Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
BCF : Just over a century ago this week, Turkish and Kurdish forces invaded land that the Assyrian people had inhabited since antiquity and began exterminating them.
The slaughter that ensued lasted from 1915-1923, leaving 300,000 Assyrians dead and innumerable women abducted.
Joseph Yacoub’s Year of the Sword: the Assyrian Christian Genocide, published in French in 2014 and translated into English in 2016, is the most accessible historical account of the events that composed the genocide, as well as a comprehensive case for those events as genocide.
Yacoub, emeritus professor of political science at the Catholic University of Lyon, provides a distillation of sources in the languages used by both the perpetrators of and witnesses to the genocide. Year of the Sword is necessary for the breadth and depth of scholarship that informs that distillation, as well as the careful marshaling of it into analysis.
The Assyrian genocide formed one distinct yet indivisible chapter of a
program of eradication that also encompassed the coeval Armenian and
Greek genocides. The purpose was to put an end to the presence of all
three Christian peoples in the territory that became the Republic of
Turkey. The politics of the genocide were not the outgrowth of a robust
nationalist ideology or tradition. (Turkish nationalism has always
struggled to reconcile the need for an atavistic sense of racial
origins, usually placed somewhere within Central Asia, and the need to
subjugate and cohere territories in Asia Minor.)
The Republic of Turkey
was instead founded upon the application of violent jihad to the
territorial boundaries of the emerging Turkish state. The Islamization
of Turkey was inseparable from the establishment of its national
sovereignty. Yacoub discusses political developments in the decades prior to the
genocide: the draconian centralization of power in the flailing Ottoman
caliphate under Sultan Hamid II (1876-1909), and the nationalism of the
Young Turks who supplanted him and ushered in an era of genocide. This
background is not treated as an inductive source of understanding, but
rather a context. Yacoub’s major focus is on detailing the act of
killing.