Pictures of Iraq from the Big Picture

Another excellent photo collection from the Boston.com site.

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

Shocker

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

 
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

It's more like this...

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

...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

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

Mixed feelings about this

Comments welcome.

My characterization of Pope Innocent III

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

Hard times in Attawapiskat and the government blame game

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

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

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

That little laugh he used for punctuation says so much.

Writing errors that make you look dumb

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!

The Arabist on today's Egyptian elections. Enthusiasm?

Digging the lost harbor of Theodosius

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

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

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

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

Smarter protest, please

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

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

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!

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

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

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

Dumb stuff

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

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

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.

Ancient brews recreated

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

Brought to us through some fabulous photography.


Thanks to Andrew for the heads up.

Polite Canadians

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

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.

A taste of Bollywood

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

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

Diversity

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

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

From the Big Picture.  Click to see it bigger.

The taking of Jerusalem, 1099

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:

1. Any important and popular religion contains a multitude of contradictory elements that can be used to justify all sorts of actions.
2. 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.

Big trouble in Egypt

In the aftermath of an army attack on a Coptic Christian demonstration...and an explanation of how this may fit into the revolutionary/counter-revolutionary situation.

From a Facebook commentary

"the pop culture of the past is the arcana of the future?"

 

"It's cutting edge when it starts, pop culture when it's going strong, and arcana ten years later. Fascinating ephemera for historians comes a century or so later."

 

Thanks to the originators (kept anonymous)!

The sad historian thinks...

...That there are whole cultures that will never enjoy maple syrup. But then he realizes that Ethiopian monks once said that about coffee...

Passed a million page views...

Sometime in the last two or three days this blog passed 1,000,000 page views. And that's just since I changed the name and hosting arrangements about three (?) years ago! Huzzah!

Hope he's right

The threat of sectarian violence in Syria

From Foreign Policy, via Brian's Coffeehouse:

From the start of the Syrian revolution, the Assad regime's media have portrayed the overwhelmingly peaceful grassroots protest movement as a foreign-backed military assault. Its preferred catchall term to describe the tens of thousands of patriots it has kidnapped and tortured, as well as the thousands it has murdered, is "armed gangs." Despite a series of televised "confessions," the regime has not provided any serious proof of the supposed American-French-Qaeda-Israeli-Saudi-Qatari plot against the homeland. Nor has it explained the evident contradictions between its narrative and the thousands of YouTube videos and eyewitness accounts of security forces shooting rifles and artillery straight into unarmed crowds.

Of course it hasn't. Yet its propaganda is taken seriously by Russian and Chinese state media, certain infantile leftists, and a vaguely prominent American academic.

Tragically, the propaganda is also taken seriously by members of Syria's minority sects -- not by all of them by any stretch, but perhaps by a majority. It's tragic because perceived minority support for this sadistic regime will inevitably tarnish intersectarian relations in Syria in the future.

Those Sunni Syrians who are (understandably) enraged by the minorities' siding with the dictatorship should remember first that many Alawis and Christians, as well as many more Druze and Ismailis, have joined the revolution and that many have paid the price. Second, Sunnis should remember that Alawis and Christians have good reason to fear change, if not to believe the propaganda.

Alawis have a complex, esoteric religion that throughout history has been savagely denounced, and its adherents savagely oppressed. Ultimately it's a matter of political interpretation whether or not Alawis are to be considered Muslims. The Ottoman Empire didn't even consider them "People of the Book," which meant that unlike Christians, Jews, and mainstream Shiites, Alawis didn't enjoy any legal rights. The ravings of the influential medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyya (who thought Alawis were "greater disbelievers than the Jews, Christians, and Indian idol-worshipping Brahmans") contributed to their oppression and justified the theft of their lands around Aleppo and their forced retreat into the mountains. Until the 1920s, the Alawis were stuck in those mountains. Antakya (Antioch) was the only city where Alawis lived with Sunnis, and Antakya was gifted by France to Turkey before the independence of the modern Syrian state.

Most Alawis today are not particularly religious. Far from pushing Alawi tenets on the general populace, the Assads discouraged the study of the faith and repressed the traditional Alawi clerics. As a result, if individual Alawis do turn to religion, most tend to practice Sunni or mainstream Shiite rituals.

Of course, as far as the business of state is concerned, it should be entirely irrelevant whether or not Alawis are Muslims or even People of the Book. As Syrian citizens they should be guaranteed the same rights and the same access to political office as anyone else. It would help a great deal if revolutionary leaders and Sunni clerics were to state this as clearly and as often as possible. The blatant anti-Alawi sectarianism of Sheikh Adnan al-Arour (given prominence by Saudi Arabia) and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (given prominence by Al Jazeera), both supposed friends of the revolution, does not help at all. Speaking to "those [Alawis] who stood against us," Arour recently promised, "I swear by God we will mince them in grinders and feed their flesh to the dogs."

The one thing the regime has done intelligently in the last six months is to play on minorities' fears. ...

 The two scenarios that most terrify the minorities (and almost everyone else) are, first, the rise of intolerant Islamism, and, second, sectarian civil war. Unfortunately, both scenarios become more likely with every moment the regime remains in power. The experience of being shot at, besieged, and tortured will inevitably drive some toward more extreme views. In addition, the military units slaughtering the people are overwhelmingly Alawi and commanded by Alawis. The regime's shabiha militias in Hama, Homs, and Latakia are Alawis recruited from the surrounding villages. These are the people torturing Sunni women and children to death, burning shops and cars, beating and humiliating old men. Their actions will have consequences. If the regime falls soon, the consequences will be legal and targeted solely at the guilty. If the regime doesn't fall soon, the consequences may be violent, generalized vigilante "justice." Then Iraq and Lebanon will become Syria's models.

Ontario election trivia--UFO and NOHP

Early in the 20th century, Ontario was governed by the UFO -- United Farmers of Ontario.  Such a party would be a non-starter today.

Another probable non-starter is the Northern Ontario Heritage Party, which wants provincial status for the North.  NOHP can't field candidates for more than 2 of the 11 northern ridings -- but somehow has a candidate in downtown Toronto.  So if you live in the St. Paul riding and want to cast a real protest vote, NOHP is available...