Daily Mail (London)
May 27, 2006 Saturday
Century of genocide;
The 20th centurywas an era of unparalleled progress yet it was also
the most violent in history. What’s trulyworrying is that the causes
of that mass bloodshed are all too prevalent today
by NIALL FERGUSON
IT WAS the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was the
century when human beings got richer than previous generations could
possibly have imagined. It was the century when, on average, people
lived longer, too.
Breakthroughs in science and technology transformed the quality of
life on earth.
The average person became better fed, healthier and taller. A much
smaller proportion of the world’s population was chained to the
precarious drudgery of subsistence agriculture. People had roughly
treble the amount of leisure time.
Moreover, thanks to the remarkable spread of the democratic form of
government, people were also more free.
Yet – and this is surely one of the greatest of history’s paradoxes –
the 20th century was also by far the most violent era mankind has
experienced since the dawn of civilisation, far more violent in
relative as well as absolute terms than any other in history.
Significantly larger percentages of the world’s population were
killed in the two world wars that dominated the century than had been
killed in any previous conflict of comparable geopolitical magnitude.
By any measure, World War II was the greatest manmade catastrophe of
all time, killing something like 60 million people, nearly 3 per cent
of the world’s population in 1938.
Moreoever, the world wars were only two of many 20th century bouts of
lethal organised violence.
Death tolls quite probably passed the million mark in at least a
dozen other wars, as well as the campaigns of extermination waged
against ethnic or social minorities by the Turkish regime during
World War I, the Soviet regime from the 1920s until the 1950s and the
National Socialist regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945, to say
nothing of the tyrannies of Mao Zedong in China and Pol Pot in
Cambodia.
There was not a single year between 1900 and 1999 that did not see
large-scale organised violence in one part of the world or another.
Estimates for the century’s total body count attributable to violence
range from 167 million to 188 million – perhaps as many as one in
every 22 deaths.
So why were those 100 years the century of mass destruction as well
as the century of mass consumption?
Why did murder rates rise almost in step with living standards?
To resolve this great paradox, it is not enough just to say that
there were more people living closer together, or more destructive
weapons.
NO doubt it was easier to perpetrate mass murder by dropping high
explosives on crowded cities than it had once been to put dispersed
rural populations to the sword. But if those were sufficient
explanations, the end of the century would have been more violent
than the beginning and middle.
In the 1990s the world’s population for the first time exceeded six
billion, more than three times what it had been when World War I
broke out.
Moreover, weaponry was vastly more destructive. But there was
actually a marked decline in the amount of armed conflict in the
century’s last decade.
In any case, some of the worst violence of the century was
perpetrated in relatively thinly populated countries with the crudest
of weapons: rifles, axes, knives and machetes.
When I was a schoolboy, the textbooks offered a variety of
explanations for 20th century violence. Sometimes they blamed
economic crises, as if depressions and recessions could explain
political conflict.
Then there was the dreary old Marxist theory that the century was all
about class conflict – that revolutions were one of the main causes
of violence.
A third argument was that the 20th century’s problems were the
consequences of extreme versions of political ideologies, notably
communism and fascism, as well as earlier evil ‘isms’, notably
racism.
The trouble with all of these theories was that they could not tell
me the answer to two simple questions. Why did extreme violence
happen in some places – Poland and the Ukraine, for example – but not
in others, like Sweden and New Zealand?
And why did it happen at certain times – the early 1940s, especially
– but not at other times, like the early 1960s?
For the most striking thing about 20th century violence was how
localised it was in both space and time.
It really was tremendously bad luck to be born in Byelorussia or
Serbia in around 1904; your chances of dying a violent death were
probably 50:50. But if you had the luck to be born, as I was, in
Western Europe in the early Sixties, you were quite likely never to
hear a shot fired in anger.
The Depression was more or less a global phenomenon – but only a
minority of countries became warmongering dictatorships as a result
of it.
THERE were social inequalities more or less everywhere. But only in
some times did these give rise to bloody revolutions.
As for the ideologies which men used to justify violence in the 20th
century, all of these were the inventions of earlier periods.
Biological racism, the nastiest of all justifications for mass
murder, was a 19th century idea.
Why was it in Europe between 1939 and 1945 that this idea became the
basis for a systematic policy of genocide waged against the Jewish
people and other groups deemed by the Nazis to be ‘subhuman’?
Why did the Germans – who in the 1920s had been perhaps the best
educated people on the planet – commit the century’s most hateful
crime?
It is much too easy to pile all the blame on a few wicked dictators:
Hitler, Stalin and Mao in particular. But as Tolstoy long ago pointed
out in War And Peace, you have to explain not only why megalomaniacs
order men to invade Russia, but also why the men obey.
In short, we need some better way to explain why the 20th century, in
so many ways a time of unparalleled progress, was also a time when
millions of men (and it was mainly men) felt motivated to engage in
lethal organised violence against their fellow human beings – not
just in more or less equal battlefield struggles, but also in
horribly unequal massacres perpetrated against defenceless civilians.
And that explanation has to pinpoint both the location and the timing
of the bloodshed.
It turns out that for violence to explode into the million-plus
casualty range, three things need to coincide: ethnic disintegration,
economic volatility and empires in decline.
By ethnic disintegration, I mean breakdowns in the relations between
certain ethnic groups, specifically the breakdown of sometimes quite
faradvanced processes of assimilation in multiethnic societies. It
was no coincidence that the worst violence of the 20th century
happened in countries that were ethnically heterogeneous
as a result of complex patterns of migration and intermarriage.
Look at an ethno-linguistic map of Europe in around 1900 and you can
quickly identify the future killing fields of the century. In
particular, that triangle of territory between the Baltic, the
Balkans and the Black Sea stands out as a kind of patchwork of
different nationalities.
In the north there were Lithuanians, Latvians, Byelorussians and
Russians; in the middle, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles; in the south,
Italians, Slovenes, Magyars, Romanians and, in the Balkans, Slovenes,
Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, Greeks and Turks.
Scattered all over the region were German-speaking communities. And
language was only one of the ways the different ethnic groups could
be distinguished.
Some of those who spoke German dialects were Protestants, some
Catholics and some Jews.
The striking thing is that these different groups were not strictly
segregated. On the contrary, from 1900 onwards there was a remarkable
blurring of ethnic lines as traditional religious communities
weakened and the number of mixed marriages rose.
By the 1920s, in many Central and East European cities, one in every
two or three marriages involving a Jew was to a non-Jew.
So the question becomes: what made so many of these multiethnic
societies blow apart in the 1930s and 1940s?
Why did neighbours quite literally murder one another in so many
different places, when it had seemed that the processes of
integration and assimilation would actually dissolve the differences
between Germans and Jews, Poles and Ukrainians, Serbs and Croats?
HERE is where economic volatility comes in – by which I mean the
frequency and amplitude of changes in the rate of growth, prices,
interest rates and employment.
The world had never experienced so many economic ups and downs as it
did during the first half of the 20th century, from the boom years
that ended in 1914 and 1929 to the catastrophic Depression of the
Thirties.
The effect of these ups and downs was deeply divisive in the
multiethnic societies of Central and Eastern Europe.
For it seemed to many people that the fruits of the good times were
disproportionately accruing to certain ethnic minorities – not only
Jews, but also Armenians. And when the bad times came, there was
already some predisposition to target those minorities for compulsory
redistribution – and retribution.
The third, fatal ingredient was provided by declining empires.
The world of 1900 was a world of empires. More than 80 per cent of
the world’s population lived in one empire or another.
But the empires that ruled Central and Eastern Europe – the Ottoman,
Austro-Hungarian, Russian and German – were fragile entities, whose
rivalries ultimately blew Europe apart in World War I.
It was in the wake of this first wave of imperial crises that the
question of ethnic minorities became acute, for in the new nation
states created after 1918 – particularly in Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia and Poland – there were numerous minorities who felt
distinctly vulnerable to the newly empowered majorities.
The Germans, in particular, who had once been so dominant in the
Austro-Hungarian empire, found themselves living as second-class
citizens.
Their feelings of post-imperial insecurity were a lethal ingredient
in the distinctly Austrian cocktail that became National Socialism.
The decline and fall of empires was a recurrent leitmotif of the 20
century.
It was not only these Central and East European empires that
collapsed; the new empires that sprang up in the 1930s – the Soviet,
the Italian, the Japanese and the Nazi – also proved ephemeral.
World War II was ultimately just as fatal for the West European
overseas empires of Britain, France and the Netherlands, which fell
apart inexorably in the 1950s and 1960s.
And precisely this pattern of imperial disintegration is another
reason why the 20th century was so violent. For violence tends to
peak when empires decline.
It is not during their rise and zenith that empires generate the most
conflict, but when they dissolve – for it is at the moment of
dissolution that indigenous peoples have the strongest incentive to
engage in civil war, in the knowledge the post-imperial spoils of
independence will go to the victor.
The potential instability of assimilation and integration; the
combustible character of ethnically mixed societies; the chronic
volatility of economic life; the convulsions that marked the decline
of Western dominance – these were the true causes of what I have
called The War Of The World.
If I am right about what made the 20th century so violent – ethnic
disintegration, economic volatility and empires in decline then what
are the implications for this still new century we live in today?
I am afraid to say that they are profoundly alarming. For there is
one region of the world which already has all these ingredients in
abundance.
That region is the Middle East.
AS I write, the evidence mounts that Iraqi society is descending into
a potentially terrible civil war between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, a
war which could all too easily escalate beyond Iraq’s borders into a
major regional conflict.
As I write, the world economy seems to be teetering on the brink of a
new era of volatility, after what has been a remarkable period of
stability and prosperity. Nowhere is that volatility more acute than
in the Middle East, where $70a-barrel oil enriches a tiny elite while
a youthful populace frets in idleness and poverty.
And, as I write, there is every reason to think that the last great
empire of the Western world – that informal American empire which has
so dominated the world in our lifetimes, and which this country has
perhaps too loyally supported – is losing its grip on the foreign
territories it has recently sought to control: not only Iraq, but
also Afghanistan.
The danger is very real that conflict in the Middle East could
escalate in the years ahead to levels we have not seen in the region
since the Iran-Iraq war; perhaps to levels we have not seen in the
northern hemisphere since the 1940s.
Nor is it clear to me that our multi- ethnic societies in Western
Europe, which are being so rapidly transformed by Muslim immigration,
would remain untouched by such a conflagration.
Once again, I fear, what has seemed like the best of times – this
fledgling 21st century, with its high-speed connections and its hedge
funds – could turn very suddenly into the worst of times.
Niall Ferguson’s new book, The War Of The World: History’s Age of
Hatred, is published by Penguin on June 1.
GRAPHIC: THE NAZI DEATH CAMP AT BELSEN: JUST ONE HORROR IN A HUNDRED
YEARS OF HORRORS

The Economist
May 27, 2006
U.S. Edition
Inside the mad despot’s realm; Turkmenistan
ashgabat and mary
A rare visit to one of the world’s most secretive and repressive
countries
THERE is not much to laugh about on state television in Turkmenistan.
But viewers may be forgiven for feeling a little quiet satisfaction
at the spectacle, late last month, of Gurbanbibi Atajanova, the
former chief state prosecutor otherwise known as the iron lady,
tearfully begging not to be sent to prison after being accused of
possessing 25 houses, 36 cars and 2,000 head of cattle. Ms Atajanova
led the purges that, in recent years, systematically removed anyone
who tried to challenge, or simply to rein in, President Saparmurat
Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbashi, or “father of Turkmen”.
Not, of course, mentioned by state television was the fact that, on
the very same day, Mr Niyazov was himself under attack. A
London-based human-rights organisation, Global Witness, was accusing
him of siphoning off most of the country’s estimated $2 billion a
year in gas revenues and concealing them in offshore accounts. One of
these contains $4 billion, alleges one well-informed insider.
Such topics cannot be discussed in Turkmenistan. Any criticism or
dissent is defined as treason and is punishable by long prison terms,
confinement to psychiatric hospital or internal banishment, mostly to
arid salt flats by the Caspian Sea. Private conversations everywhere
are monitored by eavesdropping informers, as well as bugs and
phone-taps. E-mails are monitored (there is only one
service-provider) and internet access rare: a trawl of the capital
reveals not one functioning public outlet. Surveillance, already
tight, has been ratcheted up after a failed coup attempt in 2002.
Yet there is much that needs to be discussed. Ashgabat, the capital,
is a surreal showpiece of grandiose, neo-Stalinist buildings of
gleaming white marble, with giant portraits and gold statues of the
Turkmenbashi everywhere – including one, arms aloft, that constantly
revolves through 360 degrees, so that it always faces the sun. Behind
the glitz lies a grim reality; rutted tracks leading from four-lane
highways to windowless, one-room homes, including converted railway
containers, surrounded by debris and animals. Some of these are
inhabited by those whose homes – and entire neighbourhoods – were razed
to make way for “renovation” and offered no compensation. In one, a
middle-aged woman struggles to bring up her nephew (her sister, a
heroin addict like many in Turkmenistan, is too ill). But Olga has
lost her job under new laws because she is of Armenian and Ukrainian
descent.
Such are the priorities of a regime that squanders money on prestige
projects of dubious benefit, including an ice-rink, a huge
half-finished artificial lake, vast mosques, gold-domed palaces and
soon a new zoo, complete with penguins, in a country where the summer
temperature tops 50°C. At the same time, public health and
education – the only worthwhile legacies of the Soviet Union, from
which Turkmenistan became independent in 1991 – have been all but
dismantled.
This year’s outlook is even grimmer than last’s. In January, 100,000
people had their pensions cancelled, those of another 250,000 were
severely cut back, and sickness and maternity benefits were ended.
Unusually, the decrees led to protests, including demonstrations in
the port town of Turkmenbashi, while a Niyazov statue in the city of
Mary (once known as Merv) had its arm sawn off and a bucket of human
faeces thrown over it.
Then, in April, Mr Niyazov announced a further “reform” to the
already crippled health service, adding new charges that will make
its few remaining services yet more inaccessible. Most hospitals
outside the capital have closed and the remainder offer only
rudimentary care, lacking staff, equipment and medicines, condemning
thousands to death from common, treatable illnesses such as
tuberculosis.
Every Monday at 8am, Turkmenistan’s schoolchildren line up to recite
the oath of allegiance to the president, part of a
youth-indoctrination programme that is progressively replacing the
conventional curriculum. Its core is the two-volume Ruhnama, “The
Book of the Spirit”, a homespun collection of thoughts on Turkmen
history and culture that pupils are required to spend hours studying.
Visits to bookstores reveal shelves lined with nothing but the
president’s works. Meanwhile, mandatory education has been reduced
from ten years to nine and most rural kindergartens have closed, as
have all libraries outside the capital. Russian-language teaching has
been largely phased out, music and ballet schools closed and almost
all teachers of ethnic-minority origins sacked under rigorously
enforced “Turkmenisation” policies that demand racial purity,
traceable back three generations, for all workers in state
institutions, including hospitals.
Higher education is severely run down. The annual intake is now under
3,000, a tenth of the pre-independence figure, courses have been cut
to two years and standards are so poor they are unacceptable abroad.
Worse, the president has ordered that no foreign degrees will
henceforth be recognised. Anyone with a qualification gained abroad
is either being sacked or refused a job. One economist says that all
but two of her high-school class of 30 have emigrated because they
see no future at home. “You have students returning with degrees from
the world’s best universities – MBAs from Stanford, for instance – who
can’t get jobs,” she says. “We are the last educated generation,”
sighs another professor.
In rural areas, the problems are different. Cotton is the main crop,
but the past three harvests have been catastrophic because of a
requirement to sell at state-set prices so low that farmers are left
with annual incomes of around $100. Unemployment is estimated at over
70%, exacerbated by public-sector layoffs, and by laws restricting
job-seekers to their home towns. Such is the pressure to obtain work
that bribes are standard. Even the scarf-swathed army of women
sweeping Ashgabat’s streets with twig brooms have to pay officials,
Turkmen say.
Despite widespread unhappiness with the regime, most Turkmen do not
see a way out. Rebellion looks impossible, given the level of
repression and fear; and state benefits (free gas and electricity and
highly subsidised fuel, since plentiful gas and oil are
Turkmenistan’s only blessing) take some of the edge off discontent.
Besides, people are brainwashed by a relentless propaganda machine
orchestrated by four state-television channels, two radio stations
and several newspapers propounding the idea of a “golden age”. Exiled
opposition groups have little influence, and pressure from the
outside, given Turkmenistan’s large mineral reserves, is shamefully
muted.
There is, though, much speculation about the 66-year-old
Turkmenbashi’s health. He has had heart surgery, and has a team of
eight top-notch German doctors constantly on call. This raises other
problems, most obviously the lack of a mechanism for an orderly
transfer of power, coupled with the lack of any democratic tradition
in a conservative, tribal society. Pessimistic Turkmen fear that a
lost generation, uneducated beyond the Ruhnama, may fall prey to
Islamic radicalism – and create a nasty failed state that could
destabilise an already volatile region. A fine mess for a father to
leave to his children.
GRAPHIC: Facing the sun, presiding over ruin

The Economist
May 27, 2006
U.S. Edition
Secular worries; Turkey’s troubles
Clashes over Islam in Turkey
A spat with a general proves upsetting
“THERE is a price for each word uttered by people in responsible
positions,” said Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish prime minister was
talking about an unprecedented outburst by the chief of the general
staff, General Hilmi Ozkok, after last week’s shooting in a courtroom
in Ankara that killed one pro-secular judge and wounded four others.
The general had called the anti-government demonstrations that
followed “admirable”.
Alparslan Arslan, a 29-year-old lawyer who was the gunman, said he
had picked on the judges because they supported the ban on the
Islamic headscarf in public offices, schools and universities.
Members of the cabinet, including the foreign minister, Abdullah Gül,
and the justice minister, Cemil Cicek, were called “murderers” by
thousands of pro-secular Turks, who flocked to the city’s main mosque
for the judge’s funeral on May 18th. Mr Erdogan was pilloried for not
being there.
A day later President Ahmet Necdet Sezer marched with generals,
university rectors and some 20,000 protesters to Ataturk’s mausoleum.
It was the biggest pro-secular rally since the 1993 murder of a
columnist on a secular daily, Cumhuriyet. “Turkey is secular and will
remain secular,” shouted the marchers. But will it? That has been the
worry of millions of Westernised Turks ever since the mild Islamists
led by Mr Erdogan, came to power in 2002 with a big majority.
The secularists’ fears have been exploited by the army, whose powers
are being steadily eroded by a string of reforms made necessary for
Turkey to win its prized start of membership talks with the European
Union last October. Mr Erdogan’s supporters blamed agents of “the
deep state” of rogue security officials and bureaucrats for last
week’s attack. Their aim is said to be to torpedo the EU process,
weaken the government and bully Mr Erdogan into ditching his
ambitions to succeed Mr Sezer when he retires next year.
Mr Arslan’s bizarre web of connections suggest that he did not act
alone. His alleged accomplices include a former army captain, who was
dumped at an Istanbul hospital with self-inflicted knife wounds after
the killing, and sundry ultra-nationalists involved in extra-judicial
killings, extortion rackets and attacks against Christians and Kurds.
But even if the affair proves to be a conspiracy, Mr Erdogan still
needs to ask himself why so many Turks blamed the government.
One reason may be that, just like his pro-secular critics, Mr Erdogan
has been decidedly selective in his sense of democracy and justice.
He has loudly denounced court rulings against the headscarf. Yet,
when an Istanbul prosecutor pressed charges against the country’s
best-known author, Orhan Pamuk, for speaking about the mass killings
of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915, Mr Erdogan did not utter a
squeak of reproach. His claims to defend the interests of all Turks,
not just religious ones, are beginning to ring hollow.
Yet those who are baying for the government’s blood should think
twice as well. For all his shortcomings, Mr Erdogan has brought
Turkey greater freedom and stability than any of his pro-secular
predecessors. His attempts to increase Islam’s visibility in public
life have remained just that. Although a recent poll suggests that Mr
Erdogan’s popularity rating has slipped from 35% to 28%, his party
still has twice as much support as the pro-secular Republican
People’s party. Indeed, the lack of a credible opposition remains one
of Turkey’s biggest weaknesses.
Should the judge’s murder prove to be an individual act of
retribution, “the implications are far more worrying than those of a
conspiracy,” says Murat Erdogan, at Ankara’s Hacettepe University.
“That could mean there will be further such incidents, whereas
conspiracies can be unveiled and brought under control.”

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
May 27, 2006 Saturday 02:49 PM EST
”Black boxes” from crashed Armenian plane brought to Paris
by Mikhail Timofeyev
Two flight data recorders from the Armenian Airbus-320 passenger
plane that crashed in the Black Sea of Sochi on May 3 were brought to
Paris on Saturday.
Specialists will examine and open the so-called “black boxes” to
retrieve memory microchips that record different flight data
parameters and conversations in the cockpit.
After that the recordings will be analysed in Moscow by experts from
Russia, Armenia, and France.
The CIS Interstate Aviation Committee said earlier it would take at
least 15 days to analyse the data in the recorders.
IAC head Tatyana Anodina said about 2,000 planes of the Airbus-320
type are operating around the world, and everybody wants to get full
and objective data about the accident as soon as possible.
According to Anodina, two black boxes from the crashed plane record
conversations in the cockpit and plane system data. “Unfortunately
the voice recorder was seriously damaged but the data recorder,
according to preliminary information, is in excellent condition.
Recordings will be analysed in Russia, using equipment from France
where the Airbus-320 airliner was designed,” she said.
There were three flight data recorders aboard the plane but no
signals from the third one have ever been registered, which suggests
that its radio beacon was knocked off during the crash.
Flight data recorders used on aircraft of the Airbus-320 type
withstand the depth of up to 6,000 meters for 30 days, experts from
the French air crash investigation bureau said.
Each flight recorder weighs 10 kilograms, including a seven-kilogram
armoured casing for the gadget. The casing can withstand water
pressure at a depth of 6,000 meters, the temperature of 1,100 degrees
Celsius, and the compression of 2.2 tonnes.
Of 113 people who were abroad the plane, 51 bodies have been found so
far.
The Airbus A-320 of the Armenian airline Armavia plunged into the
Black Sea as it was making a landing manoeuvre in the early hours of
May 3. The accident claimed the lives of 113 people.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress

ITAR-TASS News Agency
TASS
May 27, 2006 Saturday
Aliyev says no all possibilities for Karabakh settlement used yet
by Viktor Shulman
Azerbaijani President Ilkham Aliyev said not all possibilities for
resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have been used yet.
“The latest visit of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmen to Azerbaijan,
a visit of senior diplomats and the talks they had inspire hope for a
peaceful settlement. These possibilities have not been used up yet,
and Azerbaijan is using them,” the president said on Friday evening
at an official reception on the occasion of Day of the Republic.
At the same time, he said Baku would never allow “Nagorno-Karabakh
to be separated form Azerbaijan.”
Aliyev believes that the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over
Nagorno-Karabakh is the main source of threat not only to his country
but also to the entire region where major energy and transport
projects are implemented.

Washington Post
May 28 2006
Obituary
Berg Paraghamian, 93, a former Martin Marietta aerospace engineer who
worked on NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s, died of a stroke May 6
in the nursing unit at Maplewood Park Place in Bethesda.
Mr. Paraghamian worked for Martin Marietta in Baltimore and Denver
before being lent to NASA in 1960 to help with the planning of the
Apollo moon-landing program.
He spent two years at NASA, helping formulate the agency’s long-range
plan for space exploration.
Mr. Paraghamian returned to Martin Marietta, where he continued to
specialize in the design and development of aircraft and missiles. In
the 1950s, he helped develop the Titan I intercontinental ballistic
missile.
In 1970, he switched disciplines and became director of research and
development for the U.S. Maritime Administration in Washington. He
worked on the agency’s establishment of the National Maritime
Research Centers in Kings Point, N.Y., and Galveston, Tex. He retired
in 1980.
Mr. Paraghamian, a Bethesda resident, was born in Erzerum, Armenia.
He was a small child when his family, fleeing the Armenian genocide,
immigrated to the United States in 1915. He grew up in Belmont,
Mass., and graduated from Harvard University, where he also received
master’s degrees in education and engineering.
He served as a meteorologist with the Army Air Forces during World
War II and was stationed in Normandy after the D-Day invasion.
He was a moderator at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of
Christ in Bethesda and a member of the Cosmos Club.
Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Mary Paraghamian of Bethesda;
a son, James Berg Paragamian; and two grandchildren.

US Fed News
May 26, 2006 Friday 12:58 AM EST
USDA TO DONATE WHEAT FOR ARMENIA
US Fed News
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service has
issued the following press release:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced that it will
donate 2,500 metric tons of wheat to Armenian Technology Group, Inc.
(ATG), a private voluntary organization, for use in Armenia.
ATG will sell the wheat in Armenia and use the proceeds to continue
supporting the seed industry in the country over an 18-month period.
Project activities include a production loan program for
seed-producing farmers, and marketing and business development
services that will provide better market access, training and
information services to seed, vegetable, and fresh fruit growing
farmers.
The donation will be made under USDA’s Food for Progress program,
administered by the Foreign Agricultural Service. The supply period
for this donation is fiscal year 2006.
The Food for Progress program provides for donations of agricultural
commodities to needy countries to encourage economic or agricultural
reforms that foster free enterprise.
This year, USDA expects to donate around 560,000 tons of U.S.
commodities to 28 countries under Food for Progress.
For further information, contact Cristina Fundeneanu of FAS at (202)
720-6868, or by e-mail at [email protected].
FAS news releases are available on the Internet at

Federal News Service
May 26, 2006 Friday
STATE DEPARTMENT REGULAR BRIEFING
BRIEFER: SEAN MCCORMACK, DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN
LOCATION: STATE DEPARTMENT BRIEFING ROOM, WASHINGTON, D.C.
[parts omitted]
Q Do you have anything on Dan Fried’s visit to the Caucasus?
MR. MCCORMACK: He did — he’s just back, I think today, or he’s on
his way back. He was there working with the Minsk Group co-chairs,
Russia as well as France, to see if we could find a way forward on
resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh issue between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
I don’t have a readout for you, Nicholas, as to what sort of progress
they may have made. I know that the presidents of Azerbaijan and
Armenia are scheduled to get together pretty soon in Bucharest, in
Romania, I think the beginning of June. And the hope would be that
they might — might at that point be able to come to closure on some
of the issues that divide them. They made a run at it while they were
in France. They weren’t able to come to agreement. We, working with
the Minsk co-chairs, are hopeful that they can come together to
resolve whatever differences there are. These are tough issues, we
know; it’s going to require tough political decisions on both sides.
But we think that at the end of the day, taking those tough political
decisions will benefit all the peoples of that region.
Q Was this meeting in Minsk?
MR. MCCORMACK: It was in —
Q Yerevan.
MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah, I have to check, I have to verify for you. It
wasn’t in Minsk, though, I can tell you that.

Chicago Sun Times
May 21, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition
The rise of Christian Nationalism: Across the United States,
religious activists aim to establish an American theocracy. A new
book offers an inside look at this growing right-wing movement.
by Michelle Goldberg, Salon
A teenage modern dance troupe dressed all in black took their places
on the stage of the First Baptist Church of Pleasant Grove, a suburb
of Birmingham, Ala. Two dancers, donning black overcoats, crossed
their arms menacingly. As a Christian pop ballad swelled on the
speakers, a boy wearing judicial robes walked out. Holding a Ten
Commandments tablet made of cardboard, he was playing former Alabama
Supreme Court justice Roy Moore. The trench-coated thugs approached
him, miming a violent rebuke and forcing him to the other end of the
stage, sans Commandments.
There, a cluster of dancers impersonating liberal activists waved
signs with slogans like “No Moore!” and “No God in Court.” The boy
Moore danced a harangue, first lurching toward his tormentors and
then cringing back in outrage before breaking through their line to
lunge for his monument. But the dancers in trench coats — agents of
atheism — got hold of it first and took it away, leaving him abject
on the floor. As the song’s uplifting chorus played — “After you’ve
done all you can, you just stand” — a dancer in a white robe,
playing either an angel or God himself, came forward and helped the
Moore character to his feet.
‘A CHRISTIAN NATION’
The performance ended to enthusiastic applause from a crowd that
included many Alabama judges and politicians, as well as Roy Moore
himself, a gaunt man with a courtly manner and the wrath of Leviticus
in his eyes. Moore has become a hero to those determined to remake
the United States into an explicitly Christian nation. That
reconstructionist dream lies at the red-hot center of our current
culture wars, investing the symbolic fight over the Ten Commandments
— a fight whose outcome seems irrelevant to most peoples’ lives —
with an apocalyptic urgency.
On November 13, 2003, Moore was removed from his position as chief
justice of the Alabama Supreme Court after he defied a judge’s order
to remove the 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument he installed in the
Montgomery judicial building. On the coasts, he seemed a ridiculous
figure, the latest in a line of grotesque Southern anachronisms.
After all, Moore is a man who, in a 2002 court decision, awarding
custody of three children to their allegedly abusive father over
their lesbian mother, called homosexuality “abhorrent, immoral,
detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of
nature and of nature’s God upon which this Nation and our laws are
predicated,” and argued, “The State carries the power of the sword,
that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such
as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent
the subversion of children toward this lifestyle.”
To the growing Christian nationalist movement, though, Roy Moore is a
martyr, cut down by secular tyranny for daring to assert God’s truth.
Moore installed his massive Ten Commandments monument on Aug. 1,
2001, and from the beginning, he and his allies used it to stir up
the Christian nationalist faithful. He gave videographers from Coral
Ridge Ministries exclusive access to the courthouse on the night the
monument was mounted, and on October 14, televangelist D. James
Kennedy started hawking a $19 video about Moore’s brave, covert
installation on his show.
As the controversy over the statue ignited, Moore’s fame grew. At
rallies across the country, he summoned the faithful to an ideal that
sounded very much like theocracy. “For 40 years we have wandered like
the children of Israel,” he told supporters in Tennessee. “It’s time
for Christians to take a stand. This is not a nation established on
the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we
follow is not the Quran but the Bible. This is a Christian nation.”
By the time he was removed as chief justice, Moore had sparked a
movement, and his monument was an icon. In the days before officials
came to cart the Commandments away, hundreds flocked to Montgomery to
rally on the courtroom steps. Some slept there and imagined
themselves the nucleus of a new civil rights movement.
Thomas Bowman, a bearded Christian folk singer from Kentucky, wrote
an anthem called “Montgomery Fire” celebrating the demonstrations:
“We had love in our hearts that no man could ever remove/but with the
whole world we watched as they hauled the Commandments away.” When I
met Bowman a year later at First Baptist, he referred to the
protesters, romantically, as the “ragamuffin warriors” fighting for
God against the atheist state.
“The opposing side, the anti-God side, the do-whatever-you-want side,
the judicial side, just kept pushing and pushing and pushing for the
last 40 years,” Bowman said. And finally, he said, God called on
Christians to defend themselves.
After the Commandments were removed, a group of retired military men
from Texas who called themselves American Veterans in Domestic
Defense spent months taking the monument — now affectionately called
“Roy’s Rock” — on tour all over the country, holding more than 150
viewings and rallies in churches, at state capitols, even in Wal-Mart
parking lots. Moore also found powerful supporters in statehouses and
in Congress who proposed laws to radically restrict the power of
federal courts to enforce the separation of church and state. In
solidarity, another Alabama judge, Ashley McKathan, had the Ten
Commandments embroidered onto his robe. Christian home-school
catalogs offered copies of a video titled “Roy Moore’s Message to
America.” When Moore suggested he might run for Alabama governor,
state polls showed him with a double-digit lead.
PARALLELS WITH NAZIS
A few days before Bush’s second inauguration, the New York Times
carried a story headlined “Warning from a Student of Democracy’s
Collapse,” about Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, professor
emeritus of history at Columbia and scholar of fascism. It quoted a
speech he had given in Germany that drew parallels between Nazism and
the American religious right. “Some people recognized the moral
perils of mixing religion and politics,” he was quoted saying of
prewar Germany, “but many more were seduced by it. It was the
pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured
[Hitler’s] success, notably in Protestant areas.”
It’s not surprising that Stern is alarmed. Reading his 45-year-old
book, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the
Germanic Ideology, I shivered at its contemporary resonance. “The
ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of
national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture
and with the loss of authoritative faith,” he wrote. “They posed as
the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for
their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their
indifference to national greatness.”
Fascism isn’t imminent in America. But its language and aesthetics
are distressingly common among Christian nationalists. History
professor Roger Griffin described the “mobilizing vision” of fascist
movements as “the national community rising Phoenix-like after a
period of encroaching decadence.” Moore’s Ten Commandments has become
a potent symbol of this dreamed-for resurrection on the American
right.
True, our homegrown quasi-fascists often appear so absurd as to seem
harmless. Take, for example, American Veterans in Domestic Defense,
the organization that took the Ten Commandments on tour. The group
says it exists to “neutralize the destructiveness” of America’s
“domestic enemies,” which include “biased liberal, socialist news
media,” “the ACLU,” and “the conspiracy of an immoral film industry.”
To do this, it aims to recruit former military men. “AVIDD reminds
all American Veterans that you took an oath to defend the United
States against all enemies, ‘both foreign and domestic,’ ” its Web
site says. “In your military capacity, you were called upon to defend
the United States against foreign enemies. AVIDD now calls upon you
to continue to fulfill your oath and help us defend this nation on
the political front, against equally dangerous domestic enemies.”
According to Jim Cabaniss, the 72-year-old Korean War veteran who
founded the group, it now has 33 chapters across the country. It’s
entirely likely that some of these chapters represent one or two men,
and as of 2005, the group didn’t seem large enough to be much of a
danger to anyone.
RESENTMENT TOWARD JEWS
Still, it’s worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have
flocked to rallies at which military men pledge to seize the reins of
power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, religious
leaders and politicians lend their support to Cabaniss’ cause. And at
least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething
resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America’s Christian
majority.
“People who call themselves Jews represent maybe 2 or 3 percent of
our people,” Cabaniss told me after a January 2005 rally in Austin.
“Christians represent a huge percent, and we don’t believe that a
small percentage should destroy the values of the larger percentage.”
I asked Cabaniss, a thin, white-haired man who wore a suit with a
red, white and blue tie and a U.S. Army baseball cap, whether he was
saying that American Jews have too much power. “It appears that way,”
he replied. “They’re a driving force behind trying to take everything
to do with Christianity out of our system. That’s the part that makes
us very upset.”
We were standing outside the Texas Capitol building on a sunny
Saturday morning. A few hundred people from across the state had
turned out for the rally, which began at 10 a.m. Three or four men in
military uniforms sat with their wives on chairs at the top of the
Capitol steps. Four other men supported tall, coffin-shaped signs
labeled with the names of objectionable Supreme Court rulings.
The crowd was full of teenagers who had come on church buses and
families with young children. A white-bearded man in a leather biker
vest dragged a ten-foot-tall cedar crucifix painted red, white, and
blue. One woman wore a T-shirt with a photograph of Moore’s monument.
Another held a handwritten sign reading: “Ban Judges Not God/God
Rules.”
‘STAND UP, SPEAK UP’
Rick Scarborough, one of the headline speakers, called for a “million
Roy Moores” who will “stand up, speak up, and refuse to give up.” A
former football player at Stephen F. Austin State University,
Scarborough in recent years has positioned himself as a comer in the
Christian nationalist movement, riding church/state controversies to
ever higher prominence. In 2002, he left his post as pastor of
Pearland First Baptist Church — where he had mobilized members of
his flock in that Houston suburb to try to take over the city council
and school board — to form Vision America, a group dedicated to
organizing “patriot pastors” for political action. The same year,
Jerry Falwell christened him as one of the new leaders of the
Christian right.
Also speaking was John Eidsmoe, a retired lieutenant colonel in the
Air Force who wore full military dress. A professor at Thomas Goode
Jones School of Law, a Christian school in Montgomery, Ala., Eidsmoe
has written a number of Christian nationalist books including
Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers,
which argues that Calvinism inspired America’s founding document.
He’s a proponent of a Confederate doctrine called interposition,
which holds that states have the right to reject federal government
mandates they deem unconstitutional. “Implementation of the doctrine
may be peaceable, as by resolution, remonstrance or legislation, or
may proceed ultimately to nullification with forcible resistance,” he
wrote in a manifesto titled “A Call to Stand with Chief Justice Roy
Moore.”
DOMINION THEOLOGY
Roy Moore and Rick Scarborough are Baptists, D. James Kennedy is a
fundamentalist Presbyterian and John Eidsmoe is a Lutheran. All of
them, however, have been shaped by dominion theology, which asserts
that, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, godly men have
the responsibility to take over every aspect of society.
Dominion theology comes out of Christian Reconstructionism, a
fundamentalist creed that was propagated by the late Rousas John
“R.J.” Rushdoony and his son-in-law, Gary North. Born in New York
City in 1916 to Armenian immigrants who had recently fled the
genocide in Turkey, Rushdoony was educated at the University of
California at Berkeley and spent over eight years as a Presbyterian
missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. He was a prolific writer,
churning out dense tomes advocating the abolition of public schools
and social services and the replacement of civil law with biblical
law. He called for the death penalty for gay people, blasphemers and
unchaste women, among other sinners. Democracy, he wrote, is a heresy
and “the great love of the failures and cowards of life.”
‘A CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO’
Reconstructionism is a postmillennial theology, meaning its followers
believe Jesus won’t return until after Christians establish a
thousand-year reign on Earth. While other Christians wait for the
messiah, Reconstructionists want to build the kingdom themselves.
Most American evangelicals, on the other hand, are premillennialists.
They believe (with some variations) that at the time of Christ’s
return, Christians will be gathered up to heaven, missing the
tribulations endured by unbelievers. In the past, this belief led to
a certain apathy — why worry if the world is about to end and you’ll
be safe from the carnage?
Since the 1970s, though, in tandem with the rise of the religious
right, premillennialism has been politicized. A crucial figure in
this process was the seminal evangelical writer Francis Schaeffer, an
American who founded L’Abri, a Christian community in the Swiss Alps
where religious intellectuals gathered to talk and study. As early as
the 1960s, Schaeffer was reading Rushdoony and holding seminars on
his work. Schaeffer went on to write a series of highly influential
books elucidating the idea of the Christian worldview. A Christian
Manifesto, published in 1981, described modern history as a contest
between the Christian worldview and the materialist one, saying,
“These two worldviews stand as totals in complete antithesis to each
other in content and also in their natural results — including
sociological and government results, and specifically including law.”
Schaeffer was not a theocrat, but he drew on Reconstructionist ideas
of America as an originally Christian nation. In A Christian
Manifesto, he warned against wrapping Christianity in the American
flag, but added, “None of this, however, changes the fact that the
United States was founded upon a Christian consensus, nor that we
today should bring Judeo-Christian principles into play in regard to
government.”
Schaeffer was one of the first evangelical leaders to get deeply
involved in the fight against abortion, and he advocated civil
disobedience and the possible use of force to stop it. “It is time we
consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to
God’s Law it abrogates its authority,” he wrote.
Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on
premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he
co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to
whom he dedicated his book The Battle for the Mind. That book married
Schaeffer’s theories to a conspiratorial view of history and
politics, arguing, “Most people today do not realize what humanism
really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country —
and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today
can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the
UN, education, TV and most of the other influential things of life.
“We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them
with pro-moral political leaders,” LaHaye wrote.
As premillennialists grew to embrace the goal of dominion, they made
alliances with Reconstructionists. In 1984, Jay Grimstead, a disciple
of Francis Schaeffer, brought important pre- and post-millennialists
together to form the Coalition on Revival in order to lay a blueprint
for taking over American life. Tim LaHaye was an original member of
the coalition’s steering committee, along with Rushdoony, North,
creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy and the Reverend Donald
Wildmon of the influential American Family Association.
Between 1984 and 1986, the coalition developed 17 “worldview”
documents, which elucidate the “Christian” position on most aspects
of life. Just as political Islam is often called Islamism to
differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith, the
ideology laid out in these papers could be called Christianism. The
documents outline a complete political program, with a “biblically
correct” position on issues such as taxes (God favors a flat rate);
public schools (generally frowned upon), and the media and the arts
(“We deny that any pornography and other blasphemy are permissible as
art or ‘free speech’ “).
In a 1988 letter to supporters, Grimstead announced the completion of
a high school curriculum “using the COR Worldview Documents as
textbooks.” Since then, there has been a proliferation of schools,
books and seminars devoted to inculcating the correct Christian
worldview in students and activists.
‘WORLD CONQUEST’
Those who don’t have a year to spare can attend one of more than a
dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches
nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian
nationalist historian David Barton; David Limbaugh (Rush’s born-again
brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003,
Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick
Scarborough’s former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd,
“Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all
areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only
Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that
we find in this world. Only Christianity.”
Speaking to outsiders, most Christian nationalists say they’re simply
responding to anti-Christian persecution. They say that secularism is
itself a religion, one unfairly imposed on them. But Christian
nationalist ideologues don’t want equality, they want dominance. In
his book The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political
Action, George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy’s
Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:
“Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy
responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have
dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life
and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It
is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are
after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World
conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We
must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never
settle for anything less. . . . Thus, Christian politics has as its
primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families,
institutions, bureaucracies, courts and governments for the Kingdom
of Christ.”
Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Salon. Her book Kingdom
Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism has just been published by
W.W. Norton.

Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
May 26, 2006 Friday
Final Edition
BOOKS AT A GLANCE
by Peter Mergendahl, Jane Dickinson, Mark Graham & Jennifer Miller,
Special to the News
THRILLERS
Hardscrabble Road
By Jane Haddam (St. Martin’s, $24.95). Grade: A-
After 20 books featuring the Armenian-American FBI agent Gregor
Demarkian, one would suspect that Jane Haddam would have her craft
and character down pat. No surprise, then, when this latest Demarkian
tale is spot-on. Like John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, there’s no
slowing this sleuth down. Demarkian, though retired from the FBI,
just can’t stay away from the hunt, even as he tries to convince
himself he wants to.
He has quite a hunt on his hands here. A charismatic, power-hungry,
right-wing-ranter-of-a-radio-host named Drew Harrigan has been caught
with handfuls of prescription painkillers and has disappeared into a
closed-door rehabilitation center. Sound familiar? Before
disappearing into therapy, Harrigan had pointed a finger at an
alcoholic, homeless man named Sherman Markey as his source for the
drugs.
With the help of a legal advocacy group, Markey sues Harrigan for
slander and libel and then disappears back into the streets of
Philadelphia. Now Markey’s court appearance is looming, and the group
representing him turns to Demarkian for help in locating him.
What he first assumes will be a one- or two-day task soon takes on
darker tones. There are a great many people, it seems, who have
reasons for Markey to disappear permanently, including a left-wing,
Nobel-prize-winning professor; a Carmelite nun; and a Philadelphia
mayoral candidate. Oh, and of course there is murder to bloody the
pot.
Rife with political insights, subtle humor at all her characters’
expense and a keen eye for telling a story from multiple characters’
diverse perspectives, Hardscrabble Road is as deep as it is wide. A
few minor squabbles include a slight over-indulgence in esoteric
academic outlooks and the author’s assumption that readers will wait
– through 60 pages of elliptical and sometimes confusing plot setups
– before a word from the main character.. All in all, this is a
thriller for the thoughtful, though Rush Limbaugh fans may want to
give it a wide berth.