133) Forgotten Genocides

Interesting that the governments of Western powers step all over themselves to appease their vocal and wealthy Armenian and Greek constituents... keeping alive a genocide (sometimes that includes Greek "genocides" that New York Governor Pataki, for one, shamefully recognized not long ago; at one time, and probably still, there were more Greeks in New York City than in Athens. How do you spell "Ethnic Politics"?) that never took place, allegedly occurring some ninety years ago. Takes a lot of chutzpah, doesn't it? Especially while so many other genocides have landed in the trash heap of history. That's because the victims of these genocides simply don't have the power or money to make their case (even in WWII — who cries for the Gypsies?) ... and in one tragic (and relatively contemporary) example, no people left to make their case, because the genocide actually SUCCEEDED. (That would be the Tasmanians, wiped out by the folks down under, while part of the British Empire.) This web site has reminded the reader of the willful extermination of Ottoman Muslims that began years before World War I, chiefly through Russian expansion and systematic slaughter, claiming the lives of over five million folks, whose lives are a lot less meaningful in Western eyes. However, let us now take a look at other forgotten unfortunates.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1) The Indians

2) "Exterminate All the Brutes" (Great Britain)

3) Further British Atrocity Examples

4) Spain's "Reconcentrado"; The Philippine War

5) Nick Elaborates on the Turks' Suffering

6) Russians and their Muslim Expulsion Policies

7) Winston Churchill

8) Genocides of Turkey's Armenian Genocide Critics



A Quick, Overall Peek


The Indians

An estimated 120 million native Indians were killed in Canada, America and South America.

Small pox was used by the Spanish and British to wipe out millions of Indians to great effect.

In the East Coast of America, 12 million buffalo (the staple food of the Indians) were killed between 1870-1880 alone, in order to speed up the demise of these peoples.

Hundreds of boatloads of condemned European convicts were sent with Smallpox victims throughout the 17th,18th and 19th centuries.

General Custer was promoted for bravery in burning an Indian village of 90,000 dead Indians.

Smallpox and the Plague, according to some archaeologists, was the reason for the rapid demise of the Mian kingdoms in South America.

(Holdwater: the above facts and figures come from unverified sources.)


“EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES”




The following appeared in The New York Times Book Review



August 18, 1996

“EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES”
By Sven Lindqvist.
Translated by Joan Tate.
Illustrated. 179 pp. New York: The New Press. $20.


By Raleigh Trevelyan



THIS short book throws out a number of provocative statements, each of which could be a theme for lengthy debate. The title comes from that chilling scrawl at the end of Kurtz’s report on the “savage” tribes of the upper Congo River in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and refers — to put it succinctly — to the author’s contention that the antecedents of the Holocaust lay in European, particularly British, imperialism: “After Darwin ... racism was accepted and became a central element in British imperial ideology. ... It became accepted to shrug your shoulders at genocide.” There are passing glances elsewhere: at the hunting down of Indians in Argentina in the 1830’s; at the total disappearance of Tasmanian aborigines; at the elimination of the natives of the Canary Islands by the Spaniards at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella; at the massacre at Wounded Knee, for which Anglo-Saxon antecedents in the United States are blamed. Some of Sven Lindqvist’s arguments are echoes from Hannah Arendt; but there are differences.

My hackles began at first to rise, since I am English, was born under the raj and am convinced that those of my family who served in India did so selflessly, with affection for its people and respect for its culture. I noted that the author is Swedish, and that the Congo was a special preserve of King Leopold of the Belgians. But hackles subsided somewhat when I discovered India is barely mentioned in the book. Mr. Lindqvist is chiefly concerned with the scramble for Africa in the 1880’s and 90’s, in relation especially to “Heart of Darkness” and the gas ovens.
In fact “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a kind of travel book, by a man widely known on the Continent for his travel writing. He is on this journey alone, crossing the Algerian Sahara, either by bus or hitchhiking. The journey does not end in what was the Congo, as one might expect, but at Zinder, some way from Lake Chad. He has a heavy suitcase and a word processor packed with gruesome data of imperialist crimes and damningly racist quotations from Victorian writers. He says he is always frightened when traveling, and brooding on atrocities gives him nightmares: “There are toads for dinner. Live toads. I wake just as I am to bite the head of a toad. It is still throbbing in my hand.” I found some of this irritating, but he describes the desert beautifully, and his account of a sudden sandstorm makes it indeed something to be frightened about.


By Jove!


“Heart of Darkness” gave me nightmarish dreams too when I first read it: the looming dread, cannibals, the inscrutable jungle, the shriveled heads around Kurtz’s hut. “The horror! The horror!” I find it odd that Mr. Lindqvist does not quote these words, which are just as famous and alarming as “Exterminate all the brutes!” — though more ambiguous. Conrad makes his narrator, Marlow, interpret them as an affirmation, a moral victory, as though Kurtz with his last gasp had realized the “colossal scale” of his vile desires. Maybe they did not quite fit Mr. Lindqvist’s thesis, which in part appears to equate individual abominations and cruelties with the policies of governments. But he is good about the effect such critics of imperialism as H. G. Wells, R. B. CunnInghame Graham and Charles Dilke had on Conrad, and on Conrad’s own experiences that developed into Marlow’s account. He virtually ignores the heroic death in 1873 of David Livingstone and his exposure of the Central African slave trade, but rightly lambastes the odious Henry Stanley, whom he sees as sharing some characteristics with Kurtz. He also points out that Kurtz was made to be half English and half French; Conrad wrote, “All Europe went to the making of Kurtz.” This I suppose deals with my objection that the Congo was Belgian. All the same, mass murder there caused an outrage in England, even if, as Mr. Lindqvist says, “Queen Victoria had other things to think about than a few baskets of amputated hands in the Congo” — one being her impending jubilee in 1897, which he regards as an episode of “unequaled arrogance.”

She also had the Sudan to think about, he says. In 1898 General Kitchener’s Maxim guns wiped out the brave Mahdists at Omdurman. Few people wondered, he continues, why 11,000 Sudanese died and only 48 British. “No one asked, why few or none survived of the 16,000 wounded Sudanese.” While it is true that the victory was ecstatically welcomed in England, this is another simplification. In his typically dismissive way he describes Winston Churchill’s brilliant account of the battle, in which he took part, and his remorse and horror as “outmoded” and “old-fashioned.” Churchill wrote: “lt seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply. . . Valiant men were struggling on through a hell of whistling metal, exploding shells and spurting dust — suffering, despairing, dying.”

One of the most shameful episodes in the history of the British Empire in the 19th century is included among illustrations here: the King of Ashanti being made to kiss the feet of British officers. Mr. Lindqvlst also writes of the exterminatlon of the Tasmanians, hunted by the settlers like kangaroos. It was the shock of this “train of evil” in Tasmania, as Darwin called It, that helped to start the great debates among British writers on the ethics of colonization and colonial wars. Some of these debates were connected to the new, controversial theories of evolution. Some writers cited here were crackpots, but quotations from more celebrated and humane men like Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Kldd and Darwin are decidedly selective. Thus Darwin Is paraphrased as saying that the intermediate forms between the primates and civilized man are “gorillas and savages.”

So how does this relate to the Holocaust? Mr. Lindqvlst In very few pages throws his fireworks Into the ring. The Germans had begun to envy the British and French empires. They were being left behind; they needed Lebensraum. In South-West Africa they managed to grab a section of the continent, where they ruthlessly demonstrated that they had mastered “the art of hastening the extermination of a people of ‘Inferior culture,” as exercised already by “Americans, British and other Europeans.” They next turned their attentions to the agricultural areas of eastern Europe, and the opportunity came for Hitler in World War II. But there were too many Jews In Poland and the Ukraine, In some places as many as 40 percent of the population, “superfluous eaters” to be got rid of. True, there were mass murders of Jews In past centuries, but “the step from mass murder to genocide was not taken until the anti-Semitic tradition met the tradition of genocide arising during Europe’s expansion In America, Australia, Africa and Asia.” According to the Lebensraum theory, the Jews were essentially “a landless people, like the stunted hunting people of the African interior.” Auschwitz, Mr. Lindqvlst says, was “the modern Industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested.”

It Is no wonder that “Exterminate All the Brutes,” now translated Into English by Joan Tate, has caused heated controversy In Sweden. It Is also worth noting that It was written before the genocidal wars in Bosnia and Rwanda. Mr. Lindqvlst may claim his book is not a contribution to historical research. Even so, If he had expanded his Ideas on Imperialism and written just a lIttle more about his travels (leaving out the dreams), it could have been far more explosive. His story about a crazy French officer who thought he was a black chief, near Lake Chad, Is a fascinating parallel to “Heart of Darkness.” The British are quite used to being attacked for their hypocrisy and arrogance, and the debate about our empire, right or wrong, is by no means over. If there are people like me who are proud of at least some of our colonial achievements, it does not mean that we go along with Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” inevitably quoted here as evidence against us.

Raleigh Trevelyan is the author of “The Golden Oriole” and the forthcoming “Companion Guide to Sicily.”



Holdwater: A revealing article on further British examples of "genocidal oppression" is below
The Turks haven't learned the British way of denying past atrocities



It is not illegal to discuss the millions who were killed under our empire. So why do so few people know about them?

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 27, 2005
The Guardian

In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country's laws. Mr. Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness", which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the first world war and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country's foremost novelist for mentioning them.

As it prepares for accession, the Turkish government will discover that the other members of the EU have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities. Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.

In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Niño drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies, like Stalin's in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceeding three years, at least 1.25m died.






Three recent books - Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis - show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise — some of them violently — against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder — more than a million — were held in "enclosed villages". Prisoners were questioned with the help of "slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes". British soldiers used a "metal castrating instrument" to cut off testicles and fingers. "By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black". Elkins's evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had "failed to halt" when challenged.

These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers; they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, on the opposite page, laments our "relative lack of interest" in Stalin and Mao's crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.

In the Express we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for "the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good ... the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions" (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In the Sunday Telegraph, he insists that "the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe". (Compare this to Mike Davis's central finding, that "there was no increase in India's per capita income from 1757 to 1947", or to Prasannan Parthasarathi's demonstration that "South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.") In the Daily Telegraph, John Keegan asserts that "the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic". The Victorians "set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve".

There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain "promotes one key concept that underpins everything else - the idea of Britain's basic benevolence ... Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show 'exceptions' to, or 'mistakes' in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence". This idea, I fear, is the true "sense of British cultural identity" whose alleged loss Max laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.

Turkey's accession to the European Union, now jeopardised by the trial of Orhan Pamuk, requires not that it comes to terms with its atrocities; only that it permits its writers to rage impotently against them. If the government wants the genocide of the Armenians to be forgotten, it should drop its censorship laws and let people say what they want. It needs only allow Richard Desmond and the Barclay brothers to buy up the country's newspapers, and the past will never trouble it again.


Holdwater: Motives for why Pamuk was picked on is examined here; note how the above author labels this trial as "anachronistic brutality," but says nothing about similar freedom of speech curtailing laws in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Austria, when they pertain to "genocide deniers."


Only Nineteen Years Before the Armenian "Genocide"... and then, Just Some Ten Years Before the Armenian "Genocide"...



...The following episode in history took place, with strikingly similar figures. Yet, I have never heard about it. Have you?

If not, why do you suppose that is... and why do you $uppo$e we keep hearing about the Armenian "Genocide," time and time again? The affected people of this historical episode were Christians as well, so their lives couldn't have been any less valuable than the Armenians' lives.... right?



Similarly, a "rerun" from the link above:

The Philippine War

"Villages were destroyed, civilians murdered, prisoners tortured and mutilated along with a host of other atrocities. Many American officers and non-coms had served in the Indian Wars, and thus applied the old belief that 'the only good Indian was a dead Indian' to their relations with the Filipinos. This attitude, of course, was reciprocated by the native forces."

CASUALTY FIGURES:

U.S.-- 4,234 dead and 2,818 wounded.
Philippines-- 20,000 military dead and 200,000-500,000+ civilian dead. (Filipinos estimate from 250,000 to one million.)

"...Caloocan was supposed to contain seventeen thousand inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native....War is worse than hell."-- Soldier's Letter, Captain Elliott of the Kansas Regiment, February 27th

www.historyguy.com


A black Filipino child, spear in hand, resists
President McKinley's attempt at "ethnic
cleansing.," in the "waters of civilization."
("Oh, you dirty boy!" Judge, June 1899,
after the Philippines had been sold to the
US by Spain for $20 million)


Holdwater: The Philippine War was officially proclaimed "over" by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, but actually continued on several islands for years. Only some ten years apart from the Armenian "Genocide," and the United States appears to have acted distinctly more genocidally (with the "the only good Filipino is a dead Filipino" mentality) than the Ottoman Turks (where massacres by government forces as policy have yet to be proven), and was responsible for perhaps more civilian deaths and atrocities (some historians estimate over half a million) than the Armenian casualties of 300,000 to 600,000 from all causes combined — including the famine and disease that did not discriminate among all Ottoman civilians, along with the Armenian "non-civilian" combatants. Yet the United States Congress has the audacity to bring up Armenian "Genocide" resolutions, year after year. How do you like that?

I wonder why the U.S. Congress does not come up with an Algerian Resolution, honoring the couple of hundred thousand Algerian civilians who were done in by the French... and I wonder why the French Parliament does not similarly come up with a Filipino Resolution, honoring the perhaps over five hundred thousand Filipino civilians who were done in by the Americans? I wonder why both keep harping on the Armenian "Geno$ide"?



Further reading on American attitudes toward the Filipinos, during the war... setting an excellent parallel to American views toward the Turks.

ADDENDUM, 5-07:

A 2007 documentary from the History Channel entitled "First Intervention: The Spanish-American War" (directed and produced by Phil Tuckett. Three quick notes of interest: Indian war veterans included the "Bufallo soldiers," a black regiment, at least in the Cuban end of the Spanish-American War. Next, the sinking of the Maine, which sparked aggression against Spain, was determined in 1976 by the U.S. Navy to be "an accidental fire in the ship's coal bunker that ignited ammunitions stored nearby." Lastly, one of the talking heads made a good impression, David Trask, author of "The War With Spain, 1898"; an excerpt: "..Empire is a dangerous commodity; the control of colonial peoples is not only immoral, especially in terms of the values of the Republic, but also expedientially unsound, that you are very likely to get into more trouble than good... Our big mistake was the Philippine insurrection; the other acquistions ... that resulted from the war with Spain could be justified on a strategic basis, but not the Philippines. It involved us in East Asian affairs in a way that we wouldn't have had to have been involved, it was a mistake to go out there. But it's like a summer romance, it's much easier to start one than to end one." One more quickie: I liked actor Michael Cawelti's portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt) glossed over the Philippine years with one sentence: "This (war) isn't quite over yet; the U.S. takeover of the Philippines leads to an insurrection... it lasts six years and costs more than 20,000 lives." (In America's defense, another talking head, Dr. Lewis Gould, explained a Philippine takeover was prudent to prevent near certain Japanese domination.)

A Filipino-centric view on U.S.-Philippines matters (including post WWI relations) claims, relating to the Philippine War, "Most recent accounts by independent historians put the death toll at 1.5 million." It may be accessed here.


ADDENDUM, 11-07:

Letter appearing in Queens Chronicle, November 22, 2007, p. 9:

Waterboarding

Dear Editor:
Is waterboarding a form of torture? I believe it is. But at least it's more benign than the water torture that was used by the American army on Filipino insurgents during the Spanish American War in the early 20th century.

During that conflict the "water cure," in which sections of bamboo were forced down the throats of prisoners and then used to fill the prisoners' stomachs with dirty water until they swelled in torment, was used to gain information. Soldiers would jump on the prisoner's stomach to force the water out, often repeating the process until the victim either informed or died. This technique was so widely reported that the Cleveland Plain Dealer even published a joke about it:

Ma: What's the sound of running water out there, Willie?

Willie: It's only us boys, Ma. We've been trying the Philippine water cure on Bobby Snow, and we're pouring him out.

I suspect few Americans would laugh at a similar joke about waterboarding today. We're far too civilized. Aren't we?

Martin Levinson,
Forest Hills

"Nick" Elaborates on the Turks' Suffering




...While you all witter on about the Armenian genocide it is conveniently put aside that Muslims were also suffering; since the early 1800 as the Ottoman empire contracted, millions were evicted from the Crimea, Balkans and Caucusus with great suffering and pain. For example — in the mid 1800s about 1.2 million Abkhaz and Circassians were "cleared"- to use the phrase of an American missionary to describe the actions of Russo-Armenian troops in 1915 — from their homelands. They were put on boats and sent to Turkey. In the process one third died of murder or disease. In this one event you have a catastrophe of similar proportions to the one suffered by Armenians. During and immediately after the Bulgarian wars in 1876 about 200,000 Bulgarian Muslims died. In the 1820s Erivan province had a Muslim majority, by the turn of the century Muslims were a small minority. From 1912-1915 alone there were 500,000 Turkish refugees from the Balkans entering Turkey. After the Turks lost Eastern Anatolia to Russia in 1915 the Ottoman government enumerated about 850,000 Muslim refugees but in reality it was probably over a million. It is a meaningless exercise to talk of Armenian genocide and not to discuss these other factors. If we are in the business of apologising then others should be expressing regret also; Russians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks and, yes, even Armenians.

Excerpted from a guestbook

From: NICK
Date: 11/23/1999


1.5 million Chechens have suffered losses (the 25% claimed below would amount to nearly 400,000) similar to the Armenians , through a genocidal policy much more clear-cut than the one alleged against the Armenians... at a time of more recent history than the Armenians. Yet it has never occurred to the U.S. Congress and/or the French Parliament to come up with a "resolution" decrying this example of "Man's Inhumanity to Man." Why i$ that?




In the process of clamping down on all these revolts, Russia has even managed to attempt genocide at least twice.

For example, in the 1940s 14,000 Chechens and Ingush — 3 per cent of their entire populations — were shot and killed by Stalin’s secret police, their bodies then dumped into a pit. The act is comparable to the mass murder of Jews in the pit at Babi Yar, committed four years before by Hitler’s forces. Stalin later proceeded to ‘cleanse’ almost all 1.5 million Chechens, forcibly deporting them to concentration camps in Siberia. About 25 per cent of them died in these camps. Another 2 million Muslims in the former Soviet Union, including Dagestanis, were similarly evicted to join their dying brothers and sisters in Stalin’s death camps.[3] Eric Margolis thus notes that the Chechens are “the children of a nation that has three times nearly been exterminated by Russian genocide: in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the last when Stalin had tens of thousands of Chechens shot and the remainder of the Chechen people deported to Siberian concentration camps.”[4]

David Damren, an Associate Faculty Member in the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University, provides an overview of Russia’s attempts to wipe out both the Chechen people and their Islamic faith: “During WWII, when disturbances occurred in Chechnya in 1940 and again in 1943, Stalin responded with astonishing brutality that bordered on genocide. Accusing them of still unproven collaboration with Nazi Germany, in 1944 he forcibly relocated six entire Caucasian nationalities, including the whole Chechen and Ingush populations, to special camps in Central Asia. All told, more than a million Muslims from the Caucasus were deported, with tremendous loss of life. By some estimates one third to one-half of the population of Chechen-Ingushetia alone - well over 250,000 people - disappeared after the republic was liquidated in February 1944.

(Armenians like to claim they, too, were sent to concentration camps, the kind that people get imprisoned in... but like much of the rest of what the Armenians say, it's bunk.) The rest of this fine article can be found on the Chechnya page.


Exterminating the Brutes, Part II



WINSTON CHURCHILL


Winston Churchill


Holdwater: Winston Churchill was just the bloody right cup of tea his nation desperately needed to see the bleak, W.W.II years of horrors through. (Not just his country, but the world... if somebody like Neville Chamberlain had been sitting at his post, a flag with a Swastika might be flying atop the White House today.) Clearly, one of the great men of history.

However, he wasn't perfect. Gallipoli was perhaps the biggest fiasco of his political career when he was made the scapegoat as First Lord of the Admiralty, forcing his resignation in November 1916. Perhaps he had a resulting chip on his shoulder regarding the Turks afterwards, as he certainly expressed (just like all the other British statesmen) some clearly irresponsible conclusions regarding the Ottoman Empire's being behind a policy of extermination, when there was no proof. (As if it wasn't bad enough he made the decision to steal the "Sultan Osman" ship from the Turks, the one that was partly paid for by the Turkish peasantry, even after Britain's Attorney General declared doing so would be illegal; Churchill excused this course of action by saying, "We must... make such defence of our action to Turkey as we can" [David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace.] Before withholding the ship, however, Churchill made sure to collect the last payment from the Turks! ("There was no reason why the money due [£800,000] should not be accepted.")

Shut my sweet mouth! And here I thought when an Armenian professor claimed the English were related to the Armenians, I thought he was only kidding. Well, I'm still not sure I entirely believe him, but now I think Winston must have been part genocide-obsessed Armenian (the variety not known for honor)... otherwise, how could he have reneged on a deal in such monumental fashion?

At any rate, it's doubtful Churchill would have stood much in the way of Lloyd George's intention to wipe Turkey off the face of the earth... after all, that was part of Great Britain's plans in carving up the Ottoman Empire. Using the fabricated Armenian "Genocide" as punishment, we would get the Christian folks to come in (The United Kingdom backed Greece's invasion of Anatolia, only to abandon them when the Greeks sliced and diced the defenseless citizenry much too close for comfort), and we would get the Moslem folks to clear out. Since Churchill was so genocidally righteous, it's only fair to examine where he stood on other extermination/deportation topics, particularly in the Moslem world. We pick up at the point where the Arabs had been promised independence, via Lawrence of Arabia, in return for their cooperation to help the Brits wrest lands away from the Ottoman Empire... but for some reason, the Brits went back on their word:

According to historians, Britain used poison gas to quell a 1920 tribal uprising in the northern Kurdish town of Kirkuk.

Arguing strongly for the use of mustard gas in 1919, Winston Churchill — then a secretary of state in Britain's War Office — said he did not understand the 'squeamishness about the use of gas.'

'I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes,' the former British prime minister was quoted in "Iraq: From Sumer To Saddam," by Iraqi expert Geoff Simons.

(So THAT's where Saddam got the idea to use chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds..!)

------------

As early as October 25, 1919 Winston Churchill predicted that Zionism implied the clearing of the indigenous population:

"There are the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine, and who take it for granted the local [Palestinian] population will be cleared out to suit their convenience."

From "Expulsion Of The Palestinians," p. 15, by Nur Masalha



Dr. Robert John on Churchill's honor:

The INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL FOR HUMAN ECOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY mission includes the improvement of understanding between national and ethnic groups.

This bulletin is on the origin of the bombing of civilians in World War II.

A program on BBC television on the first of July 2005 demonstrated the origin.

The program was Decisive Weapons, the Hurricane airplane.

In the Battle of Britain following the capitulation of France, the Hurricane was more maneuverable than the Spitfire.

The Luftwaffe was bombing British airfields, with fighter escorts.

German losses in aircraft were proportionally greater than the British. But since the Germans had more planes, the end of RAF resistance was near.

At this point, Winston Churchill ordered a token bombing air raid on one of the best residential areas in Berlin.

The Germans retaliated, diverting their bombers from attacks on British air defenses.

So began the bombing of civilians in Dresden and Wurzburg, and London.

Is deliberate bombing of civilians terrorism?



This decision by Churchill parallels a similar one in World War I, when he was first Lord of the Admiralty. In accordance with the rules of war, German U-boat captains surfaced and gave merchant ships time for their crew to take to the boats before their ship was torpedoed.

Churchill armed merchant ships. When German submarines surfaced they were shelled.

Thereafter, unrestricted submarine warfare was used to incite American indignation and promote entry into the war.



This characteristic of Churchill to win, without honor if believed necessary, was seen by his peers, and was why he was dismissed by most of his social class as a CAD. Did he inherit this trait from his mother?

The idea of military honor, the spirit of sportsmanship rather than win at all costs, are history. Robert John, OAH, director general ICHEE.org (07-2005)



"Falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind" -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
GENOCIDES BY TURKEY'S ARMENIAN GENOCIDE CRITICS



By Bruce Fein

The Government of Turkey has been assailed by several members of the European Union, the European Parliament, and various arms of government in the United states for failing to concede that the 1915-23 treatment of Armenian subjects by the Ottoman Empire constituted genocide under terms of the Genocide Convention. One strategy for discouraging such gratuitous insults to history and justice is to demonstrate that Turkey's accusers have been guilty of the same misconduct but have staunchly resisted self-condemnations as perpetrators of genocide, in other words, they are applying a double and hypocritical legal standard for the crime of genocide.

This essay elaborates on that strategy, and demonstrates the moral selectivity of the EU and the United States in political and moral posturing over the claimed Armenian genocide.

The Genocide Convention of 1948 defines the crime as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing group members; 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members; 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and, 5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Convention also extends the crime of genocide to reach conspiracy, direct and public incitement, and attempt to commit genocide, or complicity in the same.

With regard to the claimed Armenian genocide, strong disproving evidence can be summoned. The relocations and killings of Armenians were not based on ethnicity, but on reasonable suspicions that they were aiding and aborting the war enemies of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Indeed, at the Versailles Peace Conference, Armenians boasted of their treason to the Ottoman government and military heroics for the World War I victors, especially Russia and France. Moreover, tens of thousands of Armenians were left undisturbed during the war in Istanbul, Izmir and elsewhere in non-military sensitive zones, which shows that the Armenian relocation orders pivoted on reasonable war necessities, not ethnicity, a fundamental element of genocide. Additionally, Ottoman officials prosecuted and
punished more than 1,000 wayward soldiers for killings or abuses of Armenians.

Furthermore, a substantial number of Armenian massacres during the war were retaliation for their massacres of Ottoman Muslims, not because of ethnicity or religion. Moreover, there was no historical animosity of the Ottoman's toward Armenians, who had climbed to peaks of official power and economic prosperity within the Empire before the World War I. More could be said against the claimed Armenian genocide, but the above sketch of contrary evidence enables a comparison with the proof of genocide charges that could be asserted against EU members and the United States. The following summarizes some of the genocide indictments that might reasonably be brought against Turkey's detractors:

1. Germany
Germany committed genocide against the Herero tribe in then Southwest Africa during its colonial occupation in the 1890s. The best evidence shows the Germans slaughtered members of the tribe because they believed they were genetically and mentally inferior. The tribe was not guilty of treason and not provoked the German savagery by its own massacres of Germans. The butchery of the Hereros was not during wartime when excesses are inevitable. Those who survived the initial German genocide revolted against their brutal treatment with the Hoitentots in 1904, but were viciously destroyed with vastly superior arms or otherwise.


2. France
Substantial evidence implicates France in Algerian genocide during 1954-62 war of independence in which more than 200,000 Muslims were slaughtered. Senior French officers who fought in Algeria have recently confessed that torture and summary executions were routine grisly instruments of French warfare. President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin, however, have fiercely opposed a parliamentary inquiry into the genocide as exploring a subject best left to historians.


3. Belgium
Belgium is seemingly guilty of genocide during its gruesome colonization of Belgian Congo under King Leopold II. The genocide spurred the legendary book by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. The King deliberately inflicted on numerous Congolese tribes conditions of calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. Belgium's ugly Congo genocide has been recently chronicled in the book, King Leopold's Ghost.


4. Portugal
Portugal's apparent genocides uncurtained in Angola, Portuguese Guinea, and Mozambique during colonial years. The Portuguese sold back tribal members as slaves, and inflicted brutal conditions of slave and caused death to Angolan, Guinean, and Mozambican tribes.


5. Spain
Spain seems implicated in the genocides of hundreds of Caribbean and Central and South American peoples, like the Mexican Aztecs, and the genocide of Basques in mainland Spain. Spanish killings and enslavements of indigenous tribes and peoples are notorious, and stretched over centuries. Ditto for Spanish Basques living on the border with France. Slavery was not ended in Cuba until Spain's defeat in 1898 Spanish-American war. Spain may also have been guilty of genocide in Spanish Morocco during its colonization.


6. Great Britain
The British apparently committed genocide of the Irish during the Great Potato Famine, 1845-48. the Irish lost ½ their population from emigration provoked by starvation conditions, and the British aggravated the starvation by callous policies permitting the exports of foodstuffs from Ireland during the famine calamity. The state of New York in the United States teaches the Potato Famine as an example of genocide.


7. Austria
Austria is guilty of the Jewish Holocaust. The sole reason it escaped that hideous stigma is because of Cold War politics after World War II when it was occupied by the West and the Soviet Union until 1955.


8. Greece
Greece is guilty of genocide of Ottoman Muslims in Crete and of Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus twice, 1963-64 and 1974. The evidence of genocide is voluminous, including testimony from former U.S. Undersecretary of State George Ball and foreign reporters on the scene.


9. Italy
Italy is guilty of genocide in Ethiopia and Somalia during its colonization and war aggressions, and a co-inspirator in the Jewish Holocaust as an ally of Hitler's Third Reich.


10. Netherlands
The Dutch seem indictable for genocide of Indonesian tribes during its long colonial rule that ended only after World War II. The Dutch slaughtered and subjugated indigenous populations for economic gain and a belief in their racial and religious superiority.


11. United States
The United states is seemingly guilty of genocides of several Native American Indian tribes and blacks during slavery. The Sand Creek massacre of helpless Indian woman and children and General Phil Sheridan's fighting fighting creed that only good Indian is a dead Indian exemplifies the former genocides. The lethal conditions of black slavery captured in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin illustrates the latter genocide.


12. Australia and New Zealand
Neither country is a EU member, but both associated with its lofty ideology of moral superiority, and were former colonies of Great Britain. Both under the colonialism of the latter and during their early years of independence, these twin nations committed genocides against Australian aboriginals and New Zealand Maoris, respectively.



Bruce Fein is an attorney and Adjunct Scholar of ATAA

Thanks to turkisharmenians.faithweb.com

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