Today -100: December 30, 1918: Of genocides, fighting Bolshevism, and pilots

The Turkish government is talking about holding courts-martial for those (few bad apples) responsible for the Armenian massacres. Armenians in the US protest that the Turks can’t be trusted to investigate themselves.

The NYT complains that the Allies aren’t creating a unified command to fight the Russian Bolsheviks. “The Allies can fight Bolshevism now, before its teeth have grown, and run the risk of having the cruder minds among their soldiers debauched by the argument that ignorance should rule knowledge; or they can wait until Bolshevism has spread that argument through the cruder minds not only of their armies but of their whole populations, and then fight it with their morale thus impaired.”

French Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon says that Allied military intervention in Russia is actually defensive, to prevent the Bolsheviks invading Ukraine, the Caucasus and western Siberia.

A German pilot, Christian Donhauser, claims that it was he who shot down and killed Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin. This may or may not be true. Donhauser, the article notes, weighs 94 pounds, not counting the Iron Cross he received for shooting down something like 30 planes. He hopes to emigrate to the US and fly planes here but instead will die in a plane crash in a couple of weeks.

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