Friday, March 15, 2019

Today -100: March 15, 1919: Of disputed islands, garbled dispatches, lynchings, and trained dogs


The Peace Conference commission working on Italian-Greek border issues says the Dodecanese islands should properly go to Greece because their population is mostly Greek but that the 1915 treaty bribing Italy into the war still holds. US delegates objected that all such secret treaties became invalid when Wilson’s 14 Points were adopted.

The US delegation is also opposing German-Austrian Anschluss, which the NYT notes violates the US’s supposed commitment to national self-determination, but it adds that it was never clear if that principle was meant to apply to enemy nationalities.

The German military executes 220 rebels. With machine guns.

Japanese Ambassador to the US Viscount Ishii calls for the League of Nations constitution to include a ban on racial discrimination, although he does hasten to reassure the US that Japan will continue its agreement to restrict emigration. He doesn’t mention the current violent Japanese crackdown on Koreans who’d like to have their country back, and I doubt anyone bothers to ask him about it.

Richard Brenne, the editor of a German-language newspaper in Cleveland, is acquitted of the crime of garbling war dispatches.

A black man, Bud Johnson, is burned to death by a lynch mob in Castleberry, Florida for supposedly attacking a white woman.

The Belgian who during the occupation accepted Germany’s offer to be Chief Secretary of the Flemish Separatist Ministry is sentenced to 15 years hard labor.

Headline of the Day -100: 


Evidently when the Germans were occupying Belgium, they fined the owner of a fox terrier which was disrespectful to the Germans. Its owner, a hotelier, had taught it to crawl on its belly when asked what the Germans would have to do when the war is over.


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