Jocko Podcast 280: BURN. DEMOLISH. KILL. The Horrors of The Armenian Genocide

2021-05-06T11:00:13Z

Underground Premium Content: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @martyrmade @echocharles 0:00:00 - Opening. 0:07:30 - Armenian Golgotha 2:22:49 - Final thoughts. 2:26:19 - How to stay on THE PATH. JOCKO UNDERGROUND Exclusive Episodes: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Jocko Store Apparel: https://www.jockostore.com Jocko Fuel: https://jockofuel.com Origin Jeans and Clothes: https://originmaine.com/durable-goods/ 2:47:40 - Closing Gratitude.

AI summary of episode

yeah daresor was one of the main gosh what do you even call a place like that you want to call it a death camp but that sort of makes you think of the Nazi example where this is like a factory of death and it wasn't it wasn't that you had these these caravans that were being wound through the desert to be robbed and raped and killed and enslaved as they went and just eyewitness report after eyewitness report describes the road on the way down is just littered with corpses and body parts everywhere you go anytime there's a hill you look over the other side of it off the road and it's just filled with bodies back there the rivers are choked with bodies and body parts but some of the people survived some of the people just figured it out you just said people who were alive started to eat the flesh of the dead people who haven't had anything to eat for a month will do you lose your mind when you start to when you start to starve and die of thirst and exposure and some people made it and for those who made it tell was waiting for them you know at the place that they got to at the end of the line one of them called their Zor is basically big open air cages that they just pen people up in and there was no food and there was no water and there was no medicine and they just stayed in there and they died and now you know this wasn't Auschwitz with you know double razor wire fences you know multiple layers deep people could kind of get there and you know if you had an ability to do if you knew somebody who maybe came down there to give you a blanket or some food you might live a little bit longer than everybody else but people were dying by the 500 the thousands the 2000s a day just dying of disease and exposure and hunger and thirst and periodically massacre sometimes when another caravan would get there and they're just simply wasn't any room for anyone else they would either take that caravan or most often they would take people who were already degraded near the point of death and they would be like well we're moving you to the next location you're going south again everybody back on the road and there was nothing south they just marched them out there people who were already right on the point of death they would march them further into the Syrian desert they would just wander out there and die or be massacred the scenes in derseor that are described or really something beyond I mean it's a heronum is Bosch painting you know this is from the book no pen can possibly convey the suffering and misery of these exile Armenians persecuted wanders surrounded by savage gangs of police soldiers riding in thousands of wagons and carts and on beasts of burden though most were on foot and many of those bear like dried leaves driven by the wind they passed through this sold bloody passage and on to the arid deserts of derseor to die without bread without water without a shroud and without a grave barely had the men from these regions been separated from the women and put on the road to exile when they were mercifully slaughtered and their corpses thrown into the rivers or valleys as food for vultures and other wild animals the young brides and virgins were yanked from the embrace of their crying mothers and taken to Turkish herems even ten year old girls were subjected to all manner of savage unbearable debotuary the older women who managed to endure the terrible hardships of the road were taken to derseor where they were brutally slaughtered during the summer of 1916 here we encounter two young Armenian engineers who had been in charge with overseeing the work of an Armenian labor battalion in tears they told me how in 1915 particularly in September and October approximately 80,000 Armenians of both sexes were encamped under tents made from bedsheets and rags on the plain near the valley stretching all the way to the spacious swampy field by the Mamure Railway Station 600 to 700 were dying daily from hunger thirst and fever when suddenly a lengthy nocturnal autumn rain came and finished the task left unfinished by the human beasts the people were stuck in the standing pools of water for several days severe cold insert ensued and none of them had adequate shelter clothing or food they froze to death by the thousands falling like the autumn leaves or they died from dysentery diarrhea bleeding and other plagues of overcrowding the field was soon covered with mounds of unbearied bodies under makeshift tents and entire families were reduced to corpses by hunger and cold with no one to bury them nor could those Armenians who found their dead kinfolk find any spades or hose to bury them with and behold suddenly one morning to bring this widespread and heart-trending wretchedness to its ultimate perfection the director of the exiled caravans and hundreds of police soldiers bearing whips and clubs surrounded the poor people already at death store and ordered them to get immediately on the road it isn't humanly possible to imagine the hue and cry the begging and pleading and the chaos that prevailed in and around those thousands of tents the tents were then taken down and the portable goods and bundles representing the deportees last bits of property were assembled but they had neither carts nor wagons nor beasts of burden to carry them the lamentation then began many would not leave loved ones who were sick in their death throws lying on the ground uncaired for and abandoned the dying agast beg not to be abandoned in the open fields as food for hungry wolves and corpse eating hyenas that prowled the night but they had no time to think the military police and major and minor officials fell upon them without pity or human feeling they struck the hapless and confused left and right hitting them everywhere eyes burst open skulls were crushed faces were covered with blood and new wounds were opened up nobody cared nobody took pity on them the survivors seeing that they had no option but to leave took down and folded thousands of tents and in an instant throwing them over their shoulders got on the road leaving their ill and dying loved ones behind the wretched Armenian mothers who unable to take their underage children two to six years old children who had fallen ill from starvation extreme cold and the hardship of the long road half dead or in the throws of death had to leave them on top of the already dead tearfully the eyewitnesses told us how two large mounds of corpses of thousands of Armenian children rose up among them numerous children who had not yet died and who extended their small hands searching for their mothers the eyes of these omaciated and neglected angels bore a look of pleading and protest directed toward their mothers and toward God and from their half dead lips some of them cried that sacred word mommy for the last time since their mothers could not possibly take the children along in a few hours the little ones would be dead and would have to be left on the road but you're talking tens of thousands at least of our menian women and children taking away this way you know maybe a hundred maybe over a hundred thousand the total number of deaths between one one point five million but the number of people who were taken away is slaves and just kind of melted into the population or were murdered later that's what happened to a lot of these people it was it was in the ten at least the tens of thousands you know sex slavery in the Ottoman Empire that this isn't something that just sort of came out of nowhere because of the chaos it was going on there was actually just last night as I was brushing up on some of this I came across in New York times article written in 1886 by a journalist who managed to he had a he had a guide there in Constantinople that was helping them and they dressed him up in a beard and said he looked like you know he was from the area and he had some money and they got him into some of these places where they were selling women and this was in 1886 none of this was going on and they would they were mostly so there's always Christian women usually you're not you can't enslaved Muslims sometimes you know people do what they do but generally speaking that's what happened and so it would be Circassians and Slavs and Armenians and sometimes a series of Greeks and so this was something that you know that the Sultan himself the way the Sultan reproduced was he had a harem of hundreds and hundreds of women and all of them were slaves taken from Christian lands and they would be kept in a cell in like a very specific part of the palace and they would be guarded by black like black African unix and so I mean just again give you some idea of like the society we're talking about here the king has hundreds of slave women kept in cells and like his own palace they're not allowed to interact with anybody else and they're guarded with they're guarded by unix who were castrated specifically for the purpose I mean this is a it's a different we're not talking about you know the abundance dog or the English parliament or something it's just a different different time in a different place I mean we do after remember that you know we're I just mentioned that New York Times article in 1886 it only 21 years before was when we got rid of you know Chatelle slavery in the United States so it was a different time and there were a lot of things going on back then but there's a there's a little bit of exotic strangeness to something like that that I think kind of shocks us a little bit and this idea that you know you could take especially non-Islamic women as spoils of war and a sex slavery we saw that reignite when ISIS you know rampaged through everywhere they were taken to Yazidis and everybody else that they found it wasn't Muslim as sex slaves and it was horrifying to us 15 gen darm's going with us the party numbered four five hundred persons we had got only two hours away from home when bands of villagers in large numbers with rifles guns axes etc surrounded us on the road and robbers of all we had the jondarms took my three horses and sold them to local Muslims pocketing the money they took my money and that from my daughter's neck also all our food after this they separated the man one by one and shop them all within six or seven days every mail above 15 years old by my side we're killed two priests one of them over 90 years of age these bandsmen took all the good looking women and carried them off on their horses very many women and girls with us carried off into the mountains among them my sister whose one year old baby they threw away a turk picked it up and carried it off I know not where my mother walked till she could walk no further and dropped by the roads I don't a mountain top we found on the road many of those who had been in previous sections carried from bayboard some women among them were killed and their husbands and sons we came across some old people little infants still alive but in a pitiful condition having shouted their voices away we were not allowed to sleep at night in the villages but lay down outside under cover of the night indescribable deeds were committed by the jondarms bandsmen and villagers many of us died from hunger and strokes others were left by the roadside two people to go on one morning we saw 50 to six see wagons with about 30 turkish widows whose huntsbidden had been killed in the war and these were going to Constantinople one of these women made a sign to one of the jondarms to kill a certain Armenian whom she pointed out the jondarms asked if she did not wish to kill him herself at which she said why not and drawing a revolver from her pocket shot and killed him each one of these turkish hanooms which is a turkish lady had five or six Armenian girls of ten or under with her boys the turk's never wish to take they killed all of whatever age the worst and most unimaginable horrors were reserved for us at the banks of the year fradies the mutilated bodies of women girls and little children made everybody shudder the bandsmen were doing all sorts of awful deeds to the women and girls that were with us whose cries went up to heaven at the fradies the bandsmen and jondarms threw into the river all the remaining children under 15 years old those that could swim were shot down as they struggled in the water after seven days we reached Erzingian not an Armenian was left alive there the turkish women took my daughter and me to the bath and their showed us many other women and girls that had accepted Islam between there and andrays the fields and hillside were dotted with swollen and black and corpses that filled and fouled the air with their stench on this road we met six women wearing the ferage and with children in their arms but when the jondarms lifted their veils they found that they were men in disguise so they shot them after thirty two days journey we reached Constantinople one of the things that would happen on the trail of tears on this road to death was you know by the time you got a week out of any of these cities where people were deported a lot of the american consulate people and other diplomats and missionaries who were there including by the way this is really worth mentioning that i've been brought up yet a lot of the people diplomats who have reported on this and broke back about it and have provided a lot of material we have today these are German diplomats austrian diplomats these are people who are allied to the Ottoman Empire in this war who were writing back about a lot of these things there's one memoir that was written about it by a guy named rafael denogales who was a venezuelin mercenary who was actually serving as a turkit as a mercenary officer as a major in the turkish military and he wrote a lot about it as well and one of the things that you hear over and over again is how by the time you're a week out of the city all these people are naked all their clothes have been taken so they're walking in july or august maybe in the Syrian desert 12 hours a day or more you know and you think maybe they would get some rest but more often than not the nighttime was the worst time because they would stop for the evening and as ever they didn't have tens most of the time those would all would have all been taken from them they didn't have any kind of shelter so they're just sitting out in the weather and if there was a village nearby or a tribe nearby or sometimes just the soldiers themselves this was their time to blow off a little bit of steam and so they would show up and they would just be walking through the encampments of all of these women and children and elderly people who who stopped and they would just take their pick for rape they would take slaves sometimes they would just torture people for entertainment their stories of pretty Armenian women being strip naked and forced to dance for turkish soldiers and when they weren't pleased with their performance they just doubted the encarricine and watched the veranda death for their entertainment there's story after story after story after story like this and not a bunch of people from one caravan we're talking from all over the country throughout the entire period of this going on there's something you know there's maybe you can get people to go put a bullet in somebody's head for their country you can maybe play play up that angle of it to get them to do something like that you've got a really in general level of extraordinary hatred I think to to get people to do some of the things that were being done here especially the regular people that doesn't go so much for the special organization you know I think I think maybe in one of the unraveling episodes we did I asked a question like if you had a bar in town in any city in America where everybody knew that's the bar where in there there's this room and there's a person in there and you can just do whatever you want to that's the gimmick at the bar like I might not go there you guys might not go there and really I mean there was a historian American historian not not Armenian but just a historian of the Ottoman Empire who said that if they had lost that battle then the word Armenia today would just be a curious historical footnote you know we'd probably still have Armenians obviously just like we had Jews for a long period of time when there was no such thing as Israel but that's what we would be talking about you know it didn't preserve Armenian independence at the time they tried you know one of the things that happened was in that brief period after they did put a stop to them Georgia Armenia and Azerbaijan which are all right there clumped together none of them wanted to be part of the Soviet Union at the time and they didn't want to be part of the Ottoman Empire either so they formed a little alliance to try to defend themselves but as soon as things got a little bit tricky Georgia was pretty quick to be like you know what we're going to go with the Soviet Union and Azerbaijan was very quick to be like you know what what Muslims too and they kind of stabbed the Armenians in the back and attacked them from behind and so the Armenians then at that point had to cut a deal with the Soviet Union and so Armenia became a Soviet socialist republic as well and so out of the out of the frying pan into the fire there you know although I mean you know the thing is one of the things that did happen in Armenia obviously you know they were under the same Soviet tyranny is everybody else to some degree but they did understand the Soviets even. and maybe the things in our house right now the furniture in our house right now maybe uh we're things that we that we took from these people when we killed them and um that's how it went over and over and over and over again you know and the thing that always the thing that is just the most unbearable to me is imagining like just I've mentioned it a few times already but it's the it's always the thing I can't get out of my head about this is that these are all women children old people the men were gone already and just imagining like your mother or your wife or your sisters or your kids being marched along out to the desert but these people set up on you know not blown up by a predator drone as bad as that it is they are being hacked down with machetes and axes and as you saw like in one of the one I think the onker eggs and apple that you read in in massacres that would take hours and hours and hours you know it takes a long time some of these they're killing 6, 7, 8,000 people at a time in a ravine by hand and that takes time and so it's just screaming in the smell of feces and blood and people you know you have just body parts hacked up over here and over there there's just a big rape or G he was a member of the young Turks um he had broken with the triumph or a little bit uh over you know military reasons over the years but he was still part of these people and a lot of the young Turks and even the committee of Union and progress the core group that was really carrying all this out they were still there they were still in the government you know there was no real we had denotsification after the second World War and there was really not a whole lot of that going on some of the very very main people you know they fled they they fled the country and so this wasn't carried out but they were tried in absentia some of them were sentenced to death some of the main architects um but after a little while everybody realized that Turkey is going to be kind of strategically important now that we have this huge threat of the Soviet Union looming up here and so like it or not we're going to have to kind of find a way to like bring Turkey back into the fall the mean Turkey was in NATO by the 1950s and it was considered a strategic necessity to just kind of forget about all this you know you get all the way up to the 1980s and there was a um an American scholar named Susan Blair who found a bunch of the American consulate documents that people hadn't people didn't even know about these and it was the entire ravine I mean you come over this ridge and it's just this entire ravine hundreds of yards and it is just bodies and they're not dead of you know this this place was was witnessed by an American from somebody from the American consulate who wrote out and saw it afterwards these bodies are not people who died of starvation or thirst or exposure these are people who's are just one big mass of gashes and mutilation and hacked off limbs and women with their heads cut off who are laying there with their dresses thrown up over their head and their legs spread with their heads cut off I mean that this is the these are the scenes that you see over and over and over and over to the point where you know you read a book like the 30 year genocide about it where he really does take the time to get into each of the massacres and it becomes almost significantly nauseatingly boring in a way and it's just it's hard to imagine when you make it personal like that you know trying to imagine the helplessness that you would feel knowing that this had happened to people that you cared about or being one of those people it would just it's it's hard to imagine well we don't necessarily just have to imagine it we can listen to when I witness the widow I witnessed this is going back to the book this is transmitted by an American ambassador to the secretary state says this a week before anything was done to bayboard the villages all around had been emptied and their inhabitants had become victims of the John Darm's and margarine bands three days before the starting of the Armenians from bayboard after a week's prison imprisonment our bishop had been hanged with seven other notables after these hangings seven or eight other notables were killed in their own houses for refusing to go out of the city 70 or 80 other Armenians after being beaten in prison were taken to the woods and killed the Armenian population of bayboard was sent off in three batches I was among the third batch my husband died eight years ago leaving me and my eight year old daughter and my mother extensive possessions so that we could so that we were living in comfort since mobilization began the merch has come common don has been living in my house free of rent he told me not to go that by Philip Garevich about the Roman in genocide we was to inform you that tomorrow we killed with our families and he has a quote in there when he's talking about what genocide is and the two the society that's perpetrating it and he has this line that's always stuck with me says genocide after all is a sort of community building exercise and that stuck with me as I was reading all the material about the Armenian genocide in the way that it's specific way that it was handled one of the things that happened was these people who would be deported down south when I say that what I'm talking about is you know all the men would be killed and the women children and old people who were left would be put into a caravan they'd be sent down to march in the Syrian desert on a march that would take about two months and when they got to the end it was just there was a death camp there where they would anybody who survived two months with you know no food because it would all be taken from them right away you know if they couldn't scrounge bugs out of the desert or eat dead bodies or whatever they had to do they'd buy a starvation if they couldn't if you weren't a woman who could you know use your body or whatever to get a Turkish soldier to give you a drink of water or do whatever you had to do then you died on the way and the roads were littered with bodies and sometimes they would just massacre all of you along the way but the ones who got to the end would get to these death camps in the Syrian desert and these routes you know it doesn't take two months to walk directly in a straight line from one place to their end state and an end place in the Syrian desert they would go on these winding routes sometimes but you wouldn't know that I maybe this has changed a little bit now you wouldn't know that by going on like rotten tomatoes the first night or first day that that thing was released there were like 5,000 like one star terrible horrible worst movie ever reviews and like all of them had kind of broken English and like whatever else I mean you see that and then immediately afterwards literally like the next year there was another Armenian genocide movie that was put out it was sponsored by the Turkish government and it was just it's almost worth watching for just the the the madness of the propaganda I mean you really have to like imagine a movie about the Nazis and the Holocaust where all of the SS officers and Heinrich Kim learned everybody else are just portrayed it's like they're just really trying to help all these Jews but like the Jews they just they ran off out there into Poland and something happened to them okay what if you had that in a prison that would be a lively joint I mean that's what you had going on here you had these caravans of women children and old people being marched down into the desert very often by guards who were from the special organization guys who were convicted murderers and rapists who had been given complete in total license from their government to do whatever they want and now you stop at nighttime and your board you've been on the road for a week riding in the hot sun on your horse guarding these people and what are you how you're going to spend your evening and the way a lot of them spent it was just you know again you just it's one of those things that like reading a book about it or anything just you really can't do justice until you really try just close your eyes and try to put yourself in the position of these people in the position of a mother who's already watched two of her children die of exposure and then has her baby grab by a leg and thrown in a river and then she's gang raped and she's going to be gang raped again and again and again for the next two months as she walks you know this road or until she can't take it anymore and commit suicide basically that was the situation of hundreds of thousands of people being marched down into the desert like this and and it was done by a bunch of Armenians without any state support you know if you think about everybody looks looks like what the masad did the Israelis did after the second world war they hunted down a thousand fifteen hundred Nazi officers SS officers around the world and that's you know that's that's good for them but the Armenians you had a group people who were doing this completely independently without any state support this group of hardcore militants who hunted these people down all around the world and essentially took out the entire Ottoman government that was running this during during the period all the high ranking people there is one other thing I want to close with I kind of forgot about earlier because there is uh to on the whole question of turkish denialism um this is a quote from a letter written by the leader of the special organization a guy named behind the inch of care and this was a letter that was found fairly fairly recently last few decades um this is right near the beginning of it he said the committee of union in progress as the bearer of the nation's honor has decided to free the homeland from the inordinate ambitions of this accursed nation and to assume the responsibility for the blemish that will stain Ottoman history in this regard the committee which cannot forget the country's bitter and unhappiness and whose cup runeth over with unrelenting desire for revenge has decided to annihilate all Armenians living within Turkey not to allow a single one to remain and has given the government broad authority in this regard on the question of how this killing and massacring will be carried out the central government will give the necessary instructions to the provincial governors and army commanders all of the unionist regional representatives would concern themselves with following up on the matter in all of the places where they were found and would ensure that not a single Armenian would receive protection or assistance not a lot of room for doubt there evil with that echo Charles maybe we could do a little decompression old school decompression scenario that was a rough one say so it was an overcrowded place they had a lot of people but they only again had about 1200 train soldiers and they were the ones that went and got everybody organized they rang the bells of the church bells of yeravan to muster everybody and you had women and children running supply lines everywhere getting everything in place you had men digging defensive fortifications you had old men serving as like signal operators with flags and things up on you know up on towers everybody was participating here and the Turkish army pushed up within you know just about within visual range just over the horizon of the capital of Armenia and they got to a place there were three areas where they fought but the main one that you know people remember today there's a great big monument there and a great museum Armenian history museum called Sardara Bot and thankfully this French guy it's not a it's not a very well-known battle if you look in general histories they'll talk they'll all talk about it So these are people who have lived in urban environment, they know how to engage in long distance trade, they know how to deal in like financial alchemy, they know how to do all, they know banking, they know law, they're all literate at a time when like 1% of your own population is literate because that's what these people do and they don't have their own place to live obviously. He was sort of a cultural figure that I that point so he was kind of there as like a technically was some kind of a minister of this or that I can't remember but really was there as like a cultural figure and he was in Paris 1942, you know 1941 and he's writing letters to people trying to figure out like I keep hearing about all these things that are going on out and polling down the east like what's going on out in the east like I hear about bad things going on east. they know the deck at work you know people forget things people forget everything it doesn't matter what you did or how bad it was or how many people were affected they have this idea that if you just keep denying it keep calling everybody a liar keep just do whatever you got to do the give it a century all we have to do is survive you know if you if you look like this was something that was really prominent at the time right you read all the read the writings of Lenin for example and Trotsky and Stalin you know all the Bolsheviks

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] Revenge, revenge, revenge.
[00:00:03] Let us kill.
[00:00:05] Let us cut to pieces.
[00:00:07] Let us swim and blood up to our knees.
[00:00:10] Revenge, revenge, revenge.
[00:00:14] Let us wipe the stain from our clothes.
[00:00:21] That is a song taught to Turkish school children as reported by the US Consulate.
[00:00:29] In February of 1915, and this is Jockel Podcast number 280, with echo Charles and me,
[00:00:37] Jockel Willink.
[00:00:38] Good evening, echo.
[00:00:39] Good evening.
[00:00:40] Also, joining us tonight is Darrell Cooper.
[00:00:42] Good evening.
[00:00:48] And the blood spread step by step from Ankara to Distant Cities Towns and Villages.
[00:00:55] At the end of August 1915, a girl barely 13 years old told me of the following to which she
[00:01:03] had been an eyewitness and which she only by some miracle had survived.
[00:01:08] In mid-August, all our menion males from 12 to 80 were arrested, taken out of town and
[00:01:17] killed by unheard of tortures.
[00:01:21] It was the turn of the girls and women.
[00:01:27] On August 20, all the Armenian women, girls and small boys were taken out into more than 70
[00:01:31] carriages and brought to a valley by a bridge an hour and a half away.
[00:01:36] Following these carriages from the town was an armed mob of Turks, each of whom on the
[00:01:42] way chose a sheep or lamb to slaughter.
[00:01:47] And they reached the area under the bridge, police and soldiers having joined the savage
[00:01:52] mob set upon these poor, defenseless women, mothers, brides, virgins and children.
[00:02:03] Just as spring trees are cut down with bill hooked, hedge knives, the blood thirsty mob
[00:02:09] attacked this group more than 400.
[00:02:14] With axes, hatchets, shovels and pitchforks, hacking off their appendages, noses, ears, legs,
[00:02:21] arms, fingers, shoulders, they dash the little children against the rocks before their
[00:02:26] eyes of their mothers while shouting, Allah, Allah.
[00:02:36] The screams of the mothers and virgins and little children echoed across the valley in
[00:02:40] the surrounding rocky hills and caves that children screamed, may rig, may rig, mother,
[00:02:47] mother, help us please.
[00:02:51] But the mob indifferent continued to rip apart the bodies so that even the stones cried
[00:03:00] out.
[00:03:05] And we after four to five hours of carnage and plunder, nights black, blanket covered this
[00:03:10] scene of blood which would stir the envy of wild animals.
[00:03:18] With the fall of night, the Turkish mob, police and police soldiers returned to town with
[00:03:23] their bundles of loot, whatever they had left.
[00:03:27] Hyenas, wolves, jackals and other scavengers came off to finish.
[00:03:36] The precipices of the valley were strewn with corpses naked or half naked.
[00:03:43] It was a scene beyond all human imagination.
[00:03:49] Now in then, in the darkness of the night, the moans and groans of the badly wounded, then
[00:03:55] the raspy drone of those giving up the ghost could be heard.
[00:04:03] After midnight, in the thick darkness, a refreshing dew began to fall.
[00:04:10] And behold, a slightly wounded, numb little girl, invigorated by the dew woke up.
[00:04:20] After alive, she began to roll over and search for mother and two sisters.
[00:04:27] In vain, she called them by name, but alas they were gone to eternal sleep.
[00:04:34] At last, she found their crushed bodies which had fallen one beside the other.
[00:04:43] In shock, the girl began to shake and sob uncontrollably.
[00:04:46] Her teeth chattering, she did not move from that spot until morning, as if the bodies
[00:04:50] of her mother and her older sisters compelled her to stay there.
[00:04:59] At dawn, a few of the Kurdish cowhurters crossing the bridge in the vicinity of this
[00:05:05] carnage saw one of the corpses moving in the distance.
[00:05:11] They approached her, took pity on her, and brought her home to their father's care.
[00:05:19] Being an anti-turk Muslim Kurdish, he secretly turned her over to his long-time friend.
[00:05:27] It was with the arrival of this little girl in the town where we were staying that for
[00:05:31] the first time, we became aware of the extent of the killing being carried out around
[00:05:37] us without a sound or whisperer.
[00:05:44] And that is an excerpt from a book called Armenian Golgotha by a man named Gregoris Polakian.
[00:06:02] And then Gregoris was born in 1875 in Tocat, part of the Ottoman Empire, educated in Germany.
[00:06:16] Eventually became a celibate priest in the Armenian apostolic church.
[00:06:25] He was one of the countless Armenians who suffered through the Armenian genocide.
[00:06:33] He was one of the lucky ones that actually survived and he wrote a book about his experiences.
[00:06:39] And like I said, the book is called Armenian Golgotha.
[00:06:43] If you don't know what Golgotha is, Golgotha is the name of the hill where Jesus was crucified.
[00:06:55] And this event is where the Armenians as a people were crucified and where as individuals
[00:07:05] for many a mere crucifixion would have been merciful.
[00:07:14] But before we jump into more of the book, I wanted to go into some of the background.
[00:07:21] And this event is not as well known as some other genocides.
[00:07:29] So Darrell, let's talk about how we got here.
[00:07:32] And what are some of the similarities and differences about what happened to the Armenians
[00:07:38] and what has happened to some other persecuted groups in the past?
[00:07:44] What's the background here?
[00:07:46] There's some people that called the 20th century the century of genocide.
[00:07:53] You look all throughout history and there's no shortage of mass killing of human beings
[00:07:57] by other human beings.
[00:08:00] In fact, if you go all the way back to like our tribal times, warfare by genocide was
[00:08:05] pretty typical.
[00:08:06] You had nomadic tribes, they didn't have prisons, they didn't have jails, they didn't have
[00:08:09] POW camps or anything like that.
[00:08:11] If you conquered another tribe, their men were going to be a problem and you didn't have
[00:08:15] any way to keep them.
[00:08:16] And so the standard operating procedure was you just took them out, took the women that
[00:08:20] were willing to sort of, I guess, get over it back to your tribe with you, raise the children
[00:08:25] as your own.
[00:08:28] Almost like social mammals, like lions, somebody comes in, kills the male lion and now takes
[00:08:33] over the pride.
[00:08:35] As time developed, you started to get a sort of systematic civilized level of mass killing
[00:08:43] at scale that had never been possible in tribal times that you could only really, you could
[00:08:49] only manage with the same sort of administration and organization that allowed you to do
[00:08:55] things like build pyramids and all the great wonders of civilization.
[00:08:59] When you get up to the modern times, you get something that's even a little bit more,
[00:09:04] a little bit different than that.
[00:09:07] If we think back to say the Romans, what they did to Carthage had been giving Rome problems,
[00:09:13] and the rebel had been rampaging around the Italian peninsula, defeating their armies.
[00:09:16] And when they finally got to drop on the Carthage Indians, they said, salt the earth.
[00:09:20] We're not dealing with this anymore.
[00:09:22] Eliminate that threat for good and they did.
[00:09:25] When Caesar went up to Gaul, Rome had been sacked by Gaul before.
[00:09:29] It was a traumatic event in Roman history.
[00:09:31] And so when Caesar went up there and ended that threat thoroughly, you could think of it in
[00:09:36] a similar way.
[00:09:37] It was attached to conquest.
[00:09:39] And that's what you kind of saw throughout history.
[00:09:42] You get up to the 20th century, you see something in a way that's different and much darker,
[00:09:47] I think, which is you have established firmly established states, annihilating internal
[00:09:55] enemies according to the state, attacking captive populations over which they have complete
[00:10:01] power and control.
[00:10:03] You're not going in and eliminating a threat that exists over the horizon, making sure that
[00:10:07] it never returns.
[00:10:09] Now you're going into a prison where everybody's kept in a cell and one by one, these
[00:10:14] unarmed people, you're simply murdering all of these people over whom you have complete
[00:10:19] power.
[00:10:21] When you think of what happened to the Armenians, when you think of what happened to the
[00:10:25] Ukrainians under Stalin, to the Jews under Hitler, these are the kinds of things you see.
[00:10:29] This is a disarmed captive population that is not a threat.
[00:10:34] And there's no way out.
[00:10:38] And that's really the key characteristic of these events.
[00:10:40] Is if you go to those people and you saw this, you saw this with the Jews in Germany,
[00:10:45] you saw this with the Ukrainians, you saw this with the Armenians.
[00:10:48] Absolutely at the beginning of the First World War is a huge part of the population, including
[00:10:53] the leadership, is really actively asking the question, what can we do?
[00:10:57] What can we do?
[00:10:58] Like, what is it?
[00:10:59] It's the beginning of the First World War, the Armenians were flying Turkish flags,
[00:11:04] tens of thousands of them went right away enjoying the Turkish military, because they knew
[00:11:08] they had a history with the Turks.
[00:11:10] They had problems before, 20 years back, we'll talk about in a second, 300,000 or so of them
[00:11:15] got massacred.
[00:11:17] And they knew in the First World War, the tension was going to be high and the stress
[00:11:20] was going to be high.
[00:11:21] So what can we do?
[00:11:23] To show our loyalty to the Empire, to show that we're down for the cause.
[00:11:27] And the answer is, there's nothing you can do.
[00:11:29] There's nothing you can do.
[00:11:31] You're all going to be wiped out and there's nothing you can do.
[00:11:35] And it's the ultimate horror movie to have your state turn on you like that.
[00:11:43] And it's interesting that you say that the Armenian genocide isn't that well known, which
[00:11:49] is very, very true.
[00:11:52] Because it really is kind of the archetypal act of genocide in the 20th century.
[00:11:56] It was really like the first one early in the century that set the tone for all of the
[00:12:01] ones that came afterwards.
[00:12:03] And it was one of the most thorough and complete and systematic and intentional genocides
[00:12:08] that we have any record of.
[00:12:14] That erasure of genocide is something that you also see throughout history.
[00:12:17] I mean, how many countless people have been genocided throughout history that we don't
[00:12:21] even know their names.
[00:12:23] We'll never know their names.
[00:12:26] Maybe we even celebrate the history of the people who did it as a glorious civilization.
[00:12:31] And we will never know the names of the countless people that they completely wiped out.
[00:12:36] It's something that we don't like to mention or talk about or admit, but the fact is that
[00:12:43] more often than not if you look historically speaking, genocide tends to work.
[00:12:48] Not only are a lot of genocides physically successful, but more often than we would really
[00:12:55] prefer the one that does it ends up getting away with it and getting the message put
[00:13:04] out to the rest of the world and people in the future who might think of doing something
[00:13:08] similar that this is an option.
[00:13:10] In fact, when Adolf Hitler was contemplating his final solution for the Jewish question
[00:13:15] in Eastern Europe, he asked his commanding generals who today remembers the Armenians.
[00:13:22] Because the truth was nobody did.
[00:13:24] It's also interesting that in World War I there was plenty of Jews that fought for Germany.
[00:13:33] Well over 100,000.
[00:13:35] Valiantly, by the way.
[00:13:39] Hitler's life was saved by a Jewish soldier.
[00:13:42] He received his iron cross from a Jewish superior officer.
[00:13:50] So, as we push through this, let's talk about the relationship a little bit of the Turkish
[00:13:59] people and the Armenians in terms of how do we end up here?
[00:14:04] You know, I mentioned that it is really the archetypal genocide of the 20th century.
[00:14:09] I don't just say that because of the methods that were used, in fact, the methods that
[00:14:14] were used in a way where kind of an agronistic and unique to the Turkish Empire.
[00:14:18] It was archetypal of the 20th century genocides because of what you just asked.
[00:14:24] Because of the specific relationship between the dominant majority group and this particular
[00:14:29] Armenian minority.
[00:14:32] The Turks, the Ottoman Empire is a strange thing to study when you get up to the late
[00:14:38] period in the 20th century.
[00:14:39] Because if you ever asked yourself, what would it have been like if the gold and
[00:14:44] hoard or the Mongols or something had just they had managed to establish themselves somewhere
[00:14:50] on the outskirts of Europe and they lasted.
[00:14:53] You get all the way up to the 20th century and they're still there and they have an advanced
[00:14:56] civilization.
[00:14:57] Now, the gangas cons like descendants like they now have control, they have a big battle
[00:15:02] fleet, they've got modern weaponry, I mean it's a big glorious civilization, Constantinople.
[00:15:07] You know, when the first world war kicked off, you're talking about one of the most sophisticated
[00:15:14] glorious cities in the world.
[00:15:17] And the out of an empire gives you some idea of what it would be like if the golden
[00:15:22] hoard survived into the 20th century.
[00:15:25] This is, you know, their Turkic peoples who came in as step warriors and conquered the Byzantine
[00:15:31] empire and took over all of North Africa, basically everything between Morocco and Persia
[00:15:36] and then down into Egypt.
[00:15:38] And so what you end up in a situation like this is you end up with like a war like people,
[00:15:46] right?
[00:15:47] That's what they are.
[00:15:48] When what they respect is war and being warriors and that sort of becomes the most
[00:15:55] respected class of people.
[00:15:57] Oh, yeah.
[00:15:58] Yeah, the idea in the major Islamic empires was always that we the majority population, the
[00:16:05] people in the commanding position of this society, we fight the wars and everybody else,
[00:16:11] the Christian and Jewish minority, for example, they pay for the wars.
[00:16:14] And that's how it works.
[00:16:15] We're a warrior people.
[00:16:16] I mean, these are step warriors who came and built up a big civilization and they kept
[00:16:22] a lot of that character even as they went forward, even as they were wearing suits and ties
[00:16:27] and, you know, going to to big security conferences and international conferences in Europe
[00:16:34] and the United States, they still had that in them.
[00:16:36] This was a warrior people from an age where it was perfectly typical to offer your enemies
[00:16:45] the option to either unconditionally surrender or be massacred totally.
[00:16:51] There was the mode of warfare on the step when they were conquering civilizations.
[00:16:54] It's how the Ottoman Empire got to where it was.
[00:16:57] And so as you move into modernity, you have this society there that up until you're
[00:17:04] still the early 1800s, still had its entire bureaucracy, governmental bureaucracy and most of
[00:17:11] its military, like its serious military officers, were still people who had been taken as slaves
[00:17:17] as children and brought back for that specific function.
[00:17:20] They would go up to the Balkans, they would go up into the Caucasus area because according
[00:17:24] to Islamic law, you can't in slave fellow Muslims.
[00:17:27] And so they would go into Christian areas and just go into a village and say, we need 10 people,
[00:17:32] we need 10 male children, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
[00:17:35] And they would do it the easy way because they knew what the hard way looked like, under
[00:17:38] the Ottoman Empire and it was no prettier than it got in the 20th century.
[00:17:43] And by the time they got up to the early 1800s, this group of bureaucrats and soldiers called
[00:17:50] the Janissaries, these were slave soldiers and bureaucrats who more or less ran the important
[00:17:56] functions of the empire.
[00:17:58] By the time you got up to the late 17 early 1800s, they were in fact running large sections
[00:18:02] of the economy.
[00:18:04] They held all the most important government positions and they were getting into this kind
[00:18:08] of strange place with the ruling elites, the ruling Turkish elites where the Turks are
[00:18:14] overall in charge.
[00:18:16] But this other group of people who are Muslim, they were born Christian children, but
[00:18:19] they were converted as children to Muslims.
[00:18:21] But that this identifiable group of people who has their own sense of themselves as an
[00:18:26] identifiable group, these Janissaries, that they have a tremendous amount of influence
[00:18:30] in power, that they're really the ones running the empire.
[00:18:33] And it got to a point where the government, the Turkish government, decided they couldn't
[00:18:36] trust these people anymore and they locked them all in their barracks one night and they
[00:18:39] burned them all the death.
[00:18:42] When they felt that this small minority group was accruing too much power and middle
[00:18:47] management where they kind of maybe probably could run the empire without the Turks if
[00:18:51] they really wanted to, their response was to wipe all of those people out overnight.
[00:18:57] And that's what they did.
[00:18:58] And it's known in Ottoman history, it was known in Ottoman history as the auspicious event.
[00:19:03] This is like a bunch of, let's say UFC fighters that are training hard, they fight, they
[00:19:12] punch each other, they kick each other, they wrestle and their agents and promoters are out
[00:19:19] there doing the work that they looked down upon, have not some promoter, I'm not some
[00:19:23] age and I'm the fighter.
[00:19:25] And then one day they look up and they go, wait a second, why is that guy driving a freaking
[00:19:30] unmercadies S class and I'm over here in a Toyota Camry and they get together and say,
[00:19:36] we're not going to do this anymore.
[00:19:41] That's one way to look at it.
[00:19:42] I mean, so in the thing that's so interesting about it, right, is if you look at what
[00:19:45] happened to the overseas Chinese population in Indonesia in the 1960s, if you look at what
[00:19:50] happened to the East Indian population of East Africa in the 1970s under like Idiamin and
[00:19:57] some others, if you look at what happened to the Jews in Europe, if there, there, you
[00:20:04] can go down the line.
[00:20:05] The people who are targeted are almost inevitably this similar group of people, right, if
[00:20:10] you look in Europe with the Jews for a long time, we were under a feudal system, the
[00:20:16] people who were in charge, the elites in a feudal system, they own all the land, the source
[00:20:21] of wealth in society is from the land, the majority of the local European population are
[00:20:26] all peasants or maybe small artisans.
[00:20:30] But then you have this group move in, you have the Jews move in and the Jews have been living
[00:20:33] in cities since the Romans kicked them out of Palestine, some of you even before that.
[00:20:37] So these are people who have lived in urban environment, they know how to engage in long
[00:20:42] distance trade, they know how to deal in like financial alchemy, they know how to do all,
[00:20:47] they know banking, they know law, they're all literate at a time when like 1% of your own
[00:20:52] population is literate because that's what these people do and they don't have their own
[00:20:55] place to live obviously.
[00:20:57] And so they go from place to place trying to survive saying what can we do here?
[00:21:00] We can't own land, only the nobility owns land, that's fine and the peasants work
[00:21:04] the land, but I'll bet you there's a lot of ways that we can help out and they bounced
[00:21:09] around Europe sometimes, accruing too much power, too much wealth and getting run out of
[00:21:13] their territory because the king decided he doesn't want to pay his debts or something
[00:21:17] like that, but that's how they survived, right?
[00:21:20] And it was fine, they fulfilled this middleman minority role for centuries and it was a role
[00:21:27] that sort of needed to be filled at a time when societies were kind of building themselves
[00:21:31] up to become more complex and sophisticated and didn't have that indigenous capacity.
[00:21:37] But then you get up to say that 1800s, maybe late 1700s depending on where you are and you
[00:21:43] have all these Jews who are engaged in things like banking, law, medicine, international
[00:21:50] trade, all of these things that the nobility didn't want to do and the peasants were
[00:21:54] incapable of doing and they're like, we'll just have the Jews do it because we don't
[00:21:57] like them anyway, their outsiders have them do it.
[00:22:00] We get up to like the 1800s and 1900s, what's every mother telling their kid that they
[00:22:04] should go do?
[00:22:05] Go be a lawyer, go be a banker, go be a doctor and so they were in prime position that
[00:22:09] when society started to change and the economy started to change, they were ready, they
[00:22:14] had been doing this stuff for a long time and they started to become very wealthy and
[00:22:18] very prominent and when that started to happen, you got a gigantic spike in antisemitism,
[00:22:25] you started seeing pogroms all over the place.
[00:22:28] You have this perfect storm too where you have like the nobility elite class who's turning
[00:22:33] against them and you also have the peasantry that says, wait a second, these people have
[00:22:38] all this money and it doesn't take very long for the nobility to lead the peasantry
[00:22:42] against the whatever class we're talking about, we could be talking about the Jews, we
[00:22:46] could be talking about the Armenians.
[00:22:48] 100% especially since it redirects any anger they might have toward the people in charge
[00:22:53] to that layer below that intermediary and they would specifically use it for that purpose,
[00:22:58] you know, they would use these people as tax collectors, they would use them as a state
[00:23:01] managers to manage the surfs and stuff because they knew that if things got out of hand,
[00:23:07] you know, and the peasant's rise up we can be like, yeah, you know, we knew that those
[00:23:10] Jews were were trouble all along, so go ahead, go nuts and that happened over and over
[00:23:16] again throughout European history.
[00:23:18] So the Armenians followed a similar path, so after the janissaries, right, now this
[00:23:26] means we now picked up where we killed the janissaries, now we need someone else to kind of
[00:23:30] it kind of come in here and run that run.
[00:23:32] So it's sort of worked out like that, but the Christians had always kind of been fulfilling
[00:23:35] those roles, right?
[00:23:37] The Christians and all the Islamic empires, if you go back and the Jews as well, they're usually
[00:23:42] urban populations, our Armenians are a little different and that's in that respect, we'll
[00:23:45] talk about in a second, but they were the ones who who naturally fulfilled those roles, the
[00:23:49] Turks, they were the warriors, you know, they're not going to go open the shop, you know, they're
[00:23:53] not doing banking and then you've got a lot of, you know, you got the Kurdish tribes, you've got
[00:23:57] these a lot of these semi-nomadic Arab villagers and stuff who were out there, you know, the
[00:24:01] Ottoman Empire is not, we're not talking about like England in the 1900s or something.
[00:24:06] It's a very sophisticated and advanced society in many ways, but you go like maybe 500 miles
[00:24:11] out to the east and it's a wild fricking west down there, you know, I mean it is like you got
[00:24:17] Armenian village surrounded by Kurdish tribes that raid that village sometimes in kidnapped your
[00:24:22] daughters and you know, you go outside the imperial corps and the Ottoman Empire did not have the
[00:24:27] state capacity to really exercise firm control over all of their lands. You know, it was a tribute
[00:24:32] empire which is again reminiscent of the old step empires, like we're not going to come in and tell
[00:24:37] you that you got a turn Turkish and you can't speak your language, just send your taxes and don't,
[00:24:42] you know, have any uprisings and if you do will come and you'll learn why the last 10 people
[00:24:47] found out that's a bad idea. Now that was really how it was. It was a tribute empire and the Christians
[00:24:53] and the Jews, Christians were more numerical than the Jews and so they really, and in the Ottoman
[00:24:58] context, when I say that we're talking mostly about Armenians and the East Greeks in the West
[00:25:04] and then a Syrians kind of spread out or a Syrian Christians as well. And by the time, a very similar
[00:25:10] thing, they had been engaging in these middleman roles, right, administrative, professional and
[00:25:17] commercial services for the empire, stuff that the empire couldn't do in its own. Things like
[00:25:22] almost of the biggest mosques that East Endworld's famous for today were all designed by Armenians,
[00:25:28] Armenian architects. By the time you got up to the late 18 early 1900s, you've got the bureaucracy,
[00:25:33] largely filling the upper roles very often filled with, I shouldn't say, and the very, very upper roles,
[00:25:39] those are Ottoman rulers, but all of these sort of middlemanagement sort of GS14 roles, right?
[00:25:45] Those are Armenians, those are Greeks, you know, people like that. They really relied on these people.
[00:25:50] And it was a similar thing. You get up into the dawn of the modern age. We're having bureaucratic
[00:25:55] skills, being literate and numerate, knowing how to deal with finance and trade and law and medicine,
[00:26:00] all of these things that the Christians and the Ottoman Empire were doing. That's where you needed
[00:26:04] to be if you were going to be successful. And they became extraordinarily successful in the Ottoman Empire.
[00:26:10] Very, very wealthy. At one point, I mean, in fact, just before the outbreak of the first world war,
[00:26:15] the most, the wealthiest banker in Europe was an Ottoman Armenian. And we're wealthy, then,
[00:26:20] the Rothchild's even. And when you get to that point, you get, you run into that,
[00:26:27] into that trouble where you have this empire, where the ruling elites, the Turkish elites,
[00:26:35] are experiencing this sense that they aren't really needed so much anymore. Now, they don't
[00:26:42] feel that. They're not going to think that consciously ever, but that's really what's going on.
[00:26:45] They're in charge now of an empire that they couldn't have really built themselves. And they couldn't
[00:26:50] really run themselves. And the people who are running it, they're starting to look at various skew
[00:26:56] for a very particular reason. And that was that this is also the age of European imperialism.
[00:27:03] You know, one of our unraveling episodes recently, we talked about the genocide of the Weagers.
[00:27:07] And you go back to the late 1800s. And the Weagers kind of became the dominant majority in
[00:27:13] Xinjiang. And that, I got annihilated for my mispronunciation of that word.
[00:27:18] But we'll have to do that in the United States. I must have got freedom.
[00:27:20] But what was I saying? I think you said Xinjiang, now I'm just messing with you. And
[00:27:30] the Weagers were in the territory. And they were being kind of oppressed by this dominant
[00:27:34] group there. And so the Xinjiang East said Roger that. And they went out and just wiped those
[00:27:37] people out. They were called the Zungars. And they don't exist anymore. And really one of the big
[00:27:43] drivers for that was, you know, we had talked about how in China, outside their borders. Well,
[00:27:49] what we think of as their borders today, they never thought about it as like a hard border
[00:27:52] back in the day. It was just that was the frontier. Past that is the step. That's where all
[00:27:56] the barbarians live. Yeah, their word for border literally meant like frontier. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:28:00] And so what they need to do is just they need to manage the barbarians out there.
[00:28:05] It's just one big buffer zone between us and them. Well, all of a sudden you start getting
[00:28:10] the British Empire, the French, later the Russian Empire, these other Europeans start coming
[00:28:15] around in any territory they see that's not already incorporated within the borders of a
[00:28:20] state that can actually defend it. They're snatching all that up. And so the Chinese say,
[00:28:25] well, okay, that's not just the frontier anymore. Now that's China. And anybody in it has to be
[00:28:30] Chinese because if you're anything but that, well, then you're somebody you're a wedge that
[00:28:36] the British, whoever might be able to come up and, you know, drive it with, yeah, bargain with.
[00:28:41] And so when these European powers start picking away at the periphery of the Ottoman Empire
[00:28:47] and then really start to close the walls in, and these Christian Europe, obviously,
[00:28:52] and they have a Christian minority population Greeks and Armenians and others who have not
[00:28:57] been treated particularly well over the years as a whole. And so they start to worry that these
[00:29:03] are potential fifth columnists that these European powers could use to start to split off more
[00:29:07] territory than they already have. So they've already got that in their heads. As we roll into world war
[00:29:17] one, is that, is that, you know, um, an appropriate thing? Is that appropriate assessment?
[00:29:22] Oh, yeah, oh, for sure. Yeah, and actually it existed before that. So when you go back to,
[00:29:26] you know, you think, I think you really have to put yourself in the mindset of the people
[00:29:30] running the Ottoman Empire and I think we can actually probably do that because we're Americans,
[00:29:35] right? And so you have to imagine, these are people who, again, had the largest and most powerful
[00:29:42] empire in the world for a number of years. I mean, they drove all the way up to Vienna twice.
[00:29:47] You go look at a map of Europe, everybody out there and I mean, if you know, it's not like
[00:29:51] there in the Balkans. It's up there in Central Europe. I mean, and if they would have, if they would have
[00:29:55] gotten past Vienna, I mean, you know, Germany was just broken into a bunch of little principalities at
[00:30:00] the time and they weren't standing up. Ottomans were on good terms with the French. I mean,
[00:30:04] they may have conquered like, you know, two thirds of Europe if they hadn't been stopped by the
[00:30:08] poles of Vienna. And so you have this empire that's not only the largest, most powerful empire
[00:30:15] in the world for centuries, it controls like its capital, is constant, the noble, the old Roman capital,
[00:30:20] you know, it controls access to the Black Sea, it has dominance over the entire eastern Mediterranean,
[00:30:26] controls access between the east and west, you know, trade routes, and then all of a sudden,
[00:30:33] you know, starting kind of, really after that 1683 fight at Vienna that they lost, it was just a
[00:30:38] gradual and then accelerating downhill slide from there. They lose, they start getting shipped away
[00:30:43] in North Africa, eventually they lose all that. They lose Egypt. The Russian empire finally
[00:30:48] starts to get its act together, takes over all of the North Caucasus and wars there. The Russians
[00:30:53] are expanding, you know, you have Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, the Russian empire is pushing
[00:30:58] down there. They lose their Balkan territories over time. They lose Bulgaria. And so you have this empire
[00:31:05] that is, you know, you have to imagine being an American and it's like, yeah, Vietnam was tough,
[00:31:11] Iraq and Afghanistan were tough. Oh, no Mexico just invaded and took over New Mexico Arizona and
[00:31:17] Southern California and there's nothing we can do about it. And now Cuba took over Florida and
[00:31:23] there's nothing we can do about it. Like, that's lost, it's gone now. And there's this
[00:31:28] growing sense that it's not going to reverse any time soon, if ever, that this is like an
[00:31:33] inexorable process of collapse that's going on. And because it's being done by these European
[00:31:41] imperialists of the ones chipping away at a Christian Europe and because of the fact that their
[00:31:46] own Christian minorities had been mistreated for centuries, the, you know, there was this sort of
[00:31:57] sense of hope among some of those Christian minorities that may be, hey, you know, where the
[00:32:01] Armenians over here in the East, it's not great to be an Eastern and Ottoman Armenian out in the
[00:32:06] rural areas in the East. The Russian empire, their Orthodox Christians, there's a bunch of
[00:32:10] Armenians that live over in the Russian empire and they're actually doing all right. They're not
[00:32:13] getting massacred by the tens of thousands. They're not having to pay taxes to, you know, the
[00:32:18] eight Kurdish chiefdans that all live around us. And so there was some of this, you know, these
[00:32:24] people weren't organized fifth columnists or anything like that. But there was this sort of sense
[00:32:28] that things might be a little bit better if they weren't living under the Ottoman Yoke. That wasn't,
[00:32:32] you know, completely invented. When after the 1877 war between the Russians and the Turks,
[00:32:41] they lost Bulgaria, a bunch of Muslim refugees came out of Bulgaria and came and moved into the
[00:32:46] Ottoman Empire. They also lost a bunch of their North Caucasian territory and a bunch of Strakasi
[00:32:51] and Muslims and other Muslim tribes from up there had to be pushed, you know, they, they, they,
[00:32:56] they fled because the classics were harassing them and stuff. And so they start coming down
[00:33:00] in a lot of them settled in this area where Armenians had traditionally lived. The whole
[00:33:04] area of South Eastern Turkey today, you know, Armenia is right across the Eastern border, but
[00:33:10] you go across the border, that whole area of South Eastern Turkey where it's mostly Kurds today.
[00:33:14] That, that for many, many centuries was all Armenians for the most part. That's traditional like
[00:33:18] Armenia. And, um, yet all of these others that moved into this territory and they started having
[00:33:24] problems with the local Armenian population. Right at this time where the Turkish government is
[00:33:29] starting to look at its Christian minorities and specifically the Armenians with a great deal of
[00:33:33] suspicion. And so, you start to get, you know, you start to get this dynamic where, you know,
[00:33:42] there's multiple things that play. They don't trust the Armenian population out there and they're
[00:33:47] mistreating them, which is leading to a certain sense of resentment from those Armenians toward the
[00:33:51] government. The government doesn't have the state capacity to go out there and really like
[00:33:56] set up shop and establish order out there. You have all of these destitute new Muslim refugees,
[00:34:01] including a lot of them are just tribes or Kurdish tribes and things, no mads who, again,
[00:34:07] their refugees, they don't have a lot going on. And so they start robbing and raiding the Armenian
[00:34:11] settlements that are out there. And the Turkish government either lacks the will or the capacity
[00:34:16] to defend them or to go out and punish them. And so Armenian self defense movement start to basically
[00:34:22] pop up just so they can defend themselves from these Kurdish raids and Circassian raids.
[00:34:26] Well, the Turkish government sees that. They say, you see, they're arming up. They just kill
[00:34:31] the bunch of Muslims from that Kurdish tribe over there. We knew it. We knew they're getting ready for
[00:34:36] rebellion. And it was just this vicious cycle that started to kick into place to the point where
[00:34:42] by the time you get to the 1880s, 1890s, you mentioned that song at the beginning that the Turkish
[00:34:46] schoolchildren who being taught during the First World War. There was an account I read from an
[00:34:51] American missionary that saw in a Turkish classroom, talking like, first, second, third grade kids.
[00:34:57] And they're going through lessons where they've got drawings up on the board, like cartoon drawings
[00:35:03] of Armenians, including women and children participating, just hacking limbs off of Turks and
[00:35:09] you know, raping them, killing them and just the most bloody and horrible ways and these
[00:35:14] schoolchildren who being taught that this is who these Armenians are. This is what they want to do to you.
[00:35:19] And so this had been by the time you get to the First World War, this kind of thing had been going
[00:35:23] on for decades. And the Armenians didn't have, you know, it didn't come to them as a complete
[00:35:30] and total shock, a lot of them anyway, because they had seen a sort of premonition of it in the
[00:35:35] 1890s when the Sultan Abdul Hamid II infamous in Ottoman and Armenian history, ordered a series of
[00:35:45] massacres starting in 1894 that, you know, what can you say? It was just a, it was a free-for-all
[00:35:53] total massacre. You know, there were soldiers in John Darm, John Darm's who were participating,
[00:35:59] but really it was a call on the local populations, Muslim villagers and tribes to get out there
[00:36:05] and participate, kill your Armenian neighbors. And they, and they was specific to the Armenians.
[00:36:09] There were some cases in fact, and this happened as well in the First World War genocide,
[00:36:14] where there are telegrams out there, messages from the government letting them know,
[00:36:18] hey, don't mess with the Catholics, make sure that you don't mess with, you know, these others,
[00:36:23] this is about the Armenians. And they butcher maybe 200,000 people over the course of about
[00:36:30] 18 months, and another 100,000 or so died in the years. So after that from starvation and exposure
[00:36:37] and whatever. And so this is something where, you know, they're not going into cities and rounding up
[00:36:41] 20, 30,000 people at a time. They're going village to village to village 50 people here. 100 people
[00:36:45] here. You look at the map of the massacres in the 1894, a million massacres. And the whole thing is
[00:36:52] just covered with like skulls and cross bones or whatever symbol they used to say, massacres,
[00:36:56] massacres, massacres, just all of eastern Anatolia was just in covered in blood. You know,
[00:37:03] the local population was basically mobilized to go out there and kill your Armenian neighbors.
[00:37:08] And that's what happened. So that's 18 late 1800s. And now we start to get into, I mean,
[00:37:15] it's the next major phase when World War One kicks off. And yeah, there's an important
[00:37:21] interlude there. Like the reason that they stopped killing them. You know, there's a book that
[00:37:25] came out recently called the 30-year genocide by Benny Morris and George Zevy, which is
[00:37:31] two Israeli historians who looked real deeply on this and got. They probably went deeper into the
[00:37:36] into the records to figure out exactly moment by moment like what happened here than anyone really
[00:37:42] has. And one of the things that they discovered is that, you know, this was not something that just
[00:37:46] popped up in the chaos of World War One. That those massacres in the 1890s, there's only one
[00:37:52] reason that they stopped. And that was that the British made them stop. There was, there was,
[00:37:58] you know, by this point, the Ottoman Empire was having huge economic problems. The British and the
[00:38:02] French were essentially had the Empire's finances and receivership. They were basically controlling the
[00:38:07] Ottoman fiscal budget, the governmental fiscal budget, had, you know, say so over it anyway. And
[00:38:15] in 1896, this Armenian militant group, after all of these murders said, we have to do something.
[00:38:22] And there's nothing you can really do. I mean, you know, you can't, you're talking about,
[00:38:26] it's not even David and Goliath. I mean, it's a flee versus Goliath. They can't fight back. There's
[00:38:30] nothing like that. The only thing they can hope to do is get the attention of outside powers
[00:38:34] who can wield influence over the Ottoman Empire. And so they say, well, what is it we can do to
[00:38:38] actually get the attention of these people? What are they? What are the British care about?
[00:38:42] And so they went and they invaded the Ottoman Central Bank, the Bank Ottoman in Constantinople,
[00:38:48] and they took a bunch of hostages and made a bunch of demands. And they knew that there were a lot
[00:38:56] of European hostages that they would be taking and that there were a lot of European assets in that
[00:39:02] bank. And so the Sultan at the time, he's, you know, again, these are these are step warriors. He's
[00:39:09] a hardcore people. He said, yeah, that's nice. Your demands, that's cool. You can throw them away.
[00:39:13] And he just surrounded the place with artillery and got ready to just blow the place to rub
[00:39:17] up all and at the same time put out an order for everybody to enconstant an opal to just go
[00:39:22] out and mask her Armenians and Constantinople. And that's what they did. They rampaged through
[00:39:25] streets, beating, killing. Anybody they could find has he prepared to just blow up this bank.
[00:39:31] And ready to the critical moment, the British sent some warships into the Dardenels there
[00:39:36] and sent a message to the Sultan that if you blow up that bank, the next thing it's going to
[00:39:39] be destroyed as your own house. And so they backed down, but that's the only reason those things
[00:39:44] stopped and he put an order out that the maskers are over and they came to an end. That period,
[00:39:50] though, up until you get to the first World War, most, you know, people who look at this seriously
[00:39:54] now realize that the first World War was not a reason for the Armenian genocide. It was just
[00:40:00] the opportunity for it. This some late 1890s, there's actually, you know, we can talk about what
[00:40:10] it was like. We can sort of throw some words on it, but there's probably nothing better than
[00:40:13] going back to the book that we're talking about, Armenian gogaatha, talking about some of that stuff
[00:40:21] that took place in the 1890s, going back to the book. The massacre began on the morning of December
[00:40:29] 28. The governor sent word to non-Armenian Christians to assemble in their churches and not
[00:40:35] stir out and refrain from sheltering Armenians. The troops were then drawn up at the entrances
[00:40:42] to the Armenian quarter. Behind them, an armed Muslim mob gathered, while the Minorets were crowded
[00:40:50] with Muslims evidently in expectation of some stirring event. The Turkish women too crowded
[00:40:57] onto the roofs and slopes of the fortress which overlooked the Armenian quarter. The mob was
[00:41:02] cheered on by the women who kept up the well-known peculiar throat noise used on such occasions
[00:41:09] by Oriental women to discourage, to encourage their braves. At around noon, a mousin cried out
[00:41:20] in the midday prayer as a glittering glass ornament resembling a crescent was seen shining
[00:41:26] from the top of the fortress overlooking the town, a mullah wave, degreen banner from a tall
[00:41:31] minaret overhanging the other end of town, shots were fired and a trumpet sounded the attack.
[00:41:41] The soldiers opened their ranks so that the mob could pour into the quarter.
[00:41:47] The governor, Nazif, was seen motioning the crowd on. The mob guided by troops who had familiarized
[00:41:54] themselves with the quarter during the siege. A body of wood cutters armed with axes led the way,
[00:42:04] breaking down the doors, soldiers then rushed inside and shot the men. A certain chic British
[00:42:13] diplomat, G. H. Fitz Morris wrote, ordered his followers to bring as many stalwart young
[00:42:21] Armenians as they could find to their number of about 100 they were thrown down on their backs
[00:42:26] and held down by their hands and feet while the shake with a combination of fanaticism, cruelty,
[00:42:34] proceeded while reciting verses of the Quran to cut their throats after the mecharite of
[00:42:42] sacrificing sheep. Those hiding were dragged out and butchered, stoned, shot and set on fire with
[00:42:53] madding saturated with petroleum. Women were cut down shielding their husbands and fathers,
[00:43:01] more Armenians were shot as they scampered along rooftops trying to escape when the killings
[00:43:06] subsided. The houses were looted and torched. As Sunset approached, the trumpet sounded again,
[00:43:15] calling the troops and the mob to withdraw. The atrocities resumed the following day December
[00:43:23] 29 with a trumpet sound that dawn. The largest number were killed at the Armenian Cathedral,
[00:43:29] where thousands had gathered for sanctuary. The attackers first fired through the windows into
[00:43:34] the church, then smashed in the doors and killed the men clustered on the ground floor.
[00:43:40] Fits Morris relates that as the mob plunged the church, they mockingly called on Christ to prove
[00:43:46] himself a greater profit than Mohamed. The Turks then shot the shrieking and terrified massive
[00:43:54] women children and some men in the second floor gallery. But gunning the Armenians down,
[00:44:00] one by one was too tedious, so the mob brought in more petroleum soaked bedding and set
[00:44:05] fired to the woodwork and the staircase is leading up to the galleries. For several hours,
[00:44:10] the sickening odor of roasting flesh pervaded the town.
[00:44:17] Writing the following march, Fits Morris noted, even today,
[00:44:23] the smell of the charred remains in the church is unbearable.
[00:44:26] The missionary who witnessed a massacre's described the horror as a grand holocaust,
[00:44:35] and for days afterwards watched men lugging sacks filled with bones and ashes from the cathedral.
[00:44:44] The trumpet again sounded at 330 pm the time for the Muslim afternoon prayer and the mob
[00:44:50] with Jew from the Armenian quarter. Shortly afterwards, Mert Fits Morris wrote,
[00:44:56] the muffti, Ali Effendi, who sang Pasha and other notables preceded by a band of musicians
[00:45:04] went around the quarter announcing that the massacre was at an end and that there would be no
[00:45:09] more killing of Christians. For the next three days, the authorities employed Jews and Donkeys
[00:45:18] to remove the dead before the massacre's erphra was home to about 20,000 Armenians.
[00:45:27] All told, perhaps as many as 10,000 died over the course of two days,
[00:45:33] 2500 to 3000 of them at the cathedral.
[00:45:36] This was no shock or moving into World War I.
[00:45:49] Although, there's maybe a way that nothing can prepare you for it, even if you've seen it
[00:45:57] come in when it happens. You're just not ready. There were a lot of Jews in Europe in the 1930s
[00:46:03] who were writing to their relatives and other parts of the world sang. We got to get out of here.
[00:46:08] We're sitting on the edge of a volcano right now. Who still, when it actually came,
[00:46:14] we're all just caught with that deer and a headlight look because what do you do?
[00:46:19] There's a lot of you can read a lot of stuff from Holocaust survivors, children, and also from
[00:46:25] Zionists who were in Palestine out of the country at the time who really can't understand why
[00:46:29] our parents or our cousins who were in Europe at the time, why aren't they fighting back? Why aren't
[00:46:34] they rising up or whatever? You just don't know what it's like to be caught.
[00:46:39] Where there's nowhere to go, the enemies in control, and there is, you can rush the electrified
[00:46:45] fence, you can, you're caught, and they've established dominance in a way that you're not going
[00:46:50] to really be able to get out of because again, these modern scale genocides like this are
[00:46:56] something that could really only be pulled off by a state. How the young Turks play into this?
[00:47:02] So after you know, there were people within the Turkish hierarchy who understood that this
[00:47:09] that this empire as it stands right now, it's got to change.
[00:47:13] Got to make a transition to have to.
[00:47:15] Let's learn it. If we're going to compete at any level with the British Empire, the rising
[00:47:20] Russian Empire, like we got to get it together, and the way we're running things now,
[00:47:24] or we can't even really control our territory effectively a few hundred miles out east,
[00:47:28] that's just not going to do it. It's not going to do it anymore.
[00:47:32] And so they were modernizers. This was a movement that started out in universities,
[00:47:36] a lot of medical students, lost students, things like that, and it was an underground group.
[00:47:40] It was sort of a revolutionary group, sort of like you were seeing all across Europe at the time,
[00:47:44] you know, the Bolsheviks and a lot of the socialists in Russia, for example.
[00:47:49] The difference I guess between like them and the Bolsheviks, there's a million differences,
[00:47:53] but the main one is they weren't international communist or anything. They were fierce,
[00:47:57] fierce Turkish nationalists. But they were, they were multi-cultural. This was a big difference, too.
[00:48:04] This wasn't strictly Armenians or Greeks inside of these were people saying,
[00:48:09] it's like when you hear today, you know, like I'm not a Irish American, I'm an American.
[00:48:14] Right. These people are saying, hey, I'm not an Armenian Turk, or I'm not a Jewish Turk. I'm Turk.
[00:48:19] Yeah. So they actually had, but they called the Ottomanist movement.
[00:48:23] You know, they were, they wanted everybody. This is a big thing in the late 1800s,
[00:48:27] really up until the defeat in the First World War that that everywhere were all Ottomans, right?
[00:48:34] Which at the time was like Ottoman, that's just the name of the Turkish commander who came in with
[00:48:39] that, you know, he was established their tribe. I mean, he was the tribal leader at the time,
[00:48:42] all S'mon. But, you know, by the time you got up to this point, I mean, America's
[00:48:47] some of the Italian sailors too, right? So like you can do that, no problem. But there was the ideas
[00:48:51] that we're all Ottomans here. Doesn't matter where you were born. Whatever. In fact, a lot of the
[00:48:55] young Turk and committee of Union and Progress, which was like a really militant group,
[00:49:00] subgroup of the young Turks. Some of their leaders, including some of the ones that would be in charge
[00:49:05] of the empire during the First World War, they weren't Turkish. Tullot Pasha of the guy was the
[00:49:10] interior minister and the effect of head of government for the Ottoman Empire was from Bulgaria, for
[00:49:16] example. In the young Turks, they had Jews, they had Armenians. The Armenians, in fact, really
[00:49:21] supported the young Turks at first because they thought we have this force that's maybe more
[00:49:26] trying to be modernizing influence seems like more of a secular influence because that was one
[00:49:32] other thing I didn't mention is as you as the Ottoman Empire started to get worried about these
[00:49:38] Christians to size European societies pushing up on their borders and maybe using their interior
[00:49:43] internal Christians as fifth columnists let's create some divide. They really started pushing
[00:49:48] that Islamic identity and really playing that angle of it up, which was something they kind of avoided
[00:49:52] before for the most part. Obviously, like the Ottoman Empire is the caliphate, right? The Sultan is the
[00:49:57] caliph. And so they're in charge, you're in somebody else's house, right? If you're a Christian
[00:50:02] or a Jew, this is the Muslims house and everybody knew that, but they really, they had an empire
[00:50:08] to manage. They weren't trying to create problems between their Muslim and Christian and Jewish subjects,
[00:50:13] by the time when it once they started worrying about the loyalty of these Christian subjects
[00:50:18] and worrying not only about that actually worrying about their non-Turkish imperial subjects,
[00:50:23] like they were worried about the Arabs not wanting to be under Turkish rule and as we saw in World War
[00:50:28] one that was probably a good call. They saw the British sent Lawrence of Arabia down there and got
[00:50:32] the Arabs to rise up and march on on the Ottoman Empire. And so they wanted to avoid
[00:50:37] that. And so they started playing up to the Arabs, it's your Muslims. This is a Muslim empire. How
[00:50:42] could you side with the British? They would say to the Kurds, you know, that you had the Russian
[00:50:47] empire who was trying to encourage Kurdish separatism, for example, just to kind of create some
[00:50:51] chaos and some problems over there. And they wanted them to say, hey, your Muslims, don't you see
[00:50:56] those Christians or just want to destroy this glorious Muslim empire? That's side effect of that,
[00:51:02] or maybe it wasn't a side effect. Because they were worried about their loyalty of these internal
[00:51:07] Christians as well, was that those Kurds? Yeah, we are Muslim. And these Christians are trying
[00:51:11] to destroy this glorious Muslim empire. Those Armenians are Christian and you started to get some
[00:51:17] real problems there. And when you couple that with what they were teaching in classrooms and stuff,
[00:51:21] by the time you get up to, you know, the first world war, it's at a fever pitch. Well,
[00:51:27] the young Turks, they seemed to be a force and to some degree they were a force that was trying to
[00:51:32] move the empire beyond all that. And so you have these Armenians, including like Armenian militant
[00:51:38] groups, you know, that it really formed up because they, because of the mistreatment of the Armenians
[00:51:43] in the East, who are down with the young Turks, the fully supported him in 1908 when the young Turks
[00:51:49] launch a coup to, you know, take over the government. They march on Constantinople, take over the
[00:51:53] government. Armenians were cheering in the streets. The Armenian militant groups were celebrating that.
[00:51:58] In 1909, a year later there was a counter coup by the conservative Sultan forces, the
[00:52:05] Sultan's forces. And during that brief period that the Sultan was back in power and the young
[00:52:10] Turks were out of power, another 30,000 Armenians got massacred in the province of Adana.
[00:52:15] And it was done with the same character that you just read. You know, this is a, again, this is
[00:52:21] the first world war in that whole period is, it's so fascinating, right? Because it's this war
[00:52:27] in which the old world marched into those trenches and the new world marched out of them,
[00:52:34] you know, it's the pre-modern world and then the modern world just really it's that transition point
[00:52:39] in that clash. And so you have this genocide that is done for modern reasons, like national
[00:52:44] reasons almost, right? You didn't, you know, this idea of like ethnic purity and needing to have
[00:52:50] like our internal period, that's a modernist idea. And the, the means by which it was carried out
[00:52:55] administratively and all of these things, the Turkish Empire was a modern empire many ways.
[00:53:00] But this is genocide that was not carried out, you know, with with ledger sheets and, you know,
[00:53:08] Zyklan B and, and gas ovens or anything like that. This was something that was done the old way.
[00:53:13] It was done with hatchets and axes and hand knives and kitchen knives and clubs and boots.
[00:53:21] And it was something that, you know, it was a genocide that was conducted in ravines just off the road
[00:53:29] and in people's basements, not on battlefields. So the situation that we're looking at,
[00:53:39] now now we get ready for World War One. And the, is it a Hillary Clinton quote,
[00:53:45] Never let a crisis go to waste. That was, that was Rama manual. Yeah, okay. President Obama's first
[00:53:51] chief of staff. Never let a crisis go to waste. Yeah. It's a new quote, but it's not a new idea at all.
[00:53:57] And so World War One breaks out. Yeah. And this is an opportunity. And they get started right away.
[00:54:04] And some people who may have been paying attention at the time, they may have had some idea that
[00:54:08] the young Turks had changed a little because they took the government back over pretty quickly in 1909.
[00:54:13] So the young Turks are in charge now. And a lot of the Armenians feel pretty good about that.
[00:54:18] At least relative to what they had been facing before. But in 1910,
[00:54:23] there was this incident. People were complaining about all of these stray dogs running around
[00:54:26] Constantinople. Tens of thousands of them that were just running around. They were attacking people
[00:54:31] sometimes destroying the city. And the young Turk government was called on to fix this problem.
[00:54:35] How are you going to fix it? Well, they sent dog catchers, thousands of dog catchers out. And they
[00:54:40] caught all of these dogs one by one. It's about 80,000 dogs they caught. And they put them in cages.
[00:54:47] And they took them all out to this island, right off the coast, in the Dardenells.
[00:54:51] And they just dropped them off there. And the medium size ones ate the small ones.
[00:54:56] The big ones ate the medium size ones. The mean ones ate the big ones. And then the mean ones
[00:55:01] died of starvation. And that's how they dealt with the dogs in Constantinople.
[00:55:06] The young Turks were this force that was supposed to be fixing all of these old legacy
[00:55:14] problems of the empire. Well, they had a chance to prove it in 1912 and 1913, just the year before
[00:55:19] the first World War Breaks out. You had the serves and the Montenegroans and a coalition of
[00:55:23] other small Balkan Slavic peoples up there who revolted against the empire. And the young Turks
[00:55:29] sent an army up there and they got pushed back. And the young Turks were humiliated by this.
[00:55:34] They lost the last of their European territories in the Balkans by doing that. And they blamed,
[00:55:41] very, and they very much blamed sort of fifth columnist Christians in those Balkan territories for
[00:55:46] what had happened. And right around this time, you start to see the forces within the young
[00:55:51] Turk movement that is very anti-Christian and specifically anti-Rominian. Because they're
[00:55:56] the ones that they really worry about. The Greeks are a separate issue. We'll talk about them a
[00:56:00] little bit. But you can say killed 300,000 Greeks right around this period too. They killed 300,000
[00:56:05] a Syrian Christians. They killed a couple hundred thousand Lebanese Christians. This was a, this was a
[00:56:10] mass killing of all Christians across the empire. They just really had it in for the Armenians in
[00:56:14] particular. And so the first World War Breaks out and, you know, again, I mentioned this like
[00:56:20] very near the beginning, you have the Armenians who recognize that like this could be a problem.
[00:56:24] Like this is going to be an issue for us not necessarily that they're going to do something
[00:56:28] like genocide us because nobody was thinking like that at the time. You know, you have to remember
[00:56:32] like nobody had, this was a pre-Holokos, this was pre-Polpot, this is pre-stalin or any of that kind
[00:56:38] of stuff. Like the idea that you would have one of these major empires. And the Ottoman Empire
[00:56:43] like to us maybe, you know, we think of it as like this very sort of exotic foreign empire that's
[00:56:49] almost this, this throwback from like an ancient time or something like that and very orient.
[00:56:54] I mean, this was the Europeans, you know, they had, they were fully integrated with,
[00:56:59] with Europe for the most part. I mean, this was something that people read about,
[00:57:03] Constantinople in the New York Times every day. You know, this was, people talk about like,
[00:57:07] you know, Germany, how one of the crazy things about the Holocaust is like,
[00:57:11] but it's Germany, how could Germany do something like that? You know, this is,
[00:57:15] we're leaving it's came from, it's way to, and a girth that came from. And, you know, the Turks were
[00:57:20] not as foreign, the Ottoman Empire rather was not as foreign back then as we probably
[00:57:25] tend to otherwise it and think about it today. And so nobody was thinking like they're going to
[00:57:29] wipe us all out. Yeah, there might be massacres that local populations might get out of control
[00:57:34] on the local government there might encourage them or or not stop them from doing it. But nobody
[00:57:39] was quite thinking along such totalizing lines because they just didn't have a historical
[00:57:44] precedent for it. Yeah, the, um, that idea that you talked about earlier of sitting there thinking,
[00:57:50] well, you know, this isn't going to happen. Right. How can this happen? Well, even as it was happening,
[00:57:56] even as it was happening and it was definitely happening. Let's hear a little bit about what happened,
[00:58:02] going back to the book. During the first days falling my arrival in Constantinople,
[00:58:11] I hastened to call on several notables who might had known for a long time and who were friends
[00:58:15] of mine. My general impression was this, no one grasped the gravity of the situation and no one
[00:58:21] was worried about tomorrow. Many insisted that Turkey would not enter the war when it began. They
[00:58:27] said the mobilization was simply a precaution. They were simple minded people convinced that as
[00:58:32] long as the government was in the hands of the young Turks. And Talaat was the interior minister,
[00:58:40] no danger faced them. But alas, the Armenian leaders came to understand the truth,
[00:58:49] only when they were already walking on the road to death. So deceived where they by the
[00:58:57] flattery of promises lavished upon them that would achieve a police and several policemen came to
[00:59:03] find Anaguni, one of the dashnack party leaders and a brilliant Russian Armenian writer and placed
[00:59:11] him under arrest. The superfied Anaguni, am I saying that right? Anaguni, Agnuni,
[00:59:18] asked if Talaat knew about this. And when the police chief showed him the arrest warrant,
[00:59:24] be bearing Talaat's signature, Agnuni was even more stunned and replied that he had been at Talaat's
[00:59:30] for dinner a short while before. And wanted to know why Talaat hadn't said anything about it.
[00:59:39] The unfortunate Anaguni being an idealistic and honorable man could not comprehend how Talaat
[00:59:45] could plot against him so cynically. The same Talaat whom he had sheltered in order to save Talaat's
[00:59:51] life while risking his own during the counterrevolution following March 31, 1909, along with his
[00:59:58] five comrades, Agnuni was taken from Idaesh. About four fifths of the way he realized that he was
[01:00:07] going to be murdered. And when Vahak, the well-known leader of the dashnacks was warned by his friends
[01:00:16] in Adana. He answered calmly and with deep conviction. As long as Jamal Pasha, who's the official
[01:00:25] intrargetarian Palestine, is alive, no one can touch a hair on my head. Then pointing to a large portrait
[01:00:33] of Jamal Pasha in a guilt-frain, prominently displayed in his room, he said, long live my good friend
[01:00:40] and friend of the Armenians. Jamal Pasha. I recall in detail the circumstances of Vahak's hanging
[01:00:48] ordered by Jamal Pasha. So here you have these people who are, they're looking, you know, it's like,
[01:00:58] hey, well, that guy's a friend of mine. He's not going to do this to me. One of them, you know,
[01:01:02] one of them talking about Talaat. I already took care of Talaat. He's going to take care of me.
[01:01:09] Or, you know, I, Jamal Pasha, he's a friend of mine.
[01:01:11] You know, there's a, from another book that you mentioned earlier,
[01:01:22] they have another interesting thing. You know, this is around the time when we start cat read
[01:01:27] and we have documents, documents that explain what, what orders were being given. And there's
[01:01:33] speaking of Talaat who is overall in charge of the government and the architect of the genocide,
[01:01:39] one of the documents, there's like a reluctant regional governor who was kind of kind of playing
[01:01:48] dumb. Hey, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do. Is this really what you want? And Talaat sent
[01:01:52] a three word telegram that said, Yack, for old year, that's it. And those, those words mean burn,
[01:02:07] demolish, kill. No room for confusion there. No room for confusion there. And that's how we,
[01:02:17] that's how we start moving into this, this situation just disintegrates now. Yeah. So if you look
[01:02:26] at why the Ottoman Empire was brought into the war by the Germans, what did the Ottoman Empire
[01:02:33] get out of it? What did the Germans expect to get out of it? What the Germans expected to get out of it
[01:02:37] was look, they're facing the British, the French, and the Russians. All three of them have been
[01:02:42] taking away territory from the Ottoman Empire for years. The Ottoman Empire would like to take
[01:02:46] that territory back, and these other three would like to keep it. So if the Ottoman Empire doesn't
[01:02:50] have to help us conquer the world here or anything, if they can just put some pressure on Egypt,
[01:02:54] put some pressure on the Caucasus and on the Balkans, then these other three empires that the
[01:03:00] Germans are facing are going to have to like redirect some resources to defend them. That's the idea.
[01:03:05] And for the Ottoman Empire, they thought this is an opportunity to get some territory back
[01:03:09] and also to fortify our position internally so that when this war is over, we don't have
[01:03:17] any problems inside that can be exploited again later. And the Ottoman Empire was not,
[01:03:27] look, the Turks can fight, they can still fight to this day from what I understand. I mean,
[01:03:30] there are a warrior people and they carry that in them, but they were not prepared for this war.
[01:03:34] They weren't prepared to go toe to toe with the British Empire.
[01:03:37] And with the Russian Empire. And so the first thing that happens, you mentioned Talat Pasha,
[01:03:44] and you mentioned Jamal Pasha. Those were two out of the three people who were kind of the Ottoman
[01:03:49] triumvirate during the first World War. Talat was the interior minister and he was the head of government
[01:03:54] for all effective purposes. Jamal Pasha was the head of the navy and he was the military governor of
[01:04:00] Syria, which is a much bigger territory than we're talking about today. It was really like all
[01:04:04] of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, like that whole thing. And he was known by the Arabs in Damascus,
[01:04:10] by the way, as the butcher, he was he starved to death very similar to the way Stalin did the holiday
[01:04:17] more. He starved to death a few hundred thousand Lebanese Christians in Mount Lebanon where
[01:04:24] he was taking all of food sending it out to the front, not allowing any food aid or anything else
[01:04:31] to come in. And a few hundred thousand people just starved to death on the streets. There are accounts
[01:04:36] from people who are there like American University and other Western missionaries in diplomats who say
[01:04:42] they would put cotton balls in their ears in their houses because outside it was just moaning children,
[01:04:48] moaning women, people dying on the streets begging for food. It just sounded like the zombie
[01:04:53] apocalypse out there. Just moans, day and night, people dying. You go out in the morning and open
[01:04:58] up your door and there's a dead child on your doorstep. I mean, Mount Lebanon lost 50% of its population
[01:05:05] up there. It was one of the worst hit parts of the entire country. And so those are two of the guys.
[01:05:09] And the third one, remember that Triumph, where it is in Ver paasha, and paasha is just a term of
[01:05:14] respect in the Ottoman Empire. It's a very high ranking, like official basically. It's not there.
[01:05:19] They're not brothers or anything. And so in Ver decides, you know, Napoleon tried to invade Russia
[01:05:26] in the winter. Hitler's going to try and do it in a few decades. Not going to go well for either
[01:05:30] of those guys, but screw it. Let's go for it. And so he gets his force and he tries to go up into
[01:05:35] the caucuses and face the Russian army up there. Maybe feeling like he's going to catch them off guard.
[01:05:39] He doesn't. The battle of Sarah Comash happens and the Russians wiping out and pushing him way back.
[01:05:45] And so now the Ottoman Empire is really starting to panic, right? If you look at like when the
[01:05:49] Holocaust really kicked into gear, it wasn't 1939, it wasn't 1940, it wasn't even really in early 1941.
[01:05:58] It was after the Germans got within seven miles of Moscow and then those Siberian troops showed up
[01:06:03] and pushed the Germans back and they realized this might not work out the way we thought it was going to.
[01:06:08] And they said, well, what else can we accomplish then? What else can we accomplish? And
[01:06:15] because the caucus is over there. If you look at the territory, Eastern Turkey,
[01:06:19] you know, the Armenians in Southeast or Eastern Turkey, they're right across the border as more
[01:06:24] Armenians. That's modern Armenia, right across the border today. And so, and these people didn't,
[01:06:28] you know, they were separate, don't keep you wrong. They even spoke really different dialects,
[01:06:32] you know, two large-degree and stuff, but they still knew that those were their Armenian cousins
[01:06:35] over the border and they knew it back and forth. Kind of like the curbs in southern Turkey in northern
[01:06:39] Syria today. And so when the Russian army pushes past, it passed that border into Eastern Turkey,
[01:06:47] the Ottoman Empire, thinking with some, just as I was some reason that these people who they
[01:06:55] had just massacred, a few hundred thousand of a few decades back and have been allowing to be abused
[01:07:00] by the Kurds and everybody else who wants a peace in the decades since, that the Russians are going
[01:07:05] to mobilize these people and put them to work against the Ottoman Empire. And so, as the Turks are
[01:07:09] retreating, they are just slaughtering and burning and destroying everything they can. Just terrorizing
[01:07:16] Armenians, murdering the people they see, especially military-age men. Most of the military-age
[01:07:21] men, by this point, have either been conscripted into the military and then disarmed, put into a
[01:07:30] slave labor battalion. And by the time you get up to 1915 around the battle of the Lippoli,
[01:07:35] they'll be worked to death or simply murdered. Generally speaking, they would get these men who
[01:07:41] the Armenians who showed up for the draft and tell them, you're going to go into the interior,
[01:07:46] we're going to build trenches, defensive fortifications, and they'd all go and they'd spend all
[01:07:50] they'd digging a trench and they'd be like, great job. Can you stand on the edge of it, please?
[01:07:54] And then they would murder them all and then fill the trench in. It was a mass grave, they'd been
[01:07:58] digging for themselves the entire time. And so, as this is going on, you have the other Armenian
[01:08:04] young man, military-age men who were like, well, they either saw that coming or maybe they
[01:08:12] didn't want to leave their home villages because they were already getting attacked by Kurdish
[01:08:15] tribes every other day and they said, I can't leave my wife and kids here and my parents here.
[01:08:19] And so, they just refused to go. But that meant you had to go into hiding, you had to go somewhere
[01:08:23] because the Turks found you as a rap. And so, all of these villages that the retreating
[01:08:28] Ottoman army is coming back through and just murdering and terrorizing, these are pretty much
[01:08:33] all women-children-old people. And that's going to be a theme throughout the entire story.
[01:08:38] Is the men are already gone? The men have already been killed a long time ago or they've had to
[01:08:43] run away across the Russian, you know, across the Russian battle lines. A lot of them did go join
[01:08:50] the Russian forces once the genocide kicked in. And so, a lot of the stuff that we're going to be
[01:08:56] that we're going to be hearing about going forward, this is all stuff that's being done pretty
[01:08:59] much entirely to groups of women-children and old people by military fighters. And so, that's
[01:09:07] that first step, disarming and then killing the Armenian men who had joined the military happens.
[01:09:13] And the second thing that the Ottoman Empire needs to do, this is before the real genocide,
[01:09:17] the mass deportations and killing really start in a systematic way. You know, they have to
[01:09:21] lay the groundwork for it and after disarming the Armenian military people, they decided they
[01:09:27] needed to get rid of these two towns that they expected would put up resistance because they had
[01:09:32] done so before. They did so during the Hamidian masquerers in the 1890s. In fact, one of them, Zetun,
[01:09:38] which was a, you know, these are mountain men. You know, these are tough people that even
[01:09:42] other Armenians kind of looked at them like they were a little bit crude and uncivilized.
[01:09:47] They were like, uh, Appalachian scotch Irish kind of like the way we in America look at
[01:09:52] those Appalachian folks like man, they're wild and they're kind of crazy and whatever, but
[01:09:55] boy, like, uh, you start problems with them, then you're going to have some problems yourself. Like,
[01:10:00] they're not going to, you're very independent minded and not used to or down with being told
[01:10:06] what to do by people. And Zetun was up in the up in the hills and they knew that they were not going
[01:10:13] to just accept this and they had the capacity to actually push back a little bit. So they
[01:10:17] they started the maskilling across Anatolia at the time. They might have to worry about these
[01:10:22] two places either turning into fortresses where Armenians could retreat and then from there who knows
[01:10:27] or just that they could turn out enough partisan fighters. They could really create problems
[01:10:31] in, uh, in the re-reational one. And so they go there first and they just, um,
[01:10:37] they wiped those places out. They go to van, Vaughan is the second one besides Zetun.
[01:10:42] And, um, you know, they go in and, uh, give them an ultimatum, tell all your men to come out.
[01:10:47] Uh, they do this under the under the guise of like we're looking for draft Dodgers and
[01:10:51] deserters and so forth. And so they show up and they just round up anybody who's there who's
[01:10:56] important, right? Any of the older men who are leaders, if there's any writers or singers or poets,
[01:11:02] if there's anybody who's prominent who could serve in a leadership capacity, you know,
[01:11:07] a sort of a collecting point for people, a rallying point. They take all them, they torture them,
[01:11:12] and they kill a bunch of them. And then they give the rest of the people an opportunity to
[01:11:17] turn in any of the men who are still around or anything. And instead the people in van barricade themselves
[01:11:22] into the town and say, we're not coming out, give us back our, our notables, give us back our, our men,
[01:11:27] our leaders. And so, uh, instead they roll in artillery and they just start shelling the town
[01:11:33] and, um, intermittently they'll send in Muslim mobs to go in and massacre the people who were in there.
[01:11:39] And eventually, uh, they, they kill enough people that they're able to get all the women and
[01:11:44] children out and they send them marching south into the desert. They do something very similar and
[01:11:48] they tune as well. Surrounded with artillery, um, burned down the monastery where a bunch of the
[01:11:54] younger men were hiding. And then the women and children who were left there, thousands and thousands,
[01:11:59] 20,000 or so and they tune actually. Um, actually, so yeah, actually, I left out one other
[01:12:06] thing. This is another thing that they, that they did to compel people is when the people in van
[01:12:11] were holed up and refusing to come out. They said, okay, Roger that and they just started going
[01:12:15] to all the villages around the town and just maskering all the people there. And, um, once they
[01:12:21] had pacified the area, they got all the women, children, uh, and old people who were left and they
[01:12:26] put them into care of ants under guard and they sent them marching south into the desert. And,
[01:12:31] you know, this is northern northern Syria, southern Turkey. That's what we're talking about here.
[01:12:35] So, you have, like, a lepo and was solo over in a rack that whole area. They just sent them
[01:12:39] marching south. Um, and then step three came. And this was really the thing that kicked off
[01:12:46] the program. Now that all of the men with guns have been neutralized, guys in the military,
[01:12:51] now that these two potential trouble sides of an and they tune or taking care of,
[01:12:55] they wanted to make sure that all of the Armenian national level leaders were neutralized. And so
[01:13:00] all of these men who are in Constantinople and Smyrna and some of the other big cities,
[01:13:04] including Gregorius Balakion, the priest who's book we're reading today,
[01:13:08] we're all arrested and deported down south as well. And, um, they could tell from the beginning that,
[01:13:17] uh, this was something probably a little bit different than what they had seen before.
[01:13:24] Well, speaking on the book, let's get a little, um, I witnessed a count going back to the book.
[01:13:30] On the night of Saturday, April 24th, 1915, the Armenians of the capital city exhausted from
[01:13:38] the Easter celebrations that had come to an end a few days earlier, we're snoring in a calm sleep.
[01:13:46] Meanwhile, on the heights of Stambul, a highly secret activity was taking place in the
[01:13:50] palatial central police station. Groups of Armenians had just been arrested in the suburbs
[01:13:56] and neighborhoods of the capital, blood-colored military buses were now transporting them to central
[01:14:02] prison. Weeks earlier, the Constantinople chief of police had sent official sealed orders to all
[01:14:08] guard houses with the instruction that they not be open until the designated day, and that they be carried
[01:14:14] out with precision and encequercy. On this Saturday night, I, along with eight friends, were
[01:14:24] transported by a small steamboat. The night smelled of death. The sea was rough, and our hearts
[01:14:32] were filled with terror. We prisoners were under strict police guard, not allowed to speak to one another.
[01:14:40] We had no idea where we were going. We arrived at the central prison and here, behind gigantic
[01:14:45] walls and large-boated gates, they put us in a wooden pavilion in the courtyard, which was said
[01:14:51] by some to have once served as a school. We sat there quiet and somber on a bare wooden floor
[01:14:56] under the faint light of a flickering lantern, two stunned and confused to make sense of what was happening.
[01:15:03] From the deep silence of the night until morning, every few hours, Armenians were brought to
[01:15:09] the prison. And so behind these high walls, the jostling and commotion increased as the crowd of
[01:15:16] prisoners became denser. It was as if all the prominent Armenian public figures, assemblymen,
[01:15:24] representatives, revolutionaries, editors, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, merchants,
[01:15:29] bankers, and others in the capital city had made an appointment to meet in these dim prison cells.
[01:15:37] Some even appeared in nightclothes and slippers. The more those familiar faces kept appearing,
[01:15:45] the more the chatter abated and our anxiety grew.
[01:15:51] Before long, everyone looks solemn, our hearts heavy and full of worry about the and impending storm.
[01:16:00] Not one of us understood why we had been arrested and no one could assess the consequences,
[01:16:05] as the nights hours slipped by are distressed mounted.
[01:16:09] Except for a few rare stoics, we were in a state of spiritual anguish, terrified of the unknown,
[01:16:15] and longing for comfort. Right through till morning, new Armenian prisoners arrived in each time
[01:16:23] we heard the roar of the military cars. We heard to the windows to see who they were.
[01:16:28] The new arrivals had contemptuous smiles on their faces, but when they saw hundreds of
[01:16:33] other well-known Armenians old and young around them, they too sank into fear.
[01:16:38] We were all searching for answers, asking what all of this meant, and pondering our fate.
[01:16:52] So these are all of the most famous Armenians in the country. These are the prominent priests,
[01:16:58] the writers in the big cities. These are the people who everybody in our, and everybody,
[01:17:03] every Armenian in Turkey knew who these people were. They knew them by name for the most part.
[01:17:08] And so they wanted to take them out immediately and just get them out of circulation at first.
[01:17:16] And they did it secretly. They did it quietly on April 24th, 1915,
[01:17:20] which is Armenian genocide remembrance day, because this is where it really kicks off.
[01:17:23] Once they did that, all most of the pieces were in place to begin the campaign of mass killing.
[01:17:31] The only things that remain were, there was this organization called the special organization.
[01:17:38] There had actually been set up for a previous war with the Russians,
[01:17:42] but they used it for a different purpose and augmented it with different people here.
[01:17:47] They freed about some 10-15,000 violent convicts from prisons, including thousands of murderers and rapists.
[01:17:55] And they freed them and promised them a pardon if they would ride with this group called the special
[01:18:00] organization, which was put under the command of the most fanatical anti-Armenian young Turks.
[01:18:06] And their job was to terrorize the Armenian population in an unrestrained manner.
[01:18:17] We think about genocide again, we're very influenced by the Holocaust and the way we think about these things.
[01:18:24] We think about a cool, exact discipline.
[01:18:26] And systematic, it's like, okay, what's your number?
[01:18:30] You can check that one off.
[01:18:31] And that's not how this was carried out.
[01:18:36] And this special organization is a good illustration of how that is.
[01:18:40] I mean, most genocides, when you look at millions of people dying in the Civil War and the Congo or in Sudan,
[01:18:47] you say, well, how's that happening? They don't have gas chambers there.
[01:18:51] They're not even going around and individually shooting every person that's there.
[01:18:55] You don't have to do that. All you have to do is go to one village.
[01:19:00] Not just kill them, but do it in the most horrific ways you can possibly imagine and make sure
[01:19:05] that a few people get away to go warn the next village over.
[01:19:08] And then those people who are mostly women, children and old people, because the men are all fighting
[01:19:12] or, you know, you can't be there when the army shows up, when the militia shows up,
[01:19:17] they say, we got to get out of here. So they take their kids and their grandparents and they run off into the bush.
[01:19:21] And defenseless women, children and old people die very quickly in the bush,
[01:19:26] while they die very quickly in the desert too. And so this was part of the goal.
[01:19:30] It's to go out there and terrorize brutally and make sure that word of that spreads to the other
[01:19:36] groups of these people get moving. Because if we can do that, they'll finish themselves off.
[01:19:42] We won't have to go around. Most of the, most of the Ottoman soldiers, they're off at the front.
[01:19:47] You know, this is being carried out by older John Don, police soldiers, ordinary men, type people,
[01:19:54] right? Like guys like that, as well as by local villagers and Kurdish tribes that they couldn't
[01:19:59] a conscripted if they wanted to. And it was helped along by the level of just savagery that they would
[01:20:05] perform these massacres in. And finally, the once everything else was in place,
[01:20:13] and this kind of happened systematically, I guess, over the, over the period of time that the
[01:20:18] genocide was taking place, but the central government worked to identify governors and mayors of
[01:20:23] local areas that might be reluctant to do what they needed to do. And when they were identified,
[01:20:29] they were taken out. Some of them were going in jail and some of them were even killed.
[01:20:33] But a lot of them were just reassigned to other places. One of them you started off talking about
[01:20:37] with a quote about what happened in Ankara. And that was an example, actually. That was one where
[01:20:41] the guy who, the valley, the governor of, of that province, he was trying to almost be a
[01:20:47] Oscar Schindler type. He got together a bunch of prominent Turks in the area, had them
[01:20:52] right a letter and sign a letter that he sent back to Constantinople saying, hey, look,
[01:20:56] whatever's going anywhere else. Like, our Armenians are actually cool. Like, we know them. They're
[01:20:59] not a problem. They're loyal. And so that guy was just fired and sent off to some random spot in
[01:21:05] the Empire. And his successor came in and immediately went to work, searched all the Armenian homes
[01:21:14] for weapons. Took them all the way right down to all their kitchen knives. The local jails there were
[01:21:20] emptied all the convicts were turned into paramilitaries. And once everything was in place, they got to work.
[01:21:28] You know, you think about that. If you were going to write like a freaking psycho,
[01:21:38] dystopic movie, right, what are you going to do? You're going to take the local criminals,
[01:21:45] rapists, murderers, and you're going to empower them and give them a authority.
[01:21:50] And total license. And in fact, encourage them to be as brutal as possible because
[01:21:56] that's part of the plan, you know, to drive these people out into the desert through brutality.
[01:22:03] It ends up looking like this going back to the book. The prominent prisoners, lawyers,
[01:22:08] bankers, merchants, and Armenian government officials were taken out on the road in the first
[01:22:14] care of an under the supervision of the police commissioner. The prison warden police soldiers and
[01:22:20] officers. Overall, superintendents was assigned to Shem Sedan, the son of Tobib, a member of the
[01:22:27] Ottoman parliament from Ankara. Although those in the Caravan were the distinguished people of the
[01:22:34] city, a mark was put on their arms and their feces, shoes, and coats were taken from them
[01:22:41] before they left the prison. Then these 150 sew or sew were taken out to the foot of town
[01:22:48] and tied together with a rope. The tools that would be used to kill these Armenians,
[01:22:57] axes, clevers, paddles, large knives, and other weapons were transported in four or five
[01:23:03] carriages directly behind the Caravan and following them were carriages filled with lime.
[01:23:09] To make sure that the crying and screaming of the people in this caravan would not be heard,
[01:23:18] some of the soldiers were ordered to play trumpets and drums as they left Ankara via the town's
[01:23:24] famous Toshcon section. Seven hours from the town, this dust-covered caravan reached the forest.
[01:23:33] They were met by the special organization. The freed criminals used as anti-Armenian death
[01:23:45] squads who possessed all kinds of weapons, a well-known lawyer. Armunog pleaded with the chief
[01:23:52] of the bandit group to be given as the sacred last right of one condemned to death,
[01:23:58] permission to say a few words. He received permission. Then he said with unusual cold
[01:24:05] hardness and a cavalier indifference to death that surprised even the special organization.
[01:24:12] It is no longer a secret that you have brought us here to be killed.
[01:24:18] But I want to ask you if you know why you are going to kill us.
[01:24:20] Leader of the bandit's answer that he didn't know why. Armunog continued. You should know
[01:24:29] that the high-ranking officials and the committee who gave you the orders to kill us did so
[01:24:34] solely to secure their personal gain and that they are leaving a stain on your history and laying
[01:24:40] waste to the fatherland. Barely had he spoke these prophetic words when hundreds of this
[01:24:53] special organization sheets attached from all sides, cutting and hacking off legs and arms and
[01:25:00] necks with axes and hatchets ripping them off partly or entirely and crushing heads with rocks.
[01:25:11] The bodies were thrown half alive dead or in the throws of death to be prepared ditches into
[01:25:17] prepared ditches and covered with lime. Those who were partly sticking out of the dirt and the lime
[01:25:25] made the heavenly arches resound with their cries of agony. More dirt was poured on them until they
[01:25:32] were buried alive. When the massacre of the first caravan was finished, the second caravan of
[01:25:43] more than 320 people was sent forward. Transported to the park known as Kayaesh, six hours from
[01:25:52] town, these people were massacred in the same merciless manner. The dismembered bodies of the
[01:26:00] martyrs were left unbehried for 15 days, Turkish officers then oversaw their burial by our
[01:26:06] minion labor soldiers. After massacring all these people, the special organization came back to
[01:26:15] town, wearing clothes, shoes and other items they had taken from them. Everywhere they boasted
[01:26:25] about how many Armenians they had killed and how in unheard of ways they had tortured and
[01:26:30] dismembered those who were still alive and even mutilated corpses. Similar massacres
[01:26:40] took place in other towns and villages with particular curr-cruity in Yazgat.
[01:26:49] First all the Armenian males of the town or city and then the women and girls were bound
[01:26:54] together and taken on foot to deep valleys a few hours away, accompanied by a Turkish mob
[01:27:01] armed with access. There they were slaughtered like sheep, pregnant women and suckling babes included.
[01:27:22] And that's how it went. Over and over and over and over and over. It's one of the things about genocide
[01:27:29] is you ever watch a movie about one or read a decent book written about a genocide they'll usually
[01:27:36] find some dramatic persona to focus on so that they have some kind of drama with it some story
[01:27:42] liner arc to follow because when you get down to it what it comes down to is we went to this village.
[01:27:48] We killed all the men. We raped all the women. We robbed all their stuff. Took their children
[01:27:51] his slaves and then we laughed and then we went to the next village and we raped all the women.
[01:27:57] We killed all the men. We took the children his slaves robbed all their stuff and we left and it's that
[01:28:01] 100 times a thousand times. You know you can't tell a Holocaust story or a right a Holocaust book
[01:28:10] that's just they marched 10,000 people to the edge of the mass graves. They shot him naked and they
[01:28:16] threw him in and they took these. It's just it gets repetitive in the most
[01:28:19] grotesque way imaginable and that's what a genocide is. The depravity of it is easy to focus on but in many ways
[01:28:29] the especially after it's been going on for months or years and the people themselves the killers
[01:28:36] themselves have been almost brutalized psychologically and spiritually by what they're doing and it
[01:28:41] becomes routine for them so that things that some individuals may have hesitated to do it first or not
[01:28:48] things that elicit any kind of hesitation anymore that it just becomes this grind of death.
[01:28:57] And one of the things that makes the Armenian genocide a thing that is I guess you could maybe
[01:29:06] only compare it to what happened in Rwanda in so far as the extent to which the general population
[01:29:14] was mobilized to participate. Something like again like with the Germans. This was something
[01:29:22] you know, Ernst Younger during the Second World War was stationed in Paris. He was sort of a cultural
[01:29:27] figure that I that point so he was kind of there as like a technically was some kind of a minister
[01:29:31] of this or that I can't remember but really was there as like a cultural figure and he was in Paris
[01:29:37] 1942, you know 1941 and he's writing letters to people trying to figure out like I keep hearing about
[01:29:43] all these things that are going on out and polling down the east like what's going on out in the
[01:29:46] east like I hear about bad things going on east. This is Ernst Younger. I mean this is a guy that
[01:29:50] even the Nazis like thought this guy was great you know there was there was possibility that he was
[01:29:57] in on one of the failed assassination attempts. Maybe he knew about it at least but Hitler himself
[01:30:03] even said nobody touches Ernst Younger. This is the guy. This is the guy that wrote Stormusty.
[01:30:07] I forget which podcast we covered up that on but I mean this guy is a hero to the German people.
[01:30:13] Yeah and so even him a guy in that position serving as a minister in Paris at the time he's like
[01:30:20] trying to find out what's going on in the east because the way that that was conducted and you know
[01:30:24] it gets overplayed a little bit how secret it was and everything. It did take a large number of
[01:30:29] people including the vermark to pull off some of it but relatively speaking this was something that was
[01:30:34] able to be kept from the German people and to be localized to the SS and like you know the people
[01:30:40] who were actually handling it. Yeah and it's one thing to you know the okay so the German
[01:30:47] populists is let's say they're helping round-up Jews but that's what they think they're doing
[01:30:52] is rounding up the Jews or they're going to ship them off they're going to be slave labor they don't
[01:30:55] they many cases didn't know the end state right whereas here we have the the Turkish population at
[01:31:03] large doing the tactical operation of genocide. Yes and you know there's a quote from a great book
[01:31:13] I know I've brought it up a few times another podcast that by Philip Garevich about the Roman
[01:31:18] in genocide we was to inform you that tomorrow we killed with our families and he has a quote in
[01:31:22] there when he's talking about what genocide is and the two the society that's perpetrating it and
[01:31:29] he has this line that's always stuck with me says genocide after all is a sort of community building
[01:31:34] exercise and that stuck with me as I was reading all the material about the Armenian genocide in
[01:31:41] the way that it's specific way that it was handled one of the things that happened was these people
[01:31:47] who would be deported down south when I say that what I'm talking about is you know all the men
[01:31:52] would be killed and the women children and old people who were left would be put into a caravan
[01:31:56] they'd be sent down to march in the Syrian desert on a march that would take about two months
[01:32:01] and when they got to the end it was just there was a death camp there where they would anybody
[01:32:05] who survived two months with you know no food because it would all be taken from them right away
[01:32:11] you know if they couldn't scrounge bugs out of the desert or eat dead bodies or whatever they
[01:32:15] had to do they'd buy a starvation if they couldn't if you weren't a woman who could
[01:32:19] you know use your body or whatever to get a Turkish soldier to give you a drink of water or do
[01:32:27] whatever you had to do then you died on the way and the roads were littered with bodies and sometimes
[01:32:31] they would just massacre all of you along the way but the ones who got to the end would get to these
[01:32:35] death camps in the Syrian desert and these routes you know it doesn't take two months to walk
[01:32:43] directly in a straight line from one place to their end state and an end place in the Syrian desert
[01:32:47] they would go on these winding routes sometimes and it wasn't just to drag it out so that people
[01:32:54] would die of exposure and starvation they would actually bring them through different
[01:32:58] Muslim villages different territories of Kurdish and Circassian tribes and when they would come
[01:33:05] through a given area just like we saw here people would be waiting for them with weapons
[01:33:10] and they would attack and they would rape and they would take the women that they liked away
[01:33:15] as sex slaves they would take the children away as slaves they would rob them of what they could but
[01:33:21] it was only allowed for a certain period of time and very often the Turkish soldiers this is actually
[01:33:26] what would happen much of the time is they would sort of organize it a little bit really like well
[01:33:30] here's a really really pretty Armenian all of you want her as a sex slave well let's hold an
[01:33:35] auction and then the Turkish soldiers get paid oh well you know we're gonna get a lot of the most
[01:33:39] valuable things that they have and so the Turkish soldiers were getting paid it was a way of
[01:33:45] sort of it was a very crude and brutal form of wealth redistribution in a way everything that these
[01:33:50] Armenians had they were being walked around to these different villages and territories so that
[01:33:55] each of the people in those places got their cut and there would be almost you read accounts where
[01:34:02] it's almost like there's a sense of expectancy almost like a party atmosphere when people know
[01:34:07] another care of ants coming through what are we gonna get this time and um all of these these
[01:34:14] Kurdish tribes a lot of these Islamic villages there were Armenian women and children
[01:34:22] tons of them in a lot of these places a lot of them would just be taken sometimes it slaves
[01:34:26] and when the novelty wore off after a few weeks or a few months they would just be murdered or turned
[01:34:30] turned away out in the desert to go to go wander and die um that then the other thing that's
[01:34:36] happening when they're doing that is that the state is taking well they're taking the opposite
[01:34:41] approach that the the Nazis took right which is that they are making all of these people
[01:34:48] complicit in this atrocity that the state is carrying out and it really does bind them together in
[01:34:53] the same kind of way that you know you know like in a mafia movie where you do a hit and all three of us
[01:34:59] who did it have to fire a shot to the body because we're all in this together now and it's uh
[01:35:05] you know this this shared knowledge that we have all participated in this tremendous crime
[01:35:12] that even going forward that can bind people together in a certain way especially we've all benefited
[01:35:16] from it we've taken slaves from it we've we've robbed and maybe the things in our house right now
[01:35:22] the furniture in our house right now maybe uh we're things that we that we took from these people when we
[01:35:28] killed them and um that's how it went over and over and over and over again you know and the
[01:35:36] thing that always the thing that is just the most unbearable to me is imagining like just I've
[01:35:43] mentioned it a few times already but it's the it's always the thing I can't get out of my head about this
[01:35:46] is that these are all women children old people the men were gone already and just imagining like
[01:35:51] your mother or your wife or your sisters or your kids being marched along out to the desert but
[01:35:59] these people set up on you know not blown up by a predator drone as bad as that it is they are being
[01:36:06] hacked down with machetes and axes and as you saw like in one of the one I think the
[01:36:12] onker eggs and apple that you read in in massacres that would take hours and hours and hours
[01:36:18] you know it takes a long time some of these they're killing 6, 7, 8,000 people at a time in a ravine
[01:36:22] by hand and that takes time and so it's just screaming in the smell of feces and blood and people
[01:36:33] you know you have just body parts hacked up over here and over there there's just a big rape or
[01:36:38] G and it's all right next to each other while over here they're searching your mother's pockets
[01:36:43] for any gold coin she might have and it's and it's that first far as you can see there are times
[01:36:49] where they did you know one instance where they did 6400 people was was the consensus estimate on it
[01:36:55] and it was the entire ravine I mean you come over this ridge and it's just this entire ravine
[01:37:00] hundreds of yards and it is just bodies and they're not dead of you know this this place was
[01:37:07] was witnessed by an American from somebody from the American consulate who wrote out and saw it
[01:37:12] afterwards these bodies are not people who died of starvation or thirst or exposure these are people
[01:37:18] who's are just one big mass of gashes and mutilation and hacked off limbs and women with their
[01:37:25] heads cut off who are laying there with their dresses thrown up over their head and their legs spread
[01:37:31] with their heads cut off I mean that this is the these are the scenes that you see over and over and
[01:37:35] over and over to the point where you know you read a book like the 30 year genocide about it where
[01:37:40] he really does take the time to get into each of the massacres and it becomes almost significantly
[01:37:46] nauseatingly boring in a way and it's just it's hard to imagine when you make it personal like that
[01:37:55] you know trying to imagine the helplessness that you would feel knowing that this had happened
[01:38:02] to people that you cared about or being one of those people it would just it's it's hard to imagine
[01:38:12] well we don't necessarily just have to imagine it we can listen to when I witness
[01:38:20] the widow I witnessed this is going back to the book this is transmitted by an American ambassador
[01:38:25] to the secretary state says this a week before anything was done to bayboard the villages all
[01:38:32] around had been emptied and their inhabitants had become victims of the John Darm's and margarine bands
[01:38:41] three days before the starting of the Armenians from bayboard after a week's prison imprisonment
[01:38:48] our bishop had been hanged with seven other notables after these hangings seven or eight other notables
[01:38:56] were killed in their own houses for refusing to go out of the city 70 or 80 other Armenians after
[01:39:02] being beaten in prison were taken to the woods and killed the Armenian population of bayboard was
[01:39:07] sent off in three batches I was among the third batch my husband died eight years ago leaving me
[01:39:14] and my eight year old daughter and my mother extensive possessions so that we could so that we were
[01:39:20] living in comfort since mobilization began the merch has come common don has been living in my house
[01:39:27] free of rent he told me not to go but I felt I must share my the fate of my people
[01:39:34] I took three horses with me loaded with provisions my daughter had some five
[01:39:39] lira pieces around her neck and I carried some 20 liras and four diamond rings on my person all
[01:39:44] else that we had was left behind our party left June 1st 15 gen darm's going with us the party
[01:39:52] numbered four five hundred persons we had got only two hours away from home when bands of villagers
[01:39:59] in large numbers with rifles guns axes etc surrounded us on the road and robbers of all we had
[01:40:10] the jondarms took my three horses and sold them to local Muslims pocketing the money they took
[01:40:15] my money and that from my daughter's neck also all our food after this they separated the man
[01:40:23] one by one and shop them all within six or seven days every mail above 15 years old
[01:40:31] by my side we're killed two priests one of them over 90 years of age
[01:40:40] these bandsmen took all the good looking women and carried them off on their horses
[01:40:46] very many women and girls with us carried off into the mountains among them my sister
[01:40:51] whose one year old baby they threw away a turk picked it up and carried it off I know not where
[01:41:00] my mother walked till she could walk no further and dropped by the roads I don't a mountain top
[01:41:06] we found on the road many of those who had been in previous sections carried from bayboard
[01:41:11] some women among them were killed and their husbands and sons
[01:41:16] we came across some old people little infants still alive but in a pitiful condition
[01:41:24] having shouted their voices away we were not allowed to sleep at night in the villages but
[01:41:30] lay down outside under cover of the night indescribable deeds were committed by the jondarms
[01:41:37] bandsmen and villagers many of us died from hunger and strokes others were left by the roadside
[01:41:44] two people to go on one morning we saw 50 to six see wagons with about 30 turkish widows whose
[01:41:53] huntsbidden had been killed in the war and these were going to Constantinople
[01:42:00] one of these women made a sign to one of the jondarms to kill a certain Armenian whom she pointed out
[01:42:06] the jondarms asked if she did not wish to kill him herself at which she said why not
[01:42:12] and drawing a revolver from her pocket shot and killed him each one of these turkish
[01:42:21] hanooms which is a turkish lady had five or six Armenian girls of ten or under with her
[01:42:28] boys the turk's never wish to take they killed all of whatever age
[01:42:31] the worst and most unimaginable horrors were reserved for us at the banks of the year fradies
[01:42:43] the mutilated bodies of women girls and little children made everybody shudder
[01:42:51] the bandsmen were doing all sorts of awful deeds to the women and girls that were with us
[01:42:57] whose cries went up to heaven at the fradies the bandsmen and jondarms threw into the river
[01:43:05] all the remaining children under 15 years old those that could swim were shot down as they struggled
[01:43:11] in the water after seven days we reached Erzingian not an Armenian was left alive there the
[01:43:25] turkish women took my daughter and me to the bath and their showed us many other women and
[01:43:32] girls that had accepted Islam between there and andrays the fields and hillside were dotted
[01:43:42] with swollen and black and corpses that filled and fouled the air with their stench
[01:43:47] on this road we met six women wearing the ferage and with children in their arms
[01:44:02] but when the jondarms lifted their veils they found that they were men in disguise so they shot them
[01:44:07] after thirty two days journey we reached Constantinople
[01:44:21] one of the things that would happen on the trail of tears on this road to death
[01:44:29] was you know by the time you got a week out of any of these cities where people were deported
[01:44:37] a lot of the american consulate people and other diplomats and missionaries who were there
[01:44:41] including by the way this is really worth mentioning that i've been brought up yet a lot of the people
[01:44:44] diplomats who have reported on this and broke back about it and have provided a lot of material we
[01:44:50] have today these are German diplomats austrian diplomats these are people who are allied to the
[01:44:55] Ottoman Empire in this war who were writing back about a lot of these things there's one memoir
[01:44:59] that was written about it by a guy named rafael denogales who was a venezuelin mercenary who was
[01:45:05] actually serving as a turkit as a mercenary officer as a major in the turkish military and he wrote
[01:45:11] a lot about it as well and one of the things that you hear over and over again is how by the time
[01:45:18] you're a week out of the city all these people are naked all their clothes have been taken so they're
[01:45:22] walking in july or august maybe in the Syrian desert 12 hours a day or more you know and they're
[01:45:31] just blistered up from the sun they don't have any food they don't have any water anything they
[01:45:36] can scrounge from the landscape or bag of some or prostitute from some turkish soldier or something
[01:45:42] that's all they got something maybe they were able to hide away on their person and so they're
[01:45:46] wasting away naked in the sun and then they would stop at night and you think maybe they would
[01:45:51] get some rest but more often than not the nighttime was the worst time because they would stop for the
[01:45:57] evening and as ever they didn't have tens most of the time those would all would have
[01:46:03] all been taken from them they didn't have any kind of shelter so they're just sitting out
[01:46:06] in the weather and if there was a village nearby or a tribe nearby or sometimes just the soldiers
[01:46:13] themselves this was their time to blow off a little bit of steam and so they would show up and they
[01:46:18] would just be walking through the encampments of all of these women and children and elderly people who
[01:46:23] who stopped and they would just take their pick for rape they would take slaves sometimes they
[01:46:29] would just torture people for entertainment their stories of pretty Armenian women being
[01:46:36] strip naked and forced to dance for turkish soldiers and when they weren't pleased with their
[01:46:41] performance they just doubted the encarricine and watched the veranda death for their entertainment
[01:46:46] there's story after story after story after story like this and not a bunch of people from
[01:46:52] one caravan we're talking from all over the country throughout the entire period of this going on
[01:46:58] there's something you know there's maybe you can get people to go put a bullet in somebody's head
[01:47:06] for their country you can maybe play play up that angle of it to get them to do something like that
[01:47:12] you've got a really in general level of extraordinary hatred I think to to get people to do some
[01:47:22] of the things that were being done here especially the regular people that doesn't go so much for
[01:47:27] the special organization you know I think I think maybe in one of the unraveling episodes we did I
[01:47:35] asked a question like if you had a bar in town in any city in America where everybody knew that's the bar
[01:47:41] where in there there's this room and there's a person in there and you can just do whatever you want to
[01:47:45] that's the gimmick at the bar like I might not go there you guys might not go there but I don't think
[01:47:50] it would be empty I think it would rarely be empty and when you're talking about okay what if you had
[01:47:55] that in a prison that would be a lively joint I mean that's what you had going on here you had these
[01:48:01] caravans of women children and old people being marched down into the desert very often by
[01:48:07] guards who were from the special organization guys who were convicted murderers and rapists
[01:48:15] who had been given complete in total license from their government to do whatever they want and
[01:48:19] now you stop at nighttime and your board you've been on the road for a week riding in the hot
[01:48:25] sun on your horse guarding these people and what are you how you're going to spend your evening
[01:48:31] and the way a lot of them spent it was just you know again you just it's one of those things that
[01:48:37] like reading a book about it or anything just you really can't do justice until you really try
[01:48:43] just close your eyes and try to put yourself in the position of these people in the position of
[01:48:47] a mother who's already watched two of her children die of exposure and then has her baby grab
[01:48:55] by a leg and thrown in a river and then she's gang raped and she's going to be gang raped again
[01:49:00] and again and again for the next two months as she walks you know this road or until she can't take
[01:49:06] it anymore and commit suicide basically that was the situation of hundreds of thousands of people
[01:49:15] being marched down into the desert like this well you said story after story after story
[01:49:25] here's some of them going back to the book and you mentioned the German diplomats
[01:49:31] here's a German diplomat the teachers of the American school and car per were gruesome
[01:49:36] torture before they were killed two professors had their hair and beard ripped out while in prison
[01:49:44] in order to extort confessions and were hung by their hands for days at a time
[01:49:52] another professor went insane when he was forced to watch Armenians being beaten to death
[01:49:58] the governor himself took part in the torture of another professor
[01:50:01] the senior executive president beat him until he was exhausted and said whoever loves his
[01:50:09] religion and his people may continue beating
[01:50:17] here's another eyewitness who was seven years old at the time we heard afterward that together with
[01:50:23] 17 other Armenian young men they had mastered them by night and had thrown them under the bridge
[01:50:29] thus when we were deported there were no males left in our family they took away my five
[01:50:39] aunts in der Zor later they cut their off their heads impaled their heads with their banats to show
[01:50:47] them to us and then they threw their corpses in the yearfraidies
[01:50:52] we found only half the body of my mother's aunt my mother buried her in the earth here's a
[01:51:04] 13 year old eyewitness the Turks came and drove us all out of the village they were forcing
[01:51:13] us to march with whip strokes they tied our hands behind us they disrobed us totally and we stood
[01:51:20] naked as the day we were born then they broke once hand another's arm still another's leg
[01:51:27] with axes and daggers behind us a little boy whose arm was broken was crying and calling for
[01:51:37] his mother but the mother had already died by an axe they came in the morning assembled us
[01:51:47] and started once more to kill and drop the bodies in the water below the cave the river
[01:51:54] cover was flowing they caught someone's head another's leg still another's hand and all these
[01:52:00] human parts were piled up upon one another on the ground some were not yet dead but had their
[01:52:10] bone shattered and their hands severed some were crying others squeaking there was the odor of blood
[01:52:19] on the hand and hunger on the other people who were still alive started to eat the flesh of the dead
[01:52:30] one of the effects of this was a very strange demographic dynamic that happened in Turkey in
[01:52:47] the years afterwards it was actually a book that came out it was in the 2000s or the 90s when it
[01:52:53] actually came out must have been the 2000s was written by a Turkish woman living in in Istanbul now
[01:52:59] her grandmother pulled her aside when she was very old and told her her life story and it turned out
[01:53:07] her grandmother was an Armenian and she had been taken as a small girl away we mentioned earlier one
[01:53:13] of the one of the Turkish women who were heading back to Constantinople with a stable of 678
[01:53:20] little Armenian girls and they were taking them back to be their house servants and that's how her
[01:53:24] grandmother was taken she was taken back into a house she ended up in a place that was pretty civilized
[01:53:30] they pretty much just raised her you know she was kind of a servant but they didn't abuse her or
[01:53:35] anything and so she was raised in this house and became Turkish she remembered who she was but
[01:53:40] everybody thought she was a Turk her granddaughter thought she was a Turk and so after she told her
[01:53:45] granddaughter her life story she wrote the she wrote the she wrote the book and it was kind of a sensation
[01:53:51] and Turkey because to this day Turkey still denies the genocide and so something that they
[01:53:59] well we'll talk about that a little bit but that aspect of it the taking of children and women
[01:54:04] the mass enslavement of these people was it was a huge section it's almost gosh man you would almost
[01:54:12] think that like it almost seems like a fake worst in death the people who have killed your husband
[01:54:19] your parents your kids your entire community your entire people and now they're gonna take you as a
[01:54:26] slave most of the most often when you're talking about the women they're being taken away as sex slaves
[01:54:31] and very often they're being taken away not by not that this would make and I guess any better but
[01:54:35] they're not being taken away by some Turkish notable to go be in his haram in Constantinople they're
[01:54:40] being taken away by some some tribesmen out until his tent in the desert and that's where she's
[01:54:48] gonna live now until they get tired of her and it's maybe not just for him you know a lot of
[01:54:52] times these were women who would be kept to be shared with friends and companies like a matter of
[01:54:58] hospitality you know this kind of thing was going on and you're talking about oh gosh I mean it's
[01:55:04] hard to really say but you're talking tens of thousands at least of our menian women and children
[01:55:10] taking away this way you know maybe a hundred maybe over a hundred thousand the total number of deaths
[01:55:15] between one one point five million but the number of people who were taken away is slaves and just
[01:55:20] kind of melted into the population or were murdered later that's what happened to a lot of these people it was
[01:55:24] it was in the ten at least the tens of thousands you know sex slavery in the Ottoman Empire that
[01:55:30] this isn't something that just sort of came out of nowhere because of the chaos it was going on
[01:55:35] there was actually just last night as I was brushing up on some of this I came across in New York
[01:55:39] times article written in 1886 by a journalist who managed to he had a he had a guide there in
[01:55:48] Constantinople that was helping them and they dressed him up in a beard and said he looked like
[01:55:52] you know he was from the area and he had some money and they got him into some of these places
[01:55:56] where they were selling women and this was in 1886 none of this was going on and they would
[01:56:01] they were mostly so there's always Christian women usually you're not you can't enslaved
[01:56:05] Muslims sometimes you know people do what they do but generally speaking that's what happened and
[01:56:09] so it would be Circassians and Slavs and Armenians and sometimes a series of Greeks
[01:56:16] and so this was something that you know that the Sultan himself the way the Sultan reproduced was
[01:56:23] he had a harem of hundreds and hundreds of women and all of them were slaves taken from Christian lands
[01:56:29] and they would be kept in a cell in like a very specific part of the palace and they would be guarded
[01:56:34] by black like black African unix and so I mean just again give you some idea of like the
[01:56:41] society we're talking about here the king has hundreds of slave women kept in cells and like his
[01:56:48] own palace they're not allowed to interact with anybody else and they're guarded with
[01:56:52] they're guarded by unix who were castrated specifically for the purpose I mean this is a
[01:56:57] it's a different we're not talking about you know the abundance dog or the English parliament or
[01:57:02] something it's just a different different time in a different place I mean we do after remember that
[01:57:06] you know we're I just mentioned that New York Times article in 1886 it only 21 years before
[01:57:11] was when we got rid of you know Chatelle slavery in the United States so it was a different time and
[01:57:16] there were a lot of things going on back then but there's a there's a little bit of exotic
[01:57:20] strangeness to something like that that I think kind of shocks us a little bit and this idea that
[01:57:25] you know you could take especially non-Islamic women as spoils of war and a sex slavery we saw
[01:57:32] that reignite when ISIS you know rampaged through everywhere they were taken to Yazidis and
[01:57:36] everybody else that they found it wasn't Muslim as sex slaves and it was horrifying to us but
[01:57:42] you know in this part of the world especially when you get out into the countryside where things
[01:57:46] don't change much very rapidly this was something that was not a huge diversion from what was normal
[01:57:54] for people and so once there was the opportunity it just happened at scale and you had tens of
[01:58:01] thousands again maybe over a hundred thousand Armenian women and children who just disappeared into
[01:58:04] Kurdish villages and into Turkish homes set us up for a daresor yeah daresor was one of the main
[01:58:16] gosh what do you even call a place like that you want to call it a death camp but that sort of
[01:58:21] makes you think of the Nazi example where this is like a factory of death and it wasn't it wasn't that
[01:58:27] you had these these caravans that were being wound through the desert to be robbed and raped and
[01:58:32] killed and enslaved as they went and just eyewitness report after eyewitness report describes the
[01:58:39] road on the way down is just littered with corpses and body parts everywhere you go anytime there's a
[01:58:44] hill you look over the other side of it off the road and it's just filled with bodies back there
[01:58:48] the rivers are choked with bodies and body parts but some of the people survived some of the people
[01:58:55] just figured it out you just said people who were alive started to eat the flesh of the dead people who
[01:59:00] haven't had anything to eat for a month will do you lose your mind when you start to when you
[01:59:07] start to starve and die of thirst and exposure and some people made it and for those who made it
[01:59:14] tell was waiting for them you know at the place that they got to at the end of the line one of them
[01:59:24] called their Zor is basically big open air cages that they just pen people up in and there was
[01:59:34] no food and there was no water and there was no medicine and they just stayed in there and they died
[01:59:39] and now you know this wasn't Auschwitz with you know double razor wire fences you know multiple layers
[01:59:46] deep people could kind of get there and you know if you had an ability to do if you knew somebody
[01:59:52] who maybe came down there to give you a blanket or some food you might live a little bit longer than
[01:59:57] everybody else but people were dying by the 500 the thousands the 2000s a day just dying of disease
[02:00:03] and exposure and hunger and thirst and periodically massacre sometimes when another caravan would
[02:00:11] get there and they're just simply wasn't any room for anyone else they would either take that
[02:00:15] caravan or most often they would take people who were already degraded near the point of death
[02:00:19] and they would be like well we're moving you to the next location you're going south again
[02:00:24] everybody back on the road and there was nothing south they just marched them out there people who
[02:00:28] were already right on the point of death they would march them further into the Syrian desert
[02:00:32] they would just wander out there and die or be massacred the scenes in derseor that are described
[02:00:39] or really something beyond I mean it's a heronum is Bosch painting you know
[02:00:47] this is from the book no pen can possibly convey the suffering and misery of these exile
[02:00:56] Armenians persecuted wanders surrounded by savage gangs of police soldiers riding in thousands of
[02:01:03] wagons and carts and on beasts of burden though most were on foot and many of those bear
[02:01:13] like dried leaves driven by the wind they passed through this sold bloody passage
[02:01:18] and on to the arid deserts of derseor to die without bread without water without a shroud
[02:01:27] and without a grave barely had the men from these regions been separated from the women
[02:01:34] and put on the road to exile when they were mercifully slaughtered and their corpses thrown
[02:01:39] into the rivers or valleys as food for vultures and other wild animals
[02:01:43] the young brides and virgins were yanked from the embrace of their crying mothers
[02:01:51] and taken to Turkish herems even ten year old girls were subjected to all manner of savage
[02:02:02] unbearable debotuary the older women who managed to endure the terrible hardships of the road
[02:02:12] were taken to derseor where they were brutally slaughtered during the summer of 1916
[02:02:21] here we encounter two young Armenian engineers who had been in charge with overseeing the work of an
[02:02:26] Armenian labor battalion in tears they told me how in 1915 particularly in September and October
[02:02:34] approximately 80,000 Armenians of both sexes were encamped under tents made from bedsheets and
[02:02:41] rags on the plain near the valley stretching all the way to the spacious swampy field by the
[02:02:47] Mamure Railway Station
[02:02:51] 600 to 700 were dying daily from hunger thirst and fever when suddenly a lengthy
[02:02:58] nocturnal autumn rain came and finished the task left unfinished by the human beasts
[02:03:04] the people were stuck in the standing pools of water for several days severe cold
[02:03:12] insert ensued and none of them had adequate shelter clothing or food
[02:03:20] they froze to death by the thousands falling like the autumn leaves or they died from
[02:03:25] dysentery diarrhea bleeding and other plagues of overcrowding the field was soon covered with
[02:03:34] mounds of unbearied bodies under makeshift tents and entire families were reduced to corpses
[02:03:40] by hunger and cold with no one to bury them nor could those Armenians who found their dead
[02:03:49] kinfolk find any spades or hose to bury them with and behold suddenly one morning
[02:03:59] to bring this widespread and heart-trending wretchedness to its ultimate perfection the director of
[02:04:06] the exiled caravans and hundreds of police soldiers bearing whips and clubs surrounded the poor
[02:04:12] people already at death store and ordered them to get immediately on the road it isn't
[02:04:17] humanly possible to imagine the hue and cry the begging and pleading and the chaos that
[02:04:23] prevailed in and around those thousands of tents the tents were then taken down and the portable
[02:04:29] goods and bundles representing the deportees last bits of property were assembled but they had
[02:04:34] neither carts nor wagons nor beasts of burden to carry them the lamentation then began
[02:04:42] many would not leave loved ones who were sick in their death throws lying on the ground
[02:04:46] uncaired for and abandoned the dying agast beg not to be abandoned in the open fields as food
[02:04:53] for hungry wolves and corpse eating hyenas that prowled the night but they had no time to think
[02:05:03] the military police and major and minor officials fell upon them without pity or human feeling they
[02:05:09] struck the hapless and confused left and right hitting them everywhere eyes burst open
[02:05:15] skulls were crushed faces were covered with blood and new wounds were opened up nobody cared
[02:05:21] nobody took pity on them the survivors seeing that they had no option but to leave
[02:05:30] took down and folded thousands of tents and in an instant throwing them over their shoulders
[02:05:36] got on the road leaving their ill and dying loved ones behind
[02:05:40] the wretched Armenian mothers who unable to take their underage children two to six years old
[02:05:50] children who had fallen ill from starvation extreme cold and the hardship of the long road
[02:05:55] half dead or in the throws of death had to leave them on top of the already dead
[02:06:00] tearfully the eyewitnesses told us how two large mounds of corpses of thousands of Armenian
[02:06:10] children rose up among them numerous children who had not yet died and who extended their small hands
[02:06:17] searching for their mothers the eyes of these omaciated and neglected angels bore a look of
[02:06:26] pleading and protest directed toward their mothers and toward God and from their half dead lips
[02:06:38] some of them cried that sacred word mommy for the last time
[02:06:48] since their mothers could not possibly take the children along in a few hours the little ones would
[02:06:53] be dead and would have to be left on the road anyway it was perhaps better that all of them
[02:06:59] the offspring of the same wretched and persecuted nation lay down in heaps in one place
[02:07:05] maybe God and men would finally have pity and see that this was suffering enough
[02:07:14] instead of half dead children mothers carried on their bosoms the weakest and most exhausted
[02:07:18] of the children still alive until they too had to be abandoned the angelic souls of thousands of
[02:07:28] Armenian children were rising to heaven to tell God of their beloved mothers endless sufferings and
[02:07:33] misfortunes those remaining in the care vans of Armenian axiles moved on and disappeared into the
[02:07:43] mountains there was an all encompassing silence as night came then the howling and yelping
[02:07:54] of hungry wolves jackals and foxes and occasionally the faint screams of Armenian children
[02:08:01] being eaten for the animals would eat the live ones first
[02:08:19] and that that wraps up what we're going to cover from the book and and of course obviously
[02:08:27] I only read a tiny percentage now to to get the book across the game some kind of
[02:08:36] understanding of of what took place and I mean what what can be called for all practical purposes
[02:08:49] is is I don't know if this is a thing to say but this was for the most part this was a successful
[02:09:02] genocide I mean it was damn near as fully successful genocide meaning we got rid of this group of
[02:09:09] people forever yes is that I mean there are Armenians in other countries obviously so the people
[02:09:17] survived but there are no Armenians in Turkey today and in fact Christians in general and again
[02:09:24] I don't mean to dilute the Armenian experience here but it is worth mentioning that this was something
[02:09:29] the Turks were attacking Christians across the empire this period they killed 300,000 a
[02:09:34] Syrian Christians they killed countless Lebanese Christians and after the war when out of Turk came
[02:09:42] back and they were fighting in the west against the Greeks he killed and then killed 300,000 Greeks
[02:09:47] Greek Christians and then expelled another million to a million and a half you know there were
[02:09:54] three or four million Armenians in Turkey proper before the war started and when it was all over
[02:10:02] by 1917 really when when the genocide kind of died down maybe tens of thousands crawled out of
[02:10:09] their hiding places went from three or four million to maybe a few tens of thousands and you
[02:10:17] have to call it in a way successful because from one standpoint Turkey got what it wanted there are
[02:10:25] no more Christians or Armenians in our country and from you know from another angle they didn't
[02:10:34] really pay for it some individuals didn't we'll get we'll get to that but you know after the
[02:10:42] one of probably the great tragedy the 20th century here's another one of its consequences was
[02:10:47] the Russian Revolution in 1917 the Bolshevik the communist take over Russia in 1917 and pull them out of
[02:10:54] the war and so the Armenians who have been hiding behind Russian lines that's where a lot of the
[02:11:00] Armenians in eastern Anatolia retreated just get behind the Russian army or the Russian army packed up and left
[02:11:05] they're out of the war and so you have all of these Armenians now right up into the what we
[02:11:11] consider today are a media proper the Republic of Armenia is wide open it is wide open over there and
[02:11:18] there is still a Turkish army in the field that is fully prepared to finish the job and they are driving
[02:11:25] up into Armenia they're driving toward the capital of Armenia yeravan talking about a Turkish army
[02:11:33] tens of thousands strong a fully equipped military force world war one air military force and you've
[02:11:38] got about 1200 Armenian soldiers and then you've got a bunch of refugees and older men and everything
[02:11:45] else who are given guns clubs anything that they could find which is not much and they're told
[02:11:51] do we flee up into Georgia up further into the Soviet Union depending on how bad this gets or
[02:11:59] are we gonna we gonna make a stand here and that's what they did
[02:12:04] there were people in yeravan lots and lots of refugees so it was an overcrowded place they had a lot of
[02:12:09] people but they only again had about 1200 train soldiers and they were the ones that went and got
[02:12:14] everybody organized they rang the bells of the church bells of yeravan to muster everybody and you had
[02:12:19] women and children running supply lines everywhere getting everything in place you had men digging
[02:12:23] defensive fortifications you had old men serving as like signal operators with flags and things up
[02:12:29] on you know up on towers everybody was participating here and the Turkish army pushed up
[02:12:35] within you know just about within visual range just over the horizon of the capital of Armenia
[02:12:41] and they got to a place there were three areas where they fought but the main one that you know
[02:12:46] people remember today there's a great big monument there and a great museum Armenian history museum
[02:12:51] called Sardara Bot and thankfully this French guy it's not a it's not a very well-known battle
[02:12:57] if you look in general histories they'll talk they'll all talk about it but they won't get much into the
[02:13:02] details thankfully there was this French guy back in the 70s a historian who went back
[02:13:06] into the records and he got everything I mean he's a military historian and so I read that book and
[02:13:11] I mean he really gets down to like the order of battle on both sides and everything else and I mean
[02:13:15] you're really talking about a fully equipped Turkish army against a rag tag group of refugees led by a few
[02:13:22] trained NCOs basically and thankfully they did have some Armenian
[02:13:27] Russians who once the Soviet Union pulled them out of the war they were like well
[02:13:31] you know I'm a colonel in the Soviet army now I guess do I go back to Moscow or wherever they're calling
[02:13:36] us or am I going to stay here in fight and so some of them stayed and helped lead the effort as well
[02:13:40] and this rag tag group put a halt it's Sardara Bot to the Turkish advance and really I mean
[02:13:46] there was a historian American historian not not Armenian but just a historian of the
[02:13:51] Ottoman Empire who said that if they had lost that battle then the word Armenia today
[02:13:57] would just be a curious historical footnote you know we'd probably still have Armenians obviously
[02:14:02] just like we had Jews for a long period of time when there was no such thing as Israel but that's
[02:14:07] what we would be talking about you know it didn't preserve Armenian independence at the time
[02:14:15] they tried you know one of the things that happened was in that brief period after they did put a stop
[02:14:19] to them Georgia Armenia and Azerbaijan which are all right there clumped together none of them
[02:14:26] wanted to be part of the Soviet Union at the time and they didn't want to be part of the
[02:14:30] Ottoman Empire either so they formed a little alliance to try to defend themselves but as soon as
[02:14:34] things got a little bit tricky Georgia was pretty quick to be like you know what we're going to
[02:14:39] go with the Soviet Union and Azerbaijan was very quick to be like you know what what Muslims too
[02:14:44] and they kind of stabbed the Armenians in the back and attacked them from behind and so the
[02:14:48] Armenians then at that point had to cut a deal with the Soviet Union and so Armenia became
[02:14:51] a Soviet socialist republic as well and so out of the out of the frying pan into the fire there
[02:14:58] you know although I mean you know the thing is one of the things that did happen in Armenia
[02:15:03] obviously you know they were under the same Soviet tyranny is everybody else to some degree but they
[02:15:08] did understand the Soviets even. Sanatical is they were they understood to a certain degree that these
[02:15:13] people were not going to give up their national or religious identity no matter what we'd have to
[02:15:21] finish the job that the Turks started if we were going to accomplish that and so they really didn't
[02:15:25] push that as hard as they did in some other places which is why you know to this the Armenian church
[02:15:30] was able to survive and then to this day once they achieved their independence finally in
[02:15:35] you know when the Soviet Union fell everything was in place there and you know say what you want
[02:15:42] about the downsides of I don't know what you would call it of nationalism or just sort of that
[02:15:49] you know um I got you Armenian is one of the things that you find about them and it's something I love
[02:15:55] about Armenians really like any Mediterranean peoples is Armenian's love being Armenian and it makes
[02:16:03] some it makes them so much fun you know it's just to me like Armenians in America they're almost
[02:16:08] a perfect immigrant group in a sense where they are they're American 100% you know you can't look at
[02:16:16] the Kardashians and be like those are Americans those are Americans as much as George Washington's
[02:16:21] an American you know it's just they they fully adopt and like they're down they join the military they do
[02:16:26] everything and fully assimilate and integrate and yet they love Armenia and they love the Armenian
[02:16:32] church and they love their people and their history and there's no tension there you know they
[02:16:38] they can be fully patriotic Americans or in France there's a lot of Armenians in France for example
[02:16:43] and they never lost that connection with their own history and um in their own traditions and
[02:16:49] I think they they really walked out line really well um well it's um it doesn't have to be mutually
[02:16:56] exclusive to be you know proud of where you're from they're proof that it was and proud of where you're
[02:17:00] from yeah they're proof that it doesn't and they didn't um they also didn't really forget no they didn't
[02:17:06] forget you know one of the things what had happened yeah one of the things that happened right is
[02:17:10] another consequence of the Russian Revolution is you have all of the you know by the top by the end of
[02:17:15] the war everybody knows what was going on in Turkey so you had the British and the Americans and
[02:17:18] everybody else who were looking at the Ottoman Empire or now it's just the Republic of Turkey right
[02:17:23] there's the the war in Turkey went on until 1924 the British defeated the Ottoman Empire they occupied
[02:17:30] Constantinople but there was still large military force commanded by a great man there was no
[02:17:37] way to put it you know he was a he was a hard man he did a lot of bad things in the field and
[02:17:41] did what he had to do for his country I suppose one way to look at it but come out out of Turk the father of
[02:17:45] the Turks father of the modern Turkish Republic he was in command he was in he was he was a hero
[02:17:51] at Gallipoli the man who out of fight knew how to command very smart very tough and he was still
[02:17:56] out there and so he moved the capital from Constantinople where the British had established themselves
[02:18:02] out to Ankara where it is now and he kept fighting you know he um it first was pushing up into the
[02:18:07] caucuses to you know with the idea that if you get past Armenian Georgia and you keep going northeast
[02:18:13] there it's just Turkic peoples like all the way over to western China at that point so there was
[02:18:19] this like pan Turkish idea that maybe okay we lost all the North African whatever but maybe
[02:18:24] you know the Arabs were always kind of trouble anyway why were we doing that maybe this is the
[02:18:27] empire this pan Turkish Empire the Armenians it's so darabat put a stock to that and then the Soviet
[02:18:32] Union established itself so that wasn't going to work out and so they retreated back and eventually
[02:18:37] they went back and pushed everybody else out of their country and um established the modern
[02:18:42] Republic of Turkey and Kamal Atturk was he was a young Turk he was a member of the young Turks
[02:18:48] um he had broken with the triumph or a little bit uh over you know military reasons over the years
[02:18:55] but he was still part of these people and a lot of the young Turks and even the committee of
[02:18:58] Union and progress the core group that was really carrying all this out they were still there they
[02:19:02] were still in the government you know there was no real we had denotsification after the second
[02:19:08] World War and there was really not a whole lot of that going on some of the very very main people
[02:19:13] you know they fled they they fled the country and so this wasn't carried out but they were tried
[02:19:18] in absentia some of them were sentenced to death some of the main architects um but after a little while
[02:19:25] everybody realized that Turkey is going to be kind of strategically important now that we have this huge
[02:19:30] threat of the Soviet Union looming up here and so like it or not we're going to have to kind of
[02:19:36] find a way to like bring Turkey back into the fall the mean Turkey was in NATO by the 1950s
[02:19:42] and it was considered a strategic necessity to just kind of forget about all this you know you get
[02:19:48] all the way up to the 1980s and there was a um an American scholar named Susan Blair who found a
[02:19:55] bunch of the American consulate documents that people hadn't people didn't even know about these yet
[02:20:01] you know because nobody was studying this it was not something that people really wanted to look into
[02:20:05] because Turkey we we have nuclear weapons and turkeys is a it's a premium important ally in the
[02:20:10] cold war nobody wants to look at this and so in the 1980s Susan Blair finds all these documents by
[02:20:15] people like Leslie Davis describing everything that they've seen out there and she says well this
[02:20:19] is incredible right set up as a book tries to get it published she can't get it published anywhere
[02:20:24] she's told by major publishers that this is too controversial we we can't touch this and the thing is
[02:20:30] those people were right because she finally found a publisher and that publisher started getting bomb
[02:20:36] threats they started getting death threats she and her family had to go into hiding for a while
[02:20:41] because uh the Turkish government they don't play around like um have you seen that movie the promise
[02:20:48] no it's it's a great movie it's about the Armenian genocide and it's a really really good movie
[02:20:53] but you wouldn't know that I maybe this has changed a little bit now you wouldn't know that by going
[02:20:56] on like rotten tomatoes the first night or first day that that thing was released there were like
[02:21:02] 5,000 like one star terrible horrible worst movie ever reviews and like all of them had kind of
[02:21:08] broken English and like whatever else I mean you see that and then immediately afterwards literally
[02:21:13] like the next year there was another Armenian genocide movie that was put out it was sponsored by
[02:21:18] the Turkish government and it was just it's almost worth watching for just the the the madness of
[02:21:25] the propaganda I mean you really have to like imagine a movie about the Nazis and the Holocaust
[02:21:31] where all of the SS officers and Heinrich Kim learned everybody else are just portrayed it's like
[02:21:36] they're just really trying to help all these Jews but like the Jews they just they ran off out
[02:21:41] there into Poland and something happened to them and I don't I mean it's that bad you know it's really
[02:21:45] that bad and it is like a state effort ever since then um you know it was happening at the time
[02:21:51] they were they a lot of this was carried out with burn after reading telegrams and things like that some
[02:21:56] of them were preserved but um throughout the 20th century all the way up to the present day there's
[02:22:02] Turks still going through all the archives and going through it and being out shred that shred that they've
[02:22:06] been doing it for centuries and it's because they I mean look um this is this is maybe one of the
[02:22:12] darker things to point out about it is they know they know the deck at work you know people forget
[02:22:19] things people forget everything it doesn't matter what you did or how bad it was or how many people
[02:22:24] were affected they have this idea that if you just keep denying it keep calling everybody a liar keep
[02:22:31] just do whatever you got to do the give it a century all we have to do is survive you know if you
[02:22:37] if you look like this was something that was really prominent at the time right you read all the
[02:22:40] read the writings of Lenin for example and Trotsky and Stalin you know all the Bolsheviks and you
[02:22:46] see the same strain in Hitler where they all understood that we're about to do something that is
[02:22:51] horrific and barbaric and that is going to be condemned by everyone and we better not lose this war
[02:23:00] but if we don't if we pull it off and all we have to do is survive and then wait it out
[02:23:06] and the storm will pass and um it passed very quickly like I said Hitler was partly inspired by
[02:23:14] you know the the Armenian example specifically because even by then just 30 years later 25 years later
[02:23:22] at that point when I got started even by then he could say and make a good point with it who
[02:23:28] today remembers the Armenians this is 25 years after his own country was allied to the Ottoman
[02:23:37] Empire as it executed one of the most thorough and complete genocides in history well you can say
[02:23:47] there was some level of vengeance on it and we're not going to talk about that now but we are going
[02:23:55] to talk about operation nemesis on the unraveling podcast which we also do it's a little
[02:24:03] take things a little bit different and a little bit deeper and we'll do that we'll talk about
[02:24:08] operation nemesis well you can listen to it right now it's um jocco unraveling podcast where
[02:24:14] Daryl and I are going to go deep well we're going to go deep on on this operation that carried out
[02:24:20] it was a what did you call it a campaign of assassination that's exactly what it was and and it was
[02:24:26] done by a bunch of Armenians without any state support you know if you think about
[02:24:31] everybody looks looks like what the masad did the Israelis did after the second world war they
[02:24:36] hunted down a thousand fifteen hundred Nazi officers SS officers around the world and that's you know
[02:24:44] that's that's good for them but the Armenians you had a group people who were doing this completely
[02:24:48] independently without any state support this group of hardcore militants who hunted these people down
[02:24:53] all around the world and essentially took out the entire Ottoman government that was running this
[02:24:58] during during the period all the high ranking people there is one other thing I want to close with I kind
[02:25:03] of forgot about earlier because there is uh to on the whole question of turkish denialism um
[02:25:10] this is a quote from a letter written by the leader of the special organization a guy named
[02:25:16] behind the inch of care and this was a letter that was found fairly fairly recently last few decades
[02:25:22] um this is right near the beginning of it he said the committee of union in progress as the
[02:25:28] bearer of the nation's honor has decided to free the homeland from the inordinate ambitions of
[02:25:33] this accursed nation and to assume the responsibility for the blemish that will stain
[02:25:38] Ottoman history in this regard the committee which cannot forget the country's bitter and unhappiness
[02:25:43] and whose cup runeth over with unrelenting desire for revenge has decided to annihilate all Armenians
[02:25:50] living within Turkey not to allow a single one to remain and has given the government broad authority
[02:25:55] in this regard on the question of how this killing and massacring will be carried out the central
[02:26:00] government will give the necessary instructions to the provincial governors and army commanders
[02:26:05] all of the unionist regional representatives would concern themselves with following up on the
[02:26:10] matter in all of the places where they were found and would ensure that not a single Armenian would
[02:26:15] receive protection or assistance not a lot of room for doubt there evil
[02:26:31] with that echo Charles maybe we could do a little decompression old school decompression
[02:26:38] scenario that was a rough one say a second yeah I don't I'm not sure that I can do that right
[02:26:45] this moment but Jesus man it kind of hard to listen to all that and then even that last part
[02:26:50] and then be like yeah by the way yeah it let's all start you know get back to lifting weights
[02:26:55] and drinking well if you remember like I think the very first time I actually needed the decompression
[02:27:03] I want to say it was podcast number 12 didn't take long but after podcast number 12
[02:27:09] where we were we talking about the the highlander in prison and you know he's getting tortured by
[02:27:18] the Japanese he's having the the maggots eat the gangrene flesh off of his legs in order to survive
[02:27:27] he gets put to a medical camp eventually gets put out to see while he's you know
[02:27:33] um you know the whole of a ship with however many hundreds of prisoners shooting all over themselves
[02:27:40] and in their own urine and sweating and starving to death and dying and then they get hit by
[02:27:44] because the because the Japanese didn't mark their prison ships so they get hit by a torpedo
[02:27:50] and most of the guys die but he somehow gets thankfully recovered oh but but recovered by a
[02:27:55] Japanese ship and so then from his Japanese ship he gets taken back to shore and he is stationed
[02:28:01] in a prison camp in the outskirts of hero shima so that was the first time where when I got
[02:28:09] done reading some of his you know some of that book you know I said echo you talk for a little while
[02:28:17] why freaking decompress so world can be a horrible place and the best thing we can do is maybe
[02:28:24] make our little part of the world a little bit better what do you got for suggestions wow
[02:28:30] let's start with our self mentally and physically hopefully don't forget I give you a hard time
[02:28:40] about your job being super easy yeah this is one time you got to earn you know earn challenge
[02:28:45] just a little for sure challenges rough transitions yeah well either way want to keep
[02:28:50] ourselves together mentally fit and speak at a witch dill cooper always impressive with how deep
[02:28:56] you can just sort of just go thank you time well you know good guns I you have little ways to go
[02:29:02] which is cool you know and I'm very supportive of and you know either way we are working out
[02:29:08] we're reading not as much as del cool but tell me what I can do to maybe to maybe catch up okay well
[02:29:13] you could have get some stuff over he's got skills on the transition right now very good support
[02:29:18] on the trans actually a big tip either yes we're working out we're reading we're doing all this
[02:29:23] good stuff for ourselves so we can provide good stuff for others can make our little world a better
[02:29:29] place and it spreads and before you know it we got a better place we're all living in
[02:29:32] I'm in full support so this so while working out we might need some supplementation
[02:29:37] probably helps the time helps all right let's start with discipline go right mental and physical
[02:29:45] support we'll say and we have essentially an energy drink you don't like it still
[02:29:53] it's hard to say that bro because here's the deal when you say essentially an energy drink what
[02:29:58] do we think in this stigma we're thinking stigma we're thinking we're not just a stigma it's a
[02:30:02] reality yeah reality is we you say energy drink you're talking about high sugar content ridiculous
[02:30:08] caffeine bunch of chemicals to preserve the whole scenario we're talking I want to talk an energy
[02:30:13] we're talking poison yeah that is the association for sure so well we're talking about that
[02:30:19] we're not talking about that in fact I don't think we're ever gonna be talking about well technically
[02:30:24] we're talking about it but when I'm talking about discipline go the RTD ready to drink
[02:30:31] can of quantum quote essentially an energy drink this is what I'm talking about no chemicals
[02:30:38] no sugar no taste good and it's good for you you drink two of these you know how people
[02:30:45] you know we have friends I don't want to name any names Tim Ford he used to be might still be
[02:30:51] odd enough but they'll get addicted to like energy drinks we'll get addicted to him meanwhile
[02:30:56] without addiction you're getting less healthy less you know like you don't need drink three
[02:31:00] of them you're like man that probably is jamming my health up this is probably no it's straight up
[02:31:05] is straight up yeah but this will need drink three of them guess what your health there so go get
[02:31:10] addicted if you want get addicted to something good for you it's like getting addicted to carrots
[02:31:16] you can't you can't you can't you can't I know that I know that I actually learned that one time
[02:31:21] I had a whole like bag of carrots and then realized and and I you know whatever it was three hours
[02:31:26] later as googling can you eat too many carrots and the google said yeah your body can't
[02:31:31] digest too many carrots and so guess what your body does is not pretty don't eat too many carrots
[02:31:38] but you can drink a lot of this one go yeah and not to go too deep into the too much of a good
[02:31:44] thing concept but even technically the most vital nutrient if you want to call it water you can drink
[02:31:51] too much water yeah it's called drowning diet no I think that's when you inhale the best thing about
[02:31:57] to go energy drinks yeah I was one of those douche bags I was pounded like 300 milligrams of
[02:32:04] caffeine I came in here one time with one of those things in chocolate like what are you drinking
[02:32:09] what are you doing here so so I switched over a while back and here's where I was like I always thought
[02:32:14] that I needed a huge amount of caffeine I drink one of those 300 milligrams things and after like
[02:32:19] an hour I was just dead again I was like I guess I need 600 milligrams wrong I guess I need cocaus
[02:32:25] the opposite of the truth because I actually switched over to these things which are like 95 I think
[02:32:29] I only need one of them and I hit one of those things and it's good maybe I'll drink another one
[02:32:34] if I got something to do in the evening but that's it there's a bunch of things that countered that
[02:32:37] caffeine you know when you've got sugar in there it's like okay cool you're gonna get an insulin
[02:32:41] head you're gonna bring you back down plus we've got thermal broning bromine in here things that
[02:32:45] that help that caffeine in go helps it kick so you don't need to OD on it you last no need
[02:32:54] um hey we also got joint warfare for your joints we got criloil for your overall general goodness
[02:33:02] overall just general goodness in the world gets get yourself some criloil we got discipline
[02:33:07] going a powder form yeah by the way the the jacco pomer the iced tea combination I think on both
[02:33:14] I think on everything it's the best but that's what I like that's cool but I was mixing that up and
[02:33:19] that's a freaking good tastey little treat you pre-judged it to scenario milk protein protein like
[02:33:27] that chocolate peanut butter are you down with this exact your go to are we doing the decoder
[02:33:32] mire technique making pudding or whatever the thing yeah yeah yeah I mean what was the rest I think
[02:33:38] it's just like less milk or whatever but I think he put it in something like peanut butter something
[02:33:45] no yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
[02:33:49] you can make all kinds of tasty things with milk or you can just have milk as is which is also
[02:33:55] a tasty thing the peanut butter milk is a peanut butter is freaking delicious that thing is delicious
[02:34:02] oh yeah I wouldn't drink it just like as a normal treat normal dessert yeah that's the
[02:34:07] dichotomy of milk that dichotomy of milk is your like I want something good for me but I also
[02:34:12] want to taste something delicious I think we have a title for the episode yeah that's my
[02:34:16] sweetest next book so we got more your kids stuff we got tea and by the way this stuff
[02:34:22] you can get the drinks at at wawa east coast east coast all east coast wawa go in there
[02:34:29] clear some shelves support the cause vitamin shop you can get all the supplements
[02:34:33] vitamin shop and we got a bunch of other retail that will be rolling out in the near future
[02:34:39] and and listen any this stuff if you got a jockel fuel dot com we will ship it to you for free
[02:34:45] if you get a subscription because let's face it we know that there's other
[02:34:50] elements out there that are providing you with free shipping and we know that that's kind of cool
[02:34:56] that's a good thing good we don't we're not taking anything away from that but we have to at least match
[02:35:01] that right we have to at least level the playing feel a little bit how do we do that free shipping
[02:35:06] free shipping if you get a subscription to any of these things which is good for you in two
[02:35:10] ways number one you save the shipping costs number two you're not waking up one morning you're out of
[02:35:15] milk you have them for dessert then oh oh you go to go get a milkshake cool can I have a milkshake
[02:35:22] and some type two diabetes up in here jockel fuel dot com check it out what else we got
[02:35:30] origin origin USA dot com american made stuff and for real american made not imported and then
[02:35:40] song and then they saw that the tag on in wherever you know no no grown grandson it's true so
[02:35:48] origin USA with a jeans boots boots jiu jitsu stuff geese if you put on your rift
[02:35:55] g lately and that thing is really good it's not that thing is you don't have one here do you do
[02:36:02] when you this is not it's sort of like it's sort of like what energy drinks what go is to energy
[02:36:08] drinks rift geese is to geese it's that freaking hype good enough you're so frustrated if you
[02:36:14] ever have to put on our normal gig and you'll be mad literally you'll be mad at you that actually
[02:36:19] happened to me I was like I'm kind of mad right you don't want none of that geese rashguards joggers
[02:36:26] if you're a jogger type human which echo trolls happens to be I go in and out for sure
[02:36:31] no yeah a lot of good stuff all american made out origin USA dot com also jocco as a store
[02:36:38] discipline equals freedom shirts hats hoodies okay want you just break into the scenario we have
[02:36:46] the the unfortunate scenario yeah well I you know I didn't find it as unfortunate as maybe
[02:36:53] maybe you did well of course not because you took care of yourself you got to look out for
[02:36:58] number one you took care of yourself so of course you're happy you're over here you've got
[02:37:03] you got a cool shirt that I don't have I incidentally halfway took care of myself
[02:37:09] and it just kind of came to light check in your attention so okay so we got this thing okay on
[02:37:14] jockel store you click on the shirt locker SHURT creative you made it okay
[02:37:22] okay creative yeah so sure actually I didn't make up somebody on twitter oh yeah Instagram
[02:37:28] the Graham someone told me call it the shirt locker I was like yeah you fully approved
[02:37:34] anyway so it's a subscription situation for shirts creative designs you had a question mark
[02:37:42] I feel like there was a question mark in your head about like oh what a creative designs
[02:37:46] yeah well I don't know what that means but they look cool and now you just were wearing the
[02:37:52] other day on the mats of justice and I don't have it and then you explain that I can no longer get it
[02:38:00] that's so anyways if you want to get cool shirts you don't want to miss out yeah so and and that
[02:38:04] actually when you kind of explained a little bit of like yeah that is kind of a thing it's
[02:38:08] it's because it's hard to communicate like hey the shirts are gonna be like cool maybe not what
[02:38:13] you're used to all the time but they will be cool to have whatever maybe that's an indication
[02:38:18] that people don't really trust your assessment of what's cool it's not be that isn't may the
[02:38:23] facts are these it's hard to be like hey guys get this they're gonna be cool and then that's
[02:38:28] sort of it maybe it's just your personality that you like me I think we have this similarity
[02:38:32] we don't like sitting here saying like hey I'm making something and it's gonna be cool
[02:38:36] that yeah so that would be whack that makes sense yeah so I'm gonna say echo's been making
[02:38:40] some stuff and it's cool and if you want to get it then you gotta go get that shirt locker on
[02:38:46] including myself because apparently yes if a cool shirt gets made that actually says discipline
[02:38:51] if you're gonna want it I don't get a version I don't get a pair what is it a copy a copy
[02:38:58] issue an issue I'm getting a huge nothing okay so this this was the thing from the beginning
[02:39:03] if you remember shirt locker you get you get a shirt that month and it's gone you don't we don't
[02:39:08] sell them on the on the store it's gone that's why you sign up for the shirt locker so you can get them
[02:39:12] every month yeah so you can't come to me after everyone's already arrived and be like where's mine
[02:39:17] it's like well again I think we we have to take some always can't blame everyone we have to take
[02:39:22] and ownership and be like hey the ownership is we have failed to convey the level of
[02:39:29] coolness of the shirts that are coming so if you want to if you want some get your shirt locker on
[02:39:35] yeah that's about that yeah so just go store dot com also don't forget about the just the
[02:39:41] year everyday representing on the path it's not an easy path but if you're representing it is
[02:39:48] your heart path yes or something you know and if you're representing let's face it it makes that path
[02:39:52] a little bit more I don't know what you're doing more something enjoyable yeah it's true hey subscribe
[02:39:59] to this podcast if you want to also we have some other podcasts we have the jockel unraveling
[02:40:04] podcasts and the jockel unraveling podcast Darrell and I go deep on some stuff we're actually
[02:40:09] going deep on operation nemesis so if you want to check that out look up jockel unraveling
[02:40:15] well so the grounded podcast got the warrior kid podcast and Darrell has his podcast which is called
[02:40:20] Margar made and you can join us on the underground we're putting out we're putting out more podcast
[02:40:29] how is that even possible we're putting out more podcasts jockel underground listen there's there's
[02:40:34] strange things happening in the podcast world in the whole world censorship random people being
[02:40:42] pulled off of platforms we don't know what's gonna happen and we would be stupid not to have
[02:40:47] some kind of a contingency plans we have a contingency plan of if we need to we don't want to but if we
[02:40:52] need to we can survive some kind of a traumatic platform of end where if they want to start putting
[02:41:03] advert to injecting advertisements into this podcast or whatever we don't want to have that happen so
[02:41:08] we need to have an alternative platform we're building it we don't want to take sponsors and have people
[02:41:13] you know have to do reads I don't want to do that so if you want to help us not do that and you
[02:41:20] want to help us have a contingency ready then you can you can subscribe to jockel underground at
[02:41:26] jockel underground dot com could you imagine jacca doing some basic assoried for like a
[02:41:30] mattress company oh my god here's the in my nightmares or it might even so not mean not to me it
[02:41:37] won't sound awesome but it would be like one of the better reads you've encountered we're not doing
[02:41:41] that we're not doing that all right there you go I've been lying in bed for three hours I can't sleep
[02:41:48] what can I do but some good stuff on there though recently derocupers been a
[02:41:56] graceiness with his presence but yeah but the psychology stuff yeah well that's a cool thing
[02:42:01] it's an opportunity to talk about things that are just outside the purview of actual jockel podcast
[02:42:08] speaking of which I got some good topics coming up on that one I got some good things we're going to go
[02:42:16] get that mischievous look yeah yes also youtube where we do channel yeah we do have a
[02:42:24] youtube channel if you want to see the videos that I am the assistant director on then you can watch
[02:42:30] him and if you like them those the ones I was the assistant director on otherwise echo is in charge
[02:42:34] you know well you know me carry you got some stuff cooking so you know who maybe well allow you
[02:42:39] the assistant director I assume it's I assume it's a slow cooker as usual psychological warfare
[02:42:47] I made an album telling echo how to overcome his moments of weakness and he recorded it and now
[02:42:54] you you can listen to it psychological warfare you people ask me for a alarm clock yeah can just
[02:42:59] get that and you can put it as your alarm that's why we did it MP3 check that out whatever you get
[02:43:03] your MP3's flip side canvas to coat a mire down there making American made stuff to hang on your
[02:43:10] wall keep you on the path got a bunch of books obviously you can go to jockelpodcast.com slash
[02:43:17] books and you can order books from the podcast is this one I don't know if you're going to be
[02:43:22] able to order this one I had this one in my collection it's a used copy I don't know if it's still
[02:43:28] available but it's Armenian Golgotha you can try and get well we'll see if we get if it's available
[02:43:35] we'll get it up there final spin I wrote a book that is a fiction book I can't novel to me just doesn't
[02:43:44] sound cool does it sound cool do you know even especially if I was like I wrote it no that sounds weird right
[02:43:52] yeah it doesn't match it doesn't match does it doesn't match does it so I need to come up with another
[02:43:57] word maybe I'll come up with another word like mulk but for like something that's kickass that's not true
[02:44:02] that's a story mulk and then I can be like oh I wrote a whatever that thing is okay and that way I
[02:44:09] can still you know feel feel good about it yeah that's a good idea because I don't this is not my thing
[02:44:15] like I wrote a novel yeah I mean like technically what's the technical definition of a novel
[02:44:20] there DC oh if you start wanting to differentiate it between a novella and a novel it gets very
[02:44:27] hairy sometimes maybe let's say a hundred pages I think it's pretty I think it's pretty well you're
[02:44:32] talking about the difference between extreme ownership yeah no I am talking about I'm talking about what's a
[02:44:36] novel yes it's like category have you ever what's a cool novel that you've read or you've read
[02:44:41] blood and reading okay that's the only cool not well I'm maybe there's some other ones but yeah blood
[02:44:47] but you call blood-mrading a novel yeah okay then I guess I'm down with a kind of
[02:44:52] because blood-mrading it's better yeah but then the next step is to call yourself a novel is
[02:44:56] you ready for that because I wrote a novel writing line with freaking blood-mrading
[02:45:04] I'm a novelist who wrote a novel the the story is called final spin it's available for pre-order
[02:45:10] right now but look the publisher's thinking he's gonna buy a book by this knuckle dragger
[02:45:14] we're gonna we're gonna show him who's gonna buy a book by this knuckle driver
[02:45:18] leadership strategy in tactics field manual we got the code the evaluation protocol
[02:45:22] discipline your freedom field manual brand new versions out we're the warrior kid four three two and one
[02:45:27] Mikey in the dragons talked about that a little bit with during Peter's the other day
[02:45:33] about face by hack worth I wrote the forward for the new version and then the old school OG
[02:45:38] extreme ownership and the economy of leadership ash on front i believe your ship
[02:45:42] consultancy we solve problems through leadership you can go to ashlamfront.com for details on that
[02:45:47] EF online revamped it's online leadership training it's outstanding I'm on their live all the
[02:45:54] time interacting if you want to come and ask me a question go there
[02:45:59] master 2021 listen we are executing it's in full execution mode there's no stopping this train
[02:46:05] may 25th and 26 in Orlando if you want to go go immediately to extreme ownership.com
[02:46:15] because now that people realize we're in go mode it's gonna sell out so if you want to go may 25th
[02:46:21] and 26 come come and get it man it's two days it's it is granular and it is the pragmatic
[02:46:30] leadership skills that you are going to take from that event bring them back and it's going to
[02:46:35] have an impact in your world so Orlando may 25th and 26 Phoenix August 17th and 18th and Vegas
[02:46:44] October 28th and 29th you have battlefield pay attention for those in the future I'll let you know
[02:46:50] one of the next one is scheduled they're outstanding and we do them at various battle fields
[02:46:57] and if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help with their families
[02:47:02] Goldstar families check out Mark Lee's mom mom and Lee she's got a charity organization and if you
[02:47:08] want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mighty warriors dot org and if you want
[02:47:14] more of my wretched reading or you need more of echoes irritating inquiries or you just you just want to
[02:47:24] hear more of derals pedantic postulations you can find us on the inner webs the novelist coming
[02:47:31] out there you go on Twitter on Instagram the gram and on Facebook echoes at echo trails
[02:47:39] deral is at margar made and I am at jockel willink and as you heard in this episode there is evil in
[02:47:46] the world and there are those people that stand up against evil and some of those people many of
[02:47:54] those people are our military service men women out there around the world fighting to keep evil at bay
[02:48:01] and at home our police and law enforcement fire fighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers
[02:48:06] and correction officers and border patrol and secret service and all the first responders all out
[02:48:10] there doing the same thing so thanks to all of you out there in uniform protecting us and
[02:48:17] everyone else remember this evil does exist and it's out there it's a mob it is a frenzy
[02:48:30] it is pent up frustration and anger it is jealousy and it is envy and it is resentment
[02:48:39] and it is out there and it is also in all of us and it is up to all of us to fight it
[02:48:50] so keep on fighting and until next time this is deral and echo and jockel out