Friday, February 16, 2007

"The End of a Thousand Years of History"

"There were never any Armenians in Azerbaijan." The Wikipedia entry for Armenia says, "Armenia has been populated since prehistoric times, and has been proposed as the site of the Biblical Garden of Eden. Armenia lies in the highlands surrounding the Biblical mountains of Ararat, upon which, as tradition states, Noah's Ark came to rest after the flood. ... In 301, Armenia became the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as its official state religion, while a number of Christian communities have been established in Armenia since 40 A.D. ... Under Ottoman rule, the Armenians were granted considerable autonomy within their own enclaves and lived in relative harmony with other groups in the empire (including the ruling Turks). However, as Christians under a strict Muslim social system, Armenians faced pervasive discrimination. When they began pushing for more rights within the Ottoman Empire, Sultan ‘Abdu’l-Hamid II, in response, organised state-sponsored massacres against the Armenians between 1894 and 1896, resulting in an estimated death toll of 80,000 to 300,000 people. The Hamidian massacres, as they came to be known, gave Hamid international infamy as the 'Red Sultan' or 'Bloody Sultan.'"






The hatreds of the world are many and ancient. Not all of them are our concern. But they exist. And each erases and denies the dreams that came before. That is the definition of darkness: the place in which no detail remains.

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.
And Bahram, that great Hunter -- the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.

And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean --
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!

14 Comments:

Blogger Utopia Parkway said...

The Muslims have a long history of destroying Jewish and Christian religious symbols and of building Mosques on top of Jewish and Christion sites that they've conquered. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is only one of many.

In this case it seems that territory is more the deciding factor than the usual religious supremacism but the complete disregard for the sensibilities of other groups is clearly evident.

2/16/2007 10:44:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

I've repeatedly mentioned on this site that while helping upland tribesmen title their lands it soon became evident that several waves of displacement had preceded European colonization in the Philippine islands. My guess is that the question "who are the natives" is an almost unanswerable question in most parts of the world.

We may never know with empirical certainty who the "natives" of a given place are. All that can be factually known is who lives where now. It is the present state of the earth that should matter. The lives of the people who exist today should matter most; yet it matters least. We drive the real treasure of creation like cattle over the insensate earth.

What does he care if de world's got troubles?
What does he care if de land ain't free?

2/17/2007 12:10:00 AM  
Blogger desert rat said...

That basic premise, W, that those of the present and future matter less than those that have gone before, is evident in the Iraq debate.

The US must stay the course, or the sacrifice of those previously lost or maimed will be for naught.

The past price paid trumping future losses, in argument at least

2/17/2007 06:45:00 AM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

The marginal calculation is the only one that counts. And it would be best to leave Iraq in a flash if that yielded the greatest marginal benefit. But there's the rub. Does it?

2/17/2007 07:04:00 AM  
Blogger StoutFellow said...

This is deja vu all over again. I'm remembering the Taliban Iconoclasts who destroyed the statues of Buddha in 2001 and the Islamic Militia destroying the Italian graves in Mogadishu. I can almost see spiral motion in the rubble as it falls into the Memory Hole.

We can't attribute the destruction of the Jewish temples in Jerusalem to Islamists. The Babylonians and Romans get credit for this, long before the WarLord Messiah hijacked the religion of Abraham. However, among current actors the Wahhabists of Saudia Arabia get the prize for creating the most entropy while erasing history - Gozers all.

2/17/2007 07:11:00 AM  
Blogger Charles said...

StoutFellow said...
WarLord Messiah hijacked the religion of Abraham.
/////////////
You havn't seen the WarLord Messiah. He is yet to come. Second time for Christians. First time for the Jews.

2/17/2007 11:53:00 AM  
Blogger Assistant Village Idiot said...

I confess I don't follow that last comment by Charles...

"Who are the natives" is a question that seems to be decided on the basis of when recorded history comes into play. Thus, literate cultures come off looking worse, as they record who was there when they arrived.

Tracing back 300 years, each of us has 1000 ancestors. 600 years, a million. Even when intermarriage among groups is minimal, by the time one goes back 1000 years, everyone in the area is descended from the same people. Hungarians and Romanians still argue about who got to Transylvania and Crisana first. Yet all are descended from all in that region.

2/17/2007 04:11:00 PM  
Blogger desert rat said...

Over at NRO the marriage patterns of those peoples descended in the geographic footprint of the 8th Century Caliphate raises it head.

Stanely Kurtz discusses cousin intermarriage in Marriage and the Terror War

... in “Root Causes,” I show that the Muslim seclusion of women, and even characteristically Muslim church-state relations, are part and parcel of a distinctive kinship structure built around a preference for the marriage of cousins.

Then in Part II he discusses how marriage is about: "Protecting the honor of the family; protecting the honor of Islam

2/17/2007 05:02:00 PM  
Blogger summignumi said...

Wretchard, you are wrong in this instance with Armenia or any area that is now Muslim. Muslims are different then other invaders of territory and do not deserve the same perspective as the rest, even Genghis Khan let the local people stay, live and prosper, Muslim killed what they could not take back as slaves, burned and destroyed what was left behind and if they occupied they still destroyed or convert what remained so no history but that of Islam could remain. Muslim are special but not the way the believe!

2/17/2007 05:40:00 PM  
Blogger Starling said...

drat,
thanks for the links on the Kurtz articles on cousin marriage. Very interesting theory he's got.

thoughtfully,
starling

2/17/2007 08:48:00 PM  
Blogger Fat Man said...

Quatrains 16 thru 19 of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald

Available from Project Gutenberg.

2/17/2007 08:58:00 PM  
Blogger Captain USpace said...

Very interesting, a haunting video. In several hundred years, when Muslims dominate the planet, if they are Taliban types, the internet will have been destroyed, the books will have been burned, and no record of 'before' will exist.

Humans should start burying books and documents to be found in the future. But where? And how will people find them? And what if the wrong people find them and destroy them?

We must all keep up the fight against the global disease of Islam, educating everybody we can, not just for today, or tomorrow, but for tomorrow's tomorrow. So hopefully, the majority of the Muslim majority will be truly moderate and as secular as possible.

In case there exists reincarnation, I don't want myself or anybody I know, or anybody they know, and so on, to be reborn into a Taliban Hell.

Talk on, blog on...

absurd thought -
God of the Universe wants
a Taliban Earth...
.

2/18/2007 02:56:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

uspace wrote: In case there exists reincarnation, I don't want myself or anybody I know, or anybody they know, and so on, to be reborn into a Taliban Hell.

I'm afraid there would be quite a waiting list to get a body. With the rejection of 21st Century technology and medicine and farming techniques, the population of the Earth will fall to 7th Century levels.

2/18/2007 06:10:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Quote from memory of Louis L'Amour's "Last of the Breed."

Soviet colonel to American Indian USAF pilot: "The white man took the land away from your people."

Pilot: "Yes. Just as my people took the land from those who were before them."

2/18/2007 06:29:00 PM  

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