One of my regular commenters asked, in a previous thread, “If everyone was truly released from the shackles of religion, and got beyond the false moral codes imposed on them, would society collapse in a heap of nihilism?” This question needs a longer answer than will fit in a reply comment.
The shortest summary is “No!” The less short answer is: “No, because religious moral codes are epiphenomenal.” And it is on point to add that the question reveals serious ignorance of the actual traits of most religions over most of history.
I’ll address the historical point first. The commenter’s question was framed from within the assumptions of one particular family of religions: the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, which are more succinctly describable as the bastard offspring of Zoroastrian dualism. In this family, “religion” bundles cosmology, theology, and morality into a single total system designed primarily to enforce norms by programming the believer with an internalized guilt machine.
Because the dominant religions of the modern West are all derived from this group, it is difficult for Westerners to understand how bizarre and exceptional these religions are in a broader context. Most religions are not total systems. Most religions do not tie morality to cosmology. In fact, most religions have very little to say about morality at all!
Consider, for example, an Altaic shaman. It’s not his job to pronounce on who should sleep with who, or to tell people that theft is wrong. It’s not even his job to tell people that they must worship Tengri or Kara-han; dealing with the gods is his specialty, thank you. His job combines aspects of psychologist and medic with a bit of divination. The closest analog of “morality”, in his culture, is a set of inherited customs and taboos which is reinforced by explanatory myths but not generated by them and not really dependent on them. The closest equivalent of religious structures about right and wrong is an elaborate set of rules about ritual purity and impurity. In the jargon of the field, his religion is an orthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy.
Over most human cultures in most human history, “religion” has been much more like Altaic shamanism than like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Er, so why didn’t these cultures “collapse in a heap of nihilism”? The same question actually applies to modern religions outside the post-Zoroastrian family. Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, are almost completely unconcerned with “morality”. Hinduism is organized around ritual purity and impurity; Buddhism’s quest for merit is about liberation of the self from attachments, not about duties one owes to God or others.
Eric S. Raymond, “If God is dead, is anything permissible?”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-02-10.
December 22, 2020
QotD: The foundational weirdness of Judeo/Christian/Islamic religions
December 15, 2020
History Summarized: Spread of Christianity
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 10 Jan 2017Things I learned when making this video: 1) when your script goes beyond 4 single-spaced pages, you’re heading into the danger zone 2) Gregorian Chants are awesome and you should totally listen to them, 3) editing always takes longer than you’d hope 4) self care is huffing frankincense for breakfast lunch and dinner and single-handedly sacking a levantine city!
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December 13, 2020
Islamism and the French Republic
Niccolo Soldo talks to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry about the rise of Islamism in France and the dangers it poses:
Brigitte Macron and Emmanuel Macron, 11 November, 2018.
Photo from the office of the President of Ukraine via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-4.0.
Islamism presents an existential threat to the French Republic. Statements are being made, positions are being taken, and the smell of action is in the air to counter this threat. Will we see a follow through from Macron?
Your guess is as good as mine. Macron is hard to predict. Although there are many reasons to be pessimistic, from French elites’ general lack of follow-through to Macron’s own (I believe, sincere and deeply-held) commitment to so-called “liberal values”, I will note that it hasn’t been all talk. BarakaCity (the biggest Muslim NGO in France) whose leaders happen to think ISIS is misunderstood, was shut down by executive decree. CCIF, a prominent “anti-islamophobia” organization, dissolved itself after the government announced its intent to shut it down. So an important Rubicon has been crossed, at least in principle: the French government has rhetorically and legally committed itself to combating not just those who engage in Islamist violence, but those who engage in Islamist advocacy and activism.
Can France’s secularism hold on in light of this challenge? Islamism is rather dynamic, and secularism lacks the ingredients for fanaticism that only the irrational are able to muster. In many countries it seems that only the elites are strongly-wedded to secularism.
I’ll let you in on a little secret we don’t share with foreigners: nobody in France believes in “laïcité“, it’s all a code to say we don’t like Islam. We have a freaking concordat, for crying out loud!
The entire notion that there is this specific French culture of “laïcité” that goes beyond institutional separation of church and state was a retcon invented in the 1980s when the Muslim population became too big to ignore. Nobody — nobody — is fooled that banning the hijab in public schools as well as “large ostentatious crosses” is a neutral secularist measure.
Today some people are claiming that wearing religious garb in the National Assembly is a breach of laïcité, but after the War the Canon Kir sat as a member of Parliament in his cassock for twenty years and nobody had any problem with it. (My favorite Kir story: during a late-night parliamentary session, a Communist deputy asked him “How come you believe in God, even though you’ve never seen him?” “What about my asshole? You’ve never seen it, yet you know it exists!”)
The fig leaf of laïcité was useful, and perhaps still is, as politically correct cover for defending French identity, but over time it will have to be discarded. There are signs that it’s beginning.
The bottom line is that France has always been assimilationist. The idea is that assimilation was invented by the Republic, but it’s not true. When Louis XIV invaded a province, he would create schools with scholarships for poor, talented youth from those places to “turn them into Frenchmen.” The self-conscious project of the French Kings was to restore the Roman Empire, and this bequeathed to us the Roman concept of citizenship: laws, language, and culture. This is what is behind “laïcité.” This assimilationism therefore has deep roots, and it is perfectly legitimate that we demand of immigrants that they assimilate into our culture, which is inescapably Judeo-Christian.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
November 30, 2020
Cultural Marxism or cultural leftism?
In the most recent Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb discusses what British Conservatives have been warned against describing as “Cultural Marxism”:
So far as I understand him — and I write as an outsider to any school of Marxist ideology — Marx made five essential points. First, there have been, since the French Revolution, two classes — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Second, the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and exploits the proletariat through the extraction of surplus value. Third, this is an unstable parasitism, as the reinvestment of surplus value leads to periodic crises of over-production. Fourth, these crises concentrate wealth in fewer hands and expand and immiserise the proletariat. Fifth, there will be an inevitable revolution, in which the expropriators will be expropriated and a communist society will emerge. A further and perhaps optional sixth point is that the inevitable revolution can be hurried by the defection of informed bourgeois intellectuals to radicalise and form a vanguard for the proletariat.
Now, where is any of this in the present mix of climate alarmism and obsession with the alleged oppression of racial and sexual minorities? How is capitalism supposed to be overthrown by getting Sainsbury to fill its advertisements with pictures of black people eating Christmas dinner? Ditto boycotts of Israeli pharmaceuticals? Ditto arguing with or against radical feminists over the exact status of men who change sex?
The answer, of course, is the Cultural Marxist hypothesis — that the present culture wars are a product of the writings of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. These men took the Marxian concept of “false consciousness” — that the bourgeoisie keeps the workers quiet by making them believe that all is for the best — and enlarged it into a project for achieving a counter-hegemony by taking over the means of cultural reproduction.
There is some truth in this answer, so far as these writings are prescribed in most university humanities departments, and many advocates of the new totalitarianism have at some time called themselves Marxists. It is, even, so a weak answer. Before about 60 AD, most Christians were Jews, and Christianity ever since has retained some Jewish religious writings among its core texts. But nothing is achieved by describing Christianity as “Gentile Judaism.” The differences between the two faiths are too essential to define either by reference to the other. In the same way, the present totalitarianism has nothing to do with the essential claims of Marxism. It lacks any interest in the analysis of surplus value, and its belief in the instability of unregulated markets derives mainly from a reading of Keynes and the welfare economists of the Cambridge School.
I prefer the term “cultural leftism.” I prefer this because the present totalitarianism is based on belief in an appearance of equality mediated by the State. It therefore has elements of socialism as reasonably defined. But it is in no sense Marxist. Its revealed preference is for a ruling class that is a coalition of politicians, administrators, policemen, lawyers, educators, plus media and business interests. So far as individuals move freely between them, these groups are mutually permeable. If they disagree over incidentals, they preside collectively over a mass of the ruled who are mostly well-nourished, but who are too atomised and intimidated by often meaningless words to combine in opposition.
Indeed, if I prefer my chosen term, I see little point in arguing against what it describes. Undoubtedly, this must be explained and opposed. But too much analysis of particulars can risk an overlooking of the much more important generality. This is that, in every time and place, there have been those who want to get on with their lives and those who want to control others. These latter will take up whatever body of ideas is most likely within the prevailing assumptions of their age to legitimise their urges.
November 24, 2020
Ten Minute History – The Thirty Years’ War
History Matters
Published 30 Sep 2018Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tenminhistory
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RbjThis episode of Ten Minute History (like a documentary, only shorter) covers the outbreak of the Bohemian Revolt which was what would eventually spiral out of control into the Thirty Years’ War. The revolt was crushed fairly quickly but sparked intervention by Denmark, who didn’t do too well, and later Sweden who did very well. Both of these were aided by France who decided to get directly involved in 1635. By 1648 the Holy Roman Empire lay in ruins, with Austria and Spain struggling to pay for the war and rebuild the Habsburg Empire. This war saw the rise of Sweden and France but most importantly saw the foundations of modern diplomacy built.
Recommended books:
Mark Greengrass – Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648. Does a great job of outlying the theological currents in Europe at the time and how all of the religious changes led to the Thirty Years’ War.
Peter H. Wilson – Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years’ War. The go-to text for the war; incredibly detailed and honestly can’t be beat for the topic. 100% recommend.
November 21, 2020
QotD: Using a “wokescreen”
It is, essentially, a new iteration of an old rule: the one stating that the person commonly to be found complaining most vociferously about a particular vice is the one disproportionately likely to be guilty of said vice.
Through decades past, this rule applied to people who were literally in the clerical class. It was, for instance (see the late Cardinal Keith O’Brien), the priest or bishop who denounced homosexuality in the most vociferous terms who would turn out to have their own peculiar interpretation of “the laying on of hands”, tending to revolve around the knees of young male seminarians.
And there is sense in this of course. Through overt displays of moral opprobrium, the petitioner imagines that everyone’s attention will be diverted. Through stressing their virtue overmuch, however, such people raise a perceptible flag to anyone with an eye for human hypocrisy.
Today, of course, the clerical class is not the clergy. It is generally a rich, massively protected, metropolitan and often corporate or corporate-backed class which poses as the defender and then enforcer of all the easiest, least-controversial causes of the time. These shift, naturally, but today a person who wishes to cloak themselves in virtue will talk up their “anti-racism” credentials; will talk about “feminism” as though women’s rights have only just occurred to them; they will stress their green credentials; and of course they will rush to the defence of anyone who claims to identify as a tree or a hedgerow and assert that said person’s right to so identify is not just ancient and long-established but biologically incontrovertible. All give off immense warning-signs.
Douglas Murray, “Do you know what a wokescreen is?”, UnHerd, 2020-08-13.
November 17, 2020
QotD: Prejudice
Or just think about how much ink has been spilled arguing that it is unfair and unjust to assume that one black youth is a criminal or a threat just because he resembles in some way a negative stereotype. I’m not mocking this argument; I am agreeing with it.
As I’ve been saying until I’m blue in the face on my book tour, one of the greatest things about this country is the ideal — always in tension with the lesser devils of our natures — that says we should take people as we find them. My objection to identity politics is that it reduces millions of people to a single attribute or grievance. It assumes that, simply by accident of birth, some people are more noble or more evil than others.
If you think that all you need to know about an African-American person to size up his character or humanity is his skin color, then you’re a racist. […]
You can run similar thought experiments about virtually any group. If all you need to know about Oscar Wilde is that he was a gay dude, just like Richard Simmons or Milo what’s-his-name, you’re a bigot. If Meyer Lansky and Albert Einstein are merely two Jews to you, you’re an anti-Semite. If Margaret Thatcher, Joan of Arc, and Lizzie Borden are just three chicks, you’re a sexist.
And again, historically, this is mostly a left-wing or liberal (both in the classical and modern senses of the word) insight. But for some bizarre reason, for many people, this idea evaporates like water off a hot skillet when you replace any of these categories with “white” or, very often, “male.”
Suddenly fancy words and phrases fly like sawdust from a wood chipper: “structures of oppression!” “decontextualized!” “ahistoricized!” etc. It’s all so clever and complicated. The same people who take to the streets at the slightest suggestion that Muslims can be judged by the evil deeds of other Muslims will lecture and harangue you for hours, mob you on Twitter, or condescendingly dismiss you for not understanding that all white people have it coming.
I am not denying the history of white racism in America. I’m more than eager to acknowledge it. But what these people are basically saying is that you can say bigoted things about all white people based on things other white people have done. And spare me the argument that some 70-hour-a-week truck driver in Appalachia has it coming because he’s a grand beneficiary of white supremacy.
Jonah Goldberg, “The G-File”, National Review, 2018-08-03.
November 14, 2020
QotD: “Modern” liberalism
My second was to find that he was now brainwashed by ideologies and slogans; that it was impossible to argue with him from reason or fact; that faced with any difficulty he would present himself as the helpless victim of forces he would not even try to define coherently.
My third was the discovery that he was now, instinctively, on the side of the criminal; that he identified with the lawless; that he admired “the transgressive,” trespass, violation. Without acknowledging it to himself, he now had a conception of “human rights” which consistently excused the wrongdoer, and consistently ignored the consequences to those who had done nothing wrong.
This “modern” liberalism, I came to understand, was the development — not over months and years but over centuries — of a mortal flaw in the “classical” liberal worldview. It was avoiding God. The liberal mind was persuaded that humans must “make their own beds.” Its great strength was that it took responsibility; its great weakness was that it had no reason to do so. Faith and reason are mutually dependent; when one goes the other eventually goes, too.
Or put this another way: the Devil gets in when we make room for him.
David Warren, “Crime without punishment”, Essays in idleness, 2018-08-03.
October 24, 2020
Andrew Sullivan on the potentials of therapeutic use of psilocybin
In the last free edition of his Weekly Dish newsletter — and probably the last time I’ll be able to link to it — Andrew Sullivan discusses the medical trials and legalization initiatives for psilocybin along with some of the history of its use in the Elusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece:
At the archaeological site of the Sanctuary of Demeter at Eleusis. The information board on the left stands on what was once the courtyard of the sanctuary. Over the staircase behind it stood the Greater Propylaea. Next to the cavern in the background stood the Sanctuary of Pluto (who abducted Persephone, Demeter’s daughter). The cavern represents the entrance to the Underworld. The path to the left of the cavern leads to the Telesterion where the faithful were initiated to the Eleusinian mysteries. The brown building up on the hill (left) is a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary (Church of Panagitsa Mesosporitissa) and stands over the area of the Telesterion.
Photo by George E. Koronaios via Wikimedia Commons.
There are many ways in which this election might portend the future, but there’s a seemingly small issue — only on the ballot in Oregon and the District of Columbia — that’s a sleeper, it seems to me, and worth keeping an eye on. It’s the decriminalization of naturally-occurring psychedelics, in particular, psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in some mushrooms which have long been dubbed “magic.”
This doesn’t come out of the blue. Huge strides have been taken in the last few years in the decriminalization of cannabis, with 33 states allowing medical use, of which 11 allow recreational as well. The FDA recently greenlit clinical trials for psilocybin as a “breakthrough therapy” for depression — with some wildly impressive results. Books like Michael Pollan’s magisterial How To Change Your Mind have helped shift the reputation of psychedelics from groovy, counter-cultural weirdness to mature, spiritual, and regulated mental health treatment. Ketamine — previously a party drug and an animal tranquilizer — has shown more promise as an anti-depressant than any therapy since the mid-1990s.
The familiar worry, of course, is that we might be ushering in an era of wild drug experimentation, with unforeseen and unknowable results. Some people fear that relaxing some of the legal restrictions on things that grow in nature could lead to social disruption or higher levels of addiction or worse. The great popularizer of psychedelics, Aldous Huxley, gave us a somewhat sobering description of what might be our future in Brave New World, and many in the West have been terrified of these substances for quite a while.
But new research suggests that this shift toward integrating psychedelics into a healthy, responsible life for Westerners may not be new at all. It would, in fact, be a return to a civilization that used these substances as a bulwark of social and personal peace. New literary investigations of ancient texts, new — and re-examined — archeological finds, and cutting edge bio-chemical technology that can detect and identify substances in long-buried artifacts, suggest that deploying psychedelics would, in fact, be a return to a Brave Old World we are only now rediscovering.
We’ve long known that human knowledge of psychedelic aspects of nature goes back into pre-history; and use of them just as far. But perhaps the most surprising find in this new area of research is that sacred tripping was not simply a function of prehistoric religious rituals and shamanism, but an integral, even central part, of the world of the ancient Greeks. The society that remains the basis for so much of Western civilization seems to have held psychedelics as critical to its vision of human flourishing. And that vision may have a role to play in bringing Western civilization back into balance.
A breakthrough in understanding this comes in the form of a rigorously scholarly new book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name, by Brian Muraresku. What he shows is the centrality of psychedelic use for the ancient Greeks, in an elaborate and mysterious once-in-a-lifetime ceremony at the Temple of Eleusis, a short distance from Athens. We’ve long known about this temple of the Mysteries, as they were known, and the rite of passage they offered — because it’s everywhere in the record. Many leading Greeks and Romans went there, including Plato and Marcus Aurelius. Here is Cicero, no less, in De Legibus:
For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those Mysteries. For by means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope.
October 23, 2020
“The Lion From The North” – Gustavus Adolphus – Sabaton History 090 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 22 Oct 2020It was a time of religion and war. Legends tell the tale of a mighty Swedish King, a Lion from the North, who arrived in the German Empire with a mighty host to save Protestantism. Beyond the legends, Gustavus Adolphus was a warrior king who sought to create a Swedish empire through hegemony on the Baltic Sea. Once, Sweden’s involvement in the 30 Years War had begun out of sheer necessity, but soon send her armies on a path of glory and fame. But would this path lead the Swedish King to victory or his inevitable demise?
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– Arms of Vasa courtesy of Sodacan from Wikimedia
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October 18, 2020
Russian Civil War in Central Asia I THE GREAT WAR 1920
The Great War
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By the fall of 1920, the Russian Civil War had unleashed three years of ethnic and internal conflict in Central Asia, and there was no end in sight. In this episode we’ll catch up on the dramatic events of the former Russian imperial lands in Central Asia from the revolution right up to the end of 1920, 100 years ago.
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Baumann, Robert F. Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, Combat Studies Institute, 2010.Becker, Seymour. Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
Brower, Daniel R. Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire, Routledge, 2010.
Buttino, M. “Study of the Economic Crisis and Depopulation in Turkestan, 1917–1920”, Central Asian Survey, no. 4, 1990, pp. 59-74, doi:10.1080/02634939008400725.
Campbell, Ian W. Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917, Cornell University Press, 2017.
Everett-Heath, Tom. Central Asia: Aspects of Transition, Routledge, 2003.
Hiro, D. Inside Central Asia, Abrams, 2011.
Keller, Shoshana. Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence, University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Khalid, A. “Central Asia Between the Ottoman and the Soviet Worlds”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 2, 2011, pp. 451-76, doi:10.1353/kri.2011.0028.
Khalid, Adeeb. “The Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic in the Light of Muslim Sources”, Die Welt Des Islams, no. 3, 2010, pp. 335-61, doi:10.1163/157006010×544287.
Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR, Cornell University Press, 2019.
Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Loring, B. “‘Colonizers With Party Cards’: Soviet Internal Colonialism in Central Asia, 1917–39”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 1, 2014, pp. 77-102, doi:10.1353/kri.2014.0012.
Olcott, M. B. “The Basmachi or Freemen’s Revolt in Turkestan 1918–24”, Soviet Studies, no. 3, 1981, pp. 352-69, doi:10.1080/09668138108411365.
Poujol, Catherine. “Jews and Muslims in Central Asia”, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, edited by Abdelwahab Meddeb, Benjamin Stora, Jane Marie Todd and Michael B. Smith, Princeton University Press, Princeton; Oxford, 2013, pp. 258–268.
Sahadeo, Jeff. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent: 1865-1923, Indiana University Press, 2010.
Sokol, Edward D. The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
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QotD: Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence”
This is exactly why he was not a militant atheist in the way we understand the expression today. He felt no need to concern himself with the veracity of Christianity’s claims about the afterlife, something we cannot be sure about. He seldom railed against the theological pretensions of Christianity or the absurdity of religion because to him the only thing that mattered was how religion affected us. He objected to Christianity because he saw it as nihilist and life-negating. It taught people to be meek, humble and to accept their lot. Nietzsche was an empiricist in that he wanted people to fulfil their life in the here and now, something that Christianity was hostile to.
Yet Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence belongs strangely to the realm of metaphysics and dualism. Its fatalism and determinism contradicts Nietzsche’s exhortation for each of us to become our own masters and to become who we truly are. While he did not believe in free will, he did believe that the Übermensch could harness and master the forces of his inner “will to power”. Contrarily, the eternal recurrence condemns us to history and supernatural fate. The notion of “eternal recurrence” reeks too much of his youthful dalliance with Schopenhauerian metaphysics.
This is perhaps why Nietzsche rarely mentioned it, and made even less effort to explain it in the books published in his lifetime. It seems too much of a flight of fancy, and the only time he spoke of it in all seriousness is when he recounted one day in August 1881, when walking in the Swiss mountains, when he had a kind of strange, rapturous religious experience – the day when the notion of “eternal recurrence” came to him in the first place.
Patrick West, “Nietzsche and the struggle against nihilism”, Spiked, 2018-08-03.
October 16, 2020
QotD: The Law of Abrogation
Dr. Sookhdeo: “In fact the reverse is true. … All the peaceful passages that are enjoined on Muslims occur in the chapters written at Mecca. They are tolerant toward Jews and Christians. But when Muhammad gets to Medina and sets up his city/religious state, the tone towards other groups changes rapidly. The statements about slaying the pagans and killing the Jews and others occur there. Now in Islamic interpretation, all passages that are revealed later take precedence over those revealed earlier. This is known as the ‘law of abrogation’.”
David Warren, “Jihad Politics”, DavidWarrenOnline, 2005-08-03.
October 6, 2020
Rowan Atkinson Live – The devil Toby welcomes you to hell
Rowan Atkinson Live
Published 29 Jul 2010In this sketch, Rowan plays the devil, also known as “Toby”, he welcomes new people to hell.
Selected Highlights from Rowan’s stand up tours during the years 1981 to 1986.
Whether mesmerising us with the sheer visual mastery of Mr. Bean, beguiling us with the acerbic wit of Edmund Blackadder, or simply entertaining us as the suave, but rather hapless British Secret Agent Johnny English, you surely won’t have escaped the comic genius that is Rowan Atkinson.
In Rowan Atkinson Live, co-written with Richard Curtis (4 Weddings & a Funeral, Notting Hill, Love Actually) and Ben Elton, Atkinson runs the whole gamut of his remarkably versatile 30 year career, with sketches, mimes and monologue’s that are guaranteed to have you shedding tears of laughter. Performing live on stage alongside “straight man” Angus Deayton, the show features a number of original and familiar routines, including sketches that appeared in the original Mr. Bean series.
“The Caucasus is a bad neighborhood”
Fighting broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia last week over the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a quasi-independent Armenian-majority territory still technically part of Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh’s declaration was not followed by formal recognition by other states). Mark Movsesian provides some historical background to the conflict in First Things:
Thirty years ago, in response to discriminatory treatment and outright pogroms against Armenians, the region declared independence. Armenia (population 3 million) supported Karabakh — though it has never formally recognized its independence — and a bloody war followed, in which 30,000 people died and hundreds of thousands on both sides became refugees. Against all odds, Armenia and Karabakh prevailed and established a buffer zone comprising perhaps 20 percent of Azeri territory.
An unstable ceasefire has held since 1994. But last week, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive against Karabakh and Armenia itself. This is more serious than past Azeri efforts to break the stalemate. Flush with petrodollars, Azerbaijan has purchased a large stockpile of heavy weapons, which it now employs against Armenia. Moreover, Turkey (population 80 million), which borders Armenia on the other side, is supporting Azerbaijan. Azeris are a Turkic people, though they are Shia, not Sunni, Muslims, and the Erdogan government sees the conflict as a way to pursue its goal of pan-Turanism. Turkey has supplied Azerbaijan with military advisers and equipment, including drones and fighter jets and thousands of Islamist soldiers from Syria, who fight for Azerbaijan on the front lines.
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One needs to go back at least a century, to the collapse of the Ottoman and Czarist Empires. The two empires had long contested the border between them, which ran to the southwest of the Caucasus. Armenians, an ancient Christian people who lived on both sides of the border, found themselves in the crosshairs. During World War I, fearful that Armenians on the border would rise up and side with Russia — some Armenians did fight with the Russians, but many others fought with the Ottomans, and the Armenian threat was always exaggerated — the Ottoman government undertook an ethnic cleansing campaign, killing millions of Armenians and other Christians in the Armenian Genocide.
The Genocide eliminated Turkey’s once sizable Christian population. It likely would have eliminated the Armenian population on the other side of the border, too, except that a hastily-organized Armenian militia stopped a Turkish army in 1918 at the Battle of Sardarabad, which took place just outside the city of Yerevan, today Armenia’s capital. Sardarabad is unknown in the West, but the image of a small group of Christian Armenians fighting, alone, to stop a Muslim Turkish army bent on their annihilation is a powerful part of Armenian consciousness today.
When the war ended, the Soviet Union quickly settled the border dispute with Turkey, giving up some historic Armenian lands around the city of Kars, and took over the Caucasus and divided it among the region’s ethnic groups. The Soviets initially promised to place Karabakh, whose Armenian identity dated back many centuries and whose population was more than 90 percent Armenian, in the new Soviet Republic of Armenia. But Stalin, as commissar for nationalities, decided to place the region in Azerbaijan instead, as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy. Armenians never accepted the decision and, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the nations of the Caucasus gained independence, the conflict over the region resumed.
