Robert Evans and Joe Kasabian challenge traditional genocide narratives by examining the 8,000-year-old Nataruk massacre, which occurred before states existed, and Raphael Lemkin's 1944 definition that excluded settler colonialism due to Allied interests. They contrast Rome's land power with Carthage's naval dominance during the Punic Wars, rejecting the myth of Roman virtue while highlighting Cato the Elder's role in justifying the 146 BC destruction of Carthage as a resource-driven genocide. Ultimately, the episode reframes ancient imperial conflicts as systematic cultural extermination rather than moral struggles between good and evil. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Funding the Diaper Bank00:16:23
So come on.
Robert.
Take it off.
Let's move it.
Robert.
Sophie.
Robert.
Sophie.
Robert.
Sophie.
Evans, comma Robert.
This is Behind the Bastards.
It's a podcast.
Hello, Joe.
Hey, hello, Robert.
I'm glad to be on the podcast.
This is the podcast of Behind the Bastards, 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 a directly enabled genocide.
Yay.
Yay.
More to the point, Joe.
We're talking, there was an episode of our sister podcast.
It could happen here.
Maybe cousin podcast is more accurate.
Maybe Behind the Bastards is like the uncle.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Depending on what state you're from, that's all of those things.
Here's what I'll say.
Behind the baskets is the uncle by marriage that 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 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 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 will be like, because it is difficult, I think, if you haven't thought about this, to imagine like prehistoric human beings engaging in organized genocide.
But they totally did.
Yeah.
I think that's something that, I mean, of course, having an organized state certainly will make that easier.
It does help.
Yes.
I think it's something we were like, I'm a grad student in Holocaust and genocide studies.
And I think it's something that people kind of 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 state structure.
Right.
I mean, you would imagine so.
I think it might be best, honestly, like given the fact that we are recording this the week of the Ovaldi shootings, it might be best to think about this the way it's reasonable to think about mass killings, where 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, and number two, 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 like why World War I was so horrific.
You know, we revolutionized the mechanisms of mass murder to harvest human meat.
It's not like the wars that happened before then were not as horrific in their day.
We just continued to surpass all previous human records of 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 an academic, on an academic capacity, specialize in genocide.
Like you got a grad degree and shit, unlike me who just reads books about this.
So you have a degree of like formal knowledge here that 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 at least one scholar will argue is like the first documented genocide in history.
And after that, we're going to be talking more about what makes people capable of committing genocide, like what's actually going on 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 as like being brainwashed or taken over by a mania.
That's generally not what happens, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, I love that argument.
It's one of my favorites.
Yeah.
We will be chatting about that in part two.
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, one which dates back roughly 10,000 years to about 8,000 BC.
It is filled with women, children, and men, both young and old.
Some of them had skulls 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 since, right?
Including people with their hands bound who were executed, particularly like women and children who were executed with their hands bound.
Marta Mirazan 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 Nataruk 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 us and the comments I made on another podcast, is that this occurs pre-the development of anything we would recognize as a state, really anywhere in the world.
This is like 8,000 to 8,500 BC is roughly when this is thought to have, when the killings that these graves were resulted or resulted from were thought to have occurred.
Depending on, you know, there's some wiggle room as to when the first state arose, right?
None of these dates are exact, but broadly speaking, somewhere around 7500 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Like in that kind of ballpark is when we get our first city.
And how much you kind of draw a line to the first city and whether you can 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 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 was not a factor in this.
People weren't doing that yet.
The peoples of that part of Kenya in roughly 8,000 BC were hunter-gatherers, or to be more specific, they were actually fisher-foragers, not really like hunting in a big deal.
Because again, it was a wet area at this point, right?
It's very dry today, but there were a lot of 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 Nataruk people.
And they're believed to have roamed and made connections as far afield as the Nile Valley and the Maghreb.
It's worth noting that in the period they were killed, the Sahara was green.
It was not yet a desert.
For an example, like how fucking old this is.
Like 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 Nataruk.
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.
Their 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 was 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 Nataruk 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.
Twelve 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 woman, 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.
Mirazan Lar 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 ferocity.
The use of these weapons, Lar notes, also suggests premeditation and planning.
She goes on to suggest that given the resources employed, the people of Nataruk 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 going to say that tracks.
What's unique is even in situations where, and 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 mass murders are done as 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 the area, but the reason why you're killing them is to take their shit.
Yes.
So that all makes perfect sense to me in my very, very broken mind.
Yeah, yeah.
But it does like, I think the thing that's like, this is not, this does not look purely like you have two groups who have like a rant, like a conflict 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 killing of like women 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 more complete than the kind of violence that is, I guess you'd say, more normal around people and between people in this period.
Yeah.
Even if you measure that against the 1948 definitions that would come however many thousands of years later, that that hits it to a T.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's the point that like Mirazan 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 significant a role is pure venal greed, which we'll be talking about more in part two.
But like people want shit, and that's a big part of why they do a genocide.
And that goes back further than states.
Now, obviously, I think one of the things that I kind of thought about reading about this case is the mass graves recently uncovered in parts of Ukraine, like Buka, and the fact that the killing of civilians whose hands were bound, like that was one of the things that 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 outside a lake in Kenya.
These archaeologists saying it was probably because they wanted resources and the Russian soldiers in Buka stealing every luxury item that isn't nailed down.
This is what people do.
Yeah, specifically, it's what, I mean, especially in Kenya, it's extra state forces or I guess paramilitary forces, tribal military forces.
Yeah, I mean, it's still happening with the Boko Haramans.
I think it's Boko Haram.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, people are pretty consistent.
You got to give us that.
Unfortunately, very painfully, depressingly consistent.
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 shitload of people isn't necessarily considered like a committer of genocide.
I think there's even a lot of debate about whether or not you would consider 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 has a lot of fun.
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 start what became like not just the concept of genocide as like a legal term, but the genocide convention actually started way before the Holocaust got going in 1933, which is like the year the Nazis took power.
So Lemkin like was aware of what was coming, you know?
Like he was.
Yeah, I mean, he had actually started his research about two decades before then.
He was in law school, I believe.
I want to say in Poland when the trial of Sogamon Tetlerian was going on in Berlin.
Yeah.
Tellerian being the Turkish or no, the Tellerian 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 and got away with.
Yeah, he's a cool dude.
Yeah, he rocks.
Yeah.
And Lemkin was watching this, well, reading it unfold in the newspaper, and he asked one of his professors 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 professor effectively believed in the sovereign idea that a sovereign could do with its people as they pleased and there wasn't any other states to tell them what to do.
Yeah.
And he immediately believed, I believe this is in 1925, something like that.
He's like, that doesn't seem right to me.
So by the time 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, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often fucking rhymes.
And it's probably worth noting here, too.
We are getting a field from the ancient days, but in the same way that Lemkin started thinking about what a genocide was and started, 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.
Defining Ancient Genocide00:09:42
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.
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, shit, who remembers the Armenians?
Yeah.
And not to mention, they're only, I mean, during World War I, the German Empire had gates in the Ottoman Empire.
Yes.
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 then the German Empire committed genocide in Namibia a couple of years before that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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, Lemkin's 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 to describe the destruction of a nation or ethnic group.
And this is one of those Greek Latin hodgepodges 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, 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.
What happened?
And that wording, not that the USSR is the only state that killed a bunch of political groups, but yeah, the wording was eventually dropped.
The argument was that the term's etymology excluded those groups because, I mean, and that's not inaccurate.
I think it's wrong, but that's not inaccurate, right?
Like 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 royal family of Russia was a genocide.
That seems weird to me.
Right.
But like the killing is the killing of like the Ukrainian starvation genocide, which was justified as the killing of like rich peasants.
Is that a genocide?
Sure, that's absolutely a genocide.
Ironically, according to Raphael 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.
Yeah.
And I mean, that wasn't even the only thing that got stripped out of there.
They also got rid of like the con 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.
Well, and then Lemkin had that on there.
And again, the U.S., the UK, and the USSR is like, we'll bump the brakes on that one.
Yeah.
None of all of the states that were responsible for like winning World War II 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.
Oh, 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 white South African also holds stuck in the genocide.
Yes.
So, when it comes to how we're going to define genocide for this, at least my proposition, Joe, I want to go to scholar Irvin Staub.
And now, Staub is another Holocaust survivor.
And 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 tens 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 is very, very close.
It's like a simplified version of Lemkin's original series.
And that's what Staub says, like, starts with Limkin and says, I think that what he was saying initially is exactly right.
And that's how we should be talking about this.
So, yeah, I think that's kind of where we're going to go here.
Or 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 presence 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 archaeologists think it was the people who carried out the genocide were from a distance away, right?
Like they had traveled to get there, wanted to wipe out a different group of people.
And that's a genocide.
Yeah, that shows pretty clear intent.
Like, not taking the children or the women, which is very common during crimes like this, shows pretty specific intents 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 shit 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 steppe north of the Black Sea between 200 and 3000 BC.
There were certainly states that existed in the world in this period, but there were not in that area, right?
Like there's no, this is like kind of around like Ukraine, Poland, that area.
There's not in 3000 BC, there's not a Ukraine or a Poland, right?
There's not political entities in any way we would recognize in this area.
So 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, we'll get into like what archaeologists mean when they talk about like cultures here.
But as the Yamnaya flowed through the continent, a number of things changed dramatically in those parts of Europe.
So 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 Christensen from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, tells new scientists, quote, I've become increasingly 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 period.
There's 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 period around 2800s 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 6,000 years writing about like the Ziploc culture versus 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.
From Addiction to Acceleration00:05:11
This is the make a small dent in the top of a pop can culture and puncture holes in it.
Oh.
You know who else has culture, Joe?
Oh, no.
Probably nobody that's coming next.
Nah, the products and services that support this podcast, Joe.
They all come from the buy things culture.
Sophie'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 we don't know that.
We really, we really don't.
Both Taser and the Washington State Highway Patrol have attempted to run ads on our data.
They're not run a fucking Fanta ad.
Hey, what were they supposed to do?
Don't you want a Fanta, Joe?
I do.
Here's some ads.
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He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Preventing Mass Atrocities00:05:21
Ah, we're back and we're talking about how Europeans are a decadent and depraved people, mainly because of beet sugar.
Series?
Beet sugar-based sweeteners.
Yeah, absolutely not.
Vile.
Use corn syrup.
Come on.
Like a civilized people.
It needs to be so thick that it just stands on its own if you cut the can away from the liquor.
Why are we even flavoring shit?
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 pull up to the ethanol pumps.
That's just corn sugar for cars.
I just drank it straight from the tap, baby.
Do it all.
Why isn't everything corn yet?
That's my question.
A lot of things are corn, but why isn't everything?
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 cup.
They turned into a corn cup.
So yeah, we're talking about 2800s BCE, the violent replacement of the globular amphora culture with the corded wear culture and the Amnaya are kind of associated with the corded wear culture.
This is all complicated archaeology here, but I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Journal of Anthropology.
And this is specifically an article that's like looking at a mass grave from this period where one culture is being replaced by another.
We sequence the genomes of 15 skeletons from a 5,000-year-old mass grave in 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 analyses 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 corded ware groups because of their lack of steppe-related ancestry.
Although the reason for the massacre is unknown, it is possible that it was connected to the expansion of corded wear 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 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 genociding.
Yeah, I mean, I think Scott Strauss wrote in his book, Prevention on Genocide, Prevention of Genocide, which you can actually download for free at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website.
Dope.
But he said that one of the major genocidal risk factors is a history of conflict within groups.
So, yeah, that tracks, especially if you're existing all on like a step fighting over the same resources, eventually you're going to be like, this would be a lot easier if those people simply didn't exist.
Boy, I have to say, Joe, that I'm happy that a book with the title and thesis, How to Prevent Genocide, is available for free and not paywalled.
That's like what it is.
Yeah, probably shouldn't pay all that, huh?
I think something has to be said for academics that realize that nobody's going to pay for our shit.
And if my field of study is how to prevent genocide, perhaps this work should be widely available.
So further research by two separate teams writing in Nature magazine in 2015 came to similar conclusions that an influx of herders from the steppes of what are now Russia and Ukraine replaced a huge amount of the gene pool in Central and Western Europe at 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 Christensen and others based on this research are similar to some of the ideas of a guy named Gustav Kosina.
Kosina was an early 20th century archaeologist in Germany whose ideas were integral to the formation of Nazi race science.
Now, obviously, the Yamnaya are not Aryans.
They, again, would probably look more like Slavs, which the Nazis did not think were a master race.
But the Nazis bestowed like honorary Aryan status on so many random groups of people from Palestinians to Armenians.
Yeah, fuck it.
You're Aryan now.
I mean, to Tibet, where a lot of Nazi race science started was them like hanging out in these monasteries in Tibet and being like, these must be ancient Aryans.
There's a lot of people.
They look just like us.
Yeah, there's a lot of...
Again, Nazis, not great scientists, except with rockets.
You got to give them the rockets.
I'm starting to think, and Robert, correct me if I'm wrong, the guys who believed in eugenics might not be the smartest people on earth.
Rome and the Aryan Myth00:15:21
No, no.
They weren't good at a lot of things.
But yeah, so this is part of why it's been difficult to kind of push this along.
But it does seem like there's a significant amount of scholarship that, 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'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 1400s and there were genocides in the Middle East from the day that there were cities.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's just there's a positive, a positivist 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 can 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.
Yeah.
And there's also this idea that it's like, okay, well, how can you prove that you prevented one?
Like, how can you prove something that didn't happen?
Like, okay, 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.
Um, 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.
It's 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 fucked up thing or stopped them from going down a path where they'd get on 4chan and get radicalized to do this.
We just don't get that, which makes it harder to like develop good programs to stop stuff like that.
That's one thing we need to steal from cops.
And that's like, cause 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 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, the answers 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, well, maybe, I don't know.
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 two, 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 in 146 BC by the Roman Republic.
And when I, this is not obviously the first genocide by one state against 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 what had happened.
Ben posits that the first recorded incitement to genocide were the words of Roman politician Marcus Porceus Cato, who for the last four years of his life ended every single public speech with the words Delinda est 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 and mys jam.
Of course.
Yeah, I love this shit.
Not genocide, but you know, Roman history.
I was going to say, it is an amazing field to work in when you can say, yeah, he got his start in genocide.
I'm like, I know it.
I know what Robert means.
Yeah, yeah, we're talking about Cato, baby.
And Cato is so, because he's such a modern right-wing shithead politician.
Like, he's every, like, so much of what he does is like, well, that could be a fucking dude today.
Because Rome is, in a lot of ways, a very modern political entity in this period, like Republican Rome.
There's a lot of things that sound very familiar because it turns out whenever people develop a republic that's based primarily around resource extraction, certain things are super similar.
Yep.
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.
Like obviously it's further back then, but like you could fly from one city to the other in about like an hour.
Like today.
Even back then they could float their far.
Even back then they could float their shitty glued together boats across the net at one another.
I mean 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 was first a mercantile power with trade routes.
Again, they're in northern Africa.
They're trading with people in modern day Britain.
Like their trade routes almost extend to like Scotland.
And of course, 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 and 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 West 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 my experience in Texas history.
Yes.
That is, it's horseshit.
Obviously, Carthage is a massive imperial aristocratic power that does all sorts of fucked up shit, including human sacrifice and stuff.
Rome in this period has stopped doing human sacrifice as a religious thing, but they also are a gigantic slave power that brutally oppressives and like enslaves entire racial groups of people during conflicts.
Like neither of them is better than the other.
There's not a good guy here.
Like they're just both.
And it's like, it's also, I think, pointless to call one the bad guy.
They're just two early states fighting a war over resources, right?
Like that's what's happening.
Yeah, there's no point in drawing a moral line between them.
All of their wars are over like proxy city states and resources.
That's exactly what we're about to talk about.
This isn't about democracy.
No, this is not in any way.
Carthage was the great naval power of the region.
Like they kind of own the Mediterranean in this period.
Well, Rome, and Rome always is an infantry power, right?
Like that's the core of Roman military power is like heavy infantry in this period and basically up until like the fall of the empire.
That's the thing that they're best at.
Whenever Rome has anything good that's not heavy infantry, it's because they like hire auxiliaries from another culture, right?
Like all of their good cavalry, all of their good archers.
They're also really good at artillery, although that's kind of less of a factor in this period, 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 battling Italians.
Again, Rome is not Italy at this point, right?
Most of Rome's wars are with Italians.
They call them Gauls, 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 Italians hate more than Romans.
So, yeah, Carthage and Rome get along for a while where they're doing all these other wars, but then some shit goes down in Sicily.
Now, if you're not a geographizer, Sicily is the American football that's being kicked by Italy, right?
If you 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 Sicily, Syracuse, goes to war with another city in Sicily, Messina.
And like Syracuse sends soldiers to attack Messina.
Carthage backs 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're like, all right, I guess we'll do it again.
And primarily.
I have no idea how many Roman kids I have ready to throw at you.
We don't care about our lives at all.
But that is why Rome becomes the big world power in this region is because they're the best at like having 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 rued ever since.
So this leads to the Second Punic War and a key moment in the Second Punic War.
The one that 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 Rome for a while.
It's a pretty impressive campaign.
It includes the massacre.
So there's this battle called Cani, Canai, you know, nobody, whatever, however you want to say it, where there's this Roman army that outnumbers the Carthaginians two 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 II.
Like you can find all generals on every side of that war talking about trying to pull off a canai.
Yeah, like I think someone did the math, and it's a historian I'm not a huge fan of, but they said that the massacre at Canai was like 600 Romans died every hour until from sunrise to sunset.
It is a calculable percentage of the entire population of Rome that dies in this battle, like a meaningful percentage.
It's like 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, all right, we got more guys.
So Rome eventually grinds Carthage down.
Hannibal's armies are beaten because they get pulled back to Africa because a dude named Scipio Africanus invades.
And there's this whole battle called Zama.
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 pissed at the Carthaginians.
This is not wildly dissimilar from how a lot of folks in Europe felt at the end of World War I, right?
We lost like a huge chunk of a generation fighting you guys.
We don't just want to shake hands and end this thing, you know?
Like, fuck you.
That's the attitude.
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 period in the fighting between them, these are the first and second 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 assholes 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 republic, 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 shit today, right?
That is one of the things that's really interesting about studying Rome in this period.
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 Hansen, who's a modern right-wing historian.
If you smushed 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 in history.
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 Rome is a dude named Scipio Africanus, who's generally seen as one of like the best generals in military history because Hannibal, pretty good at war.
Slavery in Roman Mines00:07:09
Yeah.
And Scipio beats him in a fair fight.
Cato spends the like years after the war hounding Scipio 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 Scipio's name, but every other person involved named Scipio, which is like a common first name.
It's like if you were writing a World War II history and you hated Patton, so you cut out all the Georges.
I need to be clear here.
I actually support that.
That's fuck Georges, right, right?
And fuck Patton, but yes.
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 the pettiest man alive.
And in 195 BCE, he gets elected consul, which is like pretty much the top of the Roman structure.
You have censors too every now and again when they do the census, but like consuls basically like 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 consul is, right?
There's two of them at the time.
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 as it's like the top, if you're in politics, your goal is to get to be consul one day, right?
That's like as good as it gets.
So while he's consul 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 fuck's going on with those motherfuckers.
But Spain is rebelling at this point and he takes over the military.
And he, he, he, 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 one battle, Livy 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 were 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 make a case that he's doing some genocides here.
Yeah, I mean, especially if we're going off modern definitions, like where the ICC or ICJ identifies, rightfully identifies Sebronica as an act of genocide unto itself.
So like there can be microcosms of genocidal acts.
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 60.
Yeah, it was a lot of Romans he killed.
But enslaving an entire region of people and marching that, 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 Africans who were brought into the, 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.
Yeah, you strip them of their culture, their language.
You're not going to allow it to propagate in any way, just like, you know, slave owners force slaves to take white names, adopt Christianity.
Yeah.
And 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 shit 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, that's a great gig, you know?
Roman slavery is very complicated in a way that like slavery in the Americas is not.
But this 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 talking, one of the things that's interesting, if you're talking about like urban Roman slaves, house slaves, right?
They usually, if they lived, you know, into 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 a paid internship.
You would be a slave for like 10, 15, 20 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 can 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 not like racial slavery, right?
The Romans didn't think about it in those terms.
Anyway, just it's a very interesting thing anthropologically.
And if they grabbed a 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 early civil Roman society was slaves.
Yeah, a huge amount.
They're accountants, bureaucrats, whatever.
And this is occurring at the same time as like when someone like Cato enslaves tens of thousands of people in a, in a, in an uprising or something, those folks are like being marched right to mines or fields where they're worked to death, right?
Like, which is very familiar to some of like some of the worst slavery that's ever anyway.
And 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, they're literate, you know, they're aristocrats in whatever town they came from.
At best, if they don't get, you know, put into the mines to die, which is legitimately one of the worst slavery gigs you could get in Rome, because that's like where they would send rejected gladiators and shits to the mines 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.
Yeah.
So that's still a genocide.
Yeah, it's Roman history, real neat.
You know what else is neat?
Destroying the World with AI00:04:20
Oh, no.
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Oh, for sure will.
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They're going to mail you a pre-prepared box with a tiny pickaxe in it.
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Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Cato's Cruelty to Boys00:15:24
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
So, obviously, Cato, the kind of stuff Cato is doing in Iberia, you can find a number of cases of that stuff like that happening in this period by Romans and by other generals.
It is worth noting that his peers, who are also Roman military commanders, are like, this guy's pretty cruel to his defeated enemies.
And again, Rome is the country that when they had a slave uprising, crucified the entire slave army of thousands and lined their corpses up for miles along the Via Appia, right?
And those guys are being like, wow, this dude's mean.
Guys, I'm starting to think Cato's gone too far, I say as I hammer another nail into the slave's hand.
That guy's a dick, anyway.
So as a politician, Cato engaged in acts of conservative sophistry that are, again, very familiar even today.
He got hard as fuck, and I mean that in the dick sense, thinking about farmers who he considered to be the backbone of society.
And he also, yeah, he fucking loves farmers and he hated the merchants and the business class and educated Greek teachers who he said were ruining Rome.
It's all the same shit.
You got to get out critical Greek theory out of the class.
Critical Greek theory is ruining our children.
According to the historian Polybius, quote, Cato once 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 plowmen.
Again, Roman political history, a lot of fun to read about.
Have you seen the prices of these boys?
I would like to get into the upper middle class and afford 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 plantations or latifundia, which he worked with huge teams of slaves.
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 U.S. South during slavery.
There were these massive enterprises worked by thousands of slaves.
That's farming for Cato.
The latifundia were so prevalent, they collapsed the Roman economy because regular Roman dudes didn't have jobs.
And that's why the dole started.
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's strength is like the Yeoman farmer class that Jefferson got all horny 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 a bar.
It's a long process.
The collapse of the Roman Empire isn't that simple.
It's even funnier because as you talked about, one of their strengths is being able to throw waves of idiot Roman kids at swords until you finally got tired and went home.
Back then, you had to be a land-owning male to join the military.
Yes, this was before the Marian reforms.
Yeah, so these tens of thousands of landowners died, and then assholes like Cato swooped in and bought the unworked 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 disruptible branch of money lending, aka he ran a payday loan company.
This guy sucks so bad.
This guy would 100% have his name on a stadium if he wasn't.
Oh, oh, God, yeah.
And also, Cato would have like a billion dollars in crypto.
Like, he would have been all in on NFTs.
Don't you dare tell me Cato 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 NFTs of Greek boy ass.
Yeah.
What happened to the apes that made us great?
He's just, he's just doing 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 douchebags to put on their Facebook profiles generations later.
Quotes like, quote, stick to the point, the words will follow, which is very, like, he invented Ben Shapiro.
Let's just say it.
What does it even mean?
It means like you kind of find the argument by the end point of the argument, right?
Like that's a fucking 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 this central issue that you can't go against as a conservative.
So instead, one door, right?
Like it's stick to the point and then you'll figure out the words along the way.
Coming out boldly and bravely in favor of door control.
Yeah.
So many, like many of the conservative demagogues who would come after him, he was a massive misogynist.
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 wear 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 passed this law as like part of a, you know, the war effort.
And it was very unpopular for, it 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 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.
Roman women, to protest this law, organize one of maybe the first women's rights campaign in democratic history to get it repealed.
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 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 fucking yelling at them for blocking the streets.
Cato has like an F350 with trust nests on it.
He absolutely does.
Yes.
Yeah, he awoke one night in fucking 192 BC with like the vision of the black rifle coffee logo in his head.
It does 100% fit his business model of fraud.
Knew the name of Kyle Rittenhouse thousands of years before the boy was born.
I'm having visions of nine light 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 fucking milk.
Yeah, he would have been part of the we, and he would have been one of the guys who got pardoned, right?
Like so Cato 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 indiscipline, is now being crushed and trodden underfoot 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, heaven 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 and assemblies.
What are they longing for in complete liberty or rather complete license?
The very moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors.
I mean.
Wow.
I like that you started halfway through, you switched to your Ben Shapiro voice.
I can't not.
I can't not.
There's a certain level of shithead that you just have to go into Ben Shapiro.
They all sound the exact same.
It's amazing, you know.
Again, man, like, that could be a fucking Breitbart column, right?
Like, that could be on Return of Kings, you know?
It's incredible.
Cato going his own way.
Yeah, Cato going his own way.
Ben Kiernan goes, I'm imagining Cato giving this speech in front of the Davis Serene salt.
He never felt like a glass of fucking cut wine.
Yeah.
Yeah, wine with just enough lead in it to take the edge off.
Oh, fucking hell.
Ben Kiernan goes on to write, quote, for Cato, much of this seemed a matter of social control.
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's knowing of it.
In public life, he was more severe.
In Spain, one of his officers hung himself when Cato discovered he had bought three captive boys.
Cato 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 in sight of his daughter.
Cato joked publicly that he had never embraced his wife except after a loud thunderclap.
So just a normal dude?
Just a real normal ass guy?
Like, this is the fucking origin story of fucking through a hole in a sheet.
Yeah.
Like, lays the sheet on top of his wife who's like, okay, honey, here I come.
And again, Cato 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 fuck, dude?
Especially nobility.
Yeah, come on.
Like all they do is weird sex things.
Yeah.
Men, women, each other.
It doesn't matter.
Like, man, this guy's a fucking brute.
He sucks.
And rounding out his patron saint of right-wing politicians bingo card, Cato also attacked gay people.
In 186 BCE, Roman magistrates began to prosecute an alleged Bacchic cult.
Bacchus is like the god 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 Cato helps to like lead this charge against them and a bunch of guys get convicted of quote foul sexual acts along with some women, which again makes it seem even ratter.
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 gay people to go cruise.
Cato 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 womenish enough through too lengthy a spell of feast.
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 Russian army recruitment commercial that everybody really loved like a year ago.
Yeah.
The VDV thing.
Or oh no, no, the other one.
Yeah.
Also that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's it's it's it's pretty funny.
Um anyway, so and then near the end of his life, I, 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, it'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 Achaia.
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.
Cato 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 we could reinvest this money into public works.
Yes, this is actually going well.
Cato writes in his horror, in a horror, that, quote, Carthage was, quote, burgeoning with an abundance of young men, brimming with copious wealth, teeming with weapons.
Man, he really seems a zero in constantly in young men.
He's really got a thing with 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' sail from Rome.
So again, this is funny because like it's figs, but also this is not that different from being like, I don't know, you remember guys earlier in the auts, 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 in manufacturing.
You're like, think about like the fucking 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 where it's like, look at all these computers they can build.
Fear of Japanese Manufacturing00:05:08
Ah!
Speaking of Japan, that's like quite literally the, one of the excuses they use to manufacture war in China.
It's like, look at all the land they have that we don't.
This is bullshit.
Yeah, it's it's this except for in this case, it's figs.
Yeah.
But yeah.
And as 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 gentlemen 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 is like, look at how big these Carthaginian figs are.
Crisis actor figs.
Yeah, believe it.
This is bullshit.
Again, he would have done very well with Twitter.
So Cato 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 to rally against in a time when there's all these costly and difficult constant uprisings.
On the year Cato died, 149, Rome's consul Censorinus demanded Carthage hand over her weapons and give Rome hostages.
They do this, so the Romans next demand that 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 are like, all right, we have to give them the demand they can't possibly meet.
This is why they're like, right.
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 that.
So Carthage fights for three years against Rome's might.
They finally succumb in 146 BC, and Roman legions march street 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 enter it.
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 in 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 a city-state whose inhabitants had refused to surrender was quite frequent in the ancient world.
So labeling this particular innocent incident a genocide needs careful examination.
A key element in this case, and one which would be in line with Limkin's 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 satisfy the demands, this gave the Romans a legitimate excuse for their actions.
And yeah, I'm comfortable calling it a genocide.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think one of the problems is, and I think we've already talked about this, is this hesitancy to use the term genocide is one, obviously heavily politicized when we talk about modern day events.
But two, when it comes to events that have happened thousands of years ago, everybody has this idea that genocide's a modern thing within the late 1800s, 1700s.
The late 1900s, yes.
Yeah.
And it's...
Nah.
I don't understand the hesitancy anymore.
Like, I don't understand the politicization of it either, but like, at least that you understand by like, well, we can't call this a genocide because, you know, we'll get fucking sanctioned by Russia or China or the United States.
Yeah.
But like, is fucking Italy going to sanction you?
Nobody, if you tell like Romans like this, they'll be like, yeah, I guess so.
Like, I don't think anyone gives a shit anymore.
Like, we should be able to do this.
And the ones who do care are probably like deeply, deeply.
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 pissed.
But I don't know.
I know some Italians.
I think mostly it's like talking to, I don't know, if you were to 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, okay, yeah, that's probably.
I would caution some people on not doing that in certain countries with that genocide occurred in the last 108 years or so.
That's when it gets real political.
10,000 years back, not much is, although, you know, we could talk.
You do literally live in Armenia.
The Forgotten Emu Tragedy00:04:16
All right.
Well, Joe, this is going to be the end of part one.
When it comes back to part two, we're going to have a super fun discussion about what makes human beings capable of engaging in mass killing.
It sounds like a blast.
I can't wait.
I thought you'd never ask.
It does occasionally involve blasts.
Joe, yep.
Yeah, that wasn't comfortable.
You got any pluggables to plug?
Yeah, I host the podcast, The Lions Led by Donkeys, podcast, not the British political one.
And we talk about genocide, unfortunately, quite often.
For instance, we've done seven hours on the Cambodian genocide, and we also talk about military history and stuff like that.
Yeah.
So check out Lions Led by Donkeys.
Check out donkeys.
Just find one.
They're good.
They're good.
It's a 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 that up.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Anyway, this has been Behind the Bastards, the podcast funded by the donkey meat industry, which is having a tough year, is always having a tough year.
Difficult to get people on board with donkey dates.
I can't believe Big Donkey got their hooks into iHeartMedia.
I always knew this day would come.
Yeah, yeah.
We're primarily opposing the emu farmers of America who want to lead us down the disastrous path that Australia's already followed.
What?
What?
I 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 just trying to bring them to the United States.
All their boomerangs were useless.
All right.
That's the show.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point?
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.