Sunday, December 20, 2020

 

 

STILLNESS IS THE KEY

Written by Ryan Holiday 

Review written by Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, December 18, 2020


This is the fourth Ryan Holiday book I have read.  The other three were Ego is the Enemy, The Obstacle is the Way, and Conspiracy.  Like those three books, this book is an excellent read as well.  I especially like the way in which Holiday writes.  He makes his points using historical figures and events to do so and his writing style is easy to read and understand.

Disclaimer.  I am well aware of how many people who should know about such things recommend that people SHOULD engage in stillness or meditation.  I have tried and have failed primarily because when I attempt at stillness and quietness, my head wants to explode because of the long-time suffering from Tinnitus, the ringing in my head that never ceases and is enhanced whenever I am in total silence.  It is very depressing to say the least. Yet even for me, this book is God-sent because it reinforces a life you would want to live by. It is extremely difficult for me to imagine someone reading this book and not improving their outlook on life. It is that good.

That aside, I still found Holiday’s book fascinating.  The following quote from book explains why YOU should read it as well as anyone who you value in life: “Confucius and his followers spoke constantly of the cultivation of wisdom, saying that it is achieved in the same way that a craftsman develops skill: by putting in the time.”  Everyone could benefit from reading this book but I would suggest that everyone over the age of four should at least read the chapter titled Limit Your Inputs.  Holiday is so very much on target and when you read just this one chapter you KNOW that he is and you can probably see yourself in the people he describes and trust me, that is NOT a good thing.

Holiday’s book is a well written “how to” book on creating a better life not only for you but also for the people that surround you that you love and who love you.  A quote from the book is right on point when it comes to defining the value of maintaining a personal journal: “That is what journaling is about. It’s spiritual windshield wipers, as the writer Julia Cameron once put it.”  

Who should read this book?  From the book: “People who don’t read have no advantage over those who cannot read.”  If YOU read this book and just practice some of Holiday’s advice, your life would be a better for having read it. If two read it, double the results.  But if an entire country were to read and practice its lessons, the world would truly be a better place to live for eternity!   Everyone should read and practice this book.

Would I read it again?  There would be no need, except to locate specific quotes from people throughout history that you may want to use.

Would I give it as a gift?  ABSOLUTELY!

Friday, December 11, 2020

A Golfer Predictions from 1892?

 

GOLF IN THE YEAR 2000

Written by Jay McCullough 

Review written by Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, December 8, 2020


Some books are just fun to read and this is definitely one of them.  I was attracted to the book simply because it was about golf plus a European Television Golf Announcer talked about a book written in 1892 (that is not a typo, it was written in 1892) about playing golf in the year 2000. 

This is definitely a book of fiction.  It involves time travel but like the story of Rip Van Winkle, the main character of the book falls into a mysterious coma.  His family, as it is described much later in the book, had set him up with supervisor doctor visitations, money that accrues interest over 100 plus years, and a home for his still living but comatose body to rest in.  He suddenly and for no apparent reason, awakes 108 years later much to the surprise of the homeowner who was then charged with taking care of him while lie in a coma. 

I had to continually remind myself that this book was written in 1892.  Our character writes about the many things that have changed since that date and surprisingly he was spot on in regards to some of the developments he describes about golf and golf equipment and how people watch golf on BIG SCREENS as if they were present on the course.   Other descriptions, especially about women, he was not wrong but he was also not correct.  You will have to read the book to figure out what that means.

This is a short book that can be found on Amazon for just 99 cents as a Kindle read.  If you are into time travel, novelty fiction, historical fiction or just want a quick and easy fun read, this book is for you.

Who should read this book?  Anyone looking for something fun to read or who loves the game of golf

Would I read it again?  No, there would be no need.

Would I give it as a gift?  For 99 cents, why on Earth not?

Monday, December 7, 2020

REMEMBERING THE

USCGC WHITE ALDER

By Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, December 8, 2020

 


The following is from https://coastguard.dodlive.mil/2018/12/the-long-blue-line-buoy-tender-white-alder-lost-50-years-ago-but-not-forgotten/   Coast Guard buoy tender WHITE ALDER was the former U.S. Navy lighter YF-417, one of eight YF-257-class Navy lighters acquired by the Coast Guard and converted to buoy tenders. With generous cargo space, an open deck, a large power plant, and a boom for lifting large objects, WHITE ALDER proved a capable short-range aids-to-navigation (ATON) buoy tender. From 1947 until 1968, the buoy tender was stationed in New Orleans. During the buoy tender’s more than 20-year career, its primary mission was tending river aids-to-navigation, but also performed traditional Coast Guard missions, such as search and rescue, and law enforcement.

On Saturday, December 7, 1968, WHITE ALDER was steaming down-bound on the Mississippi River. At approximately 6:30 p.m., it collided with the up-bound motor vessel Helena, a 455-foot Taiwanese freighter. The accident occurred above Head of Passes near White Castle, Louisiana, causing the 133-foot buoy tender to sink in 75 feet of water with three of its crew surviving.

Immediately after the accident, divers located the buoy tender and recovered the bodies of three WHITE ALDER crew members. However, sediment from the swift current of the Mississippi River buried the wreck site so quickly that continued recovery and salvage operations proved impossible. 14 WHITE ALDER crew members were entombed in the sunken cutter, which to this day remains sealed in the river bottom.

After the WHITE ALDER accident, the Coast Guard suffered the loss of Cutter CUYAHOGA in 1978, and buoy tender BLACKTHORN in 1980. Soon after the loss of BLACKTHORN, the service made sweeping improvements to cutter policy, doctrine, training and standardization. It created the prospective commanding officer (CO)/executive officer (XO) afloat course, mandated that all COs, XOs and officers of the day (OOD) pass the deck watch officer examination, required prospective COs and officers in charge (OINC) to conduct underway familiarization rides, and promulgated commandant cutter navigation standards. All of these steps improved the proficiency and safety of afloat operations and resulted in higher levels of cutter and crew readiness.

On December 7, 2020, the 52th anniversary of the cutter’s loss, please pause to remember WHITE ALDER and its lost crew members:

Seaman Apprentice Walter P. Abbott, III
Electrician’s Mate 2nd Class Michael R. Agnew
Chief Warrant Officer Samuel C. Brown, Jr.
Seaman Frank P. Campisano, III
Fireman Maurice Cason
Quartermaster 2nd Class John R. Cooper, Jr.
Seaman Richard W. Duncan
Seaman Apprentice Larry V. Fregia
Seaman Apprentice Ramon J. Gutierrez
Seaman Roger R. Jacks
Seaman Steven D. Lundquist
Yeoman 2nd Class Joseph A.R. Morin
Commissaryman 2nd Class Charles R. Morrison
Engineman 3rd Class Walton E. O’Quinn, Jr.
Engineman 1st Class John B. Rollinson
Chief Engineman William J. Vitt
Boatswain’s Mate 3rd Class Guy T. Wood




Wednesday, December 2, 2020

wow!

 

SLANTED

How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism!

Written by Sharyl Attkisson

Reviewed by Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, December 3, 2020



WOW!  That pretty much sums up my opinion of the latest book by Sharyl Attkisson.  I have read all of her books and they are all extremely enlightening regarding the underbelly of American Journalism. 

Attkisson confirms in her latest book what I have personally suspected for some time.  Of late I have completely stopped watching the news because I felt it is no longer news that is being presented or worthy of being watched, at least by me.  No matter what television channel or what news program you tune into, you are getting nothing but information that “someone” wants you to hear and see instead of the news that is actually happening and that can also be verified as being true.

I have read and watched Attkisson’s news programs for decades and have always felt that I received the factual news and I was permitted to make up my own mind in regards to the news story being covered.  As time went on programs and specials like hers have disappeared from our news media.  Attkisson points out from an “insider’s” point of view how what we see and hear on our television sets have been doctored and changed to create a “narrative” (her word) which is what I would refer to as an agenda.  If you are told that 2+2=5 enough times you tend to believe that is true.  When you hear others refute that proposition and who are then targeted by their fellow so-called journalists, the idea that 2+2=5 becomes more and more valid and eventually becomes what you personally believe to be true.  That is what has happened to our, with the emphasis on the word OUR, news media, electronic and print.  We are being fed “stories” and not being introduced to the news. 

Attkisson goes even further to point out the unabashedly bias of the journalists we see and read who fail to just do their job.  There was a time when it was almost impossible to determine the political slant of a television journalist (Walter Cronkite), not to be confused with a television commentator (Sean Hannity).  The news consisted of verified facts and lacked obvious opinions inserted into the stories we are now being told.  That is exactly what they are, STORIES with enough facts interspersed to make them appear real and truthful.  Attkisson gives example after example of news media bias; unverified and false news reports and she is not afraid to call out the perpetrators by name and company affiliation.  At the end of the book she identifies the number of serious untruthful stories printed about President Trump. This is not a book about Trump but instead the media coverage of Trump only is used to demonstrate how far the media has fallen in the eyes of the American viewers and readers.

The only part of the book that I disagree with is when Attkisson attempts to paint a picture of where and how the media might correct itself.  She identifies news sources that she feels go the extra yard to present the facts and not opinions or “stories.”  I, contrary to her hope for the future, feel we as a country have reached the tipping point on “our” press and therefore “our” journalists.  Journalism as I once knew it to be is dead.  I am far more pessimistic in that regard; I do not think it can ever become what it once was – a trusted AND UNBIASED source of news.

As bad as the news media is portrayed in Slanted, I still fault my fellow citizens even more than the media because we appear to be focused on one to two-minute sound bites to form our opinions and then move on.  Unfortunately, those two minutes are probably the worst spent two minutes of most of our lives when we form opinions that become beliefs based on lies, misdirection’s, personal agendas and personal narratives all designed to mold the viewer/readers mind to believe what the journalist wants you to believe.  When we stop thinking for ourselves, we have become the sheep defined in the book, 1984 written by George Orwell.  Like it or not, we have become brainwashed and 1984 has become 2020 with our unconscious approval.  As for 2+2, it equals 5 just as Orwell predicted in his book!

Who should read this book?  That’s easy.  EVERYONE unless you don’t care that you are being brainwashed by opinions, narratives and untruths.

Would I read it again?  Probably not except to look up specific instances of news media biases.  Re-reading it would not bear any fruit at least for me.  Hard to be any more disgusted over our failing news media.

Would I give it as a gift?  I like to think that if I give someone a book as a gift, they would read it.  Sadly, so many Americans today have no desire to learn the truth and therefore the gift would be meaningless if they refused to read it to its end.

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Is History Repeating Itself?

 

 IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF, AGAIN?  YOU BE THE JUDGE!

By Jim “Gymbeaux” Brown, November 17, 2020

With a lot of help from my Internet Friends! 

DISCLAIMER:  I am ashamed to admit that I was totally unaware of the Turkish/Armenian Genocide of over One Million Armenians.  I can’t be the only one that is why I have written and posted this Nugget for the Noggin involving a horrible chapter of world history. 

I heard only a few sentences of a Glenn Beck’s broadcast on 11/17/2020 where he made reference to Adoloph Hitler engaging in a genocide of the Jewish people, not only in countries that Germany conquered but also German Jews as well.  Part of Hitler’s justification involved Turkey who did something very similar to the Armenians living in Turkey and the world looked the other way.  Was that true?  I must admit that I had not heard of the Turkey/Armenian genocide. It is a subject certainly not taught in any school classrooms that I attended.  That should come as no surprise when you consider what IS and what is NOT being taught in our history classes in most of our schools.  Therefore, I did my homework.  There were two very interesting Internet sites that made reference to (1) the Turkey/Armenian genocide and then (2) Hitler’s use of the genocide and the lack of any world outrage to do the same thing to the Jewish people he encountered wherever he went including his own country, Germany. 

This is the longest Nugget I have ever uploaded to my Blog and I feel the subject is too important not to post it.  I am fully aware that most people will never take the time to read it all but they should!  Why?  Because HISTORY DOES REPEAT ITSELF AND HERE IS LIVING PROOF THAT IT DOES AND HOW IT COST MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD THEIR LIVES!  There is a second and more harrowing reason I have copied and pasted these two articles, I see it happening again and like before, no one is paying attention and no one seems to care.  Christians are the 2020 target.  They are being murdered all over the world and the world turns a blind eye.  Christianity is being attacked in America, something I never thought I would ever see and Americans and the world have turned its collective blind eyes to the situation.

AMAZINGLY there are people today, some very important people including college professors, who do not believe that the WWII Holocaust actually occurred in spite of news reels, photographs and eyewitness testimony.  To them, it never happened.  Just like to many, including the country of Turkey, the Turkey/Armenian genocide never happened.  Just like the murdering of 2020 Christians around the world has never happened.

Without any specific authority to do so, the Governors across America are taking steps to supposedly fight the COVID-19 virus that they, without any medical training, are doing by locking down economies and forbidding people to even attend church services and properly bury their dead.  At the very same time these Governors have no problems with groups like ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter gathering in great numbers to not only protest but also destroy cities and businesses.  Then as if by some miracle when Joe Biden appears to have won the Presidency, these Governors find no harm in mass gatherings of people to celebrate his apparent win.  Who knew the COVID-19 virus was so thoughtful that it will not infect ANTIFA, BLM or Biden’s supporters?  What a wonderful virus to be so considerate. 

I looked up the definition of IGNORE and found that it means,  NEGLECTDISREGARD, OVERLOOKSLIGHTFORGET mean to pass over without giving due attention.  The world IGNORED what Turkey did to the Armenians.  The world IGNORED what Germany did the population of every country it conquered but especially their own Jewish German citizens.  The world is IGNORING the systematic destruction of people of faith.  And now America is IGNORING the blatant disregard of civil liberties by our own elected Governors and Mayors. 

SPECIAL NOTE:  If you checkout the following annotated Internet links, you can locate the footnotes that verify all the information contained within the articles.  The following hopefully will provide the reader with a very valuable lesson from world history that should be both taught and never forgotten! 

From The History Channel:  https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/armenian-genocide  The Armenian genocide was the systematic killing and deportation of Armenians by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. In 1915, during World War I, leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country. Today, most historians call this event a genocide: a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people. However, the Turkish government still does not acknowledge the scope of these events. 

The Roots of Genocide: The Ottoman Empire

The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years. For some of that time, the kingdom of Armenia was an independent entity: At the beginning of the 4th century A.D., for instance, it became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion.

But for the most part, control of the region shifted from one empire to another. During the 15th century, Armenia was absorbed into the mighty Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman rulers, like most of their subjects, were Muslim. They permitted religious minorities like the Armenians to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, who they viewed as “infidels,” to unequal and unjust treatment.

Christians had to pay higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and they had very few political and legal rights.

In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian community thrived under Ottoman rule. They tended to be better educated and wealthier than their Turkish neighbors, who in turn grew to resent their success.

This resentment was compounded by suspicions that the Christian Armenians would be more loyal to Christian governments (that of the Russians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Turkey) than they were to the Ottoman caliphate.

These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II – obsessed with loyalty above all, and infuriated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights – declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all.

“I will soon settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter in 1890. “I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”

The First Armenian Massacre

Between 1894 and 1896, this “box on the ear” took the form of a state-sanctioned program.

In response to large scale protests by Armenians, Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered.

Young Turks

In 1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. A group of reformers who called themselves the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a more modern constitutional government.

At first, the Armenians were hopeful that they would have an equal place in this new state, but they soon learned that what the nationalistic Young Turks wanted most of all was to “Turkify” the empire. According to this way of thinking, non-Turks – and especially Christian non-Turks – were a grave threat to the new state.

World War I Begins

In 1914, the Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (At the same time, Ottoman religious authorities declared a holy war against all Christians except their allies.)

Military leaders began to argue that the Armenians were traitors: If they thought they could win independence if the Allies were victorious, this argument went, the Armenians would be eager to fight for the enemy.

As the war intensified, Armenians organized volunteer battalions to help the Russian army fight against the Turks in the Caucasus region. These events, and general Turkish suspicion of the Armenian people, led the Turkish government to push for the “removal” of the Armenians from the war zones along the Eastern Front.

Armenian Genocide Begins

On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals.

After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water.

Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot. 

At the same time, the Young Turks created a “Special Organization,” which in turn organized “killing squads” or “butcher battalions” to carry out, as one officer put it, the liquidation of the Christian elements. 

These killing squads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive. In short order, the Turkish countryside was littered with Armenian corpses. 

Records show that during this “Turkification” campaign, government squads also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and gave them to Turkish families. In some places, they raped women and forced them to join Turkish “harems” or serve as slaves. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.

Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. In 1922, when the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire.

Did you know? American news outlets have also been reluctant to use the word “genocide” to describe Turkey’s crimes. The phrase “Armenian genocide” did not appear in the New York Times until 2004.

Armenian Genocide Today

After the Ottomans surrendered in 1918, the leaders of the Young Turks fled to Germany, which promised not to prosecute them for the genocide. (However, a group of Armenian nationalists devised a plan, known as Operation Nemesis, to track down and assassinate the leaders of the genocide.)

Ever since then, the Turkish government has denied that a genocide took place. The Armenians were an enemy force, they argue, and their slaughter was a necessary war measure.

Today, Turkey is an important ally of the United States and other Western nations, and so their governments have been slow to condemn the long-ago killings. In March 2010, a U.S. Congressional panel voted to recognize the genocide. And on October 29, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution that recognized the Armenian genocide. 

DID HITLER USE THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AS A INCENTIVE TO TERMNATE THE JEWS?

Judge for yourself:

Here is the Internet link regarding Hitler’s reactions:  https://www.meforum.org/3434/armenian-genocide-hitler    It is well known by genocide scholars that in 1939 Adolf Hitler urged his generals to exterminate members of the Polish race.  "Who speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?" Hitler asked, just a week before the September 1, 1939 invasion of Poland.   However, while it is generally agreed that Hitler was well aware of the Armenian genocide, some genocide scholars and historians of the Ottoman Empire have questioned whether he actually made the above statement or even intended to exterminate portions of the "Polish race."

Still, there is evidence that the massacre of the Ottoman Armenians helped persuade the Nazis that national minorities posed a threat to empires dominated by an ethnic group such as the Germans or the Turks. Furthermore, these minorities could be exterminated to the benefit of the perpetrator with little risk. Indeed, it was German officials who had smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire the leaders of the Young Turk regime, culpable for the deaths of over a million Armenians and a million or more other Christian minorities such as the Assyrians and Greeks.   Diverse historical evidence suggests that Hitler viewed the Armenians and Poles as analogous; in several ways, his statement about the Armenians was consistent with his other beliefs and writings.

A number of clues point to the possibility that Hitler's "final solution" was inspired by the Turkish massacre of its Armenian population in 1915. His infamous 1939 question, "Who speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?" although hotly debated concerning its authenticity, is only one indication leading to that conclusion.

The Assassin's Leak

The historical context of Hitler's statement and the manner in which it came to Western attention has long been problematic. On November 24, 1945, The Times of London published an article stating that Hitler referred to the extermination of the Armenians during an address to his commanders-in-chief on August 22, 1939, a statement that was read at a hearing of the Nuremberg trial. Hitler's speech asserted that the aim of the war is not to attain certain lines, but consists in the physical destruction of the opponent. Thus, for the time being, I have sent to the East only my "Death's Head units" with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way, will we win the vital living space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?

The anti-Nazi writer Louis Lochner, a former bureau chief of the Associated Press in Berlin, quoted Hitler's statement from an original Nazi document before the Nuremberg trials had even convened.  Lochner had a variety of sources within the Nazi government and had been interned from December 1941 to May 1942 before being exchanged for German diplomats interned in the United States. After his release, he published What about Germany? containing the quote mentioning the Armenians.  The quote was used in the November 1945 The Times article, which cited the ongoing proceedings of the Nuremberg trials.

Two additional copies of the memorandum describing Hitler's speech were found immediately after the war in the files of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (German High Command, OKW), but neither contained the Armenian quote. Nor was either military document signed as would be expected for an official record of a meeting. These incongruities led Nuremberg prosecutors to conclude that there had been two Hitler speeches on August 22 and that the Lochner version containing the quote was a merger of notes from both. As a result of the disparities, objections were made by lawyers for two Nuremberg defendants, Hermann Göring and Erich Raeder, to the authenticity of the OKW versions and to the inclusion of the Lochner document in evidence. The key issue for the defense was not the Armenian quote per se but rather the term "brutal measures," which they claimed was never used by Hitler although they conceded that he had used "severe" expressions.

Since the prosecution had other records of the meetings, as well as one introduced by defendant Raeder, the Lochner document was included in the trial record but was not introduced as evidence. In the context of the Nuremberg trials, the overriding issue was not the Armenian quote but Hitler's call for a brutal war of aggression against Poland. But defenders of the Ottoman Empire regard the court's decision as key: The military versions of Hitler's speech without the quote are viewed as more reliable, and the Lochner version as suspect or tainted.

The question of Lochner's source for the document, and hence the quote, has therefore been the crux of intense historical interest. Lochner himself indicated only that he had obtained it from "Mr. Maass" without saying who the original source was at the August 22, 1939 meeting. But subsequent research had shown that the Lochner and The Times versions have a clear chain of transmission. The original source of Hitler's speech on the Poles and the Armenians and of its transmission to The Times was Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, a German military intelligence organization, and a leading figure in the military opposition to Hitler. Canaris became involved with several conspiracies against the dictator, including a July 20, 1944 assassination plot. Another member of the German resistance, Hans Bernd Gisevius, confirmed that Canaris took notes of the speech even though it was "forbidden to do so."

Canaris's notes were passed to three men, all of whom were executed before the Nuremberg trials convened and thus could not be questioned: Hans Oster, Ludwig Beck, and Hermann Maass. Historian Kevork Bardakjian concluded that Canaris likely passed the notes to his deputy, Oster, who then transmitted them to Beck, a conservative general and former chief of the General Staff, who had long opposed Nazi influence on the German military and foreign policy. Beck probably instructed Maass, formerly general manager of the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations, to give the document to Lochner due to Beck's role as a "leader of the German resistance." Like Canaris, Beck was involved in a number of conspiracies and was executed after the failure of the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, in which he had a leading role. Finally, historian Winfried Baumgart has argued that Canaris's notes also appear to have been the source of the two unsigned documents in the German high command files.

Gisevius and Oster believed that the invasion of Poland gave them a unique chance to get rid of Hitler and ensure peace with Poland. Canaris's opposition to Hitler was wide-ranging. An official with British intelligence boasted of having "buil[t] … up" Canaris as a potential assassin of Hitler. In 1944, the Gestapo found documents revealing Canaris to be conspiring with Catholics and the West against Hitler. The admiral was executed in a concentration camp on April 9, 1945, for plotting a coup against Hitler, along with Oster.

Turkish Historians on the "Armenian Quote"

Hitler's citation of the Armenians in his August 22, 1939 meeting has been an important concern for Turkish historians and pro-Ottoman analysts. Türkkaya Ataöv of Ankara University, with the apparent endorsement of the Turkish government, has contended that the Armenian quote does not appear in Nuremberg documents and is a forgery. He goes further to assert that no Armenian genocide took place, that Armenians had collaborated with the Nazis, and that Turks had welcomed Jews.

Similarly, Princeton University professor Heath Lowry suggested in 1985 that the lack of clear evidence that Hitler's alleged statement about the Armenians was "authentic" should have put an end to attempts to recognize the Armenian genocide in exhibits of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, resolutions of the U.S. Congress, or in the curricula on the Holocaust established by state boards of education. The logical outcome, Lowry argued, was that the Armenian genocide was simply a type of "propaganda" and "vilification against the Republic of Turkey." Finally, Guenter Lewy, professor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has contended that any attempt to link the anti-Armenian massacres and the Holocaust rests "on a shaky factual foundation." But Lewy has conceded that the document containing Hitler's statement about the Armenians might "represent an embellishment of points made in the speech" by Hitler to his generals in August 1939.

In contrast, in a notable 1995 article in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Lifton argued that Lowry was being professionally irresponsible in claiming that the Armenian genocide was simply a "ludicrous" Armenian claim. In their view, it was the more recent claim that Hitler did not refer to the Armenian genocide that lacked an evidentiary basis. Moreover, they demonstrate that Lowry, like historian Justin McCarthy, had engaged in a pattern of protesting academic characterizations of the Armenian genocide that was welcomed by the Turkish government. According to Inside Higher Education, McCarthy once called the Armenian genocide a "meaningless" idea and served on the board of a grant-making organization in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Turkish Studies, which has ties to the Turkish government. McCarthy argues that the Armenian case is dissimilar to the Holocaust and resembles the U.S. Civil War.

One of Lewy's preferred sources for Hitler's speech were the copies from the OKW, used by Nuremberg prosecutors to demonstrate command responsibility for numerous crimes in Poland. Lewy has argued that Hitler's statement about the Armenians was not "accepted as evidence by the Nuremberg Tribunal," citing Lowry to this effect. Ankara University's Ataöv similarly asserted: "Hundreds of thousands of captured Nazi documents were assembled as evidence in the trial of the major Nazi war criminals. One cannot find the oft-repeated Hitler 'statement' among these documents." The idea that the Hitler quote is a forgery and that it does not appear in the Nuremberg trial documents is frequently repeated on websites dedicated to denial of the Armenian genocide.

While the Lochner document was not used at Nuremberg, even Lowry admits that volume VII of the compilation of evidence against the Nazis, entitled Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, reproduced the statement. That compilation contained in its introduction a description of the document series as the tribunal's "documentary evidence demonstrating the criminality of the former leaders of the German Reich." This means that the document was introduced as evidence before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg even if it was not used on a specific day of the trials. The Lochner document with the Armenia quote was also included in the 1961 publication of foreign policy documents by the German Foreign Office.

The Armenian Genocide as Nazi Precedent

As part of a larger effort to deny or downplay the Armenian genocide, some historians have claimed that Hitler did not cite the Armenians as an example of the impunity of perpetrators. They have also denied that the Armenian genocide provided the inspiration or any form of precedent for the design and conduct of Nazi aggression and genocide.

One method has been to suggest that the Nazi program of extermination was a late creation. Thus, for example, Lewy suggested that Hitler did not order exterminations in Poland—or mention the extermination of the Armenians—because "by August 1939, Hitler had not yet decided upon the destruction of the Jews."

This argument is unpersuasive for several reasons. First, as has been shown, there are compelling reasons to believe that Hitler's statements about extermination in 1939 indeed cited the Armenians and were aimed at the Poles. Hitler's intentions toward the Jews had been spelled out across many statements, including in the notorious January 1939 speech in which Hitler "prophesied" that another world war would result in the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Second, Hitler had repeatedly engaged in virulent anti-Polish and anti-Slavic rhetoric prior to August 1939. Third, Hitler's decision to destroy Poland as a nation, while allowing some Poles to survive, was entirely consistent with his political philosophy that nations played out a chaotic struggle for life in an unforgiving world, as shown by history. Finally, there was the tacit acquiescence of the major powers in the Turkish model of ethnic cleansing and genocide. These may have provided Hitler with reasons to adopt it for Poland and the East.

To what extent was the Armenian genocide understood as a model by Hitler? In a 1931 interview, he told a German newspaper editor that when deciding Germany's future, one should "[t]hink of the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages (Rosenberg refers to them) and remember the extermination of the Armenians." Hitler and other contemporary European leaders admired Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a national leader who won for the Turkish people the living space it needed from the Slavs and the British. Speaking in 1925, Hitler "dwelt at length on patriotism and national pride and quoted approvingly the role of Kemal Atatürk of Turkey and the example of Mussolini, who had marched on Rome" a few weeks prior.

The parallels between Hitler and Atatürk were also noted at the time. The influential Foreign Affairs journal published an article in the 1930s stating, "Just as in Italy since 1922, and as in Germany since early in the present year, the conduct of political affairs in Turkey rests today on the personality of a leader. … By means of a clever scheme … the President, while constitutionally without undue influence, becomes the real autocrat.'" It argued that with the end of foreign "influence," Turkey "had become an almost homogeneous state" in "national and religious" terms, so that its "Christian minorities hardly existed any longer." In early 1939, the German socialists had also pointed out the similarity between the Nazis and past leaders of Turkey. Three days after the speech reported by Canaris, Hitler wrote to Mussolini that he hoped that the Turks could be persuaded to join Italy, Japan, and Russia in an anti-British coalition. He planned to hand over parts of the southern Soviet Union to Turkey in due time.

The fate of the Armenians was also understood within Nazi ideology. A key influence on Hitler was the Prussian-educated British writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain. His work Foundations of the Nineteenth Century sold 250,000 copies by 1938 and secured his fame in Germany. Volume 1 of this work offered a model for Germany, arguing that Turkey was "the last little corner of Europe in which a whole people lives in undisturbed prosperity and happiness," and blaming non-German world powers (Britain and France) for encouraging an Armenian rebellion, in response to which "the otherwise humane Moslem rises and destroys the disturber of the peace."

In 1927, leading Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg had published a booklet calling Chamberlain the "apostle and founder of a German future." In 1938, Rosenberg published a collection of speeches in which he commented that in 1921, after the Turkish minister Talat Pasha was murdered in Berlin by an Armenian, a campaign was waged in the "international press" to release the killer due to the history of struggle between Armenians and Turks. Rosenberg endorsed the Turks' resistance to Armenian claims for autonomy ("den armenischen Staat im Staat"), comparing the Armenians to the Jews, because he claimed the Armenians engaged in espionage against Turkey as the Jews did against Germany. He "praised Talat Pasha … [and] minimized the [Ottoman Christian] genocide."

Rosenberg also introduced Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter to Hitler. Scheubner-Richter had been the German vice-consul in Erzerum and documented the planning and implementation of the murder of Armenians by the Young Turks in the name of Islam and pan-Turkic ideology. Scheubner-Richter's relationship to Hitler was so close that he was killed standing next to Hitler and Rosenberg during the failed Munich "Beer Hall" putsch of 1923. Hitler then dedicated the first part of Mein Kampf to his "irreplaceable" fallen comrade. Armenian-American historian Vahkan Dadrian has argued that Scheubner-Richter had a "direct" influence on Hitler that may have included introducing him to the example of how the Ottoman Armenians (then called the "Jews of the Orient") were deported from their villages, worked to death, starved, and frozen to death during exposure to harsh winter conditions. Mike Joseph has called Scheubner-Richter the "personal link from [the Armenian] genocide to Hitler."  Scheubner-Richter's reports regarding the genocidal solution to the Armenian question foreshadow and may have inspired Hitler's later ideas and rhetoric regarding the Jews as did his descriptions of Turkish methods, including provocations and allegations of terrorism and revolution. Prior to his death, Scheubner-Richter urged that Germany be "cleansed" of alien peoples by "ruthless" measures.

Other high-ranking Nazis were also well-placed to learn how the Armenian genocide occurred and to inform Hitler. Franz von Papen became Hitler's vice chancellor after serving as chief of staff of the Fourth Turkish Army during World War I and was responsible for managing German-Austrian and German-Turkish relations under the Nazis. Rudolf Hess, deputy inspector of concentration camps under Himmler, had served in the Ottoman-German forces fighting the Russians during World War I. Hans von Seeckt was chief of the Ottoman General Staff in 1917 and 1918 and "laid the groundwork for the later emergence of the Third Reich's Wehrmacht" and "embraced Hitler and his ideology."

The similarity of the genocidal methods employed by the Nazis and the Ottomans is also inescapable. Parallels between Ottoman and Nazi theory and practice include the central place of race in the self-conception of the fascist elites and the notion of relocating ethnic minorities to reservations. Hitler often expressed his belief that race was the dominant independent variable in history and that it had to be dealt with directly by any ethnonationalist leader who wanted to be successful.  "When the race is in danger of being oppressed," he wrote, "the question of legality plays only a secondary role."

Both the Ottomans and the Nazis also used the concept of ethnic "cleaning" or "cleansing." While the Young Turks implemented a "clean sweep of internal enemies—the indigenous Christians," according to the then-German ambassador in Constantinople,  the Nazis implemented a "housecleaning of Jews, intelligentsia, clergy, and the nobility."  The official who announced the ethnic cleansing plan for Poland may have been aware of similar policies of the internal security officials of the Ottoman Empire, which resulted in "hundreds of thousands of the Ottoman Empire's Muslims, Christian Armenians, and Orthodox Greeks [being] expelled or murdered."  Hitler himself used "cleaning" or "cleansing" as a euphemism for extermination  and described his rule as being characterized by an "unheard of cleansing process."  On December 12, 1941, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that "with respect of the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep." Finally, the impunity with which the Armenians had been slaughtered—the essence of Hitler's August 22, 1939 remark—was reinforced by the international community's failure to prevent the massacre of other peoples, including later massacres by the Italians using poison-gas and machine-guns in Ethiopia.

Conclusion (Not my conclusion, but the conclusion of the author Hannibal Travis)

Numerous ideological and political influences led from the Armenian genocide to the rape of Poland and the Holocaust. Chamberlain, Hess, Rosenberg, Seeckt, Scheubner-Richter, and von Papen all likely played a role in prompting Hitler to use Turkey's example as a model for Poland. Hitler compared the two cases in his 1939 speech, which, like most evidence that the Holocaust took place, was not relied upon in the tribunal's judgment.  Subsequent efforts to discredit the speech by defenders of the Ottoman Empire should not, however, blind us to the manifold connections between the Armenian genocide and that perpetrated by the Nazis.

Hannibal Travis is the author of Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq and Sudan (Carolina Academic Press, 2010) and "The Assyrian Genocide: A Tale of Oblivion and Denial," in Rene Lemarchand, ed., Forgotten Genocides: Denial, Oblivion, and Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

My final note in regard to all of the above:   What will people write in the history books about 2020?  We are all IGNORING the obvious!  How many millions of people are going to die reportedly from the COVID-19 Virus?  My question and the question that everyone ought to be asking, especially the national news media folks, is who created the virus? China did!  Was it intentional? It was certainly NOT created by accident!!!  I believe it WAS intentionally created as a weapon to be used by the Chinese military whenever needed for whatever reason they thought it would be effective.  Was it intentionally released upon the world?  This is just my opinion but I believe that it was.  China has made it very clear that it wants to control the world.  They have no desire to attack America, its #1 enemy with military force and instead released the virus that attacked our economy, our faith in all that is right and just, and has now created an environment where we are now attacking each other.  No military attack could have been as short lived and more effective than what China has done and yet THE WORLD HAS IGNORED WHAT IT HAS DONE!  Like the example set by Turkey and then Germany, Communist China will never be punished for what it has done, ever, unless something changes.  Where is the news media?  Why are they not demanding answers to these questions?  Everyone is IGNORNING it for the same reason that no one ever challenged Turkey or Germany – they don’t want to “upset the apple cart!”  We are in a State of War, like it or not!  The problem is that no one knows for certain who the enemy is, an unseen virus, China, or both.  I personally believe it is both! 

What exactly would YOU have done in the early 1900s and then in the 1930s if you had known about Turkey and/or Germany?  Would you have spoken up?  Would you have taken action?  What are you going to do about China and the Virus in 2020?  Are you going to speak up or are you going to do what MILLIONS already have done, blame President Trump for the virus?  Are you going to take action?  Or are you going to do what people have done for decades upon decades – just ignore it and hope that it will eventually go away and no one will ever talk about it again; at least until the next time when they will do what they have always done, compare it to disasters of the past that they chose to ignore!

In my mind, there is no difference between Turkey and the Armenians; Germany and the Jews and now China and the World!  NONE!  What say you?