If you know only one thing about Armenia, it is probably the genocide of 1915-17. On April 24, 1915, authorities in what was then the Ottoman Empire arrested somewhere between 235-270 Armenians then living in what was then Constantinople. They were then placed on a series of trains which spread them out to several locations, but many were ultimately being led to their death. This was followed by the rest of the Armenian community being rounded up and marched hundreds of miles into the Syrian desert, largely without food or water, and being repeatedly attacked on the way. Those who made it were then placed in a number of concentration camps. By the end of it all, the death toll is placed anywhere between Turkey's number of 600,000, and the Western number of 1.5 million people.
Which brings us to the second thing you would know about Armenia: Turkey's steadfast refusal to accept responsibility for it and the pressure placed on other nations to go along with it, the United States being no exception. They prefer to call it the results of civil unrest. We disagree here.
Which brings us to the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which last year ruled 2-1 that heirs could not sue insurance companies that sold life insurance policies to victims of the genocide. On Friday, one of the justices, Dorothy Nelson, changed her mind and reversed her vote and the ruling, now allowing those heirs to sue. Which apparently is a thing you can do. The previous decision was that the American government had sided with the Turkish government against calling it a genocide, but here in the reversal, it was reconcluded that there wasn't anything officially stated either way.
There is a push to take one more shot at a resolution in Congress recognizing it as a genocide. And just in case you thought this was one place you could get away from the Kardashians, you should be informed that they are of Armenian heritage and that Kim has called on her fans to help give it a shove in the right direction. The "Organization For Fighting Against Baseless Armenian Allegations"- there's a name for you- is displeased.
Meanwhile, today there is an international conference, "The Crime Of Genocide: Prevention, Condemnation and Elimination of Consequences", kicking off in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. Needless to say, calls to recognize it are taking center stage. One of the few Turkish academics to recognize it, Taner Akcam, said that genocide needs a new definition that takes into account more of what happened with the Armenians. Tessa Hoffman of Germany has advised Armenia to take it to The Hague. Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said that failure to recognize it enabled other genocides to occur over the years.
The fight doesn't appear to end anytime soon. But the Armenian community is advancing.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
I Ruin Your Nice American History Again
The Minutemen hold a revered place in American history. The modern-day groups patrolling the borders calling themselves Minutemen notwithstanding, in the American Revolution, a 'minuteman' was a locally-bred soldier that was supposed to be ready to go on one minute's notice, hence the name. History's flagbearer for the group is almost certainly Paul Revere, who if you're up on your Longfellow poems, you'll recall as getting the locals alerted that they needed to get to Lexington and Concord.
Here's the thing, though.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sucked as a historian.
First off, there was a second rider, William Dawes. And the task of Revere and Dawes was merely (look at me use the word 'merely') to warn John Hancock and John Adams that they were in danger of arrest by the British. They both made it that far, but proceeded to Concord in case the British were going to be there instead. Before that, they picked up a third runner, Samuel Prescott. Revere was stopped on that second run; Dawes and Prescott got through. They were far from the only ones to do any riding that night, but Longfellow chose to focus his poem entirely on Revere.
As for the Minutemen themselves... they got lucky at Lexington and Concord. The Minutemen were a surprise thing. The British on that day were not really out specifically for a fight. Their task that night was to seize a weapons cache, and to arrest Hancock and Adams. For them to suddenly be up against a big mass of soldiers they didn't expect to be fighting that day, that was a big disadvantage. And these were not very large numbers of men as a result; some hesitate to call Lexington and Concord 'battles', preferring to use the word 'skirmish' instead. According to David Hackett Fischer's book Paul Revere's Ride, for a lot of the British troops, that was their first actual battle.
After that, the Minutemen's effectiveness went downhill in a hurry. After the Shot Heard Round The World, go back and look at the major achievements of the Americans in that war. There's nary a Minuteman in sight; it's the Continental Army doing virtually all the heavy lifting. Why? Because the Minutemen sucked.
This is a long-standing mental mistake people make: on one hand, you have a group of soldiers that have undergone rigorous formal training and supplied by an entity who's about as deep-pocketed as you'll find on the planet. On the other, you have a bunch of local guys who get together a couple times a week, train themselves, and think they can take on the world.
Who's usually going to win that exchange? I mean, honestly. Samuel Adams sure didn't; he was at Lexington that day and came away saying "Would any man in his sense, who wishes war may be carried on with vigor, prefer the temporary and expensive drafts of militia and minutemen were to a permanent and well-appointed army?"
The Minutemen were that guy who's had one karate lesson. He walks in, gets one hour of the most basic stuff in the arsenal and walks out thinking he's Bruce Lee. After Lexington and Concord, the Minutemen did guerrilla warfare while the Continental Army took on the British head-on. The Minutemen did do some head-on fighting as well, but when they did, they regretted it. The gap in skill between them and everyone else on the field was obvious. They served to add numbers and not much else. They couldn't shoot straight and they were not careful with their ammunition. As Martin L. Brown wrote in Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology, 1492-1792:
So unformidable that, frequently, the minutemen wound up being the ones who ran away. Like the man who has one karate lesson and thinks he's Bruce Lee, were he to actually be placed up against Bruce Lee, his nerve vanishes quickly.
And the hell of it is, the minutemen were supposed to be the elite members of the various local militias. They were split off from the normal militias for that purpose: the militias were basically useless and totally unreliable. Within a year, the minutemen faded back into the militias. By the end, the minutemen were little more than a farm system for the Continental Army, relegated to tasks like preventing slave uprisings, guarding prisoners, or herding cattle.
As a supplemental body, the minutemen were okay. They pulled weight when playing hit-and-run. But that's all they could do. Surprise and the addition of bodies to the ends of a line of Continental Army soldiers was all they had going for them.
It's fairly fitting to close on the quote, seemingly isolated by history into a stand-alone one-liner via A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government by Garry Wills, by General Charles Lee, who had started out wanting to lead militia forces into battle:
Here's the thing, though.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sucked as a historian.
First off, there was a second rider, William Dawes. And the task of Revere and Dawes was merely (look at me use the word 'merely') to warn John Hancock and John Adams that they were in danger of arrest by the British. They both made it that far, but proceeded to Concord in case the British were going to be there instead. Before that, they picked up a third runner, Samuel Prescott. Revere was stopped on that second run; Dawes and Prescott got through. They were far from the only ones to do any riding that night, but Longfellow chose to focus his poem entirely on Revere.
As for the Minutemen themselves... they got lucky at Lexington and Concord. The Minutemen were a surprise thing. The British on that day were not really out specifically for a fight. Their task that night was to seize a weapons cache, and to arrest Hancock and Adams. For them to suddenly be up against a big mass of soldiers they didn't expect to be fighting that day, that was a big disadvantage. And these were not very large numbers of men as a result; some hesitate to call Lexington and Concord 'battles', preferring to use the word 'skirmish' instead. According to David Hackett Fischer's book Paul Revere's Ride, for a lot of the British troops, that was their first actual battle.
After that, the Minutemen's effectiveness went downhill in a hurry. After the Shot Heard Round The World, go back and look at the major achievements of the Americans in that war. There's nary a Minuteman in sight; it's the Continental Army doing virtually all the heavy lifting. Why? Because the Minutemen sucked.
This is a long-standing mental mistake people make: on one hand, you have a group of soldiers that have undergone rigorous formal training and supplied by an entity who's about as deep-pocketed as you'll find on the planet. On the other, you have a bunch of local guys who get together a couple times a week, train themselves, and think they can take on the world.
Who's usually going to win that exchange? I mean, honestly. Samuel Adams sure didn't; he was at Lexington that day and came away saying "Would any man in his sense, who wishes war may be carried on with vigor, prefer the temporary and expensive drafts of militia and minutemen were to a permanent and well-appointed army?"
The Minutemen were that guy who's had one karate lesson. He walks in, gets one hour of the most basic stuff in the arsenal and walks out thinking he's Bruce Lee. After Lexington and Concord, the Minutemen did guerrilla warfare while the Continental Army took on the British head-on. The Minutemen did do some head-on fighting as well, but when they did, they regretted it. The gap in skill between them and everyone else on the field was obvious. They served to add numbers and not much else. They couldn't shoot straight and they were not careful with their ammunition. As Martin L. Brown wrote in Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology, 1492-1792:
"Instead of being the best marksmen in the world and picking off every Regular that was to be seen...the continual firing which they kept up by the week and the month has had no other effect than to waste their ammunition and convince the King's troops that they are really not really so formidable."
So unformidable that, frequently, the minutemen wound up being the ones who ran away. Like the man who has one karate lesson and thinks he's Bruce Lee, were he to actually be placed up against Bruce Lee, his nerve vanishes quickly.
And the hell of it is, the minutemen were supposed to be the elite members of the various local militias. They were split off from the normal militias for that purpose: the militias were basically useless and totally unreliable. Within a year, the minutemen faded back into the militias. By the end, the minutemen were little more than a farm system for the Continental Army, relegated to tasks like preventing slave uprisings, guarding prisoners, or herding cattle.
As a supplemental body, the minutemen were okay. They pulled weight when playing hit-and-run. But that's all they could do. Surprise and the addition of bodies to the ends of a line of Continental Army soldiers was all they had going for them.
It's fairly fitting to close on the quote, seemingly isolated by history into a stand-alone one-liner via A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government by Garry Wills, by General Charles Lee, who had started out wanting to lead militia forces into battle:
"As to the minutemen, no account ought to be made of them."
Sunday, December 12, 2010
I Live In A Giant Snowbank
So we've got blizzard conditions in eight states. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation has told my entire state to stay off the roads. The roof of the Metrodome has collapsed due to the weight of the snow piled on top of it. The gist is, if the snow doesn't get you, the wind will.
Basically, I'm glad I have a roof over my head. Because there are people who don't. Imagine having to live out in those kind of conditions.
While you ponder that, I'm just going to leave out a couple of links to Habitat for Humanity, Homeless International, and the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and you just do with them what you will.
Basically, I'm glad I have a roof over my head. Because there are people who don't. Imagine having to live out in those kind of conditions.
While you ponder that, I'm just going to leave out a couple of links to Habitat for Humanity, Homeless International, and the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and you just do with them what you will.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
More Wikileaks! More! MORE!
...okay, not so much Wikileaks. Everyone go update your bookmarks; OpenLeaks launches come Monday due to an internal conflict in Wikileaks.
Basically, one Wikileaks staffer figured Julian Assange as getting too big a head. He told Assange as much. Assange responded by suspending him. The staffer took some other staffers, and they all went off to set up a competing leak site.
I knew that we were going to get a bunch of leak sites, but this isn't exactly how I envisioned it starting.
Basically, one Wikileaks staffer figured Julian Assange as getting too big a head. He told Assange as much. Assange responded by suspending him. The staffer took some other staffers, and they all went off to set up a competing leak site.
I knew that we were going to get a bunch of leak sites, but this isn't exactly how I envisioned it starting.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Rapid-Fire Book Club, Brrrrrrr Edition
Another edition, another trip to Milwaukee's Downtown Books, and this is a bit late in coming; I went several days ago. Good time to get it in; there's a big dump of snow on the ground and a long time before the grass comes back.
Blake, Mike- Baseball's Bad Hops and Lucky Bounces
Crowdy, Terry- Military Misdemeanors: Corruption, Incompetence, Lust, and Downright Stupidity
Kohut, John J.; Sweet, Roland- News From The Fringe: True Stories of Weird People and Weirder Times
Nash, Bruce; Zullo, Allan- The Misfortune 500
Blake, Mike- Baseball's Bad Hops and Lucky Bounces
Crowdy, Terry- Military Misdemeanors: Corruption, Incompetence, Lust, and Downright Stupidity
Kohut, John J.; Sweet, Roland- News From The Fringe: True Stories of Weird People and Weirder Times
Nash, Bruce; Zullo, Allan- The Misfortune 500
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Random Wikileak Generator
Yes. There is one now. For those who need one stable address to get right to the diplomatic cables, don't want to deal with mirror sites and all, The Atlantic has got you covered.
I am linking to a random diplomatic cable. I don't know what this address goes to except to say that it is a cable. There is a red button on the page. Hit the button, and you will get another random cable.
See if you get anything else done all day.
I am linking to a random diplomatic cable. I don't know what this address goes to except to say that it is a cable. There is a red button on the page. Hit the button, and you will get another random cable.
See if you get anything else done all day.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
We're Gonna Go Make Our Own Peace Prize, With Blackjack, And Hookers
China is not going to be attending the Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo. They are still a bit on the angry side over dissident Liu Xiaobo winning the Peace Prize.
The extent of their consternation is now seen in that they have announced- and awarded- the first installment of their own newly created Confucius Peace Prize.
This award cannot possibly be taken seriously.
The thing about an award for peace is that peace must be inherent in the spirit in which it is given, or at least, not clearly absent. The Confucius Peace Prize cannot be further from that. It is obvious why the prize was created- to stick it to both Norway and China's own dissidents. The Nobel Prize did not exactly have the most humble of origins either- Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, read his own obituary, saw himself characterized as a "merchant of death", and created the Prizes in his will as an attempt to redeem the family name- but it wasn't an active attempt to undermine anybody. China is doing just that, which really isn't very peaceful of them.
The other thing is, if you're going to do something like this, with this kind of motivation, you damn well better hit a home run on your first pick. You had better be fixing an egregious mistake with an obvious fix.
China's pick for their Confucius Peace Prize: Lien Chan, vice president of Taiwan, for, as the linked Time article puts it, "promoting peace between Taiwan and mainland China." Or, put another way, taking the position that Taiwan is part of China and working to prevent Taiwanese independence.
Lien's people, for their part, deny that the prize even exists. Not the kind of reaction you'd be hoping for if you're China.
China's other problem: The Nobel Prize is the Nobel Prize, and the Confucius Prize is not. There is no shortage of peace prizes out there, but the Nobel Prize is the only one that gets any airtime. It's the one with the history and the credibility, as some of the others don't have a great track record selecting recipients either. Let's take some of the better active ones and their most recent winners:
NIWANO PEACE PRIZE: Ela Bhatt of India. Bhatt is the founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association of India, an organization created in 1972 in response to the fact that Indian labor laws protected only those workers who had an employer. She is also a member of The Elders, a group of people selected to brainstorm solutions to a number of problems. Bhatt sits alongside names such as Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, and honorary members Nelson Mandela and Aung Sun Suu Kyi.
SYDNEY PEACE PRIZE: Vandana Shiva, also of India. Founded, in 1991, Navdanya, an organization revolving around farming, farmers' rights, and biodiversity. At last count, Navdanya has set up 54 seed banks across India and trained over half a million farmers.
RAMON MAGSAYSAY AWARD (for Peace and International Understanding): Yu Xiaogang of China. A previous winner of the 2006 Goldman Environmental Prize (another award you probably haven't heard of), Xiaogang has won both for essentially the same thing: his work in watershed management in China and analyzing the social impact of building dams. His work has caused the Chinese government to go from 'we are building a dam and you can't stop us' to 'we really want a dam, but let's consider what it'll do to the area first'. For China, that's huge.
SEOUL PEACE PRIZE: Jose Antonio Abreu of Venezuela. Abreu founded El Sistema, a music education program for impoverished Venezuelan children, an aim he's been at since 1975. Abreu began it as something of a juvenile rehab program, on the theory that as long as they're carrying instruments, they're not carrying guns. El Sistema has since processed over 300,000 students. (A note on the Seoul Prize: Abreu is the 10th recipient. Three of the previous nine, after winning Seouls, have gone on to win Nobels: Kofi Annan, Doctors Without Borders and Muhummad Yunus.)
INDIRA GANDHI PRIZE: Shiekh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh. Aside from her platform of gender equality in schools and working Bangladesh towards middle-income status by 2021, Hasina has been instrumental in bringing democracy to the country. Almost all of her family was killed in a coup in 1975. She fled to India until 1981, and spent the next three decades fighting military rule, rigged elections, politically motivated arrests, and assassination attempts before her election in 2008.
The extent of their consternation is now seen in that they have announced- and awarded- the first installment of their own newly created Confucius Peace Prize.
This award cannot possibly be taken seriously.
The thing about an award for peace is that peace must be inherent in the spirit in which it is given, or at least, not clearly absent. The Confucius Peace Prize cannot be further from that. It is obvious why the prize was created- to stick it to both Norway and China's own dissidents. The Nobel Prize did not exactly have the most humble of origins either- Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, read his own obituary, saw himself characterized as a "merchant of death", and created the Prizes in his will as an attempt to redeem the family name- but it wasn't an active attempt to undermine anybody. China is doing just that, which really isn't very peaceful of them.
The other thing is, if you're going to do something like this, with this kind of motivation, you damn well better hit a home run on your first pick. You had better be fixing an egregious mistake with an obvious fix.
China's pick for their Confucius Peace Prize: Lien Chan, vice president of Taiwan, for, as the linked Time article puts it, "promoting peace between Taiwan and mainland China." Or, put another way, taking the position that Taiwan is part of China and working to prevent Taiwanese independence.
Lien's people, for their part, deny that the prize even exists. Not the kind of reaction you'd be hoping for if you're China.
China's other problem: The Nobel Prize is the Nobel Prize, and the Confucius Prize is not. There is no shortage of peace prizes out there, but the Nobel Prize is the only one that gets any airtime. It's the one with the history and the credibility, as some of the others don't have a great track record selecting recipients either. Let's take some of the better active ones and their most recent winners:
NIWANO PEACE PRIZE: Ela Bhatt of India. Bhatt is the founder of the Self-Employed Women's Association of India, an organization created in 1972 in response to the fact that Indian labor laws protected only those workers who had an employer. She is also a member of The Elders, a group of people selected to brainstorm solutions to a number of problems. Bhatt sits alongside names such as Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, and honorary members Nelson Mandela and Aung Sun Suu Kyi.
SYDNEY PEACE PRIZE: Vandana Shiva, also of India. Founded, in 1991, Navdanya, an organization revolving around farming, farmers' rights, and biodiversity. At last count, Navdanya has set up 54 seed banks across India and trained over half a million farmers.
RAMON MAGSAYSAY AWARD (for Peace and International Understanding): Yu Xiaogang of China. A previous winner of the 2006 Goldman Environmental Prize (another award you probably haven't heard of), Xiaogang has won both for essentially the same thing: his work in watershed management in China and analyzing the social impact of building dams. His work has caused the Chinese government to go from 'we are building a dam and you can't stop us' to 'we really want a dam, but let's consider what it'll do to the area first'. For China, that's huge.
SEOUL PEACE PRIZE: Jose Antonio Abreu of Venezuela. Abreu founded El Sistema, a music education program for impoverished Venezuelan children, an aim he's been at since 1975. Abreu began it as something of a juvenile rehab program, on the theory that as long as they're carrying instruments, they're not carrying guns. El Sistema has since processed over 300,000 students. (A note on the Seoul Prize: Abreu is the 10th recipient. Three of the previous nine, after winning Seouls, have gone on to win Nobels: Kofi Annan, Doctors Without Borders and Muhummad Yunus.)
INDIRA GANDHI PRIZE: Shiekh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh. Aside from her platform of gender equality in schools and working Bangladesh towards middle-income status by 2021, Hasina has been instrumental in bringing democracy to the country. Almost all of her family was killed in a coup in 1975. She fled to India until 1981, and spent the next three decades fighting military rule, rigged elections, politically motivated arrests, and assassination attempts before her election in 2008.
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