Episode 359 - The Armenian Genocide: Part 3

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Lions of my Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe.

With me is Tom and Nate.

I do not have a cold open again.

How are you guys doing?

Unfortunately, this series is following me everywhere.

I was in the gym yesterday and I was listening to music and I was like, I just had this band Integrity on.

It's like a 90s hardcore band.

And I was like, why is this guy singing about Armenia?

And then I looked at the title of the song.

I was like, oh, this song is called Armenian Persecution.

Really rolls off the tide.

I very quickly had to Google.

It's was like, is Dwidhelian Turkish or Armenian?

So, you know, it's following me everywhere.

Yep.

Surprise.

We are everywhere.

Yeah.

I didn't know that Charles Aznavour lived in Switzerland, actually not that far from here.

And so reading about that, I was just like, oh, wow, this is simultaneously the world's most Armenian and the world's most French man.

Yeah.

He is the best of both worlds and I think allegedly fine.

I don't think there's anything weird about him out there.

I read the French Wikipedia article about him and like his opinions about like, you know, minorities and integration and stuff.

Like, are

for a dude his age in France, pretty woke.

Like, they're not great, but God knows.

Yeah.

Him and his family were in the French Resistance and all sorts of other things.

Like, they helped the so-called army of crime,

things of that nature.

Great guy.

I am actually contractually obligated to not say anything bad about him, or I will be beaten by a gang of Armenian and Frenchmen at my door.

Which actually reminds me, it's just my grandfather.

So unfortunately, we have to talk about part three of the Armenian Genocide series.

And at the top here, I know

this series has already been like three hours long, and it hasn't exactly been easy listening, but this episode is where things get really bad.

So if you are, for some reason, someone who clicked on an episode titled The Armenian Genocide and things like the Armenian Genocide bother you, perhaps don't listen to it.

That is trigger warning for everything.

Just

everything.

Content warnings all around, except for YouTube.

You have to deal with it.

Yeah, the content warning that it serves the dual function of people who are sensitive to disturbing topics and Turks who have accidentally found this episode.

A lot of comments about people ask if we're going to turn the comments off for this one.

Nope.

Nope.

As someone who exists as a public person with the last name that I have, there's nothing any weird nationalist could not put in the comments or my mentions that I have not seen a thousand times, I assure you.

Also, I invite you, if you have something to leave in the comments regarding that kind of thing, to fuck off and die.

Or if you're going to do it, please make it in as funny a fucked up English as you possibly can because it's shitty and we abhor nationalism.

But if you say fuck to Armenia, Turkey champion, that is a funny sentence.

It's pretty solid.

I might turn that into a shirt.

So, when we left you last time, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians.

Because, man, Germany could really not pick their allies very well.

As the Ottoman military began mobilization, millions of men from across the racial and religious makeup of the Empire found themselves being forced into uniform because, wouldn't you know it, the Empire, despite being a boiling vat of racist Turkish nationalism at this point, had suddenly found all men equal enough for conscription for the first time in its history.

Because, of course, it did.

Everyone dies in the trench the same.

This is sort of how the U.S.

decided that actually it would grant Puerto Ricans U.S.

citizenship for the same reason.

So, in World War I.

Yeah, good news, we're all equal.

Asterisks.

For this one thing.

Yeah, it's like we've decided that there's no divisions or borders amongst humanity so long as you can provide us warm bodies to get fucking slaughtered in a trench.

We're all equal under God's eye when our insides are rapidly turned to outsides by an artillery shot.

Yeah, it's really unfortunate to be the one guy who's like volunteers to go serve because he thinks mustard gas sounds delicious.

He's just really confused.

Yeah,

mustard gas because I'm really into spicy food, you know.

I feel like I can handle the Scoville units, and meanwhile, the recruiter's just nodding like, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Now, speaking of nationalism, we do have to revisit the three pashas and just what the politics of the empire kind of looked like at this point.

In short, I have no good answer for that because they're complete and total chaos.

Official propaganda, much of it being cranked out by German-owned or CUP-owned newspapers, and then being spread by conservative and/or nationalist elements of the population all the way down the line to people who are maybe illiterate or so far away from the center of these boiling cauldrons of disgusting politics that they kind of got things in the tertiary method of word of mouth.

They made the obvious case for Ottomanism, or, you know, like we talked about, the somewhat mildly progressive version of a modern Ottoman state, but a Turkish nationalist one on top of that, which I know is very confusing.

But the reason for that is each pasha had very different politics.

Each of them had differing degrees of nationalist ideas, but some had more pan-Islamism or pan-Turanism or pan-Turkic nationalism sprinkled in more than others.

Some of them only used pan-Islamism for political tool.

I mean, for example, they didn't declare war, they declared a jihad, despite the fact that these three men were not religious.

They didn't really see the Ottoman Empire as a caliph or a caliphate at all at this point.

And they certainly did not see the Sultan, who they effectively locked away and made useless, as any kind of religious leader.

So they're kind of looking at it like, this is like a tool to get people on our side, to get like more and more people involved.

100%.

This is also a thing that you see later on in the 20th century, too, I think, a lot of places that were far more secular beforehand, whether or not it's like a religious source pushing it, like a a religious political movement pushing something or just like, you know, in times of crisis, appeal to this.

But it feels like I didn't realize that because the Ottoman Empire to me seemed very 19th century, like not modern, modern, but you know, like the conception of like its elites and its sort of like as like a kind of liberal, aspiring liberal state in that model did not strike me as being explicitly like, I hate to use this sort of anachronistic term here, but like Islamist.

But what you're saying sounds closer to that.

Hypothetically, they should have been, but they had long since moved away with it.

Kind of like we talked about before.

They moved away from that simply because politics warranted it.

And now politics, once again, warranted kind of smacking certain people that needed it with Islam and other people with nationalism.

Like they knew where to sprinkle things.

If you see photos of like street scenes in places like Kuwait in the 70s, for example, you'll see that things were and

quite frankly, episode, whole other series, but stuff like that, where things were like that, where politically it was expedient to not be and then suddenly either out of political expedience or out of a desire to immediately reassert force and control.

Yeah, it changes.

Certainly something that would never happen again.

Not once.

This is why they framed World War I as a religious war of Islam versus Christianity, but only for public consumption in their personal letters and personal dispatches from the government.

It was never used that way.

If the Ottoman government sounds chaotic, it's because it was.

We've talked about their confused and back-and-forth internal policy, and their foreign policy in regard to the lead up of the war was no better.

Like we talked about in the last episode, they kind of only ended up on the side of Germany because of pressure from the European powers, but also because the British ambassador was on vacation.

Like the three pashas, in reality, personally did not like one another, and their politics directly reflected this and clashed.

And despite their official titles and offices, each of them really acted like they were the ones in charge, charge and they treated themselves accordingly.

It's the most evil, fucked up version of the three Stooges.

Each of them met with world leaders separately and then lied about what their terms were and the deals they agreed to with the other ones.

There's political and palace infighting.

They're straight up bullying in some ways.

There's three pashas.

One of them always tells lies.

One of them always tells the truth.

One of them just basically gets you in the corner and fucking tries to to bully you like you're Linden, like Lyndon Johnson.

You know, one of them makes you talk to him while he's on the toilet.

That's big Talat energy.

I feel like he is the one that's like, you will speak to me while I shit.

Because he's the minister of the interior.

In an empire, you don't become minister of the interior without being the biggest piece of shit in the room.

As you will all figure out very quickly in this episode.

Talat is by far the biggest piece of shit of the three.

Enver, close second.

Jabal, distant third.

That's not making any of them sound better, but that's just how bad they were.

Like, even after they signed their alliance with Germany, Enver was still off talking to the Russians, trying to get an alliance with them without telling the other two.

And then Enver and Talat kind of single-handedly got the Ottomans actively involved in World War I, despite previously declaring neutrality over allowing German ships to cross the Bosphorus.

breaking a previous agreement that they had had with Russia, and then sent their own ships from the Ottoman Navy to join the German Navy and bomb Sevastopol without telling the rest of the cabinet, knowing that at that point they'd have like no real objections.

They'd have no choice but to get behind the war effort.

The news of the war hit the Ottoman Empire like it hit everywhere else.

People cheered, millions of men suited up to go out and die while politicians, and in the case of the Ottomans, religious leaders, things of that nature began to loudly proclaim that the war would allow the empire, Islam, the Turkish people, whatever flavor of this that you needed to regain their lost territory in the Balkans, the Caucasus, everywhere.

All of these places that the Ottomans had been embarrassed over the years, this was their chance to get them all back.

They'd get to drive away those perfidious Europeans who have longed to destroy and exploit them.

It is somewhat ironic that the kind of revanchist, you know, golden age delusions movement is inspired because war breaks out after a bosnian dude kills the emperor of austria-hungary it's like the turks aren't really doing a very good job of making the argument that they don't still lust for vienna in their hearts

it's like war broke out it's like right this is the you know stupid alliances and pacts and whatnot ethno-nationalism and the breakdown of of of ottoman control and the periphery and newly independent regions but then it's just sort of like we can finally retake the balkans and it's like if you're just an average average-ass dude in Sarajevo, like, what the fuck, man?

Please leave us alone.

Come on.

I thought we were done with this.

It's like, we killed a non-serry, we killed an Austrian guy.

How are you guys coming back?

I like the idea that by like 1950, the Ottoman empires have lowered their standards away from capturing Vienna.

And they're like, we'll settle for Tbilisi.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, remember, right before the outbreak of war, Armenian political groups were openly speaking to and organizing with Russian, French, and British government officials regarding reforms about bringing inspectors into Armenian areas.

Those men were all now enemies of the Ottoman Empire due to the war.

And despite the fact that the Ottoman government itself had also been negotiating with them and agreed with those reforms, that entire enterprise was now used to begin claiming Armenians were disloyal.

They were loyal to Russia.

They were a fifth column on the side of Europe.

Meanwhile, Armenian organizations like the Dashnaks, the Hunshoks, the Armeniakons, all these political groups were encouraging Armenian men to submit for conscription and join the Ottoman army.

Even if it wasn't their turn yet, they urged people to show the Ottomans and the rest of the people of the empire that Armenians were loyal and they were fighting for the future of the empire too.

To further this, the Dashnaks actually sent representatives over the border to talk to people who lived in Russian Armenia to tell them: don't volunteer to serve Russia.

Stay at home, dodge conscription, because on our side of the border, the Ottomans are going to see you in Russian uniform, and they're going to look at us.

They don't see a difference between Russian Armenians and Ottoman Armenians.

They see us as one people.

And if you're in a Russian uniform, they're going to think we're spies, even though you're subjects to the Russian crown.

And as well, I suppose it gives them more case that like, oh, all of the Armenians are subversives.

All of them are

against this new idea of Ottomanism.

Yes.

And Armenians in the Russian Empire rallied to the Russian army and the Russian crown.

Propaganda amongst the Armenian communities even encouraged people to join up because they needed to help liberate Armenians from the hold of the Muslim Turks, which that did not go over well in the Ottoman Empire.

Yeah.

I can imagine that, I mean, so much of this also seems like the Armenian status as, you know, sort of perpetual out-group in Ottoman society means that like one little shift in perception can have such disastrous consequences.

Yeah.

And I mean, they were also concerned outgrouping the Russian Empire as well, which is a subject for a different series at some point.

But the Russians, at least in the build-up to the war, were smart enough to be like, ah, fuck that.

We're all Christians now.

This is effectively a crusade.

And despite the fact they had outlawed Armenian schools, they had...

bulldozed churches and they had a minister who was just as racist towards Armenians as the Ottoman government was, all that immediately forgotten because now we have a war to fight.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman side, that did not happen.

Eventually, the Dashnoks, after being told by the Ottoman government that, you know what, you should use your contacts on the other side of the border to incite rebellions against the Russian crown within the Russian Armenian population, came to an official stance that, as subjects of individual empires and nations, Armenians should fight for whoever they're subjects.

of.

The Russian Armenians should join the Russian army, Ottoman Armenians should join the Ottoman army, because that is what we have to do.

There's not going to be any cross-border rebellion incitement because that is kind of playing into the propaganda that they could do that.

And arguably they couldn't, even if they wanted to.

And going further, they put out a statement saying, in the event that the empire is invaded by Russia, we will defend the Ottoman Empire, which is a statement you'd expect any group of people to make in a place that they call home.

Yeah.

I mean, I can't blame them.

No, of course not.

I mean, they had their complaints with the Ottoman military and the Ottoman government at this point, obviously, but so did the Russian Armenians.

It is important, again, to underline that the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire largely saw themselves as subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

They did not want to break away from it, and they just wanted equal rights.

So they did what any other subject of any other government would do.

And despite all of this, the Ottoman government, specifically Talat as interior minister, became intensely suspicious of the Armenians, more so than he ever had been before.

He was convinced that everything they were saying was just a lie, and the suspicion seeped into every layer of Ottoman governance.

World War I was a total disaster, the likes of which Europe had never seen up until this point.

More than men just being mobilized, so was everything else.

It was total war.

Livestock was taken, resources was taken, crops were taken, clothes were taken from the civilian population.

And the Ottoman army was no different.

They descended upon Armenian villages like locusts, tearing everything up that might be used in the war effort, leaving little in the way that could be used for the civilian population during the coming winter.

They did do this to other non-Armenian villages and even Muslim villages as well, but the Armenian villages were overwhelmingly targeted to leave nothing behind because they didn't care.

They weren't too much nicer to their own Muslim people, though.

Something that I found interesting about this is that you can see this kind of in miniature at a much with a different result in the Franco-Prussian war in terms of mobilization and the advent of new technologies, for example, in terms of how mobilization works, how deployment to the two, the front works, the usage of things like railroad lines.

But I think what's interesting about World War I is, I mean, obviously you've got, you know, 40, 44 years of

technological advancement since then and like more industrialization and entrenchment of this in Europe.

But then just the sheer scale of it, that it's total war in so many places.

And

all of the social problems and like the environmental conditions, so many places that have people kind of living on the precipice of starvation because of the way that they live as subsistence farmers, you can see like how much this suddenly becomes the knock-on effects of all of this become detrimental, the politics and the actual war itself, notwithstanding.

It's just such an immediate sea change in basically everywhere.

I mean, there are a few countries that were neutral in World War I, but you know, somebody in World War II, but like it's

just such a gigantic, you know, overturning.

And unfortunately, you know, we know from what we've talked about in the series so far that it's also an opportunity for

deliberate worsening of things and deliberate exclusion of people or othering of people.

Creating an environment where human life cannot thrive, some would say.

Weird how that works, yeah.

I wonder if that's a definition of anything.

Nothing yet, unfortunately.

Then for the men that were conscripted, I should point out here that life in the Ottoman military was a universally horrible experience, even in the best case scenario.

The Ottoman military of 1915 looked like something you'd expect in 1815.

Men didn't have uniforms, they didn't have boots, they were hardly ever paid, and the military, despite requisitioning tons of food from their own people, gave virtually none of it to their own soldiers.

This is, of course, because of widespread endemic corruption in Ottoman governance.

But abuse, starvation, disease, and outright murder were a normal part of Ottoman soldiering life.

And this is for everyone.

And things only got worse if you happened to be a minority, submitting yourself for military service.

Their officers were normally all Turks or at least Muslims deemed loyal by the CUP at this point.

They abused their minority soldiers.

They stole what little they had from them.

And then if the minority soldier had the balls to stand up to this or, you know, look at them wrong, the officer would transfer them to the one place in the military worse than just Ottoman military life in general, which was the labor battalions.

And this is not a uniform policy, but it was more of a punishment just for daring to exist.

Life in the labor battalions was effectively slavery.

You already weren't paid virtually at all, and being worked to death was not unheard of because the labor battalions were kind of plugged in to fill that gap in Ottoman logistics.

Because in the beginning of the war, the Ottomans really didn't even have a rail line going towards Russia.

to facilitate any kind of invasion.

So they just killed their own labor force trying to build it.

And in the meantime, they were back animals, for lack of a better term.

They built railroads and roads in incredibly dangerous positions.

Very little was done to protect or save them from these environments.

And remember, the labor battalions are full of criminals and now racial minorities, which they hate.

Which they would probably argue are the exact same thing.

Yes, that is correct.

Now, we do have to talk a little bit about the Caucasian front and World War I here, but I also need to point out that we've already talked about this much more in depth on episode 172, the Battle of Sarikamish, so I'll not be going into it in exhaustive detail here again.

Rather, this is going to be more of a primer to rejog your memory for what awful shit is about to come.

Enver Pasha takes personal command of the Ottoman Third Army and decides he's going to invade the Russian Caucasus with the goal of recapturing territory the Empire had lost to the Russians in the late 1800s.

So like the brilliant military mastermind that he is, he schedules the invasion of a very mountainous area to take place smack dab in the middle of winter.

The third army is marching to the Caucasus without winter clothing.

Some men don't have boots.

Soldiers don't have food on whatever other than what they can forage or they brought with them on their own.

Not every soldier even had a weapon.

This is less an army and more just like a press-ganged horde of poor, hungry, diseased people.

It's just like what they imagined, like a horde of zombies, like in movies, just like descending on a region.

Yeah.

Just as another example of how terrible life in the Ottoman army is, before the invasion even starts, desertion takes away thousands of men, starving, partially armed, and away from home.

They turn into a plague upon the area which they desert in.

They form gangs, robbing and killing people across the highlands.

And because the makeup of the empire, the vast majority of these deserters, just like the vast majority of conscripts, are Muslim, they desert in non-Muslim lands and they descend upon the Armenian civilian population, knowing that if they rob and murder them, nobody will give a fuck.

I don't want to make light of it, but I'm just envisioning if you transpose these circumstances to more recent conflicts.

And I'm just imagining like, you know, a company-sized element of U.S.

soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan who just desert, but like desert in Iraq or Afghanistan.

And it's like, you know that they're coming because you can hear the faint overtones of Alice in Chains.

And it's like, all right, fucking lock all, you know, get you.

No, No, it's Jason L.

Deed's dirt road anthem, and you know it.

They're playing Fortunate Sun, and they have zero fucking interpretation of what the lyrics mean.

Just absolutely fucking terrifying for an Iraqi farmer.

Just hear

coming over the hills.

They said, here comes the roost.

They said that because all the soldiers were just absolutely red raw with sunburn.

Guy who has to go to the dermatologist to get his moles fucking looked at once a year.

I have no comment.

Between November 1914 and January 1915, the soldiers of the Third Army, Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, and every other kind of person that called the Ottoman Empire home, slogged through the waste-deep snow, blizzards, avalanches, and more than one fucking wolf attack and a mass outbreak of typhus before they even made it to the Russian positions at Sarikamish.

Once the weather turned bad and it was clear that shit was going very, very south, Enver simply abandoned his army and returned to Constantinople.

And he came back a conquering hero, like effectively the Ottoman version of a triumph, if you will.

And then he just went to go watch the opera.

Meanwhile, his army, left out of the mountains with no real chain of command left to take it over, let alone all of the other problems it had, were completely shattered by the Russians.

The Ottoman Third Army wasn't beaten.

It was destroyed.

80% of the army was killed, amounting to tens of thousands.

Virtually nobody got out of this unwounded.

Even if you managed to escape like a Russian bullet to the leg or whatever, you got frostbite, exposure, the occasional wolf injury.

It was bad.

At first, Enver and the rest of the triumvirate banned any news of the defeat.

Then, when it became clear they could just pretend it never happened at all, They flooded the field with so much disinformation that even other members of the cabinet weren't entirely sure what was true and what wasn't.

That was until the surviving officers of the Ottoman military, German advisors included, finally made their way back from the front, bringing the reality of the situation with them.

And once news of the defeat's scale went mainstream, panic gripped Constantinople.

An army was destroyed.

An invasion from the east was sure to follow.

The Allies had yet to land at Gallipoli, but they were threatening the Dardanelles.

Bulgaria was rumored to soon be joining the war against the Ottomans, which of course wouldn't happen, but they don't know that yet.

There were riots and protests in the streets, and the triumvirate openly began to talk about how they might need to burn Constantinople to the ground rather than give it up to an invader, whether it be British or Russian.

From there, Enver, Talat, and others simply pushed the blame onto who else?

The Armenians.

The Armenians in the third army were sleeper agents working for the Tsar, and They were communicating with the Armenians and the Tsar's army, and that's the only reason why Enver's campaign ended so badly.

This was supported by German military advisors who were at several levels, including the highest in direct command of the Ottoman army.

The Ottoman chief of staff is a German man at this point.

You see, the Armenians, they are training the wolves and they let them loose in the mountains.

We have run into something we are dubbing the Beastmaster.

They don't know if it's a wolf or an Armenian guy naked running on all fours.

Much like the Nordic people, people, we have a proud tradition of wolf-based berserker gang.

All Armenians are lycanthropes.

Exactly.

An entire ecosystem of disinformation popped up from newspaper officials to official government bulletins.

They were reporting tens of thousands of armed Armenians stalking the highlands, organizing, spreading rebellions and strife.

And they absolutely were not.

These envisioned armies were not real.

This political organization did not exist.

Soon, other telegrams were citing those same bulletins saying they had heard or even seen the same thing happening.

Elements of the army and the police reported clashes with Armenian rebel groups that straight up did not happen.

And before long, what started as a flat-out lie by Talat Pasha became an established, indisputable fact.

And this remains the official Turkish government stance on the genocide.

to this very day.

You're fucking joking.

What?

Nope.

The Turkish government, of course, denies a genocide ever took place and instead says a lot of people died due to Armenian rebellions and civil war.

Jesus Christ.

The effects of this becoming government policy were immediate.

All Armenian soldiers serving within the Ottoman military, regardless of their rank or position, because there were some Armenian officers, though not many, were to be disarmed and transferred to the labor battalions.

Of course, thousands of Armenians, knowing the realities of life within the labor units, decided desertion was a better choice than submission to this order.

This was in turn used again by Ottoman propagandists as more evidence that the Armenians could not be trusted and they're plotting against the empire.

As a result, all Armenians were then fired from their jobs within the Ottoman civil service, no matter how minor or where they were.

And if they simply failed their civil service exam rather than pass it, we know what comes next for them.

They would become the most powerful Armenian cult leader of all time.

Well, some people could argue that you're Armenian Hong Kreist, Joe.

I never failed my civil service exam.

I passed many of them actually.

Can you imagine if Hong Kreist had been a paramedic, he would just be like fucking doing triage of stuffing grass in people's mouths?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it's field medicine.

Literally, my mortality rate is 99%, but I do my best.

And your leg blown open on the battlefield of World War I is just a guy shoving grass in the wound.

Shove some straw up and that shit.

Enter a a man named Habahedin Shakar.

Dr.

Shakar.

He was not technically a member of the government, but he was a hardcore supporter of the CUP.

As his title shows, he was a medical doctor and was once head of the military medical academy.

Joe, I'm going to ask, is this going to be the

president of the Armenians aren't human thing that, you know, happens during genocide?

It's coming.

For fuck's sake.

There's always, there's always some Mengele-style freak.

There's always, I mean, Mengele comes after this, obviously.

Yeah, like, it's just, there's always the guy that, like, you know, there's streets named after people in the city I live in who are like, oh, yeah, we've, we've determined, like, we can prove racism with science.

And it's like, a lot of folks in a lot of parts of the world really just are like, yep, not only do I believe this, but I'm going to do as many live autopsies as I possibly can to prove it.

Not to skip ahead to part four here, but

of the organizers of the Armenian Genocide, multiple of them have streets named after them in Stepanakert, which was taken over by Azerbaijan and the Arsaki Armenian population driven out.

And then they renamed the streets after the engineers of the Armenian Genocide.

Which didn't happen, though.

Which did not happen, but we deserved it.

It will happen again, and we'll name streets after it.

We just decided to name this street after a guy just because we really liked the name, not because he did anything memorable or historically important.

He didn't do anything we we ideologically agree with.

Yeah, this guy, instead of like getting out the calipers to measuring skulls to decide who's human, he's measuring the girth of the mustache and it was like, eh, it's

not enough and it's not long enough.

Now, Shakar was, like I said, a medical doctor.

And he went from being head of the Military Medical Academy and became friends with a guy named Dr.

Nazim, who we have talked about.

From there, he slowly became the head of the CUP's main media outlet, which was called the Council of the Islamic Community, where he professed hardcore pan-Islamist, pro-Turkish nationalist ideology.

Despite not being a cabinet member or any member of the government officially, Dr.

Shakir became probably one of the five most powerful, most influential people within the entire empire by 1915.

And a small side note here that would be repeated.

decades from now with the Nazis.

Many of the central ideologues and leaders of the CUP, the people that made the whole thing tick and some of its worst mass murderers were medical doctors and to make a very very very long story short for a lot of the same reasons yeah it's a really important point i suppose to point out that like at this time

the eugenics movement had like moved further into the mainstream of the medical community and like medicalism i suppose if you could call it was like so important in kind of declining empires, national conflicts, like at this time, as part of propaganda.

Like,

these people are like you.

These people aren't for medical, determinable, and measurable reasons.

And this is why you should hate them.

Yep.

They compare them to germs in some cases.

So, like, yeah.

At the time of the defeat at Sarakama, Shakir had been in Erzurum in the Ottoman East, and he decided that due to the betrayal of the Armenians during the battle, the Armenians needed to be seen as an internal threat.

One just as dangerous as anything coming from the outside of the country's borders.

And most importantly, according to him, there are groups of Armenian Fitayi armed and laying in wait to support the Russians during any invasion of the empire.

The first thing, according to Shakir, was that the Ottoman state needed to head off any of this and round up anyone who could be considered a leadership of the Armenian community in a kind of decapitation strike of any organizational structure.

Even the very, very vocally pro-yount and CUP parliament might have objected to this.

But the parliament was on vacation since March 1st and would not come back for a few months.

Yet again, the fucking holiday strike.

And, you know, I'm not saying the parliament wouldn't have approved this.

It would have taken longer, probably.

But since they were gone,

according to law at the time, the triumvirate was simply allowed to pass edicts as law.

Talat, Minister of the Interior, agreed with Shakir and quickly ordered the commander of the police of Constantinople Constantinople to begin arresting any prominent Armenians they could find on April 24th, 1915, which is what we consider today the official beginning of the Armenian genocide.

It's always a good thing when a date happens on this show.

Yeah.

Now, this mass arrest order is sometimes framed as a kind of surgical strike on the Armenian community, its organizational leadership, which is, of course, what the Turkish government today frames it as, but it wasn't because it wasn't laser focused.

This could be because the Ottoman police were incompetent or because it was that way on purpose.

Ottoman police did hit multiple important figures, from church leaders to Armenian assembly leaders, political leaders, local members of parliament, things like that.

But soon just regular people were getting caught up in it, like teachers, members of political parties and organizations that were not explicitly illegal at the time.

including just random people, snatch up because they looked a little too Armenian.

At some point, all that was required to find yourself being dragged away was being suspected of having Russian citizenship or being around someone who was suspected of having Russian citizenship.

The Ottoman arrest order was so purposefully vague that to this day, we do not know how many people they arrested.

But generally, it is agreed that it was at least 270 in that first wave.

However, because Ottoman cops arrested people who shared the same names as those on the list, and some cops were able to be bribed by Armenians with money to to let people go, but they kept their names on the list to make it look like they did their jobs.

Or some people were just bad at their jobs and did not do their paperwork correctly.

But then after the 24th, the arrest continued in waves after that definition was just made even more vague.

Anyone who was considered a thinker or dangerous or had a higher education of any level or happened to own a business, the number of arrested Armenians would balloon into the thousands.

Most of of these people would never be seen again.

With the arrest ongoing, Shakir proposed another measure, that the Armenian population near the border of the empire, any border, but especially the Dardanelles and the east, which was remember, where virtually the entire Armenian population lived, needed to be removed because it was only a matter of time before they rose up and stabbed the Ottoman army in the back once again.

And that couldn't be tolerated given the very real possibility of a coming invasion from both of those directions.

And with that was born the temporary law of deportation.

Immediately, the Armenian population centers of Von, Bitlis, Yerzum, and others were ordered out of their homes by Talat.

Still, soon the order would cover every Armenian in the empire, no matter where they lived or how far away from a possible front line they were.

The orders of these deportations went through two main channels.

One through official government channels, and one through a separate parallel network of party apparatus, both in written and verbal communication.

Now, legal orders, those being the ordering of deportations of Armenians away from threatened areas.

And when I say legal orders, I know that sounds fucked up.

It's because they are, but it's not outside of the generally accepted norm in the world at the time to deport their own populations away from threat areas.

And these were handled via the government, through the actual ministries and things of that nature.

And again, when I say legal orders, that's because this is not even the first time the Ottoman government had ordered a mass deportation of people within their borders before.

They had ordered a mass deportation of Greeks only a few years before this.

This is something they've done before.

It's something other countries have done before.

This is something that was supported by the Germans in the Ottoman Empire.

They believed in it.

And the first person that came up with the idea of a mass deportation was a German advisor to the Ottoman government.

This meant the Interior Minister, Talat, passed orders to governors, and those governors passed those down the normal chain of command, generally all up in the open, right?

At that point, people would then be ordered from their homes and made to leave everything behind that they could not carry.

Armenians being forced onto the road were told that they would be deported towards Kanya, away from any borders towards the center of the country.

And they were told that camps would be waiting for them, stocked with anything that they would need.

Word quickly began to spread about the deportations, eventually making it back to Vaughn.

Now, the province of Vaughn was kind kind of unlike a lot of other parts in the empire.

Prior to the outbreak of World War I, at least for a bit, it was administered by a guy named Tashin Pasha.

He was a young Turk through and through, one of the original semi-progressive ones in a way.

Still a nationalist, of course, but he believed that the Armenians living under his rule were fine.

And this is about as good as things could get for an Armenian in the empire at the time.

And I won't say that there were warm feelings on either side here, but Tashin saw Armenians as a loyal segment of the population.

He trusted them as much as he trusted any minority, which he made sure to tell Shakir and in turn Talat when they began talking about a deportation order.

He reportedly told them that they had no reason to worry or fear about the Armenians.

However, I don't want to make it sound like he was some kind of hero or standing up for his subjects or anything.

He objected, but he always followed orders.

For example, when he was ordered to fire all of his Armenian civil servants, he bitched and moaned and then did it.

So there's no reason to think that he would not deport and kill his own civilians if he was pushed to do it.

I suppose like being a moderate is a really relative term in these sort of circumstances.

Yeah.

And that's what cost him his job is that since he complained about everything else, the CUP was a bit worried that he wouldn't comply or at least would make it hard for the deportation order when it came down.

And previous to this, we talked about how the CUP had got rid of a lot of people like him and put specifically CU Brandon nationalists in charge of everything.

He had managed to ride out his job through that, but not anymore.

On March 15th, he was replaced by Enver's brother-in-law, Javdet Bey.

When Javdet arrived in Van, he brought with him a vanguard of a new kind of Ottoman soldier, men of what would become known as the Special Organization.

The special organization did not fall under the military or military chain of command.

Rather, they fell directly under the control of the party, the CUP.

It was a party parallel military and little else.

This SO technically fell under the direct command of Dr.

Shakir and Dr.

Nazim, and was, much like the last paramilitary the Ottoman government formed, mostly manned by Kurdish and Circassian tribesmen.

But the SO would grow so large that there wouldn't be enough people from those minorities.

So they emptied the Ottoman prison system, staffing the SO with tens of thousands of convicted rapists and murderers to fill out the ranks.

Remember how I said there's two ways the government passed Halat's orders?

The normal way through the government and the second way?

The second way was through the party, specifically through written and telegraphed communications and verbal orders.

That second way was to give the SO orders and receive updates about their operations.

Javdett nicknamed the SO the Kassab Tabaru, the Butcher Battalion.

And if you're noticing the Kassab in the beginning of that, yes, that is where my name comes from: Butcher.

Joe, do you want to hit us with a fun fact you've prepared?

I would love to.

So

for this episode, I have King of the Hill facts

for a show that we all know and love.

Best animated show out of all of the golden era of animated, adult-orientated entertainment.

That is correct.

Bobby School, Tom Landry Middle School, is named after Dallas Cowboys football coach Tom Landry.

actually does exist and it is in Irving, Texas, though it is an elementary school.

Nothing about that surprises me as someone who lived in Texas for many years.

I mean, it is cinema verite about Texas somehow, despite being an animated show.

If you go to a school in Texas, you have a 100% chance of whatever school you go to being named after a horrible Confederate or a football player.

That's pretty much it.

I remember

one of my friends met my uncle, and my family have very, very, very strong accents.

And a couple couple of days later, it said like, your uncle is just like Irish Boomhauer.

And I was like, yep, exactly.

That is another fun king of the hill fact.

I'll give you two because what's coming next?

The voice of Boomhauer

was modeled after a crazy fan's voicemail that Mike Judge got after making Beavis and Butthead.

I believe it.

I believe it.

So unfortunately, we got Javdett's butcher battalion.

And Javdett himself had won a hell of a reputation.

And it is precisely that reputation as to why he was given this job.

Previous to this, the Ottomans slaughtered thousands of Armenians in Persia, during which time Javdett and his butcher battalion was there.

And Javdett earned the nickname the horseshoeer because he would personally nail red-hot horseshoes to the bare feet of Armenian civilians and laugh as he forced them to run afterwards.

Jesus Christ.

If that wasn't weird enough, I'll soften that blow here.

You want to guess the name of one of Javdett's favorite SO commanders?

Fucking like Big Kasim or something.

Rafael Di Nogales from Venezuela.

What?

Yep.

I was as shook by this as I'm sure most people.

Juan Waidolu.

I learned about this a few years ago when I was in school.

And Nogales is a very strange character.

I'm not going to go into Nogales very far.

He's one of those guys that's, he's a mercenary, you know, but it's back in the day when everybody called him an adventurer.

Yeah.

He was a guy who was a hardcore Christian in a way, but didn't like like he was Catholic and really, really disliked the religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire as well,

anywhere else

if they weren't Catholic.

Also was super racist against Turks in his writing, despite working for them.

It's just interesting to be like, hey, I'm going to go work out my intranessine Christian beefs with a bunch of guys who would absolutely make me into fucking Iskander kebab if I was born here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he hated Turks.

He hated Armenians.

He hated Greeks, which is weird.

He hated everyone, according to his writings.

And he and Javdett had worked together before in Persia.

So Nogalis.

is sometimes seen as a guy who was revolted by what he was seeing about what's about to happen, but he had seen it before, and he still worked for the SO.

He was not officially a member of the SO.

He was commissioned an officer in the Ottoman military, but commanded SO soldiers.

So take that for what it's worth.

He was SS adjacent, if you will.

Soon the governor ordered another 4,000 Armenians from Bonn to be conscripted.

And village and city leadership, many of them Dashnaks, were wary of encouraging any more men to surrender themselves for military service, knowing that they would be sent directly to the labor battalions.

After this, several Dashnok leaders in the area were arrested, including a guy named Nicole Miklanian, who went by the Fidiyi name Ishkan.

Fidayi sometimes have pretty sick stage names, I gotta say.

I love them.

Like Armin Garo, for example.

That's not his real name, but it's what everybody knows him as.

It's fun.

Yeah, it's cool to have a code name.

Yeah.

Sensing things were going in a very bad direction, Minister of Parliament Arshak Bramian, representing Vaughan, went to go talk things out with Jovedet.

Javdett.

Like, because the genocide has started.

It's generally agreed upon having started, but the mass slaughter has not yet.

That car is not turning around, but we're still at the position now where Armenians that have worked within this incredibly fucked up reality think it will still, they can still talk their way out of it.

Like, they think that things will continue on being fucked up, but not as bad as things are going to be.

It's oftentimes called like a failure of imagination, and you really can't blame them for it.

So Vramian agrees to go talk with Javdet, and unbeknownst to him, Ishkan and all the other Dashnaks that had been arrested in Vaughn were already dead, and he was riding directly into an ambush.

He was snatched up by the SO and was dead by the morning.

Vramian was massively popular within Vaughn.

And for the Dashnaks, having their two main leaders killed within days of each other, they knew some shit was going to go down, so they began to prepare for it.

Before long, SO detachments, as well as mobs of regular people, flooded flooded Armenian villages across the province of Von, slaughtering every man in their wake and enslaving the women and children.

Javdad is the first Ottoman commander people can find evidence of, setting up an age limitation of sorts for their Armenian victims.

As written by Nogalis, when giving orders to the SO, he brought his hand to just slightly above his knee and told his soldiers, Any Armenian man above that height is to be killed.

Jesus fucking Christ.

And women of all ages were to be taken alive if they could.

Within about a week, 50 villages burned.

Thousands were dead.

Survivors fled into the mountains or into the city of Von itself, into its Armenian quarter, where Dashnak leader Aram Manoukian, a former school teacher, was quickly organizing self-defense groups and refusing Javdett's orders to disarm, seeing it rightfully as suicide.

You might be asking yourself, since we've already talked about the Hamidian pogroms in episode one, what makes this different, right?

This is a conversation we run into a lot when we talk about genocides, and that is the one, arguably, most essential part of any genocide, which what makes anything a genocide?

Intent.

You cannot accidentally commit a genocide.

It requires intent, the intent to destroy a people.

The goal of the Hamidian pogroms was to obliterate the Armenian power base to use mass violence to knock them, you know, back down to size for daring reform, if you will.

This is very, very different.

Weirdly, thanks to Nogalis' own memoirs, we know what the party's orders were at the time, because much like the Nazis would in a few decades, the CUP did not communicate everything through pen and paper or telegrams.

Some of it was verbal, and the orders from Talat to Javdet in the Von area were unofficial through the party's mechanisms.

According to Nogalis, he ran to a detachment of SO men who were sacking an Armenian village.

And the Turkish officer in charge told him, quote, the governor of the province, being Javdet, ordered them to, quote, exterminate all Armenian males between 12 and older.

This is just specifically in the context of Vaughan, to say nothing of the rest of the orders that are being passed down to individual provincial governors across the empire.

Meanwhile, the Armenians in Von's Armenian quarter were digging in, reinforcing buildings, digging trenches to defend themselves.

A defense council was made to unify all the various different Armenian political groups.

At the same time, regular people bricked up their houses and pulled whatever they had that might be food, medical supplies, or weapons.

The Bishop of Von sent a letter to Javdet as a number of Ottoman soldiers outside the city visibly swelled into the thousands.

And Ottoman soldiers, regular soldiers, soon joined the SO as well, many of them under the command of German officers.

The letter was meant to be one final plea, some way, out of the situation, and Javdett sent a response.

It said, quote, this country will remain Armenian or Turkish, but it cannot be both.

The army moved into siege positions.

Nobody was allowed to leave Von any longer, specifically the Armenian quarter within.

But he did allow thousands of fleeing refugees from across the province of Von to cross Ottoman lines and attempt to enter the Armenian quarter.

This was not a merciful gesture.

Rather, he was hoping by inflating the population numbers of the quarter, he'd force its defenders to starve.

Manoukian and the rest of the quarter's leaders realized this immediately and refused the refugees entry.

This led to them dying.

Something that unfortunately we have to confront.

Is that the right decision to make?

I don't know.

Just to underline the mismatch here, Javdet had about 15,000 men, rifles, machine guns, artillery, you name it.

While the Armenians at best had a few hundred old guns, mostly revolvers, weirdly enough, and a very, very limited amount of ammunition.

The men using those guns had little to no real training whatsoever because they had so little ammunition, they couldn't train on them.

The Ottoman forces were also able to station their artillery at high points that overlooked the Armenian quarter, which the Armenian quarter, just to put it in perspective, barely three square kilometers,

give or take.

And it's now packed with thousands upon thousands of people.

It's also densely built up.

It's a very old quarter of the city.

So it's a...

It's kind of like a Warren in a way.

It's one of those places that only locals know how to get around it.

It's not exactly built with a plan, you know?

For a few days, the two sides mostly just stared each other down.

But at the end of April, after the genocide officially began in Constantinople, the two sides erupted into combat.

We don't know who fired first.

I don't think it really matters, but it seems to be agreed upon that what really kicked it off was an Armenian woman that had been captured by the Ottomans, for reasons I will leave to your imagination because this episode is going to be dark enough, got away and ran towards the Armenian quarter.

And a group of Armenian men and women, because the Fidayis slash volunteers inside Vaughan were both men and women, ran out to grab her, at which point a gunfight erupted.

Despite being outgunned in nearly every conceivable way, the Armenian defenders hung on while the glow of their own burning villages in the distance lit the nights.

As the Ottoman forces stormed into the Armenian quarter, they assumed they'd be walking into not much of a fight, but they found defenders waiting in every single room of every single house and inside the countless walled gardens.

Armenian volunteers had knocked, because you could call them holes, tunnels in between buildings and

in between gardens so they could fire, duck down through a hole and go into the next house.

They could scurry from one position to another and even emerge behind advancing groups of Ottoman soldiers and shoot them in the back before scurrying away once again.

And in such close quarters, being armed with only revolvers turned out to actually be kind of perfect.

Inside the houses, fighting was hand to hand.

No prisoners were being taken on either side, with Armenian volunteers or Ottoman soldiers being hacked, stabbed, and beaten to death.

One of the leaders of the defense is a woman named Sosa Vartanian, better known by her nickname, Mairich, or mother, because she was like 50 years old, and she fought in a small fiddy squad made up of her own children.

I mean, the circumstances are horrific, but like, Jesus Christ.

And she's a hard woman.

She had been a fiddy during the Himidian pogroms as well.

Everybody looked towards mother.

Yeah, so we've got the boss and her children, Solid Snake, Revolver Ocelot, etc., etc.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, mother's, or Myrich's main tactic was fucking genius.

She had lived through this before.

She knew exactly what the Ottomans would do, and that is if they saw women, They would not try to shoot them.

They would try to run them down and kidnap them.

So her and other women would conceal revolvers on themselves and kind of just hang out in alleys waiting for groups of Ottoman soldiers to try to chase them down, only for them to literally do the meme of call the hospital, but not for me.

They would spin around and shoot them, steal the rifles off the Ottomans' bodies, and scamper back into the Armenian quarter.

Behind the lines, Armenians of all ages, classes, and political affiliations helped any way they could.

While women cooked and sewed uniforms, a literal Boy Scout troop organized by the American Christian missionaries who actively took part in the resistance, carried messages, delivered rations, and extinguished fires.

They treated wounded and acted as literal scouts.

I cannot even fathom what kind of fucked-up merit badge they earned.

But that we have an armed Armenian genocide resistance Boy Scout troop in play.

It's nice to see, you know, Christian missionaries brackets good for once.

Yes, the Protestant missionaries would help give medical care.

Their building had a basement as well, so they used it as protection from artillery.

Depending on whose accounts you believe, Armenian survivors of the Vaughan Resistance said that they helped them build explosives.

A local chemist even churned out his own gunpowder.

And we know thanks to the Taiping Rebellion series, what he probably had to do for that.

He also melted down whatever they needed.

They casted their own bullets.

In one case, they forged an entire slapdash-ass cannon cannon out of melted cooking pans.

Hey, necessity is the mother of invention, and the mother is the mother of killing Turkish soldiers.

I mean, this is kind of like the scrap drives in World War II in the United States, but like in miniature.

And it's like, well, metal.

It's like, if you don't hold this shit off, you won't be able to cook.

So it's like, I think it's just at a certain point, it's invention, it's

adaptability.

It's just horrific to think of that being the only recourse.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And you know, someone is a real bitch about it, too.

Like, don't wash the cannon with water.

Exactly.

I put my good cast iron in that motherfucker.

I'm getting blasted to bits using the Aunt Jemimian cooking cannon.

Yeah.

Like, you can't, don't, how in the fuck are you going to melt my Le Cruze down to make a goddamn cannon out of it?

The enamel's going to fuck everything up.

You're not allowed to do that.

But the first non-stick cannon.

Just greasing the cannon with a big stick of butter.

You're only supposed to clean the cannon with water and, you know, coarse salt, rubbing a sponge all over it.

All right.

You put this cannon in the dishwasher, you're going to fuck everything up.

Like, the cannon unfortunately sucked due to the fact it was made out of cooking pans and by a man who's never made a cannon before.

But they could deploy it as a kind of shotgun of sorts at the head of alleys or narrow streets and just load it full of garbage and fire it down the road as Ottoman soldiers or SO men advance and just shred them with bits of rock and whatnot.

Ottoman SO guys are the only people in human history who also can relate to what Shinzo Abe experienced.

Getting hit with the unknown device.

Fucking, yeah, just like you're turning a corner and just get blasted in the face with a series of knives, forks, and debris.

Getting hit with the Armenian doohickey.

Now, in a dark turn of events, as if this wasn't already dark enough, soldiers from the Ottoman forces began to desert in large numbers because they hadn't expected to come with any real resistance let alone armenians willing to fight them tooth and nail in some cases literally into the last man uh they were not retreating uh they had explicit orders to never withdraw fight to the last no matter what over everything because they knew what would happen to the civilian population if they didn't fight that way.

The savagery of the defenders forced the German officers to recommend to Javdev to stop sending infantry in and said, blanket the area with artillery.

So they did, firing tens of thousands of shells into the Armenian quarter.

Again, this is only three square kilometers.

The Armenians still refused to budge.

They did not withdraw, and many of them refused to even move from their positions, choosing to die under bombardment rather than abandon where they were.

Now, despite the oaths sworn by the defenders, it was only a matter of time before they finally ran out of ammo, or their defenses were slowly eaten away at by ground advances or artillery.

They had no way out.

There was no resupply, no hope of driving tens of thousands of enemy soldiers away.

Their stores were running low, their casualties were running high, and disease had begun to take hold in the quarter.

Then the Russian Imperial Army broke through the Ottoman eastern border and marched hard for Vaughn.

Javdek got word of the coming Russian army and immediately ordered a retreat.

Vaughn was saved.

Unfortunately, we do have to hand it to the Russians.

It's the opposite of the Spetsnos meme night where it's zero Russian soldiers dead.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Vaughn didn't even have a movie theater for them to have a flamethrower.

Zero Russian soldiers dead, 30,000 Armenians saved.

I mean, I appreciate you finishing the sentence with saying that Vaughn was saved, you know, obviously in a relative sense, because when you say the Russians got there, it's like in the back of my mind, you also think like, oh, are they just going to show up and just also bombard it with artillery for good measure?

Just go full.

Yeah, I mean, this very well could have turned into a tag team situation, but not in World War I, at least.

When the Russian forces marched into Vaughn, they discovered dozens of burnt out villages and so many dead Armenians that their bodies had been thrown in a nearby river, tens of thousands of them, until he inadvertently created a dam.

Around half of Vaughn's Armenian population had been destroyed and...

A few thousand survived.

Most of them in the quarter of Vaughn itself.

The Russians then weirdly proclaimed the Republic of Von and put Manukian in charge of it.

This is a really weird, very short segment of history of the area.

Pretty much immediately, a massive schism formed between the different factions of Armenians, from Ottoman Armenians to Russian Armenians, and then the various political parties that they all belonged to.

Some wanted revenge, and they went out and looked for it, trying to find any Muslims who stuck around in the area so they could kill them.

Other groups tried to stop them, while other people didn't care.

Fidiyi Hiro Andranik tried to rally Armenian volunteers to march out and liberate other nearby towns, but most people from Vaughn didn't want to leave their neck of the woods, and they were more worried about trying to rebuild their lives.

Can't really blame them for that.

No.

But despite the absolute cluster fuck of a government that popped up in the wake of liberation, it was still seen as a safe haven by other Armenians who were fleeing the ongoing deportations elsewhere.

And soon...

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians had moved into Vaughn, expecting protection from either this declared republic, the Armenian volunteers within it, or the Russian military.

Any of them were a better choice than any other choice they had.

But that isn't what happened exactly.

Instead, the Russian military was checked at the Battle of Bitlis,

and then in turn evacuated Von, telling hundreds of thousands of Armenians who had just got there that if they wanted to live, they needed to retreat with them back across the border.

So they did.

The vast majority of Armenians packed up and left, trailing after the Russian army, making their way to either Tiflis or Ichmiyatsin, where they were promised safety.

And with that, the defense of Vaughn was over.

Now, with the events at Von, to anybody with a brain

could see that they're the result of the Ottomans' orders, their policies, their genocidal plan, whatever it may be.

The people of Von were not planning a revolution.

They were not attempting to establish an Armenian fatherland, as is sometimes said.

They were pushed against the wall and given two options, fight and die, or let us kill you without a struggle.

I mean, it became another example to quote another genocide survivor we have talked about on the show, not going like lambs to the slaughter.

Yeah.

Since that is something that people insist on believing for some goddamn reason when it comes to the victims of genocide.

But remember, the Ottoman government to the young Turks, to the CUP, any Armenian self-defense, regardless of the reason, any attempt to protect themselves from being murdered by the state was proof of rebellion.

Proof that all of these things that they have been saying about those treasonous Armenians were true.

And the defense of Von was no different.

There are other self-defense efforts in towns like Zaytoun and other places that further accelerated the Ottoman government's sprawling, self-perpetuating, and self-reinforced paranoia.

By this point, mass murders were taking place across Konya as well.

As the first large groups of deported Armenians arrived in the area, there were no camps.

There were no supplies.

Nothing was waiting for them except men of the special organization.

They slaughtered them and again kidnapped the women and children.

Elsewhere, the men of the Armenian labor battalions, long since disarmed, were murdered.

Some were taken out back and shot and firing squads thousands of men wide, while others were beaten to death or bayoneted, while still others were turned over to medical detachments from the Ottoman military.

Those men from the labor battalions who found themselves in the grasp of doctors, namely Dr.

Ali Saeed, who had taken thousands of women and children into so-called hospitals as well.

There, he promised them medicine and fed them poison.

People who refused to take his medicine had bleach or chlorine injected into their eyes, and women and children were given to the special organization to be raped.

The political prisoners taken on April 24th were executed by firing squad, hanging, or we don't know.

They were simply disappeared.

The problem for the Ottoman government was that these murders were taking place pretty much out in the open.

Armenians are being murdered in hospitals on the sides of the road.

Their bodies, numbering now in the tens of thousands, could not be hidden or missed.

Most of these special organization mass killings were happening along deportation routes, meaning just on normal roads, out in the open.

There was no way to hide any of this.

And this led to U.S.

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to demand a meeting with Talat.

This is probably one of the most famous meetings that takes place, infamous, I should say, regarding the Armenian genocide.

Morgenthau is outraged.

He asks about the deaths in Kanya, to which Talat shrugs and says, quote, why?

Are they Americans?

This does not concern the United States.

Joe,

do you want to hit us with a King of the Hill fact?

Oh, do I?

Hank's niece, Luann Platter, is named after a combo platter of an entree, roll, and a side called the Luann Platter at Lubies, a Texas-based chain of cafeterias.

Ball.

Yep.

The Hills can frequently be seen dining at the restaurant.

Only the show, it's called Luli's.

I assume they...

Did not have the rights to the name.

He wasn't going to shell out for that licensing fee.

I can't imagine how much a licensing fee for Lubies would cost, but probably between $10 and $25.

Yeah, we'll miss like marketing opportunity for

Lubies.

Oh, they still use it.

They had an actress show up at Lubies dressed as Luann all the time.

Okay.

Now, where we get to the point of that meeting where Talat says, why do you care?

They're not Americans.

We can do with them what we wish.

That is pretty much...

At the time, the general idea of, let's say, most people had for what was considered rights at the time.

The belief, especially amongst governments, was that a government had the right to do whatever it wanted to its own subjects and you couldn't say anything.

Remember, international law does not exist yet, which will become important on our next episode.

But we have to point out that just as insane as what Talat is saying, it was the general belief at the time by anybody.

It's actually kind of remarkable that so many governments said something about the massacres at all.

Years later, I believe it was in the mid-20s, when a man named Rafael Lemkin, who would eventually go on to define and coin the term genocide, was in law school

because there's this thing called Operation Nemesis that the Armenians would launch after the genocide ends to assassinate several members of the CUP and

turn the assassination of Talat into something of a spectacle in the German courts.

And Rafael Lemkin is in law school at the time and he's seeing this and he's outraged.

And he asks his professor, like, why did nobody stop this?

And the law professor tells him the right of the sovereign is to do whatever they want with their own people.

And Lemkin fundamentally disagreed with that, hence what sets him down his path.

Talat then goes into a further explanation with Morgenthau, saying that they couldn't trust the Armenians as a whole, and the entire Armenian people must be treated as a threat.

After all, look at these uprisings in Von and Zaytoun, where they refused to disarm and fought back.

Morgenthau counters, quote, that is no reason to destroy a whole race.

Talat pretty much just shrugs at this point and and asks, there's a charity we'll talk about more in our next episode called Americans for Armenian Relief that gathered tons of money and goods to be distributed amongst Armenians who are being displaced and deported and murdered.

Talat asks for the money gathered by that charity to instead be given to the Ottoman government, as well as a list of Armenians that had life insurance policies with American companies.

Because, quote, the Armenians no longer have any need for them.

I'm really sorry, Joe, but this literally sounds like the little article in the Onion Parody newspaper compendium of the 20th century where, you know, there's the article about American Jews concerned about not getting letters from their relatives in the 1940s.

And the German official in this article says, oh, well, they're very busy with the war and whatnot.

That's what it sounds genuinely.

That's what it sounds like.

The most fucked up thing about this entire idea is

to lots like, oh, well, we want their life insurance policies paid out to us.

We've talked a little bit on our bonus bonus series, history of Armenia, what exactly happened to all of this life insurance money years and years later, but Morgenthau declined the request to hand out any of this over.

I'm very taken aback by this idea that they're like, oh,

well, you know, we deserve the money for the policies they paid for because in case of

surprise, early death, because we killed them.

Yeah.

Yep.

Also, like, they couldn't have been for that much money.

Like, if I'm going to divorce the fact that this is literally how I know what happened to my family, which we'll talk about in a little bit, like, the combined amount of worth from those life insurance policies is so little money for an actual nation to give a shit about, but it didn't matter.

They still wanted it because that's what this is about, you know?

Like, it couldn't be that much money for the Ottoman Empire's government to give a fuck about.

Like, it almost feels like glib to say that, like,

I feel like I'm being driven insane by like how blase

Tala Pasha is in this moment, but it's like, ah, don't worry, give the money to us.

Like, you don't, yeah, we're killing them, but like, eh, so where's that money got to go?

Like, you got to give it to someone else?

I mean, to be fair, someone that holds your attitude of how weird and blase is was Henry Morgenthau.

In his memoirs, he's like pretty speechless about the whole thing.

He couldn't believe he was being spoken to in such a way, fully knowing.

what has happened.

One of the main reasons why we know so much about what is happening in America at the time is because of Henry Morgenthau, to say nothing of his very weirdly expansive family and power and influence.

But like he was objectly horrified about all of this and never hit any of it.

While it wasn't reported by the German press because, of course, they're allies and they made sure talking about any of it was illegal.

I'm struggling to even think of a comparison where I could think of that being like...

To be willing to ask that of the American envoy is just so

it's like the closest thing I can possibly think of is like it's like the kind of thing that like fucking Al Capone would have said as a joke to fuck with like the FBI.

You know what I mean?

Like it's mobster shit, but it sounds as though he was serious.

It's wild because you generally don't see such blase comments from government to government specifically to the ambassador when something like this is happening.

Yeah, there's normally

exactly.

There's the idea that we're like, oh, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Like that just sounds like some Armenian propaganda.

Like,

we really, we'd love for international charities to give us money and not go there.

You know what I mean?

Like, that kind of a thing.

The idea of being like, it's like soldier F shit.

It's like, you know, paratroop, the fucking army paratroopers being like, Bloody Sunday.

Yes, it happened.

It was good and we'll do it again.

Like,

it's insane.

And now with the international pressure on the government, it became clear to Talat and Enver and other engineers of the genocide that Kanya, the center really of the empire, wasn't suitable for widespread murder.

So more orders went out.

The Armenians under the deportation order, which now remember was everybody.

Nobody was exempt from it, would instead be ordered to march into the Syrian desert,

famously declaring they can live in the desert and nowhere else.

Now, in many cases, they were ordered to go to certain places where they'd be picked up by the Ottoman rail system, but the Ottoman rail system didn't have close capacity to handle this many deportees, even if it wasn't also handling war logistics.

Instead, they were sent by the government fully knowing that about in 90% of cases, there would be no train.

Many of the victims of the genocide would never reach the desert at all, because that wasn't the intention.

Deportation was always meant as a prelude, a cover for massacre and eventual destruction.

After the Armenians kicked out of their villages, everything left behind was stolen, divided up by government officials, military officials, and men of the SO.

Their houses were stolen so soon after the Armenians were sent away that in many cases, there were still hot tea on the stove waiting for new Muslim settlers.

Once the Armenians were on the road, they would be trailed by detachments of the SO, who in turn would be trailed by detachments of the Ottoman military.

They would stalk the columns of deportees, waiting for them to get weak from exhaustion, hunger, or thirst, or disease.

Then they would move in and separate the men.

Most men at this stage went quietly because they were warned that failure to do so would bring harm to their families.

They assumed they were probably being conscripted, to be fair.

Even if they had the means to fight back, which of course they didn't, because if they did have a weapon at home, which many Armenian men did, it had been taken away from them.

The men were taken away from the main body of deportees and killed.

Most of the time, the SO men would then double back and kill the rest, sometimes taking women, slaves, and children to be adopted out to other families.

In other places like Diyarbakir, there wasn't a large-scale expulsion into the desert.

Rather, for lack of a better term, there was an orgy of administrative violence.

The province, governed by Dr.

Mehmed Rashid, was quickly given over to the SO, and they began what amounted to be a reign of terror that lasted for weeks.

It began with the conscription of wealthy Armenians and business owners, with the mass arrest of anyone considered leadership, from Dashnaks to local churchmen, it didn't matter.

Then Armenians were forced from their homes, killed in the streets, businesses were burned, men were strung up and left for weeks until their bodies rotted and fell down and were left to be eaten by wild animals.

Thousands were driven to the banks of the Eagle River and drowned.

Dr.

Rashid ordered the SO to round up entire villages, pack them into churches, and burn the churches to the ground.

And it's important to note that not all of this happened at once.

It was slow, lasting over weeks.

The population was slowly picked apart and destroyed, and they knew it was happening while it was happening.

This is how my family died in Diyarbakir.

They, along with 97% of the Armenian population, were dead by the end of July.

The same went for Bitlis and Mush.

The few people in these areas that survived fled into the mountains.

Many of these people formed self-defense groups to protect themselves or what little they had left, while others fled the country entirely, generally making it into Russia or into Persia.

The most famous of these incidents is when the populations of several small villages around the foot of Musa Dak, which literally translates to Moses Mountain, got word of a coming deportation and instead of complying, packed what they had, including a few firearms, and hiked up into the mountains, as was their tradition when something dangerous was coming.

They were led by Moses Dird Kalusian.

So yes, you have Moses leading people up Moses Mountain.

And he led about 5,000 mid, women, and children.

They were soon under siege by those of the SO and elements of the Ottoman military.

And the men and the women at Musaddak had to get creative.

They didn't have a lot of guns, barely any ammunition, and they mostly had like whatever they had at hand to defend themselves.

They laid traps for Ottoman soldiers and paramilitaries so they could take them out one by one and steal their weapons and ammo.

They did this with pistols, knives, and in more than one case, dropping big fucking rocks on their heads like an Armenian version of Akma.

Oh, they're doing like the donkey Kong thing of throwing barrels down the mountain.

Yeah, yeah.

I know that Armenian.

His name's Donk.

Donk Donkey.

Kimar Kong.

I assume Kong translates as Kong.

I don't think we have a word for Kong.

If you're an Armenian called Kong, sound off in the comments.

Right into the show, bro.

They brought food with them, but they quickly ate their way through as the weeks wore on.

They began to forage off of anything and anything, including grasses and tree bark.

But there was 5,000 people packed into a very, very small space.

Soon, disease began to take hold.

And that is probably how I would tell you how they all died.

But something extraordinary happened.

The international community directly stopped a genocide.

Oh, it's nice when they do that for once, ever.

Right?

And in the way I say it countless times is the only way to stop a genocide.

This is probably the most famous story from the genocide.

It's been immortalized in the book, the 40 Days at Musadak, even though it wasn't 40 days, it was actually 53.

The author of the book was a Jewish man.

It's a very, very good book, but he changed the number from 53 to 40 because it was being published in the 30s, and he wrote it as a warning to the European Jews of what could happen to them.

So he changed it because I guess the number 40 is poignant.

Well, 40 Days and 40 Nights in the Desert, yeah.

Led by a man called Moses.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, no, I think I had that wrong, wasn't it?

40 Days and 40 Nights was the great flood of Noah.

I don't know, Nate, you're the Jewish one, not us.

Every one of you has read the Bible, which is the fucking Old Testament.

Hey, hey, speak for yourself.

It's not exactly word for word, the exact same as the Torah, but like, yeah, the Tanach.

If my Armenian priest has listened to guests, of course I've read the Bible.

Just across the Mediterranean station at Cyprus was the French 3rd Naval Squadron under the command of Louis D'Artage Fournet.

One of his ships, under the command of Captain Jean-Joseph Brisson, sailed to Mussadak, which is right on the sea, and saw a massive red cross drawn on a white bedsheet that the Armenians had draped on the hillside facing the sea.

He heard fighting going on, and of course, the French had some knowledge of what was going on regarding the Armenians, and Bressant ran back to his base and told Fournet.

Fournet then radioed French naval command on what they should do if we can get involved, that kind of thing.

But after waiting what amounted to be about two hours, he said, fuck it, and order Bressant to immediately stop what was happening.

Fournet and the rest of the the fleet sailed forward to aid the Armenians directly.

The French fleet opened fire on the Ottomans to drive them back.

Then they sent rowboats armed with Marines to the shore to evacuate over 4,000 Armenians.

They were all saved.

The ordeal lasted 53 days and has gone down in history as probably the most well-known incident of things that would occur during the genocide.

And how to stop them, most importantly.

Meanwhile, the German vice-consul launched an official complaint with Palat about what was happening in Diyarbakir, but not for the reasons you probably imagined, you know, the genocide.

They didn't object to the killing of Armenians.

Of course, they couldn't.

The German imperial forces were actively engaged in the genocide, but rather they complained about the indiscriminate killing of non-Armenian Christians who live in the same area, because the Germans were employing them.

They were mostly mad about the killing of Assyrians in this case.

Because, like we point out in episode one, the parallel genocide of the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Assyrians is ongoing.

Governor Dr.

Rashid later wrote, quote, my Turkishness triumphed over my identity as a doctor in this situation.

The Armenians were a load of harmful microbes that had affected the entire body of the fatherland.

Was it not my duty to kill the microbes?

Well,

there I suppose you have straight from the horse's mouth.

And the doctors, all of the doctors, of which there's many that have key parts, all write like this this for the most part.

They all make a direct comparison to bacteria, microbes, disease, which is, of course, not uncommon.

And as summer goes on, the vast majority of deaths were occurring in the long streams of Armenian deportees as they struggled to leave towards Syria as they had been ordered to.

Now, the reality of how and where Armenians are coming from differs, and how they unfortunately come to the end differs.

Armenians coming from the eastern part of the empire, the Russian border, are normally killed in large-scale massacres before they leave their villages.

Armenians from everywhere else are generally marched towards Syria and killed along the way.

Though, as we will talk about in part four, a large portion of them survive into Syria, but that is not the intent.

The intent is that they die along the way.

And that's because as these columns of deportees are marching, the Ottoman military, the SO, again, large groups of Ottoman civilians also have kill zones set up for them.

As columns of deportees march into one specific area, there'd be thousands of people waiting for them.

Again, the men would be taken to be killed because they see the most possible route of resistance coming from the men, and then everybody else would be killed afterwards.

So, so many people would be killed in one day that the Ottoman military or the SO in one given place would run out of ammo.

So, they'd switch to using axes, clubs, and rocks.

Fucking hell.

Most of these killing spots were

they tried to be out of the way so there wasn't piles of dead bodies on the sides of the road.

But piles of dead Armenians on the side of the road in the Ottoman Empire were impossible to escape at this point.

But they to funnel Armenian deportee columns into places like valleys and gorges like the place called Kemah, where they would be killed so the incoming lines of deportees didn't see them and they'd get scared and try to run.

But in some cases, these gorges, the entire floor would fill with the bodies of the dead.

And then other groups of SO men under the direction of doctors would come in and dump piles of quicklime over the corpses.

In other places like Lake Hazar, tens of thousands were thrown from the cliffs.

The Tigris and the Euphrates themselves were used as killing grounds, with thousands of Armenian men tied together at the ankles and thrown into the waters.

The bodies clogged the Euphrates River to the point that the SO had to throw explosives at them to try to free the water.

Fucking hell.

Like, you know, when we do these series about, you know, genocides or even episodes that like involve large-scale murders and massacres, I always like, it's moments like this that like really hammer home for me, like,

the level of inhumanity.

of it all that like you killed so many people you have to throw a stick of dynamite at it to unblock the river what the fuck and also that that your only concern out of all of this is that it's inconvenient for the river to be blocked.

The bodies, the people that you killed, are insignificant.

It's like literally,

you're treating it like

it's a landslide or some kind of natural disaster.

You're like, well, fuck, you know, we kind of need the water, but we don't need those people.

It's really easy

to understand this is this is what man does to man when they no longer see someone as human.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All of this was done at the party level and the government level.

And each time a village, a city, town, its population was expelled into the roads to be killed, Dr.

Shakir or Talat or some other party functionary would immediately check in to where this was happening to make sure it was being done and being done correctly.

In one case, after the population of Harput was targeted for destruction, Talat wrote the party secretary there, quote, have the Armenians who have been dispatched from there been liquidated?

Have they been exterminated or sent somewhere else?

Please be explicit in your report, brother.

Yeah.

From May to November, nearly the entire population of the eastern highlands had been driven out, and the vast, vast majority of them were already dead.

The population of Armenians streaming from the western portion of the empire into Syria faced no better options.

They too faced killings on the roads, but also the resulting thirst and starvation of their forced march.

No town was allowed to give them anything.

Like as they passed near a town or a city, the guards would close in to make sure they couldn't go in.

And if they did, they would immediately be shot.

And what little food and water they could keep on their person they took with them from home was generally stolen by soldiers, paramilitaries, or again, regular civilians.

Columns of humanity, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, stretched for miles following train tracks.

Thousands died along the way, dropping dead from thirst or exposure and the summer sun.

Thousands more marched directly into designated kill zones manned by either the army, the SO, and civilians.

Eventually, thousands of survivors made their way to the Syria desert, any one of a dozen locations where they'd been told a camp would be waiting.

But they found nothing but deserted train stations and dead bodies.

There is no shelter, no food, and no water.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were now trapped in open-air concentration camps, penned in by roving gangs of soldiers and special organization death squads.

Soon, like in many other places across the Ottoman Empire, local civilians joined in, working hand in hand with the state functionaries to murder, rob, and rape the people now trapped in the desert.

Deir Azor becomes probably the worst of these places.

It's the name and the camp that sticks out in our collective mind as being the camp.

It's a place where mass murder, institutional sexual abuse, imposed starvation, thirst, and disease end up killing at minimum 200 people per day.

A German diplomat nearby in Aleppo witnessed the scenes and said,

They are the forgotten whose only liberator is death.

By the end of 1915, nearly 800,000 Armenians were already dead.

And that is where we'll pick up next time on our conclusion to our series, part four.

Fuck me, I'm gonna have to like go into the next room and after we finish recording and be very upset about all this.

Yeah, you gotta go into the screaming room.

How's everybody everybody doing?

Is what I normally say at the end of one of these episodes and now just feels empty and hollow.

How'd you fucking think, Joe?

Not good.

I hope at minimum

we're learning or you're learning about a part of history that you previously didn't know while simultaneously picking up how similar it is to other things that would happen later.

How are you, Joe?

Given the subject matter.

I'm fine.

The reason for that is, of course, I studied these things in school for years.

And so I've kind of, when it comes to the presentation aspect of it, I see it's very important

to do.

Therefore, it doesn't bother me.

In a way, I don't want to say I'm excited to do this series because excitement isn't the word.

I've wanted to do this for a very long time for the reason that it is not something a lot of people know about, but it is something we should learn from.

I've said before, I don't know if I entirely agree with it anymore, that one of the best things we can do to protect our fellow people from this form of violence is educate people on examples of it from history.

I don't know if I believe in that all the way anymore.

A lot has happened since I've been to grad school and a lot has happened since we've started the show where my opinions have changed.

However, I do still believe it's very, very important to learn from these examples in history.

So maybe we could better protect our fellow people when they become the other.

So we can make sure that our fellow people do not become the other.

Because we know what happens when we allow that to happen.

And depending on where our listenership is living right now, that is happening.

And the takeaway from that is do what you can to make it not easy.

Yeah.

Everybody, thank you so much for joining me again here on part three.

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