organization of the pro-Soviet Vietnamese communists, we're at a moment when the tension between the Soviets and the Chinese is at its most acute.
9:12 It is the greatest success of the American services, this is under the reign of Richard Nixon as president, Kissinger, his all-purpose adviser, who stood by Nixon's side during the worst period, along with Johnson's, of the bombings of Vietnam, and who nonetheless received the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm showing in passing the limits of certain international accolades.
9:45 So, why do I bring in the Sino-Soviet tension? It's not the Westerners who created it. I won't go into the details of the conflict. Stalin had made the mistake of backing Chiang Kai-shek at one point, that is, the China that has now retreated to Taiwan after losing the civil war between Chinese factions at the end of the war, when the communist forces were led by Mao.
10:22 Following the Long March, they drove the Japanese out of China, the Japanese who caused 17 million deaths in China. Add the Russians to the Japanese and you have two-thirds of the deaths of World War II. The Soviets plus the Chinese, the communists plus the Chinese communists, you already have — mainly at the military and civilian level, I'm lumping the two together — two-thirds of all the military and civilian victims of World War II.
10:53 It's tough being communists, you know. And so, yes, at the time, from Moscow, seen from a distance, Mao Zedong was still very poorly known, [as was] the Japanese invasion of China. There are equivalents of the massacres carried out by the Germans in Europe, the most significant of which is the Nanjing massacre, among many other carnages in Chinese cities. I'm speaking here of the massacres carried out by the Japanese. There's the one at Nanjing.
11:23 This is worth remembering, it will matter for the rest of my answer. And it represents I don't know how many Oradours in number of victims. Because that in no way lessens the horror of Oradour. So, the Americans managed this decoupling between the two Meccas — sorry, of this religious reference of communism — very well.
11:53 That's just how the language works, isn't it — that of communist China and the Soviet Union. They managed it very well to the Chinese's advantage. The danger was the USSR. Just as now the danger is Russia, isn't it? Especially for the Europeans. Nowadays the Europeans are more American than the Americans. We'll come back to the Ukrainian file. But let's stay with Alain Jette Kandou's question. They managed this so well that they ramped up the tension, and the first deaths — more than a thousand deaths of Soviet soldiers, after the 30 million dead they had already left behind in World War II, no nation has ever consented to such a sacrifice to fight fascism —
Never again against the red plague: the Cold War 12:45 and us, getting rid of it by having them get rid of it themselves. So, what people tell me is, still, what about the Americans and the Normandy landings — yes, that was in '44. I told you I'm rearranging the social frameworks of memory. I'm not obliged to upend certainties as long as there's distance — this is familiar to those who listen to me — between certainty and truth. Certainty is that the earth doesn't move. Look, look carefully, I look at the floor, it's solid ground, it doesn't move.
13:18 There is a great distance between certainty and truth, because beneath my feet, like everything on earth, we are moving at 30 km/second around the sun. Let's come back down to earth. Yes, they landed in 1944 when the Russians were already practically in Berlin, when the Reich was on its knees. So, as a result, some ill-intentioned minds, myself among them at times, go so far as to think — one should even say it more often — but at least to think that they landed not to fight against Nazism but to come back afterward, because they had been informed about the gas chambers and all that since 1943, and to come back.
14:04 But the [heads of state], they didn't believe it right away. There's Roosevelt and later Truman. Some ill-intentioned minds, myself included, I tell you, I think it wasn't to fight fascism that they intervened in Normandy, but so that the Red Army wouldn't make it all the way to Brest — a guarantee, still now, that it's absolutely necessary to intervene in Ukraine because the Russians won't stop at Ukraine.
14:37 So this country, which has always been invaded — by Napoleon, by Hitler — death has always come, and on what scale? I'm thinking here above all, of course, of the Wehrmacht. Death has always come from the West, from — what do you call it in German? — ah yes, Occident, occidere, "I have slain," "I have killed it," the land of death. No, no, I'm not engaging in self-flagellation, because I too am a Westerner in conventional terms, I'm a French citizen, there's nothing more Western than France — well, there's Spain, there are certain parts of the British Isles which have their own "Finistère" [land's end], isn't there — no, this isn't a long detour, we are at the heart of the problem.
15:30 In 1945 — if you look at our site, I mean our site here, not our Facebook page — you'll see that I came to political discourse, whereas I was more into music, literature, and philosophy, because of this initial trauma of being born in 1945, and I was always troubled — the years corresponding to my youth, my formation, childhood, adolescence — the amnesia that now reigns over everything I'm recalling here, bringing memory back to the surface, hadn't yet been achieved; and so there were the horrors of the Third Reich, there wasn't yet the framing of "yes, but they weren't the only ones, there's" — yes, it's totalitarianism, evil isn't just the Nazis, it's a great nebulous mass into which one lumps communism, the Nazis — so as a result Hitler got to breathe a bit of the ordinary air, he was no longer alone in his historical dungeon. I've already touched on this,
16:41 I'll come back to it later, I don't want to muddy the waters, I want to stay with Alain Jette Kandou's question, but I remind you, when we say "never again," and here I say that the Khmer Rouge are the greatest carnage since the one that stops at the moment of my birth — sorry for the personal anecdote — "never again," I mean, meant "never again the brown plague," and well, yes, it's true that the so-called Western countries, which quickly created NATO — which I prefer to call Atlanticist imperialism, it's more precise than "Western" because I am part of the West, and for me, these are my political adversaries, political ones, I have no physical adversaries as far as I know — so yes, there really was an implementation of "never again," but not against the brown plague, from 1945 on it was against the red plague, and that was called the Cold War, that's the start of the Cold War,
17:52 on the still-smoking ruins of the Reich, which had targeted, more fiercely than anyone else, the "Judeo-Bolsheviks" — yes, don't look far, it's not just the communists, well it is the Jews too, it's the same with the Nazis, read the German press of the 1930s, the enemy — this is Hitler speaking — is Judeo-Bolshevism, it's the same for them; besides, Marx was a Jew, Jesus was a Jew, pity and all that — us, we're Nietzscheans, Nietzsche isn't quite that, but he wrote odious texts about what is feminine and decadent in pity — no, but this matters, you see it's not off-topic compared to what we usually cover, all of a sudden certain faces start reappearing, before I return to the Khmer Rouge — afterward, I try to be honest, I speak in the common tongue, because some of those who follow me a bit more consistently
19:02 than others, and I thank them for it, know that I prefer to call them the Khmer Verts [Green Khmer], because their very first action was to empty, within 24 hours, the capital — the Asian capital, that's a lot of people — of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, and then, in the weeks that followed, the same order was given to all the towns of Cambodia, to empty every town so that people would go and serve as agrarian slaves in the countryside, at the rice harvest, while the Khmer in power enriched themselves through the trade in rubies gathered from the mines of Pailin — but let's not push too far into the details so as not to lose the essential point.
Sasakawa, the Latin American dictatorships, and liberation theology 19:47 Yes, it's the brown plague. The priority, above all, is anti-communism. I'm going to show a first document that illustrates, for Asia already, the leaders — I don't like doing anti-Americanism, when I speak of Atlanticist imperialism, of course the flagship is the army of the United States of America, but I mean, there are people in the United States who criticize this. Besides, you can check out a post I left today on Facebook that is more economic than political, about the crisis the United States is going through.
20:27 I'm speaking of an economic crisis. I understand that when Trump says he wants to remake America, he has his work cut out. "Great again." Yes, I left a post by Richard Wolff. Yes, Wolff like the wolf, with two F's. There, Richard Wolff, W-O-L-F-F. For those who don't want to wait, or who rightly think it might be better and more developed than my post, and who want to look him up on Wikipedia to see who Mr. Richard Wolff is.
21:00 So, they want guarantees of objectivity. And so, we're going to move on to a first document showing you how the American services, from the immediate end of the war in Germany as in Japan, very quickly moved past the era of trials — the Nuremberg trials and so on. Besides, in Germany, they took place with…
21:30 Anyway, let's not go into all that at the same time. But what needs to be known is that in Asia, in Japan in particular, the criminal regime of Japan at the time never had its Nuremberg trial. So, for what follows, I'll ask Pierre-Alain for the first document. There. So, you see, the references — you'll find them when the video — this is a recording, so the video, as soon as it's edited, very, very quickly, you'll see it — you'll see these references below the video, they're in small print underneath, you see, you have references, we couldn't be more detailed for those who want to look into it.
22:09 This is the work of specialists and historians. An association founded in 1967 and led by Yoshio Kodama, a Yakuza underworld figure — the Yakuza, you know, that's the Japanese mafia — and Ryōichi Sasakawa. There's the man I'd like to start with for our friend Alain Jette Kandou, who is looking into this — there, if he thinks he needs sources other than Pagani, he's quite right, and I'd love for everyone to do the same, because I don't like gurus — when you look into it, you see, it's written down in full, you have the references and his spelling, and you'll see the literature is abundant on him, on Wikipedia or other sources, online.
22:54 Ryōichi Sasakawa, a shady businessman — a bit like feminism [sic, likely a transcription error] — who described himself, and I quote him directly, I'm not speaking behind his back, as "the richest fascist in the world." So now, let's look a bit more at his background, you'll see, there, this is another source, we know this, I drew it from a study, you see, which isn't about the problem we're developing here, but which is very serious, by specialists, very academic, on NGOs in general, and how they can serve as cover for the most appalling things, isn't that so, these so-called non-governmental organizations that governments adore, and it's always the same governments, adore using to achieve their ends, as they say afterward, when it turns out badly, "it's not me, it's private entities, it's the NGOs."
23:42 Well, so, one doesn't attack the Sasakawa Foundation with impunity — we find him again, the shady man, "the richest fascist in the world" by his own account, one of the most powerful humanitarian foundations in the world. Some of you may have heard of the Moon sect in Korea, which gathers millions of people, hyper-Catholic, hyper-fascist — I'm not saying Catholicism is fascist, and God knows there were complicities between the Catholic hierarchy and fascism, but there were also, in Latin America, people who were a bit more Catholic, a bit more Christian, at any rate more Christian than the ones I just mentioned, who recalled the Christianity of the Gospels, who developed liberation theology — after all, since I'm in the process of rearranging the social frameworks of memory, why not recall once again, too bad for those who've already heard it, that these were clergy, priests, members of the clergy, weren't they?
24:48 While their superior in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Latin America was collaborating with the worst dictatorial regimes set up by Uncle Sam — parenthesis within the parenthesis, I'm not losing my thread, Alain Jette Kandou, parenthesis within the parenthesis, we're still in the midst of the carnage. This is the era when all these South American countries, these countries of Iberian culture — I'm not talking about the inhabitants of native Indian origin, that is, who were massacred less systematically than in North America, but well, whatever's left of them, I mean, and in what state — no, no, I'm talking about the average sociology, aren't I, of the people who live in those countries — so those countries were led by people with Spanish or Portuguese names, when it's Brazil — so here are these Iberian and Latin names, aren't they?
25:44 So, in Bolivia, there was Hugo Banzer, Banzer, yes, in Paraguay there was Stroessner, Alfredo Stroessner, very Iberian, all that, isn't it? What did I say? That there was Hugo Banzer? No, that was in Bolivia, excuse me, Hugo Banzer, that was in Bolivia; in Brazil there was Geisel, G-E-I-S-E-L, I'm laughing, it's terrible, excuse me, but you see, one doesn't expect to find all these names at the head of Latin American countries, does one?
26:19 To be completely honest, to show you I don't systematically bash Americans, even though these regimes wouldn't have lasted a month without the financial and military support and — I'll come back to this — the logistics of Uncle Sam, the anti-guerrilla strategy carried out by the Americans in that geographical sector, that of Latin America, so from Central America down to Patagonia, to Tierra del Fuego — the Americans, there, took their lessons, I'm being honest, from the French side, who had become seasoned in the matter through anti-guerrilla warfare because of the colonial wars, weren't they?
27:11 In Indochina first, then in Algeria afterward. And yes, it's official, there were exchanges of experts, if we can call them that, weren't there? There — to learn how to gouge out guerrillas' eyes with little spoons. There. As it is — I'm no voyeur, I'll stop there. So, to tell you that these liberation theologians — I'm not losing my parenthesis within the parenthesis — liberation had settled the relationship between the political and the religious in a magnificent way.
27:48 We are in philosophy, so I pay tribute to them on that level, aren't I? By saying, how could one be more Hegelian than this: the question of whether God exists or doesn't exist — does God exist or not exist? Yes, I send both believers and atheists back to back on this — the question is very poorly framed. God can exist if we make Him exist here below, in this world, by expanding the kingdom of freedom so as to push back what Engels called the realm of necessity.
28:26 You see, I try to pay attention to my vocabulary, even though it's not equations and Y equals and X, I try with this everyday language which is not made for knowledge, all the same to make it as unequivocal as possible, opposing the kingdom of freedom to the empire of necessity, of constraint, of tyranny. There you go, those liberation theologians, that's what put itself on the side of the wars of liberation, most often Castrist ones.
28:58 So, Sasakawa was spotted very early by this Atlanticist apparatus that hunts communism everywhere, and in particular, it would be the last straw if it came back to Japan. In Japan already, it's not the country that suffered the greatest destruction during the war with Germany in the brown camp, if you will—otherwise, taking every category together, it's of course the Soviet Union and China.
Sasakawa, Mussolini, and the World Anti-Communist League 29:37 I'll pick this back up... it's specified about our friend Sasakawa, well, "friend" is a manner of speaking, you don't attack the Sasakawa Foundation with impunity, which still today, worldwide, is one of the most powerful foundations in the world and the main private donor to the United Nations organization. Its founder Ryōichi Sasakawa had several faces and was, in turn, an influential figure of the Japanese far right—well, how about that, I thought Pagani was a bit of a conspiracy theorist—a fabulously wealthy businessman, and a philanthropist on an international scale. Far-right philanthropist, yes—human rights, Anthropos, that's man, isn't it?
30:27 On an international scale, using his fortune acquired, well, in the 1920s—so he didn't wait for the US Army, this guy, you see, I'm being honest—he was already hunting communists, before the Cold War had even begun, in the 1920s, when fascism was starting to rise, at the top of the Japanese executive, by speculating on rice. Among the first to be guillotined in the French Revolution were those called the starvers—yes, those the revolutionary called the starvers, those who speculated on—no, it's not rice, it's wheat—who made the price of bread explode in Paris by stockpiling wheat. There were some, they stockpiled it so prices would rise—I'm thinking of someone who lived in Niger and knows how we, we Westerners—not you and me, well, those called Westerners, in any case their executives, the Western establishment—have relentlessly kept in power, in the poorest countries, I'm thinking here of the Sahel countries in particular,
31:37 men who speculated on food staples in countries where people are starving, doing the same thing, stockpiling now millet, now rice, now sorghum—basically, food staples—so that prices would rise. So, using his fortune acquired in the 1920s by speculating on rice, he created his own military air force—there you go, a guy who created his own military air force in the 1920s in Japan—then he took the lead, along with Yoshio Kodama, doesn't ring a bell? It's in Saint-Dirien, for L'Ingé de Kandou—and I put myself in his shoes—who's going to talk to him about Yoshio Kodama and Ryōichi Sasakawa?
32:18 Kodama was the boss of the party of patriotic masses, Kokusui Taishūtō. He is suspected of having organized certain attacks at the time against prime ministers, and of having, alongside his friend Yoshio Kodama, taken part in the plundering of mineral resources in China. I remind you—I said it earlier, but I repeat it because what has been torn from memory for more than half a century needs to be repeated several times for it to come back—that the Japanese occupation of China was terrifying.
32:52 I hate the Japanese as such, as an identity, just as little as I hate Americans as such—it's regimes that I'm criticizing here. Otherwise, I have boundless admiration for Japanese culture, and not only for its cinema, which is magnificent when it is magnificent, because it's like everywhere, there's dross, there's everything you like, there's the worst, there's the best—but the best, among the summits of cinema, its literature, its visual arts—well, that's not just me, I'm not the only one for whom that holds true.
33:24 In his political activities, one can note, among other things—look closely, this shows you who Ryōichi Sasakawa was—he had gone to Italy in 1939, in the middle of the fascist regime, as Japan's emissary, to propose to Benito Mussolini, well, to create an international fascist organization. This organization would go on to exist, and since I don't want to pile up texts, it would confuse you, I ask each of you, and in particular L'Ingé de Kandou, who had the merit of asking a question wanting to know more about all these matters, to go look it up yourselves.
34:05 I'll refer you to Wikipedia, for lack of better—because it's the least worst source—but you well know that on the internet there are even more detailed things, but in any case, in Google, in a search, you just type World Anti-Communist League. World Anti-Communist League and its Asian branch whose acronym is WACL. W-A-C-L. I'll repeat, W-A-C-L.
34:35 You can do it either with two separate searches, or by putting WACL in parentheses after World Anti-Communist League. WACL. It's the most structured Asian branch of the World Anti-Communist League. It brought together everything that survived from the Third Reich—former SS men, collaborators, those who fled fast from the Red Army's advance because they had been at the head of massacres organized alongside the German Nazis in Central and Eastern Europe.
35:08 And in particular, among them—there are hundreds, thousands, I won't drown you in it—but there's one whose name you need to remember to get back to current events. He was Ukrainian, a Ukrainian who looked everywhere to devour communists in order to kill Russians. It's Stetsko. S-T-E-T-S-K-O. At least put Stetsko into Wikipedia. You won't believe your eyes or your ears if you read it out loud in your head, as is probably the case most of the time.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution and support for the Khmer Rouge 35:38 There. So, I'm coming back now to Cambodia. Why did I make a detour through Latin America? Because the Chinese, and the American initiative, had blown so hard on the embers that already existed before them, of the tension between Beijing and Moscow, that it rose to such a degree of intensity that the first Soviet deaths after the Second World War occurred in those years—the late 1960s and early 1970s—close to 2,000 Soviet soldiers killed on an island of the Ussuri River, on the Far Eastern border.
36:28 Today Russian—not Soviet at the time—border with China, decimated by the Chinese army, we came to the brink of war. Fortunately, there were people responsible for handling this. I have to pay tribute here to Zhou Enlai, no doubt the greatest statesman China had after the Mao of the Long March. And so, we were right in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, you've heard of it, Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards—very quickly, this is my analysis, but you're not obliged to follow it, I told you I don't like being a guru, verify it, enrich it, contradict it on points where maybe I add too much or don't say enough—namely that in the Cultural Revolution, there's Mao Tse-tung who, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward—it's been established that it was a technical, economic failure, a kind of voluntarism, a bit of what's called leftism among communists, wanting to go fast—there were, I don't know, thousands of little makeshift blast furnaces,
37:38 scattered here and there like that, but which produced hammers that broke after three blows. After the failure of the Great Leap Forward—I'll try to be quick—Mao began to be criticized inside the Chinese Communist Party. I'll go fast: to regain control, he relied on these very young adolescents, given a Kalashnikov, to hold at gunpoint those who had made the Long March with him. And I will always salute that Mao Tse-tung—the one who resisted and defeated the Japanese butcher, Japanese imperialism, avenging the Chinese, even if that makes up for nothing of the suffering of the 17 million dead that this imperialism caused in China. I will always pay tribute to that Mao—yes, for me, it's not all black or all white. But the Cultural Revolution went too far. Fortunately, those who were at the head—what was called at the time the Gang of Four, all this is documented, look it up in the usual sources, the Gang of Four—when they were
38:48 politically liquidated, and China as you know it today got moving again with much more balanced development, having given up holding a peasant at gunpoint with a Kalashnikov because two hens were found at his place and so he was a dreadful capitalist—yes, I'm exaggerating on purpose, but because there were hundreds of thousands of cases like that. Fortunately, China came out of it. I'm saying things nobody mentions anymore, including in communist circles—especially in communist circles that agitate against the CP—the CP, I'm not even talking about it, it's been a long time since it's no longer the CP—but those who agitate against the CP call themselves Marxist-Leninists, to point out that they are orthodox. I have nothing against Marx, I have nothing against Lenin—no, I own it, that'll be the subject of another discussion if you're surprised—I have nothing against Lenin, but I don't understand the formula "Marxist-Leninist",
40:00 they shouldn't be so sure of their Marxism, because it would suffice to say "I am Leninist," which implies that I am Marxist—why specify Marxist-Leninist? I look like I'm splitting hairs, no—everyone who lived through the periods I've just recalled knows that all the proclamations of China, of the Red Guards, the China of the Cultural Revolution, the one that would be—L'Ingé de Kandou, listen carefully—the one that would be the outside support, in the same geographic zone, because here I'm setting the CIA aside for now, for the Khmer Rouge, to the point that the King of Cambodia, who was in cahoots with the Khmer Rouge at that time, while also being their hostage.
40:45 Look into the history of the country, you'll see it's quite a story—took refuge in China, in the Maoist China of the time, in the China of the Cultural Revolution. I'm coming back to it, because the question was precise: they were opposed to the Soviets, they were opposed to the pro-Soviet Vietnamese.
41:16 So, I'll continue the historical account now. We are in the Vietnam War, we're in the 70s, between '70 and '80, if you like, that's essentially what I'm recalling. It was in '75 that the Khmer Rouge entered the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and began their unforgettable regime—what I call the Green Khmer—emptying the cities and then massacring the peasants in the countryside, who were practically slaves.
41:56 But all this happened during the Vietnam War. Now, at the beginning, the Khmer Rouge didn't just fall from the sky like that. They had existed before '75 in the Cambodian maquis. And their leaders—most of you at least know the names—the Pol Pots, a bit less known, the Khieu Samphans, the Ieng Sarys, that's all these people, Duch, to mention all those who had a trial that came very late—not like the Nuremberg trial, a generation later.
42:28 But these leaders had done their studies to be able to attend communist universities, in Moscow, in Paris—of all places, yes—in libertarian Paris, in the Paris of the anticommunist left. Donations. Sometimes you learn some good ones. Look it up! How can you believe something this enormous on someone's word? You're right to doubt it. So check it.
Hegel: negative freedom as a flight from all content 43:01 Yes, the Red Guards did their schooling in Paris. But then, going back to the time when they returned home, they would implement—a process described like nowhere else, from a strictly philosophical point of view this time. And which I have often recalled. Well, I'm going to do it once more because the game is worth the candle. Forgive me for leaving the subject, but I'm an old man who commits a few lapses.
43:33 So, very far from the Cambodia of our time, this is a text written in the 1800s, between 1820 and 1825, the Elements of the Philosophy of Right—that is, the political testament of the old Hegel of Berlin. So, here it is. Where Hegel seems very far from our problems. He is looking at the stages of the representation of the self and its consequences
44:07 on what is called the will. And you know that he proceeds at times, doesn't he, thesis, antithesis, well then. No doubt, the aspect of the will defined here—this absolute possibility—they did their schooling in Paris, I remind you, at the time, people discussed all that—of abstracting myself from every determination. That is absolute libertarianism. I abstract myself from every determination. You know the libertarians in the United States—well, the most extreme, libertarian ones, are those who wait for the tax man with a rifle in front of their farm.
44:42 I'm not stopping them from consuming, they have televisions, computers, consuming the wealth accumulated by human history over ten thousand years, but they want to owe nothing to anyone. You know that Clouscard divided our society into two social classes so we wouldn't get lost. It's a great service he did us. There are ten thousand social classes, but they always come down to these two. The class of those who produce more than they consume, and the class of those who consume more than they produce.
45:12 Those ones, they consume without producing anything. Imagine that. So, because they want to abstract themselves from all determination—already, being obliged to work to live, to eat, to pay attention to others, these are constraints on the absolute self. So this absolute possibility of abstracting myself is an impersonal game, from every determination in which I find myself or in which I have placed myself, this flight from all content, you see?
45:43 I am not a man, I am not a woman, I am not French, I am not... In short. In which I find myself or in which I have placed myself, this flight from all content as from a restriction, that restricts my infinity. What is determinate, thus finite, terminated, is opposed to what is indefinite, thus indeterminate. Smoke-sellers—smoke doesn't have a well-determined shape. That's what this will determines itself into.
46:13 That is what representation—when there's a representation, it's opinion, generates common opinion—stands opposed to the concept, to the one who works a bit with words. That's what representation posits for itself as freedom: I am free, I don't give a damn about anyone or anything. And it is thus that he sums up negative freedom, or the freedom of the understanding—and not of reason, mind you. It is the freedom of the void. You want to see why I keep going? It's to answer directly L'Ingé de Kandou, who thinks I'm forgetting her question.
46:44 She's going to be either pleased or terrified. It can manifest itself in a real figure and become a passion. These are no longer ideas, we're entering the real. Let's come back a bit to the Khmer Rouge. So, if it remains purely theoretical, let's stay in philosophy, it's the religious fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation. There you go, from Hegel's pen in 1820 in Berlin, here comes Asia showing up. I didn't do that on purpose. And a Buddhist culture. Cambodia has a Buddhist culture.
Hindu contemplation, Buddhism, and colonial discourse 47:15 A third digression that I've already made, but I think many forget it, though I know more and more people who retain and accumulate all these references. When I was small, when I was born in Vietnam, I was surrounded by adults, acquaintances of my parents who were French expatriates, all very reactionary, as colonial expatriation generally produces, who thought one should never have brought them into the flow of civilization.
47:45 In fact, they were happier without all that. That's how the far right spoke at the time. It's not the colonialist far right anymore—now it's the common discourse of the common ecologist. It's extraordinary. I'm not talking about ecology, I respect it, there are real problems. I'm talking about the ecology of discourse. I'm going after the discourse, not the physical persons, nor the real things that exist, but the discourse. So, yes, and around me, they said, the Vietnamese don't like us.
48:21 Well, actually they didn't say "the Vietnamese"—what am I saying? Let's not be anachronistic, they said "the Annamites." Right? The Annamites, they don't like us. Because "Vietnam" already sounded nationalist, reunified, already sounded a bit communist. No, no. The Annamites, they don't like us. The Nhà Quê, the more vulgar ones said the Nhà Quê. It's like saying the "bougnoules," you see, for North Africans, Blacks, well, anyway. The "métèques" for Corsicans like me—I have to tell you, I can include myself, by origin.
48:53 They said, they don't like us, they're nationalists. No arguing there. But they said, on the other hand, the Cambodians are nice, they're gentle, they're Buddhist. Two million dead. The Buddhist cultures. So again, here I'm not talking about the teaching of Siddhartha Gautama, called the Buddha—just as little as I confuse the Gospel according to Luke, according to Mark, according to Matthew, according to John, and so on—I'm talking about the Gospel, I'm talking about the canonical texts, about what certain moments of the institutional Church made of it.
49:28 Nowhere is it written in the Gospel that one must pour molten lead into the anuses and eyes of Jews, as the Spanish Inquisition did in the 17th and 18th centuries. If you're talking about serious matters likewise, that massacre could well horrify the Buddha, no doubt, but beware of the enthusiasm for Buddhism that was very common in Third Reich circles—look it up!
49:59 Look it up! It's interesting, the visits of Third Reich delegations to Lhasa to go see the Dalai Lama—oh yes! They pass him off as a great humanist ever since he's been working for the CIA. All right, I'm going to get worked up. So I'll close my digression on... In my childhood, I heard talk of those who would soon initiate the genocide in Cambodia, but they're nicer than the Vietnamese—it's about L'Ingé de Kandou, we mustn't lose the thread.
The fanaticism of destruction and Rimbaud's Conte 50:31 At the time, there were, during the Vietnam War, the pro-Soviet Vietnamese, the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge—Chinese of the time, that is, of the Cultural Revolution, in short, of a China that has, fortunately, turned that page. It is the freedom of the void, I'll take up the sentence again, and this time I'll continue without interrupting: it can manifest itself in a real figure and become a passion. So, if it remains purely theoretical, it's the religious fanaticism of pure Hindu contemplation.
51:09 If it turns toward action, in politics as in religion—listen carefully now, you'd think we'd landed in Phnom Penh in 1975—it is the fanaticism of the destruction of every existing social order, and the excommunication of any individual suspected of wanting order—what could be more anti-libertarian than the notion of order—and the excommunication, yes, of any individual suspected of wanting order, and the annihilation—annihilation, in German, that's Vernichtung, the final solution—and the annihilation of every organization trying to come into being.
51:48 It is only by destroying that this negative will has the feeling of its existence—not the proof, not the reasoning, proving existence, cogito ergo sum, no—if only to have the feeling of its existence, it must destroy, it must destroy—ah yes, that reminds you—ah, thank you, I already hear, I see some of your eyebrows saying it to yourselves—yes, it's Rimbaud's tale, a prince, it takes half a page, I could tell you the whole tale, it's a magnificent text: a prince, like in a fairy tale, was annoyed at having only ever devoted himself to the perfection of vulgar generosity, but like all monarchs, he foresaw astonishing revolutions of love and suspected his wives, his favorites, of being capable of more than that complacency embellished with sky and luxury. He wanted to see the hour of desire—that's all of us, I'm doing voice-over here—he wanted to see the hour of desire and of essential satisfaction—that's more, I'm resuming the voice-over, that's more heterodox—desire, we all know satisfaction, when that,
52:58 whether or not it was an aberration of piety—you see, when Rimbaud at 18 already knew that it's an aberration of piety to see arrive finally the moment when desire stops, that is, no more need to desire, one is satisfied all along the line—whether or not it was an aberration of piety, he possessed at least a fairly broad measure of human power—imagine princes, imagine the Roman emperors, the Caligulas, the Neros—and there it starts: all the women who had known him were assassinated. What havoc in the garden of beauty! Under the sword they blessed him. He ordered no others; the women reappeared. Then he amused himself killing all those who followed him, after the hunt or the libations, all followed him—notice that he meets no obstacle, remember that well, the freedom of the void, the negation of all determination, of all constraint, there is no obstacle—he threw himself upon the crowd and cut it to pieces. He amused himself slaughtering luxury animals. He was no fool, that existed in the Roman Empire, there was an emperor some of you may have heard of because there were sword-and-sandal films, remakes,
54:09 blockbusters, where you see the emperor Commodus, who really existed, who used to enter the arena to play at being a gladiator in front of all his subjects, you see? And I say in front of these subjects because there were lictors—those are guards, the cops of the time, armed with a spear like that, or a sword, ready to jab, to shove those who weren't applauding, watch out—and he would go face tigers, bears, panthers—no wait, let's not take the emperor for an idiot, you know?
54:43 What he actually fought against were geese—he would go strangle geese in front of ten thousand people who had every interest in applauding. So there, when Rimbaud says, he amuses himself slaughtering luxury animals: "Can one find ecstasy in refinement? Grow young again through cruelty?" That's the text, "The people did not murmur"—yes, no constraint, no one offered the support of his views. So I say, he could raze whole cities if this keeps going.
55:15 There's the rest. And the end. One evening, he galloped proudly. A genie appeared. Notice that the sex is not specified. A genie appeared of an ineffable beauty, even an unavowable one. From his physiognomy and his bearing emanated the promise of a multiple and complex love, of an unspeakable happiness, even an unbearable one. The prince and the genie probably annihilated themselves in essential health.
55:47 How could he not have died of it? So together, they died. But this prince died in his palace, it's a tale, at an ordinary age. The prince was the genie, the genie was the prince. Full stop. The end. No, my final point. On the next line, at this mysterious fall which I have already commented on elsewhere, learned music fails our desire. You see? An example of what Hegel says exactly, it is only in annihilating that this will has the sensation of existing.
56:22 isn't that so? To have its truth, it's really extraordinary, as long as it lasts, these things. So, and here, that's an individual, but when it's an entire regime with the most powerful military logistics in the world, it is only in destroying that this negative will has the feeling of its existence. It thinks it wants a positive state. For example, look, you think I'm making false analogies with the Khmer Rouge, for instance, the state of universal equality.
56:55 The Khmer Rouge said that it abolished all property and instituted supposed equality, whereas in fact they kept the rubies taken from the mines, within the regime, while famine spread through the work sites, the rice paddies, the rice paddies. That's how it is, but we love it. It thinks it wants a positive state, so, for once, a determination, something that posits itself and does not oppose itself, the state of universal equality or of universal religious life. But in fact it doesn't want positive reality at all, because that reality, whatever it may be, implied, whatever regime it is, as soon as it is actual reality, so to speak, it immediately introduces some order, a singular determination.
57:40 I don't know, one has to eat to live. Both institutions and individuals, so that it's in negating, in suppressing—that means one evening, then equality of the paddies gets suppressed—it's in negating this specification and this objective determination that precisely this negative freedom becomes self-conscious. And listen carefully to the fall, which is the best answer I can give, the fall of Khandou—as for what the Khmer Rouge were, afterward I'll come back to their political positioning—thus, what it believes it wants, you see, like Hegel, before Freud, before Marx, who says that men enter into determinate relations independent of their will, whether it's the Freudian unconscious or the ideological unconscious developed by Marx, you see, Hegel here designates it very well: thus what it believes it wants, understood, in its head, becomes—sorry—what it believes it wants can only be for itself an abstract representation, and its realization can only be, and this is the fall, a fury of destruction of millions of deaths in a very small country.
The first massacres target pro-Soviet Vietnamese 58:51 So let's go back over the history, but now informed by all these determinations: the first massacres carried out by the Khmer Rouge were against the Vietnamese. I remember an article from Le Monde, if I could find the issue number I would gladly give it to you, so don't just take my word for it, because for once here I don't have the reference. For once, I say this in homage to Pierre Alain, I'm going to make him blush, but I remember I had alluded to a front page of Le Monde diplomatique from the 1970s, which had on its front page an article titled 'The real German miracle is happening in the East.'
59:31 I said in the video, I'm sorry, but I believe—if you can find it, I'm not as good a browser as you are, I'm too old—but it's from the 1970s, in Le Monde, it's in fact—I haven't finished my sentence—that I see the text I had been looking for for years appear on the screen, you see, with that front page of Le Monde diplomatique of the time. So, well, listen, I sound biased. So I'll give another reference.
1:00:05 The Maoists—what I'm referring to here is the Maoist faction of that period, this is not Chinese communism. Neo-Maoist, one must say; again, one mustn't say a word against the Mao of the Long March who fought the war against the Japanese, that's much earlier—but the one of the Cultural Revolution. I seem to be loading the boat against them, and above all guilty of slander in saying that they were playing into American hands, and that the Americans didn't hold back from inviting Deng Xiaoping, at the time, who came to China... who put on a cowboy hat, and when he came back, he invaded Vietnam, which had barely emerged from a war in which it had triumphed, in tatters, in blood, over the two greatest colonial imperialisms alongside England, namely the American and the French.
1:00:59 Those who are surprised that I speak of colonialism regarding the Americans, I'll do a separate development on that specifically. It's the only successful colonialism. We'll come back to that historically. At the price of another genocide, moreover. Read an article—I'll post the link under the video as soon as it's edited—because I have it here, another article from Le Monde.
1:01:29 Le Monde, I'm not going to go looking at L'Humanité or Pravda. I know that if you collected all the anti-communist pages of Le Monde, that would make quite a few issues. There are only right-wing people—the stupidest right wing in the world, they say the French right, that's what they say in foreign chancelleries. The stupidest right wing in the world believes that the world [i.e. Le Monde] is left-wing. Anyway. Yes, this article said, in a comical mode—not very comical, but anyway—that the pro-Chinese, Maoist, Marxist-Leninist Dutch communist party, in the 1970s, was in fact a creation of the Dutch secret services, on the order and at the instigation and financing of the CIA.
1:02:19 Now, this isn't Papa Pagani's conspiracy theory. It's the very man who created the Dutch secret service operative who, in his anti-communist struggle, created the Dutch Maoists—he's the one who tells, and he's proud of it in his memoirs, that it fooled everyone, including in China. They went to greet the leaders of the Red Guards, they were warmly received. This was in fact—in case you think I'm exaggerating, that I'm overstating the case—how many times will I tell you that I'm going to die soon.
1:02:55 I'm not in a hurry, I assure you, I'm not morbid, but I mean, I'll be 80 next February. I won't give you the exact date, because that would be a bit much, but it's soon. So I will indeed be 80. So I am going to die soon, statistically speaking, in terms of probability. So I'm a bit pressed for time. And so I'm forced to repeat myself to save time. You think I'm overdoing it, well I'm right in the thick of it.
1:03:25 The sad truth, the tragic truth. That's why I keep saying: inform yourselves. A bit informed and guided by my references, even if it means retracting them should they turn out to be misleading. Inform yourselves. I'll continue. The first victims were Vietnamese. I mentioned this article from Le Monde, I haven't finished, but now I'll go on with this article from the 1970s which said that the Mekong in Vietnam, because it crosses the border, the Mekong was loaded—the entire surface of the Mekong was loaded with Vietnamese corpses.
1:04:11 Vietnamese, yes, pro-Soviet Vietnamese. Now I'm being very precise in my answer to Khandou. They were more than anti-Soviet, they were against anything that was, closely or remotely, connected to it, and that's why it suited the Americans doubly, because they were gunning down Vietnamese whom the Americans were bombing with thousands of tons of bombs—a million tons of bombs, sorry. Napalm—I won't go into it, I'm not much for that kind of voyeurism, but at least inform yourselves about the My Lai massacre, M-Y, hyphen, L-A-I with an umlaut, or L-A-Y, that's not the My Lai version, is it?
1:04:50 these are like Oradour-sur-Glane, but with bigger numbers and atrocities—well, anyway, one hero of the My Lai massacre, among other Vietnamese villages, I'm only talking about civilians, only civilians, the elderly, women holding children, babies, the wounded. So it suited the Americans doubly, the American executive.
1:05:20 I respect this great people, there are plenty of things I admire about American society. And not only those on the left—I have great respect for John Ford. Why not? For Faulkner, he's an immense novelist, even if he has some reactionary sides, being a man of the American South. But well, without even mentioning lesser efforts than Faulkner, America would be saved. It suited them doubly: to liquidate Vietnamese who were pro-Soviet, isn't that right?
1:05:52 For those fighting, and the Vietnamese by myriad bombs, and the Soviets, by all the nuclear missiles still installed today at the largest base in Europe, which is the Ramstein base in Germany, which Zelensky just visited. That's now his meeting place. That's probably where he'll take refuge soon. That's what I intended to answer to Khandou.
The fall of the regime and Western support for the Khmer Rouge 1:06:27 I thank him for his question. But once again, I've given you a few items to look at, either on Wikipedia or Google. It's the International Communist League. You'll tell me, why aren't we quicker to say let's inform ourselves about the Khmer Rouge? Except that the articles on the Khmer Rouge, I don't know who wrote them, but they're full of anti-Vietnamese bias. Yes, I still have to tell you something. This regime is perhaps the most monstrous of the post-war era, as a regime, because the regime that carried out the massacres in Rwanda disappeared quickly.
1:07:07 This one took a long time to disappear. Because how did it end? This is how I'll close my answer to Khandou. I'll close it now. It was the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese army, who in the middle of the war diverted 150,000 men in the middle of the war against the Americans, against the largest army in the world. There were 500,000 GIs, weren't there? In South Vietnam, the great rear base was Thailand.
1:07:38 You understand why Thailand is now one of the biggest brothels in the world, so to speak. Well, let's say, it's known for sex tourism, a mass sex tourism such as you don't see, not only in Thailand but in few countries to that extent—but originally it's because it was the great rear base for 500,000 GIs, soldiers, who needed... what did the Japanese call them? How many... this isn't a matter for jest here. Comfort women.
1:08:10 Yes, so how did it end? The Vietnamese, the Vietnamese army, finally went in and put an end to the massacre. Put an end to the massacre. To the massacre. But not to the Khmer Rouge, who withdrew! Forgive me for laughing. It's not... but it's... it's a nervous laugh—to the border between Cambodia and pro-American Thailand, and there, in guerrilla warfare, they continued to carry out skirmishes. But this time against the Vietnamese army, they could no longer, thankfully, carry out the carnage of their own population as they had done from 1975 to 1978.
1:08:45 Here I'll be precise. And it was represented at the UN, inform yourselves, regarding the camp... under the name of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. But what they don't tell you is that all the Western countries—you know, us Westerners, us democracies opposed to dictatorships—every time there was a resolution pitting the Khmer Rouge, who by then, at the border, were nothing more than a puppet political entity, thankfully, no longer anything militarily on Cambodian soil.
1:09:20 But politically, they were at the UN and they opposed the Vietnamese. Every single time, the Westerners gave the point to the Khmer Rouge, they supported them in the UN votes by rejecting the Vietnamese resolutions and voting for the Khmer Rouge resolutions. Again, it's easy to inform yourselves, these are UN sources. That's how I'll conclude this matter. I'll go back to the cycle on evil. Have we left it? I told you at the beginning, in the introduction, that if I answered this question by dwelling on it, and developing it right to the end of this session, even though I always find it hard to leave you, it's because it seemed to me to be at the very heart of the illustrations one could give of what the essence of evil is.
1:10:10 And by that, I don't mean only the Khmer Rouge leaders, I don't know, but also those who allowed them to have this power and who are still in power today. Well, until next time. And we haven't finished with evil. We are not delivered from evil. Thank you for your attention. Thanks again to Khandou, and until next time. Thank you.
