Speaker 1: Hey everybody. Robert Evans here and for the last two years,
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards listeners have funded the Portland Diaper Bank,
Speaker 1: which provides diapers for low income families. Uh. Last year
Speaker 1: y'all raised more than twenty one thousand dollars, which was
Speaker 1: able to purchase one point one million diapers for children
Speaker 1: and families in need in one um. And this year
Speaker 1: we're trying to get dollars raised for the Portland Diaper Bank,
Speaker 1: which is going to allow us to help even more kids.
Speaker 1: So UM, if you want to help, you can go
Speaker 1: to bTB fundraiser for pd X Diaper Bank at go
Speaker 1: fund me. Just type and go fund me b TB
Speaker 1: Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank. Again, that's go fund Me
Speaker 1: bTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or find the link
Speaker 1: in the show notes. Thank you all. Let's go. Let's
Speaker 1: start the podcast, So get off, let's move it. Robert, Sophie,
Speaker 1: Robert Sophie, Robert Sophie, evens Toma Robert. This is Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. It's a podcast. Hello Joe, I'm glad to
Speaker 1: be on the podcast. This is the podcast of Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards where we talk about bad people, and today
Speaker 1: we're talking about the worst people broadly speaking, in the
Speaker 1: world in history, which are collectively all of the people
Speaker 1: who have participated in are directly enabled genocide. Um yea
Speaker 1: more to the point, Joe, we're talking. There was an
Speaker 1: episode of our sister podcast it could happen here. Maybe
Speaker 1: cousin podcast is more accurate. Um, maybe behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: is like the uncle. I don't know, I don't depending
Speaker 1: on what state you're from, that's all of those things.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is the uncle by marriage could happen here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds right anyway. I made a comment about the
Speaker 1: fact that because we were talking about anarchism and stuff
Speaker 1: and and what kind of things the state makes possible
Speaker 1: in what kind of things are just human nature? And
Speaker 1: I made a comment that like, genocide is not something
Speaker 1: you need a state or like a nation for. It's
Speaker 1: just like a thing that people have always done, and
Speaker 1: that basically, as long as we have evidence of people
Speaker 1: organizing in any capacity, we have evidence of genocide. And
Speaker 1: um some folks got upset about that. There were some
Speaker 1: people who really questioned that, and because I had not
Speaker 1: actually provided any kind of evidence, it's understandable that people
Speaker 1: will be like, because it is. It is difficult, I
Speaker 1: think if you haven't thought about this, to imagine like
Speaker 1: prehistoric human beings engaging in organized genocide. Um, but they
Speaker 1: totally did. Yeah, I think it's something that I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, having an organized state certainly will make that easier.
Speaker 1: It does help. Yes, I think it's something we're like.
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm a grad student in holocaust and genocide studies, um,
Speaker 1: and I I think it's something that people can get
Speaker 1: lodged in their head. Is when they see or hear
Speaker 1: the were genocide, they immediately think of like death camps
Speaker 1: and things like that, which of course wouldn't happen without
Speaker 1: a state structure, right, I mean you would imagine. So
Speaker 1: I think it might be best, honestly, like, given the
Speaker 1: fact that we are recording this the week of the
Speaker 1: Valdi shootings, it might be best to think about this
Speaker 1: the way it's reasonable to think about mass killings where um,
Speaker 1: there whether or not guns are available, there will absolutely
Speaker 1: be mass killings and a wide variety of societies. And
Speaker 1: the evidence for this is that many societies where guns
Speaker 1: are not available have mass killings. The easy availability of
Speaker 1: guns does mean those killings you're number one, more frequent.
Speaker 1: Number two tend to kill more people. Um, not always,
Speaker 1: but generally speaking. And it's the same thing with like genocide.
Speaker 1: Genocide prior to the state existed, but you can get
Speaker 1: a lot nastier with it when you have the apparatus
Speaker 1: of a centralized state. Of course. It's it's like, um,
Speaker 1: why World War One was so horrific. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: we we revolutionize the mechanisms of mass murder to to
Speaker 1: this human meat. It's it's not like the wars that
Speaker 1: happened before then. We're not as horrific in their day.
Speaker 1: We just we just continued to surpass our previous human
Speaker 1: records with their own violence. Yeah. Anyway, we're doing Genocide
Speaker 1: Week this week. Joe Joe Casabian, co host of The
Speaker 1: Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Um, and you are also uh,
Speaker 1: like uh an academic on an academic capacity specialized in genocide.
Speaker 1: Like you've got a grad degree and ship, unlike me
Speaker 1: who just reads books about UM. So you have a
Speaker 1: degree of like formal knowledge here. Uh that is is
Speaker 1: beyond certainly like what I have in this area, which
Speaker 1: I think I hope will be hopeful because we'll be
Speaker 1: getting into this kind of meandered a bit in episode one.
Speaker 1: We will primarily be talking about kind of the prehistoric
Speaker 1: roots of genocide and then sort of the first what
Speaker 1: what what what? At least one scholar will argues like
Speaker 1: the first documented genocide UM in in history. And after
Speaker 1: that we're going to be talking more about what makes
Speaker 1: people cape of committing genocide, like what's actually going on
Speaker 1: that that pushes people to it? Because um, some of
Speaker 1: this is just based on my continual frustration of the
Speaker 1: description of like, you know, the perpetrators of the Holocaust
Speaker 1: is like being brainwashed or taken over by a mania.
Speaker 1: That's generally not what happens. But we're getting ahead of
Speaker 1: ourselves here. Yeah, yeah, oh, I love that argument. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's one of my favorites. We we will be
Speaker 1: chatting about that in part too, But right now, I
Speaker 1: want to talk about probably the earliest evidence that exists
Speaker 1: in history of an act of genocide UM. It was
Speaker 1: discovered on the banks of Kenya's Lake Turkana in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. It is a mass grave, one which dates
Speaker 1: back roughly ten thousand years to about eight thousand BC.
Speaker 1: It is filled with women, children, and men, both young
Speaker 1: and old. Some of them had school shattered by blunt weapons.
Speaker 1: Others had been repeatedly pierced by some form of projectile.
Speaker 1: One woman was a pregnant woman who appeared to have
Speaker 1: her hands bound and have been beaten before her execution. Um.
Speaker 1: It looks very much like mass graves you would find
Speaker 1: from basically every act of genocide ever committed sense right,
Speaker 1: including people with their hands bound who were executed. UM,
Speaker 1: particularly like women and children who were executed with their
Speaker 1: hands bound. Uh. Marta Mirazon Lar of the University of
Speaker 1: Cambridge notes that the injuries discovered quote shocked for their mercilessness,
Speaker 1: but that quote what we see at the prehistoric side
Speaker 1: of Nataruk is no different from the fight's wars and
Speaker 1: conquests that shaped so much of our history. And again,
Speaker 1: what's interesting to me kind of in the context of
Speaker 1: where this line of thoughts started for for us and
Speaker 1: the comments I added another podcast, is that this is
Speaker 1: this occurs pre the development of anything we would recognize
Speaker 1: as a state really anywhere in the world. This is
Speaker 1: like eight thousand eight BC is roughly when this is
Speaker 1: thought to have when the killings that these graves were
Speaker 1: resulted or resulted from we're thought to have occurred depending
Speaker 1: on you know, there's some wiggle room as to win
Speaker 1: the first state arose, right, none of these like thea
Speaker 1: exact but broadly speaking somewhere around in Mesopotamia in Egypt,
Speaker 1: like in that kind of ballpark is when we get
Speaker 1: our first like city and you know how much you
Speaker 1: how much you kind of draw line to the first
Speaker 1: city and like whether you con consider that like a
Speaker 1: proper state is also a little bit because none of this,
Speaker 1: like they didn't just pick a day to be like,
Speaker 1: well now we have states, now human beings existing states, right,
Speaker 1: people started like living. You know, this all occurred kind
Speaker 1: of gradually. Um, So precision isn't possible. But these were
Speaker 1: definitely whatever happened in that mass graven lake Turkana was
Speaker 1: not organized by anything we would recognize as like a
Speaker 1: mass political entity that calls itself a nation, right like
Speaker 1: that that was not a factor in this. Um. People
Speaker 1: weren't doing that yet. Um. The people's of that part
Speaker 1: of Kenya and roughly eight thousand BC were hunter gatherers,
Speaker 1: or to be more specific, they were actually fisher foragers,
Speaker 1: not really like hunting in a big deal, because again
Speaker 1: there's it was a wet area at this point. It's
Speaker 1: very dry today, but it was there were a lot
Speaker 1: of like lakes and rivers that no longer exist in
Speaker 1: the area UM Today. The individuals who lived there and
Speaker 1: who were found in that mass grave are known as
Speaker 1: the natar Uk people UM, and they're believed to have
Speaker 1: roamed and made connections as far afield as the Nile
Speaker 1: Valley and the Maghreb Uh. It's worth noting that in
Speaker 1: the period they were killed, the Sahara was green. It
Speaker 1: was not yet a desert. For an example, like how
Speaker 1: fucking old this is? Like you could you could grow
Speaker 1: things in the Sahara UM. So yeah. Um. This also
Speaker 1: probably made travel simpler, which is why folks who were
Speaker 1: far away could make it to natar Uck Um. Now,
Speaker 1: we don't know who committed the massacre of these people,
Speaker 1: but as this right up from the Smithsonian magazine makes clear,
Speaker 1: it was done with great intention. The remains were submerged
Speaker 1: in a lagoon after they were killed, which helped preserve
Speaker 1: them and may suggest that the people who killed them
Speaker 1: wanted to hide what they had done. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe there was some ritual thing there. We don't really know, um,
Speaker 1: but it don't looked like other graves that had been
Speaker 1: found in the area at the time. Hide from who,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly quote uh, it's not clear that anyone was
Speaker 1: spared at the not A Rock massacre. Of the twenty
Speaker 1: seven individuals found, eight were male and eight female, with
Speaker 1: five adults of unknown gender. The site also contained the
Speaker 1: partial remains of six children. Twelve of the skeletons were
Speaker 1: in a relatively complete state. Ten of those showed very
Speaker 1: clear evidence that they had met a violent end. Um.
Speaker 1: In the paper, the researchers described quote extreme blunt force,
Speaker 1: trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs,
Speaker 1: arrow allegiance to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged
Speaker 1: in the skull and thorax of two men. Four of them,
Speaker 1: including a late term pregnant women, appear to have had
Speaker 1: their hands bound. Um. It's noted by the archaeologists that
Speaker 1: the killers carried weapons that would not have been used
Speaker 1: for hunting and fishing, so that this was These were
Speaker 1: not people like using kind of the tools that they
Speaker 1: used for other stuff for violence. These were people who
Speaker 1: brought special things meant to kill human beings UM. Mirazon
Speaker 1: Lar notes that there were a number of like close
Speaker 1: proximity weapons like knives UM, and that this is kind
Speaker 1: of a hallmark of intergroup conflict, as was the brutality
Speaker 1: of the killings right um like it suggests a degree
Speaker 1: of like uh ferocity UM. The use of these weapons,
Speaker 1: Laar notes also suggests premeditation and planning. She goes on
Speaker 1: to suggest that given the resources employed, the people of
Speaker 1: Natarup were likely massacred for their own resources. Right. This
Speaker 1: was not like a simple thing for people in this
Speaker 1: period to get together the kind of equipment they used
Speaker 1: for this. UM, Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna
Speaker 1: say that tracks. Um. What's unique is even in situations
Speaker 1: where and we'll we'll talk about this more. I'm sure
Speaker 1: when we get the perpetrators and there and their motivations
Speaker 1: is um, even mass atrocity crimes or mass murders UM
Speaker 1: are are done. Is normally like women and children are taken,
Speaker 1: especially during this time period for very obvious reasons. I
Speaker 1: won't go into UM. And the men are killed because
Speaker 1: with the men is the identity of of of the area.
Speaker 1: But the reason why you're killing them is to take
Speaker 1: their ship. Yes, so that all that all makes perfect
Speaker 1: sense to me in my very very broken mind. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but it does, like I think the thing that's
Speaker 1: like this is not this does not look purely like
Speaker 1: you have two groups who have like a like a
Speaker 1: conflict over over something like this is there's a lot
Speaker 1: of evidence of that kind of violence, and it does
Speaker 1: not look quite like this. Like there's a reason why
Speaker 1: this is noted as different. Again, the killing of like
Speaker 1: women and and and children, pregnant people, the fact that
Speaker 1: like they were kids, like people were bound and executed,
Speaker 1: that all looks um again, just like it's it's more
Speaker 1: complete than the kind of violence that is, I guess
Speaker 1: you'd say, more normal around people in between people in
Speaker 1: this period. Even if you measure that against you know,
Speaker 1: the definitions would come however, many thousands of years later.
Speaker 1: That that hits it to a t. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: that that's the point that like Mirizon Lar makes is
Speaker 1: that um, her exact quote is this shows that two
Speaker 1: of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies, control
Speaker 1: of territory and resources, were probably the same for hunter gathers,
Speaker 1: and that we have underestimated their role in prehistory. Again,
Speaker 1: just the idea that like genocide uh goes back quite
Speaker 1: a bit. And that also, I mean one of the
Speaker 1: things that it is worth noting too, because when we
Speaker 1: think about genocide in a modern context, it's always nearly
Speaker 1: always framed as motivated by racism um. And it's like,
Speaker 1: obviously racism has played a significant role in many genocides, um,
Speaker 1: but just as as significant a role as pure venal greed,
Speaker 1: which we'll be talking about more in Part two. But
Speaker 1: like people want ship and that's a big part of
Speaker 1: why they do a genocide, and it's that goes back
Speaker 1: further than states UM. Obviously. I think one of the
Speaker 1: things that's I kind of thought about reading about this
Speaker 1: case is the mass graves recently uncovered parts of Ukraine,
Speaker 1: like Buka, and the fact that the killing of civilians
Speaker 1: who's hands were bound like that was one of the
Speaker 1: things that I thought of those pictures I saw of
Speaker 1: like corpses on the road with their hands bound, and
Speaker 1: then ten thousand years ago you have dead people with
Speaker 1: their hands bound in a mass grave outside of lake
Speaker 1: in Kenya. UM. These archaeologists saying it was probably because
Speaker 1: they wanted resources, and the Russian soldiers in buccus stealing
Speaker 1: every luxury item that that isn't nailed down, you know,
Speaker 1: like this is uh what people do. Yeah, specifically it's
Speaker 1: what I mean, especially in Kenya, it's extra state forces
Speaker 1: or I guess paramilitary forces, tribal military forces. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's still happening. And with the Boko Haramas, I
Speaker 1: think it's yeah, yeah, yeah, um, yeah, people are pretty consistent.
Speaker 1: You gotta give us that, um, unfortunately painfully depressingly consistent. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And obviously I think there's some people who might have
Speaker 1: some objections here. Um, because nobody doubts that ancient folks
Speaker 1: murdered each other in war. Um, that's pretty pretty widely accepted.
Speaker 1: But we consider genocide to be kind of going beyond that.
Speaker 1: You know, every king or warlord who like killed a
Speaker 1: shipload of people isn't necessarily considered like a committer of genocide.
Speaker 1: I think there's even a lot of debate about like
Speaker 1: whether or not you would consider like Genghis Khan like
Speaker 1: is a lot like it's the sacking of a city
Speaker 1: for the purposes he did the same as like the
Speaker 1: extermination of a of a race, and that's a that's
Speaker 1: a debatable point. So I think if we're gonna have
Speaker 1: a productive point productive talk about like genocide in an
Speaker 1: ancient context, we're gonna need to leap forward a bit
Speaker 1: to something that you, uh, spoilered a little bit. Spoiler
Speaker 1: is the wrong term for this, um, the definition of genocide.
Speaker 1: Spoiler alerts spoiler exactly. Yeah, that's yeah, that's He's the
Speaker 1: He's the single man with whom that word has its
Speaker 1: like linguistic origins. Um Limpcoln was a Holocaust survivor Um
Speaker 1: and he was an extremely delicated, dead cated, an intelligent man,
Speaker 1: and his crusade too to start what became like not
Speaker 1: just the concept of genocide as like a legal term,
Speaker 1: but the the Genocide Convention actually started way before the
Speaker 1: Holocaust got going in nineteen thirty three, which is like
Speaker 1: the year the Nazis took power. So Lincoln, like I
Speaker 1: was aware of what was coming, you know, like he was,
Speaker 1: I mean he he had actually started his research about
Speaker 1: two decades before then. He was in law school, I
Speaker 1: believe the same in Poland, Um, when the the trial
Speaker 1: of Sagamantelerian was going on in Berlin. Yeah, to Leirian
Speaker 1: being the Turkish or no the Tolerian being the Armenian
Speaker 1: who assassinated one of the Turkish officials who was responsible
Speaker 1: for organizing the Armenian genocide. Yeah, he shot Talat Pasha
Speaker 1: and broad daylight in Berlin, UM with the sole purpose
Speaker 1: of going on trial admitting that he killed him and
Speaker 1: using it as a pulpit to talk about the genocide,
Speaker 1: which he successfully did day with Yeah, he's a cool dude.
Speaker 1: Yeah he rocks. Yeah. UM and Lemkin was watching this
Speaker 1: on well, reading it unfolding the newspaper, and he asked
Speaker 1: one of his professors, like, how a state could get
Speaker 1: away with doing this? Um? And why isn't more Turkish
Speaker 1: authorities on trial because none of them would ever stand trial. Uh.
Speaker 1: And his and his professor effectively believe in the in
Speaker 1: the sovereign idea that a sovereign could do with its
Speaker 1: people as they pleased and it wasn't any other states
Speaker 1: to tell them what to do. Um. And he immediately believed,
Speaker 1: I believe this is a nineteen something like that. He's like,
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem right to me. So by the time
Speaker 1: the Holocaust started and his family died in the Holocaust, UM,
Speaker 1: he had studied the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the
Speaker 1: natives in North America. Uh and uh He's like, this
Speaker 1: is you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but often fucking rhymes,
Speaker 1: and it's it's it's probably worth noting here too. We're
Speaker 1: we're getting a field from the ancient days. But in
Speaker 1: the same way that like limp Can started thinking about
Speaker 1: what a genocide was and started like, you know, attempting
Speaker 1: to get other people to talk about this as it like,
Speaker 1: as a crime and to kind of change attitudes about
Speaker 1: like that. Um, he was motivated and inspired by the
Speaker 1: same things that in a very different way, we're motivating
Speaker 1: and inspirational to Hitler, because Hitler also studied the genocide
Speaker 1: of the Native Americans and was like, oh, this seems cool, Um,
Speaker 1: this seems like a good way to get a bunch
Speaker 1: of land. And also Hitler was directly inspired by the
Speaker 1: genocide of the Armenians. I think his exact quote was
Speaker 1: like people were asking him like this is and this
Speaker 1: is I think from his table talk. But he was
Speaker 1: being asked by one of his officials like are we
Speaker 1: not going to get in trouble for this? And he
Speaker 1: was like, well, shit, who remembers the Armenians. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and not to mention they're only um, I mean during
Speaker 1: World War One, the German Empire had in the Ottoman Empire. Yes, ironically,
Speaker 1: one of them is the the main prime very resource
Speaker 1: for pictures about the Armenian genocide because he took pictures
Speaker 1: of it and smuggled them out. Yeah. And and then
Speaker 1: the German Empire committed genocide and Namibia a couple of
Speaker 1: years before that. Yeah yeah, yeah, Which we'll we'll talk
Speaker 1: about all of this in more detail at some point,
Speaker 1: but let's talk about the definition of genocide because people
Speaker 1: don't you know, Limpcoln's foresight is not widely appreciated, and
Speaker 1: it is not until nineteen forty four, um that it
Speaker 1: starts to like the kind of the stuff he's talking about,
Speaker 1: starts to gain more ground. And that's also the year
Speaker 1: that he proposes the term genocide to describe the destruction
Speaker 1: of a nation or ethnic group. Um. And this is
Speaker 1: one of those Greek Latin hodgepodge is that I think
Speaker 1: frustrates some linguistic nerds. Here he basically took the Greek
Speaker 1: word genos for race or tribe, and he merged it
Speaker 1: with Latin's side which obviously means killing. I think everyone
Speaker 1: knows that bit of latin. Um. So because of his
Speaker 1: tireless work, on December eleventh, ninety six, the United Nations
Speaker 1: General Assembly passed a resolution declaring genocide is the denial
Speaker 1: of the right of existence of entire human groups. Many
Speaker 1: instances of such crimes have occurred when racial, religious, political,
Speaker 1: or other groups have been destroyed entirely or in part. Um.
Speaker 1: Now that the definition of genocide that's kind of given
Speaker 1: there in that and this is the resolution is immediately challenged. UM.
Speaker 1: A number of nations, including the USSR, disliked the inclusion
Speaker 1: of political groups as victims of genocide for reasons that
Speaker 1: should be obvious, right, And that wording not that the
Speaker 1: USSR is the only state that killed a bunch of
Speaker 1: political groups. But yeah, the wording is was eventually dropped. Um.
Speaker 1: The argument was that the terms etymology excluded those groups
Speaker 1: because I mean and and that's not in a I
Speaker 1: think it's wrong, but that's not inaccurate, right, Like the
Speaker 1: word genocide does imply racial or national groups. UM. So
Speaker 1: it's not hard to see why, like a number of
Speaker 1: states were concerned about this. For example, was the killing
Speaker 1: of the Russian nobility a genocide. And this is an
Speaker 1: area in which like, well, yeah, I think it actually
Speaker 1: would be wrong to say that, like killing the royal
Speaker 1: family of Russia was a genocide. That seems weird to me. Um,
Speaker 1: But but like the killing is the killing of like
Speaker 1: the Ukrainian you know, starvation genocide, which was justified as
Speaker 1: the killing of like rich peasants. Is that a genocide? Sure,
Speaker 1: that's absolutely a genocide, and ironically, according to Raphael Imkin,
Speaker 1: it sure is. Yes, yes, um, so yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's obviously, like I think we can all agree how
Speaker 1: exactly to separate other mass killings from genocide is important
Speaker 1: because not all mass killings are the same, and we
Speaker 1: shouldn't call all of them genocides. But also I think
Speaker 1: it's also worth saying that like, yeah, political groups being
Speaker 1: massacred can absolutely be a genocide. And I mean that
Speaker 1: wasn't even the only thing that got stripped out of there.
Speaker 1: They also got rid of like then, umh Lemkin wrote
Speaker 1: about the concept of genocidal settler colonialism and genocidal slavery, yes,
Speaker 1: as well as assimilation as being a form of cultural genocide. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, like famously in North America, there was the
Speaker 1: saying kill the Indians saved child, which we all rightfully
Speaker 1: accept now as genocide. But yeah, well and then let
Speaker 1: Limpkin had that on there and again the US, the
Speaker 1: UK and the USSR. I was like, we'll pump the
Speaker 1: brakes somebow. None of all of the states that were
Speaker 1: responsible for like winning World War two also had vested
Speaker 1: interests in certain things not being called genocide because spoilers,
Speaker 1: they had all done genocides. As someone who holds a
Speaker 1: lot of stock in big genocide, I have a problem
Speaker 1: with Stephanie. Yeah ah man though it is a good
Speaker 1: time to be invested in genocide. Wow, doing better than Tesla.
Speaker 1: To be fair, I have a feeling that the white
Speaker 1: South Africa also holds stuck in the yea. UM. So
Speaker 1: when it comes to how we're going to define genocide
Speaker 1: for this UM, at least my proposition show UM. I
Speaker 1: want to go to scholar Irvan Staub And now Staub
Speaker 1: is another Holocaust survivor UM and his he wrote a
Speaker 1: really good book called UM The Origins of Evil UM,
Speaker 1: which goes over kind of what inspired perpetrators in a
Speaker 1: number of genocides. His book, in addition to talking about
Speaker 1: like Rwanda and Cambodia, and obviously the Holocaust includes the
Speaker 1: massacre of thousands, potentially tens of thousands of leftists in Argentina.
Speaker 1: Um in his study of Genocide and group violence. I
Speaker 1: like his book, and for our purposes, i'd like to suggest,
Speaker 1: using his definition, quote, genocide means an attempt to us
Speaker 1: exterminate a racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, or political group, either
Speaker 1: directly through murder or indirectly by creating conditions that lead
Speaker 1: to the group's destruction. Yeah. That that that that is
Speaker 1: very very close. Um it's like a simplified version of
Speaker 1: Lempkin's original. Yes, yes, and that's what that Staub says,
Speaker 1: like starts with Limpkin and says like, I think that
Speaker 1: what he was saying initially is is exactly right, and
Speaker 1: that's how we should be talking about this. Um So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's that's kind of where we're gonna go
Speaker 1: here or what that that that's what when we talk
Speaker 1: about genocide in this episode, that's more or less what
Speaker 1: we mean. Um So. I think obviously there's a strong
Speaker 1: case to be made for the Lake Turconom mass grave
Speaker 1: as evidence of genocide based on this, even though we
Speaker 1: clearly don't know the entire story there, um, but the
Speaker 1: presence of pregnant women, the elderly, young kids um all
Speaker 1: differentiates it from the kind of simple human on human
Speaker 1: violence that has occurred since forever. Um. We don't know
Speaker 1: exactly what happened, but we know that one armed group
Speaker 1: and and archaeologists think it was the people who carried
Speaker 1: out the genocide were from a distance away, right, Um,
Speaker 1: Like that they had traveled to get there, wanted to
Speaker 1: wipe out a different group of people, and that's that's
Speaker 1: a genocide. Um. Yeah, that shows pretty clear intense, like
Speaker 1: not taking the children or the women, which is very
Speaker 1: common during crimes like this, pretty shows pretty specific intense
Speaker 1: that these people would not can to you. Yes, uh.
Speaker 1: And there are other cases of probable ancient genocide. Obviously,
Speaker 1: all of them do lack the kind of context that
Speaker 1: we need for it to be like as kind of
Speaker 1: satisfying narratively, because there's just ship you don't know when
Speaker 1: you're talking about stuff from this far back. Um. One
Speaker 1: of the most uh, probably well known at least among archaeologists,
Speaker 1: involves the Yamnia people who occupied the Eurasian step north
Speaker 1: of the Black Sea between two and three thousand BC. Uh.
Speaker 1: There were certainly states that existed in the world in
Speaker 1: this period, but there were not in that area, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's no this is like kind of around like Ukraine,
Speaker 1: Poland that area, there's not in three thousand BC. There's
Speaker 1: not a Ukraine or a Poland. Right, there's not political
Speaker 1: entities in any way we would recognize UM in this area. Uh.
Speaker 1: So the Yamnia were an ethnic group who colonized large
Speaker 1: swats of Europe and stages over a period of centuries. UM.
Speaker 1: It's actually maybe even more accurate to kind of look
Speaker 1: at them as like a collection of ethnic groups. They
Speaker 1: were a culture, right. Um. This is all kind of
Speaker 1: confusing when we talk about what we'll get into like
Speaker 1: what archaeologists mean when they talk about like cultures here. Um.
Speaker 1: But as the Omnia flowed through the continent, a number
Speaker 1: of things changed dramatically and those parts of Europe. UM.
Speaker 1: So we can we can see evidence of like these
Speaker 1: people coming into the area, and we see very suddenly
Speaker 1: that existing burial practices in the area change. A warrior
Speaker 1: class appears, and like evidence of them in burials appears
Speaker 1: when they had not existed before UM. And we find
Speaker 1: more evidence of large numbers of people dying violent deaths.
Speaker 1: Christian Christiansen from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, UH tells
Speaker 1: New Scientists quote, I've become concreasingly convinced that there must
Speaker 1: have been a kind of genocide. Now again, there's not
Speaker 1: like cities or states or empires in Europe, and in
Speaker 1: this part of Europe, in this period, there's not written history,
Speaker 1: So we're talking about like archaeologists tend to talk about
Speaker 1: this in terms of like broad clashes between cultures. And
Speaker 1: one of the things we see in this period around
Speaker 1: It's BC is the violent replacement of what are called
Speaker 1: the globular Amphora culture, which is again a group of
Speaker 1: ethnic groups and people living in this region who are
Speaker 1: defined by the way in which they make pottery, by
Speaker 1: the corded wear culture, which is another type of pottery
Speaker 1: and is associated with another like Again, because this is
Speaker 1: so far ago, we don't have a lot of other content.
Speaker 1: Must we must return to a pottery based culture. We
Speaker 1: must become pottery based again. It would be funny to
Speaker 1: think about like people six thousand years writing about like
Speaker 1: the ziplock culture versus the UH the pyrex with a
Speaker 1: little plastic thing on top culture. What culture is this? Oh?
Speaker 1: You see he was in high school pottery class and
Speaker 1: he made a very bad attempt to make a bong.
Speaker 1: That was me. That was my culture. The water pipe
Speaker 1: culture versus the drilling a hole in an apple and
Speaker 1: putting in some tinfoil culture. This is the make a
Speaker 1: small dent in the top of a popkin cult, puncture
Speaker 1: in it. Oh. You know who else has culture? Joe?
Speaker 1: Oh no, Uh, probably nobody. That's coming next the products
Speaker 1: and services and support this podcast, Joe. They all come
Speaker 1: from the by things. Sophie's not looking happy with me here.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just not your best work. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: never is. You know who didn't Actually I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: you know who didn't benefit from a genocide? But you don't.
Speaker 1: We really, we really don't. Both Taser and the Washington
Speaker 1: State Highway Patrol have attempted to run ads on our network.
Speaker 1: Fant What were they supposed to do? Uh? Don't you
Speaker 1: want to, Fanta, Joe? I do. Here's some ads. Ah,
Speaker 1: we're back, and we're talking about how Europeans are a
Speaker 1: decadent and depraved people. Um, mainly because of beat sugar,
Speaker 1: serious sugar. The sugar based sweeteners. Yeah, absolutely not use
Speaker 1: corn syrup. Come on like a civilized people, and it
Speaker 1: needs to be so thick that it just stands on
Speaker 1: its own. If you cut the can away from the lakes,
Speaker 1: why are we even flavoring ship? Just give kids entire
Speaker 1: cans of pure corn syrup. Let him suck it out
Speaker 1: and then smoke out of the cans. Actually, this is
Speaker 1: why my life act is I I pull up to
Speaker 1: the ethanol pumps. That's the that's just corn sugar for cars.
Speaker 1: I do think it straight from the tap. Baby do
Speaker 1: it all? Why Why isn't everything corn yet? That's my question.
Speaker 1: A lot of things are corn, but why isn't everything? Um?
Speaker 1: These are We are the corn culture. That is what
Speaker 1: archaeologists will be calling us. This whole society rapidly degenerated
Speaker 1: and turned into a corn cut, turned to do a
Speaker 1: cord cup. Um. So yeah, we're talking about b c E.
Speaker 1: The violent replacement of the globular Amphora culture with the
Speaker 1: corded war culture, and the Omnia are kind of associated
Speaker 1: with the cord war culture. This is all complicated archaeology here,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from a write up
Speaker 1: in the Journal of anthropology and this is a specifically
Speaker 1: an article that's like looking at a mass grave from
Speaker 1: this period where one culture is being replaced by another.
Speaker 1: We sequence the genomes of fifteen skeletons from a five
Speaker 1: thousand year old mass grave in Poland associated with the
Speaker 1: globular Amphora culture. All individuals had been brutally killed by
Speaker 1: blows to the head, but buried with great care. Genome
Speaker 1: white analyzes demonstrate that this was a large extended family
Speaker 1: and that the people who buried them knew them well.
Speaker 1: Mothers are buried with their children and siblings next to
Speaker 1: each other. From a population genetic viewpoint, the individuals are
Speaker 1: clearly distinct from neighboring corded war groups because of their
Speaker 1: lack of step related ancestry. Although the reason for the
Speaker 1: massacre is unknown, it is possible that it was connected
Speaker 1: to the expansion of courted where groups which may have
Speaker 1: resulted in violent conflict and the fact that they're loved
Speaker 1: ones got to them kind of suggests this was part
Speaker 1: of a series of like raids and clashes that were
Speaker 1: meant to wipe them out. That like this community was
Speaker 1: you know, attacked, killed found by their relatives as part
Speaker 1: of like an ongoing struggle that eventually led to the
Speaker 1: replacement of one group with another, you know, which is
Speaker 1: pretty genocide. Yeah, I mean, I think um. Scott Strauss
Speaker 1: wrote in his book Prevention on Genocide UM Prevention of Genocide,
Speaker 1: which you can actually download for free at the U S.
Speaker 1: Holocustomeral Museum website dope, but he said one of the
Speaker 1: major genocile risk factors is a history of conflict within groups.
Speaker 1: So uh yeah, that that tracks, especially if you're existing
Speaker 1: all on like a step, fighting over the same resources offential,
Speaker 1: and you're like, this would be a lot easier if
Speaker 1: those people simply didn't exist. Boy, I have to say,
Speaker 1: Joe that I do. I do. I'm happy that a
Speaker 1: book with the title and uh thesis, how to Prevent
Speaker 1: Genocide is available for free and not pay Walt, Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't pay all that, huh. I think. I think
Speaker 1: something has to be said for academics that realized that, like,
Speaker 1: nobody's gonna pay for our ship and if my and
Speaker 1: if my field of study is how to prevent genocide,
Speaker 1: perhaps this this work should be widely available. Um. So
Speaker 1: further research by two separate teams, writing in Nature magazine
Speaker 1: in two thousand and fifteen, UH came to a came
Speaker 1: to similar conclusions that an influx of herders from the
Speaker 1: steps of what are now Russia and Ukraine replaced a
Speaker 1: huge amount of the gene pool in central and western
Speaker 1: Europe and around three thousand BC, really more like hundred
Speaker 1: But you know, um, this coincided with the disappearance of
Speaker 1: Neolithic pottery and burial styles, as well as other cultural
Speaker 1: artifacts that had been seen earlier. I'm winning out those
Speaker 1: last couple of things, the change in burials and the
Speaker 1: change in artifacts, because again that's evidence of a genocide.
Speaker 1: This culture is being wiped out. Um. Now. Part of
Speaker 1: why this has been controversial with scholars is that the
Speaker 1: theories proposed now by Christiansen and others based on this
Speaker 1: research are similar to some of the ideas of a
Speaker 1: guy named Gustaf Cosina. UH. Cosina was an early twentieth
Speaker 1: century archaeologist in Germany whose ideas were integral to the
Speaker 1: formation of Nazi race science. UM. Now, obviously the Naya
Speaker 1: are not Arians. They again would probably look more like
Speaker 1: Slavs um, which the Nazis did not think. We're a
Speaker 1: master race slip. But the Nazis bestowed like honorary arian
Speaker 1: status on so many random groups of people, from Palestinians
Speaker 1: to Armenians. Yes, I mean to to Tibet where they
Speaker 1: like where a lot of Nazi race science started. Was
Speaker 1: them like hanging out in these monasteries in Tibet and
Speaker 1: being like these must be the ancient arians. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of just like us. Yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of Again, Nazis not great scientists, except with rockets. You
Speaker 1: gotta give them, you gotta give them the rockets. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm starting to think, and Robert quickly if I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: the guys who believed in eugenics. Eugenics might not be
Speaker 1: the smartest people on Earth. No, No, they weren't good
Speaker 1: at a lot of things. Um. But yeah, So this
Speaker 1: is part of why, like it's been uh difficult to
Speaker 1: to to kind of push this along. But it does
Speaker 1: seem like there's a significant amount of scholarship that like,
Speaker 1: again there's and this is not we're focusing on Europe
Speaker 1: in all of this so far, just because I mean,
Speaker 1: we started with Africa, but like that's where the majority
Speaker 1: of the scholarship has happened. One has to assume all
Speaker 1: throughout Asia all throughout the Middle East, Southeast Asia, other
Speaker 1: parts of Africa, Latin America. You know, there's genocides all
Speaker 1: over all throughout history in every part of the world.
Speaker 1: It's like a thing that people do. We're just kind
Speaker 1: of talking about what we've got some documentation of. Like
Speaker 1: obviously there were genocides in Mesoamerica long before um, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: the fourteen hundreds, and there were genocides and the Middle
Speaker 1: East from the day that there were cities, um, like
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's just there's there's a positive positivist uh
Speaker 1: train of thoughts in the field that says that, like
Speaker 1: within genocide prevention that believes that, um, genocide is like
Speaker 1: one of the natural states of man and uh, you
Speaker 1: know in modern day you can work to prevent that, yes, hypothetically,
Speaker 1: seeing how we seem to be very exceedingly bad at
Speaker 1: doing that. Yeah, we're not good at preventing it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's probably worth acknowledging that, Like you are trying to
Speaker 1: prevent something that we've been doing for forever, which is
Speaker 1: always hard to do. It's like, yeah, preventing people from fighting,
Speaker 1: you know, like we we were pretty good at Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there's also of this, UM, this idea that it's
Speaker 1: like okay, well, how can you prove that you prevented one?
Speaker 1: Like how can you prove prove something that didn't happen?
Speaker 1: Like okay, well, what about these things would you rather
Speaker 1: be wrong about? I mean, it's it is. It is
Speaker 1: the same we talked about, like how to prevent mass
Speaker 1: shootings um. And there's a bunch of different things on
Speaker 1: the table when it comes to like what kind of
Speaker 1: like social programs and like interventions can like stop kids
Speaker 1: who might be on the path to being willing to
Speaker 1: do something like that. One of the problems is that, well,
Speaker 1: if you successfully like intervene and a kid doesn't decide
Speaker 1: they want to do something like that, you never know, right,
Speaker 1: like like you don't get the data that like, oh
Speaker 1: the fact that like this teacher you know, sat down
Speaker 1: and talked with this kid stopped them from doing this
Speaker 1: this fucked up thing, or stop them from going down
Speaker 1: a path where they get on four Chan and get
Speaker 1: radicalized to do this, or like we just don't get that,
Speaker 1: which makes it harder to like develop good programs to
Speaker 1: stop stuff like that. UM. That's one that's one thing
Speaker 1: we need to steal from cops. And that's like because
Speaker 1: I used to be a medic, so it was one
Speaker 1: of those I worked the firefighters all the time, and
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that like whenever there's not
Speaker 1: a lot of fires, um, like, well we can cut
Speaker 1: the budget from the fire department whenever they don't need
Speaker 1: that money. But but like whenever you know, crime goes down,
Speaker 1: it's never like, well, clearly we actually don't need that
Speaker 1: many cops or cops at all. It's well, we need
Speaker 1: to keep funding the cops because crime is down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the answers always give those guys more money, just
Speaker 1: like the answers to uh war in genocide or always
Speaker 1: give the military's more money. Right. Yeah, It's like maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know, there's a there's a middle ground in
Speaker 1: there somewhere we could try something a little different. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. So at any rate, I think this
Speaker 1: establishes that, like genocide, canon has existed outside the structure
Speaker 1: of state violence. UM. Now, in Part two, we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about some of the things that, presumably since
Speaker 1: time and memorial, have made individual humans capable of taking
Speaker 1: part in genocide. Um. But for now, I want to
Speaker 1: move out of prehistory into just kind of early history
Speaker 1: and talk about what some historians will suggest was the
Speaker 1: first modern genocide UM, the elimination of Carthage in one
Speaker 1: BC by the Roman Republic UM. And when I this
Speaker 1: is not obviously the first genocide by one state against
Speaker 1: you know, people of another state, UM, but it is
Speaker 1: very modern in part because Rome was a republic, and
Speaker 1: so an awful lot of what goes on in the
Speaker 1: genocide of Carthage sounds very familiar. UM. And the fact
Speaker 1: that I've picked this is influenced by the work of
Speaker 1: Australian born historian Ben Kiernan, who's currently director of Genocide
Speaker 1: Studies program at Yale UH. He got his start in
Speaker 1: genocide when he visited Cambodia before the coming of the
Speaker 1: camer Rouge UH, and then afterwards he traveled around the country,
Speaker 1: he learned the camer language, he carried out extensive research
Speaker 1: and interviewed a whole bunch of people about like what
Speaker 1: had happened um. Ben posits that the first recorded incitement
Speaker 1: to genocide were the words of Roman politician Marcus Porteus Cato, who,
Speaker 1: for the last four years of his life, ended every
Speaker 1: single public speech with the words Delinda est Carthago or
Speaker 1: Carthage must be destroyed. Um. Now to explain like what
Speaker 1: happened here, we're going to have to go back into
Speaker 1: classic history a little bit, which I know is both
Speaker 1: you use in my jam. Um. Yeah, I love this
Speaker 1: ship not genocide, but you know Roman history. I was
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, uh, it isn't It is an
Speaker 1: amazing field to work. And when you can say, yeah,
Speaker 1: he got his start in genocide, and I'm like, I
Speaker 1: know what, I know what, Robert, Yeah, Yeah, we're talking
Speaker 1: about Cato baby, and Kato is so because he's such
Speaker 1: a modern right wing ship head politician, like he's every
Speaker 1: like so much of what he does is like, well,
Speaker 1: that could be a fucking dude today. Um. Because Rome
Speaker 1: is in a lot of ways a very modern political
Speaker 1: entity in this period, like republican Rome. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of things that sound very familiar because it turns like
Speaker 1: whenever people develop a republic h that's based primarily around
Speaker 1: resource extraction, certain things are super similar. Sometimes history is
Speaker 1: a big dumb loop. Yeah. So, Carthage was a port
Speaker 1: city on the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near
Speaker 1: where the modern city of Tunis is today. Um, the
Speaker 1: fact that like Carthage is in Africa and Rome is
Speaker 1: Rome makes them sound very distant. They are four hundred
Speaker 1: miles away. That is the difference between San Francisco and
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. And if you've seen how people from San
Speaker 1: Francisco talk about l A, you'll understand how genocidal desire
Speaker 1: could erupt between the two cities. But yeah, these are
Speaker 1: not like far but like obviously it's further back then,
Speaker 1: but like you could fly from from one city to
Speaker 1: the other in about like an hour like today. Even
Speaker 1: back then they could float. It's not that far. Back then,
Speaker 1: they could float their shitty glued together across the net
Speaker 1: at one another. It's not it's not hard to get
Speaker 1: to even then, which is why the war happens right. Um.
Speaker 1: So while Rome was from the beginning a land military
Speaker 1: power expanded through force, Carthage Carthage was first a mercantile
Speaker 1: power with trade routes. Again, they're in northern Africa, they're
Speaker 1: trading with people in modern day Britain. Um. Like their
Speaker 1: their trade routes almost extended like Scotland. And of course
Speaker 1: they're like as far down in Africa as gabon Um
Speaker 1: now in my very right wing history classes in Texas,
Speaker 1: I tended to learn what was more or less the
Speaker 1: propaganda line about these wars, which is that the Carthaginians
Speaker 1: are these brutal child sacrificing Eastern devils and the war
Speaker 1: between them in Rome is like what, this is the
Speaker 1: first war between the West and the East, and it's
Speaker 1: what makes the birth of the democratic West possible, Like
Speaker 1: this is the start of all of our wonderful traditions.
Speaker 1: They had to like beat these barbarians, which is that
Speaker 1: hurts my brain? Nonsense um that that is I actually
Speaker 1: started uh community college when I was in Texas because
Speaker 1: I was in the army, and that tracks my experience
Speaker 1: in Texas history. That is its horseshit um. Obviously, Carthage
Speaker 1: is a massive, like imperial aristocratic power that does all
Speaker 1: sorts of fucked up ship, including like human sacrifice and stuff.
Speaker 1: Um Roman this period has stopped doing human sacrifice as
Speaker 1: a religious thing. But they also are a gigantic slave
Speaker 1: power that brutally oppressives and like enslaves entire racial groups
Speaker 1: of people during conflicts. Like neither of them is better
Speaker 1: than the others. There's not a good guy here, like
Speaker 1: they're just both and it's like it's also I'm like,
Speaker 1: I think pointless to call one the bad guy. They're
Speaker 1: just two early states fighting a war over resources, right Like,
Speaker 1: that's what's happened. There's no point in drawing a moral
Speaker 1: line between. All of their wars are over like proxy
Speaker 1: city states. And that's exactly what we're about to talk.
Speaker 1: This isn't about democrat, this is not this is not
Speaker 1: not in any way. Um, Carthage was the great naval
Speaker 1: power of the region, like they kind of own the
Speaker 1: Mediterranean in this period, while Rome in Rome always is
Speaker 1: an infantry power, right like, that's the core of Roman
Speaker 1: like military power is like heavy infantry um in this
Speaker 1: period and basically up until like the fall of the Empire,
Speaker 1: that's the thing that their best at. Whenever Rome has
Speaker 1: anything good that's not heavy infantry, it's because they like
Speaker 1: higher auxiliaries from another culture, like all of their good cavalry,
Speaker 1: all of their good archers they're good at. They're also
Speaker 1: really good at artillery, although that's kind of less of
Speaker 1: a factor in this period, but they get very very
Speaker 1: good at artillery to um. But yeah, so Carthage has
Speaker 1: the boats, Rome has the dudes who hit people with swords, right,
Speaker 1: that's their strengths. Broadly speaking, the two states actually got
Speaker 1: along pretty well for a while. Carthage had some wars
Speaker 1: with Greeks, which Rome was fine with because Rome was
Speaker 1: bathering battling Italians. Again, Rome is not Italy at this point, right,
Speaker 1: most of Rome's wars are with Italians. They call them Galls,
Speaker 1: but they're like dudes from northern Italy, right, they're my ancestors,
Speaker 1: Transalpine gall. You know, it becomes a big issue. Like
Speaker 1: at one point Caesar allows them into Senate and the
Speaker 1: Romans are like these barbarians. There's Italian this is something
Speaker 1: that hasn't changed. Again, there's nothing that Romans hate more
Speaker 1: than Italians, and there's nothing more than Romans. So um, yeah,
Speaker 1: the the Carthage Rome get along for a while where
Speaker 1: they're they're doing all these other wars. But then some
Speaker 1: ship goes down in Sicily. Now, if you're not a geographyzer,
Speaker 1: Sicily is the American football that's being kicked by Italy, right,
Speaker 1: if you think about think about that. So at the time,
Speaker 1: Sicily is primarily a Carthaginian province. It's not right there
Speaker 1: to think it's not like Sicily is like part of
Speaker 1: Carthage in the way that we would consider like Oklahoma
Speaker 1: part of the United States, but they have like the
Speaker 1: influence there um. But both powers get kind of drawn
Speaker 1: into a conflict because one city in in Sicily, Syracuse,
Speaker 1: goes to war with another city in Sicily, messina Um,
Speaker 1: and like Syracuse sins soldiers to attack messina Um, Carthage
Speaker 1: back Syracuse, Rome backs messina and they get drawn into
Speaker 1: a war that starts as like this kind of like
Speaker 1: proxy fight. It's more complicated than that, but you really
Speaker 1: don't need to know the details unless you want to
Speaker 1: go read about the Punic wars. So Rome puts together
Speaker 1: a big fleet to go fight the Carthaginians and they
Speaker 1: just get mass instantly massacred. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: fun about Rome is that this is along this is
Speaker 1: like a proud part of their military tradition. A war starts,
Speaker 1: they build this massive military thing, it gets wiped out
Speaker 1: to the man and then they're like, all right, I
Speaker 1: guess we'll do it again, and we don't care about
Speaker 1: our lives and like. But that is why Rome becomes
Speaker 1: the big world power in this region, is because they're
Speaker 1: the best at like having an entire armies wiped out,
Speaker 1: to the man and going like, all right, back to
Speaker 1: the drawing board, let's do another one, you know, And
Speaker 1: that's what they do. It takes them like twenty years
Speaker 1: to rebuild their fleet, but they eventually grind down the
Speaker 1: Carthaginian navy and they win the war, and they win
Speaker 1: sicily Um, which Sicilians have rude ever since. So this
Speaker 1: leads to the Second Punic War, and a key moment
Speaker 1: in the Second Punic War, the one everyone knows about
Speaker 1: is you've got this Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca who crossed
Speaker 1: is the Alps with some elephants and a bunch of dudes,
Speaker 1: and he attacks Italy. Uh, he threatens Rome for a while.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty impressive campaign. It includes the Massacre. So
Speaker 1: there's this battle called canny Um can I you know,
Speaker 1: nobody whatever, how are you want to say it, where
Speaker 1: there's this Roman army that outnumbers the Carthaginians two to one,
Speaker 1: but Hannibal does what's called a double envelopment and completely
Speaker 1: surrounds them and like wipes them out in one of
Speaker 1: it's still probably the most famous defeat in military history
Speaker 1: up until World War Two. Like you can find all
Speaker 1: generals on every side of that war talking about trying
Speaker 1: to pull off a cane I. Um yeah, Like I
Speaker 1: think someone did the math, and it's a historian. Historian
Speaker 1: I'm not a huge fan of, but they said that
Speaker 1: the massacre at can I was it was like six
Speaker 1: Romans died every hour until from sunrise the sunset. It
Speaker 1: is a calculable percentage of the entire population of Rome
Speaker 1: that dies in this battle, like a meaningful percentage. Um.
Speaker 1: It's like it goes really badly. And again, the strength
Speaker 1: of him is that they keep like this happens to
Speaker 1: them a bunch in Roman history, and they're like, all right,
Speaker 1: we got more guys. Um. So Rome eventually grinds Carthage down.
Speaker 1: Hannibal's armies are beaten because they get pulled back to
Speaker 1: Africa because the dude named Scipio Africanus invades and there's
Speaker 1: this whole battle called zama Uh. It's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: neat history if you want to read into it. So
Speaker 1: by the end of the war, Rome has lost like
Speaker 1: a lot of a generation of young men and they're
Speaker 1: pretty pissed at the Carthaginians. This is not wildly dissimilar
Speaker 1: from how a lot of folks in Europe felt at
Speaker 1: the end of World War One. Right, we lost like
Speaker 1: a huge chunk of a generation fighting you guys. We
Speaker 1: don't just want like to shake hands and and in
Speaker 1: this thing, you know, like fuck you. That's the attitude. Um. So,
Speaker 1: a surrender is negotiated, and under the terms of the surrender,
Speaker 1: Carthage loses all of its territory outside of North Africa,
Speaker 1: they have to give up their fleet, and they have
Speaker 1: to pay a large war debt to Rome. Um. And
Speaker 1: so you know, this is again you could like kind
Speaker 1: of look at this as there's shades of Versailles in
Speaker 1: this um And from this point on Carthage is realistically
Speaker 1: no kind of military threat to Row, right, Like that
Speaker 1: is not happening after this point. Um. Now, up through
Speaker 1: this period in the fighting between them, these are the
Speaker 1: first and second punic wars is what they're called, right.
Speaker 1: The first one is the fighting of our sicily. The
Speaker 1: second one is hannibal. Up through this point, there's not
Speaker 1: a good guy or a bad guy in this story.
Speaker 1: You know, that's two assholes beating each other up over
Speaker 1: her treasure. It's what happens after this point that's fascinating,
Speaker 1: because while Rome is very much an aristocratic state and
Speaker 1: calling it a democracy or even a republic, it is
Speaker 1: a republic, but like people tend to exaggerate what that
Speaker 1: means when they talk about it. Um. It is one
Speaker 1: of the first nations on Earth with proper politicians in
Speaker 1: the modern sense of the word, guys who you could
Speaker 1: like pull on the TV and see dudes doing some
Speaker 1: of the same ship today. Right. That is one of
Speaker 1: the things that's really interesting about studying Rome in this period.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to Marcus Porcius Cato, better known
Speaker 1: as Kato the Elder and Kato the Wise. He was
Speaker 1: a famous conservative politician who railed against Greek culture for
Speaker 1: its decadent influence on Romans. He was kind of like
Speaker 1: Victor Davis Hansen, who's a modern right wing historian. If
Speaker 1: you smushed him up with like some Dan Crenshaw and
Speaker 1: like a dash of Ted Cruz, oh my god, you're
Speaker 1: just vultron together the worst guy, and he is. He
Speaker 1: is the worst guy. He sucks so bad. Um. He
Speaker 1: was legitimately a soldier and a pretty competent one. He
Speaker 1: fought in the Second Punic War. He commanded troops, and
Speaker 1: he spent the years after the Second Punic War. So
Speaker 1: I just mentioned. The guy who wins the Second Punic
Speaker 1: War from Rome is a dude named Scipio Africanus, who's
Speaker 1: generally seen as one of like the best generals in
Speaker 1: military history because Hannibal pretty good at war um, and
Speaker 1: Scipio beats him in a in a fair fight. Uh.
Speaker 1: Cato spends the like years after the war hounding Scipio
Speaker 1: into the grave and basically like repeatedly encouraged like accusing
Speaker 1: him of corruption uh and like profligacy and like wasting resources. Um.
Speaker 1: And he writes histories of the Punic Wars and deletes
Speaker 1: not only Scipio's name but every other person involved named Skipio,
Speaker 1: which is like a common first name. It's like if
Speaker 1: you it's like if you're writing a World War two
Speaker 1: history and you hated Pattents, so you cut out all
Speaker 1: the George is I need to be clear here, I
Speaker 1: actually support that that that fuck George's right, right, and
Speaker 1: fuck Patten. But yes, Cato sucks, But you do have
Speaker 1: to admire this sheerless level. It's very petty he's an
Speaker 1: incredibly petty dude. Um So, he's a he's the pettiest
Speaker 1: man alive. And in one b C he gets elected Console,
Speaker 1: which is like pretty much the top of the Roman structure.
Speaker 1: You have sensors to every now and again when they
Speaker 1: do this census, but like consoles basically like as as
Speaker 1: as it's it's like the prime if there were multiple
Speaker 1: prime ministers and they got to command armies. That's kind
Speaker 1: of what a console is. Right there there's two of them, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and they're both political and military leaders. Again, it's the
Speaker 1: top of the Roman political structures called the curses on
Speaker 1: our um um and it's like it'says, it's like the time.
Speaker 1: If you're in politics, your goal is to get to
Speaker 1: be console one day. Right, that's like as as good
Speaker 1: as it gets. Um So, while he's consul in one five,
Speaker 1: he takes command of Roman legions in Spain because Spain
Speaker 1: rebels Spain rebels a lot. It's called Iberia. At this point.
Speaker 1: There's actually not any kind of Spanish identity at this moment,
Speaker 1: right because Iberia is huge and people who are in
Speaker 1: like the deserts of Zaragoza have no particular identity with
Speaker 1: the people who are like on the north coast of
Speaker 1: Spain or whatever, right like, they don't even they don't
Speaker 1: know what the fuss going on with those motherfucker's um.
Speaker 1: But Spain is rebelling at this point, and he takes
Speaker 1: over the military um and he, you know, he does
Speaker 1: a number of things that we would call war crimes today.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you'd call them. They're not really
Speaker 1: out of step with military tactics in the day, but
Speaker 1: they're pretty brutal. Um. I'm gonna quote from Ben Kiernan here.
Speaker 1: He was a courageous and effective general, noted for his
Speaker 1: cruelty towards his defeated enemies. Livy sympathize. Kato had more
Speaker 1: difficulties subduing the enemy because he had, as it were,
Speaker 1: to reclaim them like slaves who had asserted their freedom.
Speaker 1: Kato commanded his officers in Spain to force this nation
Speaker 1: to accept again the yoke which it has cast off.
Speaker 1: In one battle, Livy estimate sites an estimate of forty
Speaker 1: enemy killed. When seven towns rebelled, Kato marched his army
Speaker 1: against them and brought them under control without any fighting
Speaker 1: worth recording. But after they again revolted. He ensured that
Speaker 1: the conquered were not granted the same pardon as before.
Speaker 1: They were all sold by public auction. Now again, under
Speaker 1: like the definitions we've cited of genocide, you could you
Speaker 1: could make a case that he's doing some genocides here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially um, if we're going off modern definitions,
Speaker 1: like we're the the i c C or i C
Speaker 1: j uh identifies rightfully identifies Sabernitza as an active genocide
Speaker 1: unto itself. So like there can be micro cosms of
Speaker 1: genocidal acts, so this would absolutely count as one, yes,
Speaker 1: for sure, especially the you know, killing for two thousand
Speaker 1: people may not be a genocide depending on the situation
Speaker 1: in which you do it. For example, Hannibal killed a
Speaker 1: similar number of Romans and that was not really a genocide.
Speaker 1: I think it was. It was a lot of Roman um,
Speaker 1: but enslaving an entire region of people and marching because
Speaker 1: you're taking them away from where they live too, you're
Speaker 1: marching them out like that is an act even if
Speaker 1: you're not killing them, it's an act of genocide. You're
Speaker 1: destroying the culture, right um. In the same way that
Speaker 1: like what American slave owners would do to to Africans
Speaker 1: who were brought into the like that was an act
Speaker 1: of genocide, even though they were not trying to murder
Speaker 1: those people because they were a resource, right, it's still genocidal.
Speaker 1: You strength them of their culture, it's not you're not
Speaker 1: gonna allowed to propagate anyway, just like you know, slave
Speaker 1: owners force yeah, slaves to take white names, adopt Christianity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is this is one of those. Because there's
Speaker 1: areas in which Roman slavery is very similar to because
Speaker 1: there's chattel slavery is a huge part of Roman slavery,
Speaker 1: and that's very similar to ship you see in the America.
Speaker 1: And there's areas where it's different. For example, an awful
Speaker 1: lot of Greeks sold themselves into slavery because it was
Speaker 1: a pretty good deal. If you were like selling yourself
Speaker 1: to a rich family to like teach their kids and
Speaker 1: stuff like, that's a great gig, you know. Um, it's
Speaker 1: Roman slavery is very complicated in a way that like
Speaker 1: slavery in the America's is not. But this chunk of
Speaker 1: Roman slavery is very similar, especially because some Roman slaves
Speaker 1: could attain their freedom while others certainly could yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean if you're one of the things that's interesting if
Speaker 1: you're talking about like urban Roman slaves, how slaves, right,
Speaker 1: they usually if they lived, you know, in the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: so would get their freedom. And a lot of the
Speaker 1: wealthiest people in the city of Rome were either former
Speaker 1: slaves or descendants of slaves. Because for those people, it
Speaker 1: was like it was like a paid internship. You would
Speaker 1: be a slave for like ten, fifteen, twenty years, you
Speaker 1: would get money when you were freed, and the person
Speaker 1: who had owned you would have to pay you money
Speaker 1: the rest of their life. Now you would have to
Speaker 1: support them in a number of ways politically and stuff.
Speaker 1: There was this client system that was built up, but
Speaker 1: it allowed a lot of people who started successful mercantile
Speaker 1: businesses were able to do so because they got their
Speaker 1: training while they were a slave, and then they got
Speaker 1: funding from their former owner to start a business. And
Speaker 1: as a freed slave, you can't hold political office, but
Speaker 1: you can vote and your kids can hold hold full
Speaker 1: political office. Right, So a lot of the wealthiest, most
Speaker 1: powerful families in Rome do have like a slave that
Speaker 1: was like their granddad or something like that, because it
Speaker 1: is it's not like racial slavery, right, the Romans think
Speaker 1: about it in those terms anyway, just it's it's a
Speaker 1: very interesting thing anthropologically, and if they grabbed a slave
Speaker 1: and whatever, you know, you happen to be educated, you
Speaker 1: would probably like half of the like I'm not exactly
Speaker 1: sure the numbers, but a large amount of early civil
Speaker 1: Roman society was slaves. Yeah, it's a huge the accountants, bureaucrats, whatever.
Speaker 1: And this is occurring at the same time as like
Speaker 1: when someone like Cato En slaves tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: people in a in a in an uprising or something.
Speaker 1: Those folks are like being right to minds or or
Speaker 1: fields where they're worked to death, right like, which is
Speaker 1: very familiar to some of like some of the worst
Speaker 1: slavery that's ever anyway, And Roman is interesting. And even
Speaker 1: in the best case scenario here, let's say you know,
Speaker 1: ten thousand, and that's a very high number of these
Speaker 1: people are educated, their literate, you know, their aristocrats and
Speaker 1: whatever town they came from. At best, if they don't
Speaker 1: get you know, put into the minds to die, which
Speaker 1: is legitimately when the worst slavery gigs you could get
Speaker 1: in rome Um because it's like where they would send
Speaker 1: rejected gladiators and ships to the minds too, But you
Speaker 1: would go into Roman society and have to adopt Roman culture,
Speaker 1: Roman customs, Roman language, all of these things in order
Speaker 1: to continue to survive. So that's still a genocide. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a Roman history, real neat um. You know what
Speaker 1: else is neat Oh? No, services that port this podcast,
Speaker 1: who also have enslaved a couple of towns in Iberia
Speaker 1: after crushing a brutal uprising. You know what products and
Speaker 1: services might not send you to the minds, Oh, for
Speaker 1: sure will. They'll put you right in those minds. Look,
Speaker 1: you don't get the kind of quality smoked salmon that
Speaker 1: puts out and they're smoked salmon breakfast platter without a
Speaker 1: lot of people dying to mine lithium. They're going to
Speaker 1: mail you a pre prepared box with a tiny pick
Speaker 1: X in it. That's how you get involved with you
Speaker 1: mind it, we ship it program. Anyway, here's atsuh, we're back.
Speaker 1: So obviously Kato what what the kind of stuff Kato
Speaker 1: was doing in Iberia? You can find a number of
Speaker 1: cases of that stuff like that happening in this period
Speaker 1: by Romans and by other generals. It is worth, noting
Speaker 1: that his peers, who are also Roman military commanders, are like,
Speaker 1: this guy is pretty cruel to his defeated enemies, you know.
Speaker 1: And again, Rome is the country that when they had
Speaker 1: a slave uprising, crucified the entire slave army of thousands
Speaker 1: and lined their corpses up for miles along the via Appia, right,
Speaker 1: And they're those guys are being like, Wow, this dude's mean. Guys.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm starting to think Kato's gone too far. I say,
Speaker 1: as I hammer and another nail into the slaves hand,
Speaker 1: that guy's a dick anyway. So um, as a politician,
Speaker 1: Kato engaged in acts of conservative sophistry that are again
Speaker 1: very familiar even today. Um, he got hard as fuck,
Speaker 1: and I mean that in the dick sens, thinking about farmers,
Speaker 1: who he considered to be the backbone of society. And
Speaker 1: he also, yeah, he fucking loves farmers. And he hated
Speaker 1: the merchants and the business class and educated Greek teachers,
Speaker 1: who he said, we're ruining Rome the same ship. You
Speaker 1: gotta get out critical Greek theory on the class. Critical
Speaker 1: Greek theory is ruining our children. According to the historian Polybius,
Speaker 1: quote Kato once declared in a public speech that anybody
Speaker 1: could see the republic was going downhill when a pretty
Speaker 1: boy could cost more than a plot of land and
Speaker 1: jars of fish more than plowman. Again, Roman political history
Speaker 1: a lot of fun to read about. Have you seen
Speaker 1: the prices of these boys? I would like to get
Speaker 1: into the upper middle class for Greek boy. So Kato
Speaker 1: made a huge point of the values of quote, the
Speaker 1: life of simplicity and self discipline. He did this while
Speaker 1: owning several massive plant plantations or lata fundi, which he
Speaker 1: worked with huge teams of slate. When he talked about
Speaker 1: being a farmer, because he wrote a book about farming,
Speaker 1: his farms were like they were like the plantations of
Speaker 1: the US South during slavery. There were these massive enterprises
Speaker 1: worked by thou sense of slaves, like that's the lad
Speaker 1: of farming for Cato. The lat of funda were so
Speaker 1: prevalent they collapsed the Roman economy because regular Roman dudes
Speaker 1: didn't have jobs, and that's why the dolls started. It's part,
Speaker 1: it's a big part of why, and it takes a while,
Speaker 1: which is evidence of some of the things the Romans
Speaker 1: were doing that we're smart but like, it's a big
Speaker 1: part of why the Roman Empire eventually collapses because Rome's
Speaker 1: strength is like the yaleman farmer class that Jefferson got
Speaker 1: all horny about. It's small farmers, right, who would breed
Speaker 1: kids who were like used to roughing it, and then
Speaker 1: those kids would join the Roman military and that's what
Speaker 1: expanded the Roman Empire. And over time all of those
Speaker 1: farms were taken over by rich senators who wanted hobby
Speaker 1: farms worked by slaves, which made it difficult for them
Speaker 1: to recruit soldiers, which led to about it. It's a
Speaker 1: long process, the collapse of the Roman empires, and that simple.
Speaker 1: But it's it's even funnier because you, as you talked about,
Speaker 1: one of their strengths is being able to throw waves
Speaker 1: of idiot Roman kids at swords until you finally got
Speaker 1: tired and went home. Um. Back then you had to
Speaker 1: be a landowning male to join the military. So before
Speaker 1: the Marian reforms, Yes, so these tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: landowners died and then assholes like Cato's arms of yeah,
Speaker 1: we're like, well this fill it with slaves. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was noted of Kato that he preferred he quote
Speaker 1: preferred to buy those prisoners of war who were young
Speaker 1: and still susceptible, like puppies. Yeah. Despite his public rants
Speaker 1: against merchants, he also made most of his money, according
Speaker 1: to Plutarch as quote the most disruptible branch of money
Speaker 1: lending a ka. He ran a payday loan company. This
Speaker 1: guy sucks so bad because his name on a stadium.
Speaker 1: Oh oh god. Yeah. And also Kato would have like
Speaker 1: a billion dollars in crypto, like he would have been
Speaker 1: all in on n f T s. Don't don't you
Speaker 1: dare tell me Kato wouldn't own a board ape that
Speaker 1: he would get stolen from him when he clicked a
Speaker 1: fishing ink. Now, he would just get really mad that
Speaker 1: people are buying n f T s of Greek Boy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what happened to that made us great? He's just he's
Speaker 1: just doing a return to mommy, ye resert to monkey.
Speaker 1: So Kato goes through decades of public life. He writes
Speaker 1: a bunch of books. We still have his book on farming.
Speaker 1: He writes one on soldiering that we don't have. He
Speaker 1: lays down a lot of pithy quotes for douchebags to
Speaker 1: put on their Facebook profiles generations later quotes like quote
Speaker 1: stick to the point, the words will follow, which is
Speaker 1: very bit like he he invented Ben Shapiro. Let's just
Speaker 1: say it, like, what does that even mean? It means
Speaker 1: like you kind of find the argument by the endpoint
Speaker 1: of the argument, right like that that's a fucking Michael
Speaker 1: Scott quote. It is a Michael Scott quote. But it's
Speaker 1: also like you can see, it's like Ted Cruz being like,
Speaker 1: we just need one door in the school. So you know,
Speaker 1: like your point is, I don't want anything to fundamentally
Speaker 1: change about like guns, because it's the central issue that
Speaker 1: you can't go against as a conservative. So instead one door, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's stick to the stick to the point, and you'll
Speaker 1: figure out the words along the way. Coming out boldly, yeah,
Speaker 1: bravely a favorite door control so many, like many of
Speaker 1: the conservative demagogues who would come after him, he was
Speaker 1: a massive misogynist, and this is he's a misogynist. During
Speaker 1: the Roman republic Um now, Kato spoke out against the
Speaker 1: repeal of a law from the Second Punic War which
Speaker 1: denied women the right to quote possess more than half
Speaker 1: an ounce of gold or where party colored clothing or
Speaker 1: right in a horse drawn vehicle in a city or town. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: this was this law. I'm not entirely certain why they
Speaker 1: passed this law during the war, but it's like they
Speaker 1: passed this law as like part of a you know,
Speaker 1: a the war effort, and it was very unpopular for
Speaker 1: it was very unpopular for obvious reasons and the injustice
Speaker 1: of this law. Roman women because again is a republic,
Speaker 1: they don't have the right to vote, but there are
Speaker 1: they do understand the idea of like protesting right, like
Speaker 1: that does exist in Rome, the idea that you would
Speaker 1: get people together. Now, generally Roman protests are armed mobs
Speaker 1: that murder people. But who's who's to say if that's
Speaker 1: it's not always bad, right? A lot of the times
Speaker 1: the armed mobs are in the right. Um, Roman women
Speaker 1: to protest this law organize one of maybe the first
Speaker 1: women's rights campaign in democratic history to get it repealed.
Speaker 1: Uh Livy writes that quote women came in from the
Speaker 1: towns and rural centers and beset all the streets of
Speaker 1: the city and all the approaches to the forum. Um.
Speaker 1: This horrified Cato, and he found himself asking, quote, are
Speaker 1: you in the habit of running out into the streets,
Speaker 1: blocking the roads, addressing other women's husbands, or are you
Speaker 1: more alluring in the street than in the home, more
Speaker 1: attractive to other women's husband women's husbands, and even at home,
Speaker 1: it would not become you to be concerned about the
Speaker 1: question of what laws should be passed or repealed in
Speaker 1: this place. So again to tell you about how modern
Speaker 1: a right wing politician this guy is. He's yelling at
Speaker 1: them for blocking the streets. Kato has like an every
Speaker 1: dust Yes. Yeah, he he awoke one night in fucking
Speaker 1: one nine two b c with like the vision of
Speaker 1: the black rifle coffee logo in his head. It does
Speaker 1: his business model of fraud. He knew the name of
Speaker 1: Kyle Rittenhouse thousands of years before the boy was born,
Speaker 1: having visions of nine line clothing and apparel. Uh, he
Speaker 1: would have done amazing on Facebook. Um. He and Steve
Speaker 1: Bannon would have gone fishing together. He was just so
Speaker 1: ready for our world. He absolutely would have been on
Speaker 1: that boat they got raised by the Yeah, he would have.
Speaker 1: He would have been part of the week, and he
Speaker 1: would have been one of the guys who got pardoned.
Speaker 1: Right like so, Kato screeched to his fellow legislators that
Speaker 1: gatherings of women were quote the greatest danger a democracy
Speaker 1: could face. Quote Our liberty overthrown in the home by
Speaker 1: female and discipline is now being crushed and trodden underfoot
Speaker 1: here too in the Forum. It is because we have
Speaker 1: not kept them under control individually that we are now
Speaker 1: terrorized by them collectively. But we, Heaven preserve us, are
Speaker 1: now allowing them to even take part in politics, and
Speaker 1: actually to appear in the Forum and be present at
Speaker 1: our meetings and assemblies. What are they longing for? In
Speaker 1: complete liberty or rather complete license. The very moment they
Speaker 1: begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors.
Speaker 1: I mean, I like that you started halfway through you
Speaker 1: switched to your Ben Shapiro voice. I can't not, I
Speaker 1: can't not. There's a certain level of ship head that
Speaker 1: you just have to go into Shapira again. Like that
Speaker 1: could be a fucking bright Bart column, right, Like that
Speaker 1: could be on Return of Kings. You know, it's amazing,
Speaker 1: it's incredible. So going his own way, going its own way,
Speaker 1: Ben Kieranan goes, I'm imagining Kato giving this speech, and
Speaker 1: for the Davids are he never felt like a glass
Speaker 1: of fucking like yeah yeah wine with just enough letting
Speaker 1: it to take the edge off. Fucking hell um. Ben
Speaker 1: Kiernan goes on to write quote for Kato. Much of
Speaker 1: this seemed a matter of social control occluding according to Plutarch,
Speaker 1: since he believed that among slaves sex was the greatest
Speaker 1: cause of delinquency. He made it a rule that his
Speaker 1: male slaves could, for a set fee, have intercourse with
Speaker 1: his female slaves, but no one of them was allowed
Speaker 1: to consort with another woman. After Kato's wife died, a
Speaker 1: prostitute Quote would come to see him without anyone's knowing
Speaker 1: of it. In public life, he was more severe. In Spain.
Speaker 1: One of his officers hung himself when Kato discovered he
Speaker 1: had bought three captive boys. Kato sold the boys and
Speaker 1: returned the price to the treasury. He once banished from
Speaker 1: the Senate a man who had kissed his own wife
Speaker 1: in broad daylight and in sight of his daughter. Kato
Speaker 1: joked publicly that he had never embraced his wife except
Speaker 1: after a loud thunder clap. So just a normal dude,
Speaker 1: How are you just a real normal ass guy? Like
Speaker 1: this is? This is the origin this is the fucking
Speaker 1: origin story of fucking through a hole in his shue,
Speaker 1: likes the sheet on top of his wife, who's like, okay, honey,
Speaker 1: here I come. And again, Kato is not normal for
Speaker 1: Rome in the period. He's not abnormal. They're certainly like
Speaker 1: dudes who line up behind him in his power block.
Speaker 1: But like most a lot of Roman society is like
Speaker 1: the fuck dude, especially nobility up. All they do was
Speaker 1: weird sex thing men women each other. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Like man, this guy's a fucking prude. He sucks and
Speaker 1: rounding out his patron saint of right wing politicians Bingo card.
Speaker 1: Kato also attacked gay people and one eight six b
Speaker 1: C Roman magistrates began to execute an alleged bokic cult.
Speaker 1: Boxus is like the god of wine and other cool stuff.
Speaker 1: Uh Now, this cult had formerly been an all female cult,
Speaker 1: which had overtime become an all gay men cult. Basically
Speaker 1: like a place for them to go cruising. It is
Speaker 1: pretty rad um, but like Kato helps to like lead
Speaker 1: this charge against them, and a bunch of guys get
Speaker 1: convicted of quote foul sexual acts along with some women um,
Speaker 1: which again makes it seem even rather um. Cato enthusiastically
Speaker 1: denounces the cult and he helped in order to like
Speaker 1: because of how much he hates the fact that, like
Speaker 1: there's this fairly popular cult that basically is like a
Speaker 1: place for for for gay people to go cruise. Kato
Speaker 1: builds support for an invasion of Dalmatia. Um, and he
Speaker 1: justifies it by saying, quote, because they do not want
Speaker 1: the men of Italy to become womenish enough through too
Speaker 1: lengthy a spell of feast. He's like, this is evidence
Speaker 1: that our guys are getting too girly, so we have
Speaker 1: to evade this random country. This is Cato falling for
Speaker 1: like the Russian army recruitment commercial that everybody loved like
Speaker 1: a year ago. Yeah yeah, yeah, the VDV thing or
Speaker 1: oh no though the other one yeah yeah yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's pretty funny. Um anyway. So and
Speaker 1: then near the end of his life this has all
Speaker 1: been color on Cato. In one BC, Spain rises in
Speaker 1: rebellion again. This is like forty years after he's crushed
Speaker 1: rebellion in Spain, right, so forty years it's about enough
Speaker 1: time for you to like replace all the people who
Speaker 1: he killed. Um. So this rebellion really doesn't have a
Speaker 1: lot to do with Carthage, which again has no navy
Speaker 1: and not much of a military at this point. But
Speaker 1: the invasion is or the uprising is followed by uprisings
Speaker 1: in Macedonia and in Achaia, and a wiser man might
Speaker 1: have concluded that people were mad about like Roman taxes,
Speaker 1: all of the murdering and enslaving they were doing in
Speaker 1: these areas. Kato was not that dude. Um In one
Speaker 1: fifty two b C. He takes part in a senatorial
Speaker 1: mission to Carthage. Now the city has lost its empire,
Speaker 1: but it's still it's a really good location. They're still
Speaker 1: able to like trade. They can't have a militarized navy,
Speaker 1: but they got like boats bringing places stuff all over
Speaker 1: the place. And the fact that they're no longer paying
Speaker 1: for the massive military that they've had as an empire
Speaker 1: means that they're like, they're doing really well. Like the
Speaker 1: economy is thriving. Right, it turns out that we can
Speaker 1: reinvest the work. Yes, this is actually going well, Kato
Speaker 1: writes in his Horror In a Horror that quote Carthridge
Speaker 1: was quote burgeoning with an abundance of young men brimming
Speaker 1: with copious wealth, teeming with weapons. Um Man, he really
Speaker 1: seems a zero and constantly in young men. He's really
Speaker 1: got a thing with the young men. Now filled with
Speaker 1: a mix of jealousy and paranoia, he returns home and
Speaker 1: he takes to the Senate. Ben Karenan writes on his return,
Speaker 1: while he was rearranging the folds in his toga in
Speaker 1: the Senate, Cato by design let fall some Libyan figs.
Speaker 1: And then after everyone had expressed admiration for their size
Speaker 1: and beauty, he said that the land produced them was
Speaker 1: but three days sail from Rome. So again this is funny,
Speaker 1: but it's like it's figs. But also this is not
Speaker 1: that different from being like, I don't you remember guys
Speaker 1: earlier in the odds, like when China had their big
Speaker 1: Olympics thing, or just like looking at like look at
Speaker 1: all the stuff they're making in China, like they're they're
Speaker 1: they're like, we we have to we can't compete with them.
Speaker 1: They they're eating us alive and manufacturing, Like think about
Speaker 1: like the fucking um one of those Michael Crichton books
Speaker 1: written in between Reagan and Clinton, where he's like terrified
Speaker 1: of Japan, like that whole fear of Japan in the eighties,
Speaker 1: where it's like, look at all these computers they can build.
Speaker 1: A speaking of Japan, that's like, quite literally the one
Speaker 1: are the excuses they use to manufacture war in China.
Speaker 1: It is like, look at all the land they have
Speaker 1: that we know this is bullshit. It's it's this, except
Speaker 1: for in this case it's figs. But yeah, um, and
Speaker 1: as Kiernan writes, it's all a lie quote. His figs
Speaker 1: could not have come from Carthage more than a six
Speaker 1: sta voyage in summer. His audience of senatorial gentleman farmers
Speaker 1: probably knew they came from Kato's own estate near Rome.
Speaker 1: Some may even have read his advice on how to
Speaker 1: plant African figs in Italy. Carthaginian product had barely penetrated
Speaker 1: the Italian market. So Kato brings his own figs and
Speaker 1: it's like, look at how big these Carthaginian figs are. Crisis.
Speaker 1: Yeah again, he would have done very well with Twitter.
Speaker 1: So Kato spent the last five years of his life
Speaker 1: haranguing his fellow senators to destroy Carthage, and gradually they
Speaker 1: get on board with the idea. While the plan is
Speaker 1: always couched in terms of Roman self defense. The arguments
Speaker 1: are all economic, and the primary reason to support the
Speaker 1: war was to give the nation an easy foe to
Speaker 1: rally against in a time when which there's all these
Speaker 1: costly and difficult constant uprisings. On the year Kato died
Speaker 1: one nine, Rome's console Sinsurnas demanded Carthage hand over her
Speaker 1: weapons and give Rome hostages. They do this, so the
Speaker 1: Romans next demand that the Carthage uproot itself and moved
Speaker 1: twelve miles inland so that they can burn the old
Speaker 1: city to the ground. The Carthaginians are like, no, we're
Speaker 1: not gonna do that. Roman like, all right, we have
Speaker 1: to give him the demand. They can't possibly. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is why they're the whole city. They're trying to come
Speaker 1: up with the demand that will force Carthage to fight them,
Speaker 1: and eventually they have to be all right, you gotta
Speaker 1: move your city twelve miles. Well, no, that sounds really dumb. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Carthage fights for three years against Romes. Might they
Speaker 1: finally succumb in one six b C and Roman legions
Speaker 1: march street to street, house to house, killing systematically depending
Speaker 1: on who you go to The city is likely to
Speaker 1: have held between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people when Roman soldiers enter it. I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: a rite up in World History dot org here. Even
Speaker 1: at this lower end, the slaughter in the city was, however,
Speaker 1: substantial and probably unprecedented in the European world up to
Speaker 1: that time. The survivors, possibly numbering anywhere for the thirty
Speaker 1: thousand to fifty thousand people, were sold as slaves on
Speaker 1: direct orders from Rome. The city was subsequently set allite
Speaker 1: and after ten days of burning, demolished stone by stone.
Speaker 1: Polybius in his histories uh noted that the destruction of
Speaker 1: the Carthaginians was immediate and total, so much that there
Speaker 1: were no Carthaginians left to even express their remorse. The
Speaker 1: killing of all the inhabitants of the city state whose
Speaker 1: inhabitants had refused to surrender was quite frequent in the
Speaker 1: ancient world, so labor labeling this particular innocent incident a
Speaker 1: genocide needs careful examination. A key element in this case,
Speaker 1: and one which would be in line with Limpkin's notion
Speaker 1: of genocide, was Rome's apparent intention to destroy carthage It's
Speaker 1: people and culture. No matter what this underlying aim could
Speaker 1: be seen in Romes increasingly impossible to satisfy demands placed
Speaker 1: on Carthage before the outbreak of war, when Carthage could
Speaker 1: no longer realistically satisfy the demands, this gave the Romans
Speaker 1: a legitimate excuse for their actions. And yeah, I'm comfortable
Speaker 1: calling it a genocide. Yeah, yeah. I think one of
Speaker 1: the problems is, and I think we've already talked about this,
Speaker 1: is this hasn'tancy to use the term genocide. Is one,
Speaker 1: obviously heavily politicized when we talk about modern day events,
Speaker 1: but two, when it comes to events that have happened
Speaker 1: thousands of years ago. Everybody has this idea that genocide
Speaker 1: is a modern thing within the eight eighteen hundreds. Yeah
Speaker 1: it's nah, it's And I don't understand that the hesitancy anymore,
Speaker 1: Like I I don't understand the political politicization of it either,
Speaker 1: but like, at least that you understand why, like, well,
Speaker 1: we can't call this a genocide because you know, we'll
Speaker 1: get fucking sanctioned by Russia or China, the United States.
Speaker 1: But like, is fucking Italy gonna sanction nobody? Nobody if
Speaker 1: you tell like Romans like this, they'll be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess, like I don't think anyone gives a ship anymore,
Speaker 1: Like we should be able to do this. Um, And
Speaker 1: the ones who do care are probably like, deeply deep
Speaker 1: probably really it's probably like Mussolini's granddaughter. I'm sure she's
Speaker 1: not and she is legitimately a political figure in the country.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'm sure there are some people who would
Speaker 1: be pissed, But I don't know. I know some I
Speaker 1: know some Italians. I think mostly it's like it's like
Speaker 1: talking to I don't know, if you were like go
Speaker 1: to somebody in Kenya and be like, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: somebody did a genocide here ten thousand years ago, I
Speaker 1: think most people would be like, okay, yeah, that's probably
Speaker 1: I would caution some people, I'm not doing that. And
Speaker 1: in certain countries with that the genocidit card in the
Speaker 1: last hundred and eight years or so, that's when it
Speaker 1: gets real political. Ten thousand years back, not much as
Speaker 1: although you know we could we could talk. Um, you
Speaker 1: do literally live in Armenia. Um. All right, well, Joe,
Speaker 1: this is going to be the end of part one.
Speaker 1: When it comes back to Part two, We're gonna have
Speaker 1: a super fun discussion about what makes human beings capable
Speaker 1: of engaging in mass killing. It sounds like will last
Speaker 1: I can't wait. I thought you'd never asked. It does
Speaker 1: occasionally involve blasts. Um, Joey, that was that was uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: Um you got you got any pluggable puck. I host
Speaker 1: the podcast The Lines Led by Donkeys podcasts, not the
Speaker 1: British political one. Um, and we talk about genocide unfortunately
Speaker 1: quite often. For instance, we've done seven hours on the
Speaker 1: Cambodian genocide and we also talked about military history and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Yeah. Um, so check out Lions led
Speaker 1: by donkeys. Check out donkeys, just find one. They're good.
Speaker 1: They're good, good animals, the good animals. Yeah, they do
Speaker 1: good stuff, useful, hardy, um, good eating. Oh man, donkey
Speaker 1: put that on some like rye bread, a little bit
Speaker 1: of catch up. Yeah yeah, absolutely. Anyway, this has been
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards, the podcast funded by the donkey made industry,
Speaker 1: which is having a tough years, always having a tough year.
Speaker 1: Difficult to get people on board with donkeys. I can't
Speaker 1: believe Big Donkey got their hooks into I heart media.
Speaker 1: I always knew this day would Yeah, yeah, where where
Speaker 1: we're we're primarily opposing the EMU Farmers of America UM
Speaker 1: who disastrous path that Australia has already followed? What what
Speaker 1: was making an Australia joke, So we have to oppose
Speaker 1: big EMU. It's just proxy war, don't you know them
Speaker 1: is already defeated Australia. They're just trying to bring them
Speaker 1: here and they're just trying to bring them to the
Speaker 1: United States. All their boomerangs were useless. All right. That's
Speaker 1: the show. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from cool zone Media, visit our
Speaker 1: website cool zone media dot com, or check us out
Speaker 1: on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts.