Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Ancient Genocide and the War on Carthage
Aired: 2022-06-02
Duration: 01:40:15


=== Mithridates and the Diaper Bank (14:55) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:00:43]  You doctored this particular test twice in somewhere, correct?
[00:00:47]  I doctored the test once.
[00:00:48]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:00:53]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:00:55]  Greg Lesby and Michael Manchini.
[00:00:58]  My mind was blown.
[00:00:59]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:01:01]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:01:02]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:01:04]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:08]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:16]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[00:01:18]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:01:20]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:01:22]  A shocking public murder.
[00:01:24]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:01:30]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:01:32]  Those are shots.
[00:01:34]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:01:36]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[00:01:40]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:50]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:01:54]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:01:58]  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.
[00:02:05]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[00:02:09]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:02:12]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:02:23]  Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here.
[00:02:25]  And for the last two years, Behind the Bastards listeners have funded the Portland Diaper Bank, which provides diapers for low-income families.
[00:02:33]  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.
[00:02:44]  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.
[00:02:53]  So if you want to help, you can go to BTB Fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank at GoFundMe.
[00:02:59]  Just type in GoFundMe, BTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank.
[00:03:03]  Again, that's GoFundMe, BTB fundraiser for PDX Diaper Bank, or find the link in the show notes.
[00:03:08]  Thank you all.
[00:03:11]  Oh, what's shitting orange?
[00:03:15]  My Joe.
[00:03:17]  That's hell yeah.
[00:03:22]  Just for us, for nobody else.
[00:03:24]  This is the best intro of all time.
[00:03:28]  How are you doing, Joe, for part two of our Genocide Spectacular?
[00:03:31]  I'm good.
[00:03:33]  I often am like my people that listen to my show often joke that I surprise my guests with a genocide.
[00:03:43]  And this time it gets to happen to me.
[00:03:45]  And it's quite nice, you know?
[00:03:48]  I did almost open this episode with what's eliminating ethnic groups, my every people in the history of the human race.
[00:03:59]  But that wouldn't, I just didn't want to see Sophie's disappointed face one more time.
[00:04:04]  I can feel her shaking her head now across the internet.
[00:04:08]  She always is somewhere.
[00:04:09]  Robert, you could never disappoint me.
[00:04:11]  I often have.
[00:04:13]  So, part two.
[00:04:15]  Everybody's good to go.
[00:04:16]  This is behind the bastards, by the way.
[00:04:17]  You're Joe Kasabian, co-host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.
[00:04:21]  Let's get back to some genocide.
[00:04:23]  So, as I'm sure everyone listening to this show is aware, the United States is currently in a bit of a moral panic over the fact that transgender people exist.
[00:04:33]  The groomer discourse, which has arisen on the right-wing, in which trans and now increasingly all queer people are accused of being child molesters or want to be child molesters because they like write books that tell kids that people who aren't cisgender exist.
[00:04:47]  Right.
[00:04:48]  Yeah.
[00:04:49]  Folks have been accusing this.
[00:04:51]  Folks like on the left and queer people have been pointing out that this is eliminationist rhetoric, right?
[00:04:56]  This is potentially the kind of rhetoric that can lead to a genocide.
[00:04:59]  And the basic fear is that right-wing thought leaders are trying to convince their followers that transgender people are pedophilic monsters because you can do anything to pedophiles, right?
[00:05:07]  Like it is the lowest of the low.
[00:05:10]  Exactly.
[00:05:11]  So if you can like lump a group of people in as being that, it doesn't matter what you do to them.
[00:05:16]  Now, I've seen a number of posts in this line on the Intar webs that have brought up Dr. Gregory Stanton's 10 stages of genocide, which he laid out in 1986 and were revamped in 2016.
[00:05:28]  Step one is classification, e.g. splitting society into us and them rather than using mixed categories.
[00:05:34]  This is not always done intentionally.
[00:05:36]  This often just kind of happens, but it can feed into what later becomes a genocide.
[00:05:40]  Next is symbolization, which gives names or symbols to the classification.
[00:05:45]  The most obvious example of this from history would be the yellow star that Jewish people were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, or indeed the purple triangle that homosexual people were made to wear.
[00:05:55]  Next comes discrimination on a legal basis and then dehumanization, which is comparison of members of the target group to insects or vermin.
[00:06:05]  This is not in his list, but plague bacillus is a really common one, particularly by the Nazis.
[00:06:10]  I think that had something to do with the fact that there had been a plague not that long before the rise of the Nazis.
[00:06:14]  And famously in Rwanda calling people in Yezi or cockroaches.
[00:06:19]  Yes, cockroaches, which we'll chat about a little bit more later.
[00:06:23]  And then there's organization, which is the forming of militias and other, crucially, non-state groups geared towards the elimination of targeted people.
[00:06:31]  Polarization is number six, in which extremists drive groups apart and broadcast propaganda in the mass media to indoctrinate people with hate.
[00:06:39]  Now, most of the time when I see people bringing up Stanton's Ten Stages of Genocide to talk about how that's where the right's trying to push people, they will least the United States at either step four or step six.
[00:06:50]  And you can certainly make a strong case for either.
[00:06:52]  But while Dr. Stanton's scale has its uses, I'm not like shitting on it or anything.
[00:06:57]  I think the way in which people are interpreting it leads to some inaccurate beliefs about how genocide tends to proceed.
[00:07:05]  And it overall pushes people towards a more mechanistic and centralized view of how genocides occur.
[00:07:11]  And while this does describe some historic genocides, well, because he's looking back at genocides and trying to describe them in stages, I don't know that it's super useful in predicting them, which I would argue that it's not.
[00:07:27]  Simply, I mean, I'm not, of course, I'm not hating on his research.
[00:07:31]  His research is great.
[00:07:33]  It's just, I think it takes a lot of agency from the perpetrators of genocides themselves.
[00:07:38]  I think it's very good.
[00:07:40]  And I mean, even Strauss sometimes does this as well.
[00:07:43]  It's very good to understand.
[00:07:44]  Everyone does when you're doing this kind of history, right?
[00:07:47]  To an extent.
[00:07:47]  Yeah.
[00:07:49]  It's something that's very, very good to understand the organization of the radical core that makes all genocides possible, but isn't inevitable.
[00:07:59]  Radical cores can form and there can still not be a genocide.
[00:08:02]  Yes.
[00:08:03]  And I also like the kind of the fact that we're sort of critiquing this doesn't mean we're not saying, for example, trans people should not be concerned about the rhetoric coming out of the right as eliminationists.
[00:08:13]  Not saying that at all.
[00:08:14]  Just I think focusing on the stages and the way that people do kind of leads people to inaccurate expectations about how things proceed and have proceeded historically.
[00:08:24]  And that's what we're going to talk about today.
[00:08:27]  So in order to get into that, let's start with another example from ancient history.
[00:08:31]  This is one that you brought up to me, Joe, when I mentioned that I wanted to do this episode.
[00:08:36]  The Asian Vespers of 88 BC.
[00:08:39]  Ah yeah, the Asiatic Vespers where Romans got the hit with the Uno reverse card.
[00:08:44]  Yes, exactly.
[00:08:45]  Yeah, this is the Uno reverse of the genocide that they did in Carthage.
[00:08:50]  So starting in like 91 BC, Romans had what they called the social war, which was social because the people they lived next to, Italians, were not Roman citizens, but they had to submit to some Roman policies.
[00:09:02]  They couldn't vote.
[00:09:03]  They weren't like, I don't know, as a general rule, when people have to submit to policies by a government but have no say in that government, they can get unhappy with that.
[00:09:12]  This is not a thing Americans would be familiar with, right?
[00:09:14]  Nothing like that has ever happened here.
[00:09:16]  Never.
[00:09:17]  Never.
[00:09:18]  Never occurred in this part of the world.
[00:09:20]  So eventually the Italians go to war with the Romans.
[00:09:23]  I'm not going to get into detail about that, but they call it the social war, which is funny because it is unbelievably brutal.
[00:09:28]  And this is also, this is a pattern in Roman history where like a group of people who are close to the imperial core will have an uprising because their rights are being denied and they will make demands, which will be denied, and then they'll fight a war.
[00:09:40]  The Romans will crush them brutally and then grant most of the demands later.
[00:09:45]  And that's what happens here because the Italians get everything they want after the Romans wipe out like a generation of them.
[00:09:51]  Right.
[00:09:51]  Yeah.
[00:09:52]  Well, there's fewer of you now to grant rights to.
[00:09:54]  So that's better for us.
[00:09:57]  So yeah, Rome is at war with Italy in this period.
[00:10:02]  And while this is all going down, there's a, you know, this place called Pontus, which is in the modern-day Black Sea region of Turkey.
[00:10:11]  And the guy who runs it is a king named Mithridates, Mithridates, whatever you want to call him, the sixth.
[00:10:18]  And he starts like rubbing his hands together, like that guy in that meme.
[00:10:21]  You know the meme, the guy rubbing his hands together.
[00:10:23]  Wasn't it Birdman?
[00:10:25]  He's doing this.
[00:10:26]  Mighty, I think it's Birdman.
[00:10:27]  That's exactly Mithridates.
[00:10:28]  It's like, that's what he's doing.
[00:10:30]  Looking at Rome fighting Italy, like, oh yeah, I'm going to get some shit.
[00:10:33]  So famously, Mithridates was also related.
[00:10:39]  And again, this is something that goes back through history.
[00:10:43]  It's related into the neighboring kingdom of Armenia.
[00:10:46]  And they take part in this as well.
[00:10:48]  Yeah, they sure do.
[00:10:51]  So Rome and the peoples in like that whole region of the world, you know, the coat, which generally like, they'll call these guys like Persians a lot of the time.
[00:11:01]  Like it's all like, it's this, you know, it's Asia, right?
[00:11:03]  Like that's what the Romans, this is just Asia.
[00:11:06]  And they'd fought a while and they would fight many more wars in the future.
[00:11:10]  So old Mithridates decides that like while the Republic's got his back turned, he's going to annex two neighboring kingdoms that have like tight relationships with Rome, primarily like trading based.
[00:11:21]  So because Rome has so much economic interest in the area, they have a Roman commission to Asia.
[00:11:26]  And the guy who's running it, basically, the guy who's running the Roman Commission to Asia is like, hey, Mithridates, you can't annex these places.
[00:11:34]  You have to give them back to their kings.
[00:11:35]  You have to restore their sovereignty.
[00:11:37]  And the head of the Roman Commission doesn't do this because he's a cool dude, but because he's been bribed, right?
[00:11:41]  Like these guys paid him to do it.
[00:11:44]  Because, you know, stuff can't come back.
[00:11:45]  Like, it's not like Rome is centralized for the day, but it's not like he can radio back home and be like, what do you want me to do?
[00:11:51]  Like, that takes like six months to get anything back, right?
[00:11:55]  So, the two countries that Mithridates had annexed, Cappadocia and Bithnia, get freed because Mithridates doesn't really want a straight-up fight with the Romans at this date.
[00:12:04]  But they now owe the chief Roman dude in the area a lot of money because they'd promised to pay him for this.
[00:12:10]  Now, this guy, this dude who like makes Mithridates leave and gets bribed, is Manius Aquilus.
[00:12:15]  Aquilius.
[00:12:16]  We don't actually know how any of these names were pronounced because here's the fun thing.
[00:12:19]  As a guy who took three years of Latin, nobody knows how ancient Latin was pronounced.
[00:12:22]  We know how people have said like ecclesiastic Latin, but it is different.
[00:12:26]  Like nobody actually understands exactly how Romans would have said everything.
[00:12:31]  So Manius Aquilius, head of the Roman delegation, tells the king of, I think, Cappadocia, Nicomedes, that a good way to get money that he owes Manius might be by invading Pontus and taking their stuff.
[00:12:45]  Now, the fact that they had just been annexed by Pontus, if you're a smart person, you might be like, well, maybe these guys can't beat Pontus in a war if this just happened, right?
[00:12:54]  Like, maybe their invasion won't go well.
[00:12:56]  Maybe this is a stupid idea.
[00:12:58]  You might think Mannius Aquilis would think that, but he does not.
[00:13:02]  So Nicomedes tries to invade Pontus, and they just get curb-stomped by Mithridates.
[00:13:08]  Just absolutely pounded.
[00:13:11]  So, next, I'm going to quote from a write-up for the University of Chicago's Encyclopedia Romana.
[00:13:17]  Quote, Mithridates retook Cappadocia and Bithnia, defeating Nicomedes at the river Amnius.
[00:13:22]  Fighting against chariots armed with scythes on the wheels, the army was terrified at seeing men cut in halves and still breathing, or mangled in fragments or hanging on the sides.
[00:13:30]  Overcome rather by the hideousness of the spectacle than by loss of the fight, fear disordered their ranks.
[00:13:36]  Mithridates then swept into Phyrgia and the Roman province of Asia.
[00:13:40]  Aquilius, who so ill-advisedly had precipitated the war without ratification from the Senate, fled the mainland, but was given up by the citizens of Mytilene.
[00:13:47]  Ridiculed and paraded on an ass, he eventually was executed, relates Appian, when Mithridates poured molten gold down his throat, thus rebuking the Romans for their bribe-taking.
[00:13:58]  And this is a cool and good way of executing powerful rich people that happens a bunch of times to Romans in it.
[00:14:05]  This is not the last time a Roman will be force-fed molten gold in this part of the world.
[00:14:09]  It rocks.
[00:14:10]  It's pretty cool.
[00:14:11]  It's objective.
[00:14:12]  Like Mithridates, I'm not calling him a great guy, but like, it's pretty cool to do this to guys like that.
[00:14:17]  I want to say this happens as someone Mithridates.
[00:14:20]  I mean, it happens to me one of Mithridates' relatives later on, but I can't remember who.
[00:14:28]  Cool.
[00:14:28]  That's good.
[00:14:29]  No, it famously happened.
[00:14:31]  So, you know, later during the time of like Caesar and you've got like Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.
[00:14:37]  And Crassus is like the richest guy in the world at the time.
[00:14:40]  Some people will argue he's the richest dude there ever was.
[00:14:42]  He made like a big chunk of his fortune by when there would be fires in Rome.
[00:14:46]  He owned a fire department.
[00:14:47]  And so he would like go to people and he would be like, you want me to save your house?
[00:14:51]  You got to like give me your house, like sell me your house.
[00:14:54]  And then you'll be able to get your shit out at least.

=== Comparing Rome to Rwanda (11:12) ===

[00:14:55]  And like that's a big asshole.
[00:14:57]  He like goes to war in kind of this vague region of the world against like Parthia because he's a dick and his army gets its ass.
[00:15:06]  Again, this is one of those times where like the Romans lose like a whole generation of young men.
[00:15:11]  And yeah, according to legend, he gets killed by having gold poured down his throat too, the richest man in history, which is neat.
[00:15:17]  Marching your army through the mountains of Parthia and getting wrecked is like kind of an origin story for a lot of important people in Rome.
[00:15:24]  Like Mark Antony did that too.
[00:15:25]  Yeah, it's like getting chicken pox for Roman military leaders.
[00:15:28]  You just got to go get your ass wrecked in Asia.
[00:15:33]  So again, obviously, so far, this is broadly speaking, morally unproblematic within the context of ancient history.
[00:15:40]  But if you know your Roman history, you know that, like, and maybe if this hadn't happened, if he'd gotten back to Rome, there's a decent chance they would have like executed Marcus, like thrown him off the Tarpean rock or something for fucking around.
[00:15:53]  They did that sometimes.
[00:15:54]  But now a Roman elected leader has been executed by a foreign king.
[00:15:59]  And Rome does not take kindly to that shit.
[00:16:03]  So things start churning up for a war, and Mithridates or Mithridates, whatever, decides his first step should be to cleanse his new territory of all Roman citizens.
[00:16:11]  And this is where things get genocide-y.
[00:16:13]  Quote: In 88 BC, in a measure of the hatred felt for the Romans in Asia, Mithridates wrote secretly to all his satraps and city governors that on the 30th day thereafter they should set upon all Romans and Italians in their towns and upon their wives and children and their freedmen of Italian birth, kill them and throw their bodies out unburied and share their goods with King Mithridates.
[00:16:33]  Tens of thousands were massacred.
[00:16:34]  Valerius Maximus records 80,000 deaths.
[00:16:37]  Plutarch, 150,000, and what has been called the Asian or Ephesian Vespers.
[00:16:43]  So, yeah, this is definitely a genocide.
[00:16:49]  Pretty clear example of a genocide, and one that happens very rapidly.
[00:16:55]  It might be most reasonable to like compare it to Rwanda, where there were pre-existing tensions because the Romans had kind of come into this area with all the money.
[00:17:04]  They were backed by this state that had bossed people around.
[00:17:07]  They were like landlords and they were bankers and they were like seen as kind of economically oppressing people in the region, seen as arrogant, seen as like backed by this outside state that was unfairly exerting power in the area.
[00:17:20]  And so people had been pissed for a while.
[00:17:22]  And when Mithridates takes over and says, like, hey, it's time to get rid of these motherfuckers.
[00:17:26]  There's a lot of folks who are like willing to do it because of these pre-existing ethnic tensions.
[00:17:32]  Yeah, obviously.
[00:17:34]  With the main difference of these ethnic tensions were actually different ethnicities and not invented.
[00:17:40]  Yes, and not invented.
[00:17:41]  Yeah, because these are like dudes from Italy showing up in fucking Turkey, which is actually, again, like with Carthage, not all that far.
[00:17:50]  But yeah.
[00:17:51]  So this upsets Rome.
[00:17:54]  The whole story ends after two more wars with Roman victory and the death of Mithridates and the rise of a guy named Sola who sucks ass, but that's a story for another day.
[00:18:03]  Definitely an act of historical genocide.
[00:18:06]  It does not, however, again, if we're talking about Dr. Stanton's scale, it doesn't correspond directly to that.
[00:18:10]  Now, there is an us versus them component to the massacre, right?
[00:18:14]  That exists well prior to Mithridates giving the order, right?
[00:18:17]  The fact that there are these divisions that Romans are kind of seen as other.
[00:18:21]  But there's no buildup to this, really.
[00:18:23]  There's no propaganda arm to dehumanize them.
[00:18:25]  There's no gradual stage of separating Romans from other people in their community.
[00:18:30]  He issues secret orders that local officials and their levies fulfill.
[00:18:35]  And as an incentive, he divides the property of the dead Romans between himself and the inhabitants of the city that they're killed in.
[00:18:41]  There it is.
[00:18:41]  That's why.
[00:18:42]  Yes, that's why, right?
[00:18:44]  And this is the thing I think scholars obviously talk, because we're quoting a bunch of scholars, talk about this a lot.
[00:18:50]  But as a general rule, when people popularly discuss genocide, they almost never talk about how fucking much of it is about money.
[00:18:57]  Yeah.
[00:18:58]  It's starting to become more accepted now.
[00:19:01]  Like we talked about, I think, in the very beginning of the last episode, is that people really wanted to believe that every perpetrator of a genocide is a dead-eyed psycho who's a dead set racial propaganda Jewish.
[00:19:15]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:16]  Yeah.
[00:19:16]  I mean, that's pretty solidly thrown out the window by Christopher Browning's work and ordinary men, which then spawned one of the worst books on the Holocaust, I think, I've ever read called Hitler's Willing Executioners.
[00:19:29]  Oh, yeah.
[00:19:31]  But yeah, it's.
[00:19:33]  There's a lot that's problematic about that.
[00:19:38]  Make a long story short for people who don't want to read it.
[00:19:42]  He hits the Nazis with their own race science.
[00:19:45]  Yeah.
[00:19:47]  Which you don't need to do.
[00:19:50]  You do need to do.
[00:19:51]  Robert, the only thing that can stop a bad guy with race science is a good guy with race science.
[00:20:00]  And not to mention, like the Rwandan genocide jumps to my immediately.
[00:20:05]  Some of the new scholarships.
[00:20:06]  Yeah, we'll be talking about this quite a bit.
[00:20:08]  But yeah, I mean, this is actually literally what we're leading into.
[00:20:11]  But yeah, I mean, it's worth noting that like, yeah, the king incentivizes people who inform on hidden Romans and he promises slaves freedom.
[00:20:20]  Again, the genocide occurs.
[00:20:22]  There is an aspect of it as people have been pissed at Romans in this region for a long time, but they have incentives, right?
[00:20:28]  They don't just suddenly get let off the leash and do a genocide because they're angry at Romans.
[00:20:33]  It's worth it.
[00:20:35]  The balance sheet makes it worth it, you know?
[00:20:38]  And this is an important truth about why people do genocides, because it pays.
[00:20:42]  Racism and nationalism are always major causes cited, along with kind of vague and constantly frustrating claims of brainwashing by propaganda.
[00:20:50]  But as we'll cover, focusing on those things leads to a really myopic view about why mass killings occur.
[00:20:56]  Our earliest two genocides, we have no context about it, right?
[00:21:00]  We have no idea why the Yamnaya, how the Yamnaya justified what they did or how the people who killed the people in Nataruk justified what they did.
[00:21:08]  But it seems safe to conclude that the folks carrying out the violence and their civilians, the civilians back home, whatever that was, probably saw there being some sort of a resource gain in killing those people.
[00:21:20]  That is very likely.
[00:21:23]  Popular scholarship of the Holocaust tends to focus on the yellow stars and arson attacks on synagogues and of course the camps.
[00:21:29]  And obviously, all of that's very important.
[00:21:31]  But many Americans have never even heard of Aryanization.
[00:21:34]  And in order to explain what that is, I'm going to quote from the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
[00:21:39]  Under voluntary Aryanization, the Nazi German state encouraged Jewish businessmen who were already facing economic and social discrimination to sell their businesses in Germany at radically reduced prices.
[00:21:49]  In early 1933, there were about 100,000 Jewish-owned businesses in Germany.
[00:21:54]  About half of those were small retail stores dealing mostly in clothing or footwear.
[00:21:58]  The rest were factories or workshops of varying sizes or professional offices for lawyers, physicians, and other independent professionals.
[00:22:04]  By 1938, the combination of Nazi terror, propaganda, boycott, and legislation was so effective that some two-thirds of these Jewish-owned enterprises were out of business or sold to non-Jews.
[00:22:14]  Jewish owners, often desperate to immigrate or to sell a failing business, accepted a selling price that was only 20 or 30% of the actual value of each business.
[00:22:23]  And I think it's important to highlight this because you can draw a real direct line between what Mithridates is doing and what the Nazis are doing here, right?
[00:22:30]  Oh, yeah.
[00:22:30]  Yeah.
[00:22:31]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:22:32]  That's the same basic idea.
[00:22:33]  Yeah.
[00:22:33]  Especially when Aryanization became forced, which, I mean, of course, you could argue that it already is forced.
[00:22:39]  But when it becomes, you know, they go from voluntary to force in the Nazi sense of the word, when they start deportations, all their property outside of like precious metals and things which end up vanishing into Swiss bank accounts and are still there to this day.
[00:22:56]  Yeah.
[00:22:57]  They get auctioned off at drastically reduced prices to German civilians.
[00:23:02]  Yes.
[00:23:03]  And yeah, it's obviously like one of the things to note is that what Mithridates does is faster because like it's years between Aryanization and the actual physical elimination of Jewish human beings in Europe on a mass scale.
[00:23:17]  There's a good, again, this is not something that gets talked about, especially in our popular retellings of the Holocaust.
[00:23:22]  It tends to get glossed over.
[00:23:24]  There's one very good movie that is like focused on Aryanization, although it's Aryanization on the Eastern Front during the invasion of Russia by the Nazis.
[00:23:32]  It's called The Shop on Main Street.
[00:23:34]  It won a full and Oscar.
[00:23:35]  Made in the USSR in like the 60s.
[00:23:38]  And it is all about a local dude named Tono, who's like just like a Russian dude whose like brother collaborates.
[00:23:46]  I think it's his brother, collaborates with the Nazis.
[00:23:49]  And because his brother's working with them, this like kind of, he's the town drunk, basically, gets given a Jewish woman's business and he like tries to hide her and stuff.
[00:23:57]  It's a very bleak movie, but it's a good movie about that aspect of the genocide that I don't think I've ever seen anything else tie into it.
[00:24:06]  Maybe it, and one of the things that's really interesting about the shop on Main Street, I recommend watching it, is that this is again filmed in the USSR in like the 60s.
[00:24:15]  So all of the people acting in the movie had lived through this.
[00:24:19]  Like the actors in this movie had either participated in or watched their neighbors give up their Jews when they were kids, like during the Nazi advance.
[00:24:27]  So it's they're not so much acting as like remembering.
[00:24:31]  And it's, it is a potent film.
[00:24:34]  Like you should watch the shop on Main Street.
[00:24:36]  It's a very good movie.
[00:24:38]  Just like have something like the new Nicholas Cage movie to put on afterwards that will make you less sad.
[00:24:44]  Because holy shit, is it bleak?
[00:24:47]  Wow, World War II movie about the Eastern Front.
[00:24:51]  Yeah, I can't believe it's depressing.
[00:24:53]  Anyway, I'm going to go have a nice palette cleanser called Come and See.
[00:24:56]  Yeah, I would say it's on the level of come and see in terms of bleakness, not in terms of like how intense the imagery of come and see is, which is like nothing else.
[00:25:08]  Yay!
[00:25:09]  Russian movies about World War II.
[00:25:13]  Yeah, it's interesting because like when you think about the fact that Mithridates and the Nazis had the same basic idea, but he immediately proceeded to genocide and it took them years.
[00:25:26]  You might conclude, one of the things you might conclude from this is that a benefit from modern civilization in that is that in order to get a population to buy into a genocide, you have to separate the killing from the financial gain by a couple of years.
[00:25:39]  You got to be accountable to everybody.
[00:25:41]  I'm not sure if that does speak well of civilization.
[00:25:44]  Like I don't, you can try, you can interpret that however you would like, if that's what you choose to take out of this lesson.
[00:25:50]  Yeah, I would argue that it does not, especially because it seems like most genocides, not all, but most in the modern era, like the vast majority of work that is done is done to make it palatable, not only to lay people in civilization, but also to the perpetrators.

=== A Competitive World's Dark Side (04:29) ===

[00:26:08]  Yeah.
[00:26:09]  And it's because this might shock some people.
[00:26:12]  Ideology isn't all that important for people doing the killing.
[00:26:15]  It's important for people doing the organizing.
[00:26:18]  Yeah.
[00:26:18]  And that's what we're, this is, I mean, this is all what we're talking about.
[00:26:21]  But first, you know who doesn't organize people to participate in an ethnic cleansing in order to make financial benefits for a specific class of people?
[00:26:30]  We actually don't know that.
[00:26:32]  Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:33]  Because it can be and they for certain have.
[00:26:36]  Yeah.
[00:26:37]  The Ford Motor Company.
[00:26:40]  When abducts children for their child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia, they abduct children from all socioeconomic classes, all major religious and racial groups, all kinds of kids on the child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia.
[00:26:53]  That's the guarantee.
[00:26:55]  The guarantee of equality, freely sourced children.
[00:27:00]  Yeah, our kidnapping gangs do not see race.
[00:27:15]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:27:19]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
[00:27:24]  Murder at City Hall.
[00:27:25]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:27:27]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:27:30]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:27:36]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:27:39]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:27:48]  Everybody in the chamber ducks.
[00:27:50]  A shocking public murder.
[00:27:52]  They scream, get down, get down.
[00:27:54]  Those are shots.
[00:27:54]  Those are shots.
[00:27:55]  Get down.
[00:27:56]  A charismatic politician.
[00:27:57]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:28:00]  I still have a weapon.
[00:28:02]  And I could shoot you.
[00:28:05]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:28:07]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:28:10]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:28:11]  That may have been about sex.
[00:28:13]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:28:26]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:28:30]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:28:34]  If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:28:36]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:28:40]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:28:44]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:28:48]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:28:50]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:28:54]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:28:56]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:28:58]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:29:00]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:29:03]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:29:05]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:29:07]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:29:12]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:29:13]  Trust me, babe.
[00:29:14]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:29:24]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:29:30]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:29:34]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:29:40]  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.
[00:29:50]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:29:55]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:29:58]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:30:01]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:30:03]  That's so funny.
[00:30:04]  Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:30:12]  Say you love me.
[00:30:15]  You know I.
[00:30:17]  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.
[00:30:25]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:30:30]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

=== Preventing Genocide Through Protest (15:41) ===

[00:30:37]  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.
[00:30:44]  From power to parenthood.
[00:30:46]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:30:49]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:30:51]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:30:53]  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.
[00:30:58]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:31:04]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:31:07]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:31:13]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:31:15]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:31:18]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:31:29]  Oh, we're back.
[00:31:31]  So we've discussed a shortcoming, I think, of Dr. Stanton's scale.
[00:31:34]  And again, we're not trying to shit on like his research or anything.
[00:31:36]  This is primarily even not really an issue with the scale, but with like the way it is popularly interpreted.
[00:31:41]  Like it's a like genocide is a thermometer, right?
[00:31:45]  Gonna dial up the genocide temperature.
[00:31:49]  That's not quite how it works.
[00:31:50]  And I'd like to present folks with another rubric that they might find more useful for determining how people, and specifically individual people, although this does, you know, kind of work on communities, get to tip to the point where they are willing to participate in genocide, right?
[00:32:05]  This is another way of looking at it that I find more useful.
[00:32:08]  We can talk about like the shortcomings of this way as well, and I'm sure we will.
[00:32:12]  Genocide historian Irvin Staub, who, by the way, was only alive to do his research because Raul Wallenberg saved his life.
[00:32:20]  He's one of the kids that Wallenberg hid in like a house during the genocide in Hungary.
[00:32:26]  Staub was a pioneer in understanding specifically the temporal procession of motivations in individuals who consent to take part in genocide.
[00:32:34]  That was like a thing he was really interested in.
[00:32:37]  What is happening in the head?
[00:32:38]  Like what are the different things that have to happen for someone to be like willing to do this, you know?
[00:32:43]  Up until his, and he's obviously he's very much working off of the work that Limkin pioneered.
[00:32:47]  He quotes Limkin constantly in his book.
[00:32:49]  You know, none of these people are like doing anything entirely like this is scholarship, right?
[00:32:54]  Everybody's like participating and building an understanding.
[00:32:58]  Up until his book was published in 1989, there was fairly little organized scholarship concerned with how individuals changed over time to support genocide.
[00:33:07]  Staub focused on what he called a continuum of destruction, which other scholars have empirically documented in studies of Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia.
[00:33:17]  The findings of all of this research on motivation were aptly described by one of the scholars who followed Staub, Scott Strauss, who wrote of Rwanda, quote, Rwandans killed for multiple reasons.
[00:33:27]  Others joined in the attacks for one reason, but then continued for other reasons.
[00:33:31]  Their motivations changed over time.
[00:33:34]  Now, I found a good article published in 2020 by Jan Reinerman and Timothy Williams in the incredibly named International Journal of Violence.
[00:33:42]  I think it's actually called Violence an International Journal, but either way, it's a pretty cool title for a thing.
[00:33:50]  Now, based on the research of guys like Staub and Strauss, going all the way back to Limkin, they propose a sort of hierarchy of needs and list ways in which different motivations can influence those needs to make people capable of directly carrying out mass murder.
[00:34:04]  Quote, to understand why individuals engage in violent action, we need to understand both their motivations and inhibitions, both of which stem from certain needs.
[00:34:11]  Inhibitions conceptually being motivations for not engaging in violent action.
[00:34:16]  As such, we can identify individual hierarchies of needs, and only when the most salient one is a motivation for action will an individual participate.
[00:34:25]  Now, to explain why, they present a chart listing the needs of an individual in a specific moment, which can generally be categorized as security, moral integrity, social belonging, and a desire for better life conditions.
[00:34:37]  So, for security, a person's desire to keep themselves safe might lead them to participate in a genocide to avoid coercion, violence, or the threat of violence from the state or another group.
[00:34:46]  A person's moral integrity might keep them from killing if they believe that murdering people is always wrong.
[00:34:52]  A person's need for social belonging might convince them to kill if doing so will keep them in good with the group.
[00:34:57]  And likewise, they might not be willing to kill if that will ostracize them from the people around them.
[00:35:02]  And the need to improve their own individual circumstances might, of course, lead a person to support genocide for economic gain.
[00:35:08]  Quote, this can be illustrated through the actions of a Rwandan Hutu who might have faced strong pressure from other Hutus to participate.
[00:35:15]  As Strauss argues, this was the most common motivation for people to participate in the killings and rendered the need for security most salient in the hierarchy of needs and motivations at this time.
[00:35:25]  In a similar vein, an example of coercion can be found in Cambodia, where coercion caused a diffuse feeling of anxiety in which everyone feared becoming a victim themselves, making fear endemic.
[00:35:36]  Furthermore, coercion in this case provoked strict obedience to the orders of their superiors for the fear of life-threatening consequences.
[00:35:42]  Some former cadres of the Khmer Rouge claimed that if people did not kill and follow the rules, they would be killed, or stated they were fearful for their security.
[00:35:50]  A statement of a former Khmer Rouge illustrated this as follows.
[00:35:53]  But it was the order from higher, and if they did not do it, they were also killed.
[00:35:57]  Therefore, whether they wanted to do it or not, they had to do it.
[00:36:00]  They just followed the order.
[00:36:03]  Yeah, that tracked especially Rwanda.
[00:36:06]  I mean, the vast majority of the genocide wasn't committed by arms of the state, though the Rwandan military did help.
[00:36:12]  Most of it was done by Hutu power militias in the Inter Hamwe.
[00:36:16]  And like a huge number of the victims of that genocide are also moderate Hutus who refused to take part.
[00:36:24]  And yeah, people, you can actually go on the Rwandan Genocide Museum's website and watch a ton of perpetrator interviews.
[00:36:35]  And virtually all of them will point out that the community was doing it.
[00:36:40]  I was worried that if I didn't take part, I too would be killed.
[00:36:43]  And also, I stole their stuff.
[00:36:45]  It's like the three things blame.
[00:36:47]  Yeah.
[00:36:48]  And I think that's what's so important is that it's not just fear of coercion.
[00:36:52]  It's not just that someone is ordering them.
[00:36:54]  And it's not just that they have an economic benefit.
[00:36:58]  It is a continuum of things that kind of, you know, and again, you could get overly mechanistic with this and view it as like flipping switches.
[00:37:06]  It's not quite, it's just, it's the same way that like, you know, people, in any circumstance, can do things they would not expect of themselves, because things change that, like alter the calculus they're making in the moment about like, what is uh, what is the thing to do?
[00:37:24]  Um, and it's I.
[00:37:26]  I think that's much more useful than just being like well, if you brainwash certain people, you can get them to commit genocide.
[00:37:32]  Um, it's more like if, if you can provide the proper incentives in the proper way at the right time, people can, are willing to engage in horrific things that they would consider impossible of themselves in a different situation.
[00:37:48]  Right, I mean, that's one of the main reasons why the Holocaust switched from being mass shootings to death camps is because human beings cannot continuously do that forever.
[00:37:59]  No no, and they will break down they, as they did.
[00:38:03]  We could talk about like, the rates of alcoholism among the ss, or like, just like, the fact that um uh like, so many of those guys killed themselves right, which shouldn't you, shouldn't feel bad for them, but it's just like, oh god no no, there's a certain, there's a certain subset of the human population who could, who could shoot, you know, unarmed people all day long and not have any effect.
[00:38:24]  But it's not a lot of them and it's not most of the people Who do that kind of thing.
[00:38:30]  So, the need for social belonging is also a well-documented and powerful motivation for many participants in genocide.
[00:38:37]  Obviously, a lot of Germans watched their neighbors be led away and avoided speaking up.
[00:38:41]  And this is an area where, like, the popular view is often because, like, well, if they had said something, they would have gotten in trouble.
[00:38:48]  And we just talked about how coercion is a factor, especially in Rwanda, but it's also not as much of a factor in a lot of genocides as you think.
[00:38:55]  For example, in Germany.
[00:38:57]  One thing that is worth noting is that soldiers in Germany were not punished or executed for refusing to participate in genocide.
[00:39:05]  They were ostracized by their fellows sometimes.
[00:39:07]  I'm sure some dudes got like beat up or whatever by their buddies.
[00:39:10]  Like, if you're talking about like individual coercion, but the state did not execute German soldiers for refusing to kill Jewish people.
[00:39:17]  No, of course not.
[00:39:19]  And ordinary men, Christopher Browning, points out before every mass killing to include the largest mass killing of human beings.
[00:39:27]  Yeah.
[00:39:27]  Which the Russians are shelling, or were shelling.
[00:39:29]  Yes.
[00:39:30]  Yeah, the Holocaust Memorial specifically.
[00:39:32]  Good stuff.
[00:39:34]  Like the, it's noted that, I mean, this is a reserve police battalion, I believe, reserve police battalion 101 or something.
[00:39:41]  Yeah.
[00:39:42]  We're like given explicit permission.
[00:39:44]  Like, you don't have to do this if you don't want to.
[00:39:46]  Like, you can request a transfer somewhere.
[00:39:49]  So again, it's not just any of these factors because social coercion can be totally absent in the way that it's like, in the way that we were describing earlier, where it's a fear of your own physical security, right?
[00:39:59]  For not participating.
[00:40:00]  That is not a necessary precursor of genocide.
[00:40:03]  It can be.
[00:40:05]  And it's interesting here because one of the things that is worth noting, because I don't want to just be talking about why genocides happen, if you want to look at like how to prevent them or to mitigate them, one of the most successful things you can do is protest in the moment against it.
[00:40:20]  And this is a thing that was successful in Nazi Germany against the Nazis on a number of occasions.
[00:40:27]  People who protested direct acts of deportation and killing did not tend to be imprisoned or harmed by the state.
[00:40:33]  In fact, the state on a number of occasions backed off.
[00:40:37]  And Staub writes at lengths about the power of bystanders to influence or at least in specific limited instances, halt and slow down the process of genocide.
[00:40:47]  And when talking about this, he points to a well-documented psychological phenomenon, the bystander effect.
[00:40:52]  When a number of people are present in an emergency, a significant number, somebody gets hit by a car or something, and there's a bunch of folks watching, responsibility is diffused.
[00:41:00]  And each individual person on scene is less likely to help, right?
[00:41:03]  Because they assume someone else who knows better is going to get in there, right?
[00:41:07]  We could talk about the cops stacked up at Uvalde, refusing to like, although that may be a different thing, but like, I'm sure that was a factor in what was happening psychologically.
[00:41:15]  The same thing that causes most people in a room to ignore when like a dude slaps his girlfriend is at play when agents of the state come to disappear people.
[00:41:24]  Staub points out that even the Nazis backed away repeatedly in the face of public resistance.
[00:41:29]  Quote, they did not persist, for example, when Bulgaria, where people protested in the streets, refused to hand over its Jewish population, or when within Germany, relatives and some institutions protested the killing of the mentally retarded, mentally ill, and others regarded as genetically inferior.
[00:41:46]  Like there were cases in which, and there was a backlash after Kristallnacht that caused changes in Nazi policy.
[00:41:52]  And this is, again, some of these scholars who are talking about it in the way that we've just been discussing will say that what's happening here is that in that moment where like you're trying to round up people and folks show up to protest, your human need for moral integrity can kind of switch to make you incapable temporarily of at least like continuing to do the thing you had come there to do, right?
[00:42:15]  You had come there morally willing to round up these people for genocide, but the approbation of the community around you suddenly makes you unwilling to do that.
[00:42:25]  That moment doesn't mean they weren't willing to do it later.
[00:42:28]  But it doesn't mean that like they decide that it's morally wrong.
[00:42:33]  A big factor in what may be happening is that when they are presented with a crowd of people protesting them, they suddenly think, Oh, I might get punished for this later.
[00:42:40]  This might not be safe for me.
[00:42:43]  Like, if this is pissing off this many people, I actually might like have to deal with consequences for participating in this, right?
[00:42:50]  So, that may be part of what's going on.
[00:42:52]  But it does point to, and this is something Stab points out a lot: it's actually not useless to like one of the most useful things you can do at every stage of like of kind of building genocidal tensions is make it clear that like you hate what these people are doing and you oppose them.
[00:43:09]  Um, because that has a number of influences that can like at least mitigate the harms that are being done.
[00:43:15]  Um, and that's this is kind of gets to like the root of um what the dehumanization dialogue is getting at.
[00:43:23]  You know, the problem that most often when people talk about dehumanizing in the context of genocide, they frame it as the use of specific language to deny people their humanity in order to prepare to execute a genocide.
[00:43:35]  Um, and that's not always how it goes.
[00:43:38]  And in fact, there's more evidence for it occurring the opposite way around.
[00:43:41]  In Cambodia, for example, killers reported being disturbed by the acts of mass murder they committed at first and then reported that it got easier with time, like killing ducks and chickens.
[00:43:50]  And part of this is that, like, the longer you do this without people stopping you, and the more, the less like resistance you encounter to it, the more it just seems like if you're in a culture where people are doing this, you feel less like, number one, you're going to get punished for it, less like it's a problem.
[00:44:06]  It gets more like that's a big part of like what dehumanization is, not what happens before, but what happens like during.
[00:44:13]  Um, and a lot of the participants in the Cambodian genocide will say that like they hated what they were doing at first, and then with time, they just came to regard it as like killing ducks and chickens, you know, the way they'd slaughtered animals as kids on the farm.
[00:44:25]  Um, they integrated the execution of human beings in their life into their lives in order to like protect themselves, right?
[00:44:32]  Right.
[00:44:33]  Um, and Professor Eliza Luft has also written and researched this topic extensively, and she writes, I find that dehumanization is more often an outcome of participation in violence rather than a precursor.
[00:44:44]  In other words, people make difficult decisions about whether or not to participate in genocide based on their access to financial resources, who they're being asked to kill, their proximity to extremists ordering the violence, and signals sent by local elites.
[00:44:57]  But the more they kill, the easier killing becomes.
[00:44:59]  And this is partly due to shifts in social perception.
[00:45:02]  Although events in genocide describe reactions that include vomiting, shaking, nightmares, and trauma the first few times they kill, over time, their physical and emotional horror at killing subsides.
[00:45:11]  My research suggests this cognitive adaptation to violence goes hand in hand with a transformation in how ordinary killers perceive their victims.
[00:45:19]  Dehumanizing propaganda can help with this process by providing participants with cultural narratives that frame violence as the morally right thing to do.
[00:45:27]  And this is when we talk about preventing genocide.
[00:45:29]  You mentioned earlier like the racial motivations and stuff, that's key at like the core of people who are trying to plan and organize this.
[00:45:36]  One of the ways to disrupt it, you have to disrupt all of these potential incentives, right?
[00:45:41]  It's about creating friction for the people who want to organize this.
[00:45:44]  It's about making it difficult for folks to profit.
[00:45:47]  It's about making it difficult for people to feel like this is okay.
[00:45:50]  It's about making them like see and encounter resistance constantly at every stage of this, because that's a big part of like stopping people from feeling stopping people from like stopping the people who will actually do most of the activity of genocide from getting from feeling like they this is a good thing for them to do.
[00:46:11]  It's disrupting like the signaling and the messaging that brings people in, you know?
[00:46:16]  Like that's the stage at which you can stop this stuff.

=== Creating Friction Against Plots (03:52) ===

[00:46:18]  Yeah, I think that there's certainly a level of feeling of impunity.
[00:46:24]  And most of the people that would end up doing these things, they'll also, in my opinion, a lot of the people who would end up committing the violence didn't actually ever see themselves doing it.
[00:46:36]  Like the Reserve Battalion that Christopher Browning writes about, those guys are all people who were discharged from military service or not allowed to have military service due to like medical problems.
[00:46:49]  So it's a job.
[00:46:50]  They thought they were going to go be occupied territory cops and shit.
[00:46:56]  And as far as like the Rwandan genocide or even the Armenian genocide, where a lot of the violence is communal, there's an intense economic problem, economic friction, and a history of conflict with these people between the two groups.
[00:47:15]  And unfortunately, it just takes someone to harness it and allow them to be in a position to grant impunity.
[00:47:23]  But I think that the communities that are taking part in it, like you've pointed out, are only doing it because they're like, well, we're clearly going to get away with this.
[00:47:32]  Yeah.
[00:47:32]  Like they're not, they're not going to live.
[00:47:34]  Nobody starts off starting a checkpoint with a machete outside of Kigale if they think like there's going to be a trial in like six months.
[00:47:44]  Exactly.
[00:47:44]  Exactly.
[00:47:45]  And part of like, you know, one of the things that Luft points out is that like a thing that can influence populations to participate is like their prop their proximity to extremists ordering the violence.
[00:47:54]  What Stanton would point out is like these militias, these non-state groups, which is like one of the reasons why when anti-fascists talk about the point, the value of like confronting groups in the street at the early stages of this, that's part of the value of that.
[00:48:07]  It's not just that like you'll stop them from coming out because in a lot of ways it just makes them want to come out.
[00:48:12]  It's other people who might kind of passively go along with them when they start setting up checkpoints, seeing how much resistance there is to those groups and the things that they say, right?
[00:48:21]  It's about keeping.
[00:48:23]  Yeah, some of it is about, because again, there's a number of things that can like flip in a person that can make them willing to participate this.
[00:48:31]  It's about trying to make it so that people never feel like this is a thing they can participate in with impunity or without being ostracized from society, right?
[00:48:40]  Like that's that's that's part of it.
[00:48:42]  That's part of it.
[00:48:43]  Like none of this, there's no simple solution to stopping genocide.
[00:48:46]  Oh, of course.
[00:48:46]  But that's part of it.
[00:48:48]  It's something that we've been trying to figure out since Raphael Lemkin first wrote his insanely long book.
[00:48:54]  But like a good example of this is like, oh, the water's getting too hot.
[00:48:58]  Time to fucking bail is like the plots against Hitler during World War II.
[00:49:02]  I mean, yeah, there was several plots against him early on, but they really only picked up once it became pretty fucking clear that like, this shit's coming down on us.
[00:49:11]  Yeah, like the famous Stauffenberg plot was like, not because Stauffenberg hated the Nazis.
[00:49:15]  It was because he didn't like that they were losing.
[00:49:18]  Yeah.
[00:49:18]  I mean, he was a Nazi and he was anti-Semitic and he was one of those guys.
[00:49:22]  It's like, okay, so death camps are a step too far.
[00:49:25]  But even that, it seemed like, and that seemed, but even then, him and most of the central organizers of that plot had all been on the Eastern Front at some point and they were like, we're going to fucking lose.
[00:49:38]  Yeah.
[00:49:38]  We're going to, we're going to lose.
[00:49:40]  And also when you're at that level of command where you're like sitting with Hitler in the bunker, you know, not only are we going to lose, but like, oh shit, there's going to be hell to pay.
[00:49:47]  And we're all in this bunker with Radolf Hitler.
[00:49:50]  This is coming down on us.
[00:49:52]  There is going to be hell to pay.
[00:49:55]  Oh, no, if it isn't the consequences of my actions.
[00:49:58]  Yeah.
[00:49:58]  Yeah.
[00:49:59]  Speaking of the consequences of my actions, if you buy these products and services, the main consequence of your actions is that you'll finally be happy.
[00:50:10]  All right.

=== The Eastern Front Organizers (03:40) ===

[00:50:11]  Here's ads.
[00:50:17]  10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
[00:50:21]  Silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:50:25]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:50:31]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:50:32]  Somebody tell me that!
[00:50:33]  Jeffrey Hood did it!
[00:50:35]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:50:42]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:50:45]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:50:53]  Everybody in the chamber ducks.
[00:50:56]  A shocking public murder.
[00:50:57]  They scream, get down, get down.
[00:50:59]  Those are shots.
[00:51:00]  Those are shots.
[00:51:01]  Get down.
[00:51:01]  A charismatic politician.
[00:51:03]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:51:05]  I still have a weapon.
[00:51:07]  And I could shoot you.
[00:51:10]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:51:12]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:51:15]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:51:17]  That may have been about sex.
[00:51:19]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:51:23]  Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:32]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:51:36]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:51:39]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:51:42]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:51:46]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:51:49]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:51:53]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:51:55]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:52:00]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:52:02]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:52:04]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:52:06]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:52:09]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:52:10]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:52:13]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:52:17]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:52:19]  Trust me, babe.
[00:52:20]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:52:30]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:52:35]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:52:40]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:52:46]  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.
[00:52:55]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:53:00]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:53:04]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:53:06]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:53:08]  That's so funny.
[00:53:10]  Sherry with me each night, each morning.
[00:53:18]  Say you love me.
[00:53:21]  You know I.
[00:53:23]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app.
[00:53:27]  Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:53:30]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:53:36]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:53:43]  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.
[00:53:49]  From power to parenthood.

=== Disrupting Hierarchy of Fears (15:45) ===

[00:53:51]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:53:55]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:53:57]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:53:59]  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.
[00:54:04]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:54:10]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:54:13]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:54:19]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:54:21]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:54:24]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:54:35]  All right, we are back.
[00:54:38]  So, you know, people, I think, as we're repeatedly getting onto here, are complicated, and so are genocides.
[00:54:44]  And we're never talking about a single reason.
[00:54:47]  You know, I'm sure, I'm sure, again, in every genocide, there's probably individual people whose motivations are very simple and can be as simple as like, I'm just a piece of shit.
[00:54:56]  You know, those guys, like Oscar Durlwanger, like, these guys exist, right?
[00:54:59]  There's people who just suck ass like comprehensively, and that's why they're on board.
[00:55:04]  But you can't actually do a whole genocide with just those people.
[00:55:09]  No, you need the, you need the whole banality of evil to back you up.
[00:55:13]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:55:15]  And that's the thing.
[00:55:16]  Like, I think people misinterpret that sometimes as like being entirely focused on like guys like Eichmann, who are these like bureaucrats.
[00:55:24]  But like part of it is that motivations for genocide can be banal.
[00:55:28]  They're not everyone was radicalized to think that the Jews were this like Titanic threat.
[00:55:33]  It's like, no, they were like they participated in the Holocaust for pretty banal reasons in a lot of cases.
[00:55:41]  Yeah.
[00:55:41]  And there's a lot of attempting to make things palatable for people.
[00:55:45]  Like a good example, like the very beginning stages of the Holocaust is like, well, you know, before they started death camps, they're killing the mentally ill, the disabled.
[00:55:56]  And that was to, you know, we don't hate these people, but, you know, they're, you know, evolutionary dead ends.
[00:56:07]  They're hurting everybody.
[00:56:08]  This is better for them.
[00:56:10]  Yeah.
[00:56:10]  You know, and you see a good parallel of that, in my opinion, in the peak of the eliminationist rhetoric that we're seeing in the United States right now is the framing of trans identity as mental illness.
[00:56:26]  Yes.
[00:56:27]  So you, well, you want to cure mental illness, right?
[00:56:30]  Like, why wouldn't you want to do that?
[00:56:32]  Yeah.
[00:56:32]  So you have states like Florida or I believe Texas and a few others who are forcing detransition on people in order to cure them.
[00:56:43]  And I think it's both that they are talking about forcing detransition because these people need to be cured, but they're also talking about that they're spreading it, right?
[00:56:53]  Yes.
[00:56:54]  Which justifies, could be used to justify elimination in the same way that like the Nazis talked about the Jews and how like you can't let people who are just like a quarter Jewish live because they're spreading this like there's something inherently, you know, and again, this is the high-level justification for it, but like this is also, that's part of why the individuals got on board is like this, this, this rhetoric that was explained to them, like, because you have to give people some kind of explanation, right?
[00:57:21]  People feel a threat from the state or they feel like that they're going to be ostracized.
[00:57:26]  And also the propaganda lets them feel that their victims are somehow less human.
[00:57:29]  And not just that, but a threat to them, right?
[00:57:32]  And you get some of this in like the correspondence of Einsatzgruppa talking about like, well, we have to kill these babies because they'll grow up into Jews who will like threaten our babies and stuff.
[00:57:42]  And so, you know, the killing is justified.
[00:57:43]  But also it's not just that.
[00:57:45]  It's that I'm getting paid to do this.
[00:57:46]  This is my job.
[00:57:47]  This is keeping me away from a more dangerous chunk of the front.
[00:57:50]  Or maybe I'll get a promotion from the party if I'm like doing it, you know, this other role in like the Holocaust or something, if I can effectively move all these people on these trains.
[00:57:58]  You know, it's almost best to look at the willingness of members of a population to participate or allow genocide to occur with their consent as like the weakening of an immune system.
[00:58:12]  Like there's certain individual barriers in people that make them unwilling to support something like this.
[00:58:17]  And you don't just like flip a switch over time, but you weaken barriers and you get them to like, well, you know, you're not saying yes to massacring all these people, but like, let's get them out of our community.
[00:58:28]  Let's get them out of our schools.
[00:58:29]  Let's shut down their ability to operate clinics.
[00:58:32]  Let's do, and like the every kind of new incentive weakens more barriers.
[00:58:36]  And again, things get, you know.
[00:58:39]  It's like we just talked about Stauffenberg, high-level Nazi, and he was deeply anti-Semitic.
[00:58:46]  He believed in the Nuremberg laws.
[00:58:48]  He didn't see anything wrong with them.
[00:58:49]  His main problem is he didn't, he thought killing them was too far.
[00:58:53]  But once you've gotten to that point, what barrier is there?
[00:58:57]  Like you've already acquiesced to camps, to Aryanization, to forced deportation.
[00:59:04]  Like really, how far of a jump is it for most people?
[00:59:07]  And for him, I mean, he didn't attempt to kill Hitler because of the Holocaust.
[00:59:12]  No.
[00:59:12]  So for people like him, who I fully believe would be and are generally the vast majority of people that are the, you know, the state actors of any kind of genocidal powder, whether it be the Ottoman Empire, Nazi Germany, the United States, USSR, whoever, the vast majority of people will talk themselves into accepting a certain amount of this that they directly have their hands in or they can directly see.
[00:59:38]  And whatever happens beyond what they see, then that's somebody else's problem.
[00:59:42]  I can't speak of it.
[00:59:45]  They'll talk themselves into becoming palatable because much like Reserve Police Battalion 101, this is a salary.
[00:59:54]  This is a pension.
[00:59:54]  I can take care of my family.
[00:59:56]  So, I mean, people are able to compartmentalize of why they need to be this horribly murderous bureaucrat because, well, I'm just filing papers.
[01:00:07]  My hands aren't bloody.
[01:00:08]  Yeah.
[01:00:08]  And this is, I think, why I have been, as I think most people who participated in a lot of protests, very critical about the value of protest in a lot of situations.
[01:00:18]  But when it comes to stuff like the don't say gay bill, when it comes to stuff like like, okay, folks are saying some really sketchy eliminationist stuff about trans people, we should get as many fucking people out in the street.
[01:00:29]  And a part of the value of that is making not the most, you're not going to change anybody's mind at like the fucking Ron DeSantis level, but there's a lot of people who are more on the edge and you're not going to make them into suddenly nicer woke people, but you can convince them that like, oh, if things get worse and more is demanded of me against this population, there's a lot of folks who are going to want my fucking head.
[01:00:54]  You know, and there's a value in, I mean, you're not like, it's like Paul Gosar is a fucking white nationalist.
[01:01:00]  You're never going to change his dude's a psycho.
[01:01:02]  No.
[01:01:03]  However, and we both have in the past and will in the future have laughed at things like polite society and things like that.
[01:01:11]  But when you make a guy like that feel so deeply unwelcome in any open space because of his rhetoric is obscene, it simply won't happen that much anymore.
[01:01:23]  Yeah.
[01:01:23]  Like these ideas are allowed to propagate like you've shown and talked about before on your show, where they use a guy's freedom of speech to spread hate.
[01:01:32]  They don't care about freedom of speech.
[01:01:34]  They care about spreading hate.
[01:01:36]  That's it.
[01:01:37]  Yeah.
[01:01:39]  So yeah, I think what's important about looking at it all this way in the way that we've been talking about is that when you think about, when you think about kind of getting people able to commit to participate to allow genocide as in this more fluid way, it frames the willingness to engage in mass killing as more fragile than people tend to think it is, which is important.
[01:02:00]  This is why Strident's sudden opposition in the moment can delay or prevent acts of genocide.
[01:02:05]  Raul Wallenberg stopped a shitload of people from getting deported from Budapest on fucking trains because he would wave papers in their face and yell bureaucratically at Nazi soldiers, and it made them think they'd get in trouble, right?
[01:02:17]  And that saved thousands of lives.
[01:02:19]  Yeah, I mean, look at the safety community in Nanking.
[01:02:23]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:02:24]  Headed by a literal Nazi who pointed out that, like, I'll fucking contact the consulate of Nazi Germany if you hurt anybody under my command, like anybody under my protection.
[01:02:36]  And that that wall of like, I might get in trouble is what stops Japanese soldiers from like they possibly saved over 200,000 people.
[01:02:44]  Yeah.
[01:02:45]  And the only thing that saved them wasn't force of arms, though that is important when a genocide is unfolding.
[01:02:50]  Because once it started, you can't prevent it.
[01:02:52]  You have to stop it.
[01:02:54]  Yeah.
[01:02:54]  But in the prevention stage, the thing that stops people from the murder is this might blow up in my fucking face.
[01:03:01]  Exactly.
[01:03:02]  Exactly.
[01:03:03]  And again, that's the uplifting part of this is that like you can you can you can stop this.
[01:03:10]  And it's about like what we're talking about when a guy like Wallenberg shows up or that fucking Nazi in Nanking, they are disrupting and reordering the higher, like the hierarchy of kind of needs and fears in the head of the individuals who were previously willing to undergo genocide.
[01:03:24]  And they're deciding in that moment, this is not safe.
[01:03:27]  This is not a good idea.
[01:03:28]  This is not beneficial in this moment.
[01:03:30]  Again, you're not de-radicalizing them, but you don't always need to, right?
[01:03:36]  And yeah, it's honestly, I think a lot about like the way doctors can talk about suicide sometimes, where it's like, well, there are, and this is not everyone who participates in a genocide, but like there are moments where they're willing to, especially in a case like Rwanda, and other moments where they wouldn't be willing to.
[01:03:54]  And if you can disrupt someone in the moment they're willing to, they won't do it again necessarily.
[01:04:00]  That's maybe worth thinking about.
[01:04:03]  Yeah.
[01:04:05]  Prevention prevention is real tricky.
[01:04:07]  I mean, it's something that even people in the field of genocide studies still don't completely agree on.
[01:04:13]  Of course they do.
[01:04:13]  Like famously, the guy, one of the people that runs Doctors Without Borders, said, like, you can't stop a fucking genocide with doctors, you know, effectively saying that once it begins, the only thing you can do is kill the perpetrators until it stops, which I don't disagree with.
[01:04:30]  I don't disagree.
[01:04:31]  I'm not, I'm certainly not going to argue with that statement.
[01:04:34]  No.
[01:04:34]  But obviously, like, of course, there's prevention.
[01:04:36]  Like, the key is prevention.
[01:04:38]  Like, yeah, it's great that you can, you know, the collective forces of the allies stop the Holocaust from happening or from being complete.
[01:04:47]  But the goal is to stop it from getting that fucking.
[01:04:50]  Boy, it got pretty far.
[01:04:51]  Yeah.
[01:04:54]  It was not a not a speedy, uh, not a speedy intervention, even though.
[01:04:59]  No.
[01:04:59]  And they certainly didn't even intervene to stop the Holocaust.
[01:05:03]  Honestly, it was the fucking international equivalent of stacking dudes outside the door in a fucking classroom.
[01:05:10]  Well, there's a, like, it took way longer than it should have.
[01:05:13]  We can talk about boatloads of Jewish people being sent away from the shores of the United States during the Holocaust because the administration didn't want to seem sympathetic towards the Jews as they were trying to get support built up to enter the war.
[01:05:25]  Like all sorts of stuff shit.
[01:05:26]  I mean, and in reality, even the successful genocides that have been ended via military action were never, that military action that ended them were never initiated with the exception of very, very few to actually stop a genocide.
[01:05:40]  Like, obviously, World War II comes to mind, World War I and the Eastern Front.
[01:05:43]  And I would add what the YPG did in northern Iraq, you know, or the Sinjar.
[01:05:49]  Vietnam invading Cambodia.
[01:05:51]  They stumbled into a genocide saying, what the fuck is going on here?
[01:05:58]  I would argue that the YPG and coalition forces stopping the genocide of Yazidis is one of the times that it was done on purpose.
[01:06:08]  And in a relatively timely manner.
[01:06:10]  Yeah.
[01:06:11]  Same with Yugoslavia.
[01:06:14]  Yeah.
[01:06:14]  Less timely.
[01:06:16]  Significantly less timely.
[01:06:17]  Significantly less timely.
[01:06:19]  Yeah.
[01:06:20]  Unfortunately, once you pull the military card, things get even worse because you have to kill people.
[01:06:27]  That's why prevention is so fucking important and it's so widely overlooked.
[01:06:32]  And it's one of the things, like I think I already said that it's very, very hard to champion genocide prevention because you're proving that something did not happen.
[01:06:45]  And people, and what if you, it's a lot like how we all would really like to envision convincing really weird right-wingers that climate change is real.
[01:06:58]  Because what's the worst thing that happens if I'm right?
[01:07:02]  The air is cleaner.
[01:07:03]  Yeah, it's nicer outside.
[01:07:05]  Yeah, well, no, you're going to crash the economy.
[01:07:08]  Yeah.
[01:07:08]  What's the worst thing that happens if we are worried about eliminationist rhetoric whenever it pops up, whether it be trans or gay people or Rohingya or Uyghurs?
[01:07:21]  Like, what's the worst that happens if we're wrong?
[01:07:25]  There wasn't a genocide.
[01:07:27]  Oh, no.
[01:07:28]  Sorry.
[01:07:29]  People were less shitty to teenagers who were dealing with one of the things that is most difficult to deal with in our society.
[01:07:36]  Yeah.
[01:07:38]  It's literally something that only can't have that.
[01:07:45]  It's one of the things that literally only has upside.
[01:07:48]  No, and it's, it's, I mean, it comes down to, because again, as you said, there's not broad agreement on how to prevent genocides because spoilers, we have not figured out conclusively how to stop genocide from happening.
[01:07:59]  There's several going on right now.
[01:08:00]  But one thing is making the people at the at the central top level of the genocide hierarchy, the folks pushing all of the things, the kind of genocide elites, making them scared to say shit.
[01:08:14]  That's a part of it.
[01:08:15]  And making the people who are potentially lower on that totem pole, who might listen to those militias or whatnot in the moment, realize that they will be wrecked if they take part in that.
[01:08:26]  That there's more people who don't like that sort of shit.
[01:08:30]  So they get scared and they shut the fuck up.
[01:08:33]  Yes.
[01:08:33]  Make racists afraid of getting.
[01:08:35]  Not that it's always about racism, but like, you know, you get what I'm saying.
[01:08:38]  Make bigots worried about their actions.
[01:08:40]  Like that's why when people complain, like, what's the worst thing that, or what could you possibly be doing to change anything if you're outing members of far-right militias at protests?
[01:08:54]  That's why they're covering, they're hiding themselves for a reason.
[01:08:59]  Because they're worried about what's going to happen to them when people realize they're marching around wearing a shirt that says 6 million wasn't enough.
[01:09:06]  Yeah.
[01:09:07]  Yeah.
[01:09:07]  Make them.
[01:09:08]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:09:09]  And it's one of those things, to get back to the script a little bit.
[01:09:15]  When we talk about how much you can disrupt someone's motivational hierarchy and the way in which like that can actually stop actions, Robert J. Lifton cites a case of an inmate in a concentration camp who put in a request with a Nazi doctor who had a, I mean, who was a Nazi doctor in a concentration camp, right?
[01:09:35]  Right.
[01:09:36]  Yeah.

=== Radio Broadcasts and Mass Killing (15:36) ===

[01:09:37]  And he puts in this like weird request and the doctor grants it and it winds up saving this guy's life.
[01:09:42]  And referencing this situation, Staub argues, apparently the inmates' unusual behavior activated some motivation low in the hierarchy, politeness, correctness in responding to a request, perhaps even compassion.
[01:09:55]  And this allowed him to like grant this guy's exception requests that like got him out of like the uh uh you know the the kind of hopper to get fed into the genocide machine.
[01:10:05]  And it's like it's in the same way that like what Wallenberg was doing with a lot of these Nazis who were trying to load Jews onto onto trains.
[01:10:11]  He was disrupting what they were doing by activating something that was deeper programmed in them.
[01:10:17]  The idea that like, yeah, if a guy who claims to be a government official comes up to you and you're a state employee and tells you to stop what you're doing because it's illegal, you kind of stop.
[01:10:27]  Right.
[01:10:27]  Right.
[01:10:28]  Yeah.
[01:10:28]  And there, there's a there's a book on rescuers during the Holocaust.
[01:10:32]  I think it's called like the psychology of rescue.
[01:10:35]  I can't remember exactly what it's called.
[01:10:37]  But they point out that one of the ways that many people rescued people wasn't because they had some deep-seated revulsion of Nazism or even they maybe they didn't even like Jews all that much.
[01:10:52]  But one of the things that stuck out, especially in the case of like that doctor, not that I'm calling him a rescuer.
[01:10:57]  He was a literal doctor at a concentration camp.
[01:10:59]  But his psychology was like, well, he put in a request, as he should.
[01:11:04]  I reproved it.
[01:11:04]  Like, I'm not saving this man's life.
[01:11:06]  I'm simply doing my job.
[01:11:08]  Yeah.
[01:11:08]  Like there was like a bureaucratic shield in front of them where they didn't see what they were doing as necessarily good or bad.
[01:11:15]  They're simply doing their job.
[01:11:16]  And this is why, oh, God, I forget the name of this guy.
[01:11:19]  The guy who wrote Bloodlands, which is a great book about the genocide in primarily like East or in like Ukraine and Poland, will point out that the areas in which the Jewish communities were most thoroughly destroyed were places that had suffered what he called double state destruction, which is where like the government is destroyed, another government came in, and it was, in this case, it's like the Soviets took over, they destroyed the existing government, and then the Soviets were destroyed and the government structure they had created was destroyed.
[01:11:50]  And you saw higher percentages of like the Jewish population wiped out in those areas than you did in, say, France, where the Nazis just kind of took over and tweaked the existing state structure.
[01:11:59]  And part of it is because there was bureaucratic, there were levels of bureaucracy that people could hide in and that provided like kind of excuses for folks to save their lives, right?
[01:12:12]  A lot of the Jews who were saved in Western Europe were saved because like some functionary was able to find a way that it wasn't technically illegal to like protect them, you know?
[01:12:23]  Anyway, it's probably worth talking about propaganda at some point here, because while we've been, I think, like rightfully cautioning people against over like over amplifying the value of eliminationist propaganda and genocide, because it's all the popular culture tends to focus on.
[01:12:41]  Yes.
[01:12:42]  It is a factor, right?
[01:12:44]  It's not a non-factor genocide.
[01:12:47]  And in the context of modern fears about a new genocide, a number of folks recently have made very direct comparisons between modern right-wing media and radio and radio stations in Rwanda during that genocide.
[01:12:59]  This line of argument became particularly common in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, in which a teenaged white supremacist killed 10 people at a grocery store in a majority black area.
[01:13:07]  Because the shooter espoused the great replacement conspiracy theory, which Tucker Carlson also pushes, a lot of folks claimed a causative link between the two.
[01:13:15]  I will tell you right now, there was none.
[01:13:17]  Tucker, the kid was radicalized elsewhere, right?
[01:13:20]  Not that Tucker Carlson is not saying things that can influence people to participate in mass killing.
[01:13:25]  I'm not saying that.
[01:13:27]  But this kid, that's not where this happened from.
[01:13:30]  And similarly, like Scott, Scott Strauss wrote a research paper on RTLM, which is the main two power radio station broadcasting out of Kigali.
[01:13:40]  And it didn't, I mean, I'm not saying it didn't have an effect.
[01:13:45]  It did marginally.
[01:13:49]  I mean, and I think that shows, again, what we talked about, that while propaganda is real, it's not the magic bullet.
[01:13:57]  So, like, people have this concept of RTLM as being machete radio is like a term commonly used for it.
[01:14:04]  But it hardly broadcasted outside of the capital of Kigali due to geography.
[01:14:10]  Rwanda has tons of mountains.
[01:14:11]  Radio doesn't like mountains.
[01:14:14]  So, and not to mention like some of the worst killings took place in a southern commune, which had no RTLM reception.
[01:14:23]  So, like, similarly, these people were influenced by other means to do mass killing, not this thing that makes it easier for us to understand.
[01:14:33]  Yeah.
[01:14:35]  Yeah.
[01:14:35]  Um, so, uh, yeah, I think when it comes to kind of the way in which this incorrect view of what happened in Rwanda is getting sort of like compared with things today, uh, a good example would be NPR's Steve Inskeep, who tweeted, quote, a fact about Rwanda's genocide has always struck with me.
[01:14:53]  The ruling party caused much of the killing by going on the radio and telling ethnic Hutus that ethnic Tutsis must be killed, along with Hutus who disapproved.
[01:15:01]  Many people listened and dismembered their neighbors.
[01:15:03]  For a brief overview of the Rwanda, we're getting into all of this, but let's give an overview of what happened there.
[01:15:09]  So, Rwanda was a Belgian colony for a long time.
[01:15:12]  And if you know the Belgians, they did them some genocide in the regions that they ran things.
[01:15:16]  Yeah.
[01:15:17]  Now, the Tutsis were used as their model natives, right?
[01:15:20]  And favored over the Hutu.
[01:15:21]  This is a thing that every colonizing power does absolutely everywhere.
[01:15:26]  And it's caused a lot of anger between the Hutus and the Tutsis, who previously had not really been all that separate, right?
[01:15:33]  They weren't even an ethnic group.
[01:15:35]  It was a social class.
[01:15:36]  Exactly.
[01:15:37]  It was very fluid.
[01:15:38]  A Hutu could become a Tutsi.
[01:15:39]  A Tutsi could become a Hutu.
[01:15:42]  Because it's easier for them as the colonizers, they solidify this.
[01:15:46]  And part of what they do is they put out a system of racial IDs, which further informalize this division.
[01:15:51]  Now, this does support one of Dr. Stanton's 10 stages of genocide, but it also interestingly makes the point that stages don't all need to be purposefully incited in order to drive people towards a genocide, because the Belgians are just doing this because they're lazy.
[01:16:04]  And this makes it easier to run a colony.
[01:16:06]  But it does help.
[01:16:07]  This is a big part of why the genocide happens.
[01:16:09]  And it's part of why they're able to know who's a Hutu and who's a Tutsi.
[01:16:12]  Well, because we have fucking cards, you know?
[01:16:15]  Yep.
[01:16:17]  Like you were just talking about propaganda, that propaganda takes over.
[01:16:20]  And then over generations, it becomes real.
[01:16:22]  Like the ethnic divide, it doesn't matter if it's real or fake.
[01:16:26]  It's perceived as being real.
[01:16:28]  Therefore, it's real.
[01:16:29]  Now, in any case, in 1994, following the assassination of the president during a very ugly civil war, Hutu government and military officials orchestrated a three-month orgy of racial violence, culminating in the massacre of more than 500,000 people.
[01:16:43]  In the aftermath of the killings, a lot focused on the broadcasts of specific radio stations, notably RTLM, and how announcers referred to Tutsi as Inyezi, which means cockroach, and advised listeners to hunt them down and massacre them.
[01:16:57]  There were cases where violence was clearly caused by radio broadcasts.
[01:17:01]  On April 12th, a broadcaster claimed armed Tutsi were at an Islamic center in Kigali.
[01:17:05]  A day later, a mob stormed the mosque and killed hundreds of people.
[01:17:09]  That same day, the announcer came back on the air and urged people to exterminate Tutsi and stop them from taking power.
[01:17:14]  So certainly not claiming that the radio had no influence on what was happening.
[01:17:18]  Of course not.
[01:17:19]  No, there's a reason why they were all convicted of genocide.
[01:17:21]  Yes.
[01:17:22]  Journalists and scholars seized on this as an explanation for the nightmarish slaughter, which seemed kind of inexplicable otherwise.
[01:17:29]  Unfortunately, this led to descriptions of events that sounded more than a little fucking racist.
[01:17:34]  And I'm going to quote Strauss here.
[01:17:35]  Obviously, Strauss isn't the one being the racist, but he's quoting other people's, how they interpreted this.
[01:17:39]  I believe Daryl Lee is who he's quoting.
[01:17:42]  Parts, yeah, I think one of them.
[01:17:43]  But yeah, writing in the preface to a seminal study, for example, a UN investigator claimed that Rwandan Rwandan media were the vector by which the poison of racist propaganda is spread.
[01:17:53]  Similarly, Melvern claims, in order to commit genocide, it is necessary to define the victim as being outside human existence, vermin and subhuman.
[01:18:00]  In Rwanda, the propaganda campaign against the minority Tutsis was relentless in its incitement to ethnic hatred and violence.
[01:18:06]  Another observer, a journalist, asserts, when the radio said it was time to kill the people opposed to the government, the masses slid off a dark edge into insanity.
[01:18:14]  The UN investigator quoted above similarly concluded that the poison of radio propaganda is all the more effective because it is said the Rwandan peasant has a radio culture of holding a transistor up to his ear in one hand and holding a machete in the other, waiting for orders emitted by RTLM.
[01:18:28]  That's pretty racist.
[01:18:30]  Yeah, right.
[01:18:30]  It reduces them to like a murdering automaton.
[01:18:33]  Exactly.
[01:18:34]  And what a lot of people are missing when you like when you read passages like that, and that one about the machete in one hand and the radio, that's not Daryl Lee, that's someone else.
[01:18:42]  But one of the things that they're leaving out is RTLM only started about six months before the genocide.
[01:18:49]  Yeah.
[01:18:50]  Yeah.
[01:18:50]  Well, yeah.
[01:18:51]  It was not, this was not like deeply rooted into their culture.
[01:18:54]  No, there's no radio cut.
[01:18:56]  Half of Rwanda, I believe, has no radio signal at all.
[01:19:00]  It is worth noting that like this is a very centralized state.
[01:19:03]  It had been centralized under the Belgians.
[01:19:04]  Rwanda is still quite centralized today.
[01:19:06]  And like, that's not a non-factor in stuff, but like it is not this that people are not just like, oh, the radio said to murder, time to go murder.
[01:19:13]  I guess this is why I'm doing it.
[01:19:15]  It's very racist.
[01:19:16]  It takes away everything.
[01:19:19]  And it's even worse because it also allows you to couch this and like, well, they're illiterate.
[01:19:25]  And, you know, they did have a high illiterate population, but they're illiterate and therefore they're not as intelligent as I, enlightened person from the outside.
[01:19:34]  That's why this, when this radio tells me to go man a checkpoint with a machete and kill everybody, I'm simply going to do it.
[01:19:41]  There's this thing we had that we had these episodes on General Butt Naked and the Liberian Civil War recently.
[01:19:46]  And I had to make a point of, because so much of what happens is so lurid and it gets reported as like, look at this, like these crazy like witch doctor, like cannibals and stuff.
[01:19:55]  And someone accused me on Reddit of like trying to mitigate what he did by going into how it's not really any different from Western war crimes.
[01:20:03]  And that's the same thing with Rwanda.
[01:20:05]  It's not like, yes, there are elements of Rwandan culture that made this are part of why this happened, right?
[01:20:11]  And some of that is how centralized the state and government is.
[01:20:14]  And you can say the same thing about Germany.
[01:20:16]  That had an impact on why things occurred the way that they did.
[01:20:19]  There's nothing different about the centralization.
[01:20:22]  They weren't like Rwandans weren't commanded by their radios to do a genocide any more than Germans were commanded by Hitler over the radio to do a genocide.
[01:20:30]  There was a continuum of things that were going on that made people willing to participate in this.
[01:20:35]  And it's a lot more complicated than they had a radio in their ear.
[01:20:38]  Oh, God.
[01:20:39]  Of course.
[01:20:40]  I mean, not to mention that they check literally every block of Strauss's risk factor for genocide.
[01:20:48]  They've had previous massacres.
[01:20:50]  Paul Harbrim Mia, who I believe his first name is Paul, who was president that was shot down, had since the civil war been ceding more and more power to the Hutu power dynamic to rally power around himself because they were losing.
[01:21:04]  Yeah.
[01:21:04]  So he had ceded more and more power to the incredibly far radical extreme of the Hutu power.
[01:21:10]  So by the time he was dead, he had effectively already lost power.
[01:21:14]  That's why one of the major overlying conspiracy theories is he was shot down by the Hutu power section.
[01:21:20]  Nobody's entirely sure, but they think he was.
[01:21:23]  And that is like the inciting incident of the genocide.
[01:21:25]  Yeah.
[01:21:25]  The president's plane gets shot down.
[01:21:27]  It's still a mystery as to exactly what happened.
[01:21:29]  Anyway, Strauss goes on to note that, quote, most discussions of Rwandan media effects attribute little or no agency to listeners.
[01:21:36]  The Rwandan public is often characterized as hearing a drumbeat of racist messages and directly internalizing them, or as hearing orders to kill and heeding the command.
[01:21:43]  Those views are consistent with stereotypes about Rwandans, namely that they obey orders blindly, that they are poorly educated and thus easily manipulated, and that they are immersed in a culture of prejudice.
[01:21:52]  Now, Strauss carried out an exhaustive analysis of massacres in Rwanda, where they occurred in relation to broadcast towers in particular.
[01:21:59]  He looked at the strength of those towers and where they could reach and when massacres occurred in relation to specific broadcasts.
[01:22:06]  His conclusion was that the vast majority of the violence could not be explained by urgings to kill from radio personalities, and that in fact, most of the broadcast people cited as inciting things happened after most of the violence had occurred.
[01:22:19]  A follow-up investigation from another group of academics used a village-level data set from the genocide to estimate the impact of RTLM in encouraging genocide.
[01:22:28]  They attributed roughly 10% of the overall violence to the station, which is a lot.
[01:22:32]  Don't get me wrong.
[01:22:34]  That's a lot for a radio station to incite.
[01:22:37]  And noted that these broadcasts had more of an influence on convincing militias who were organized and radicalized to kill ahead of time to go after specific targets.
[01:22:45]  And then those militias would rope in civilians rather than, again, people just like, again, those folks prior to fucking radio being involved were already ready to kill.
[01:22:54]  They moved into an area because a specific target was signposted by the radio and they would rope civilians in through coercion and a variety of other means that we've already talked about.
[01:23:04]  So yeah, radio in mass media, absolutely, no reasonable scholar would argue, does not play a significant role in genocide.
[01:23:13]  But consistent with the research of guys like Staub and Strauss, the willingness to participate in such violence exists on a continuum.
[01:23:19]  Even most Rwandan radio-inspired massacres were committed by dudes who joined militias.
[01:23:24]  So yeah, the article by Reinerman and Wilson I cited earlier notes of Rwanda, quote, a need for social belonging can result in a motivation for an individual to want to conform to his or her group, leading to participation in order not to stick out and to be able to remain part of the group.
[01:23:39]  A member of a group interviewed by Hatzfield mentioned the strong bond to the group with whom he killed during the genocide.
[01:23:45]  We liked being in our gang.
[01:23:46]  We all agreed about the new activities and we helped each other out like comrades.
[01:23:51]  Their need, and again, it's traumatic to partake in this kind of killing, and trauma bonds people together, you know?
[01:23:57]  Right.
[01:23:58]  So even in those situations where killings can be tied to particular broadcasts, it's ignorant to blame the propaganda in a vacuum, just as it's kind of ignorant to blame the propaganda Tucker Carlson spits out for the Buffalo shooting.
[01:24:10]  Tucker is allowed to do what he does because people listen, and those people were conditioned to listen by folks other than Tucker, generations of right-wing media, and also family and friends, right?
[01:24:19]  The fact that he's able to get up there and spread great replacement bullshit is the end part of a continuation of propaganda and hatred that we could pull right back to the Civil War if you want to go back far enough, you know?
[01:24:34]  Which doesn't mitigate Tucker's complicity in it at all, but it's not.
[01:24:37]  No, he's not generating it, you know?
[01:24:40]  He's not generating it.
[01:24:43]  He's a stage in a long procession.
[01:24:46]  I think someone pointed out that he might be one of the first extremists that was radicalized by his own audience.
[01:24:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:24:52]  I think that's a big factor because he's doing it in part because it gets him the views, because it gets people to listen, right?
[01:24:57]  And that's the same thing that happens with a lot of people who get radicalized online, right?
[01:25:01]  When we talk about the way like 4chan and 8chan work, where like people come into it joking about this stuff and over time radicalize each other into supporting the literal actions.

=== Authority, Fear, and Milgram (14:28) ===

[01:25:13]  But there's no such thing as ironic racism.
[01:25:15]  No, there's no ironic racism and there's no lone wolves.
[01:25:19]  People are radicalized for violence in communities and by communities.
[01:25:23]  It's shared jokes.
[01:25:24]  It's shared lingo.
[01:25:25]  It's a desire for acceptance.
[01:25:27]  It's a variety of different things that like push people here.
[01:25:31]  Now, of course, again, obedience to authority can be one of these things.
[01:25:36]  But authority doesn't always mean like a fear.
[01:25:40]  Sometimes it's the authority of like the kind of group consensus about what's cool, you know, about what's funny, about what's good.
[01:25:47]  Obviously, like one of the things that gets talked about that got, and this is something that like I think is maybe a little more debatable when we talk about like the role of authority in genocide, is the Milgram experiment, right?
[01:26:00]  This gets talked about a lot.
[01:26:01]  And in short, the Milgram experiment consisted of, I think he did in what, the 70s?
[01:26:05]  60s or 70s?
[01:26:06]  I think it may have been earlier than that.
[01:26:08]  I think it's, because these went on for a while.
[01:26:12]  But the experiment consisted of experimenters, because Milgram was trying to study like, why do people like he was looking at the just following orders excuse that a lot of Nazis made and being like, well, is that the case?
[01:26:24]  And basically, he would have a student deliver electric shocks to a patient who was actually an actor, but the student who was the test subject thought that they were really shocking the person.
[01:26:33]  And like a dude with a clipboard would tell them to periodically increase the voltage until it got up to a level that was noted as being potentially lethal.
[01:26:41]  And the people who were delivering the shocks, some of them would cry, a lot of them would argue.
[01:26:45]  They were generally all pretty unhappy, but most would deliver the shocks when ordered to do so by an authority figure.
[01:26:51]  Staub writes, quote, Milgram suggested that people can enter an agentic mode in which they relinquish individual responsibility and act as agents of authority.
[01:27:00]  While obedience is an important force, it is not the true motive for mass killing or genocide.
[01:27:04]  The motivation to obey comes from a desire to follow a leader, to be a good member of a group, to show respect for authority.
[01:27:10]  Those who willingly accept the authority of leaders are likely to have also accepted their views and ideology, guided by shared cultural dispositions, the shared experience of difficult life conditions, shared motivations that result from them, and shared inclinations for ways to satisfy motives.
[01:27:24]  People join rather than simply obey out of fear or respect.
[01:27:28]  We must consider not only how those in authority gain obedience, but how the motivations of the whole group evolve.
[01:27:33]  Milgram's dramatic demonstration of the power of authority, although of great importance, may have slowed the development of a psychology of genocide as others came to view obedience as the main source of human destructiveness.
[01:27:44]  Yeah.
[01:27:44]  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's always interesting, especially because one of the main points, I believe, of that experiment was that they were told repeatedly they could quit whenever they want.
[01:27:53]  Yes.
[01:27:54]  And the person in the room with them, I believe, could only say, you must continue the experiment.
[01:27:59]  Yeah.
[01:28:00]  But like, and that, of course, directly inspired the writing of ordinary men, and amongst other things.
[01:28:07]  Yeah.
[01:28:08]  And it definitely allows the dispersion of personal responsibility if you believe you're big of a power of a bigger structure.
[01:28:16]  And another thing I think is key is dispersion of your own personal responsibility into a structure you believe is impugn.
[01:28:23]  Like it's not going to be held accountable for anything that it does.
[01:28:26]  Yeah.
[01:28:27]  Yeah.
[01:28:29]  And it's, it's, again, like, so, and, and, and Staub's not saying like this isn't a factor or like the Milgram experiment doesn't say anything useful about genocide.
[01:28:37]  It's the, it's the kind of boiling it all up.
[01:28:39]  People want to say like one thing, right?
[01:28:42]  Um, and it isn't.
[01:28:43]  And it's like, and also just like the fact that people are like following authority isn't just as simple as like they're following orders.
[01:28:51]  It means that like they are, they are, their motivation is a desire to be in a power structure underneath an authority and they accept the views and the values of that authority, right?
[01:29:01]  Which is more complicated than just thus just, I will follow orders, you know?
[01:29:06]  And this is an area in which like the authoritarian culture of Germany prior to the Nazi rise of power affected the willingness of people to participate in the instrument of genocide.
[01:29:18]  Yeah, it's cool.
[01:29:20]  And I think it is, it's important to have a more complicated understanding of like what can motivate people to this than just I do whatever the leader tells me.
[01:29:31]  Um, because that's not where genocides start.
[01:29:35]  All genocide starts with the willingness of human beings to partake in the act itself, right?
[01:29:41]  Like that is, or if, if not start, because it may be wrong to like prescribe it that way, but that you can't have a genocide without the willingness of people to participate, not just to participate, but to welcome or at least not like discourage the people doing the participation, right?
[01:29:59]  Like folks, like it, it's, it's never, it's never one thing.
[01:30:05]  Like societies are more complicated than that, and genocides are accomplished by societies, right?
[01:30:10]  They're not accomplished by dudes who suck.
[01:30:13]  Yeah.
[01:30:13]  And to be completely clear, we're not saying that like genocides occur because of like the marginalized, targeted out group is not resisting hard enough.
[01:30:23]  It's lay people that could escape this.
[01:30:26]  No problem.
[01:30:27]  It's this, it's the slow incoming tide that you're fine with.
[01:30:31]  Like, well, like to like stereotypically, there's a famous poem about this.
[01:30:37]  You know, it's one like, well, you know, this law in Florida isn't really a big deal.
[01:30:44]  I don't live in Florida.
[01:30:45]  Well, millions of fucking people do.
[01:30:47]  Yeah.
[01:30:47]  Yeah.
[01:30:48]  The idea that like, ha ha, well, this is what the right gets, you know, this bad thing happening in Florida because they wouldn't vote against it.
[01:30:53]  It's like, no, no, no.
[01:30:54]  This is a problem.
[01:30:55]  And it's the same.
[01:30:56]  People who are dumb enough to believe that this isn't going to go nationwide after a while are the most naive motherfuckers I've ever heard of.
[01:31:05]  And this is a deeper naivety than just that.
[01:31:07]  I would extend it to people who say, oh, well, it's not our business.
[01:31:13]  Like, I don't, like, I'm not going to, I can dismiss the mass killings of protesters in Syria because that's over there.
[01:31:21]  You know?
[01:31:22]  Oh, now suddenly millions of refugees have flooded Europe and it's reignited a far right.
[01:31:27]  And Victor Orban has seized and centralized an end to democratic functional democracy in Hungary.
[01:31:33]  And now the Republicans are holding a CPAC there talking about how to do the same here.
[01:31:39]  I forgot that they had CPAC in Hungary.
[01:31:41]  Yeah, they sure did.
[01:31:45]  You can't abrogate your responsibility to be a part of the human race.
[01:31:50]  And that includes being like, well, this is like that.
[01:31:54]  That's what actual resistance to fascism is, right?
[01:31:57]  Is like comprehensively calling out bad shit as bad.
[01:32:01]  Like that's not being like, well, it's in Florida, you know?
[01:32:06]  Right.
[01:32:07]  Well, it's in Texas.
[01:32:08]  LOL stupid South campaign.
[01:32:10]  LOL stupid South, right?
[01:32:11]  Like it's, it's, it's taking as much offense to like acts of evil that occur far away as the ones that happen like next door.
[01:32:19]  Because, like everything, like eventually it will.
[01:32:23]  It's the same with, like climate change right, it's it's.
[01:32:24]  Like right it's not being.
[01:32:26]  Like, oh well fuck California, I live up here in Washington State where climate change will never hit us.
[01:32:33]  Or like right um right, yeah it.
[01:32:36]  This is the difficult thing about it um, and it's it's.
[01:32:39]  And I think it's even harder for people to grasp, yeah um uh, when it literally doesn't impact them at all.
[01:32:45]  Uh yeah, there's, I mean, the vast majority of people in any coming or future genocide.
[01:32:51]  Like rarely uh, are they going to be directly impacted?
[01:32:55]  If they, if they don't want to be um, unless you are, of course, the out party but, like you know, a random guy in, you know Duluth Minnesota, like he's not going to be impacted by this.
[01:33:07]  But the hard part and the key for prevention is realizing that if you want to prevent this from happening, it needs to be made important to the point that people who literally cannot have no role in it can make a role in it by stopping it.
[01:33:26]  Because obviously, these things are going to impact outgroups, minorities, racial, ethnic, religious, or otherwise.
[01:33:34]  They're not, they purposefully do not have a voice that can stop this from happening.
[01:33:39]  Nope.
[01:33:40]  That's why they're being targeted.
[01:33:42]  Yeah.
[01:33:42]  So throw an egg at Ron DeSantis.
[01:33:48]  It's the conclusion we've made here.
[01:33:51]  Or Abbott.
[01:33:52]  Abbott could use an egg.
[01:33:54]  Oh, that fucking guy.
[01:33:56]  Give them all a good egging.
[01:33:58]  Egg it out.
[01:33:59]  Like that, like that kid in Australia.
[01:34:03]  Oh, I forgot about that kid.
[01:34:04]  That was nice.
[01:34:05]  It was a good kid.
[01:34:06]  This is when we find out he did something terrible immediately afterwards.
[01:34:09]  No, I think he raised a bunch of money for some nice cause.
[01:34:11]  Oh, nice.
[01:34:12]  People were paying attention to him.
[01:34:13]  I don't know.
[01:34:14]  Hopefully someone's going to be like, please don't milkshake duck that kid for me.
[01:34:20]  Well, Joe, I don't know.
[01:34:22]  How do you feel at the end of this?
[01:34:23]  Genocide, yay or nay?
[01:34:25]  You know, I'm going to be a centrist on this one.
[01:34:29]  No one can say some people like genocide, some people dislike genocide.
[01:34:33]  Some people say that.
[01:34:34]  Can we compromise?
[01:34:36]  Yeah, we're going to compromise to everything that they've ever said.
[01:34:39]  No, I mean, I got into this field because it's very important to me, both in my, in, in my history and, you know, in the future.
[01:34:46]  It's, it's something that's the history of these things are important so we can stop revisionism from coming and taking place and also so we can help prevent it in the future.
[01:34:56]  And hopefully we can make prevention something that is not like a weird thing to bring up.
[01:35:01]  No.
[01:35:02]  So go out and don't commit genocide.
[01:35:06]  That's the key here.
[01:35:07]  That is definitely.
[01:35:09]  There's a lot of debates as to how to prevent it, but don't do a genocide.
[01:35:13]  We ask that.
[01:35:14]  That's the baseline we ask of our listeners is please do not participate in an act of genocide.
[01:35:19]  We're lowering the bar here.
[01:35:21]  Yeah, the bar is through the floor.
[01:35:26]  Unlike some of our sponsors, including the Washington State Highway Patrol.
[01:35:31]  Man, fuck those guys.
[01:35:32]  I used to live in Washington and they're the worst.
[01:35:35]  We had a very funny one-star review of someone being like, I thought I was going to love this podcast, but then they started talking shit about the Washington State Highway Patrol.
[01:35:42]  I have two relatives in the Highway Patrol, and they're both like wonderful men who are not violent at all.
[01:35:50]  I would really like to believe that they listened to the behind the police series.
[01:35:54]  Like, this sounds fun.
[01:35:56]  Yeah.
[01:35:57]  Up until they were totally down with shitting on every other police department until we got to the one their cousin was in.
[01:36:03]  Yeah, fuck the St. Louis cop.
[01:36:05]  Wait a second.
[01:36:06]  We're the good ones.
[01:36:09]  Bow tie wear and fucks.
[01:36:12]  My cousins in the Washington State Highway Patrol aren't violent at all.
[01:36:16]  T-shirt is bringing up a lot of questions answered by my shirt.
[01:36:22]  I'm not allowed around their families anymore.
[01:36:24]  They're not allowed outside their house.
[01:36:25]  It's weird.
[01:36:26]  Anyway, Joe, you got any pluggables?
[01:36:28]  Yeah.
[01:36:29]  Have you ever done a podcast before this?
[01:36:31]  Has that happened in the world?
[01:36:34]  I'm the host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.
[01:36:36]  We talked about fuck-ups in military history.
[01:36:39]  We also talk extensively about genocide specifically.
[01:36:44]  We've talked about Nan King.
[01:36:45]  We've talked about the Namibian genocide.
[01:36:47]  We've talked for seven hours about the Cambodian genocide.
[01:36:52]  I promise it's not all that heavy.
[01:36:55]  We do other stuff too.
[01:36:56]  No, if you want that, then you're going to have to go to the genocide cast with Rock and Robbie and The butt, John Wilson.
[01:37:08]  It's a drivetime radio show.
[01:37:09]  I was doing a radio, but I didn't think it out very well.
[01:37:13]  A morning zoo crew.
[01:37:15]  A morning zoo crew that's just about shit.
[01:37:18]  Well, it's six in the morning.
[01:37:19]  We got a lot of traffic blacked up on the I-5.
[01:37:22]  You know what else got backed up on a highway?
[01:37:25]  Jesus.
[01:37:28]  Good stuff.
[01:37:29]  All right.
[01:37:30]  Episode's over.
[01:37:31]  Go home.
[01:37:34]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:37:37]  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.
[01:37:56]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:38:04]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:38:06]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:38:08]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:38:10]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:38:15]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:38:17]  Trust me, babe.
[01:38:17]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:38:27]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:38:34]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:38:38]  I doctored the test once.
[01:38:40]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:38:44]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:38:47]  Greg Lesby and Michael Marincini.
[01:38:49]  My mind was blown.
[01:38:50]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:38:52]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:38:53]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:38:55]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:38:59]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:39:07]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[01:39:10]  How could this ever happen in City Hall?
[01:39:12]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:39:13]  A shocking public murder.
[01:39:15]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:39:21]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:39:23]  Those are shots.
[01:39:25]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:39:27]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[01:39:32]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== Shocking Murder at City Hall (00:34) ===

[01:39:41]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:39:46]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:39:49]  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.
[01:39:56]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[01:40:00]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:40:03]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:40:12]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:40:14]  Guaranteed human.