The Turkish government responded to the pope’s comments by recalling its ambassador to the Vatican, and summoned the Vatican’s ambassador in Ankara to express its “great disappointment and sadness.”

It’s okay, Turkey, I get disappointed when people bring up my horrendous crimes against humanity too.

So, what actually happened and when?

In 1915 there were about 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) where their ancestors had lived for 3000 years. They were both an ethnic and religious minority in the Muslim-ruled country. (Armenia, when it was independent, was the first country to make Christianity its official religion.) The Turkish government wanted a solution to the “Armenian problem” so they decided to force them from their homes and send them into the Syrian Desert without food or water.

It began on April 24 of that year. On that day the government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals – many Armenians were well-educated business owners, lawyers, doctors, and craftsmen, in contrast to the majority Turkish peasant farmers – and the rest were given a choice of walking until they dropped dead of exhaustion and exposure or stopping walking and being shot dead on the spot.

The military weren’t the only ones to get to join in the mass murdering fun. Killing squads made up of murders and ex-convicts went about crucifying (literally), drowning, and burning Armenians. They raped the women and kidnapped children, converting them to Islam and giving them to Turkish families. The children were given new Turkish or Arabic names and were beaten if they spoke Armenian.

In May, the Ottoman government began confiscating “abandoned” Armenian property. This resulted in a lot of property seizures since people were not allowed to take anything with them nor were they allowed to sell it before they left.

Ancient cities were leveled and all traces of Armenian culture was destroyed.

The genocide didn’t end until 1922. During those years the Armenian population in Turkey went from a couple million to fewer than 400,000.

The architects of the Armenian Genocide fled to Germany which promised not to prosecute them for their crimes. They were later located and assassinated by Armenian activists.

If you see similarities between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, you’re not imagining it. Hitler saw how little was done by other countries to come to Armenia’s aid and used it as a guideline for his own genocidal plans.

Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my ‘Death’s Head Units’ with the orders 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 space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians? – Adolf Hitler

The Manhattan Project test.

Three weeks later on August 6, 1945 the first atomic bomb used in a war was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. 66,000 people died and 4 1/2 square miles of the city was completely destroyed.

Three days later a second bomb was dropped, this time on Nagasaki, Japan. It killed 36,000 people and destroyed 40% of the city. Neither of these were the deadliest bombing attacks on Japan. Over 100,000 people died as a result of the Operation Meetinghouse bombing on Tokyo on March 9, 1945. The biggest difference is that the Tokyo bombing used 330 B-52s and they used incendiary bombs carrying napalm.

The dates of the first atomic bomb tests by other countries are:

USSR – August 29, 1949
United Kingdom – October 3, 1952
France – February 13, 1960
China – October 16, 1964
India – May 18, 1974
Israel – September 22, 1979…maybe
Pakistan – May 28, 1988
North Korea – October 9, 2006 but that one was a bit weak. They had a for realsies one on February 12, 2013

Time lapse map showing all of the nuclear explosions from 1945 through 1998 – that’s 2053 nuclear explosions.

Here’s the tl;dw version.

How atomic bombs work.

General Sherman

 Under General Sherman’s orders, the army destroyed Atlanta and forced its citizens to leave their homes. Afterwards, he sent a militia officer, William Howard, to assess the damage. Out of 3,600 homes, only 400 were left standing.

While the targets were primarily military, there was no great effort to prevent civilian casualties and destruction of commercial property was considered necessary to winning the war.

The following January General Sherman wrote:

We quietly and deliberately destroyed Atlanta and all the railroad which the enemy had used to carry on war against us; occupied his State capital, and then captured his commercial capital, which had been so strongly fortified from the sea as to defy approach from that quarter.

It was 1863 and there was a new military draft lottery in NYC to draft men to fight for the Union army in the U.S. Civil War. All male citizens between the ages of twenty and thirty-five were eligible, as were all unmarried men between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Men with means could either hire a substitute or buy their way out of the army for $300, that would be over $5000 today, adjusted for inflation. While blacks could, and did, join the army, they were not subject to the draft because they were not considered citizens.

It started with protests – demonstrations against the first federally mandated conscription laws in the United States – but quickly became violent riots that lasted for four days.

The city had always been divided on the subject of the Civil War. There had been calls for the city to secede from the Union, it depended heavily on the slave trade and had strong business ties to the South. Democratic Party leaders incited people with stories about how the Emancipation Proclamation would leave New York overrun by freed slaves.

Early Monday morning on July 13, 1863, the riots began. A group of firefighters who were mad about the conscription of their chief began smashing windows of the city’s Provost Marshall’s office. The mob that had formed outside followed them in and began destroying draft equipment.

Another early target was the offices of the New York Tribune newspaper because it was pro-war. (The editor, Horace Greeley was an abolitionist.)

By the afternoon the attackers had begun going after black people. The mob went to the Colored Orphan Asylum (the children had been safely removed shortly before) and destroyed clothing and toys and then set the building on fire. The destruction took only 20 minutes.

They were temporarily slowed by a night of heavy rain but were back out the next morning, ready for more mayhem. They destroyed downtown businesses and constructed barricades to keep the police away.

One black man, William Jones, was lynched.  Jeremiah Robinson was beaten and drowned. A black sailor, William Williams was stabbed and stomped on, then stoned.

Col. Henry O’Brien who was in charge of the 11th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment was also killed when he was coming to the aid of police fighting the rioters. The mob had withdrawn and O’Brien had walked down the street to a drugstore. Unfortunately, a group of rioters returned and attacked him. He was beaten, stoned, kicked, and then tortured to death. A black coachman, Abraham Franklin, was removed from his home and hanged, then dragged dead through the streets by his genitals.

They attacked white abolitionists and prominent Republicans. The mob burned down the home of Abby Hopper Gibbons, an abolitionist and social activist.They attacked two white women, Ann Derrickson and Ann Martin, who were married to black men.

White dock workers and longshoremen who had resented having to work with blacks attacked any buildings near the docks that catered to black clients – boarding houses, dance halls, tenements, and brothels. The businesses were destroyed and their white owners were stripped naked and left in the streets.

The New York state militia and other troops were called in to put down the riots. Many of the federal troops had just come from the battle at Gettysburg.

City Democrats put forth a bill to provide low interest loans for draft exemptions, Republican Mayor George Opdyke vetoed it, but the veto was overturned. This was the era of the Tammany Hall run city government which continued to grow in power by fighting for the rights of white working men.

Over 100 people died. Hundreds of buildings were damaged, some burnt to the ground, but only 67 people were convicted for their violent attacks and none of them received a meaningful sentence.

The draft was restarted a month later. Out of 80,000 men drafted from the state of New York, fewer than 2,400 actually went into the army. The rest had physical deferments or other exemptions.