158. The Armenian Genocide - Pt. 3!

Okay. Welcome to the episode. Hi. Oh boy. Uh David's hosting today. Oh yeah. And You're supposed to introduce yourself, David, remember? You just did. Okay. Well, David, this is where you go. I'm your host, David. I uh I don't I I uh I have a horizontalist rhizomatic idea of power. David's an anarchist I I'm anti edible. There are Thousands of plateaus.

These were I was asking you the other day to help me with Deleuze and Guitari jokes because I had gone to the deluzonal well already, which is the obvious obvious one. Right, right, right. Uh-huh. Well, this is your host, David. And I'm your co-host Madeline. For anybody new. Uh if somebody just recommended the podcast to a friend and it's their first time listening. I disclaim the role of host. Okay. I am the I'm the talker. And the researcher. Yes. The host.

Uh sure. Okay. We're in part three of and we're talking about the Armenian genocide. And first of all, I wanted to talk because I was like talking I was talking to the the guy. I spent a lot of time talking to the guy Right. That's just a corner store. Yes. Yes. I've never heard that as the saying for it. This is what everyone called the food king or whatever it was in Fresno, the one on what Moroa? Yeah, I lived right next to that. I never heard anybody call it that. This is what I call it.

But I spent a lot of time talking to the guy at the little corner store by my house. I don't know why. But he always wants my opinion he will ask my opinion about Iran last Oh, that is weird. And I was like What'd you say? Well uh in spite of what insane right wingers may say. Uh no one is going to be thanking the United S States for liberating them into a grave.

Rights. Like I think which I think is the sane thing. That's a very um like PC mixed company response. I think that's good. Well it's just like right, like you could come up with like a fever dream fantasy you know, from like George Tenant's head, right? Like the old director of the CIA of like what like an evil dictatorship is. Right. Uh And dropping a bunch of bombs on civilians and like school children is never going to make it. Like that's not gonna make

life better for anyone'cause everyone's dead. Um, yes, but have you considered their magical special ghosts will be so free? They might They'll be so free. They'll be in so many little ghost blue jeans listening to ghost rock and roll. They might get a soccer field. Yeah, right. Um All right. So Madeline, can you give us spe oh, so the importance of the Armenian genocide, right? And I think it the Armenian genocide or like why it like

If you do not if you did not grow up on the west coast of the United States, uh where we have a large Armenian diaspora. Yeah. Uh uh there is a question like, why should we talk about this thing that happened about, you know, a little over a century ago? Well, the first thing I'm gonna say is that unlike other diaspora It's diaspora for plural, right? Sure sure. Diaspora's word. It feels like it should be like diaspora with an E. Okay, whatever.

Unlike other diaspora, slash diasporas, slash diaspora, choose your adventure, I think the Armenian diaspora is is pretty good. I mean, I think they're pretty politically literate about their own history. Yeah, I mean there it was uh in September, generally speaking, in my neighborhood at least, i it's like uh it's an there are parades.

Right. These are not the kind of people who are gonna be like, you know what we should do? Bomb bomb Armenia. I mean they're uh so no. No, they're not they're they're not gonna be like the uh some of the other diaspora acting up on the internet like

Yeah, I mean there is like there is like a sort of continued resentment over stuff you talked about on the Patreon. Uh the Nagorni Karabash stuff. Right. Which is like uh like up until what this year, uh, had been a majority Armenian part of Azerbaijan that was connected by a bizarre ten mile little stretch of the and a very like Uh four hundred oh five connecting to Long Beachway.

Yes, exactly. But I do also think that because of their uh because of this, a lot of people in the Armenian diaspora tend to be very skeptical of the American government. Yeah. They dislike Turkey. To put it mildly. No, there is uh But you know what I mean like sometimes you meet people in the diaspora and it's like uh Cubans in Florida who are like, Yeah, fuck Cuba, kill'em all And you're like, What the fuck is happening? And it's like, Well, you left Cuba under very specific circumstances.

Um, there's a reason why you don't fuck with the rest of Cuba, right? But the Armenian uh diaspora is not like that. Like the system of it down, Armenian. Sure. Okay. I love that this is uh this context you are helping our I'm just saying. As a diaspora, it's up there in terms of of of good diasporas, politically literate and and hating the right people, I think.

I guess yeah, okay. Sure. This is and this is not that into Israel, not that into the United States, not that into Turkey, obviously. Madeline is painting with a brush the size of a barn door. I think it's a pretty good di if you were in the Armenian diaspora, I think you're doing great out there. You're okay. Good work. Because some of the diaspora, they're acting crazy.

They're all over the place like, Oh, the United States bomb my country next and and the the Armenian diaspora would never do that, I don't think. I was called Oh, what were you? The three The reason to talk about the Armenian genocide specifically is that it has extraordinarily large implications for the definition of genocide and the definition of international law, such as it is, and the ways in which those laws are subject to many contradictions.

Uh, because it like the issue of is it a genocide has never been fully resolved in terms of like I mean it's been resolved among sane people. Right. Uh, but in terms of international law, in terms of international politics, etc.

Right. Because it has to have like the specific motivation of like uh Well, I mean, okay, so Essentially and we'll talk we'll get into this today, but uh essentially in the aftermath of of World War One and the formation of Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire. An ideology that was come up with by this guy, Mustafa Kemal, Ataturk called Kemalism, who's the first.

This guy was the first president of Turkey, that uh essentially adopted many of these sort of like Turkification policies. in terms of the creation of a national state, which means that you have to fundamentally deny the Armenian genocide as like it like becomes categorically impossible to talk about the Armenian.

Yeah. And some bears fuck ass letters on the anniversary. Oh yeah. Right. Which we talked about in the first episode. Yeah. Um, and we'll and that's kind of we're gonna wrap it up there too, but As a girl. Consequence of which and like Turkey and its relationship to the United States and its relationship to Israel at like in terms of being an absolutely necessary conduit for uh natural gas and oil pipelines from Azerbaijan into Europe, uh has

Like, right, there has been like a a lot of international pressure, hence no one up until Biden acknowledging that an Armenian genocide had happened to like be like bad things happened. We don't We we're not gonna say what they are and we're not gonna name it. So it's and it's what they try to do with Palestine too. Same treatment. Right. But yeah, w we all know. This was a joke.

Yeah. The the the the Armenian people. Yeah. It means there's so fucking much. Yes. So Turkey will say something on the order of three hundred thousand Armenians died. Um, most estimates put it at about one. Hi. Fucked. It's so fucked. Okay, so that's reason one. Reason two is that the sort of like uh you know, there are a lot of competing notions of nationalism happening in the twentieth century.

Or whatever, but the kind of like Wilsonian nationalism that becomes the predominant Western notion as opposed to a, for example, Lenin type nationalism. the underlying contradictions of Wilsonian nationalism as like a policy for understanding what states should look like. becomes very evident in the ways in which the Ottoman Empire and the emerging Turkish state deal with ethnic minorities, in not just including Armenians, but also including Kurds, Arabs, uh uh Assyrians Greece.

uh so on and so forth within their borders. Okay. Right. So uh it is a good example of many contradictions in international law and the sort of like ideological concepts of national Does that does that sound good? Yeah. So that is my main thesis for why you should give a shit about this. Um I think you should give a shit about the Armenian genocide because genocide bad, obviously, and you should care. The also the Armenian people are out here

Always, always in the United States, diaspora always being like listen to us, care about this. Why the fuck is nobody talking about this? And they are constant and they're persistent and they are consistent. And it's like how do you look at these people and not be inspired to want to listen to what happened?

Yeah, there has been and I don't go into this in this'cause the this particular point in this, but there has been a kind of surreptitious thing among uh uh Israel and Jerusalem to want to displace many of the Armenian Christian population from Populations from Jerusalem because they're like, this is fucking real estate, dude. This is like we've got. we want that land too. So great. Uh so can you ooh catch us up? Okay. So

We ended last last time on World War One breaks out. World War One breaks out. And the Ottoman Empire's all in They but like they're like hesitant. They're kind of fucked. Like they're not in a they are put it this way, they are not Austra Hungary. Yeah. They're they're not doing so great. They're hanging on by a threat.

They if I were the the Ottoman state uh in like the CUP, can you remind us what C UP is? I actually don't remember that. I remember when you said that, I was like, what the fuck is that? That was the young Turk like the right wing of the Young Turk movement, the Congress for Union and So go on. Okay, yeah. So they're hanging on by a thread. They've got all sorts of internal conflict. They got people battling uh internally for control of what and by whomst and then they end up in this fuck out.

Yeah. World War One. Everybody's fighting. And it's like, oh my God, I'm an empire, do not go in there, but they get all involved. And what is the two weekends? Uh yeah. Weakens them further. And internal conflict exacerbated by war, all of a sudden who are they looking to blame in their border?

The uh ethnic minorities. Ethnic minorities. They're like you know who's actually our real problem? Mm-hmm. The Armenians. So they're using I remember there's something to do with like Greek people too and they ended up using the war as a pretext to like Forcefully expel people from certain regions. Greek people as well. Greek people and Assyrians, which is like another like extraordinarily old, like Christian.

And they use the war as a pretext to basically ethnically cleanse different areas within their borders. Yeah. And so can you remind us of the Battle of Sarakamas? And w I'm not like a battle like I'm not like a war guy. I don't do history channels like the guns are here type shit. I just can't like it makes me s and Yeah, I feel like I don't fully remember but the the battle was just like um

I know a lot of people d uh died. It was like hundred thousand people or something. A lot of people died and it was it even really considered a battle'cause some of them were like children getting masked? No, this is something you're th you're thinking of the Balkan. Oh yes. Uh but so essentially Uh what happened is in so the CUP, the Congress of Union and Progress, uh, uh which had become like increasingly right wing and increasingly sort of the ethnonationalist in its politics, takes over

The parliament and then dissolves it and starts running the Ottoman Empire. Slight we're just gonna say, I'm gonna switch back and forth between the Ottoman Empire and Turkey because Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But uh uh and that is led by

three people, two of whom we'll talk a lot about and one we won't because he was the minister of finance. And so that is uh that one is um Jamal Pasha. He was the Minister of Finance. And so he doesn't really get like he's not the most instrumental in the policies uh of genocide as as much as the Minister of Interior Tala Uh and the minister of war in

So remember Enver is the guy who there's the article why no one is named Enver in Turkey. Right. Which is like he he's like we're gonna fight this whole like this hella cool battle in you know, in the Balkans against Russia at Sarakamas and he gets everyone killed. Right. That's right. And then he comes back and he doesn't even want to tell everybody how bad he messed up. They're like how to go with the battle. And he's like, you know.

And and they're like, what the fuck? And then it's like, Oh, you've got everybody killed. Yeah. And then he's like, Well, no, it was actually uh Armenian instigators within our borders. who uh got R to blame for this. So that kind of kicks off Like the the real beginning of the Right. Yeah, and I mean there had been massacres in uh nineteen oh five of like twenty thousand people at uh Adonna. There had of course been the massacres that occurred mostly in eastern Anatolia.

uh in nineteen or n eighteen ninety five and eighteen ninety six they killed I wanna say uh a hundred thousand people. Um go back if you want the actual number because I can't remember it. I'm not going to scan through my notes. Uhhuh. Uh So the first thing that happens after it is discovered that at the Battle of Sarkomas, like the Russian slash Turk or Ottoman Armenians had betrayed the Ottoman Empire.

Scare quotes there. Uh uh is that Armenians within the military are uh disarmed and put into labor. Right. Uh so in February of nineteen fifteen, following the disarmament of Armenians, Tulat Pascha, so that's the Minister of the Interior, tells the German ambassador Hans uh Freyr von Waggenheim, uh he is going to resolve the Armenian question by eliminating Armenians.

In a conversation at the German embassy, Talat says, quote, Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention. And this is the other thing, remember is that The British and the Russians had

tried to send representatives to institute reforms in the Ottoman Empire. Because they didn't want the em Ottoman Empire to fall because the Ottoman Empire ow owed them a lot of money. Yeah. Yes, I do remember that. And those reforms included like protecting the rights of army Um... Uh uh so what on earth do we want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians. And this is Talat who said this. Talat, yes. So Talat is just like

But hey, don't worry about it, man. We'll kill them all. Yeah. God. Um, it should be mentioned also, Wagenheim uh was deeply, deeply opposed to this policy and was was like, this is craziness. He did

after the war join uh like uh an early version of the Nazi party. So he was inspired actually. Yeah, I mean, you know what, I was wrong. Mass murder of ethnic minorities is awesome and then he became a a proto Yeah, and so Talaw's really worried that it uh the plan to deport and massacre Armenians would

reach an a like a an international audience. Who didn't approve. Who didn't approve and would like fuck with his shit. And so he was just like, We're gonna do it during the war so Like nobody People are so fucking- So in a telegram from November eighteenth, he writes to the governor in Aleppo, and this is a longer quote From the intervention of the embassy in Constant uh in Constantinople upon the instructions of the American government in certain localities

Americans have secured information through secret means. Basically, there are Americans like taking picture of our like disarmament and like essentially concentration camps of Armenians. Americans. Yeah. So remember because there were all sorts of American missionaries, uh, and Red Cross people who were like witnessing the situation and going Because Armenians were mostly Christian too. Armenia I mean like right the oldest uh Christian church. Christian church. Armenia. Yeah. So the Christian um

like what, missionaries or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And like there was it was like Christian missionaries who it was like either like let's help our fellow Christians or whatever or like let's make them Protestant. Right. But th they were like the Christians are being slaughtered. Yeah. Which is interesting'cause you would think that the West would be more

concerned because our whole thing, like they were using this in Africa right now. The Christians are being slaughtered, therefore we must bomb Africa, which is fucking wild. Um but you know it's one of those situations where that just shows you how politically inconsistent the United States

Well I mean everyone was like a lot of people were concerned and like But like there wasn't a lot of political will behind doing anything about it, besides like sending a representative over to be like, let's check in on the map. Got it. But there were a lot of like American missionaries going over to our

to be like, let's find out what's going on there. Got it. Uh uh to continue the quote, although in reply to their enquiries it has been stated that the deportation of the Armenian refugees is being conducted in safety and comfort that has not been sufficiently convincing, take care that the expulsion from cities, towns, and central localities not create events that might attract attention.

From the point of view of the present policy, it is necessary for foreigners in such localities to be convinced that the transfer of refugees is solely for the purpose of relocation. For that reason, it is necessary to For the time being, that the deportees be afforded gentle treatment, and the known methods be applied only in the most suitable cases, we urgently advise you to arrest the informants and to hand them over to the military authorities for trial.

At the same time, Dr. Nazim, so that uh Nazim is the old uh telegraph operator who'd become one of the most like nationalist guys. He gives a speech at a closed session of the Central Committee of the C U P in which he said, quote, If we remain satisfied satisfied with the sort of local massacre which took place in Adana and elsewhere in nineteen oh nine, I got the date wrong. I thought it was nineteen Said nineteen oh five earlier.

If this purge is not general and final, it will inevitably lead to problems. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety so that there is no further Armenian on this earth. And that the very concept of Armenia is extinguished. Okay, I'm sorry. You hear like you hear that and then you look at this is what I mean. you look at the Armenian people still existing. Yeah. And like, how are you not like fuck yes? Like defeated something so fucking evil.

It is uh th it I will say, you know, living in living in Fresno Living Wood like It is actually write easy to have like uh good politics on like ethnic minorities. Yeah. That's why I was so surprised to leave Fresno and be like, I'm sorry, what do you mean these people are saying the United States government is awesome and should go

bottom down country. This is not something we're exposed to where we grew and look at the people in India. Huge Chicano uh population in Fresno. Huge mom population. Huge mom population, huge Armenian population. So you're right. It's like this is part of where we grew up. It's like of course you you have pride in where you came from and you understand how the United States or Western backed forces or in this case, you know, later on it would be w the United States backing Turkey.

um, have done horrible things to your country. You get this anti imperialist education very, very early on and it is jarring to leave that environment and see people In places like Miami, you know. Cheering on imperialism. It's very, very jarring to witness. And then you hear Democrats tell you you have to listen to them like they are correct. I mean, I think that like for the the sort of mobilization of expat stuff is the of the fraught. But I think like it is

It is really easy to not buy lines about like the international liberal order as like a rules based uh order. I don't know if you saw uh AOC gave a speech at some fucking international conference that was like, we want the international rules based order back. And there's like a little asterisk in the speech where she's like, not that it ever really existed, but we would love it if it did and it should. And it's like

Yeah, I mean, it is rife for abuse. Like it's not like it's n not ever going to be an ideological consistent thing. And it's very that rings different if you are constantly hearing from people where it's like under the international rules-based order, my people were genocided. Right. Exactly. Exactly. You're like th who has this surplus?

Yeah, uh so no more Armenians on earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished. We are now at war. We shall never have a more suitable opportunity than this. We need to pay no attention to protests from the press or fear of the intervention of the powers. And even if we were to pay attention, it will make no difference because it will be an accomplished fact for all time. This time the action will produce uh total annihilation, and it is essential that no single Armenian survive.

Perhaps there are those among you who feel that it is bestial to go so far. Oh you think? You may ask, for instance, what harm can children, the elderly or the sick do to us that we feel compelled to work there for their elimination? Or you may feel that only those guilty should be punished. I beg you, gentlemen, do not be weak, control your feelings of pity, otherwise those very feelings will bring about our own demise.

A month after this, Talat wrote a second telegram to the governor in Aleppo, urging him to quote, gather and feed only those orphans who do not remember the disaster their parents have suffered, send away the rest with the caravan. Wow. So a nineteen nineteen article well this is skipping forward in time, but like it it News travels slower before TikTok.

Uh, so there's a nineteen nineteen article in a Russian language newspaper called Nasha Evia, which gives a detailed analysis of the orders circulating among the young Turk leaders in the spring of uh nineteen fifteen. The circular the so this is just like they're reprinting something that was given to all the governors uh throughout oh Turkey.

On the basis of Article three and four on societies close, all Armenian societies arrest their administrative personnel, as also those known for their anti-government inclinations send them to the villiettes of Baghdad and Mosul and So that's one. Uh but so that's only those people who are guilty of being an Armenian police. They're only massacring strip the Armenians of all arms in their possession. So that's your guns guy.

Uh m Madeline is uh Second Amendment uh essentialist. Uh uh uh three, by unofficial means incline the Muslim's correspondence. In localities like Van, Erzurum, and Adana incite Muslims into organizing anti-archists. Okay. Stoke ethnic tensions. And this is also right, like there is this like real concern at the time among the CUP to sort of like Turkify non ethnically Turkic people. uh based off of religious identification, if that makes any sense. So but essentially being like,

your Kurds, your Arabs, you know, your Bosnians or I don't know, whatever. Yeah. Um, like congratulations, you're now Turkic. Right. Um Uh in the Villiets like Erzurum van uh Mamared Ur Asis and Beatlis leave the task to the people, old troops and other organized forces are to main outward order. Localities like Adana, Sivaz, Bursa, Nicomedia, and Izmir support the Muslim population. And this is going to be here. how the genocide plays out, which is it's like neighbor on neighbor by

It's supported by soldiers and the special organization. They're doing a not our guide. I am more surprised that a lot of American conservatives don't use this as like a weird racist or Islamophobic talking point about like the horrors that Christians have endured at the very least. But you see, like even when they do this in other countries like Africa and they employ racism and bigotry and all this stuff. to talk about Christians being oppressed.

Which is sometimes not even real. In this case it is real, but they're not being oppressed because they're Christians, obviously. Yeah. That's a coincidence. But it's like they could if they were smart racists be using this to stoke racial fears uh or something. I mean the problem is the r like the role Turkey plays both in NATO and with like that's what I was gonna say. But you see that the ultimate hypocrisy

in this and why people don't care about it is because it's not finan there's no financial incentive to care about this. There's financial incentive to back Turkey. Yeah. So number five is men under fifty and school teachers are to be massacred first. Girls and children are to be converted to Uh six is dismissed from the state service all Armenians on charges of SVS.

Uh uh seven, Armenians in the army service are to be exterminated by the military authorities. Eight, carry out the Armenian massacres simultaneously everywhere to exclude chances of self defense. You know what? Word getting around. Which word does get around. Uh Uh uh and nine is the present order is to maintain it is to remain strictly secret. It is urgent that only a few know about its existence. I mean they really were like, here's the manual, here's the playbook for genocide. Yeah.

So as the orders to disarm and uh Armenians within the military and the placement of Armenian men in labor battalions goes underway and march, Armenians living in Zaytun, against the advice of the Dasht Party, begin to resist and Because You're just gonna send us to a labor battalion and then we're gonna be killed. We kinda know what's gonna happen.

After the first deportations in March in the Silesian town of Dortial, deserters flee into the countryside and on march twenty sixth Ottoman soldiers nonetheless begin burning the local monastery to the ground. Uh in May of that year, Tala tells the German language newspaper the distinctions between uh innocent and guilty Armenians are specious, saying, quote, We have been blamed for not making a distinction between the guilty and the innocent Armenians.

To do so is wasn't possible because of the nature of things, one who is still innocent today could be guilty tomorrow. The concern for the safety of Turkey simply had to silence all other concerns. Our actions were determined by national and historic necessity. Uh Uh at the same time, um, Shakir organizes the Shetz uh killing units within the special organization. And remember, the special organization was that sort of paramilitary group.

uh uh that was made up of a bunch of like released felons, like murderers from jail and rights, yes. Uh and CUP officials began telling officials to deport Armenia. Uh and just to explain Shakir,'cause I'm not gonna I don't think I mentioned him before. Uh uh he'd been a doctor who'd been exiled during Abdul Hamid's r reign, and he'd returned to Turkey during the second constitutional era after the Young Turk Revolution.

At that point, he became a journalist and propagandist of the right wing of the Young Turk movement. And when war broke out, he became head of the paramilitary special organizations. He had been among the CUP party members who had tried to convince Armenians and the eastern provinces to form to do like espionage against Russia.

Uh on march twentieth, the New York Times reports that quote appalling accounts of conditions in Armenia have reached the officials in London of the Armenian Red Cross fund and have been given out by them. The latest recital is a for uh is from an Armenian doctor named uh Dirjian who says that the whole plane of Lashgird is virtually covered with the bodies of men, women and children.

When the Russian forces retreated from the district, the Kurds fell upon the helpless people and shut them in mosques. The men were killed and the women were carried away to the mountains. The organizers of the Red Cross Fund say that there are nearly a hundred and twenty thousand destitute Armenians now in the Caucasus. What had in fact happened is that the remains of Inver's Third Army after the retreat from the Battle of Saracamas.

Uh uh with the aid of the Kirks and with the aid of Shakir's secret organization, Sheds descended upon the plains of Al Alashgard, which had been home to around forty thousand Armenians, the section of northeast Persia occupied by the Ottomans. And at the time

And which saw similar massacres at the hands of irregulars from the secret organizations by led by Khalil Bey. What's interesting is like the the whole world just uses the Kurds as their hired guns. Well, here's the fucking thing, right? Like

I don't know how to say like pity the Kurds, kind of. Right. Yes. I mean what's interesting with Iran, because we're talking about this now, is that Iranian Kurds are like, some of them will join. Some of them are like, I don't know, you kind of fucked this over with that old Turkey thing, the United States, whatever. Some of them are like, Yeah, we'll help the United States.

This war. Kurds in Iraq are like absolutely fucking not endeavor again, United States. Fuck off. Like you do a horrible thing. So yeah, totally. It is a very um they're in a precarious political position. And I feel like that's the thing, it's like the same thing with the the Hmong people in Laos who were tricked into helping the CIA against the Vietnamese communists. Yeah.

a lot of people when when you're a quote unquote hired gun by the West or by any sort of power structure in this case the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, like

it's not because people respect you and want your autonomy and your strength and for you to survive. It's like they it's a very dehumanizing kind of it's like yeah yeah they'll do whatever. Yeah, I mean and like in the you know, every sort of commentator on the Armenian genocide and on conditions and Turkey at the mo like today and like the place that Kurds have within Turkish society today is like

The real fucking uh shame of it is that like the policy of Turkification that meant the genocide of Armenians would eventually come for the Kurds. Yes. Right. Like, um So in April fifteenth, news reaches Van and Armenians begin organizing a resistance. They flee into the hills. The resistance lasts five weeks and which it's basically a siege by the Turkish army. Their hope is the Russian forces advancing into Anatolia rescue them.

While the people of Van were under siege, the general of the Turkish irregulars, Sevdet, sends his forces into the surrounding villages to massacre the Armenians there. By May he proposes a compromise with the besieged city, in which they agree to emigrate to Persia. When talks collapse, Sevdet resorted to sending Armenian women and children into the city in the hopes of increasing the chances of start.

Oh okay, so just like pump more people in there so you run out of resources. And it's women and children, so you're gonna feel bad once. Wow psychotic messages. Yeah. By May fourteenth Ottoman artillery had arrived and Sevdet began shelling in the city. This was uh parting salvo because at the same time Ottoman troops are being forced to retreat. by the advancing Russian and we're still talking Tsarist Russian. Yes. But you gotta imagine like

If you are the Army needs, you don't give a shit who the political like what the political power should you're just like oh my god, thank God. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Uh so the Russian commanders enter Van and they eventually estimate that they found around fifty five thousand corpses. Uh this accounted for about half of the population. Uh the Russian commander appointed uh Aram, Manukian governor of the province, and the government would last two months.

In revenge for the massacres, Armenians and Vans van immediately began seeking out and killing Turks. I will say, regardless of whether or not Uh so Aram's government i in the brief time that it lasted was largely made up of Doshnoks and many of them Russian Armenians. And remember Dashnuk had been like the more moderate socialist nationalist party. Uh the government excluded Muslims from its administration, but did include Assyrians and Yazidis.

In the meantime, Armenian residents of Van began rebuilding. Instead of building within the walls of the city, they built nearby, and this is still the case, there's no like the city of Van is next to the ruins of old Van. Uh about a third of the Armenians who fled towards Russian lines were massacred on their way. From Van. Wow. Uh on April twenty third, the Armenian National Assembly met to convince the CUP to rethink the policy of deportation and murder. And I've Oh my God. Like this is

Uh right. One does sympathize at this point with like the hardline socialist militant like Hunchucks, who are like Dude would stop trying to stop trying to They're not going to talk to you. Stop texting the C UP. Right. This is your crazy ex who's trying to kill you. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Uh so at the same time the patriarch Urk met with Talot and was told by Talat that the Armenians had brought their fate upon themselves by inviting Russians to advise.

Form. Oh uh uh Turkish officials begin a series of raids, starting with a raid on the Dashnok newspaper office in Constantinople, Istanbul. Uh the arrests expand to include many of the Armenian intellectual and religious leaders, including clergy, members of par and members of parliament, in response to La issues the following memorandum to the High Command of the Ottoman Empire. Quote It has become clear once again with the latest revolts which have occurred in Zaitoon and Bitlis at

Sivan and Van that the Armenian committees, which for a long time have been trying to establish an autonomous administration within their revolutionary political structure in the Ottoman territories. So he's basically saying, like, hey, you know those people in these places who we tried to massacre and then like fought back. This is evidence of the perfidy of Armenians and justification for their murder.

Uh on April twentieth, the governor of Bitlist, Mustafa Abdul Halik, anticipating a repeat of the resistance in Van, ordered the arrest of quote, the cream of the youth of Armenian Bitlist. They were marched through the streets and hanged outside the cities. Uh, their bodies were left there for two weeks. Three days later Sevda arrived with his settes. I don't speak Turkish, so I don't know how to say that. So Okay. Uh and began the systematic torture and murder of Armenians there.

This is from Gregor Suni. Uh quote, in some places Armenians were herded into barns and burned. Elsewhere women were used as prostitutes to serve the Ottoman soldiers until they contracted venereal disease and were poisoned. Children who managed to hide were hunted down and drowned or thrown into pits.

By the end of the month, all but a dozen Armenians had been eliminated from Bitlis. Wow. Estimate its place the number of victims at fifteen thousand. In nearby Moose, uh one hundred and forty one thousand Armenians spread across two hundred and thirty-four towns.

Uh this area is systematically cleansed of the entire population. Mostly there they are said Uh so uh uh New York Times reported the Times says the young P Turks have adopted the policy of Abdul Hamid, namely the ar annihilation of the Armenians. On May 27th, 1915, the COP passes the temporary law of deportation calling for the deportation of all Armenian. Between June and August, the deportation, mass murder, torture, and Islamisation of children reaches its peak.

Obviously, the pretext for the mass murder of Armenians was national security. However, Talat was concerned to show that the actions taken against the Armenians were not extended to other Christians. Got it. Uh uh in one particular case that of Mechmed Rasid of Dr or Bakyar Uh reports began to filter back to Talat and the other Pashas that Rasid was also targeting Assyrians and Yazidi.

The German consul and Mosul reported that Racid was quote causing havoc like an eager bloodhound among the Christians in his Yeah. Rashid had been responsible for the murder of several hundred Christians, mostly Armenians, but also Assyrians. Uh and the Assyrians go off like they were like we're doing one genocide at a time. Right. Uh so oh when Tulat got news of Rashid's successes, he had him reassigned and ordered him to return the stolen goods of the Assyrian and Greek Christians.

After the war he fled arrest and lived in hiding. When he was discovered he committed suicide. He also wrote a memoir claiming that he'd only done his patriotic students. Yeah. So that's for a regime. You're like patriotically to save ourselves, we must murder this ethnic minority. Yeah. People are like, I'm being a patriot. I will murder the ethnicity.

So in May almost all of the Armenians in eastern A Anatolia were rounded up. Usually the men were shot outside of the towns and the women marched towards Aleppo in the southeast. In one instance, Anadana, which had already seen a massacre of twenty thousand people. six years earlier. Uh the local governor relented to the Armenian and Catholicos in order to stop the massacres. He was promptly replaced by Talat's second in command, Ali Muni, who carried out the deportations and massacres.

Wow. Dispossessed Armenians were marched through the villet of Madeline, you gotta help me with this one. This is Mem Ritual Memory twelve.

Okay, so Muratulis? There we go. Mamura tulisis. Uh which the American consul there labeled as the slaughterhouse province. God. Uh uh You know what's bad when the Americans This is well and it is also right, like it's so it's the American vice consul, and it this is I will say Nineteen fifteen America is not which isn't this is not to justify America in nineteen fifteen or to be like, wow, they're so good, but it is not post-1948.

Yeah, but post uh you know the genocide of indigenous people, uh the invasion of Cuba, uh the occupation of the Philippines. No, I'm not suggesting as we speak. Uh uh back in a guy who's But this is the period of first of first of all this is a console official. Okay. Right. So he's doesn't necessarily represent like the top line American view. Right. But I don't th I think that I would say that this is Three

America understanding itself as like the ascendant power. Right. Right. Uh uh and like a bipolar sort of Cold War situation. So they're like, Oh, like we're just like the little old wheel like we're m chugging along towards that, but we're not there yet. Uh It but where was I? Uh Uh so some German officials, though allied with the Turks, began to take photographs of the massacred Armenians. In response, the CUP declared such photographs to be espionage.

Most of the Armenians who survived deportation were deposited in camps along the Euphrates and the Syrian desert town of Der El Zor, and to this day, if you talk to like any Armenian, this is their like out Um As Russian troops advanced on Erzurum, the C UP ordered the liquidation of the camps north of Aleppo. In March of nineteen sixteen, the camps were closed and the Armenians sent it further south towards D Dere Elzor. So essentially what's happening. is as Russians

occupy more and more of eastern Anatolia. The camps that are set up n on like the Syrian border become uh i uh vulnerable to russians and so ooh the the Armenians there are all pushed into Dara. Uh uh at first the governor of the province, Ali Saudbe, attempted to soften the lot of the Armenians, hoping that they would settle in the desert province and cultivate it. Uh some of the Armenians even set up like small trades.

Ali Swad was shortly after replaced by Zuliz Zaki Bei, known specifically for his cruelty, and again here's Sunni Orphans were thrown out of the orphanages, torture and hangings became the norm.

Girls raped or delivered to Arabs of the surrounding villages for their pleasure or their service. Children drowned in the river, neither the weak nor the innocent were spared. The only thing that prevented the complete destruction of the Armenian population at Der Elzor was the military need for the world. Uh, one German diplomat recorded what he saw at the camp, quote.

The entrance alone immediately displays the settlers' main occupation, burning the dead, dull, brooding, laborious, sick, half-dead movement. Dera el Zor itself is not an ugly city with lovely wide streets. Previously fourteen thousand inhabitants. presently twenty five to thirty thousand. There are no organizational arrangements for the huge accumulated mass of people. There's insufficient food. A stream driven mill clacks insufficiently day and night.

a shortage of bread and vegetables was determined. Three hospitals are crowded with over a thousand sick people, one local doctor, one government doctor, and the pharmacy almost empty. The local doctor just left town for a few days on a business trip. The mortality rate is one hundred and fifty to two hundred a day. Wow. Only in this way is it possible for new settlers to be brought in.

Uh in June of uh fifteen, Hanchuck leaders were rounded up in Istanbul and hanged. One of the men hanged said before his death, You can only hang our bodies, not our ideology. You will see on the horizon a socialist argument. Uh uh july sixteenth through August cables between US Ambassador Morgenthau and US Consul Jesse Jackson.

Not that's just the name. That's just the name. That's just the name The time's not right. Uh uh but Morgenthau tet uh sends telegrams to Jesse Jackson. Um more than one million Armenians are Wow. And Adana, the most famous example of Armenian resistance there, forty two hundred villagers withdrew to the Musa Deg Mountain, where they beat back Ottoman soldiers until they were rescued by the French Navy who settled them in Port Said in Egypt.

In other instances the resistances were less successful. In Urfa, for example, when an Armenian deserter shot at Turkish authorities entering his home, a mob formed in response. The Armenians barricaded themselves in the American mission, Turkish soldiers were called in, and the entire Armenian quarter. Uh In case that was unclear.

Uh in September the temporary law of confiscation and expropriation, all real estate and property belonging to Armenians is confiscated. Talat orders a second wave of extermination in the spring and summer of nineteen sixteen. A July telegram to authorities in Dar el Zor orders the authorities to forbid Armenians from congregating.

After affirming that Armenians were indeed congregating the concentration camp he'd established for them there, he orders his subordinate to recruit gangs to carry out the mass murderer of Armenians at the camp. Four hundred thousand die. Wow. Yeah. Major number. Oh my god. Uh so May nineteenth of nineteen The secret Sykes Peakot Agreement, which essentially appropriation appropriates Western Armenia uh to Russia. So this is

Uh, an agreement among the Allied powers who kind of see the writing on the walls. And also pre, I'm gonna say 1917 revolution, Russia. leaps the Entente Powers. Right. Uh Uh at the same time, Inverpasha orders all non-Turkish place names to be changed. Uh Max von Schubner Richner, former v vice consul at Erzurum and future Nazi gives his assessment of the genocide to be e i the eth eventual turkification of the entire Ottoman Empire.

Quote, those inhabitants who are neither Muhammadan nor Turkic Turkish should be made to become so by force, or if that is not possible, annihilated. The first item on their program was the execution of Armenians. And this is something I don't really talk much about in my notes, but I'm just gonna mention here, which is that in prob mostly in like the nineties and early two thousands, because this is long enough ago

to where most of these people are dead now. Uh Throughout eastern Anatolia, people have been like co came out of the woodwork in the nineties and two thousands and they were like, actually I am Armenian. This is how I was Islamified or Islam uh Islamicized uh during this thing. I was Turkified or whatever, but I am ethnically Armenian. And there has been among certain Ethnically Armenian.

people in eastern Anatolia like an extraordinarily complex relationship with their Armenian past, where it's like, There's o for obvious reasons an overwhelming impulse to identify with Turkey and Turkish national identity that like has become really vexed in the last few years with r where they have begun taking trips and going on missions to Armenia. So This is an like it's an ongoing thing for people in the region. Um so 1917, Madeline Wayhouse.

Uh we get we get the Russian Revolution. We get Tsar and Women's Day just happened, International Women's Day. The women rise up in Rajah, they take to the streets and it kicks off what will become the Russian Revolution. Yeah. Uh Tsar Nicholas abdicates that's March fifteenth. Uh and the US enters the war April sixth. And it's always this is one of those things where it's like the US is always kinda there for like a minute in the in both world wars where it's like we do tend to enter late

We do tend to enter late. That is true. Like we're sort of like, all right, now that you guys have killed each other. We'll show up, save the day, clear up shop. And then uh create an entire national ideology around us winning the Correct. Yeah. Save the save the day was the bigger quote for anybody anybody who thought I was serious.

So with the Bolshevik Revolution there's immediate civil war in Russia and Russian soldiers began abandoning the army Which is so the first thing for Armenians, the first thing that happens because of the Russian Revolution is

uh catastrophe. They yeah, they lose all their support because now, yeah, we got three years of civil war breaking out in in Russia. And famously I wanna point out one of my favorite stories about the Russian Revolution is that Germany thought that the way to weaken Russia was to smuggle Vladimir Lenin, who had been expelled by the Tsar from Russia. back into Russia on a secret train passage. Because he was like this

Uh, Germany was like, This is the best weapon we have against Russia right now. Yeah. Is Vladimir Lenin. Because Vladimir Lenin is so good, is so inspiring. He will cause all the people of Russia to uh revolt against their leader. So they're like, we have a secret weapon and he's approaching by train as we speak. Uhhuh. And they smuggled him on a train, sent him back into Russia, and they were right. Vladimir Lenin showed him in Russia, went and spoke to all the soldiers and said,

you know, uh these rich people, the imperialists, whatever, they are making you fight a war against other workers. Do not do that. Do not turn your guns on other workers. Turn your guns on the rich who are making this war from them. And yeah, it is something that contributes obviously to the revolution. And and so what you do have though is you have

Um, the soldiers no longer fighting the rich man's war, but this does yeah, this is bad obviously to communities. Yeah, I mean and uh in you're gonna hate this. Oh god. And Trotsky's work or you know Trotsky's early work is is mostly fine. Here's the thing about There's some good Trotsky work in there. He's just a little cuckoo about a lot of shit and then he did that weird thing where he was like maybe I'll be friends with facts. Yeah. But like here's the thing.

He was an essential part of the early revolution. Yes. Right. Like and I like that's that is hard to deny. Undeniable. And he like, I'm going to say between Lennon's account, which uh it's a little heavy on ideology, right? Uh whereas like it's not it's not a good it doesn't read like a good history, it reads like uh what is to be done the expanded version, the correctors.

That sounds great. What are you talking about? No, I mean but like No, I get it. I've always said it's like linen okay linen can be a little bit of a a a whining Nancy sometimes, a little bit. Yeah, I like I get it. I get it. And you know what? I love linen. I love what he's contributed to communism very, very obviously. But sometimes he does get a little, you know.

It but I was on in Trotsky's account of the Russian Revolution, like the organization of uh soldiers in the Russian army is like one of the he's like this is the fucking thing that we did. Like this is the best part. And so obviously the soldiers are like we're not fighting this stupid imperialist war. Yes. Uh the problem with the stupid imperialist war is that it was the one thing standing between the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia and certain destruction.

So those Armenians who do flee or who can do flee with the Russian military Uh As the Ottomans retake Erzurum cars and vans, they commit more scattered murder murders and massacres. But at this point the Armenian population is so decimated there there are few massacres left.

commit. It's like when the Americans were bombing North Korea and they had to turn around because they're like, there's nothing left to bomb. Yeah. We're out of things to bomb. So as I mentioned, uh April, the US officially enters the war and Wilson so Wilson is like

There are all of these debates in Congress at the time where peop where Wilson is like, We need to recognize Armenia as like a place and we need to be like like support Armenia as a state. Holy shit, you guys, you see what fucking happened. Uh and Congress is like No, that seems rash because like we might want To to be friends. We might yeah.

Uh and so but so he issues his fourteen point plan, uh, which emphasizes the quote autonomous development for nationalities under Turkish rule. And so those the idea is like this is like of like a federation kind of idea.

Uh point twelve reads Thus the Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Ottoman rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelle should be permanently opened as free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations.

Under international guarantees. And I'm going to say, and I think I mentioned this later, so we'll find out, but I'm just gonna explain this right now. So the Darton. It is uh a strait that goes between the Black Sea and what eventually opens out into the Mediterranean.

and uh Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, the first president who I mentioned, becomes kind of the hero of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles campaign. So For obvious reasons, it is of strategic import to the Entente powers to have access to shipping routes between Russia and the Mediterranean. Uh, the first but the Turks had essentially mined the uh the entire strait. Um at first they tried to um just like blow up Turkish ships or Ottoman ships and like demine the Straits.

Eventually they realize that's not going to work because they keep getting shelled from Gallipoli. So they try a land invasion of Glipoli, which they fail which the Untaunt powers fail at miserably, and Ataturk becomes the hero of this war. And I think that like his the sort of military stature. from the Gallipoli campaign is in large part why he became the first president of the successor state of Turkey. So if I don't get to it in the future, that's how

That's important. Okay. Again, I'm not history channel board. Okay. All right, all right. But I think You know, we're adding a feature to my Twitch stream on Wednesday. It's called Weapons Wednesday, where we learn about one major military weapon in the news. Dude, I oh I want to learn about the Thad intercept. Oh, I was gonna say uh the old Mos and Nagant. Sad. That was uh it is a copy of the Mauser rifle that was like the first like mass produced um

uh like bolt action rifle that was issued to every fuck I think Springfield made the American version. Um but uh like to every army during like through World War Two, but the Mosin Nagant was the Soviet one, which like I've shot a couple in my life. They're heavy as fuck. Like In in the Soviet Union the gun is a tree with Uh, but it was the gun used by a what is her first name? Olga Pavlachenko? Yes. Uh of the the Woody Guthrie song Miss Pavlachenko that has a line that goes through my head.

every now and again killed by your gun, killed by your gun over 300. Very cool. So it's good to have uh important role models. Yeah. Um yeah. Well this came about because I did not understand how nuclear enrichment worked. Uhhuh. And so I didn't understand that the nuclear enrichment Iran was doing was the same nuclear enrichment you have to do just to get nuclear energy. Yeah. So I knew that Ayatollah was like, um You know, I I don't believe we should have nuclear weapons. I believe that's bad.

And I also knew that there was some development plan for nuclear enrichment happening that the UN was overseeing and checking in on for Iran and Iran was part of this nuclear development agreement with the United States and they kept sticking to it. So but I also also know that the Ayatollah is not a dictator in Iran and they have elected parliament and they have a president.

So I figured that they were still developing nuclear weapons just on a the timeline allowed by uh the UN, right, in case they wanted them in the future, even though the IETO was like, No, no, no, they're so immoral. And then

I was live streaming and I was like, Yeah, well they're developing nuclear weapons and my whole chat was like, No, they're not even developing nuclear weapons. They're developing nuclear enrichment for nuclear energy and infrastructure projects. And up to a certain point, it's the exact same process.

So while the whole West was making up the stories about them wanting nuclear weapons, it's because they were doing nuclear enrichment for infrastructure projects. And I was like, I would know that this was the same process if I understood more about how nuclear weapons

So that's when I was like, I need to under in order to really understand what's happening around the world, I have to have some functioning knowledge of weaponry. And and so I was like, that's a missed opportunity, right? So then when we talk about now what's going on with Iran where everybody's like Oh they have these drones that are like

thirty thousand dollars to make and they're getting shot down by this other thing that the US has that's four million dollars each and we can't make them fast enough. Like that's an important dynamic of what's going on that you need to understand. Yeah, I will say my I don't know how y I mean, okay, so you know that like whenever Russia enter like either under Tsar or Soviet Union type times, enters a war, the thing everyone says is like the the land and their

a capacity and willingness to just sacrifice tens of They have numbers and they harsh environment. Yeah. And so they uh they're it's just like they're just gonna throw people and winter at this until it works. Yeah. I think like the United States has a like Let's call it an infinite credit line. Yes. That is kinda like where it's like Uh

we're just gonna do that until it works. So it's like But then it it often doesn't even work and we just withdraw. No, I wonder if destroying an area. Because like right the George H. W. Bush Uh af like after the first Iraq war, uh like proudly announced that Vietnam syndrome had been, you know, done away with and like our addiction to defeat was fine like we had overcome it and we were back, baby. Like we could do military stuff again because we like

you know, f like fucked up Saddam Hussein in order to like liberate Kuwait's oil fields or whatever. Yeah, and big air quotes and yeah. Uh uh but like My point being, right, like I like I have this overwhelming sense that what's happening in um, Venezuela, what's happening in Iran right now, and like the fact that there is no talk of state building. Yeah. Right? Is the like the Trump administration and who's the like musclehead? Pete Hegzath? Yeah. He's a tripper. That

I mean, dude, I will just recommend that anyone curious about Pete Hegseth read the open letter from his mother about him. Well, I've never read that. I was gonna recommend everyone just Google his tattoos. Oh yeah. No, just I just the letter from his mother is Okay. It was after if he had I been credibly accused of raping a woman at a conservative conference and his mother wrote a letter that was basically like, You are uh

Okay. I'm finding the letter and I'm gonna read it on our Twitch stream tomorrow. Okay. Uh but again, credibly accused. I don't think he was ever tried, um or Yeah, I can't remember what happened there. Where the fuck were we? Oh, also you should talk about the Dragonoff. It's banned in the United States because the trigger mechanism, it's not even an automatic rifle. They're so fucking cool looking and they're apparently really good, like long like uh not fully sniper rifles.

Uh I have a friend who likes guns a lot. Specifically Soviet guns. Yes. This which is why I know all this. Uh, but is the same uh l or or is more similar to the two fully automatic ri rifles in the United States. What's it? What's it called? Uh the Dragonov. Okay. Uh sniper rifle. I think it's called the drug enough SVT. Um cool looking. SVD. There we go. Yeah.

Okay, so we're talking about oh Wilson's fourteen point plan. Uh so the Brest Lit uh Litovsk treaty happens on March third between Russia, Turkey, Germany. Russia cedes three of its Armenian provinces to Turkey again. Soviet Russia now is but in the middle of a fucking civil war. Following the treaty, the Trans Caucasian Federation has formed. This doesn't last very long, which is Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

Almost immediately, Azerbaijan and Georgia declined to sign a treaty with the newly formed Soviet Union, effectively leaving the partnership and abandoning the newly formed Armenia. So and like the newly formed Armenia here is being is made up. So be it, aren't you? Yeah. Oh, so when Russia cedes three Armenian provinces to Turkey, those are the provinces that become Armenian.

Uh, n no. So remember how oh there's Russian Armenian stuff and the Caucasus and that like little tendril of Russia. Uhhuh. Or whatever. that borders Persian slash Iranian territory on one side and then uh uh Turkish slash Ottoman on the other. Right. So they see do remember they had invaded and occupied parts of eastern Anatolia, including Urzurum and Ban and Bitlis and all of that.

Right. And so they seed those back. So they're like, We took this, but you can have it back. And and then they take their own region that had been occupied by Armenians and were like, This is for you. Yeah, where it's like well this is just like that had been the homeland of the Armenians since time immemorial. Some of it was in Russia and some of it was in the Ottomans. So they are like we give up our

Or it's like by you are going to be run by a Soviet government. Like it's like this is when we get the official Soviet Republic of Yeah. Of Armenia. Okay. That's good. Um That was I could have probably written that out in a simpler way, but it makes sense. I just wasn't sure if we were there yet.

Yeah. Because of the civil war making everything so complicated to administer in the USSR, I wasn't sure if they were like, Okay, you're independent for now and then later they were like, Oh okay, come be a And I'm this is one thing I will say. So we talked about the Nagorni Karabash.

or whatever, uh in the Patreon episode. And uh right, Azerbaijan and Georgia also become Soviet states at this point, or within the Soviet Union at this point. And Look, I'm like it's hard to fault Soviet leadership in like Moscow with not understanding the complexity.

the complexities of ethnicity and the Caucasus. Right. And they actually did manage to hold it together after a while for a really long time. But I will say, like Armenians i like in like the Soviet Armenian state under Khrushchev, Brezhnev Gorbachev is our in between those motherfuckers. I think you got it. Okay. So essentially, like in the entirety of the post Stalin era, every now and again Armenians and the Armenian National Assembly and the Soviet state of Armenia would write to Leningrad.

uh and be like, hey guys, can we have Nagorni Karaba Karabash fac? Because it's like us. It's our like it's an entirely it's like 80% Armenians and

All of like a radio silence. Right. So I was probably looking at a map going, What? How does that make sense? How the little island. Yeah, but and I like you know I think that I don't know. There's but like I don't think it There is it should when the borders had initially been drawn, they probably should have just included that region in the state of Armenia.

full stop. Right. Uh though Sunni makes the point that like this region was mu was much more cosmopolitan and that in especially the post Soviet era, er uh the These three states that had made up the Trans Caucasian uh partnership or whatever, um, have become much more ethnically homogenous, uh, which has led to growing ethnic tension. Um the and by way of a long digression.

So, oh, Turkey reoccupies Erzurum cars and van as the Russians retreat following the Bre as uh Litovsk Treaty. They're replaced by regiments by the Transcaugation Federation as well as the Ottoman Third Empire. So there's this moment where they're like, There's like a little bit of competition over who's occupying here because it's like Azerbaijanis and uh Georgians and Armenians. Sharing the occupation with the Ottoman army. Uh when so when Georgia and Azerbaijan failed to come to Armenia's

or the third army launches an assault on occupied Armenian territory under the command of Mechhmed Wahib. They immediately capture Kars, followed by uh Alexandropol, Well and what's at stake here for the Ottomans is that they kind of know that a treaty with the British is coming and that they're about to lose.

So they're like land grab, land grab. We gotta get as much fucking land as we can. Right. Uh it is so and remember they had lost so much territory in the Balkans and in the Caucasus at the time. They were like, we just gotta fucking. Do what we can. Uh, the Third Army sends detachments to invade eastern Armenia i in the region of Tifhlis and Yerevan at the Battle of Sardarabad under the direction of Moses Silician.

They repel the Armenians repel the Third Army and save what is left of historic Armenia on May twenty eighth of nineteen seventeen. Uh So here's the thing. The Ottomans take this fight all the way to Baku, unlike the Black Sea and Azerbaijan. uh at the end of World War One before the ultimate fall of the Ottoman Empire, and so they invade this like Soviet-controlled region in Transcaucasia, hoping to incorporate Baku into the eastern part of what is now Azerbaijan.

into the Ottoman state. Does that make sense? Yeah. Uh At this point, a group of Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Armenians allied with the Bolsheviks announce a Soviet under the authority of the Armenian Revolutionary and former Dashnok member Stepan uh Xiaomian nickname the Caucasian linen. Oh, okay. I really gotta give granting the history that the word Caucasian has had uh synonym for white amongst idiots. Yeah. I really do like the fact that someone is like

No no no. This is the white let it. This is the really white letter. Almost immediately the Azerbaijanians end up forming their own battalions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the newly appointed Soviet. So there's like a sort of slightly pan-Turkic flavored Azerbaijani national movement forming against the So This leads to a series of clashes between members of the Soviet government and our Azerbaijani protesters.

In the ensuing clashes, somewhere between two thousand and twelve thousand Azerbaijanis are killed in Madeline, how do we get such a huge discrepancy in numbers? Right. Two thousand. Right. And then that's right, John. Yeah.

Unless you have it flipped sometimes and people who do the killing are like, We're so badass we killed more of them. Yeah, but that you have to be really proud of your shut size. Yes. So uh Azerbaijanis and I I'm curious like I so Azerbaijanis to this day regard the quote unquote days of March incident, which happens at the end of March into the first days of April as a genocide, citing as their claim the hope for an Armenian state on Azerbaijani land, which

It doesn't s I mean like the uh Nagorni Karabash stuff is kind of the reason for that. Uh And I'm going to quote an interview with an interview with Sunny here, who I've been quoting a lot. He's been like my main guy uh researching this. Armenians led by the Dashnak Party backed by the Soviets and helped to put down the Azerbaijani uprising quite bloodily, what might have been a political even a class struggle degenerated into an ethnic struggle. The Azerbaijanis were of course very pro Turkish.

While the Chr Christian Armenians favored ties with Russia, in September of nineteen eighteen the Turkish army took Baku and Azerbaijanis avenged the March Days by massacring about twenty thousand Armenians.

The memory of these two people, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, lingered all through the Soviet period and are a factor in the latest developments, and this is what we talked about. He he was talking he gave this interview in the eighties when Azerbaijan and Armenia went to war, which we talked about in the Patreon event. Um

So between 1918 and 1923, the Ottoman Empire is basically in shambles. Essentially what happens, and for the rest of this, what we're going to cover is they immediately go into a civil war, uh, and also an anti-colonial war against the British and the French at the same time.

So the British and the French are like, We we're occupying all of this, we're going to do that treaty we did before. We're just gonna carve up this fucking place and it's gonna be ours. Uh Is so England and France occupy is simple and by November second, Talat, Invert, and Jamal will the central committee of the C UP flee the country. Uh the Entente captures Damascus, Beirut, and Aleppo, and they liberate the remaining Armenians. November 11th, we get armistice to.

Uh and so this is the point at which we do have to talk more about U uh Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He'd been, as I mentioned, an officer in the army, and he had been kind of an early member of CUP or affiliated with C UP. But as early as nineteen twelve he be he'd begun cutting off ties. I think he was among the young Turks who were like

Well, you guys are really doing single party rule. That's crazy. Like we want we were trying to do liberal democracy or e here. What the fuck are you doing? Um So there's this nationalist war of independence against the colonialist Entente powers, and this civil war between this like newly formed Turkish Nationalist Party. under Ataturk on the one hand and then the CUP on the other. Uh or like what remains of the CUP, the so called unionists on the other.

Um and we're we start to get right, like the genocide has h realistically the genocide lasts. Like the the main brunt of the genocide thi un undoubtedly quite effectively lasts a little over a year, nineteen fifteen to nineteen sixteen, though there are you know, scattered massacres and mass killings throughout the course of the war and even after

But uh so you start to get contested narratives about what had happened to the Armenians. Um and so I wanted to quote from Ataturk, uh w who starts very quickly to like this is still the line whatever has befallen the non Muslim elements living in our country is the result of the policies of separatism they pursued in a savage manner when they allowed themselves to be made tools of foreign intrigues and abused their privileges.

There are probably many reasons and excuses for the undesired events that have taken place in Turkey. And I definitely want to say that uh these events are on a level far removed from any of the forms of oppression which are committed in the states of Europe without any excuse. So he's talking essentially about uh the killing of Muslims and the caucuses. by Christians and places like Bosnia.

So he's like, Well we did uh kinda had it coming and also not that bad when you think about other stuff. Yeah. Uh inver so inver I'm just gonna repeat this from or like do this from memory. I have my notes right here in case I need to, but he makes a short alliance with the Bolsheviks and Lenin sends him to Uzbekistan. uh where there's a Soviet government to help put down uh like a sort of pan Turkic rebellion against the Soviet. He gets down there. What do you think he does?

No, he's like, I love the Pan Turkic ship. Screaming in. Yeah, that makes sense he turns turncoat. Uh so he he gets sent to Bukhara and there's this nationalist revolt. He almost um immediately abandons the Bolshevik side and tries to forge an alliance with the Bukharan independence movement. But he starts calling himself the emir of Turkestan, which is a fake thing, which does not exist. There's no such thing as but like he's gone fully pan Turkic. Yeah. Weirdo. And he's like, I I am the

depo deposed ruler of this place that I made up. Okay. Uh which kind of pisses off the actual emirs who are a part of the anti Bolshevik national movement in Uzbekistan. Does that make sense? Yes. Uh Uh so he gets killed in nineteen twenty-two in an assault by a Bolshevik cavalry brigade, in which the nationalists are like Kinda had it coming. Right. Right.

As nationalists gain power against the so called unionists, so uh the British start taking control of Istanbul. Ul in August the Allies sign a treaty, the quote unquote treaty of Sevres, which would have established a large independent Armenia. Separate from the Soviet Armenia? Got it. Uh

The hope was that Wilson would use his considerable pool to implement it. However, when he went before Congress seeking a mandate for Armenia, it gets rejected, essentially on grounds of like, let's see what what pans out with this Ataturk fella. Uh Uh in nineteen twenty two, Kamalis drive the Greeks out of Smyrna, causing another ethnic cleansing.

Uh in December the newly created Democratic Republic of Armenia was forced to cede all of the territory in eastern Aatolia that should have been Armenia. in the Treaty of Sar Sevres around the same time, uh, Sughoman tell uh Telerian assassinates the Talash Pasha in Berlin where he is hiding. Um and this is actually part of this huge thing that I I don't get into here'cause it's like

I'm just gonna recommend that people read about it. And there's a book about it called Operation Nemesis, where a bunch of mostly like former Hunshak members who had been a part of the Armenian immigrant community essentially form their own it's like, you know You know the like Mossad people who like hunted down Nazis in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and this is the only cool thing that Mossad has ever fucking done. Yeah. Just hunt down Nazis. Um if that's all they did.

If that's all they did They would have been great. We would have been like remember m uh saw it was. Yeah. No. But the they kind of do that. And so it's called Operation Nemesis. There's a fantastic book by that name. Uh I can't remember the name of the author.

Uh so they essentially hunt down all sorts of people who were associated with the C U P and who participated in the genocide and just assassinate them. Okay. Uh Uh so uh police uh And oh, so on january thirtieth, uh Entente powers to finally declare an end to the Ottoman state, and the ensuing years Turkish nationalists centered around Anatolia Wage a continued war against ethnic minorities into in order to ensure

the territorial integrity of the newly formed Turkish state. One report from the above mentioned occupation of Sni Smyra gives a flavor for the events. Police and Kamala's soldiers gradually surrounded the Armenian quarter. This is, by the way, a quote from a vice consul there. They stopped and questioned everyone, then they let the Jews go, and after robbing the Christians martyred them. The Armenian and Greek quarters became the target of Turkish barbarity.

At noon Turkish criers appeared in the Armenian corridor and told the Turks to leave. Things became clear after noon. The Turks had left the Armenian corridor and it was burned burning all over. The arsonists did their best to make sure that the flames covered as much territory as possible and reached the furthest quarters of where the Armenians and Greeks had taken refuge.

Towards morning, more than five thousand buildings, among them twenty nine churches, thirty two schools, five embassies, seven clubs, five banks, three hospitals, were turned to ruins. According to some reports, the number of murders from further massacres at the end of the war reached around thirteen thousand five hundred. As late as 1922, uh a British representative in Turkey was writing to the Del Daily Telegraph, thus.

And I don't think this guy was very well informed about the genocide that had happened, which you will catch a flavor of. I'm sure that when this material or the events in Asia Minor which is under Kamala's rule becomes public knowledge, it will astound the entire civilized world. though for the past eight years the world has already been full of horrible stories, the actual deportations and massacres in Asia Minor

are without precedent in Turkish history. They exceed in importance those of the Gladstone era. So this is the eighteen ninety five to ninety six massacres. And even those that took place in nineteen fifty I mean, this is the actual genocide. And that's why I'm like Bro, were you? there during the genocide? Like did not exceed it, yeah.

They are not isolated incidents, but systematic and with the complete extermination of the Christian races as their only motive, they were intensified and augmented during the course of the following months since the question of armistice and the protection of minorities was made as part of the Charters of the Peace.

Treaty. An important Kamalist official recently declared that within one minute's peace there would no longer be any need to protect the minorities and that a mistake made in nineteen fifteen had been done in not doing away once and for all all with Christianity and the Christians in Turkey might very well be rectified. So essentially the Kamalist line becomes it wasn't that big of a deal. They kind of had it coming. We're going to complete the task.

Right. Uh uh uh starting in around nineteen nineteen, however, under British pressure, like this other thing is happening where the Ottoman corps are trying to try the perpetrators of the genocide. Around three hundred prominent members of the C U P are arrested. And it's pretty interesting. Well this is it's like they're Nuremberg trials, right? Okay. Um So like we're civilized now? W w most of us are good Nazis. Wait, we're good Nazis. We did we

had a Jewish girlfriend once. Right. We don't or like I I guess in this instance an Armenian girlfriend. Even Armenian girlfriend Armenian girls are hot. Yeah. Which has been the historic line of every people who like since time Yeah, it's what fucking American soldiers are saying about Iranian women right now. They're so hot. They they're calling them the Middle Eastern Latino.

Oh fuck. I know. It's fucking disgusting. I also I just nervous thing. First of all, I like it is I had not heard that, but it expresses a level of provincialism. I as a like a a like it makes me ashamed of my f of Americans to be like You've never thought about Iran before this moment. Yeah. And instead of thinking of one of the richest and ultra oldest cultures of poetry and arts and you know, philosophy.

Instead of thinking about the accomplishments of women in Iran who were like the majority of college graduates make up like seventy percent of STEM graduates alone, where you're like, Wow, Ira Iran has a huge culture around brilliant women's science. That's like supposed to think of when you think about women in Iran. They have so many women scientists. But I guess right, it's like even like where it's like this is a place that

no matter what you should have been thinking about as like one of the great flourishing of like worlds world culture. I d I don't know how else to put that. Right. Like then it just seems and then you're like I there's a hot chick, but even not even knowing how to be like, Wow, that chick's hot of being like, I have to Yeah, she's hot and brown like a Latina.

In a way that can be subordinate and do like we're doing Edward Said style orientalism where we're gonna be like uh brown man bad, let's rescue hot brown wolves. Yes, exactly. Exactly that. Exactly. It's fucking your age. Fucker. Dumbass country. Mm hot girls going on the internet being like, Yay, thank you. And then be like, I love Trump.

Yeah, this is the United States. And you're just like, what the fuck? Stop this. This is We live in the dumbest kind I like I you know, I was telling you on the phone last night as I was driving home, um, where it was like the thing about like America needs to get our fucking nose bloodied. Like we need to have an L. Like we've had so many L's though, and the thing is we're so like

like um pathological. Yeah. We don't even believe it. Like we don't believe that the war on terror was an L. We don't believe that the Vietnam War was Yeah, I mean I guess it's like it's like not just d'cause the American people have had L's all the fucking like'cause Yeah, us as a people, yes. Uh the American security state and capitalist class.

has thus far largely evaded consequence for the many L's that they ha that have come home in coffins from our wars abroad. And those are the motherfuckers who need to pay. Uh But they won't. Um I'm a pacifist, you know that. I know, I um I mean Oh boy. Uh uh so uh in the immediate aftermath there are these trials and there's this tremendo and you gotta think like so

uh between one and one point five million. I've been going with one point five is my like that's the estimate that most people say today. Okay. Um Three hundred people are not enough to commit a mat like a genocide of that scam. Right. In a year. So just taking these three hundred people, it's symbolic. And about a hundred and sixty of them get Wow. Okay. So okay. So like yeah, by this logic, what, every single person was killing a hundred and forty thousand uh Armenians? That's half. Okay.

Uh so there's this tremendous like flood of information about what happened. And so for example, the poet Halid Adib uh Hanim wrote in the Turkish newspaper Vikit. Quote When we were powerful we tried operating with medieval methods to exterminate the Christians, particularly the Armenians.

Today we live through the saddest and darkest days of our national life, in the eyes of America and Britain. We are a state that has done away with its innocent citizens and sons. The present government must be returned to their homeland. And so you get this like sort of cultural acknowledgement, which is so frustrating when you look at like the sort of like post like the Kamala's line, you begin to get a cultural acknowledgement and a lot of newspapers at the time of like

guys, we fucked up really bad. And like the we fucked up is both like we did something absolutely inhumane, but also we've lost credit on the world stage because we and it like are you I will say Morgenthau, the um American ambassador who had written the thing about uh to Jesse Jackson about like more than one million Armenians lost, uh, essentially took like a very orientalist line about the like uh barbarity and bloodlust of the Oriental Turk

As his racist. We made it super racist. We made the ethnic cleansing even more racist. Yeah. So under British pressure, the Ottoman court martials, the perpetrators of the Armenian massacres commence and Itahab leaders, that's C UP members, uh uh begin to get sentenced to death mostly in Yeah. Uh, the trials also laid bare other atrocities undertaken by the Young Turks. This is from John Kirkassian's The Armenian Genocide, The Young Turks Before the Judgment of History quote.

Among the atrocities committed by the Turks against the Armenians, special consideration should be given to the medical experiments performed by Turkish quote unquote doctors on Armenian infants. or orphans. This indeed was a prototype for the fascist crimes of World War Two. Testimony confirmed This is to be found in the Armenian State Archival material and in Turkish and Armenian period articles published in Constantinople.

For example, between 1914 and 1915, Ali Saïb, health services inspector, tested new medicines on Armenian orphans and the sick, as a result of which they were poisoned and died. Additionally, the tribunal found that the unsterilized blood of typhus patients was injected into Armenian soldiers which killed them.

Yeah. Uh Kirkasyan continues, quote, We will only stress that after the fall of the Young Turk government, the Turkish state authorities acknowledged that a genocide was committed against the Armenians and themselves tried and condemned the Young Turks' barbaric deeds. So as insufficient as the trials were, it was an acknowledgement by the Turkish state.

That is something had happened that something had happened. Which makes the subsequent denial of the Armenian genocide so frustrating. Right. Um In the newly minted Armenian state, after the Red Army marched on Yerevan, Armenian officially becomes a part of the Soviet Union in So there had been a Soviet ahead of civil war, this makes sense. They're kinda like okay, we're cleaning shop, we're organized.

Yeah, by the time the genocide was over, between one and one and a half million Armenians had been killed, and ninety percent of the Armenian population was decimated. This is the population within the Ottoman state, either dead or refugees in Syria or the Caucasus. uh in addition to the killed and displaced, one has to account for the forced Islamicization and Turkification of the so called qu hidden Armenians. So this is from an article written in two thousand nineteen.

Hidden Armenians are the present generation descendants of Armenian orphans left behind in Turkey after the nineteen fifteen Armenian genocide. These orphans, the living victims of the genocide, were forcibly assimilated. Islamic Turkified and curdified in state orphanages, military schools, Turkish and Kurdish homes. In recent years it has become apparent that they did not forget their Armenian roots and secretly passed them on to the next generation.

In the early two thousand tens, almost a hundred years after the genocide, certain events in Turkey, this is Turkey's and like closer ties with Israel and with uh NATO at the time. Uh It tri triggered the hidden Armenians to have the courage to openly reveal their original Armenian identity in large numbers and return to their Armenian roots, language and culture. The most significant event triggering the new phenomena was the two thousand eleven reconstruction of the Surp.

Uh Girago's church and Diar Bakir and Dikrangurdj. please forgive me for saying that wrong, uh, which acted like a magnet bringing the hidden Armenians together from various regions of Turkey, the planning, fundraising, and reconstruction of the church Uh, we're followed by other events such as piano concerts at the church, Armingan language classes, cultural events and conferences. Uh yada yada. So essentially there is currently uh

an attempted revival of Armenian life within tur like I'm gonna say within historic Armenia. Yes. I don't like you I as a general rule think that like Uh, ascribing to the motives of ethnic nationalists and their sort is like generally speaking a bad idea with Armenia. Well, what have I always said?

It's it is a tool of national liberation, yada yada y press from oppressive nations to be able to identify them as the other harming you. Generally speaking it does seem like that it people do tend to turn their guns. uh like because of the inherent contradictions within nationalism as an ideology, people do like after the liberation, people do tend to turn their guns on other That it is just how it happened.

Okay, so at this point we've established the following state of affairs. The formerly Russian Armenian area has split off into the Soviet state after uh Kamal becomes president of the Ottoman Successors Day, a kind of epilogue cleansing of the ethnic Armenian population occurs. Jesus. And Kamal which we've talked of we are, you know. Yeah. And Kamalism as the dominant ideology of the new Turkish state emphasizes cultural homog homogeneity.

uh an ethnic national identity as one of its core tenants. The six fillets that had been predominantly Armenian under Ottoman rule become car part of Turkey, and the state policy of the acknowledgement of Armenian genocide changes from the t one of tacit acceptance to denial And so this is from an Erdogan press conference held in two thousand seventeen. Uh that quote There has never been any genocide, holocaust massacre, ethnic cleansing, or torture in our Turkish history. That's crazy.

It's crazy. And I will say He d he so Turkish is the is the interpolation f like my interpolation into that quotation. He says in our history, but he means Turkish history. But if you specify Turkish Then you're necessarily Excluding the Ottoman period. Right.

And but I think Ray we all understand that to be bullshit. And we understand there to be like basic continuity. Um and I kind of wanted uh to end wait, Madeline, can you uh you know what, I'm just gonna discuss it. So uh This a there was there were all so There were all of these groups that were kind of the Armenian uh uh RAF, like the Red Army faction that formed in the seventies and eighties that essentially would do like terrorist attacks on Turkish officials.

Um, they killed a Turkish ambassador in Berlin. They blew up um the desk at the LL Airlines in France in nineteen eighty three. They did all this crazy shit and like their demands are essenti their demands at the time were essentially I don't know, I I think that we'll end it here and we'll just have a discussion about this'cause I I'm gonna put the demands from most reasonable to What do we think of this? Okay. Uh so the all of the oh, also the

The name of the organization is the Armenian Secret Army for Armenian Liberation. Okay. Which I find very funny as a name. Uhhuh. Where I'm like, you really gotta emphasize the Armenian. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But so they're the ones who blow up the airport desk um at the French airport and this is in nineteen eighty three and so their demands are that Turkey acknowledges the Armenian genocide. Easy. Recreation.

Easy. The return of the six this is the last one. And I'm curious because it's complicated. The return of the six villets of historic Armenia to the modern state of Armenia. I mean... There are Turkish and Kurdish people living in that and who have been who had been living in that territory for closing in on Seventy years at that point? Yeah. Right. Mm-hmm. Uh who would have to be essentially repatriated into a new country. Repatriated, another word for that.

Ethnic cleansed. Not ethnic cleansed. Well, I mean they would have been put it this way, a whole fucking region. Oh, I didn't mean repatriated. I mean like now all of a sudden they would become part of Yeah, but right all of but all of these people who are Kurds. and Turks and Arabs and potentially Yazidis. Right.

um would either become a part of Armenia and then become an ethnic minority and a state that at the time had become increasingly ethnically homogeneous to the point where it was ninety percent straight up Armenian. Uh-huh. So all of a sudden Army would Like I think in this in the Armenian Secret Army for the liberation of Armenia and their vision.

All of those people go out and that went through that. Yeah, you can stay here if you're not Palestinian. It's a secular state, but it's ours. Yeah. I mean I think in this our They're they also do have connections with the old PLO, the Armenian. It's a great army. Eventually what happens is a bunch of infighting from more nationalists. uh Armenian paramilitary terrorist organizations doing plane hijackings and bombings throughout the seventies and eighties.

Uh and the more liberate like PLO oriented uh people like it just leads to internal squabbles and like assassinating of each other instead of Turkish officials in Berlin. Um, and then Armenia, as we mentioned in the Patreon on episode, enters a brief warf with Hasar Paishan at nineteen eighty four. Right. Well, brief, but like with like recurring flare up. Yeah. Uh which is why so To be, I'm like, it's really hard for me to imagine the repatriation of these people of Turk

Kurds, etc. To modern day Armenia. Into Armenia without that becoming the pretext for like more bloodshed. Right. Especially especially given that genocide. Like right like and like m memories of and resentment over the genocide. Right. Interesting. It is interesting. Yeah. So what do you think? Um

About the whole thing or about that point? Well I mean both. But here we are. We're at the end. I'm looking at my sources at the bottom of the thing. Here's what I think about that request. That request is the that's the hard that's the hard line and you go in and you negotiate from

You go, we're gonna give you your first two. The third one, let's talk about this. This provides complications. Let's reach some sort of negotiation or agreement. You go in with your big want, expecting it to be whittled down. And that's the one that's most problematic.

So that one you expect to be whittled down a little bit. So I think as a demand, give us our fucking land back opens up the dialogue. And to me like the thing is is like again with Armenia, granting Armenia is like the Um with like a few others in global history, one of the few people who has been s like consistently documented over the course of straight a millennia.

right as like having a specific homeland place with a culture that visitors have been like, This is these people and that includes those six villettes in the eastern part of Anatoly. Mm-hmm And so there is a huge part of me that's little that is just like From time immemorial everyone has said That's our And not and not with like a a cool two thousand year gap. No. Right. That not like what Israel's doing. Yeah, like like that like they're well this has always been Armenia. And so I don't

Just give'em their land back. Yeah. Just give'em their land back. And if you wanna stay you can and if you wanna move, that's fine. And then what they do is they just everybody who wants to leave and go back to area that's still um like Turkey, then it's just like, okay, then you negotiate how to fund that. And this is I mean, this is with also the like the proviso of like the huge history and like the coming out of like hidden Armenia.

People who are ethnically Armenia. You're gonna have to shift some people around. Yeah. There's some people who might want to be more in Armenia. There's some people who might want to be like, okay, I'm out. I want to stay in Turkey.

And this isn't Turkey anymore, I'll go. Okay. So way easier than a war. Yeah. Figuring out the logistics of that for people in six designated fighting miles. I will say the state of Armenia, which at the time this is we're talking nineteen eighty three when the bombing happened. When the killing of the diplomats in Berlin happens. Uh

Armenia is still a Soviet state and but like also s like a Soviet state and a Soviet Union that is like rapidly falling the fuck apart. Right. Right. Like we are in Brezhnev era and about to enter Gorbachev era where it's like this is You know how uh Car nerds describe nineteen seventies American cars as the Malaise era. Yes. This is the Malaise era Soviet Union. Uh huh.

I feel like I feel like that's Yeah, safe to say. Safe to say. Yeah, this is the area where other other communists were looking at the Soviet Union. What the fuck's going on over there? You guys are You're losing. And they stopped defending their revolution after Stalin. Oh they d they failed to defend their revolution. Yeah.

Um and I So I said at the beginning of this week's episode that the reason that I was interested in this was that it tells us a lot about some of the contradictions and so right like Yeah, what is the ground speaking of, what is the justification to not call this legally a jump?

So essentially what Turkey wants to say, like the and the Erdogan quote, um, right. So actually you know what, we can go way back or I think I didn't I put I think I sent this as a thing. We talked about Uh at the very beginning, many, many weeks ago, uh

Er Erdogan sending the letter to the uh Armenian Patriarch, um or to the Patriarch of the Armenian Church being like we regret the deaths of Armenians, this was the inevitable result of the war in which many Turks and Kurds It's sad, but people you know how people fought and died. I mean so there like there is the documentation of the triumph of C U P officials Enver Pasha, uh Talat Pasha and Jamil Pasha. Um

like r explicitly saying we are going to kill all the Armenians. We are going to do it. Like we are going to It seems very clearly a clear cut case of We are doing genocide. So that but like I think the justification is something like In order to create a modern state that is not riven through with the internal contradictions of have like having ethnic

minorities within the borders. There has been a kind of like talking out of both sides of your mouth by a lot of pe like people in power that has essentially been like We are a modern cosmopolitan ethnic state v of many ethnicities that are all Turk. Okay. So if if that makes any sense the situation they're trying to do is that this wasn't eth targeted ethnic cleansing, this was just casualties of war. Yeah.

But like and but the reason for wanting to do that as opposed to like doing like the uh what's the fucking thing that Germany does that's psych uh like equally psycho the um z Philo Semitism where they they're like

we love the Jews who no longer exist within our borders so much that we love Israel. Yes. That kind of thing. Yes. And it's illegal to say from the river to the sea in Germany. Yeah. But right, so l like Germany has Like Germany's way through it has been to be like we are the most moral people who always acknowledge and have a lot of s like

Avant garde memorials to Jews. Yes. Uh that people take Instagram photos at um within our borders. Right. Uh the sort of Turkish policy has essentially been like people die. Don't fuck with our state. Don't do anything that would like undermine the essential premise of the foundation of the successor state to the Ottoman Empire. Yeah. Which was, I think, I think I'm going to make the argument a genus.

Yeah, it was a genocide. I think it is very clearly a fucking genocide. Um wow, wild. Well, I'm so glad I have all the backstory on the Armenian genocide now. Again, as you mentioned, living in Fresno, you are You grew up in the Ar uh Armenian uh diaspora. It's almost like a part it's such a huge part of the Fresno culture. It's like part of the atmosphere you're around all the time and

And you know that uh like I grew up knowing there was an Armenian genocide but I never really knew how it played out or the details of it or the intricacies. Uh Um, it is very interesting hearing that there are people who are like, No, it didn't happen. And I mean like the other thing, so American presidents up until Biden and I'm gonna this is Malay's era Biden. Um

had had always said like we regret what happened to the Armenians, but they had where are we time wise? Oh, one forty nine. Hey, I was not bad. We're perfect. It's not a short episode after all. Yeah, it's not bad. Uh but like have Always said something to the effect of like Something bad happened. Many massacres happened, but they like the G word short of the G word, yeah. Um Very very and then Donald Trump just starts we're were genocide for anything.

It's it's wild. Okay. Well that is the episode on uh the Armenian genocide. If you guys want to check out the um addendum episode we uploaded over on Patreon that's about the current tons between Azerbaijan and Armenia and how it plays out today. Find us at patreon.com slash pick me up I'm scared. I believe it's two or three dollars a month. It's super cheap and you get access to a backlog of episodes, including book clubs we've done.

uh things like that that you might be into. Otherwise, um I am going to be out of town not this week, but the next week. So we might have a late episode. Maybe we're gonna record Tuesday or something like that. Yeah, yeah. When I get back from the trip that I not talk about. Oh, okay. We don't talk about that. We don't talk about that right now. Okay. Um so that's it. So thanks everybody for sticking around and we should be back next week. Yep. Yep. Okay. How was that?