“Oh, the people will lick our boots—just as they’d lick the boots of the Germans if they entered in triumph. With them, nothing succeeds like success. They don’t love the Turk, but they don’t love anyone but themselves. (More…)
War
Before Burnet laid himself down that night on his humble couch in Firouz Ali’s house the plan for his departure had been thoroughly discussed. Among the barber’s friends and agents was one Ibrahim, once a prosperous owner of camels, which he hired out to merchants or pilgrims. (More…)
After censoring 100 of my company’s letters, what strikes one is the piquancy of style achieved by the omission of all punctuation: “The Bible says this is a land of milk and honey there is plenty of water and dust about if that’s what they mean?” or “The sentry shot an Arab one night soon after we got here I saw him soon afterwards caught him in the chest a treat it did.” (More…)
The Turks had, they think, 15,000 men and 32 guns. Their position was twelve miles long and most elaborately entrenched and wired with all the German devices, and rested on a marsh at either end. (More…)
I agree with most of your reflections about the moral justification of war. War is an evil, because it is the product of sin and involves more sin and much suffering. But that does not mean it is necessarily wrong to fight. Once evil is at work, one of its chief results is to leave good people only a choice of evils, wherein the lesser evil becomes a duty. (More…)
Like everyone else, you write under the cloud of Warsaw and in the expectation of the enemy forthwith dashing back on us in the West. But the last two months have made it much harder for him to do that soon, if at all: and I hope the month which will pass before you get this will have made it harder still. (More…)
If you drive towards the eastern part of Georgia, to the Chechen border, in Akhmeta, you’ll find a group of picturesque villages, home to the Kists, an ethnic group that traces its origins back to the Chechens of the northern Caucasus. (More…)
Bogdan Bogdanovich’s Partisan Memorial Cemetery should be Mostar‘s second major tourist attraction. Built in 1960, the park is something between a memorial, and Gaudi’s Park Buell. High stone walls climb narrow paths in disorienting labyrinths. Ramps lead to a plateau engraved with stone flowers, the nameless graves of Partisans who fought against the Croatian Ustasha, Mussolini, and the Nazis. (More…)
“My nation is Yezidi, my language is Ezdiki, my religion is Sherfedin” reads a poster in Cyrillic script on the wall of a Yezidi family home in Zovuni, a village on the outskirts of Armenia’s capital of Yerevan. A portrait of the tomb of Sheikh Adi in Lalish, northern Iraq – a major pilgrimage site for Yezidis – hung on the wall beneath it. (More…)
“I’ve driven to Yeraskh more times than I can count,” says Artash, Yerevan veterinarian and part time tour guide. “It always amazes me.” Mount Ararat, on one of those crisp Armenian autumn days, is visible from the city’s centre. Cynics might, and do, see it as Turkey looming over what remains of the Armenian state. (More…)
My first impulse was to run. Seeing the footage on the video screen, I feared for the worst. The North had attacked, and we were watching it on TV, somewhere deep underneath Seoul. “I’m gonna have to photograph that,” I erupted, hoping that I was being neurotic. As the sequence of events flashed in front of me, depicting a staged raid on South Korea’s capitol, I came to my senses. This was just a training video. (More…)
The protest was shocking. Yet, for anyone who follows German politics, the bombs found on Berlin’s train tracks should not have been a surprise. For eight years, Germany has participated in the Afghan conflict. The third largest contributor to NATO forces in the country, the Bundeswehr’s participation has grown progressively unpopular. But, a fuse for leftist violence? Unanticipated. (More…)