REPEAT

   "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."-George Satayana 


Everybody knows this quote. Nobody ever seems to pay any attention to it. Yesterday’s events in Northeastern Syria are a perfect example. Due to a late Sunday night call between Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump, assuring the Turks that the U.S. would pull back it’s troops and not oppose a Turkish incursion into Syrian territory, NATO member Turkey invaded the previously controlled Kurdish land mass on Turkey’s southern border. The Kurds are (were) U.S. allies in the global fight against Daesh (ISIS). Tens of thousands of Daesh women and children are held in refugee camps like al-Hol, controlled by the Kurds. Makeshift prisons also hold captured Daesh foreign fighters. These fighters and their wives and kids present a giant problem. They are all in the line of battle. Maybe that’s the idea.

    The Turks have a horrible human rights record going back to the Ottoman Empire. The term genocide was coined in response to the forced expulsion and killing of over a million and a half Armenians by the Turkish government in 1915. After giving Erdogan the green light on Sunday, yesterday Trump said he thought it was a “bad idea” for Turkey to invade. Huh? This slight back step is in no doubt due to the scathing criticism he has received from his “faithful” evangelical rightwing and even a few loyalists in his own Republican Party. This massive voting block of evangelical Christians are concerned about Trump throwing the Christian minority in Syria under the bus in his rush to accommodate Erdogan. Too late. Funny how the evangelicals have no such concerns when Trump suggests shooting Central American Christian immigrants in the legs. Central America is too far from “the holy land.”

   

    Remembering the past has become a hobby of mine. It’s fun to try to get a handle on it. The Twentieth Century seems like yesterday. It’s nothing to go back 300 years. Just to bring the narrative  into my Catskill neighborhood, lets go all the way back to August of 1777. The Revolutionary War was raging on two fronts. The rebel insurgency was fighting both the British (in New York City, Philadelphia and New England) and the British allies, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, in Central New York and the Catskills. George Clinton was the governor of New York sending out orders from the de facto rebel capitol in Poughkeepsie. Anna Osterhout Moyers was home with her kids in Stone Arabia as her husband Henry nursed a sore foot, marching along the Mohawk River with Nicolas Herkimer, towards Oriskany.

     Henry Moyer’s sore foot would save his life, as he pulled up lame before the battle, limping back home to Anna. After being ambushed and sliced apart by Mohawk and tory forces, 450 rebel men would not return to their families from the bloody creek bed at Oriskany. The battle lasted only a few hours.

     Because of the extreme bloodshed at Oriskany, another ancestor, Johannes Osterhout, Jr., and his sidekick “Nicolas the Indian,” were tasked by Gov. Clinton with going from Wawarsing (birthplace of my great grandparents) to Oquaga (east of Binghamton) to parlay with the Tuscarora. The Tuscarora assured the two “go-betweens” that yes, many of their young men had gone north to fight with the Mohawks and British at Oriskany, but the community at Oquaga was not hostile to the rebels and would stay out of the fight. Osterhout and Nicolas reported back to the governor and were paid 15 pounds for their service. Actually the cash went to Johannes, while Nicolas got a pint of rum. Due to Osterhout’s and Nicolas’ intelligence the village would be spared for the time being. It’s all there in George Clinton’s official papers.

     What’s this got to do with events in Syria? The parallels are obvious. The only reason the Tuscarora had survived that long was because of British guns, powder and horses. The Kurds are in the same precarious position. Eventually the British withdrew their support for the Six Nations, leaving them at the mercy of the battle hardened, Indian hating, American Patriots……… among them the Osterhouts. The Brits pulled back and let the Americans invade the Iroquois heartland. George Clinton’s brother General John Clinton would team up with Maj. General John Sullivan and weave a path of death and destruction from Osterhout, Pennsylvania to the Finger Lakes of New York. On Gov. Clinton’s and Gen. George Washington’s orders, nothing was left standing. Men, women and children were killed, crops burned and apple orchards girdled. The core of the great Haudenosaunee Confederacy was obliterated; while the British sat by and made peace with their unruly colonists and continued making boatloads of money. The Indians would never return. 

    

     When Trump’s clueless depravity unleashed the might of the second most powerful army in the NATO alliance on the Kurds, he may very well have put another genocide in motion. In a matter of weeks the Kurdish homeland may be gone forever. Only a narcissistic, megalomaniac like Trump, who knows nothing of history, can, in politically induced retrospect, opine that Turkey’s invasion now looks like “a bad idea”— warning he’ll ruin Turkey’s economy if they step out of bounds. Everything is transactional with Trump. Lives mean nothing to him.Yesterday he blamed his pulling back troops from protecting the Kurds on the Kurds not helping us in the Second World War, “they didn’t help us with Normandy, for example.” Or the Revolution, for another example. They deserve whatever they get. There’s some history for you. ‘member?