Why Cambodia? Politics, Philosophy, Autobiography. ❷ The Truth Crab Interview.

cambodian genocide is it would you call
it i want to ask you how did you get interested in cambodia and it's possible the answer is my youtube channel but how would you how did you get yourself to watch okay cool cool cool yeah it was just a book i bought it was it was something weird it's called like the four horsemen and it was like a really depressing sort of uh photojournalism book so this guy went to like multiple places it was a book from the 80s you went to lebanon and cambodia and vietnam and a bunch of places and just like essays about what horrors were happening and photos and i just remember like that i think that was the first time where i kind of was like reading about it and learning a bit about it and then i remember you know watching documentaries and learning about carpet bombing and all this craziness that led to the khmer rouge and yeah and then just kind of dug into it so but it's it's interesting to me because for people in the audience who don't know you've lived there for a while i understand and i don't i've heard you mention this and i've studied the language and all that stuff too yeah yeah okay there you go yeah so i don't i don't know too much about it i've kind of always been curious like why cambodia and when did that start when did your interest start and what was the deal behind your cambodian well look i'll just say uh i haven't asked you the parallel set of questions about how happy or unhappy you are in canada but if uh if you want to build your character a little bit let me tell you the future is in cambodia and it's happening right now so you're you're a few years younger than me um you can you can you could have a really interesting next decade of your life if you want to have a foothold in cambodia and of course you don't have to be there 12 months a year you could be there three months a year or six months a year but um today in 2020 cambodia is a much different place from what it was when i first went there i will always remember i was wearing combat boots at that time with steel toe i had to be ready to defend myself all the time and i had my money in the soles of my boots um you know the big bills you know i forget maybe i had a thousand dollars in cash on me something like that and it was in thai currency in the soles of my boots and i was you know kind of ready to go come i i came through uh the jungle river route over land from the southeast corner of laos down through and eventually so down through a whole bunch of towns nobody's heard of and nobody cares about and where of course nobody speaks english and eventually ended up in the in the capital city in phnom penh and i'll always remember when i took the money out of my boots the uh the heat had been so intense that the top bill on each side under the foot that was being crowned into the boot had been ruined so i lost like 2 000 tie bot from the key the friction of carrying the money in the bottom of my boots so i mean it was rough back then it's gotten less and less rough and you know it was a place where the greatest danger to you were the cops themselves if you got a problem not you know so i did get to see i was there at the very end of the real cambodia and you know when there was no internet and no electricity in that stuff you know what i mean if that's if that's what you're into you know approximately how old were you god sorry great great question without looking up so was it 15 years ago some of that right so uh my daughter is seven years old so yeah i mean well i first got interested in cambodia way back 2001. the first time i got the books out of the library and started studying the cambodian language and history cambodia was way back then and i assumed i was going to start in cambodia i was like okay great i'm going to get an english teaching certificate and i'm going to go out and do a combination of teaching english historical research humanitarian work like volunteer for all the humanitarian work i can get and survive by teaching english and uh so your audience won't know this i wasn't just studying the modern language i was also studying the ancient language pali so pali is the ancient scriptural language of buddhist philosophy so it was doing all that simultaneously it was a very intellectually stimulating time of my life and maybe a somewhat emotionally deprived time in my life you know when i look back now maybe i wasn't making the the best decisions on my own behalf you know just in terms of my own self-interest but nevertheless um so yeah there's a combination of language historical humanitarian all these all these interests coming together driving in cambodia but i first okay so gee how to make a long story short i ended up first living in hong kong then taiwan then thailand bangkok thailand then uh the capital city of laos chan then i had years in laos and much later ended up in cambodia so i did visit cambodia before that like before i actually lived there continuously and cambodia was always on my radar i remember saying to people in laos you know cambodia feels big to me like it seems enormous and ancient and important and when i'm here in laos everything seems small and trivial and the the history isn't as deep uh just in terms of centuries there's not many not as many centuries of history and the massacres aren't as big i mean you know you've seen some cambodia these are this is mass murder on an unbelievable scale the violence in cambodia is just mind-boggling you know in laos there's a little bit of violence there you know but it's it's like the smurfs compared to the land of giants you know cambodia still had that quality so i i did eventually end up living and working in cambodia but not it wasn't the first place i lived it it felt like it was the last place i lived it was the end of a long long journey of living and working for many years in asia before i got to cambodia interesting um so you were talking about so just quickly why can't bo so like i was going to say why cambodia but i guess it wasn't it wasn't just my understanding was you had like specifically singled out cambodia and you traveled there so you were just doing this whole kind of tour no so i did though that's that's the interesting thing so like when i was still in canada uh before i left for asia it was cambodia that i chose so i remember i had various university professors i talked to about this i was looking for a language where i could combine my humanitarian interests you could to be blunt my political interests my interest in the reality of the world as it exists today which has a lot to do with poverty and you know it has a lot to do with humanitarian concerns but it's fundamentally political um i wanted to be able to do that and then also work on the ancient history the language buddhism as a philosophy as a religion i didn't want to be a philosopher cut off from political reality i want to be a philosopher who plunged into and really dealt with or drowned in you know contemporary political violence i wanted to i wanted to literally go out and get my my feet wet my hands dirty and work on the farms work on a rice farm uh you know help people on you know ice farm you know see see whatever the state of the poverty and uh anarchy in a pejorative sense was as these countries have emerged in their post-war you know squalor and so on and see the consequences of the american bombing of these countries they're full of craters you know that's a whole other aspect of the story but no uh i looked at many different options i looked at mongolia i considered learning mongolian so you can imagine also mongolia has some of those same factors mongolia used to be a communist country today it's a democracy has a language a modern language that is in some ways linked to an ancient language for buddhist philosophy but in some ways a totally different language um you know mongolia presented a lot of the same opportunities and challenges but no it wasn't mongolia that won what i really decided was it was it was cambodia for my own future so yeah already in toronto before i left i was writing of the cambodian alphabet and i was learning to read pali the ancient buddhist philosophy in its cambodian iteration in the cambodian orthography so yeah i had all this stuff come together and uh sorry looking really briefly again your viewers know this but both of my parents were communists my mother and my father were communist extremists so the history of cambodia it's one of those things where you hold up the mirror uh you hold the mirror to the reality of human nature you hold the mirror to the reality of civilization but also in my case you're holding up the mirror to your own family the excuses they made for mass murder my parents were pro-violence they were pro-revolution they were pro-mass murder and you know it's confronting them and it's confronting my own childhood delusions and then you know moving forward and trying to do something positive out of the ashes so yeah for me the significance of communism and mass murder in cambodia is a little bit different because i grew up with a family who supported that who told me that it was good and right and justified so and for me becoming an adult partly had to do with challenging and overturning my parents values so yeah can we i'd like to talk about that for a little bit because it's do it i'm interested in uh and and communism in general is something i'm kind of interested in at the moment um so when you say they act it's like they advocated for matt you're thinking specifically about like khmer rouge like they were sympathetic to the communist cambodian dictatorship yes so the the short answer is my parents were real communists they supported the most extreme most violent forms of of communism they weren't insincere halfway economy i'm not i'm not saying that to insult anyone obviously it would be morally superior to not support mass murder um but i guess you could say i had the advantage of not being raised with parents who were well put this way there's a difference between having parents who are say holocaust deniers and having parents who admit that the holocaust happened who say yes it happened but who supported it like if you had parents who were actually nazis who worked for adolf maybe they worked in the concentration camp a lot of people in germany must have had parents or grandparents who actually worked in the concentration camps and actually supported it right like they're not denying it that was positively what what they were about politically so it's a very very different sort of thing but yeah they they supported the most brutal most terrible excesses of communism for example in tibet um they supported the destruction of tibet but the chinese communist party and destruction of tibetan culture and so on so you know there was no uh there was no sitting on the fence with them and yeah i mean that ideology is so simple that you can understand it as a child i would say it's a childlike ideology um but then you reach a fork in the road where it's like am i gonna keep making excuses for this the way my parents do am i gonna pretend that things make sense that really don't make sense or am i gonna you know acknowledge what's wrong and evil about this and start you know doing my own research and coming to my own conclusions so was there a time there was a time that you can remember when you were just kind of let's say indoctrinated by your parents and you were going along with it and you had kind of like an awakening we were like wait a second yes yes yes well and you know uh one of the realest moments in my life to be not captured on video camera was me confronting my father about that a very short time before he died my dog my father was basically on his death bed he had this condition that killed him in hospital very very gradually so it's not like he died that day but still he was he was in the bed where he was gonna die but you know i really confronted my father because he was in denial about it and he was he was claiming that no he hadn't indoctrinated me and hadn't raised me to be a communist and i really had to passionately say to him no look like this was my childhood this is the reality of what i grew up with this is what you taught me at the dinner table every night and um you know of course it's quite common to meet people who were indoctrinated into say you know christianity islam mormonism any other or crazy cult religion but the big difference is that when you're indoctrinated into communism as a child you go out and look at the newspapers for sale in the newspaper stand and you see gorbachev you see the soviet union you see mao zedong you see the stuff they're talking about you see nuclear weapons like it's not that the newspapers are saying the same things that my parents are saying but the imaginary things my parents believed in the outside world was always confirming to be real that it was real that it was a big deal you know so if you grew up in a crazy cult version of christianity any mainstream religion like this or hinduism you know you're training yourself as a child to believe in things you never see and things you never hear but raising a child with communism they're being trained to believe in things that they see all the time you see it confirmed all the time you know you hear all the time that cuba is this important country now of course my parents actually supported communist dictatorship in cuba like the news isn't going to do that but still you know that's that's being affirmed for you all the time that cuba is this real place that really matters and in those days of course this is before 1989 also if anything the mainstream press was massively exaggerating the importance the wealth the success the military power of those those communist countries do you um wait so okay so go back though do you recall was it a particular was there something was there an incident or was there something you saw or read about that made you kind of change your perspective on communism oh yeah sure i mean i would say the the most important shift was during university and during my first year of university because at that point i was already too smart and too well informed to be a conv to really believe what my parents had taught me but like there was still the option of being kind of academic marxist and back then people use the term marxian like oh you're not marxist but you're marxian like i'm a like you're a sophisticated person who's still involved with this so like the final you know turning point is like okay am i still gonna make some excuses to some extent and try to be a part of this intellectual tradition or no am i really going to accept this is bad and evil and wrong this really fundamentally is about justifying mass murder it fundamentally is about justifying class struggle and refusing to allow democracy to exist like that's really a lot of what communism is about is using violence to destroy democracy and then to perpetuate the regime after that that's that's created that way um so that that was that was really the most important turning point but sure earlier i mean in terms of childhood or high school years sure there are a whole bunch of uh a whole bunch of wake up points and you know of course the easier road to have taken would have been to just not care about politics that's that's what you're not asking me you know i'm sorry i'm not complaining but i mean i think a lot of people were raised in the type of family i was raised in they would respond to it by just concluding all politics is i'm just going to stop caring about politics and i'm going to go party you know going to go to something else my life or something but i came to conclusions you know politics really matter economics also really matters i still really care about the study of economics however marxist economics are complete you know that just the particular school of thought that i was raised in um was was meaningless and worthless and bad yeah i got a lot of follow-up questions i need to say great okay cool i have a lot of water to drink so just take a quick break do you need to take a break or do you want to do hey man cue the music i don't know do you have an animated uh segue i'll put something on uh great i could just just give me two minutes no problem at all folks