In the Shadows of Utopia: The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Nightmare

Ranking history

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Latest episodes

• 1973 Part Two: Pull Them Up By Their Roots! Ta Mok and the 'Model' Southwest Zone

  October 5, 2026 · 2 hr 15 min

  In June 1973, a young American official and his fiancée climbed a mountain on the Vietnamese border, expecting a view of farmers planting rice. What they saw instead were columns of black smoke rising from Cambodian villages as far as the…

• Interview: The Man Who Stole the Gods | Douglas Latchford & Cambodia’s Looted Khmer Art with Matthew Campbell

  September 15, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

  Matthew Campbell, award-winning journalist for Bloomberg Businessweek and author of The Man Who Stole the Gods, joins Lachlan Peters to discuss Douglas Latchford, the extraordinary plunder of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer antiquities, and the…

• 1973 Part One: The Return of the King

  September 1, 2026 · 1 hr 44 min

  In early 1973, Norodom Sihanouk travelled down the Ho Chi Minh trail and back onto Cambodian soil for the first time since the coup. China Pictorial published a special issue of photographs to prove it. In the background of several of them…

• Terrorism, Rock and Roll and the Battle of Angkor Wat

  May 31, 2026 · 2 hr 20 min

  At the beginning of 1972, Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese forces fought each other in the temple complex at Angkor. In Phnom Penh, a city swollen with refugees and rocked by bombings, the radios played Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea. It…

• How to Get Out of a War in Indochina: Nixon, Mao and the Paris Peace Accords

  February 16, 2026 · 2 hr 1 min

  In February 1972 Richard Nixon flew to Beijing to shake Mao's hand. In May he went to Moscow. In between, North Vietnam launched the largest conventional offensive of the war and American bombers returned in force. All of it, in one way or…

• 1972 - Life (and Death) in the Liberated Zones. Regrets for the Khmer Soul and M-13

  January 4, 2026 · 1 hr 38 min

  In 1972 a Phnom Penh schools inspector named Ith Sarin spent nine months inside Khmer Rouge territory and came back to write about it. Around the same time a French scholar named Francois Bizot spent three months chained in a jungle camp…

• Chenla II: Lon Nol Strikes Out

  August 11, 2025 · 1 hr 37 min

  In February 1971 Lon Nol suffered a stroke and was flown to Hawaii to recover. Many hoped he would not come back. He did, and by December the army under his command had suffered a defeat on Route 6 from which it never recovered. Time…

• S3: (Bonus) A Brief History of the Thai Cambodian Border Dispute

  July 25, 2025 · 32 min

  Hello everyone, I've put together a quick look at the long history of the Thai Cambodia border dispute to compliment what I'm sure many of you are reading and watching in newspapers and on television. The escalation is far from good, and I…