The Sack of Jerusalem, revised

The more history I read, the more I learn that the pop version of it isn’t merely incomplete, it is often downright misleading. I was always dubious of the stories of the terrible massacre of Jews and Muslims by Christian crusaders during the Sack of Jerusalem; the detail about the blood reaching to the bridles of the horses ridden by the knights in particular never passed the smell test for four reasons:

  1. The crusaders didn’t have many horses left. They’d eaten most of them at the siege of Antioch and they weren’t able to replace many of them.
  2. You’d have to kill a tremendous amount of people very, very quickly and intentionally drain their bodies for the blood to get that deep before it ran off through the city’s drainage systems.
  3. There were only about 15,000 crusaders attacking the city.
  4. Who rides horses when storming city walls?

Despite my skepticism about the body count, I was startled by the incredible shrinking number of people killed after the walls were breached when reading Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land.

Neither Latin nor Arabic sources shy away from recording the dreadful horror of this sack, the one side glorying in victory, the other appalled by its raw savagery. In the decades that followed Near Eastern Islam came to regard the Latin atrocities at Jerusalem as an act of crusader barbarity and defilement, demanding of urgent vengeance. By the thirteenth century, the Iraqi Muslim Ibn al-Athir estimated the number of Muslim dead at 70,000. Modern historians long regarded this figure to be an exaggeration, but generally accepted that Latin estimates in excess of 10,000 might be accurate. However, recent research has uncovered close contemporary Hebrew testimony which indicates that casualties may not have exceeded 3,000, and that large numbers of prisoners were taken when Jerusalem fell. This suggests that, even in the Middle Ages, the image of the crusaders’ brutality in 1099 was subject to hyperbole and manipulation on both sides of the divide.

Casualties may not have exceeded 3,000? For what is still cited as one of the most brutal massacres of all time? It’s the Spanish Inquisition all over again. Here, for example, is the previous authority on The Crusades, Steven Runciman, describing the sack:

Iftikhar and his men were safely escorted out of the city and permitted to join the Moslem garrison of Ascalon. They were the only Moslems in Jerusalem to save their lives. The Crusaders, maddened by so great a victory after such suffering, rushed through the streets and into the houses and mosques killing all that they met, men, women, and children alike. All that afternoon and all through the night the massacre continued. Tancred’s banner was no protection to the refugees in the mosque of al-Aqsa. Early next morning a band of Crusaders forced an entry into the mosque and slew everyone. When Raymond of Aguilers later that morning went to visit the Temple area he had to pick his way through corpses and blood that reached up to his knees.

The Jews of Jerusalem fled in a body to their chief synagogue. But they were held to have aided the Moslems and no mercy was shown to them. The building was set on fire and they were all burnt within. The massacre at Jerusalem profoundly impressed all the world. No one can say how many victims were involved, but it emptied Jerusalem of its Moslem and Jewish inhabitants.
– The First Crusade, Steven Runciman, p. 286-287

What may not be apparent here is that Jerusalem had already been emptied of its Christian inhabitants, who were expelled by Iftikhar ad-Dawla, the Fatimid governor of the city, in preparation for a potential siege, and who, by Runciman’s own account, “outnumbered the Moslems in Jerusalem”. And it should be obvious that the 15,000 attackers couldn’t have killed all that many people, considering that they spent the evening of the day they took the city gathering in order to give thanks to God.

The other unassailable truth of Jerusalem’s conquest is that the crusaders were not simply driven by a desire for blood or plunder; they were also empowered by heartfelt piety and the authentic belief that they were doing God’s work. Thus that first, ghastly day of sack and slaughter concluded with an act of worship. In a moment which perfectly encapsulated the crusade’s extraordinary fusion of violence and faith, dusk on 15 July 1099 saw the Latins gather to give tearful thanks to their God. A Latin contemporary rejoiced in recounting that, ‘going to the Sepulchre of the Lord and his glorious Temple, the clerics and also the laity, singing a new song unto the Lord in a high-sounding voice of exultation, and making offerings and most humble supplications, joyously visited the Holy Place as they had so long desired to do’.

Now, a sack certainly did take place and many of the city’s inhabitants were killed. But the scale appears to have been at least one order of magnitude less than has been conventionally claimed and certainly the entire population was not wiped out. So where did the legend come from? From a chronicler who wasn’t there liberally borrowing imagery from the Revelation of St. John.

The Gesta Francorum noted that the crusaders were left wading up to their ankles in blood by the work of butchery. However, another ‘eyewitness’, Raymond of Aguilers, expanded on this image. Lifting a scriptural quote from the New Testament Book of Revelation, he declared that the Franks ‘rode in [enemy] blood to the knees and bridles of their horses’. This more extreme image gained wide acceptance and was repeated by numerous western European histories and chronicles in the course of the twelfth century.

Mailvox: employment advice

DH, who has more than a little expertise in the area of employment and human resources,  offers some excellent advice in this age of purges:

Make them fire you. If you resign under pressure you have basically no legal standing. Make. Them. Fire. You. If they pressure you to resign, you should write a letter, declining to resign, declining to take any responsibility for your private, off-duty, speech and/or actions. Specifically point out that you are exercising your personal discretion to engage in political and social commentary regarding current events, that you are not willing to be subjected to a hostile work environment for your unorthodox political views, and that you are not willing to explain or defend or justify those personal political views.

Always make them do their own dirty work.

Most of the time, employment purges are not legal. If you are being pressured to resign, that is in itself a de facto admission that they know they can’t fire you. Of course, none of this will prevent you from getting blackballed when applying for a new job, which is why it is wise to always use an untraceable pseudonym on the Internet and to avoid social media.

It will be used against you, somehow, by someone. Whether or not that is fair and desirable is irrelevant. Those are the new rules of the game. Master them and play by them. Play by them ruthlessly and remember that the Left tends to be far more careless about these things than the Right because they assume their positions are beyond criticism.

Free speech in corporate America

While self-described savages are openly attacking free speech at SF conventions, more men are losing their jobs for expressing their opinions on current affairs:

A tech guru who was accused of making ‘weird and insensitive’ comments about the murderous manifesto written by Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger has been fired. Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam posted a series of bizarre annotations alongside extracts from the virgin killer’s 141-page memoir, including one that speculates that Rodger’s sister must be ‘smokin hot’. After the accusations, he was lambasted as being misogynistic, and it has since emerged that he was let go from the company he helped found.

Would it have been less indicative of hatred for women had Mr. Moghadam speculated that this girl was ugly? Rodger wasn’t an unattractive young man and since his Eurasian features were on the feminine side, it would be logical to conclude that his sister was likely more attractive than the norm. As, in fact, appears to be the case.

I would think that women, in particular, would want to avoid an employment standard where one will lose one’s job simply for expressing an opinion about a woman’s attractiveness. I tend to suspect that the company was simply looking for an excuse to rid itself of an unwanted founder and took advantage of an opportunity. But coming as it does on the heels of other opinion-related dismissals, the news is somewhat troubling.

UPDATE: as is so often the case, Moghadam was not actually fired. He merely resigned: “In light of this, Mahbod has resigned – both in his capacity as an
employee of the company, and as a member of our board of directors,
effective immediately.”

Europe’s quislings

The chief architect of the coming ethnic cleansing in Britain, Tony Blair, archly refuses to pay heed to the clearly expressed voice of the British people concerning the ongoing invasion of their island:

Tony Blair this morning launched a furious assault on Ukip in the wake of the party’s European election triumph – describing it as ‘nasty and unpleasant’. The former Prime Minister urged the Labour leader Ed Miliband to ‘stand up’ and take on Nigel Farage. He said Mr Miliband had to ‘stand firm’ in the face of growing demands to promise an in-out referendum on Europe and ignore pleas from within his party to take a tougher stance on immigration…

In his comments, made to a Swedish television station, Mr Blair said: ‘Of course we should be worried when a party like Ukip comes first in the European election, it would be foolish not to be. But on the other hand we also have to stand for what is correct and right for the future of Britain in the 21st century. When the world is changing so fast, to end up having the debate dominated by anti-immigrant feeling and a desire to get Britain out of Europe, these are not solutions for the 21st century.’

Another globalist whore, Tory Ken Clarke, said: “Every western country is multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and everybody gets used to listening to foreign languages on the bus. Young people aren’t bothered by that.'”

When the mass inter-ethnic violence begins, just remember these quislings publicly claiming that “no one is bothered” by hearing alien invaders speaking foreign languages in their hometowns. Blair could not be more wrong. What is right for the future of Britain is that it be inhabited and governed by the sovereign British people.

The fact that every Western country has been invaded by third-worlders in the last forty years doesn’t mean that they always will be occupied by them. Spain was once occupied by Muslims and France was once occupied by Germans. Europeans have a long and noble history of expelling their invaders, even if it takes 500 years.

QED

It appears I may have erred in describing NK Jemisin as “an educated, but ignorant half-savage”. I was clearly too generous in giving her the benefit of the doubt, as she is, by her own admission, “all savage and damned proud of it”.

This is why I say I was premature in calling for a reconciliation. Reconciliations are for after the violence has ended. In South Africa the Truth & Reconciliation Commission came after apartheid’s end; in Rwanda it started after the genocide stopped; in Australia reconciliation began after its indigenous people stopped being classified as “fauna” by its government. Reconciliation is a part of the healing process, but how can there be healing when the wounds are still being inflicted? How can we begin to talk about healing when all the perpetrators have to do is toss out dogwhistles and disclaimers of evil intent to pretend they’ve done no harm?

(Incidentally: Mr. Various Diseases, Mr. Civility, and Misters and Misses
Free Speech At All Costs, if you represent the civilization to which
I’m supposed to aspire then I am all savage, and damned proud of it. You may collectively kiss my black ass)….

There are some signs of hope, I guess: SFWA did throw that one bigot
out, though plenty more remain. Chip Delany’s been honored as a SFWA
Grandmaster some fifty years after one of his novels was rejected for
serialization in ANALOG because its editors didn’t think anyone could
relate to a black protagonist. WisCon invited me here to be one of its
Guests of Honor, five years after I ragequit the Concom over the
Elizabeth Moon affair. We are talking about what’s happening. We are
fighting back. But I am desperately afraid that Delany’s prediction
will continue to prove true, and that the violence will escalate as more
of us step up and demand that our contributions be recognized, our
personhood respected, our presence acknowledged. If that’s the case,
then we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. And we need to prepare.

So. If they think we are a threat? Let’s give them a threat. They
want to call us savages? Let’s show them exactly what that means.

Yes, because history is absolutely rife with examples of how well savages fare when faced with civilized opposition. I note, with no small amusement, that Jemisin has now publicly conceded the truth of everything I wrote in that controversial Twitter-linked post last summer. She has not only conceded her barbarism and her inability to grasp the fundamental nature of SF/F, but the nonsensical nature of her call for “reconciliation” in SF/F as well.

Last summer, I wrote: “Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for
“reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a
call for its decline into irrelevance. Nor do the back-patting Samuel
Johnsons wiping their eyes and congratulating her for her
ever-so-touching speech understand that.
There can be no reconciliation between the observant and the delusional.”

Even the most skeptical critic must admit that I warned everyone the pinkshirt inquisition would not end with me. Don’t let that “plenty more remain” escape your notice. Remember, this is the woman who would read out Robert Heinlein himself out from the SF genre on the basis of his being “racist as fuck“, as well as “the average American” and “most of science fiction fandom” too.

I, for one, welcome this escalation. I think it is a wonderful thing that the other side has finally admitted the ideological conflict they have long denied. I find it encouraging that they now openly confess they seek to “Make them uncomfortable. Shout them down. Kick them out.”

Disnearations of civilization indeed.

Immigration and feminism

Full credit to JudgyBitch, as she highlights the logical connection between the feminist push for more educated white middle-class women in the workforce and feminist support for mass immigration that I had not previously noticed:

Let me state up front that I don’t believe feminism engaged in any kind of mass conspiracy to essentially enslave black women – but the effect has been exactly that.  It’s a nice coincidence that feminists seem deeply unwilling to address. There are two things working in concert:  women in the paid labor force and single motherhood.

In order for (mostly) white women to enter the paid labor force with their fancy college degrees in reading and feeling, they need an exploitable class of individuals to provide domestic services at wages that won’t eat up their own wages.  Maids, nannies, child care workers, housekeepers – these are some of the shittiest, most underpaid jobs a woman can get.  And those are jobs that are disproportionately performed by women of color.  In order to incentive women of color to accept these shitty jobs with crappy wages and no benefits, they need to have no plausible alternatives.

Enter the single mother.  By creating a culture that is welcoming of single motherhood – de-stigmatizing it and treating it as a “lifestyle choice”,and then adding the widespread of incarceration of men of color and black men in particular, that incentive is in place.  Daddy in jail and Mommy a single mother is a perfect recipe for creating an exploitable class of women who can pick up all the white lady’s shit work.

Her alternative does not compute, as we already know that the working class being used here is even less capable of productive professional work than the “reading and feeling” crowd. But it does explain nicely why the feminists, and more importantly, the globalists who have long been pushing feminism in order to weaken national sovereignty, are so relentlessly pro-immigration in this regard.

She focuses on the black population, but it is actually the newly imported Hispanic and Asian populations that are more relied upon in this regard.  And so, once more we see that feminism is a societally destructive institution. It is more lethal than National Socialism and less economically coherent than Communism.

The Return of Nations

The end of the Imperial Europe project is in sight as minor anti-EU parties grow into major parties, in some cases, the nation’s most popular party. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. And it looks as if there is a very good chance that Britain will be the first nation to leave the EU’s evil and anti-democratic empire:

Nigel Farage tonight hailed Ukip’s victory in the European elections as the most ‘extraordinary result in British politics for 100 years’. Support for Ukip has surged by more than 12 per cent, outstripping a more modest boost in votes for Labour, while the Lib Dems faced near-wipeout, with some calling for Nick Clegg to resign.

Mr Farage said he was ‘proud’ of the campaign which has seen him humiliate the Westminster parties, pushing Labour and the Tories into second and third.

As Ukip was triumphing in the UK, across the Channel France’s far-right National Front was on course for a massive victory in European elections tonight as the country swung behind its anti-immigration, anti-EU agenda.

Early estimates suggested the number of Eurosceptic MEPs in Brussels could double. In Denmark, the anti-immigration far-right People’s Party is on course to win with 23 per cent while in Hungary, the extreme-right Jobbik – accused of racism and anti-Semitism – was running second

Elsewhere, in Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats were expected to secure victory with 36 per cent of the vote. In Greece, the poll was topped by the radical left anti-austerity Syriza movement, beating the governing New Democracy into second place.

In the UK, immigration dominated much of the campaign, with UKIP arguing proper border controls were not possible while in the EU.

Everywhere but Germany, which runs the EU to its liking, the political tide is flowing strongly against the EU. And the tide is only going to grow stronger, because the commissars of the EU have never listened to the people, which means eventually some sort of crisis is coming when the EU will be forced to choose between following its own rules or showing its true totalitarian face.

And the corrupt political leaders don’t have the power to impose their will on the people. Which is why the entire project has been built on lies, smoke, and mirrors.

The Tea Party is over

The Tea Party is rapidly losing support:

Support for the tea party has dropped to an all-time low, said a new CBS News poll released Wednesday. Just 15 percent of Americans told the pollsters that they are supporters of the tea party movement today, which is less than half the level of support at its peak of 31 percent in November 2010 shortly after the midterm election when the movement fueled a landslide Republican win to take majority control of the House.

That’s also the lowest level of support gauged by the poll since it began asking about the tea party in February 2010. The polls findings were released the day after primary elections in which Republican establishment candidates beat tea party-backed opponents in key races, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trouncing tea party-backed Matt Bevin in Kentucky.

The poll found that the tea party had lost significant support among its core constituency: Republicans.

Unlike many right-wing commentators, I didn’t jump on the Tea Party bandwagon because I was always dubious about the genuine nature of its commitment to get American finances in order. The Tea Party became overtly pointless after most of its elected members promptly rolled over on the issue of the debt ceiling, which was its only credible weapon. And what is the point of a political party that demonstrates it is willing to surrender on its sole purpose for existence without even putting up a fight?

The ever-moving goalposts

The US Supreme Court has long made a habit of post-opinion editing:

The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions years after they were issued, altering the law of the land without public notice. The revisions include “truly substantive changes in factual statements and legal reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard and the author of a new study examining the phenomenon.

The court can act quickly, as when Justice Antonin Scalia last month corrected an embarrassing error in a dissent in a case involving the Environmental Protection Agency.

But most changes are neither prompt nor publicized, and the court’s secretive editing process has led judges and law professors astray, causing them to rely on passages that were later scrubbed from the official record. The widening public access to online versions of the court’s decisions, some of which do not reflect the final wording, has made the longstanding problem more pronounced.

Unannounced changes have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law. They have also retreated from descriptions of common ground with other justices, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did in a major gay rights case….

After-the-fact editing is not a new phenomenon. “The current court did not begin this practice, which finds its origins in the court’s earliest days and has extended to all justices over the years, liberal and conservative, but the court today can take the steps to correct it,” Professor Lazarus said. “Easy to do, and long overdue.”

The court seems to have been even more freewheeling in the past. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney added approximately 18 pages to his 1857 majority opinion in the Dred Scott decision after it was announced.

My police friends told me long ago that there is no such thing as a “law-abiding citizen”, that the traffic laws were explicitly written to permit them to exercise their judgment and pull over anyone, at any time. But it’s interesting to see that virtually no one has even a theoretical chance of knowing what the law is, given the way that interpretive case law not only trumps black-letter written law, but is susceptible to behind-the-scenes editing at any time.

Disnearations of civilization

And to think some have said that a society of women such as this are incapable of building, or maintaining, an advanced civilization. Here is a selection of quotes from two African women who won the U.S. national debate championship with an argument nominally concerning the War Powers Resolution:

They say the niggers always already queer, that’s exactly the point! It means the impact is that the that the is the impact term, uh, to the afraid, uh, the, that it is a case term to the affirmative because, we, uh, we’re saying that queer bodies are not able to survive the necessarily means of the body. Uh, uh, the niggers is not able to survive….

Uh, man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs, uh, the, inside the trauma of representation that turns into the black child devouring and identifying with the stories and into the white culture brought up, uh, de de de de de, dink, and add subjectively like a white man, the black man!

When the nigger, uh, sees these pains and suffering that he can only, uh, envision himself that he, uh, does not see another nigger that he, uh, can feel sympathy for or embrace, but rather, uh, that, a-bluh, that that otherness gets obliterated….

Uh, says that the the the way status co works is through, uh, whiteness allowing, uh, forcing other bodies to tell, uh, nearations of whiteness in, uh, the violences that whiteness does me, uh, say that that is the link that we will go for!

Convincing though it no doubt may be, this is not, I would submit, representative of a nearation of Western civilization. It’s the audio version of Mandela’s sign language guy or the pinkshirts’ SF/F: the poor cargo cultists have some idea what the magical thing is supposed to sound or look or read like, but they don’t fundamentally grasp its object.

It tends to remind one of McRacist reading from her latest novel.  Here is a fun new game: Debate Champion or Award-winning Writer?

  1. “The average American is bigoted as fuck.”
  2. “The niggers is not able to survive.”
  3. “The way status co works is through whiteness.”
  4. “Heinlein was racist as fuck…. Yeah, trust me, he was a full-blown racist.”
  5. “This is not a safe country for people of color.”
  6. “Otherness gets obliterated.”