Christmas Every Day

Once much of central and western Asia was populated by Christians of the Church of the East, descendants of the Nestorians who fled persecution by seeking refuge beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. The Church was largely wiped out by the Mongols of Timur but pockets survived in mountainous places.

One such remnant was the Assyrian Church living in what is now Turkey, Syria and Iraq. During the First World War the same wave of mass murders that the Turks perpetrated on their Armenian Christian minority engulfed many Assyrians.

In August, 1933 a new wave of massacres was aimed at the Assyrians, as Kurds and Arab nationalists carried out a number of massacres. A British observer described the scene at the village of Simele which was attacked on August 7:

A cold blooded and methodical massacre of all the men in the village then followed, a massacre which for the black treachery in which it was conceived and the callousness with which it was carried out, was as foul a crime as any in the blood stained annals of the Middle East. The Assyrians had no fight left in them, partly because of the state of mind to which the events of the past week had reduced them, largely because they were disarmed. Had they been armed it seems certain that Ismail Abawi Tohalla and his bravos would have hesitated to take them on in fair fight. Having disarmed them, they proceeded with the massacre according to plan. This took some time. Not that there was any hurry, for the troops had the whole day ahead of them. Their opponents were helpless and there was no chance of any interference from any quarter whatsoever. Machine gunners set up their guns outside the windows of the houses in which the Assyrians had taken refuge, and having trained them on the terror stricken wretches in the crowded rooms, fired among them until not a man was left standing in the shambles. In some other instance the blood lust of the troops took a slightly more active form, and men were dragged out and shot or bludgeoned to death and their bodies thrown on a pile of dead.

These actions led to the coining of the word “genocide”. The symbol above in Syriac commemorates the date August 7

The French Revolution had begun. The king Louis XVI had summoned the nation’s political classes to meet at Versailles in the form of the antique Estates-General (which had not met since 1610). There, the Third Estate, representing all Frenchmen not in either the clergy or the nobility, had declared itself the true national assembly and compelled the other two estates to join them. The possibility of true reform had Paris in a frenzy of excitement but the king’s dismissal of the Finance Minister Jacques Necker was seen as a conservative counter-coup. Rumours of the use of mercenary troops to crush the new Assembly were rife. Camille Desmoulins, a young radical lawyer, pistol in hand, declared to a crowd: “Citizens, there is no time to lose; the dismissal of Necker is the knell of a Saint Bartholomew for patriots! This very night all the Swiss and German battalions will leave the  Champs de Mars to massacre us all; one resource is left; to take arms!” 

(Desmoulins, the false-news firebrand, rose high in the councils of the insurgents but eventually fell foul of the inevitable social law which states “Revolutions eat their own children.” He was sent to the guillotine by those even more ruthless than he.)

On July 13, various Parisian mobs broke into royal armouries and seized weapons; local militias now had muskets and cannons at their disposal. The next day the target was the Bastille, the medieval prison which dominated central Paris. The fortress had a grim reputation; it often housed those enemies of the crown who had been whisked away behind its walls never to be seen again. On July 14, however, its inmates only numbered seven: 4 forgers, two lunatics and the Comte de Lorges, an aristocrat accused of incest, but who may have been sent there by relatives as part of a property dispute. The expenses of the latter three were all paid by their families. The real target of the rebels was probably the gunpowder housed in the fortress.

The siege of the Bastille lasted all afternoon. The defending troops resisted the attackers, killing 98 of them for the loss of one of their own, but having no supplies to endure a long conflict, the governor, the Marquis de Launay, surrendered at 5:30 pm. He and five of his men were lynched by the mob and their heads paraded about on pikes by capering rebels. The seven released inmates were also paraded about for a time and made much of, until it was realized just what kind of men they were. The forgers were soon returned to prison, the madmen were found asylums, and the aristocrat alone was allowed to go free.

Quite why the French should treat this bizarre incident as the occasion for annual national rejoicing remains a mystery.

Of all the occupations that one might expect to find among the warlike, human-sacrificing cannibals known as the Aztecs, the least expected would be moral philosopher. And yet …

Read this fascinating article: https://aeon.co/essays/aztec-moral-philosophy-didnt-expect-anyone-to-be-a-saint

Best wishes to our American friends on the 242nd anniversary of their disastrous decision to leave the British Empire.

I would like to draw everyone’s attention to the royal reply to the Declaration of Independence and ask our southerly neighbours to soberly assess the consequences of the path not taken. 

The British expressed regret at the misguided actions of the American Congress, but announced that the king was still willing to negotiate and to revise those points over which the colonists felt themselves aggrieved. They asked the rebels to “reflect seriously upon their present Condition and Expectations, and to judge for themselves whether it be more consistent with their Honour and Happiness to offer up their Lives as a Sacrifice to the unjust and precarious Cause in which they are engaged, or to return to their Allegiance, accept the Blessings of Peace, and be secured in a free enjoyment of their Liberty and Properties.”

The road not taken led straight to the continuation of slavery for another almost 90 years, genocidal war with native tribes, and a civil war whose effects are still being felt.

It is not too late to come back home, American cousins. The Empire, like the father of the Prodigal Son, awaits your penitent knock on the door.

Canada’s founding fathers (o, the patriarchy!) at the 1864 Charlottetown Conference. Remember: diversity is our strength.

Canada’s first national flag:

I learned years ago that in World War II the Japanese Empire had attempted to bomb the American west coast with balloons intended to cause forest fires. I even knew that these devices had actually killed some Americans.

What I did not know was that these bombs also hit Canada and landed as far inland as Manitoba.

Read all about it here, 74 years after the incendiary campaign:

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/05/the-japanese-balloon-bombs-of-world-war.html

1712

The Mohocks

Eighteenth-century London, poorly-policed and crime-ridden was the playground for various gangs of aristocratic vandals, one of the most notorious calling themselves “The Mohocks”. This account describes their comeuppance.

On the 6^th of June 1712, Sir Mark Cole and three other gentlemen were tried at the Old Bailey courthouse in London for riot, assault, and beating the watch. A paper of the day asserts that these were ‘Mohocks, that they had attacked the watch in Devereux Street, slit two persons’ noses, cut a woman in the arm with a penknife so as to disable her for life, rolled a woman in a tub down Snow Hill, misused other women in a barbarous manner by setting them on their heads, and overset several coaches and chairs with short clubs, loaded with lead at both ends, expressly made for the purpose. In their defence, the prisoners denied that they were Mohocks, alleging that they were ‘Scourers,’ and had gone out, with a magistrate’s sanction, to scour the streets, arrest Mohocks and other offenders, and deliver them up to justice.

On the night in question they had attacked a notorious gambling-house, and taken thirteen men out of it. While engaged in this meritorious manner, they learned that the Mohocks were in Devereux Street, and on proceeding thither found three men desperately wounded, lying on the ground; they were then attacked by the watch, and felt bound to defend themselves. As an instance of the gross misconduct of the watch, it was further alleged that they, the watch, had on the same, night actually presumed to arrest a peer of the realm, Lord Hitchinbroke, and had latterly adopted the practice of going their rounds by night accompanied by savage dogs. The jury, however, in spite of this defence, returned a verdict of ‘ guilty;’ and the judge fined the culprits in the sum of three shillings and four-pence each.

1944

D-Day

By 1944 German forces were being pushed back on the Eastern Front and in Italy, but everyone knew that the Allies were preparing an invasion of continental Europe from bases in England. The Germans had constructed the massive Western Wall stretching from Norway to Spain, trusting to its minefields, beach obstacles, gun emplacements, and concrete bunkers to pin any invaders on the beach and deter any progress inland. The Allies relied on deception and air superiority to keep the enemy from knowing where their blow would be struck and from moving in reinforcements.

On the morning of June 6, over 20,000 Canadian, British, and American paratroopers were dropped over the Normandy peninsula to take control of bridges and roads behind the landing zones. A thousand warships then bombarded defenders along a fifty-mile stretch of the coast, and units of the French Resistance were activated on missions of sabotage. Almost 7,000 vessels from 8 Allied navies, from battleships to landing craft converged on 5 beaches, codenamed Utah and Omaha (the objectives of American forces) and Sword, Juno, and Gold (targets of Canadian and British armies).

Casualties were heavy, particularly in the American sector, and none of the initial objectives were reached on the first day but a successful toehold in France had been achieved and would provide the beachhead for the armies that would soon sweep the Germans out of France.