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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know, because after listening to stuff you should know. You will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here. And for the last two years behind the ******** listeners have funded the Portland Diaper Bank, which provides diapers for low income families. Last year, y'all raised more than $21,000, which was able to purchase 1.1 million diapers for children and families in need in 2021. And this year we're trying to get $25,000 raised for the Portland Diaper Bank, which is going to allow us to help even more kids. So if you wanna help, you can go to bTB fundraiser for PDX diaper bank at GoFundMe. Just type in go fund me bTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper bank again that's go fund me bTB fundraiser for PDX diaper bank or find the link in the show notes. Thank you all. Let's go. Let's start the podcast. So, Robert, get off. Let's move it. Robert. Sophie. Robert. Sophie. Robert. Sophie. Evans, Robert. This is behind the ********. It's a podcast. Hello Joe. Hey Joe. Robert, I'm, I'm glad to be on the podcast. This is the podcast of behind the ******** where we talk about bad people and today we're talking about the worst people, broadly speaking, in the world in history, which are collectively all of the people who have participated in or directly enabled genocide. Yeah, yeah. More to the point, Joe, we're talking. I there was an episode of Our Sister podcast. It could happen here. Maybe Cousin Podcast is more accurate. Maybe behind the ******** is like the uncle. I don't know. I don't. Depending on what state you're from. That's all of those things. Here's what I'll say. Behind the ******** is the uncle by marriage. It could happen here. Yeah, that sounds right. Anyway, I made a comment about the fact that because we were talking about anarchism and stuff and and what kind of things the state makes possible and what kind of things are just human nature, and I made a comment that like. Genocide is not something you need a state or like a nation for. It's just like a thing that people have always done and that it basically, as long as we have evidence of people organizing in any capacity, we have evidence of genocide. And some folks got upset about that. There were some people who really questioned that. And because I had not actually provided any kind of evidence, it's understandable that people would be like, because it is. It is difficult, I think, if you haven't thought about this, to imagine like, prehistoric human beings engaging in organized genocide. But they they totally did. Yeah, yeah. I I think that's something that. I mean, of course having an organized state certainly will make that easier. It does help, yes. I I think it's something we were like, I'm a, I'm a grad student in the Holocaust and genocide studies and I. I I think that's something that people can get lodged in their head is when they see or hear the word genocide, they immediately think of like death camps and things like that, which of course wouldn't happen without a a state structure, right? I mean you would imagine. So I think it might be best to honestly like given the fact that we are recording this the week of the ivaldi shootings, it might be best to think about this the way it's reasonable to think about mass killings where there whether or not guns are available, there will. Absolutely be mass killings in a wide variety of societies, and the evidence for this is that many societies where guns are not available have mass killings. The easy availability of guns does mean those killings are, number one, more frequent #2 tend to kill more people. Not always, but generally speaking and it's the same thing with like genocide. Genocide prior to the state existed, but you can get a lot nastier with it when you have the apparatus of a centralized state. Of course it's it's like why World War One was so horrific. You know, we we revolutionized the the the mechanisms of mass murder to to harvest human meat. It's it's not like the wars that happened before then we're not as horrific in their day we just. We just continued to surpass all previous human records with their own violence. Yeah, anyway, we're doing genocide week this week, Joe Joe Kasabian, Co host of the Lions, led by Donkeys podcast. And you are also like a an academic on an academic capacity specialized in genocide. Like you got a grad degree in **** unlike me who just reads books about this. So you have a degree of like, formal knowledge here that is is beyond. Certainly like what I have in this area, which I think I hope will be helpful because we'll be getting into this kind of meandered a bit in episode one. We will primarily be talking about kind of the prehistoric roots of genocide. And then sort of the first what, what, what, what these one scholar will argue is like the first documented genocide in in history. And after that we're going to be talking more about what makes people capable of, of committing genocide, like what's actually going on that that pushes people to it. Because some of this is just based on my continual frustration. Of the description of like, you know, the perpetrators of the Holocaust is like being brainwashed or taken over by a mania. That's generally not what happens, but we're we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that argument. It's it's it's one of my favorites. Yeah. We we will be chatting about that in Part 2. But right now I want to talk about probably the earliest evidence that exists in history of an act of genocide. It was discovered on the banks of Kenya's Lake Turkana in 2012. It is a mass grave. On which dates back roughly 10,000 years to about 8000 BC, it is filled with women, children and men, both young and old. Some of them had skull shattered by blunt weapons, others had been repeatedly pierced by some form of projectile. One woman was a pregnant woman who appeared to have her hands bound and have been beaten before her execution. It looks very much like mass graves you would find from basically every act of genocide ever committed. Sense right? Including people with their hands bound who were executed. Particularly like women and children who were executed with their hands bound. Marta Mirazon Lar of the University of Cambridge notes that the injuries discovered quote shock for their mercilessness. But that quote, what we see at the prehistoric site of Naturak is no different from the fights, wars and conquests that shaped so much of our history. And again what's interesting to me kind of in the context of where this line of thought started for for us in the comments I made another podcast is that this is this occurs pre the development of anything we would recognize as a state really anywhere in the world. This is like 8000 to 8500 BC is roughly when this is thought to have when the killings that these graves were were resulted or resulted from were thought to have occurred depending on you know there's there's some wiggle room as to when the first state arose right and none of these. Dates are exact, but broadly speaking somewhere around 7500 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt like in that kind of ballpark is is when we get our first like city and you know how much you how much you kind of draw a line to the the first city. And like whether you consider that like a proper state is also a little bit because none of this, like they didn't just pick a day to be like, well, now we have states, now human beings exist in states, right? People started like living. You know, this all occurred kind of gradually. So precision isn't possible, but these were definitely whatever happened in that mass grave in Lake Turkana was not organized by anything we would recognize as like a mass political entity that calls itself a nation, right like that, that that was not a factor in this. People weren't doing that yet. The peoples of that part of Kenya in roughly 8000 BC were hunter gatherers or to be more specific, they were actually Fisher foragers, not really like hunting and a big deal because again they there's it was a wet area at this point, right? It's very dry today, but it was there were a lot of like lakes and rivers that no longer exist in the area today. The individuals who lived there and who were found in that mass grave are known as the Naturak people, and they're believed to have roamed and made connections. As far afield as the Nile Valley and the Magreb. Worth noting that in the period they were killed, the Sahara was green. It was not yet a desert for an example like how ******* old this is like you could you could grow things in the Sahara. So yeah, this also probably made travel simpler, which is why folks who were far away could make it to naturak. Now, we don't know who committed the massacre of these people, but as this write up from the Smithsonian magazine makes clear, it was done with great intention. There remains were submerged in a lagoon after they were killed, which helped preserve them and may suggest that the people who killed them wanted to hide what they had done. You know, maybe there were some ritual thing there we don't really know, but it doesn't look like other graves that had been found in the area. At the time, hide from who? Yeah, exactly. Quote it's not clear that anyone was spared at the Nada Rock massacre. Of the 27 individuals found, eight were male and eight female, with five adults of unknown gender. The site also contained the partial remains of six children. 12 of the skeletons were in a relatively complete state. Ten of those showed very clear evidence that they had met a violent end. In the paper, the researchers described quote, Extreme blunt force trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck. And stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men, four of them, including a late term pregnant women, appear to have had their hands bound. It's noted by the archaeologists that the killers carried weapons that would not have been used for hunting and fishing. So that this was these were not people like using kind of the tools that they used for other stuff, for violence. These were people who brought special things meant to kill human beings. Mirazon Lara notes that there were a number of like close proximity weapons, like knives. And that this is kind of a hallmark of intergroup conflict, as was the brutality of the killings, right? Like, it suggests a degree of like a ferocity. The use of these weapons, Lara notes, also suggests premeditation and planning. She goes on to suggest that given the resources employed, the people of Naturak were likely massacred for their own resources. Right. This was not like a simple thing for people in this period to get together the kind of equipment they used for this. Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna say that tracks what's unique is even in situations where and well we'll talk about this more I'm sure when we get to perpetrators and their and their motivations is even mass atrocity crimes or or mass murders are are done is normally like women and children are taken especially during this time period for very obvious reasons I won't go into and the men are killed. Yes. Because with the men is the identity of of of the area. But the reason why you're killing them is to take their ****. Yes. So that all that all makes perfect sense to me and my very, very broken mind. Yeah yeah but but it does like I think the thing that's like this is not this is not look purely like you have two groups who have like a rant like a conflict over over something like this is there's a lot of evidence of that kind of violence and it does not look quite like this. Like there's a reason why this is noted as different again the the killing of. Like women and and and and children, pregnant people, the fact that like they were kids, like people were bound and executed, that all looks again just like it's it's more complete than the kind of violence that is, I guess you'd say more normal around people in between people in this. Yeah. Even if you measure that against, you know, the the 1948 definitions that would come however many thousands of years later. That that hits it to a tee. It yeah. Yeah. And that that's the point that like mirrors on LAR makes is that her exact quote is this shows that two of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies, control of territory and resources were probably the same for hunter gatherers and that we have underestimated their role in prehistory. Again, just the idea that like genocide. Goes back quite a bit. And that also, I mean one of the things that is worth noting too, because when we think about genocide in a modern context, it's always nearly always framed as motivated by racism. And it's like obviously racism has played a significant role in many genocides, but just as as significant a role as pure venal greed, which will be talking about more in Part 2. But like people want **** and that's a big part of why they do a genocide and it's that goes back further than states. Now obviously I I think one of the things. That's I kind of thought about reading about this case is the mass graves recently uncovered in parts of Ukraine like Buca. And the fact that the killing of civilians whose hands were bound like that was one of the things that, like I thought of those pictures I saw of like corpses on the road with their hands bound. And then 10,000 years ago you have dead people with their hands bound in a mass grave at outside of Lake in Kenya. These archaeologists saying it was probably because they wanted resources and the Russian soldiers in Bucas stealing every luxury item that that isn't. Nailed down, you know, like this is what people do. Yeah. I mean, specifically it's what I mean, especially in Kenya, it's extra state forces or I guess paramilitary forces. Try tribal military forces. Yeah. I mean it's still happening and and like with the Boko Haram and I think it's. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, people are pretty consistent. Uh, you gotta give us that. Umm, unfortunately, yeah. Painfully, depressingly consistent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously, I think there's some people who might have some objections here because nobody doubts that ancient folks murdered each other in war. That's pretty, pretty widely accepted. But we consider genocide to be kind of going beyond that. You know, every king or warlord who, like, killed a **** load of people isn't necessarily considered like a. A committer of genocide. I think there's even a lot of debate about, like, whether or not you would consider like, Genghis Khan. Like, is a lot like, is the sacking of a city for the purposes he did the same as, like the extermination of a of a race? And that's a that's a debatable point. So I think if we're going to have a productive point, a productive talk about like, genocide in an ancient context, we're going to need to leap forward a bit to something that you spoilered a little bit. Spoiler is the wrong term for this, the definition of genocide. Spoiler alerts. Spoiler alert. Raphael lemkin. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's yeah, that's he's the he's the single man with whom that word has its, like, linguistic origins. Lemkin was a Holocaust survivor, and he was an extremely delicated, dedicated and intelligent man. And his crusade to to start what became like, not just the concept of genocide as, like a legal term, but the the Genocide Convention actually started way before the Holocaust got going in 1933. Which is like the year the Nazis took power so limpkin like. Was aware of what was coming, you know, like he was. Yeah. I mean he had actually started his research about 2 decades before then he was in law school, I believe it's in Poland when the the trial of Sogenannte Lyrian was going on in Berlin. And being the the Turkish or no, the talarian, being the Armenian who assassinated one of the Turkish officials who was responsible for organizing the Armenian genocide. Yeah, he shot Talat Pasha in broad daylight in Berlin with the sole purpose of going on trial, admitting that he killed him, and using it as a pulpit to talk about the genocide, which he successfully did it and got away with. Yeah. He's a cool dude. Yeah. He rocks. Yeah. And Lemkin was watching this unfold, reading it unfold in the newspaper. And he asked one of his professors, like how a state could get away with doing this. And why isn't more Turkish authorities on trial? Because none of them would ever stand trial, and his and his professor effectively believe in the in the sovereign idea that a a sovereign could do with its people as they pleased. And it wasn't any other states to tell them what to do. Yeah. And he immediately believed, I believe this is a 1925, something like that. He is like, that doesn't seem right to me. So by the time the the Holocaust started and his family died in the Holocaust. He had studied the Armenian Genocide, the genocide of the natives in North America, and he's like, this is a you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often ******* rhymes. And it it's it's probably worth noting here, too, we are, we are getting a field from the ancient days, but in the same way that like limpkin. Started thinking about what a genocide was and started like, you know, attempting to get other people to talk about this as it, like as a crime and to kind of change attitudes about like that. He was motivated and inspired by the same things that in a very different way were motivating and inspirational to Hitler. Because Hitler also studied the genocide of the Native Americans and was like, oh, this seems cool, this seems like a good way to get a bunch of land. And also Hitler was directly inspired by the genocide of the Armenians. I think his exact quote was like. People were asking him, like, this is and this is I think from his table talk, but he was being asked by one of his officials like, are we not going to get in trouble for this? And he was like, well, **** who remembers the Armenians? Yeah. Yeah. And and not to mention they're only, I mean during World War One, the German Empire had and the Ottoman Empire, ironically, one of them is the. Main primary resource for pictures about the Armenian genocide because he took pictures of it and smuggled them out. Yeah. And and then the German Empire committed genocide in Namibia a couple of years before that. Yeah. Yep, Yep. Which we'll talk about all of this in more detail at some point. But let's talk about the definition of genocide because people don't, you know, limpkins foresight is not widely appreciated. And it is not until 1944 that it starts to like the kind of the stuff he's talking about starts to gain more ground. And that's also the year that he proposes the term genocide. Describe the destruction of a nation or ethnic group. Umm. And this is one of those Greek Latin hodgepodge that I think frustrates some linguistic nerds here. He basically took the Greek word genos for race or tribe and he merged it with Latin's side, which obviously means killing. I think everyone knows that bit of Latin. So because of his tireless work, on December 11th, 1946, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution declaring genocide is the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups. Many instances of such crimes have occurred when racial, religious, political or other groups have been destroyed entirely or in part. Now that the the definition of genocide that's kind of given there in that, and this is the resolution, is immediately challenged. A number of nations, including the USSR, disliked the inclusion of political groups as victims of genocide for reasons that should be obvious, right? Can't imagine why, Robert, why, what happened? And that wording, not that the USSR is the only state that killed a bunch of political. Groups. But yeah, the wording is it was eventually dropped. The argument was that the terms etymology excluded those groups because, I mean and and that's not in it. I think it's wrong, but that's not inaccurate, right. Like the the word genocide does imply racial or national groups. So it's not hard to see why, like a number of states were concerned about this. For example, was the killing of the Russian nobility a genocide? And this is an area in which like, well, yeah, I think it actually would be wrong to say that. Like killing. The the Royal Family of Russia was a genocide. That seems weird to me, right? But but like, the killing is the killing of, like the the Ukrainian starvation genocide, which was justified as the killing of, like, rich peasants. Is that a genocide? Sure, that's absolutely a genocide. And ironically, according to Rafael Lemkin, it sure is. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, I mean, it's obviously like, I think we can all agree how exactly to separate other mass killings from genocide is important because not all mass killings are the same and we shouldn't call all of them genocides. But also I think it's also worth saying that, like, yeah, political groups being massacred can absolutely be a genocide. And I mean, that wasn't even the only thing that got stripped out of there. They also got rid of like the. Lemkin wrote about the concept of genocidal settler colonialism and genocidal slavery. Yes, as well as assimilation as being a form of cultural genocide. Yeah. You know, like famously in North America, there was the saying kill the Indian, save the child. Which we all rightfully accept now as genocide, but yeah, it is. Yeah, well, and then let Limpkin had that on there. And again, the US, the UK and the USSR was like, well, pump the brakes on that one. None of all of the states that were responsible for, like, winning World War Two also had vested interests in certain things not being called genocide because spoilers, they had all done genocides. As someone who holds a lot of stock in big genocide. I have a problem with this definition. Yeah. Ohh man though, it is a good time to be invested in genocide. Wow, doing better than Tesla. To be fair, I have a feeling that the, the white South African also holds stock in the. Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to how we're gonna define genocide, for this at least my proposition, Joe, I want to go to scholar Ervin Staub. And now Staub is another Holocaust survivor. And his, he wrote a really good book called The Origins of Evil, which goes over kind of what inspired perpetrators in a number of genocides. His book. In addition to talking about like Rwanda and Cambodia, and obviously the Holocaust includes the massacre of thousands, potentially 10s of thousands of leftists in Argentina in his study of genocide and group violence. I like his book, and for our purposes I'd like to suggest using his definition. Quote Genocide means an attempt to exterminate a racial, ethnic, religious, cultural or political group, either directly through murder or indirectly by creating conditions that lead to the group's destruction. Yeah, that that that is very, very close. It's like a simplified version of Lumpkins original. Yes, yes. And that's what that style says. Like starts with Limpkin and says, like, I think that what he was saying initially is, is exactly right and that's how we should be talking about this. So yeah, I think that's that's kind of where we're going to go here or what that that that's what when we talk about genocide in this episode, that's more or less what we mean. So I think obviously there's a strong case to be made for the Lake Turkana, mass grave as evidence of genocide based on this, even though we clearly don't know the entire story. There. But the presidents of pregnant women, the elderly, young kids all differentiates it from the kind of simple human on human violence that has occurred since forever. We don't know exactly what happened, but we know that one armed group and and archaeologists think it was the people who carried out the genocide were from a distance away, right. Like they they had traveled to get there, wanted to wipe out a different group of people. And that's that's a genocide. Yeah. That shows pretty clear intent, like not taking the children. For the women, yeah. Which is very common during crimes like this is pretty shows pretty specific intent that that these people would not continue. Yes. And there are other cases of probable ancient genocide. Obviously, all of them do lack the kind of context that we need for it to be, like, as kind of satisfying narratively, because there's just **** you don't know when you're talking about stuff from this far back. One of the most probably well known, at least among archaeologists, involves the Yamnaya. People who occupied the Eurasian step north of the Black Sea between 2 and 3000 BC, there were certainly states that existed in the world in this. But there were not in that area, right? Like there's no this is like kind of around like Ukraine, Poland to that area. There's not in 3000 BC, there's not a Ukraine or Poland, right? There's not political entities in any way we would recognize in this area. O the Yamnaya were an ethnic group who colonized large swaths of Europe in stages over a period of centuries. It's actually maybe even more accurate to kind of look at them as like a collection of ethnic groups. They were a culture, right? This is all kind of confusing when we talk about what we'll get into, like what archaeologists mean when they talk about, like cultures here. But as the Imnaha flowed through the continent, a number of things changed dramatically and that those parts of Europe, so we can we can see evidence of, like, these people. Coming into the area and we see very suddenly that existing burial practices in the area change, a warrior class appears and like evidence of them in burials appears when they had not existed before, and we find more evidence of large numbers of people dying violent deaths, Christian Christiansen from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, tells New Scientist. Quote I've become concrete, singly convinced that there must have been a kind of genocide. Now again, there's not like cities or states or empires in Europe and in this part of Europe in this. Not written history. So we're talking about, like, archaeologists tend to talk about this in terms of like broad clashes between cultures. And one of the things we see in this. Around 2800 BCE is the violent replacement of what are called the globular amphora culture, which is again a group of ethnic groups and people living in this region who are defined by the way in which they make pottery, by the Corded Ware culture, which is another type of pottery and is associated with another. Like, again, because this is so far ago, we don't have a lot of other content. We must return to a pottery based culture. We must become pottery based again. It would be funny to think about like people 6000 years writing about like the the the zip lock culture versus the the Pyrex with a little plastic thing on top culture. What culture is this? Oh you see he was in high school pottery class and he made a very bad attempt to make a bong. That was me. That was my culture, the water pipe culture versus the drilling a hole in an apple and putting in some tinfoil culture. This is the make a small dent in the top of a pop can called puncture holes in it. Ohhh, you know who else has culture? Joe? Ohh no, probably nobody that's coming next. Now, the products and services that support this podcast, Joe, they all come from the Buy things culture. So if he's not looking happy with me here, I mean, it's just not your best work. Yeah, it never is. You know who didn't? Actually, I was going to say, you know, who didn't benefit from a genocide, but you never know. But we really, we really don't both Taser and the Washington State Highway Patrol have attempted to run ads on our network so. Hey, what were they supposed to do? Ohh, don't you wanna Fanta, Joe? I do. Here's some ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. 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Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behindbetter. Com behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Eating particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back and we're talking about how Europeans are a decadent and depraved people, mainly because of beet sugar. Seriously. Sugar? Sugar based sweeteners? Yeah, absolutely not vile. Corn syrup. Come on like a civilized people, and you need to be so thick that it just stands on its own. If you cut the can away from the like, why are we even flavoring ****? Just give kids entire cans of pure corn syrup, let them suck it out, and then smoke out of the cans. Actually, This is why my life hack is I I pull up to the ethanol pumps. That's the that's just corn sugar for cars. I just drink it straight from the tap, baby. Do it all. Why can't? Why isn't everything? Corn yet? That's my question. A lot of things are corn, but why isn't everything? These are we are the corn culture. That is what archaeologists will be calling us. My goodness, this whole society rapidly degenerated and turned into a corn cob, turned into a cord cap. Oh yeah, we're talking about 2800 BCE. The violent replacement of the globular amphora culture with the Corded Ware culture and the Amaya are kind of associated with the court where culture. This is all complicated archaeology here but I'm going to, I'm going to quote from a write up in the Journal of Anthropology and these this is a specifically an article that's like looking at a mass grave from this. Where one culture is being replaced by another. We sequenced the genomes of 15 skeletons from a 5000 year old mass grave. Poland associated with the globular amphora culture all individuals had been brutally killed by blows to the head, but buried with great care. Genome wide analysis demonstrate that this was a large extended family and that the people who buried them knew them well. Mothers are buried with their children and siblings next to each other. From a population genetic viewpoint, the individuals are clearly distinct from neighboring courted war groups because of their lack of step related ancestry. Although the reason for the massacre is unknown, it is possible that it was connected to the expansion of Corded Ware groups which may have resulted in violent conflict. And the fact that their loved ones got to them kind of suggests this was part of a series of, like, raids and clashes that were meant to wipe them out, that, like, this community was, you know, attacked, killed, found by their relatives as part of, like, an ongoing struggle that eventually led to the replacement of one group with another, you know, which is pretty genocide. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think Scott Strauss wrote in his book prevention on genocide, Prevention of Genocide, which you can actually download. For free at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website don't. But he said that one of the the the major genocidal risk factors is a history of conflict within groups. So yeah, that that tracks, especially if you're existing all on like a step fighting over the same resources. Eventually you're like, this would be a lot easier if those people simply didn't exist. Boy, I have to say, Joe, that I do. I I do respect. I'm I'm happy that a book. With the title and, uh, thesis, how to prevent genocide is is available for free and not paywalled. Like that's like one of us. Yeah, probably shouldn't pay. Well, that couldn't work credits, I think. I think something has to be said for academics that realize that, like nobody's going to pay for our ****. If my and if my field of study is how to prevent genocide, perhaps this this work should be widely available. So further research by two separate teams. Writing a nature magazine in 2015, uh came to a came to similar conclusions that an influx of herders from the steps of what are now Russia and Ukraine replaced a huge amount of the gene pool in central and Western Europe and around 3000 BCE, really more like 2800. But you know, this coincided with the disappearance of Neolithic pottery and burial styles as well as other cultural artifacts that had been seen earlier. I'm pointing out those last couple of things, the change in burials and the change in artifacts. Because, again, that's evidence of a genocide. This culture is being wiped out now. Part of why this has been controversial with scholars is that the theories proposed now by Christiansen and others based on this research are similar to some of the ideas of a guy named Gustav Cosina. Cosina was an early 20th century archaeologist in Germany whose ideas were integral to the formation of Nazi race science. Now, obviously the Anaya are not Arians. They again would probably look more like slaves. Umm. Which the Nazis did not think we're a master race, but the Nazis bestowed like honorary Arian status on so many random groups of people from Palestinians to Armenians. Really? Yeah, **** it, you're Marian now. To to Tibet, where they like, where a lot of Nazi race science started. Was them like hanging out in these monasteries in Tibet and being like, these must be the ancient Aryans. There's a lot of just like us. There's a lot of, again, Nazis. Not great scientists, except with rockets. You got to give them, you got to give the Rockets. I'm, I'm starting to think, and Robert, correct me if I'm wrong, the guys who believed in eugenics, eugenics might not be the smartest. People on Earth, no, no, they they they they weren't good at a lot of things. But yeah, so this is part of why, like, it's been difficult to, to, to kind of push this along. But it does seem like there's a significant amount of scholarship that like, again, there's and this is not, we're focusing on Europe in all of this so far just because, oh, I mean, we started with Africa, but like, that's where the majority of the scholarship has happened. One has to assume. All throughout Asia, all throughout the Middle East, Southeast Asia, other parts of Africa, Latin America, you know, there there's genocides all over all throughout history in every part of the world. It's like a thing that people do. We're just kind of talking about what we've got some documentation of like obviously there were genocides in Mesoamerica long before, you know, the, the 1400s and there were genocides and the Middle East from the day that there were cities like, yeah, yeah, it's just there's a, there's a positive. The positivists, uh, train of thought in the field that says that like. Within genocide prevention, that believes that genocide is like one of the natural states of man and, you know, in modern day, you could work to prevent that. Yes. Hypothetically, seeing how we seem to be very exceedingly bad at doing that, yeah, we're not good at preventing it. Yeah, it's probably worth acknowledging that, like, you are trying to prevent something that we've been doing for forever, which is always hard to do. It's like, yeah, preventing people from fighting, you know, like we we we're pretty good at it. And then there's also this, this idea that it's like, OK, well, how can you prove that you prevented one? Like, how can you prove, prove something that didn't happen? Like, OK, well, what what about these things would you rather be wrong about. I mean, it's it is it is the same. We talk about like how to prevent mass shootings. And there's a bunch of different things on the table when it comes to like, what kind of like social programs and like, interventions can, like stop kids who might be on the path to being willing to do something like that. One of the problems is that. Well, if you successfully like intervene and a kid doesn't decide they want to do something like that, you never know, right? Like right. Like you don't get the data that like, oh the fact that like this teacher, you know, sat down and talked with this kid stopped them from doing this, this ****** ** thing or stop them from going down a path where they get on 4 Chan and get radicalized to do this. They're like, we just don't get that, which makes it harder to like. Develop good programs to stop stuff like that. That's one. That's one thing we need to steal from cops. And that's like, because I used to be a medic. So it was one of those. I worked with firefighters all the time. And it was one of those things that, like, whenever there's not a lot of fires, like, well, we can cut the budget from the fire department. We really don't need that many. But but like, whenever, you know, crime goes down, it's never like, well, clearly we actually don't need that many cops or cops at all. It's, well, we need to keep funding the cops. Because crime is down, yeah. But the answer is always give those guys more money, just like the answers to war and genocide are always give the militaries more money, right? Right. Yeah. It's like, maybe, I don't know, there's there's a middle ground in there somewhere. We could try something a little different. Yeah, I don't know. So at any rate, I think this establishes that, like, genocide can and has existed outside the structure of state violence. Now, in Part 2, we're going to talk about some of the things that presumably since time immemorial have made individual humans capable of taking part in genocide. But for now, I want to move out of prehistory into just kind of early history and talk about what some historians will suggest was the first modern genocide, the elimination of Carthage and 146 BC by the Roman Republic. And when I this is not obviously the first genocide by one state against, you know, people of another state, but it is very modern, in part because Rome was a Republic and so an awful lot of what goes on in the genocide of Carthage sounds very familiar. And the fact that I've picked this is influenced by the work of Australian born historian Ben Kiernan, who's currently director of Genocide Studies program at Yale. He got his start in genocide when he visited Cambodia before the coming of the Khmer Rouge, and then afterwards he traveled around the country, he learned the Khmer language, he carried out extensive research and interviewed a whole bunch of people about like, what had happened. Bin posits that the first recorded incitement to genocide were the words of Roman politician Marcus Porcius Cato, who for the last four years of his life ended every single public speech with the words Delinda estate, Carthago or Carthage must be destroyed. Now, to explain like, what happened here, we're going to have to go back into classic history a little bit, which I know is both use anise jam. Of course. Yeah, I love this ****. Not genocide, but, you know, Roman history. Going to say it isn't. It is an amazing field to work in when you can say, yeah, he got his start in genocide and I'm like, I know, I know, Robert, yeah, we're talking about Kaido baby and Kato is so because he's such a modern, right wing, ******** politician. Like he's every like so much of what he does is like, well that could be a ******* dude today because Rome is in a lot of ways a very modern political entity in this. Like Republican Rome. There's a lot of things that sound very familiar. Because it turns like whenever people develop a Republic that's based primarily around resource extraction, certain things are super similar. Sometimes history is a big dumb loop. Yeah, so Carthage was a port city on the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea, near where the modern city of Tunis is today. The fact that like Carthage is in Africa and Rome is Rome makes them sound very distant. They are 400 miles away. That is the difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles. And if you've seen how people from San Francisco talk about LA, you'll understand how genocidal desire could erupt between the two cities. But yeah, these are not like far, but like obviously it's further back then, but like, you could fly from from one city to the other in about like an hour, like today. Even back then they could float. There's not that far back then they could float their ****** glued together boats across the met at one another. Yeah, it's not. It's not far. It's not hard to get to even then. Which is why the war happens, right? So while Rome was from the beginning a land military power that expanded through force Carthage, Carthage was first a mercantile. Power with trade routes. Again. They're in northern Africa, they're trading with people in modern day Britain like they're their trade routes almost extended like Scotland. And of course they like as far down in Africa as Gabon. Now. In my very right wing history classes in Texas I tended to learn what was more or less the propaganda line about these wars, which is that the Carthaginians are these brutal child sacrificing eastern devils and the war between them in Rome is like what this is the first war between the West and the east, and it's what makes the birth of the democratic W possible. Like this is the start of all of our. Wonderful traditions. They had to like, beat these Barbarians, which is God, that hurts my brain so bad. Nonsense that is. I actually started a Community College when I was in Texas because I was in the army and that tracks with my experience in Texas history. Yes, that is it's *********. Obviously Carthage is a a massive, like imperial aristocratic power that does all sorts of ****** ** **** including like human sacrifice and stuff. Roman this. Has stopped doing human sacrifice as a religious thing, but they also are a gigantic slave power that brutally oppresses and, like enslaves entire racial groups of people during conflicts. Like, neither of them is better than the others, but there's not a good guy here. Like, they're just both. And it's it's like, it's also like, I think, pointless to call 1 the bad guy. There's just two early states fighting a war over resources, right? Like that's what's happening, and there's no point in drawing a moral line between all of their wars. Over like proxy city States and resource, that's exactly what we're about to talk. This isn't about democracy. No, this is not, this is not, not in any way. Carthage was the great naval power of the region. Like they kind of own the Mediterranean in this. While Rome and Rome always is an infantry power, right? Like that's the the core of Roman like military power is like heavy infantry in this. And basically up until like the fall of the empire. That's the thing that they're best at whenever Rome has anything good. It's not heavy infantry, it's because they like higher auxiliaries from another culture, right? Like all of their good cavalry, all of their good Archers they're good at. They're also really good at artillery, although that's kind of less of a factor in this. But they get very, very good at artillery too. But yeah, so Carthage has the boats, Rome has the dudes who hit people with swords, right? That's their strengths. Broadly speaking, the two states actually got along pretty well for a while. Carthage had some wars with Greeks, which Rome was fine with because Rome was battering battling Italians. Again, Rome is not Italy at this point, right? Most of Rome's wars are with Italians. They call them gals, but they're like dudes from northern Italy, right? They're my ancestors, transalpine Gaul, you know? It becomes a big issue. Like at one point Caesar allows them into Senate, and the Romans are like these Barbarians. They're Italian. This is something that hasn't changed. Again, there's nothing that Romans hate more than Italians, and there's nothing I hate more than Romans. So. Yeah, they're the Carthage, Rome, get along for a while where they're they're doing all these other wars, but then some **** goes down in Sicily. Now, if you're not a geography sizer, Sicily is the American football that's being kicked by Italy, right? If you think about, think about that. So at the time, Sicily is primarily a Carthaginian province. It's not right though to think it's not like Sicily is like part of Carthage in the way that we would consider like Oklahoma part of the United States, but they have like the influence there, but both powers get kind of. Drawn into a conflict because one city in in Sicily, Syracuse, goes to war with another city in Sicily, Messina, and like Syracuse, send soldiers to attack Messina, Carthage, back Syracuse. Rome backs Messina, and they get drawn into a war that starts as like this. Kind of like proxy fight. It's more complicated than that, but you really don't need to know the details unless you want to go read about the Punic Wars. So Rome puts together a big fleet to go fight the Carthaginians and they just get mass instantly massacred. One of the things that's fun about Rome is that this is a long this is like a proud part of their military tradition. A war starts, they build this massive military thing, it gets wiped out to the man. And then they were like, alright, I guess we'll do it again. And primary, no idea how many Roman kids I have ready to throw. We we don't care about our lives and like, but that is why Rome becomes the big world. Power in this region is because they're the best at like, having an entire armies wiped out to the man and going like, all right back to the drawing board. Let's do another one, you know? And that's what they do. It takes them like 20 years to rebuild their fleet, but they eventually grind down the Carthaginian Navy and they win the war and they win Sicily. Which Sicilians have ruled ever since. So this leads to the Second Punic War, and a key moment in the Second Punic War. The one everyone knows about is you've got this Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca who crosses the Alps with some elephants and a bunch of dudes, and he attacks Italy. He threatens room for a while. It's a pretty impressive campaign. It includes the massacre. So there's this battle called canny canine, you know, nobody whatever. However you want to say it, where there's this Roman army that outnumbers the Carthaginians 2 to one, but Hannibal does what's called a. Double envelopment and completely surrounds them and like wipes them out, and one of it's still probably the most famous defeat in military history up until World War Two. Like you can find all generals on every side of that war talking about trying to pull off a Ki. Like, I think someone did the math and it's a historian, historian I'm not a huge fan of and but they said that the massacre at Kanaha was a was like 600 Romans died every hour until from sunrise to sunset. It it is a calculable percentage of the entire population of Rome that dies in this battle, like a meaningful percentage. It's like it's it goes really badly. And again, the strength of Rome is that they keep like, this happens to them a bunch in Roman history and they're like, alright, we got more guys. So Rome eventually grinds Carthage down. Hannibal's armies are beaten because they get pulled back to Africa because the dude named Scipio Africanus invades. And there's this whole battle called Zama. It's it's it's it's neat history if you want to read into it. So by the end of the war, Rome has lost, like, a lot of a generation of young men, and they're pretty ****** at the Carthaginians. This is not wildly dissimilar from how a lot of folks in Europe felt at the end of World War One, right? We lost, like, a huge chunk of a generation fighting you guys. We don't just. Like to shake hands and. And in this thing, you know, like, **** you. That's the attitude, right. So a surrender is negotiated. And under the terms of the surrender, Carthage loses all of its territory outside of North Africa. They have to give up their fleet and they have to pay a large war debt to Rome. And so, you know, this is, again, you could like kind of look at this as there's shades of Versailles in this. And from this point on, Carthage is realistically no kind of military threat to Rome. Right, like that. Is not happening after this point now up through this. In the fighting between them. These are the 1st and 2nd Punic Wars is what they're called, right? The first one is the fighting over Sicily, the second one is Hannibal. Up through this point, there's not a good guy or a bad guy in this story, you know, that's two ******** beating each other up over treasure. It's what happens after this point that's fascinating because while Rome is very much an aristocratic state and calling it a democracy or even a, it is a Republic. But like, people tend to exaggerate what that means when they talk about it. It is one of the First Nations on Earth with proper politicians in the modern sense of the word. Guys who you could like pull on the TV and see dudes doing some of the same **** today, right? That is one of the things that's really interesting about studying Rome in this. And this brings us to Marcus Porcius Cato, better known as Cato the Elder and Cato the Wise. He was a famous Conservative politician who railed against Greek culture for its decadent influence on Romans. He was kind of like Victor Davis Hanson, who's a modern right wing historian. If you smooshed him up with like some Dan Crenshaw and like a dash of Ted Cruz, Oh my God, you're just Voltron together. The worst guy, and he is he is the worst guy. He sucks so bad. He was legitimately a soldier and a pretty competent one. He fought in the Second Punic War, he commanded troops, and he spent the years after the Second Punic War. So I just mentioned the guy who wins the Second Punic War for Brome is a dude named Scipio Africanus, who's generally seen as one of, like, the the best generals in military history. Is Hannibal pretty good at at war? Yeah. And Scipio beats him in a in a fair fight. Cato spends the like, years after the war, hounding Skipio into the grave and basically, like, repeatedly encourage, like accusing him of corruption and, like profligacy and like wasting resources. And he writes histories of the Punic Wars, and he deletes not only Skipio's name, but every other person involved named Scipio, which is like a common first name. It's like if you it's like if you were writing a World War Two. History and you hated patents, so you cut out all the Georges. I need to be clear here. I actually support that that that **** Georges, right? Right. And **** Patton. But yes, I know Cato sucks, but you do have to admire this sheer level of pettiness. It's very petty. He's an incredibly petty dude. So he's a he's the pettiest man alive and in the 195 BCE he gets elected console, which is like pretty much the top of the Roman structure. You have sensors to every now and again when they do the census. But like. Consoles basically like as, as as it's if like the prime. If there were multiple prime ministers and they got to command armies, that's kind of what a console is, right? There's two of them at the there's two of them, yes, yes. And they're both political and military leaders. Again, it's the top of the Roman political structures called the cursus honorum. And it's like, it's it's like the if you're in politics, your goal is to get to be console one day, right? That's like as as good as it gets. So while he's console in 195, he takes command of Roman legions in Spain because Spain rebels, Spain rebels a lot. It's called Iberia at this point. There's actually not any kind of Spanish identity at this moment, right? Because Iberia is huge and people who are in like the deserts of Zaragoza have no particular identity with the people who are like on the North Coast of Spain or whatever, right? Like they don't even, they don't know what the **** is going on with those *************. But Spain is rebelling at this point and he takes over the military and he he. We'd, you know, he does a number of things that we would call war crimes today. I don't know if you'd call them. They're not really out of step with military tactics in the day, but they're pretty brutal. I'm going to quote from Ben Kiernan here. He was a courageous and effective general, noted for his cruelty towards his defeated enemies. Livy sympathized. Cato had more difficulty subduing the enemy because he had, as it were to reclaim them. Like slaves who had asserted their freedom. Cato commanded his officers in Spain to force this nation to accept again the yoke which it has cast off in 1 battle, Livy estimated cites an estimate of 40,000 enemy killed. When seven towns rebelled, Cato marched his army against them and brought them under control without any fighting worth recording. But after they again revolted, he ensured that the conquered. Not granted the same pardon as before. They were all sold by public auction. Now again, under like the definitions we've cited of genocide, you could you could make a case that he's doing some genocides here. Yeah, I mean, especially if we're going off modern definitions like we're the the ICC ICJ. Identifies, rightfully identifies Serenita as an act of genocide unto itself. So, like, there can be microcosms of genocidal acts. Yeah. So this would absolutely count as one. Yes, for sure. Especially the, you know, killing 40,000 people may not be a genocide, depending on the situation in which you do it. For example, Hannibal killed a similar number of Romans, and that was not really a genocide. I think he killed like 60 or so. It was. It was a lot of romance. He killed, but enslaving and. Entire region of people. And marching because you're taking them away from where they live, too. You're marching them out like that is an act. Even if you're not killing them, it's an act of genocide. You're destroying the culture, right? In the same way that like what American slave owners would do to to Africans who were brought into like, that was an act of genocide. Even though they were not trying to murder those people because they were a resource, right. It's still genocidal. You stripped them of their culture. Exactly. It's not you're not going to allow it to propagate anyway. Just like, you know, slave owners force. Yeah. Leaves to take white names, adopt Christianity. Yeah. And this is, this is one of those because there's areas in which Roman slavery is very similar to because there's chattel slavery is a huge part of Roman slavery, and that's very similar to **** you see in the Americas. And there's areas where it's different. For example, an awful lot of Greeks sold themselves into slavery because it was a pretty good deal. If you were like selling yourself to a rich family to like teach their kids and stuff, like, that's a great gig, you know, it's Roman slavery is very complicated in a way that like. Slavery in the Americas is not, but this. Yeah. Chunk of Roman slavery is very similar, especially because some Roman slaves could attain their freedom while others certainly could not. Yeah, I mean, if you're one of the things that's interesting, if you're talking about like urban Roman slaves, how slaves, right. They usually, if they lived, you know, in the middle age or so, would get their freedom. And a lot of the wealthiest people in the city of Rome were either former slaves or descendants of slaves because for those people it was like, it was like a paid internship. You would be a slave for like 10-15, twenty years. You would get money when you were freed, and the person who had owned you would have to pay you money the rest of their life. Now. You would have to support them in a number of ways, politically and stuff. There was this client system that was built up, but it allowed. A lot of people who started successful mercantile businesses were able to do so because they got their training while they were a slave, and then they got funding from their former owner to start a business. And as a freed slave, you can't hold political office, but you can vote. And your kids. And hold hold full political office, right. So a lot of the wealthiest, most powerful families in Rome do have like a slave that was like their granddad or something like that because it is right. It's not like racial slavery, right. The Romans didn't think about it in those terms anyway. Just it's it's a very interesting thing. Anthropologically, they, you know, grabbed us slave and whatever, you know, you happen to be educated, you would probably like half of the like. I'm not exactly sure the numbers, but a large amount of of early civil Roman society was. Slaves, yeah, it's a huge amount. There are accountants, bureaucrats, whatever. And this is occurring at the same time as like when someone like Cato Enslaves 10s of thousands of people in a in a, in a, an uprising or something. Those folks are like being marched right to mines or or fields where they're work to death, right. Like, which is very familiar to some of like some of the worst slavery that's ever. Any Rome is interesting. And even in the best case scenario here, let's say, you know, 10,000 and that's a very high number of these people are educated. You're literate, you know, they're aristocrats and whatever town they came from at best if they don't get, you know, put into the minds to die, which is legitimately when the worst slavery gigs, you could get in Rome because that's like where they would send rejected gladiators. And she was to the minds, too, but you would go into Roman society and have to adopt Roman culture, Roman customs, Roman language, all of these things in order to continue to survive. So that's still a genocide. Yeah, it's. Roman history, real meat. You know what else is neat? Oh no. Products and services that support this podcast, who also have enslaved a couple of towns in Iberia after a crushing a brutal uprising. You know what products and services might not send you to the mines? Ohh for sure, well they'll put you right in those minds. Look, you don't get the kind of quality smoked salmon that puts out in their smoked salmon breakfast platter without a lot of people dying to mine lithium. They're going to mail you a pre prepared box with a tiny pickaxe in it. That's how you get involved with. You mine it, we ship it program. Anyway, here's adds. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals, like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people? And so alleviating poverty is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. So obviously, Kato. What, what the kind of stuff Kato was doing in Iberia. You can find a number of cases of that, stuff like that happening in this. By Romans and by other generals. It is worth noting that his peers, who are also Roman military commanders, are like, this guy is pretty cruel to his defeated enemies, you know? And again, Rome is the country that, when they had a slave uprising, crucified the entire slave army of thousands and lined their corpses. For miles along the Via Appia, right? And there those guys are being like, wow, this dude's mean guys, I'm. I'm starting to think Kato's gone too far. I say as I hammer another nail into the slaves hand. That guy's * **** anyway. So as a politician, Cato engaged in acts of conservative sophistry that are again very familiar. Even today. He he got hard as **** and I mean that in *** **** sense, thinking about farmers who he considered to be the backbone of society. And he also, yeah, he ******* loves farmers and he hated the the merchants and the business class and educated Greek teachers who he said were ruining Rome. Same ****. You gotta get out critical Greek theory out of the class. Critical Greek theory is ruining our children. According to the historian Polybius quote, Cato wants declared in a public speech that anybody could see the Republic was going downhill when a pretty boy could cost more than a plot of land and jars of fish more than Plowman. Again, Roman political history. A lot of fun to read about. Yep. Have you seen the prices of these boys? I would like to get into the upper middle class and for me a fine Greek boy. So Cato made a huge point of the values of quote, the life of simplicity and self-discipline. He did this while owning several massive plantation plantations or latifundia, which he worked with huge teams of. When he talked about being a farmer because he wrote a book about farming, his farms were like, they were like the plantations of the US S during slavery. They were these massive enterprises worked by thousands of slaves, like that's that's farming for Cato. The latifundia were so prevalent they collapsed the Roman. Economy because regular Roman dudes didn't have jobs anymore. That that's why the dole started. It's part. It's a big part of why. And it takes a while, which is evidence of some of the things the Romans were doing that were smart. But like, it's a big part of why the Roman Empire eventually collapses. Because Rome strength is like the Yeoman farmer class that Jefferson got all ***** about. It's small farmers, right? Who would breed kids who were, like used to roughing it. And then those kids would join the Roman military. And that's what expanded the Roman Empire. And over time, all of those farms were taken over by Rich senators who wanted hobby. Farms worked by slaves, which made it difficult for them to recruit soldiers, which led to about it. It's a long process. The collapse of the Roman Empire isn't that simple, but it's it's even funnier because you you as you talked about. Like one of their strengths as being able to throw waves of idiot Roman kids at swords until you finally, like, got tired and went home. Back then you had to be a land owning male to join the military. So before the Marian reforms, yes. So these 10s of thousands of land owners died, and then ******** like Cato swooped in and bought the. Onward farms up. Yeah. And we're like, well, I'll take this, fill it with slaves. Yeah. It was noted of Cato that he preferred he, quote, preferred to buy those prisoners of war who were young and still susceptible like puppies. Oh, that's grim, yeah. Despite his public rants against merchants, he also made most of his money, according to Plutarch, as quote the most disruptive branch of money lending, AKA he ran a payday loan company. This guy sucks so bad. This guy with 100% have his name on a stadium. Ohh God yeah. And also Cato would have like a billion dollars in crypto. Like Kate, he would have been all in on NFT's. Don't don't you dare tell me Kato wouldn't own a board ape that he would get stolen from him when he clicked a phishing link. Now he would just get really mad that people are buying NFT's of Greek boy ***. What happened to the Apes that made us great? He's just he's just doing a return to monkey. Yeah, return to monkey. So Cato goes through decades of public life. He writes a bunch of books. We still have his book on farming. He writes one on soldiering that we don't have. He lays down a lot of pithy quotes for ****** **** to put on their Facebook profiles generations later. Quotes like, quote, Stick to the point the words will follow, which is very bit like he. He invented Ben Shapiro. Let's just say it. Like, what does that even mean? It means, like, you kind of find the argument by the end point of the argument, right? Like, that's a ******* Michael Scott quote. It is a Michael Scott quote, but it's also like, you can see, it's like Ted Cruz being like, we just need one door in the schools, you know? Like your point is, I don't want anything to fundamentally change about like, guns because it's the central issue that you can't go against as a conservative. So instead one door, right like it. Stick to the stick to the point and you'll figure out the words along the way, coming out boldly. Yeah, bravely in favor of door control. So many, like many of the conservative demagogues who would come after him, he was a massive misogynist and and this is he's a misogynist during the Roman Republic. Now Cato spoke out against the repeal of a law from the Second Punic War which denied women the right to quote, possess more than half an ounce of gold or where party colored clothing or ride in a horse drawn vehicle in a city or town. Now this was this law. I'm not entirely certain why they passed this law during the war, but it's like they they passed this law as like part of a you know, a the war effort and it was very unpopular for. Was very unpopular for obvious reasons and the injustice of this law. Roman women because again this is a Republic. They don't have the right to vote. But there are they do understand the the idea of like protesting right like that does exist in Rome. The idea that you would get people together. Now generally Roman protests are armed mobs that murder people. But who's to say that's good or bad? Who's to say if that's it's not always bad, right? A lot of the times the armed mobs are in the right won't Roman women to protest this law organized one of maybe the 1st. Women's rights campaign and democratic history to get it repealed. Uh, Livy writes that quote. Women came in from the towns and rural centers and beset all the streets of the city and all the approaches to the forum. This horrified Cato, and he found himself asking, quote, are you in the habit of running out into the streets, blocking the roads, addressing other women's husbands? Or are you more alluring in the street than in the home, more attractive to other women's women's husbands? And yet, even at home, it would not become you to be concerned about the question of what laws should be passed or repealed in this place. So again, to tell you about how modern a right wing politician this guy is, he's ******* yelling at them for blocking the streets. Kato has like, an F-350 with truck nuts on it and have absolutely Duffy sticker. Yes, yeah, he he awoke one night in ******* 192 BC with like the vision of the Black Rifle coffee logo in his head. Does 100% fit his business model of fraud so that he knew the name of Kyle Rittenhouse thousands of years before the boy was born? I'm having visions of nine lighting, clothing and apparel. He would have done amazing on Facebook. He and Steve Bannon would have gone fishing together. He was just so ready for our worlds. He absolutely would have been on that boat that got raided by the ******* mail. Yeah, he would have. He would have been part of the week and he would have been one of the guys who got pardoned, right? Like. Yeah, so Kato screeched to his fellow legislators that gatherings of women were, quote, the greatest danger a democracy could face. Quote our liberty, overthrown in the home by female and discipline, is now being crushed and trodden under foot here too, in the forum. It is because we have not kept them under control individually that we are now terrorized by them collectively. But we haven't preserve us, are now allowing them to even take part in politics and actually to appear in the forum and be present at our meetings. In assemblies, what are they longing for and complete liberty, or rather, complete license? The very moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors. Wow. I like that. You started halfway through. You switched to your Ben Shapiro voice. I cannot. I cannot. There's a certain level of ******** that you just have to go into. Ben Shapiro. They all sound the exact same. It's amazingly, you know again, man, like that could be a ******* Breitbart column, right? Like that could be on return of kings, you know? It's amazing. It's incredible. So going his own way. The way Ben Kiernan goes, yeah, I'm imagining Kato giving this speech in front of David. Sorry. Yeah, he's never felt like a glass of ******* like cut wine. Yeah, yeah, wine with just enough lead in it to take the edge off. Ah, ******* hell, Ben Kiernan goes on to write quote for Cato, much of this seemed a matter of social control. According to according to Plutarch, since he believed that among slaves sex was the greatest cause of delinquency, he made it a rule that his male slaves could, for a set fee, have intercourse with his female slaves, but no one of them was allowed to consort with another woman. After Cato's wife died, a prostitute quote would come to see him without anyone knowing of it. In public life. He was more severe. In Spain. One of his officers hung himself when Cato. Discovered he had bought 3 captive boys. Kato sold the boys and returned the price to the Treasury. He once banished from the Senate a man who had kissed his own wife in broad daylight and insight of his daughter. Kato joked publicly that he had never embraced his wife except after a loud Thunder clap. So just a normal dude, how you just a real normal *** guy. This is, this is the this is the ******* origin story of ******* through a hole in a sheet. Yeah, like, yeah, is this sheet on top of his wife who's like, OK, honey, here I come. And again, Kato is not normal for Rome in the period. He's not abnormal. There's certainly, like, dudes who line up behind him in his power block. But like most, a lot of Roman society is like, what the **** dude? Especially nobility. Like, come on, man. Made out of, like, all they do is weird sex thing. Yeah, men, women, each other. It doesn't matter. Like, man, this guy's a ******* brute. He sucks and rounding out his patron St of right wing politicians bingo card, Cato also attacked gay people and 186 BCE Roman magistrates began to prosecute an alleged Bacchic cult. Bacchus is like the God of of wine and other cool stuff. Now this cult had formerly been an all female cult which had over time become an all gay men cult. Basically like a place for them to go cruising. It is pretty rad, but like Kato helps to like lead this charge against them and a bunch of guys get convicted of quote. Owl sexual acts, along with some women, which again makes it seem even radder. Cato enthusiastically denounces the cult, and he helped. In order to like because of how much he hates the fact that like there's this fairly popular cult that basically is like a place for for for gay people to go. Cruise Kato builds support for an invasion of Dalmatia and he justifies it by saying quote, because they do not want the men of Italy to become womanish enough through too lengthy a spell of feast. Like he's like, this is evidence that our guys are getting too girly, so we have to invade this random country. This is Cato falling for like the the. Russian army recruitment commercial that everybody really loved like a year ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The VDV thing. Ohno, though. The other one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also that. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's it's pretty funny anyway, so and then near the end of his life, this has all been color on Cato in 154 BCE. Spain rises in rebellion again. This is like 40 years after he's crushed a rebellion in Spain, right? So 40 years. That's about enough time for you to, like, replace all the people who he killed. So this rebellion really doesn't have a lot to do with Carthage, which again has no Navy and not much of a military at this point. But the invasion is. Or the uprising is followed by uprisings in Macedonia and in Achaea. And a wiser man might have concluded that people were mad about, like, Roman taxes, all of the murdering and enslaving they were doing in these areas. Kato was not that dude. In 152 BCE, he takes part in a senatorial mission to Carthage. Now, the city has lost its empire, but it's still it's in a really good location. They're still able to like, trade. They can't have a militarized Navy, but they got like, boats bringing places, stuff all over the place. And the fact that they're no longer paying for the massive military that they'd had as an empire means that they're like, they're doing really well, like the economy is thriving, right? It turns out that it turns out we could reinvest this money into public work. Yes, this is actually going well. Kato writes in his heart, in a horror that quote, Carthage was quote, burgeoning with an abundance of young men brimming with copious wealth, teeming with weapons, and he really seems a zero, and constantly in young men. He's really got a thing with the young men now, filled with a mix of jealousy and paranoia, he returns home and he takes to the Senate, Ben Kiernan writes on his return, while he was rearranging the folds in his toga in the Senate, Cato by design, let fall some Libyan figs, and then after everyone had expressed admiration for their size and beauty. He said that the land produced them was but three days sale from Rome. So again, this is funny because like it's figs, but also this is not that different from being like, I know you remember guys earlier in the aughts, like when China had their big Olympics thing or just like looking at like, look at all the stuff they're making in China. Like they're they're they're like we we have to we can't compete with them. They they're eating us alive and manufacturing. You're like, think about like the ******* one of those Michael Crichton books written in between Reagan and Clinton where he's like terrified of Japan. Like that whole fear of Japan in the 80s. It's like, look at all these computers they can build. Speaking of Japan, that's like, quite literally the one of the excuses they use to manufacture war in China is like, look at all the land they have that we don't. This is ********. Yeah, it's it's this. Except for in this case it's figs. But yeah, it is, Kiernan writes. It's all a lie. Quote, his figs could not have come from Carthage more than a six day voyage in summer. His audience of senatorial gentleman farmers probably knew they came from Cato's own estate near Rome. Some may even have read his advice on how to plant African figs in Italy. Carthaginian products had barely penetrated the Italian market, so Cato brings his own figs, and it's like, look at how big these Carthaginian figs are. Crisis actor figs, yeah, believe that this is ******** again, he would have done very well with Twitter, so Kato spent the last five years of his life haranguing his fellow senators to destroy Carthage, and gradually they get on board with the idea. While the plan is always couched in terms of Roman self-defense, the arguments are all economic, and the primary reason to support the war was to give the nation an easy foe. The rally against and a time when which there's all these costly and difficult constant uprisings. On the year Cato died, 149 Romes console Censorinus demanded Carthage hand over her weapons and give Rome hostages. They do this. So the Romans next demand that the Carthage uproot itself and move 12 miles inland so that they can burn the old city to the ground. The Carthaginians are like, no, we're not going to do that, Roman senators. And you're like, all right, we have to give them the demand they can't possibly meet. Like that. This is why they're like, right? The whole city. They're trying to come up with a demand that will force Carthage to fight them, and eventually they have to be all right, you got to move your city 12 miles. Well, no, that sounds really dumb about yeah. So Carthage fights for three years against Romes. Might they finally succumb in 146 BC? And Roman legions March St to Street, house to house, killing systematically. Depending on who you go to, the city is likely to have held between 100,000 and 200,000 people. When Roman. Soldiers into it, uh, I'm going to quote from a write up in worldhistory.org here. Even at this lower end, the slaughter in the city was, however substantial and probably unprecedented in the European world up to that time. The survivors, possibly numbering anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 people, were sold as slaves on direct orders from Rome. The city was subsequently set alight and after 10 days of burning, demolished stone by stone. Polybius and his histories noted that the destruction of the Carthaginians was immediate and total so much that there were no Carthaginians. Left to even express their remorse, the killing of all the inhabitants of the city state whose inhabitants had refused to surrender was quite frequent in the ancient world. So labour labeling this particular innocent incident of genocide needs careful examination. A key element in this case, and one which would be in line with Limpkins notion of genocide, was Rome's apparent intention to destroy Carthage, its people and culture. No matter what. This underlying aim could be seen in Rome's increasingly impossible to satisfy demands placed on Carthage before the outbreak of war, when Carthage could no longer realistically. Satisfied the demands. This gave the Romans a legitimate excuse for their actions. And yeah, I'm comfortable calling it a genocide. Yeah, yeah. I I think one of the problems is, and I think we've already talked about this, is this hasn't Inc to use the term genocide as one, obviously heavily politicized when we talk about modern day events. But two, when it comes to, to events that have happened thousands of years ago, everybody has this idea that genocide is a modern thing within the late 1800s. Seventeen. Whatever, yes. Yeah. And it's. Nah, Nah, it's. I don't understand that the hesitancy anymore. Like, I I don't understand the political politicization of it either, but, like, at least that you understand why, like, well, we can't call this a genocide because, you know, we'll get ******* sanctioned by Russia or China or the United States. Yeah, but like, it's ******* Italy going to sanction nobody. Nobody. If you tell, like, Romans like this, they'll be like, yeah, I guess so. I don't think anyone gives a **** anymore. Like we should be able to do this, and the ones who do care are probably like, deeply deep. Probably. Really. It's probably like Mussolini's granddaughter. I'm sure she's not. And she is legitimately a political figure in the country. So yeah, I'm sure there are some people who would be ****** but I don't know. I know some. I know some Italians. I think mostly it's like, it's like talking to, I don't know, if you were like, go to somebody in Kenya and be like, hey, you know, somebody did a genocide here 10,000 years ago, I think most people would be like, OK, yeah, that was probably, I would caution some people on not doing that and and in certain countries. That the genocide occurred in the last 108 years or so, that's when it gets real political 10,000 years pat back not much as although, you know, we could we could talk you, you do literally live in Armenia. All right. Well, Joe, this is going to be the end of part one. When it comes back to Part 2, we're going to have a super fun discussion about what makes human beings capable of engaging in mass killing. I it sounds like it will last. I can't wait. I thought you'd never ask it. It does occasionally involve blasts, Joe. Yep. Yeah, that was that. Wasn't comfortable. You got. You got any plug cables to plug? Yeah, I host the podcast the Lions. By donkeys podcasts, not the British political one. When we talk about genocide, unfortunately, quite often, for instance, we've done 7 hours on the Cambodian genocide and we also talked about military history and stuff like that, yeah. So check out lions led by donkeys. Check out donkeys. Just find 1. They're good. They're good animal. They're good animals. Yeah, they do good stuff. Useful, hearty, good eating. Oh man. Donkey. Put that on some, like, rye bread, a little bit of ketchup. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Anyway, this has been behind the ******** the podcast funded by the donkey meat industry, which is having a tough year as always. Having a tough year. Difficult to get people on board with documents. I can't believe Big Donkey got their hooks into iheart media. I always knew this day would come. Yeah, yeah, we're, we're, we're we're primarily opposing the EMU farmers of America. You wanna leave this disastrous path that Australia has already followed? What? What was making an Australia joke? Sophie, we have to oppose big EMU. It's just proxy war, don't you know? The Emus already defeated Australia. They're just trying to bring them here. They're trying to bring them to the United States. All their boomerangs were useless. All right, that's the show. Behind the ******** is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it then after just 18 months of podcasting. Speaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. 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