The Armenian Question

The question has resurfaced again, as it so often does. Was what happened to the armenian people mainly in 1915 a genocide? Germany now officially thinks so. And Turkish president Erdogan responds with calling it blackmail. Personally, I don't quite understand Turkey's stance in this since the solution seems so easy: blame it on the Three Pashas. I know it takes a bit more than that, but bear with me.

This has some history to it, so for those of you who don't know these events took place during the World War I, also called the Great War, which raged from 1914 to 1918. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled over much of the Middle East, entered the war late 1914 when Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, disguised two German warships as Ottoman and attacked the Russian Empire without informing the rest of the cabinet. Basically he tricked the whole empire into war, a war that would dissolve said empire. Towards the winter that year he launched a campaign into the Caucasus Mountains to attack the Russians, but he didn't give his soldiers proper winter clothing, this proved disastrous to say the least. Numbers differ here, but generally you could say that out of the whole Third Army, roughly 118 000 people, more than half of the Ottoman soldiers never returned home, and more than half of those froze to death. This, the Battle of Sarikamish was but the first battle of a war that would continue for years. Enver Pasha, who also led the attack and forced his troops to attack against impossible odds, blamed the whole failed attack on the Armenians.

Some background on minorities in the Ottoman Empire, I'm going to try to keep this simple: the empire was big. At its height the corners of the empire was in today's Algeria, Ethiopia, Iraq and Hungary, as you can imagine this includes a whole bunch of minorities. But this was in the 17th century. By the time of the Great War mostly only the Middle East was under Ottoman rule, and the Balkans had successfully rebelled only recently. This leaves four major ethnicities left in the empire, namely the Turks, Arabs, Kurds and Armenians. The Arabs has a fascinating story of their own during the war, so I won't cover them here. And of course there are many more ethnicities here, but these are what I see as the main players in this.

Towards the end of the 19th century there was a series of massacres of Armenians by the ruling Turkish elite as a response to a growing Armenian nationalist liberation movement, so there was some resentment over this by early 20th century. And what happened in the years prior to the Great War was a series of Balkan wars, which ended with many provinces in the Balkans leaving the Ottoman Empire to create their own independent states, as previously stated. The Armenians and Kurds saw this and began to wonder if they should perhaps govern themselves as well and began looking for ways to achieve this. When war broke out with the Russians, many Kurds and Armenians joined or otherwise helped the Russians in this fight in the hope that Russia would support Armenian and Kurdish independence. This was seen as traitorous by the Ottoman government. Their response? Disarm all Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman forces and use them as labour, start killing off many able bodied young Armenian men and arrest and/or kill over two thousand Armenian intellectuals around the empire. What then started was a mass deportation of most of the Armenian population with the purpose of stripping the Armenians their ability to organize any kind of opposition to the Ottoman government. What this mass deportation included was death marches through the Syrian deserts, starvation, confiscation of property, concentration camps and straight up massacres. The death toll of these events is hard to say exactly. The low estimate is the official Turkish one at 300 000 dead, the high estimate is that of Armenia, at 1 500 000 dead.

Is this genocide? The official story of Turkey today is that these mass deportations didn't include deliberate killing, but that seem to clash with many witness reports, some of those Turkish, any many Turkish officials who protested at the time against what some called the "annihilation" of the Armenians.

So where does this put Turkey today? Are they responsible for genocide? I would ultimately say no, they are not. The genocide was orchestrated by the three men who pretty much ruled the empire at the time, namely Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Ismail Enver Pasha and Ahmed Djemal Pasha, collectively known as the Three Pashas (Pasha is an honorary military name given upon being promoted to the rank of Mirliva). I mainly blame them for what happened. And if you hadn't noticed, the Ottoman Empire doesn't exist today. After the war the Three Pashas fled into exile and Turkey got caught in a war for independence with Mustafa Kemal, also known as Atatürk (who hated Enver Pasha by the way), leading the Turks to victory and establishing the Republic of Turkey, the one that exists today.

This creates a bit of a conundrum as to how responsible modern Turkey is, and what it seems to have ended in is an acknowledgement by Turkey that bad things happened, but they refuse to agree to the word "genocide". And they have arguments for this, some more or less solid. But their arguments are not as strong as the ones of the Armenian people. One thing Erdogan said yesterday was "The countries that are blackmailing us with these Armenian genocide resolutions have the blood of millions of innocents on their hands.", referring to the Holocaust and the Herero and Namaqua genocide. The difference in my eyes is that Germany has without a doubt owned up to that, but I have yet to see that attitude from Turkey. Apologies for atrocities made by generations before have to my knowledge been a pretty good thing for the apologizing nations.

So back to my point, the way I see it, the best way for Turkey to get past this is to clearly apologise as a people while at the same time laying the blame with the individuals who planned and executed the whole thing, the Three Pashas.

This has been my slightly condensed view and thoughts on a very big and complicated, so I assume you will not agree with everything written here. If I have made any mistakes here, please let me know. Anyway, if nothing else, I hope this at least can be some food for thought.

Prosperity and peace
Joakim Henberg

On the Subject of No

After hearing Bunny Wailers message of love, peace and well being for all the people of this world at Liseberg the other day I can't help but to feel compelled to write. Though his words rang with a will for world peace and everyone working together for a better world, my thoughts lately have been on a more personal side of love, the one of sexuality and respect for your fellow man, and a serious problem that's finally been more openly discussed in the general public.

A few weeks ago I attend West Pride here in Gothenburg and for the first time walked in a Pride parade. These last few years I've made an extraordinary journey through myself with my own sexuality and I felt it was about time I participated more activlely outwards and started using my voice. There was some confusion on with section of the train my small company of friends should walk in, but we ended up not inaccurately with the polyamorous people. It felt good proudly walking there in front of everyone with my wonderful girlfriend in hand beside me, but I'm going to be frank with you, we would have walked even prouder in a BDSM-section.

The BDSMf*-scene is a world wide place of society where you'll find people with an amazing sense of integrity, respect and open-mindedness, because these things are absolutely vital to the lifestyle. You cannot have sadomasochism or bondage without an enormous respect for safety and the dangers that may arise. The integrity of every participant is paramount, both in form of feeling comfortable in the situation and that this side of you will not be public knowledge in a world where an essential part of you is taboo and often not protected against discrimination. And in that part of society where people will meet and support each other and create a forum for sexuality you would be nowhere without an open mind and an acceptance of others attractions. All this creates a place where you would be respected as you would nowhere else, but also a collection of people whose expertise on sex and safety is probably as high as it can ever be. Of course there are rotten eggs in this basket as well. BDSMf is not one monolithic thing and there are about as many versions of it as there are participants, and not att participants and good people, which leads us to the problem I mentioned earlier.

The justice system and law here in Sweden is seriously lacking in both protection of the participants and expertise on the subject. Lately there have been popping up many newsreports of rapes done in the name of BDSM where the rapist has gone free, here's one example (all links in swedish today). The handling of cases like this has gotten a lot of critisism, not the least from the BDSM-scene. The thing I hear the most is the wish for the law to be altered so that sex must require a consent in some form or negligence of damage caused to that person, and I love that this is finally being discussed, not to mention it being discussed this openly. But the biggest reaction of the BDSM-scene is another. Earlier this week I attended my first meeting with the BDSMf-group of the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU) (for which I am not a representative, just to be clear) and the main concern there was the same as mine, the amount knowledge that judges and attourneys possess of these types of sex is frighteningly low.

The kind of activities we're talking about when we say BDSM can be dangerous. Dangerous to the extent of the worst case senario if done wrong being death (though extremely rare and far from acceptable). We know this and I won't go into here why we like this stuff, but we also have adapted to it. Like a said earlier, there's enormous respect for safety here and we accomplish this through the abbreviation SSC. It guides pretty much all our activities, and since law doesn't seem to apply to us we are very strict on this. SSC stands for Safe, Sane and Consensual:

• Safe as in "how might this be dangerous?" and "can I use some form of safety through devices or tecniques that removes or minimizes that danger?". For instance, everytime i tie someone up I have a special kind of scissors at hand at all times in case of emergency. Things like that.

• Sane most often applies to how activities might affect people around and the participants themselves. There can be things you really want to do but it would be reckless in its raw form. For instance, if you drive someone to tears and then leave him or her there and do nothing else, you would have failed on the sane-part in my book.

• Consent is perhaps the most relevant here. We deal with that mostly in two ways. First the participants talk to each other to establish what they want out of it, things they don't want to do, would do if asked and generally getting a feel of each other to make things easier and more fun. This part can be shortened if done at a club as there are other people around that can come to your aid if needed.
  Secondly there are safewords. A safeword can be anything really, a word you otherwise wouldn't use during sex (not "stop", "no" or something like that), humming a melody or even a nonvocal signal of some sort. If tied up and cannot speak, some hold keys or a rubber ball in their hand to simply drop. The idea of a safeword is that when spoken all activities stop at once, you abort the play because something is wrong. Two words often used as safewords are "red" and "yellow" and are often house rules in clubs, "red" for stop and "yellow" for pause.

This is how safety is done in the BDSM world and this is what the justice system does not understand. If you're doing bondage or having rough sex with someone and don't have a safeword, "stop" means stop, "no" means no. Negligence of that is not acceptable, it's rape. And I can tell you it's scary to know that if I would rape somebody, I would get away with it. Of course, I would be shunned by the whole community and generally hated, but there would be no jailtime and no fine for me to be paid. And when attourneys and judges use words like "dominanssex" ("dominance sex") it screams lack of knowledge and we in the know cringes from how poorly educated they are on the subject. (Is dominance sex opposed from submission sex? Are you then having different types of sex with each other at the same time? This is not a term used in the scene as it would be confusing.)

Anyway, these are some of my thoughts and opinions on the ongoing debate. I've been wanting to speak up on this ever since i saw this wonderful and inspiring article, I do have some knowledge and experience here. But at the same time it's scary to know that we are operating outside the protection of law, but I have high hopes that this might change soon. Debates like this can make societies better places to live in.


Prosperity and peace
Joakim Henberg


*BDSMf stand for Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism, Masochism and Fetishism. It encompassed A LOT of different sexualities and versions there of.

Thoughts on the EU Elections

After yesterdays election I was left with a much reviailised interest in politics. It's been years since I participated in a meeting with politicians and I've only attended a few marches and actions since my teen years. But my thoughts have always stayed in that world with a feeling that I should and want to do what I can for this world, whatever that might be. And with the best election in half a century for fascist and far-right parties all over the EU, what better time to start than now? Now, I'm not going to fix the world with a few words on a blog, but my ambitions doesn't end here. I want to do more, but I need to gather my thoughts first. I have a lot of will, and this might just be my way.

So what's the situation like? UKIP, National Front, the Danish People Party, Jobbik, Golden Dawn and my fellow countrymen, the Sweden Democrats are all parties that are doing really well, and they are doing so by spreading fear and hatred over a continent that's famed for its excessive bloodshed throughout the years. And please remember that we've only had a relative peace for just under 70 years, that kind of peace hasn't been seen here for over eighteen centuries. And it it isn't much of a peace neither, nor was it then. Conflicts are still fresh in large parts of Europe and are easily provoked, as seen in Ukraine now for example. Other such conflicts have been seen in the Balkans, Hungary, Ireland and Spain, all of this after the war. Nevertheless, this period has been remarkably peaceful and if we want that to continue we need to work on it!

A few instances has done a good job in keeping that peace, in my opinion. One is the United Nations that was started after the wars to do just that by promoting cooperation internationally. Another is the Olympic Games, perhaps not started for that purpose, however it is doing a good job in securing stable international relations. And a third one is the EU, started to directly keep the peace between France and Germany by a trade union and has now developed much further than that. A lot can be said about the EU, my opinions of it are mixed to say the least, but I will always hold that in high regard. I'm telling you all this because I want to show you how much it takes to simply keep people from shooting each other, and more needs to be done.

What's wrong with the situation now is these parties are instead of cooperating, trading and bettering their relationship with the rest of the world, they're shutting it out, strengthening the borders and sometimes even kicking ethnically "other" people out. They're doing it to be safe, to safeguard your own through trubbled times, because people are afraid. And I get it, I'm afraid too. But this way they're just ensuring the trubbled times continue and perhaps escalate. By simply moving everything "other" outside your borders, tensions are going to rise. Remember, the last time these kind of ideas grew this popular, over 60 million people were killed. But hey, we've only been in a situation like this once before so who knows what's going to happen.

So that's pretty much the opposite of what I would like. In this new era of globalisation we have a much increased cultural exchange, this is true. World economics works quite differently and jobs are being relocated all of the time, much like the industrial revolution, this is true. People are moving more now than ever before, this is also true. This is all happening and it will continue to happen. Stopping it would be like trying to stop a river with your hands. If your strategy is stopping the flow and you're doing it well you are still going to keep at it indefinitely with all you've got, with dubious success. The world is changing and we cannot dam that river, but we can change its direction and perhaps even let it irrigate our lands. We have tremendous technological assets at our hands, a global community to spread all our ideas through and an economy that's actually evening out in many (not all) areas. We can do truly amazing things with this, create a better world. All it takes is cooperation, trade and good international relations, and that can't happen if we cower behind high walls.

My party, the Green Party, made a smashing success, but so did the fascists. So both despite and thanks to yesterdays election, I actually remain hopeful of the future and I will follow this with great interest.


Prosperity and peace
Joakim Henberg