This post is inspired by a friend of ours who told a very interesting story from her growing up in a neighbouring Southern state.  (And when you live in Tennessee, that doesn’t mean much, because most of the Southern states and some of the border ones too are neighbours.)  She grew up in the 1980’s, and was up for one of these “Governor’s schools” for exceptional young people.  In her case the guy who was in charge was gay, and she came from an Independent Baptist family.  Needless to say, she was turned down for the school, and to keep his perfect record her brother was turned down too.

The gay man didn’t discriminate much longer; he died of AIDS.  But after the ball anti-discrimination legislation (and before, as was the case in Miami) has been a major push of the LGBT community.  It’s back in front of Congress, although the executive decision to extend the 1964 Civil Rights Act makes that effort a waste of political capital.  And here in Chattanooga the city, while we grieve over the shooting of five servicemen, passed one of these ordinances.

The whole concept of anti-discrimination legislation is to enforce fairness in our society.  The tricky part is twofold.  First, which groups benefit from “fairness”?  And second, who does the enforcing?

The answer to the first has traditionally been driven by the American obsession with identity politics: race, gender, and now sexual orientation.  (The transgender movement has complicated all of this in ways that are not fully understood, but then again so have multi-racial people).  The truth is that class background and status are more important, but that would force too many people to eat crow around here.

The second depends upon who is running the show.  Same social class distinctions bring up the issue of income inequality, something which people talk about but don’t act upon.  It’s understandable: most of the people doing the talking would have to step down in the zero-sum society and let others move up, which they’re certainly not ready to do.

The LGBT community has shown a talent for getting the rich and powerful on their side.  They are the ones which ultimately arbitrate who gets what in a society where power becomes more centralised by the day.  Coupled with the weakening rule of law, what we end up with is simple: a society where those who rule make the rules and change them when it suits them, irrespective of what the “people’s representatives” might have to say in the matter.

Some think that SCOTUS’ ruling on same-sex civil marriage was the turning point.  It was not; it was in the tradition of Roe vs. Wade where SCOTUS dug up rights that no one else had found.  It’s one thing to create law ex nihilo; it’s quite another to contradict its plain meaning when it didn’t work out the way it was supposed to.  That’s what happened with King vs. Burwell, the Obamacare decision.  The people who came up with the scheme knew perfectly well what they  anticipated would happen: they figured that, in the absence of subsidised health care on exchanges, they would have people howling at the states to give them.

But, strange thing, that didn’t happen.  The American political dynamic didn’t work the way they thought it would.  There were no unwashed masses howling for health care; the masses took a bath and howled against Obamacare.  So SCOTUS fixed the problem by letting the Feds go on with exchanges which the law had not provided for.

Such blatant rewriting of the law is a clear sign that we have passed beyond the rule of law; we have rule by elites.  That’s a big reason the current Occupant has been busy pushing his branch left; he figures that the judiciary, of like mind and class, will go along with him at least half the time, maybe more.

Breaking down the rule of law in this country will have two effects.

The first, short-term one, is that elite opinion will drive whose discrimination gets redressed and whose does not.  The results will be similar to those experienced by my friend, only on a wider scale.  (And it’s a lot easier to discriminate and get away with it than you think; our bureaucratised system makes it easier to trash people than to lift them up).

The second, long-term one, is that people will realise that the rule of law is out.  That revelation would change the way people interact with the government–and with each other–in ways that only people from outside the U.S. understand.  The big casualty will be the moral force of the law; the state will be seen as a big protection racket for itself and its patrons and the population will respond accordingly.

And then things will really get interesting.

This continues a series inspired (somewhat) by Noel Barber’s The Sultans.  The previous instalment is here.

The question of the massacres of the Armenians during the Ottoman Empire is one of those poisonous issues that never seems to go away.  But what can we learn from it? To find that out, we need to go back to where it all started.

The decline of the Ottoman Empire was a long one that started with the death of Suleiman I and ran all the way until the last Sultan abdicated in 1922.  One of those countries which took advantage of decline was Russia.  In 1774 one of those wars ended with the Treaty of Kainardji, where the Ottomans almost lost control of the Crimea (the drama over that little peninsula never ends, does it?) But more relevant to the present discussion was the following treaty provision:

Turkey promises to protect constantly the Christian religion and churches and allow the ministers of Russia at Constantinople to make representations on their behalf.

What this basically did was make a large part of the Sutan’s subjects agents of a foreign power.  The broad term for this kind of thing, which could also be judicial and economic, is “concessions,” and other European powers, especially the British and French, would pile on the Empire in similar ways.  The Ottoman Empire was the first major non-European power to be subjected to this kind of thing, basically colonialism without a colony.  The Europeans were so enamoured with the results that they repeated it elsewhere, especially in China, where the Chinese kicked back hard, first with the Boxer Rebellion and ultimately with the People’s Republic.

Like many things, it took a while for the ramifications of this to kick in.  And the Armenians within the Empire did their best to be the loyal, productive subjects they were through Ottoman history.  Even when the Sultan raised the Banner named Barack and declared jihad on the Russians in 1876, the Armenian religious leadership responded as follows:

Shortly after the declaration of war Monsignor Narses, Patriarch of the Armenian Church, also addressed to his flock a pastoral, in which he called upon them to show, as in the past, their unalterable fidelity to the Ottoman throne. He recalled to their memory how the Armenians had worked for the good of the Fatherland, and had contributed to it by agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, and even by participation in administrative reforms. Pie summoned them to remain, as a Christian people, faithful to their traditions, to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things which are God’s.” The Patriarch exhorted his people to give an example of fraternal love, whether to fellow-believers or otherwise, and, above all, to pray that God ” may deliver us from the implacable enemies who come to our attack.” His Eminence further inculcated the duty of assisting by every possible aid and contribution the Ottoman Government, to which they were bound to furnish every moral and material support. His Eminence also directed the Armenians to pray for the success of the Sultan’s arms, ” so that our ecclesiastical liberties, our language, and the free administration of our scholastic and religious establishments, may be preserved to us.” (H.M. Hozier, The Russo-Turkish War, Vol 1)

However, not all Armenians were under the Sultan’s rule.  Some had been lost to conquest, but others to emigration, driven by the “Turkification” process (which included military service) and the uninspiring economic state of the Empire.  Many of these Armenians, inspired by European nationalism, began to agitate for either their own state or more rights under the one they had.

That played into the paranoia of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.  In 1894, following some outbreaks of rebellion, he decided to “give them a box on the ears.”  What that meant was the first of the Armenian massacres, which were carried out with precision and direction from the Sultan himself, with help from any non-Armenian population which would join in the slaughter.  This included the elimination of the Christian population of Trebizond and the burning of the cathedral in Urfa, which was packed with refugees from the slaughter and who perished with the building.

The massacres went off and on for three years.  It helped to wreck the Sultan’s reputation among his own people and earned him the moniker “Abdul the Damned.”  It seriously aided the push to do something drastic about the Sultan’s rule.  That something came in 1908, when the “sons of donkeys,” led by the Young Turks, forced Adbul Hamid to abdicate and set up a constitutional monarchy–of sorts.

The Young Turks–soon lead by the triumvirate of Enver, Talaat and Jemal after a coup in 1913–found out quickly that taking charge of a nation and making it work were two different things.  They actually came to an agreement to reform the Armenian provinces, one worked out with Russian leadership.  But having come to power in the midst of the Balkan Wars, they found themselves in the middle of a much great conflict–the First World War–on the side of Germany.

That put them back into war with Russia.  Enver Pasha, a parade ground general if there ever was one, decided to invade the Caucasus Mountains at the start of winter, where Turkish armies froze to death and which was a military disaster for the Ottomans.  Unable to achieve victory against the Tsar’s armies, and incensed that some of these armies were Armenian volunteers, the “progressives” decided that genocide was in order.

With no more use for Armenians than Woodrow Wilson had for black people, Talaat boasted that “I have accomplished more towards solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in three years.”  Talaat had the brass to ask American Ambassador Morgenthau the names of the dead Armenians with American life insurance policies so that the Empire could collect the death benefits.  Enver even brushed off the Ambassador’s diplomatic attempt to let him shift the blame to his underlings; Enver stated that “…I am entirely willing to accept the responsibility for everything that has taken place.”  That, of course, was the death of three-quarters of a million Armenians.

The impending loss of World War I likewise was the end of the rule of Enver, Talaat and Jemal, who left Constantinople in a German torpedo-boat.  Turkey stumbled through several years of further conflict and suffering until Kamal Ataturk, who was the military genius Enver was not, deposed the last Sultan and make Turkey a secular republic.

At this point it’s time to pause and attempt to learn some things from this horrific history.  A good place to start would be another observation by Thomas Sowell in Black Rednecks and White Liberals:

Past grievances, real or imaginary, are equally irredeemable in the present, for nothing that is done among living contemporaries can change in the slightest the sins and the sufferings of generations who took those sins and sufferings to the grave with them in centuries past.  Galling as it may be to be helpless to redress the crying injustices of the past, symbolic expiation in the present can only create new injustices among the living and new problems for the future, when newborn babies enter the world with pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day.  Both have their futures jeopardized, not only by their internal strife but also by the increased vulnerability of a disunited society to external dangers from other nations and from international terrorist networks.

To be relevant in our times, history must not be controlled by our times.  Its integrity as a record of the past is what allows us to draw lessons from it.

One of the most chilling lessons of the history of the twentieth century is how deceptive domestic tranquillity can be in a multi-ethnic society, when it takes only the right circumstances and the right demagogue to turn neighbour murderously against neighbour.

First: the Turks need to simply admit the truth of these massacres.  They were bad.  To some extent there is a disconnect because the Ottoman Empire was superseded by the Republic of Turkey.  The Turks’ ancestors did not pick the Sultan or really the Young Turks for that matter.

Second: the Armenians need to realise that some of the “payback” they seek has already been done. Armenian nationalists assassinated Talaat and Jemal (the Bolsheviks dispatched Enver in combat).  And obsessively nursing grievances about this is unworthy of one of the most enterprising people on God’s earth.

Third: we need to realise that the combination of European nationalism and the centralising tendencies of the modern state are, together, poison, a poison that transcends the Armenian tragedy.  We live in a world where it’s possible for a variety of people can live the way they want to, especially with the technology we have.  But instead we see democratic institutions being used to force a uniformity on society based upon the possible effects that certain groups might have on the rest of society.  In that context what could be means of liberation become tools of enslavement.

If we could learn that last lesson, the Armenians who perished in the desert–and all of the other groups who have experienced persecution, suffering and mass death–would not have died in vain.

This continues a series inspired (somewhat) by Noel Barber’s The Sultans.  The previous instalment is here.

It should be obvious from this post that the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state.  In fact, in its day it was the Islamic state in the Middle East and anywhere else.  Yet it’s different in many ways from ISIS.  How is this so?  And why?

The first thing to remember is that the Ottoman Empire was Turkish, not Arabic.  Given the fact that the Qur’an is considered non-translatable (something I agree with) and that Arabic culture permeates the Islamic world, it’s easy to conflate the two.  But in fact many of the important Islamic countries today–Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even Arabic-speaking (sort of) countries like Algeria are not Arabic.  So things can be different.

The Ottomans, as was the case in previous caliphates, imposed a dhimmi system on their non-Islamic subjects (primarily but not exclusively Christian, as the bloodbath in Iraq and Syria reminds us).  And the Ottomans could be brutal, although brutality in war was the common currency of the Middle East then and still is now.  But once things settled down and they established their control the Ottomans did not wipe out their non-Muslim populations, but sequestered them in their millet system, where they were ruled by their own authorities who in turn answered to those of the Sultan.  They lived in divided cities and of course the countryside.  And they experienced many restrictions; they had, for example, to dismount from a horse when a Muslim passed.

And the rulers could be reasonable.  Grand Vizier Ahmed Kiuprili granted permission to rebuild some churches.  When one of his people pointed out that an old law required that they be rebuilt using original stones, he brushed him off with the following:

They were fools who invented that formula and greater fools still are they who follow it.  These people desire to repair their temple; if it is so dilapidated that to repair it is impossible, let them build a new one.  All that we need care about is, that they do it at their own expense, and not with the money of Muslims; and provided they pay their tribute regularly, the rest does not concern us.

(Egypt has a similar law, probably an Ottoman inheritance; they could use this Grand Vizier, who also laid down the principle of free trade based on the silence of the Qur’an.)

And the Sultan Mahmud II stated that “I distinguish among my subjects Muslims in the mosque, Christians in the church, Jews in the synagogue, but there is no difference among them in any other way.”

So how did we get from this state to, say the tragedy of the Armenians?  The answer comes from Europe.

The Ottomans divided up their population into their respective groups which lived to varying degrees under their own laws and customs.  In a society where the locus of power is at the centre and autocratically held, various groups are useful to the power holder because they can be used as counterweights to other possible power challengers in the society.  In this way the religious and ethnic lack of “purity” can be used by the ruler as a way of perpetuating his or her control.

The Enlightenment established the principle that all people should be equal under the law and that the law should apply uniformly to everyone.  This concept was central to both the American and French Revolutions, but it spread to other parts of Europe, both before, during and after Napoleon’s time.  An example from the Christian side of the Balkan border is instructive.

In 1781 the Austrian Emperor Joseph II issued an edict of toleration for the Jews, but at the same time began the process of bringing the Jews into a legal, social and educational system where the special authority of their own religious leadership was no longer recognised.  The idea was that the Jews would be more useful to the Empire, albeit in a way different from before.   The Ottoman Empire went through this same process, albeit with lags both in time and in the depth of penetration of progress.

Parallel with that was the spread of European nationalism, the idea that people groups should have their own national expression.  With the spread of more universal education, this resulted in a gradual “Turkification” process in the Ottoman Empire, which didn’t sit well with many of the ethnic and religious groups which lived there.  The beginning of the modern exodus of Christians from the Middle East can be traced to this process, coupled with the desire for economic opportunity.

In relatively homogeneous countries like the UK, France, Spain, Germany and Italy, this process was considerably smoother than in multi-ethnic and religious amalgams such as Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.  The first major rush for the exits in the latter was the Greek revolt, which resulted in the re-establishment of that nation.  (I wonder if Europeans are now sorry they helped that…) From then to World War I there was a procession of nations outgoing: Bosnia (which got scarfed up by the Austrians, fatally for many,) Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, and finally Albania.

The European Union, formed as it was after the two bloodbaths of the World Wars, is a tacit admission that European nationalism is poison.  The break-up of another attempt at multi-ethnic union, Yugoslavia, made the point at its worst, and Europe’s nations still struggle with separatist movements, especially the Catalans and the Scots.  Although Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were rickety edifices that ultimately collapsed, finding a better way has proven a difficult process.

Part of the downside of European nationalism are attempts to “clean up” ethnic diversity.  The best known of these is the Holocaust that the Nazis perpetrated, although the mass migrations resulting from border shifting weren’t pretty either.  But before most all of this was the tragic massacre of the Armenians, and to this we will turn in our next post.

This continues a series inspired (somewhat) by Noel Barber’s The Sultans.  The previous instalment is here.

Ottoman culture has seeped into ours in ways we’re not aware of.  When we hear words such as divan, caftan and ottoman itself, we’re hearing about things that came from that culture.  Like most people, I like to take in the old movie.  Ever wonder why, when the movie involves a harem, the eunuch is always black?

The reason for that is simple: in the Ottoman Sultan’s palace, the head eunuch–the Kislar Aga, literally the head of the women–was always black, as were his underlings.  How he got to Constantinople and his high position was not a pretty process, as Thomas Sowell describes in Black Rednecks and White Liberals:

By a variety of accounts, most of the slaves who were marched across the Sahara toward the Mediterranean died on the way.  While these were mostly women and girls, the males faced a special danger–castration to produce the eunuchs in demand as harem attendants in the Islamic world.

Because castration was forbidden by Islamic law, the operation tended to be performed–usually crudely–in the hinterlands, before the slave caravans reached places within the effective control of the Ottoman Empire.  The great majority of those operated on died as a result, but the price of eunuchs was so much higher than the price of other slaves that the practice was still profitable on the balance.

The British, with their newly found aversion for slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century, found that their appeals to the Ottomans to end the institution went over like a lead balloon:

When the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire first raised the issue of abolishing slavery with the sultan in 1840, he reported this response:

…I have heard with extreme astonishment accompanied with a smile at a proposition for destroying an institution closely inter-woven with the frame of society in this country, and intimately connected with the law and with the habits and even the religion of all classes, from the Sultan himself on down the lowest peasant.

The Ottomans eventually “officially” abolished slavery, an abolition largely honoured in the breach.  The British for their part tried to help out, but sometimes it backfired.  Gen. Charles “Chinese” Gordon tried to stop the 80,000-100,000 slave trade through the Sudan, and the Sudanese responded with the revolt of the Mahdi. Gordon was killed and the British sent Lord Kitchener to finally put down the revolt.

As the British ambassador was told, slavery was interwoven into society from top to bottom.  In addition to the eunuchs, all of the harem women were slaves.  The Ottomans invented the devşirme whereby young Christian men, mostly from the Balkans, were taken, forcibly converted to Islam, and became the feared Janissaries of military fame.  The white Circassians contributed generously to the harem slaves; they had pride of place there.

And slavery was there at the end.  When Abdul Hamid II abdicated in 1908 as the Young Turks revolted, his Kislar Aga was executed for cruelty.  When the last Sultan, Mahomet VI, abdicated, a eunuch helped him aboard the HMS Malaya for his voyage into Italian exile, and followed his five wives who came later.

The Ottomans’ reluctance to part with involuntary servitude should give us pause about how “obvious” it was to eliminate it.  As Sowell notes:

While slavery was common to all civilisations, as well as to peoples considered uncivilised, only one civilisation developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history–Western civilisation.  Today it seems so obvious that, as Abraham Lincoln said, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”  But the hard fact is that, for thousands of years, slavery was simply not an issue, even among the great religious thinkers or moral philosophers of civilisations around the world.

We may wonder why it took eighteen centuries after the Sermon on the Mount for Christians to develop an anti-slavery movement, but a more profound question is why not even the leading moralists in other civilisations rejected slavery at all.  “There is no evidence,” according to a scholarly study, “that slavery came under serious attack in any part of the world before the eighteenth century.”  That is when it first came under attack in Europe.

Themselves the leading slave traders of the eighteenth century, Europeans nevertheless became, in the nineteenth century, the destroyers of slavery around the world–not just in European societies or European offshoot societies overseas, but in non-European societies as well, over the bitter oppositions of Africans, Arabs, Asians and others.  Moreover within Western civilisation, the principal impetus for the abolition of slavery came first from very conservative religious activists–people who would today be called the “religious right.”  Clearly, this story is not “politically correct” in today’s terms.  Hence it is ignored, as if it never happened.