Cambodian Civil War

You know, otherwise he'll just be an oddity.

The, uh, people believed too, at least throughout the first, uh, several years of what came to be called the Cambodian Civil War, which pitted Lon Nol's government, you know, which again was this client regime of Washington against the Khmer Rouge.

The leading Cambodian communist intellectual was Khieu Samphan.

He won popular support against Sihanouk in the '60s as being this sort of social justice advocate, and he had a reputation for not being corrupt, which was remarkable among any political figure then, especially as the war heated up.

There is a province in Cambodia called Simreap and a city called Simreap that's very famous for these incredible temple complex called Angkor Wat.

And in that province, that was the province most destroyed by the Cambodian Civil War.

And so we have schools and do village developments in the countryside in the Simrit province.

And so the STEM program is basically to implement the capabilities for the children in those village schools to be able to be competitive in the national examinations that are on the STEM side.

But the other thing they sort of mention in there, which can be a bit confusing, is that they say that this was essential and reference the great and victorious national democratic revolution, basically being victorious in what they call a national democratic revolution because of the collectivization of the peasantry.

And what they're actually talking about there, the national democratic revolution, that just basically means the Cambodian Civil War.

Now, why not just call it that? Well, we have to remember that the Khmer Rouge are applying Marxist-Leninist theory to everything they do, and in that theory, the revolution comes in stages.

This isn't something Pol Pot cooked up in the jungle.