Published on 5 Feb 2015
After more than 6 months of stalemate, the German Empire is playing two new cards to gain a decisive advantage. On the Eastern Front, the Germans use gas on a huge scale for the first time. While the attack fails, the foundation for gas warfare is laid. At the same time Kaiser Wilhelm II agrees to unrestricted submarine warfare – any ship can be sank at any time.
February 6, 2015
Gas! – A New Horror On The Battlefield I THE GREAT WAR Week 28
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January 30, 2015
All Or Nothing – Winter Offensive In The Carpathians I THE GREAT WAR Week 27
Published on 29 Jan 2015
Konrad von Hötzendorf has to prevent the Russian army from entering the Hungarian plains. So, he starts a huge offensive in the Carpathian Mountains — in mid winter. He also wants to demonstrate his power to Italy and Romania who are considering entering the war for the Entente. Meanwhile, in the Northern Sea the first Battle of Dogger Bank takes place which leads to the sinking of the German ship SMS Blücher.
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March 22, 2014
March 7, 2014
Turkish government threatens to ban YouTube and Facebook
After an embarrassing leak, Prime Minister Erdogan has threatened to ban the services that carried the leaked voice recordings:
Turkey’s prime minister has threatened drastic steps to censor the Internet, including shutting down Facebook and YouTube, where audio recordings of his alleged conversations suggesting corruption have been leaked in the past weeks, dealing him a major blow ahead of this month’s local elections.
In a late-night interview Thursday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan told ATV station that his government is determined to stem the leaks he insists are being instigated by followers of an influential U.S.-based Muslim cleric. He has accused supporters of Fethullah Gulen of infiltrating police and the judiciary and of engaging in “espionage,” saying that the group even listened in on his encrypted telephone lines. The Gulen movement denies involvement.
“We are determined on the issue, regardless of what the world may say,” Erdogan said. “We won’t allow the people to be devoured by YouTube, Facebook or others. Whatever steps need to be taken we will take them without wavering.”
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August 26, 2013
Suddenly of greater interest to the media – where are the carriers now?
Zero Hedge pulled a quick summary of US, French, and British naval units in light of the rumours of some kind of attack on Syria:
- A U.S. military source said on Friday the U.S. Navy was increasing its number of cruise missile-carrying destroyers in the Mediterranean to four from three by delaying the return to the United States of the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Mahan.
- The aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman, by far the most powerful warship in the region, left the Mediterranean last weekend, passing through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea.
- Defence experts say the carrier could still strike Syria from south of Suez. As well as the strike aircraft carried by the Truman, several of her escort ships are also capable of firing Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles.
- Since earlier this year, the United States has also had F-16 jets in Jordan, where they remained after a major military exercise this year at the request of the Jordanian government. It also has a major air base at Incirlik in Turkey that could easily house multiple aircraft as part of a wider military campaign.
The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle is still in or near Toulon, while the Royal Navy is said to have at least one Trafalgar or Astute class submarines in the Mediterranian. The RN no longer has in-service aircraft carriers, so any British air support would have to be from the RAF, possibly based in Cyprus (but subject to local government approval).
Update: This report says that the USS Ramage is also being retained in the Mediterranean along with the USS Mahan.
Update, 27 August: It was just mentioned (no link) that the Charles de Gaulle has been ordered to leave port, bound for the Eastern Mediterranean.
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July 11, 2013
Call it what you like, it’s still (petty) abuse of power and position
BBC News Magazine collects a few euphemisms for bribes:
If you are stopped by traffic police in North Africa the officer may well ask you to sponsor his next cup of “kahwe“, or coffee. In Kenya you might be stopped by traffic policemen and asked to contribute to “tea for the elders” (“chai ya wazee” in Swahili). But in Turkey, the police would rather you give them “cash for soup”, or “chorba parasi” — soup is traditionally eaten at the end of a night of heavy drinking.
[. . .]
The phrase “a fish starts to stink at the head” (balik bashtan kokar) comes from Turkey, reminding us that petty bribes at street-level are often matched by greater corruption at the top of organisations and institutions. Mexican officials looking to earn a kickback for arranging a business deal will demand they are given “a bite” (una mordida), while their Columbian counterparts are said to “saw” (serrucho) off a part of a government contract for themselves.
[. . .]
Large-scale corruption has its own vocabulary, often created by the media. The “cash for questions” scandal involving British politicians comes to mind, as well as the Italian “tangentopoli” (“bribesville”) scandal in the early 1990s. Combining “tangente” meaning kickback, and “-poli” meaning city, the term referred to kickbacks given to politicians for awarding public works contracts.
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June 28, 2013
Turkish PM throws treason accusation against BBC journalist
I guess the BBC is doing a fair job of agitating the powers-that-be, at least in Turkey:
Selin Gerit, a London-based presenter for BBC’s Turkish service, was until last week relatively unknown in her home country. However, that changed when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told parliament she was guilty of treason over her coverage of the anti-government protests sweeping the nation.
The prime minister’s condemnation has triggered concerns among fellow journalists, who believe Erdoğan — who accuses the media of fanning the demonstrations — is attempting to stifle dissent.
The campaign against Girit was launched last weekend when the mayor of Ankara, Melih Gökçek, posted a series of angry tweets. The BBC criticised what it called government intimidation. The corporation’s comments triggered Erdoğan to claim in parliament the following day that Girit was “part of a conspiracy against her own country”.
Turkish journalists see the focus on Girit as a warning to them all — an example to cow the rest of them into submission. Serdar Korucu, editor of a major domestic news outlet, said: “The prime minister is telling us, ‘Be careful what you say and do, or you can easily be next’.”
The mainstream media have ignored much of the unrest, with CNNTürk airing a documentary on penguins while the central square in Istanbul became the scene of street protests unprecedented in Erdoğan’s 10-year rule. The public was outraged, and protests were staged outside local news outlets.
Many journalists, however, were not surprised. Fatma Demirelli, managing editor of Today’s Zaman, the English-language daily, said self-censorship had long become the norm in newsrooms. “Journalists now have a sort of split brain: on the one hand you see what the news is, but on the other you immediately try to gauge how to report it without stepping on anyone’s foot,” she said. “Self-censorship has become an automatic reflex.”
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June 8, 2013
Anonymous claims to have successfully hacked Turkish government network
A report at RT.com says the Turkish government’s internal network has been breached by members of Anonymous:
Turkish government networks were hacked on Wednesday, compromising the private information of staffers in PM Tayyip Erdogan’s office, a source in PM’s office confirmed to Reuters. The attack was in support of the ongoing anti-government protests.
Staff email accounts were reportedly accessed after a phishing attack, and those affected were cut off from the network, a source said.
Anonymous hacked the Prime Minister’s official website (basbakanlik.gov.tr) and gained access to staff email addresses, passwords and phone numbers, the group said in a press release.
[. . .]
The group also stressed it will not share most of the hacked data because it “respects people’s privacy” and “does not believe in the full use of power against the weak.”
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June 3, 2013
Turkey’s unexpected wave of protests
The Economist explains what is happening in Turkey:
The wave of unrest was completely unexpected. The protestors cut across ideological, religious and class lines. Many are strikingly young. But there are plenty of older Turks, many of them secular-minded, some overtly pious. There are gays, Armenians, anarchists and atheists. There are also members of Turkey’s Alevi Muslim minority. What joins them is the common sentiment that an increasingly autocratic Mr Erdogan is determined to impose his worldview. The secularists point to a raft of restrictions on booze; liberals to the number of journalists in jail (there are more journalists in prison than in any other country in the world). Thousands of activists of varying stripes (mainly Kurds), convicted under Turkey’s vaguely worded anti-terror laws, are also behind bars. Then there are those incensed by mega urban-development projects, including a third bridge over the Bosphorus, which will entail felling thousands of trees. Scenting the public mood, retailers announced that they had pulled out of the planned arcade in Taksim Square. “This is not about secularists versus Islamists — it’s about pluralism versus authoritarianism,” commented a foreign diplomat.
Mr Erdogan wants to be elected president when the post comes free in August 2014. And he has made no secret of his desire to boost the powers of the presidency “a la Turca” as he put it, spurring accusations that what Erdogan really wants is to become a “Sultan”.
“Tayyip [Erdogan] istifa”, a call for the prime minister to resign, was the slogan most commonly chanted by the protestors. Not that most Turks would have known. Media bosses fearful of jeopardising their other business interests shunned coverage of the protests for nearly two days, opting instead to screen programmes about breast-reduction surgery and gourmet cooking. Faced with a public outcry, the main news channels began broadcasting live from Taksim Square. But pro-government papers continue to point the finger of blame at provocateurs and “foreign powers” bent on undermining Turkey. It seems an odd description of the thousands of housewives leaning over their balconies clanging their pots.
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November 10, 2012
What Ataturk accomplished to create modern Turkey
History Today posted that today is the anniversary of the death of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who carved modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire:
Mustapha Kemal Pasha was given the honorific title ‘father of the Turks’ at the height of a revolution which he was pushing forward intuitively and idiosyncratically, there being no precedent for such a fundamental sea change in a Muslim state.
Inevitably, it took someone standing outside the Islamic tradition of Ottoman Turkey to create a new state out of Anatolia — rising from the wreck of the empire. But as The Times was to say in its obituary, this was a man of extraordinary qualities; a Cromwell of the Middle East and also a maverick with an almost feminine subtlety in handling crises on the path to supreme power. He had an iron will and displayed single-mindedness when it came to ensuring the security of the state, even to hanging former confederates who plotted against his revolution.
Ataturk was born of an Albanian mother in Salonika and, without connections followed a military career in which, after being involved with the Young Turks reformist movement, he made his name in 1915 by rushing reinforcements to the Gallipoli beach-head and holding the ANZAC assault.
[. . .]
The Kemalists formed a provisional government in the small town of Ankara, in the middle of the desolate Anatolian plateau. On the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts the Greeks and Italians laid claim to what they regarded as their Asia Minor birthright, hoping to recreate some sort of classical empire. Kemal disabused the Greeks, who soon, of all the Allies hoping for a piece of Anatolia, were alone in arms against the nationalist forces. Halted in a blistering hot wilderness just short of Ankara, the Greeks, who had out-marched their supply lines, were outflanked and thrown back by Kemal’s outnumbered and ragged levies at the Sakaria river. A retreat became a headlong flight and the Greek forces joined their fellow nationals and the Armenians and foreigners who had formed the mercantile community of Smyrna, in a panic-stricken evacuation of the sacked and blazing port. Kemal is supposed to have indulged in a drinking orgy as Smyrna went up in flames — a Tartar conqueror’s celebration of total victory.
The Greeks quit the struggle and their sponsor, the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who had threatened armed British intervention backed by the fleet to keep Constantinople an open port under British protection, followed suit. The French and Russians signed separate treaties, giving the Kemalists recognition and aid.
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November 3, 2012
Not your ordinary religious decision
I’m not sure how other religious organizations might handle a request like this one:
A transsexual living in Mersin who underwent surgery to become a woman has requested a change in regulations so that she can return to being a man by having a penis reattached to her body.
D.K., a 34-year-old originally from the eastern province of Van who describes herself as a believing Muslim, asked the Directorate of Religious Affairs whether it was religiously permissible to receive a penis transplant from a cadaver, but religious officials said it was impermissible unless the penis originally belonged to the transplant recipient.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
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August 28, 2012
Rehabilitating Florence Nightingale’s reputation
History Today has a defence of the much-maligned Florence Nightingale:
Jamaican-born Mary Seacole (1805-81), voted top of the list of the 2004 ‘100 Great Black Britons’ poll, is now slated to replace Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) as the true ‘heroine’ of the Crimean War. She is to be honoured as no less than the ‘Pioneer Nurse’ with a massive statue to be erected at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. This in spite of the strong links between Nightingale and the hospital, her base for over 40 years. It was there she established the first secular school for nurses in 1860 with funds raised in her name for her work in the Crimean War during the conflict of 1854-56. The Nightingale School operated for over a century from the hospital, whose redesign in the 1860s Nightingale also influenced.
[. . .]
The campaign promoting Seacole over Nightingale builds on 30 years of books, articles and films denigrating the latter. While she always had detractors, the serious assault on Nightingale’s reputation can be dated to 1982, with the publication of the Australian historian F.B. Smith’s Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power (Croom Helm, 1982). The next major hit came in 1998 with Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel (Constable, 1998) by a retired management consultant Hugh Small, which argues that Nightingale was actually responsible for the high death rates of the Crimean War and had a nervous breakdown as a result when she supposedly recognised this. Neither claim is supported by any serious documentation. Social media goes even further: see Facebook ‘Florence Nightingale was a Murdering Bitch’, later renamed ‘Florence Nightingale: The World’s Worst Nurse’, where she is described as a ‘deluded power hungry bitch’, who ‘looks like an uptight bitch’, so that ‘the day she died’ was ‘the best thing that ever happened to the field of nursing’.
[. . .]
The French were the instigators of the Crimean War, sent more troops and were better prepared than the British. Their death rates were lower in the first year. But the British government learned from the commissions it sent out and made enormous changes. British death rates fell dramatically, from 23 per cent in the first winter to 2.5 per cent in the second — no greater than deaths among soldiers in peacetime barracks in London, as Nightingale proudly showed in a chart. In contrast, the French (lower) 11 per cent death rate in the first winter, rose to 20 per cent in the second winter. Since the French were late in publishing their statistics, neither Nightingale nor the royal commission could use them for comparison. However French doctors themselves credited the British reforms for their superior performance. Once they were properly cleansed and functioning Nightingale was proud of the Crimean hospitals. In her own charts she separated the two periods, before and after the sanitary and supply commissions, to emphasise the crucial role they played in reducing mortality.
Her analysis of what went wrong was widely accepted and led to major changes to health care in the British Army. The ‘Nightingale Fund’ raised in her honour for that work paid for the training school at St Thomas’, which led to raising nursing to the level of a profession throughout much of the world. Her experience of the war, and her reputation and research as a result of it, grounded all the social and public health work she did for the rest of her life. Her vision for health reform included bold statements, such as the belief that the poor should receive as good quality hospital care as private patients and warnings as to the dangers of hospital acquired infections. Nightingale, in short, is no mere historical figure. Her lamp should not be retired but shone brightly onto the hospital and health care problems of today.
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June 17, 2012
Royal Navy submarine wreck discovered in the Dardanelles
What appears to be the wreck of the E14 has been located just 800 feet offshore in the Straits of the Dardanelles:
Its precise location in the eastern Mediterranean remained a mystery until this month when a Turkish marine engineer and a diver detected it on the seabed off the town of Kumkale – just 800ft from the beach.
The wreck was discovered by marine expert Selçuk Kolay and film-making diver Savas Karakas, who had spent three years trying to find it.
After studying documents at the national Archives in Kew, west London, and surveying Turkish defences, they scanned an unusual object from a boat on the surface.
But they could not establish what it was because it was near the mouth of the straits — a sensitive military area where diving was forbidden.
It took two years to get permission from the military before their team were able to dive to the wreck and confirm it was the E14 earlier this month.
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April 22, 2012
Protecting the Turkish identity should not include ignoring history
Ayşe Kadıoğlu is a Turk who went to university in the United States. Part of the experience was meeting Armenian-American students in Boston and learning about events in Turkish history that have been rigorously suppressed in aid of bolstering “Turkishness”:
I grew up in Turkey, where the prevailing education system still conceals certain historical facts in primary and secondary school curricula lest they harm the “indivisibility of the state with its country and nation”, an expression that is used several times in the current Turkish constitution. Perhaps the fear about deeds that can harm the unity of the state and nation is best symbolised in the Turkish national anthem, which begins with the lyrics “Do not fear”.
When fears nurture and sustain taboos, the ability to retain experiences declines. Enduring an education that is laden with either false historical facts or an eerie silence makes it impossible for people to exit the state of self-imposed immaturity.
[. . .]
There are many taboos in Turkey that mainly concern the protection of the “indivisibility of the state and nation”. There are also many laws that make it a crime to break these taboos. When taboos are sustained by law, the minds (and, many times, bodies) of citizens end up being imprisoned. One such taboo involves the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In Turkey, it is a crime to insult his memory and harm his statutes. Another taboo involves the sacredness of the armed forces. This is sustained by a law against discouraging people from performing their compulsory military service.
[. . .]
Taboos, enforced by law, are fetters in front of the ability to reason. It is possible to be released from the spell of taboos and strengthen the ethos of democracy by upholding the realm of public debate and deliberation. Therefore, yes, I agree with Free Speech Debate’s fourth draft principle, “We allow no taboos in the discussion and dissemination of knowledge”, because we try not to be trapped in a state of immaturity and want to do our utmost to fulfil our capacities as reasonable human beings.
March 22, 2012
Syria is a “nation made up of little pieces, and they all are about to fall to the floor”
Geoffrey Clarfield on the history of Syria and the possible future of the region:
From outside Syria, it appears that a government is waging war against citizens who are demanding change and democracy. That is certainly how many media outlets are reporting the ongoing violence in that country. But as many Syrians know, this war is about something else entirely. Something much larger.
A century ago, Syria was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Although the administrative sub-districts of what is now called Syria changed many times under the Turks, by the early 20th century they comprised a number of distinct administrative units that centred around key cities, such as Damascus and Aleppo. Beginning in 1874, they also included the areas around Jerusalem (which had a Jewish majority). The British called the area “the Levant.”
The area was, and still is, made up of a number of occasionally co-operating, occasionally competing ethnic groups: Sunni Arabs, Maronite Christians, Arabic-speaking Greek Orthodox Christians, Aramaic-speaking Christians, Arabic-speaking Alawis, Muslim Gypsies, Armenians, Jews, Yezidis, Kurdish-speaking Sunnis and nomadic Sunni Bedouin — each with their own distinctive history, loyalties and competing interests.
[. . .]
As the Sunni Arab elites of Aleppo and Damascus clamoured for independence from the French, they became enamored with three overlapping ideologies. The first was that of Pan-Islam, which many rejected because it was seen as too similar as that of the defunct and discredited Ottoman Empire. The second was Pan Arabism, which held that the Arab world was once one country, and was destined to become one again. (This school of thought would survive until Nasser’s era in the 1950s and 1960s, but no one talks about it anymore.)
The third was “Greater Syria.” This theory held that the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean were all members of one unit — including present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and southwestern Turkey. Extreme versions of the “Greater Syria” ideology include Cyprus and the Sinai desert. In none of these worldviews is there any room for an independent Jewish homeland, a Christian Lebanon or, in the masimalist cases, even a Greek Orthodox Cyprus. Unlike Pan Arabism, the ideology of Greater Syria still has some resonance in the region.
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