Pre-1900 Secret Union of Oppressed Peoples

Is there any way that in the late 19th C, common cause could've been made between intellectuals from among the Armenian, Jewish, African-American, and other communities which had been suffering immense persecution in their respective countries, into some organisation perhaps like a 19th C version of the co-operation between such late 20th C groups as the ANC and other liberation movements ? What impact could such a secret union of oppressed peoples have made against Ottoman oppression of Armenians, Russian pogroms against the Jews, lynchings in the Deep South, and German, Belgian and other European colonial atrocities in Africa and elsewhere ?
 
Is there any way that in the late 19th C, common cause could've been made between intellectuals from among the Armenian, Jewish, African-American, and other communities which had been suffering immense persecution in their respective countries, into some organisation perhaps like a 19th C version of the co-operation between such late 20th C groups as the ANC and other liberation movements ? What impact could such a secret union of oppressed peoples have made against Ottoman oppression of Armenians, Russian pogroms against the Jews, lynchings in the Deep South, and German, Belgian and other European colonial atrocities in Africa and elsewhere ?

We're really just not going to let go of this Armenian thing this week, are we. It's like starving dogs with a bone. You can't pry it out of their knashing teeth.

Armenians did not suffer immense persecution. If you want a "secret union of anarcho-communist terrorist nationalist separatists", then there pretty much already was.
 
We're really just not going to let go of this Armenian thing this week, are we. It's like starving dogs with a bone. You can't pry it out of their knashing teeth.

Armenians did not suffer immense persecution. If you want a "secret union of anarcho-communist terrorist nationalist separatists", then there pretty much already was.

Hrm.... Not in the late 19th, at any rate.

Actively oppressing Christians in those days'd be a pretty solid way to end up curbstomped by half of Europe.

Although.... It might be groups just like that most likely to actually join such a union. A "united front" of separatist groups through much of Europe I could imagine. Christian terrorist groups in the Porte, Slavic ones in Austria-Hungary, Poles everywhere. Such groups would get quite a bit of short term benefit from places to hide outside their "home" nations, and the opportunity to compare tactics and methods.

Wouldn't last though. When you are a tiny, violent, radical group you do not want to set yourself as the enemy of the entire European establishment. One EEEVIL OPPR3SSOR really ought to be enough. The long term effects of such a thing would be early successes by the troublemakers, but then the Powers would see their common interests, and that'd be the end of that. In the end you'd just have a little more professionalism in your stateless baddies, a little earlier.
 
Sorry. Your original idea deserves an answer.

If we exclude people yelling "Ouch! Ouch! Stop huuuurrting me!" as they ethnically cleanse their Muslim neighbors, then we could have such an organization. It's hard to see though, how it could extend into Africa or much of Asia and Latin America until after the WWII era. For that matter, it isn't easy to see what it could actually accomplish, excepting the organization of a truly fantastic network of safe houses.

It's worthwhile remembering that broad pan-national identities did exist, and they were called religions. Other than that.... An Ethiopian a hundred years ago had little more interest in an Angolan than he did in a Korean or a German. They're all foreigners, ungodly far away.

Side note: You create a society for oppressed peoples. Can you keep the terrorists out?
 

Sachyriel

Banned
We're really just not going to let go of this Armenian thing this week, are we. It's like starving dogs with a bone. You can't pry it out of their knashing teeth.

Armenians did not suffer immense persecution. If you want a "secret union of anarcho-communist terrorist nationalist separatists", then there pretty much already was.

There still is.

If you use labour relations, all the factions can be supportive, and the Secret Union of Oppressed Peoples can get larger and larger.
 
Hrm.... Not in the late 19th, at any rate.

Actively oppressing Christians in those days'd be a pretty solid way to end up curbstomped by half of Europe.
Are you aware of the 1894 Rosebery appeal and of the subsequent formation of the Near Eastern Triplice?
 
I don't even speak Spanish.
Lulz.

There was a minor diplomatic crisis in the mid-1890s over purported Turkish massacres of Armenian Christians. It was nearly brought to war in late 1895, when Russia was seriously contemplating seizing the Straits as preemptive action in the event of British intervention. Britain was distracted from this and the concurrent First Venezuelan Crisis by the episode of the Jameson Raid and the Kruger Telegram, and backed down in the Ottoman Empire. Salisbury took the opportunity to issue a circular to several foreign ministries, especially the Russian, in 1896 after the Armenian seizure of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople, over the possible issuance of a note to the Porte indicating that the Great Powers would endorse a reform program to make life better for the Armenians. The 1897 Greco-Turkish War and the German seizure of Jiaozhou put a halt to musings about that, and the note was never issued.

The Near Eastern Triplice was a temporary grouping of France, Russia, and the UK, who were the Powers concerned in drafting the note to the sultan, the reform-program note which never got through.

The point of this post is, yes, the Great Powers did care about whatever the Armenians thought was being done to them. Just not that much.
 
It seems to me that if there's any way to actually get all the Powers to support the Ottoman Empire, it's to provoke paranoia by taking a suspicion that all these movements are part of a dark international conspiracy, and actually forming a dark international conspiracy to confirm their fears.

After that, anytime an Armenian assassinates an Ottoman official, it will be viewed as an attack on all the Powers, not Evil Oppressive Muslims, Inc. Ditto for everything else.
 
There still is.

If you use labour relations, all the factions can be supportive, and the Secret Union of Oppressed Peoples can get larger and larger.

Don't see it being much of a 'Secret Union' if there are a lot of people in it. Since its pre-1900 one could even add women.
 
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