Muhlberger's World History

Indefinite hyperbolic numbers!

2012-02-10T13:52:00.000-05:00

Zillion, squillion, bajillion!

Stephen Chrisomalis of Wayne State University gives a delightful talk about where these numbers come from!

The Syrian situation -- how not to change a regime

2012-02-10T11:03:00.001-05:00

Some of my regular morning reading just oozes pessimism about Syria today:

Eshani writes in Syria Comment that Syria’s Opposition Must Find a Different Way.

An excerpt:

As the death toll mounts on the streets in Syria, it is important to remember how we got here. Damascus has decided to reassert control over its restive cities by using the full might of its military. This should not come as a surprise to observers and policy makers. Indeed, the surprise is that the government has taken this long to order its offensive.
In the first three months of this crisis, it is fair to suggest that the opposition was largely peaceful. By the summer of 2011, this was beginning to change. The uprising was morphing into an armed resistance as weapons started to surface on Syrian streets. The defining moment was at the beginning of Ramadan. Contrary to consensus opinion, the government was not deterred by the start of the Holy month. Hama was stormed and taken back from the opposition to the shock of the region. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia made its first defining public comment on Alarabiya Television Channel immediately following Hama’s fall to the government, after withdrawing its ambassador from Syria.
Since Hama, Syrian opposition members have begun increasingly to call to demand weapons and a military response to overpower the regime. For the next 6 months, Syrian streets and neighborhoods became armed enough that the mighty Syrian army had to think twice before entering the developing mini enclaves ruled by the opposition within its cities. Not surprisingly, taking up arms suddenly became the accepted modus operandi of the opposition and the uprising. Those cautioning against such strategies were referred to as ignorant or regime supporters.
Young opposition activists who followed the advice to arm and fight the regime are now being left to fend for themselves against the military Goliath of the Syrian Army. As I wrote following my return from the country, many assured me that the armed forces were yet to use more than 20% of their capacity. As I listened to pronouncements by opposition leaders about the necessity to arm, I could not help but wonder what would happen when Damascus would unleash its full military might. We will now find out.

While Rastan, Homs and Zabadani were becoming hell for its residents, I was dismayed to see that the so-called brains of this revolution were landing in Doha airport. The purpose of the meeting is of course to focus on “the situation on the ground in Syria” and find ways of “helping the rebels”. How infuriating to see men in suites sit in the comfort of Doha hotels instructing the poor men, women and children of the restive neighborhoods of Syria on what they should do next. The fact is that since the first calls to arm the population, the brain trust of this revolution sent the people of Syria into a kamikaze mission. Did anyone really think that the Syrian army was going to be defeated at the hands of poor young men with Kalashnikovs?

...

Those of us living in the comforts of the West are only too familiar with how politicians in democratic countries compete over their “records”. My wish is to see the Syrian opposition begin to discuss President Assad’s record on the economy, the public sector, illegal housing, the environment, health care, education, the media, and individual liberties. Instead, we seem to hell bent on steering our country straight into an iceberg with 23 million on board.

The Syrian National Council and many Arab and International policy makers who are now pontificating on Syria’s future were nowhere to be seen in 2007, when the President’s second 7-year term began. We have gone from being in a coma to calling for the downfall of the regime and even the hanging of its leader. This is insanity. The Syrian National Council must call for all rebels and opposition groups to stop arming themselves. Instead, it should declare that the opposition set its sights on 2014, when President Assad’s second presidential term will come to an end.

What is needed is a smart and innovative strategy that helps spare lives but effectively convinces the leadership that the old ways of doing business are over. Popular efforts must be spent in writing a new constitution, a bill of rights to calm minority fears, and an economic plan to reassure the business community and workers alike. The standard of living of most Syrians is appalling, so is the education level and health care system. The opposition must channel their energies towards such topics rather than the senseless calls to arm the rebels in what is clearly a suicide mission.

Juan Cole on the wider dangers of a violent revolutionary strategy:

The first thing that comes to mind at these horrific images is that something should be done.
But what? Sen. John McCain has called for arming the rebels, as has the The New Republic, which appears to be veering again toward Neoconservatism.

My wise colleague Marc Lynch has raised important questions about the wisdom of this course.

I would argue an even stronger case against. Once you flood a country with small and medium arms, it destabilizes it for decades.

Ronald Reagan spread weapons all around northern Pakistan, and in my view began the destabilization of that country, which now has an endemic problem with armed tribes, militias and gangs. I saw the same thing happen in Lebanon shortly before, during the civil war that threw that country into long term fragility. More recently, we saw a civil war in Algeria (1991-2000) that left 150,000 people dead, which is really no different than what has been going on in Syria except that it was on a much larger scale and the West at that time decided to support the secular generals against the rebelling Muslim fundamentalists. The arming of Iraq post-Saddam has left it a horribly violent society for the foreseeable future (a plethora of US arms given to the new Iraqi military and police were often sold off to guerrillas). And while the war would have been longer in Libya if Qatar and France had not secretly armed the rebels, it likely would have had a similar outcome (what was really important was NATO attrition of Libyan armor). And in that case the problem the country now faces, of militia rule and fragmentation, would have been much less severe.

If people don’t think a flood of arms into the hands of Syrian fighters will spill over onto Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel/ Palestine, they are just fooling themselves. The Palestinians in the region have largely given up or been made to give up arms, in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. But if small and medium arms become widespread and inexpensive, it will take us back to the late 1960s and early 1970s when Palestinian guerrillas shook Jordan, Lebanon and Israel. The Palestinians themselves always suffered from a resort to arms, and are best served by a peaceful movement of protest, and a remilitarization of their struggle would produce further tragic setbacks.

Turkey, it should be noted, is against letting arms in to either side. They do not want another ‘dirty war’ in their heavily Kurdish southeast, as happened in the 1980s-1990s.

And then there is a Joshua Landis interview on the significance of events in the city of Homs.

A new era in publishing (might be "The Call of All Nations")

2012-02-09T13:55:00.000-05:00

At the ccel.org site, they have an electronic copy of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History.

And this note.

This book has been accessed more than 1280134 times since July 13, 2005.

This is not the only copy on the Web, either.

A new article on Boucicaut and Christine de Pizan

2012-02-08T12:18:00.000-05:00

A colleague drew my attention to this:

Zenep Kocabiyikoglu Cecen, "Two different views of knighthood in the early fifteenth century: Le Livre de Bouciquaut and the works of Christine de Pizan," Journal of Military History 76(2012): 9-35.

Summary: the big differences in attitude are a strong argument against Christine's authorship of the Livre. I agree.

Image: Boucicaut as portrayed in the book of hours he commissioned.

Review of "The Secret History of Democracy" by Christopher Hobson

2012-02-07T09:47:00.000-05:00

A fair evaluation, I think:

The Secret History of Democracy is an ambitious attempt to offer an alternative narrative to the dominant account of the history of democracy. Reacting to a common tendency to draw a line from Ancient Athens, through Republican Rome to revolutionary America and France and so on, this book seeks out other historical instances of democracy. In highlighting these ‘hidden’ examples, the hope is to re-energise the way we now think about democracy. Even if not fully announced as such, what the editors are essentially trying to offer is a history of the present – a critical rereading of the past to better comprehend the contemporary situation and enable political action towards further democratisation. Lamenting the way democracy is regularly understood by the (Anglo-American) West, Isakhan and Stockwell propose that by ‘opening awareness of the breadth of democratic forms [it] gives people the means to deepen, strengthen and develop democratic practice and the opportunity to promulgate democracy more widely’ (p. 223). And the various chapters in the volume do indeed offer a broad selection of democratic pasts. The book considers pre-Athenian experiences elsewhere in Greece, the Middle East, India and China; it explores democracy in the ‘Dark Ages’ in Iceland, Venice and Islamic history; it revives forgotten democratic practices in colonial and settler contexts in Africa, Australia and Canada; and it looks at more contemporary examples in the Arab Middle East. In light of the ongoing Arab Spring, the notable inclusion of multiple chapters on the Arab Middle East – too often excluded from books on democracy – is particularly prescient and worthwhile.
For the most part, the individual chapters are strong, and they offer useful illustrations of how versions of democracy can be found in many places where we have forgotten to look. For instance, Philippe Paine provides a fascinating account of ‘Buffalo Hunt democracy’ that was practised by the Métis people of Western Canada. The extent to which the chapters contribute to the overarching aims of the book is more mixed, however. Contributions such as Steven Muhlberger's on Ancient India, Pauline Keating's on China, and Mohamad Abdalla and Halim Rane's on Islam's past clearly identify the relevance of previous democratic experiences for contemporary struggles, but some of the other chapters do not connect their historical examples to present-day concerns in a sufficiently deep manner. This does not undermine the value of the chapters as stand-alone pieces, but it does have consequences for the volume as a whole. In itself, identifying examples of democratic practices that fall outside the standard historical narrative is not necessarily that difficult. Few would maintain the extreme position that democracy has only existed in the West. The question then is how these past experiences with democracy can be mobilised so that ‘people all over the world may come to have a greater sense of ownership over democracy and take pride in practising and re-creating it for their time, for their situation and for their purposes’ (pp. 15–16). On this point there is less direction both from the editors and most of the contributors.
A further issue that arises is: why these specific cases? There are many ‘secrets’ in democracy's past, and there are many different examples that could have been considered. What is it about these experiences that make them particularly valuable in re-envisioning contemporary democracy? Here the editors give little guidance. For instance, given that there are many examples of democratic practices in countries that are now struggling to institute democracy, what is it that makes street protests in Iraq worthy of inclusion above so many other alternatives? In this regard, the volume would have benefited from a much better explicated set of cases, and a stronger attempt to link them to contemporary concerns over democracy. While noting these shortcomings, on the whole this is an interesting and worthwhile addition to the slowly growing literature on the global history of democracy. In redirecting our gaze away from the standard historical reference points, it offers an important corrective to the common tendency of identifying democracy as a Western product. This volume pushes us to question accepted thinking on the topic, and suggests that the past may be one route towards a more democratic future.

Christopher Hobson (2012): The secret history of democracy, Global Change,
Peace & Security: formerly Pacifica Review: Peace, Security & Global Change, 24:1, 193-194

Charny as arbitrator under the "droit d'armes"

2012-02-05T13:25:00.000-05:00

Back in 1992, the renowned military historian Philippe Contamine wrote an article of Geoffroi de Charny for the festschrift (celebratory collection) dedicated to Georges Duby. I just found this little nugget in the article (my rough translation):

At that time [Charny] was recognized as an expert in the conflicts that can arise between people in arms about ransom and loot: an act of Philippe de Valois in April 1347 sets out how Aimery de Rochechouart, chevalier , was retained, he and the men of his company having "all costs and expenses and everything which appertained to their profession" from Savary de Vivonne, Lord of Tours. However, during the taking and plundering of Poitiers by the English of the Earl of Derby in October 1345, Aimery and his people were captured. He himself was ransomed for 4000 crowns of gold, a sum to which were added expenses of 2000 crowns. He thought he should be able to demand the 6000 crowns from Savary de Vivonne, who refused. The King with the consent of both parties, appointed arbitrators for the dispute concerning the "droit d’armes," namely Guillaume Flote, seigneur de Revel, and Geoffroy de Charny. They discharged Savary de Vivonne any fault, however, requiring him to pay to pay 2000 crowns (the costs) to Aimery de Rochechouart.

I also found out today that if you type enough French into MS Word, it starts giving you French spellings, French quotation marks, etc.

We could use more of this

2012-02-04T14:08:00.000-05:00

From the Weather Network site, the sun rising over Lake Nosbonsing:

It's been a gray winter.

"Killer of Men" and "Marathon" by Christian Cameron

2012-02-04T11:14:00.001-05:00

I read these books a few months ago but I guess I was too busy to write them up properly. I will make up for that omission now.

I read these two books under what must be ideal conditions. A mutual friend took me over to see Christian Cameron -- re-enactor, amateur scholar, and historical novelist -- at his home. Although there were other guests already present, Christian took the time to share with us wine, food, and sparkling, amusing, learned conversation. As we left, he gave me copies of the two books, and I had them to read on the long bus trip home.

All you need now is that the books be good, right?

Well, they are.

Cameron has pulled off a difficult feat, writing a pretty convincing story of the distant past in the first person -- from the point of view of a fifth-century BC Greek householder and warrior. Lots of people write first-person historicals that may or may not be fun, but aren't very convincing as a portrait of the protagonist or the protagonist's society. There is always the temptation to make the hero/heroine more sympathetic by portraying him or her as somehow holding to some or even many contemporary values, however unlikely that may be. How many medieval historicals feature a physician or other healer whose remarkably modern and scientific insights are an essential part of the plot and her/his character? Too many.

I didn't feel that way about Cameron's protagonist, who is modeled on a real person, but one who, thank heaven, is no one famous. The amount of learning and literary skill it took to do this should not be underestimated.

There is one aspect where the first-person presentation eventually lost credibility with me. First-person presentation demands a fair bit of suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience; that suspension is a delicate thing. Somewhere in the second book of this (unfinished) series I stopped believing the hero could remember every blow he threw or tactic he used on various battlefields or in maritime encounters through his whole long life -- which ain't over yet. You are warned -- Cameron is a military re-enactor and it shows.

That doesn't affect my judgment that he is also a superior historical novelist.

A costuming book of interest: Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, 1325-1515

2012-02-03T17:49:00.000-05:00

I got the following note a few days ago, and I know some readers will be interested:

Kindly note our offer on:
Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, 1325-1515
by Anne H. van Buren; edited by Roger S. Wieck.
published by Giles Ltd. in association with the Morgan Library & Museum, New York
- reg. price: $95.00
- now: $76.00 (20% discount) + 8.00 shipping (in the U.S.) = $84.00
- published: Sept. 2011
- 464 pages, 9 x 12"
- 298 color illustrations
- hardcover with dust jacket
More info about the book below.
Limited number of copies available.
Please inquire for shipping cost outside the U.S.
Send orders to: eskenazi@riversidebook.com
thank you very much.
best wishes,
Brian Eskenazi
Riverside Book Company, Inc.
New York
www.riversidebook.com

About the Book

A comprehensive study of dress in Northern Europe from the early fourteenth century to the beginning of the Renaissance,Illuminating Fashion is the first thorough study of the history of fashion in this period based solely on firmly dated or datable works of art. It draws on illuminated manuscripts, early printed books, tapestries, paintings, and sculpture from museums and libraries around the world.
“Symbolism and metaphors are buried in the art of fashion,” says Roger Wieck, the editor of Illuminating Fashion and curator of the accompanying exhibition at the Morgan Library. Examining the role of social customs and politics in influencing dress, at a time of rapid change in fashion, this fully illustrated volume demonstrates the richness of such symbolism in medieval art and how artists used clothing and costume to help viewers interpret an image

.
At the heart of the work is A Pictorial History of Fashion, 1325 to 1515, an album of over 300 illustrations with commentary. This is followed by a comprehensive glossary of medieval English and French clothing terms and an extensive list of dated and datable works of art. Not only can this fully illustrated volume be used as a guide to a fuller understanding of the works of art, it can also help date an undated work; reveal the shape and structure of actual garments; and open up a picture’s iconographic and social content.
It is invaluable for costume designers, students and scholars of the history of dress and history of art, as well as those who need to date works of art.

About the Authors

Anne Hagopian van Buren, who died in 2008, was an eminent art historian. A specialist in Medieval and Netherlandish art, she was the editor of Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception and Research (2005).

Roger S. Wieck is curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum and author of Late Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated

Most resonant phrase I saw on the Web this week

2012-02-03T16:10:00.001-05:00

"The unreported world," used by Al Jazeera English to characterize what they try to cover.

In my experience, a pretty accurate characterization.

Best short discussion of medieval scholarship of the day

2012-02-03T14:01:00.001-05:00

From Got Medieval:

As everybody knew, the lives of saints were meant to mirror the life of Christ, so if you wanted to tell the truth about a saint, all you had to do was tell the truth about Christ.

This sort of thinking derived from the way that medievals read their Bible, which is to say, typologically. Things in the Old Testament were said to pre-figure or pre-incarnate the things in the New Testament. Jonah spent three days in a whale’s belly. Christ arose from the grave after three days. These two facts were not coincidental: Johan pre-figured Christ; he was a “type” of Christ. So if you want to know more about the Resurrection, you could always learn more about Jonah and the whale. Indeed, you can’t swing a dead cat in medieval exegesis without hitting an earlier dead cat that prefigures the very cat you’re swinging.

Wish I'd had this to put before my grad seminar on medieval chroniclers a couple of years ago.

BTW, Got Medieval's author is blogging his thinking on the subject of his dissertation, namely Geoffery of Monmouth and Uther Pendragon, if you want to see a modern scholar at work.

"Losing" Iraq

2012-02-03T10:52:00.000-05:00

Some of Obama's political opponents are peddling the idea that his administration "lost" Iraq. An article in Salon by Matt Duss refutes this charge:

Brett McGurk, who served as a senior advisor to three U.S. ambassadors in Baghdad, helped negotiate the 2008 withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government. He also attempted to negotiate a new agreement in 2011 that would’ve allowed a residual U.S. force to stay.
It wasn’t possible, as he explained in a Washington Post Op-Ed. “The decision to complete our withdrawal was not the result of a failed negotiation,” McGurk wrote, “but rather the byproduct of an independent Iraq that has an open political system and a 325-member parliament.”
Trying to force an agreement through that parliament would have been “self-destructive,” he wrote. “That had nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with Iraqi pride, history and nationalism. Even the most staunchly anti-Iranian Iraqi officials refused to publicly back a residual U.S. force — and in the end, they supported our withdrawal.”
As for the claims that Iran would benefit from the U.S. withdrawal, the fact of the matter is that Iraq became “exposed” to Iranian influence the moment the Bush administration removed Saddam Hussein. For years Saddam had served as the biggest check on Iranian power in the region. It was the Bush administration, supported by the likes of Krauthammer and Ajami, that created an Iraqi government largely run by Iran’s partners and clients. Paradoxically, removing the U.S. presence from Iraq could actually serve to diminish Iranian influence there, by removing one of the drivers of resentment that Iran has exploited in recent years to its advantage.

Actually this whole theory of a "lost Iraq" makes me wonder when it was "unlost."

Image: The Iraqi parliament, whose deliberations you can read about here.

Report from Syria

2012-01-31T17:15:00.000-05:00

From Ehsani at Syria Comment.

Feel threatened by Iran?

2012-01-31T11:30:00.002-05:00

Here's Tom Englehardt's take on the threat:

Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S.
(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels. The task force provides “highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments,” Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and “seeks to confront irregular threats...”
The unit began its existence in mid-2009 -- around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership’s wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the United States -- or might do in the future -- is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard. “It would be inappropriate to discuss operational plans regarding any particular nation,” Arastoo says about the U.S.
Okay, so I made that up. Sue me. But first admit that, a line or two in, you knew it was fiction. After all, despite the talk about American decline, we are still on a one-way imperial planet. Yes, there is a new U.S. special operations team known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council, or JSOTF-GCC, at work near Iran and, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, we really don’t quite know what it’s tasked with doing (other than helping train the forces of such allies as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).
And yes, the quotes are perfectly real, just out of the mouth of a U.S. “spokesman for special-operations forces in the Mideast,” not a representative of Iran’s Republican Guard. And yes, most Americans, if they were to read about the existence of the new special ops team, wouldn’t think it strange that U.S. forces were edging up to (if not across) the Iranian border, not when our “safety” was at stake.
Reverse the story, though, and it immediately becomes a malign, if unimaginable, fairy tale. Of course, no Iranian elite forces will ever operate along the U.S. border. Not in this world. Washington wouldn’t live with it and it remains the military giant of giants on this planet. By comparison, Iran is, in military terms, a minor power.

I sincerely wish the war-drum beaters would cool it. But the chosen strategy of American politicians to blow everything except the problems of unemployment and climate change out of all proportion really worries me.

I am no fan of the scummy Iranian regime. But as someone else said recently, it is mainly a threat to Iran. They have got real problems but are no closer to dealing with them than...you name it.

One state in Israel/Palestine

2012-01-31T01:19:00.001-05:00

Over at Juan Cole's Informed Comment site, the guest bloggers Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled argue that the two-state solution (two sovereign entities, Israel and Palestine) is now impossible.

What makes the two-state solution unachievable is the fact that since 1967 Israel has settled close to three quarters of a million Jews in the territories it captured from Jordan in 1967. About one-third of those are in the area Israel defined as Jerusalem and annexed in 1967, declaring it to be non-negotiable. Of the remaining five hundred thousand, the lowest estimate of the number that would have to be removed in order for a viable, territorially contiguous Palestinian state to be set up in the West Bank is one hundred thousand. This is a task that no Israeli government, committed as it may be to the two-state solution, would be able to carry out, politically. To this day no Israeli government has removed even one of the West Bank “outposts” that are illegal by Israeli law (all Jewish settlements in the occupied territories are illegal by international law), despite promises to the US and several decisions by Israel’s own High Court of Justice.
The declared purpose of the settlement drive in the West Bank (as in the other occupied territories) was to change demographic realities in order to make Israel’s withdrawal from those territories impossible. This purpose has been achieved. Not only are the settlers, their family members and their supporters an electoral power block that cannot be ignored, settlers and their supporters now make up a significant proportion of the command structure of Israel’s security forces, the same forces that would have to carry out a decision to remove the settlers.
To counter this argument, critics may point to the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005. That example, however, actually supports our argument. In order to remove 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza, an easily isolated region of no religious significance to Jews, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a military hero idolized by both the settlers and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had to deploy the entire man and woman power of all of Israel’s security forces. Moreover, the Gaza withdrawal was not done in agreement with the Palestinians, or in order to facilitate peace with them. It was done unilaterally, in order to make Israel’s control of Gaza more efficient. Judging by this example, removing 100,000 settlers from the West Bank, in order to enable the establishment of a Palestinian state, would be an impossible task.

Of course, dealing with the realities of a single state is not going to be exactly easy.

History Club events

2012-01-30T15:15:00.001-05:00

Hi all,

From the club officers:

This is a reminder of a few events happening this week.

There will be a meeting this Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 11:30-12:30 in room A143. ... We will be discussing clothing orders, the book sale, 4^th year pub night and the next pub night. Anyone interested in being on the executive council next year are encouraged to come out so they can learn the ropes!

This Thursday, February 2, 2012 will be our first pub night of the New Year. It will take place at the Fox and the Fiddle beginning at 8pm. The theme is symposium. Symposiums held in Ancient Greece involved wine and discussion. At our symposium you are welcome to drink whatever you chose, alcoholic or not. There will be tables set up with a political or social question placed at each table (ie. Are men and women equal always in all ways? or Should marijuana be legalized?). You are invited to come out and discuss these questions with your friends and peers. Or just come out and hang out! Hope to see you there!
Sam

History Department Seminar Series: Michael Del Vecchio speaks on fish culture, Friday February 4

2012-01-30T14:06:00.002-05:00

From Derek Neal:

This is how Mike himself describes his talk:
Farming Fish:
Fish-culture and Sport in the late Nineteenth Century
Over the past one hundred and fifty years the province of Ontario has stocked
over twenty billion fish. This paper seeks to understand how local, provincial,
national, and transnational influences shaped the practice and ideology of fish-
culture in Ontario in the second half of the nineteenth century. Fish-culture, also
known as pisciculture or aquaculture, has defined angling ethics, fisheries science,
and state management of freshwater ecosystems in the province since the first
fish was stocked in 1864. The technology of fish-culture has altered almost every
freshwater ecosystem in Ontario within the reach of anglers. Unique water bodies
were replaced with "techno-sportscapes" through the introduction of non-native
fish species. Fish such as Rainbow Trout, whose native range is restricted to the
Pacific Rim, and Brown Trout, imported from Europe, have become “naturalized”
species in the Great Lakes and several other bodies of water throughout Ontario
as a result of stocking efforts. A vast body of literature exists on fish-culture
published between 1850 and 1900, the majority of which was written by and to
recreational fishers. Using books and sporting journals published in England, the
United States, and Canada, I demonstrate how these watery techno-spaces were
part of an international trend which can be located at the intersection of technology
and angling.

It's in A122 at 2:30 PM.

The cathedral of Middlesex

2012-01-30T11:00:00.001-05:00

The pic is from the Daily Mail. Here's why it is in the news (the Guardian):

An extraordinary medieval barn once dubbed "the cathedral of Middlesex" by Sir John Betjeman has been bought by English Heritage in a move to save it from decay, it is announced on Monday.
Just beyond today's sprawl of Heathrow, between the roaring M25 and M4 motorways and the straggling warehouses and industrial estates around the airport perimeter, the Great Barn at Harmondsworth has stood since 1426.
It has long been famous among building historians and admired by the poet and conservation campaigner Betjeman. Repair work is now being carried out – including to its huge roof – and it will open to the public regularly for the first time this spring.
"This is the best preserved medieval barn in England, probably in Europe, and the ninth largest ever built in England. For its size, and its state of preservation, it is unique," said Michael Dunn, an English Heritage historic buildings expert, of the 60 metres long, 12 metres wide and 11 metres high timber structure.
Justine Bayley, an archaeologist who lives in Harmondsworth village and secretary of the group that has acted as guardians for the barn, said: "If we had a pound for everyone who walks in here and says 'wow!' we could have re-roofed the building twice over. It's really the only appropriate response."

Those of us who have owned or used barns, packed them with hay for the winter will say "60 METERS LONG!"

This great barn was owned by a church corporation, which had the stability of ownership and wealth to build such a thing. Imagine the fertility of the area necessary to justify the investment. Now, of course, Middlesex is pretty much indistinguishable from suburban sprawl anywhere.

Thanks to sharp-eyed Paul Halsall.

For scale, and for the fun of it, another pic from the Guardian:

That beautiful destrier, again

2012-01-27T14:16:00.000-05:00

I am trying to put the finishing touches on my translation of Charny's Questions, and once again I have come up against the case of the beautiful destrier -- Tourney Question 8. I have had real experts look at this and they are baffled, and suggest that there is a transcription error. Therefore I am putting out this call to anyone who has access to Jean Rossbach's edition (in the Free University of Brussels library, or to the main mss., which are at Paris and Brussels. Your help in checking the text would be much appreciated.

Anyone who has sufficient confidence in their mastery of Middle French can contact me directly and I will send you the French text and my current translation, and you too can have a go at it.

Rent, charity, First Nations, Canada

2012-01-27T12:33:00.000-05:00

My colleague at Nipissing University, Catherine Murton Stoehr, wrote this fine piece for the Toronto Star:

Strengthening the chain between First Nations and non-aboriginal Canadians

On Tuesday, Assembly of First Nations national chief Shawn Atleo presented Governor General David Johnston a silver wampum belt symbolizing the relationship between the British people and the First Nations. He stopped short of saying what we all know to be true, that the chain is almost rusted out. One of the central reasons for this breakdown is that non-aboriginal Canadians see all money and resources given to First Nations people as charity, while people in Atleo’s world see it as rent. If you’re handing out charity, you get to set conditions like submission to unelected managers. But people paying rent don’t get to interfere in their landlords’ business.
When British officials took over the land and destroyed the hunt in northern Ontario, they promised to immediately rebuild aboriginal communities’ infrastructure and then to support that infrastructure forever. In the same way that a lease remains in effect as long as a person rents a house, the treaties remain in effect as long as non-First Nations people live in Canada. Consistently fulfilling the terms of the treaties is the minimum ethical requirement of living on the land of Canada.
Attawapiskat is covered by Treaty 9. Like all the treaties, the written promises that colonial officials made in exchange for the land were very small. Historians correctly point out that the real treaties were the agreements that colonial representatives and First Nations leaders made orally. Indeed, the written documents cut out many of the oral promises and all of the shared “spirit and intent” of the oral agreements. So when we in 2012 talk about fulfilling the written treaty documents, we are talking about a limited, achievable goal. The more difficult part will be recovering and living up to the spirit and intent of the treaties.
So what did Canadians offer in return for the right to live on First Nations land and to sell the trees, minerals, fish and furs they found there? In Treaty 9, we promised to provide teacher salaries, school buildings and educational equipment. The children of Attawapiskat have been without a safe school building since 1979 when their school was contaminated by a diesel spill that made them ill. In 2000 the community moved the children into temporary buildings. In 2008 the Canadian government refused the request of a delegation of children from Attawapiskat asking for a new school.
The worst effect of that decision was to deprive 400 children of a proper school and to lay on them all the social and economic exclusions that arise from not having education. Another more insidious effect was to poison the relationship between the ancestors of the treaty signatories. By failing to provide the promised school, our government made it impossible for Canadians in the Treaty 9 area to live up to their moral obligations.
It may be that Stephen Harper wishes to begin a radical new era of just relations with First Nations people, but when he stands up in Parliament and expresses frustration at Attawapiskat’s finances, he hurts his cause by engaging in an old tradition of political theatre. He is encouraging Canadians to continue believing that we are the generous benefactors of the First Nations people, but that is not true. They have been our benefactors since the days of the fur trade and we have become one of the wealthiest societies in human history.
The bad news is that we have been left holding the bag and the profits from a 200-year-old land heist. The good news is that there is a clear path forward. To strengthen the chain between the First Nations and non-aboriginal Canadians, we must turn our gaze from the shortcomings of First Nations people onto our own. We must restore our side of the treaty relationship, which means learning the written and oral promises made over our bit of Canada and requiring our representatives to put fulfilling them at the top of their priority list.
We must do this because we said we would and we are honest. The Canadian people are not thieves and profiteers and we will make good on the deals from which we have received one blessing after another. My generation will pay the rent in Attawapiskat.
Catherine Murton Stoehr is an instructor in the department of history at Nipissing University.

Constructed categories

2012-01-22T15:52:00.000-05:00

Hanne Blank, being interviewed in Salon about her book Straight, is talking about gender identity, but this discussion has a more general application:

[Interviewer] I’m quite attached to my identity as a gay man — and, to be honest, I would feel a little troubled having my category taken away from me.
See, that’s the thing, no one is going to take that away from you. No one can take that away from you. The only thing they can take away from you is the illusion that this is not something that is constructed. And that’s very, very different. Just because something is constructed as a social category, doesn’t mean that it’s not enormously meaningful. It doesn’t mean that we haven’t built a whole damn civilization on it. Doesn’t mean that we don’t live our daily lives on it, doesn’t mean that we don’t use it all the time every time we’re walking down the street. This is real. It’s stuff that has physical manifestations in the real world. But that does not mean that it is organic.
[Interviewer] Or innate.
Or inevitable.

Festival time in Harbin

2012-01-22T09:42:00.001-05:00

Some people have not got much winter this year, and some are even complaining about it. But in Harbin, Manchuria, they've got the snow and ice they need for their annual festival. Click on this pic to see these Chinese girls having fun, and go to the Big Picture to see lots more.

How one gained entree into the highest circles in 6th-century Europe

2012-01-21T14:29:00.004-05:00

This year I returned to the early Middle Ages or late Antiquity to teach a fourth-year seminar on Gregory of Tours. Gregory was a sixth century bishop of what is now western France and who wrote a massive history of his times, the Histories, or more commonly the History of the Franks. Gregory is a lot of fun to study because he is interested in lots of things and wrote with a great deal of personality (though how much of that personality is literary artefact is hard to say).

Gregory begins his history with this statement: "I wish first of all to explain my faith, so that whoever reads me may not doubt that I am a Catholic." This is followed by about two pages of a detailed creed or declaration of faith. Fair warning about his priorities, admittedly not very surprising from a bishop who is justifying his role as a teacher to his audience, which undoubtedly included his fellow bishops and would include in the future his successors in the church at Tours. For some people, this declaration was an essential preamble to anything else Gregory might say.. Gregory was completely in sympathy with that point of view.

Yesterday, I was reading the letters of St. Radegund in preparation for a class discussion of this famous nun who lived at the same time Gregory did. Radegund is a very interesting figure. Born as a Thuringian princess, she was carted off to Gaul while still a child, after the Franks had destroyed most of her family. On reaching adulthood, she was married to King Lothar of the Franks, presumably to strengthen the Frankish claim to overlordship of Thuringia. Radegund and Lothar never got along very well, and eventually she insisted on becoming a nun and establishing a convent where she could live the ascetic life surrounded by other like minded women – and some women who were also high-ranking refugees from court life. Radegund became the foremost female religious figure in Frankish Gaul, but never completely lost her royal status. One example of her working the system through her dual status was her acquisition of a piece or pieces of the True Cross from the Byzantine emperor. We can guess that if a random, distant nun had asked for such a fantastic gift, she would not have gotten it. Her request would never have gotten to the Emperor.

We dod not have Radegund's request for a relic, we do have something that looks like a thank you letter that she set off to Emperor Justin (II) and Empress Sophia once she had it. And a curious letter it is.
Here's the beginning of her letter:

To the August Justin and Sophia
The highest glory of the father, son, and nourishing spirit,
one god to be adored in this trinity,
majesty, triple person, simple substance,
equal consort and coeval with itself,
one force remaining the same, one power in three
(which the father begetting , the spirit enables),
indeed distinct in persons, joined in vigor,
of one nature, equal in strength, light, throne,
the trinity was always with him, ruling without time,
lacking no use nor capable by seizing. 10
Highest glory to you, creator of things and redeemer,
who, just, gives Justin headship in the world.
He claims, properly, the dominant fortress over kings,
who pleases the heavenly king by serving.
How deservedly he rules Rome and the Roman world
who follows what the dogma says from the cathedra of Peter,
what Paul sang far and wide, with one trumpet to thousands,
to heathens and the senseless he poured out salt from his mouth,
whose four-sided axle the wheel of his tongue circled,
cold hearts are warm from the faith of his eloquence. 20
Highest glory to you, creator of things and redeemer,
who, just, gives Justin headship in the world.
Strengthened, the disturbed faith of the church shines again
and venerable law returns to its former place.
Give back your vows to God, since the new purple holds whatever
the council of Chalcedon established.
Gaul sings this to your merits, Augustus,
the Rhone, the Rhine, the Danube, the Elbe do.
Beneath the western axle Galicia heard the deed,
Biscayne brought it to the nearby Basques. 30
The pious fable runs to the farthest people of the faith
and the British land across the ocean is favorable.
How well, lover, do you share the care with the lord!
You make his causes yours, he makes yours his.
Christ gives you the power, you give Christ the honor:
he gives the summit, you give back the faith.
There was nothing more on earth that he might give to be ruled,
nor more that you could give back than nourishing faith is strong.
Fathers sent into exile for the name of Christ
then came back, with the diadem to you. 40
Released from prison, residing in the former seat,
hold you to be one general good.
Curing so many sorrows of the confessors,
you come as a healing to innumerable people.

Presumably Radegund had in a previous communication established that she was the kind of person who was worthy of Imperial attention -- holy woman and influential Frankish queen. But just in case Justin and Sophia might have second thoughts, and be tempted to think that Radegund was only a barbarian they mistakenly had been overgenerous to, Radegund spends line after line of poetry buttering them up, showing that she is quite aware of current religious conflicts, is on the right side of them, and appreciates (weak word) Justin's role in establishing theological truth and restoring unjustly persecuted bishops to their sees. The man is a universal hero and his wife is not far behind him.

That's the way, or one way, that one established one's right to a place in the Big Time in sixth-century Christian Europe. Radegund may have been a Thuringian or a Frank, she was determined to show that she was no hick. One wonders if the letter had the desired effect.

Image: Radegund imagined by the illustrator of the Nuremberg Chronicle, 15th century.

Nobody for President

2012-01-20T14:25:00.000-05:00

Back in 1972, I was at a gathering of science fiction fans when I saw a prominent fan wearing what looked like a "Nixon for President" badge. That was such a rare sentiment in my circles that I couldn't believe my eyes. Sure enough, when I got closer I saw that it actually said, "Nobody for President."

It is getting to the point that this might be the official Republican motto for 2012.

Image: The Furry Freak Brothers chiming in at a later date.

Four Wordles (word clouds) based on my translation of Charny's Questions

2012-01-20T13:40:00.000-05:00

Wordles or word clouds are graphic arrangements of words indicating by the size of each word how often it appears in a text. How much can you read into that? Well, at the least it may alert you to something you might otherwise overlook.

In all of these "Charny" and "asks" are among the largest terms. That is because each of the 130 or so questions begins "Charny asks."

Jousting questions:

Proper size:
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4699960/Charny%27s_Questions_on_Jousting

Tourney questions:

Proper size:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4699970/Charny%27s_Questions_on_Tournaments

War questions:

Proper size:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1287540/Charny%27s_Questions_on_War

All together:

Proper size:

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4699987/Charny%27s_Questions

Have fun!

Snow in Egypt

2012-01-19T14:37:00.000-05:00

A YouTube video shows a significant amount of snow on the ground at Alexandria earlier this month:

But other videos brought up by the same search ("snow in Egypt") seem to show snow in Egypt in other recent years.

A Scandal in Belgravia

2012-01-16T21:39:00.000-05:00

I just saw the first of this season's episodes of the BBC's Sherlock. I think it continues to be an absolutely brilliant adaptation. But then I really, really liked A Knight's Tale, and not just for the jousting.

Ian McKay speaks -- the annual Department of History Keynote Lecture, January 26

2012-01-16T09:49:00.000-05:00

From Jamie Murton:

The History Department is very pleased to announce the visit to North Bay of one of the leading historians of Canada working today, Dr. Ian McKay of Queen’s University. McKay’s recent book, Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada won the 2008 John A. Macdonald prize from the Canadian Historical Association for best book of the year. His article "The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” is remaking how historians understand the Canadian past. He works on Canadian cultural history, working-class history, the history of Canadian socialism and the history of Nova Scotia.

At Nipissing University McKay will deliver the History Department’s annual keynote lecture, “Warrior Nation: the Use and Abuse of History in Harper’s Canada,” on Thursday, Jan 26, at 7:30 pm in H106.

As well, he will participate, along with our own Dr. Larry Patriquin, in a panel discussion “Unite the Left North Bay?

A Community Conversation,” on Wednesday, Jan 25, at 8 pm at the WKP Kennedy Gallery, 150 Main St E, North Bay.

For more information e-mail Jamie Murton at jmurton@nipissingu.ca or Catherine Murton Stoehr at mstoehr@nipissingu.ca

After 35 years

2012-01-15T14:29:00.001-05:00

It was about 35 years ago that I was introduced to the joys of chocolate croissants in Toronto. I'm pretty sure they were sold in only a few places, like the P'tit Gourmet, a really neat delicatessen specializing in French food.

Finally, chocolate croissants have reached Bonfield, Ontario. Not exactly a French-style croissant, more like a North American crescent roll. But not bad.

And get this, city people. It costs 75 CENTS. The one cheap thing for sale on the entire planet.

Two pictures of Afghanistan, December 2011

2012-01-15T08:33:00.003-05:00

From The Big Picture, two views of an undercapitalized society, a miller and a fuel scavenger. I am heating with wood at the moment, but I have electric backup. That picture reminds me of things I saw in India.

Click the pic for a better view.

It continues

2012-01-14T16:43:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Arabist.net and AhramOnline.

Thoughts on revolution and politics from Egypt

2012-01-14T11:30:00.000-05:00

Egyptians are in the middle of something very important, and so what they have to say is of particular interest.

Arabist.net has provided us with an English translation of an article by the liberal Egyptian academic Samer Soliman. I include the following excerpt in hopes you will follow the link to the whole thing:

A critical stance in support of my colleagues in the Revolution
By Samer Soliman, al-Shurouk, 9 January 2012
The revolution’s one-year anniversary represents a chance for reassessment and self-criticism by all those who participated in it. From this standpoint, the criticism that I direct at the positions and ideas of some of my revolutionary colleagues is the criticism of a comrade and has no trace of superiority. Its aim is to improve the performance of reform and revolutionary currents and get past unnecessary divisions in order to achieve our shared goal: establishing a state based on freedom, social justice and human dignity. I have four criticisms for some of my colleagues.
First: Absolute hostility to parties and to organizing is a fatal mistake
Politics, by one definition, is the management and organization of shared and collective interests. You are responsible for managing the affairs of your own home. However, managing the affairs of the entire building is not your responsibility alone, but rather the responsibility of the union of landlords, tenants or the like. This is politics. Politics is nothing but a collective activity that aims to organize the affairs of the state and society. Consequently, whoever is hostile to organizing is unwittingly hostile to politics. If you refuse to organize yourself in a party or group, how can you engage in an activity that basically aims at organizing society and the state? If you accept being organized in small groups, but absolutely reject parties, then you are hostile to the politics that aims to run the state apparatus. As a result, you insist on marginalizing yourself on the pretext of keeping your “revolutionary purity” away from party maneuvering. Yes, politics does not depend on party organizations alone, but is also based on non-party organizations such as pressure groups. However, these pressure groups are not an alternative to parties. Environmental groups, for example, push through their demands to limit pollution by communicating with parties, and cooperating with them and offering them support to the extent that they adopt programs to protect the environment. Whoever decides to act through politics must be a member in an organization of some sort: a party that aims to reach power or participate in it; a pressure group that does not wield power directly but which exerts influence on it; a union that defends workers’ rights in a certain profession, etc. The important thing is that members of every type of organization cannot do without the other types, and that true change only comes through integration and forming alliances among different types of organization.

The article continues with sections on the following points:

Second: Revolution does not mean toppling the regime immediately, and revolution is not opposed to reformThird: The older generation is the wrong enemyFourth: Construction cannot wait for demolition to be complete, and the economy cannot wait for the revolution to be complete

It just breathes common sense.

Intellectual goodies on the Internet -- two sets of economics posts

2012-01-14T03:33:00.007-05:00

Will McLean has a wide and serious interest in late medieval society, especially that of 14th and 15th century England. Currently he is interested in how English noble households worked, and is investigating them through their preserved account books. A number of people I know, and perhaps more readers whom I don't know, may find his explorations worth reading. This looks like a good place to start; from there you might follow the "Economics" tag, backward and forward.

The very validity of the academic tradition(s) of economic thought is being debated, by economists most of all. If at this point you are curious about what university students are actually being taught in introductory economics classes, then you might want to wander over to Brad DeLong's blog and follow the "Econ 1" postings starting, say, here. Brad DeLong (who teaches at Berkeley) is a prominent controversialist and critic of much of what has happened in the United States in the last 10 years, so he is not a neutral voice. He has a lot to say on a lot of subjects, and if you follow him you will be exposed to a lot of material, including the arguments of people he disagrees with. Some of this will be economic arguments that I find rather opaque, but others will be of wider relevance.

Image: loafing -- and working -- around the old manse.

Catamarca province, Argentina

2012-01-13T12:37:00.000-05:00

Just one of the amazing landscapes that the Dakar Rally, an extreme-conditions vehicle competition, went through. This from the Big Picture, natch, and you should click on it to get a better look.

Europe?

2012-01-11T18:25:00.000-05:00

Over at the New York Times blog site, Frank Jacobs has a long article on "Where is Europe?"

This nifty map is the least of it:

Bhaktapur, Nepal in the monsoon.

2012-01-09T12:57:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Anuar Patjane, the Big Picture, and the National Geographic Society.

One estimate of the cost of the War with Iran

2012-01-08T13:57:00.000-05:00

By Orrin Schwab via Gary Sick:

If there is near unanimity in the Congress to go to war with Iran I say lets go. Lets do it! They are the duly elected representatives of the people of the United States and they have determined that war with Iran is in the best interests of the country. We should initiate hostilities as soon as practicable.

Here are some parameters to consider for our war:

1. Iran is 1.6 million square kilometers and has approximately 80 million
inhabitants (77-78 million plus).

2. That makes Iran four times the area of Iraq and three times the
population of Iraq.

3. The Iraq War was completed very quickly, and very easily. But the
occupation, i.e. the reduction of resistance lasted ten years and has
produced a relatively weak state.

4. In order to do things right this time, we need sufficient ground
forces to secure a mountainous multiethnic country with more than two
thousand years of national history. We may be welcomed as liberators
but coalition forces ultimately met with armed resistance from
numerous groups many of whom practiced deadly suicide attacks.

5. We need a long term occupational force for Iran. I think an effective
occupation of 80 million people spread over 1.6 million square
kilometers should require well over 1 million well trained troops for
at least 5 years maybe 10 years if things go badly.

6. The only way we can provide this level of forces is through a return to
the Draft. The Selective Service system needs to activated
immediately.
All military reserves needed to be recalled to active duty while we
begin the process of training millions of young male and female
draftees for service in Iran. A five year occupation should require,
ballpark, 5 million draftees. Of course, we have the manpower.
According to the CIA, the U.S. has 120 million males and females
between the ages of 18 and 49 who are fit for military service.

7. The direct financial cost of the war should be a multiple of the Iraq
War which was 800 billion from 2003 through 2011. The cost of
deploying troops to Afghanistan averages about one million dollars per
troop. If we plan on 1 million troops for five years that would mean
5 trillion in direct costs financed by the U.S. Treasury through
2016-2017 and then undetermined costs thereafter.

8. The economic benefits of this exercise in military Keynesian economics
should be huge. Unemployment should disappear. War related
manufacturing should be a virtual renaissance for domestic industry.
The financing of the war will significantly increase the public debt, anathema to Republicans, but they are spoilsports. They reject military Keynesianism, which worked wonders for Japan and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s as well as the United States and the Soviet Union.

9. No whining about casualties. The U.S. could sustain hundreds of
thousands or more total casualties, including deaths from combat,
disabling wounds, and huge numbers of psychiatric losses related to
combat and the effect of concussive injuries to the brain.

Source.

Canada has a warship sailing to the Middle East right now to fight terrorism, so this is us, too.

Endeavor over Ponte Vedra, Florida

2012-01-08T12:51:00.001-05:00

Thanks to James Vernacotola, the Big Picture, and the National Geographic Society. Click to see it larger.

Today's date on the Mayan calendar

2012-01-07T17:35:00.000-05:00

More here.

From The Big Picture and the National Geographic Photo Contest, 2011

2012-01-07T12:50:00.000-05:00

Kent Shiraishi captures the first snow at a nature spot in Hokkaido, Japan. Don't forget to click to see a bigger version. As usual, the bigger picture is much more impressive.

Michael Jackson is not dead

2012-01-06T17:03:00.000-05:00

Not if Electric Guest has anything to say about it.

Louis Farrakhan and Ron Paul

2012-01-03T15:33:00.001-05:00

An amazing column at the Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Read the whole thing. These excerpts may tell you why you should:

As I often do on this blog, I'd like journey back to the Crack era--the late 80s and early 90s--when the general sense was that the black youth of America had lost their minds.... What we wanted was a great messenger who would talk to us, instead of talking to white people. You see, whatever our anger, we were American (though we would have said different) and believed in our talent to reinvent ourselves and compete with the world.

The need was real. And the man who best perceived that need--Louis Farrakhan--preached bigotry, and headed a church with a history of violence, and patriarchal and homophobic views. We knew this. Some of us even endorsed it. A few of us debated about it. But, ultimately we didn't care. Farrakhan--and his cadre of clean disciplined black men and modest, chaste black women--spoke to our deep, and inward, sense that we were committing a kind of slow suicide, that--as the rappers put it--we were self-destructing.

Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, Farrakhan's beguiled young African-Americans. At the height of his powers, Farrakhan convened a national meeting of black men on the Mall. (Forgive my vagueness. The number is beside the point. It was a grip of dudes.) The expectation, among some media, was for violence. What they got instead was a love-in. I was there. I know how to describe the feeling of walking from my apartment at 14th and Euclid, down 16th street, and seeing black women, of all ages, come out on the street and cheer. I can't explain the historical and personal force of that. It defied everything they said we were, and, during the Crack Era, so much of what we come to believe.

I think about that moment and I get warm--and then I think about Farrakhan and I go cold. The limitations of the man who'd orchestrated one of the great moments of my life were evident as soon as he took the stage and offered a bizarre treatise on numerology. The limitations became even more apparent in the coming months, as Farrakhan used the prominence he'd gained to launch a world tour in which he was feted by Sani Abacha and the slave-traders of the Sudan.

During Farrakhan's heights in the 80s and 90s, national commenters generally looked on in horror. They simply could not understand how an obvious bigot could capture the imagination of so many people....what the pundits never got was that Farrakhan promised something more--improvement, minus the need to beg from white people. Farrakhan promised improvement through self-reliance--an old tradition stretching back to our very dawn. To our minds, the political leaders of black America had fled the field.

I've thought a lot about Farrakhan, recently, watching Ron Paul's backers twist themselves in knots to defend what they have now euphemistically label as "baggage." I don't think it makes much sense to try to rebut the charges here. No minds will changed.

Still let us remember that we are faced with a candidate who published racism under his name, defended that publication when it was convenient, and blamed it on ghost-writers when it wasn't, whose is at home with Lost-Causers, and whose take on the Civil Rights Act is at home with segregationists. Ostensibly this is all coincidence, or if it isn't, it should be excused because Ron Paul is a lone voice speaking on the important issues that plague our nation.

I have heard this reasoning before.

... as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul

It is not enough to simply proffer Paul as a protest candidate.One must fully imagine the import of a Paul presidency.How, precisely, would Paul end the drug war? What, exactly, would he do about the Middle East? How, specifically,would the world look for women under a Ron Paul presidency?

And then the dispatches must be honestly grappled with: It must be argued that a man who could not manage a newsletter, should be promoted to managing a nuclear arsenal. Failing that, it must be asserted that a man who once claimed that black people were knowingly injecting white people with HIV, who fund-raised by predicting a race-war, who handsomely profited from it all, should lead the free world. If that line falls too, we are forced to confess that Ron Paul regularly summoned up the specters of racism for his own politically gain, and thus stands convicted of moral cowardice.

Let us stipulate that all politicians compromise. But the mayhem and death which attended the talents of Thomas Watson and George Wallace, renders their design into a school of sorcery all its own. In that light, it is fair to ask that if Ron Paul was willing to sacrifice black people to garner the support of the bigoted mob, who, and what, else might he sacrifice?

...

The fervency for Ron Paul is rooted in the long-held hope of a reedemer, of one who will rise up and cut through the dishonest pablum of horse-races and sloganeering and speak to the people. It is a species of saviorism which hopes to deliver a prophet upon the people, who will be better than the people themselves.

But every man is a prophet, until he faces a Congress.

Le Saint Suaire et la collégiale de Lirey (Aube) by Alain Hourseau

2012-01-03T13:18:00.000-05:00

A forthcoming book on Charny, his family and the Shroud of Turin. If your French is weak, Google Translate works pretty well on this description.

http://alain.hourseau.free.fr/livre-7.html

More from Phil Paine on intelligent protest

2012-01-03T12:15:00.000-05:00

More from Phil on the limitations of current forms of activism. An excerpt:

Protests within a functioning democracy are fundamentally different from [the fall of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring]. The protestors face no significant danger. This is not to say that we should turn a blind eye to cops violating civil rights, strong-arming peaceful demonstrators, or the kind of treasonous fraud perpetrated by the authorities that occurred during the G-20 summit in Toronto. All those responsible for these crimes against my country should be punished severely for them, though I know that they never will be. But there is a world of difference between a brief stay in a local lock-up and a court appearance, and facing a firing squad or ten years digging rocks with your bare hands in a mine. Protesters in Canada do not face danger great enough to classify their actions as examples of great courage. I’m not implying that they shouldn’t engage in protest. Protest is urgently needed. But it is not helpful or honest to misrepresent its nature.
What motivates real protest in a democracy is not physical courage, but civic virtue....This is why I do not feel any gladness when professional pseudo-revolutionaries, conventional ideological “anarchists” or “radicals” participate in such protests, or attempt to take them over. They are there precisely to validate the “good guy” image of the authorities, and to torpedo the moral legitimacy of the protest. They perform exactly the same debasing function that Islamic Fundamentalist groups have done for the Arab Spring.
Within a democratic polity, one finds protests occurring all the time, precisely because a free society should be open to them, and should encourage them. But such protests differ greatly in their quality. Some protests tell us little more than that somebody is angry about something. Since another, equally large or influential group may be equally angry about an opposite state of affairs, this seldom has any influence on either opinion or policy. More sophisticated protest aims at influencing public opinion, by 1) making clear what is wrong about some public policy; 2) putting forward a different, presumably better policy; and 3) convincing a broad public of the wisdom of acting to this end. In a democracy, effective protest should merely be the initial step in a process culminating in real political organization and action. This action must, to be genuinely effective, translate into people marking x’s on ballots in the end. If it is merely a ritual, an amusement, or a way of blowing off steam, it is not progressive.

Read the rest.

Pictures of Iraq from the Big Picture

2012-01-01T23:01:00.001-05:00

Another excellent photo collection from the Boston.com site.

Image: Ihab Najam, an unemployed security guard pessimistic about the future.

Favorite blog posts of 2011

2012-01-01T21:55:00.001-05:00

It was harder to pick them this year. In particular my selection of Arab Spring posts seems rather random even to me. But with such a huge series of events in train it might take omniscience to make the "right" choice.

Shocker

2012-01-01T09:46:00.000-05:00

Shock 1: The Globe and Mail leads off the new year (on its mobile site at least) with an op-ed on There's no way out but a new politics of fairness.
Shock 2: It's written by Michael Ignatieff.
Shock 3: It makes sense.

Another good Globe piece from the estimable John Allemang on the revolutions ?to come?

Reflections on 2011

2011-12-29T23:33:00.001-05:00

Brian Ulrich reflects and analyzes developments in the Arab countries over at Brian's Coffeehouse. This particularly caught my attention:

One framework we have seen the past year is that "the nation," meaning the people, is rising up against internal oppressors so as to establish a new government on its own behalf. One question now is how the "nations" will be defined, or what identities will be on people's minds as they act politically. In Iraq, probably moreso than under Saddam Hussein, loyalty to a community of Sunnis, Shi'ites, or Kurds competes with that to Iraq as a whole. Those "Arab Spring" countries with religious differences will face the question of deciding if those differences preclude national unity. This issue might be most explosive in Syria, but for the moment, it is also a subject for discussion in Egypt, where salafis see Christians not as equal citizens, but as a subject population under Muslim rule.

More good stuff here.

More from Moscow

2011-12-25T23:53:00.000-05:00

From msnbc.com:

For many protesters, the animosity goes way beyond Putin the candidate. Vasily's father, Fyodor, now 50, says he watched in shock as the Soviet Union fell 20 years ago, then in horror as Russia passed, rudderless, through a decade of economic collapse and war. And then came Putin. Stability. Prosperity. "All over the country there was a scream of joy when we got rid of this alcoholic, Yeltsin. We finally saw a man who was sane, who was physically fit, and he wasn't reading from his notes," recalled the older Gnuchev.

His son Vasily says he was too young to remember the bad old days of democratic Russia. But he prospered under Putin, and always felt free. And that's the real problem. The Putin regime's reportedly widespread electoral fraud pulled the rug from under a whole generation who believed in their leader, who believed in Putinism. "Now we see that everything is a lie," Vasily explained. "The Kremlin just stole our votes -- it's just incompatible with the picture of the world we grew up in."

It's that humiliation -- indeed, violation -- mixed with anger that seems to drive many Russian, middle-class protesters into the streets -- even when the elements are conspiring against them -- and will keep the pressure on Putin, with promises of more protests to come. But what if this "people power" movement really blossoms, only to be thwarted yet again, not in a free and fair election come March, but by another brazen, Putin-led ploy to retain power?

As in Cairo, so in Moscow

2011-12-24T09:08:00.000-05:00

From today's Globe and Mail, a report of an activist named Navalny speaking at a huge anti-Putin rally:

“We have enough people here to take the Kremlin,” he shouted to the crowd. “But we are peaceful people and we won't do that — yet. But if these crooks and thieves keep cheating us, we will take what is ours.”

Crushing the revolution--but at what price?

2011-12-23T13:45:00.000-05:00

From Arabist.net, an essay by an Egyptian novelist, who argues that the Army's efforts to preserve its position in the Egyptian state is destroying the Egyptian state.

Goodbye to Military Rule

By Ezzedine Choukri-Fishere, al-Tahrir, 20 December 2011

...

What the Military Council has not realized is that the explosion in January was the outcome of a blockage in the regime’s arteries, and not just Mubarak’s. What the Military Council has not understood is that the state’s solid structure – the security regime – is the real problem, and not Mubarak.

If the Military Council realized this, they would strive to change the political equation for society to enter the state as a partner. If they realized this, they would have reached an understanding with civilians in February over a joint form of rule that would close the curtain on the past and protect the independence of the military establishment in the future. It seems, however, that they haven’t realized this, they didn’t believe it when they were told, and they didn’t listen.

Instead of this, they listen to the ones staging a coup against the revolution, who portrayed to them that violence, terrorizing the people, and control of the state media would put an end to mass support for the revolution and to the revolutionary forces themselves, one after the other.

What is the result of this? The result is that these coup-makers are tearing down with their own hands the structure they’re trying to protect. They’re sullying the image of the army in the eyes of society and are placing it in the same category as the Interior Ministry cronies involved in murder, torture and abuse. The result is that these coup-makers are provoking the people’s ire and resentment against the army. In the past, these feelings of outrage, resentment, and fear would lead to submissiveness and surrender. Now, however, they will motivate society to gain control of the army, open up its files, hold it accountable, and to do other things the coup-makers were trying to prevent.

Coup-makers go home. You’re bringing down the structure on top of all of our heads.

I'd say this same dynamic applies to more than just Egypt.

Ron Paul, dishonest segregationist creep

2011-12-21T13:38:00.002-05:00

When you are trying to get into a meditative state and all you can think of is how contemptible Ron Paul is, it is time to LET IT OUT!

Ron Paul seems to be this generation's Eugene McCarthy, a politician brave enough to oppose American imperialism and denounce its destructive effects, who has attracted a deal of support from young people, and who otherwise has a rather eccentric record. The American political system has niches for politicians with unusual views, and sometimes they rise out of obscurity and have a real effect.

Ron Paul is giving libertarianism (so called) a much higher profile than it has ever had. I say so-called libertarianism because Paul's brand seems to be focused entirely on assuring, through decentralization of political power, that those who have won wealth and privilege by fair means or foul, get to keep their goodies. Is that libertarianism? If so you can keep it.

Actually, there are more objectionable parts of Ron Paul's program. For instance, "liberty" doesn't reach as far as women controlling their own bodies. It seems to me that there is a religious agenda lurking behind the libertarian facade. Liberty doesn't include the First Amendment ("no establishment of religion")?

But the one that gets me where I live is Paul's opposition to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. It mightily offends me to hear the dishonest segregationist arguments of my youth recycled in the 2010s.

Dishonest? Paul and his son and his other supporters present their opposition to racial equality in the public sphere as a simple matter of preserving freedom of association. In fact segregation in the south was a prime example of the historic winners using state power, economic domination and terror to secure the continuation of privilege won by force of arms. And calling the result liberty. Or "states' rights.

Segregation was not a matter of individual choice, it was a policy designed and enforced by the enfranchised at the expense of the disenfranchised. To talk about segregation without acknowledging that is deeply dishonest. When (apparently) young people talk about this issue in abstract terms, I think they may have been suckered. But I don't give Ron Paul the benefit of that doubt.

Tournaments on TV -- and YouTube

2011-12-19T13:56:00.001-05:00

Here's a 2008 BBC Timewatch episode on William Marshal and the 12th century melee tournament. It is good, they talked to the right experts and took the cameras to Interesting and relevant locations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0LamXQ39EQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Matthew Gabriele's book reviewed in The Medieval Review

2011-12-19T12:08:00.001-05:00

Gabriele, Matthew. An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne,
the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 202. $90.00. ISBN: 9780199591442.

Reviewed by Thomas F. X. Noble
University of Notre Dame
tnoble@nd.edu

"Charlemania" has been a growing industry in recent years and Matthew
Gabriele now takes a significant place on the shop floor. His brief
and readable book demonstrates how, especially in the eleventh
century, a Frankish "Golden Age" was constructed, and with what
consequences. There is a line in Flannery O'Connor about the danger
of parking your buggy on the track when the Dixie Special is coming
down the line. Gabriele is the buggy and Anne Latowsky's forthcoming
book is the Dixie Special. Nevertheless, I do not think the buggy was
flattened by the train. I really like this book and learned a lot
from it. Occasionally its prose is over the top and, in many
instances, it is more colloquial than some traditionalists find
congenial. The argument and research are critical, thorough, and
sound.

Gabriele's method is basically aggregative. He continually puts
layers of evidence on top of each other until they add up to a
cohesive, coherent picture. In the first chapter "The Birth of a
Frankish Golden Age" gives away the story and the remaining chapters
flesh it out. Gabriele shows, following other good scholars, that in
the ninth and tenth centuries, Charlemagne was not always visible and
was often contentious when he did emerge. Yet a deep tradition was
implanted. Then he, and with him his age, became a figure of prime
interest, a holy figure, and the ruler of an empire that stretched
from Iceland to Jerusalem. Demonstrating these points alone would
have been original and important but what sets this book apart is its
careful explanation of how and why this happened and why it matters.
Specialists in vernacular literature know perfectly well that
Charlemagne exploded in the twelfth century. Robert Folz famously
showed that the liturgical Charlemagne took flight in the same period,
only to soar ever higher in later times. Anne Latowsky, who
ironically teaches in a French department, is going to reveal the
continuing power of the Latin tradition. What we have lacked is the
essential background.

Interest in Charlemagne appears in various settings. For example, 68
of 97 forgeries of Charlemagne's charters come from religious houses
that sought to claim him as their founder. No other ruler even comes
close as a "source" of legitimacy. But historical writers added to
the dossier, beginning with Benedict of St. Andrea who, around 970,
was the first to attribute to Charlemagne a journey to Jerusalem.
Materials dating from the late eleventh century and stemming from
Charroux also have this fictitious journey. Around 1080 the
Descriptio Qualiter also has the story and adds a visit to
Constantinople where Charlemagne received relics and acknowledgment.
Crusade narratives sometimes said that armies followed Charlemagne's
path to the East. These sources seem to have drawn on a common fund
of tradition; they are not demonstrably dependent on one another.
Little by little Charlemagne was portrayed as the preeminent earthly
power. Why?

Drawing on late antique and biblical resources, the Carolingians had
defined their realm as a Davidic kingdom based on Old Testament models
with Aachen as a new Jerusalem (it was a new Rome too, but that is not
Gabriele's theme). In the post-Carolingian world, Jerusalem assumed
growing prominence. More churches emulated Jerusalem's churches,
especially the Anastasis. The liturgy increasingly drew on themes
pertaining to Jerusalem. Relics of the passion proliferated. This
constant and rising emphasis on an imaginary Jerusalem made the
tangible city more important, more desirable. The eleventh century
witnessed a dramatic increase in pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In 1026
Richard of St.-Vannes led perhaps 700 people to the East and then both
the number and size of pilgrimages expanded sharply. As many as
12,000 people left Germany for the Holy Land in 1064-65.

The Carolingians uncoupled empire from Rome which opened up real and
imagined possibilities for assigning Charlemagne rule over all kinds
of lands and peoples. The imaginary and expanded Carolingian Empire
came to be seen as a kind of imperial Christendom with roots in an
historic past but relevance in a fraught present. Prophetic texts
said that at the end of time a Frankish king would lay down his
scepter on the Mount of Olives and thereby bring Roman and Christian
imperium to an end. So an "empire of memory" lived on and one of its
key dimensions was that a Frankish ruler would defend Christendom from
its enemies right to the end. In complex ways Antichrist, pilgrimage,
Charlemagne, and a Christomimetic emperor entered a coherent
narrative: "Charlemagne's militant, Frankish, Christian empire
prefigured the Last Emperor's; and in the eleventh century, past and
future began to converge" (128).

Talking about Charlemagne was, thus, a way of unlocking a glorious
past that mattered in new ways in the present, particularly as that
past was seen as a militant one. Gabriele has much to say about the
coalescence of a European identity built on a constantly shifting
Frankish one. He demonstrates the importance for historians to be
attentive to many kinds of sources. To be sure, he is alert to the
potential relevance of his findings for the First CrusaSde. But he is
wise enough not to claim that he has explained that phenomenon. Urban
II, Gabriele notes, never mentioned Charlemagne. But Urban's words
were sounded, and resonated, in a world with a thick web of
associations which Gabriele disentangles beautifully.

In addition to his, let us say, empirical findings, Gabriele has
another agenda that will give the attentive reader a lot to think
about. He quotes (66) Keith Michael Baker--a distinguished historian
of modern France--who said that "[h]istory is memory contested;
memory is history controlled and fixed." I might have wished that
Gabriele's approach to this fascinating, original, and important
exposition of the theme was a little less allusive, or implicit, but I
think he is absolutely correct to place emphasis on how, with specific
reference to Charlemagne, history and memory were manipulated,
adjusted, intertwined, and differentiated.

Here is a suggestion: take Gabriele's book, Amy Remensnyder's
Remembering Kings Past (1995), Jay Rubenstein's Armies of
God (2011), and Anne Latowsky's forthcoming (2012) book and teach
a terrific seminar.

The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter

2011-12-17T20:59:00.000-05:00

I am in the middle of this very interesting book. You might expect that the book would have a lot to say about the history of dividing black from white. But there is much more about American theorizing about the differences between the various "European" races, and about which were superior or inferior. I was not completely unaware of the disapprobation of "native" (white) Americans for poor, Catholic Irish immigrants (among them some of my ancestors), but I was taken aback by the amount of energy during the 19th century into proving that the "Celtic" race was at the bottom of the stack, and a menace.

And there's this note on page 107:

Rhode Island delayed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution until 1870, because legislators feared that it might enfranchise members of the Celtic race. Black men had been able to vote there since 1840.

6th century names that start with G

2011-12-16T08:07:00.001-05:00

Gallomagnus, Galswinth, Garachar, Gararic, Garivald, Germanus, Godigisel, Godomar, Gogo, Goiswinth, Grindio, Grippo, Gundegisel, Gunthar.

Not to mention Gregory.

In other letters, let's not forget Chramn, Chundo, and Chuppa.

Muhlberger covers the war in Iraq, 2006-2011

2011-12-15T21:06:00.002-05:00

The war in Iraq is over, at least the American part. Who knows what turmoil, even civil wars may follow? But almost all the American forces are gone.

This is practically a non-story in the American and international media. [Or so I thought. See the first comment below.] Therefore I am posting a link to blog posts labelled "Iraq," which gives you access to the corpus of the renown foreign correspondent, Steve Muhlberger.

I am quite aware that the war began in 2003; that was before I started to blog. I freely admit that the closest I got to Iraq was when I flew over Turkey and Iran on my way to New Delhi in 2005. Some of the posts with Iraq have nothing to do with the just-past war. The very best stuff was from the Iraqi staff of Inside Iraq. But I thought somebody should reflect back on the war, and since I am the person I have the most influence over, I am doing it myself.

Apologies for the inevitable broken links. I am particularly sorry that so many pictures have disappeared.

My brief summing up: this is what you got instead of Mars. Mars, in fact, would have been cheaper.

A delicious passage from Gregory of Tours -- or rather translator Lewis Thorpe

2011-12-15T12:12:00.000-05:00

Here's the Latin from Histories (or The History of the Franks) 7.2:

Quibus discedentibus, coniuncti Dunenses cum reliquis Carnotenis, de vestigio subsecuntur, simile sorte eos adficientes, qua ipsi adfecti fuerant, nihil in domibus vel extra domus vel de domibus relinquentes.

Thorpe's English:

[Raiders from Chateaudun wreaking reprisals on attackers from Blois and Orleans] meted out to them the same treatment which they themselves had received: they left nothing inside the houses and nothing outside the houses, and they knocked the houses down.

With apologies to the long-ago victims of this violent episode, that's pretty amazing.

Image: the same action, same country, somewhat later.

The literary art of writing final examinations

2011-12-14T12:40:00.008-05:00

On Monday I gave a final exam in my Crusade and Jihad course. It required the students to write two short essays, which I had told the students in advance.

Chatting with the students before the exam began, I was apprised of a curious fact: a prof in another department, a prof also fond of requiring essay questions on finals, expected those essays to have titles and complained bitterly when they were not provided. I was flabbergasted. I had never had a student title a final exam essay. Though I did of course get several from the students in this week's exam.

Question: If you are a prof, do you expect or get titles on exam essays? If you have written essays on exams, have you felt inspired to put titles on them?

Do math answers ever get titles, I wonder...

Image: Sweating over the perfect title while studying for the big exam...

What is it about Toronto, anyway?

2011-12-13T20:38:00.000-05:00

Or Ontario? Or Canada?

Phil Paine recently wrote an essay on the theme, "Nobody [today] is likely to laud Toronto as the exemplar of anything."

I bumped into a business traveller, recently, from the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh. After discussing Andhra, he asked me, perplexed, why the urban infrastructure in Toronto was so backward. I could only be embarrassed. How could I tell him that there were no Hubbards, Harrises, or Hastingses around, and if there were, they would never be permitted to do anything.

He concludes by pointing directly at Toronto's mayor. And he's quite right to do so. Except...

He actually won the election (though by making assertions and promises that he must have known were untrue). No one claims that the vote was rigged. Nor is he the first of his kind.

This short-circuits the obvious question, which is where do the creepy leaders we all too often get stuck with come from? and replaces it with the question, where do the people who elect them come from? Canada has many virtues, some large, some small, but it also has within its collective soul a big lump of small-minded, uncharitable hatefulness. Don't believe in a collective Canadian soul? You may be right. Then where do all the people come from who do not value the Canadian virtues that I so admire? The people who, for a small instance, use the comment section of Globe and Mail to unendingly complain that Pierre Trudeau wrecked the country? I am not an admirer of Trudeau, actually, but this is ludicrous. The whole nearly 40 years I've lived in this country, it's been wrecked? What are the values held by such people? What process produces them?

Anyway, Phil's essay reminds us that we can do better, and have. Take a look.

Image: No one would build this today.

A great site for historical pictures of Toronto

2011-12-12T10:15:00.000-05:00

Here's the link, and a couple of samples. Thanks to Andrew.

Yonge Street in the 70s:

Chorley Park, an official residence of the Lieutenant Governor, 1910s:

Iceland's president explains -- democracy was on the line

2011-12-11T14:25:00.000-05:00

In the financial crisis of 2008-, Iceland refused to saddle its citizenry with huge debts incurred by private banks, despite tremendous pressure from European governments and institutions. Today the president of Iceland described the danger to democracy at that time on CBC Radio's Sunday Edition.

Have a listen and learn:

How 15 demonstrators stood between police protecting the PM's office and rock-throwing protesters, preventing who knows what.
How when all of Iceland's allies turned their backs on Iceland, or made terrible threats against it, only China (!) was willing to discuss aid and support
How "Gordon Brown [UK PM] will be remembered in Iceland when he has been forgotten in Britain."

You will have to listen to, or skip over, some other material at the beginning of the segment.

Image: One of Iceland's other minor problems during the same period.

It's not cannon law, people

2011-12-09T15:10:00.000-05:00

It's more like this...

Best cover on an early medieval book that I can recall...

2011-12-09T11:02:00.002-05:00

...goes to this beauty:

As someone who studies formal combats, I should probably have a look at a book called Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire. Don't you think?

Update: Another candidate in the same category:

End of term anxiety? and historical movies

2011-12-08T17:06:00.000-05:00

Today was the last class meeting this term for my course on the History of Islamic Civilization. It was the due date for a term paper, too. So many students had asked for one or two day extensions that I rather expected a very low attendance and very few papers handed in. (I actually don't mind giving extensions, not when I've heard credible reports from numerous students that they are swamped at end of term.)

Imagine my surprise when the vast majority showed up with essays in hand! Was it just end of term anxiety that made them think they needed those extensions?

The class did me the courtesy of watching one of my favorite movies, The Man Who Would Be King (1975), which I used in place of a lecture on "the West's advantage," i.e. what factors led to European dominance of the globe by the 19th century. The movie doesn't really have much profound to say about that subject, but it has its virtues, besides being fun. First, it portrays the confidence (arrogance?) that Westerners eventually enjoyed, and implies the lack of confidence that might inflict the people on the other side of the confrontation. Second, after lots of discussion of the rise and fall of Middle Eastern and Central Asian empires in the course of the term, the class got to see a dramatic, schematic depiction of the rise of one tiny empire.

I have a short list of movies in my head which I think of as "history as it really works" or "what you won't learn from your classes or textbooks." These are not necessarily realistic historical movies -- prominent on the list is The Life of Brian -- but they do cut through the crap, or at least provide an opening for a laugh of recognition of some truth or other. The Man Who Would Be King could easily encourage more mythological thinking as anything else. It's a movie about Freemasonry, for goodness sake. But for its tracing of the rise and fall of "Uta the Terrible," and for the figure of Billy Fish, it makes my list of movies that have something to say about history.

Nestar Russell speaks on the Milgram experiments and the Holocaust, Dec. 9, 2 pm

2011-12-05T11:28:00.000-05:00

Mixed feelings about this

2011-12-04T12:52:00.000-05:00

Comments welcome.

My characterization of Pope Innocent III

2011-12-03T11:25:00.002-05:00

He was determined to rally Christendom to discipline the whole disobedient world.

Hard times in Attawapiskat and the government blame game

2011-12-02T11:11:00.001-05:00

In some peculiar way, I think of Attawapiskat, a First Nations reserve, as a neighboring community, even though it is a fly in community way up on James Bay, and I can drive to Toronto or Ottawa easily on reasonably good roads. Why? Because we share the same regional CBC radio service, and for 20 years I have been hearing weather forecasts for Attawapiskat.

Currently, a lot of people are hearing about Attawapiskat and it is all bad news. People are living in shacks and tents – this is up at James Bay mind you– and the sewage situation is in a state of collapse. The band government has had to work very hard to attract the attention of senior levels of government and the general public, and now that they have, they are being blamed for bad management and wasting the money that the government gives them.

When I said the government "gives" them money, you have to remember that what the First Nations "give" in return is – Canada. People are always saying that we non-natives "give" money to natives, but you seldom hear people talking about the money senior levels of government "give" to Toronto or the Township of Bonfield, even though those "gifts" are a very significant part of the budget of both municipalities.

Our Prime Minister wants us to believe that this is all to be blamed on native mismanagement. If you want a better understanding of the roots of the problem I recommend this blog entry. Or you could just look at the band documents. Apparently the Prime Minister has not bothered yet.

Quoting well--another useful guide

2011-12-01T22:07:00.000-05:00

From the same website that tried to save you from glaring usage errors, some guidance on the use of quotations.

IT heroes save the day at Nipissing University

2011-11-30T18:59:00.000-05:00

Call it involuntary distance education. But it all worked out for the best.

This morning I woke to the biggest heaviest snowfall I have seen in a long time. I have a very long country driveway that can be cleared by hand if the time is available, or plowed if our neighbor is available. Looking out the window I knew that handscraping was not going to be possible. Certainly not before my 10 o'clock class. My three-hour seminar starting at 12:30? That would depend upon my neighbor.

By 11 o'clock it was pretty clear that he was not going to show up in time. (It turns out that he was having tractor trouble.) What to do? Cancel another class? That thought really bugged me. This was the last class before our in-class midterm, and there were things I wanted to get done.

One faint possibility occurred to me. What if I used Skype to communicate with the students? It might not be an ideal way to run a seminar discussion, but surely it would be better than an unplanned disruption. I called the IT helpdesk. Could they set up a computer in the classroom to be a Skype station? Would they?

No hesitation. I am sure they had plenty of other things to do, but with great willingness and competence they set up my classroom so that I could discuss the upcoming term test and run a discussion on queens and other wives in sixth-century France. I would not have you think it was perfect, but it was better than the alternative: sitting in front of the fire with a glass of wine… Wait a minute, was that a possibility?

I was glad in any case not to lose the class meeting. Thanks, Marg! Thanks, Greg! Thanks, whoever else pitched in (that includes at least one student)!

Sometimes this really is a great place to work.

Image: hmm...

Jimi Hendrix would have been 69 this month

2011-11-30T13:12:00.003-05:00

That little laugh he used for punctuation says so much.

Writing errors that make you look dumb

2011-11-29T22:58:00.000-05:00

I don't know if any of my current students read this blog, but any who do might consider that I think this article is right on the money!

Get out the vote!

2011-11-28T13:02:00.000-05:00

The Arabist on today's Egyptian elections. Enthusiasm?

Digging the lost harbor of Theodosius

2011-11-26T12:32:00.027-05:00

This week the CBC TV show The Nature of Things had an episode on the discovery and archaeological rescue of one of the major harbors of Constantinople. I missed it, but fortunately the whole episode is on the web.

The reason that this harbor was found was the construction of a train tunnel across the Bosphorus. Both the construction of the tunnel and the archaeological rescue are technological wonders. This is a technological nerd-fest.

And the photography of Istanbul is great, too.

Did I mention that they found 37 medieval ships?

Image: rescue archaeology.

Thanks to my audience

2011-11-25T19:41:00.000-05:00

In North Bay, Ontario, you can fill a room late Friday afternoon, late in dreary November, with faculty members, students, non-university community members and a dean or two, to listen to a paper on the fears and insecurities of 14th century men-at-arms.

Who knew?

Thanks for coming, people.

Image: Someone else's seminar, in Hong Kong. They had a bigger audience.

Newt Gingrich, the Republican candidate with the history PhD, analyzes our current troubles

2011-11-24T09:39:00.000-05:00

As summarized by Jim Wright:

Apparently, according to Newt, America’s current economic woes stem from two sources: greedy middle school janitors and unemployed children.
Newt’s solution? Fire the janitors, hire the kids.
Like chocolate and peanut butter, or feeding the homeless to the hungry, kids and janitorial work naturally go together. It’s just so, so obvious when Newt points it out, isn’t it?
Fire the janitors, hire the kids.
Brilliant.
First we recoup billions in janitor salaries.
Those goddamned janitors and their outrageous salaries. Who can forget those greedy maintenance men commuting to school each morning? Their private helicopters landing on the roof of the gymnasium, flying in from the Hamptons after a weekend of booze, blow and hookers? Their chauffer driven limos blocking the school bus loading zones? Oh yes, let us never forget who caused this financial disaster, them with their 24K gold handled mops and gilded toilet plungers while our children could barely afford to chew gum and stick it to the bathroom mirrors? I tell you, nothing chaps my ass more than when those key-twirling broom jockeys took billions in taxpayer bailouts and then gave themselves millions in bonuses. Personally I think it’s a Goddamned outrage that they get taxpayer funded lifetime pensions and golden parachutes even after being found guilty of ethics violations and forced to resign from their jobs. Honest to God, folks, how many more countries could we have invaded if these jumpsuit wearing sons of bitches weren’t bleeding us dry? How many more faith based programs could we have funded? How many high school girls had to graduate because those damned janitors stole money for abstinence only birth control classes? How many aircraft carriers could we have built? Ask yourself this, how many more tenured history professors could we have hired if we hadn’t had to pay those stinkin’ greedy Janitors? Hell, we could have filet mignon and caviar in the Congressional lunchroom three meals per day instead of, well, ok bad example, but I think I’ve made my point here.

There's more, and all of it equally on target.

P.s. When was the last time you heard someone in the public forum speak up for more tenured history professors? Oh, I know it's satire, but even still...

Two adjacent post titles in my Google Reader

2011-11-21T20:41:00.002-05:00

Video: The people want the fall of the Field Marshall

U.C. Davis Police Chief Suspended

Muhlberger speaks on Captivity and Ransom: Friday, November 25, 4 pm

2011-11-21T13:23:00.000-05:00

Smarter protest, please

2011-11-20T19:07:00.002-05:00

Phil Paine, continuing this earlier post:

Shakespeare didn’t have Romeo and Juliet commit suicide in the first act, and then let the remaining characters pitch tents on the stage and chat aimlessly for the remaining four acts. That was because Shakespeare was a dramatist. His aim was to move people to emotion, to make them think, to shock, horrify, or delight them. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume that he was pretty good at it. Today’s protesters could learn a thing or two from him.
As I mentioned in Part 1, the Occupy protest movement began by taking advantage of new methods (the social media), and then quickly reverted to an old formula. The advantage that social media offered was the ability to bring people together quickly to do some strategic and dramatic thing —- to surprise. The “flash mob” is the appropriate template for a protest using social media. The flash mob originated as an amusement —- one in Toronto called people to a pillow fight in front of the Eaton Centre. There have been some political protests using this technique, and these have been dubbed “smart mobs,” but their use has been very limited, so far. The key to the flash mob’s effectiveness is its ability to end as dramatically as it begins. This leaves those in authority disconcerted, and makes them look incompetent. It has the same advantage in protest that guerilla tactics can have in military conflicts.
The Occupy movement has squandered the opportunity to move into the modern age of protest. Social media were used to bring people together, but once there, power reverted to the traditionalists, and the only thing they could think of doing was squatting down and staying put. The smart mob turned into a “sit in,” a protest relic from a generation ago that is notorious for its ineffectiveness and tendency to alienate the very people that the protest is supposed to convince.

...

If you speak to these old-schoolers, it won’t be long before you hear them prattle nonsense about how they are continuing the traditions of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. They are deluding themselves. The Civil Rights activists were not amusing themselves. They did not go out on picnics. They were dealing with the Ku Klux Klan, and with corrupt and violent state governments in the American south. They were in constant danger. Civil Rights activists faced the serious possibility of being tortured or killed. Everything done was aimed at projecting an atmosphere of seriousness of purpose, and of clearly delineating the moral issues involved. Anyone who wants to see real protest in action could do no better than to study the events of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956. Protests like this led to a gigantic transformation of American society, one of the most dramatic in world history. Take note of the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy did not organize catfish fry-ups, sponsor watermelon eating festivals, or instruct their followers to dance the madison. They did not paint themselves blue. They rationally, intelligently, and bravely, calculated which actions would produce the desired results, and undertook them, making huge personal sacrifices to do so. The American public came to realise that it was the State Governments and the Klan who were the savages, the forces of chaos.
I have become progressively more annoyed with the Occupy movement because of its utter failure to heed these simple and obvious facts. We desperately need to get the American and Canadian public to understand the trouble we are in, and the dangers we face over the coming years. Intelligent protest is one of the things that has to be done. I’ve outlined some of the reasons why the protest we are seeing is not intelligent or effective. Next, in Part 3, I will discuss the types, dynamics, and structure of protest.

Read the whole thing.

Image: Boycotting the segregated bus system, 1955

National Geographic and the Big Picture present pictures to make you weep

2011-11-20T03:04:00.047-05:00

The Big Picture always presents amazing examples of photojournalism; National Geographic, with more than a century of dedication to photography as an art, runs an annual photography contest for portrayals of people, places and nature. When the two together present a selection (this year's contest is still open), what do you think?

Well, it's even better than that.

There's the link up there, and here are three pics I really like to whet your appetite. Click to see them at a more appropriate size, or go see the originating site. Yes, go.
go.

Above: Sun and rain in Catalonia.

Above: Rock and water, East Lothian, Scotland

Above: Flesh and Bones, Toronto

Fior di Battaglia (The Flower of Battle) -- a new and accessible treatment

2011-11-19T15:01:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of people pursuing various kinds of historical re-enactment and re-creation, and I know a great many of them. One variety I take an interest in is the effort to re-discover the methods and techniques of medieval one-on-one combat. This not as hopeless a project as you might think. Starting with the late 13th and early 14th century, there are a number of illustrated treatises. Interpreting is no easy matter, but hey, that's scholarship for you.

One of the most interesting of these treatises is Fiore dei Liberi's substantial and systematic Flower of Battle. Just recently Ken Mondschein has published (with Getty Publications) an accessible introduction, The Knightly Art of Battle. What do I mean by accessible? Thanks to the support, I imagine, of the J. Paul Getty Museum, which owns a very good manuscript of the work, it has (1) 93 color illustrations and (2) costs only $14.95. Yes, that's what it says.

If you are interested in having this book, here's the link to the Getty shop; and of course you can poke around the web for information and discussion of Fiore and other medieval masters.

Dog sweat!

2011-11-18T22:46:00.000-05:00

The very occasional blog IranWrites reviews the movie Dog Sweat.

...

Not long into the film, I felt that I had an urge to scream, “Say something for God’s sake!” when immediately the facial expression of an actress shuts me up, saying, “What is there to say. Don’t you see?”
No, I don’t see if there is no talk, no laughter, no crying, no discussions, no debates, no complaints, no questions, no answers, not a single complex sentence. But why?
“We are in strange land my dears, where language has gone through a massive transformation. Language as the medium for communication has lost its function where communication has lost its place in the society and culture, where the efforts are made to hide rather than reveal, where one must divert rather than to direct, where one has to misguide rather than to guide; then words are better forgotten if one has to lie,” I’m whispering to myself.
Lips do not kiss, hands do not touch, gazes are afraid to connect. It is not restraint but hiding. There is no need for censorship since there is not even any desire for of any sort expression. There is still an outcry for an “empty nest,” an empty room, a dangling key to an empty apartment. It seems that finding “that key” is the ultimate goal, though I’m not so sure that there is anything but darkness behind the closed door. Even passion is absent …
‌But little by little, I learn to hear them. I learn their language. It is very simple, their facial expressions, sweet faces with bitter and sad expressions, tell us of boredom, aimlessness, hopelessness, very gently and good-naturedly. But beneath those bitter expressions on those faces, those cold faces, those deadly silences, one can see the residue of some drive, of some hope and some faint and colorless shadow of something that might once have been a dream or fantasy.
They narrate their own story, as if the film were a documentary and had been made spontaneously, with actors and actresses, without script, on stage thriving to tell their stories. It seems they have something to say only if they find someone to listen, if they feel safe, if they find privacy, if they know how....

Uzbekistan in English Russia

2011-11-18T21:15:00.000-05:00

English Russia, a Russian photosite captioned in English, used to be part of my daily routine. Eventually the flood of traffic wore me out. Just now I went back for a look and I found it is still publishing a tremendous amount of striking visual material. Go have a look at Colors of Uzbekistan, or the recent montage of photos from Chechnya.

Image: the mausoleum of Tamerlane (Timur). Click to see it large and even more beautiful.

Chilperic, King of the Franks: Gregory of Tours' mysterious but oddly contemporary characterization

2011-11-15T18:23:00.000-05:00

Gregory says (Thorpe translation) that the king "hated the poor and all they stood for."

Dumb stuff

2011-11-15T01:13:00.000-05:00

Phil Paine on the flaws in the "Occupy" movement:

All that said, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the “Occupy” movement. When social media made if possible for a broad range of people to make their disatisfaction known, it had a salutory effect. If that technology had been used to draw people to specific places, where they could engage in some surprising and dramatic symbolic activity, then equally quickly disappear, leaving the authorities to wonder what would happen next, and the public eager to understand what it was all about, then it would have had even more impact. But, instead, things instantly reverted to the accepted formulae. Camping out on the protest site for some undetermined time is just plain dumb. Now, of course, it’s the old-school, old-fart habitual protesters back in control, and those people don’t have the slightest interest in changing anything. There is no group of people more stuck in the past, more hide-bound with orthodoxy, and more ill-suited for intelligent protest

More here.

Worthwhile Canadian initiative

2011-11-13T15:48:00.000-05:00

There is an economics blog called "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative," supposedly named after a phrase that won a contest for "most boring possible headline." Today I ran across a real-life WCI, an amazing example of the strengths of the public health approach to problems so characteristic of my adopted country (as opposed to the moralistic approach elsewhere, but unfortunately now being imitated by the current federal government).

This WCI is likely going to be buried, but I am going to do my bit to spread the news, which I read in the Ottawa Citizen:

The number of rabies cases in Ontario's foxes, skunks, raccoons and livestock has just doubled. But paradoxically, this doubling is a minor blip.
Through most of 2011 there had been only a single rabies case in the entire province. As of last week, there are two. One new case was enough to double the total.
Two rabid animals, in the province that was once the rabies capital of North America, with thousands of confirmed cases a year.
One of the most stunning victories in the fight against infectious disease has been fought and won in Ontario, which had more than 3,000 cases of "terrestrial" rabies (meaning all animals except bats) in 1980.
Back then, Ontario had more rabies than all other provinces and U.S. states combined. The disease threatened children, hunters, livestock, and household pets.
For reasons never really understood, today's commonest strain of rabies crept south from Arctic foxes in the 1950s, spreading in animals' saliva along Hudson Bay to Ontario, where it stayed - not just in foxes, but commonly in skunks and raccoons too.
It's almost all gone now. And a strain called raccoon rabies, which spread north from Florida, has been completely wiped out in Ontario since 2005.
The strange story of how we rid the province of nearly all rabies is a combination of vaccine research, animal psychology, and the skill of bush pilots.

...

Here's what happened. Around 1980, someone had the bright idea of vaccinating wildlife against rabies. After all, it works in dogs and cats.
Obviously the problem was delivering the drug in the wild.
The solution was blindingly simple: Put oral vaccine in meatballs. A government airplane flies low with a pilot, navigator and bombardier, and they drop vaccine-laced bait onto the land below.
The bait also contains tetracycline, a common antibiotic that stains an animal's teeth brown. That reveals what proportion of wild animals are taking the bait.

There's more.

Image: There's still need for progress on the bat front...

The situation of Arab Christians

2011-11-07T21:30:00.000-05:00

Daniel Philpott:

A tense subplot of the Arab Spring is the increasing endangerment of the region’s Christians. In Egypt, Coptic Christians, 10% of the population, have been attacked repeatedly by Salafist Muslims unleashed – many literally released from prison -- by the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. No wonder that Christians in Syria now fear their fate at the hands of the country’s Sunni Muslim majority should President Bashar al-Assad’s government fall.
The experience of Christians in Iraq is hardly encouraging, either. The kidnapping and murder of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho by Muslim militants in early 2008 is emblematic of what Iraq’s Christian community has suffered since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The population of Iraqi Christians has declined from around two million to around 400,000 since the Gulf War of 1991, which weakened Hussein’s rule. Under the dictatorships of Mubarak, Assad, and even Hussein and Qaddafi, all of them unsavory to be sure, Christians enjoyed relative security, though it was sometimes bloodily interrupted and usually attended by pervasive social discrimination. Arab authoritarianism was a leaky shelter but it was nevertheless a roof over their heads.

But however dangerous Arab Christians’ fate now may be, going back to the good old days of dictatorships is not an option. The surge of democracy-demanding youth, popular impatience with corruption and economic stagnation, and a religious reawakening over the past generation all serve to block such a backslide. Of course, for other minorities and for Muslims at odds with their regimes, the good old days were not good at all. They were not good for the residents of Hama, Syria, 10,000 of whose inhabitants were murdered by the current president’s father, Hafez al-Assad; and they are not good for protesters of the son’s dictatorship, over 2900 of whom the regime has killed by now. They were not good for democracy activists or traditional Muslims in Egypt, over 20,000 of whom Mubarak held in his jails. Arab authoritarianism was a model that could not last. Apart from suppressing the dynamism of democracy and the free market, such regimes were repressively secular, creating legions of religious discontents and radicalizing traditional Muslims, often in the direction of violence. Ultimately this shelter for Christians proved to be not only leaky but rotten at its foundations.

The position of today’s Arab Christians is indeed precarious. Among the possible outcomes, Islamist regimes that afford Christians little freedom to practice their faith or participate in politics are entirely plausible. But this outcome is far from inevitable, no more inevitable than was the persistence of dictatorship. Only this past week, elections in Tunisia, the country that ignited the Arab Spring, gave a plurality of votes to an Islamic party, but one that is relatively liberal and that will rule in coalition with non-religious liberal parties. In Egypt, too, the possibilities are more complex than secularist safety and Salafist violence. When Christians are attacked it is not always at the hands of Muslims. The shooting of Christian demonstrators in Cairo this past October 9th was carried out by the army. When Muslims have attacked Christians, far more have defended them. Just after Muslim terrorists slaughtered 25 Coptic worshippers and injured some 100 others in Alexandria on New Year’s Day of this year, thousands of Muslims across the country gathered in candlelight vigils and formed human chains around Coptic churches during worship. Today, Egyptian Muslim office-seekers are divided among proponents of a strongly Islamic state and supporters of liberal rights, including religious freedom for Christians. The scenario of religious freedom, then, is plausible, too.

He goes on to discuss what outsiders might do to help.

Image: Egyptian Christians celebrating Easter.

Economics as pseudo-science

2011-11-06T19:04:00.000-05:00

The Globe and Mail has a substantial article on how the pretentions of economists to be scientists and practitioners of a purely math-based discipline have helped bring us to the current disaster.

A former colleague at my university warned me about this 20 years ago. He said the leading economics department he had trained in was abandoning economic history entirely. Indeed it was abandoning economics. When they recruited grad students, they ignored graduates from their own bachelor program in favor of the best math graduates they could get. Such was their faith in abstract mathematics.

Image: borrowed from http://kaihaanj.com/

Ancient brews recreated

2011-11-06T12:52:00.001-05:00

Mcleans reports:

And then there’s Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania who, after analyzing the residue that lingers in the nooks and crannies of millennia-old potted vessels, is bringing ancient elixirs back to life. It’s gastronomical nostalgia on steroids.

McGovern, a pioneer in the field of biomolecular archaeology who did undergraduate work in chemistry and has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology, has collaborated on five beverages with Sam Calagione, the award-winning founder and president of Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware: Midas Touch, an Iron Age beer based on samples found in the king’s supposed tomb; Chateau Jiahu, a Chinese blend of grapes, rice and honey based on the oldest sample of booze ever discovered; Theobrama, a 3,200 year-old Honduran chocolate drink; Chicha, a corn beer with Peruvian lineage; and Ta Henket, an Egyptian ale being released in December with 18,000-year-old components.

There's more at the link...

A remarkable Waterloo re-enactment

2011-11-06T08:29:00.003-05:00

Brought to us through some fabulous photography.

Thanks to Andrew for the heads up.

Polite Canadians

2011-11-05T12:30:00.000-04:00

The Globe and Mail reports on what happens when you give 'em a gun and the prospect of filling the freezer with moose meat.

Armed gangs defending their turf. Death threats and torched property. Victims too fearful to go to police.

Sounds like another organized-crime offensive on the streets of Montreal. But the action is playing out in a more improbable setting: the backwoods wilderness of Quebec during hunting season.

Generations of hunters have turned to the rugged forest of the Gaspé Peninsula each fall to bag a moose, but an explosive growth in the number of animals, coupled with growing competition for hunting spots, has turned nature’s idyll into a battleground.

Although Quebec sets aside vast swaths of Crown land for hunting, territory that in theory belongs to everybody, some take matters into their own hands to protect what they regard as their personal hunting spots.

The problem has come to a head on the Gaspé, where some 25,000 permit-holders descend in the forest in a nine-day firearm hunt lasting to late October. During that time, according to several officials and witnesses, a supposedly public playground gives way to roadblocks, armed patrols and less-than-subtle warnings by rival hunting gangs to keep out.

Some hunters are tasting the woods’ frontier justice firsthand. Michel Guénette is a 54-year-old truck driver who has been hunting in the Gaspé since he was a boy. Last year he discovered his family’s six trailers incinerated, with empty canisters of propane lying amid the rubble. When he showed up for the hunt this year, his tree blind was trashed.

There's more where that came from.

Astonishingly good

2011-11-05T12:08:00.000-04:00

Law and Order SVU is in its 13th season and I have to say, that although in the normal course of events the series should be as stale as thirteen-year-old bread, in some ways it is better than ever.

The most recent episode was classic SVU. It could easily have been in season one -- heck, it would have been a good pilot, introducing the whole series. But somehow it pulled me in, really pulled me in. Was it the acting? The direction? Who knows?

But what really started this train of thought was the previous episode, about a young loser couple whose infant dies mysteriously. It was heartbreaking, and though the case was only marginally an SUV matter, it may have been the best episode ever. Here I have to say that the people who played the young couple were astonishingly good, and the writers should be proud.

Eyes on Egypt -- the modern martyrs

2011-10-30T22:28:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month, a demonstration by Coptic Christians in Egypt was broken up with deadly force by the army, who among other things ran over the demonstrators with tanks.

This sent a shock through Egyptian politics, throwing a shadow over hopes that the recent revolution -- clearly incomplete -- would lead to a democratic and non-sectarian Egypt.

At the same time, I was reading Peter Brown's Cult of the Saints preparatory to teaching about the social role of martyr's cults in Late Antiquity.

When the following essay -- martyrs' passion? -- appeared in the Arabist, I was electrified.

It is about the struggle to expose through honest autopsies, what happened to the demonstrators.

The original author is being harassed by military prosecutors.
Image: Meena Daniel

LIVING WITH THE MARTYRS

By Alaa Abdel Fattah, al-Shorouk, 20 October 2011

A couple days spent at the morgue. A couple days amid the corpses of those struggling to preserve their martyr status, fighting against the Mubarak regime in its entirety; not just against Mubarak’s military who ran them over, not just against Mubarak’s media machine which denied them the honor of martyrdom and turned them into mere killers, and not just against Mubarak’s judicial system which denied them their rights.

These corpses are fighting to preserve the glory of their martyrdom in the gloomy morgue of a poor government hospital. They are fighting against the insanities of the Mubarak era claiming that an autopsy would harm the sanctity of the deceased and won’t bring them the triumph they deserve. They are fighting against the domination of the sultan’s theologians and priests who want us to believe that those seeking justice in this life are abandoning their right for justice in the afterlife. They are fighting against Mubarak’s politics of division, which made the poor believe their enemies lie among the poor, thus turning their attention away from those embezzling their daily bread.

A couple days spent with merciful death and merciless shame. My God, why do most of our martyrs belong to the poor? How were they discerned by the tank and the gun? Don’t we all bear the same blood and lie in the same grave? Still, it seems we have let the martyrs down, over and over again.

Our Egypt is incredible. It only picks the best of us. Meena Daniel was its right choice. It was him who sealed our triumph in the morgue.

Blessed are the meek

They came to the hospital by the hundreds, searching for wounded bodies to treat and murdered bodies to bury. They came searching for a shelter from the night that embodied all their fears. They came searching for anyone willing to share their anger and seeking strength in numbers. They came as the “church’s flock.” The hospital was surrounded by plainclothes assailants (perhaps these are the honest citizens cheered day and night by Mubarak’s military?), backed by the defenders of our security and revolution, seeking to assure these people that their only hope is to belong to the church’s flock.

We came looking for our friend from the Square, the guy with the charming smile, Meena, who belongs to us and to whom we belong. Martyrdom chose Meena as he belongs to the church’s flock as much as to the revolution. These were the words of his family members who insisted on involving his buddies in every decision – we are his buddies after all. Meena struggled from his afterlife hoping we’d be accepted by the families of the martyrs, making us a group of comrades in the same struggle. We all bleed and weep the same, don’t we? Just as the truth – hushed on television stations – kept sprinkling out of the tears of the mothers of martyrs, it shows in our tears. They understood we were Meena’s buddies; that was enough for them to forget to ask our names in their usual suspicious manner.

So the hospital issued its report on the Maspero incident: did they die of cardiac arrest or was there a fight? The priests came forward with their advice: let’s bury them quickly as it’s hot outside and there is no refrigeration in the morgue. This is where we intervened, strong with the arrogance and naïveté of our revolt: What about justice? What about punishment? This is our last chance to uncover the criminals; we need the forensic report.

How insane this was of us! Do we really mean to ask for an autopsy in our quest for justice we have never seen before, not even once? Not even by coincidence? What justice are we seeking, we, the poor? What justice are we seeking, we, the Copts? What justice are we seeking from the criminals ruling us? Don’t you understand that we’re vulnerable?
Still, Meena was one of us. His sister was the first to agree to an autopsy and this was enough to convince others, one after another. They were reluctant and we were insistent. Lawyers encouraged us amidst hours of weeping, hugs and debates. We were running against the clock, bringing every ice cube and every miserable fan we could find, hoping that our affection would be enough to maintain the purity of the bodies.

The next morning, the prosecutors arrived to find half of the families demanding an autopsy. This is when the noble judge issued his rule: I could either issue burial permits or forensic requests, aren’t we all equal in death? Of course, the priests were here to spice up the atmosphere: our monsignor will celebrate the mass for their companions in a short while; so you’d better hurry before it’s too late. Have mercy on your children, their reward in Paradise is grand.

We stood unified in our fight against the regime. This time, however, the battle field has changed. This time, it’s about reason, logic and compassion. We made it in defeating the regime which faced our resolute rows of anger, bricks and solidarity. This time, however, we needed to lead a long debate before the prosecutor agreed to an autopsy for all the corpses… provided that we take charge of the forensic work.
What a sad truth this is turning to be! We had, first, to manage the security of our demonstrations. Next, things evolved and we had to ensure the smooth running of public facilities. Now, we have the duty of ensuring the work of public servants, on behalf of the government! Why, thus, would we bother to ask the police and the army to do their job. After all, it shows clearly on the corpses of our martyrs.

We had the families understand that the autopsy is a lengthy procedure. Thus, it was wise to move the corpses to the Zeinhum morgue where the services are convenient. Fear invaded the place again; it’s true that Meena made them believe in our country, still, rumors never stopped spreading while the gangs of “gentlemen” standing outside kept on terrorizing the crowds all night long. While we didn’t admit it openly, we got the message: We won’t leave the Coptic neighborhood because God knows what evil awaits us over there.

So we had to secure the hospital. We had to ensure appropriate working conditions for the forensic team. We had to evacuate thousands of scared souls from the building and control the reactions of thousands of angry people. There were just a handful of us to manage this whole procedure. Ironically, we had to assume the role of the Central Security Forces too. It seems we have a new battlefield to take over with our only weapon being our solidarity.

The forensic team started its mission, guarded by us and supervised by our lawyers and doctors, our unseen soldiers who experienced all kinds of injustice and who knew how to unveil evidence of murder, torture, crimes and massacres, much better than forensic experts. The team began its work while we were frightened by the idea of letting a family member see the infuriating scene of a scalpel cutting through the corpse of a dear son. We were frightened by the idea of seeing our ranks crumble in the face of the “gentlemen” attacks or the outrage of the bereaved.

My kingdom is not of this world

It is true that the unity of our ranks worries all those opportunists; the traders of the cause being the most treacherous of them all. They are everywhere around us: Do you really trust this lawyer? She’s so young and unproven… I have a much broader experience, and who are these? All of these are Muslims! How could you trust them? You have warned us for months, dear Meena, when you said: it is crucial that Maspero joins forces with Tahrir Square. It is crucial that the demands of the Copts remain the demands of the people and vice-versa. The choice is so hard, dear Meena. While the oppressive authorities are hitting indiscriminately, these opportunists know well how to hit where it hurts most. So we spent the rest of the day fighting their deceitful rumors and fake accusations. Our goal was to return confidence and tranquility to the souls of our people.

In the beginning, we assumed a role we thought was similar to that of the Central security forces. We soon realized how both roles were so different. I will never understand how security forces anywhere in this world could believe that violence is the way to bring discipline back into masses of angry or scared citizens. I also wonder who recommended to the world’s governments that using guns and bullets in the face of the masses would deter them. The only thing we thought of as a weapon in front of the waves of anger surrounding us was our chests. We threw ourselves in front of the crowds and we cried for our martyrs. This is how we were able to drive out the delusions of a sectarian military reality and to spread the truthful dream of a free Egypt.

Dear Meena, our revolution is so fragile! Any stray bullet could topple it. Dear Meena, our revolution is so strong! One powerful sole would suffice to save it. Dear Meena, you made me grasp the teachings of the prophets. When will the military do the same? As soon as the forensic team started its work, complaints started on the lack of means, on the poor circumstances and on the nuisance of the surrounding guards. Still, the team had to accomplish its mission. When it was known that the team is almost done with the autopsy and is about to put up its report on the causes of death, someone began spreading rumors of false reports being prepared. Since the cause of death could refer to a single mortal wound, while the corpses are filled with scores of them, this was enough for the families of the martyrs to believe what they heard, and it was enough for the waiting crowds to burst in outrage. This was also enough to cause our ranks to collapse.

On the brink of victory, we found ourselves facing the toughest ordeal. The families believed in the dream of justice; they let us dissect the corpses of their sons while they delayed the funeral mass that was to be celebrated by the monsignor, which led in turn to another night’s delay of the burial. They made all the sacrifices we asked of them despite their initial reluctance. Now, they demand assurances; they want to experience the justice they are after. In return, all we had for them was a bunch of incomprehensible technical and legal stuff. Indeed, why does the report say run over by a “heavy vehicle” when truth is clear and we all know it was an armored tank? Why doesn’t it say it was an armored tank? Why is there a mention of fiery projectiles? Why is there no mention of “security service bullets”? Haven’t we been promised justice? Why can’t we read the name of the criminal who is known to all of us?

I didn’t grasp the victory we achieved while we were inundated by tons of details. At one moment in time, I looked around and saw that our unified ranks gained the sympathy of the hospital staff, the doctors and the priests! What have you done, dear Meena? Is it the vulnerability of our families that awakened their conscience or is it your strength that burst out their imagination? Did we really succeed in overcoming all these obstacles in just a few hours? I can claim that even the forensic doctors joined our ranks too. The only solution was to sit with each family, explain the causes of death and point out the details that will be shown in the forensic report. That’s in addition to explaining the role of the prosecutor and lawyers. Our unity was contagious enough to attract the forensic doctor who forgot he was just a public servant and who made himself our judicial representative. When he sat with the families and explained the content of the reports, something he was only used to doing with the powerful class, he may have remembered that justice is always by the side of the vulnerable. I saw them describe the features of the martyrs to their families, a way to make them believe that they are not just corpses and to prove that they know them and care for their memory. I finally witnessed the dream, for which you reached martyrdom turn into reality, even for a short moment.

On our way to the church, our victory was total. None bothered to check who carried the martyrs and who led the acclaim. Was it a Muslim who was shouting “We either bring them justice or we die like them”? What a silly question. Don’t we all have the same blood and cry out the same tears?

Turn the other cheek

Before moving to the Coptic hospital, we were in another hospital, away from the battle scene, waiting for the X-ray of Ahmed’s foot, injured with a live bullet.

We picked up Ahmed from Talaat Harb Street while he was trying to save his homeland by joining his companions gathered in the Tahrir Square. The fall of our martyrs had happened just a few hours earlier. Our youth did not bother to have a count and see which group outnumbers the other. They did not either think about what action to take in the face of the “unarmed” forces (according to the press conference) showering them with bullets.

They were only worried about the gravity of events that might follow if they left the Square to the demonstration of mercenaries shouting “Islamic! Islamic!”… a demonstration organized with the blessing of the army and the police. We all knew it was a fabricated demonstration, an attempt to bring a civilian touch to a military-driven massacre, thus directing the blame towards the Salafis.

We saw in Ahmed a mythical hero when he resisted his friends and refused to be hospitalized claiming that his wound is superficial and is just an impact of a tiny projectile. Still, we managed to convince him and take him away on our shoulders. On our way by taxi to a private hospital, away from the events’ scene, he told us how he was arrested and tortured by the “honest” military and how he was allowed a “fair” trial in a military tribunal. He told us how he got shot during the Abbassiya battle of treachery. His injuries did not prevent him from rejoining his companions who were facing the horror of live bullets.

Once at the hospital, and after we confirmed he was hit by live bullets and not just tiny projectiles, we were visited by a police investigator. Ahmed’s resolution was impressive, replying cold-bloodedly and defiantly to the officer’s questions. He impressed us further when he showed his disgust following the officer’s asking his name: “So you’re a Muslim”… Would he have refused his release from the hospital if he were e a Christian? The only moment during which Ahmed showed his vulnerability, just like ours, was when he cried while the doctor was sterilizing his wound. We haven’t noticed his young age until he replied with fear to his mother calling him on his mobile: “Maspero? What do I have to do with that Mum? I’m hanging out with my friends…”

Does Major General Hamdi Bedeen realize that some of us fear our loving mothers more than they fear bullets and tanks? Did the Marshal hear us shout “O Marshal, O Marshal, here comes another bridegroom from Tahrir” while taking Meena on his last visit to the square? Does anyone of the military realize the deep meaning out of seeing the mother of Khaled Said visiting the mother of Meena Daniel? Or did they forget the value of blood, tears, hugs and dreams? They no longer have a place amongst us but we are more tolerant towards those who let us down in the beginning.

A taste of Bollywood

2011-10-26T16:30:00.000-04:00

I think I've posted this here before, but it is worth repeating. You may want to turn on the captions.

Will Mclean reports on Libya

2011-10-21T18:37:00.001-04:00

Moamar Khaddafy is DeadIn related news, so is Gadhafi, Gaddafi, Qadhafi, Qaddafi, and el-Qaddafi.

Diversity

2011-10-21T13:14:00.000-04:00

I think the next time I hear "Canada is becoming more diverse," I may scream.

Has there been a single week since 1763 when that was not true?

Image: Here they come -- whoever they are. :-)

Two optimistic views of the fall of Qaddafi

2011-10-21T10:49:00.002-04:00

From Juan Cole:

The last stand at Sirte was very like Jim Jones’s last stand in the jungles of Guyana. Jones was an American religious leader who gradually went mad, demanding more and more sacrifice and obedience from the members of his People’s Temple congregation, which then gradually became a cult. I define a cult as a group wherein the leader makes very high demands for obedience and self-sacrifice, and the values of which diverge from those of mainstream society. When the outside world seemed clearly to be pursuing the People’s Temple into Guyana, with a Congressmen showing up in Jonestown to rescue a handful of adherents who wanted to go home, Jones reacted with fury, first sending a militia to kill the congressman and the defectors, and then instructing his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. Many were injected with cyanide laced with liquids or shot. Those who would not agree voluntarily to be “translated” to the next world together with their messianic leader would be subjected to the ultimate coercion.
Qaddafi’s stand at Sirte underlined the cultish character of his politics,...

The final defeat of Qaddafi and Qaddafism is a victory for the Fourth Wave of democratization that began in Tunisia and continued in Egypt. There is now a contiguous bloc of 100,000,000 Arabs in North Africa who have thrown off dictatorship and aspire to parliamentary government (Tunisia’s elections are coming up on Sunday). Those who dismiss this movement because Muslim religious forces will benefit are exhibiting a double standard. Roman Catholicism benefited from Third Wave democracy movements like those in Poland and Brazil, as did Eastern Orthodoxy. Were democracy to break out in Burma, Theravada Buddhism would benefit. So what?

The Arab League, President Obama and NATO have been vindicated in their decision to forestall the massacre of eastern Libyan cities such as Benghazi. The region’s remaining bloodthirsty tyrants, who have not scrupled to massacre non-combatants for exercising their right of peaceable assembly and protest, should take the lesson that mass murder is a one-way ticket for them to the sewage drain of history. As I told the NYT today, ““The real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular politics in the Arab world… People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators.”

And at cbcnews.ca:

So if the Libyans themselves hadn’t risen up in the first place, NATO wouldn’t have considered intervening, and Gadhafi would almost certainly still be alive and in charge.

That’s the lesson the Arab world takes away from Gadhafi’s fall, and it’s a valuable one.

Many if not most in the Arab world likely believe it was the Libyans who “got” Gadhafi.

In those pictures he was surrounded by Libyan fighters, not foreign troops. It is precisely the image — if not the exact circumstances — that both the NTC and NATO wanted right from the start, to avoid the Iraq mistake and the baggage that came with that.

Among Arabs those nuances count for a lot. And so those images will undoubtedly breathe new life into the flagging uprisings in Syria and Yemen. They will also give pause to the autocrats who still rule them.

Arab editorials in today's papers openly wondered who would be next in what they now willingly call the Arab Spring, and what might be on the minds of the possible candidates as they watched Gadhafi’s final moments.

It is a very different Arab world than it was when Saddam was caught. This Arab Spring, sparked singlehandedly by a desperate Tunisian young man, is all about people, and therefore legitimate in the eyes of most of the region. The old rules lurk behind the scenes, but they are weakening as the people continue to press for substantive change.

Even in countries where there has been no large scale protest, old regimes have clamoured to introduce change. Saudi Arabia would not have given women the right to vote and run in municipal elections without the Arab revolts. Jordan has had two governments resign in the span of months in the name of introducing reform.

The Arab Spring has been a messy affair, and it will continue to be, and in some countries, spring may never come. But in each of those countries where it has or will, it unfolds differently — as evidenced by those affected so far — and with different speeds and efficacy.

Having world powers on your side certainly seems to help--whether it's moral or military. In future, other revolutions may or may not involve foreign intervention, and we may yet see an example that involves only regional intervention, without the involvement of Western powers.

But the one common, requisite ingredient in all of them has been a willing people. People who have broken the barrier of fear, who refuse to remain silent — even after they might have managed to fell longstanding regimes, as in Egypt's case.
After now watching three strongmen fall in successively higher degrees of humiliation, you can bet the continuing uprisings will have a renewed momentum.

And a more pessimistic view:

Arab Spring a failure so far

All in all, as noted above, a fine candidate for early departure from this life.

But that's as far as it goes. Other than that, Gadhafi's death demonstrates nothing more than the ability of Western militaries to cut down whomever they choose.
There will, no doubt, be attempts to portray his downfall and death as an example of what happens when a nation decides to rise up against tyranny and pursue its own destiny.

Americans, in particular, love that narrative, which is why the phrase "Arab Spring" is still so popular in the mainstream media here.

The fact is, the Arab Spring, if it even existed, has been a sputtering failure so far. It certainly didn't even threaten Gadhafi. He was hunted down by NATO military power, plain and simple.

Had it not been for NATO warplanes, Gadhafi would still be in command, violently persecuting his own people.

Image: And the women?

Polo in Kashmir

2011-10-20T18:22:00.002-04:00

From the Big Picture. Click to see it bigger.

The taking of Jerusalem, 1099

2011-10-18T18:14:00.001-04:00

People often wonder how medieval Christians could have taken part in holy war, given Jesus's well-known pacifistic pronouncements. Here are excerpts from a lecture I gave yesterday on the taking of Jerusalem, which ended in a massacre, which touches on the issue:

Here’s what Tyerman (page 31) says about a famous Christian account of the massacre:

Raymond of Aguilers… who witnessed the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, described the ensuing massacre on the Temple Mount: "it is sufficient to relate that in the Temple of Solomon and the portico crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses." What ever the atrocities performed that day, Raymond was quoting Revelations 14:20 "and the winepress was trodden without the city and the blood came out of the winepress even to the horse bridles."

Comments? [No comments from students.]

Here are my comments. Massacres of garrisons and the civil population of fortifications and cities that had resisted for a long time were pretty common in medieval times. According to the laws of war (or the customs of war) those who resisted, even if they were not armed and had no authority or say in the waging of war, brought the consequences of such resistance upon themselves. It was kind of a no-win situation because people who surrendered too quickly to a threat of siege might invite the revenge of their rulers if the rulers won the war eventually. But to focus on the other situation: we've already seen in this course that a siege was a hard task and a dangerous one even for the people outside. I sometimes joke that it is no real joke that sieges came down to who caught dysentery first, the people outside in their squalid camps, or the people inside crowded together in bad conditions. Besiegers died in significant numbers in a hard siege, and the numbers went up significantly if there were a number of unsuccessful assaults. Besiegers became targets for missiles thrown at them from above, and insults meant to break the morale and boost morale on the other side. When besiegers swarmed into a city through a gap in the walls or by the treachery of the tower commander, that they were not in a good mood all. All the anger fear and hardship came together in a murderous rage and perhaps a sudden feeling of invulnerability. Like hunters, they fell upon their prey, animate and inanimate.

Further remark is necessary in the case of Jerusalem, however. Modern observers from the historically Christian environment often expressed wonder that the religion of peace and my kingdom is not of this world could have inspired warfare. Forgetting entirely about Muslim and Jewish accounts of the slaughter of Jerusalem, we can see just from Christian accounts that not only did nominal Christians take part in mass murder like anyone else, they felt more justified in doing so in this case because they had scriptural authority behind them. Those who took part and had read their Bible knew that this was God's will.

Two further points:

Any important and popular religion contains a multitude of contradictory elements that can be used to justify all sorts of actions.
People who study religion or are particularly pious or are opposed to some specific religion often act like a person or group can be completely characterized as "Christian" or "Muslim" or "Shiite" or whatever. Not so. Those Crusaders at Jerusalem liked to think of themselves as Christians, bound by the law of God, but also as warriors, subject to the customs of war. This should be obvious, but the way people talk, it clearly isn't.

Image: A medieval illustration combines the taking of Jerusalem with the Crucifixion.