I recently linked to an article containing a number of WWII images taken in Nazi occupied Russian territory.  As an introduction to the pictures the article’s author wrote the following:

The photos are shocking and cruel, but they should teach us to respect others’ lives and dignity. We are equal and we are not born to be slaves.

Moving prose.  We are principally equal – human beings – and deserve equal treatment. We are not born to be slaves. Not to each other, not to ideology, not to States.  We should increase our principal understanding of what respect, dignity, and slavery means. We should increase the measure of respect, dignity, and liberty we give each other and demand from the institutions that govern us.

That bit of reflection prompted me to do bit of research into the series of atrocities the Armenians call the Armenian Genocide, but Ottomans Turks, the perpetrators of the aforementioned atrocities, deny was genocide. You probably know that whether to label the over one million Armenians that Ottoman-Turkey killed during the first world war is a contentious issue internationally and domestically.  For instance:

Two years ago [in 2008], before a resolution was to be put to a vote in the House, Turkey recalled Ambassador [to the US] Sensoy in protest. Its president warned of “serious troubles” and its top general said that military ties with the U.S. would never be the same. To limit further damage, the Bush administration and eight former secretaries of state then weighed in to kill the bill. It worked.

With regard to the fight over whether to officially label the Turk-on-Armenian atrocities ‘genocide’ this author persuasively argues what I believe is a more important point:

Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecution if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying that the terrible thing that happened to the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire was not a genocide. In Turkey, you get prosecuted for saying it was. What is state-ordained truth in the Alps is state-ordained falsehood in Anatolia. * * *

This kind of nonsense is all the more dangerous when it comes wearing the mask of virtue. A perfect example is the recent attempt to enforce limits to the interpretation of history across the whole EU in the name of “combating racism and xenophobia”. A proposed “framework decision” of the justice and home affairs council of the EU, initiated by the German justice minister Brigitte Zypries, suggests that in all EU member states “publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes” should be “punishable by criminal penalties of a maximum of at least between one and three years imprisonment”. * * *

Let me be clear. I believe it is very important that nations, states, peoples and other groups (not to mention individuals) should face up, solemnly and publicly, to the bad things done by them or in their name. The West German leader Willy Brandt falling silently to his knees in Warsaw before a monument to the victims and heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto is, for me, one of the noblest images of postwar European history. For people to face up to these things, they have to know about them in the first place. So these subjects must be taught in schools as well as publicly commemorated. But before they are taught, they must be researched. The evidence must be uncovered, checked and sifted, and various possible interpretations tested against it.

It’s this process of historical research and debate that requires complete freedom – subject only to tightly drawn laws of libel and slander, designed to protect living persons but not governments, states or national pride (as in the notorious article 301 of the Turkish penal code). The historian’s equivalent of a natural scientist’s experiment is to test the evidence against all possible hypotheses, however extreme, and then submit what seems to him or her the most convincing interpretation for criticism by professional colleagues and for public debate. This is how we get as near as one ever can to truth about the past.

How, for example, do you refute the absurd conspiracy theory, which apparently still has some currency in parts of the Arab world, that “the Jews” were behind the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York? By forbidding anyone from saying that, on pain of imprisonment? No. You refute it by refuting it. By mustering all the available evidence, in free and open debate. This is not just the best way to get at the facts; ultimately, it’s the best way to combat racism and xenophobia too. So join us, please, to see off the nanny state and its memory police.

The author’s name is Timothy Garton Ash. He has a good piece here on Europe’s illogical, illiberal, and appalling stance degrading position on civil liberty, and especially free speech.  A snippet:

So, for example, last week the home secretary pathetically and idiotically banned the Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering the UK to show his noxious and offensive anti-Islam film at the invitation of members of the House of Lords. Result: a curtailment of free speech that gives Wilders more free publicity than he could otherwise have dreamed of. And how does the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne react? Oh, that’s all right, he says, because the film is really offensive. Well, d’oh. Call yourself a liberal? John Stuart Mill would be turning in his grave. And I shall need some convincing that the Conservative frontbench are going to be any better.

I’m not sure I fully understand all the reasons for this cravenness, but here’s one. A couple of years ago I asked a very senior New Labour politician if his government had not got the balance between security and liberty wrong. “Well”, he replied, “one thing I can tell you is that if you ask the British people they will always choose more security.” And this is where the ball comes back to us. Since our leaders are now mainly followers – following the latest opinion poll, focus group or newspaper campaign – it’s up to us, the people, to change their view of what “the people” want.

Pardon my digression. Atrocities should be be investigated thoroughly, and people free of Orwellian restrictions on speech and thought should discuss them openly to find truth. Here are some links with pertinent information about what the Turks did to Armenians during the First World War.

Images:

Here’s a m0ral-relativistic argument against labeling the Armenian atrocities as genocide.

This is a good window into the Armenian point of view.

Finally, here’s the transcript of a Sixty Minutes video clip on the matter.  Excerpt below.

(CBS) Wars are fought over oil, land, water, but rarely over history, especially about something that happened nearly 100 years ago. But that’s what Turkey and Armenia are still fighting over: what to label the mass deportation and subsequent massacre of more than a million Christian Armenians from Ottoman Turkey during World War I.

Armenians and an overwhelming number of historians say that Turkey’s rulers committed genocide, that its actions were a model for what Hitler did to the Jews. The Turks, meanwhile, say their ancestors never carried out such crimes, and that they too were victims in a world war.

Ever since, this battle over history has not only ensnared the two nations but even the White House and Congress, where resolutions officially recognizing the genocide are currently moving through the House and Senate.

But our story begins where the lives of so many Armenians ended, far from Istanbul, in the desert.

“60 Minutes” and correspondent Bob Simon took a drive into what is now Syria, to the barren wilderness, to what amounts to the largest Armenian cemetery in the world.

“As many as 450,000 Armenians died here,” author Peter Balakian told Simon.

Balakian is an Armenian American who has written extensively about what happened in this desolate place.

According to Balakian, 450,000 Armenians died in this spot in the desert. “In this region called Deir Zor, it is the greatest graveyard of the Armenian Genocide,” he explained.

Deir Zor is to Armenians what Auschwitz is to Jews. The most ghoulish thing about the place is that 95 years later the evidence of the massacres is everywhere.

Just a short distance from the banks of Euphrates there’s a dump. It’s also the site of a mass grave. It has never been excavated. All we had to do was scratch the surface of the sand to collect evidence of what had happened here.

Under the surface was evidence of bones. “It’s the hill full of bones,” said Dr. Haroot Kahvejian, an Armenian dentist who showed Simon around.

Interesting read here.  Apparently, during WWII teenagers from Hawai’i enlisted in the armed services to essentially camp out on a number of tiny Pacific islands and report the weather and any enemy (and British) activity. Sounds like a pretty awesome time, especially if you’re a spearfisherman, aside from the fact that the Japanese attacked several of those islands and killed a number of volunteers. Excerpt below:

Beginning in 1935, the U. S. Army secretly assigned 170 Hawaii schoolboys to desolate islands to hinder England’s expansion in the Pacific equatorial region. The army told the boys, ‘You will colonize and help establish claim to the Baker, Jarvis and Howland Islands. They’ll become famous air bases in a route to connect Australia and California.’

* * *

Twelve students at a time were placed among the islands for six months. They were given 50-gallon drums of water and food staples. The ocean teemed with edible fish; it took about five minutes to step out on a reef and spear mullet and snapper for the day’s meal.

Boys charted the weather, checked in with the Army by shortwave radio, read school books they took with them, and waited for six months to end. Some re-enlisted to help their families.

* * *

Should curious Englishmen stop by, boys were to claim the islands as “their home” and radio the U.S. Army immediately.

They built a church and dedicated it to the memory of Amelia Earhart who, with Fred Noonan, had disappeared while flying to Howland Island which is 1700 miles southwest of Hawaii.

Jarvis, Howland, and Baker Islands were once valued for the guano deposits filled with phosphate birds left there (reason for the U.S. Guano Act of 1856). Other than having doo-doo from birds using islands as a nesting and roosting place, there was virtually nothing on the islands: treeless, sparse, only scattered grasses, vines, and low shrubs.

* * *

Two of the boys were killed during air raids and a submarine shelling at Howland Island on December 8, 1941. The Japanese shot down the American flag over their ‘Amelia Earhart church.’

Wiki has more info on Howland island’s WWII history here:

Ground for a rudimentary aircraft landing area was cleared during the mid-1930s, in anticipation that the island might eventually be used as a stop-over for a commercial trans-Pacific air route and also to further U.S. territorial claims in the region against rival claims from Great Britain. In keeping with its intended aviation role, Howland Island became a scheduled refueling stop for American pilot Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan on their round-the-world flight in 1937. WPA funds were used by the Bureau of Air Commerce to construct three graded, unpaved runways meant to accommodate Earhart’s modern twin-engined Lockheed Model 10 Electra.

The facility was named Kamakaiwi Field after James Kamakaiwi, a young Hawaiian who had arrived with the first group of four colonists, was subsequently picked as leader and spent a total of over three years on Howland, far longer than the average recruit. It has also been referred to as WPA Howland Airport (the WPA contributed about 20% of the $12,000 cost). Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea and their radio transmissions were picked up on the island when their aircraft reached its vicinity but they were never seen again.

Finally I must note that someone has formed the “Fictional Nation of Howland, Baker, and Jarvis.”

Right now, lava is flowing out of the earth’s core and oozing out of a relatively tiny rock, the island of Hawaii, in the midst of the largest geographic feature on planet earth, the Pacific Ocean. Pretty nuts.

Also nuts is that the largest residential subdivision in the United States, Hawaii Ocean View Estates, is built on the southern rift zone of the largest active volcano on earth, Mauna Loa.

Finally, tomorrow is the day the batshit crazy Iranian Mullahs promised to bring an extra high level of smack down on the “Iranian people’s righteous indignation.” Read the whole thing. Excerpt below:

I believe that the Iranian regime has assembled the largest armed force in history to protect it from the Iranian people’s righteous indignation on Thursday the 11^th.  There will be hundreds of thousands of police, revolutionary guards, Basij, and people bused in from the countryside to Tehran.

Additionally, the regime is shutting down communications, especially in Tehran.  Iranian Tweeters say internet is largely gone, and cell phones are not working.  None of this is new, and in the past the dissidents have managed to beat the censors; it will be interesting to see if the mullahs’ trusted advisers (mostly Chinese) are more effective this time.  They certainly have failed in China, and the Iranian authorities have demonstrated an almost supernatural ability to screw up their own plans.

A case in point:  the political center of the city is Azadi Square, and workers have been stringing loudspeakers (and probably cameras) all over the  square and the approach routes, in order to drown out the chants of the demonstrators.  So today they tested the system by broadcasting the national anthem.  Except it was the shah’s anthem, not the Islamic Republic’s.

On a related note, I found Brett Stephen’s recent WSJ article Seven Myths About Iran to be an interesting, contrarian read. Excerpt below:

(5) The Iranian regime is headed for the ash heap of history. The best policy is to do as little as possible until it crumbles from within.

Communist regimes were also destined for the ash heap. Unfortunately, it took them decades to get there, during which they murdered tens of millions of people. It matters a great deal to Iran’s people, and its neighbors, that the regime go quietly. But it also matters that it go quickly, and waiting on events is not a policy.

(6) The more support we show Iran’s demonstrators, the more we hurt their cause.

This was the administration’s view after the June 12 election, as it walked on tiptoes to avoid the perception of “meddling.” The regime accused the U.S. of meddling all the same.

But protest movements like Iran’s (or Poland’s, or South Africa’s) are sustained by a sense of moral legitimacy that global support uniquely conveys. When will American liberals get behind Iranian rights, as they have, say, Tibetan ones? Maybe when President Obama tells them to.

I bring to you, Mogogo Cab. For many moons I wondered about the meaning of Mogogo. You have to admit, it’s a pretty mysterious, weird name. If I had to guess I’d say someone got high, mispronounced “Mo-Fo” as Mogogo, and an opportunistic cab driver to be named his vehicle Mogogo so his friend never forgets that one night he was so wasted he couldn’t even swear.

UnFortunately the Internet exists to sap the mystery out of anything remotely interesting by supplying actual information. Alas, sometimes I prefer conjecture. Anyway, a minute on Google reveals that Mogogo is Eritrean in origin. A Mogogo is a type of stove (picture here) used to bake Injera, a traditional Eritrean bread.

Apparently, baking Injera consumes 40% of Eritrea’s energy resources.  As such, building a more efficient Mogogo “can potentially have dramatic positive impacts on the Eritrean standard of living.”  Improving the efficiency of baking Injera is so important that the Eritrean Energy Research and Training Division of the Department of Energy of the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Water Resources (really) apparently invented and rigorously tested a “finite element heat balance model for an electric” Mogogo.  Awesome. Abstract of their lengthy report is below:

The greatest energy savings is attained by using enjera batter with a low water content (a savings method in widespread use in the Eritrean Highlands) and a cooking style that produces moist, thick to medium thick enjera. Major improvements in efficiency are also predicted if cooking plate thermal conductivity is improved. Modeling predicts that most of the efficiency improvements can be obtained by simply using modified clays of higher conductivity, rather than changing to metal cooking plates. The modeling in combination with the experimental results aid in formulating a series of actions to aid in the promotion and development of improved enjera cooking efficiency.

Mogogo is also the name of at least two restaurants, one in Copenhagen and another in Holland.

I’m looking forward to riding in the Mogogo cab. I want to ask the cab driver whether he uses a traditional wood or dung fired Mogogo or broke down (stepped up?) and purchased an electric Mogogo. I’d like to inquire whether the Mogogo is a well known Eritrean symbol. Most of all, I’d like him to laugh at me, ask what the hell I’m talking about, and tell me that his buddy couldn’t say “Mo-Fo” one night at a bar, it came out as “Mogogo,” and that’s why he named his cab Mogogo. Because it’s funny, not serious.

Indegeneity is relative, not absolute. It is best understood on a spectrum. I understand indegeneity as a function of several factors, including being a distinct, historic, cultural group identified by an exclusive membership that inhabits a defined, and usually isolated, territory, and has historically lacked the capacity for self-determination or has effectively been denied self-determination by technologically advanced, foreign forces.

With that in mind, read this article about a truly indigenous person, Boa Sr. Excerpt below:

The last member of a 65,000-year-old tribe has died, taking one of the world’s earliest languages to the grave. Boa Sr, who died last week aged about 85, was the last native of the Andaman Islands who was fluent in Bo. Named after the tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to the pre-Neolithic period when the earliest humans walked out of Africa.

Boa was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese, a group of tribes that are the the first descendants of early humans who migrated from Africa about 70,000 years ago and who arrived on the islands around 65,000. Other groups went on to colonise Indonesia and Australia

I’d put the Hadza tribe of Tanzania right next to the Great Andamanese on the far end of the indigeneity spectrum. Here’s an excerpt from the National Geographic article about the Hazda people:

They grow no food, raise no livestock, and live without rules or calendars. They are living a hunter-gatherer existence that is little changed from 10,000 years ago. What do they know that we’ve forgotten?

* * *

About a thousand Hadza live in their traditional homeland, a broad plain encompassing shallow, salty Lake Eyasi and sheltered by the ramparts of the Great Rift Valley. Some have moved close to villages and taken jobs as farmhands or tour guides. But approximately one-quarter of all Hadza, including those in Onwas’s camp, remain true hunter-gatherers. They have no crops, no livestock, no permanent shelters. They live just south of the same section of the valley in which some of the oldest fossil evidence of early humans has been found. Gene tic testing indicates that they may represent one of the primary roots of the human family tree—perhaps more than 100,000 years old.

What the Hadza appear to offer—and why they are of great interest to anthropologists—is a glimpse of what life may have been like before the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Anthro pologists are wary of viewing contemporary hunter-gatherers as “living fossils,” says Frank Marlowe, a Florida State University professor of anthropology who has spent the past 15 years studying the Hadza. Time has not stood still for them. But they have maintained their foraging lifestyle in spite of long exposure to surrounding agriculturalist groups, and, says Marlowe, it’s possible that their lives have changed very little over the ages.

For more than 99 percent of the time since the genus Homo arose two million years ago, everyone lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, once plants and animals were domesticated, the discovery sparked a complete reorganization of the globe. Food production marched in lockstep with greater population densities, which allowed farm-based societies to displace or destroy hunter-gatherer groups. Villages were formed, then cities, then nations. And in a relatively brief period, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was all but extinguished. Today only a handful of scattered peoples—some in the Amazon, a couple in the Arctic, a few in Papua New Guinea, and a tiny number of African groups—maintain a primarily hunter-gatherer existence. Agriculture’s sudden rise, however, came with a price. It introduced infectious-disease epidemics, social stratification, intermittent famines, and large-scale war. Jared Diamond, the UCLA professor and writer, has called the adoption of agriculture nothing less than “the worst mistake in human history”—a mistake, he suggests, from which we have never recovered.

UPDATED:

To further illustrate the spectrum of indegeneity consider that approximately 230,000 years ago Neanderthals were the dominant hominid specie in the continent of Europe.  Approximately 40,000 years ago Homo Sapiens began settling in Europe, and within 10,000 years completely displaced Neanderthals. See Neanderthals in Our Midst, noting that:

“[M]any experts have maintained that humans completely replaced the Neanderthals, consistently out-doing them and slaughtering them when they got in the way. Other anthropologists, however, believe that rather than dying out, the Neanderthals assimilated into early human populations through interbreeding, also known as admixture.”).

Carbon-dated, anthropological evidence makes clear that Neanderthals are the indigenous hominid of Europe, at least with respect to Homo Sapiens.  If an individual today could demonstrate that he/she possesses Neanderthal blood, which may actually be possible through mitochondrial DNA studies, he/she would theoretically possess inherent indigenous rights [under, say, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] against Homo-Sapiens.

South Park, Season 14, begins March 17, 2010. Mark your calendars.

Cupid being shot to death by arrows. (Found that example after visiting the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and seeing an effigy of Cupid shot full of arrows.)

An insulin truck killing a diabetic. – Gordon Bryson.

Have at it in the comments. I appreciate good examples of irony.

Boing Boing has an interesting post up about an artist I wasn’t familiar with.

Arnold Bocklinwas a 19th century symbolist painter whose work influenced and inspired Salvador Dali, Sergi Rachmaninoff, Marcel Duchamp and H. R. Giger. Adolph Hitler owned eleven of his paintings and cited Bocklin as his favorite painter.

Check it out. Here’s what must be Hilter’s favorite painting. It’s title? The Isle of the Dead.