NM's blog

An interview with Chris Kaspar de Ploeg

We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children… During an assault [on Indians], the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female or even discriminate as to age. —Cited in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 358; cited in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 379. It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so and even if it requires a campaign lasting the whole of next year. They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made. —  Major General John Pope, who led the Union forces, to Colonel Henry Sibley in David A. Nichols, “The Other Civil War: Lincoln and the Indians,” Minnesota History 44, no. 1 (1974): 4.

Armenian Genocide The War also brought full-scale genocide. The mass murders of Armenians by Turks in 1915 should not be thought of being marginal to Europe, committed amid a backward or ‘barbarous’ Islamic civilization. They were committed by a modernizing secular state, still a major player in European power-politics, committed to the most advanced European ideals. Thus I will address it at some length. [My italics N.M.] The death-toll was somewhere over one million, fifty to seventy per cent of all Armenians in the Turkish lands.14 If this was slightly lower than the Jewish loss-rate in the ‘Final Solution’, this was mainly because more Armenians could flee into neutral countries—350,000 of them managing to reach Europe, the biggest group of refugees during the war. The genocidal decision was taken by the Committee of Unity and Progress (CUP), the highest level of the Ittihadist (Young Turk) government. The orders were transmitted through reliable Ittihadist Governors and army grou...

 A Syrian gravedigger recounts a genocide, but is anyone listening?

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