oh, inverted world

With everything seeming so unreal and draining—including the stages of disbelief that we or they as the cognizetti had to confront as assumptions collapsed—I was hoping to awake from this bad dream and find ourselves in a place where all the progress towards social justice as imperfect as it is and as far as we have to go was not refudiated and undone by the victory of chauvinism and exceptionalism.
America’s relevance that so many are clutching after is diminished both domestically and abroad, and as tragic as it is to valid the insecurities of groups whose support comes at the disenfran- chisement of others—no protection for the minority, the greater threats come in the form of contagion in this nativism, emboldening tyrants and charismatics globally, and in laxer attitudes—verging towards ignorance—regarding climate change and responsible stewardship for the environment. Not that we’re custodians of the Earth, but rather having the passion and curiosity to make the pursuits of the sciences accountable and transform our world safely. It’s bad enough that those holding power are loath indulge that sometimes uncomfortable and inconvenient self-critique that one’s presumptions may be wrong and sustain the intellectual and emotional wherewithal to wonder why others might see the same things differently, but it’s not just as if we’ve given some mustachioed caricature of a villain enough rope to hang himself but also an arsenal of nuclear weapons and a surveillance system without parallel at his disposal. With such toys, why aspire to anything higher?

sentimental journey

Once Protestantism took hold in large swathes of northern Europe, particularly in England, the pilgrimage undertaken to exotic lands fell out of fashion, people of means needed to articulate another rite of passage that would fulfil this lost outlet. Almost immediately, the notion of the Grand Tour was invented as an authoritative substitute, since one could claim instant superiority in matters of taste and worldliness over one’s neighbours for having seen the masterpieces of the continent first-hand and having even brought back some art as souvenirs.

Though such deportment would have been non- permissible beforehand on the Camino de Santiago, such gap year trips were also seen as not only edifying but also the chance to discretely work whatever hot-blooded passions (associated already with Mediterranean climes) that might need to be exorcised to avoid any scenes at home. The odd and singular aspect of these sojourns was that the itinerary was squarely planted in Catholic lands, which were considered the subversive enemy for the reformed countries of the north—almost as if the most popular tourist-destination for Americans during the Cold War was Stalingrad, immersed in the culture of an ideological nemesis. Many Britons and others felt it was unpatriotic to indulge the sights of the south, but a domestic tourism industry was not developed until the French Revolution made travel impossible, and the Low Countries as well as Scotland and the fjords of Norway were discovered by people who had not previous ventured outside the capitals. After matters had settled down a bit and travel to Southern Europe was again possible, people complained of the changed character of tourism—there were just too many of them and one could hardly be enraptured by art and architecture in a pulsing, pushing crowd of sight-seers. The elite among the holiday-makers began turning away from these cultural enlightening itineraries in response and began to focus on natural destinations, like the beaches and mountains, leaving the cities and museums for the masses.

press-gang or 1812 overture

While the deportment of history—when one scratches the surface—shows affairs to be far otherwise, international largess, hegemony seems reserved as a soft-power to just a select few or active belligerents, an encouraging word to play along. Learning a little bit, however, about the long-lived British practise of impressment. Comparable to the phenomena that goes by the name of crimping or shanghaiing, so called press-gangs of the Admiralty, in lieu of a standing order for conscription or compulsory service, the privileged purchase of impressment was enjoyed from the times of George I until the early nineteenth century by English navies.
This practise of policing the idle and the incorrigible into service at sea was widespread and took place at sailors’ haunts by hook or by crook, with the poor having no recourse other than to oblige themselves to a fixed term aboard that was subject to multiple extensions with pay offset by half a year and no defined career track for non-officers. Any by-stander might fall prey to this scheme—especially merchant seamen that betray some degree of acumen. As tensions in European waters increased in post-revolutionary France, Britain believed it had a moral right to impressment, and revisiting one of the many issues left unresolved in the American War for Independence—once Canadian had had its limit with poaching—Britain refused to recognise the concept of naturalisation—that is, renouncing one’s subjecthood in order to gain citizenship and enter the employ of the more profitably import-export business. The acquisition of this labour-force (and of course the pay for commercial shipping was far better than service for king and country), in the pall of the Napoleonic wars, ignited the conflicts of 1812. The northern US states attested that such conscription was routine, sealed by a shilling sunk in a drink, while the South was vocally against this kind of slavery and the federalist prerogative. Never an attempt to reclaim the North American colonies but rather with the aim of destabilising revolutionary forces, this bone of contention and forced repatriation makes me think of the uniquely American habit (Uganda is also party, to the denunciation of the US) of universal taxation and burgeoning desire to leave it all. It strike me as if there is a bit of no quarter to be found here either, no matter what civil society has previously conceded to—like living off the grid or shedding one’s birth-rite. What do you think? Are we all still so impressed to allegiance to one system or other and left with little choice?

bagful of wits or the fox and the hedgehog

Greek poet Archilochus, reflecting on the perils of being too clever, said of the fabled fox that he knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
I wonder which character society finds more palatable, to be peripatetic and know a hundred means of escape, evasion, succeeding that we can adapt—or try to in the moment—to a given situation or be content, hunkered down with one sure and reliable idea. Reflecting on the ongoing centennial of the Great War and the horrors that followed, ideologies that took root in the scorched pastures of Europe where God and King were beforehand disbanded by terror and revolt and brief revanchment by Napoleon and the brittle empire of the Hapsburgs that couldn’t hold the centre led us down terrible paths that put us off outwitting ourselves—for a generation at least. Maybe ideologues do admit of one core idea driving their agenda but in practise and execution, it’s only maybe a fox disguised as a hedgehog. Presently, I fear we’ve again acquired a taste to be clever and forgotten about the dangers of nationalism and rank hypocrisy in wealth and technologies. We don’t need to dart down those manifold paths—a hundred routes to utopia—another time and hopefully we’ve learned enough from history to restrain and humble ourselves.

siss boom ba

Just in time for US Independence Day (and probably equally valid for Bastille Day), Mental Floss presents an animated field guide for identifying the various standard effects used in pyrotechnic displays. I never knew that they had specific names, other than “ohh” and “ahh.” The image used of a frozen firework in bloom is a long-exposure image captured deftly by the brilliant photographer David Johnson at a show in Australia with more examples at the link.

dungeon master or cosplay caliphate

Writing for the always provoking Æon magazine, pastor Benjamin Dueholm takes up the banner of fantasy politics—the sleeping hero, the once and future king with a parallel which stops necessarily short of the gruesome violence and vile pretensions that by its unsettling and discomforting nature may bridge that gap in trying to understand the allure that the would-be caliph has for his following.

The standard explanation usually repairs towards brainwashing, alienation, general listlessness and marginalisation of Muslim youth, but it is probably more productive to confront a prickly affinity even if in the end the comparison does not pan out—especially given that traditional accounts are not leading anyone anywhere. Going off to fight jihad is certainly degrees more radical than attending a convention, re-enactment not matter how devoted or die-hard the fan is, but the idea of role-playing and seeing the slumbering and legitimate liberator awake (and vanquish all the pretenders) is not so far removed from our shared cultural, literary and cinematic mythology. One finds other examples in Arthurian legend and the Matter of Britain, in Friedrich Barbarossa asleep under the mountain, as well as more recently renewed struggles, like the notion of a legitimate heir to all of Christendom. Instead of Romulans, sith, orcs, however, they target far less formidable and imaginative foes. Cosplayers, subcultures usually don’t become delusional in their pursuits and passions but tragic and catastrophic outcomes may follow when they do, and perhaps if anything can be gleaned from this analogy (though I feel that there is a lot there, which is also maybe too close for comfort), it is the ability to perceive—take to heart, when other members of the community say that their actions are not Islam. What do you think?

shelter-in-place oder white-flight

While captialising on the fears of rich, white people is a legitimate business model and a fool and his money are soon—nay eventually, since there’s so much of it, the reports that luxurious doomsday bunkers are being outfitted somewhere in the hinterland of Germany for a select number of high-paying clients to ride out a nuclear holocaust seems a bit over the top. Fortunately, we have not had the occasion to test the effectiveness and security of such entombment under realistic conditions, but it seems no matter the material wealth at one’s command, surviving an event that brings the rest of the world to rack and ruin bivouacked with those who tipped off the downfall in the first place (and are now the self-appointed rebuilders of civilisation) is a very appealing notion. Such money is better spent on an ark in space before we get to the point of burying our heads in the sand.
The articles never say where this secret compound, built in the corridors already hollowed out by the state apparatus of the East German government at the height of the Cold War (which surely has keys to the rear-entrance) and I suppose that location cannot be maintained undisclosed, especially when the Apocalypse is nigh and the peasants come clawing at the door with the torches and pitchforks that ought have appeared much earlier, and while there are several candidate sites, my money’s on a place called Prenden (a part of the community of Wandlitz in the state of Brandenburg—the cavernous bunker here being sufficiently unassuming and isolated, expect that it’s conveniently close to the construction site of the much delayed Berlin-Brandenburg international airport (BBF).

tenterhooks or looming large

In a brilliant gloss for Æon magazine, writer Virginia Postrel presents an an excellent exposition on how textiles and fashions parallel and drive technological advancement.
The broadest example lies in trade, captured famously along the Silk Road, the trade route that saw not only the exchange of cloth but of also knowledge and ideas between the Orient and Occident worlds, and the later shipping empires.
Research into natural pigments and dyeing techniques led to greater understanding the discipline of chemistry. The printing-presses of clothmakers (to imprint patterns) inspired Johannes Gutenberg to establish the publishing industry in the West. It was factories that housed the great power-looms and the flying-shuttle that drove the Industrial Revolution and gave manufacturing countries a distinct advantage, leading to a huge population explosive, lasting environmental impact, colonialism, labour-issues and societal upheaval from those who puzzled over what mass-production meant. The punch-cards that were the basis of programming these steam-powered jabberwockies to produce increasing intricate designs that led to the development of computers. Contemporaneously, cheap and disposable clothing represents the debate on exploitation, out-sourcing and off-shoring—plus our notions of consumption in general. Even if the shirt on one’s back is not yet a Wearable, it is still heir to all the excellence and dread of human achievement, and that is truly something to think about.

palabra jot

Just as the kingdoms of Heaven and the Earth were already careening in directions unknown with the confluence of Martin Luther’s critical and revolutionary stance, Henry VIII’s dissention that led to the Anglican confession, the discovery of the New World materialising and successive plagues picking off large swaths of the impious and faithful alike, the event that probably shook the foundations of the Church the most was a conciliatory bearing, a compromise characterised as a Middle Way, advocated by one of its own, Dutch theologian and scholar Desiderius Erasmus.
In the spirit of Cicero, regarded as the father of humanism, Erasmus championed dialectic over pure dogma and believed that religion revealed rather than one imparted made one’s belief genuine and steadfast—although Erasmus did not go as far as Luther in abolishing the priestly class, maintaining that tutors were necessary. Furthermore, raising more contention with the Protestant movement than reconciliation, Erasmus argued that that personal, less mediated relation with the divine was not consequent to the notion of predestination, accepting that one is part of God’s plan and happy with that, but instead that the orthodox idea of free will (which is not unfettered agency but the ability to see outcomes as otherwise than they actually turn out—that is, understanding that one’s actions and intentions have consequences, for good or evil) still had a place in this reformed cosmology. The most public and controversial act of the academic, however, was his decision to brush up on his Greek and Latin (the stock-phrase Pandora’s box comes from one of Erasmus’ earlier, honest mistranslations of Hesiod—it ought to be Pandora’s jar) and undertake to produce a definitive new translation of the Bible, since Luther’s own (thanks to the advent of the printing-press) was a popular success and successful too in promulgating historic typos. Luther, as King James and virtual all theologians relied on the four century translation of Saint Jerome of the Greek testaments into Latin. Wanting to provide his parishioners as pupils a better text and feeling admittedly divinely inspired, Erasmus quipped that “it is only fair that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin” and began his new version. Though a traditionalist in terms of Church politics, Erasmus did a poor job in restraining himself when it came to language. While I am sure that all linguists of any ilk sort of cringe to find surpassing λόγοϛ rendered as plain old word (Verbum), it was just too much for the Church to take when the first proofs started, very first chapter and verse, “In the beginning there was Conversation…” It is hard to say if Erasmus and his adherents might have negotiated a more peaceful and civil schism or might have made matters far worse, but both sides rejected this agitator’s backing as too much of a liability.

uAwg oder plus-ones

Preparations for the upcoming G-7 summit are putting undo onus on residents, by-standers and potential antagonists for the selected venue, the alpine retreat of Schloss Elmau. For the sake of security theatre, the compound—which was ironically envisioned at the behest of a local countess back in 1914 as an artistic retreat where an international class of volunteers matriculated annually to cater to and learn from artists in residence and not the exclusive and now fortified hotel that it has become. Campers are disappointed to find many pitches off-limits and other accommodations already claimed by authorities or members of the press that claimed any vacancies months prior.
Traffic is restricted as well as taking one’s cows to pasture. Protesters are unable to vent their frustrations because, ostensibly intimidated by the police, they’ve been afforded no quarter. I hope a few demonstrators do seek through the cordon, disguised as horses or haystacks—not so there’s violence or chaos, but just so the make-believe atmosphere created for the overlords is not so flawless as to allow them to keep their delusions. What do you think? I hope this kind of caravan never comes to town.

bypass or great big convoy

Via the ever-excellent Kottke comes this rather profound study and projection of how self-driving vehicles will alter the economy and particularly the gas-food-lodging infrastructure built to support commercial trucking. While it does not take much boldness to imagine a phalanx of safer, more efficient robot guided convoys taking truckers out of the drivers’ seats as it has already come to pass, but the impact does not of course stop with this last lament of middle-class bread-winners.
The article is written from an American perspective and by analogy compares the seismic changes that could occur to those communities that the interstate freeway system passed by and withered for the sake of expedience, but I think the analysis is completely universal. With manufacturing increasingly retreating into yonder tightfistedness, goods are forever being shuttled back and forth. Consuming merchandise created and delivered by machine, vast swathes of the human workforce (and ultimately, all of it) become redundant and without access to meaningful employment. The untenable situation is accelerating to an important junction, wherein either there is no demand to satisfy the production-capacity because no one has the tender to pay for it or money becomes a rather meaningless trifle and in a utopian society, humans are at last allowed to enjoy the fruit of their labour. I suppose that’s precisely the point of progress but it is hard for me to imagine that the robber-barons might herald this event joyfully—especially if they knowing ushered in their own severance. What do you think? Will those automated cars drive us all off a cliff or make our existence better by abolishing capital?

arsenal and armoury

Though medieval times are known—particularly in Europe, for violence and brutality and tactical sophistication does not exactly leap out, there were a few rather interesting innovations that were given exposure during the Crusades and contributed to the arsenal of exchange of destructive play-things among the East and West—arsenal itself coming from the Arabic word, dār as-sināça, a workshop.
The mainstay of the European Crusaders was the siege engine or the catapult (battering rams and siege towers included), which although refined and improved, was a technology already known and utilised during antiquity—and that was really the West’s best game. They were skilled at building secure fortifications that would repel attacks but were also good an undermining defenses. The Seljuk Turks were highly skilled archers and were more mobile than European warhorses at staging ambushes however they were also in possession of a secret weapon, inspired by the so called Greek fire of the Byzantines.  Still a mystery as to the exact formula, this was an incendiary substance, and like napalm, once aflame it was impossible to extinguish and would burn even across the surface of water or could be used like a flame-thrower.

The Muslims also expertly utilised messenger pigeons to quickly relay reports and commands across vast distances, a sorcery that the Europeans had never seen before and could not hope to compete with. It was, however, the armies of the khan from the far distant Mongolian steppe encroaching on Persia and on Transylvania to the north that brought to the battlefield the most volatile new weapon. The Mongols were able to ransack Baghdad and suppress nearly an entire continent through gun-powder, but once witnessing the power of explosives, the Muslims and then the Europeans alchemists were quick to harness it for themselves.

cowboys and indians: fifth column or the last crusades

After stalling out at the strategically important but ultimately indefensible port of Damietta, the Crusaders were left with little option but to bid a retreat with no gains to show for their efforts, even with the Ayyubid sultanate of Egypt facing incursions on two fronts, with the previously unseen Mongols on their eastern boundaries. This threat is indeed not for another, separate story-line but folds fundamentally into our present narrative directly. The Crusader States in Cyprus and the Holy Land did not merely evaporate after Frederich II’s failed mission. The doubly-excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor was an Islamophile, having been exposed to the culture and religion early on in his court at Sicily and managed to negotiate a truce with the Egyptian armies that allowed the meagre holdings in the Near East to survive for almost another tumultuous fifty years.
Warrior pilgrims from Europe, however, were not content to be just tolerated under the conditions of standing treaties and came for a fight. The integration and cooperation, even if it was mainly kept up in order to vouchsafe trading-relations, was a bit of a revulsion for the newly-arrived and for leaders back in Europe, fatigued by their own civil-strife and lacking the will to bolster any harmonious middle-ground—as we have seen the Crusaders themselves do rather inexplicably time and time again when settlements of the Holy City of Jerusalem were offered and refused.
Though under continued threat externally and prone to the same problems of succession internally and civil war, the Crusader States had achieved somewhat of a happy equilibrium, similar to the case after the debacle of the Fourth Crusade and long-lull in adventuring. To the East, however, dust was stirred under hoof of the massive, unstoppable Mongol army, grandson of Genghis Khan, a talented and merciless general called Hülegü dispatched to conquer Persian and the Levant and expand the empire. Shocking, the Mongols sacked and utterly destroyed the ancient city of Baghdad and were making advances at Damascus and Cairo. The only lands that emerged from Hülegü’s wake unscathed were those that wisely, unhesitatingly surrendered, like the Kingdom of Armenia, without a fight and agreed to pay tribute and join the Mongol thrust. The ruthlessness and totality of destruction to the Muslim cities outdid even the worst of the Crusaders, but in a strange twist of history Hülegü spared the Christian inhabitants, allowing their churches to stand and for them to retain their property where all others were toppled and quickly relieved of the wealth and lives. The Buddhist khan had strong Christian sympathies due to the influence of his mother and number-one wife, who were both Nestorians, members of the Assyrian Church of the East.
Hülegü even returned lands that had been recently taken by the Egyptians back to the Principality of Antioch, and later traveled to Rome himself for a papal audience to urge a union of Mongols and Latin Christians to retake Jerusalem. It’s hard to say why this offer was not well received back in Europe—maybe Rome felt that the Nestorian influence was too radical and heretical to invite in.  Had that project been undertaken or had the Mameluke armies, usurpers of the sultanate, not been able to turn the tide of battle at the walls of Cairo at Ayn Jalut (the Springs of Goliath), the Mongols eventually bidden to leave the desert so that their horses could graze, the world we’ve inherited, I think, would have looked very different. Once Egypt was able to recover from that harrowing clash, the Mameluke sultan, Baibars, attacked the Crusader States, chipping away at them over the years until they were no longer sustainable, first as punishment for having sided with the Mongols and then for violence unleashed upon the resident merchant population of the Crusader territories.

Baibars’ diplomatic overtures to the Golden Horde, the rival khanate that had advanced into the southern Rus, the Crimea and across the Balkans, and subsequent allegiance, helped to keep Hülegü at bay, ensuring the survival of Egypt and Syria. After nearly two dread centuries of presence in the Holy Land, the European Crusaders were expelled, not to return again as occupiers until some seven-hundred years later with the dissolution of the vast Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the Great War.

rex mundi or spirits in the material world

The massacre of the Cathars in Europe—particularly in their bastions of southern France is not just a historical curiosity, a footnote or something merely comparable with the ongoing plight and persecution of the Yazidi under contemporary righteous bullies and deserves much more of a mention than a few lines sandwiched between the more well-known campaigns of the Children’s Crusades and the Reconquista. What little that is known for certain about the beliefs and traditions of people grouped under the name Cathar, which means pure one but may have been applied in the pejorative sense to a whole spectrum of individuals with unorthodox tenets, is scant and suspect since it was chronicled by those who sought to exterminate heresy in all its forms. A few common accusations of the inquisitors sketches at least a faint outline of the framework of their belief—the dichotomy between the material and spiritual world, which are the handiwork of distinct gods, the former faulty, evil and covetous and the later perfection, goodness and love, and born to the dual nature of mind and body, they believed that they were duty-bound (as reflected by their manner of worship) to try to reconcile this dual-nature through a series of reincarnation until finally pure, having elevated and shed that physical form.

With procreation seen as a way of perpetuating the cycles of death and re-birth, marriage was generally eschewed and couples practiced birth-control. As anyone might be reborn as anything, there was not the usual denigration of women and most of the sects practiced vegetarianism. Naturally, such beliefs were dangerous and subversive, as the community scoffed the authority of the Church, and while they believed that Jesus was a good man with admirable qualities and a prophet, the Cathars found it ridiculous to believe that a saviour would be made incarnate. Secular authority was questionable too, appealing as it did to the divine right of kings.
For decades, missionaries were sent into the Balkans, where the faith had probably originated, and into parts of southern France and Italy to try to reform the Cathars—but seeing no conversions for all their efforts and with the needed catalyst came in the form of murdered papal delegate, accompanied by Saint Dominic, and perhaps more pointedly, the tacit permission to sack Byzantium, a twenty-year long purge, called the Albigensian Crusade (named for the arch-diocese of Albi, which was in the centre of Cathar country), was launched to rid Languedoc of Cathar influences. Of course, frustrated clerics and nobles welcomed themselves to the spoils of the auto-de-fay. The story of this persecution, however, is an even greater crime than mankind generally unleashes on his own kind in that, like the destruction of Constantinople in terms of learning and culture lost to the world, the region that was home to most of the Cathars prior to the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Aude praire with the cities of Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan, Nîmes, Toulouse and Avignon, was probably the chief contender for the most refined and advanced territory in all of medieval Europe—everything in between Ireland (with its monasteries, which were also irritants for the Church but remote enough to be left alone) and said Constantinople—which now toppled, exposed Europe to incursions from the Mongols and Ottomans.

Hints of this cultivation remain in the architectural tradition but little else, as the genocide was nearly total. Anecdotally at least, this indiscriminate slaughter was the source of the saying, paraphrased, “Kill ‘em all and let God sort them out.” Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. Pockets endured in the most remote rural areas and Cathar communities were also incorporated into other sects of outliers, the new Protestants and the Moravian (Herrenhuter) of the German woodlands. On a lighter note, happily an international café chain affords us the opportunity to reflect and share our experiences with gnosticism and the Albigensian Crusade by branding the avatar of the dread and almighty Abraxas on all their merchandise.

cowboys and indians: sacerdotal or the fifth crusade

I spoke ridiculously too soon when I claimed that the horrors of the misrouted Fourth Crusade which sacked Constantinople, ravaging the beautiful city, depleting its treasures and resulting in the very brief reign of a resented Latin emperor called Romania but failed to reunite the lands or the Church, had put Europe—or at least the guilty Church—off of crusading permanently. Far from it—in fact before the same Pope Innocent III rallied the European noble houses to again descend on the Holy Land—in keeping with his original vision of the campaign with a thrust through Egypt, there was a coordinated massacre of the Cathar gnostics at home, inspired in part by the papacy’s equivocal attitude when the Crusaders were attacking fellow Christians in Byzantium. Mainstream Christians had regarded this dualistic sect that believed in the transmigration of the soul and equality of the sexes with suspicion for some time and called them devil-worshippers and pagans for the tenet that God had a good and an evil aspect and were glad to have the excuse to be rid of them and take their lands in southern France.  The Reconquista heated up to drive the Moors from Spain and Portugal.

Separately, two charismatic shepherd boys in Seine-Saint-Denis and Köln gathered thousands of children, the poor and disposed to march on the Holy Land and convert the Muslims—both promising that the Mediterranean at Marseilles or over the Alps and in Brindisi would part before them, like Moses crossing the Red Sea. Once the horde made its way to the shore, the Mediterranean did not comply and those who did not try to start their young lives anew at these endpoints or try their fortune at going home were caught by Saracen pirates and sold into slavery. It’s hard to say if the adult population of Europe felt obliged to complete the mission their children were willing to undertake unquestioningly or not (some question the accounts or if such travesties even happened at all), but in any case, Pope Innocent was able to marshal the support of armies that might be able to fulfill the task of recapturing the Holy Land without too much variance. This time, however, the leaders of the Crusader States would rather that Europe didn’t try to help out again. The past few years had ushered in a time of relative peace and great prosperity and Christian and Muslims coexisted due to a constellation of conditions, including the death of Saladin and crises of succession among his heirs, lack of Crusader aggression and very lucrative and mutually beneficial trading arrangements.
The last thing that the County of Acre, then the dominant Crusader State, wanted was to have a bunch of uncouth holy warriors despoiling the calm but they were not in a situation to disinvite the coming armada of ships. A sizable Crusader fighting force landed at Acre and King John of the realm tried his best to occupy the restless men, who were additionally an onerous task to quarter, and as more forces from Hungary, Germany, France and Flanders arrived, King John was helpless to prevent the march on Egypt. The Crusaders sought control of the city of Damietta (Dumyāt) at the mouth of the Nile, which protected the waterway to the capital of Cairo, some two hundred kilometers downstream. Maneuvers were indecisive and guarded, the force strong enough to besiege the fortification but not strong enough to take the city outright and the months before the Crusaders decamped, they found that they had starved the population into submission. Once Damietta had fallen, the way-forward remained unclear as they were awaiting the arrival of relief-forces from the armies of Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II that would give them an unstoppable numerical advantage and could thus safely proceed. The armies of Sultan al-Adil, Saladin’s brother, were watching events unfold in a similarly vacillating manner, as internal strife prevented them from a certain counter-attack.
While at this impasse, the sultan ordered the destruction of the defensive fortifications that protected the city of Jerusalem, preemptively entertaining the idea that the Holy City might become an important bargaining token in the near future and if it was to fall to the Crusaders, the Muslims wanted them to have a city not easily defended, just as Saladin had directed for the town of Ascalon to be demolished to stop the earlier Crusaders’ advance from Jaffa to the Holy City, then resolved to negotiate with the Crusaders in order to end this stalemate and attend to its own affairs. The offer that the sultan’s ambassadors brought to the table was unbelievably favourable—concession of Jerusalem and return of the True Cross in exchange for leaving Egypt in peace, but what was even more unbelievable was how the Crusaders rejected the terms. Maybe they were sly to the dismantling of Jerusalem and did not want to take it just to see it lost again, but I think the only plausible logic behind their stance—which was not universal among the ranks, was that they were sure that they were going to triumph, with the wealthy and powerful Egypt and not just out of the way Jerusalem as the prize.
The papal legate, nominally in charge of military operations, was flattered with a prophesy that he fancied to be a sure sign that he’d personally led the Crusaders to victory—and besides, Egypt was apparently being attacked on its eastern border by the long awaited cavalry from the land of Prester John and so there was no way that absolute triumph could be denied them. Except that the papal legate had misinterpreted the augurs and having waited so long in Damietta, the Nile had again flooded and was no longer navigable and the fighting-force was bogged down once again. Frustrated, the separate divisions splintered and sailed back to Acre and then back home to Europe. One last exception was that Egypt was not under siege from a magnanimous Oriental Christian Magi, but rather these skirmishes with an unknown and fierce tribe marked the first encounter that the Western world had with Genghis Khan and the Mongol Hoard, but all that is for another story-line.

cowboys and indians: the fourth crusade or the tale of the two sicilies

The Latin Church, going into another apoplectic shock over the failure of the Third Crusade, with the failure to retake Jerusalem back from the forces of Saladin and what was seen as an unacceptable appeasement—bordering on tolerance—of the Muslims wherein the Crusaders only barely managed to cling to the coastline with the cities of Jaffa, Acre, Tripoli and Antioch, decided to once and for all settle matters by again taking the reins, as happened in the First Crusade, a century beforehand. Pope Innocent III dispatched legates and recruiters to all corners of Christendom, determined to carefully control the quality of holy warriors, skilled and pious knights only with no more of those roadies that the Pontiff blamed for past fiascoes or avarice souls only coming along for material gain. Owing to the untimely death of Richard Lionheart by a stray arrow that led to his little brother John taking the throne, whose sympathetic dealings with the French nobility and general lack of restraint incited a revolt among his own barons and a crisis of succession and civil war that ended with John persuaded to check his own power with by signing the Magna Carta in the field of Runnymede. All these events took far longer to play-out that the two year campaign of the Fourth Crusade to come, so enlistment efforts in England were fruitless. So too were they in neighbouring France, with Louis II unwilling to budge or part with his armies until this matter was resolved.
Even though relations with the Holy Roman Empire under the ambitions of Hohenstaufen Emperor Henry VI was strained, Germany was more responsive to the entreaties of the Pope. Henry VI was hoping to undo the embarrassment of the dissolution of the German contribution to the Third Crusade after order fell asunder when his father, Barbarossa, unceremoniously drowned en route, but this putting on a brave face also carried ulterior-motives. Henry was also a match-maker, tutored in building strategic alliances through matrimony by veteran Eleanor of Aquitaine, and secured loyalties at home before incorporating more and more lands into the empire.
Henry conquered the important naval power of Sicily and had many of the Papal States as well as the buffer kingdoms of Armenia and Cyprus in his corner, and hoped to established an universal empire that stretched throughout Europe and across the Mediterranean to rival Byzantium, if not entice it to merge into a single super-power. Perhaps Henry would have succeeded too and the world would be very different, had he not, like his father, died of malaria in transit. Like with the earlier, disastrous German campaign (whose only legacy was the creation of the imitative Order of the Teutonic Knights to protect the pilgrims who did not retreat), the Crusade careered off course shortly afterward, despite Pope Innocent’s efforts to wrest back control. The Church’s original plan would have the armies of Europe travel to Egypt by ship and launch a conquest on Jerusalem. Fatefully, Henry’s own Sicily was at war with Genoa and Pisa, leaving Venice as the only sea-going city state from which to depart—although some of the English and French volunteers left from Flanders and Marseilles.
Venice had been scheming against Byzantium from sometime and despite having been expelled from the capital of Constantinople along with the other Latin Christian population (depriving the merchants of lucrative trade opportunities) recently found themselves charged with naval protection of the empire’s flank along the Adriatic—the admiralty having dissolved and sold the Byzantine fleet for personal gain. It was this and other lapses of leadership that had caused the people of Byzantium to revolt against the Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who was forced to abdicate and blinded in a palace-coup, and surrender the throne to his brother, Alexios III. The defeated man began plotting against his brother and conspired with the Venetians, persuading them it was time to attack Byzantium and restore him to power. Conveniently, the Crusader armies were on their way, and a detour to Constantinople surely would be tolerated. The Germans acquiesced to the stop over, though presciently Pope Innocent admonished the Crusaders that they were entering fellow-Christian lands as visitors and on the pain of excommunication, forbid any one damaging or pilfering Byzantine property. This command was not well circulated and mostly ignored and the armies, beginning a series of atrocities that goes very nearly unmatched in recorded history, first sacked Zadar and Trieste on the Dalmatian coast, despite the cities both confessing the Roman Catholic rite. And spurred on by this conquest and the allure of even greater booty, the Crusader army put the ancient and wealthy city of Constantinople under siege and proceeded with raids once the port was taking, looting immeasurable wealth, defiling churches, taking holy relics as war-trophies, destroying libraries and other storehouses of knowledge and burning a fifth of the city.
The deposed, blind emperor was restored—as were the free-trade zones and consulates of the thalasso- cracies, but the city and the empire would never recover. Jesus wept.  The Great Schism occurred, the Eastern Orthodox Church splitting with the Latin Church over irreconcilable differences and disgust that been sorely sustained for centuries afterwards. The attack and following civil-unrest, the Greeks not at all pleased with being ruled by a puppet-emperor of Western Europe severely crippled their ability to defend themselves from Ottoman invaders and eventually Byzantium fell, with Turkish territory spanning at its apogee from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the suburbs of Vienna, from Baku to Algeria. Only a fraction of the Crusaders reached the Holy Land, those embarking from France and Belgium, and only helped maintain the status quo in the diminished Crusader holdings. Overcome with grief and guilt for the destruction that resulted from the venture, the Latin Church would never again sanction a crusade to the Holy Land—those to follow are the doing of secular powers, but did, after the fall of Byzantium, launch expeditions to beat back the Ottomans and restore the Eastern Empire.

shareholder value

Around a year and a half ago, while strolling through Frankfurt’s old warehouse district, I had the chance to see the new headquarters of the European Central Bank under-construction. Just now, regaled with protests to mark the occasion, the fancy and sleek building saw its grand-opening—or rather its christening, baptism with due remonstration since it’s not really an inviting place for the rabble—although I quite liked the old HQ, though I suppose it was too humble and retiring for this flag-ship role. Though the core thrust behind the Occupy and Blockupy movements is unchanged, it’s rather thought-provoking how the message has become more focused, not only targeting monumental disparities in wealth and opportunity but more specifically how this and other institutions have straitening outlays of austerity—which can translate into even greater, generational handicaps.

afturköllun

The Foreign Ministry has informed the European Union that it will no longer be pursuing its bid of accession into the supranational monetary and trade pact.

The nation of just over three-hundred thousand residents made their bid to join the EU in 2009, just as the people were mounting a revolt, spurned by the global hedonism of speculation in investment markets that ravaged the otherwise sufficient and partaking economy that threatened to a generation without prospects and marginalise Iceland. This announcement, while doubtless a popular one and a decision to be respected by all sides ultimately, did however come from a minister who had tried before to unilaterally derail talks who committed his government without the clearance or consent of parliament. Though there is probably no chance that the minister will be made to eat his words, circumventing democratic processes does seem like rather a big deal, and though the EU remains outwardly chipper, I think it might be doing so through clenched-teeth.

blue-collar or the golgafrinchans

Though I am never one to be surprised that I managed to miss an item of depth and scope and am usually very pleased for the serendipity of discovering it later—since after all there’s too much emphasis put on the new and novel (even if often it’s little more than a repackaged footnote), I was really floored when I was introduced anthropology professor David Graeber’s wiltingly vivid critique of the labour force as a reflection of the values of those who bind the purse strings. As predicted by economist John Maynard Keyes back in 1930, by the end of the century, mankind had harnessed technologies sufficient to allow us to fulfill our productivity quotas with a fifteen hour workweek and enjoy more leisure time without stint.
There is for me little room for doubt that that came about for us globally but we are not able to accept it and kept our current caste-system.  In a perfectly engineered jobs market, however, the growing bulk of which are in administration and management, are distastefully unfulfilling and we’ll plug away well beyond those first few break-even hours to whittle away at redundancy, said technology even stealing more of the balance of free-time. We’re committed to this for the sake of appearances and stability, rigged also for us to harbor resentment for those who we suspect not putting in their fair share of drudgery, that’s yet pointless and the invention of some corporate constabularies to keep us safely occupied. Naturally, those in power fear the tide of social unrest that characterised the 1960s and 1970s and don’t want to see it return—certainly accounting for why the Occupy-Movements were disdained.  Discord is also sewn, deviously well, among those tethered to their petty bailiwicks and those who perform actual work, a class maligned of teachers, sanitation workers and nurses and assailed with selfish questions of minimum wage, social security—and that intervening service-sector that’s been created to cater to that overwhelming sea of middling-management, also expected to work the customary workweek, though time must fly for them.
And of course, there is a corollary envy for the wealthy, privileged and talented who got all the breaks and whom give us off course something to aspire to and a reason to play along.  Still, it does psychological violence to our morale.  Even with the amount of manufacturing jobs swept out of sight—in order to build and sustain this dystopian state of affairs, it’s not as if there are legions of assemblers and welders nor wild crews of labourers under the whip of a single floor bosses—and a disproportionate number of meaningless, imaginary jobs are held in the world’s workshops too. If this article is new to you as well, I highly recommend reading it, as I think my humble abstract has turned out to be nearly as long, and be sure to staff it through your aggrieved colleagues and co-workers.

intellectual heirs or non-aggression axiom

At the risk of courting controversy and inviting trollish commentary (I think that those risks are acceptable), I’d like very much like to recommend Dangerous Minds’ toppling treatment of Ayn Rand. The essay, including three “trash-compactor” digests of the film adaptation (conveniently plucked out of forty plus years of “development Hell”) of Atlas Shrugged meant to placate the new generation of Tea-Partiers really resonated with me because I too, as a teenager, was an avid fan of this sort of pseudo-intellectual fervor and it took quite some doing to disabuse me of this allure and get out of that phase.

I am really mortified to own up to that much, but even today I still carry around an onerous reminder of that period in the form of a passkey that’s an obscure reference to Anthem (a plagiarized novella, oh nos, about the assault against science—ostensibly, but really a critique of collectivism and supporting the luddites in the end anyway) that I am made to plug into my (work) computer every time I turn around—lest I forget. I guess that this was a fairly common rite of passage, growing pain, though not defensible like a bad sense of style that takes some time to mature. Screenwriter and comedian John Rogers observed once, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” On balance, we all tend to gravitate towards creative, selfless fantasies, I think, but when the impressionable aren’t given to being particularly well-read or well-informed and have a limited library, this sort of sophistry becomes a masterpiece. The idea that prompted Rand to writing Atlas Shrugged, a great lump of a tome, was toying with the idea of declaring herself on strike from her publishers for their difficult demands—I wish she had, rather than creating a dystopian world where all the supposedly talented and ingenious and indispensable people picketed in order to make her ideas and agenda seem legitimate.