Tea at Trianon: Armenia's Agony

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Armenia's Agony

From Church Militant:

April 24 marks the anniversary of the Armenian genocide where more than 1.5 million Christians were annihilated by the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Modern-day Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, continues to deny that genocide occurred even though Muslims systematically killed unarmed Armenian Christian men, women and children — most of whom were inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire — in a two-year period from 1915–1917. In addition to mass murder, the well-documented atrocities included:

Rape of women and children

Confiscation and theft of the property and possessions of the deportee population

Starvation, never being given food or water

Impaling infants, children and pregnant women, including crucifixion

Locking deportees in churches or other structures and burning them alive

Death marches into the desert

(Read more.)

From PJ Media:

Today, April 24, marks the “Great Crime,” that is, the genocide of Christians—mostly Armenians but also Assyrians—that took place under the Islamic Ottoman Empire throughout World War I. Then, the Turks liquidated approximately 1.5 million Armenians and 300,000 Assyrians. Most objective American historians who have studied the question unequivocally agree that it was a deliberate, calculated genocide:

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [more than double the amount of time the invading Islamic Turks had occupied Anatolia, now known as “Turkey”] lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000…. Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.
Similarly, in 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 359 heard testimony that included evidence of “[m]utilation, violation, torture, and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (consistent with Islam’s rules of war). Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross,” she wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.

Whereas the genocide is largely acknowledged in the West, one of its primary if not fundamental causes is habitually overlooked: religion. The genocide is usually articulated through a singularly secular paradigm, one that factors only things that are intelligible from a secular, Western point of view—such as identity and gender politics, nationalism, and territorial disputes. Such an approach does little more than project modern Western perspectives onto vastly different civilizations and eras. (Read more.)

From Unherd:

This is not the only recent discovery. A French researcher working at the Gladstone archive in Wales recently unearthed some documentation detailing his fascination with the so-called Eastern Question, and specifically with the condition of the Armenian minorities living under Ottoman rule. Deep in the archive she found an annotated translation of a pamphlet titled “Dying Armenia and Christian Europe” written by a French missionary detailing the murder of Christian Armenians in the 1890’s. One passage Gladstone apparently marked with a red pen:

“The Turkish government knew beforehand of the purposed attempt and had taken the necessary measures, not to prevent the revolutionary action of a few foreign Armenians, but to organise, owing to this welcome opportunity, a universal massacre of Christians belonging to the peaceful inhabitants of Constantinople.”
And this was before the peak of the genocide in 1915. The missionary continues: “The great and terrible tragedy of Armenia is, however for the time (I trust for the time only) out of sight, if not out of mind.” (Read more.)