Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer up your pants.*

Strange bedfellows.

Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows.

New Senate Whip John Barrasso with President Elect Donald Trump and President John F. Kennedy with his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Politics is, we also know, the art of compromise, but to what extent is a politician to blame for compromising with the truth?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chosen by Donald Trump to be the new head of Health and Human Services.

He is, frankly, a nutter on health topics, who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near such a post.

John Barrasso is, by training, an orthopedic surgeon.

I've long suspected, well I'm pretty much certain, that Dr. Barrasso doesn't actually believe even half of what he's saying..He's doing it to 1) keep his Senatorial seat; and 2) advance himself in the Senate, even though at his age he could easily retire and be done with it.

Without getting too deep into it, I also believe that once you start compromising on fundamental things, you keep doing it, including with the truth.  You don't start off deep into it, but you end up there.

Dr. Barrasso was known, at one time, as "Wyoming's Doctor" and had spots on local television with health minutes, and hosted the Labor Day Marathon.  He continued to do this after he became Senator, a spot he was appointed to by the legislature to fill a vacancy before he was elected.

I've met him, as a physician, but can't claim to know him.  I've been with him on commercial aircraft numerous times.  I've always left him alone, as I figure that while traveling, people don't like to be bothered.  I don't.  Not everyone was like that, however, and I'd see people who recognized him treat him sort of like fans treated Elvis Presley.

Dr. Barrasso is originally from Pennsylvania.  With a solid Italian American parentage, and an early Catholic education, I'd guess, but don't know, that he was a Catholic up until some point.  He list himself as a Presbyterian now, and has been divorced, and later remarried.  He's in his early 70s.  Early on, his positions were clearly moderate Republican, but starting at least as early as 2016 they began to rapidly head towards Trumpism.  He had a right wing challenger in the GOP primary last go around, and while I think the chances of him every losing were small, he went hardcore to the right.

Now he's the whip.  Trump is going to expect him to whip up support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, holds some of the nuttiest ideas on healthcare, and particularly vaccines, imaginable.  He shouldn't be anywhere near the Department of Health and Human Services.

Will Barrasso choke those down and support them.

Again, people don't get to supporting anything overnight.  Some do rapidly, some over decades.

RFK, Jr. has no business in this office.

Kennedys

Before moving on, hasn't the country had enough of the Kennedys?  

I certainly have.

The over tattooed and expropriation.

Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is taking a lot of flak.  Some of it is for things he's said or believes

Some of it for his tattoos, which are interpreted to mean things which they might not.

One of those tattoos is of a Jerusalem Cross.

The Jerusalem cross consists of a large cross potent surrounded by four smaller Greek crosses representing the spread of the gospel to the four corners of the earth.  It was used as the emblem and coat of arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem after 1099.

Hegeth is a member of a church which is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.  Therefore, he's appropriating a Catholic symbol, while he's not a Catholic.  Indeed, he's not even close, as he's on his third spouse, something no adherent Catholic would have done.

He also has a tattoo on a bicep that states Deus vult, "God wills", a phrase that dates back to the First Crusade, but which has been appropriated by many groups over the years.   And it doesn't stop there.

“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” he's stated.

Perhaps he should learn more about the faith espoused by the symbols that he's had inked on himself.  Indeed, quite frankly, the men who cried Deus vult in the 11th Century and those who fought to defend the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have regarded him as a heretic. 

Anyhow,  one thing that I've worried about since the rise of Christian Nationalist is that Catholics are the ones who are going to take a beating in the end, even though its really a Protestant movement.  I can already see it starting to happen.  Former Senator Adam Kinzinger, who comments heavily on Blue Sky and Twitter, had a post noting that "the Crusades weren't Christian".  Oh yes they were, the thing they weren't is the edited version that English Protestants came up with to attempt to tar and feather the Church.  Others have been running around claiming that the Jerusalem Cross, which Catholics use a lot, is a Nazi symbol, which it isn't, or a camouflaged swastika, which it isn't.

The United States remains a Protestant nation, including in the way it reacts to symbols and in its misunderstanding of history.

All this serves, I'd note, to bury a deeper item that should be of actual concern, which is the American Evangelical view towards Israel.  This is not universal, by any means, but there's a branch of American Evangelicalism which sees itself as having a direct role in bringing about the Second Coming through its interaction with Israel.  According to somebody who knew him and commented on it recently (therefore at least making it somewhat suspect) former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has been nominated by Trump to be Ambassador to Israel, and who is a Baptist minister, has those views.

Really, people with the apparent views of Huckabee and Kinzinger really have no business in the offices they've been nominated to serve in.

Hairless wonders.

This is sort of an odd aside, but the huge increase in male tattoos, including chest tattoos, has caused me to wonder, has there been a reduction in male chest hair in recent years?

Chest hair is a secondary male characteristic which is caused by a variety of genetic factors.  One of those is a high testosterone level, and for that reason, hairy chests have gone, at any one time, from being regarded as "brutish" to sexy.  Because of the conditions of the Second World War, Americans were acclimated for a time to seeing men shirtless, which was unusual, and for a good several decades after the war, hairy chested men, or just flat out hairy men in general, were in vogue.  Indeed I can recall seeing some 1960s vintage war movie with Fabian in it which was ridiculously hairy.

This is clearly really out now, but it still raises the question, what's going on.  Personally, I couldn't have a giant chest tattoo like Hegseth for the same reason that Tom Selleck couldn't.  I doubt that I really could have a tattoo anywhere safe for the the generally non visible part of my arms either.

It's interesting to note that there has been a substantial reduction in detected testosterone levels in the US since the 1980s.**

Maybe RFK, Jr. can look into that.

Creeps

It's a real irony that the man so many Christian Evangelicals saw as the Christian candidate has such a horrible personal tract record at least in the sexual ethics category, but perhaps that fact should cause us to be less than surprised that he nominated Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General of the United States.

There seem to be no doubt that Gaetz dabbled down in this category to a 17 year old.  Yes, he wasn't prosecuted, but he may have had a credible defense based on scienter.  According to at least one report, once he learned she was 17, he abstained from her favors until she was 18.

The thing here, however, is that this conduct is completely immoral.  Not only is it sex outside of marriage, which Christianity, but Gaetz is a creep who is fishing in the bottom of the well.  Frankly, this deserves further investigation as most 17 year olds or 18 year olds would have had no interest in Gaetz, so something should be done to figure out why they did and what's behind that.

This guy has no significant legal experience and shouldn't be anywhere near the AG's office.

Scenes from the American dumpster fire.

Strange bedfellows indeed.

At this point, however, if Matt Gaetz invited Mike Johnson over to the Playboy Grotto, if it still existed, I'd expect him to go.

Something about this photo just shows how trashy American culture has become.

Trashy.

I think there is sort of a faction in the Republican Party that has a strange kind of... sort of homoerotic fascination for Putin.

Boris Johnson recently stated this.

The fascination for Putin (who has a hairless chest, I'd note) is pretty weird.

Trad Rant

The recent election seems to have bubbled some stuff up from the bottom of the cultural dutch oven, and not just stuff like the weird things noted in the two above entries. Some of this is interesting to ponder, including pondering whether its a serious trend or something else.

One of them is the emergence of secular (and religious) trad women, holding a romantic, it seems, view of the not so distant path.

Here's an example.  Interesting trad rant starting at 21:00.

Interesting trad rant starting at 21:00.

This topic has come up here before, and the same way, more or less. The video clip above was cut down as a TikTok clip and reposted on Twitter, where it went viral.  Just the part where the young female Republican Trumpite starts the rant linked above.  We posted on this topic before, where a young woman, who was not aspiring to be a Hallmark farm wife, was having an absolute meltdown about having to work.

It's easy to dismiss this stuff, but there's something to it, which as noted, I've dove into before.  What's bizarre, maybe, is there somewhat to be some sort of minor movement.  Witness, in photos lifted from Twitter, although if I did it right, you can jump right to their Twitter feed.

I don't want to go to far in criticizing this, really, as it has a real appeal, as does a lot of sort of agrarian conservatism and Chesteronian distributism I see creeping into the culture, sort of sideways.  These people are sincere, and there's a real appeal to it.  Shoot, I'd live an agrarian life if people around me would allow it, or so I tell myself.

Others tell themselves that too, and also mock themselves, as for example, here:

Carpathian shepherdess.

Well, enough of all of that.

Footnotes:

*“A Little Song, a Little Dance, a Little Seltzer Down Your Pants”

**That may actually be due to the overall increase in the median age, as testosterone levels decline, normally, in males as they age.

Related Threads:

Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.

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Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 65th Edition. Toilet Paper Day, Swedish immigration and emigration, Wyoming trending on Twitter.

Labels: 2020s, 2024, 2024 Election, Daily Living, Disaster, emigration, Immigration, law, Sweden, The Wyoming Fires of 2024, Twitter, Wyoming, Zeitgeist

July 25, 1920. Saladin, nous voici

Syrian volunteers uniformed and equipped in the fashion of the former Ottoman Army, 1920

On this day in 1920 the French, largely using native troops drawn from North Africa, officially entered Damascus and put an end to the Emir Feisal's independent Syrian government.  The French commander, Mariano Goybet, made the unfortunate reference to the Crusades on the occasion at the Umayyad Mosque when he declared, "Saladin, nous voici", which translates (at bit roughly), to "Saladin, we're back", or "Saladin, we're here."

Probably more fortunately most of the people in Damascus didn't speak French, but nonetheless the sentiment expressed the really aggressive and arrogant position taken by France in regard to Syria, which had only lately been freed from Ottoman rule by the Arab Army and the British Commonwealth during World War One.  The Arab Army's late war goal had been the occupation of Damascus.

Syria was then, as it is now, a multicultural nation which featured a variety of ethnicities and which retained a significant Christian population.  The reference to Saladin recalled the defeat of Christian forces at the hands of Saladin at the end of the Crusader era in the 1170s through 1190s.  France had at that time been heavily invested in the region and, in spite of the passage of centuries, that had not been forgotten by the French who regarded Syria as a special charge even if the Syrians did not want them back.

Feisal would flea to British protection and was given Iraq as a consolation prize, a kingdom that ultimately cost him his life.

Syria would remain a French mandate until 1946, with French rule being unpopular.  A long running revolt broke out in 1926 which ultimately lead to an effort to create an independent state by the French in 1936, but the French government did not ratify it.  The British supported Syrian independence following World War Two and a Syrian government formed during the mandate period took it into independence.   

Following Syrian governments have proven themselves to be unstable since that time, with coups taking place within a few years of independence.  The Ba'ath Party, an Arab nationalist fascist party, has been in power since 1961, but obviously its rule is far from unchallenged.

Syrian soldier in 2012.

What would have occurred had the French simply acquiesced to a Hashamite kingdom in 1920 remains a great historical, "what if".

Redrawing the battle lines to fit modern sensibilities, and thereby doing violence to history.

I suppose I'm over-publishing on this topic, due to the recent controversy over South Carolina's continued flying of one of the Confederate battle flags (there were a variety of them).  I've already posted on that immediately below.

On that topic, tonight on the national news I saw a man yelling at the reporter interviewing him when that reporter associated the Stars and Bars with the cause of slavery.  He yelled back something to the effect that Southern solders "were never fighting for slavery".

Oh, yes they were.

Oh sure, a person can put any number of nuances on this.  Drafted men, for example, fight (sometimes) because they were drafted. But at the end of the day, the argument that Southern soldiers didn't know that the war was about slavery are fooling themselves and dishonoring history. No matter what else the motives of individuals solders were, and no matter how hard, and even valiantly, they fought, they knew that if they one, slavery as an institution was going to be preserved, and that's what had taken their states into rebellion.  Individual motives may have been, and likely often were, much more complicated than that, but that's the simple fact.

What's also the fact, however, is that there's a tremendous desire on the part of people to make combatants of the past, even the near past, fit their sensibilities.  People don't like to think that people who fought really hard, and who had some admirable qualities, let alone people who are related them, fought for a bad cause, and knew it.

So, let's see how some examples of this work.

"The lost cause" has been a romantic Southern perception since some point during Reconstruction, when Southerners ceased confronting what they'd fought for and reimagined it.  As they did so, something the opposite of what Americans did to their returning servicemen during the late 60s and early 70s occurred, as they began to imagine the cause as noble and every Southern soldier a hero.  This stayed largely a Southern thing up until film entered the scene, and Birth of a Nation spread the concept everywhere.  It's likely best expressed in Gone With the Wind, which no matter what else a person thinks of it, has a very racist and rosy view of the old South.  It well expressed the concept that every slave was like Pork, Mammy or Prissy, and ever Southern soldier was Ashley.  The slave holding South is presented as a romantic dream, and effectively. Heck, I like the film. But it doesn't express reality.

The reality of Southern secession was that the Southern slave holding states had such a hair trigger about slavery the election of Abraham Lincoln was too much for it to endure, simply because he expressed the intent not to let slavery spread.  Southern legislatures went out of the Union, or tried to, on that point.  

That doesn't mean every Union soldier was enlightened.  But it should be noted that Union soldiers fought for the more philosophical point of preserving the Union.  At one time, their service was hugely admired, but in recent years, somehow, the romance that surrounds the Southern cause is the one that tends to be remembered.  That skews history.  Sure, the individual motivations of Southern troops may be more complicated, but that's still a fact that can't 'be ignored.

It probably also shouldn't be ignored that a huge percentage of the Southern fighting force had deserted by the end of the war either, or that regions of the South were hostile to the Confederacy.  

Which brings me to Italians during World War Two, truly.

For some reason, Italians, who actually did fight pretty hard in North Africa and in the Soviet Union (you didn't know that they fought with the Germans in the USSR, they did) are regarded as cowardly as they gave up when it became obvious that Mussolini wasn't worth fighting for.

Now, exactly what's wrong with that?  That doesn't make them cowards, that makes them smart.

I don't know what that says about the German fighting man in World War Two, but whatever it is, it isn't admirable.  But here too there are apologist who would excuse the German soldier.

German troops fought hard everywhere right to the bitter end, and they did so for an inescapably evil cause.  That's not admirable, and I don't care if most of them were drafted.  Most Italian soldiers were drafted too, and by 1943 they were giving up where they could, including their officers.  Some German officers did rebel, but mot didn't, and most German troops fought on until late war.  They shouldn't have.  They shouldn't have fought for Hitler at all.

The Japanese have gotten more of a pass about World War Two than the Germans have on every level, and I do suppose that the fact that Japanese soldiers were largely ignorant of things elsewhere may provide a bit of an excuse for the barbarity that they engaged in, but only barely.  And the occasional confusion of Japanese Medieval chivalry for later day Japanese "honor" is bunk.  The Japanese were brutal during World War Two and the fact that they claimed to liberate other Asians and then acted brutally shows that they should have known better.

Speaking of chivalry, however, the recent trend to show the enemies of Medieval Christendom as primitive nobles and the forces of Medieval Christendom as baddies is also revisionism in need of a dope slap.  Crusaders who went off to the Middle East weren't on a confused mission, they were repelling an invasion, and the Vikings weren't admirable in their pagan state.

Speaking of mounted troops (chivalry) another odd one has been the modern tendency to view all native combatants as committed against the United States in the 18th and 19th Century, or even against all European Americans.  Many Indians view things this way themselves, but it doesn't reflect the complicated reality.  Many tribes allied themselves with European Americans in various instances, sometime temporarily and sometimes not so.  In the West an interesting example of this is the Shoshone, who were allies of the United States and who contributed combatants to campaigns of the 1870s.  In recent years I've occasionally seen it claimed that the Shoshone were amongst the tribes that fought at Little Big Horn, in the Sioux camp.  It's not impossible that some were there, but by and large the big Shoshone story for the 1876 campaign was the detail contributed to Crook's command against the Sioux.  I'll note I'm not criticizing them for this, only noting it.

Regarding the main point, the fact of the matter is that we admire those who fight for us bravely, and bravery is admirable.  It's hard to accept that bravery for a bad cause is admirable, however. That doesn't mean that all bravery serves honor.  Quite the opposite can be true.  Redrawing the motives of combatants doesn't do history any favors, and it doesn't do justice of any kind to the combatants on any side in former wars either.

Botching history on the bully pulpit

Every year there's an event called the National Prayer Breakfast.  I'll confess I don't really know much about it, other than it happens in D.C., and the President usually goes to it.  Typically, most Presidents have been careful not to say anything controversial, but President Obama has been the exception. This year he made just such a statement when he said:

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. …So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.

Now, this statement is one of those ones that's guaranteed to spark controversy, and I suspect that the President didn't quite mean this the way it sounds, but how does it measure up historically?  And beyond that, how does what it implies measure up?  So let's look at what the statement seems to say, and what it seems to imply.  It seems to say and imply:

1.  Some people are accusing Islam of being violent (and that's a correct thing to state, i.e., some people are saying that).

2.  Christianity has had its own examples of people doing terrible things in the name of Christianity; and three of those things are:  a) misdeeds in the Crusades; b) misdeeds during the Inquisition; and c) slavery and American segregation era racism.

So how do those claims, none of which is unique to the President, stack up? And how does the counter claim, which was essentially being addressed, that Islam is violent measure up?

Let's start with one of the most misconstrued periods of history of all time included in the list above, the Crusades.  Were bad deeds done in the name of Christianity during the Crusades.  Not so much.

The Crusades in and of themselves are very much misunderstood and this is principally due to the Reformation.  Prior to the Reformation western Europeans did not have a negative view of the Crusades, and even during the early part of the Reformation some figures, such as Martin Luther, were pleading for Christian intervention in defense of Catholic lands, such as Austria, against invading Islamic armies.  It was only later, when various Protestant groups developed a revisionist history that the suggestion that the Crusades were improper came about, and this was due to a desire to point fingers at their rivals and to distinguish themselves.  Like most big revisionist histories, the revision wasn't too accurate.

The "Crusades", which weren't called that until centuries later, came about as defensive wars designed to stop Islamic invasion of Christian lands, with much of those Christian lands occupied by Eastern, not Western, Christians. The Byzantines found that they were unable to stop invading Islamic armies, which had become newly aggressive after Islamic leaders, ironically non Arabs, first acted to subjugate Islamic Arab kingdoms in the Middle East. Those Islamic kingdoms sometimes had Christian majority populations, and the two groups had managed to settle into co-existence, but under this effort to subjugate those kingdoms, that policy ended and local Christians were persecuted or even given no choice but to convert to Islam. At the same time, Islamic forces began to expand into the region and threaten Anatolia.  The Byzantines asked for help, with Rome urged be provided.  Also, the same impulses acted to provide for armed escorts for pilgrims to the Holy Land, as they were subject to attack by marauding Islamic bands.

The initial efforts were successful.  Over time, the advancing Islamic armies were rolled back, areas that were occupied by them were once again under Christian rule, and in some places, over time, invading Islamic armies were completely and permanently defeated, such as in Sicily.  Less permanently, but significantly, Christian kingdoms, sometimes presented as invading kingdoms now, were created in various areas of the Mediterranean Middle East which very often had majority Christian populations newly freed from Islamic rule.   As we all know, the effort was not long term successful as the Ottoman Turks did manage to subjugate and defeat the Ottoman Empire, Islamic armies ultimately retook what they'd lost in the Middle East, and they even invaded up into Europe.  

So what were the terrible deeds?

Well, unless you consider the wars themselves terrible, not much.  The wars were fought under the conventional rules of the day, which weren't quite as nice as the modern ones, but they also saw a great deal less bloodshed than imagined as well.  Victorious armies of this, and earlier, periods grossly exaggerated their victories and usually claimed that vast numbers of enemy combatants, and even enemy civilians, were killed, but in reality, by one calculation, the number of people killed by the Crusading armies is actually less than those killed in pitched, but modern, battles today. That is, all the dead doesn't really add up to the same for one fairly typical battle today. Indeed, overall combat casualties were pretty low for the entire series of events.  And the claims about civilian towns people, including women and children, appear to be largely just made up.

The Crusaders did misbehave when they went through Constantinople, which cannot be denied, but nobody has every claimed that was done in the name of Christianity, quite the contrary.  In that, you have an example of Christians misbehaving, but not in Christ's name.  

So, the Crusades, a defensive war in the first place, turns out not to be an example of what the President claims.  The error would be understandable, save for the fact that he's so well educated.

Before we go on, let's look at the counter example, Islamic violence, which is what brings this topic up anyhow?  Is the same true of Islam, i.e., that its violence is conventional and misunderstood, in a historical context?

Well, here too, people who cite strongly to the "religion of peace" claim have history to contend with, but then so do those who would claim that all Islam is necessarily violent.

Very early Islam, that is Islam during Mohammed's life, spread at first through what was apparently his charismatic personality but then, during his life, took to violence.  From the outside, it seems that early on, when the more peaceful aspects of the Koran were written in these regards, it was a distinctly minority religion, and probably a Gnostic heresy.  It may have been quite a bit different than what it is today.  As Mohammad gained adherents, he turned to the violent spread of the new religion, and the later more violent portions of the Koran were written.  It seems fairly clear that the version of the Koran we have today doesn't actually match the earliest one, with the very earliest one held in a library in war torn Yemen, were nobody is allowed to view it, but the evolution was probably there. What this probably reflects, therefore, is that early on Mohammad wanted to try to make sure his faith wasn't unduly persecuted by the orthodox Christian faith, or the remaining Jewish faith, and so he urged peace and co existance.  Later on, when he was spreading the faith through the sword into mostly pagan areas of the Arabian peninsula, he was willing to take on Christians and Jews as well, and so the text grew considerably more dark.  So, Islam does in fact have a violent early history, in real contrast to Christianity which was hugely oppressed and non violent in its early centuries, and also in contrast to the Christian actions in the crusades.

Early Islam, in fact, spread mostly by the sword, being ultimately stopped in western Europe at Tours, and then rolled back, in the east at Vienna.   But that doesn't mean that all Moslems are violent, nor does it mean that Islam has been trying to spread by the sword every day of every year.  Indeed, right now the criteria for launching a violent action under Islam are relatively strict and basically can't really be done, as the authorities who would be allowed to decree it just simply don't exist.  So a good argument can be made that while Islam certainly has a violent past, those who act violently for it today may be heretical or at least out of the safe confines of their faith.

Okay, back to the other points, what about the Inquisition?

The term "Inquisition" usually means the Spanish Inquisition.  There are other Inquisitions, and for the most part they are inquiries of some sort or another.  The Spanish one is cited most typically, as it too gained currency as a "bad act" during the Reformation.  There's rich irony even in that, at least in the English speaking world, as any of the contestants in England were not shy about using force and Protestant authorities would go on to be very oppressive against not only Catholics, but other Protestants.

The problem overall is that its taken out of context pretty badly and also grossly exaggerated.

In order to understand it in the first place, a person has to be aware that the existing legal structure everywhere at that time viewed the Crown as the ultimate legal authority, and also, everywhere, viewed heresy as threat to the Crown.  It wasn't until the Reformation for the most part that European monarchies would have a concept of religious tolerance, although even then they typically did not. Henry VIII, for example, was happy to have his backer Thomas Cromwell be seen to be executed as a heretic.  Nations that went from being Catholic nations to Protestant ones quite often took the exact same position, except that they adopted a different church as the state church. So, in context, the concept of heresy as a state offense was very strong for a very long time.  This had to do not just with the Faith, however, but also very much with the concept of government.  In an era when monarchies could generally not act contrary to the faith, and when they all claimed to rule consistent with it, heretical acts were regarded as treasonous.  If a person could separate form the Faith, then they could also separate from the Crown.

This lead to various monarchies trying accused heretics.  In the case of the Spanish Inquisition, the Church became concerned that the judicial authorities were too ready to find people guilty, not to lax in doing so, and that the judicial authorities were also not competent to try such offenses. Given that, they Inquisition came about to look into such offenses.  This resulted in the accused being less likely, not more, to be found guilty.  Indeed, there were protests at the time against the Inquisition on that score, i.e., being too ready to find the accused innocent.

The trials of such things were not always pretty to be sure, and here perhaps the President has a point. But that's because all trials of serious matters were subject to shocking conduct by modern standards.  The concept of some sort of coercion was the norm, and it wasn't until centuries later that this was regarded as an improper judicial technique.  Even now, apparently, we haven't really come fully around to rejecting that concept in our own minds, as our own country has recently used what we must rationally concede to be torture to gain information from terrorists.  That doesn't excuse it, but it does place it in context.

So, again with the Spanish Inquisition. . . not so much.  It was an effort to reduce improper convictions, not to spur convictions, and its actions were consistent with those universally accepted then, but not now, in trials.  Interestingly, it resulted in many fewer deaths than British witch trials that would soon follow did, although those are generally regarded as attributable to Christian beliefs by their perpetrators.  The ultimate irony may be that pointing the finger at the Spanish Inquisition came up in the context of the Reformation, at which time the English Crown was always at a close state of war with Spain, but during which England itself was in a period of engaging in massive religious repression during which it wasn't shy about using violence.  Indeed, should the President have cared to make it, the actions of various British monarchs and political figures would have been a much better example of what he was trying to cite to than the Spanish Inquisition.

Well then, what about slavery and racism?

Here, I think, the President has a better point.  Nobody is claiming that Christianity sanctions slavery or racism, but people did make those claims.  Slavery in the South was sometimes excused on that basis, in no small part because the South was an overwhelmingly Christian region with a lot of serious Christians who had to reconcile their actions somehow.  Slavery is mentioned in the New Testament quite a bit, and so the rationalization was that because it isn't outright condemned, it must be sanctioned.  Well, actually it isn't, and the Greek word of the period in which the New Testament was written makes no distinction between a "slave" and a "servant", because in that period there really wasn't one. That reflects the economic realities of the 1st Century, but it has nothing to do with the 18th and 19th Century in terms of human bondage, and it doesn't license it.  Southern Christians, however, argued the opposite.

Be that as it may ,that was a position taken by individuals, rather than by any one church.  So, for example, the very large Episcopal church in the South didn't declare acceptance of slavery tto be doctrinal by any means.  Indeed, and again ironically, here too we have to bring in the United Kingdom as for much of this period the UK, which was home to at least two of the widespread Protestant faiths in the South, was the European standard bearer for the anti slavery effort.  The English may have gotten race based slavery rolling in North America to some extent, but they also really took it on later on, and often due to religious impulses.


Raced based slavery might, however, make it a better example here, as it might actually fit the President's example of some Christians misusing their faith to do a bad thing.  Although it was a rationalization, not doctrinal, but I think that was his point.  I.e., some people did do that, just as some Moslems now excuse violent actions the same way.

I don't really know how Christianity could be used to justify racism, but again, some have bizarrely tried that as well, so perhaps that too is a better example.  In the recent violent actions in France, for example, one of the attackers was living with his girlfriend, and their violent actions killed a Moslem policeman.  No way that Islam sanctions any of that, so a person engaging in that sort of activity has had to do some huge rationalization to get there.  I think in these instances you have the example of somebody believing so strongly that their actions are justified, that they then go to the conclusion that they can do anything they want.  No religion sanctions that, but some people behave that way.

So, on this one, I think I'd grade the President with a 50, a scale which would leave him with an F.  Back to the books.  Of course, these historical failings are commonly believed ones, and so maybe I'd reluctantly given him a C.

Repeating History. Learning from the Crusades

I just bumped up the Myths thread, which includes a lot of historical myths.  I thought about adding this one to it, but it deserves its own thread, so here it goes.

 Depiction of the Sarcens outside of Paris in 732. That's right, outside of Paris.  The Islamic invasion of Europe in this early Caliphate stage advanced this far north, which it would do again (outside Vienna) 700 years later.

One of the most often repeated lines about history is George Santayana's observation that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  This is often changed to "those who have not learned from history are doomed to repeat it", and similar variants, all of which are true.  Probably something that can be added to that is that those who learn history incorrectly, or who misunderstand history, get to repeat it as well, frequently to their horror.

And so we have the Crusades.

The Crusades weren't called the Crusades at the time that they occurred.  That's a term tagged on them in later years, post Reformation, when they were understood as sort of a singular episode.  Even that understanding isn't really correct, as it seems to assume, quite falsely, that the Church declared war on Islam, and then the Crusades happened, and then they ended.  None of that is really right.  Looking at what really  happened is worth doing, as we didn't learn the history, and now we are in fact repeating it.

The Crusades were once more or less accurately understood, but over the past several decades there's been a lot of hand wringing in the western world about how awful we (Europeans) were, or sometimes how awful the Catholic church was, for picking on the Moslems in the Middle East. That's the current view now, backed up in self-righteous statements people have issued over the years, seemingly assuming that we enlightened folks would never do something like that now, and we just failed to comprehend Islam.  None of that is even close to being historically accurate.

The First Crusade was "called" in 1095.  By that time, however, the Christian world had endured Islamic armed invasion for about 400 years.  The first waive of it had come during Mohamed's lifetime when he expanded his new religion by the sword, taking over the Arabian peninsula in the process.  This lead him into Christian lands, which would remain Christian for decades thereafter, in spite of the invasions, and whose remnants even today still exist.  In the following decades Islam was spread by Arab armies in wars of conquest all over North Africa and into Spain. The Moslems' armies of conquest then spread over the Pyrenees and into France, until Charles Martel arrested their progress, and turned them around, in the Battle of Tours in 732, just mere decades after Mohamed's death.  This arrested the progress of Islam's advance by the sword, all the way up in central France, and the process began of rolling the Islamic tide back in Spain, a process that wouldn't be complete until 1492.

In Middle East, Moslem forces, by the 11th Century, were oppressing the Christian residents of that region, which in many instances constituted the majority of the population and were pressing into the Byzantine Empire.  The Great Schism had not yet occurred, although the differences that would lead to it in culture were starting to manifest themselves, and the Byzantines called for help. The result was the Crusades.

We have tended to view that as some sort of unwarranted invasion for some time, but in reality, in an era when history generally progressed slowly, it wasn't seen that way at all.  It was an armed expedition to help a Christian Ally, the Byzantines, and to protect the Christian population of the Middle East, which was often the majority in any one region, all against an aggressive Islam that was an unwanted and unrelenting invader.  It was seen as a massive existential threat to the region, and to the safety of the Western World.

In other words, the Arab Islamic Armies (and later the Ottoman Turks) were seen pretty much the way we're seeing ISIL right now.  In taking on ISIL, we're pretty much doing what they started doing in the 11th Century.

Well, we might want to quit picking on the Crusaders, I suppose, given that.

And we might want to consider that the defensive wars of the Crusades were initially a success, but ultimately failed.  As a defensive war, they succeeded in arresting Arab Islamic invasion of the Byzantine Empire and in removing Islamic over-lordship of Christian lands.  They no doubt also occupied some Islamic territory as well.  But ultimately, they failed.  The reason is simple.  It wasn't because Europeans were trying to control a foreign culture.  Recent research has shown that the majority Christian population in those regions where they were the majority adapted to the Europeans pretty quickly and even generally welcomed the European immigrants that came along after the armies.  No, what happened is that after the initial successes, the Europeans generally lost interest in the region and when it fell again, viewed it as a far off distant threat.  The threat wasn't even appreciated again until the Turks invaded Anatolia and took Constantinople in 1453.  Ultimately, the Moslem armies would be turned around in Vienna, in 1529.

So what can we learn from this? Well, a variety of things I suppose.  One thing is that before condemning our own culture for taking on a military project, perhaps we ought to consider what they were really thinking and why.  The other may be that when regarding a threat, just because it was in antiquity doesn't mean that it really has fully gone away, but maybe just gone smaller or larger.  The Battle of Tours was 300 years distant from the First Crusades, and 1400 years from the Siege of Constantinople. We're about 500 years from that Siege, and the similar one at Vienna, making us closer in time to those events than Charles Martel was.

I'm not saying that those who have invaded Iraq and who contest for Syria are fully analogous to Mohamed's armies of the 7th Century, nor to the Ottoman Turks of the 15th. But they see themselves that way, and we would be pretty naive to at least not appreciate their world view, and the world view of those faced with similar or at least somewhat similar threats in the distant past, and learn by them.

Wednesday, July 7, 1909. Lawrence goes to the Middle East.

Undergraduate student T. E. Lawrence left Britain for his first trip to the Middle East, bound for Syria and Palestine to study the influence of the Crusades on European military architecture. The trip would later produce the book Crusader Castles, which came out the following year.

Some photos of agricultural child labor in Maryland were taken, captions are original.

Bertha Marshall a berry picker on Jenkins Farm, Rock Creek, near Baltimore, Md. Been at it 2 summers. Picks about 10 boxes a day. (2 cents a box). Photo July 7, 1909. Location: Baltimore, Maryland.

Johnnie Goldberg and father on a Rock Creek farm. Boy worked at Young Island, S.C. one winter. July 7, 1909. Location: Baltimore, Maryland.

Name: A four year old helper in the berry field Rock Creek, Baltimore, Md. Mother said, "He helps a little." July 7, 1909. Location: Baltimore, Maryland.

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 6, 1909. Albert Einstein, quitter.

Labels: 1900s, 1909, Career advice, Personalities, Science, Switzerland, Work