Quotulatiousness

December 23, 2020

Repost – “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” versus “Happy Midwinter Break”

Filed under: Business, Government, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Neil Smith on the joy-sucking use of terms like “Happy Midwinter Break” to avoid antagonizing the non-religious among us at this time of year:

Original infographic from Treetopia – https://www.treetopia.com/Merry-Christmas-vs-Happy-Holidays-a/304.htm

Conservatives have long whimpered about corporate and government policies forbidding employees who make contact with the public to wish said members “Merry Christmas!” at the appropriate time of the year, out of a moronic and purely irrational fear of offending members of the public who don’t happen to be Christian, but are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Rastafarian, Ba’hai, Cthuluites, Wiccans, worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or None of the Above. The politically correct benediction, these employees are instructed, is “Happy Holidays”.

Feh.

As a lifelong atheist, I never take “Merry Christmas” as anything but a cheerful and sincere desire to share the spirit of the happiest time of the year. I enjoy Christmas as the ultimate capitalist celebration. It’s a multiple-usage occasion and has been so since the dawn of history. I wish them “Merry Christmas” right back, and I mean it.

Unless I wish them a “Happy Zagmuk”, sharing the oldest midwinter festival in our culture I can find any trace of. It’s Babylonian, and celebrates the victory of the god-king Marduk over the forces of Chaos.

But as anybody with the merest understanding of history and human nature could have predicted, if you give the Political Correctness Zombies (Good King Marduk needs to get back to work again) an Angstrom unit, they’ll demand a parsec. It now appears that for the past couple of years, as soon as the Merry Christmases and Happy Holidayses start getting slung around, a certain professor (not of Liberal Arts, so he should know better) at a nearby university (to remain unnamed) sends out what he hopes are intimidating e-mails, scolding careless well-wishers, and asserting that these are not holidays (“holy days”) to everyone, and that the only politically acceptable greeting is “Happy Midwinter Break”. He signs this exercise in stupidity “A Jewish Faculty Member”.

Double feh.

Two responses come immediately to mind, both of them derived from good, basic Anglo-Saxon, which is not originally a Christian language. As soon as the almost overwhelming temptation to use them has been successfully resisted, there are some other matters for profound consideration…

December 22, 2020

QotD: The foundational weirdness of Judeo/Christian/Islamic religions

Filed under: History, Middle East, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

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 15, 2020

History Summarized: Spread of Christianity

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 10 Jan 2017

Things 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

How the Romans Stole Silk Production Secrets from China

Filed under: China, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Kings and Generals
Published 31 Jan 2019

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Silk production was one of the biggest secrets of China and one of the most lucrative industries of the age. So it is not a surprise that the Roman emperor Justinian was eager to learn this secret. In this video we will discuss the start of the silk production, its importance and the story of how Justinian managed one of the first industrial thefts in history

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November 30, 2020

Cultural Marxism or cultural leftism?

Filed under: History, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Matters
Published 30 Sep 2018

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This 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”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To better understand the era we are living through, it might help to first understand the nature of the “wokescreen”. Like those billowy emissions of dry-ice in a 1980s pop video, this device is useful if you want to hide bad and egregious behaviour from public view.

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 14, 2020

The Decline of the Great Library of Alexandria

Filed under: Africa, Books, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 27 Mar 2019

Presented by Ms History. The Great Library was a center of knowledge. Its decline was not the single cataclysmic event that may seem to think, but its slow decline is perhaps, even more tragic. It is history that deserves to be remembered.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As images of actual events are sometimes not available, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

Ms. History Guy is an avid reader and former reference librarian, and reviews around 100 books per year. Feel free to follow her progress or befriend her on Goodreads where she goes by the name “Heidi the Reader”: https://www.goodreads.com/MsHistory

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#history #thehistoryguy #library

QotD: “Modern” liberalism

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All of this became “dated,” as I grew older. My first shocking discovery about the “modern” liberal is, that while he might give lip-service still to some “antiquated” ideals, and gratuitously pose as virtuous, his first instinct when faced with serious responsibility was to cut and run.

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 31, 2020

Atun-Shei’s Dracula

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 30 Oct 2020

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An in-depth analysis of Dracula, the original 1897 book by Bram Stoker, possibly the most influential horror novel ever written. Why has the Count enjoyed such longevity in popular culture? What made Dracula so scary for Victorian readers? And what – pray tell – makes vampires so attractive?

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~REFERENCES~

[1] “Dracula Movies” (2016). IMDB https://www.imdb.com/list/ls058255047/

[2] Leslie S. Klinger. The New Annotated Dracula (2008). W.W. Norton & Company, Page xvi

[3] Klinger, Page xxi

[4] Dr. Andrzej Diniejko. “Slums and Slumming in Late-Victorian London.” The Victorian Web http://www.victorianweb.org/history/s…

[5] Gill Davies. “London in Dracula; Dracula in London” (2004). Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, Volume 2 Number 1 http://www.literarylondon.org/london-…

[6] Klinger, xxxii-xli

[7] “An 1897 Review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (2019). Literary Hub https://bookmarks.reviews/an-1897-rev…

[8] “The Spectator‘s Review of Dracula, 1897″ (2012). The Spectator https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/t…

[9] olly Furneaux. “Victorian Se•ualities” (2014). British Library https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victo…

[10] Klinger, Page xvii-xviii

[11] Greg Buzwell. “Daughters of Decadence: The New Woman in the Victorian Fin De Siécle” (2014). British Library https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victo…

October 23, 2020

“The Lion From The North” – Gustavus Adolphus – Sabaton History 090 [Official]

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Media, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 22 Oct 2020

It 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?

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to “The Lion From The North” on the album Carolus Rex: https://music.sabaton.net/CarolusRexEN

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1gvN…

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Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
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Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Karolina Dołęga
Sound Editor: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.com

Visual Sources:
– Nationalmuseum
– Arms of Vasa courtesy of Sodacan from Wikimedia
– Nils Forsberg Gustav II Adolf courtesy of Nils Forsberg, Swedish painter from Wikimedia
– Death of King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden by Carl Wahlbom courtesy of Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP (Glasg) from Wikimedia
– Icons from The Noun Project: Cannon by Graphic Nehar, Man by Milinda Courey

All music by: Sabaton

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

October 20, 2020

The watchful algorithms of the Nanny State’s AI tools

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren considers the evolution of the Nanny State’s arsenal of technological surveillance (supplemented by the Karenstapo):

While it is not in my interest, currently, for gentle reader to get off the Internet, the idea must have occurred to him. In times like these, why put yourself under watch from Big Brother (or, Big Sibling, as he might prefer)? Why surround yourself with his electronic eyes, the way I am presently surrounded by jackhammers?

Granted, Nanny State was devising ways to track its citizens, and to exercise “crowd control,” long before the Internet was invented. But we had the advantage with them, for they were incompetent, often laughably inept. However, Internet-plus-meejah-plus-activists-plus-Guvmint makes a more capable adversary.

I am not recommending a systematic withdrawal from the world. That is for people with a religious calling, or some grave eccentricity. Rather I am thinking of self-defence, in the spirit of buying a gun. Of course, I am writing from Canada, one of the countries where owning a gun is more-or-less illegal; as is any other form of self-defence. (“When seconds count, the police will be here in minutes.”) Though I have noticed that, upcountry, the “No Hunting” signs tend to be used for target practice.

The “other side,” as I see it, which always worked on numbers, now has algorithms. “Artificial Intelligence” can home right in. The Nanny State never took the individual seriously, except when he was offering a threat. Now it is threatened by anything human. It is, as it were, utilitarian in outlook — “the greatest good for the greatest number” — along with other fatuous concepts, unamenable to reason. By its nature, it is positivist, nominalist, relativist, and “idealistic” in a very abstract way.

Whereas we, so far as we are human, take ourselves quite personally. In a clinch, we often prefer our own survival, and the survival of family and friends, to the requirements of a bureaucratic “policy.” That this is “selfish” should be immediately affirmed.

Because the masses are now deprived of a Christian education, they misconstrue the “selfishness” of Christian teaching, which tells us that we ought selfishly to become saints. Our intention should be to get ourselves to Heaven, along with any we know who can be taken with us. But charity is not “selfish,” in ways they understand. Under modern tenets of “multiculturalism,” even fidelity to the old Christian view is decried as a form of selfishness, calling out for persecution. For this is because it is “cultural,” not “multi” — for all the many languages it speaks.

Our enemy wants us to eschew uniqueness, and become instead “diverse” — by which it means homogenized and narrowly interchangeable. Increasingly, this adversary has the means to enforce its arbitrary will.

October 18, 2020

QotD: Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal recurrence”

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In making Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence the theme of this book, Gillespie has set himself a huge task. Not only is it one of the philosopher’s weakest and most unconvincing theses, it is the one that sits in opposition to nearly everything else he wrote. For Nietzsche, despite his writing appearing wistful and gothic Romantic, was essentially an empiricist. He had no time for the dualism of Plato and only a fleeting but unconvinced interest in Kantian metaphysical idling about what lay beyond the tangible world. Nietzsche wrote that all there was for sure was the here and now.

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 6, 2020

Rowan Atkinson Live – The devil Toby welcomes you to hell

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rowan Atkinson Live
Published 29 Jul 2010

In 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”

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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.

[…]

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.

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