The twigs and boughs chopped off the pine trees in Chkalov Street by the fragments at cover shelling were used for the construction of a passable Xmas tree so that the kids would receive divers impressions at their childhood and not only the monotonous panicky alertness of the adults around them in the miserly flicker of a candle dripping molten wax tears in the murky basement vault…
So, why after those relentless bombardments, and in absence of “the Russian bayonet” appraised in the Empire’s poetry as a panacea and pledge against Asiatic blood bathes, why (excuse the monotony of using the same question word) not to enter the city and kick up (no! we won’t say “carnage” we are too globalized citizens of the new order for that), kick up some fun at another ethnic cleansing, and get rid of all those basement dwellers (possible carriers of more threatening pandemics), and rename the city into “Khankendi”?
Well, they would if they could, they certainly would but for the nagging impediment named “phedais”.
Despite the Arabic-Muslim origin of the word that means “self-sacrificer”, some researchers derive it from Neo-Greek roots of the period when Hellas was no more and Greece was not yet around, and in their stead there was the Osman Empire (otherwise denominated the Ottoman or simply Sublime Porte). To keep things clearer, phedai is just a guerrilla-fighter or Bandera-man who kisses his family good-bye, grabs his wooden fork or AK, and leaves his home sweet home going to defend his village.
Why did Armenians need phedais?
It’s certainly a good question, yet after skirring thru Wikipedia or Britannica you’ll see that in a 15-year stretch (1894-1909) 2.5 millions of Armenians under the wise rule of the Osman Empire lived thru 3 massacres the most horrendous of which was the first (1894-1896).
Over-meticulous German pastor Johannes Lepsius had counted (absolutely proved) killing of 88 243 Armenians alongside the destruction of 2 493 villages (inhabitants of 456 of those got Islamized), the desecration of 649 churches and monasteries (328 were, luckily, turned into mosques), and death of additional 100 000 Armenians caused by starvation and diseases among the homeless. The total number approximates 200 000.
The following 2 massacres:
a) 25 000 in Diyarbakir Vilayet (yet, since there were massacred Assyrians as well, let’s divide the number evenly which leaves 12 500 for each of the groups, in brotherly way);
b) variously estimated from 15 000 to 30 000 in Adana Vilayet (only Armenians this time) which makes average of 22 500.
Sum total: 235 000 in 3 massacres.
(I don’t call for boycotting your summer vacation in Turkey, the hotel Manager over there might very well be a great-grand kid of an Islamized Armenian).
Each outbreak of the mentioned atrocities was vigilantly responded to with a mutual outcry in the indignant Europe and unsparing headlines at the leading newspapers.
In the 20-th century the word “massacre” fell out of vogue, gave way to and got replaced with the word “genocide”.
The Armenian genocide in 1915-1923 sums up to 1.5 millions of human lives. And ultimately we come to:
2 500 000 – 1 500 000 – 235 000 = 765 000
Two third of the entire people exterminated or (to put it optimistically) one third survived.
Figures are a fucking effective means of consolation – the skimming shoot of eyes over the long row of zeroes and that’s that, you’re good to live on further. The trick is just not to let the details crack your mental mail of arms by pictures of a mujik sliced with sabers, a baby hoisted on the bayonet, a woman beastly raped and killed and dumped into the same mountain of decomposing bodies.
No. It is not a feverish verbal diarrhea of a wacky blogger, the illustration is taken from the pencil sketches by an eyewitness (they did not travel with cameras yet). Poor Frenchman! Poor Frenchman! What repulsive nightmares he was haunted by in the rest of his life!
Turkey flatly rejects this arithmetic (ask the hotel Manager), yet the obstinate figures are there to show the remainder of one third of survivors (plus those who took Shahada).
Where are they, the un-Islamized part of that third?
Fled to Russia, fled to France, fled to America.
In Russia they would become citizens in the pending USSR, in the West they’d flesh out the Diaspora…
As noted by a European eyewitness of the massacre in 1894, the attackers were distinguished by exceptional cowardice, so if running into resistance they immediately moved along to shoot up, rob, rape, and kill in the next village, which emphasizes the need in phedais-guerrillas-Bandera-men if you want to survive in your native land.
And what were they, those 2.5 millions of Armenians who could not last in their land (albeit provided with phedais of their own)?
I’m gonna put it straight – just mujiks they were. All life long they plowed, harvested, hauled the dung from cow houses out, were digging, hacking, building and from 1555 they clung to the same occupations but already as a part of Turkish Empire (all over one quarter of the then state’s territory were they toiling thru their lives).
Okay, fine, the mujiks also had their own elite: merchants, political figures, shoemakers, writers and composers, however, those were far away, in the capital city of Istanbul. But, on the whole, just mujiks as is they were.
From 1915 to 1923, while the elite were being hanged out on the lampposts in the capital city, the arrangement about mujiks was way simpler – collected in crowds, they were driven to Syria (also a part of the then Ottoman Empire), driven into the desert under the pretext as if some camps were awaiting to accommodate them there. So one million human beings died on that trek because they were driven without any food, shepherded by riflemen.
The guardsmen did not bypass gutting dead womenfolk in case she swallowed her gold earrings while alive. Some were lucky to find. (Armin Theophil Wegner; 1886—1978, another German witness of heinous atrocities.)
Still, what did Turkey need all that trouble for?
Easy as pie – it’s an Empire and any state of that status has no choice but to grow. It exists only while it grows, like those polyps in the Coral Reef.
But behold and see – the neighboring insistent grower, Russian, end 1800’s grabbed ample swathes off the Ottoman Empire. Who else might possibly be guilty of such an affront if not those Armenians? They also worship the Cross.
At the dawn of the next, 20th century, Turkey looses almost all of its possessions in Europe. Who’s guilty again?
For consolidation of any Empire, having an enemy is the must, be it an external or inner one. Such supposition can be exemplified with the Third Reich whose efforts brought the German nation to be consolidated not only by their just pride in their philosophers, composers, and high quality household appliances made in Germany but also the genes-deep feeling of guilt for the Genocide of Jews. Which is, of course, another story, yet the core remains the same – you can’t go on without an enemy and in absence of a sufficient bogey to make us stick together, we’ll invent some covid or another, and draw a useless mask on each and every visage, and subject folks to shitty injections, and any bitch holding off is against us, we’ll shut up their squeaks opposing the holy institutions and wisdom of our rulers…
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