Part One: Ancient Genocide and the War on Carthage

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey everybody. Robert Evans here and for the last two years,
Behind the Bastards listeners have funded the Portland Diaper Bank,
which provides diapers for low income families. Uh. Last year
y'all raised more than twenty one thousand dollars, which was
able to purchase one point one million diapers for children
and families in need in one um. And this year

(00:22):
we're trying to get dollars raised for the Portland Diaper Bank,
which is going to allow us to help even more kids.
So UM, if you want to help, you can go
to bTB fundraiser for pd X Diaper Bank at go
fund me. Just type and go fund me b TB
Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank. Again, that's go fund Me
bTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or find the link

(00:45):
in the show notes. Thank you all. Let's go. Let's
start the podcast, So get off, let's move it. Robert, Sophie,
Robert Sophie, Robert Sophie, evens Toma Robert. This is Behind
the Bastards. It's a podcast. Hello Joe, I'm glad to

(01:09):
be on the podcast. This is the podcast of Behind
the Bastards where we talk about bad people, and today
we're talking about the worst people broadly speaking, in the
world in history, which are collectively all of the people
who have participated in are directly enabled genocide. Um yea

(01:29):
more to the point, Joe, we're talking. There was an
episode of our sister podcast it could happen here. Maybe
cousin podcast is more accurate. Um, maybe behind the Bastards
is like the uncle. I don't know, I don't depending
on what state you're from, that's all of those things.
Behind the Bastards is the uncle by marriage could happen here. Yeah,

(01:52):
that sounds right anyway. I made a comment about the
fact that because we were talking about anarchism and stuff
and and what kind of things the state makes possible
in what kind of things are just human nature? And
I made a comment that like, genocide is not something
you need a state or like a nation for. It's
just like a thing that people have always done, and
that basically, as long as we have evidence of people

(02:13):
organizing in any capacity, we have evidence of genocide. And
um some folks got upset about that. There were some
people who really questioned that, and because I had not
actually provided any kind of evidence, it's understandable that people
will be like, because it is. It is difficult, I
think if you haven't thought about this, to imagine like
prehistoric human beings engaging in organized genocide. Um, but they

(02:34):
totally did. Yeah, I think it's something that I mean,
of course, having an organized state certainly will make that easier.
It does help. Yes, I think it's something we're like.
I'm a I'm a grad student in holocaust and genocide studies, um,
and I I think it's something that people can get

(02:56):
lodged in their head. Is when they see or hear
the were genocide, they immediately think of like death camps
and things like that, which of course wouldn't happen without
a state structure, right, I mean you would imagine. So
I think it might be best, honestly, like, given the
fact that we are recording this the week of the
Valdi shootings, it might be best to think about this
the way it's reasonable to think about mass killings where um,

(03:21):
there whether or not guns are available, there will absolutely
be mass killings and a wide variety of societies. And
the evidence for this is that many societies where guns
are not available have mass killings. The easy availability of
guns does mean those killings you're number one, more frequent.
Number two tend to kill more people. Um, not always,
but generally speaking. And it's the same thing with like genocide.

(03:41):
Genocide prior to the state existed, but you can get
a lot nastier with it when you have the apparatus
of a centralized state. Of course. It's it's like, um,
why World War One was so horrific. Um, you know,
we we revolutionize the mechanisms of mass murder to to
this human meat. It's it's not like the wars that

(04:03):
happened before then. We're not as horrific in their day.
We just we just continued to surpass our previous human
records with their own violence. Yeah. Anyway, we're doing Genocide
Week this week. Joe Joe Casabian, co host of The
Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Um, and you are also uh,
like uh an academic on an academic capacity specialized in genocide.

(04:28):
Like you've got a grad degree and ship, unlike me
who just reads books about UM. So you have a
degree of like formal knowledge here. Uh that is is
beyond certainly like what I have in this area, which
I think I hope will be hopeful because we'll be
getting into this kind of meandered a bit in episode one.
We will primarily be talking about kind of the prehistoric
roots of genocide and then sort of the first what

(04:50):
what what what? At least one scholar will argues like
the first documented genocide UM in in history. And after
that we're going to be talking more about what makes
people cape of committing genocide, like what's actually going on
that that pushes people to it? Because um, some of
this is just based on my continual frustration of the
description of like, you know, the perpetrators of the Holocaust

(05:13):
is like being brainwashed or taken over by a mania.
That's generally not what happens. But we're getting ahead of
ourselves here. Yeah, yeah, oh, I love that argument. It's
it's it's one of my favorites. We we will be
chatting about that in part too, But right now, I
want to talk about probably the earliest evidence that exists
in history of an act of genocide UM. It was
discovered on the banks of Kenya's Lake Turkana in two

(05:36):
thousand twelve. It is a mass grave, one which dates
back roughly ten thousand years to about eight thousand BC.
It is filled with women, children, and men, both young
and old. Some of them had school shattered by blunt weapons.
Others had been repeatedly pierced by some form of projectile.
One woman was a pregnant woman who appeared to have

(05:56):
her hands bound and have been beaten before her execution. Um.
It looks very much like mass graves you would find
from basically every act of genocide ever committed sense right,
including people with their hands bound who were executed. UM,
particularly like women and children who were executed with their
hands bound. Uh. Marta Mirazon Lar of the University of

(06:16):
Cambridge notes that the injuries discovered quote shocked for their mercilessness,
but that quote what we see at the prehistoric side
of Nataruk is no different from the fight's wars and
conquests that shaped so much of our history. And again,
what's interesting to me kind of in the context of
where this line of thoughts started for for us and
the comments I added another podcast, is that this is

(06:37):
this occurs pre the development of anything we would recognize
as a state really anywhere in the world. This is
like eight thousand eight BC is roughly when this is
thought to have when the killings that these graves were
resulted or resulted from we're thought to have occurred depending
on you know, there's some wiggle room as to win
the first state arose, right, none of these like thea

(06:58):
exact but broadly speaking somewhere around in Mesopotamia in Egypt,
like in that kind of ballpark is when we get
our first like city and you know how much you
how much you kind of draw line to the first
city and like whether you con consider that like a
proper state is also a little bit because none of this,
like they didn't just pick a day to be like,

(07:20):
well now we have states, now human beings existing states, right,
people started like living. You know, this all occurred kind
of gradually. Um, So precision isn't possible. But these were
definitely whatever happened in that mass graven lake Turkana was
not organized by anything we would recognize as like a
mass political entity that calls itself a nation, right like

(07:42):
that that was not a factor in this. Um. People
weren't doing that yet. Um. The people's of that part
of Kenya and roughly eight thousand BC were hunter gatherers,
or to be more specific, they were actually fisher foragers,
not really like hunting in a big deal, because again
there's it was a wet area at this point. It's
very dry today, but it was there were a lot

(08:03):
of like lakes and rivers that no longer exist in
the area UM Today. The individuals who lived there and
who were found in that mass grave are known as
the natar Uk people UM, and they're believed to have
roamed and made connections as far afield as the Nile
Valley and the Maghreb Uh. It's worth noting that in
the period they were killed, the Sahara was green. It

(08:24):
was not yet a desert. For an example, like how
fucking old this is? Like you could you could grow
things in the Sahara UM. So yeah. Um. This also
probably made travel simpler, which is why folks who were
far away could make it to natar Uck Um. Now,
we don't know who committed the massacre of these people,
but as this right up from the Smithsonian magazine makes clear,

(08:45):
it was done with great intention. The remains were submerged
in a lagoon after they were killed, which helped preserve
them and may suggest that the people who killed them
wanted to hide what they had done. Um. You know,
maybe there was some ritual thing there. We don't really know, um,
but it don't looked like other graves that had been
found in the area at the time. Hide from who,
yeah exactly quote uh, it's not clear that anyone was

(09:09):
spared at the not A Rock massacre. Of the twenty
seven individuals found, eight were male and eight female, with
five adults of unknown gender. The site also contained the
partial remains of six children. Twelve of the skeletons were
in a relatively complete state. Ten of those showed very
clear evidence that they had met a violent end. Um.
In the paper, the researchers described quote extreme blunt force,
trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs,

(09:31):
arrow allegiance to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged
in the skull and thorax of two men. Four of them,
including a late term pregnant women, appear to have had
their hands bound. Um. It's noted by the archaeologists that
the killers carried weapons that would not have been used
for hunting and fishing, so that this was These were
not people like using kind of the tools that they
used for other stuff for violence. These were people who

(09:53):
brought special things meant to kill human beings UM. Mirazon
Lar notes that there were a number of like close
proximity weapons like knives UM, and that this is kind
of a hallmark of intergroup conflict, as was the brutality
of the killings right um like it suggests a degree
of like uh ferocity UM. The use of these weapons,

(10:15):
Laar notes also suggests premeditation and planning. She goes on
to suggest that given the resources employed, the people of
Natarup were likely massacred for their own resources. Right. This
was not like a simple thing for people in this
period to get together the kind of equipment they used
for this. UM, Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna
say that tracks. Um. What's unique is even in situations

(10:37):
where and we'll we'll talk about this more. I'm sure
when we get the perpetrators and there and their motivations
is um, even mass atrocity crimes or mass murders UM
are are done. Is normally like women and children are taken,
especially during this time period for very obvious reasons. I

(10:58):
won't go into UM. And the men are killed because
with the men is the identity of of of the area.
But the reason why you're killing them is to take
their ship. Yes, so that all that all makes perfect
sense to me in my very very broken mind. Yeah. Yeah,
but but it does, like I think the thing that's
like this is not this does not look purely like

(11:18):
you have two groups who have like a like a
conflict over over something like this is there's a lot
of evidence of that kind of violence, and it does
not look quite like this. Like there's a reason why
this is noted as different. Again, the killing of like
women and and and children, pregnant people, the fact that
like they were kids, like people were bound and executed,
that all looks um again, just like it's it's more

(11:41):
complete than the kind of violence that is, I guess
you'd say, more normal around people in between people in
this period. Even if you measure that against you know,
the definitions would come however, many thousands of years later.
That that hits it to a t. Yeah, yeah, And
that that's the point that like Mirizon Lar makes is

(12:02):
that um, her exact quote is this shows that two
of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies, control
of territory and resources, were probably the same for hunter gathers,
and that we have underestimated their role in prehistory. Again,
just the idea that like genocide uh goes back quite
a bit. And that also, I mean one of the
things that it is worth noting too, because when we

(12:25):
think about genocide in a modern context, it's always nearly
always framed as motivated by racism um. And it's like,
obviously racism has played a significant role in many genocides, um,
but just as as significant a role as pure venal greed,
which we'll be talking about more in Part two. But
like people want ship and that's a big part of
why they do a genocide, and it's that goes back

(12:45):
further than states UM. Obviously. I think one of the
things that's I kind of thought about reading about this
case is the mass graves recently uncovered parts of Ukraine,
like Buka, and the fact that the killing of civilians
who's hands were bound like that was one of the
things that I thought of those pictures I saw of
like corpses on the road with their hands bound, and

(13:06):
then ten thousand years ago you have dead people with
their hands bound in a mass grave outside of lake
in Kenya. UM. These archaeologists saying it was probably because
they wanted resources, and the Russian soldiers in buccus stealing
every luxury item that that isn't nailed down, you know,
like this is uh what people do. Yeah, specifically it's

(13:26):
what I mean, especially in Kenya, it's extra state forces
or I guess paramilitary forces, tribal military forces. Yeah, I
mean it's still happening. And with the Boko Haramas, I
think it's yeah, yeah, yeah, um, yeah, people are pretty consistent.
You gotta give us that, um, unfortunately painfully depressingly consistent. Yeah. Yeah.

(13:51):
And obviously I think there's some people who might have
some objections here. Um, because nobody doubts that ancient folks
murdered each other in war. Um, that's pretty pretty widely accepted.
But we consider genocide to be kind of going beyond that.
You know, every king or warlord who like killed a
shipload of people isn't necessarily considered like a committer of genocide.

(14:14):
I think there's even a lot of debate about like
whether or not you would consider like Genghis Khan like
is a lot like it's the sacking of a city
for the purposes he did the same as like the
extermination of a of a race, and that's a that's
a debatable point. So I think if we're gonna have
a productive point productive talk about like genocide in an
ancient context, we're gonna need to leap forward a bit
to something that you, uh, spoilered a little bit. Spoiler

(14:37):
is the wrong term for this, um, the definition of genocide.
Spoiler alerts spoiler exactly. Yeah, that's yeah, that's He's the
He's the single man with whom that word has its
like linguistic origins. Um Limpcoln was a Holocaust survivor Um
and he was an extremely delicated, dead cated, an intelligent man,

(15:01):
and his crusade too to start what became like not
just the concept of genocide as like a legal term,
but the the Genocide Convention actually started way before the
Holocaust got going in nineteen thirty three, which is like
the year the Nazis took power. So Lincoln, like I
was aware of what was coming, you know, like he was,
I mean he he had actually started his research about

(15:24):
two decades before then. He was in law school, I
believe the same in Poland, Um, when the the trial
of Sagamantelerian was going on in Berlin. Yeah, to Leirian
being the Turkish or no the Tolerian being the Armenian
who assassinated one of the Turkish officials who was responsible
for organizing the Armenian genocide. Yeah, he shot Talat Pasha

(15:46):
and broad daylight in Berlin, UM with the sole purpose
of going on trial admitting that he killed him and
using it as a pulpit to talk about the genocide,
which he successfully did day with Yeah, he's a cool dude.
Yeah he rocks. Yeah. UM and Lemkin was watching this
on well, reading it unfolding the newspaper, and he asked

(16:07):
one of his professors, like, how a state could get
away with doing this? Um? And why isn't more Turkish
authorities on trial because none of them would ever stand trial. Uh.
And his and his professor effectively believe in the in
the sovereign idea that a sovereign could do with its
people as they pleased and it wasn't any other states
to tell them what to do. Um. And he immediately believed,

(16:30):
I believe this is a nineteen something like that. He's like,
that doesn't seem right to me. So by the time
the Holocaust started and his family died in the Holocaust, UM,
he had studied the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the
natives in North America. Uh and uh He's like, this
is you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but often fucking rhymes,

(16:53):
and it's it's it's probably worth noting here too. We're
we're getting a field from the ancient days. But in
the same way that like limp Can started thinking about
what a genocide was and started like, you know, attempting
to get other people to talk about this as it like,
as a crime and to kind of change attitudes about
like that. Um, he was motivated and inspired by the

(17:16):
same things that in a very different way, we're motivating
and inspirational to Hitler, because Hitler also studied the genocide
of the Native Americans and was like, oh, this seems cool, Um,
this seems like a good way to get a bunch
of land. And also Hitler was directly inspired by the
genocide of the Armenians. I think his exact quote was
like people were asking him like this is and this

(17:36):
is I think from his table talk. But he was
being asked by one of his officials like are we
not going to get in trouble for this? And he
was like, well, shit, who remembers the Armenians. Yeah, and
and not to mention they're only um, I mean during
World War One, the German Empire had in the Ottoman Empire. Yes, ironically,
one of them is the the main prime very resource

(18:00):
for pictures about the Armenian genocide because he took pictures
of it and smuggled them out. Yeah. And and then
the German Empire committed genocide and Namibia a couple of
years before that. Yeah yeah, yeah, Which we'll we'll talk
about all of this in more detail at some point,
but let's talk about the definition of genocide because people
don't you know, Limpcoln's foresight is not widely appreciated, and
it is not until nineteen forty four, um that it

(18:23):
starts to like the kind of the stuff he's talking about,
starts to gain more ground. And that's also the year
that he proposes the term genocide to describe the destruction
of a nation or ethnic group. Um. And this is
one of those Greek Latin hodgepodge is that I think
frustrates some linguistic nerds. Here he basically took the Greek
word genos for race or tribe, and he merged it

(18:43):
with Latin's side which obviously means killing. I think everyone
knows that bit of latin. Um. So because of his
tireless work, on December eleventh, ninety six, the United Nations
General Assembly passed a resolution declaring genocide is the denial
of the right of existence of entire human groups. Many
instances of such crimes have occurred when racial, religious, political,
or other groups have been destroyed entirely or in part. Um.

(19:06):
Now that the definition of genocide that's kind of given
there in that and this is the resolution is immediately challenged. UM.
A number of nations, including the USSR, disliked the inclusion
of political groups as victims of genocide for reasons that
should be obvious, right, And that wording not that the

(19:26):
USSR is the only state that killed a bunch of
political groups. But yeah, the wording is was eventually dropped. Um.
The argument was that the terms etymology excluded those groups
because I mean and and that's not in a I
think it's wrong, but that's not inaccurate, right, Like the
word genocide does imply racial or national groups. UM. So

(19:48):
it's not hard to see why, like a number of
states were concerned about this. For example, was the killing
of the Russian nobility a genocide. And this is an
area in which like, well, yeah, I think it actually
would be wrong to say that, like killing the royal
family of Russia was a genocide. That seems weird to me. Um,
But but like the killing is the killing of like
the Ukrainian you know, starvation genocide, which was justified as

(20:11):
the killing of like rich peasants. Is that a genocide? Sure,
that's absolutely a genocide, and ironically, according to Raphael Imkin,
it sure is. Yes, yes, um, so yeah, I mean
it's obviously, like I think we can all agree how
exactly to separate other mass killings from genocide is important
because not all mass killings are the same, and we

(20:32):
shouldn't call all of them genocides. But also I think
it's also worth saying that like, yeah, political groups being
massacred can absolutely be a genocide. And I mean that
wasn't even the only thing that got stripped out of there.
They also got rid of like then, umh Lemkin wrote
about the concept of genocidal settler colonialism and genocidal slavery, yes,

(20:57):
as well as assimilation as being a form of cultural genocide. Um.
You know, like famously in North America, there was the
saying kill the Indians saved child, which we all rightfully
accept now as genocide. But yeah, well and then let
Limpkin had that on there and again the US, the

(21:17):
UK and the USSR. I was like, we'll pump the
brakes somebow. None of all of the states that were
responsible for like winning World War two also had vested
interests in certain things not being called genocide because spoilers,
they had all done genocides. As someone who holds a
lot of stock in big genocide, I have a problem

(21:38):
with Stephanie. Yeah ah man though it is a good
time to be invested in genocide. Wow, doing better than Tesla.
To be fair, I have a feeling that the white
South Africa also holds stuck in the yea. UM. So
when it comes to how we're going to define genocide
for this UM, at least my proposition show UM. I

(22:01):
want to go to scholar Irvan Staub And now Staub
is another Holocaust survivor UM and his he wrote a
really good book called UM The Origins of Evil UM,
which goes over kind of what inspired perpetrators in a
number of genocides. His book, in addition to talking about
like Rwanda and Cambodia, and obviously the Holocaust includes the

(22:22):
massacre of thousands, potentially tens of thousands of leftists in Argentina.
Um in his study of Genocide and group violence. I
like his book, and for our purposes, i'd like to suggest,
using his definition, quote, genocide means an attempt to us
exterminate a racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, or political group, either
directly through murder or indirectly by creating conditions that lead

(22:43):
to the group's destruction. Yeah. That that that that is
very very close. Um it's like a simplified version of
Lempkin's original. Yes, yes, and that's what that Staub says,
like starts with Limpkin and says like, I think that
what he was saying initially is is exactly right, and
that's how we should be talking about this. Um So, Yeah,

(23:04):
I think that's that's kind of where we're gonna go
here or what that that that's what when we talk
about genocide in this episode, that's more or less what
we mean. Um So. I think obviously there's a strong
case to be made for the Lake Turconom mass grave
as evidence of genocide based on this, even though we
clearly don't know the entire story there, um, but the
presence of pregnant women, the elderly, young kids um all

(23:25):
differentiates it from the kind of simple human on human
violence that has occurred since forever. Um. We don't know
exactly what happened, but we know that one armed group
and and archaeologists think it was the people who carried
out the genocide were from a distance away, right, Um,
Like that they had traveled to get there, wanted to
wipe out a different group of people, and that's that's

(23:46):
a genocide. Um. Yeah, that shows pretty clear intense, like
not taking the children or the women, which is very
common during crimes like this, pretty shows pretty specific intense
that these people would not can to you. Yes, uh.
And there are other cases of probable ancient genocide. Obviously,
all of them do lack the kind of context that

(24:06):
we need for it to be like as kind of
satisfying narratively, because there's just ship you don't know when
you're talking about stuff from this far back. Um. One
of the most uh, probably well known at least among archaeologists,
involves the Yamnia people who occupied the Eurasian step north
of the Black Sea between two and three thousand BC. Uh.

(24:27):
There were certainly states that existed in the world in
this period, but there were not in that area, right, Like,
there's no this is like kind of around like Ukraine,
Poland that area, there's not in three thousand BC. There's
not a Ukraine or a Poland. Right, there's not political
entities in any way we would recognize UM in this area. Uh.
So the Yamnia were an ethnic group who colonized large

(24:51):
swats of Europe and stages over a period of centuries. UM.
It's actually maybe even more accurate to kind of look
at them as like a collection of ethnic groups. They
were a culture, right. Um. This is all kind of
confusing when we talk about what we'll get into like
what archaeologists mean when they talk about like cultures here. Um.
But as the Omnia flowed through the continent, a number

(25:11):
of things changed dramatically and those parts of Europe. UM.
So we can we can see evidence of like these
people coming into the area, and we see very suddenly
that existing burial practices in the area change. A warrior
class appears, and like evidence of them in burials appears
when they had not existed before UM. And we find
more evidence of large numbers of people dying violent deaths.

(25:34):
Christian Christiansen from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, UH tells
New Scientists quote, I've become concreasingly convinced that there must
have been a kind of genocide. Now again, there's not
like cities or states or empires in Europe, and in
this part of Europe, in this period, there's not written history,
So we're talking about like archaeologists tend to talk about
this in terms of like broad clashes between cultures. And

(25:57):
one of the things we see in this period around
It's BC is the violent replacement of what are called
the globular Amphora culture, which is again a group of
ethnic groups and people living in this region who are
defined by the way in which they make pottery, by
the corded wear culture, which is another type of pottery
and is associated with another like Again, because this is

(26:17):
so far ago, we don't have a lot of other content.
Must we must return to a pottery based culture. We
must become pottery based again. It would be funny to
think about like people six thousand years writing about like
the ziplock culture versus the UH the pyrex with a

(26:38):
little plastic thing on top culture. What culture is this? Oh?
You see he was in high school pottery class and
he made a very bad attempt to make a bong.
That was me. That was my culture. The water pipe
culture versus the drilling a hole in an apple and
putting in some tinfoil culture. This is the make a

(26:59):
small dent in the top of a popkin cult, puncture
in it. Oh. You know who else has culture? Joe?
Oh no, Uh, probably nobody. That's coming next the products
and services and support this podcast, Joe. They all come
from the by things. Sophie's not looking happy with me here.

(27:21):
I mean, it's just not your best work. Yeah, that
never is. You know who didn't Actually I was gonna say,
you know who didn't benefit from a genocide? But you don't.
We really, we really don't. Both Taser and the Washington
State Highway Patrol have attempted to run ads on our network.
Fant What were they supposed to do? Uh? Don't you

(27:49):
want to, Fanta, Joe? I do. Here's some ads. Ah,
we're back, and we're talking about how Europeans are a
decadent and depraved people. Um, mainly because of beat sugar,
serious sugar. The sugar based sweeteners. Yeah, absolutely not use

(28:14):
corn syrup. Come on like a civilized people, and it
needs to be so thick that it just stands on
its own. If you cut the can away from the lakes,
why are we even flavoring ship? Just give kids entire
cans of pure corn syrup. Let him suck it out
and then smoke out of the cans. Actually, this is
why my life act is I I pull up to

(28:35):
the ethanol pumps. That's the that's just corn sugar for cars.
I do think it straight from the tap. Baby do
it all? Why Why isn't everything corn yet? That's my question.
A lot of things are corn, but why isn't everything? Um?
These are We are the corn culture. That is what
archaeologists will be calling us. This whole society rapidly degenerated

(28:58):
and turned into a corn cut, turned to do a
cord cup. Um. So yeah, we're talking about b c E.
The violent replacement of the globular Amphora culture with the
corded war culture, and the Omnia are kind of associated
with the cord war culture. This is all complicated archaeology here,
but I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from a write up

(29:19):
in the Journal of anthropology and this is a specifically
an article that's like looking at a mass grave from
this period where one culture is being replaced by another.
We sequence the genomes of fifteen skeletons from a five
thousand year old mass grave in Poland associated with the
globular Amphora culture. All individuals had been brutally killed by
blows to the head, but buried with great care. Genome

(29:40):
white analyzes demonstrate that this was a large extended family
and that the people who buried them knew them well.
Mothers are buried with their children and siblings next to
each other. From a population genetic viewpoint, the individuals are
clearly distinct from neighboring corded war groups because of their
lack of step related ancestry. Although the reason for the
massacre is unknown, it is possible that it was connected
to the expansion of courted where groups which may have

(30:01):
resulted in violent conflict and the fact that they're loved
ones got to them kind of suggests this was part
of a series of like raids and clashes that were
meant to wipe them out. That like this community was
you know, attacked, killed found by their relatives as part
of like an ongoing struggle that eventually led to the
replacement of one group with another, you know, which is

(30:23):
pretty genocide. Yeah, I mean, I think um. Scott Strauss
wrote in his book Prevention on Genocide UM Prevention of Genocide,
which you can actually download for free at the U S.
Holocustomeral Museum website dope, but he said one of the
major genocile risk factors is a history of conflict within groups.

(30:47):
So uh yeah, that that tracks, especially if you're existing
all on like a step, fighting over the same resources offential,
and you're like, this would be a lot easier if
those people simply didn't exist. Boy, I have to say,
Joe that I do. I do. I'm happy that a
book with the title and uh thesis, how to Prevent

(31:09):
Genocide is available for free and not pay Walt, Yeah,
probably shouldn't pay all that, huh. I think. I think
something has to be said for academics that realized that, like,
nobody's gonna pay for our ship and if my and
if my field of study is how to prevent genocide,
perhaps this this work should be widely available. Um. So

(31:34):
further research by two separate teams, writing in Nature magazine
in two thousand and fifteen, UH came to a came
to similar conclusions that an influx of herders from the
steps of what are now Russia and Ukraine replaced a
huge amount of the gene pool in central and western
Europe and around three thousand BC, really more like hundred
But you know, um, this coincided with the disappearance of

(31:55):
Neolithic pottery and burial styles, as well as other cultural
artifacts that had been seen earlier. I'm winning out those
last couple of things, the change in burials and the
change in artifacts, because again that's evidence of a genocide.
This culture is being wiped out. Um. Now. Part of
why this has been controversial with scholars is that the
theories proposed now by Christiansen and others based on this
research are similar to some of the ideas of a

(32:17):
guy named Gustaf Cosina. UH. Cosina was an early twentieth
century archaeologist in Germany whose ideas were integral to the
formation of Nazi race science. UM. Now, obviously the Naya
are not Arians. They again would probably look more like
Slavs um, which the Nazis did not think. We're a
master race slip. But the Nazis bestowed like honorary arian

(32:40):
status on so many random groups of people, from Palestinians
to Armenians. Yes, I mean to to Tibet where they
like where a lot of Nazi race science started. Was
them like hanging out in these monasteries in Tibet and
being like these must be the ancient arians. Um, there's

(33:00):
a lot of just like us. Yeah, there's a lot
of Again, Nazis not great scientists, except with rockets. You
gotta give them, you gotta give them the rockets. I'm
I'm starting to think, and Robert quickly if I'm wrong,
the guys who believed in eugenics. Eugenics might not be
the smartest people on Earth. No, No, they weren't good

(33:22):
at a lot of things. Um. But yeah, So this
is part of why, like it's been uh difficult to
to to kind of push this along. But it does
seem like there's a significant amount of scholarship that like,
again there's and this is not we're focusing on Europe
in all of this so far, just because I mean,
we started with Africa, but like that's where the majority

(33:42):
of the scholarship has happened. One has to assume all
throughout Asia all throughout the Middle East, Southeast Asia, other
parts of Africa, Latin America. You know, there's genocides all
over all throughout history in every part of the world.
It's like a thing that people do. We're just kind
of talking about what we've got some documentation of. Like
obviously there were genocides in Mesoamerica long before um, you know, uh,

(34:07):
the fourteen hundreds, and there were genocides and the Middle
East from the day that there were cities, um, like
and yeah, it's just there's there's a positive positivist uh
train of thoughts in the field that says that, like
within genocide prevention that believes that, um, genocide is like

(34:27):
one of the natural states of man and uh, you
know in modern day you can work to prevent that, yes, hypothetically,
seeing how we seem to be very exceedingly bad at
doing that. Yeah, we're not good at preventing it. Um. Yeah,
it's probably worth acknowledging that, Like you are trying to
prevent something that we've been doing for forever, which is

(34:49):
always hard to do. It's like, yeah, preventing people from fighting,
you know, like we we were pretty good at Yeah.
And there's also of this, UM, this idea that it's
like okay, well, how can you prove that you prevented one?
Like how can you prove prove something that didn't happen?
Like okay, well, what about these things would you rather

(35:10):
be wrong about? I mean, it's it is. It is
the same we talked about, like how to prevent mass
shootings um. And there's a bunch of different things on
the table when it comes to like what kind of
like social programs and like interventions can like stop kids
who might be on the path to being willing to
do something like that. One of the problems is that, well,
if you successfully like intervene and a kid doesn't decide

(35:33):
they want to do something like that, you never know, right,
like like you don't get the data that like, oh
the fact that like this teacher you know, sat down
and talked with this kid stopped them from doing this
this fucked up thing, or stop them from going down
a path where they get on four Chan and get
radicalized to do this, or like we just don't get that,
which makes it harder to like develop good programs to

(35:56):
stop stuff like that. UM. That's one that's one thing
we need to steal from cops. And that's like because
I used to be a medic, so it was one
of those I worked the firefighters all the time, and
it's one of those things that like whenever there's not
a lot of fires, um, like, well we can cut
the budget from the fire department whenever they don't need
that money. But but like whenever you know, crime goes down,

(36:17):
it's never like, well, clearly we actually don't need that
many cops or cops at all. It's well, we need
to keep funding the cops because crime is down. Yeah,
but the answers always give those guys more money, just
like the answers to uh war in genocide or always
give the military's more money. Right. Yeah, It's like maybe
I don't know, there's a there's a middle ground in

(36:38):
there somewhere we could try something a little different. Um yeah,
I don't know. So at any rate, I think this
establishes that, like genocide, canon has existed outside the structure
of state violence. UM. Now, in Part two, we're going
to talk about some of the things that, presumably since
time and memorial, have made individual humans capable of taking
part in genocide. Um. But for now, I want to

(37:00):
move out of prehistory into just kind of early history
and talk about what some historians will suggest was the
first modern genocide UM, the elimination of Carthage in one
BC by the Roman Republic UM. And when I this
is not obviously the first genocide by one state against
you know, people of another state, UM, but it is

(37:20):
very modern in part because Rome was a republic, and
so an awful lot of what goes on in the
genocide of Carthage sounds very familiar. UM. And the fact
that I've picked this is influenced by the work of
Australian born historian Ben Kiernan, who's currently director of Genocide
Studies program at Yale UH. He got his start in

(37:40):
genocide when he visited Cambodia before the coming of the
camer Rouge UH, and then afterwards he traveled around the country,
he learned the camer language, he carried out extensive research
and interviewed a whole bunch of people about like what
had happened um. Ben posits that the first recorded incitement
to genocide were the words of Roman politician Marcus Porteus Cato, who,

(38:02):
for the last four years of his life, ended every
single public speech with the words Delinda est Carthago or
Carthage must be destroyed. Um. Now to explain like what
happened here, we're going to have to go back into
classic history a little bit, which I know is both
you use in my jam. Um. Yeah, I love this
ship not genocide, but you know Roman history. I was

(38:24):
I was gonna say, uh, it isn't It is an
amazing field to work. And when you can say, yeah,
he got his start in genocide, and I'm like, I
know what, I know what, Robert, Yeah, Yeah, we're talking
about Cato baby, and Kato is so because he's such
a modern right wing ship head politician, like he's every
like so much of what he does is like, well,
that could be a fucking dude today. Um. Because Rome

(38:47):
is in a lot of ways a very modern political
entity in this period, like republican Rome. There's a lot
of things that sound very familiar because it turns like
whenever people develop a republic h that's based primarily around
resource extraction, certain things are super similar. Sometimes history is
a big dumb loop. Yeah. So, Carthage was a port

(39:09):
city on the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near
where the modern city of Tunis is today. Um, the
fact that like Carthage is in Africa and Rome is
Rome makes them sound very distant. They are four hundred
miles away. That is the difference between San Francisco and
Los Angeles. And if you've seen how people from San
Francisco talk about l A, you'll understand how genocidal desire

(39:30):
could erupt between the two cities. But yeah, these are
not like far but like obviously it's further back then,
but like you could fly from from one city to
the other in about like an hour like today. Even
back then they could float. It's not that far. Back then,
they could float their shitty glued together across the net
at one another. It's not it's not hard to get

(39:52):
to even then, which is why the war happens right. Um.
So while Rome was from the beginning a land military
power expanded through force, Carthage Carthage was first a mercantile
power with trade routes. Again, they're in northern Africa, they're
trading with people in modern day Britain. Um. Like their
their trade routes almost extended like Scotland. And of course

(40:13):
they're like as far down in Africa as gabon Um
now in my very right wing history classes in Texas,
I tended to learn what was more or less the
propaganda line about these wars, which is that the Carthaginians
are these brutal child sacrificing Eastern devils and the war
between them in Rome is like what, this is the
first war between the West and the East, and it's
what makes the birth of the democratic West possible, Like

(40:35):
this is the start of all of our wonderful traditions.
They had to like beat these barbarians, which is that
hurts my brain? Nonsense um that that is I actually
started uh community college when I was in Texas because
I was in the army, and that tracks my experience
in Texas history. That is its horseshit um. Obviously, Carthage

(40:57):
is a massive, like imperial aristocratic power that does all
sorts of fucked up ship, including like human sacrifice and stuff.
Um Roman this period has stopped doing human sacrifice as
a religious thing. But they also are a gigantic slave
power that brutally oppressives and like enslaves entire racial groups

(41:18):
of people during conflicts. Like neither of them is better
than the others. There's not a good guy here, like
they're just both and it's like it's also I'm like,
I think pointless to call one the bad guy. They're
just two early states fighting a war over resources, right Like,
that's what's happened. There's no point in drawing a moral
line between. All of their wars are over like proxy

(41:38):
city states. And that's exactly what we're about to talk.
This isn't about democrat, this is not this is not
not in any way. Um, Carthage was the great naval
power of the region, like they kind of own the
Mediterranean in this period, while Rome in Rome always is
an infantry power, right like, that's the core of Roman
like military power is like heavy infantry um in this

(42:01):
period and basically up until like the fall of the Empire,
that's the thing that their best at. Whenever Rome has
anything good that's not heavy infantry, it's because they like
higher auxiliaries from another culture, like all of their good cavalry,
all of their good archers they're good at. They're also
really good at artillery, although that's kind of less of
a factor in this period, but they get very very
good at artillery to um. But yeah, so Carthage has

(42:23):
the boats, Rome has the dudes who hit people with swords, right,
that's their strengths. Broadly speaking, the two states actually got
along pretty well for a while. Carthage had some wars
with Greeks, which Rome was fine with because Rome was
bathering battling Italians. Again, Rome is not Italy at this point, right,
most of Rome's wars are with Italians. They call them Galls,

(42:44):
but they're like dudes from northern Italy, right, they're my ancestors,
Transalpine gall. You know, it becomes a big issue. Like
at one point Caesar allows them into Senate and the
Romans are like these barbarians. There's Italian this is something
that hasn't changed. Again, there's nothing that Romans hate more
than Italians, and there's nothing more than Romans. So um, yeah,

(43:08):
the the Carthage Rome get along for a while where
they're they're doing all these other wars. But then some
ship goes down in Sicily. Now, if you're not a geographyzer,
Sicily is the American football that's being kicked by Italy, right,
if you think about think about that. So at the time,
Sicily is primarily a Carthaginian province. It's not right there
to think it's not like Sicily is like part of

(43:29):
Carthage in the way that we would consider like Oklahoma
part of the United States, but they have like the
influence there um. But both powers get kind of drawn
into a conflict because one city in in Sicily, Syracuse,
goes to war with another city in Sicily, messina Um,
and like Syracuse sins soldiers to attack messina Um, Carthage

(43:51):
back Syracuse, Rome backs messina and they get drawn into
a war that starts as like this kind of like
proxy fight. It's more complicated than that, but you really
don't need to know the details unless you want to
go read about the Punic wars. So Rome puts together
a big fleet to go fight the Carthaginians and they
just get mass instantly massacred. One of the things that's
fun about Rome is that this is along this is

(44:12):
like a proud part of their military tradition. A war starts,
they build this massive military thing, it gets wiped out
to the man and then they're like, all right, I
guess we'll do it again, and we don't care about
our lives and like. But that is why Rome becomes
the big world power in this region, is because they're
the best at like having an entire armies wiped out,

(44:35):
to the man and going like, all right, back to
the drawing board, let's do another one, you know, And
that's what they do. It takes them like twenty years
to rebuild their fleet, but they eventually grind down the
Carthaginian navy and they win the war, and they win
sicily Um, which Sicilians have rude ever since. So this
leads to the Second Punic War, and a key moment
in the Second Punic War, the one everyone knows about

(44:56):
is you've got this Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca who crossed
is the Alps with some elephants and a bunch of dudes,
and he attacks Italy. Uh, he threatens Rome for a while.
It's a pretty impressive campaign. It includes the Massacre. So
there's this battle called canny Um can I you know,
nobody whatever, how are you want to say it, where
there's this Roman army that outnumbers the Carthaginians two to one,

(45:18):
but Hannibal does what's called a double envelopment and completely
surrounds them and like wipes them out in one of
it's still probably the most famous defeat in military history
up until World War Two. Like you can find all
generals on every side of that war talking about trying
to pull off a cane I. Um yeah, Like I
think someone did the math, and it's a historian. Historian

(45:39):
I'm not a huge fan of, but they said that
the massacre at can I was it was like six
Romans died every hour until from sunrise the sunset. It
is a calculable percentage of the entire population of Rome
that dies in this battle, like a meaningful percentage. Um.
It's like it goes really badly. And again, the strength

(45:59):
of him is that they keep like this happens to
them a bunch in Roman history, and they're like, all right,
we got more guys. Um. So Rome eventually grinds Carthage down.
Hannibal's armies are beaten because they get pulled back to
Africa because the dude named Scipio Africanus invades and there's
this whole battle called zama Uh. It's it's it's it's
neat history if you want to read into it. So

(46:21):
by the end of the war, Rome has lost like
a lot of a generation of young men and they're
pretty pissed at the Carthaginians. This is not wildly dissimilar
from how a lot of folks in Europe felt at
the end of World War One. Right, we lost like
a huge chunk of a generation fighting you guys. We
don't just want like to shake hands and and in
this thing, you know, like fuck you. That's the attitude. Um. So,

(46:42):
a surrender is negotiated, and under the terms of the surrender,
Carthage loses all of its territory outside of North Africa,
they have to give up their fleet, and they have
to pay a large war debt to Rome. Um. And
so you know, this is again you could like kind
of look at this as there's shades of Versailles in
this um And from this point on Carthage is realistically

(47:03):
no kind of military threat to Row, right, Like that
is not happening after this point. Um. Now, up through
this period in the fighting between them, these are the
first and second punic wars is what they're called, right.
The first one is the fighting of our sicily. The
second one is hannibal. Up through this point, there's not
a good guy or a bad guy in this story.
You know, that's two assholes beating each other up over

(47:25):
her treasure. It's what happens after this point that's fascinating,
because while Rome is very much an aristocratic state and
calling it a democracy or even a republic, it is
a republic, but like people tend to exaggerate what that
means when they talk about it. Um. It is one
of the first nations on Earth with proper politicians in
the modern sense of the word, guys who you could

(47:45):
like pull on the TV and see dudes doing some
of the same ship today. Right. That is one of
the things that's really interesting about studying Rome in this period.
And this brings us to Marcus Porcius Cato, better known
as Kato the Elder and Kato the Wise. He was
a famous conservative politician who railed against Greek culture for
its decadent influence on Romans. He was kind of like
Victor Davis Hansen, who's a modern right wing historian. If

(48:08):
you smushed him up with like some Dan Crenshaw and
like a dash of Ted Cruz, oh my god, you're
just vultron together the worst guy, and he is. He
is the worst guy. He sucks so bad. Um. He
was legitimately a soldier and a pretty competent one. He
fought in the Second Punic War. He commanded troops, and
he spent the years after the Second Punic War. So

(48:29):
I just mentioned. The guy who wins the Second Punic
War from Rome is a dude named Scipio Africanus, who's
generally seen as one of like the best generals in
military history because Hannibal pretty good at war um, and
Scipio beats him in a in a fair fight. Uh.
Cato spends the like years after the war hounding Scipio
into the grave and basically like repeatedly encouraged like accusing

(48:52):
him of corruption uh and like profligacy and like wasting resources. Um.
And he writes histories of the Punic Wars and deletes
not only Scipio's name but every other person involved named Skipio,
which is like a common first name. It's like if
you it's like if you're writing a World War two
history and you hated Pattents, so you cut out all
the George is I need to be clear here, I

(49:13):
actually support that that that fuck George's right, right, and
fuck Patten. But yes, Cato sucks, But you do have
to admire this sheerless level. It's very petty he's an
incredibly petty dude. Um So, he's a he's the pettiest
man alive. And in one b C he gets elected Console,

(49:35):
which is like pretty much the top of the Roman structure.
You have sensors to every now and again when they
do this census, but like consoles basically like as as
as it's it's like the prime if there were multiple
prime ministers and they got to command armies. That's kind
of what a console is. Right there there's two of them, yes, yes,
and they're both political and military leaders. Again, it's the

(49:58):
top of the Roman political structures called the curses on
our um um and it's like it'says, it's like the time.
If you're in politics, your goal is to get to
be console one day. Right, that's like as as good
as it gets. Um So, while he's consul in one five,
he takes command of Roman legions in Spain because Spain
rebels Spain rebels a lot. It's called Iberia. At this point.

(50:18):
There's actually not any kind of Spanish identity at this moment,
right because Iberia is huge and people who are in
like the deserts of Zaragoza have no particular identity with
the people who are like on the north coast of
Spain or whatever, right like, they don't even they don't
know what the fuss going on with those motherfucker's um.
But Spain is rebelling at this point, and he takes
over the military um and he, you know, he does

(50:42):
a number of things that we would call war crimes today.
I don't know if you'd call them. They're not really
out of step with military tactics in the day, but
they're pretty brutal. Um. I'm gonna quote from Ben Kiernan here.
He was a courageous and effective general, noted for his
cruelty towards his defeated enemies. Livy sympathize. Kato had more
difficulties subduing the enemy because he had, as it were,

(51:03):
to reclaim them like slaves who had asserted their freedom.
Kato commanded his officers in Spain to force this nation
to accept again the yoke which it has cast off.
In one battle, Livy estimate sites an estimate of forty
enemy killed. When seven towns rebelled, Kato marched his army
against them and brought them under control without any fighting
worth recording. But after they again revolted. He ensured that

(51:24):
the conquered were not granted the same pardon as before.
They were all sold by public auction. Now again, under
like the definitions we've cited of genocide, you could you
could make a case that he's doing some genocides here. Yeah,
I mean, especially um, if we're going off modern definitions,
like we're the the i c C or i C
j uh identifies rightfully identifies Sabernitza as an active genocide

(51:49):
unto itself. So like there can be micro cosms of
genocidal acts, so this would absolutely count as one, yes,
for sure, especially the you know, killing for two thousand
people may not be a genocide depending on the situation
in which you do it. For example, Hannibal killed a
similar number of Romans and that was not really a genocide.
I think it was. It was a lot of Roman um,

(52:13):
but enslaving an entire region of people and marching because
you're taking them away from where they live too, you're
marching them out like that is an act even if
you're not killing them, it's an act of genocide. You're
destroying the culture, right um. In the same way that
like what American slave owners would do to to Africans
who were brought into the like that was an act
of genocide, even though they were not trying to murder
those people because they were a resource, right, it's still genocidal.

(52:37):
You strength them of their culture, it's not you're not
gonna allowed to propagate anyway, just like you know, slave
owners force yeah, slaves to take white names, adopt Christianity. Yeah,
And this is this is one of those. Because there's
areas in which Roman slavery is very similar to because
there's chattel slavery is a huge part of Roman slavery,

(52:57):
and that's very similar to ship you see in the America.
And there's areas where it's different. For example, an awful
lot of Greeks sold themselves into slavery because it was
a pretty good deal. If you were like selling yourself
to a rich family to like teach their kids and
stuff like, that's a great gig, you know. Um, it's
Roman slavery is very complicated in a way that like
slavery in the America's is not. But this chunk of

(53:18):
Roman slavery is very similar, especially because some Roman slaves
could attain their freedom while others certainly could yeah, I
mean if you're one of the things that's interesting if
you're talking about like urban Roman slaves, how slaves, right,
they usually if they lived, you know, in the Middle Ages,
so would get their freedom. And a lot of the
wealthiest people in the city of Rome were either former

(53:40):
slaves or descendants of slaves. Because for those people, it
was like it was like a paid internship. You would
be a slave for like ten, fifteen, twenty years, you
would get money when you were freed, and the person
who had owned you would have to pay you money
the rest of their life. Now you would have to
support them in a number of ways politically and stuff.
There was this client system that was built up, but
it allowed a lot of people who started successful mercantile

(54:03):
businesses were able to do so because they got their
training while they were a slave, and then they got
funding from their former owner to start a business. And
as a freed slave, you can't hold political office, but
you can vote and your kids can hold hold full
political office. Right, So a lot of the wealthiest, most
powerful families in Rome do have like a slave that

(54:23):
was like their granddad or something like that, because it
is it's not like racial slavery, right, the Romans think
about it in those terms anyway, just it's it's a
very interesting thing anthropologically, and if they grabbed a slave
and whatever, you know, you happen to be educated, you
would probably like half of the like I'm not exactly
sure the numbers, but a large amount of early civil

(54:45):
Roman society was slaves. Yeah, it's a huge the accountants, bureaucrats, whatever.
And this is occurring at the same time as like
when someone like Cato En slaves tens of thousands of
people in a in a in an uprising or something.
Those folks are like being right to minds or or
fields where they're worked to death, right like, which is
very familiar to some of like some of the worst

(55:06):
slavery that's ever anyway, And Roman is interesting. And even
in the best case scenario here, let's say you know,
ten thousand, and that's a very high number of these
people are educated, their literate, you know, their aristocrats and
whatever town they came from. At best, if they don't
get you know, put into the minds to die, which
is legitimately when the worst slavery gigs you could get

(55:29):
in rome Um because it's like where they would send
rejected gladiators and ships to the minds too, But you
would go into Roman society and have to adopt Roman culture,
Roman customs, Roman language, all of these things in order
to continue to survive. So that's still a genocide. Yeah,
it's a Roman history, real neat um. You know what

(55:50):
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who also have enslaved a couple of towns in Iberia
after crushing a brutal uprising. You know what products and
services might not send you to the minds, Oh, for
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(56:11):
you don't get the kind of quality smoked salmon that
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lot of people dying to mine lithium. They're going to
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mind it, we ship it program. Anyway, here's atsuh, we're back.

(56:39):
So obviously Kato what what the kind of stuff Kato
was doing in Iberia? You can find a number of
cases of that stuff like that happening in this period
by Romans and by other generals. It is worth, noting
that his peers, who are also Roman military commanders, are like,
this guy is pretty cruel to his defeated enemies, you know.
And again, Rome is the country that when they had

(57:01):
a slave uprising, crucified the entire slave army of thousands
and lined their corpses up for miles along the via Appia, right,
And they're those guys are being like, Wow, this dude's mean. Guys.
I'm I'm starting to think Kato's gone too far. I say,
as I hammer and another nail into the slaves hand,
that guy's a dick anyway. So um, as a politician,

(57:25):
Kato engaged in acts of conservative sophistry that are again
very familiar even today. Um, he got hard as fuck,
and I mean that in the dick sens, thinking about farmers,
who he considered to be the backbone of society. And
he also, yeah, he fucking loves farmers. And he hated
the merchants and the business class and educated Greek teachers,

(57:46):
who he said, we're ruining Rome the same ship. You
gotta get out critical Greek theory on the class. Critical
Greek theory is ruining our children. According to the historian Polybius,
quote Kato once declared in a public speech that anybody
could see the republic was going downhill when a pretty

(58:06):
boy could cost more than a plot of land and
jars of fish more than plowman. Again, Roman political history
a lot of fun to read about. Have you seen
the prices of these boys? I would like to get

(58:31):
into the upper middle class for Greek boy. So Kato
made a huge point of the values of quote, the
life of simplicity and self discipline. He did this while
owning several massive plant plantations or lata fundi, which he
worked with huge teams of slate. When he talked about
being a farmer, because he wrote a book about farming,

(58:53):
his farms were like they were like the plantations of
the US South during slavery. There were these massive enterprises
worked by thou sense of slaves, like that's the lad
of farming for Cato. The lat of funda were so
prevalent they collapsed the Roman economy because regular Roman dudes
didn't have jobs, and that's why the dolls started. It's part,
it's a big part of why, and it takes a while,

(59:15):
which is evidence of some of the things the Romans
were doing that we're smart but like, it's a big
part of why the Roman Empire eventually collapses because Rome's
strength is like the yaleman farmer class that Jefferson got
all horny about. It's small farmers, right, who would breed
kids who were like used to roughing it, and then
those kids would join the Roman military and that's what
expanded the Roman Empire. And over time all of those

(59:35):
farms were taken over by rich senators who wanted hobby
farms worked by slaves, which made it difficult for them
to recruit soldiers, which led to about it. It's a
long process, the collapse of the Roman empires, and that simple.
But it's it's even funnier because you, as you talked about,
one of their strengths is being able to throw waves
of idiot Roman kids at swords until you finally got
tired and went home. Um. Back then you had to

(59:56):
be a landowning male to join the military. So before
the Marian reforms, Yes, so these tens of thousands of
landowners died and then assholes like Cato's arms of yeah,
we're like, well this fill it with slaves. Um. Yeah,
it was noted of Kato that he preferred he quote

(01:00:18):
preferred to buy those prisoners of war who were young
and still susceptible, like puppies. Yeah. Despite his public rants
against merchants, he also made most of his money, according
to Plutarch as quote the most disruptible branch of money
lending a ka. He ran a payday loan company. This

(01:00:38):
guy sucks so bad because his name on a stadium.
Oh oh god. Yeah. And also Kato would have like
a billion dollars in crypto, like he would have been
all in on n f T s. Don't don't you
dare tell me Kato wouldn't own a board ape that
he would get stolen from him when he clicked a

(01:00:59):
fishing ink. Now, he would just get really mad that
people are buying n f T s of Greek Boy, Yeah,
what happened to that made us great? He's just he's
just doing a return to mommy, ye resert to monkey.
So Kato goes through decades of public life. He writes
a bunch of books. We still have his book on farming.

(01:01:21):
He writes one on soldiering that we don't have. He
lays down a lot of pithy quotes for douchebags to
put on their Facebook profiles generations later quotes like quote
stick to the point, the words will follow, which is
very bit like he he invented Ben Shapiro. Let's just
say it, like, what does that even mean? It means
like you kind of find the argument by the endpoint

(01:01:44):
of the argument, right like that that's a fucking Michael
Scott quote. It is a Michael Scott quote. But it's
also like you can see, it's like Ted Cruz being like,
we just need one door in the school. So you know,
like your point is, I don't want anything to fundamentally
change about like guns, because it's the central issue that
you can't go against as a conservative. So instead one door, right, Like,
it's stick to the stick to the point, and you'll

(01:02:06):
figure out the words along the way. Coming out boldly, yeah,
bravely a favorite door control so many, like many of
the conservative demagogues who would come after him, he was
a massive misogynist, and this is he's a misogynist. During
the Roman republic Um now, Kato spoke out against the

(01:02:30):
repeal of a law from the Second Punic War which
denied women the right to quote possess more than half
an ounce of gold or where party colored clothing or
right in a horse drawn vehicle in a city or town. Um. Now,
this was this law. I'm not entirely certain why they
passed this law during the war, but it's like they
passed this law as like part of a you know,

(01:02:50):
a the war effort, and it was very unpopular for
it was very unpopular for obvious reasons and the injustice
of this law. Roman women because again is a republic,
they don't have the right to vote, but there are
they do understand the idea of like protesting right, like
that does exist in Rome, the idea that you would
get people together. Now, generally Roman protests are armed mobs

(01:03:11):
that murder people. But who's who's to say if that's
it's not always bad, right? A lot of the times
the armed mobs are in the right. Um, Roman women
to protest this law organize one of maybe the first
women's rights campaign in democratic history to get it repealed.
Uh Livy writes that quote women came in from the
towns and rural centers and beset all the streets of

(01:03:34):
the city and all the approaches to the forum. Um.
This horrified Cato, and he found himself asking, quote, are
you in the habit of running out into the streets,
blocking the roads, addressing other women's husbands, or are you
more alluring in the street than in the home, more
attractive to other women's husband women's husbands, and even at home,
it would not become you to be concerned about the
question of what laws should be passed or repealed in

(01:03:55):
this place. So again to tell you about how modern
a right wing politician this guy is. He's yelling at
them for blocking the streets. Kato has like an every
dust Yes. Yeah, he he awoke one night in fucking
one nine two b c with like the vision of

(01:04:15):
the black rifle coffee logo in his head. It does
his business model of fraud. He knew the name of
Kyle Rittenhouse thousands of years before the boy was born,
having visions of nine line clothing and apparel. Uh, he

(01:04:36):
would have done amazing on Facebook. Um. He and Steve
Bannon would have gone fishing together. He was just so
ready for our world. He absolutely would have been on
that boat they got raised by the Yeah, he would have.
He would have been part of the week, and he
would have been one of the guys who got pardoned.
Right like so, Kato screeched to his fellow legislators that

(01:05:00):
gatherings of women were quote the greatest danger a democracy
could face. Quote Our liberty overthrown in the home by
female and discipline is now being crushed and trodden underfoot
here too in the Forum. It is because we have
not kept them under control individually that we are now
terrorized by them collectively. But we, Heaven preserve us, are
now allowing them to even take part in politics, and

(01:05:23):
actually to appear in the Forum and be present at
our meetings and assemblies. What are they longing for? In
complete liberty or rather complete license. The very moment they
begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors.
I mean, I like that you started halfway through you

(01:05:43):
switched to your Ben Shapiro voice. I can't not, I
can't not. There's a certain level of ship head that
you just have to go into Shapira again. Like that
could be a fucking bright Bart column, right, Like that
could be on Return of Kings. You know, it's amazing,
it's incredible. So going his own way, going its own way,

(01:06:06):
Ben Kieranan goes, I'm imagining Kato giving this speech, and
for the Davids are he never felt like a glass
of fucking like yeah yeah wine with just enough letting
it to take the edge off. Fucking hell um. Ben

(01:06:29):
Kiernan goes on to write quote for Kato. Much of
this seemed a matter of social control occluding according to Plutarch,
since he believed that among slaves sex was the greatest
cause of delinquency. He made it a rule that his
male slaves could, for a set fee, have intercourse with
his female slaves, but no one of them was allowed
to consort with another woman. After Kato's wife died, a
prostitute Quote would come to see him without anyone's knowing

(01:06:52):
of it. In public life, he was more severe. In Spain.
One of his officers hung himself when Kato discovered he
had bought three captive boys. Kato sold the boys and
returned the price to the treasury. He once banished from
the Senate a man who had kissed his own wife
in broad daylight and in sight of his daughter. Kato
joked publicly that he had never embraced his wife except
after a loud thunder clap. So just a normal dude,

(01:07:15):
How are you just a real normal ass guy? Like
this is? This is the origin this is the fucking
origin story of fucking through a hole in his shue,
likes the sheet on top of his wife, who's like, okay, honey,
here I come. And again, Kato is not normal for
Rome in the period. He's not abnormal. They're certainly like
dudes who line up behind him in his power block.
But like most a lot of Roman society is like

(01:07:38):
the fuck dude, especially nobility up. All they do was
weird sex thing men women each other. It doesn't matter.
Like man, this guy's a fucking prude. He sucks and
rounding out his patron saint of right wing politicians Bingo card.
Kato also attacked gay people and one eight six b
C Roman magistrates began to execute an alleged bokic cult.

(01:08:01):
Boxus is like the god of wine and other cool stuff.
Uh Now, this cult had formerly been an all female cult,
which had overtime become an all gay men cult. Basically
like a place for them to go cruising. It is
pretty rad um, but like Kato helps to like lead
this charge against them, and a bunch of guys get
convicted of quote foul sexual acts along with some women um,

(01:08:23):
which again makes it seem even rather um. Cato enthusiastically
denounces the cult and he helped in order to like
because of how much he hates the fact that, like
there's this fairly popular cult that basically is like a
place for for for gay people to go cruise. Kato
builds support for an invasion of Dalmatia. Um, and he

(01:08:44):
justifies it by saying, quote, because they do not want
the men of Italy to become womenish enough through too
lengthy a spell of feast. He's like, this is evidence
that our guys are getting too girly, so we have
to evade this random country. This is Cato falling for
like the Russian army recruitment commercial that everybody loved like
a year ago. Yeah yeah, yeah, the VDV thing or

(01:09:07):
oh no though the other one yeah yeah yeah yeah,
it's it's it's it's pretty funny. Um anyway. So and
then near the end of his life this has all
been color on Cato. In one BC, Spain rises in
rebellion again. This is like forty years after he's crushed
rebellion in Spain, right, so forty years it's about enough

(01:09:28):
time for you to like replace all the people who
he killed. Um. So this rebellion really doesn't have a
lot to do with Carthage, which again has no navy
and not much of a military at this point. But
the invasion is or the uprising is followed by uprisings
in Macedonia and in Achaia, and a wiser man might
have concluded that people were mad about like Roman taxes,
all of the murdering and enslaving they were doing in

(01:09:50):
these areas. Kato was not that dude. Um In one
fifty two b C. He takes part in a senatorial
mission to Carthage. Now the city has lost its empire,
but it's still it's a really good location. They're still
able to like trade. They can't have a militarized navy,
but they got like boats bringing places stuff all over
the place. And the fact that they're no longer paying
for the massive military that they've had as an empire

(01:10:12):
means that they're like, they're doing really well. Like the
economy is thriving. Right, it turns out that we can
reinvest the work. Yes, this is actually going well, Kato
writes in his Horror In a Horror that quote Carthridge
was quote burgeoning with an abundance of young men brimming
with copious wealth, teeming with weapons. Um Man, he really

(01:10:32):
seems a zero and constantly in young men. He's really
got a thing with the young men. Now filled with
a mix of jealousy and paranoia, he returns home and
he takes to the Senate. Ben Karenan writes on his return,
while he was rearranging the folds in his toga in
the Senate, Cato by design let fall some Libyan figs.
And then after everyone had expressed admiration for their size

(01:10:53):
and beauty, he said that the land produced them was
but three days sail from Rome. So again this is funny,
but it's like it's figs. But also this is not
that different from being like, I don't you remember guys
earlier in the odds, like when China had their big
Olympics thing, or just like looking at like look at
all the stuff they're making in China, like they're they're
they're like, we we have to we can't compete with them.
They they're eating us alive and manufacturing, Like think about

(01:11:15):
like the fucking um one of those Michael Crichton books
written in between Reagan and Clinton, where he's like terrified
of Japan, like that whole fear of Japan in the eighties,
where it's like, look at all these computers they can build.
A speaking of Japan, that's like, quite literally the one
are the excuses they use to manufacture war in China.
It is like, look at all the land they have

(01:11:36):
that we know this is bullshit. It's it's this, except
for in this case it's figs. But yeah, um, and
as Kiernan writes, it's all a lie quote. His figs
could not have come from Carthage more than a six
sta voyage in summer. His audience of senatorial gentleman farmers
probably knew they came from Kato's own estate near Rome.
Some may even have read his advice on how to

(01:11:57):
plant African figs in Italy. Carthaginian product had barely penetrated
the Italian market. So Kato brings his own figs and
it's like, look at how big these Carthaginian figs are. Crisis.
Yeah again, he would have done very well with Twitter.
So Kato spent the last five years of his life
haranguing his fellow senators to destroy Carthage, and gradually they

(01:12:19):
get on board with the idea. While the plan is
always couched in terms of Roman self defense. The arguments
are all economic, and the primary reason to support the
war was to give the nation an easy foe to
rally against in a time when which there's all these
costly and difficult constant uprisings. On the year Kato died
one nine, Rome's console Sinsurnas demanded Carthage hand over her

(01:12:40):
weapons and give Rome hostages. They do this, so the
Romans next demand that the Carthage uproot itself and moved
twelve miles inland so that they can burn the old
city to the ground. The Carthaginians are like, no, we're
not gonna do that. Roman like, all right, we have
to give him the demand. They can't possibly. Yeah, this

(01:13:01):
is why they're the whole city. They're trying to come
up with the demand that will force Carthage to fight them,
and eventually they have to be all right, you gotta
move your city twelve miles. Well, no, that sounds really dumb. Yeah,
So Carthage fights for three years against Romes. Might they
finally succumb in one six b C and Roman legions

(01:13:22):
march street to street, house to house, killing systematically depending
on who you go to The city is likely to
have held between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand
people when Roman soldiers enter it. I'm gonna quote from
a rite up in World History dot org here. Even
at this lower end, the slaughter in the city was, however,
substantial and probably unprecedented in the European world up to
that time. The survivors, possibly numbering anywhere for the thirty

(01:13:44):
thousand to fifty thousand people, were sold as slaves on
direct orders from Rome. The city was subsequently set allite
and after ten days of burning, demolished stone by stone.
Polybius in his histories uh noted that the destruction of
the Carthaginians was immediate and total, so much that there
were no Carthaginians left to even express their remorse. The
killing of all the inhabitants of the city state whose

(01:14:05):
inhabitants had refused to surrender was quite frequent in the
ancient world, so labor labeling this particular innocent incident a
genocide needs careful examination. A key element in this case,
and one which would be in line with Limpkin's notion
of genocide, was Rome's apparent intention to destroy carthage It's
people and culture. No matter what this underlying aim could
be seen in Romes increasingly impossible to satisfy demands placed

(01:14:27):
on Carthage before the outbreak of war, when Carthage could
no longer realistically satisfy the demands, this gave the Romans
a legitimate excuse for their actions. And yeah, I'm comfortable
calling it a genocide. Yeah, yeah. I think one of
the problems is, and I think we've already talked about this,
is this hasn'tancy to use the term genocide. Is one,

(01:14:48):
obviously heavily politicized when we talk about modern day events,
but two, when it comes to events that have happened
thousands of years ago. Everybody has this idea that genocide
is a modern thing within the eight eighteen hundreds. Yeah
it's nah, it's And I don't understand that the hesitancy anymore,

(01:15:10):
Like I I don't understand the political politicization of it either,
but like, at least that you understand why, like, well,
we can't call this a genocide because you know, we'll
get fucking sanctioned by Russia or China, the United States.
But like, is fucking Italy gonna sanction nobody? Nobody if
you tell like Romans like this, they'll be like, yeah,

(01:15:31):
I guess, like I don't think anyone gives a ship anymore,
Like we should be able to do this. Um, And
the ones who do care are probably like, deeply deep
probably really it's probably like Mussolini's granddaughter. I'm sure she's
not and she is legitimately a political figure in the country.
So yeah, I'm sure there are some people who would

(01:15:52):
be pissed, But I don't know. I know some I
know some Italians. I think mostly it's like it's like
talking to I don't know, if you were like go
to somebody in Kenya and be like, hey, you know,
somebody did a genocide here ten thousand years ago, I
think most people would be like, okay, yeah, that's probably
I would caution some people, I'm not doing that. And

(01:16:14):
in certain countries with that the genocidit card in the
last hundred and eight years or so, that's when it
gets real political. Ten thousand years back, not much as
although you know we could we could talk. Um, you
do literally live in Armenia. Um. All right, well, Joe,

(01:16:37):
this is going to be the end of part one.
When it comes back to Part two, We're gonna have
a super fun discussion about what makes human beings capable
of engaging in mass killing. It sounds like will last
I can't wait. I thought you'd never asked. It does
occasionally involve blasts. Um, Joey, that was that was uncomfortable.
Um you got you got any pluggable puck. I host

(01:17:01):
the podcast The Lines Led by Donkeys podcasts, not the
British political one. Um, and we talk about genocide unfortunately
quite often. For instance, we've done seven hours on the
Cambodian genocide and we also talked about military history and
stuff like that. Yeah. Um, so check out Lions led

(01:17:22):
by donkeys. Check out donkeys, just find one. They're good.
They're good, good animals, the good animals. Yeah, they do
good stuff, useful, hardy, um, good eating. Oh man, donkey
put that on some like rye bread, a little bit
of catch up. Yeah yeah, absolutely. Anyway, this has been

(01:17:42):
behind the Bastards, the podcast funded by the donkey made industry,
which is having a tough years, always having a tough year.
Difficult to get people on board with donkeys. I can't
believe Big Donkey got their hooks into I heart media.
I always knew this day would Yeah, yeah, where where
we're we're primarily opposing the EMU Farmers of America UM

(01:18:04):
who disastrous path that Australia has already followed? What what
was making an Australia joke, So we have to oppose
big EMU. It's just proxy war, don't you know them
is already defeated Australia. They're just trying to bring them
here and they're just trying to bring them to the
United States. All their boomerangs were useless. All right. That's

(01:18:26):
the show. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool zone Media, visit our
website cool zone media dot com, or check us out
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Ancient Genocide and the War on Carthage