#military repression

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"GOVERNOR OF TABRIZ MONSTER OF CRUELTY SAYS CAMBRIDGE MAN," Vancouver Sun. October 15, 1912. Page 1. ---- Professor Edward Granville Brown Exhorts Great Britain to Put a Stop to Horrors Practised by Ruler. ---- POLITICAL ENEMIES BRUTALLY TORTURED ---- Those Who Differ With His Beliefs Are Treated to Fiendish Practises by Monster. ---- (Special Cable to The Sun.) LONDON, Oct. 14.-Dreadful tales of fiendish cruelty are told of the governor of Tabriz by Edward Granville Brown, professor of Arabic at Cambridge university, who, through the medium of the press, exhorts the British government to interfere with a man whose sole delight is to torture and kill those of his subjects who profess an opposite political opinion to his own.

Incidentally it may be said that the Liberals of Tabriz are the sufferers.

Shujand Dewla, governor of Tabriz, writes the professor, is a monster rather than a human being, taking a cold blooded delight in hanging, stabbing and even cutting men in two like sheep, if he believed them to be unsatisfied with his rule.

It is a common occurrence, writes the professor, to see men lying in a dying condition in the streets of Tabriz, with tongues cut out, eyes gauged from their sockets, and horse-shoes nailed to their bare feet.

Concluding, Professor Brown declares that nothing is thought too fiendish by the governor of the province, and deaths through the plentiful application of the whip are common, while he asserts that the governor has been known to have the mouths of those suspected of Liberal principles, sewn up.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Above:  "The Russian Gallows" and other photographs from Edward Browne, The Reign of Terror at Tabriz. Manchester: Taylor, Garnett, Evans & Co, 1912. "In addition to such in-camera acts of counterrevolutionary violence, there were also public performances of violence, conducted by both constitutionalists and anticonstitutionalists. For example, in the city of Ardebil after the royalist coup Amir Mo’azez Garrussi unleashed his own wrath on constitutionalists, including the perforation of victims’ septa, through which ropes were tied as harnesses for parading the victims through the streets and the bazaar, before having them publicly hanged or beaten to death with clubs. For their part, after dethroning Mohammad Ali Shah in July 1909, the revolutionary forces publicly executed many prominent and ordinary royalists, including the hanging of the arch anticonstitutionalist cleric Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri, often with the victims left hanging from the gallows for some time.  Public display of corpses at times required preventing the natural decay of the body-deprived-of-life in a postmortem effort to preserve the cadaver for the purpose of maximizing the spectator efficacy of the display and its intended message. This was the case with the royalist “Arshad al-Dauleh,” who was captured and shot by revolutionaries after rallying his forces in sup- port of Mohammad Ali’s attempted repossession of the throne in 1911.

The public exhibition of Arshad al-Dauleh’s corpse was a combined gesture of the corporeal inscription of constitutionalist victory in routing forces loyal to the former shah, effective liquidation of a notorious and formidable royalist reactionary, and avenging the imagined nation—very likely also conveying a message of nationalist resistance to Russian machinations in Iran, given St. Petersburg’s collusion in the latest royalist intrigue and the swift in-camera trial and execution of Arshad al-Dauleh in order to prevent Russian intercession on his behalf. Arshad al-Dauleh’s corpse was taken to Tehran and placed on public display for three days, his stomach cut open in order to pack ice into his body for postponing decomposition. The preservation of the corpse or body parts for the production of optimum “actuarial” effect of violence was in keeping with a well-established practice in Iran, where cadavers or decapitated heads of criminals and rebellious tribal and/or political persons were occasionally stuffed with straw or other materials and placed on public display. By the time of the revolution, the modern media of photography and cartoons appearing in tabloids (with the press serving as yet another component of Iranian modernity) were deployed as additional multivalent circulatory mechanisms for multiplying and prolonging the public scopic utility of corporeal confinement, injury, and demise, used by different contending political factions to respectively celebrate and vilify their prowess or victimization.

For example, in early 1908 the constitutionalist caricature tabloid, Kashkul (Mendicant’s Bowl), printed a cartoon depicting the grotesque murder of a number of defenseless, and evidently unsuspecting, constitutionalists by a counterrevolutionary mob at Tehran’s Artillery Square (meidan-i toup-khaneh). The victims included a young man (Inayatullah Khan of Zanjan), who had his eyes gouged out after being killed. In the cartoon, while the mutilated body of a victim hangs upside down from a tree (evidently the body of Inayatullah Khan of Zanjan after being killed) and a hacked body of another appears at the base of the tree, the anticonstitutionalist hooligan Mulla Ibrahim, portrayed as a beast-headed butcher, is shown busy carving out his victim’s eyes. While the caption next to the figure of the victim suspended from the tree denies accusations of his apostasy, the caption below the figure of Mulla Ibrahim and his young victim questions the genuine religious devotion of Mulla Ibrahim (and, by extension, all other anticonstitutionalists claiming to be defending Shi’i Islam against religious heresy and atheism). The caption, underscoring the “uncivilized” nature of the atrocity, asks, “In which religion and nation is it permissible to gouge out his eyes?” This incident occurred shortly after a public denunciation in the constitutionalist paper Majlis of earlier attacks carried out by counterrevolutionary thugs at the Artillery Square, allegedly sanctioned by the lead- ing anticonstitutionalist cleric, Shaykh Fazlul- lah Nuri, as a means of combating irreligion." - Mansour Bonakdarian, "The World Born Through The Chamber of a Revolver: Violence, Culture and Modernity in Iran, 1906 -1911," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 25, Number 2, 2005, pp. 331-333

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"At the end of August [1918], the government began efforts to apprehend those people who defaulted on their obligation to the state. While the military believed that the draft was necessary to sustain the war effort, in Quebec the imposition of conscription during the [Spanish Flu] epidemic only confirmed that English-speaking Canadians had little concern about wasting French lives. Defaulters were pursued across Canada, but the military authorities focussed their efforts on Quebec. Soldiers in groups varying in size from a couple of dozen to several hundred men - 'special service detachments' - were assigned to apprehend French Canadian draft dodgers. These roving bands were tasked with 'raiding theatres, pool-rooms and visiting, by night, that part of the cities occupied by the working classes.' They roved the countryside, searching lumber camps and farmer's fields for defaulters. If any were discovered, the treatment meted out was brutal: ''All deserters and absentees without leave should be punished no matter what their medical category...even if they cannot be made use of for strictly military service and even they have...never been on duty...field punishment number two...will be found a convenient punishment to impose.'' Field punishment number two consisted of forcing prisoners to perform hard labour while restrained in iron shackles. All across Quebec the search for deserters, asbentees and defaulters intensified during the pandemic period. Special Service Detachment #1, administered out of Quebec City, set out to apprehend defaulters throughout October and early November. Between October 1 and November 13, this small detachment of soldiers dealt with more than 300 men under the provisions of the Military Service Act. Groups of soldiers travelled across the Quebec countryside searching the woods, lumber camps and villages. On October 3rd, soldiers stalked the streets of Laterriere and Hebertville; on the 8th, those of St-Gedeon. On the 15th - by which time the influenza had broken out in the unit itself - two parties went to Lake Edward and St-Fulgence; on the 25th, Bagotville was searched. On the 28th the same detachment returned to Laterriere, where two prisoners were taken. On November 1, it was in Chicoutimi; on the 2nd, in Chambord. On the very day the armistice was declared, a party of Special Service soldiers searched the village of Jonquieres and subjected two defaulters to field punishment number two." - from Mark Humphries, The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 143

[omnewswire]

UK riots: British paratroopers are trained in riot control BlackListed News - 1/29/12 2:33 PM During the exercises at the Lydd training base in Kent, the elite troops were pelted with petrol bombs and missiles and “fought” running battles with gangs of protesters as part of the battalion’s “public order training”.

[theamericanbear]

[theamericanbear]

Nothing but menace in this approach to Daraa. The trepidation among the people on the street is unmistakable. Stay strong Syria.