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."
Today, April 24, is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. The Genocide Education Project offers a summary of that tragic event which transpired during World War I (1914-1918):
More than one million Armenians perished as the result of
execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical
abuse. A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years [and
2,000 years before the invading Turks arrived] lost its homeland and
was profoundly decimated in the first large-scale genocide of the
twentieth century.
At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million
Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000…. Despite
the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the
Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic
evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors,
denial of the Armenian Genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone
on from 1915 to the present.
The evidence is, indeed, overwhelming. As far back as 1920, U.S. Senate Resolution 359 heard
eyewitness testimony concerning the “[m]utilation, violation, torture,
and death [which] have left their haunting memories in a hundred
beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom
free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”
In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described how she was raped and thrown into a harem (consistent with Islam’s rules of war).
Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being
defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw
16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her
cross,” Aurora wrote, “spikes through her feet and hands, only their
hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” (Such scenes were
portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls.)
Often overlooked, however, is that this was less a genocide of Armenians and more a genocide of Christians. Thus the opening sentence of House Resolution 296,
which passed on the hundredth anniversary of the genocide (2019),
correctly mentions “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks,
Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other
Christians.”
That last word—Christians—is key to understanding this tragic chapter
of history: Christianity is what all of those otherwise diverse peoples
had in common, and therefore it—not nationality, ethnicity, territory,
or grievances—was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the
Turks would and would not “purge.”
As one Armenian studies professor asked,
“If it [the Armenian Genocide] was a feud between Turks and Armenians,
what explains the genocide carried out by Turkey against the Christian
Assyrians at the same time?”
According to another professor, Joseph Yacoub, author of Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide,
the “policy of ethnic cleansing was stirred up by pan-Islamism and
religious fanaticism. Christians were considered infidels (kafir). The
call to Jihad … was part of the plan” to “combine and sweep over the
lands of Christians and to exterminate them.” Several key documents,
including a Syriac one from 1920, confirm that “there was an Ottoman
plan to exterminate Turkey’s Christians.”
