Quotulatiousness

May 1, 2021

Rulers Who Were Actually Good — History Hijinks

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Apr 2021

History is full of Rulers, but most of them (especially some famous ones) can be Kind Of Terrible upon closer inspection. So let’s take a look at two kings we can actually consider to be Good — not perfect, not blameless, but a heck of a lot more virtuous than the average ruler, that’s for sure.

This topic was requested by our patron Duncan! Thank you for your patronage, and for the topic suggestion.

SOURCES & Further Reading: The Great Courses Plus lectures “Being Persian” by Robert Garland, “The Persian Era” by Jean-Pierre Isbouts, “Saladin: Chivalry and Conquest – 1187” by Eamonn Gearon, and “Saladin and the Defeat of the Crusaders” by Dorsey Armstrong.

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March 28, 2021

QotD: Laïcité and French Catholicism

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

What of Catholicism in France? Soundly defeated by the Third Republic in 1905 with the introduction of Laïcité, are there Catholics (and other Christians) who secretly wish to see secularism get a bloody nose by way of the Islamists?

As I said, “secularism” isn’t a real thing. I am an optimist when it comes to French Catholicism. There is a rising generation of young Catholics, and they are excellent, and numerous. More and more people are understanding that the only thing modernity offers is consumer crap from China, divorce, and joyless sex at best. The churches on Sunday are full in the big cities. Houellebecq is right; for us, the future is either the foot of the Cross, or submission to Islam. And I think we’re showing we don’t want to submit to Islam …

What people don’t understand about French Catholicism is that while 1905 was certainly a defeat, French Catholics did not simply disappear. They abandoned politics, but they did continue to have children, to bring them up into Catholic schools, etc. so there has always been an important Catholic subculture, including at the elite levels. I am optimistic about the future of Catholicism in France.

Niccolo Soldo, “The Zürich Interviews – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Unrepentant Baguette Merchant”, Fisted by Foucault, 2020-12-02.

March 20, 2021

The rise of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander reviews Soner Cagaptay’s recent book The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey:

If you only learn one thing from this post: it’s pronounced “air-do-wan”.

If you learn two things from this post, learn that, plus how a country which starts out as a flawed but somewhat-liberal democracy can lapse into near-dictatorship over the course of a few years.

I got The New Sultan: Erdogan And The Crisis Of Modern Turkey because, as a libertarian, I spend a lot of time worrying about the risk that my country might backslide into illiberal repression. To develop a better threat model, I wanted to see how this process has gone in other countries, what the key mistakes were, and whether their stories give any hints about how to prevent it from happening here. Recep Tayyip Erdogan transformed Turkey from a flawed democracy to a partial dictatorship over the past few decades, and I wanted to know more about how.

As an analysis of the rise of a dictator, this book fails a pretty basic desideratum: it seems less than fully convinced the dictator’s rise was bad. Again and again I found myself checking to make sure I hadn’t accidentally picked up a pro-Erdogan book. I didn’t; author Soner Cagaptay is a well-respected Turkey scholar in a US think tank who’s written other much more critical things. The fact is, Erdogan’s rise is inherently a pretty sympathetic story. If he’d died of a heart attack in 2008, we might remember him as a successful crusader against injustice, a scrappy kid who overcame poverty and discrimination to become a great and unifying leader.

I want to go into some of this in more depth, because I think this is the main reason why Erdogan’s example doesn’t generalize to other countries. What went wrong in Turkey was mostly Turkey-specific, a reckoning for Turkey’s unique flaws. Erdogan rose to power on credible promises to help people disenfranchised by the old system; by the time he turned the tables and started disenfranchising others in turn, it was too late to root him out. If there’s a general moral here, it’s that having the “good guys” oppress and censor the “bad guys” is fun while it lasts, but it’s hard to know whether you’re building up a karmic debt, or when you’re going to have to pay the piper.

Given how hard it is to convince people of that moral, let’s go through the full story in more detail.

And given that it’s impossible to discuss modern Turkey without at least briefly touching on the founder of the country, here’s an amusing apocryphal story about “The Father of the Turks”:

Medieval Turkey was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, officially an Islamic caliphate though in practice only inconsistently religious, ruled by autocratic sultans and a dizzying series of provincial governors. As time passed, they fell further and further behind Western Europe; by World War I, they were a mess. As the stress of the war caused the empire to fracture, General Mustafa Kemal seized power, reorganized the scraps of Ottoman Anatolia into modern Turkey, and was renamed ATATURK, meaning “Father of Turks”.

Ataturk was born in Ottoman-controlled Greece, and was typical of a class of military officers at the time who were well-educated and “Europeanized”. He wanted to turn backwards Turkey into an advanced Western country — and Western countries were mostly secular. He saw Islam — the religion of the old Ottoman Empire — as a roadblock, and passed various laws meant to relegate it to the margins of public life.

(my favorite Ataturk story, probably apocryphal, was that he passed a law banning women from wearing hijabs. Nobody followed it and the police wouldn’t enforce it, so he passed a second law requiring prostitutes to wear hijabs, after which other women abandoned them. As far as I can tell this is an urban legend, but it captures the spirit of the sort of measures he took to drag Turkey, kicking and screaming, into secular modernity.)

March 1, 2021

QotD: Anti-semitism in Harold Lamb’s novels

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

The “brushes with anti-Semitism” lie in Lamb’s portrayal of the Jewish merchants of the time [Wikipedia]. They sell the Cossacks clothes, weapons, food, and gunpowder and turn the freebooters’ loot into cash. They are depicted as avaricious, cowardly, mean, and quite willing to toady to the warriors and princes they serve. How are we to interpret this in light of Lamb’s sympathetic portrayals of a dozen other races and cultures?

Of course it’s possible Lamb was simply replaying anti-Semitic attitudes he had absorbed somewhere. But in reading these stories I had another moment like the one in which I understood that [Edgar Rice] Burroughs [Wikipedia] was using “white” as culturist code for “civilized”. It was this: the behavior of Lamb’s Jewish merchants made adaptive sense. Maybe they were really like that!

Consider: The Jews of Lamb’s milieu lived under Christian and Islamic rulers who forbade them from carrying weapons, who despised them, who taxed and persecuted them with a heavy hand. If you were a Jew in that time and place, exhibiting courage and the warrior virtues that Lamb was so ready to recognize in a Mongol or an Afghani was likely to earn you a swift and ugly death.

Under those conditions, I’m thinking that being cowardly and avaricious and toadying would have been completely sensible; after all, what other options than flattering the authorities and getting rich enough to buy themselves out of trouble did Jews actually have?

Lamb seems to have have mined the historical sources pretty assiduously in his portrayals of other cultures and races. Rather than dismissing Lamb’s Jews as creatures of his prejudices, I think we need to at least consider the possibility that he was mostly replaying period beliefs about Jewish merchants, and that those beliefs were in fact fairly accurate. He certainly seems to have tried to do something similar with the other flavors of human being in his books.

Nowadays we tend to interpret Lamb’s Jewish merchants through assumptions that read something like this: (1) All racial labels are indications of racist thinking, and (2) all race-associated stereotypes are necessarily false, and (3) all racial labels and race-related stereotypes are malicious. But it seems to me that, at least as I read Burroughs and Lamb, all these assumptions are highly questionable. As long as you hold them, you can’t notice what “whiteness” in Burroughs really means, or account for the genuine multiculturalism of Lamb’s books.

Eric S. Raymond, “Reading racism into pulp fiction”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-01-18.

February 25, 2021

QotD: Islam and the impact of the Enlightenment

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

In private, however, or when addressing his soldiers, Napoleon was contemptuous of the Islamic word. “You have come to this country,” he told his army before the battle of the Pyramids, “to save the inhabitants from barbarism, and to bring civilisation to the Orient.” This was why, in addition to muskets, cannon and cavalry, he had brought with him to Egypt a printing press, a hot-air balloon and a small army of intellectuals.

The blaze of the Enlightenment, although it might seem to have been lit in Europe, was not just for Europeans. All the world had the potential to share in its radiance. Illumination was the same wherever it manifested itself, and this meant that in Peking as in Paris, in Baghdad as in Bordeaux, there were sages more than qualified to rank alongside Voltaire and Diderot.

The Enlightenment, far from ranking as something parochial and culturally contingent, was properly a global phenomenon. These various dogmas, which the philosophes had tended to take for granted, had then been given a new and militant edge by the French Revolution. That religion was superstition; that rights were universal; that equality, individual liberty and freedom of expression were simultaneously natural and sacred: these were the convictions that had inspired in the citizens of revolutionary France their continent-shaking sense of certitude. Thrones had been toppled; abbeys demolished; the detritus of a benighted past erased. And if in Europe, then why not further afield? The Rights of Man were for everyone, after all, or they were nothing. “Any law that violates them,” as Robespierre had put it, “is fundamentally unjust and tyrannical. Indeed, it is not law at all.”

This sense of missionary purpose, which inspired in those who felt it an ambition to bring the entire world from darkness into light, outlasted the execution of Robespierre, the defeat of Napoleon, the seeming triumph of reaction across post-revolutionary Europe. In 1854, when the Ottoman Empire was facing a critical threat from Russia, France joined Britain in insisting as a condition of its entry into the Crimean War that the slave trade across the Black Sea be abolished.

Also abolished was the jizya, a tax on Jews and Christians that reached back to the very beginnings of Islam, and was directly mandated by the Qur’an. Such measures, to the Ottomans, risked immense embarrassment. The effect, after all, was to reform Islamic jurisprudence according to the standards of non-believers. It was, for Muslim traditionalists, an ominous straw in the wind. Over the course of the century and more that followed, the weathering effects of Western hegemony on the practices that Muslims believed they had inherited from Muhammad — the Sunnah — became more and more pronounced.

Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.

February 20, 2021

Confessed genocidal nation refuses to accuse China of genocide

Filed under: Cancon, China, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jen Gerson considers the moral smallness of Canadian government wiggling out of labelling China’s treatment of their Uyghur minority as the genocide it certainly is:

This week, the Prime Minister of an admittedly genocidal G7 state refused to condemn China for its treatment of its minority Uyghur population. A treatment that has included family separation, forced sterilization, and warehousing thousands of people in what can only be described as modern concentration camps.

Justin Trudeau failed to condemn China, noting, quite rightly, that genocide is an “extremely loaded” term. One not to be bandied about lightly. It demonstrates some moral cowardice on his part, certainly, but also a degree of pragmatism. Canada’s squeaky and lonely objection would do little good. We’re already in a vulnerable position, what with the ongoing captivity of two Canadians who remain in Chinese detention as an act of retaliation for our arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. A declaration of genocide in this case is probably better handled by a collection of nations. As long as we can live with the shame of the smallness that such an argument implies.

(Although perhaps it was unwise to pin so many of our early hopes of an early vaccine rollout on a doomed collaboration with a Chinese manufacturer with a vaccine backed by China’s Institute of Biotechnology and its Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Who could have predicted we would run into problems with such a notoriously reliable and honourable global partner that occasionally engages in hostage diplomacy? But I digress.)

The real issue with Trudeau’s grovelling little deflection on the question of Chinese genocide is that it made his own position on the subject not two years ago impossible to ignore in comparison. The final report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry stated that the truths it uncovered in the process of its years-long investigations:

    … tell the story — or, more accurately, thousands of stories — of acts of genocide against First Nations, Inuit and Métis women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. This violence amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples … This genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, Métis and First Nations rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations.

Several pundits at the time noted at the time that this stretched the definition of “genocide” beyond ordinary recognition. “Genocide” is not the result of a set of compounding government failures over time: it’s a word that we reserve to describe a discreet set of acts motivated by the deliberate intent to decimate or totally exterminate an ethnic population. But after a day or so of hemming and hawing on the issue after the report was released, our prime minister noted: “The issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term … We accept the finding that this was genocide, and we will move forward to end this ongoing national tragedy.”

There was some careful phrasing in this response. Note, Trudeau agreed that this was genocide, not that it is genocide. The prime minister dodged the implication that Canada is engaged in deliberate ethnic cleansing. But it’s worth peeling back the skin of the onion, past the obvious and easy allegation of hypocrisy, and instead ask ourselves why?

Why can we get away with calling ourselves a genocidal state, but not China?

January 23, 2021

History Summarized: Atlantic Exploration

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Europe, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jan 2021

So you just conquered Iberia, and you’re wondering where to go from here? It’s a more common conundrum than you might think. Consider: a big wooden floaty house that goes splish-splash in the Atlantic Ocean. Anyway, this is a video about Portuguese and Spanish (erm, Castilian) exploration in the Atlantic during the 1400s. Please note my deliberate decision to Nope on out at the turn of the 1500s.

This topic was requested by our longtime patron Antonio Juarez! Thank you Antonio for supporting our work and helping to provide entertaining educational content.

SOURCES & Further Reading: Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal; lectures from Great Courses Plus “1571: Spain, Portugal Encircle the Globe” by Donald J. Harreld, “Renaissance and Exploration: New Horizons” by Jennifer McNabb, “Portugal’s Great Leap Forward” by “Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius”

TRACKLIST: “Scheming Weasel (faster version),” “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys”, “Local Forecast – Elevator” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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December 22, 2020

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

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

One of my regular commenters asked, in a previous thread, “If everyone was truly released from the shackles of religion, and got beyond the false moral codes imposed on them, would society collapse in a heap of nihilism?” This question needs a longer answer than will fit in a reply comment.

The shortest summary is “No!” The less short answer is: “No, because religious moral codes are epiphenomenal.” And it is on point to add that the question reveals serious ignorance of the actual traits of most religions over most of history.

I’ll address the historical point first. The commenter’s question was framed from within the assumptions of one particular family of religions: the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, which are more succinctly describable as the bastard offspring of Zoroastrian dualism. In this family, “religion” bundles cosmology, theology, and morality into a single total system designed primarily to enforce norms by programming the believer with an internalized guilt machine.

Because the dominant religions of the modern West are all derived from this group, it is difficult for Westerners to understand how bizarre and exceptional these religions are in a broader context. Most religions are not total systems. Most religions do not tie morality to cosmology. In fact, most religions have very little to say about morality at all!

Consider, for example, an Altaic shaman. It’s not his job to pronounce on who should sleep with who, or to tell people that theft is wrong. It’s not even his job to tell people that they must worship Tengri or Kara-han; dealing with the gods is his specialty, thank you. His job combines aspects of psychologist and medic with a bit of divination. The closest analog of “morality”, in his culture, is a set of inherited customs and taboos which is reinforced by explanatory myths but not generated by them and not really dependent on them. The closest equivalent of religious structures about right and wrong is an elaborate set of rules about ritual purity and impurity. In the jargon of the field, his religion is an orthopraxy rather than an orthodoxy.

Over most human cultures in most human history, “religion” has been much more like Altaic shamanism than like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Er, so why didn’t these cultures “collapse in a heap of nihilism”? The same question actually applies to modern religions outside the post-Zoroastrian family. Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, are almost completely unconcerned with “morality”. Hinduism is organized around ritual purity and impurity; Buddhism’s quest for merit is about liberation of the self from attachments, not about duties one owes to God or others.

Eric S. Raymond, “If God is dead, is anything permissible?”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-02-10.

December 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

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/

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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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