Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that sometimes when bad stuff happens, people use that opportunity to do good stuff in response to the aforementioned bad stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kildroy, and with me today is my guest, James Stout.
Hi James. Hi, Margaret. I'm happy to be here.
I'm happy you're here too, and I'm happy that Sophie's here. Who's our producer?
Hi Sophie.
Hi mag Hi Hi James. Hi.
I'm also happy that Daniel is not here. No, that comes across badly. Our audio engineer is Daniel, who is not here, but we'll hear this.
Hi Daniel, Daniel, You're always here in our hearts. Hi Daniel.
Yeah. Everywhere I go I carry down in my heart. Yeah.
Our theme music was written for us by un woman and this week is d next week because it's a four parter, because it started as a two parter and then it didn't fit. Because it's a big thing that we're talking about, but it's an I can't sell this as exciting. It's mostly bad, but there's good stuff within it.
This week and next week we're going to talk about one of the least discussed worst things that has happened in the history of the world, the Armenian genocide, And we're going to talk about the well, the scrappy, poorly funded Armenians who set out to and successfully killed basically everyone responsible for that particular nightmare, which is an impressive feat. Yeah, James, I know the answer to this question because I already asked you, have you heard much about the Armenian Genocide.
I've had a little bit. Yeah. I used to teach a world's history course at the University of California and we talked a little bit about the Armenian genocide, and I was kind of shocked how most folks coming into that course who are really genuinely unaware that anything bad had happened to the Armenian people.
Yeah. I knew the words Armenian genocide. I mean I knew the cliff notes of what had happened, right, but I didn't I didn't know as much as i've known.
Now.
Yeah, how about Operation Nemesis. You heard Operation Nemesis?
Is this when they go about splatting all the people who did the Armenian genocide.
There's so many there's yeah, yeah, yeah, can I do this?
Yeah? This one is pretty cool. Ways to respond to a genocide go not a bad one. Yeah.
It was just so cut and dry. I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot that's going on, right, it's the forethar we're going to talk about it. But like, yeah, they're like, well, that can't happen. And and there's a lot of stuff that came up during this that I didn't realize that even like complicates it more. It wasn't just revenge. It was actually political actions that had a real and direct impact on people who are still living.
Because well, we'll get into it, yeah, because it's also going to be a story about how socialist revolutionaries of every stripe and the presence of women in general in revolutionary struggle has been left out of the mainstream retellings of this story, Like most of the mainstream retellings of this story I've heard, basically come down to, Oh, some middle class Armenian Americans with no connections to power at all got together and killed all these people, you know,
and it's meant to be like this like scrappy underdog story because of the fact that they're like all detached, but it removes them from a lineage of struggle and actually specific actors who were involved. So I disagree with that way of telling it. And I want to shout out the Armenian listener who wrote to suggest this story,
so thank you. The shortest version of this story is that in nineteen fifteen, a pseudo revolutionary nationalist Turkish force called the Young Terms led a genocide of somewhere between a million and two million Christians, particularly Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. The numbers are hotly contested. Mostly they're tracked separately by ethnicity, but it was an absolute nightmare, and folks did not
take a line down, which brings me the question. I feel like you two probably know more about modern political media landscape. There's an influential group called the Young Turks that's around.
Yeah, this is one of those things that, like I if people aren't guessing from the way I speak, I didn't grow up in the United States, and yeah, yeah, get crazy, I did, I see? I just mainlined Harry Potter movie. It's why I'm a terrible fucking person. That's not true. I didn't grow up here and I wasn't always like a heavy user of the Internet, like I'm PULHDM now, but I remember having a distinct moment and someone being like, oh, yeah, man, you check this thing out.
They called the Young Turks not but they called fucking what And apparently it's this left liberal media network, which, like unsurprised me, has terrible takes on things. I have now become sadly very aware of how terrible they are. But why what the fuck are you going for with that?
It? As best as I can understand, I have not really consumed any of the Young Turks content, as best as I could understand. If you're like kind of stuck in a specific nationalist lens, you can ignore all of the bad stuff and stick to like the like ten minutes that the Young Turks in the eighteen nineties was like vaguely progressive or something. But it's like naming your media network the Nazi, Like if this is like yeah media.
Yeah, it's it's insane, Like it speaks I think to the fact that people don't like when I would when I would lecture about the Armenian genocide. If students who are aware at all, they were aware through the medium of the Kardashians, which is I know nothing else. I know the Kardashian are educators about the Armenian genocide, and I know that one of them is married to one of the dudes from Blink one A two, And this is all I know about them.
Two facts more than I had. But Sophie is probably laughing at both of us for our pop culture.
Yeah, Sophie's going to do her own podcast about.
Explain yea explaining pop culture to the people who live under rocks on my network is that.
We found some anarchists and explained television to Yeah.
I would listen to that.
Yeah, I would just do that. Should be really fun.
Do me some good, because I'm not proud of the fact that I have no idea what's going on unless it happened in eighteen ninety six.
In my points of reference stop at the end of the Spanish Civil War and from there, I'm just going off context on Twitter. Yeah, but no Young Turks really shit name, Like if you didn't see like all of their other terrible stuff coming, I feel like the name should have been a massive clue.
Yeah, but I mean I had never heard of the Young Turks, the original movement, you know, even in as little as I knew about anything else, and so I assume that that's what it is, is that people just don't know, you know, and like, Okay, this is really petty. There's this Armenian composer that I learned about this week named Gomitas, and it's transliterated different ways, different times, and the music is so beautiful, and there's like all of
these like long importance is very important. Composer. He loses his mind in the Armenian genocide. He's considered one of the victims of the genocide. He lives for a while longer, but he, you know, he loses his mind completely. And my metal band has more listeners on Spotify than this guy. And it was just this moment of like, oh, people don't know about the past. Yeah, you know, I didn't know about this guy. It's amazing. This is completely up
my alley. It is like crazy, dramatic, dark and beautiful. I'm so into it. But this is start the story. I was gonna say to get back to the story, but we haven't started it yet. So just to make soph happy, I'm going to start this story in the year three hundred and one.
I have a triple digit Yeah, yeah, use a full pot of ass.
The Armenian genocid was both ethnically and religiously motivated, but especially religiously motivated. To say that Armenia is a Christian nation is to understate the case dramatically. Armenia is the first Christian nation in the history of the world in the year three hundred and one, seventy nine years before Rome, years before Ethiopia. I think Georgia was also up there.
In general, most Armenians belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church, which is part of the Oriental Orthodox tradition, which is distinct from the Eastern Orthodox tradition.
For us, I think it's a Postolic.
Apostolic Okaystal, you should include me getting that wrong and you're fixing me, I think.
I think so fixing.
I'm like going back to going to Catholic church Apostolic.
And the reason it is an Apostolic church is because tradition holds that it was Saint Jude, one of the original apostles of Jesus, who traveled to Armenia and started converting people. So it's real Christian. What exactly Armenia means as a political entity versus as a people is a complicated issue that has changed many, many times over the course of history. There's a country called Armenia right now in West Asia. It's sort of sandwich between Turkey and Georgia.
This is sort of a rump state. It is the remnant of a larger previous state. Most modern Armenians have a heritage that more directly comes from modern day Turkey, as someone from Armenia explained to me, or rather an Armenian person explained to me earlier today when I was
trying to sort out exactly this question. Armenia has been doing this thing for thousands of years at this point, but it hasn't always existed as a distinct political entity, although the culture and the people have been around for a very long time. But we're not going to track Armenia as it comes and goes as a country. Instead, we're going to talk about the Armenian people. And I just want to point out that this is they are
in some ways distinct, right. I had always assumed, like, oh, Armenians, those are people who live in Armenia, and that's my white Americans, like Irish people are from the island of Ireland and everything simple, you know.
Yeah, Americans really often conflate like nation and state because of the nature of American nationalism and stayhood. But yeah, I think a lot of it. Even if you're from Europe, break you can understand the Catalonius a nation but not a state, and you have some kind of lived experience of that. Yeah, And it can be again venturing into things that I used to teach about when I would still being a historian.
I mean that is part of why you were the guests. I appreciate that you know a lot.
Of this stuff. Thank you. Yeah, people should read Benedict Anderson if they want to know more about that.
So now we're going to jump over to a recent friend of the pod, or at least recurring character of the pod, the Ottoman Empire. And we talked a bunch about the Ottoman Empire on the show. So I'm not going to do a lot of it, but I'm going to drill down a little bit further into how it
worked as a multi ethnic empire. I was talking to an Armenian Greek friend about doing this episode, and the way he put it was basically like, look, I'm not going to go to bat for empires in general, but the Ottomans just wanted your taxes and didn't give a fuck what else you did. And this is an exaggeration, and we're going to talk about some of the exceptions to that over all, Like as far as empires go, you.
Know, big Empire fan Margaret Kiljoy.
Yeah, you know, they they're yeah, they're a minarchist, they're not minarchist, but you know they do not begin that discourse from da oh wow, let's start an Ottomans as a discourse subject. I don't anyway. If anyone wants to bring it up to me, just at me at.
I right, okay, on Twitter, and so she could be found.
Yeah, the Ottoman Empire has a distinct advantage and a distinct disadvantage of being on the Anatolian Peninsula aka Asia Minor aka more or less what we call Turkey. Now, this is an advantage because it's at the crossroads of the world. It's at a disadvantage because it's at the crossroads of the world. I am honestly not sure if
there's ever been a more invasion prone place. I got really lost and sidetracked for a long time reading about centuries of backs and forth of people invading this place. My main takeaway was people really like invading this place.
The Turks, who are a distinct ethnic group from the also generally Muslim Arabs, formed the Imperial Core, and they won their empire by being seriously good warriors, highly mobile cavalry with composite bows which are just basically like a better bow technology, would go around and conquering and demanding total surrender and bringing people into this empire. They ruled huge trunks of Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe
for centuries. The Crusaders would like, comment and conquer shit, and to be clear, the Crusaders also really like killing non Catholic Christians. That crusaders not great people, not that it would have been okay if they were. What I'm trying to say is a crusader sucked. The Mongols would comment and conquer shit. And the Ottoman Empire was at war with Russia like basically always any pick a random year
and they were probably at war with Russia. But once they conquered Constantinople from the Christians in fourteen fifty three what's now Istanbul, they managed a pretty stable empire. That particular battle was apparently very wild, like one day when I've like completely lost all interest in everything else and I'm entirely cynical. I'm absolutely going to run a history podcast where I talk about people carrying boats over and putting them down in harbors and shit.
But portage podcast.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, it's actually specifically going to be about portage, Sophie, Is that all right? We could do that, the portage portage cast always be portaging.
Putage, always carry a boat. I see, I love it? Yes, please, I love it? Yeah, great, Wow, this is perfect We Narco Ottomans did. Anyway, there are authoritary bucks.
I'm not going to bat for them here, all right, and now I'm about to say nice things about them. As soon as they had constants noble, they were honestly comparatively chill about it compared to the Christians. Jews and Christians were immediately invited and sometimes maybe forced to come live in the city alongside the Muslim population. By the early five to fifteen hundreds, they kind of rule what's
the sort of known world? Because Western Europe is a dinky little backwater, It is poor as fuck, and it is not too politically powerful on the world stage at this point. And what turned it around is that they quote unquote discovered the New World and then robbed the shit out of it. And it turns out that if you rob a whole bunch of people of a bunch of gold and enslave a bunch of people, you can make money doing that.
Yeah, not the best way to make money, no, But you know what the best way to make money is, James, Oh yeah, I do bug it. It's inserting adverts for brands that are not at all problematic and your podcast.
Yeah exactly. I'm sure every thing that is about to be advertised to you is something that I would wholeheartedly support. Maybe maybe it's a pocket boat, like a tiny yeah, so that you can carry it yep, brought to you by pocketboat.
Wow.
I actually really kind of want one of those, like folding kayak or canoes.
I ate shit so fucking hard in an inflatable canoe on the fifty July, like I got fucking tumbled. It's broken half like it folded. Okay, so they're not the most reliable canoes. I gave mine to the folding one. It gave to my friend in Moab who also stuffed it in a fucking pocket and it folded on him. I like, oh, yeah, he could have drowned.
Was this like white watering or what?
So he was white watering? I was surf kayaking. Okay.
See my plan is to go to this like small lake that has toads and put my dog in the canoe and then put me in the canoe and move around at like two miles an hour.
Okay, I think you're more of a target demo. Yeah, you've made like kayak Twitter really mad now by conflating kayak and canoe.
I know, although I do know how to do both, I'm not very good at many sports. But I once won a kayak race. Wow, And that's why I am shelling for whatever comes next, because there wasn't a lot of money in winning kayak race when I was thirteen. Here you go, hi, Margaret Kiljoy. Here boy, the world sure is a mess right now?
Huh.
Seems like every day there are more and more reasons to get out into the streets and protest. That's why when I get arrested, there's only one strategy, I trust. I shut the fuck up. I say, I would like to remain silent. I would like to talk to my lawyer, and then I shut the fuck up. In the United States of America, it's constitutionally protected and recommended by the
National Lawyers Guild. That's shut thg f u c k up once again, Sahu t thche fuc k up, because you can't talk yourself out of custody, but you can talk yourself into a conviction.
Providing identification to law enforcement required in some states and situations, giving them an address expedient in most circumstances. Never discuss the events leading to arrest with anyone except your lawyer, doctor, or therapist. Posting pictures of protests and actions on social media may lead to complications. If you have already talked to cops or experienced confusion about talking to cops, call your attorney immediately, as these may be signs of more
serious legal problems. The concept of not talking to cops does not provide legal advice, and the foregoing statements are for informational purposes only. If you have specific legal questions, consult an attorney.
And we're back. And So Europe went from warring kingdoms to really really wealthy kingdoms because they took advantage of the great deals that we offer heracles on media, and they started modernizing their warships with new pocket boats and forever change to the war. The Ottoman Empire, their main advanced technology was basically bureaucracy. They were pretty good at it.
The ability to actually rule a massive empire and pull taxes out of everyone took a lot of work, and they had a really elaborate millet system for how they handled ethnic and religious minorities. All of the different millets, all of the different groups of people. They all had different costumes that I think they had to wear. I know they weren't allowed to wear a bunch of different colors very specifically. I ended up with like kind of mixed answers about whether or not they had to wear these.
But Greeks wore sky blue hats with black slippers, Armenians wore dark blue and later red hats with violet slippers, and Jews wore yellow hats with blue slippers. Wow, they color coded their minorities. Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure I love that. No, I'm going to say all the bad stuff now. Yeah, non Muslim men couldn't marry Muslim women. Church steeples couldn't be higher than the minarets on mosques,
church bells were banned Christians, couldn't dress like Muslims. They couldn't build tall houses or buy slaves truly in oppression, that last one. Yeah, and most importantly in a way that'll come up as a major problem. They couldn't carry weapons. They also paid a millet tax, which was a tax that Muslims didn't have to pay. Yeah, but this tax
also exempted them from military service. Partly, we'll get into it. Overall, the Ottoman Empire, like basically, this was so much better than Europe for religious minorities, and it's just incredibly shameful that that's the case, right, Europe was in a kill the heretic phase where for really long time they were in this phase. If you disagreed about like the Third Council, the Nicean Commission on the Nature of the Trinity or whatever, they would fucking burn you alive. So I'd rather wear
a silly hat. Yeah, Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, I lame as Yes.
And they were allowed their own legal systems and autonomous structures as long as they stayed loyal to the Sultan. Leaders of these millets were often powerful actors within the Ottoman Empire, And of course we're talking about a huge swath of land over the course of like six hundred years, so things ebbed and flowed. Author Eric Bogosian who wrote the book Operation Nemesis, which is a very good book that does a lot better of a job than anything
else that I read about Operation Nemesis. It lays it out that words like Armenian and Turk really only started getting used regularly at the end of the nineteenth century. Quote. Aside from their respective religious faiths, the two peoples are in many ways congruent in their culture and style. Both people call roughly the same vast territory home, and for a thousand years they would intermarry and there's just a ton of intermingling and the thing about like they called
the same area home. I feel like it's important because we have this idea like ethnanationalism. It's like, oh, everyone gets an Ethno state and it's all distinct areas because everyone grew up in different areas and they just have to go back to their corner. I don't like ethno nationalism. You'll be shocked to learn. And it's just not true right that Armenia and Turkey are like separate. I mean, they're separate they're distinct, right, they're culturally distinct, but.
Yeah, they know distinct geographical entities with like this fictive ethnicity that. Yeah, people are tied by their blood to the soil.
Yeah. And like a little like shot Collars where if you go past the electric fence, the invisible fence, you know, like you.
Get a beep thin a zapp. Yeah, and don't give Joe Biden any ideas he's already doing it. No, that's true.
A big listener of this podcast Joe Biden, because he got really confused and he was like, I think I like stuff. I don't know what I like anymore.
People I like ice cream?
Yeah, I do like ice cream? So much in common with that man anyway. Okay, have you heard about this system where Christians had to give up a certain percentage of their kids to the Ottoman Empire?
I have, unfortunately, h once again, this is this is a thing that uh, like, world history is informed by like this idea. The teaching of world history in the Mode University is informed by the idea that, like the state is the final and best organization of mankind, and therefore we have to study these giant, massive states and empires and that's how we understand human history. Right I am, as an anarchist, don't believe that. But yes, unfortunately, this is a thing that was on Sidyby.
It's it's interesting. And when I say interesting, I mean that is like a literal sense in that is a a different way of doing things than that than what like Western Europe was doing. Right. Yeah, there was a system where starting in the fourteenth century, a certain percentage of boys born to Christian homes were requisitioned as slave labor.
Kids as young as seven and as old as twenty were taken over to Constantinople and raised in Muslim families and converted to Islam and then became slaves to the state. And slavery is always always bad, but American listeners will conflate all slavery with the unique cars of chattel slavery in the US, and it's important to understand that these are distinct without putting moral positions on it. Many of these formerly Christian boys became like the sultan's personal guards.
Many wound up with power and prestige. They would become government ministers, which were called slave administrators and provincial governors, and there were several Grand viziers, which is the position just below sultan, and sultan was often just a figurehead except for a few forceful, powerful personalities throughout history. So sometimes these literal civil servants, these these slave iministrators, were
the most powerful political actors in the empire. Some Muslim families would pretend their kids were Christian so that they could taken up by this, because it was a path to prestige. And now mostly this is like, well, if only everyone wasn't so poor that this seemed like the way to do things. But whatever, And while they're supposed to cut ties with their families, many of them use their positions of power to help out their families. This
system declined in the seventeenth century. It ended by sixteen forty eight because Ottoman soldiers wanted to recruit their own kids into the army instead of the sons of Christian families. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire is in a state of perpetual war because they're basic philosophy and this like whenever I read shit from like Western authors, even like Armenian American authors and stuff like that, whenever I read stuff that says things like this, I get a little bit like is
this Orientalysm, like what's going on? Right, because because you're Europe is obsessed with like this like fantasy version of the Ottoman Empire, right, yeah, and some of it is based on reality, like you know, the Harem system and all kinds of things, right, but best as I can tell, and so like I have a like second guess and a doubt right that I want to sow the seeds of doubt about the things that like almost anything written in English, you know, Yeah, the Ottoman Empire is in
a state of perpetual war because their basic philosophy divides the world into the House of Islam aka their empire and the House of War aka everywhere they haven't yet conquered. By the end of the Ottoman Empire, about a third of its population was European, a third Anatolian like what's now Turkey, and one third Arabian and or North African. And this was almost evenly split between Muslims and Christians,
with a sizable minority of Jews. The Christians and the Jews in the Ottoman Empire filled similar rules as Jews wound up leaning Christian Europe basically like non aristocratic trades that Muslims were more likely to avoid artisans, merchants, traders, bankers. This is not to say that most Armenians were middle class. Most of them were dirt poor peasants. We'll get into it, but a lot of this middle class did was filled
by Christians. Social class, which had religious and ethnic components, was the division talked about more often than religion, although religion determined your access to social class. The Askiri were a class of military administrators aka the professional Ottoman and they were exclusively Muslim and this included court officials and clerics as well as the military, whereas the rahea were basically the tax paying class, and these include Christians, Muslims,
and Jews. Then about a fifth of the Ottoman Empire, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth century were the cool the slaves, and some of those were high class, but not all of them, like we talked about, And that's the Ottoman Empire and how Armenians were living for centuries in this kind of relative peace. But you know, I wouldn't be mad at someone who was like, I don't like living this way and I don't want to live this way anymore.
Yeah, can I drop you my favorite random Ottoman Empire fact. Please do I feel like that's one day I'll do a whole episode on this. But so, Suliman Shah is like the kind of fictive father of the Ottoman Empire, right, and I guess it is one of the notable founders, not not necessarily the founder, but one of the notable
kind of founders the Automo Empire. His tomb is like supposed to be the site in Syria twenty fifteen, in the peak of the civil war in Syria, Turkey sent an entire fucking army column to scoop up the tomb and the forty dudes who are guarding it, forty Turkish guys just hanging out around this tomb and move it back too closer to the Turkish border. Whoa like just
a unilateral military operation to find a dead guy? Like, I know it would be a great film, and I think that it's like, especially when we talk about like modern Turkey denying the Armenian genocide, you can see a lot of like it's not I don't know whatever, I'm not enough of an expert on current affairs, but like, yeah, there's a lineage. Yeah, Ottomanism is not like absent from the discourse and identity in Turkey.
Now, so the nineteenth century hits and I feel like the subtext of the show besides, everyone dies of tuberculosis if you don't get murdered by the state is the nineteenth century changes everything in the world. Everything started changing and fast. In the mid nineteenth century, rebellion broke out in the Balkans against the Ottoman Empires. This is where the word Balkanization comes from. Where things break up, and you famously get the rise of nationalism, which buy and
large made everything worse. And this is when media started doing things like Turkey is mad or well, I guess they would have said the Ottomans are mad.
You know.
It's when we start like like Britain will raise his mighty I don't know how they do to Britain her mighty fists Britannia or John Bull depending okay, And so you start having this idea that like, nations are people, not just that people make up nations or whatever. Right, Yeah, most Armenians at this point are poor, rural peasants, although in larger towns and cities you have that modern class
of artisans and merchants. But most Armenians are living medieval lives in the nineteenth century, Like they are not hanging out under electrical light or glass windows. There's even this thing where like when they talk about like westernization, they're like, they're trying to come in here with their glass windows. And I'm like, it's one of those things that I like don't.
Like.
Every now and then I'm trying to like write like medieval era fantasy, and I'm like, I don't think they had windows, like we understand them, you know.
Yeah, it wouldn't be practical in the absence of a good glass.
Yeah. Like in colder places you had scraped hide I think, okay, in warmer places you were like, that's a hole in the wall.
Yeah, we just made a hole here.
Yeah. So they're living medieval lives. They're using hand looms, blacksmiths are fixing plows. They live in mud walled houses and all that shit. Even bigger towns might not have a single telephone. There's no paved roads, no railroads. A lot of the folks, the Christians in the countryside are essentially surfs. When the land was sold, the peasants came
with the sale. Meanwhile around them were the Kurdish tribes, another distinct ethnic group in the area, but one that was pastoralist and nomadic, and things were famously not great between these two groups. The Muslim Kurds were allowed to take more or less any liberties they wanted with the Christians, often like moving into people's houses for the winner without asking and things like that. This antagonism was set up on purpose by the Ottoman rulers to have the Armenians and.
The Kurds at each other's throats and such cases. Yeah, this is how empires work. Like, Yeah, I was just talking to some friends in Mema right now about how like the Hunter is very clearly trying to set up the Rahingia against other people in Rakine. Like it is a tale as old as time with empire, and it works. It worked for a very long time. I'm happy to say that all the Kurdish organizations that I pay attention to have all talked about this openly and admitted the
role of Thirds in the Armenian genocide. Yeah, unlike the country of Turkey. Yes, Turkish individuals, many Turkish individuals are very aware of it and are sorry.
Go ahead, what were we gonna say?
No? I met a really interesting guy not so long ago at the border who essentially was his grandparents I believe, had been Armenian but had given their son to a Kurdish family at the time of the Armenian genocidekind and did like look after my little baby, like they're genociding us.
And yeah, he had only found this out in his attempt to document his family as part of his asylum application, and was like trying to explain, like as someone who identified as Kurdish, Like that's a really fucking the weird situation to be in, right, you're finding that, like your identity is Kurdish and you know, but yeah, your grandfather, I guess your grandfather was as a little baby like given to a Kurdish family. But then like Kurdish people are also complicit in this.
Right, No, this is actually this comes up a lot in that a lot of Armenian survivors of the genocide survived by either I hadn't read about. I believe it. I believe this man's version. I believe this man's story, but most of what I've read about our survivors who have been like taken into Muslim families by force, and so you have and then also just like if you say you are now Turkish and change your religion, we
won't kill you. And so there's this whole thing in the nineteen eighties I think where a ton of Turkish folks were like, holy shit, my grandparents were Armenian, and like we only found out when they were like dying and on their deathbeds being like, you know, hey, actually I was a Christian, you know.
Damn yeah.
But anyway, so in the countryside in nineteenth century, the Kurds and the Armenians are being played against each other. The country wanted to modernize to have a chance militarily and economically against Europe. And one of the things that keeps coming up in nineteenth century history is you start being like, oh, everyone in a constitution because it's like good for liberty and stuff, and like slowly you start being like the power. I think a lot of people
did want it for good reasons. A lot of people were like, oh no, that's a that's the better system by which to create a modern military and be able to like continue to exert power on the world stage and not be conquered is to have a constitution.
Yeah, generally, liberally, like nineteenth century liberalism was heavily tied to like militarism, right.
Yeah, So in eighteen seventy six, this secret society called the Young Ottomans that had been around for a while, and this is different than the Young Turks. They managed to get a constitution in a parliament set up, and their name was inspired by a similar movement, the Young Italians, which at some point I'm going to cover the unification of Italy and because a lot of leftists were really excited about at the time and now it's really awkward.
But that same year, the new sultan, who had agreed to the constitution was like, nah, never mind, that's enough of that. I thought I wanted a constitution, I actually don't. Democracy sucks. I'm in charge. By eighteen seventy eight, the pretense of democracy was gone. Three years later, the Empire basically went bankrupt. European bankers stepped in and the Empire
became an economic colony of the West. European powers had rights over railroads, shipping, mining, water banks, mineral rights, just everything. But you know what else is an economic colony of Western corporate interests US.
Sadly, yes, it's us, good, good, great here's some ads.
Welcome back.
I think that was my most cynical a transition.
Yeah, that one.
From its brief flirtation with constitutional monarchy, the seeds of change had been sown because like, Okay, as much as I'm like, oh, like it's all like as cynicals I am about constitutional monarchy, whatever it's it's still better than autocracy. Like I get why people fought for this, you know. And new groups popped up to modernize the empire. Most at the beginning wanted to continue to have a religiously
pluralistic but still Islamic society. That's like they were like, look, our vibe kind of works for us, Like why would we fuck that up? Like, of course the Christians are allowed here as long as we get to like our minarets are taller.
You know.
One of these new groups was called the Young Turks, and they start off kind of good. Then they turn out to be more or less the precursors of the Nazis in terms of should we genocide religious minorities. We'll come back to them. The Sultan he had a problem. He's trying to do this autocracy thing right, and the problem is that ethnic minorities weren't being ruled well enough. And I think the first problem he tried to solve in this way was the quote unquote Kurdish problem.
When you're referring to a group of people and then using the word problem afterwards, bad sign.
This is part of why I'm going to call them the precursors of the Nazis. All of the like phrasing of like the following problem and the solution to that problem. Like it just I mean there's literally German officers taking notes ding.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, there's yeah, there's more than a rhetoric shed between these two.
Uh so, yeah, this Kurdish problem. Nomadic people are hard to rule. The best chance most dictators have is to leverage the militaristic society of nomadic people for their own aims. So Hamid the Sultan broke up the largest tribes of the Kurds and killed a bunch of their leaders, and then co opted a bunch of them into a paramilitary
force called the Hamadie, which he named after himself. And if yeah, and if this sounds familiar to what the Czar did or the Cossacks, because you've been found along a cool zone media book club and I was reading about that a while ago. It's because it's the same fucking thing, and this is okay, this is a rabbit
hole I want to ask you about. Yeah, the overlap between the Kurds and the Cossacks is really interesting because both are nomadic horse tribes that wind up being the shock troops of reaction and then wind up being the core of two of the most impressive, large scale anti authoritarian socialist societies the world's ever seen.
Yeah, it is an interesting parallel.
And during that one, Makno was a Cossack and he led the anarchist Ukrainian Project, while the Kurds have spearheaded the autonomous region of Northeast Syria that exists currently, and their pluralistic society is built on democratic and federalism.
Yeah, that's nice. And there are like, I know, there are like Havalds from Curtis Dan who are fighting in Syria now I'm sorry, in Syria in Ukraine, now okay with there, And there are also Cossack folks playing there, and there were like horizontally organized units that might comprise both of them. I don't know. I'm talking to one of them soon, so we'll find out.
And it's like interesting because like a lot of people, whenever you have like these, you know, a nomadic culture that becomes like shock troops of reaction, people are like, oh, it's because they're so fighty, but you're like, well, also they're like refusal to be ruled. Also has a cultural tendency towards anti authoritarian socialism.
Yeah, like the idea of like martial races is inherently tied to empire, right, Like, at some point everyone was fighty, and then yeah, they're totally the folks that they couldn't subdue became the ones who they painted as barbarians totally.
Yeah, And it's just so interesting the way that that sometimes those groups are still like the more privileged group within within a system, like on some level the Kurds. But then again you can see how much good it did them to be slightly more privileged, because then in the eighteen nineties the sultan was like, eh, let's just kill you all, you know.
Yeah, so it has continued.
Yeah, so these broken up Kurdish tribes get even more violent and banditry prone because their society has been disrupted, right, and they're largely taking it out on the rural Armenians. Then in eighteen ninety four eighteen ninety six, the Sultan was like, hey, would you just go crush the Armenians. They're too friendly with Russia. So hundreds of thousands of Armenians were slaughtered. They were burned alive, they were aflayed, they were raped, they were dismembered. It's a really bad time.
This is sometimes called the first Armenian genocide. And this started what's also to be uh has been called if if this was Wikipedia, people will be very angry because I'm saying has been called and saying I'm saying who called it that? And the answer is a bunch of books I read. They started a culture of massacre, and since the Christians weren't allowed to bear arms, there wasn't a time they could do about it, at least not legally.
They did do quite a lot about it through friend of the pod crime, Crime that we'll talk about on Wednesday.
That's my that's my Cliffhanger. I promise you crime. Yeah, right, very rare to have crime on this podcast. So exciting for us.
But I don't know, how are you feeling so far?
Well, it's a part of the world I've recently visited, so yeah, yeah, and then I've been watching the football recently and seeing a lot of a lot of a lot of Gray Wolf salutes, which is really a stadium full of people doing a fascist salute. Is not a thing that I'd expected to see in Germany again, but here we are. Wait, were the Gray Wolves in Germany doing it? Yeah? The Grey Wolves is the largest right wing group in Germany, which is impressive given that Germany is Germany.
Yeah, yeah, right, what's the German So the Gray Wolves, which I only vaguely know about, but anyone who's listening, it's a Turkish far right nationalist group, right, yeah, ultranationalists pan Turkish.
They conceive of Turkey that being a mono ethnic Sunni Islamic state that expands across much of the old Ottoman Empire to unite Turkic people, right, Okay, they are Yeah, the street fighters at MHP they people can listen to a podcast what it could Happen here where my friend Sherien and I talk about the Mirage massacre and the Gray Wolves and why Turkish bobs are beating Syrian refugees this week in Turkey. It's great, It's very affirming stuff.
But yeah, the Gray Wolves are the right wing ultranationalists, street fighting kind of movement of Turkish ulter nationalism. Yeah.
And if you're a metal head and you want to be mad, their salute is distinct from throwing the horns, but hard to tell. Yeah, it's distinct from throwing the horns.
It's close. Or if you're a shadow puppetella, then really if you've been previously doing the little dog, yeah, problematic now.
Which is really low on the list of reasons why we need to destroy them.
Yeah, just imagining like a just a street fighting branch at a shadow puppet movement, fucking them up.
I mean I think about like like twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, I would like go to these anti Trump rallies in like a small southern town, and the localhema groups, the historical European martial arts books who are just like poor rural biker nerds who are amazing and lovely people would show up with their like heathens against hate signs and like they're like you know, medieval kit right, Yeah, And part of it is just like get those runs out
of your fucking mouth. Yeah yeah, yeah, like fuck you, yeah, again like I can't see that and not have a certain reaction.
But at the same time, yeah, those people were they were first on the ruin shit.
Yeah yeah, And so I appreciate the work that people have put into and not like because there's one version of the putting in the work where you're like, hey, no one should use runes anymore because Nazis have them, and another that's like, we will fucking take those back from the Nazis by before all the Nazis and having the fact that we street fight Nazis while using these change what people's perception is.
Yeah, I love that for them. Yeah, be a Viking against fascism.
Yeah. So, but don't throw the horns in the wolf way.
That's my keep those two middle fingers tight tight into the palm you did, or do it like the really awkward way where you kind of have the thumb out even though you're like not supposed to.
But it doesn't only matter, you know, Yeah, the.
Ship is sailed now, but at least people know what you're doing, I guess.
Anyway, when we come back on Wednesday, we will talk about how the Armenians formed massive revolutionary socialist organizations committed to doing terrorism against the people who were murdering them, which is classic cool people coose Yeah, stand by of the show. Well, yeah, I mean thing you could plug. I guess you'd just plugged her.
Yeah. I do a podcast, but it could happen here. It's also on cool Zone Media. You can listen to it by typing it could happen here podcast into your machine as search as the Internet and it will come up and you will find a podcast every day. And I am writing a book for ak Press about anarchist at War that involves some of the people we've spoken about today, and you can read it eventually when I finish it.
Does that have a working title?
So I wanted to do We renounce everything but victory, which is the last words that Buenaventors Luti spoke well, which I think is cool but still unsure. I always feel like any any really cool speech which is attributed to de Ruti, you have to work really hard to ascertain if he actually said that or anything like it, or some Dutch dude made up.
I know, because his best quote wasn't actually probably said by him.
Yeah, but I don't care.
He would have said it.
Fuck it, yeah, fuck it, yeah, he he hated a fascist, and yeah, there's a new there's a new quote growing in her hearts.
It's growing in anyway. I have a book coming out in September. You can pre order it. I'm the Kickstarter is done, but I'm still signing book plates for all of the pre orders that go through Firestorm Books. The book is called The Sapling Cage That September twenty fourth. It's about a young trans witch who goes off and joins the Witches, which implies that she didn't start as a witch, which is true. She didn't even start off knowing that she was a girl.
I'm really enjoying it. Oh yeah, cool, that makes it surfe endos my. It's my current plane book where I'm like, all right, I need to be distracted from the fact that I'm in this horrible metal death trap.
Let's escape to another world.
That's where Margaret's books are always stocked in tiny submarines that billionaires go on.
Now, oh yeah, they give that to them instead of like, I don't know, something that could help them survive, like maybe not getting in one of those.
Yeah, a brain, They're going to get down to the bottom and be like, wait a second, I've been living my life all wrong. This capitalism thing is terrible for people. But by then it's too late they hear the rivets popping. I should mention that Margaret I am doing. I did a translation for Margaret Strange in a Tangled Wilderness zine as well, which that'll be out at some point to our Patreon backers and on our website Tangled Wilderness dot org.
I'm part of a collectively run publisher called Strangers in a Tangledilderness and we are publishing some of James translations about the Spanish of war and how people romanticize it too much, including us. Yes, and we'll see you on Wednesday.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.