Today -100: February 5, 1923: Of crown princes, occupations, and klokards

The Lausanne Conference breaks up in failure. Turkey refused to honor the corrupt concessions the old Ottoman government gave foreigners and refused to allow foreign legal advisors to control the arrests and searches of foreigners. The Turks point to all the territorial concessions to which they did agree.

Former crown prince Wilhelm of Germany is meeting monarchist conspirators from Germany near the border. The Netherlands is not happy that he’s abusing the terms of his asylum.

The French occupation of the Ruhr and Rhineland is going swell. In Ingelheim, French troops start shooting after two coal trains ram into each other, mistakenly thinking it was sabotage rather than what happens when you try to run trains during a train strike. And in Bilke, a French soldiers trips and accidentally shoots a young German girl dead. In Essen, French troops fire machine guns over the heads of a Communist meeting. And French soldiers occupy railroad junctions in order to cut the line between Frankfort and Switzerland, in retaliation for Germany stopping the running of express trains through Germany between Paris & Prague and Paris & Bucharest, ostensibly due to a shortage of coal, i.e. the French coal blockade of Germany. And a tuberculosis sanitarium in Sankt Blaslen in the Black Forest is forced to expel its French and Belgian patients. The German government is sending money to the Ruhr to prop up the resistance. Indeed, they’re printing money as fast as they can, which may have consequences later.

Greece informs Britain and France that it will go to war with Turkey, again, if the latter continues to claim Karagatch. Britain & France are expected to tell Greece to simmer down.

The Rev. Dr. Oscar Haywood, the Ku Klux Klan’s national Klokard (lecturer), is in NY and challenges Thomas Dixon to a debate. He also says that the Mer Rouge Klan did not murder Watt Daniels and Thomas Richards, who in fact merely “disappeared”; those two dead bodies found in Lake La Fourche were actually cadavers stolen from a medical school.

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