Episode 360 - The Armenian Genocide: Part 4

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe.

With me is Tom and Nate.

As always,

still though cold open here because that's too dark even for me.

Fellas, how are you doing?

What did you do over the weekend that isn't as grinding and depressing as what we've been talking about?

Give me something happy.

I turned 30.

Uh, on oh, that's sad.

Welcome to the club.

I had a really fun birthday party.

Um, did karaoke with my friends.

Uh, it was fun, it was fun.

Welcome, I'd say welcome to your 30s, but I'm 40 now, so unless you go by the like the 20, the 21st century didn't start until 2001 rules.

I'm still actually in my 40s now.

There's a big four at the tens columns.

I I got a couple more years.

I turned 37 in June.

So,

two days after our festival appearance, there's your plug moving on.

I'm very excited to be unkilled right now.

I'm going to start wearing socks and sandals, which I kind of already do.

I also do that.

Yeah.

I definitely do that.

I'm letting my dog out because I don't want to put shoes on.

Sometimes I worry about it, you know, becoming decrepit and old and isolated.

And then I read some of the things my wife finds on Instagram where she shares this thing where this dude who's a doctor and this black dude in America, one of his patients was an 87-year-old black guy who, from what I can tell from what's inferred, was there to get Viagra.

And in the middle of the consultation, the patient's phone rang.

It was a scam call.

And he just picked it up and said, chocolate's the name, money's the game, run it.

And then I'm like,

and I was like, apparently you can be a fucking badass when you're 87.

Fuck yeah.

Life goals, baby.

So for me, over the weekend,

I cleaned up.

One of my wife's friends was in town, and they took our daughter out and walked around like around the Red Lake and and stuff.

And I cleaned the house a ton.

I went for a run and then we went to dinner and we went to the, like, there's this, there's a fondue place that's really good, but it's funny because they literally have a dude doing like yodeling and alp horn playing and playing like Swiss music, which Geneva wasn't part of Switzerland until like the early 19th century.

And all of that stuff, while there is that kind of stuff in like the French-speaking parts that are like really alpine, like Valet, that's not really...

That seems more German.

The best way I could describe it is with all the affection in the world.

It's like you're in California and there's like a Guido-themed restaurant.

Like, that's the best way I could think of it.

Or the opposite.

There's like, you're in New York and there's like an extremely, I don't know, like humble county themed restaurant where everyone has to say hella and it's just weed everywhere.

But it's nice, though.

Food was great.

So yeah, I had a good time.

And then Sunday, I did at least get a nice walk-in.

I wanted to run, but I just, I just felt fucking brain dead.

And now I'm.

Back on it, back on it to learn about the Armenian genocide.

I went out and got tulip pilled.

I saw some nice tulips because it's that time of the year here in the Netherlands.

It was 21 on Saturday, dude.

It was so nice.

Yeah, it was really, it was really warm.

That's like, it's in the 70s.

I don't know the exact calculation, but it was warm and like not a cloud in the sky.

It was phenomenal.

It wasn't as warm here, but it was still nice enough where all of us Dutch or Dutch adjacent iguanas migrated outside to stand in the sun and do nothing.

And then I started watching Ted Lasso, and that's been a joy.

You know,

it's been nice to watch something optimistic and stupid.

We're moving all our investments away from Americans and investing solely in tune-ups.

I hear it's a real growth commodity.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a bubble that certainly won't burst.

Ironically, I did start buying European-made workout supplements in order to dodge incumbent tariffs.

But other than that,

it was a nice weekend.

So now that we've started this episode at a high, I have to bring us back down to our low, and that is part four, our conclusion of our four-week-long long armenian genocide series uh and for people who uh don't subscribe to the show on patreon over on our side series uh ani and i are going to be talking about other parts of this that just couldn't make it into the main narrative here so we could kind of keep it in a length that is doable for the show So that is where you're going to catch a ton of other subjects that could have been Tetris, the column side series, and all sorts of other stuff over there.

So, if you're listening to this and you know of something that happened during the genocide that we did not cover, Armenians, I'm looking at you, it's going to be over there.

Also, small, not necessarily correction, but clarification.

Jarbakir is also sometimes known as, by its Armenian name, Tigranikert.

I did not call it that for the small fact that nobody else calls it that, and nobody would have any idea what I'm talking about.

So, it wasn't necessarily an error, it was more of a clarification for the general consumption of this show.

So please, please just leave me alone.

And when we left you last time through the spring and the fall, the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire had been driven from their homes on the orders from the Ottoman government, fed into kill zones throughout the country, and slaughtered by designated death squads alongside Ottoman and German soldiers.

The few that managed to survive so far found themselves then stranded in the Syrian desert.

Now, when we talk about genocide, there are several parts of this crime, so to speak.

And I'm not talking about standing in front of the ICC or whatever and facing the legal crime of genocide.

That is something completely different.

I'm talking about the historical definition as laid out by Raphael Lemkin.

Obviously, the one that sticks in everyone's mind, my own included, maybe some of our listeners, maybe you guys too, is the mass murder aspect of genocide.

However, that in itself and by itself does not make a a genocide.

Obviously, we talked about before intent being the most important part of this, and that is still true.

But the purpose of committing a genocide is to destroy a people, to wipe them out.

And with them goes any hint that they ever existed.

After all, it's never a genocidaire's goal to proudly stand on a pile of corpses and declare to the world what they did and who they killed and what they stole from them.

And the Armenian genocide is no different.

As the main body of the Armenian people were displaced and killed, laws, edicts, decrees, both made in public and behind closed doors, began to erase the history of the Armenian people from the highlands, from the towns, from the villages, and even the cities that Armenians had lived in since the beginning of recorded history.

The names of places were changed, not only streets, buildings, and villages, but entire cities, provinces, and mountains.

Armenian churches were burned down, blown up, and disfigured, so nobody would ever know there was a church there, or if it was a church, who went there.

armenian schools are destroyed mass burnings of armenian literature were carried out anywhere that literature could be found even graveyards with their easily identifiable armenian stonework and crosses were destroyed the number of armenian religious sites in the ottoman empire went from well over 2 000 to fewer than 50 and those were generally left in ruins and later restored and even those few only survived by being converted into something else some armenian villages were destroyed so thoroughly that not even the settlers that were coming in afterwards bothered to move into them.

Across the highlands, even today, which are of course now known as Eastern Anatolia by most people for the exact reasons that I'm talking about now, hundreds of places once lived in by thousands of Armenians for generations remain in ruins, ignored, and unspoken of.

In every other place, settlers moved into their new towns, their new names, and the Armenians were never spoken of ever again.

The history of those places they now live in was forgotten either by personal choice or government decree.

However, there were other parts of the Armenian cultural identity still standing, that being surviving Armenians.

No genocide is ever complete.

There's always survivors.

And like we said, most men above the age of 12 or about waist high were killed outright.

Women were enslaved and children, boys and girls, were taken.

Due to the way that identity existed, back then, women could be sold as wives or sex slaves, depending on which way you look at it.

It's the slavery part, and they would eventually be forced to have children by their new masters.

Because of the way things were thought of back then, any children that these women had would not be Armenian.

This was fine because the child's father would be a Muslim Turk, Kurd, Circassian, or other.

And that hypothetical child would then be raised with a Turkish name in a Muslim household, and they would never have any idea of this secret mom or secret grandmother ever again.

And it's for that reason today that's thought that several million Turkish people have Armenian great-grandmothers, but they'll never have any idea.

That secret of their great-grandmother first started as some kind of secret knowledge never to be spoken of, and then faded over time as the family grew older, family trees grew longer, and time wore on.

For that reason, that it became something of an internet meme.

for Turks to discover their genetic makeup was not Turkish at all through places like in me because I mean Armenians were not the only people of this habitat Greeks Assyrians Yazidis people like that millions of people found out that oh there's a blood lie 23and me became like a psyop by the Armenians and Greeks to destabilize the great Turkish state that is a conspiracy theory that is real Yes, I have seen that said that like due to the Armenian lobby that they're like redoing this with genetic revanchism.

It's absolutely mad.

I don't know the reasons, explicit reasons why I can guess, and I'm sure you can guess, but like, for example, 23andMe and those kinds of DNA testing things are illegal in Israel unless it's like a court order for paternity.

And I bring it up just to be like, I'm kind of surprised that given how autocratic and top-down Turkey is under Erdogan, that like they didn't just ban it outright.

I don't know, did they?

Not that I'm aware of, no.

From time to time on Reddit, I'll still see someone post something like, oh, my family was Turkish, is supposed to be Turkish.

I just found out I'm Greek in Armenian.

God, what the fuck do I do now?

However, for others, men, women, and children, they were given a choice, though not much of one.

Some Ottoman commanders believed, especially the pan-Islamic ones, that the Armenians by the book could not be killed outright.

It was un-Islamic.

They need to be given the choice to convert first.

change their name to something Turkish, which I personally don't remember from the Quran, and that would save their lives.

And tens of thousands did do this.

Possibly more.

We'll never know for sure.

And I am not here to judge anybody for that choice.

How hard is it to choose survival over a belief?

I mean, I don't know.

It's not me.

Nobody should judge them for it.

The adults that didn't make this choice suffer the same fate as everyone else we've talked about.

And the children who refused to accept this.

were thrown out of orphanages to die of starvation and exposure.

Sometimes they were turned over to those doctors who would then do those experiments to them that we already talked about.

We talked before about day-to-day Armenian life.

Small to you know mid-sized to sometimes large-scale businesses and institutions all run by Armenians.

They own land, they were merchants, they were traders.

Some were ministers in the government a few years before this.

Armenians were a normal functioning member of the empire until

this started.

Like in every other genocide we've ever talked about or ever will talk about, depending on how many more we talk about, one of the main drivers, the main motivators, the main goals is always financial.

Remember back to our other episodes.

If you're Muslim and poor and you were found wanting in any meaningful way, the government's only answer was, we would love to do that for you, but the Armenians stole it.

Now with the Armenians out of the way, everything was left behind to be collected, for lack of a better term.

Official government bodies were created to detail lists of everything being stolen and assess it for its worth.

The temporary deportation law literally demanded Armenians do this themselves.

You categorize your own belongings and give them to the government officials.

This was under the guise that, oh, so it could be easily returned to you later, when in reality, it was just to make their job easier.

This just feels like so deeply insidious.

It is.

I'm reminded of events that, you know, take place a few decades after this where so much of the kind of methodical process when it came to death camps, you know, in Nazi Germany or in the, you know, occupied territories in Eastern Europe were touted and sold to victims as like, well, this is just to make sure you can get clean things, you can get your stuff back, you can get a shower, you can do all these things because the idea was to make people cling to hope until the last possible second.

It makes people easier to control.

And this sounds identical, frankly.

And we don't have to go that far back in time to see this.

In the 90s, we talked about Rwanda, the same thing happened.

That financial motivation is always there.

It is an inextricable part of any genocide.

Well, I mean, like, what happened in Srebrenica was literally they were like, we need to find the people we want to, we just want to talk to all the men and boys so we can like do interviews and figure out because we only want to, we only want to find, punish the, the wrongdoers.

And then it's like, that was the plausible

separation.

Separating men and boys from their families.

And then, you know, they killed like 7,000 people.

And a part of that deportation law regarding property read, quote, leave all of your belongings, your furniture, your beddings, your artifacts.

Close your shops and businesses with everything inside.

Your doors will be sealed with special stamps.

On your return, you'll be given everything you left behind.

Do not sell your property or any expensive item.

Buyers and sellers alike will be liable for legal action.

Make a list of everything you own, including livestock, and give it to a specified official so all of your things can be returned to you later.

You have 10 days to comply.

Jesus Christ.

Fuck me, man.

What I'm surprised by is that, like, I realize it's a translation, but it's phrased in such a way as to be as, like, clinical and methodical, but also to, like, once again, to really, you know, crank the hope dial.

Yeah.

Make it sound like it's just an administrative thing.

It's a minor temporary inconvenience.

And this actually leads to something darkly comedic in a way later on, where Armenians who do survive this and they do return home now all have meticulously documented, like officially stamped government paperwork saying where their property is.

And they go to the settlers who have moved into their home, like, I have paperwork from the Ottoman Empire saying, this is my house.

This is my business.

And they're like, oh,

yeah.

You weren't supposed to come back.

And of course, because modern Turkey takes the place of the Ottoman Empire, they empower the settlers so people don't get their stuff back.

But like, they kind of accidentally created the most bureaucratic hell for people in a way.

It's like whoopsie, but the eye doesn't have a dot on top of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The most valuable properties and belongings would be saved for Turks, while other things in descending orders of value would be sold off to Muslim minorities.

This genocidal redistribution of wealth became a centerpiece of the Ottomans' economic plan, as it always does through genocide.

It did with the Nazis, it did with Rwanda, it did with Sepridica.

And in the Ottoman Empire, this became known as the national economy was the official title for it.

And there's a lot of other parts of it as well, but a huge part of it was the stealing of Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian wealth and then redistributing it to their Muslim population.

With Talat going so far as to issue very specific directions as to how the Ministry of Internal Affairs would monitor and organize everything.

And in case you're wondering, yes, I do have that.

Quote, the movable property left by Armenians should be conserved for long-term preservation, for the sake of an increase of Muslim businesses in our country.

Companies need to establish strictly made up of only Muslims.

Movable property should be given to them under suitable condition that will guarantee the business's steady consolidation.

The founder, the management, and the representative should all be chosen from honorable leaders and the elite to allow tradesmen and agriculturalists to participate in its dividends.

The vouchers need to be half a lira or one lira and registered to their names to preclude that the capital falls in foreign hands.

And foreign in this specific manner means Armenian.

The growth of entrepreneurship in the minds of Muslim people needs to be monitored, and this endeavor and the results of its implementation need to be reported to the ministry step by step.

Oh,

fucking hell.

It's just so grim.

What's interesting here is Halat is the Minister of the Interior, right?

He's effectively the engineer of the genocide more than anyone else.

But when you compare it to other genocides, people that you think of, when you think of engineering a genocide, he is so much more involved in the minutiae of the step-by-step genocidal project than any of the other ones, at least as verifiable by official documents.

Just like, yeah, the transfer of ownership and stuff, like it just is so grim how systematized it all was.

And like how just every single step was documented, systematized, and it's just like, yeah, you'll get your stuff back.

Not really, though.

And in case you're wondering if this has gone away, it hasn't.

There's lawsuits to this day of Armenians, of course, family members of survivors and victims, trying to get their property back.

And one of those places is Insirlik Air Base, ran by the U.S.

Air Force.

That was originally an Armenian family's plot of land stolen by the Turkish government during the genocide and then leased back to the United States government and is now today used to stockpile America's nuclear weapons.

Yeah, so IntraLik, the reason why basically Turkey is in NATO is so that America could have, I mean, more than anything else, so that America could have an Air Force base where they had nuclear weapons pointed very close.

Back in the day, that was necessary.

I wouldn't argue necessary.

I don't mean necessary insofar as geopolitically.

I mean technologically, it was necessary to to have the weapons.

Of course, I don't support this.

No, but basically, like even in the era, the early era of intercontinental ballistic missiles, effectively, the main plan for deploying stuff was bombers.

And in this case, you had, you know, it's like a three-hour flight from Istanbul to Moscow.

So you can imagine that Interlik is further east, and it's a short flight.

So this was always a thing.

I mean, there's an argument to be made that, I mean, based on historical records and some of the minutes of meetings, that Nikite Khrushchev basically was like, well, these motherfuckers have all these missiles in Turkey, and it's pretty close.

What if we got even closer and we got to Cuban pieces of shit?

We're going to fuck with them.

That's exactly what happened.

Yeah.

It's not even like evidence points in this direction.

It's an A to B thing.

So the perfidious Turk apparently caused the Cuban missile crisis.

And there's also like a saying, because of, of course, Turkey's, let's say, problematic geopolitical stances in most things, that inserlik is like called like the hostages uh because like turkey houses nuclear weapons america still wants them there for some reason even though they oppose to turkey in many things so yeah long story short inserlik is built and stolen armenian territory uh and there has been a court case ongoing for many many many years uh regarding because obviously it's um turkey considers the land its legal property and leases it to the United States, where the Armenian family is like, you should be leasing it from us and paying us.

Of course, that hasn't happened because that would be too funny, honestly.

But yeah, it's still caught in, I don't even want to say a legal limbo because that would require there to be some form of restitution or closure in any of this.

It's more of running your face into a brick wall and hoping the outcome changes.

But yeah, if you're listening in there in the U.S.

Air Force and you served at Incerlik, that's now something you know about one of your duty stations.

Yeah, it's like, you know, we're going to solve all these problems.

We'll return Diego Garcia to the Chagos Islanders.

We'll return Interlik Air Base to the Armenian family that owned it.

We'll solve it by rebasing all of our stuff in a completely neutral and non-problematic area, northern Cyprus.

Yeah,

it would be even funnier if instead of returning it to the Armenian family, the United States returned it to Armenia.

So it just becomes Armenian territory in Turkey.

Yeah, at the Armenian Air Force, which, if Mebri serves, includes four jets total.

Now gets all of Inserlik?

That's my new political ideology.

Return Insurlik to the Armenian Air Force.

Weird exclaves are kind of my thing.

So yeah, I'm on board with this.

It's also something of a regional flavor.

Now, in the areas where Armenians were deported to and managed to survive, that being mostly in Syria, Talat and Enver made sure to lay out strict rules that only a certain amount of Armenians were allowed to live in certain areas altogether.

They were never allowed to be even a large large minority.

They were not allowed to build churches, build Armenian schools, use the Armenian language, nothing.

Any deviation from these rules, most importantly, if the Armenian population of any specific area in Syria ever rose over 5 to 10%, depending on who the officer in charge was, that would end up with the special organization or the army being sent in to bring the population back down.

Talat even calls this a, quote, culling.

All of this, everything I'm talking about, is a process collectively collectively known as cultural genocide.

The destruction of cultural heritage.

It could be religious, linguistic, social, anything that ties a group of people to their indigenous culture, or if not indigenous, generally accepted culture of the time to the point it can be reasonably forgotten.

The goal was not for people to remember the destruction of the Armenians.

It was to make it so the Armenians never existed at all.

That is the goal of genocide.

The goal of a genocide is not to stand on a pile of corpses, fist pumping a victory.

It's to make it so these group of people, these others, whoever they may be, were never there.

I mean, wasn't that more or less explicitly Hitler's rationale about

the Holocaust?

I mean, effectively, there was the famous quote about, I don't know if this is a problem.

After all, who remembers the Armenian people?

Yeah.

That is a quote that is heavily debated.

Yeah.

Depending on who you talk to, he said it during a speech in Ober-Salzburg.

It is even in the Armenian Museum, the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan.

It is of dubious.

Sure.

It's of dubious known factual correctness, let's say.

It is not confirmed nor unconfirmed.

Yeah.

Apocryphal stuff like that

has a life of its own.

So I don't want to ascribe too much importance to it.

But I think the notion there of, like, even if people did acknowledge that it happened, it was so, as far as we are, we understand it from what we've heard so far in the series, and also just as what I've known from reading about it, is effectively unpunished in every way.

Exactly.

So, they did, you know, in a sense, it's sort of like the notion of like, what real penalty would we pay for this?

It's already been established that you can.

That is a fact of that is certainly part of it.

And there's also, it goes in the Nazis' weird relationship with Kemal Ataturk, the Young Turk movement, and the CUP is really, really deep.

A lot of early Nazi groups were pretty inspired by Atatürk's rise to power and his nationalism and things of that nature, which makes sense.

A lot of the earliest Nazis were in the Ottoman Empire running this shit.

And that actually brings us to what we're talking about next.

Because in order to look at the process in which the CUP was enforcing on Armenians, we should look no further than the diary of German vice consul Max von Stuber Richtner.

Now, Richter was a voice within the German government that objected to the Ottoman policies, but saw them up close and personal nonetheless.

After several meetings with Talatin Enver, he wrote, quote, the inhabitants who are neither Mohammedan, and for people who don't know, that is the old-timey word for Muslim, or Turkish, should be made to become so by force.

And if that is not possible, annihilated.

And it's interesting that a German would use this word in 1915.

Side note here though, Richter, despite standing up somewhat for the Armenians and objecting to the ongoing genocide, was one of the literal very first members of the Nazi party after Adolf Hitler took over.

He was such a hardcore Nazi, he died while marching literally arm in arm with Hitler during the Beer Hall push.

And he is actually almost certainly, like if you read about, not saying to read Mein Kampf, but if you read what Hitler writes about this period, he says a man saved his life by pulling him out of the way of the incoming fire.

That was him.

Jesus.

Part of Mein Kampf is literally dedicated to him.

People have layers.

I mean, if you remember back years ago, we talked about the events of Nanking and the Nazi Batman, as we nicknamed him.

The man is a hardcore Nazi and looked at the crimes the Japanese are doing and was horrified.

He stopped the murder of multiple families by literally getting in between them and their death squads.

While also, again, being a Nazi and and fully knowing what was the Nazis were doing.

People have lairs like Shrek

I mean I think about this too that yeah you'll find that it's just one of the more frustrating but also in my opinion kind of futile notions is that someone who can acknowledge the wrongness in an action committed by others or even onto the group of which they themselves are a member will then be sort of blessed with like King Midas touch of empathy and understanding and that same kind of like ironclad commitment to the principle that this shouldn't happen.

It's just unfortunately that's not been the case.

I think you can read through history and find that to be true.

You can also, in my life experience, have seen this.

It's unfortunate because you can see someone who so obviously gets it, who so obviously understands that this is wrong and it's an abomination.

And yet, even if they're not an

ardent participant in the same kind of abuse and atrocity later on, they will typically become the kind of person who equivocates it away and tries to be like, oh, it's just complicated.

Or, no, you know, like, I'm conflicted, or, oh, I kind of don't like it.

But, you know, just sometimes you just have to do hard things.

It's like actually, that does come up here shortly, unfortunately.

I do want to point out something very similar.

The Nazi Batman from the Nan King series and him

and a lot of the Germans that opposed what was happening in in the Ottoman Empire, but would go on to be hardcore Nazis.

And that was the difference between ideology and seeing it firsthand.

A lot of people are terrifyingly comfortable with violence being done either on their behalf or in their name until they see it.

And that is, I mean, famously, Himmler got visibly ill while seeing a mass shooting, despite the fact he was an engineer of the Holocaust, right?

The most disgusting, violent people on earth don't necessarily want to look it in the eye.

And I think that's these people are seeing thousands of dead Armenians on the side of the road and like, well, that is uncouth.

I think as well, there's an element of for people like this who, you know, their beliefs are so much wrapped up in their ideologies.

Like when you encounter something that isn't explained by the ideology you already subscribe to, it's kind of like the human element kind of takes over.

Like Nazi Batman is like, well, you know, we didn't consider the Chinese.

So I don't know how to react.

Yeah.

And Richter was one of the few, let's call them for a lack of a better term here, decent Germans in the Ottoman Empire at the time.

And what I mean by that specifically is a German government official and open objection to the genocide that their government was helping commit.

Fritz Bronsart von Schellendorf was a German officer and chief of staff for the Ottoman army.

Remember, like we talked about before, a lot of these high-ranking Ottoman army positions are filled by Germans.

There's not a single meeting that the Ottoman government would have had regarding this entire genocide that Schellendorf as chief of staff would not have been there for.

In my opinion, Schellendorf's name should be held alongside Talat and Vernjabal as architects of the destruction of the Armenian people.

And Schellendorf, despite everything that happens later and the wide-scale denial of the Armenian genocide by both the Ottoman and then Turkish state and the German Empire and then the Weimar Republic, he never hid shit.

He wrote openly about it in his own defense in his autobiography in 1919.

And he does it, I swear to God, like this.

Quote, like the Jew, the Armenian outside of his homeland is a parasite, absorbing the well-being of the country in which he is established.

This also results in hatred that has been directed against him in a medieval manner.

as an unwanted people and has led to his murder.

In case you're wondering, yes, he does become a Nazi.

Yeah, big fucking shocker.

I'm laughing, I mean, darkly, about the other guy who I apologize for not remembering, the man who human shielded himself during the Beer Hall put because he didn't live to see the next phases of what this ideology he was supporting would create.

I'm just laughing at this guy, like even in being a fucking Nazi and being pro-Hitler in the 20s, retaining that disgust and outrage at what happened in Armenia or in the Ottoman Empire to Armenians and just being like,

I swear swear upon my, you know, my eternal soul, this will be the most shameful thing that people will associate with Germany in the 20th century.

And being like, whoops, whoops.

Then there's also Otto von Feldman.

He's chief of operations in the Turkish Supreme Army Command.

He was a close friend and advisor to Talat and chided other officials who thought the mass murder thing was the wrong thing to do.

He, like Schellendorf, was in every meeting that these things would have been talked about, and he personally commanded the Ottoman First Army in the field, which meant he would have personally commanded multiple genocidal acts using his Turkish soldiers.

Feldman described the genocide, Nate, like you said before, hard but beneficial.

I'm very uncomfortable when this kind of thing happens, not as a joke, but rather because of the fact that like trying to formulate that turn of phrase, I was seeking for, you know, what I would describe as like the most craven and self-justifying way of explaining it, explaining it away, of making, making the problems disappear.

And I think when you confront a historical record of it that's just so unself-consciously shameless like this,

I don't know, it just makes you feel very

powerless in terms of how eternal this degree of just like cowardice and self-justification seems to be.

I mean, speaking without any irony here, because this is this series, this is not the fun jokes chaos mode of our normal show, it kind of instigates a comparable, but maybe opposite hardness, if that makes sense, to say, I have to steal myself against the inevitable cowardice and betrayal of so many people who obviously know better.

Yeah.

I think history, unfortunately, I'm not one of those people that thinks history rhymes or anything, or repeats, rather,

but I do think that is a common thread through every crime we've ever talked about.

And unfortunately, that will continue being a common thread, whether it be, you know, the banality of evil,

people

not wanting to stick out

or not wanting to say something because it doesn't affect them personally.

And I should point out there is famously a German who does stand up against the Armenian genocide.

He's a very young German military medic named Armin Wagner.

And he's one of the reasons why we have any pictures of the genocide at all.

And that's going to be a story we're going to talk about over on our history of Armenia series.

So there are Germans who directly get involved to try to stop this.

However, the German government, specifically the imperial government up to the Kaiser himself, have blacklisted and censored any news about these massacres that the German army is taking part in.

So they're not being reported in the German press and they're being kept very, very secret behind the impenetrable barrier of German militantism as the time.

I mean, for example, the head of the Ottoman Railroad Department is a German.

He's signing off on all of the mass deportations that are using the railroads.

He effectively, indirectly, but directly, because he knew what they were going to be used for, signed off on the death warrant of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.

Colmar Freyher von der Goltz is probably the strangest German involved in any of this.

He was one of the main reformers of the Ottoman military to Germanic standard, for lack of a better term.

Not that he succeeded very well in that, but he had so many Ottoman officers go through his training that they became known as the Goltsch Generation.

And these are the same men who'd gone to lead the young Turk revolution, become the backbone of the CUP, and directly command and commit the genocide in the field.

When the CUP came to power, he supported them entirely and advised them that, you know, you need to prep the next generation for this and start nationalist youth groups to influence them, lest they become soft because Goltz believed that the next generation of Germans were falling into this trap.

Christ.

As far as anyone can tell, he was the one who came up with the first detailed plan to deport Armenians in the case of a war against Russia, to deport them from the eastern border.

But specifically, in his plan, obviously, he did not chart out a mass murder.

Instead, he called for a relocation.

But because he's a fucking idiot, he did not realize that this is the only way relocation ever ends this way in this manner.

He never served in the German colonies, so he didn't directly take part in the Namibian genocide, which would have taken place about 10 years before this, but he certainly knew people who did, I will say.

Joe, it's like, like you said earlier, like the distance people have from violence makes them so much more comfortable with it.

And like in a kind of logistics role, you're kind of, oh, it's deportations.

And he's thinking about this in like a very practical, logistical sense, which helps him not confront the fact that, yeah, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die because of what you are doing right now.

Yeah, if you bury the details in bland logistics,

you don't see it.

You don't, if what you're talking about doesn't have a face, you can't look it in the eye.

You know what I mean?

So fast forward a few years when his Ottoman government begins enacting his plans, he's horrified of the murder, the death marches, the lack of preparations made in these camps that aren't really real for the relocated Armenians.

He's shocked to see his mass deportation program turned into genocide, and he threatened to resign if the murders didn't stop.

Obviously, the murders continued, and he did not resign because in his diary, he wrote that his Prussian honor cannot take it because they were in the middle of a war, of course.

He's also the only one of these guys to not go on to become a hardcore Hitlerite, but that's because he died in 1916 via shitting himself to death from typhus.

But we can assume he probably would have due to the fact that he had already formed multiple right-wing German youth groups and believed that nationalism was the only hope of stopping the German youth from becoming soft.

But yeah, he dies horribly in 1916 instead.

Joe, did you just say about 10 minutes ago that history doesn't rhyme?

Sometimes it does, fair enough.

It doesn't repeat.

It rhymes.

It has similar bars, if you will.

History samples off each other.

We're stealing flows right now.

History is one big mashup.

It's one big Diplo concert.

It's one big anime music video.

Yeah, it's one gigantic girl talk set.

I was going to ask you, Joe, do you find that there is any kind of like emphasis or effort to indict or ascribe blame to the Germans because of this?

It depends.

Historically or like within sort of the cultural memory

of Armenians, you know, whether or not they're Western Armenians who are descendants of the genocide or Eastern Armenians who are not.

Well,

it depends.

And Vaja and Dadarian wrote a very good book about it.

You can find it in the show notes.

I believe it might be out of print, but you can still find it on the internet or in some old bookstores.

That's how I found mine in some old bookstore in Fresno.

But in academia, I would say, yes, it's very well known to the general historical narrative.

popular narrative, if you will, absolutely not.

And you can look at it that way for like Armenians.

i can speak for myself and other armenians that i know of course when we when we talk about the genocide we only talk about the turks in the ottoman yeah and just below that the the the kurdish tribesmen who who helped commit it the germans people know about it uh if memory serves me correctly it's been a while since i've been in the museum it's not even in the museum but it should be more popularly known for example we'll talk about later and we've done an episode about it in the past the story of sogmon tetlerian and the assassination of talat pasha and the one of the reasons why he gets away with it in a German court is the German authorities were terrified that he was just going to start roasting German complicitcy.

It's not even the right term.

Direct involvement.

Yeah.

And there's been a fair amount of good things written about it that go into it in very, very good detail.

But the German state or politically, it's not something that anybody ever talks about.

Whenever anybody tries to get the genocide recognized, it's always the recognition of the the destruction of the Armenian people by the Ottoman government.

And the Germans are completely left out of it.

It shouldn't be.

Just like recently, a couple of years ago, the German government kind of sort of did reparations for Namibia, but didn't call them reparations while accepting responsibility for the genocide.

That's probably the best case scenario for any genocided people, in my opinion.

But yeah, there's been no official recognition as far as I'm aware.

Nobody really pushes for it.

It's unfortunate.

It's one of those things that kind of gets brushed on the rug.

And same could be said for other genocides.

I mean, a lot of collaborator states and national ethos, if you will, around the Holocaust is kind of sanded away to blame the Nazis.

In Rwanda, nobody ever blames the French.

I was thinking about something related to the Holocaust, but kind of in the opposite direction, which is that this is something that no historian, no credible historian, and certainly no, like even outside of a kind of a fringe element, it's not particularly, it's not acknowledged in any way, but there is a hard, hard line, kind of eliminationist tendency amongst israeli settlers to try to argue that actually the holocaust happened because the grand movety of jerusalem gave hitler the idea and this is false obviously ibn al-Husseini was extremely anti-Semitic and did not want

Jewish settlers coming to what was then mandatory Palestine.

But the idea that Hitler wouldn't have had the idea and wouldn't have done it otherwise, especially considering the sort of...

He's been writing about it for many, many years.

And also the smoking gun is that al-Husseini went to Berlin and met with Hitler, but like they had already started building the death camps in Eastern Europe by this point.

So it's an absurd allegation to make, but it's one of those things where you see sometimes, like you said, like an oversimplification or a kind of like an idea of shifting it, of directing it and saying, actually, if people have acknowledged

this crime took place, we can somehow impugn our enemies through it.

And in the case of, I don't know if there is like any kind of profound or or observable like antipathy amongst Armenians towards modern Germany.

I don't know of it.

You would know better than that.

Not that I'm aware of.

But had there been, if there were, you could imagine that this might be more of a thing.

But yeah, like I think it from what you've said so far, it seems pretty hard to argue that even if this guy gave them an idea, it doesn't matter.

They would have found a way to do it anyway because it's what they wanted to do in the first place.

He was complicit, but the idea that like it was going to happen with or without the Germans, I would just argue it happened more completely because the Germans, to be completely honest, one of the main reasons why Germany is not more brought into the conversation conversation is because the German state after that is not attacking Armenia anymore.

I mean, obviously, World War II happens and Armenia is part of the Soviet Union, but that's something completely different.

Yeah.

The German body politic, the German nation state doesn't become a geopolitical threat to the Armenians constantly after this.

So the Germans, they fall down the list somewhat.

But also, I think it's like interesting in terms of like historiography that when you look at crimes of a national scale committed by countries, quite often the like those involving collaboration kind of skate away scot scot-free generally yeah yeah like if you look at um some of like the involvement of the baltic states in world war ii the history of that has kind of like been buried quite a lot you know the forest nazis all that sort of stuff you'll find your history is quite fungible when i'm building a national ethos Yeah, I would say this too, because one of the things that I just see so often is kind of like the

sort of default joke about the country I happen to live in is the Nazi gold thing and the truth is is that like there's two outsides of that and one of them is that they traded gold for other foreign currency because the Nazi government once the war started needed foreign currency lots of other European countries did this too it's just that every other one besides Switzerland got invaded and had a fascist government installed and so like the fact that Switzerland didn't I mean there could be certain arguments made about Swiss collaboration so far as like turning away Jewish refugees 100% no no and I was going to say also that like some of the element too when in talking about Nazi gold is because like they fought really hard to not disclose the ownership of bank accounts of purloined Nazi whoops

and also another thing too I'd say really quickly is that they obviously were also on the list of countries Hitler wanted to invade it's just that he had a slight disagreement on the Eastern Front that kind of precluded that yeah so I mean it would have happened otherwise and then you'd have a different story to tell but it's just that it didn't the world's first and only Stalin Gred Festival

I'm not bringing this up to shoehorn Switzerland into it but it's just one of those things where it's like as you said the the collaboration, the stuff at the periphery gets sanded away in favor of a much more simplified version of it.

And it's like, I mean, quite frankly, the Dutch government, the Danish government, also traded gold bullion for foreign currency to the Nazis.

It's just, they got fucking invaded in 1940 because this was happening, you know what I mean, like earlier in the war.

And it's like, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Everybody's

national history gets molded somewhat.

And most of the time, it is not in the direction of reconciliation.

Yeah.

Such as the personal views and political actions of every single major liberal and conservative party figure in Britain in World War II, save a handful.

Because if you go through all their fucking unredacted diaries, even if they didn't say anything publicly, it basically is like...

It's like doing fucking cutesy face heart fanfic about I love Hitler so much.

I wish we had Hitler.

I wish Hitler ruled Britain.

To include the guy who was very recently king.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, yep.

Anyway, the German government, which after disaster after disaster in the Ottoman war effort, had only become more and more involved in propping up the Ottoman military.

Like German soldiers made jokes about it was like having a corpse chained to their ankle sometimes.

They were getting quite aggravated about the conduct of the government regarding the genocide.

Not that they were against the genocide necessarily.

After all, they had been kind of sort of commanding it in many different ways.

But instead, they were pissed that by 1916, the government was still wasting so many resources on it that it was hurting the war effort overall.

So soon the Germans were pressuring the Ottoman government to stop what I'll call the active genocidal measures, or what the paper, Genocide and Humanitarian Resistance in Ottoman Syria, calls the first phase of the genocide.

Also, let the irony of the Germans telling someone else this be known.

This being the massive expenditure of men and material to actively deport and murder hundreds of thousands of people, the death toll at this point is over a million.

Talat agreed with the Germans insofar as he believed that he needed to shift to the secondary phase of genocide, that being creating an environment where mass death would occur on its own.

And for that, he had the various camps through Syria and Mesopotamia, which now imprisoned about a half of a million Armenians, which are the last surviving Armenians from the Ottoman Empire that had not been forced, converted, or otherwise kidnapped.

And remember, the Ottoman government had made zero preparations for the deported Armenians, assuming the process of deportation without material assistance and directly into a series of death squads would be enough to kill most of the intended victims.

And they had.

But on top of that, Talat knew that actually surviving long enough and making it to one of the camps was alone as good as a death sentence.

And for tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people eventually, it would be.

Hundreds died from starvation, disease, and exposure every single day.

Just to be sure that the Armenians died away from international eyes, all non-Muslims and non-Armenians were banned from the deportation areas, and all humanitarian aid was forbidden as well.

And that brings us to a weird small side note here, the humanitarian aid portion of it.

There was a massive humanitarian aid drive across the world for the Armenians, but especially in the United States during this time.

This created one of the world's first ever large-scale civilian-run humanitarian programs that would depend on donations called the American Committee for the Relief in the Near East.

Relief in the Near East kind of came up with that model for citizen humanitarian aid drives that we're all obviously now very familiar with.

And despite what you think of some of these organizations, And if you ever find yourself like really hating one of those, you should probably take a good long look in the mirror, probably.

I mean, unless they're the Salvation Army, but that's a whole different story.

That's different.

Yeah, that's very religious.

It's different when it's religiously sprinkled in, you know?

But despite what you may think of some of these organizations now, this is quite incredible.

But also, it shows how horrible history is.

Because Relief in the Near East was created to help Armenian survivors starting in 1915.

That same organization is now called the Near East Foundation.

And that ends up helping Armenian survivors of the 2023 Karabakh genocide as they fled to Armenia.

So, yeah, they're also doing a lot of good work in Palestine right now.

So, unfortunately, the foundation continues to need to exist.

Anyway, Armenians who had been sent to die in these camps, you know, their life, their culture extinguished, to the utter shock of the Ottoman officials in charge of the camp system, the Directorate of Settlement and Tribes and Immigrants, they were shocked to see that Armenian life was starting all over again.

Smugglers brought food and medicine in, and Armenian groups from across the political spectrum did what they could to hand it out to those who needed the most.

In the areas of Deiraz-Or and Raqqa, Ottoman overseers actually sent complaints back to Constantinople in the spring of 1916 saying, the Armenians aren't dying like you said they were going to.

Every segment of this new Armenian society had a hand in its survival.

This is from Genocide and Humanitarian Resistance in Ottoman Syria.

Quote, even those considered the weakest and in needing of protection the most, the children, exercised agency.

They begged, they rummaged for food, and they relayed messages to other camps clandestinely.

Survivors from the same villages clumped together.

Families, broken by mass killings, reformed to create new ad hoc family units.

And they even created government to administer the camps, as the Ottomans had effectively just left them to their own devices to die in the desert.

This is not to say Armenians were thriving, but they were not dying like the Ottomans thought they should have been.

And so many had been sent there, they kicked off one of history's darkest Uno-Reverse cards.

The Armenians Armenians sent to die there from exposure and disease actually caused a mass outbreak of disease across the general non-Armenian population of the area, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

They brought typhus and other disease because these areas were very sparsely populated at the time, hence why they were sent there.

And the Armenians who had been forced to march in that direction brought with them all of the diseases that they had gathered on the journey, which had been killing them by the thousands as well.

So they cause a massive typhus outbreak.

I'm reminded of, and I don't want to name the countries because I feel like a lot of people get really fucking weird and racist and shitty about it, but there are stories of, for example, diseases breaking out in areas where they are unknown because of international peacekeepers sent there who bring,

even despite their efforts, bring diseases that are unknown to those populations.

And particularly if it's like a population that's already very vulnerable because of war and natural disaster, it can cause unintended, horrible consequences.

Yeah, this has happened multiple times.

It's happened in the last decade.

Yeah.

Put it down.

To Haiti.

That's what I was going to say.

Yeah.

And that happens, I mean, throughout history.

And the reason for that, despite the fact that these Armenians are supposed to be locked away from the outside world to die, right?

But the camps were pretty much just open air.

They were secured by elements of the SO, the special organization, or the Ottoman army, but they didn't really stop anybody from coming in, only from going out.

So when traders and merchants from the outside, namely, you know, Muslim Arabs, came in to barter and trade,

and there's also gangs that would just come in and try to snatch Armenian women and children.

So that is how the typhus epidemic started.

They kidnapped people and brought the disease back to their community.

So they really earned it.

Yeah.

And I should stop for a second to underline the barter and trade system here because it goes without saying that the people involved in this are not good.

The merchants would come into the camp knowing the people there were dying of starvation and disease and had very, very little to barter with.

And they would trade them spoiled food and contaminated water at wild rates.

And they'd strip people of what little wealth they were able to bring with them.

And failing that, they would force families to barter themselves so others could live.

I feel like whether or not you're a Syrian literal kidnapping gang or a member of immigration customs enforcement, when your job is go to places and steal children, you kind of need to have a look in the mirror and be like, yeah, I'm kind of on team the wrong side.

I'm kind of on get smote by God levels of bad here.

I think that's what the typhus was.

I think I'm on team typhus.

The first time on this show, we're all universally on team typhus.

Typhus isn't going away in the Armenian camps, but the least we could do is spread them to everyone else.

Like, you motherfuckers, you brought us here.

I guess I always try to be a little bit like more of the mentality that so much of this stuff is driven by circumstances and a lot of people are going to be affected who had nothing to do with it.

But at the end of the day, if the proximate cause is like, you know, the kindergarten bandits fucking sneaking in here to snatch children and sell them on the slave market, it's like if they happen to bring with them

consequences that then extend far beyond what they thought they were getting themselves into, you can't exactly be like, ooh, say a fucking prayer for their immortal souls.

What a tragedy.

Sometimes you barter consequences, you know?

Light a candle for them in the ice chapel.

Even with everyone trying as hard as they could as a community to survive, again, hundreds of Armenians were dying every single day, and that still was not enough for Talat, who agreed with the Germans to stop shunting away things that they would need for the war to his little genocide side project.

The director in charge of the various camps also informed Talat that so many Armenians had survived the deportations, that there was no way they could keep them to only 5% of any given area.

So again, Talat sent in the SO and the military, and they were joined, again, by mobs of regular civilians to liquidate several concentration camps around Raqqa, Deirazor, and Aleppo.

Armenians who had just happened to be living in Syria, because there was also an Armenian population in Syria, who had not been deported, were also caught up in the liquidation.

Hundreds of thousands more were dead by the fall of 1916.

Jesus Christ.

So, Nate Tom, I have 18 cool facts about Beavis and Butthead.

Would you like to hear one?

Yeah, hit us, hit us.

Mike Judge improvised most of the dialogue for all of the music videos.

So

we might be showing our age here that we have watched Beavis and Butthead, I'm realizing.

I've never actually watched Beavis and Butthead.

Oh, goddammit.

I watched it on TV when I was, I mean, I was grade schooler.

Like, it was, you know, it's way more a Gen X thing, but yeah, when I was like 10, 11, it was on TV.

I'll give you two.

Beavis and Butthead were named after kids that lived in Mike Judge's neighborhood.

There's a 12-year-old kid who called himself Iron Butt and a friend who called himself Butthead.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Okay, according to him, he earned the nickname Iron Butt because they had a game where they would kick each other in the ass as hard as they could, and this did not hurt 12-year-old Iron Butt.

This is just, yeah, the type of shit you do when you're 12.

I'm bored, and there's nothing to do.

It's also funny that Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and Daria all take place in the same universe.

Yeah.

They are all basically all in in some part of Texas.

I'll give you this one, though.

It's really funny about Beevus and Butthead is that

they would have very strange things where they would like songs because obviously they'd watch music videos and react to them.

And sometimes if they liked a song by a weird band with a weird hole.

The first React content creators.

It would actually become more popular.

Like there's a Swedish band called Whale that had a song called Hobo Humpin' Slowbo Babe that kind of kicks ass.

And Beeves and Butthead made it somewhat popular in America.

Similarly, they seem to like What's the Frequency Kenneth by REM, which you don't expect Beeves and Butthead to be into.

However, I will leave you with this.

It became kind of a PR thing to see if you could get your band's video or if you were on a label like bands that you represented on Beevs and Butthead to break through in America.

And they tried with Blur and they sent, I think it was girls and boys.

And the reaction of Beeves and Butthead, the characters, was like, uh, are these guys Australian?

Needless to say, it did not break through.

So after this, only a few camps around Hama and Damascus were left, and maybe around 200,000 Armenians, accounting for quite possibly the only surviving Armenians that were still in the Ottoman Empire and not have been forced to convert.

And this is essentially how the Armenian genocide ended.

And I do need to stop here and point out, obviously it continues into 1917 and 1918, but this is how it continues on.

But I do need to stop and point out something else.

As I assume most people are aware, the Russian Empire eventually falls to revolution, leaves World War I early, and signs a treaty Brest-Litovsk.

In that treaty, the transitional government of Russia gives up a ton of land to the Ottoman Empire.

That land was now home to hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees who had survived the initial genocide.

This leads to more acts of genocide against them and them fleeing even further as Ottoman troops advance into the South Caucasus, including Armenia proper, today the Republic of Armenia.

Armenian volunteer groups quickly take up arms to defend themselves.

And then a group of these men, largely Dashnaks, but not entirely, declare independence for the First Republic of Armenia in May of 1918.

Now, this covers most of what the Republic of Armenia is today, but a little bit bigger, and they have a lot of claims to the ancestral lands which Armenians are indigenous to and had just been genocided from.

But the Armenian First Republic is half occupied by the Ottoman Empire.

It's overwhelmingly populated by refugees.

It's of about like 40%,

tens of thousands of whom were orphans.

People are starving.

They're thirsty.

They're desperately ill.

All of that is unfortunately a story for a different day.

I'm planning on covering the entire history of the First Republic over on the history of Armenia at some point in the future, because it is here throughout the Turkish War of Independence, Armenia's eventual invasion by the Soviet Union, and the Armenian genocide.

It all continues, as well as a lot of political infighting as Armenians try to mesh all these different groups of Armenians together and create a modern nation state in their history for the first time.

But for our story here, the Ottoman Empire is forced to see that they're losing a war.

Talat and the rest of the triumvirate eventually resign on October 18th, 1918, and they scatter, becoming outlaws.

The new government signs the Armistice of Mudros on October 30th.

The losses that the Ottoman Empire had suffered were catastrophic and largely unrecoverable.

And that's only speaking about what happened at the front.

That's not even counting what they had done to themselves.

The Allies occupy Constantinople.

The British openly declare pretty much from the start about bringing Ottoman war criminals to some kind of trial for what they're calling something new, crimes against humanity.

Everyone is aware of what they're guilty of, but the German government, with only a few months of surrendering and their own empire coming to an end, ordering several people

involved in the German operations in the Ottoman Empire to quickly start publishing pieces that would show that the German Empire had nothing to do with these well-known crimes that the Ottomans committed, while the Ottomans had been kind of trying to cover their tracks for the last two years or so.

And while they're doing that, the German military helps all of the architects of the genocide get away.

Talat, Enver, Dr.

Nazim, Dr.

Shakir, the head of public security, Osman Bedri, and the commander of the genocide entrebizond, Shamal Azmi, are all escorted to Berlin in December 8, 1918.

And while the British and the Turkish opponents of the CUP demanded their extradition, the German government refused.

The CUP simply rebrands under a new name and just kind of continues on.

At the same time, the all-but-dead Ottoman government under Mehmed VI began cranking out their own forms of genocide denial, and many of these had already been in the works for quite a while with the three pashas still in command.

They point to Armenian uprisings, which in reality, as we covered, were acts of self-defense.

They point to other rebellions, which, as we talked about, simply did not exist.

And the existence of Armenians organizing themselves at all as as evidence that no genocide took place.

Sure, lots of people died, but those are just the realities of war.

It was a civil war,

which of course was still the fault of the Armenians.

But one of the key ways to deny the genocide is to say, flood the zone.

Have so many different excuses and

theories and explanations that you spend 10 times longer trying to debunk them all one by one.

than they ever did coming up with them.

The most popular form of denial, one that still exists today, along with pretty much everything else we've already talked about, is that the Turkish nation committed no genocide.

The killings, which were limited in number and certainly not a genocide, were done by the CUP, which is only made up of a few people.

Since they went into exile, the book is closed.

And all the crimes

that they had done, whether they be crimes, which is of course debatable, they were only done by those few men, but also simultaneously, they were driven to do them.

by their love of the fatherland and because the Armenians were in open rebellion.

There's even a good old-fashioned trap card that you can find in modern Turkish denialism, which was there was no Armenian genocide at all.

In fact, it was the Armenians who committed genocide against the Turks.

Ah,

please explain that, Joe, because that is a logical gotcha that I don't understand.

Well, in order for this theory to make sense, you have to start huffing gas like hard.

Just like, just go hard to the paint, put petrol straight up your nostrils.

Because it kind of flips reality.

We've often talked about it, I know Trash Future talks about a lot, that sometimes there's a certain group of populations just operating in a different layer of reality to the point that you really can't understand or speak to them.

And this is one of those where none of the mass killings of Armenians took place.

It was all fabricated.

And in fact, the mass killings that did take place were done by Armenians against Turks and Kurds and Arabs and everyone else.

And that was helped by the Russians, it was helped by the British, it was helped by whoever it needs to be done.

And of course, there's no evidence for this.

This is oftentimes used today by the modern Azeri state as well.

It is completely devoid of any factual truth at all.

And while the most popular newspapers in Constantinople cranked out genocide denial, war crimes trials actually did begin in 1919.

Among the charges of the accused were profiteering, massacres of the Armenians, the Greeks, the Assyrians, and corruption.

All of the three pashas were brought up on charges, but because they were safely in Germany, and international law existed even less back then than it does today, they would never stand for their crimes.

For the few men actually brought before the trials, they simply blamed the pashas and the CUP.

They did the we were just following orders thing.

And interestingly, the last Ottoman government under Mehmed VI and his grand vizier, Tafiq Pasha, completely acknowledged what had happened to the Armenians.

With the caveat, of course, is, well, we didn't do it, the CUP did it.

Dozens of men were charged, convicted, and sentenced to death, including all of the CUP leadership, in absentia.

But only three executions were completed.

And each time an execution took place, it was turned into a rallying cry by the growing Turkish nationalist movement.

Every executed man became a martyr.

Eventually, the trials were moved to Malta as the Ottoman government weakened, and so they could be watched more closely by the British, only for the people to eventually come to the general agreement that, you know, there's actually no legal framework for what we're doing.

So rather than simply creating one out of thin air, which of course they would do at the end of World War II, and none of us are saying that was a bad thing.

The British simply released all the accused war criminals and genocide heirs they had at Malta.

One of these men was Mustafa Kemal, better known today as Kemal Atatürk, the leader of the national movement and father of modern Turkey.

He would eventually tie all these surviving elements together, the nationalist movement, the CUP, and the young Turks.

And now we know it was Turkey is what was made out of that, out of the blood and the bones of the remaining Greek and Armenian populations.

Armenians as a whole, within the rotting corpse of the empire, had a massive reversal of treatment within the Allied zone of occupation and control, including the areas under the Allied-backed Ottoman government.

That is because in the head of the Allies, it wasn't the Armenians that led the Ottomans to war.

It was the Turks.

The Armenians are allies.

And chief amongst those people was, strangely, Woodrow Wilson, famed racist.

One of the more racist American leaders ever.

Now, despite Woodrow Wilson being the most racist American president who never owned slaves, he did become a champion for the Armenian people, despite the fact Armenians could not become citizens in the United States at the time due to their race.

And this is true.

We talked about it over on history of Armenia.

So he was still deeply racist, but if you, you know, squinted hard enough, he's like, well, they're Christian and they look kind of white.

But again, still racist because Armenians were considered, quote, oriental per American legal standard at the time.

Together with the allies and representatives of of Ottoman minorities, chief amongst them the Armenians, all at the table, they draw up the Treaty of Sevrus in 1920.

The entire part of this saga is, to make a very long story short, messy as hell.

The Allies write up the treaty, which all but parts out the Ottoman Empire to a point it would hardly be a state at all.

Something the Ottoman government complains about and wishes to edit so they might be able to exist.

and the Allies refuse.

Among the parts that were carved out of the Ottoman Empire at the insistence of Woodrow Wilson is what would become known and is still known today as this concept of Wilsonian Armenia.

Now, this would have covered the four eastern provinces of the empire that were majority Armenian and would have been far larger than modern-day Armenia.

The small problem, of course, was the first republic still existed right next door.

And its government pointed out that, hey, we already got a country over here.

If you're going to take all this shit and make it Armenian, we should have one state.

And eventually that was kind of sort of agreed on.

And I should point out here that I know a lot of Armenians today, myself included, have talked about the concept of Wilsonian Armenia.

But if you look at it, it looks great on a map.

And that's where anything good about it stops.

It never would have worked.

Think of Wilsonian Armenia a lot like every other colonial project that someone, in this case Wilson, just kind of draws lines somewhere knowing very little about a place and then calls it a country.

The population makeup would have been, let's say, troubling at the least.

A lot of places that were just straight up not Armenian were included.

These included places that were Georgian, Greek, Kurdish, and Turkish, and not to mention what is considered modern-day Azerbaijan.

The hypothetical country would not have even been majority Armenian at the end of the day.

There's like 12 different minorities involved.

And that is even accounting for the Turkish state that would have been left right next door.

that certainly would have not let this fly and the Soviets on the other side who really, really, really wanted to color back in the lines of the Russian imperial era.

And of course they would.

To make matters even dumber, the treaty was taking so long being kicked back and forth.

Wilson simply said, fuck it, and asked Congress to give the United States a mandate over what would become Armenia, meaning an Armenian state under protection of the United States.

Which, admittedly, when you take a glance back at the history books and what is to come, sounds pretty great.

Especially if you look at Armenians' current ally, you know?

There's a group of people who have been like i mean i just imagine a lot of dominicans and haitians being like wait they'll send all these motherfuckers over there to guard that place we can finally go back to normal that's of course why it never would have worked yeah of course yeah armenian smedley butler smedley butler just get his arm pilled just really really into it he's just just brandy head like nobody's business he gets armenian language tattoos all over him look The problem, of course, is we're talking about America in the 20s.

Not the United States, not even in the mid-1940s.

Of course, America could have never projected their power to the point that it could take over a state in the Caucasus on the border with the Soviet Union and then a resurgent, modern nationalist Turkey on the other side.

It never would have fucking happened.

I mean, we've talked about it on this show when the U.S.

invaded the Soviet Union in like the 19 teens, and all you have to show for it is a great big-ass graveyard in fucking Alaska.

So

that's unfair.

A lot of weirdly American-produced Moses and the Gants as well.

Those exist.

And this, I don't want to say almost passes.

Congress votes it down 53 to 23 on June 1st.

So it almost happened.

And this is due to pressures from the Kamalist movement, the Soviet Union, and of course, the United States after World War I is not necessarily less isolationist.

They kind of want to recede back.

into their sphere of influence.

And the concept of having an American proxy state in the Caucasus just sounds like you might as well have told the U.S.

Congress in 1920 we're going to go to the moon.

I mean, I also love the idea that like they were crippled by the fact that there were like basically 1920s Henry Quellers who were just like, yeah, only the old, their only opinion on foreign affairs.

They were getting money from Ataturk or I don't know.

I guess Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union at this point, so it couldn't have been that.

As the Turkish nationalist movement completely rejected the treaty and their movement continued to grow, you know, during the Turkish War of Independence.

The treaty was eventually completely abandoned.

And with the treaty, their local allies had been working with the British, the French, the Americans were also abandoned.

Kemal's forces stormed through the empire.

The fires of genocide burned once again across Greek and Armenian cities.

And eventually, the Turkish Republic was formed in 1923.

And the allies, having given up on parting out the empire really, signed the Treaty of Luzon, recognizing them.

As for the perpetrators of the genocide who managed to get away, they have not stayed safe for long.

The Dashnaks, having been driven from the First Republic after the takeover by the Soviets, launched what has become known as Operation Nemesis, a plan to hunt down and murder the people responsible for the deaths of over 1 million Armenians.

We did an episode about this a long time ago, episode 101 for those curious.

But Sogumon Tetlarian tracks down and kills Talat Pasha in broad daylight in the streets of Berlin in March 1921.

As per his plans, he allows himself to be arrested, does not even attempt to put up a real defense in court, and on the stand, he loudly proclaims, quote, I've killed a man, but I am not a murderer.

Instead, he turns his own murder trial into a platform to tell everyone about the Armenian genocide.

This includes calling survivors up to testify for his defense, despite this not being a legal defense whatsoever.

He's often said he's an Armenian genocide survivor, and historical evidence shows that's not entirely entirely true because he lies his ass off.

He leaves out the whole part of, you know, this was an organized plot,

like this is an organized assassination plot based out of Watertown to Massachusetts of all places.

He tells of the assassination that the ghost of his mother killed in the genocide commands him to kill Talat.

in his dreams.

He says that he suffers from seizures and epilepsy because back then epilepsy was considered a mental disorder.

Neither of those things is true.

He did not have epilepsy and he did not see visions of his mother.

Eventually the court found him not guilty, primarily based on a new legal concept best described as that motherfucker deserved it.

There's a lot of arguments that go into this as to why the German courts found him not guilty.

Of course, they did not know he was a part of a larger assassination plot, but also because the German government knew that the longer the trial wore on, that they were worried that Germany would get dragged into it and their responsibility in it.

And they even have some Germans, veterans of the German Imperial Army in the Ottoman Empire, testify that what Tetlerian was saying was true.

So they're like, oh, fuck.

Oh, fuck.

Just change your subject.

Change your subject, Commander.

We need to move on.

We need to move on.

He didn't.

Let's just get rid of this guy.

He eventually has to flee the Nazis.

And up until this point, Tetliran actually kept the Luger that he killed Talat with because

the German government gave it back.

And he's forced to flee the Nazis.

And before he runs, he has to throw it into a lake, unfortunately.

So it's lost to history.

He's buried in California.

A year after the assassination of Talat, Dr.

Shakir and Jamal Azmi both get clapped on the streets of Berlin as well by a team of Dashnot gunmen named Aram Yaganian and Ashfir Shikhanian.

These guys, they don't wait around to be arrested because they probably assume the German courts are not going to fall for this shit twice, but they both get away.

Jamal Pasha got got while traveling to Tbilisi, then known as Tiflis, when he was meeting with Soviet authorities in 1922 to act as something

as a middleman between

Kemal Adaturik's nationalist movement and the Soviet Union because they were collaborating on a few things.

He's gunned down along with the secretary by a group of Dashnak hitmen, all of whom escape, at least for a little bit.

One of the gunmen later starts an underground network to support Armenian political prisoners within the Soviet Union, but is eventually vanished by the Cheka, never to be heard from again.

Now, honestly, the weirdest death of all three of the Pashas has nothing to do with Nemesis at all, and that is Enver Pasha.

Now, he runs after the downfall of the Empire, of course, and he all but abandons Turkish nationalism and instead fully adopts Turkic nationalism or pan-Turanism.

Ah,

man's on some plov and some booze kashi.

Yep.

He's about to be getting

some fucking underground bread ovens.

It's going to get weird.

Hell yeah.

Look, that bread slaps.

It does.

But he eventually runs to the Soviet Union and managed to convince them that somehow he's on their side, despite the fact that man was never once a fucking communist.

But he earns their trust because Lenin is a fucking idiot.

And he sends him to put down an Islamic uprising in Bukhara, which becomes known as the Basmachi Revolt.

In what is now Uzbekistan, I believe.

Yes.

And as soon as he's there, he switches sides and joins the revolt, proclaiming himself the leader, which does not go over well.

Who could have seen this coming?

Who could have seen this at all?

What if a Turkish guy was Uzbek?

Probably has to convince the Uzbeks.

According to the book, A Peace to End All Peace, quote, Enver's personal weaknesses reasserted themselves.

He was vain, a strutting man who loved uniforms, medals, and titles.

For use in stamping official documents, he ordered a golden seal that described him as commander-in-chief of the armies of Islam, son-in-law of the caliph, and representative of the prophet.

Then he calls himself the emir of Turkestan.

Now, this is a small problem, of course, because he was working for a guy who had already declared himself the Emir of that place.

And at some point in the first half of 1922, the Emir of Bukhara broke off relations with them.

And then he is tragically abandoned by the Emir of Afghanistan, who thinks he's insane.

The revolt, especially this part of it, gradually gets broken down piece by piece.

And one day, while he's in Dushanbi celebrating Eid, a Soviet cavalry detachment ambushes him.

Enver is wounded and then is personally executed by the commander of that Soviet detachment, Hakab Melkumian.

The guy just happened to be Armenian.

His name is sometimes rucified as Yakov Melikov or Melumkov.

But yeah, that was not his choice.

I mean, I feel like in a way, he got the most gracious way to exit because if he had managed to stick around, it's like Stalin had entire technical universities devoted towards building blenders for guys like this.

Like it's just, yeah, it wasn't going to end well.

Yep.

According to Malcumian's personal recollections of the incident, he only recognized it was Anver after he cuts the guy's fucking head off.

And he was like, huh, well, all right then.

That just attaches it to his horse.

Unfortunately, Malcolmian falls victims to something that many other Soviet minorities do, and that is the Great Purge.

He is very nearly executed before someone vouches for him and his life is saved.

And he is so-called rehabilitated.

And it's thanks to that that we now know him by his Russian name rather than his Armenian one.

Now, I'm kind of ending this story in what could be considered a high note.

Armenian assassins taking justice into their own hands or sometimes random happenstance due to the failures of the world community.

Still, in reality, there's no ending here.

Happy or otherwise.

Unlike every other genocide that we've covered on the show, or we ever will, I assume, there is no ending point.

The Armenian genocide goes from a concerted effort to destroy the Armenian people within the Ottoman Empire by the end of World War I,

becomes a shattered thing, a genocide that gets thrown in five different directions, from the struggle of the First Republic to the Turkish War of Independence, the invasion of the Soviets.

The genocide of the Armenians continues, both in body and culture, for years to come.

only occasionally to start up again with the continued destruction of Armenian heritage in Turkey and the invasion and destruction of the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, with Turkish and Azeri soldiers making the same exact claims, flying the same exact flags, and in many cases invoking the same names of the CUP men who started the slaughter in 1950.

Today in Artsakh, sometimes known as Nargano-Karabakh, Armenian churches are being modified or destroyed, cemeteries are being bulldozed.

and a state effort by modern Azerbaijan with the assistance of not only Turkey, but virtually the entire international community is being made to erase the thousand-year memory of the Armenian people from the land.

There's an Enver Pasha street in the middle of Stepanakert.

Today, as over 100 years ago, the goal is not to stand on a hill and tell everyone what they did, but it's to make it as if the Armenians never existed at all.

The Holocaust had an end.

The Cambodian genocide had an end.

The Rwandan genocide had an end.

Every genocide that we have ever covered has, at one point, an end because someone, a military power, regionally or global, came in and put a stop to it.

Whether stopping the genocide was their goal or not, it stopped.

We talked about the Cambodian genocide.

The Vietnamese had no idea what they were walking into, but they still stopped the genocide.

But it only stopped because someone, anyone, was dedicated enough to stop it.

Situations like the fate of the Armenian people, or like today, the Palestinians, showed the refusal to meet genocidal violence with military force and enough of that force to ensure the genocide errors are either destroyed or brought before an international court, the original genocide and the thoughts of the motivations behind it will only continue.

They'll morph and they'll twist and they'll shift and they'll turn into something new that will bubble up to the surface at some point to continue destroying lives for generations to come.

Throughout time, from the highlands to the death camps to the killing fields to Gaza, we are looking at the consequences of impunity.

So in closing, I thought that we should include a famous passage by an Armenian-American writer, William Saroyan.

Quote, I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled and whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no longer uttered.

Go ahead.

Destroy this race.

Let's say, like it is again in 1915.

There's a war in the world.

Destroy Armenia.

See if you can do it.

Send them from their homes into the desert.

Let them have neither bread nor water.

Burn their houses and their churches.

See if they will not live again.

See if they will not laugh again.

See if this race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor 20 years after and laugh and speak their tongue.

Go ahead.

See if you can do anything about it.

See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world, you son of a bitch.

A couple of Armenians talking in the world.

Go ahead and try to destroy them.

The end.

So I actually, I found it very funny because I have a copy of William Sarian's short story story collection.

My name is Aham, which the old, old, old version of it that I have in front of me has a description on the front cover.

A joyful portrait of American immigrant life, which I feel as though is a bit of a

way to put it.

But the reason why I wanted to, I was thinking about this throughout the series and I was thinking about stuff that came to mind and things I'd seen both in history and also in reading fiction writing.

And I have a lot of examples I could give, but this one I think came to mind the most more in kind of like maybe a darker way, less hopeful than what you said, but a lot of ways explaining sort of how some of this is allowed to go on.

And I don't want this to sound like an explicitly anti-religious thing so much as an explicitly sort of like the idea of the danger of received wisdom and trusting it.

The last story in this collection is a story called A Word to Scoffers, and it's very short.

A friend of mine said it was his favorite story, and I read it a long time ago, and it came to mind while we were talking today.

And effectively, it's just about a guy who's, you know, Armenian-American, and his uncle lives in Reno, and his uncle tells him, get out, you gotta move, move to the big city, go to New York, get out of here, this place sucks.

So he takes buses across the desert, and he stays in a hotel room at one point that is haunted and he sees all of human iniquity before him and he's terrified.

And then waiting for his bus, he meets a Mormon missionary who basically says to him,

you know, that the whole thing is you just have to believe.

And he says, believe what?

And he says, why everything.

Everything you can think of, left, right, north, east, south, west, upstairs, downstairs, all around, inside, out, visible, invisible, good and bad, neither and both.

That's the secret.

It took me 50 years to find out.

At the end of the story, two pages later, because it's very short, the bus leaves.

And he says, I thought I was kidding, the old padre of Salt Lake City, getting back to my vast book learning and anti-religious poise, but I was sadly mistaken because, unwittingly, I had been saved.

In less than 10 minutes after the bus left Salt Lake City, I was believing everything, left and right, as the missionary had said, and it's been that way with me ever since.

And I bring that up because what I think is so much of this, so much of what allowed this to go on, seems to draw upon the idea that enough of a critical mass of people being told a thing is just a certain way, regardless of how far off the actual events it is, creates a situation in which the overwhelming majority of them will never question it.

And even if they are confronted with the truth, they'll simply become emotional and defend it.

I think all of humanity is guilty of this to some extent, but I think in this particular case, I think the thing that has made this so affecting, hearing the story, is just the fact that so much energy is devoted, even in the present moment, to making it as difficult as possible for people to actually confront it and acknowledge it.

And to me, I think that is what's so distressing about it is that I think the victims of this are absolutely entitled to revenge, but it doesn't sound like a lot of people are asking for revenge.

They just want acknowledgement.

And even that is a bridge too far.

It depends.

Of course, I can only speak for myself.

I don't want to speak for anybody else.

I can say that overwhelmingly, like, yeah,

there are some people who do want ancestral lands returned to the Armenian state.

Some people want the return of their family's belongings as much as they still exist.

I can speak for myself where I say, like, it would be nice that there's a general recognition and it doesn't become a geopolitical football to be used, which, like, today, the Turkish and Armenian border is still closed.

And a lot of that pressure is used in modern geopolitical problems involving Azerbaijan, which have, they, of course, have their own issues at play.

A lot of that thanks to Soviet fuckery, but the politics involved in the genocide are still very, very, very real today.

Something as simple as a normalization, as it's called, between the two states, a huge part of that is the genocide recognition.

Turkey is going to recognize, of course, they're not, or if the Armenian government is going to push that.

Meanwhile, you know, when some states do recognize it, or sometimes like before President Biden recognized it a few years ago, it was like individual states and cities in the United States are recognizing it.

And they would immediately become under huge pressure from the Turkish like Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Inherently, it's like, again, uses a political football because obviously Turkey is a much bigger geopolitical power than Armenia is.

So people kind of, it's seen as making a choice because it kind of is.

For me,

I would just wish it would stop.

I wish that the two could come to some conclusion.

I think that is probably the most hopeful thing I've said on this show because it's also simultaneously certainly not going to happen anytime soon.

Until then, I think the best thing we can do is the same thing that we've done, the same thing that we've said every time we talk about this is there's a reason why all of these genocides have the same stepping stones, every single one.

And you should learn those and harden yourself to them so you can make sure it doesn't happen to someone you care about or you don't even know.

I think we said on this series already: someone in your country is being othered.

Someone, I don't care where you live, someone is being othered, and you cannot let that happen.

As far as some kind of political statement to make at the end of this, is the same thing I just close it out with: the only thing that's ever stopped a genocide is military force.

And that is something that we should not be shy from.

Because to quote the former head of Doctors Without Borders, I cannot stop a genocide with doctors.

And there's nothing wrong with using force to stop that.

Because it is the only thing that has ever worked.

Take that for what it's worth for what's going on in the world right now.

That is the only thing that has ever worked.

Yeah.

And I suppose my perspective on this is that like the, in this case and, you know, contemporary examples, like the denial of the legitimacy of truth completely like gets rid of any consequences for people perpetrating acts of violence against others like if you like you said Joe you know people who live in a different reality will just completely obfuscate what is true and tell you that you're the one who's wrong and you're the one who's insane and you're the one where there's nothing wrong going on all the proper procedures and everything are being followed

but that is just to deny what is true in order to harm others and continue harming them either through direct acts of violence or retrospectively by looking at the past and delegitimizing people's claims of harm.

What you're saying is like there's only one reason why anybody would do that.

There's only one reason why anybody would be so divorced from reality.

The end?

But we do do something called questions from the legion on the show.

And since this is the end of the series, we get to talk about that.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support the show on Patreon.

You can ask us through Patreon DMs or on Discord where we have a dedicated channel for it, and we will answer your question on the show.

Today's question comes from the Discord.

Again, if you'd like to ask, we have a channel for you, let's throw it on there.

What is the weirdest subreddit you had to explore while going down a rabbit hole on some topic or community or something you became hyper-focused on and you ended up liking?

I have an answer.

Go ahead.

You know that I speak German, but I speak high German, standard German, and I don't understand Swiss German at all.

Like, it's a different language.

I mean, you can get used to it over time, but I don't live in a German-speaking part, so I don't hear it very often.

But a friend of mine who's Swiss commented about this and mentioned that there is a subreddit

called

basically Reddit slash Bundsley.

And Bundsley is like a, it's like a very stereotypical Swiss German last name, and it's a term, kind of becomes, it kind of becomes like a...

like a term to describe a guy who's like an extremely Swiss German person and it's like constantly calling the cops for noise complaints, among other things.

And they love sharing things like, you know, call the cops because, you know, are you like, I saw someone putting their

feet on the train seat or like a train seat with no cushion.

It's like, are you allowed to put your feet on this?

Or do you have to call the cops?

And like any photos they see of angry complaint letters or like laminated signs being like, stop letting your dog poop here, but they're laminated and printed in color and underlined and highlighted.

And they have like fucking zip ties holding them on.

And someone's like, well, he didn't cut the ends of the zip ties.

He must not be Swiss.

Like, that kind of thing.

But they write in phonetically spelled out Swiss German, which is a trip to see because it's not really a standardized written form of the language, but it's actually helped me to understand it a little bit because in context, you start to see what they're saying.

And like, oh, this word is very close to the standard German word, but like, it's just pronounced differently.

You know, it's like it's very dialectical.

I've actually gotten better at understanding Swiss German because of Bunsley.

And it's also, my wife previously dated a Swiss German guy, and she was like, none of this is a surprise to me because it's just how this guy was.

And now you understand a little bit about like what I experienced.

And so, yes, I spent some very, very, I still periodically browse it, but

they have little tags for posts, and one of them made no sense to me because it's so colloquial Swiss German and it just doesn't make any sense.

I couldn't figure out what the fuck it was trying to say.

But what it effectively was is the Swiss German way of saying like, the report is out, which is effectively what you say to someone to say, I have already called the police.

And the idea that that is their fucking tagline is just extremely funny.

So anyway.

I have one.

I guess that's not even a niche, really.

Everybody knows I like professional wrestling because I'm a huge dork.

But I found that the squared circle subreddit is,

for people unaware, professional wrestling, professional wrestling fans are

problematic in many ways.

It could be racism, misogyny, fucking homophobia, you name it.

It's very, very normal to see that in any pro-wrestling fan space.

And I've been really surprised to see that that one is like for a group of, I think, like 100,000 or so pro-wrestling, that's strangely inclusive.

Like, it's refreshing.

Um, because Reddit's pretty tends to be pretty center-right at best in a lot of things, generally, like, yeah, at best, especially in like you know, hobbies like this one or fucking UK politics, Jesus, you will want to die.

And like, it's it's been strangely good in a lot of ways.

And when someone kind of steps in line or says something that you would expect to see in a wrestling space, they're very quick to be slapped down.

Um, and it's nice to enjoy your stupid fucking hobby in a place that doesn't make you feel even worse for enjoying it.

My one is a combination of YouTube and Reddit.

It's just like, it's a community of

people obsessed with ancient masonry.

And like, it's, you know, like the ancient technology people, but these people are like so insane.

Like, there's a channel that has like 130,000 subscribers that I love just like throwing on the videos in the background.

It's like ancient plasma hell witnessed worldwide in petroglyphs or like like people like looking who are stone masons, like looking at like ancient masonry.

It's like, yeah, there's no way like people could have cut this.

And it's just fucking incredible.

It's like that Graham Hancock shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

And it's just like all these people who are obsessed with debunking, like, you know, like, oh, you can't carve an angle like this in stone with a, you know, a sharp chisel or a straight chisel.

And I'm like, yeah, you can.

You're just not good enough.

This is a skill issue.

It's refreshing to find in this era

a group of dumb conspiracy theorists who aren't just like foaming at the mouth racist in some way.

At least on the surface.

Because, I mean, it's all inherently racist, right?

Like, they believe it has to be aliens or whatever because primitive people could have done this.

Yeah.

It could still be fun on the surface, I suppose.

Yeah, like the people I'm obsessed with are like looking at it from a purely technical angle, which is so fascinating.

Because you would think if they're looking at it at a purely technical angle, or they're like engineers or whatever, which I'm assuming they're not.

As much as engineers as the guys who make like the suicide extension cables or whatever.

They're like, nah, nah, unknown, this doesn't work for me.

I wish I could find it, but I'm doomed to remember internet ephemera that has since disappeared and is no longer Google searchable, even if it ever was.

And I don't, I seem to recall somebody on a Facebook comment posting in character as Stone Cold Steve Austin, but basically being like pro-queer rights.

And

something to the effect of like something about, you know, you guys want to listen to music where people are jumping around like a bunch of jackwagons talking about Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

Well, you know,

I got some better scripture for you.

It's Austin 316.

You just kicked you.

I just whooped your ass.

And that's that on that because Stone Cold said so, but it was in all caps.

And there's something just weirdly fucking.

That's the bottom line.

Yeah.

Because Stone Cold

says so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's there's something weirdly redeeming about that.

I'm sure if I went through my old hard, like copies of copies of copies, hard backup hard drives, I could probably find that actual image.

And then a lot of memes that have really not fucking aged well.

So I don't know if I want to.

Similarly, like Stone Cold.

I don't really want to.

Or The Undertaker.

Open that up.

Everyone else that I ever watched on TV as a child.

Anyway, that is the end of our Armenian Genocide series.

I hope...

I don't want to say if you enjoyed it, but I hope you learned something from it.

This is a series I've wanted to do for a really long time.

A lot of people are leaving comments on Patreon asking if I'm okay.

I assure you, I am fine.

I encourage everybody to read the source material and the bibliographies and learn more.

And pay attention to the history of our media side series because we'll expand upon this in the future.

Guys, thank you so much for joining me on this.

I'm sure it was just a boatload of fun.

I promise the next series will not be as hopelessly grim.

That is a large gap between those two things.

But you host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

Well, I am the producer and co-host of Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry being stupid,

as well as about British politics.

I am the co-host and producer of What Hell of Way Too Dad, a podcast about being a dad and why you shouldn't join the military.

And I'm the producer of Kill James Bond, a podcast about film from a feminist perspective, and it's extremely funny, as well as the producer or co-producer, I suppose, of No Gods, No Mayors, a podcast of the history of the world.

Well, no, the history of every mayor ever throughout all of history.

And I was just on that show.

And no one knows what it is, but they have created an order to it.

And I was just on that show for a bonus episode about the famous mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick.

It's a lot of fun.

Go listen to that.

And I'll also plug one other thing that you might find very funny, but don't watch this video if you have epilepsy, is that talking about weird, nice, positive turns.

Goldust or Dustin Rhodes, the professional wrestler, once appeared in a Black Moth Super Rainbow music video dressed in a pink latex suit and basically making sex moves in a hot tub.

And the song whips ass.

It's called Hairspray Heart.

Check out that video.

That is the most gold dust thing I've ever heard.

That's fucking the song whips ass.

It's so cool.

But yeah, there's lots of flashing lights and shit, so definitely don't watch it if you have epilepsy.

I am the co-host and producer of Beneath the Skin, a show about the history of everything, told you, the history of tattooing.

And the producer of This Guy Sucked, a show about guys who sucked throughout history, like Henry Ford and Jerry Lee Lewis and and some people you might know, like Henry Dundas.

This is the only show that I host, so thank you for listening to it.

Consider supporting us on Patreon.

This is coming out after our live show in London, so I'd like to thank everybody who came out to see us.

I'm sure it was a lot of fun.

We'll be back in London on June 22nd, and you can check the show notes and grab tickets for the Big Fat Festival.

You can come out and see us and a ton of other shows.

You can get two nights of Nate.

You know, you can see all sorts of stuff.

And until next time, I hope you all do something that makes you feel nice.

I don't know whatever the fuck that might be.

Don't re-listen to this series.

Go have fun.

Take care of yourselves and be nice to each other.

We'll talk to you next time.