The Crusades, Obama and so forth.

What do we all make of Obama's comments on the Crusades, and the rather outsized reaction to it?

WaPo: "Why Obama invoked the Crusades — and what it says about how he views terrorism"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/02/06/why-obama-invoked-the-...

Business Insider: "People are freaking out after Obama compared ISIS to the Crusades"
http://www.businessinsider.com/people-are-freaking-out-after-obama-compared-isis...

WSJ: "Obama’s Crusades"
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-crusades-1423256805

ABC News: "Historians Weigh in on Obama's Comparison of ISIS Militants to Medieval Christian Crusaders"
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/historians-weigh-obamas-comparison-isis-militants...

etc.

I think the clamor is the sound of his point being loudly missed, and the context of the speech being pointedly ignored.

"{Historical Event X} proves that Christianity foments violence" is an ancient, wheezing warhorse of an argument that's been around for . . . centuries at least. And thoughtful Christians have been meeting it, for just about as long, by observing that Christianity can't be defined as the sum of all the acts that individuals commit in the name of Christ.

I have to assume that the audience at the National Prayer Breakfast know that history . . . and grasped the implied analogy that President Obama was reaching for: Vile actions committed int he name of a religion, but at odds with its stated core principles, discredit the actors . . . but not the religion. Maybe they did . . . I don't know . . . I wasn't there. But the commentariat -- including at least some of my fellow historians, who should damn well know better -- seem to have missed the boat in spectacular fashion.

Maybe next time he should try the direct approach: "Y'all get torqued off when people beat Christianity over the head with the Massacre at Acre, or Salem, or Jim Crow . . . so don't go beating Islam over the head with ISIS, because it's the same damn fallacy."

(edited to keep "Historical Event X" from linking to Smith's Bible Dictionary :-) }

>2 ABVR:

I agree that condemning Islam on the basis of ISIS is a fallacy, but I strongly disagree with the attempt to "equalize" ISIS with the discrimination, persecution and oppression major institutions of Christianity enforced on populations in Europe and elsewhere. No, these things are absolutely not the same, or even much alike.

For what it's worth, several posters in the Depicting the Prophet Mohammed thread have indicated that it doesn't much matter what a religion did or believed 500 or a 1000 years ago; what matters is what they believe and do today. Thus, in that instance, it doesn't matter that depictions of the prophet were common in premodern Islam (especially of the Persian and then later Ottoman varieties), because nobody approves of them today.

I presume, therefore, that the Crusades and Inquisition, like depictions of the prophet, are simply historical oddities, without real relevance to what Christians do or believe today.

(I should add that >2 ABVR:'s analysis is spot-on.)

I presume, therefore, that the Crusades and Inquisition, like depictions of the prophet, are simply historical oddities, without real relevance to what Christians do or believe today.

You would presume thus, other opinions are available.

Your "historical oddities" affected millions of lives over centuries, and by "affected" I mean everything from oppressed to murdered. Even today, institutions and organisations of major Christian sects foster intolerance and even stoop to protecting crime.

I certainly hope ISIS will turn out to be a historical footnote--but there's no question that two millennia of Christian tyranny and its odd "little" excesses (what's centuries of Church-sanctioned rapine, torture and mass murder in the big picture?) is anything but.

Historians weigh in on Obama's comparison of ISIS militants to Crusaders (GMA / Yahoo):

“I don’t think the president knows very much about the crusades,” Thomas Madden, a historian at the University of St. Louis, told ABC News.

“He seems to be casting them as an example of a distortion of Christianity and trying to compare that to what he sees as a distortion of Islam in the actions of ISIS,” Madden said. “The initial goal of the Crusades was to give back lands to Christians that been conquered, due to Muslim conquests.”

The Crusades, which began in 1095 with the call of Pope Urban II to recover Jerusalem from Muslim rule, were a series of wars that lasted nearly two centuries. Although no reliable estimate of casualties caused by Crusaders exists, the massacre of over 2,700 Muslim prisoners by Richard the Lionheart outside Acre during the Third Crusade has been well documented and is remembered in the Middle East to this day.

Thomas Asbridge, a historian at the University of London, said in a statement to ABC News, “It is true to say, that by modern standards, atrocities were committed by crusaders, as they were by their Muslim opponents, it is however, far less certain that, by medieval standards, crusading violence could be categorized as distinctly extreme in all instances.”

Asbridge said he doesn’t have a problem with the president reminding the world that the Christian Church “advocated violence, and at times even encouraged its adherents to engage in warfare” but to suggest a causal link between ISIS and the distant medieval phenomenon of the Crusades is “grounded in the manipulation and misrepresentation of historical evidence.”

I guess what confuses me about Asbridge's final comment is that the President wasn't suggesting a causal link between ISIS and the Crusades.

Oh dear, a historian with poor reading comprehension, how novel.

The Crusades remain a sore point for the Roman Church and benighted conservative American Christianists, mostly because of the barbarism unleashed by Papal authority.

But "historical oddities"? Let's take anti-semitism:

from Jean Richard, The Crusades c. 1071-c.1291

“The pope’s message was spread by preachers. It was a monk, we are told, perhaps the abbot of Saint-Beigne of Dijon, Jarenton, who made the duke of Normandy, Robert Curthose, decide to depart. The popular preachers, the men Jacques Heers has called ‘God’s fools’, who already attracted large audiences to whom they preached the reform of morals, were associated in the publicizing of the pope’s message; Robert of Arbrissel is said to have been given a mandate to this effect. The most famous of these preachers was Peter the Hermit, whose surname evokes the eremetical movement of the late eleventh century, of which he was presumably a part. The monk (the Byzantines called him Peter of the Cowl), originally from near Amiens, has become the hero of a legend which portrays him as the instigator of the crusade, having received while on pilgrimage the complaints of the patriarch of Jerusalem, confirmed by a vision…

A recent study by J. Flori has once again emphasized the original features of the crusade as it was preached by these men, who went beyond the lines mapped out by Urban II in his speech at Clermont, in particular by introducing into their sermons an anti-semitic note; this was to result in the exactions of which the Jews of the Rhineland and the Danube valley were the principal victims. We know too little about the conditions in which the troops which followed these preachers were recruited to be sure of this. It is only likely that their sermons added to the proclamation of the indulgence and the effusion of graces promised to participants in the expedition the exhortations borrowed from their usual themes aimed at moral reform…” p. 29

“While it would be unjust to assume that the crusaders were necessarily all great sinners needing to expiate grave faults, as has sometimes been claimed, it is the case that many of them, professional soldiers or peasants, required on occasion to bear arms in military operations, were susceptible to the temptation to violence. The morals of the age were crude. The religious education of many crusaders no doubt remained rudimentary and their leaders had to impose a respect for discipline, which necessitated recourse to harsh measures; looters were sometimes hanged. The clergy present on the crusade might also, by their exhortations, exercise a restraining influence, or urge repentance. But not all of them were supervised with such rigour.

The inadequacy of supervision and the absence of preparation with regard to food supplies probably explain many of the incidents that occurred during the course of the crusaders’ march through Christian Europe. But other factors played a part, especially during clashes with the Jews. These first occurred, apparently sporadically, at the time of the departure of those who joined Peter the Hermit’s crusade in northern france, during the month of December 1095, when serious incidents are recorded in Rouen and Champagne. We know little about what happened, but they probably explain the dispatch of a letter by the Jews of France to their co-religionists in Germany, warning them that they would have to submit to the financial demands of the crusaders and facilitate their progress.

The journey of the first bands of crusaders through the Rhineland was accompanied by abuse of and exactions on the Jewish communities. There were probably asked to make financial contributions to the followers both of Peter the Hermit and of Godfrey of Bouillon. We should remember that such demands were regarded as bound up with the special status of the Jews, who were allowed by lords to practice loans at interest on their lands, they themselves on occasion taxing and even extorting money from them in order to meet their own financial needs.

The Jewish communities suffered much worse from the passage of other troops, in particular those led by the priest Folkmar and, most of all, Count Emich of Leiningen, who had made himself leader of a band composed of German and French lords which also included a popular element. On 3 May 1096 they launched an attack on the Jews of Speyer, a dozen of whom were killed, the bishop managing to protect the rest. Emich then arrived at Worms, where there was a massacre on a larger scale; the count of Leiningen’s crusaders murdered and pillaged and here, too, the bishop offered the shelter of his castle to the Jews. But after the crusaders left the local people attacked the castle and killed a large number of Jews, many of whom cut their children’s throats or killed themselves to escape a forced conversion. Similar scenes occurred in Mainz between 25 and 29 May, but on a larger scale, after which some groups left Count Emich, who continued his journey towards the Danube, to attack the Jewish communities of Cologne, Metz, Trier and the lower Rhine valley. Forced conversions followed from Ratisbon to Prague, without the same scenes of carnage; they were the work of the followers either of Peter the Hermit or of Folkmar.

The explosion of violence directed against the Jews which accompanied the crusade had not been part of the project inaugurated by Urban II…But there may have been other factors more directly linked to the crusade. The Church forbade attacks on Jews, and Alexander II had issued reminders of this at the time of the expeditions to Spain. But the Christians who left for the East might believe that the Jews, in the same way as the Muslims, were enemies of Christ. The followers of Emich of Leiningen were characteristically keener to convert Jews to Christianity than to massacre them. Emich himself is presented by Jewish chronicles as having been blessed by visions and the mark of the stigmata in his flesh, as a sign of his mission. This, according to Paul Alphandery, is in line with the eschatological perspectives which associated the crusade and the imminent Second Coming of Christ. For Emich and his followers, in accord with the conviction that the conversion of the Jewish people must precede this return, it was necessary to force baptism on the Jews and to punish the obstinacy of those who refused.” pp. 37-41

All this despite the commandments: "5. You shall not kill" and "10. You shall not covet
your neighbor's goods."

It's simply obscene to speak about the crusades or the inquisition or sheer damn all-encompassing THEFT and exploitation and parasitism going on for centuries as a "historical oddity".

Add to it that no one knows what's future going to be like and it's also flat-out stupid.

The Holocaust is a "historical oddity" from that point of view. What's a a few years of systematically burning people compared to the length of total German history? What's thousands of executioners compared to the millions of Germans past and present? But you know what--contemporary Germans by and large don't feel they can dismiss those few years as a "historical oddity"--and what's more, they feel so although they don't subscribe to Nazi ideology.

How much less possible is it to dismiss the crusades and inquisition and fucking paedophiles still active and protected, to someone who waves about the same book as Torquemada and the witchfinders.

Even if I were a Christian I'd die before I'd belong to something like the RCC or those bastards spreading homophobia in Africa.

The Crusades seems to bring on the crazies in some people.

My take:

1. Obama's comment was nothing like what critics seem to make of it. He said:

"And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

2. This comment seems basically correct to me.

3. Obama was not comparing the Crusades to ISIS anymore than he was "comparing" Jim Crow to ISIS. He was speaking to the evil that can be done in the name of religion. That this evil is of different sorts, amounts, origins and whatever else is perfectly obvious. As things stand, Obama's was general—and true—statement.

4. It's ambiguous, but I'd prefer to stress that evil acts were committed "during the Crusades" rather than "the Crusades were an evil act." This is what many conservatives seem to be getting at, although Obama's comments leave it unclear. I at least don't see anything inherently evil about sending armies to recover conquered Christian lands (e.g., First Crusade) or help embattled Christian lands (e.g., Second Crusade).

But evil acts during the Crusades? Good grief—an absolute ton. Evil acts (and attitudes) abound and, with fairness, we must judge them more harshly because they were done in the name of a peace-loving God. The widespread attacks on Jews in Eastern Europe? The slaughter of innocents at the fall of Jerusalem—not unusual, but still extremely dreadful? The turning of a crusade on Byzantium itself, leading to the sack of the city, the imposition of hated, foreign rule and, basically, the end of Byzantine power, even after the recovered the city? The list is very long.

>4 nathanielcampbell:

For what it's worth, several posters in the Depicting the Prophet Mohammed thread have indicated that it doesn't much matter what a religion did or believed 500 or a 1000 years ago; what matters is what they believe and do today. Thus, in that instance, it doesn't matter that depictions of the prophet were common in premier Islam (especially of the Persian and then later Ottoman varieties), because nobody approves of them today.

Was this what was argued? My read was that depictions of Mohammed were never common even in the pre-modern period, relatively speaking, and the exceptions can't be treated as representative of the Islamic tradition.

In terms of the Crusades, the Catholic Church still believes in just wars, which at least the first three Crusades could be argued to fit under (the fourth was an unspeakable crime). While there were evil acts, with the European pogroms being particularly unjustifiable, I have never seen it persuasively argued these were of any greater extent or magnitude than any other conflict we might try to argue was just.

The execution of the prisoners at Acre for example - It is unclear what other reasonable options were available to King Richard. He did not have the resources to hold them, and he could not let them go, because prisoners previously released had broken their oaths not to return to the fight. It was not gratuitous, he just did not have any other practical options.

>10 timspalding:
Thanks for including the mention of slavery and Jim Crow, which gets elided in some of the talk about how Obama is supposedly bitching about very distant stuff that happened 800 years ago. (That's what I'm hearing on Facebook.)

I'm surprised that no one seems to bring the massacre at Srebrenica. It was motivated by various factors, but Christian religious identity was one of them.

Alas, we're not talking about very distant stuff.

>10 timspalding:
unique to some other place, (or some other people)

I wonder if Obama was echoing Matthew 7:3. Granted the motes and beams are huge today but maybe that was he was trying to do.

3. Obama was not comparing the Crusades to ISIS anymore than he was "comparing" Jim Crow to ISIS. He was speaking to the evil that can be done in the name of religion.

Absolutely. (I think only malice and stupidity can insist on misreading Obama's meaning, but one might wish he hadn't bothered reaching for such a clichéd specific instance of "evil in the name of religion". Had he really cared about analogy, there was a ready example in Lebanon's Christian Phalange, as murder-minded an organisation as any in the Middle East.) But, Obama aside, count how few posts it took before someone implied that acceptance of the argument means that therefore NO evil done in the name of religion should be taken in account when judging that religion.

Extremism and fundamentalist oppression enforced by violence and terror are latent manifestations of every absolutism, whether on the margins (as ISIS currently) or institutionalised (several Islamist societies currently and the Christian church in general until very, very recently and locally still in many places).

Whether, when, why they will manifest themselves depends on the circumstances--in short, on history--given a chance to institute absolute rule, the Christians took it as readily as Muslims. Given a chance to spread religion by force, the Christians did it as readily as Muslims. (But contrary to that idiotic bromide, history never repeats itself; Islamists aren't "delayed Christians", three buses and a train behind the rest of the world. They are not behind anything, they are IN the world as much as anyone.)

There's nothing "odd" about fundamentalism within an absolutist framework. One can hope that this or that terrorist manifestation, grass roots or institutionalised, will remain a footnote or wither away, but these things are never "oddities".

I'm surprised that no one seems to bring the massacre at Srebrenica. It was motivated by various factors, but Christian religious identity was one of them.

Yeah. But western European civilization, and American civilization, is in some sense heir to the Crusades. The Papacy still exists, France still exists, England still exists, etc. The vicious hatreds of the Serbs against the Moslems isn't really "ours" in the same way--and indeed "we" (here being America) was the strongest opponent of the violence—far stronger than Europe was—and eventually ended it with force of arms. I don't feel the slightest guilt about it personally—I was out protesting in front of the White House at the time.

Still it illustrates the point, as you say.

I wonder if Obama was echoing Matthew 7:3. Granted the motes and beams are huge today but maybe that was he was trying to do.

Indeed. If we are to blame civilizations, we should note the general barbarity of the times, and apportion blame fairly in context. If we are to be Christians, IMHO, we are to do far better than that.

Absolutely

Shit, Lola and I agree :)

Given a chance to spread religion by force, the Christians did it as readily as Muslims.

A distinction can, I think, be drawn in the degree to which that is related to the basis of faith. Christian powers certainly spread when they could. But the core texts of the faith, the doctrines of the faith and it's "traditions" (in the Catholic/Orthodox sense) have little-to-nothing to say in favor of it. One may ascribe this merely to Christianity's history--having a leader who died, and who were completely out of power for three centuries--but it is true.

The same could not be said about Islam. Islam spread by violence from the start--under the very command of its founder. It's subsequent political spread in the middle east was almost entirely military. It had from its inception a developed, scriptural theology of religious violence. Classical Islamic law insists on the obligation to spread the faith through violence, and lays down how this is to be done. It's true that this violence has limits, which can restrain it—something the Crusaders didn't have. So long as certain conditions were met, Islam has a legal structure which allowed Christians to live and even prosper in Islamic cities—something Christianity rarely allowed. But it wasn't all roses. In its brutal behavior against captured cities, ISIS is following the same highly developed Islamic law, rooted in scripture, followed by Mehmet the Conquerer, etc.(1) Ditto the ISIS practice of offering captured Yazidis—understood as pagans, not People of the Book—a choice between conversion and death.

We should put this in a context. Most Muslims today have rejected the theology of permanent war. I haven't surveyed them, but I suspect most Muslims today would recoil in horror at the wanton murder of the Yazidis. And, yes, one may make lists of atrocious actions done by Christian countries sometimes in the name of Christianity. But there are some real distinctions here—distinctions which give a theology of religious violence more purchase in one tradition than the other.

---

1. Mehmet, who was not by no means a monster, even if he could sometimes be monstrous, actually preserved many of the churches in Constantinople, especially in areas that surrendered at the last minute, but in doing so he drew criticism then and especially later.

>10 timspalding: He was speaking to the evil that can be done in the name of religion.

I agree with Tim (and Lola!). There is a class of conservative in America that is so implacably anti-Obama that if he helped a little old lady across the street they'd accuse him of taking away the freedoms of the elderly, and that's what I hear coming to the fore in the outrage over what were really fairly innocuous remarks (which can be read in their entirety here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/02/05/remarks-president-national...

). But clearly the point is western countries, and America especially, can and have committed evil acts we considered justified at the time.

As for whether the Crusades were "evil" in themselves, well I suppose any attempted invasion is evil to the people being invaded. The invaders always have their own justifications but they are of little comfort to the people being attacked.

>16 southernbooklady:

A gif is appropriate here.



I suppose any attempted invasion is evil to the people being invaded

Sometimes it depends upon whom one understands as the "people." The rulers always feel invaded. Many of the areas the Crusaders invaded and cities they took, such as Antioch, were majority Christian. Jerusalem was apparently majority Christian too, but, to avoid Antioch's fate--betrayed by a sympathetic Christian--the rulers expelled all the Christians before the siege. It's certain the Jews and muslims that remained felt invaded. Indeed, it appears most of them were killed.

Sound bites aside, here's the more developed version of the Crusades that I've seen shared by a Christian friend who is intelligent, university educated and professionally very successful in his career.

http://christianheritagefellowship.com/the-crusades/

The vicious hatreds of the Serbs against the Moslems isn't really "ours" in the same way--and indeed "we" (here being America) was the strongest opponent of the violence—far stronger than Europe was—and eventually ended it with force of arms. I don't feel the slightest guilt about it personally—I was out protesting in front of the White House at the time.

Oh, please. This is racism pure and simple--anti-Serb or anti-Balkan, doesn't matter. Serbs ARE bloody "yours"/"ours". Show some respect for people who absorbed and resisted Ottoman rule for 400 years, preserving Christianity and identity ten times older than yours--and that of fucking Western Europe too. Who defended Austro-Hungary and lands beyond for centuries but frontier people, Magyars, Croats, Serbs? (Croatia's now extinct Serbian minority had origins precisely in those displaced populations that moved westward before the Ottoman advance and that got strategically placed, armed and trained for defence along the frontier.) Who had a Christian empire in the Balkans centuries before the genocide that gave you your country even started? Who was strategically used by the West in the war against the Turks, both as weapons and buffer zone?

Speaking of your country, I'd like to understand better what exactly makes a massacre like the one in Srebrenica more reprehensible than the Iraq war--that you personally supported--which is still tallying civilian victims in numbers dwarfing ten Srebrenicas--or than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that you justify, with hundreds of thousands of civilian victims in a blink of an eye? Or Vietnam and Laos?

Is it that your American murderers prefer to keep such a finely observed distance from the victims?

>12 krolik:

I'm surprised that no one seems to bring the massacre at Srebrenica. It was motivated by various factors, but Christian religious identity was one of them.

Well, you got one answer--Serbs aren't Christian like Americans are Christian, and what with their nasty vicious hatreds they probably aren't Christian and/or human at all. Never you mind how Turks feel about Serbs or Greeks or Bulgarians or Albanians or... or, indeed, anyone else in the Balkans about anyone else. Or why. Or whether it even makes sense to talk of "hatred".

There's another answer--that's ignorance (also present in the above). Very few people care to learn or think about Balkan politics, it's hard. Best to skip altogether.

As for me, I think you make an excellent point. What one sees in the example of Srebrenica is that Christians WILL commit massacre and ethnic cleansing when circumstances "allow". A pre-existing condition of war helps--is perhaps necessary for such a thing to occur. It's notable although inexplicable to armchair anthropologists that Balkan savages on occasion go through decades, even centuries, without massacring their neighbours. But then one or the other misses a donkey or a nubile daughter, or a drunk from one faith pisses against the temple of another, and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly there's war--and THEN there's no telling what may happen.

For example, Bosnian Serbs wanted to "cleanse" the Srebrena region for easier annexation to Serbia. Logical, isn't it? Yes, it actually is logical. Involves some horrific prepping and disposal of human resources, but hey--IF this had happened, say, 200 years ago--about the time the red Indian and the buffalo bit the dust--nobody'd even remember it today.

And do you think this would reflect on the status of "real Christians" for today's Serbs? I'm betting no more than slavery reflects on the status of "real Christian" Americans.

In history it's not what happened, it's when it happened, that matters the most to our morality, and WHERE it happens is the only safeguard of smug superiority.

We've seen just how Christian-like Americans behave outside the haven between the great seas.

>19 LolaWalser:

You mistake me. Of course it's something—racism and anti-islamism. I'm not downplaying it. I was explaining why, as SBL said, "no one seems to bring the massacre at Srebrenica." The massacres in the Balkans certainly speak to the ability for Christians to murder people.

I think one can differentiate to some degree based on how closely religion motivates an action. The Serb-Croatian-Bosnian conflict were more "religious nationalism" than a religious war per se. The intercommunal hatred had its ultimate roots in religion, and religious symbolism played a part, but, unlike the Crusades or the ISIS, the leaders generally did not make explicit religious arguments in favor of the violence—that God wanted them to fight the others, etc. Indeed, they were largely secular. As the US Ambassador put it:

"The major proponents of destructive nationalism weren’t driven by religious faith. Franjo Tudjman had been a communist most of his life; he converted to Catholicism when he turned to nationalist activities. Milosevic, a lifelong communist, never, as far as I know, entered a Serbian Orthodox church except for blatant political activities. I recall a visit he made for electoral reasons to a Serbian monastery on Mt. Athos in northern Greece. Not even the official photographs could disguise the disconcerted and uncomfortable look on his face." (Source)

Either way, religion does come in for blame. But we can't uncritically equate the ethnoreligious hatreds of the Balkans with the explicitly Islamic rhetoric and intentions of ISIS.

Speaking of your country, I'd like to understand better what exactly makes a massacre like the one in Srebrenica more reprehensible than the Iraq war--that you personally supported

Well, one is the intentional slaughter of innocents. The other is an invasion to topple an evil—indeed genocidal—dictator, which subsequently went badly but which was never an intentional attack on civilians.

which is still tallying civilian victims in numbers dwarfing ten Srebrenicas

And let's not forget the Normandy Invasions. We killed perhaps a million German and other-Axis soldiers. We are monsters.

Wait, maybe it matters what you intend in war, why you're making war and how you're going about it? No, can't be that!

or than Hiroshima and Nagasaki

I completely agree with you on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While our intention was not explicitly civilian, the weapons we used were incapable of differentiating, and these acts--together with the bombing of Dresden and so forth--are deep and permanent blots on the American conscience. Period.

Or Vietnam and Laos?

I'm surprised you didn't throw in Grenada. But if we're going to get into it, I think Vietnam was more of a mixed operation than, say, Nagasaki. But the civilian attacks were not morally defensible.

And let's not forget the Normandy Invasions. We killed perhaps a million German and other axis soldiers. We are monsters.

I was and am talking about civilians. Go back to 1944 and kill some more German soldiers, please.

Wait, maybe it matters what you intend in war, why you're making war and how you're going about it? No, can't be that!

No, it can't. What exactly is the difference between the 8000 slaughtered men and boys in Srebrenica and that number of men and boys slaughtered in Iraq by your soldiers? What exactly makes Bosnian Serb desire to annex the region to Serbia worse than your invasion of Iraq?

>19 LolaWalser: Serbs are labeled more or less the loose cannons of the Balkans, despite, for an easy one, Ante Pavelić and the NDH of WWII. My only objection to the above is that the Slovenes were left out--though they were used differently and to a lesser extent.
Further, regarding the run up to Srebrenica, the Serbs of Knin in Croatia were the powder-keg of the war. This was known, well-known, before the war, and saner foreign ministers than those of Germany, especially, urged restraint: don't encourage or even ALLOW declarations of independence until there is some resolution to the problem of the Serbs in Knin. But with much encouragement, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence: Slovenia, knowing they would be allowed (a farcical ten day war ensued), Croatia because he thought he could outsmart Milošević and grab more of Bosnia. Once the main Serbs were incarcerated in The Hague, attention dwindled, but a lot of dirt came out during the proceedings, dirt that implicated virtually everyone involved, including Slovenia's heroic Kučan. But really the most amazing land-grab of the war was the US taking Kosovo for all intents and purposes. Against a great deal of common sense, Kosovo was made independent--Bush went there and promised it, one year later it happened. Hence, there is really no argument against Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Albania expansion, in effect, was encouraged and allowed. The US did care--that is absolutely true. Europe looked on while the US acted: they came up with the asinine Dayton Accords that left the status quo in Bosnia, meaning a rogue Republica Srpska, along with a division between Croats and Bosnians. It is a mess that will not remain quiet forever.
What the caring US did do was arm the Croats so the Croats could in their turn wipeout the Serbs as viciously as anyone in that war wiped out anyone. Then sanctions were imposed. I have visited Beograd and spoken to victims of the sanction--an expert on US literature was particularly eloquent on the suffering, and that period had much to do with the following berserkery in Kosovo. Nato bombed in 1999, that is how much the US cared. The killing began in earnest in 1991. What did NATO bomb? Hundreds of factories, for one thing.

Lola's point about how refugees from the Turks were used resonates today. There is even a word to describe the phenomenon: Uskok. The Uskoks most famously were pirates active almost 100 years, during mostly the 16th century, but they were also inland, guarding fortresses throughout the fluid no man's land between Ottomans and Austros. The pirate Uskoks originally attacked only Ottoman ships, but when they realized that trade between Venice and the Ottomans, and even Vienna and the Ottomans, continued as usual, they began attacking whoever they felt like attacking. Interestingly, the Uskoki, whose name stems from the word 'jump' as in from place to place, as in refugees from the Ottomans, were Serb, Croatian, and any other Christians who fled and were ill-paid to fight, to 'man' the forts. Tito himself was probably of Uskok stock, as many endured in the Zagorje region of Croatia where he was born.

Oldie but goldie:

Militia boasts of role in Sabra massacre

Maybe you have to be a "fake" or a "bad" Christian, and almost certainly you have to be a cruel bastard to do what these people have done, but I will repeat this point unto my last breath: it doesn't matter, "the fakes" and even the cruel bastards don't matter until the circumstances bring them into action.

The cruel and horrific acts on so many sides in the Middle East aren't happening because people there are bad Christians, bad Muslims and bad Jews, but because they are in the circumstances they are in.

Change the circumstances, and you get real American Christians from the Midwest being bad, "fake" Christians in the Middle East.

I was and am talking about civilians. Go back to 1944 and kill some more German soldiers, please.

Well, we also killed civilians, French and German, without intending to. (We also killed some intending to, or at least using weapons that could not distinguish, which is close to the same thing, which I wholly and unreservedly condemn. Again, period.) The point is that it matters. Civilians died in Iraq. We did not intend to kill civilians.

What exactly makes Bosnian Serb desire to annex the region to Serbia worse than your invasion of Iraq?

Well, we didn't want to annex it, that's for starters. We wanted exactly the opposite--to prop up a government and get out, like we did the first. Second, implicit in this is that we didn't want to kill of all the Iraqis, or force them all to move to an adjacent country, as the Serbs did. If the Serbs had gotten their way, Bosnia would have been virtually cleared of Muslims, by foot or the grave. If we had gotten our way, we would have overthrown Saddam, installed a democratic government and gotten the heck out.

Change the circumstances, and you get real American Christians from the Midwest being bad, "fake" Christians in the Middle East.

The atheist has discovered the fallen state of mankind :)

While I think you're wrong on a lot, you're right here, or close to right. There but for the grace of God, Americans would be forced to choose between cooperating with evil—Nazi, ISIS, Serb, whatever—and resisting it. No doubt a high percentage of Americans would indeed fail.

As I said, the fallenness of mankind. All we can do is try again and again to internalize the evil of such things, and the importance of resistance. When I was a kid we had a very comprehensive holocaust education—a controversial program called Facing History and Ourselves. Growing up in Boston, with Holocaust survivors and even, when I was very young, survivors of the Armenian genocide, drilled into me the absolute importance of these events as critical to our moral compass. It's why I was outraged that Europe did nothing about the Bosnian war, and America did precious little for a long time. Ditto Rwanda. Ditto ISIS today.

Politics is hard, however. In retrospect, the Iraq war was a disaster. But I—and so many American liberals—were overinfluenced by the American involvement in the Balkans, and other events of the 90s. We believed that monsterous genocidal maniacs should be removed, that American armies had achieved a whole new level of effectiveness (and without messy civilian targets), etc. We also believed that Iraq had WMDs, whereas in fact they merely had had them. We also believed that Iraq was full of little Achmed Chalabis, who'd welcome America toppling their horrible dictator and turn to a no-doubt-imperfect but real democracy. We were wrong. This is to be sharply distinguished from going into Iraq because Christ wanted us to extermiante muslims, or whatever.

>20 timspalding: Vietnam can be viewed as an attenuated nuclear-style war on civilians. There was no need to fight it, no need to uphold a division of the country, no need especially to arm the French. There was no need to use napalm and white phosphorous. There was not only no need to bomb the entire region (Laos and Cambodia), there was ample evidence that bombing would not work.
Colonialism was dead and or dying everywhere. What possible excuse could there be to step in and take over for the French? (And in grotesque comedy, repeat virtually all of their 'mistakes'?).

>25 timspalding:

I could fight a point here and there, but I am so much closer to you than many Americans, that I won't. Overall Vietnam was a bad war, morally and prudentially.

>23 LolaWalser:

You annexed Texas. Austria annexed Bosnia. Tons of annexations going all over the place with nary a murmur. I'm not seeing how it's inherently a super-specially-evil political act. Eye of the beholder and all.

>24 timspalding:

Ehhhhh, no. Can't go with "falleness of mankind", not just philosophically, but because it's totally the opposite of what I'm talking about.

I mean that if you think you're behaving better than anyone else, you have to consider that you don't exist in a situation of war.

Which, by the way, I believe is also the prime reason you can think of dead Iraqi children as "collateral damage". That simply wouldn't be possible if Iraq were next door with bombs falling on your roof too.

>27 timspalding:

As you know, the mere annexation was not the issue.(1) Changing borders there was about ethnic cleansing—as it has been again and again in the Balkans, from the Greek War of Independence on.

Which, by the way, I believe is also the prime reason you can think of dead Iraqi children as "collateral damage".

Perhaps if they were next door, I would become irrational and fail to understand the difference between intentional targetting and unintentional. I would hope not. Incidentally, you said I should go back in time to attack German soldiers. Are you under the impression that this would involve no dead civilians?!

If you were next door to French people killed during the Normandy invasion, maybe you'd think it was just like the Americans aiming at civilians. People think irrational things when death is close to them. That doesn't excuse it when it is not.

---

1. FWIW, Texas was overwhelmingly American when it was annexed—the guess is 10/1 before the Republic was even declared, not counting slaves. And we waited nine years. I believe in local self-determination. There is a difference between that, and having irregulars sweep across a country killing the men, forcing everyone else to flee and burning their houses. It is remarkable how morally unhinged these comparisons can get with you.

>22 RickHarsch:

Serbs are labeled more or less the loose cannons of the Balkans,

I think of them as, at worst, the Americans of the Balkans: narcissism, megalomania, endless pleading of exceptionalism and bloody conviction of being the Chosen People.

>30 LolaWalser: They can certainly come off that way, but that is the loudest of them for the most part--and when the situation is ripe, the loudest of them are in power and you have lust for greater Serbia. Over time I have found Croats virtually the same, particularly in Hercegovina, likely because it has been the most vulnerable area. I don't know much about divisions within Serbia, but in Croatia the divisions are quite stark. Zagrebians might as well be Serbs to a war vet in Ploče.

But, to concede a point, the narrative of Kosovo Polje has its USist aspects: more Serbs fought with the Ottomans than did Croats or Albanians...many Serb warlords just went with who they thought would win.

>29 timspalding:

'1. FWIW, Texas was overwhelmingly American when it was annexed—the guess is 10/1 before the Republic was even declared, not counting slaves. And we waited nine years. I believe in local self-determination. There is a difference between that, and having irregulars sweep across a country killing the men, forcing everyone else to flee and burning their houses. It is remarkable how morally unhinged these comparisons can get with you.'

It is remarkable how morally unhinged were those who swept across a continent, simply TAKING it at all costs.

Anyway, offering the time frame you do is bizarre. And, of course it leaves open such options as cleansing Palestinians, while white-washing Kosovar Albanians.

It is remarkable how morally unhinged were those who swept across a continent, simply TAKING it at all costs.

I think conquest of much of the USA was wrong in many important ways. I think Americans then were guilty of extensive ethnic cleansing—and treaty-breaking, etc. I think current Americans have a special debt to the remaining Native Americans, which, while not requiring us to vacate half the country, is nowhere near to being paid.

We were speaking about the annexation of Texas. Similarly, we weren't talking about Israel. You can't just name conflicts and assume you know what I think of them and attack me for that false belief.

Actually, I wasn't bent on comparing annexations so much as pointing out how this or that (annexation, in this example) political act is deemed A-OK or foul depending on circumstances (yes, still on that theme).

There's no question that describing annexation of Texas as somehow righteous because, SELF-DETERMINATION!, is wrong wrong wrong--or then why not welcome everyone everywhere annexing the regions--so common along borders especially!--with a sizeable diaspora? This should warm the cockles of everyone from France to Mongolia at least.

The US could annex Canada tomorrow and some might object, but who'd DO anything about it?

And thus it would be RIGHT by goddam and gent.

But I'm afraid I'll remain morally unhinged regarding Iraq, which just won't compute in my brain as obviously less reprehensible than Srebrenica.

>34 LolaWalser:

You seem to have a problem with differences of scale and intent. I support self-determination of regions, especially if done democratically, carefully and under the rule of law. It is only reasonable that people should have the government they want. Under certain circumstances, that includes the right to self-determination.

This is not an invitation for Canada to claim California. Nor is it the peculiar notion that might makes right. It's a general moral principle fundamental to liberal, democratic political thinking (and perhaps the Declaration of Independence's chief impact on the world). It is no more similar to "Canada is allowed to claim California" than supporting democracy is supporting a Nazi takeover of Congress. That you won't draw distinctions in such matters is not, I think, my problem.

>33 timspalding: I mentioned Israel because of past disputes that have led me to think I have a good idea what you think about it. And annexations in general seem to be the topic, no? If I am wrong that you find the 'annexation' of Palestine not morally unhinged, I apologize.

>35 timspalding:

If scale matters, Iraq is far bigger than Srebrenica (or actually all of the 1990s Balkan wars).

Intention is the tiling of the nether regions. I wonder what hinging your ethics take when you can support invading foreign countries and "democratic self-determination" at the same time.

>36 RickHarsch:

I think Israel fits perfectly into all this. Tim is on record as waving away Balkan national mythologies as silly dreams, but defending the rights of Zionists with what--to the morally unhinged like myself--look like far worse claims.

I don't think self-determination played any part in the annexation of Golan.

>35 timspalding:

I do not support the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, either future and theoretical or the creeping annexation of the settlements. The creation of the state of Israel was a much more complex thing. It involved quantities of ethnic cleansing and that matters. If I were alive then, I'd have supported the UN "Partition Plan." (It deserves mentioning that, if Israel had lost the 1948 War, the situation would have been pretty either!) At this point, however, I don't think it would work to resettle millions of Palestinian refugees within Israel, nor do I think the morality there is simple. The right to return to your land is not absolute, when new generations are living there. This applies to Greeks and Turks, Germans and Czechs, Finns and Russians, etc. But some accommodation should be made.

I wonder what hinging your ethics take when you can support invading foreign countries and "democratic self-determination" at the same time.

Invasion can be justified on other grounds. For example, we invaded Germany. We invaded Iraq to neutralize a threat—a threat we were wrong about. The population of Iraq was largely glad that we overthrew Saddam; he was a hated man. They were not happy with the denouement. We bear some responsibility for this. We have, as usual, overreacted, and are now doing precious little to defeat ISIS, an organization worse even than Saddam.

>39 timspalding:
'We invaded Iraq to neutralize a threat—a threat we were wrong about.' That was known to be false before the invasion; that has been proven since to be false; and the word 'neutralize', like #39's tender 'But some accommodation should be made.' is bloodless speech and is in contexts like these Orwellian.

Re: Israel. The annexation of Palestine is different because as you say, 'It involved quantitites of ethnic cleansing and that matters.' How further ethnic cleansing elsewhere logically extends from that in Europe I will never understand (people get emotionally 'carried away', but organizations and apologists nearly 70 years later?)

ETA: ON the iraq 'threat': http://crooksandliars.com/2015/02/jon-stewart-brian-williams-scandal-finally

It would have been foolish for President Obama to have referenced any recent foreign examples of Christian failings. He has a world audience and condemnation of members of that audience will not their opinion of you. Waving sticks undoes a lot of the good talking softly and offering carrots does.

Mandaeans, Copts, Samaritans, Ezidis, and Zoroastrians, are still existent in the Middle East. In the West none of the indigenous religions survive.

It is was not just muslims that Christians fought, Charlemagne lined his pagan Saxons up and offered them a stark choice, a new shirt if they were baptised and a sword edge if they were not. All over Europe sacred sites were destroyed and taken over. Whether you worshiped at Donar's Oak, or embraced Chatarism, you met the sharp edge of a sword.

>42 SimonW11:

That's an interesting topic to explore. Some scattered thoughts:

1. The fact that Europe had no scriptural, credal religions—except Judaism, which survived—may be enough of an explanation. East and west, there's a sharp difference between happened to credal religions and polytheistic or "pagan" ones. The latter has been lost everywhere in the ancient European and middle-eastern world.

It's worth thinking about why, and I propose two explanations:

a. that both Christianity and Islam tended to be harder on these--in the west, Jews survived where pagans did not. Under Islam it was common to spare groups that could claim to be "people of the book" (Jews, Christians, sometimes Zoroastrians, sometimes other groups), but give pagans the choice between conversion and the sword.

b. non-credal polytheistic religions generally can't stand up to credal ones. Almost everywhere in the world such religions are in a continuous process of shrinking, with no real means of returning. Conversion from credalism to paganism is extremely rare. It's notable that Julian the Apostate was raised Christian, and, when emperor, commissioned something very like a catechism for paganism, laying down what pagans believe. It was, of course, the first such document, and that's telling.

The big success here is indian polytheism, which adopted some of the habits of mind of the credal religions. Tell an ancient Greek that, in the Congo they worship such-and-such and, if the goes, he'll accede to it, and have no thought that he's leaving or joining any religion. Tell a Hindu to worship a Congolese god and he'll refuse, and he'll go on worshipping Indian gods wherever he is. This was also the big success within Islam. Muslims were a small minority in India, and couldn't rely on the mass conversions they saw in North Africa or Iran. Stamping out the Indian pagans just wasn't possible, and never happened.

2. It's certainly true that—overall—classical Islam was nicer to Jews and Christians than Catholic Christianity was. This cannot be said too much.

3. The history of Islamic approaches to these minority religions is not much less grim. The choice between conversion and the sword was common, and repression, massacres and other bad stuff was constant . (See Wikipedia: Persecution of Zoroastrians .) The largest Zoroastrian community exists because they escaped outside of Islam, to India. In Iran virtually all their sacred sites were taken over or destroyed.

As for Yazidis, because they had no real claims to being People of the Book, and given the way Islam associated their worship with that of the devil, they were subject to repeated genocidal attacks. This is why they survive only in mountainous regions, where they could ride them out.

"Paganism," by which is meant "in Europe" to be the old Greek-Roman (and Celtic which the Romans also included, in aspects) religion, survived as "folk tales" and yes "fairy stories" literally, with the polytheistic gods "reduced" to trolls, fairies and other "blithe" spirits and it continues to this day as "superstition" and of course as "All Hallow's eve" eh.

And the "subtext" of ROMAN Catholic Christianity is the very plethora of "saints" to pray to, not to mention the BVM, the "Blessed Virgin Mary," who is as close to goddess status as the church may allow. In that sense Catholicism echoes Hinduism in that the "polytheistic" aspects are "bridges" of sorts to THE concept of "God" which is singular. And even protestants have "the trinity" eh.

Islam and Judaism are much less "tolerant" of "lesser gods" although Muhammed basically has the status (if never the title) of "son of God" and in many respects so do Moses or Abraham.

I found what was said above about "credalism" very interesting and relevant but I think there's always a polytheistic penchant in human spirituality no matter "the creed"...

key I think to their survival was that the religions I listed are not idolatrous.

All religions have "idols" -- it's only the ones one DOESN'T believe in that are "idolatrous"...