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.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Fourteen

       "As Jackson struggled to rescue Armenians and as he watched their property and wealth being confiscated, Morgenthau was dealing with Talaat Pasha back in Constantinople.  He continued to try to reason with the minister of the interior, telling him that after the war he would have to meet with 'public opinion everywhere, especially in the United States.  Our people,' he said, 'will never forget these massacres. . . You are defying all ideas of justice.'  Not only was Talaat unreachable, but at one point, he changed the subject and made an astonishing request.  Knowing that many Armenians with American ties had life insurance policies with the New York Life Insurance Company and the Equitable Life of New York, Talaat said to the ambassador:  'I wish that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders.  They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money.  It of course all escheats to the State.  The government is the beneficiary now.  Will you do so?'  Outraged by this, Morgenthau lost his temper, told Talaat he would never get such a list from him, and stormed away.

       But even Bernau had not seen what Aurora Mardignian experienced north of Aleppo in Diyarbekir, where the killing squads played 'the game of swords' with Armenian girls.  Having planted their swords in the ground, blade up, in a row, at several-yard intervals, the men on horseback each grabbed a girl.  At the signal, given by a shout, they rode their horses at a controlled gallop, throwing the girl with the intent of killing her by impaling her on a sword.  'If the killer missed,' Mardignian writes, 'and the girl was only injured, she would be scooped up again until she was impaled on the protruding blade.  It was a game, a contest,'  the traumatized survivor wrote in her memoir, and after the girls were dead, the Turks forced the Jews of the city to gather up the bodies in oxcarts and throw them in the Tigris River.

       As he watched from his office day by day, {Consul Oscar} Heizer was shocked at what Jesse Jackson had referred to as the Ottoman government's 'gigantic plundering scheme.'  Again, to Morgenthau, he described how the Armenian houses in Trebizond were 'being emptied of furniture by the police one after the other.  The furniture, bedding and everything of value is being stored in large buildings about the city,' he reported.  Since there was no attempt at labeling or properly storing any of these objects, Heizer reported, the idea that the government had any plan to return anything to the Armenians was 'simply ridiculous.'  Like Henry Riggs, who described Turkish women plundering Armenian goods in Harput, Heizer also watched a 'crowd of Turkish women and children follow the police about like a lot of vultures and seize anything they can lay their hands on.'  As soon as the more valuable things were taken out of a house by the police, the women and children would rush in and take the rest, leaving every house stripped clean.  'I see this performance every day with my own eyes,' Heizer wrote the ambassador;  'I suppose it will take several weeks to empty all the houses and then the Armenian shops and stores will be cleared out.'  And the government's commission, which was supposed to be overseeing all this, had no intention of returning any of the goods to the Armenians.
       Leon Surmelian watched his family life and his comfortable home with its Parisian furnishings and carpets and piano disappear overnight.  The young boy also watched in despair as the Turks confiscated his father's pharmacy:  'We almost wept when we saw the shutters of our pharmacy drawn in broad daylight. . . . Poor father, they had taken his pharmacy away from him,'  and everywhere, 'the city was dead, the stores closed, the streets deserted.'  When Surmelian escaped from captivity a year or so later, he sneaked back to his family's house, only to discover that it had been picked clean of every item.  As he walked the empty rooms he was haunted by the absence of what had once been his childhood home.  'Even the linoleum had been stripped off the floor,' he exclaimed.  He soon dicovered that every Armenian house in the region had been plundered and walls and floors torn up in the search for hidden treasures."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian  pgs260-61, 262, 267.

Character of the Happy Warrior

Who is the happy Warrior?  Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
--It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
Whose high endeavours are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright:
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is dilligent to learn;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes his moral being his prime care;
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain;
In face of these doth exercise a power
Which is our human nature's highest dower;
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of their bad influence, and their good receives:
By objects, which might force the soul to abate
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate;
Is placable--because occasions rise
So often that demand such sacrifice;
More skillful in self-knowledge, even more pure,
As tempted more;  more able to endure,
As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
--'Tis he whose law is reason;  who depends
Upon that law as on the best of friends;
Whence, in a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,
And what in quality or act is best
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
He labours good on good to fix, and owes
To virtue every triumph that he knows:
--Who, if he rise to station of command,
Rises by open means;  and there will stand
On honourable terms, or else retire,
And in himself possess his own desire;
Who comprehends his trust, and to the same
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;
Whom they must follow;  on whose head must fall,
Like showers of manna, if they come at all:
Whose powers shed round him in the common strife,
Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
But who, if he be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a Lover;  and attired
With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired;
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw;
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need:
--He who, though thus endued as with a sense
And faculty for storm and turbulence,
Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans
To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;
Sweet images!  which, wheresoe'er he be,
Are at his heart, and such fidelity
It is his darling passion to approve;
More brave for this, that he hath much to love:--
'Tis, finally, the Man, who, lifted high,
Conspicuous object in a Nation's eye,
Or left unthought-of in obscurity,--
Who, with a toward or untoward lot,
Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not--
Plays, in the many games of life, that one
Where what he most doth value must be won:
Whom neither shape of danger can dismay,
Nor thought of tender happiness betray;
Who, not content that former worth stand fast,
Looks forward, persevering to the last,
From well to better, daily self-surpast:
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
For ever, and to noble deeds give birth,
Or he must fall, to sleep without his fame,
And leave a dead unprofitable name--
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause;
And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause:
This is the happy Warrior;  this is He
That every Man in arms should wish to be.

                                             William Wordsworth

Reverse Harringtonism

     James Harrington, author of The Republic of Oceana, the Whig classic, is sometimes compared to Karl Marx because he saw a logical link between economic wealth and political power.  That is to say, Harrington believed that the wealthy should have more political power.  A good Harringtonian would say that people who pay more taxes should have more say in an election.  What the contemporary United States practices is reverse Harringtonism.  With Motor Voter, Americans who are on public assistance recieve more encouragement to vote than citizens that aren't.  In other words, people who are poor at making money are the people who elect our leaders.  Is it any wonder we elect spendthrifts who spend money like water? 

Hornet's nest

        Thomas Joscelyn at The Weekly Standard indicates that, contrary to previous claims by State Department officials, Al Qaeda was involved in the Benghazi attack that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stephens and three security staff.  Ben Qumu, a onetime inmate of Guantanamo Bay, has now been identified as being among those responsible for the attack, which was claimed at the time to be caused by a YouTube video, but is now thought to be linked to the Obama administration's arms smuggling to Syrian rebels.
         The Syrian nonsense has thus claimed four lives, and would have cost the United States far more had President Obama persisted in his intended goal of military action against Russia-supported strongman Bashir al-Assad.  The United States is overextended, both economically and militarily, and still shows no basic understanding of its limits in the twenty-first century.  We foolishly destabilized Egypt and Libya, and were we not checked, we would have stirred a hornet's nest in Syria.  Benghazi is proof that, even when one forbears smashing the hornets' nest, it may yet be stung.

Update:  Al Qaeda flag once again flies over Fallujah.  So much for Bin Laden's death being the end of the road for Al Qaeda.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade) Part Thirteen

     "{Leslie} Davis learned that because the Muslims considered 'the clothes taken from a dead body to be defiled,' all the Armenians were forced to strip before being killed, and Davis describes 'gaping bayonet wounds on most of the bodies.'  Because bullets were so precious, it was 'cheaper to kill with bayonets and knives.'  Davis was also shocked to find that, as he put it, 'nearly all of the women lay flat on their backs and showed signs of barbarous mutilation by bayonets of the gendarmes, these wounds having been inflicted in many cases probably after the women were dead.'  The bodies, they learned, were of Armenians who had been marched there from distant places.  In other parts of Turkey, the same methods of massacre by butchery were occuring because the Turks didn't want to waste ammunition.  In Ankara and its surroundings, only a couple of hundred miles east of Constantanople, the killing was done with 'axes, cleavers, shovels, and pitchforks,' Krikoris Balakian wrote.  It was like a slaughter-house;  Armenians were hacked to pieces, and the killing squads mixed with townspeople 'dashed infants on the rocks' before the eyes of their mothers.  The carnage around Ankara was so horrible that Talaat Pasha ordered more than forty thousand corpses to be quickly buried in mass graves, but the stench of death and the mounds of bodies overwhelmed the landscape.
       South of Harput, Davis and his companion left the lake, travelling through the village of Keghvenk, and again the stench of rotting corpses overwhelmed them.  'We could smell the dead bodies,' Davis wrote, but 'as it was getting late and we had already seen so many, we did not feel like going even that distance out of our way to see any more.'  But as they rode from Keghvenk back to Mezre, they saw thousands of corpses half buried, and later Davis learned that many of them were the men who had been imprisoned before the deportation.  Within ten miles of Mezre they saw the remains of Armenian camps where thousands had been held before they were massacred.  Arriving home at about nine o'clock in the evening, Davis wrote:  'I felt that I understood better than ever what the "deportation" of the Armenians really meant.  I felt also that I had not been wrong in speaking of Mamouret ul-Aziz. . . as the "Slaughter-house Vilayet" of Turkey.'
       A few weeks later Davis made another trip to Lake Goeeljuek.  This time he and Dr. Atkinson went by themselves.  Leaving at about three o'clock in the morning one day in late October, Davis was eager to see the other side of the lake and get a fuller picture of the area.  On the east side of the lake, they found many bodies of Armenians who had recently been killed, most likely the inhabitants of the village of Goeeljuek, which they found 'absolutely deserted, except for a few hungry cats which were prowling around among the ruins of the houses.'
       Again the scenes of death were everywhere.  In one of the most remote places along the lake, Davis and Atkinson saw hundreds of bodies piled on top of one another on the beach.  They lay 'within a space not more than two or three hundred feet in length and hardly a quarter that distance in width.'  It was at the outlet of a steep small ravine leading to the lake, and as they rode down the hill they were shocked at how people could be brought to such a place.  Then they saw that almost all of them were women and children who had been recently killed.  'We noticed bayonet wounds on many of them. . . . .One woman,' Davis observed, 'on the edge of the pile lay flat on her breast with the head of her little baby protruding from under her body.  All of the bodies were naked,' he went on, 'and many of them showed signs of the brutal mutilation which the gendarmes inflicted upon so many of the women and girls whom they killed.'
       In late July 1915, {Jesse} Jackson reported that as the temperature ran somewhere between 105 and 115 degrees, 'a group of more than 1,000 women and children from Harput was being conducted southward near Veren then turned over to a band of Kurdish chetes who abducted 'the best looking women, girls and children, killing those who put up the most resistance,'  and beat and stripped the rest of the women, Jackson went on, 'thereby forcing them to continue the rest of the journey in a nude condition.'  About three hundred of these women arrived in Aleppo days later 'entirely naked, their hair flowing in the air like wild beasts,' having traveled 'afoot in the burning sun.'  Some of these women came to the consulate, and Jackson recorded that their bodies were 'burned to the color of a green olive, the skin peeling off in great blotches, and many of them carrying gashes on the head and wounds on the body as a result of the terrible beatings.'
       These scenes kept passing before Jackson's eyes, and only weeks later he described what he called 'one of the most terrible sights ever seen in Aleppo,' the arrival of 'some 5,000 terribly emaciated, dirty, ragged and sick women and children, 3,000 on one day and 2,000 the following day.'  They were the only survivors, Jackson reported, of what he termed 'the thrifty and well to do Armenian population of the province of Sivas,'  where the Armenian population had been 'over 300,000 souls.'  They told Jackson that they had travelled about a thousand miles on foot since before Easter, and thousands of the women had been carried off into harems, or raped, robbed, and left naked.
       What Jackson saw was the remnant of women who survived the kind of sexual violence that Aurora Mardignian described in her survival narrative, Ravished Armenia.    Mardignian, from a wealthy banking family in Chemeshgezek, a town north of Harput, was one of thousands of young Armenian girls raped and thrown into harems.  Her descriptions of sexual violence confirm and go even beyond what Jackson saw and heard.  Having been in a house full of Armenian girls who were raped and then killed by Turkish soldiers, she escaped and before long found herself with about four hundred young men and women who agreed to convert to Islam to save their lives.  After they had converted, the gendarmes robbed them all, stripped the women and raped them in front of their husbands, who were tied up and forced to watch before they were killed.  Then, the surviving women were marched to Malatian, south of Mezre near the Euphrates.  Approaching the city of Malatia, they found the wells stuffed with the corpses of dead women, and as they entered the city, they saw sixteen girls crucified on wooden crosses, vultures eating their corpses.  'Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands,'  Mardiganian wrote, 'only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.'
       In Aleppo too, the city was becoming overwhelmed by corpses and famine-ravaged refugees.  By the fall a typhus epidemic had broken out in the city and the surrounding towns and villages, and the entire place resembled something from the Black Plague.  'The number that succumbed in the city was so great,' Jackson wrote, 'that the sanitary authorities could not cope with the situation, and the military authorities provided huge ox-carts into which the dead bodies were thrown, 10 to 12 in each cart, and the procession of 7 or 8 carts would proceed to the nearby cemetery with their gruesome loads of ghastly uncovered corpses, usually nude, with the heads, legs and arms dangling from the sides and ends of the open carts.'  At the cemetery,  the gendarmes dumped the bodies into trenches that had been dug for the purpose.  For months the procession of death carts passed in front of the consulate.  Several of Jackson's closest friends and members of the consular staff died in the epidemic, and, as he wrote, his own survival seemed 'almost a miracle.'
       Because of his strategic location on the line of the deportation marches, Jackson quickly became a receiving station for reports on the atrocities in the region, and he informed Morgenthau that reigns of terror had begun in Diyarbekir and Urfa, and that the gendarmerie was now 'searching the houses of the Armenians for weapons, and not finding any.'  In Urfa (the site of massacre and the burning of the cathedral in 1895-96), the gendarmes told the bishop of the city that unless weapons were produced, 'the entire Armenian population' of Urfa would suffer the fate of Zeitun, where everybody had been massacred or deported in early April.  What Jackson emphasized to Morgenthau was that 'the people here [Urfa] have always been loyal to the Government and have never resisted;  not even when they were butchered like sheep.  Why the local Government persists in persecuting a population that has always had a good record for loyalty is very strange.'
       In the terrible heat of August, writing again to Morgenthau (who was at his summer quarters on the Bosporus) , Jackson enclosed a letter he had just received form the Reverend F.H. Leslie.  In the chaos of the deportations and massacres in the Urfa region, Reverend Leslie had just been made the American consular agent for the entire district of Urfa.


               My dear Consul Jackson:
                 . . . For six weeks we have witnessed the most terrible cruelties inflicted
                 upon the thousands of Christian exiles who have been daily passing through
                 our city from the northern cities.  All tell the same story and bear the
                  same scars:  their men were all killed on the first days march from their
                   cities, after which the women and girls were constantly robbed of
                  their money, bedding, clothing, and beated, criminally abused and abduct-
                   ed. . . . Their guards forced them to pay even for drinking from the
                  springs along the way and were their worst abusers but also allowed the
                   baser element in every village through which they passed to abduct the
                    girls and women and abuse them.  We not only were told these things
                    but the same things occured right here in our own city before our very
                    eyes and openly on the streets.  The poor weak women and children died
                     by thousands along the roads and in the khan where they were confined
                     here.  There must be not less than five hundred abducted now in the
                     homes of the Moslems of this city and as many more have been sexually
                     abused and turned out on the streets again.
       Desperate and fearing total annihilation for the Armenians, Reverend Leslie begged Jackson to send him his own vice-consul, Samuel Edelman, to help.  'I cannot handle this work nor remain here much longer,' Leslie pleaded.  Not long after, the American pastor was imprisoned for aiding the Armenians.  Already mentally broken from what he had witnessed, he was now tortured in prison, and he committed suicide there.  Later Jackson was able to get Leslie's wife and child out of the country."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 245-46 and 253-55. 

The Fifth Column: Why Popes Make Lousy Economists

The Fifth Column: Why Popes Make Lousy Economists

Limbaugh Jumps Shark

        Ludwig Wittgenstein gave us the memorable admonition to speak not about that which we know nothing of.  Papa Bergoglio has a new encyclical which condemns unfettered capitalism.  Not to be unavailed of an opportunity to be reactive, Rush Limbaugh excoriates the pontiff on not knowing anything about economics.  Now, not having read the encyclical itself (past offerings, such as that of John XXIII, are indeed hostile to capitalism), one might well ask where Rush Limbaugh's PhD in Economics is from?  Is it from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Thought?  Here's a news flash.  There is no Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Thought.  There's only a rotund high school graduate who makes beaucoup dinero offering up other people's thinking as if it were his own.  And a rotund high school graduate with a Vicodin problem, at that.  Perhaps Pope Francis is talking about something he knows nothing about.  If he is, then he is only one of many guilty of the same failing.  At least the Pontiff doesn't perpetually refer to an educational institution of his own imagining. 

More Craft Than Kindness

        John Trenchard, and especially Thomas Gordon, were very anti-Catholic writers.  But their Cato's Letters are an interesting example of Whig writing from the elegant eighteenth.  The following is from Cato's Letters #62.

       Idiots and lunaticks indeed, who cannot take care of themselves, must be taken care of by others:  But whilst men have their five senses, I cannot see what the magistrate has to do with actions by which the society cannot be affected;  and where he meddles with such, he meddles impertinently or tyrannically.  Must the magistrate tie up every man's legs, because some men fall into ditches?  Or, must he put out their eyes, because with them they see lying vanities?  Or, would it become the wisdom and care of governors to establish a travelling society, to prevent people, by a proper confinement, from throwing themselves into wells, or over precipices;  or to endow a fraternity of physicians and surgeons all over the nation, to take care of their subjects' health, without being consulted;  and to vomit, bleed, purge, and scarify them at pleasure, whether they would or no, just as these established judges of health should think fit?  If this were the case, what a stir and hubbub should we soon see kept about the established potions and lancets?  Every man, woman, or child, though ever so healthy, must be a patient, or woe be to them!  The best diet and medicines would soon grow pernicious from any other hand;  and their pills alone, however ridiculous, insufficient, or distasteful, would be attended with a blessing.
       Let people alone, and they will take care of themselves, and do it best;  and if they do not, a sufficient punishment will follow their neglect, without the magistrate's interposition and penalties.  It is plain, that such busy care and officious intrusion into the personal affairs, or private actions, thoughts, and imaginations of men, has in it more craft than kindness;  and is only a device to mislead people, and pick their pockets, under the false pretence of the publick and their private good.  To quarrel with any man for his opinions, humours, or the fashion of his clothes, is an offense taken without being given.  What is it to a magistrate how I wash my hands, or cut my corns;  what fashion or colours I wear, or what notions I entertain, or what gestures I use, or what words I pronounce, when they please me, and do him and my neighbour no hurt?  As well may he determine the colour of my hair, and control my shape and features.
       True and impartial liberty is therefore the right of every man to pursue the natural, reasonable, and religious dictates of his own mind;  to think what he will, and act as he thinks, provided he acts not to the prejudice of another;  to spend his own money himself, and lay out the produce of his labour his own way;  and to labour for his own pleasure and profit, and not for others who are idle, and would live and riot by pillaging and oppressing him, and those that are like him.
        So that civil government is only a partial restraint put by the laws of agreement and society upon natural and absolute liberty, which might otherwise grow licentious:  And tyranny is an unlimited restraint put upon natural liberty, by the will of one or a few.  Magistracy, amongst a free people, is the exercise of power for the sake of the people;  and tyrants abuse the people, for the sake of power.  Free government is the protecting the people in their liberty by stated rules:  Tyranny is a brutish struggle for unlimited liberty to one or a few, who would rob all others of their liberty, and act by no rule but lawless lust.

Making It Personal

        Many northern abolitionists were reluctantly willing to cooperate with the United States government that allowed southern states to practice slavery.  That is, before the Fugitive Slave Act came along in the 1850s, and meant that even those for whom slavery was an obnoxious evil, returning escaped slaves to their owners was now a legal necessity.  In other words, it was then a legal duty to assist slavery.
       Similarly, many pro-lifers had been living an uneasy truce with the U.S. government between 1973 and the present, assisted by the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited Medicaid from funding abortion.  These people were personally uninvolved in abortion, and were thus individually blameless from the legalization of abortion.  The HHS mandate of Obamacare has changed this.  And, in the same way the Fugitive Slave Act made abolitionists criminals if they refused to return slaves, Obamacare makes pro-lifers finance abortion.  Could slavery have existed many more decades had the Fugitive Slave Act not required people to violate their consciences?  Perhaps it might have.  But one thing is certain.  Either Obamacare will smear the blood on everyones' hands, and thus make everyone an accomplice to abortion, or it will serve to galvanize opposition to a practice that, had this step not been taken, may have existed without the same revulsion.  Either the liberals win, and everybody accepts abortion and infanticide, or we enter an even more acrimonious chapter in the culture war.

Loopholes

        Loopholes are often used to do that which ordinarily incurs legal or moral opprobrium.  The zombie loophole is a liberal fantasy in which the usual opprobrium attached to the taking of human life is detached by the rationale of "they're not really alive."  (See also, any NARAL argument for abortion.)  So liberals love zombies, because they can be dispatched with a shotgun blast to the head with nary a guilt feeling.  And liberals also love comparing conservatives to zombies.  During the 2012 campaign, Obama surrogates dropped zombie comparisons with Romney supporters.  (Point of fact, Romney was a wolfman, not a zombie.)  Now, Toure (yes, the hombre con un nombre strikes again) compared TEA partiers to zombies.  Now, one might say this is only a case of someone remarking on their resiliency.  Estase thinks it is more like a tacit justification for eventually murdering them.  Remember the 90s film The Last Supper,where the plot was that conservatives are so awful, sending them to the shades was the only remedy.  For every French Revolution, you have to have a September Massacres.

Update:  More signs that liberals would like to kill us.  Item, Ed Schultz refers to the lovely and chaste Laura Ingraham as "that right-wing slut, Laura Ingraham."  Item, Martin Bashir says Sarah Palin deserves scourging and having feces put in her mouth.  The Septembrists are not far off.  Get at me dawg!

Contradictions

Seen recently on a box:
"M. Holland--The Gold Standard in Plastics"
       Which reminds me of another contradiction.  The week after Pope Francis basically said the Rosary wasn't "really" praying, I see the local Catholic bookstore selling a Pope Francis rosary.

What Happens In Bath, Stays In Bath

"To a person who does not thus calmly trace things to their source, nothing will appear more strange, than how the healthy could ever consent to follow the sick to those places of spleen, and live with those whose disorders are ever apt to excite a gloom in the spectator.  The truth is, the gaming-table was properly the salutary font to which such numbers flocked.  Gaming will ever be the pleasure of the rich, while men continue to be men;  while they fancy more happiness is being possessed of what they want, than they experience pleasure in the fruition of what they have.  The wealthy only stake those riches which give no real content, for an expectation of riches in which they hope for satisfaction.  By this calculation, they cannot lose happiness, as they begin with none;  and they hope to gain it, by being possessed of something they have not had already. 
        Probably upon this principle, and by the arrival of Queen Anne there, for her health, about the year 1703, the city of Bath became in some measure frequented  by people of distinction.  The company was numerous enough to form a country-dance upon the bowling-green:  they were amused with a fiddle and hautboy, and diverted with the romantic walks round the city.  They usually sauntered in the weather in the grove, between two rows of sycamore-trees.  Several learned physicians, Dr. Jorden and others, had even then praised the salubrity of the wells, and the amusements were put under the direction of a master of the ceremonies.
          His {Richard Nash} first care when made Master of the Ceremonies, or King of Bath, as it is called, was to promote a music subscription of one guinea each, for a band, which was to consist of six performers, who were to receive a guinea a week each for their trouble.  He allowed also two guineas a week for lighting and sweeping the rooms;  for which he accounted to the subscribers by receipt.
         The pump-house was immediately put under the care of an officer, by the name of the pumper;  for which he paid the corporation an annual rent.  A row of new houses was begun on the south side of the gravel-walks, before which a handsome pavement was then made for the company to walk on.  Not less than seventeen or eighteen hundred pounds were raised this year and in the beginning of 1706 by subscription, and laid out in repairing the roads near the city.  The streets began to be better paved, cleaned, and lighted;  the licences of the chairmen were repressed, and by an Act of Parliament procured on this occasion, the invalids, who came to drink or bathe, were exempted from all manner of toil, as often as they should go out of the city for recreation.
         The houses and streets now began to improve, and ornaments were lavished upon them even to profusion.  But in the midst of this splendour, the company still were obliged to assemble in a booth to drink tea and chocolate, or to game.  Mr. Nash undertook to remedy this inconvenience, and by his direction, one Thomas Harrison erected a handsome assembly-house for these purposes.  A better band of music was also procured, and the former subscription of one guinea was raised to two.  Harrison had three guineas a week for the room and candles, and the music two guineas a man.  The money Mr. Nash received and accounted for with the utmost exactness and punctuality.  To this house were also added gardens for people of rank and fashion to walk in;  and the beauty of the suburbs continued to increase, notwithstanding the opposition that was made by the corporation;  who at that time looked upon every useful improvement, particularly without the walls, as dangerous to the inhabitants within.
        His dominion was now extensive and secure, and he determined to support it with the strictest attention.  But in order to proceed in everything like a King, he was resolved to give his subjects a law, and the following Rules were accordingly put up in the pump-room:--
        RULES TO BE OBSERVED AT BATH
       1)That a visit of ceremony at first coming, and another at going away, are all that is expected or desired by ladies of quality and fashion, --except impertinents.
        2)That ladies coming to the ball appoint a time for their footmen coming to wait on them home, to prevent disturbances and inconveniences to themselves and others.
        3)That gentlemen of fashion never appearing in a morning before the ladies in gowns and caps, show breeding and respect.
        4)That no person take it ill that any one goes to another's play or breakfast, and not theirs;  except captious by nature.
        5)That no gentlemen give his ticket for the balls to any but gentlewomen.--N.B. Unless he has none of his acquaintance.
        6)That gentlemen crowding before the ladies at the ball, show ill-manners;  and that none do so for the future, --except such as respect nobody but themselves.
         7)That no gentleman or lady take it ill that another dances before them;--except such as have no pretence to dance at all.
         8)That the elder ladies and children be content with a second bench at the ball, as being past or not come to perfection.
          9)That the younger ladies take notice how many eyes observe them.--N.B.  This does not extend to the Have-at-alls.
         10)That all whisperers of lies and scandal be taken for their authors.
          11)That all repeaters of such lies and scandal be shunned by all company,--except such as have been guilty of the same crime.--N.B.  Several men of no character, old women and young ones of questioned reputation, are great authors of lies in these places, being of the sect of levellers.

         These laws were written by Mr. Nash himself, and by the manner in which they are drawn up, he undoubtedly designed them for wit.  The reader, however, it is feared, will think them dull.  But Nash was not born a writer;  for whatever humour he might have in conversation, he used to call a pen his torpedo:  whenever he grasped it, it benumbed all his faculties.
        But were we to give laws to a nursery, we should make them childish laws;  his statutes, though stupid, were addressed to fine gentlemen and ladies, and were probably recieved with sympathetic approbation.  It is certain they were in general religiously observed by his subjects, and executed by him with impartiality;  neither rank nor fortune shielded the refactory from his resentment.
        The balls, by his directions, were to begin at six, and to end at eleven.  Nor would he suffer them to continue a moment longer, lest invalids might commit irregularities, to counteract the benefit of the waters.  Everything was to be performed in proper order.  Each ball was to open with a minuet, danced by two persons of the highest distinction present.  When the minuet concluded, the lady was to bring the gentleman a new partner.  This ceremony was to be observed by every succeeding couple;  every gentleman being obliged to dance with two ladies till the minuets were over, which generally continued two hours.  At eight the country-dances were to begin;  ladies of quality, according to their rank, standing up first.  About nine o'clock a short interval was allowed for rest, and for the gentlemen to help their partners to tea.  That over, the company were to pursue their amusements till the clock struck eleven.  Then the master of the ceremonies entering the ball-room, ordered the music to desist by lifting up his finger.  The dances discontinued, and some time allowed for becoming cool, the ladies were handed to their chairs."   Life of Richard Nash by Oliver Goldsmith pgs. 519-20 and 521-22.

N.B. means "nota bene," or note well.

Robin Hood: Genesis of a Whig Myth

       I am going to lay out a personal theory, and encourage anyone who knows anything about the history of the Robin Hood myth to share knowledge in the comments. 
       In my early days as a conservative, I had the knee-jerk idea that there was something wrong with the Robin Hood myth.  Steal from the rich, give to the poor;  how Marxist!  As an experienced observer of eighteenth century British politics, I now conclude that Robin Hood is a Whig myth.  Who are the villains in Robin Hood?  Landed aristocracy, the church, and a corrupt Sheriff.  In other words, three groups that anyone in the elegant eighteenth would have associated with the Tories.  And another thing, the heroes are thieves!  Thieves, as in Bluff Bob in The Beggar's Opera?  The emerging commercial class are often spoken of by the Tories as being thieves.  Hence Estase's term Hip Hop Whiggery, also referring to the Daniel Defoe novels Roxana and Moll Flanders.  So in defending thievery as the natural consequence of restricted economic opportunities, the Tories are again attacked!  Feel free to conclude I've watched The Public Enemy too many times.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Twelve

       "Armenian homes, whether modest or affluent, were often furnished with art, artifacts, carpets, and European furniture;  and it was known by their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors that Armenians had their savings and often gold and valuable jewelry stored in their houses.  Armenians churches--and there were some 2,530 of them across Turkey--were not only places of worship but civic places where Armenian culture was collected and presented as part of the artistic and historic life of the community.  Like small museums, Armenian churches housed rare scriptures and books as well as paintings, frescoes, gold-and-jewel studded chandeliers, and other precious objects.  Of the desecration of Armenian churches, Morgenthau later wrote:
                    I do not believe that the darkest ages ever presented scenes more
                    horrible than those which now took place all over Turkey.  Nothing
                    was sacred to the Turkish gendarmes;  under the plea of searching
                    for hidden arms, they ransacked churches, treated the altars and sacred
                     utensils with the utmost indignity, and even held mock ceremonies in
                      imitation of the Christian sacraments.  They would beat the priests into

                      insensibility, under the pretense that they were the centres of sedition.
                      When they could discover no weapons in the churches, they would some
                       -times arm the bishops and priests with guns, pistols, and swords, then
                       try them before courts-martial for possessing weapons against the law,
                       and march them in this condition through the streets, merely to arouse
                       the fanatical wrath of the mobs.
       In 1915 the material wealth of Armenian culture was an open house for plunder.  As the local Turkish and Kurdish community began pillaging Armenian homes, Davis looked on in horror:
                     The scenes of that week were heartrending.  The people were
                     preparing to leave their homes and to abandon their houses, their
                      lands, their property of all kinds.  They were trying to dispose of their
                      furniture and household effects, their provisions and even much of their
                      clothing, as they would be able to carry but little with them.  They were
                       selling their possessions for whatever they could get.  The streets were
                       full of Turkish women, as well as men, who were seeking bargains on
                        this occasion, buying organs, sewing machines, furniture, rugs, and
                        other articles of value for almost nothing.  I know one woman who sold
                        a two hundred dollar organ to a Turkish neighbor for about five
                       dollars.  Sewing machines which had cost twenty-five dollars were sold
                        for fifty cents.  Valuable rugs were sold for less than a dollar.  Many
                        articles were given away, as their ownere were unable to sell them
                        and were obliged to leave them behind.  The scene reminded me of
                        vultures swooping down on their prey.  It was a veritable Turkish       
                         holiday and all the Turks went out in their gala attire to feast and to
                         make merry over the misfortunes of others.
       Henry Riggs was also astonished by what he saw.  In the public square, there were 'mountains of bedding, furniture and utensils. . . . sold at auction. . . .[for] one fifth of their value, and often far less.'  For many of the Muslims, it was 'the opportunity of a life time to get-rich-quick.'  Some Turks and Kurds attacked the homes of defenseless women, raping them and taking their possessions.  Some Turks, Riggs reported, especially those of 'the better class looked with genuine horror at the treatment accorded to the Armenians, and when it came to enriching themselves as a result of the sufferings of the poor victims, they would not do it.'  Such booty they believed was haram (forbidden), and would put a curse on them and their legacies.
       It became clear to Davis that the Temporary Law of Deportation and Confiscation and its new Emval-i Mertruke (abandoned goods) commission was a charade.  The commission was ostensibly set up to guard the property of the deported Armenians and, after supposedly paying out of it any debts of the owners, was to send the money to them in their new homes.  Most of the Armenians were killed, as was undoubtedly intended by the government, and as Davis put it, 'none who survived ever received any money from the Committee.'  As he tried to help Armenians claim their money, he realized that it was, as Consul Jackson later put it, 'a gigantic plundering scheme.'  After the commission had 'gotten possession of hundreds of thousands of dollars,'  Davis noted, 'it conveniently lost its books and explained that, as all the money received had been used up for expenses and there were no funds on hand, there was no necessity anyway of rendering any account!'  Deutsche Bank Director, Arthur von Gwinner, and the Ottoman parliamentary senator Ahmed Riza all reached similar conclusions.
        Armenian businessmen were forced to abandon their businesses, their shops, their merchandise, their lifetime accumulations.  Kerop Bedoukian watched in horror as the gendarmes took over his father's grocery store, and then 'systematically,'  he writes, 'the contents of the stores' everywhere were all being confiscated and 'loaded onto ox-drawn carts' and supposedly 'taken to government storage depots.'  Farther west in Ovajik, near Ismit, not far from Constantinople, Serpouhi Tavoukdijian also watched as the Turkish gendarmes took 'bolts of rich silks and cloth' from her father's store and then pillaged her brother Lazarus's toy store.  Antranig Vartanian, a fifteen-year-old boy whose family were livestock farmers on the Moush plain, described being forced by the Turkish gendarmes to go into a barn, where hundreds of Armenians had been burned alive, and take from the corpses jewelry and valuables.  'I saw the corpse of a woman propped up by some barn beams,' he recalled vividly.  'She had been strangled to death outside of the barn, and the remains of a beautiful embroidered apron were still on her body.  I saw gold bracelets and necklaces and other jewels on her body and I took them back to the gendarmes.'  The gendarmes were so delighted with the jewels that they spared Vartanian's life.
        Those who took their money with them were robbed of it immediately;  others left it in the bank, and others deposited money and valuables with German or American missionaries.  Realizing that the consulate was the safest place to leave money and valuables, still others deposited it with Leslie Davis, and his quarters soon became what he called 'a safe deposit vault' for the Armenians.  It was 'pathetic,' Davis recalled, 'to see the people bringing their money, their jewels, their valuable documents, and articles of all kinds to the Consulate and to the missionaries, asking us to keep them.'  With more than two hundred thousand dollars in gold hidden at the consulate, Davis worried about being raided by the Turkish authorities, and found it more than ironic that when the vali came over for evening tea and card games, the safe with the Armenian gold stood there in the same room.  By the fall of 1915 Davis was receiving orders from the vali demanding that he turn over to the government all the money and property the Armenians had been leaving in his care.  When he refused to comply, he found himself drawn deeper into the crisis.
       Davis was also horrified by the economic significance of killing off the Armenians;  as he put it:  'It was literally a case of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, for there would be no one left to till the soil and the authorities might have forseen the famine which actually did visit the land the following year.'  Davis noted that 'Nearly all the merchants, bankers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, carpenters, brick-layers, tile-makers, tinsmiths, bakers, tailors, shoe-makers, and other artisans so essential to the life of the people were Armenians. . . .By one stroke,'  Davis wrote, 'the country was to be set back a century.'  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 233-236

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Eleven

       "Dr. Boghosian described similar scenes.  His group of deportees was led out of the Chankiri prison, he recorded, on Assumption Sunday in August 1915.  Marched out of town, tied to each other by ropes, and joined with a group of several hundred more men, they were sent out into the 'bright moonlit night,' with three carts filled with 'spades, hoes, pick-axes, and shovels.'  Along the way more than two dozen of them were killed by the gendarmes, who bludgeoned them to death with their rifles.  They were spared for the moment when a Turkish captain redirected their caravan south to Kayseri.  Along that route more than 200 died of starvation and dysentary--familiar ways of dying in the extermination process.  Most of them would die in the coming months, but Dr. Boghosian, like Krikoris Balakian, was among the lucky survivors.

       What happened to these deported Armenian cultural leaders happened to Armenian intellectuals all over Turkey.  In this calculated way the CUP destroyed a vital part of Armenia's cultural infrastructure, and succeeded in practically silencing a whole generation of Armenian writers.  The death toll shows that at least eighty-two writers are known to have been murdered, in addition to the thousands of teachers and cultural and religious leaders.  It was an apocalypse for Armenian literature, which was in its own moment of a modernist flowering.  Daniel Varoujian, Siamanto (Adam Yarjanian), Krikor Zohrab, Levon Shant, Gomidas (Soghomon Soghomonian), and many others had taken Armenian poetry, fiction, drama, and music into a new era.  Fortunately many of the poems, novels, plays, and essays survived and are an important part of the Armenian literary tradition today.  But it may nevertheless be that the Young Turk government's extermination of Armenian intellectuals in 1915 was the most extensive episode of its kind in the twentieth century.  In many ways it became a paradigm for the silencing of writers by totalitarian governments in the ensuing decades of the century.  After April 24 it would be easier to carry out the genocide program, for many of the most gifted voices of resistance were gone.

       When Morgenthau first settled into his new post in Constantinople, he was alarmed by the recent accession to power of the CUP triumverate--Enver, Talaat, and Jemal.  Morgenthau called the new Committee of Union and Progress 'an irresponsible party, a kind of secret society' that ruled by 'intrigue, intimidation, and assassination.' 
       Then, as the Ottoman Empire joined Germany in World War I in November 1914, Morgenthau witnessed the Ottoman declaration of war that was issued simultaneously with a declaration of jihad had 'started passions' that would fuel the extermination program against the Armenians.  By the spring of 1915, Morgenthau began receiving detailed dispatches and telegrams about the deportations and massacres of the Armenians from his consular staff in the interior of Turkey.  Those reports would soon be heard around the world, and they would become essential to Morgenthau's new sense of conscience and responsibility. 

       In every city, town, and village a significant part of the Armenian population was financially stable, or even wealthy, and this caused great resentment and envy among their Muslim neighbors.  A disproportionate number of Armenians were successful in small business, trade, and commerce;  they were artisans, craftsmen, and farmers as well as teachers, clergy, and physicians.  Armenian culture was steeped in what later came to be called the Protestant work ethic.  With the coming of the missionaries, a new class of educated and intellectual Armenians had emerged as an academic elite throughout the empire.  By 1914, there were 1,996 schools and 451 monateries stretching from Constantinople to Van."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs215-16, 223-24, and 233.

Insanity

     There is an old saying, sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, that says :"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results."  President Obama made it clear in 2008 that he was opposed to "stupid wars," a phrase he never elucidated beyond stating that Iraq was a stupid war and Afghanistan wasn't a stupid war.  Estase always suspected that what "stupid" really meant was "unpopular," given the fact that when Obama was running for office there had been two horrific battles of Falujah, which figured prominantly on the TV news, and appeared often in the complaints of G.W. Bush's critics. 
       Estase always thought that one virtue Iraq held that Afghanistan didn't was that Iraq was at least being fought to institute a popular government, which even the most sanguine neo-con knew would be impossible for Afghanistan.  The American Left was fond of comparing Iraq to Vietnam, when the real turkey of a war was being fought to prop up a drug criminal named Hamid Karzai, who was not even fond enough of us to exclude the possibility of himself fighting the United States.  So, twelve years after starting a war in a country whose sin was protecting a now-dead terrorist, we still are fighting in Afghanistan.  And my readers in Russia know well that this is an endless source of irritation for their government. 
       So now, Oh Blah Blah, who in 2007 declared he was against "stupid wars," is set to fight on the side of Al Qaeda against the equally unloveable Bashar Al-Assad.  And who are Bashar Al-Assad's allies?  Iran and Russia!  Oh lovely, we are about to irritate the Russians in yet another part of the world!  And the intrepid Obama, who was so incensed about the cost of the Iraq War, will spend how much money we borrowed from China for this useless misadventure? 
      Obama also made war in violation of the 1973 War Powers Act in Libya.  And the locals anally raped and killed a U.S. Ambassador to show their appreciation.  Obama will not seek Congressional approval for action in Syria, because as deified Emperor, he has no need to follow anything so mundane as the U.S. Constitution.
       Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria.  Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Ten

        "Balakian described 'the terror of death' that hung in the air of the bus, especially as they passed the rocky coast where in previous decades the sultan's military police had thrown to their deaths hundreds of Armenian and Turkish intellectuals and political activists.  The group was then put on a steamship that normally held about 65 people, but was now loaded down with about 250 Armenians and dozens of military police--young soldiers, commisars, army spies, and police officials of various ranks.
        They sailed out on the rough waters of the Sea of Marmara and finally landed at Haydar Pasha's wharf, where they were marched out of the steamship in pairs to a huge embarkation station.  As the ornate process continued, the Armenian leaders were then taken to a special train, which was, as Balakian put it,'waiting and ready to take us all to the depths of Asia Minor, where,except for a few rare cases, we would all meet out deaths.  With the lights out,' Balakian wrote, ' the doors of the cars shut, and with police and police soldiers posted everywhere, the train started.  And so we began to move further and further away form the places of our lives, each of us leaving behind grieving and unprotected mothers, sisters, wives, children, possessions, wealth, and everything else.  We headed out to a region unnamed and unfamiliar.  To be buried forever.'
        Sometime past midnight an official on the train, who happened to be Armenian, whispered in Balakian's ear: 'Reverend Father, please write down the names of your arrested friends on this piece of paper and give it back to me.'  The man then 'slid a piece of paper and a pencil into my hand, and leaving the lamp by me, he went off to the busy policemen who were in charge of us. . . my heart was pounding and in haste I wrote, in the flickering dim light, the names I could remember, and slid the list back to the Armenian official.'  It was at this point that Balakian began to bear witness in a more formal way, and perhaps the writing down of the names was part of the process that led him to write his memoir.
        The train proceeded south along the coastline of the Sea of Marmara and by dawn they were passing through Nicomedia (Izmit) and Bardizag.  At dusk they came to the town of Eskishehir, where the Ankara and Konia railway lines separate, and then, after some delay and much apprehension among the prisoners, the train veered off toward Ankara.  Around midday on Tuesday they arrived at the Sinjan Koy railway station, near Ankara.  At the station Ibrahim, the chief of the central prison, who had been with them since Constantinople, stood up and began to read off the list of names:  'Silvio Ricci, Agnuni, Zartarian, Khazhag, Sharigian, Jihangiulian, Dr. Daghavarian, Sarkis Minasian,' the names were shouted out.  They were all progressive intellectuals, nonpolitical party people, conservatives, Balakian recalled, 'some seventy-five in all.  We were riveted on each name as it was called,' he wrote,' and then we kissed those who were leaving us.  In that instant, we began to weep, and as one person wept, others began to weep too, and we had this feeling that we were being separated from each other forever.'
         The first group was taken to Ayash, northwest of Ankara, while Balakian's group would be taken to Chankiri, to the northwest of Ankara.  In both places the men were imprisoned, tortured, and most of them killed in the subsequent few months in the desolate countryside of the region.  Balakian describes many of their deaths, among them the murders of the famous poet Daniel Varoujian and the novelist and Ottoman parliament membor Krikor Zohrab.  Varoujan and four colleagues had been with Balakian in prison in Chankiri, and on Thursday August 12, Jemal Oguz, the CUP responsible secretary, telegraphed the police guard office on the Chankiri-Kaylajek road, they were ambushed by four Kurdish chetes.  'The whole thing,' Balakian wrote, 'had been arranged in advance, and in secret.'
        The chetes then took the five Armenians to a nearby creek, undressed them, and folded up their clothing for themselves.  Then 'they began to stab them to death, slashing their arms and legs and genitals, and ripping apart their bodies.'  Only the thirty-three-year old Daniel Varoujian tried to defend himself, and this provoked the killers further;  they not only 'tore out his entrails, but dug out the eyes of this great Armenian poet.'  The killers then divided the pillage among themselves, taking more than 450 Ottoman gold pieces that were sewn into the clothing of Dr. Chillingerian and Onnig Maghazadijian.  They paid off the police, and after dividing up the belongings, left in the carriages.
         Balakian learned the details of the killings from one of the Turkish carriage drivers--the twenty-one-year-old son of the local bathhouse keeper--who returned to Chankiri depressed and shaken.  Sobbing as he spoke, he said to the Armenian priest, 'I don't want to be in this trade anymore.  I'm going to sell my horse and carriage and get out of this town.  I don't want this kind of profit.'  When the carriages returned to Chankiri without Varoujian and the others on Friday, the news of their murders spread terror among the deportees and the Armenian families of the town.  The interim governor, who had guaranteed that the men would reach Ankara safely, went immediately to Tuney (the town were they were killed) with the chief of police from Kastamouni and an investigative team.  There, they 'found the five dead men in unrecognizable condition in the creek.'"
The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs.213-215.