Jocko Podcast - 280: BURN. DEMOLISH. KILL. The Horrors of The Armenian Genocide

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

0:00:00 - Opening.0:07:30 - Armenian Golgotha2:22:49 - Final thoughts.2:26:19 - How to stay on THE PATH.2:47:40 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Revenge, revenge, revenge. Let us kill. Let us cut to pieces. Let us swim in blood up to our knees. Revenge, revenge, revenge. Let us wipe the stain from our clothes. That is a song taught to Turkish schoolchildren, as reported by the U.S. consulate in February of 1915.

This is Jocko podcast number 280 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also joining us tonight is Daryl Cooper. Good evening. And the blood spread step by step. From Ankara to distant cities, towns, and villages. At the end of August 1915, a girl barely 13 years old told me of the following to which she had been an eyewitness and which she only by some

miracle had survived in mid-August all Armenian males from 12 to 80 were arrested taken out of town and killed by unheard-of tortures next it was the turn of the girls and women on August 20th all the Armenian women girls and small boys were taken out into more than 70 carriages and brought to a valley by a bridge an hour and a half away following these carriages from the town was an armed mob of Turks, each of whom on the way chose a sheep or lamb to slaughter. When they reached the area under the bridge, police and soldiers, having joined the savage mob set upon these poor defenseless women, mothers, brides, virgins, and children. Just as spring trees are cut down with bill-hooked hedge knives, the bloodthirsty mob attacked this group more than 400 with axes, hatchets, shovels, and pitchforks, hacking off their appendages, noses, ears, legs, arms, fingers, shoulders.

They dashed the little children against the rocks before their eyes of their mothers while shouting Allah. Allah. The screams of the mothers and virgins and little children echoed across the valley in the surrounding rocky hills and caves. the children screamed, May rig, May rig. Mother, mother, help us please. But the mob, indifferent, continued to rip apart the bodies so that even the stones cried out. Finally, after four to five hours of carnage and plunder,

night's black blanket covered this scene of blood, which would stir the envy of wild animals. With the fall of night, the Turkish mob, police and police soldiers returned to town with their bundles of loot, whatever they had left. Hyenas, wolves, jackals, and other scavengers

came off to finish. The precipices of the valley were strewn with corpses naked or half-naked. It was a scene beyond all human imagination. Now and then in the darkness of the night the moans and groans of the badly wounded and the raspy drone of those giving up the ghost could be heard. After midnight in the thick darkness a refreshing dew began to fall.

And behold, a slightly wounded, numb little girl, invigorated by the dew, woke up. Half alive she began to rove in search of her mother and two sisters. In vain she called them by name, but alas they were gone to eternal sleep. At last she found their crushed bodies, which had fallen and one beside the other. In shock, the girl began to shake and sob uncontrollably, her teeth chattering. She did not move from that spot until morning, as if the bodies of her mother and her older sisters compelled her to stay there.

At dawn, a few of the Kurdish cow herders crossing the bridge in the vicinity of this carnage, saw one of the corpses moving in the distance. They approached her, took pity on her, and brought her home to their father's care. being an anti-Turk Muslim Kurdish he secretly turned her over to his longtime friend it was with the arrival of this little girl in the town where we were staying that for the first time we became aware of the extent of the killing being carried out around us without a sound or whisper and that is an excerpt from a book called Armenian Golgotha by a man named Gregoros Balakian.

And Gregoros was born in 1875 in Toquat, part of the Ottoman Empire, educated in Germany, eventually became a celibate priest in the Armenian Apostolic Church. And he was one of the countless Armenians. who suffered through the Armenian genocide, though he was one of the lucky ones that actually survived, and he wrote a book about his experiences. And like I said, the book is called Armenian Golgotha. And if you don't know what Golgotha is, Golgotha is the name of the hill where Jesus was crucified.

And this event is where the Armenians as a people were crucified. and where as individuals for many a mere crucifixion would have been merciful. But before we jump into more of the book, I wanted to go into some of the background since this event is not as well known as some other genocides. So, Darrell, let's talk about how we got here. And what are some of the similarities and differences about what happened to the Armenians? and what has happened to some other persecuted groups in the past. What's the background here?

There's some people that called the 20th century, the century of genocide. You look all throughout history and there's no shortage of mass killing of human beings by other human beings. In fact, if you go all the way back, back to like our tribal times, warfare by genocide was pretty typical. You had nomadic tribes. They didn't have prisons. They didn't have jails. They didn't have POW camps or anything like that. If you conquered another tribe, their men were going to be a problem.

And you didn't have anywhere to keep them. And so the standard operating procedure was you just took them out, took the women that were willing to sort of, I guess, get over it back to your tribe with you, raise the children as your own. Almost like social mammals, you know, like lions. You know, somebody comes in, kills the male lion, and now takes over the pride. as time developed, you started to get a sort of systematic civilized level of mass killing at scale that had never been possible in tribal times that you could only really, you could only manage with the same sort of administration and organization that allowed you to do things like build pyramids and all the great wonders of civilization, right?

And when you get up to the modern times, you get something that's even a little bit more, well, a little bit different than that. If we think back to say the Romans and what they did to Carthage, Carthage had been giving Rome problems. Hannibal had been rampaging around the Italian peninsula, defeating their armies. And when they finally got the drop on the Carthaginians, they said, salt the earth. We're not dealing with this anymore. Eliminate that threat for good. And they did. When Caesar went up to Gaul, Rome had been sacked by Gaul before.

a traumatic event in Roman history. And so when Caesar went up there and ended that threat thoroughly, you could think of it in a similar way. It was attached to conquest. And that's what you kind of saw throughout history. When you get up to the 20th century, you see something in a way that's different and much darker, I think, which is you have established, firmly established states, annihilating internal enemies according to the state, attacking captive populations. over which they have complete power and control. You're not going in and eliminating a threat that exists over the horizon, making sure that it never returns.

You know, you're going into a prison where everybody's kept in a cell and one by one these unarmed people. You're simply murdering all of these people over whom you have complete power. When you think of what happened to the Armenians, when you think of what happened to the Ukrainians under Stalin, to the Jews under Hitler, these are the kinds of things you see. disarmed captive population that is not a threat. And there's no way out.

And that's really the key characteristic of these events, is if you go to those people, and you saw this, you saw this with the Jews in Germany, you saw this with the Ukrainians, you saw this with the Armenians, absolutely at the beginning of the First World War, is a huge part of the population, including the leadership,

is really actively asking the question, what can we do? What can we do? Like, what is it? At the beginning of the First World War, the Armenians were flying Turkish flags. Tens of thousands of them went right away and joined the Turkish military because they knew. They had a history with the Turks. They'd had problems before. 20 years back, we'll talk about in a second, 300,000 or so of them got massacred.

And they knew in the First World War, detention was going to be high and the stress was going to be high. So what can we do to show our loyalty to the empire to show that we're down for the cause? and the answer is there's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do. You're all going to be wiped out, and there's nothing you can do. And it's the ultimate horror movie to have your state turn on you like that. You know, and it's interesting that you say that the Armenian genocide isn't that well known, which is very, very true.

Because it really is kind of the archetypal act of genocide in the 20th century. It was really like the first one early in the century that set the tone for all of the ones that came afterwards. And it was one of the most thorough and complete and systematic and intentional genocides that we have any record of. That erasure of genocide is something that you also see throughout history. I mean, how many countless peoples have been genocided throughout history that we don't even know their names? We'll never know their names. and maybe we even celebrate the history of the people who did it as a glorious civilization, and we will never know the names of the countless people that they completely wiped out.

It's something that we don't like to mention or talk about or admit, but the fact is that more often than not, if you look, historically speaking, genocide tends to work. Not only are a lot of genocides physically successful, but more often than we would really prefer the one that does it ends up getting away with it and getting the message put out to the rest of the world and people in the future who might think of doing something similar that this is an option.

In fact, when Adolf Hitler was contemplating his final solution for the Jewish question in Eastern Europe, he asked his commanding generals, who today remembers the Armenians. Because the truth was nobody did. Yeah, and it's also interesting that in World War I, there was plenty of Jews that fought for Germany. Well over 100,000, yeah.

Valiantly, by the way. Hitler's life was saved by a Jewish soldier. He received his Iron Cross from a Jewish superior officer. So as we, as we, as we push through this, let's talk about like the relationship a little bit of the Turkish people and the Armenians in terms of how do we end up here? You know, I mentioned that it is really the archetypal genocide of the 20th century. And I don't just say that because of the methods that were used.

In fact, the methods that were used in a way were kind of anachronistic and unique to the Turkish Empire. It was archetypal of the 20th century genocides because of what you just asked, because of the specific relationship between the dominant majority group and this particular Armenian minority, you know, the Turks, the Ottoman Empire is a, it's a strange thing to study when you get up to the late period in the 20th century. Because, you know, like if you ever asked yourself, like what would it have been like if like the Golden Horde, right,

or the Mongols or something had just, they had managed to establish themselves somewhere on the outskirts of Europe, and they lasted. And you get all the way up to the 20th century, and they're still there. And they have an advanced civilization now. The Genghis Khan's descendants, like, descendants, like they now have control. They have a big battle fleet. You know, they've got modern weaponry.

I mean, it's a big, glorious civilization. Constantinople, you know, when the First World War kicked off, you're talking about one of the most sophisticated, glorious cities in the world. And the Ottoman Empire gives you some idea of what it would be like if the Golden Horse. survived into the 20th century. This is, you know, they're Turkic peoples who came in as step warriors and conquered the Byzantine Empire

and took over, you know, all of North Africa, basically everything between Morocco and Persia and then down into Egypt. And these... And so what you end up in a situation like this is you end up with like a warlike people, right? That's what they are. And what they respect is war.

And being warriors. and that sort of becomes the most respected class of people. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the idea in the major Islamic empires was always that we, the majority population, the people in the commanding position of this society, we fight the wars, and everybody else, the Christian and Jewish minorities, for example,

they pay for the wars. And that's how it works. We're a warrior people. I mean, these are step warriors who came and built up a big civilization. And they kept a lot of that character, even as they went forward, even as they were wearing suits and ties and going to big security conferences and international conferences in Europe and the United States. They still had that in them.

This was a warrior people from an age where it was perfectly typical to offer your enemies the option to either unconditionally surrender or be massacred totally. There was the mode of warfare on the step when they were conquering civilizations. It's how the Ottoman Empire got to where it was. And so as you move into modernity, you have this society there that up until the early 1800s still had its entire bureaucracy, governmental bureaucracy, and most of its military, like its serious military officers, were still people who had been taken as slaves as children and brought back for that specific function. would go up to the Balkans, they would go up into the Caucasus area, because according to Islamic law, you can't enslave fellow Muslims. And so they would go into Christian areas and just go into a

village and say, we need 10 people. We need 10 male children. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. And they would do it the easy way because they knew what the hard way looked like under the Ottoman empire, and it was no prettier than it got in the 20th century. And by the time they got up to the early 1800s, this group of bureaucrats and soldiers called the, Janissaries, these were slave soldiers and bureaucrats, who more or less ran the important functions of the empire. By the time you got up to the late 17, early 1800s, they were in fact running large sections of the economy.

They held all the most important government positions, and they were getting into this kind of strange place with the ruling elites, the ruling Turkish elites, where the Turks are overall in charge, but this other group of people who are Muslim, they were born Christian children, but they were converted as children to Muslims, but that this identifiable group of people who has their own sense of themselves as an identifiable group, these Janissaries, that they have a tremendous amount of influence in power, that they're really the ones running the empire. And it got to a point where the government, the Turkish government, decided they couldn't trust these people anymore, and they locked them all in their barracks one night, and they burned them all

to death. When they felt that this small minority group was accruing too much power and middle management, where They kind of maybe probably could run the empire without the Turks if they really wanted to. Their response was to wipe all of those people out overnight. And that's what they did. And it's known in Ottoman history. It was known in Ottoman history as the auspicious event. This is like a bunch of, let's say, UFC fighters that are training hard.

They fight. They punch each other. They kick each other. They wrestle. And they're agents. and promoters are out there doing the, you know, the work that they look down upon. Hey, I'm not some promoter. I'm not some agent.

I'm a fighter. And then one day they look up and they go, wait a second, why is that guy driving a freaking a Mercedes S class? And I'm over here in a Toyota Camry. And they get together and say, we're not going to do this anymore. Yeah, that's one way to look at it. I mean, well, and so in the thing that's so interesting about it, right, is if you look at what happened to the overseas Chinese population in Indonesia and the 1960s.

If you look at what happened to the East Indian population of East Africa in the 1970s under like Idi Amin and some others, if you look at what happened to the Jews in Europe, you can go down the line. The people who were targeted are almost inevitably this similar group of people, right? If you look in Europe with the Jews for a long time, you know, we were under a feudal system, the people who were in charge, the elites in a feudal system, they own all the land. The source of wealth in society is from the land. The majority of the local European population are all peasants or maybe small artisans. But then you have this group move in.

You have the Jews move in. And the Jews have been living in cities since, you know, the Romans kicked them out of Palestine. Some of even before that. So these are people who have lived in an urban environment. They know how to engage in long-distance trade. They know how to deal in like financial alchemy. how to do all, you know, they know banking, they know law. They're all literate at a time when like 1% of your own population is literate because that's what these people do. And they don't

have their own place to live, obviously. And so they go from place to place trying to survive saying, what can we do here? We can't own land. Only the nobility owns land. That's fine. And the peasants work the land. But I'll bet you there's a lot of ways that we can help out. And they bounced around Europe, sometimes accruing too much power, too much wealth and getting run out of their territory because a king decides he doesn't want to pay his debts or something like that. But that's how they survived, right? And it was fine. They fulfilled this middleman minority role for centuries.

And it was a role that sort of needed to be filled at a time when societies were kind of building themselves up to become more complex and sophisticated and didn't have that indigenous capacity. But then you get up to, say, the 1800s, maybe late 1700s, depending on where you are. and you have all these Jews who are engaged in things like banking, law, medicine, international trade, all of these things that the nobility didn't want to do, and the peasantry wasn't capable of doing. And they're like, well, just have the Jews do it because we don't like them anyway.

They're outsiders. Have them do it. We get up to like the 1800s and 1900s. What's every mother telling their kid that they should go do? Go be a lawyer. Go be a banker. Go be a doctor. And so they were in prime position that when society started to change and the economy started to change,

They were ready. They had been doing this stuff for a long time, and they started to become very wealthy and very prominent. And when that started to happen, you got a gigantic spike in anti-Semitism. You started singing pogroms all over the place. You have this perfect storm, too, where you have like the nobility elite class who's turning against them. And you also have the peasantry that says, wait a second, these people have all this money. And it doesn't take very long for the nobility to lead the peasantry, against the whatever class we're talking about. We could be talking about the Jews.

We could be talking about the Armenians. 100%, especially since it redirects any anger they might have toward the people in charge to that layer below them, that intermediary. And they would specifically use them for that purpose. They would use these people as tax collectors. They would use them as estate managers to manage the serfs and stuff because they knew that if things got out of hand,

you know, and the peasants rise up, we can be like, yeah, you know, we knew that those Jews were trouble all along, So go ahead, go nuts. And that happened over and over again throughout European history. And so the Armenians followed a similar past. This is so after the Janissaries, right? Now we now, this is this mean we now picked up where we killed the Janissaries. Now we need someone else to kind of come in here and run this.

So it sort of worked out like that. But the Christians had always kind of been fulfilling those roles, right? The Christians in all the Islamic empires, if you go back, and the Jews as well, they're usually urban populations Armenians are a little different and that's in that respect we'll talk about in a second but they were the ones

who naturally fulfilled those roles the Turks they were the warriors you know they're not going to go open a shop yeah you know they're not doing banking and then you've got a lot of you know you got the Kurdish tribes you got a lot of these semi nomadic Arab villagers and stuff who are out there you know the Ottoman Empire is not we're not talking about like England in the 1900s or something

it's a very sophisticated and advanced society in many ways but you go like maybe 500 miles out to the east, and it's a wild, freaking west out there. You know, I mean, it is like you've got an Armenian village surrounded by Kurdish tribes that raid that village sometimes and kidnap your daughters. And, you know, you go outside the imperial core and the Ottoman Empire did not have the state capacity

to really exercise firm control over all of their lands. You know, it was a tribute empire, which is, again, reminiscent of the old step empires. Like, we're not going to come in and tell you that you've got to turn Turkish and you can't speak your language. just send your taxes and don't have any uprisings. And if you do, we'll come and you'll learn why the last 10 people found out that's a bad idea.

And that was really how it was. It was a tribute empire. And the Christians and the Jews, Christians were more numerical than the Jews. And in the Ottoman context, when I say that, we're talking mostly about Armenians in the East, Greeks in the West, and then Assyrians kind of spread out. Assyrian Christians as well. And by the time, a very similar thing, they had been engaging in these middleman roles, right? Administrative, professional, and commercial services for the empire. Stuff that the empire couldn't do on its own.

Things like most of the biggest mosques that Istanbul is famous for today were all designed by Armenians, Armenian architects. By the time you got up to the late 18, early 1900s, you've got the bureaucracy largely in the upper roles very often filled with, I shouldn't say that. And the very, very upper roles, those are, those are Ottoman rulers. But all of these sort of middle management sort of GS-14 rules, right? Those are Armenians. Those are Greeks, you know, people like that. They really relied on these people. And it was a similar thing. You get up into the dawn of the modern age. We're having bureaucratic skills, being literate and numerate, knowing how to deal with finance and trade and law and medicine, all of these things that the Christians in the Ottoman Empire were doing. That's where you needed to be if you were going to be successful. And they became extraordinarily successful in the Ottoman Empire, very, very wealthy. At one point, in fact, just before the outbreak of the First World War, the most, the wealthiest banker in Europe was an Ottoman Armenian. More wealthy than the Rothschilds even. And when you get to that point, you run into that trouble where you have this empire, where the ruling elites, the Turkish elites, are experiencing this. sense that they aren't really needed so much anymore. Now they don't feel that. They're not

going to think that consciously ever, but that's really what's going on. They're in charge now of an empire that they couldn't have really built themselves and they couldn't really run themselves. And the people who are running it, they're starting to look at very askew for a very particular reason. And that was that this is also the age of European imperialism. In one of our unraveling episodes recently we talked about the genocide of the Uighurs and you go back to the late 1800s and the Uyghurs kind of became the dominant majority in Xinjiang and that I got annihilated for my mispronunciation of that word after that episode. Well then if you got annihilated I must have got really what was I saying?

I think you said chingiang now I'm just messing with you and and and the the the Uyghurs were in the territory and they were being kind of oppressed by this dominant group there and And so the Qing Chinese said, Roger, that. And they went out and just wiped those people out. They were called the Zongars, and they don't exist anymore. And really one of the big drivers for that was, you know, we had talked about how in China, outside their borders, well, what we think of as their borders today,

they never thought about it as like a hard border back in the day. It was just that was the frontier. Pass that as the step. That's where all the barbarians live. Yeah, their word for border literally meant like frontier. Yeah, yeah. And so what they needed to do is just they need to manage the barbarians out there. it's just one big buffer zone between us and them.

Well, all of a sudden you start getting the British Empire, the French, later the Russian Empire, these other Europeans start coming around in any territory they see that's not already incorporated within the borders of a state that can actually defend it. They're snatching all that up. And so the Chinese say, well, okay, that's not just the frontier anymore. Now that's China. And anybody in it has to be Chinese because if you're anything but that, well, they're And you're a wedge that the British or whoever might be able to come up and, you know,

bargain with. Bargain with. And so when these European powers start picking away at the periphery of the Ottoman Empire and then really starting to close the walls in, these Christian Europe, obviously, and they have a Christian minority population, Greeks and Armenians and others, who have not been treated particularly well over the years as a whole. And so they start to worry that these are potential fifth columnists, that these are the people, European powers could use to start to split off more territory than they already have. So they've already got that in their heads as we roll into World War I? Is that, is that,

you know, an appropriate thing? Is that appropriate assessment? Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And actually, it existed before that. So when you go back to, you think of like, you really have to put yourself in the mindset of the people running the Ottoman Empire. And I think we can actually probably do that because we're Americans, right? And so you have to imagine these are people who, again, had the largest and most powerful empire in the world for a number of years. I mean, they drove all the way up to Vienna twice. You go look at a map of Europe, everybody out there.

And, I mean, Vienna's, it's not like there in the Balkans. It's up there in central Europe. I mean, and if they would have gotten past Vienna, I mean, you know, Germany was just broken into a bunch of little principalities at the time and they weren't standing up. Ottomans were on good terms with the French. I mean, they may have conquered like, you know, two-thirds of Europe if they hadn't been stopped by the Poles of Vienna.

And so you have this empire that's not only this, the largest most powerful empire in the world for centuries. It controls, like its capital is Constantinople, the old Roman capital. You know, it controls access to the Black Sea. It has dominance over the entire eastern Mediterranean, controls access between the east and west, you know, trade routes. and then all of a sudden, you know, starting kind of, really after that 1683 fight at Vienna that they lost,

it was just a gradual and then accelerating downhill slide from there. They lose, they start getting chipped away in North Africa. Eventually they lose all that. They lose Egypt. The Russian Empire finally starts to get its act together. It takes over all of the North Caucasus and wars there. The Russians are expanding. You know, you have Orthodox Christians in the Slavic Balkans.

The Russian Empire is pushing down there. they lose their Balkan territories over time. They lose Bulgaria. And so you have this empire that is, you know, you have to imagine being an American. And it's like, yeah, Vietnam was tough. Iraq and Afghanistan were tough. Oh, no, Mexico just invaded and took over New Mexico, Arizona,

and Southern California, and there's nothing we can do about it. And now Cuba took over Florida, and there's nothing we can do about it. Like that's lost. It's gone now. And there's this growing sense. that it's not going to reverse anytime soon, if ever, that this is like an inexorable process of collapse that's going on. And because it's being done by these European imperialists

are the ones chipping away at Christian Europe, and because of the fact that their own Christian minorities had been mistreated for centuries, there was this sort of sense of hope among some of those Christian minorities that maybe, hey, you know, we're the Armenians over here in the East. It's not great to be in Eastern and Ottoman Armenian out in the rural areas in the East. The Russian Empire, they're Orthodox Christians.

There's a bunch of Armenians that live over in the Russian Empire, and they're actually doing all right. They're not getting massacred by the tens of thousands. They're not having to pay taxes to, you know, the eight Kurdish chieftains that all live around us. And so there was some of this, you know, these people weren't organized fifth columnists or anything like that. But there was this sort of sense that things might be a little bit. it better if they weren't living under the Ottoman yoke. That wasn't completely invented. When after the 1877 war between the Russians and the Turks, they lost Bulgaria. A bunch of

Muslim refugees came out of Bulgaria and came and moved into the Ottoman Empire. They also lost a bunch of their North Caucasian territory and a bunch of Circassian Muslims and other Muslim tribes from up there had to be pushed. They fled because the Cossacks were harassing them and stuff. And so they start coming down. And a lot of them settled in this area where Armenians had traditionally lived. The whole area of southeastern Turkey today, you know, Armenia is right across that eastern border, but you go across the border, that whole area of southeastern Turkey where it's mostly Kurds today, that for many, many centuries was all Armenians for the most part. That's traditional like Armenia. And yet all of these others that

moved into this territory and they started having problems with the local Armenian population, right at this time where the Turkish government is starting to look at its Christian minorities and specifically the Armenians with a great deal of suspicion. And so you start to get this dynamic where there's multiple things at play. They don't trust the Armenian population out there and they're mistreating them, which is leading to a certain sense of resentment from those Armenians toward the government. The government doesn't have the state capacity to go out there and really like, set up shop and established order out there. You have all of these destitute new Muslim refugees,

including a lot of them are just tribes or Kurdish tribes and things, nomads who, again, they're refugees. They don't have a lot going on. And so they start robbing and raiding the Armenian settlements that are out there. And the Turkish government either lacks the will or the capacity to defend them or to go out and punish them. And so Armenian self-defense movements start to basically pop up just so they can defend themselves from these Kurdish raids and Circassian raids. Well, the Turkish government sees that. You see, they're arming up. They just killed a bunch of Muslims from that Kurdish tribe over there.

We knew it. We knew they were getting ready for rebellion. And it was just this vicious cycle that started to kick into place, to the point where by the time you get to the 1880s, 1890s, you mentioned that song at the beginning, that the Turkish school children were being taught during the First World War. There was an account I read from an American missionary that saw in a Turkish classroom talking like first, second, third grade kids.

and they're going through lessons where they've got drawings up on the board, like cartoon drawings of Armenians, including women and children participating, just hacking limbs off of Turks and, you know, raping them, killing them in just the most bloody and horrible ways. And these school children are being taught that this is who these Armenians are. This is what they want to do to you. And so this had been, by the time you get to the First World War,

this kind of thing had been going on for decades. and the Armenians didn't have, you know, it didn't come to them as a complete and total shock, a lot of them anyway, because they had seen a sort of premonition of it in the 1890s when the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, infamous in Ottoman and Armenian history, ordered a series of massacres starting in 1894 that, I mean, what can you say? It was just a free-for-all total massacre. You know, there were soldiers and gendarmes who were participating, but really it was a call on the local populations, Muslim villagers and tribes to get out there and participate, kill your Armenian neighbors.

And it was specific to the Armenians. There were some cases, in fact, and this happened as well in the First World War genocide, where there are telegrams out there and messages from the government letting them know, hey, don't mess with the Catholics, make sure that you don't mess with these others. this is about the Armenians. And they butchered maybe 200,000 people over the course of about 18 months. And another 100,000 or so died in the year or so after that from starvation, exposure and whatever.

And so this is something where they're not going into cities and rounding up 20, 30,000 people at a time. They're going village to village to village, 50 people here, 100 people here. You look at the map of the massacres in the 1894 Himidian massacres. And the whole thing is just covered with like skulls and crossbones or whatever symbol they used to say massacre site, massacre site, massacre site. It's just all of eastern Anatolia was just covered in blood. You know, the local population was basically mobilized to go out there and kill your Armenian neighbors. And that's what happened. So that's 18, late 1800s.

And now we start to get into, I mean, is the next major phase when World War I kicks off? Yeah, there's an important interlude there. Like the reason that they stopped killing them. You know, there's a book that came out recently called The 30-year genocide by Benny Morris and Drozzevi, which is two Israeli historians who looked real deeply on this and got, they probably went deeper into the records to figure out exactly moment by moment, like what happened here than anyone really has. And one of the things that they discovered is that, you know,

this was not something that just popped up in the chaos of World War I, that those massacres in the chaos of World War I, that those massacres, the 1890s, there's only one reason that they stopped, and that was that the British made them stop. There was a, you know, by this point the Ottoman Empire was having huge economic problems. The British and the French were essentially had the empire's finances and receivership. They were basically controlling the Ottoman fiscal budget, the governmental fiscal budget. They had, you know, say so over it anyway. And in 1896, this Armenian militant group, after all of these, you know, the government,

murders said we have to do something and there's nothing you can really do I mean you know you can't you're talking about it's not even David and Goliath I mean it's a flea versus Goliath they can't fight back there's nothing like that the only thing they can hope to do is get the attention of outside powers who can wield influence over the Ottoman Empire and so they say well what is it we can do to actually get the attention of these people what are they what do the British care about and so they went and they invaded the Ottoman Central Bank the bank Ottoman in Constantinople and they took a bunch of hostages

and made a bunch of demands. And they knew that there were a lot of European hostages that they would be taking and that there were a lot of European assets in that bank. And so the Sultan at the time, he's, you know, again, these are step warriors. He's a hardcore people. He said, yeah, that's nice.

Your demands, that's cool. You can throw them away. And he just surrounded the place with artillery and got ready to just blow the place to rubble. And at the same time put out an order. for everybody in Constantinople to just go out and massacre Armenians in Constantinople and that's what they did.

They rampaged through the streets, beating, killing, anybody they could find as he prepared to just blow up this bank and read at the critical moment the British sent some warships into the Dardanelles there and sent a message to the Sultan that if you blow up that bank, the next thing that's going to be destroyed is your own house.

And so they backed down, but that's the only reason those things stopped and he put an order out that the massacres are over and they came to an end. That period, though, up until you get to the First World War, most people who look at this seriously now realize that the First World War was not a reason for the Armenian genocide. It was just the opportunity for it.

This late 1890s, there's actually, you know, we can talk about what it was like. We can sort of throw some words on it, but there's probably nothing better than going back to the book that we're talking about. Armenian Golgotha Talking about some of that stuff that took place in the 1890s Going back to the book The massacre began on the morning of December 28 The governor sent word to non-Armenian Christians

To assemble in their churches and not stir out And refrain from sheltering Armenians The troops were then drawn up at the entrances To the Armenian quarter Behind them an armed Muslim mob gathers gathered while the minarets were crowded with Muslims evidently in expectation of some stirring event the Turkish women too crowded onto the roofs and slopes of the fortress which overlooked the Armenian quarter the mob was cheered on by the women who kept up the well-known peculiar throat noise used on such occasions by oriental women to discourage to encourage their braves at around noon Amuzin cried out in the midday prayer as a glittering glass ornament resembling a crescent was seen shining from the top of the fortress overlooking the town a mullah waved a green banner from a tall minaret overhanging the other end of town shots were fired and a trumpet sounded the attack the soldiers opened their ranks so that the mob could pour into the quarter the governor nazif

was seen motioning the crowd on the mob guided by troops who had familiarized themselves with a quarter during the siege a body of woodcutters armed with axes led the way breaking down the doors soldiers then rushed inside and shot the men a certain sheik british diplomat g h fitzmoris wrote ordered his followers to bring as many stalwart young armenians as they could find their number of about a hundred they were thrown down on their backs and held down by their hands and feet while the shake with a combination of fanaticism cruelty proceeded while reciting verses of the Quran to cut their throats after the mecca right of sacrificing sheep those hiding were dragged out and butchered stoned shot and set on fire with matting saturated with petroleum

Women were cut down shielding their husbands and fathers. More Armenians were shot as they scampered along rooftops trying to escape. When the killings subsided, the houses were looted and torched. As sunset approached, the trumpet sounded again, calling the troops and the mob to withdraw. The atrocities resumed the following day, December 29, with a trumpet sound at dawn. The largest number were killed at the Armenian Cathedral, where thousands had gathered sanctuary. The attackers first fired through the windows into the church, then smashed in the doors, and killed the men clustered on the ground floor. Fitzmoris relates that as the mob plundered the church,

they mockingly called on Christ to prove himself a greater prophet than Mohammed. The Turks then shot the shrieking and terrified mass of women, children, and some men in the second floor gallery. But gunning the Armenians down one by one was too tedious, so the mob brought in more petroleum soaked bedding and set fire to the woodwork and the staircases leading up to the galleries for several hours the sickening odor of roasting flesh pervaded the town writing the following march fitzmoris noted even today the smell of the charred remains in the church is unbearable a missionary who witnessed the massacres described the horror as a grand holocaust and for days afterwards watched men lugging sacks filled with bones and ashes from the cathedral. The trumpet again sounded at 3.30 p.m. The time for the Muslim afternoon prayer and the mob withdrew from the Armenian quarter. Shortly afterwards, Fitzmores wrote, the mufti, Ali Effendi, Hussein Pasha, and other

notables preceded by a band of musicians, went around the quarter announcing that the massacre was at an end and that there would be no more killing. of Christians. For the next three days, the authorities employed Jews and donkeys to remove the dead. Before the massacres, Urfra was home to about 20,000 Armenians. All told, perhaps as many as 10,000 died over the course of two days. 2,500 to 3,000 of them at the cathedral. So this was no shocker moving into World War I. Yeah, although, you know, there's maybe a way that nothing can prepare you for it, even if you've seen it coming when it happens. You're just not ready.

There were a lot of Jews in Europe in the 1930s who were writing to their relatives in other parts of the world saying, we've got to get out of here. We're sitting on the edge of a volcano right now. Who still, when it actually came, were all, you know, just kind of caught with that deer in a headlights look, because what do you do? You know, and there's a lot of, you can read a lot of stuff from Holocaust survivors' children and also from Zionists who were in Palestine out of the country at the time who really can't understand, like, why are our parents or our cousins who were in Europe at the time? Like, why aren't they fighting back? Like, why aren't they rising up or whatever? And it's just, you just don't know what it's like to be caught where there's nowhere to go. The enemy's in control. And there is, yeah, you can, you can rush the electrified fence. You can, you're caught. And they, and they've established. dominance in a way that you're not going to really be able to get out of.

Because, again, these modern-scale genocides like this are something that could really only be pulled off by a state. How'd the young Turks play into this? Yeah. So after you, you know, there were people within the Turkish hierarchy who understood that this, that this empire as it stands right now, it's got to change. Got to make a transition to. You have to. Modernity. If we're going to compete at any level with.

the British Empire, the rising Russian Empire, like we got to get it together. And the way we're running things now where we can't even really control our territory effectively a few hundred miles out east, that's just not going to do it. It's not going to do it anymore. And so they were modernizers. This was a movement that started out in universities, a lot of medical students, law students, things like that. And it was an underground group. It was sort of a revolutionary group, sort of like you were seeing all across Europe at the time.

You know, the Bolsheviks and a lot of the socialists in Russia, for example. the difference, I guess, between like them and the Bolsheviks. There's a million differences. But the main one is they weren't international communists or anything. They were fierce, fierce Turkish nationalists. But they were multicultural, right? This was a big difference too. This wasn't strictly Armenians or Greeks inside of, these were people saying,

it's like when you hear it today, you know, like I'm not a, I'm not an Irish American. I'm an American. Right. These people are saying, hey, I'm not an Armenian Turk or I'm not a Jewish Turk. I'm Turk. Yeah. So they actually had what they called the Ottomanist movement. You know, they wanted everybody, this is a big thing in the late 1800s,

really up until the defeat in the First World War, that we're all Ottomans, right? Which at the time was like, Ottoman, that's just the name of the Turkish commander who like came in with that, you know, who established their tribe. I mean, he was the tribal leader at the time, Osman. But, you know, by the time you got up to this point, I mean, America's some old Italian sailors, too, right? So, like, you can do that. It's no problem. But there was the idea is that we're all Ottoman and Ottomans here. Doesn't matter where you were born or whatever. In fact, a lot of the Young Turk and Committee of Union in Progress, which was like a really militant group,

subgroup of the young Turks, some of their leaders, including some of the ones that would be in charge of the Empire during the First World War, they weren't Turkish. Talat Pasha, the guy was the Interior Minister and the effective head of government for the Ottoman Empire was from, he was born in Bulgaria, for example. And the young Turks, they had Jews, They had Armenians. The Armenians, in fact, really supported the young Turks at first because they thought, we have this force that's maybe more trying to be a modernizing influence. Seems like more of a secular influence because that was one other thing I didn't mention is

as the Ottoman Empire started to get worried about these Christian societies, European societies, pushing up on their borders and maybe using their internal Christians as fifth columnists. Let's create some divide. They really started pushing. that Islamic identity and really playing that angle of it up, which was something they had kind of avoided before for the most part. Obviously, like the Ottoman Empire is the Caliphate, right? The Sultan is the Caliph. And so they're in charge. This is all this is, you're in somebody else's house, right, if you're a Christian or a Jew. This is the Muslim's house and everybody knew that.

But they really, they had an empire to manage. They weren't trying to create problems between their Muslim and Christian and Jewish subjects, right? By the time, once they started worrying about the loyalty of these Christian subjects and worrying not only about that actually worrying about their non-Turkish imperial subjects like they were worried about the Arabs not wanting to be under Turkish rule and as we saw in World War I that was probably a good call they said the British sent Lawrence of Arabia down there and got the Arabs to rise up and march on on the Ottoman Empire and so they wanted to avoid that and so they started playing up like you know to the Arabs it's you're Muslims this is a Muslim empire how could you side with the British they would say to the

Kurds, you know, that you had the Russian Empire who was trying to encourage like Kurdish separatism, for example, just to kind of create some chaos and some problems over there. And they wanted them to say, hey, you're Muslims. Don't you see those Christians or just want to destroy this, glorious Muslim empire? And the side effect of that, or maybe it wasn't a side effect, you know, because they were worried about the loyalty of these internal Christians as well, was that those Kurds said, yeah, we are Muslim. And these Christians are trying to destroy this glorious Muslim empire. those Armenians are Christian and you started to get some real problems there and when you couple that with like what they were teaching in classrooms and stuff by the time you get up to you know the First World War it's at a fever pitch well the young Turks they seem to be a force and to some degree they were a force that was trying to move the empire beyond all that and so you have these Armenians including like Armenian militant groups you know that had really formed up because they because of the mistreatment of the of the Armenians. in the East who are down with the Young Turks.

They fully support them. In 1908, when the Young Turks launch a coup to take over the government, they march on Constantinople, take over the government. Armenians were cheering in the streets. The Armenian militant groups were celebrating that. In 1909, a year later, there was a counter coup by the conservative Sultan forces, the Sultan's forces. And during that brief period that the Sultan was back in power and the young Turks

were out of power, another 30,000 Armenians got massive. occurred in the province of Adana. And it was done with the same character that you just read. You know, this is a, again, this is, this is, the First World War in that whole period is, it's so fascinating, right? Because it's, it's this war in which the old world marched into those trenches and the new world marched out of them, you know, it's the pre-modern world, and then the modern world just really, it's that, it's that transition point in that clash.

And so you have this genocide that is done for modern. reasons, like nationalist reasons almost, right? You didn't, you know, this idea of, like, ethnic purity and needing to have, like, our internal pure, that's a modernist idea. And the means by which it was carried out administratively and all of these things, the Turkish empire was a modern empire in many ways. But this was a genocide that was not carried out, you know, with ledger sheets and, you know, Zyclon B and gas ovens or anything like that.

This was something that was done the old way. It was done with hatchets and axes and hand knives and kitchen knives and clubs and boots and it was something that it was a genocide that was conducted in ravines just off the road

and in people's basements not on battlefields. So the situation that we're looking at now we get ready for World War I and the is it a Hillary Clinton? and quote, never let a crisis go to waste. That was Rahm Emanuel.

Yeah. Okay. President Obama's first chief of staff. Never let a crisis go to waste. Yeah. It's a new quote, but it's not a new idea at all. Oh, no. And so World War I breaks out, and this is an opportunity.

And they get started right away. And some people who may have been paying attention at the time, they may have had some idea that the young Turks had changed little because they took the government back over pretty quickly in 1909. So the young Turks are in charge now. and a lot of the Armenians feel pretty good about that, at least relative to what they had been facing before. But in 1910, there was this incident people were complaining

about all of these stray dogs running around Constantinople. Tens of thousands of them that were just running around. They were attacking people sometimes destroying the city, and the young Turk government was called on to fix this problem. How are you going to fix it? Well, they sent dog catchers, thousands of dog catchers out, and they caught all of these dogs one by one. It was about 80,000 dogs they caught.

and they put them in cages, and they took them all out to this island right off the coast in the Dardanelles, and they just dropped them off there. And the medium-sized ones ate the small ones, the big ones ate the medium-sized ones, the mean ones ate the big ones, and then the mean ones died of starvation. And that's how they dealt with the dogs in Constantinople. You know, the young Turks were this force that was supposed to be fixing all of these old legacy problems, of the Empire. Well, they had a chance to prove it in 1912 and 1913, just the year before the First World War breaks out. You had the Serbs and the Montenegrins and a coalition of other small Balkanslavic peoples up there who revolted against the empire. And the young Turks sent an army up there and they got pushed back. And the young Turks were humiliated by this. They lost the last of their European territories in the Balkans by doing that. And so, and they blamed very much blamed sort of fifth column. Christians in those Balkan territories for what had happened.

And right around this time, you start to see the forces within the Young Turk movement that is very anti-Christian and specifically anti-Armenian, because they're the ones that they really worry about. The Greeks are a separate issue. We'll talk about them a little bit. But because they killed 300,000 Greeks right around this period, too. They killed 300,000 Assyrian Christians. They killed a couple hundred thousand Lebanese Christians.

This was a mass killing of all Christians across the empire. They just really had it in for the Armenians. particular. And so the first world war breaks out. And, you know, again, I mentioned this like very near the beginning. You have the Armenians who recognize that like this could be a problem. Like, this is going to be an issue for us, not necessarily that they're going to do something like genocides, because nobody was thinking like that at the time. And you have to remember, like, nobody had, this was pre-Holocast, this was pre-Polpot, this was pre-Stalin or any of that kind of stuff, like the idea that you would have one of these major empires. And the Ottoman

empire like to us maybe, you know, we think of it as like this very sort of exotic foreign empire that's almost this this throwback from like an ancient time or something like that and very orient. This was a, the Europeans, you know, they had, they were fully integrated with, with Europe for the most part. I mean, this was something that people read about Constantinople in the New York Times every day. You know, this was a, people talk about like, you know, Germany, how one of the crazy things about the Holocaust is like, but it's Germany. How could Germany do something like that. You know, this is where Liebnitz came from. It's where, you know, and Gerta came from. And, you know, the Turks were not as foreign. The Ottoman Empire, rather,

was not as foreign back then as we probably tend to otherize it and think about it today. And so nobody was thinking like they were going to wipe us all out. Yeah, there might be massacres. The local populations might get out of control. And the local government there might encourage them or not stop them from doing it. But nobody was quite thinking along such totalizing lines. because they just didn't have a historical precedent for it. Yeah, that idea that you talked about earlier of sitting there thinking, well, you know, this isn't going to happen, right? How can this happen? Well, even as it was happening.

Even as it was happening and it was definitely happening. Let's hear a little bit about what happened going back to the book. During the first days following my arrival in Constantinople, I hastened to call on several notables whom I had known for a long time and who were friends of mine. My general impression was this. No one grasped the gravity of the situation and no one was worried about tomorrow. Many insisted that Turkey would not enter the war.

When it began, they said the mobilization was simply a precaution. They were simple-minded people, convinced that as long as the government was in the hands of the young Turks and Talat was the interior minister, no danger faced them. But alas, The Armenian leaders came to understand the truth only when they were already walking on the road to death. So deceived were they by the flattery of promises lavished upon them that when a chief of police and several policemen came to find Anguni, one of the Dashnak Party leaders and a brilliant Russian Armenian writer and placed him under arrest, the stupefied Anguni. Am I saying that right?

Agnuni. Agnuni asked if Talat knew about this. And when the police chief showed him the arrest warrant bearing Talat's signature, Agnuni was even more stunned and replied that he had been at Talots for dinner a short while before and wanted to know why Talat hadn't said anything about it. The unfortunate Agnuni being an idealistic and honorable man could not comprehend how Talat could plot against him so cynically, the same Talat whom he, He had sheltered in order to save Talat's life while risking his own during the counter-revolution

following March 31, 1909. Along with his five comrades, Agnuni was taken from Ayash. About four-fifths of the way, he realized that he was going to be murdered. And when Vahak, the well-known leader of the Dashnax, was warned by his friends in Adana, he answered calmly and with deep conviction. As long as Jamel Pasha, who's the official in charge of Syria and Palestine, is alive, no one can touch a hair on my head. Then pointing to a large portrait of Jamal Pasha in a guilt frame prominently dismayed in his room, he said, long live my good friend and friend of the Armenians, Jamal Pasha. I recall in detail the circumstances of the hawks hanging.

ordered by Jamal Pasha. So here you have these people who are, they're looking, you know, it's like, hey, well, that guy's a friend of mine. He's not going to do this to me. One of them, you know, one of them talking about, Talat. I already took care of Talat.

He's going to take care of me. Or, you know, Jamal Pasha, he's a friend of mine. You know, there's a, from another book, it's a book that you mentioned earlier. they have another interesting thing. This is around the time when we start, you know, we have documents, we have documents that explain what orders were being given.

And there's speaking of Talat, who was overall in charge of the government and the architect of the genocide, one of the documents, there was like a reluctant regional governor who was kind of playing dumb, hey, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do. Is this really what you want? And Talat sent a three-word telegram that said, Yach, ver, oldier. That's it.

And those words mean burn, demolish, kill. No room for confusion there. No room for confusion there. And that's how we start moving into this situation just disintegrates now. Yeah. So if you look at why the Ottoman. empire was brought into the war by the Germans. Like, what did the Ottoman Empire get out of it? What are the Germans expected to get out of it? What the Germans expected to get out of it was, look, they're facing the British, the French, and the Russians. All three of them have been taking away

territory from the Ottoman Empire for years. The Ottoman Empire would like to take that territory back, and these other three would like to keep it. So if the Ottoman Empire doesn't have to help us conquer the world here or anything, if they can just put some pressure on Egypt, put some pressure on the Caucasus and on the Balkans, then these other three empires that the Germans are facing are going to have to redirect some resources to defend them. That was the idea. And for the Ottoman Empire, they thought this is an opportunity to get some territory back and also to fortify our position internally so that when this war is over, we don't have any problems inside that can be exploited again later. And the Ottoman Empire,

was not, look, the Turks can fight. They can still fight to this day, from what I understand. I mean, they're a warrior people and they carry that in them, but they were not prepared for this war. They weren't prepared to go toe to toe with the British Empire and with the Russian Empire. And so the first thing that happens, you know, you mentioned Talat Pasha, and you mentioned Jamal Pasha. Those were two out of the three people who were kind of the Ottoman triumvirate during the First World War. Talat was the interior minister, and he was the head of government for all effective purposes. Jamal Pasha was the head of the Navy, and he was the military governor of Syria,

which is a much bigger territory than we're talking about today. It was really like all of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, like kind of that, that whole thing. And he was known by the Arabs in Damascus, by the way, as the butcher. He was, he starved to death, very similar to the way Stalin did the Hulladamor. He starved to death a few hundred thousand Lebanese Christians in Mount Lebanon, where he was, he was taking all the food, sending it out to the front, not allowing any food aid or anything else to come in. And a few hundred thousand people just starve to death on the streets. There are accounts from people who were there like American University and other Western missionaries and diplomats who say they would put cotton balls in their ears in their houses because outside it was just moaning children, moaning women, people dying on the streets begging for food.

It just sounded like the zombie apocalypse out there. Just moans day and night, people dying. You go out in the morning and open up your door and there's a dead child on your doorstep. I mean, Mount Lebanon lost 50% of its population up there. It was one of the worst hit parts of the entire country. And so those are two of the guys. And the third one, member of the Triumvirate, is Enver Pasha. And Pasha is just a term of respect in the Ottoman Empire.

It's a very high-ranking, like, official, basically. It's not there. They're not brothers or anything. And so Enver decides, you know, Napoleon tried to invade Russia in the winter. Hitler's going to try and do it in a few decades. Not going to go well for either of those guys, but screw it. Let's go for it. And so he gets his force and he tries to go up into the caucuses and face the Russian army up there,

maybe feeling like he's going to catch them off guard. He doesn't. The Battle of Saracomish happens and the Russians wipe him out and push him way back. And so now the Ottoman Empire is really starting to panic, right? if you look at like when the Holocaust really kicked into gear. It wasn't in 1939. It wasn't in 1940. It wasn't even really in early 1941.

It was after the Germans got within seven miles of Moscow. And then those Siberian troops showed up and pushed the Germans back. And they realized this might not work out the way we thought it was going to. And they said, well, what else can we accomplish then? What else can we accomplish? And, you know, because the caucus is over there. If you look at the territory, eastern Turkey, You know, the Armenians in southeastern and eastern Turkey there, right across the border,

it's more Armenians. Like, that's modern Armenia right across the border today. And so, and these people didn't, you know, they were separate. Don't get me wrong. They even spoke really different dialects, you know, to a large degree and stuff. But they still knew that those were their Armenian cousins over the border, and they knew it back and forth. Kind of like the Kurds in southern Turkey and northern Syria today. And so when the Russian army pushes past, past that border into eastern Turkey,

The Ottoman Empire is thinking with some justice, I mean, with some reason that these people who they had just massacred a few hundred thousand of a few decades back and have been allowing to be abused by the Kurds and everybody else who wants a peace in the decades since, that the Russians are going to mobilize these people and put them to work against the Ottoman Empire. And so as the Turks are retreating, they are just slaughtering and burning and destroying everything they can, just terrorizing Armenians, murdering the people they see, especially. military age men. You know, most of the military age men by this point have either been conscripted into the military and then disarmed, put into a slave labor battalion, and by the time you get up to 1915 around the Battle of Gallipoli, they'll be worked to death or simply murdered. Generally speaking, they would get these men who, the Armenians who showed up for the draft and tell them you're going to go into the interior, we're going to build trenches, defensive fortifications and they'd all go and they'd spend all day digging a trench and they'd be like great

job can you stand on the edge of it please and then they would murder them all and then fill the trench in it was a mass grave they'd been digging for themselves the entire time and so as this is going on you have the other Armenian young men military age men who were like well they either saw that coming or maybe they didn't want to leave their home villages because they were already getting attacked by Kurdish tribes every other day, and they said, I can't leave my wife and kids here and my parents here. And so they just refused to go. But that meant you had to go into hiding. You had to go somewhere because the Turks found you was a rap. And so all of these villages that the retreating Ottoman army is coming back through and just murdering and terrorizing, these are pretty much all

women, children, and old people. And that's going to be a theme throughout the entire story, is the men are already gone. The men have already been killed a long time ago, or they've had to runaway across the Russian, you know, across the Russian battle lines. A lot of them did go join the Russian forces once the, once the genocide kicked in. And so a lot of the stuff that we're going to be, that we're going to be hearing about going forward, this is all stuff that's being done pretty much entirely to groups of women, children, and old people by military, you know, fighters. And so that's that first step, disarming and then killing the Armenian men who had joined the military happens. And the second thing that the Ottoman Empire needs to do. This is before the

real genocide, the mass deportations and killing really start in a systematic way. You know, they have to lay the groundwork for it. And after disarming the Armenian military people, they decided they needed to get rid of these two towns that they expected would put up resistance because they had done so before. They did so during the Hamidian massacres in the 1890s. In fact, one of them, Zaytun, which was a, you know, these are these are mountain men. You know, these are tough. tough people that even other Armenians kind of looked at them like they were a little bit crude and uncivilized. They were like Appalachian Scots-Irish kind of like the way we in America look at like those Appalachian folks like man, they're wild and they're kind of crazy and whatever. But

boy, like you start problems with them and you're going to have some problems yourself. Like they're not going to, you're very independent minded and not used to or down with being told what to do by people. And Zaytune was up in the hills. And they knew. that they were not going to just accept this and they had the capacity to actually push back a little bit. So that if they started the mass killing across Anatolia at the time, they might have to worry about these two places, either turning into fortresses where Armenians could retreat and then from there, who knows, or just that they could turn out enough partisan fighters to really create problems in the rear echelon.

And so they go there first and they just, they wipe those places out. They go to Van. Vaughn is the second one besides Zaytun. And, you know, they go in and give them an ultimatum, tell all your men to come out. They do this under the guise of, like, we're looking for draft dodgers and deserters and so forth. And so they show up and they just round up anybody who's there who's important, right? Any of the older men who are leaders, if there's any writers or singers or poets, if there's anybody who's prominent who could serve in a leadership capacity, you know,

as sort of a collecting point for people, a rallying point. They take all them, they torture them, and they kill a bunch of them. And then they give the rest of the people an opportunity to turn in any of the men who are still around or anything. And instead, the people in Van barricade themselves into the town and say, we're not coming out. Give us back our notables. Give us back our men, our leaders. And so instead they roll in artillery and they just start shelling the town. And intermittently, they'll send in Muslim mobs to go in and massacre the people who were in there.

and eventually they kill enough people that they're able to get all the women and children out, and they send them marching south into the desert. They do something very similar in Zaytune as well, surrounded with artillery, burned down the monastery where a bunch of the younger men were hiding, and then the women and children who were left there, thousands and thousands, 20,000 or so in Zaytune, actually. Actually, I left out one other thing. This is another thing that they did to compel people. is when the people in van were holed up and refusing to come out,

they said, okay, Roger that. And they just started going to all the villages around the town and just massacring all the people there. And once they had pacified the area, they got all the women, children, and old people who were left, and they put them into caravans under guard, and they sent them marching south into the desert. This is northern Syria, southern Turkey.

That's what we're talking about here. So you have like Aleppo and Mosul over in Iraq, that whole area. They just send them marching south. And then step three came, and this was really the thing that kicked off the program. Now that all of the men with guns have been neutralized, guys in the military, now that these two potential trouble sides van and Zaytun are taken care of, they wanted to make sure that all of the Armenian national level leaders were neutralized. And so all of these men who are in Constantinople and Smyrna and some of the other big cities,

including Gregoros Balakian, the priest who's book we're reading today, were all arrested and deported down south as well. And they could tell from the beginning that this was something probably a little bit different than what they had seen before. Well, speaking of the book, let's get a little eyewitness account going back to the book. On the night of Saturday, April 24, 1915, the Armenians of the capital city exhausted from the Easter celebrations that had come to an end a few days earlier, were snoring in a calm sleep. Meanwhile, in the heights of Istanbul, a highly secret activity was taking place in the palatial central police station.

Groups of Armenians had just been arrested in the suburbs and neighborhoods of the capital. Blood-colored military buses were now transporting them to central prison. Weeks earlier, the Konstantzanoble chief of police had sent official sealed orders to all guard houses with the instruction that they not be open until the designated day and that they be carried out with precision and in secrecy on this Saturday night I along with eight friends were transported by a small steamboat the night smelled of death the sea was rough and our hearts were filled with terror we prisoners were under strict police guard not allowed to speak to one another we had no idea where we were going. We arrived at the central prison and here behind gigantic walls and large

bolted gates they put us in a wooden pavilion in the courtyard which was said by some to have once served as a school. We sat there quiet and somber on a bare wooden floor under the faint light of a flickering lantern too stunned and confused to make sense of what was happening. From the deep silence of the night until morning every few hours Armenians were brought to the prison. And so behind these walls, the jostling and commotion increased as the crowd of prisoners became denser. It was as if all the prominent Armenian public figures, assemblymen, representatives, revolutionaries, editors, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, merchants, bankers, and others in the capital city had made an appointment to meet in these dim prison cells.

Some even appeared in night clothes and slippers. The more those familiar faces kept appearing, the more. the chatter abated and our anxiety grew. Before long, everyone looked solemn. Our hearts heavy and full of worry about an impending storm. Not one of us understood why we had been arrested, and no one could assess the consequences, as the night's hours slipped by our distress mounted. Except for a few rare stoics, we were in a state of spiritual anguish, terrified of the unknown and longing for comfort. Right through till morning, new Armenian prison, arrived and each time we heard the roar of the military cars we hurried to the windows to see who they were the new arrivals had contemptuous smiles on their faces but when they saw hundreds of other well-known armenians old and young around them they too sank into fear we were all searching for answers asking what all of this meant and pondering our fate so these are all of the most famous armenians in the country these are the prominent priests

the writers in the big cities. These are the people who everybody in our, everybody, every Armenian in Turkey knew who these people were. They knew them by name for the most part. And so they wanted to take them out immediately. And just get them out of circulation at first. And they did it secretly.

They did it quietly on April 24th, 1915, which is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, because this is where it really kicks off. Once they did that, most of the pieces were in, place to begin the campaign of mass killing. The only things that remained were, there was this organization called the special organization that had actually been set up for a

previous war with the Russians, but they used it for a different purpose and augmented it with different people here. They freed about some 10, 15,000 violent convicts from prisons, including thousands of murderers and rapists. And they freed them and promised them a pardon. if they would ride with this group called the Special Organization, which was put under the command of the most fanatical anti-Armenian young Turks. And their job was to terrorize the Armenian population in an unrestrained manner.

You know, we think about genocides. Again, we're very influenced by the Holocaust and the way we think about these things. Methodical, disciplined. Systematic, you know, it's like, okay, what's your name? number and check that one off and you know and um that's not how this was carried out and this this special organization is is a good illustration of how that is i mean you know most genocides when you look at millions of people dying in the civil war in the Congo or in Sudan you say well how's that happening they don't have gas chambers there they're not even going around and individually

shooting every person that's there you don't have to do that all you have to do is go to one village, not just kill them, but do it in the most horrific ways you can possibly imagine and make sure that a few people get away to go warn the next village over. And then those people who are mostly women, children, and old people, because the men are all fighting or, you know, you can't be there when the army shows up, when the militia shows up, they say, we got to get out of here. So they take their kids and their grandparents and they run off into the bush and defenseless women, children, and old people die very quickly in the bush. Well, they die very quickly in the desert too. And So this was part of the goal is to go out there and terrorize brutally

and make sure that word of that spreads to the other groups so that these people get moving. Because if we can do that, they'll finish themselves off. We won't have to go around. Most of the Ottoman soldiers, they're off at the front. This is being carried out by older gendarme, police soldiers, ordinary men type people, right, like guys like that, as well as by local villagers and Kurdish tribes.

that they couldn't have conscripted if they wanted to. And it was helped along by the level of just savagery that they would perform these massacres in. And finally, once everything else was in place, and this kind of happened systematically, I guess, over the period of time that the genocide was taking place, but the central government worked to identify governors and mayors of local areas that might be reluctant to do what they needed to do. and when they were identified, they were taken out. Some of them were thrown in jail, and some of them were even killed.

But a lot of them were just reassigned to other places. One of them, you started off talking about with a quote about what happened in Ankara. And that was an example, actually. That was one where the guy who, the valley, the governor of that province, he was trying to almost be an Oscar Schindler type. He got together a bunch of prominent Turks in the area, had them write a letter and sign a letter that he sent back to Constantinople saying, hey look, whatever's going on anywhere else.

Like our Armenians are actually cool. Like we know them. They're not a problem. They're loyal. And so that guy was just fired and sent off to some random spot in the empire. And his successor came in and immediately went to work. Searched all the Armenian homes for weapons, took them all away right down to all their kitchen knives. The local jails there were emptied.

All the convicts were turned into paramilitaries. and once everything was in place, they got to work. You know, you think about that. If you were going to write like a freaking psycho, dystopic movie, right? What are you going to do? You're going to take the local criminals, rapist, murderers, and you're going to empower them and give them authority. And total license.

And in fact, encourage them to be as brutal as possible because that's part of the plan, you know, to drive these people out into the desert through brutality. It ends up looking like this going back to the book. The prominent prisoners, lawyers, bankers, merchants, and Armenian government officials were taken out on the road in the first caravan under the supervision of the police commissioner, the prison warden, police soldiers, and officers. Overall superintendents was assigned to Shem Sedin, the son of Tabib, a member of the Ottoman parliament from Ankara. Although those in the caravan were the distinguished people of the city, a mark was put on their arms, and their fezes, shoes, and coats were taken from them before they left the prison. Then these 150 so or so were taken out to the foot of town and tied together with a rope. The tools that would be used to kill these Armenians, axes, cleavers, paddles, large knives, and other weapons were transported in four or five carriages directly behind the caravan, and following them were carriages filled with lime.

To make sure that the crying and screaming of the people in this caravan would not be heard, some of the soldiers were ordered to play trumpets and drums as they left Ankara via the town's famous Tash Khan section. Seven hours from the town, this dust-covered caravan reached the forest. They were met by the special organization. The freed criminals used as anti-Armenian death squads who possessed all kinds of weapons. A well-known lawyer. Arminaug pleaded with the chief of the bandit group to be given as the sacred last right of one condemned to death. Permission to say a few words. He received permission.

Then he said with unusual cold-heartedness and a cavalier indifference to death that surprised even the special organization. It is no longer a secret that you have brought us here to be killed. But I want to ask you if you know why you are going to kill us. The leader of the bandits answered that he didn't know why. Arminag continued, you should know that the high-ranking officials and the committee who gave you the orders to kill us did so, solely to secure their personal gain and that they are leaving a stain on your history and laying waste to the fatherland barely had he spoke these prophetic words when hundreds of the special organization sheets attached from all sides cutting and hacking off legs and arms and necks with axes and hatchets

ripping them off partly or entirely and crushing heads with rocks then the bodies were thrown half alive dead or in the throws of death to be prepared ditches into prepared ditches and covered with lime Those who were partly sticking out of the dirt and the lime Made the heavenly arches resound with their cries of agony more dirt was poured on them until they were buried alive when the massacre of the first caravan was finished the second caravan of more than 320 people was sent forward transported to the park known as Kayash six hours from town these people were massacred in the same merciless manner the dismembered bodies of the martyrs were left unburied for 15 days Turkish officers then oversaw their burial by Armenian labor soldiers after

massacring all these people the special organization came back to town wearing clothes shoes and other items they had taken from them everywhere they boasted about how many Armenians they had killed and how in unheard of ways they had tortured and dismembered those who were still alive and even mutilated corpses Similar massacres took place in other towns and villages With particular cruelty in Yazgat First all the Armenian males of a town or city and then the women and girls were bound together and taken on a foot on foot to deep valleys a few hours away a accompanied by a Turkish mob armed with axes. There, they were slaughtered like sheep,

pregnant women and suckling babes included. And that's how it went. Over and over and over and over. It's one of the things about genocide is, if you ever watch a movie about one or read a decent book written about a genocide, they'll usually find some dramatic persona to focus on so that they have some kind of drama with it,

some storyline or arc to follow, because when you get down to it, what it comes down to is we went to this village. We killed all the men, we raped all the women, we robbed all their stuff, took their children as slaves, and then we left. And then we went to the next village, and we raped all the women,

we killed all the men, we took the children as slaves, robbed all their stuff, and we left. And it's that 100 times, a thousand times. You know, you can't tell a Holocaust story or write a Holocaust book. that's just they marched 10,000 people to the edge of the mass graves, they shot them naked and they threw them in.

And they took these, it's just it gets repetitive in the most grotesque way imaginable, and that's what a genocide is. The depravity of it is easy to focus on, but in many ways, especially after it's been going on for months or years, and the people themselves, the killers themselves, have been almost brutalized psychologically and spiritually. by what they're doing, and it becomes routine for them, so that things that some individuals may have hesitated to do it first

or not things that elicit any kind of hesitation anymore, that it just becomes this grind of death. And one of the things that makes the Armenian genocide, a thing that is, I guess you could maybe only compare it to what happened in Rwanda, in so far as the extent to which the general population was mobilized to participate. Something like, again, like with the Germans, you know, this was something, Ernst Younger, during the Second World War, was stationed in Paris.

He was sort of a cultural figure at that point, so he was kind of there as like a, technically was some kind of a minister of this or that, but I can't remember, but really he was there as like a cultural figure. And he was in Paris, 1942, you know, one and he's writing letters to people trying to figure out like I keep hearing about all these things that are going on out in Poland and on the east like what's going on out in the east like I hear about bad things going on on the east this is ertz younger I mean this is a guy that even the Nazis like thought this guy was great you know there was there was possibility that he

was in on one of the failed assassination attempts maybe he knew about it at least but Hitler himself even said nobody touches Ernst younger right this is the guy this is the guy that wrote stormist steel I forget which podcast we call I've covered that on, but I mean, this guy is a hero to the German people. Yeah, and so even him, a guy in that position, serving as a minister in Paris at the time, he's like trying to find out what's going on in the East because the way that that was conducted, and, you know, it gets overplayed a little bit how secret it was and everything. It did take a large number of people, including the Vermeck, to pull off some of it.

But relatively speaking, this was something that was able to be kept from the German people and to be localized to the SS and like, you know, the people who were actually handling it. Yeah, and it's one thing to, you know, okay, so the German populace is, let's say they're helping round up Jews. But that's what they think they're doing is rounding up the Jews or they're going to ship them off. They're going to be slave labor. They don't, many cases, didn't know the end state. Right. Whereas here we have the Turkish population at large doing the tactical operation of the tactical operation of,

genocide. Yes. And there's a quote from a great book. I know I've brought it up a few times another podcast by Philip Gorevich about the Rwandan genocide. We wish to inform you that tomorrow will be killed with our families. And he has a quote in there when he's talking about what genocide is to the society that's perpetrating it. And he has this line that's always stuck with me. He says genocide after all is a sort of community building exercise. And that stuck with me as I was reading all the material about the Armenian genocide and the way that specific way that it was handled. One of the things that happened was these people who would be deported down south. When I say that, what I'm talking about is, you know, all the men would be killed

and the women, children, and old people who were left would be put into a caravan. They'd be sent down to march into the Syrian desert on a march that would take about two months. And when they got to the end, it was just, there was a death camp there, where they were, anybody who survived two months, with no food because it would all be taken from them right away. You know, if they couldn't scrounge bugs out of the desert or eat dead bodies or whatever they had to do, they'd buy a starvation. If they couldn't, if you weren't a woman who could, you know,

use your body or whatever to get a Turkish soldier to give you a drink of water or do whatever you had to do, then you died on the way. And the roads were littered with bodies. And sometimes they would just massacre all of you along the way. But the ones who got to the end would get to these death camps in the Syrian desert. And these routes, you know, it doesn't take two months to walk directly in a straight line

from one place to their end place in the Syrian desert. They would go on these winding routes sometimes. And it wasn't just to drag it out so that people would die of exposure and starvation. They would actually bring them through different Muslim villages, different territories of Kurdish and Circassian tribes. And when they would come through a given area, just like we saw here, people would be waiting for them with weapons, and they would attack, and they would rape, and they would take the women that they liked away as sex slaves.

They would take the children away as slaves. They would rob them of what they could, but it was only allowed for a certain period of time. And very often the Turkish soldiers, this is actually what would happen much of the time, is they would sort of organize it a little bit. We're like, well, here's a really, really pretty Armenian. All of you want her as a sex slave. Well, let's hold an auction.

and then the Turkish soldiers get paid. Oh, well, you know, we're going to get a lot of the most valuable things that they have. And so the Turkish soldiers were getting paid. It was a way of sort of, it was a very crude and brutal form of wealth redistribution in a way. Everything that these Armenians had, they were being walked around to these different villages and territories so that each of the people in those places got their cut. And there would be almost, you read accounts where it's almost like there's a sense of expectancy, almost like a party atmosphere, when people know another caravans coming through,

what are we going to get this time? And all of these Kurdish tribes, a lot of these Islamic villages, there were Armenian women and children, tons of them in a lot of these places. A lot of them would just be taken sometimes as slaves, and when the novelty wore off after a few weeks or a few months, they would just be murdered or turned away out in the desert to go wander and die. But then the other thing that's happening when they're doing that is that the state is taking, well, they're taking the opposite approach that the Nazis took, right?

Which is that they are making all of these people complicit in this atrocity that the state is carrying out. And it really does bind them together in the same kind of way that, you know, like in a mafia movie where you do a hit and all three of us who did it have to fire a shot to the body because we're all in this together now. And it's a, you know, this shared knowledge that we have all participated in this tremendous crime, that even going forward that can bind people together in a certain way, especially we've all benefited from it, we've taken slaves from it,

we've robbed, and maybe the things in our house right now, the furniture in our house right now, maybe were things that we took from these people when we killed them. and that's how it went over and over and over and over again you know and the thing that always the thing that is just the most unbearable to me is imagining like just

I've mentioned it a few times already but it's always the thing I can't get out of my head about this is that these were all women, children, and old people, the men were gone already and just imagining like your mother or your wife or your sisters or your kids being marched along out the desert by these people set upon, you know, not blown up by a predator drone, as bad as that

is, they are being hacked down with machetes and axes. And as you saw, like in one of the one, I think the Ankara example that you read, in, in massacres that would take hours and hours and hours. It takes a long time. Some of these, they're killing six, seven, eight thousand people at a time in a ravine by hand. And that takes some time. And so it's just screaming and the smell of feces and blood and people, you know, you have just body parts hacked up over here. And over there, there's just a big rape orgy.

And it's all right next to each other. While over here, they're searching your mother's pockets for any gold coins she might have. And it's that for as far as you can see. There are times where they did, one instance where they did 6,400 people was the consensus estimate on it. And it was the entire ravine. I mean, you come over this ridge, and it's just this entire ravine, hundreds of yards, and it is just bodies. And they're not dead of, you know, this place was witnessed by an American,

somebody from the American consulate who wrote out and saw it afterwards. These bodies are not people who died of starvation or thirst or exposure. These are people who are just one big mass of gashes in mutilation and hacked off limbs. and women with their heads cut off who are laying there with their dresses thrown up over their head and their legs spread with their heads cut off. I mean, these are the scenes that you see

over and over and over and over and over to the point where you read a book like the 30-year genocide about it where he really does take the time to get into each of the massacres and it becomes almost sickeningly, nauseatingly boring in a way. And it's just, it's hard to imagine

when you're, make it personal like that. You know, trying to imagine the helplessness that you would feel knowing that this had happened to people that you cared about or being one of those people. It would just, it's hard to imagine. We don't necessarily just have to imagine it. We can listen to an eyewitness, a widowed eyewitness. This is going back to the book. This is transmitted by an American ambassador to the Secretary of State says this. A week before anything was done to Baybort, the villages all around had been emptied and their inhabitants had become victims of the gendarmes and martyring bans. Three days before the starting of the Armenians from Baybord,

after a week's imprisonment, our bishop had been hanged with seven other notables. After these hangings, seven or eight other notables were killed in their own houses for refusing to go out of the city. 70 or 80 other Armenians after being beaten in prison were taken to the woods and killed the Armenian population of Baybort was sent off in three batches I was among the third batch My husband died eight years ago leaving me and my eight-year-old daughter and my mother extensive possessions So that we could so that we were living in comfort Since mobilization began the Merquez commandant has been living in my house free of rent he told me not to go but I felt I must share my fate of my people I took three horses with me loaded with provisions my daughter had some five lira pieces around her neck and I

carried some 20 lira's and four diamond rings on my person all else that we had was left behind our party left June 1st 15 gendarmes going with us the party numbered four 500 persons we had got only two hours away from home when bands of village in large numbers with rifles guns, axes, etc., surrounded us on the road and robbed us of all we had. The gendarmes took my three horses and sold them to local Muslims pocketing the money. They took my money and that from my daughter's neck also all our food. After this, they separated the men one by one and shot them all within six or seven days, every male above 15 years old. by my side were killed two priests one of them over 90 years of age these bandsmen took all the

good-looking women and carried them off on their horses very many women and girls were thus carried off into the mountains among them my sister whose one-year-old baby they threw away a turk picked it up and carried it off i know not where my mother walked till she could walk no further and dropped by the roadside on a mountain top we found on the road Many of those who had been in previous sections carried from Bayboard some women among them were killed and their husbands and sons We came across some old people and little infants still alive but in a pitiful condition having shouted their voices away We were not allowed to sleep at night in the villages but lay down outside under cover of the night Indescribable deeds were committed by the gendarmes

Bandsmen and villagers many of us died from hunger and strokes Others were left by the roadside too feeble to go on. One morning we saw 50 to 60 wagons with about 30 Turkish widows whose husbands had been killed in the war, and these were going to Constantinople. One of these women made a sign to one of the gendarmes to kill a certain Armenian whom she pointed out. The gendarmes asked if she did not wish to kill him herself, at which she said, why not? and drawing a revolver from her pocket shot and killed him. Each one of these Turkish Hanums, which is a Turkish lady, had five or six Armenian girls of ten or under with her.

Boys the Turks never wished to take, they killed all of whatever age. The worst and most unimaginable horrors were reserved for us at the banks of the Euphrates. The mutilated bodies of women, girls, and little children made everybody shudder. The bandsmen were doing all sorts of, of awful deeds to the women and girls that were with us whose cries went up to heaven.

At the Euphrates, the bandsmen and gendarmes threw into the river all the remaining children under 15 years old. Those that could swim were shot down as they struggled in the water. After seven days, we reached Erzingian. Not an Armenian was left alive there. The Turkish women took my daughter and me to the bath and there showed us many other women and girls. that had accepted Islam between there and enderese the fields and hillsides were dotted with swollen and blackened corpses that filled and fouled the air with their stench on this road we met six women wearing the ferrage and with children in their arms but when the gendarmes lifted their veils they found that they were men in disguise so they shot them after 32 days journey we reached Constantinople. One of the things that would happen on the Trail of Tears, on this road to death,

was, you know, by the time you got a week out of any of these cities where people were deported, a lot of the American consulate people and other diplomats and missionaries who were there, including, by the way, this is really worth mentioning that I haven't brought up yet, a lot of the people, diplomats who have reported on this and wrote back about it and have provided a lot of material we have today. These are German diplomats, Austrian diplomats.

These are people who are allied to the Ottoman Empire in this war who were writing back about a lot of these things. There's one memoir that was written about it by a guy named Rafael de Nogales, who was a Venezuelan mercenary who was actually serving as a Turkic, as a mercenary officer as a major in the Turkish military. And he wrote a lot about it as well. And one of the things that you hear over and over again is how by the time you're a week out of the city, all these people are naked.

All their clothes have been taken. So they're walking in July or August, maybe, in the Syrian desert, 12 hours a day or more, and they're just blistered up from the sun. They don't have any food. They don't have any water. Anything they can scrounge from the landscape or beg off some or prostitute from some Turkish soldier or something. That's all they got. Something maybe they were able to hide away on their person.

And so they're wasting away, naked in the sun. And then they would stop at night. And you'd think maybe they would get some rest. But more often than not, the nighttime was the worst time. Because they would stop for the evening. And as ever, they didn't have tents most of the time. Those would have all been taken from them. They didn't have any kind of shelter.

So they're just sitting out in the weather. And if there was a village nearby or a tribe nearby or sometimes just the soldiers themselves, this was their time to blow off a little bit of steam. And so they would show up. And they would just be walking through the encampments of all of these women and children and elderly people who have stopped. And they would just take their pick for rape.

They would take slaves. Sometimes they would just torture people for entertainment. Their stories of pretty Armenian women being stripped naked and forced to dance for Turkish soldiers. And when they weren't pleased with their performance, they just doused them in kerosene and watched them burn to death for their entertainment. There's story after story after story after story like this, and not a bunch of people from one caravan.

We're talking from all over the country throughout the entire period of this going on. There's something, you know, there's maybe you can get people to go put a bullet in somebody's head for their country. You can maybe play up that angle of it to get them to do something like that. you've got to really engender a level of extraordinary hatred, I think, to get people to do some of the things that were being done here, especially the regular people. That doesn't go so much for the special organization. I think maybe in one of the unraveling episodes we did, I asked a question, like if you had a bar in town in any city in America where everybody knew that's the bar. there, there's this room and there's a person in there. And you can just do whatever you want to them. That's the gimmick at the bar. Like I might not go there. You guys might not go there. But I don't think

it would be empty. I think it would rarely be empty. And when you're talking about, okay, what if you had that in a prison? That would be a lively joint. I mean, that's what you had going on here. You had these caravans of women, children, and old people being marched down into the desert very often by guards who were from the special organization, guys who were convicted murderers and rapists who had been given complete and total license from their government to do whatever they want. And now you stop at nighttime and you're bored. You've been on the road for a week riding in the hot sun on your horse guarding these people. And how are you going to spend your evening? And the way a lot of them spent it was just, you know, again, you just, it's one of

those things that like reading a book about it or anything, it just you really can't do justice until you really just close your eyes and try to put yourself in the position of these people in the position of a mother who's already watched two of her children die of exposure. And then has her baby grabbed by a leg and thrown in a river and then she's gang raped and she's going to be gang raped again and again and again for the next two months as she walks, you know, this road or until she can't take it anymore and commit suicide basically. That was the situation of hundreds of thousands of people being marched down into the desert like this.

Well, you said story after story after story. Here's some of them going back to the book and you mentioned the German diplomats. Here's a German diplomat. The teachers of the American school in Carpert were gruesome. tortured before they were killed two professors had their hair and beards ripped out while in prison in order to extort confessions and were hung by their hands for days at a time another professor went insane when he was forced to watch Armenians being beaten to death the governor himself took part in the torture of another professor

the senior executive president beat him until he was exhausted and said Whoever loves his religion and his people may continue beating. Here's another eyewitness who was seven years old at the time. We heard afterward that together with 17 other Armenian young men, they had massacred them by night and had thrown them under the bridge. Thus, when we were deported, there were no males left in our family. They took away my five aunts in Dersor. Later, they cut off their heads.

impaled their heads with their bayonets to show them to us, and then they threw their corpses in the Euphrates. We found only half the body of my mother's aunt. My mother buried her in the earth. Here's a 13-year-old eyewitness. The Turks came and drove us all out of the village. They were forcing us to march with whipstrokes. They tied our hands behind us.

They disrobed us totally, and we stood naked as the day we were. were born. Then they broke one's hand, another's arm, still another's leg, with axes and daggers. Behind us, a little boy whose arm was broken was crying and calling for his mother, but the mother had already died by an axe. They came in the morning, assembled us, and started once more to kill and drop the bodies in the water. Below the cave, the river Kabir was flowing. They caught someone's head, another's leg, still another's hand, and all these human parts were piled up upon one another on the ground. Some were not yet dead, but had their bones shattered and their hands severed. Some were crying, others squeaking. There was the odor of blood on the hand and hunger on the

other. People who were still alive started to eat the flesh of the dead. one of the effects of this was a very strange demographic dynamic that happened in Turkey in the years afterwards. There was actually a book that came out. Remember if it was in the 2000s or the 90s when it actually came out? It must have been the 2000s. It was written by a Turkish woman living in Istanbul now. Her grandmother pulled her aside when she was very old and told her life story. And it turned out her grandmother was an Armenian.

And she had been taken as a small girl away. We mentioned earlier one of the Turkish women who were heading back to Constantinople with a stable of 6, 7, 8 little Armenian girls. And they were taking them back to be their house servants. And that's how her grandmother was taken. She was taken back into a house that was... She ended up in a place that was pretty civilized.

They pretty much just raised her. She was kind of a servant, but they didn't abuse her or anything. And so she was raised in this house and became Turkish. She remembered who she was, but everybody thought she was a Turk. Her granddaughter thought she was a Turk. And so after she told her granddaughter her life story, she wrote the book, and it was kind of a sensation in Turkey because to this day, Turkey still denies the genocide. And so it's something that they, you know, well, we'll talk about that in a little bit.

But that aspect of it, the taking of children and women, the mass enslavement of these people was a huge section. I mean, it's almost, gosh, man, you would almost think that, like it almost seems like a fate worse than death, the people who have killed your husband, your parents, your kids, your entire community, your entire people,

and now they're going to take you as a slave. Most often, when you're talking about the women, they're being taken away as sex slaves. And very often they're being taken away, not that this would make it, I guess, any better, but they're not being taken away by some Turkish, to go be in his harem in Constantinople.

They're being taken away by some tribesmen out into his tent in the desert, and that's where she's going to live now until they get tired of her. And it's maybe not just for him. A lot of times these were women who would be kept to be shared with friends and company as like a matter of hospitality, you know, this kind of thing was going on. And you're talking about, oh, gosh, I mean, it's hard to really say, But you're talking tens of thousands, at least, of Armenian women and children taken away this way, maybe over 100,000.

The total number of deaths between 1 and 1.5 million. But the number of people who were taken away as slaves and just kind of melted into the population or were murdered later, that's what happened to a lot of these people. It was at least the tens of thousands. Sex slavery in the Ottoman Empire, this isn't something that just sort of came out of nowhere because of the chaos that was going on. There was actually, just last night as I was brushing up on some of this, I came across a New York Times article written in 1886

by a journalist who managed to, he had a guide there in Constantinople that was helping him, and they dressed him up in a beard, and said he looked like he was from the area, and he had some money, and they got him into some of these places where they were selling women, and this was in 1886. None of this was going on. and they were mostly, so there's always Christian women usually. You can't enslave Muslims.

Sometimes people do what they do, but generally speaking, that's what would happen. And so it would be Circassians and Slavs and Armenians and sometimes Assyrians and Greeks. And so this was something that, you know, the Sultan himself, the way the Sultan reproduced was he had a harem of hundreds and hundreds of women. And all of them were slaves taken from Christian lands. and they would be kept in a cell in like a very specific part of the palace and they would be guarded by black African eunuchs and so let me just again give you some idea of like the society we're talking about here the king has hundreds of slave women kept in cells in like his own palace

they're not allowed to interact with anybody else and they're guarded with they're guarded by eunuchs who were castrated specifically for the purpose I mean, this is a different, we're not talking about, you know, the Bundestag or the English parliament or something. It's just a different time and a different place. I mean, we do have to remember that, you know, I just mentioned that New York Times article in 1886, and only 21 years before was when we got rid of, you know, Chattel slavery in the United States. So it was a different time, and there were a lot of things going on back then. But there's a little bit of exotic strangeness to something like that that I think kind of shocks us a little bit.

and this idea that, you know, you could take especially non-Islamic women as spoils of war into sex slavery. We saw that reignite when ISIS rampaged through everywhere. They were taken to Yazidis and everybody else that they found who wasn't Muslim as sex slaves. And it was horrifying to us. But, you know, in this part of the world, especially when you get out into the countryside where things don't change much very rapidly, this was something that was not a huge diversion. from what was normal for people. And so once there was the opportunity, it just happened at scale.

And you had tens of thousands, again, maybe over 100,000 Armenian women and children who just disappeared into Kurdish villages and into Turkish homes. Set us up for Dersor. Yeah, Dersor was one of the main... Gosh, what do you even call a place like that? You want to call it a death camp, but that sort of makes you think of the Nazi example where this was like a factory of death, and it wasn't that. You had these caravans that were being wound through the desert

to be robbed and raped and killed and enslaved as they went. And just eyewitness report after eyewitness report describes the road on the way down is just littered with corpses and body parts everywhere you go. Anytime there's a hill, you look over the other side of it off the road, and it's just filled with bodies back there. The rivers are choked with bodies and body parts, but some of the people survived. Some of the people just figured it out.

You just said people who were alive started to eat the flesh of the dead. People who haven't had anything to eat for a month will lose your mind when you start to starve and die of thirst and exposure. And some people made it. And for those who made it, hell was waiting for them. You know, the place that they got to at the end of the line, one of them called Der Zor. It was basically big open-air cages that they just pen people up in,

and there was no food, and there was no water, and there was no medicine, and they just stayed in there, and they died. And now, you know, this wasn't Auschwitz with, you know, double razor wire fences, you know, multiple layers deep. People could kind of get there, and, you know, if you had an ability to do, if you knew somebody who maybe came down there to give you a blanket or some food, you might live a little bit longer than everybody else. But people were dying by the 500, the thousands, the 2,000s a day,

just dying of disease and exposure and hunger and thirst and periodically massacre. Sometimes when another caravan would get there, and there just simply wasn't any room for anyone else, they would either take that caravan or most often they would take people who were already degraded near the point of death. And they would be like, well, we're moving you to the next level. location, you're going south again, everybody back on the road, and there was nothing south. They just marched them out there. People who were already right on the point of death, they would

march them further into the Syrian desert, and they would just wander out there and die or be massacred. The scenes in Dersor that are described are really something beyond. I mean, it's a Hieronymus Bosch painting, you know. This is from the book. No pen can possibly convey the suffering and misery. of these exiled Armenians. Persecuted wanderers surrounded by savage gangs of police soldiers riding in thousands of wagons and carts

and on beasts of burden though most were on foot and many of those bear. Like dried leaves driven by the wind they passed through this soul-bloody passage and onto the arid deserts of Dersore to die without bread, without water, without a shroud

and without a grave. Barely had the men from these regions been separated from the women and put on the road to exile when they were mercilessly slaughtered and their corpses thrown into the rivers or valleys as food for vultures and other wild animals. The young brides and virgins were yanked from the embrace of their crying mothers and taken to Turkish harems. Even 10-year-old girls were subjected to all manner of savage, unbearable, debauchery. The older women who managed to endure the terrible hardships of the road were taken to Der Zor, where they were brutally slaughtered during the summer of 1916. Here we encounter two young Armenian engineers who had been in charge with overseeing the work of an Armenian labor

battalion. In tears, they told me how in 1915, particularly in September and October, Approximately 80,000 Armenians of both sexes were encamped under tents made from bed sheets and rags on the plane near the valley, stretching all the way to the spacious, swampy field by the Myanmar Railway Station. 600 to 700 were dying daily from hunger, thirst, and fever, when suddenly a lengthy nocturnal autumn rain came and finished the task left unfinished by the human beasts. The people were stuck in the standing pools of water for several days. Severe cold ensued, and none of them had adequate shelter, clothing, or food. They froze to death by the thousands, falling like the autumn leaves, or they died from dysentery, diarrhea, bleeding, and other plagues of overcrowding. The field was soon covered with mounds of unburied bodies. Under makeshift tents, entire families were reduced to corpses by hunger and cold,

with no one to bury them. Nor could those Armenians who found their dead kinfolk find any spades or hoes to bury them with. And behold, suddenly one morning to bring this widespread and heart trending wretchedness to its ultimate perfection, the director of the exiled caravans and hundreds of police soldiers bearing whips and clubs

surrounded the poor people already at death's door and ordered them to get immediately on the road. It isn't humanly possible to imagine the hue and cry, the begging and pleading, and the chaos that prevailed in and around those thousands of tents. The tents were then taken down, and the portable goods and bundles representing the deportees' last bits of property were assembled. But they had neither carts nor wagons nor beasts of burden to carry them.

The lamentation then began. Many would not leave loved ones who were sick in their death throws lying on the ground, uncared for and abandoned. The dying, aghast, begged not to be abandoned in the open fields as food for hungry wolves and corpse-eating hyenas that prowled the night. But they had no time to think. The military police and major and minor officials fell upon them. Without pity or human feeling, they struck the hapless and confused, left and right, hitting them everywhere. Eyes burst open, skulls were crushed. Faces were covered with blood and new ones. wounds were opened up. Nobody cared. Nobody took pity on them. The survivors, seeing that they had

no option but to leave, took down and folded thousands of tents and in an instant throwing them over their shoulders, got on the road leaving their ill and dying loved ones behind. The wretched Armenian mothers who were unable to take their underage children, two to six years old, children who had fallen ill from starvation, extreme cold, and the hardship of the long road, half dead or in the throes of death, had to leave them on top of the already dead. Tearfully, the eyewitnesses told us how two large mounds of corpses of thousands of Armenian children rose up. Among them numerous children who had not yet died and who extended their small hands searching for their mothers. The eyes of these emaciated and neglected aimings,

Bore a look of pleading and protest directed toward their mothers and toward God and from their half-dead lips some of them cried that sacred word mommy for the last time Since their mothers could not possibly take the children along in a few hours the little ones would be dead and would have to be left on the road anyway It was perhaps better that all of them the offspring of the same wretched and persecuted nation laid down in heaps in one place and Maybe God and men would finally have pity and see that this was suffering enough. Instead of half-dead children, mothers carried on their bosoms the weakest and most exhausted of the children still alive until they, too, had to be abandoned. The angelic souls of thousands of Armenian children were rising to heaven to tell God of their beloved mothers' endless sufferings and misfortunes. Those remaining in the caravans of Armenian exiles moved on and did. Disappeared into the mountains. There was an all-encompassing silence as night came then the howling and yelping

Of hungry wolves jackals and foxes and occasionally the faint screams of Armenian children Being eaten for the animals would eat the live ones first and that that wraps up what we're gonna cover from the book and of course obviously I only read a tiny percentage now to get the book across to gain some kind of understanding of what took place. And I mean, what can be called for all practical purposes is I don't know if this is a thing to say. But this was, for the most part, this was a successful genocide. I mean, it was damn near a fully successful genocide, meaning we got rid of this group of people forever. Yes. Is that pretty close?

There are Armenians in other countries, obviously. So the people survived, but there are no Armenians in Turkey today. And in fact, Christians in general, and again, I don't mean to dilute the Armenians. experience here, but it is worth mentioning that this was something the Turks were attacking Christians across the empire at this period. They killed 300,000 Assyrian Christians. They killed countless Lebanese Christians. And after the war, when Atta Turk came back and they were fighting in the West against the Greeks, he killed, and then he killed 300,000 Greeks, Greek Christians, and then expelled another million to a million and a half. You know, there were three or four million

Armenians in Turkey proper before the war started and when it was all over by 1917 really when the genocide kind of died down maybe tens of thousands crawled out of their hiding places. It went from three or four million to maybe a few tens of thousands. And you have to call it in a way successful because, you know, from one standpoint, Turkey got what it wanted. There are no more Christians or Armenians in our country. And from another angle, they didn't really pay for it. Some individuals did, and we'll get to that. But, you know, after the probably the great tragedy of the 20th century,

here's another one of its consequences, was the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Bolsheviks, the communists take over Russia in 1917 and pull them out of the war. And so the Armenians who have been hiding behind Russian lines, that's where a lot of the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia retreated, just get behind the Russian army here. The Russian army packed up and left. They're out of the war. And so you have all of these Armenians now,

right up into what we consider today Armenia proper. The Republic of Armenia is wide open. It is wide open over there. And there is still a Turkish army in the field that is fully prepared to finish the job. and they are driving up into Armenia. They're driving toward the capital of Armenia at Yerevan. You're talking about a Turkish army. Tens of thousands strong, a fully equipped military force,

World War I-era military force, and you've got about 1,000 Armenian soldiers, and then you've got a bunch of refugees and older men and everything else who are given guns, clubs, anything that they could find, which is not much. And they're told, do we flee up into Georgia, up further into the Soviet Union, depending on how bad this gets? Or are we going to make a stand here?

And that's what they did. There were people in Yerevan, lots and lots of refugees. So it was an overcrowded place. They had a lot of people, but they only, again, had about 1,200 trained soldiers. And they were the ones that went and got everybody organized. They rang the church bells of Yerevan to muster everybody. And you had women and children running supply lines everywhere, getting everything in place. You had men digging defensive fortifications.

You had old men serving as like signal operators with flags and things up on towers. Everybody was participating here. And the Turkish army pushed up within, you know, just about within visual range, just over the horizon of the capital of Armenia. And they got to a place. There were three areas where they fought. But the main one that, you know, people remember today, there's a great big monument there and a great Armenian history museum called Sardarabad.

And thankfully, this French guy, it's not a very well-known battle if you look in general histories. They'll all talk about it, but they won't get much into the details. Thankfully, there was this French guy back in the 70s, this historian who went back into the records, and he got everything. I mean, he's a military historian, and so I read that book, and he really gets down to, like, the order of battle on both sides and everything else. And, I mean, you're really talking about a fully equipped Turkish army against a rag-tag group of refugees led by a few trained N.C. basically. And thankfully, they did have some Armenian Russians who, once the Soviet Union pulled them out of the war, they were like, well, you know, I'm a colonel in the Soviet army now, I guess. Do I go back to Moscow or wherever they're calling us, or am I going to stay here and fight?

And so some of them stayed and helped lead the effort as well. And this rag tag group put a halt at Sardarabat to the Turkish advance. And really, I mean, there was a historian, American historian, not Armenian, but just a historian of the Ottoman Empire who said, that if they had lost that battle, then the word Armenia today would just be a curious historical footnote. We'd probably still have Armenians, obviously, just like we had Jews for a long period of time when there was no such thing as Israel, but that's what we would be talking about. You know, it didn't preserve Armenian independence at the time. They tried.

One of the things that happened was in that brief period after they did put a stop to them, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, which were all right there clumped together, none of them wanted to be part of the Soviet Union at the time, and they didn't want to be part of the Ottoman Empire either. So they formed a little alliance to try to defend themselves. But as soon as things got a little bit tricky, Georgia was pretty quick to be like, you know what, we're going to go at the Soviet Union.

And Azerbaijan was very quick to be like, you know what, we're Muslims too, and they kind of stabbed the Armenians in the back and attacked them from behind. And so the Armenians then at that point had to cut a deal with the Soviet Union. And so Armenia became a Soviet socialist republic as well. And so out of the frying pan and into the fire there, you know. Although, I mean, you know, the thing is, is one of the things that did happen in Armenia. Obviously, you know, they were under the same Soviet tyranny as everybody else to some degree, but they did understand the Soviets even, as fanatical as they were.

They understood to a certain degree that these people were not going to give up their national or religious identity no matter what. we'd have to finish the job that the Turks started if we were going to accomplish that. And so they really didn't push that as hard as they did in some other places, which is why the Armenian Church was able to survive. And then to this day, once they achieved their independence finally, when the Soviet Union fell, everything was in place there. And, you know, say what you want about the downsides of, I don't know, what you would call it, of nationalism, or just sort of that, you know,

Armenians, one of the things that you find about them, and it's something I love about Armenians, really like any Mediterranean peoples, is Armenians love being Armenian. And it makes them so much fun. You know, it's just, to me, like Armenians in America, they're almost a perfect immigrant group in a sense, where they are, they're American, 100%.

You know, you can't look at the Kardashians and be like, those aren't Americans. Those are Americans as much as George. Washington's an American. You know, it's just they fully adopt and like they're down. They join the military. They do everything and fully assimilate and integrate and yet they love

Armenia and they love the Armenian church and they love their people and their history and there's no tension there. You know, they can be fully patriotic Americans or in France. There's a lot of Armenians in France for example and they never have lost that connection

with their own history and their own traditions. And I think they They really walked that line really well. Well, it's, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to be, you know, proud of where you're from. They're proof that it doesn't. And they're proof that it doesn't. And they didn't, they also didn't really forget. No.

They didn't forget what had happened. Yeah, one of the things that happened, right, is another consequence of the Russian Revolution is you have all of these, you know, by the time, by the end of the war, everybody knows what was going on in Turkey. So you had the British and the Americans and everybody else who were looking at the, Ottoman Empire, or now it's just the Republic of Turkey, right? The war in Turkey went on until 1924. The British defeated the Ottoman Empire. They occupied Constantinople, but there was still a large military force commanded by a great man. I mean, there's nowhere the way to put it. He was a hard man. He did a lot of bad things in the field and did what he had to do for his country, I suppose, is one way to look at it. But Kamal Ataturk, the father of the Turks, father of the modern Turkish

Republic. He was in command. He was a hero at Gallipoli. The man knew how to fight, knew how to command, very smart, very tough, and he was still out there. And so he moved the capital from Constantinople, where the British had established themselves out to Ankara, where it is now. And he kept fighting. He at first was pushing up into the caucuses to, you know, with the idea that if you get past Armenia and Georgia, and you keep going northeast there, it's just Turkic peoples, like all the way over to Western China at that point. And so there was this like pan-Turkish idea that maybe, okay, we lost all the North Africa and whatever.

But maybe the Arabs were always kind of trouble anyway. Why were we doing that? Maybe this is the empire, this pan-Turkish empire. The Armenians at Sardarabat put a stop to that. And then the Soviet Union established itself. So that wasn't going to work out. And so they retreated back. And eventually they went back and pushed everybody else out of their country

and established the modern Republic of Turkey. And Kamala, of Turk was, he was a young Turk, he was a member of the young Turks. He had broken with the triumvirate a little bit over, over, you know, military reasons over the years, but he was still part of these people. And a lot of the young Turks and even the Committee of Union in Progress, the core group that was really carrying all this out, they were still there. They were still in the government, you know, there was no real, like we had denotification after the Second World War, and there was really not a whole lot of that going on. Some of the very, very main people, you know, they

fled the country and so this wasn't carried out but they were tried in absentia some of them were sentenced to death some of the main architects um but after a little while everybody realized that turkey is going to be kind of strategically important now that we have this huge threat of the soviet union looming up here and so like it or not we're going to have to kind of find a way to like bring turkey back into the fold i mean turkey was in nato by the 1950s and um it was considered a strategic necessity to just kind of forget about all this. You get all the way up to the 1980s. And there was an American scholar named Susan Blair

who found a bunch of the American consulate documents that people didn't even know about these yet. Because nobody was studying this. It was not something that people really wanted to look into because Turkey, we have nuclear weapons in Turkey. It's a supremely important ally in the Cold War. Nobody wants to look at this. And so in the 1980s, Susan Blair finds all these documents by people like Leslie Davis describing everything that they've seen out there.

And she says, well, this is incredible, writes it up as a book, tries to get it published. She can't get it published anywhere. She's told by major publishers that this is too controversial. We can't touch this. And the thing is, those people were right because she finally found a publisher. And that publisher started getting bomb threats. They started getting death threats. She and her family had to go into hiding for a while because,

the Turkish government, they don't play around. Like, have you seen that movie The Promise? No. It's a great movie. It's about the Armenian Genocide, and it's a really, really good movie. But you wouldn't know that. Maybe this has changed a little bit now. You wouldn't know that by going on like rotten tomatoes.

The first night or first day that that thing was released, there were like 5,000, like, one star, terrible, horrible, worst movie ever reviews. And like, all of them had kind of broken English and like whatever else. I mean, you see that. And then immediately afterwards, literally like the next year, there was another Armenian genocide movie that was put out that was sponsored by the Turkish government. And it was just, it's almost worth watching for just the, the madness of the propaganda.

I mean, you'd really have to like imagine a movie about the Nazis and the Holocaust where all of the SS officers and Heinrich Himmler and everybody else are just portrayed as like, they're just really trying to help all these Jews. But like the Jews, they just, they ran off. out there into Poland and something happened to them. I mean, it's that bad. You know, it's really that bad. And it is like a state effort.

Ever since then, you know, it was happening at the time. They were, a lot of this was carried out with burn after reading telegrams and things like that. Some of them were preserved. But throughout the 20th century, all the way up to the present day, there's Turks still going through all the archives and going through, be like, yep, shred that, shred that. They've been doing it for centuries.

And it's because they, I mean, look, this is, this is, this is one. maybe one of the darker things to point out about it is they know they know that that can work you know people forget things people forget everything it doesn't matter what you did or how bad it was or how many people were affected they have this idea that if you just keep denying it keep calling everybody a liar keep just do whatever you got to do that give it a century all we have to do is survive you know if you if you look like this was something that was really prominent at the time right all the writings of Lenin, for example, and Trotsky and Stalin, you know, all the Bolsheviks,

and you see the same strain in Hitler, where they all understood that we're about to do something that is horrific and barbaric and that is going to be condemned by everyone, and we better not lose this war. But if we don't, if we pull it off, then all we have to do is survive, and then wait it out, and the storm will pass.

and it passed very quickly. Like I said, Hitler was partly inspired by, you know, the Armenian example, specifically because even by then, just 30 years later, 25 years later at that point when I got started, even by then, he could say and make a good point with it, who today remembers the Armenians. This is 25 years after his own country was allied to the Ottoman Empire. as it executed one of the most thorough and complete genocides in history. Well, you can say there was some level of vengeance on it. And we're not going to talk about that now,

but we are going to talk about Operation Nemesis on the Unravelling podcast, which we also do. It's a little, take things a little bit different and a little bit deeper, and we'll do that. We'll talk about Operation Nemesis. Well, you can listen to it right now. It's Jocko Unraveling Podcast, where Darrell and I are going to go deep. Well, we're going to go deep on this operation that carried out.

It was, what would you call it, a campaign of assassination? That's exactly what it was. And it was done by a bunch of Armenians without any state support. You know, if you think about everybody looks at like what the Mossad did, the Israelis did after the Second World War. They hunted down 1,500 Nazi officers. officers, SS officers around the world. And that's, you know, that's good for them. But the Armenians, you had a group of people who were doing this completely independently

without any state support, this group of hardcore militants who hunted these people down all around the world and essentially took out the entire Ottoman government that was running this during the period, all the high-ranking people. There is one other thing I want to close with. I kind of forgot about earlier. because there is on the whole question of Turkish denialism. This is a quote from a letter written by the leader of the special organization, a guy named Bahadin Shakir. And this was a letter that was found fairly recently, the last few decades.

This is right near the beginning of it. He said, the Committee of Union in Progress as the bearer of the nation's honor has decided to free the homeland from the inordinate ambitions of this accursing. nation, and to assume the responsibility for the blemish that will stain Ottoman history in this regard. The committee, which cannot forget the country's bitter and unhappy history and whose cup runneth over with unrelenting desire for revenge, has decided to annihilate all Armenians living within Turkey, not to allow a single one to remain, and has given the government broad authority in this regard. On the question of how this killing and massacring will be carried out, the central government will give the necessary instructions to the provincial governors and army commanders.

All of the unionist regional representatives would concern themselves with following up on the matter in all of the places where they were found and would ensure that not a single Armenian would receive protection or assistance. Not a lot of room for doubt there. With that, Echo Charles, maybe we could do a little decompression, old school decompression scenario. That was a rough one. Save us, Echo. Yeah, I don't I'm not sure that I can do that right this moment, but geez, man it kind of hard to listen to all that and then even that last part and then be like, yeah, by the way, yeah, let's all start, you know, get back to lifting weights and drinking. Well, if you remember, like, I think the very first time I actually needed to decompress.

I want to say it was podcast number 12. Didn't take long. It didn't take long. But after podcast number 12, where we were talking about the Highlander in prison, and, you know, he's getting tortured by the Japanese. He's having the maggots eat the gangrene flesh off of his legs in order to survive. He gets put to a medical camp, eventually gets put out to sea while he's, you know, in the hull of a ship with however many hundreds of.

of prisoners shitting all over themselves and in their own urine and sweating and starving to death and dying. And then they get hit by a, because the Japanese didn't mark their prison ships. So they get hit by a torpedo. And most of the guys die, but he somehow gets thankfully recovered.

Oh, but recovered by a Japanese ship. And so then from his Japanese ship, he gets taken back to shore and he is stationed in a prison camp in the outskirts of Hiroshima. So that was, was the first time where when I got done reading some of his you know some of that book um you know I said uh echo you talk for a little while why I freaking decompressed so world can be a horrible place

and the best thing we can do is maybe make our little part of the world a little bit better what do you got for suggestions well let's start with our self mentally and physically hopefully I'll give you a hard time about your job being super easy Yeah This is one time you got to earn Yeah A little challenges

For sure Rough transitions Yeah Well either way We want to keep ourselves together mentally fit Speaking of which Daryl Cooper Always impressive with how deep you can just sort of just go

I thought you were talking about I've been out Well you know The guns I have little ways to go Which is cool You know and I'm very supportive Either way, we are working out.

We're reading not as much as Daryl Cooper. Why don't you tell me what I can do to maybe catch up? Okay, well, you could have get some supplements. Look at this. He's got skills on the transition as well. Very good support. Skills on the transition. Oh, yeah, big turn.

Either, yes, we're working out, we're reading, we're doing all this good stuff for ourselves so we can provide good stuff for others and make our little world a better place and it spreads. And before you know it, hey, we've got a better place. We're all living in. I'm in full support of this. So while we're working out, we might need some supplementation. Probably.

It helps. Big time helps. All right, let's start with discipline. Go, right? Mental and physical support, we'll say. And we have essentially an energy drink. You don't like it still. It's hard to say that, bro.

Because here's the deal. When you say essentially an energy drink, what are we thinking? The stigma. We're thinking stigma. We're thinking, well, it's not just a stigma. It's a reality. Reality is you say, energy drink, you're talking about high sugar content, ridiculous caffeine, a bunch of chemicals

to preserve the whole scenario. We're talking, we're not talking to energy, we're talking poison. Yeah, that is the association for sure. So, well, we're not talking about that. In fact, I don't think we're ever going to be talking about, well, technically we're talking about it. But when I'm talking about discipline go, the RTD ready to drink can of quote unquote essentially an energy drink, this is what I'm talking about.

No chemicals. No sugar. No. Tastes good and it's good for you. You drink two of these. You know how people, you know, we have friends. I don't want to name any names, Tim Ford. He used to be, might still be, I don't know.

Tim. But they'll get addicted to like energy drinks. They'll get addicted to them. Meanwhile, with that addiction, you're getting less healthy, less, you know, like, you know, when you drink three of them, you're like, man, that probably is jamming my health out. Do it? Probably. No, it straight up is.

Straight up, yeah. But this one, you drink three of them, guess what? You're healthier. So go get addicted if you want. Get addicted to something good for you. It's like getting addicted to carrots. You can't eat too many carrots. I know that.

I know that. I actually learned that one time. I ate a whole bag of carrots and then realized it. And I, you know, whatever it was. Three hours later, I was Googling, can you eat too many carrots? And Google said, yeah, your body can't digest too many carrots. And so guess what your body does? It's not pretty.

Don't eat too many carrots. But you can't drink a lot of discipline go. Yeah, and not to go too deep into the too much of a good thing concept, but even technically the most vital nutrient, if you want to call it water, you can drink too much water. Yeah, it's called drowning. No, no, no, I think that's when you inhale water. You know, the best thing about to go energy drinks is I was one of those douchebags.

I was pounding like 300 milligrams of caffeine. I came in here one time with one of those things, and chocolate was like, what are you drinking? What are you doing to yourself? And so I switched over a while back, and here's where I was worried. Like, I always thought that I needed a huge amount of caffeine. I drink one of those 300 milligram things. And after like an hour, I was just dead again.

I was like, I guess I need 600 milligrams. Wrong. I guess I need cocaine. It was the opposite of the truth because I actually switched over to these things, which are what, like 95, I think, milligrams? And I only need one of them. And I hit one of those things and it's good. Maybe I'll drink another one if I got something to do in the evening, but that's it.

There's a bunch of things that countered that caffeine. You know, when you've got sugar in there, it's like, okay, cool, you're going to get an insulin hit. You're going to bring you back down. Plus, we've got thermobroman in here. Things that help that caffeine in go helps it kick. So you don't need to OD on it. Yeah, last. No need.

Hey, we also got joint warfare for your joints. We got krill oil for your overall general. Goodness yeah overall just general goodness to the world gets get yourself some krill oil We got discipline go in a powder form yeah by the way the the jaco Palmer the iced tea combination I think on both I think on everything it's the best but that's what I like that's currently but but I was Mixing that up and that's a freaking good tasty little treat too Pre-jitsu scenario you know protein protein like that chocolate peanut butter are you down with this is that your go-to? How yeah are we doing the Dakota Meyer technique making pudding or whatever the thing.

Have we done that yet? Yeah. What was the rest? I think it's just like less milk or whatever. But I think he put it in something like peanut butter or something. No. I'm going to have to reassess Dakota on that one. Yeah, I haven't been there yet.

But you can make all kinds of tasty things with milk. It's true. Or you can just have milk as is. Yeah. Which is also a tasty thing. The peanut butter milk is a, peanut butter is freaking delicious. That thing is delicious I would drink it just like as a normal treat

Normal dessert yeah for sure That's the dichotomy of milk The dichotomy of milk is you're like I want something good for me But I also want to taste something delicious I think we have a title for the episode Yeah that might be the next book So we got warrior kid stuff

We got tea and by the way this stuff You can get the drinks at at Wawa East Coast East Coast all east coast Wawa go in there Clear some shelves support the cause vitamin shop you can get all the supplements

at vitamin shop and we got a bunch of other retail that we'll be rolling out in the near future and listen any of this stuff if you go to joccofuel.com

we'll ship it to you for free if you get a subscription because let's face it we know that there's other elements out there that are providing you with free shipping and we know that that's kind of cool

that's a good thing we don't we're not taking anything away from that but we have to at least match that right we have to at least level the playing field a little bit how do we do that free shipping free shipping if you get a subscription to any of these things which is good for you in two ways number one you save the shipping cost number two you're not waking up one morning you're out of milk yeah what are you having for dessert then oh oh you go to go get a milkshake cool can I have a milkshake and some type two diabetes up in here

uh jacofuel.com check it out What else we got? Origin. Origin USA. com. American-made stuff and for real American-made made. Not imported and then sewn and then they sew the tag on in wherever, you know. No, no, no.

Grown. Grown. It's true. So Origin USA, we've got jeans, boots, jujitsu stuff, geese. Have you put on your rift ghee lately? Yeah. That thing is ridiculous. I slept in it last night.

is, you don't have one yet, dude. No, yeah, no. When you, this is not, it's sort of like, it's sort of like what energy drinks, what go is to energy drinks, Rift Gies is to Gies. It's that freaking hype.

Good analogy. You're so frustrated. If you ever have to put on a normal Ghee again, you'll be mad. Literally, you'll be mad. Literally, yeah, that actually happened to me. I was like, I'm kind of mad right now.

You don't want none of that. Geese, rash guards, joggers, if you're a jogger type human, which echo turtles happen. to be. I go in and out for sure. Yeah, a lot of good stuff. All-American Media or origin USA.com. Also, Jocko has a store. Discipline equals freedom shirts, hats, hoodies. Okay, why don't you just break into the scenario? We have the unfortunate scenario that we have right now. Well, I, you know, I, I didn't find it as unfortunate as maybe, maybe you did.

Well, of course not because you took care of yourself. You got to look out for number one. You took care of yourself. So, of course, you're happy. Well, okay. You're over here. You got a cool shirt that I don't have. I incidentally halfway took care of myself.

And it just kind of came to light in your attention. So, okay, so we got this thing. Okay, on Jocco store, you click on the shirt locker. S-H-U-R-T. Creative. You made it up. Okay. Very creative.

That's what I'm saying. Creative. Yeah, so sure. Actually, I didn't make up somebody on Twitter or Instagram. The Graham. Someone told me, call it the shirt locker. I was like, dang. Fully approved.

Anyway, so it's a subscription situation for shirts, creative designs. You had a question mark. I feel like there was a question mark in your head about like, oh, what is creative designs? Yeah, well, I don't know what that means, but they look cool. And now you just were wearing the other day on the mats of justice, and I don't have it. And then you explain that I can no longer. Get it. So anyways, if you want to get cool shirts, you don't want to miss out.

Yeah. So, and that actually, when you kind of explained it a little bit, I was like, yeah, that is kind of a thing. It's because it's hard to communicate like, hey, these shirts are going to be like cool. Maybe not what you're used to all the time, but they will be cool to have or whatever. Maybe that's an indication that people don't really trust your assessment of what's cool and what's not. Be that as it may, the facts are these. It's hard to be like, hey, guys, get this. They're going to be cool.

And then that's sort of it. Maybe it's just your personality that you, like me, I think we have this similarity. We don't like sitting here saying like, hey, I'm making something and it's going to be cool. So that would be whack. That makes sense. Yeah. So I'm going to say Echo's been making some stuff and it's cool. And if you want to get it, then you've got to go get that shirt locker on, including myself.

Because apparently, even if a cool shirt gets made that actually says discipline and freedom on it, I don't get a version. I don't get a pair. What is it? A copy. A copy. issue. An issue. I don't get issued nothing.

Okay. So this was the thing from the beginning, if you remember, shirt locker. You get a shirt that month and it's gone. We don't sell them on the store. That's why you sign up for the shirt locker so you can get them every month. So you can't come to me after everyone's already arrived and be like, where's mine? It's like, well, again, I think we have to take some.

We just can't blame everyone. We have to take ownership and be like, hey, the ownership is we have failed to convey the level of coolness of the shirts that are coming so if you want to if you want some get your shirt locker on that's about that Jocco store dot com

Also don't forget about the just that your everyday representing on the path it's not an easy path But if you're representing It is a hard path yes sir And if you're representing Let's face it it makes that path a little bit more I don't know a little bit more something

enjoyable Yeah, it's true. Hey, subscribe to this podcast if you want to. Also, we have some other podcasts. We have the Jockle Unravelling Podcast. And the Jocco Unravelling podcast, Daryl and I go deep on some stuff. We're actually going deep on Operation Nemesis. So if you want to check that out, look up Jockle unraveling.

We also have the grounded podcast. Got the Warrior Kid podcast, and Daryl has his podcast, which is called Martyrmaid. And you can join us on the underground where we're putting out. We're putting out more podcasts. How is that even possible? We're putting out more podcast, Jocko Underground. Listen, there's strange things happening in the podcast world, in the whole world, censorship, random people being pulled off of platforms.

We don't know what's going to happen. And we would be stupid not to have some kind of a contingency plan. So we have a contingency plan of if we need to, we don't want to. But if we need to, we can survive some kind of a traumatic, platform event where if they want to start putting advertising injecting advertisements into this podcast or whatever we don't want to have that happen so we need to have an alternative platform we're building it we don't want to take sponsors and have people you know have to do reads I

don't want to do that so if you want to help us not do that and you want to help us have a contingency ready then you can you can subscribe to Jocko Underground at jaco underground.com Could you imagine Jaco doing some basic ass read for like a mattress company? Oh my God. It would be in my nightmares. Or it might even sound I mean not to me it won't sound awesome but it would

be like one of the better reads you've encountered. We're not doing that. We're not doing that. All right, there you go. I've been lying in bed for three hours. I can't sleep. What can I do? But some good stuff on there though recently. Daryl Cooper's been

Gracie us with his presence, but yeah, about the psychology stuff. Yeah, well, that's a cool thing is it's an opportunity to talk about things that are just outside the purview of actual Jocko podcast. Speaking of which, I got some good topics coming up on that one. I got some good I got some good things. We're gonna go we're gonna go on Good good. Yes, also YouTube We have a YouTube channel official we do have a YouTube channel if you want to see the video that I am the assistant director on, then you can watch them.

And if you like them, those are the ones I was the assistant director on. Otherwise, Echo was in charge. Well, you know, me and Carrie, we got some stuff cooking, so, you know. Cool. Maybe we'll allow you to assistant director. I assume it's in this slow cooker,

as usual. Psychological warfare, I made an album telling Echo how to overcome his moments of weakness and he recorded it. And now you can listen to it. psychological warfare you need people ask me for alarm clock yeah can just get that and you can put it as your alarm that's why we did it mp3 check that out wherever you get your mp3s um flipside canvas

dakota mire down there making american made stuff to hang on your wall keep you on the path got a bunch of books obviously you can go to jocco podcast dot com slash books and you can order books from the podcast is this one i don't know if you're going to be able to order this one i i had this one in my collection. It's a used copy. I don't know if it's still available, but it's Armenian Golgotha. You can try and get,

we'll see. If it's available, we'll get it up there. Final spin, I wrote a book that is a fiction book. I can't, novel to me just doesn't sound cool. Does it sound cool to you?

No. Especially if I was like, I wrote a novel. That sounds weird, right? Yeah. It doesn't matter. It doesn't match. It doesn't fit in.

So I need to come up with another word. Maybe I'll come up another word like mulk, but for like something that's kick ass, that's not true, that's a story. The monk of novel. And then I can be like, oh, I wrote a, whatever that thing is. And that way I can still, you know, feel good about it. Yeah, that's a good idea. Because I don't, it's just not my thing.

Like I wrote a novel. Yeah. I mean, technically, what's the technical definition of a novel there, D. D.C.? Ooh, if you start wanting to do. differentiate it between a novella and a novel it gets very hairy sometimes maybe you let's say a hundred pages i think it's pretty i think it's pretty well you're talking about the difference between extreme ownership yeah no i yeah i'm talking about i'm talking about what's a novel yes it's like a category have you

what's a cool novel that you've read or you've read blood meridian okay that's the only cool not well maybe there's some other ones but yeah blood but do you call blood meridian a novel yeah okay then i guess i'm down with it kind of because blood meridian yeah but then the next next step is to call yourself a novelist. Are you ready for that? That's a good point. I wrote a novel. Right in line with freaking

blood meridian. I am a novelist who wrote a novel. The story is called Final Spin. It's available for pre-order right now. Look, the publisher's thinking, who's going to buy a book by this knuckle-drager? We're going to show them who's going to buy a book by this knuckle driver. Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Field Manual.

We got the code, the evaluation of protocols, Disciplinary Freedom Field Manual. Brand new versions out way the warrior kid four three two and one Mikey and the dragons Talked about that a little bit with Jordan Peterson the other day About face by Hackworth. I wrote the forward for the new version and then the old school OG extreme ownership and the economy of leadership Eschlamfront I have a leadership consultancy we solve problems through leadership you can go to eshalomfront.com for details on that EF online revamped it's online leadership training it's outstanding

I'm on there live all the time interacting if you want to come and ask me a question go there muster 2021 listen we are executing it's in full execution mode there's no stopping this train May 25th and 26 in Orlando if you want to go go immediately to extreme ownership.com because now that people realize we're in go mode it's going to sell out so if you want to go May 25th and 26, come and get it, man. It's two days. It's, it is granular and it is the pragmatic leadership skills that you are going to take from that event, bring them back, and it's going to have an impact in your world. So, Orlando, May 25th and 26, Phoenix, August 17th and 18th, and Vegas, October 28th and 29th.

EF Battlefield, pay attention for those in the future. I'll let you know when the next one is scheduled. They're outstanding, and we do them at various battlefields. And if you want to help service members active and retired, you want to help with their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom. Mom and Lee, she's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved,

go to America's Mighty Warriors.org. And if you want more of my wretched reading or you need more of echoes irritating inquiries or you just you just want to hear more of darrell's pedantic postulations you can find us on the interwebs the novelist coming out there yeah there you go on twitter on instagram and on facebook echo is at echo charles darrell is at martyr made and i am at jocco willink and as you heard in this episode there is evil in the world And there are those people that stand up against evil. And some of those people, many of those people, are our military service men and women out there around the world fighting to keep evil at bay.

And at home are police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and Border Patrol and Secret Service and all the first responders all out there doing the same thing. So thanks to all of you out there in uniform protecting us. Everyone else, remember this evil does exist. And it's out there. It's a mob. It is a frenzy. It is pent up frustration and anger. It is jealousy and it is envy and it is resentment and it is out there.

And it is also in all of us. And it is up to all of us to fight it. so keep on fighting and until next time this is darrell and echo and jocco out