Archive for the ‘History Of Islam’ Category

Why The Crusades Were Lost: Saint Louis’ Racism Against The Mongols!

July 9, 2017

Islam came to near annihilation in the Thirteenth Century as Franks and Mongols unified and took the Islamist capitals, Baghdad and Damascus. A little known episode. At the time, the overall Mongol Khan was a woman (another little known episode!) But she didn’t cause the problem. Instead Saint Louis’ jealous racism, and unbounded hatred of “infidels” made the difference.

Richard the Lionheart lived in France, where he was supposedly vassal to the king of France, Philip II Augustus his companion in arms (who left the so-called “Holy land” after a while, leaving his soul mate Richard, in charge). Richard may not have lost major battles. But, a century later, Saint Louis, Louis IX of France, did, and ruined France in the process.

It became clear nothing good was achieved by all this crusading. On top of that, the climate started to wobble. Instead, the French switched to the trading model with Islam (rendered possible by treaties consecutive to the Crusades). Immense fortunes were made (Jacques Coeur, born a commoner, became the richest man in France by trading with the Levant in the fifteenth century, and soon, master of the mint, and a most important European diplomat).

Arab chroniclers used the correct term, “Franki” (Franks) to qualify the Europeans trying to (re)conquer the Middle East from the religion of Islam, which had smothered it.

By the time the Crusades were launched, direct Muslim aggression against Europe has been continuous since 715 CE, a full four centuries (the word “Europe” was used first by the Franks in the context of the Muslim invasions). This continual Muslim attack was viewed, correctly, by all concerned, as the continuation of the war of Islam against Rome. (Naturally so, as the Franks so themselves as “Rome”. By 800 CE, the Franks had officially “renovated”, as they put it, the Roman empire…)

Painted in 1337 CE. Notice that the Franks are covered in armor, and the Muslims are not. Obvious technological superiority. The Romans already bought light steel helmets in Gaul! Muslim tech superiority is a lie. In plain view.

There is plenty of evidence that the Franks were more advanced than the Muslims in crucial military technology, as early as 715 CE. How could they not be? The Muslims were just coming out of savage Arabia, all the technology they had, was stolen, or, let’s say, adopted from others.

Four terracotta hand grenades, with “Greek Fire” inside, used by the defenders of Constantinople against the Turks. Greek Fire had many variants, some secret to this day. The Chinese developed dry versions, with salpeter, which turned into black powder later.

The Franks, who had been the crack troops of the Roman empire, as early as 311 CE, had better steel, better armor, better steel weapons, and giant war horses capable of wearing armor themselves. That’s why the Franks were able to defeat the Muslims, overall, in the first phase of the war with Islam, which was in Europe (711 CE, attack on Spain, until the counterattack on Jerusalem, 1099 CE).

This European technological superiority was obvious during the Spanish reconquista. An armored Spanish horse was like an intelligent, indomitable battle tank, which would charge again and again, rarely seriously wounded. By contrast, Muslim cavaliers wore little armor, their relatively small Arab horses were excellent but all too little (I used to ride my own very combative Arab stallion in Africa, which nobody else would, or could, ride… Its name, appropriately chosen, was Napoleon…).

Horse archers were not effective against heavily armored cavalry. They could bother it, but not defeat it. This is why the Mongols decided wisely not to attack the Franks again, after invading, suffering huge losses, Hungary, and Croatia. The Mongols debated what had happened to their ancestors the Huns, eight centuries earlier, in France (annihilation spared only political decision). The Mongols used rocket artillery.

Noah Smith wroteWhy Did Europe Lose the Crusades?“. Said he: “A little while ago, I started to wonder about a historical question: Why did Europe lose the Crusades? The conventional wisdom, at least as I’ve always understood it, is that Europe was simply weaker and less advanced than the Islamic Middle Eastern powers defending the Holy Land. Movies about the Crusades tend to feature the Islamic armies deploying fearsome weapons – titanic trebuchets, or even gunpowder. This is consistent with the broad historical narrative of a civilizational “reversal of fortunes” – the notion that Islamic civilization was much more highly advanced than Europe in the Middle Ages. Also, there’s the obvious fact that the Middle East is pretty far from France, Germany, and England, leading to the obvious suspicion that the Middle East was just too far away for medieval power projection.

Anyway, I decided to answer this question by…reading stuff about the Crusades. I read all the Wikipedia pages for the various crusades, and then read a book – Thomas Asbridge’s “The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land“. Given that even these basic histories contain tons of uncertainty, we’ll never really know why the Crusades turned out the way they did. But after reading up a bit, here are my takes on the main candidate explanations for why Europe ultimately lost.”

He pursue by fingering “lack of motivation” as the main cause of the loss of the Crusades. That is true, in part: Europe opened to the ocean. However, the Crusades won in important ways (opening up trade). But the Europeans also really lost, when it would have been easy to win.

Noah Smith’s analysis focuses only on the English (so to speak) aspect of the Crusades. He does not quite say that a rogue frankish army seized Constantinople in 1204 CE. And then he omits completely what happened in the Thirteenth Century (because Richard Lionhearted was then dead, and history is all about the Anglois?).

For politically correct reasons, some of them ten centuries old, some more voguish, allegations have been made of the superiority of Islam (or China, for that matter). These (often self-serving from racist self-declared anti-racists) assertions are not grounded in fact.

By 1000 CE, the Franks had the highest GDP per capita in the world, and its history. European technology was, overall, the most advanced. Europeans were stunned by how little the Chinese used machines and animals.  

The Arabic numbers were Greek numbers perfected in India, where the full zero was invented, and were reintroduced through central Asia. Out of the 160 major work of Antiquity we have, 150 survived in European monasteries, the universities of the time (and the ten remaining were saved by the Persians, initially).

The Middle East, long the cradle of most invention, has been clearly a shadow of its former self, ever since Islam established its dictator, intolerance and war friendly terrorizing culture of god obsession.

Crusades in the Middle east until 1204; The image Noah Smith uses, which misinforms the reality of what happened…

Europe didn’t “lose the Crusades”. Saint Louis did. Europe didn’t just decide the Middle East was hopeless, in all sorts of ways. Europe had got reopening of the Silk Roads from Saladin. Meanwhile in 1244, the Khwarezmians, recently pushed out by the advance of the Mongols, took Jerusalem on their way to ally with the Egyptian Mamluks. Europe shrugged (by then “Roman” emperors such as Frederick I Barbarossa had used a Muslim company of bodyguards… So there was strictly no anti-Muslim hatred and racism… contrarily to what happened with the Mongols, see below…) 

It is also true that Saint Louis, a weird mix of a dangerous religious fanatic of the worst type, and a modern, enlightened king, lost its entire army (to a woman, the only female leader Islam ever had!) in Egypt. Saint Louis was taken captive at the Battle of Fariskur where his army was annihilated. He nearly died, was saved from dysentery by an Arab physician (impressed Arabs offered for him to rule them). A huge ransom had to be paid, comparable to the French budget. Then Saint Louis died in front of Tunis, in another ridiculous crusade (1270 CE).  Louis fell ill with dysentery, and was cured by an Arab physician

The Seventh and Eight Crusades were disastrous military defeats

Saint Louis, a racist, was the direct cause of the survival of Islam. The Mongols, allied to local Franks had destroyed Baghdad (siege of the Abbasid Caliphate) and Damascus (siege of the Umayyad). The Mongols asked respectfully to make an official alliance with Christianity, and eradicate Islam.

Instead the Pope called Nestorian Christian Mongols heathens, and him and Saint Louis promised excommunication to all and any Frank joining the Mongols in war. Thus the Mongols attacked Egypt without Frankish help, and were defeated by the Mamluks Turks.

Dejected, the Mongols decided that they were Muslims (Islam has no pope, and the Caliphate had been destroyed by the Franco-Mongol alliance ) Under Timor Lame, they would carve a giant Mongol-Muslim empire all the way into India.

This is just a fraction of the common operations of the Franks and Mongols, when they were allied against the Muslims, destroying Baghdad, seizing Damascus. Saint Louis and his pet the Pope saved Islam by calling a halt to the cooperation. Mongols and Franks actually took Damascus together, and the commanders entered the conquered city, side by side…

The Spanish were more serious. They, Isabella, Ferdinand and their advisers, planned to pursue the reconquista by extirpating Islam from North Africa and the Middle East.

The extremely well-trained, battle hardened army was prepared, but then the Americas had just been discovered, and war with France for the control of the world in general and Italy in particular, became everything. Spain engaged in a war with France it took nearly two centuries to lose. The conquest of the Americas changed the world, though. The reconquest of the Christian empire from the Muslims was given up…

It could have been done: the Spanish occupied many cities of North Africa, including Algiers and Oran. Power was divided between Ottoman pirates (“Barbarossas”) and the kingdom of Tlemcen. In any case, in 1525 CE, while Cortez was conquering Central America, defeating among others, the Aztecs, pirates retook Algiers in the name of the Turk Selim 1. At the same time, Selim defeated the Egyptian Mamluks, taking control of the Levant, Mecca, and Egypt.

Islam, a pretty deleterious religion in its literal, Salafist form, survived. North Africa and the Middle East, previously long the world’s wealthiest place, is now the poorest and most war-ridden…

And the war goes on, the ideology of Salafist, literal Islam, being fundamentally antagonistic to civilization.

For the USA, the Iraq war has been an enormous victory: it boosted the price of oil for a decade, enabling the massive deployment of US fracking. Now the USA is again the world’s number one fossil fuel producer. Also French and US military forces are fighting from Mali to Afghanistan, maintaining economic and military control over an area still crucial for energy production (although it will soon become economically irrelevant, from renewable energy).  

All the regimes from Mali to Afghanistan, are, officially, friendly to civilization. So why does the war goes on? Because the ideology is islam is centered on Jihad, no holds barred. Thus Islam gives a ready ideology to those who want to make no holds barred. This is why the Turks converted to islam. Within a generation, they had invaded a huge swathe of Central Asia, and overran very old civilization: Georgia, Armenia, and the Oriental Romans (“Constantinople”).

Then Christian pilgrims going to Jerusalem were massacred (up to 10,000 at one time) by various Muslim potentates. Constantinople, having lost half of its territory, to the recently converted, ferociously invading Turks, asked the “Occidental” Roman empire to come to the rescue.   

In 1095 Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in a sermon at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military intervention for the so-called Byzantine Empire and its Emperor, Alexios I, who needed desperately to stop the westward invasion of the migrating Turks colonising Anatolia.

Morality of all this? What people think they know about history has little to do with what really happened. The forces presently in conflict have been in conflict ever since Islam exists, as Muhammad wanted it. The Quraish, in Mecca, the dominant tribe Muhammad belonged to, didn’t trust Muhammad: he was an analphabet and an epileptic. To boot, Muhammad succeeded in life by marrying a wealthy business woman, and then switching from caravan trading, to caravan raiding.

Just before he died, Muhammad led the first attack against the Romans (who had not attacked him, and refused combat). War is the great arbiter of human destiny. The enormous Roman field army, horrendously led erroneously, was annihilated on its third day of battle at Yarmouk against the Arab Muslim army. Emperor Heraclius, a great general had not been present, he was in Alexandria.

War is a great arbiter, but it is also extremely fickle. Crucial battles are won, and lost, which should never have been won, or lost. Sometimes by sheer happenstance, sometimes from hubris, sometimes by having top generals with top armies not considering the worst imaginable case (as happened to the Romans when fighting the Arabs at Yarmouk, or with Yamamoto at Midway, or the French mid May 1940…).

To learn from history, it has to be learned in full. Civilization missed a chance to eliminate the Islamist war ideology when it aborted the natural alliance with the Mongols. But it’s not very surprising: the overall leader of Europe, then, was Saint Louis. Saint Louis invented the modern justice system, and put his mother, Blanche de castille, in charge of France for many years. So he could be viewed as non-sexist and all for justice. He is represented to this day, rendering justice below an oak. However, Saint Louis was also a savage. He really believed that unbelievers should be killed painfully. Interestingly, Saint Louis came to believe that the Muslims were believers: his fanatical rage was oriented towards Jews and those who, in Christendom, did not believe. So it’s entirely natural that, by considering the Mongols heathens, and forbidding a further alliance with them, he would, in the end, save Islam!

It’s not just that Saint Louis burned 12,000 Jewish manuscripts in Paris, in 1243 CE (5 years before he led the disastrous Seventh Crusade). Saint Louis wrote abominable descriptions of the atrocious ways in which he would kill infidels (I read it in the original texts long ago; however, I was unable to find a source today…)

We have Jihadists around, ready to kill the innocent nowadays, because Saint Louis was actually one of them!

Patrice Ayme’


Islam – Religion of Peace or Totalitarian Ideology?

July 1, 2017

I lived my childhood in Muslim countries, from the age of two weeks. Islam was then never a problem, it was a very tolerant and tolerable part of the landscape. I never had a problem with the call to prayer, anymore than I had with church bells. Both of them could be heard, as the places I grew up in enjoyed diverse version of “Sufi” Islam. “Sufism” is actually immensely varied. In West Africa it meant not only women didn’t wear a veil, but were going bare chested.

Now things have completely degenerated: Saudi and emirates’ wealth, discreetly propped by divisive Western plutocracy, have imposed a variant of Islam which was basically unknown when not outright outlawed eight centuries ago in the places of higher civilization (Sultanate of egypt, Abbasid Caliphate, Persia).

This unamusing version comes straight out of the Qur’an written by Uthman, Third Caliph, which Aisha, the child-bride wife of the Prophet, condemned and went to war about because, she said, it was a pack of lies and fake representations of what Muhammad thought. Interestingly, Aisha fought Ali at the Battle of the Camel, so she is hated by the Shia, too. Thus Aisha condemned both Sunni and Shia Islams.

Picard, named after the Star Trek character, for his humanitarian logic, is a frequent commenter on this site and the author of the site “Defense Issues” has produced his own critical essay on Salafist Islam. (We are all severely criticizing, following Aisha’s notoriously free spirit!). This breath of fresh air is reproduced below.

Defense Issues

“Truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

  • Gloria Steinem

During times of universal deceit; telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

  • George Orwell


  • Potter Stewart

The worst form of inequality is to try make unequal things equal.

  • Aristotle

Political power comes from physical occupation: not historical rights, not title deeds, not moral rights – only occupation. Those people who occupy a territory determine the nature of the society in that region.

  • Arthur Kemp


  • Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi, Libyan Leader, March 2007

Western liberals (including the current Pope)…

View original post 39,601 more words


February 8, 2017


Please consider, for Carter’s villainous attack:

















O’Reilly (FOX News): Do you respect Putin?

President Trump: I do respect him but —

O’Reilly: Do you? Why?


O’Reilly: But he’s a killer though. Putin’s a killer.




O’Reilly: But mistakes are different than —




This is an important step. Forward. Progress.

What you can’t face, you can’t change.






Patrice Ayme’

Reciprocal Perversity

August 9, 2016

























Thus MAD is one of the main engines of evolution.

Patrice Ayme’

Charlie Manson & The Qur’an

December 4, 2015

Madness, A Mood, Can Be Contagious:







One ancient proof that madness arise from culture-wide moods?


















Patrice Ayme’

Love Without Wisdom: Ruin of Humanity.

November 20, 2015

Love without wisdom is only ruin of humanity? Lying, too, is the ruin of humanity, which is truth, if nothing else.

Lying about Islam will not seduce youth. Just the opposite.

If there is no love of wisdom, there is no wisdom in love.

Attack of the day, this time Al Qaeda on Bamako’s most prestigious hotel. Ten Muslim Fundamentalists versus 200 guests and 30 employees. What could go wrong? “God is great!” screamed the gun totting Radicals. Therein were airline crews from Air France, Turkish Airways, and many Members of Parliament from many countries, including France (of course), Senegal, Quebec, etc.

Human Spirit Is Indomitable

Human Spirit Is Indomitable

Well what could go wrong is that there were 40 French gendarmes from GIGN (Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale) plus French and U.S. Special Forces in the immediate area. The siege got resolved very quickly with only two dozens killed.

The deepest problem we are facing is philosophical. There is the Islam we have, and then there is the Islam we wish to have. The Islam we have, is the one in the Qur’an. Nobody reads the Qur’an, everybody talks about it, as if they had. Well, nobody reads it, except for the Islamist State, and other Muslim Fundamentalists, or “Radicals”

The West says:”The Islamist State is not Islam, it’s terrorism”. The Islamist State, and other Muslim Fundamentalists reply:”Just read the Qur’an”. Young, dissatisfied people (rightly dissatisfied from austerity, discrimination, inequities, etc.) then decide to make a little experience for themselves: who is right? They read the Qur’an and discover that the Muslim Fundamentalists told the truth: the Islamist State is the Qur’an, unadultarated. As long as the leadership of the West (political and intellectual) lies in a blatant way, and is easily caught lying, it will have no credit, and will only enrage youth ever more. (Maybe that’s what they want? As war serves plutocracy well?)

Islamism Is Terrorism, Wisdom Is Love

It’s as simple as that. Don’t agree? Well read the Qur’an oh you silly ones who talk about books you never read and were mostly told lies about. Before reading comprehension, one needs reading. Right, normal people prefer reading novels than reality.

In the Qur’an it is famously said that who kills someone, kills all of humanity. Never mind that Muhammad himself killed more than 1,000, including an entire tribe of Yathrib (now Medina). Yet, the Qur’an says this. However that verse is ABROGATED by tens of later verses which order all sorts of people (remember that later verses take precedence over earlier ones):

Imams bemoan “Radicalism”. But “radical” means about roots, and in the case of Islam, it means the Qur’an. Radical is the Qur’an. The Qur’an itself is a fabrication of Uthman, not Muhammad, as Aisha pointed out. Entire pieces of it were removed (notably the famous “Satanic Verses”).

So why not rewrite the Qur’an in a new version, the “Real Message of God According to Muhammad, Which Uthman And Others Hid From You”?

That will allow to remove the verses in the Qur’an which are in conflict with civilization.

Meanwhile the comedy of stupidity unchained, keeps on unfolding. I showed an educated lady from California hyper-threatening verses from the Qur’an, which should be unlawful, just because they are hate crimes. She quietly told me: ”Oh, there is the same in the Bible.” She has been a professional woman earning her keep as an engineer for decades.

So the pan is hot?’ Say who pass nowadays for smart, well-balanced people. ‘No problem, the fire is hot too.” Surely, the argument that we should be happy with the Qur’an, because it is similar to the rule book of the Inquisition belongs to those who hope keenly to bring back the Inquisition.

If there is no love of wisdom, there is no wisdom in love. It’s not enough to love God. You have to check first it’s not the Devil, as the Cathars pointed out.

The Vatican had the King of Paris (also known as “France”) annihilate the Cathars, using a Bible Fundamentalist army. One million dead. And all the Cathars’ writings.

But not, as you can see, all their ideas.

Meanwhile in Algeria, the local dictator, Bouteflika, had cartoonist Tahar Djehiche imprisoned 6 months in jail for cartoons ‘insulting the president’ -https://t.co/nJ9tF5xafX”. When the mood is around that insulting the Prophet deserves death, surely insulting the president deserves 6 months. Islam is the bed of gory dictatorship.

Who is Bouteflika?  A terrorist who became a general. He is one of the original principals from the FNL, a terrorist group to whom the French dictator (the one who dictated), De Gaulle, gave power in… 1962. De Gaulle, a famous racist, thought that Bouteflika was perfect for Algeria. De Gaulle thought he could keep “Muslims” or North Africans at bay, and away, by giving them to the wolves. That mood persisted, although its racism had to morph a bit. So the children of the North Africans who fled to France, or Europe, were mistreated by austerity (no schools for you, Muslims, the Qur’an is good enough, and selling drugs, too). So here we are. (Fully describing the relationship between France and North Africa deserves 1,000 pages, I am myself a byproduct; this was just an appetizer…)

If there is no love of wisdom, there is no wisdom in love. People are born from love, and thus have a capacity, and a need to love whatever, including evil. Love is not enough. Love without wisdom is only ruin of humanity.

Patrice Ayme’

Perspective: Islamophobia Is Not Racist

March 19, 2015


One perspective cannot oppose another, it complements it.


















The first rise of Christianofascism brought down the Roman government.



And what of “Islam”, meanwhile?




The Caliphate is a myth:







So what, looking forward?










As the New York Times reveals to the baffled masses:






And that fascism is intimately related to war.

And that war arises from limited resources. Even in chimpanzees.





Patrice Ayme’

When A Child Fights Evil Well

October 10, 2014














Patrice Ayme’

Obama Right On Syria

September 24, 2014

Might does not make right, but right needs might.

My frienemies at the New York Times thought smart to pose as superior moral characters with two front pages editorials today on Syria, both entitled “Wrong On Syria”. They lambasted president Obama for doing what I told him to do (at last someone who listens to me!). What did I tell him to do? Bomb (the bad guys in) Syria. First I wanted to do in Assad the Plutocrat, but I admit that the Caliphate is an even juicier objective.

Once upon a time a Frankish-Mongol army entered Damascus (that was not long after the same characters, with Armenian and Georgian help, had destroyed the Caliphate in Baghdad). History does not just repeat itself, its very rich.

Civilization has to be defended. Obama has understood this. Annual spending, in constant dollars, by the Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission on nuclear weapons research, development, testing and production:

Morality & Justice Without Force Are Not To Be

Morality & Justice Without Force Are Not To Be

[It’s all right that you be wrong, as long as I can flatten you.]

One does not want to make the Roman mistake of edifying what came to known as the “Limes”… The limit of the empire, a succession of walls, forts, garrisons, and legions, all around the Empire. Thus, when the bad guys broke through the limes, there was nothing to stop them: the interior of the Empire was essentially defenseless. Very rich, and very defenseless. When the Goths rampaged through Roman Asia, the Balkans, and Greece, in the middle of the Third Century, it took years to send a Roman army after them (they immediately fled).

On December 31, 406 CE, the Rhine froze so thoroughly and suddenly, that entire German nations galloped across. Among them, the Vandals. By then, thanks to an austerity program, the Roman army was actually the Frankish army. The Franks, who had beaten the Germans several times in years prior, in Bavaria, were taken by complete surprise, thanks to this freak weather event. After a torrent of German nations (reminiscent of the “torrent of German tanks” of May 1940) pierced through the Alsatian plain, there was nothing to stop them. The Vandals charged through Gaul, and then Spain. They soon invaded rich and completely defenseless Africa, which had known peace, the famed Pax Romana, for 5 centuries.

Italy, and Rome, never recovered from this.

History exists, to inform us. Syria and Mesopotamia used to be part of the Roman empire, so Obama can argue we are back home.

Even earlier in history, recent, 2014 genetic studies show that Mesopotamian, Fertile Crescent farming came to Europe under the form of the farmers who knew how to do it. This result was obtained by genetic analysis of Greeks… who are therefore, at least, partly, Iraqis.

So the West ought to relax: the Middle Earth is where it’s coming from. Russia is eleven time zones across, but Mesopotamia is just a time zone away from Paris and London. It’s the suburbs. Time to take care of them, by subjugating the awful systems of ideas that festered there (without naming it, of course, some of the critique of Obama at the UN could be viewed as pointed straight towards the Qur’an, which contains therein an evil system of thought, in no way less Satanic than the one in the Bible, as the Cathars no doubt noticed).

The New York Times editorials stupidly argued that Obama and Hollande had no right to bomb Iraq, and needed a UN Security Council authorization. That’s doubly dumb: first, common sense, human rights, the teaching of history, can override the UNSC. Although India just successfully sent a probe to Mars, the UN, and is predecessor, the SDN, were fundamentally French ideas which were finally implemented by the USA in 1944 (San Francisco, Bretton Woods).

Secondly, of course, Iraq is a sovereign nation. So if the legitimate government of Iraq wants France and the USA to bomb the bad guys on its territory, that is its sovereign prerogative. And that’s exactly what happened.

OK, the situation is extremely messy: there are bad guys all over. But that does not mean goodness ought to sit on its hands. That was the mistake made in 1936, when the rogue African army of general Franco attacked the Spanish Republic. France announced loudly she would intervene, and then backed-off, while the Nazis and Italian fascists got emboldened. In the end, Franco and his professional killers assassinated millions of Spaniards, and the Nazis and fascists got trained in all sorts of ways. Meanwhile, the Western democracies got used to the idea that it was better to do nothing.

This time, the show of force is a lesson to the world. Obama said at the UN that force was the only language the killers understood. Yes, right. And one of these killers is Putin. The Kremlin dictator stands warned: if he wants war too much, he will get it.

Using extreme violence is not the best outcome for superior morality, but it is sometimes the one and only optimal outcome, as far as civilization is concerned. This is such a case. The New York Times can pose all it wants, it’s as wrong as it was in 2003, justifying the invasion of Iraq.

Patrice Ayme’

Demonic Empire & Bliss

June 27, 2014

Traditionally, there are those who are for empire, and those who are against it. Also there are those who distinguish good empires (the Athenian empire, the French “mission civilisatrice”; English Commonwealth) from the disgusting ones (say UK’s anti-Boer South Africa), to the very bad ones (plutocrat Leopold II’s Heart of Darkness Congo), or the outright demonic ones (the Kaiser’s holocaustic Namibia).

However, Manicheism goes only that far. I am going to suggest a completely different form of analysis, and approach, to the concept of empire.

An empire has subjects, just as a predator has preys. This is the conventional view. And, yet, it contains its own overcoming. Indeed, just as there is a mathematical entanglement between predator and prey, there is a philosophical entanglement between an empire and its subjects.

Good Empires Rest On Holy Wisdom; Ἁγία Σοφία, Constantinopolis

Good Empires Rest On Holy Wisdom; Ἁγία Σοφία, Constantinopolis

“Imperium” depicted initially the absolute, life-and-death ordering capability from top Roman generals. (Roman “emperors” inherited that capability, as they were always the commanders in chief, at least on paper.)

To this day, an empire is supposed to be all about a few ordering the many (thus, intrinsically “fascist”). Yet, even this Roman military root is endowed with subtlety: imperium does not reduce to fascism.

Why? The semiotics of fascism is, fundamentally, not just about the many being strong by tying up together. It’s about the law, and the law is absolute: Dura Lex, Sed Lex (Law Hard, But Law).  So the many are tied by an absolute.

Roman generals were obeyed absolutely, only when they inspired an aura of absolutism, that only vertiginous respect could confer them.

A professional special force killer was sent to assassinate Marius (seven times Consul, who triumphed in Africa over Jugurtha, and Gaul, Piedmont over invading Germans). He found the elder Marius in a room. Marius, unafraid, addressed the would be-assassin with his stentorian voice: ”Soldier, are you going to kill your general?”. Trembling, excusing himself, the assassin fled, and Marius’ enemies gave up on the notion of killing their all too respected foe.

In other words, imperium worked best when the soldiers loved their generals. After all, soldiers were armed to the teeth, trained to kill, and not to fear death. Generals need to be loved, the law does not. So imperium is an intrinsically milder notion than fascism.

Thus it’s not enough to say there are good empires, and bad ones. More generally, there are good empire-subject entanglements, and bad, unjust ones. It’s not all about just about the empire, it’s also about the subjects, and it’s also about the interactions of the one, with the others. Moreover those entanglements can be asymmetric.

Let me give an example. The Roman empire was the ultimate empire. Arguably, it’s going on, stronger than ever, 27 centuries after its founding (long story). For at least a millennium, the Romans interacted with the Celts, Jews, Egyptians, Greeks and Mesopotamians.

It was the same Roman empire, however, the outcomes were very different, and drastic differences are reflected to this day: the West became Rome, and Mesopotamia is still wrecked by war without end. By far the most complex interaction was with the Celto-Germans. It was pretty much antipodal to what happened with the Jews and the Mesopotamians, and, one can even claim, with the Greeks.

In Mesopotamia, and against the Iranians, Rome and its successor regime (“Constantinople”) struggled in vain for seven centuries. Nothing came out of it, except so much morbidity that, in the end, the Arabs overwhelmed both Persia and most of Rome.

The Jews, or rather, domineering Jewish fanatics, who made no sense whatsoever, in two formidably suicidal wars, rejected Rome. The first of these killed a million Jews, much of the population of Israel, then. It started by the cold blooded killing, inside Jerusalem, of 600 legionnaires of the Roman garrison. The strategic objective was unclear, and soon at least three Jewish factions were fighting each other, to death besides engaging the Romans.

The Romans had a sense of humor, and catapulted thousands of pig heads inside Jerusalem (I presume that they let them rot carefully first). On the less amusing side, the legions devastated forests throughout the region to build gigantic works for the siege of the holy city.

Egypt did not care about Rome one way or another. That mood of pragmatic indifference was contagious: while the titanic struggle of the Judaic War unfolded, just over the horizon, the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Alexandria did not raise the smallest protest.

Greece had been severely mistreated by the plutocratic Roman Senate, by 146 CE: Corinth was destroyed as a warning that republican independence of Greek City-States will not be tolerated. That was mass terrorism, and it marked Greece for centuries to come, as intended. Greek democracy did not recover, until the EU chased out the pro-Washington dictatorship, 21 centuries later.

And then there were the Celts and the Germans.  Those were not united, they relished their complicated world. They had adopted many traits of Greek civilization, even before the Romans showed up. Their metallurgy was second to none, and a major export to Rome. Ultimately, after 16 centuries of tragi-comedy, and all sorts of happenstance, the Celto-Germans became Rome (officially, in 800 CE).

It’s actually a curious thing: after a terrible war when Caesar intervened (Caesar was accused by some in the Senate and some historians, to have caused much of the problem), nothing anti-Roman ever happened again in Gallia. Even when the so called Gallic Empire ruled, later, it was not to reject Rome, but to improve it.

Differently from what had happened in Greece, the Romans did not rule Gaul through terror (although the war with Caesar had killed and enslaved millions, it had been a very complicated, messy affair, nothing like the cold blooded holocaust at Corinth) . Far from it. Even Latin was not imposed. In the Fifth Century the bishop of Lugdunum (= Lyon) preached in Celtic. Latin replaced Celtic completely, well after the legions were gone (that happened in 400 CE, a decision of Rome, taken when, for budgetary reasons, Rome put the Franks in charge of defending the two Germania and Gallia). Phasing out the three Celtic languages happened when the Franks, who came to rule Gaul completely in the early Sixth Century, completely gave up their own Low Countries German for Latin.

The Celto-Germano-Greco-Roman civilization became a symbiosis ruled by the Franks. Why a community of minds there, and not with Israel, or Mesopotamia? It’s obviously an explanation that involves many factors. The Celto-Germans and the Greco-Romans had a very long story, with fair intellectual trade, in both directions: by the time Caesar showed up, that intense trade was at least a millennium old. The Roman army was equipped with Celtic metal works for centuries.

Celts and Romans had important principles in common, like a quasi-religious dislike for kings, and, certainly, hatred of tyranny. This dislike was so strong that Armanius (Hermann) a once-Roman officer who treacherously annihilated Roman general Varus and his three legions (plus supporting troops, and fellow travellers), was later killed by fellow rebels for behaving, it was alleged, like a king.

Yet, as Rome became a fascist dictatorship, the Germans became more sympathetic to fascism, and kingship. Clovis, elected king of the Franks, his father, Roman imperator Childeric I, and his grandfather Merovius. Thus, Western Europe (or, at least, the elements if Western Europe which came to re-establish an empire) was pretty much evolving as one mental unit.

Such bliss of a common spirituality was not shared in the Middle East. The Jewish God symbolized tyranny made divine. Persians and Mesopotamians needed to kneel abjectly to all the plutocrats they could find. Lack of water had led the civilization of the Middle East to dictatorship. The hydraulic dictatorship (Fernand Braudel) implied “Oriental Despotism” (Karl Marx).  Fascism, cruel and demented, the “Right of Sword”.

Darius, who fought from Ethiopia to Ukraine, exhibited a clear case of the “Right of the Sword”. That existing mood was embraced 11 centuries later in the Qur’an. Unbelievably, the Sword is still festering today: arguing for the Right Of The Sword, Arab plutocrats are agitating, in 2014, to have Justinian’s Cathedral, Ἁγία Σοφία, “Holy Wisdom“,now a museum, been converted again to a mosque, so that the depiction of the real world represented therein be covered up again, as reality offends Islam.

This is an example of the persistence of moods and systems of ideas. Cynics will also point out that their genesis, namely the desert, only got worse.

Well, whatever: if we understand the situation, we can probably fix it. No empire, no law. Thus it remains to make the empire good.

Today the European Empire’s 28 heads of state approved Jean-Claude Junkers as head of the European Commission (the EU’s executive branch). The European Parliament is widely expected to elect Junkers next week. The 28 elected chiefs used the occasion to sign on the Free Trade and Association Treaty with Ukraine and Moldavia. Justly unsatisfied by this slap to Putin, they also sent Vlad the Impaler, back in Moscow, an ultimatum. Yes, an ultimatum. Electing the head of the EC is a furthering of democracy in the European empire. But democracy is naught, if it can’t bite.

The 28 EU leaders demanded that separatists return border checkpoints, release hostages and start talks to implement a peace plan drawn up by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko by June 30. Failure to do so will result in “further significant restrictive measures” against Russia.

Vlad The Invader has three days to obey. It may be time for him to remember what happened when his preceding supporter of minorities through annexations, Adolf Hitler, refused to obey. Unbelievably, France persuaded Britain to declare war.

Wisdom without doom is only gloom.

Patrice Aymé