It Could Happen Here - The War In Armenia

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Robert sits down with Joe Kassabian to talk about the invasion of Armenia by Azerbaijan, and the looming threat of genocideSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hey, welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things falling apart. And today we definitely have a things, well, I don't know, hopefully not falling apart, but certainly getting fucked up episode for you. And today we definitely have a things, well, I don't know, hopefully not falling apart,

but certainly getting fucked up episode for you. This is going to be a bit of part of the world that probably fairly few Americans spend much time thinking about. It's certainly a conflict that's kind of been lost in everything that's happening in Ukraine right now. But Armenia and Azerbaijan, their neighbor, have been at a state of more or less regular war since 2020. Since longer than that, but this kind of latest wave of it started in 2020. It was over a breakaway, well, what's often referred to as a breakaway region that both countries claimed and that stayed kind of independent for a very long time. region that both countries claimed and that stayed kind of independent for a very long time until a 2020 invasion by the Azeris in this area, which is majority Armenian. And it was kind of a

military disaster for the Armenian side. The war went very badly. A lot of troops were killed. A lot of territory was taken. And ever since, the Azeri military has been carrying out border strikes in and around areas that are kind of near their shared border with Armenia. Over the last 10 hours, as I record this, and I'm talking to you all on Monday, the 13th of September, over the last about 10 hours, the Azeri military has launched a fairly unprecedented set of strikes within Armenian territory. So not just kind of hitting border areas and not just hitting military targets, but hitting cities, hitting civilian areas, trying to move troops across the border. There's video evidence of this. To talk about what's happening, what's been happening in the past over the last couple of years and what's happening now. I'd like to welcome on Joe Kasabian. Joe, you will know from his podcast Lions Led by Donkeys, from his book The Hooligans

of Kandahar, and a number of other books that I think we'll talk about a little bit at the end here, from his appearances on The Behind the Bastard. Joe, you are an American citizen, but you're also Armenian, and you're currently in armenia yeah um i moved here a couple months ago permanently um uh citizenship is we kind of have like our own repatriation laws but i'm still waiting on that um and so to to go off a couple things that you said we've been at a state of war effectively since the 90s when we first gained independence from the Soviet Union. Without going into the incredibly complicated history of Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh, Artsakh still exists.

They did not take all of it in 2020. But 2020 was a military disaster for Armenia, unequivocally so. We lost over 4,000 people. Huge swaths of territory where their population became the victims of a regional genocide. There are no Armenians that have been confirmed to still be alive within that territory. There's endless videos of Azeri troops beheading old men and women and destroying homes and cemeteries and churches. old men and women and destroying homes and cemeteries and churches.

And ever since the war ended in 2020, a month has not gone by where either Artsakh or Armenia itself has not been attacked. We've probably lost over 100 soldiers since then. These are kids, they're conscripts. We have military mandatory service here. So these are 18, 19 year old kids doing their two years of service on top of the civilians that are currently being bombed. We don't know how many people are dead at the moment. And it's truly aggravating. I mean, Armenians live with this all the time. It's a sword hanging over our heads that when this is going to happen, 2020 happened with unprecedented international support and not only support, but willing,

willingly ignoring it. I mean, NATO powers helped Azerbaijan do this Turkey and Israel, Israel, I mean, NATO powers helped Azerbaijan do this, Turkey and Israel. Israeli drone designers literally test flew a suicide drone into Armenian soldiers to sell it. I mean, it's honestly kind of, I don't know what to say about it other than it should be another thing that the world should be united against and they never will. No, I mean it's so frustrating. One of the things that I have had a lot of issue with because obviously I, as you are, am supportive of Ukrainian people's attempts to – so far quite successful attempts, to stop Russia from taking over their homes. But one of the things that's happened alongside this is a kind of lionization

of a specific kind of Turkish drone, the Bayraktar, which was particularly effective in the opening stages of the war. And military equipment wonks can argue as to whether that was due to Russian kind of tactical failures and operational failures or whether it was due to new realities about how drones function. But one of the things that was ignored in all of this kind of fetishization of this drone and people raising money to buy more of them is that the drones were really combat tested for the first time, massacring armenians yeah um yeah and it's i try not to get too mad when i see stuff like that because i understand why the ukrainians are happy of course and like of course yeah i should point out unequivocally i support ukraine's

fight for independence just like i wish people um supported ours um and and the And the wars effectively have the same kind of propaganda angle. Obviously, before Russia invaded Ukraine, they were talking about denazification or demilitarization. When you look at their speeches and their rhetoric, it's that they believe that Ukraine does not have the right to exist

and that Ukrainians are either Russian or they also should not exist. And that's effectively what we're looking at too. This is why Armenians constantly compare what is happening now to 1915. Azerbaijan continuously says they want Artsakh or Nagorno-Karabakh. They want it back, but that's not what they're attacking right now. If you look at the rhetoric of Aliyev and his government going all the way back to the 90s, when his dad was in charge and a few other people,

their ideology is that Armenia is not a real state. They have claims over our capital Yerevan. They have claims over the south where they're invading right now. They have claims over the south where they're invading right now. And everywhere those soldiers go, they wipe out the local population of Armenians. There are no Armenian survivors in Hadrut or Shushi or any of these other places they took in 2020. They do not exist. And ever since then, they've been purposely going through and destroying any evidence that armenians ever live there which is ridiculous armenians have been living in these places since before rome was fucking established

yeah um i mean and this is obviously we're talking about the armenian genocide which um occurred during kind of the and concurrent to the kind of late stages of World War I and was unrecognized by the United States until, what was that now, two years ago, Joe? Yeah, something like that. He finally became the first president, first U.S. president to recognize it. And this is because we've mentioned Turkey a couple of times. There's a couple of reasons for this, but most of them boil down to not wanting to piss off the Turkish government.

this, but most of them boil down to not wanting to piss off the Turkish government. The Turkish government has strong attitudes that essentially everybody in Anatolia is Turkish and all this has been, right? There were no Greeks, there were no Kurds, there were no Armenians. And this has led to, I mean, it's led to ethnic cleansings and genocides against the Armenians and against the Kurds. One of the things that was being done in Rojava that I found so compelling was an attempt to educate, an attempt by the Kurds there to educate people who were joining the YPG about Kurdish complicity in the genocide against Armenia, because they recognized themselves as victims of the same thing, you know, starting, I think, you know, all of the, it's hard to say starting in,

right, because we're trying to talk about concurrent conflicts, but they all go back, everything's going back quite a while. You mentioned Aliyev a little bit ago, and I don't want to talk about him. We're talking about Ilham Aliyev, who's the current president of Azerbaijan, the fourth, and of course, the son of the former leader, which is always a recipe for a good functional democracy. Also, his wife is vice president. Yeah, and his wife is vice president, which is nice. It's just like House of Cards.

Yeah, he's the Kevin Spacey. His attitude and rhetoric towards Armenians in general is eliminationist at best. Yeah. is eliminationists at best. Yeah. Like, he's, I mean, the countries put out stamps that show Armenia being fumigated, like during the height of the pandemic, which, like, as a genocide scholar,

generally when I see a picture of a place being gassed, I get suspicious. They've talked about how it was a good thing that in the 90s Armenians were driven from Baku and the Baku pogroms and a few other places. I mean, weren't there

literally some of those trophies at arms shows and stuff? Like pieces of captured equipment with blood on it and stuff. Yeah, and they also had, honestly, one of the weirdest, like, it blood on it and stuff. Yeah. And they also had, um, honestly, one of the weirdest, like it's incredibly offensive and racist. Uh,

the, um, these, um, characters of our, of Armenian soldiers who like at the same time, they're like racist towards Armenians, but also vaguely anti-Semitic.

Like they looked like, uh, a character of a Jewish person that come out of their sturmur uh with like yeah you know and i understand how stereotypically people think uh armenians look in like this racist art where we have you know big hooked noses and big eyebrows and things like that which admittedly i know i meet both of those personally but that's besides the point uh like if you look at the pictures and they were taken down because like even like israel was like oh that's a bit much and like they helped that happen um but like

also to talk you can't talk about azerbaijan without talking about turkey because they have this ideology that's like two people one state they they do believe in like pan-terranism especially erdogan um i mean he's been ever ever since he's gone like full fascist that's something he's been hammering the drum on and like this is an extension of that he's effectively a neo-ottomanist he wants to reunite the empire which is fucking insane but also has real life things you know but also to bring us you know to the conflict that Americans are more focusing on, as we've talked about before, this is another similarity between what Russia is doing in Ukraine and what Azerbaijan and Turkey are doing in Armenia. to bring back some sort of lost imperial splendor, right? And are utilizing kind of the tactics of genocide in order to try to make that happen. Yeah, I think for Turkey, it's a lot of this lost splendor,

especially as their economy shits itself from mismanagement. And I think for Azerbaijan, it's the other way around. In the 90s, when we fought the first Karabakh War, Armenia won. I mean, it wasn't from being militarily superior or having more money. It had to do with two largely unorganized forces in the fallout of the Soviet Union. And Armenia ended up winning. And ever since then, that loss has been something of uh like uh national it's like it was kind of like the national mythos of azerbaijan because before then

azerbaijan as a national identity simply didn't exist it's relatively new um and that loss in that war became the defining moment that's where um the loss to Armenia was internalized. And it became school curriculum that Armenians were at fault for everything. We're subhuman. We've been compared to cockroaches. For instance, if you have, say, my last name, you cannot legally enter the country of Azerbaijan. You cannot enter that country with an Armenian last name. Rac racism and fascism is state doctrine there. So when, you know, their oil production kicked back up from after the war damages and after the fallout of the Soviet Union, on top of military reforms that have been lasting for 30 years, they're the ones on the upswing now, not Turkey, in my opinion. And it also helps they're fighting someone like Armenia,

which, you know, Armenians that we have military history and everything but we have no fucking money we have no natural resources we have no allies we have no one's gonna airdrop a pallet of fucking high mars and yerevan like nobody's coming to help us we have ak's that fought in the first war uh we have bmp ones that have probably seen more combat than most people who are still alive that's a an armored personnel carrier essentially we we have nothing um i'm not going to speak about the capabilities of the armenian military but like you can imagine what a small landlocked country with a small population not a lot of money can feel it's not a lot um yeah it it's not a lot and this kind of gets us to another topic that has to be broached with

is which is kind of talking about the relationship of russia to all this because one of the things that's very frustrating about this conflict is that americans particularly tend to want things very simply so you hear you've got a russian client state uh which is how it's not what armenia is i'm not saying that joe obviously but is is, it's not what Armenia is, I'm not saying that, Joe, obviously, but is how it's easy to kind of, especially like kind of in the boil out, sort of break things out as, it's like, okay, you've got this state backed by Russia, and then you've got this other state fighting it that's backed by Turkey. Well, Turkey's part of NATO, they're part of, you know, the fight against Russia, so

they must be the good guys. And none of that's accurate. Absolutely not. But I think it's important to explain why. the good guys and none of that's accurate absolutely but i think it's i think it's important to explain why so i mean it's it's really hard to explain armenian russia's relationship other than imperialism um obviously armenia has been conquered by countless countries throughout our fucking long history but the most recent one being the soviet union uh which we did not join willingly um and then after the fall of the soviet, the Russian Federation. We're solidly within Russia's sphere of influence

and by no active choice of ours. We're members of the CTSO. We're members of the Eurasian Economic Union and neither of those were by choice. We were strong-armed into it because there's nothing else. There's no other option. And as far as it goes,

this is like the brotherly relationship or this client state. It would be exactly like someone blaming Ukraine for what happened in Maidan or blaming Ukraine for what happened in 2014 or what happened now, because they're trying to get away from that. I mean, we can't, we don't have the resources to do it. We don't have the resources to do it. Just for an example of how Armenia plays tightropes this shit, never once have we voted in favor of Russia during this war.

Our representatives to the UN, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, our prime minister is solidly neutral because that's the best he can do. He's either voted against, he's abstained, he's never voted for to support Russia during this war at all. Now, obviously, back in 2014, there was a different Armenia. We had a pro-EU movement here that was quite strong. This is before I lived here, of course, that voted to declare our intentions to want to join the EU. I believe this is under President Serge Sargissian.

And it passed overwhelmingly in the popular vote because unlike the people invading us, we are a free and fair democracy with the freedom of speech and expression and everything else that people like to claim they want to defend, but they don't. And after a five-minute meeting with Putin, it was gone. There was no more referendum, and we decided not to join the EU anymore. By we, I mean the president. After that, we had our Velvet Revolution in 2018, which got rid of him

and distanced ourselves from Russia as much as we realistically could. So in 2014, I believe, for instance, Armenia kind of slightly supported Russia when it came to annexing Crimea. And now you can kind of see why the president was a fucking stooge. That's not the case anymore. We now have a parliamentary system. And as much as I'm not the biggest fan of Prime Minister Pashinyan, he's not that guy. And as much as I'm not the biggest fan of Prime Minister Pashinyan, he's not that guy. That's not like the 2014 to 2020 in Armenia is a different fucking world. And I know, like you said, people really like to simplify these things. They want this to be a team sport.

They want this to be NATO versus Russia and people like Belarus or whoever else. But there's a pretty big fucking difference here we have not actively supported this war there has been anti-war protests outside my fucking window since the war has started you ukrainians have flooded here by the thousands and they have met nothing but armenians who have welcomed them with open arms russians have come too and we're not the biggest fans of them but what can you do about it um you know like yeah we're solidly neutral in this and it's one of the things that fucking and i mean granted neutral government wise people wise absolutely we're not neutral um and one of the things that

pisses me off the most is that people can see the realities of the war in ukraine where they can see right through russian propaganda when it's like demilitarization denazification whatever and they can see on its face that's complete and utter bullshit but like when because you know ukraine is fighting for their sovereignty their independence and the right to exist that we all have um and when it comes to us, we don't get that. Like, oh, well, we're calling for both sides to deescalate

and maybe Armenia shouldn't have fucking started this. We haven't done anything. It was fucking midnight last night and the South started being bombed. What the fuck is there to be deescalated? You can't deescalate self-defense.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over

the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep

into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you have what is a really uncomfortable situation and one that a lot of people don't like talking about the reality of, because essentially when you have a country like Azerbaijan that is insisting on repeatedly violating the territory of its neighbor, and that has proven

not just a willingness but an eagerness to engage in acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, you have two options for dealing with that other than let them do it, right? Option one is send in peacekeepers to stop the aggression. Now, Russia has troops that were called peacekeepers in the area. You know, there's you could debate prior to the invasion of Ukraine how good they were at that job, but they certainly are not capable of doing it now. So then the question is, OK, who else who what who else's peacekeepers are going to come in? So then the question is, okay, who else's peacekeepers are going to come in, right? And if that's not a realistic solution and you don't want to let Azerbaijan just do a genocide, then what you do is you give them weapons. Armenia weapons, not Azerbaijan. People are already doing that part, unfortunately.

The U.S. and NATO included. Yeah, indeed. Indeed. And again, there's this, we're all kind of, in terms of like the discourse around this in the United States, living in the shadow of the war on terror, in which an irresponsible quantity of weapons were handed out to an irresponsible variety of groups. And many of them went to bad, ins in bad places. The reality is that, you know, we're sitting on a fucking stockpile of weapons here in the United States as tall as the sky, and handing over a tiny percent of that, when people talk about like, we're giving this much aid to Ukraine, we're not spending that much cash straight on aid to Ukraine, we're picking up shit we have in mothballs, and we're handing it to them, because we've spent all of our treasure on a pile of guns larger than you can conceive of in

terms of its actual size and weight um and i don't know like when when i think about what is to be fucking done here realistically um i would like for armenia to have access to javelins and and some fucking stingers i mean even like one of the things that pisses me off is like you said, there's two options here. You do nothing and you're complicit in a genocide. That's what this is. It's like being silent in 1945. It's being silent

in 1915. It's being silent in Rwanda. We were silent during most of those things and we saw how they all ended. We sure were. There's only one way this fucking ends if we don't get guns. And that's with a lot of dead Armenians. By supporting Azerbaijan or sitting out, that is what you explicitly support is thousands and thousands of dead civilians. Like that's the only way this ends.

way this ends. And it is, again, and I hate that we keep going back to Ukraine, but it's relevant because it's the conflict that people are actually focusing on. The people who are counter on anti-side providing weapons to the Ukrainian military make claims about corruption, which they could also make about the Armenian government. Sure. And claims about, you know, arms trafficking and all that stuff. But so far, and Ukraine, by the way, is a country with a deeper history of corruption. Significantly. The Armenian government, even. For all of its faults, the Armenian government is less corrupt than Ukraine's. Yeah.

Yeah. You haven't seen a ton of that happening. What you have seen is the weapons that have been handed to them blowing up invaders' tanks and aircraft. And the sheer quantity that has been destroyed is evidence that that weaponry has been used pretty responsibly. And when you are talking about a group of people facing annihilation, I'm simply not worried that they're going to sell their stingers to fucking ISIS or wherever. Right. Who the fuck are we going to sell them to? We have Turkey on one side and Azerbaijan on the other. Are we going to sell them to Georgia? That's actually fine.

Like, you know, and that's... I don't know. I think people are fucking gutless. You saw this happen in January before the war in Ukraine started when people were like, oh, weapons are only going to make it worse. No, they're fucking not. You know what's worse than an armed population defending itself?

It's an unarmed one being murdered anyway. And in case nobody paid attention, because they probably didn't, you can go back and look at the video footage of what happens to unarmed Armenians in 2020. And it's the same fucking shit ISIS did to Yazidis. It's the same fucking shit they did to Kurds. And it's the same fucking shit ISIS did to Yazidis. It's the same fucking shit they did to Kurds. And it's the same fucking shit that will happen again

if we do not get what we need to defend ourselves. And I don't give a fuck if you don't like Russia. I don't fucking like Russia either. But it's the reality that we live in. If you are fucking intelligent enough to realize the diplomacy and geopolitics of how Ukraine ended up in the war that they're in now, you should understand why we are in the situation that we are in too. You cannot realistically believe we deserve what is happening unless you also believe Ukraine deserves what's happening to them.

It's impossible. I don't know. This is obviously – how could this not be, like, emotional? And it is, just feeling like... I can't... And it must be so much worse, obviously, just being there, but, like, this feeling of a fucking train coming at you,

and people aren't going to do shit because there's this fucking problem with optics. And it's more complicated when we talk about it. When I talk about optics, I guess we're talking about discourse. When it comes about why politically the United States is unlikely to do anything like what we've suggested, it's more complicated than that. And a decent amount of it comes down to the fact that we have, what is it, 13 nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey right now. Yep, and Incirlik, which is land stolen from Armenians from the genocide. Yep, great stuff, America.

Well done. We really knocked it out of the park. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on

the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone

in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept,

but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head

and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jacquie Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics

and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts. What is it that people can do to help outside of trying to become informed about the conflict,

which I think we can talk about some sources at the end of this. Are there places, Red Cross-style things that people can donate to to help to the extent that that kind of thing is helpful? Yeah, I mean, generally, crowdfunding for weapons systems is illegal unless you're Ukraine nowadays.

Yeah, I'm thinking more about medical aid. The Armenian Red Cross is always a good option. They helped a lot in 2020. They still help now. We still have a ton of internally displaced people. There's also the Hindraman Fund, which directly funds wounded servicemen because we really don't have a va exactly here um there's uh quite a few other ones but the the armenian red cross

is of course uh the most reliable and easy to donate if you're in the west for sure you don't have to navigate any confusing armenian language websites because it's it's hard and armenia isn't great at the internet so like most of them don't have translations um yeah but you know it's yeah i understand i'm a little bit more emotional than most people probably hear me on podcasts but like um i'm mad how could you not i'm mad i'm fucking frustrated. I don't know how much longer people can let this kind of thing happen. I hope the EU's gas this winter is fucking worth it, because this is what you got. This is what that deal got us.

So I hope you're nice and warm in the fucking winter, because we probably won't have power, or we'll have more dead or whatever but real glad you pivoted away from russian gas and signed a deal fucking azhubaijan you spineless fucks and it's uh i mean it goes it's the spinelessness is deeper than that right because the reason why the fucking gas crunch that led to that deal happened in the first place was among a number of things, years of seeding to Russian government aggression in places like Georgia and in places like Ukraine.

And, and you've got that, you know, here you have the invasion by Azerbaijan almost like two years ago now. And then there was another one in 2016 before that. And, and no pushback, right?

And when you, this, this is, the thing is, And then there's another one in 2016 before that. And no pushback, right? None, zero. The thing is, and this is not a popular kind of thing to go to talk about on the left, but it's true. If you want to pay attention to why that whole World War II situation got so goddamn bad, a big part of it is there not being any kind of effective rules-based international order to stop bigger countries or at least more aggressive ones from fucking with their neighbors and one of the things we were supposed to have learned from that war is that you don't let people do that it's bad yeah and then we did a bunch of it right that when a motherfucker shows up yeah yeah like it shouldn't be that hard tix i don't care what your politics is i mean everybody knows that we're both very left wing but when someone comes and continuously fucks with you the only way to make them stop is by hitting them in the goddamn face until they realize it's

not a good idea like and this i don't care like diplomacy doesn't work when one side only wants you dead you can't debate my right to live or my neighbor's right to live or these kids right to live wherever they're fucking schools bombed right now you there's no debate to be had you have to hit them until they fucking stop there's like i'm sorry there's not going to be any de-escalation of fucking genocide like that's not how this works people tend to get this in the immediate sense when you're talking about you know some fucking bigot in front of you. Everybody loves cheering on a video of some guy dropping a racial slur and getting knocked to the ground. Obviously, those are a lot of fun.

Right, those are great. is that if you let assholes, the actual moral of like why it's important to punch Nazis in the face when they're doing Nazi shit, is that if you just let them do Nazi shit and you try to like appease them and calm them down, you'll often calm them down here and there and they'll like back off, but they'll have gotten a little bit more. They'll have gotten a little bit of what they want. They'll have gotten a little bit further and they just keep making shit worse until somebody actually does fucking drop them. And it's the same with, you know, and again, I, we just talked about what the great lesson of World War II should have been. And the thing that actually happened is the generation that took power in the United States and in a lot of other

Western countries after that, not exclusively the West, but I think we're talking about our people here, immediately went and fucked around and carried out acts of aggression all over the world. But that doesn't mean the basic lesson is bad. The lesson is don't let people, we should not have been allowed to do that, but we shouldn't, like, that should not be a thing that the world accepts. Like, you can't just sit back and be like oh well that country's gonna go do a genocide now but it's far away so there's nothing to be done um other than continue

to buy the oil of the people doing the genocide and thereby fund the genocide right like it's it's fucking unconscionable man like and even if you want to look at this as like the west also fucked around during the cold war which like yeah, yeah, you know, it's not sure everybody did. You know, it stopped them around. They didn't fuck around so much in Southeast Asia after the US got punched in the fucking face in Vietnam. Did they? That's right. Yeah.

Like it was a lot less fucking. It shouldn't be this fucking complicated. I don't I don't care what political ideology you subscribe to. Like it's self-defense. Like it's collective defense collective mutual self-defense. When we need help, you give us fucking help. Like,

yeah, it shouldn't be that fucking hard. I mean, to be fair for, for some people will never truly matter, um, because they don't see countries like Armenia or countries like Azerbaijan as having agency to do their own things and want their own things.

And if that is you, I hope to see your house on CNN one day. But like, you know, that does there should be like that sounds like like an old Russian curse, like may your house be on CNN. I believe it's from the Balkans. Yeah. Yeah. But I can imagine. Yeah. Some little old lady saying that to you.. We have the right to freedom as much as anyone else. And not only that, we've achieved it. Armenia is a moderately progressive place. I mean, we're still working on some things. We have the freest democracy in the region.

We have great standard of living for most people. And it is only getting better. This is a place that has freer and fairer elections and virtually anyone else over here to include russia to include fucking ukraine to include turkey to include all these places that people insist are worth defending i'm just curious why we're not like why are like why are armenians less than what did we ever fucking do to deserve this it's it's incredibly depressing um and maybe we're not the right shade of white i don't i don't fucking know anymore man like it's yeah it's it's really weird to me um even like internationally

uh geopolitically you know the secretary, Blinken, urged both sides to de-escalate. Suck my fucking dick. Like, what are we de-escalating? They're invading us. I would like to ask Al-Qaeda,

I would like to ask How do you de-escalate that? I would really like to ask the city of New York to de-escalate when planes flew into the World Trade Center. Like,

get the fuck out of here. Like, how do you de-escalate this? They're bombing cities. Like's it's maddening um and it's not gonna end it's not gonna end until someone fucking ends it we can't we we just had a generationally destroying war two years ago that we've not recovered from we have an entire society that's dealing with various different forms of ptsd um we don't have the the institutions to take care of all of the victims from two years ago um we didn't get any help then either and we're not gonna get any help now i uh

yeah i you know i i think again there's this there's this tendency towards isolationism in the left brought on by the Iraq War. But none of this – if nothing is done, if there's no international response to this, and if the Azeris aren't stopped by autocathonic resistance, then it won't stop with Armenia, because violence of this sort never does. There's a book, I'm interested in your thoughts on it actually, Joe, but I found it quite illuminating a number of years ago, An Inconvenient Genocide by Adam Hochschild, which is about the Armenian genocide and its influence on Hitler, making the point that even though Hitler never was anywhere close to Armenia, neither were any fucking German troops, for that matter, particularly close. Oh, they sure were. Imperial German troops were very much in charge of a lot of different death squads. It's a weird story. I was speaking Hitler's Germany. Yeah, of course. I apologize. I meant the Wehrmacht.

To be fair, they tried. Yeah. But the point that Hochschild was making was that Hitler was not engaged in the Armenian genocide, but he paid attention to it. away with it yeah um and and got to take that let take land that as you pointed out is currently occupied by some u.s nuclear warheads um was was part of what emboldened him to do not just the holocaust but everything he did in europe and there was a line specifically in reference to the holocaust from hitler i believe it was during his table talk that was like essentially he was saying well of course we'll get away with it nobody remembers armenians anymore yeah it's literally on the wall of our genocide museum here.

Did anyone do anything to Turkey? Yeah, exactly. And that's the fucking thing. It goes back to 2020. Everybody was saying... I understand the politics behind Artsakh are messy for people who are not from this region. I don't have enough time to go into them.

The majority Armenian population that was given to Azerbaijan by the Soviet Union with absolutely no process. And they attempted to vote to join Armenia while we were still in the Soviet Union, which is well within the rights, according to the Soviet Union's constitution, if such rights functionally existed, which they did not. And that's what started the first war. But in 2020, every war has been about that ever since, effectively, at least politically on its surface,

because internationally is recognized as part of Azerbaijan because they go off old Soviet maps for fucking reasons. I don't know. I mean, we could talk about Sykes-Picot here too. Exactly.

But like, you know, in in 2020 people were saying that like oh if this will all end if armenia simply gives up artsakh which we don't claim artsakh nobody i mean some some people do the government does not um we don't recognize it as an independent country either, which they themselves have declared themselves. It's messy, I understand. But it's not within the Republic of Armenia to negotiate the non-existence of the Republic of Artsakh. That is their right to self-determination. That is politically what the government believes. Now, they were saying,

well, now that these areas have been taken over by Azerbaijan, we can finally move towards peace. There was fucking peace talks a week ago. Prime Minister Pauschenyan met with Aliyev, I believe in Belgium. I'm not entirely sure. They literally met a week ago. Maybe it was two weeks ago. It was very recent.

But the thing is, is every time this peace process starts again, this happens. Because it's not about Arsakh. It's not about Nagorno- starts again this happens because it's not about arsah it's not about nagano karla it's not about any of these it's it's about our right our fundamental right to exist they do not believe in it like it's not just like it wasn't about um jews uh being involved in business it wasn't about jews no marrying germans it was about their fundamental right to exist. Like, it's all it is. The same could be said for Palestinians. This isn't about

Palestinians. Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of which... Fucking Israelis are just placing Armenians in Palestine as well. Like, it's not about these small little nibbles that they're taking. It's not about the freedom of movement. It's not about the freedom of movement.

It's not about your right to date someone, which came up recently. They made some Israeli law against that. You have to declare your romantic intentions before you go into the West Bank or whatever. It's not about those things. Those are means to men. Maybe that'll make it easier to get the American leftists on this one. Right.

No, no, guys, Israel's the bad guys here. We can do this. Fuck, even Noam Chomsky wouldn't deny this genocide. Yeah. Actually, that's not entirely true. He probably would. But the thing is, is it's not about these small nibbles. It's not about your right to do X or your right to do Y.

It's not about Art Socks' right to freedom. It's they don't believe you should exist. And they will take and take and take and take until you're fucking powerless and they can wipe you out that is their goal i mean you can see that in palestine you can see that in arsakh you can see that increasingly in armenia you can see that's what russia's goal was in ukraine it was russia's goal in georgia like it's how imperialism fucking works it doesn't have to have an american flag or a british flag over it for that to be what it's called it's genocidal imperialism and like if you're too dumb to fucking see that i don't know what

else to tell you like i don't know how else these do you need me to draw in fucking crayon like yeah and i i think we're both getting angry here primarily at groups of people who i don't believe are the the primary listeners that will have on this not necessarily no but i but i but i get it like no it's it's this constant fucking thing you have whenever there's a war anywhere and you are like well what is the solution well the people who are the victims need to have access to weapons. Right. Yeah.

And if you're saying, which I agree with, sending in U.S. or whatever troops to X country usually doesn't work out, then what is the option? Give them fucking weapons. Yeah. And honestly, like, what would make the situation worse if we had American soldiers here? Yeah, I mean, I just don't think that's a thing that logistically the

US military can do. Well, it would never happen. There's not even a base here. But like, there's some situations where, yes, military assistance could make a situation worse. Bad things will happen. You cannot deploy large amounts of weapons or soldiers

to a specific area without there being some kind of negative effects however you have to realistically weigh the good and the bad yeah the the the world military the allies bombed germany flat but they stopped the fucking holocaust yeah yeah we blew up a fair amount of people in the 90s we stopped the genocide like we blew up the shit out of isis and there was also some civilian casualties which fucking suck quite a few you stopped the aziti genocide with the assistance of the pkk and the ypg and the ypj like you cannot unleash military power without the acceptance that innocent people are going to die. The way that you weigh that is more fucking people are going to die if you don't.

That's I think the key of it and probably the point to close on is that it's not a decision. Do we do we bring violence to this situation or not? The question is. how how lopsided will the violence be right the violence be uh one state armed by its allies massacring uh an under you know equipped military and then civilians until there's no one left of the people who inhabited that area um or will those people have the equipment to defend themselves? Like that, that's the question.

There's no, there's no, the situation, the only way for the situation to not be violent is for Azerbaijan to not do what they're doing right now. Right. And Hey, if,

if some sort of fucking diplomatic pressure works, I will, I will be unbelievably psyched to eat both of our words in this if the if fucking blinken manages to i don't i don't yeah i have no idea like how how you actually have an impact here but that would be lovely i just don't think it's likely yeah there's i mean don't get me wrong there's a time for diplomacy and that time ends when troops attempt to cross the border or they start cluster bombing our cities. There's a time for diplomacy and you can do two

things at once. And to be completely clear, I'm not calling for the 101st to fucking land in Yurovan or whatever. I don't want the American military to come here. We'll take care of ourselves, but we need the tools to do so. And the fact remains is you can be

vehemently against war i know i am i fought them they fucking suck i do not want war to happen to anybody but when they when it comes talking's over or at least it hits the back burner like there's negotiations going on in ukraine and russia that we don't hear about but at the same time ukraine knows they have to continue doing violence in the meantime like you can't you can't just like whoa guys let's just hit the brakes and let's like have a fucking peace conference in belgium or whatever like suny is being bombed goris is being bought like armenians are dying like there's no words that will fix that but we'll fix it as fucking artillery systems, high Mars,

GPS guided weapons, fucking body armor. We don't even have first aid kits. Like there's, there's things that we need that can happen in addition to political pressure because political pressure is great if we ever have it, but there needs to be something in the meantime. Like the director of doctors without borders one time said um

something that was incredibly controversial when he said it because he's a doctor and he runs you know a charity he said you can't stop a genocide with doctors and he meant that you need to give people fucking weapons because you know there's like like we already said and then i'll promise i'll stop talking um there's two ways that this ends. We defend ourselves and we survive, or you sit by and you do nothing, and there's thousands of more graves full of Armenians by the end of this. That's it.

I mean, once upon a time, the world said never again, and that shit has had a big fucking asterisk next to it ever since. And people need to fucking prove that words actually mean things. If you want to defend democracies and shit like you do in Ukraine, I have a fucking democracy for you to defend. And we need weapons.

Yeah, I think that's as good a note as any to end on. Joe Kasabian, host of Lions Led by Donkeys, author of The Hooligans of Kandahar. You've got other, a bunch of other books that have come out now. Yeah, I have the Victory of Death series out if you enjoy military sci-fi. And I have another one coming out in October called The Frontier Corps. You can pre-order it now.

If you look on my Twitter, you can find a link to pre-order it. It's free if you have Kind kindle unlimited so you know if for the ebook um so yeah um also if you don't feel like giving me money that's that's great to donate to the armenian red cross they need it more than i do yeah um all right everybody that's the episode. Bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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