280: BURN. DEMOLISH. KILL. The Horrors of The Armenian Genocide

0:00:00 - Opening. 0:07:30 - Armenian Golgotha 2:22:49 - Final thoughts. 2:26:19 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:47:40 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  Revenge, revenge, revenge. Let us kill, let us cut to pieces, let us swim in blood up to our knees. Revenge, revenge, revenge.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  Let us wipe the stain from our clothes.

• 0:20Jocko Willink?

  That is a song.

• 0:24Jocko Willink?

  Taught to Turkish schoolchildren as reported by the US consulate in February of 1915. And this is Jocko Podcast number 280 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also joining us tonight is Daryl Cooper. Good evening.

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  And the blood spread step by step. From Ankara to distant cities, towns and villages. At the end of August 1915, a girl barely 13 years old told me of the following to which she had been an eyewitness and which she only by some miracle had survived. In mid-August, all Armenian males from 12 to 80 were arrested, taken out of town and killed by unheard of tortures. Next, it was the turn of the girls and women. On August 20th, all the Armenian women, girls and small boys were taken out into more than

• 1:30Jocko Willink?

  70 carriages and brought to a valley by a bridge an hour and a half away. Following these carriages from the town was an armed mob of Turks, each of whom on the way chose a sheep or lamb to slaughter.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  When they reached the area under the bridge, police and soldiers, having joined the savage mob set upon these poor, defenseless women, mothers, brides, virgins and children.

• 2:02Jocko Willink?

  Just as spring trees are cut down with bill hooked hedge knives, the blood thirsty mob attacked this group more than 400 with axes, hatchets, shovels, and pitchforks hacking off their appendages, noses, ears, legs, arms, fingers, shoulders. They dashed the little children against the rocks before their eyes of their mothers while shouting "Allah, Allah."

• 2:35Jocko Willink?

  The screams of the mothers and virgins and little children echoed across the valley and the surrounding rocky hills and caves. The children screamed "Mehrig, Mehrig." "Mother, mother, help us please."

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  But the mob, indifferent,

• 2:56Jocko Willink?

  continued to rip apart the bodies so that even the stones cried out.

• 3:04Jocko Willink?

  Finally, after four to five hours of carnage and plunder, night's black blanket covered this scene of blood which would stir the envy of wild animals.

• 3:18Jocko Willink?

  With the fall of night, the Turkish mob, police, and police soldiers returned to town with their bundles of loot, whatever they had left. Hyenas, wolves, jackals, and other scavengers came off to finish.

• 3:36Jocko Willink?

  The precipices of the valley were strewn with corpses, naked or half naked.

• 3:43Jocko Willink?

  It was a scene beyond all human imagination.

• 3:49Jocko Willink?

  Now and then, in the darkness of the night, the moans and groans of the badly wounded and the raspy drone of those giving up the ghost could be heard.

• 4:03Jocko Willink?

  After midnight, in the thick darkness, a refreshing dew began to fall.

• 4:10Jocko Willink?

  And behold, a slightly wounded, numb little girl, invigorated by the dew, woke up.

• 4:19Jocko Willink?

  Half-alive, she began to rove in search of her mother and two sisters.

• 4:26Jocko Willink?

  In vain, she called them by name, but alas, they were gone to eternal sleep.

• 4:34Jocko Willink?

  At last, she found their crushed bodies, which had fallen one beside the other.

• 4:43Jocko Willink?

  In shock, the girl began to shake and sob uncontrollably, her teeth chattering, she did not move from that spot until morning, as if the bodies of her mother and her older sisters compelled her to stay there.

• 4:59Jocko Willink?

  At dawn, a few of the Kurdish cowherders crossing the bridge in the vicinity of this carnage saw one of the corpses moving in the distance.

• 5:11Jocko Willink?

  They approached her, took pity on her, and brought her home to their father's care.

• 5:19Jocko Willink?

  Being an anti-Turk Muslim Kurdish, he secretly turned her over to his longtime friend.

• 5:27Jocko Willink?

  It was with the arrival of this little girl in the town where we were staying that, for the first time, we became aware of the extent of the killing being carried out around us, without a sound

• 5:41Jocko Willink?

  or whisper.

• 5:49Jocko Willink?

  And that is an excerpt from a book called Armenian Golgotha

• 5:58Jocko Willink?

  by a man named Gregoris Bilakian.

• 6:03Jocko Willink?

  And Gregoris was born in 1875 in Tokat, part of the Ottoman Empire, educated in Germany.

• 6:16Jocko Willink?

  Eventually became a celibate priest

• 6:20Jocko Willink?

  in the Armenian Apostolic Church.

• 6:25Jocko Willink?

  And he was one of the countless Armenians who suffered through the Armenian genocide.

• 6:33Jocko Willink?

  Though he was one of the lucky ones that actually survived and he wrote a book about his experiences. And like I said, the book is called Armenian Golgotha. And if you don't know what Golgotha is, Golgotha is the name of the hill where Jesus was crucified.

• 6:55Jocko Willink?

  And this event is

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  where the Armenians as a people were crucified and where as individuals, for many, a mere crucifixion would have been merciful.

• 7:14Jocko Willink?

  But before we jump into more of the book, I wanted to go into some of the background. Since this event is not as well known as some other genocides.

• 7:29Jocko Willink?

  So Daryl, let's talk about how we got here and and what are some of the similarities and differences about what happened to the Armenians? And what has happened to some other persecuted groups in the past? What's the background here?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  There's some people that called the 20th century, the century of genocide.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  You look all throughout history and there's no shortage of mass killing of human beings by other human beings.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  In fact, if you go all the way back, back to like our tribal times, warfare by genocide was pretty typical. You had nomadic tribes. They didn't have prisons. They didn't have jails. They didn't have POW camps or anything like that. If you conquered another tribe, their men were going to be a problem and you didn't have anywhere to keep them. And so the standard operating procedure was you just took them out, took the women that were willing to sort of, I guess, get over it back to your tribe with you, back and raise the children as your own. Almost like social mammals, you know, like lions. You know, somebody comes in, kills the male lion, and now takes over the pride. As time developed, you started to get a sort of systematic civilized level of mass killing at scale that had never been possible

• 8:45Speaker 01

  in tribal times, that you could only really, you could only manage with the same sort of administration and organization that allowed you to do things like build pyramids and all the great wonders of civilization, right? And when you get up to the modern times, you get something that's even a little bit more, well, a little bit different than that. If we think back to, say, the Romans and what they did to Carthage. Carthage had been giving Rome problems. Hannibal had been rampaging around the Italian peninsula, defeating their armies. And when they finally got the drop on the Carthaginians, they said, "Salt the earth. We're not dealing with this anymore. Eliminate that threat for good," and they did. When Caesar went up to Gaul, you know, Rome had been sacked by Gaul before.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  It was a traumatic event in Roman history. And so when Caesar went up there and ended that threat thoroughly, you could think of it in a similar way. It was attached to conquest, and that's what you kind of saw throughout history. When you get up to the 20th century, you see something in a way that's different and much darker, I think, which is you have established, firmly established states, annihilating internal enemies, according to the state, attacking captive populations over which they have complete power and control. You're not going in and eliminating a threat that exists over the horizon, making sure that it never returns. You know, you're going into a prison where everybody's kept in a cell, and one by one,

• 10:14Speaker 01

  these unarmed people, you're simply murdering all of these people over whom you have complete power.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  When you think of what happened to the Armenians, when you think of what happened to the Ukrainians under Stalin, to the Jews under Hitler, these are the kinds of things you see. This is a disarmed captive population that is not a threat. And there's no way out. And that's really the key characteristic of these events, is if you go to those people, and you saw this, you saw this with the Jews in Germany, you saw this with the Ukrainians, you saw this with the Armenians, absolutely at the beginning of the First World War, is a huge part of the population, including the leadership, is really actively asking the question, "What can we do? What can we do?" Like, what is it? At the beginning of the First World War, the Armenians were flying Turkish flags.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Tens of thousands of them went right away and joined the Turkish military, because they knew, they had a history with the Turks, they'd had problems before. Twenty years back, we'll talk about in a second, 300,000 or so of them got massacred. And they knew in the First World War, the tension was gonna be high, and the stress was gonna be high. So, what can we do to show our loyalty to the empire, to show that we're down for the cause? And the answer is, there's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do. You're all going to be wiped out, and there's nothing you can do. And it's the ultimate horror movie, to have your state turn on you like that.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  You know, and it's interesting that you say that the Armenian genocide isn't that well-known, which is very, very true. Because it really is kind of the archetypal act of genocide in the 20th century. It was really like the first one, early in the century, that set the tone for all of the ones that came afterwards. And it was one of the most thorough, and complete, and systematic, and intentional genocides that we have any record of. That erasure of genocide is something that you also see throughout history. I mean, how many countless peoples have been genocided throughout history that we don't even know their names? We'll never know their names.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  And maybe we even celebrate the history of the people who did it as a glorious civilization, and we will never know the names of the countless people that they completely wiped out.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  It's something that we don't like to mention or talk about or admit, but the fact is that more often than not, if you look historically speaking, genocide tends to work. Not only are a lot of genocides physically successful, but more often than we would really prefer, the one that does it ends up getting away with it and getting the message put out to the rest of the world and people in the future who might think of doing something similar, that this is an option. In fact, when Adolf Hitler was contemplating his final solution for the Jewish question

• 13:15Speaker 01

  in Eastern Europe, he asked his commanding generals, "Who today remembers the Armenians?" Because the truth was, nobody did.

• 13:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's also interesting that in World War I, there was plenty of Jews that fought for Germany.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Well over 100,000, yeah.

• 13:35Jocko Willink?

  Valiantly, by the way.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Hitler's life was saved by a Jewish soldier. He received his Iron Cross from a Jewish superior officer.

• 13:46Jocko Willink?

  So as we push through this, let's talk about like the relationship a little bit of the Turkish people and the Armenians in terms of how do we end up here?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  You know, I mentioned that it is really the archetypal genocide of the 20th century. And I don't just say that because of the methods that were used. In fact, the methods that were used in a way were kind of anachronistic and unique to the Turkish Empire. It was archetypal of the 20th century genocides because of what you just asked, because of the specific relationship between the dominant majority group and this particular Armenian minority.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  You know, the Turks, the Ottoman Empire is a, it's a, it's a strange thing to study when you get up to the late period in the 20th century because, you know, like if you ever asked yourself, like, what would it have been like if like the Golden Horde, right? Or the Mongols or something had just, they had managed to establish themselves somewhere on the outskirts of Europe and they lasted and you get all the way up to the 20th century and they're still there and they have an advanced civilization now, you know, the Genghis Khan's like descendants, like they now have control, they have a big battle fleet, you know, they've got modern weaponry, I mean, it's a big glorious civilization. Constantinople, you know, when the First World War kicked off, you're talking about one of, one of the

• 15:12Speaker 01

  most sophisticated glorious cities in the world. And the Ottoman Empire gives you some idea of what it would be like if the Golden Horde survived into the 20th century. This is, you know, they're Turkic peoples who came in as step warriors and conquered the Byzantine Empire and took over, you know, all of North Africa, basically everything between Morocco and Persia and then down into Egypt. And

• 15:38Jocko Willink?

  And so what you end up with in a situation like this is you end up with like a warlike people, right? That's what they are. And what they respect is war and being warriors. And that sort of becomes the, the most respected class of people.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. The, the idea in, in the major Islamic empires was always that we, the majority population, the people in the commanding position of this society, we fight the wars and everybody else, the Christian and Jewish minorities, for example, they pay for the wars. And that's how it works. We're a warrior people. I mean, these are step warriors who came and built up a big civilization. And they kept a lot of that character even as they went forward, even as they were wearing suits and ties and, you know, going to, to, to big security conferences and international conferences in Europe and the United States, they still had that in them. This was a warrior people from an age where

• 16:41Speaker 01

  It was perfectly typical to offer your enemies the option to either unconditionally surrender or be massacred totally. It was the mode of warfare on the step when they were conquering civilizations. It's how the Ottoman Empire got to where it was. And so as you move into modernity, you have this society there that up until the early 1800s still had its entire bureaucracy, governmental bureaucracy, and most of its military, like its serious military officers, were still people who had been taken as slaves, as children, and brought back for that specific function. They would go up to the Balkans, they would go up into the Caucasus area, because according to Islamic law, you can't enslave fellow Muslims.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  And so they would go into Christian areas and just go into a village and say, "We need 10 people, we need 10 male children, we can do this the easy way or the hard way." And they would do it the easy way, because they knew what the hard way looked like under the Ottoman Empire, and it was no prettier than it got in the 20th century. And by the time they got up to the early 1800s, this group of bureaucrats and soldiers called the Janissaries, these were slave soldiers and bureaucrats, who more or less ran the important functions of the empire. By the time you got up to the late 17, early 1800s, they were in fact running large sections of the economy, they held all the most important government positions, and they were getting

• 18:08Speaker 01

  into this kind of strange place with the ruling elites, the ruling Turkish elites, where the Turks are overall in charge, but this other group of people who are Muslim, they were born Christian children, but they were converted as children to Muslims, but that this identifiable group of people who has their own sense of themselves as an identifiable group, these Janissaries, that they have a tremendous amount of influence and power, that they're really the ones running the empire. And it got to a point where the government, the Turkish government, decided they couldn't trust these people anymore, and they locked them all in their barracks one night, and they burned them all to death.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  When they felt that this small minority group was accruing too much power and middle management, where they kind of maybe probably could run the empire without the Turks if they really wanted to, their response was to wipe all of those people out overnight. And that's what they did. And it's known in Ottoman history, it was known in Ottoman history as the auspicious event.

• 19:03Jocko Willink?

  This is like a bunch of, let's say, UFC fighters that are training hard, they they fight, they they punch each other, they kick each other, they wrestle, and and their agents and promoters are out there doing the, you know, the work that they look down upon. Hey, I'm not some promoter, I'm not some agent, I'm a fighter. And then one day they look up and they go, wait a second, why is that guy driving a freaking a Mercedes S-Class? And I'm over here in a Toyota Camry. And they get together and say, we're not gonna do this anymore.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  That, yeah, that's one way to look at it. I mean, well, and so, and the thing that's so interesting about it, right, is if you look at what happened to the overseas Chinese population in Indonesia in the 1960s. If you look at what happened to the East Indian population of East Africa in the 1970s under like Idi Amin and and some others. If you look at what happened to the Jews in Europe, if there there, you can go down the line. The people who were targeted are almost inevitably this similar group of people, right? If you look in Europe with the Jews, for a long time, you know, we were under a feudal system, the people who were in charge, the elites in a feudal system, they own all the land, the the source of wealth in society is from the land, the majority of the local

• 20:25Speaker 01

  European population are all peasants, or maybe small artisans. But then you have this group move in, you have the Jews move in. And the Jews have been living in cities since, you know, the Romans kicked them out of Palestine, some of even before that. So these are people who have lived in urban environment, they know how to engage in long distance trade, they know how to deal in like financial alchemy, they know how to do, you know, they know banking, they know law, they're all literate at a time when like 1% of your own population is literate, because that's what these people do. And they don't have their own place to live, obviously. And so they go from place to place trying to survive, saying, what can we do here? We can't own land, only the nobility owns land, that's fine, and the peasants work the land. But I'll bet you there's a lot of ways that we can help out.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  And they bounced around Europe, sometimes accruing too much power, too much wealth, and getting run out of their territory because a king decides he doesn't want to pay his debts or something like that. But that's how they survived, right? And it was fine. They fulfilled this middleman minority role for centuries. And it was a role that sort of needed to be filled at a time when societies were kind of building themselves up to become more complex and sophisticated and didn't have that indigenous capacity. But then you get up to, say, the 1800s, maybe late 1700s, depending on where you are, and you have all these Jews who are engaged in things like banking, law, medicine, you know, international trade, all of these things that the nobility didn't want to do and the

• 21:53Speaker 01

  peasantry wasn't capable of doing. And they're like, we'll just have the Jews do it because we don't like them anyway. They're outsiders. Have them do it. We get up to like the 1800s and 1900s. What's every mother telling their kid that they should go do? Go be a lawyer. Go be a banker. Go be a doctor. And so they were in prime position that when society started to change and the economy started to change, they were ready. They were ready. They had been doing this stuff for a long time and they started to become very wealthy and very prominent. And when that, when that started to happen, you got a gigantic spike in antisemitism. You started seeing pogroms all over the place.

• 22:27Jocko Willink?

  You have this, you have this perfect storm too, where you have like the nobility elite class who's turning against them. And you also have the peasantry that says, wait a second, these people have all this money and it doesn't take very long for the nobility to lead the peasantry against the whatever, whatever class we're talking about. We could be talking about the Jews. We could be talking about the Armenians.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, especially since it redirects any anger they might have toward the people in charge to that layer below them, that intermediary. And they would specifically use them for that purpose, you know? They would use these people as tax collectors. They would use them as estate managers to manage the serfs and stuff because they knew that if things got out of hand, you know, and the peasants rise up, we can be like, yeah, you know, we knew that those Jews were trouble all along. So go ahead, go nuts. And that happened over and over again throughout European history. And um.

• 23:18Jocko Willink?

  So the, so the Armenians followed a similar path. This is, so after the Janissaries, right? Now we, now is this, does this mean we now picked up where we, we killed the Janissaries? Now we need someone else to kind of.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  It kind of.

• 23:30Jocko Willink?

  Come in here and run this?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  It sort of worked out like that, but the Christians had always kind of been fulfilling those roles, right? Um, the Christians in all the Islamic empires, if you go back, and the Jews as well, um, they, they're usually urban populations. Armenians are a little different in that's, in that respect, we'll talk about in a second, but they were the ones who, who naturally fulfilled those roles. The Turks, they were the warriors. You know, they're not gonna go open a shop.

• 23:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  You know, they're not doing.

• 23:54Jocko Willink?

  Banking.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  And then you've got a lot of, you know, you've got the Kurdish tribes, you've got a lot of these semi-nomadic Arab villagers and stuff who are out there. The Ottoman Empire is not, we're not talking about like England in, in the 1900s or something. It's a very sophisticated and advanced society in many ways, but you go like maybe 500 miles out to the east and it's the wild fricking west down there. You know, I mean, it is like, you've got an Armenian village surrounded by Kurdish tribes that raid that village sometimes and kidnap your daughters and, um, you know, you go outside the imperial core and the Ottoman Empire did not have the state capacity to really exercise firm control over all of their lands. You know, it was a tribute empire, which is again reminiscent of the old step empires. Like, we're not gonna come in and tell you that you gotta turn Turkish and

• 24:38Speaker 01

  you can't speak your language. Just send your taxes and don't, you know, have any uprisings and if you do, we'll come and, and you'll learn why the last 10 people found out that's a bad idea. And that, that was really how it was. It was a tribute empire. And, um, the Christians and the Jews, Christians were more numerical than the Jews and so they really, and in the Ottoman context, when I say that, we're talking mostly about Armenians in the east, Greeks in the west, and then Assyrians kind of spread out, Assyrian Christians as well. And by the time, a very similar thing, they had been engaging in these, these middleman roles, right? Administrative, professional and commercial services for the empire. Stuff that the empire couldn't do on its own.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Things like, most of the biggest mosques that Istanbul is famous for today were all designed by Armenians. Armenian architects. By the time you got up to the late eighteen, early nineteen hundreds, you've got the bureaucracy largely in the upper roles very often filled with, I shouldn't say, in the very, very upper roles, those are Ottoman rulers. But all of these sort of middle management, sort of GS fourteen rules, right? Those are Armenians, those are Greeks, you know, people like that. They really relied on these people. And it was a similar thing. You get up into the dawn of the modern age, we're having bureaucratic skills, being literate and numerate, knowing how to deal with finance and trade and law and medicine, all of these things that the Christians in the Ottoman Empire were doing. That's where you needed to be if you were going to be successful.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  And they became extraordinarily successful in the Ottoman Empire, very, very wealthy. At one point, in fact, just before the outbreak of the First World War, the wealthiest banker in Europe was an Ottoman Armenian. More wealthy than the Rothschilds even. And when you get to that point, you run into that trouble where you have this empire, where the ruling elites, the Turkish elites, are experiencing this sense that that they aren't really needed so much anymore. Now, they don't feel that, they're not going to think that consciously ever, but that's really what's going on. They're in charge now of an empire that they couldn't have really built themselves, and they couldn't really run themselves.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  And the people who are running it, they're starting to look at very askew for a very particular reason. And that was that this is also the age of European imperialism. In one of our unraveling episodes recently, we talked about the genocide of the Uighurs. And you go back to the late eighteen hundreds, and the Uighurs kind of became the dominant majority in Xinjiang. And that, I got annihilated for my mispronunciation of that word.

• 27:18Jocko Willink?

  Well, then you got annihilated, I must have got really annihilated. What was I saying?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  I think you said Xinjiang, no, I'm just messing with you. And the Uighurs were in the territory and they were being kind of oppressed by this dominant group there. And so the Qing Chinese said, "Raja, that." And they went out and just wiped those people out. They were called the Zongars, and they don't exist anymore. And really, one of the big drivers for that was, you know, we had talked about how in China, outside their borders, well, what we think of as their borders today, they never thought about it as like a hard border back in the day. It was just that was the frontier, past that is the step, that's where all the barbarians live.

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, their word for border literally meant like frontier.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so what they need to do is just, they need to manage the barbarians out there. It's just one big buffer zone between us and them. Well, all of a sudden, you start getting the British Empire, the French, later the Russian Empire, these other Europeans start coming around and any territory they see that's not already incorporated within the borders of a state that can actually defend it, they're snatching all that up. And so the Chinese say, well, okay, that's not just the frontier anymore. Now that's China.

• 28:28Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And anybody in it has to be Chinese, because if you're anything but that, well, then you're somebody, you're a wedge that the British or whoever might be able to come up and, you know, drive.

• 28:39Jocko Willink?

  Bargain with, yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Bargain with. And so when these European powers start picking away at the periphery of the Ottoman Empire, and then really starting to close the walls in, in these Christian Europe, obviously, uh, and they have a Christian minority population, Greeks and Armenians and others, who have not been treated particularly well over the years as a whole. And so they start to worry that these are potential fifth columnists that these European powers could use to start to split off more territory than they already have.

• 29:09Jocko Willink?

  So they've already got that in their heads.

• 29:14Jocko Willink?

  As we, as we roll into World War I, is that, is that, you know, an appropriate thing? Is that appropriate assessment?

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And actually, it existed before that. So when you go back to, you think of like, think, you really have to put yourself in the mindset of the people running the Ottoman Empire. And I think we can actually probably do that because we're Americans, right? And so you have to imagine, um, these are people who, again, had the largest and most powerful empire in the world for a number of years. I mean, they drove all the way up to Vienna twice. You go look at a map of Europe, everybody out there, and I mean, Vienna's, it's not like there in the Balkans. It's up there in Central Europe. I mean, and if they would have, if they would have gotten past Vienna, I mean, you know, Germany was just broken into a bunch of little principalities at the time, and they weren't standing up. Ottomans were on good terms with the French. I mean, they might, they may have conquered like, you know, two thirds of Europe

• 30:07Speaker 01

  if they hadn't been stopped by the Poles at Vienna.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  And so you have this empire that's not only this, the largest, most powerful empire in the world for centuries, it controls, like its capital is Constantinople, the old Roman capital, you know, it controls access to the Black Sea, it has dominance over the entire Eastern Mediterranean, controls access between the east and west, you know, trade routes. And then all of a sudden, you know, starting kind of, really after that 1683 fight at Vienna that they lost, it was just a gradual and then accelerating downhill slide from there. They lose, they start getting chipped away in North Africa, eventually they lose all that, they lose Egypt. The Russian Empire finally starts to get its act together, takes over all of the North Caucasus and wars there. The Russians are expanding, you know, you have Orthodox Christians in the Balkan, Slavic

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Balkans, the Russian Empire's pushing down there. They lose their Balkan territories over time, they lose Bulgaria. And so you have this empire that is, you know, you have to imagine being an American, and it's like, yeah, Vietnam was tough, Iraq and Afghanistan were tough, oh no, Mexico just invaded and took over New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California, and there's nothing we can do about it. And now Cuba took over Florida, and there's nothing we can do about it. Like, that's lost, it's gone now. And there's this growing sense that it's not gonna reverse anytime soon, if ever, that this is like an inexorable process of collapse that's going on.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  And because it's being done by these European imperialists are the ones chipping away at Christian Europe, and because of the fact that their own Christian minorities had been mistreated for centuries, the, you know, there was this sort of sense of hope among some of those Christian minorities, that maybe, hey, you know, we're the Armenians over here in the east, it's not great to be an Ottoman Armenian out in the rural areas in the east. The Russian Empire, they're Orthodox Christians, there's a bunch of Armenians that live over in the Russian Empire, and they're actually doing alright, they're not getting massacred by the tens of thousands, they're not having to pay taxes to, you know, the eight Kurdish chieftains that all live around us.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  And so there was some of this, you know, these people weren't organized fifth columnists or anything like that, but there was this sort of sense that things might be a little bit better if they weren't living under the Ottoman yoke, that wasn't, you know, completely invented.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  After the 1877 war between the Russians and the Turks, they lost Bulgaria. A bunch of Muslim refugees came out of Bulgaria and came and moved into the Ottoman Empire. They also lost a bunch of their North Caucasian territory and a bunch of Circassian Muslims and other Muslim tribes from up there had to be pushed, you know, they fled because the Cossacks were harassing them and stuff. And so they started coming down and a lot of them settled in this area where Armenians had traditionally lived. The whole area of southeastern Turkey today, you know, Armenia is right across that eastern border, but you go across the border, that whole area of southeastern Turkey where it's mostly Kurds today, that for many, many centuries was all Armenians for the most part. That's

• 33:17Speaker 01

  traditional like Armenia. And yet, all of these others that moved into this territory, and they started having problems with the local Armenian population, right at this time where the Turkish government is starting to look at its Christian minorities and specifically the Armenians with a great deal of suspicion. And so you start to get, you know, you start to get this, this dynamic where, you know, there's multiple things at play. They don't trust the Armenian population out there and they're mistreating them, which is leading to a certain sense of resentment from those Armenians toward the government. The government doesn't have the state capacity to go out there and really like set up shop and establish order out there. You have all of these destitute new Muslim refugees, including a lot of them

• 34:02Speaker 01

  are just tribes or Kurdish tribes and things, nomads, who, again, they're refugees, they don't have a lot going on. And so they start robbing and raiding the Armenian settlements that are out there. And the Turkish government either lacks the will or the capacity to defend them or to go out and punish them. And so Armenian self-defense movements start to basically pop up, just so they can defend themselves from these Kurdish raids and Circassian raids. Well, the Turkish government sees that, they say, you see, they're arming up. They just killed a bunch of Muslims from that Kurdish tribe over there. We knew it. We knew they were getting ready for rebellion.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  And it was just this vicious cycle that started to kick into place, to the point where by the time you get to the 1880s, 1890s, you mentioned that song at the beginning, that the Turkish schoolchildren were being taught during the First World War. There was an account I read from an American missionary that saw in a Turkish classroom, talking like first, second, third grade kids, and they're going through lessons where they've got drawings up on the board, like cartoon drawings of Armenians, including women and children participating, just hacking limbs off of Turks and, you know, raping them, killing them in just the most bloody and horrible ways, and these schoolchildren are being taught that this is who these Armenians are, this is what they want to do to you. And so this had been, by the time you get to the First World War, this kind of thing

• 35:22Speaker 01

  had been going on for decades, and the Armenians didn't have, you know, it didn't come to them as a complete and total shock, a lot of them anyway, because they had seen a sort of premonition of it in the 1890s, when the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, infamous in Ottoman and Armenian history, ordered a series of massacres, starting in 1894, that, I mean, what can you say, it was just, it was a free-for-all total massacre. You know, there were soldiers and gendarmes who were participating, but really it was a call on the local populations, Muslim villagers and tribes, to get out there and participate,

• 36:06Speaker 01

  kill your Armenian neighbors. And it was specific to the Armenians, there were some cases in fact, and this happened as well in the First World War genocide, where there are telegrams out there and messages from the government, letting them know, hey, don't mess with the Catholics, make sure that you don't mess with, you know, these others, this is about the Armenians. And they butchered maybe 200,000 people over the course of about 18 months, and another 100,000 or so died in the year or so after that from starvation and exposure and whatever. And so this is something where, you know, they're not going into cities and rounding up 20, 30,000 people at a time, they're going village to village to village, 50 people here, 100 people here, you look at the map. Of the massacres in the 1894 Hamidian massacres.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  And the whole thing is just covered with like skulls and crossbones or whatever symbol they use to say massacre site, massacre site, massacre site. It's just all of Eastern Anatolia was just covered in blood. You know, the, the local population was basically mobilized to go out there and kill your Armenian neighbors and that's what happened.

• 37:10Jocko Willink?

  So that's 18, late 1800s. And now we start to get into, I mean, is the next major phase when World War I kicks off and?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's an important interlude there. Like the, the reason that they stopped killing them. You know, there's a book that came out recently called The 30 Year Genocide by Benny Morris and Dzorzevi, which is two Israeli historians who looked real deeply on this and got, they probably went deeper into the, into the records to figure out exactly moment by moment like what happened here than anyone really has. And one of the things that they discovered is that, you know, this was not something that just popped up in the chaos of World War I. That those massacres in the 1890s, there's only one reason that they stopped and that was that the British made them stop. There was a, there was a, you know, by this point, the Ottoman Empire was having huge economic problems. The British and the French were essentially had the empire's finances in receivership.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  They were basically controlling the Ottoman fiscal budget, the governmental fiscal budget. They had, you know, say so over it anyway. And in 1896, this Armenian militant group, after all of these murders, said, we have to do something and there's nothing you can really do. I mean, you know, you can't, you're, you're talking about, it's not even David and Goliath. I mean, it's a flea versus Goliath. They can't fight back. There's nothing like that. The only thing they can hope to do is get the attention of outside powers who can wield influence over the Ottoman Empire. And so they say, well, what is it we can do to actually get the attention of these people? What do they, what do the British care about? And so they went and they invaded the Ottoman Central Bank, the Bank Ottoman in Constantinople.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And they took a bunch of hostages and made a bunch of demands and. They knew that there were a lot of European hostages that they would be taking, and that there were a lot of European assets in that bank. And so the Sultan at the time, he's, you know, again, these are step warriors, he's hardcore people. He said, "Yeah, that's nice, your demands, that's cool, you can throw them away." And he just surrounded the place with artillery and got ready to just blow the place to rubble. And at the same time, put out an order for everybody in Constantinople to just go out and massacre Armenians in Constantinople. And that's what they did. They rampaged through the streets, beating, killing anybody they could find, as he prepared to just blow up this bank.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  And right at the critical moment, the British sent some warships into the dardanelles there and sent a message to the Sultan that if you blow up that bank, the next thing that's going to be destroyed is your own house. And so they backed down, but that's the only reason those things stopped. And he put an order out that the massacres were over, and they came to an end. That period, though, up until you get to the First World War, most, you know, people who look at this seriously now realize that the First World War was not a reason for the Armenian genocide, it was just the opportunity for it.

• 40:01Jocko Willink?

  The late 1890s, there's actually, you know, we can talk about what it was like, we can sort of throw some words on it, but there's probably nothing better than going back to the book that we're talking about, Armenian Go-Gotha. Talking about some of that stuff that took place in the 1890s, going back to the book. "The massacre began on the morning of December 28. The governor sent word to non-Armenian Christians to assemble in their churches and not stir out and refrain from sheltering Armenians. The troops were then drawn up at the entrances to the Armenian quarter.

• 40:44Jocko Willink?

  Behind them, an armed Muslim mob gathered, while the minarets were crowded with Muslims evidently in expectation of some stirring event. The Turkish women too crowded onto the roofs and slopes of the fortress which overlooked the Armenian quarter. The mob was cheered on by the women, who kept up the well-known peculiar throat noise used on such occasions by Oriental women to discourage, to encourage their braves."

• 41:16Jocko Willink?

  At around noon, Amuzin cried out in the midday prayer as a glittering glass ornament resembling a crescent was seen shining from the top of the fortress overlooking the town. A mullah waved a green banner from a tall minarette overhanging the other end of town. Shots were fired and a trumpet sounded the attack.

• 41:40Jocko Willink?

  The soldiers opened their ranks so that the mob could pour into the corridor.

• 41:47Jocko Willink?

  The governor Nazif was seen motioning the crowd on, the mob guided by troops who had familiarized themselves with the corridor during the siege.

• 42:00Jocko Willink?

  A body of woodcutters armed with axes led the way, breaking down the doors. Soldiers then rushed inside and shot the men.

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  A certain sheik, British diplomat G. H. Fitzmorris, wrote: "Ordered his followers to bring as many stalwart young Armenians as they could find. To their number of about a hundred they were thrown down on their backs and held down by their hands and feet, while the sheik, with a combination of fanaticism, cruelty, proceeded while reciting verses of the Quran

• 42:39Jocko Willink?

  to cut their throats after the Mecca Rite of sacrificing sheep."

• 42:46Jocko Willink?

  Those hiding were dragged out and butchered,

• 42:50Jocko Willink?

  stoned, shot, and set on fire with matting saturated with petroleum.

• 42:58Jocko Willink?

  Women were cut down shielding their husbands and fathers. More Armenians were shot as they scampered along rooftops, trying to escape. When the killings subsided, the houses were looted and torched.

• 43:12Jocko Willink?

  As sunset approached, the trumpet sounded again, calling the troops and the mob to withdraw.

• 43:20Jocko Willink?

  The atrocities resumed the following day, December 29th with a trumpet sound at dawn. The largest number were killed at the Armenian cathedral, where thousands had gathered for sanctuary. The attackers first fired through the windows into the church, then smashed in the doors and killed the men clustered on the ground floor. Fitzmorris relates that as the mob plundered the church, they mockingly called on Christ to prove himself a greater prophet than Mohammed. The Turks then shot the shrieking and terrified mass of women, children, and some men in the second-floor gallery. But gunning the Armenians down, one by one, was too tedious, so the mob brought in more

• 44:03Jocko Willink?

  petroleum-soaked bedding and set fire to the woodwork and the staircases leading up to the galleries. For several hours, the sickening odor of roasting flesh pervaded the town. Writing the following March, Fitzmorris noted even today, “The smell of the charred remains in the church is unbearable.” A missionary who witnessed the massacres described the horror as “a grand Holocaust,” and for days afterwards, watched men lugging sacks filled with bones and ashes from the cathedral.

• 44:45Jocko Willink?

  The trumpet again sounded at 3:30pm, the time for the Muslim afternoon prayer, and the mob withdrew from the Armenian quarter. Shortly afterwards, Fitzmorris wrote, “The Mufti, Ali Effendi, Hussein Pasha, and other notables preceded by a band of musicians went around the quarter announcing that the massacre was at an end, and that there would be no more killing of Christians.” For the next three days, the authorities employed Jews and donkeys to remove the dead. Before the massacres, Urfra was home to about 20,000 Armenians.

• 45:27Jocko Willink?

  All told, perhaps as many as 10,000 died over the course of two days, 2,500 to 3,000 of them at the cathedral.

• 45:44Jocko Willink?

  So this was no, this was no shocker moving into, um, into World War I.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, although, you know, there's, there's, there's maybe a way that, um, nothing can prepare you for it, even if you've seen it coming, when it happens, you're just not ready. There were a lot of Jews in Europe in the 1930s who, you know, were writing to their relatives in other parts of the world saying, "We gotta get out of here." They're, we're sitting on the edge of a volcano right now, who still, when it actually came, were all, you know, just kind of caught with that deer in a headlights look, because what do you do? You know, and there's a lot of, you can read a lot of, um, a lot of stuff from Holocaust survivors, children, and also from Zionists who were in Palestine, out of the country at the time, who really can't understand, like, why are our parents or our cousins who were in Europe at the time,

• 46:32Speaker 01

  like, why aren't they fighting back? Like, why aren't they rising up or whatever? And it's just, you just don't know what it's like to be caught, where there's nowhere to go. The, the enemy's in control, and there is, yeah, you can, you can rush the electrified fence, you can, you're caught. And they, and they've established dominance in a way that you're not gonna really be able to get out of, because, again, these modern-scale genocides like this are something that could really only be pulled off by a state.

• 47:00Jocko Willink?

  How'd the young Turks play into this?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so after you, you know, there were, there were people within the Turkish hierarchy who understood that this, uh, that this empire as it stands right now, it's gotta change.

• 47:13Jocko Willink?

  Gotta make a transition to modernity.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  If we're going to compete at any level with the British Empire, the rising Russian Empire, like, we gotta get, get it together. And the way we're running things now, where we can't even really control our territory effectively a few hundred miles out east, that's just not gonna do it. It's not gonna do it anymore. Um, and so they were modernizers. This was a movement that started out in universities, a lot of medical students, law students, things like that. And it was, uh, it was an underground group. It was, uh, sort of a revolutionary group, sort of like you were seeing all across Europe at the time. You know, the Bolsheviks and a lot of the socialists in Russia, for example. The difference, I guess, between like them and the Bolsheviks, there's a million differences, but the main one is they weren't international communists or anything. They were fierce, fierce Turkish nationalists.

• 47:59Jocko Willink?

  But they were, they were multicultural, right? This was, this was a big difference, too. This wasn't strictly Armenians or Greeks inside of, these were people saying, it's like when you hear today, you know, like, I'm not a, I'm not a Irish-American, I'm an American.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:14Jocko Willink?

  These people are saying, hey, I'm not a Armenian Turk, or I'm not a Jewish Turk, I'm Turk.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they actually had a, what they called the Ottomanist movement. You know, they were, they wanted, um, everybody, this is a big thing in the late 1800s, really up until the defeat in the First World War, that, um, that, every, we're, we're all Ottomans, right? Which at the time was like Ottoman, that's just the name of the Turkish commander who like came in with that, you know, he, who established their tribe. I mean, he was the tribal leader at the time, Osman. But, uh, you know, by the time you got up to this point, I mean, America's some old Italian sailor, too, right? So like, you can do that, it's no problem. But there was the idea that we're all Ottomans, Ottomans here. Doesn't matter where you were born or whatever. In fact, a lot of the Young Turk and Committee of Union and Progress, which was like a really militant group,

• 49:00Speaker 01

  subgroup of the Young Turks, um, some of their leaders, including some of the ones that would be in charge of the empire during the First World War, uh, they weren't Turkish. Talat Pasha, the guy who was the interior minister and the effective head of government for the Ottoman Empire, uh, was from Bulg- he was born in Bulgaria, for example. And the Young Turks, they had Jews, they had, um, Armenians. The Armenians, in fact, really supported the Young Turks at first, because they, they thought, we have this force that's maybe more trying to be a modernizing influence, seems like more of a secular influence, because that was one other thing I didn't mention is, um, as you, as the Ottoman Empire started to get worried about these Christian societies, European societies, pushing up on their borders and maybe using their inter- internal Christians as, uh, fifth columnists.

• 49:45Jocko Willink?

  Let's create some divide.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  They really started pushing that Islamic identity and really playing that angle of it up, which was something they kind of avoided before, for the most part. Obviously, like, the Ottoman Empire's the caliphate, right? The Sultan is the, the caliph. And so they're in charge, this is all, this is, you're in somebody else's house, right? If you're a Christian or a Jew. This is the Muslims' house, and everybody knew that. But they really, they had an empire to manage. They weren't trying to create problems between their Muslim and Christian and Jewish subjects, right? By the time, when, once they started worrying about the loyalty of these Christian subjects, and worrying, not only about that, actually worrying about their non-Turkish imperial subjects. Like, they were worried about the Arabs not wanting to be under Turkish rule. And as we saw in World War I, that was a, probably a good call.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  The British sent Lawrence of Arabia down there and got the Arabs to rise up and, and march on, on the Ottoman Empire. And so, they wanted to avoid that. And so, they started playing up like, you know, to the Arabs, it's, "You're Muslims. This is a Muslim empire. How could you side with the British?" They would say to the Kurds, you know, that you had, you had the Russian Empire who was trying to encourage like Kurdish separatism, for example, just to kind of create some chaos and some problems over there. And they wanted them to say, "Hey, you're Muslims. Don't you see those Christians are just want to destroy the, you know, the, this, this Muslim, glorious Muslim empire?" And the side effect of that, or maybe it wasn't a side effect, you know, because they were worried about the loyalty of these internal Christians as well, was that those Kurds said, "Yeah, we are Muslim, and these Christians are trying to destroy this glorious Muslim empire."

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Those Armenians are Christian, and you started to get some real problems there. And when you couple that with like what they were teaching in classrooms and stuff, by the time you get up to, you know, the First World War, it's at a fever pitch. Well, the Young Turks, they seemed to be a force, and to some degree, they were a force that was trying to move the empire beyond all that. And so, you have these Armenians, including like Armenian militant groups, you know, that had really formed up because they, because of the mistreatment of, of the Armenians in the East, who are down with the Young Turks, fully support them. In 1908, when the Young Turks launch a, launch a coup to, you know, take over the government, they march on Constantinople, take over the government, Armenians were cheering in the streets. The Armenian militant groups were celebrating that.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  In 1909, a year later, there was a counter coup by the conservative Sultan's forces. And during that brief period that the Sultan was back in power and the Young Turks were out of power, another 30,000 Armenians got massacred in the province of Adana. And it was done with the same character that you just read. You know, this is, again, this is, the First World War and that whole period is, it's so fascinating, right? Because it's this war in which the old world marched into those trenches and the new world marched out of them. You know, it's the pre-modern world and then the modern world just, really, it's that transition point and that clash.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  And so you have this genocide that is done for modern reasons, like nationalist reasons almost, right? You didn't, you know, this idea of like ethnic purity and needing to have like our internal purity, that's a modernist idea. And the means by which it was carried out administratively and all of these things, the Turkish Empire was a modern empire in many ways. But this is a genocide that was not carried out, you know, with ledger sheets and, you know, Zyklon B and gas ovens or anything like that. This was something that was done the old way. It was done with hatchets and axes and hand knives and kitchen knives and clubs and boots.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  And it was something that, you know, it was a genocide that was conducted in ravines just off the road and in people's basements, not on battlefields.

• 53:35Jocko Willink?

  So the situation that we're looking at, now, now we get ready for World War I. And the, is it a Hillary Clinton quote, "Never let a crisis go to waste"?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  No, that was Rahm Emanuel. Yeah. President Obama's first chief of staff.

• 53:52Jocko Willink?

  "Never let a crisis go to waste."

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:54Jocko Willink?

  It's a new quote, but it's not a new idea at all.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 53:58Jocko Willink?

  And so, World War I breaks out.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:00Jocko Willink?

  And this is an opportunity.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  And they get started right away. And some people who may have been paying attention at the time, they may have had some idea that the Young Turks had changed a little, because they took the government back over pretty quickly in 1909. So the Young Turks are in charge now. And a lot of the Armenians feel pretty good about that, at least relative to what they had been facing before. But in 1910, there was this incident, people were complaining about all of these stray dogs running around Constantinople. Tens of thousands of them that were just running around, they were attacking people sometimes, destroying the city. And the Young Turk government was called on to fix this problem. How are you gonna fix it? Well, they sent dog catchers, thousands of dog catchers out, and they caught all of these dogs, one by one. It was about 80,000 dogs they caught, and they put them in cages, and they took them

• 54:47Speaker 01

  all out to this island right off the coast, in the Dardanelles, and they just dropped them off there. And the medium-sized ones ate the small ones, the big ones ate the medium-sized ones, the mean ones ate the big ones, and then the mean ones died of starvation. And that's how they dealt with the dogs in Constantinople. You know, the Young Turks were this force that was supposed to be fixing all of these old legacy problems of the empire. Well, they had a chance to prove it in 1912 and 1913, just the year before the First World War breaks out. You had the Serbs and the Montenegrins and a coalition of other small Balkan Slavic peoples up there who revolted against the empire. And the Young Turks sent an army up there, and they got pushed back.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And the Young Turks were humiliated by this. They lost the last of their European territories in the Balkans by doing that. And so, and they blamed, they very much blamed, sort of, fifth columnists, Christians in those Balkan territories for what had happened. And, and right around this time, you start to see the forces within the Young Turk movement that is very anti-Christian, and specifically anti-Armenian, because they're the ones that they really worry about. The Greeks are a separate issue, we'll talk about them a little bit, but, because they killed 300,000 Greeks right around this period, too. They killed 300,000 Assyrian Christians, they killed a couple hundred thousand Lebanese Christians. This was a, this was a mass killing of all Christians across the empire. They just really had it in for the Armenians in particular. And so, the First World War breaks out.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  And, you know, again, I mentioned this like very near the beginning, you have the Armenians who recognize that like this could be a problem, like this is gonna be an issue for us, not necessarily that they're gonna do something like genocide us, because nobody was thinking like that at the time. You have to remember, like, nobody had, this was pre Holocaust, this was pre Pol Pot, this is pre Stalin, or any of that kind of stuff, like, the idea that you would have one of these major empires, and, and the Ottoman Empire, like, to us, maybe, you know, we think of it as like this very sort of exotic, foreign empire, that's almost this, this throwback from like an ancient time, or something like that, and very ori, this was, the Europeans, you know, they had, they were fully integrated with, with Europe for

• 57:00Speaker 01

  the most part, I mean, this was something that people read about Constantinople in the New York Times every day, you know, this was, people talk about, like, you know, Germany, how one of the crazy things about the Holocaust is like, but it's Germany, how could Germany do something like that, you know, this is where Liebknecht came from, it's where, you know, and Goethe came from, and, you know, the Turks were not as foreign, the Ottoman Empire, rather, was not as foreign, back then, as we probably tend to otherize it and think about it today, and so, nobody was thinking like they were gonna wipe us all out, yeah, there might be massacres, the local populations might get out of control, and the local government there might encourage them, or, or not stop them from doing it, but nobody was quite thinking along such totalizing lines, because they just didn't have a historical precedent for it.

• 57:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, um, that idea that you talked about earlier, of sitting there thinking, well, you know, this is, this isn't gonna happen, right, how can this happen, well...

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Even as it was happening.

• 57:56Jocko Willink?

  Even as it was happening, and it was definitely happening, let's hear a little bit about what happened, going back to the book. During the first days following my arrival in Constantinople, I hastened to call on several notables, whom I had known for a long time, and who were friends of mine. My general impression was this, no one grasped the gravity of the situation, and no one was worried about tomorrow. Many insisted that Turkey would not enter the war, when it began, they said the mobilization was simply a precaution, they were simple-minded people, convinced that as long as the government was in the hands of the young Turks, and Talat was the interior minister, no danger faced them.

• 58:43Jocko Willink?

  But alas, the Armenian leaders came to understand the truth only when they were already walking on the road to death.

• 58:55Jocko Willink?

  So deceived were they by the flattery of promises lavished upon them, that when a chief of police and several policemen came to find Agnuni, one of the Dashnak Party leaders and a brilliant Russian Armenian writer, and placed him under arrest. The stupefied Agnuni, am I saying that right? Agnuni. Agnuni asked if Talat knew about this.

• 59:22Jocko Willink?

  And when the police chief showed him the arrest warrant bearing Talat's signature, Agnuni was even more stunned and replied that he had been at Talat's for dinner a short while before, and wanted to know why Talat hadn't said anything about it.

• 59:39Jocko Willink?

  The unfortunate Agnuni, being an idealistic and honorable man, could not comprehend how Talat could plot against him so cynically, the same Talat whom he had sheltered in order to save Talat's life while risking his own during the counter-revolution following March 31, 1909. Along with his five comrades, Agnuni was taken from Iash.

• 1:00:04Jocko Willink?

  About four fifths of the way, he realized that he was going to be murdered.

• 1:00:10Jocko Willink?

  And when Vahak, the well-known leader of the Dashnaks, was warned by his friends in Adana, he answered calmly and with deep conviction. "As long as Jamal Pasha," who's the official in charge of Syria and Palestine, "is alive, no one can touch a hair on my head." Then pointing to a large portrait of Jamal Pasha in a gilt frame prominently disneyed in his room, he said, "Long live my good friend and friend of the Armenians, Jamal Pasha."

• 1:00:44Jocko Willink?

  I recall in detail the circumstances of the hawks hanging ordered by Jamal Pasha. So here you have these people who are they're looking, you know, it's like, hey, that guy's a friend of mine. He's not gonna do this to me. One of them, you know, one of them talking about um Talat, I already took care of Talat, he's gonna take care of me. Or, you know, Jamal Pasha, he's a friend of mine.

• 1:01:15Jocko Willink?

  You know, there's a um from another book, it's a book that you mentioned earlier.

• 1:01:22Jocko Willink?

  They have another interesting thing, you know, this is around the time when we start, we have, we have documents, documents that that explain what what orders were being given. And there's, speaking of Talat, who is overall in charge of the government and the architect of the genocide. Um, one of the documents, there's a, there's like a reluctant regional governor. Who was kinda, kinda playing dumb, hey, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do, is this really what you want? And Talat sent a three-word telegram.

• 1:01:58Jocko Willink?

  That said, Yak ver oldir.

• 1:02:03Jocko Willink?

  That's it. And those, those words mean burn, demolish, kill.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  No room for confusion there.

• 1:02:15Jocko Willink?

  No room for confusion there, and that's how we, that's how we start moving into this um

• 1:02:22Jocko Willink?

  this situation just disintegrates now.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you look at why the Ottoman Empire was brought into the war by the Germans.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Like, what did the Ottoman Empire get out of it? What did the Germans expect to get out of it? What the Germans expected to get out of it was, look, they're facing the British, the French, and the Russians. All three of them have been taking away territory from the Ottoman Empire for years. The Ottoman Empire would like to take that territory back, and these other three would like to keep it. So if the Ottoman Empire doesn't have to help us conquer the world here or anything, if they can just put some pressure on Egypt, put some pressure on the Caucasus and on the Balkans, then it's, then these other three empires that the Germans are facing are gonna have to like redirect some resources to defend them. That was the idea. And for the Ottoman Empire, they thought this is an opportunity to get some territory back. And also to fortify our position internally so that when this war is over,

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  we don't have any problems inside that can be exploited again later. And the Ottoman Empire was not, look, the Turks can fight, they can still fight to this day from what I understand, I mean, they're a warrior people and they carry that in them, but they were not prepared for this war. They weren't prepared to go toe-to-toe with the British Empire and with the Russian Empire. And so, the first thing that happens, you know, you mentioned Talat Pasha and you mentioned Jamal Pasha. Those were two out of the three people who were kind of the Ottoman triumvirate during the First World War. Talat was the interior minister and he was the head of government for all effective purposes. Jamal Pasha was the head of the navy and he was the military governor of Syria, which

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  is a much bigger territory than we're talking about today. It was really like all of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, like kind of that whole thing. And he was known by the Arabs in Damascus, by the way, as the butcher. He was, he starved to death, very similar to the way Stalin did the Holodomor. He starved to death a few hundred thousand Lebanese Christians in Mount Lebanon where he was taking all the food, sending it out to the front, not allowing any food aid or anything else to come in, and a few hundred thousand people just starved to death on the streets. There are accounts from people who were there, like American University and other Western missionaries and diplomats who say they would put cotton balls in their ears in their

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  houses because outside it was just moaning children, moaning women, people dying on the streets begging for food. It just sounded like the zombie apocalypse out there, just moans, day and night, people dying. You go out in the morning and open up your door and there's a dead child on your doorstep. I mean, Mount Lebanon lost 50% of its population up there. It was one of the worst-hit parts of the entire country. And so, those are two of the guys. And the third one, a member of the triumvirate, is Enver Pasha. And Pasha is just a term of respect in the Ottoman Empire. It's a very high-ranking, like, official, basically. It's not there, they're not brothers or anything. And so Enver decides, you know, Napoleon tried to invade Russia in the winter.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Hitler's gonna try and do it in a few decades, not gonna go well for either of those guys, but screw it, let's go for it. And so he gets his force and he tries to go up into the Caucasus and face the Russian army up there, maybe feeling like he's gonna catch them off guard. He doesn't. The Battle of Sarikamish happens and the Russians wipe him out and push him way back. And so now, the Ottoman Empire is really starting to panic, right? If you look at like when the Holocaust really kicked into gear, it wasn't 1939, it wasn't 1940, it wasn't even really in early 1941. It was after the Germans got within seven miles of Moscow and then those Siberian troops showed up and pushed the Germans back and they realized this might not work out the way we thought it was going to. And they said, "Well, what else can we accomplish then?

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  What else can we accomplish?" And, you know, because the Caucasus over there, if you look at the territory, eastern Turkey, you know, the Armenians in southeastern and eastern Turkey there, right across the border is more Armenians, like that's modern Armenia right across the border today. And so, and these people didn't, you know, they were separate, don't get me wrong, they even spoke really different dialects, you know, to a large degree and stuff, but they still knew that those were their Armenian cousins over the border and they knew it back and forth, kinda like the Kurds in southern Turkey and northern Syria today. And so, when the Russian army pushes past, past that border into eastern Turkey, the Ottoman Empire is thinking with some justice, I mean with some reason, that these people

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  who they had just massacred, a few hundred thousand of, a few decades back, and have been allowing to be abused by the Kurds and everybody else who wants a piece in the decades since, that the Russians are gonna mobilize these people and put them to work against the Ottoman Empire. And so, as the Turks are retreating, they are just slaughtering and burning and destroying everything they can. Just terrorizing Armenians, murdering the people they see, especially military aged men. You know, most of the military aged men by this point have either been conscripted into the military.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  And then disarmed, put into a slave labor battalion. And by the time you get up to 1915, around the Battle of the Lipoly, they'll be worked to death or simply murdered. The, generally speaking, they would get these men who, the Armenians who showed up for the draft and tell them, "You're going to go into the interior. We're going to build trenches, defensive fortifications." And they'd all go and they'd spend all day digging a trench and they'd be like, "Great job. Can you stand on the edge of it, please?" And then they would murder them all and then fill the trench in. It was a mass grave they'd been digging for themselves the entire time. And so, as this is going on, you have the other Armenian young men, military aged men,

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  who were like, "Well, they either saw that coming or maybe they didn't want to leave their home villages because they were already getting attacked by Kurdish tribes every other day." And they said, "I can't leave my wife and kids here and my parents here." And so, they just refused to go. But that meant you had to go into hiding. You had to go somewhere because if the Turks found you, it was a rap. And so, all of these villages that the retreating Ottoman army is coming back through and just murdering and terrorizing, these are pretty much all women, children and old people. And that's going to be a theme throughout the entire story, is the men are already gone. The men have already been killed a long time ago or they've had to run away, cross the Russian, you know, across the Russian battle lines.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  A lot of them did go join the Russian forces once the, once the genocide kicked in. And so, a lot of the stuff that we're going to be, that we're going to be hearing about going forward, this is all stuff that's being done pretty much entirely to groups of women, children and old people by, by, by military aged, you know, fighters. And so, that's that first step, disarming and then killing the Armenian men who had joined the military, happens. And the second thing that the Ottoman Empire needs to do, this is before the real genocide, the mass deportations and killing really start in a systematic way, you know, they have to lay the groundwork for it. And after disarming the Armenian military people... They decided they needed to get rid of these two, these two towns that they expected would put up resistance because they had done so before. They did so during the Hamidian massacres

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  in the 1890s. In fact, one of them, Zetun, which was a, you know, these were, these are mountain men, you know, these are tough people that even other Armenians kind of looked at them like they were a little bit crude and uncivilized. They were like Appalachian Scotch-Irish, kind of like the way we in America look at like those Appalachian folks like, man, they're wild and they're kind of crazy and whatever. But, boy, like, you start problems with them, then you're gonna have some problems yourself. Like, they're not gonna, you're very independent-minded, and, and not used to or down with being told what to do by people. And Zetun was up in the, up in the hills. And they knew that they were not going to just accept this, and they had the capacity to actually push back a little bit. So that if they started the mass killing

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  across Anatolia at the time, they might have to worry about these two places either turning into fortresses where Armenians could retreat, and then from there, who knows? Or just that they could turn out enough partisan fighters to really create problems in, in the rear echelon. And so they go there first, and they just, they wipe those places out. They go to Van, Von is the second one besides Zetun, and, you know, they go in and give them an ultimatum, tell all your men to come out. They do this under, under the guise of like, we're looking for draft dodgers and deserters and so forth. And so they show up, and they just round up anybody who's there who's important, right? Any of the older men who are leaders, if there's

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  any writers, or singers, or poets, if there's any, anybody who's prominent, who could serve in a leadership capacity, you know, as sort of a collecting point for people, a rallying point. They take all them, they torture them, and they kill a bunch of them. And then they give the rest of the people an opportunity to turn in any, any of the men who are still around or anything. And instead, the people in Van barricade themselves into the town, and say, we're not coming out. Give us back our, our notables. Give us back our, our men, our leaders. And so, instead, they roll in artillery, and they just start shelling the town. And intermittently, they'll send in Muslim mobs to go in and massacre the people who were in there. And eventually, they, they kill enough people that they're able to get

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  all the women and children out, and they send them marching south into the desert. They do something very similar in Zetun as well. Surround it with artillery.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Burned down the monastery where a bunch of the younger men were hiding. And then the women and children who were left there, thousands and thousands, 20,000 or so in Zaytoun actually. Actually, so yeah, actually I left out one other thing. This is another thing that they that they did to compel people is when the people in Van were holed up and refusing to come out, they said, okay, Roger that. And they just started going to all the villages around the town and just massacring all the people there. And once they had pacified the area, they got all the women, children and old people who were left and they put them into caravans under guard and they sent them marching south into the desert. And this is northern Syria, southern Turkey, that's what we're talking about here.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  So like you have like Aleppo and Mosul over in Iraq, that whole area, they just send them marching south. And then step three came, and this was really the thing that kicked off the program. Now that all of the men with guns have been neutralized, guys in the military, now that these two potential trouble sides, Van and Zaytoun, are taken care of, they wanted to make sure that all of the Armenian national level leaders were neutralized. And so all of these men who were in Constantinople and Smyrna and some of the other big cities, including Grigoris Balakian, the priest whose book we're reading today, were all arrested and deported down south as well. And they could tell from the beginning that this was something probably a little bit

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  different than what they had seen before.

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  Well, speaking of the book, let's get a little eyewitness account going back to the book. On the night of Saturday, April 24, 1915, the Armenians of the capital city exhausted from the Easter celebrations that had come to an end a few days earlier, were snoring in a calm sleep. Meanwhile, in the heights of Istanbul, a highly secret activity was taking place in the palatial central police station. Groups of Armenians had just been arrested in the suburbs and neighborhoods of the capital. Blood-colored military buses were now transporting them to central prison. Weeks earlier, the Constantinople chief of police had sent official sealed orders to

• 1:14:07Jocko Willink?

  all guardhouses with the instruction that they not be open until the designated day and that they be carried out with precision and in secrecy.

• 1:14:20Jocko Willink?

  On this Saturday night, I, along with eight friends, were transported by a small steamboat.

• 1:14:28Jocko Willink?

  The night smelled of death, the sea was rough, and our hearts were filled with terror.

• 1:14:35Jocko Willink?

  We prisoners were under strict police guard, not allowed to speak to one another. We had no idea where we were going. We arrived at the central prison, and here, behind gigantic walls and large bolted gates, they put us in a wooden pavilion in the courtyard, which was said by some to have once served as a school. We sat there, quiet and somber on a bare wooden floor, under the faint light of a flickering lantern, too stunned and confused to make sense of what was happening.

• 1:15:03Jocko Willink?

  From the deep silence of the night until morning, every few hours, Armenians were brought to the prison.

• 1:15:11Jocko Willink?

  And so, behind these high walls, the jostling and commotion increased, as the crowd of prisoners became denser.

• 1:15:20Jocko Willink?

  It was as if all the prominent Armenian public figures, assemblymen, representatives, revolutionaries, editors, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, dentists, merchants, bankers, and others in the capital city, had made an appointment to meet in these dim prison cells.

• 1:15:37Jocko Willink?

  Some even appeared in night clothes and slippers.

• 1:15:42Jocko Willink?

  The more those familiar faces kept appearing, the more the chatter abated, and our anxiety grew.

• 1:15:51Jocko Willink?

  Before long, everyone looked solemn, our hearts heavy and full of worry about an impending storm.

• 1:16:00Jocko Willink?

  Not one of us understood why we had been arrested, and no one could assess the consequences. As the night's hours slipped by, our distress mounted. Except for a few rare stoics, we were in a state of spiritual anguish, terrified of the unknown, and longing for comfort.

• 1:16:19Jocko Willink?

  Right through till morning, new Armenian prisoners arrived and each time we heard the roar of the military cars, we hurried to the windows to see who they were. The new arrivals had contemptuous smiles on their faces, but when they saw hundreds of other well-known Armenians, old and young, around them, they too sank into fear. We were all searching for answers, asking what all of this meant. And pondering our fate.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  So these are all of the most famous Armenians in the country. These are the prominent priests, the writers in the big cities, these are the people who everybody in our, everybody, every Armenian in Turkey knew who these people were. They knew them by name, for the most part. And so they wanted to take them out immediately. And just get them out of circulation at first. And they did it secretly, they did it quietly, on April 24th, 1915, which is Armenian genocide remembrance day, because this is where it really kicks off. Once they did that, um, all, most of the pieces were in place to begin the campaign of mass killing.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  The only things that remained were, um, there was this organization called the Special Organization that had actually been set up for a previous war with the Russians, but they used it for a different purpose and augmented it with different people here. They freed about some 10, 15,000 violent convicts from prisons, including thousands of murderers and rapists. And they freed them and promised them a pardon if they would ride with this group called the Special Organization, which was put under the command of the most fanatical anti-Armenian young Turks. And their job was to...

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Terrorize the Armenian population in an unrestrained manner. You know, we think about genocides, again, we're very influenced by the Holocaust and the way we think about these things. Methodical. Exactly. Disciplined. Systematic, you know, it's like, okay, what's your number? And check that one off and, you know, and that's not how this was carried out. And this, this special organization is, is a good illustration of how that is. I mean, you know, most genocides, when you look at millions of people dying in the civil war in the Congo or in Sudan, you say, well, how's that happening? They don't have gas chambers there. They're not even going around and individually shooting every person that's there. You don't have to do that.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  All you have to do is go to one village, not just kill them, but do it in the most horrific ways you can possibly imagine and make sure that a few people get away to go warn the next village over. And then those people, who are mostly women, children and old people, because the men are all fighting or, you know, you can't be there when the army shows up, when the militia shows up, they say, we gotta get out of here. So they take their kids and their grandparents and they run off into the bush and defenseless women, children and old people die very quickly in the bush. Well, they die very quickly in the desert, too. And so this was part of the goal, is to go out there and terrorize brutally and make sure that word of that spreads to the other groups so that these people get moving.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Because if we can do that, they'll finish themselves off. We won't have to go around, you know, most of the, most of the Ottoman soldiers, they're off at the front. You know, this is being carried out by older gendarme, you know, police soldiers, ordinary men type people, right? Like guys like that, as well as by local villagers and Kurdish tribes that they couldn't have conscripted if they wanted to. And it was helped along by the level of just savagery that they would, that they would perform these, these massacres in. And

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Finally, the, once everything else was in place, and this kind of happened systematically, I guess, over the, over the period of time that the genocide was taking place, but the central government worked to identify governors and mayors of local areas that might be reluctant to do what they needed to do, and when they were identified, they were taken out. Some of them were thrown in jail, and some of them were even killed. But a lot of them were just reassigned to other places. One of them, you started off talking about, with a quote about what happened in Ankara, and that was an example, actually. That was one where the guy who, the valley, the governor of, of that province, he was trying to almost be a Oscar Schindler type. He got together a bunch of prominent Turks in the area, had them write a letter and sign a letter that he sent back to Constantinople, saying, hey,

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  look, whatever's going on anywhere else, like, our Armenians are actually cool, like, we know them, they're not a problem, they're loyal. And so that guy was just fired and sent off to some random spot in the empire. And his, his successor came in and immediately went to work. Searched all the Armenian homes for weapons, took, took them all away, right down to all their kitchen knives. The local jails there were emptied, all the convicts were turned into paramilitaries, and, um, once everything was in place, they got to work.

• 1:21:33Jocko Willink?

  You know, you think about that, if you were gonna write, like, a freaking psycho, dystopic movie, right, what are you gonna do? You're gonna take the, you're gonna take the, the local criminals, rapists, murderers, and you're gonna empower them and, you know, give them, give them authority?

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  And total license. And in fact, encourage them to be as brutal as possible because that's part of the plan, you know, to drive these people out into the desert through, through brutality.

• 1:22:03Jocko Willink?

  It ends up looking like this, going back to the book. The prominent prisoners, lawyers, bankers, merchants, and Armenian government officials, were taken out on the road in the first caravan, under the supervision of the police commissioner, the prison warden, police soldiers, and officers. Overall, superintendent was assigned to Shem Sedan, the son of Tabeeb, a member of the Ottoman Parliament from Ankara. Although those in the caravan were the distinguished people of the city, a mark was put on their arms, and their fezes, shoes, and coats were taken from them before they left the prison.

• 1:22:45Jocko Willink?

  Then these hundred and fifty so or so were taken out to the foot of town and tied together with a rope. The tools that would be used to kill these Armenians, axes, cleavers, paddles, large knives, and other weapons, were transported in four or five carriages, directly behind the caravan, and following them were carriages filled with lime. To make sure that the crying and screaming of the people in this caravan would not be heard, some of the soldiers were ordered to play trumpets and drums, as they left Ankara via the town's famous Tash Khan section.

• 1:23:29Jocko Willink?

  Seven hours from the town, this dust-covered caravan reached the forest. They were met by the special organization. The freed criminals used as anti-Armenian death squads who possessed all kinds of weapons. A well-known lawyer, Arminog, pleaded with the chief of the bandit group to be given as the sacred last rite of one condemned to death, permission to say a few words. He received permission. Then he said with unusual cold-heartedness and a cavalier indifference to death that surprised even, even the special organization.

• 1:24:12Jocko Willink?

  "It is no longer a secret that you have brought us here to be killed."

• 1:24:18Jocko Willink?

  But I want to ask you if you know why you are going to kill us. The leader of the bandits answered that he didn't know why.

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Arminog continued, "You should know that the high-ranking officials and the committee who gave you the orders to kill us did so solely to secure their personal gain, and that they are leaving a stain on your history and laying waste to the fatherland."

• 1:24:46Jocko Willink?

  Barely had he spoke these prophetic words, when hundreds of the special organization's sheets attacked from all sides, cutting and hacking off legs and arms and necks with axes and hatchets, ripping them off partly or entirely, and crushing heads with rocks.

• 1:25:11Jocko Willink?

  Then the bodies were thrown, half-alive, dead, or in the throes of death to be prepared ditches into prepared ditches and covered with lime.

• 1:25:22Jocko Willink?

  Those who were partly sticking out of the dirt and the lime made the heavenly arches resound with their cries of agony. More dirt was poured on them until they were buried alive.

• 1:25:38Jocko Willink?

  When the massacre of the first caravan was finished, the second caravan of more than 320 people was sent forward,

• 1:25:48Jocko Willink?

  transported to the park known as Kayash. Six hours from town, these people were massacred in the same merciless manner.

• 1:25:59Jocko Willink?

  The dismembered bodies of the martyrs were left unburied for 15 days. Turkish officers then oversaw their burial by Armenian labor soldiers.

• 1:26:11Jocko Willink?

  After massacring all these people, the special organization came back to town wearing clothes, shoes, and other items they had taken from them.

• 1:26:24Jocko Willink?

  Everywhere, they boasted about how many Armenians they had killed, and how in unheard-of ways they had tortured and dismembered those who were still alive, and even mutilated corpses.

• 1:26:38Jocko Willink?

  Similar massacres took place in other towns and villages with peculiar cruelty in Yazgat. First, all the Armenian males of a town or city, and then the women and girls were bound together and taken on foot to deep valleys a few hours away, accompanied by a Turkish mob armed with axes.

• 1:27:07Jocko Willink?

  There, they were slaughtered like sheep, pregnant women and suckling babes included.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  And that's how it went, over and over and over and over. It's one of the things about genocide is, if you ever watch a movie about one, or read a decent book written about a genocide, they'll usually find some dramatic persona to focus on, so that they have some kind of drama with it, some storyline or arc to follow, because when you get down to it, what it comes down to is, "We went to this village, we killed all the men, we raped all the women, we robbed all their stuff, took their children as slaves, and then we left. And then we went to the next village, and we raped all the women, we killed all the men, we took the children as slaves, robbed all their stuff, and we left." And it's that a hundred times, a thousand times.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  You know, you can't tell a Holocaust story, or write a Holocaust book, that's just, they marched 10,000 people to the edge of the mass graves, they shot them naked and they threw them in, and they took these... It's just, it gets repetitive in the most grotesque way imaginable, and that's what a genocide is. The depravity of it is easy to focus on, but in many ways, the... Especially after it's been going on for months or years, and the people themselves, the killers themselves, have then almost brutalized psychologically and spiritually by what they're doing, and it becomes routine for them. So that things that some individuals may have hesitated to do at first

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  are not things that elicit any kind of hesitation anymore, that it just becomes this grind of death.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  And one of the things that makes the Armenian genocide a thing that is, I guess you could maybe only compare it to what happened in Rwanda, insofar as the extent to which the general population was mobilized to participate. You know, something like, again, like with the Germans, you know, this was something Ernst Younger during the Second World War was stationed in Paris. He was sort of a cultural figure at that point. So he was kind of there as like a, technically was some kind of a minister of this or that, but I can't remember. But really he was there as like a cultural figure. And he was in Paris, 1942, you know, 1941. And he's writing letters to people, trying to figure out like,

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  I keep hearing about all these things that are going on out in Poland and out in the East. Like what's going on out in the East? Like I hear about bad things going on in the East. This is Ernst Younger. I mean, this is a guy that even the Nazis like thought this guy was great. You know, there was, there was possibility that he was in on one of the failed assassination attempts. Maybe he knew about it at least. But Hitler himself even said, "Nobody touches Ernst Younger," right?

• 1:30:05Jocko Willink?

  This is the guy, this is the guy that wrote "Storm us, steel." I forget which podcast we covered that on, but I mean, this guy is a hero to the German people.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so even him, a guy in that position, serving as a minister in Paris at the time, he's like, trying to find out what's going on in the East because the way that that was conducted and, and you know, it gets overplayed a little bit, how secret it was and everything. It did take a large number of people, including the Wehrmacht, to pull off some of it. But relatively speaking, this was something that was able to be kept from the German people and to be localized to the SS and like, you know, the people who were actually handling it.

• 1:30:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it's, it's one thing to, you know, the, okay, so the German populace is, let's say they're helping round up Jews. But that's what they think they're doing is rounding up the Jews or they're gonna ship them off. They're gonna be slave labor. They don't, they, many cases, didn't know the end state.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  Whereas here we have the, the, the Turk- Turkish population at large doing the tactical operation of genocide.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Yes, and, you know, there's a quote from a, a great book. I know I've brought it up a few times in other podcasts that, um, by Philip Gorevich about the Rwandan genocide. We wish to inform you that tomorrow will be killed with our families. And he has a quote in there when he's talking about what genocide is in a, to the society that's, that's perpetrating it. And he has this line that has always stuck with me. He says genocide after all is a sort of community building exercise. And that stuck with me as I was reading all the material about the Armenian genocide and the way that it, specific way that it was handled. One of the things that happened was these people who would be deported down south. When I say

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  that, what I'm talking about is, you know, all the men would be killed and the women, children and old people who were left would be put into a caravan. They'd be sent down to march in the Syrian desert on a march that would take about two months. And when they got to the end, it was just, there was a death camp there where they, anybody who survived two months with, you know, no food because it would all be taken from them right away. Um, you know, if they couldn't scrounge bugs out of the desert or eat dead bodies or whatever they had to do, they'd die of starvation. If they couldn't, um, if you weren't a woman who could, uh, you know, use your body or whatever to get a Turkish soldier to give you a drink of water or do whatever you had to do, then you died on the way. And the roads were littered with bodies and sometimes they would just massacre all of

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  you along the way. But the ones who got to the end would get to these death camps in the Syrian desert. Um, and these, uh, these routes, you know, it doesn't take two months to walk directly in a straight line from one place to their end state and end place in the Syrian desert. They would go on these winding routes sometimes. And it wasn't just to drag it out so that people would die of exposure and starvation. They would actually bring them through different Muslim villages, different territories of Kurdish and Seraccean tribes. And when they would come through a given area, just like we saw here, people would be waiting for them with weapons, and they would attack, and they would rape, and they would take the women that they liked away as sex slaves.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  They would take the children away as slaves. They would rob them of what they could, but it was only allowed for a certain period of time. And very often, the Turkish soldiers, this is actually what would happen much of the time, is they would sort of organize it a little bit. Be like, "Well, here's a really, really pretty Armenian. All of you want her as a sex slave. Well, let's hold an auction." And then the Turkish soldiers get paid. "Oh, well, you know, we're gonna get a lot of the most valuable things that they have." And so the Turkish soldiers were getting paid. It was a way of, sort of, it was a very crude and brutal form of wealth redistribution, in a way. Everything that these Armenians had, they were being walked around to these different villages and territories so that each of the people in those places got their cut.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  And there would be almost, you read accounts where it's almost like, there's a sense of expectancy, almost like a party atmosphere, when people know another caravan's coming through. "What are we gonna get this time?" And all of these Kurdish tribes, a lot of these Islamic villages, there were Armenian women and children, tons of them, in a lot of these places. A lot of them would just be taken sometimes as slaves, and when the novelty wore off after a few weeks or a few months, they would just be murdered or turned away out in the desert to go wander and die. But then the other thing that's happening when they're doing that is that the state is, well, they're taking the opposite approach that the Nazis took, right?

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Which is that they are making all of these people complicit in this atrocity that the state is carrying out. And it really does bind them together in the same kind of way that, you know, like in a mafia movie where you do a hit and all three of us who did it have to fire a shot to the body because we're all in this together now. And it's a...

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  You know, this shared knowledge that we have all participated in this tremendous crime, that even going forward, that can bind people together in a certain way, especially when we've all benefited from it, we've taken slaves from it, we've robbed, and maybe the things in our house right now, the furniture in our house right now, maybe were things that we took from these people when we killed them. And that's how it went, over and over and over and over again, you know? And the thing that always, the thing that is just the most unbearable to me, is imagining, like, I've mentioned it a few times already, but it's always the thing I can't get out of my head about this, is that these were all women, children, and old people, the

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  men were gone already, and just imagining like your mother, or your wife, or your sisters, or your kids, being marched along out into the desert by these people, set upon, you know, not blown up by a predator drone, as bad as that is, they are being hacked down with machetes and axes, and as you saw like in one of the, I think the Ankara example that you read, in massacres that would take hours and hours and hours, it takes a long time, some of these, they're killing six, seven, eight thousand people at a time in a ravine, by hand, and that takes some time, and so, it's just screaming, and the smell

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  of feces and blood, and people, you know, you have just body parts hacked up over here, and over there, there's just a big rape orgy, and it's all right next to each other, while over here, they're searching your mother's pockets for any gold coins she might have, and it's that, for as far as you can see, there are times where they did, you know, one instance where they did sixty-four hundred people, was the consensus estimate on it, and it was the entire ravine, I mean, you come over this ridge, and it's just this entire ravine, hundreds of yards, and it is just... Bodies, and they're not dead of, you know, this, this place was, uh, was witnessed by an American, uh, uh, from, somebody from the American consulate who rode out and saw

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  it afterwards. These bodies are not people who died of starvation, or thirst, or exposure. These are people who's, are just one big mass of gashes and mutilation and hacked off limbs, and women with their heads cut off, who are laying there with their dresses thrown up over their head and their legs spread, with their heads cut off. I mean, that's, this is the, these are the scenes that you see over and over and over and over and over, to the point where, you know, you read a book like The Thirty Year Genocide about it, where he really does take the time to get into each of the massacres, and it becomes almost sickeningly, nauseatingly boring, in a way. And, um, it's just, it's hard to

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  imagine when you make it personal like that. You know, trying to imagine the helplessness that you would feel, uh, knowing that this had happened to people that you cared about, or being one of those people. It would just, it's, it's, it's hard to imagine.

• 1:38:12Jocko Willink?

  Well, we don't necessarily just have to imagine it. We can listen to an eyewitness, a widowed eyewitness. This is going back to the book. This is transmitted by an American ambassador to the Secretary of State. Says this, "A week before anything was done to Baybort, the villages all around had been emptied and their inhabitants had become victims of the gendarmes and martyring bands. Three days before the starting of the Armenians from Baybort, after a week's imprisonment, our bishop had been hanged with seven other notables. After these hangings, seven or eight other notables were killed in their

• 1:38:57Jocko Willink?

  own houses for refusing to go out of the city. Seventy or eighty other Armenians, after being beaten in prison, were taken to the woods and killed. The Armenian population of Baybort was sent off in three batches. I was among the third batch."

• 1:39:12Jocko Willink?

  My husband died eight years ago, leaving me and my eight-year-old daughter and my mother extensive possessions, so that we were living in comfort. Since mobilization began, the Merkez Commandant has been living in my house, free of rent. He told me not to go, but I felt I must share the fate of my people. I took three horses with me, loaded with provisions. My daughter had some five lira pieces around her neck, and I carried some twenty liras and four diamond rings on my person. All else that we had was left behind. Our party left June 1st, fifteen gendarmes going with us. The party numbered four or five hundred persons.

• 1:39:54Jocko Willink?

  We had got only two hours away from home when bands of villagers in large numbers, with rifles, guns, axes, etc., surrounded us on the road and robbed us of all we had.

• 1:40:10Jocko Willink?

  The gendarmes took my three horses and sold them to local Muslims, pocketing the money. They took my money, and that from my daughter's neck, also all our food.

• 1:40:21Jocko Willink?

  After this, they separated the men, one by one, and shot them all within six or seven days, every male above fifteen years old.

• 1:40:31Jocko Willink?

  By my side were killed two priests, one of them over ninety years of age.

• 1:40:40Jocko Willink?

  These bandsmen took all the good-looking women and carried them off on their horses. Very many women and girls were thus carried off into the mountains, among them my sister, whose one-year-old baby they threw away. A Turk picked it up and carried it off, I know not where.

• 1:41:00Jocko Willink?

  My mother walked till she could walk no further and dropped by the roadside on a mountaintop. We found on the road many of those who had been in previous sections, carried from Baybort, some women among them were killed, and their husbands and sons.

• 1:41:19Jocko Willink?

  We came across some old people and little infants still alive but in a pitiful condition, having shouted their voices away.

• 1:41:28Jocko Willink?

  We were not allowed to sleep at night in the villages but lay down outside. Under cover of the night, indescribable deeds were committed by the gendarmes, bandsmen, and villagers. Many of us died from hunger and strokes.

• 1:41:43Jocko Willink?

  Others were left by the roadside, too feeble to go on.

• 1:41:49Jocko Willink?

  One morning we saw fifty to sixty wagons with about thirty Turkish widows whose husbands had been killed in the war, and these were going to Constantinople.

• 1:42:00Jocko Willink?

  One of these women made a sign to one of the gendarmes to kill a certain Armenian whom she pointed out. The gendarmes asked if she did not wish to kill him herself, at which she said, "Why not?", and drawing a revolver from her pocket, shot and killed him.

• 1:42:20Jocko Willink?

  Each one of these Turkish hanumes, which is a Turkish lady, had five or six Armenian girls of ten or under with her. Boys the Turks never wished to take, they killed all, of whatever age.

• 1:42:36Jocko Willink?

  The worst and most unimaginable horrors were reserved for us at the banks of the Euphrates.

• 1:42:43Jocko Willink?

  The mutilated bodies of women, girls, and little children made everybody shudder.

• 1:42:51Jocko Willink?

  The bandsmen were doing all sorts of awful deeds to the women and girls that were with us, whose cries went up to heaven.

• 1:43:02Jocko Willink?

  At the Euphrates, the bandsmen and gendarmes threw into the river all the remaining children under fifteen years old. Those that could swim were shot down as they struggled in the water.

• 1:43:16Jocko Willink?

  After seven days, we reached Erzingian. Not an Armenian was left alive there. The Turkish women took my daughter and me to the bath, and there showed us many other women and girls that had accepted Islam. Between there and Enduriz, the fields and hillsides were dotted with swollen and blackened corpses that filled and fouled the air with their stench.

• 1:43:53Jocko Willink?

  On this road, we met six women wearing the férage and with children in their arms. But when the gendarmes lifted their veils, they found that they were men in disguise, so they shot them. After thirty-two days' journey, we reached Constantinople.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  One of the things that would happen on the Trail of Tears, on this road to death, was, you know, by the time you got a week out of any of these cities where people were deported, a lot of the American consulate people and other diplomats and missionaries who were there, including, by the way, this is really worth mentioning that I haven't brought up yet, a lot of the people, diplomats who have reported on this and wrote back about it and have provided a lot of the material we have today, these are German diplomats, Austrian diplomats, these are people who are allied to the Ottoman Empire in this war, who are writing back about a lot of these things. There's one memoir that was written about it by a guy named Rafael de Nogales, who was a Venezuelan mercenary,

• 1:45:04Speaker 01

  who was actually serving as a mercenary officer, as a major in the Turkish military, and he wrote a lot about it as well. And one of the things that you that you hear over and over again is how by the time you're a week out of the city, all these people are naked, all their clothes have been taken. So they're walking in July or August, maybe, in the Syrian desert, 12 hours a day, or more, you know, and they're just blistered up from the sun. They don't have any food, they don't have any water, anything they can scrounge from the landscape, or bag off some, or prostitute from some Turkish soldier or something, that's all they got. Something maybe they were able to hide away on their person. And so they're wasting away, naked

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  in the sun. And then they would stop at night, and you'd think maybe they would get some rest, but more often than not, the nighttime was the worst time. Because they would stop for the evening, and as every, they didn't have tents most of the time, those would all, would have all been taken from them, they didn't have any kind of shelter. So they're just sitting out in the weather, and if there was a village nearby, or a tribe nearby, or sometimes just the soldiers themselves, this was their time to blow off a little bit of steam. And so they would show up, and they would just be walking through the encampments of all of these women and children and elderly people who've, who've stopped. And they would just take their pick for rape, they would take slaves, sometimes they would

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  just torture people for, for entertainment. There are stories of pretty Armenian women being stripped naked and forced to dance for Turkish soldiers, and when they weren't pleased with their performance, they just doused them in kerosene and watched them burn to death for their entertainment. There's story after story after story after story like this. And not a bunch of people from one caravan, we're talking from all over the country, throughout the entire period of this going on. There's something, you know, there's, maybe you can get people to go put a bullet in somebody's head for their country, you can maybe play, play up that angle of it to get them to do something like

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  that. You've got to really engender a level of extraordinary hatred, I think, to, to...

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  Get people to do some of the things that were being done here, especially the regular people. That doesn't go so much for the special organization. You know, I think, I think maybe in, in one of the unraveling episodes we did, I, I asked a question, like, if you had a bar in town, in any city in America, where everybody knew that's the bar, where in there, there's this room and there's a person in there, and you can just do whatever you want to them. That's the gimmick at the bar. Like, I might not go there, you guys might not go there, but I don't think it would be empty. I think it would rarely be empty. And when you're talking about, okay, what if you had that in a prison? That would be a lively joint. I mean, that's what you had going on here. You had these caravans of women, children, and old people, being marched down into the

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  desert, very often, by guards who were from the special organization, guys who were convicted murderers and rapists, who had been given complete and total license from their government to do whatever they want, and now you stop at nighttime, and you're bored, you've been on the road for a week, riding in the hot sun on your horse, guarding these people, and what are you, how are you gonna spend your evening? And the way a lot of them spent it was just, you know, again, you just, it's one of those things that, like, reading a book about it or anything, it just, you really can't do justice until you really just close your eyes and try to put yourself in the position of these people.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  In the position of a mother who's already watched two of her children die of exposure, and then has her baby grabbed by a leg and thrown in a river, and then she's gang raped, and she's going to be gang raped again, and again, and again, for the next two months as she walks, you know, this road, or until she can't take it anymore and, and commit suicide, basically. That was the situation of hundreds of thousands of people being marched down into the desert like this.

• 1:49:19Jocko Willink?

  Well, you said story after story after story.

• 1:49:25Jocko Willink?

  Here's some of them going back to the book and you mentioned the German diplomats. Here's a German diplomat. "The teachers of the American school in Karper were gruesomely tortured before they were killed.

• 1:49:39Jocko Willink?

  Two professors had their hair and beards ripped out while in prison in order to extort confessions and were hung by their hands for days at a time.

• 1:49:52Jocko Willink?

  Another professor went insane when he was forced to watch Armenians being beaten to death. The governor himself took part in the torture of another professor.

• 1:50:03Jocko Willink?

  The senior executive president beat him until he was exhausted and said whoever loves his religion and his people may continue beating."

• 1:50:17Jocko Willink?

  Here's another eyewitness who was seven years old at the time.

• 1:50:21Jocko Willink?

  "We heard afterward that together with seventeen other Armenian young men, they had massacred them by night and had thrown them under the bridge.

• 1:50:31Jocko Willink?

  Thus, when we were deported, there were no males left in our family.

• 1:50:37Jocko Willink?

  They took away my five aunts in Durzor.

• 1:50:42Jocko Willink?

  Later they cut off their heads, impaled their heads with their bayonets to show them to us, and then they threw their corpses in the Euphrates.

• 1:50:56Jocko Willink?

  We found only half the body of my mother's aunt.

• 1:51:02Jocko Willink?

  My mother buried her in the earth." Here's a thirteen year old eyewitness. "The Turks came and drove us all out of the village.

• 1:51:12Jocko Willink?

  They were forcing us to march with whipstrokes. They tied our hands behind us. They disrobed us totally and we stood naked as the day we were born.

• 1:51:23Jocko Willink?

  Then they broke one's hand, another's arm, still another's leg with axes and daggers.

• 1:51:32Jocko Willink?

  Behind us, a little boy whose arm was broken was crying and calling for his mother, but the mother had already died by an axe."

• 1:51:45Jocko Willink?

  They came in the morning, assembled us, and started once more to kill and drop the bodies in the water.

• 1:51:53Jocko Willink?

  Below the cave, the river Kabur was flowing. They caught someone's head, another's leg, still another's hand, and all these human parts were piled up upon one another on the ground.

• 1:52:08Jocko Willink?

  Some were not yet dead, but had their bones shattered and their hands severed. Some were crying, others squeaking.

• 1:52:17Jocko Willink?

  There was the odor of blood on the hand and hunger on the other.

• 1:52:25Jocko Willink?

  People who were still alive started to eat the flesh of the dead.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  One of the effects of this was a very strange demographic dynamic that happened in Turkey in the years afterwards. There was actually a book that came out, I can't remember if it was in the 2000s or the 90s when it actually came out. It must have been the 2000s. It was written by a Turkish woman, living in Istanbul now. Her grandmother pulled her aside, when she was very old, and told her her life story. And it turned out her grandmother was an Armenian, and she had been taken as a small girl away. We mentioned earlier, one of the Armenian, one of the Turkish women who were heading back to Constantinople with like a, with a stable of six, seven, eight little Armenian girls. And they were taking them back to be their house servants, and that's how her grandmother was taken.

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  She was taken back into a house that was, um, she ended up in a place that was pretty civilized. They pretty much just raised her, you know, she was kind of a servant, but they didn't abuse her or anything. And so she was raised in this house and became Turkish. She remembered who she was, but, uh, everybody thought she was a Turk. Her granddaughter thought she was a Turk. And so after she told her granddaughter her life story, she wrote the, um, she wrote the, she wrote the book, and it was kind of a sensation in Turkey. Because to this day, uh, you know, Turkey still denies the genocide. And so, I mean, it's something that they, you know, well, we'll talk about that in a little bit. But that aspect of it, the taking of children and women, the mass enslavement of these people was a, was a huge section. I mean, it's almost...

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  Gosh, man, you would almost think that,

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  like, it almost seems like a fate worse than death. The people who have killed your husband, your parents, your kids, your entire community, your entire people, and now they're gonna take you as a slave. Most of, most often, when you're talking about the women, they're being taken away as sex slaves. And very often, they're being taken away not by, not that this would make it, I guess, any better, but they're not being taken away by some Turkish notable to go be in his harem in Constantinople. They're being taken away by some,

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  some tribesmen out into his tent in the desert. And that's where she's gonna live now until they get tired of her. And it's maybe not just for him. You know, a lot of times, these were women who would be kept to be shared with friends and company as like a matter of hospitality. You know, this kind of thing was going on. And you're talking about, oh, gosh, I mean, it's hard to really say, but you're talking tens of thousands, at least, of Armenian women and children taken away this way. And maybe a hundred, maybe over a hundred thousand. The total number of deaths, between one and 1.5 million. Uh, but the number of people who were taken away as slaves and just kind of melted into the population or were murdered later, that's what happened to a lot of these people. It was, it was in the ten, at least the tens of thousands.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  Um, you know, sex slavery in the Ottoman Empire, that, this isn't something that just sort of came out of nowhere because, uh, of the chaos that was going on. There was actually, just last night, as I was brushing up on some of this, I came across a New York Times article written in 1886 by a journalist who managed to, uh, he had a, uh, he had a guide there in Constantinople that was helping him, and they dressed him up in a beard, and said he looked like, you know, he was from the area, and he had some money, and they got him into some of these places where they were selling women. And this was in 1886. None of this was going on. And they would, uh, they were mostly, so it was always Christian women, usually. You're not, you can't enslave Muslims. Sometimes, you know, people do what they do. But generally speaking, that's what would happen. And so it would be Circassians and Slavs and Armenians.

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  And, uh, and sometimes Assyrians and Greeks. Um, and so this was something that, uh, you know, the Sultan himself, the way the Sultan reproduced was, he had a harem of hundreds and hundreds of women, and all of them were slaves, taken from Christian lands. And they would be kept in a cell in like a very specific part of the palace, and they would be guarded by black, uh, like, black African eunuchs.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  And so, I mean, just again, to give you some idea of like the society we're talking about here, the king has hundreds of slave women kept in cells in like his own palace. They're not allowed to interact with anybody else and they're guarded with, uh, they're guarded by eunuchs who were castrated specifically for the purpose. I mean, this is a, it's a different, we're not talking about, you know, the Bundestag or the English Parliament or something. It's just a different, different time and a different place. I mean, we do have to remember that, you know, um, I just mentioned that New York Times article in 1886, that only 21 years before was when we got rid of, you know, chattel slavery in the United States. So it was a different time and there were a lot of things going on back then. But there's a, there's a little bit of exotic strangeness to something like

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  that, that I think kind of shocks us a little bit. And this idea that, um, you know, you could take, uh, especially non-Islamic women as spoils of war into sex slavery. We saw that reignite when ISIS, you know, rampaged through everywhere. They were taking Yazidis and everybody else that they found who wasn't Muslim as sex slaves. And it was horrifying to us, but, you know, in this part of the world, especially when you get out into the countryside where things don't change much very rapidly, um, this was something that was not a huge diversion from what was normal for people. And so, once there was the opportunity, it just happened at scale. And you had tens of thousands, again, maybe over a hundred thousand Armenian women and children who just disappeared into Kurdish villages and,

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  um, into Turkish homes.

• 1:58:09Jocko Willink?

  Set us up for, uh, Derzor.

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, Derzor was one of the main, gosh, what do you even call a place like that? You want to call it a death camp, but that sort of makes you think of the Nazi example where this is like a factory of death and it, and it wasn't, it wasn't that. You had these, these caravans that were being wound through the desert to be robbed and raped and killed and enslaved as they went. And just eyewitness report after eyewitness report describes the road on the way down is just littered with corpses and body parts everywhere you go. Anytime there's a hill, you look over the other side of it off the road and it's just filled with bodies back there. The rivers are choked with bodies and body parts. But some of the people survived. Some of the people just figured it out. You just

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  said people who were alive started to eat the flesh of the dead, people who haven't... Had anything to eat for a month will do, you lose your mind when you start to, when you start to starve and die of thirst and exposure and some people made it. And for those who made it, hell was waiting for them. You know, the place that they got to, at the end of the line, one of them called Der Zor. It was basically big, open-air cages that they just penned people up in and there was no food and there was no water and there was no medicine and they just stayed in there and they died.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  And now, you know, this wasn't Auschwitz with, you know, double razor wire fences, you know, multiple layers deep. People could kind of get there and, you know, if you had an ability to do it, if you knew somebody who maybe came down there to give you a blanket or some food, you might live a little bit longer than everybody else, but people were dying by the 500, the thousands, the 2000s today, just dying of disease and exposure and hunger and thirst and periodically massacre. Sometimes when another caravan would get there and there just simply wasn't any room for anyone else, they would either take that caravan or most often they would take people who were already degraded, near the point of death and they would be like, "Well, we're moving you to the next location. You're going south again, everybody back on the road."

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  And there was nothing south. They just marched them out there. People who were already right on the point of death, they would march them further into the Syrian desert and they would just wander out there and die or be massacred. The scenes in Der Zor that are described are really something beyond. I mean, it's a Hieronymus Bosch painting, you know?

• 2:00:47Jocko Willink?

  This is from the book. "No pen can possibly convey the suffering and misery of these exiled Armenians. Persecuted wanderers, surrounded by savage gangs of police soldiers, riding in thousands of wagons and carts and on beasts of burden, though most were on foot and many of those bare."

• 2:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Like dried leaves driven by the wind, they passed through this soul bloody passage and on to the arid deserts of Derzour. To die without bread, without water, without a shroud, and without a grave. Barely had the men from these regions been separated from the women and put on the road to exile when they were mercilessly slaughtered and their corpses thrown into the rivers or valleys as food for vultures and other wild animals. The young brides and virgins were yanked from the embrace of their crying mothers and taken to Turkish harems.

• 2:01:56Jocko Willink?

  Even ten-year-old girls were subjected to all manner of savage unbearable debauchery. The older women who managed to endure the terrible hardships of the road were taken to Derzour, where they were brutally slaughtered during the summer of 1916. Here we encounter two young Armenian engineers who had been in charge with overseeing the work of an Armenian labor battalion. In tears, they told me how in 1915, particularly in September and October, approximately eighty thousand Armenians of both sexes were encamped under tents made from bed sheets

• 2:02:40Jocko Willink?

  and rags on the plain near the valley stretching all the way to the spacious swampy field by the Mammur railway station. Six hundred to seven hundred were dying daily from hunger, thirst, and fever, when suddenly a lengthy nocturnal autumn rain came and finished the task left unfinished by the human beasts. The people were stuck in the standing pools of water for several days. Severe cold ensued, and none of them had adequate shelter, clothing, or food.

• 2:03:20Jocko Willink?

  They froze to death by the thousands, falling like the autumn leaves, or they died from dysentery, diarrhea, bleeding, and other plagues of overcrowding.

• 2:03:33Jocko Willink?

  The field was soon covered with mounds of unburied bodies. Under makeshift tents, entire families were reduced to corpses by hunger and cold, with no one to bury them.

• 2:03:46Jocko Willink?

  Nor could those Armenians who found their dead kinfolk find any spades or hose to bury them with.

• 2:03:56Jocko Willink?

  And behold, suddenly, one morning, to bring this widespread and heart-trending wretchedness to its ultimate perfection, the director of the exiled caravans and hundreds of police soldiers, bearing whips and clubs, surrounded the poor people already at death's door, and ordered them to get immediately on the road. It isn't humanly possible to imagine the hue and cry, the begging and pleading, and the chaos that prevailed in and around those thousands of tents. The tents were then taken down, and the portable goods in bundles representing the deportees' last bits of property were assembled. But they had neither carts nor wagons nor beasts of burden to carry them.

• 2:04:39Jocko Willink?

  The lamentation then began.

• 2:04:42Jocko Willink?

  Many would not leave loved ones who were sick, in their death throes, lying on the ground, uncared for, and abandoned. The dying, aghast, begged not to be abandoned in the open fields as food for hungry wolves and corpse-eating hyenas that prowled the night.

• 2:05:00Jocko Willink?

  But they had no time to think. The military police and major and minor officials fell upon them. Without pity or human feeling, they struck the hapless and confused, left and right, hitting them everywhere. Eyes burst open, skulls were crushed, faces were covered with blood, and new wounds were opened up. Nobody cared. Nobody took pity on them.

• 2:05:27Jocko Willink?

  The survivors, seeing that they had no option but to leave, took down and folded thousands of tents and in an instant, throwing them over their shoulders, got on the road, leaving their ill and dying loved ones behind.

• 2:05:43Jocko Willink?

  The wretched Armenian mothers, who were unable to take their underage children, 2 to 6 years old, children who had fallen ill from starvation, extreme cold, and the hardship of the long road, half-dead or in the throes of death, had to leave them on top of the already dead.

• 2:06:04Jocko Willink?

  Tearfully, the eyewitnesses told us how two large mounds of corpses of thousands of Armenian children rose up. Among them numerous children who had not yet died and who extended their small hands, searching for their mothers.

• 2:06:21Jocko Willink?

  The eyes of these emaciated and neglected angels bore a look of pleading and protest directed toward their mothers and toward God.

• 2:06:36Jocko Willink?

  And from their half-dead lips, some of them cried that sacred word, "Mommy, for the last time."

• 2:06:48Jocko Willink?

  Since their mothers could not possibly take the children along, in a few hours, the little ones would be dead and would have to be left on the road anyway.

• 2:06:58Jocko Willink?

  It was perhaps better that all of them, the offspring of the same wretched and persecuted nation, lay down in heaps in one place. Maybe God and men would finally have pity and see that this was suffering enough.

• 2:07:14Jocko Willink?

  Instead of half-dead children, mothers carried on their bosoms, the weakest and most exhausted of the children still alive, until they too had to be abandoned.

• 2:07:26Jocko Willink?

  The angelic souls of thousands of Armenian children were rising to heaven to tell God of their beloved mothers' endless sufferings and misfortunes.

• 2:07:38Jocko Willink?

  Those remaining in the caravans of Armenian exiles moved on and disappeared into the mountains. There was an all encompassing silence as night came.

• 2:07:50Jocko Willink?

  Then the howling and yelping of hungry wolves, jackals and foxes. And occasionally the faint screams of Armenian children being eaten.

• 2:08:07Jocko Willink?

  For the animals would eat the live ones first.

• 2:08:19Jocko Willink?

  And that

• 2:08:22Jocko Willink?

  that wraps up what we're going to cover from the book and of course, obviously.

• 2:08:29Jocko Willink?

  I only read a tiny percentage now to to get the book across to gain some kind of understanding of of what took place.

• 2:08:41Jocko Willink?

  And

• 2:08:44Jocko Willink?

  I mean, what can be called for all practical purposes

• 2:08:52Jocko Willink?

  is I don't know if this is a thing to say, but this was for the most part. This was a successful genocide. I mean, it was damn near a fully successful genocide, meaning we got rid of this group of people forever.

• 2:09:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:09:12Jocko Willink?

  Is that pretty close?

• 2:09:14Speaker 01

  There are Armenians in other countries, obviously, so the people survived. But there are no Armenians in Turkey today. And in fact, Christians in general, and again, I don't mean to dilute the Armenian experience here, but it is worth mentioning that this was something the Turks were attacking Christians across the empire at this period. They killed 300,000 Assyrian Christians. They killed countless Lebanese Christians. And after the war, when Adeturk came back and they were fighting in the West against the Greeks, he killed and then he killed 300,000 Greeks, Greek Christians, and then expelled another million to a million and a half.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  You know, there were three or four million Armenians in Turkey proper before the war started. And when it was all over by 1917, really, when the genocide kind of died down, maybe tens of thousands crawled out of their hiding places. Went from three or four million to maybe a few tens of thousands.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  And you have to call it, in a way, successful because, you know, from one standpoint, Turkey got what it wanted. There are no more Christians or Armenians in our country. And from, you know, from another angle, they didn't really pay for it.

• 2:10:37Speaker 01

  Some individuals did, and we'll get to that. But, you know, after the, one of, probably the great tragedy of the 20th century, here's another one of its consequences, was the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Bolsheviks, the communists, take over Russia in 1917 and pull them out of the war. And so the Armenians who have been hiding behind Russian lines, that's where a lot of the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia retreated, just get behind the Russian army here. The Russian army packed up and left. They're out of the war. And so you have all of these Armenians now, right up into the, what we consider today Armenia proper, the Republic of Armenia, is wide open. It is wide open over there. And there is still a Turkish army in the field that is

• 2:11:22Speaker 01

  fully prepared to finish the job. And they are driving up into Armenia. They're driving toward the capital of Armenia, Yerevan.

• 2:11:31Speaker 01

  Talking about a Turkish army, tens of thousands strong, a fully equipped military force, World War I era military force, and you've got about 1,200 Armenian soldiers. And then you've got a bunch of refugees and older men and everything else, who are given guns, clubs, anything that they could find, which is not much. And they're told, do we flee up into Georgia, up further into the Soviet Union, depending on how bad this gets? Or?

• 2:11:59Speaker 01

  Are we gonna, are we gonna make a stand here? And that's what they did. There were people in Yerevan, lots and lots of refugees. So it was an overcrowded place. They had a lot of people, but they only, again, had about 1,200 trained soldiers. And they were the ones that went and got everybody organized. They rang the bells of, the church bells of Yerevan to muster everybody. And you had women and children running supply lines everywhere, getting everything in place. You had men digging defensive fortifications. You had old men serving as like signal operators with flags and things up on, you know, up on towers. Everybody was participating here. And the Turkish army pushed up within, you know, just about within visual range, just over the horizon of the capital of Armenia.

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  And they got to a place, there were three areas where they fought, but the main one that, you know, people remember today, there's a great big monument there and a great museum, Armenian history museum called Sardarabat. And thankfully, this French guy, it's not a, it's not a very well-known battle if you look in general histories, they'll talk, they'll all talk about it, but they won't get much into the details. Thankfully, there was this French guy back in the seventies, this historian who went back into the records and he got everything. I mean, he's a military historian. And so I read that book and, I mean, he really gets down to like the order of battle on both sides and everything else. And I mean, you're really talking about a fully equipped Turkish army against a ragtag group of refugees led by a few trained NCOs, basically.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  And thankfully, they did have some Armenian Russians who, once the Soviet Union pulled them out of the war, they were like, well, you know, I'm a colonel in the Soviet Army now, I guess, do I go back to Moscow or wherever they're calling us, or am I gonna stay here and fight? And so some of them stayed and helped lead the effort as well. And this ragtag group put a halt at Sardarabat to the Turkish advance. And really, I mean, there was a historian, American historian, not, not Armenian, but just a historian of the Ottoman Empire who said that if they had lost that battle, then the word Armenia today would just be a curious historical footnote. You know, we'd probably still have Armenians, obviously, just like we had Jews for a long period of time when there was no such thing as Israel, but that's what we would be talking about.

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  You know, it didn't preserve Armenian independence at the time. They tried, you know, one of the things that happened was in that brief period after they did put a stop to them, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, which are all right there clumped together, none of them wanted to be part of the Soviet Union at the time, and they didn't want to be part of the Ottoman Empire either. So they formed a little alliance to try to defend themselves. But as soon as things got a little bit tricky, Georgia was pretty quick to be like, you know what, we're gonna go at the Soviet Union. And Azerbaijan was very quick to be like, you know what, we're Muslims too. And they kind of stabbed the Armenians in the back and attacked them from behind. And so the Armenians then at that point had to cut a deal with the Soviet Union. And so Armenia became a Soviet Socialist Republic as well.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  And so out of the frying pan and into the fire there, you know. Although, I mean, you know, the thing is, is one of the things that did happen in Armenia, obviously, you know, they were under the same Soviet tyranny as everybody else to some degree, but they did understand, the Soviets even, fanatical as they were, they understood to a certain degree that these people were not going to give up their national or religious identity, no matter what. We'd have to finish the job that the Turks started if we were going to accomplish that. And so they really didn't push that as hard as they did in some other places, which is why, you know, to this, the Armenian Church was able to survive. And then to this day, once they achieved their independence finally, in, you know, when the Soviet Union fell, everything was in place there.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, say what you want about the downsides of, I don't know what you would call it, of nationalism, or just sort of that, you know, Armenians, one of the things that you find about them, and it's something I love about Armenians, really like any Mediterranean peoples, is Armenians love being Armenian.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  And it makes them, it makes them so much fun, you know, it just, to me, like Armenians in America, they're almost a perfect immigrant group in a sense where they are, they're, they're American, a hundred percent, you know, you can't look at the Kardashians and be like, those aren't Americans, those are Americans as much as George Washington's an American, you know, it's just, they, they fully adopt and like they're down, they join the military, they do everything and fully assimilate and integrate, and yet they love Armenia and they love the Armenian church and they love their people and their history and there's no tension there, you know, they, they're, they can be fully patriotic Americans or in France, there's a lot of Armenians in France, for example, and they never have

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  lost that connection with, with their own history and, and their own traditions and I, and I think they, they really walk that line really well.

• 2:16:54Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's, um, it's, it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to be, you know, proud of where you're from.

• 2:16:59Speaker 01

  They're proof that it doesn't.

• 2:17:00Jocko Willink?

  And proud of where you're from.

• 2:17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're proof that it doesn't.

• 2:17:02Jocko Willink?

  And they didn't, um, they also didn't really forget.

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:17:06Jocko Willink?

  They didn't forget.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  You know, one of the things.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  What had happened.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the things that happened, right, is another consequence of the Russian Revolution is you have all of these, you know, by the time, by the end of the war, everybody knows what was going on in Turkey, so you had the British and the Americans and everybody else who were looking at the Ottoman Empire, or now it's just the Republic of Turkey, right, there's, the, the war in Turkey went on until 1924, the Bri, the British defeated the Ottoman Empire, they occupied Constantinople, but there was still a large military force, uh, commanded by a, a great man, I mean, there's no other way to put it, you know, he was a, he was a hard man, he did a lot of bad things in the field and did what he had to do for his country, I suppose is one way to look at it, but Kemal Atatürk, the father of the Turks, father of the modern Turkish Republic, he was in command, he was in, he was, he was a hero at Gallipoli, the man knew how to fight, knew

• 2:17:53Speaker 01

  how to command, very smart, very tough, and he was still out there, and so he moved the capital from Constantinople, where the British had established themselves, out to Ankara, where it is now, and he kept fighting, you know, he, um, at first was pushing up into the Caucasus to, you know, with the idea that if you get past Armenia and Georgia. And you keep going northeast there. It's just Turkic peoples, like, all the way over to western China at that point. And so there was this, like, pan-Turkish idea that maybe, okay, we lost all of North Africa and whatever, but maybe, you know, the Arabs were always kind of trouble anyway, why were we doing that? Maybe this is the empire, this pan-Turkish empire. The Armenians at Sodarabat put a stop to that, and then the Soviet Union established itself. So that wasn't going to work out.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  And so they retreated back, and eventually they went back and pushed everybody else out of their country and established the modern Republic of Turkey. And Kemal Atatürk was, he was a Young Turk. He was a member of the Young Turks. He had broken with the triumvirate a little bit, over, you know, military reasons over the years, but he was still part of these people. And a lot of the Young Turks, and even the Committee of Union and Progress, the core group that was really carrying all this out, they were still there, they were still in the government, you know? There was no real, we had denazification after the Second World War, and there was really not a whole lot of that going on. Some of the very, very main people, you know, they fled, they fled the country, and so this wasn't carried out, but they were tried and absentia, some of them were sentenced

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  to death, some of the main architects. But after a little while, everybody realized that Turkey is going to be kind of strategically important now that we have this huge threat of the Soviet Union looming up here. And so, like it or not, we're going to have to kind of find a way to, like, bring Turkey back into the fold. I mean, Turkey was in NATO by the 1950s, and it was considered a strategic necessity to just kind of forget about all this. You know, you get all the way up to the 1980s, and there was a, an American scholar named Susan Blair who found a bunch of the American consulate documents that people hadn't, people didn't even know about these yet, you know, because nobody was studying this.

• 2:20:03Speaker 01

  It was not something that people really wanted to look into, because Turkey, we have nuclear weapons in Turkey, it's a supremely important ally in the Cold War, nobody wants to look at this. And so in the 1980s, Susan Blair finds all these documents by people like Leslie Davis describing everything that they've seen out there, and she says, "Well, this is incredible", writes it up as a book. Tries to get it published. She can't get it published anywhere. She's told by major publishers that this is too controversial. We can't touch this. And the thing is, those people were right. Because she finally found a publisher, and that publisher started getting bomb threats. They started getting death threats. She and her family had to go into hiding for a while. Because the Turkish government, they don't play around. Like, have you seen that movie, The Promise? No.

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  It's a great movie. It's about the Armenian genocide, and it's a really, really good movie. But you wouldn't know that. Maybe this has changed a little bit now. You wouldn't know that by going on like Rotten Tomatoes. The first night, or first day that that thing was released, there were like 5,000 like one-star terrible, horrible, worst movie ever reviews. And like, all of them had kind of broken English and like whatever else. I mean, you see that. And then immediately afterwards, literally like the next year, there was another Armenian genocide movie that was put out that was sponsored by the Turkish government. And it was just, it's almost worth watching for just the Propaganda value? The madness of the propaganda. I mean, you'd really have to like imagine a movie

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  about the Nazis and the Holocaust, where all of the SS officers and Heinrich Himmler and everybody else are just portrayed as like, they're just really trying to help all these Jews. But like, the Jews, they just, they ran off out there into Poland and something happened to them. And I mean, it's that bad. You know, it's really that bad. And it is like a state effort. Ever since then, you know, it was happening at the time, they were, a lot of this was carried out with burn after reading telegrams and things like that. Some of them were preserved. But throughout the 20th century, all the way up to the present day, there's Turks still going through all the archives and going through, be like, yep, shred that, shred that. They've been doing it for centuries. And it's because they, I mean, look, this is, this is maybe one of the darker things to point out about it, is

• 2:22:13Speaker 01

  they know

• 2:22:16Speaker 01

  They know that that can work. You know, people forget things. People forget everything. It doesn't matter what you did, or how bad it was, or how many people were affected. They have this idea that if you just keep denying it, keep calling everybody a liar, keep, just do whatever you gotta do, that give it a century. All we have to do is survive. You know, if you, if you look like this was something that was really prominent at the time, right? You, you, all the, the writings of Lenin, for example, and Trotsky and Stalin, you know, all the Bolsheviks, and you see the same strain in Hitler, where they all understood that we're about to do something that is horrific and barbaric, and that is going to be condemned by everyone, and we better not lose this war. But if we don't,

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  if we pull it off, then all we have to do is survive, and then wait it out, and the storm will pass. And it passed very quickly. Like I said, Hitler was partly inspired by, you know, the Armenian example, specifically because even by then, just 30 years later, 25 years later at that point when it got started, even by then, he could say, and make a good point with it, who today remembers the Armenians? This is 25 years after his own country was allied to the Ottoman Empire as it executed one of the most thorough and complete genocides in history.

• 2:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, you can say there was some level of vengeance on it, and we're not going to talk about that now, but we are going to talk about Operation Nemesis on the Unraveling Podcast, which we also do. It's a little, take things a little bit different and a little bit deeper, and we'll do that. We'll talk about Operation Nemesis. Well, you can listen to it right now. It's Jocko Unraveling Podcast, where Daryl and I are going to go deep. Well, we're gonna go deep on, on this operation that carried out. It was a, what'd you call it, a, a campaign of assassination?

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  That's exactly what it was. And, and, and it was done by a bunch of Armenians without any state support. You know, if you think about, everybody looks, looks at like what the Mossad did, the Israelis did after the Second World War. They hunted down a thousand, fifteen hundred Nazi officers, SS officers around the world. Um, and that's, you know, that's, that's good for them. But the Armenians, you had a group of people who were doing this completely independently, without any state support. This group of hardcore militants who hunted these people down all around the world and essentially took out the entire Ottoman government that was running this during, during the period. All the high-ranking people. There is one other thing I want to close with. I kind of forgot about earlier. Cause

• 2:25:05Speaker 01

  there is, uh, on the whole question of Turkish denialism, um, this is a quote from a letter written by the leader of the special organization, a guy named Bahadin Shakir. And this was a letter that was found fairly, uh, fairly recently, last few decades. Um, this is right near the beginning of it. He said, "The Committee of Union and Progress, as the bearer of the nation's honor, has decided to free the homeland from the inordinate ambitions of this accursed nation, and to assume the responsibility for the blemish that will stain Ottoman history in this regard. The committee, which cannot forget the country's bitter and unhappy history, and whose cup runneth over with unrelenting desire for revenge,

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  has decided to annihilate all Armenians living within Turkey, not to allow a single one to remain, and has given the government broad authority in this regard. On the question of how this killing and massacring will be carried out, the central government will give the necessary instructions to the provincial governors and army commanders. All of the Unionist regional representatives would concern themselves with following up on the matter in all of the places where they were found, and would ensure that not a single Armenian would receive protection or assistance." Not a lot of room for doubt there.

• 2:26:25Jocko Willink?

  Evil.

• 2:26:31Jocko Willink?

  With that, Echo Charles, maybe we could do a little decompression, old school decompression scenario. That was a rough one.

• 2:26:40Speaker 01

  Save us Echo.

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not sure that I can do that right this moment, but geez, man. It's kind of hard to listen to all that and then even that last part and then be like, yeah, by the way, yeah, let's all, you know, get back to lifting weights and drinking.

• 2:26:57Jocko Willink?

  Well, if you remember, like, I think the very first time I actually needed to decompress, I want to say it was podcast number 12.

• 2:27:06Speaker 01

  Didn't take long.

• 2:27:07Jocko Willink?

  It didn't take long, but after podcast number 12, where we were, um, we're talking about the Highlander in prison. And, you know, he's getting tortured by the Japanese, he's having, um, the maggots eat the gangrene flesh off of his legs in order to survive. He's gets put to a medical camp, eventually gets put out to sea while he's, you know, in the hull of a ship with however many hundreds of prisoners shitting all over themselves and in their own urine and sweating and starving to death and dying. And then they get hit by a, because the Japanese didn't mark their prison ships.

• 2:27:47Jocko Willink?

  So they get hit by a torpedo and most of the guys die, but he somehow gets thankfully recovered. Oh, but recovered by a Japanese ship. And so then from his Japanese ship, he gets taken back to shore and he is stationed in a prison camp in the outskirts of Hiroshima. So that was the first time where when I got done reading some of his, you know, some of that book,

• 2:28:14Jocko Willink?

  you know, I said, Echo, you talk for a little while, why freaking decompress? So world can be a horrible place and the best thing we can do is maybe make our little part of the world. Little bit better. What do you got for suggestions?

• 2:28:30Speaker 02

  Well, let's start with ourself mentally and physically. Hopefully. Um, don't forget.

• 2:28:38Jocko Willink?

  I give you a hard time about your job being super easy.

• 2:28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:42Jocko Willink?

  This is one time you gotta earn, you know, earn a little bit.

• 2:28:45Speaker 02

  Challenges, for sure. Challenges.

• 2:28:46Jocko Willink?

  Rough transitions.

• 2:28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, either way, we want to keep ourselves together mentally fit. And speaking of which, Daryl Cooper, uh, always impressive with how deep you can just sort of just go.

• 2:28:58Speaker 01

  Thought you were talking about.

• 2:28:59Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I, you have little ways to go, which is cool, you know, and I'm very supportive of it and, you know. Either way, we are working out, we're reading, not as much as Daryl Cooper.

• 2:29:09Speaker 01

  Why don't you tell me what I can do to maybe, uh, to maybe catch up?

• 2:29:13Speaker 02

  Okay, well, you could have, get some.

• 2:29:14Jocko Willink?

  Look at this, he's got skills on the transition as well.

• 2:29:17Speaker 02

  Yep, very good support.

• 2:29:18Jocko Willink?

  Skills on the transition.

• 2:29:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, big time. Uh, either way, yes, we're working out, we're reading, we're doing all this good stuff for ourselves so we can provide good stuff for others. And make our little world a better place and it spreads and before you know it, hey, we've got a better place we're all living in.

• 2:29:32Jocko Willink?

  I'm, I'm in full support of this.

• 2:29:34Speaker 02

  So while we're working out, we might need some supplementation.

• 2:29:37Jocko Willink?

  Probably.

• 2:29:38Speaker 02

  It helps. Big time helps. All right, let's start with discipline. Go. All right, mental and physical, uh, support, we'll say. And we have essentially an energy drink. You don't like it still?

• 2:29:53Jocko Willink?

  It's hard to say that, bro. Cause here's the deal. When you say essentially an energy drink, what are we thinking?

• 2:29:58Speaker 02

  The stigma.

• 2:29:59Jocko Willink?

  We're thinking stigma. We're thinking, well, it's not just a stigma, it's a reality.

• 2:30:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:03Jocko Willink?

  Reality is when you, you say energy drink, you're talking about sh- high sugar content, ridiculous caffeine, a bunch of chemicals to preserve the whole scenario. We're talking, we're not talking energy, we're talking poison.

• 2:30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is the association for sure.

• 2:30:17Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:30:17Speaker 02

  Well, we're not talking about that.

• 2:30:19Jocko Willink?

  So we're not talking about that.

• 2:30:20Speaker 02

  In fact, I don't think we're ever gonna be talking about, well, technically, we're talking about it, but when I'm talking about discipline, go, the RTD, ready to drink can of quote unquote, essentially an energy drink, this is what I'm talking about. No chemicals, no sugar.

• 2:30:39Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:30:41Speaker 02

  Tastes good and it's good for you. You drink two of these, you know how people, you know, we have friends, I don't want to name any names, Tim Ford. He used to be, might still be, I don't know, but they'll get addicted to like, energy drinks. They'll get addicted to them. Meanwhile, with that addiction, you're getting less healthy, less, you know, like, you know, when you drink three of them, you're like, man, that probably is jamming my health up.

• 2:31:03Jocko Willink?

  Probably, no, it's straight up is.

• 2:31:05Speaker 02

  Straight up, yeah, but this one, you drink three of them, guess what? You're healthier, so go get addicted if you want.

• 2:31:11Jocko Willink?

  Get addicted to something good for you, it's like getting addicted to carrots.

• 2:31:16Speaker 01

  You can't eat too many carrots.

• 2:31:18Jocko Willink?

  I know that, I know that, I actually learned that one time, I ate a whole like, bag of carrots and then realized and I, I, you know, whatever it was, three hours later, I was Googling, can you eat too many carrots? And Google said, yeah, your body can't digest too many carrots. And so guess what your body does? It's not pretty, don't eat too many carrots, but you can't drink a lot of this one go.

• 2:31:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and not to go too deep into the too much of a good thing concept, but even technically, the most vital nutrient, if you want to call it water, you can drink too much water.

• 2:31:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's called drowning.

• 2:31:53Speaker 02

  No, no, I think that's when you inhale water.

• 2:31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the best thing about the go, energy drinks, is I was one of those douchebags. I was pounding like, three hundred milligrams of caffeine, I came in here one time with one of those things and Chuck was like, what are you drinking?

• 2:32:09Speaker 01

  What are you doing to yourself? And so I switched over a while back, and here's where I was worried, like, I always thought that I needed a huge amount of caffeine. I'd drink one of those three hundred milligram things and after like, an hour, I was just dead again, I was like, I guess I need six hundred milligrams. Wrong.

• 2:32:24Jocko Willink?

  I guess I need cocaine.

• 2:32:25Speaker 01

  It was the opposite of the truth, because I actually switched over to these things, which are what, like ninety-five, I think, milligrams? And I only need one of them, and I hit one of those things and it's good. Maybe I'll drink another one if I got something to do in the evening, but that's it.

• 2:32:36Jocko Willink?

  There's a bunch of things that countered that caffeine, you, you know, when you've got sugar in there, it's like, okay, cool, you're gonna get an insulin hit, you're gonna bring you back down. Plus, we've got thermobromine in here, things that, that help that caffeine in go, helps it.

• 2:32:51Jocko Willink?

  Kick. So you don't need to OD on it.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, last.

• 2:32:54Jocko Willink?

  No need. Um, hey, we also got joint warfare for your joints. We got krill oil for your overall general goodness. Overall, just general goodness to the world. Get, get yourself some krill oil. Uh, we got discipline go in a powder form.

• 2:33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:09Jocko Willink?

  By the way, the, the Jaco Palmer, the iced tea combination, I think on both, I think on everything, it's the best, but that's what I like.

• 2:33:16Speaker 01

  That's currently wearing that too.

• 2:33:18Jocko Willink?

  I was, uh, mixing that up and that's a freaking good tasty little treat too. Pre jujitsu scenario. Molk.

• 2:33:25Speaker 01

  Yep, protein.

• 2:33:26Jocko Willink?

  Protein.

• 2:33:27Speaker 01

  Like that chocolate peanut butter.

• 2:33:28Jocko Willink?

  Are you down with this? Is that your go to?

• 2:33:30Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:33:30Speaker 02

  Are we doing the Dakota Meyer, uh, technique making pudding or whatever the?

• 2:33:35Jocko Willink?

  I haven't tried that yet.

• 2:33:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:33:37Jocko Willink?

  What was the rest?

• 2:33:38Speaker 02

  Uh, I think it's just like less milk or whatever.

• 2:33:41Jocko Willink?

  No, but I think he put it in something like.

• 2:33:44Speaker 01

  Peanut butter or something?

• 2:33:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:33:46Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna have to reassess Dakota on that one.

• 2:33:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I haven't been there.

• 2:33:49Jocko Willink?

  You can make, but you can make all kinds of tasty things with milk. Or you can just have milk as is.

• 2:33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Which is also a tasty thing. The peanut butter milk is a, peanut butter is freaking delicious. That thing is delicious.

• 2:34:02Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah. I would drink it just like as a normal treat.

• 2:34:05Jocko Willink?

  Normal dessert. Yeah, for sure. That's the dichotomy of milk. The dichotomy of milk is you're like, I want something good for me, but I also want to taste something delicious.

• 2:34:14Speaker 01

  I think we have, I think we have a title for the episode.

• 2:34:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's might be the next book. Uh, so we got Warrior Kid stuff. We got tea. And by the way, this stuff, you can get the drinks at, at Wawa, East Coast. East Coast, all East Coast, Wawa, go in there, clear some shelves, support the cause. Vitamin shop, you can get all the supplements at vitamin shop and we got a bunch of other, uh, retail. That will be rolling out in the near future and, and listen, any of this stuff, if you go to jacofuel.com, we will ship it to you for free. If you get a subscription, cause let's face it, we know that there's other.

• 2:34:50Jocko Willink?

  Elements out there that are providing you with free shipping and we know that that's kinda cool.

• 2:34:56Speaker 02

  It's a good thing.

• 2:34:57Jocko Willink?

  Good, we don't, we're not taking anything away from that, but we have to at least match that, right? We have to at least level the playing field a little bit. How do we do that? Free shipping, free shipping. If you get a subscription to any of these things, which is good for you in two ways. Number one, you save the shipping costs. Number two, you're not waking up one morning, you're out of milk.

• 2:35:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:35:16Jocko Willink?

  What are you having for dessert then? Oh, oh, you'll go to go get a milkshake? Cool. Can I have a milkshake and some type two diabetes up in here?

• 2:35:26Jocko Willink?

  Uh, jockofuel.com, check it out. What else we got?

• 2:35:31Speaker 02

  Origin, Origin, OriginUSA.com. American made stuff and for real, American made. Not imported and then sewn and then they sew the, the tag on in wherever, you know, no, no, no.

• 2:35:46Jocko Willink?

  Grown and sewn.

• 2:35:47Speaker 02

  It's true. So Origin USA, we've got jeans, boots.

• 2:35:51Jocko Willink?

  Boots.

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  Jiu Jitsu stuff.

• 2:35:53Jocko Willink?

  Geez, have you put on your Rift Gee lately?

• 2:35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:57Jocko Willink?

  That thing is ridiculous.

• 2:35:59Speaker 02

  I slept in it last night.

• 2:35:59Jocko Willink?

  That thing is, you don't have one yet, dude.

• 2:36:01Speaker 02

  No, yeah, no.

• 2:36:02Jocko Willink?

  When you, this is not, it's sort of like, it's sort of like what energy drinks, what go is to energy drinks. Rift Geez is to Geez. It's that freaking hype.

• 2:36:12Speaker 02

  Good analogy.

• 2:36:13Jocko Willink?

  You're so frustrated. If you ever have to put on a normal gee again, you'll be mad.

• 2:36:16Speaker 02

  Literally, yeah. That actually happened to me. I was like, I'm kinda mad right now.

• 2:36:21Jocko Willink?

  You don't want none of that. Uh, Geez, rash guards, joggers. If you're a jogger type human, which Echo Trolls happens to be.

• 2:36:30Speaker 02

  I go in and out for sure. Well, yeah, a lot of good stuff. All American made, yeah. OriginUSA.com. Also, Jaco has a store. Discipline equals freedom. Shirts, hats, hoodies.

• 2:36:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay, why don't you just break into the scenario we have, the unfortunate scenario that we have right now?

• 2:36:49Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I didn't find it as unfortunate as maybe, maybe you did.

• 2:36:54Jocko Willink?

  Well, of course not, because you took care of yourself.

• 2:36:57Speaker 02

  Gotta look out for number one.

• 2:36:59Jocko Willink?

  You took care of yourself, so of course you're happy.

• 2:37:01Speaker 02

  Well, okay.

• 2:37:01Jocko Willink?

  You're over here, you got a cool shirt that I don't have.

• 2:37:05Speaker 02

  I incidentally halfway took care of myself and it just kind of came to light.

• 2:37:11Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:37:11Speaker 02

  In your attention. So, okay, so we got this thing. Okay, on Jocko's store, you click on the shirt locker, S H U R T. Creative. You made it up?

• 2:37:22Jocko Willink?

  Okay, very creative. That's what I'm saying, creative.

• 2:37:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so shirt locker.

• 2:37:25Jocko Willink?

  Actually, I didn't make up. Somebody on Twitter or Instagram, the gram, someone told me, call it the shirt locker. I was like, dang.

• 2:37:33Speaker 02

  Fully approved. Anyway, so it's a, it's a subscription situation for shirts, creative designs. You had a question mark. I feel like there was a question mark in your head about like, oh, what are creative designs?

• 2:37:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I don't know what that means, but they look cool. And now you just were wearing the other day on the mats of justice, and I don't have it. And then you explain that I can no longer get it. So anyways, if you want to get cool shirts, you don't want to miss out.

• 2:38:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so and that actually, when you kind of explained it a little bit, I was like, yeah, that is kind of a thing. It's because it's hard to communicate like, hey, these shirts are gonna be like, cool. Maybe not what you're used to all the time, but they will be cool to have or whatever.

• 2:38:16Jocko Willink?

  Maybe that's an indication that people don't really trust your assessment of what's cool and what's not.

• 2:38:22Speaker 02

  Be that as it may, the facts are these. It's hard to be like, hey, guys, get this, they're gonna be cool. And then that's sort of it.

• 2:38:29Jocko Willink?

  Maybe it's just your personality that you, like me, I think we have this similarity, we don't like sitting here saying like, hey, I'm making something and it's gonna be cool. So that would be whack.

• 2:38:38Speaker 02

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 2:38:39Jocko Willink?

  So I'm gonna say Echo's been making some stuff and it's cool. And if you want to get it, then you gotta go get that shirt locker on, including myself, because apparently. Even if a cool shirt gets made that actually says discipline and freedom on it, I don't get a version, I don't get a pair, a, uh, uh, what is it, a copy.

• 2:38:57Speaker 02

  A copy of issue.

• 2:38:59Jocko Willink?

  An issue, I don't get issued nothing.

• 2:39:00Speaker 02

  Okay, so, well, this, this was the thing from the beginning, if you remember Shirt Locker, you get, you get a shirt that month and it's gone. You don't, we don't sell them on the, on the store. It's gone. That's why you sign up for the Shirt Locker, so you can get them.

• 2:39:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:12Speaker 02

  Every month.

• 2:39:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:13Speaker 02

  So you can't come to me after everyone's already arrived and be like, where's mine?

• 2:39:17Jocko Willink?

  It's like, well, again, I think we, we have to take some, we just can't blame everyone. We have to take ownership and be like, hey, the ownership is, we have failed to convey the level of coolness of the shirts that are coming. So if you want to, if you want some, get your Shirt Locker on. That's about that.

• 2:39:37Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 2:39:37Jocko Willink?

  JacoStore.com.

• 2:39:39Speaker 02

  Also, don't forget about the, just that your everyday representing on the path. It's not an easy path. But if you're representing, it is a hard path, yes, or something, you know? And if you're representing, let's face it, it makes that path a little bit more,

• 2:39:55Speaker 02

  I don't know, a little bit more something.

• 2:39:56Jocko Willink?

  Enjoyable.

• 2:39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true.

• 2:39:58Jocko Willink?

  Hey, subscribe to this podcast if you want to. Um, also, we have some other podcasts. We have the Jaco Unraveling Podcast. And the Jaco Unraveling Podcast, Daryl and I go deep on some stuff. We're actually going deep on Operation Nemesis, so if you want to check that out, look up Jaco Unraveling. We also have the Grounded Podcast, got the Warrior Kid Podcast, and Daryl has his podcast, which is called, Murder Made. And you can join us on the Underground, where we're putting out, we're putting out more podcasts. How is that even possible? We're putting out more podcasts, Jaco Underground. Listen, there's, there's strange things happening in the podcast world, in the whole world. Censorship, um, random people being pulled off of platforms.

• 2:40:43Jocko Willink?

  We don't know what's gonna happen, and we would be stupid not to have some kind of a contingency plans. We have a contingency plan of, if we need to, we don't want to, but if we need to, we can survive some kind of a traumatic platform event, where i- if they want to start putting...

• 2:41:03Jocko Willink?

  Injecting advertisements into this podcast or whatever, we don't want to have that happen. So we need to have an alternative platform. We're building it. We don't want to take sponsors and have people, you know, have to do reads. I don't want to do that. So if you want to help us not do that, and you want to help us have a contingency ready, then you can, you can subscribe to Jaco Underground at JacoUnderground.com.

• 2:41:28Speaker 01

  Could you imagine Jaco doing some basic ass read for like a mattress company? Oh my God, it would be in my nightmares.

• 2:41:34Speaker 02

  Or it might even sound, I mean, not to me, it won't sound awesome, but it would be like one of the better reads you've encountered.

• 2:41:40Jocko Willink?

  We're not doing that. We're not doing that.

• 2:41:42Speaker 02

  Alright, there you go.

• 2:41:43Speaker 01

  I've been lying in bed for three hours. I can't sleep. What can I do?

• 2:41:51Speaker 02

  You know, but some good stuff on there though. Recently, Daryl Cooper's been gracing us with his presence, but yeah, but the psychology stuff and the psych.

• 2:42:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, that's a cool thing. It's an opportunity to talk about things that are just outside the purview of actual Jaco podcasts. Speaking of which, I got some good topics coming up on that one. I got some good, I got some good things. We're gonna go, we're gonna go on.

• 2:42:16Speaker 01

  He's got that mischievous look.

• 2:42:18Speaker 02

  Good. Yes. Also YouTube, we have a YouTube channel, official.

• 2:42:23Jocko Willink?

  We do have a YouTube channel. If you want to see the videos that I am the assistant director on, then you can watch them. And if you like them, those are the ones I was the assistant director on. Otherwise Echo is in charge.

• 2:42:35Speaker 02

  Well, you know, me and Kerry, we got some stuff cooking. So, you know, maybe we'll allow you to assistant.

• 2:42:40Jocko Willink?

  I assume it's, I assume it's in the slow cooker as usual. Psychological Warfare, I made an album telling Echo how to overcome his moments of weakness and he recorded it and now you, you can listen to it. Psychological Warfare, people ask me for alarm clock. You can just get that and you can put it as your alarm. That's why we did it. MP3, check that out wherever you get your MP3s. Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer, down there making American made stuff to hang on your wall, keep you on the path. Got a bunch of books. Obviously, you can go to jocko podcast.com slash books and you can order books from the podcast.

• 2:43:20Speaker 02

  Is this one?

• 2:43:21Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if you're gonna be able to order this one. I had this one in my collection. It's a used copy. I don't know if it's still available, but it's Armenian Golgotha. You can try and get, well, we'll see if we get, if it's available, we'll get it up there. Final spin. I wrote a book that is a fiction book. I can't, novel to me just doesn't sound cool. Does it sound cool to you?

• 2:43:49Jocko Willink?

  Even especially if I was like, I wrote a novel. That sounds weird, right?

• 2:43:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't match.

• 2:43:54Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't, doesn't fit in. So I need to come up with another word. Maybe I'll come up with another word like Mulk, but for like something that's kick ass, that's not true. That's a story. And then I can be like, oh, I wrote a, whatever that thing is. And that way I can still, you know, feel, feel good about it.

• 2:44:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good idea.

• 2:44:13Jocko Willink?

  Cause I don't, this is not my thing. Like I wrote a novel. I mean, technically, what's the technical definition of a novel there, DC?

• 2:44:22Speaker 01

  Oh, if you start wanting to differentiate it between a novella and a novel, it gets very hairy sometimes. Maybe you, let's say a hundred pages. I think it's pretty, I think it's pretty.

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  Well, you're talking about the difference between extreme ownership.

• 2:44:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, yeah, I'm talking about, I'm talking about what's a novel?

• 2:44:37Speaker 02

  Yes, it's like a category.

• 2:44:39Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever, what's a cool novel that you've read, you've read?

• 2:44:41Speaker 01

  Blood Meridian.

• 2:44:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that's the only cool not, well, maybe there's some other ones, but yeah, blood, but you call Blood Meridian a novel?

• 2:44:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay, then I guess I'm down with it, kind of, because Blood Meridian.

• 2:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then the next step is to call yourself a novelist. Are you ready for that?

• 2:44:58Speaker 02

  Good point.

• 2:44:59Jocko Willink?

  I wrote a novel.

• 2:45:02Jocko Willink?

  Right in line with freaking Blood Meridian.

• 2:45:04Speaker 01

  I am a novelist who wrote a novel.

• 2:45:06Jocko Willink?

  The, the, the story is called Final Spin. It's available for preorder right now. But look, the publisher is thinking, who's gonna buy a book by this knuckle dragger? We're gonna, we're gonna show them who's gonna buy a book by this knuckle driver. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. We got the code, the evaluation protocols, discipline, freedom field manual, brand new versions out. Way the Warrior Kid Four, Three, Two, and One. Mikey and the Dragons.

• 2:45:30Jocko Willink?

  Talked about that a little bit with Jordan Peterson the other day. About Face by Hackworth, I wrote the foreword for the new version and then the old school OG, Extreme Ownership and the Academy of Leadership, Echelon Front, I have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. You can go to echelonfront.com for details on that. EF Online revamped. It's online leadership training. It's outstanding. I'm on there live all the time interacting. If you want to come and ask me a question, go there. muster2021. Listen, we are executing. It's in full execution mode. There's no stopping this train. May 25th and 26th in Orlando. If you want to go, go immediately to extremeownership.com

• 2:46:15Jocko Willink?

  because now that people realize we're in go mode, it's going to sell out. So if you want to go, May 25th and 26th, come and get it, man. It's two days. It's, it is granular and it is the pragmatic leadership skills that you are going to take from that event. Bring them back and it's going to have an impact in your world. So Orlando, May 25th and 26th, Phoenix, August 17th and 18th, and Vegas, October 28th and 29th. EF Battlefield, pay attention for those in the future. I'll let you know when the next one is scheduled. They're

• 2:46:53Jocko Willink?

  outstanding and we do them at various battlefields. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help with their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Lee, she's got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. And if you want more of my wretched reading, or you need more of Echo's irritating inquiries, or you just, you just want to hear more of Daryl's pedantic postulations, you can find us on the interwebs. The novelist coming out there. Yeah, there you go. On Twitter, on Instagram.

• 2:47:37Jocko Willink?

  And on Facebook, Echo is at Echo Charles, Daryl is at Martyr Made, and I am at Jocko Willink. And as you heard in this episode, there is evil in the world, and there are those people that stand up against evil. And some of those people, many of those people are our military servicemen and women out there around the world, fighting to keep evil at bay. And at home, our police and law enforcement, firefighters, and paramedics, and EMTs, and dispatchers, and correctional officers, and Border Patrol, and Secret Service, and all the first responders, all out there doing the same thing. So, thanks to all of you out there in uniform, protecting

• 2:48:16Jocko Willink?

  us. And everyone else, remember this, evil does exist. And it's out there. It's a mob. It is a frenzy. It is pent up frustration and anger. It is jealousy, and it is envy, and it is resentment, and it is out there. And it is also in all of us. And it is up to all of us to fight it. So, keep on fighting. And until next time, this is Daryl, and Echo, and Jaco. Out.