Episode 358 - The Armenian Genocide: Part 2

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

I'm Joe.

With me is Tom Innate.

And we still have no cold open because that feels dirty and wrong.

Boys, how you doing?

It's spring.

It's spring in Central Europe and it's wonderful.

The hippies were right.

If you eat well and exercise, you feel better.

I fucking hate them for it.

But every year I learn this anew.

And I'm in my rediscovery phase right now.

So that's basically all that's going on in my life.

I got an 18-month-old who yells at me and throws shit, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

She just yells and throws shit.

I have to, other work-related, unrelated to podcasting, have to put together a proposal for a museum.

And it's weird trying to rediscover how to be professional to normal people when your job is making jokes about calm every day.

I empathize with that from the beginning of when this podcast started.

It's really hard.

The lines began to blur to the point that my coworkers would look at me and I realized, oh no,

I've become too strange to be a public school teacher.

You've become a Kafka-ass character of showing up with your real face and you can't make dick jokes to children.

It is interesting because this does happen to me sometimes when I have to temper myself in conversations with normal people.

It's not like I'm like massively awkward, but there's times when I'm like, oh, I could definitely do a little bit of a riff here.

And you realize it's going to fall completely flat because it's just going to you're just going to seem a little bit insane.

Like what we do, how we communicate.

I promise you, it's not just endless riffs amongst our loved ones, family members, neighbors, etc.

We are normal people.

Speak for yourself.

This is why my family doesn't speak to me anymore.

That being said, I was in the pub a couple of weeks ago and my mate like described the subreddit for big loads and their criteria of shooting big combs of like viscosity, velocity, volume.

And I was like, yeah, the three Vs.

I've really found my people.

All right.

Yeah,

every time I log into Reddit because I haven't changed my password in so long, it just says I've been perma-banned.

I'm like, it's probably better that way.

Some things things are a gift.

Fellas, dear listeners, we're on Armenian Genocide Part 2 here.

I encourage you to go listen to part one.

If for some reason you're starting here, I don't know what the fuck is wrong with you.

But when we left you last week, the large-scale massacres of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian population had finally stopped.

Hundreds of thousands were dead.

The bloody Sultan Abdul Hamid II did years of, well, pretty shitty half-assed reforms, if we're going to be honest here.

And now he was facing oppositions within his own beloved Turkish Muslim majority.

These people, these constitutionalists and reformists, were known as the Young Turks.

And despite the name Young Turk, it covered virtually every walk of life within the Ottoman Empire.

Every ethnicity, every religion, every ideology, really.

It was the largest tent possible as long as people wanted some kind of devolution of power away from the sultan and into a representative parliament and a constitution, but agreed on the survival of the empire as a political body.

This included everything from socialists and Marxists to hardline Turkish nationalists, who will unfortunately become the most important people in this series going forward.

They would become known as the Committee for Union and Progress or the CUP.

Or if you want to make fun of them, the Cup.

I don't know why that's funny to me.

It makes them seem a lot less threatening and also a lot less like the people who murdered my family.

Hey, they're the cup.

The idea of like the ecumenical young Turks, it's like you can be a young Turk member.

Like, it's like all these Astro-Turk political organizations basically meant to make life worse in America.

It's sort of like the, you know, like young conservatives for progress or something like that.

It's like, you don't have to be young.

You don't have to be a conservative.

You just have to be a fascist.

Yeah, pretty much.

Or it's like, I'm a young Turk.

I'm actually Croatian and I'm 90 years old.

Well, this is just bringing up age gap Turk discourse.

I'm a Serbian guy who lives in Kosovo for some reason.

And I'm a centarian, a super centarian, but I'm in the younger.

I hate when my I get cancelled by your Turks are problematic.

I wanted liberal reform, but a guy with a fez is just keeping it at arm's length with one of the ice cream scoops.

Oh, Lord.

Yeah.

Oh, oh, it turns out you just get ethno-nationalism.

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Oh, no.

That's my least favorite flavor of ice cream.

I'm going to be honest.

Everybody knows the ethno-nationalist flavored ice cream is pistachio-flavored.

I like pistachio ice cream.

I don't know why it's the first flavor that came to my mind.

I'm sorry, all my fellow pistachio ice cream flavor lovers.

Yeah, gotta find whatever Regip Tayap Erdogan's favorite ice cream flavor is, and that is the Ethno-Nationalism flavor.

It's probably Iron.

It's probably just like unflavored yogurt ice cream.

I was just drinking that the other day.

God damn it.

It's good.

It's fucking good.

But he's so into it.

Don't make me acknowledge the fact that I like it on the podcast.

Your inner Turk is coming out, Joe.

Hey, fuck you.

There's a reason for that.

I thought we were going to discuss in these episodes.

It's easier to see these groups as not having a shared position as much as shared worries and anxieties.

Their fear of the death of the empire, the downward spiral it was trapped in, and the pull of minority nationalism tearing away at the fringes of the empire.

And because of Abdul Hamid's increasing tyranny, like Armenian revolutionaries, for example, people that should be diametrically opposed to any kind of Turkish reform movement, found themselves on the same side as the young Turks.

And like them, a lot of this organization was being done abroad.

Obviously, Abdul Hamid is not going to put up with the shit happening in like center of Constantinople at the moment.

But it becomes so popular, it began to leak back into the empire by the late 1800s.

In the aftermath of massacres, Armenians abroad and in the empire were warming up to the idea of working with the young Turks.

Regardless of their political ideology and goals, were though, they were still wary.

We have to remember what just happened, and they are kind of questioning if these young Turks are genuine about their want for reform.

Yeah, it's one of those things where you look at, I suppose, devolvement movements that are centered around like ethnic identity, particularly in dying empires, cracking up states.

Don't ask what happened after the fall of Yugoslavia.

You know, it's really like, can we trust these people to have our best interests at heart?

And despite the name Young Turk, again, I need to

reiterate here, it's not just Turks that are in it.

It follows every walk of life throughout the Ottoman Empire.

But if you're, you know, a politically engaged Armenian, probably a member of the Dashnox or the Hunchaks, those same walks of life just massacred your family.

So why would you be really into working with them?

You would at least be suspicious, and they were, but there's a faction within the Young Turk movement, the CUP, that were getting incredibly militant.

Like there was bombings and shootings taking place against, you know, maybe people that work for the government who are not in favor of reform.

And then Young Turk and CUP allies within the government itself attempted a coup in 1896.

It didn't work out, but there was an attempt.

The one hurdle between a true alliance between the CUP militants and the Armenian militants, those being the Dashnaks and the Hanshoks, was that the CUP was wary itself of any radical group that specifically wanted to break away from the empire.

But before too long, that wouldn't be too much of an issue because the Dashnaks dropped any demand for an independent Armenia from the Empire.

Instead of calling for what they called at the time a fatherland, they used the slogan, quote, oppressed of all nations unite.

They effectively couched their language at Marxism to appease the Turkish nationalists.

Love doing, you know, proto-third worldism to please the guy in the big hat.

This is going to sound flippant once again, and I'm not intending it just to be like for laughs, but I'm just thinking about like a tendency that's dismissed by the powers in this, in the, you know, the Metropole, more or less ignored except at the periphery, and then somehow becomes popular through

like underground or cross-cultural movements and then more or less re-imported and becomes a massively dominant thing seemingly out of nowhere.

And the closest comparison that I can have is K-pop fandom in America.

And you have the element of also these people massacred your family.

If you're a Vietnamese K-pop fan, I'm sorry, but the Koreans did deploy to Vietnam, but they did some fucked up shit.

So, you know what I mean?

Like, it's weird to me in a situation like this.

Like, I, of course, I'm saying this, hindsight is 2020, et cetera, et cetera.

Previous episodes of this podcast and posts on social media have showed that I'm not a huge fan of the Dashnoks and the modern day formation of them, but I see where they're coming from insofar as like they need political allies.

And the Young Turk movement is the best way away from Sultan Hamid, right?

But it is really funny seeing something from over 100 years ago and you see the same like mealy mouthed shit of people changing legit political messaging and worries and exploitation and outright slaughter and instead just like covering them all in a nice, warm,

like ideological blanket, we're like, oh, no, we don't need to be worried about X population.

We need to be worried about all the workers.

Like, okay, I understand that, but right now we need to be worried about X population.

Shut the fuck up.

The weird kind of uncanny valley effect when you see those posters, having grown up in America, you know, like even the end of the Cold War, when you see those World War II posters, they're like, this is a Soviet soldier, or this is your friend.

He's a Chinese soldier.

He is your friend.

And it's like,

this might be updated.

Make sure, make, make, make sure to turn auto updates on on your political messaging.

And I'm not, like I said, I'm not trying to be flippant about it, but it's just interesting because it's like, in a way, it sounds as though this, because Young Turks now has the associations with all the things we are going to talk about.

But at the time, like you said, if it's a political alternative, it seems to have purchased with quite a lot of people and it's not the sultan.

It makes sense why people

want to align themselves with it.

Yeah, I mean, the young Turks wanted to return to the Ottoman constitution that declared all people within the Ottoman Empire equal.

Like, that's your best bet at the time.

I don't blame the Dashnoks for doing so.

I mean, in the same vein that, like, if you're, you know, you, you've been oppressed under both the Ottoman Empire and then, like, British protectorate turning and being like, actually, the Bath Party sounds fucking great.

You know what I mean?

You can understand it.

You might need to update, click auto-update on your politics on this one, but at the time, it is.

Yeah, because it's one of those situations you can say, I don't agree with it, but I understand it.

I think as well, like, like the desperation of the situation breeds, like we have limited options.

What is the one that will lead to the most stability in our mind?

Let's go with that.

Yeah, exactly.

And the Dashnaks were in favor of a federal empire, effectively, like self-determination for Armenians, but within an Ottoman federal system.

But others within the CUP radical circle thought that even the idea of Armenian ethnicity, status, recognition of anything about Armenians being a separate people was just absurd.

Instead, they were simply Ottomans.

And that is all that needed to be known.

There were no Turks.

There were no Arabs.

There were no Yazidis.

There were no Armenians.

We're simply Ottoman, which is like the Turkish version of your annoying friend saying all lives matter.

Yeah, you're all temporarily embarrassed Ottomans.

I don't see race.

I'm actually colorblind.

Putting a coexist sticker on the back of your horse card.

Oh, God, that sucks.

But actually, all of the little symbols would actually be represented in the Ottoman Empire, which is unique.

Tom, you have more perspective on this than I do, but there's a part of me that feels as though there's maybe not identical, but similar kind of obscuration that takes place in discussions of like Britishness versus any constituent nation or ethnicity in the United Kingdom and the fact that like English people who call themselves English don't like the idea that anyone who's not white and, you know, dozens of generations from England could be English.

And it's like, right, but if you live in England, technically speaking, like demographically, you are English.

You know what I mean?

That kind of a thing.

And so it's like, not to derail, but it's more like you can see these sorts of arguments or like refractions of them in the modern day.

It's just that when you look at this from the distance we're looking at it, it starts to look a lot more sinister.

It speaks of assimilation.

Like in the case of the Armenians within the Empire, and this idea is like, we don't need to worry about you having a different religion.

We don't need to worry about you having a different culture, a different language, a different everything.

You're all just us, which means, like, you know, the differences are going to be ironed out over time, which is familiar to many cultures, you know?

Yeah, like, I think the thing, especially like Britain is a good example when you look at, like, I suppose, the end of the British Empire and the establishment of like the British Commonwealth as this like non-institutional body, but this kind of existing cultural identity.

And what happens in these situations is when you have the state existing as like a superstructure and all the institutions that support the state existing as a structure, those different, I suppose, like coexisting or conflicting identities can exist within the institutions, but can never gain access to the state.

So you are the same, but separate.

And you see that kind of replicated in the UK at the moment where like being English is a very, very specific thing.

And being British is the same as it, but it's not the same in other regions.

And also like the history of the Commonwealth and when you have Commonwealth citizenship, when you actually put that to the test, when people start using their Commonwealth citizenship to move to Britain, all of a sudden it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, we didn't mean like that.

I would say like a more apt comparison would be like how Ireland exists today.

Yep.

Yes, Irish people and British people are two distinct groups of people, but due to forced assimilation through religion, through the mechanisms of the state, culturally, linguistically, pretty much the same now.

Or like how a lot of, I mean, how many Native Americans in the United States speak their native language?

It all happened due to, you know, the force of policy.

And, you know, while Ottomans, for lack of a better term, Ottomans in the young Turk milieu in this perspective are saying those things, they're not exactly liberal.

They're not exactly progressive.

A lot of it is like, yeah, Turkish will be the only legal language of the Ottoman Empire.

Yeah, Islam will be the only religion that we recognize in the Ottoman Empire.

But, you know, we're all Ottomans.

I mean, we're all all Ottomans.

If you want to go to university, you better speak Turkish.

If you want to go into business, you better speak Turkish.

If you want to go into this walk of life, if you want to leave your dirt farming village, you better speak Turkish.

Yeah.

And it's creating, I suppose, a new

pathway between that like structure of institutions into the superstructure of the state in that like that pathway is now determined by engaging in, I suppose, like linguistically, culturally, you know, definitely economically with being Turkish.

You can be Armenian, but you have to be Turkish.

Yes.

I actually have a quick example that I think is also really relevant before we move on, which is I know exactly a story that I think is extremely apropos to this one.

So the military dictator of South Korea during the Cold War, Puck Chung-hee, actually took the civil service exam and had intended on working as a civil servant in the Japanese Manchukuo state, basically of the occupation state of Korea and Manchuria.

And on the day of the civil service exam, he was overheard by a proctor before the test started speaking to one of his classmates in Korean and was immediately thrown out of the the test and couldn't take it.

And then wound up becoming joining the sort of auxiliary military in Manchukuo and then becoming a senior officer that way.

But like the reason why he didn't become a functionary of the Japanese state instead of later the dictator of South Korea is that Japanese-ness and assimilation was hard line drawn enforced.

And so it's similar.

It's like, okay, you can be an ethnic Korean and do things that will, you know, we might let you, but you're not allowed to actually be Korean.

You're not allowed to actually speak your language.

You're not allowed to, that has to be subsumed if you are going to be part of the state.

And that's, that's, I don't know if it's 100% exactly comparable.

Same ballpark.

That's what I'm.

Yeah, that's that's that to me, like you can think of these other examples.

I will say same ballpark for about the next year in this timeline.

But when it comes to the destruction of cultural identity, what we call cultural genocide, fold that paper up, stick it in your pocket for part four.

Roger that.

Also, no good story on this podcast ever starts with a guy took a civil service exam.

Yeah, it never does, does it?

Yeah, exactly.

But in a political meeting in Paris in 1902, this argument caused a blow-up between the Armenian delegation, also amongst themselves within the delegation, mostly being the Dashnaks and the Hunshaks, but also with a group of young Turks.

Now, the Hunshaks refused this deal of foregoing the idea of an Armenian fatherland.

Because they believed that the only true safety that the Armenian people could have was with an independent state, a nation-state, something that they haven't had in the modern age.

The Dajaks disagreed, and it caused a massive schism between the two of them.

But I should also point out here that this delegation of young Turks, like I already kind of alluded to, was not exactly progressive or liberal.

There were liberals.

There were true progressives in the young Turk movement, but they were by far a minority.

I'm just imagining what could cause a similar dust-up in Paris in 2025 between Armenians and Turks, and it's like argument over whose Dior genes are the tightest and the whitest.

No, it's who invented Baklava for sure, or hummus, or whose bread is the flattest and most delicious.

Or who's wearing the most Dior Sauvage.

Who gets to own a cell phone shop on a particular corner of a street?

Who has the most overly financed white BMW?

Actually, since it's France we're talking about, it would just be Charles Osnavour coming on the radio.

Whether or not you're voting for Eric Zimmoor, yes.

We both probably will, unfortunately.

But the young Turks in this group, and it will become a majority of young Turks are nationalists and not just Ottoman nationalists.

They're Turkish nationalists, ethno-nationalists, which there's still different flavors of them as well.

There's people who, you know, are center-right, centrists within the young Turks, who maybe don't believe in the destruction of the Ottoman minorities, but do believe in the supremacy of the Turkish people within the Ottoman framework.

And then there's the CUP.

The CUP saw any of this free and equal shit as treason.

To them, an Ottoman state was a Turkish one.

Full stop.

The Turkish people were not equal to anyone, and the minorities needed to be assimilated, kicked out, or otherwise pressed down into being little more than slaves.

The CUP delegation at this meeting in Paris accused the sultan's nephew, who was actually chairing the meeting, the sultan's nephew being a dissident, of course.

And they said, well, we can't listen to the sultan's nephew.

He's a British agent, clearly in the hire of the Armenians, and he's Georgian, which might just be the most caucuses argument I've ever fucking heard in my life.

This is an argument that would happen today.

That was an argument that you would get forwarded on WhatsApp and it says forwarded many times from your uncle.

Yes.

It's like the real life version of one of the things that Milo has talked about about Russian politics where like a politician will have like a big important press conference to make a huge important declaration.

It's treated like a matter of state importance on TV.

And the declaration is like actually Greeks or Uzbek.

Yeah.

And like, that's just the thing that he wanted to make sure everybody knew.

And it's like, yeah, this has a long, proud history.

There's like a six-way handshake across the Ottoman Empire.

Like, oh, I can't trust him.

He's a Turk.

I can't trust him because he's an Armenian.

I can't trust him because he's Georgian.

He's Arab.

He's Yazidi.

But they're all accusing one another of being the other thing while also all accusing each other of being gay.

We have to suppress the Hazar myth because then otherwise, if the Jews also get called Turkish, then like it's just, it's going to fucking disrupt the equilibrium.

But while these groups of radicals recruited and plotted, the reality for Armenians in the highlands was virtually unchanged.

Large-scale official massacres that drew the ire of, let's say, the international community, but not much else had stopped, but only for a short amount of time.

Once international attention was drawn elsewhere, they quickly started again.

The reason for this was the same reason that the killings took place the first time.

The Sultan, who had previously declared the quote-unquote Armenian question would only be answered in blood, saw the very existence of the Armenians on the highlands in their indigenous land as a national security threat.

Anytime he heard of three Armenians hanging out, he assumed they were plotting rebellion.

And that isn't me making up a bit about three Armenians hanging out.

That was the British Council making that remark.

They love little like pithy aphorisms that just come across as insanely racist now.

Well, like he was saying that as like making fun of the sultan.

Like the guy is so paranoid if he sees three Armenians hanging out.

It must be a group of armed Doshnaks.

He saw any use of weapons or organization of Armenians in a political way as a revolt.

And those two things only increased both in reality and perception after the massacres occurred.

And I should point out here again, it was actually completely legal for Armenians to own firearms.

It had been for who knows how long at this point, decades.

It was perfectly fine for the man of the house to own a rifle, especially the rural areas.

It was not considered illegal or suspicious in any way.

The highlands are both always kind of notoriously lawless, but also hunting, guarding livestock, things of that nature, having a hunting rifle was completely normal.

There was no issues with it.

I mean, you think about.

Afghanistan, remember the rules that they had there was like families could own an AK.

Yeah.

Like you could have a home defense weapon.

Like that wasn't illegal, you know, and that's, you know, even through the paradigm of like sort of essentializing and otherizing people as like just like ethnically terrorist, you know what I mean?

Like that still was, it was understood.

Like, yeah, it's dangerous.

You need to be able to defend yourself.

It was legal for them to own a rifle, but most families didn't own a rifle.

Like they could have one.

I imagine they were much more expensive back then, too.

They're pretty pricey, and not everybody was herders or livestock people.

Not everybody had a use for it.

So not everybody had one.

It's contrast to America.

Wait, I don't have a use for a goat.

I'm not going to buy one.

I have an idea for a time machine.

Like, hey, this desert eagle has Evangelian colors on it.

I should definitely put it in my Toyota year.

I'm going to go back in time, pop in my ancestral village, find the nearest Doshnok organizer, and say, bro, I have brought you a crate of M16s from some guy's house in New York.

Ignore the anime stickers on the magazine.

I know you don't know what that is.

He's also Armenian, but let's not talk about how he got there.

It's fine.

It's fine.

That's why I brought you the guns.

The last thing a Turk sees is the Asuka Langley AK-47 coming over the hill.

I once saw a guy who had taken blue, like light blue translucent saran wrap and wrapped all of the wooden parts of his AK-47.

And the best way I could describe it was it was like when Bic Sean talked about having a Sirokh vodka chopper.

I'm sure it sucked for actually using it, but it was the coolest looking rifle I'd ever seen.

Get me the Dosh Duck Sirok chopper.

Think about this.

Men in the official government paramilitaries, which we talked about in the last episode, who were supported by the army and under command of local governors and military officers, had just murdered hundreds of thousands of people, including quite possibly, if you are an Armenian at this time, your neighbors or family members.

For people in the highlands, there's zero trust between them and the government.

So, Dashnaks, Hunshaks, and the Armenikons continued their training and organization of self-defense groups made up of volunteers.

These become known in Armenian lore as the Firayi, or freedom fighters, volunteers, right?

And the whole point was: so, these villagers, these these areas, these towns, not just very rural villages, sometimes it's just like the Armenian quarter in a particular city or town, would be able to protect themselves in case shit went sideways again.

And despite the training and organization of these groups being by explicitly political people, the groups themselves were not politically driven whatsoever.

These were not Armenian freedom fighters.

These were the guy who owns the corner store wanting to protect his neighborhood from another wide-scale massacre.

They were armed neighborhood watch groups, but not in the cursed American way.

The government, hearing about all this, of course, saw this as the organization for a coming rebellion and once again sent in paramilitary death squads.

This led to multiple battles, such as the one that happened in the town of Mush in November 1901.

A band of around 30 Fedayi, led by Andranik Azanian, known to Armenians today simply as Andranik, and a man named Kvork Chavush turned the Arkalatz monastery into something of a fortress.

This was at a choke point that could protect Mush from paramilitaries, things of that nature.

And it was also, because of the way Armenian monasteries tend to be built, a naturally defensible position.

At first, they fought only the paramilitaries, but like we talked about last time, paramilitaries tend to not be so good at fighting people who shoot back.

So soon thousands of autumn regular soldiers are sent in.

But it's November.

If you've ever been to this area of world of November, the weather starts to turn quite quickly on you.

In the harsh highlands, things start to get cold.

Thousands of men camped out together as, you know, fall slowly turns to winter means disease rips through the Ottoman ranks.

And Andranique and his small band of Fidayi launch constant hit-run attacks on the army.

After several weeks and having run out of ammunition and in one case, knifing Ottoman soldiers in their sleep, Andranique and the others simply changed into some Ottoman soldier uniforms they had picked up off some dead bodies and walked out of the monastery through Ottoman lines.

Nobody realized realized what was happening.

Going up against Armenian Frank Castle with the Punisher skull shaved into his chest here.

Andranik is one of my favorite characters from Armenian history.

Fucking absolute hero.

Also, how bad is the Ottoman military?

It's like, hey, did we have any soldiers coming from that direction?

No?

Ah, they look trustworthy.

Just let them through.

They look covered in blood and they're carrying thousands of fezz.

What should we do?

I like that

that's the version of scalping is just taking the fez.

I would say taking the mustache, but if you look at pictures of Armenian Fidiyi at the time, we're sporting very similar mustaches.

Exactly.

After this, Andranique and other Fidiyyi retreated to Sassoon, the site of horrible slaughter only a few years before we talked about in our last episode.

And they pressured the Armenian patriarch to tell Tsar Nicholas II to tell the Sultan to back off while simultaneously demanding reform from the Ottoman government.

Specifically, the disbandonment of the paramilitary death squads.

The Russians, brought in to be the mediator in this situation, didn't really give a shit.

Because if you remember from part one, their foreign minister might be the only guy so racist against Armenians that he would be allowed into the Ottoman government.

And in turn, the Sultan played out like Sassoon was once again in open rebellion and sent the Ottoman army in to suppress it.

This would require the army to cross through mountains and valleys, things that were the Armenians' backyard and where they lived, and the Fidiyis savage the Ottoman forces and guerrilla raids through the mountains.

Fighting a guerrilla force in mountainous terrain that they are unfamiliar with.

I don't think you two have any experience of that.

Yeah, I mean, certainly modern Turkey doesn't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No comment.

No comment.

The result of what would become known as the Second Sassoon Resistance was unfortunately a foregone conclusion.

Eventually, the Ottomans would bring the full weight of their army through the mountains, and no matter how badly out of dates, how badly trained, and how horribly led the Ottoman army was, they did have multiple artillery batteries and just sheer force of numbers.

What followed was the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands and the burning of at least 50 more Armenian villages in the Sassoon area.

Now, in response to this, the Dashnaks attempted to assassinate the Sultan.

Could have been a good move.

The Sultan famously barely ever left his palace, so they had to time it perfectly.

The plan was to bomb his carriage as it left the palace in the very few times that it does.

Bombing the carriage does make more sense than the thing that immediately came to mind, which was to ask myself: Does Armenia have a tradition similar to ninjutsu?

Like

you're going to go for the most obvious target, as opposed to trying to enter the palace and disarm the palace guards and throw Armenian ninja stars and so on and so forth.

Yeah, that'd be way cooler.

Scamper up the palace walls in tow shoes.

They're meaning resistance, sponsored by Vibram.

Yeah.

The Vibram ninjas.

You just concentrate really hard and the hair grows out like a fucking ninja tsuki.

The hardest part of being an Armenian ninja is painting over the three white stripes on the sides of your pants so you can blend it with the knight.

Look, man, I'm just laughing at the idea.

It's like, yeah, they have poison darts, but they're actually tipped with brandy that just makes you really drunk and kind of emotional.

And the guards just start getting in their feelings.

Yeah, you just end up being a really annoying drunk who's crying and telling telling all your friends that you really love them, bro.

It's just all these Turkish guards just like suddenly listened to Dre like 115 years early.

Now the first attempt at killing the Sultan went very, very badly because the two Dashnoks that were building the bomb accidentally did what bomb makers tend to do from time to time, and that is blowing themselves up.

Yeah, it always seems to go like...

First round, kill yourself.

Second round, you don't kill your target, but you manage to kill like world's most photogenic child in a sailor suit.

Like,

it always happens that way.

Many people don't know this, but when a child in a sailor suit is skipping down the sidewalks, curling a large lolly, bombs just gravitate to them.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like the red balloon bomb, basically.

It's like the children's book they really don't want you to read.

So they take a second crack on it.

July 21st, 1905.

They don't blow themselves up, but they do miss the carriage entirely.

They killed 28 innocent bystanders.

The Sultan is not even injured.

I assume all 28 were small children.

In sailor suits.

Small children in sailor suits.

They were on a small children, best dressed in sailor suit costume, like prize exhibition.

They get to go, and every single one of them gets to go out and have a nice, nice day out.

The Sultan, before leaving the gates of the palace, like, send out the palace guard.

And it's just like kids in sailor suits.

Now, this led to a break between elements of the young Turks, the more, the more liberal, progressive young Turks, the more militant CUP, and the Dashnoks.

Because the Dashnaks and the CUP, as well as the Hunshaks, who are not really working with anybody else in this situation, are all very militant.

However, they're different flavors of militant.

The CUP, despite blowing up and shooting several people who worked directly for the Sultan at this point, still wanted a kind of constitutional monarchy.

So trying to kill the Sultan was a bit of a party foul.

The more progressive young Turks also didn't, they didn't want a republic.

They wanted a constitutional monarchy.

There was a small group of Republicans, but they're so small a number, they're really unimportant for this.

The Republicans in the Turkish nationalist sense become important quite a few years later.

So it creates a schism between all these groups like, holy shit, why would you try to kill the Sultan?

I can't imagine why.

Oh no.

And then to make this entire episode even more embarrassing, the same European powers who were just calling Abdul Hamid the bloody red sultan were now publicly sending him well wishes and admiring his resilience and courage for surviving the assassination attempt.

So much has changed since then.

I know, right?

That's one thing that's kind of like echoed continuously while writing the series is like, this would happen today.

I mean, it is happening today.

As we are recording this, and it continues to happen today in Palestine, where, you know, oh, I can't believe all these horrors of all these people dying.

Oh, yeah, there's dying just like that.

Or like the guy who's on the list of like, America might actually sanction this one guy for being a huge piece of shit, but somebody hits him with a spitball, and then it's like fucking messages of condolence from every single politician in the West.

Yeah, I mean, Sultan Abdul Hamid was just directly responsible for the deaths of around 300,000 people about 10 years before this took place.

No, we don't want you to kill him.

We want him to decide he's going to be a good person and not do it anymore.

And that's definitely going to happen.

Yeah, we're going to hit him with a line of dialogue that's so hard-hitting and so heartfelt that Sultan Hamid's going to stand up and apologize and realize that he's done wrong.

We've got him with 1900s Lin Manuel Miranda, and he's going to have a change of heart.

Now, after this, there's another Congress of Ottoman opposition in 1907.

By the time this new gathering formed, things had worsened for the Empire.

Things were always worsening for the Ottoman Empire at this point.

More territories were breaking away.

More wars and revolutions were breaking out.

Several more factions of the young Turks began to see things the way the CUP did, that the Sultan's regime just wasn't going to step down.

Violent action would be required.

And again, they still wanted the Sultan.

They just didn't want him to be in charge.

So it's like they're plotting the world's weirdest violent coup.

Political assassinations began to sweep through the empire.

Military officers, Muftis, bureaucrats loyal to the Sultan began to get clapped left, right, and center.

And the men responsible for this uptick in political killings were present at the meeting, and they will become the engineers of the Armenian genocide within a few years.

Talat Bey and Enver Bey, soon to be known as Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha.

Enver was something of the Young Turks military organizer.

So what started as an intellectual movement now had a dedicated military faction as well.

By now, like I said, more factions of the Young Turks began to side with the CUP.

Ottomanism, or the Ottoman state, the Empire, all this ideas of equality, amongst the minorities.

Fuck that.

The Ottoman Empire belonged to the Turks.

And a new argument began to run through the circles of the young Turks.

That is, the empire must be secured for the future of the Turkish race.

And boy, if that line doesn't hit a little bit weird.

It might sound familiar because it's supposed to.

MAGA is secretly Turkish.

Joe, but like, I have one question.

And maybe you have the answer to it, maybe you don't.

But like, what is the, I suppose, like, the internal stability of the Sultanate like at this moment while all this is going on.

Oh, it's completely destabilized.

The Sultanate government, the Sublime Porte, is a rotten pile of shit about ready to fall over

for much of the same reasons that we talked about that led to the Empire being as rickety as it is at this point.

Not to mention, every year I'm talking about, because I do have to speed along quite a bit here, is there's more bad things happening to Empire, seemingly every few months.

I mean, famously, Dr.

Patrick Wyman kind of explained how the fall of Rome happened for the average person which was you know once upon a time a guy from the government would come and fix that bridge but now he's not coming anymore

so our only connection to the government is now gone yeah that's happening across the Ottoman Empire at a rapid pace okay guy in Pittsburgh right now is like oh oh I'm you have my attention like every six months that passes in the Ottoman Empire at this point like three years of history are occurring especially for something as old as the Ottoman Empire it's not a gradual decline at this point.

The Ottoman Empire has been driven off a fucking cliff.

Huge swaths of the military at the staff level were now hardline CUP backers, and more than that behind them were young Turk backers of the various different factions of the movement.

And they hit the streets openly.

Units of the Ottoman army, led by their young Turk cadre, mutinied.

They took to the streets.

They're threatening to march on Constantinople.

And this is what is dubbed Young Turk Revolution.

In July of 1908, it worked.

The Sultan blinked.

He backed down.

He restores the Constitution and allows a new parliament to meet.

Now, what's important to see here is that the Young Turk Revolution is, it gets a bit of revisionism in modern history.

So you can see it as a liberal, reform-minding, constitutionalist movement that would lead part and parcel to the Republic of Turkey as we know it today.

And that isn't true.

This was not a popular uprising that forced forced the Sultan back.

In reality, it was a military coup.

Military men with military organization, all led by a small corps of hardcore nationalist politicians, had risen to leadership positions within the Young Turk movement.

It was the mutinies and little else that forced the Sultan to back down and restore the constitution.

There was no large-scale grassroots protest movement of the civilian population.

It was, at its very essence, a far-right military coup supported by far-right paramilitaries that just so happened to kind of sort of pump the brakes when the Sultan backed down rather than kind of just form a dictatorship immediately.

But it's only hitting pause on that.

That is coming.

Instead, the hardliners within the CUP backed off and allowed the return of a previous semi-moderate constitutional government.

to keep the seat warm.

Fair elections would be held, political exiles were allowed to return, and security improved, owing mostly to the fact that the government stopped ordering the death squads to kill people.

Throughout the empire, the sultan's men, loyal men put in place to do his bidding, and governorships and mayoralships, wherever, were replaced by men of the constitutionalist regime.

Newspapers, debate clubs, political parties, organizations all opened and ran freely.

Women's rights took a huge step forward.

And just in general, Ottoman society seemed to actually be achieving that whole Ottomanism thing people had dreamed of.

The Armenians of Constantinople, caught up in this revolutionary fervor of the day, deposed their own church head for being a stooge of the sultan.

They reformed the Armenian National Assembly and loudly proclaimed from Taksim Square to a crowd of Muslims in Turkish, quote, we have one common religion, and that is freedom.

That would not last long.

Yeah, I feel like this is an antecedent to being lulled into a false sense of security.

And this this is not even

seven years away from what's coming.

It feels like these details, yeah, like I understand there's a little bit of curation involved, but it just, I don't know, it's more poignant, I think, because of the fact that like

this isn't cynicism.

This is actually like a genuine desire for reform and like liberation, but even within the confines of what people have dictated is acceptable.

Yeah.

This is people playing the game and being sincere.

And yet.

This is the most hopeful that the Armenian nation within the Ottoman Empire had been in living memory by far.

And it is not going to go well.

Armenians and historians today tend to look back on these people, specifically the Dashnoks, which again, I am no fan of in their modern formation,

and kind of curse them for being collaborators in one way or another for what's coming.

And it's just like, no, you...

really don't understand.

How would they have possibly fucking known?

You know, I think that's incredibly reductive and stupid to do.

There's a concept, I mean, I've encountered this in like comparative literature, literary theory, but also it applies to history as kind of the fog of the present.

Yeah.

Which is to say that like these people are making choices based on what's immediately apparent to them.

And even with a little bit of remove, there's just so much more clarity.

You can see the, you know, the sort of gathering forces.

You can see the elements kind of maneuvering into place that are going to lead to something much worse and much more dangerous.

And there is perhaps an urge to chastise these people and to think, well, how could you not have known?

But like, once again, they were reacting to what was happening right in front of them.

And like, they couldn't see all of these as antecedents.

They just saw them as like, this is what's happening now.

And look at what they just lived through.

The pogroms.

Right that just happened.

Like, how could you possibly think that anything worse than that could happen?

And yeah, this is going to be a thing that's like, this is going to, the crime committed against these people up to this point is going to live in, you know, their cultural memory as this horrible low point but there is this urge to be like well we've gotten through it we've moved beyond it right and like you said not not really not being able to conceive of it immediately pivoting to something much much worse this is the best hope that they had for the future of a mostly free and equal system within the binds of the Ottoman Empire and people human beings are inherently hopeful As they should be.

We want to see the good in things.

Like that's, I'm not saying it's a bad thing.

We want to see the good.

We want to see the silver lining.

We want to see the positive thing we can work towards.

That's just our nature.

Yeah.

And not to mention the people who will eventually be the engineers of the Armenian genocide, Talat and Enver.

Shamal is also in there, but he's less important for the greater narrative.

We'll talk about him later.

But like they're hanging out and talking with the Dashnak party, with members of the Armenian Assembly.

Like these are, these are not mysterious people to them who they've never spoken to.

They're literally telling them they will work together.

And like, I think as well, like the, like I talked about earlier on, like the shift between like structure and superstructure.

And like, this seems like a kind of like a, on one hand, like a bloodless coup, but also like this seems like a genuine, genuine kind of like structural change in how institutions and the state operate.

So you can't really blame people for feeling hopeful about it.

Not at all.

Yeah.

Not at all.

I would probably feel just as hopeful, honestly.

Well, some Armenian groups in response to this massive change use this new thaw in relations with the government, government, uh, organization with the government, cross-cultural communication, to disband their self-defense groups, which is what the Dashnaks did.

Other groups actually use that thaw to rebuild theirs just in case.

Because, I mean, at this point, who the fuck are they going to trust?

I could see both sides.

And in December 1908, the Dashnaks officially recognized that, quote, Turkish Armenia is an inalienable part of the Ottoman Empire.

But again, on top of that was this concept of a federalized, decentralized empire with an Armenia inside of it, but not an independent republic of Armenia.

The reasons for this are obvious for anybody to see.

They're desperately trying to show everyone that despite everything that they've heard, that Armenians are part of the empire.

They're loyal parts.

They're loyal Ottoman citizens.

They're working towards the greater good of the empire.

And they always have and they always will be.

Of course, unfortunately, in hindsight, this really makes them look like they're trying really hard to, you know, look like they're one of the good ones.

But that's not what it seemed like at the time.

Remember, this is a time of genuine foundational change in the empire, and they wanted everybody to see that they wanted in.

Yeah.

And as well, I suppose that kind of like building of like, you are an important part of this greater whole that is the new version of the Ottoman Empire.

I think it's totally reasonable for people to want to engage in that, especially what they've suffered through in previous years is like, okay, this means we stop getting murdered and massacred.

Yeah, okay, we'll buy in.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, think about the degree of completely earnest and sincere patriotism, like pro-U.S.

patriotism on the part of first, second, and third generation Japanese Americans.

Like that's not put upon, like, that's a genuine sentiment.

Like, they lived through horrible things, but like, even before internment, even before the war, like.

there was a genuine sense of like, we want to show that we really want to be Americans too.

You know what I mean?

And like, that wasn't artifice.

That was a genuine, and even, even after after the things that happened, so many of those people, the elder people in the community, were very, very, very, like, what you would describe as patriotic Americans.

Sure.

Like, even though they had every right to not be, like, that, this is just like, if someone is saying, we're willing to give you a position in this, the superstructure, like Tom mentioned, in this larger society where you are approaching something like equity,

you are a free member of it.

You get to have a say and you get to be yourself without this kind of like forced, kind of like top-down crushing assimilationism.

Like people are going to respond positively to that.

It's just that unfortunately we look at it now and we see such a, I don't know, such a, I don't even know if calling it a bait and switch is correct, but like that's how it's going to be perceived from our perspective now in the present.

Yeah.

And like every other story where an out-group tries to do this, it doesn't work.

The majority was never going to trust them.

They saw every act that they did as inherently suspicious.

And the overall messaging messaging of the new Ottoman government was decidedly one way.

Because those first elections, the CUP candidates won 160 out of 288 seats.

The Armenian parties managed to get a handful of people elected, including the leader of the Ottoman bank raid, Armen Garo, which is pretty fucking great.

It went from holding up the bank to being a member of parliament within only a couple of years.

Yeah, his constituency, his electoral riding, like the area that votes for him is just that British boat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's been given its own district status.

But politically, the Armenians were also at each other's throats.

The Hunchaks and the Dashnaks were opposed to one another.

They fought over voters.

The church hated them both for being atheists, communists, and socialists.

The Dashnaks were also against continued armed actions, while the Hunchaks continued supplying groups with weapons, training, and their Fidi groups launched revenge attacks against people they thought responsible for previous violence against Armenians, namely Kurdish villagers.

That is something that happened.

Were they taking revenge on people?

Maybe.

Were they shooting a whole bunch of innocent civilians?

Absolutely.

That is something that was going on.

Because again, the highlands were still completely lawless.

Going back to Dr.

Wyman's explanation of how the Roman Empire slowly began to crumble, the footprint of the state was not really there.

And not to mention the footprint of the state in the highlands that would have facilitated some kind of safety and security was not invested in the safety and security of the Armenian people.

They were still the paramilitaries and the Ottoman army and the Ottoman police who had just been slaughtering people last week.

I mean, this is not meant to sound glib at all.

And in light of what you've just said, this is, yeah, I realize that maybe this is thin ice, but one of the points that I would make is that like, on one hand, it's funny to envision this when you think about the politics involved, the kind of internecine schisms, all of the arguments and splits happening as like this is the time of uncles with really strongly held opinions.

But then at the same time, it's like, unfortunately, what this leads to is what you've just described, you know, like the lead up to this great victimization, but also a period of time in which, like, now granted the freedom of maneuver, they're also victimizing other people.

Yeah.

You know, they're victimizing their previous victimizers, whether or not they're actually the people who did it to them or just ethnically the same.

Yeah.

There's no, there's no way to know for sure other than they knew that they were targeting Kurds.

This does seem to be more of a hunchhock thing than a Dashnock thing, but there's a lot of mix and match revenge killings going on at the time.

God knows how many fucking stories you will hear of horrible crimes against just random civilians by American occupation troops in Western Europe after during at the end of and after World War II.

Like how many people wound up in like fucking Spandau prison because like they raped German civilians, murdered German civilians.

You know what I mean?

Stuff like that.

Like this American, like American troops, you know, doing the sort of Band of Brothers shit.

You know, that's part of it.

That doesn't discredit.

the things when you look at causes where you say these people are on the right side of things.

People on the right side of things can do horrible shit to Do horrible fucking things.

I'm reminded of a story that the writer Phil Kleig told about like meeting a World War II veteran who showed him this book: this is a story of a we found the body of a German woman who was very brutally raped and murdered, and it was done by American troops.

And like their command basically refused to prosecute them.

Yeah.

Or the revenge that the Soviet army took on the other half of Germany.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, on the occupation of the game.

And you can be on the right side of history and be an absolute fucking monster at the same time.

Fucking horrible piece of shit.

Yeah.

I think I've I've said before, like when the U.S.

government acknowledged the Armenian genocide a couple years ago, I was like, thanks.

It only took 100 and some odd years.

Yeah, but it must be so great that this happened, but then also you technically served under Mike Flynn, who is extremely pro.

We will not acknowledge the Armenian genocide because he is like the biggest tax expenditure of the Turkish government.

That's unfair.

There's also air camps.

There's also the fact that before long, the raids on Armenian villages are also occurring, like they never stopped at all.

The little bit of restraint that the government had to keep these people in line, the death squads,

just groups of bandits as well.

Not all of them were government sanctioned paramilitaries.

Everything broke down all over again.

There was massacres, theft of both property and people, specifically young Armenian girls, so they could be sold into Kurdish and Turkish families as brides.

And when the Armenians demanded that the government do something to stop this, the government said that they would.

But the government was worried about pissing off the Kurds.

So they just did nothing and allowed the two sides to shoot at one another in the highlands.

And this isn't that surprising when you look at the empire's government at the time.

The young Turk revolution brought nothing but one crisis after another.

Sometimes these crises were just political, sometimes they're political and violent.

This was done by everybody.

Everyone in this political play, but specifically the CUP, which despite winning the majority, still acted as a kind of secret cabal, for lack of a better term.

They never met in Constantinople, but rather in Salonika, the headquarters and stronghold of the CUP.

They never published the names of their leadership.

Their faction meetings were also done in secret.

So I guess the government of Switzerland actually has partially in line with the CUP on that one.

They never took notes of their meetings.

That militant edge that they were some kind of like rogue terrorist outfit never left them.

And now with many CUP men in the army at staff level all the way down to the lowest level, it meant that this muscle, these assets from the military could be deployed.

And then they could use the government and their influences with the rest of the young Turk movement who slowly bend the project of the Young Turk Revolution to their own, which was Turkification and nationalism.

This included reaffirming Turkish as the empire's only official language and banning the teaching of any other language in school.

But by 1909, the Grand Vizier, Camille Pasha, generally considered a, for lack of a better term, a progressive liberal for the time, tabled an inquiry to parliament to look at just what the fuck was going on in the highlands.

Who were these paramilitaries exactly?

Who was in control of them?

Who was giving orders?

You know, due to just everything we just talked about.

Because he saw this as a national security issue.

This entire border region was out of control.

So he tabled suggestions on how to fix the problem.

Specifically, he asked the Armenian members of parliament for ideas how to better serve their people who live there.

The CUP faction immediately got involved, shooting down any kind of cross-cultural talks and made sure it ended right then and there.

But in the halls of the Ottoman government, things were, to make a very, very long story short, which I recognize is very rich for me to say at this point, things were fucked up.

For the many factions of the young Turks, but specifically the smaller liberal faction, they realized they had deposed the Sultan only to empower a different tiny faction of power brokers and tyrants.

That being the CUP.

Not to mention, these non-CUP aligned Young Turk members were getting a little worried about the steadily growing pile of corpses of those who opposed them, and realized that they needed to be deposed lest they be added to the pile.

For others, specifically religious conservatives, Even this swing to nationalists governance was liberal for them.

They lived in a caliphate.

They wanted to live in a caliphate.

They wanted that conservative leadership.

You can kind of see how all these different factions being involved kind of made the empire impossible to govern at this time.

There's too many things polling away and nobody to control them.

And not to mention, so many of these ideologies are just completely incompatible with one another.

No matter how this hashes out, it's only going to end with a pile of dead people in one way or the other.

But Enver and the others in the CUP didn't give a single solitary fuck.

Enver wrote, quote, All of the heads dreaming of sharing power, they must be crushed.

We have to be harsher than Nero as far as ensuring domestic peace is concerned.

And domestic peace to him was domestic silence.

A CUP assassin took out the editor of an opposition newspaper, and this finally seemed like just a step too far.

Six days later, on April 12th, 1909, a group of, for lack of a better term, anti-CUP elements within the Young Turk movement, the military, conservative religious circles, universities, whatever, united and began staging protests and elements of the military staged mutinies, all demanding the return of the Sultan.

Somewhat ironic, given what will be coming within a few years, but these crowds began to hunt down and kill people thought to be members of the CUP.

And they very, very nearly got their hands on Enver and Talat.

Some say they came within meters of being captured.

You know what saved them?

Was it a random Irish guy showed up and was like,

which way is to the town square?

And they let him off.

It's an Irish guy looking to get his pub approved.

No, he's like trying to get a hair transplant and he can't find a clinic.

So he's like...

Yeah, he already had the veneers installed.

So it's like, come with me or I'll bite you in half.

The last Armenian liberal who did like a sir, sir, sir at the crowd of people that are fucking...

Well, Nate is the most correct.

Groups of Dashnoks hid Talat and Anvar in their homes, knowing that they would not be looked for there.

Fucking hell.

Wow.

I highly doubt these men survived the genocide, but if they did, they'd probably feel a whole lot like that guy in World War I that let Hitler live.

That's like the first statement you've said on these two episodes that's really like pierced my soul.

You're not going to want some random guy to get lynched in the street because because as far as you know, that guy hasn't hurt anyone you know yet.

You know, it's just a guy.

Yeah, Jesus Christ.

And with that,

I have some interesting Futurama facts for you.

Last episode, we had interesting Simpsons facts, but we all kind of came to a conclusion that we all like Futurama way, way more.

So this fun fact is during one episode, a man is heard asking this stupid tube.

vacuum tube public transportation system to take him to JFK Jr.

airport.

And that was done done before JFK Jr.

died in a plane crash a couple months after the show came out.

Yeah, because it was in 99.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And in every broadcast after that, they blanked that out.

Take me to RFK Jr.

Airport.

Take me to RFK Jr.

Airport.

I really want to die of beasles.

Yeah, exactly.

You go there and if you're vaccinated,

you're not allowed to board.

So soon the government was toppled and again, the Sultan sat on the fancy chair.

But a pro-CUP military group quickly began to form out of the Ottoman Third Army, led by Mahmoud Pasha and calling itself the Action Army,

because Ottoman revolutionary groups named themselves similar to WWF wrestlers in the 70s.

They marched on Constantinople, deposed the government once more, and again, the CUP was reseated.

And again, the constitution was put back into effect.

But this time they went a step further.

They completely deposed Abdul Hamid and replaced him with Mehmet V, his brother, because Mehmet was kind of known for being a bit of a wuss.

If there's any coups, he probably wouldn't be in on them.

Then the Action Army and the CUP turned against their political opponents who had just couped them.

They were all aided by also supporters of the CUP's version of the Young Turk revolution and began shooting.

political opponents in the street.

And this included Irmenians as well, that helped the CUP kill their political opponents.

So, whoops.

But things did not end there.

The CUP passed multiple laws slashing personal and ethnic rights.

Any kinds of minority privilege, whatever was left, were now gone.

Any kind of political organization along those lines was also gone.

Any kind of lobbying or advocacy group for minorities or a specific religion were now illegal.

To go further, the CUP openly spoke against any groups who would do those things or were known to organize in those ways.

And they said that anybody who did those kinds of things were clearly acting in rebellion and revolt due to their rejection of Ottomanism, which in the CUP parliaments meant Turkification, assimilation, and ethnic dominance.

I don't need to point out here that when one dominant ethnic group of a nation, state, or whatever.

fucking plot of land you happen to be on uses a monopoly of state violence or implied violence to force minority groups to speak and act a certain kind of way is bad.

Also remember, it's still within a very, very, very, very recent memory of these minority groups and in this context, the Armenians, about what the state had already done to them.

So therefore, only alienating them further.

That brings us to the city of Adana.

It was a trading hub with a population kind of split in half between Muslim and Christian.

But the Christian were majority Armenian, but not all of them.

There's also a lot of Greeks, a lot of Assyrians.

But the power dynamic of the empire was completely reversed here.

Armenians were better off than their Muslim counterparts, who were majority Turkish.

Meanwhile, propaganda now produced by the CUP at an official level told Turks and Muslims that the Armenians were below them in every way.

This began to breed some kind of racism-based resentment within the city.

Like we kind of talked about in the last episode, things have been turned upside down and to the people at the bottom, it seemed unfair.

And tensions had been boiling for quite some time.

When word of the first coup got to Adana, the Armenians panicked because, to be honest, they have been through this before.

Adana was a CUP stronghold, and once people heard of a coup, they immediately began to blame the Armenians for it, the ever-present outside threat.

Despite the fact that the Armenians largely supported the CUP, though I'm not going to say there wasn't Armenians on both sides of that coup, but the Dashnox, the largest Armenian organization at play, did support the CUP.

Mobs, paramilitaries, and government officials immediately attacked the Armenian quarter of Adana, setting fires, shooting people, and looting Armenian-owned businesses.

Armenians, who had armed themselves at this point, quickly began to shoot back, and eventually, the governor of Adana sat down community leaders from both sides and tried to end the violence.

A week later, a local CUP newspaper then blamed all of the violence on the Armenians, who backed the coup in order to restore an ancient Armenian kingdom that would have included Adana.

There's no evidence that this plot was ever real, but the newspaper said, quote, the Armenians are the reason for their own destruction, the Turks and the country.

The governor, worried about more violence, asked the government to send soldiers to restore peace.

And they did.

But on April 25th, someone, nobody's entirely sure who, opened fire into the government camp.

At this point, the army was immediately ordered to attack the Armenian quarter.

The army went on a rampage and was quickly joined by civilians from every other quarter of the city.

Men, women, and children were butchered, and they set the city on fire.

As the bodies piled up in the street, foreign missionaries and diplomats rushed in to try to stop the killing, including the British Consul Charles Doutley Wiley, who personally got between a group of Ottoman soldiers who were just about to slaughter an Armenian family.

He literally stood between them and told them, if you're going to kill them, you have to shoot me.

Knowing that there is no way they would cause the international incident, the Ottoman soldiers backed down.

But the killing spread from the city of Adana into the region at large, and Armenians once again turned to self-defense groups and their own weapons to defend themselves.

In most cases, the Ottoman army directly aided the killing of Armenians.

But in the village of Hajin, the Ottoman officer in charge actually ordered his men to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Armenian self-defense groups to fire on Muslim paramilitaries.

It did not happen much, but it did happen.

For the first time in the 20th century, the term Holocaust, a Greek term used for for the complete burning of an offering to the gods, was used to describe the mass killings of Armenians during the Adana massacres.

By the time it was all finally over, another 30,000 Armenians were dead, though it's thought that that number could be as high as 50,000.

Okay, so another Futurama fact.

Apparently, it was nearly impossible to get the show on the air.

Matt Groening said that it had been, quote, the worst experience of my grown-up life.

I remember Wired magazine doing a thing about it coming out, and it felt like it was ages from the sort of promo article they did about Futurama to when it actually aired.

Like Fox was doing everything they could to not run it.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it was because they expected more of The Simpsons.

And not this like super highbrow, complicated science jokes.

Sitcom.

Yeah, not a show that's 10 times better than The Simpsons in every possible conceived way.

They just really didn't like the weird lobster octopus guy.

They're like, get rid of fucking Zoidberg.

And Matt Granig was like, over my dead dead body.

He'll fucking kill me.

Now, in the aftermath of the Adana massacres, the government quickly blamed the entire episode, of course, on Armenians?

Armenian rebels.

Yeah, the Dashnoks who were organizing them in revolt.

They were striking out against the Empire.

The British Consul, the same man who nearly died trying to save an Armenian family, remarked,

Every Turk in the town is fully persuaded that the Armenians burnt their own houses down.

I suppose with the idea of bringing about foreign interference.

It's stupid.

This is something that will never happen ever again.

History happens in vacuums.

I keep saying this.

Low-rent explanations for things that let you blame your enemies are always just so incredibly half-hearted.

Like, it just, it's, it's like, that's why the fascists and conspiracy theorists just like default to just the hand-waving it's the Zog or it's the Jews kind of explanation because like they can't be bothered to even think through the first steps of like the logic behind it.

Yeah, those damn wily Armenians jumped onto my bayonet to get the Russians involved.

The Turks are complaining about the AUG, the Armenian occupation government.

We've joked about this over on history of Armenia, where the same exact conspiracy theories are just reworked to include Armenians.

It's a tale as old as well.

What we're talking about right now.

Yeah, yeah, the protocols of the elders of the guys who run the Glendale Galleria Apple store.

They ended up in Glendale after this, you fuck.

How'd you think they ended up there now?

I love the idea that actually there's like a, you know, aliens built the pyramids story that like actually the San Fernando Valley was was settled.

It was autochtonous.

Armenians settled it.

They were there before anyone else.

Western Armenia expands all the way to California if you zoom out enough on the map.

And Armenians, for their part, admitted, yeah, we shot at you, but you did it first.

Which, yeah.

I mean, they were claiming it was self-defense because they couldn't.

say that we did nothing.

And in July, a quick investigation and trial found dozens of people guilty for various different crimes from murder to looting.

And to the surprise of many in the Armenian community, 124 Muslims, including several army officers, were executed for the role in the Adana massacres.

However, none of those military officers or other people executed were connected at all to the CUP, the main driver for the massacres.

Rather, most of them were in rival factions to the CUP.

Yeah, it's like on one hand, you want to look at it and say, okay, well, there is a point at which when states are on the decline, where going against the expressed desire or orders of the state may get you punished by the state, even if you are factionally aligned with it, but then you hear this next detail, you're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It was just another opportunity for them to dispose of some people.

Yeah, it was like, oh, yeah, we could use this to purge some more people.

Cool.

We're taking off more boxes on our genocide bingo card.

It's dehumanization of the other, the ousting of opposing factions within the state.

We're getting there.

Six Armenians were also executed, but these men all happened to be organizers within the Armenian community, namely within the self-defense groups.

So the CUP used the massacre that they caused to further their own goals and eliminated even more of their opponents, while fundamentally never admitting they did anything wrong.

The Grand Vizier said the massacres were, quote, political, not a religious question.

Before the Armenian political committees began to organize, there was peace.

I'll leave you to judge with who caused the bloodshed.

I was gonna say that in a way you could make the argument that they were political more than religious, but not for the way this guy means.

Sure.

He is both right and wrong in multiple different ways.

Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, that they were political because they were basically like, they were a kind of revanchist faction within Ottoman politics trying to assert control and manipulate ethnic tension and notions of ethnic supremacy for their own political ends.

But it wasn't because some Armenians published a pamphlet that was like weeping out for Lenin.

Like, you'll find my politics are also intensely racist.

Just so we could run this down.

All right.

The official government line was the Armenians didn't start it, but they did.

And it was their fault.

We executed members of the army for the slaughter that we're actually okay with because the army did nothing wrong.

It said slaughter.

They even blamed the governor, Chave Bey, officially for the killings, despite him being the only Ottoman official who tried at any point to stop them from happening.

No attempt was ever made for any kind of restitution to the Armenian community.

Nothing stolen was ever given back.

And the Armenian population of Adana was effectively wholly displaced.

Some would call this a dry run.

This was but a small part of the CUP and in turn young Turk method of dealing with minorities.

Over the years, as we've talked about, Armenians have been killed, driven from their lands, and their lands stolen all across the country.

A full 40% of the Armenian population had already been displaced from their indigenous land into urban centers, into provinces where they were not the majority, both purposefully and otherwise, or simply out of the country.

country.

The goal was the breakup of the Armenian peasantry as a body, to break them up so small they could be absorbed, while simultaneously handling the issue of a poor and pissed-off minority population of non-Turkish Muslims by turning them into settlers of Armenian land.

And with each and every crisis within the empire, and what I've talked about is not an exhaustive list of crises within the Ottoman Empire at this point.

With each massacre, with each coup, each political killing, the CUP gets its finger into the government more and more.

The Young Turk movement, whether it was good or bad, whatever, simply becomes a smaller part of the growing CUP rather than how it started.

Soon CUP men were on top of the government.

Talat Pasha was a minister of the interior, and he quickly conducted an internal purge, filling the government not with young Turk loyalists like they had been before, but CUP loyalists.

Talat, one of the guiding ideologues of Turkish nationalism, quickly went to work spreading that through the empire in the form of CUP-run schools, firing teachers at universities who did not preach the party line, and empowering Ottoman cops and soldiers to extort and rob minorities once again, simply to remind them where they stood.

And I should point out here, the CUP, much like the Sultan, is not good at governing.

The entire time we're talking about, the Ottoman Empire is continuing its very rapid decline.

More and more problems are popping up, and each time they do, Talat literally just blames everything on Armenians.

Or failing that, Greeks.

Because they're still around too.

If Muslims from an area complain that their cattle are dying, the official government response was, Armenian veterinarians were poisoning them.

If a Turkish man complained that the schools in their village were not as good as someone else's, the official government line was the Armenians stole the money for the school.

I am not making those two things up.

Those are actually two examples of what actually happened.

This starts to sound a lot like very familiar things that we've talked about on this show very quickly.

Yep.

If anything goes wrong, they did it.

Official CEP pamphlets and propaganda said, quote, Armenians are sucking the blood of Muslims.

And these vipers who we are nourishing have been sucking out all of the lifeblood of the nation.

They're the parasitical worms eating into our flesh whom we must destroy and do away with.

Soon, unofficial but official boycotts of Armenian-owned businesses began with mobs of people beating the shit out of anybody, Muslim or no, who spend their money inside.

All police and soldiers stood by and let them.

However, things were still going bad for the CUP.

Like I said, for all of their propaganda, they were still running the country like shit.

Factions of young Turks were still dedicated to liberal reforms.

And eventually, the CUP themselves were openly rigging elections.

Talat was caught stealing money from the government.

Wild amounts of embezzlement.

The CUP was once again kicked out of office in a military mutiny of opposition young Turk officers in 1912.

This group was called the Savior Officers.

And again, to make another long story short, because in case any very, very angry non-Turkish Muslims are listening to this, this is not an exhaustive history of the Young Turk Revolution or this period of time.

It's very, very long and complicated.

I feel like there could probably be a whole podcast series about that somewhere else.

But this continued destabilization of the Ottoman government, amongst many other things going on, eventually led to the First Balkan War.

and the Balkan League of States breaking away from the Ottoman Empire.

And this is easily one of the largest and most embarrassing defeats of the Ottoman decline until their, arguably, their final decline and the end of the empire.

The loss of the Balkans, this defeat during the Balkans War, was pretty much officially the death of any concept of Ottomanism.

It's important to understand that in the context of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans were not just some far-flung territory.

They were in the Ottoman mind palace, considered part of the fatherland, inseparable, a very, very important part of the empire.

The loss of the Balkans was considered like traumatic in the national sense.

To many, like Talat and Enver, and another man we haven't spoken about yet, Mehmed Nazim, Dr.

Mehmed Nazim, commonly simply known as Dr.

Nazim, one of the founders of the CUP.

All this is kind of like the last bit of proof that they needed that showed them that the Ottoman experiment, so to speak, this multinational, multi-religious empire, even with the dynamics that it had, which were fucked up, was doomed to failure.

Enver, Talat, and Nazim's politics, already nationalists, became even more so.

Seeing the minorities of the Empire, even their fellow Muslims, like Arabs and Kurds, being untrustworthy, and for the Christians, like the ones that had risen up against them in the Balkans, in many cases, a constant threat to the Empire's safety.

Dr.

Nazim wrote: The pretensions of the various nationalities are a capital source of annoyance for us.

We hold linguistic, historical, and ethnic aspirations in abhorrence.

This, and groups like it, will have to disappear.

There should only be one nation on our soil, the Ottoman nation, a Turkish nation.

Then another government crisis hit, because, like I said, the Ottoman Empire in this era is nothing but a jumble of crises.

With the Ottomans on the ropes, the Europeans demanded the Ottomans hand over a city only about 100 miles away from Constantinople.

And it did seem like the government was going to concede to this.

And just to give a little bit of a picture of how people saw this, giving up this city was thought of as the death of the empire.

There'd be an outside foreign empire only 100 miles away from Constantinople.

The thought was inconceivable, but the government was going to capitulate to this.

That is when Talat and Enver, along with a cadre of loyalist military officers at their back, stormed into the palace and took power all over again.

They slaughtered a couple cabinet ministers along the way, and this is already happening at the end of the First Balkan War, but this allowed them to frame themselves as the national saviors.

They stopped the final capitulation and all the territories that were lost in the Balkan War, well, that's the fault of the government we cooed, but we saved it from being worse.

And a new border was negotiated to solidly put the CUP faction back in charge, and they would never be really threatened again.

This time, the CUP government would be different.

There would be no factions.

There would be no liberal young Turks.

Any hints of constitutional thought out the window.

Instead, the Ottoman Empire would be a one-party state, ruled by what would be known as the three Pashas, Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Jamal Pasha.

This new triumvirate took virtually all of the power away from parliament, and they had to approve of any positions within parliaments, the cabinet, you name it.

But this government change, again, did little to fix the issues in the highlands.

Rebellions by Kurds popped off, kidnappings continued, and violence and an overall sense of lawlessness reigned.

Whether this be real and allowed or whatever by the government, this was the leverage, though, that allowed the great powers to get all up in the Ottoman Empire.

You see, most of the powers wanted the empire to survive in one piece.

It made things easier for them.

If you have one country, it's easier to exploit one government than ten new ones.

However, who would dominate the new government became a point of contention between Germany, the UK, France, and Russia.

Generally speaking, the UK, France, and Russia all ended up on one side, and Germany was on the other.

The UK, France, and Russia was generally on the side of pressuring the CUP into allowing European administrators into the highlands to facilitate, I guess you could call it, Christian protectionism.

They saw themselves politically as the protectors of Ottoman Christians and wanted a Christian governor to be be in charge of Christian provinces, and they mean to pressure the Ottoman government into doing that.

Meanwhile, the Germans' way into the Ottoman circle of power was more of like modernization to get their way in rather than pressure.

I mean, they both kind of worked in the end of the day, I suppose.

So, one of the things that France, the UK, and Russia was really trying to get the CUP to do was allow quote-unquote administrators from Europe into these Christian lands of the empire.

You could consider those councils, diplomats, effectively just like observers.

Obviously, the CUP really fucking hated this idea, and they saw it as one really, really big way for the first real step for Ottoman Armenia or Western Armenia to break away into an independent state, which isn't true, but I know this is getting quite dark, but there's a very funny quote with some old-timey racism involved here because the British council argued in the Armenians' defense of the Ottoman government as to why these administrators had nothing to do with the concept of an independent Western Armenia.

And he said this again in defense of the Armenian people, explaining to Talat Pasha, quote, the Armenians are a commercial race interested primarily in economics.

They have no mind for politics.

That is some old-timey racism that only a British diplomat could come up with.

Yeah.

Thanks, buddy.

Thanks for your defense.

Handshake between 19th or early 20th century British diplomat and Gene Roddenberry writing out the draft script for the different races in Star Trek.

Yeah, I really like you get the various different shades of British consul guy.

The one that's ready to jump in front of a volley of gunfire to save Armenians, and the other one's like, nah, these fucking morons, they don't want to be mayor.

You kidding me?

They just want to sell you trinkets.

Gene Roddenberry.

throwing you off the scent by calling the Cardassians that.

That's really the Ferengi or the true Armenians of space.

Finally, after seeing the world powers minus Germany raid against them, the Ottoman government signed the deal in February of 1914 to allow European inspectors into Armenian provinces.

And this could be seen as a win-win from every angle.

Europeans wanted the empire to stay together while being able to leverage the conditions of the Armenian people for concessions.

from the Ottoman government.

Meanwhile, the Ottomans, who were facing almost certain foreign intervention in one way or another, managed to keep it to bare minimum.

There's no invading armies, stealing the provinces.

For now, they're keeping the invasions at a dull roar.

However, let's jump back a bit to the day that this was signed.

February 8th, 1914.

It would take months for these inspectors to make their way into the empire, form their staffs, make their connections with the Armenian community, and actually get into the provinces.

The first who managed to get there was a Norwegian, Nikolai Hoff, and a Dutchman, Louis Konsen Vesterneck.

But that wasn't until May.

Then there were arguments about who they could hire onto their staff.

For example, Hoff wanted to hire Armin Goro to be his like head staff guy.

Talat absolutely refused because obviously he's not only a member of parliament, but also an Armenian fidi, for lack of a better term.

And then if they were like, okay, fine, we'll hire some of these other people we found.

But every single Armenian they hired, Talat refused, said that they couldn't be hired for this reason or that reason.

And then Hoff finally managed to get a staff of people that the government signed off on for him to finally leave Constantinople.

He made it to Vaughan only for the Ottoman government to then demand his return to Constantinople.

By the time that the men were even remotely able to do their jobs, it was July.

1914.

It's just funny because there's always this like weird poignance and foreboding whenever you talk about summer of 1914.

And I'm trying to think of like the only equivalent is like you and me, Joe, like driving around as teenagers listening to At the Drive-In and be like, ah, summer 2001, this fucking rules.

Except one arm scissor is just all the VA would give us after our arms were blown off in World War I.

I finally got a musical reference.

Yes, yes, you finally did.

Yeah, exactly.

I fucking hate it when I thought I was going to get VA disability, but I'm constantly having my time wasted at the invalid litter department.

Yeah, at this point, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was dead.

The July crisis was splitting Europe and beyond.

And both the British and German governments were desperately trying to get the Ottomans to fall on their side.

Because at this point, there's a very real possibility that the Ottomans ended up on the side of the Allies.

But British efforts in the Empire on the diplomatic front were hamstrung somewhat.

You want to guess why?

That's really stupid.

Hmm.

So what happened was the British diplomats, junior diplomats, are like, oh, fuck, oh shit.

We have to get the Ottomans on our side.

However, it's old times, right?

The ambassador needs to be there.

The British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire was on vacation.

He's in beer.

Yeah, just like dying of gout from eating a thousand lobsters for one meal.

What's so funny is the July crisis is already in full, you know, it's in full sprint going forward.

He's like, I got, I got 10 more leave days, bro.

You could wait.

Yeah, the ambassador's like, the lights are going down all across Europe, but this dinner is wild as fuck.

It's hitting really good right now.

Which is bullshit, because if he went to the Ottoman Empire, he would get the best food anybody that is living

at the time is going to have, where there is food at this point, I should point out.

Yeah, I think that's an important point.

Yeah, Armenian cuisine is certainly struggling, but other parts of it are thriving.

But yeah, so I'm not saying this guy was on vacation is why the Ottoman Empire ended up on the side of Germany in World War I, but it had a huge reason to do with it.

The Germans also had a lot of modernization efforts in the Ottoman Empire already.

And the German government wasn't involved in a lot of the exploitation that had been going on with the Ottoman government at this point, like the so-called capitulations, the Germans weren't involved with.

So that kind of hatred, that want of vengeance to be free of all of those things, the Germans were divorced from that.

So they kind of won by default.

The French and the British and the Russians had muscled in on the Empire so strong at this point that siding with the Germans was really the only way out the Ottomans saw coming.

So soon the German ambassador was able to use the pro-German elements within the Ottoman government, as well as the absolute hatred towards the British and the French, to strike a deal offering massive military reforms, modernization, professional development, and all the other stuff for the Ottoman military in a secret treaty that was signed on July 30th, 1914.

But publicly at first, the Ottoman Empire declared the neutrality in World War I.

That did not last long.

It was pretty clear from the massive number of Germans suddenly moving to Constantinople that things were shifting a certain way.

The German government also bought the largest newspaper in the Ottoman Empire and began churning out pro-German propaganda, but as well as anti-Armenian propaganda because they knew what they wanted to read.

If these people are going to accept our propaganda in favor of the Axis and are the central powers and also the concept of schlager, we have to give them a little bit of dessert.

So we're going to give them anti-Armenian hatred.

Eventually, the Ottoman Empire declared war, sucking the Empire and the Armenian question into World War I.

That is where we'll pick up next time on the Armenian Genocide Part 3.

It's getting dark again.

I was going to say I have a fun futurama fact to close us out here, but it's not fun at all.

And that is, Zap Brannigan was originally written to be voiced by Phil Hartman.

Yep.

Not a fun fact.

That's depressing.

Moving on.

Yeah, we'll someday have to do a series on the historical crimes of Andy Dick.

John DiMaggio, the guy who does like half the voices in Futurama, but mainly Bender's voice, auditioned for the role of Professor Farnsworth doing the Bender voice.

So that's fun.

What a world we could have lived in.

Yeah.

It could have changed everything.

I don't know if you know that story, but apparently that's the John Lovitts basically explained it this way: that like the reason that Phil Hartman's wife relapsed.

He gave her coke, gave her Coke at a party, and she relapsed, and then that led to the eventual murder-suicide.

And famously,

him beating the shit out of Andy Dick at a bar, which is a funny image to have in your head.

John Lovitt's just dusting anybody is a funny image to have.

And that is the Armenian Genocide Part 2.

I hope we were able to bring some level of levity to this to make it easier.

I know some people will not like that.

Sorry, that's what we do here.

But, fellas, you host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

Trash Future.

What a hell of a way to dad.

Kill James Bond.

No gods, no mayors.

Potatoes, skin, and this guy sucked.

This is the only show that I host, and you're already listening to it, but consider supporting us on Patreon.

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And if you have anything wrong with what we said today, please email Nate.

Until next time,

I don't know.

Pet a dog.

If the Germans buy your newspaper, watch out.

That that's a good example.

Yep.

Until next time, pet a dog.

Beware of German newspaper owners.