Episode 357 - The Armenian Genocide: Part 1

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Hello and welcome to the Lions if by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe.

With me is Tom and Nate and I'm willing to bet from the title of this episode that you have clicked on, you're realizing that there's no cold open today.

How you guys doing?

Well,

I hadn't checked the schedule yet this morning, and you sent the link for the recording, and I saw that you had, you know, entitled it the first episode of the series about the Armenian Genocide.

And I was just like, oh, so it's definitely not

a

planned interruption.

Jokes are fun.

Boys doing some riffing kind of episode.

But, you know,

sometimes we dance around the abyss, and sometimes we just get elephants footed by the abyss.

And hey, I will say there's some parts today that are quite fun fun in the grand scheme of things if you, you know, look at that specific event and not the greater epochs part of.

Well, it's just like people are like, oh, we love the chaotic energy of the show, and I appreciate people saying that, but it's sort of like this episode and ones like it are often it's like, hey, we have our sort of podcast Scooby-Doo troop of fun guys.

It's like, we're going to make them go experience the movie Event Horizon.

It's Scooby-Doo, but every mask you pull off is just another guy with a very small mustache and a a fez for the next beta month.

Yeah, it's the uh, it's time for

introspective uh contemplation about the uh horrors visited upon man from his fellow man.

No, Scooby, you don't want to decrypt that video, it's a hell dimension.

Most people don't know this, but Scooby-Doo, sleeper Armenian.

That's why people are trying to hunt him down.

Um, Scooby-Doobian,

Scoob, Scooby-Doo,

well, I'm glad we got our our laughter up front.

So I do have to preface this with, normally we do cute animal facts for when my fellow hosts get uncomfortable, but we've been doing this show for so long that we've run out of websites that have new cute animal facts for us to use.

So instead, I have a list of interesting facts about The Simpsons, which I feel like will fill the gap.

sufficiently.

A perfectly cromulent

gap filler.

What do millennials love more than The Simpsons?

Absolutely nothing.

I have not seen a season of The Simpsons in probably about 15 years.

But before we go into our series,

what do you guys, what have you heard?

What do you know about the Armenian Genocide other than shit that I have yelled at you all drunk?

Pretty much that.

All right.

Fair enough.

I know that.

So it's not exactly the world's greatest historian, but some of his research was pretty helpful, I think, in terms of just going through sources.

And I've read Robert Fiske's The Great War for Civilization, and there's a part about the Armenian Genocide.

And I think the thing that I recall that it's more or less coterminous with World War I, and also that there were situations in which, like, literal rivers were blocked by dams of dead bodies.

Yep, that's that it was on a scale that was just unprecedented for its time, not for the 20th century, but for its time.

Unfortunately, it would be grossly overshadowed by more human misery in a few decades.

But on April 24th, 1915, the first state-organized industrial-level genocide of the modern age began.

Between the years 1915 and 1917, though arguably, not really that arguably, it goes on even longer than that, around 1.5 million Armenians living within the Ottoman Empire would be slaughtered.

using methods that with only a few decades would become known around the world from the horrors of the Holocaust.

Armenians would be driven from their homes, shoved into trains like livestock, forced onto death marches, sent to death camps.

They'd be worked to death, loaded up on boats and sunk in the middle of the ocean, experimented on by doctors, and driven into the desert, all by the Ottoman government locked in the throes of a newfound revolutionary Turkish nationalism and supported by Imperial Germany.

This is the story of the Metz Giichern, or the great evil crime, or what would become known eventually when a different world was invented, the Armenian Genocide.

But before we begin, we have to acknowledge our sources that I used for the series.

This is not an exhaustive list.

These are the main ones.

For the entire list, go to our show notes as always.

So They Can Live in the Desert and Nowhere Else by Ronald Grigor Sunni.

That one is probably the most readable.

There's also The Burning Tigress by Peter Pakalian.

And in my opinion, the most authorits on the genocide, A Shameful Act and Killing Orders, both by Taner Chakam, who is a Turkish historian and has been skirting a warrant for his arrest for years for writing those books.

There's also the German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide by Vachand Dadarian, which is very good and covers exactly what it says on the tip.

Another thing we have to acknowledge before we begin is what is commonly called the Armenian Genocide involved many other victims than just Armenians.

This included Greeks, Assyrians, and Yazidis, all murdered in an effort to support and expand Turkish nationalism and ethnic supremacy in the dying throes of the Ottoman Empire.

These are crimes that require their own eye and at one point, their own series.

And to make this narrative structure something that this podcast can handle without it being 50 episodes long, this series will focus on specifically the Armenian portion of the sprawling tragedy.

Just like the Holocaust, in any genocide, there's always more victims.

And in order for for this to make sense, we have to focus on each thing as its own separate episode, if you will.

Just know that in the background of whenever I'm talking about horrific crimes being committed against Armenians, similar crimes are being committed against Greeks, Syrians, and Yazidis.

As always, no matter how much people are told and media is created, genocide never happens rapidly.

or in a vacuum.

We explored this during a Rwanda series.

Something that people think happened to the blink of an eye and there is no background at all to it, right?

It's the end of a series of events.

Usually, they have been boiling just below the surface for generations and taken advantage of by one party or another to secure power while scapegoating someone who has been othered.

And the Armenian Genocide is no different.

To understand just...

how all of this knits together, we have to understand the history of the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire itself.

Also, another asterisk caveat thing here.

For starters, what today is the Republic of Armenia is not the place where the Armenian genocide took place.

Though obviously, many people who live there are related to and descendant from victims or survivors of the genocide.

The genocide of the Armenian people is best understood as a scar of the people, but not particularly a nation-state.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it took place.

primarily in what's now Iraq and Syria.

Those would be primarily where the large-scale killing took place.

For instance, Deirzor is one of the places that was famous for one of the death marches that occurred there.

But the victims of the genocide largely came from western Armenia.

That is Ottoman Armenia.

Today, it is largely part of Turkey.

The legality of which is up for debate, but that is a different subject for a different time.

For instance, I am Western Armenian.

I have no cultural or ethnic connection to the Republic of Armenia.

I am a citizen, but I am not connected to that country in any meaningful sense of the word.

Western Armenians are culturally different, though religiously very similar.

We have a different language.

We have different customs, everything.

So while the Republic of Armenia as it exists today in 2025 is not where the majority of the killings took place, there are parts of it that when the genocide expands in scope after the end of World War I and when the with the establishment of the first republic of armenia genocide continues mostly uh at the leadership of kamal autaturk and the eventual birth of modern turkey but generally speaking what is known as the armenian genocide took place in ottoman armenia uh this was in a place known as the armenian highlands today is commonly known as anatolia this is where uh armenians are a indigenous ethnic group as well as many other ethnic groups it's something of a tapestry of people all about to die in this story.

Armenians as a unified and non-unified people had various different stages of statehood over the years.

As much as statehood existed in history back then, this included large empires and small statelets, and a lot of the time was spent being ruled by others.

We covered a lot of this in our History of Armenia podcast over on Patreon.

I'm really, really not going to go over it again.

So if you want some of those early primers and beginnings of Armenian civilization, go back and listen to those.

It saves us all a lot of time here on the main feed.

Pretty much as soon as one conqueror left, another would come up right behind them and take over from the Persians, the Romans, the Mongols, to the Arabs, and finally the Ottoman Turks.

The Ottoman Turkic conquest of the Armenian people began one small kingdom at a time, starting in 1071 at the Battle of Manzikert and ending around the 15th century.

And obviously, there's a lot of ground to cover between when Armenians and their land were taken over by the Ottomans and what amounts to be the end of the Ottoman Empire.

There's a lot of time in between those two places.

Armenians were one of the many minorities within the Turkish and Muslim-dominated empire.

Because remember, the Ottoman Empire is supposed to be a caliphate.

It goes through time periods where that is kind of not as important as it once was.

But in general, it is supposed to be a religious empire.

The imperial constructs of the Ottomans did not just end with the conquering of people and coloring on a map, like a very popular game, which I will not name, but this probably is some form of DLC for.

Once people were folded into these borders, cultural imperialism would follow.

They wanted people to abandon their cultures and religions and adapt to the Ottoman way of life.

And specifically when it comes to the Ottoman Empire, race was really not what they were worried about.

Officially, it was religion.

They wanted people to be Muslim.

If you believe what the government said and what they wrote, race was not important, but in reality, when it got down to the brass tacks, race was also important.

It was a Turkish-dominated empire, and everybody else would be below the Turkic people.

Through the course of Ottoman history, this cultural imperialism took form in many different ways.

Of course, the probably best known of these is the Janissaries, famously.

Janissaries were child recruits into elite infantry groups within the empire.

raised and educated in Ottoman and Islamic norms.

These Janissaries are often said to have been built from conscripting specifically Christian or non-Muslim children into the ranks to slowly infuse them with a dominant culture.

But that wasn't always the case, actually.

When the janissaries are first born, Muslim kids could have been conscripted into it as well, because janissary was a title of privilege and it could pull one's family out of poverty.

So it wasn't really around religious grounds.

So eventually, over time, the Muslim conscript numbers would dwindle down to nothing, and it would be mostly a form of cultural imperialism.

But let's talk about that poverty.

People kind of willingly allowing the Ottoman state to steal their children for the possibility of crawling out of poverty.

Being a minority in the Ottoman Empire was an existence in grinding, never-ending poverty.

Christians, as well as all minorities of the empire, whether it be Yazidi or some other minority religion, were second-class citizens known as dhimmi.

They paid a higher tax rate.

They had few, if any, legal protections.

If a dispute happened between, let's say, an Armenian and a Muslim, Armenians have no legal protection.

Your legal protection only extended as far as your group of people.

For example, in the case of pretty much anything, there's a massive streak of racism and religious bigotry that controlled all facets of minority life.

Some Armenians facing this kind of pressure, and some Greeks and Assyrians as well, adopted Turkish names, learned Turkish, and converted to Islam.

There's a group of Armenians today that still exist within Turkey known as the Hamshin people.

They are one of those groups.

They speak a form of Armenian that is completely unintelligible to the rest of us, but that is how these conversions slowly take hold.

But that was the goal.

Make life so intolerable for a religious minority that you say, fuck it, and abandon your old culture and adopt the new one.

This is particularly visible in the Balkans as well.

Yeah, of course.

Famously, a region region that will be popular and important in the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Like it's really seeming like we're getting all of the building blocks towards

a genocide of disenfranchisement in terms of like legality, ethnicity,

religion, and it's either assimilation or domination.

Yeah.

Across the entirety of the Ottoman Empire, there also were significant Christian and Jewish communities.

But I think that you'll notice that a lot of places that we would now potentially associate with more recent political events and particularly the Eastern Bloc, you know, before a time, if you think of World War I as this great big rupture, before that, it would be, you know, from the perspective of nowadays, completely unrecognizable in terms of, you know, how it was administered and sort of what was associated with it.

And I think it's just more to do with the fact that the Ottoman Empire is a long time ago, relatively speaking, but also the time in which it was ruling is such a huge span of time.

Oh, yeah.

You have to, I think, take that into consideration as well, that, you know, we are talking about events that transpired, you know, within the lifetimes of our great-grandparents.

And we are also talking about events that transpired that are politically relevant, not just like dates, you know, that transpired before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas.

Yep.

Unfortunately, those two things blended together really, really badly.

And what would probably end with more Armenian assimilation into the Ottoman way of life that being Turkish effectively, was the cultural center of Armenian life never went away.

And that was the Armenian Apostolic Church, the first organized Christian church.

And this became something of a repository for Armenian culture and language in every village throughout what would become known as the Armenian Millet.

And I should point out that in a lot of places, the Armenian Apostolic Church is still the center point of Armenian culture and language, mostly because of, of course, the events that we're going to talk about.

In the diaspora today, you know, me notwithstanding, it's very common for people to send their kids to Armenian school, which is run by the church and it teaches kids Armenian language, customs, and culture.

I was raised by the non-Armenians out of my family, so I didn't have that.

And this is kind of where that tradition starts, where the church and the clergy are kind of the holders and organizers of the center of the Armenian world.

And this becomes known as, like I said, the Armenian millet.

And the millet system is the system that the Alman Empire developed after the period of what I guess you could consider hard conversion had passed over their minority subjects.

The millets were governing bodies of separate religious minorities, and they recognized three of them at first, that being the Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Apostolic, and the Jewish people.

That system would rapidly expand over the years to include Catholics, Syriacs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and so on and so forth.

But for now, that's just those three, though.

The expanding millet system is really unimportant to our story.

All recognized minorities fell into one of these camps, even if they didn't actually.

For example, in the beginning, again, this isn't that important.

It's just weird.

If you were Christian and you were a minority within the Ottoman Empire, you had to fall into the Greek Orthodox millet or the Armenian Apostolic millet.

There was no other one.

So if you're Catholic or Protestant, you name it like, no, congratulations.

You are Armenian or you are Greek.

Tell me to put on a cloak and kneel at the weird-shaped cross.

Exactly.

Just imagine you're like a Slovenian Orthodox Christian or something.

You're like, well, you're Armenian to me, dude.

Sorry.

Yep.

The machine for calculating the senses only can take so many lines of data at once.

This is one of the many reasons why Christians of that region of the world are super, super close to one another, because for a period of time, they all fell out under the same empire and weirdly had to be the same ethno-religious body

But all the minorities fell into one of those camps and the religious rules of the millet would rule your life as allowed by the Ottoman government of course the Ottoman hand was heavy on the scale the heads of these millets reported to the foreign ministry of the Ottoman Empire as if they were a foreign nation and the foreign minister would then choose the replacement heads of the church as people died or moved on.

The best way to describe the rule of the millet is rule by path of least resistance.

If you're Armenian living in your village, you could probably go your entire life without ever having to deal with a Turkish government official.

Every local government function from taxation to licensing, whatever it is that you needed, would be done by a fellow Armenian working within the millet system.

Your average Armenian would speak Turkish, they'd speak Arabic, they'd probably speak Greek and of course Western Armenian, but they would have no real connection with the Ottoman government.

Everything would be done through Armenians working through the church, which is also working through the millet system, if that makes sense.

But life in that world was poor, short, and hard.

There's something of a trope, if you will, that Armenians, despite being very small in numbers in the grand scheme of things, held massive sway in the fields like banking, finance, and industry.

And if that doesn't sound too familiar to you, ooh.

Now, those stereotypes exist for many of the same reasons.

In reality, there are very small numbers of Armenians allowed to break into this upper crust of mercantile life.

Some even obtain some small amount of political power, but the vast, vast majority, I think I saw a statistic that was like 92%

of Armenians living within the Ottoman Empire lived as subsistence farmers, hand to mouth, damn near on the brink of starvation at any given time.

Outside of that, there were specific jobs left to Armenians because the dominant Muslim population of any given area thought that those jobs were below them, dirty or unclean.

Those were tanners, winemakers, cleaners, sometimes finance, and of course, the people who castrated slaves.

So they give the Armenians the ball scissors.

Yeah, and also a lot of those slaves were also Armenian.

So there's a lot of dark shit going on here.

I don't want to make light of it, but I do have one bit of curiosity that I just want addressed.

Did that make its way into the family naming system?

Is there a surname amongst Armenians descended from this that is related to that vocation?

Ball cutter, the ball.

Ball scissors guy.

I'll have to ask around.

Ball Codian.

Yeah.

I'm not sure if ball scissors would be in Armenian, but I feel like it might work.

And that isn't to say there wasn't some crossovers between the millets.

Famously, like Assyrians, Greeks, Yazidis, and Armenians are all super close to this day.

And a lot of this is because of that.

Like, the joke is like, if you are a Greek person or Armenian person, you're dating someone that's Greek or Armenian, your family just kind of shrugs as close enough because there was business deals.

There's close friendships and intermarriage between those groups.

And for example, one of the largest populations of Yazidis in the world is in Armenia today.

And they're not originally from there.

A lot of them moved there because

after the Yazidi genocide, of course, perpetrated by ISIS, Armenia opened its doors to them, considered like an old friendship.

Ironically, the same churches that ruled over their minority communities and really were one of the main reasons why Armenian culture and language survived so many empires, but specifically in this case, the Ottoman one, were also functionaries of the Ottoman Empire.

High-ranking priests, all Armenian, were selected by the Ottoman government and sermons they preached and lessons they taught told Armenians to mind their social betters.

Remember, you know, like it says in the Bible, render unto Caesar, right?

They would use things like that to be like, well, the Turks and our Muslims, in this case, are Caesar.

If someone got, you know, a little uppity about the whole oppression thing and maybe talked about what if we had an independent country, they're oftentimes ratted out to the authorities by their own priests.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, it was not uncommon for priests to tell their followers that the outrages committed on the Armenian Armenian people were punishment sent by God for the sins of Armenians.

So they'd effectively say, yeah, the Ottomans are doing this to us, but we deserve it.

I fucking hate the transmutability of the Mark of Cain.

This shit is constantly following me everywhere I go.

The priest pointing up at the night sky, like, we've brought upon the gaze of the moon Turk.

I should point out here, though, that, like, not every member of the clergy and not every church was like this.

As we go forward in time, many Armenians are saved by members of the Armenian church, and the church acts as a rallying point during the genocide.

But this is a section of the church that definitely existed and held a lot of political power and power within Armenian society within the empire.

I mean, all I can say is that if you're, you know, an Armenian subsistence farmer, you've seen the full moon a lot of times, and maybe you've seen some of the representations in illuminated manuscripts of Ottoman rulers.

And I will say the moon and those enormous turbans probably looked similar to your eyes.

So the concept of the moon Turk, that might not be like a linguistic complication to you.

You're like, oh, yeah, the pasha, he's just got, he's got a, he's got a turban the size of the moon.

When the moon hits your eye, like a big Turkish pie.

That's a genocide.

The Ottoman government, of course, created this system and imposed it on others in order to weave in a culture of dispossession, powerlessness, and subjugation into the very cultural being of being Armenian.

Like your cultural and social center is the church and the church is telling you, yeah, life sucks, but we deserve it.

The Turks are Caesar in this case, and we have to render unto them is what they're owed, and they owe us.

Oh, the wonderful concept of Christian eternal penance.

You deserve to suffer.

You deserve to suffer until you die.

Yeah, everything sucks and we deserve it.

Yeah, fuck's sake.

However, By doing so, both the Ottoman government and their functionaries with the church, or maybe even true believers in this version of apostolic doctrine, wove in a distinct, very strong brand of Armenian-ness.

That is, we're being subjugated by these others, therefore we can never become one of them.

That makes us distinct and different.

And those distinctions and differences should be protected and never taken away from us.

We can never belong to them, so why try?

But in the early years of Ottoman rule and into the mid-1800s, things, let's say, in comparison, were not terrible.

I really, really, really do not want to make it sound like there was some kind of

Ottoman golden age of cross-religious harmony or something, because sometimes that is what people tend to do.

It was not the case.

We already talked about the pressures of being a minority in the empire and the pressures that put on people and the lack of any kind of social or economic movement.

The ever-present threat of violence should something or someone

be a little too Armenian.

Also, the stealing of people's fucking kids.

There's no time of harmony here.

What I mean is there was little direct violence.

There was implicit violence, but there wasn't like Ottoman jackbooted thugs storming through your village every day.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard the Janissary system and the way that it was enforced referred to as like a child tax or boy tax, which I'm not trying to make a joke about the nomenclature there.

I'm just saying.

Yeah, we're not talking about the British government right now.

Yeah, right.

But what I'm trying to say is that it was treated as

a kind of fact of life that once every three years, I think they would come and they would just take a number of male children away.

Yeah.

And yes, there would be like recompense in the sense of pensions and the funds they would receive, but like those children would never again be part of their families.

Yeah, they were never allowed to go home.

You would never see your child again.

Your child was effectively bought from you, but it was more like civil forfeiture in a way, because it's like, yeah, we're taking it, whether you like it or not, and you will accept this payment for it i guess yeah uh and it was a normal accepted way of life for hundreds of years i mean obviously like mortality was so high in so many different ways in this era across the world but certainly in this part of the world that i but you don't want to be like oh well yeah people were used they were used to it but also like it's not as if this wasn't an enormously traumatic thing uh not so far as um it wasn't outside the norms uh i mean yeah uh populations of oppressed people get so used to evil shit happening to them over generations because that's how long we're talking here that things the most horrific things on earth just become normal yeah and that's what i was trying to say i guess is that like it was a fact of life but that doesn't make it not traumatic it's just that it was one of many traumas that was just institutionalized yeah it's it was as normalized if you're an armenian villager in the highlands at this era that your kid could be taken by the state as it was like a Kurdish cavalryman could come by and shoot a member of your family and you have no legal challenges to it.

It was just another trauma upon another trauma.

It was just the way it was within the empire.

And the stage of existence within the Armenian society, the Armenian community, the Armenian millet in this era is best described as benign neglect.

Armenians weren't being massacred by the states, but they also weren't getting any benefits of it either.

As the empire continued to decline, so did the life of Armenians.

They had no benefits, they had no security, nothing really.

Though I noted that this was until the mid-1800s.

So what changed to suddenly make benign neglect turn into something much, much worse?

To make a long story short, geopolitics and imperial collapse.

And we talked a lot about this on the show, actually, in the past, but it does require going back over just for a little bit of the context for the series.

In the 1800s for the Ottomans, it was a very, very, very, very bad stretch of time.

Now under the rule of Sultan Mahmoud II, the Ottoman Empire creaked forward in history history as a badly aging, confused political body.

The throes of nationalism were tearing at its minorities combined with the pressures from outside empires, and this led to things like the Serbian Revolution, the Greek War of Independence, and about a dozen Russo-Ottoman wars, all of which they lost.

Each time the Ottomans fought against an outsider, even an internal rebellion, their armies would be crushed.

Their prestige as an empire would take another hit, and their borders would shrink.

As these defeats piled up, as they lost territory, as minorities of the empire began to ask, yo, what the fuck?

We want freedom.

We want equal rights.

We want legal protection, self-rule, or something.

All of these things were valid to ask for, obviously, but this all brought pressure from the outside as well as the Ottomans began a terminal imperial decline, famously earning the nickname the sick man of Europe.

Joe, I suppose I want to ask as well, because like at this particular period, you're seeing kind of like the waning of some global empires and the rise of others.

Like, and one thing that's kind of consistent throughout the decline is a decline and I suppose the financialization of the empire.

Like, what is the main financial support for the Ottoman Empire like at this time?

Like, what is propping it up?

Actually, we're about to get to that.

Because the Ottomans were...

Because the Ottomans ran into a really bad problem.

That is, they're losing all of this territory.

Tax revenue is going down.

They're going to have to find something new.

And that is one of those internal and external pressures that I was talking about.

When you're dubbed the sick man of Europe, other European powers are going to swoop in and try to fuck with you and fuck with you hard.

Treaty after treaty was forced on the Ottomans that all but imploded their already badly mismanaged economy.

These treaties were like, look, I'm not.

Here to defend the Ottoman Empire as anything, but the treaties that were forced on the Ottomans at this point were incredibly unfair uh so much so they became known as the capitulations worse still the ottoman administrative state functioned largely like it had before uh like generations ago provincial governors ruled their areas like feudal kings with little intervention from the central government as long as taxes were paid on time but over the years these governors just began telling the central government to fuck off ignoring them entirely one of the most damaging times has happened during this era is in egypt but like the Ottomans realized we have to modernize.

We need to keep up with the time, both in administration and military affairs, because they have suffered one catastrophic military defeat after another at this point.

And the Ottoman military, the Ottoman bureaucratic system, all of that, to say it's operating like it's 100 years old is actually paying it like a compliment.

It hadn't been reformed in hundreds of years, let alone 100 years.

This led to the Tanzimat reform of 1839.

Now, these reforms were mostly hypothetical.

The idea was to take away the millet system and instead bring up a new secular form of law and centralized government.

Because people in the Ottoman government realize that, you know, all this nationalism shit, all these rebellions that we're losing and like, you know, for example, the Balkans and Greece.

A lot of it has to do with we don't have anything in common with one another because of our religion and millet system.

So they need to to form a new idea, a new national identity, Ottomanism.

This never really existed before because after everything I've already explained, how the fuck could it?

However, part of this new system required doing away with the Dimi tax system.

That being every minority paying way more in taxes than a Muslim man would.

On top of losing a lot of territory, that means the Ottoman tax revenue plummeted.

Some people within the Ottoman government pointed out: like, hey, if we do this, we actually can't pay for anything because our entire system was built upon exploiting our minorities, but it didn't matter.

The Ottomans actually couldn't back down even if they wanted to, because one of the things that the outside empires, namely the UK, France, and Russia, were pushing on the Ottomans was equality for Christian subjects.

Everybody in the empire needed to be equal.

The unfair taxes need to be undone.

An Ottoman failure to reform would mean a cutoff from British or French financial institutions and trade agreements from the Russians.

And most importantly, the Russians, who remember, are right next door, are threatening them with another war because they had since declared themselves the protectors of the Ottoman Christian population.

Though I should point out France also declares it at some point.

There's dueling declarations of protectionism here.

And since the Ottomans decided to reform, the French and the British opened up financial institutions.

And soon the financial footprint of specifically the British, but the French are in the game too, grew to the point that it was larger than the Ottomans' owned Ministry of Finance.

I assume probably the move of like European industrialization

to the center of like Britain really had like a destabilizing influence on the Ottomans at this time.

It certainly didn't help, but the Ottoman system at this point, financial, industrial, because they really did not industrialize that well,

is so backwards.

And only is it after all these rebellions, constantly getting their teeth kicked in by Russians, that they're really starting to realize like this gap that we have is we can't fix it ourselves.

And one of the deals they make with the British and the French is pretty much endless debt.

We'll give you all the money you need in the form of loans, in which case you can then use those loans to purchase modernization from us, which did happen.

And it completely drowned the empire in debt.

To the point that servicing the Ottoman debt, just on the behalf of the British and the French, required more people in Constantinople than, again, the Ottomans' Ministry of Finance had.

Just servicing the Ottoman debt.

Fun.

That spells great things for an empire, a sclerotic dying empire.

Don't worry, that's IOUs.

That's just as good as cash.

April, let me hold a couple billion.

Yeah, well, you know, to this day, we see the knock-on effects of this because we always associate payday loans with success, development, and forward progress.

What if the British and French empires were nothing but a payday loan scam?

Yeah, exactly.

Like Dickensian-style artwork that says we cash checks here.

Please, sir, can I have another?

Actually, you can.

Yeah, you can have lots.

You can have it.

You can have as much as you want, bro.

The Sultan going to a pawn shop saying, How much will you give me for this big hot?

I got this giant onion hat and like a huge harem.

How, like, how much can I get that?

Do you know we own the moon?

Like, can I take a collateralized loan against the moon?

Yeah, it's like Weimar-era hyperinflation guy basically trying to purchase one weaving loom and he has to bring like dump truck box and carts full of Turkish delight just endlessly, like a comical degree.

Yo, you, my name's Murat Pasha.

Can I get some looseies from you?

The moon Turk brought to you by Barclays Bang.

The sublime Porte is going to have like a fucking quick and load sign standing.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Haya Sophia's new sponsor, Wonga.

The hardest part about renaming my Armenian village on the highlands after Deliveroo was getting the church to agree to it.

But afterwards, you know, we got free delivery.

However, these laws were of like equality and secularism were all largely bullshit.

The The Armenian highlands, despite its name, was not only inhabited by Armenians.

It's a mix of Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, and by the mid-1800s, it'd also be home to about 1 million Circassians, having been driven from their land in the Russian Empire during the Circassian Genocide.

The Ottomans took them in as fellow Muslims after, to be fair, quite a long time of doing nothing.

And a lot of other Muslims like, you're supposed to be the protectors of Muslims.

And the Ottoman government going, oh, fuck, we can't possibly house and feed all these people.

The quick and lone guy isn't getting back to me.

Gonna hand in my shoes next.

Just gonna say, Circassians, are you guys willing to settle this new city we've built called Just Eat Tin Kurt?

They're looking around.

He's like, Can any of you do teeth or hair plugs?

We really need to make some fucking money, guys.

I have a deal for you.

It's called Burger Shah.

But eventually, the Ottoman government caves and they let all these people in.

And instead of setting anything up for them, they pretty much take all of the Circassian refugees and just dump them in the Armenian highlands.

Soon there's countless arguments over land rights, trade rights, who could live where.

And previously these disputes would be handled by the millet system, but now that didn't exist.

And instead, they'd be handed by the supposedly secular Ottoman courts, which constantly just threw aside any Armenian complaints and ruled on any kind of Muslim contention in the court.

And I should point out here again that this effort to do away with these, with these religious aspects of the millet system really didn't work.

And outside of official functions, that is still how people generally ran their communities because it's how they knew how to run their communities.

As you'll learn as we go on, the Ottoman administrative state is really, really, really weak.

So they'll outlaw something or institute something else and they just don't do it because they don't have the means to do it.

So they're like, no, everything will be handled by agents from Constantinople, from the central state, but then they just never get sent out because they don't have them.

And instead, the Armenian church just goes back to collecting taxes and doing business license like they've always had before and then just sending that shit in.

But soon with all of these new refugees in the area facing pressure from both them,

armed groups, and the state, Armenians say, fuck it, and they start leaving their ancestral land, moving into more towns and cities, or failing that, over the border into eastern Armenia, which Russia had just taken from the Persians in 1828.

Ironically, these Armenians driven into urban life took on even more non-Ottoman traits and cultures because French and British traders had set up French and British-owned businesses and schools.

in these areas and they looked at Armenians and said, well, close enough, you're at least Christian, and began to let them into these institutions.

Soon, these newly urbanite Armenians were getting professional education, they were dressing like Westerners, and rising through the empire's social and economic standings for the first time.

Before long, Armenians had risen to create a new kind of minority middle class.

Middle managers for Western companies had moved in to feast on the dying corpse of the Ottoman Empire.

For example, in the case of the Ottoman railroads, which were ran by the Germans, their actual administrative footprint on the ground was very, very small.

So the Germans simply hired a small army of Greeks and Armenians to run everything for them.

Within these Western companies, the norms of the empire were reversed, with the Armenians getting preferable treatment and the Muslims getting the shit jobs.

And within a few years, these Western companies were the best gig in any town in the empire because everything else was falling into disrepair.

Armenians who didn't get jobs within these companies quickly opened shops nearby who would cater to Westerners or Westerner-employed Armenians who suddenly have a lot of disposable income.

Of course, those people that work at those companies are going to go shop at the stores owned by their people because that is how the Ottoman system was always run before.

And that is just now how every barbershop in London works.

Oh, here's well.

I mean, what's interesting is that there's so many parallels in Europe in the 20th century, but another one that I would point out, it's not exactly one-to-one parallel, but

it's quite similar: the situation of ethnic Chinese people in Malaysia.

And this also led to a similar situation that basically became race riots and, you know, drove mass migrations of people into Singapore, for example, that this sort of thing happens, that the circumstances around it and in the case of what was British Malaya, favoring by outsider parties of one group over another in economic affairs as well as like political rights creates the situation.

And it's like, oh, wait, you've reversed the natural order of things of me being good and you being shit.

Guess what?

Along will probably come someone who's like, hey,

we can restore the lost fallen era.

We can restore the golden age.

Right.

Just hypothetically speaking, I don't know much about the history of this, but I'm just assuming.

It's certainly getting to that point.

At the end of this episode, I will speak a name that you will probably recognize.

And this Western influence is one you could see immediately.

Whereas, you know, the British, the French, the Germans, the Russians, when they moved in, for example, they moved into parts of Constantinople that were Christians lived because they saw them as good neighbors, mostly for racist reasons, of course.

But once they moved in, they dumped tons of money into those parts of town to make better and a more enticing place to live for their people, for more Russians, more Brits, more Germans, whoever, to move in.

But it also benefited the Armenians living there because they're Christian.

That's where they had to live.

And Constantinople, like every other corner of the Ottoman Empire, had been long allowed to simply fall into disrepair due to imperial government being too corrupt or incompetent.

So soon the Muslims that didn't live in this part of town, but did live in the city, looked over at the Christians, the ones that they've always been told that they're above and they're better than and asked, what the fuck?

This was seen as a kind of intolerable reversal of the known and accepted hierarchy of things.

And as Western influence within the empire grew, so did the power and influence of a very, very small number of Armenians.

Like we talked about before, the vast majority of Armenians were subsistence farmers, with now added land issues on top of it.

The rise in prominence is evidenced by the fact that an Armenian was in charge of the Ministry of Finance.

No surprise giving the Ministry's position in relation to the French and British, whose banks were full of Armenians now.

And dozens of Armenians were elected during the first ever Ottoman parliamentary elections in 1877.

This led to something of an Armenian renaissance within the Ottoman Empire in education and social momentum and political power.

It led to an upswell of Armenian cultural education amongst their own people.

And for the first time, a group other than the church was doing it.

And it also formed this idea of a national identity.

Newspapers were printed, ideas began to be spread, and professional Armenians from the cities eventually moved back to the villages to open schools and hospitals.

This led to a serious conflict between factions of Armenians as well as the Armenian church.

The church was divided.

So you had the Ottoman church, which had patriarchs in Constantinople and Jerusalem.

But the actual head of the Armenian faith, the Holy Mother See, think of that as the Vatican, is the Alkatikos in Ichmiyatsin, which is in Russian Armenia, for lack of a better term.

This only added to the the conflict, the power plays, the personal beefs of every layer of Armenian society, because now you have one that is socially liberal for the time, very moving into a very modern age.

Women are going to school and being educated, and then you have the very conservative factions that are kind of being led around by the church.

Not to mention the Ottoman state on top of it.

Yeah, it's kind of like the church operating.

And it's like, if things stay the same as they are, we can kind of predict the future and afford ourselves like some sort of stability.

Whereas like this new group that is achieving some level of upward mobility and self-determination kind of unsettles that a little bit.

Yeah.

And like, I don't mean to like defend the church's actions.

I'm not a huge fan of the Armenian Apostolic Church, but like they saw their way forward as safe.

They were worried that if these new reform-minded progressive Armenians take the rein, it's going to lead the Armenian people into ruin because the Ottoman government is going to react.

The church believes, like, well, the government is reforming.

We haven't had to do anything crazy.

Let's just keep doing what we've been doing and we'll be safe like we've always been.

That's the most good faith I could give them.

I mean, it's the thrust of like a lot of faith organizations in this sort of situation that like slow incremental change will lift all boats, where it's like, but we can kind of predict that like no big ruptions will make us unsafe or

kill millions millions of people.

And the other people see a different way.

Yeah, like a rising tide lifts all boats.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Armenians are shouting, motherfucker, we're landlocked.

In the middle of all of this, in the middle of the reforms, liberal and progressives, Turks, Greeks, Armenians and otherwise, began to find a common ground.

The reforms that the empire had set out to do were good, but like most things that the Ottoman government did, they were half-ass and full of problems.

This led the Armenians to leverage their power and get their own National Assembly.

Armenians elected by Armenians to have an eye on Armenian affairs and effectively be an Armenian lobby and advising group to the Ottoman government to push reforms that would help their people.

However, the National Assembly, like the current National Assembly of Armenia, quickly fell into pointlessness and bickering.

Now, this had to do with the Ottoman government simply ignoring it and the urban Armenians ignoring the larger needs of their poorer rural constituents, who were still the massive majority.

All of these high-minded political ideas I need to point out were mostly the idea of urban Armenians.

Rural Armenians were kind of left out hanging in the wind.

Then the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 erupted.

To make a very, very long story short, this was another war born of territorial demands from Russia.

and demands of freedom from the Ottoman Empire's minorities.

In this case, much of the Balkans.

Armenians of the Empire kind of got caught somewhere in the middle, considering themselves loyal citizens of the Ottoman Empire, while also hoping the Russians would win, because then they'd be in a better position to force concessions from the Sultan for better treatment and maybe more reforms.

The war ended very, very badly for the Ottomans, leading to them giving up massive swaths of land.

But it also led to something called the Congress of Berlin, where imperial powers got together to recognize the new Balkan states that had broken away from the the Ottomans, but also debate what would become of the Armenians in what is probably the most troubling phrase that any group of people can ever hear, the Armenian question.

Oh, it's not good when they ask the question.

It's never good when you're the subject of a question.

No.

Now, the Armenian question in this context means what rights Armenians should have within the Ottoman Empire and how those rights should be protected.

Something that was openly pushed for at the Congress by a man named Krikor Adanian, the Armenian advisor to the Ottoman reform Grand Vizier, Midhat Pasha.

He was a very progressive-minded reformer, as much as one could be in the Ottoman government.

And they were kind of advocating for this to the Europeans as agents of the Ottoman Empire.

It's kind of strange.

Unfortunately for Krikor, for Midhat, and every other reformer in the empire, though, the position of Sultan would soon be taken by a man named Abdul Hamid II.

And while he signed for what he was forced to sign after the war in order to end it, he then quickly ended everything else.

He suspended the reforms, he suspended the constitution, and he dismissed parliament.

Ottomanism was officially dead.

Using the Armenians' press for more rights, more reforms, protections, their closeness with the Westerners and the Westerners seemingly being their favorites?

All is evidence, Abdul Hamid began to see them as disloyal enemies of the Ottoman Empire, plotting with their outside friends to undermine Ottoman rule and eventually break away from the empire like all those fucking Balkans had.

Which I should point out here is not true.

Some Armenians were pushing for total independence, but they were a very, very, very small minority.

Most, including most of the middle class and the vocal contingents of Armenian life that the Ottomans would have seen, were pushing for more of a kind of self-rule within the framework of the empire.

They didn't want to leave.

Mostly, I mean, I'm not saying they had any love for the empire, but they just saw breaking ways and impossibility, so they didn't plan for it.

But now with the reforms dead and with the facade of equality gone with it, Armenian writers and thinkers began to think of a national body for Armenians rather than just the people who were collectively known within Armenian as the Armenian nation.

Rather, they began to think of an Armenian nation as a fatherland, a place.

a nation-state.

Which is concurrent with a lot of ideas that were emerging and becoming more pronounced in Europe at the time as well.

Yeah.

But it's like, if you're an Ottoman administrator, it's like, well, what if we gave these people nationhood and an idea of the centrality of the characteristics that unify them?

And there's like, and then you look at Italy or Germany, like, oh, no, but, but, but not like that.

Yeah, we don't have pasta.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

We don't have a hand gesture for every possible human emotion.

That's true.

Yeah.

We just communicate with our eyebrows.

Now, I'm talking about all this high concepts of a fatherland and a nation state.

Those are more the urban middle class of Armenians that are thinking that way.

They're being radicalized through political theory.

Yeah.

Which I promise you, we will not be talking about.

Meanwhile, people in the highlands were being radicalized simply by their existence because their life had returned to what it always had been.

No rights, crushing taxes, no political representation, and no rights to levy any complaints and get relief.

Soon things were made worse by what could easily be described as banditry.

The Ottoman state was failing and failing hard and fast, and the highlands were always large, rural, and barely policed.

It's a massive stretch of land, and the Ottoman state really only exists there in vibes for the most part.

Remember, things were not left to the central government until very, very recently, which was then never really implemented.

That led to Kurdish, Circassian, and Turkish bands of bandits to prey upon Armenians that lived nearby, knowing that the state wouldn't lift a finger to protect them.

And since Armenians had always been banned from military service, they had no real means of self-defense.

Though they could own rifles for hunting and whatnot, they didn't have any understanding of military organization or discipline.

The Armenians of the Highlands were once thought to be so passive that the government had declared them the most loyal millet in all of the empire.

But now they were openly talking about taking up arms.

Armenians petitioned the church to take their complaints to the Ottoman government.

One letter to the patriarch in Constantinople said, quote, The governors have sucked our bloods like leeches, and there's no possibility of reconciliation.

We're informing your holiness that the sooner or later, an incident will provoke our people to action.

This is our final request.

Other Armenians near the Russian border sent their own delegations across asking the Russians for protection from these roving gangs, who were, at this stage, not state-sanctioned, but state-allowed, let's say.

But the Russians also ignored them.

This led to more Armenians to lobby the political groups that were supposed to protect them, like the state and the church, to do their job.

However, by this point, the Ottoman state under Abdul Hamid had become so paranoid about the Armenians that any kind of organization, peaceful or not peaceful, a petition or a protest, it didn't matter, was considered some kind of nationalist insurrection.

That paranoia led to a new kind of nation building, in a way, by Abdul Hamid.

Harsh crackdowns against Armenians in cities and rural areas were imposed.

He instituted a kind of gerrymandering of provincial borders to make sure there was always some form of dominant Muslim population in an area to break up a Christian majority, whether it be Turks or Kurds or Circassians or Arabs, it didn't matter.

Armenians were banned from public service.

He ordered Western companies that had hired Armenians in their service to fire them.

And remember how I said that the Ottoman government was supposed to be a caliphate?

Well, it had been a long time since they've been really acting like one.

And now they were suddenly again, with Abdul Hamid calling himself a caliph for the first time in a really long time.

And he instituted a strict conservative Islamist state ideology.

That's because to Abdul Hamid, the way to save the empire was to unify the empire under Islam.

This was harder than you might think because, for example, outside the majority Turkish population, other Muslim minorities, those being Kurds, Arabs, Circassians, they fucking hated the government too.

The Ottoman government wasn't servicing anyone.

It was deeply corrupt and mismanaged.

Their Muslim population, outside of suffering state violence, was suffering the same kind of bullshit life that everybody else was.

There was also a deeply entrenched racism against non-Turkish Muslims that he now had to undo.

So he came up with a revolutionary way to unite his Muslim population, whether they be Turks or otherwise.

Blame the Armenians for all of the problems.

It's a great way to bolster your failing state, is to create an internal enemy to unify people against.

Yep.

Especially one where you already have strong feelings against.

I would also say coming to this without any kind of like foreknowledge, something that I find interesting is the parallels that are coming to mind are things like bleeding Kansas.

And the expansion of slavery and the conflict about that in border territories or in newly absorbed conquered territories of North America.

And the idea of the kind of political control, the gerrymandering, the

state approved or state-tolerated vigilante violence.

I feel like there are parallels here where it's not the exact same situation and certainly not the same result across the board.

But you can see around the same time the same phenomenon taking place.

And in this case, it just feels like it's a much more explosive situation.

Yeah, they have their unofficial street bandits.

You know, they won't be unofficial for long like most of these groups aren't uh but they have their shooters in the street that they have plausible deniability of because while this is happening european powers mostly britain france and russia are like hey you have to control this you know what is going on and abdul hamid can simply throw up his hands like oh they're bandits you know what can we do it's it's like i think that the combination of well orientalism and distance from it and these perceptions of like, you think of Constantinople in this era, you think of all of the kind of associated tropes along with that.

But what this is actually reminding me of is, yeah, the American West in a lot of ways.

It's basically Turkish for a few dollars more.

It's also mostly self-imposed.

Without going into too much detail, at any point, the state could control these people.

They simply choose not to.

Sure.

Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah, because it's useful to them.

Their violence is at...

enacting what the state wants to happen.

It is a state policy.

And there's a lot of problems within the empire that they're blaming Armenians for.

It wasn't the state that made it so nobody built roads or rail lines going out to your village.

It's not the state's fault that we don't have jobs.

It's not the state's fault that taxes have gone up or that tax money that you paid was stolen.

It was all Armenians,

effectively the Armenian deep state and their friends, the Westerners.

Everything is an Armenian cabal.

Effectively.

The Armenians made a pastry so good it did MK Ultra on the Germans.

That's right.

And we do have to hit pause here and jump over to something of a side series and also down the street from where Nate's currently sitting.

In 1887, the first explicitly Armenian revolutionary movement formed in Geneva, made up of Armenians from Russia and Persia.

They call themselves the Social Democrat Party or the Hunchuk.

They're not really social democrats.

They're a mix of communists, general left-wing people, Marxists.

But the key thing to know about them is that they they believed the key to Armenian revolution would be found in freeing those under Ottoman rule.

Then from that point on, it would spread to other places.

But they believed in violence to achieve this.

Like, because this is the 1870s, correct?

Or early 1880s?

Yeah, you get into the late 1800s.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's like you see the spread of like Marx and other left-wing thinkers, particularly in Europe.

Obviously, Geneva was a hotbed for it.

And it's like the

propaganda of the the deed era is slowly coming.

So like the emphasis on violence as revolutionary action is like at the fore of like a left-wing liberation ideology.

And you also see similar things in other places where European immigrant communities have settled.

I mean, this is like sort of the build up to the high point of anarchism and like anarchist political violence in the United States, for example.

And also, like, I think the industrial conditions in Geneva less so because it was actually weirdly cut off from industrial France for a time.

But you are fomenting this in the urban experience in industrialized or industrializing Western Europe.

So it makes sense why Armenians in France and also in Switzerland, this part of Switzerland, would be exposed to that and see like a parallel.

And it's like the first place they've ever lived were allowed to actually discuss political stuff openly and not have to worry about getting their head caved in.

A few years later, the Hunshoks joined with Christopher Malakian's young Armenia group, and they formed an organization between them called the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, known as the ARF, also known as the Doshnaks.

I will be calling them Dashnaks from here on out.

But as left-wing groups are wont to do, before long there's a theory-based beef and they broke up again, leaving now with us the Hunchucks and the Doshnaks, a split that exists literally to this day.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Joe, but isn't the word for bread in Armenian Hots?

Yeah.

So basically, this is 19th century HOTS tube.

Now, now these are two very separate organizations with essentially the same goal and i should also point out here uh there's a very very small number of armenians who consider themselves revolutionary and none of this is happening within the empire itself there would be a different group within the empire itself which we'll get to most of these revolutionary conversations are happening outside ottoman land like obviously in geneva and paris and tflis and russia which is today tbilisi georgia then they mostly had to flee into europe to join the other groups because surprise surprise, the Russian authorities were not super big fans of all these Armenian revolutionaries hanging around either.

It also is worth mentioning at this time, political repression of revolutionary or radical groups in the Russian Empire is a massive thing.

And just about everybody that would factor into later revolutionary movements in Russia, you'll hear stories of them or their loved ones being affected.

You know, whether it's Russian authors or later people like Vladimir Lenin, people like siblings, friends,

getting arrested by, I can't remember the name of the secret police under the Tsar, but arrested and often tried and executed.

Like that, political repression is a huge thing in the Russian Empire.

Oh, yeah.

And specifically in the Caucasus, when it came to left-wing organization, most of it is being done by Armenians, Georgians, and Turkic people in what is today Azerbaijan.

And it's really nice that all these people would have to flee only to return and then Lenin to then come and invade everything all over again.

Thanks, buddy.

Well, you know, like they said, there's the one thing we can count on.

Self-determination.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Not like that.

You're doing it wrong.

If there's one thing we can count on for the Soviet Union, it's that ethnic minority populations are safe where they are and they will always remain in their ancestral homelands.

Anyway, I will not be reading anything about this.

I'm licking my finger and turning this page on minorities in Kazakhstan.

Interesting.

Yeah, I was going to say, hey, you know, like, it's weird how uniformly Russian the Crimean Peninsula is.

Anyway, let's not ask that question.

No need to look into that.

Now, despite the Russians trying hard to crack down on their own Armenian revolutionary groups, the border between the two empires is quite long and very porous, leading revolutionaries from Russian Armenia and Georgia to cross the border with money, guns, and revolutionary literature to begin trying to organize people in the highlands.

And it should be known that like the Highland people didn't really give a fuck about the literature.

They wanted the guns and they'll know how to use them.

Because it's basically they show up with supplies, weapons, things that can support you, and then printouts of blog posts.

Yeah, like, bro, I'm being raided by Kurdish tribesmen for like the third time this week.

If you hand me one more pamphlet by this cunt named Carl, I'm going to shoot you.

Yeah, exactly.

But these early stages of Armenian revolutionary organization, both the Hunchhocks and the Doshnoks, I have to say, were hardly political.

They learned their lesson quite quickly and instead switched to try to organize themselves into self-defense groups to check these bandit raids.

Because at this point, the bandit raids have escalated to the point that they're now simply trying to drive Armenians from their homes and villages, in some cases entire provinces, so they could seize the land.

So this is kind of like Cossack pogroms and things like that.

It's getting there.

Yeah.

The revolutionaries told people that the government wasn't coming to help them because the government was the one who sent them in the first place.

And this might sound like some kind of conspiracy theory used by the organizers to get villagers on their side, but in 1891, the Sultan literally did that officially.

He formed these various bands of raiders into a official government paramilitary, citing, of course, the distrustful nature of the Armenians by evidence of the fact that now they had guns and were defending themselves.

Ottoman officers went to Kurdish and Arab villages to train, arm, and give them uniforms for this purpose.

The Sultan offered the men a salary and benefits and began welcoming Kurdish and Arab children into higher education institutions in Constantinople for the first time.

Furthermore, the paramilitaries would be allowed to keep anything they stole, including food, wealth, entire businesses, and the lands that the Armenians had been living on.

In exchange for them turning into a government death squad, the Sultan would officially welcome them into the upper crust of Ottoman imperial life.

So now the raids continued, but this time with open sanction from the Sultan.

Self-defense against these bands of rapists, slavers, and murderers was now considered open rebellion against the state.

As violence spread throughout the highlands, revolutionaries spread themselves throughout the empire's urban centers, like Constantinople, to demand the Armenian elite and middle class use their money, power, and influence to try to stop what was happening.

But the urban Armenians were, let's just say, not the biggest fan of these pistol-wielding communists.

They were a little worried.

Now, suddenly, these guys were like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

You're fighting off soldiers and cops from the government.

That's going to bring Ottoman soldiers down onto the villages because now you're in rebellion.

I'm with the church on this one.

We just need to ask nicely.

Yeah, when you punch the gray wolves, you become just as bad as they are.

Yeah, exactly.

So men and women from both of these revolutionary groups stormed a church where the Patriarch of Constantinople was hiding and held him at gunpoint to demand that he tell the sultan to stop the attacks.

The patriarch refused and had to run for his life.

There would be multiple assassination attempts against him after this.

Just knocking over fucking gigantic sensors of like myrrh and frankincense everywhere.

It's just like fenugreek flying to the four winds while this man's fleeing.

Flogging him with the fucking canter.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like a big shotgun of rat shot, but it's just this Turkish delight that's gone hard.

In another city, Yozgat, Ottoman police began roughing up an Armenian woman when investigating crime, leading to a group of Armenian men to get pissed and confront them.

An Ottoman army officer arrived to try to calm the situation down by shooting an Armenian man in the leg.

Now, this would normally work by scaring off the Armenians.

But the Armenian men who had confronted the cops had actually been concealing guns the entire time, so they pull them out and start firing.

Several people die on both sides.

This was only only made worse as more and more cops and paramilitaries were sent into Armenian provinces hunting for so-called revolutionary activity.

A British diplomat that was stationed nearby said, quote, the local authorities have made it their goal to saddle the Armenians with every crime that occurs in the district.

This brings us to a town of Sassoon in 1894.

The town was majority Armenian, but the province was largely run by Kurds.

The relationship between the two minorities within the empire was, let's say, tense, with Armenians forced to pay what was effectively protection racket money to the Kurds to get them to leave them alone.

And this is on top of their already high tax rate.

However, with the introduction of the fancy titles uniforms pay and promises of loot given to Kurdish leadership, that protection money was suddenly not good enough, as the Kurds had effectively been given a green light to simply steal the Armenian land, assuming there was no Armenians on it.

That is when a group of Hunshaks led by Mirhan Tamatsian traveled to the town, smuggling guns and knowledge of how to use them with him.

Before long, the Hunshoks, side by side with villagers, were fighting off groups of paramilitaries who had charged in the town.

And soon, the Ottoman government declared Sassoon was in open revolt.

More paramilitaries were sent in and got their teeth kicked in as well, because it turned out they weren't the best soldiers on earth when the people they were trying to kill started shooting back at them for once.

Once again, it's very easy to be a soldier when you're fighting unarmed peasants and farmers.

Yeah, like, oh, oh no, someone's shooting at the death squad as they all run into the hills.

The Betty Hill music playing in the background.

The Betty Hill music played only on Duke Dukes.

Eventually, the paramilitaries called for help, and the regular Ottoman military was sent in with artillery and everything else, and no amount of Armenian resistance they could muster would be enough to save them.

What followed became known as the Himidian massacres, often sometimes called the Hamidian pogroms.

The Ottoman army, paramilitaries, and regular people whipped into a frenzy about the Armenians they heard so much about being in revolt and being traitors and whatnot, joined forces to butcher their neighbors.

So is this like the, yeah, I suppose this is an antecedent for what's going to come of like the unity of like the state, paramilitary, and regular civilians in enacting violence against the Armenians?

Yep.

And learning the different ways you could whip people up into a frenzy.

Like some people, it's like, you know, they're traitors to the sultan.

Other people, it's they're infidels to your faith.

Other people, it's like, if you kill them, you can steal their house.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Hitting them with everything.

Yeah, it's a comprehensive idea of like, these are undesirable people in our society.

And if you remember back to the other genocide series that we've done, all happened then too.

Yep.

It doesn't matter if it's in the 1990s or in the 1800s or 1915.

It's always the same.

When that was enough, fake rumors were spread by the Ottoman officials saying the Europeans were going to invade.

They were going to take over Armenian provinces and create an independent Armenian kingdom.

And the only way to stop that was to simply make sure there wasn't any Armenians there anymore.

And while this started in Sassoon, it began to spread across the empire, from the streets of Constantinople to the most rural villages of the highland.

According to one investigating British commissioner, quote, Armenians were hunted down like wild beasts where they were found.

In Diyarbakir, where my family is from, the Ottoman governor sent his forces in to support the paramilitaries.

Thousands were murdered.

Thousands of women and children were kidnapped with the women taken into slavery, their faces tattooed, and children were forced to convert and adopted into Kurdish families and Turkish families.

The French consul sent a telegraph to their ambassador in Constantinople saying, quote, the city is engulfed in fire and blood.

God save us all.

As word of the massacres got out, the British government was actively involved trying to stop them, which I'm sure is surprising to most of our listeners.

Lord Kimberly, foreign minister at the time, immediately pushed the Sultan for reforms and to stop the killings.

The Sultan refused and told the minister himself, quote, the Armenian question will not be answered with reform, but with blood.

Soon, military intervention, a full invasion of the Ottoman Empire with the goal of overthrowing the Sultan quickly became popular within the British government.

However, due to geopolitics with Russia, they knew they simply couldn't invade the Ottomans without getting the support or at least the green light from the Russians unless it sparked another war between them.

So Kimberly quickly met with the Russian foreign minister, Prince Alexei Lobanov-Rostovsky, to ask, hey, could we team up or can you step aside?

We can fuck up the empire and then we can parcel out the pieces afterwards and we'll stop the killing of the Armenians all at the same time.

Prince Alexei refused.

This is because he may have been the one person in the entire world so racist against Armenians he could give the Ottomans a run for their money.

Because meanwhile in Russia, he had been pushing for a ban on Armenian schools, churches, and even speaking the Armenian language, and said his favorite version of Armenia would, quote, be without Armenians.

The Armenians continued to be slaughtered in their tens of thousands across the empire with no repercussions from the European community, who I only bring up because they had previously sworn to protect them.

So.

A group of Dashnok revolutionaries led by Bedros Parlan raided the Ottoman Bank, which despite its name, was a European-controlled bank in the center of Constantinople.

However, the bank was heavily guarded, and the initial takeover turned gunfight, left around half of the raiders dead, including Parlan, leaving command of the operation to an absolute hero, a man named Armen Garo.

After the bank was secure, they gathered hostages and told the government if the massacres didn't stop, they would start killing the hostages, all of whom were Turkish.

They gave further demands to the Europeans, which boiled down to, keep your fucking promises, or you'll burn your bank to the ground.

Which, remember, it's the 1800s.

All of the wealth is inside that bank.

Word of what was happening inside the bank quickly got out to the city at large, and soon violent armed mobs of civilians began stalking the streets, looking to slaughter any Armenians they could find.

Ottoman police and soldiers simply stepped aside and let it happen.

And the only group that came to the Armenians' aid in Constantinople was the city's Jewish population, who quickly ran over and invited Armenians to hide in their quarter of the city because it was not their turn on the atrocity chore wheel at the moment.

The fighting inside the bank lasted for 14 hours as Ottoman soldiers, police, and paramilitaries were fought off by Armengaro's group of men.

Sir Edgar Vincent, the British head of the Ottoman bank, agreed to Armengaro's terms and said he would do his best to pressure the Ottoman government.

as long as the occupation of the bank ended.

When Garo said that he and his men would be slaughtered as soon as they stepped out of the bank, Vincent simply said, Well, then you can use my own personal pleasure yacht to escape in.

And they did.

Imagine holding up a bank for hours.

They killed probably 50 to 100 people defending the bank during the takeover and then simply skipped out in a British pleasure yacht.

Escape on my stately pleasure yacht.

I hate making facile comparisons, but it's just like,

what else could come to mind than like five Ottoman stars in Ottoman GTA and you jump in the goddamn boat and just whip ass out of there?

Quick, I have to pull the boat into the Dardanelles at the spray and pay.

Do it flipping shitties in the river like it's fucking COVID lockdown on the Thames.

The narrator giving you commands in the game for some reason is like a Guido Mafia guy.

He's like, they're going to close the chain on the Bosporus.

You got to fucking get out of here.

Armin, my man, you got to get the fuck out of there.

Unfortunately, the massacres did not stop after the bank takeover, and instead they spread even further.

Urged on by the Sultan, who the international press was now condemning as the Red Sultan or the bloody red sultan.

Ottoman forces slaughtered tens of thousands across the empire, and each time the Europeans demanded answers, the Ottoman government would simply shrug and say, well, they're rebelling.

No European government believed the Ottomans, nor did the United States.

Hell, even Russia knew that they were lying, but nobody lifted a finger to stop the killing.

That is when when the Armenians of Vaughn saw the paramilitaries coming for them in 1896.

The town of Vaughn had so far largely gotten away from the killings.

This led to them being something of a safe harbor for other Armenians to flee to it.

And with them, they brought word of what was happening outside the village.

Because Vaughn is very close to what's now the Iranian border, if I'm not mistaken.

It's very, very far east in what's now Turkey.

Yep.

I mean, it wasn't even 100 years ago at this point of the story when Russian Armenia was Persian.

It's one of the reasons why we have a lot of cultural simulations with the Persians.

This also happened to be a place where Hunshox and Doshnox were joined by a third group, the Armenikons,

which was an Ottoman Armenian revolutionary group, the first one.

And they all joined together to, they all have their ideological complaints with one another, but the Armenikons' political ideology boils down to being vaguely Marxists, vaguely socialist, but with more of an an idea of we'll worry about that when we get there

type thing.

They mostly just believed in the armed liberation of their people, if need be.

The reasonable stop killing us policy being at the center rather than our teachers a cab.

Right.

Like you have these three groups that they could argue on the most minute bullshit on earth, but they all largely agreed with, we'll worry about that after we shoot these dickheads on horseback.

And this tends to be a thing that you see, you know, across these kinds of things in the modern era, but like specifically at this time, that like, as you said, like these people would absolutely like they would take down the hosting of the leftist dating site over splits on their opinion on the Spanish Civil War.

But for the time being, they're willing to fucking work together.

Yeah, it's like we need to get rid of the Moon Turk because the Moon Turk prefigures bedtime, which is in and of itself kind of revolutionary.

I fucking hate you.

Two Armenians sitting in a trench outside of Von Black.

So, Armin, what do do you think about DoorDash?

Anyway,

these three groups armed and trained a few hundred men and women, you know, women fiday or women freedom fighters or partisans in Armenian culture.

Very, very important.

And together, they're able to hold off Ottoman forces for a week between June 3rd and 11th.

And it's then when the Sultan reached out to European powers and asked them, you know what?

The fighting has gone on long enough.

Because remember, he's still framing this as if the Armenians are in some form of organized rebellion and not like these people are shooting people from their backyard and he reaches out to the european powers specifically uh britain france and russia to be like i need a mediator between me and the armenian people because you know they're the armenian revolutionary government because he's framing the fact that the dashnaks hunch and the armenikons are all involved as like that is the government of von and not like Those are the guys who showed up with guns so everybody could protect themselves.

There's a very small number of them.

Like the population of Vaughn is tens of thousands and there's only a couple hundred of self-defense forces, let's call them.

So it's not like they formed an army.

And he reaches out to the Europeans and says, I just want the fighting to stop.

And, you know what, you guys can have free reign to pack your shit and cross into Persia.

The people in Vaughn, realizing that they don't really have many other options agree.

The Europeans agree.

The Ottoman government agrees.

And they're given a few days to pack up their shit, leave their weapons behind, and march towards Persia.

What happens next is arguably the worst mass killing of the pogrom period.

At least 20,000 Armenians are slaughtered.

It could be higher.

We really don't know.

And hundreds of villages are wiped out.

Normally they're burnt to the ground.

Sometimes they just blink at them with artillery.

They're literally...

wiping any trace of Armenians from the highlands at this point.

They could just take the houses and move in, but they don't.

By the time the Sultan, facing external and internal pressures, declared the Armenian question to be solved and the killings to officially be stopped, between 300,000 and a half million Armenians had been killed.

The Sultan, having destroyed the Constitution, parliament, and all reforms, and then using the state monopoly and violence on the Armenian population as a means to unify the conservative Muslim elements of the empire, had actually turned several other elements of Ottoman society against him, his government, and his very ideology.

Segments of the majority Turkish population, as well as that is every walk of minority life, had grown sick and tired of the Sultan's despotic rule.

And instead, they wanted to return to constitutionalism and a dedication to Ottoman reform as a way to save the empire.

These constitutionalists would get the nickname the Young Turks.

And that is where we will pick up next time.

Yeah.

Woo, buddy.

We'll just have to hear about their large nephews for the rest of our lives.

So, did you know Homer Simpson's email, chunkylover53 at aol.com, is generally registered and users will get an automated response from him if they try to contact it?

Will they send a voice memo in German Homer voice?

Have you ever heard German Homer voice?

You don't want to.

I haven't.

No, I do my best not to hear German.

in general.

Germans will defend this to the death, but German Homer voice is one of the most unpleasant things you'll ever hear, whether or not you speak German.

I will give you one more Simpsons fact to cushion the landing from this podcast.

In the Spanish version, instead of doe, Homer Simpson simply says, ouch.

I'm wondering, does Barbara

still say i Caramba, or does he have to say something else?

You know, it's like, I think

instead of i Karamba, he probably says g Willikers.

I don't fucking know.

Oh, and in French, Homer says to oh.

So, yeah,

that is that is the cushion for this very long episode of Misery.

That is the Armenian Genocide Part 1, which brings us to a point in time known as the Himidian pogroms and coming into the Young Turk Revolution.

And how do you guys feel at this moment?

I'm just thinking about French Homer would have definitely slept with Lurlene, but

I'm not feeling good, man.

I'm not looking forward to the next four fucking episodes.

I was on vacation when I was like seven with my parents in Alsace and I remember watching the beheading the Jebediah Springfield episode in French.

Uh at my dad's who's not a very good French speaker trying to translate it for me and not really succeeding.

So I don't know.

My my mind is spinning and I'm like, Yeah, that's a that's a positive European memory.

I feel like we need about two millennia of positive European memories to like combat the weight of every other European memory.

Challenge level impossible.

But what if I told you that the Matt Groening is the voice behind Maggie Simpsons sucking so?

This is the only way I know how to cushion the blows and leave this episode behind until next week.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not good.

No, no.

You know what's funny?

I saw the first Simpsons episode when it premiered in 1989.

I was five years old.

I'm 40 fucking years old now.

Why is that show still on TV?

I don't know.

I've heard it's gotten better.

I'm not going to watch it, though.

No, though, I saw someone shared a screenshot of Homer Homer with an iPhone doing a FaceTime call.

I'm like, that shouldn't happen.

That shouldn't exist.

That is a crime before God and all things that we hold sacred.

My childhood has become grotesque and strange, and I no longer recognize it.

You're not wrong.

You're not wrong.

My fun fact is my mom nearly married Al Gene,

one of the creators of The Simpsons.

What?

What?

Yep.

Yep.

You could have had such a different life.

You could have had like money and not be a podcaster.

The world would have been a better place because none of the Kasabian children would have been born.

And I did.

My mom told me this when I was younger and I found L Gene on Twitter and I asked him if he remembered my mom.

And of course, my last name is different than my mom's.

And he said no.

And I said her name would have been, you know, in her main name.

And he was like, oh, yeah.

So she wasn't lying.

I thought she was fucking with me for decades.

I was supposed to see the premiere of Street Fighter, the movie with Wes Studio because he was one of my mom's clients when she worked in insurance, but he had like another acting gig.

So I was deprived of a chance to see one of the worst movies of the 90s with, in fairness, one of the coolest actors in America.

But

such is life.

That is the end of the Armenian Genocide Part 1, where we rapidly try to talk about anything else.

Yeah, we do.

Everyone, thank you so much for listening.

Guys, thanks for joining me.

This series, I kind of goes without saying, it means a lot to me to do because, and we've been doing this show for closer to a decade than not now.

This is a subject that's really important to me and my personal history and my family's personal history and the personal history of millions of other people just like me.

And I think that doing an episode like this is really important at this period of history.

Because, like we've talked about before, we've hammered this nail into the board a million fucking times.

And that is, these things all start the same exact way.

It doesn't matter if it's happening in Diyarbakir or Rwanda or anywhere else, anywhere, any of the other episodes we've talked about.

These things have a pattern and we need to learn it.

But guys, you host other shows.

Plug those shows.

That feels so fucking inappropriate, brother.

Giving you motherfucking whiplash.

Trash Future, kill James Bond.

What a hell of a way to dad.

No gods, no mirrors.

Beneath the skin, and this guy sucked.

This guy sucked, the title that perfectly encapsulates everyone on this podcast that we just talked about.

This is the only show that I host.

You're listening to it, so thanks for that.

Consider supporting us on Patreon where you get episodes like this early.

Like I said, almost a decade of bonus content, e-books, audiobooks, first dips and live show tickets and merch.

And by the time this comes out, there might still be tickets available for our live show in London.

So get those.

I promise the live show.

will not be depressing like this.

Well, it might be for you, depending on what upsets you.

I don't fucking know.

Get the show.

Come see us live April 11th.

There's also live stream tickets available as well.

So even if you can't make it to the United Kingdom, or if you're in the United Kingdom and you can't make it to London, you can still watch it from the comfort of your couch.

All of those links will be in the show notes, as well as links to the Patreon and our merch store where you can get other stuff.

Until next time, organize self-defense and shoot people on horseback.