Part Three: 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, your weekly reminder that when bad things happen,
people can do good things in response to it, and
your weekly reminder that sometimes we all fall into the
trap of seeing things as good and bad. But actually
it's true. There are things that are good and there
are things that are bad, And even though morality is subjective,

(00:23):
there are some things that are just true. Like it's
true that I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy and with me
today as my guest on this part three out of
four is James Hi.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
James Hi, Margaret, It's nice to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
How are you? Usually I make the joke about this
on this totally different day, but it is a different.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Day, different day. Yeah, we've had a weekend. Yeah, someone
has tried to shoot Donald Trump. Yep, that's the thing
that happened this weekend. I went for a nice trail run.
It's nice. I picked some fennel. I mentioned the fennel
because I shoved it in my running pack and it's
choosed now and I've just recovered it and unfortunately it's

(01:02):
no longer an edible condition, which is which is sad.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
This is very relatable to me.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
I just just fucked like a magpie, just just taking
things and then having no ability to use them.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, and that's how I got the name Magpie.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Really, do you like shiny stuff?

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, rusty things. I would find little trash on the
street and bring them back to where I was staying.
So someone started calling me Magpie. And then later I
met someone named Magpie whose full name was Margaret, and
I was like, there's an idea.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
I love that. It's really sweet. Do you also collect
cool stones? I do, not as much as I used to.
When I like hitchiked and traveled full time. I just had,
like we call it goblin treasure. Me and all my
friends would collect like rusty objects and like little neat
stones and things like that, and then make a kind
of jewelry out of it all. Yeah. I love to
do that. I'd love to have a jar of stones

(01:55):
on my desk, just just neat stones from around the world.
Hell yeah, I was picking one up recently in Syria.
My fixer was like, you cannot be picking up cool looking,
shiny shit from the ground, so this is how we
all die. Yeah, that makes sense, which is the thing
I know intellectually. You know that you see a nice

(02:15):
stony you just want to just want to own it.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
I think everyone has a little magpie, you know, sitting
on their shoulder, chirping in.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Their ear, yeah, telling them to pick up shiny things.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
One of our ear chirpers is today's producer, who's Ian Hi, Ian.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Hey, magpie, Hey James, how are you guys doing good?
Were great?

Speaker 1 (02:39):
And our audio engineer is Danel Hi Daniel. Everyone's say
hy to Daniel.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Sorry, Hi Daniel, Hi Daniel.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. I
it becomes this thing where like I sometimes forget to
have everyone say hi to Daniel, but then like when
I do, it like haunts me, and I'm convinced that
the episode will be bad. I don't normally have these
compulsive behaviors, but that has become one, and so we
will just stick with it because what I'm beating around

(03:08):
the bush around is that this is probably gonna be
the darkest episode of cool People did Cool Stuff that
I've ever recorded, because here we are in part three
about Armenian resistance to genocide, and that means that today
we're gonna talk about the Armenian genocide.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Oh dear, see, this is like Coming of Roberts Show.
Now you're just gonna tell me.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Know, it's always a little bit like that, right, because
when I first started this, I was like, Oh, it's
just gonna be all the fun people, and then you're like, oh,
my definition of fun people is usually people who are
like fighting against the most evil things that have ever
happened in the history of the world.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Right, Yeah, you have to go through to bad stuff.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Like you could imagine a cut of Star Wars, Like,
imagine Star Wars is cool, people did cool stuff. However,
you could do a behind the Bastards and it would
just be all of the details of blowing up alder On.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Yeah, we have the whole narrative hit, we have it.
I like that. I like the analogy.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah, I'm better, is what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, he's kind of in the Ja ja binks area.
Where's you a more.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Exactly exactly? This is totally a fight that I want
to pick and care about.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Yeah, please tweet your thoughts about which Star Wars character
rober Evans would be to Margaret at I write, okay
on Twitter.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
So, the Armenian genocide, like the Assyrian genocide in the
Greek genocide that all happened at the same time was
a systematic mass murder, exile, or forced conversion of nearly
all the Christians in Anatolia like what's now Turkey. This
is generally seen as the first modern genocide in terms
of a systematic approach to the destruction of an entire

(04:44):
ethnicity and all of its people. I didn't end up
including it into the script, but I read a whole
bunch about how the word genocide came to be because
looking at this, and then in the immediate wake of
the holocaust of the World War two, people were like,
we don't have a word for kill all the people,
you know.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we had to come up with a
whole new word for something that was so terrible that
we hadn't invented a word for yet.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, like crime beyond crime. And obviously people had done
it before, right, right, we are both recording from places
that that has happened, you know.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, And like European folks did this to indigenous people
sort over the world, right, Like I'm thinking of the
Herero genocide for example, Like, yeah, we did it. It
wasn't I guess so visible to people in the metropol, right,
and that's what made this kind of stand out to
them at the time.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, and we'll get into it. Turkey tried real or
the Ottoman Empire tried really hard to not have anyone
know about it and to try and have it happen
like all the previous ones.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, they're still trying.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, they still refuse to admit that this happened. Hooray.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
And they will cynically use the genocide of the indigenous
peoples of North America as a way as like a
hammer with which to bash the United States for when
it acknowledges or threatens to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, right,
Like I don't know if you've seen this, but they'll
be like, well, you guys compoint fingers because of what
you did to your indigenous peoples, which, yeah, that's bad too.

(06:18):
Two things can be bad. Multiple genocides cannot have occurred.
There's not a shield you can put up and to
excuse your own shitty behavior.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
We should all acknowledge that stuff that seems like it's necessary,
even just from a pure like understanding how the world works,
Like even if you don't care about people, you know,
I mean a horrible. Whatever these things happened, stop pretending
like they didn't anyway, So let's talk about how it happened.

(06:49):
It was centralized and systematic. It was enacted in the
summer of nineteen fifteen during World War One. It started
furthest East, and then it moved its way westward, all
under the pretense of defeating this internal threat. Right, they
were like, oh, the Armenians, they are all going to
go join Russia, and a few thousand of them, did
you know. I also can't blame anyone who did, they

(07:11):
would still be whatever anyway. Yeah, I'm not going to
linger super long on the like gory details, but I'm
going to do it more than I usually do because
usually I kind of am, like, and then some really
bad stuff happened, because I'm usually talking about stuff that
people kind of know about on some level. Right, But

(07:32):
just saying a million people died doesn't give you a
sense of what happened. And one of the main issues
about how the Armenian genocide is discussed is that it's
not People barely know shit about it. I only knew
the tiniest bit. I kind of knew the like a
bunch of people died level, right, yep. And of course

(07:53):
it started with, as we talked about last time, those
forced labor death camps for the conscriptable men. Right, everyone
who is conscripted into the army in World War One,
if you were Christian, they were like just kidding or
taking your guns away, and now you're gonna die. It
quickly expanded beyond that. That would be enough, right, that
would be one of the worst things that's happened. But

(08:16):
sometimes if a village was entirely Armenian soldiers and militias
would just show up, round everyone up, and then kill them.
In villages with mixed Christian and Muslim populations, they did
more of this exodus style thing. They'd start by rounding
up and arresting all of the men who hadn't been
conscripted into these labor death camps, anyone who was suspected
of being a leader or in any way might be

(08:39):
perceived as a threat to their power, right, and deal
with those people, And then they would announce to the
remaining Christians in the town that they were being deported
for their own good. And they did it all classic
write down an inventory of everything you're leaving behind, which
is everything by the way, you can't bring anything with you,

(09:00):
We'll make sure it's returned to you later. You know,
they wrote the receipts.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, right. The bureaucracy of these things is just fucking
like a whole set of Kaman in Jerusalem thing. But yeah,
the cold, bureaucratic nature of genocide is pretty horrific to comprehend.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Yeah, I mean, the comparisons to the Nazis is just
direct they write themselves, but are worth pointing out still,
you know. Yeah, And of course these receipts were alive.
People were forced to sign over the deeds to their
houses and lands, which is like such a like we're
the good guys, right, it's all legal.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Here's yeah, like what the fuck are you doing? You're
going to kill these people? Like do you really need
to do this too?

Speaker 1 (09:39):
Yeah? And I bet a lot of it is to
like make people think that they're going to survive.

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, just you know, to prevent like I guess, rebellion
or like, yeah, I'm sure if you were going to
be genocided, you would act in a way that was different,
like right, for whatever reason.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
And so they sign away their houses in their land
and then they're marched off into the desert, or they're
boarded onto trains or boats, and the people marching through
the desert. These are death marches. Anyone who acted up
was killed. They were denied food, they were denied water.
You weren't allowed to stop and drink from the springs
along the side of the road. Kurdish groups were allowed
to attack and rob the caravans. Young women were kidnapped

(10:20):
and forced to convert Islam. Young boys were taken as slaves,
often as shepherds, but the only men who survived were
the ones who escaped. An incredible number of people they
started coming out, and I think the seventies or eighties
there was this whole book about it. An incredible number
of people who were raised Turkish today have discovered recently
that at least one of their grandmothers was of Armenian

(10:40):
descent and forced to convert and lie about it her ethnicity.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
Sometimes Armenians were deported by train, forced to buy their
own tickets onto cattle cars, which is probably just another
way to be like, oh, yeah, no, you're you're going somewhere.
The dead were removed at each train stop and thrown
down in bankments, and they were taken to these outposts.
Then they were left to die, and if they didn't
die fast enough for the new arrivals, they were just killed.

(11:10):
It's like they're figuring it out as they go along
genocide right now.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, yeah, they haven't quite like perfected it in the
way that the Nazis had or industrial lives hit in
that way.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
But yeah, yeah. Along the Black Sea, people were just
taken out onto boats and drowned. Children were put into
sacks and thrown overboard. Whole boats full full of people
were like taken out and sunk. Muslim leaders who fought
against this mass murder were replaced or executed. Muslims would
hide their Christian neighbors and if they were caught, both

(11:41):
the Muslims and the Christians would be executed. Victims were
forced to strip before they were killed, often before they
were deported at all, because it was against Sharia law
to strip clothes off of a corpse to sell life
insurance of the murder people was used to finance the
murder of others. They were packed into houses and they
were set alight. Others used as target practice for Turkish officers.

(12:02):
I wasn't joking that this is just going to be
dark for a moment.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Yeah, it's a fucking litany of horrible shit.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
A lot of Christians were crucified, often to their own
doors or barns. Often they were raped and impaled. I'm like,
I'm like, not even telling me some of the worst shit.
I don't know. I spent a long time thinking about
how I was going to talk about this, And we're
having this conversation a lot right now with what's going
on in Palestine right where there's like these arguments where

(12:31):
you don't need to see it or you do need
to see it, you know, and people make really good
cases on both sides. And I think where I'm at personally,
and this is maybe a gut instinct, is that, like
I think it is worth knowing and then not lingering on,
but like knowing. And that's like why when I engage

(12:51):
with like World War two stuff, I don't engage with
the details of the Holocaust stuff as much, right because
I faced it in whatever way, you know, I've read
about it, you know.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah, And I've like, when I think about my personal engagement,
I guess with genocidal violence. I've been part of I've
been a historian of the Spanish Civil War, I've seen
people uncover their grandparents and find their like shattered skulls
in the village they still live in. Yeah. I also
one of the things that impacted me most in recent

(13:21):
years that really just made like I've been a conflict
reporter for a while, I've seen really horrible shit. I've
heard stories of terrible things. And in twenty twenty, I
was in Rwanda and as COVID was all kicking off,
and like one of the last things I did for
everything shut down was go to the Genocide Museum in Kigali. Yeah,

(13:41):
and for whatever reason, like that is the most moving
museum exit that I've ever attended. And it wasn't like
the numbers and like there were vast numbers of people
killed in Rwanda. It was individual stories that really fucked
me up for a while. And I think like for

(14:04):
it and also just hearing from like they were wander
genocide wasn't that long ago. It was in our lifetimes
within probably lots of listeners life to known and ninety four,
you know, hearing from people who had been present. It's
sort of it's one thing as a historian, it's one
thing to see people uncovering their grandpa grandma or whatever,
non binary grandparent doesn't matter. But like it's different when

(14:25):
it's someone like you know, you can walk around Rowanda
and see where shit happened. I remember bike all around
the country and then to see how like in that country,
ethnicity in a meaningful sense does not exist today people
my I have young Rwandan friends who are in their
early twenties now who don't know which of those two
ethnicities would pertain to them because it's just not it's

(14:47):
not a relevant form of identity. This thing happened for
something that I mean, all all identities bigger than you know,
very small communities are made up. Doesn't mean they're not real.
But it just disappeared afterwards, and it disappeared for reasons
that aren't always great. Disappeared kind of due to the
full set of state. But to just be like this
thing fucking had people killing each other with knives and

(15:10):
fucking shovels and now it's gone, like it was completely false.
It profoundly moved me in a way I think about
like identity and the world.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
No, it makes sense, and it makes sense about how
like it is worth sometimes to go and read the
specific stories of individuals you know, yeah, And I think
what I decided on for this episode, right is that
I'm not doing that. But I'm also not glossing over.
I want to be like, this is what happened pretty roughly.

(15:43):
I got a lot out of reading about it. I
got a lot of upsetness, you know. But I also
think it's like worth understanding what people are fighting against
and also just like I don't want people to like
panic or worry specifically, but it's like it's worth understanding
how bad the world could be, you know.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, no, it is. I think we should face up
to the realities of what it's I mean, I uh
Sin Syria last year spoken to a ZD people who
went through genocidal violence by the so God Islamic state, right, like, yeah,
things can be really fucking terrible and we shouldn't. You know,
it's very easy, especially now, right we have so much

(16:24):
stuff and so many things and so many disurrections. It'll
be okay, and like it probably will be right, I don't,
I don't, Yeah, totally, it probably will be fine. Yeah,
And that probably won't be you who faces genocidal violence.
If you're a person with a smartphone downloading a podcast well, right,
more people have smartphones electricity in their homes, Like smartphones
are very broadly distributed around the world, but probably won't
be you listener. It will probably be someone who you

(16:45):
see on the news. But it's still something that we
should face up to about the state, right, the state
is the only tool that can do this. Yeah, and
humanity more broadly.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
That is actually an important point that I didn't talk
about too much, is that, like one of the reasons
that words like genocide exists because it's a state level
crime and the concept of the modern state is fairly new.
That doesn't mean that kingdoms didn't pull off stuff like this,
and that you know, diverse groups, decentralized groups. I've also
done some bad stuff, right, Yeah, but yeah, there's a scale. Yeah.

(17:19):
One account I read described the mass suicide where children
and teenagers would join hands and jump off cliffs together
to escape what was coming. And in order to do this,
more than thirty thousand felons were released from Turkish prisons
into the Special Organization, which was guerrilla fighters who were
at war against the Armenian civil population of the country.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
It's not ready a war, it's just it's just murdering
people is what that is.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah, they're like, what have we let out all the
murderers to do a bunch of murder?

Speaker 2 (17:51):
Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's that's how the state can
pretty fuck things up, I guess yep. Not dramatically different
to what's happening now in part of Syria. Sadly. Yeah,
like you relabeled Jahada's fighting, No, totally, I'm gonna throw
to ads without a clever thing.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, here they are, here's ads.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
And we're back.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
I guess there is a line about how serious I
can feel where I can't do my cycle. Yeah, there
it is, we found it. Yeah, so this was happening,
and this happened during the summer of nineteen fifteen. As
we talked a little bit last time, the Kurdish tribes
are major participants in all of this, since for generations
they've been told the Armenians were the reason for their

(18:44):
own poverty. However, it is possible that the role of
the Kurds has been overstated to shift blame away from Turkey.
But that's people's speculation and there's no my guess is
is not all one way or the other. The Kurds
were absolutely involved in this Also, Turkey could absolutely be

(19:06):
overstating their responsibility.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
I didn't think it hugely matters if you're responsible for
like thirty or forty percent of a genocide, like you
were still responsible. And the Kurdish groups that I'm familiar
with acknowledge their complicity and apologize for it, which is
again important.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
That is the next paragraph I have. Sorry, no, no,
it's good. It is worth reiterating.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Coming in here with my fucking nerd shit.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
To be clear, all modern Kurdish movements openly speak about
the Armenian genocide and admit the Kurdish role in it,
and speak about how Kurdish and Armenian liberation are inseparably linked. Well,
an awful lot of the groups I said all, but
I read a list and it was all of the
groups that I know about were on that list of
people who talk about it openly.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, I'd certainly like I have met seeing Armenian and
Assyrian units within the SDF. Yeah, right, so that like
autonomous can unities within the broader an s in North
and Easyria.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
I feel like this makes me better understand to I
don't want to like totally fall into this nerd stuff
in case people don't know exactly what we're talking about.
But you know, when people talk about the Kurdish movement
of you know, when people talk about Roshabam right and
the Northeast Syrian Autonomous movement that's going on. One of
the reasons that I'm under the impression I think, I know,
you know more about this that Kurdish folks talk about,

(20:25):
being like, this is not a Kurdish movement. We are
among these movements. This is a pluralistic movement. Even though
they're the ones who kind of spearheaded it. I assume
that this kind of stuff is part of the reason
that they're like real aware of not wanting to fall
into nationalism.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yeah, Like, it's not an ethno nationalist movement. It's a
movement which is liberatory and the people it's trying to liberate,
if it has any one focus, are not the Kurds
per se, but women if they have a focus. Right,
But that's why they will use an e s in
pref to Rosjava, which just means west in Kurdish, right,

(21:03):
you have north, southeast and West Kurdistan. This is West Kurdistan. Yeah,
got my compass in my head.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
You know, it's an easier thing to say Roosevelt right
than oh, yay, the autonomous regions of Northeast Aria.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
You know, yeah, yes, totally, and people understand what you mean.
But I think the problem that they have faced, and
then we'll get back to tour genocide chat is that
American media are incapable of understanding movements in the Middle
East without reference to ethnicity or without primarily referencing ethno nationalism. Right,

(21:36):
like the Uzidis a z d they are kind of
Kurdish but also distinct right, they're like they have been.
You have the Yebashi right, which is an a Zli
group within the broader Kurdish liberation movement. It's confounding for
people to write about. I have seen other journalists be like, well,
are they Curds? Are they not Curds? Like? Are they

(21:56):
you know? Like? And then well, you have two Kurdish groups,
you know, right next to each other who are in
conflict right now, Like the Frist is not the salient
determining right, it's their outlook. But totally especially with Kurds right,
who because they have been persecuted for who they are
by various states for a very long time, it's hard
for I think any frame of analysis it doesn't primarily

(22:18):
reverenced ethnicity to especially in the Western media, to.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Be used, no totally. And even when we're talking about
like the Armenian genocide, right, it's like, you know, we
talk about the Armenian genocide, and we talk about Asyrian genocide,
and we talk about the Greek genocide. Well mostly we
talk about their well mostly we don't talk about any
of them. Yeah, but like it's the fact that they're
Christian that is the in many ways, the relevant thing.
But that also doesn't quite get across. It's not because

(22:42):
it's like, oh, well, you go to church on Sunday,
that's why we're mad, you know. Yeah, it's like much
more important about like cultural stuff that's going on. So
one of the reasons that we don't know as much, well,
we know a fair amount about the Armenian genocide. One
of the reasons it's not talked about as much, right
is because the Burkish government with the Ottoman Empire was
interested in covering it up. And the way they covered

(23:05):
it up was to pretend it wasn't happening, especially while
it was happening. The goal was to not have the
West notice until it was done, no photos of it
were allowed. Photo development places were told to report anyone
who brought photos in of it. Wow. Passenger trains had
their windows blacked out so no one could see the
corpses lining the tracks. And the way they covered it

(23:28):
up was very orchestrated. First they would be like, no,
it's not happening. And then if it is happening, if
someone notices it is happening, it's because of the Armenian insurgency.
And they pretended that the deportation was humane and that
all property was inventoried, and they cared about the deportees.
Another thing they would do is they'd send two telegrams
with the orders, and one was a like real order,

(23:50):
like kill them all, and the other would be like
a pleasant fiction. Right, Oh, how was the deportation going?
Is everyone doing okay? After the order was followed, they
would destroy the real telegram and keep the fake one. Yeah,
and then they destroyed all the files about it. There's
this like rumor that there's a vault somewhere in a
Swiss bank with records of this whole thing. Who knows.

(24:13):
There is a lot of Like as the Ottoman Empire fell,
they got a lot of the rulers of it moved
a lot of like golden shit to Switzerland, right, So yeah,
but why would you keep records of agendocide?

Speaker 2 (24:23):
I guess maybe you're really proud of it.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
States be weird. I've found some stuff in archives. You're like,
why do you write this down? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (24:32):
Totally?

Speaker 2 (24:34):
What are you doing here? Bro?

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah? Where's their security culture? I guess when you're like
the state level actor, you don't have security culture because
you think you were the top.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Right, yeah, yeah, and you don't realize it. Well, I mean,
what do I do? I try a snoky history book
about how they're all pieces of shit, like it didn't
stop them, did it? Like doesn't effect then they're all dead?

Speaker 1 (24:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Yeah, Well, I guess you can get Franco exhumed and
fly his body across the country. That was kind of funny.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
One of the groups that worked hardest to bring attention
to the Armenian genocide while it was happening was in
this part's like funny, funny is the wrong word? The
American Protestant missionaries. Can you guess who the American Christians
were there to proselytize too?

Speaker 2 (25:17):
The Muslims. No, they try to convert the Armenians to
like plus one Christians, like unorthodox Christians.

Speaker 1 (25:25):
I mean, they weren't trying to convert them to Christianity, period,
because that's how American protestant Ism writ large. Yeah, you know,
obviously there's Protestant is a very diverse ideological and theological framework. Yeah,
the Protestant missionaries were over there to convert the world's
oldest Christian nation to Christianity.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
Yes, we love to see it.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Yeah, the literally got our Christianity directly from one of Jesus' apostles.
Armenians weren't Christian enough for them.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Perfect.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
But while they were there, America hadn't entered the war yet,
and the Ottoman Empire didn't like really want America to
enter the war on the side of kill the Ottoman Empire.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
Right, Yeah, makes sense.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
And actually later the US never declared war on the
Ottoman Empire. So these are some of the only protected
Christians in the country, and so they're working really really
hard to try and bring attention to this and care
for people.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
The other protected Christian group that was there were their
German allies, oh dear, mostly the German allies did not
work to save all of the Armenians. Some were basically
taking notes like, oh, you can just kill them all.
But many German soldiers wound up being some of the

(26:43):
loudest advocates for recognition of the genocide and provided hundreds
and hundreds of pages of evidence.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
So yeah, okay, they say, came right in the end,
this is post World War two, like they no, oh, okay,
no post World War one, right, okay, So like, because
that's the thing is like the German allies in the
eye him An Empire weren't Nazis, you know, No, they
were mony kids.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah, or fucking conscripts, you know, like yeah, yeah, I'm
guessing they like I'm mentioning who Germany would have sent
to the Ottoman Empire at that time, you know, like
probably not.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
It's like fighting troops.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
I mean, I'm sure there's some rank and file soldiers
on the Southern Front of the war. I only know
a little bit about the Southern Front of the First
World War, but.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, that is a an area I don't know a
lot about either.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
So all of these folks collected evidence, evidence that was needed.
Because Turkey still denies his mascot of this day. And
now we've covered the Armenian genocide, and I don't want
to be like and now it's done, but like, you
know whatever, Now you know what happened. Now I get
to talk about the cool people. I want to talk
about the Armenian man who took out the guy most

(27:49):
directly responsible for the genocide. He was a small, nervous,
epileptic man who was driven by visions to do what
needed to be done, a man named Soghom until her
Sokomantelerian was born in Anatolia in eighteen ninety six in
a small peaceful village. Although it's like, oh, peaceful village,

(28:10):
but it gets compared a lot to the wild West.
This like rural Ottoman area. Right, violence can pop off
wherever bandits are everywhere. It is a rough time to
be an Armenian peasant.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
But you know, just a place where the state doesn't
ye have like the monopoly on violence, right, Like people
are just violencing left, right, center, right.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
Instead they're wielding the nomadic war machine with which to
enact their violence.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
His father emigrated to Serbia during the eighteen nineties because
of extreme poverty and to hope to send money home
to his family. Because of the war and the genocide,
he never made it home again, which is the reason
he's the family member who survives this story. Mom moved
the family to a bigger town of like twenty six
thousand people. You know, I would have been like, that's

(28:59):
a tiny town, except now where I live, Like, that's
like way bigger than the big town that's near my
tiny town, you know.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, Metropolis.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah, there's probably like three Walmarts there, you know, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Back in the eighteen nineties, a Turkey did love a Walmart.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. In nineteen thirteen, newly an adult
Sokolman emigrated to Serbia to join his father. When he
heard Russia might invade the Ottomans, he was like, oh
fuck yeah, sign me up, nice, I want to invade
the Ottomans yet them. He's ready to grow yeah, and
his dad is like, no, you really shouldn't. He goes

(29:38):
on a train for twenty four hours to Bulgaria and
eventually he gets his dad's he's I think he might
even be seventeen or maybe eighteen, is actually a minor.
At this point, he needs his dad's permission to sign
up for the Russian military, which is like surprising to me.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
But yeah, yeah, that is given him the general state
of the Russian military.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yeah, but you know, he has to talk his dad
into it. His dad's not excited about it. He goes
to Bulgaria and then he goes to Georgia for training,
and his commander was this Armenian who had probably been
an assassin for the ARF back in the day, but
then he had split with the ARF when they'd backed
the young Turks. So basically their commander was cool and right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
He seems to have already made all the good choices. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
There in Georgia, Tillerian met older ARF fighters and was
part of this like youthful revolutionary scene, and he writes
a lot in his journal about how he is like
madly in love with this woman and but you know,
they all have to be chased for the revolution and
shit like that, right, and they get to feel like
heroes when they're on the train off to the front
as Armenian refugees wave handkerchiefs and cheers they go off

(30:43):
to go fight. And I don't want to even be
cynical about that, because, like I mean, that's true, Like
they were heroes in this in this context, right.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Yeah, Like I think about like I have friends in
the PDF and me Emma who are fighting the Tamadola junta. Right, Yeah.
When they go through villages where they come back, they're like, yeah,
everyone look lines of roads and clap to them. Or
when they like liberate villages, you know if one lines
are road and claps to them, because yeah, they're the people.
They're the only people doing something.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah, and they're fighting and dying.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
Yeah, they are definitely doing both those things.

Speaker 1 (31:18):
Yeah. He started off as an unarmed medical orderly. The
Southern Front of World War One was decades behind the
Western Front technologically because there wasn't the road infrastructure for vehicles.
Artillery had to be drawn by horse cart. There's no planes,
no tanks. The Ottomans had fled and so they're basically

(31:38):
fighting against Kurdish tribes who are fighting the invading Russians.
Because why support people if you're the Ottoman Empire when
you can make them do all the dying for you.
My cynicism is whatever, Speaking of cynicism, here's an ad
break and we're back. And of course the Russian army

(32:06):
was also fucked up in murdering people and being evil
because it's an army.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
But as they advance, Tellurian starts seeing the bodies of
Armenian civilians everywhere. The genocide was decentralized and there's just
corpses scattered around everywhere. And he's an odd fellow for
a soldier, right. He's like prone to seizures and passing
out during times of heightened stress, which includes like being
in a war and also seeing your entire people murdered.

(32:36):
At one point, he actually passes out in the middle
of a firefight.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
And then there's this part of his life that I
want to know more about. He starts running across orphans everywhere.
Most of the survivors of the genocide were children, and
so there are these gangs of orphans roaming around, begging
and stealing and avoiding adults. And he makes it his
purpose in life to rescue as many of them as possible.
It's became his life mission. And I don't know as

(33:02):
much about it because he's most famous for being an assassin,
but he rescued every orphan he could constantly. When he
wrote about it in his journal, he would talk about
how he was like, Okay, when they're awake, they run
away from all the adults, so you got to catch
him at like dawn when they sleep in the following places.
And it's like kind of written as if he's like hunting,
but he's I mean, he's not right, you know.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
Yeah, Yeah, he's trying to get these kids out of
Where do they go? Where do they get rescued?

Speaker 1 (33:26):
That's what I don't know. Okay, that's what I'm frustrated
by not knowing. Someone must know. But what I have
read mostly didn't talk about this part of his life.
But I'm very interested in it, and I don't know.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Interesting, It like kind of implies that he just has
this gaggle that's following him.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
Amazing. It's like a child army.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
Yeah, and you know he's like a medical orderly, right,
so he's not like, hey, kids, run this grenade up
to the front, you know, right.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
They can be putting on bandages or yeah, vibing back
there at the field hospital. Yeah, and people do that
with dogs. I seem some yeah, some units really just
accruing dogs.

Speaker 1 (34:05):
That makes sense to me. That would absolutely be me.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, yeah, that would be me too. Yeah, There's one
unit in Memma that I have this giant plush teddy
bear like four to five feet off the ground. They
dragged around with them for a while, like they would
send me videos of their firefights. You know, they just
put it in a chair. It would just be like
like it was spectating at the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
I suspect that adding some level of surrealism is a
useful way to make your way through a war.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, I can see that, allowing yourself to like maybe
dissociate or like yeah, just make yeah, like everything's strange
right now.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
You know.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
It seemed to be very good at that in Burma,
like what the fuck is happening? People do a lot.
You see it a lot among the gis, whether it's
people like listening to Katie Perry or something. Well, they're like, yeah,
you know out there calling in air support whatever it is,
Like I've I've noticed it. It's a yeah, it is
a way to get through things for sure.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
Yeah. And so eventually he comes to his own former house.
It's long since abandoned. It's now a barracks for Russian soldiers.
He basically comes up and he's like, hey, can I
like go in there? That's my house. And the guy's like,
fuck really, and like gives him a cigarette, you know,
oh great, and he goes and he passes out in

(35:20):
his childhood garden. And this is what at least when
he started having visions. It might be when he started
being epileptic and fainting, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, it seems like if he was epileptic and they knew,
there would be some kind of disqualifying factor for service,
but maybe not, I don't know. Maybe that's why he
was a medical ordlyan, not a you know, the machine gunner.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
And then by the time he's in and this is happening,
they just need everyone and he's there, you know, totally.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, he's there, and he's doing his thing anyway. Yeah,
and he's clearly capable of continuing to do it, seems like.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
And so he lays down in his childhood garden and
he has a vision about his brother being there, come
from Serbia to try and find their family. And he
wakes up and he's like staggering around his old neighborhood,
going to his old neighbors' houses and stuff like that,
and it's this transformative experience in his life, and in
one of these visions he sees Talat Pasha, the orchestrator

(36:18):
of all of this. The minister raised his hand and
Tillaryan cut it off, and this he believed was divine revelation,
and I'm not in any position to tell him he's wrong.
He also started having vivid dreams of his family giving
him advice and lessons and also being like pretty constantly,
his mom would be like, you kill that fucking guy.

(36:40):
Yet you know it's up. You know you're alive to
do this thing, right, It's maternal love for you.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
Meanwhile, in nineteen sixteen, shit somehow got even worse for
the survivors because the Brits abandoned their plan of conquering Constantinople,
and so the Armenians knew that they would just keep
being murder until the war was over. Bizarre, for his part,
stopped promising an autonomous Armenia, and as Armenians started to
try and resettle reclaim towns, they still faced hell. Then

(37:12):
in nineteen seventeen, Veteran of the Pod I almost in
front of the pod, but it's too complicated to say
that Veteran of the Pod the Russian revolution hits the world.
Russia signs a peace agreement with the Ottoman Empire, and
the Armenians are now on their own. In February nineteen eighteen,
the Armenians fought like fucking hell to defend their reclaimed
territory against the Ottomans, which bought time for the exodus

(37:34):
of the civilians. This moment alone, I would watch a
ten part mini series about. Yeah, you know, the exodus
did not go great for people. I mean it saved
a lot of people's lives. A lot of people froze
to death or were cut down by Kurdish forces. There's
like they just like find officers like frozen in their boots,

(37:55):
you know, in the mountains and stuff.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Yea.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
When the Bolsheviks true and formally left the war, they
agreed to quote utilize every available means to disperse and
destroy the Armenian bands operating in Russia and the occupied
provinces of Turkey.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
That was nice of them, Yeah, real, real solidarity kind
of shit that you love to see.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Never a good idea to side with the Bolsheviks, even
as a Bolshevik.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Yeah no, yeah, yeah, yeah, they will kill you two.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yeah. So, once again, the Armenians had fought alongside to
suppose an ally, only to have the ally turn on them.
Don't worry, that's going to happen at least two more
times in the very near future. Oh good, good, Tillerian
and the other Armenian soldiers, they stayed to fight and
defend this exodus. Right, twelve hundred Armenian soldiers held off
one hundred thousand Turks.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Tillerian took a severe wound to his right arm in
the fighting and was out of the fight and was
like transported.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
To a hospital.

Speaker 1 (38:52):
In nineteen eighteen, the Christian nations of Georgia and Armenia
joined the Muslim nation of Azerbaijan to form a new country, Transcaucasia.
This didn't last. If you're like al Comino, there's there's
not a country called that on the map. Somewhere there's
a white trans people joking here that you shouldn't make
it be wrong.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yeah, it's it's not presenting itself. Really.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah. They all had their own interests and they were
all scrambling. Turkey captured Armenia. Azerbai John helped them do it.
Yet another former ally now attacking Armenia.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Like right now, currently as you listen to this podcast. Yes,
but also in the story.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
Yeah, no, yep, yep.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah. History is great, kids, because we learned from it
and we change, we make things better.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
I'm like more and more. I know it's because it's
like what I do for a living, but I am
like more and more convinced that we genuinely actually need
to better understand the history.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
No. Yeah, no, that is a thing that's true.

Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah. So Tillurian, as fellow soldiers are trying to fight
off two armies that are invading some Armenian vets, gather
in London and they join the Allied forces still fighting
in the sun in Front. But that didn't go well,
and Tillarian was not among them. And then World War
One ended Britain one Constantinople became a safe enough place

(40:10):
for former enemy combatants like Tillurian, so he went there.
The young Turks are out of power. Peacetime was hard
on Tellurian. War had probably been harder, I'm gonna be
honest about that. Yeah, but he felt like he was
crazy because everyone around him were trying to act like
they hadn't survived a genocide. He was twenty two.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
At this point. Oh wow, houck, he's young.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
He had spent four years in Hell. Yeah, and he'd
been taking his time during that time. He had rescued orphans,
he had buried corpses, he had fought, he had nearly died.
He had no idea if his family was alive or not.
He left a notice with the Arf newspaper looking for
his family. Meanwhile, the Cup the Young Turks, their whole

(40:57):
leadership had resigned and they escaped done a German torpedo boat,
like at the last minute. It's a lot Pasha, Jamal
Pasha and Enver Pasha and a ton of other mass murderers.
They'd split up, some to Berlin, some to Moscow, some
to Rome, but no one was sure where they'd gone.
A lot of the Young Turk leadership was tried in
absentia and sentenced to death, but most of them weren't

(41:19):
around to be killed. Some of them were executed, but
the big leaders of the genocide got the fuck out
of town. This is not a peaceful time to be
in the city. It's clearly more peaceful than it just
like had been during the war, right right, But things
are spicy. No one knows who's in charge. Greece declared
that all Greek Christians and Constantinople were independent of the

(41:40):
Saltan's rule.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
Yeah. I love that for them, it as your responsibilities.

Speaker 1 (41:46):
Yeah, well I kind of I kind of like it
because like one of the whole things that people use,
like like anti Catholic stuff in the United States from
like two hundred years ago was always about our like
divided loyalty and how you know, Rome was going to
tell all the Catholics what to do or whatever. Yeah,
and like, okay, here's a time where that was sort
of true.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
You know.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
I mean, it wasn't the pope, right because it's Greek Orthodox,
but right, you know, yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
There, whatever, it is a prelate.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
Just I'm slowly learning all this shit.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, I'm not goot out the ship to learn.

Speaker 1 (42:18):
The city was divided up and ruled by Britain, Italy, France,
and Greece. Everyone sent troops to try and claim a
piece of the Ottoman Empire. This is like the fucking
prize of World War One, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yeah, the old Man of Europe.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
Yeah, the sick Man of Europe.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Sick Man of Europe. That's it.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
Yeah, my bad, No, No, it's like I mean it might
have been the old Man too, but I remember reading
specifically that I think it was the Czar who called
him the sick man of Europe.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, the sick man of Europe.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
Yeah, which is cool and good that when you imagine
that there's a sick man in your family, everyone is
just plotting how to rob him.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
He's just gonna well, to be fair, if you're the
czar and someone older than you and your family is dead,
all you're thinking about is like the ship that you're
going to get when he.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
Dies, Like, yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
This is how Aristos relate to each other and it
it's why they're incapable of normal human empathy and interaction.
Every success, they have hinges on people they love dying.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Yeah. No, that makes sense. And then the way that
the sultans would end up, like once a sultan gets
into power, they like kill most of their family that.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
Yeah they know they Yeah we really, we really set
them up to do psycho shit.

Speaker 1 (43:23):
Yeah yeah. I almost got into like a lot of
how that, like the power worked in the Ottoman Empire
and stuff, and then I was like it's not central enough,
and I I'm not trying to do orientalism about.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yes, yeah, it's not like Britain does this stick too, right, Yeah,
all sausage pans are just coming into a power when
he's like eighty something and half dead.

Speaker 1 (43:42):
Yeah, so everyone's trying to get a piece of the
Ottoman empire. Tillian had contact with the larger Armenian revolutionary
movement through a woman from that Marxist party that had
used to be mad at the arf. After the genocide,
no one had the stomach for in fighting one of
the like rare moments of left or radical unity, you know.

Speaker 2 (44:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
Through her and through the general Armenian community, he learned
that the murderers had escaped and were hiding out. He
also learned that in that very neighborhood there was a
collaborator and Armenian who had compiled a list of names
for the Turks and was like alive and living large
a couple blocks away. So Tilarian was like, well, you know,
I'm sure that guy will never do it again, and

(44:28):
then lived a quiet and peaceful life as a coffee importer.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
I fancy that's maybe not true.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
No wait, no, the quiet, peaceful life is a coffee
importer is going to come after a bunch of murder.
Uh Tilarian did not waste time. Everyone was complaining about
the collaborator, but no one would do anything about it.
This is the thing that was making him feel fucking crazy,
you know. Yeah, so we started hanging out near the
guy's house. He waited for the collaborator to be hanging
out near a window. One evening, he was giving a

(44:55):
toast to his guests and then he had a big mental.
We have his journ roles, is why we know a
lot of what he was thinking of these various times
he was like, should I shoot him in the head
or the chest? I'm not talking about current events here.
I'm not talk here about current events here.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Just go right, bast it.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
This soldier with battle experience shot the man in the
chest and aimed center mass and then fled the scene.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
How'd that go for him?

Speaker 1 (45:23):
It went great?

Speaker 2 (45:24):
Okay? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
His Marxist friend found him at his apartment and shook
his hand and said, I congratulate you, my brother, because
he gets home and he's like, I didn't see him die.
I fucked up. I should have gone for the head shot.
The fuck am I doing? I'm a failure. My mother
will never forgive me. I don't know if he went
that far. She comes in and she's not the mother.
The friend, the Marxist revolutionary comes and says, I congratulate you,

(45:47):
my brother, and informed him that his target was dying
in the hospital. And just like that, to Larian was
a hero. He was not one whom people could really
shout about from the rooftops, but everyone in the Armenian
community was like, there's our guy.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
Yeah, this is our dude now.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
And then he was like, well, that's not enough. I'm
a pretty cool person. What if I do even more
cool stuff? And the cool stuff he's gonna do spoiler
alert become a coffee importer. That's not the that's not
the party's famous for. We're gonna talk about it on Wednesday.
It is a cool thing to do, though. I like coffee,
I know.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
Yeah, yeah, if you're financing justice for Joe us not justice,
I suppose more like revenge.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
He has a pretty like happily ever after story.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
Okay, now I'm excited.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
This is like one of the most happily ever after
hero people on this show I've ever talked about. And
if you want to hear that, you have to wait
till Wednesday. Well not you, James, you have to wait
about fifteen minutes. Okay, sick. But first, if people want
to hear more from you, where can they do it? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (46:56):
All over the internet at the moment. I'm talking about
about the Olympics at the minute because they are happening.
And I wrote a book about the anti fascist Popular
Olympics which happened in nineteen thirty six. Anti fascist Populalympics. Good,
regular iOS, Olympics Bad. That's the short version of my book.
For the longer version, you can find it on the
internet or i'd a libry. I'd love you to go
to your library and ask them to get the book

(47:18):
and then lots of people can read it and you
don't have to part with your money. It's called the
Popular Front and the nineteen thirty six barcel In Olympics.
It's written by me, James Stout. They can listen to
it could happen here. Another podcast on the Carl Zone
Media network where we talk about all kinds of news
and current affairs, where I am currently writing about Turkey
and its actions in Kurdistan. So if you're down on

(47:42):
Turkey and I'm sorry, but there's going to be more
on the Turkey front that will be out in a
couple of weeks, I hope, And yeah, I think that's
where I have Twitter James Stout, and I have a
website James Stout dot net, which has all kinds of
things I've written in the past.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Nice if you want to hear more from me, I
write every Wednesday on Substack. Half of the posts are free.
If it's like a more important thing I'm saying to
the world or whatever, it'll be free. And then if
it's slightly more personal, you can pay me if you
want to read my memoir stuff. And I also do
an individual and community preparedness podcast or Live Like the

(48:19):
World Is Dying. You can hear James on some of
the episodes. I have a book that is currently in
pre order called The Sapling Cage, and you can get
it wherever you get books, but instead you should get
it from Firestorm Well, if you're in the US, you
should get it from Firestorm Books. It's a cooperative run publisher.
I swear I know how to use words based in Ashville,
North Carolina, and if you order it from them for

(48:41):
your pre order, it'll come signed.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
It comes out in September. I'm excited for people to
read it. I think you'll enjoy it. If you don't,
don't tell me. I don't care. Take care of yourselves
and we'll see you on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did
Cool Stuff is production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website foolzonmedia dot com,

(49:06):
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts