Quotulatiousness

July 26, 2023

Justin Trudeau’s odd choice to agitate Muslim Canadians over his LGBT beliefs

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the weekend’s roundup post from the editors of The Line, one of the topics discussed was Prime Minister Trudeau’s attempt to blow smoke up the collective butts of deeply religious Canadian Muslims that the only reason they were upset about his blatant dedication to LGBT issues was due to brainwashing by extreme right-wing Americans:

this week offered us a video clip of Trudeau that was just too interesting for us to pass up. Readers may recall a story from a few weeks ago in which several Muslim students in Edmonton absented themselves from Pride events and were lambasted by their teacher, who told them that they had to support this event or they “can’t be Canadians.” We didn’t make much note of it at the time because our colleague and friend at the National Post Colby Cosh had the definitive and winning take: that is, the teacher is a fucknut. These kids didn’t protest or object to pride or make their peers feel uncomfortable in any way. They just declined to participate. And in a pluralistic society, politely absenting oneself from ideological events with which one disagrees and instead hanging out at the Orange Julius or wherever the hell kids spend time these days is about the most perfect and Canadian response.

Perhaps not coincidentally, upon receiving such clear signals about the conduct that is now expected of a Canadian, Muslim parents are organizing ever louder protests against what they deem to be LGBTQ “indoctrination” in schools. And if you’ve been paying any attention to the logic pretzels that have been spun about intersectionality, lived experiences, the importance of listening to minority voices in majority cultures and so on, this is about the point at which you’re going to grab the popcorn, because what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a bona fide clash of values between competing minority interest groups.

So we give the prime minister a lot of credit for meeting with Muslim parents in a Calgary-area mosque last week to discuss the issue. And we mean that! Genuinely! Heading face-first into a mob of angry parents is a really difficult thing for anybody to do. He deserves credit for doing this.

However, the response that was recorded by attendees was also very, very interesting. The furore over LGBTQ issues in schools is much ado about nothing, he insisted; the result of right-wing extremists spreading “a lot of untruths about what’s actually in provincial curriculums”.

Trudeau continued: “They are weaponizing the issue of LGBT, which is something that, yes, Islam has strong opinions on …. That is something that is being weaponized by people who are not doing it because of their interest in supporting the Muslim community.”

A few notes about this response: The first is that it is undeniably true. There are anti-LGBTQ activists who are trying to mobilize the Muslim community because this minority population has greater moral suasion among the intersectionality set than socially conservative white Christians. There are right-wing commentators out there who focus on cases, videos, examples and books that they claim demonstrates a pervasive trend of “indoctrination” on LGBTQ issues in school environments. The examples are out there, and some are age-inappropriate. However, we have no sense that those examples are representative of what’s happening in most classrooms. Are there a lot more non-binary 12-year-olds in middle school nowadays? Sure. Is that a problem? We don’t know. Maybe? But we’ve yet to walk into an elementary school hosting a 24/7 Pride Parade with naked men and women throwing rainbow glitter and condoms to the kiddies. We are savvy enough media consumers to know that in a social-media age, edge cases have a habit of being falsely portrayed as routine.

Our snark aside, Trudeau’s response is interesting because it is also a dodge. Trudeau doesn’t actually want to deal with the hard problem of how to accommodate competing minority rights. So instead he pretends there is no problem. He blames the perception of a problem on disinformation agents. Marvellous — right up until the moment we see some video from a Toronto school of a teacher screaming at eight-year-olds that there is no such thing as boys and girls and that the whole concept of biological sex is an expression of imperialism and white supremacy. (Ed note: pin this graf for future victory lap.)

Or, just as an example of the sort of thing that just maybe could happen, when an ostensibly trans shop teacher shows up to class in a wig and Size-Z prosthetic breasts with armour-piercing nipples and the school board responds by saying “This is not a problem, you bigot,” and then it turns out that the teacher in question hasn’t been entirely upfront about their life! Or until, well, some teacher tells a bunch of Edmonton kids that skipping pride to head to the mall makes them un-Canadian. Oops! Wait, so who’s lying now?

The second reason we found this response interesting is that it’s become this government’s go-to deflection. All criticism is just disinformation. Anybody who disagrees with the Liberals is a baddie because can’t you see how awesome and empathetic and genuinely well intentioned they are? Throw in a little threadbare virtue, a touch of white saviour: “you, poor, deluded, Muslims, are just being manipulated by malign forces and can’t possibly understand what you’re saying or what you really believe,” and you’ve got a pitch-perfect urban progressive Canadian non-comment. It’s a mask slip moment, when we see exactly how Trudeau seems himself, and how he sees the people he’s talking to. Oh wait: actual Muslims find this statement condescending and insulting? Don’t they know whose side they’re supposed to be on? Maybe they’re just watching too much Matt Walsh. Why does anybody need to define what a woman is anyway? Maybe we need a new law for that so the plebes stop getting so confused …

You see where this logic takes us. We may wade into this one a bit more at The Line in coming days and weeks, so enough said for now. But for now, it’s enough to note that this is not how a mature, pluralistic society handles irreconcilable differences in values and beliefs. Generally speaking, everyone is pretty content to let adults live and let live, but when you bring kids into any ideological agenda, expect matters to get ugly quickly. And you’re going to need a better response to legitimate concerns about how an emerging secular ideological consensus around gender and ideology crashes against deeply held religious values than: “YouTube lies”.

July 5, 2023

Intersectionality showdown

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray on the major break in progressive solidarity caused by non-white American Muslims’, Ethiopian Christians’, and Peruvian Catholics’ unexpected reaction to woke teachers wanting to sexually indoctrinate their children:

We’re wading through this culture war sewage because we have a political class that’s deliberately pumping it into the culture to keep us from noticing that, how can I put this in a sophisticated way, they suck.

But this really tedious maneuver is increasingly leading to moments like this — and Twitter still won’t let Substack writers embed tweets, so click to watch video, but here’s the substance of the thing:

The fake conflict is increasingly likely to be a dozen sanpaku-eyed AWFL’s against a thousand genuinely multicultural parents, battling over insane questions like the “book bans” that remove highly explicit sexual content from elementary school libraries. In 2023, the culture war is rapidly cooking down to STOP PREVENTING US FROM TALKING TO YOUR EIGHT YEAR-OLDS ABOUT SUCKING DICK, YOU NAZIS.

If you’ve never read what I wrote about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, please take a moment to go read this. About 900 people died at Jonestown in 1978, but Jones started in Indianapolis in the 1950s. He moved his church to a rural property in California, and then to Guyana, by constantly telling his parishioners that they were threatened by hostile forces outside the church that were maneuvering to destroy them. The frequent recourse to invented threats is a sign of a sick movement, not a sign of something the grows and flourishes.

That’s where we are. We’re watching a sick thing die. The question, now, is how long it takes to die, and how much damage it does in its death throes. But the increasingly hysterical tone, against an increasingly matter-of-fact response — a thousand parents saying calmly that no, we won’t let you inflict this curriculum on our children — suggests that the inflection point is getting closer.

May 2, 2023

QotD: The musical importance of the city of Córdoba

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Which city is our best role model in creating a healthy and creative musical culture?

Is it New York or London? Paris or Tokyo? Los Angeles or Shanghai? Nashville or Vienna? Berlin or Rio de Janeiro?

That depends on what you’re looking for. Do you value innovation or tradition? Do you want insider acclaim or crossover success? Is your aim to maximize creativity or promote diversity? Are you seeking timeless artistry or quick money attracting a large audience?

Ah, I want all of these things. So I only have one choice — but I’m sure my city isn’t even on your list.

My ideal music city is Córdoba, Spain.

But I’m not talking about today. I’m referring to Córdoba around the year 1000 AD.

I will make a case that medieval Córdoba had more influence on global music than any other city in history. That’s probably not something you expected. But even if you disagree — and I already can hear some New Yorkers grumbling in the background — I think you will discover that the “Córdoba miracle,” as I call it, is an amazing role model for us.

It’s a case study in how communities foster the arts — and in a way that benefits everybody, not just the artists.

[…] a thousand years before New Orleans spurred the rise of jazz, and instigated the Africanization of American music, a similar thing happened in Córdoba, Spain. You could even call that city the prototype for all the decisive musical trends of our modern times.

“This was the chapter in Europe’s culture when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived side by side,” asserts Yale professor María Rosa Menocal, “and, despite their intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a complex culture of tolerance.”

There’s even a word for this kind of cultural blossoming: Convivencia. It translates literally as “live together.” You don’t hear this term very often, but you should — because we need a dose of it now more than ever. And when scholars discuss and debate this notion of Convivencia, they focus their attention primarily on one city: Córdoba.

It represents the historical and cultural epicenter of living together as a norm and ideal.

Even today, we can see the mixture of cultures in Spain’s distinctive architecture, food, and music. These are both part of Europe, but also separate from it. It is our single best example of how the West can enter into fruitful cultural dialogue with the outsider — to the benefit of both.

Ted Gioia, “The Most Important City in the History of Music Isn’t What You Think It Is”, The Honest Broker, 2023-01-26.

April 8, 2023

Russia’s Last Crusade – The Crimean War 1853-1856

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Media, Middle East, Military, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 7 Apr 2023

The Crimean War between the Ottoman Empire and Russia (and later the UK and France) has been called the last crusade and the first modern war at the same time.
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March 20, 2023

“The New American Empire lasted, at most, twenty years, if one counts the two falls of Kabul as brackets”

Filed under: History, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the brief — and largely unacknowledged by Americans — high-water mark of the 21st century’s biggest empire:

A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com

This century has already seen its fair share of great delusions, society-changing disasters built on wishful thinking: you can loan mortgages to people who obviously can’t pay them back; you can cure pain with an opiate that won’t make people addicted; and now the unstoppable idea of equality of outcomes between races, a project doomed to failure and tragedy.

But none was perhaps so spectacularly disastrous as liberal imperialism. Twenty years ago, George W Bush sent the most powerful military the world had ever seen into the birthplace of Abraham to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and as Niall Ferguson wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time: “the greatest empire of the modern times has come into existence without the American people even noticing”.

The New American Empire lasted, at most, twenty years, if one counts the two falls of Kabul as brackets. This was despite enormous technological supremacy, and genuine goodwill and benevolence among many of the state-builders.

The United States was “born liberal”, as historian Louis Hartz said, even if the crime wave of the late 20th century made that a dirty word, and the “New American Empire” would spread the benefits of liberalism to grateful beneficiaries around the world.

Yet what is so striking about the imperialists of the 21st century, compared to their forebears in the 19th, was just how little interest they seemed to show in the subject people. Their naivety about human nature, and their utopian belief that people around the world just wanted “freedom”, chimed with a lack of curiosity about humanity.

To think that people around the world might not be the same, that they might not want “freedom” nor have the social structure or culture that suited democracy, might be to venture into dangerous territory. To suggest that Iraq was incapable of democracy was insulting to Iraqis, since as the US president said ahead of the war: “There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken.”

Yet the defeated nations in 1945 had very old, well-established institutions and very strong national identities, something Iraq did not. The latter was extremely clannish, something no one seemed to consider. Sovereignty and strong institutions take generations to build, and cannot just be imposed by foreigners working on abstract principles like “democracy”.

Bush was not alone. That same year, John McCain had said: “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along”. And on March 1, 2003, two weeks before the war started, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, had dismissed warnings about sectarian conflict: “We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they’ve never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together.” On top of that, “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” He was totally wrong, while in contrast the American Conservative‘s pessimistic warnings about Iraq’s social fabric proved correct.

March 17, 2023

Ukrainian, Yugoslav and Baltic Nazis? – ϟϟ Foreign Fighters Part 2

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 16 Mar 2023

Across Europe, non-Germans are filling the ranks of Heinrich Himmler’s forces. These foreign fighters certainly don’t meet the racial standards of the SS but times are tough and the Reichsführer-SS needs warm bodies. So, does that mean Himmler’s given up on the idea of a Germanic master race? Not at all. And he uses all sorts of twisted esoteric logic to justify his latest moves.
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March 8, 2023

“By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges”, cousin marriage “makes the development of civil society more difficult”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on what he calls the worst western foreign policy disaster since 1204, the Iraq quagmire:

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, better known in the West as “Baghdad Bob” or “Comical Ali”, Iraqi Minister of Information for President Saddam Hussein.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the greatest western foreign policy disaster since the Fourth Crusade. It was the pre-eminent modern-day example of folly, driven by wishful thinking, utopianism and a lack of interest in history and how human societies differ. This was mostly carried out by good people, including our own Tony Blair, and promoted by thoughtful and humanitarian commentators who thought they were making the world a better place.

The White House regime which brought chaos and misery to Iraq were most of all entranced by The Weekly Standard, the now-defunct magazine most associated with neoconservative foreign policy. Had any of them read The American Conservative instead, they might have avoided the whole tragedy. In particular they ought have read Steve Sailer’s “The Cousin Marriage Conundrum“, printed in the run-up to the invasion and in which the author made a seemingly curious argument for why nation-building in Iraq would fail — its high rates of cousin marriage.

Pointing out that between 46 and 53 percent of Iraqis who married did so to first or second cousins, Sailer wrote that: “By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges”, cousin marriage “makes the development of civil society more difficult”. The neocon dream of jumpstarting democracy was therefore clearly doomed to failure.

Even those with a cursory knowledge of the country knew that Iraq was split between Sunni and Shia Arabs, as well as Kurds in the north, each group’s area of dominance roughly corresponding to three former Ottoman provinces. However, these were further subdivided into “smaller tribes, clans, and inbred extended families — each with their own alliances, rivals, and feuds”, in total about 150 tribes comprising some 2,000 clans.

Saddam’s politics were mired in blood, in both senses. He came from the al-Bu Nasir, a tribe comprising some 25,000 people based in the town of Tikrit, and his regime was filled with his relatives. His political career had begun in 1957 when the 20-year-old had joined the revolutionary Ba’ath (“Resurrection”) Party, following his uncle Kharaillah Tulfha, who had fought against the British in the Second World War. Tulfha would become his father-in-law, for Saddam also married his first cousin, although he later took a second wife. Family life wasn’t entirely harmonious, and the man who introduced that couple, Saddam’s food taster, was later stabbed to death by the dictator’s psychotic eldest son Uday at a party thrown by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

The unfortunate food taster was an Assyrian Christian, and within Saddam’s regime religious minorities could rise high, as is often the case in empires, because they presented no threat. His foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was also a Christian, his birth name being Mikhail Yuhanna.

The family was everything in Saddam’s Iraq. Mark Weiner wrote in The Rule of the Clan of countries governed by “clannism” that: “These societies possess the outward trappings of a modern state but are founded on informal patronage networks, especially those of kinship, and traditional ideals of patriarchal family authority. In nations pervaded by clannism, government is co-opted for purely factional purposes.” The inevitable result of clannism is kin-based corruption whereby resources, positions and other rewards are monopolised by family groups. In these societies, Weiner wrote, “the nuclear family, with its revolutionary, individuating power, has yet to replace the extended lineage group as the principle framework for kinship or household organisation”.

The Weekly Standard was called the in-flight magazine of Air Force One, but presumably there weren’t that many White House staffers reading the American Conservative at the time, a publication started by Pat Buchanan, the great Republican critic of neocon foreign policy. So the Coalition blundered into a disastrous invasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, wrecking Iraq and leaving many areas newly-divided along sectarian lines, while minorities like the Christians and Mandaeans were driven almost to extinction.

January 24, 2023

The Byzantine Empire: Part 9 – The Last Centuries

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 30 Dec 2022

In this, the ninth in the series, Sean Gabb gives an overview of the last years of Byzantium, from the Crusader sack in 1204 to the Turkish capture in 1453.

Between 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.
(more…)

January 2, 2023

How much of the media coverage of the Bosnian War was fake news?

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kate at Small Dead Animals linked to this rather disturbing collection of intelligence cables from the Canadian peacekeeping force in Bosnia to NDHQ in Ottawa during the conflict, which contradicts the media narrative of the time:

Map of deployment of National Battalions in UN Forces in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina – Early 1993 (Balkan Battlegrounds Map I)
Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990-1995 author credit: Central Intelligence Agency.

A trove of intelligence files sent by Canadian peacekeepers expose CIA black ops, illegal weapon shipments, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags, and stage-managed atrocities.

The established mythos of the Bosnian War is that Serb separatists, encouraged and directed by Slobodan Milošević and his acolytes in Belgrade, sought to forcibly seize Croat and Bosniak territory in service of creating an irredentist “Greater Serbia”. Every step of the way, they purged indigenous Muslims in a concerted, deliberate genocide, while refusing to engage in constructive peace talks.

This narrative was aggressively perpetuated by the mainstream media at the time, and further legitimized by the UN-created International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) once the conflict ended. It has become axiomatic and unquestionable in Western consciousness ever since, enforcing the sense that negotiation invariably amounts to appeasement, a mentality that has enabled NATO war hawks to justify multiple military interventions over subsequent years.

However, a vast trove of intelligence cables sent by Canadian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia to Ottawa’s National Defence Headquarters, first published by Canada Declassified at the start of 2022, exposes this narrative as cynical farce.

The documents offer an unparalleled, first-hand, real-time view of the war as it developed, with the prospect of peace rapidly degrading into grinding bloodshed that ultimately caused the painful death of the multi-faith, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.

The Canadian soldiers were part of a wider UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) dispatched to former Yugoslavia in 1992, in the vain hope tensions wouldn’t escalate to all-out-war, and an amicable settlement could be reached by all sides. They stayed until the bitter end, long past the point their mission was reduced to miserable, life-threatening failure.

The peacekeepers’ increasingly bleak analysis of the reality on the ground provides a candid perspective of the war’s history that has been largely concealed from the public. It is a story of CIA black ops, literally explosive provocations, illegal weapon shipments, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags, and stage-managed atrocities.

Read the complete Canadian UNPROFOR cables here.

See key excerpts of the files referred to in this article here.

December 10, 2022

The “Dark” Ages were fine, actually — History Hijinks

Filed under: China, Europe, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 5 Aug 2022

Curb your Crusading – the artwork, literature, and scholarship are far more interesting.

SOURCES & Further Reading: China: A History by John Keay, Byzantium & Sicily & Venice by John Julius Norwich, Great Courses Lecture series Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble lectures 27 through 38: “The Emergence of the Catholic Church”, “Christian Culture in Late Antiquity”, “Muhammad and Islam”, “The Birth of Byzantium”, “Barbarian Kingdoms in the West”, “The World of Charlemagne”, “The Carolingian Renaissance”, “The Expansion of Europe”, “The Chivalrous Society”, “Medieval Political Traditions I”, “Medieval Political Traditions II”, and “Scholastic Culture”.
(more…)

November 5, 2022

The Byzantine Empire: Part 8 – The Breakdown, 1025-1204

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 20 May 2022

In this, the eighth video in the series, Sean Gabb explains how, having acquired the wrong sort of ruling class, the Byzantine Empire passed in just under half a century from the hegemonic power of the Near East to a declining hulk, fought over by Turks and Crusaders.

Subjects covered include:

The damage caused by a landed nobility
The deadweight cost of uncontrolled bureaucracy
The first rise of an insatiable and all-conquering West
The failure of the Andronicus Reaction
The sack of Constantinople in 1204

Between 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or The Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.

The purpose of this course is to give an overview of Byzantine history, from the refoundation of the City by Constantine the Great to its final capture by the Turks.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the history of Byzantium. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

October 28, 2022

The Byzantine Empire: Part 7 – Recovery and Return to Hegemony, 717-1025 AD

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 2 May 2022

In this, the seventh video in the series, Sean Gabb explains how, following the disaster of the seventh century, the Byzantine Empire not only survived, but even recovered its old position as hegemonic power in the Eastern Mediterranean. It also supervised a missionary outreach that spread Orthodox Christianity and civilisation to within reach of the Arctic Circle.

Subjects covered:

The legitimacy of the words “Byzantine” and “Byzantium”
The reign of the Empress Irene and its central importance to recovery
The recovery of the West and the Rise of the Franks
Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire
The Conversion of the Russians – St Vladimir or Vladimir the Damned?
The reign of Basil II

Between 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or The Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.
(more…)

October 25, 2022

The Byzantine Empire: Part 6 – Weathering the Storm, 628-717 AD

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 16 Feb 2022

In this, the sixth video in the series, Sean Gabb discusses the impact on the Byzantine Empire of the Islamic expansion of the seventh century. It begins with an overview of the Empire at the end of the great war with Persia, passes through the first use of Greek Fire, and ends with a consideration of the radically different Byzantine Empire of the Middle Ages.

Between 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.

The purpose of this course is to give an overview of Byzantine history, from the refoundation of the City by Constantine the Great to its final capture by the Turks.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the history of Byzantium. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

October 18, 2022

The War That Ended the Ancient World

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

toldinstone
Published 10 Jun 2022

In the early seventh century, a generation-long war exhausted and virtually destroyed the Roman Empire. This video explores that conflict through the lens of an Armenian cathedral built to celebrate the Roman victory.
(more…)

October 14, 2022

That time that H.G. Wells fell afoul of Muslim sentiments

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the New English Review, Esmerelda Weatherwax recounts an incident from the 1930s where Muslim protestors took to the streets of London in reaction to a recent Hindustani translation of H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World:

Screen capture of the 1938 Muslim protest march in London from a British Pathé newsreel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADausiEe4pM

… my husband was at the Museum of London and spotted a very brief mention of this protest in 1938 on a list of 20th century London events. I did some research.

The book they objected to was HG Wells’ A Short History of the World. This was originally published in 1922 but in 1938 an abridged version was tranlated into Hindustani and published in India. His observations about the Prophet Mohammed did not find favour with Indian Muslims (and as you know pre-partition the area called India covered what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh). There were protest meetings in Calcutta and Mumbai (then transliterated as Bombay) and the consignments of the books that WH Smith the booksellers sent to Hyderabad mysteriously never arrived. Investigation showed that the Sind government banned its import. Protests spread to east Africa and were reported in Nairobi and Mombasa.

The paragraphs concerned said “He seems to have been a man compounded of very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception, and quite sincere religious passion”. Wells concludes, not unfavourably, that “when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writing have been allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed upon the Arabs, much power and inspiration”.

There had been a number of Muslims living in east London for some years, sailors who came through the docks, retired servants, some professional men and in 1934 they formed a charitable association for the promotion of Islam called Jamiat-ul-Muslimin; they met on Fridays at a hall in Commercial Road.

On Friday 12th August 1938 a copy of A Short History of the World was, as apparently reported in the Manchester Guardian the following day “ceremoniously burned”. The main Nazi book burnings were over 5 years previously but I can’t but be reminded of them. I can’t access the Guardian on-line archive for 1938 as I don’t have a subscription, but I have no reason to doubt what they reported.

A few days later Dr Mohammed Buksh of Jamiat-ul-Muslimin attended upon Sir Feroz Khan Noon, the high commissioner for India. Sir Feroz tried to explain that in Britain we could (or could then) freely criticise Christianity, the Royal family and government as a right. He reminded Dr Buksh that Muslims were “a very small minority in England, and it would do them no good to try and be mischievous in this country, no matter how genuine their grievances were”.

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