RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2021/11/05/face-to-face-with-the-auschwitz-memorial-twitter-project/

The Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum, both in its extent and its quality. At no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty.

~Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

A girl of perhaps 11 years, with lush, braided hair and a beautiful face, sits alone in a classroom looking up from her book at the photographer. She is self-possessed and gives the most natural smile.

Another photo shows a girl of five or six intently studying something she holds in her hands, possibly a flower or a piece of white cloth. She has a white bow in her hair.

In a third photo, a handsome, well-dressed woman in her late teens is sitting in an armchair by an open window smiling, apparently engaged in conversation.

These are three of a succession of arresting photographs accompanying brief online biographies of people transported to Auschwitz and, with rare exceptions, killed there between 1941 and 1945.

The photographs are posted on the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter site, which is run by the Auschwitz‑Birkenau Memorial and State Museum in Poland.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/to-evade-pre-prohibition-drinking-laws-new-yor

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

Near the end of the 19th century, New Yorkers out for a drink partook in one of the more unusual rituals in the annals of hospitality. When they ordered an ale or whisky, the waiter or bartender would bring it out with a sandwich. Generally speaking, the sandwich was not edible. It was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese,” wrote the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Other times it was made of rubber. Bar staff would commonly take the sandwich back seconds after it had arrived, pair it with the next beverage order, and whisk it over to another patron’s table. Some sandwiches were kept in circulation for a week or more.

Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoiding breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.

The new law did not come out of nowhere. Republican reformers, many of them based far upstate in Albany, had been trying for years to curb public drunkenness. They were also frustrated about New York City’s lax enforcement of so-called Sabbath laws, which included a ban on Sunday boozing. New York Republicans spoke for a constituency largely comprised of rural and small-town churchgoers. But the party had also gained a foothold in Democratic New York City, where a 37-year-old firebrand named Theodore Roosevelt had been pushing a law-and-order agenda as president of the city’s newly organized police commission. Roosevelt, a supporter of the Raines Law, predicted that it would “solve whatever remained of the problem of Sunday closing.”

In his crackdown on vice in New York, Theodore Roosevelt supported the Raines Law.

New York City at the time was home to some 8,000 saloons. The seediest among them were “dimly lit, foul-smelling, rickety-chaired, stale-beer dives” that catered to “vagrants, shipless sailors, incompetent thieves, [and] aging streetwalkers,” Richard Zacks writes in Island of Vice, his book-length account of Roosevelt’s reform campaign.

The 1896 Raines Law was designed to put dreary watering holes like these out of business. It raised the cost of an annual liquor license to $800, three times what it had cost before and a tenfold increase for beer-only taverns.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/armenian-genocide-past-present-and-future-raymond-ibrahim/

On April 24, 2021, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. president formally to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.  What was this genocide about, and what is its significance for today?

The Genocide Education Project offers a summary of that tragic event which transpired during World War I, specifically between 1915 and 1917:

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.

The evidence is indeed overwhelming.  As far back as 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 359 heard eyewitness testimony concerning the “[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 how she was 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.)

In short, that the Turks orchestrated and carried out a deliberate genocide of Armenians during World War I is an uncontested fact—for those who still care about facts—irrespective of who does or does not acknowledge it (Turkey itself epitomizing the latter category).

Even so, the extent of Turkish atrocities committed against Armenians far exceeds the Armenian Genocide.  In fact, it is more appropriate to see the latter, not as a singular event, but as an especially severe segment of an ancient and ongoing continuum.

The Genocide before the Genocide

The Turks’ initial genocide of Armenians began slightly over a thousand years ago, when the Muslim tribesmen first began to pour into and transform a then much-larger Armenia into what it is today: the eastern portion of modern-day Turkey.

Thus, in 1019, “the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword,” writes Matthew of Edessa (d.1144), a chief chronicler for this period.  Three decades later, the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the unwalled city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and “put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.”

After thoroughly plundering the city, he ordered it, including 800 churches, to be set ablaze and turned into a desert. Arzden was “filled with bodies” and none “could count the number of those who perished in the flames.”  Eight hundred oxen and forty camels were required to cart out the vast plunder, mostly taken from Arzden’s churches. “How to relate here, with a voice stifled by tears,” continues Matthew, the many butchered Armenians who were “left without graves” and “became the prey of carrion beasts,” and “the exodus of women … led with their children into slavery and condemned to an eternal servitude! That was the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” laments the chronicler, “so, lend an ear to this melancholy recital.”

No one tells it better than Ambassador (Retired) Yoram Ettinger…..rsk

The evening of September 6, 2021 will launch the 5782th Jewish New Year.

1.  Annual reminder.  The Hebrew word Rosh (ראש) means first/head/beginning and Hashanah (השנה) means the year. The root of the Hebrew word Shanah is both “repeat” and “change.” Rosh Hashanah constitutes an annual reminder of the need to enhance one’s behavior through a systematic study of moral values, learning from experience and avoiding past errors.  Rosh Hashanah ushers-in the Ten Days of Repentance, which are concluded on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

The New Jewish (lunar) Year is the only Jewish holiday, which is celebrated upon the (monthly) appearance of a new moon, proceeding from relative-darkness to a fully-illuminated moon in the middle of the month.

2.  Humility.  Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on the 6th day of Creation, when the first human-being, Adam, was created.  Adam is the Hebrew word for a human-being (אדמ), which is the root of the Hebrew word for “soil” (אדמה). Moreover, the Hebrew letter  הis an abbreviation of God, the Creator.  Thus, the date of the Jewish New Year highlights the centrality of the soil – a metaphor for humility – in human life.

3.  Genesis.  The Hebrew letters of Rosh (ראש) constitute the root of the Hebrew word for Genesis (בראשית), which is the first word in the Book of Genesis. Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on the first day of the Jewish month of Tishrei – “the month of the Strong Ones” (Book of Kings A, 8:2) – when the three Jewish Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and the Prophet Samuel were born. Tishrei means beginning/Genesis in ancient Acadian. The Hebrew letters of Tishrei (תשרי) are included in the spelling of Genesis (בראשית). Furthermore, the Hebrew spelling of Genesis (בראשית) includes the first two letters in the Hebrew alphabet (אב), a middle letter (י) and the last three letters (רשת) – representing the totality of the Creation.

4.  The Shofar (a ritual ram’s horn).  Rosh Hashanah is announced and celebrated in a humble and determined manner, by the blowing of the (bent-humble) Shofar. The sound of the Shofar used to alert people to physical challenges (e.g., military assaults). On Rosh Hashanah, it alarms people to spiritual challenges, while paving the potential road to salvation. It serves as a wakeup call to the necessity of cleansing one’s behavior.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/07/thoughts-on-an-awful-anniversary/

I mean “awful” in the old sense of “full of awe.”

It is not often that I agree with the politics espoused by The Guardian, England’s most left-wing serious newspaper (or perhaps I mean its most serious left-wing paper). But several years ago on the date of this writing—August 6—The Guardian published a sober and clear-sighted article about the terrifying event whose anniversary August 6 commemorates: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The article by the journalist Oliver Kamm won my wholehearted endorsement and I wrote about it at the time.

The idea that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—and, since the Japanese failed to surrender, of Nagasaki on August 9—was a “war crime” has slowly acquired currency not only among the anti-American intelligentsia but also among other sentimentalists of limited worldly experience. In fact, as Kamm points out, the two bombings, terrible though they were, “should be remembered for the suffering which was brought to an end.”  For here is the . . . I was going to say “inarguable,” but that is clearly not right, since there have been plenty of arguments against it. No, a better word is “irrefutable.” The irrefutable fact about the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945 is that they ended World War II. They saved hundreds of thousands of American lives—including, possibly, that of my father, who was a Marine stationed somewhere out East—and, nota bene, millions, yes millions, of Japanese lives. (They also brought to an end the industrial-strength sadistic behavior of the Japanese in China, towards all its prisoners of war, and its future plans for wholesale destruction.)

Were those bombings terrible? You betcha. I, like many people reading this, have read John Hersey’s manipulative book on the subject and have seen plenty of pictures of the devastation those two explosions caused.  But again, if they caused suffering, they saved the much greater suffering that would have ensued had the United States invaded Japan. This was understood at the time. But in recent years a revisionist view has grown up, especially on the Left, which faults President Truman for his decision to drop the bombs. “This alternative history,” Kamm argues, “is devoid of merit.”

New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.

Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan’s military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

Kamm’s article elicited the usual howls of rage and vituperation. But he was right:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire—and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.