CLASSIC: What is genocide?

Modern historians generally mark the beginning of the Armenian Genocide as 24 April, 1915. However, people and nations still can't seem to agree on whether it actually was a genocide. Why? And why do both sides accuse the others of a conspiracy?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So this week's classic episode is an example of the
topic that we felt we needed ethically to explore. We
we felt that it was an ethical obligation. This episode
touches on some incredibly disturbing things. You can tell by

(00:23):
the title it is What is genocide? That is a
question we explore concerning not only the genocide of World
War Two, but the Armenian genocide and why calling it
a genocide is so controversial to some people. Um, what
do you guys recall about this episode? I just remember

(00:43):
the news in this time discussing that specific controversy about
Armenia and the genocide from the earlier nineteen hundreds and
whether or not, Yeah, whether or not very specific people
within I think the British government, the United States government,
and a few other Western powers, whether or not they

(01:05):
would recognize it, what what occurred to the Armenian people
as genocide? So with that, let's jump in from UFOs
two Ghosts and government cover ups. History is writ with
unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the
stuff they don't want you to now. Hello, welcome back

(01:30):
to the show. My name is Matt and I'm then.
We are here with our super producer Noel Brown, and
most importantly here with you, listening wherever you are whatever
you're doing, which, now that I say it, Matt, it
creeps me out a little. Yeah, they can hear everything
you're saying, right, And we don't know what you guys

(01:51):
are doing out there. You driving a car, man, We
shouldn't get into that. There could be some dark So
are you dragging up body size garbage bag behind you?
I can only imagine that something like that is happening,
and we are just somehow manifesting it by even saying, oh, yeah,
let's put some positive stuff in into Did you just

(02:14):
finish running a mile faster than you ever thought you
could or a kilometer faster than you ever thought you could?
Congratulations on that. Congratulations. Are you working out? Did you
get to that last set? Are you? Are you dozing gently?
Maybe maybe drinking booze, maybe having a cup of tea

(02:34):
before you? Are you giving your dog the spring slash
summer shave right now? Is that what you're doing because
you needed to have something while you were doing that? Yeah? Yeah.
Are you on the way to a job interview that
might be your dream job or something? Well, hopefully you're
not doing that and listening to this, hopefully you're preparing mentally.
Unless this is how you do that, maybe it is.

(02:56):
I don't know, we don't know what the dream job is.
But ladies and gentlemen, Matt Noel and I are here
today looking for a little bit of levity here of
wanting to be positive. And you know, often humor can
be a defense mechanism. I can't remember which, I can't
remember who said it, Matt, but you've heard that quotation

(03:18):
before that humor is tragedy with a scab. You know,
our tragedy plus time equal's comedy, right. Uh. Gary Larson
had one of my favorite quotes about humor, which was
the relationship between tragic and humor, where he said, uh,
tragedy is when I cut my finger. Humor is when
you walk into an open sewer and die. And he

(03:41):
was being tongue in cheek. Of course, Gary Larson is
an amazing person and I love the far Side. But
the reason we are, uh, the reason we are looking
for some of that levity is that, uh, we're today
we're exploring, um a couple of interrelated sub jecks that

(04:01):
are a matter of great debate across the planet. Yes,
and in this particular case, there's a lot of history
and emotion that's bottled up in this subject. So um yeah,
that's why we we want you to be doing something happy.
Please be doing something happy. Well, I mean hopefully not

(04:23):
too happy. You're not something you can only do once
because we don't want to ruin it for you. If
you are a few footsteps away from the summit of
Mount Everest, just turn on some cool mountain climbing music. Yeah.
If if your wife is going into labor with your
first child at this moment, take your headphones off right now,

(04:44):
right way, wearing headphones come on. That's terrible. Uh yeah,
what what we were talking about right now is a
is an event that occurred a hundred years ago this week,
and just to just the um put us in the mindset,

(05:05):
maybe uh tell a little bit about it as a story. Okay,
so as near as we can tell. In the modern day,
around April twenty four, nineteen fifteen, uh, the Ottoman Empire,
which was already in decline, took action. For a while.

(05:26):
They had suspected that one of their geopolitical rivals, one
of their nemesses, Russia, was using the minority group of
Armenian Christians in the Empire as a clandestined force to
work against the Ottoman Empire. And so they rounded up intellectuals,

(05:48):
they rounded up uh statesman, people of note. And by
the end of this and this is generally thought when
it began, by the end of that time, an estimated
one point five million Armenians living in the area were dead,

(06:12):
uh in in brutal ways. I mean death, marches, starvation, degradation,
all the terrible things that could occur. Yeah, there are
some pretty horrifying images even on the Wikipedia page of
all places, if you look this, uh, this event up.
Now we should say that this, this event again a

(06:33):
hundred years later, century later, remains intensely divisive, depending on
part what part of the world you are in. UM
around twenty maybe more than twenty now countries have officially
signed on to say that what occurred said genocide. Uh.
The many major world powers. Turkey, however, does not describe

(06:58):
this as a genesis. Side and to look at why
what what we're finding here is that despite this disagreement,
neither side denies that hundreds of thousands of people died.
It's it's more a conversation about whether this was what

(07:19):
could be described as a genocide. And interestingly enough, this
gives us a look at international relations plenty of conspiracies,
because both sides believe that there is a conspiracy of
some sort of foot behind the claim here. But before
we get to all of that today, we need to

(07:42):
ask ourselves what a genocide actually is. Right. According to
Raphael Limken, who actually coined the term genocide in nineteen
forty four, the term comes from the Greek genos or genos,
meaning race or kind uh and side c I d E,

(08:03):
which it means death. So literally, when you say genocide,
you're saying killing a race or tribe, right right. And
as we as we pointed out in our earlier video
on this, the term technically the way the way it

(08:23):
should be constructed would be genticide g E N T
I C I d. But now genocide is the word
we use today to mean this, this specific kind of crime. Yeah,
and it's not the first word that attempted to describe
this occurrence in the seventeen nineties. Uh, there's a word

(08:48):
pop populo side I think, and that originated from the
French Revolution, the idea of killing an entire or the
attempted killing of an entire population. Right. We also know
that Limcoln arrived at this after after trying a couple
of different words and ultimately understanding that he had to

(09:10):
create something that people would know, people would be able
to recognize instantly that wasn't already with something else. And
he has he has a profound story because he worked.
He was born in Poland, a lawyer, and uh he
made it his life's work essentially to get this Convention

(09:35):
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Uh.
He he wanted people to h he wanted nations to
be able to prosecute this as a crime. And this
is of course, you know, at the close of World
War two, after the Holocaust. So which which was you know,

(09:56):
by no means no means whatsoever the own the genocide
in human history, right. No, it was just at this
point someone is actually trying to put a label on
it that that is represent truly representative how horrifying it is.
And I do I really like that point of having

(10:16):
having to create a word to represent this horrific act,
because it's there wasn't one and you could say massacre,
you could say all these other words, but it wouldn't
truly represent trying to wipe out an entire tribe and
or race, or you know, a group of people in
that way. Yeah, I'm glad you said that there is
there is a difference, because if we look at the

(10:39):
way Lincoln defines it, he says, there's and and don't worry, guys,
we're not going to spend too much time just bogged
down in the specifics and the semantics. Well, this is
interesting to me. I hope it's interesting to you. Yeah. Absolutely,
And there's some of we have to talk about. So
Lincoln keeps the emphasis all of genocide on a group

(11:01):
or a kind of a people, uh, not necessarily a nation.
And there's also intent. That's an important part. We have
a quotation from him here. It is intended rather to
signify a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the
destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups,
with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. So this

(11:26):
means that attacking a nation is not really going to
be genocide automatically. He later clarified even further. I think
in ninety six this occurs. He said that genocide should
be known as a conspiracy to exterminate national, religious, or

(11:48):
racial groups. So well, several of these things can fit
in a box. But it's not a genocide unless the
plan is to kill every person in that nation, which
which which you know, legally separates it from a different
act of you know, from a conventional act of war. Uh.
The u N ultimately picked up on this, but they

(12:09):
have a much more long winded definition, so long of course,
that we refused to We refused to read it in
our video because we realized we could just throw it
up on the screen. Um, but we've got the quote here.
Who wants to take it? You want you want to handle,
you want me to sure. Genocide is defined as any

(12:35):
of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,
such as killing members of the group, causing serious bodily
or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures

(12:58):
intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferred
children of the group to another group. So we see
some we see some terrifying examples in these definitions already,
because we know, you know, the lost generation of Aboriginal

(13:19):
children in Australia sent away from their families these different
schools in the US, when Native American children were sent
off to these UH schools to teach them to assimilate Rwanda.
Good example. Yeah, the Rwanda who to UH to see

(13:40):
genocide uh. We we also see that this doesn't necessarily
ending a group, does not necessarily mean UH bussing everybody
to a place and shooting them in the head. This
could just be a generation thing where you know, like

(14:01):
their children are no longer part of this culture because
you could also kill the culture as well as the people.
So with all, with all that, that's that's the idea
of genocide. And you'll and you'll hear people who say,
you can find things online where people say that the

(14:21):
Armenian the events in the Ottoman Empire at that time
were not a genocide. They argue that there are two
different definitions of genocide. There's the one that you or
I or or n like we the common people would recognize,
and then there's the more nuanced legal version, which hinges

(14:42):
upon intent. So with all that in mind what what
happened in Armenia. So here here's the stuff you really
need to know about the Armenian Massacre. It's also known
as the Armenian Holocaust or Med's Urine the Armenian gen aside,
though it's not legally recognized as a genocide. UM. The

(15:06):
massacre began April nineteen fifteen, about a hundred years ago today.
We've mentioned that a couple of times. UM. It's estimated
that the deaths, like we said, range as high as
one point five million, but that number varies depending on
which side you're talking to, and even UM, in certain
historical accounts it maybe I think you said in the video,

(15:27):
anywhere from three hundred thousand all the way up to
one five million. Right, Yes, and we see there's an
argument here about whether there is a dearth or a
lack of primary sources die commnitary evidence. However, we do
know that UM, shortly after the nineteen fifteen events, Uh,

(15:51):
this stuff began to appear in the news, right yes,
so so the people who are actually doing the the
killing were Turkish forces at the time, the Ottoman Empire.
Like you said, the big question here is why why
did this occur. Why would this happen? And you mentioned

(16:13):
at the top that there was some suspicion within the
Ottoman Empire that the let's say, the Russian forces were
attempting to somehow use this population against the Empire, and
that seems to be where it started, right and to
be fair, this is not an impossible things, as we

(16:37):
had also talked about. Of course, one of the one
of the comparisons that you can make to clandestine groups,
because what they're ultimately arguing, the Ottoman Empire is arguing
here is that Russia was using UH this population or
members of this population as a clandestine force pretty much

(16:59):
terrorist group right or at the very least espionage and
they were therefore a proxy. This is occurring today in
other countries. You know, Iran has proxies in the Middle East,
the US has proxies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia
has proxies in the Middle East. There are proxies in

(17:20):
other countries. Of course, we know that in like during
the escalation and the occurrence of the Vietnam War UH,
the US engaged Lao Asian UH groups to to fight
and UH that itself could be an entire episode as

(17:40):
possible that it was happening, But I don't think it's
possible that that number of people, or that large of
a percentage of a group of people could be working
in that way. That's I you know, I'm certain that's
not possible. Absolutely, you hit the nail on the head.
Would one point five million people be working in it

(18:02):
even even or maybe yeah, maybe the idea was more
that a small group would motivate a I mean, we
see a lot of coups begin as a move for independence, right, right, Yeah,
maybe it could be something like that. But what But
here's the thing. Even today, the Turkish government says it's

(18:25):
not a genocide, there was in their very sense of
about it. Recently, just recently, Pope Francis um caused a
huge uproar when he described, uh, the Armenian events as
a genocide. Uh. And did so, of course, because there
is massive concern about people of the Christian faith in

(18:47):
the in the Middle East at this time, right, and
this this was a concern that Turkey will recall an
ambassador away from your country if you mentioned this officially
the the US president. Uh. And not to get too political,
but these are just the facts, folks. Whichever side of

(19:07):
political ideology you fall on. I'm being completely factual when
I say that several US presidents and political officials have
while they are running said they are going to call
this thing in genocide to use the g work, and
then when they are elected they never do, or they
haven't yet. I guess is the most fair way to

(19:30):
say it. Uh. But why is this so sensitive, Turkey says.
Turkey says that, uh, this is an attempt to attack
their identity and history, as I believe the term they use,
and and maybe that means an attempt to weaken them

(19:50):
in the international sphere. I'm not I'm not a hundred
percent sure. Maybe there would be reparations involved of some sort. Uh.
But they also say that the facts themselves have been twisted.
Both sides of the group say that. Turkey says, it's
not it cannot be a genocide because the intent is
not there. Right, This is a preservation of the state. Yeah,

(20:14):
preservation of the state, and believing that they're fighting some
kind of guerrilla army or of some in some way,
that's how they're choosing to view it, right, And also
the argument that the numbers of deaths are wildly inflated,
that this is maybe three hundred thousand, not a one
point five million, and that furthermore, both sides were fighting

(20:37):
and more Muslims died than Armenian Christians. And it's strange because, uh,
what what we're finding is that although everyone on both
sides admits that horrific events occurred and hundreds of thousands
of people died, the question here is is hinging on

(21:02):
these these small differences based on the definition that the
u N and Limpkin gave. I was thinking about this earlier,
and I'd like, I'd like to hear your opinion on it, Matt,
and you too, know. So if we're thinking about atrocities
that occurred in World War two, uh, the deployment of

(21:26):
nuclear weapons, right, first and only time that happened catastrophic
h So that is still not considered a genocide. Right,
That's a very genocide of very specific type of crime.
But it's also coupled with the internment of Japanese of

(21:47):
American citizens of Japanese descent. I would be interested in
the in what the government would put forth as an
official statement of intent if they were going to be sought,
uh to admit to genocide during those attacks. Yeah, bring
it up for comparison and perspective. At this point, let's

(22:11):
go ahead and talk about the uh, the conspiratorial ideas
surrounding this um, the whole genocide notion. So we've got
one idea which the Turkish government says, which is that
this is an attack on Turkish society essentially. Yeah, and

(22:37):
and attarnishing. They think it's at tarnishing of their history. Yeah.
And you know, Turkey is and enormously influential country in
that area of the world right now. It's swinging above
its weight class. It's the pivot between Europe and Asia,
between the Muslim world, well what's often called the Muslim

(22:59):
world and what's often called the Western world. Uh. And
it's in many countries opinion, a good country to be
on good terms with. Yes, and it has historically been
that way, that region at least right the gateway to
these So why but why would somebody be attacking it? Then?

(23:20):
Would they would this be a move if there if
what they're saying has any sand to it, would this
be a move to weaken their serenity or hedge hedgemonty
her perhaps? Unfortunately I can't answer that. I don't know.
I mean, it seems like that's what they perceive it

(23:41):
to be. Answer politically, Uh, yeah, guys, secret reveal here
in his other job, Matt is actually attache to the
local Turkish consulate. You got me. And there's another subject here.
It is Uh, it's very sensitive to say the least.

(24:04):
The country of Israel formed after World War Two, right, Uh?
And and those are just the facts, uh, still negotiating
borders on the official position Israel is that it uh
neither denies nor confirms whether the Armenian massacres were a genocide.

(24:34):
And and for many observers, of course, that seems to
be a strange thing because they experienced at least the
um the the worst genocide that we I think we
can currently cite, unless you maybe go back to treatment

(24:56):
of Native Americans in the United States. You that's an
interesting question. I'd like to I'd like to look back
further into that. I found some I found some fascinating
stuff though, about the expansion of Iran and into what
I call the stands, you know, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, all those uh.

(25:20):
And the only other country that officially also denies that
this was a genocide during the Ottoman Empire's time is
Azerbaijan shares a border with Iran. So how much of
how much of these calculations of staying on Turkey's good
side are ultimately about the seething, invisible proxy war that

(25:45):
is consuming the Middle East. Yeah, that that is a
great question. It's a question that unfortunately I don't know
the answer to. But what we do know is that,
regardless of what sort of label people will put on it,
at the very minimum, hundreds of thousands of people died.

(26:08):
Civilians died. I'm sure there are very many soldiers as well,
but you know, children, women, the elderly, regular people died,
Muslim as well as Christian. And uh, this is not
the this is not actually the first genocide in the

(26:29):
twenty century. There there are a couple of other arguable genocides,
and if human behavior is any sort of precedent, more
of these sorts of events will occur in the future. So, unfortunately,

(26:51):
ben I I agree with you, more of this will
happen in the future. Um Tis, I guess it's what
it means to be human. There are they are dark
places that we go to. Um But yeah, so anyway,
all of that being said this. You know, this kind
of thing I think needs to be at least recognized

(27:14):
and remembered so that future generations don't forget these terrible
things that have happened in our past and could happen
if we are not vigilant um to make them stop.
That's why I think even giving this this event, this
type of event in name such as genocide, is so important. Um.

(27:35):
And yeah, I don't know, it's tough to even talk
about this kind of subject, I think, right, it reminds
me of some of the quotations that we always hear
rephrase before, but somehow rarely followed. Those who do not
understand the past are doomed to repeat it. But there

(27:56):
is a little bit of light at the tunnel. Communication
sans technology is allowing more people to be more transparent
than ever before. Right And if you know, social media
gets a bad rap, and often it deserves that, right,
but the ability to communicate with one another across the

(28:20):
globe of could be could be something that goes a
long way towards preventing these kind of things from occurring invisibly.
You know what I mean. You can only hope. You
can only hope. So if you want to learn more,
head on over to how Stuff Works dot com and
check out the article what was the first genocide in

(28:42):
the twentieth century? And as always, thank you so much
for listening. For those of you who check out our
YouTube series, thanks for sharing that and talking with us
in the comments. Actually have to go later. I have
to go right now and check out some of the
comments on the gaia hypothesis, the idea we just released

(29:02):
the the concept that Earth itself is one gigantic living
super organism, which is not spoiler alert regarded as solid
science by its detractors, but such a inspiring, even beautiful idea.
And that's the end of this classic episode. If you

(29:23):
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(29:45):
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