 was the Armenian genocide of 1915. And there were people, many people in Turkey, including leaders, including Mr. Erdogan, who would like to make us deny that that took place. There have been movies made about it, people who want to remind everybody that in 1915, 1.5 million Armenians were killed. It was an intent to destroy the Armenian people. And it was, by virtue of any definition, you can find. And by the way, one of those things is intent to destroy. That's in the United Nations Commission on Genocide. This was genocide, it was clearly genocide, but there's still a made up fabricated controversy over it. This movie that we're going to talk about, intent to destroy, covers that. And it covers an earlier movie that actually George and I reviewed a few months ago called The Promise, dealing with the same subject. The early movie was largely fictitious in terms of the characters and their relationships and all that. This one is a documentary. So this one wraps around the earlier one and tells us much more. George Kasin, a regular contributor to movies you can learn from, and we can really learn from this one. History is not in the past. You can quote me on that. And the Armenian genocide is not in the past. It's still an ongoing issue. And it's important that we know about it and remember it was kind of an early version of the Holocaust in Germany. And it is worth knowing about because we need to understand the human condition and the sometimes awful events of the 20th century. George, you are Armenian and you're very passionate about this. So I want you to not get too excited during our discussion. But why don't you give the broad brush and discuss intent to destroy? This documentary was produced, I mean, directed and partially written by Joe Berlinger who is a documentary, he produces documentaries and he's very seasoned and he did a really good job with this one. And the producers are himself, Chip Rosenblum and Eric Israelian who is a physician at UCLA. And what was lacking in the prompts which where Terry George put in this, I think silly love triangle between an American journalist and an Armenian medical student in Turkey, Ottoman Empire and this French Armenian socialite sort of got away from the reality of this Armenian genocide situation. So it sort of took away from it. Now, while that movie didn't get that many good reviews from the viewers, this one got good reviews and then Rotten Tomatoes 92%. So this is a very well done, excellent documentary that hits all the major points and it shows the skills of the director, Joe Berlinger. Okay, what this gets into, it gets into so many aspects of this. One of the things is the denial. You know, people don't know that even before the two Israeli historians who recently wrote a book, the 30 year genocide where he gets, they get into the Greeks, the Syriacs or they're also known as the Syrians and the Armenians over the period of 30 years, how these people were annihilated from what is present-day Turkey, right? Those three, but then before you had Deborah Lipschak, I mean, one of the heroes for the Armenians, Israel Charney and Yau Aron, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, and Charney and Aron wanted to have a conference on Holocaust and genocide in Israel that also pulled in the Armenian situation in 1915 and the Turkish government put up the screws, threatened Israel with everything in the book, you know, so that the government finally cancels, you know, that they can't, I mean, I think Charney and Aron canceled the conference. The Turkish government got involved with that bill and was able to crush it, just like they have done numerous times before that's discussed in this documentary, how they control the narrative, right? And the reason I talked about that is that it happened to something I was actively involved in, right? And then so disappointed because the JACL backed out, the AJA Groups backed out because someone twisted their arm, it was the Turkish government. Okay, so this documentary gets into that big time. And not only- Well, let's go back to the beginning, George. We need to tell our viewers what happened in 1915 because they don't know. Yeah, yeah. 1915, there were Armenian revolutionary groups. That's historically established. They wanted to, you know, the Ottoman empire was falling apart. Russia and Turkey were on opposite sides, right? So there were some Armenians that were rabble arousing, you know, they blew up a bank in Istanbul, you know, pretty much the revolutionaries, right? And then there was the Russian threat, right? And then all of the Balkans, you know, had Greece and all the Balkan countries had pretty much thrown off the yoke of the Ottoman empire. So the Armenians were viewed as a fifth column, you know, for Russia. There were Armenians that were in the Turkish, the Ottoman army, right? My grandfather was part of the economy, was a major player in the Turkish economy. So, but there were certain elements when under the Sultan was removed. And then the mission, admitting for union and progress to progress. Let me go back to the beginning. And this is just at the beginning of World War I. Yeah, yeah. The Germans and the Turkish government, and this was before Ataturk, as I recall, there were a lot of politics going on and part of it was that the Germans and the Turks were in a kind of alliance. The Germans wanted the Turks to help them prepare for what they saw as a coming World War. So the Armenians became a chess piece on the board because there was plenty of resentment toward them and they were always discriminated against, excluded and so forth, even though there were a substantial part of the population of Turkey, including the eastern side of Turkey, which was formerly known as Armenia. You hear that term, but there is no Armenian now. As I recall, 1.5 million of the Armenians were killed, brutally, systematically, and the intention of the Turkish government with help from the German government was to actually destroy the people. And they thought they could do this under cover of war. The war was coming, remember it started in 1914, so it had already started and the Armenians were a scapegoat. And something you use under cover with, you know, there were those who felt that they always wanted to, they only wanted to get rid of the Armenians and the war was a good excuse to do that. So they were pretty mean. I mean, they killed people on the spot, men, women, children, they marched them to their deaths in long marches and they were very brutal. Now mind you, the Holocaust in the 40s had not yet happened and the systematic industrialized killing memory would not get known to the world. This was the biggest genocide up to that point. More people killed for no reason, men, women, children. So what happened after the war was over was that the Turkish government, including Ataturk, who took office in the 20s, as I recall, they didn't want the world to scorn Turkey, great Turkey as a pariah for what happened. So they entered into a kind of long-term mission to make propaganda and have people ignore and forget what happened. It's really extraordinary that this campaign against, you know, the history of it has continued from then till now. And luckily we have enough First Amendment in this country so that people could write books and make movies and the like and bring it back to attention. But the fact is that the United States has not really been on the right side of this issue. The United States is on the wrong side of this issue. And, you know, our brand of capitalism has become to threats by the Turks. There was one incident, more than one, where a movie was either made or about to be made in Hollywood about this back, I guess in the 30s, and they came to MGM and they said, if you make this movie, we're never gonna show this movie or any other movie from the United States in Turkey. And they let the State Department know about that. And before you know it, the movie never got made. And this was a campaign that went on all this time, a hundred year campaign. And that is definitely part of this movie. And Erdogan, you remember him? The guy who won the election last weekend. Erdogan is in the same camp. He's a denier. And a lot of people are deniers. You know, if you talk to a group of Turks, a number of them, maybe a lot of them are gonna say to you, I don't really know if it happened or not because they have been the subject of this propaganda all this time. But the reality is there's enough evidence out there to prove the case. And that's what this movie is about. It's been criticized for spending too much time on the promise, which as you say, was really not up to the standard of a good movie dealing with a shocking historical event. But it's a good effort and it is being well reviewed. And I don't know if it's gonna win awards, maybe it has. But the point is it's kind of a documentary about a movie that's largely fiction. It's a documentary about a mixed bag of fact and fiction, which is troublesome because, you know, we haven't had enough documentaries that deal directly with this genocide. But I think it left me with the impression that there was enough material there to make the case resoundingly for anyone, you know, who watches it, that there was in fact a genocide. There was no excuse, there was no cover, there was no justification whatsoever to systematically engage in a destruction of the people of Armenia, the Armenians. And they did a terrific job at that because it killed so many people under the circumstances. So this movie brings it to our attention and I'm glad you suggested it because I think it's an important movie for everybody to watch. You know, I don't know about the average Joe in this country, but if you walked up to somebody on Fifth Avenue and said, do you know about the Armenian genocide? Unless they were Armenian and there are not many left actually, so many were killed. Most people would say, I never heard of that. It hasn't been taught in the schools. It hasn't been in the media that much movies and books that might have been made and written about it have not been because of the threats, systematic, political and foreign policy type of threats that the Turkish government has made over these last hundred years. They've been stomping out any recollection of it, but the reality is it happened. How can we not know about it? They've controlled the narratives and one of the key points is that they confiscated all the property, real and liquid assets of all these people so and then handed them over to their buddies, right? And yeah, so I mean, if you look into the exactly the methods that were used, you know, the Baghdad Railway that went from Germany to Iraq, some of those things was like a dress rehearsal for what was done later with the Holocaust, with the trains. So I mean, this gets into that that. But what they did is they stuffed hundreds of people into these rail cars. Exactly. Didn't give them food or water in the hot sun and let them sit there and they died. No surprise. And they did this systematically. This was their methodology, their industrial way of killing Armenians. The Armenians, you know, really didn't have a chance the men, women, children. I mean, they were not interested in war. They were just middle-class citizens doing their thing for the Turkish economy. There was a really mean streak in the Turkish government at the time. And it was a confluence of meanness and historical discrimination and hate. And that's the way it wound up. And I think what's interesting too is to look at the Armenians as an example of how this works. You know, one day you have a shop and you're selling widgets in your shop in a city or you're making widgets in a shop in your city and they come and take it all away from you and take you and your family out of your home and kill you away from the crowd, but nevertheless kill you. And then they take all your property, procreate all your property. And they do this, you know, it was written down. It was a Turkish policy at the time that they intended to destroy these people. And they with the collaboration of the Germans. So, I mean, we're really, it's awful that it happened and it's awful that it's been propagandized. And this movie is more, in some ways it's less than what it should have been and in some ways it's more than what it should have been. You know? I think it's sort of like one of those Burns films, you know, with a lot of photographs that do prove the case, but you never saw them before. There's horrible things they did to people. Some of it was recorded, memorialized in black or white photographs, like the Holocaust. I was gonna say that that other one we watched, you know, about the Holocaust, how well it was done by Burns, right? He was the one who did it. Yeah. Berlinger pretty much did very similar and that's why it's so powerful because it was done so with pictures and documentation, just like that other one we did, you know, we reviewed. This is really good. As you said, it's that silly love triangle that takes away that parts of this back showing, it's showing how a movie is made and how all the different, back behind the scenes, all the players, how they make a movie and that's part of this too, you know, so, but it's much more powerful. Let me add that, I saw a review, okay, of Intent to Destroy and they said, what is this with showing you how to make a movie? Is that, do you care about that? I don't care about that. What is this about showing you all the love triangle things and the promise? They already did that, that happened already and we reviewed it, it stands by itself and it's mostly fiction about the relationships of the characters, nice. But this movie pretends to be a documentary. They really didn't have to talk about the promise. They didn't have to talk about the making of the promise and all those shots of, you know, the crew and the cameras and the lights and then a time of day all the technical stuff about making a movie. That's not why I watched it. That's not what I got at it. I didn't care about that. I cared about the essential historical events that they were covering and I actually looked back and this is gonna affect my rating of this movie, George and I looked back and say, you know, I wanna know more about this. Don't tell me about some third party's view of it. I wanna know the documentary side of it. So I think they missed the boat and I think the reviewers have said this. So it's a mixed bag. On the other hand, it opens the curtain for you and maybe you like to watch them make the promise movie. Maybe you care about how pretty she was and all the bravado of the characters in that movie. But for me, for my money, I wanted and maybe it's still coming down the pike. I wanted to know more about how this happened. I wanted to know about the political winds of war, so to speak. I wanted to know about the relationships of the geopolitical players. I wanted to know about the Armenians as a people, how they lived, what it was like for them to get rounded up and killed. I wanted to hear testimonies and there were some testimonies. Troubling also George and I'll stop in a minute was that the movie felt they had to put some of the deniers on the screen. Did you catch that? Yes. That was really offensive to me. It wasn't balanced reporting. So on the one side, you had people who were testified if families were murdered in this genocide. And on the other hand, you have these people that make, you know, sly, subtle remarks about how it never happened. I didn't think that was, I didn't want to hear that. Sorry, that's my bubble. I didn't want to hear them with the propaganda. Okay, they can tell you there was propaganda but I don't want to hear it. You know, I was just like listening to some of these right wing conservatives where you know you can't believe them. And that's how I felt about some of the people they brought on to show you, quote, balanced reporting. How did you feel about that? Well, you know, there was an earlier documentary or something that had both sides. I forgot which one it was, you know, on this issue. And there was much more of the Turkish viewpoint of what according to them happened. And this was sort of underplayed. So, you know, they wanted to give the other side a little bit of a, one of the reviewers, I think at Ebert, right? You know, the one who did it, Roger Ebert said, one of the Turkish officials said the Armenians have Holocaust envy. And the reviewer said, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard, Holocaust envy. You know, but for me, Jay, and for the reviewers, I'm so immersed in this because of my own family history, right? That it's hard. I've always tried to look at the big picture as much as I can, try to pull myself out of it and look at the, from a historical historiography standpoint where, you know, try to get rid of the emotion and try to use my brain as to what transpired and what caused this, right? And so I have a different perspective according to some, a lot of emotional armies that get totally involved with that. And my family was so, my great-grandfather, especially, and all his cousin who was at the, in the sublime port in Istanbul. And we think that the finance minister of the Ottoman Empire was also a close relative of my family, named, they called him Pashaq, because he was a, you know, a really good finance minister, that I have a little different perspective because they were so much part of the government. And, you know, so, you know, I try to pull myself out of this and your perspective is from a viewer outside, you know, outside of looking in and you have a much more clear perspective to the bigger picture. I'm just being so logistic about this. So you have 1.5 million people march to their deaths, largely including, you know, families, husbands, wives, children, and the Turks killed them indiscriminately as long, you know, just because they were Armenian, that's really does sound like genocide to me. And so, you know, then the Turks say, well, no, they were troublemakers, you know, they were fighting with us. Well, you know, I don't think those children were fighting with the Turks. I don't think those women, including a lot of pregnant women who were born in this genocide, I don't think they were fighting with the Turks. That doesn't make any sense at all. So they say, oh, they were fighting with us, therefore we killed them. Really? These people were fighting with you? There's really no evidence of that. So they've been whitewashing it for years. And I actually think it's a stain on Turkey. It's a stain on the Turkish government then and since then, it's a stain on the United States for not being honest about it. It's a stain on MGM for not making the movie. It's a stain on our State Department. It's a stain on Germany. Like Germany needs more stains. And Russia, I mean, you know, this was really bad. This was the worst thing that had happened until that time. We found it could get worse, didn't we? But until that time, what a great opening act for World War I. So I think we learned not only about how people do genocide, but we learned how people do propaganda. Exactly. The problem is they're still doing it. Yeah, they're still doing it. The Kavassu group just said called Biden a charlatan for mentioning the Armenian genocide on April 24th. If you look at the history of the Armenian genocide, as I said, the methods, you'll really, it'll really open your eyes to how, and Lemkin knew this, how it led to the same tactics for the Holocaust. I mean, you got to look into the history, the specific history of the methods that were used. Only 25 years, technology had advanced, right? But it was very, and Germany, a lot of these Germans were in Ottoman Empire, they went back and they were the top guys in the Third Reich. So they learned, this was like sort of an internship. So if you look into the history, you'll see that there's a lot of connections there. But George, George is so much here. In the movie, of course, it's imperfect, but also the study of the Armenian genocide. I'll tell you what I think. The Armenian genocide is an example of this simmering discrimination that took place historically, existed in Turkey. And it had been going on a long time. And then you have autocrats who were running Turkey at the time, and they used it, they used it as a political wedge, as a political weapon to try to get more power, to try to get more power on the international stage as well. And what they did was completely immoral, crimes against humanity, crimes against nature, war crimes. Definitely war crimes. I'm not sure what happened with that. I mean, we know there were war crimes that took place in this genocide, but how much accountability, I don't think there's been too much. And so what you know, what it teaches us is you can have, God, this applies across the board. You can have this low-level simmering discrimination, and then the politicians come, the MRO leaders come, and they fan the flames of that. And before you know it, people are being killed wholesale. This happened through the 20th century, and there's every possibility of happening now, George. Definitely, precisely, precisely what I was gonna agree with you, that it could happen today, even in America, given the current feeling, the current emotional feelings, certain elements of our community, it's scary. It's really, really scary. The last few years, Donald Trump, you know, broad whistling, yeah, you know, that's precisely why it's so important for people in the general public to learn about this, right? Because it's not, it could happen again. It could happen in our country. And it's not outside of the possibility, and that's exactly what you said. We're dealing with the same thing. You've got Putin in Ukraine killing people. You've got all the autocrats in that area, you know, and you have crazy people in our country running in the Congress, and formally in the executive branch, and in the judicial branch. So we've got to be really careful, and you hit the nail on the head. I'll leave it at that. Well, the thing in the Armenian genocide was that, no question, it was the government doing it. It was the Turkish government doing it. And when you get, and of course in the Holocaust, it was the German government doing it. When you get to the point where it's the government doing it, the government is industrialized. The government has guns and troops and weapons and railcars for that matter. And so that's when it gets to be a crisis. If you have hate that's built up against a religious sect or a race, that's usually by proxies. Trump's acolytes, for example, who follow him because they think this is what he wants them to do. But when you get the government directly involved, there's a tipping point. And now that society, that government has divided the country, and we're really in trouble when that happens. So that's why it's a great concern to see a conservative, autocratic candidate win in this country because that could be the next step for us. There are still, the flames have been fanned. There are still a lot of people who hate other people in this country. And if they were motivated to engage in a large scale of violence, they would. But it really gets serious when the government itself is drawn into or sent into that violence for whatever pretext. So George, this is scary, but I wanna ask you a question. What rating do you give it? George saying, you know, I mean, because it really brings to light a lot of things the promise did not. I would give it, I would give it a nine. Maybe I would say more than 8.5 because I like what it's saying, you know. Some of the things that you mentioned about the silliness of the love triangle and showing them, making a movie, all that stuff is perished. I would love to see some really good documentary filmmaker or some really good filmmaker to do a movie. Maybe Spielberg, you know, someone like him with that level. Maybe Burns, maybe Burns, he could do a job on it. Burns, yeah, Burns could do this. And to bring to light all the things that the Turkish government under the Republic has literally controlled the narrative, not only in Turkey, but all over the world. Even that. Including in this country. Yes. It has a huge effect in this country and people believe it accepted. And in our government, they have not accepted the reality of this historical event. And the last point before we go is, by the way, I give it a nine too, but it's a soft nine. It's a 8.5 to nine. That's where I am, I'm on the lower side of the nine. But you know, it teaches us about the United States, doesn't it? Oh yeah. We have, this is a stain on the United States that we didn't belly up to it. That we didn't recognize it as the reality and we still don't. And it's very troublesome that we have enough discrimination in this country where it falls. I wonder if you could teach the subject in the schools of Florida? You know, we don't know. We don't know history. We only know this kind of superficial, you know, the veneer. And this is what really happened and we haven't been taught about it. So I'm very concerned that the press, you and me, everybody who speaks about historical events, we have to make it clear that these things happened and people must know about them. But what's happening in Florida? They're censoring all the history of what the African-Americans went through in this country and other minority groups. It's about, I mean, they want to censor the history. They want to get the books banned, you know? They don't want to talk about what happened to the African-Americans. Let's just forget it and go on. So yeah, he's mentioning Florida. That's, this is a contemporary issue. Well, denial is lying, isn't it? Precisely. Those Turkish guys, the government guys who are on the intent for destroy, they were lying through their teeth. And you know, in Turkey, those little kids for a hundred years have been taught that this didn't exist. So that's what they believe. They've been indoctrinated. You know, that's why the ones you mentioned, they said, no, we don't think that happened because the facts, unless when a scholar leaves, like, you know, the scholars, what was your name? Murad and then Tanra Akhen, when they leave Turkey and they go to the West and they are able to read about both sides, they realize that it's just bogus with what they were taught as children, you know? There's a lot of American Turks that have said that, you know, basically when they learn the facts, they realize they were indoctrinated. Believe me. But you know what, George? I gotta add one point to that. In Turkey today, 2023, it's not just that the schools have not taught the subject. It's not just that the public has been subjected to a campaign over a hundred years. It's more than that. If you question the government's position on it, the government's propaganda on it, you will suffer. They will find a way, Erdogan will find a way. So people are afraid, even if they have come to realize what happened, even if they have, you know, thrown off the yoke of disinformation, they really can't speak about it because they will be consequences. That's right now today. That's my view of it anyway. George, thank you so much. It's great to have this discussion and I tell you the truth. I think much more of you as a survivor of this genocide as an Armenian. And so it's built into the DNA of our movie reviews. Thank you very much for doing this. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.