RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/hong-kong-protests-peterloo-massacre-1819-history-rhymes/

Two hundred years ago today, Britain was shocked by the violent suppression of a peaceful protest. Here’s hoping history doesn’t repeat itself.

History rhymes: The massive protests in Hong Kong have happened to coincide with one of the most tragic demonstrations in British history. Two hundred years ago today — Aug. 16, 1819 — tens of thousands of English men and women gathered in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform. The deadly response from the city’s authorities in what is called the Peterloo Massacre, or the battle of Peterloo, galvanized the radical movement, outraged the British public, and embarrassed the government. Two centuries later, it reminds us of the dangers of even peaceful political protest.

The years following Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars were marked by serious economic problems, which inflamed the sense among many Britons that they were not adequately represented in Parliament. A radical reform movement grew around the country, spurred on by a charismatic speaker named Henry Hunt.

When Hunt visited Manchester to call for universal suffrage and annual parliaments, about 60,000 men, women, and children came to listen. They were laborers — cotton-factory workers and loom weavers, for example — from around the region, and they carried signs that read “Liberty or Death,” “Universal Suffrage,” and “Taxation without Representation is Unjust and Tyrannical.”

The large crowd and its demands alarmed a British government that remembered the French Revolution. Hunt himself was a figure of particular concern, in part because he’d been involved in a demonstration that deteriorated into a riot three years before. So Manchester’s magistrates commissioned a warrant for his arrest and ordered a group of yeomanry, or volunteer, cavalrymen to disperse the crowd almost immediately after he started his speech.

But the yeomanry did not keep the peace; they brought chaos. Waving sabers in the air, they struck the weapons indiscriminately into the crowd, causing panic and sending the gathered people running in all directions. Many were trampled. According to one witness, “The piercing shrieks and deep moanings of the people were indescribable; the petitioners were carried off their feet many yards.”

Rev. Justin Perkins. A Residence of Eight Years in Persia among the Nestorian Christians with Notices of the Muhammedans, New York, 1843; p. 276.

May 20, 1836] Yesterday an unoffending Jew was publicly beheaded and burned in this city. The enraged Mohammedans had, for two or three days, thronged the governor’s palace by thousands, demanding that the whole Jewish population of the city should be put to death to a man. And to appease the mob, the governor delivered up this individual. He was arraigned under the accusation of having murdered a Mohammedan child. The Mohammedans…cherish the belief, (or profess to cherish it,) that the Jews possess an instinctive thirst for human blood, as well as seek human victims for an annual sacrifice.

In this instance, a Mohammedan infant was found dead, before the door of a Jew.

The probability is that the child died a natural death and was thus exposed by interested persons, to rouse public indignation against the poor Jews; and so strong is the hatred of the Mohammedans towards the descendants of Israel, that the stratagem proved entirely successful, as is often the case in Mohammedan countries…The hostility cherished by Mohammedans towards the Jews is inconceivably more bitter than their hatred to Christians. The determined aversion which the Jews early manifested to the religion of the impostor [Muhammad] is still remembered and strongly resented by his followers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274515/remembering-first-and-forgotten-armenian-genocide-raymond-ibrahim

Last April 24 was Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.  Millions of Armenians around the world recollected how the Islamic Ottoman Empire killed—often cruelly and out of religious hatred—some 1.5 million of their ancestors during World War I.

Ironically, most people, including most Armenians, are unaware that the first genocide of Christian Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks did not occur in the twentieth century; it began in 1019—exactly one-thousand years ago this year—when Turks first began to pour into and transform a then much larger Armenia into what it is today, the eastern portion of modern day Turkey.

Thus, in 1019, “the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of infidels called Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword,” writes Matthew of Edessa (d.1144), a chief source for this period.  Three decades later the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Turkic Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the unwalled city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and “put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.”

After thoroughly plundering the city—which reportedly contained eight hundred churches—he ordered it set ablaze and turned into a desert. Arzden was “filled with bodies” and none “could count the number of those who perished in the flames.” The invaders “burned priests whom they seized in the churches and massacred those whom they found outside. They put great chunks of pork in the hands of the undead to insult us”—Muslims deem the pig unclean—“and made them objects of mockery to all who saw them.”

Eight hundred oxen and forty camels were required to cart out the vast plunder, mostly taken from Arzden’s churches. “How to relate here, with a voice stifled by tears, the death of nobles and clergy whose bodies, left without graves, became the prey of carrion beasts, the exodus of women … led with their children into Persian slavery and condemned to an eternal servitude! That was the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” laments Matthew, “So, lend an ear to this melancholy recital.”