Imagine Montana, population 900,000, conquering the Western Hemisphere, population 800 million. In little more than one generation: slaughtering its armies, assimilating its air forces and navies, killing almost every government and corporate official; conscripting a tenth of the entire population in every country to provide logistical support; deliberately sparing, but nonetheless abducting, every high-profile scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, doctor, and clergyman, and rotating them amongst Helena, Albany, Austin, Mexico City, and Brasilia. Building infrastructure from Point Barrow and Labrador to Recife and Tierra del Fuego, then mounting a two-pronged invasion of Africa, overrunning Nigeria and South Africa in six weeks, poised to sweep north and east to the Mediterranean and Red Seas within months — and then abruptly withdrawing.
In the thirteenth century, events on that scale occurred in Eurasia, and Jack Weatherford explains how in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World …
History
We’re All Gonna Die!
Eventually.
The idea that all of mankind is in mortal danger, which can be averted only by repentance and radically mending our ways, is not a new one. It actually precedes Al Gore and “Earth in the Balance,” believe it or not. Do you doubt it? Here is an example from 1014 by St. Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester.
Old English:
Leofan men gecnawað þæt soð is: ðeos worolde is on ofste & hit nealæcð þam ende. & þy hit is on worolde aa swa leng swa wyrse, & swa hit sceal nyde for folces synnan fram dæge to dæge, ær antecristes tocyme, yfelian swyþe. & huru hit wyrð þænne egeslic & grimlic wide on worolde. Understandað eac georne þæt deofol þas þeode nu fela geara dwelode to swyþe, & þæt lytle getreowþa wæran mid mannum, þeah hy wel spræcan. & unrihta to fela ricsode on lande, & næs a fela manna þe smeade ymbe þa bote swa georne swa man scolde, ac dæghwamlice man ihte yfel æfter oðrum, & unriht rærde & unlaga manege ealles to wide gynd ealle þas þeode.
Modern English:
Beloved men, know that which is true: this world is in haste and it nears the end. And therefore things in this world go ever the longer the worse, and so it must needs be that things quickly worsen, on account of people’s sinning from day to day, before the coming of Antichrist. And indeed it will then be awful and grim widely throughout the world. Understand also well that the Devil led this nation astray for very many years, and that little loyalty has remained among men, though they spoke well. And too many crimes reigned in the land, and there were never many of men who deliberated about the remedy as eagerly as one should, but daily they piled one evil upon another, and committed injustices and many violations of law all too widely throughout this entire land.
Religious Tolerance
One of the persistent comparisons between the West and the Muslim world has been the place of religious tolerance. We in the West have become so accustomed to religious pluralism that a sizable minority feels safe in denigrating the religious background of the West by taking it out of context, while defending those who hijack yet another religion by insisting that the majority of believers of that other religion don’t share the views of those extremists. Goose and gander deserve different sauces. Yet, we tolerate these, and others less self-contradicted, because we have developed a respect for the freedom of conscience, without which we would still be experiencing the internecine brawls that rocked our ancestral societies in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Observers of the Islamic world have noted the societal trajectories there. While the outlying societies, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, have been largely able to co-exist with other religions (although these relationships have been strained in the past century), the core of the Muslim world, the Arabian peninsula, has been home to an intolerant fundamentalism which denies the validity not only of other faiths, but also militates against coreligionists who happen to follow a different interpretation. The Sunni-Shia divide, although subtle in practice, has been politically exploited over the centuries.
Trafalgar: 200
David Foster posts a reminder of a significant anniversary.
UPDATE: Lex has a great post on this topic on the Anglosphere blog.
Red Bait
It was a given while I was growing up that Sen. McCarthy‘s hunt for Soviet agents in the US government was a sickening example of paranoia gone wild. The common wisdom said that lives were needlessly ruined, innocent people and their reputations were destroyed, and America teetered on the brink of becoming a Fascist state where the FBI would be far worse than the Gestapo.
Heh. Talk about paranoia gone wild.
The reason why this take on McCarthy’s crusade is absurd is due to the fact that he was substantially correct. Declassified documents from the Venona Project, a top secret effort to intercept and decode Soviet messages, essentially proved that there were spies on the Russian payroll working at sensitive jobs inside the US government. Some of them even refused payment for betraying their country, so dedicated were they to the most murderous ideology the world has ever seen.
A film co-written and directed by George Clooney tells the tale of veteran newsman Edward R. Murrow, a journalist who used his television pulpit to stand up to Sen. McCarthy and start his fall from grace. I was wondering how Clooney would handle the fact that Murrow, by discrediting McCarthy and ending attempts to reveal the agents who were working for a hostile foreign power, was actually doing the Soviet’s work for them. Alas, he handles it by making sure that there isn’t a hint of it anywhere in the film. According to these two reviews, the movie portrays Murrow as a hero for speaking truth to power and bringing down the brutish Senator before he could destroy any more innocent lives.
The Venona Project translations of Soviet communiqués have been available to the public for more than ten years now. Even so, a shockingly small percentage of people are aware of them. It would seem that the majority of the people interested in this subject simply swallow the story outlined in the first paragraph and don’t ever bother to read up on it. That’s a great pity. It’s also a great pity that Clooney’s movie will probably be a fairly big hit for a drama that’s all talk and no action.
I think I’m going to miss this one when it comes to my multiplex, though. I just don’t see any reason to reward a filmmaker for perpetuating a thoroughly debunked myth.