Quotulatiousness

December 19, 2020

History-Makers: Ibn Khaldun

Filed under: Africa, Books, History, Humour, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 18 Dec 2020

Big thanks to our friend Al-Muqaddimah for his help with this video. The look of this video’s maps is an homage to his wonderful mapmaking style. For more Islamic History, check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf0O…

From the coast of Tunisia across the Straits of Gibraltar, over the Atlas Mountains, and east to the Nile of Egypt, Ibn Khaldun had certainly seen history at work. That experience came in handy as he wrote The Muqaddimah, a genre-defining masterwork of Historiography — not just retelling the events of the past, but explaining their causes and effects through the lens of human behavior and sociology.

SOURCES & Further Reading: Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Irwin, The Muqaddimah

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December 13, 2020

Islamism and the French Republic

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

Niccolo Soldo talks to Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry about the rise of Islamism in France and the dangers it poses:

Brigitte Macron and Emmanuel Macron, 11 November, 2018.
Photo from the office of the President of Ukraine via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-4.0.

Islamism presents an existential threat to the French Republic. Statements are being made, positions are being taken, and the smell of action is in the air to counter this threat. Will we see a follow through from Macron?

Your guess is as good as mine. Macron is hard to predict. Although there are many reasons to be pessimistic, from French elites’ general lack of follow-through to Macron’s own (I believe, sincere and deeply-held) commitment to so-called “liberal values”, I will note that it hasn’t been all talk. BarakaCity (the biggest Muslim NGO in France) whose leaders happen to think ISIS is misunderstood, was shut down by executive decree. CCIF, a prominent “anti-islamophobia” organization, dissolved itself after the government announced its intent to shut it down. So an important Rubicon has been crossed, at least in principle: the French government has rhetorically and legally committed itself to combating not just those who engage in Islamist violence, but those who engage in Islamist advocacy and activism.

Can France’s secularism hold on in light of this challenge? Islamism is rather dynamic, and secularism lacks the ingredients for fanaticism that only the irrational are able to muster. In many countries it seems that only the elites are strongly-wedded to secularism.

I’ll let you in on a little secret we don’t share with foreigners: nobody in France believes in “laïcité“, it’s all a code to say we don’t like Islam. We have a freaking concordat, for crying out loud!

The entire notion that there is this specific French culture of “laïcité” that goes beyond institutional separation of church and state was a retcon invented in the 1980s when the Muslim population became too big to ignore. Nobody — nobody — is fooled that banning the hijab in public schools as well as “large ostentatious crosses” is a neutral secularist measure.

Today some people are claiming that wearing religious garb in the National Assembly is a breach of laïcité, but after the War the Canon Kir sat as a member of Parliament in his cassock for twenty years and nobody had any problem with it. (My favorite Kir story: during a late-night parliamentary session, a Communist deputy asked him “How come you believe in God, even though you’ve never seen him?” “What about my asshole? You’ve never seen it, yet you know it exists!”)

The fig leaf of laïcité was useful, and perhaps still is, as politically correct cover for defending French identity, but over time it will have to be discarded. There are signs that it’s beginning.

The bottom line is that France has always been assimilationist. The idea is that assimilation was invented by the Republic, but it’s not true. When Louis XIV invaded a province, he would create schools with scholarships for poor, talented youth from those places to “turn them into Frenchmen.” The self-conscious project of the French Kings was to restore the Roman Empire, and this bequeathed to us the Roman concept of citizenship: laws, language, and culture. This is what is behind “laïcité.” This assimilationism therefore has deep roots, and it is perfectly legitimate that we demand of immigrants that they assimilate into our culture, which is inescapably Judeo-Christian.

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

October 18, 2020

Russian Civil War in Central Asia I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Asia, Europe, History, Military, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 17 Oct 2020

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By the fall of 1920, the Russian Civil War had unleashed three years of ethnic and internal conflict in Central Asia, and there was no end in sight. In this episode we’ll catch up on the dramatic events of the former Russian imperial lands in Central Asia from the revolution right up to the end of 1920, 100 years ago.

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» SOURCES
Baumann, Robert F. Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, Combat Studies Institute, 2010.

Becker, Seymour. Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

Brower, Daniel R. Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire, Routledge, 2010.

Buttino, M. “Study of the Economic Crisis and Depopulation in Turkestan, 1917–1920”, Central Asian Survey, no. 4, 1990, pp. 59-74, doi:10.1080/02634939008400725.

Campbell, Ian W. Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917, Cornell University Press, 2017.

Everett-Heath, Tom. Central Asia: Aspects of Transition, Routledge, 2003.

Hiro, D. Inside Central Asia, Abrams, 2011.

Keller, Shoshana. Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence, University of Toronto Press, 2020.

Khalid, A. “Central Asia Between the Ottoman and the Soviet Worlds”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 2, 2011, pp. 451-76, doi:10.1353/kri.2011.0028.

Khalid, Adeeb. “The Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic in the Light of Muslim Sources”, Die Welt Des Islams, no. 3, 2010, pp. 335-61, doi:10.1163/157006010×544287.

Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR, Cornell University Press, 2019.

Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Loring, B. “‘Colonizers With Party Cards’: Soviet Internal Colonialism in Central Asia, 1917–39”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 1, 2014, pp. 77-102, doi:10.1353/kri.2014.0012.

Olcott, M. B. “The Basmachi or Freemen’s Revolt in Turkestan 1918–24”, Soviet Studies, no. 3, 1981, pp. 352-69, doi:10.1080/09668138108411365.

Poujol, Catherine. “Jews and Muslims in Central Asia”, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, edited by Abdelwahab Meddeb, Benjamin Stora, Jane Marie Todd and Michael B. Smith, Princeton University Press, Princeton; Oxford, 2013, pp. 258–268.

Sahadeo, Jeff. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent: 1865-1923, Indiana University Press, 2010.

Sokol, Edward D. The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

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October 16, 2020

QotD: The Law of Abrogation

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

Rather than say this myself, let me quote Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, the “traditionalist” Anglican who directs the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity in London. He found himself recently trying to explain the crazy truth to a journalist who asked him about violent passages in the Koran, which Islamists quote constantly. “Is there no part of the Koran which modifies these violent texts in the way that we would say our New Testament modifies the Old Testament?”

Dr. Sookhdeo: “In fact the reverse is true. … All the peaceful passages that are enjoined on Muslims occur in the chapters written at Mecca. They are tolerant toward Jews and Christians. But when Muhammad gets to Medina and sets up his city/religious state, the tone towards other groups changes rapidly. The statements about slaying the pagans and killing the Jews and others occur there. Now in Islamic interpretation, all passages that are revealed later take precedence over those revealed earlier. This is known as the ‘law of abrogation’.”

David Warren, “Jihad Politics”, DavidWarrenOnline, 2005-08-03.

October 6, 2020

“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.

September 27, 2020

Dividing Up The Middle East – The Creation of Lebanon I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 26 Sep 2020

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In the summer of 1920 it became clear that the many different voices and local opinions on the future of the former Ottoman provinces were going to be mostly ignored. France and Britain had their own ideas for the new mandate states in the region.

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» SOURCES
Sicker, Martin. The Middle East in the Twentieth Century (Greenwood Publishing, 2001)

Gontaut-Biron, Roger. Comment la France s’est installée en Syrie (Paris: Plon, 1922). https://archive.org/details/commentla…

Cornwallis, K. Notes on the Middle-East No.4. 1920. File 756/1917 Pt 2-3 “ARAB BULLETIN Nos 66-114” [‎374r] (756/834), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/L/PS/10/658.

Miller, David Hunter. My Diary. At the Conference of Paris. Vol 4. (New York, 1924). https://archive.org/details/MyDiaryAt…

D’Andurain, J. “Gouraud, Henri” 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 2014-10-08. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10303. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Naamany, B. “A hundred years since Sykes-Picot, maps’ reading”. General Secretariat of the Arab League. Tunis. Tunisia. 2018. http://nna-leb.gov.lb/en/show-news/98…

Meouchy, N. “Les temps et les territoires de la révolte du Nord (1919-1921).” In: Alep et ses territoires: Fabrique et politique d’une ville (1868-2011). (Beyrouth – Damas: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2014).

Raymond, André. “III – La Syrie, du Royaume arabe à l’indépendance (1914-1946)”. In La Syrie d’aujourd’hui. Aix-en-Provence: Institut de recherches et d’études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans, 1980. (pp. 55-85)

Kouyoumdjian, O. “Le Liban à la veille et au début de la Grande Guerre: Mémoires d’un gouverneur, 1913-1915″. Revue D’histoire Arménienne Contemporaine. Paris: Centre d’histoire arménienne contemporaine. 2003.

Government of New Zealand, Ministry for Culture and Heritage. “Anzac troops take revenge on Arab civilians at Surafend” https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/anzac-….

Ministère de la Guerre. Etat-major des armées. Service historique. Les armées françaises dans la Grande guerre. Tome IX. 9, 1, ANNEXES. Imprimerie Nationale. Paris. France. 1935.

Australian Imperial Force unit war diaries. 1914-1918 War. Light Horse. Item number: 10/3/47. Title : 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade. December 1918. AWM4 Class 10 – Light Horse. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C13…

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September 25, 2020

“In the Name of God” – The History of Terror – Sabaton History 086 [Official]

Filed under: France, History, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 24 Sep 2020

Terrorism might be one of mankind’s oldest weapons. Since antiquity, horrific violence and assassinations were used to overthrow supposed tyrants and strike fear into the heart of the public.

The French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, saw terrorism evolving into its modern form. Political opponents, counter-revolutionaries, or simply sympathizers of the “old order”, were targeted and eliminated in a wave of terror. Political murder became romanticized.

Throughout the centuries until today, terror persists as a weapon of the few against the masses, in an effort to change society by force. Nothing made that clearer than the terrorist attacks against the United States on 9/11 2001.

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September 4, 2020

QotD: Muhammad Ali Jinnah

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

Born into a Shia mercantile family, Jinnah left for England after high school, where he studied law and acquired a love for parliamentary procedure. Thoroughly and poshly anglicized (200 Savile Row suits were found in his closet after his death), he returned to India before the First World War, armed with a fearsome reputation as a barrister so brilliant judges tried to avoid him, and committed to Hindu-Muslim unity. His English was exquisite, but he spoke no Urdu. Completely secular, Jinnah was so indifferent to his religion — he drank and ate pork — that he planned Pakistan’s inauguration-day banquet as a luncheon, unaware it was Ramadan (they changed it to dinner).

Jinnah’s political intentions are hotly contested. According to New York Times Pakistan expert, Jane Perlez, many Pakistan researchers contend Jinnah had no interest in an Islam-dominated state, but “used the idea of Pakistan as a mere bargaining chip for Muslim majority rights within a loosely united post-colonial India.” With no autobiography or recollections from close friendships for our guidance, Jinnah remains a shadowy historical player, a political loner with an indeterminate goal beside Nehru, Gandhi and Viceroy Lord Mountbatten.

It is quite possible, for example, that Jinnah created the Muslim League and employed the rhetoric of Islam (slogan: “Islam in Danger”) and started wearing native clothes to harness religious fervour to political ambitions never fully articulated. But we can’t ever know, as a lifetime of chain smoking caught up with Jinnah, and he died before the first (bloody) year of Pakistan’s existence was out.

In Jinnah’s first speech to his newly minted country, though, we have this strong intentional clue: “You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”

Barbara Kay, “A celebrated figure today could well be the condemned sinner of tomorrow”, National Post, 2018-06-05.

August 17, 2020

Dateline Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, 5 August 2020

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

That’s a significant date, as Tom Holland explains at UnHerd:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi performing Bhoomi Pujan at Shree Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh on August 05, 2020.
Photo released by the Press Information Bureau on behalf of the Prime Minister’s Office, (ID 90071) via Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, on 5 August, the Prime Minister of India laid a foundation stone and helped bury a distinctive period in global history. Narendra Modi had travelled to Ayodhya, a city long identified by Hindus with one of their most beloved gods. Lord Rama — avatar of Vishnu and hero of the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana — was said to have ruled within its walls as the very model of those who uphold truth and justice. Like Camelot, the court of Rama glimmers tantalisingly in the imaginings of those who fall beneath its spell: the reminder of a vanished golden age, the hope that it might come again.

In recent decades, the mingled regret and yearning that the memory of Rama’s capital can inspire among Hindus had come to be focused on one particular location in the modern city of Ayodhya: the Ram Janmabhoomi, the “birthplace of Rama”. At the moment, nothing serves to mark the sacred spot. But soon enough that will change. A great complex of buildings will rise. As Modi, officially declaring the process of construction begun, put it: “A great temple will now be built for our Lord Rama.”

A fortnight earlier, the President of Turkey had celebrated a similar reconsecration. In 1453, when the Christian capital of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, its most stupefying building, the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia, had been converted into a mosque, and duly served for almost half a millennium as a monument to the triumph of Islam over a defeated and superceded order. Then, in 1935, a decade and more after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement within its heartlands by a Turkish republic, the mosque of Ayasofya was turned into a museum. So, for decades, it remained. Then, this summer, the museum once again became a mosque. On 24 July, Hagia Sophia opened for Friday prayers. “It is breaking away from its chains of captivity,” President Erdogan declared rhapsodically. “It was the greatest dream of our youth. It was the yearning of our people and it has been accomplished.”

The synchronicity between Modi’s trip to Ayodhya and Erdogan’s to Hagia Sophia is striking, and only flimsily obscured by the fact that the Prime Minister of India is trampling the legacy of an Islamic empire much as the President of Turkey has trampled the legacy of a Christian one. In the early sixteenth century, shortly after the Moghul conquest of the lands that once, so Hindus believed, had constituted the Ram Rajya, the “realm of Rama”, a mosque was built in Ayodhya. By the twentieth century, large numbers of Hindus had come to believe that this same mosque, the Babri Masjid, stood directly on the site of the Ram Janmabhoomi. In the 1980s, the BJP — the party to which Modi belongs — began a campaign to demolish it. In 1992 a mob duly tore it down. Communal riots exploded. Thousands died.

Last November, even as the site was formally granted to Hindus, the Supreme Court of India condemned the demolition of the mosque as a crime. But a crime by whose standards? Not, it would seem, by Modi’s. Just as Erdogan justified the conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque by “right of conquest”, so the Prime Minister of India, hailing the opportunity to build a temple on the site where the Babri Masjid had stood, invoked the ancient traditions of his country. It was, he declared, “a unique gift from law-abiding India to truth, non-violence, faith and sacrifice.” History as well as justice stood on his side.

August 14, 2020

From protests to riots to …

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

In the Claremount Review of Books, Angelo M. Codevilla looks at historical patterns that may prefigure what is going on in major urban areas today:

Hagia Sophia in the Faith district of Istanbul, 18 November 2004.
Photo by Robert Raderschatt via Wikimedia Commons.

The Americans who confess other people’s racism absolve themselves inexpensively by a moral mechanism common to humanity: the more I profess to hate evil, the more I showcase my own goodness. Such confessions, however, have a particular history of tragedy in Christian civilization. Again and again over the centuries, persons who have imagined themselves cleansed by ritual confessions have believed themselves elevated above the rest of humanity and, hence, entitled to oppress or even annihilate those around them. Today’s self-purifiers, arms outstretched in supine submission, who then countenance violence against persons, property, and cultural symbols, are mostly unwitting protagonists in yet another chapter of a hoary history.

Although Judeo-Christianity teaches that perfection is not of this world, nevertheless the Old Testament (see the Book of Daniel) and the New (Revelation, chapter 20) refer tangentially to a final state in human affairs in which all evil will have been defeated and the virtuous will have triumphed over their enemies. In the Book of Revelation, this final stage is to last for a thousand years. Jesus Christ’s warnings notwithstanding, people have hearkened periodically to “false prophets” who brandish the prospect of ultimate vengeance over evil. Between the 11th and 16th centuries, any number of movements of this sort used ritual confessions to cleanse themselves, and energized the mobs that waged Europe’s bloodiest wars of that age. Thereafter, though such movements secularized their terms, they fit into the same moral and intellectual categories. Now as ever, they are about destroying civilization in the name of altering the human condition.

But whereas revolutionary movements from the Middle Ages to roughly the middle of the 20th century opposed the ruling classes wholeheartedly and found no friends among them, this generation’s movements have intense, problematic relations with those classes, about which more below.

Today we see scenes of monuments which had stood for decades, now destroyed and defaced, as well as the forceful cancellation of names from circulation. Smashing others’ idols was, and remains, a staple of tribal warfare. The Old Testament recalls the divine command to destroy idols, and the clashes between Christian and Muslim armies always aimed as much at symbols as at people. The Song of Roland contains a lyrical account of Charlemagne’s iconoclasm in his campaign against the Saracens. In the 6th century, Emperor Justinian made Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia cathedral the Christian world’s biggest and most important church. The Muslims who added that city to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 killed its priests, toppled its statues, and made it into the principal mosque of the Muslim caliphate at war with Christendom. In 1923, Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s modernizer, turned the building into a museum in order to end that war. But in July 2020 Turkey’s Islamist president Recep Erdogan, consistent with his hostility to Judeo-Christian civilization, turned it into a mosque again and began covering up what remain of the Christian frescoes on its walls. Destroying symbols, however, has had no place within Christian civilization. As the equivalent of torturing dead men, it has always been the work of cowards likelier to run from living enemies. On the other hand, war against statues, paintings, books, biographies, etc., has been a defining feature of civilization’s revolutionary enemies, consistent with their chosen identities as alien tribes.

What follows is a glance at the bloody history of this little-known flaw. It is a tale whose cautionary moral Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn best expressed: the line between good and evil runs not between persons — never mind between parties, classes, or races — but down the middle of every human heart. That is central to our civilization.

H/T to David Warren for the link.

August 6, 2020

Rhodes: A Short History

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

History Time
Published 2 Mar 2017

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Situated at a crossroads between East and West, in a strategic location between the Aegean and the Mediterranean, Rhodes has long been fought over by the surrounding powers. As a result, Rhodes is one of the most historic sites on Earth.

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July 31, 2020

Xi Jinping and the “Chinese dream”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Health, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Zineb Riboua outlines possible ways for the West to counter ongoing Chinese economic espionage:

President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

Since 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s favourite catchphrase has been “the Chinese dream”. In stark contrast to the evil, capitalistic American dream, Xi’s alternative vision of progress teaches that the only route to prosperity is through rigid adherence to collectivist ideology.

The Chinese state embodies a very particular ideology. Over the last few decades, it has aggressively ramped up its economic and political capital through business and enterprise, inextricably tying itself to the economic fortunes of both developed and developing countries. It is now seeking to use the economic capital it has accumulated to force its political agenda into reality.

That is why the role of private companies in China is unparalleled. Milton Friedman defined corporate social responsibility in terms of private companies’ sole duty to make a profit, and then increase that profit. Chinese companies appear to be exempt from this rule because they interact with the state in a unique and troubling way.

The current state of the Chinese political and economic landscape is no accident. When Deng Xiaoping spoke in the 1980s of building a “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, this is probably exactly what he had in mind. The Chinese Communist party has succeeded in weaponising local market forces in such a way that it now holds all the cards in its nation’s dealings with the outside world, both political and economic, because the line between the public and the private is non-existent.

This strategy has not gone unnoticed. Thanks to the Chinese Communist party’s recent conduct – unprecedented aggression in Hong Kong, the appalling genocide of the Uyghur people and a costly unwillingness to share information relating to the coronavirus outbreak – the state of its internal affairs has come into sharp focus on the international stage.

Unsurprisingly, the hawkish US has placed itself at the forefront of counter-Chinese rhetoric. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo said recently: “We gave the Chinese Communist party and the regime itself special economic treatment, only to see the CCP insist on silence over its human rights abuses as the price of admission for Western companies entering China.”

July 5, 2020

Andrew Sullivan – “There is no doubt at this point that communist China is a genocidal state”

Filed under: China, Government, Liberty, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest column, Andrew Sullivan discusses China’s latest outrages against groups within China:

Protest against the Chinese government in Hong Kong, 25 November 2019.
Photo by Studio Incendo via Wikimedia Commons

Genocide is not measured simply by the number of human beings in a demographic group who have been killed. Such numbers vary. The pogroms in Europe of the 14th century killed far, far fewer Jews than died in the 20th-century Holocaust, but it would be crazy not to see a very similar eliminationist impulse. It’s the genocidal intent that defines a genocide. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines it as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Their definition includes the following five categories:

  1. Killing members of the group.
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

There is no doubt at this point that communist China is a genocidal state. The regime is determined to coerce, kill, reeducate, and segregate its Uighur Muslim population, and to pursue eugenicist policies to winnow their ability to sustain themselves. The Associated Press just published an exhaustive and chilling account of the extent of the campaign, which was reportedly supported and seconded by the president of the United States when speaking with President-for-life Xi.

We already know about the reeducation camps. We found out this week the grisly detail that China may even have been exporting human-hair products taken from Uighur political prisoners in those camps. What the AP helps us better understand is how the regime is forcibly sterilizing Uighur women inside and outside the camps, attempting to control the Uighur population by assaulting basic reproductive freedom. Uighur families with multiple children are now in danger of being sent to camps for the crime of bringing Uighur kids into the world: “Time in a camp — what the government calls ‘education and training’ — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by [scholar Adrian] Zenz confirmed. In 2017, the Xinjiang government also tripled the already hefty fines for violating family planning laws for even the poorest residents — to at least three times the annual disposable income of the county.”

And the campaign of terror is working: “Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone — compared to just 4.2% nationwide, statistics show.” In the Uighur city of Hotan, over a third of all married women of childbearing age were sterilized in 2019 alone. And this is taking place in the context of a new campaign to increase the fertility and offspring of the majority Han Chinese. This is pure racial social engineering.

This genocidal dictatorship also took this past week to stomp all over what’s left of freedom in Hong Kong. Just before the anniversary of the end of British rule in Hong Kong, Beijing has introduced a new security law that all but eviscerates any freedom for dissent in the former British colony. It renders a variety of offenses that involve pro-democracy activism and criticism of the regime punishable by up to a lifetime in jail. The law is deliberately vague, was passed with no input from Hong Kong’s own government before its details were revealed, and criminalizes offenses such as “secession, subversion against the central Chinese government, terrorism, and colluding with foreign forces.”

The effect has been immediate: Key members of a leading dissident group, Demosisto, resigned, and the party has been disbanded. Throughout Hong Kong, businesses that had posted messages of support for the pro-democracy forces are swiftly removing them. People are deleting their social-media accounts for fear of imprisonment. A BBC reporter notes the immediate impact: “One contact of mine, a lawyer and human-rights activist, sent me a message shortly after the law was passed. ‘Please delete everything on this chat,’ he wrote.”

History Summarized: Colonial India

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Humour, India — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 4 Jul 2020

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Indian History has always been a story of peoples coming and going, but the subcontinent’s modern history takes that up to 11, with the arrival of Central Asian Mughals and boatloads of Europeans. See how India transforms from Medieval to Modern in this final act of our History of India.

SOURCES & Further Reading: The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru, A History of India by Michael H. Fisher (a lecture series by The Great Courses).

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

Special thanks to Varda Alighieri for coaching me through my (hopefully serviceable) pronunciations!

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June 4, 2020

QotD: Islamofascism

Filed under: Middle East, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The great silence by left-leaning Western feminists, and other large parts of the left, to human rights abuses carried out in the name of Islam is, to see it as its kindest, caused by an overdeveloped sense of tolerance or cultural relativism. But it is also part of the new anti-Americanism. Look at American Christian fundamentalism, they say.

Dislike of George Bush’s foreign policy has led to an automatic support of those perceived to be his enemies. Paradoxically, this leaves the left defending people who hold beliefs that condone what the left has long fought against: misogyny, homophobia, capital punishment, suppression of freedom of speech. The recent reaffirmation by Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie has been met by virtual silence; as has the torture and murder in Iraq of a man who would be presumed to be one of the left’s own — Hadi Salih, the international officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. The hard left these days is soft on fascism, or at least Islamofascism.

The religious right in America would, if it could, wind back access to abortion and some other women’s rights. But as far as I am aware, no Christian fundamentalist in the US has suggested banning women from driving cars, or travelling without their husbands’ permission, or forcing them to cover their faces. Contrary to popular opinion, one is not the same as the other.

Pamela Bone, “The silence of the feminists”, The Age, 2005-02-04

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