spread-eagle

Looking at the cover of the latest edition of an environmental publication that I receive from time to time, I was immediately reminded of the way that the best-preserved fossilised examples of the fabled archeopteryx are framed and thought that this posing pigeon meant to call for their preservation also.

It’s just a funny coincidence, I suppose, and a gentle reminder that even the most innovative and integrated among us can face the same fate, and without even the courtesy of being fawned over by future generations.

cowboys and indians: on the way to canossa

The shrewd administrator and extremely accidental pope Urban II toured France and Italy, mostly to set aright the balance of the respective domains of Church and State—not to pull the twain asunder nor to eschew the clerics’ civic responsibility, which most would describe as meddling—by putting the secular powers firmly in their place. Urban was heir to the battle royale of the wills between the papacy and the imperial throne. His predecessor Pope Gregory VII had excommunicated Emperor Henry IV for his attempts to circumvent Church authority by giving out (or rather selling, what’s known as simony) religious offices as sort of grace-and-favour rewards to his loyal nobles.

Once excommunicated, the allegiance of his subjects was null and void and effectively ended his reign—except that Henry went one better and installed his own anti-pope in Rome to rechristen him as the Holy and Roman emperor of the Germans. The genuine Holy See elevated an anti-king, and so on. Urban was a powerful public speaker and his arguments and railing against the nobles appealed to a vast audience, but a chance plea for assistance from the Byzantine emperor of the East gave the resourceful Urban the cementing petition he needed to reassert religious supremacy over the landed-gentry. The Seljuk Turks had occupied the Anatolian peninsula and the Norman conquests had established enclaves in the Balkans and Alexius I Comnenus request for help (on behalf of the Eastern Church, ostensibly) to the legitimate Church became a seductive rallying point. Although the incursions in Byzantium which threatened its territorial integrity were recent developments and the mad, cruel reign of Caliph Al-Hakim bi Amr Allāh that over saw the destruction of many Jewish and Christian places of worship (to be restored and rebuilt by his predecessor) in the Holy Land was reportedly violent enough to be topical though it was some seventy years hence, on balance there was little strife among the three Abrahamic religions—and under Muslim rule, which had taken hold in the Middle East over four centuries earlier, practising other faiths was tolerated and even protected. Not everything was peaceable, of course, but given the threats that confronted daily life a thousand years ago, disease, brigandage and the general cheapness of life, it was a pretty manageable arrangement.
Such facets of the complicated geo-politics of the day (and the Muslims surely had their own sectarian and sacred and mundane intrigues to contend with and spin as well) were too bothersome to try to extract, so in the year 1095 with fire-and-brimstone Urban rallied the crowds to commit themselves to retaking the lands lost in the Eastern Empire—and, with spot-on improvisational skills, the Holy Land itself—with tales, harking back to the worse atrocities magnified of the mad caliph. Urban attached a grave urgency to this holy campaign, as churches were being desecrated and pilgrims tortured and executed—a pilgrimage being a popular way to atone for one’s sins, though Canossa was not arduous enough to impress Pope Gregory. The pope hoped to let his convocation germinate and give the feudal lords the chance to assemble men and supplies, but perhaps his speech was a little too persuasive, as instead of under the leadership warrior-bishops or the knights of those newly created recruiting orders (the Hospitallers, the Templars, the Teutons or the Maltese) the peasants marched off at their own accord, infused with righteous indignation. Some forty thousand massed in Köln and headed towards Constantinople. Along the way, I suppose to vent some aggressions and prime themselves for combat, they burned synagogues and harassed the Jewish population. Shamed into quick action and more importantly, deprived of the serf labour force needed to work the land and provide protection, the armies of the nobility marched the other direction, towards Jerusalem on their crusade—the peasants having all been captured or killed in their zeal by the Turks.

supercuts

It’s pretty difficult to point to something and declare it either original, visionary or retro and derivative.
Not that the latter are necessarily negative qualities or opposed to the former, I suppose that there is a bit of pride that’s attached to one’s contemp- oraries, which is a fine thing too, since I think not much ruffles the curiosity more than being disabused of smug creativity. Musician, benefactor and producer George Harrison, who was certainly among the farsighted and talented set, even had the courtesy to place a macro-image meme of himself in the inside sleeve, I was reminded, of his 1975 Extra Texture album—tucked away, like a time-capsule to remember later, just like the primordial LOL cats or early examples of viral shorthand.

so goes the neighbourhood

Though some may posit that the refugees that come in hopes of settlement in better lands represent those whom did not make the cut in their homelands, and while that might have been a true characterisation of the pilgrims that landed on Plymouth Rock and the penal colony that was Australia, I think that it’s a rather placating racist thing to believe, allowing one to believe that he is refraining judgment on a whole people and culture while excusing the xenophobia one harbours for the neighbours.

Of course, hope and perception fosters the rarefied notions of ethnicity plus the attendant traffickers that promise to facilitate the transfer. Taking a stance that somewhat inverts the surge of, as reported, of South American immigrants on the southern border of the US, lured, some cry, by the guarantees of amnesty and a better life, the interior minister of Kosovo is demanding that western Europe repatriate the thousands of asylum-seekers, among the country’s most destitute, as quickly as possible. I am only cognisant really of this story, stuck in a traffic-snarl behind a tour bus whose advertised route shuttled between Pristina, the capital, and Düsseldorf, and I suspect the rush and crush is due to the responsible EU body proclaiming Kosovo to be a proper country and no longer meeting its criteria for granting sanctuary. The unlucky souls in the immigration lottery should be dealt with in an expedient matter and most importantly, perhaps, to defang the traffickers’ wiles by dispelling the bewitchment of the West. What do you think? Per capita, I’d venture that this statement is shielding people from disappointment and from harm while acknowledging that such routes are driven with allures of welfare as well.

green-shoots or brussel-sprouts

Though it is probably not possible to legislate morality or majority opinion with controls and tactics that paradoxically would not wilt before Corporate Europe Observatory’s latest fact-finding report, the group, which is devoted to uncovering cronyism, revolving-door political appointments and general corruption within the EU halls of power, hopes to at least sham-shame those European public-relations firms that play the willing sophist—with bogus, whitewashed blather—to some of the world’s most brutal regimes. One would think that one can only recognise ruthlessness in hindsight, given what image-makers can do, and how a little, well targeted character assassination can obscure real assassinations. The detailed study with eighteen cases can be perused at the link.

talvisota tai finmark

The young country of Finland found itself in a very unenviable position just after the start of WWII. Until 1809, Finland had been a part of the Kingdom of Sweden, until Imperial Russia conquered the territory to provide a buffer-region (a march) to protect Saint Petersburg during the Napoleonic Wars. This freshly created Duchy of Finland, however, took the chance to break free during the chaos of successive revolutions and civil wars that visited Russia and was able to declare independence in 1918, just before the peace was brokered for WWI.

The non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union also defined the respective powers’ spheres of influence, and Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries were ceded to the Stalin regime—Germany’s violation of the agreement with invading Poland of course was the catalyst for starting the fighting—and though Finland had made strong connections with the other neutral Nordic nations, the Soviet Union tugged on Finland, expecting it to assimilate as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had done. During the Winter War (Talvisota in Finnish) of 1939 the Finns rebuffed the Red Army, using among other conventional weapons, an improvised incendiary device, called the Molotov cocktail, named after the Soviet foreign minister whose negotiations had sacrificed Finland in the first place. The advance on the part of Moscow had given the League of Nations (precursor to the United Nations) cause to reject Soviet membership. Germany did not hesitate in making overtures to the precarious Finnish government after the Soviet withdrawal, which I think to everyone’s surprise, the Finns entertained. Ostensibly, the arrangement could be seen as an opportunistic quid-pro-quo—giving Germany the staging ground for its invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa)—though whether that was already in the making is unclear—and the chance for Finland to reclaim resource-rich territory lost, but I suspect that the damning, besmirching decision was recognised as the only alternative available and the vanities of legacy and repute were quickly cast away. The Finnish foreign minister, Rudolf Holsti, chose what he felt was the lesser of two evils by committing his “government” and not his country to support the Nazi regime—worded carefully so that the decision could be overturned by the next government, as it was, and would hopefully preserve Finland as an independent state, which it did. The Soviets attacked Finland for this treachery, but it avoided annexation. Though the definition of what a democracy is a very subjective one, the UK and the Allies’ attack on Finland, who’s since reformed its reputation and I think this chapter of history goes unknown outside of Scandinavia, in what’s called the Continuation War (Jatkosota) marks by some estimates the only war-time hostility between two democratic powers.