Journal BlackHat's Journal: wear the hat do the dance and let the suit keep wearing you 4
Yesterday I mentioned the start of the 'Christianity, Democracy or Die' phase of history(1790's Europe). This was a change from previous Monarchy, Christianity or Die. Some have argued that it was 'Enlightened'. This is an error. The reality was, they never could pick between MCoD and DCoD. So they bounced from one to the other on the crests of their cyclic civil unrests at home.
Quote:
As the first fruits of the Venetian alliance, Bonaparte seized upon Corfu and the other Ionian Islands. "You will start," he wrote to General Gentili, "as quickly and as secretly as possible, and take possession of all the Venetian establishments in the Levant.... If the inhabitants should be inclined for independence, you should flatter their tastes, and in all your proclamations you should not fail to allude to Greece, Athens, and Sparta." This was to be the French share in the spoil. Yet even now, though stripped of its islands, its coasts, and its ancient Italian territory, Venice might still have remained a prominent city in Italy.
It was sacrificed in order to gain the Rhenish Provinces for France. Bonaparte had returned to the neighbourhood of Milan, and received the Austrian envoy, De Gallo, at the villa of Montebello. Wresting a forced meaning from the Preliminaries of Leoben, Bonaparte claimed the frontier of the Rhine, offering to Austria not only the territory of Venice upon the mainland, but the city of Venice itself. De Gallo yielded.
Whatever causes subsequently prolonged the negotiation, no trace of honour or pity in Bonaparte led him even to feign a reluctance to betray Venice.
"We have to-day had our first conference on the definitive treaty," he wrote to the Directory, on the night of the 26th of May, "and have agreed to present the following propositions: the line of the Rhine for France; Salzburg, Passau for the Emperor;
[snip...snip]
From the year 1798 down to the Peace of Paris, Greece was more affected by the vicissitudes of the Ionian Islands and by the growth of dominion of Ali Pasha in Albania than by the earlier revolutionary ideas. France was deprived of its spoils by the combined Turkish and Russian fleets in the coalition of 1799, and the Ionian Islands were made into a Republic under the protection of the Czar and the Sultan.
It was in the native administration of Corfu that the career of Capodistrias began. At the peace of Tilsit the Czar gave these islands back to Napoleon, and Capodistrias, whose ability had gained general attention, accepted an invitation to enter the Russian service. The islands were then successively beleaguered and conquered by the English, with the exception of Corfu; and after the fall of Napoleon they became a British dependency. Thus the three greatest Powers of Europe were during the first years of this century in constant rivalry on the east of the Adriatic, and a host of Greeks, some fugitives, some adventurers, found employment among their armed forces. The most famous chieftain in the war of liberation, Theodore Kolokotrones, a Klepht of the Morea, was for some years major of a Greek regiment in the pay of England. In the meantime Ali Pasha, on the neighbouring mainland, neither rested himself nor allowed any of his neighbours to rest. The Suliotes, vanquished after years of heroic defence, migrated in a body to the Ionian Islands in 1804. Every Klepht and Armatole of the Epirote border had fought at some time either for Ali or against him; for in the extension of his violent and crafty rule Ali was a friend to-day and an enemy to-morrow alike to Greek, Turk, and Albanian. When his power was at its height, Ali's court at Janina was as much Greek as it was Mohammedan: soldiers, merchants, professors, all, as it was said, with a longer or a shorter rope round their necks, played their part in the society of the Epirote capital.
Among the officers of Ali's army there were some who were soon to be the military rivals of Kolokotrones in the Greek insurrection: Ali's physician, Dr. Kolettes, was gaining an experience and an influence among these men which afterwards placed him at the head of the Government. For good or for evil, it was felt that the establishment of a virtually independent kingdom of Albania must deeply affect the fate of Greece; and when at length Ali openly defied the Sultan, and Turkish armies closed round his castle at Janina, the conflict between the Porte and its most powerful vassal gave the Greeks the signal to strike for their own independence.
The secret society, which under the name of Hetaeria Philike, or association of friends, inaugurated the rebellion of Greece, was founded in 1814, after it had become clear that the Congress of Vienna would take no steps on behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte.
The founders of this society were traders of Odessa, and its earliest members seem to have been drawn more from the Greeks in Russia and in the Danubian provinces than from those of Greece Proper. The object of the conspiracy was the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, and the re-establishment of a Greek Eastern Empire. It was pretended by the council of directors that the Emperor Alexander had secretly joined them; and the ingenious fiction was circulated that a society for the preservation of Greek antiquities, for which Capodistrias had gained the patronage of the Czar and other eminent men at the Congress of Vienna, was in fact this political association in disguise.
The real chiefs of the conspiracy always spoke of themselves as acting under the instructions of a nameless superior power. They were as little troubled by scruple in thus deceiving their followers as they were in planning a general massacre of the Turks, and in murdering their own agents when they wished to have them out of the way. The ultimate design of the Hetaeria was an unsound one, and its operations were based upon an imposture; but in exciting the Greeks against Turkish rule, and in inspiring confidence in its own resources and authority, it was completely successful. In the course of six years every Greek of note, both in Greece itself and in the adjacent countries, had joined the association. The Turkish Government had received warnings of the danger which threatened it, but disregarded them until revolt was on the point of breaking out. The very improvement in the condition of the Christians, the absence of any crying oppression or outrage in Greece during late years, probably lulled the anxieties of Sultan Mahmud, who, terrible as he afterwards proved himself, had not hitherto been without sympathy for the Rayah. But the history of France, no less than the history of Greece, shows that it is not the excess, but the sense, of wrong that produces revolution. A people may be so crushed by oppression as to suffer all conceivable misery with patience. It is when the pulse has again begun to beat strong, when the eye is fixed no longer on the ground, and the knowledge of good and evil again burns in the heart, that the right and the duty of resistance is felt.
Early in 1820 the ferment in Greece had become so general that the chiefs of the Hetaeria were compelled to seek at St. Petersburg for the Russian leader who had as yet existed only in their imagination. There was no dispute as to the person to whom the task of restoring the Eastern Empire rightfully belonged. Capodistrias, at once a Greek and Foreign Minister of Russia, stood in the front rank of European statesmen; he was known to love the Greek cause; he was believed to possess the strong personal affection of the Emperor Alexander. The deputies of the Hetaeria besought him to place himself at its head.
Capodistrias, however, knew better than any other man the force of those influences which would dissuade the Czar from assisting Greece. He had himself published a pamphlet in the preceding year recommending his countrymen to take no rash step; and, apart from all personal considerations, he probably believed that he could serve Greece better as Minister of Russia than by connecting himself with any dangerous enterprise. He rejected the offers of the Hetaerists, who then turned to a soldier of some distinction in the Russian army, Prince Alexander Hypsilanti, a Greek exile, whose grandfather, after governing Wallachia as Hospodar, had been put to death by the Turks for complicity with the designs of Rhegas. It is said that Capodistrias encouraged Hypsilanti to attempt the task which he had himself declined, and that he allowed him to believe that if Greece once rose in arms the assistance of Russia could not long be withheld. Hypsilanti, sacrificing his hopes of the recovery of a great private fortune through the intercession of the Czar at Constantinople, placed himself at the head of the Hetaeria, and entered upon a career, for which, with the exception of personal courage proved in the campaigns against Napoleon, he seems to have possessed no single qualification.
In October, 1820, the leading Hetaerists met in council at Ismail to decide whether the insurrection against the Turk should begin in Greece itself or in the Danubian provinces. Most of the Greek officers in the service of Sutsos, the Hospodar of Moldavia, were ready to join the revolt. With the exception of a few companies serving as police, there were no Turkish soldiers north of the Danube, the Sultan having bound himself by the Treaty of Bucharest to send no troops into the Principalities without the Czar's consent.
It does not appear that the Hetaerists had yet formed any calculation as to the probable action of the Roumanian people: they had certainly no reason to believe that this race bore good-will to the Greeks, or that it would make any effort to place a Greek upon the Sultan's throne. The conspirators at Ismail were so far on the right track that they decided that the outbreak should begin, not on the Danube, but in Peloponnesus. Hypsilanti, however, full of the belief that Russia would support him, reversed this conclusion, and determined to raise his standard in Moldavia.
And now for the first time some account was taken of the Roumanian population. It was known that the mass of the people groaned under the feudal oppression of the Boyards, or landowners, and that the Boyards themselves detested the government of the Greek Hospodars. A plan found favour among Hypsilanti's advisers that the Wallachian peasantry should first be called to arms by a native leader for the redress of their own grievances, and that the Greeks should then step in and take control of the insurrectionary movement. Theodor Wladimiresco, a Roumanian who had served in the Russian army, was ready to raise the standard of revolt among his countrymen. It did not occur to the Hetaerists that Wladimiresco might have a purpose of his own, or that the Roumanian population might prefer to see the Greek adventure fail. No sovereign by divine right had a firmer belief in his prerogative within his own dominions than Hypsilanti in his power to command or outwit Roumanians, Slavs, and all other Christian subjects of the Sultan.
The feint of a native rising was planned and executed. In February, 1821, while Hypsilanti waited on the Russian frontier, Wladimiresco proclaimed the abolition of feudal services, and marched with a horde of peasants upon Bucharest. On the 16th of March the Hetaerists began their own insurrection by a deed of blood that disgraced the Christian cause. Karavias, a conspirator commanding the Greek troops of the Hospodar at Galatz, let loose his soldiers and murdered every Turk who could be hunted down. Hypsilanti crossed the Pruth next day, and appeared at Jassy with a few hundred followers. A proclamation was published in which the Prince called upon all Christian subjects of the Porte to rise, and declared that a great European Power, meaning Russia, supported him in his enterprise. Sutsos, the Hospodar, at once handed over all the apparatus of government, and supplied the insurgents with a large sum of money. Two thousand armed men, some of them regular troops, gathered round Hypsilanti at Jassy. The roads to the Danube lay open before him; the resources of Moldavia were at his disposal; and had he at once thrown a force into Galatz and Ibraila, he might perhaps have made it difficult for Turkish troops to gain a footing on the north of the Danube.
But the incapacity of the leader became evident from the moment when he began his enterprise. He loitered for a week at Jassy, holding court and conferring titles, and then, setting out for Bucharest, wasted three weeks more upon the road. In the meantime the news of the insurrection, and of the fraudulent use that had been made of his own name, reached the Czar, who was now engaged at the Congress of Laibach. Alexander was at this moment abandoning himself heart and soul to Metternich's reactionary influence, and ordering his generals to make ready a hundred thousand men to put down the revolution in Piedmont.
He received with dismay a letter from Hypsilanti invoking his aid in a rising which was first described in the phrases of the Holy Alliance as the result of a divine inspiration, and then exhibited as a master-work of secret societies and widespread conspiracy. A stern answer was sent back. Hypsilanti was dismissed from the Russian service; he was ordered to lay down his arms, and a manifesto was published by the Russian Consul at Jassy declaring that the Czar repudiated and condemned the enterprise with which his name had been connected. The Patriarch of Constantinople, helpless in the presence of Sultan Mahmud, now issued a ban of excommunication against the leader and all his followers. Some weeks later the Congress of Laibach officially branded the Greek revolt as a work of the same anarchical spirit which had produced the revolutions of Italy and Spain.
The disavowal of the Hetaerist enterprise by the Czar was fatal to its success. Hypsilanti, indeed, put on a bold countenance and pretended that the public utterances of the Russian Court were a mere blind, and in contradiction to the private instructions given him by the Czar; but no one believed him. The Roumanians, when they knew that aid was not coming from Russia, held aloof, or treated insurgents as enemies. Turkish troops crossed the Danube, and Hypsilanti fell back from Bucharest towards the Austrian frontier. Wladimiresco followed him, not however to assist him in his struggle, but to cut off his retreat and to betray him to the enemy. It was in vain that the bravest of Hypsilanti's followers, Georgakis, a Greek from Olympus, sought the Wallachian at his own headquarters, exposed his treason to the Hetaerist officers who surrounded him, and carried him, a doomed man, to the Greek camp. Wladimiresco's death was soon avenged.
The Turks advanced. Hypsilanti was defeated in a series of encounters, and fled ignobly from his followers, to seek a refuge, and to find a prison, in Austria. Bands of his soldiers, forsaken by their leader, sold their lives dearly in a hopeless struggle. At Skuleni, on the Pruth, a troop of four hundred men refused to cross to Russian soil until they had given battle to the enemy. Standing at bay, they met the onslaught of ten times their number of pursuers. Georgakis, who had sworn that he would never fall alive into the enemy's hands, kept his word. Surrounded by Turkish troops in the tower of a monastery, he threw open the doors for those of his comrades who could to escape, and then setting fire to a chest of powder, perished in the explosion, together with his assailants.
The Hetaerist invasion of the Principalities had ended in total failure, and with it there passed away for ever the dream of re-establishing the Eastern Empire under Greek ascendancy. But while this enterprise, planned in vain reliance upon foreign aid and in blind assumption of leadership over an alien race, collapsed through the indifference of a people to whom the Greeks were known only as oppressors, that genuine uprising of the Greek nation, which, in spite of the nullity of its leaders, in spite of the crimes, the disunion, the perversity of a race awaking from centuries of servitude, was to add one more to the free peoples of Europe, broke out in the real home of the Hellenes, in the Morea and the islands of the Aegaean.
Soon after Hypsilanti's appearance in Moldavia the Turkish governor of the Morea, anticipating a general rebellion of the Greeks, had summoned the Primates of his province to Tripolitza, with the view of seizing them as hostages. The Primates of the northern district set out, but halted on their way, debating whether they should raise the standard of insurrection or wait for events. While they lingered irresolutely at Kalavryta the decision passed out of their hands, and the people rose throughout the Morea.
The revolt of the Moreot Greeks against their oppressors was from the first, and with set purpose, a war of extermination. "The Turk," they sang in their war-songs, "shall live no longer, neither in Morea nor in the whole earth."
This terrible resolution was, during the first weeks of the revolt, carried into literal effect. The Turks who did not fly from their country-houses to the towns where there were garrisons or citadels to defend them, were attacked and murdered with their entire families, men, women and children. This was the first act of the revolution; and within a few weeks after the 2nd of April, on which the first outbreaks occurred, the open country was swept clear of its Ottoman population, which had numbered about 25,000, and the residue of the lately dominant race was collected within the walls of Patras, Tripolitza, and other towns, which the Greeks forthwith began to beleaguer.--C. A. Fyffe
News expelled:
Few, that is, apart from the Home Office. Under rules introduced last month, Australians - and Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and Americans - must prove they have a good grasp of English to become UK citizens. Yet officials have still not decided how to prove this. Translation: White only. Abo's, Natives, and most of all-- Francophone Blacks are not welcome.
Eight men appeared in the dock today accused of plotting terrorist attacks in Britain and the United States. Amid extremely tight security at Belmarsh Magistrates' Court in south east London, the men each appeared in the dock for less than 10 minutes. All were remanded in custody until a preliminary hearing at the Old Bailey on August 25
A former Staten Island ferry captain who initially refused to speak with investigators about a disastrous ferry wreck will escape prosecution in exchange for his help in the case against another official. In an agreement made public Wednesday at the arraignment of former Capt. Michael Gansas, the sole charge against him - lying to Coast Guard investigators - will be dropped if he helps in the prosecution of Patrick Ryan, the city director of ferry operations.
A Moroccan accused of helping the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers approved of Hitler's extermination of the Jews and was part of a group that raged against the United States ``because it defends Israel'' witnesses testified Wednesday. Sudanese student Ahmed Maglad, 30, testified he met defendant Mounir el Motassadeq while living in Hamburg in 1997 and through him met lead suicide pilot Mohamed Atta, who he said was ``aggressively religious'' and was always trying to ``prove something.'' Maglad told the state court he also knew Ramzi Binalshibh, a U.S. detainee who is the suspected contact between al-Qaida and the Hamburg cell that included three of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots.
Italian police have defused a bomb near Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Sardinian holiday villa, hours after a visit by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Police have denied local reports that a second device was also found in the Porto Rotundo area after a newspaper received the bomb warning. Excuse me for thinking it is a pile of poo. King silvio and his merry band are not above prompting or even creating this out of whole cloth. The paper said the caller gave details of where the first bomb was planted, but would not reveal the location of the other, saying: "We're not telling you, go and find it. It's for [the bos^h^h^h^h^h^h^h]Berlusconi."
48.50 and back to ~38 to ~41 until spring 05. Will there be a 50 day? Hard to say, but I may point to your attention the date the trades are for (futures market + usage patterns).
Switzerland has decided to return to Nigeria almost $500m allegedly stolen by late military ruler Sani Abacha. The money, which has been frozen in Swiss accounts, was of criminal origin, the Swiss justice ministry said. To be divided up base on number of SPAM messages received. So ~1gig messages gets you a nickle and a Stryper CD.
OYAITJ: 42923: Idi dies, ' Lessons in How to Lie About Iraq', and Enoch Powell on a pogo stick.
Texttoon:
Fumetti : Stock photo of The Blairs with Silvio Berlusconi. Center is Cherie mouth open in horror as Silvio and Tony, arms around her, smile and look away. Overlayed speech bubble has Tony saying; "Ignore it. It's just David Kelly's ghost. It can't hurt us."
Faith No More? (Score:2)
They used to open for Camper Van Beethooven, then vice-versa, after "We Care Alot".
Re:Faith No More? (Score:2)
The line I had thought of first
If you don't make a friend, now/ One might make you
was trumped by
So wear the hat and do the dance/ And let the suit keep wearing you.'s
"ISR" [wikipedia.org] appeal. [/:-)
Neat side note on the flat etc.
Re:Faith No More? (Score:2)
Oh, the bands in those days! Most were obscure - and didn't make a noise outside the clubs here. Many far better than FNM. Didn't know that we were in our 'Golden Years'...
Re:Faith No More? (Score:2)
Wrinkles smoothed by nanoclaws/
With my machines I can dispatch you/
From this world without a trace/
Our nostalgia ghosts are ready to take your place/
Content-shifting shopping malls/
Gasoline trees and walk-through walls/
None of them knew...