Posted in ARTISTS AND ARTS - Music, Arts, Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Uncategorized, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, Special Interest
Tagged amelin plays Gershwin - Concerto in F, art, best classical music:, entertainment, EUZICASA, Great Compositions/Performances, great compositions/performanes, Make Music Part of Your Life Series, Music, New York City, Orchestra, Piano, YouTube
When St. Mamertinus was Abbot of the monastery which St. Germanus had founded at Auxerre, there came to him a young man called Marcian (also known as Marian), a fugitive from Bourges then occupied by … continue reading
Posted in Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, SPIRITUALITY, Uncategorized
Tagged 2015: St. Marian, April 20th, Auxerre, Hugh of Anzy le Duc Bl, John Finch St, Marian St. Agnes, Saint of the Day, Saint of the Day for Monday, St. Mamertinus
This colorful springtime festival in Zurich, Switzerland, ushers in spring by exploding the Böögg (“snowman”), the symbol of winter. Sechseläuten means the “six-o’clock ringing.” On Monday, members of the guilds parade through the city in medieval costumes, accompanied by bands. Everyone converges at six that evening. The bells ring, groups on horseback gallop around the Böögg (which is stuffed with cotton wadding and firecrackers) to the music of a hunting march, and then the Böögg explodes and burns. Torchlight parades go on into the night, and feasts are held at guild halls. More… Discuss
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.Herman Melville (1819-1891) Discuss
Famous for his comic portrayals of a wistful innocent with horn-rimmed glasses who blunders in and out of hair-raising situations, American movie actor Harold Lloyd was the most popular film comedian of the 1920s. He appeared in over 500 films, including many shorts, spanning both the silent and sound eras. Noted for his use of physical danger as a source of comedy, he performed his own stunts, famously hanging from the hands of a clock far above the street in an iconic scene from what film? More… Discuss
Pasteurization is the process of heating beverages or food, such as milk, beer, or cheese, to a specific temperature for a specific period of time in order to kill microorganisms that could cause disease, spoilage, or undesired fermentation. The process was named after its creator, French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who conducted the first pasteurization test with fellow French scientist Claude Bernard in 1862. Why is pasteurization not designed to kill all microorganisms in food? More… Discuss
Pasteurization is the process of heating beverages or food, such as milk, beer, or cheese, to a specific temperature for a specific period of time in order to kill microorganisms that could cause disease, spoilage, or undesired fermentation. The process was named after its creator, French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who conducted the first pasteurization test with fellow French scientist Claude Bernard in 1862. Why is pasteurization not designed to kill all microorganisms in food? More… Discuss
Posted in Educational, FOOD AND HEALTH, Health and Environment, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MY TAKE ON THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, Uncategorized
Tagged Claude Bernard, Claude Bernard in 1862, First Pasteurization Test Conducted (1862), France, Louis Pasteur, Paris, pasteurization, science
A marching band is a sporting group of instrumental musicians that generally performs outdoors. Instrumentation typically includes brass, woodwinds, and percussion instruments, and the music usually incorporates a strong rhythmic component suitable for marching. Marching bands grew out of military bands, which used to control troop movements on the field. What military traditions survive in modern marching bands? More… Discuss
| Definition: | (adjective) Lacking authenticity or validity in essence or origin; not genuine. |
| Synonyms: | specious, unauthentic |
| Usage: | The professor explained to the student that her essay had received a “C” due to numerous examples of spurious reasoning. Discuss. |
Science of Breath, by Yogi Ramacharaka, pseud. William Atkinson, [1904], at sacred-texts.com
Life is absolutely dependent upon the act of breathing. “Breath is Life.”
Differ as they may upon details of theory and terminology, the Oriental and the Occidental agree upon these fundamental principles.
To breathe is to live, and without breath there is no life. Not only are the higher animals dependent upon breath for life and health, but even the lower forms of animal life must breathe to live, and plant life is likewise dependent upon the air for continued existence. The infant draws in a long, deep breath, retains it for a moment to extract from it its life-giving properties, and then exhales it in a long wail, and lo! its life upon earth has begun. The old man gives a faint gasp, ceases to breathe, and life is over. From the first faint breath of the infant to the last gasp of the dying man, it is one long story of continued breathing. Life is but a series of breaths.
Breathing may be considered the most important of all of the functions of the body, for, indeed, all the other functions depend upon it. Man may exist some time without eating; a shorter time without drinking; but without breathing his existence may be measured by a few minutes.
And not only is Man dependent upon Breath for life, but he is largely dependent upon correct habits of breathing for continued vitality and freedom from disease. An intelligent control of our breathing power will lengthen our days upon earth by giving us increased vitality and powers of resistance, and, on the
other hand, unintelligent and careless breathing will tend to shorten our days, by decreasing our vitality and laying us open to disease.
Man in his normal state had no need of instruction in breathing. Like the lower animal and the child, he breathed naturally and properly, as nature intended him to do, but civilization has changed him in this and other respects. He has contracted improper methods and attitudes of walking, standing and sitting, which have robbed him of his birthright of natural and correct breathing. He has paid a high price for civilization. The savage, to-day, breathes naturally, unless he has been contaminated by the habits of civilized man.
The percentage of civilized men who breathe correctly is quite small, and the result is shown in contracted chests and stooping shoulders, and the terrible increase in diseases of the respiratory organs, including that dread monster, Consumption, “the white scourge.” Eminent authorities have stated that one generation of correct breathers would regenerate the race, and disease would be so rare as to be looked upon as a curiosity. Whether looked at from the standpoint of the Oriental or Occidental, the connection between correct breathing and health is readily seen and explained.
The Occidental teachings show that the physical health depends very materially upon correct breathing. The Oriental teachers not only admit that their Occidental brothers are right, but say that in addition to the physical benefit derived from correct habits of breathing, Man’s mental power, happiness, self-control, clear-sightedness, morals, and even his spiritual growth may be increased by an understanding of the
“Science of Breath.” Whole schools of Oriental Philosophy have been founded upon this science, and this knowledge when grasped by the Western races, and by them put to the practical use which is their strong point, will work wonders among them. The theory of the East, wedded to the practice of the West, will produce worthy offspring.
This work will take up the Yogi “Science of Breath,” which includes not only all that is known to the Western physiologist and hygienist, but the occult side of the subject as well. It not only points out the way to physical health along the lines of what Western scientists have termed “deep breathing,” etc., but also goes into the less known phases of the subject, and shows how the Hindu Yogi controls his body, increasing his mental capacity, and develops the spiritual side of his nature by the “Science of Breath.”
The Yogi practices exercises by which he attains control of his body, and is enabled to send to any organ or part an increased flow of vital force or “prana,” thereby strengthening and invigorating the part or organ. He knows all that his Western scientific brother knows about the physiological effect of correct breathing, but he also knows that the air contains more than oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen, and that something more is accomplished than the mere oxygenating of the blood. He knows something about “prana,” of which his Western brother is ignorant, and he is fully aware of the nature and manner of handling that great principle of energy, and is fully informed as to its effect upon the human body and mind. He knows that by rhythmical breathing one may bring himself into harmonious vibration with
nature, and aid in the unfoldment of his latent powers. He knows that by controlled breathing he may not only cure disease in himself and others, but also practically do away with fear and worry and the baser emotions.
To teach these things is the object of this work. We will give in a few chapters concise explanation and instructions, which might be extended into volumes. We hope to awaken the minds of the Western world to the value of the Yogi “Science of Breath.”
Posted in BOOKS, Educational, Fitness, running, biking, outdoors, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, SPIRITUALITY, Uncategorized
Tagged at sacred-texts.com, by Yogi Ramacharaka, correct breathing, pseud. William Atkinson, Science of Breath, William Atkinson, Yogi Ramacharaka, [1904]
‘1
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
17
The Gitanjali or `song offerings’ by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Nobel prize for literature 1913, with an introduction by William B. Yeats (1865–1939), Nobel prize for literature 1923. First published in 1913.
This work is in public domain according to the Berne convention since January 1st 1992.
INTRODUCTIONIA few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine, I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.' It seemed to him natural that I should be moved, for he said,I read Rabindranath every day, to read one line of his is to forget all the troubles of the world.’ I said, An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second had he been shown translations from Petrarch or from Dante, would have found no books to answer his questions, but would have questioned some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant as I question you. For all I know, so abundant and simple is this poetry, the new renaissance has been born in your country and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.' He answered,We have other poets, but none that are his equal; we call this the epoch of Rabindranath. No poet seems to me as famous in Europe as he is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry, and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burma wherever Bengali is spoken. He was already famous at nineteen when he wrote his first novel; and plays when he was but little older, are still played in Calcutta. I so much admire the completeness of his life; when he was very young he wrote much of natural objects, he would sit all day in his garden; from his twenty-fifth year or so to his thirty-fifth perhaps, when he had a great sorrow, he wrote the most beautiful love poetry in our language’; and then he said with deep emotion, words can never express what I owed at seventeen to his love poetry. After that his art grew deeper, it became religious and philosophical; all the inspiration of mankind are in his hymns. He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but has spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.' I may have changed his well-chosen words in my memory but not his thought.A little while ago he was to read divine service in one of our churches—we of the Brahma Samaj use your word `church’ in English—it was the largest in Calcutta and not only was it crowded, but the streets were all but impassable because of the people.’
Other Indians came to see me and their reverence for this man sounded strange in our world, where we hide great and little things under the same veil of obvious comedy and half-serious depreciation. When we were making the cathedrals had we a like reverence for our great men? Every morning at three---I know, for I have seen it'---one said to me,he sits immovable in contemplation, and for two hours does not awake from his reverie upon the nature of God. His father, the Maha Rishi, would sometimes sit there all through the next day; once, upon a river, he fell into contemplation because of the beauty of the landscape, and the rowers waited for eight hours before they could continue their journey.’ He then told me of Mr. Tagore’s family and how for generations great men have come out of its cradles. Today,' he said,there are Gogonendranath and Abanindranath Tagore, who are artists; and Dwijendranath, Rabindranath’s brother, who is a great philosopher. The squirrels come from the boughs and climb on to his knees and the birds alight upon his hands.’ I notice in these men’s thought a sense of visible beauty and meaning as though they held that doctrine of Nietzsche that we must not believe in the moral or intellectual beauty which does not sooner or later impress itself upon physical things. I said, In the East you know how to keep a family illustrious. The other day the curator of a museum pointed out to me a little dark-skinned man who was arranging their Chinese prints and said, ``That is the hereditary connoisseur of the Mikado, he is the fourteenth of his family to hold the post.'' 'He answered,When Rabindranath was a boy he had all round him in his home literature and music.’ I thought of the abundance, of the simplicity of the poems, and said, In your country is there much propagandist writing, much criticism? We have to do so much, especially in my own country, that our minds gradually cease to be creative, and yet we cannot help it. If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others.'I understand,’ he replied, `we too have our propagandist writing. In the villages they recite long mythological poems adapted from the Sanskrit in the Middle Ages, and they often insert passages telling the people that they must do their duties.’
II
I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics—which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention—display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my live long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. If the civilization of Bengal remains unbroken, if that common mind which—as one divines—runs through all, is not, as with us, broken into a dozen minds that know nothing of each other, something even of what is most subtle in these verses will have come, in a few generations, to the beggar on the roads. When there was but one mind in England, Chaucer wrote his Troilus and Cressida, and thought he had written to be read, or to be read out—for our time was coming on apace—he was sung by minstrels for a while. Rabindranath Tagore, like Chaucer’s forerunners, writes music for his words, and one understands at every moment that he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in his passion, so full of surprise, because he is doing something which has never seemed strange, unnatural, or in need of defence. These verses will not lie in little well-printed books upon ladies’ tables, who turn the pages with indolent hands that they may sigh over a life without meaning, which is yet all they can know of life, or be carried by students at the university to be laid aside when the work of life begins, but, as the generations pass, travellers will hum them on the highway and men rowing upon the rivers. Lovers, while they await one another, shall find, in murmuring them, this love of God a magic gulf wherein their own more bitter passion may bathe and renew its youth. At every moment the heart of this poet flows outward to these without derogation or condescension, for it has known that they will understand; and it has filled itself with the circumstance of their lives. The traveller in the read-brown clothes that he wears that dust may not show upon him, the girl searching in her bed for the petals fallen from the wreath of her royal lover, the servant or the bride awaiting the master’s home-coming in the empty house, are images of the heart turning to God. Flowers and rivers, the blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the Indian July, or the moods of that heart in union or in separation; and a man sitting in a boat upon a river playing lute, like one of those figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is God Himself. A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image, as though we had walked in Rossetti’s willow wood, or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.
Since the Renaissance the writing of European saints—however familiar their metaphor and the general structure of their thought—has ceased to hold our attention. We know that we must at last forsake the world, and we are accustomed in moments of weariness or exaltation to consider a voluntary forsaking; but how can we, who have read so much poetry, seen so many paintings, listened to so much music, where the cry of the flesh and the cry of the soul seems one, forsake it harshly and rudely? What have we in common with St. Bernard covering his eyes that they may not dwell upon the beauty of the lakes of Switzerland, or with the violent rhetoric of the Book of Revelations? We would, if we might, find, as in this book, words full of courtesy. I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and take my departure. Here I give back the keys of my door---and I give up all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words from you. We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.' And it is our own mood, when it is furthest froma Kempis or John of the Cross, that cries, And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well.' Yet it is not only in our thoughts of the parting that this book fathoms all. We had not known that we loved God, hardly it may be that we believed in Him; yet looking backward upon our life we discover, in our exploration of the pathways of woods, in our delight in the lonely places of hills, in that mysterious claim that we have made, unavailingly on the woman that we have loved, the emotion that created this insidious sweetness.Entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment.’ This is no longer the sanctity of the cell and of the scourge; being but a lifting up, as it were, into a greater intensity of the mood of the painter, painting the dust and the sunlight, and we go for a like voice to St. Francis and to William Blake who have seemed so alien in our violent history.
III
We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just as we fight and make money and fill our heads with politics—all dull things in the doing—while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian civilization itself, has been content to discover the soul and surrender himself to its spontaneity. He often seems to contrast life with that of those who have loved more after our fashion, and have more seeming weight in the world, and always humbly as though he were only sure his way is best for him: Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face, and when they ask me, what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.' At another time, remembering how his life had once a different shape, he will say,Many an hour I have spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my heart on to him; and I know not why this sudden call to what useless inconsequence.’ An innocence, a simplicity that one does not find elsewhere in literature makes the birds and the leaves seem as near to him as they are near to children, and the changes of the seasons great events as before our thoughts had arisen between them and us. At times I wonder if he has it from the literature of Bengal or from religion, and at other times, remembering the birds alighting on his brother’s hands, I find pleasure in thinking it hereditary, a mystery that was growing through the centuries like the courtesy of a Tristan or a Pelanore. Indeed, when he is speaking of children, so much a part of himself this quality seems, one is not certain that he is not also speaking of the saints, `They build their houses with sand and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds. They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.’
W.B. YEATS September 1912
GITANJALI
1
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.
All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony—and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight across the sea.
I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.
I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.
Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art my lord.
Posted in Arts, BOOKS, Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Poetry, Poets, Writers, Special Interest, SPIRITUALITY, Uncategorized
Tagged a must read), Abanindranath Tagore, Indian civilization, Rabindranath, rabindranath tagore, Rabindranath Tagore - Gitanjali (a moving introduction by W.B. Yeats, the British Museum, William Blake
By Ann Scheinble
Pope Francis prays with journalists on the papal flight en route to South Korea, August 14, 2014. Credit: Alan Holdren/CNA
Vatican City, Apr 19, 2015 / 08:48 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis led a moment of prayerful silence on Sunday for the hundreds of migrants killed off the coast of Lampedusa, saying they were like us in their search for happiness.
“They are men and women like us, our brothers who seek a better life: hungry, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war,” the Pope said in off-the-cuff remarks. “They were looking for happiness.”
The Pope was speaking during his weekly Regina Caeli address to the crowds in Saint Peter’s Square, some twelve hours following the accident.
Hundreds of people are feared dead after the boat carrying as many as 700 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, according to the Italian coastguard.
The BBC reports that the ship went down at around midnight local time south of the Italian island of Lampedusa, a major entry point for migrants from northern Africa.
“I express my deepest sorrow in the face of such a tragedy, and assure my remembrance in prayer for the lost and their families,” Pope Francis said in his Apr. 19 address.
He invited those in the crowd to take a moment of prayerful silence for those killed in last night’s boat accident before leading the crowds in praying the Hail Mary.
The pontiff then made a “heartfelt appeal” to the international community to act “decisively and promptly”, in order to prevent similar tragedies from being repeated.
Thousands have made their way to Lampedusa from Africa over the years, with scores of migrants dying en route, often due to factors such as overcrowding on the boats.
Today’s tragedy comes less than two years after a boat carrying 500 migrants sank off coast of Lampedusa, killing at least 300.
Pope Francis had visited the island a few months earlier, in July 2013, praying for the migrants, both living and those who perished en route.
The BBC reports that some 900 migrants are believed to have died since the beginning of 2015 trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.
Before leading the crowds in reciting the Regina Caeli, Pope Francis reflected on the readings for the Third Sunday of Easter, centering his address on the theme of “witness.”
In the first reading, Pope Francis cited the words of St. Peter: “But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.” (Acts 3:14-15).
Turning to the Gospel, the Pope reflected on Jesus telling the disciples that they were “witnesses” of His death and resurrection.
“Every baptized person is called to give witness, with (his) words and life, that Jesus is risen, that Jesus is alive and present among us.”
The identity and mission of the witness, Pope Francis said, is summarized into three words: to see, to remember, and to recount.
“The content of the Christian witness is not a theory, not an ideology, or a complex system of precepts and prohibitions or a moralism,” the pontiff said.
Rather: “It is a message of salvation, a concrete event, even a Person: It is Christ risen, living, and only savior of everyone.”
The witness of a Christian is “all the more credible,” when it shines through a way of living that is “evangelical, courageous, gentle, peaceful, merciful.”
On the other hand, a Christian who seeks comfort, vanity, selfishness, while becoming “deaf and blind the question of ‘resurrection’”, Pope Francis asked, “how can he communicate the living Jesus,” the “liberating power of Jesus alive and his infinite tenderness?”
Pope Francis concluded his Regina Caeli address by asking Mary’s intercession to help Christians become “witnesses of the Lord’s Resurrection, carrying to the persons who we encounter the Easter gifts of Joy and Peace.”
Tags: Pope Francis, Regina Caeli, Migrants, Witness
Posted in Educational, Special Interest, SPIRITUALITY, Uncategorized, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, Special Interest
Tagged 2014. Credit: Alan Holdren/CNA, August 14, Christianity - Faith: Pope: Doomed migrants were looking for happiness :: Catholic News Agency (CNA), Migrants, Pope Francis, Pope Francis prays with journalists on the papal flight en route to South Korea, Regina Caeli, Witness
‘Paintings of Pains’ (palette de Frida Kahlo_Mexico_1952-1_) (FotoSketcher_ Emergence 2)
Palette de Frida Kahlo, Mexique, 1952 pic.twitter.com/gvokTq4D95
— Old Pics Archive (@oldpicsarchive) April 19, 2015
Posted in Arts, Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, Painting, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Photography, Special Interest, Uncategorized, Virtual Museums tour., YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, Special Interest
Tagged 1952 — Old Pics Archive (@oldpicsarchive), art, entertainment, EUZICASA, Mexique, Palette de Frida Kahlo
Posted in ARTISTS AND ARTS - Music, Arts, Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, SPIRITUALITY, Uncategorized, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, Special Interest
Tagged Acoustic Guitar, Anna Magdalena Bach, art, Bist Du bei mir, entertainment, EUZICASA, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, great compositions/perfoemances, Great Compositions/Performances, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach: Bist du bei mir (BWV 508), Make Music Part of Your Life Series, Music, Per-Olov Kindgren, YouTube
Posted in ARTISTS AND ARTS - Music, Arts, Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, Uncategorized, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, Special Interest
Tagged D. 438 - Franz Schubert, entertainment, EUZICASA, Great Compositions/Performances, Make Music Part of Your Life Series, Music, Rondo for Violin and String Quartet in A Major, video, YouTube
Archbishop and “the First Martyr of Canterbury.” He was born in 953 and became a monk in the Deerhurst Monastery in Gloucester, England, asking after a few years to become a hermit. He received … continue reading
Posted in Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, SPIRITUALITY, Uncategorized
Tagged 2015, Alphege St. Alphege of Canterbury St. Crescentius St. Expeditus St. Gerold St., April 19th, England, EUZICASA, First Martyr of Canterbury, Saint of the Day, Saint of the Day for Sunday, St Alphege, St. Alphege Archbishop, the First Martyr of Canterbury.
President James Garfield and his daughter are captured on film.
Photo: Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.
– See more at: http://www.historynet.com/picture-of-the-day#sthash.NcmnT3vD.dpuf
Revolutionary struggle against Spanish rule began in Venezuela in 1810. On July 5, 1811, a group of citizens in Caracas became the first in South America to proclaim a formal declaration of independence from Spain. Forces led by Simón Bolívar assured independence in 1821. April 19 is a separate national holiday, known as Declaration of Independence Day, while July 5 is celebrated as Independence Day. More… Discuss
Posted in Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, Uncategorized
Tagged Declaration of Independence Day, Independence Day, Politics, Revolutionary struggle, Simón Bolívar, today's holiday: Venezuela Declaration of Independence Day, Venezuela, Venezuela Declaration of Independence Day
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
Posted in BOOKS, Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Poetry, Poets, Writers, QUOTATION, Special Interest, Uncategorized, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, YouTube/SoundCloud: Music, Special Interest
Tagged art, Free Audiobook, Literature, Ralph Waldo, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Philosophy, Scream, Self-Reliance, Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. Ralph Waldo Emerson, United States, video, YouTube
In 1940, American chemist Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues discovered plutonium. He soon joined the Manhattan Project and was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb, which he unsuccessfully pressed President Truman not to use on civilian targets. In 1951, he and Edwin McMillan shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on transuranium elements. During his lifetime, Seaborg held dozens of patents—among them the only patents ever issued for what? More… Discuss
Posted in Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Radiation induced Cancer and death, Radiation Poisoning, Special Interest, Uncategorized
Tagged Chemistry, development of the atomic bomb, Edwin McMillan, EUZICASA, glenn seaborg, Glenn Seaborg (1912), Nobel Prize in Chemistry, plutonium, Politics, science, the Manhattan Project, Today's Birthday, United States
The world’s first space station, the Soviet Salyut 1, was launched in 1971. The cosmonauts aboard the Soyuz 11 spacecraft were the first to enter, remaining aboard for 22 days. By 1982, five more Salyut space stations had been orbited successfully, two of them for military purposes. By rotating the crews regularly, the Soviets were able to staff the stations for extended periods. All the Salyut space stations decayed and are no longer in orbit. What happened to Salyut 1? More… Discuss
Posted in Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, Uncategorized
Tagged first space station, Politics, Salyut space stations, science, Soviet Salyut 1, Soyuz 11, this day in the yesteryear: The World's First Space Station Is Launched (1971), United States, World's First Space Station
| Definition: | (noun) One who wastes, especially one who wastes money; an idler or a loafer. |
| Synonyms: | prodigal, profligate |
| Usage: | Despite his parents’ best efforts to teach him responsibility, Sam grew up to be a wastrel who squandered his entire fortune. Discuss. |
Slot machines are popular casino games that constitute about 70% of the average casino’s income. The player pulls a handle to rotate a series of reels that have pictures printed on them. Winning or losing is determined by which pictures line up with the pay line, a line in the middle of a viewing window. Some believe skill is involved in the game, but the probability of a win is determined by the game’s random number generator. Who invented the slot machine? More… Discuss
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://muslimanonymous.info ( Find out what stories, articles and other polished material this website collects and share with…well if we only knew that…)
The concept of “mercy” in the Old Testament has a long and rich history. We have to refer back to it in order that the mercy revealed by Christ may shine forth more clearly. By revealing that mercy both through His actions and through His teaching, Christ addressed Himself to people who not only knew the concept of mercy, but who also, as the People of God of the Old Covenant, had drawn from their age – long history a special experience of the mercy of God. This experience was social and communal, as well as individual and interior. […]
The truth, revealed in Christ, about God the “Father of mercies,” enables us to “see” Him as particularly close to man especially when man is suffering, when he is under threat at the very heart of his existence and dignity. And this is why, in the situation of the Church and the world today, many individuals and groups guided by a lively sense of faith are turning, I would say almost spontaneously, to the mercy of God. They are certainly being moved to do this by Christ Himself, who through His Spirit works within human hearts. […]
In fact, revelation and faith teach us not only to meditate in the abstract upon the mystery of God as “Father of mercies,” but also to have recourse to that mercy in the name of Christ and in union with Him.
Posted in Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, QUOTATION, SPIRITUALITY, Uncategorized
Tagged 2015, April 18, Dives in Misericordia, Divine Mercy, Encyclical Letter, Encyclical Letter “Dives in Misericordia” on Divine Mercy, John Paul II, mercy of God, SPIRITUAL REFLECTION, the People of God
In an address at a UN Conference on the theme: “The Persecution of Christians Globally: A Threat to International Peace and Security”, Archbishop Bernardito Auza, Permanent Representative of the Holy See to the United Nations, urged the international community to act in protecting Christians and religious minorities in the Middle East.
The following is the text of Archbishop Auza’s address:
United Nations, New York, 17 April 2015
Your Excellencies, Distinguished Panelists,
Friends, Ladies and Gentlemen:
Before the tens of thousands who came to St. Peter’s Square to listen to his Easter Message to the City of Rome and to the World last April 6, Pope Francis vigorously appealed to raise up “intense prayer” and “tangible help” for the Christians throughout the world, “who are being persecuted, exiled, killed, and decapitated for the sole reason that they are Christians.”
“They are our martyrs of today,” he continued, and “they are more numerous than in the early Christian centuries.”
The Pope prayed that “the international community will not remain mute and unmoved before such an unacceptable crime” — which he called “a worrisome deviation from the most basic human rights” — and articulated his sincere hope “that the international community does not turn a blind eye” to the situation.
Today in this setting where the deliberations of the international community take place, we come with both of our eyes wide open. And as we consider in depth the details of the persecution of Christians across the globe, it’s going to be very difficult to keep our eyes dry.
In Iraq and Syria, in Nigeria and Libya, in Kenya and in regions of the Asian subcontinent, the earth has been getting literally soaked with blood. We have seen barbaric images of Coptic Christians beheaded in Libya; churches filled with people blown up during liturgical celebrations in Iraq, Nigeria and Pakistan; ancient Christian communities driven out of their homes on the biblical Plain of Nineveh; Christian students executed in Kenya…
Even as we speak, thousands across the world are being persecuted, deprived of their fundamental human rights, discriminated against and killed simply because they are believers.
We know that these attacks against people of faith do not happen just to Christians. Less than a month ago, hundreds of Muslim worshippers were killed or wounded when suicide bombers allied with the so-called Islamic State attacked the two Mosques in which they were worshipping in Yemen. Muslim minorities elsewhere have also been attacked by extremists who claim to be Muslims themselves.
Ethnic minorities have been targeted as well. During a UN Security Council debate on the victims of attacks and abuses on ethnic and religious grounds in the Middle East, which was held March 27, Iraqi Yazidi congresswoman Vian Dakhil, with tears in her eyes, told the world: “We are being slaughtered, our girls are being sold, our children are being taken.”
Nevertheless, the fact is, in many parts of the world, Christians have been specifically targeted. As a 2014 Pew Research Center report on religious hostilities across the world documented, brutal attacks on people of faith happen to Christians more than to any other religious group. Between 2006 and 2012, Christians were targeted through harassment, persecution or martyrdom in 151 out of 193 Members States of the United Nations. This points to a collective failure of this international organization, whose primary objective is to spare peoples and nations from the scourge of violence and unjust aggressions.
His Excellency the UN Secretary-General Mr. Ban Ki Moon has repeatedly condemned “in the strongest terms all persecution and violations of the rights to life and physical integrity of individuals and communities based on religious, ethnic, national, racial or other grounds.” His presentation of the situation in the Middle East during the March Security Council briefing was very sobering: The so-called “Islamic State” (ISIL/ISIS) or Da’esh has been systematically killing ethnic and religious minorities and those who disagreed with its warped interpretation of Islam. He said that in Iraq, information strongly suggested that Da’esh had perpetrated genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and that minorities had been victims of that violence. Syria has seen an exceptional rise in those atrocities. In Libya, Da’esh-affiliated groups were targeting minorities and attacking religious sights.
Pope Francis has expressed several times his “great pain to know that Christians in the world submit to the greatest amount of such discrimination.” He said, “This is happening more than 1700 years after the edict of Constantine, which gave Christians the freedom to publicly profess their faith.” He added, “This is not a fantasy; the numbers tell us.” Between 100 and 150 million Christians are persecuted in the world today.
According to the Religious Freedom in the World Report 2014 – which covers the period from October 2012 to June 2014 –acts of religious persecution are not only widespread, but also on the increase. In almost every country, the change in the status and condition of religious minorities has been for the worse. Religious persecution is alarmingly high, or high, or worrisome in 116 countries, or in 59% of all the countries in the world. In brief, global religious freedom has entered a period of serious decline in the last three years.
In the Middle East in particular, Christians have been specifically targeted, killed or forced to flee from their homes and countries. Only 25 years ago, there were nearly two million Christians living in Iraq; the most recent estimates are less than a quarter of this figure. Faced with the unbearable situation of living in a conflict zone controlled by terrorist and extremist organizations who constantly threaten them with death, and with a deep sense of feeling abandoned, they have been forced to flee their homes.
The disappearance of these communities from the Middle East would not only be a religious tragedy, but a loss of a rich cultural-religious patrimony that has contributed so much to the societies to which they belong. For 2,000 years, Christians have called the Middle East home; indeed, as we all know, the Middle East is the cradle of Christianity. Thus, it is painful and unfathomable that these ancient Christian communities in the region — especially those who still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ — are among those threatened with extinction.
Pope Francis has repeatedly stated that we cannot resign ourselves to thinking of the Middle East without Christians. Their uninterrupted existence in the region is testimony of many centuries of coexistence, side by side with Muslims and other religious and ethnic communities. The whole world has a great interest in preserving that coexistence and we must all join to prevent the expulsion of Christians before it’s too late.
Last month in Geneva, before the UN Human Rights Council, 65 nations signed a statement drafted by Lebanon, Russia and the Holy See supporting the human rights of Christians and other communities, particularly in the Middle East. It was the first time there has been explicit mention of the category of Christians before the Human Rights Council.
That statement called attention to the fact that “the existence of many religious communities is seriously threatened” with Christians “now especially affected.” It called on all States to join together and address this alarming situation by building together a culture of peaceful coexistence, recognizing religious and ethnic pluralism as an enrichment to the globalized world, and reaffirming their commitment to “respect the rights of everyone, in particular the right to freedom of religion, which is enshrined in the fundamental international human rights instruments.”
Is it now too late to act? When we call to mind those who have already lost their lives, any action would come too late. But any action to spare even just one from persecution and from all forms of atrocities will not only be timely, but most urgent. The fate of those persecuted urges us to do all that we can to prevent further victims of attacks and abuses. Christians and other religious minorities of the Middle East and elsewhere plead for action, not in some abstract form, but in a manner that is truly conscious of their pain and suffering and their existential fear for their survival.
I am grateful for your presence this afternoon. Your presence is already an act of solidarity with the persecuted Christians all over the globe. They are counting on us and praying for ever greater efforts on our part to spare them from protracted persecution. Their very own survival could depend on our acts of solidarity. We pray that we may be able together to open the eyes of the world to what is going, and help them not to take their focus off of the plight of persecuted Christians until their lives are secure, their dignity is defended, and their rights protected.
Thank you very much for your presence here this afternoon.
| Armenian Genocide | |
|---|---|
| Part of the persecution of Armenians | |
Armenian civilians, escorted by armed Ottoman soldiers, are marched through Harput (Kharpert), to a prison in the nearby Mezireh (present-day Elâzığ), April 1915.
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| Location | Ottoman Empire |
| Date | 1915[note 1] |
| Target | Armenian population |
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Attack type
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Deportation, mass murder |
| Deaths | 1.5 million[note 2] |
| Perpetrators | Committee of Union and Progress (Young Turks) |
| History of Armenia |
|---|
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 Armenia portal |
The Armenian Genocide[8] (Armenian: Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն Hayots Tseghaspanutyun),[note 3] also known as the Armenian Holocaust,[9] the Armenian Massacres and, traditionally by Armenians, as Medz Yeghern (Armenian: Մեծ Եղեռն, “Great Crime”),[10] was the Ottoman government‘s systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects inside their historic homeland which lies within the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre.[11][12][13] Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians and the Ottoman Greeks were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal policy. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.
Raphael Lemkin was explicitly moved by the Armenian annihilation to coin the word genocide in 1943 and define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters.[14] The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides,[15][16][17] because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out in order to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.[18]
Turkey, the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, denies the word genocide is an accurate term for the mass killings of Armenians that began under Ottoman rule in 1915. It has in recent years been faced with repeated calls to recognize them as genocide. To date, twenty-three countries have officially recognized the mass killings as genocide,[19] a view which is shared by most genocide scholars and historians.
Since 1876, the Ottoman state had been led by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Immediately after the Treaty of Berlin was signed, Abdul Hamid attempted to forestall implementation of its reform provisions by asserting that Armenians did not make up a majority in the provinces and that their reports of abuses were largely exaggerated or false. In 1890, Abdul Hamid created a paramilitary outfit known as the Hamidiye which was made up of Kurdish irregulars who were tasked to “deal with the Armenians as they wished”.[23]:40 As Ottoman officials intentionally provoked rebellions (often as a result of over-taxation) in Armenian populated towns, such as in Sasun in 1894 and Zeitun in 1895–96, these regiments were increasingly used to deal with the Armenians by way of oppression and massacre. In some instances Armenians successfully fought off the regiments and in 1895 brought the excesses to the attention of the Great Powers, who subsequently condemned the Porte.[25]:40–2
In October 1895, the Powers forced Abdul Hamid to sign a new reform package designed to curtail the powers of the Hamidiye but, like the Berlin Treaty, it was never implemented. On 1 October 1895, 2,000 Armenians assembled in Constantinople to petition for the implementation of the reforms, but Ottoman police units converged on the rally and violently broke it up.[23]:57–8 Soon, massacres of Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then engulfed the rest of the Armenian-populated provinces of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzurum, Harput, Sivas, Trabzon, and Van. Estimates differ on how many Armenians were killed but European documentation of the pogroms, which became known as the Hamidian massacres, placed the figures at between 100,000 and 300,000.[30][31]
Although Hamid was never directly implicated in ordering the massacres, it is believed that they had his tacit approval.[25]:42 Frustrated with European indifference to the massacres, a group of members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation seized the European-managed Ottoman Bank on 26 August 1896. This incident brought further sympathy for Armenians in Europe and was lauded by the European and American press, which vilified Hamid and painted him as the “great assassin”, “bloody Sultan”, and “Abdul the Damned“.[23]:35,115 While the Great Powers vowed to take action and enforce new reforms, these never came to fruition due to conflicting political and economic interests.
On 24 July 1908, Armenians’ hopes for equality in the empire brightened once more when a coup d’état staged by officers in the Ottoman Third Army based in Salonika removed Abdul Hamid II from power and restored the country to a constitutional monarchy. The officers were part of the Young Turk movement that wanted to reform administration of the perceived decadent state of the Ottoman Empire and modernize it to European standards. The movement was an anti-Hamidian coalition made up of two distinct groups: the liberal constitutionalists and the nationalists; the former were more democratic and accepted Armenians into their wing whereas the latter group was more intolerant in regard to Armenian-related issues and their frequent requests for European assistance.[23]:140–1 In 1902, during a congress of the Young Turks held in Paris, the heads of the liberal wing, Sabahaddin and Ahmed Riza Bey, partially persuaded the nationalists to include in their objectives ensuring some rights for all the minorities of the empire.
One of the numerous factions within the Young Turk movement was a secret revolutionary organization called the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). It drew its membership from disaffected army officers based in Salonika and was behind a wave of mutinies against the central government. In 1908, elements of the Third Army and the Second Army Corps declared their opposition to the Sultan and threatened to march on the capital to depose him. Hamid, shaken by the wave of resentment, stepped down from power as Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Arabs, Bulgarians and Turks alike rejoiced in his dethronement.[23]:143–4
A countercoup took place in early 1909, ultimately resulting in the 31 March Incident on 13 April 1909. Some reactionary Ottoman military elements, joined by Islamic theological students, aimed to return control of the country to the Sultan and the rule of Islamic law. Riots and fighting broke out between the reactionary forces and CUP forces, until the CUP was able to put down the uprising and court-martial the opposition leaders.
While the movement initially targeted the Young Turk government, it spilled over into pogroms against Armenians who were perceived as having supported the restoration of the constitution.[25]:68–9 When Ottoman Army troops were called in, many accounts record that instead of trying to quell the violence they actually took part in pillaging Armenian enclaves in Adana province.[32] The number of Armenians killed in the course of the Adana massacre ranged between 15,000 and 30,000 people.[25]:69[33]
In 1912, the First Balkan War broke out and ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire as well as the loss of 85% of its European territory. Many in the empire saw their defeat as “Allah’s divine punishment for a society that did not know how to pull itself together”.[25]:84 The Turkish nationalist movement in the country gradually came to view Anatolia as their last refuge. That the Armenian population formed a significant minority in this region would figure prominently in the calculations of the Three Pashas, who would eventually carry out the Armenian Genocide.
An important consequence of the Balkan Wars was also the mass expulsion of Muslims (known as muhacirs) from the Balkans. In fact, beginning in the mid-19th century, hundreds of thousands of Muslims, including Turks, Circassians, and Chechens, were expelled or forced to flee from the Caucasus and the Balkans (Rumelia) as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars and the conflicts in the Balkans. Muslim society in the empire was incensed by this flood of refugees. A journal published in Constantinople expressed the mood of the times: “Let this be a warning … O Muslims, don’t get comfortable! Do not let your blood cool before taking revenge”.[25]:86 As many as 850,000 of these refugees were settled in areas where the Armenians were resident from the period of 1878–1904. The muhacirs resented the status of their relatively well-off neighbors and, as historian Taner Akçam and others have noted, the refugees would come to play a pivotal role in the killings of the Armenians and the confiscation of their properties during the genocide.[25]:86–87
On 2 November 1914, the Ottoman Empire opened the Middle Eastern theater of World War I by entering hostilities on the side of the Central Powers and against the Allies. The battles of the Caucasus Campaign, the Persian Campaign and the Gallipoli Campaign affected several populous Armenian centers. Before entering the war, the Ottoman government had sent representatives to the Armenian congress at Erzurum to persuade Ottoman Armenians to facilitate its conquest of Transcaucasia by inciting an insurrection of Russian Armenians against the Russian army in the event a Caucasus front was opened. [25]:136[34]
On 24 December 1914, Minister of War Enver Pasha implemented a plan to encircle and destroy the Russian Caucasus Army at Sarıkamış in order to regain territories lost to Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Enver Pasha’s forces were routed in the battle, and almost completely destroyed. Returning to Constantinople, Enver Pasha publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians in the region having actively sided with the Russians.[23]:200
On 25 February 1915, Enver Pasha sent an order to all military units that Armenians in the active Ottoman forces be demobilized and assigned to the unarmed Labour battalion (Turkish: amele taburlari). Enver Pasha explained this decision as “out of fear that they would collaborate with the Russians”. Traditionally, the Ottoman Army only drafted non-Muslim males between the ages of 20 and 45 into the regular army. The younger (15–20) and older (45–60) non-Muslim soldiers had always been used as logistical support through the labour battalions. Before February, some of the Armenian recruits were utilized as labourers (hamals), though they would ultimately be executed.[35]
Transferring Armenian conscripts from active combat to passive, unarmed logistic sections was an important precursor to the subsequent genocide. As reported in The Memoirs of Naim Bey, the execution of the Armenians in these battalions was part of a premeditated strategy of the CUP. Many of these Armenian recruits were executed by local Turkish gangs.[23]:178
On 19 April 1915, Jevdet Bey demanded that the city of Van immediately furnish him 4,000 soldiers under the pretext of conscription. However, it was clear to the Armenian population that his goal was to massacre the able-bodied men of Van so that there would be no defenders. Jevdet Bey had already used his official writ in nearby villages, ostensibly to search for arms, but in fact to initiate wholesale massacres.[23]:202 The Armenians offered five hundred soldiers and exemption money for the rest in order to buy time, but Jevdet Bey accused the Armenians of “rebellion” and asserted his determination to “crush” it at any cost. “If the rebels fire a single shot”, he declared, “I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and” (pointing to his knee) “every child, up to here”.[36]:298
The next day, 20 April 1915, the siege of Van began when an Armenian woman was harassed, and the two Armenian men who came to her aid were killed by Ottoman soldiers. The Armenian defenders protected the 30,000 residents and 15,000 refugees living in an area of roughly one square kilometer of the Armenian Quarter and suburb of Aigestan with 1,500 ablebodied riflemen who were supplied with 300 rifles and 1,000 pistols and antique weapons. The conflict lasted until General Yudenich of Russia came to their rescue.[37]
Reports of the conflict reached then United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, Sr. from Aleppo and Van, prompting him to raise the issue in person with Talaat and Enver. As he quoted to them the testimonies of his consulate officials, they justified the deportations as necessary to the conduct of the war, suggesting that complicity of the Armenians of Van with the Russian forces that had taken the city justified the persecution of all ethnic Armenians.
By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to the empire’s security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:
In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as] ‘the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will succeed in opening up the straits [of the Dardanelles]’.[26]:220
On the night of 23–24 April 1915, the Ottoman government rounded up and imprisoned an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders of the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, and later those in other centers, who were moved to two holding centers near Ankara.[23]:211–2 This date coincided with Allied troop landings at Gallipoli after unsuccessful Allied naval attempts to break through the Dardanelles to Constantinople in February and March 1915.
Following the passage of Tehcir Law on 29 May 1915, the Armenian leaders, except for the few who were able to return to Constantinople, were gradually deported and assassinated. The date April 24 is commemorated as Genocide Remembrance Day by Armenians around the world.
In May 1915, Mehmet Talaat Pasha requested that the cabinet and Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha legalize a measure for the deportation of Armenians to other places due to what Talaat Pasha called “the Armenian riots and massacres, which had arisen in a number of places in the country”. However, Talaat Pasha was referring specifically to events in Van and extending the implementation to the regions in which alleged “riots and massacres” would affect the security of the war zone of the Caucasus Campaign. Later, the scope of the deportation was widened in order to include the Armenians in the other provinces.
On 29 May 1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the Temporary Law of Deportation (“Tehcir Law”), giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it “sensed” as a threat to national security.[23]:186–8
With the implementation of Tehcir Law, the confiscation of Armenian property and the slaughter of Armenians that ensued upon its enactment outraged much of the western world. While the Ottoman Empire’s wartime allies offered little protest, a wealth of German and Austrian historical documents has since come to attest to the witnesses’ horror at the killings and mass starvation of Armenians.[39]:329–31[40]:212–3 In the United States, The New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the process as “systematic”, “authorized” and “organized by the government”. Theodore Roosevelt would later characterize this as “the greatest crime of the war”.[41]
Historian Hans-Lukas Kieser states that, from the statements of Talaat Pasha[42] it is clear that the officials were aware that the deportation order was genocidal.[43] Another historian Taner Akçam states that the telegrams show that the overall coordination of the genocide was taken over by Talaat Pasha.[44]
The Armenians were marched out to the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding desert. There is no evidence that the Ottoman government provided the extensive facilities and supplies that would have been necessary to sustain the life of hundreds of thousands of Armenian deportees during their forced march to the Syrian desert or after.[45] By August 1915, The New York Times repeated an unattributed report that “the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people”.[46] Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha were completely aware that by abandoning the Armenian deportees in the desert they were condemning them to certain death.[47] A dispatch from a “high diplomatic source in Turkey, not American, reporting the testimony of trustworthy witnesses” about the plight of Armenian deportees in northern Arabia and the Lower Euphrates valley was extensively quoted by The New York Times in August 1916:
The witnesses have seen thousands of deported Armenians under tents in the open, in caravans on the march, descending the river in boats and in all phases of their miserable life. Only in a few places does the Government issue any rations, and those are quite insufficient. The people, therefore, themselves are forced to satisfy their hunger with food begged in that scanty land or found in the parched fields.
Naturally, the death rate from starvation and sickness is very high and is increased by the brutal treatment of the authorities, whose bearing toward the exiles as they are being driven back and forth over the desert is not unlike that of slave drivers. With few exceptions no shelter of any kind is provided and the people coming from a cold climate are left under the scorching desert sun without food and water. Temporary relief can only be obtained by the few able to pay officials.[45]
Similarly, Major General Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein noted that “The Turkish policy of causing starvation is an all too obvious proof, if proof was still needed as to who is responsible for the massacre, for the Turkish resolve to destroy the Armenians”.[26]:350
German engineers and labourers involved in building the railway also witnessed Armenians being crammed into cattle cars and shipped along the railroad line. Franz Gunther, a representative for Deutsche Bank which was funding the construction of the Baghdad Railway, forwarded photographs to his directors and expressed his frustration at having to remain silent amid such “bestial cruelty”.[23]:326 Major General Otto von Lossow, acting military attaché and head of the German Military Plenipotentiary in the Ottoman Empire, spoke to Ottoman intentions in a conference held in Batum in 1918:
The Turks have embarked upon the “total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia … The aim of Turkish policy is, as I have reiterated, the taking of possession of Armenian districts and the extermination of the Armenians. Talaat’s government wants to destroy all Armenians, not just in Turkey but also outside Turkey. On the basis of all the reports and news coming to me here in Tiflis there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks systematically are aiming at the extermination of the few hundred thousand Armenians whom they left alive until now.[26]:349
A network of 25 concentration camps was set up by the Ottoman government to dispose of the Armenians who had survived the deportations to their ultimate point.[49] This network, situated in the region of Turkey’s present-day borders with Iraq and Syria, was directed by Şükrü Kaya, one of Talaat Pasha’s right-hand men. Some of the camps were only temporary transit points. Others, such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz, were briefly used for mass graves and then vacated by autumn 1915. Camps such as Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra’s al-‘Ayn were built specifically for those whose life expectancy was just a few days.[50] According to Hilmar Kaiser, the Ottoman authorities refused to provide food and water to the victims, increasing the mortality rate, and Muslim men obtained Armenian women through recorded marriages, while the death of their husbands were not recorded.[51]
Bernau, an American citizen of German descent, traveled to the areas where Armenians were incarcerated and wrote a report that was deemed factual by Rössler, the German Consul at Aleppo. He reports mass graves containing over 60,000 people in Meskene and large numbers of mounds of corpses, as the Armenians died due to hunger and disease. He reported seeing 450 orphans, who received at most 150 grams of bread per day, in a tent of 5-6 square meters. Dysentery swept through the camp and days passed between the instances of distribution of bread to some. In “Abu Herrera”, near Meskene, he described how the guards let 240 Armenians starve, and wrote that they searched “horse droppings” for grains.[52]
The Tehcir Law brought some measures regarding the property of the deportees, but during September a new law was proposed. By means of the “Abandoned Properties” Law (Law Concerning Property, Dept’s and Assets Left Behind Deported Persons, also referred as the “Temporary Law on Expropriation and Confiscation”), the Ottoman government took possession of all “abandoned” Armenian goods and properties. Ottoman parliamentary representative Ahmed Riza protested this legislation:
It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as “abandoned goods” for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed from their domiciles and exiled. Now the government through its efforts is selling their goods … If we are a constitutional regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we can’t do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor the law can allow it.[53]
On 13 September 1915, the Ottoman parliament passed the “Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation”, stating that all property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities.[26]:224
The American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR, also known as “Near East Relief”), established in 1915 just after the deportations began, was a charitable organization established to relieve the suffering of the peoples of the Near East.[54] The organization was championed by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau’s dispatches on the mass slaughter of Armenians galvanized much support for the organization.[55] In its first year, the ACRNE cared for 132,000 Armenian orphans from Tiflis, Yerevan, Constantinople, Sivas, Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem. A relief organization for refugees in the Middle East helped donate over $102 million (budget $117,000,000) [1930 value of dollar] to Armenians both during and after the war.[56][57]:336 Between 1915 and 1930, ACRNE distributed humanitarian relief to locations across a wide geographical range, eventually spending over ten times its original estimate and helping around 2,000,000 refugees.[58]
The Committee of Union and Progress founded the “Special Organization” (Turkish: Teşkilat-i Mahsusa) that participated in the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community.[59] This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special forces outfit, and it has been compared by some scholars to the Nazi Einsatzgruppen.[23]:182, 185 Later in 1914, the Ottoman government influenced the direction the Special Organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed Special Organization.[60] According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees.[61] Vehib Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the Special Organization, the “butchers of the human species”.[62]
Eitan Belkind was a Nili member who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned to the headquarters of Kamal Pasha. He claims to have witnessed the burning of 5,000 Armenians.[63]:181,183
Lt. Hasan Maruf of the Ottoman army describes how a population of a village were taken all together and then burned.[64] The Commander of the Third Army Vehib’s 12-page affidavit, which was dated 5 December 1918, was presented in the Trabzon trial series (29 March 1919) included in the Key Indictment,[65] reporting such a mass burning of the population of an entire village near Muş: “The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in the various camps was to burn them”.[66] Further, it was reported that “Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after”.[67] Vahakn Dadrian wrote that 80,000 Armenians in 90 villages across the Muş plain were burned in “stables and haylofts”.[68]
Trabzon was the main city in Trabzon province; Oscar S. Heizer, the American consul at Trabzon, reported: “This plan did not suit Nail Bey … Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard”.[69] Hafiz Mehmet, a Turkish deputy serving Trabzon, testified during a 21 December 1918 parliamentary session of the Chamber of Deputies that “the district’s governor loaded the Armenians into barges and had them thrown overboard.”[70] The Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: “I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea”.[71] Vahakn Dadrian places the number of Armenians killed in the Trabzon province by drowning at 50,000.[68] The Trabzon trials reported Armenians having been drowned in the Black Sea,[72] according to a testimony, women and children were loaded on boats in “Değirmendere” to be drowned in the sea.[73]
Hoffman Philip, the American chargé d’affaires at Constantinople, wrote: “Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing”.[74] According to Robert Fisk, 900 Armenian women were drowned in Bitlis, while in Erzincan, the corpses in the Euphrates resulted in a change of course of the river for a few hundred meters.[39] Dadrian also wrote that “countless” Armenians were drowned in the Euphrates and its tributaries.[68]
The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton writes in a parenthesis when introducing the medical experiments during the Holocaust, “Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later suggest”.[75]
Morphine overdose: During the Trabzon trial series of the Martial court, from the sittings between 26 March and 17 May 1919, the Trabzons Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that Dr. Saib caused the death of children with the injection of morphine. The information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and Vehib), both Dr. Saib’s colleagues at Trabzons Red Crescent hospital, where those atrocities were said to have been committed.[76][77]
Toxic gas: Dr. Ziya Fuad and Dr. Adnan, public health services director of Trabzon, submitted affidavits reporting cases in which two school buildings were used to organize children and send them to the mezzanine to kill them with toxic gas equipment.[78]
Typhoid inoculation: The Ottoman surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal wrote “on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the Third Army in January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent Armenians slated for deportation at Erzincan were inoculated with the blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood ‘inactive'”.[78] Jeremy Hugh Baron writes: “Individual doctors were directly involved in the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim‘s brother-in-law Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938″.[79]
In 1919, following the Mudros Armistice, Sultan Mehmed VI was ordered to organise courts-martial by the Allied administration who was in charge of Constantinople to try members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (Turkish: “Ittihat Terakki”) for taking the Ottoman Empire into the World War I. By January 1919, a report to Sultan Mehmed VI accused over 130 suspects, most of whom were high officials.
Sultan Mehmet VI and Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha, as representatives of government of the Ottoman Empire during the Second Constitutional Era were summoned to the Paris Peace Conference by US Secretary of State Robert Lansing. On 11 July 1919, Damat Ferid Pasha officially confessed to massacres against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and was a key figure and initiator of the war crime trials held directly after World War I to condemn to death the chief perpetrators of the genocide.[80][81][82] The military court found that it was the will of the CUP to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its Special Organization. The 1919 pronouncement reads as follows:
The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principal factors of these crimes the fugitives Talaat Pasha, former Grand Vizir, Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former Minister of Education, members of the General Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral person of that party; … the Court Martial pronounces, in accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty against Talaat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim.
The term Three Pashas, which include Mehmed Talaat Pasha and Ismail Enver (the main perpetrators of the Genocide), refers to the triumvirate who had fled the Empire. This happened at the end of World War I, on the night of 2–3 November 1918 with the aid of Ahmed Izzet Pasha. In 1919 they were sentenced to death in absentia at the trials in Constantinople. The courts-martial officially disbanded the CUP and confiscated its assets, and the assets of those found guilty. The courts-martial were dismissed in August, 1920 for their impartiality and lack of transparence, according to then High Commissioner and Admiral Sir John de Robeck,[83] and some of the accused were transported to Malta for further interrogation. At least two of the three Pashas were later assassinated by Armenian vigilantes.
Ottoman military members and high-ranking politicians convicted by the Turkish courts-martial were transferred from Constantinople prisons to the Crown Colony of Malta on board of the SS Princess Ena and the SS HMS Benbow by the British forces, starting in 1919. Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe was in charge of the operation, together with Lord Curzon; they did so owing to the lack of transparency of the Turkish courts-martial. They were held there for three years, while searches were made of archives in Constantinople, London, Paris and Washington to find a way to put them in trial.[84] However, the war criminals were eventually released without trial and returned to Constantinople in 1921, in exchange for 22 British prisoners of war held by the government in Ankara, including a relative of Lord Curzon. The government in Ankara was opposed to political power of the government in Constantinople. They are often mentioned as the Malta exiles in some sources.[85]
Meanwhile, the Peace Conference in Paris established the “Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions” in January 1919, which was commissioned by United States Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Based on the commission’s work, several articles were added to the Treaty of Sèvres. The Treaty of Sèvres had planned a trial in August 1920 to determine those responsible for the “barbarous and illegitimate methods of warfare … [including] offenses against the laws and customs of war and the principles of humanity”.[18] Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire “hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914″.
According to European Court of Human Rights judge Giovanni Bonello the suspension of prosecutions, the repatriation and release of Turkish detainees was amongst others a result of the lack of an appropriate legal framework with supranational jurisdiction, because following World War I no international norms for regulating war crimes existed, due to a legal vacuum in international law; therefore contrary to Turkish sources, no trials were ever held in Malta. He mentions that the release of the Turkish detainees was accomplished in exchange for 22 British prisoners held by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.[85][86]
On 15 March 1921, former Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha was assassinated in the Charlottenburg District of Berlin, Germany, in broad daylight and in the presence of many witnesses. Talaat’s death was part of “Operation Nemesis“, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation‘s codename for their covert operation in the 1920s to kill the planners of the Armenian Genocide.
The subsequent trial of the assassin, Soghomon Tehlirian, had an important influence on Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish–Jewish descent who campaigned in the League of Nations to ban what he called “barbarity” and “vandalism”. The term “genocide“, created in 1943, was coined by Lemkin who was directly influenced by the massacres of Armenians during World War I.[87]:210
While there is no consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide, there is general agreement among western scholars that over 500,000 Armenians died between 1914 and 1918. Estimates vary between 800,000,[88] to 1,500,000 (per Western scholars,[89] Argentina,[90] and other states). Encyclopædia Britannica references the research of Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office, who estimated that by 600,000 Armenians “died or were massacred during deportation” in a report compiled on the 24th May 1916.[67][91] This figure, however, accounts for solely the first year of the Genocide and does not take into account those who died or killed after the report was compiled on the 24th May 1916.[92]
According to documents that once belonged to Talaat Pasha, more than 970,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916. Talaat’s widow, Hayriye Talaat Bafralı, gave the documents and records in 1983 to Turkish journalist Murat Bardakçı, who has published them in a book titled The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha (aka “Talat Pasha’s Black Book”). According to the documents, the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before 1915 stood at 1,256,000. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later in 1917.[93]
Justin McCarthy calculated an estimate of the pre-war Armenian population, then subtracted his estimate of survivors, arriving at a figure of a little less than 600,000 for Armenian casualties for the period 1914 to 1922.[94] In a more recent essay, he projected that if the Armenian records of 1913 were accurate, 250,000 more deaths should be added, for a total of 850,000.[95]
However, McCarthy’s numbers have been highly contested by many specialists. Some of them, like Frédéric Paulin, have severely criticized McCarthy’s methodology and suggested that it is flawed.[96] Hilmar Kaiser[97] another specialist has made similar claims, as have professor Vahakn Dadrian[98] and professor Levon Marashlian.[99] The critics not only question McCarthy’s methodology and resulting calculations, but also his primary sources, the Ottoman censuses. They point out that there was no official statistic census in 1912; rather those numbers were based on the records of 1905 which were conducted during the reign of Sultan Hamid.[100] While Ottoman censuses claimed an Armenian population of 1.2 million, Fa’iz El-Ghusein (the Kaimakam of Kharpout) wrote that there were about 1.9 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire,[101] and some modern scholars estimate over 2 million. German official Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter wrote that fewer than 100,000 Armenians survived the genocide, the rest having been exterminated (German: ausgerottet).[102]:329–30
Mass killings continued under the Republic of Turkey during the Turkish–Armenian War phase of Turkish War of Independence.[103] 60,000 to 98,000 Armenian civilians were estimated to have been killed by the Turkish army.[104] Some estimates put the total number of Armenians massacred in the hundreds of thousands.[105][25]:327
Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire’s own allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including Pope Benedict XV, only to be turned away by Ottoman government officials who claimed they were retaliating against a pro-Russian insurrection.[16]:177 On 24 May 1915, the Triple Entente warned the Ottoman Empire that “In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres”.[106]
The United States had consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire, including locations in Edirne, Elâzığ, Samsun, İzmir, Trebizond, Van, Constantinople, and Aleppo. It was officially a neutral party until it joined the Allies in 1917. In addition to the consulates, there were numerous American Protestant missionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions, including Van and Kharput. The atrocities were reported regularly in newspapers and literary journals around the world.[23]:282–5
On his return home in 1924 after thirty years as a U.S. Consul in the Near East, and most of the preceding decade as Consul General at Smyrna, George Horton wrote his own “account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers; with a True Story of the Burning of Smyrna” (1926 subtitle, The Blight of Asia).[107] Horton’s account quoted numerous contemporary communications and eyewitness reports including one of the massacre of Phocea in 1914, by a Frenchman, and two of the Armenian massacres of 1914/15, by an American citizen and a German missionary.[107]:28–9,34–7. It also quoted U.S. businessman Walter M. Geddes regarding his time in Damascus: “several Turks[,] whom I interviewed, told me that the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race.”[108]
Many Americans spoke out against the genocide, including former president Theodore Roosevelt, rabbi Stephen Wise, Alice Stone Blackwell, and William Jennings Bryan, the U.S. Secretary of State to June 1915. In the U.S. and the United Kingdom, children were regularly reminded to clean their plates while eating and to “remember the starving Armenians”.[109]
As the orders for deportations and massacres were enacted, many consular officials reported what they were witnessing to the ambassador. In memoirs that he completed during 1918 Morgenthau wrote, “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact …”[36]:309 The memoirs and reports vividly described the methods used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities committed against the Christian minority.[110]
On the Middle Eastern front, the British military was engaged fighting the Ottoman forces in southern Syria and Mesopotamia. British diplomat Gertrude Bell filed the following report after hearing the account from a captured Ottoman soldier:
The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours … some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardianship of some hundred Kurds … These Kurds were called gendarmes, but in reality mere butchers; bands of them were publicly ordered to take parties of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations, but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and old women … One of these gendarmes confessed to killing 100 Armenian men himself … the empty desert cisterns and caves were also filled with corpses …[39]:327
Winston Churchill described the massacres as an “administrative holocaust” and noted that “the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be. … There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions, cherishing national ambitions that could only be satisfied at the expense of Turkey, and planted geographically between Turkish and Caucasian Moslems”.[39]:329
Historian Arnold J. Toynbee published the collection of documents The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1916. Together with British politician and historian Viscount James Bryce, he compiled statements from survivors and eyewitnesses from other countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, who similarly attested to the systematic massacre of innocent Armenians by Ottoman government forces.[111]
The book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to build up sentiment against the Central Powers[citation needed], but Bryce had submitted the work to scholars for verification before its publication. University of Oxford Regius Professor Gilbert Murray stated, “… the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question”.[26]:228 Other professors, including Herbert Fisher of Sheffield University and former American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, came to the same conclusion.[26]:228–9
A great lion came from the distances.
It was huge as silence is,
it was thirsty, it was after blood,
and behind its posturing
it had fire, as a house has,
it burned like a mountain of Osorno.
It found only solitude,
it roared, out of uncertainty and hunger –
the only thing to eat was air,
the wild foam of the coast,
frozen sea lettuces,
air the colour of birds,
unacceptable nourishment.
Wistful lion from another planet,
cast up by the high tide
on the rocky coast of Isla Negra,
the salty archipelago,
with nothing more than an empty maw,
claws that were idle
and a tail like a feather duster.
It was well aware of the foolishness
of its aggressive appearance
and with the passing of years
it wrinkled up in shame.
Its timidity led it on
to worse displays of arrogance
and it went on aging like one
of the lions in the Plaza,
it slowly turned into an ornament
for a portico or a garden,
to the point of hiding its sad forehead,
fixing its eyes on the rain
and keeping still to wait for
the grey justice of stone,
its geological hour.
****The Lion poem by Pablo Neruda ( from the volume “Selected poems”)
55
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Languor is upon your heart and the slumber is still on your eyes.
Has not the word come to you that the flower is reigning in splendour among thorns? Wake, oh awaken! Let not the time pass in vain!
At the end of the stony path, in the country of virgin solitude my friend is sitting all alone. Deceive him not. Wake, oh awaken!
What if the sky pants and trembles with the heat of the midday sun—what if the burning sand spreads its mantle of thirst—
Is there no joy in the deep of your heart? At every footfall of yours, will not the harp of the road break out in sweet music of pain?
Posted in Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, on the mundane side of the town, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Poetry, Poets, Writers, QUOTATION, Special Interest, Uncategorized
Tagged art, entertainment, EUZICASA, Fifty Five - ('Languor is upon your heart and the slumber is still on your eyes...'), Gitanjali (from Collection of Indian Poems), heart, languor, Literature, rabindranath tagore
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Tagged andante con moto, Bavarian Radio Symphony, best classical music:, entertainment, EUZICASA, Great Compositions/Performances, lorin maazel, Make Music Part of Your Life Series, Mozart, Music, schubert symphony, Schubert Symphony No 5 B flat major, Schubert Symphony No 5 B flat major Bavarian RSO Maazel, video, YouTube
Martyr whose Apologia, or defense of the faith, is considered one of the most priceless documents of the early Church. Apollonius was a Roman senator who was denounced as a Christian by one of his … continue reading
A massive earthquake felt from Oregon to Los Angeles and as far inland as Nevada jolted San Francisco, Calif., at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906. The earthquake caused severe damage and loss of life in the San Francisco Bay area, and a three-day fire spawned by the shaking reduced 4.7 square miles of the city to blackened ruins. Military officials estimated $400 million of damage and a total of 700-800 killed. Modern research estimates that closer to 3,000 of San Francisco’s 400,000 inhabitants lost their lives.
The photo captures a painter sitting amid earthquake rubble painting a picture of ruins of large building after the earthquake.
Photo: Library of Congress
– See more at: http://www.historynet.com/picture-of-the-day#sthash.kTuHwCsJ.dpuf
Like much of Africa, the area that is now Zimbabwe was long controlled by Europeans. In 1922, the 34,000 European settlers chose to become a self-governing British colony, Southern Rhodesia. In 1923, Southern Rhodesia was annexed by the British Crown. A fight for independence took place in the 1970s. An independent constitution was written for Zimbabwe in London in 1979, and independence followed on April 18, 1980. Independence Day is celebrated in every city and district of the nation with political rallies, parades, traditional dances, singing, and fireworks. More… Discuss
Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation.
Widely considered one of the greatest distance runners in history, Haile Gebrselassie is an Ethiopian long-distance track and road running athlete. Over the course of his career, he has set more than 20 records and won numerous Olympic and World Championship titles, achieving major competition wins in outdoor, indoor, cross country, and road running races as short as 1,500 meters and as long as full marathons. In 1995, he beat the world record for the 5,000-meter run by how many seconds? More… Discuss
Posted in Educational, Fitness, running, biking, outdoors, Health and Environment, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Special Interest, Uncategorized
Tagged Haile Gebrselassie, road running races, the greatest distance, today's birthday: Haile Gebrselassie (1973), World Championship titles
One of the first flying aces in history, Roland Garros was a French aviator and WWI fighter pilot. Early in the war, Garros fitted a machine gun to the front of his plane so that he could shoot while flying and soon downed three German aircrafts. While on a mission in 1915, his fuel line clogged, and he was forced to land behind German lines. He was captured and held as a prisoner of war until 1918, when he managed to escape and rejoin the French army. What happened when he returned to combat? More… Discuss
Voodoo refers to West African religious beliefs and practices that also have adherents in the New World. Voodoo believers are most numerous in Haiti and Benin, where they enjoy official government recognition. Voodoo contends that all of nature is controlled by spiritual forces which must be acknowledged and honored through offerings and animal sacrifice. Voodoo’s incarnation in the American South is often called Louisiana Voodoo. What is a gris-gris? More… Discuss
| Definition: | (noun) A state of alarm or dread. |
| Synonyms: | apprehension |
| Usage: | With trepidation, the children approached the haunted house. Discuss. |
Posted in Educational, Uncategorized
Tagged trepidation, trepidation Definition, word: trepidation
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Tagged art, berliner philharmoniker, C-sharp minor, entertainment, EUZICASA, Franz Liszt, Great Compositions/Performances, Herbert von Karajan, Herbert von Karajan / Berliner Philharmoniker, hungarian rhapsodies, hungarian rhapsody, LISZT Orchestral Hungarian Rhapsody No 4, Make Music Part of Your Life Series, Music, YouTube
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Tagged art, Bratu- piano, Duo Artemis 2014 Constanta, entertainment, EUZICASA, Gabriel Marin- flute Andreea, Great Compositions/Performances, Make Music Part of Your Life Series, Music, Robert Schumann- Romanze op. 94 no. 2, Teatru de Opera si Balet Oleg Danovski, YouTube
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Tagged aram khachaturian, Aram Khachaturian - Masquerade: Waltz, art, entertainment, EUZICASA, Great Compositions/Performances, Khachaturian, Make Music Part of Your Life Series, Mikhail Lermontov, Music, St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, Waltz, YouTube
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Tagged Amilcare Ponchielli, Amilcare Ponchielli - La danza delle ore / La Danse des heures / Dance of the Hours, best classical music:, Dance of the Hours, entertainment, EUZICASA, Great Compositions/Performances, La danza delle ore, La Gioconda, Make Music Part of Your Life Series, Music, Rudolf Kempe, wiener philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker Rudolf Kempe, YouTube
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Tagged art, entertainment, EUZICASA, Henryk Górecki, Henryk Górecki - Symphony Nº3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). Second Movement, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Make Music Part of Your Life Series, movement, Music, Orchestra, Second Movement, Symphony nº3, YouTube
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
(from Collection of Indian Poems)
Posted in BOOKS, Educational, IN THE SPOTLIGHT, MEMORIES, MY TAKE ON THINGS, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS, PEOPLE AND PLACES HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, Poetry, Poets, Writers, QUOTATION, Special Interest, Uncategorized
Tagged art, entertainment, EUZICASA, Fifty Three-('Beautiful is thy wristlet, Gitanjali (from Collection of Indian Poems), Literature, rabindranath tagore, thy wristlet, wristlet
In this time of the swollen grape,
the wine begins to come to life
between the sea and the mountain ranges.
In Chile now, cherries are dancing,
the dark mysterious girls are singing,
and in guitars, water is shining.
The sun is touching every door
and making wonder of the wheat.
The first wine is pink in colour,
is sweet with the sweetness of a child,
the second wine is able-bodied,
strong like the voice of a sailor,
the third wine is a topaz, is
a poppy and a fire in one.
My house has both the sea and the earth,
my woman has great eyes
the colour of wild hazelnut,
when night comes down, the sea
puts on a dress of white and green,
and later the moon in the spindrift foam
dreams like a sea-green girl.
I have no wish to change my planet.
[A.R.]
379
asia-america-europa-australia-antarctica
greenworld-bluewater-clearair-myworld
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Center for Effective Government (Access the website here)
EFF: Access Here
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC -_- ACCESS HERE (CLICK TO ACCESS THE WEBSITE)
LEGENDS OF AMERICA - VISIT HERE -
FAMOUS POETS AND POEMS: ACCESS FROM HERE ANYTIME- ANYWHERE
kjazz 88.1 FM (California State University, Long Beach: ACCESS HERE
Public Catalogue Foundation (access from here)
Environmental Working Group (you're one click away)
http://www.change.org/ (Click to access Site)
HAIKU TOPICS (ACCESS HERE)
American Songwriter Widget
WEB GALLERY OF ARTS - ACCESS HERE
THE BRITISH LIBRARY (ACCESS HERE)
American Bone Health
WIDGET: The Aria Database (you are one click away)
AllMusic (one click away)
WIDGET_Classic Cat: The Free Classical Music Directory (one click away)
SHAKESPEARE NAVIGATOR A MUST HAVE WIDGET! (YOU ARE ONE CLICK AWAY!)
Towns of Yesteryears - Ghost Towns of Today (Access a ghost town here)
BIBLIOKLPT (One Click Away)
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA Access Here
Widget: Public domain Images (Access Here)
News Manual - a professional resource for journalism and the media (click to access)
A la découverte de l'encyclopédie Larousse (access here)
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America - Online Chapel - Calendar (Click to access)
Today in History: click to Access Here
Judicial Watch: Access here
mp3.li: your music library access here (Always opens in a new page)
nourished kitchen-reviving traditional foods: (access/open in new window)
400000 IR - Photos - Metropolitan Museum of Art (Access from here)
KUNJI SAN-Martial Arts Supplies
Movie Sounds org
BibleHistoryOnline.com
THE HOLY ROSARY PORTAL: PRAY WITH US
The University of Sydney- Glycemic Index
Access The Public Cataloggue Foundation: Your Paintings
CIDSE - TOGETHER FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE (CHANGE FOR THE PLANET -CARE FOR THE PROPLE-ACCESS THIS NEW WEBSITE FROM EUZICASA)
euzicasa 
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