Part Two: Operation Nemesis and Armenian Resistance to Genocide

Margaret continues talking with James Stout about how a group of unlikely heroes assassinated the architects of the Armenian genocide.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People did
Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that Wednesday comes after Monday,
and so if this part came after the first part.
I'm your host, Marta Kiljoy and my guest is James.
It's down. Hi, Hi, James, Hi, lovely to be here.
We were just talking about Wallace and Grommitt because we

(00:24):
are terrible people and know nothing about England except Wallace
and Grommit.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
And it's a good we we we're wre It's some
Gromit respects over here. It's a high point of British
culture imperialism.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
I think I.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Haven't watched since I was a kid, but I didn't
think there's anything problematic, Like.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
I don't know, probably the achieved that penguin. I'm not sure. Yeah,
maybe they did not kind to the to the sheep.
Who knows, but also not problematic. It's Sophie Hi, Sophiehi.
And our audio engineer is Daniel Hi. Danel Hi, Danille Hi, Daniel.

(01:06):
Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. And
if we seem a little distracted, it's because some shit's
happening right now as we record that we don't know
what's going to happen, but we're not going to tell
you what it is because you're you live in the
future and either nothing happened last week or lots of
stuff happened last week. Anyway, This is part two of
a four parter about Operation Nemesis and Armenian resistance to genocide.

(01:33):
And when we last left our heroes they were like,
we don't like this. What do you mean the first
Armenian genocide. That's a terrible name for a thing that's
happening to us. What are you getting at Because spoiler alert,
it's going to get worse than twenty years. But it's
the eighteen nineties and the Sultan wants to simplify his kingdom.

(02:00):
The Sultan has overseen wide scale massacre of Armenian populations
and they organize to do something about it. They started
defending themselves by setting up Friend of the Pod revolutionary
socialist organizations that were unabashedly into terrorism. I didn't set
out to have be a friend of the Pod, but
it is a thing that people have hit upon a

(02:20):
lot in life. When you're in the middle of being
mass murdered, is to resist by the means that are available. To.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, it does work. It's it's one of the few
ways to not get mass murdered or it to minimize
the mass murdering.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, unfortunately, well we don't really have an ab we
can't like scientific death at history. But oh, that would
be dark. Oh I would totally watch a TV show
where people anyway whatever, like once we invent time machines
and we just destroy them all. I'm a little bit
off track. I love this. I love this.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
That would be a great podcast. Marga goes back in time.
She has five Kalashni coughs. Who will she give them to?

Speaker 1 (03:05):
Yeah, and two boats put in the boat. Yeah, you're
the Marines now. Because Armenian resistance culture has always been
well historically was actually pretty interestingly leftist and anti authoritarian.
This goes back a long time, back to future friend
of the pod, the Polician who's I'll know how to

(03:25):
pronounce their name by the time I talk about them.
More Christian rebels of the seventh century who revolted against feudalism,
the superstitions of the church, and the oppression of women
by men, which is pretty early to start having a
revolt for those things.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yet into it, I'd love to see that. Yeah, I'm
excited to learn more about them one day.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, well, we'll build a time machine and we'll give
them collestional coughs and see what happens. Sick. Probably it'll
be that if you take the most ardent revolutionary and
give them a koalestion of cough within a month, or
worse than the Zar himself, but you know whatever. Fast
forward back to the eighteen nineties and these early Armenian
nationalist movements. They start off honestly pretty cool as far

(04:07):
as I can tell. They're really into forming a secular
democracy that doesn't discriminate regardless of ethnicity, gender, or immigration status.
Like specifically, they're like, hey, it doesn't matter whether or
not you're born here, Like, we want everyone to be
treated the same. This is far better than modern quote
unquote democracies. Yeah, including this one. Yeah. The most famous

(04:31):
of these organizations doesn't get called ARF, and that is
a shame. It's the Armenian Revolutionary Federation or ARF. They're
mostly called mostly called toshnog.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Okay, also cool wood, fun wood to say, no, that's true,
good bad name, that's true.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
ARF is just fun. Because I'm a terrible person. The fighter.
They were mostly called toshnog their fighters are called Tashnog's
and arf was started by mixture of anarchists, socialists, and nationalists,
which is a ow the kind of thing only the
nineteenth century is providing. Yeah yeah, yeah, or probably the
twenty first century. Yay, but we'll know better this time

(05:14):
and it'll be worse. They desire to create a quote
libertarian socialist society in Armenia with freedom of religion and
speech and assembly and all that shit. They were founded
by folks in a blurry space between socialism, anarchism, and nationalism.
Like it was less like I'm an anarchist and I'm
joining this, I'm a socialist, I'm a nationalist. It was
like a little a little stew you know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
I think that was probably a lot more common back then,
Like we see that a lot of other movements around
the turn of the twentieth century. Right, Yeah, you don't
have to like have a flag in your bio. You
can just be a person who has heterodox beliefs taken
from different sources.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
Yeah yeah, Now I'm like imagining what their flag. Anyway,
they probably had a flag, and they also the founders
this cut their teeth as part of the Russian nihilists.
They were like just part of the people run around
trying to explode the czar or I think that this
was people's will who are a little bit distinct but

(06:12):
are not I don't know, whatever the blurry speaking of
a stew of revolutionary terrorists, that's where they come from,
the stew of revolutionary terrorists in Russia. The arf is
still around somewhere along the way. They got shitty, at
least according to an Armenian that I talked to, they

(06:32):
started leaning way more into the nationalism and like homophobia
and like pure bloodlines and if you're not the right
kind of Christian you're bad, they know, and less on
the socialism and not at all in the anarchism these days.
I think that this shift started happening in the twentieth century,

(06:54):
probably in the interwar period, like shortly after the events
we're going to be talking about this week and next week,
but I couldn't promise you. But in the meantime, before
they became reactionaries, they started off really cool. I think,
as justus as I can figure, they did cool stuff.
And there's a bunch of other groups as well, including

(07:15):
one that's like more properly Marxist, but they're less woven
into this particular story. And so these groups they just
went around defending Armenian people, and they did that by
killing collaborators and spies and dumping their bodies on the
streets with like notes attached to them being like, shouldn't
a snitch, motherfucker. I don't know what the notes said.

(07:37):
The notes said, do you know, shouldn't snitch? Motherfucker? Yeah,
And they raised money for their cause by kidnapping wealthy
Armenians and holding them for ransom. Okay, impressive, real Robin
hood vibes. Yeah. And their other big thing that they
were into was handing out illegal firearms to villagers so
that people could themselves defend themselves from me. Yeah. Yeah.

(08:01):
Every time they get a little bit cooler, I know. Okay,
and then here's where they either peak cool or start
going bad. Who knows. If you just read about it
and out of context, it's kind of like neat flavoring
because they are these anarchist socialist nationalists, Christian Holy Army
fighting for a secular state in gender equality through gorilla

(08:21):
campaigns and terrorism. But they are like also into all
this religious iconography even though they're fighting for a secular state.
The volunteer fighters take on a name that means devotee.
Some workers for the party were called apostles, and the
gorilla fighters in the hills were called martyrs for the
cause because they weren't expected to survive. Interesting, Yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Get lots of and I'm thinking specifically of the Kurdish
freedom gorillas, So you use their culture of martyrdom is
very developed there.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah, like outside of a religious context. Yeah, and this
is like within a religious context but also within a
pro secular Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
That's reading like, yeah, they're religious, but they're not like
a theocrat.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah, it's like a culturally religious thing. Again, the best
I can read about this, you know, and the word
for their actions like what we would call like an
action or a direct action or a military campaign or
something they would call a holy task. Oh wow, the
holy work. I don't know. I like, I just like

(09:28):
the idea of this like holy work of ensuring religious freedom,
including freedom from religion. Yeah, I can appreciate that. And
then before they would go into battle, priests would come
out and bless them. But despite this resistance, Muslim violence
against the Christians continued, and it's like, again, we can't
ab test. It's possible that this was not as complete
because of this culture of resistance. We do know that

(09:50):
ARF was incredibly influential, but the massacre of Armenians, the
culture of massacre continues. They are especially priests, get it.
I think this is when they start crucifying everyone. It's like,
I'm not gonna get into the specific examples because I'm
gonna do it later when we talk about the genocide
and I'm sorry, but it feels necessary, so I'm not

(10:11):
gonna do it this time. So, but it's bad, It's
really bad. And so the ARF and the other groups
are like, well, how the fuck do we get the
world to know about what we're facing? And this is
a major problem that Armenians continue to face to this day. Yeah,
and so they're like, well, why don't we go raid
and occupy a huge bank that's owned by the Westerners,

(10:32):
the Imperial Bank Ottoman. Okay, love this, yeah, no, this
is watching a movie about all of this. In eighteen
ninety six, they do just that. Two dozen Tashnag fighters
run into the bank, throwing bombs, they shoot and kill
a guard, they get hostages, like dozens of hostages, and
they occupy the building, and they go through the building

(10:54):
and they put dynamite on every floor so that like
if someone fucks with them, that they're all going out. Yeah,
the early mutually issued destruction. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
I love this era because, like the I feel like,
at no point, possibly we're approaching another point where this
will be the case again, has the state and just
like random groups of people motivated by whatever been like
roughly at a par in terms of their capacity to
do violence, right, Like, everyone has fucking dynamite. People are
getting maxim guns, you know, like, yeah, there's nothing the

(11:28):
cops have that you don't. There's no Apache helicopter to
come after you.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
No, that's a good point. Although there is artillery involved
in this story, but I mean soon enough, there's artillery
in all sides, right, yeah, it's just a tube. Yeah.
And so the Sultan is like, well, it's not my
fucking bank. I'll just kill you all. Fuck the hostages.
I'm just gonna kill everyone. But the Western forces that

(11:54):
are like kind of occupying this place already because they
have so many economic interests, they tell the Sultan they
point guns at the Sultan's palace and they are like,
if you blow up our bank, we will level the
palace of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. It's when
you know, capitalism done taken out of the yeah, exactly.

(12:15):
And so this three way standoff. One of the arf
guys was this twenty four year old who went by
the name of Arman Garo and he's later going to
become one of the masterminds of Operation Nemesis and like
a big important, like Armenian politician, and we'll talk about
him a bunch. He was born into a wealthy family
and he had been studying abroad in France when he

(12:37):
learned about how Armenians were being treated back home and
he was like, not fuck that, and he volunteered to
fight and he didn't show up and like I'm in charge.
He actually the actual military commander of this operation was
a seventeen year old named Babkinsuni and he was killed
during the takeover, and so I think Arman wound up
in charge or because he's like so important and immortalized.

(12:59):
Later I kind of get the sense that maybe they
were like he was there, so therefore he's in charge.
Because the later he's in charge of everything, right, post promoted. Yeah,
but I'm I'm not sure. Maybe he was in charge.
He ended up negotiating with the Westerners, and the Westerners
negotiated surrender with the Sultan, and the bank occupiers were

(13:20):
all whisked away to Europe. Some of them were deported
to Argentina. And the implication is that it did not
go well for them. They were never heard from again. Okay,
none of their demands were met. Meanwhile, during the bank occupation,
Turkish paramilitary is just like angry militia's classic villain of
the pod. These Islamic students in white turbans with clubs

(13:44):
filled with nails went around and killed thousands of Armenians
in the streets of Constantinople. It's like one of those
things where like, wow, this has happened in Western Europe,
we would fucking know about this, you know, right.

Speaker 2 (13:58):
Yeah, it's done a good They've done a good job
of like kind of hiding this from most people's knowledge
of world history.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, but at the moment this did bring the ARF action,
did bring the whole oppression of the Armenian people into
the international spotlight. So the AARF saw it as a victory,
but like kind of in this like god were so
fucked way where they're like, yeah, hooray, thousands of us
were going to die anyway, and thousands of us died.

(14:25):
But people were looking and no, I'm not going to
do an ad transition there as too too. I'm gonna
get another paragraph before I do it. Can't do it,
She's podcast enough. Yet after the bank occupation, nothing was
getting better, and so the ARF was like, well, this

(14:51):
is the end of the nineteenth century and let's just
kill the sultan. Yeah, why not go for broke? Yeah,
much like you can go broke, I mean four broke
with all of our gambling ads, go gamble. That's always
a good idea. Wow, wow, thanks Gat, Thanks proud of myself.

(15:15):
Here they are and we're back, and we were talking
about assassinating world leaders in history.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
I like you added that that's a special caveat to
keep us from getting an FBI visit.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
Yeah, And they were like, you know, he's particularly good
at assassinating world leaders. You know, he's famous for it.
Who do you think the ARF is gonna call their
anarchist friends? Yep, yes, I love it. They're like, we
need to get ourselves some anarchists. It's possible that a
fuck ten of them were anarchists themselves, and it just
wasn't noted in the text that I read, you know,

(15:57):
because the two things. Okay, I have learned that if
it's not written by a socialist, it leaves out all
of the left right. And if it was written by socialists,
it leaves out the anarchists. And if it was written
by anarchists, it leaves out women. All of them leave
out women. This is the Margaret rule of history books
written in the twentieth century.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, this is true, and you get there are some
good books on anarchist women in Spain.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
Okay, fair enough, but they had to be written because
of the twenty the historians the twentieth century, which is okay.
One of the reasons I'm annoyed is that all of
the anarchists who were like doing the shit and all
the revolutionaries who were doing the shit were like, half
of us are women. We love we're fighting for gender equality.
Check out, I'm going to name drop all the people
who are doing all this cool shit. And then the
like fucking armchair historians of the twentieth century were like

(16:44):
and then de Rudy single handedly save Spain or whatever.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, I often see that de Ruti like single handedly
like led their resistance to the coup, Like now, I
see it on social media, and it's just yeah, it's
a betrayal of everything he would have staid for.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
And so this is a example of both of these
categories that have been largely left out. But now that
they have an assassin, they can't leave out the anarchists completely.
So they went and they got two Belgian anarchists, a
married couple. You will be shocked to know that I
don't know the woman's name. I can't find it. Oh god.
I had to reinsert her based on context, knowing that

(17:22):
she was absolutely part of this plot and absolutely involved
because she had to run from the cops in the end. Anyway,
Margaret is angry at historians. Yeah, it's a story of
that's the free space these days on the Bingo. So
the narrative is always a Belgian anarchist named Edward Joris

(17:43):
came and helped them, even though his wife was one
hundred percent part of the plot. Fuck you history books.
I know more about Edward, so I'm gonna talk a
little bit about him. He was a man whose anarchist
politics led him to believe quite strongly an anti colonial struggle,
so he was down to get involved. And they all decided,
let's do a time bomb. Let's do a car time bomb.

(18:06):
And they called it Operation Dragon because the Armenians they
are good, solid namers, just classic names. Operation Dragon, operation Nemesis.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
Nemesis is a fantastic one, like you can't go wrong
with that. No, no, they're yeah Dragon unless they find
your plans and they pretty much know you're going to
blow shit up with Operation Dragon.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
I have the word sedition tattooed on my hands, so
I like to believe that this my speech will somehow
apply in the court situation.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yeah, that's why Margaret was unforciate, unable to attend January
to sixth.

Speaker 1 (18:39):
I was so mad that the seditionists. So one of
the reasons that this is interesting to me that they
plan this car bomb to kill the Sultan is because
history does record the anarchist as inventors of the car bomb.
Sorry about that, but yeah, I hate a car bomb.

(19:01):
That's sad. I've been subject to no probmity to car bombs. Yeah,
this one. In nineteen twenty, the Wall street car bombing,
which was bad and it was fucked up and I'm
mad about it, but it was done by anarchists.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
You know, we have the first podcast network to live
podcast a car bomb, Margaret, that's one of our claims.
Like really, yeah, I know. Robert and I were we
were having drinks on the roof of a building just
to opposite the Thai Burmese border when a car bomb
went off and I happened to be recording on my

(19:38):
little little little podcasting machine and you can hear you
can hear us being like oh ah, and then wondering
when we're going to hear the airplane because like thinking
it was a regular bomb and it'd be like no,
and then everyone sort of being like are there any
more bombs? And then someone found on Facebook, like almost instantly, right,

(19:59):
and it did. These folks love to be posted on Facebook,
and there were pictures of this car bomb that we were.
We tried to get across too closer to visit it,
but it was not possible at that time.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
So that's fair. I'm glad you all chose to continue
to be alive instead of prioritizing getting close to the bomb.
The real real win for cool sat and media though. Yeah,
head crews have done that, has he? Yeah, so anarchists
were the first podcast yeah yeah, yeah, and twenty one
hundred years prior to that, we get called the first

(20:31):
car bombers for a shitty bombing. But fifteen years before that, uh,
we tried to car bomb the Sultan and it was
a larger pluralistic We'll talk about the pluralism of that movement,
but you know, the Belgians were involved. Their target. The
Sultan was really paranoid about being assassinated. He like had

(20:54):
this thing he was like he felt like he shouldn't
get assassinated. He'd prefer not to you know.

Speaker 2 (20:59):
Yeah, it chose if you've lived a good life, if
you're worried about multiple people trying to assassinate you, I think.

Speaker 1 (21:03):
Yeah, totally. For some reason, he was aware of the
fact that he was like massacring a ton of people.
And this was like also the peak era of like
what if the solution is just to kill that one
guy though? Yeah, And every night he slept in a
different room of his palace and he fed his meals
to his cats and dogs to test for poison. But

(21:27):
he was the formal leader of Islam, so he had
to go to a public service every Friday. The way
I know women were involved in this plot is because
the way that they scouted was that they would all
dress up as young couples looking for blessings for their weddings.
So at least half of the scouts were women, unless
they were substantially ahead of their time. I did manage

(21:52):
to find one woman's name who was involved in the plot.
This makes us I'm clearly pro this plot like whatever
as a Marxist bombmaker named Anna Nellon's her and her
also bomb maker husband died later that year in a
tragic and entirely foreseeable We were making bombs at home
and then the bombs went off accident.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
Yeah, and it's now bomb area, you know. Yeah, don't
be smoking if you're making your bombs at home.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
Yeah, something like the ultimate like Devil Make Care archetype
is the smoking bomb maker in an apartment in like
the Lower East Side in like eighteen nineties.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, I've interviewed a couple of bomb makers who have
had a lot of substantial parts of their bodies to
smoking while making bombs. Yeah, it's so like, it's so
it's obviously a terrible and traumatic event. But like again,
we met these bomb makers, Robert and I, and we
were having a couple of beers and guys like, yeah,

(22:48):
so telling good stories and he's like, oh yeah, my friend,
my friend we always made the bombs together. And we're like,
what happened to your friend? And he's like, well, one
day we were making bombs. And then you could just
see everyone being like, well you're smoking a cigarette, bro.
It'll be like we went for a cigarette affect for
fuck's sake.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
Fuck. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
And that's like tip for you today, vape if your
if your bomb maker, I guess we'll get.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Get large when you when you pick amateur bomb maker
as you're like profession it's because you're like, I'm not
gonna live very long.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah, you're probably in a bit of a pickle anyway
to be considering it as a career move.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah. Maybe some people do it for the purity of
the art, you know, sure, yeah, totally. So they made
this car time bomb. They slipped the bomb car into
the procession of wagons alongside with the sultan, and then
the fucking sultan stopped to talk to someone for like
a minute, and so the bomb went off and missed him.
This killed one of the bombers, and it killed twenty

(23:48):
six members of the Sultan's retinue. But sadly, no Sultan
always blowing up the bridesmaids, never blowing up the brides.
That's true for Obama and true for anyway. Oh, it's
a dark joke. Thank you, thank you. Yeah. In response
not to my joke, but to the assassination attempt on
the leader of all of Islam and the Ottoman Empire,

(24:10):
hundreds of folks were arrested and tortured, including the Belgian
anarchist guy. His wife slipped authorities, and then there was
this massive protest movement in Belgium to put pressure on
the salt and to free him. Love that. And then
here's where you know that the Ottoman Empire is a
little bit weak to the west right now. It worked.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Yeah, yeah, if Belgium is pushing you around that, he said,
yeah for the person who tried to blow up your leader.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yeah yeah. Still huge win for Belgians and got no
and Edward Joris, who went home and presumably presumed a
happy and hopefully on event. I would rest on those
laurels for the rest of my life.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah, but you know, Ector Joris, maybe maybebe went straight
back to the bump factory.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, who fucking knows. Meanwhile, the ARF aren't the only
folks who hate the Sultan. Those young Turks. It's either
a click or secret society. It depends on We won't
put it of Ottoman officers. They wanted the constitution back. Well,
not for very long, but they claimed that they wanted
the constitution back. Formally, their name is the Committee of

(25:19):
Union and Progress, but everyone calls them the Young Turks
ARF and the Young Turks. In nineteen oh eight, they
pull it off. They stage a bloodless coup and they
take power away from the Sultan, who stays on briefly
as a figurehead. Everyone was like, holy shit, this rules.
We fucking did it. We have a constitution. It's all
roses from here on out. Muslims and Christians are literally

(25:42):
singing and dancing together in the streets. They're like, we
fucking did it together. Fuck, yeah, we rule. Yeah. A
representational government might give them rights, and it might allow
them to be modern enough to fend off Europe, which
was buying them out piece by piece and destroying their culture.
Right elected to this new parliament, is Arman Garo from

(26:04):
the bank takeover the one who had negotiated it, and
the ARF is now legitimate. And the other Armenian revolutionaries
they're like, hey, this is going to go badly, y'all.
Shouldn't help the young Turks. I hope enough of them
were alive. Later. I told you so the ARF, but
I couldn't promise. Yeah, there was this brief attempt at

(26:26):
a counter coup from the right wing after this, you know,
bloodless coup or whatever, And in the end, the old
Sultan was ousted entirely. The new Sultan is a figurehead
of the cup the young Turks. And I don't know
if you knew this, James, but did you know that
power consistently corrupts revolutionaries every single time.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Yeah, it's a thing that that's been said that the
people do talk about maybe bad, maybe power bad.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
Well, right away the young Turks became autocrats and started
murdering their rivals and their allies. Cool. Soon enough, tens
of thousands of Armenians are being slaughtered. Fucking again, this
isn't even the This is this is like an intermission genocide.

(27:13):
This is the second Genosid that Okay, it's dark warm
up genocide. Yeah, Western Europe is starting to put together
kind of like a peacekeeping intervention. They're like, hey, what's
happening over there, you guys? Okay, Like we've been hearing
some stuff by nineteen thirteen, but that gets interrupted by

(27:36):
World War One. Yeah, by nineteen thirteen, the young Turks
are like, just kidding, we are not doing democracy. The
Central Committee is in charge. Who's the Central Committee not telling?
The moderates are out? Racist nationalists are in. There are
three guys who do the most of being in charge,
although they're not the only people. It's Talat Pasha, Enver

(27:56):
Pasha and Jamal Pasha. Pasha is an honorific anyone holding
a top level position within the Ottoman Empire, Governor's general
shit like that. I've seen the young Turks compared to
the Nazis time and time again, and it seems apt
I don't have like a butt here. You have sociologists
and poets building up a nationalist ideology that is explicitly

(28:17):
opposed to religious and ethnic diversity. This new country is
for the Turks and only the Turks. And maybe the
most in charge man is Talat Pasha. He's a huge, strong,
man with a Walris mustache. He's also, like a lot
of the young Turks, not particularly ethnically Turkish. He's mostly

(28:41):
noted as a Bulgarian Muslim, although his Wikipedia says Bulgarian
Romanian Turkish descent. The first inclination this is a fuck,
sorry Sophie and me and the listener. The first inclination
of how they like to solve their problems is how
they decided to deal with the problem of stray dog
in Constantinople. Oh no, they wanted to deal with straight dogs.

(29:05):
So they wound and rounded up eighty thousand dogs and
then dropped them on a small animalize each other and
starve and ships passing by. I could hear the tortured
howls of dogs before they died. Oh no, they did
a dog genocide. They did second time in like six
weeks that you and or Robert have surprised me with

(29:27):
horrible dog genocide. I know, I was real sad when
I listened to the Bastards episode that talked about it.
I don't I think it's worth understanding how fucking monsters.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
No it is, yeah, because you've had to go to
the extra step of like if you wanted the dogs
to die there. You could just kill them. Yeah, but
they've they've decided to put them on a genocide island.

Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
Wow, now popular tourists. It's not because of that, but
oh great, Yeah, what's the island called?

Speaker 1 (29:56):
And put it in? I was like skipping through this part.
I was like, Aha, what is the minimum number of
facts I can put in here to get across the gravity?
You know? Yeah? Because fuck I dogs. Dogs are not
morally culpable in the way that humans are capable of being. Yeah,
because they're all perfect angels. M h. Much like the

(30:21):
perfect angels that we sell the ax it. I don't
know how we could sell and.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
We can't make it. We can't make an island joke.
I think we're legally prohibited from.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
No. No an angel joke. I was trying to Okay, no,
I got nothing. I don't know why you're sad to
go sad by this stuff and then come back and
we're back, and now we're gonna there's a world war

(30:59):
right now? Sorry guys. Yeah, Joe and Biden went to
sleep and yeah, now he's transported back. Joe Biden, if
you're listening, you are in World War one right now.
Again on the Western front. He's like, what's that, Jack,
you got ice cream? Yeah, that's right. All you got
to do is beat the Germans and you can get

(31:21):
some ice cream, Joe, save us from the hunt, Joseph. Yeah,
the Ottomans, we're almost certainly going to end up siding
with Germany, but not as like certainly certainly because it's
not it's not really the Ottoman Empire. It's the young
Turks who are in charge, right, Yeah, and a lot
of them are Francophiles, right. They all come out of

(31:42):
this like we like constitutional democracy as long as we
can murder all of our rivals and not have a
constitutional democracy, which frankly is also how most Western governments
would prefer to be, I think. But yeah, some of
them were Francophiles, others were Prussia. Files But Germany and
the Ottoman Empire we're both like, yeah, we hate fuck Russia.

(32:03):
We hate Russia. So that's the main reason why I
was like always going to be Germany. I think the
Ottomans joined the Germans, and the way they did this
was firing on Russian ports from the Black Sea. That's
a good way to let people know, isn't it. I know,
I know. It's just just a nice little reminder that

(32:23):
I mean, I guess to be fair, I feel like,
if you're Russia, you can just kind of assume the
Ottoman Empires at war with you. Yeah a moment. Yeah,
you don't want to be you don't want to be
caught sleeping. And the Western Powers didn't mind that Turkey,
that the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers or whatever

(32:44):
on some level because they wanted Everyone wants Turkey, right right,
it's the carving up but Turkey. I'm sure this joke
has been made. That's why they want you to call
it Turkia now because people will not stop. But I
think they got mad about people posting pictures of Turkey's

(33:07):
in replied to them on an x formerly known as Twitter. Yeah,
seizing Turkey would be key to seizing all of the
Arab areas too, and the Suez Canal, which would save
you from needing to sail all the way around Africa.
So like Britain and France are like, wouldn't that be sweet?
You know? And then the young Turks fell for the

(33:29):
classic blunder. James, you ever tried to invade Russia? No,
I've been to Russia.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
But it was more in a sort of non invasive
posture when I okay, okay, I just went to the
hotel from the nineteen eighty Olympics and Scott really drunk
with my friends for every night.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah, it's great. I got some stories when I used
to travel way more. I like didn't go to Russia
because my Greek friend was telling me about going to
Russia and like the level of scrutiny and bureaucracy that
they put on everyone who's coming in and how terrifying
it is. Yeah, Like he was on the train and

(34:09):
he was going into Russia and they stopped him and
they were like, it's like eleven fifty eight pm and
they're like, oh, it says here that you're visas for tomorrow.
You can't come in. And he's like, I don't speak Russian.
And he's trying to speak in like Greek and English
and stuff, you know, and and so he has to
interpret through the woman sitting next to him, and then
eventually the the guard. Eventually it turns midnight and he's like,

(34:34):
can you let me in now? And they're like fine,
and he says thank you in Russian, and so then
the guard gets mad again and it's like you could
speak Russia this old time, you fucking liar, like, and
I was like, no, I'm good out of Bulgaria. But
I didn't go to I didn't go to Russia. I'm
sure Bulgaria was nice too. It was nice, although at

(34:56):
the time Bulgaria is the place where everything is confusing
and backwards, and there were Nazis tagging a cab over swastikas.

Speaker 2 (35:06):
Okay, fascinating. Acab is a grand unifying principle of a
lot of organizations that wouldn't otherwise agree on very much.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
I know. And also a lot of organizations that totally
love cops. They just want them to be their cops.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Yeah, yeah, well that is that is an unfortunate problem
with many, yeah, many organizations.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
There's a good book called thirteen twelve about football aultras
which looks at like left and right football altras and
how they abder to take the cops. Oh shit, okay,
very good book, would recommend it. So Invading Russia. The
Ottoman Empire decides to invade Russia in December, and that's
the one two punch. Don't invade Russia. Don't invade Russia.

(35:47):
In December, like yeah, that's yeah, bad cool. Seventy thousand
soldiers died. However, overall the Ottoman Empires called the Southern Front.
They did whole Constantinople, which no one expected. They fought
off the British, the Australian and the New Zealanders and
this one campaign and the Turkish commander told as soldiers,
I'm not ordering you to fight, I am ordering you

(36:09):
to die.

Speaker 1 (36:11):
Well at least you.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Know, yeah, we had great feat of aritory theh Yeah,
it's like very quotable.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
I wouldn't feel good about it, yeah, yeah, true. And
in all of this in World War One, the young
Turks are like, I bet the Armenians will go over
to the enemy, and like, first of all, well look sure,
who could blame them? Right, yeah, why not? What do
you going to lose? Yeah, Armenian freedom fighters were absolutely

(36:40):
sabotaging the Turkish. They were cutting telegraph wires and spine
and moving guns around and shit. Some a few thousand
of them crossed into Russia to volunteer because enemy of
your enemy and all that shit. In fact, Armangaro, the
arf guy who had occupied the bank and then later
been in Parliament, he went and fought for Russia. But

(37:02):
this is a few thousand Armenians out of two million
Armenians living there. The overwhelming majority of Armenians considered themselves
to be part of the Ottoman Empire. And for hundreds
of years Christians had been paying that extra millet tax

(37:23):
right which actually exempted them from conscription. That was like
part of the whole point. Not under the Young Turks.
Oh great, and for a little while, oh Sparta, Okay,
for a little while, the Armenians were in the Turkish army.
They had guns, they had officers, and shit. They're like, yeah,
we're part of the Ottoman Empire. We've helped you come

(37:44):
to power. Let's do our thing. By February nineteen fifteen,
the Young Turks forced all of the Christians into what
were called labor battalions. That's not a good thing. No,
these are slave units in which the soldiers are worked
to death. The point was to work them to death. Yeah,
anyone who had the t merity, tenacity, whatever. Anyone who

(38:06):
didn't die while working was marched off and murdered in
the desert. And so at this point people are like, oh,
this is this is like bad, right, this is like,
now what we want to have happened, and so you
started getting resistance to this right away, and so the
Christians and I think with the help of sympathetic Muslims.
But I haven't done enough research about this part of

(38:28):
it yet. I know a little bit about it. Later,
they set up an underground network of in Constantinople to
help people skip out on being conscripted into slave labor
death camp time. And this was called the Army of
the Attics, which is a sick name. Yeah, thousands of
Christians were sheltered in addicts and behind false walls all
through Constantinople. Like sweet. The more I read this story,

(38:53):
the more I was like, World War One is just
World War II.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah, yes, we have less like a mythology around it.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
Yeah, because Western Europe is so up its own ass
that at least in America, which I'm now calling part
of Western Europe or whatever, that World War one is
just French and German people and trenches who are sad
and killing each other with machine guns, which is bad, right,
But no, there's a genocide of people based on being

(39:25):
religious minorities that kills millions, that involves people hiding in addicts,
and like whatever, Yeah, it's the same shit.

Speaker 2 (39:35):
I think it's they're both creatures of like you have
this decline of like absolute monarchy and like religion having
the claim on universal truth, and then to replace that
we get nationalism, and we get nationalism we do in
group out group. And this is what happens in World one,
this is what happens in World War two, is what
happens in the Armenian genocide, it's what happens in many

(39:57):
of the other genocides, like the creatures of the same thing. Yeah,
the fascists just went a little bit harder, and we
find their aesthetic a little bit more repugnant. So we
created this good versus evil narrative which like fascists or evil,
but like, yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean everyone of find
them is good.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
And so at this point, the Ottomans are saying, how
do we solve the Armenian question? And that is what
they called it cool, and so they decided to eliminate
all Armenians living in Anatolia and basically all Christians. They
disguised these as deportations and hit it by the fog

(40:37):
of war. And they didn't say, let's do a genocide,
one because no one says that, and two because that
word didn't exist. That word was created in part because
of what happens next, which is my opposite of a cliffhanger,
because normally you want to make people excited about what

(40:58):
comes next. For a cliffhanger, this is one of the
worst things that's happened in the history of the world.
But the cool people special is finding the people doing
amazing things during the darkest chapters of history. And there's
a lot of those people and they're coming up next week. Yay, yay.

(41:19):
One of the things that really surprised me we're reading
about all this is just how much tied into all
of these like revolutionary socialist organizations and all of it.
It was like, like it always is. I feel like
the few times I've seen it, it's been presented as
it sort of just comes out of nowhere, you know, Yeah,
and very few things come out of nowhere.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
Yeah, And like we do a disservice and we remove
them from context, right because like how we get to
a place where we can do genocide is it's shit
that's extremely fucking relevant right now. Yeah, Like if we
are watching a genocide happen as we are, like we're
just seeing this global crackdown or refugees, Like we need

(41:57):
to think about that too, And I think we do
that with World War two as well, right we like
oh right by, you know, like nineteen thirty three, poof,
they're the Nazis, like totally we don't look at you know, like,
oh wow, what economic recession. I want to like the
thing that will never happen again.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
And one of the things that really stands out to
me that I've been like thinking a lot about after
doing this particular research, is this whole thing where like
they're not allowed to be armed and everyone else around
them is armed, right, Yeah. And one of the reasons
I think about it is that, like I get why
there's this like liberal and progressive desire to reduce them
number of guns in our society, right, Like women are

(42:38):
safer if their husbands don't own guns. That is just
a fucking thing, you know. And so it's like I
get why we're talking about all of that, And it
feels like this inescapable thing that that genocide is like
way more common then people tend to think that the

(43:01):
like absolute worst things that humanity can do to each
other happens way more often then people want to admit.
People want to talk about the Nazis as this complete
outlier with nothing else like it before or after.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
You know, yeah, like I know, if I can maybe
like bang my anarchist drama a bit, like, I think
it's very hard again, if we are historians who are
enabled unable to conceive of human society existing in a
modern fashion outside of the state, to look at how
often the state is a tool for genocide, right, and

(43:34):
how often a state is created by or for genocide,
And yeah, like that doesn't I think if you accept
that analysis, then it doesn't follow that it's a good
idea to allow the state to have a monopoly on
the tools by which it can do killing. And that

(43:54):
leads to people should own guns. But yeah, unfortunately, we're
in a particularly fucked time in human history where you know,
things like, like, we have other problems, right, Misogyny is
a problem. That's why women are at risk if their
domestic partner's own guns, right, or specifically male domestic partners,
I guess, And we have many other societal problems of alienation,

(44:15):
and this leads to these things like mass shootings, which
are fucking horrific. Like I don't have the answer at
all of those things, but yeah, I do think like
like we're at a time when I don't know, if
we look at things that have led to genocide, Like
it's a scary fucking time in human history, is what
I'm saying. And you know, the Left party right now
in American politics is the party which has presided over

(44:38):
record numbers of migrant deaths more than the fucking right
party did in the trumpeter and like it's just not
even a thing that we talk about very much in
the mass media, and that scares the shit out of me.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
Yeah no, And it's it's you know, it's like and
I don't want to, like I don't know what to
specifically do about it. I don't. This is not me
saying like everyone should go out and get firearms, although
I think that it is useful for some people to
familiarize familiarize themselves with the use of them, and like
safe environments and things like that. But it's like it's

(45:13):
just a it's a sketchy time and and I think
that like people are often coming and so swinging so
hard on these like easy answers where they're like, of
course guns are great, and you're like, well, the only
reason that we should have firearms is because the other
side does.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
You know, yeah, bad, they kill people Like I just
I am a person who enjoys guns. I have lots
of them. I like to buy old ones and fix
them up. But like, yeah, I would love a world
where it didn't exist. Yeah, and like, I mean, but.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
Then again, you know, some of the worst atrocities that
have happened in history happened with swords, you know, fucking machetes. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah.
I guess that's where we'll leave it. And next week
we will talk about the Armenian genocide, but we're also
going to talk about Operation Nemesis and how people resisted

(46:10):
in ways that are more complex. And it's like, no
matter what, the simple version of the story is really cool,
but the deeper version of the story is even cooler.
I'm excited to hear that. Yeah. Hell yeah, I love
a good resisted story anyway.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah, anything you want to plug, I will plug building
community and mutual aid. Like, I think the solution to
whatever the fuck is going to happen.

Speaker 1 (46:35):
Is each other.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
It's not the state, it's not any political party. It's
building community and showing up for one another, and that
includes down at the border where you can come and volunteer.
Someone who listened to our podcast came this week and
I was so happy, like, oh hell yeah, someone do it.
Came from the internet to the passenger seat of my
truck and we went around and helped people. So yeah,
you don't have to come to a border with the

(46:56):
people who need help everywhere, and building strong communities like
these strong communities that went and killed like Genesee Dais
is the way to fix your problems.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
So do that.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
Make friends. You don't have to get guns, but if
you can make PB and J sandwiches for hungry people,
then you're doing the work.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
It's that either like Simpsons or Futurama. I mean that's
like guns for the people who want guns and not
guns for the people who want not guns.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, yeah, that's perfect and fucking free food for everyone
and to sleep and yeah if you want to gun, cool,
but going to save you on your own, you make friends,
look after them.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
And I will plug giving food away to people. It
is never wrong. Sometimes it's complex. Sometimes there's like things
you can get into the complicated nature of blah blah
blah blah blah. But like overall, you don't know what
else to do. Find your local food, not bombs. Yeah,
make a fucking lentil. It's the instrument of the revolution.

(47:57):
Oh maybe I want eat lentils. No, I I always
eat dumplanes after after recording. There's not a lot of
vegan comfort food. And where I live, rocery store, you're
outside of the hot land of the vegan Yeah, cake,
but there are dumplanes at the grocery store that happened

(48:19):
to be vegan, and they are my comfort food. And
I eat dinner later on recording nights, and now everyone
knows that I'm currently hungry. That is what everyone has learned.
But one of the best, like the same is like
you're talking to people who come up because of the show,
who are volunteering at the border. You know, I was
recently talking to someone who was like, hey, cool Zone
media talking about how important feeding people is. Is how

(48:40):
I like started spending most of my time making soup
for people. Oh yes, it's it's really cool. Thanks listeners
for participating in creating a better culture. And Sophia, you
got anything you want to plug? We're sunscreen hell yeah, damn.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah, So if you said that, because I today I'm
wearing a sleeveless top and it's painfully obvious that parts
of me have not.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
Seen the sun for like ten months, and I'm extremely
wear sunscreen even if you don't leave your house. I'm
going to pitch the two rules of sleeves. I've probably
done this on the show before, but I feel like
you need to know them. James stout. The two rules
of sleeves are suns out, guns out, m classic and
it's corollary. Sun's gone, sleeves gone. Ah Okay, I like that. Yeah,

(49:31):
so if you have an option, Yeah, so there's no sleeves,
that's the rule. Yeah, you didn't need them. They're, uh,
you know, thing of the past. Yeah, we're sunscreen. All right,
see you all next week. Cool People Who Did Cool
Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. Or more

(49:52):
podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.