First Floor Tarpley

The Reinhardt University History Program Blog

First Floor Tarpley

Category Archives: Atrocity

Tiananmen Square

Posted on by

Thirty years ago today, the Chinese Communist Party massacred thousands of student protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The most iconic photograph of the event was taken by American photographer Jeff Widener the next day.

The soldiers driving the tanks were not so evil that they were prepared to run over the protestor, but the man was spirited away and has never been seen since.

For many other photographs of that fateful day follow this link from Business Insider. It deserves to be remembered, especially given how China, and its Western flunkies, have tried assiduously to throw the whole thing down the memory hole.

When they do acknowledge its existence, they will say, well, we were right to crack down. China has a history of revolutions starting from seemingly innocuous events (e.g. the Railway Rights Protection Movement), and the students of 1989 were allegedly trying to do the same thing. So by asserting its authority, the CCP maintained the regime, which could then institute reforms on its own terms and its own schedule, setting up China to be the economic juggernaut it is today. Compare this to the rest of the formerly Communist world, particularly Russia, which was looted by oligarchs (in cahoots with the Harvard Boys), and even now is in demographic free fall, with much less global influence than it once had.

There is something to be said for this critique.

But real countries don’t massacre their own citizens.

Circassians

Posted on by

May 21 is Circassian Memorial Day, when the worldwide Circassian community remembers the Russian-led Circassian Genocide of the 1860s, part of Russia’s attempt to expand into the Caucasus. Circassians (also known as the Adyghe) are largely Sunni Muslim, but their language is Northwest Caucasian, i.e. not Indo-European. Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, was once the Circassian capital.

Wikipedia.

I have discovered that the Circassians fly a distinctive flag, which dates from the nineteenth century and was adopted as the flag of the Russian Republic of Adygea 1992. Apparently it was designed by David Urquhart, a Scottish diplomat serving in the Ottoman Empire. The stars reference the twelve Adyghe princedoms.

Uh-Oh

Posted on by

Apparently the guy who shot up the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand had “Charles Martel” emblazoned on his gun, and designated Anders Breivik a “Knight Justiciar.”

Get ready for another round of accusations that the study of the Middle Ages is inherently racist.

Not that I approve of shooting people as they’re going to Friday prayers. Even Charles Martel fought like a man, on the field of battle. If you simply must participate in some counter-jihad, go where the actual wars are, like in northern Nigeria or northern Iraq. Or do a stint in the IDF.

Note to the Sun: a masjid is a mosque. It makes no sense to talk of “Masjid Al Noor Mosque” or the “Linwood Masjid Mosque.”

A friend of mine suggests that the shooter deliberately picked Christchurch as the place for his massacre, because it highlights the irony that there are mosques in a place called Christchurch. But there are Christian churches throughout the Dar-al-Islam! Why not live and let live? Sheesh.

Coptic Martyrs

Posted on by

From the Facebook page of Our Lady of the Mountains of Jasper, Georgia, an interesting icon:

An article on The Stream indicates that this icon was made in 2015 by Serbian artist Nikola Sarić. It references the kidnapping and beheading of 21 Christians in Libya by agents of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which had taken place earlier in 2015. Twenty of the men were Egyptian Copts, and one was Ghanaian, whose darker face is shown on the top right; they were in Libya as construction workers in the city of Sirte when ISIL nabbed them.

The executions took place on the Mediterranean beach on February 15, 2015, with ISIL agents dressed in black and their victims in orange jumpsuits, referencing the outfits worn by al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Painting, Tomb of Rameses VI. Pinterest.

I like how there is something Egyptian about this icon, both from the way the figures stand and how they are arranged, and yet it is not so stylized that that horrific event isn’t instantly recognizable. I also like how icon-making is a living tradition and for actual martyrs for the faith, not just revered but non-religious figures like Harvey Milk, Steve Biko, or Mother Jones.

Little Ice Age

Posted on by

A story that’s been making the rounds:

Genocide of Native Americans by European settlers was cause of Little Ice Age

The upheavals following the first contact with Europeans in 1492 is thought to have cut the population of 60 million living across the Americas down to five or six million within just 100 years

The “Little Ice Age” of the 16th and 17th centuries was triggered by the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas by European settlers, new research suggests.

Scientists have long wondered what caused the drop in temperatures so severe that it caused the River Thames to freeze over.

New analysis by University College London (UCL) argues that so many people were slaughtered or died of disease that the amount of agricultural land dramatically reduced, which in turn sucked carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

Known as the “Great Dying,” the upheavals following the first contact with Europeans in 1492 is thought to have cut the population of 60 million living across the Americas down to five or six million within just 100 years. Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, the study found that much of the land previously cultivated by indigenous civilizations would have fallen into disuse, becoming swallowed up by forest and grassland.

It estimates that an area of 56 million hectares, roughly the size of modern-day France, would have been “rewilded” in this way.

The scale of the change is believed to have drawn an amount of CO2 from the atmosphere equivalent to two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.

Professor Mark Maslin, from UCL’s School of Geography, said: “There is a marked cooling around that time which is called the Little Ice Age, and what’s interesting is that we can see natural processes giving a bit of cooling, but to actually get the full cooling – double the natural processes – you have to have this genocide–generated drop in CO2.”

The research team examined historical population data, using it to model the reduction of land devoted to agriculture.

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, said: “Scientists understand that the so-called Little Ice Age was caused by several factors – a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, a series of large volcanic eruptions, changes in land use and a temporary decline in solar activity. The drop in CO2 is itself partly due the settlement of the Americas and the resulting collapse of the indigenous population.

“It demonstrates that human activities affected the climate well before the industrial revolution began.”

An interesting theory! But I have some questions. How many Native Americans actually practiced agriculture? And why do cultivated crops put more CO2 into the atmosphere than wild flora? This quite apart from the immense difficulty of determining past population numbers in the absence of a proper census. It would have been good for the article to cite actual data (from ice cores, etc.) about just how much atmospheric carbon dioxide declined in the Early Modern Period.

But as is so often the case with newspaper articles, you have to read all the way to the end to get the real story (which is why I have taken the liberty of reproducing the entire piece). Prof. Hawkins says something completely commonsensical – that the LIA was caused by a variety of factors, only one of which was the decline of atmospheric CO2. Thus the headline, that “genocide” “caused” the Little Ice Age, seems completely overstated, in the usual journalistic fashion.

Lachlan Macquarie

Posted on by

From the antipodean ABC, courtesy my friend Lachlan Mead, an article assessing the George Washington of Australia:

Fact check: Was Lachlan Macquarie a mass murderer who ordered the genocide of Indigenous people?

The claim

Lachlan Macquarie, governor of NSW from 1810 to 1821, is often remembered by history as a man of the enlightenment who brought civilisation to the colony.

Indeed, the plaque attached to his monument in Sydney’s Hyde Park reads: “He was a perfect gentleman, a Christian and supreme legislator of the human heart.”

But late last month Bronwyn Carlson, head of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University, challenged this during an ABC RN Breakfast interview.

Asked if she would be satisfied with a different or additional plaque, Professor Carlson said: “Would people be satisfied to say this: ‘Here stands a mass murderer who ordered the genocide of Indigenous people’?”

Is this characterisation of Macquarie accurate? Did Macquarie commit mass murder? Did he order genocide? RMIT ABC Fact Check delves into a fraught and controversial part of our history.

The verdict

The issue is not cut and dried.

In April 1816, Macquarie ordered soldiers under his command to kill or capture any Aboriginal people they encountered during a military operation aimed at creating a sense of “terror”.

At least 14 men, women and children were brutally killed, some shot, others driven over a cliff.

Although Macquarie’s orders included an instruction to punish the guilty with as little injury to the innocent as possible, archival evidence shows he knew innocent people could be killed.

In addition, Macquarie explicitly instructed his soldiers to offer those Aboriginal groups encountered an opportunity to surrender, and to open fire only after meeting “resistance”.

These instructions appear to have been ignored. Historical records suggest the soldiers offered no opportunity to surrender, opening fire on a group of people ambushed at night and who were fleeing in terror.

Macquarie appears to have glossed over this failure in the weeks following the massacre, telling his superior back in England that his men acted “perfectly in Conformity to the instructions I had furnished them”, and claiming the soldiers had indeed encountered resistance before opening fire.

Macquarie was ultimately responsible for his men. By today’s standards, his actions — and lack of action in not bringing soldiers who disobeyed his instructions to account — would, as a minimum, likely be regarded as a war crime involving a disproportionate response that led to a significant loss of life.

And, depending on the definition, the incident might also be described as “mass murder”, perhaps akin to recent military massacres in which innocent civilians attempting to flee were killed.

The issue of whether or not the actions amount to genocide is a complex one. A legal definition of genocide did not exist until after World War II. It is questionable whether this can be applied retrospectively to Macquarie’s actions, which took place some 130 years before the UN General Assembly made genocide a crime under international law.

Furthermore, it seems unlikely that Macquarie set about deliberately to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, as per the UN definition, however misguided and destructive some of his Indigenous policies might have been. It is, therefore, problematic to suggest that Macquarie, as an individual, was guilty of ordering genocide.

However, it can be argued that the impact of the wider conflict between Aboriginal people and Europeans (whether soldiers or vigilante settlers), combined with a range of other factors — the loss of land and food sources, the spread of disease, the removal of children, and alcohol abuse, for example — contributed to the large-scale loss of life and culture that resembled genocide.

Experts contacted by Fact Check acknowledged the nuance in the arguments, but differed in their interpretations of Macquarie’s actions and his culpability or otherwise.

Read the whole thing.