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to stay put but its russian jews were expelled and sent back to russia despite the fact that if there was one country in the world that jews hated it was russia and if there was one group of jews that the critically short on manpower ottoman army might convince to take up arms against russia it was jews who had fled russia and been given sanctuary in the oe but never mind that they were simply expelled creating a mass exodus from ottoman controlled palestine to the nearest russia allied country british controlled egypt since aaronsohn s family consisted of actual ottoman subjects they did not have to move but they witnessed the expulsions of many in their communities and the subsequent ottoman army requisitions of virtually everything not nailed down food horses fence posts plows clothes baby clothes women s underwear for the cause and then the locusts came locust swarms of biblical proportions descended upon the land devouring everything the army hadn t children and animals were actually going blind because the locusts would land on their eyes while they were asleep and drink the moisture from their eyeballs the war had barely even begun and the population was already facing starvation the ottomans hired aaronsohn to head the locust eradication program giving him sweeping powers to do whatever was necessary to get rid of the bugs unfortunately local authorities were often less than eager to listen to a jewish guy preferring the eradication strategy of doing absolutely nothing and then the armenian genocide started this is obviously what the ottoman army needed to be spending its energy on at this point in the war right most able bodied armenian males were simply shot but the women children and elderly were force marched into the desert to die of thirst starvation train stations were clogged with throngs of desperate starving people train tracks were clogged with the corpses of formerly desperate people who d been run over by the trains many of the skilled workers on the railroads were themselves armenian and with the official expulsions were also transformed into starving desperate corpses because what army needs a functioning railroad during a war it was basically the zombie apocalypse to his credit enver pasha who apparently wasn t informed of the kill all the armenians policy actually tried to save the starving people streaming into his city by requisitioning food and other resources for them but there wasn t anything to be had because there was already a famine going on meanwhile aaronsohn and some of his close family were travelling up and down the locust affected area watching all of the destruction and thinking oh my god the ottomans are murderously incompetent we have to get the british to invade and start running things or we re all going to die and so aaronsohn became a spy or at least tried to become a spy but that s a story that i ll let you read the book to learn the end of william yale hailed from the family that had gifted the famous university with its name but his particular branch of the family had fallen on hard times and yale went to work as a common laborer for standard oil in oklahoma but yale was ambitious and hard working and the company soon decided to send him to the middle east to scout for oil and so william yale was stranded in the ottoman empire when the war broke out at the time the us was neutral not a combatant so he just hunkered down and tried to look out for standard oil s interests until drilling could resume his status protected him from most of the war s worst privations but he still saw the destruction around him eventually he made it back to the us and joined the war effort in his capacity as a mid east expert or yet another spy though he never abandoned his true loyalty to standard oil the us plays a rather small role in the book since it had almost no part in the ottoman theatre in fact the us never even declare war on the ottomans the us only comes in as player at the end of the story with the americans attempting to influence the creation of a new world order at the treaty of versailles which by all accounts involved a bunch of naïve ideas born of no real experience with the regions under dispute but that shouldn t surprise you if you ve been paying any attention to the past hundred years of us foreign policy so do i recommend it yes it s a good book especially if you re interested in the late ottoman empire lawrence of arabia or wwi i ve now begun reading lawrence s personal memoir seven pillars of wisdom and while i am enjoying it i find that i am quite glad i read lawrence in arabia first even though seven pillars is 650 pages long the material is dense and many events are covered so quickly that i wouldn t know what lawrence is talking about if i hadn t already read about it in more depth in lawrence in arabia i m sure this was less of an issue back when the book was published and the general public was more familiar with the course of various wwi battles 1 comment review the berlin baghdad express may 24 2021 evolutiontheorist uncategorized islam jihad ottoman empire wwi note this book is not actually about the berlin baghdad express railway it has a few good chapters on the subject but the bulk of the book is actually on ottoman german political relations and the ottoman sphere in world war one that said it is a good book about wwi if that s what you re looking for mcmeekin s the berlin baghdad express probably should have been named oppenheim s jihad the book traces the peculiar german notion that they could perhaps in exchange for some bribes inspire the muslim world to come together in an anti french british and russian jihad in support of german efforts in wwi they managed to get the ottoman turks who wanted to take back egypt and the suez canal from the english and to oppose russian advances on their northern border to go along with their jihad idea but the rest of the muslim world was far from convinced the bedouins who depended largely on british traffic for their food and income took german bribe money and disappeared the sherif of mecca perhaps the most important person in the world to get behind an ottoman declared jihad decided the new ottoman government was dominated by secular modernizers and declared war on them instead the sudanese and libyans were less than enthusiastic about trekking across a continent or two to help the germans a muslim uprising within british egypt never materialized the germans never quite overcame the sunni shia split and while the afghanis ostensibly signed on there was never any practical way to get men and materials to and from afghanistan interestingly the largest muslim country in the world at the eve of wwi was not the ottoman empire but the british empire which ruled over millions of muslim subjects in india the ultimate realization of the germans scheme was for muslims in india and egypt to revolt against british rule causing havoc in the colonies and cutting off the suez thus distracting the british from the western front where they and the french had bogged down into a grinding death match stalemate with the germans german propaganda pamphlets undoubtedly made it to india but the jihadi stampede never materialized compared to the colossal cost of the european theaters in wwi these african and asian adventures were small potatoes a week s worth of guns men and bribes might bring whole armies over to the german side in essence they were small bets with small odds but the potential to pay off grandly if any of them worked unfortunately for the germans they all failed jihad might be the duty of all muslims but traipsing across a continent to wage jihad in a foreign country on behalf of the germans did not sound particularly appealing to the vast majority of muslims especially when you could just wage jihad at home against local infidels the ottoman empire s declaration of a holy war against the infidels did however make the empire s 25 non muslims rather insecure and in some cases very dead the war was an absolute disaster for the ottomans who simply had no ability to wage it they were broke without the manpower transportation networks or equipment necessary to undertake a world war the ottoman empire might look impressive on a map but much of that territory was desert wasteland or desert wasteland much of it was sparsely populated by nomads who dabbled in tribal warfare and banditry the hinterlands had not at all been pacified and brought under central control the british supported muslim rulers in egypt didn t want to trade their positions of relative power for subordination to the ottomans and no one wanted to pay higher taxes unlike central europe the ottoman empire had very few completed train lines especially across its vast deserts and even roads were scarce in some areas not to mention water down in mecca the economy was based on the pilgrimage and as mentioned above the world s biggest muslim country was british india british ships brought the pilgrims grain and other foods to a region that could do very little farming for itself war with the british meant for the arabians economic ruin and starvation the german attempt to build railroads across the ottoman empire so that troops and equipment wouldn t have to be transported by wagons and camels across the desert kept running into setbacks from paranoid sultans who were afraid of too much work being completed at once to funding issues to mountains to the sudden loss of all of their armenian employees a non trivial part of the work crews in a country where almost the ethnic turkish population had been drafted the armenian genocide was of course both a humanitarian and strategic disaster while some armenians did side with russia during the war the majority of armenians were in fact loyal subjects and the state could hardly afford to lose both subjects and the money it cost to kill them their corpses also literally clogged up rivers wells and rail lines it s hard to overstate just how horrifying a million dead people are the ottoman empire s military forays were just as disastrous they tried to attack russia in the middle of winter which worked out exactly like you d think they schlepped men and equipment across the sinai desert to attack the suez only to discover that the british had machine guns their army hemorrhaged men through death and desertion so quickly that they were soon enlisting men in their 50s about the only thing that worked out in their favor was the british inability to do anything even remotely intelligent thus sparing the ottomans attacks on their weakest points instead they threw their men into the literal bloodbath that was gallipoli just about the worst possible place they could have chosen to attack on the entire ottoman coastline if you re trying to make sense of the absolute mess that was wwi this book is a good place to start it shows how each decision looked at in isolation basically made sense and yet when you zoom out to look at the big picture what you get is nonsense the british decisions to attack the dardanelles the straight connecting the mediterranean and the black sea directly made sense the british could use their impressive navy in the attack opening the dardanelles would let their allies the russians move more easily into the mediterranean and their forces could be brought to bear directly on constantinople the ottoman capitol if it had worked it would have been a stupendous victory unfortunately the british should have paid more attention to the fact that constantinople has been conquered only a handful of times in 2000 years it s a difficult city to take when the naval attack failed because the turks figured out how to mine the waters around the dardanelles the british decided they needed to land a ground force to support their naval force gallipoli they decided was a good spot to provide ground support to their naval force so that s where they landed their forces unfortunately gallipoli was extremely easy to defend the turks quickly moved in machine guns and the british were slaughtered and slaughtered and slaughtered if you ve seen futurama the british are basically zapp branigan gallipoli was such a stupid place to attack that at first the defenders didn t really believe the british were attacking it they assumed the attack was just a diversion and that the real attack would come somewhere weaker and more difficult to defend the germans essentially couldn t believe that the british would actually be this stupid but the real attack never came against all logic they were actually trying to attack gallipoli in the end gallipoli was a terrible loss an absolute humanitarian catastrophe that produced nothing of worth for anyone but like the entirety of wwi each step that led up to the decision to land at that point made sense in isolation likewise the german dream of pan islamic jihad on behalf of the ottoman sultan a weak puppet of the young turks cup gov t that had deposed the former sultan looked good on paper and was an absolute disaster in reality 5 comments nettles march 1 2021 march 1 2021 evolutiontheorist uncategorized the sun is up and the nettles are out i ve always been fascinated by wild foods picking a wild berry or parsnip gives you a little taste of what our distant ancestors lives were like the ways they looked at the world and the flavors they enjoyed nettles are famous because they re one of the very first wild plants available in spring and are available almost everywhere there s not a whole lot available in winter unless you really like pine trees which i don t they re also famous because they don t look spiky but if you accidentally brush up against one while walking in shorts you will be very very sorry i ve never eaten nettles before but when i found them in the woods while hiking with the family decided they d be worth trying why not once i pointed out the nettles my kids of course started poking them the best way to harvest nettles is with salad tongs because you don t want to touch them you always bring salad tongs on your hikes right pick the tender top leaves and put them in a bag if you re not sure whether it s nettles or not just poke the plant a few times you ll figure it out once you get them home figure out how you re going to handle them for rinsing and chopping you can eat nettles raw if you just carefully crush all of the spines before sticking it in your mouth take a tender top leaf carefully by the bottom press the sides together curse as you verify that yes this is definitely stinging nettle why are you holding it mash once you re satisfied that you ve probably crushed all of the ouchy bits eat it it tastes a little like mint oddly enough they re not closely related as far as i know but they plants do have some superficial similarities after washing and chopping i opted to sauté mine in butter with onions and asparagus asparagus isn t actually up yet in my area but it is an early spr...