Jabzy
Published 20 Mar 2015I will try and cover the other Crusades soon
March 5, 2020
First Crusade | 3 Minute History
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March 1, 2020
The rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire – Leonora Neville
TED-Ed
Published 9 Apr 2018Check out our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/teded
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Most history books will tell you that the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century CE, but this would’ve come as a surprise to the millions who lived in the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages. This Medieval Roman Empire, today called the Byzantine Empire, began when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, moved Rome’s capital. Leonora Neville details the rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire.
Lesson by Leonora Neville, animation by Remus & Kiki.
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February 10, 2020
History Buffs: Kingdom of Heaven
History Buffs
Published 15 Aug 2015Apparently, Orlando Bloom was suffering from a nasty cold when shooting a big chunk of this movie. I think it shows … Anyway, it’s time for a brand new episode of History Buffs! Enjoy guys and thank you so much for all your support!
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February 6, 2020
The rise of the Saadi Empire of Morocco
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes outlines the rise of a Morocco-based Islamic empire that beat the Portuguese and established a thriving smuggling network with England:
Panoramic view of the Old Medina in Fez, Morocco.
Photo by Michal Osmenda via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1500 you would have thought that Morocco’s golden ages were firmly in the past. The Portuguese in 1415 had conquered Ceuta, on the southern side of the Straits of Gibraltar, with minimal resistance. Over the next century they had then spread their influence across the Moroccan coastline, building forts, establishing small trading colonies, and interfering in local politics. Faced with constant raids, coastal towns like Safi, Massa, and Azammur submitted themselves to Portuguese vassalage in exchange for protection. And when local rulers failed to please them, the Portuguese installed new ones or even took direct control. A disunited Morocco was at the mercy of Portuguese colonial ambition — a source of grain destined for Portugal’s population, and of horses and patterned cloths for it to exchange in sub-Saharan Africa for gold and slaves.
In the 1510s, however, a new dynasty arose in Sus, in the south-west of the country, claiming direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. These sharifs, the Saadi dynasty, began to fill the vacuum left by ineffective leadership from the sultans in Fez and Marrakech. And to address the massive power imbalance between themselves and the Portuguese, they began to cultivate sugar, selling it to other Europeans — Spanish, French, Genoese, Dutch, and English — in exchange for gunpowder weapons.
The English were especially expert smugglers, frequently able to sneak past the Portuguese fleets to where they could trade directly with the Saadis. Merchants from the Hanseatic league even approached the English government about using English mariners to get iron shot to Morocco. Their request was denied — Elizabeth I and her ministers were always careful never to explicitly allow the munitions trade, even in private letters, and often publicly disavowed it — but it was common knowledge among London’s merchants that the government supported the smuggling. This was partly about having a supply of sugar independent of Portuguese and Spanish control, but it was also a matter of national security. Because hidden among the sugar, marmalade, candied fruits, and almonds that the English transported from Morocco, were also copper and saltpetre — crucial materials for England’s own gunpowder weapons (I still haven’t quite worked out why England needed to import copper, given it had its own deposits in Cornwall, but it seems to have been important and a secure supply of saltpetre was definitely essential).
Both sides benefited from the arrangement. By the mid-1540s, the Saadis had bought the firearms and artillery necessary to take Marrakech and Fez, effectively unifying the country, and had earned sufficient wealth to buy the allegiance of the Moroccan population, providing grain during periods of intense famine. With that allegiance, they began isolating the Portuguese forts along the coastline, denying them access to food, workers, and trade. From the perspective of the Portuguese crown, the forts thus lost their economic value, while becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. Rather than providing Portugal with Moroccan grain, the forts increasingly needed grain from Portugal. With the added pressure of Saadi sieges, now aided by massive artillery, Portugal began to lose their footholds, abandoning many of the rest. Thus, in the space of a few decades, the export of sugar (and saltpetre) by the Saadis had put the mighty Portuguese empire on the back foot.
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February 3, 2020
Yet another attempted settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict that will go nowhere
Ted Campbell on the recent peace plan proposed by US president Donald Trump:
On the subject of the Trump Mideast Peace Plan, I agree with both The Economist which says, “as a blueprint for a two-state solution it was dead on arrival,” and with the Globe and Mail‘s Mark MacKinnon who writes that “President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan … aims to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict almost completely on Israel’s terms [and, while] Mr. Trump’s allegiances came as no surprise [to the Palestinian leaders, but] some of [their] bitterness was reserved for the leaders of Arab states that Palestinians see as quietly going along with the designs of the U.S. President and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
I think that is because President Trump, and much of the world, has lost patience with the Palestinians who still demand a right of return that, if ever seriously considered by anyone, would destroy Israel. Only Iran really wants that.
The strategic situation in the region, indeed in the entire Islamic Crescent which stretches from Mauritania and Morocco on the Atlantic coast of West Africa to Indonesia in East Asia, has changed in the past 70 years. There is no longer a unified Muslim “world” that opposes the very existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Indeed, a few Arab and Islamic states have correct, even friendly relations with Israel and others trade with the Jewish state (without having diplomatic relations) to their mutual advantage. The current problems in the region are centred on a power struggle between the Shia Islamic community, centred in Iran and the larger but socially and politically fragmented Sunni Islamic community …
… the differences are more than just religious. Iran, backed by China and Russia, and Saudi Arabia, backed by the USA, are engaged in something close to a real shooting war while Egypt and Turkey egg them both on. All four have some claim to dominance in the region and none is a real “friend” to any of the others and none gives a damn about Palestine or the Palestinian people.
[…]
President Trump has done a big political favour for Benjamin Netanyahu … but, ultimately it is probably pointless, and he and his successor and her (or his) successor, too, will likely still be seized with this issue in 2025 and 2030 and beyond.
Eventually, a solution will be found … it will, I suspect, involve Israel ceding a bit of territory to a new Palestinians state and, perhaps, establishing some sort of controlled, limited access corridor from the West Bank, possibly across the Northern Negev Desert. More importantly, it will involve Israel and Jordan, working in tandem, helping the new state to grow and prosper and live in peace with its neighbours. It’s a dream, of course, but it’s better, better for everyone, than is another war.
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February 1, 2020
The Greco-Turkish War & The Turkish War Of Independence I THE GREAT WAR 1920
The Great War
Published 31 Jan 2020Sign up for Curiosity Stream and Nebula: https://curiositystream.com/thegreatwar
The Ottoman Empire was among the losing powers of World War 1 and left a power vacuum after the armistice of Mudros. The Great Powers had already made plans for the territory beforehand and now Greece had ambitions to take over the parts of Turkey where Greeks lived.
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Criss, Nur Bilge: “Occupation during and after the War (Ottoman Empire)”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2015-08-05 https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018).
Macmillan, Margaret. The Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2001).
Karsh, Efraim and Inari Karsh. Empires of the Sand (London: Harvard UP, 1999).
Llewllyn Smith, Michael. Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor (London: Hurst, 2016 (1973))
Gerwarth, Robert. The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (Penguin, 2017).
Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Avon, 1989)
McMeekin, Sean. The Ottoman Endgame (Penguin, 2015)
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
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January 31, 2020
The little-known golden age of “The Xeriffe” in the 17th century
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes discusses the economic snapshot of 17th century Europe (and parts of the wider world) provided in the work of Giovanni Botero:
… I’ve spent the past couple of days reading the work of an Italian geographer, Giovanni Botero. His 1590s treatise, on The Strength of all the Powers of Europe and Asia (translated into English in 1601 as The Traveller’s Breviat) tries to provide a comprehensive account of the relative strengths of all the world’s great powers. It can be a bit dry — at times it’s a bit like reading a table of statistics, but in paragraph form, as he goes through every country’s population, geography, and industries, as well as their manpower, the sizes and qualities of their armies and navies, their political systems, taxes, and geopolitical situations. Yet in all that information, we get a snapshot of what characteristics stood out internationally, at a point that was midway through England’s crucial century of change.
I thought I had a pretty good general grasp of the economic history of Europe and the west in the post-Middle Ages period, but Anton mentions something I didn’t know anything about:
Panoramic view of the Old Medina in Fez, Morocco.
Photo by Michal Osmenda via Wikimedia Commons.
Yet there was another region that Botero singled out in terms of its technological and economic achievements, which I had never heard mentioned before: the land of “The Xeriffe”.
The term is usually rendered as sharif, denoting a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad via his grandson, Hasan ibn Ali. In 1600, the title was claimed by the rulers of the Saadi Empire, centred around Fez, in present-day Morocco. Botero claimed that its cities were of marble and alabaster, decorated with great lamps of brass. In Fez in particular were “200 schools of learning, 200 inns, and 400 water mills, every one driven with four or five wheels”, from which the ruler derived a substantial rent. The city also featured “600 conduits, from whence almost every house is served with water.” Indeed, he noted that “the inhabitants are very thrifty, given to traffic [commerce], and especially to the making of clothes of wool, silk, and cotton.”
So here was a remarkable city. One that was wealthy, populous, somewhat industrialised, and given to trade. It was a centre of learning for the entire region, especially under the long rule of one of its sultans, Ahmad al-Mansur “the Golden” and his immediate successors: the library they amassed forms one of the major surviving collections of Islamic manuscripts on literature and science (which was captured during a war in the seventeenth century, and has been in Spain ever since). The Saadi Empire even had some military might: during its rise it successfully contended with Portugal, and it had a large arsenal of gunpowder weapons, which it put to use in conquering parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. It maintained friendly commercial and diplomatic links with both England and the Dutch Republic, uniting with them in their opposition to Spain.
And yet, the Saadi Empire is never mentioned as an efflorescence [defined as “temporary bubblings up of innovation and economic growth, which ultimately resulted in stagnation or decline”]. It doesn’t even feature in debates about the causes of the Long Divergence — the centuries-long reversal of economic fortunes between northwestern Europe and the Islamic world. The latest major book on the reversal, by Jared Rubin (which is excellent, by the way), is entirely devoted to comparisons with the Ottoman Empire, not discussing Morocco even once. That may just be a product of which sources are most readily available in English, or because there are currently quite a few excellent Turkish economic historians, like Şevket Pamuk or Timur Kuran. It’s also possible that the descriptions of Fez’s wealth were exaggerated, or that there are straightforward explanations for its relative economic decline. But, if we’re to fully understand the causes of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, I think the rise and fall of the Saadi Empire is another efflorescence we need to seriously consider.
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January 18, 2020
History Summarized: Classical India
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Jan 2020Classical and Medieval Indian History is a tale of constant flux — but in between the dozens and hundreds of states at play across the peninsula, there are clear trends that arise. Let’s take this chapter of history as an opportunity to dig into different types of sources, and try and wrap our heads around a story that doesn’t fit neatly into a single chronology.
FURTHER SOURCES: The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru, “A History of India” by Michael H. Fisher (lecture courtesy of The Great Courses).
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December 20, 2019
“Seven Pillars of Wisdom” – T. E. Lawrence of Arabia – Sabaton History 046 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 19 Dec 2019The British T.E. Lawrence played a major role in bringing together a coalition of Arab factions to rise up against the Ottoman Empire. Their efforts helped the British war effort in the Middle East, but the British-Arab coalition was not as stable as it might have seemed.
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Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Production Intern: Rune Væver Hartvig
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastoryArchive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.Sources:
– National Portrait Gallery
– Boston Public Library
– IWM: Q 59294, Q 73536, Q 115096, Q 73535, Q 60212, Q 103747, Q 67234, Q 59703A, Q 59576, Q 58858A, Q 58861, Q 58863, Q 59193, Q 58823, Q 58938, Q 59078, Q 59190, Q 58841, Q 58704, Q 59422, Q 58891, Q 60035, Q 59073, Q 60102, Q 60096, HU 123936, Q 12629, Q 58752, Q 59314, Q 59314A, Q 58830, Q 58845, Q 12364, ART 3198, ART 2510, Q 105583, Q 103750, Q 59324, Q 59312, Q 12363, Q 103770, Q 86295, Q 59061, Q 72565, Q 12332An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
From the comments:
Sabaton History
2 days ago (edited)
Thats right, it’s Indy of Arabia! Even though “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” is a crew-favourite, we have waited with this episode until we could show off some exclusive material from the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” music video. With none other than Indy Neidell in the role of Lawrence (or Peter O’Toole?). This episode sure is among our favourite episodes to this date — we hope you enjoy it as well. If you do (and you weren’t already convinced by Joakim’s awesome Call To Action (17:20), please consider supporting this project on Patreon. It is thanks to those who are already there that we’re able to keep making these episodes! -> https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistoryCheers,
The Sabaton History Team
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November 2, 2019
Notepad++ release 7.8.1, also known as the “Free Uyghur” edition, draws unfriendly Chinese attention
I’ve been using Notepad++ as one of my text editor options for a long time. It’s a very useful tool, and I heartily commend it to anyone needing a Windows text editor that can do a lot more than just edit text. I hadn’t downloaded the most recent version, so I was unaware that the developer was under attack from Chinese government supporters for his explicit designation of version 7.8.1 as the Free Uyghur edition:
On Tuesday, Don HO, the developer of Notepad++, a free GPL source code editor and notepad application for Microsoft Windows, released version 7.8.1, prompting a social media firestorm and a distributed denial of service attack.
Notepad++ v7.8.1 was designated “the Free Uyghur edition,” in reference to the predominantly Muslim ethnic group in western China that faces ongoing human rights violations and persecution at the hands of Beijing.
“The site notepad-plus-plus.org has suffered DDoS attack from 1230 to 1330 Paris time,” HO said in an email to The Register. “I saw the [reduced] amount of visitors via Google analytics then the support of my host confirmed the attack. The DDoS attack has been stopped by an anti-DDoS service provided by our host [Cloudflare].”
Previous politically-themed Notepad++ releases have focused on Tiananmen Square and the terrorist attack on French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo.
A post on the project’s website explains HO’s decision to criticize the Chinese government, something companies with business interests in China generally try not to do for fear of retribution.
From the Notepad++ website:
Human rights in China is always a hotly contested topic. Since 2017, numerous reports have emerged of the Uyghur people being detained in extrajudicial “re-education camps”, subjected to political indoctrination, and sometimes even torture. 2018 estimates place the number of detainees in the hundreds of thousands.
The Uyghurs are not ethnically Chinese but live in China’s so-called autonomous Xinjiang region. The region’s name suggests the Uyghurs have autonomy and self-governance. But similarly to Tibet, Xinjiang is a tightly controlled region of China. After the recent Xinjiang conflict, Beijing has recast the Uyghur ethnic group as a terrorist collective. This has allowed Beijing to justify its transformation of Xinjiang into a surveillance state. There has also been a marked rise of Islamophobia across China.
At least 120,000 members of Kashgar’s Muslim Uyghur minority have been detained in Xinjiang’s re-education camps which aim to change the political thinking of detainees, their identities, and their religious beliefs. Reports from the World Uyghur Congress submitted to the United Nations in July 2018 suggest that 1 million Uyghurs are currently being held in the re-education camps.
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October 31, 2019
The Legend of Vlad the Impaler
Royal Armouries
Published 31 Oct 2017Hear the story of the infamous tyrant Vlad Tepes, notorious for the grisly way in which he killed his enemies.
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September 27, 2019
A visual masterclass in trolling
For all that Donald Trump is known for trolling his opponents on Twitter, he’s certainly not the only one, as these makeshift posters in Massachusetts illustrate:
The locals are outraged, but as Alaa Al-Ameri describes, they’re not quite sure how to safely express their fury:
Think of Posie Parker’s billboards quoting the dictionary definition of the word “woman”. The power of such acts comes from two things. First, they acknowledge – usually with irreducible simplicity – that something that went without saying a moment ago has suddenly become unsayable. Secondly, the outrage they provoke does not come from any epithet, caricature or insult, but rather from having the nerve to draw the viewer’s attention to an act of cognitive dissonance that we are all engaging in, but would rather not acknowledge.
The result is that those who attempt to explain why the act is offensive end up simply tying themselves in knots, while revealing that they have never given a moment’s thought to the position they find themselves defending. This seems to generate even more anger, with the inevitable online mob quickly joined by politicians, journalists and other public figures, eager to see that the heretic is made an example of.
At their best, these acts of public disobedience are examples of real-life Winston Smiths pointing out to the rest of us that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”. Their persecutors, like his, are those who know and fear the truth of Smith’s next sentence: “If that is granted, all else follows.”
The example of perfectly crafted dissent that I’d like to submit here appears in this video from Massachusetts local TV news, showing some reactions to the fly-posting of white sheets of paper bearing the statement “Islam is right about women”. The reactions are deeply revealing. Nobody can clearly point out why they object to the statement – indeed, nobody seems to object to the statement at all on its face. Yet most seem to express offence at it – if a little unconvincingly.
The reason for their dilemma is obvious enough to anyone who has been paying attention. Western society has managed to convince itself (at least in public) that any statement criticising any aspect of Islam is, by definition, bigotry. As a result, Western societies have effectively decided to enforce Islamic restrictions on blasphemy, and called it “tolerance”.
The strain of conforming to this lie is evident in the fumbling attempts by the interviewees to explain their objections. Do they believe that Islam is right about women? If so, why the objection? Do they believe that Islam is wrong about women? If so, in what sense is the statement an attack on Islam or Muslims? Do they believe that the author of the poster is saying that “Islam is right about women”, but doing so ironically? In which case, the objection can only be that the author is guilty of a thoughtcrime by stating that “two and two make five” with insufficient sincerity. Or do they worry that they are guilty of thoughtcrime for noticing the irony?
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September 18, 2019
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms* (*not all sections apply in Quebec)
Andrew Coyne on the disgraceful habit of the federal government (and nine provincial governments) to look the other way when Quebec decides that some of the guarantees in the Charter don’t apply in La Belle Province:
For many observant persons, particularly Muslims, Sikhs and orthodox Jews, this amounts to a religious hiring bar: the wearing of the hijab, the turban and the kippa are key requirements of their faith, and as such core elements of their identity. To demand that they work uncovered is, in effect, to post a sign saying Muslims, Sikhs and Jews need not apply.
We should be clear on this. It’s not just a dress code, or an infringement of religious freedom, or religious discrimination, or those other abstract phrases you hear tossed about. We are talking about a law barring employment in much of the public sector — not just police and judges, but government lawyers and teachers — to certain religious minorities.
Existing workers may have been grandfathered, but only so long as they remain in their current jobs. Should they ever move, or seek a promotion, they will face the same restrictions. The signal to the province’s religious and, let’s say it, racial minorities, vulnerable as they will be feeling already after the mounting public vitriol to which they have been exposed in the name of the endless “reasonable accommodation” debate, is unmistakable: you are not wanted here. Not surprisingly, many are getting out — out of the public service, out of Quebec.
That this is actually happening, in 2019, in a province of Canada — members of religious minorities being driven from their jobs, and for no reason other than their religion — is sickening, and shameful. That shame is not reserved to Premier Francois Legault or his CAQ government, the people responsible for designing and implementing this disgraceful exercise in segregation, this manifestly cruel attempt to cleanse the province’s schools and courts of religious minorities. It is no less shaming to the rest of us, everywhere across Canada, so long as we permit it to continue.
That is, so far as we are capable of feeling it. But experience has taught us to look the other way when it comes to Quebec, to tell ourselves that it is none of our affair, that we must not raise a fuss when the province explicitly elevates the interests of its ethnic and linguistic majority over those of its minorities, or threatens the country’s life for long years at a time — the beloved “knife at the throat” strategy — to back its escalating fiscal and constitutional demands. We dare not. We cannot. For then Quebec would leave.
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September 15, 2019
QotD: “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my Browning”
This, attributed to Goering but rather indited by some other nutjob mediocrity, is among my favourite phrases. Often I cite it with glee. I know just what he meant; rarely has one the chance to empathize with Nazis. Monsters they were, but also human, and if we lose the means to recall what made them tick, we are disadvantaged against their successors.
Ditto with Islamic terrorists, incidentally. Unless we can see them, sometimes, from the angle that makes them most attractive, we miss the whole picture. Know the enemy, I say. The worst psychopath may offer to share some droll humour. It is my firm belief that even liberals and progressives can be charming, sometimes.
I wonder which part of Mr Browning’s works Herr Goering would reach for? Would it be an earlier work, as Paracelsus or Sordello? A later, such as Jocoseria or Asolando? Me, I think I would start with a dilatory romp through the Dramatic Idylls, then hunker down with The Ring and the Book.
David Warren, “Include me in”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-08-30.
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September 8, 2019
QotD: The Amritsar massacre and the partition of India
A comparison is in order. At the famous Amritsar massacre of 1919, shot in elaborate and loving detail in the present movie and treated by post-independence Indian historians as if it were Auschwitz, Gurkha troops under the command of a British officer, General Dyer, fired into an unarmed crowd of Indians defying a ban and demonstrating for Indian independence. The crowd contained women and children; 379 persons died; it was all quite horrible. Dyer was court-martialed and cashiered, but the incident lay heavily on British consciences for the next three decades, producing a severe inhibiting effect. Never again would the British empire commit another Amritsar, anywhere.
As soon as the oppressive British were gone, however, the Indians — gentle, tolerant people that they are — gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting. Trained troops did not pick off targets at a distance with Enfield rifles. Blood-crazed Hindus, or Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, stabbing women, old people. Interestingly, our movie shows none of this on camera (the oldest way of stacking the deck in Hollywood). All we see is the aged Gandhi, grieving, and of course fasting, at these terrible reports of riots. And, naturally, the film doesn’t whisper a clue as to the total number of dead, which might spoil the mood somehow. The fact is that we will never know how many Indians were murdered by other Indians during the country’s Independence Massacres, but almost all serious studies place the figure over a million, and some, such as Payne’s sources, go to 4 million. So, for those who like round numbers, the British killed some 400 seditious colonials at Amritsar and the name Amritsar lives in infamy, while Indians may have killed some 4 million of their own countrymen for no other reason than that they were of a different religious faith and people think their great leader would make an inspirational subject for a movie. Ahimsa, as can be seen, then, had an absolutely tremendous moral effect when used against Britain, but not only would it not have worked against Nazi Germany (the most obvious reproach, and of course quite true), but, the crowning irony, it had virtually no effect whatever when Gandhi tried to bring it into play against violent Indians.
Despite this at best patchy record, the film-makers have gone to great lengths to imply that this same principle of ahimsa — presented in the movie as the purest form of pacifism — is universally effective, yesterday, today, here, there, everywhere. We hear no talk from Gandhi of war sometimes being a “necessary evil,” but only him announcing — and more than once — “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” In a scene very near the end of the movie, we hear Gandhi say, as if after deep reflection: “Tyrants and murderers can seem invincible at the time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.” During the last scene of the movie, following the assassination, Margaret Bourke-White is keening over the death of the Great Soul with an English admiral’s daughter named Madeleine Slade, in whose bowel movements Gandhi took the deepest interest (see their correspondence), and Miss Slade remarks incredulously that Gandhi felt that he had failed. They are then both incredulous for a moment, after which Miss Slade observes mournfully, “When we most needed it [presumably meaning during World War II], he offered the world a way out of madness. But the world didn’t see it.” Then we hear once again the assassin’s shots, Gandhi’s “Oh, God,” and last, in case we missed them the first time, Gandhi’s words (over the shimmering waters of the Ganges?): “Tyrants and murderers can seem invincible at the time, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.” This is the end of the picture.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
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