Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Four

     "The plan to exterminate the Armenians was accelerated and shaped by the rapid rise of military officers to crucial positions of power.  This new military authority remained free from the restraints of the Ottoman legislature.  With the proclamation of the Temporary Law of Deportation of May 27, 1915, which ordered the forcible deportation of the Armenians, Ottoman officers were given the power to take charge of the wholesale removal of the Armenian population, and the Ministry of War under Enver was authorized to administer the details.
         In creating an efficient killing process the Special Organization systematically recruited, organized, and deployed tens of thousands of convicted criminals for the purpose of massacring the Armenian population.  In this astonishing use of the nation's criminal manpower, the military authorities were given autonomy to authorize the release of thousands of convicts from the prisons.  While the Ottoman government had deployed convicts in small numbers in the Balkan War of 1913, and the sultan had also emptied some prisons for the sake of killing Armenians in the 1890s, the harnessing of the criminal element of Ottoman society was brought to an entirely new threshold in 1915.
       The organization of the chetes--the ex-convict killer bands--was similar to the Reich Security Main Office's einsatzgruppen,or mobile killing units.  While Raul Hilberg claims that the Reich Security Main Office conducted 'for the first time in modern history. . . a massive killing operation,' it appears in fact that the CUP's Special Organization was the first state bureaucracy to implement mass killing for the purpose of race extermination.  Arnold Toynbee was among the first to assess the role of these killing squads when he wrote that:' Turkish "political" chetes. . .made their debut on the western littoral, and in 1915, after being reinforced by convicts released for the purpose from the public prisons, they carried out the designs of the Union and Progress Government against the Armenians in every province of Anatolia except the vilayet of Aidin.'
       The CUP's killing program also involved a hierarchy of command.  At the top of this chain, Dr. Shakir played a role not unlike that of Nazi Reich Security Head, Reinhard Heydrich.  The miltary hierarchy was essential to the operation, and accordingly the Special Organization units were mostly directed by active or reserve officers.  The small detachments were commanded by lieutenants and captains, the larger ones by majors.  In order to ensure that the officers would lead the killing efficiently, they were given incentives of Armenian booty and spoils.  The killing squads and their leaders were motivated by both the ideology of jihad , with its Islamic roots, and pan-Turkism influenced by European nationalism.  The confession made by a Turkish gendarmerie captain named Shukru to the Armenian priest Krikoris Balakian in Yozgat in 1916 dramatizes the role of jihad in the killing process.  Captain Shukru admitted to Balakian, a deportee he assumed would soon be dead, that he had been ordered to massacre all the Armenians of Yozgat because it was a 'holy war.'  When it was over, he told the priest, he 'would say a prayer and his soul would be absolved.'
       The killer bands, or chetes, who played such a significant role in the killing process, were estimated to be about thirty to thirty-four thousand in number.  While Talaat, Shakir, Enver, Gokalp, Nazim, and the others found the idea of using ex-convicts to be an effective means of carrying out genocide, there was another hidden agenda.  Using ex-convicts, they believed, would enable the government to deflect responsibility.  For as the death tolls rose, they could always say that 'things got out of control,' and it was the result of 'groups of brigands.'"  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs. 182-183

Chicago Sewers

        The People's Republic of Illinois is the home of the corrupt Hyde Park socialists Obama, Axelrod, and Jarrett.  The Machine controls the bulk of the state house.  This is the reason Estase has always said that the cloaca maxima of Shiitown empties into Springfield.  The junior senator, Mark Kirk, who is on record saying that confirming Federal judges is "a waste of time," now is wasting his power on passing the Amnesty Bill.  This is to make up for his record of rock-ribbed conservative votes, like when he voted for gay marriage.  What use are Illinois Republicans, assuming there actually are any?

Genderflection and the Empathy Gap

       Estase believes that political correctness is something that often involves double standards.  Women are usually given consideration based solely on this attribute.  Estase calls this genderflection.  I will use this in context.  The press made great deference to the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsberg was a grandmother.  This was an example of the press genderflecting to a Supreme Court Justice for the virtue of being female.  Justice Ginsberg is an indefatigable supporter of abortion.  So she wishes for fewer women to actually be grandmothers.  But she is female, and by happenstance has grandchildren, so she must be a great person.  Estase loathes it when people say something like, "As a parent, I find it horrible that kids were hurt at the Boston Marathon bombing."  So, if you don't have kids, it doesn't bother you to see kids hurt?  You have to be a parent to have empathy?  That would be like saying, "As a man, I hate seeing a man get a basketball slammed into another man's crotch."  So women don't understand that having a basketball hit your testicles doesn't feel good?

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Three

       "On November 14, less than two weeks after the Ottoman Empire entered the war, the sheikh-ul-Islam (the chief Sunni Muslim religious authority in the Ottoman world), Mustafa Hayri Bey--who was a CUP appointment and not, as it was traditionally, the sultan's choice--made a formal declaration of jihad in Constantinople, followed by well-organized demonstrations in the streets.  Even though the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians were the only Christians exempt from the jihad, they were uneasy about this aspect of the Ottoman religious war cry.  Wagenheim wired the Wilhelmstrasse (Foreign Ministry) that the unleashing of religious passions among the Turks was liable to do more harm than good.  He noted that there had already been anti-Armenian violence and other disorder in the city, and he assured the kaiser that he was doing everything 'to prevent further troubles for which we would be held responsible.'  The Entente governments were alarmed about the jihad, and the Italians, for example, now bolstered their armies in Libya, where they feared trouble.
       To promote the idea of jihad, the sheikh-ul-Islam's published proclamation summoned the Muslim world to arise and massacre its Christian oppressors.  'Oh Moslems,' the document read, 'Ye who are smitten with happiness and are on the verge of sacrificing your life and your good for the cause of right, and of braving perils, gather now around the Imperial throne.'  In the Ikdam,the Turkish newspaper that had just passed into German ownership, the idea of jihad was underscored:  'The deeds of our enemies have brought down the wrath of God.  A gleam of hope has appeared.  All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women, and children must fulfill their duty. . . . If we do it, the deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured.'  Jihad pamphlets appealed to the need to exterminate all the Christians--except those of German nationality.  'He who kills even one unbeliever,' one pamphlet read, 'of those who rule over us, whether he does it secretly or openly, shall be rewarded by God.'  In the worldwide Islamic revolution that was coming, 'India' would be 'for the Indian Moslems, the Caucasus for the Caucasian Moslems, and the Ottoman Empire for the Ottoman Turks and Arabs.'
       At the American embassy the day after the jihad proclamation, over tea and cakes, Enver assured Ambassador Morganthau that jihad proclamations would not mean any harm to Americans, nor would there be any massacres.  In the midst of his assurances, Morgenthau's secretary came into the room to report that a mob was demonstrating 'against certain foreign establishments,' and already had attacked an Austrian shop that was advertising 'English clothes' for sale.  Enver brushed off this news as nothing to worry about, but shortly after he left, a report came to Morgenthau that a mob had looted a French dry goods store, the Bon Marche, and was heading toward the British embassy.  A few minutes later the mob marched to 'Tokatlian's, the most important restaurant in Constantinople, ' as Morgenthau called it.  Then Turks broke the mirrors and windows and smashed the marble table tops;  within minutes the restaurant was 'completely gutted.'
        If the jihad failed to incite a worldwide call for three hundred million Muslims to take arms against Christians, it did fan the flames of Turkish nationalism and continued to escalate what Jay Winter has called 'the culture preparation of hatred.'  As the American ambassador put it, the jihad 'started passions aflame that afterward spent themselves in the massacres of the Armenians and other subject peoples.' "The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian Pgs. 169-170

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade) Part Two

       "In ways that were similar and anticipated the Nazi race-hygeine ideology of the 1930s, which depicted the Jew as a 'harmful bacillus' and 'bloodsucker' infecting the German nation from within (Hitler called the Jew 'a maggot in a rotting corpse' and 'a germ carrier of the worst sort'), pan-Turkist ideology envisioned the Armenian as an invasive infection in Muslim Turkish society.  One Turkish physician, Mehmed Reshid, a staunch party member who was appointed governor of Diyarbekir in 1915--and would be responsible for the deaths and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians--likened the Armenians to 'dangerous microbes,' asking rhetorically, 'Isn't it the duty of a doctor to destroy these microbes?'  Known as the 'executioner governor,' Dr. Mehmed Reshid tortured Armenians by nailing horseshoes to their feet and marching them through the streets, and by crucifying them on makeshift crosses.  After the Genocide Reshid confessed 'My Turkishness prevailed over my medical calling.'  Other physicians, like Dr. Behaeddin Shakir and Dr. Mehmed Nazim, both CUP leaders, also believed that Armenians were gavurs who had become 'tubercular microbes' infecting the state.
        {Ziya} Gokalp's pan-Turkism was bound up in grandiose romantic nationalism and a 'mystical vision of blood and race,' and was influenced by the German nationalism of Herder and Wagner, who were also key influences on Nazi Aryan ideology.  Gokalp believed that for Turkey to revitalize itself, it had to reclaim a golden age, which he defined as a pre-Islamic era of Turkic warriors such as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.  It is ironic that Hitler also extolled Genghis Khan in his speech about the future of German world domination and his immediate plan to invade Poland.  Speaking to his elite generals eight days before invading Poland in 1939, Hitler praised the virtues of power and brutality, referring to how easy it had been to dispense of defenseless people like the Armenians.  'Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter--with premeditation and a happy heart.  History sees him solely as the founder of a state.  It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me.'  And then the fuhrer asked rhetorically:  'Who today, after all, speaks of the annhilation of the Armenians?'
        For Turkey to be strong again, Gokalp believed, it had to emulate this great military past, and it had to be a pure, homogenous nation.  A nation, Gokalp wrote, must be 'a society consisting of people who speak the same language, have had the same education and are united in their religious and aesthetic ideals--in short those who have a common culture and religion.'
       Gokalp declared with passion that nationalism was the new religion in the twentieth century, and that loyalty to the nation must be, for the healthy state, unqualified and total.  'I am a soldier, it [the nation] is my commander/I obey without question all its orders.  With closed eyes/I carry out my duty,' his doggerel went.  Like Mehmet Reshid, he espoused the idea that non-Turks were invasive germs that threatened the health of the state.  'Greeks, Armenians, and Jews' were 'a foreign body in the national Turkish state.'  Believing the Armenians and Greeks to be parasites, Gokalp and the other pan-Turkists strove to rid their society of this Christian bourgeois element.  Gokalp's theory of national economy advocated a homogenous Turkish bourgeoisie, and during the Balkan Wars, a Turkish boycott of Greek and Armenian businesses was a major manifestation of the new xenophobia.  As Tekinalp put it, 'The rigorous boycott' created 'a feeling of brotherhood. . . in the hearts of people all over the empire.'   It was only a beginning, for as U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau put it, the boycott with its attack on Christians, especially the Greeks in this case, foreshadowed what would happen to the Armenians later.  Turkish rage at the gavur bourgeosie would explode in more extreme ways when the wholesale theft and pillaging of Armenian wealth became institutionalized during the Genocide.
        The Young Turk leaders, especially Enver Pasha, went beyond pan-Turkism and became obsessed with the idea of pan-Turanism, an ideology based on the hope of reclaiming the Caucasus and central Asia--an idea laced with some of the occultlike fantasy characterized by the Nazi belief about ruling the world for a thousand years.  For Enver it fueled his desire to wipe out the Armenians, whom he saw as an obstacle to Turkish expansion into the Russian Caucasus and then into central Asia, and it dictated some of his military strategy.  The pan-Turanist part of Gokalp's ideology made a special appeal to Turkish fantasies.  It was predicated on an irridentist idea that the Ottoman Empire could revive itself by achieving some sort of union among 'all peoples of proven or alleged Turkic origins,' both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire.'
       The idea encapsulated a dream of creating an empire among the Turkic peoples from Albania through Anatolia, into the Caucuses and then into central and east-central Asia.  As the Turks drove east, Gokalp believed, they would find the mythical origin of their culture,' a Shangri-La-like area in the steppes of Central Asia.'  By 1910, as the idea of Turkification became increasingly popular, the CUP decided to make the Turkish language compulsory in all schools throughout the empire, and it reiterated this at annual meetings in the ensuing years leading up to World War I.
       By 1914, as Turkey positioned itself to join Germany in the war, the Young Turk leadership was embracing various elements of pan-Turkism, pan-Turanism, and Turkification.  Obsessed with their mortal enemy, Russia, and angry about Russian rule of the Turkic peoples of central Asia, the Young Turks used pan-Turkic goals as a rationale for entering the war.  Throughout the press from Tasvir-i Efkar and Sabah to government organs such as Tanin, and opposition papers like Ikdam and Zaman, pan-Turkist propaganda was very much part of the zeitgeist.

       Turkey's new alliance with Germany and partnership in World War I accelerated the empire's militarization program.  By March 1914 the Germans had become an entrenched presence in the empire and in the Ottoman military.  High-ranking German officers now found themselves holding commanding positions in the Ottoman army and navy.  Gen.  Liman von Sanders had arrived in Constantinople in December 1913 and was to become commander of the First Ottoman Army Corps, and also inspector-general of the Ottoman army, while Maj. Gen. Fritz Bronssart von der Goltz, Maj. Gen. Freidrich Kress von Kressenstein, Gen. Eric von Falkenhayn, Maj. Gen. Hans von Seekt all assumed positions of power in the Ottoman army.  The German rear admiral Wilhelm Souchon became commander of the Ottoman navy, as did his successor Vice-Adm. Hubert von Rebeur-Paschwitz.
       To the new American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, the aggressive presence of the German army in Turkey seemed nothing less than evidence of the kaiser's plan 'to annex the Turkish army to his own.'  It was certainly no coincidence that Enver Pasha had been trained in Berlin, where he was military attache in 1909.  He worshipped German kultur, and in Morgenthau's view, was little more than ' a cog in the Prussian system.'  With the new German leadership, Morgenthau found himself witnessing changes in the Ottoman army.  'What. . . had been an undisciplined, ragged rabble was now parading with the goose step, the men were clad in German field gray, and they even wore a casque-shaped head covering, which slightly suggested the German Pickelhaube [spiked helmet].'  Of this the 'German officers were immensely proud,' for they felt they had transformed 'the wretched Turkish soldiers of January into these neatly dressed, smartly stepping, splendidly maneuvering troops.'
       By the summer of 1914, Morgenthau described the German officers as 'rushing through the streets every day in huge automobiles,' and filling 'all the restaurants and amusement places at night, consuming large quantities of champagne.'  In particular, General von der Goltz, who had accrued the title of pasha, drove through the streets in a flashy car 'on both sides of which flaring German eagles were painted,' and a 'trumpeter on the front seat' announced them as they barreled down the boulevards.
       Although the Ottoman Empire signed a secret treaty with Germany on August 2, 1914, many high-ranking Turks were still pro-British, including Yussuf Izzedin, the heir apparant to the sultanate, and Grand Vizier Said Halim.  Jemal Pasha was a Francophile, the majority of the cabinet were not pro-German, and public opinion was more pro-English than pro-German.  But Enver and Talaat had succeeded in engineering the German ascendancy, and this struck Morgenthau as ironic because England, not Germany, had been 'Turkey's historic friend.'
       By the summer of 1914, an aggressive German public relations campaign had coopted the Turkish press and fueled the new Turkish-German alliance.  German ambassador Hans von Wangenheim purchased the Ikdam, one of Turkey's largest newspapers, and began vigorously promoting Germany at the expense of France and Great Britain.  The Osmanischer Lloyd, one of Turkey's largest newspapers, and became an organ of the German embassy, and a new wave of censorship followed, in which the Turkish press was ordered to publish only pro-German sentiment.  Russia was portrayed as Turkey's chief enemy, responsible for Turkey's recent losses, and Germany as its ally.  As Morgenthau put it:  'The Kaiser suddenly became 'Hadji Wilhelm.''
       Trainloads of Germans from Berlin--some 3,800 of them--began landing in Constantinople.  Most of them were mechanics sent by the kaiser to work in ammunition plants and to repair Turkish destroyers for war.  Like the military officers, this new crew of Germans also filled the cafes at night and paraded through the streets 'in the small hours of the morning, howling and singing German patriotic songs.'  It was a movement in which the gradual erosion of British dominance seemed to have given way fully to German hegemony in Turkey.  To the close-up diplomatic eye of the American ambassador, it seemed that the British had not played the game properly.  British ambassador Sir Louis Mallet 'had not purchased Turkish officials with money, as had Wagenheim;  he had not corrupted the Turkish press, trampled on every remaining vestige of international law, fraternized with a gang of political desperadoes, and conducted a ceaseless campaign of misrepresentations and lies against his enemy.'  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 164-166, 167-169.
        

Kaiser Saluting the Head of the Mohammedan Church (1917)

From Macomb (IL) Daily Journal ,Saturday December 29, 1917.  Caption:  "This photograph, one of the very few showing the kaiser in Constantinople, shows him saluting the Cheek-Ul-Islam, head of the Mohammedan church.  It has just come to the United States after publication in Germany.  In the photograph are showed the Cheek, the sultan of Turkey, Enver Pasha, minister of war, who has been charged with being the German agent in Turkey, and the kaiser."

The Roundup, Part Four

       "Rosina Sorani and her brother, Settimio, had spent the day in their apartment wondering what they should do.  She had been on her way to work when she saw the trucks parking on the Via del Portico d'Ottavia.  She had calmly turned round and retraced her steps.  From then on they had taken turns to use the telephone;  Rosina to try and contact Foa, her brother to reach Father Weber and Renzo Levi.  Settimio finally contacted the Pallotine priest late in the afternoon who said he would come at once.  When he arrived he explained he had been in the Vatican all day helping to deal with the situation. 
       Weber said he would take them to where Foa, Almansi, and Levi met after going into hiding.  It was a dairy shop run by a Catholic widow and her daughter.  While she provided them with coffee, the three most powerful men in the Jewish community listened to Weber's news.
       They had discussed how they could save the Jews.  Foa suggested he should write an appeal to the pope to intervene.  Weber said Pius was doing all he could.  Levi proposed a direct approach should be made to either the German embassy or its mission to the Holy See to ask for the freedom for the old and sick and the women and children.  He would personally guarantee to pay any sum of money in exchange for their release.  The money would be raised from America.  Weber had asked how long it would take to find such a sum.  Levi thought it would take 'a few days.'  The Pallotine father had looked at the others and said he feared there were only hours left in which to negotiate any deal.
       Nevertheless Ugo Foa decided he would still write to the pope and Weber said he would bring the letter to the Vatican.  When he gave it to Weber it contained a sentence which caught his attention.  Foa had written there were a number of people in the ghetto who were classified under the racial laws as Mischlinge-- the offspring of parents who were of mixed religion.  Some, Foa wrote, had even been baptized and while they still lived in the ghetto were regarded as Catholics.  They should be allowed to go free.
       Pfeiffer hurried to see Maglione.  After reading the letter the secretary of state produced a copy of the racial laws and found the relevant passage.  He had taken the book and Foa's letter with him to the pope.  Pius told Maglione to inform Weizsacker and asked to intervene to have the Mischinlinge freed and arrange for a senior member of the Vatican  to go to the Collegio Militare, taking with him a copy of the racial laws to show to the officer in charge.  Maglione proposed sending Bishop Hudal, given he was the signatory of the letter to Stahel.
        Hudal's role in the roundup has remained secret until now.  In his own notes of the matter Maglione only referred to him as a 'Vatican official.'
        On Sunday morning, dressed in his bishop's robes, Hudal introduced himself to Dannecker at the entrance to the Collegio Militare as 'the most senior Reverend Alois Hudal, the senior German-speaking bishop abroad.'
       Twenty-one months later he would use similar words to receive Heinrich Mueller in his palatial office in the Pan-Germanic college to discuss with the former German gestapo chief the help Nazi war criminal needed from Hudal to obtain Vatican documents to hide in South America.
       There is no evidence the pope and the Vatican were implicated in the matter-- let alone an organization which became known as ODESSA, which appears to have been the brainchild of Hudal.  In 2011 Mossad files show that figures like Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka;  Klaus Barbie;  Martin Bormann;  and Adolf Eichmann were all assisted with false papers and hiding places provided by Hudal while they were en route to hide in Latin America at the end of the war.
       The details emerged in 1945 when Dannecker was captured and interrogated by American forces.  He had been hiding in Bad Tolz in Bavaria organizing Nazi resistance to the Allied occupation.  He had already instructed his wife to poison their two children;  one died, the other was saved.  Dannecker was found hanging in his cell awaiting trial.
        That Sunday morning at the Collegio Militare what passed between them ended with Dannecker agreeing with Hudal that 274 'non-Jews'--spouses and offspring--caught in the roundup were to be set free.
       They left the barracks soon after the bishop drove back to the Vatican.  In the meantime Weizsacker had told Maglione he was unable to help free the non-Jews."  The Pope's Jews by Gordon Thomas pgs 222-224

The Roundup, Part Three

       "It was around 5 A.M. when on Saturday Prince Filippo Doria Pamphilj awoke.  For days now he had knelt on his prie-dieu and prayed about whether it was time to tell the Resistance to place the detonators in the tunnel beneath his family palazzo on the Via del Corso to ensure the enormous baroque edifice, with its thousand rooms, which had become the Waffen SS headquarters and barracks in Rome, would be totally destroyed.
       Over the past weeks, the forty-three-year-old prince, dressed in a coalman's clothes, had led the demolition team through the tunnels as they worked by the light of a lantern placing the explosives beneath a palace where for centuries the family had lived and welcomed monarchs, popes, and rulers of Europe with two exceptions:  Prince Filippo had refused to entertain Mussolini or Hitler when they came to Rome.
        His decision had cost the price his liberty--imprisoned in one of Mussolini's concentration camps.  After pressure from the Vatican to free him.  Pope Pius had advised Filippo to go into hiding from the furious Fascists.
        The palace gardener, by then a member of the Resistance, had found the prince a home in Trastevere among its working-class population, and introduced him to the partisan leaders, who promised he would be safe among them.  They showed him some of their hideouts.  He had told them about the tunnels.  When the Germans arrived he proposed the palace should be blown up.
        Even hard-bitten men of the Resistance had hesitated.  The damage could be widespread, the revenge of the Germans guaranteed, and he would become a prime target, together with his family.
       Prince Filippo discussed the matter with his wife, Gesine, and their daughter, Princess Orietta.  Gesine had reminded her husband that the palace would eventually pass to Orietta as their only child and she would be entitled to an inheritance which would include four princedoms, two dukedoms, and immense estates including a castle, a thirteenth-century abbey, and the church of St. Agnes in Rome's Piazza Navona.
        Orietta told her father he must do what he felt was right.
        Since then Prince Fillipo knelt every morning as dawn broke on his prie-dieu and prayed to make the right decision.
        On that morning his devotions were interrupted by the roar of trucks emerging from the Collegio Militare and moving down the road on the opposite bank of the Tiber.

         The pope's first orders were given calmly.  Maglione was to continue to stay in contact with Weizsacker.  Father Pankratius was to obtain information from the German high command in Rome.  The secretary of state's two assistants--Montini and Tardini--were to work together to contact the religious houses where Jews were being sheltered and told what was happening.  Father Leiber was to inform Osborne and Tittmann and ask them if their governments would protest to Berlin;  the pope's secretary would make a similar request to neutral missions to the Holy See.  Pascalina was to inform Chief Rabbi Zolli and ask him to convey the news to all the other Jews hiding in the Vatican.  D'Altishofen, the Swiss Guard commander, was to contact the Rome police for information.  Ottaviani was to inform O'Flaherty, who should send his priests out into the streets to establish what was happening.  The Vatican switchboard was alerted and it began to handle priority calls from the network Pius had mobilized to help the Jews.
        Through the long day Pius remained in his office receiving reports and issuing new orders.  To Father Leiber he was 'leading the smallest state on earth to challenge the military masters of Rome.  It was clear that upon his courage and decision-making would depend the lives of those being taken into the military college.'

        It was midmorning when Weizsacker was shown into Maglione's office.  The secretary of state said the ambassador must intervene with the foreign minister in Berlin to have the roundup cancelled 'for the sake of humanity and Christian charity.'
       Weizsacker's response came after a pause.  'It would be more powerful if the pope was to publicly protest against the deportation.'
       The words would form part of the claims and counterclaims of what followed in the short meeting between the two diplomats.  Weizsacker claimed he praised the Holy See for its balanced attitude throughout the war and asked if it 'was worthwhile putting everything in danger just as the ship is reaching port?'
        Maglione would insist, 'I reminded him that the Holy See had no wish to be put in a position where it is necessary to protest but if the Holy See is obliged to do so I trust the consequences to divine providence.'

        Hudal had been given a seat around the table for the noon meeting on Saturday which the pope regularly held in a salon in the Apostolic Palace with his senior advisors.  They included Maglione, Montini and Tardini, Monsignor Leiber, Monsignor Ottaviani, and Father Pfeiffer.
         After Maglione had reveiwed his meeting with Weizsacker, Ottaviani reported that the convents and religious houses were sheltering ghetto Jews who had managed to escape and Father Weber had brought a number into the Vatican.
         Each person had before him a copy of the letter Gumpert and Kessel had composed and which Pankratius had brought to Hudal.  It now became the subject of discussion.
         Hudal said he found the content acceptable but that the signatory was too low-ranking to represent the views expressed.  As it involved the Holy See it should be signed by someone with a suitable rank in the Vatican as he was certain then that General Stahel would transmit the letter to Berlin.  Further it should be brought to the Stadtkommandant by Father Pfeiffer to reinforce the letter represented the Holy See's position.
        While agreeing to this approach, Maglione had a question:  Who should sign the letter?  Hudal said he would be honored to put his name to the letter.  It was left to the pope to say the document should not be written on Vatican stationery but on Bishop Hudal's German college notepaper as its rector.  This would be interpreted by his critics as 'evidence' that the pope did not wish to be further involved in the fate of the Jews.

        At 5 P.M. Father Pfeiffer arrived at General Stahel's office in the Hotel Flora and handed over the letter bearing Hudal's signature.  After reading it Stahel sighed, shook his head, and summoned his aide to take it to the communications room to have it encoded and transmitted to the Foreign Office in Berlin.  The matter was now in other hands, the general said.
        Back in his office in the Apostolic Palace Father Pfeiffer informed Maglione and Hudal of Stahel's decision.  The secretary of state told Father Pfeiffer to inform Weizsacker.
        Pfeiffer's confirmation it was on its way to Berlin was the signal for Weizsacker to prepare his own response to the roundup.  He began to write in a fine copperplate.
       'With regards to Bishop Hudal's letter I can confirm that this represents the Vatican's reaction to the deportation of the Jews of Rome.  The Curia is especially upset considering that the action took place, in a manner of speaking, under the pope's own window.  The reaction could be dampened somewhat if the Jews were to be employed in labor service here in Italy.  Hostile circles in Rome are using this event as a means of pressuring the Vatican to drop its reserve.  It is being said that when analogous incidents took place in French cities, the bishops there took a clear stand.  Thus the pope, as the supreme leader of the church and as bishop of Rome, cannot but do the same.  The pope is also being compared with his predecessor, Pius XI, a man of more spontaneous temperament.  Enemy propaganda abroad will certainly view this event in the same way, in order to disturb the Curia and ourselves.'
       He signed and sealed the letter and put it aside to go in the diplomatic pouch to Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin.  That decision would later arouse more speculation than anything else Weizsacker had done during his tenure in Rome.  Was the latter a clear indication he was prepared to risk his career, and very likely his life, to try and save the Jews?  If so, knowing the urgency of the situation, why had he not immediately encoded it and sent it to Berlin?  The diplomatic pouch would not leave until Monday.  By then, he could reasonably deduce, the fate of the Jews would be settled.  From what he had heard Judenaktionen were swift operations."  The Pope's Jews , pgs.204-5, 209-10, 214, 215-16,21-19.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade) Part One

      
"The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it;  because the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense;  and because when we now refuse to war with Turkey we show that our announcement that we meant 'to make the world safe for democracy' was insincere claptrap."  Theodore Roosevelt to Cleve Dodge 1917

         "The British consul Henry Barnham, who oversaw Aintab and Birecik in Aleppo Province, made it clear in his account how powerfully the killing of Armenians was motivated by Islamic fanaticism and a jihad mentality:
                   The butchers and the tanners, with sleeves tucked up to the shoulders,
                    armed with clubs and cleavers, cut down the Christians, with cries of
                     'Allahu Akbar!'  broke down the doors of the houses with pickaxes
                     and levers, or scaled the walls with ladders.  Then when mid-day came
                     they knelt down and said their prayers, and then jumped up and resumed
                     the dreadful work, carrying on far into the night.  Whenever they were
                      unable to break down the doors they fired the houses with petroleum,
                      and the fact that at the end of November petroleum was almost
                      unpurchaseable in Aleppo suggests that enormous quantities were bought
                       up and sent north for this purpose.
       Muslim clerics played a perpetual role in the massacring of Armenians;  imams and softas would often rally the mob by chanting prayers;  and mosques would often rally the mob by chanting prayers;  and mosques were often used as places to mobilize crowds, especially during Friday prayers.  Christians were murdered in the name of Allah.  One survivor, Abraham Hartunian, described the desecration of two Armenian churches (one Gregorian--Armenian Apostolic--and the other Protestant) in the town of Severek in Diyarbekir Province:
                     The mob had plundered the Gregorian church, desecrated it, murdered all
                      who had sought shelter there, and, as a sacrifice, beheaded the sexton on
                      the stone threshold.  Now it filled our yard.  The blows of an axe crashed
                       in the church doors.  The attackers rushed in, tore the Bibles and
                       hymnbooks to pieces, broke and shattered whatever they could,
                        blasphemed the cross, and, as a sign of victory, chanted the Mohammedan
                         prayer:  'La ilaha ill-Allah, Muhammedin Rasula-llah' (There is no other
                        God but one God, and Mohammed is His prophet). . . . The leader
                         of the mob cried:'Muhammede salavat!' Believe in Mohammed and deny
                         your religion.  No one answered. . . . The leader gave the order to
                         massacre.   The first attack was on our pastor.  The blow of an axe dec-
                         apitated him.  His blood, spurting in all directions, spattered the walls
                        and ceiling.
         Two letters from a Turkish soldier on duty in Erzurum with the Fourth Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-fifth Regiment, written to his parents and brother in Harput, also lend insights into Turkish attitudes about killing Armenians.  The letters came into the hands of a British consul after the massacres in that city and were put into the consular file marked 'Confidential.'
                   My brother, if you want news from here we have killed 1,200 Armenians, all
                   of them as food for the dogs. . . .Mother, I am safe and sound.  Father, 20
                    days ago we made war on the Armenian unbelievers.  Through God's grace
                    no harm befell us.  There is a rumor afoot that our Battalion will be order-
                    ed to your part of the world--if so, we will kill all the Armenians there. 
                     Besides, 511 Armenians were wounded, one or two perish every day.  If
                     you ask after the soldiers and Bashi Bozouks, not one of their noses has
                     bled. . . .May God bless you.
        In these letters, massacring Armenians is seen as a commonplace occurence sanctioned by Islam as well as by the government.  As Dadrian put it:  'Here is a regimental unit of the standing army engaged in broad daylight in peacetime killing operations against unarmed civilian populations.'
       Among the most ghoulish scenes recorded was the extermination of the Armenians of Urfa.  Urfa, once ancient Edessa (the city to which Christ's disciples brought Christianity, in this dry region of southeastern Anatolia), had been the site of massacre in October 1895 during the wave of autumn killings of that year, and the Armenians remained under siege in their quarter of the town for the following two months.  Then, on December 28th at midday, a bugle sounded and Turkish soldiers and civilians invaded the Armenian quarter.  Doors of houses and shops were smashed open with axes and clubs, and people were shot on the spot.  Their material goods and valueables were stolen, and kerosene was poured on the rest.  At sunset, when the bugle sounded again, the killers retreated, and the Armenians who had survived sought refuge in their cathedral.  (Traditionally synagogues and churches were to be respected as places of refuge under Islamic law.)
       The next morning the Turkish troops fired through the church windows and broke down the iron door, mockingly calling on 'Christ now to prove himself a greater prophet than Mohammed.'  They began killing everyone on the floor of the church by hand or with pistols.  From the altar they gunned down the women and children in the gallery.  Finally the Turks gathered bedding and straw, on which 'they poured some thirty cans of kerosene'  and set the church ablaze.  British Consul G.H. Fitzmaurice's careful description reveals something about the religious ethos underpinning the killings:
                 The gallery beams and wooden framework soon caught fire, whereupon,
                  blocking up the staircases leading to the gallery with similar inflammable
                  materials, they left the mass of struggling human beings to become the prey
                  of the flames.
                            During several hours the sickening odour of roasting flesh pervaded the
                  town, and even to-day, two months and a half after the massacre, the smell
                  of putrescent and charred remains in the church is unbearable. . . . I believe
                  that close on 8,000 Armenians perished in the two days' massacre of the 28th
                  and 29th December. . . . I should, however, not be at all surprised if the
                  figure of 9,000 or 10,000 were subsequently found to be nearer the mark.
      The massacres of the 1890s fully inaugurated the modern fate of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.  Abdul Hamid's policy of massacre began in what the social psychologist Irvin Staub has called a 'continuum of destruction.'  As Staub notes, 'A progression of changes in a culture and individuals is usually required for mass killing or genocide.  In certain instances--the Armenian Genocide, for example--the progression takes place over decades or even centuries and creates a readiness in the culture.'
       The Hamidian massacres also initiated the idea that massacre could be committed with impunity.  While the European powers set up an investigative commission after Sasun and Van, and asked the sultan for reforms, there was no forceful intervention to halt the massacres, nor was there any punishment in the aftermath.  There was, to be sure, worldwide coverage of the events and attendant outrage, and there was an outpouring of humanitarian relief and philantropy for the surviving victims.  The sultan was vilified in the European and the U.S. press as the "Bloody Sultan,"  and depicted as a paranoid despot and a defiler of human freedom.  Yet in the face of such world opinion, Abdul Hamid remained unrepentant, continuing to deny his actions and blame the victims.
       By the end of the 1890s, the lack of political recourse or punishment let the sultan off the hook, and left Turkish society engaged in a culture of massacre that permanently dehumanized Armenians in an evolutionary process that would culminate in genocide in 1915.  As Christian infidels, Armenians had already been marginalized.  Now they became fair game.

        On the night of April 12 {1909}, some units of soldiers in the First Army Corps in Constantinople revolted.  As dawn broke on the morning of April 13, there was an astonishing sight:  Regiments of soldiers marched in the morning mist across the bridges from the suburbs to the Golden Horn, shooting their rifles into the sky to announce their advent.  Several hundred filled the courtyard outside the parliament in Saint Sophia Square, while others poured into the old Byzantine plaza known as the Augusteon.
        As the mullahs, hojas (religious teachers), and softas in their white turbans and robes joined the soldiers, cries of 'Down with the Constitution!' and 'Long live the shari'a !' resounded in the plaza and throughout the streets of the city.  The presence of the Muslim zealots created such tension that the chief of the Constantinople police was soon in the streets confronting them as they demanded the dismissal of the minister of war and the president of the chamber.  The softas and their religious colleagues were also protesting the sight of women in public, a complaint that had become commonplace after the revolution.  As the day went on, riots broke out in the streets and the soldiers and the softas sacked and looted the CUP's {Committee of Union and Progress} newspaper offices, sending many CUP members into hiding.
        In the chaos Grand Vizier Hilmi Pasha resigned, as did other cabinet members.  Although the sultan issued an order that the shari'a would be protected, for the moment the government was in disarray.  By telegraph, the news of the counterevolution reached the army in Salonika, and within days an 'Army of Deliverance' was mobilized and sent to the capital.  Enver Bey, who was in Berlin at the Turkish embassy, rushed back to join his army, and on April 23 the Young Turk troops entered Constantinople.  After some clashes with the softas and soldiers, which were over by about five o'clock in the afternoon, the Deliverance Army quashed the counterrevolution.  The CUP was now in a position to increase its influence over the next few years, in what would be an unstable and transitional time for the Ottoman government.

       During that span of about five hundred years, the Christians of the Balkans, the majority of whom were Slavs, lived under Ottoman Muslim rule, and were accorded the traditional Ottoman treatment of those of infidel status.  The Balkan Christians, like the Arminians, were subjected to heavy taxation, arbitrary violence, political disenfranchisement, and cultural oppression;  some of them converted to Islam.  There were constant rebellions and uprisings against the Turks, which were put down by the Ottoman army.  Finally, by 1828, Greece had successfully fought its war for independence.  In 1876 the Bulgarians staged a rebellion, only to be brutally massacred by Ottoman forces in what quickly became known as 'the Bulgarian horrors.'  In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Balkan states petitioned continually for reform.  After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, article 23 of the Treaty of Berlin promised reforms for the Armenians.  With the Treaty of Berlin the Bulgarians had achieved partial autonomy, and the process of Balkan secession had begun.
       By 1912, as new Balkan alliance were formed in opposition to Ottoman rule, the Turks again responded with massacre.  In the summer of 1912 the Ottoman army carried out two massacres, one in Ishtib, east of Skopje, and another in Kocani, southeast of Skopje, the capital city of Kosovo.  In October 1912, the tiny state of Montenegro began a war of rebellion against Ottoman rule.  Five days later the other Balkan states demanded reforms and mobilized their armies.  On October 17 the Ottoman Empire had declared war on Bulgaria and Serbia, and the next day Greece declared war on the Ottoman Empire.  What ensued was astonishing.  Within a day Turkey suffered heavy losses to the combined fronts of the Balkan armies, and was forced to stage an eleventh-hour defense near Constantinople.  By October 26 the Serbs had won at Skopje in Kosovo, by November 8 the Greeks had taken Salonika, and by November 29 Albania had declared its independence.
       Throughout the period of the Balkan crisis, Turkish sentiment was marked by rage.  In the streets of Constantinople on the eve of the war students and CUP members shouted:'We want war!', 'To Sofia, to Sofia!', 'Down with Greece!  Greeks, bow your heads!' and the hatred of European intervention was clear as they chanted 'Down with article 23, down with it!', 'Down with equality!', 'The Balkan dogs are trampling on Islam.'
        An editorial in the newspaper Tanin, a quasi-official voice of the CUP, declared: 'Europe's intervention and Europe's desire to control our internal affairs is a warning to us to ponder the fate not only of Rumelia [Macedonia], but also eastern Turkey, for it will be impossible to spare eastern Turkey the fate awaiting Rumelia.'  In the Turkish mind, the struggle to keep the Balkans was never far from the Armenian Question."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 112-115, 146-147,160-161, and 308

Are They Joking?

       When Estase was a teenager he listened to a crappy Irish band called U2.  They had a song on their album "Rattle and Hum" called "Bullet the Blue Sky."  After listening to this dreck a couple of hundred times, Estase realized "Bullet the Blue Sky" was an indictment of the United States as a militaristic, nasty, money-obsessed country.  In other words, U2 was Obama before Obama was Obama.  At that point, Boner and all his little drunkie friends became anethema to Estase.  At that point, I became extremely suspicious of rock musicians and their wisdom in general.  So when Estase learned Adam Levine, the tatooed sex-obsessed frontman of Maroon 5 said "I hate this country" on The Voice, he  did not surprise anyone.  Popular culture helped elect Oh Blah Blah because the actors and musicians despise our military, our traditions, and the capitalist system that made them rich.  Scarlett Johannson seems much uglier when you consider that she is a pro-abort who backs Oh Blah Blah.  Was Levine joking?  Was Johannson joking? Was Bono joking?

The New Church

       Dr. Janet Smith has come up with an argument about how the Archdiocese of New York did nothing wrong by covering abortion and contraception in its contract with health workers.  Estase won't bother with reading it.  Why?  Because Dr. Smith is engaging in a high level casuistry to justify cooperation with evil.  And the bizarre thing is that it is the same kind of cooperation with evil that the Catholic bishops have been protesting against in terms of the HHS mandate of Obamacare for a year!  Cardinal Dolan (Oh Blah Blah's good friend, who likes to hang out with the President and have dinner with him, and who refuses to endorse refusing communion to pro-abortion politicians, as does Cardinal Wuerl of Washington) has vitiated the argument that the Church cannot fund abortion and contraception, because he already has funded abortion and contraception.  So what has all this huffing and puffing about not complying with the HHS mandate been about?  The Catholic church can pay for abortion and contraception in some cases, but not others? 

       When Jesus made the analogy of giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, the meaning was (in my view) that money can be given to the government, but that's all government can expect from us.  The government doesn't own us.  The government doesn't control our will, our intellect, our soul.    This is why the Catholic Church once thought it should be in the health care business in the first place.  Once, the Catholic Church saw fostering human life as a part of its ministry.  The behavior of Catholic bishops today is quite different.  Now, handing out free stuff to the poor is the only criterion.  This is why Sister Carol Keegan sees nothing wrong with fostering Obamacare even as it will run her Scranton hospitals out of business.  All that's important is that people get free health care.  It matters not a bit if formerly Catholic hospitals now provide abortions.  It matters not a bit if Catholic hospitals offer contraception and abortion to their employees in New York.  What does the revelations about New York demonstrate?  One, Catholic health care is dead.  Nowhere in America does a Catholic hospital actually act according to Catholic morality, or if it does, Estase hasn't heard where.  Second, the bishops have been complaining that they can't do something that the Archbishop of New York has already agreed to.  And the leading Catholic ethicist has come up with a moral justification!  So does the government have the right to expect more than money from us?  If the Church is in the process of ceding its role in health care to the government, is the government the new Church? 

Crimes Against History

       "It was the sound of boots running toward the palazzo front door which had first warned Princess Pallavicini.  She was alone:  having sent her cook and maid south to her country home, together with her chauffeur and gardener.  She knew that if she was discovered forging documents they would be imprisoned--or even executed as collaborators.
       Already her friend, Princess Virginia Agnelli, the widow of Edoardo Agnelli, the Turin Fiat heir, was imprisoned in the San Gregorio Convent;  in spite of the Lateran Treaty, the building had been turned by the Fascists into a prison for the ladies of the Black Nobility.  Virginia had smuggled out a message to Nina that she was 'reasonably comfortable and I can use the chapel.' 
       The kicking of boots against the front door and shouts in German sent Nina racing to the back of the palace to jump out of a ground floor window.  Knowing the penalty of death faced her when her illegal wireless was discovered she ran through the streets to the only person and place she knew would provide sanctuary--Monsignor O'Flaherty in the German college.
        That night O'Flaherty found her a bedroom in the nun's quarters.  Hours later Radio Rome broadcast that she was to be arrested on sight for using an illegal radio and working for the enemy.  A substantial reward was announced for her capture.  O'Flaherty told Nina he had obtained permission for her to stay in the college for the forseeable future where she would continue to produce her documents until the Allies arrived.  Nina worked from a basement room and the special paper and equipment she had left behind in the palazzo was replaced by an old friend of O'Flaherty's, Count Guisseppe Dalla Torre, the editor of L'Osservatore Romano. 

       From her office window in the synagogue Rosina {Sorani} watched the approaching freight cars.  She knew why they were there and did not know what to do.  Apart from the caretaker she was the only person in the building.
        Rosina had hardly slept in the small apartment Settimio had found them.  They discussed late into the night what Father Weber had told her brother after she helped to burn the documents Settimio had brought from his office.
        The priest had assured him he would take care of the remaining refugees in Delasem's care, mostly women and children.  Settimio had given him a list of their names and addresses.  He had begun to worry about the Germans finding it.  She had tried to reassure him, though she herself had become increasingly uneasy:  First Almansi and now Foa and Rabbi Zolli had disappeared.  There had still been no reply as she had continued to call the numbers of the president and the chief rabbi into the early hours.  She knew there was no point in calling Almansi.  He had said he would never answer the phone in his hiding place, instead he would call the synagogue and leave a message where he could be found at a different place every evening in the city 'in order to deal with matters relavant to carrying out my duties.'
        The freight cars were now parked outside the synagogue and she recognized the three officers from the ERR who had descended from the car and were leading the overalled men into the synagogue.
         The younger of the officers, who had spoken to her in Hebrew the first time he came into the synagogue, politely asked her to lead them to the library.  Rosina had said it was locked.  The officer who had threatened her ordered her to open it.  Rosina said she did not have the key.  He motioned to one of the soldiers to follow him and moments later there was the sound of the library door being forced open.  The looting of the library was about to start.
       A crowd had begun to form in the street below.  Among them was Umberto di Veroli, who had come out from his shop opposite the synagogue to see what was happening.  The soldiers had formed a line to hold back people.
       As the removal men emerged with books the ERR men supervised their storage in the freight cars.  Sheets of corrugated paper were placed between the books to protect them.  Slowly and carefully the piles of irreplaceable literature filled each car to its roof.  A total of 26,568 volumes were ready for their long train journey to Germany.  It was early evening when the work was finished.
        The Hebrew-speaking officer thanked Rosina for her 'patience and understanding.'  She told him it was not appropriate to thank her for what had been done.  He gave her a Heil Hitler salute and joined the others in the car.  As the freight cars trundled back up the road Umberto di Veroli handed her a sheet of paper on which he had written the stenciled numbers on the freight cars;  saying he hoped that one day they could help to trace the stolen library.  Close to tears he called it a crime against history.
        Four years would pass until in October 1947 an officer in the monuments, fine arts, and archives section of the Allied military government in West Germany was assigned to discover the fate of the books.  Major Seymour J. Pomerenze, a former archivist at the National Archives in Washington, found they had been shipped to the ERR Institute der NSDP fuer Erforschung der Judenfrage in the small village of Hungen.  From there Pomeranze traced them to the Rothschild Library in Frankfurt and they were shipped back to Rome.  Like so many books they had survived being sacrificed as a burnt offering to racial hatred in Nazi Germany.
       On that Wednesday evening when the freight cars had departed, Foa arrived at the synagogue with its caretaker.  Rosina was waiting for them and together they went to the Treasury, the repository of the gold articles used in religious sermons.  They carried them down to the synagogue's mikvah, the ritual bath.  While Rosina stood guard at the entrance the men began to place the precious pieces in the tank of holy water which supplied the bath.  That night back in his hiding place, Foa wrote, 'With the help of God they are saved and kept intact.'  But the fate of many of those who used them was drawing closer.
       Sister Pascalina had taken upon herself the task of keeping track of the number of Jews who had been rescued by the Vatican since October 1942, when Italy's leading Fascist newspaper, Regime Fascista, had reminded its readers that 'we should not forget that in the long run the pope is a greater enemy of National Socialism than Churchill or Roosevelt.  It is incomprehensible that the Catholic clergy should today support so many protests against the elimination of the Jews.'
        Pascalina's own record keeping would include details of a secret letter the pope wrote to the Catholic bishops of Europe in 1942 after the Wannsee Conference.  Headed Opere et caritate (by work and charity), it asked them to 'save the Jews and other victims of persecution.'  Pius requested his letter remain secret 'for the same reason the International Red Cross and the World Council of Churches had avoided making any public statement which would increase the suffering of Jews.'
        Pascalina's records also showed that in the late summer of 1943 over two thousand Jews in Hungary were given documents by the Vatican which identified them as baptized Catholics.  The cardinal of Genoa had been told to have his priests issue baptism certificates to eight hundred Jews hidden in the city.  In every city, town, and village where Jews were hidden, Pius had sanctioned priests to provide the certificates and, in some cases, make Jews citizens of the Vatican.  All told, there were over four thousand Jews hidden in convents and monasteries across Italy.
       In Rome the number of Jewish families being sheltered had increased since Father Weber had brought those on the Delasem list to convents.  Many arrived in the ambulance driven by Monsignor Patrick Carroll-Abbing.  The vehicle now bore Vatican license plates to protect it from being stopped by German police.
        Nevertheless, a different problem had arisen one October morning when Father Patrick arrived at the convent of Our Lady of Sion and found a group of Jewish families he had earlier brought to the convent in an uproar.  The mother superior had told them their menfolk could not stay in the convent because the order's rule forbid it.  Father Patrick asked the nun to keep the men until he returned.  He had driven to the Vatican and explained the situation to Father Leiber.  He had immediately telephoned the mother superior to say she was absolved from the order's rule as the Holy Father had decreed that 'given the grave situation, nuns are allowed to give hospitality in their convent to Jewish men as well as their families.'  By the end of the day over a hundred and fifty mother superiors had been contacted and given the same ruling.
        By the second week of October O'Flaherty's organization had found secure hiding places for close to five hundred Allied soldiers.  The number would have been greater but for the number of escapees caught on the streets by the Koch or Black Panther gangs who were incarcerated in an old palace near the Pantheon.
        Derry told O'Flaherty it was time the escapees in hiding were reminded they 'are under British military discipline and not to damn well go wandering through the streets like tourists.  They need to understand that feeding, clothing, and finding them hiding places is a dangerous game.'
       O'Flaherty suggested that Derry should visit the safe houses.
       His ID card in his suit pocket and escorted by Father Owen Sneddon--the New Zealand priest who had chosen 'Horace' as his code name--Derry's tour of the safe houses gave him an insight into the courage of Romans risking their lives to help escapees.  Before he left each safe house Derry firmly impressed on the soldiers they were in a position of great responsibility to ensure their helpers were not caught.
       After once more installing his family in the apartment his wife's gynecologist had loaned them, Zolli had gone to see Father Borsarelli, the abbot of the Sacred Heart monastery in Rome.  The priest had become a confidant of the chief rabbi after Zolli visited the monastery to see its small but important collection of religious paintings.  After several visits Zolli had eventually told Borsarelli of his spiritual journey through prayer and meditation which had brought him from devout Judaism to wishing to convert to Catholicism.
        Now, the abbot had asked hism to wait while he went to make a telephone call.  When he returned he told Zolli they would go and collect his wife and children and take them to the Vatican where they could stay with the full blessing of the pope.  The abbot told Zolli that among the pope's favorite saints was Saint Neri, 'who had always prayed for the Hebrews and so intense was his desire to see the Jews united to Christ that at the sight of one of them still outside the fold, he would weep.'
      It was dusk when the monastery's old car drove into the Vatican.  Inside its walls the chief rabbi and his family would become the latest of three hundred Jews who had so far been given sanctuary.  The Pope's Jews, by Gordon Thomas pgs.185-86, and 195-199.

The Roundup, Part Two

       "Realizing that the broadcast had provided an opportunity to abandon the plot.  Wolff had flown to see Hitler and told him that the whole of Catholic Italy would defend the Vatican to protect the pope.
       Warming to his argument, Wolff went on to tell Hitler that to deal with mass civil unrest would require German troops to be withdrawn from the southern front where they were engaged trying to hold back the advancing Allies.
       The atmosphere in Hitler's office was captured in Wolff's account preserved in the Jesuit Curia library at the Borgo Santo Spirito in Rome:'Hitler, his hand trembling, stood at his office window staring out at the fir trees, the look on his face one when he received bad news.'  Wolff told him he had asked Bishop Alois Hudal to 'persuade' Pius to leave the Vatican voluntarily.  It emerged that Hudal actually went through the motions of exploring the idea with fellow Nazi sympathizers in the Vatican.  But no doubt awed by the responsibility stemming from their mere knowledge of the proposal, they refused to take it any further.  Only then had Hudal abandoned the idea.
       Wolff recalled how Hitler had finally turned from his office window and cancelled the plot, 'the madness in his eyes all too evident.'

       Hauptsturmfuhrer Theodor Dannecker arrived in Rome by train on the evening of October 8, 1943.  He was thirty years old, a slim, lantern-jawed bachelor and his height, six feet three inches tall, did nothing to compensate for his poorly coordinated body movements, which included a tic that continually flicked his head to one side.
       Early that year he had carried out deportations from Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia of over eleven thousand Jews to Aushwitz and Treblenka.  Previously he had performed similar operations in France, Poland, Belgium, and Holland.  In all, Dannecker had sent several hundred thousand Jews to their deaths.  Ironically his first girlfriend, Lisbeth Stern, had been Jewish.
       As usual Eichmann's office had arranged for him to travel alone in a reserved compartment to give him time to think how he would plan his latest mission.  On the train he had read the dispatches Kappler had sent:  his call for more troops to conduct the roundup and his concern about the Rome Resistance.  Dannecker understood why Eichmann had decided Kappler was not capable of conducting a successful Judenaktion.  Perhaps living in Rome had made him soft.  Dannecker had seen that happen before when a local police chief in Belgrade had refused to carry out executions.  Danneker, then a member of the SS Verfuegungstruppe, a specialist combat support force, had shot him.  After Eichmann selected him to head the Judenreferat, the Jewish department, Dannecker summed up his work in the words of his hobby.  'Over the years I have learnt which hook to use for which fish.'
       In his finely tailored SS uniform and polished boots he embodied someone to be feared and hated;  a brutal, mean, crude man.
        Following his usual custom of remaining unobtrusive on a mission Dannecker stayed in a small hotel on Via Po.  The accomodation had been arranged for him by one of the Judennaktion officers who had arrived in Rome earlier;  he had worked with Dannecker for a year and knew his habits.
       Dannecker had changed out of his uniform into a suit and eaten alone at a nearby restaurant;  the quality of the food was indifferent but it was still better than that offered in Berlin.  Afterward he had walked around Rome, studying the solid marble statues and the sarcophagi.  The city, he decided, was even more impressive than Paris.  Rome had its priests in black, white and purple robes and the Latin Mass which came from a church he passed.  And, of course, there were the Romans:  children sitting on the marble edges of fountains;  the young women, their hair often the color of flame;  old men and women sitting at their tables in pavement cafes.  How many of those he had seen were Jews?  How many would die under his orders?

       Pope Pius continued to receive reports from the network.
       In the monastery founded by Saint Francis of Assisi a synagogue had been opened in the basement where close to a hundred Jews in hiding could worship while the monks prayed above in the chapel.  The Vatican information office, where Sister Luke worked, had opened a special unit to deal with overseas Jews seeking news of their relatives.  By October 1943, the unit had answered twenty thousand inquiries in a month.  The pope had appointed his own liason with Delasem, the Capucine Father Bourg D're.  He had been given a 'start-up' sum of five million lire to provide food, clothing, and medicine for Jewish refugees arriving in Rome.
       The pope's response to every report contained the reminder that as well as saving Jews, every effort must be made to save the contents of synagogues and cultural centers, especially the libraries.  'For Jewish people their history is as important to be protected as ours,' Pius wrote.
       On that October morning Rosina Sorani sat at her desk sorting through Foa's mail when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs from the ground floor.  The tread was too heavy for Foa and he usually called up to have his coffee ready.  A stocky, barrel-chested, middle-aged man stood in the doorway.  He gave her a snaggletoothed smile and introduced himself as a photographer from the ERR who had come to inspect numerous texts in the library.  He handed her a typed sheet.
       Rosina looked at the paper and saw it listed the rarest works in the library:  books from the famous Soncino publishing house dating from the fifteenth century;  original texts from sixteenth-century Constantinople and Salonika;  manuscripts which were histories of the literary and intellectual life of Rome;  a record of how the kabala came to replace already existing philosophy;  a thirteenth-century mathematics text and an extremely rare Hebrew-Italian-Arabic vocabulary published in Naples in 1488.  Finally there were twenty-one Talmudic tracts.
       Rosina hesistated.  The precious texts were kept in a locked area at the back of the library and though she had a key to open it she wondered if she needed Foa's permission to admit a stranger.  The officer said she should accompany him to the library and reassure herself that he'd handle the manuscripts and books with proper care.  Foa had not arrived and she decided he would probably have no objection;  besides, in the past she had allowed Rabbi Zolli and one or two of the senior students at the rabinnical college to look at some of the books to research papers they were writing.  She led the way to the library, gave the officer a pair of white cotton gloves, and unlocked the door to the room where the books were kept.
       She saw he was an expert, in the way he opened a book, softly touching the paper and leafing through the pages, the way she had seen Rabbi Zolli do.  The man had the same attention to touch, running a gloved hand down a page, stopping at a special point of interest to him before moving on to another page.  At times he would smile at Rosina as she handed him a document, identifying it as a codex or a palimpsest.  He would stand there, sometimes moving a hand above the page as if he was giving it some sort of benediction.
       Much of what he asked to see was written in obscure alphabets.  She had asked him about one and he told her it was Armenian, a branch of the old Christian church.  But mostly he remained silent, his eyes fixed on a page, his eyes widening and brightening.  Occasionally he would breathe in, the way Rabbi Zolli did when he seemed to know where to look for a particular text.
       Finally he finished.  Rosina locked the door behind them and walked him back to her desk;  he turned to her and delivered a terrifying sentence.  'You will please inform your president that the library is under sequester and if any books are missing you will have to pay with your life.'
       He turned and walked down the stairs.
When Foa arrived later that morning she told him about the latest visit of the ERR official.
       He dictated four letters for her to type.  The first was to General Stahel;  the others were to the neo-Fascist city administration:  the minister of interior, the minister of education, and the director general of public safety.  Each had the same text:  an account of the ERR visits;  the sequestering of the library;  its unique value.  It concluded by asking that immediate and appropriate action be taken to protect the library.  After signing the letters Foa told Rosina to hand deliver them to the various addresses.  He would never receive a reply.

       Dannecker's hope that his mission would remain secret failed through a regulation General Stahel had introduced.  Like every hotel guest in Rome, Dannecker had to register.  As a serving officer he was only required to provide his name, rank, and unit on the form which was routinely collected and brought to the Stadtkommandant's headquarters at the Hotel Flora.  There it was checked against a list of names of expected military officers arriving in the city;  they were usually on leave or on their way to another posting.
       But Dannecker's name was not listed.  Its absence might had been ignored in some other headquarters, but Stahel from the outset of his appointment as Stadtkommandant had ordered that any oversight was to be tracked down and rectified.  One of his staff officers was ordered to call Berlin and was told Dannecker was in Rome on the order of Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann and his presence was to remain secret, a classification approved by Reichfuhrer Himmler.
       Stahel was furious.  For him no one could come to Rome on even a secret mission without him being told its purpose.  It had been infuriating to learn over the radio and newspapers of a plot to kidnap the pope of which he had known nothing beforehand and which had caused such an outcry.  But now to find that Eichmann--a man Stahel strongly disliked--had somehow enlisted Himmler's backing for some secret mission was too much;  Stahel's instinct told him it could only bring trouble for him.  He had called Kesselring at his headquarters in Frascati.  The commander-in-chief had been firm:  Dannecker's mission must remain Geheime Reichssache--a secret affair of the Reich."  The Pope's Jews by Gordon Thomas pgs162-165, 167-168,173-175, and175-176

Cooper's Hill

With a tip of the petasus to the University of Toronto (www.rpo.library.utoronto.ca).

Sure we have poets that did never dream
Upon Parnassus, nor did taste the stream
Of Helicon, and therefore I suppose
Those made not poets, but the poets those.
And as Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court,
So where the Muses and their troops resort,
Parnassus stands, if I can be to thee
A poet, thou Parnassus art to me.
Nor wonder, if (advantag'd in my flight
By taking wing from thy auspicious height)
Through untrac'd ways and airy paths I fly,
More boundless in my fancy than my eye.
Exalted to this height, I first look down
On Paul's, as men from thence upon the town
Paul's, the late theme of such a muse whose flight
Has bravely reach'd and soar'd above thy height:
Now shalt thou stand, through time, or sword, or fire,
Or zeal (more fierce than they) thy fall conspire,
Secure, whilst thee the best of poets sings,
Preserv'd from ruin by the best of kings.
As those who rais'd in body, or in thought
Above the earth, or in the air's middle vault,
Behold how winds, and storms and meteors grow,
How clouds condense to rain, congeal to snow,
And see the thunder form'd, before it tear
The air, secure from danger and from fear,
So rais'd above the tumult and the crowd
I see the city, in a thicker cloud
Of business, than of smoke, where men like ants
Toil to prevent imaginary wants;
Yet all in vain, increasing with their store,
Their vast desires, but make their wants the more.
As food to unsound bodies, though it please
The appetite, feeds only the disease.
Where, with like haste, though several ways they run,
Some to undo, and some to be undone;
While luxury, and wealth, like war and peace,
Are each the other's ruin, and increase;
As rivers lost in seas, some secret vein
Thence reconveys, there to be lost again.
Some study plots, and some those plots t' undo,
Others to make 'em, and undo 'em too,
False to their hopes, afraid to be secure,
Those mischiefs only which they make, endure,
Blinded with light, and sick of being well,
In tumults seek their peace, their Heaven in Hell.
Oh happiness of sweet retir'd content!
To be at once secure, and innocent.
Windsor the next (where Mars with Venus dwells,
Beauty with strength) above the valley swells
Into my eye, as the late married dame
(Who proud, yet seems to make that pride her shame)
When nature quickens in her pregnant womb
Her wishes past, and now her hopes to come;
With such an easy, and unforc'd ascent,
Windsor her gentle bosom doth present;
Where no stupendious cliff, no threat'ning heights
Access deny, no horrid steep affrights,
But such a rise, as doth at once invite
A pleasure, and a reverence from the sight.
Thy master's emblem, in whose face I saw
A friend-like sweetness, and a king-like awe,
Where majesty, and love so mix'd appear,
Both gently kind, both royally severe.
So Windsor, humble in itself, seems proud,
To be the base of that majestic load,
Than which no hill a nobler burden bears,
But Atlas only, that supports the spheres.
Nature this mount so fitly did advance,
We might conclude, that nothing is by chance
So plac'd, as if she did on purpose raise
The hill, to rob the builder of his praise.
For none commends his judgment, that doth choose
That which a blind man only could refuse;
Such are the towers which th' hoary temples grac'd
Of Cybele, when all her heavenly race
Do homage to her, yet she cannot boast
Amongst that numerous, and celestial host
More heroes than can Windsor, nor doth fame's
Immortal book record more noble names.
Nor to look back so far, to whom this isle
Must owe the glory of so brave a pile,
Whether to Caesar, Albanact, or Brute,
The British Arthur, or the Danish Knute,
(Though this of old no less contest did move,
Than when for Homer's birth seven cities strove)
(Like him in birth, thou shoulds't be like in fame,
As thine his fate, if mine had been his flame)
But whosoever it was, nature design'd
First a brave place, and then as brave a mind.
No to recount those several kings, to whom
It gave a cradle, or to whom a tomb,
But thee (great Edward) and thy greater son,
He that the lillies wore, and he that won,
And thy Bellons who deserves her share
In all thy glories, of that royal pair
Which waited on thy triumph, she brought one.
Thy son the other brought, and she that son
Nor of less hopes could her great off-spring prove;
A royal eagle cannot breed a dove.
Then didst thou found that order, whether love
Or victory thy royal thoughts did move,
Each was a noble cause, nor was it less
I' th' institution, than the great success
Whilst every part conspires to give it grace,
The King, the cause, the patron, and the place,
Which foreign kings, and emperors esteem
The second honour to their diadem.
Had thy great destiny but giv'n thee skill,
To know as well, as power to act her will,
That from those kings, who then thy captives were,
In after-times should spring a royal pair
Who should possess all that thy mighty power,
Or thy desires more mighty, did devour;
To whom their better fate reserves whate'er
The victor hopes for, or the vanquish'd fear;
That blood, which thou and thy great grandsire shed,
And all that since these sister nations bled,
Had been unspilt, had happy Edward known
That all the blood he spill'd, had been his own,
Thine, and the Christian name, and made them blest
To serve thee, while that loss this gain would bring,
Christ for their God, and Edward for their king;
When thou that saint thy patron didst design,
In whom the martyr and the soldier join;
And when thou didst with the azure round,
(Who evil thinks may evil him confound)
The English arms encircle, thou didst seem
But to foretell, and prophesy of him
Who has within that azure round confin'd
These realms, which nature for their bound design'd,
That bound, which to the world's extremest ends,
Endless herself, her liquid arms extends;
In whose heroic face I see the saint
Better express'd than in the liveliest paint,
That fortitude, which made him famous here,
That heavenly piety, which saints him there.
Who when this order he forsakes, may he
Companion of that sacred order be.
Here could I fix my wonder, but our eyes,
Nice as our tastes, affect varieties;
And though one please him most, the hungry guest
Tastes every dish, and runs through all the feast;
So having tasted Windsor, casting round
My wandering eye, an emulous hill doth bound
My more contracted sight, whose top of late
A chapel crown'd, till in the common fate,
Th' adjoining abbey fell:  (may no such storm
Fall on our times, where ruin must reform)
Tell me, (my muse) what monstrous dire offense,
What crime could any Christian king incense
To such a rage?  Was't luxury, or lust?
Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just?
Where these their crimes?  they were his own, much more;
But they (alas) were rich, and he was poor;
And having spent the treasures of his crowns,
Condemns their luxury to feed his own;
And yet this act, to varnish o'er the shame
Of sacrilege, must bear devotion's name.
And he might think it just, the cause and time
Considered well, for none commits a crime
Appearing such, but as 'tis understood,
A real, or at least a seeming good.
While for the Church his learned pen disputes
His much more learned sword his pen confutes,
Thus to the ages past he makes amends,
Their charity destroys, their faith defends.
Then did religion in a lazy cell,
In empty, airy contemplation dwell;
And like the block unmoved lay:  but ours,
As much too active like the stock devours.
Is there no temperate region can be known.
Betwixt their frigid, and our torrid zone?
Could we not wake from that lethargic dream,
But to be restless in a worse extreme?
And for that lethargy was there no cure,
But to be cast into a calenture?
Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance
So far, to make us wish for ignorance?
And rather in the dark to grope our way,
Than led by a false guide to err by day?
Parting from thence 'twixt anger, shame and fear,
Those for what's past, and this for what's too near:
My eye descending from the hill, surveys
Where Thames among the wanton valleys strays.
Thames, the most lov'd of all the ocean's sons,
By his old sire to his embraces runs,
Hasting to pay his tribute to the sea,
Like mortal life to meet eternity.
Though with such streams he no resemblance hold,
Whose foam is amber, and their gravel gold;
His genuine, and less guilty wealth t' explore,
Search not his bottom, but survey his shore;
O'er which he kindly spreads his spacious wing,
And hatches plenty for th' ensuing spring.
Nor with a sudden and impetuous wave,
Like profuse kings, resumes the wealth he gave.
No unexpected inundations spoil
The mower's hopes, nor mock the ploughman's toil:
But God-like his unwearied bounty flows;
First loves to do, then loves the good he does.
Nor are his blessings to his banks confin'd,
But free, and common, as the sea or wind;
When he to boast, or to disperse his stores
Full of the tributes of his grateful shores,
Visits the world, and in his flying towers
Brings home to us, and makes both Indies ours;
Finds wealth where 'tis, bestows it where it wants,
Cities in deserts, woods in cities plants.
So that to us no thing, no place is strange,
While his fair bosom is the world's exchange.
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'er flowing full.
Heaven her Eridanus no more shall boast,
Whose fame in thine, like lesser currents lost,
Thy nobler streams shall visit Jove's abodes,
To shine amongst the stars, and bathe the gods.
Here nature, whether more intent to please
Us or herself, with strange varieties,
(For things of wonder give no less delight
To the wise maker's, than beholders' sight.
Though these delights from several causes move,
For so our children, thus our friends we love)
Wisely she knew, the harmony of things,
As well as that of sounds, from discords springs.
Such was the discord, which did first disperse
Form, order, beauty through the universe;
While dryness moisture, coldness heat resists,
All that we have, and that we are, subsists.
While the steep horrid roughness of the wood
Strives with the gentle calmness of the wood
Such huge extremes when Nature doth unite,
Wonder from thence results, from thence delight.
The stream is so transparent, pure, and clear,
That had the self-enamour'd youth gaz'd here,
So fatally deceiv'd he had not been,
While he the bottom, not his face had seen.
But his proud head the airy mountain hides
Among the clouds;  his shoulders, and his sides
A shady mantle clothes;  his curled brows
Frown on the gentle stream, which calmly flows,
While winds and storms his lofty forehead beat:
The common fate of all that's high or great.
Low at his foot a spacious plain is plac'd,
Between the mountain and the stream embrac'd:
Which shade and shelter from the hill derives,
While the kind river wealth and beauty gives;
And in the mixture of all these appears
Variety, which all the rest endears.
This scene had some bold Greek, or British bard
Beheld of old, what stories had we heard,
Of fairies, satyrs, and the nymphs their dames,
Their feats, their revels, and their amorous flames?
'Tis still the same, although their airy shape
All but a quick poetic sight escape.
There Faunus and Silvanus keep their courts,
And thither all the horned host resorts
To graze the ranker mead, that noble herd,
On whose sublime and shady fronts is rear'd
Nature's great master-piece;  to show how soon
Great things are made, but sooner are undone.
Here have I seen the King, when great affairs
Give leave to slacken, and unbend his cares,
Attended to the chase by all the flower
Of youth, whose hopes a nobler prey devour:
Pleasure with praise, and danger, they would buy,
And with a foe that would not only fly.
The stag now conscious of his fatal growth,
At once indulgent to his fear and sloth,
To some dark covert his retreat had made,
Where nor man's eye, nor Heaven's should invade
His soft repose;  when th' illusions of his fear
Had given this false alarm, but straight his view
Confirms, that more than all he fears is true.
Betray'd in all his strengths, the wood beset,
All instruments, all arts of ruin met;
He calls to mind his strength, and then his speed,
His winged heels, and then his armed head;
With these t' avoid, with that his fate to meet:
But fear prevails, and bids him trust his feet.
So fast he flies, that his reviewing eye
Has lost the chasers, and his ear the cry;
Exulting, till he finds, their nobler sense
Their disproportion'd speed does recompense.
Then curses his conspiring feet, whose scent
Betrays that safety which their swiftness lent.
Then tries his friends, among the baser herd,
Where he so lately was obey'd, and fear'd,
His safety seeks:  the herd, unkindly wise,
Or chases him from thence, or from him flies.
Like a declining statesman, left forlorn
To his friends' pity, and pursuers' scorn,
With shame remembers, while himself was one
Of the same herd, himself the same had done.
Thence to the coverts, and the conscious groves,
The scenes of his past triumphs, and his loves;
Sadly surveying where he rang'd alone
Prince of the soil, and all the herd his own;
And like a bold knight errant did proclaim
Combat to all, and bore away the dame;
And taught the woods to echo to the stream
His dreadful challenge, and his clashing beam.
Yet faintly now declines the fatal strife;
So much his love was dearer than his life.
Now every leaf, and every moving breath
Presents a foe, and every foe a death.
Wearied, forsaken, and pursu'd, at last
All safety in despair of safety plac'd,
Courage he thence resumes, resolv'd to bear
All their assaults, since it was vain to fear.
And now too late he wishes for the fight
That strength he wasted in ignoble flight:
But when he sees the eager chase renew'd,
Himself by dogs, the dogs by men pursu'd:
He straight revokes his bold resolve, and more
Repents his courage, then his fear before; 
Finds that uncertain ways unsafest are,
And doubt a greater mischief than despair.
Then to the stream, when neither friends, nor force,
Nor speed, nor art avail, he shapes his course;
Thinks not their rage so desperate t' assay
An element more merciless than they.
But fearless they pursue, nor can the flood
Quench their dire thirst; alas, they thirst for blood.
So towards a ship the oarfinn'd galleys ply,
Which wanting sea to ride, or wind to fly,
Stands but to fall reveng'd on those that dare
Tempt the last fury of extreme despair.
So fares the stag among th' enraged hounds,
Repels their force, and wounded returns for wounds.
And as a hero, whom his baser foes
In troops surround, now these assails, now those,
Though prodigal of life, disdains to die
By common hands;  but if he can descry
Some nobler foe's approach, to him he calls,
And begs his fate, and then contented falls.
So when the King a mortal shaft lets fly
From his unerring hand, then glad to die,
Proud of the wound, to it resigns his blood,
And stains the crystal with a purple flood.
This a more innocent, and happy chase,
Than when of old, but in the selfsame place,
Fair liberty pursu'd, and meant a prey
To lawless power, here turn'd, and stood at bay.
When in that remedy all hope was plac'd
Which was, or should have been at least, the last.
Here was that charter seal'd, wherein the Crown
All marks of arbitrary power lays down:
Tyrant and slave, those names of hate and fear,
The happier style of king and subject bear:
Happy, when both to the same centre move,
When kings give liberty, and subjects love.
Therefore not long in force this charter stood;
Wanting that seal, it must be seal'd in blood.
The subjects arm'd, the more their princes gave,
Th' advantage only took the more to crave:
Till kings by giving, give themselves away.
And even that power, that should deny, betray.
"Who gives constrain'd, but his own fear reviles
Not thank'd, but scorn'd;  nor are they gifts, but spoils. . . ."
Thus kings, by grasping more than they could hold,
First made, their subjects by oppression bold:
And popular sway, by forcing kings to give
More than was fit for subjects to recieve,
Ran to the same extremes;  and one excess
Made both, by striving to be greater, less.
When a calm river rais'd with sudden rains,
Or snows dissolv'd, o'erflows the adjoining plains,
The husbandman with high-raised banks secure
Their greedy hopes, and this he can endure.
But if with buys and dams they strive to force
His channel to a new, or narrow course;
No longer then within his banks he dwells,
First to a torrent, then a deluge swells:
Stronger, and fiercer by restraint he roars,
And knows no bound, but makes power his shores.

by Sir John Denham