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checked her bag to make sure she had not mislaid her glass cutter and the
little suction cup with which she d removed the cut window glass.
Chapter 13
Morning, April 17, 1912
San Francisco
John Banks
fter breakfast, their cook cleared the dishes around John as he
read the newspaper. Jy-ying had gone to the kitchen to get him a
A
second cup of coffee, and herself more green tea. She still hated
to ask the cook to do these little things for them.
John began with the business section, as he now always did, unless
a tantalizing headline caught his eye and he beat Jy-ying to the front
section. He felt he had to check for news relevant to their Hua Import &
Export Company, really the operational center of their mission. And of
course, he had to check the progress of his stocks, their major source of
funds beyond what he and Jy-ying had brought downtime with them.
Without their foreknowledge of the market, they would have by now
used up more than half of their billions. Bribing politicians and under-
writing democratic and anti-war movements in Asia and Europe would
exhaust the wealth of even the filthy rich.
He often ruminated on how their mission to change the world had
first changed him. In the First Universe, as a college professor of his-
tory at Indiana University, business was as remote to him as Hollywood
or the military. No business or classified sections ever dirtied his fin-
gers with printer s ink.
Khoo Jy-ying
Jy-ying returned, gave John his coffee and Prince Wei a back rub,
and settled down in her chair. She picked up the San Francisco Call s
front section and began scanning it. After turning several pages, she
stopped, raised her eyebrows, and pointed at something on page 4. Oh
my, she said, drawing John s attention. There is an Associated Press
dispatch from Reuters here. It says that there are massacres going on in
Turkey. She read it aloud:
Genocide Never Again 45
Civil War Breaks Out in Turkey
Reuters via AP, April 16, 1912. Diplomats and foreign journalists
have reported massacres of Armenians in Artvin, Kars, and Tunceli,
and large-scale deportations from eastern Turkey. Some estimate that
around ten thousand may have been killed.
In response to questions, Young Turk government spokesman Ab-
dullah Babacan replied, The Armenians are sympathetic to the
enemies of Turkey and have risen in rebellion. They have murdered
thousands of Muslims.
Of the deportations, the spokesman said, It is the government s
legitimate attempt to move those people away from the border with
Russia. If Russia were to invade Turkey, our rebellious Armenians
would provide aid to the Russians, and many of the men would join
the Russian forces.
For that reason, the spokesman added, Many Armenians also are
being deported from Istanbul to the interior. If the war soon ends, all
these people will be allowed to return to their homes.
Damn! John exclaimed. This must be one of those series of mas-
sacres the Armenians in Turkey have suffered before. In the First
Universe, there was a full-scale genocide of Armenians and Greeks be-
ginning in 1915, but that was during World War I, when the Turks were
allied with Germany. I ve been assuming that if we prevent that war,
we will also prevent this genocide.
Jy-ying asked, What is genocide ?
That s right. In your Second Universe, the word may not have been
invented. It is the intentional murder of people because of their ethnicity,
race, nationality, or religion, or to be more precise, the attempt to elimi-
nate a group in whole or in part by murder or other means, such as
deportation. The word was invented by the international law scholar
Raphael Lemkin in 1944, during the Second World War that was fought
from 1939 to 1945 in the First Universe. During that war, the Nazis tried
to exterminate the Jews as a group, and Lemkin meant for his new word,
genocide, to apply to such campaigns. You may remember this geno-
cide often called the Holocaust from the DVD Joy showed you about
the First Universe s wars and democides. After the war, Lemkin played a
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