Ben Kiernan

And The descriptions of the violence, of the barbarity, the brutality to men, women, and infants was deeply harrowing.

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 Program and the Genocide Studies Program.

He is 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.

W- tell everyone what your book is called.

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

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

Thanks for having me.

And I think that is a testament to your choice to do this as a graphic history.

Yeah, that was so, so true that a big tome, historic textbook or even something that is filled with facts like Ben Kiernan's Blood and Soil that I used when I needed to look up a fact of some sort, it's not going to stick with you the same way as it does when it is a much more visual and selective story that is based in human interaction.

I'm thinking of going to Rwanda and to the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which used to have an exhibit about the Armenian Genocide.

Many genocide museums do this.

And by then, the radio was being run by Yeng Thirith, which was Yeng Sary's wife and also the sister of Pol Pot's wife.

And toward the end of 1972, Ben Kiernan tells us that some of these Hanoi Khmers had found out just how much trouble they were in.

Yeng Thirith gave one of them, a man named Pen Sovann, the job of putting together a list, every Khmer who had spent the Sihanouk years living in Hanoi.

And he actually wrote down this list, and a little while later, while Thirith was off sick, one of her assistants, a woman whose own husband was on the list, showed him the secret party report that the list had been sort of written into.