Tag: history

esr calls BS on tor.com

Specifically, with regards to their woefully misplaced glee concerning an asserted discovery of “women warriors”:

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female insists an article at tor.com. It’s complete bullshit.

What you find when you read the linked article is an obvious, though as it turns out a superficial problem. The linked research doesn’t say what the article claims. What it establishes is that a hair less than half of Viking migrants were female, which is no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. The leap from that to “half the warriors were female” is unjustified and quite large.

There’s a deeper problem the article is trying to ignore or gaslight out of existence: reality is, at least where pre-gunpowder weapons are involved, viciously sexist.

It happens that I know a whole lot from direct experience about fighting and training with contact weapons – knives, swords, and polearms in particular. I do this for fun, and I do it in training environments that include women among the fighters.

I also know a good deal about Viking archeology – and my wife, an expert on Viking and late Iron Age costume who corresponds on equal terms with specialist historians, may know more than I do. (Persons new to the blog might wish to read my review of William Short’s Viking Weapons and Combat.) We’ve both read saga literature. We both have more than a passing acquaintance with the archeological and other evidence from other cultures historically reported to field women in combat, such as the Scythians, and have discussed it in depth.

And I’m calling bullshit. Males have, on average, about a 150% advantage in upper-body strength over females. It takes an exceptionally strong woman to match the ability of even the average man to move a contact weapon with power and speed and precise control. At equivalent levels of training, with the weight of real weapons rather than boffers, that strength advantage will almost always tell.

Supporting this, there is only very scant archeological evidence for female warriors (burials with weapons). There is almost no such evidence from Viking cultures, and what little we have is disputed; the Scythians and earlier Germanics from the Migration period have substantially more burials that might have been warrior women. Tellingly, they are almost always archers.

Here we go again. Who do these science fiction SJW idiots think they’re trying to fool? That retarded Hugo-winning blog post about how women have always fought notwithstanding, all these women – and it is mostly women – have proven with their insane inventions and historical misrepresentations is that they have never, ever, stepped into a ring with a man.

As I have previously mentioned, I have fought women. I have fought female black belts. And it’s like fighting very flexible 12 year old boys, only the women usually quit faster. I’ve never fought a full two-minute round with a woman where I didn’t ease off; most times they will simply quit after the second time you knock them down. They are slow, small, and weak. They are much slower and weaker than you probably imagine if you have never kicked one in the face or punched one in the stomach.

I found the occasional look of betrayal some women would show to be particularly amusing. Yes, I did just hit you in the face. Yes, I’m sure it did hurt. No, I won’t stop because you’ve got tears welling up in your eyes. What on Earth do you think you are here for? That sort of dojo bunny never stuck around for long. The sort that did ended up marrying both of our senseis.

More importantly, there is the evidence of historical logic. Any society that made use of women warriors wouldn’t have survived for long. From Families and Demographics in the Viking Age:
 
“A typical woman probably bore 7 infants during her lifetime,
29 months apart on average. During pregnancy, women were expected to continue
working. After the child’s birth, the mother typically returned to work with
little delay. Evidence suggests that mothers nursed their children until the age
of 2 years, which may have dictated the interval between the births of a
couple’s children. A typical couple probably had 2 or
3 living children at any one time. Few parents lived to see their
children marry. And fewer lived to see their first grandchild.

So, a female warrior would have had to be not just as good as her male counterparts, but exceptional, and kill AT LEAST seven enemy warriors before being killed herself for the opportunity cost of her warrior womanhood to be considered break even from the tribe’s perspective. Then again, it’s not impossible for at least one bygone society to have been this stupid and shortsighted. After all, our society observably is.

The idea that the Vikings were sexually egalitarian is hysterical if you have ever read the account of a Viking funeral written by Ibn Fadlan in 921, when he was serving as the secretary of an embassy from the Baghdad Caliphate to the Bulgars. By my count, sixteen men have sex with the slave girl who “volunteers” to be slain with her master before she is stabbed and strangled on the ship that is subsequently burned. Wikipedia has a partial description, which appears in full in the revised edition of THE HISTORY OF THE VIKINGS by Gwyn Jones.

And even the mythical warrior woman Brynhildr followed the practice in the human sacrifice she offered for Sigurd.
    Bond-women five
    shall follow him,
    And eight of my thralls,
    well-born are they,
    Children with me,
    and mine they were
    As gifts that Buthli
    his daughter gave.

The patient game

China is making use of its long-honed method for military dominance on the USA:

What is peculiar to China’s political culture, and of very great contemporary relevance is the centrality within it of a very specific doctrine on how to bring powerful foreigners—indeed foreigners initially more powerful than the empire—into a tributary relationship. Specialists concur that this doctrine emerged from the very protracted (3rd century BCE to 1st century CE) but ultimately successful struggle with the Xiongnú (匈奴) horse-nomad state, just possibly remote ancestors of Attila’s Huns, but definitely the inventors of the Steppe State political system that would be replicated by all their successors, and more adapted than replaced even by the Mongols….

The method forms a logical sequence:

  • Stage One: start by conceding all that must be conceded to the superior power including tribute, in order to avoid damage and obtain whatever forbearance is offered. But this in itself entangles the ruling class of the still-superior power in webs of material dependence that reduce its independent vitality and strength.
  • Stage Two: offer equality in a privileged bipolarity that excludes all lesser powers, or “G-2” in current parlance. That neutralizes the still powerful Other party, and isolates the manipulated soon-to-be former equal from all its potential allies, preventing from balancing China with a coalition.
  • Stage Three: finally, when the formerly superior power has been weakened enough, withdraw all tokens of equality and impose subordination.

Until the Chinese government decided—very prematurely I believe—to awaken the world to its classically imperial territorial ambitions by demanding the cession of lands, reefs, rocks, and sea waters from India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam (demands that disturb and damage the concurrent Tianxia narrative of an alternative and more harmonious state system, disseminated even within the confines of Stanford University), it was making much progress towards Stage Two, the stage of equality preparatory to the final stage of subordination.

For all its weaknesses, and they are many, one thing that must be kept in mind is that the Chinese always play the long game. The Han have been playing this game and winning at it for a very long time; they are considerably more successful in historical terms than other ancient cultures such as the Greeks, the Romans, or the Jews. China is less than 70 years into its long-term struggle with the USA and has already reached the point where it is able to challenge the USA on a regional level; I very much doubt that its strategists are unaware that it took 147 years to subdue the Xiongnú.

Meanwhile, the USA is sinking into weakness and amalgamation with lesser, non-European cultures. I would expect Stage Two to be reached within the next 20 years. If the USA thought in similar terms, it would go to war with China now, while it still has the advantage. But US leadership doesn’t think further ahead than the next presidential election, or, as the rise of ISIS in the void of conquered Iraq demonstrates, in grand strategic terms.

Fabled “Roots”

I’d heard that a fair amount of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-prize winning “Roots” was fictitious, but I didn’t know that a considerable amount of the book was plagiarized, or that the entire thing is about as historically legitimate as “Star Wars”.

Unfortunately, the general public is largely unaware of how Haley’s monumental family autobiography, stretching back to 18th-century Africa, has been discredited. Indeed, a 1997 BBC documentary expose of Haley’s work has been banned by U.S. television networks – especially PBS, which would normally welcome such a program.

Coincidentally, the “Roots” anniversary comes amid the growing scandal over disclosures of historian Stephen Ambrose’s multiple incidents of plagiarism. Because as Haley himself was forced to acknowledge, a large section of his book – including the plot, main character and scores of whole passages – was lifted from “The African,” a 1967 novel by white author Hal Courlander.

But plagiarism is the least of the problems in “Roots.” And they would likely have remained largely unknown, had journalist Philip Nobile not undertaken a remarkable study of Haley’s private papers shortly before they were auctioned off.

The result was featured in a devastating 1993 cover piece in the Village Voice. It confirmed – from Haley’s own notes – earlier claims that the alleged history of the book was a near-total invention…. Historical experts who checked Haley’s genealogical research discovered that, as one put it, “Haley got everything wrong in his pre-Civil War lineage and none of his plantation ancestors existed; 182 pages have no basis in fact.”

Given this damning evidence, you’d think Haley’s halo would long ago have vanished. But – given this week’s TV tribute – he remains a literary icon. Publicly, at least. The judge who presided over Haley’s plagiarism case admitted that “I did not want to destroy him” and so allowed him to settle quietly – even though, he acknowledged, Haley had repeatedly perjured himself in court.

The Pulitzer Prize board has refused to reconsider Haley’s prize, awarded in 1977 – in what former Columbia President William McGill, then a board member, has acknowledged was an example of “inverse racism” by a bunch of white liberals “embarrassed by our makeup.”

To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, the left-wing literary establishment is desirous of the perceived success of black authors. The science fiction community is literally decades behind in handing out affirmative action awards to inept and derivative authors of diversity.

The definitive IQ list

I thought it might be useful to have a single place where confirmed IQs of various individuals can be listed. With the exception of the estimate for Barack Obama (whose IQ can only be estimated due to his refusal to release his academic records), only reliably reported IQs based on objective measures should be listed here; remember that the PSAT/SAT only served as an IQ proxy until 1994 and cannot be used to estimate IQ after that date. An IQ score with a plus sign after it indicates a known minimum IQ for the individual. A minus score indicates a known ceiling.

Also keep in mind that various awards and membership in various groups have direct IQ implications. Anyone in Mensa has a 132+ IQ. A perfect pre-1994 SAT score indicates a 168+ IQ. Anyone who is not a National Merit Semifinalist has an IQ below 140. Anyone who is not a National Merit Outstanding Participant has an IQ below 130.

168+ Paul Allen, Microsoft founder
168 Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. Army general
167 Bill Gates, Microsoft founder
166 James Woods, actor
160 Rush Limbaugh, broadcaster
151 Vox Day, game designer
140+ Hillary Clinton, U.S. senator
140+ PZ Myers, science blogger
140 John C. Wright, author 
140 Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy
138 David Robinson, NBA
134 Al Gore, U.S. Vice-President
133 John McCain, U.S. senator
127 George W. Bush, U.S. President
123 John Kerry, U.S. senator
123 Richard Feynman, physicist
116 Barack Obama, U.S. President
103 Bill Bradley, U.S. senator

If you know of sources showing the IQs of other public figures, please put them in the comments along with the relevant citation or a link to the source. This is not for the discussion of the IQ scores of any non-public figures, so please resist the urge to talk about yourself as any such comments will be deleted.

And why might that be?

Charles Krauthammer, an American Jew, laments the resurgence of world anti-semitism. And yet, neither he nor anyone else ever seems to ask the obvious question: why is it resurging now? Are we expected to believe that it is a complete coincidence that various peoples around the world suddenly appear to have developed, apropos of nothing at all, a sudden and simultaneous dislike for a relatively small group of people?

[T]he other problem for Israel has been the inability to win over public opinion around the world. “The rest of the world’s reaction to what’s happening in Gaza is Orwellian,” Krauthammer said. “It is shocking, especially in Europe. It is a resurgence of anti-Semitism not seen since the `30s, this is a recurrence, it’s all over the world, and don’t tell me its anti-Zionism. You listen to the slogan, you see the sign, Hitler was right in Germany, a sign in Germany saying that this is a veneer that is a front for anti-Semitism and it is back. It’s all over the world. And that’s what we’re now beginning to face.

I’ve been warning of this resurgence for several years now, as I picked up the first signs of it during the 2008 financial crisis. Now that it’s being mentioned in the mainstream media, perhaps more people will begin to take the matter seriously. The first thing people have to understand is that emo-posturing and affecting shock and horror accomplishes absolutely nothing. The guilt trip simply doesn’t work anymore and it’s time to abandon the Holocaustian dodge. The Shoah wasn’t the worstey worstest event in human history; far worse genocides, both in terms of absolute numbers and percentages of the people being targeted, have occurred since. It’s not even the worst thing to have happened to the people of Israel in their history, 11/12 being considerably more than half.

One would do well to reflect upon why the Roman treatment of the Jews was so much harsher than their treatment of nearly every other people they conquered from Britain to Egypt, aside from the Carthaginians. Were the Romans mysteriously anti-semitic too or did the Jews manage to upset them in some manner? Regardless, the fact that nearly everyone with any direct experience of the Endlosung is now dead, combined with the fact that the world is considerably less Eurocentric than it was, means that virtually no one gives a damn about the Holocaust anymore. That card is played out.

Try it on the Chinese. Or the Cambodians. You’re going to expect tears, cash, and prizes for six million people killed during the biggest war on the planet seven decades ago when the Chinese more recently offed eight times that many of their own people over nothing more than resource allocation and lunatic political theory? Ask the average half-illiterate 80-IQ American public school student about the Holocaust and he’s as likely to think it has something to do with slavery or Palestine as World War II.

Another American Jew, Richard Cohen, is aware of perspectives changing: “A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that among Americans age 65 or older, 53 percent blame Hamas for the violence and 15 percent Israel. For those ages 18 to 29, Israel is blamed by 29 percent of those questioned, Hamas by just 21 percent.” 

Second, understand that the resurgence of anti-semitism is happening for a reason. What that reason may be is up for discussion, but not that logic dictates its existence. Anti-semitism can be irrational but it is not always so, and pretending otherwise is both disingenuous and futile. The world knows what Ben Bernanke did last summer, so to speak. The world knows who is funding President Goldman Sachs and it understands why the head of a petty state in the Middle East can tell him off and expect him to fall in line. The world knows that the U.S. Congress is Israeli-occupied territory. The world knows who owns Hollywood, the U.S. media, and the bailed-out banks. The world knows who has been flooding its nations with third-world barbarians who don’t even understand the concept of indoor plumbing.

And the world doesn’t like it. Not one little bit. Actions have consequences; the problem is that the consequences are not always proportionate.

It’s absolutely useless to try to continue hiding behind claims of Jewish wonderfulness, supercapability and work ethos. First, virtually no one buys it. Too many of us know how the game is played; too many of us have seen incompetent, inept, and lazy Jews advanced in tribal fashion over far more capable, competent, and responsible Gentiles. Too many of us observe that Germany and China appear to be doing rather well these days despite lacking the benefit of Jewish guidance. Second, and much more importantly, no one cares why.

Does this mean that I endorse this rising tide of anti-semitism? No, of course not, otherwise I wouldn’t have warned Jews of it in the first place. If I were anti-semitic, I would smile like a helpful SS-Totenkopfverbände officer meeting a train and tell every nervous Krauthammer and Cohen on board not to worry, everything is just fine, everything is in order, isn’t it shocking that some of those terrible animals in the Holy Land can’t seem to get over their irrational hatreds of your wonderful people!

But I understand why the hatred exists and I know that it is, to a certain extent, merited. It observably is. Jews don’t have to like that fact, they don’t even have to accept it, but they will have to deal with it nevertheless. And I also suspect that the growing hatred is going to get out of hand as the global economy worsens, that the innocent will be caught up in the angry tide along with the red-handed guilty.

The idea that post-nationalism and demographic divide-and-conquer would make the Jews in America safer was intrinsically wrong, as wrong as the idea that amassing vast wealth and political influence serves as an effective form of community protection for a small minority. People like helpless refugees. People rather like grateful immigrants who settle quietly in their own communities and gradually integrate over time. People hate rich people who tell them what to do. And people really, really hate rich and powerful foreigners with supremacy complexes who tell them what to do while settling criminally-inclined aliens in their neighborhoods.

In successfully attacking the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant nature of America, Jews destroyed the American exceptionalism that offered them protection. Now that it is essentially gone, Jews have not only lost a reliable Gentile shield against global anti-semitism, but aside from Christian Zionists like Sarah Palin who fly the flag of Israel in their churches, the white Anglo-Saxons who previously defended them are no longer much inclined to do so. And, contra Spengler, I very much doubt that the Chinese are likely to serve as an adequate substitute for white American Christians. Reflect on what the Han have done to the peaceful, harmless people of Tibet and then think about how well they are likely respond to tribal gamesmanship.

You can argue if you like. You can call me names if you like. You’ll hardly be the first. But look at it logically: if anti-semitism is like the weather or cancer, then the world will just have to suffer it forever without much hope of anything changing until such time as the Jews finally go the way of the Amalekites. My perspective is actually the optimistic one, because if the rise in anti-semitism is largely a rational reaction to material Jewish actions, it should be possible to avoid its most dangerous forms, outside of those implacable sentiments genuinely inspired by the ongoing territorial conflict in the Middle East.

If you seek pro-Israeli propaganda, you’ll have to go elsewhere. If you wish to read anti-semitic rantings, this isn’t the place to find them. On this controversial subject, as with all others, I am only interested in the truth and its probable ramifications for the future. If I am incorrect, by all means, feel free to show me how and I will modify my thinking. But if you have nothing but groundless assertions and fervent personal opinions to offer, you needn’t bother.

Familiarity breeds no tolerance

I recently finished reading Thomas Asbridge’s book on The Crusades, which I recommend despite its moderately secular bias. I was a little surprised, however, to note that I’d only marked five notes, one of which was the following:

However, for all the contact between Muslims and Latins witnessed in this era–through war and peace–Islam’s attitude towards western Christendom was not radically altered. Old prejudices remained, among them popular misconceptions about the worship of Christ and God as an indication of polytheism, as well as entrenched antipathy towards the use of figurative religious images, forbidden in Islam, and wild assertions of Frankish sexual impropriety. Familiarity does not seem to have bred much in the way of understanding or tolerance. But equally, contrary to the suggestion of some scholars, the advent of the crusades did not prompt widespread deterioration in Muslim relations with indigenous eastern Christians. There were some intermittent signs of a hardening in attitudes, particularly in cases where native Christians living under Islamic rule were suspected of aiding or spying for the Franks, but, broadly speaking, little changed until the rise of the more fanatical Mamluks.

For both Islam and the West, perhaps the most striking transformation wrought by the crusades related to trade. Levantine Muslims already maintained some commercial contacts with Europe before the First Crusade through Italian seaborne merchants, but the volume and importance of this economic interaction were revolutionised in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, largely as a result of the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean. The crusades and the presence of the crusader states reconfigured Mediterranean trade routes–perhaps most powerfully after Constantinople’s conquest in 1204–and played a critical role in solidifying the power of the Italian mercantile cities of Venice, Pisa and Genoa.

Two interesting notes there. First is the fact that after 200 years of close contact, there was little improvement in terms of understanding or toleration between the Frankish and Islamic cultures. There was even some indication of “a hardening in attitudes” despite the occasional intermarriage and a considerable amount of trade; neither side objected in the least to making use of the women of the other side.

Given that the West has had much the same result with its African subculture over the last 200 years, these multiple multi-century data points should suffice to demonstrate that both the multicultural and the melting pot models of multiethnic societies are fundamentally incorrect. This historical conclusion is soundly supported by the relevant social science. And that means that as happened before in both the Holy Land and in Spain, and as is happening now in the Middle East, societal homogeneity will come to the fore again in the West. The Western equivalent of “the more fanatical Mamluks” will eventually rise due to the failure of their predecessors to deal with the problem in a less violent manner.

The second is the way that the main transformation was economic. In the West, we assume that because there has been an economic transformation, there will be a cultural transformation. The history of the Crusades indicates this is incorrect, and that the economic transformation is ultimately irrelevant to the cultural and demographic transformations. This historical perspective is in line with socionomic theory, which holds that economics is a consequential factor, not a causal one.

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.