Arkansas Republicans Scramble to Disown Elected Pro-Confederate Colleagues Who Praise Slavery, Genocide

The good ol’ days in Arkansas, according to some members of its current legislature

Members of the Republican Party in Arkansas began speaking out this week to attempt to distance themselves from three Republican elected officials who have been outed—in some cases have long ago outed themselves—as proponents of, variously, slavery, genocide, religious pogroms, and the summary execution of naughty children.

Rep. Jon Hubbard

Rep. Jon Hubbard, a state legislator, wrote in a 2009 book, Letters to the Editor: Confessions of a Frustrated Conservative, that Southern slavery “may actually have been a blessing in disguise” because “the blacks who could endure those conditions” (you know, the ones that people like Hubbard’s ancestors didn’t whip to death) “would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.”  He also blamed African-Americans for bringing down educational standards with their “lack of discipline and ambition” and said that “planned wars or extermination” as a policy response to immigration “now ... seems to be barbaric and uncivilized” but “will at some point become as necessary as eating and breathing.”

Rep. Loy Mauch

Another Arkansas state representative, Rep. Loy Mauch, wrote in 2009, “If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution, and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?”  Mauch, a member of the League of the South, a Southern separatist group classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.) as a racist hate-group, has also called the Confederate flag “a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order,” and he once delivered a keynote address titled, “Homage to John Wilkes Booth,” referring to Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.

A League of the South rally in South Carolina

Lastly, a former legislator running for Arkansas office again, Charlie Fuqua, published a book this year, titled God’s Law, in which he argues that there is “no solution to the Muslim problem short of expelling all followers of the religion from the United States.”  Fuqua, a recipient of the Arkansas Christian Coalition’s “Friend of the Family” award, also quotes scripture to the effect that parents have the right to kill their children in order to set a disciplinary example for other children.

Most Arkansas Republican politicians, in replies to nosy Yankee journalists over the past week, have been pretending that they didn’t know that their colleagues, whom they had supported numerous times in the past, including financially, had such views—although Hubbard’s book came out in 2009, for crying out loud, and the other men’s views were also well known long before being brought to light this week.

Fuqua told reporters on October 6th, “I think my views are fairly well-accepted by most people.”  Given that it’s Arkansas, he’s probably right.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Kurdistan Update: Both Turks & PKK Claim to Control Şemdinli, Zaza MP Abducted, Donna D’Errico and Noah’s Ark

With Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria still circling the drain and Syria’s Kurds still hanging on to their string of liberated towns in the far north of the country, news on what exactly is going on in Turkey is paradoxically harder to come by.  The part of Hakkari province, in the far southeast, where the battle raged for at least two weeks between Kurdish rebels and the military for the town of Şemdinli is still more or less sealed off to the press and outsiders by the government.  Both the Turkish government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) claim to control the town.  Since there is no more heavy bombardment or movement of matériel being reported, it seems more likely that the Turks control it for now, but the P.K.K. are not down for the count.  They are launching attacks in and around Şemdinli on an almost daily basis, and in Tunceli province, in Anatolia, they abducted a member of Turkey’s parliament under the authorities’ noses, just to show they could.  (The M.P. is a Kurd and an ally and was released within 48 hours.)  Here is all the news this week from Kurdistan ...

[Note: See these earlier articles from this blog on related topics, especially with respect to the Kurds and the Arab Spring: “And Now Civil War ... Could Syria Break Up?” (Nov. 2011), “The Iraq War Is Over, but Is Iraq’s Partition Just Beginning?” (Dec. 2011), “Ten Separatist Movements to Watch in 2012” (Dec. 2011); “Get Ready for a Kurdish Spring” (March 28, 2012); “Shifting Alliances in the Kurdish Struggles” (April 1, 2012); “Turkish Delights Hide Ugly History” (April 4, 2012);  “Syria’s Kurds Are Setting Up a Quasi-State—How Long Can It Last?” (July 2012), “Liberation of Syrian Kurdistan Infuriates Turkey, Iraq, and the Free Syrian Army—in Fact, Everyone but Assad” (Aug. 2012), “Turkish Kurdistan Ground War in Progress, Iraq Border Crisis Eases: Kurdistan and Syria Update” (Aug. 2012).]

Turkey, Kurdish Rebels Both Claim Control of Şemdinli after 3-Week Battle.  Both sides in the battle between Turkey’s military and the P.K.K. are claiming victory, for the moment, in the three-week-old battle for the town of Şemdinli, near the borders with Iran and Iraq.  The governor of Hakkari province, which includes Şemdinli, said August 11th that the battle was over.  “As a result of the operations, conducted with determination and rigor,” his statement read, “the terrorist organization P.K.K. was unable to reach its cruel goals and a large number of its members have been rendered ineffective.”  However, the spokesman for the P.K.K.’s People’s Defence Forces (H.P.G.) said that, as of August 11th, Şemdinli, which in Kurdish is called Şemzînan, was in Kurdish control, adding, “Most of the Turkish army bases in the area are under siege and no longer under the control of the Turkish army.  Turkish helicopter and fighter jets have been trying to fly over, but due to H.P.G.’s attacks they have withdrawn from the area.  The Turkish army has failed to end the besiegement.”  It is not clear how much of the town, if any, they do control, but there was plenty of apparent P.K.K. activity reported in the area in the day or so after the governor’s announcement, including gunfire in the direction of village guards but believed to be aimed at the mayor of Derecik, a town near Şemdinli.  The mayor’s house was also attacked that day.  And on August 12th in Yüksekova, also in Hakkari, P.K.K. set up a roadblock on a highway and distributed propaganda, while a nearby fuel tanker vehicle was set afire.  The next day, the P.K.K. attacked an airport construction site in Hakkari, setting fire to trucks and abducting 11 drivers.  On August 17th an explosion at a government office in Şemdinli district injured one policeman.  The same day, landmines in Şemdinli damaged an army convoy, leading to a gunfight but no reported casualties, while  elsewhere in Hakkari province that day a police checkpoint was attacked by unknown assailants with assault rifles.  The fighting in Şemdinli began June 23rd after P.K.K. fighters—including some arriving, according to the Turkish government, from the self-declared allegedly-P.K.K.-allied Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region in northern Syria—tried to take control of the town.  The government said earlier that over 115 P.K.K. fighters had been killed (as reported earlier in this blog).

P.K.K. Abducts, Releases Kurdish Lawmaker and Alevi-Rights Activist in Anatolia.  Kurdish rebels on August 12th kidnapped a Kurdish opposition legislator at a roadblock in Tunceli province, in the Anatolian region in east-central Turkey.  Two others kidnapped with him were freed shortly afterward, but the lawmaker, Hüseyin Aygün, from the Republican People’s Party (C.H.P.), remained unaccounted for until he was released late the following day.  Tunceli’s governor, Mustafa Taskeşen, said that Aygün was kidnapped by the armed separatist P.K.K. under orders from their central command in Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan region.  Ironically, Aygün is a human-rights lawyer from the Zaza ethnic group, considered part of the Kurdish nation, and he has championed Kurds in torture and forced-evacuation cases and even defied his own opposition party on behalf of the Alevi population, a religious community following an unorthodox strain of Shia Islam.  Alevis, who have their highest concentration in Tunceli province, make up approximately 25% of both the Turkish and Kurdish populations in Turkey—the Kurds themselves being about 20% of Turkey.  Aygün’s advisor, Deniz Tunç, who, along with a journalist, was also kidnapped in the incident but freed mere hours later, told a television interviewer later that Aygün had argued with this abductors in Kurdish for half an hour in order to convince them to free Tunç and the journalist.  The P.K.K. said August 13th that the military operations launched immediately after the abduction in a search for Aygün and his captors were putting Aygün’s life at risk.  Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, lost no time in linking the kidnapping to the emboldenment of Kurds by the establishment of a rebel Kurdish quasi-state in northern Syria last month.

Hüseyin Aygün, back safely

Violence Ongoing Elsewhere in Turkish Kurdistan.  On August 14th, it was reported that P.K.K. rebels attacked two police stations in Antioch, in Hatay province, near the Syrian border, injuring two police officers.  The following day, in Bitlis province, P.K.K. members attacked government offices in Güroymak with rocket-launchers, injuring a police officer.  One of the attackers was reportedly “rendered ineffective,” which is how the Turkish government phrases it when they kill people.  There were also demonstrations in Diyarbakir, the notional capital of Turkish Kurdistan, and other areas for the August 15th anniversary of the P.K.K.’s declaration of war against the Turkish state in 1984.  Police responded with tear gas.  P.K.K. supporters in Gaziantep, very near the border with Syria, threw gasoline bombs at a public market, while elsewhere in Gaziantep province two engineering vehicles were burned.

U.S. Accuses Iran of Being behind Flow of Arms from Syrian Kurds into Turkey.  The United States’ ambassador to the Republic of Turkey, Francis Ricciardone, said this week that the Islamic Republic of Iran was funneling weapons to allies in Syria of the P.K.K. and that these weapons are being used against targets within Turkey.  These claims unite two concerns shared by the closely allied U.S. and Turkey: the fear of Syrian Kurds using their recently declared Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region as a staging ground for the P.K.K. war against the Turkish government, and Iran’s increasingly strident support for the embattled Arab Shiite regime of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

Turkish Bombers Strike Alleged P.K.K. Bases in Northern Iraq.  Turkish aircraft bombed four positions in northern Iraq’s Kandil Mountain region, in the autonomous Kurdistan region, on August 15th, targeting alleged camps of Turkey’s P.K.K.  Parts of the villages of Bermka, Sekanya, Sorgul, and Bukriska were hit in the nighttime strikes.  There were no reports of casualties, but P.K.K. sources say Kurdish farms and orchards were damaged.

6 Car Bombs Kill 7 in Kirkuk; Kurdish Party Office Targeted.  In Kirkuk, in the disputed Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq which lies outside of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government’s official bailiwick, six car bombs exploded on August 16th, two of them targeting a Kurdish political party’s offices during a celebration.  A total of seven people were killed in the Kirkuk bombings that day.

16 Iranians, Including 7 Kurds, “Confess” to Spying for Israel.  Official state television in the Islamic Republic of Iran last week broadcast “confessions” by 16 people, including seven Iranian Kurds, to working for Israel to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists.  One of those seven is Maziyar Ibrahimi, a resident of Iraq’s northern autonomous Kurdistan region.  The foreign-relations head at the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) in Arbil, Iraq, said, “We dismiss all the accusations that suggest we have relations with Israel.  When we asked Iran for evidence, they did not have any and the consul of Iran in Arbil apologized for these accusations.”

Donna D’Errico, injured in her quest for Noah’s Ark

Baywatch Babe’s Ill-Fated Quest for Noah’s Ark Almost Derailed by P.K.K. Fighting.  Last week misfortune plagued an American sex star’s quest for Noah’s Ark atop Turkey’s Mt. Ararat, the legendary mountain said to still harbor remnants of the Old Testament vessel.  Donna D’Errico, formerly of the television series Baywatch and once in 1995 a Playboy Playmate of the Month, fell some distance and injured herself with scratches and bruises while climbing with Kurdish guides last week.  She also communicated electronically to her fans about a brief scare over trouble with the P.K.K. insurgency, writing, on August 10th, “Early this morning I was awakened by one of our Kurdish guides saying that we had to leave the mountain immediately because there was trouble with the PKK and the Turkish Military on the mountain and that we were in serious danger.  I think we should be ok.  But please pray for us.” Mt. Ararat (see map above) is in Turkey’s eastern Kurdistan region (in an area formerly populated also by Armenians, before the Turkish genocide), but part of its slopes are in Iran, and the peak is near the point where those two countries meet Azerbaijan’s separatist Nakhchivan enclave and the Republic of Armenia.  D’Errico, who is 44, arrived safely home August 14th, defending her quest for the Ark by saying, “I know everybody thinks it’s funny and it’s a big joke and people don't believe in it, but I do.”  So far the Ark has not been found, but D’Errico’s Facebook page does include photos of Turkish squat toilets.

Donna D’Errico, modern-day Indiana Jones, with her now-estranged husband,
the former Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Six.
Reportedly, if D’Errico finds Noah’s Ark, she plans to board it two by two ... all by herself.

[You can read more about these and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Maybe They Could Call Themselves Jutes—Oh, Wait, That Name’s Already Taken

Geneticists from Israel’s Sheba Medical Center have found a genetic marker associated with the well-mapped Ashkenazic—or Eastern European Jewish—genetic profile in a population of a Colorado Indian tribe.

The tribe was not specified, but Colorado has only two federally recognized indigenous communities: the Southern Ute Tribe, and the Ute Mountain Tribe.  The Utes migrated to what is now Colorado from Mexico before statehood but after European settlement of North America began.

The marker is a “harmful modification in the BRCA1 gene,” linked to a higher risk of breast and ovarian cancer.  The shared ancestry is likely to be linked to Spanish colonialism in Mexico—Spain being a country which had a large Jewish population until the expulsions of 1492 (the same year Christopher Columbus sailed—and, heck, some people think he may have been part Jewish), but where much Jewish genetic residue presumably remained.  Historians are only just beginning to appreciate how many Jewish families maintained their traditions and identity discreetly or secretly in the Wild West and under Spanish colonialism.

However, crackpot anthropological theories, such as that put forth in the Book of Mormon (which also claims that God punished some human populations for their laziness by making them dark-skinned, and that Jesus Christ visited the cities of Mesoamerica), are likely to seize on the study as evidence for the supposed origins of Native Americans in the Lost Tribes of Israel.  Many Native Americans find these Mormon theories deeply offensive—not out of anti-Semitism, but in reaction to the implication that anything culturally sophisticated or commendable among indigenous people needs to be explained through some Old World connection, which is a common thread in crackpot theories of the peopling of the Americas.  (I could do a search for Mormon websites responding to the news, but I don’t really have the patience for it right now.)  Meanwhile, on this side of the sanity–insanity divide, there may also be attempts to identify the Utes as a genuinely remnant genetically-and-culturally Jewish population, like the Lemba of Zimbabwe and South Africa, who abstain from pork, circumcise, use the Star of David, and maintained Old Testament stories in their oral traditions long before they learned, in the modern period, that there were other populations that shared those traits.

Members of the Lemba ethnic group in Zimbabwe—almost certain descendants of emigrants from the Holy Land

Many early anthropologists, missionaries, and settlers noted similarities between some indigenous North American cultural practices and beliefs and those found readily in the Old Testament and in Jewish tradition.  Examples include occasional arguable monotheism, the levirate (the practice of a man, for example, marrying his deceased brother’s wife), organization into tribes and clans, matrilineal descent (a post-diaspora adaptation in Jewish kinship, still persistent), animal sacrifice, food taboos, oral traditions of a Great Flood, even very sparsely distributed instances of circumcision.  But these, it is now clear, are more attributable to the global widespread nature of some cultural traits—traits which many European settlers of the era likely had not known of at all except through reading the Bible.

The flag of the Southern Ute Tribe.  As flag designs go, it’s a bit ... busy, isn’t it?

If nothing else, these new genetic discoveries may explain some unusual moments from the history of the Wild West.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]