We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Wait a minute, I thought it was George Bush who was supposed to be the new Hitler:
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has called on Muslims to use brains as well as brawn to fight Jews who “rule the world”.
“The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy… 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews,” he said, speaking at the opening of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in the Malaysian administrative capital Putrajaya.
Well, at least he’s not a holocaust-denier. Anyway, he has probably been driven to desperation by the Zionist occupation of..er, Malaysia.
The Reconquest of Spain
D. W. Lomax
Longman, first published 1978
It is surprising to read (p. 179), “There seems to be no serious book in any language devoted to the history of the whole Reconquest,” (at least when the book was published in 1978) despite the fact that it would seem to be the underlying theme of the history of the Middle Ages in the Peninsula, with the nice firm dates of 711-1492. The author commends O’Callaghan’s A History of Medieval Spain.
Like everywhere else, from Persia to the Atlantic, Islam rolled unstoppably over the whole of Spain, except its tiny northern edge, probably leaving that out in favour of richer pickings in southern France. Even here, in Asturias, only active resistance to the Arabs ensured the survival of the tiny state and an early civil war amongst the Moslems led to the withdrawal of disaffected Berbers from northern territory which was then occupied by Christians.
The author claims, with some evidence, that quite early the ideal of Reconquest was the ambition of the Christian kings and people. However, the initial Ummayad emirate, subsequently caliphate, flourished until the end of, and particularly during, the tenth century, though the last caliphs were puppets. It is probably this period of the Muslim occupation that has been idealised as a time of toleration by Muslims of Christians and Jews, though these were definitely second-class citizens and persecution of them not unknown.
The break-up of the caliphate enabled the Christians to advance again, with some assistance from France; also the crusading ideal, though mainly focussed on Jerusalem, was some help, sometimes by crusaders en passant. The capitulation of Toledo, even though it remained something of an outpost, signalled this. However, about 1085, some of the Muslims, in desperation invited in from North Africa the Almoravids, a puritanical sect (often hated by the more liberal decadent Spanish Muslims) who, in the great battle of Sagrajas (1086) halted the reconquest. The Cid (1043-99) is of this period. Much of the time he as often served Muslim kings as Christian, but after capturing Valencia, “was the only Christian leader to defeat the Almoravids in battle in the eleventh century”. (p. 74)
By this time the Christian states were Portugal, Leon-Castille (gradually united), Aragon and Navarre, sometimes allied, but more often not and generally with no scruples about fighting each other with Muslim allies. However, Aragon was pushing down the Ebro valley, taking Saragossa in 1118, though the Almoravids fought back successfully to prevent it reaching Valencia, which had been evacuated after the death of the Cid.
Like the Caliphate before them, the Almoravids disintegrated and were largely replaced, from 1157, by another sect from Africa, the Almohads, who soundly defeated the Castilians at Alarcos in 1195. This defeat seems to have first cowed then roused the Christians (particularly the Pope); finally Christians from all the Spanish kingdoms, and some from France, united in a campaign which won the decisive victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). In the forty years after the battle the Almohad empire broke into pieces which were annexed by” Castile and Aragon. Vital cities – such as Cordova (1236) and Seville (1248) – passed permanently into Christian hands so that “by 1252 the whole of the Peninsula was nominally under Christian suzerainty” (p. 129), though this, of course, did not mean the end of Muslim kingdoms.
The pace of reconquest slowed down, initially as a result of another transfusion from Africa, the Marinids, who, however, could only defend the Muslim rump. In 1340, at Tarifa, their sultan was decisively defeated and no successor state in Africa invaded Spain again. Muslim Spain survived as Granada for another 150 years, the Christians occupying much of the time fighting and rebelling against each other. One is forced to add: when they should have been completing the Conquest. The process, when it happened, certainly united Spain. In the end, “Fernando and Isabel could cure one crisis in 1481 simply by setting the war-machine to work once more to conquer Granada.” (p. 178)
The author, at his Conclusion makes the persuasive claim that “Only Spain [and also, I suppose to a lesser extent Portugal, which he does not mention] was able to conquer, administer, Christianize and europeanize the populous areas of the New World precisely because during the previous seven centuries her society had been constructed for the purpose of conquering, administering, Christianizing and europeanizing the inhabitants of al-Andalus.” (p. 178) As so often in books published from the 1970s on, the maps leave much to be desired; certainly places are mentioned in the text which are not to be found on them.
Two days after I had finished this book I listened to a discussion on “Cordovan Spain” under Melvyn Bragg’s chairmanship on Radio 4. The three other participants were Tim Winter, a Muslim convert, of the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University, Mary Nickman, a Jewess (carefully correcting herself from AD to Common Era) and an executive director of the Maimonides Foundation, and Martin Palmer, whose voice was not to me sufficiently distinguishable from the first, an Anglican lay preacher and theologian, and author of A Sacred History of Britain. Although the consensus was largely positive about the Ummayad regime, and their tone “multicultural” in the modern sense, the first two did seem to agree that the three religions, while coexisting, did not indulge in dialogue, let alone interpenetrate. This confirms an episode mentioned in the book, that even when promised immunity in a bilateral debate, a Christian was executed “when he expressed his real opinion of Mohammed”. (p. 23) Nor was the Koran translated into Latin “until the twelfth or thirteenth century”, someone said in the discussion. Needless to say, the rosy view of Muslim Spain did not take into account that the Muslim conquest fatally disrupted Mediterranean civilization, the burden of Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. To pick up the shards and pass a few of them on does not strike me as a very large recompense.
Another bracing dose of perspective from Victor Davis Hanson:
[A]fter September 11 we will either accept defeat and stay within our borders to fight a defensive war of hosing down fires, bulldozing rubble, arresting terrorist cells, and hoping to appease or buy off our enemies abroad — or we will eventually have to confront Syria, Lebanon’s Bekka Valley, Saudi Arabia, and Iran with a clear request to change and come over to civilization, or join the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
[B]y any historical measure, what strikes students of this war so far in its first two years is the amazing degree to which the United States has hurt its enemies without incurring enormous casualties and costs.
As always with VDH, it pays to read the whole thing.
Ralph Peters bangs one out of the park today, echoing and expanding on the sentiment behind my earlier post on “I hope we win”. A few tidbits:
The truth is that today’s media shape reality – often for the worse. The media form a powerful strategic factor. They’re actors, not merely observers.
The media is a key strategic factor today. And it is profoundly dishonest for so powerful a player to pretend it bears no responsibility for strategic outcomes.
The selectivity with which the news is reported shapes opinion, here and abroad. The news we see, hear and read from Iraq is overwhelmingly bad news. Thus, the picture the American electorate and foreign audiences receive is one of spreading failure – even though our occupation has made admirable progress.
We’re on the way to talking ourselves into defeat in the face of victory. Much of the media has already called the game’s outcome as a loss before we’ve reached half-time. Even though the scoreboard shows we’re winning.
To an extent few journalists will admit, terror as we know it depends on the media as its accomplice, amplifying the terrorist’s deeds and shaping successes out of terrorist failures – the opposite of the media’s approach to American efforts.
From the terrorists’ perspective, 9/11 was, above all, a media event – a global demonstration of their power.
This is not an argument for propaganda, or for turning our press into mindless red-white-and-blue cheerleaders. But the media must face up to the responsibility that goes with their influence.
The terrorists, from Arafat to Hussein to bin Laden, all count on the media as a critical element in their campaigns, relying on the faux objectivity of “the cycle of violence” and moral relativism to conceal their barbarity, counting on the instinctive oppositionism of the Western media to undermine support for the war, and relying on the “news appeal” of bad news to give their side the bully pulpit while draining the life out of our victories.
The media have to understand that they are not neutral bystanders, but, against their will, have been made into combatants in this war. The only question is, whose side will they aid? So far, the verdict is pretty clear that the mainstream media, unwitting as it is, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
About a week ago one of our readers, known only to me as “Pierre55”, suggested I might find this french language article interesting. I did and I think others will also. It is worth the effort even if your french language skills date to barely passed courses from your teen years like mine.
There are some very interesting statistics which compare Baghdad, Johannesburg and Washington…
Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing out this Reuters story. It seems Polish force have found some brand spanking new 2003 dated French Roland missiles in an Iraqi arms dump.
It just goes to show: where there’s a customer, there’s a way.
The third post by Our Man in Basra about his observations from both Iraq and the West, to which he has now returned.
I have noticed that most Westerners tend to form one of two opinions about the situation in Iraq and about what we should be doing. One opinion is what I would call Idealistic. Iraqis are human beings just like us and so deserve democracy and freedom just like us. Therefore we should give them these things, as soon as possible. This viewpoint seems to be held by Americans who do not work with actual Iraqis, and by many libertarians.
The second opinion, which I shall call Realistic, is that the Iraqis are fundamentally different people to us. They have a different culture, a different religion, are basically untrustworthy, and uncivilised. They like stealing from and killing each other. They need a brutally authoritarian regime to keep them in order, and basically we are wasting our time trying to teach them anything else. This point of view tends to be held by those who deal with Iraqis day-to-day and is most acutely felt by ex-Idealistic Americans who simply cannot understand people who, instead of repairing their country, trash it.
The problem with the Idealistic theory is that Iraqis have been traumatised by thirty five years of brutal kleptocracy. They have no experience or understanding of what democracy, or even freedom, actually mean. For example, the end of Saddam’s rule in Basra was taken by most Basrans to mean the end of traffic rules as well, so they now drive like suicide bombers.
This is similar to what occurred in Central Europe after communism. Most people had little understanding of what a free market meant. They tended to think that capitalism meant a free license to rip off your customers. They also expected that the coming of freedom would mean instant wealth like in the West. They took a while to realise that it meant the freedom to build yourself wealth like in the West. The same is true, but twenty times more, in Iraq. At least the Central Europeans had a past history of civil freedom, and neighbours to learn from. None of this is true for the Iraqis.
The Realistic viewpoint, on the other hand, is intrinsically, if unconsciously, racist. There are objective differences between Iraqis and Westerners due to Islamic faith and tribal traditions. But these are not genetically encoded and impossible to change. In fact there are aspects of both Islam and of tribal traditions that are perfectly compatible with democracy and freedom. And indeed, the argument that Iraqis are lazy and stupid simply does not reflect the facts to be seen on the streets of Basra. You can see Iraqis driving cars that are little more than steering wheel, engine and a few road tires, but they keep them moving. They may be destroying their own infrastructure, but they show incredible determination and inventiveness while doing so.
What astounds me about both viewpoints, which are held by many intelligent people, is how absurdly simplistic they are. Iraqis are for the most part rational people, whose behaviour can be rationally explained. They react rationally to the environment they are in, which includes their experience under Saddam and their fear of his return. It may not make sense to give them complete democracy and freedom immediately and this point was made to me often by Iraqis, who insist that we should not try to govern Iraq with Western laws. They keep saying that Iraqis are different and need a strong fist.
But to suggest that Iraqis cannot learn to operate in a free and capitalist society is absurd. The problem here is the time scale. Neither viewpoint seems to take account of what of the blindingly obvious – you cannot rebuild the entire Iraqi society in a matter of months. The war ended at the end of May and we have only had four months so far. The reconstruction of Germany after World War II took about a decade.
Having been in Basra for some months, I am convinced, as are most Iraqis, that it will be a rich and prosperous city somewhere around five to ten years from now. As long as Iraqis have security from Ba’athists and from the neighbouring states, they will achieve this themselves. But with the French manoeuvring to give the UN political primacy in Iraq, the question is not: will Iraq be rebuilt, but who will get the credit?
There is little doubt there has been a perceptual disconnect between the reports from the hotel bar in Baghdad and those of virtually everyone else on the scene. The difficulty for someone sitting a long distance away is to judge who really is the more accurate.
Lazarus Long, or more accurately his creator Robert Heinlein, said “If it can’t be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.”
Earlier this month I decided to take a closer look at the relevant figures. I’ve been tracking the results on a day by day basis ever since. As it is now the end of the month, I am publishing my results.
D.Amon, all rights reserved, may be used with attribution to Samizdata
The graph is rather striking in its clarity. There are three phases visible. March and April are quite obviously the period of major combat. The second is May; combat deaths plummet to almost nothing while the accident rates skyrocket. The third period is one of minor combat. Accident rates fall drastically but combat deaths climb to a minor peak before tailing off slowly. At present the combat death rate is running an almost insignificant amount over the accident rate.
My interpretation of the graph is:
- March and April are clearly the period of major combat.
- May is a postcombat month. Remnants of the regime are dispersed and disorganized. There are a lot of dangerous ordinance laying about. Soldiers are tired, ease up slightly and have more accidents because of it.
- June through the present is a period of low intensity conflict. One can read the state of the opposing forces in the short-lived secondary peak followed by a long tail off. That tail-off is their journey into oblivion.
It will be interesting to see if the end comes with a bang or a whimper. One could imagine a last desperate and suicidal offensive by the remaining Saddamites. Alternatively, if Saddam is calling the shots and is taken out of the picture the remnants might just quit and go elsewhere. The most likely scenario – in my opinion – is an exponential tail-off in as the remnant forces are killed or captured
I think our attitude toward America should change … we have a chance, in America, to be the moral leadership of America. The problem is when? It will happen, it will happen [Allah willing], I have no doubt in my mind, Muslims sooner or later will be the moral leadership of America. It depends on me and you, either we do it now or we do it after a hundred years, but this country will become a Muslim country. And I [think] if we are outside this country we can say ‘Oh, Allah destroy America,’ but once we are here, our mission in this country is to change it.
– Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, a prominent American Muslim leader
Islamic culture gets bashed quite enough in the blogosphere without me sticking my oar in, but I wonder what the kumbayah singing disciples of multiculturalism think of this?
A strict Kurdish Muslim who slit his daughter’s throat after she started seeing a Christian boy has been jailed for life. Abdalla Yones, 48, tried to commit suicide after murdering 16-year-old Heshu and pleaded with the Old Bailey to pass a death sentence on him. Heshu was beaten for months before the “honour killing” and had planned to run away from home, begging her father to leave her alone.
The court heard Yones was “disgusted and distressed” by her relationship with an 18-year-old Lebanese student and launched a frenzied attack at their family home in Acton, west London. Heshu was stabbed 11 times and bled to death from her throat being cut.
Sentencing Yones, Judge Neil Denison said: “This is, on any view, a tragic story arising out of irreconcilable cultural differences between traditional Kurdish values and the values of western society.”
Or more correctly, a tragic story arising out of an Islamic Kurdish culture with no real notion of objective moral truth beyond what they have been told is written in some book and a Western one which at least imperfectly aspires to find such a thing.
All cultures have problems, flaws and idiocies but that does not therefore mean all cultures are equal. When Islamic culture is not tempered by secular influences, it is particularly prone to produce monstrous crimes like this one. Not that irrational secular creeds cannot produce evils aplenty (such as fascism and other forms of socialism), but at least most strains of Western Christianity and Judaism have had their more demented fundamentalist edges worn off by centuries of secularism.
Brave individuals can use reason to transcend the confines of their culture, but all cultures are not the same and I do so wish some people would stop pretending otherwise.
There are those who think the United Nations does a good job of “nation building”. I’m among those who think otherwise and I’m happy to see there are those in “high places” who agree with me:
When foreigners come in with their international solutions to local problems it can create a dependency. For example East Timor is one of the poorest countries in Asia yet the capital is now one of the most expensive cities in Asia, local restaurants are out of reach for most the Timorees and cater to international workers who are paid probably something like 200 times the local average local wage. At the cities main supermarket prices are reportedly on a power with London and New York or take Kosovo a driver shuttling international workers around the capital earns 10 times the salary of the University professor, 4 years after the war the United Nations still run Kosovo by executive fiat. Decisions made by the elected local parliament are invalid without the signature of a U.N. Administrator and still to this day Kosovo ministers have U.N. overseers with the power to approve or disapprove their decisions. Now that’s just a different approach I’m not saying that maybe okay for Kosovo but my interest is to see if we can’t do it in a somewhat different way. Our objective is to encourage Iraqi independence by giving Iraqis more and more responsibility over time for the security and governance of their country.
I find myself in violent agreement with SecDef Rumsfeld yet again.
You cannot train an army over night. You certainly cannot instantly ingrain alien concepts like “human rights” into rebuilt remnants of Iraq’s security forces. It takes time but we are now seeing results.
Iraq’s own forces are now controlling the Iran-Iraq border. Congratulations to them, and congratulations to the fine people who trained them.
With solid foundations in place, we will now be seeing Iraqi’s take over their own security at an accelerating pace.
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