Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 330 - The Rwandan Genocide: Part 4

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Like what we do? Consider supporting us on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Grab tickets to our live show in Belfast: https://www.universe.com/events/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-belfast-tickets-83V5QD Can't make it to Belfast? We're streaming it! Get your stream tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-live-in-belfast-tickets-1008166803047 The Conclusion to the Rwandan Genocide series. sources used for this series: Scott Straus. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda Scott Straus. Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention Scott Straus. Rwanda, RTLM, and Mass Media Effects. Jean Hatzfeld. Machete Season. Philip Gourevitch. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Alison Des Forges. Leave None to Tell The Story: Genocide In Rwanda. Roméo Dallaire. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Case Files. https://unictr.irmct.org/en/cases

Hello Lions led by donkeys fans Just a heads up if you're interested in attending our Belfast show on October 26th But are not on this side of the Atlantic or anywhere close to it We wanted to present another option, which is live streaming The venue has a live stream setup and we have a ticketed event set up now as well where you can watch the show Live from wherever you are in the world. Check the link in the show notes. It's got all the information you need about how to get a ticket and also the time zone information which is obviously very important. Once again that is Saturday the 26th

of October in Belfast. So British summertime GMT plus one at 8 p.m. And if you click the link in the show notes you can find all the information that you need if you are interested. Anyway, thanks for being a Lions fan and we hope you enjoy this episode. Hey everyone! Welcome back to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. With me in the London studio on the other side of the ocean is Tom and Nate. Fellas, we're about to enter another cave of misery.

How you doing? It's pretty, pretty generous of you to call the English channel, the ocean. But I mean, I guess technically it's part of the Atlantic. I don't recognize the English channel. When we flew down, it was just very funny because the flight time was like 50 minutes from London city to Rotterdam. And it's like 50 miles to the coast, 50 miles across the channel to Rotterdam, across the to the hook of Holland.

And then you're there. And I was just like, this is three hours on the train. This is like 12 hours by car. Man, birds must think we're complete idiots. I will not be judged by a bird. All right. I watched a seagull the other day nearly die because it attempted to eat an entire corn dog with the stick still attached to it. You can't judge me, You feathery fucks. The seagulls in Dublin are like famously so aggressive and like it's always funny every year when Americans come over and they're like, Oh, Oh, I got my chips in Dublin. And

then it's just immediately stolen by a seagull. Same here. Same here. I've seen a seagull swoop down and take a chicken filler, a full chicken filler roll out of someone's hands and just fly away. So my mom is in town visiting me. That's my good thing for the part of this episode because my mom hasn't really ever left the United States. Yeah. Yeah.

She had to get a passport specifically to come and visit me. It's crazy. Yeah. My family's gone through some hard times this year. So it's like, I know the last two it's you know nice to see my family. My mom is pretty much all that remains of it other than my sister, but she's getting to experience the wonders that is the Netherlands, and we're walking down by the beach because the weather was very nice yesterday, and there's so many

anybody who's been to the beach in the Netherlands know there's a fuckload of seagulls here, and they're there, militant. And there was a little Dutch kid, like six, seven years old, carrying one of those, you know, servings of fries, the mayo on top that you can buy for like six euro or whatever, walking back to his parents and just vanished in a cloud of seagulls. And I was like, I had like, you hear this child screaming and seagulls swirling around them and like a torrent of birds. And then the seagulls take off and the whole thing of fries paper and all is missing.

But the kid is untouched. See, this is why it's so good that Berlin's an inland city because imagine the amount of techno twinks that would be stolen by seagulls if it wasn't. I was going to say, like, a lot of people would starve to death because their post-rave, you know, donor box would just get completely obliterated. We would find out how many poppers a seagull can do though. No, that's a ketamine donor. You don't want it.

Seagull, no! Bird's just lying on the ground trying to flap its wings. Can't lift. Upside down. What I was going to say is, I don't know if you've seen this before and I don't want to recount the full sort of like lifespan of a meme, but there was a story in the Daily Mail about some guy who looked like the real life version of the Baz meme, who was like this disgusting man kills a seagull for stealing his chips.

And it was just like, this guy, I don't know how he did it, I think he may just grabbed it by the neck and broken his neck or something, but someone then of course had to do the full Baz art of the guy, but in the outfit that the photo of the guy was wearing, I said, so shouldn't have nicked me chips, simple ass. That Dutch kid could have learned from this guy.

He shouldn't have nicked my chips. Yeah, that kid's gonna carry some trauma with the rest of his life that is strictly bird related. Like he is who directed the movie, the birds can't remember his name. Alfred. Yeah. It was like the Dutch version of Hitchcock child. Yeah. Shelly Duval was a Dutch child. Yeah. Since the Seagulls are getting so aggressive now we're have to rebranding the nation's favorite hobby of bird watching. We're going to change it to bars watching. We're just going to go to the pulp around the corner of birdwatching. We're going to change it to bars watching We're just gonna go to the pulp around the corner from Nate's house

It's hot weather lately. I've been seeing a lot of St. George's cross tattoos on bald heads Oh, you might want to go seagull punching. Yeah, that's like I don't even know what that accent was I can't do accents. I'm not good at it I know as the Dutch person who heckled me in our Netherlands live show could attest I'm not good at accents. No, that's why you have me on the sure about that Are you fucking sure about that buddy? Here's Canadian a Dutch person was Canadian. It's all just Sean Connery I could only do Sean Connery Yeah, well, I mean I know we have to talk about a serious subject again

So, you know, we have to have our levity corner here for a couple of minutes. And then we're like, all right, put on our serious hats. Do the thing where your eyes are held open like a clockwork orange and stare. I feel like this is the one series that no one's going to be angry about our intros. Mm hmm. Oh, fucking do not get ahead of yourself. That's true. That's true. I mean, someone did just snap the sign off of the front of the studio chuck it under the sidewalk Maybe some people are madness your ops are everywhere

I made a comment to Joe that Joe thought that it was gonna be it's because of led by donkeys the stupid FBP if it's supposed to stand it's a stupid hashtag thing from Twitter that they're like, oh, it's follow back pro Europe's fuck Brexit Pro Europe. It's a bunch of the most annoying people on the planet. And led by donkeys is basically a sort of like annoying performance art slash pod. I'm not even that they do a podcast. I've heard they do a podcast that goes around doing annoying things about Brexit. Like the most cringe like your dad thinks this is funny in a very, very specifically very southern English way of like the dumbest irony shit you can imagine. Imagine the shittest version of Marina Abramovich performance but it's like

from a dude who is from Kent and has like probably enough family wealth to be a Tory but like is principled. If someone did this to Republicans in the US my mom would find it hilarious. I don't see any problem with it. It just wasn't us. It wasn't us. British listeners will remember when the guy, the people about the Sue, Sue, you're shouting at tea or whatever thing on Twitter and like, it would be so lib and annoying. And then like a guy like literally wrote a song within 24 hours. And it was just like, that is the ethos of led by donkey. So unfortunately they share three words of our name. According to the Internet, I was curious. I looked it up. We started first.

Yeah, exactly. So fucking get a new name. You the change by the way, you're the one that sucks. Yeah. Anyway, so because they recently did some stupid stunt with Liz Truss, with like a cabbage at the time of recording, because this is coming out significantly beyond that. But yeah, it was like two days ago when we're recording. a cabbage at the time of recording because this is coming out significantly beyond that. But yeah, it was like two days ago when we're recording. Yeah. And basically Joe's theory was that one of the 10,000 Brits in the Hague saw the

sign and just assumed it was the same. It was like, fuck you. How dare you insult Liz Trust. She was the best prime minister we ever had for 44 days. But my theory is actually that that was a much more clever op who waited for this opportunity for a cover story because he wanted revenge for us saying that Bernard Montgomery was a pervert. Yeah, like, led by donkeys for American listeners is essentially the British equivalent of Podsave America. Yeah, fair point. Yeah. Well, no, I would say the Romanian slash whatever the fuck they call themselves now, but it's in that vein yeah, if my mom was British she would find them funny that's the kind of person

I mean I don't see anything wrong with that My main contention is someone who does not live in the UK and this does not give a single solitary fuck about British politics Is we did not prank the former Prime Minister. I'm not saying we wouldn't. I'm just saying we didn't. Leave us alone. If we did it, it would be funnier. If we did it, it would make reference to her wearing, disappearing, go to like a bondage convention in the middle of an economic crisis or running up a 20,000 pound bill for like soiled bathrobes somehow. These are all indisputable things. Or it'd be me like rocking up dressed like a fucking archaic Megatron made by York automatons.

Be shit in robes, dog. Or be making a joke about the fact that Liz Truss started her career trying to be a liberal Democrat in the 90s on a specifically Republican, which in the UK means anti-monarchist, let's not have a monarchy as part of the government, platform. And though she became a Tory which implies monarchism She managed to achieve her initial dream by killing the Queen Okay, fuck me with that fellas we have to do this time to yoke Ariums now Oh, fuck you don't ever use that expression around me Whatever that is sounds sticky

We are on part four the conclusion of our series on the Rwandan genocide. And when we left you last time, a lot of really bad stuff happened. Go back and listen to the series in order you monster. To be specific, Rwandan Tutsis were discovering the impotence of the international forces in their country under the banner of UNAMIR, or the UN forces in Rwanda. They had all but abandoned them to their fate at the hands of UNAMIR or the UN forces in Rwanda. They had all but abandoned them to their fate at the hands of the Hutu death squads. But at the end of the last episode I told you we were going to explore the international diplomatic community and what exactly they were

doing as word of this genocide leaked out into the outside world. And I need to start off here by immediately discounting the theory that people were unaware of what was happening. Everybody knew what was happening. It was not a thing of scope or a surprise issue. Remember, we've talked about that General Romeo D'Alier, the commander of Unamir, had told them ahead of time what was going to happen due to it being leaked outside of the UN structure, journalists and non-insane members of the Catholic clergy were reporting what was going on boldly and consistently as a genocide since day one. There is no question that everyone in every hall of power knew what was happening in depth and in detail and there's no point of debating this

I love that a we just have like an international Association of ghouls Doing nothing in the face of like an absolute atrocity something that will never happen again Oh, just wait until I hear what what I tell you what happens next because you can just copy and paste this into virtually any conflict after Rwanda to include some that have happened in the last couple of years and some that are happening as we are recording. Yep.

Now that we have settled that, we can move past the post-scriptum excuse that nations use today to explain their lack of response. So what was really going on behind closed doors? And this is the part of the... I have to unfortunately tell everybody that this part of the series is going to be a lot more abrupt than everyone probably hopes. Uhhh. In short, the UN issued stern warnings of concern, but did nothing. Refusing to call what was happening a genocide, along with every member of the UN Security Council. Bill Clinton's administration,

then president of the United States, put strict rules on public communications, forbidding the use of the word genocide. Instead, major powers of the world came together to threaten Rwanda with economic sanctions, which would have resulted in effectively a total embargo, though technically they were pretty much already under one. Even if it was being freely violated by specifically one member of the UN Security Council,

France, with help of our dear friend Victor Boone. But we will talk more about that in a little bit. Now, the reason for the UN doing this is very cut and dry for people who do not know. According to the UN Charter, the UN is compelled to stop genocides from happening with force. If something is labeled a genocide, the UN must act and intervene to stop it per law. Clearly, the UN was not going to do that, nor was anyone else. So they simply danced around the issue,

saying when describing what was happening in a bullet-pointed manner, running down like the checklist of things that make a genocide per the UN Charter definition, but then refusing to actually call it one. Or they would float the term ethnic cleansing. I need to be clear here when it comes to this word. It's not a thing. Ethnic cleansing does not have a legal definition, nor is it a crime under international law. It is a term that people use as a cop-out. And more specifically, it was invented as a defense of genocide.

So when you use the term ethnic cleansing, you are actually forgiving a genocide. I implore people to never use it. I have definitely used it in the series and I didn't realize that what you just described. I guess for me it's more like there is a, as you described, a legal threshold for what constitutes a genocide. And I have assumed, I suppose, that the term ethnic cleansing was basically describing something when that legal genocide threshold had not been met or had not been declared. I feel as though there's like this weird notion

that the only way you can call something a genocide is once it's been done and enough people have died. Yeah. And this isn't a knock on you. This is not a knock on you. A lot of people use this word without knowing it is nothing. I'm not like, oh no, I fucked up horribly. It's just more like the notion here is that for example, a lot of people would look at what happened in former Yugoslavia and say, okay, what happened in Srebrenica, what happened in garage day, what happened in a number of the safe areas. Okay, that's a genocide, but like Serb militias forcing Bosnians or Croatians

out or Croatians forcing Serbs out or whatever. That's ethnic cleansing. That's ethnic violence. That's civil war. You know what I mean? Well, that is where the term originated from. And it was a term that was originated by the genocide heirs. What I'm trying to say is I don't want to defend that. I'm just saying that I suppose I have through my lifetime absorbed that notion that there's war and then genocide is like a step up in severity. Oh, you're not alone in that. I think that I think it's fair to say that's a general belief. And that's why I brought it up. To make a long story short, what makes a genocide is not body

count. It is not implementation. It is not how it ends. It is intent. You do not have to kill anyone in order to make a genocide a thing. You have to intend to do X, Y, and Z. You don't have to be successful. If you kill five people through your actions during what is intended to be a genocide, it is still a genocide. It's kind of like the creation of a structured violence targeted towards a specific group rather than the actual act. Is that correct? Not necessarily. Okay. It's like what makes murder, murder and what makes, you know, for instance, mass violence without the intent to wipe out a population. If you don't have

the intent, it's not a genocide. Just like if you kill someone and you don't mean to, it's not murder normally, it's manslaughter, right? But then also it feels like in journalism and colloquial speech, in everyday speech, people only use the term genocide to describe sort of ex post facto huge mass slaughters with genocidal intent, like the Holocaust, like the Armenian genocide, like the genocide of Native Americans or indigenous people throughout the Armenian genocide like the genocide of Native Americans or Indigenous people throughout the world throughout the Americas things like this and it's like right But it feels as though like there's a do like oh actually you're crying wolf

If you call an intended genocide that wasn't successful Genesis like right, but or you're hysterical or you're being hysterical Yeah, it's like I get that all the time as someone who says You're being hysterical. Yeah. It's like I get that all the time as someone who says Because one of the things that you learn through the field of genocide studies, which is both historic It's a mix of history and law kind of molded together is that people never attempt to be proactive even though this is like all emergencies all catastrophes you need to be proactive in order to stop them, is they're obsessed with only labeling things that are already done a genocide, rather than things that are ongoing that you can currently stop. And as what we just talked about,

you can see why it is in everybody, and by everybody I mean geopolitically, everybody's best interests to not label things that are currently ongoing as genocides because then they need to get involved and stop them. Either they're complicit or they're fucking lazy and the term genocide means you have legally you have to do something and everyone really likes to cling to this idea that like we're civilized because we've got all these important international norms we respect and it's like well do we? Everybody wants to say never never again until you have to put up or shut up. That's what it comes down to. Yeah.

The contemporary example around the debate, whether the famine and what happened in Ireland during the 1840s to 50s, whether that constitutes genocide or not. And it's a lot of academic hand wringing about establishing intent. And it was like, you look at all of the commentary that was happening in international press around the time, it's like, I feel like it's a fairly clean cut example of stuff that was being said in the House of Commons. I don't think that could be realistically debated with anybody in good faith at this point. Yeah.

Mike Davis's book, Late Victorian Holocaust. Which I am reading right now. Points this out too, that like, in the 1870s and 1880s, these mass famine events in colonized places in what is now the developing world, like, you know, particularly in the British colony of India, and at that time, which included what is now also Pakistan and Bangladesh, you know, like hundreds of thousands of people died. And then basically the British parliament was like, well, if we give them any kind of food aid, that just encourages them to be lazy and have more kids, it's better if they all

starve to death. Which was also what Winston Churchill said. During the World War I and II, it was an engineered famine. I don't know what else you can call a purposefully engineered famine other than a tool for destruction. That's exactly why the Holodomor is considered a genocide. Famine was also a part of many other genocides that were engineered. Famine was a tool used against the native populations in North America, both in the United States and Canada. It was a tool used during the Armenian genocide. It was a tool used during the Rohingya genocide, during the Yazidi genocides, because there was many of them. It's a

weapon. Also look at what the British did to the MoMo in Kenya in the 1950s. The thing is, people find it very easy, well, find it easier to label things post-scriptum as genocide. Because normally it's years after the fact, and any hints of stopping it, or any hints of having to hold anybody accountable, any hints of actually having to do any lifting that comes with the concepts of rehabilitation, justice are gone. They don't have to do anything anymore. So it's a lot easier to label these things or say recognize them a hundred years later, like for instance, the Armenian genocide,

then it is to do anything. It's really, really easy to label these things what they are years after the fact and they are to recognize what they are years after the fact, and they are to recognize what they are while they're ongoing. It's infuriating. I mean, a couple of years ago, wasn't that long ago, the Azeris invaded the Republic of Artsakh and completely drove out the indigenous Armenian population. What did the world do? Nothing. Strongly worded letters of concern. But then also continued to trade massively with Azerbaijan because they've got oil and money. Yep. Yep. It's as hopeless as the series is, is no matter how much you learn about these things, nobody gives a fuck. That's the fun part. Now, speaking of not giving a fuck.

Now, Europe was happy to stay out of this entire thing because this would turn into an actual no shit war. And the US, like we kind of pointed out in other episodes of the series, was just removed from the whole fuck up in Somalia. So they were not ready to even think about starting a new conflict in Africa. And one thing I'd point out about Somalia is this is not historically accurate, but the common perception in America was that the only reason the US got involved in Somalia was because either George H.W. Bush or Barbara Bush felt bad and said, we have to do something. And that led to the situation where the US was then basically taking sides, fighting one of or many of the factions in the Somali civil war, which,

if you remember, if you've seen Black Hawk Down or you read Mark Bowden's book, the mission on which 18 Rangers died and un-told probably thousands of Somalis was intended to deploy Rangers to fast rope down to try to arrest a Somali warlord. Muhammad Farah, I did. Yeah, exactly. And so it's like- It was a classic example of uncontrolled mission creep. Mission creep is the exact word I would use, yeah. Which I promise we will cover that at some point. I already have the resources for it.

And so the events in Black Hawk Down took place in 1993 and we are now in early 1994. It's very, very fresh. So that's not to exonerate Clinton at all. No. At all at all. Clinton is 100% complicit in this as is obviously not as complicit as say Francois Mitterrand, which we will get to in a second. Oh good old fucking Francois Mitterrand Don't you worry? He has done some shit

But I mean Clinton is as complicit as the rest of the international community not named France. France is very complicit Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean if you ever want want to see what Francois Mitterrand thought, go and Google... Oh, fuck me. There are some videos out there on YouTube of Francois Mitterrand and in the early 80s with Thomas Sankara, the leader of Burkina Faso. Mitterrand was also close friends with Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Empire. And Mitterrand, I would say that Mitterrand's attitude towards Sankara in those videos is worse than the famously bad speech that the King of Belgium gave when what is now the DRC obtained independence. Now Mitterrand is the first socialist president.

Well, he was from the French Socialist Party, but it doesn't quite translate the way that people would think. Mitterrand famously had three members of the French Communist Party as ministers in his government. He was the leftmost president. Greggen and Thatcher were like, are we going to have to invade France when he won the election in 1981? Genuinely.

But Mitterrand was a complete chauvinist in the classic French style And so I'm just saying you have to remember Mitterrand was president for back when the French presidential terms were seven years If I remember correctly Mitterrand was president for two full seven-year terms. I promise your opinion of Mitterrand is about to go down Fascinating guy, but here's what I'll say. I'll leave it. Just one brief moment of levity. Joe, do you know what a, what Ortolan is? Yes, I do.

Oh. So Ortolan, for those of you who don't know, is a kind of bunting. It's a kind of bird and it's a delicacy in Gascony, which is a region in France. And the way that it's made is basically that they capture these poor little birds and they blind them so they don't have the daily sunrise-sunset cycle to regulate how they eat. And they just eat constantly and fattened, get massively fattened. And then they basically pluck them and they drown them in cognac. So they inhale cognac and then they pluck them and roast them in butter. And the idea is that you eat them whole, bones, guts, everything.

There's this notion that when you eat it, you're supposed to cover your face with a napkin to kinda keep, the idea is more to keep the, A, to keep the sort of like flavors and smells in to appreciate them, but also because it's gross, you're gonna have shit all over your face. But the colloquial or sort of joke interpretation is actually what you're doing is so cruel to this poor little bird that you wanna hide

your sin from God. Mitterand's last meal was two Ortellon. One is considered fucking excessive, and man was like, no, I want two, I'm going to fucking, I'm going out like the truest Frenchman ever. I love it. Our moment of levity includes drowning a baby bird. Well, to be fair, I will say another funny story about Mitterrand is former Taoiseach of Ireland, Charles Hawley is alleged to have had an affair with his wife. Fred saw that Bitter Red was also accused of sharing sex workers with Bokassa of Central

African Republic. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh government was worried that, you know, the optics of this whole thing were bad. Oh yeah great fucking worry about the fucking optics while you're undertaking a genocide. Yeah that's fucking great. So far no attempt was made to hide what they're doing either the acts or the aftermath. Mobs of civilians, uniformed death squads of the government roamed the country, piles of dead bodies were left outside of checkpoints rotting in the street, not to mention the mass killings in churches and schools and whatnot.

And despite this being a government orchestrated campaign of genocide, it looked like an out-of-control orgy of violence. Because it was, two things can be true at the same time. And I don't want to make this sound like the government realized this was bad and should stop, but rather the genocide needed to change gears and become hidden. For a comparison sake, think of the Holocaust by bullets in the East during World War II, and the switch to using death camps. That's the easiest comparison I can think of. Instead of open wanton slaughter, it was decided to continue behind closed doors under the

guise of the thing that they've been talking about since before all this started, rooting out RPF infiltrators. This process is known as pacification. This quote is from Leave None to Tell the Story. On April 24th, administrative military militia leaders met to discuss measures to make the slaughter more circumspect. Prefect Runzaho, General Bizumungu of the army and Colonel Laurent Ritongisari of the national police and heads of the militia agreed that the bands of killers would end the slaughter at the barriers, the checkpoints, on the roads and they would

instead take the quote suspects to the appropriate authorities to have their cases, quote, investigated and decided. The militia would continue to search out, quote, infiltrated RPF elements, but would do so in a more orderly fashion than previously through, quote, crisis committees, a name echoing the military committee established by Baguassora on April 7th that, you know, began the whole thing. They also directed militia to allow staff and vehicles of the International Committee of the Red Cross to pass without hindrance because before this, there are multiple incidents that ICRC vehicles would be stopped and militias would take wounded people from the ambulance

and execute them in front of ICRC staff. They would stop doing that. The international protests that greeted such incidents illustrated just the kind of censure that the Rwandan authorities wanted to avoid. It's really interesting in the sense that like, you know, so much throughout the, I suppose, history of genocide is this kind of morbid sense of PR management while it's going on? Yeah, it's the return of normalcy is what everybody goes for. And it's like the transformative process that like, like you said, like all genocides

go through at a certain point when it goes from not necessarily like random spreads of violence, but it becomes like structured and concentrated in these kind of more formalized ways and that's when it really starts to ramp up. Because the hope is, when it comes to a genocide, is this return to institutional sanity, you could call it, kind of placiates a lot of the people who would object, the lay people who want nothing to do with it. Once you, once you return to this idea of normalcy in institutions and government, people have more of a tendency to return to the idea that the government is doing the right thing because they don't have to look it in the eye anymore.

It's a very, very pure form of propaganda and as well, it makes it easier, like you said, for people who don't want to acknowledge the reality of what's going on to look away and like pretend like the atrocity is not as bad as in reality it is on the ground. Right. For example, um, during the Armenian genocide, the first outpourings of violence were in the middle of like urban areas. And when the governments realized that like, Oh wow, a lot of people are really going to object to this. They began the death marches to get the Armenian population away from people who might object to it and to continue the slaughter so they couldn't see it. And it's also this reflexive method of propagation of like materials because like you have both

sides showing at the same time. You have the propaganda that's intended to kind of placate and like assuage any kind of fears or concerns people have while also there's the internal propaganda that is like essentially like ramping up a violent intent. So it's like, you know, you have the dehumanization of people internally and then internally or externally it's like, oh, like it's not as bad as everyone said. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Yeah. Don't worry. The prime minister said that the population should continue seeking out the quote enemy and deliver them to authorities rather than dealing with them on the spot in the open.

If necessary, the people could call the armed forces for help in order to do so. To show this was not really a message to leave the Tutsis alone, he repeated the usual directive that the authorities, civilians, and military should be ready to help the population quote, defend itself. A key part of this pacification process is what the government called a return to normalcy for the Hutu population because during the first weeks of the genocide, so many people were out taking part in it, hiding from it, or being killed by it, that the country outside of these exact death squads ceased to function. So the idea was to send normal people, that being not the military, the police, or the

enter a home way, back to their everyday lives and leave the genocide in the hands of those death squads away from the eyes of normal people. It's a pretty grim statement to be like, Hey guys, I know you're really into doing all this genocide violence, but we do need bus drivers still. Yeah. I mean, it's the banality of evil aspect of it. I'm not making a joke here.

It's that the idea that they're like, actually we need to kind of get things back on a normal footing because we're going to not be able to have our normal economic inflows and outflows because all of our economy has basically been voluntary corvée labored into doing a genocide. It's pretty much what it boils down to is that the government believed the genocide was in, so to speak, the downward part of the peak of violence, and there was going to be a return of normalcy on the international stage, and they needed to also return to their lives. Because they didn't see any of this going against them. Which, thankfully, it's about to. So I guess I can say that as an optimistic standpoint, but don't be too happy about that because I have a lot of other shit I have to talk about first. Now the Hutu's government public-facing message was a return to security and an end to the

killings, which of course they claimed they had no part in. Instead they said it was rogue elements that they are now regaining control over. They even talked about setting up courts to put these rogue elements on trial for the role in the violence. Of course, none of this is true and none of it ever happened, and virtually every court, court member, and judge, who is not a Hutu power man, was dead. All this was also another part to lure the Tutsis out of hiding to make them believe that it was over. A lot of people didn't buy this, but some people did. And they were not, they did not survive very long when they came out of hiding. And remember, hundreds of thousands of people have already fled across the borders out of

Rwanda. So when I'm talking about the people still in Rwanda, it's those Tutsis who have not fled and have managed to remain in hiding this whole time. However, this pacification tactic only lasted a few weeks. As April turned into May, things began to change once again. The RPF was making massive gains on the ground throughout the entire eastern part of the country, and the Rwandan military was getting hammered. As the RPF cut the road between Ghidorahma and Kigali, the Hutu power government once again

went into genocidal overdrive. There is mass killings in the open once more. In some communities, the children of mixed Hutu and Tutsi parents, which had been protected, assuming their dad was a Hutu, were no longer protected. In some cases, men turned their own wives and children over to the death squads, either murdering them themselves or giving them to people who would. RTLM once again began blasting propaganda, having previously just kind of turned into a music station for the last couple weeks.

However, there were simply not that many Tutsis to be found anymore, which caused a problem for the Hutu power guys. The civilian defense groups, now armed to the teeth and having been transformed into cold, hardened murderers, were now outright bandits of chaos. They began robbing, murdering, and victimizing literally anybody who came through their barricades. In many cases, they ambushed and stole from marked government vehicles, and since so much power had been given to them, the police were now unable to stop them. Meanwhile, the military was getting washed by the RPF. One pro-Hutu power administrator even joked. After a community fell to the RPF, quote, it's a good thing the RPF arrived when it did. The thugs were beginning to take over. Oh, fucks sake.

Other gangs of bandits, cops, death squad members, whatever, devolved into infighting over the things that they eluded from dead Tutsis. This included members of the government who were busy fighting one over like who would embezzle Tutsi savings accounts as all the bank accounts had been frozen. In one commune, thieves broke into a bank protest that they were simply trying to separate the money that belonged to the Tutsis from the money that belonged to the Hutsus. In order to solve this, local administrators took control of everything, cataloged stolen land, livestock, homes, cash, jewels, you name it, and divided it among their political allies, as well as individuals who were most involved in the killing.

The amount of infighting at the national and local level was intense with political maneuvering at its core. Between minor and major offices, as well as a lot of settling of petty grievances, Kutsu power men routinely murdered one another for political and personal gain. In the middle of the genocide, framing it as the person they killed were harboring RPF sympathies. Chaos has only added to the situation as elements of the police and military, having been absolutely washed by the RPF and were retreating from combat in the battlefields, to turn up in communities and then turn into robbing gangs of lunatics as they retreated against their fellow Hutus. Even as the RPF continued their advance reaching the outskirts

of Kigali once again, the government urged whatever remained of their security forces to continue the genocide. It was with this massive loss of ground to the RPF that the gears of international intervention began to grind forward in June when France, the Hutu government's lone ally in the international stage, stepped forward. Here we go. France had, previous to the genocide, been the main backer and trainer of the Rwandan security forces, by extension meaning its army, its police, the Entre-Homwe. However, that had to stop after the UN arms embargo was put on Rwanda. And it did, openly. France stopped shipping weapons to Rwanda and instead shipped them to Zaire via planes owned by Victor Boot, where Mbuthu Sese Seko

then shipped them overland into Rwanda. France and the Hutu government were in close contact throughout the entire genocide, with members of the Rwandan military being frequently and routinely flown to France in the middle of everything to meet with members of the government. There had been a secure telephone line sent to Rwanda allowing the Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Vizamungu, to talk directly with the French Minister of Defense. Along with that, the French sent radios and a warning that Rwanda would have to clean up their image and turn international opinion back on their side while France prepared measures to intervene. This is in the end of April and the beginning of May, which is around the same time that the pacification efforts started. The two are connected. They only

did this because France kinda sorta told them they needed to watch their PR. As Alison Deforge puts it, the condition for renewed French assistance was not to end the genocide, but to make it presentable. They're more concerned with the public perception of the killing than the killing itself. My question is just like, what does France gain from this? By doing this? Knowing about a lot of the stuff that France did and is about to do, it's just like, when you're concerned about optics, what do they gain from all of this? The same thing they've always gained, colonial power, exploitation over economic resources. In another meeting, the Rwandans understood that direct French help wouldn't be showing

up but asked for quote, foreign soldiers to help them. This meant mercenaries or what really happened, French soldiers and police operating off the official books and they got them. One man that we can pin down that did this was a police captain named Paul Beryl. He was a French cop turned military and security trainer for the Rwandan police, but specifically the enter a homway. Beryl by his own admission was there from the very beginning of the genocide and as one of the last people in Kigali when the government finally collapsed.

Despite France officially refusing to admit Beryl was working for them directly, he was living in the French embassy this entire time. Also you want to know what he called his training program? Oh god. Uhhhh. Nate, you're not ready for this. It's a little too on the nose. Operation Insecticide. Because the Hutus were calling the Tutsis cockroaches.

Christ. Nate, it gets so much more worse. Now, eventually the international criminal courts came knocking to ask Beryl some questions after all of this is over. He denied everything, France has protected him, and he's never been charged. However, eyewitnesses from Rwanda, Rwandans, international aid organizations, and UN soldiers alike saw that there were quite a few white French-speaking men hanging around the Rwandan military, the Entera Homway, and civilian defense groups.

UN soldiers reported seeing white men in uniforms driving around Kigali and other times flying Rwandan military helicopters. But the full impact and purpose of these French agents, mercenaries or otherwise, will absolutely never be known. The French did a quote unquote investigation of their role in the Rwandan genocide, effectively confirmed everything that I said and then said, yeah, but it wasn't our fault. Oh, when that statement came out, I was so, because it was in 2019, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a little while ago. Yeah. Macron did it. He admitted that France did everything that I just said with some caveats, of course, not going into so much detail, but then said, yeah, but it would have happened without us anyway. Yeah like denied any sort of responsibility in their involvement in

the Rwandan genocide and it was just like so fucking sickening. It's honestly unsurprising. No one's going to investigate themselves and find themselves guilty. It's disgusting. I guess the thing about it is part of me wants to ask, what on earth does France feel like it stands to gain from this? But then I am reminded of France having a kind of like soft power above all else policy towards sub-Saharan Africa, former colonies in the Francophone world and the French speaking. This is the African Great Lakes region. It's also, you know, a big footprint for France. Yeah. And also the same reason why the DRC is so exploited today. It's a huge country

with an inordinately large amount of mineral resources. And, you know, Congolese people don't see the benefit or very, very, very few Congolese people see the benefits of the extraction of those resources Oh good news Nate the DRC is coming up. Oh, no. I know what this is now I mean, yeah by mid-june France would not have to fake any of this anymore with victory clearly in hand by the RPF They announced Operation turquoise an armed Intervention that the government framed as a humanitarian mission to end the killing. But make no mistake, the French mission was not to stop the genocide, but rather to stop the RPF from winning the war, just like they had done before. This is

not the first time they did this. A journalist in Paris said military leaders openly talked about defeating the RPF and even going into active conflict with them immediately. Still others like the commander of turquoise said their goal was to force the Arusha Accords back into compliance, which if you remember the Arusha Accords in the beginning of all this would have forced the RPF to share power with the same government that had just been committing a genocide. François Mitterrand, France's president at the time, also said that maintaining the Hutu government was the quote, democratic thing to do. Oh, like it's just such bare face kind of, oh, we just want to return to normal, seeing

things as they were. Like let's just like take everything that's happened in the past nearly a hundred days and just like push them under the rug. So like all that stuff that happened, let's just forget about it, put it in the past. We all need to work together again because we need to make money. At France, even invited other countries, namely the United States to help them and the U S patently refused. Obviously the U S was never going to help on any African mission after what happened in Somalia, but they pointed out that you're just gonna prop up the Hutu government.

The quickest way to end this genocide is to let the RPF win. That was the US's like through line is like, no, just let it go. It'll be over in like a week. As far as any American plans to intervene, they never went beyond some random ideas. Namely, at one point they wanted to bomb the main RTLM radio station, but they decided against it. Oh, Bill Clinton is fucking bombed. That does sound very Clinton-esque to be like, well, we can send a cruise missile.

Just blow up the radio station. Make sure that it's set to target as many children's aspirin factories as possible. How am I supposed to help these men when I'm busy getting sucked off? Oh. It was only when the Rwandan military began losing Kigali itself that France accepted that they would have to go on their own. Though they did have one ally, Senegal, who sent 32 whole soldiers. Can you imagine being the Senegalese NCO? They're like, hey, we got a special mission for you because we love you. It's like you and a platoon plus by margin of one additional soldier, you're going to go and you're going to help hold the line in Kigali.

All 32 of you, do us proud. Also, we're just doing this so France knows that we are still their friend. You guys are the pride of Dakar. We're going to send you out. You're going to come back covered in glory. Note that I didn't say alive. Pretty much everyone else knew, like saw this mission for what it was. Nobody wanted to be involved in Operation Turquoise. And as the French invaded, their troops were transported in planes owned by Victor Booth.

Victor Booth. They were under specific orders to prop the Hutu government up. That meant the troops chased away civilians and militia forces, but never with combat. More of just a shoe, get out of here, go. I feel like you just do the sort of like 2000s YouTube pitched down scary version of a song and do the UPS song about that's logistics and it's Victor Boots theme song. Like, because it's just, all this man does is provide all the crucial logistics, nodes, and just in time delivery to make sure that the worst possible thing can happen. That's right. He's evil or Jeff Bezos.

I mean, Jeff Bezos would do it if he thought he could get away with it, I think. Now, like I said, they didn't really engage in combat with the Inter-Homway or civilian defense forces and instead would reinforce and secure government soldiers and police. In virtually every case, the French military were actively organizing with mass murderers who had just been slaughtering people a few days before. And the optics of this were not lost on the Rwandan government, who saw the French as their saviours. Men, women, children, enter a home way members, soldiers, police, lined the street to welcome the French.

In some cases, enter a home way members, painted their machetes in the French tri-colour and waved them around as soldiers drove by." That is such a fucking on the nose metaphor for France's involvement in Africa in the 20th century. That's just, I mean. Like if that happened in a movie or a book, you'd roll your eyes. Valerie Bemirocki, who was a presenter on RTLM, urged listeners to make special efforts to seek out French soldiers, sing and dance for them, drink with them, invite them to dinner and serve as guides.

You know, I'm not even trying to be flippant. I feel like I say this so often, but if you swapped that and had this version be painted on American flags on machetes, like that would be the least subtle system of a down music video from the 90s. God, you're right. In another case, French troops are told at the resistance at Bississero, that hill and forest we talked about before, which was still going on at the end of June. One French officer, Captain Marine Guillier, went over to see what was going on after a journalist informed him of the resistance. The Tutsis came out of the woods thinking the French were their saviors, they're there

to help them, but then were horrified to see Giliere walking side by side with members of the Death Squad that had just been hunting them right up to the Resistance's positions. Like, you know, this show is, it's entertainment, whatever morbid form of entertainment it is right now, but like, for the past two episodes, well the whole series is just like, I've been like overcome with a kind of dark empathy in terms of like, just imagine like how much fear like you would feel seeing that and knowing you're about to like face a very certain death. And it's like, it's so unbelievably heartbreaking and soul destroying that like it's like, it's so unbelievably heartbreaking and soul destroying that like, it's unimaginable.

Yeah. It's, it's hard to fathom. And like Gilear was asked by a journalist, like, why didn't you help the Tutsis at Bissacero? He responded, quote, I don't want to get involved with politics. I guess to me, this is an extreme example. And you can find this sort of amoral opportunism in many parts of our daily lives, but it's just so much starker and crueler here in the sense that there is no ambiguity about what is happening here, especially this late in the process.

Not at all. Not at all. And the idea of being the kind of, well, I'm here for the paycheck opportunist mercenary, et cetera. I can scream till I'm blue in the face about, fuck you, you pieces of shit. But I don't even have the energy to do that in the sense that it's just so antithetical to the human spirit that you just don't even really know how to respond. And I'm not going to have any defenses

of the French soldiers, of course not. It does seem that like Gillear and other soldiers were lied to by their own ministry of defense and their own government about what was happening because they were told that the people at Bississera were the RPF. But later Gillear and his soldiers stumbled upon a group of 800 Tutsis that had been rounded up by Hutu death squads about to be murdered. And Gillear ordered his soldiers

to open fire on the enter of Hamwai to save these Tutsis. So it's this weird moment where that is unequivocally a good thing and a right thing to do. But it's also, it's not like it started this cascading response of French soldiers who refused to work with the Entre-A-Homwe. It did change their attitude. They no longer hung out with them or were friendly with them. They told them to fuck off. They called them murderers and rapists, but they just continued working with them. And the French government continued defending the government. So

Yeah, it's this I wish I could say this started a fucking mutiny amongst the French who just decided to kill the who to power Government, but that's not what happened. Yeah, they started to dig in with the government to face the RPF But just as that happened a ceasefire between the two sides was signed, and the French announced they would open a quote, humanitarian zone that would promise to provide safety for anyone from any threat throughout the southwest of Rwanda. See how that's worded? Yup. This opened the path for the RPF to finish toppling the government in Kigali, while also opening a path for the Hutu government and their supporters to run.

Seeing the end of the government was clear as day, the French director of African affairs at the foreign ministry said, quote, we have nothing more to say to them except get lost as fast as possible. This created a rush to the south. Quote, administrative officials, members of the militia, and the Rwandan military soldiers flooded into the secure zone along with ordinary civilians who feared the RPF advance. At this time, both officials and the RTLM were ordering people to flee and warning that the RPF would surely kill them if they did not run. The French

joined in such warnings, telling people in Butare to flee west to Kikigoro and later warned others to seek refuge across the border in Zaire. As soldiers, police, enter Ahamwe members, other members of the genocidal infrastructure fled into these zones, they were not disarmed. France also began compiling names of people in the government they saw as responsible for the genocide, and specifically this was the military that did this. Because, I guess when you can't prop someone up anymore, you have to fully throw them under the bus.

However, the French president told the military to stand down on this, saying arresting people was not part of their mission. So they all went to safety and eventually into hiding. The French government also took a direct role in evacuating chosen people, such as General Bizimungu, the head of the army, and the architect of the entire genocide, Baguessora. While the French were doing this, the war was all but over. RPF units completed their advances and in many cases saved thousands of Tutsis who were literally about to be murdered. However, the RPF unleashed their own horrors upon the Hutu population as they went. The RPF terror campaign took many forms.

One was the murder of pretty much anyone connected to the Rwandan security apparatus. Another was any Hutu that a Tutsi claimed who had taken part in the genocide at all. While of course many Hutus did, the RPF wiped out entire towns on little more than an accusation. During their advance, they killed tens of thousands of civilians. Allison DeForge puts the number at around 60,000, while others put the number much higher. In such a systematic way, it could have only come from the top down. The full breadth of this violence will never be known because, in short, Rwanda doesn't allow you to investigate it.

This is because the RPF was very successful in controlling information leaving their camp and going into the outside world. It's also because, well, like I said before at the time of recording, the RPF is still the government of Rwanda and Paul Kagame is its dictator, who criminalizes any discussion or research into crimes against Hutu, framing them as genocide denial punishable by prison terms. This has led to a few people to levy a theory of, quote, double genocide happening in Rwanda. First, the Hutus against the Tutsis,

and then the Tutsis against the Hutu in revenge. I need to point out here, however, in the field of genocide studies, as well as that of history, this is not something that is accepted as fact, and instead it is seen something as being propagated by the remaining who-to-power believers to dilute the horrors of what their government and ideology had done. I fall on the side of historians who believe that what the RPF did in revenge was horrifying,

but it does not make it a genocide. What's important to remember here, like we talked about before, is what makes genocide is intent. Crimes against humanity and war crimes are not necessarily genocide, and genocide is not necessarily a war crime. There's a clear pattern of intent laid out by the Hutu government.

I feel like we've done a pretty decent job explaining their well-laid-out intent to exterminate the Tutsis, but there was no intent that anybody can prove of the RPF To wipe out the Hutus I want to throw this in just in case people misinterpreted what you said when you say genocide is not a war crime what that Means is that genocide is not necessarily punished under the framework that says that there is acceptable behavior in armed conflict And then there's unacceptable behavior. That's punished., specifically genocide is not always an act of war.

Exactly. The context of a genocide taking place does not require there to be a war where the notion of what will constitute a war crime and be prosecuted as a war crime exists. And it is a crime against humanity, but crimes against humanity is a separate charge is what I mean. So you can commit a crime against humanity, but unless it meets the criteria of genocide, it's two different crimes. So their spree of revenge mass murder is much more likely, in my opinion, to be compared

to, say, Soviet revenge murders as they advance towards Germany during World War II. There's no documented written intent, verbal or otherwise, to implicate the RPF in a coordinated attempted genocide. Much of what we have in support of this quote double genocide theory today is written by who to power supporters and sympathizers as well as let's say how do I frame this deeply fucking weird western people who are less than ethical. Then let's talk about a few of them. Here we go.

Here we go. For example, one of the most well known western tellings of this version of events is by a woman named Judy Revers. In her book, Praise of Blood, the Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which came out in 2018. Of course, of course. The book puts the bulk of the blame of all of this on Tutsis for their own genocide, says the roadblocks, the massacres, all of that, the most shocking, most widely known events of the Rwandan genocide, were done by the RPF as a false flag. I'm gonna ask, Joe, what is this woman's connection to Rwanda?

None! Yep, couldn't guess that. The book also claims that the RPF covered up their own genocide of Hutus by cremating hundreds of thousands of victims via large ovens in a national forest. I should not have to point out here there is zero fucking evidence that this ever took place. And in case you're wondering, Joe, isn't she ostracized from the academic community? Kind of like David Irving would have

been? No. She has won a ton of awards. Her book has to be the most lavished upon, widely accepted piece of genocide denial in mainstream that I have ever seen. I would also say, just point this out, we had very accurate detailed satellite photography in the 90s. If they were burning corpses in the forest, they would need either charcoal or wood, which puts out smoke and heat signatures. You would have seen it from space. Also suddenly the RPF is building massive cremation ovens in the national forest, totally unseen by everyone and leaving no hint to be seen in the modern day. It is ridiculous. They're just so dastardly. They're just so evil. They're so good at it.

It's absolutely ridiculous. They somehow figured out how to turn human bodies into smokeless fuel because when you burn things, and especially when you burn things, en masse it leaves chemical deposits in the soil, in the trees. You can find it in biomass in such as animals. Has any of this been found? No.

Also, she's allowed in polite society. She is championed as a great journalist. She's won a ton of awards. It's honestly sickening. I've never seen genocide denial like this be so mainstream. I've never seen anything like it. I've read the book. I read it when I was in grad school. It is, it's akin to reading like David Irving shit about the Holocaust. It's completely without evidence. It makes up things in whole cloth. But the main difference is like, David, I've heard David Irving

is dead, but maybe he's not, but he has gone through the rest of his life having to grift neo-Nazis for his survival because he's a penniless mockery not allowed in polite society, not allowed to travel to some countries because of what he has written. And this woman is still getting normal work. Unfortunately, he's still alive. I've heard rumors that he was dead. I wasn't sure. Also, David Icke is still alive, work. Unfortunately, he's still alive. I've heard rumors that he was dead, I wasn't sure. Also, David Icke is still alive, sadly.

Yeah, but David Icke is a fucking weirdo crank. Like, David Irving. He didn't have the kind of like, Infermit Earth. David Irving had a kind of polite acceptance for a very long time, all the way up until he didn't. David Icke was, if I remember correctly, was a sports announcer, like a football commentator.

Yeah, yeah, he was. He was a footballer at some point too, but now he's just the guy that everybody knows is the lizard people guy. But yeah, he's a fucking weirdo. And everybody knows David Icke is a fucking weirdo. You have to be deeply fucked up individual to believe anything that David Icke says because he has been so mocked and pushed to the fringes of society. Well, this woman is just allowed to continue writing and everybody accepts it. She's won more book awards for her genocide denial book than I ever have. Listen, I'm just going to say, journalism is a very unique field in the fact that like you have an inverse equation of talent and ethics towards the outcome of winning awards because it's very easy to be very unethical and very bad at your job and win awards in journalism.

Wait, wait, is that Glenn Greenwald's theme music? By the end of the Rwandan genocide, nearly one million Tutsis were dead in just a hundred days. However, the horrors of all of this would not end there. The safety zone established by the French funneled both genocide heirs and survivors into the same camps over the border in Zaire, which of course would eventually be known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Hutu power elements within those camps were still armed and they began to slaughter Tutsis once again. Furthermore, in those camps were dozens of wanted men which Zaire either refused the handover or simply lacked the organizational ability to do so. Paul Kagame, now the president of Rwanda, launched an invasion into Zaire. This would eventually be known as the African Great War, or the First Congolese War, or the First Congo War, to bring the Hutu genociders to, quote, justice. Ten million people died. The aftermath of these wars continues to this day with Rwanda,

allegedly still fueling the ongoing conflict, which kills thousands of people every year. And I need to point out here, that allegedly is pretty load bearing. It's all but been proven that Rwanda is still fueling all of this and there is Rwandan military soldiers actively in Congo helping these rebel groups. Speaking of genocide heirs, that brings us to an important question. What do you do with a country that had neighbor turned against neighbor,

and every town, every city, and every village? Well, nobody had any fucking idea. I'm gonna guess, uh, you do nothing. Well, first there was a spat of executions, held in public, where thousands of people gathered to watch the firing squad deaths of a few people. However, the celebratory atmosphere of the executions was, again, not great for optics. And soon the RPF had to think of something else. Rwanda arrested hundreds of thousands of people and chucked them into a literal pit known

as Gitarama Prison in the chaotic aftermath of the genocide. These were foot soldiers that did the majority of the killing. However, most of these people were there based on simple accusations. None of these low-level cases had any evidence, quite simply because nobody had any means to collect any. There is also the problem of there being literally nobody available to handle criminal cases. Like we said before, the majority of the state had been destroyed, killed or ran to the Congo. The Rwandan Minister of Justice said that they had won one single functioning court in the country and it would take them literally centuries to try the 130,000

people they had just in Gitarama prison. There was still a lot of people they did not put in prison yet. So they developed something called the Gachacha system. This was a kind of traditional participatory, supposedly restorative justice system that had its roots in traditional Rwandan society during the pre-colonial era. A locally appointed judge with a group of other people, all drawn from your local community, would take the backlog of cases away from the government and hold them in their own towns and villages. The only thing left for the government to handle would be the so-called

Category 1 criminals, meaning the leadership of the genocidal government. These local courts could still sentence people to life in prison, but execution was now off the table. Though a full confession and taking part in the reconciliation process, their sentence could be reduced by 20 years or more. Other sentences included community service, hard labor, or the permanent loss of civil rights. However legally, these courts are pretty fucking dubious. The accused were offered no lawyers, no right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, no right to be informed of the charges being brought against them, no right to defend preparation

time, no right to even be present at their own trial, no right to confront witnesses – which I admit I'm fine with that part actually – no right against self-incrimination, no right against double jeopardy, no right against arbitrary arrest and detention, and furthermore, vast evidence of corruption amongst Gechacha court officials, since the judges were volunteers, they were unpaid, that left a wide path for people to be bribed out of any sentence, and people who had no money to be doomed due to their poverty. Also, no crimes committed by the RPF were to be allowed to enter the court, meaning it is not much of a reconciliation process centred around Rwandan unity if only 50% of things could be heard. Like most courts after a war, this was simple victor's justice.

But like the Nuremberg trials, I feel comfortable not complaining about this too much. Consider it a personal flaw, I guess. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call, you know, the local trials of genocide heirs as a kangaroo court. Like, I feel like that's a bit stretched. Like, they're very clearly unfair, but okay. You know, like, fine. I'm not gonna complain about it too hard.

I would point out an example, given the kind of Eurocentric nature of the way that we learn history that I think more people would be aware of, where I would say I don't really care that much is if you look at the end of World War II and post liberation of Western Europe, the way that collaboration regime people were treated in places like France or the Netherlands, for example. We can object to it on the basis of law and order and fairness, but also it's like, okay. Like I said, consider it a personal flaw of mine.

I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, if you decide to work for the occupation government and do stuff that gets people who are trying to fight the occupation government killed, you are playing a role in that. And then the occupation government loses and you're left to the people who you helped kill, you probably shouldn't be surprised that they're going to kill you. Yeah. Probably should have gotten on the fucking boat to Argentina or whatever. You know what I mean? Like I'm just saying.

As the Kachachak corps weren't shooting people, they did not have the ability to sentence people to death. The Rwanda did not sentence anyone after the first initial spat of executions to death for the role in the genocide. A lot of innocent people almost certainly got thrown in prison though. And they probably remain there to this day. Yeah. Okay? I don't know what to say. There was no other better way. Because again, this is a genocide where the vast majority of the Hutu population did take part. And then they just went home. I don't know how you're supposed to handle that.

It's one of those things where it feels like there's so much remove between us and them that I don't really know what to say other than that there's a part of even if you weren't the one doing it, you were absolutely seeing it. You're complicit. Yeah. And there's just like, I guess I just don't know what to say. I don't know either. I don't really have a pronouncement to make. I'm not casting any blame on these courts for doing what they did, though there is the

possibility that they went a little too far because the Kachacha courts would eventually prosecute two million people out of a population of eight million at the time. Though, to be fair, that could also be a fair amount of people to be prosecuted that took part in this or in some way materially supported it because not all these people are being sentenced to prison. A lot of them are sure. A lot of them are being sentenced to labor or having their civil rights taken away, which isn't great. But still, you committed a genocide. Again, I'm not casting any aspersions toward them for what they did in these courts? Because I do not have a better

option here. I don't have a better suggestion. Nobody does. How do you administer a type of restorative justice on this scale? You don't. How do you do it? You don't. So I'm going to point something out here that will seem like a digression, but it's not. If you know anything about post-production and audio and you've ever seen an equalization or an EQ graph, there's a thing called a notch filter or where you can basically drop down

the frequency in a very, very narrow band, very, very narrow, basically down to zero to try to take out some kind of problem noise. And I bring this up because you can imagine a chart, you know, and then there's this notch in the middle that goes to zero. If you look on the Wikipedia article for the Rwanda genocide, it shows the life expectancy in Rwanda and that notch filter is in 1994. Like that is the impact. There's nobody in this, there's not a single person in this country that was not touched by this genocide either as a perpetrator or a victim.

There's so many different ways that I suppose you can quantify like the level of violence that happened and like one of them that some people do know about but is kind of under reported is that like one in four victims of sexual violence in Rwanda during the genocide contracted HIV. They used HIV as a weapon as well. Oh don't worry we'll get to that unfortunately. Oh Christ. Then there's the thing that everyone's probably at least familiar with. The International

Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, held in Arusha, Tanzania, beginning virtually as soon as the genocide was over in 1994. The process would take years, with the trial against the RTLM presenters and owners, as well as the people who ran the Cangra newspaper, not starting until the year 2000. Like virtually every other genocide trial before it, in sense, they all denied responsibility, simply claimed they were following orders, and this trial about the radio presenters and the newspaper was called the hate media trial. Their main argument was, we didn't kill anybody. How are we guilty of anything? Yeah. Instead of buying that bullshit, they're all found guilty of incitement to commit genocide and sentenced between 30 years and life. And then there's the case of Riju. You remember

the, uh, now he's the white guy who worked for RTLM. Yep. Well, afterwards he fled to Kenya, joined the local Somali diaspora, converted to Islam, changed his name to Omar, and then was finally arrested in 1997 while trying to move to Iraq. As soon as he was turned over to the court, he flipped on everyone and anyone he worked with and received a reduced sentence of 12 years which he was allowed to serve in Italy. Then the Italians released him several years early in violation of their agreement with the international court and Raju has refused to talk about anything about this ever again. He's still alive today somewhere. I don't know what name he's under, but he's out there somewhere.

It's funny. I was reading, it was a collection of essays a few years ago, it was about first hand accounts of people living in post World War II Germany. And one of them I found very moving in that it became a society where you couldn't necessarily trust the character of the people within your community because so many people got away with what they did. It's like your neighbour could have committed like horrible, horrible crimes and you will just never know. And they will, they're under no obligation to say it. And it's like, this guy is just like roaming around and is someone's neighbor and like, he lives somewhere in Europe today. I don't know where, but he's out there. Maybe Belgium again, maybe Italy, probably Belgium. As for the main architect of the genocide, Theonist Bagasora.

He ran, escaping justice until 1996 when he was arrested in Cameroon. Bagasora was convicted of 10 counts of 8 different crimes including genocide, 2 personal counts of murder, one for Rwandans and one for the peacekeepers, extermination, systematic rape, and persecution. Other inhumane acts, two counts of violence to life, one count for Rwandans, one count for peacekeepers, as well as outrages upon personal dignity. He was found guilty, sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and died behind bars in 2021 while serving his time in Mali. Rest in peace, bitch. Jean-Paul Akayasu, a guy we haven't talked about yet, but he was the mayor of Iturama,

and committed crimes so horrific that the international court had to invent a new charge for him, codifying it as genocidal rape. He did things so horrific that the charge of genocide was not enough. This is where things get weird. He was represented by a Montreal-based lawyer named John Philpott, brother of Robin Philpott, a politician in the Quebec independence movement who went on to write an entire book denying the Rwandan genocide, a book that was then defended by André Basclère, another Quebec independence politician and convicted sex criminal.

Not that any of those last parts are important, it's just fucking weird. The Quebecois and the French have never been closer. Jean-Paul Akayasu was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and he is currently alive and serving his sentence in Benin. The president of the Entra Hamwe, Jerry Kujuga, was arrested in Congo, did not even try to argue what he did was not a genocide, but rather defended the genocide as an act of self-defense, which is a concept we've already talked about. It should be noted here, Kujuga's father was

Tutsi, making him a Tutsi by his own ideology. He hid it and even made sure to save the Tutsi side of his family by stashing them in the Hotel du Miqueline. They all survived. He was sentenced to life without possibility of parole and at the time of recording is currently serving his sentence in Benin. Jean Cabanda, the prime minister during the genocide was captured, blamed the military for everything and was found guilty, sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, and is currently serving his sentence in Mali. Mali has come up a lot, and it's ended up being the home for most of Rwanda's convicted, as they agreed to house them.

Dozens have served their time there, and upon being released from prison, simply decided to stay in Mali. According to one man who refused to be named by a Guardian article, he stayed in Molly because, quote, I do not want to be shot in the head. However, others were able to run much further for much longer. Many members of the Rwandan clergy have never been charged. They were quietly smuggled away by the church and dispersed amongst Francophone world, Africa or otherwise. Most of them have never even been named. Then there's Flugenskaya Shema. He managed to hide out as a farmer in South Africa until last year.

What? 2023. The process to bring him to justice is still ongoing at the time of recording and is fighting his extradition from South Africa to Rwanda. That, that is insane. There's another man, president Dr. Heyador Sikubiwanbo. You might remember him as the doctor who went around teaching people how to murder people more effectively, never captured. He fled to Congo, conducted interviews while on the run, and was very nearly killed by

Rwandan forces during the first Congo War, but he lived out the rest of his life in relative peace and comfort, and died a free man in 1998. Many key members of the genocidal government remain at large, and tens of thousands of arrest warrants have been issued, with 72,000 being sentenced in absentia. Most of these people will never face justice, either in hiding or being protected by governments or institutions that refuse to extradite them for one reason or another. Just like the road that got us here. Rwandan justice continues to be hampered by the inaction and allowance of the international community,

the pain and the suffering of their colonial activities, supported later by their own geopolitical actions. Just like in most genocide, mean the people most at fault will have something that they have taken forever from their victims. Peace. Oh, do you want to talk maybe before we end about what France did with the documents in the embassy during Operation Turquoise? If I remember correctly, they destroyed most of them and hid the other ones. Essentially during Operation Turquoise, French military operatives went into the embassy and took every single document and either shredded it or expedited it back to France.

And those were the ones that McCrone looked over during his court investigation and still managed to find we didn't do anything wrong. Yeah. Yeah. The end. Yeah. Fuck them. Yeah. That is the conclusion to our series on the Rwandan genocide. It's hopeless is the best way I can describe it. Unfortunately. Um, yeah. Yeah. There's a good article that came out a while ago of an interview with a Rwandan woman who was an asylum seeker in Ireland and, you know, 30 years onwards, she's just like, I've never gotten any peace after this. Like, you know, it's like the amount of displacement, the amount of suffering, like that's that

I brought up that like one in four victims of sexual violence during Ruan genocide contracted HIV. It's like I said in the last episode, it's like staring into the abyss. It's just, you're just filled with despair. And Paul Kagame continues to make it much worse by his actions in the Congo as we are recording. Yep. Yep. He's a fucking asshole.

And unfortunately, he also stopped the genocide. It's one of those parts of history that it's like, oh, good guy Paul Kagame, the revolutionary patriotic front totally stopped the genocide. Like if only that was it. Yeah. Look at the first Congolese war. Look at the second Congolese war. Look at the second Congolese war. I was going to say that you made the comment that Mobutu didn't do anything to disarm the

Hutu power militants and the Rwandan military when they fled. Oh, that was the French military that refused to disarm anybody when they went into the safe zones. I would also say too that obviously like Mobutese Saseko being in power was because he sort of doing the bidding of both France and the United States in Sub-Saharan Africa during the Cold War. And at this time he was in very poor health and was constantly seeking medical treatment in France.

So it's one of those things where that doesn't surprise me, but it's just, it's just such a grim story. When you think about it, you know, I don't want to like be like, here's this thing about Germany instead of about the topic at hand, but it just was reminded of something you said, and I think it's maybe relevant, which is when I was a kid, there was a movie that came out in Germany when I lived there. And it was pretty well received.

It won and it got nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign language film. It's called Das schreckliche Mädchen or The Nasty Girl, The Dirty Girl. And it's basically about a girl who as sort of like a high school history class project, writes an essay about my town during the Third Reich, because the notion, the sort of received wisdom was that actually we weren't involved. It turns out everyone was involved. Of course.

All of the prominent families were involved. They were all Nazis. There were concentration camps that people just had basically written out of history in that area. And the town responds by more or less trying to kill her and trying to ruin her life Trying to drive her to suicide and in the end they change their tune

They're like, oh wow, isn't this woman so great that she you know helped bring the truth to light? But the fact is like everyone tried to stop it and I bring this up because I feel like people often Unthinkingly look at a country like Germany and say well at least they learned it's like yeah I wouldn't go that far and the point I make in that is yeah When you look at this stuff, there's a lot of the questions like some people were brought to justice, some people escaped justice. But I think that point you raised, Tom, and you also mentioned, Joe, the fact that you have a country where there's no one who was not affected and there's no one who doesn't

know someone who was involved. It's such a, I don't know, like I said, it just feels like the kind of the death of the human spirit in the sense that this happened and that like for a significant number of people who perpetrated it, it was kind of like, well, eh, you know, lack of resources. It's like you get off with a warning this time. And that, I don't know, I feel like it's just kind of struggled to process the enormity of it. Yeah.

And I bring up the German example, not because it'd be like, oh, this is easier to understand than something in Africa, but rather to say that it's a universal phenomenon. The German experience after the Holocaust is often touted as this idea of how to heal from it. And I think it's good to bring up the fact that that is largely a fake concept. There are German films made in the late 40s, like neorealist films that attend to the fact that people were openly like, the Nazis should have won, the Nazis were good. We didn't do anything wrong, we shouldn't apologize.

German society is... I mean, and I can't think of a post-genocide society where this isn't the case, to be completely honest. Exactly, that was the point I was gonna make, is that yeah, the German society is not unique. It feels like the only lesson you can derive from it is to actually acknowledge that the universality of what you've just described also applies to the warning signs and the precursors. Yep. Yep. A tale as old as time and often repeated.

I suppose to end this and bring a little bit of bright light. Do you want to hear a fun fact about Rwanda? Sure. About 60% of the population of the endangered species of mountain gorillas can be found around Varunga Massive, which the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda is part of. Rwanda takes their conservation very seriously. This means that less than 100 tourists per day are allowed to take part in gorilla tracking. Want to hear an unfun fact about Rwanda? The other part of that national forest is in the Congo and Rwanda is actively destroying it during their war there. Oh, Joe, you had to ruin it. The end!

Folks, thanks a lot for joining us. We do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can support us on Patreon and we will ask it on air. Today's question, let's make it something light. This is from the Discord. What is a bad movie slash TV show slash video game slash etc that you generally like and enjoy? Demonstrably bad is the key here. Oh see if it was before this month Joey would have

said choppy. I've been keeping that fraud up for years that I actually like that movie and now everybody knows I actually hate it. In a way, I don't know if I necessarily have any secrets on this, because I've talked about them or I've done episodes about them, but I really love the terrible pan-European Skinimax style series, Borgia, Faith and Fear, with John Doman, the guy who played the chief in The Wire as Rodrigo Borgia.

It sucks. And it's just an excuse to show topless women most of the time. It has some of the best costume design I've ever seen and it has actually won rewards for that. But it's just, it's fun and stupid. I would say film, I've done an episode of TF about this, but I absolutely love, not just for nostalgia reasons, the 1995 Robert Longo for some reason film Johnny mnemonic with Keanu Reeves I've still never seen it Dolph Lundgren

I believe I see and a very strange cameo where there's a sort of like computer brain surgery Techno tech master who drives what can only be described as a grimdark Winnebago played by Henry Rollins can only be described as a grimdark Winnebago, played by Henry Rollins. Sick. It is such a good movie. When you learn that it was intended to be, it was shot with the intention of it being black and white,

it kind of makes more sense. Robert Longo, I express surprise because Robert Longo was a very, very famous artist, like a sketch pencil artist, but just contemporary artists in general. It's the only film he ever directed. Other than that, he had done some music videos. This movie did not do well. It's the only film he ever directed other than that. He had done some music videos This movie did not do well. It's not well received critically

It does have some of the worst 90s CGI I have ever seen in which basically a psychic dolphin has to basically guide Canary's character to destroy like computer AI it is fucking stupid But for some reason I watched it when I was 11 and I was like, this is so cool And then I watched it for a TF episode in like 2019 I made them watch it and I was like now this is still fucking cool Like yeah, you see you you gotta fight the robot you gotta fight the robot you gotta lift weights and fight the robot It's so good mine is quite easy. I we we watched the last samurai for a bonus episode years ago

Yeah, I remember. I still love that fucking movie. It sucks, it's complete dog shit, the actual story it's based on is way more interesting. But I'll watch anything with Ken Watanabe in it. So I love it. I'll throw this out as a bit for a little bit of trivia. For those of you who are close to my age,

who or probably either are or know somebody who was afflicted with this disease called being really, really into LCD sound system in the 2000s. The cover of the third LCD sound system album, This Is Happening is a direct homage to Robert Longo's Men in the City's pencil illustration series. And so that's the level of influence he had of like, what's a really cool kind of like homage we can do. It's Robert Longo's illustrations in the 80s. It was like, he also directed this dumb as fuck movie with Keanu Reeves in 1995. The sort of like post-apocalyptic kind of like

crusty punk squat, you know, conducts attacks on their invading enemies by dropping explosive Volkswagen Beetles on them. Like, I'm dead serious, it's so dumb. I have to watch this movie now. It's so fucking dumb, it's great, dude. During a massive plague that kind of resembles COVID, Johnny Mnemonic is basically a cybernetically

enhanced human who's got a huge hard drive in his brain. He's a data courier that has to store confidential data in his brain, loaded into his brain by like mini-disc, and travel to deliver it. The massive unthinkable quantity of data is like 100 gigabytes. It sounds just likeable quantity of data is like a hundred gigabytes. It sounds just like a side quest in fucking cyberpunk, honestly. Yeah, a hundred. Oh, no, dude, it's fully like, yeah, it's like snow crash shit.

If every side character was T-posing and morphing through the walls. And as November Kelly from Trash Future pointed out, it inhabits the strange space when everyone's like, in the future it would be dystopian and Japanese somehow. Like it's very much of that era. But yes, they have bug bombs as they call them. They drop fucking Volkswagen Beetles. I guess another one I have and then Tom can go into his is like, I still like Firefly. Oh Joe. Oh fuck off. It's good world building even if Joss Whedon sucks ass. I hate Joss Whedon sucks ass. Like it was. I hate Joss Whedon.

I don't like him either. I'm not a fucking Buffy fan or whatever, but like the world building and vibe was maculate and it would have turned into something shit because it was Joss Whedon if it wasn't canceled when it was. But as someone who enjoys good, interesting sci-fi, that's different, you know, it rules. I'm glad it stopped when it did. Otherwise it would have turned into shit. that's different, you know? It rules. I'm glad it stopped when it did, otherwise it would have turned into shit.

Tom, what do you got? One last one for me about video games. This is a terrible game and I don't recommend it in every capacity, but I have the strange fondness and I think my worldview has been massively affected by the original NES game, Fist of the North Star, both because of the fact that when you punch someone, their head explodes and when you kick someone,

they fly into space. And so to me, like the idea of you kick someone and they just fly eternally into the sky. Like that is just definitional now. For me, Oh God, I have so many cause like I very famously have not seen like so many incredible movies that like people reference all the time. I've never seen, I've never seen gladiator. I saw gladiator in theaters twice with my dad. It was such a take your teen son to the theaters movie, man. I'm just saying. I saw gladiator with my mom because she didn't know what she was getting into. I love like early Adam Sandler movies and just like absolute bottom of the barrel, late 2000s movies. Like you don't mess with the Zohan where that movie sucks.

Adam Sandler plays an IDF agent. Yeah. It's just weird cause you were watching them as like a teenager and we were watching them like on someone's DVD player while deployed. Yeah. Like in terms of video games, like I don't know if people consider it bad, but I think it's bad. Only Moosha two on the PS two go to incredible game, but like music, I have two answers. One, which is like, I think people can argue either way. You only have two answers. I've, I've, I also have a ton. I didn't even, I didn't even consider that wasn't an invitation. The Grateful Dead is really like, like I joked before is like, you can either be into the Grateful Dead or Steely Dan. You can't have

two dad bands. I'm into both. Yeah. The Grateful Dead are bad and they're cringe and it's kind of like, here's jam bad music, they're better than the fish, all the same. But I feel like the real bad music answer that is going to be like a steel rod from God for the two of you is I fucking love Creed. I do too. Only the early stuff, but I had Creed's first album is fucking incredible Something in common with my mother I'm just saying my voice is still messed up from whatever illness I had over the weekend But I was about to do some Scott staff and impressions into See that I can't here's the thing arms wide really popular, it was a huge hit the spring semester

of my freshman year of high school and I didn't have my driver's lessons yet because I turned 16 that fall and I rode the bus to and from, mostly unless I was doing sports practice to and from school every day and I had to hear with Arms Wide Open like five times a day and see that stupid video where he's like, he's basically Jesus and then like a meteor shower hits. I fucking hate that song. I will say though, Laine Staley walks so Scott's Dap could run.

Yes, true. I mean, Laine Staley wasn't exactly known for movement. Ed Kowalczyk walked so Scott's Dap could run. One that I suppose people maybe find surprising, and like, I feel like I will get heat for saying his music is universally bad, is Billy Joel. No, no,. What Billy Joel's music is bad. It's hokey. But my mom no longer agrees with you. It's hokey. You've lost the mom vote.

That man can fucking play piano. Like he wrote some great songs. He just wrote a lot of bad ones too. Yeah. Like it's also very funny that his song that all the boomers wanted to play is fucking We Didn't Start the Fire, which is like musically the most boring of anything. And he hates playing it. And it's you look at like how complex a song like The Stranger seems from an Italian restaurant is, and it's like, that's the shit he wants to play. They're like, no, sing the boomer song.

But make him fucking do it. It's just... If I remember correctly, other than there's a key change at one point, it's the same four chords over and over again. Which for a Billy Jules song is like, yeah, I'm sure he hates it. All right, fellas. That is a podcast. You have other podcasts. Plug those other podcasts. I am the co-host and editor of Trashfuture, a podcast about the tech industry and why it sucks. I am the producer of Kill James Bond, a podcast about movies that's very funny and good. You should watch their videos that they're putting out from their live shows that I filmed. And also, you should listen to it. And then What A Hell Hell Of Way To Dad podcast about, well, formerly about Don't Join The Army,

it's still about that, but also about being a dad, because I am one. I have a daughter who will be a year old, not too long from now, I cannot believe a year has gone by, until my daughter basically stands up and starts yelling at me. And I was like, you know what, you weren't doing that when you were a baby who literally couldn't move. So life goes on. Joe, thank you for shattering our psyches, but allowing us to have dumb riffs about Scott Stapp at the end. Yeah. The duality of pod glue factory, a show that's technically about nothing but riffs, uh, featuring

some of the wonderful cast members from trash future, uh, beneath the skin to my own show about the history of everything told to the history of tattooing and also housekeeping Belfast live show October 26th in the OEM music center. It's the bank holiday weekend. Wear a costume because it's going to be Halloween. Personally, where's the best costume is going to win a prize. Yeah. If you want an exclusive t-shirt that we probably will have zero left off by the end of the show, come to Belfast. And yeah. This is the only show that I do. So consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you years and years of bonus content. It's like hundreds of episodes at this point.

Gets you every episode early, gets you first dibs on live show and merch when it goes live, and buy tickets for Belfast. We'll see you there. Until next time. Think of something happy, I don't know. Yeah, God. Go watch a puppy run through the grass or something. Don't think about this episode after you finish it. And we'll talk to you next time. Yeah, take care. Bye.