#‘urban warfare?’ more like ‘internal conflict!!’

[pocketscribbs]

lmao tangle got traumatized hahaaaa...haaaa...

Tangle’s anxiety arc confirmed

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Douglas Murray

Published: Feb 24, 2024

Like a number of ‘anti-colonialists’, William Dalrymple lives in colonial splendour on the outskirts of Delhi. The writer often opens the doors of his estate to slavering architectural magazines. A few years ago, one described his pool, pool house, vast family rooms, animals, cockatoo ‘and the usual entourage of servants that attends any successful man in India’s capital city’.

I only mention Dalrymple because he is one of a large number of people who have lost their senses by going rampaging online about the alleged genocide in Gaza. He recently tweeted at a young Jewish woman who said she was afraid to travel into London during the Palestinian protests: ‘Forget 30,000 dead in Gaza, tens of thousands more in prison without charge, five MILLION in stateless serfdom, forget 75 years of torture, rape, dispossession, humiliation and occupation, IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU.’ It is one thing when a street rabble loses their minds. But when people who had minds start to lose them, that is another thing altogether.

I find it curious. By every measure, what is happening in Gaza is not genocide. More than that – it’s not even regionally remarkable.

Hamas’s own figures – not to be relied upon – suggest that around 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October. Most of the international media likes to claim these people are all innocent civilians. In fact, many of the dead will have been killed by the quarter or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that fall short and land inside Gaza.

Then there are the more than 9,000 Hamas terrorists who have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces. As Lord Roberts of Belgravia recently pointed out, that means there is fewer than a two to one ratio of civilians to terrorists killed: ‘An astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields.’ Most western armies would dream of such a low civilian casualty count. But because Israel is involved (‘Jews are news’) the libellous hyperbole is everywhere.

For almost 20 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza, we have heard the same allegations. Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza during exchanges with Hamas in 2009, 2012 and 2014. As a claim it is demonstrably, obviously false. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the population of the Strip was around 1.3 million. Today it is more than two million, with a male life expectancy higher than in parts of Scotland. During the same period, the Palestinian population in the West Bank grew by a million. Either the Israelis weren’t committing genocide, or they tried to commit genocide but are uniquely bad at it. Which is it? Well, when it comes to Israel it seems people don’t have to choose. Everything and anything can be true at once.

Here is a figure I’ve never seen anyone raise. It’s an ugly little bit of maths, but stay with me. If you wish, you might add together all the people killed in every conflict involving Israel since its foundation.

In 1948, after the UN announced the state, all of Israel’s Arab neighbours invaded to try to wipe it out. They failed. But the upper estimate of the casualties on all sides came to some 20,000 people. The upper estimates of the wars of 1967 and 1973, when Israel’s neighbours once again attempted to annihilate it, are very similar (some 20,000 and 15,000 respectively). Subsequent wars in Lebanon and Gaza add several thousands more to that figure. It means that up to the present war, some 60,000 people had died on every side in all wars involving Israel.

Over the past decade of civil war in Syria, Bashar al-Assad has managed to kill more than ten times that number. Although precise figures are hard to come by, Assad is reckoned to have murdered some 600,000 Arab Muslims in his country. Meaning that every six to 12 months he manages to kill the same number as died in every war involving Israel ever.

There are lots of reasons you might give to explain this: that people don’t care when Muslims kill Muslims; that people don’t care when Arabs kill Arabs; that they only care if Israel is involved. Allow me to give another example that is suggestive.

No one knows how many people have been killed in the war in Yemen in recent years. From 2015-2021 the UN estimated perhaps 377,000 – ten times the highest estimate of the recent death toll in Gaza. The only time I’ve heard people scream on British streets about Yemen has been after the Houthis started attacking British and American ships in the Red Sea and the deadbeat idiots on the streets of London started chanting: ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around.’ Because like all leftists and Islamists there is no terrorist group these people can’t get a pash on, so long as that terrorist group is against us.

I often wonder why this obsession arises when the war involves Israel. Why don’t people trawl along our streets and scream by their thousands about Syria, Yemen, China’s Uighurs or a hundred other terrible things? There are only two possible conclusions.

The first is a journalistic one. Ever since Marie Colvin was killed it became plain that western journalists were a target in Syria. Not eager to be the target, most journalists hotfooted it out of the country. Some who didn’t fell into the hands of Isis. Israel-Gaza wars by contrast do not have the same dynamic and on a technical level the media can applaud itself for reporting from a warzone where they are not the target.

But I suspect it is a moral explanation which explains the situation so many people find themselves in. They simply enjoy being able to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-like behaviour’. They enjoy the opportunity to wound Jews as deeply as possible. Many find it satisfies the intense fury they feel when Israel is winning.

Like being fanned on your veranda while lambasting the evils of Empire, it is a paradox, to be sure. But it is also a perversity. And it doesn’t come from nowhere.

==

"From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab."

This is the actual genocide.

[eretzyisrael]

by Abraham Wyner

Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.

Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.

Are there better numbers? Some objective commentators have acknowledged Hamas’ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be roughly accurate. Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable guide. The fog of war is especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible to quickly determine civilian death totals with any accuracy. Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamas’ own misfired rockets, accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself.

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

The data used in the article can be found here, with thanks to Salo Aizenberg who helped check and correct these numbers.

[hero-israel]

re: the whole Biden administration offering info thing. so I know a bit about foreign policy stuff and there's a few things to keep in mind here. anything that is stated publicly was definitely already stated behind closed doors months ago, and it being made public is a separate strategic play (relatedly, "leaks" are authorized like half of the time tbh). the reason for offering the info in the first place is bc the USA is trying to convince Israel to do realignment operations which are more reliable than trying to eliminate terrorists via conventional warfare, as using the conventional means to take on an unconventional force tends to create more combatants than it kills. the USA has been making this offer to Bibi and co from the beginning bc the USA immediately clocked that hamas wanted to provoke a large reaction on October 7th and the USA has plenty of experience with why a large reaction is a really bad move. the reason the offer is being made more publicly now is so that the general public will be aware that this offer was on the table and if Bibi turns it down then he's responsible for whatever happens in Rafah, which is likely to go sideways bc yknow urban warfare is horrific. it's a semi last ditch effort to apply pressure to Bibi to reconsider the operation or risk further public backlash and civil unrest. realignment operations would also reduce civilian casualties significantly in comparison to the more traditional ground offensive that's been happening, especially so in an urban environment, and thus would reduce the number of new recruits to hamas. this is well known among the experts so at least one of the Israeli advisors must have pointed this out in addition to the USAmericans advice but for whatever reason Bibi has been reluctant to go for it. idk what Bibi's goal is here but I imagine it has something to do with clinging to power somehow. anyway that's the short version of that. basically think of foreign policy as an international poker game where everyone is cheating and remember that not knowing the details of what's going on behind the scenes is unfortunately what makes us the public.

I could see that as being true, but still don't see the internally-reasoned argument of "knowing where it is and not telling the IDF." If that's a "stick" against Israel, it's mostly falling on Palestinians.

What, in an achievable sense, are "realignment operations"? I've read one source after another say "of course Israel should destroy the tunnels and kill Hamas and rescue the hostages, but in a way that doesn't kill any civilians on the surface," and they don't describe what that way actually is (sort of like the person who said the way to stop Houthi attacks is to resolve the I/P conflict first, presto!).

[healthstyle101]

In war-scarred Sudan, over 1,200 children under 5 years old have died in last 5 months, UN says

Tragedy Strikes Sudan: Over 1,200 Children Under 5 Dead Due to Measles and Malnutrition In a devastating revelation, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) disclosed that more than 1,200 children under the age of 5 have lost their lives in the past five months within nine camps located in conflict-torn Sudan. The primary causes of these heartbreaking deaths are a lethal combination of measles and malnutrition. This alarming news emerged on Tuesday. The UNHCR has diligently documented these fatalities, which occurred between May 15 and September 14. These camps are situated in the White Nile province, where a considerable number of Sudanese citizens have sought refuge amid the six-month-long battle between rival generals, the ongoing conflict in the capital city of Khartoum, and other regions. In response to this grim situation, Filippo Grandi, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, expressed deep concern, stating, "Dozens of children are dying every day — a result of this devastating conflict and a lack of global attention." Sudan's Unfolding Chaos Sudan was plunged into turmoil in mid-April when long-standing tensions between the military, under the leadership of Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and the formidable paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, erupted into open warfare. This violent conflict has transformed the capital and other urban areas into battlegrounds. According to Volker Perthes, the U.N. envoy in Sudan, who resigned last week, at least 5,000 people have lost their lives, and over 12,000 have suffered injuries. However, it is likely that the true number of casualties is even higher. The impact of this strife has been felt far and wide. Over 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes, with more than 1 million crossing into neighboring countries, as reported by the U.N.'s migration agency. Moreover, the conflict has wreaked havoc on Sudan's healthcare system, rendering many hospitals and medical facilities inoperable. A Plea for International Support Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, emphasized the dire need for international support, saying, "Local healthcare workers desperately need the support of the international community to prevent further deaths and the spread of outbreaks." Sudan's Looming Crisis The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued a grave warning on Monday, highlighting that the ongoing conflict, coupled with hunger, disease, displacement, and the destruction of livelihoods, poses a grave threat to the entire country. OCHA's chilling assessment reveals that approximately half of Sudan's population, totaling around 25 million people, will require humanitarian assistance by year-end. Shockingly, 6.3 million individuals are just one step away from famine, according to the agency's report. A Region in Distress The UN Refugee Agency further disclosed that numerous displaced Sudanese individuals are suffering from both measles and malnutrition. This dire situation extends to refugees arriving in South Sudan and Ethiopia, where cases of measles and malnutrition have been reported. Additionally, Chad, hosting the largest number of Sudanese refugees since the conflict began, is grappling with acute malnutrition among children. The United Nations Children's Agency has sounded a grave warning, suggesting that "many thousands of newborns" in Sudan may face mortality by year-end due to a lack of access to treatment. The situation in Sudan remains a humanitarian crisis that requires immediate international attention and support to avert further suffering and loss of life. Read the full article

[terramythos]

TerraMythos 2021 Reading Challenge - Book 27 of 26

Title: Jade War (The Green Bone Saga #2) (2019)

Author: Fonda Lee

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Female Protagonist, LGBT Protagonist, First-Person (briefly), Third-Person 

Rating: 10/10 

Date Began: 10/14/2021

Date Finished: 10/26/2021

Having barely escaped destruction at the hands of the Mountain clan, the No Peak clan seeks to strengthen its position locally and abroad. As war breaks out beyond Kekon’s shores, international attention turns to the small island nation and its valuable magic jade supply. Jade can enhance one’s physical abilities when worn, making it a coveted weapon of war. No Peak, led by the powerful and canny Kaul siblings, must strike risky alliances and combat unexpected enemies to secure the clan’s future on the world stage. But the Kauls will also have to grapple with themselves and how far they’re willing to go to protect family, clan, and country. 

“You have to go where your enemies are,” Hilo said. “And then further.” 

Content warnings and spoilers below the cut.

Content warnings for the book: Depicted — Death, animal abuse/death, graphic violence, graphic sexual content, drug use/addiction/withdrawal/overdosing, racism, domestic abuse, suicide/suicidal ideation, sexism, torture, terrorism, self-harm. Mentioned — Colonialism, p*dophilia, r*pe, child abuse, warfare, homophobia.

Jade War is everything a good sequel should be. The stakes are higher, the scope is broader, the political machinations are more intricate and intense, and characterization both improves and continues to impress. While I enjoyed Jade City a lot, Jade War is a huge step up. Assuming Jade Legacy sticks the landing (which I fully expect it to), I can say that The Green Bone Saga is one of the most criminally underrated fantasy series of the last few years.

Full disclosure — I initially struggled with this book. The first third or so is definitely a slow burn. Lee introduces a lot of different plot threads that, seemingly, have little connection to one another. Hilo meets with a jade smuggler to negotiate a hostage situation. Anden gets effectively exiled to Espenia and struggles to adapt in a strange, foreign county. Shae meets up with her secret boyfriend and ruminates on her role in the clan vs her personal desires. Stuff like that. I found it a little difficult to connect with everything. But all that setup pays off big time— and several threads from Jade City come back as well. Small details and minor characters return in interesting ways that play with one’s expectations. When everything comes together in the  final act, it’s simultaneously satisfying and harrowing.

While Jade City focused on Janloon and the clan war between the Mountain and No Peak, Jade War elevates things to the world stage. Jade, found only on Kekon, enhances the martial abilities of people who wear it. It’s captured international attention as a potential weapon. When conflict erupts in nearby countries, Kekon finds itself caught in the middle as allies and enemies alike seek to procure jade by any means necessary. Add that to a longer timeline and the strained, tenuous peace between the two Green Bone clans, and you end up with a layered political conflict.

And boy does political intrigue take center stage in this novel. The last book had its fair share of politics, negotiations, and backstabbing. But like everything else, it’s on a whole new level here. Everyone’s playing the long game, and many chapters read as intense, manipulative chess matches. Though they’re fun to read, these stretches would lure me into a false sense of security. Then Lee would just gleefully blindside me with a shocking twist or development. There’s always a sense of tension reading Jade War, because one never knows when the shoe is going to drop.

The title is almost a misnomer, because the so-called “jade war” happens elsewhere in a foreign country. We never see it directly. The war we do see is fought in nontraditional battlefields— boardrooms, clandestine meetings, homes, etc. I’m almost—ALMOST— disappointed that Lee’s excellent fight scenes are less prevalent in this book. But honestly, I think this just enhances the ones we do get. In particular, there’s an intense fight about halfway through the novel, and it’s probably the best one so far. I’m avoiding spoilers, but it’s just stupidly good. Again, Lee writes action better than almost anyone I’ve encountered. Her descriptions and choreography are vivid and cinematic.

Characterization is on-point, both improving what I liked and addressing my criticisms from Jade City. Specifically, the Maik siblings get a lot of development, something I felt was lacking in the last book. I got a clear sense of Maik Kehn and Maik Tar as individuals rather than interchangeable background characters. Maik Wen gets lots of attention and a few perspective chapters. She ends up being the most important character outside of the main leads.

Anden also feels way more impactful as a character. My struggle last book was that he didn’t do much and felt a little wasted. But now that he’s a fish out of water and has to develop as a person outside of clan expectations, he matures quite a bit. His chapters add a lot of context about the world outside of Kekon, and I like how even Espenia has an unofficial clan structure among the Kekonese diaspora. He also has the most optimistic ending, which is a far cry from last book. His chapters seem almost at odds with the rest of the story, but, like everything else in the book, it all comes together in the end. It’s hard to pick a fave out of the three leads, but Anden comes closest.

But most of all, I love that Jade War explores and expands on the morally gray nature of the characters. Jade City touches on this a bit; often our heroes do questionable things out of necessity with an ends justify the means attitude. After all, Ayt Mada and the Mountain are cutthroat and willing to do whatever they can to undermine No Peak. Why shouldn’t No Peak do the same? The kid gloves come off in Jade War, however. The climax of the first act solidifies this— I won’t spoil it, but it’s a total shock that haunted me for the rest of the book.

The morally gray, violent nature of the story is often juxtaposed with the core theme of family. There are several kid characters who are obviously set up to be the next generation of Kauls. Hilo, despite his brutal nature in much of the book, takes to fatherhood with love and enthusiasm. He’s shown to be a compassionate and caring father figure, something he never had himself. But then you have one chapter where Hilo dispassionately buries a man alive to suffer a slow, agonizing death in jade withdrawal… then goes home and has a cute, meaningful scene with one of his kids. It’s horrifying, and there’s lots of examples of this throughout the book. The takeaway is that the two sides of clan life are intertwined… something the conclusion (especially Shae’s speech) drives home.

One last detail I enjoyed is that Hilo and Shae experience a reversal. Hilo, normally portrayed as the headstrong warrior archetype, shows his more duplicitous and politically cunning side. Meanwhile, Shae becomes more impulsive; she’s the one who jumps into a secret relationship and picks the most notable fight in the book. This is the opposite of their dynamic in the last book, yet it’s still perfectly in character based on their backstories. In Jade City, we learned the two siblings basically hated each other as kids, and even now they butt heads pretty often. The narrative doesn’t dwell on this much, but it’s interesting that the two are, at their core, pretty similar people.

If I have a criticism it’s that, again, I wish we saw more of the Mountain and its villains. Ayt Mada is such a fascinating antagonist, but outside of a few memorable scenes, we see very little of her directly. Nau Suen is also an unexpected treat (god, that one wham line), but outside of one chapter, he disappears until near the end of the book. As the Mountain and No Peak become more similar, and the line of morality continues to blur, I really want to see more of these characters. They’re not exactly the narrative focus, and I get that, but I think exploring them more could only strengthen the story.

That being said, Jade War was freaking awesome. I’m sad I have to wait a whole month for Jade Legacy to release, but I have high hopes for it. Definitely check this series out; it’s unlike any urban fantasy series I’ve read before, and its roots in martial arts and gangster stories add a lot to the experience. Mind the warnings though, because these books get pretty dark.

[newstfionline]

Saturday, August 21, 2021

Landlords look for an exit amid federal eviction moratorium (AP) When Ryan David bought three rental properties back in 2017, he expected the $1,000-a-month he was pocketing after expenses would be regular sources of income well into his retirement years. But then the pandemic hit and federal and state authorities imposed moratoriums on evictions. The unpaid rent began to mount. Then, just when he thought the worst was over, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a new moratorium, lasting until Oct. 3. David, the father of a 2 1/2-year-old who is expecting another child, fears the $2,000 he’s owed in back rent will quickly climb to thousands more. The latest moratorium “was the final gut punch,” said the 39-year-old, adding that he now plans to sell the apartments. Most evictions for unpaid rent have been halted since the early days of the pandemic and there are now more than 15 million people living in households that owe as much as $20 billion in back rent, according to the Aspen Institute. A majority of single-family rental home owners have been impacted, according to a survey from the National Rental Home Council, and 50% say they have tenants who have missed rent during the pandemic. Landlords, big and small, are most angry about the moratoriums, which they consider illegal. Many believe some tenants could have paid rent, if not for the moratorium. And the $47 billion in federal rental assistance that was supposed to make landlords whole has been slow to materialize. By July, only $3 billion of the first tranche of $25 billion had been distributed.

Student loans (WSJ) The Biden administration announced it will wipe out $5.8 billion in student loans held by 323,000 people who are permanently disabled. This means the Education Department will discharge loans for borrowers with total and permanent disabilities per Social Security Administration records. Currently there is $1.6 trillion held in student loan debt, much of which could be eliminated through executive action.

New England preps for 1st hurricane in 30 years with Henri (AP) New Englanders bracing for their first direct hit by a hurricane in 30 years began hauling boats out of the water and taking other precautions Friday as Tropical Storm Henri barreled toward the Northeast coast. Henri was expected to intensify into a hurricane by Saturday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. Impacts could be felt in New England states by Sunday, including on Cape Cod, which is teeming with tens of thousands of summer tourists. “This storm is extremely worrisome,” said Michael Finkelstein, police chief and emergency management director in East Lyme, Connecticut. “We haven’t been down this road in quite a while and there’s no doubt that we and the rest of New England would have some real difficulties with a direct hit from a hurricane.”

Booming Colo. town asks, ‘Where will water come from?’ (AP) “Go West, young man,″ Horace Greeley famously urged. The problem for the northern Colorado town that bears the 19th-century newspaper editor’s name: Too many people have heeded his advice. By the tens of thousands newcomers have been streaming into Greeley—so much so that the city and surrounding Weld County grew by more than 30% from 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, making it one of the fastest-growing regions in the country. And it’s not just Greeley. Figures released this month show that population growth continues unabated in the South and West, even as temperatures rise and droughts become more common. That in turn has set off a scramble of growing intensity in places like Greeley to find water for the current population, let alone those expected to arrive in coming years. “Everybody looks at the population growth and says, ‘Where is the water going to come from?’” [one local professor] said.

Everything’s Getting Bigger In Texas (AP, CNBC, Forbes) Texas has long been a popular destination for newcomers, thanks to cheaper land and housing, more job opportunities, lower taxes, and fewer regulations. There’s also the great weather, food, schools, and medical facilities, the abundant resources and year-round recreation and outdoor activities, artistic and cultural events, fairs, festivals, music venues, and the diverse and friendly people—you know, just to name a few. Texas has always been a business-friendly environment, which has certainly not been lost on tech and financial companies headquartered in strictly-regulated and high-priced states like California and New York. There are 237 corporate relocation and expansion projects in the works in Texas just since the pandemic hit. Tech giant Oracle moved its headquarters to Austin in late 2020; Tesla is building its new Gigafactory there, and Apple will have its second-largest campus there as well. Both Google and Facebook have satellite offices in Austin, and the file hosting services company Dropbox will be leaving San Francisco for Austin. Recently, the global real estate services firm CBRE and multinational financial services behemoth Charles Schwab moved their headquarters from California to the Dallas area. Hewlett Packard’s cofounders were two of the original grandfathers of Silicon Valley, who started their company in a Palo Alto garage in 1939. Now, the corporation is moving its headquarters from San Jose to Houston. And the number of mega-wealthy individuals who’ve moved to Texas are too numerous to mention. It’s not just big cities like Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio that are seeing an influx of people—bedroom communities are growing by leaps and bounds as well—places like New Braunfels, located in the Texas Hill Country, Conroe, 40 miles north of Houston, and McKinney, just 30 minutes up U.S. 75 from Dallas.

‘Bracing for the worst’ in Florida’s COVID-19 hot zone (AP) As quickly as one COVID patient is discharged, another waits for a bed in northeast Florida, the hot zone of the state’s latest surge. But the patients at Baptist Health’s five hospitals across Jacksonville are younger and getting sick from the virus faster than people did last summer. Baptist has over 500 COVID patients, more than twice the number they had at the peak of Florida’s July 2020 surge, and the onslaught isn’t letting up. Hospital officials are anxiously monitoring 10 forecast models, converting empty spaces, adding over 100 beds and “bracing for the worst,” said Dr. Timothy Groover, the hospitals’ interim chief medical officer.

Grace heads for a second hurricane hit on Mexican coast (AP) Hurricane Grace—temporarily knocked back to tropical storm force—headed Friday for a second landfall in Mexico, this time taking aim at the mainland’s Gulf coast after crashing through the country’s main tourist strip. The storm lost punch as it zipped across the Yucatan Peninsula, but it emerged late Thursday over the relatively warm Gulf of Mexico and was gaining energy. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Grace’s winds were back up to 70 mph (110 kph) early Friday and were expected to soon regain hurricane force. It was centered about 265 miles (425 kilometers) east of Tuxpan and was heading west at 16 mph (26 kph). The forecast track would take it toward a coastal region of small fishing towns and beach resorts between Tuxpan and Veracruz, likely Friday night or early Saturday, then over a mountain range toward the heart of the country and the greater Mexico City region. Forecasters said it could drop 6 to 12 inches (15 to 30 centimeters) of rain, with more in a few isolated areas—bringing the threat of flash floods, mudslide and urban flooding.

“Self-determination 1, Human Rights 0” (Foreign Policy) Most Latin American governments offered little official support to the U.S. War in Afghanistan when it began in 2001. At the time, Venezuela put forward a blistering critique of meeting “terror with more terror,” and then-Cuban leader Fidel Castro said U.S. opponents’ irregular warfare abilities could draw out the conflict for 20 years. Over the weekend, as the Afghan government collapsed and chaos engulfed Kabul’s airport, today’s leaders of Cuba and Venezuela echoed their critiques while foreign ministers of other Latin American countries diplomatically issued statements of concern about Afghanistan’s humanitarian needs. Chile and Mexico made plans to accept Afghan refugees, and several countries signed on to a joint international statement protecting Afghan women’s rights. To many in Latin America’s diplomatic and foreign-policy communities, the dark events in Afghanistan confirmed the importance of the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The extended U.S. presence in Afghanistan was “the same mistake as always: trying to build democratic states through the use of force,” Colombian political scientist Sandra Guzmán wrote in El Tiempo. Many Latin Americans stressed that methods other than military interventions should be used to work toward human rights, even as they acknowledged how challenging it can be to make progress. “Self-determination 1, human rights 0 #Afghanistan,” tweeted Uruguayan political scientist Andrés Malamud after Kabul fell.

Afghanistan war unpopular amid chaotic pullout (AP) A significant majority of Americans doubt that the war in Afghanistan was worthwhile, even as the United States is more divided over President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and national security, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Roughly two-thirds said they did not think America’s longest war was worth fighting, the poll shows. Meanwhile, 47% approve of Biden’s management of international affairs, while 52% approve of Biden on national security. The poll was conducted Aug. 12-16 as the two-decade war in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban returning to power and capturing the capital of Kabul. Biden has faced bipartisan condemnation in Washington for sparking a humanitarian crisis by being ill-prepared for the speed of the Taliban’s advance.

The U.S. Blew Billions in Afghanistan (Bloomberg) The rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s government to the Taliban fueled fears of a humanitarian disaster, sparked a political crisis for President Joe Biden and caused scenes of desperation at Kabul’s airport. It’s also raised questions about what happened to more than $1 trillion the U.S. spent trying to bring peace and stability to a country wracked by decades of war. While most of that money went to the U.S. military, billions of dollars got wasted along the way, in some cases aggravating efforts to build ties with the Afghan people Americans meant to be helping. A special watchdog set up by Congress spent the past 13 years documenting the successes and failures of America’s efforts in Afghanistan. While wars are always wasteful, the misspent American funds stand out because the U.S. had 20 years to shift course.

Western groups desperate to save Afghan workers left behind (AP) The Italian charity Pangea helped tens of thousands of Afghan women become self-supporting in the last 20 years. Now, dozens of its staff in Afghanistan are in hiding with their families amid reports that Taliban are going door-to-door in search of citizens who worked with Westerners. Pangea founder Luca Lo Presti has asked that 30 Afghan charity workers and their families be included on Italian flights that have carried 500 people to safety this week, but the requests were flatly refused. On Thursday, the military coordinator told him: “Not today.” Dozens of flights already have brought hundreds of Western nationals and Afghan workers to safety in Europe since the Taliban captured the capital of Kabul. Those lucky enough to be rescued from feared reprisals have mostly been Afghans who worked directly with foreign missions, along with their families. European countries also have pledged to evacuate people at special risk from the Taliban—feminists, political activists and journalists—but it is unclear exactly where the line is being drawn and how many Afghan nationals Western nations will be able to evacuate.

[militant-holy-knight]

In light of President Obama’s recent remarks comparing the brutality of the Islamic State to the Crusades, it might be time to take a fresh look at those events. Were they really the one-sided Dark Ages barbarism we have been taught? Were they an early manifestation of Western imperialism and global conquest?

In his landmark book, “God’s Battalions” (HarperOne 2009), Baylor University social sciences professor Rodney Stark suggests otherwise. It is a well-researched chronicle, including 639 footnotes and a bibliography of about 300 other works, yet reads like an adventure story full of military strategy and political intrigue.

What Prompted the Crusades

He begins in the final years of Mohammed and describes how a newly united Arab people swept through (Zoroastrian) Persia and the (Orthodox Christian) Byzantine-  controlled areas of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa. (Byzantine refers to the Greek-speaking eastern remainder of the Roman Empire.) Eventually Arabs took over control of the Mediterranean islands, most of Spain, and the southern part of Italy, and even reached as far as 150 miles outside of Paris before being turned back by the Franks, or early French.

The Muslims were brutal in their conquered territories. They gave pagans a choice of converting to Islam or being killed or enslaved. Jews and Christians (other People of the Book) were usually but not always treated somewhat better, and allowed to retain their beliefs but under conditions of Sharia subjugation. But the Muslim-held territories were not monolithic. Stark writes:

‘Perhaps the single most remarkable feature of the Islamic territories was the almost ceaseless internal conflict; the intricate plots, assassinations, and betrayals form a lethal soap opera. North Africa was frequently torn by rebellions and intra-Islamic wars and conquests. Spain was a patchwork of constantly feuding Muslim regimes that often allied themselves with Christians against one another.’

Not surprisingly, there was intense Christian resistance and determination to take back lost territories. Especially effective were the Normans and the Franks in Spain and Italy.

The Golden Middle Ages Belonged to Europeans

Western scholars have often characterized this clash of cultures as an Islamic Golden Age versus a European Dark Age, but Stark demolishes this as a myth. He says the best of the Islamic culture was appropriated from the people Muslims conquered—the Greeks, Jews, Persians, Hindus, and even from heretical Christian sects such as the Copts and Nestorians. He quotes E.D. Hunt as writing, “the earliest scientific book in the language of Islam [was a] treatise on medicine by a Syrian Christian priest in Alexandria translated into Arabic by a Persian Jewish physician.” Stark writes that Muslim naval fleets were built by Egyptian shipwrights, manned by Christian crews, and often captained by Italians.  When Baghdad was built, the caliph “entrusted the design of the city to a Zoroastrian and a Jew.” Even the “Arabic” numbering system was Hindu in origin.

And, while it is true that the Arabs embraced the writings of Plato and Aristotle, Stark comments,

‘However, rather than treat these works as attempts by Greek scholars to answer various questions, Muslin intellectuals quickly read them in the same way they read the Qur’an – as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction…. Attitudes such as these prevented Islam from taking up where the Greeks had left off in their pursuit of knowledge.’

Meanwhile, back in Europe was an explosion of technology that made ordinary people far richer than any people had ever been. It began with the development of collars and harnesses that allowed horses to pull plows and wagons rather than oxen, doubling the speed at which people could till fields. Plows were improved, iron horseshoes invented, wagons given brakes and swivel axels, and larger draft horses were bred. All this along with the new idea of crop rotation led to a massive improvement in agricultural productivity that in turn led to a much healthier, larger, and stronger population.

Technology was also improving warfare with the invention of the crossbow and chain mail. Crossbows were far more accurate and deadly than conventional archery, and could be fired with very little training. Chain mail was almost impervious to the kind of arrows in use throughout the world. Mounted knights were fitted with high-back saddles and stirrups that enabled them to use more force in charging an opponent, and much larger horses were bred as chargers, giving the knights a height advantage over enemies. Better military tactics made European armies much more lethal. Stark writes:

It is axiomatic in military science that cavalry cannot succeed against well-armed and well-disciplined infantry formations unless they greatly outnumber them…. When determined infantry hold their ranks, standing shoulder to shoulder to present a wall of shields from which they project a thicket of long spears butted in the ground, cavalry charges are easily turned away; the horses often rear out of control and refuse to meet the spears.

In contrast, Muslim warriors were almost exclusively light cavalry, riding faster but lighter horses bareback with little armor, few shields, and using swords and axes. Their biggest advantage was their use of camels, which made them much more mobile than foot soldiers and gave them the ability to swoop in and out of the desert areas to attack poorly defended cities.

Muslims Slaughter, Rape, and Pillage

These differences provided Crusader armies with huge advantages, but what would prompt hundreds of thousand Europeans to leave their homes and travel 2,500 miles to engage an enemy is a desert kingdom—especially after the Muslim conquest of Europe had been turned back?

In 638 Jerusalem surrendered to Muslim invaders, and mass murders of Christian pilgrims and monks became commonplace.

There had been long-festering concern about the fate of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. After his conversion to Christianity in the early 300s, the Roman Emperor Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of what was believed to be Jesus’ tomb, and other churches in Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. These sites prompted a growing number of European pilgrims to visit the Holy Land, including Saint Jerome, who lived in Bethlehem for the last 32 years of his life as he translated the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. By the late fifth century, Stark reports, more than 300 hostels and monasteries offered lodging to pilgrims in Jerusalem alone.

But in 638 Jerusalem surrendered to Muslim invaders, and mass murders of Christian pilgrims and monks became commonplace. Stark includes a list of select atrocities in the eight and ninth centuries, but none worse than the some 5,000 German Christians slaughtered by Bedouin robbers in the tenth century.

Throughout this period, control of Palestine was contested by several conflicting Muslim groups. Stark writes, “In 878 a new dynasty was established in Egypt and seized control of the Holy Land from the caliph in Baghdad.” One hundred years later, Tariqu al-Hakim became the sixth caliph of Egypt and initiated an unprecedented reign of terror, not just against Christians but against his own people as well. He burned or pillaged some 30,000 churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the tomb beneath it.

Soon enough, newly converted Turkish tribes came out of the north to seize Persia and Baghdad (by 1045) and press on to Armenia, overrunning the city of Ardzen in 1048, where they murdered all the men, raped the women, and enslaved the children. Next they attacked the Egyptians, in part because the Turks were Orthodox Sunnis and the Egyptians were heretical Shiites. While the Turks did not succeed in overthrowing the Egyptians, they did conquer Palestine, entering Jerusalem in 1071. The Turks promised safety to the residents of Jerusalem if they surrendered the city, but broke this promise and slaughtered the population. They did the same in Ramla, Gaza, Tyre, and Jaffa.

Emperor Alexius Pleads for Help

Finally, they threatened Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Alexius Comnenus wrote to Pope Urban II in 1095, begging for help to turn back the Turks. This was remarkable given the intense hostility between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Perhaps the pope saw an opportunity to unite or at least reduce tensions between the two Christian churches, but he responded with a call to create an army that would go to the Middle East.

Without ongoing support from Europe, the Crusaders could not survive constant attacks from the Muslims.

I am not going to regurgitate all the battles of the Crusades themselves. It is a fascinating history well worth studying in part for its parallels and lessons for today. Let’s just say that the Crusaders were extremely effective militarily, often defeating far larger Muslim armies, despite having traveled some 2,500 miles into an alien desert climate. Their biggest enemies were disease, starvation, and political betrayal. Plus, the Crusades were expensive and home countries grew weary of paying the taxes needed to support them (sound familiar?)

The Crusaders ended up establishing their own kingdoms in the Holy Land, which lasted for about 200 years or, as Stark notes, almost as long as the United States has existed; but without ongoing support from Europe they could not survive constant attacks from the Muslims.

How the Crusades Were Different from Military Action of the Day

So, what to make of all this?

The Crusaders were unique in that they did not seek to plunder or enslave.

Actually, the Crusaders were unique in that they did not seek to plunder or enslave. They didn’t even try to forcibly convert anyone to Christianity. Their sole interest was to protect the pilgrims and Christian holy sites. They sometimes sacked cities that refused to provide food to a hungry army, but they didn’t take riches back to Europe. There were few riches to be found. Rather than exploiting indigenous resources to benefit Europe, Europe sent money and resources to the Middle East. Pilgrims were quite lucrative for host countries, just as tourism is today.

War was a nasty and brutal business at the time, and had been for all of recorded history. Cities fortified themselves as protection against invading armies. A siege of a city meant surrounding the area and cutting off supplies until the population surrendered, often by starving. In the Bible, II Kings 6:24-33 relates the story of the siege of Samaria, in which two starving women agree to kill and eat their sons.

The rule of war at the time was that, if a city surrendered, the population would be spared, but if it resisted and the invading army had to take it by force all the inhabitants would be killed or enslaved. But Stark notes that Muslim armies often violated even this rule—promising sanctuary, then slaughtering the population that surrendered. (Before we get too smug and condescending about the savagery of these ancients, let’s not forget the rocket bombing of London, the firebombing of Dresden, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a mere 70 years ago.)

Muslim armies often promised sanctuary, then slaughtered the population that surrendered.

One way in which Muslim fighters today have advanced over their forebears is that during the Crusades they did not adopt new tactics to counter the technological advantage of the Europeans. They never used crossbows or shielded infantry, even after several hundred years of fighting. Today, Muslim warriors quickly evolve to make the most of Western technology, although they still never seem to develop anything of their own.

An Enduring Clash Between Inquiry and Submission

One final thought on this. As Stark indicates above, there is in too many Muslim countries a sense of obedience that precludes robust debate or new ideas, let alone technological innovation. In his classic, “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman quotes Osama bin Laden as saying,

‘It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had been part of our (Islamic) world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Andalusia. Spain is an infidel country, but its economy is stronger that our economy because the ruler there is accountable. In our countries, there is no accountability or punishment, but there is only obedience to the rulers and prayers of long life for them. (pp. 400-401)’

Friedman confirms that this is based on a 2002 report, the first Arab Human Development Report. This report, written by Arabs, found that Spain had a larger gross domestic product than all 22 Arab states combined!

I think Stark is closer to the mark than bin Laden. The problem is a cultural way of thinking that starts with the Qur’an and the Prophet and emphasizes unquestioning obedience. The very name of the religion, Islam, means “submission.” The thinking of bin Laden that emphasizes punishing poor rulers is a complete misunderstanding how progress is made. European cultures place a high value on questioning everything, even the divinity of Jesus Christ. Certainly there have been exceptions to this, but in the sweep of history it is an unmistakable trait.

So we have perhaps the starkest conflict of worldviews imaginable: on one hand, a robust and virtually unlimited spirit of inquiry, and on the other a fervent dedication to universal obedience and submission. How this plays out is the story of our times.

[inick4u]

Tame the Dragon

It was on 9 November 1989, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany crumbled. It culminated in one of the most famous scenes in recent history - the fall of the Berlin Wall. An end to the Cold War was declared at the Malta Summit three weeks later, and the reunification of Germany took place in October the following year. It took US (and west) around 45 years after world war-2 to claim the triumph over mighty Soviet Union when it got dissolved in Dec 1991. The similarities between communist USSR and present day China in their hegemonic, expansionist, tyrannical, authoritarian, Orwellian regimes are not unfathomable.

Rise of China, its Military and Economical Potency

Rise of china started in 1980, due to initiation of economic reforms and trade liberalization with real annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 9.5% through 2018, a pace described by the World Bank as “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history.” Such growth has enabled China, on average, to double its GDP every eight years and helped raise an estimated 800 million people out of poverty and becoming second highest GDP around 13.41 trillion USD in 2018.

In terms of Military strength, Second only to the U.S. and Russia, the Chinese military continues to grow alongside a local burgeoning Military-Industrial Complex with around 21 lakhs active personnel and around 175 billion USD budget.

Threat of China to India and stability of world at large

Chinese leadership interpreted 2008 financial crisis as decline of US supremacy & inadequacy to maintain stability in economy. First manifestation of China asserting its belligerent policies started in March 2010 with its expansive claim over South China Sea. Chinese claim over South China Sea was projected as their core interest and non-negotiable like Tibet and Taiwan. In November 2012 at 18th Party Congress of CCP ,Hu Jintao who was loathe to be seen as weak in foreign policy, especially in the context of a rapidly growing concern about social stability and regime legitimacy was succeed by Xi Jinping. After that number of steps undertook by PRC to increase their stakes in world stability. In series of that, Launching of Belt and road initiative in 2013 widely seen as agenda  to threaten sovereignty, export sub-standard norms and practices, ensnaring developing countries with debt dependence and then translating that dependence into geopolitical influence. China’s actions in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Malaysia are central to the “debt trap diplomacy” debates. This was followed by numerous controversies over dubious cyber activities, maritime and land disputes with its neighbor (such as India, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, and Philippines), ethnic atrocities on Uighur Muslims in Xinxiang, curbing anti-china protest in Hong Kong and Trade war with US.

By any parameters, one can safely conclude that china has been overtly challenging US and west domination on world affairs in all facets over a decade now and pose severe threat to regional & world stability.

On domestic front, New Delhi has been very skeptical and apprehensive about Beijing and its hawkish polices after trauma of 1962 war. The event of Doklam, raising Kashmir issue in UN, blocking India’s entry into NSG (Nuclear Supplier Group), Supporting jihadi terrorist on international forums, pact with Pakistan for CPEC with an aim to undermine India’s sovereignty and now killing of 20 Indian soldiers in Ladakh by PLA has unsurprisingly conveyed the devious plot of evil Xi-Jinping regime to destabilize India.  China is also following the strategy of containing India in maritime region by establishing bases for the forward deployment of their naval assets and to gain relative advantage and leverage Indo-pacific region.

Now, outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic allegedly originated in wet markets of Chinese city of Wuhan and its information suppressed by China has really triggered the conflict between world and China wide open. The world is now badly suffering with devastating effect of Covid-19 at all fronts and wants to hold the Chinese government responsible for hiding the information unscrupulously.

Infiltration of China in Indian Economy

We need to understand few basic facts about infiltration of China in Indian economy before going into the debate of boycott China campaign. India is running biggest single trade deficit with China comparing to any other country. The imbalance has continuously been widening year after year to reach USD 58.04 billion in 2018. Over time, our raw material-based export commodities of largely agricultural and pharmaceutical products have been overshadowed by Chinese exports of machinery, power-related equipment, telecom, organic chemicals, and fertilizers. Many Chinese electronic, IT and hardware manufacturing companies are also having operations in India. These include Huawei Technologies, ZTE, TCL, Haier etc. Chinese mobile handset companies Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo, Realme occupy nearly 75% of Indian mobile handset market.

Apart from the bilateral trade, Chinese investments in a country come through direct, routed and through corporate penetration in technology and infrastructure sectors. Officially, China's FDI in India stands at over $2.34 billion. Some observers and think tanks report a higher investment including rerouted ones. They put the Chinese investments in India at over $4 billion. Some of our shining brands having massive Chinese investment are Ola, Flipkart, Swiggy, Paytm, Snapdeal, Zomato etc.

 Can Boycotting Chinese Product help?

Any people movement of boycotting Chinese Product is not only going to be very futile engagement with very less dividend but shows our approach of banalisation of very complex international matter with united  jingoism. Almost every experts are opining to the contrary and also we don’t have any history of such successful attempt or study of consumer boycotting in attaining self-reliance or penalizing the “enemy” nation.

The range of goods that we import from China is immense: consumer durables such as electronic goods, smartphones, industrial goods, vehicles, solar cells, and essential pharmaceutical products including tuberculosis and leprosy drugs and antibiotics, among many others. It needs to be acknowledged that China has increased its export to Africa, Europe, US and its dependence on export to India is not great (2% of its total exports). So even if Indians boycott all the goods imported from China, it will not make as big an impact on China. On the other hand sudden throwing out Chinese firms may impact Indian industries and tech startups due to lack of investment, raw material and low cost capital investment. Another impact could be further worsen of unemployment rate which currently stands at alarming 24% rate.

USP of Chinese goods has been its affordability and availability. With a careful study of global society’s multi-cultural needs – some of the cheapest saris, toys, Diwali firecrackers and god idols in India come from China.  In our country where 75% of population only managed to earn Rs. 33 per day, consumer eventually prefer to go for the cheapest available option in the market. So call for boycotting anyways going to diminish sooner or later without achieving its goal.

 Ways to counter the bully

To quote great ancient Chinese General and Military Strategist Sun Tzu “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

Conventional warfare cannot be a viable option to counter a nation which is 5 times bigger in GDP and 3 times bigger in terms of military spending. Hence opening remarks of this article about history explains why India needs a long term, stable, prudent multilateral strategy to counter china and can be classified as follows.

a) Economic Reforms, bilateral and multilateral Trade agreement – It’s not intricate to understand that reason China is able to challenge US is because of their sustained economic growth. And this is an undisputed opinion in the world that India has failed to reach its potential after forced Liberalization of 1991 (explanation needs another article).  

An efficient government is one that draws down its intervention where it is distortionary and goes big where it needs to—is a better goal. The Indian state has made the wrong call too often. We have already lost a decade for structural economic reforms and cannot be further delayed. The Clarion call of Atmanirbar Bharat should not be misconstrued to the policy of protectionism and disruption. Though it’s impossible to suggest any magic wand to overturn India’s economic woes (going on now from long time) in few paragraphs but let’s discuss some basic concepts.

India is inadequately formalized, financialised, urbanized, industrialized and skilled. There are fundamentally two different part of economy i.e. Rural and Urban economy. Rural economy is mostly based on agriculture and constitute 65% of population. Agricultural reforms should ensure easier access to inputs like seeds, technology, power, finance and insurance. They should effect greater connectivity, both virtual and through logistic networks, of the farmer to warehouses, rural industry and final consumers.

Some bold steps for Land and labor reforms need to be undertaken. Though some states like MP and UP made some labor reforms but union government’s formulation with wider consultation of industry and trade unions required.

India, with its massive domestic consumption, can hunker down and resolve to boost domestic demand in the coming months. Government must put more money in people’s hands by creating more jobs through huge public investment projects that bring about new national assets. The government also needs to go further in reforming the banking sector & financial institute, including stricter regulations over lending and enhanced supervision from regulators. Government must work on issue like Simplification of GST, elimination of red tapism, avoiding crony capitalism, low tariffs to attract foreign investment, encouragement to startups etc.

India’s Spending on R&D is very low. In the process of self-reliance, it becomes paramount that along with improvement in our education systems we must spend on R&D of technological development. Eg. India has quadrupled its imports of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. 175 million such batteries were imported in 2016, 313 million in 2017, 712 million in 2018 and 450 million in 2019. About ¾ of this import comes from China causing surge in our import bill. With Robust R&D Infrastructure, increasing import tariffs and assisting our indigenous industry, this can be easily overturned in a span of 3-4 years. Same can be applied to electronics industry, mobile handset industry and some low cost equipment’s which now heavily depending on China.

Trade agreements with like-minded countries in non-sensitive sector will also help in much needed infusion of funds and making our products competitive globally and exportable.

This is long haul process and needs stable, strong vision and may not get us the headlines but surely will help to transform our economy.

(In April, the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that for the first time in 40 years, China had applied for more patent applications than the U.S. including artificial intelligence, brain science, dark matter, genetic engineering and quantum computing and communications. These are areas at the cutting edge of science. No wonder why China’s firm Huawei is pioneer of 5G technology.)

 Most of things mentioned here are very conceptual, subjective and aspirational. The downturn of Business friendly Chief Minister to the Prime Minister governing with heavy centralization, rhetoric, popular slogans, Communal division is tragic and still anew in our mind. But hope some sanity prevails because history won’t be as forgiving as present day electorate.

 b) Military & strategic Co-operation with World Powers & Alliance with geo-political Anti-China Forces – Well the good news is that in the post COVID era, threats of rise of hegemonic China are acknowledged by all. Many countries including US like Australia, UK, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan have started aggressive opposition of Chinese polices. Hence analogy of Cold war -2 is not mere catchphrase. And threats posed by Beijing demand a ‘more global approach’.

India should realize that higgledy-piggledy strategy against China and non-alignment wouldn’t give the desired result. Strategic military co-operation without compromising the autonomy would play the most vital part in foreign relations. The expansion of G7 is being deliberated and UK is keen to have India join the D10 alliance. India already participates in the Quad (with Australia, Japan, and the U.S.) and in the Indo-Pacific Strategy, both U.S.-led anti-China platforms. Alliances would help to promote a coordinated response between friendly states to challenges posed by the present conduct and future ambitions of the People’s Republic of China. By developing a common set of principles and frameworks (diplomatically and militarily) that transcend conservatism will be able achieve the goals.

Regional players like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are challenging Beijing draconian approach in the region. India should join their voices and the first step would be recognizing Taiwan and setting up diplomatic relation with them. India should also raise the concerns of Chinese policy towards Uighurs , Hong Kong and Tibet on international forums more often than not.

 c) Peace on Domestic front – In pursuit of competing with a giant china and its proxies like Pakistan, the importance of peace and law & order on domestic front cannot be over emphasized. The prospects of being a democratic country is our biggest strength vis-a-vis China. However our insidious political class across the country has been indulged in sabotaging the democracy and interested in only grabbing the power.  Without really going into the narrative of our Indian ethos and ancient culture of accommodating people of all beliefs, I want to underlay that the basic principle of wealth and prosperity is peace. Dangerous religious and Caste trends could destroy the social fabric of the nation in the long run. Alienation of Minorities should be reversed. Instances of communal riots across states, violent agitation of Jats in Haryana, perpetual violence in Bengal demonstrate very grim portrait of our society. The soft power of demography, importance of communal-social harmony and the need of unity against foreign enemy cannot be overlooked. Though it seems very trivial but in my opinion this is very crucial and hardest step of all.

 Lastly it’s not a question of belling the cat, its how well world take snipe shots to kill this beast.

(Views expressed here are mine while source of most figures is google search)

[nugicus]

Proactive Instead of Reactive: The Flawed Concept of the First Crusade as a Defensive War

It goes without saying but its undeniable how the Crusades have firmly implanted themselves into modern culture, despite the numerous other conflicts that have occurred in the nearly one thousand year-long Middle Ages. Our persistent fascination with them can be seen whenever they are constantly represented in popular media in the past few decades, whether it be Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, History Channel’s Knightfall, DC Comic’s Batman, and video games, such as Ubisolft’s Assassins Creed and Paradox Interactive’s Crusader Kings II. The concept has become so ingrained in our collective understanding that the very terminology of the word “crusade” has evolved to the point that it had begun to lose it’s religious origins and is now included to mean striving for a cause that is commonly considered as just even when such a cause isn’t religious in nature.

There is a completely apprehensible reason for such a profound resonance among today’s collective imagination: the very idea of the Crusades have become extremely fascinating due to the incredible amount of devotion exhibited by the Frankish knights who answered the call. This extreme level of enthusiasm that imbued itself in these holy wars led to thousands of Latin Christians in taking up arms and undertaking a horrendously perilous journey across thousands of miles when traveling just fifty was considered a highly rare occurrence at the time. The existence of a astoundingly high level of religious fervor that characterized the First Crusade allowed its participants to accomplish unimaginable feats of bravery, fortitude, and resilience, including traversing though hundreds of miles of exceedingly arid terrain and brutally carving through the territory of at least three hostile Muslim states in order to reach their much-anticipated goals. Those goals being, of course, the retaking of Jerusalem, which had been conquered by Muslim forces centuries earlier, and the complete salvation of their very souls.

- Frankish knights and men-at-arms. - Osprey Publishing

However, significant historical events that have occurred centuries in the past and have such a momentous effect in the current zeitgeist have the tendency to become subjected to frequent instances of oversimplification, misrepresentation, misappropriation, and even manipulation by individuals through either intentional or ignorant means. The Crusades are no different. In this case, the reason for such a shrewd reshaping of the memory of the holy wars is usually for the purpose of fueling certain ideologically driven agendas that are commonly spread by the repetition of numerous misconceptions about the campaigns for the holy land during the 11th and 12th centuries. One of the most prevailing misconceptions that has a habit of popping up in discourse, especially on the internet, is the claim that the First Crusade (1096-1099) was primarily a defensive war, in which Latin Christianity initiated the conflict by leading armies of rigidly honor-bound, chivalric knights as a response against wanton Muslim aggression that took the form of a “jihad” or a recent catastrophic lose of Christian territory. The claim is used time and again on far right blogs and YouTube videos that display disingenuous maps and poorly researched lectures, like those of Bill Warner, that fail to consider important political and religious divisions between Muslim powers during the medieval period. It is an extremely gross oversimplification of a conflict whose origins, which were highly determined by political, theological, cultural, and historical developments that were occurring internally in both Christian Europe, as well as in the Muslim world, largely dispels the culturally idealistic narrative that the First Crusade was a justifiable reaction to the provocation of Muslim jihad.

In the late 11th century, the political sphere in western medieval Europe existed as a highly fragmented state of affairs. Land was severely divided among a landed, warrior elite descended from the same Germanic “barbarians” who had conquered sections of the former Western Roman Empire centuries prior and who constantly came into conflict with one another over territory due to a myriad of petty feuds, dynastic rivalries, and succession disputes. In order to accomplish their aims, these feudal lords relied on a class of mounted, professional soldiers known as “knights,” who, unlike their modern depictions as a noble class of warriors with a rigid code of honor based on protecting the weak from persecution, constantly pillaged and burned nearby peasant communities in the countryside, especially those that were under the lordship of rival warlords. Further facilitating these incessantly high levels of warfare at the time was the lack of central authority monarchies had over their vassals who were only bound to their kings due to fragile oaths of fealty and could pursue their own territorial ambitions with impunity. This lack of any central control over the power of the warrior nobility coupled with the nearly unending warfare between the feudal lords caused violence and lawlessness to become endemic to the continent. The last time western Europe saw a significant degree of territorial unity was in 800 CE when the king of the Franks, Charlemagne, was crowned Emperor after successfully capturing large swaths of terrain of what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Northern Italy. However, by the late 11th century, Charlemagne’s reign was seen by the European populace as nothing more than a fading memory of a bygone age of momentous political security.

- Medieval Europe at the time the First Crusade was announced. - Crusader Kings II from Paradox Interactive

Similar to the near-powerless feudal monarchs of Europe, the head of the Latin Christian church, the Pope, was having difficulty exerting papal authority over the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Europe. The Pope at this time was nothing more than a religious figurehead who could exert little-to-no authority over the rest of the church hierarchy, including the bishops who, at this time, had stronger ties with local secular rulers, such as the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of France, than they did with the papacy. A number of these monarchs had the ability to appoint high church officials to oversee cities and monasteries and sold church offices to members of the royal nobility, in a practice known as “simony,” who sought highly privileged careers in the church. This is despite the fact that, theoretically speaking, the appointment of ecclesiastical offices was the church’s undertaking. Many members of the church also held a seething contempt for the majority of knights who regarded them as overly vain, violence-prone rogues due to their savage treatment of the peasant population which became so entrenched in European life that religious clerics, such as Bernard de Clairvaux, went so far as to accuse them of “fighting for the devil.”

By the reign of Pope Gregory VII (1073-85), however, the papacy, who saw themselves as having the God-given role to protect Christendom from the corrupting influences of the secular world, had started to attempt reforming the church and knighthood by reasserting their supreme authority over religious affairs through the use of excommunication and by advocating the need of sacral military sponsorships, known as “holy wars.” By calling on Christian rulers to help defend the church, popes that had focused on reform had hoped to redirect the violence caused by the martial enthusiasm of the feudal warlords to be used towards combating the papacy’s and Christendom’s supposed enemies, mainly the Holy Roman Emperor and Muslim forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. These initial proactive measures of forming an military wing of the church under Pope Gregory fell flat on account of his confrontational methods, but one of his reformist-minded successors, Pope Urban II (1088-99), succeeded is calling for a crusade for the Holy Land at the Council of Clermont (1095) after Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenos requested military aid against the Seljuk Turks. This was achieved mainly due to the religious atmosphere of Latin Europe, the gradual acceptance of religiously ordained violence, and the strategy the papacy used to market the crusade.

- Pope Gregory VII was the first leader of the papacy to experiment in the implementation of an armed wing of the church. - Wikipedia

Unlike the fragmentation that characterized the political sphere of western Europe in the late 11th century, the same region was undergoing a period of an unprecedented level of spiritual unity. By 1095, the pagan peoples who once raided, pillaged, and settled all across the interior and coastline of the continent, such as the Tengri Magyars and Norse Vikings, had become largely Christianized, which led to Christianity becoming the most widely established religion in the West and to European society in becoming highly centered around the notion regarding the importance of religious devotion:

“This was a setting in which Christian doctrine impinged upon virtually every facet of human life–from birth and death, to sleeping and eating, marriage and health–and the signs of God’s omnipotence were clear for all to see, made manifest through acts of ‘miraculous’ healing, divine revelation and earthly and celestial portents.” - Thomas Asbridge - The Crusades: The Authoritative History for the War of the Holy Land (2011) 

While this religious doctrine stressed the importance of love, charity, and tradition, it also led to the formation of a perilous anxiety, especially in the mindsets of the warrior nobility, which was brought on by the constantly reminded belief that one was destined to either eternal salvation or eternal damnation in accordance of an individuals acts in life:

“The Latin Church of the eleventh century taught that every human would face a moment of judgement–the so-called ‘weighing of souls’. Purity would bring the everlasting reward of heavenly salvation, but sin would result in damnation and an eternity of hellish torment. For the faithful of the day, the visceral reality of the dangers involved was driven home by graphic images in religious art and sculpture of the punishments to be suffered by those deemed impure: wretched sinners strangled by demons; the damned herded into the fires of the underworld by hideous devils.” - Thomas Asbridge - The Crusades: The Authoritative History for the War of the Holy Land (2011)

It is not surprising, then, that the feudal nobility became intensely obsessed with the idea of repentance of ones sins and purity of ones soul, as the inherent contradiction of having both blood on ones hands and being a committed Christian was not lost on them. For feudal lords and their knights who believed they were destined for hellfire due to their rapacious brutality, there were multiple gestures they could make in their path to atone for their sins. These acts included devoting ones life to a impoverished existence in the form of monasticism, giving alms to the poor and donating to religious houses, and taking part in a pilgrimage to one of the many holy sites of Christendom, namely Jerusalem or Rome. The last being especially compelling due to the journey to sacred locations normally being fraught with danger.

- Medieval depictions of hell, like those found in Giotto's The Last Judgment from 1307, filled the hearts and minds of the faithful with the fear of losing their souls to eternal torment. - Web Gallery of Art

In the 11th century, there was also a growing theological development that was accepted by a greater following as time went on: religiously sanctioned warfare. Christianity may seem like a pacifistic faith, at first, due to one of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament clearly stating “Thou shall not kill,” but many Germanic European Christians had understood the notion that some acts of violence were justifiable, specifically on defensive grounds, and an inescapable part of life if still sinful. There were also many who believed that the papacy may even sanction violence, since in the past bishops of the church would commonly bless weapons and armor and, at least during the time of Charlemagne, direct military campaigns with the express purpose of converting pagans. The concept of papal sponsorship of warfare was found potentially attractive to secular lords and knights who were suffering from “damnation anxiety” for being too well-accustomed to violence on account of Pope Gregory VII, who heavily promoted the idea, claiming that those participating in a holy struggle to defend Christendom would receive the same spiritual rewards as those who participating in a religious pilgrimage.

Despite such a powerful religious atmosphere in Europe at the time, Pope Gregory was mainly unsuccessful in sponsoring an armed pilgrimage to the East, since the idea of the Pope leading an army in person was considered too radical for its time. It did, however, establish an important precedent that would relied upon in a more indirect and refined manner by later popes, namely Pope Urban II, who waited for an opportunity to present itself to make the notion of an armed pilgrimage to the east, now called a “crusade,” into a reality and to spread the papacy’s sphere of influence. As already mentioned, Pope Urban II was offered a chance to expand Rome’s authority outside the confines of central Italy and to redirect the widespread violence spawned from the many petty feuds between noble houses against a common foreign foe by calling for a holy war when, while presiding over an ecclesiastical council in the Italian city of Piacenza during the spring of 1095, ambassadors representing the Greek Christian Byzantine Emperor arrived requesting military aid against Muslim forces. By 1095, the Byzantine Empire lost roughly half of its size, including almost all of Anatolia, when it suffered a catastrophic loss at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 against the Muslim Seljuk Turks and was seeking to regain its lost territory. Using the defense of eastern Christendom as a pretext, Pope Urban called for a crusade by autumn during a special sermon at the Council of Clermont in southern France in a room full of hundreds of spectators, including archbishops, bishops, and abbots. According to accounts, Pope Urban not only sent a call to aid the Greek Christians from the impending threat of Islam. He had also included a secondary aim: sending a military expedition to the holy city of Jerusalem. A site considered the most sanctified in all Christendom, its inclusion as one of the grand objectives for the First Crusade, as well as the admittance of the guarantee of heavenly salvation for those who participated, resonated deeply among the hearts and minds of God-fearing knights all across western Europe.

However, the inclusion of these two spiritually profound goals still presented a serious problem to Pope Urban II. There was no recent horrible atrocity or urgent threat of Muslim invasion towards Latin Christendom in which to draw upon in order to produce a greater sense of legitimate justification and raging hunger for vengeance to encourage knights to cross thousands of miles to retake the holy city of Jerusalem:

“Recent history offered no obvious event that might serve to focus and inspire a vengeful tide of enthusiasm. Yes, Jerusalem was ruled by Muslims, but this had been the case since the seventh century. And, while Byzantium may have been facing a deepening threat of Turkish aggression, western Christendom was not on the brink of invasion or annihilation at the hands of Near Eastern Islam.” - Thomas Asbridge - The Crusades: The Authoritative History for the War of the Holy Land (2011) 

It’s also important to note that the hostility between Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Seljuk Turks wasn’t religious in nature and the former was also involved in frequent clashes with its Christian Slavic neighbors:

“The reality is that, when Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont, Islam and Christianity had largely coexisted for centuries in relative equanimity. There may have been little love lost between Christian and Muslim neighbors, but there was, in truth, little to distinguish this enmity from the endemic political and military struggles of the age.” - Thomas Asbridge - The Firt Crusade: A New History (2005)

So how did Pope Urban II rectify the problem with the lack of a recent nearby tragedy to exploit in order to boost enthusiasm for his militarized religious pilgrimage? He did this by demonizing Muslims in the Near East to absolutely morbid degrees and exaggerating any sort of negative treatment of Christians may have endured under the rule of Islam:

“Muslims therefore were portrayed as subhuman savages, bent upon the barbaric abuse of Christendom. Urban described how Turks ‘were slaughtering and capturing many [Greeks], destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God’. He also asserted that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being abused and exploited by Muslims, with the rich being stripped of their wealth by illegal taxes, and the poor subjected to torture.” - Thomas Asbridge - The Crusades: The Authoritative History for the War of the Holy Land (2011)

He further dehumanized Muslims by describing them as bloodthirsty abominations who took sadistic glee in enslaving and violating Christian women and disemboweling Christian pilgrims who headed for the holy land. It is unsure whether or not Pope Urban II truly believed in his own propaganda, but his incendiary rhetoric and his promise of the remission of sins for those who took part in the holy venture certainly captivated his audience and succeeded in persuading many atonement-seeking knights that fighting Islam was preferable to fighting fellow Christians. He was so successful in his proclamation of a crusade that when news spread of it throughout Europe by word of preachers he managed to recruit both a sanctioned and unsanctioned army in the tens of thousands strong. By 1099, the former led by Bishop Adhemar de la Puy and Count Raymond of Toulouse and numbering around 50,000 footmen and knights miraculously managed to retake Jerusalem after months of fighting, the dwindling of resources, and threats of desertion.

- The Council of Clermont started a deadly dehumanization campaign against Muslims in the Near East. - Wikipedia

Interestingly, this vast, primarily Frankish army wasn’t even what Emperor Alexius had hoped for when he had asked the papacy for military aid against the Turks. He was expecting, at most, a few thousand freelance knights he could comfortably incorporate into his own forces to safeguard his remaining territory and retake parts of Anatolia. When the massive crusader force finally make it to Constantinople, Emperor Alexius tried to demand its leaders, with varying degrees of success, to swear an oath of vassalage to him and return to the Byzantine Empire any territory they took from the Turks.

Evidently, nothing about this dehumanizing speech about Muslims viciously terrorizing Christians inhabiting the Near East could be farther from the truth. First of all, while Islamic society may have far from an ideal progressive paradise by modern standards, one of the reasons it was so successful in it’s growth after the caliphs (the successors of the religion’s founder, the Prophet Muhammed, and leaders of all of Islam’s religious and political affairs) began conquering large swathes of territory outside the Arabian peninsula during the 630s was the relatively tolerant approach it took to treating non-Muslims that resided in territory it had subjugated. Rather than leading mass conversions of the people the caliphs had surmounted, non-Muslims, specifically those with common monotheistic religious roots to Islam, such as Jews and Christians, were labeled as “Peoples of the Book” and where allowed to practice their faiths in exchange for the payment of a poll tax. In all honestly, it was an era of unmatched religious tolerance for its time:

“Most significantly, throughout this period indigenous Christians actually living under Islamic law, whether it be in Iberia or the Holy Land, were generally treated with remarkable clemency. The Muslim faith acknowledged and respected Judaism and Christianity creeds in which it enjoyed a common devotional tradition and a mutual reliance upon authoritative scripture. Christian subjects may not have been able to share power with their Muslim masters, but thy ere given freedom to worship. All around the Mediterranean basin, Christian faith survived and even thrived under the watchful but tolerant eye of Islam. Eastern Christendom may have been subject to Islamic rule, but it was not on the brink of annihilation, nor prey to any form of systemic abuse.” - Thomas Asbridge - The Firt Crusade: A New History (2005)

It’s also far from accurate to suggest that Islam in the late 11th century existed as a singular religious-political, monolithic realm that constantly waged its own holy war on non-Muslim neighbors in the form of a “jihad.” Not unlike western Europe, by the late 11th century the Near East was a fragmented assortment of political and religious holdings and the tensions between them had increased in intensity ever since the fall of the expansive Umayyad caliphate during a bloody coup in 750. After the Abbasid dynasty took over and moved the capital from Damascus to Baghdad, the caliphs authority gradually began to devolve over time to the point they became nothing much more than nominal figureheads who held power only in theory. When the First Crusade was announced in 1095, the Near East was politically and religiously divided between two rivaled forces: the Sunni Seljuk Turks and the Shia Fatimid caliphate. Descended from nomadic tribesmen known for their armies of mounted archers, the Seljuks conquered much of what is now Persia, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia, declared themselves sultan and effectively became the overlords of Sunni Islam and the defenders of the Abbasid Caliphate. However, during the time the crusaders reached the Near East, the Seljuk’s territory was itself in disarray over the succession of the title sultan which led their empire to fracture. Their primary adversaries, the Shia Fatamids, were a rival dynasty who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammed’s daughter, Fatima, who had conquered large portions of territory that used to be part of the domain of the Abbasids including North Africa, the Levant, Syria, and Egypt.

-  The Seljuk Empire and the Fatamids were the mst powerful Muslim states in the Near East during the late 11th century. - istanbulclues.com

The schism that resulted in the Sunni-Shia split is traced back to a dispute regarding the legitimacy of Muhammed’s successors. Adherents of the Sunni sect subscribe to the belief that Muhammed’s legitimate successor was his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, and that all rightful caliphs are those elected by members of the Muslim elite. Shia Islam, on the other hand, contends that only descendants of Muhammed’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and his daughter, Fatima, can be proclaimed caliph. Both sects regarded the other as believers in a dangerous heresy and constantly squabbled for territory in the Levant, which fostered a high degree of religious and political disunity in the Near East that aided the crusaders in their taking of Jerusalem.

As time moved ever farther from the era of rapid Muslim conquest and expansion that characterized the 7th and 8th centuries, enthusiasm for Islam’s own version for a holy war, a jihad, gradually began to wane to the point that by the near end of the 11th century it entered a period of relative inactivity. In the classical sense, a jihad, which literally means “struggle” or “striving,” was interpreted by Sunni Muslim jurists during the early period of Islam’s history as an endless holy war to be waged on non-Muslims and endorsed by the caliphs until all accepted the rule of Islam. Similar to the Christian crusades, it was considered a holy obligation that all Muslims should take part and those who contributed to a jihad rewarded with entry into heavenly Paradise. However, as Muslim Arabs began to trade with Christian communities and largely abandoned their nomadic roots, calls of jihad against Christendom started to lose substantial momentum and instead were turned against rival Muslim sects that Sunnis considered heretical: 

“As the centuries passed, the driving impulse towards expansion encoded in this classical theory of jihad was gradually eroded. Arab tribesmen began to settle into more sedentary lifestyles and to trade with non-Muslims, such as the Byzantines. Holy wars against the likes of Christians continued, but they became far more sporadic and often were promoted and prosecuted by Muslim emirs, without caliphal endorsement. By the eleventh century, the rulers of Sunni Baghdad were far more interested in using jihad to promote Islamic orthodoxy by battling ‘heretic’ Shi‘ites than they were in launching holy wars against Christendom. The suggestion that Islam should engage in an unending struggle to enlarge its borders and subjugate non-Muslims held little currency; so too did the idea of unifying in defence of the Islamic faith and its territories. When the Christian crusades began, the ideological impulse of devotional warfare thus lay dormant within the body of Islam, but the essential framework remained in place.” - Thomas Asbridge - The Crusades: The Authoritative History for the War of the Holy Land (2011)

In review, the belief that the First Crusade was a purely righteous backlash against a supposed existential threat posed by Islam is shown to be largely insufficient in evidence after explaining the politically divided state of both western Europe and the Muslim of the 11th century, the unbalanced power dynamic between the Latin Church and secular monarchies, the proactive efforts the papacy attempted in directing holy war, and the generally tolerant treatment towards Christians living under Muslim rule. The purpose of revealing the multiple religious and political complexities that expedite momentous instances of historical conflict is to expose the faultiness of oversimplifying the origins of the crusades which only leads to the manufacturing and reinforcing of historical misconceptions that have the tendency to glorify or mythologize historical events. This construction of an imaginative view of the crusades can be quite dangerous since those that perpetuate it have the penchant of selecting certain elements that fits more comfortably with a groups ideological agenda while glossing over some of the worst cases of religious violence, some of which would be considered examples of genocide by today's international human rights laws. These include the bloody Rhineland massacres, when member’s of the unsanctioned People’s Crusade slaughtered Jewish communities along the Rhine, and the massacre of Jews and Muslims that occurred when the crusaders had taken the city of Jerusalem.

This semi-mythological and overglorified view of the Crusades, however, was not always thus. After the Reformation and during the European Enlightenment, the Crusades became largely re-appraised by scholars and theologians, which led the holy wars to lose their fanciful descriptions and become considered as a significantly dark and exceedingly violent period in European history. It was seen by Enlightenment scholars as a prime example of the vile barbarity and terrible oppressiveness unrestrained religious devotion can ultimately produce if left unchecked. By the 1800s, this hostile attitude towards the Crusades had begun to change during the rise of European imperialism and nationalism. Scholars during the 19th century, such as French historian Joseph Francois Michaud, started a trend that became exceedingly difficult to dislodge from European perspectives. They romanticized the crusaders as daring adventurers who were given the noble task of “civilizing” Asia and interpreted the crusades  as admirable cases of “proto-colonization.” This misrepresentation that overlionizes the Crusades was the beginning of the subject falling sway to the phenomena known as “historical parallelism.”

Historical parallelism is “the desire to see the modern world reflected in the past.” (Asbrigde 2011) Today the concept is being used in a manner to draw a false comparison between the medieval and modern worlds through the utilization of historical inaccuracies surrounding the separate time periods and the misappropriation of crusader imagery as a tool for propaganda purposes. These efforts have increased strikingly in the past few years due to the growing influence of ultra-nationalism in the West that has been increasing since the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Neofascist protestors in Charlottesville, for example, wore shields that were unsubtly emblazoned with the Templar Cross while others have been chanting the infamous medieval crusader phrase “Deus Vult!,” which means “God wills it!” in Latin. Interestingly, the process of appropriating the crusader period isn’t just monopolized by the hard right in the West. Radical Islamic organizations and leaders for decades, such as Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin Laden, have frequently referenced the Crusades as a means of condemning the West and portraying Western military forces, especially those that have intervened in the Levant, as modern-day crusaders that are hell bent on invading Islamic territory and that the only response to such a Christian invasion is violent “jihad.”

While the crude and shameless “borrowing” of crusader symbolism is far from a recent development among alt-right groups and Islamic propagandists, its urgent now more than ever to confront such mistruths that these organizations have the habit of spreading, especially on video sharing sites such as YouTube. In the case of the Crusades, the proliferation of historical falsehoods results in the formation of a false, fatalistic “us vs them” narrative between European and Muslim civilization that characterizes both cultures as if they are locked in never-ending antagonism with each other since medieval times. This agenda-driven endeavor to revise the Crusades as a war fought along ethnic lines is a barely disguised attempt to justify prejudice against Muslim immigrants, including recent Muslim refugees who are desperate to escape from the civil wars that have been plaguing parts of the Middle East. Thankfully scholars, such as historian Christopher Tyerman with his new book The World of the Crusades, have been diligently fighting back against this tide of virulent misinformation with imperative efforts to clarify and correct our understanding of the Crusades through the use of Twitter threads, Op-Eds, blog posts, and books. Their push to reverse this negative transformative effect the internet has had on historiography is undoubtedly an uphill battle but their struggle will hopefully prove how important history as field of study is in this post-9/11 world.

Sources:

Asbridge, Thomas. The Crusades: The Authoritative History for the War of the Holy Land. 2011.

Asbridge, Thomas. The First Crusade: A New History. 2005.

Phillips, Jonathan. Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades. 2010. 

[theculturedmarxist]

The Echo of Calgacus

Regarding the question, “does the size of the US military make armed resistance impossible?”

The size of the US military is more of a liability than a benefit in regards to putting down armed struggle within the US.

I think part of the reason the bourgeoisie are so incredibly nervous about the prospect of open, armed, organized rebellion in the US is that once it happens, that’s it. For them, it’s either full-on, open military oppression or capitulation. With urban sprawl projected to only continue, there’s the very real reality of unmitigated urban warfare facilitated by the US’s vast transportation system whose sheer size makes it a nightmare to regulate or monitor efficiently, and further confused by the absence of any clear, demarcated lines of affiliation between servile and restive populations.

The potential Atlanta-Charlotte “mega region.” circa 2060

South Eastern Sprawl circa 2009

Likelihood of urbanization c. 2060

Factor in too the likelihood of climate change forcing massive population shifts and concentrations from coastal and marginal rural areas to urban zones as the environment and economy deteriorate, and you’re looking at every urban center becoming a powder keg of various forces, ideologies, and interests of conflicting natures being crammed in together.

These potentialities bring the US military face to face with what has been witnessed in its occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, where in spite of all its vastness and virtually unlimited firepower, it can’t bring the local populations to heel. This is in part because of its doctrine of bringing its tremendous firepower to bear wherever it believes an enemy is to be found—for every “enemy combatant” they kill, five more are created. This happens even in the relatively remote and disconnected regions of Afghanistan. What would the result be of leveling a city block in a major urban center in the United States? Hundreds dead, thousands more injured, maimed, and all of it witnessed by thousands more either at the scene with their own eyes or via the phones and cameras and other digital devices they have with them. Add in the casual brutality and wanton disregard for life that the US military has cultivated within its culture through its everyday operation abroad and you have a recipe for complete and total disaster as already discontent populations have added onto their current miseries the very real potentialities of themselves, their relations, friends, loved ones, etc, just being wiped out either on purpose or by accident in the course of typical US counter insurgency activities. All it takes is one “stray” missile, one “errant” bomb on a church, preschool, community center, whatever, and you’re looking at a total PR nightmare.

And all that is aside from the logistical nightmare of trying to carry out other activities and goals necessary for destroying an enemy military force. It isn’t only a matter of boots on the ground and rounds on target. You have to starve them out, cut off their means of providing healthcare, destroy their refuges and safe havens. When this enemy military is mixed in with and completely indistinguishable from the regular population, it is invariably going to lead to harming that population of otherwise loyal (or at least obedient) group. In the effort to deprive insurgent populations of food, fuel, medicine, etc, it’s going to mean depriving the general population of those things as well.

In short, everything the US military would or could do to effectively combat an armed insurrection will work against it, and all the moreso the longer the conflict goes on.

This isn’t even to factor in the fact that the US’s playbook for sponsoring insurgencies abroad can just as easily work against it at home. I find it hard to believe that countries that have for so long suffered under the US stirring up trouble among their populations, funding separatists, arming guerillas, spreading propaganda, etc, would sit idly by when the opportunity presents itself to pay the US back. Countries with the means will send arms and munitions, aid material and financial, military and civilian “advisers” and “observers,” will harbor, train, and equip the people looking to disrupt or overthrow the US government, for one reason or another.

Consider too that every pair of boots fighting uprising in the US is a pair that can’t be deployed elsewhere in the world to maintain the global system of bourgeois oppression. If a truly international revolutionary organization can be built to create and facilitate proletarian struggle in all corners of the world, then that only sweetens the prospects of successful revolution. All of the US’s military might is predicated upon the assumption that its supply lines will remain unmolested and intact wherever it is operating. Weapons systems like the Abrams require many highly specialized parts which themselves are built in specialized production facilities and need both rare materials and expertise to construct and implement. What would it mean for tank fleets of the US and every other regime that relies on them if the one place the Abrams tank and its parts are built were to be destroyed or even disrupted for any amount of time? The production facilities of other essential USM equipment, including helmets, parachutes, body armor, jets, jet fuel, etc, etc, are also spread out across the vast geography of the United States, providing ample potential opportunities to strike at them directly, or the individuals or resources necessary to produce them.

These considerations and others stretch on and on. This shouldn’t be construed as though such a feat would necessarily be easy, but that the immense size, the sheer bulk of the United States Military doesn’t equate to invincibility, and I would assert that anyone that says that such a task would be impossible has never taken a serious look at the idea, or has any idea what would be involved or necessary in such a conflict.

[redcurrents]

Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla – Part III: What Can Be Done? Problems of Revolutionary Strategy. Sub-Section 3. “One Great Battle or a Long Campaign?”

*Strategy of the Urban Guerrilla, Chapter IV pg-68-72

In urban warfare, unless all of a town has taken up arms, small military endeavours should not be undertaken to seize posts, arsenals or other large objectives. It is better to draw out the revolutionary spirit of the people with small and repeated military actions until they willingly enter into battle, or rather until there are no neutral parties in the revolutionary war.

Battles as in Stalingrad or “El Alamein” are typical of powerful national armies or coalitions of national armies. A revolutionary who acts as commander-in-chief of an insurgent town will never enter into a large battle such as the uprising of Warsaw against Hitlers troops, just to become the military objective of the heavy artillery of the enemy. Such strategy, typical of bureaucratic generals, will always lead to the defeat of the insurgents. 

Homeric battles such as that of the Commune of Paris in 1871 should not place within the city. Actions should consist of numerous small conflicts both in and out of the city which slowly corrode the enemy, stripping him of his ability to unite his forces. Entering into a large urban battle, confronting the Yanqui power combined with its sepoyan followers, is more like a surrender than a genuine revolutionary strategy. In 1965 the Vietnamese NLF had blockaded more than fifty cities, disconnecting them from their rural source of supplies. However, this did not entirely liberate the cities since it contributed to the North American bombing of them and led to conventional warfare.

A revolutionary commander should not be subject to the myths of the classic strategy, in which all else is secondary to the conquest of space. In the case of the revolutionary, the fundamental strategic objective is not space. The positive force is the will of the people. Consequently, it is not necessary to hold a position upon which the enemy can exert its power in three dimensions (air, land and sea) or a fourth dimension (atomic weapons, including nuclear warheads). When the enemy realises that, because of the cost, the atomic bomb cannot be used to kill an ant, when its heavy artillery and its great concentration of troops fail to produce results, the revolutionary soldiers will liberate the cities. Meanwhile, guerrilla warfare is necessary, even taking many troops from the cities to the countryside in order to revolutionise them.

“A revolutionary commander should not be subject to the myths of the classic strategy, in which all else is secondary to the conquest of space. In the case of the revolutionary, the fundamental strategic objective is not space. The positive force is the will of the people.“

The strategic error of Colonel Caamaño in the rebellion of Santo Domingo in 1965 was based on the following factors. During the first and second day of his coup d’état he should have rushed to defeat the internal enemy. However, after three days the North American Marines landed and changed the allegiance of powers in a way unfavourable to Caamaño. He should have sent a part of his troops quickly to the interior of the country. In this many the Americans would not have been able to surround them in the small perimeter of the city. If the followers of Caamaño had controlled the interior of the country, the Yanquis would have had to negotiate with them or else embark on a prolonged revolutionary war such as in Vietnam. The US was not morally and politically prepared for such a war, lacking the support of the Latin American masses, who were solidly behind Caamaño, not to mention lack of support from its own citizens.

A revolutionary command that does not fall into strategic mistakes must conduct itself as in Madrid (1936) or Petrograd (1917), provided that the people in the streets and the military establishment is in a state of disorder. To give up the taking of a city when no military resistance is found would be absurd and against the basic rules of strategy. Once the city is taken over, it must be defended against enemy attack by moving parts of its population to the countryside. A different strategy is required by the people in the event of foreign intervention. If the invader should attempt the capture of a city, that action must be repelled not by defending one firm, strong position, but rather by going into light guerrilla formations and inflicting persistent casualties to the invaders through evening attacks or by daylight ambushes wherever the terrain allows. But it is most important to preserve the morale of the people. When confronting an enemy equipped with superior arms and forces, revolutionary warfare must not concentrate the defense of one position.

With the fall of the Paris Commune, the victorious enemy appropriated 400, 000 rifles and approximately 1,500 pieces of artillery. Had that material been well distributed in the interior as well as in Paris, the Commune could have destroyed the forces of Versailles. That is how the Paris Commune failed in its strategy and in its politics of coordination of the peasant forces and other provincial communes. The alliance of workers and peasants is fundamental to the revolution. The peasants must accept the aid of the urban labourer to assure him the land; to attempt to gain it on his own is to remain in the condition of a pariah. The urban labourer needs the peasant to upset communications, to sabotage and harass the enemy. The peasant must be part of a territorial organisation, regional or provincial paramilitary group and unit of self-defense, working during the day and fighting at night. The secret of revolutionary victory lies in the unity of country and city under the same strategic direction in the revolutionary war. This war must not be fought only in the countryside nor must it be fought only in the city. Each must complement the other. Victory will not result from urban strategies as in Warsaw, nor will it be a product of classic peasant fighting dispersed and disconnected between regions. On the contrary, both countryside and city must be unified under the same military command and one commander-in-chief.

[sharpened--edges]

For a certain time already I have noted that many people have started actively avoiding photographic or moving-image representations, surreptitiously taking their distance from the lenses of cameras. Whether it’s camera-free zones in gated communities or elitist techno clubs, someone declining interviews, Greek anarchists smashing cameras, or looters destroying LCD TVs, people have started to actively, and passively, refuse constantly being monitored, recorded, identified, photographed, scanned, and taped. Within a fully immersive media landscape, pictorial representation—which was seen as a prerogative and a political privilege for a long time—feels more like a threat.

There are many reasons for this. The numbing presence of trash talk and game shows has led to a situation in which TV has become a medium inextricably linked to the parading and ridiculing of lower classes. Protagonists are violently made over and subjected to countless invasive ordeals, confessions, inquiries, and assessments. Morning TV is the contemporary equivalent to a torture chamber—including the guilty pleasures of torturers, spectators, and, in many cases, also the tortured themselves.

Additionally, in mainstream media people are often caught in the act of vanishing, whether it be in life-threatening situations, extreme emergency and peril, warfare and disaster, or in the constant stream of live broadcasts from zones of conflict around the world. If people aren’t trapped within natural or man-made disasters, they seem to physically vanish, as anorexic beauty standards imply.

[…]

Additionally, social media and cellphone cameras have created a zone of mutual mass surveillance, which adds to the ubiquitous urban networks of control, such as CCTV, cellphone GPS tracking and face-recognition software. On top of institutional surveillance, people are now also routinely surveilling each other by taking countless pictures and publishing them in almost real time. The social control associated with these practices of horizontal representation has become quite influential. Employers google reputations of job candidates; social media and blogs become halls of shame and malevolent gossip. The top-down cultural hegemony exercised by advertisement and corporate media is supplemented by a down-down regime of (mutual) self-control and visual self-disciplining, which is even harder to dislocate than earlier regimes of representation. This goes along with substantial shifts in modes of self-production. Hegemony is increasingly internalized, along with the pressure to conform and perform, as is the pressure to represent and be represented.

[…]

This is why many people by now walk away from visual representation. Their instincts (and their intelligence) tell them that photographic or moving images are dangerous devices of capture: of time, affect, productive forces, and subjectivity. They can jail you or shame you forever; they can trap you in hardware monopolies and conversion conundrums, and, moreover, once these images are online they will never be deleted again. Ever been photographed naked? Congratulations—you’re immortal. This image will survive you and your offspring, prove more resilient than even the sturdiest of mummies, and is already traveling into deep space, waiting to greet the aliens.

The old magic fear of cameras is thus reincarnated in the world of digital natives. But in this environment, cameras do not take away your soul (digital natives replaced this with iPhones) but drain away your life. They actively make you disappear, shrink, and render you naked, in desperate need of orthodontic surgery. In fact, it is a misunderstanding that cameras are tools of representation; they are at present tools of disappearance. The more people are represented the less is left of them in reality.

Hito Steyerl, “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation” (2011), in The Wretched of the Screen (Sternberg, 2012), pp. 165–8.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

(IMPORTANT: PRAT SUMMARIZES IDLIB PROVINCE AND THE REBEL THREESOME LOL)

Four Rebel Factions (JTS; Suqour al-Sham, Jaish al-Ahrar, Jaish al-Azza) Preparing To Merge in Idlib as part of Turkish efforts to extend influence in the last major rebel territory in Syria

body of the text via google translate:

Four military factions operating in the Idlib province are preparing to integrate into a new military body, days after the formation of the National Liberation Front.

A military source said early Wednesday (June 6th) that the "Syrian Liberation Front" is preparing to merge with factions, "the Hawks," "Free Army" and "Army of pride."

The source added to the grapes of my country that the expected integration parallel to the integration of factions, "the Free Army," noting that all factions "free" that did not join the "National Front" will be part of the new formation.

According to the source, did not oppose the Turkish side of the efforts of the factions mentioned integration, stressing his knowledge but did not support him.

The talk about the formation expected after a week from the declaration of the factions "free army" in Idlib for the formation of the "National Liberation Front" led by the faction, "the Levant" backed by Turkey.

The "liberation of Syria" includes the "Ahrar al-Sham" movement and the "Nur al-Din al-Zanki movement", and was engaged in military confrontations against the "Sham Liberation Organization" ended with a complete cease-fire agreement between the two parties.

Idlib is awaiting what it expects after the deployment of the monitoring points under the "easing tension" agreement, and the subsequent developments, most notably the internal military movements by the factions operating there.

And depends on Turkey in Idlib to organize the next phase of the province, especially the service reality and civil life and military structure, the same scenario applied in areas of the "Euphrates Shield" in the northern suburbs of Aleppo.

Turkey had the largest role in forming the National Liberation Front (FNL), which receives substantial military and financial support, and is trying to start a new military structure for Idlib.

Earlier, my country had received information that the "liberation of Syria" had received additional support from Turkey after its formation and that new steps had been taken with regard to the organization and numbers of fighters.

The movements of the factions in Idlib coincide with the security situation in the province, which killed dozens of civilians and military in the past days.

It did not specify the main source behind the chaos, but "liberation of the Sham" has confirmed repeated periods of cells to organize the "Islamic state" and behind.

First thing i wanna mention, Nur al-Din al-Zenki, one of the mentioned groups, is the faction that infamously recorded themselves beheading a 12 year old child for allegedly sympathizing with the Assad government

Zenki, like many members of this upcoming merger, are what remains of the surrender negotiation green bus population/fighter transfer to Idlib from previous rebel hold outs like Aleppo, Damascus and Hama.

Zenki merged with local hardline islamist group, Ahrar al-sham, to form JTS. Ahrar al-sham was at one point the second largest rebel faction against Assad after the FSA early in the revolution, 2013. It is Ahrar al-sham that pundits and observers of the war would primarily point to in highlighting that the revolution was not “moderate”

The sudden influx of rebel factions to the area from other parts of the country has destabilized it greatly (more than it ever was when it was al nusra/jabhat fatah al sham versus the FSA and Ahrar al-sham), where a new “Tahrir” titled faction sprouts up every other month and some even fight over it, as was the case between HTS (Tahrir al-Sham) and JTS (Jabhat Tahrir Suriya) when they began hostilities in February 2018 the day after the formation of JTS, lasting until late April. Al Zenki was especially called out by HTS, saying Zenki a little bitch betrayer of the revolution who wouldnt come to sharia court for a laundry list of shit like sending YPG recruits against HTS and killing HTS leaders. JTS in response produced a slur for the HTS akin to the one produced for the Islamic State, Daesh. The JTS now calls the HTS “Hitish”

Oh look, a map of that conflict last february:

The Al Qaeda dominated salafist HTS (Tahrir al-Sham, Syrian/Levant Liberation Front) exerts the most influence in Idlib besides the JTS (Jabhat Tahrir Suriya, Syrian Liberation Front), who are second in power and influence.

Anyway, back to the article topic, this recent announcement of the growth of JTS into a new faction includes FSA factions like Jaish Al-Izzah (Army of Glory) who online mujahideen and rebel fanboys saw as being treacherous for not joining other perpetually disorganized FSA groups in their 11 group merger late last month into Jabhat al-Wataniya lil-Tahrir (National Front for Liberation) aka NFL, lol

This is notable because NFL is squarely a Turkish coordinated effort to bang much of the remaining FSA brigades together into a proxy army. The NFL includes Faylaq al-sham, which is an extremely close proxy of Turkey as it not only participated in the “Euphrates Shield” operation to capture Al Bab from the Islamic State, but also the Turkish invasion of Afrin as one of the frontline FSA proxies in the offensive there to conquer YPG held afrin canton. What’s more, Faylaq al-sham’s leader, Colonel Fadlallah al-Haji, is now the overall commander of the newly formed NFL, meaning that the primary FSA faction in Idlib is squarely in the pocket of Turkey

So with that in mind, here’s the situation in Idlib:

Each one of these observation posts looks something like this:

So, if it isn’t clear yet, Turkey is intent on asserting it’s influence over Idlib. Most of these observation posts rest on JTS or FSA/NFL held territory. As the article states, Turkey is entering the next phase of forming the “service reality, civil life and military structure” of Idlib province. Turkey gives support to JTS but NFL is wholly their project as part of a grander vision to coordinate the rebellion akin to how they ran shit in the Euphrates Shield and Afrin operations.

All in all, the absolute state of Idlib is as follows, ranked by strength:

1. Tahrir al-Sham, aka HTS

The independent al qaeda affiliate which is the recent amalgamation with lesser groups from previous iterations such as Jabhat Fateh al-sham, Jabhat al Nusra before it and indeed, al Qaeda in Iraq. Important perennial note: AQI split into al nusra and ISIS, the islamic state, so we can say that HTS is the radical islam faction in Idlib. There is a reason why JTS, an islamist salafist organization in their own right, calls HTS “criminal” and derisively as “HITISH” as Syrian rebels previously called ISIS “DAESH”

2. Jabhat Tahrir Suriya, aka JTS

The gulf state supported JTS is a formation of the successful salafi islamist factions of the revolution who split from the free syrian army early on, like 2013. They include the various forces who were dumped into Idlib over the last year and a half by syrian government green buses after the SAA managed to kick their barrel bomb wounded asses out of urban centres like Aleppo and Damascus. As such, JTS was bolstered with veterans of acute urban warfare against the elite Tiger Forces and Hezbollah. This is partly why JTS made immediate gains against HTS when hostilities erupted last february.

3. Jabhat al-Wataniya lil-Tahrir, aka NFL

This is the most recent merger, third smallest coalition in Idlib and wholly Turkish coordinated Free Syrian Army proxy. There ain’t much left to say besides that they have many conventionally named free syrian army components like 1st Infantry Division, 1st coastal division, 23rd Division and other cutesy AHHH SOUNDS MODERATE ENOUGH TO ME titles to a western listener even though many of them have committed war crimes such as the looting and selling of civliian property to Turkish black markets, the indiscriminate shelling of civilians within Aleppo particularly in Sheikh Maqsoud, an isolated Kurdish suburb of the city under neutral YPG control. In spite of this, many parts of the NFL pledge a moderate form of ideology such as “Islamic Democracy” or even “Syrian nationalism” as is the case with the Free Idlib Army. The 1st coastal division is officially vetted by the United Nations formed “Friends of Syria Group,” so at least within the NFL there are elements that are generally “moderate.”

 ------

So in conclusion, Idlib is now shared between the HTS, JTS and NFL with each respectively being radical al qaeda islamism, salafist islamist and moderate islamism to secularism.

But in real terms, that means that Idlib is split between an independent radical islam rebel group known as Al Qaeda in the Levant with hostility for rivals that nobody outside of their group likes and two groups allied with Turkey. With turkish aspirations in the area, it is possible for JTS and NFL to merge, as is likely the goal for Turkey in forming what they have signaled is their personal spit of Syrian land. this will inevitably put Turkey, JTS and NFL on a collision course with HTS to decide who controls Idlib.

There will be blood.

[xtruss]

The Future of American Power

Arundhati Roy on America’s Fiery, Brutal Impotence

The US leaves Afghanistan humiliated, but now faces bigger worries, from social polarisation to environmental collapse, says a novelist and essayist

— September 3rd, 2021

— By Arundhati Roy

This By-invitation commentary is part of a series by a range of global thinkers on the future of American power, examining the forces shaping the country's standing.

IN FEBRUARY 1989 the last Soviet tank rolled out of Afghanistan, its army having been decisively defeated in a punishing, nearly decade-long war by a loose coalition of mujahideen (who were trained, armed, funded and indoctrinated by the American and Pakistani Intelligence services). By November that year the Berlin wall had fallen and the Soviet Union began to collapse. When the cold war ended, the United States took its place at the head of a unipolar world order. In a heartbeat, radical Islam replaced communism as the most imminent threat to world peace. After the attacks of September 11th, the political world as we knew it spun on its axis. And the pivot of that axis appeared to be located somewhere in the rough mountains of Afghanistan.

For reasons of narrative symmetry if nothing else, as the US makes its ignominious exit from Afghanistan, conversations about the decline of the United States’ power, the rise of China and the implications this might have for the rest of the world have suddenly grown louder. For Europe and particularly for Britain, the economic and military might of the United States has provided a cultural continuity of sorts, effectively maintaining the status quo. To them, a new, ruthless, power waiting in the wings to take its place must be a source of deep worry.

In other parts of the world, where the status quo has brought unutterable suffering, the news from Afghanistan has been received with less dread.

The day the Taliban entered Kabul, I was up in the mountains in Tosa Maidan, a high, alpine meadow in Kashmir, which the Indian Army and Air Force used for decades to practise artillery and aerial bombing. From one edge of the meadow we could look down at the valley below us, dotted with martyrs’ graveyards where tens of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims who had been killed in Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination are buried.

In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist group, came to power cunningly harnessing post-9/11 international Islamophobia, riding a bloody wave of orchestrated anti-Muslim massacres, in which thousands were murdered. It considers itself a staunch ally of the United States. The Indian security establishment is aware that the Taliban’s victory marks a structural shift in the noxious politics of the subcontinent, involving three nuclear powers: India, Pakistan and China, with Kashmir as a flashpoint. It views the victory of the Taliban, however pyrrhic, as a victory for its mortal enemy Pakistan, which has covertly supported the Taliban in its 20-year battle against the US occupation. Mainland India’s 175m-strong Muslim population, already brutalised, ghettoised, stigmatised as “Pakistanis”—and now, increasingly as “Talibanis”—are at even greater risk of discrimination and persecution.

Most of the mainstream media in India, embarrassingly subservient to the BJP, consistently referred to the Taliban as a terrorist group. Many Kashmiris who have lived for decades under the guns of half a million Indian soldiers, read the news differently. Wishfully. They were looking for pinholes of light in their world of darkness and indignity.

The details, the nuts and bolts of what was actually happening were still trickling in. A few who I spoke to saw it as the victory of Islam against the most powerful army in the world. Others as a sign that no power on Earth can crush a genuine freedom struggle. They fervently believed—wanted to believe—that the Taliban had completely changed and would not return to their barbaric ways. They too saw what had happened as a tectonic shift in regional politics, which they hoped would give Kashmiris some breathing space, some possibility of dignity.

The irony was that we were having these conversations sitting on a meadow pitted with bomb craters. It was Independence Day in India and Kashmir was locked down to prevent protests. On one border the armies of India and Pakistan were in a tense face-off. On another, in nearby Ladakh, the Chinese Army had crossed the border and was camped on Indian territory. Afghanistan felt very close by.

In its scores of military expeditions to establish and secure suzerainty since the second world war, the United States has smashed through (non-white) country after country. It has unleashed militias, killed millions, toppled nascent democracies and propped up tyrants and brutal military occupations. It has deployed a modern version of British colonial rhetoric—of being, in one way or another, on a selfless, civilising mission. That’s how it was with Vietnam. And so it is with Afghanistan.

Depending on where you want to put down history’s markers, the Soviets, the American- and Pakistan-backed mujahideen, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, the unspeakably violent and treacherous warlords and the US and NATO armed forces have boiled the very bones of the Afghan people into a blood soup. All, without exception, have committed crimes against humanity. All have contributed to creating the soil and climate for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS and their affiliates to operate.

If honourable ‘intentions’ such as empowering women and saving them from their own families and societies are meant to be mitigating factors in military invasions, then certainly both the Soviets and the Americans can rightly claim to have raised up, educated and empowered a small section of urban Afghan women before dropping them back into a bubbling cauldron of medieval misogyny. But neither democracy nor feminism can be bombed into countries. Afghan women have fought and will continue to fight for their freedom and their dignity in their own way, in their own time.

Does the US withdrawal mark the beginning of the end of its hegemony? Is Afghanistan going to live up to that old cliché about itself—the Graveyard of Empires? Perhaps not. Notwithstanding the horror show at the Kabul airport, the debacle of withdrawal may not be as big a blow to the United States as it is being made out to be.

Much of those trillions of dollars spent in Afghanistan circulated back to the US war industry, which includes weapons manufacturers, private mercenaries, logistics and infrastructure companies and non-profit organisations. Most of the lives that were lost in the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (estimated to be roughly 170,000 by researchers at Brown University) were those of Afghans who, in the eyes of the invaders, obviously count for very little. Leaving aside the crocodile tears, the 2,400 American soldiers who were killed don’t count for much either.

The resurgent Taliban humiliated the United States. The Doha agreement signed by both sides in 2020 for a peaceful transfer of power is testimony to that. But the withdrawal could also reflect a hard-nosed calculation by the US government about how to better deploy money and military might in a rapidly changing world. With economies ravaged by lockdowns and the coronavirus, and as technology, big data and AI make for a new kind of warfare, holding territory may be less necessary than before. Why not leave Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran to mire themselves in the quicksand of Afghanistan—imminently facing famine, economic collapse and in all probability another civil war—and keep American forces rested, mobile and ready for a possible military conflict with China over Taiwan?

The real tragedy for the United States is not the debacle in Afghanistan, but that it was played out on live television. When it withdrew from the war it could not win in Vietnam, the home front was being ripped apart by anti-war protests, much of it fuelled by enforced conscription into the armed forces. When Martin Luther King made the connection between capitalism, racism and imperialism and spoke out against the Vietnam war, he was vilified. Mohammad Ali, who refused to be conscripted and declared himself a conscientious objector, was stripped of his boxing titles and threatened with imprisonment. Although war in Afghanistan did not arouse similar passions on American streets, many in the Black Lives Matter movement made those connections too.

In a few decades, the United States will no longer be a country with a white majority. The enslavement of black Africans and the genocide and dispossession of native Americans haunt almost every public conversation today. It is more than likely that these stories will join up with other stories of suffering and devastation caused by US wars or by US allies. Nationalism and exceptionalism are unlikely to be able to prevent that from happening. The polarisation and schisms within the United States could in time lead to a serious breakdown of public order. We’ve already seen the early signs. A very different kind of trouble looms on another front too.

For centuries America had the option of retreating into the comfort of its own geography. Plenty of land and fresh water, no hostile neighbours, oceans on either side. And now plenty of oil from fracking. But American geography is on notice. Its natural bounty can no longer sustain the “American way of life”—or war. (Nor for that matter, can China’s geography sustain the “Chinese way of life”).

Oceans are rising, coasts and coastal cities are insecure, forests are burning, the flames licking at the edges of settled civilisation, devouring whole towns as they spread. Rivers are drying up. Drought haunts lush valleys. Hurricanes and floods devastate cities. As groundwater is depleted, California is sinking. The reservoir of the iconic Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which supplies fresh water to 40m people, is drying at an alarming rate.

If empires and their outposts need to plunder the Earth to maintain their hegemony, it doesn’t matter if the plundering is driven by American, European, Chinese or Indian capital. These are not really the conversations that we should be having. Because while we’re busy talking, the Earth is busy dying.

— Arundhati Roy is a novelist and essayist.

[0ssuary]

a brief history of the world

Yotri is a small Earth-like planet with three moons, one of which is very large, about a fifth the size of Yotri itself, and acts almost as a binary planet system. Both their days and year are longer than ours, the days running about thirty hours, and the year 412 days (with the exception of every ten years, when it is only 410). It is culturally divided into three regions, each of which have their own unique terrain and ecological features. Mahai, where Handien is located, is predominantly dry grasslands, deserts, canyons and flat mountains, with part of an ancient forest along its western border and tree-covered mountains along its eastern border. Irya, the largest region, sits on the eastern side of the enormous old-growth forest. It has many different biospheres, including jungles, volcanoes, various deciduous forests, and the world’s only inhabited islands. Skana, the northern-most and smallest region, is predominantly mountainous, with some tundra and glaciers. Civilization began on Yotri nearly nine millennia ago, originating in Irya and spreading outward.

Each region specializes in different branches of science. Irya studies climate and oceanography, Mahai focuses primarily on biology, botany, and agriculture, and Skana puts most of its resources into computer sciences and space exploration. While there have been wars and various political conflicts, both within and between the regions, Yotri has been free of major warfare for several millennia (with the exception of some smaller clashes typically within regional sects rather than between the regions themselves, and usually political rather than violent). Once technology had begun to advance to the point that resources were not as scarce to come by, the need for war dwindled and became meaningless. For the last thousand years, there has been the additional unifier of survival, the world only just truly beginning to find a new equilibrium and normalcy after a major volcanic and seismic event that nearly triggered a mass extinction.

At the time, Skana had been on the verge of its first deep space mission, and had been experimenting with colonization techniques on one of the lesser moons. Convinced they could find a way to survive somewhere else in their star system, they spent almost a century modifying their space stations into an evacuation ship, and two hundred thousand people left the planet, with another fifty thousand following a year after. In the meantime, Irya and Mahai partnered to find ways to counter the environmental effects of a sky full of ash, keeping the population just above famine, and cultivating and breeding algaes out at sea that would both filter the water and atmosphere and dump enough gases back into the atmosphere to start stabilizing it. In tandem with the algae colonies, large ocean barges with enormous filters were built to draw the ash out of the air to stave off any further major climate disaster. It wasn’t perfect, many, many people died, whole cities and districts were abandoned, but it worked. After a century of breeding floating islands of algae, running the filters, adding more as they refined the design to be more efficient, eliminating all energy sources that produced excessive waste, the ash began to clear enough to restore some seasonal rain and the clouds began to break. A world that had not seen a clear sky in nearly two centuries once again had light.

Skana offered to build larger ships to take people from Mahai and Irya if they could provide the materials, but both regions’ cultures are tied closely to the planet itself and they would rather had died on their home if they were going to die. Millions of Skanans stayed behind and made the best of what was left, waiting for word that there was a new home to go to. Transmissions were frequent at first, but fruitless, and then they came less and less, with longer delays, and eventually the gaps and delays between them were so long and the world had begun to recover that the idea of leaving it now seemed pointless. They sent one final transmission to the voyaging ship, a well-wishing for their safety, and life moved on.

Moving forward, there was a cultural renaissance, and an overhaul of energy and technology to run as efficiently and low-impact as possible. New temples were built. Irya’s traditional dance and dialects began to thrive again. Skana has always been the more pragmatic of the three regions, but even there, old holidays and celebrations were treated with a reverence and jubilee they hadn’t garnered in centuries. Handien’s temple was the first to be completed in the resurgence of old traditions, and was the first community to phase out most technology, though if one were to look close enough, even in Handien, technology is still ubiquitous in small ways. Most homes have electricity, the city has clean, running water and a sewage processing facility outside of town. Many homes have a basic communicator, like an intercom system, and powered vehicles are a common sight. They are hyper-aware of waste and all energy is renewable. After such scarcity and nearly being wiped off the planet, nothing is taken for granted. Everything gets used or reused or turned into something else. It’s largely like this in most of the urban centers as well, but it is especially true in the traditional communities and is an integrated practice of their faith and cultural values, to be grateful and ingenious with what nature provides for them.

A few unique features of the world are its moons (and consequently its oceans and tides), and its ancient forest. The forest, nearly as large as Skana, is protected by international law, and the much of it, especially the oldest communities of trees at its center, survived the centuries of ash. This ancient center is older than any of the nations, older than any spoken language on the planet. The trees there make California redwoods look unimpressive. Being on the ground in the oldest parts of the forest, nearly no light reaches the forest floor, and there is very little insect or animal noise. Hot springs under the rocky soil keep the forest center evergreen and lush, like a rainforest. From Feana and Rho’ki’s little house on the eastern edge of the forest, the center section is so enormous it looks like a mountain, despite the terrain itself staying quite flat from Mahai to Irya.

The three moons (two very similar to our own, one pale, one a darker grey, and the other much larger and closer and green, covered in small plant life) create strong, dramatic tides. Most coasts are sheer rocky cliffs, with the low tides leaving the cliffs bare for several hundred feet, and high tides rising anywhere between fifty feet to just barely lapping over the edge. The ocean takes up nearly three-quarters of Yotri. The moons each have a unique orbit, the two smaller moons roughly the same distance away, with one moon cycling every fourteen or fifteen days, and the other every twenty or twenty-one days. The green moon has a polar orbit, and only takes about eight days to orbit. The occasions when all three moons are in the same phase are sacred days in the faiths of all three of the major cultures.

I’d like to eventually make some simple maps and sketches of the cities and landscapes, but art is a much more recent hobby for me and takes more time and spoons. Also, everything here is subject to retcon! This blog is like a file cabinet of ideas and brainstorming and while most of it will likely remain unchanged, some details might shift as I get a better idea of some finer plot points with the final novel.

Questions or clarifications are encouraged and really helpful!