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Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 19 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 18 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week as well. Originally this week was going to cover the currently ongoing genocide in Ukraine, but I need to do some more research before I’m ready to record that episode so instead today’s episode is going to be an interlude and we’re going to be talking aboutone of my favorite women in history. Olga of Kiev, a woman who is the very definition of fuck around and find out.
But first! The Alchemist’s Table! Today’s libation is called Kissed by Summer. It’s 2 oz of bourbon, 1 oz each of amaretto and francelico. .75 oz of vanilla simple syrup, 3 dashes of angostura bitters. Shake well and pour over ice. Top with equal parts lemonade and ginger beer and enjoy!
So, now onto Ola of Kiev, the Saint of Slaughter. Olga’s exact year of birth is unknown, but we know she was born somewhere between 890 and 925 CE in Pleskov. She was of Varangian origin, which was an ethnic group descended from Swedish vikingr invaders that eventually settled in the area of the Kievan Rus. She was 15 years old when she was married to Prince Igor I of the Rurik Dynasty. Igor was the son of Rurik, making him only the second ruler of this particular dynasty. During Igor’s reign and owing to a great deal of military aid from his guardian Oleg the Wise the Kievan Rus, and the many tribes of people living in it all came under Rurik control.
Tragedy would strike the Rurik Dynasty in the form of a neighboring tribe known as the Drevelians, a tribe of Eastern Slavic peoples. The Drevelians were not part of the Kievan Rus, though they had joined them in military campaigns against the Byzantine Empire previously and paid a yearly tribute to Igor’s predecessors in the Rurik Dynasty. After Oleg the Wise died in 912 CE the Drevelians stopped paying their tribute to Igor, instead paying it to a local warlord.
In 945 CE Igor set out with his army to bring the Drevelians into line. No longer would he allow them to deny him what he saw as his rightful tribute. He marched his army to the traditional Drevelian capital, Iskorosten, today known as Korosten in the Zhytomyr Oblast in northern Ukraine. Now, Igor’s army was much larger than any the Drevelians could field, so they backed down and agreed to resume their payments to Igor. However, Igor became greedy and after leaving to return home he turned around and went back to Iskorosten to demand even MORE tribute, at which point he Drevelians captured him alone and killed him.
According to the Byzantine chronicler Leo the Deacon, Igor's death was caused by a gruesome act of torture in which he was "captured by them, tied to tree trunks, and torn in two." They allegedly tied one leg each to two bent over birch trees and then let them catapult up in opposing directions, tearing him in half. Though it is possible that this exact story is apocryphal, the fact that Igor was killed by the Drevelians cannot be denied.
Upon learning of the death of her husband Olga ascended to the throne to rule as regent in the name of her son Sviatoslav. Olga was the first woman to rule over the Kievan Rus. Now, there isn’t a great deal of information in the historical record regarding what Olga’s reign was like. But there is A LOT of information detailing the bloody revenge she got on those who stole her love from her.
The Drevelians, now firmly in the Fuck Around stage and emboldened by their successful murder of Igor sent a missive to Olga. They proposed that Olga should marry the Drevelian prince Mal. The man directly responsible for killing her husband. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, a document formerly thought to have been written by Nestor the Chronicler, although now it is considered to be of unknown authorship, Olga responded to their bold pronouncement thusly:
“Your proposal is pleasing to me, indeed, my husband cannot rise again from the dead. But I desire to honor you tomorrow in the presence of my people. Return now to your boat, and remain there with an aspect of arrogance. I shall send for you on the morrow, and you shall say, "We will not ride on horses nor go on foot, carry us in our boat." And you shall be carried in your boat.”
When they returned the next day the Drevelians repeated the words Olga had bade them and the people of the Kievan Rus lifted their boat upon their shoulders and carried them into the courtyard of Olga’s castle. The Drevelians were thrilled by this, feeling as though they were carried in great honor upon a palanquin. Once they were brought into the courtyard their porters dropped them, boat and all, into a trench that Olga had ordered dug the day before and were buried alive. It is written that Olga bent down to watch them as they were buried and "inquired whether they found the honor to their taste."
The Drevelins were now squarely in the middle of the Find Out stage, although they didn’t know it yet as all 20 of the men from the initial retinue they had sent were now buried in the courtyard of Olga’s home. So Olga wrote to the Drevelians and asked them to send “their distinguished men to her in Kiev, so that she might go to their Prince with due honor.” The Drevelian, completely unaware of the fate of the previous retinue sent others to Olga, who ordered a bath be drawn so that they might wash off the dust of the road. Once the bath was drawn and the Drevelians were comfortably in the bathhouse, Olga set the damnthing on fire. No one escaped alive.
But Olga’s revenge was not complete. The Drevelians, still unaware that Olga was engaged in acts of genocidal revenge over the death of her husband, received another missive from her. She was on her way to Iskotorsten and asked that they prepare great quantities of mead so that she might mourn and feast her husband as is proper. And the Drevelians compiled and a funeral feast was held by Igor’s tomb. When the Drevelians were good and drunk on mead, Olga ordered her followers to fall upon them and slaughter them all. According to the Primary Chronicle some 5000 Drevelians were killed in a single night.
Olga would then return to Kiev, her capital city, and prepare her armies to march back to Iskotorsten. She swept across Drevelian land like an avenging angel until she reached, once again, their capital. Here is where things stalled and Olga entered into a year long siege. Eventually she sent another missive to the Drevelians asking them why their capital refused to surrender. “All of your other cities have surrendered and now pay tribute to me, why would you rather die of hunger than pay tribute.”
The Drevelians, as you might expect, responded that they were worried that Olga ws still dead set on revenge, but Olga told them that the boat, bathhouse, and feast massacres had satisfied her. She instead asked them for 3 pigeons and three sparrows from each house and the Drevelians rejoiced that the price they were asked to pay was so low. Oh those poor fools.
Olga then instructed her army to attach a piece of sulphur bound with small pieces of cloth to each bird. At nightfall, Olga told her soldiers to set the pieces aflame and release the birds. They returned to their nests within the city, which subsequently set the city ablaze. As the Primary Chronicle tells it: "There was not a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught fire at once." As the people fled the burning city, Olga ordered her soldiers to catch them, killing some of them and giving the others as slaves to her followers.
Olga would go on to become a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Not because of the genocide she committed. Mostly because of her efforts to Christianize the Kievan Rus, a mission that she did not succeed in, but that was carried to fruition by her grandson Vladimir.
Well… that’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.
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Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 18 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 17 2 weeks ago, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week as well. This week we’re going to be diving back into learning about historic genocides as we learn about the Congolese genocide committed by King Leopold II of Belgium. We’ve talked about the Congolese Genocide previously on Day 11, Free Congo. But for today’s episode we’re going to go into much greater detail about this particular genocide and not just discuss it within the context of a current conflict.
Now, before we get to The Alchemist’s Table I wanted to apologize that there wasn’t a new episode last week. Sometimes you just don’t have the energy, the motivation, the spoons or the spell slots. So, I took a week off. It might happen again. And now on to the booze! Today’s libation is called Cherries Jubilee. It’s 2 oz of Islay scotch. I'd recommend a Bowmore if you’re not a huge fan of the peat. Then 1 oz of creme de cacao. 1 oz of frangelico. Add .75 oz of cherry syrup. Shake and pour overice. Top with ginger beer or a hard cider. Garnish with luxardo cherries and enjoy.
Now, with that out of the way let’s get into the Congolese Rubber Genocide.
In order to understand this genocide we first need to understand European colonialism during this time. Colonialism has taken many forms over the years and in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century it transitioned from the classic form of American colonialism into what we would consider New Colonialism. New Colonialism would rely less on direct military control of an area and would rely more on having governmental institutions in power that would directly benefit those pre existing colonial power structures.
So, near the end of the 19th century there was very little European colonial and mercantile presence in Africa. There were some port towns, to be sure, and there was trade, but very little of the African continent was under the control of European powers at this time. But, European greed for gold and, especially, ivory wouldn’t allow them to ignore African riches for much longer. The Berlin Conference was organized between November 1884 and February 1885 at the request of King Leopold II of Belgium and was organized by Otto von Bismarck of Germany.
The primary purpose of the Berlin Conference was regulating European colonization and trade during the New Imperialism period. It might seem strange to need to differentiate New Imperialism from the forms of empire building that came before. Afterall, the methodology was largely the same. Conquest. And the reasoning was, mostly the same. Resources and land acquisition. But New Imperialism also came with a good deal of “civilizing” flavor. You might be familiar with the poem White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling. If you’re not. You can fully understand the entire mindset of 19th and 20th century colonialism simply by reading that poem.
Now, Leopold had been using the explorations of Henry Morgan Stanley, and his own organization, the International African Association to quietly try and create his own private colony in central Africa that would be called the Congo Free State, but France found out and started making moves, and then Britain and Portugal found out and began trying to grab land which led Germany to do the same. War was brewing quickly as these various European powerhouses all sought as much land, wealth, and power as they could grab. This, ultimately, would be why the Berlin Conference was called and why it was so successful. These European powers decided, instead of going to war and killing each other over Africa they’d just all meet and carve it up like a pecan pie and settle it all peaceful like.
There were 14 nations/empires in attendance at the Berlin Conference, Germany, Austria Hungary, the International Congo Society (this really means King Leopold II of Belgium), Spain, Denmark, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire. And while all 14 of those countries were in attendance at the Berlin Conference and had a say in the final decisions that were made, only 7 countries were actually going to colonize Africa once it was over.
Those countries were Belgium (really just King Leopold II, this would be his own private colony), Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Portugal, and Italy. At the time of the Berlin Conference, in 1885, less than 10% of the African continent was under European control, but by the time World War 1 broke out only Liberia and Ethiopia were still independent. Although, Liberia certainly only existed because of US colonial power, and so doesn’t REALLY count as independent.
Wanna know one of the most buckwild things about the Berlin Conference? I ask knowing that there is no way for you to answer or to stop me from telling you short of skipping forward by about 30 seconds. Part of the General Act, the document that was signed and ratified at the conclusion of the Berlin Conference was a commitment from the European powers involved to END AFRICAN AND ISLAMIC SLAVERY. Most of those European powers would go on to enslave the populations they conquered and colonized.
This period of New Imperialism is what we tend to call The Scramble for Africa. So far we’ve been talking about this all in fairly clinical terms, as if these European countries simply sat around a table and calmly decided who would get what land in the second largest continent on the planet and then it just happened, with no additional muss or fuss. Anyone who has studied even the barest amount of human history knows that nothing happens without muss or fuss. There were wars, and battles, and massacres that led to Europe gaining control of African territory.
We now need to talk a bit about the Congo Free State, and how King Leopold of Belgium, a frail weakling (compared to the other European powers) managed to worm his way into the conference and into one of the most lucrative colonies in Africa. The Congo Free State was a truly massive colony that was owned personally by Leopold. It was NOT, at least between the years 1885 and 1908, part of the Belgian Empire, it was not owned by the Belgian government and was ruled entirely separately, it just happened to be ruled by the King of Belgium. Leopold was able to gain this massive colony by convincing the monarchs of Europe that he was engaged in humanitarian and philanthropic work, and that the Congo Free State would be an area of free trade in Africa. He also then proceeded to lie to the leaders of Britain, Germany, France, and the US telling them all that he would give them special trade status.
Leopold maintained a guise that he was not trying to use the Congo Basin to increase his own wealth and economic and political power. He maintained that his presence in the region was, as was a huge part of the ethos of New Imperialism, to civilize the savages of the Congo Basin and to bring them closer to God and good European cultural supremacy.
Leopold pledged to suppress the east African slave trade; promote humanitarian policies; guarantee free trade within the colony; impose no import duties for twenty years; and encourage philanthropic and scientific enterprises. Beginning in the mid-1880s, Leopold first decreed that the state asserted rights of proprietorship over all vacant lands throughout the Congo territory. In three successive decrees, Leopold promised the rights of the Congolese in their land to native villages and farms, essentially making nearly all of the CFS terres domaniales (state-owned land). Leopold further decreed that merchants should limit their commercial operations in rubber trade with the natives. Additionally, the colonial administration liberated thousands of slaves.
Four main problems presented themselves over the next few years.
Leopold II ran up huge debts to finance his colonial endeavour and risked losing his colony to Belgium.
Much of the Free State was unmapped jungle, which offered little fiscal and commercial return.
Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (part of modern South Africa), was expanding his British South Africa Company's charter lands from the south and threatened to occupy Katanga (southern Congo) by exploiting the "Principle of Effectivity" loophole in the Berlin Treaty. In this he was supported by Harry Johnston, the British Commissioner for Central Africa, who was London's representative in the region.
The Congolese interior was ruled by Arab Zanzibari slavers and sultans, powerful kings and warlords who had to be coerced or defeated by use of force. For example, the slaving gangs of Zanzibar trader Tippu Tip had a strong presence in the eastern part of the territory in the modern-day Maniema, Tanganyika and Ituri regions. They were linked to the Swahili coast via Uganda and Tanzania and had established independent slave states.So very quickly Leopold began to renege on his promises. The first concession he made to his greed and desire for power was to establish a policy of terres vacantes. Vacant land, which was defined as any land that did not have a house or cultivated garden plot. This was, of course, most of the country. Any terres vacantes was now automatically property of the state to be portioned out to Leopold’s cronies and supporters. Next Leopold would decree that any locals harvesting rubber or ivory were only allowed to sell to the state. This was doubly enforced because most of the rubber or ivory harvesting was happening on “state owned land” and so it “mae sense” that they could only sell to the state, which now had a monopoly on those products and could set the prices at whatever they wanted. Trading companies were, obviously, pissed by this as part of the General Act of the Berlin Conference was a promise of Free Trade in Belgium.
Now, what made The Congo so special in the history of capitalist exploitation was that it was home to something that would become one of the most important natural resources in the entire world, rubber. There are only two sources of natural rubber in the world. The sap of the Hevea brasiliensis, or rubber tree that grows in the Amazon River Basin, and the sap of Landolphia owariensis, a species of woody vines that grow in the Congo. I mean, technically there are 2500 species of plants that produce natural latex and rubber, but those two are the big ones. Today 99% of natural latex and rubber comes from the Amazon, but Leopold was able to make massive profit off of his colony.
By the final decade of the 19th century, John Boyd Dunlop's 1887 invention of inflatable, rubber bicycle tubes and the growing usage of the automobile dramatically increased global demand for rubber. Now, as mentioned previously the rubber in the Congo came from vines. So while the trees in the Amazon basin could be tapped much in the same way we get Maple syrup, the Congolese workers would slash the vines and lather their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be scraped off the skin in a quite painful manner, ripping off the workers hair.
The economic system in the Congo Free State was known as the red rubber system. It was a slave economy that Leopold enforced through the use of his armed forces known as the Force Publique. The officer corp of the Force Publique was made up entirely of White Europeans, and much of their rank and file was made up of slaves captured by Arabic slavers in the Upper Congo. Many of the other soldiers were children who had been kidnapped from their villages and raised in Roman Catholic missions in conditions very similar to slavery. Each slave in the Congo Free State was required to harvest a regular quota of rubber sap. What that quota was was often arbitrarily decided based purely on profit based concerns.
Workers who refused to supply their labour were coerced with "constraint and repression". Dissenters were beaten or whipped with the chicotte, a bullship made of hippo hide, hostages were taken to ensure prompt collection and punitive expeditions were sent to destroy villages which refused. The policy led to a collapse of Congolese economic and cultural life, as well as farming in some areas.
One refugee from these horrors described the process:
We were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved ... When we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and taken away.
Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting or to stockpile them for mutiny. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in cut-off hands.A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 300 mi north of Stanley Pool:
“All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator ... From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets ... A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river ... Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.”
One junior officer in the Force Publique had this to say about the quota system:
The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber ... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace ... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
Within the Congo Free State there was also rampant famine and disease that killed hundreds of thousands of people, a type of residential school where children were sent to learn to be either workers or soldiers. About 50% of the children who entered these schools died. There were also several reputable reports of Congolese people turning to cannibalism in the face of their lack of food resources. With everyone being forced to harvest rubber there was no one to farm or gather or hunt for food. It is generally accepted that over the course of Leopold’s rule in the Congo Free State, between 1885 and 1908 that at least 10 million Congolese people were killed.
The peak year for the cost of rubber was 1903, with rubber fetching the highest price and concessionary companies raking in the highest profits.
However, the boom sparked efforts to find lower-cost producers. Congolese concessionary companies started facing competition from rubber cultivation in Southeast Asia and Latin America. As plantations were begun in other tropical regions around the world, the global price of rubber started to dip. Competition heightened the drive to exploit forced labour in the Congo in order to lower production costs. Meanwhile, the cost of enforcement was eating away at profit margins, along with the toll taken by the increasingly unsustainable harvesting methods. As competition from other areas of rubber cultivation mounted, Leopold's private rule was left increasingly vulnerable to international scrutiny.
Missionaries carefully and meticulously documented the many abuses of the Congolese Red Rubber system. This would finally be noted by the international community and by the Belgian government itself as a violation of the 1885 Berlin Act which gave Leopold authority and control of the Congo as long as he: "care[d] for the improvements of their conditions of their moral and material well-being" and "help[ed] in suppressing slavery."
After 2 years of international pressure the Belgian government agreed to annex the Congo Free State and make it an official part of the Belgian Empire. The reason the debate lasted 2 years was that no one wanted to take on the responsibility of fixing everything Leopold had fucked up so royally (pun intended).
But what happened to Leopold you ask? Did he go to jail? Did he get a slap on the wrist? Was he deposed as king and sent into exile on a small island in the Pacific where he eventually died of stomach cancer? Nah, he did die though, but he died as King of Belgium. He had surgery on December 17, 1909. He had a coronary bridging performed, aiming at correcting insufficient irrigation of the myocardium. ''A few hours after the operation, a failure of the myocardium occurred leading to death the same day’’. Leopold had ruled Belgium for 44 years, which makes him, to this day, the longest reigning Belgian monarch. You also might be please to know that his funeral procession was booed by every crowd he passed. His people fucking hated him.
Exciting news y’all! We actually DO have some reviews this week! So let’s read em!
And now for the outro!
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.
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Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 17 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 16 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. We’re going to do something different this week. We’ve been learning about some, frankly depressing things. War, genocide, slaughter, ethnic tensions and cleansings. These are all important things to be learning about. Especially the ones that are happening in the world right now. But it is always important to remember to take care of ourselves. We need to take some time to breathe and remember that we are human beings with thoughts and feelings and that we require rest or we will, quite simply, die.
So today, after our visit to the Alchemist’s Table, we are going to learn about the history of juggling!
Today’s libation is called Herb Garden. It’s 1 oz each of gin, elderflower liquor, and jagermeister. 2 splashes each of Orleans and Cardamom bitters, and a splash of lavender simple syrup. Shake well and strain into a glass with muddled mint. Top with lemonade and enjoy!
So! Now onto the juggling. First let’s get the obvious out of the way. What is juggling? Juggle is a verb and it is defined as to continuously toss into the air and catch (a number of objects) so as to keep at least one in the air while handling the others, typically for the entertainment of others.
Though it also bears mentioning that what we will be discussing in this episode is more specifically referred to as toss juggling. Bounce juggling and contact juggling also exist as distinct disciplines. Moving forward I’ll be using the general term juggling, but know that we are discussing toss juggling.
The classic tool for juggling is, obviously, balls but you can juggle anything that you can throw. I’ve seen people juggle knives, flaming torches, chainsaws, music stands, bowling balls. Anything you can throw. Although, the three most basic juggling props are balls, clubs, and rings.
The oldest archeological depiction that we have of juggling comes from ancient Egypt from around the 21st century BCE. There was some wall art in the Beni Hasan cemetery complex that appears to show 4 young women juggling balls. We say appears to be because without text based evidence describing the scene or the ability to talk to someone who made the art it’s just a guess. But you can look up the wall art, and it looks like juggling to me.
The next big piece of juggling in the historical record comes from the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history and it is not only my favorite story from the history of juggling, but it is also one of my favorite historical stories to exist, full stop.
Xiong Yiliao was a Chu warrior who fought under King Zhuang of Chu during the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history. Ancient Chinese annals state that he practiced nòngwán, "throwing multiple objects up and down without dropping". During a battle in about 603 BC between the states of Chu and Song, Xiong Yiliao stepped out between the armies and juggled nine balls, which so amazed the Song troops that all five hundred of them turned and fled, allowing the Chu army to win a complete victory.
Dude just walked in between two armies about to fight and pulled one of the biggest bluffs since the Empty Fort Strategy. But also, NINE BALLS!??!?! That’s amazingly impressive. The world record for most balls juggled at a single time TODAY is only 11. The record was set by Alex Barron on the 3rd of April, 2012. Juggling 9 balls is still considered a massive achievement. I’ve never really been able to progress beyond 3.
There’s another story from the Spring and Autumn period of a man named Lanzi who was known to walk around on stilts that were “twice as long as his body” while juggling 7 jian swords. Let’s put aside, for a moment, that jian swords are not weighted even remotely close to how modern juggling clubs or knives are and that they are far longer. The current record for most clubs juggled is only 8. It was set in 2023 by Moritz Rosner who managed a bare 18 tosses and catches before losing the pattern. Lanzi, by the way, was probably not the guy's actual name. Lanzi was often used as a general term for itinerant entertainers during this time.
The Ancient Greek historian Manetho once described jugglers and acrobats thusly: “birds of the country, the foulest brood of the city.” Male and female jugglers jumped forward and backward over swords or tables; girls threw up and caught again a number of balls or hoops to the accompaniment of a musical instrument; others displayed an astounding skill with their feet and toes while standing on their hands.
And the Greek historian Xenophon once had this to say about the performance of a dancing girl at a party hosted by Socrates: And at the instant her fellow with the flute commenced a tune to keep her company, whilst someone posted at her side kept handing her the hoops till she had twelve in all. With these in her hands she fell to dancing, and the while she danced she flung the hoops into the air - overhead she sent them twirling - judging the height they must be thrown to catch them as they fell in perfect time.
The record for ring juggling, by the way, is only 13 rings and was set in 2002 by Albert Lucas who managed exactly 13 throws and catches.
Now, many of these ancient historians were known to exaggerate, so it's unclear if these historic records are real, or if they were just picking numbers they assumed were impressive. If the former, it’s wild that the records have increased by so little. If the latter, they were correct.
Ancient Roman sources make mention of jugglers and juggling fairly frequently. They mention contact juggling with glass spheres a number of times and Sidonius Apollinaris, a Roman officer leading a legion in the French province of Niemen, allegedly wrote in his letters that he enjoyed juggling three or four balls as a hobby for his own satisfaction and to entertain his companions in the legions.
The Boke of Saint Albans, published in England in 1486, contains one of my very favorite juggling fun facts. It mentions a “Neverthriving of Jugglers” as part of a list of collective nouns. This is hilarious and painful and it is nearly impossible to make a thriving wage as a juggler.
Stewart Culin in Games of the North American Indians, a book that was written in 2012 lists examples of juggling among the Naskapi, Eskimo, Achomawi, Bannock, Shoshone, Ute, and Zuni tribes of North America. One example, quoted from George Dorsey, describes a game played by Shoshone women who juggled up to four balls made of mud, cut gypsum, or rounded water-worn stones. Dorsey describes betting contests in which the women raced toward an objective such as a tree or tipi while juggling. This is very similar to a modern day sport called joggling where participants juggle while jogging.
From 1768 onwards, when Phillip Astley opened the first modern circus he included jugglers along with his equestrian acts, acrobatics, and clowns. And in 1793 when John Bill Rickets brought the idea of the circus to the United States and performed for George Washington he juggled while on horseback. So largely from the 18th century forward juggling has been heavily associated with the circus. There have been man firsts and exciting advancements made in the field of juggling over the years. From Jim Harrigan creating the concept of comedic juggling to Dewitt Cook inventing the modern concept of club juggling when he performed a routine using Indian Clubs. Indian clubs are a heavy wooden club that was and still are used as a strengthening and conditioning tool. They are much heavier and not weighted quite the same as modern plastic clubs.
There have also been more weird stories, such as Enrico Rastelli who was born in Siberia in 1896. Widely hailed as one of the greatest jugglers of all time he was the first recorded person to juggle 10 balls, though he was never able to juggle 9.
There was also Charles Hoey who was the first to juggle 4 clubs, though he could not stop juggling without dropping. When performing on stage the curtain had to be closed while he was still juggling so the audience wouldn't see him drop.
Juggling has a long and delightfully quirky history. It’s one of my favorite party trick, though one that I don’t practice as often as I used to or as often as I should. Still, it’s fun to do and fun to learn about. I hope you enjoyed learning about it, because next week it’s right back into the breach.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.
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Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 16 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 15 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 7th part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, episode 12 was on Sudan, episode 13 was on Xinjiang, episode 14 was on Rakhine State, episode 15 was on Tigray, and today’s episode will focus on the current situation in Haiti.
Today’s trip to the Alchemist’s Table will look somewhat similar to last weeks. This drink is called Persephone’s Wedding. It starts with muddled mint before adding some lavender simple syrup and 2 oz of gin. Strain all that over ice and stir for about 30 seconds before topping with lemonade and garnishing with mint.
Starting in 1492 Haiti became one of the first European colonies following Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean with the settlement at La Navidad. Haiti would remain under European control until their revolution that ended in 1804. We’re glossing pretty heavily over the Haitian Revolution in today’s episode because the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent Haitian Massacre will be a later episode on this podcast.
Now, just because Haiti was now an independent nation and no longer a French colony didn’t mean that the country was free of European influence or control. Spain, Germany, and Britain still had large amounts of economic and political sway in the island nation. This would especially be the case when US President Woodrow Wilson, that racist movie loving fuck, sent the Marines to occupy Port au-Prince. Germany was also heavily invested in the island nation, and while the US wasn’t in World War 1 yet, they had severe anxieties over an anti-American, and pro-German, president being installed so they took over the nation, overthrew Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the then president of Haiti. The Marines declared martial law and severely censored the press. Within weeks, a new pro-U.S. Haitian president, Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, was installed and a new constitution written that was favorable to the interests of the United States. The constitution (written by future US President Franklin D. Roosevelt) included a clause that allowed, for the first time, foreign ownership of land in Haiti, which was bitterly opposed by the Haitian legislature and citizenry.
The US would keep a firm grip on Haitian politics, even after their occupation ended in 1934. Haiti would now enter an even greater period of political instability (which is not to say that US occupation was a good thing, an end of colonial occupation often sees old ethnic tensions flare up and massive violence enacted to dismantle colonial power structures).
The president at the end of the occupation, Sténio Vincent was forced to step down under US pressure in 1941 and was replaced by Élie Lescot who served until 1946 when he was overthrown in a military coup d'etat and replaced by Dumarsais Estimé until 1950 when HE was overthrown in a military coup and replaced by the staunchly anti-communist Paul Magloire who was strongly supported by the US.
Now despite the massive amounts of political instability that we just discussed, it is about to get worse with the Duvalier dynasty.
In 1956–57 Haiti underwent severe political turmoil; Magloire was forced to resign and leave the country in 1956 and he was followed by four short-lived presidencies. In the September 1957 election François Duvalier was elected President of Haiti. Known as 'Papa Doc' and initially popular, Duvalier remained President until his death in 1971. He advanced black interests in the public sector, where over time, people of color had predominated as the educated urban elite. Not trusting the army, despite his frequent purges of officers deemed disloyal, Duvalier created a private militia known as Tontons Macoutes ("Bogeymen"), which maintained order by terrorizing the populace and political opponents. In 1964 Duvalier proclaimed himself 'President for Life'; an uprising against his rule that year in Jérémie was violently suppressed, with the ringleaders publicly executed and hundreds of mixed-raced citizens in the town killed. The bulk of the educated and professional class began leaving the country, and corruption became widespread. Duvalier sought to create a personality cult, identifying himself with Baron Samedi, one of the loa (or lwa), or spirits, of Haitian Vodou. Despite the well-publicized abuses under his rule, Duvalier's firm anti-Communism earned him the support of the Americans, who furnished the country with aid.
This is something you will find about the United States. While they style themselves the land of the free and the home of the brave they’re more than willing to finance and support dictators as long as they 1. Oppose communism and 2. Give the US a free hand to control their economy. So it didn’t matter to the “Greatest Country on Earth” is Papa Doc was killing mixed race people and all of his political opponents. He was anti-communist and that was good enough.
Now there WAS a coup attempt against Duvalier in the first year of his reign (the first of many) led by some of the military officials he had fired. Those men thought that they could come riding back in and that the people, fed up of Papa Doc’s growing autocratic tendencies, would rally to them and they would quickly restore the old social order. But Haiti had gone through 4 presidents the year before Papa Doc came into office and while he wasn’t the best loved president, he was considered competent (having previous served as Minister of Health) and he was bringing order and stability to the country. So the coup attempters.. There’s got to be a better way of saying that, were all killed and their bodies dragged through the streets of Port au-Prince, as if each citizen was a little Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy.
Papa Doc, despite the multiple coup attempts, did reign as president for life. He was still President when he died in 1971 and was immediately replaced by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed Baby Doc. Baby Doc assumed the “presidency” at the age of 19, making him the youngest president in world history.
Jean-Claude tried to reign back some of the harsher policies of his father, but was still deposed in a popular uprising in 1986 and forced to step down and flee the country.
Haiti would then fall under the rule of its military for a brief time and then had a series of bad elections and even more coups. There was a coup in June of 1988, another in September of 1988, and a third one in September of 1991. The US would send troops in under Operation Uphold Democracy to try and bring some stability to Haiti. Though, as is always the case when the US tries to bring free market reforms and “democracy” to a country they did a shitty job of it.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been elected president in 1990 and had been deposed in the 1991 coup returned to finish out his term, lost in 1995, but was reelected again in the year 2000. He would then be deposed AGAIN in 2004 in another coup d’etat.
One of Aristide’s worst decisions while in office was when he outlawed pro-Duvalier militias like the Macoute, but he also ordered the disbandment of the Haitian Army. So the Army disbanded, but never disarmed and just would up forming or joining various militia groups. From 1994 to 2004, a de facto anti-Arisitide insurgency took place in Port-au-Prince, as ex-soldiers attacked the government. In response to the chaos, youth set up self-defense groups, called chimères, which were supported by the police and the government to shore up its position. Receiving de facto state support from Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party, the youth gangs took control of entire communes and became increasingly independent-minded. U.S. diplomat Daniel Lewis Foote argued, "Aristide started [the gangs] on purpose in the early 1980s, as a voice, as a way to get some power [for ordinary Hatians], [...] and they morphed over the years."
Now, the precise nature of the events of the 2004 coup are disputed; some, including Aristide and his bodyguard, Franz Gabriel, stated that he was the victim of a "new coup d'état or modern kidnapping" by U.S. forces. These charges were denied by the US government. As political violence and crime continued to grow, a United Nations Stabilisation Mission (MINUSTAH) was brought in to maintain order. However, MINUSTAH proved controversial, since their periodically heavy-handed approach to maintaining law and order and several instances of abuses, including the alleged sexual abuse of civilians, provoked resentment and distrust among ordinary Haitians.
So now Haiti has no standing army, armed militias and gangs fighting on and off in the streets, an UN peacekeeping mission sexually abusing civilians and they’re about to be hit with a Magnitude 7 earthquake.
On 12 January 2010, at 4:53 pm local time, Haiti was struck by a magnitude-7.0 earthquake. This was the country's most severe earthquake in over 200 years. The earthquake was reported to have left between 160,000 and 300,000 people dead and up to 1.6 million homeless, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded. It is also one of the deadliest earthquakes ever recorded. The situation was exacerbated by a subsequent massive cholera outbreak that was triggered when cholera-infected waste from a United Nations peacekeeping station contaminated the country's main river, the Artibonite. In 2017, it was reported that roughly 10,000 Haitians had died and nearly a million had been made ill. After years of denial, the United Nations apologized in 2016, but as of 2017, they have refused to acknowledge fault, thus avoiding financial responsibility.
And now, we’re at the Haitian Gang War. The Vox journalist Ellen Ioanes summarized the beginnings of the situation quite well: "Haiti has faced serious and compounding crises, including a devastating 2010 earthquake, floods, cholera outbreaks, hurricanes, and corrupt, dictatorial, and incompetent leaders". Gangs stepped into the power vacuum, seizing political power through co-operative politicians and economic control through protection rackets, kidnappings and murders.
As of 2022 researchers form the NGO Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime have estimated that there are some 200 gangs in Haiti and that most of them are set up somewhere in Port au-Prince. Sexual violence from members of these gangs is a common crime being committed nearly daily against people from rival gang territories. Rape only became a crime in Haiti in 2005 and abortion is still illegal, so rape victims are legally required to keep those children. Though as we know, making abortion illegal doesn’t stop abortions, it just stops safe ones.
One of the most powerful gangs in Haiti at this time is, technically, an alliance of gangs, called the G9 alliance is lead by a former police officer named Jimmy Chérizier, nicknamed Barbecue. G9 is based in the capital's communes of Delmas, Pétion-Ville and parts of Carrefour. The G9 alliance includes many former soldiers and policemen in its ranks and was long connected to the PHTK party (which is a Center-Right political party) until distancing itself after Ariel Henry became president. The G9 now portrays itself as a revolutionary organization, and has begun to create a nation-wide alliance network dubbed "G20".
Since the coalition was founded, it has been responsible for multiple massacres against civilians and clashes with other rival gangs. From 2020 to 2021, the G9 was responsible for a dozen massacres, in which at least 200 people were killed. The G9 was believed to have had close ties to the government of Moïse, which was accused of large-scale corruption. The coalition members frequently evaded prosecution after the massacres and the clashes. Chérizier stood out in that regard because despite the arrest warrants against him, he continued to move freely and to maintain an active presence on social media with no effective attempts by Haitian government forces to arrest him. The G9 also began attacking neighborhoods in which civilians protested against the president and started clashes against rival gangs with the support of the police.
Now, in 2021 Jovenel Moïse, the 43rd president of Haiti was assassinated and then Ariel Henry (who some suspect to be involved in the assassination) served as acting Prime Minister of the country until he stepped down this past April.
Henry’s removal from power was long sought by the G9 gang alliance. Cherizier had this to say on the issue in March 2024 "If Ariel Henry doesn't resign, if the international community continues to support him, we'll be heading straight for a civil war that will lead to genocide"
"Either Haiti becomes a paradise or a hell for all of us. It's out of the question for a small group of rich people living in big hotels to decide the fate of people living in working-class neighborhoods," he added.
Now, while there are over 200 gangs in Haiti at the moment most of them have allied themselves with the G9 alliance, or with the gang alliance that popped up to oppose the G9, known as G-Pep. But also, as of late 2022 an anti-gang bwa kale vigilante movement emerged to attack and kill any gang members. The vigilantes often burned captured gang members alive. Of course, the gangs responded with counter attacks against both the vigilantes and anyone who expressed support of the vigilanties.
By mid-2023, the gang war between G9 and G-Pep continued unabated, and the resistance by anti-gang vigilantes also grew in scope. Thousands of people were displaced by the clashes. The severity of the ongoing gang war in Haiti has led to the United Nations Security Council authorizing a one-year deployment of an international force led by Kenya to help the Haitian government deal with the crisis. Chérizier declared that G9 would resist if an international intervention force committed "human rights abuses" and claimed that it would "be a fight of the Haitian people to save the dignity of our country."
Despite the horrors he is committing against his own people Cherizier really and truly believes that he is fighting on behalf of a free Haiti. There isn’t a genocide in Haiti, as of yet, but there is a massive civil war between militias and gangs with human rights abuses on all sides of this conflict.
On 18 June 2024, the International Organization for Migration reported that more than 580,000 people have been displaced by the increased violence in Haiti since March of 2024. The report also warned that since most of the people displaced have been from communities already struggling with poor social conditions, there may be more tension and violence in the coming days.
An international policing force, known as Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti was authorized under UN Resolution 2699 on October 2, 2023 to assist the Haitian National Police in stopping this gang war. Nations who will be taking place in this mission include Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Chad, Guyana, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica, Kenya, Suriname, and the Bahamas. The first deployment of 400 troops from Kenya has officially put boots on the ground as of June 25, 2024.
This ongoing gang war will not be resolved anytime soon and it can, and will, get worse before it gets better. Haiti has never had a chance to build a stable society or government. A long and ongoing history of foreign interference, ceaseless coups and natural disasters mean that Haiti has always been on the back foot.
We also have to take into account Haiti’s natural resources, because that’s the only reason any imperial power would ever care about Haiti. According to WorldAtlas.com, recent findings suggest that Haiti might have some of the largest oil reserves in the world, potentially larger than those of Venezuela. The country is estimated to be sitting on about 159 billion cubic feet of natural gas and 142 million barrels of oil, with undiscovered reserves possibly holding up to 941 million barrels of crude oil and about 1.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
According the the State Department the US doesn’t currently have plans to send troops to Haiti. I’m sure that will change.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Haiti.
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Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 15 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 14 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 6th part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, episode 12 was on Sudan, episode 13 was on Xinjiang, episode 14 was on Rakhine State, and today’s episode will cover the genocide that is ongoing in Tigray in Ethiopia.
Let’s see what the Alchemist’s Table has in store for us this time. Today’s libation is called Memories of Summer. Muddle some mint and strawberries in the bottom of your shaker, add .5 oz of simple syrup, 2 oz of gunpowder gin, stir well for about 30 seconds before double straining over ice and topping with lemonade. Garnish with a sprig of fresh mint and enjoy.
Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite part, it’s time for the historical context. Tigray is both the northernmost regional state in Ethiopia, as well as an ethnicity. Tigray is known as the birthplace of Ethiopian civilization and their motto is “There is no mountain we would not climb.” That’s fucking badass.
When the Scramble for Africa began at the end of the 19th century CE barely 10% of africa was under EUropean colonial control, and by the time World War 1 broke out more than 90% of the country had been colonized, with only Liberia and Ethiopia remaining free states. While Ethiopia remained under its own sovereign control, this was in large part because they willingly allied themselves with Great Britain. In fact many Ethiopian troops fought on the side of Britain during the Mahdist War in Sudan that we discussed on Day 12.
Part of Ethiopia’s independence also came from their alliances with Italy. King Menelik II of Ethiopia signed the Treaty of Wuchale with Italy in 1889. This treaty guaranteed Ethiopian sovereignty as long as Italy could control areas north of Ethiopia’s currently held territory (in areas that are now the nation of Eritrea) and in return Ethiopia would receive arms and munitions and Menelik would have Italian support as emperor. Menelik would remain emperor from 1889 until his death in 1913. Though, it is worth noting that Etiopia was only able to maintain its sovereignty because of their victory during the Italo-Ethiopian War that ran from January 1895 until October 1896.
The beginning of Menelik’s rule was marked by severe tragedy though as it coincided with the 1890s African rinderpest epizootic. Which is a very fancy way of saying that disease killed 90% of Ethiopia’s cattle and that this, combined with a drought caused by reduced rainfall killed about 1/3rd of the country’s population. The virus, known as Rinderpest, is potentially thought to have been introduced into Eritrea in 1887 by Indian cattle brought by the Italians for their campaign against Somalia. Lack of rainfall from as early as 16 November 1888 led to famine in all but southernmost provinces; locusts and caterpillar infestations destroy crops in Akele Guzay, Begemder, Shewa, and around Harar. Conditions worsened with a typhus epidemic, a major smallpox epidemic (1889–90), and cholera outbreaks (1889–92). Making the beginning of Melenik’s rule really fucking bad.
Near the end of his life Melenik was filled with with concern over issues of succession. He hadn’t yet picked an heir and if he died without one his nation would descend into civil war and would become ripe for the picking for European colonial powers. He would eventually settle on one of his grandchildren Lij Iyasu, as his heir. Iyasu would only reign for about 3 years before being deposed on charges of converting to Islam. Ethiopia had been a Christian kingdom since King Ezana of the Aksumite Empire adopted Christianity as the official religion in the 4th century CE. There’s no definitive proof that Iyasu converted to Islam at any point in his life, but there was enough “proof” that everyone felt comfortable stipping him of authority and giving it to Haile Selassie. He served as the Regent for Empress Zedwditu from 1916 until her death in 1930, and after her death served as Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 until he was deposed in 1974 by the Derg following the 1973 oil crisis.
Derg or Dergue is Amharic (a Semitic language descended from Ge’ez, which is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It translates as committee or council.
Now, Ethiopia would fall under partial Italian control during the 1930s as part of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War between Fascist Italy and Ethiopia, and while Italy would have some successes during this war, they’d never attain full control over Ethiopia, making Ethiopia the only African nation to not ever fall under colonial control. Some would argue that Liberia would fall under that umbrella as well, but considering that Liberia, as a nation, was artificially created by the US as a place for freed slaves to return to, I don’t think it qualifies.
Haile Selassie as the emperor of Ethiopia would be one of the founding members of the United Nations. Haile Selassie's rule ended on 12 September 1974, when he was deposed by the Derg, a committee made up of military and police officers. After the execution of 60 former government and military officials, the new Provisional Military Administrative Council abolished the monarchy in March 1975 and established Ethiopia as a Marxist-Leninist state. The abolition of feudalism, increased literacy, nationalization, and sweeping land reform including the resettlement and villagization from the Ethiopian Highlands became priorities.
Mengistu Haile Mariam would become the ruler of Ethiopia following the fall of Haile Selassie until in May 1991, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) forces advanced on Addis Ababa from all sides, and Mengistu fled the country with 50 family and Derg members. He was granted asylum in Zimbabwe as an official guest of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
Now the period of Derg rule is also known as the Ethiopian Civil War. It lasted from 1974 until 1991. The Derg in its attempt to introduce full-fledged socialist ideals, fulfilled its main slogan of "Land to the Tiller", by redistributing land in Ethiopia that once belonged to landlords to the peasants tilling the land. Although this was made to seem like a fair and just redistribution, the mismanagement, corruption, and general hostility to the Derg's violent and harsh rule coupled with the draining effects of constant warfare, separatist guerrilla movements in Eritrea and Tigray, resulted in a drastic decline in general productivity of food and cash crops. Although Ethiopia is often prone to chronic droughts, no one was prepared for the scale of drought and the 1983–1985 famine that struck the country in the mid-1980s, in which 400,000–590,000 people are estimated to have died. Hundreds of thousands fled economic misery, conscription and political repression, and went to live in neighboring countries and all over the Western world, creating an Ethiopian diaspora community for the first time in its history. Insurrections against the Derg's rule sprang up with ferocity, particularly in the northern regions of Tigray and Eritrea which sought independence and in some regions in the Ogaden.
The Ethiopian Civil War left at least 1.4 million people dead, with 1 million related to famine and the remainder from violence and conflicts, which is one third of population.
In July 1991, the EPRDF convened a National Conference to establish the Transitional Government of Ethiopia composed of an 87-member Council of Representatives and guided by a national charter that functioned as a transitional constitution. In 1994, a new constitution was written that established a parliamentary republic with a bicameral legislature and a judicial system.
Mengistu's authoritarian military regime faced organized opposition for all of its fourteen years of rule. Opposition groups including the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), a rival Marxist–Leninist group, and the Tigray-based Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, a coalition of ethnic democratic forces, led armed resistance to the Derg in a conflict known as the Ethiopian Civil War. The Derg used violence, commonly enacted through military campaigns, to suppress dissidents. In 1976, the Derg instigated the Qey Shibir (Ethiopian Red Terror), a violent political repression campaign targeting the EPRP. Under Mengistu's leadership, the Derg did not only rely on state personnel to carry out the Qey Shibir; it also armed militias and civilian supporters and granted "genuine revolutionaries and patriots" impunity, further localizing state violence. The Qey Shibir resulted in 50,000 fatalities. In addition, many victims of the Qey Shibir were subjected to torture, exile, and sexual assault. The Qey Shibir and the 1983-1985 famine, an event partly created and exacerbated by the government's military policies, increased popular support for the EPRDF, which successfully overthrew Mengistu's regime in 1991.
As we entered the 21st century ethnic tensions began to increase between the people of northern Ethiopia, specifically in the Tigray region and the rest of the nation.
Data from the Minorities at Risk (MAR) project were used by Charles E. Riddle to study the degrees of discrimination by the dominant Amharas against the non-dominant ethnic groups in Ethiopia from 1950 to 1992, during the later reign of Emperor Haile Selassie and that of Mengistu Haile Mariam of the Derg. Amharas dominated during the Haile Selassie epoch. Systematic discrimination against Afars occurred throughout the period. Tigrayans were initially culturally assimilated with the Amharas, speaking Amharic, and suffered little discrimination. Under the Haile Selassie government, the Oromo language was legally banned from education, public speaking and use in administration. During the Haile Selassie regime, the Harari people were persecuted. The imperial forces ordered the confiscation of Harari property and mass arrests of Harari men, as a result an estimated 10,000 Hararis fled their homeland in 1948.
The Derg culturally rejected the Tigrayans, who decreased their usage of Amharic, reverting to Tigrinya, and discrimination against the Tigrayans became strong. Eritreans, treated by MAR and Riddle as an ethnic group, and Somalis were strongly discriminated against throughout the period. The Oromos were initially strongly discriminated against, but adopted Amharic as their official language when the Derg came to power, and discrimination against them dropped. Both the Haile Selassie and the Derg governments relocated numerous Amharas into southern Ethiopia where they served in government administration, courts, church and even in school, where Oromo texts were eliminated and replaced by Amharic. In the aftermath of the Ogaden War during the 70s, Hararis, Somalis and Oromo Muslims were targeted by the Derg Government.
This leads us to needing to talk about the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. The Tigray People's Liberation Front, also called the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, is a left-wing ethnic nationalist, paramilitary group, and the former ruling party of Ethiopia. The TPLF was in charge of Ethiopia from the time the Derg was overthrown in 1991 until 2018.
Now it’s finally time to get to the beginnings of the Tigray Wart and the Tigray genocide. To do that we need to discuss the 2020 Tigray regional election. As we stated previously, Tigray is a regional state of Ethiopia, and in 2020 Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia postponed the 2020 general election over concerns of COVID 19. Tigray decided to hold their elections anyway, regardless of the proclamation made by Ahmed. Their election was considered illegal by the Ethiopian federal government. The TPLF won 98.2 percent of the vote.
After years of increased tensions and hostilities between the TPLF and the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea, fighting began when TPLF forces attacked the Northern Command headquarters of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), alongside a number of other bases in Tigray. The ENDF counterattacked from the south – while Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) began launching attacks from the north – which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed described as a "law enforcement operation".
The war officially ended in November 2022. On 2 November 2022, the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan leaders signed a peace accord, with the African Union as a mediator, and agreed on "orderly, smooth and coordinated disarmament". The agreement was made effective the next day on 3 November, marking the two-year anniversary of the war.
As part of this process, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed appointed TPLF's Getachew Reda as head of the Interim Regional Administration of Tigray, and the Ethiopian parliament removed the TPLF from its terrorism list.
But where does the Tigray Genocide come into play? Why are we talking about this civil war in this podcast? Let’s get into it.
Issued on Tuesday, June 4th by the United States-based New Lines Institute, aa 120-page draft quotes multiple, widespread and credible independent reports that Ethiopian forces and their allies carried out “acts constituting the crime of genocide” during the conflict, which ran between 2020-22. The authors call for Ethiopia to be brought before the International Court of Justice.
In a report issued in September 2023, the United Nations said war crimes and crimes against humanity were still being committed nearly a year after government and Tigrayan regional forces agreed to end the fighting.
It says the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), alongside the allied Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) and assorted regional militia “possessed the intent to destroy Tigrayans as an ethnic group”.
At least four acts constituting the crime of genocide are noted in the report: killing Tigrayans, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life upon Tigrayans calculated to bring about their destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births among Tigrayans.
Additionally, the finger is pointed at social media posts made by “certain individuals” that constitute public incitement to genocide.
Ethiopia, which has been accused of seeking to prevent international scrutiny, has repeatedly denied that its forces carried out war crimes during the conflict. Eritrea has claimed such accusations against it are defamatory.
However, the new report, which took two years to compile and features the contribution of dozens of legal experts, backs up the findings of the UN by stating that there is “reasonable basis to believe” that the countries are responsible for war crimes and/or crimes against humanity.
In conclusion, the authors call on the international community to put pressure on Ethiopia via bilateral relations, as well as bringing the country before the ICJ.
The war had a devastating impact on the healthcare system of Tigray; of the 853 health facilities in the region, 86% were at least partially damaged; 232 of them were left "completely unusable", and 28 were destroyed entirely.It also led to a higher rate of maternal and infant mortality in the Tigray Region. In a study funded by UNFPA Ethiopia and UNICEF Ethiopia, it was estimated that maternal mortality rates had increased from 186 deaths per 100,000 people pre-war to 840 deaths per 100,000 people post-war.
According to Tigrayan health official Tsegay Gidey, 81% of mothers in the Seharti Samre woreda had birth defects, and 32 newborn infants had died between January–June 2023.
Although the war largely came to a halt after the peace agreement was signed, Eritrea continues to occupy parts of Tigray as of mid-2023. The EDF has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in northern Ethiopia since November 2022; from 17 to 25 November alone, Eritrea was reported to have destroyed 241 houses and killed at least 111 people. by 30 December, it was estimated that Eritrean and Amhara forces killed 3,700 since the signing of the peace deal.
The Tigray Health Bureau noted that 852 cases of rape and sexual assault were reported between November and December 2022; according to aid workers and interviews with survivors, most of these were committed by Eritrean forces.
As of January 2023, over half of Irob district was occupied by Eritrea. Irob advocacy groups and former residents have described it as a "de-facto annexation" of the area. A religious Irob leader told The Guardian in August 2023 that Eritrea was blocking off international aid to the area, and lamented that "there has been no improvement for us since the peace."
In January 2024, Human Rights Watch reported that authorities and regional forces were still forcibly expelling Tigrayans from their homes in the Western Tigray Zone, which is largely inaccessible to humanitarian agencies. Additionally, nearly 40% of the Tigrayan population is suffering from extreme food shortages, a situation made worse by the World Food Program's suspension of aid deliveries in May 2023.
All the available evidence points to a continued genocide against the Tigray people from the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea as they as systematically denied food, water and access to medical care.
The Tigray Genocide is often described as “The War The World Forgot”, and based on the West’s general attitude towards Africa this feels right. Especially when I account for the fact that I, a genocide studies scholar didn’t even know about the Tigray Genocide until 2024. I account this a failure on my part, but also on the part of the global mainstream media that this never even came across any of the news websites I frequent, nor the social media websites I, more often, get reputable news from.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Tigray.
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Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 14 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 13 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 5th part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, episode 12 was on Sudan, episode 13 was on Xinjiang, and today’s episode will talk about the genocide of the Rohingya people of Myanmar.
It’s officially the end of week 2! We made it. Congratulations one and all on surviving 2 weeks worth of weeks. As a gift for you all we’re going to visit the Alchemist’s Table. Today;s libation is called Prohibition Sweet Tooth. It’s 1.5 ounces each of Redemption Bourbon and Creme de Cacao, followed by .75 oz of Frangelico. Shake well and pour over ice.
Officially the Rohingya genocide began around 2016 and continues to this day, but as we know from every other episode we’ve had so far, genocide’s don’t just pop up out of nowhere all of the sudden. There is context, there is a roadmap of hindsight that we can follow back to, if not a starting point at least a starting line.
So, first, let’s talk about Myanmar. There have been homonid species living on Myanmar for about 750,000 years, first in the form of Homo erectus and then Homo sapiens starting around 25,000 years ago. Then a whole lot of history happened that, while fascinating and important, isn’t strictly relevant to what we’re going to discuss today.
Starting on January 1, 1886 Myanmar (then called Burma) was officially annexed by the British Empire under the control of the British East India Company. Burma would remain under British rule until 1948. Burma was officially declared an independent state by an act of Parliament, specifically the Burma Independence Act 1947. Burma then remained under a civilian government until 1962, at which point it was overthrown in a coup detat and Burma (which became Myanmar officially in 1989) has been under military rule since then.
Between 1962 and 1974, Myanmar was ruled by a revolutionary council headed by the general. Almost all aspects of society (business, media, production) were nationalised or brought under government control under the Burmese Way to Socialism, which combined Soviet-style nationalisation and central planning. A long series of anti-government protests resulted in a popular uprising in 1988, sometimes called the 8888 Uprising. This would lead directly to the renaming of the country from Burma to Myanmar and the country’s first free, multiparty elections in 30 years.
So, as you can see Myanmar has had an interesting and contentious history born of a desire for a strong sense of national unity, stability, and growth. It was the instability of the civilian government, the lack of growth, the skyrocketing crime rates, and the fear of the disintegration of Burma into several smaller nations that would lead to the 1962 coup after all.
When your country has such a strong, almost rabid desire for unity and strength and national identity it always goes hand in hand with a desire for a homogenous society. The Germans in World War 2 felt it. The Ottomans in World War 1 felt it. It’s what nations who fear their own collapse DO. They look for the divisive elements, the ones who don’t fit the majority mold and they say “Hey, these people won’t fall in line. They’re dividing out country, threatening it with their different religion, culture, values, etc. We can solve all of our problems, save our country if we just… get rid of them”.Myanmar is a Buddhist majority country, by an overwhelming margin. According to the 2014 Myanmar census 90% of the country's population (of about 56 million) is Buddhist. 6.3% is Christian and just over 2% is Muslim.
The Rohingya people, the subjects of our episode for today and Mulsim, so let’s dive back and take a look at the history of Muslim persecution in Myanmar. The first Muslim documented in Burmese history (recorded in the Glass Palace Chronicle) was Byat Wi during the reign of Mon, a Thaton king, circa 1050 AD. The two sons of Byat Wi's brother Byat Ta, known as Shwe Byin brothers, were executed as children either because of their Islamic faith, or because they refused forced labor.
Throughout the premodern era various restrictions were placed on Muslim communities in Burma. The Burmese king Bayinnaung banned Islamic ritual slaughter, thereby prohibiting Muslims from consuming halal meals of goats and chicken. He also banned Eid al-Adha and Qurbani, regarding killing animals in the name of religion as a cruel custom. Burma having largely adopted Buddhism by the 12th century CE.
Although, in a strange, cruel, and somewhat ironic twist King Bodawpaya from 1782–1819 arrested four prominent Burmese Muslim Imams from Myedu and killed them in Ava, the capital, after they refused to eat pork. According to the Myedu Muslim and Burma Muslim version, Bodawpaya later apologized for the killings and recognised the Imams as saints.
During the "Burma for Burmese" campaign in the late 1930s, a violent demonstration took place in Surti Bazaar, a Muslim area. When the police, who were ethnically Indian (there was a lot of anti-Indian sentiment in Burma in the 1930s, and because most Indian people living in Burma were Muslim, this also affected Muslim Burmese people), tried to break up the demonstration, three monks were injured. Images of monks being injured by ethnically Indian policemen were circulated by Burmese newspapers, provoking riots. Muslim properties, including shops and houses were looted. According to official sources, 204 Muslims were killed and over 1,000 were injured. 113 mosques were damaged.
Panglong, a Chinese Muslim town in British Burma, was entirely destroyed by the Japanese invaders in the Japanese invasion of Burma in World War 2. And, after the 1962 coup all Muslim troops were expelled from the Army.
And, of course, we need to talk about the 1997 Mandalay Riots. Mandalay is the second largest city in Myanmar. a mob of 1,000–1,500 Buddhist monks and others shouted anti-Muslim slogans as they targeted mosques, shop-houses, and vehicles that were in the vicinity of mosques for destruction. Looting, the burning of religious books, acts of sacrilege, and vandalizing Muslim-owned establishments were also common. At least three people were killed and around 100 monks arrested. The unrest in Mandalay allegedly began after reports of an attempted rape of a girl by Muslim men, though there’s no way to know if that story is true or not.
In 2001, anti-Muslim pamphlets, most notably The Fear of Losing One's Race, were widely distributed by monks. Many Muslims feel that this exacerbated the anti-Muslim feelings that had been provoked by the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. (The Buddhas are two giant statues in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan that daye from about the 6th century CE, they have long been considered a holy site by Buddhists and they were destroyed by the Talbian in 2001). And that’s why on 15 May 2001, anti-Muslim riots broke out in Taungoo, Pegu division, resulting in the deaths of about 200 Muslims, in the destruction of 11 mosques and the setting ablaze of over 400 houses. On 15 May, the first day of the anti-Muslim uprisings, about 20 Muslims who were praying in the Han Tha mosque were killed and some were beaten to death by the pro-junta forces.
Now, something that we need to discuss before I forget to is that since 1982 the Rohingya have been denied voting rights and citizenship within Myanmar thanks to the 1982 Citizenship Law. The law created three categories of citizenship: the first category applied to ethnic Burmans and members of the Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Mon, Arakan Buddhists, Shan, and any other ethnic group present in Myanmar prior to 1823 (though they did not include Rohingya Muslims, rendering them stateless), granted them full citizenship.
The second category granted partial “associate” citizenship to the children of mixed marriages where one parents fell into the first category, as well as to individuals who had lived in Myanmar for five consecutive years, or to individuals who lived in Myanmar for eight out of the ten years prior to independence. Associate citizens could earn an income, but could not serve in political office. The third category applied to the offspring of immigrants who arrived in Myanmar during the period of British colonial rule.
When we look at the state of Myanmar during the 20th century we can very clearly see Levels 3 and 4 of the Pyramid of Hate. The Pyramid of Hate was created in the mid aughts and was based on the Alport Scale of Prejudice created by psychologist Gordon Alport in the 1950s. Simply put the five levels, going from bottom to top are thoughts, words, discriminatory policy, violence towards individuals because of their membership to the group and violence against the cultural markers of the group, and finally genocide. Myanmar, very obviously has and had discriminatory policy and violence towards individuals and their cultural markers. Massacres, riots, burning Qurans and mosques all fit under level 4.
But, of course, things can and did get worse. There was the 2012 Rakhine State riots. Sectarian violence erupted between the Rakhine ethnic group and the Rohingya and ended with most of the Rohingya population of Sittwe, the capital of the Rakhine State being expelled. Over the course of the riots that lasted most of June and erupted again in October a little over 160 people were killed and over 100,000 Rohingya were displaced.
We are now in our time of rapid escalation of violence as the next major anti Rohingya event would occur in March of 2013. But before we talk about the 2013 riots we need to talk about the 969 Movement. The 969 is a violently Islamophobic Buddhist Nationalist organization founded and run by Ashin Wirathu.
Time for a slight diversion for a fun fact: The three digits of 969 "symbolize the virtues of the Buddha, Buddhist practices and the Buddhist community". The first 9 stands for the nine special attributes of the Buddha and the 6 for the six special attributes of his Dharma, or Buddhist Teachings, and the last 9 represents the nine special attributes of Buddhist Sangha (monastic community). Those special attributes are the Three Jewels of the Buddha.
Wirathu claims that he does not advocate for violence against Muslims and that all he wants is peace, and yet in a Time magazine article he had this to say: "You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog", Wirathu said, referring to Muslims. "If we are weak", he said, "our land will become Muslim".
The 2013 riots were particularly brutal. One incident involved several Muslim teenagers dragging a Buddhist man off of his bike and setting him on fire. As well as the deadliest incident of the riot which occurred when a Buddhist mob attacked and torched the Mingalar Zayone Islamic Boarding School. While outnumbered security forces stood by, rioters armed with machetes, metal pipes, chains, and stones killed 32 teenage students and four teachers.
Now, while 2016 would be the “official” start of the genocide we would be remiss if we skipped over the 2015 refugee crisis. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh fled from religious persecution and continued denial of basic rights in their home countries by means of boat travel, often through previously existing smuggling routes among the Southeast Asian waters. Many Rohingyas fled to Indonesia and Malaysia, which both adopted a stance open to acceptance of the Rohingya refugees still at sea in mid-May.
And now we’re at the genocide itself, though before we do that, let’s take a look at that the US State Department had to say about Myanmar and Rakhine shortly before the shit hit the fan.
The situation in Rakhine State is grim, in part due to a mix of long-term historical tensions between the Rakhine and Rohingya communities, socio-political conflict, socio-economic underdevelopment, and a long-standing marginalisation of both Rakhine and Rohingya by the Government of Burma. The World Bank estimates Rakhine State has the highest poverty rate in Burma (78 per cent) and is the poorest state in the country. The lack of investment by the central government has resulted in poor infrastructure and inferior social services, while lack of rule of law has led to inadequate security conditions. Members of the Rohingya community in particular reportedly face abuses by the Government of Burma, including those involving torture, unlawful arrest and detention, restricted movement, restrictions on religious practice, and discrimination in employment and access to social services. In 2012, the intercommunal conflict led to the death of nearly 200 Rohingya and the displacement of 140,000 people. Throughout 2013–2015 isolated incidents of violence against Rohingya individuals continued to take place.
In 2016 a Rohingya resistance group known as Harakah al-Yaqin formed and attacked several border police posts leaving 9 officers dead and looting as many munitions as they could. In response to this the government of Myanmar immediately began cracking down on all Rohingya people as quickly and viscously as they could.
In the initial operation, dozens of people were killed, and many were arrested. Casualties increased as the crackdown continued. Arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, brutalities against civilians, and looting were carried out. Media reports stated hundreds of Rohingya people had been killed by December 2016, and many had fled Myanmar as refugees to take shelter in the nearby areas of Bangladesh.
Those who fled Myanmar to escape persecution reported that women had been gang raped, men were killed, houses were torched, and young children were thrown into burning houses. Boats carrying Rohingya refugees on the Naf River were often gunned down by the Burmese military.
In a report published in March 2024, the IIMM stated the military had in a "systematic and coordinated" manner "spread material designed to instil fear and hatred of the Rohingya minority". The report found military was used dozens of seemingly unrelated Facebook pages to spread hate speech against the Rohingya prior before the 2017 Rohingya genocide. This is similar in intent to the use of radio stations to spread constant anti Tutsi propaganda during the Rwandan genocide, though obviously as information technology advances methods get more sophisticated. Though I hesitate to call Facebook sophisticated..
In August 2018, a study estimated that more than 24,000 Rohingya people were killed by the Burmese military and local Buddhists since the "clearance operations" which had started on 25 August 2017. The study also estimated that over 18,000 Rohingya Muslim women and girls were raped, 116,000 Rohingyans were beaten, and 36,000 Rohingyans were thrown into fires. It was also reported that at least 6,700 to 7,000 Rohingya people including 730 children were killed in the first month alone since the crackdown started.
In September 2018, the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar released a report stating that at least 392 Rohingya villages in Rakhine State had been razed to the ground since 25 August 2017. Earlier, Human Rights Watch in December 2017 said it had found that 354 Rohingya villages in Rakhine state were burnt down and destroyed by the Myanmar military.
In November 2017, both the UN officials and the Human Rights Watch reported that the Armed Forces of Myanmar had committed widespread gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against the Rohingya Muslim women and girls for the prior three months. HRW stated that the gang rapes and sexual violence were committed as part of the military's ethnic cleansing campaign while Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said that the Rohingya women and girls were made the "systematic" target of rapes and sexual violence because of their ethnic identity and religion.
In February 2018, it was reported that the Burmese military bulldozed and flattened the burnt Rohingya villages and mass graves in order to destroy the evidence of atrocities committed. These villages were inhabited by the Rohingya people before they were burnt down by the Burmese military during the 2017 crackdown.
Since the 25 August incident, Myanmar blocked media access and the visits of international bodies to Rakhine State. Rakhine State has been called an information black hole.
According to the Mission report of OHCHR (released on 11 October 2017 by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights), the Burmenese military began a "systematic" process of driving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from Myanmar in early August 2017. The report noted that "prior to the incidents and crackdown of 25 August, a strategy was pursued to":
Arrest and arbitrarily detain male Rohingyas between the ages of 15–40 years;
Arrest and arbitrarily detain Rohingya opinion-makers, leaders and cultural and religious personalities;
Initiate acts to deprive Rohingya villagers of access to food, livelihoods and other means of conducting daily activities and life;
Commit repeated acts of humiliation and violence prior to, during and after 25 August, to drive out Rohingya villagers en masse through incitement to hatred, violence, and killings, including by declaring the Rohingyas as Bengalis and illegal settlers in Myanmar;
Instill deep and widespread fear and trauma – physical, emotional and psychological, in the Rohingya victims via acts of brutality, namely killings, disappearances, torture, and rape and other forms of sexual violence.
In addition to the massive and horrific amounts of violence that are occuring, even now, inside Myanmar there is also the refugee crisis we mentioned earlier. There are over 700,000 Rohingya people who have been displaced from their homes and are living in refugee camps in surrounding countries. Most fled to Bangladesh while others escaped to India, Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia.
On 12 September 2018, the OHCHR Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar published its report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Following 875 interviews with victims and eyewitnesses since 2011, it concluded that "the [Burmese] military has consistently failed to respect international human rights law and the international humanitarian law principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution." Even before the most recent incident of mass Rohingya displacement began in 2011, the report found that the restrictions on travel, birth registration, and education resulting from Rohingya statelessness violated the Rohingya people's human rights. During the mass displacement of almost 725,000 Rohingya by August 2018 to neighbouring Bangladesh, as a result of persecution by the Tatmadaw, the report recorded "gross human rights violations and abuses" such as mass rape, murder, torture, and imprisonment. It also accused the Tatmadaw of crimes against humanity, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The mission report recommended that six Burmese generals in the Tatmadaw stand trial in an international tribune for atrocities committed against the Rohingya.
Despite all this the UN refuses to do anything substantive. Instead they are still trying to cooperate with the Tatmadaw and convince them to stop committing genocide. The UN has always been a useless tool of appeasement, Western imperialism, and white supremacy that refuses to hold anyone accountable. Of course, if the UN held genocidal regimes accountable they’d have to arrest the entire permanent Security Council so, the lack of accountability isn’t surprising. It’s why cops don’t arrest other cops.
You may have noticed that the dates in this episode stop after 2018, you also might remember that Myanmar has been called an information black hole. The genocide is still ongoing, nothing has gotten better and it’s probably gotten worse, but getting verifiable information out of Myanmar is all but impossible at this point. Keep Myanmar in your sight.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Rakhine.
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Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 13 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 12 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 4th part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, episode 12 was on Sudan and today’s will be on a very widely denied genocide, especially in left wing political circles. The Uyghur Genocide.
But first, let’s fortify ourselves with the waters of life and remember that part of our activism needs to always be finding joy in life and getting ourselves a little treat. It’s time for the Alchemist’s Table. Today’s libation is called a Rumsberry Breeze. In your shaker muddle some raspberries with half an ounce of simple syrup. Add two ounces of dark rum. Shake well and double strain over ice. Top with ginger beer and enjoy.
The genocide of the Uyghur people and the longer history of ethnic tensions between Han Chinese and the Uyghur peoples has centered around Xinjiang for as long as it’s been around. First thing’s first. Let’s dive a bit into the history of the Uyghur people. The Uyghur are an ethnically Turkic people living, mostly in the Tarim and Dzungarian Basins in East Turkestan (what is sometimes called Uyghurstan) today. Xinjiang, sometimes also called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, has been under Chinese control since it was conquered from the Dzungar Khanate in around 1759.
Now, how long have the Uyghur people been living in the area? Well, that’s a matter of some contention and the answer you get will depend on what sources you go with. The history of the Uyghur people, including their ethnic origin, is an issue of contention between Uyghur nationalists and Chinese authorities. Uyghur historians view Uyghurs as the original inhabitants of Xinjiang, with a long history. Uyghur politician and historian Muhammad Amin Bughra wrote in his book A history of East Turkestan, stressing the Turkic aspects of his people, that the Turks have a 9,000-year history, while historian Turgun Almas incorporated discoveries of Tarim mummies to conclude that Uyghurs have over 6,400 years of history. The World Uyghur Congress has claimed a 4,000-year history. However, the official Chinese view, as documented in the white paper History and Development of Xinjiang, asserts that the Uyghurs in Xinjiang formed after the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate in ninth-century CE Mongolia, from the fusion of many different indigenous peoples of the Tarim Basin and the westward-migrating Old Uyghurs.
Regardless of which timeline we go with, the Uyghur people have certainly been living in the region for far longer than the Chinese Empires that have been dominating them for hundreds of years. And, make no mistake, modern day China is still very much imperial.
Something that we’ll cover in more detail later, as it is very relevant to the current genocide, is that the Uyghur people are, as a general rule, Muslim. The earliest records we have indicate that before this conversion to Islam around the 10th century CE the Old Uyghur people (Old Uyghur is meant to differentiate the Pre-Chinese Uyghur population from the modern one) followed the Tocharian religion. We don’t really have any details about what, exactly, that religion entailed, but today most of the Tocharian inscriptions are based on Buddhist monastic texts, which suggests that the Tocharians largely embraced Buddhism. The pre-Buddhist beliefs of the Tocharians are largely unknown, but several Chinese goddesses are similar to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European sun goddess and the dawn goddess, which implies that the Chinese were influenced by the pre-Buddhist beliefs of the Tocharians when they traveled on trade routes which were located in Tocharian territories.
The history of China’s abuses over the peoples they conquered is a long one, but details on the exact situation of the Uyghur people are somewhat few and far between. However two of the most important parts of Uyghur-Chinese history in the region come from the 19th century CE with the Dungan Revolt and the Dzungar genocide.
Something we need to note right now is that the modern Uyghur Ethnic group wasn’t called the Uyghur before the Soviet Union gave them that name in 1921, although the modern Ughurs are descended from the Old Uyghurs, at the time of the Dungan Revolt and the Dzungar Genocide they were known by the Chinese as Turki or Taranchi. So if you’re ever reading sources about these two events, you might not ever see the word Uyghur, despite them being involved in both events.
The Dungan Revolt lasted from 1862 until 1877 and saw a roughly 21 million people killed. According to research by modern historians, at least 4 million Hui were in Shaanxi before the revolt, but only 20,000 remained in the province afterwards, with most of the Hui either killed in massacres and reprisals by government and militia forces, or deported out of the province. It has its roots in the ongoing ethnic tensions between the Hui (Muslim) minorities of China and the ethnic Han peoples. It also stemmed from economic conflicts as Han merchants were known to greatly overcharge Hui peoples and there was massive corruption and fiscal instability resulting from the Taiping Rebellion that led to the peoples of Xinjiang being heavily burdened by unfair taxes.
All of these tensions would explode into a riot in 1862 (some sources say over inflated pricing on bamboo stalks). As a result of this there was a massacre of Han people’s by the Hui and everything snowballed from there.
With the start of the revolt in Gansu and Shaanxi in 1862, rumors spread among the Hui (Dungans) of Xinjiang that the Qing authorities were preparing a wholesale preemptive slaughter of the Hui people in Xinjiang, or in a particular community. Opinions as to the veracity of these rumors vary: while the Tongzhi Emperor described them as "absurd" in his edict of September 25, 1864, Muslim historians generally believe that massacres were indeed planned, if not by the imperial government then by various local authorities. Thus it was the Dungans who usually revolted in most Xinjiang towns, although the local Turkic people—Taranchis, Kyrgyzs, and Kazakhs—would usually quickly join the fray.
The revolt would rage for 15 years, with many Muslim people of Xinjiang and China been slaughtered or forced to convert away from Islam. Though these reprisal killings and forced conversions really only took place in areas that were in active revolt. There were many Chinese Muslims in the Qing armies during the pacification of the Revolt and many also received great acclaim and promotions once the war was over.Although, it needs to be stated that there were some cities that were actively committing genocide, such as the city of Kashgar which carried out a preemptive slaughter of their Hui population in 1864. So, there was a genocide of the Hui people, as genocide is defined as actions taken with intent to destroy in whole or in part a particular national, racial, ethnic or religious group.
Hell, the Taranchi Turkic peoples, our modern Uyghurs, originally aided the Hui, but wound up turning against them to join the Qing armies once they learned that the Hui wanted to put Xinjiang under their specific rule.
I technically did these events out of order, but I’m not going to fix that. We’ve got to dip 100 years into the past to find the Dzungar Genocide. This genocide happened at the end of Mongol Rule in Xinjiang and around the time the Qing initially came in. We’re going to talk about this very briefly, as we still have all our modern issues to discuss.
The main reason we even need to bring up the Dzungar genocide in a podcast episode on the Uyghur Genocide is that the Uyghurs participated in this genocide on the side of the Qing army as part of an uprising against the Dzungar Khanate. The Dzungar Genocide killed between 70 and 80% of their original population of about 600,000.
The Qianlong Emperor had this to say when ordering the extermination of the Dzungari people.
"Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak should be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we act as before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur. If a rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally come to the garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request surrender. If he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubtedly a trick. Tell Tsengünjav to massacre these crafty Zunghars. Do not believe what they say."
So, Xinjiang was once again under Qing rule and would remain so until the Wuchang Uprising overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China (not to be confused with the modern day Republic of China, which is actually the nation of Taiwan under Chinese imperialist control.
All of this context is to show that relations between the Chinese government and the various Muslim ethnicities within its borders have always been one of Master and Slave. The Chinese government has always treated non-Han peoples as lesser, and the presence of Muslim Chinese peoples was only tolerated for as long as they worked in lock step with Beijing. Once they didn’t, they were prime targets for reprisal massacres and forced conversion.
We would see this scenario play out again during the time of the Chinese Republic in 1931 with the Kumul Rebellion. The Kumul Rebellion began because of the actions of Jin Shuren, the governor of Xinjiang from 1928 until 1933. Jin was notoriously intolerant of Turkic peoples and openly antagonized them. Such acts of discrimination included restrictions on travel, increased taxation, seizure of property without due process and frequent executions for suspected espionage or disloyalty. However, the event that would spark the rebellion would be the annexation of the Kumul Khanate, a semi autonomous region in northern Xinjiang.
At the end of the Rebellion Jin was dead and the First East Turkestan Republic was established around the city of Kashgar in the far west of Xinjiang. The First East Turkestan Republic would only last for a year before being conquered by a Chinese warlord named Shen Shicai, who had backing and support from the Soviet Union. In 1937, specifically to coincide with Stalin’s own Great Purge, Shicai planned and executed the elimination of "traitors", "pan-Turkists", "enemies of the people", "nationalists" and "imperialist spies". His purges swept the entire Uyghur and Hui political elite. The NKVD provided the support during the purges. In the later stages of the purge, Sheng turned against the "Trotskyites", mostly a group of Han Chinese sent to him by Moscow. It’s estimated that he killed between 50 and 100,000 people in these purges.
Shicai would eventually betray the Soviets to join with the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, which would lead to the Soviets backing the Uyghur people in the Ili Rebellion leading to the creation of the Second East Turkestan Republic, which would eventually get folded into Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China in 1949.
From the 1950s to the 1970s China enacted two main policies against the Uyghur people. They instituted mass migrations of Han Chinese people into Xinjiang as well as passing various laws designed to infringe and smother Uyghur ethnic and religious identity. Uyghurs are barred from freely practicing their religion, speaking their language, and expressing other fundamental elements of their identity. Restrictions apply to many aspects of life, including dress, language, diet, and education. The Chinese government closely monitors Uyghur religious institutions. Even ordinary acts such as praying or going to a mosque may be a basis for arrest or detention.
While repression of Uyghur cultural beliefs and identity had existed from day 1 on the PRC, it was in 1990 that everything started to go pear shaped. The Barin Uprising took place between the 4th and 10th of April, 1990. Violence began on the evening of 4 April, when a group of 200 to 300 Uyghur men attempted to breach the gates of the local government office in a protest against alleged forced abortions of Uyghur women and Chinese rule in Xinjiang. Following the uprising in an unprecedented move, Chinese authorities arrested 7,900 people, labelled "ethnic splittists" and "counter-revolutionaries", from April to July 1990.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s there were various terrorist attacks committed by Uyghur resistance groups and freedom fighters, leading to further crackdowns and tightening of police control in Xinjiang throughout the years.
Until 2001 Beijing spoke about these attacks as isolated incidents and made no broad statements of all Uyghur being terrorists, despite regularly arresting thousands of Uyghur people for no real reason. Many of those arrested Uyghur people wound up in Laogai (reform through labor) camps or in laojiao (re-education through labor) camps scattered throughout China. But, after the 9/11 attacks on the United States the tone shifted and more and more anti-Uyghur rhetoric started to become anti-terrorist rhetoric.
This type of shift in language always precedes an uptick in genocidal violence. Now that all Uyghur are being labeled as terrorists, all Uyghur can be arbitrarily arrested and put in camps or even merely killed and no one will really care because it’s not ethnic based discrimination. It’s an anti terrorism campaign designed to protect the people from violent thugs.
After 2001 Beijing Sided with the U.S. in the new “global war against terrorism,” the Chinese government initiated an active diplomatic and propaganda campaign against “East Turkestan terrorist forces.” This label was henceforth to be applied indiscriminately to any Uighur suspected of separatist activities. There has been no sign of any attempt by the Chinese authorities to distinguish between peaceful political activists, peaceful separatists, and those advocating or using violence. Although, it needs to be said that violence is a perfectly valid political tool when resisting genocide and imperialism.
This leads us to China’s Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism and the creation of their “vocational education and training centers” (both laogai and laojiao allegedly closing down in around 2013, although satellite evidence says that’s bullshit).
In early 2014, Chinese authorities in Xinjiang launched the renewed "strike hard" campaign around New Year. It included measures targeting mobile phones, computers, and religious materials belonging to Uyghurs. The government simultaneously announced a "people's war on terror" and local government introduced new restrictions that included the banning of long beards and the wearing of veils in public places.
Over the life of the camps it is estimated, by various sources that between a few hundred thousand and 1.8 million people have been arbitrarily detained in these camps and subjected to forced labor as a method of reformation. This is part of a Chinese government policy called hashar and includes many public works projects in Xinjiang.
Beyond the simple fact of these slave labor camps, the state also began imposing harsh penalties for violations of birth limits. It also implemented an aggressive campaign of mass sterilization and intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD) implantation programs. Chinese government officials justify this by equating high birth rates with religious extremism. Chinese academics have argued that ethnic minority population growth threatens social stability and national identity.
Leaked government documents show that violations of birth limits are the most common reason Uyghur women are placed in a detention camp. Women have testified to being sterilized without their consent while in detention. Other women have testified that they were threatened with detention if they refused sterilization or IUD implantation procedures.
So, in summation, since the 1950s at least the Chinese government has been engaging in forcible assimilation practices. Something that the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (a legally non binding resolution passed in 2007) says Indigenous people have a right to not be subjected to. As well as forced sterilization and forced abortions for violating China’s family planning laws. And arbitrary detention and forced labor on invented charges of religious extremism and separatist activities. And then also having their children taken away from them and placed into something akin to the residential school system of the US, Canada, and Australia where they are forbidden from even speaking the Uyghur language.
Under the UN CPPCG China is guilty of genocide in the form of causing severe bodily or mental harm to the group, imposing measures designed to prevent births within the group, and transferring children of the group to another group.
The Uyghur Genocide is one of the more difficult ones to talk about online, especially if you frequent leftist political circles and spaces like I do as anything anti-China is seen often seen as Western propaganda and part of Cold War policies of anticommunism, as if China doesn’t have roughly 814 billionaires controlling the majority of their means of production. The wealthiest man in China is Zhong Shanshan. He privately owns a bottled water company and is worth over 60 billion dollars. China isn’t a communist country, it’s not even socialist. It’s just fascist and capitalist. But that’s a rant for a different day.
The Uyghur Genocide is real and verifiable, although it can be difficult to do so as there is a lot of misinformation and propaganda regarding it on both sides of the discussion. None of that changes the fact of the genocide or of the destruction of Uyghur culture in Xinjiang.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Xinjiang.
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Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 11 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 10 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 3rd part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, today’s episode will be on Sudan. The nation of Sudan is currently dealing with, among other things we’ll cover in detail later in this episode, the largest deplacement campaign of anywhere on the planet with over 9 million people being displaced from their homes by war and genocide.
It always feels a little weird transitioning into this part of the episode, but it’s now time for the Alchemist’s Table. I’ve invented nearly 90 cocktails over the past 2 years and this one remains my very favorite. It’s called the No True Scotsman. Take 2 oz of your scotch whiskey of choice, though I’d recommend a light Islay scotch, something like a Bowmore, or maybe a Campbeltown like Glen Scotia. Then add .75 oz of Frangelico, 1 oz of Maple syrup. Shake this like your life depends on it and pour over ice. Top the drink with ginger beer and enjoy.
Now, fortified as we are by uisce beatha, the waters of life, let’s get into it. So, what is happening in Sudan, right now? A civil war officially started between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the the Rapid Support Forces that grew out of the Janjaweed militias that were so prevalent in the Darfur Genocide. The war officially began on 15 April 2023 and is still ongoing. But, in order to understand what is happening right now, we need to understand what was happening in the 19th century under British and Egyptian colonialism in the region.
So, let’s starts at as much of the beginning as we can. Let’s start at the Mahdist War. Following Muhammad Ali's invasion (no, a different Muhammad Ali) in 1819, Sudan was governed by an Egyptian administration. Throughout the period of Egyptian rule, many segments of the Sudanese population suffered extreme hardship because of the system of taxation imposed by the central government. Under this system, a flat tax was imposed on farmers and small traders and collected by government-appointed tax collectors from the Sha'iqiyya tribe of northern Sudan. Throughout the century, and especially after Egypt was floundering to pay the costs of the Suez Canal, Britain got more and more involved. In the late 19th century a war broke out between the Mahdist Sudanese, led by Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah, who had proclaimed himself the "Mahdi" of Islam (the "Guided One"), and the forces of the Khedivate of Egypt, initially, and later the forces of Britain. Eighteen years of war resulted in the creation of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899–1956), a de jure condominium of the British Empire, and the Kingdom of Egypt, in which Britain had de facto control over Sudan.
Sudan officially voted for independence in 1956 and became its own independent republic. Although it achieved independence without conflict, Sudan inherited many problems from the condominium. Chief among these was the status of the civil service. The government placed Sudanese in the administration and provided compensation and pensions for British officers of Sudan Political Service who left the country; it retained those who could not be replaced, mostly technicians and teachers. Khartoum achieved this transformation quickly and with a minimum of turbulence, although southerners resented the replacement of British administrators in the south with northern Sudanese. To advance their interests, many southern leaders concentrated their efforts in Khartoum, where they hoped to win constitutional concessions. Although determined to resist what they perceived to be Arab imperialism, they were opposed to violence. Most southern representatives supported provincial autonomy and warned that failure to win legal concessions would drive the south to rebellion.
To understand the issues in Sudan we need to understand that, ultimately, this is a religious and ethnic conflict between the mostly Islamic North and the largely Christian and animist South regions in the nation of Sudan. On November 17, 1958, the day parliament was to convene, a military coup occurred. Khalil, himself a retired army general, planned the preemptive coup in conjunction with leading Umma members and the army's two senior generals, Ibrahim Abboud and Ahmad Abd al Wahab, who became leaders of the military regime. Abboud immediately pledged to resolve all disputes with Egypt, including the long-standing problem of the status of the Nile River. Abboud abandoned the previous government's unrealistic policies regarding the sale of cotton. He also appointed a constitutional commission, headed by the chief justice, to draft a permanent constitution. Abboud maintained, however, that political parties only served as vehicles for personal ambitions and that they would not be reestablished when civilian rule was restored.
Despite the Abboud regime's early successes, opposition elements remained powerful. In 1959 dissident military officers made three attempts to displace Abboud with a "popular government." Although the courts sentenced the leaders of these attempted coups to life imprisonment, discontent in the military continued to hamper the government's performance. In particular, the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) gained a reputation as an effective anti-government organization. To compound its problems, the Abboud regime lacked dynamism and the ability to stabilize the country. Its failure to place capable civilian advisers in positions of authority, or to launch a credible economic and social development program, and gain the army's support, created an atmosphere that encouraged political turbulence.
A revolution in 1964 returned the nation to civilian rule, but did little to remove the preceding issues that plagued Sudan. This all brings us within the context of the First Sudanese Civil War. This war was a conflict from 1955 to 1972 between the northern part of Sudan and the southern Sudan region that demanded representation and more regional autonomy. The war was divided into four major stages: initial guerrilla warfare, the creation of the Anyanya insurgency, political strife within the government and establishment of the South Sudan Liberation Movement. Around a million people died over the course of the nearly 17-year long war.
The war would end with the signing of the Addis Ababa Accord, which created two main things. A South Sudanese Autonomous Region, and relative peace, if only for about a decade. The Second Sudanese Civil War would break out in 1983. Some sources describe the conflict as an ethnoreligious one where the Arab-Muslim central government's pursuits to impose Sharia law on non-Muslim southerners led to violence, and eventually to the civil war. Historian Douglas Johnson has pointed to exploitative governance as the root cause.
This war lasted for some 22 years, making it one of the longest civil wars in recorded Human History. Roughly two million people died as a result of war, famine and disease caused by the conflict. Four million people in southern Sudan were displaced at least once, normally repeatedly during the war. The civilian death toll is one of the highest of any war since World War II and was marked by numerous human rights violations, including slavery and mass killings.
Perhaps one of the greatest horrors and tragedies of the Second Sudanese Civil War was the use of child soldiers. Armies from all sides enlisted children in their ranks. The 2005 agreement required that child soldiers be demobilized and sent home. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (the SPLA, by the way, was founded in 1983 as a rebel group to reestablish the South as an autonomous region after president Nimeiry declared the South to officially be part of a fully reunited Sudan.) claimed to have let go 16,000 of its child soldiers between 2001 and 2004. However, international observers (UN and Global Report 2004) have found demobilized children have often been re-recruited by the SPLA. As of 2004, there were between 2,500 and 5,000 children serving in the SPLA.
There was also a revival of slavery during the Second Civil War, it was largely directed at southern Christians, on the grounds that Islamic law allegedly allowed it, and also at women, many of whom were kept as sex slaves and repeatedly raped.
The Second Civil War ended officially in 2002 with the signing of the Naivasha Agreement. This guaranteed autonomy for the South for 6 years after which a referendum would be help to vote for official independence. This war ended with roughly 2 million people, mostly civilians, dead of drought and famine caused in large parts by the fighting. Still, while the Second Civil War ended in 2005, it overlapped with a crisis that my generation is very familiar with and that is still, technically, ongoing to this day.
I am speaking, of course, of the Darfur Genocide that began in 2003 and has not ended to this day.
The War in Darfur, which is also sometimes called the Land Cruiser War, because there were a LOT of Toyota Land Cruiser pick up trucks on both sides of the war, began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel groups began fighting against the government of Sudan, which they accused of oppressing Darfur's non-Arab population.
So first let’s talk real quick about the SLM and the JEM.
When General Omar al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front headed by Dr. Hassan al-Turabi overthrew the Sudanese government led by Ahmed al-Mirghani in 1989. A large section of the population in Darfur, particularly the non-Arab ethnicities in the region, became increasingly marginalized. These feelings were solidified in 2000 by the publication of The Black Book, which detailed the structural inequity in the Sudan that denies non-Arabs equal justice and power sharing. In 2002 Abdul Wahid al-Nur, a lawyer, Ahmad Abdel Shafi Bassey, an education student, and a third man founded the Darfur Liberation Front, which subsequently evolved into the Sudan Liberation Movement and claimed to represent all of the oppressed in the Sudan.
The Black Book, also known as The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan detailed how, despite the Arabic people of North Sudan making up 5.4% of the population they still held 79.5% of the wealth in the nation. So in this context, beyond being a war and genocide based on ethnicity and religion we can see economic reasons for the war. There was a massive disparity between the haves and the have nots, and Karl Marx would tell us that this is the foundation and origin of all of history’s great wars.
Now, the Justice and Equality Movement trace their origin to the writers of The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan, a manuscript published in 2000 that details what it views as the structural inequality in the country; the JEM's founder, Khalil Ibrahim, was one of the authors.
The JEM claims to number around 35,000 with an ethnically diverse membership. According to critics it is not the "rainbow of tribes" it claims to be, as most JEM members, including its leader, are from the Zaghawa tribe. The JEM is part of the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), an alliance of groups opposed to the Government of Sudan.
The Darfur Genocide has it’s roots in the same places as all geocides. One group, who feels themselves superior to all others, decided that the best way to deal with these divisive elements in their society is to try and kill them. We saw the same type of conflict in the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century. The Northern Sudanese government saw the non Arabic elements of South Sudan as threats to their power in the region and so decided to kill them.
The use of rape as a tool of genocide has been noted as well. This crime has been carried out by Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed ("evil men on horseback") paramilitary groups. The actions of the Janjaweed have been described as genocidal rape, with not just women, but children as well. There were also reports of infants being bludgeoned to death, and the sexual mutilation of victims being commonplace.
One thing I want to make sure we mention is that the President of Sudan during the Darfur genocide has had arrest warrants issued against him by the ICC.
He has been charged with five counts of crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape; two counts of war crimes: intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking part in hostilities, and pillaging; three counts of genocide: by killing, by causing serious bodily or mental harm, and by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction, allegedly committed at least between 2003 and 2008 in Darfur, Sudan. To this day he remains at large and is not in custody.
I say remains at large. We, more or less, know where he is. As of 2019 al-Bashir was ousted from his political role by the RSF in a military coup and jailed in Khartoum. Tensions rose between the RSF and the SLM and in 2023 they erupted, once again, into a civil war in Sudan.
This brings us, more or less, up to modern day Sudan and the current conflict. To put it as simply as possible, ethnic and religious tensions between the Arabic north and the Christian south have exploded into a full scale war in a period of drought and famine. Roughly 9 million people have been displaced and pretty much everyone who lives in Sudan is without adequate food and water. The United Arab Emirates, among other nations are actively supporting the RSF in their continued subjugation of South Sudan and are actively contributing to the ongoing Darfur genocide.
Roughly 80% of Sudanese hospitals no longer exist, and the World Food Programe has indicated that some 95% of Sudanese people are in a state of massive food insecurity.
On 3 August 2023, Amnesty International released its report on the conflict. Titled Death Came To Our Home: War Crimes and Civilian Suffering In Sudan, it documented "mass civilian casualties in both deliberate and indiscriminate attacks" by both the SAF and the RSF, particularly in Khartoum and West Darfur. It also detailed sexual violence against women and girls as young as 12, targeted attacks on civilian facilities such as hospitals and churches, and looting.
Early March 2024, the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan, mandated by Resolution 2620 (2022) of the UN Security Council, published their latest report. It described the wide-ranging devastation and violence in the country, caused in many cases by the RSF and associated militias. With regard to war crimes in West Darfur, the report estimated the death rate through ethnic cleansing of the Masalit community in El Geneina between 10,000 and 15,000. In her speech before the Security Council Committee, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Representative to the United Nations, commented: "It is my hope that the sobering report will at long last shake the world from its indifference to the horrors playing out before our eyes."
In April 2024, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights released a report into breaches of the Genocide Convention in Darfur. The independent report found that there is "clear and convincing evidence" that the RSF and its allied militias "have committed and are committing genocide against the Masalit," a non-Arab ethnic group, and that all 153 states that have signed the Genocide Convention are "obligated to end complicity in and employ all means reasonably available to prevent and halt the genocide." It goes on to say that there is "clear and convincing evidence" that Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Russia via the actions of the Wagner Group are "complicit in the genocide."
The ongoing genocide and refugee crisis in Sudan can, absolutely trace its roots to British imperialism, but beyond that it is part of an ongoing religious conflict between Islam and Christianity dating back all the way to the Crusades.
The conflict between the SAF and the RSF is ongoing and shows no signs of slowing down or stopping. While these two groups fight for control over Sudan millions of innocent civilians are dying due to lack of access to food and water.
Civil war and genocide is ongoing against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups and against the general non-Arabic Muslim peoples of Sudan. This conflict has been going on for so long that we have all but forgotten about it. I was in high school and engaging in political activism to end the Darfur genocide. This was nearly 20 years ago. I’m old as hell. There are so many horrible crimes and genocides that exist in the world today. Please don’t forget about these suffering people. Genocide relies on existing for long enough that it becomes part of the background. None of this is normal. Never again is right now.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Sudan
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Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 11 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 10 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to be talking about the currently ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the long history of capitalist exploitation, western imperialism, and systemic racism that led to it.
But first, as is tradition, let’s take a trip over to the Alchemists Table to see what potion we’ve got for today. Today’s libation has a lot going on in it, it’s called Underworld Vacation. It starts by adding some strawberries and blueberries to the bottom of your shaker with .75 of an ounce of rose simple syrup before muddling the fruit. Then add one ounce each of pomegranate and elderflower liquor followed by 2 oz of Hendricks Lunar gin, add ice to your shaker and then stir for about 30 seconds before straining into a highball glass and topping with about 4 oz of prosecco.
With that out of the way it’s time to talk, once again, about the most important part of history. The proverbial devil in the literal details, context. Because to understand what is happening in the DRC today you need to understand the Kivu Conflict, and to understand that you need to understand the Second Congo War, and to understand that you need to understand the First Congo War, and to understand that you need to understand the end of the Rwandan Genocide and the Congo Crisis of the 1960s, and to understand that you need to understand the Scramble for Africa, The Berlin Conference and King Leopold !! of Belgium.
So, we’ve got a lot to cover, and we’re going to be doing it in fairly broad strokes, but it might still take us a while, so let’s get started with the Berlin Conference.
Near the end of the 19th century there was very little European colonial and mercantile presence in Africa. There were some port towns, to be sure, and there was trade, but very little of the African continent was under the control of European powers at this time. But, European greed for gold and, especially, ivory wouldn’t allow them to ignore African riches for much longer. The Berlin Conference was organized in 1885 at the request of King Leopold II of Belgium and was organized by Otto von Bismarck of Germany.
Leopold had been using the explorations of Henry Morgan Stanley, and his own organization, the International African Association to quietly try and create his own private colony in central Africa that would be called the Congo Free State, but France found out and started making moves, and then Britain and Portugal found out and began trying to grab land which led Germany to do the same. War was brewing quickly as these various European powerhouses all sought as much land, wealth, and power as they could grab. This, ultimately, would be why the Berlin Conference was called and why it was so successful. These European powers decided, instead of going to war and killing each other over Africa they’d just all meet and carve it up like a pecan pie and settle it all peaceful like.
There were 14 nations/empires in attendance at the Berlin Conference, Germany, Austria Hungary, the International Congo Society (this really means King Leopold II of Belgium), Spain, Denmark, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire. And while all 14 of those countries were in attendance at the Berlin Conference and had a say in the final decisions that were made, only 7 countries were actually going to colonize Africa once it was over.
Those countries were Belgium (really just King Leopold II, this would be his own private colony), Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Portugal, and Italy. At the time of the Berlin Conference less than 10% of the African continent was under European control, but by the time World War 1 broke out only Liberia and Ethiopia were still independent. Although, Liberia certainly only existed because of US colonial power, and so doesn’t REALLY count as independent.
This period of New Imperialism is what we tend to call The Scramble for Africa. Sof ar we’ve been talking about this all in fairly clinical terms, as if these European countries simply sat around a table and calmly decided who would get what land in the second largest continent on the planet and then it just happened, with no additional muss or fuss. Anyone who has studied even the barest amount of human history knows that nothing happens without muss or fuss. There were wars, and battles, and massacres that led to Europe gaining control of African territory, but that’s not the topic of today’s podcast.
We now need to talk a bit about the Congo Free State, and how King Leopold of Belgium, a frail weakling (compared to the other European powers) managed to worm his way into the conference and into one of the most lucrative colonies in Africa. The Congo Free State was a truly massive colony that was owned personally by Leopold. It was NOT, at least between the years 1885 and 1908, part of the Belgian Empire, it was not owned by the Belgian government and was ruled entirely separately, it just happened to be ruled by the King of Belgium. Leopold was able to gain this massive colony by convincing the monarchs of Europe that he was engaged in humanitarian and philanthropic work, and that the Congo Free State would be an area of free trade in Africa.
Leopold maintained a guise that he was not trying to use the Congo Basin to increase his own wealth and economic and political power. He maintained that his presence in the region was, as was a huge part of the ethos of New Imperialism, to civilize the savages of the Congo Basin and to bring them closer to God and good European cultural supremacy.
Of course, all of that was a lie, and that lie would reveal itself over the intervening years. The Congo was home to something that would become one of the most important natural resources in the entire world, rubber. There are only two sources of natural rubber in the world. The sap of the Hevea brasiliensis, or rubber tree that grows in the Amazon River Basin, and the sap of Landolphia owariensis, a species of woody vines that grow in the Congo. I mean, technically there are 2500 species of plants that produce natural latex and rubber, but those two are the big ones. Today 99% of natural latex and rubber comes from the Amazon, but Leopold was able to make massive profit off of his colony.
The economic system in the Congo Free State was known as the red rubber system. It was a slave economy that Leopold enforced through the use of his armed forces known as the Force Publique. Each slave in the Congo Free State was required to harvest a regular quota of rubber sap. What that quota was was often arbitrarily decided based purely on profit based concerns.
Workers who refused to supply their labour were coerced with "constraint and repression". Dissenters were beaten or whipped with the chicotte, hostages were taken to ensure prompt collection and punitive expeditions were sent to destroy villages which refused. The policy led to a collapse of Congolese economic and cultural life, as well as farming in some areas.
Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting or to stockpile them for mutiny. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in cut-off hands.
A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 300 mi north of Stanley Pool:
“All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator ... From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets ... A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river ... Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.”
One junior officer in the Force Publique had this to say about the quota system:
The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber ... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace ... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
Within the Congo Free State there was also rampant famine and disease that killed hundreds of thousands of people, a type of residential school where children were sent to learn to be either workers or soldiers. About 50% of the children who entered these schools died. There were also several reputable reports of Congolese people turning to cannibalism in the face of their lack of food resources. With everyone being forced to harvest rubber there was no one to farm or gather or hunt for food. It is generally accepted that over the course of Leopold’s rule in the Congo Free State, between 1885 and 1908 that at least 10 million Congolese people were killed.
Eventually word got out of what was happening in the Congo Free State and a conclave of the European powers of the Berlin Conference was called as, even they, decided that Leopold was going too far. Leopold offered to reform his government and economic system in the Congo, but no one would give him the chance, but also, no one wanted to take on the responsibility of rebuilding the Congo. Eventually, after two years of debate, the Belgian Parliament took over control of the Congo. Leopold would die about a year later in 1909.
The Congo would remain under under Belgian control for another 50+ years, and while the abuses and overwhelming violence of King Leopold’s rule were curbed. They even added a clause to the new Colonial Charter to outlaw slavery. Article 3 of the new Colonial Charter of 18 October 1908 stated that: "Nobody can be forced to work on behalf of and for the profit of companies or privates", but this was not enforced, and the Belgian government continued to impose forced labour on the indigenous people of the area, albeit by less obvious methods. So, even without King Leopold, the Belgian Congo was still a European colony, which means it was still exploited for profit.
African independence movements existed throughout the entirety of European colonialism and imperialism in Africa, excepting Liberia the first country in Africa to gain independence from direct European control would be South Africa which would nominally gain its independence in 1910 after the creation of the Union of South Africa and would formally gain official independence when the last vestiges of British parliamentary control would leave the country in 1931 with the Statute of Westminster, and while there would be other successful independence movements after World War 1, such as Egypt, most African decolonization would come after World War 2, including the Congo’s.
Nationalist movements popping up in various African nations and agitating for Independence is, generally speaking, what would eventually cause all of African independence, and this would be no different for the Congo. Though, something that is often also common in the case of independence movements that emerged between the end of World War 2 and the early 1990s is that they would become proxy wars for the US and the USSR during the Cold War. To make a long, complex story very short, the US came out on top in this war.
The nationalist movements within the Congo largely emerged amongst a class of people called the évolués, which is a term that was used in French and Belgian colonies for “evolved ones”, people of African descent who had become somewhat Europanized through education.
One of the deciding moments in Congolese independence came in the form of the Leopoldville Riots of 1959. Joseph Kasa-Vubu, who would become the first President of an independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the leader of the ABAKO political party, the Alliance of Bakongo. The riots began because many young folks and members or sympathizers of the ABAKO party felt that the government was forbidding them from organizing and protesting.
The riots broke out on the 4th of January, 1959. The crowd began throwing rocks at police and attacking white motorists. The initial group of protesters were soon joined by 20,000 Congolese leaving a nearby soccer stadium. At the time press accounts estimated that 35,000 Africans were involved in the violence, which quickly spread as the rioters attempted to enter the European section of the capital. Rioters allegedly smashed and looted storefronts, burned Catholic missions and beat Catholic priests. Many demonstrators chanted "indépendance immédiate"
The Belgian Parliament established a commission of inquiry to investigate the cause of the riots. The commission found the disturbances to be the culmination of discontent with racial discrimination, overcrowding, and unemployment. It also concluded that external political events, such as France's decision to grant self-governance to the neighboring French Congo, to be a contributing factor, and criticized the colonial administration's response to the riot. On 13 January the administration went forward with its scheduled announcement of reforms, including new local elections in December, the institution of a new civil service statue that made no racial distinctions, and the appointment of more Africans to advisory bodies. The Belgian King, Baudouin, also declared for the first time that independence would be granted to the Congo in the future.
January 4th is still celebrated as an auspicious day in the DRC, it’s the Day of the Martyrs and denotes a turning point in the independence movement.
Congolese independence was officially declared, as planned, on the 30th of June, 1960, with Kasa-Vubu of the ABAKO elected as president and Patrice Lumumba of the Congolese National Movement appointed as the Prime Minister.
Now, despite the DRC formally being declared as independent at this day, they still relied heavily on Belgian colonial institutions that had been in place previously, like the Force Publique and various white technical experts who couldn’t be replaced in the face of a lack of ready replacements available amongst the Congolese people. The fact that this lack of available peoples being a result of European colonialism forbidding Congolese people from higher education wound up being somewhat irrelevant, but absolutely caused greater levels of resentment among the newly independent Congolese.
In the face of this lack of change and in the face of an address given by Lieutenant General of the Force Publique Émile Janssens, many of the Congolese troops mutinied.
The address went as follows:
"Independence brings changes to politicians and to civilians. But for you, nothing will be changed ... none of your new masters can change the structure of an army which, throughout its history, has been the most organized, the most victorious in Africa. The politicians have lied to you."
Instead of sending in Belgian troops to put down the mutiny, as Janssens wanted, Lumumba fired him and began to institute some reforms, including immediately remaining the Force Publique to the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC) and promoting all black soldier by at least one rank. While this had success in Leopoldville and Thysville, it failed in the rest of the country and the mutiny intensified.
The government attempted to stop the revolt—Lumumba and Kasa-Vubu intervened personally at Léopoldville and Thysville and persuaded the mutineers to lay down their arms—but in most of the country the mutiny intensified. White officers and civilians were attacked, white-owned properties were looted and white women were raped. The Belgian government became deeply concerned by the situation, particularly when white civilians began entering neighbouring countries as refugees. The international press expressed shock at the apparent sudden collapse of order in the Congo, as the world view of the Congolese situation prior to independence—due largely to Belgian propaganda—was one of peace, stability, and strong control by the authorities.
The Congo Crisis would run for 5 years and would end with the torture and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, with Joesph Kasa-Vubu dying while under house arrest, and with the military dictator Mobuto Sese Seko “elected” as the president of the Republic of Congo-Leopoldville. This would note just one in the long string of times that the US helped to install a military dictator in order to overthrow a democratically elected left wing government, just because they had support from the USSR and the US feared (and fears) any threat to their capitalist hegemony.
Between 1965 and 1971 Mobutu consolidated his hold on power as much as he could, removing all provincial control over anything and bringing every scrap of infrastructure he could under the control of himself and his central government. In 1971, with his hold on power relatively secure and as part of his policy of Africanization of the Congo’s culture and government Mobutu renamed the Republic of Congo Leopoldville to Zaire, a name that was derived from the Kikongo wore nzere, meaning “river that swallows all rivers”.
Mobutu would remain as “president” of Zaire all the way until 1997, but his hold on power would begin to crumble with the First Congo War that began in 1993. Now comes the time for more context. What started the First Congo War? Honestly, to a certain extent we can view the First Congo War as an extension of the Rwandan Genocide.
The Rwandan Genocide began in 1994 as a final culmination of ethnic tensions that were exacerbated by, first, German and the Belgian colonialism. See, Rwanda used to be a German colony, Rwanda was one of the nations that Germany got as part of the Scramble for Africa, but after World War 1, with the signing of the treaty of Versailles Germany was forced to give up all of its overseas colonies. Belgium gained control of Rwanda.
Belgium maintained many of the systems of power and oppression that Germany had put into place, most notably the fact that they put the Tutsi ethnic group in positions of authority and disenfranchised the Hutu and Twa ethnic group.
The Twa are the indigenous ethnic group of Rwanda, but by the time the Rwandan genocide occurred they were only about 1% of the population, about 85% were Hutu and the remaining 14% were Tutsi. Still, based on the indicators of European scientific racism and phrenology the Tutsi had more “European features” and so were considered superior to the Hutu ethnic group and placed, exclusively, in positions of authority. The sudden shift in power dynamics after Rwandan independence is what would lead to the Rwandan Genocide as Hutu supremacists decided to vent their fury on the Tutsi people.
We won’t go into any more detail than that for the Rwandan genocide. Suffice it to say that when it ended hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsi people had fled the nation of Rwanda to neighboring African countries, such as Zaire. Roughly 1.5 million ethnic Tutsi people wound up settling in Zaire. There were also about 1 million Hutu extremists in eastern Zaire who had fled the retaliation of the Rwandan Patriotic Front at the end of the Rwandan Civil War and the Rwandan Genocide.
As mentioned previously, the First Congo War, also known as Africa’s First World War can most simply be seen as an extension of the Rwandan Genocide. Zaire had been in decline since Mobutu gained power in 1965. He was a terrible leader and the average GDP of Zaire dropped by about 65% during his reign. Eastern Zaire was a region of massive instability that was only made worse by the number of Hutu extremists who fled to the region following the Rwandan Genocide.
Rwanda, just fully, invaded Zaire in 1996 in order to put down various Hutu rebel groups that were extant in the region. These rebel groups were actively funded and supported by Mobutu’s government leading to this war that lasted for some 6 months. It involved several African nations including Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Burundi, Zambia, ZImbabwe, South Sudan, Tanzania, South Africa, Ethiopia, Chad, China, Israel, and Kuwait.
Following the war Mobutu went into exile in the nation of Togo where he eventually died of prostate cancer in 1997. Zaire came under the rule of the communist aligned Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Kabila had heavy support from Rwandan, Burundian, and Ugandan forces during his rise to power in the form of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire.
Kabila also came to be seen as an instrument of the foreign regimes that put him in power. To counter this image and increase domestic support, he began to turn against his allies abroad. This culminated in the expulsion of all foreign forces from the DRC on 26 July 1998. The states with armed forces still in the DRC begrudgingly complied although some of them saw this as undermining their interests, particularly Rwanda, which had hoped to install a proxy-regime in Kinshasa.
Several factors that led to the First Congo War remained in place after Kabila's accession to power. Prominent among these were ethnic tensions in eastern DRC, where the government still had little control. There the historical animosities remained and the opinion that Banyamulenge, as well as all Tutsi, were foreigners was reinforced by the foreign occupation in their defence. Furthermore, Rwanda had not been able to satisfactorily address its security concerns. By forcibly repatriating refugees, Rwanda had imported the conflict.
This manifested itself in the form of a predominantly Hutu insurgency in Rwanda's western provinces that was supported by extremist elements in eastern DRC. Without troops in the DRC, Rwanda was unable to successfully combat the insurgents. In the first days of August 1998, two brigades of the new Congolese army rebelled against the government and formed rebel groups that worked closely with Kigali and Kampala. This marked the beginning of the Second Congo War.
The Second Congo War is generally considered to be the deadliest war since World War 2. Over the course of this war some 5.4 million excess deaths took place.
Now comes the time where I need to define what an excess death is. In epidemiology, the excess deaths or excess mortality is a measure of the increase in the number deaths during a time period and/or in a certain group, as compared to the expected value or statistical trend during a reference period (typically of five years) or in a reference population. It may typically be measured in percentage points, or in number of deaths per time unit.
To put it more simply, disease, depravation, and starvation were so rampant during the Second Congo War that the overwhelming majority of deaths weren’t caused directly by the fighting, but were caused by the residual damage of the fighting.
The Second Congo War involved many of the same issues of the First Congo War. It would end with Laurent-Désiré Kabila assassinated in 2001 in his office by an 18 year old former child soldier. Laurent would be replaced as president by his son Joseph Kabila, who was elected unanimously by the Congolese parliament.
To further highlight the complexity of the Congolese Wars, In April 2001, a UN panel of experts investigated the illegal exploitation of diamonds, cobalt, coltan, gold and other lucrative resources in the Congo. The report accused Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe of systematically exploiting Congolese resources and recommended the Security Council impose sanctions.
All conflicts within Congolese territory will ultimately go back to economic exploitation and capitalist overreach. The Congo Basin is full of some of the most valuable natural resources that exist on the planet, and people will always be fighting over them.
This leads us into the Kivu conflict. The Kivu conflict is an umbrella term for a series of protracted armed conflicts in the North Kivu and South Kivu provinces in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo which have occurred since the end of the Second Congo War. This includes, but is not limited to Effacer le tableau, which was a genocidal extermination campaign against the Mbuti Pygmy ethnic group. The Bambuti were targeted specifically as the rebels considered them "subhuman", and it was believed by the rebels that the flesh of the Bambuti held "magical powers". There were also reports of cannibalism being widespread. It is estimated 60,000 to 70,000 Pygmy were killed in the campaign, and over 100,000 more were displaced.
There are more than 120 distinct rebel groups involved in the Kivu Conflict, including the March 23 Movement, which a UN report indicates was created by the Rwandan government in order to potentially take over the Congolese government.
Conflict began in 2004 in the eastern Congo as an armed conflict between the military of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and the Hutu Power group Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) has played a large role in the conflict. With 21,000 soldiers in the force, the Kivu conflict constitutes the largest peacekeeping mission currently in operation. In total, 93 peacekeepers have died in the region, with 15 dying in a large-scale attack by the Allied Democratic Forces, in North Kivu in December 2017. The peacekeeping force seeks to prevent escalation of force in the conflict, and minimise human rights abuses like sexual assault and the use of child soldiers in the conflict.
In 2007 and 2008, in several news and TV reports, the BBC published own evidence about Pakistani MONUC peacekeepers in Mongbwalu had entered in a gold-for-guns trading relationship with Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI) militia leaders, eventually drawing Congolese army officers and Indian traders from Kenya into the deal. Following its own investigations, the UN concluded that there was no involvement of Pakistani peacekeeper in any such trade relationship. Namely Human Rights Watch harshly criticized the UN for the way it handled the investigation, providing detailed information from several UN documents, arguing that serious allegations of wrongdoing by Pakistani peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo were ignored, minimized or shelved by the UN’s Organization of Internal Oversight Services.
MONUC officials say nothing of substance about mining in Congo, which proceeds in parallel with the bloodletting, arms trading and extortion. For example, Anvil Mining has been involved in massacres in DRC. Anvil directors include former U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Brown, who served at U.S. embassies in Brussels, Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville and South Africa. Brown was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (1987–1989) under George Shultz and George H.W. Bush and Director of Central African Affairs (1980–1981). Interestingly, Brown succeeded William Lacy Swing—head of MONUC in DRC—as Ambassador to the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville). Meanwhile, the former top internal intelligence and security chief of the United Nations Observer's Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) has been worked for Anvil mining in Katanga since 2006.
There have been numerous cases of sexual misconduct by UN peacekeeping forces in the Congo. This has been acknowledged by the UN itself (such as the letter of 24 March 2005 from the Secretary-General to the President of the General Assembly).
So, basically foreign powers both within Africa and outside of it are actively fighting within the Congo Basin in order to secure control of the vast amount of natural resources that exist within the nation. The DRC currently produces about 70% of the world’s cobalt, and 80% of the cobalt mines in the DRC are owned by China.
The leading use of cobalt in modern technology is in rechargeable batteries. So your cell phone battery, your laptop batteries, any kind of rechargeable battery you have is likely created using Congolese cobalt, which is a direct cause of the millions of deaths and displacements that are occuring in the DRC.
The DRC is, effectively, the site of a capitalist proxy war as the region is fought over by foreign governments and local rebel groups for control over Congolese natural resources. No one in Europe or the US would even begin to care about an African country if it wasn’t for the battery technology resources that are so abundant in the region. Between 1885 and today it is, very easy, to say that roughly 20 million people have been killed by capitalist excess and exploitation.
We can, absolutely call what is happening in the DRC a genocide, though it can be difficult to always pinpoint who, exactly are the victims. Broadly speaking the victims are the Congolese people, all of them, who are being killed over a desire to control the cobalt mines. This has gone far beyond simple ethnic conflict between Hutu and Tutsi, though that conflict, which is still ongoing, definitely added to the fire. This is a genocide of the people of the DRC by capitalism itself.
Capitalism has always been, and will always be an inherently genocidal institution. It craves the acquisition of individual wealth at the expense of the working class. You cannot have a system predicated on infinite growth within a closed system. Capitalism will always require that resources and wealth be stolen from people who need them. And when so much of our wealth is tied up in food, water, and housing, the theft of those resources from the working class will lead to our deaths.
For the past century and a half the Congo Basin has been subjected to genocide after genocide in the name of capitalism. What is happening right now is only an extension of that, though made far more complicated by the literal hundreds of competing groups and the lack of any international will to see peace achieved.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Congo.
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Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 10 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 9 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to be learning about history’s favorite war criminal, Genghis Khan. The man, the myth, the incorrigible slut.
But first! It’s time for another installment of the Alchemist’s Table. Today potion is called Summer Cyclone. Take 1.5 oz of anejo tequila, 1 oz of Blue curacao, and 1 oz of coconut syrup. Shake vigorously and pour into a wine glass. Top with prosecco and enjoy.
With that out of the way it’s time for a biography! Would it shock you to hear that Genghis Khan was not his given name? The Khan of khans was born Temujin sometime between the years 1155 and 1167, there is still a lot of dispute over exactly when Temujin was born, though many traditions have him being born in the Year of the Pig, so either 1155 or 1167, although based on its fidelity to the accepted timeline of Temujin’s life, 1162 is generally considered the most accurate estimate for his birth year. Temujin’s life gets even more confusing when you learn that even his birthPLACE is up for debate. The Secret History records his birthplace as Delüün Boldog on the Onon River, but this has been placed at either Dadal in Khentii Province or in southern Agin-Buryat Okrug, Russia. The Secret History being the book The Secret History of the Mongols, which is the oldest surviving literary text we have written in a Mongolian language, though it bears noting that it was written after Temujin’s death.
Oh yeah, and we also don’t know where he’s buried. It’s generally accepted that he is buried somewhere near the Mongol sacred mountain of Burkhan Khaldun in the Khentii Mountains. But the exact site of his burial is, to this day, unknown.
So, we don’t know when he was born, we don’t know where he was born, and we don’t know where he was buried. So what DO we know about the life and times of Temujin? Luckily, a whole fucking lot. Though, before we get into the scholarly consensus, let’s talk about some of the myths and legends surrounding his birth. Some legends say that Temujin was born clutching a blood clot in his hand, this is a somewhat common trope in various Asian folktales prophesying that Temujin would grow up to be a great warrior. It is also said that Hö'elün, Temujin’s mother and the principal wife of Yesügei, chieftain of the Borjigin tribe was impregnated by a ray of light. Oh, and apparently Temujin’s entire family line was started by a blue grey wolf and a red doe about 21 generations prior to his birth.
Yesügei,died when Temujin was 8 years old after being poisoned by a group of Tartars that he was sharing a meal with. Temujin was able to ally himself with some of his father’s former friends and allies and began to rise to some levels of prominence, but tensions with one of his friends Jamukha eventually led to the two men fighting a decisive battle, which Temujin list and afterwards was not seen in the lands of his father for about a decade.
There was, for a long while, debate and dispute over where Temujin was and what happened to him during that time, though it is now generally accepted that he crossed the border into Jin China where he lived as either a servant or slave, sources are unclear on exactly which.
Temujin’s clash with his former friend Jamukha took place in 1187 Dalan Baljut, and it would be around 1196 that Temujin returned to the steppes, now much more powerful and influential than he’d been before. In early summer 1196, he participated in a joint campaign with the Jin against the Tatars, who had begun to act contrary to Jin interests. As a reward, the Jin awarded him the honorific cha-ut kuri, the meaning of which probably approximated "commander of hundreds" in Jurchen. At around the same time, he assisted Toghrul with reclaiming the lordship of the Kereit, which had been usurped by one of Toghrul's relatives with the support of the powerful Naiman tribe. The actions of 1196 fundamentally changed Temüjin's position in the steppe—although nominally still Toghrul's vassal, he was de facto an equal ally.
Now, when speaking of Genghis Khan one of the things that is most often spoken about is his infamous cruelty, but this trait was not unique to him. After his defeat of his former friend Temujin Jamukha is said to have boiled 70 prisoners alive. Shortly after his return, when many of Jamukha’s former allies defected in the face of his cruelty and harshness, Temujin was able to subdue the disobedient Jurkin tribe that had previously offended him at a feast and refused to participate in the Tatar campaign. After executing their leaders, he had one of his men symbolically break a leading Jurkin's back in a staged wrestling match in retribution.
What followed was a series of campaigns with Temujin and Torghul on one side, and Jamukha on the other, having been named gurkhan, khan of the tribes, by those tribes, mainly the Onggirat, the Tayichiud, and the Tatars, who wanted to break the growing strength and supremacy of Temujin and Torghul. This campaign began in 1201 and was completed by 1202. During it a man named Jebe, from one of the tribes Temujin fought against entered into Temujin’s service. How you ask? Well during one of the battles Jebe shot Temujin’s horse out from under him. Temujin thought that was dope as fuck and said “Hey, you want a job? If you don’t I can always kill you.” Jebe took the job.
After each tribe was defeated Temujin killed their leaders and folded the surviving troops into his armies, many of them becoming nökor or noyans of Temujin during the rest of his life and campaigns. After proposing the marriage of his son Jochi (who might not have been his actual blood related son, but might have been adopted by Temujin after his wife Borte was captured and then several months later gave birth to him) Temujin was betrayed by his ally Torghul. Jamukha, who had been granted clemency following his defeat whispered poison into the ears of the other tribal leaders. He said that this was a ploy by Temujin to gain control of Torgul’s tribe the Kereit. He also fed into their fears of how Temujin was already shaking up steppe society by promotion based on merit instead of based on blood lines, something that annoyed and angered many of the tribal aristocracy.
After his defeat and forced retreat Temujin called in every available ally he still had and swore to them a, now famous, oath of loyalty that has come to be known as the Baljuna Covenant.
What follows is allegedly part of Temujin’s declaration as recorded in The Yuanshi in 1370:
"[Temüjin] raised his hands and looking up at Heaven swore, saying "If I am able to achieve my 'Great Work', I shall [always] share with you men the sweet and the bitter. If I break this word, may I be like the water of the River, drunk up by others."
Among officers and men there was none who was not moved to tears.The oath-takers of Baljuna were a very heterogeneous group—men from nine different tribes who included Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists, united only by loyalty to Temüjin and to each other. This is something that Temujin would maintain for his entire life. The khanate was a shockingly diverse and multicultural place. Genghis Khan was well known, by friends and enemies alike, for being a culturally and religiously tolerant man. All people needed was to be loyal to him.
This doesn’t mean that Temujin was not a religious man. He worshipped the ancient Turkic deity Tengri, God of the Heavens and the Sky. Tengrism is an interesting religion that has elements of poly and pantheism in it. Part of Genghis Khan’s reason for conquest was his belief that it was the destiny that Tengri had laid out for him, but more on that later.
After the Baljuna Covenant there followed a few years of war where Temujin and his allies defeated Torghul and eventually Temujin’s childhood friend Jamukha. The Secret histories indicate that, despite his many betrayals Jamukha was executed honorably, though other sources indicate that he was dismembered until he finally died.
And so it was, that in 1206 Temujin became the sole ruler of the steppes. He proceeded to call a kuraltai, a gathering of the tribal chiefs and took for himself the name Genghis Khan and was named the Khaqan, the Khan of Khans over all of the Mongol tribes. Now, Genghis Khan knew something that all the men he had defeated in his rise to power didn’t. He knew why no tribal confederacies before had succeeded. It wasn’t because of any personal failing on the parts of the men in charge, it was because of the very structure of their society. The Mongol tribes were too, well, tribal. They felt their loyalty belonged to their specific family of clan and not to a larger idea of an empire or nation.
Luckily for Genghis though, he’d already killed most of the traditional tribal leaders and chieftains, so he was able to reshape his society, like wet clay, into what he wanted it to be. So he set out to create a highly militarized society and meritocracy where loyalty to the nation, to the khan, and your own ability would decide how far you could rise.
Every single man in the empire between the ages of 15 and 70 was in the army and was organized into large 1000 men segments that were further broken down into 10 blocks of 100 that were broken down into 10 units of 10. Any captured troops who were to be folded into the Khan’s army were sent, each one, to different units so they couldn’t organize and rebel against him.
Between 1206 and 1210 Genghis consolidated his hold on power over the steppes. It was during this time that the Tangut led Western Xia kingdom fell under Mongol control. The siege of the capital Zhongxing while ultimately successful, was not one of the Khan’s greatest moments. His armies, while vast, lacked any true siege equipment save for some crude battering rams and their attempt to flood the city by diverting the Yellow River failed and wound up flooding their own camp. Still, in the end Emperor Zhangzong surrendered to the Khan and agreed to pay tribute in exchange for the Mongols withdrawing.
And now Genghis would turn his attention to the Jin Dynasty Wanyan Yongji, a man who had previously served with Genghis back when he worked for the Jin, and who Genghis hated. usurped the Jin throne in 1209. When Genghis was asked to submit and pay the annual tribute to Yongji in 1210, Genghis instead mocked the emperor, spat, and rode away from the Jin envoy—a challenge that meant war.
Despite being outnumbered 8 to 1 by the 600,000 strong Jin army, Genghis decided to invade. He made his way easily across the border and immediately began a scorched earth campaign. Anything they couldn’t carry with them would be burnt. If they couldn’t have the supplies, they’d make sure that the Jin couldn’t have them.
The conquest of the Jin took 4 years and during that time the army of Genghis Khan grew, both in size and ability. After the failed siege of Xijing Genghis decided it was time to build a troops of siege engineers and proceeded to recruit some 500 of them from the Jin over the next 2 years.
This trait is what would make the Khan and his armies so fearsome and successful. Well this and their willingness to be utterly ruthless and brutal when they felt they had to. But this flexibility, this humility to look at their methods and say “this isn’t working, let’s try something new” would allow them to defeat forces they, frankly, shouldn’t have been able to.
Genghis used his past successes and the stories about him that spread ahead of his armies enhance his reputation and then he wielded it like a club to smash through resistance. Take the siege of the Jin capital of Zhongdu. Yongji had been killed and the government was in shambles, but still Genghis had no way to breach Zongdu’s walls. His army was able to do nothing except camp before the city walls and wait as disease and starvation ravaged his armies. Some sources even allege that they turned to cannibalism to survive during this siege. Yet, despite this Genghis still called for peace negotiations with the Jin. Negotiations that were successful. Genghis secured the Jin empire as well as a tribute of 3,000 horses, 500 slaves, a Jin princess, and massive amounts of gold and silk.
As we stated earlier, of all the things Genghis Khan is known for, one of the most notable and oft repeated is his brutality to his enemies. Nowhere are the more stories about this than in his treatment of the Khwarazmian Empire, a Persianate Sunni Muslim empire. The khans armies there were under the command of his youngest son Tolui. Over the course of the conquest three major sieges of note took place at Nishapur, Merv, and Herat. Contemporary Persian historians put the death toll of this campaign at 5.7 million people, though more modern historians estimate and much lesser death toll of 1.25.
One story says, that after the death of one of Genghis’s step sons Toquchar, that the entire city was order slaughtered. Some stories say that all 1,748,000 people living in Nishapur were killed within an hour.
Genghis Khan would die in 1227. He had fallen off his horse in the winter of 1226 and became more and more ill as time went on, eventually passing on August 25, 1227. The exact nature of the khan's death has been the subject of intense speculation. Rashid al-Din and the History of Yuan mention he suffered from an illness—possibly malaria, typhus, or bubonic plague. Marco Polo claimed that he was shot by an arrow during a siege, while Carpini reported that Genghis was struck by lightning. Legends sprang up around the event—the most famous recounts how the beautiful Gurbelchin, formerly the Xia emperor's wife, injured Genghis's genitals with a dagger during sex.
Following Genghis Khan’s death the capital city of the Xia Kingdom, Zhongxing was put to the sword and almost the entire population of the city was killed.
There are many stories of the Khan’s brutality, and of the brutality of his descendants. One story from later in the Mongol Empire has the plague entering Europe during the Siege of Caffa when the Mongol troops launched diseased bodies over the walls in an early form of biological warfare.
We also have stories of Mongol armies marching civilians in front of their armies to act as human shields. Over the entire course of the Mongol Empire, from 1206 until about 1400 it is estimated that their armies killed between 30 and 50 million people. Based on Antarctic ice cores, scientists have identified a sudden decrease in atmospheric carbon of about three parts per million (ppm) between 1200 and 1470 CE, which roughly correlates with the Mongol invasion of Asia as well as the Black Death in Europe. So it is very possible that Genghis Khan, his descendant’s and armies killed enough people to cool down the entire planet.
Still, slaughter and mayhem are not all Genghis was known for. He was largely responsible for the existence and prosperity of the Silk Road, he is, at least partially responsible for the existence of written Mongolian languages, which were based on the Uyghur script, he helped lay the foundation of the legal system known as the Great Yasa.
The legacy of Genghis Khan is a complex one. One the one hand we have plenty of stories of him boiling his enemies alive, of his armies creating mountains of thousands of skulls, of human shields. But as we study more and more of the legacy and life of Genghis Khan we are more and more convinced that those stories are fear based myths from the people’s he conquered, because it is also often noted that Genghis Khan abolished the use of torture thoroughout his Empire. He was religiously tolerant, he outlawed slavery, he created one of the first international postal systems. Also, about .5 percent of the population is directly related to him.
So what do we really know about the life of Genghis Khan, especially considering that no eyewitness description or contemporaneous depiction of Genghis Khan survives. We don’t really know anything. Not where or when he was born, not where he was buried, not what he looked like, nor even, really, what his conduct was in war. So did he even really exist? Yes, there’s no debate on that. There ARE plenty of contemporary sources from Mongolian, Chinese, and Persian sources discussing Genghis Khan and his verifiable existence. But beyond saying that he lived? Most everything else is propaganda from one source or another. We can still find truth in propaganda though.
All we have to do is find the things that multiple, independent sources agree on and we can reasonably assume that to be the truth. So, Genghis Khan existed, and he definitely killed a lot of people in his quest for power and wealth. The details though? Those are a bit fuzzier.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.
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Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 9 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 8 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to be looking at infighting within Christianity. There are many differing opinions within the faith on the whos and whats and whys and hows, and very oft en they decide to kill each other over these, ultimately minor, differences. The Cathar Genocide, often known as the Albegensian Crusade, was just such an event. It was a time when the Pope felt threatened by those who he deemed to be heretics and so decided to kill them.
But, first it’s time to craft our potions. Todays libations, gods I love that word, is called Melting Snow. Take two ounces of sake, 1 ounce of triple sec, 3-4 dashes of black lemon bitters, shake and pour into a rocks glass before gently pouring 1 tsp of grenadine syrup into it. The resulting drink should have the grenadine settle at the bottom initially making a lovely presentation. Though I’d mix it before actually imbibing.
With that out of the way let’s talk about who the Cathar were. The name Cathar comes from the Greek word katharoi, meaning “the pure ones”. Their other name, the Albegensians, comes from the fact that many adherents during the Crusade lived in or around the city of Albi. Catharism is described as a somewhat dualist, somewhat Gnostic heretical branch of Christianity. Though, it bears mentioning that both are likely exonyms and the followers of this particular faith often self identifies as Good Men, Good Women, or Good Christians.
So what is dualism and what is gnosticism? Well in the case of the Cathars they were pretty much the same thing. Dualism is the moral or spiritual belief that two fundamental concepts exist, which often oppose each other. Gnosticism draws a distinction between a supreme, and hidden God above all, and a lesser deity (sometimes called the demiurge) who created the material world. Consequently, Gnostics considered material existence flawed or evil, and held the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the hidden divinity, attained via mystical or esoteric insight. Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment. Gnosticism preferred people to have personal knowledge and experience with the divine, something that threatened the power of the early Church.
Cathar cosmology identified two Gods. One who created the perfect spiritual world and the other, the demiurge who created the imperfect and sinful physical world. The demiurge is often identified as Yahweh and is referred to as Rex Mundi, King of the World. All visible matter, including the human body, was created or crafted by this Rex Mundi; matter was therefore tainted with sin. Under this view, humans were actually angels seduced by Satan before a war in heaven against the army of Michael, after which they would have been forced to spend an eternity trapped in the evil God's material realm. The Cathars taught that to regain angelic status one had to renounce the material self completely. Until one was prepared to do so, they would be stuck in a cycle of reincarnation, condemned to suffer endless human lives on the corrupt Earth.
Also, while they revered Jesus Christ, they also denied that he was ever a mortal man, instead believing that both he and Mary were Angels taking the semblance of a human form in order to teach our sin tainted flesh to grow closer to the purity of divinity. Other Cathar beliefs included the pescetarian diet, their view that women were pretty purely to tempt men away from divine purity and some Cathars believed that Eve had sex with Satan and gave birth to a race of giants who were all wiped out in the Great Flood. Cathars also rejected the Catholic priesthood, labeling its members, including the pope, unworthy and corrupted. Disagreeing on the Catholic concept of the unique role of the priesthood, they taught that anyone, not just the priest, could consecrate the Eucharistic host or hear a confession. There were, however, men selected amongst the Cathars to serve as bishops and deacons.
Now, while the Cathar Crusade took place over a 20 year period between 1209 and 1229, the persecution against them began almost as soon as they were founded. The Cathars were denounced as heretics by 8 separate church councils between 1022 and 1163. However the true troubles wouldn’t begin until 1208 when Pope Innocent III sent a legate named Pierre du Castelnau to chastise Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse for his lack of action against these heretical Cathars who lived on his land. Castelnau withdrew from Toulouse after 6 months of Raymond basically ignoring him. On January 15, 1208 Pierre was assassinated. Innocent suspected, and acted on the suspicion that the assassination was carried out by an agent of Reymond, although this was never proven.
Still, when has lack of evidence ever stopped the Church from killing people? The assassination of Pierre du Castelnau was causus belli for the Albigensian Crusade. The Albigensian Crusade, the Cathar Genocide, took place all around the area known as Languedoc, also known as Occitania. Today the province is a part of southern France, but for a while it was its own region with distinct culture and its own language. Occitan wasn’t very similar to French, it was not mutually understandable. In fact it was closer to Catalan than it was to French. Now, because Catharism rejected both the authority of the French King and the Pope in favor of a far more egalitarian relationship with their nation and their God many nobles from France embraced Catharism, at least at a surface level due to their desire to also reject the authority of the King of France. This made Catharism not just a threat to the spiritual and material authority of the Pope, but also a threat to the material authority of the King.
After the assassination of Castelnau Raymond VI Count of Toulouse was excommunicated from the Church. Although there was a very brief period when Raymond sent embassies to Rome and exchanged gifts. They reconciled and the excommunication was lifted, only for him to be excommunicated AGAIN on the grounds that he didn’t properly meet the terms of reconciliation.
And so it was that in 1209, after assembling an army of about 10,000 men near the city of Lyons that Pope Innocent III declared his crusade against the Albigensians, stating that a Europe free of heresy could better defend its borders against Muslim armies. This crusade against the Albigensians also coincided with the Fifth and Sixth Crusades in the Holy Land.
Most of the troops for the crusade came from Northern France, although there would also be volunteers from England and Austria. After some initial dispute over who would lead the quote righteous armies of the Lord unquote Papal Legate Arnaud Amalric was chosen as the commander.
As the Crusaders assembled, Raymond attempted to reach an agreement with his nephew and vassal, Raymond Roger Trencavel, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, for a united defense, but Raymond Roger refused him. Raymond decided to make an accommodation with the Crusaders. He was fiercely opposed by Amalric, but at Raymond's request, Innocent appointed a new legate, Milo, whom he secretly ordered to obey Amalric. On 18 June 1209, Raymond pronounced himself repentant. He was scourged by Milo and declared restored to full Communion with the Church. The following day, he took the Cross, affirming his loyalty to the crusade and promising to aid it. With Raymond restored to unity with the Church, his lands could not be attacked. The Crusaders therefore turned their attention to the lands of Raymond Roger, aiming for the Cathar communities around Albi and Carcassonne.
Béziers would be the first major engagement of the Cathar Genocide, although at around the same time, another Crusader army commanded by the Archbishop of Bordeaux took Casseneuil and burned several accused heretics at the stake. The crusading armies arrived at Béziers on 21 July, 1209 and demanded that the Catholics of the city leave and that the Cathars surrender. Both groups ignored them and the city settled in for a long siege.
The siege lasted for exactly one day. The troops within Béziers attempted to sortie beyond the gates of their city and after being routed they were pursued through the open gates of the city and it fell within 24 hours. Amalric then proceeded to order the slaughter of every single person, adult or child, within the walls of the city. What follows is possibly apocryphal, a phrase which hears means made up, but allegedly when asked by his troops how they should distinguish between Catholic and Cathar Amalric said “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius” The literal translation of which is “Kill them. The Lord knows those that are his own” There’s some dispute over whether or now Amalric actually said this, but it is agreed that it captures the vibe rather well as the entire city of Béziers was killed. There were no survivors. The death toll is placed at around 20,000 people, though this is thought to be an exaggeration.
Raymond Roger was not at Béziers when it fell. He had fled with most of his troops to the city of Carcassonne (yes, like the board game) intending to hold there. After the surrounding towns and villages heard about the slaughter at Béziers they all surrendered without a fight. This made Carcassonne the next major target of Amalric and his band of brigands. The 45 mile march to Carcassonne took the crusaders 6 days to complete. Once arrayed around Carcassonne they settled in for a siege that lasted slightly longer than the one at Béziers. But, after 6 days and after cutting the cities water supply Raymond Roger sought to negotiate. Amalric agreed to parley, but took Roger prisoner while speaking under truce. Carcassonne would not be the site of another slaughter though. All the people of the city were marched out of the city at sword point. They were naked according to Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay, a monk and eyewitness to many events of the crusade, but "in their shifts and breeches", according to Guillaume de Puylaurens, a contemporary. Rogers died several months later, either of dysentery or from being assassinated.
In each city the armies approached, they reacted differently and treated the people differently. The fall of Lastours and castle Cabaret took much longer than the others, although this was largely because of the onset of winter. The area around Cabaret was full of communes like Lastours, Minerve, and Bram. After Minerve fell to bombardment from siege weapons, destroying the main well of the commune, it surrendered. The crusaders, now under the command of Simon de Montfort wished to be more lenient to the people of Minerve. He allowed to defending soldiers, the Catholics, and the non-perfecti Cathars. Perfecti was the title of those Cathars who were considered adept in the teachings of their faith. They were roughly analogous to deacons. The Perfecti were given the option to recant their beliefs and return to the Catholic faith. Of the 143 perfecti in Minerve, only 3 elected to do this. The rest were burned at the stake, many walking directly into the flames of their own volition, not even waiting for their executioners to force them.
There were some successes for the Cathars though. The siege of Termes almost ended with the Cathar being slaughtered, but in the end them managed to abandon the city and escape before the walls could be breached, owning in part to a massive rain storm.
In May of 1211 the castle of Aimery de Montréal was retaken; he and his senior knights were hanged, and several hundred Cathars were burned. The crusade was turning towards its end. Montfort began to position his troops around the city of Toulouse meaning to crush one of the last major Cathar bastions in France. The Cathars, in their fear, turned to Peter II of Aragon for aid and support. Peter’s sister Eleanor was married to Raymond VI. Peter, named a valiant hero for his actions against the Moors was able to use his influence to get Innocent to call a halt of the crusade and used that time to try and negotiate peace.
When those peace negotiations failed Peter decided to come to their aid of Toulouse against Simon de Montfort, fearing that Montfort was becoming too powerful and gaining too much influence within the Catholic Church. This alarmed Innocent III who immediately declared the Crusade begun again. Meanwhile Raymond VI had had his excommunication lifted and then reinstated AGAIN during this time.
Unfortunately for the Cathars and for Peter II, he would die in his first major engagement with Simon’s forces. The Battle of Muret saw a devastating loss for Peter’s forces. Despite outnumbering Simon’s armies Simon had better tactics and carried the day. The next few years was a flurry of activity and victory fo Simon, who was eventually named the new count over all of Raymond VI’s lands that had already been captured. Any land that had not yet been captured would fall under the control of the Catholic Church who would hold onto them until Raymond VII, who was currently in England with his father, having fled a few years ago, was old enough to govern them himself.
The crusade would continue for a few years more, though there were periods of confusion and relative peace. One such period was when Pope Innocent III died suddenly and unexpectedly and the crusade was taken over by the much more cautious King Philip II of France. The crusade was resumed with greater vigor in 1217 on orders from Pope Honorius III and for the remainder of it would center around Toulouse and maintaining control of it. By 1222 Raymond VII, who had returned from exile with his father had reclaimed all the lands that he had lost and the crusaders were firmly on the backfoot.
Come 1225 Raymond VII was excommunicated, like his father (now deceased) and King Louis VII of France, son of Philip II (now deceased) renewed the Crusade. The Cathar heresy was going to be dealt with one way or another. The exact number of troops that Louis brought with him to renew the Crusade is unknown, but it is known that it was the largest force to be brought against the Cathars throughout the entirety of the genocide. Louis began his campaign in earnest in June of 1226 and quickly recaptured the towns of Béziers, Carcassonne, Beaucaire, and Marseille, this time with no resistance. Eventually the armies surrounded Toulouse and Raymond, not having the manpower to resist surrendered and signed the Treaty of Paris at Meaux on April 12, 1229.
Now, something important to be aware of is that Historian Daniel Power notes that the fact that Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay's Historia Albigensis, which many historians of the crusade rely heavily upon, was published only in 1218 and this leaves a shortage of primary source material for events after that year. As such, there is more difficulty in discerning the nature of various events during the subsequent time period.
With the war over we would transition into the next phase of the genocide, that of destroying Catharism as a cultural element and forcing surviving Cathars to repent and convert.
With the military phase of the campaign against the Cathars now primarily at an end, the Inquisition was established under Pope Gregory IX in 1234 to uproot heretical movements, including the remaining Cathars. Operating in the south at Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne and other towns during the whole of the 13th century, and a great part of the 14th, it succeeded in crushing Catharism as a popular movement and driving its remaining adherents underground. Punishments for Cathars varied greatly. Most frequently, they were made to wear yellow crosses atop their garments as a sign of outward penance. Others made obligatory pilgrimages, which often included fighting against Muslims. Visiting a local church naked once each month to be scourged was also a common punishment, including for returned pilgrims. Cathars who were slow to repent or who relapsed suffered imprisonment and, often, the loss of property. Others who altogether refused to repent were burned. The vast majority of those accused escaped death and were sentenced to a lighter penalty.
Still, Catharism as a distinct religion was all but destroyed. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century, referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history". And, at the risk of making an appeal to authority fallacy, if the guy who invented the term and died fighting for its recognition in national and international law calls it a genocide, it is one.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.
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Content warning for discussion of genocide.
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 7 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 6 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we;re going to be looking at one of the many genocides that have been perpetrated against indigenous Americans. This, however, will not be the genocide you’re expecting. That will be a later episode. The Genocide at Sacred Ridge took place long before the arrival of European colonizers. Unfortunately, much like history’s oldest war in Jebel Sahaba, we don’t have a historical record of the events so much as a purely archaeological one. But, we’ll get to that shortly, first…
Let’s start things right off with the second installment of the Alchemist's Table. I hope you enjoyed last week’s potion. This week we’ve got another delightful brew called A Taste of Fall. Start with 2 oz of bourbon or rye whiskey, follow up with an ounce of maple syrup (make sure you’re using actual maple syrup, not pancake syrup) then finish with 4 oz of soft Apple Cider, shake well and strain into a wineglass.
With that out of the way let’s talk about the Puebloans. Puebloans is the modern taxonomy for many indigenous peoples who lived and live in and around southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. Now when looking at old cultures without a writing system, or at least without a surviving written record peoples tend to be classified into distinct categories based on the things they left behind. The artifacts we are able to find from archeological sites, how they built their homes, and any kind of art they left behind. There are a number of beautiful petroglyphs at sites like Mesa Verde, which is now a national park.
So, who are the Puebloan people and where did they come from? Well the Jargon tells us that They are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, which developed from the Picosa culture. But to understand what that means we have to know WHAT the OSHARA tradition is and what the Picosa culture is. The simple answer is that we define these cultures by the technology they used and divide them up somewhat arbitrarily in order to have distinct THINGS to talk about. Historical and archeological classification is all made up. None of it is REAL in any objective sense. It’s just that we as humans need some way to put things into little boxes so that we can study and understand it.
Puebloan prehistory was divided up into 8 periods at an archeological conference in Pecos , New Mexico in 1927. It’s called, you might be shocked to discover, the Pecos Classification. The Pecos classification didn’t include any dates, it just split up these prehistoric civilizations based on changes in architecture, art, pottery, and cultural remains.
So what defined the Puebloan people? Well, most notably it was the emergence of housing structures known as pueblos, the switch from woven baskets into pottery for storage, and the advent of farming. Once people began to develop these technologies and cultural markers they were considered to have transitioned from the Basketmaker III Era into the Pueblo I Era. This is also why no real dates were attached to these periods, because not all groups would enter them at the same time.
Hell, even more distinct historic eras, like the Middle Ages are arbitrary and were determined after the fact, as my old history professor Dr. Brian Regal used to say “no one just woke up on January 1st, 1500 and said “Welp, I guess the Middle Ages are done now!”
Now, Puebloan is the modern taxonomy for the people who lived and live in the Four Corners region. That being the area on a map of the modern United States where the corners of Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico all meet. However, that’s not the only name those people were known as. The Navajo referred to these peoples as the Anasazi, a term which means ancient enemy, although some say that the term actually translates as “those who do things differently. The Hopi use the term Hisatsinom for these people. Those most modern Puebloan people prefer the term Ancestral Puebloan.
The population of Puebloan people in the Four Corners region grew rapidly between the years 700 and 1130 CE due to an increased amount of rain making farming much more effective in the region allowing for greater food stocks. Though, it is interesting to note (a phrase I just realized I use a lot as a tangent transition) that study of skeletal remains from the region show increased fertility, NOT decreased mortality. SImply put, people still died at the same average rate, but more were born than were dying. Though, the order of magnitude increase of the local population was also influenced by migration from the surrounding areas.
Hopi myths, and similar stories from the Zuni and Acoma peoples hold that Puebloan people emerged into the mortal world from the underworld by climbing up through a sipapu, which was a firepit at the base of a religious building called a kiva. It is said that these peoples were lizard-like in form until they emerged into the sun, whereupon they came to look like humans.
These Ancestral Puebloan peoples lived in times of relative prosperity, although, while the area they lived had good, consistent rainfall that allowed for farming without the need for irrigation techniques, not everything with their circumstances would be well and good.
War and conflict is, generally, always fought over economic reasons when you drill down into it. Control over resources in an environment where they are scarce will always lead to fighting.
This brings us to the archeological site Sacred Ridge. Sacred Ridge is an archaeological site about 8 miles southwest of Durango, Colorado. It covered about 11.6 acres and contained some 22 homes which were built in a style known as pit structures. Meaning that while they had walls and a roof emerging above the ground, the primary structure of the house was dug into the ground in the form of a pit.
What follows will be, somewhat, graphic description of the state of a few dozen sets of skeletal remains that were found in some of the pit houses, so: content warning for discussion of tortured and mutilated remains.
Two of the pit houses contained 14,882 identified human body fragments, belonging to about 35 people, about half the estimated population of the village. The victims show signs of extreme torture and mutilation, including beating on the feet, scalping, and eye gouging. Because of biological and dietary differences between the residents of the village and other villages in the same area, some scientists believe that this provides evidence of ethnic cleansing.
Archaeologists speculate that the village at Sacred Ridge had some form of authority over other settlements in the Ridges Basin area, and that the massacre is part of an uprising following a time of severe food shortages due, in part, to a drier climate. The graphic torture and dismemberment may have been part of a demonstration used to intimidate other elements of the population.
This is one of those mysteries we will never be able to solve fully. History is full of them. Short of a time machine the only thing we will ever have regarding the fates of the people of Sacred Ridge are theories. The truly tragic thing about Sacred Ridge is that it didn’t even remain a site of human habitation. The entire ridge was abandoned by local peoples within about 15 years of the incident, based on tree ring dating from the area.
There is much dispute over whether the events at Sacred Ridge constitute a genocide, that being actions taken with the intent to wipe out a particular national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part, or it was merely a massacre directed at a people who were prosperous while others suffered.
Anthropologist Debra Martin has even suggested that the attack at Sacred Ridge may have been in reprisal for dark and malevolent magics that were being practiced by some of the people in the region.Witch accusations and killings have long occurred in societies throughout the world, Martin says. Hopi, Zuni and other Pueblo groups have for centuries killed people regarded as malevolent sorcerers controlled by unseen, wicked forces. Children are viewed as particularly easy prey for evil spirits seeking bodies and souls to commandeer for nefarious purposes. Procedures for destroying witches include mutilating, cutting up and burning bodies so evil spirits have no human vessels to inhabit.
Much as with the war that was alleged to have taken place based on evidence left on skeletal remains at the grave site at Jebel Sahaba, we will never know the why of Sacred Ridge. Is it a genocide? Was it an attack on evil witches? Was it merely a massacre to get at food that starving people greatly needed?
I don’t know and that, quite frankly, is my very favorite sentence to say.
That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day. -
Content warning for discussion of genocide.
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 7 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 6 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. Speaking of weeks, we’ve finally hit our first week! Get it? This is episode 7, the episodes are called Days. There are 7 Days in a Week… I’m funny dammit!
I’ve got something special for you starting at the end of Week 1. It’s a new segment I’m going to call the Alchemist’s Table. Every Day I’m going to be sharing with you a cocktail recipe that I have invented. If you enjoy a nice cocktail and you aren’t driving to work feel free to make yourself one before sitting down for the rest of the episode.
For Day 7 we’re going to be enjoying the first cocktail I ever created. It’s called A Taste of Spring. It starts with 2 oz of Gin, I prefer gunpowder gin, but a London Dry will work just fine. Followed by 1 oz of elderflower liquor, 1 oz of lavender syrup, stir for about 30 seconds in ice before straining into a rocks glass over ice. And that, my friends, is a Taste of Spring. Enjoy.
Anyway, it’s time to head back to the West, and for this episode we have to travel back in time to the 5th century BCE for the Siege of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. IN a modern historical context we look at the Peloponnesian War as being between Sparta and Athens, and while this isn’t technically wrong, it’s also not as right as it could be.
The Peloponnesian War was fought between the Delian League, which was a confederacy of various Greek city-states with Atens in supreme control. The Delian League was created as a defensive alliance against the Persian Empire following the Second Persian Invasion of Greece (this is the invasion that included the famed Battle of Thermopylae). And the Peloponnesian League which was less a league and more an ancient world version of the Warsaw Pact, with Sparta (then called Lacadeamon) at the head with its various allied city states. See, around 550 BCE SParta got tired of having to conquer everyone and instead offered to NOT conquer them if they joined the League.
The Delian League got its name from the island of Delos where they would meet and where their treasury was held before being moved to Athens in 454 BCE. The Peloponnesian League got IT’S name from the peninsula at the southern tip of Greece, which is known as the Peloponnese Peninsula. The Peloponnesian League is something of a misnomer as its membership was not limited to that area of Greece.
But, I ramble, and so let us return to the Peloponnesian War. Why did Sparta and Athens, erstwhile allies against Xerxes I and the Persian Empire decide to go to war with each other?
The period between the Second Persian Invasion of Greece and the Peloponnesian War is sometimes known as the Pentecontaetia, a term which means “a period of 50 years” which refers to the 48 year period between 479 and 431 BCE. The Pentecontaetia saw the rise of Athens as one of the most prominent Greek City States, it saw the rise of Athenian democracy, and it saw the rise of tensions between Sparta and Athens. You can look at this period as somewhat similar to the rising tensions between Rome and Carthage. Sparta HAD been the most powerful Greek city-state, and now suddenly they had a rival and didn’t like that. Sparta was the Sasuke to Athens Naruto, the Vegeta to Athen’s Goku.
Following the flight of the Persian armies from Greece Athens began to rebuild the great walls around their city that had been lost to the Persian armies. Sparta, upon learning about this construction, asked them not to do that. But Athens rebuffed them, not wanting to put Athens effectively under the control of Sparta’s massive army. Another way we can view Athens and Sparta through the lens of Carthage and Rome is that Athens was vastly superior at sea, and Sparta was vastly superior on land, just as Carthage and Rome were, respectively. I’m taking bets now on who is going to win this war, assuming you don’t already know.
These tensions, which were further exacerbated by a helot revolt within Sparta would explode, though not terribly violently, during a 15 year conflict known as the First Peloponnesian War. This first war would end with the signing of the Thirty Years Peace treaty. This treaty, which would only last for 15 years, would solidify the Athenian and Spartan Empires and would cement Athens as a true powerhouse in the Aegean Sea.
Conflict between Athens and Corinth, a member of the Peloponnesian League, is what ultimately led to war. Athens and Corinth effectively fought a brief proxy war over control of the Corinthian colony of Potidea. Corinth, outraged that Athens had encouraged one of its colonies to rebel against their authority, urged Sparta to call a conclave to try and arbitrate peace as was stipulated under the Thirty Years Peace.
The Spartan King Archidamus II urged the Spartan magistrates (known as ephor) and the citizen assembly known as the ecclesia not to go to war, but in the end the assembly determined that Athens, in urging Potidea to rebel against one of their allies and then aiding them in the fight for the city had broken the Peace and war was officially declared in 431 BCE. The Second Peloponnesian War had begun.
The Second Peloponnesian War, often known as just the Peloponnesian War, can be broken up into three distinct segments. The Archidamian War, The Sicilian Expedition, and the Decelean War.
The first 10 years of the war are sometimes also called the Ten Years War. Sparta was, almost entirely, a land based empire. The Spartan Army was the most feared and one of the best trained armies of the ancient world. Their hoplites and their phalanxes were nearly invincible. Meanwhile Athens had the same prestige on the waves. The Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, though discussed far less frequently than the concurrent Battle of Thermopylae, is no less impressive a feat of military genius.
So the Spartan strategy during the beginning of the war was to march its armies to the land around the city state of Athens and seize them. This caused many Athenian farmers to abandon their farms and retreat behind Athens famous Long Walls. The Long Walls were fortified walls that connected Athens' main city to its ports at Piraeus and Phaleron. So despite the loss of farmland around Athens itself, this siege did basically nothing. Sparta was also only able to keep troops on the field for a few weeks at a time, as the hoplites were still needed to harvest their own fields and troops were always needed to keep the helots in line. The longest siege of the Ten Years War was only 40 days.
Meanwhile Athens stayed in the Aegean Sea with their fleet, avoiding any open warfare with the Spartans who were unable to breach their walls anyway. The Athenians had great successes in their early naval battles, including the Battle of Naucaptus where 20 Athenian ships went up against 77 Peloponnesian ships and emerged victorious. Of course, all of Athen’s momentum would come to a screeching and screaming halt when th plague hit in 430 BCE.
The Plague of Athens was an interesting facet of the war. While some Athenians believed that the Spartans were the cause of the plague, evidenced they said by the fact that the Spartans were unaffected by it, but Thucydides, author the the famous History of the Peloponnesian War was in the city when the plague hit. He even contracted it and survived his illness. Thucydides says that the plague came from Ethiopia as it appeared to have entered Athens along the Long Wall from the port of Piraeus. There’s not much in the way of evidence regarding WHAT exactly the plague was, although Thucydides listed out a large number of symptoms that victims experienced including: Fever, Redness and inflammation in the eyes, Sore throats leading to bleeding and bad breath, Sneezing, Loss of voice, Coughing, Vomiting, Pustules and ulcers on the body, Extreme thirst, Insomnia, Diarrhea, Convulsions, and Gangrene. Modern epidemiologists and paleopathologists believe, based on extensive examination of all the available evidence that the plague was likely either smallpox or typhus, although it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know for certain.
The plague had a massive impact on the course of the war. For one, it killed Pericles, the Athenian statesman and strategos of the Athenian military. It also killed over 30,000 people, made foreign mercenaries unwilling to aid Athens, no matter how much they were offered as they did not want to risk getting sick, the plague even halted any Spartan military action in Attica until it was finished as the Spartans also feared the disease.
Even with the loss of Pericles Athens continued to have success on sea as well as on land through the efforts of their commanders Demosthenes and Cleon. They started to put cracks in the Spartan armies image of invincibility until the Spartans captured Amphipolis, a silver mine that supplied much of the Athenian war chest in 424 BCE. In 422 a great battle was fought at Amphipolis which saw both Cleon, and the Spartan general Brasidas killed. The loss of these military commanders would see Athens and Sparta sit down to try and negotiate peace.
The Peace of Nicias would be a failure from the very start. Despite it, nominally, declaring peace between Sparta and Athens, despite PoWs being exchanged and control over territories ceded back to those who originally owned them, the Peace of Nicias was something of a joke.
Sparta and Athens entered something of a Cold War. They didn’t fight against each other specifically, but Athens spent a LOT of time trying to stir up helot revolts and encourage Spartan allies to revolt against them in order to gain greater autonomy under Athenian democracy.
Something that is interesting to note, is that despite the single largest land battle of the Peloponnesian War taking place in 418 BCE, the Peace wasn’t formally abandoned, and war declared again between Athens and Sparta until 214 BCE.
The Battle of Mantinea was fought between Sparta and some of its Arcadian allies on one side, and the combined might of Argos, Athens, Mantinea and various Arcadian allies of Argos. The battle, which involved nearly 20,000 troops combined, ended with a Spartan victory and saw a reversal of previous trends. After the Spartan loss at the Battle of Pylos in 425 BCE many began to think of the Spartans as weak and cowardly, but Mantinea reversed that thinking very quickly.
The Siege of Melos, the true subject of this episode, also took place during the Peace of Nicias. Athenian aggression against Melos began about 10 years before the Siege. Melos was a small island about 68 miles off the Eastern coast of Greece. Small islands, due to their reliance on navies, were generally allies of Athens who had uncontested control of the seas. Melos though, decided to remain neutral. They were ethnically Dorian, same as the Spartans (the Athenians were ethnically Ionian). In 425 Athens demanded that Melos pay them a 15 talents (about 390 kgs) of silver. Melos refused. They were determined to remain neutral (although there is pretty good evidence that they donated 20 minas (about 12.5 kgs) of silver to the Spartan war effort.
In 216 BCE Athens once again went to Melos and demanded that Melos join the Delian League and pay tribute. Melos again refused. Thucydides wrote a dramatization of conversation between Athenian embassies and the leaders of Melos in his Histories (Book 5, Chapters 84–116). The Melian Dialogue is one of the earliest events I learned about during undergrad when I took a class on the History of Just War.
I need to go off on a slight tangent here. When I took this class there was this one guy, whose name I never learned. He was jacked as hell and always showed up to class double fisting iced coffees from Starbucks. Now this class was built around a questionL “Is there such a thing as a Just War?”, but apparently this dude never read the syllabus because about 3 weeks into class he asks “When are we gonna get to the battles?” See, he thought it was History of Just War, just meaning only. He thought it was a military history class, not a class on moral philosophy seen through the context of war. I’m pretty sure he got an A though…
Anyway, back to Melos. It’s unlikely that the conversation Thucydides wrote out is how it played out in real life, though given the Athenian love of oration and speeches, he’s probably not TOO far off the mark.
I’m going to read you a part of the Melian Dialogue:
Athenians. For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences- either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us- and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Melians. As we think, at any rate, it is expedient- we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest- that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current. And you are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon.
Athenians. The end of our empire, if end it should, does not frighten us: a rival empire like Lacedaemon, even if Lacedaemon was our real antagonist, is not so terrible to the vanquished as subjects who by themselves attack and overpower their rulers. This, however, is a risk that we are content to take. We will now proceed to show you that we are come here in the interest of our empire, and that we shall say what we are now going to say, for the preservation of your country; as we would fain exercise that empire over you without trouble, and see you preserved for the good of us both.
Melians. And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?
Athenians. Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.
Melians. So that you would not consent to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side.
Athenians. No; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness, and your enmity of our power.
Melians. Is that your subjects' idea of equity, to put those who have nothing to do with you in the same category with peoples that are most of them your own colonists, and some conquered rebels?
Athenians. As far as right goes they think one has as much of it as the other, and that if any maintain their independence it is because they are strong, and that if we do not molest them it is because we are afraid; so that besides extending our empire we should gain in security by your subjection; the fact that you are islanders and weaker than others rendering it all the more important that you should not succeed in baffling the masters of the sea.
See, Athens refused to allow Melos to remain neutral because they believed that, if they allowed this small, weak nation to live independent of their might that they would soon find themselves overrun with rebellion as all others would see Athens let Melos go free and see Athens as weak, as if they somehow feared fighting Melos. So, pragmatically, it would be better for them to kill all the Melians to maintain their image as strong than it would be for them to simply leave Melos be.
Despite their claim to democracy, Athens was very much of the opinion that might made right. The strong take what they can and the weak suffer as they must.
This was, more or less the beginning of Just War theory, as it was one of the first time that justice, fairness, and rightness was discusses in the context of war. Just War Theory, by the way, is generally made up of three elements. Jus ad bellum, do you have just reasons for going to war? Jus in bello, is your conduct during war just? And a more modern addition, jus post bellum, is your conduct after the war is over also just?
Melos, ultimately, refused to surrender to Athens and, indeed, tried to fight against their armies and ultimately failed. The siege lasted from summer of 416 until the winter and ended with Melos surrendering. Athens, in a very Genghis Khan esque move decided to kill every adult man on Melos and sell all of the women and children into slavery. This form of genocide where one particular gender is targeted is common in old world genocides. Very often it is the men, those who could join opposing militaries who would be targeted for the slaughter although Shaka Zulu was infamous for killing all the women and folding the men into his armed forces during his conquests.
The genocide of Melos wasn’t an attempt to wipe out an ethnicity, Melians being Dorian just like the Spartans. It WAS, however, intended to destroy the people of Melos, and it succeeded.
The Peloponnesian War would continue until 404 BCE and would end with a Spartan victory, partially through aid gained from the Achaemenid Dynasty from Persia and some from Alcibiades of Athens, but the war isn’t the important part and so we will ignore the final 12 years of it. That’s it for this week. No new reviews, so let’s jump right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.
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Content warning for discussion of genocide and mention of suicide.
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 6 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 5 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to, finally, be stepping outside of the Western sphere of influence and migrating over towards Jin Dynasty China to learn about an event that is sometimes known as the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians. This refers to the genocide of many non-Han tribes from China that took place in the beginning of the 4th century CE.
As always, we will start with that most important of set dressings, context. The thing that, without, all of history would just be one shot DnD stories told around a table. But before even that, let’s talk about the word barbarian. Etymologically the word barbarian comes to us from the Greek word barbar, meaning a non-Greek person or someone who didn’t speak ancient Greek. Meaning that, technically, we are all barbarians. In a more modern context the word has a far more pejorative connotation. It’s used in the same contexts as words like savages or uncivilized. It becomes an inherently stigmatizing term. One designed to make the people being referred to by it inherently lesser than those using it.
The is one of our first instances of dehumanization being used in a historic genocide. The Romans didn’t see the Carthaginians as animals or subhuman, merely as a threat to the Roman way of life and to Roman hegemony over the Mediterranean. Pontus didn’t see the Romans as barbarians or savages, merely a threat to Pontus’s control over Asia Minor. But the Five Barbarian Tribes? They were inherently less. They were, to be sure, a threat to Jin dynastic control over China, but more than that, they weren’t Han Chinese, and so they were ethnically inferior.
The Jin Dynasty emerged from the chaos and turmoil of the Three Kingdoms Period. Following the end of the Han Dynasty the Three Kingdoms of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu dominated China from 220 to 280 CE. The Sima clan from the Cao Wei kingdom rose to prominence in 249 CE after staging a coup against the Cao clan. By 263 Sima Yi had conquered both the kingdom of Cao Wei and the Kingdom of Shu Han. Sima Yi would die in 265 CE, but his son Sima Yan would go on to conquer the kingdom of Eastern Wu in 280 CE, uniting China once again and declaring himself the first emperor of the Jin Dynasty. Sima Yan would die 10 years later, in 290 CE and would be called Emperor Wu, the Martial Emperor of Jin, posthumously.
The death of Emperor Wu would spark a succession war that would come to be known as the War of the Eight Princes, and it would be within the context of this war that the Upheaval of the Five Barbarians would occur. See, after Emperor Wu died he was succeeded by his son, Sima Zhong, also known as Emperor Hui. Hui was developmentally disabled. We don’t know the exact nature of his disability, but records show that, while he could read and write just fine, he was unable to make traditionally logical decisions on his own. So, despite ruling as emperor for 17 years, Emperor Hui never exercised any real authority on his own, instead coming under the control of 9 different regents over the course of his reign.
It was because of Emperor Hui’s disabilities and the relative ease with which he could be controlled by a regent that the War of the Eight Princes began in earnest. The War of the Eight Princes, which lasted from 290 until 306 CE is somewhat akin to the Hundred YEars War in that it was not an extended period of continuous fighting. It was stretches of relative peace, interspersed with massive amounts of lethal violence that saw shifts in power each time.First, after Emperor Wu died he named his father in law Yang Jun, and the Prince of Ru’nan, Sima Liang, as coregents of his second son, Sima Zhong. Yang Jun though didn’t want to share power and managed to get Sima Liang sent away from court to Xucheng, leaving himself in sole control over the imperial court. Yang Jun, however, was wildly unpopular and was soon deposed by Jia Nanfeng, the new Empress of Jin and Sima Liang, who became the first of the Eight Princes in this war.
The rest were Sima Wei, Sima Lun, SIma Jiong, Sima Ai (sometimes written as Sima Yi), Sima Ying, Sima Yong, and Sima Yue. All of these men were rulers over certain administrative zones within the control of the Jin Dynasty and some of them, like Sima Wei, ruled for just days before being captured and killed by other princes.
The third prince, Sima Lun, was the tutor of the crown prince, son of Sima Zhong, Sima Yu. Empress Jia, fearing a loss of her own power should Sima Yu come of age and inherit the throne had him arrested. This led some Chinese government officials to reach out to Sima Lun to gain his aid in overthrowing the Empress, who had been ruling as regent since Sima Wei had been executed. Lun not only captured the Empress, but also forced her to commit suicide by making her drink gold powdered wine.
Sima Lun gaining control of the regency caused many of the other princes to join forces Sima Jiong, who had been discontented by his position in the government following the overthrow of Empress Jia and sent to Xuchang, Sima Ying, and Sima Yong. Sima Ying joined with Sima Jiong after the latter declared rebellion against Sima Lun, and Sima Yong was originally on the side of Sima Lun, but defected to the other side once he realized that Sima Jiong and Ying had a larger and more powerful army. Sima Lun was defeated in relatively short order, and much like Empress Jia, was forced to commit suicide. Once Emperor Hui was reinstated on the throne he declared a grand celebration in the form of a five day, non stop, drinking binge. The emperor’s drink of choice was likely wine or a fermented spirit called baijiu which is made from sorghum.
SIma Jiong was eventually betrayed by his allies Sima Ying and Yong and was killed by his own troops. It was actually Sima Ai who captured the capital after Sima Jiong death, but he elected to share authority with his brother, Sima Ying. Ying wasn’t happy about this though and colluded with Sima Yong to try and have Sima Ai assassinated, though this plot would fail. War would once again break out between SIma Ai and Sima Ying and Yong, only this time SIma Ai would ultimately fall to his brother and Sima Yong.
Sima Yue, the Prince of Donghai, eventually rebelled against SIma Ying, and though being defeated was appointed to the preposition ot Grand Tutor to try and make peace between the two sides. This peace wouldn’t last as in 305 SIma Yue would raise troops against SIma Yong. Yue would ultimately be victorious over both Ying and Yong and would rule as the last regent before Emperor Hui died on January 8, 307 CE after eating poisoned bread. There is some debate over whether or not Sima Yue was responsible for the Emperor’s death. But, after Emperor Hui died he was succeeded by his brother, Sima Chi, known as Emperor Huai. Huai needed no regent, and so ruled in his own right. Though he would oversee the loss of much of the Jin Dynasty’s territory following the Upheaval.
Now, so far we’ve talked a lot about princes, but very little about Barbarians. So now it’s time to shift our focus. Both of these events happened roughly concurrently, and while there was certainly some overlap between them, they were two different events.
The Five Barbarians was a name applied to various nomadic tribes later in history. Those tribes being the Xiongnu, the Jie, the Xianbei, the Qiang, and the Di. All of these tribes (although the Xiongnu is technically a tribal confederation) are also often referred to under the exonym Hu.
Now, various tribes and tribal confederacies had been immigrating into China since the later days of the Han Dynasty, and while relations between these tribes and the people of China wasn’t always sunshine and roses it was good enough that these peoples could live together. With China being thrown into chaos by the Three Kingdoms Period and the War of the Eight Princes many of the tribes went into rebellion. And so in 304 CE, before the War of the Eight Princes even ended, China entered the Sixteen Kingdoms period as various, often short lived, dynastic kingdoms were founded in the northern parts of China.
As one might expect, the Jin Dynasty refused to accept these new kingdoms as distinct from it, and it also refused to accept them as political equals. For example, envoys from the Shi Zhao dynasty, an ethnically Jie dynasty ruled over by Shi Le, a man who had once been an indentured farmer before rising to power during Liu Yuan’s rebellion that established the Han Zhao dynasty, were expelled and all of their gifts they brought for Sima Chi were burnt.
You might be wondering what all of the 16 kingdoms were, well The term "Sixteen Kingdoms" was first used by the 6th-century historian Cui Hong in the Spring and Autumn Annals of the Sixteen Kingdoms and refers to the five Liangs (Former, Later, Northern, Southern and Western), four Yans (Former, Later, Northern, and Southern), three Qins (Former, Later and Western), two Zhaos (Han/Former and Later), Cheng-Han and Xia. There was even a brief period between 376 and 383 when the Former Qin dynasty reunited all of northern China.
In 386 Northern China would be fully reunited under the Northern Wei dynasty and by 420 southern China was fully reunited under the Liu Song dynasty, but to find our genocide we actually need to go a little further back in time. We’ve drifted too far forward.
We now find ourselves in the Later Zhao dynasty, also known as the Shi Zhao dynasty. Remember that Shi Le was part of one of the Five Barbarian tribes. He was of Jie ethnicity. Shi Le and his adoptive brother Shi Hu had long standing habits and traditions of adopting other people into their clans. Bringing into the family through law, if not necessarily by blood. One such man was Ran Zhan, an ethnically Han man who would be adopted under the name Shi Min. Shi Min gained power over the Shi Zhao dynasty through the methods you might expected after listening to everything else in this episode. He lied, cheated, and staged a coup.
While in control of the Shi Zhao dynasty, Shi Min survived no fewer than three assassination attempts in the first year of his rule. This lead Shi Min to conclude that he couldn’t trust any of his followers, but he was especially wary of the Jie and the various other tribes as they were refusing to fall in line with his edicts. See, Shi Min, in his paranoia ordered that all Hu people be disarmed and be banned from carrying weapons (disarmament of a particular segment of the population is often an initial step towards genocide as it prevents them from being able to fight back when you ultimately decide to kill them.)
When non-Chinese tribes began to flee the capital city of Ye, Shi Min realized that he would not be able to use the Hu, so he issued an order (this is generally referred to as a culling order) to the ethnic Chinese according to which each civil servant who killed one Hu and brought his head to him would be promoted in rank by three degrees, and a military officer would be transferred to the service at his Supreme Command. Shi Min himself led Chinese in killing the Hu people without regard for sex or age; during the day tens of thousands of heads were severed. In total over 200 thousand people were killed; their bodies were dumped outside the city. Troop commanders in various parts of the state received a rescript from Shi Min to kill the Hus; as a result half of the people with high noses and bushy beards were killed. Among the 200,000 people who died in the massacre many were in fact ethnic Chinese who had high big noses, deep-set eyes and thick full beards, which in combination were considered to be the indicators of non-Hanness.
This brings us an important point when talking about genocides which is, how do perpetrators identify their victim groups? Well, the simple answer is, they don’t. In most cases the identifying features or characteristics that perpetrators use are arbitrary and are not particular to one group of people. The Nazis misidentified thousands of people as Jewish based solely on the size and shape of their nose or whether or not they were circumcised. I, myself, have been misidentified as Jewish by neo Nazis on the internet because of the size of my nose. Shi Min chose a big nose and a full beard as distinctly “barbarian” features, completely ignoring that many ethnically Han people would share those features. There is no logic in how genocidal regimes operate. Never was, never will be.
Another thing I want to highlight is the use of the word cull when referring to the orders Shi Min gave in 349 CE. Words like cull or purge can be seen often when discussing genocide. You will find euphemism in all aspects of genocide. Now, obviously the word genocide didn’t exist in 349 CE, so there was no way to call it that, but words like purge or cull are designed to be clinical and detached from the act of killing. There’s no direct call to murder, or slaughter, or massacre. There’s a call to cull the divisive, lesser, elements from our society. This allows people to remove themselves by one step from the violence they are about to commit. It doesn’t change facts, it doesn’t make something any less of a genocide, but it does make it easier for people to be convinced to carry one out.
That’s it for this week folks. Thanks so much for tuning in and sticking around. We have some more reviews to read this week, so let’s get right to that.
Thank you all so much, and now for the outro
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day
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Content warning for discussion of genocide and child death
Episode music can be found here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time
Day 5 will take a look into the historic event known as the Asiatic Vespers, one of the only genocide committed against Rome instead of by it.
Episode Notes Below:
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 3 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 2 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. For this week’s episode we’re going to be talking about a genocide committed AGAINST the Romans. This is particularly unusual because usually the Romans are the ones committing genocides and war crimes. Historically speaking the event is called the Asiatic Vespers, which should explain the pun in the episode title. And if it doesn’t, I’m not going to be explaining it. Google is free.
Our timeline places us in the Roman Republic. The Punic Wars are over, Carthago cecidit and Rome had steadily been expanding its borders in all directions. By the time the Punic Wars were over Rome held all of Italy, most of Iberia, most of Greece, parts of northern Africa, including Carthage, and were on the cusp of moving into the Anatolia (what is today part of the nation of Turkey). You might think that Rome would be tired of wars after their decades of fighting against the Carthiginians, but their victories only made them hungry for more.
During the final decade of the 2nd century BCE the Romans were engaged in 2 distinct wars. One in northwest Africa (the area that is today Algeria) against King Jurgatha of Numidia called the Jugurthine War and one fought around western Europe against various Celtic and Germanic tribes who had invaded from the Jutland Peninsula (modern day Denmark and parts of Northern Germany) called the Cimbrian Wars.
Both wars would end in Roman victories, and we will discuss them very briefly now as they are relevant to our later discussion, but not the main focus of this episode. The Jugurthan War took place two generations after the fall of Carthage. King Massinisa, an ally of Rome against Carthage died in 149. He was succeeded by his son Micipsa, who was succeeded by two sons and an illegitimate nephew. Adherbal (son), Hiempsal I (son), and Jugurtha (the nephew). Micipsa, fearing conflict amongst his three heirs bid them split the kingdom up into three parts. One to be ruled over by each of them.
The Roman Senate has been given the authority, by Micsipa, to make sure his will was carried out, but being the corrupt piece of shit it was, the Senate allowed itself to be bribed by Jugurtha to overlook his crimes after he assassinated Hiempsal and forced Adherbal to flee to Rome for safety. Peace WAS declared, albeit briefly, between the two men, although in 113 BCE Jugurtha, once again, declared war on Adherbal.
Rome, fearing instability in the region, acquiesced to Adherbal’s request for aid and sent troops to the fight and ambassadors to Jugurtha to demand peace negotiations. Jugurtha was clever though, and knew how much the Romans loved to talk. So he kept them doing just that until Cirta, Adherbal’s capital ran out of food and had to surrender. Jugurtha immediately had Adherbal executed as well as all Romans who had aided him in the defense of Cirta.
Now, the Pax Romana didn’t exist just yet, but Rome still took a hard line against anyone who dared to harm her citizens. So in 112 BCE the Jugurthine War was declared. We’re not going to go into any great detail of the Jugurthine War, suffice it to say that Rome won, it lasted until 105 BCE, and that some historians see this war as the true beginning of the fall of the Roman Republic. Gaius Marius was the victorious general and consul of the Jugurthine War (and also the Cimbrian War we’re going to talk about next) and he would use his successes in these, and other wars, to try and seize greater power in Rome.
That brings us to the Cimbrian War. Although, to be perfectly clear, these two wars happened at, pretty much, the same time. The Jugurthine War was 112 to 105 BCE and the Cimbrian War was 113 to 101 BCE, and Gaius Marius fought in both of them. Dude must have had the speed force to be in both places at once.
The Cimbrian Wars were another war in a long line of “Rome didn’t intend to conquer this region, but an ally called for help and they definitely planned on staying after they won the war”. According to Roman sources the Cimbrian peoples came down from the north and, eventually, attacked the Roman allied Celtic federation the Taurisci, who asked Rome for aid against the Cimbrians.
One of the interesting things about the Cimbrian War was that, after an initial victory against the Roman general and consul Gnaeus Papirius Carbo the Cimbrians were perfectly poised to carry their invasion into Italy itself, but instead of doing so they turned and pushed their way into Gaul (modern day France). The war against the Cimbri was an unmitigated disaster until Marius came in and shored up the Roman strategy. Marius, it is interesting to note, was the uncle of Julius Caesar. Famed for being the worst hostage and the best knife practice dummy in history.
The Cimbrian War would end with Roman victory and would also spark the rivalry between Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix which would eventually lead to the first of Rome’s great Civil Wars which would see Sulla march on Rome and see Marius outlawed and exiled, albeit very briefly.
I said earlier that there were two major wars during the end of the 2nd century BCE. There were actually 3. The Third being the Second Servile War that took place from 104 until 100 BCE on the island of Sicily. Servile War was the name that Rome gave, or that historians gave, to the three large scale slave uprisings that occurred during the time of the Roman Republic. If you’re wondering where Spartacus is, he won’t be around until the Third Servile War. The reason to bring up the Second Servile War is that this one also involved our good friend Gaius Marius. He was not one of the generals in this war, but he was in northern Africa trying to recruit aid for the war with the Cimbri from the Roman province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. There, after discovering that King Nicodemus III had no one to spare for Rome as all able bodied men had been enslaved by tax collectors, the Senate issued an edict stating that no Roman ally could be enslaved. This led to discontent on the island of Sicily as several hundred slaves were freed, but many were not as they were not from Roman allied states. This, combined with the abuses that were rampant in Roman Republic slavery led to a massive, and ultimately futile, uprising against the Republic.
Now, Rome and the Kingdom of Pontus, which had been declared in 281 BCE and had been ruled over by a string of Kings all named Mithradates were neighbors across the Anatolia, but during the Cimbrian and Jugurthine Wars they, frankly, had nothing to do with each other. Rome had some interests in the area due to their alliance with Nocodemus and the Kingdom of Bithynia, but they were very occupied with the Cimbrian War, the Jugurthan War, the Second Servile War, and then in the beginning of the 1st century BCE, the Social Wars that they fought against former, autonomous, allies living on the Italian peninsula (the Social War also ended in Roman victory).With the beginning of the Social War Mithradates VI saw the oppurtunity to expand further into the Anatolia and allied with Tigranes I of Armenia and declared war against the Roman client state of Cappadocia. Mithradates and Tigranes were quickly able to conquer Cappadocia and expel Nicodemus from Bithynia. When Rome heard about this they demanded that both kings be restored to their thrones and then, stupidly, urged those kings to go to war against Pontus and Armenia. Mithradates responded to this aggression by conquering Cappadocia and Bithynia and conquering most of Roman Asia with about a year.
Once Rome was no longer distracted by the Social War they would turn their attention to Pontus and Mithradates, although it would take almost 2 years for Rome to mobilize armies against Mithradates.
See, at first the Roman general Sulla was placed in charge of the forces against Pontus, but political backbiting from Publius Sulpicius Rufus, a political opponent of Sulla, almost saw the army taken from him and placed in the hands of his rival Marius. Sulla responded to this threat by marching into Rome with his forces and taking control by force, forcing Marius into a brief exile.
Mithradates would take the delay in Rome’s response to carry out the event that would come to be called the Asiatic Vespers. The Vespers were a genocide targeted all Roman and otherwise Latin speaking peoples in the western Anatolia
The genocide were a calculated response to the Roman declaration of war. It was meant to force cities to take a side: "no city that did his bidding now could ever hope to be received back into Roman allegiance". The killings took place probably in the first half of the year 88 BC, although precise dating is impossible. Valerius Maximus indicates a death toll of approximately 80,000, while Plutarch claims a death toll of 150,000. The reported numbers, according to fragments of Dio, are however probably exaggerated. They were planned, with Mithridates writing secretly to regional satraps and leaders to kill all Italian residents (along with wives, children, and freedmen of Italian birth) thirty days after the day of writing.
Mithridates furthermore offered freedom to slaves which informed on their Italian masters and debt relief to those who slew their creditors. Assassins and informers would share with the Pontic treasury half the properties of those who were killed. Ephesus, Pergamon, Adramyttion, Caunus, Tralles, Nysa, and the island of Chios were all scenes of atrocities. Many of these cities were under the control of tyrants, and many of the inhabitants enthusiastically fell upon their Italian neighbours, who were blamed "for the prevailing climate of aggressive greed[,] acquisitiveness[,] and... malicious litigation".
Based on this we can see the initial uprising against Roman rule in the region as a kind of class uprising against oppressors. This brings us to an important discussion about the use of violence in social revolutions. Violence is, and always will be, a necessary tool in creating social change. However, there will always be a line that should not be crossed.
Mithradates, in inciting enslaved peoples to rise up against their masters and in debtors to kill their creditors, was based as fuck. That’s some capital G, capital S good shit. Those are the oppressors. Those are the people committing violence against the people of the Anatolia. Political violence SHOULD be directed at the people in positions of authority, especially if those people are using that authority to oppress marginalized communities. The part where the morality starts to slough off like flesh off a 5 day old corpse is when the WOMEN and CHILDREN start to be killed.
The First Mithradatic War (there would be two others) would begin immediately after Rome heard of these massacres. The war would run from 89 BCE until 85 BCE and would, ultimately, end in Roman victory. The war ended with the signing of the treaty Dardanos and the end result was status quo ante bellum. Which is a Latin phrase that basically means. Everything is the same as it was before the war. Mithradates retreated back to Pontus and everything that had been a Roman client state returned to being so.
Of course none of this would bring back to roughly 80,000 Roman and Latin speaking civilians that had been killed during the Vespers, but necromancy doesn’t exist and revivify can only be cast within a minute after death anyway.
That’s it for this week folks. We don’t have any more review at the time of recording this, so we’re gonna jump right into the outro.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day
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Content warning for discussion of genocide
Episode music can be found here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time
Day 4 will take a deep dive into the Punic Wars and the Sacking of Carthage. The Fall of Carthage is widely considered to be the first recorded genocide in history and we will be looking at the hows the why and the whos of it all.
Episode Notes below:
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 4 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 3 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to be going all the way back to the purported origins of my field of study. This week we’re going to be discussing History’s first genocide… probably. Remember that genocide require intent to destroy a specific group of people, and the destruction of Carthage during the Third Punic war is the first time in history that was can demonstrate that intent, at least so far.
As always we are not going to be diving right into the event itself. All history exists within specific cultural, national, and ethnic contexts. Genocide moreso than any other type of event. No nation just wakes up one day and suddenly decides to go on a mass murder spree. So what caused Rome and Carthage, two states that had been allies and friends for hundreds of years to suddenly fight three wars against each other and ultimately, in the case of Rome, wipe Carthage off the map?
Following the Pyrrhic War and throughout the middle of the 3rd century BCE Rome and Carthage because the two preeminent powers of the Mediterranean. During this time Carthage would come to dominate southern Spain, much of the coastal regions of North Africa, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, and the western half of Sicily, in a military and commercial empire. Whereas Rome had subjugated almost the entirety of the Italian peninsula and finally driven the last Greek colonies off of the mainland.
In 265 BCE a group of Italian mercenaries called the Mamertines appealed to both Carthage and Rome for aid after they had seized the city of Messana on the island of Sicily (modern day Messina) from the Kingdom of Syracuse. Carthage immediately entered the war, but on the side of Hiero II the King of Syracuse. The Romans, as Romans are wont to do, debated for a while about this. They didn’t really want to go to war to support people who had stolen a city from its rightful owner, and as Carthage had already entered on Syracuse’s side, entering the war at the Mamertine’s request could lead to a war with Carthage. However, Appius Claudius Caudex filled his fellow senator heads, as well as the heads of the general assembly, with thoughts of booty and plunder. Many of the senators were already arguing that there was a strategic and monetary advantage to gaining a foothold on Sicily.
The First Punic War officially began when the first Roman sandal made landfall in 264 BCE. By the way, in case you’re wondering why it’s called the Punic war, and not the Carthaginian War, Punicus was a term the Romans used to refer to the people of Carthage, hearkening back to their Phonecian origins. When the Romans landed Messana was under siege by the combined forces of the Carthaginians and the armies of Syracuse. Sources are unclear as to why, but first the Syracusans and then the Carthiginians withdrew from the siege. Rome’s armies, under the command of Caudex marched south and put Syracuse under siege, but having only brought two legions with them they did not have the forces or supplies for a protracted siege.
Immediately this war was looking to be a bad idea for Rome, as Carthage had nearly overwhelming naval superiority at the beginning of the war. Indeed it is somewhat shocking, at face value, that Rome was able to win the First Punic War as the majority of the 23 year long war was fought on, or very near the water. To try and counter the Carthiginians naval prowess the Romans introduces a device called a corvus to their ships. The corvus was a 4 foot wide and 36 foot long bridge that was attached to the front mast of a Roman quinquereme. It has a large, hooked spike attached to the underside of the front of the bridge and was used to attach Roman ships to Carthiginian ones and allow for swift boarding of enemy vessels. While the corvus did have some measure of success it made Roman ships very front heavy, made them far less maneuverable, and in heavy seas were practically useless.
Now, Sicily was a nightmare for an attacking force. Its hilly and remarkably rugged terrain made moving large bodies of troops very difficult. The ground of Sicily heavily favored the defender. In fact, in 23 years of fighting on the island, only two full scale pitched battles were fought.The Battle of Agrigentum in 262, which was a Roman victory, and the Battle of Panormus, which was also a Roman victory. Agrigentum was a particularly interesting case. Both Roman consuls at the time Quintus Mamilius Vitulus and Lucius Postumius Megellus were in the field with 40,000 Roman soldiers.
A large army has an even larger stomach though, and the consuls had two major problems. First, because of Carthage’s naval superiority it was exceedingly difficult to keep their forces supplied by sea. And to compound those issues, neither consul had experience moving around armies of this size. So after seizing Agrirentum, right around harvest season. The consuls dispersed their men to the fields in order to harvest as much food as the possible could. And, of course, that was the moment that Hannibal Grisco (a different Hannibal than the one famous for marching elephants over the Alps) attacked the Roman forces. Rome’s forces would rally after this initial assault and rout the Carthiginian forces before besieging and capturing the city, selling 25,000 people into slavery.
The war was less direct after Agrigentum for a few years. Rome made failed attempts in Corsica, Sardinia, and Northern Africa. For several years the war followed a pretty simple pattern. Rome was superior on land. Carthage was superior at sea, and sieges sucked for everyone.
In 265 BCE Rome gained two new consuls Marcus Atilius Regulus and Lucius Manlius Vulso Longus. Both men, frustrated by the stalemate that was raging on Sicily decided to take the fight to Africa itself. After a series of relatively quick sieges of Aspis and Adys Rome had taken the city of Tunis, this put them only 10 miles away from Carthage itself. Carthage tried to sue for peace, but the terms that Regulus offered were so harsh that Carthage decided to fight on. Rome would actually suffer one of its largest defeats at Tunis, though it wouldn’t come from a Carthiginian general. Rome lost to a Spartan mercenary commander Xanthippus. In 255 BC Xanthippus led an army of 12,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry and 100 elephants against the Romans and defeated them at the Battle of Tunis.
Rome would lose much of its fleet and tens of thousands of allied soldiers in various storms around the Mediterranean. There was even a time, following the Battle of Phintias, that it looked like things were finally turning around for Carthage. However, by 248 Carthage only had control over two cities on the island, Lilybaeum and Drepana and both nations' coffers were nearly emptied. Carthage tried to get a 2000 talent (approximately 52,000 kilograms of silver) loan from Ptolemaic Egypt, but was denied. Rome turned to its wealthiest private citizens. Asking them each to build a single quinquereme and promising repayments from the reparations they would make Carthage pay after the war. It should also bear mentioning that Rome lost about 17% of its fighting age men over the course of this war.
The consuls who finished off the war were Gaius Lutatius Catulus and Quintus Valerius Falto (Rome elected new consuls yearly). These two consuls defeated the last of Carthages fleet in the Battle of Aegates Island. After this battle was finished Rome continued to put pressure on Lilybaeum and Drepana until Carthage decided to sue for peace. The Treaty of Lutatius was signed and brought the First Punic War to its end: Carthage evacuated Sicily, handed over all prisoners taken during the war, and paid an indemnity of 3,200 talents over ten years.
This wouldn’t end Carthages’ woes though. In 237 BC Carthage prepared an expedition to recover the island of Sardinia, which had been lost to the rebels (mostly foreign soldiers they were unable to pay fully after the war) In a fit of cruelty, the Romans stated they considered this an act of war. Their peace terms were the ceding of Sardinia and Corsica and the payment of an additional 1,200-talent indemnity. Weakened by 30 years of war, Carthage agreed rather than enter into a conflict with Rome again; the additional payment and the renunciation of Sardinia and Corsica were added to the treaty as a codicil.
The tensions caused by THIS particular bit of tomfuckery would be one of the major determining factors in the start of the Second Punic War. The mark that the First Punic War made on history cannot be understated. It was not only the longest Rman war to date, but it was the most devastating maritime war of the ancient world. Over the course of it Rome built over 1000 ships and would use the skills they learned and honed in this war to rule the seas, virtually uncontested for the next 600 years.
Following the First Punic War Carthage turned its eyes to the North. They knew they would need to expand their power base and accrue a much greater store of wealth if they were ever going to stand on equal footing with Rome again. The Italian Peninsula and the surrounding island were off limits, so they turned to Iberia.
They would meet Rome again in Iberia, but in 226 the two powers signed the Treaty of Ebro, fixing the River Ebro as the border between the two empires. It’s likely that Rome had no intention of maintaining the terms of this treaty as some few years after they established an alliance with the city of Saguntum, a city which existed within the Carthiginian sphere of influence. Hannibal (yes, that one, with the Elephants) saw this as an act of aggression from Rome and besieged the city of Saguntum, eventually seizing it after 8 months of siege. Rome sent Quintus Fabius Maximus to the Carthage senate with peremptory demands. When these were rejected, as Rome knew they would be, war was declared in the spring of 218 BC.
The Second Punic War would last for 17 years and would, again, end in victory for Rome. The war got off to somewhat of an odd start. Both Rome and Carthage planned to invade the other, but neither side seemed to really know what the others were doing or where they would be. It’s likely, given the way the previous war had gone, that Rome expected a naval attack from Carthage, and so they remained in the south putting together their plan to invade Africa again. Hannibal though had a different plan. He intended to swing up through Iberia, starting in modern Cartagena, cross the Alps, which he did in 15 days, and sweep down on Rome from the North. He successfully crossed the Alps with 20,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and an unknown number of elephants (he’d left Iberia with 37 of them, but it’s unclear how many survived the crossing.)
Hannibal then proceeded to dog walk the Roman army around Italy for the next two years. The only challenge he really faced was from Quintus Fabius Maximus, nicknamed Cuncator (the Delayer) by his contemporaries for his adoption of the Fabian Strategy. Well, his creation really. The strategy is named after him. The Fabian strategy employs hit and run tactics and seeks to avoid pitched battle. Fabian hoped to use this harrying tactic to enter into a battle of attrition, hoping that Hannibal would run out of supplies and be forced to leave or surrender.
In 216 Rome elected two new consuls Gaius Terentius Varro, who advocated pursuing a more aggressive war strategy, and Lucius Aemilius Paullus, who advocated a strategy somewhere between Fabius's and that suggested by Varro. The Senate also authorized the raising of a double sized army, some 86,000 men. The largest Roman army in history at that point.
Varro and Paullus lost most of their army in Rome’s greatest military disaster, the Battle of Cannae. Some 67,500 Roman troops died in this one battle. This was almost the end for Rome. They almost lost the whole war in that one Battle. Hannibal was supported by Gaulish and Spanish mercenaries, he was up against military incompetents, and he was about to be joined by the King of Macedonia as an ally. In 215 Phillip V launched the First Macedonian War.
It was time for Rome to bring back the one man who had stood a chance against Hannibal. It was time to bring back Fabius. Fabius became consul again in 215 BC and was re-elected in 214 BC. Rome, now more desperate than they’d been in a long time also drastically reduced its standards for soldiers. Enrolling slaves, criminals and those who did not meet the usual property qualification. By early 215 BC they were fielding at least 12 legions; by 214 BC 18; and by 213 BC 22. By 212 BC the full complement of the legions deployed would have been in excess of 100,000 men, plus, as always, a similar number of allied troops. The majority were deployed in southern Italy in field armies of approximately 20,000 men each. This was insufficient to challenge Hannibal's army in open battle, but sufficient to force him to concentrate his forces and to hamper his movements.
For 11 years after the Battle of Cannae, the war was raged across Southern Italy in a constant give and take as Carthage captured Roman cities, only for them to be recaptured. The fighting in Italy was fierce and seemed to be going mostly in Hannibal's favor, but Italy was not the only theatre of this war. The Iberian Theatre could best be described a a holding action for the first several years. As Rome sought to hold Carthiginian forces in Iberia and prevent them from reinforcing Hannibal by crossing the alps again (although Hannibal's brother Hasdrupal was able to cross the Alps with 35,000 additional troops).
Scipio Africanus was ultimately successful in Iberia, clearing it of Carthiginian control. He almost lost control of the region when the Iberian leaders sought to fight against the Romans who they had just fought with against the armies of Carthage. They’d expected Rome to leave after defeating Carthage here, but Rome wouldn’t give up land it held and sent Claudius Nero over to stabilize the situation.
This left Iberia under Roman control and Italy fighting for its life against Hannibal and Hasdrubal. In a move of some desperation and no little boldness Rome decided to finally launch its invasion of Africa in 204 BCE led by the famed Scipio Africanus, and after defeating Carthage in two major battles, Carthage elected to sue for peace and recall Hannibal and his brothers from Italy.
Rome and Carthage entered into peace negotiations. The Roman Senate ratified a draft treaty, but because of mistrust and a surge in confidence when Hannibal arrived from Italy, Carthage decided to take one last stab at achieving victory. Thus did the Battle of Zarna begin. Hannibal tried to use a charge of 80 elephants to break Rome’s lines, but Rome was able to turn the charge back and the elephants wound up devastating their own forces.The new peace treaty dictated by Rome stripped Carthage of all of its overseas territories and some of its African ones. An indemnity of 10,000 talents of silver was to be paid over 50 years and hostages were taken. Carthage was forbidden to possess war elephants and its fleet was restricted to ten warships. It was prohibited from waging war outside Africa and in Africa only with Rome's permission.
And so there would be peace for 50 years. Sort of, but not really. Carthage finished paying off their indemnity in 151, 50 years after the end of the Second Punic War and was, once again, economically prosperous. They were, really, no military threat to Rome anymore, but many Roman senators refused to believe that. Most famous of which was the senator Marcus Porcius Cato, also known as Cato the Censor. Cato had been part of an assembly sent to Carthage in around 153 BCE and notes how wealthy and prosperous it seemed. He was famous for ending all of his speeches before the senate with the phrase Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam ("Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed"), which is often shortened to merely Carthago delenda est (Carthage must fall).
In 149 BCE Rome sent its armies to Carthage, under the pretext of a punitive expedition because Carthage was allegedly engaging in illicit military operations. The Third Punic War, which lasted for a mere three years, really only had the one major engagement. That being the Siege of Carthage, which would eventually be led by Scipio Aemilianus, the adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus.
Initially Carthage tried to surrender and, indeed, surrendered all of their weapons. But Rome would not be swayed by this. They wanted Carthage destroyed, and ultimately it would be.
The early years of the siege saw little success. Carthage was a hard city to besiege, and it still had some allies in the region. So in addition to contending with the city itself, Roman forces needed to be on guard for allied towns and cities who would try to come to Carthage’s aid. After 3 years though it would end in a single week of some of the most horrific slaughter of the ancient world. In Spring of 146 Scipio launched a full scale adult on the harbor area and successfully breached the walls of Carthage. Over six days, the Romans systematically worked their way through the residential part of the city, killing everyone they encountered and setting the buildings behind them on fire. The city was razed to the ground, over 700,000 people were killed, including women and children, and some 50,000 survivors were sold into slavery.
The next part of the story that you might know, if you know this story at all, is that Scipio then proceeded to salt the earth around Carthage so that nothing would ever grow there again. This story is almost certainly apocryphal. Which is fancy historian speak for “full of shit”. There are no ancient sources for this event. The salting story entered the academic literature in Bertrand Hallward's article in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), and was widely accepted as factual.
What IS factual though is that Rome committed genocide in sacking Carthage. There was a clear and deliberate plan to destroy every single vestige of the people of Carthage, either through mass slaughter or slavery. There was clear intent to destroy planned and carried out by the duly elected leader of Rome and its armies. It literally doesn’t get any more clear than this. Intent was vocally demonstrated by Cato and physically carried out by Scipio.
That’s it for this week my friend. Thank you for coming with me on this educational foray into the past. We’ve got some more reviews to read for this week, so let's jump right into them.
*Read Reviews*
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. PLease remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.
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Trigger Warning for discussions of genocide, transphobia, and mention of suicide
Note: There are some audio sync issues on this episode between me and Jo. Apologies for that. I'm still learning how to edit audio smoothly. I'm going to leave the episode as is though (unless its just utterly unlistenable). It's a learning experience.
Episode music can be found here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time
Day 3 will dive deep into the historic context surrounding trans identities, look at the origins of the gender binary, look at famous trans individuals throughout history, and tackle the modern manifestations of transphobia and how it all adds up to a trans genocide. Day 3 features special guest Jo Dinozzi, actor, fight choreopgrapher, and Director of A Sketch of New York.
Episode notes to follow:
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 3 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 2 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to be talking about the trans genocide that is currently ongoing in the United States, this is certainly an issue in other parts of the West, such as Canada and the UK, but I live in the US and that’s the location that I am most qualified and able to speak on. As with last week we’re not going to be starting with what’s happening right now in 2024. We’re going to dive deep into the historical context surrounding trans gender identities and their perpetual position as a marginalized community.
Before we get into that though! I have something special for you this episode! Today we are joined by a guest, my good friend, Jo Dinozzi. Hi Jo, thanks so much for joining me today.
So, I thought we’d start today off with an examination of the gender binary and where it all started. According to Suzzanah Weiss, a feminist writer and sexologist with a Masters of Professional Studies in Sexual Health from the University of Minnesota:
“Arguably, modern notions of the gender binary originated during the Enlightenment,” they say. “That’s when scientists and physicians adopted what historians call a ‘two-sex model’ when describing people’s bodies.”
This model treated male and female bodies as opposites, and as the only two options.
“Up until that point, popular thinkers thought more along the lines of a one-sex model, where male and female bodies were homologous,” explains Weiss.
Case and point: female genitalia were viewed as male genitalia turned inward, and female orgasm was deemed necessary for reproduction since male orgasm was.
Indeed, the one-sex model had its own problems. Mainly, women were often viewed as incomplete men.
“But the two-sex model created new problems, such as the devaluing of female sexuality and the erasure of anyone outside the gender binary,” they say.
You can find more information on the one sex theory and the emergence of the two sex theory in Thomas Laqueur's book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.
So far though we’ve just been looking at Western ideas of gender though, many cultures around the world have far more expansive views of gender, though many of these ideas of gender are still attached to biological features and characteristics.
Some examples of these include the Hijra from Hinduism, to further underline how bigoted Western systems of power can be, the British passed a law in 1871 categorizing all Hijra people as criminals.
The Bugis ethnic group of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, recognizes three genders beyond the binary. These are the Calalai, the Calabai, and the Bissu.Something interesting to note is while Bugis gender is often described as a spectrum, bissu are deemed to be above this classification: spiritual beings who are not halfway between male and female, but rather embody the power of both at once.
In Mexico there is a third gender called Muxes which is deeply embedded within the indigenous Zapotec culture. Since the 1970s, every year in November, muxes celebrate La Vela de las Auténticas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro, or the Festival of the Authentic and Intrepid Danger-Seekers, a day of energetic merriment to honor muxes.
There’s also Sekarata from the Sajalava people indigenous to Madagascar. They are viewed as both sacred and protected by supernatural powers.
There is, of course, Two Spirit people. This is a pan Indigenous North American term that was coined in the 1990s as a way for the indigenous LGBTQIA+ for reject white, Western, ideas about queerness and gender identity. There has been some push back against the term Two Spirit as some see it as inherently recognizing the Western Gender binary. Many indigenous tribes such as Niitsitapi, the Cheyenne, the Cree, the Lakota, and the Ojibwe, to name just a few have their own terms for these gender identities that fall outside of the binary. Those terms are, of course, in their own languages and I think I would only insult some people with how poorly I pronounce them. So, suffice it to say, you can find more information about this on the wikipedia article for Two-Spirit under the subheading Traditional Indigenous Terms.
Last culture I want to go over for today is Judiasm. Jewish law, or halacha recognizes 8 distinct genders. The two classic ones that we all know and have mixed feelings about and then 6 others Androgynos, Tumtum, Aylonit hamah, Aylonit adam, Saris hamah, Saris adam.
So, as we can clearly see, the idea of a strict gender binary of only Male and Female isn’t an idea that was always widely accepted and the fact that is has crept into so many cultures around the world that had much greater levels of acceptance of diverse identities is solely the fault of western colonialism and white supremacy.
Something that should be noted is that gender identity and gender presentation are two different things in a society and often for individuals. I, for example, identify as agender or gender apathetic. I don’t identify with any gender at all really, but my gender presentation is decidedly masculine. In my opinion gender identity is internal and specific to each individual person, whereas gender presentation is external and based on the culture you live in and how that society views the way a specific gender traditionally looks.
With that out of the way let’s talk about the greatest nightmare of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro… pronouns.
You’ve got them, I’ve got them, everyone’s got them. Well, that might not, actually be true. There might very easily be people who don’t feel that any currently available pronoun fits their own concept of gender. I guess it’s more accurate to say that I have never met anyone who doesn’t use any pronouns.
There’s a specific set of pronouns that I want to discuss today, though we could likely do a whole other episode on just pronouns. I want to talk about they/them pronouns. Cause, those are really the ones that started this whole temper tantrum conservatives have been throwing for the past several years. They say that they/them is a plural pronoun, and always has been. As if language never changes and we were all STILL speaking Old English.
Hell, when the folks who made the King James Bible were translating it they used thee, thou, thy, and thine as singular and ye, you, your, and yours as plural. Also, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen all used the singular they in their works. It’s been in the Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, and Pride and Prejudice.
So, if we’re gonna be pedantic about it, I have sources to back up my pedantry and they don’t. But also, language evolves! We have contronyms now! Words that are their own opposites! So, just chill and take the opportunity to grow, if you haven’t already.
Next thing to talk about is, of course, the difference between gender and sex. Gender is an internal identity that is based on your own relationship with the concept of gender. Sex is biological and is, frankly just based on your genitals. No one is out there doing chromosome tests on every single baby born. A doctor just looks at your crotch and decides. They’ll also assign you a gender at birth based on those same characteristics, but just because you’re assigned a gender doesn’t mean you have to keep it.
We also have to note that, just like gender, sex also exists on a spectrum. And listen, you don’t have to believe me. Go watch Season 1, Episode 9 of Bill Nye Saves The World. He’ll tell you too, and if you don’t trust Bill Nye on Science, you’re a fool of a Took.
I’m actually going to turn the mic fully over to Jo at this point as she is far better informed on this topic than I am.
(Insert Jo here)
Now, something that we need to talk about is the Recency Illusion. There are many people that believe trans gender people are somehow a new phenomenon. That they haven’t always existed throughout history. So here are some examples for you to do some more reading on, on your own.
Ashurbanipal (669-631BCE) - King of the Neo-Assryian empire, who according to Diodorus Siculus is reported to have dressed, behaved, and socialized as a woman.
Elagabalus (204-222 CE) - Roman Emperor who preferred to be called a lady and not a lord, presented as a woman, called herself her lover's queen and wife, and offered vast sums of money to any doctor able to make her anatomically female.
Kalonymus ben Kalonymus (1286-1328) - French Jewish philosopher who wrote poetry about longing to be a woman.
Eleanor Rykener (14th century) - trans woman in London who was questioned under charges of sex work
Chevalier d'Eon (1728-1810) - French diplomat, spy, freemason, and soldier who fought in the Seven Years' War, who transitioned at the age of 49 and lived the remaining 33 years of her life as a woman.
And, of course:
Sylvia Rivera (1951-2002) - Gay liberation and trans rights pioneer and community worker in NYC; co-founded STAR, a group dedicated to helping homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women
Marsha P. Johnson (1945-1992) - Gay liberation and trans rights pioneer; co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera, the woman who threw a brick to start the Stonewall Riots
And, I would be remiss if we didn’t talk about my favorite trans gender individual in history, the Public Universal Friend. The Public Universal Friend was originally a Quaker born in 1752. However, The Friend contracted a very serious illness, suspected to be typhus, in 1776 and nearly died. Once the Friend had recovered they shunned their original name and all gendered pronouns. Asking to be referred to only as the Public Universal Friend, the P.U.F. or simply as the Friend. Whenever someone asked if the Friend was male or female, the Friend would merely reply. “I am that I am”. The Friend would go on to form an offshoot of Quakerism called the Society of Universal friends which, unfortunately, ceased to exist in 1860, 41 years after the Friend’s death in 1819. The congregation's death book records: “25 minutes past 2 on the Clock, The Friend went from here.”We’re starting to make our way to more modern issues now, next on our docket is the looting of the Institute of Sexology in Berlin in 1933. On 6 May 1933, the Institute of Sexology, an academic foundation devoted to sexological research and the advocacy of homosexual rights, was broken into and occupied by Nazi-supporting youth. Several days later the entire contents of the library were removed and burned. The Institute was founded by Magnus Hischfield in 1919 and was the earliest institution to be doing research into gender affirming surgery, as well as offering contraceptive services and sexual health education. The Institute actually performed one of, if not the first, gender affirming surgery in 1931. It was bottom surgery for a trans woman named Dora Richter. She is believed to have died in the initial attack on the Institute.
On May 10th, the German Student Union, a group of young Nazis, dragged every single book and bit of research out of the Institute, piled them in Bebelplatz Square and set them on fire. This was the first, and largest book burning of the 3rd Reich, with over 20,000 books burned. There is no telling how far back trans gender health research was set by this event. Hirschfield wasn’t in Germany when the book burning occurred. He was on a world speaking tour and remained in Nice, France after he finished. He died there of a heart attack in 1935.
We’re getting closer and closer to the modern day now dear listeners. Before we get there I want to talk with you about a resource I like to use called the Pyramid of Hate. It was designed by the ADL based on the Alport Scale of Prejudice, which was created by psychologist Gordon Alport in 1954. The Pyramid illustrates the prevalence of bias, hate and oppression in our society. It is organized in escalating levels of attitudes and behavior that grow in complexity from bottom to top. Like a pyramid, the upper levels are supported by the lower levels; unlike a pyramid, the levels are not built consecutively or to demonstrate a ranking of each level. Bias at each level reflects a system of oppression that negatively impacts individuals, institutions and society. Unchecked bias can become “normalized” and contribute to a pattern of accepting discrimination, violence and injustice in society.
The second level of the Pyramid included bigoted humor as one of these hallmarks of systems of oppression. There are many people who feel that humor is somewhat sacred. That it falls outside the standard array of ethics and that anything can be joked about, because it’s just a joke and there’s nothing serious about it.
If you are the type of person who believes that… well you probably haven’t made it this far into the episode. Regardless, let me draw everyone’s attention to a PhD dissertation written by former appellate attorney of the Texas 5th Circuit Court Jason P. Steed.
Steed says, and I’m quoting directly from a series of tweets he made a few years ago: You're never "just joking." Nobody is ever "just joking." Humor is a social act that performs a social function (always). To say humor is a social act is to say it is always in social context; we don't joke alone. Humor is a way we relate/interact with others. Which is to say, humor is a way we construct identity - who we are in relation to others. We use humor to form groups… ...and to find our individual place in or out of those groups. In short, joking/humor is one tool by which we assimilate or alienate. We use humor to bring people into - or keep them out of - our social groups. This is what humor *does.* What it's for. Consequently, how we use humor is tied up with ethics - who do we embrace, who do we shun, and how/why? And the assimilating/alienating function of humor works not only on people but also on *ideas.* This is why, e.g., racist "jokes" are bad. Not just because they serve to alienate certain people, but also because… ...they serve to assimilate the idea of racism (the idea of alienating people based on their race). A racist joke sends a message to the in-group that racism is acceptable. (If you don't find it acceptable, you're in the out-group.) This is why we're never "just joking." To the in-group, no defense of the joke is needed; the idea conveyed is accepted/acceptable. The defense of “just joking is only ever aimed at the out group. If you're willing to accept "just joking" as defense, you're willing to enter an in-group where the idea conveyed by the joke is acceptable. If "just joking" excuses racist jokes, then in-group has accepted the idea of racism as part of being in-group.This segues us into our next topic fairly smoothly. We’re going to be talking about the AIDs crisis. You might be wondering how this is a smooth segue, well that’s because when the AIDs epidemic first began in the 1980s, the Reagan administration treated it as a joke.
Here's the first exchange between Speakes and journalist Lester Kinsolving from 1982, when nearly 1,000 people had died from AIDS:
Lester Kinsolving: Does the president have any reaction to the announcement by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic in over 600 cases?
Larry Speakes: AIDS? I haven't got anything on it.
Lester Kinsolving: Over a third of them have died. It's known as "gay plague." [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this.
Larry Speakes: I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?
Lester Kinsolving: You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry! [Press pool laughter.]
Larry Speakes: Do you?
Lester Kinsolving: No, I don't.
Larry Speakes: You didn't answer my question. How do you know? [Press pool laughter.]
Lester Kinsolving: Does the president — in other words, the White House — look on this as a great joke?
Larry Speakes: No, I don't know anything about it, Lester.
Because they saw the AIDs epidemic as one big joke, and because of the massive amounts of homophobia in American politics the Reagan administration did nothing about the thousands and thousands of people dying. But why, why I can hear you asking. Because AIDs, the so called “gay plague” was thought to only affect gay men. They also thought it could be spread through saliva, so there was a joke from a later press conference about the President banning kissing as a way of fighting the spread of AIDs.
But I digress. AIDs was thought to only affect a specific part of the population. Gay men. A segment of the population that the Reagan administration didn’t want in American society. So when they heard they were dying, instead of doing research, or raising public awareness, or even expressing compassion for the suffering of fellow humans, they did nothing and made bad, poor taste jokes, because they wanted gay men to die.
Now, many people will look at this and say that it wasn’t a genocide because the deaths weren’t caused by government action, but by government in action. These people are wrong. This was DELIBERATE in action, knowing and planning for that inaction to kill as many people as possible. This was, as clear as it can be, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group, in whole or in part. Now, no one is saying that Reagan CAUSED AIDs, but he saw what it was doing and specifically did nothing to prevent any of the deaths that it caused.
This, finally, brings us to the modern day and the ongoing trans genocide. We have established our historic context, we have set a historic precedent for inaction as a form of genocide. Now we can really get into it.
Remember the Pyramid of Hate that we touched on briefly earlier. Well, Level 3 is Systemic Discrimination and includes Criminal justice disparities, Inequitable school resource distribution, Housing segregation, Inequitable employment opportunities, Wage disparities, Voter restrictions and suppression, and Unequal media representation. There are, according to translegislation.com, in 2024 alone 530 anti trans laws have been placed before various state and federal legislations. I remind you that it is only April 2nd, when this episode first releases. 16 of them have passed, 87 of them have failed, and 430 are still currently active.
These bills seeks to discriminate against trans people in almost all areas of life, with the 3 most prevalent categories being Education, Sports, and Healthcare. In 2024 alone 132 bills have been proposed to deny or restrict access of trans people to gender affirming care.
But why is this important? Other than because healthcare is a human right that should be freely available to everyone. A new study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, using data from U.S Transgender Population Health Survey found that 81% of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide, 42% of transgender adults have attempted it, and 56% have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury over their lifetimes.
If you are a trans individual and you need mental health services or support, please reach out to the Trevor Project at (866) 488-7386 or call the Trans Lifeline at (877) 565-8860. You’re not alone, and you never will be.
Now, to return to our regularly scheduled educational program.
The US deliberately blocking people from accessing gender affirming care is genocide. Full stop. End of story. According to an article titled Suicide-Related Outcomes Following Gender-Affirming Treatment: A Review, by Daniel Jackson, which is a meta analysis of 23 different studies on the effect of gender affirming care on trans suicide rates, having access to gender affirming care greatly reduces the risk of suicide among trans youth and adults. So if you know that having access to these services will help keep a group of people alive, and you deliberately block access to that service, you are actively trying to kill them. This is, just as with the AIDs epidemic, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group, in whole or in part. It is also, causing severe bodily or mental harm to members of the group, which is another way in which genocide can be committed. Florida even went so far as to pass a bill, SB 254, banning gender affirming care for minors. They call it child abuse, and will take children away from their parents if the parents try and get the GAC. This is “transferring children of the group to another group” which is a third way in which the US government is committing a trans genocide.
There are two more things I want to talk about today. First is detransitioning. There are some people who transition from one gender to another and then go back. Conservative talking heads would have you believe that there is a massive majority of trans people feeling this regret and returning to the gender they were assigned at birth. As with all things, they are lying to you.
The results published in the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that 8% of respondents reported having ever detransitioned; 62% of that group reported transitioning again and were living as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth at the time of the survey. About 36% reported having detransitioned due to pressure from parents, 33% because it was too difficult, 31% due to discrimination, 29% due to difficulty getting a job, 26% pressure from family members, 18% pressure from a spouse, and 17% due to pressure from an employer. There will certainly be some people who will transition and then find that they don’t actually identify with the gender they transitioned to, but that’s a fantastically small number, and while those people deserve our empathy and support, they are not representative of the overall trans community.
Also it should be noted that you don’t have to medically or physically transition to be trans. Many people do this because of gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia. But surgery and/or hormones are not requirements for being trans. I’m technically trans, as I identify with a gender other than the one I was assigned at birth, but I have no intentions of taking hormones or having surgery. I’m just gonna hit the gym and get big muscles.
The last thing I want to cover is the epidemic of transphobia that infects this country, and in the present day nothing exemplifies that more than the tragic death of Nex Benedict and the inattentiveness and inaction of her school in protecting her. New was a 16 year old non binary youth attending Owasso High School in Oklahoma. After a year of bullying over her gender identity Nex was attacked by 6 girls in the bathroom. They beat her into unconsciousness. Instead of calling the police or an ambulance, the school called Nex’s mother Sue and told her that Nex was suspended for two weeks. Nex was examined by hospital staff, spoke with police, and then was discharged. They went to bed complaining of a sore head. The next day, when getting ready to go with their mother to Tulsa, Nex collapsed and had stopped breathing before the ambulance arrived. The Medical Examiner eventually ruled Nex’s death a suicide caused by Benedryl and Prozac, stating that it had nothing to do with the beating Nex received from students at their school.
I think that’s bullshit. I have nothing more to say on that other than Fuck Oklahoma and Fuck the Owasso Public School Disctict.
That’s it for today dear listeners. Stay angry, stay safe. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Stick around for the outro.
We’ve got some more reviews over the past week. Some of them aren’t technically reviews. Spotify apparently has a Q&A feature, and defaults to “What did you think of this episode?” so I’m going to read those too.
*Read Reviews*
Jo, thank you so much for being here today and for providing your valuable insight and knowledge. Do you have any projects that you’d like to plug before we sign off?
Alright, that brings us right up to the end.
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. PLease remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day and remember, Trans Rights are Human Rights.
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Content warning for discussions of antisemitism and genocide.
Also, note that from 19:10 until 20:05 you can hear an electric saw in the background. Nothing I can do about that.
Episode music can be found here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time
Day 2 will dive deeply into the historic context of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and the Gazan Genocide. Starting 3700 years ago this episode will hit the major beats of the story and attempt to make everything a little bit clearer, if not really easier to understand.
Episode transcript follows:
Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome to Day 2 of Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard. Thank you for everyone who tuned in for Day 1 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. Today we’re going to be discussing the Gazan Genocide, what is often called, in mainstream, Western, media the Israel-Palestine Conflict. However, we’re not going to be starting in 2023, we’re not even going to be starting in 1948. To the best of my abilities we are going to drill into the historic context of this genocide and the ongoing historic and ethnic tensions that exist in the region.
Before we start with that context I would like to state for the record that what is being done to the people of Gaza is, unequivocally, a genocide.
Now, to find the beginning of this we are going to have to go back about 3700 years to the Levantine region. The regions known as the Levant is comprised of the modern nations of Cyprus, parts of Turkey southwest of the Euphrates, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and of course Israel and Palestine. Both historical record and genetic testing of modern Jewish and Palestinian people show them both being descended from ancient Canaanite cultures. While Biblical narratives show the Israelites entering the region from Egypt and conquering the region under the command of Moses' successor Joshua. Modern archeology and the historical view has, however, discounted this. The Bible is not and should not ever be used as a valid historical source. Indeed, modern archeology and historical research shows that the Jewish ethnicity emerged naturally as an offshoot of the Canaanites in much the same way that the Palestinian ethnicity did.
It is also interesting to note that historically, Palestine appears to have been a name for a region and not a distinct nation or kingdom. Indeed, during the seventh century BC, no fewer than eight nations were settled in Palestine. These included the Arameans of the kingdom of Geshur; the Samaritans who replaced the Israelite kingdom in Samaria; the Phoenicians in the northern cities and parts of Galilee; the Philistines in the Philistine pentapolis; the three kingdoms of the Transjordan– Ammon, Moab and Edom; and the Judaeans of Kingdom of Judah. The first written record of the region being called Palestine, by the way, comes from 12th century BCE Egypt, which used the term Peleset for the area.
Around 720 BCE, Kingdom of Israel was destroyed when it was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which came to dominate the ancient Near East. Under the Assyrian resettlement policy, a significant portion of the northern Israelite population was exiled to Mesopotamia and replaced by immigrants from the same region. During the same period, and throughout the 7th century BCE, the Kingdom of Judah, experienced a period of economic, as well as population growth. Later in the same century, the Assyrians were defeated by the rising Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Judah became its vassal. In 587 BCE, following a revolt in Judah, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II besieged and destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, putting an end to the kingdom. The majority of Jerusalem's residents, including the kingdom's elite, were exiled to Babylon. This marks the first historic diaspora of Jewish people from their indigenous homeland.
Jewish people in the region enjoyed a brief period of political independence and national sovereignty following the Maccabean Revolt. This would only last for a few brief decades before the area would be conquered by the Romans. During the first Roman-Jewish War Jerusalem and the Second Temple, which has been built back in about 516 BCE were both destroyed. From that point on Roman rule would crack down even harder on Jewish people living in the empire. Many of these tensions were caused by the cultural and religions differences between the Romans and Jewish people. Their refusal to worship Roman gods and their refusal to venerate the emperor made them perpetual pariahs.
Jewish communities would continue to resist Roman rule and oppression and this resistance would come to a violent head in events like the Kitos War and the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The Bar Kokhba revolt, led by Simon Bar Kokhba was certainly influenced by the Romans building a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount after the destruction of the Second Temple. The revolt, as with the First and Second Roman-Jewish Wars was a complete military defeat for the Jewish people. The Jewish Talmud relates that, when the fortress of Betar was besieged in 135 CE that the Romans went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood up to their nostrils.
This revolt would result in Judea being literally wiped off the map. And I mean that quite literally, while the Jewish population was greatly reduced from the area, both by slaughter at the hands of the Romans and because many people were forced from the region, there was still and there has always been a Jewish population in the Levant. But any Roman map from after the Bar Kokhba Revolt would now show the region labeled as Syria Palestina.
The Diaspora of Jewish people from Israel and Judea would result in Jewish populations congregating all around Eurasia. Jewish communities would settle near the Rhine, eventually collating into the Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity. Jewish communities would settle on the Iberian Peninsula and in Northern Africa collating into the Sephardi Jewish ethnicity. Jewish communities would also remain in the Middle East, in Syria Palestina (though they were forbidden by the Romans to live in Jerusalem) and collate into the Mizrahim Jewish ethnicity. There are also smaller Jewish ethnicities like the Bene Israel from India and the Beta Israel from Ethiopia.
One of the conclusions that is important to take away at this point is that both Palestinians and Jewish people, Judaism being both a religion and an ethnicity, are indigenous to the lands of Israel and Palestine. I don’t really care if you favor a one state or two state solution, but the fact of their mutual indigineousness is undeniable.
Now, at this point we’re going to take a huge jump forward in time to 1516 when Syria Palestina falls under Ottoman rule. As many ethnically Palestinian people had converted to Islam following the Islamic Conquests of the Middle East in the 7th century CE they were largely seen as good Ottoman citizens and interfered with very little. Jewish people, on the other hand, because they were not followers of Islam found themselves living under the dhimmi system. This was a common system under Muslim empires that allowed people to practice other religions, but with limited rights and at the cost of increased taxes.
Some of the restrictions placed on Dhimmi were: In addition to other legal limitations, dhimmis were not considered equals to Muslims, despite being considered “people of the book” Their testimony against Muslims was inadmissible in courts of law wherein a Muslim could be punished; this meant that their testimony could only be considered in commercial cases. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses and camels, and their houses could not overlook those of Muslims. All that being said, the lives of Jewish people in the Ottoman Empire were still demonstrably better than those of Jewish communities living in Europe and they were much more freely able to practice their religion.
We’re going to jump ahead again to the First Aliyah which took place between 1881 and 1903. Aliyah is a Hebrew word meaning “ascent”. There have been five “official” Aliyah throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. These Aliyah are periods of increased Jewish immigration to their ancestral homeland. This First Aliyah saw Jewish people, mostly from Eastern Europe and Yeman move to Ottoman Palestine because of an increased number of pogroms. Most of the Jewish people from Eastern Europe came from the Pale of Settlement and by 1903, saw about 25,000 Jewish people immigrate. This period also saw many thousands of Jewish people immigrate to the US in order to escape the ever increasing amounts of antisemitic violence around Europe.
This First Aliyah also marks, more or less, the beginning of the Zionist movement. Political Zionism as a movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century. He saw antisemitism and antisemitic violence as an indelible part of any society in which Jewish people lived as minorities. He also believed that the only way a Jewish State could be established would be with the help of European powers. He also described the Jewish State as an outpost of civilization against Barbarism and compared himself to Cecil Rhodes. So, safe to say that Herzl was not a man with good intentions for the people that would become his neighbors.
Throughout the first decade of the Zionist movement, there were several instances where some Zionist figures, including Herzl, supported a Jewish state in places outside Palestine, such as "Uganda" (actually parts of British East Africa today in Kenya), Argentina, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Mozambique, and the Sinai Peninsula.] Herzl, was initially content with any Jewish self-governed state. Jewish settlement of Argentina was the project of Maurice de Hirsch. It is unclear if Herzl seriously considered this alternative plan, and he later reaffirmed that Palestine would have greater attraction because of the historic ties of Jewish people to that area.
This, as it was always going to, brings us to the Balfour Declaration. As soon as World War I began the Great Powers of Europe began deciding how they were going to carve up the Ottoman Empire, the Sick Man of Europe, like a Thanksgiving turkey. The Balfour Declaration was part of this planning. The declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 stating their support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
The entire Declaration reads as follows: His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
They clearly failed in all regards of their declaration after the first statement.
The end of World War I saw the League of Nations place Palestine under British colonial control, leading to the creation of Mandatory Palestine in 1920, with the League officially giving Britain a Class A mandate in 1922. Britain was originally supposed to guarantee Arab independence following the defeat of the Ottomans in exchange for the Great Arab Revolt that took place against Ottoman rule. The creation of Mandatory Palestine and the existence of the Balfour declaration was partially responsible for Jewish immigration over the next 30 years.
As Jewish immigration increased, Palestinian peasants, known as fellahin (fellahin were often tenant farmers or other such peoples who didn’t own the land they worked) were forced off the land they worked to survive. These tensions would result in small-scale conflicts between Jewish and Arab people living in Mandatory Palestine, though the first conflict of real historic note would be the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936. The revolt lasted until 1939. It was a popular uprising of Palestinian Arabs that demanded Arab independence and and end to open-ended Jewish immigration to Palestine. The revolt eventually ended with the issuance of the White Paper in 1939. The White Paper was going to attempt to create a national home for the Jewish people within an independent Palestine within 10 years. However this proposal was rejected by both the Arab and Zionist sides of the negotiation.
Before the White Paper, and before the massive violence of the Great Revolt was an Arab General strike that lasted for 6 months in order to try and get their voices heard. This led to the creation of the Peel Commission, which recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. This plan was, like the White Paper that would come after it, rejected by both sides.
Of force everything would change after World War 2. After the war the British Mandate for Palestine was dissolved and the Israeli Declaration of Independence was issued later that same day. This declaration came as part of the UN partition plan which was outlined in UN Resolution 181 (II). The Resolution set forth to create an Independent Jewish State, an Independent Arab State and a Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem.
This UN Resolution came during the context of the 1947 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine which began after the UN initially voted on the partition plan resolution. This war would have far reaching consequences for everyone in the region and would lead to events like the Nakba and the Israeli government initiating Plan Dalet.
Nakba, an Arabic word meaning Catastrophe, refers to the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes following the 1947 Civil War and the broader 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Some 750,000 Palestinian people were forced to flee their homes and their country after the First Arab Israeli War saw Israel in control of all of the land the UN had granted them in the partition plan as well as roughly 60% of the land that was to be Palestine. Causes of Arab flight from Palestine include: Jewish military advances, destruction of Arab villages, psychological warfare and fears of another massacre by Zionist militias after the Deir Yassin massacre, which caused many to leave out of panic; direct expulsion orders by Israeli authorities; the voluntary self-removal of the wealthier classes; collapse in Palestinian leadership and Arab evacuation orders.
This period of time would also see many thousands of Jewish people expelled from the surrounding Muslim countries. As you might expect the majority of those people would move to Israel.
While we can see that tensions in the region and Zionist abuses of Palestinian people existed before this point, if we HAD to point to a single moment that defined the entire conflict, ethnic cleansing, and genocide it would be this moment.
Following the flight of the majority of the Palestinians from Palestine, Israel passed a number of laws, known as Israel land and property laws, disallowing the Palestinians their right to return to their homes in Palestine. Wars would continue over the decades, but the point at which things start to get particularly heinous comes at the end of the Six Day War, also known as the Arab Israeli War. Following this war, which Israel fought against Syria, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq, Israel now had control of the Golan Heights, The West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula leaving very little land still under Palestinian sovereign control.
Israel would eventually cede the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in 1978 as part of the Camp David Accords in exchange for peace and Egyptian recognition of the State of Israel. They retained control over the rest of the territories they had seized.
The actions of Israel during this time put increasing strain on Palestinians as more and more of them were forced into refugee camps, and while Gaza is technically under the control of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Hamas and the West Bank is under the partial control of the Palestinian National Authority both still find themselves heavily under the control of the Israeli government and military. Especially since October of 2023.
Human Rights Watch, a non-government organization, considers Israel to still be an invading and occupying force in these two Palestinian regions. The two of which are separated from each other by the nation of Israel.
“Even though Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and settlements from Gaza in 2005, it continues to have obligations as an occupying power in Gaza under the Fourth Geneva Convention because of its almost complete control over Gaza’s borders, sea and air space, tax revenue, utilities, population registry, and the internal economy of Gaza. At a minimum, Israel continues to be responsible for the basic welfare of the Palestinian population in Gaza.”
We actually have to backtrack a little bit here before we can finally catch up to the modern day. We need to pop back to 1987, the First Intifada, and the creation of Hamas.
The First Intifada lasted from December 1987 until, basically the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, although some date the end in 1991 with the Madrid Conference. The Intifafa, or Uprising, was a sustained series of protests, strikes, and riots that began after an IDF truck hit another car carrying Palestinian workers, all four of whom died in the crash.
Now, where does Hamas come into this, well in the long history of the Western world, they were created by the people they now fight against. Hamas, in the beginning of its existence, received funding from the Israeli government to act as a counterweight against the more moderate elements of the PLO. Israel would then turn around and try and destroy Hamas when they started to get too powerful.
It was Hamas who was behind the October 7th Attacks on Israel. Hamas, by the way, has been the defacto ruling party of Gaza since 2007. Hamas said its attack was in response to the continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, rising Israeli settler violence, and recent escalations.
The attack on October 7th began with some 300 missiles being fired into Israeli territory along with coordinated attacks at locations and events like the Re’im Music Festival and various kibbutz’s such as Kfar Aza and Be’eri. The attack lasted into the 8th of October and saw 1,143 people killed, 767 of whom were civilians and 36 of whom were children. Also roughly 250 civilians and soldiers were taken hostage with the intent of using them to try and secure the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. It does bear mentioning that Israel has knowledge of such an attack a year in advance, according to the New York Times, but dismissed it as impossible.
Since this attack by Hamas Israel has been increasing the violence and slaughter that it is committing against the Palestinian people. In the name of their alleged war with Hamas Israel has forced the people of Gaza to move farther and farther to the south as they bombed the northern part of the Strip to glass. Today most of the surviving population of Gaza, some 1.5 million people are forced to live in the city of Rafah, a city that they were told they’d be safe in. They is no longer the case as Israel is now bombing Rafah as well.
Israel has also been blockading Gaza since 2007 and, effectively, has complete control over the food, water, electricity, and medicine that gets into Gaza. Part of this control comes from the fact that Israel keeps bombing hospitals, like they did with Al Shifa in November of 2023. Israel claims that Hamas was using the hospital as a staging ground, despite this being proven false by independent investigations.
We know from our previous video that genocide isn’t just the mass slaughter of a particular group of people. It is also inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part. By this definition, concentrating 1.5 million people into a small area without adequate food, water, or medicine, and then bombing that area demonstrates clear intent to destroy.
An even more clear example of this intent was the Flour Massacre that occurred on February 29, 2024. On that day Israel let food aid into Gaza after over a month of not letting anything through their blockade. When people lined up to receive this aid, the Israeli military shot them. The Israeli military set a deliberate trap to lure in starving civilians and then shot and killed over 100 people.
We also have massive amounts of intent demonstrated in the words of members of the Israeli government. Such as with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called the people of Gaza Human Animals and said that they would allow no food or water to get in. Or when Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister said they’d turn Gaza into a deserted island.
There can be no denying the genocide in Gaza. None whatsoever. The actions of the Israeli government are inexcusable and must be condemned with all possible haste. We are in the midst of a genocide, and so if you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during something like the Holocaust, now you know. Whatever you’re doing now, is what you would have done then.
Hopefully what we covered today will provide some needed context for everything that is going on right now. I don’t know if it will make anything clearer, and I doubt it will provide you with any solutions, but just because you learn information doesn’t mean you can necessarily apply it.
Thank you for joining me for Day 2. This was a very heavy topic and next week will not get any lighter. Next week we will be diving into the history and context of the ongoing trans genocide that is currently ongoing in the United States.
Last thing we're gonna do today before we do is the outro is read some reviews that came in on Apple Podcasts over the week. I say over the week, all three of these came in on the 21st. 2 of them came from Canada!
And now my notes say “read the reviews* Oh… wait, that was something i was supposed to DO. Not an actual sentence i was supposed to read. I hope i remember to edit this out…
Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. PLease remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day and Free Palestine.
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Content warning for discussion of genocide.
Welcome to the first spisode of Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard. This episode will discuss the early days of the field of genocide, the process by which it became a crime undernational law, the life of Raphael Lemkin, in brief, and the first time a country was charged with this crime above all crimes
Intro and outro music linked here: https://uppbeat.io/track/paulo-kalazzi/heros-time
Episode Transcript to Follow:
Hey, Hi, Hello. This is The History Wizard and thank you for joining me for the flagship episode of “Have a Day w/ The History Wizard”. As we embark on this journey together we’re going to be talking about History, Politics, Economics, Cartoons, Video Games, Comics, and the points at which all of these topics intersect.
Anyone who has been following me one Tiktok or Instagram, @thehistorywizard on Tiktok and @the_history_wizard on Instagram, for any length of time. Literally any length of time at all, will probably be familiar with some, if not all, of the information we’re going to learn today. However, I hope that you’ll bear with me as it is important to, before we dive into the meat of the matter, make sure we’ve got some bones to wrap it around… Yes, that is the metaphor I’m going to go with. I wrote it down in my script, read it, decided I liked it, and now you all have to listen to it.
For our first episode we are going to be diving into one of my favorite parts of my field of expertise, meta knowledge concerning the field of genocide studies itself. Yes, that’s right. We’re going to start with the definition of genocide.
The United Nations established the legal definition of genocide in the Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, which was unanimously adopted by the 51 founding members of the UN in the third meeting of the General Assemble and came into full legal force in 1951 after the 20th nation ratified it. This, by the way, is why none of the Nazis in the Nuremberg Trial were charged with the crime of genocide. The crime didn’t exist when they were on trial. But, to return to the matter at hand, the definition of genocide can be found in Article 2 of the Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide and reads as follows:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.It is important to note that definition of genocide that the UN adopted is not exactly the same as the definition that Lemkin first proposed to the UN. His definition included economic classes, as well as political parties. There was, significant, pushback against the inclusion of those two categories from the US and the USSR as both nations feared that their many of their own actions could be considered genocide. Lemkin didn’t fight too hard for those categories to stay in the definition, he was more concerned with ethnicity, nationality, race, and religion for, what he called, their cultural carrying capacity.
Now, despite Lemkin’s concern over the destruction of cultures, there is no strict legal definition of cultural genocide. The inclusion of Article 2, subsection E: Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, could be seen as a nod to this idea, but it’s not nearly enough. There was some effort to rectify this oversight in 2007 with the passage of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that indigenous peoples have a right against forcible assimilation. But even that is barely a step in the right direction as the UN DRIP is a legally non binding resolution making it little better than a suggestion.
Now, where did the word genocide come from? Who made it and why? The term genocide was the brain child of a Polish-Jewish lawyer and Holocaust survivor named Raphael Lemkin. Now, despite Lemkin being a Holocaust survivor and term not gaining legal recognition until 1948, Lemkin actually based his work on the Armenian Genocide, what he originally called The Crime of Barbarity. Fun fact about Lemkin, he spoke 9 languages and could read 14.
Anyway, after reading about the assassination of Talat Pasha in 1921. Talat was assassinated by Soghomon Telhirian as part of Operation Nemesis (he was put on trial for the assassination and was acquitted) After reading about the assassination Lemkin asked one of his professors at Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv) why Talat was unable to be tried for his crimes before a court of law. The professor replied thusly: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them, and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." Lemkin replied, "But the Armenians are not chickens". His eventual conclusion was that "Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people"
In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. This is where the world would first encounter the word “genocide” a word that Lemkin had created by combining the Greek root ‘genos’ meaning race or tribe, with the Latin root ‘cide’ meaning killing.
Lemkin was as a private solicitor in Warsaw in 1939 and fled as soon as he could. He managed to escape through Lithuania to Sweden where he taught at the University of Stockholm until he was, with the help of a friend, a Duke University law professor named Malcolm McDermott Lemkin was able to flee to the US. Unfortunately for Lemkin he lost 49 member of his family to the Holocaust. The only family that survived was his brother, Elias and his wife who had both been sent to a Soviet forced labor camp. Lemkin was able to help them both relocate to Montreal in 1948.
After publishing his iconic book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” with the help of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Lemkin became an advisor for chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, Robert H. Jackson. It was during these trials that he became convinced, more than ever before, that this crime above all crimes needed a name and laws to prevent and punish it.
Even after the passage of the Convention for the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide Lemkin didn’t consider his work to be over. The UN was brand new and had little in the way of real authority (something that hasn’t changed over the past 70 years). So Lemkin traveled around to world trying to get national governments to adopt genocide laws into their own body of laws. He worked with a team of lawyers from Arabic delegations to try and get France tried for genocide for their conduct in Algeria and wrote an article in 1953 on the “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine” what we know as the Holodomor, though Lemkin never used that term in his article.
Lemkin lived the last years of his life in poverty in New York city. He died in 1959 of a heart attack, and his funeral, which occurred at Riverside Church in Manhattan, was attended by only a small number of his close friends. Lemkin is buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens.
The last thing I want to discuss in our first episode is the first country to be charged with the crime of genocide before the United Nations. As we have already established, despite the Holocaust being the western world’s premiere example of genocide, no one at the Nuremberg Trials was tried for the crime of genocide. So who, I can hear you asking from the future, who was the first country charged with genocide?
Why, dear listener, it was none other than the U S of A in a 1951 paper titled “We Charge Genocide, which was presented before the United Nations in Paris in 1951.
The document pointed out that the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defined genocide as any acts committed with "intent to destroy" a group, "in whole or in part." To build its case for black genocide, the document cited many instances of lynching in the United States, as well as legal discrimination, disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, a series of incidents of police brutality dating to the present, and systematic inequalities in health and quality of life. The central argument: The U.S. government is both complicit with and responsible for a genocidal situation based on the UN's own definition of genocide.
The paper was supported by the American Communist Party and was signed by many famous personages such as:
W. E. B. Du Bois, George W. Crockett, Jr., Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Ferdinand Smith, Oakley C. Johnson, Aubrey Grossman, Claudia Jones, Rosalie McGee, Josephine Grayson, Amy and Doris Mallard, Paul Washington, Wesley R. Wells, Horace Wilson, James Thorpe, Collis English, Ralph Cooper, Leon Josephson, and William Patterson. It was Patterson who presented the paper and the signatures before the UN in 1951. The UN largely ignored Patterson and never deigned to hear his case against the US government. And upon his return journey Patterson was detained while passing through Britain and had his passport seized once he returned to the US. He was forbade to ever travel out of the country again.
The history of the field of genocide studies is long, unfortunately, far longer than the existence of a word with a legal definition and laws to back it up. We’ll be going through the history of genocide in future episode, interspersed with other historical events or pressing issues of great import as we take this educational journey together. I’m going to try and put an episode together once a week, and if that needs to change for any reason I will let you know. Next week, on March 26th, we’ll be learning about the Gazan genocide and the vast amount of historical context that goes into this, currently occurring, genocide.
I’ve been the History Wizard. You can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard. You can find me on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Have a Day w/ The History Wizard can be found anywhere pods are cast. If you cannot find it on your podcatcher or choice, let me know and I will try and do something about it. Tune in next week for more depressing, but very necessary information and remember… Have a Day!
