Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Fifteen

       "As far west as Adrianople, in Thrace, in March 1916, Consular Agent Charles E. Allen described his view of the process of Turkification and general ethnic cleansing.  Once agein the Turks employed forced conversions to Islam and installed muhajirs in the homes of deported Armenians, but in this case the Greeks, who were the largest Christian population there, were the worst hit.  The authorities are working toward 'the Turkification of Thrace,' Allen wrote Morgenthau.  'They are simply expelling' the Greeks and seizing their property, and "installing" Muslims in their houses.  About half the Greek population of Thrace had already been deported back to Greece, and the few remaining Armenians had already been converted to Islam to avoid death, and would 'be required to intermarry with the Turks.'  Allen conjectured that 'this method of securing the disappearance of the Armenian race' might have been promoted by the Germans in order to prevent more killing, as 'the Turks would probably have preferred a quicker and more effective method.'
       Not far from Adrianople, in Ovajik, just west of Constantinople, ten-year-old Serouphi Tvoukdjian woke to find the town crier ordering all Armenian families to prepare to be deported in four days.  They were 'herded into side-entrance box cars,' taken by rail to Konia and Adana,  and then released and forcibly marched into the Syrian desert.  Farther west in the great port city of Smyrna, the American consul, George Horton, documented a similar Turkification frenzy in a report to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in February 1915.  'I have the honor to inform you,' he wrote, 'that lawless Turkish bands are appearing in increasing numbers in this district and are spreading a reign of terror among the Christians of all races.'  Horton closes his letter to Bryan with the refrain of a song Turkish students in Smyrna were singing:
                                            Revenge!  Revenge!  Revenge!
                                             Let us kill, let us cut to pieces,
                                             Let us swim in blood up to our knees,
                                             Revenge!  Revenge!  Revenge!
                                             Let us wipe the stain from our clothes.
       Farther south along the Mediterannean coast, in Adana Province, which still bore the scars of the 1909 massacre, Consul Edward Nathan reported the same pattern of massacre and deportation that was in motion in all other areas of Turkey.  Writing to Ambassador Morgenthau on July 26, 1915, Nathan informed him that 'deportation measures on a large scale' are to be carried out 'against Armenians in the cities of Adana, Tarsus and Mersina.'
       So rapid and massive was the deportation from Adana and its vilayet that in Katma, at the eastern edge of Cilicia, Shukru Aghzarian and some of the other surviving deportees 'found about 200,000 Armenian deportees living in tents without food or water.'  Hundreds were dying by the day, and to make this worse, the 'local Turks,' Aghzarian writes, 'threw offal into the wells' and 'often cut the ropes' on the water buckets.
       Nathan emphasized that the Ottoman government had sent a 'member of the Special Commission on Deportations. . . to superintend the matter.'  The deportees were forced to give all their real estate titles to the authorities, and the rest of their immovable wealth, he noted, was 'taken possession of by the Government.'  The entire region, Nathan explained, was being stripped of its 'best commercial element.'  Because the Armenians were the chief employees of foreign businesses such as the Singer Manufacturing Company, the German agricultural machine companies, and the various petroleum companies, the impact on the region would be disasterous."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs.  269-71.

The Evil Side of 1908

       "A committee of the Illinois legislature is investigating it and the public is taking some interest, but how many people in this state know what horrors the charitable term "Feeble Minded" covers?
       Only those in whose family has come the most terrible affliction that can descend upon it, the birth of a 'feeble-minded' child, know what the term hides under its generous folds.
       'Feeble-minded?'  Yes!  Does it mean weak minded;  does it mean a mind not as strong as the normal, mind afflicted most likely by sickness or fright or some such causes as bring about insanity in the adult? 
       Feeble minded is a curtain that hangs suspended between the public and the truth.
       But behind it there is a chamber of horrors more terrifying than any language or art can portray.
       Yes!  'Feeble-minded is a misnomer, a deception and make believe.
       The word 'children' was attached to the name of this institution when it was created, but like its adjacent term 'feeble minded' it conveys a wrong impression, yet it tells the absolute truth;  for the 'feeble minded' is such at birth and remains such to death;  at any and at all ages, a child, if the word can be applied to a shapeless being that is human only because it has been born of human beings.
       The 'feeble-minded' in this institution are the idiotic, imbecilic, epilectic, brainless, deformed, debauched, degraded offsprings of tainted and diseased ancestry.
       They are the living third and fourth generations upon whom an almighty God declared the sins of their fathers should be visited.
       There are 1,200 of them behind those frowning walls of this institution.
      There are 2,000 more who would be committed to its care if there were accomodations.  How many more of these there are in the state only the omnipotent knows.  In back rooms, on buildings, in garrets, families bearing their disgrace in silence, have hidden away scores of creatures like those forms one sees behind the barred windows at Lincoln.
       Of those who are in the institution at Lincoln nearly all have been sent up by the state.  There are inmates whose parents are well to do and have committed their feeble-minded children to this institution for the benefit of its superior treatment.  This class is made up as a rule of children whose condition is due to after birth causes but they are comparatively few.
       The rest have been charges upon the public and have been consigned to the 'Feeble-Minded' asylum until discharged.  Yes!  until discharged.  That day never comes.  The day of cure never arrives.  Patients are not sent home from Lincoln cured or better as they are from Kankakee or Jacksonville or Elgin.
      Suppose you are a stranger in Lincoln.  The time hangs heavy upon you and you seek something to interest or amuse you.
       You hear the people talk about the 'institution.'  You wander that way.  The first impressions are foreboding.  There is a high iron fence about the. . . Their feet are misshapen;  their heads are abnormally large or small, but always abnormally formed, often times terrifying to look upon.
       What they do they do mechanically.  Their work is not guided by a mind.  They work because they have been taught in a mechanical way to work.  They learn it by rote and do according to a rule of muscular development and operation just one simple thing.
       It is impossible to teach them what books contain.  This has been abandoned.  To teach them to do something that will keep their bodies and hands active is now the purpose of the school and teachers.
       Few become productive but the effort against the irresistable products of sinful flesh and blood continues just the same, because it appears to be humane and just.
       Of the 1,200 only a small per cent goes to school.  Only a few are capable of receiving instruction.
       From the small class known as the 'brighter children' the descent into regions, where live the savage child in a condition of bestiality that shames even the filthiest animal is rapid.
       You pass the epileptic, the marks of the disease plainly written in his lineaments and actions.  You see him in seizure;  a more terrifying spectacle man is not called upon to witness.  You watch the insane child, the mad child, and the violent child, who rages and tears from his body all vestige of clothing, whose control over his physical functions and debasing passions was long ago severed.  Here is a state lower than the lowest, he raves and screams day after day.  Revolting the sight must be to you and the horrifying pictures of these wards will linger with the most hardened and disturb his rest for weeks and months.
       There are spectacles in the back wards of this institution for 'feeble-minded children' that are never opened to the public gaze.  The man who enters the lion cage and fights the big denizens of the Nubian forest displays no more heroism than the attendant who daily waits upon these foul creatures.  These feeble-minded, deformed children are anaemics.  They fight because they are near animal.  They fall because there is slow nerve communication between the eye, the brain, and the muscles.  They are vicious becaus viciousness was bred into them by drunken parents.  They are lustful because they are children of uncontrolled passion.
       Words convey no idea of the scenes witnessed in an hour's journey through this institution.  No description can impart the horrors that the faces of 1,200 idiotic and imbecilic children in all stages of idiocy, imbecility, and insanity can fix upon the plates of memory.  They are pictures that can never be effaced.  These are children.  They are what they are through no fault of their own.  Disease of their own bodies has not caused their condition.  They are helpless, hapless, life-long inmates of an asylum where their physical comfort may be looked after, where their hands and feet may be guided by a sort of automatic process to do certain things;  they are the retribution and the hell that visit themselves upon the living."  Macomb (IL) Daily Journal 1908 {possibly written by W.H. Hainline}

Lair of the Primrose League

       Missouri is the home of Representative Mike Lair, who donned a tinfoil hat to ridicule Common Core opponents.  Common Core is a pro-abort propaganda tool.  It is based on unproven educational theories.  (Remember look/see from the 70s?  Anyone want to repeat that mistake?)  One of its big supporters is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which, no coincidence, is pro-abortion.    Common Core is the means by which Bill Ayres style leftists will take control over future generations. 
      I don't know about Mike Lair's voting record, and I don't live in Missouri.  I suspect Mike Lair is a Primrose Leaguer, and that he thinks anything that socons and Tea Partiers don't like must be a good thing.

Urbana Foreign Policy

     Forgetting your place as a city might mean creating a parallel foreign policy, as Urbana, Illinois did in the early 2000s.  That bespoke a grandiosity and mistaken importance one might also attribute to President Obama.  Now, of course, unlike Urbana, President Obama has the legal authority to create American foreign policy.  It's just that Obama's foreign policy is as irresponsible and silly as what one might expect from Urbana.
      Before Obama took office, he called Iraq a "dumb" war.  This was before we knew he thought Afghanistan was dumb too;  he just wasn't telling us.  Then he destabilized Egypt, an ally.  Then he destabilized Libya.  Finally, when civil war gripped Syria, Obama played world policeman by vowing he would not tolerate use of chemical weapons.  Because of Bashir al-Assad's client relationship with Russia, Obama was unable to enforce his threat.  Syria would have, no doubt, made Iraq look as though Max Planck and Einstein concieved it.   Urbana does not any longer need to create its own foreign policy.  The official one is crazy enough!
      Update: As of the week of March second, Oh Blah Blah is threatening war with Russia over its actions in Ukraine.  Former Secretary of State Hellery Clinton compares Putin with Hitler.  It is amazing how warlike these peaceniks are.

Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog

Good people all, of every sort
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wondrous short,--
It cannot hold you long.
In Islington there was a man,
Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran,--
Whene'er he went to pray.
A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad,--
When he put on his clothes.
And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.
This dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man.
Around from all the neighbouring streets
The wondering neighbours ran,
And swore the dog had lost his wits,
To bite so good a man.
The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
They swore the man would die.
But soon a wonder came to light,
That showed the rogues they lied;
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died.

                                        -Oliver Goldsmith

The Immigrant Song

        George Will has always been a favorite of mine.  Unlike many commentators, he has a Burkean style to his commentary.  When Estase gets a little more caught up on his reading list (2042, maybe?) he intends to read Statecraft as Soulcraft.  However, I think in his recent remarks about immigration he is showing signs of having lived in D.C. too long.
       Immigration is of benefit to big business.  Why?  Because corporate America loves having low skilled workers that will come in and do degrading, unglamorous jobs for $8.25/hr.  This is why every employer who pays minimum wage longs for amnesty.  It isn't born out of some kind of altruism.  It is borne out of a desire to have cheap labor.
      The idea that cheap labor equals economic growth is nonsense.  Skilled labor and entrepreneurship cause economic growth.  This is why India has a growing economy.  If just the presence of hordes of cheap labor caused economic growth, Bangladesh and China would be much more wealthy than they are. 
        Add to this the costs of cheap labor.  People who work for minimum wage, and especially people who work part-time at minimum wage (as many are forced to do in this economy) will require food stamps, Medicaid, and other costly social welfare benefits.  So explain how increasing the number of unskilled workers will grow the economy, when you are talking about also increasing the number of people recieving social welfare benefits? 
         On a purely partisan note, anyone who thinks amnesty will not kill the prospects of conservatives is a fool.  George W. Bush thought Hispanics were potential Republican voters.  He also thought John Roberts was a good pick for Chief Justice.  He also did some very un-conservative things to education.  Without No Child Left Behind, would we be staring down the barrel of Common Core?  Clearly, the former governor of Texas was a mixed bag, and no one's idea of a prophet.  If Hispanic voters favored Republicans, the entire southern border of the U.S. would have been fortified with a thirty foot electrified fence during the Clinton presidency.  Laura Ingraham is right.