June 1st, 2009
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#17 |
Write heavy; write hard. 
Join Date: April 10th, 2005 Status: Lurking Rep Power: 30 | Re: General 'Black Jack' Pershing vs. Muslim Terrorists Even though the Pershing story is legend, around the time of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 those kind of rumors were central to the revolt. Native soldiers called sepoys, both Muslim and Hindu (did the Sikhs participate in the 1857 Mutiny?), revolted and took over Britsh garrison towns throughout the sub-continent.
To facilitate the mutiny, conspirators had spread the false rumor to Muslim soldiers that pork fat was used to grease the ammunition, which got in the mouths of soldiers when they had to bite a paper cartridge open. The same sort of story was spread to Hindu soldiers, except for them the bullets were supposedly smeared with beef tallow.
When it was finally put down, the British killed, literally tens of thousands of Indian men women and children. Many historians put the death toll easily in the hundreds of thousands, with one Indian historian proposing an unsubstantiated figure of 10 million Indians killed during and after the Mutiny. One of the more picturesque punishments meted out to mutineers was to strap them across the mouths of cannon, and then as massed native troops witnessed the punishment, the guns were fired and the mutineers bodies reduced to bloody fragments. |
"No, I do NOT want to talk about it." |
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