Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 143 - Monte Melkonian Part 1: The Boy Scout Revolutionary

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

The story of how a regular kid from a California suburb ended up as a military hero of Armenia. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: Melkonian, Markar. My Brother's Road: An American's Fateful Journey to Armenia

and welcome to yet another episode of the lines of my donkeys podcast i'm joe and with me as always seemingly now sarah from it came From The Sea. What up? Hello. Someone said that you're replacing Nick. And I would instead say you're more like a diet Nick. You're like Nick, but without all the Catholic church jokes. It's true. Yeah, and a little less sugar. A little less sugar.

We're recording very early in the morning, at least for us. Um, we're recording very early in the morning for at least for us. Um, I just woke up, uh, because we're trying to record a series before it gets way too hot on our little Island. Uh, and I prepared for this episode by having a cup of coffee that I promptly filled with expired coffee creamer, uh, without knowing how expired, was it chunky expired or just sour expired? It wasn't chunky expired. It tasted like there was a party in my mouth and everybody is throwing up, though.

It's like that sleeper expired milk flavor. Yeah, which is actually today's sponsor of the show. Expired coffee creamer from the gas station. Did you buy it? When did you buy it? Everything gets expired here immediately though not as long ago as you'd expect yeah but for a liquid that's mostly sugar and milk byproduct because it's not like i was buying like organic shit everybody knows how much money i make from the show it's public knowledge uh but it was old enough now uh this is an episode or a series rather i thought you'd

make a very good guest on um and it's not because that you're closely connected to this topic at all oh no uh have you ever heard of a guy named Monty Melkonian? Not really. You've told me a little bit about him, but before that, I hadn't heard anything. So Monty Melkonian is probably one of the weirdest military heroes of all time. And I say that mostly because he's an Armenian military hero, despite the fact he is born about 30 minutes away from our lovely co-host Nick in California. And certainly not for reasons doing from like recent events whatsoever. We're going to talk about how an American became an Armenian military hero. For no particular reason, not related to anybody on the podcast right now.

Yeah, not even remotely. Now, he is enshrined in Armenia as Commander Avo. Now, obviously, every Armenian would know who Monty Melkonian is. There's currently more statues of Monty Melkonian than Lenin in Armenia, but people will lovingly call him commander avo i will call him something of the forest gump of revolution um and i mean that in the best way possible i mean the the movie forest gump not the book forest gump um have you ever read the book forest gump i've heard it's like horribly depressing yeah and he's like a violent alcoholic i don't mean that oh yeah yeah he abuses some people um we're going for the fun shenanigans of tom hanks that's right yeah yeah um now i should point out my source for this book um because

someone will immediately correct me on this. And it's not the greatest history research I've ever done because it's a very hard thing to research. There's very few resources when it comes to researching Monty's life in English. And I don't speak fluent Armenian, and I was not going to learn for this podcast. The book is called My Brother's Road, and it's written by Monty's brother marcar um so obviously some things might be glossed over and maybe monty's mythos has blown up just a little bit throughout however i do have to say marcar was pretty fair in judging his brother's legacy um more fair than my brother would probably be if I was to die a revolutionary hero.

Yeah, my family would not write a flattering review of my life. Yeah, like he Markar is pretty upfront that Monty was a flawed guy and he might have tried to smooth out some of the edges. But that's a very hard thing to do when you're talking about the fact that your brother was quite literally a terrorist for a large part of his life. Question that's not going to be relevant to anything else going on. Were they one of those families where everybody, like every child had a name that started with the same letter as their last name? I don't know.

They got Monty and Marco. I don't know if they had another sibling, actually. I assume they did and it was like Mickey. Yes. The traditional Armenian name Mickey. know what if they had another sibling actually uh i assume they did it was like mickey ah yes the traditional armenian named mickey yeah uh mickey mousian um now he's an immigrant he changed his name when he got here and started working for walt disney uh so monty melconian was born at november 25th 1957 in vasalia california i probably mispronounced that salia vasalia it's california i don't care um his father chose the name monty

because he wanted something short and uh as his father put it quote something that would sound good over loudspeakers uh i'm sure he did not mean the way that that would eventually mean. Monkey paw curls. I think he wanted his son to be like a baseball star or something. Despite what he would eventually become, Monty was an exceedingly American kid. And his parents were a carpenter and a school teacher. And they hardly ever spoke to him about his Armenian heritage. Something I will point out that is very fucking rare for any Armenian family.

Even for my very non-Armenian family growing up, it was very obvious that we were Armenian. We talked about it all the time. It was very important to our culture, even though none of us have Armenian names. Do you know when his parents came to the US? They were born here. Oh, okay. Yeah. I might be part of it.

His grandfather had immigrated right after the genocide. Now, they would vaguely tell stories of what they called the old country, as they called it, but that was about it. They didn't send them to Armenian school, which is very common. They didn't go to an Armenian church. I think they went to a Presbyterian church.

They were forcing assimilation onto their family. Instead of doing any of that, he focused on doing American kid stuff like playing baseball and joining the Boy Scouts. Monty, despite the era he grew up in being the 1950s, he was friends with everyone

um he didn't have like his parents weren't racist so he didn't have that imprinted onto him by society and he was very loyal to his friends uh he didn't understand american racism because as many americans know uh uh well fuck i gotta say that again. He didn't quite understand American racism because anybody who knows Armenian or is Armenian themselves knows we get a little dark when we tan. So he actually was a victim of racism himself. He was kicked out of a segregated pool

because white people thought he was mixed race. Jesus. Nobody ever accused racists of being smart or even understanding their own hatred. It's true. So fuck, yeah. Now, Monty's upbringing was purposely very American. Like I said, they changed their church rather than the traditional Armenian apostolic church or Armenian Orthodox church,

even though that's one of the oldest denominations of Christianity on Earth. the oldest denominations of Christianity on Earth. In doing so, it meant that he never learned the Armenian language or anything about his own culture. Because of this, he never became religious, a point of contention that continues in mainstream Armenia and Armenian culture at large when it comes regarding him. A lot of people try forcing religious beliefs onto him. He never really had.

At no point did he ever say he was a Marxist. He really did not like religion. But, I mean, Armenia is a very, very religious country. And they try to foist that onto his mythos. And it's just at no point does Markar really bring that up. He talked vaguely of a higher power, but he was not a religious man. Now, Monty was in the Boy Scouts,

though he eventually quit because he earned every badge that he could get and got bored. Honestly, it ends up being a bit of a trend throughout his life. Pretty much everything that he tries, he excels at immediately, gets bored and quits.

Yeah, which is not a problem I've ever had. I get very mediocre very quickly and then I quit. See, that's the truly American experience. Monty started playing Little League and he soon quit because he saw that playing with kids his age were no longer a challenge. And this is where Markar begins to leak out that Monty was a bit of a bastard. He was short-tempered and loved fighting, though he tried not to fight for no reason,

though he would fight his brother all the time because, you know, of course. They're related. That's enough of a reason. Yeah. And Markar points out that at no point uh when monty monty was always the bigger and stronger of the two and would beat the dog shit out of markar and he never once apologized

for it which yeah i mean this sounds like a big brother um and like he in his own accounts markar points out he never once beat his his older brother in anything and that's something as a younger brother i have solidarity in. I mean, Markar beat him in one thing, but we'll get there. Yeah, Markar is still alive. Take that. Exactly.

The ultimate win. Monty also found himself being discriminated against, and along with some of his friends, who are mostly Mexican. So he decided to pick fights with other white kids for being racist. Hell yeah. At other points when white kids

attempted to pick on Mexicans, Monty would tell them that he was Mexican too, so they would try to fight him. And then he would promptly beat their ass. Which, rad. I love that. Yeah, that's pretty dope. Eventually their little weird white suburban life got uprooted because Monty's dad decided it would be very good for their family.

If he sold all of their belongings, they went on a European backpacking trip for a while. That sounds pretty fucking rad, too. Yeah, that's back when you could do stuff like that. And that's what they did. They landed in Keflavik, Iceland, and slowly traveled down through the mainland. While traveling through Europe, they hit Amsterdam, and it was there they met another Armenian family.

And that was the first time that Monty heard about the genocide of 1915, which is just the normal conversation that occurs between two Armenians. I've actually experienced this. He was maybe a teenager. i don't think a teenager yet okay okay still pretty pretty young and i can explain that this actually happens like how did how do you start that conversation normally what happens is when two armenians meet

one another you quickly try to discover if you're related or not um that this is normally dependent not on your last name though sometimes it is but where your family's originally from because a lot of armenians are from eastern anatolia which was taken over by turkey um which then leads into stories about the genocide and how your family still exists this is a very common occurrence and this is how my family escaped the genocide this is literally a conversation. Like a few months ago, I had Dr. Pakalian on the show. We had this exact same conversation and we found out we are almost certainly related. This happens all the time.

Now, remember, his family never talked about it with him. And this is the first time he ever heard of it. His family wanted to shield him from anything to do with his Armenianmenian culture uh because they wanted to become an american boy and assimilate a side note here assimilation is racist moving on yeah yep on their trip they eventually made it to uh castiglione spain um which i i think i pronounced that right i don't know. And their father decided they should enroll in a Spanish language school. At this point, they've just moved to Europe. Yeah, what? They're European drifters.

They just immigrated with extra steps. Yeah. And while in a Spanish language school where Monty was learning Spanish, one of many languages he had learned over the years, a teacher asked Monty where he was from. And Monty, of course, responded that he was from America. And the teacher said, no, where are you really from?

Because white Spanish people are about as racist as Americans. Racism be like that. Though, as fucked up as a question this is, this happens to me a lot. But it was something that Monty never thought about. Like, he wanted to know where his ancestors came from.

And he had no real answer. He knew what Armenia was, but he couldn't even point it out on a map. But more than that, it mentally changed him. It broke his idea of how he saw himself because how others saw him. Others did not see him as a kid from California, just another normal American kid. They saw him as an Armenian. And it was after this, they took a long bus ride through Turkey.

Something I would not recommend. And they visited their ancestral home village. Another thing I would highly not recommend. It was a different time, I guess. I don't know. And they're originally from the village of Mersephon currently known by a different illegal name which I will not say

now in my defense I never claimed I was going to be fair and balanced in this series though when we do talk about the first Artstock war I will do my best to remain kind of neutral.

But not now. Now, Mirzafan was once the home of tens of thousands of Armenians, and that had been reduced to just a couple people due to the genocide. Using an old map and a town god, they found the house

of their great-grandfather, Misak Karamegian, which is currently occupied by a Turkish family. Another M name, though, gotta say. It's a trend. Yeah. It was then they discovered that the town guide

was also a descendant of an Armenian family, but they had changed their name and their religion to sell out their neighbors to the Ottoman Empire in order to save their lives. Yep. Yep. Now, this did happen, and it happened quite a lot. And this actually kind of instilled something in Monty

of a bitter hatred of traitors, of people that it taught him a lesson that just because someone is being loyal to you does not mean that they actually will be. Right. And it pretty badly affected his life for quite a while and i would say it probably affected a lot of his revolutionary relationships as well he's kind of a paranoid dude um years later uh monty marked this visit uh to mercifon as um

a pivotal moment in his life that changed everything. He told his partner Seta, or sometimes it's read as Seta, with a T or a D, but it doesn't really matter. He told a journalist that once he was there, he saw what we had lost that day. And this being Greater Armenia. Now, there's a joke, like me and Travis used to make a joke of Greater Kurdistan encompasses the entire world. But Greater Armenia was an actual historical thing that did exist at one point. Me and Travis used to make a joke of Greater Kurdistan encompasses the entire world.

But Greater Armenia was an actual historical thing that did exist at one point. And he saw what his family had lost, more importantly. When the family returned to Europe, Mati was a changed man. He began to teach himself everything he could about Armenian history and culture. And he attempted to teach himself the language, though though badly which I could also stand all day. Fair. I assume it's the 60s version equivalent of just using babblefish or whatever. Probably just flashcards. Yeah, I

guess. He also began to loathe many of his own family members. He saw them as idiots who let the American dream steal their culture and identity attempting to assimilate them into a culture and a country that would simply never accept them. He's not wrong. He's absolutely not wrong.

It's kind of harsh. Yeah. He thought they were sellouts, turning themselves what he called a cheap trick for capitalism. So not only did Monty begin his Armenian journey, but also his education leftist politics as well. His parents mostly stayed quiet on the topic, which is more than I expected. Kind of just allowing their teenage son to self-radicalize. So it wasn't quite to that point yet. I would say he was the edgy kid you knew in high school who probably wore like a Che Guevara shirt, but didn't quite didn't quite understand what he was talking about yet.

Didn't really understand that buying a Che Guevara shirt at like Spencer's kind of defeated the purpose. Yeah, though he was mostly learning about the horrors of Armenian history, though, through the lens of a lot of leftist theory, which honestly is the way to do it. leftist theory which honestly is the way to do it um the one day um his mom told him that if it wasn't for the massacres of the genocide they would never they would never had the uh ability to be born in america this infuriated body to no end oh oh no he pointed out quite rightly that that the growing up in suburban california was not in fact worth the slaughter of millions yeah what the fuck, mom? Yeah, imagine being such a dumbass your teenage son dunks on you that hard

about your own culture. Instead, he decided the only thing that he could do to repay the genocide was securing the lost ancestral lands of the Armenian people. Though he wasn't entirely sure how. Because remember, he's a child. He's a teenager. He's got big dreams.

And then unfortunately, uh, someone would give him an example of what to do. Um, this happened almost the same week as someone walked into the Biltmore hotel in Santa Barbara and shot two men dead. The gunman was 70 year old Corkin Yannick Canyon, uh, and his targets were the councils of the

Republic of Turkey. Ah. Well. Yanakanian surrendered peacefully to the cops after killing the two men, and said he simply could not forgive the Turkish government for what they did to his people and his family.

This had a deep impact on Monty, and the idea of generational revenge and trauma and things that needed to be righted uh began to uh course through his mind of course righted uh is is is left up for debate at this point um i don't think going down some turkish government employees will do that but i get it like right he's dealing with some trauma and he doesn't exactly understand how to do it um it's one this is one of those problems that like we ran into when we did the uh the irish republic series forever ago which was then interrupted by terrorism um it's like you know it i obviously i'm not in favor of gunning down innocent people uh but

every once in a while there's like a rebel movement that you completely or like maybe a freedom fighter terrorist whatever same thing different flavors um that you kind of understand and empathize how they got there but not their actions right um yeah this is a whole series of that and it is hard because like there is there are there are forms of retribution and retributive justice that could happen right that would like they would never make up for the loss of life but they would they would help the people who are left behind but they're all too big like you can't as as like monty could not go and retrieve all of the land that Turkey stole. And that would be the thing.

That would be the thing that you'd want to do. But what you can do is you can pick up arms, whether or not you should. Sarah, I got some good news for you. He's going to do both of those things eventually. You got to try out all your options and just see which one works the best. Right. Now, like I said before, Monty was excelling at just about everything he did.

He graduated from school a year early, and instead of me and joining the army, he began university early and went to Japan as well. Once there, he quickly mastered a conversational level of Japanese, the language, and obtained a

black belt in judo and karate and learn how to fucking do kendo what a fucking weeb yeah uh he wasn't done though he then scraped together what money he had and then went on a tour of southeast asia now this is the late 60s early 70s and he decided to go on a vacation to vietnam oh just how just go on a vacation to a war at the age of 16 um just you know and like he like he almost got killed in like an artillery strike apparently yeah yeah uh popular thing to do in vietnam at the time Yeah, it was all the rage unfortunately. Then he returned to the United States and went to the University of California and doubled majored

in math and history before changing to history and archaeology because he thought it would be easier to graduate faster while still double majoring. Okay. Sure. Not wrong. While in school he became a student activist in both armenian and

leftist circles and i should point out um by this point of his life mantis racist as hell uh his brother doesn't use that word but i will um it isn't that so it isn't that he hates the turkish government which he does i also hate hate the Turkish government. They're fascists. He hates Turks in general. And he also really hates Kurdish people. So he's just a bit of a racist. Why Kurdish people? The Kurds had a huge hand in perpetrating the Armenian genocide. Okay.

Which actually is something the SDF and the Rojava government, whatever the acronym they use, has publicly apologized for. And they're the only government group in this circle that's actually attempted to apologize for the actions of the genocide. Now, Markar attempts to frame this as monty could simply never forgive them for what they did uh for the genocide

which fair i'm not one arguing forgiveness but i don't hate turks so like it's just racism uh he eventually did learn the the turkish language though um now this wasn't um any kind of like i don't know bridging the gap or unity type thing no it's utilitarian right yeah he wanted to learn more about his enemy and he thought the only way he could do that is by learning turkish which i can't imagine hate learning a language yeah Yeah, he did. He absolutely learned. By the time he's an adult, he spoke better Turkish than he did Armenian, which is kind of ironic. Not going to lie. Don't you think?

Now, during this time, people in leftist Armenian circles began to spread rumors that soon the Shah of Iran would fall as Iran is being rocked by protests at the time. Now, we talked a lot about this during our Iran-Iraq war series. Go ahead and listen to that. I'm not going to redouble the Iranian revolution. But for those unaware, Iran has a huge Armenian diaspora population, and many of them are leftists. And many of the early protests and organizations that would become, unfortunately, the Iranian Islamic revolution was actually cornered by communists, many of whom were Christians and Armenian. and organizations that would become, unfortunately, the Iranian Islamic Revolution, was actually cornered by communists, many of whom were Christians and Armenian.

Most of those people would be killed by the revolution once the Islamist extremists co-opted it, unfortunately. That's what happened with leftist movements. Yeah, funny how that works. up in with leftist movements yeah funny how that works uh now monty being kind of dumb at the time assumed that well if iran is being rocked by revolution turkey would also soon fall to leftist revolution but he was worried that it occurred before the armenians had organized enough to be able to seize the opportunity of a weakened turkish state and force their collective demands on them. He was like hoping for the domino theory. Yeah, he was real pie in the sky type and he would be for a very long time.

Because I mean, he's still a college student. Right. And he also began to read things about a group calling themselves the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, as well as a group called the justice commandos now the the justice commandos yes um now the secret army was kind of like a big tent leftist organization while the justice commandos were armenian nationalists um but both of them were launching shooting and bombing attacks against Turkish diplomats, airliners, and government institutions.

These were rightfully, in my opinion, called terror attacks. Though Monty decided to call them armed propaganda. Okay. Yeah. Rad band name, I'll say. That's a way to spin it.

That's just terrorism with extra steps. Sprinkles on top. Yeah, like I said, rad band name, a weird way to spin that. Though, I know people are really touchy when it comes to call things terror attacks. They have a definition. Using violence to scare or terrorize people for political means which is like quite literally what's happening um right you don't have to you don't have to church it up uh even if you agree with it maybe just don't say it on twitter or whatever

or write it down at all uh otherwise the uh the uh fbi might come and visit you. Now, in his circles at school, he said all of these targets were legitimate. Because he argued that these airlines and all these other things were employees of a government that committed the Armenian genocide. And because that government refused to acknowledge their crime, you know, that being the Turkish government, anyone who worked for them obviously didn't either making them a legitimate target, despite none of these are military targets.

Yeah. It's one of those where like, I agree with this and I agree with that. And I do not agree with the conclusion you've come to. Yes. Yeah. It's like watching someone write out like long division, then come to the wrong conclusion.

You're like, Oh, so close. So close. You're right there. Yeah, it's like watching someone write out Long Division then come to the wrong conclusion. You're like, ooh, so close. Ooh, so close. You're right there. That is when he helped form a student organization called the Armenian Student Association, or ASA. Not as cool as the Justice Commandos. And it's hard to say that maybe he meant to have the same

abbreviation as the Armenian Secret Army. Maybe he didn't. He seems smart. It seems like a thing he'd do intentionally. He announced the first meeting in fall of 1977. I want you to picture this in your head. It's the late 70s. You're in college in

California and you're Armenian or at least interested in Armenian cultural issues. You go to this meeting and you're greeted by monty who at this point had stopped grooming himself um and i can tell you from personal experience if i don't cut my hair or shave i look like a fucking mountain person immediately my hair is like thick look yeah like he probably looks something like the unabomber when he was arrested.

Like, really, like, white guy fro hair, huge giant beard, dressed in tattered clothes and flip-flops. And when you met him, he was handing out Xeroxed copies of bombed and explosive-making recipes that he had Xeroxed from the Anarchist Cookbook. To be fair, I've been to San Francisco a couple of times this just sounds fine i've been normal the 1970s were fucking wild could you could you imagine like going to like udub uh and like going to your class and you're just greeted by a fucking mountain man looking motherfucker handing you uh directions how to build a bomb and him not getting arrested no now it'd be like directions for how to make the perfect granola mess. I don't know which of those I'd prefer, honestly. Both are good.

Yeah, like, would you like one from stack A or one from stack B? And, like, that's something that's going to come up, like, repeatedly is, like, the past was fucking wild when it came to stuff like this. Because, like, you know, in the U.S., this is, you stuff like this. In the US, this is almost considered the golden age of terrorism. There's a lot of airplane hijackings. Skyjacking. Yeah, like Carlos the Jackal was in the wild and stuff like that.

But the US had... 9-11 hadn't happened yet. So a vaguely Middle Eastern man hanging out bomb recipes did not scare anybody. It's fine. Then a couple months later at 3 a.m., a bomb blasted through the

door of UCLA professor Stanford Shaw. Now, nobody was hurt, and Shaw joked that he must have given out too many Fs during the last quarter. Now, that was not the reason. The real reason, probably but unconfirmed, was because Shaw and his wife had recently published a two-volume book titled

The History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, in which they dismissed the Armenian genocide as propaganda peddled by Armenian nationalists. Oh my god. It's not good. Now, Monty was, to nobody's's surprise immediately a suspect in the bombing

um and uh you know mostly because he'd just been you know handing out bomb making literature on a college campus uh screaming about like armenian rights And, you know, he was also a vocally militant activist and hung out with other people like him, leading him to be put on the FBI's radar for at least a few years and certainly not for the last time. However, they could never pin the bombing on him and eventually had to drop it. Now, me and Markar actually agree on this, that we don't think it was Monty. Because it's not that we don't think Monty was capable of building a bomb or doing a terrorism. We'll get to that. But mostly because at this point, he seemed to be fighting nonviolent battles, like getting into shit fits with a school over an Armenian genocide display. Okay.

Like, he was arguing about arts and culture. He wasn't like, you know, it's time to grab the Kalashnikov. The only thing you have to lose is your chain. He hadn't quite graduated to the point of exploding things yet. And more importantly, he had no idea how. The reason why he would build a bomb later is because he learned how to do it in fucking Lebanon. What was he handing out xerox to like bomb recipes for then uh maybe for other people like he wasn't i mean for inspo i mean i have no doubt

like monty was smart enough that if he wanted to build a very simple bomb he could have done it but right but he wouldn't actually attempt it until he got taught how to do it by actual bomb makers it's just he doesn't seem like the type of person who would have kept it quiet either no he probably would have bragged about it um to somebody person who would have kept it quiet either no he probably would have bragged about it um to somebody yeah he would have wrote a zine or whatever i don't know edgy college kids in the 70s um now uh monty finally graduated and accepted the grad position at oxford uh now he argued that um being in graduate school for archaeology would allow him to go to ancient Armenia or modern day Turkey. The real reason was probably because it would make it much easier to get a visa into the Soviet Union and get to Soviet Armenia and study in Armenia proper.

Because he had already tried to get that visa and it had been rejected multiple times. So he assumed if he was attached to oxford university they would let him in um now during this time he moved in with his cousins the barbarians um who were shocked to find he could hardly speak more than a few word a few words of armenian despite years of teaching himself uh so he's not great at everything. Though he still couldn't go to Armenia, they recommend he go to Lebanon instead. He could simply move in amongst the country's massive Armenian population and immerse himself that way.

So not to mention, Lebanon was in the middle of a pretty horrible civil war, and he saw Lebanon as a gateway into the armed struggle of the Armenian people. The civil war. And he saw Lebanon as a gateway into the armed struggle of the Armenian people. The gateway war. Yeah. An idea. I mean, he has been romanticizing

revolution and armed struggle for years, which, you know, never leads to problematic things. Now, he saw himself as a militant revolutionary. One that just so happened to not do either one

of those things yet um he he was desperately looking for a war to fight um and i guess i mean at this point the closest he'd come is dodging artillery while on vacation in south vietnam and this would be his first time actually fighting um now lebanon had fractured at this point into a multi-sided civil war with each religion ethnicity and nationality forming effectively their own armed factions and trying to kill each other at various points. Now, obviously, that is not an exhaustive study of the Lebanese civil war. I think you got it. I'm actually an expert on the subject.

Don't email me. Yeah. Now, Armenians generally lived in their own place. It was a neighborhood called the Burj Hammud, I believe, but generally known as the Armenian Quarter. And he believed that the Armenian Quarter would be under siege and needed dedicated revolutionaries in order to save their neighborhood. Now, that ended up being partially true.

The Armenian quarter was in a very weird, precarious position in this war, where they didn't really want to fight over Lebanese government. They just wanted people to fucking leave them alone. And more people were nice. Now, once he and his cousin had gotten to Lebanon, they realized they really had no idea what they'd gotten themselves into. While in the UK, they realized they really had no idea what they'd gotten themselves into. While in the UK, they thought that the conflict boiled down

to a loose collection of leftists, Muslims, and Palestinians facing off against Christian fascists who call themselves the Falange. The Falange? Yeah. There's a whole thing about it. I'm not going to go into it. Aren't those like finger bones?

Those are Falanges. Which I believe is the word that Phoebe from Friends used for her fake last name is Regina Phalange. Solid name. But that wasn't really the case when they got to the Armenian

quarter. The Armenians, as always, living together and running their own affairs pretty much wherever they live, have decided to consider themselves neutral in the greater Lebanese conflict. But what really this did is made them an ally and enemy of everyone at the war at some point or another. Monty showed

up to the local militia. He assumed he would be greeted as a fellow comrade revolutionary, but instead they dismissed him as some random American kid who was going on a war vacation, which had happened quite a few times at this point. Totally wrong. Yeah, they gave him a rifle

though, which he had never had any training on, and sent him out to a militia guard post without any training on how to fire it. I don't think Monty had fired a gun before in his life. I just imagine them laughing to themselves so they send him off like okay sure kid yeah um and he was he's not coming back yeah like like

most i don't know uh people caught up in their own dreams he's pretty disappointed by the people he met in that they were just people um yeah he had filled his head with the idea of tough take no shit revolutionaries fighting off reactionaries from every angle instead what he found were a loose collection of child soldiers teenagers and old men who hardly slept chugged gallons of coffee did drugs and spent their time playing cards and daydreaming about escaping the war and going to the united states yep which yeah this is their life man yeah man they can't leave like you chose they came here if they had a choice they wouldn't be sitting out there bombed out fucking bunker playing cards and get shot yeah drinking at first pretty much everybody hated him now um had become kind of

commonplace for armenians uh from the u.s uh to run to run to Lebanon because they want to be part of a greater struggle for the Armenian people experiencing the realities of war realizing it's fucking terrible and running off again. So they didn't have time for his bullshit. Then unfortunately people began to spread

rumors that he was the CIA or the KGB or MI6 or something. And the reason for this is because when he finally did get shot at, he didn't even react. He was just like, oh, I'm being shot at. So the idea that he was just some dumb American kid was discarded and figured he must be some super spy. No, he's just kind of dumb.

A sniper took a shot at him and he just stood there, which I've been there before. Like the first time I got shot, I didn't react either. Cause your brain doesn't react in like, Oh, someone's trying to kill me. It's right.

What just happened? It just seems so like fake, right? Yeah. Like that can't, that can't really happen. Right. Uh,

but Monty didn't let the suspicions of the people around him, slow him down though he probably should have instead he started to get up in his own head again and instead of just becoming a militiaman around his fellow Armenians and fitting in which he still had not done he wanted to start a collective farm and military training camp up in the Bekaa Valley and so he pitched this idea to the local political parties of uh of the

armenian quarter uh now i'm not going to go into a lot of armenian politics because they're very weird um but there's two main competing political parties both of whom fucking hate one another and in lebanon they kind of ruled shit like a mafia uh i don't know if that's still true or not. But there's one who is mostly right-wing nationalists, one who are mostly left-wing nationalists, and they fucking hate one another. And they're constantly maneuvering to fuck one another over. And most importantly, if you're an outsider like Monty is and you go to Lebanon, you don't piss them off

because they will kill you um so he pitched this idea to his training camp in the becca valley and immediately got laughed at because like who the fuck is this guy like yeah like what the fuck do you know about even like farms let alone like militia training yeah yeah he he wants to do communism out in the hills and they're like, fuck off, kid. Now, Monty got kind of pissed at the Armenians who actually lived in this place, didn't let him just storm in and take over after seven weeks. And also everybody thinking he was a CIA agent began to nag at him.

So he left Lebanon for Iran, which obviously used to be much easier than it is today. Now, his goal was still a Soviet visa, something he'd been trying to get for the whole time he was in Lebanon. But in order to do that, you have to call people on the phone and make appointments, which is very hard to do due to phone service pretty much being blown out by artillery strikes and stuff. But while there, he contacts uh and with some friends back in california who then traveled to iran to take part in protests against the shah who are still uh taking place and largely led by iranian communists unfortunately for monty he found out firsthand that the shah suppressed these protests with machine gun fire uh because when he went there

the next day after a protest he watched soldiers of the Iranian Imperial Army clearing the square of corpses with a bulldozer and soaking up tons of blood with sawdust yeah this happened a lot before the Shah finally ran

though he didn't let this scare him off because at this point he had been shot at and you know has seen enough stuff so he didn't quite run off corpse bulldozer that's that's a different level yeah yeah that's up there with corpse road but you know um corpse dozer is corpse road's third album the worst kind of killdozer oh god um while he was there became an english teacher and then uh realized that uh they were kind of being paid terribly for how much the staff was being paid or how much the school was being paid.

So they were teaching English for what is mostly the upper crust of Iranian society. So elites would send their kids there to learn English and him and other teachers were teaching them. And they realized they weren't getting fuck all for pay. So he quickly unionized his workplace and led his fellow teachers were teaching them. And they realized they weren't getting fuck all for pay. So he quickly unionized his workplace and led his fellow teachers on a strike.

Which immediately led to them all being fired. Because that's what happens when your country's ran by an asshole and you have no labor rights. Thankfully that doesn't happen anymore. Doesn't happen in this century. Nope. Certainly not to Instacart.

Or Amazon. Or Tesla. Or Walmart. anymore doesn't happen in this century nope certainly not to instacart um or amazon or tesla or walmart while he was planning his next move in iran he got word from lebanon that the fascist phalangist militias were surrounding the armenian quarter and demanding tribute in order to ward off an attack and it was only a matter of time before shit popped off for real in the neighborhood. So we quickly got back to Beirut. And at this point, half the city was surrounded by Falange and the other half was surrounded by the Syrian army. And they also used to be allies. But now we're shooting at one another because that's how things happen in Lebanon. And while they were shelling at one another, their shells began to land pretty short, directly into the Armenian quarter.

The bombardment went on for eight days, and Monty hid the entire time in a basement with civilians as the city was pulverized around them. Now, remember the Armenian secret army from a while back? Well, one of Monty's dreams now, because he

had heard that they're headquartered in Lebanon and Beirut somewhere in the neighborhood and he wanted to link up with them and join them like that was what he wanted to do but there was a small problem he could not find them you know the secret army part I guess so he just thought it was just the name I thought

it was just a clever name yeah I thought like no for real, we're right here, but we're also secret, and you can't find us, but also we're doing propaganda, armed propaganda, or whatever. Monty walking around like, hey, have you heard about this secret army?

So he just kind of started his own branch, which I should point out was not what the secret army was about like they weren't like a a leaderless resistance type thing um it's not like anybody can be antifa yeah um and they were not looking to start franchises and people warned him not to do this uh but monty didn't care uh and he was but he was also short on money so he he wanted to like what i think his plan was was i'm gonna call myself the secret army i'm gonna go do secret army stuff the secret army is gonna know like yo this must have been monty we need this guy on our team that's what i could i see happening the

problem was is monty was broke as fuck and had had no money to buy any guns or explosives or anything and like the militia only lent him an ak like he couldn't like just take it like he didn't he didn't turn it in when he wasn't using it so like he had to go buy some guns um and you know monty was a guy who thought almost throughout his entire life that he was the smartest most important guy in whatever room he happened to be standing in. He was an idealist caught up in his own grand plans that only existed in his and his head alone. He was a revolutionary without the revolution. And while Monty wouldn't act on his plans immediately uh he was planning on doing something big

uh though someone called us prepping a terror attack and those people would probably be right um i've heard it called armed propaganda yeah yeah also i guess armed propaganda is corpse Armed Propaganda is Corpse Road's fourth album. After this, in 1979, as the Iranian revolution took off in full steam and most of Monty's friends had been killed by Islamic revolutionaries, the Kurds of Iran, as well as the fringe remnants of the leftist revolutionaries, many of them also Kurdish and Armenian, stood up against the Islamic government and kind of joined forces Monty it turns out was willing to overlook his own prejudice against the Kurds when a revolution was involved and quickly bailed on Lebanon again and went back to Iran now like before Monty asked to join the rebellion against the Islamic revolution on the front lines

and he was told to fuck off in short order. Who the fuck are you? And when he tried to rally Armenian support for the Kurds, a historically tough thing to do, he was announced as an American spy again. Yeah, I can see it. Soon it became clear that he needed to get the fuck out of there before somebody shot him.

And after more revolutionary letdowns, he simply went back to Beirut. Che Guevara Monti was not quite yet. Once there, he learned that the Phalangist militia had killed several Armenians. And things between the two sides were tense, again. They almost always were, but they weren't shooting at each other every day. Between the two sides were tense again. They almost always were, but they weren't shooting at each other every day.

There was like a series of, you know, armistices, I guess you could call them with, which immediately collapse. But one night while he was on guard, several armed phalangists approached money's posts and he shot at them. And remember, body doesn't have any training yet.

He doesn't quite know what to do. And he's also alone. How long has he been there? Yeah. So he charged at them, firing wildly before taking off down a nearby alley, popping out from a different alley and shooting at them again. I don't know if this is his goal, but he bounced back and forth so much that he tricked the militiamen into thinking there are several more people

than there actually were. That's some cartoon bullshit. Yeah, Monty's spastic ass kept them pinned down alone until backup could arrive. Damn. But while he had accounted himself well on the Lebanese battlefield, he'd also get involved in Lebanese politics. Something that ended up with him being kidnapped at least twice By the same group? Probably

He was black bagged Another Another group of Armenian politicians Also kidnapped him And he was also Someone attempted to murder him four times Almost all of them by other Armenians Probably one by Phalangist but no one's really sure They're just over his shit to murder him four times. Almost all of them by other Armenians.

Probably one by phalangists, but no one's really sure. They're just over his shit. Yeah. He eventually made contact with a Fatah agent named Abu Nadal who taught him how to build a car bomb.

So that's where he learns. Okay. Okay. Monty decided that he would kill a local militia leader that was opposed to the phalangists now this sounds dumb because it is but it makes sense in monty's brain his idea was to blow up this militia leader and then blame it on the phalangists yeah yeah i knew that's where

that was going it never works out no uh he wanted to do he wanted to do a false flag. Yeah, an amateur false flag. Yeah. So he would obviously force the two sides to go to war against one another and leave the Armenians alone. When he set the bomb off, it killed some random bystanders and a bodyguard, leaving the main target unharmed. Worse still, the leader blamed the Palestinians, not the phalangists. And then launched attacks against them. I'm starting to think that Monty isn't good at politics either. He's good at everything except the whole revolutionary part at this point.

Yeah, it's like Monty, certainly this attempt at revolution won't be bad this time. Ah, well, nevertheless. Nevertheless? Alas. Alas, well, nevertheless. Nevertheless? Alas. Alas, he persevered. Yet he persisted. Nevertheless, Monty persevered. Throughout this failed attack,

so he was kind of right in one thing. By setting off a giant bomb, he did get the attention of the secret army. The group he had just been kind of cosplaying as when he blew up an entire city block.

And he met with a recruiter, a man that he noted had the worst teeth he had ever seen. I don't... Yeah. It's impressive that stuck out to him immediately which

says they must have been awful yeah Monty immediately joined the group and it couldn't have happened at a better time because the next day someone warned him that he needed to leave the Armenian quarter immediately or a different Armenian political group was going to kill him so that's exactly what he did

moving across the city before his ass finally got got for fucking around. Their contact brought him to a local secret army headquarters where Monty met their leader. Hartuyian Takushian. Now, he was an Iraqi Armenian. He goes by several different names. People think that this is his birth name. I people think that this is his birth name.

He is mostly known by hijab hijab in which also seems to be a fake name. He went dude has like a dozen different fucking names. I'm going by his birth name, which is the cushion. I think the man has layers like an onion. Yeah, like an ogre as he had been a part of an ira of an iraqi revolutionary group before he turned into an armenian iraqi revolution revolutionary um and he had been a member of the revolutionary socialist group the popular front for the liberation of palestine um okay now during this time uh this that's where the secret army kind of branched up branched off from like the the the popular front was like yeah you can start your own

own armenian group under our command and he was like word so like it wasn't like this independent group of heroic revolutionaries and instead it was just this guy had a couple other people working under the umbrella of a marxist lateninist group and under an even larger umbrella of the PLO or the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Now, there's some interesting, weird connections that Takushian had. Now, while he was 16 years old, he came over to the personal training of a guy named Wadi Haddad. Now, he was a socialist militant who had connections to Black September. For people unaware, Black September is the group that carried out the Munich Olympic attacks and killed Israeli athletes. And there's also a rumor.

rumor um now for people who are unaware after those attacks israel launched operation wrath of god to hunt down and kill these people um that they think had even loosely connected uh to these attacks which is how wadi haddad would eventually die via poison toothpastes um though toothpaste yeah uh it's unconfirmed um but it it sounds like something they might do. The Operation Wrath of God people were really into car bombs themselves. Because Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, wanted to terrorize them like they had terrorized the Israelis. So that involved a lot of explosives. This group was also allied with the Kurdish Workers' Party or the PKK, because there's nothing like bonding over the destruction of the Turkish state. It brings families together. Yeah, yeah.

Sometimes the revolution was the friends we made along the way. And admittedly, working and living with the PKK actually deeply affected Bani in a very positive way. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Abdallah Ajalon's organization has some pretty strict rules when it comes to how the soldiers or the fighters of the PKK present an act. Like not smoking or drinking, though the smoking thing is very loosely enforced. But mostly like don't be drunk and don't be assholes don't commit crimes stuff like that um there's a lot of like don't victimize people that are like at your level or

lower yeah i mean now obviously that's a hell of a juxtaposition for the pkk because they car bomb civilians so like you know you know um now after starting his group and funding it with money from his buddy who owned a bookstore the secret army bombed multiple targets and shot several diplomats creating something of a beef with a rival assassination squad that we already talked about the justice commandos um now at this point things are so confused and i'm saying by this point i mean modern history today that nobody's entirely sure who killed who uh because it was was there like i was there like a venn diagram between the asa and the justice commandos where like some people kind

of went back and forth between the two groups the politically they were very different and it seems like it seems like the justice commandos were much better organized um they had a much better name yeah they do and takushin's kind of an asshole um and he he's he's not very smart uh we'll talk a little bit about that more in the next episode but uh what he did was instead of trying to build his organization up which he was trying to do and failing mostly uh he would simply hear because he had connections through i mean the justice commandos were buying illegal firearms and explosives just like he was so like they had mutual relations and friends with people

in the in the that's right in the black market community it's only so big of an area that they're based out of like oh only so big of a community that they can operate within yeah did you sell machine guns to a different armen Armenian ah okay I know who that is um so like whenever he heard about a bomb or a gun attack going off he would immediately call his press contacts and take credit for it for the secret army rather than

the justice commandos and then the justice commandos would do the same thing so at this point nobody is fucking sure who killed who or who bombed what because they're all lying yeah stolen terrorist valor if you will it's the only good stolen valor at one point to kushian pissed off the wrong factional group uh and was shot 12 times at a kgb drive-by uh but survived uh so yeah like he he's trying to do the same thing monty was doing but slightly better mostly because he has more experience yeah he has much better connections and at some point

someone opined that he had kgb connections which was probably true um because i mean when you think about it all these armenian groups are targeting turkish targets which is an enemy of the soviet union so they're like yeah yeah sure buddy like we're all about armenian liberation let's go blow up turkish stuff uh also at this time like the the ktb was kind of just throwing money at any little group like that like they didn't have to give them a ton of money right most of these groups are so poor like anything that they gave helped right it was really cheap for the kgb to just garner support that way i mean it was just like they openly support the plo as well they didn't give a shit about palestinian liberation like no no but if we

give you a little bit of money and you go like bother people we don't like yeah why not yeah like taking over fucking planes and bombing airports and, you know, it keeps, it keeps your enemies occupied and looking internally rather than look like worrying about, um, the Soviet union and, you know, Soviet politics.

Yeah. Yeah. It's really great to, um, be the thorn in the side of a major power of the, like, uh, during the cold war,

like the U S or what happens to be a lot of the time, France or Israel, because the Soviet Union supported a lot of the Arab states against Israel. So, yeah, they don't give a shit about Armenia. They don't give a shit about Arab liberation. They just want to fucking cause chaos, which

they did. Now, there's no proof that the KGB supported them, but it certainly seems like they would, because remember's no proof that the KGB supported them, but it certainly seems like they would, because remember, they're under the greater PLO umbrella. So, you know, trickle-down support. Trickle-down terrorism. Yeah.

Now, Monty was pretty fucking let down by the Secret Army when he finally got to see it. He called it a rinky-dink operation, but he decided that it was better than anything else he had going on and threw his lot with them anyway. Probably because this is the first revolutionary group he attempted to get into that actually let him in. Choosy beggars and all that. Yeah, it's a revolutionary free agency, and he waited to, like, he didn't have the intangibles that the bigger groups needed. Like, he's in the farm club team of the plo he needs to get himself a terrorist agent yeah that's right um now the big letdown here for monty was not the size of the operation but rather how it was run

he assumed that the secret army is ran by someone like him you know uh what he considered a romantic revolutionary intellectual or at least someone who was well read um instead to kushin was a high school dropout who hardly spoke a word of armenian um and worse still the secret army had no overarching political goals uh they were loosely marxist um and kind of sort of talking about liberating the occupied territories of Greater Armenia but it was mostly just about the violence. Yeah, just freebasing car bombs. This is fine. Yeah, like

if you would have asked Akushin why he's blowing up Turkish airplanes he would have no idea. He just hated Turks. He just really hated Turkish people. So it's kind of a racist death squad at this point with vague political overtones.

And like Tekusin himself did not say that his secret army, because even small groups, which the PLO is not a small group at this point, but other groups like it would say, no, our end goal is to liberate Palestine. Or our end goal is to destroy the Israeli state or whatever.

They have goals. Takushin admitted he just wanted to make noise. You know what? It's very demoralizing. I respect that. It's demoralizing. But at least he's honest. But he's honest about it.

I mean, sure, he's honest. But imagine you're a young revolutionary and you're like, ah, I want to bring down the Turkish state. Dekushin's like, yeah, I'm not about that action, boss. I'm just about throwing hand grenades at stewardesses. I mean, to be fair, Monty could have, I don't know, probably could have done any amount of research and figured that out. Yeah, and his thing was is um this group is

obviously doing things like they're doing armed propaganda so he wants to join them they're doing terrorism um and he wants to join them and take part in this and he believes like well you know once i'm in i'll be able to politically reform them i can change him i can change them i just need time yeah yeah exactly um now he just if he can get them in a conference room and he can talk about theory for like four to eight hours now he didn't see any of these as warning signs per se um now takushi and then took him under his wing and began training him which was about as half-assed as you could imagine. Now, this is the first actual training that Monty had received. But the secret army was about as broke as Monty.

So they didn't really have any money for bullets. So you could go out to the range and shoot a gun, but there was no firearms training. And instead, Takushin would just use his personal pistol to fire at monty's feet um like he would just pop out from around corners and like kind of ambush him and uh we don't have bullets for you to practice your marksmanship however i will have just enough rounds for me to shoot at your legs. I will fire at your feet like an Acme cartoon. And he did this until Monty no longer flinched when he jumped out and shot at him. And I don't know if this is Monty becoming endured to gunfire or if him just being over Takushin's bullshit.

Yeah, at some point, just fucking shoot me, man. Yeah, just put one in my fucking shin and I'll go back to California, you asshole. Yeah. man. Yeah, just put one in my fucking shin and I'll go back to California, you asshole. Yeah. Though, eventually, I assumed Takushi and got bored of shooting at his new recruits.

And decided that it was time for Monty to go on his first mission. To go do some armed propaganda terrorism of his own. And that is what we'll pick up next week. Oh boy. Oh boy. Does it go about as well as i think it's gonna

go um i will say on the loosest definition of success monty succeeds i don't know if i feel good or bad about that that's a good way to be conflicted right now um yeah it's it was like me uh learning about monty in the first place. Because my knowledge of Monty worked backwards. Which was, ah, he was an Armenian military hero. And that's pretty much all I knew about him. And then I learned, oh, a lot of car bombs. Which is interesting, because this doesn't happen that often. happen that often um you know like uh normally obviously armenia was in a very very unique position to be in which we will talk about at length uh on part three but um normally someone

like him isn't normalized in a state structure they're like no come on i mean obviously as like outside state actors you get people who are outright terrorists being used for nefarious purposes but like armenia armenia made this guy a lieutenant colonel um posthumously posthumously okay well he was i believe he was a major while he was still alive but uh he was one of the best overall commanders in armenia during the first artsock war um but yeah i mean this is a guy that had no military training like for real um never went to a military academy at this point he's in his 20s and he barely speaks armenian yeah and he would die uh speaking very bad armenian uh the the problem is like he learned in lebanon um and lebanese Lebanese Armenians speak a weird form of Armenian.

Right. But the Armenian language, there's Eastern, there's Western, and there's different dialects from within. And he just kind of picked it up. And you can get on YouTube and pull up interviews of him speaking to people. And he has a very hard time understanding people uh but like he's able to like communicate with them anyway um but yeah military stuff i'm sure it's it's not that bad he figured it out obviously um so how you feeling about monty at the end of

part one like not great oh that Your opinion is going to go down next episode. He sounds like you described him as that edgy teen and even into his 20s in Lebanon and in all these conflicts, he still just sounds like he's that edgy teen who thinks he knows best

but has no experience. To his credit, he does a lot of reflection later on in his life and I say later on in his life but I think he dies when he's 35 it's a rough looking 35 though but you know he

admits that like he was a fucking idiot pretty much like I'm paraphrasing obviously but yeah he's very much edgy teen but now uh he actually is doing doing some revolutionary activities terrorism um some armed propaganda yes some of that armed propaganda he loves so much so sarah thank you uh for joining me and and continuing to join me as our on our journey of learning about armenia's greatest, Asterix, to come from California.

I really don't like... The finest export America has. I really would like to say that he is Armenia's best military commander because in modern times, there's never been a more successful one than him. And that includes last year's conflict in 2020. Armenian military completely collapsed. And the Armenian military collapsed in the 90s as well. And there was people like Monty, and more specifically, Monty himself, that held it together.

So I don't want to say he's the greatest military commander in Armenian history. But he certainly is in modern Armenian history. And even though he's a suburban kid from California, which is all very weird. But again, thank you for joining us. Everybody, thank you for joining us on part one. Part two next week. It gets bad. I can't wait.

I like it when things get bad. Didn't you run the right podcast?