Burke: Word of the Day<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The www.alphadictionary.com<\/a>\nword of the day for today is burke<\/em> (b\u025crk\u2014just\nlike bird<\/em>, except for the last\nconsonant sound). It\u2019s a verb, so we should say, \u201cTo burke,\u201d and it is spelled\nwith a short b<\/em>. According to www.dictionary.com<\/a>, it means either \u201cto\nmurder, as by suffocation, so as to leave no or few marks of violence\u201d or \u201cto\nsuppress or get rid of by some indirect maneuver.\u201d Alphadictionary elaborates\non the second definition: \u201cTo cover up, to sweep under the rug, to quietly\nsuppress, as politicians are wont to burke investigations into their\nwrongdoing.\u201d But it then adds, \u201cThe [second] definition of today’s word has\nmany applications outside the field of politics: \u2018To make the film even more\ndepressing, the director burked all the elements that might have even faintly\ncurled the lips of the audience.\u2019”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alphadictionary provides the history of the word thus: \u201cThe\neponym of today’s word was an Irishman, William Burke who, with his accomplice,\nWilliam Hare, was executed in Edinburgh in 1830 for suffocating 16 people in\norder to sell their bodies to the Edinburgh Medical School for dissection. He\nreceived \u00a37 10\/- each for his wares, an excellent price even considering the\nextra work he performed. He was arrested with accomplices almost by accident,\nno suspicions having been raised by his seemingly limitless stock and overnight\nservice.\u201d The two started out by selling the body of a boarder, living with\nHare, who died of natural causes. To make up for back unpaid rent, they decided\nto try to sell the body at the University of Edinburgh, one of the leading\nschools for studying anatomy in the world at that time. They were thanked and\ntold that they would be welcome back any time\u2014there was a real shortage of\navailable corpses for study. But after a while, the pair got a bit carried away\nwith helping out the sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On this date in 1934, Sergei Kirov was murdered in\nLeningrad. Kirov was one of the \u201cOld Bolsheviks,\u201d having been part of the\nrevolutionary movement going back to 1904. He was a friend of Lenin and Stalin.\nHe was a military leader in the Russian Civil War of 1917 to 1920, known for\nhis merciless suppression of anyone who hid money or goods from his troops. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After the Revolution and the Civil War, he was first the\nparty leader in Azerbaijan and then, starting in 1926, the leader of the party\nin Leningrad. He was a staunch Communist and believer in forced collectivism,\nbut he also acted independently at times. Therefore, many believe that Stalin\nhad him murdered. Whether that is true or not, Kirov\u2019s murder led to the Great\nPurge of 1934-38.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stalin, getting progressively more paranoid, used the murder\nof his old friend to purge the Communist Party of anyone he thought might\ndisagree with him about pretty much anything. He staged what later became known\nas the Moscow Trials, during which party members confessed to being spies and\nwere sentenced to death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the Purge, according to the estimates of some\nhistorians, 30,000 members of the Red Army were executed, including 81 of 103\ngenerals and admirals. In addition, Stalin signed a law that made families\nresponsible for the betrayal of the men, so children as young as 12 were\nexecuted as traitors. Of the roughly 3 million party members, about a third\nwere purged in the course of the four years. Many were sent to the Gulags.\nEstimates of the dead from the Great Purge range from 750,000 to 1.5 million. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Keep in mind that this number is in addition to the millions\nwho killed in the Holodomor of 1932-33.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the Russian Revolution, the communists proposed\nsomething called democratic centralism, defined by Wikipedia like this: \u201cDemocratic\ncentralism is a Leninist democratic practice in which political decisions\nreached by voting processes are binding upon all members of the party.\u201d During\nthe Civil War, Lenin was granted dictatorial powers because of the needs of the\nwar, but after the Civil War was over, many members of the party felt that it\nwas time for democratic centralism to take hold. Stalin, who took over as the\ndictator even before Lenin\u2019s death in 1924, was happy with complete power and\nobjected to anyone who wanted him to share. As a result of this disagreement,\nhundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions of people, died. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Leaders today are not able to simply murder, through show\ntrials and gulags, the people who disagree with them. They have to be subtler,\nmore secretive. They have to suppress the opposition by some indirect maneuver.\nThey have to \u201ccover up, to sweep under the rug, to quietly suppress, as\npoliticians are wont to burke investigations into their wrongdoing.\u201d Then\nagain, some leaders, like college presidents and provosts, can just refuse to\ntalk about their wrongdoing and seem to able to get away with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The image is a drawing of William Burke as he appeared at\nthe bar. Taken in Court. George Andrew Lutenor; a portrait painter who was also\none of the jurors at William Hare’s trial – Anon (1829), West Port Murders, or An Authentic Account of the Atrocious Murders\nCommitted by Burke and His Associates<\/em>, Edinburgh: Thomas Ireland Junior\n(facing title page)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Burke: Word of the Day The www.alphadictionary.com word of the day for today is burke (b\u025crk\u2014just like bird, except for the last consonant sound). It\u2019s a verb, so we should […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4688,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4690,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions\/4690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}