Tag: history

The price of war

I posted this 10 years ago. I think it is still relevant today.

The price of war does not stop being paid when the guns fall silent.
This was driven home to me when we bought our first house from an older
couple who had lived there for many years. My grandfather, a Marine
who’d fought on Guadacanal and Tarawa, recognized the home seller as an
Army veteran and asked where he had served.

 

In Europe, the man answered, and his eyes filled unexpectedly with
tears. He turned away for a moment, and then, composed again, he
apologized and explained that he’d lost his brother in Normandy. This
conversation was taking place 53 years later, but it was clear that the
pain still lingered.

It is almost impossible for us, sixty years later, to understand the
grim realities of D-Day. Yes, we are unfortunate enough to live in
what a Chinese sage described as the curse of interesting times, and
yet, we do not yet live in a real state of war. Most of us know a few
soldiers who are involved in the present conflict – I was relieved to
receive an email yesterday from my Italian cousin in Baghdad, telling me
that he was fine after the embassy attack – but it is not the vast
majority of young men of our acquaintance who are in uniform and in
danger as was the case back then.

A few years ago, I took part in a massive simulation of Gold Beach,
using the Advanced Squad Leader system. Each player was responsible for
a section of the beach; I was commanding three companies of British
troops plus 12 Shermans and a few funnies. The experience drove home
how a relatively small number of defending German troops were able to
inflict terrible casualties on the landing Allies, and it was sobering
to see the pile of cardboard casualties grow and realize that each piece
represented the lives of ten men.

To the left, I lost an entire company, and only a lucky shot and a
wildly aggressive charge by one Sherman commander allowed me to take out
the two AT-guns defending my attack sector and get the two surviving companies off the beach. It
was only a game, and yet, one could see how the valiant action of a single brave man could make all the difference in the world to the rest of the men involved.

In the end, after many hours, the Allies triumphed on the table just
as they had many years before on the real beaches. But there was no
celebration by the winners, instead we found ourselves standing quietly
around the massive array of maps, contemplating those who had fought and
died so long ago. Some may think that it is strange and silly, if not
downright disrespectful, to view the tragic loss of human life through
the lens of a wargame. But, sixty years later, this is the only lens
that many of us have.

Soon, all the young men who stormed Normandy will be gone. But as
long as there are other young men who are curious about history, who
want to know what happened when, where and why, neither they nor their
sacrifices will ever be forgotten.

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.

Sedition in the USA

Washington, we may have a problem:

“The causes and motives of seditions are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons; strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and what soever, in offending people, joineth and knitteth them in a common cause….

“Above all things, good policy is to be used, that the treasure and moneys, in a state, be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread. This is done, chiefly by suppressing, or at least keeping a strait hand, upon the devouring trades of usury, ingrossing great pasturages, and the like.”
– Francis Bacon,  “Of Seditions And Troubles”

  • Innovation in religion, check.
  • Taxes, check.
  • Alteration of laws and customs, check.
  • Breaking of privileges, check.
  • General oppression, check.
  • Advancement of unworthy persons, check.
  • Strangers, check.
  • Dearths, check.
  • Disbanded soldiers, check.
  • Factions grown desperate, not yet.

And as for suppressing the devouring trade of usury, well, the economy may be in the doldrums and the employment/population ratio is down, but at least the stock market and the big banks are doing well.

The legend confirmed

Atari’s legendary ET dump in the desert has been found:

A decades-old urban legend was put to rest Saturday when workers for a documentary film production company recovered “E.T.” Atari game cartridges from a heap of garbage buried deep in the New Mexico desert.

The “Atari grave” was, until that moment, a highly debated tale among gaming enthusiasts and other self-described geeks for 30 years. The story claimed that in its death throes, the video game company sent about a dozen truckloads of cartridges of what many call the worst video game ever to be forever hidden in a concrete-covered landfill in southeastern New Mexico.

The search for the cartridges of a game that contributed to the demise of Atari will be featured in an upcoming documentary about the biggest video game company of the early ’80s.

I’m of two minds about this discovery. While I’m glad to know the dump was real, (which I always assumed to be the case), I would have preferred for the cartridges to be left for far future generations to discover, just so their archeologists could come up with the usual cockamamie theories about the items they are uncovering.

One of the more amusingly wry gems of The Hermetic Millennia is when the ur-history of the Witches is mentioned in passing:

Mickey turned and turned again, and drew a large circle on the snowy ground with his staff. “Here is my circle of Power! Within it, all who walk tread lightly on their Mother Earth, leaving no trace when they die; and all goods are held in common; and all class-enemies, all enmities, inequalities, and patriarchy must be left outside, and cannot pass my ninefold wards! I call upon Jadis and Jahi, Phoebe and Prudence, Sabrina and Samantha, Willow and Wendy, to watch the sacred bounds!”

Menelaus went up to him, stepping into the circle, and said softly, “Uh. You do know all those people watching your sacred bounds are, um, made up from kiddie pixies and texts and toons, right? Make-believe?”

Mickey drew himself upright, which thrust his belly out even farther, and the scowl on his face was like a line drawn in a pie pan filled with raw dough. “Many records survived from the Days of Fire—the Final Archive listed nine hundred thousand references to the beloved Witch Hermione alone, not to mention Gillian Holroyd and Glinda the Good! Would you have us believe that the ancients devoted so much emphasis, effort, and attention to what they knew to be merely idle fictions?! Next you will claim that the warlocks Klingsor and Castaneda are unreal!”

There can be little doubt that the development of the novel during the present period of civilization is going to seriously screw up future historians if Man ever passes through another post-literate period. Which, based on the present trends, looks increasingly likely.

Mailvox: the disqualification game

Stuck in the 1990s, Truth seems to think that successfully tarring someone with “raciss” is still a form of effective disqualification as he attempts to convince Tom Kratman to denounce me for my crimes of BadThink:

And how about if the claim of “ignorant half-savage” is based on
Vox’s tribe-to-society ratio or whatever it is he calls it? Would you
consider that genetic and therefore racist? Because as I recall, he
professes that blacks haven’t had enough time to adapt from savage to
social, generationally speaking. Which, is to say, he believes savagery
runs too thick in their genes. Would you consider that racist Mr.
Kratman?

I feel like your character is a higher quality than that. Of course, I have only the slightest evidence for that feeling. But I’d like it to be true. I’d love to be able to read a local sci-fi author who’s published through a major outlet. The only other I know of in this area code is Rod Belcher and I enjoyed his work. I’d probably enjoy yours. I’m just not one of those folks who can separate art and artist.

Disqualify… disqualify… disqualify. I find it amusing that Truth appears to think Tom
is sufficiently naive to fall for the rabbiting. But neither Tom nor I care what a Random Internet Rabbit defines as “racist”. By Truth’s lights, Tom is already disqualified because he admitted to being scientifically literate about genetic science.

Truth then addressed me:

I notice Mr. Kratman didn’t include, “calling black people ignorant half-savages is not racist.” What say you, Vox? Cultural or genetic marker? In the past you’ve said genetic. If not, correct me.

I will first ask a question of my own, which Truth will answer if he wishes to participate in the discussion: Truth, do you assert that there is not a single black individual in the U.S.A. who is an ignorant half-savage?

Now, in answer to Truth’s question, and contra Tom’s position, my observation is that you cannot possibly separate culture and genetics. It is logical to conclude, and it has been repeatedly observed, that cultural differences are derived from genetics. A society with an average 85 IQ will inevitably feature a very different culture than a society with an average 115 IQ. Among other things, the lower IQ culture will have shorter time preferences and its social mores will feature less consideration of the logical consequences of an individual’s actions. This is why secular progressives tend to equate intelligence with higher forms of civilization.

But it is also logical to conclude, and it has been also been observed, that genetic differences are derived from culture. A society where women have children at an average age of 18 will have genetically superior children to those produced in a society in which women have children at an average age of 35. Even something as purely cultural as the average number of children a woman bears will have tremendous genetic implications; there is reason to believe that some of the differences between r/selected and K/selected are genetic, and those genetic differences are, in part, derived from the culture that produces them.

(It must be made clear that this is NOT related to TENS in any way. We’re not dealing with the differences between species here, but intra-species differences for the most part and partial sub-species differences at most. Nor is most of the selection naturally imposed.)

In any event, the trivial thinkers who look at my time-to-civilization hypothesis and focus on its racial implications aren’t seeing its true scope, much less grasping the potential horror of it. The much more serious aspect of the hypothesis is its implication that civilization is the consequence of a centuries-long eugenic program that eventually, and inevitably, transforms itself into a dysgenic program. If the hypothesis holds, this would not only explode, once and for all, the secular conceit of linear progress, but would provide an elegant explanation for the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations as well as the observed inability of Africans to collectively reach a self-sustainable civilized standard despite the best efforts of well-intentioned individuals of various races for more than 150 years.

And if the fact that I occasionally contemplate such things offends you to the point that you don’t wish to read anything that I write or edit or publish, well, that leads to the obvious question: what in the name of the 1,200 sister-wives of Shaka Zulu are you doing here? Especially in light of Truth’s self-admitted anti-intellectual outlook:

I can deal with the economics, military policies, and other right wing stuff, but dismissing an entire race of humans as ignorant half-savages is beyond my threshold. The history of such thought has given rise to countless atrocities.

First, Truth’s personal thresholds do not dictate objective reality. The only thing that matters is if the observation is true or not. In this particular case, there is a considerable quantity of evidence supporting both the singular example provided, as well as the current state of civilizational progress of the human sub-species concerned. Second, we are discussing the collective mean here. In any group with more than two individuals there will obviously be those who exceed the mean, but that is totally irrelevant in this context.

As for the appeal to historical atrocity, has it never occurred to Truth that it is reality that dictated those atrocities and not the mere observation of the reality? He is assigning causal value to a consequence. If the savage behavior of a group of savages leads another group to wipe them out, it is not the second group’s belief that the first group was savage that was the causal factor, but rather, the fact that first group was a) savage, and b) aggressive.

To give one example, Julius Caesar would never have killed one million Gauls and enslaved another million had Gaius Marius not been forced to defend Rome from repeated invasions from the north 50 years prior.

Dead Horse: the conclusive beating

Longtime Ilk will recall that once upon a time, in 2004, a lengthy debate was inspired by a book written by Me-So-Michelle that insisted the WWII-era internment of Japanese-Americans was justified on the basis of legitimate military fears of an invasion of America’s West Coast in early 1942. I took extreme exception to that ludicrous attempt to justify internment, knowing that the argument was complete nonsense, and demonstrated that Malkin hadn’t done even a modicum of military research given her incorrect count of US carriers and inability to correctly interpret the significance of US carrier movements in early 1942.

This did not prevent a number of Malkin fans from attempting to defend the woman, mostly on the sophisticated grounds of “yeah, but, how can you REALLY know, for, like, you know, sure?”

As it happens, the recently released gray book of Admiral Chester Nimitz, published by the American Naval Records Society, not only makes for fascinating reading, but conclusively settles the matter of the US military’s historical concerns regarding a potential invasion of the American West Coast in 1942. These are the verbatim words of the US Navy’s assessment of the situation in January 1942, quoted from Volume 1 of the briefings for the USN Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet (CINCPACFLT). There is considerably more information than this available, but I have only transcribed that which is directly relevant to the subject at hand.

January 8, 1942
EMPLOYMENT OF CARRIER TASK FORCES IN JANUARY

ENEMY SITUATION
From the best intelligence we have, it appears that:

  1. The Far East offensives are occupying practically all of the amphibious forces of the enemy plus 3 or 4 carriers, 2 BB’s, about 13 cruisers, about one-third of his destroyers, some submarines and many auxiliary types. How long these forces will be needed in the Far East is problematical but it is believed that the end of January will see them there.
  2. Since the raid on the 7th, all First Fleet units and carriers have apparently remained west of the Eastern Marshalls.
  3. Carrier groups are being refitted or exchanged.

ENEMY INTENTION

In other estimates the enemy’s intentions in general order of priority have been deduced as follows:

a) The prosecution of the offensives in the Far East until all of Malaya, Philippines and NEI have been captured. In this will probably be included Rangoon.
b) Consolidation of this territory.
c) Advance upon Australia.

    While these are going on:

d) Continued submarine raids on our forces and communications, minor attacks against outlying islands and Alaska.
e) Cruiser raids against the routes to Australia, and possibly to the Mainland.
f) Capture Samoa.
g) Capture Canton. [Canton Island (Kiribati)]
i) Capture Java.
J) Attack with strong forces, including carriers, for demolition Johnston, Palmyra, Midway.
k) Sweeps in force along our communications to outlying islands; along our route to Mainland.
l) Carrier raids on West Coast.
m) Attacks for capture of Midway, Palmyra; main Hawaiian Islands; Oahu.

One of the basic questions facing us is: Is the close cover of Oahu necessary at this time? Taking in combination the present state of its defenses and our deductions as to enemy intentions, the answer is “no”.

In other words, the admiral commanding all the US military forces in the Pacific had absolutely no fear of a West Coast invasion, knew perfectly well that the limited Japanese transport capacity was committed elsewhere, and even went so far to conclude that the risk of a Hawaiian invasion was so low that it was not necessary to closely defend Hawaii, let alone California. Not only were Japanese naval forces fully engaged in the Far East, but their anticipated next move was in precisely the opposite direction from the West Coast!

As for the prospective carrier raids, I addressed the logistical aspects of them back in 2004 and showed that no amount of carrier raids could have even slowed down the American production of war materials, much less “cripple the war effort”, as evidenced by the INCREASE in German manufacture under heavier and more regular bombing than the sort permitted by carrier raids.

The lesson, as before, is this: Michelle Malkin is an ignorant media whore with risible intellectual pretensions. To the best of my knowledge, she has never come out and admitted that she was wrong, nor has she publicly disavowed the ridiculous argument she presented in her book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror.

Mailvox: A brief history of the Reconquista

In which Toni corrects me concerning my observations concerning the Reconquista of Spain and the current invasion of European America:

You mention the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 AD. You say: “Consider how small, in comparison to the present number of invaders, the earlier immigration was,” after mentioning a force of no more than 15,000 men.

Of course, those populations were smaller. But it was not a one-time event and that number greatly underestimates the whole inflow. The Muslims sent wave after wave against the peninsula.  You also mention that “the people invaded at the time also did not realize it was an invasion that was taking place around them”. That’s not exactly the case. In a way, it’s worse than that.

In 711 AD, the peninsula was under Visigoth rule. Even before the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, several Germanic tribes had invaded the peninsula (Suebi, Vandals, etc). Eventually, around 410 AD, one of these, the Visigoths (the Western Goths), managed to retain the control of the territory. Rome actually encouraged the Visigoths to pacify the peninsula against the other Germanic tribes.

But the Visigoths were a foreign minority (not more than 200,000) ruling over a larger and already diverse population. A demoralized and tired population that had recently gone through the fall of ‘their’ Empire (a few Roman emperors were actually from Hispania) and through successive invasions.

The Visigoth ruling elite was plagued by constant infighting. They had an elective monarchy and in late 710 AD they elected Rodrigo as their king. However, some Visigoth noblemen chose to side with Agila II instead. Agila II did effectively rule the Visigoth provinces of Iberia and Septimania, that is, the former Roman provinces of Tarraconense and Narbonense (northeastern Spain and southern France). Rodrigo ruled from Toledo, the Visigoth capital in the center of the peninsula.

The pro-Agila II faction sent envoys to North Africa to get military support in their fight against Rodrigo. In early 711 AD, Arab, Syrian, and Berber mercenaries crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa to fight for Agila II. These Muslim forces broke their agreement with Agila II and decided to stay in the peninsula.

It is not that the locals couldn’t tell the difference between trading ships and an invading army (one has to admire Muslim historiography). It’s that the invading army was originally fighting for one of the ruling factions. And most importantly, all ruling factions were made up of foreigners anyway. So:

  1. The locals had little to no attachment to their leaders.
  2. The leaders were too busy fighting among themselves to care for the people (they were not their people after all).
  3. The invaders were disloyal to the “king” that had hired them—a king who had been disloyal to his own rightful king. Compare this to the Roman attitude “Rome does not pay traitors who kill their chief”.

About the size of the invasion:

The Muslim invasion received wave after wave of new blood both from Africa and Arabia. It usually went like this: some new Muslim leader appeared in North Africa advocating a purer observance of Islamic law. They set their eyes on Al-Andalus (the Muslim invaded Iberian Peninsula, present-day Spain and Portugal), a land of wealth, were the Muslim leaders often lived in decadence, corruption, and infighting in a soup of racial tensions between Arabs and Africans. The new sect got plenty of followers in North Africa and easily overthrew the Muslim elite in Al-Andalus, only to repeat the cycle… The newcomers were always numerous and ready to fight and far more fanatical.

In 1162, for instance, Abd-al-Mumin launched a new campaign from Africa to purify Al-Andalus and fight the Christians. Ibn Abi Zar says there were “300,000 horsemen, 80,000 volunteers, and 100,000 infantrymen.” In 1184, Abu Yakub Yusuf also crossed the Straits attempting to attack Lisbon with 100,000 men. In 1195, Yusuf II crossed the Straits with 300,000 men (mostly Berbers and black slave foot soldiers, archers, and Arab horsemen) and marched towards Toledo, Alfonso VII tried to stop them with his heavy cavalry of 10,000 men while reinforcements from Leon and Navarra were on their way. (That’s just a sample of about one million ‘”immigrants”” in less than 40 years in a context of almost 800 years). Etc…

When the Muslims crossed the Pyrenees, the Franks led by Charles Martel very soon managed to stop them at the Battle of Poitiers in 733 AD. Then the Muslims had to abandon their goal of crushing the Christendom from the Western front and retreated back to the Iberian Peninsula. The Franks set a protectorate north and south of the Eastern Pyrenees, the Spanish March, in present-day Catalonia and southern France (roughly, what Agila II had controlled, and would later become the Crown of Aragon, one of the founding kingdoms of Spain). And ‘Europe’ forgot about the peninsula. Indeed the peninsula looked like a lost cause to the European Christians, as local Christians retained only a few microscopic kingdoms up north in the cold mountain ridges that used to be Celtic.

So Europe, unlike Africa and Arabia, did not send wave after wave of new blood. Only when the Spanish and Portuguese Christians had managed to reconquer a significant size of the territory did some fellow Europeans join the fight, in Almeria and Lisbon, for example, but never in the overwhelming numbers of the relentless Muslim tide.

By the way, it is because of these difficulties that feudal serfdom never took root in Spain and Portugal. (Medieval Europe and Feudalism are not synonyms). Most of the Reconquista was actually achieved by dirt poor free men who rode southward to retake the plains and the towns, founded free cities and charter cities, years ahead of the royal armies, the religious orders, and even the hidalgos, who were exempt from paying taxes and had a right to bear arms because they fought.

Three final notes,

  1. A recurring topic in the history of (and prelude to) the Reconquista is infighting (first among the Visigoths, and then among the Christians Kingdoms and in Muslim Taifas). This is commonly referred to in Spain as “Reinos de Taifas”. As soon as 740 AD, the Muslims in the peninsula were fighting among themselves. (The Musa you mention was condemned to death by his superiors for taking too much booty for himself, the death sentence was commuted, but eventually he was murdered in a mosque in Damascus anyway in 716. His son married Rodrigo’s widow, converted to Catholicism, and was also murdered, his head sent to Damascus. Musa’s lieutenant, Tarik ibn Ziyad —Gibraltar is named after him, Jabal Tarik, Mountain of Tarik—was also murdered by his own people.)
  2. In 1492, when the Reconquista was completed with the liberation of Granada, the plan was to take the fight all the way to Mecca and rid the world of Islam. But in that same year the very same kings who rode into Granada also funded an expedition that stumbled into a New World, and then Christians decided that Islam was not such a big deal after all and that there were more exciting adventures ahead.
  3. As late as 1756, the Spanish navy was still fighting off Muslim pirates raiding the coast, without much help from anyone as usual. A thousand years had passed since the invasion of 711 AD.  Fifty years after that, an American president refused to pay the ransom that the Muslim African pirates were demanding to free the enslaved American mariners. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War.

So there was a large native population being politically dominated by a small immigrant elite that encourages an invasion by a much larger group of immigrants that turns out to be disloyal to that elite. The historical analogy between 700s Spain and 2000s America may not be precise, but it is even more similar than the one I had previously drawn. In either case, it should be encouraging to traditional Americans to know that after 780 years of invasion and occupation, Spanish Christians were able to reconquer their own country.

The butter knife at the gun fight

While Tom Kratman doesn’t assert there are no atheists in foxholes, in the afterword of the Tuloriad, he expresses his doubts about the survival prospects of a culture that relies on putting large quantities of atheists on the front lines.

Where was Secular Humanism at Lepanto?
The moral of this story, this afterword, is “Never bring a knife to a gunfight.” Keep that in mind as you read.

In any case, religious fanatics? Us? We don’t think so.

We’re not going to sit here and lecture you on the value and validity of atheism versus faith. We’ll leave that to Hitchens and Dawkins or D’Souza or the pope or anyone else who cares to make the leap. One way or the other. Hearty shrugs, all around. A defense of the existence of God was never the purpose of the book, anyway, though we would be unsurprised to see any number of claims, after publication, that it is such a defense.

Sorry, it ain’t, either in defense of Revelations or in defense of Hitchens’ revelation that there was no God when Hitchens was nine years old. (Besides, Dinesh D’Souza does a much better job of thrashing Hitchens in public than we could, even if we cared to.)

Moreover, nope, we don’t think it’s unethical to be an atheist. We don’t think it’s impossible, or really any more difficult or unlikely, to be an atheist and still be a highly ethical human being. The same, sadly, cannot be said for governments. Thus, consider, say, the retail horrors of the Spanish Inquisition which, from 1481 to 1834 killed—shudder—not more than five thousand people, few or none of them atheists, and possibly closer to two thousand. Compare that to expressly atheistic regimes—the Soviet Union, for example, in which a thousand people a day, twenty-five hundred a day by Robert Conquest’s tally— were put to death in 1937 and ’38. And that’s not even counting starved Ukrainians by the millions. The death toll in Maoist China is said to have been much, much greater. Twenty million? Thirty million? A hundred million? Who knows?

Personally, we’d take our chances with the Inquisition before we would take them with a militantly communist, which is to say, atheist, regime. The Inquisition, after all, was a complete stranger neither to humanity nor to the concept of mercy.

But that’s still not the point of this book or this afterword. Go back to the afterword’s title. Ever heard of Lepanto? Everyone knows about the Three Hundred Spartans now, at least in some form or another, from the movies. Not enough people know about the battle of Lepanto….

Now let’s suppose, just for the moment and just arguendo, that God doesn’t exist, that He’s a pure figment of the imagination. What then won the battle of Lepanto? No, back off. What got the Christian fleet together even to fight the battle, for without getting together to fight it it could never have been won?

The answer is, of course, faith, the faith of the pope, Pius V, who did the political maneuvering and much of the financing, and also the faith of the kings, doges, nobles and perhaps especially the common folk who manned the fleet. And that answer does not depend on the validity of faith, only upon its sincere existence. Faith is, in short, a weapon, the gun you bring to a certain kind of gunfight.

If you’ve got any interest in the atheism/religion debate or military history, you simply must read the whole thing. And then reflect upon the likelihood that the West’s secular humanist culture will survive either the challenge of Islam in the Dar al Harb or the third world’s Christian revival.

The ahistorical atheist

Armarium Magnum explains why so many atheists are historically illiterate:

After 30+ years of observing and taking part in debates about history with many of my fellow atheists I can safely claim that most atheists are historically illiterate.  This is not particular to atheists:  they tend to be about as historically illiterate as most people, since historical illiteracy is pretty much the norm.   But it does mean that when most (not all) atheists comment about history or, worse, try to use history in debates about religion, they are usually doing so with a grasp of the subject that is stunted at about high school level.

This is hardly surprising, given that most people don’t study history past high school.  But it means their understanding of any given historical person, subject or event is (like that of most people), based on half-remembered school lessons, perhaps a TV documentary or two and popular culture: mainly novels and movies.  Which is why most atheists (like most people) have a grasp of history which is, to be brutally frank, largely crap.

Worse, this also means that most atheists (again, like most people) have a grasp of how history is studied and the techniques of historical analysis and synthesis which is also stunted at high school level – i.e. virtually non-existent.  With a few laudable exceptions, high school history teachers still tend to reduce history to facts and dates organised into themes or broad topics.  How we can know what happened in the past, with what degree of certitude we can know it and the techniques used to arrive at these conclusions are rarely more than touched on at this level.  This means that when the average atheist (yet again, like the average person generally) grasps that our knowledge of the past is not as cut and dried and clear as Mr Wilkins the history teacher gave us to understand, they tend to reject the whole thing as highly uncertain at best or subjective waffle at worst.  Or, as Grundy put it, as “crap”.

All this leads some atheists, who have fallen in to the fallacy of scientism and reject anything that can’t be definitively “proven”, to reject the idea of any degree of certainty about the past.  This is an extreme position and it’s rarely a consistent one.  As I’ve noted to some who have claimed this level of historical scepticism, I find it hard to believe they maintain this position when they read the newspaper, even though they should be just as sceptical about being able to know about a car accident yesterday as they are about knowing about a revolution 400 years ago.

This is something I, too, have noticed with regards to many atheists, beginning with Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins. It is obvious they don’t know any more about history than they do about theology; no one who knows anything about history believes religion causes war, thinks that the Spanish Inquisition was one of the most lethal institutions in human history, or finds the assumption that Jesus was not a legitimate historical figure to be a reasonable one.

However, I do have to take exception to this statement: “This rejection can be more pronounced in atheists, because
many (not all) come to their atheism via a study of science.“ This observably isn’t true. Armarium Magnum has the order reversed. The vast majority of atheists become atheists as teenagers, before they have embarked upon any course of study, and they become atheists for reasons that are entirely emotional by their own account. They then turn to science for the explanations that they can no longer seek in religion, and are understandably disappointed and embittered when they cannot find them there either.

The reason the rejection is often more pronounced in atheists is because they are observably less rational than most people who are interested in history. No one who does not believe in the existence of gods through a rational process can legitimately call himself an atheist, for the obvious reason that it is impossible to rationally prove the non-existence of gods. An agnostic’s lack of god belief may have a rational basis, an atheist’s non-belief never can. Their irrationality not only makes them unusually susceptible to swallowing falsehoods that thirty seconds on Wikipedia would render obvious, but makes it hard for them to give up their ahistorical dogma.

What’s worse is that I’ve also experienced
atheists who have been shown extensive, clear evidence that the medieval Church
taught the earth was round and that the myth of medieval Flat Earth belief was
invented by the novelist Washington Irving in 1828, and they have simply
refused to believe that the myth could be wrong.

Neat historical fables such as the ones about Christians
burning down the Great Library of Alexandria (they didn’t) or murdering Hypatia
because of their hatred of her learning and science (ditto) are appealing
parables.  Which means some atheists fight
tooth and nail to preserve them even when confronted with clear evidence that
they are pseudo historical fairy tales.  

And before anyone angrily denounces Armarium Magnum as another theistic polemicist cut out of the same godbothering cloth as me, perhaps it should be noted that the gentleman is himself an atheist. It’s a good piece and I even learned something. It’s more than a little amusing to be informed that belief in the medieval belief in a flat earth is intellectually akin to belief in the Headless Horseman. And that will certainly make for a useful rhetorical device.

The real death of Erwin Rommel

This first-person account
of the death of the brilliant German general illustrates why one should
never believe the Official Government-Approved Histories:

A
seven-page report [Dr Friedrich Breiderhoff] made to Cologne police on
July 22 1960 has now been found in the city’s archive in which he
details how he was threatened with pain of death by an S.S. man to lie
on Rommel’s death certificate.

Dr Breiderhoff was
brought from his post at the reserve military hospital at Ulm where he
was the chief physician. He was told to inspect a person in a car
outside by two senior army officers. He told police: ‘It was Herr
Rommel.  His hat and his marshall’s baton were lying to the right of his
upper body on the floor.

“Then a man in civilian dress
appeared and ordered me to begin resuscitation attempts and told me
that I must not tell the staff that he was dead. I made a direct cardiac
injection and then attempts at resuscitation with heart massage and
breathing exercises, as if the Field Marshall had drowned.  I felt
completely that Rommel was a dead man already. Then an S.S. man ordered
me to remove the vomit from his mouth and I found an empty cyanide
capsule in his throat covered with brown and yellow mucus. I was then
ordered that I had to put ‘heart attack’ on the death certificate on the
express orders of the High Command of the Armed Forces.”

Now,
I very much doubt that anyone still believes that Rommel died of
natural causes, but the point is that even when the factual information
is documented and in the possession of the government authorities, it
often fails to make its way out to the public.