John Ray, a strong friend of the State of Israel, runs the excellent Dissecting Leftism Blog that I requently read. Recently he published a series of articles on the fate of the Jews and the survival of the English...The articles can be found on http://tongue-tied2.blogspot.com/2008/12/fate-of-jews-some-of-things-i-have.html
Here is my reply - Part I
To John
I am a regular reader of your blog, as mentioned in earlier correspondence, and have much admiration for your way of thinking especially your strict adherence to logic and reason. While I don’t agree with you on some points (usually economics) I find your insight into history refreshing. It’s a shame that you have received some abuse (probably from a few of my co-religionists) with respect to the ‘Success of the Jews’ theme that you have been expanding on but cooler heads are too often a rarity these days.
Nevertheless I wish to add some objections to your core thesis that agues that the English have survived in style for the last millennium and a half. While on the surface this carries with it an apparent truism it overlooks the fact that English history, despite a popular misconception, has not been in and of itself peaceful. Looking at the period after 1066 (the time when England was last successfully invaded) Albion has witnessed on local soils rebellions by the Saxons against Norman Feudalism, the Baron Wars, Peasant Rebellions, the War of the Roses (which really spanned the era between Richard II and Henry VII), the English Civil War, the Jacobite War and the insurrection of Monmouth. If one adds in the American Revolution (which for all intent of purpose can be looked at as an internal struggle between English speaking people) it is evident that the English have had a long history of warring amongst themselves.
In addition if you add in the numerous English lives (mostly commoners) that have been lost in the pursuit of Empire on a global basis –not to mention those lives foregone in conflicts with Spain, the Netherlands, France, Scotland, Denmark, the United States etc – the idea of surviving with style, at least how it reflects down to the bulk of the populace, is found wanting.Now I will not deny the fact the English have been very successful in transmitting their culture on a worldwide basis. The dominance of the English language and systems of education and governance attest to this phenomenon but it has come at a price which I believe cannot be swept so easily under the proverbial rug.The English are a very admirable people (I have been somewhat of an anglophile for most of my life although my enthusiasm has waned as of late as British institutions which I once respected continue to shed ground to the Stealth Jihad) but the accident of geography that has afforded them island status clearly played a large role in their success (yes the Scots and Welsh could harass the English but by shear force of number were unlikely to ever win the upper hand….).
Winston Churchill was correct in arguing that the island situation was an advantage that could not last forever and that Britain would need to work on establishing alliances to ensure survival. This was not a novel idea at the Empire level (regional alliances with the Iroquois, the Basuto, the Sikhs were common) but in the more critical area of European politics it was particular loathsome to the English mindset. After the Napoleonic Wars and the obvious realization that the European Powers (Russia, Prussia and Austria) were intent on turning back the forces of liberalism and nationalism (via the Concert System) Britain retreated into a type of ‘splendid isolation’ where it focused on growing its Empire alone without outside interference. With the possible exception of the Crimean War this attitude characterized British geo-politically thinking up to the Second Anglo Boer War.
It was only after the South African conflict, where British resources were stretched to breaking point by the guerilla tactics of well organized militia that the need for global allies would become a necessity. In fact one can pinpoint this change in policy to the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Agreement of 1902, a framework that set the foundation for the Entente Cordiale with France and the Anglo-Russian Entente.However even in this regard the Brits were slow to the post, for one the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy was already well established. Germany also had cultivated an ally in the Ottoman Turks. One could even argue (with hindsight) that Britain’s decision to enter into a system of alliances and thereby join the trend was ultimately what caused the weakening of the Empire by forcing London to engage in a vortex of events leading to the disastrous Great War (although I suspect that you will argue otherwise using the pretext that the growing influence of German Naval Power made war inevitable).
I believe that the success of the English people resides with a combination of factors. They are a very resourceful people (their pragmatic creativity during the First Industrial Revolution and beyond bears this out) but so does a commitment to the free inquiry. The former has its structural origins in the English Reformation, but was further augmented by the battle against autocracy during the Civil War and the Hanoverian transfer of power during the reign of George I. These changes were not as forthcoming amongst Britain/England’s continental rivals who were forced to delay the coming of modernism to the Enlightenment Period.
However what has most served the English is their ability to adapt – to take the best from the outside and make it somehow English. They did this with the Roman system of laws, Grecian Rationalism, Judeo-Christian Ethics, Stoicism and Iberian naval proficiency. It is this same characteristic that the family branch of the English, the Americans, have utilized with remarkable success today (Another island nation the Japanese are similar to the English in this regard).
It is this adaptation that has created the illusion that the English have resisted invasion. While no army since William the Conqueror have overwhelmed the English on the home front since the 11th century (although the Hungarians humbled the English football team at Wembley in the 1950s) it is equally true that the English monarchy has resided in the hands of foreigners since then. The Normans were of a Franco/Norse stock, the House of Plantagenet, and its spin offs in Lancaster and York were all Gallic, the Tudors were Welsh, The Stuarts - Scottish and Hanover, Saxe-Coburg and Windsor were/are all German. Yes not since the ill-fated Harold Godwinson (aka Harold II) has England had a monarch of English ethnicity and before that power was invested for some time with Danish kings such as Canute and Hardicanute.
What is most remarkable though is that within a short period the English turned these foreigners into extensions of England itself…..so that their ethnicity is more a matter of historical detail than anything else.
However with each addition and influx of change a point of saturation is neared. Changes are rarely neutral with respect to key factors. The utility of adaptation carries with it a double-edged outcome. At what point in a series of changes is the system or the people no longer English?
British Internationalism, the overriding policy of adaptation, that dominates the nation in 2008 is a consequence of this underlying tendency, however in subjecting itself to the relativism of multiculturalism the Brits seem to have shot the bolt and traded away the base in one foul swoop. Could it be that the English will simply whither away? Over adapted themselves to death? …Maybe there is a grace in this style but I am at a loss to find it. I am working on the Jewish side of the argument and will send you a reply soon……….
Sincerely
Gavin Kanowitz
Worldoreason
Monday, December 29, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
On a White President in South Africa
Source: http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/sandilememela/2008/11/19/the-anc-may-not-be-ready-for-a-white-president-in-a-100-years/
Taken from Article by: Sandile Memela
The ANC’s commitment to non-racialism is unquestionable but it may need another 100 years to deliver a white president. This is not a problem of the organisation’s principles and ideals per se. Instead, it is the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.
Of course, when it first started out in 1912, the ANC was an exclusive African liberation movement. Its primary purpose was the total liberation of African people. So, whoever joined the organisation later was required to put the interests of African people, first.
What that means is that if you were Indian, coloured or white who joined the ANC, you accepted that you were part of the family because you truly believed that Africans had a right to self-determination, especially the leadership of their own indigenous organisation.
Significantly, in the late 1950s, the ANC experienced an ideological split when Robert Sobukwe suspected that non-Africans exerted too much influence and thus were taking over the leadership of the ANC. According to him, this compromised the rights of Africans to fight for the return of their land and for political self-determination. As far as Sobukwe was concerned, this South Africa was, essentially, a black man’s country and whoever chose to live and die here would do so under the terms of African people.
In the 1950s the ANC would not budge from non-racialism and thus Sobukwe was allowed to leave with those who did not buy into the notion of non-racialism. Thus in 1959 the PAC was launched.
The ANC survived it first major split and grew stronger because of its unwavering commitment to non-racialism. In fact, it was African nationalists in the ANC who suggested that Indians, coloureds and whites should organise themselves (along racial lines,) first, to join what later became known as the Congress Alliance. But this was a partnership that would, primarily, work towards African liberation and political liberation.
For the rest go to the source
Taken from Article by: Sandile Memela
The ANC’s commitment to non-racialism is unquestionable but it may need another 100 years to deliver a white president. This is not a problem of the organisation’s principles and ideals per se. Instead, it is the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.
Of course, when it first started out in 1912, the ANC was an exclusive African liberation movement. Its primary purpose was the total liberation of African people. So, whoever joined the organisation later was required to put the interests of African people, first.
What that means is that if you were Indian, coloured or white who joined the ANC, you accepted that you were part of the family because you truly believed that Africans had a right to self-determination, especially the leadership of their own indigenous organisation.
Significantly, in the late 1950s, the ANC experienced an ideological split when Robert Sobukwe suspected that non-Africans exerted too much influence and thus were taking over the leadership of the ANC. According to him, this compromised the rights of Africans to fight for the return of their land and for political self-determination. As far as Sobukwe was concerned, this South Africa was, essentially, a black man’s country and whoever chose to live and die here would do so under the terms of African people.
In the 1950s the ANC would not budge from non-racialism and thus Sobukwe was allowed to leave with those who did not buy into the notion of non-racialism. Thus in 1959 the PAC was launched.
The ANC survived it first major split and grew stronger because of its unwavering commitment to non-racialism. In fact, it was African nationalists in the ANC who suggested that Indians, coloureds and whites should organise themselves (along racial lines,) first, to join what later became known as the Congress Alliance. But this was a partnership that would, primarily, work towards African liberation and political liberation.
For the rest go to the source
Those almost Jewish Puritans
Source: http://www.jewishledger.com/articles/2008/11/21/news/on_the_cover/news01.txt
by Ted Roberts
Why is it important for us American Jews of 2008 to know that in 1649, a Puritan couple, asked for a repeal of Edward I's Act of Jewish banishment - in effect for 350 years?The key fact is their Puritanism - a form of Christianity - that accented the Old Testament and drove them to sympathy with Judaism. It was the core of the faith of those who founded our America.All this reminds me of the best theological secret of the past millennium - especially to Jews. It concerns those wandering, persecuted Puritans. Strange people. Revolutionary in their religious beliefs. They loved the Old Testament - our Humash - unanimously swear to it.Before you slice into your traditionally rare, half-done turkey, next Thanksgiving give a thought to those strange birds, the Pilgrims. What a rare breed they were - typical of the exotics who stand the world on its head. Hacking, sniffing, trembling with chills in the late New England Fall, they sat down to the first Thanksgiving. They gave thanks, as we do, before every meal. More prayerful than usual because it was their Seder equivalent. And so what if half of them had fluttered skyward that year? Those celestial beings were happier than the earthy survivors, since they were wrapped in warm clouds and dined to their full at heavenly tables. So, laugh and dance like the Chasids. You see, they believed in Heaven.The secret of their Jewish leanings is not widely known to most rabbis and their flock. These alienated folks left the 17th Century urbanity of London for the stone-cold wilderness of savage North America. The "New Zion", they called it - does that give you a clue? "The Puritans' mania for the Old Testament developed directly out of their experience of persecution by the established church." So says the renowned historian Barbara Tuchman in her 1957 book Bible and Sword.. She verifies my vague suspicions that our American forefathers were SO Jewish that you wonder why the old pictures don't show them in yarmulke and tiffilin.
According to Tuchman, fleeing persecution, the Puritans saw themselves as 16th Century Israelites; named their kids Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Rebecca. Did you know that the seal of Yale and Harvard is in Hebrew of all things. "They paid a respect to the Hebrew language that they refused to the language of their gospels...." Tuchman tells us. Even McCauley, the greatest of English historians, rants about their "Hebraic leanings". It was no secret - they flew the flag of Moses and metaphorically, culturally waged war with episcopal Christianity. Another historian, Cunningham, sums it up neatly: "The general tendency of Puritanism was to discard Christian morality and to substitute Jewish habits in its stead".
For the rest go to the source
by Ted Roberts
Why is it important for us American Jews of 2008 to know that in 1649, a Puritan couple, asked for a repeal of Edward I's Act of Jewish banishment - in effect for 350 years?The key fact is their Puritanism - a form of Christianity - that accented the Old Testament and drove them to sympathy with Judaism. It was the core of the faith of those who founded our America.All this reminds me of the best theological secret of the past millennium - especially to Jews. It concerns those wandering, persecuted Puritans. Strange people. Revolutionary in their religious beliefs. They loved the Old Testament - our Humash - unanimously swear to it.Before you slice into your traditionally rare, half-done turkey, next Thanksgiving give a thought to those strange birds, the Pilgrims. What a rare breed they were - typical of the exotics who stand the world on its head. Hacking, sniffing, trembling with chills in the late New England Fall, they sat down to the first Thanksgiving. They gave thanks, as we do, before every meal. More prayerful than usual because it was their Seder equivalent. And so what if half of them had fluttered skyward that year? Those celestial beings were happier than the earthy survivors, since they were wrapped in warm clouds and dined to their full at heavenly tables. So, laugh and dance like the Chasids. You see, they believed in Heaven.The secret of their Jewish leanings is not widely known to most rabbis and their flock. These alienated folks left the 17th Century urbanity of London for the stone-cold wilderness of savage North America. The "New Zion", they called it - does that give you a clue? "The Puritans' mania for the Old Testament developed directly out of their experience of persecution by the established church." So says the renowned historian Barbara Tuchman in her 1957 book Bible and Sword.. She verifies my vague suspicions that our American forefathers were SO Jewish that you wonder why the old pictures don't show them in yarmulke and tiffilin.
According to Tuchman, fleeing persecution, the Puritans saw themselves as 16th Century Israelites; named their kids Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Rebecca. Did you know that the seal of Yale and Harvard is in Hebrew of all things. "They paid a respect to the Hebrew language that they refused to the language of their gospels...." Tuchman tells us. Even McCauley, the greatest of English historians, rants about their "Hebraic leanings". It was no secret - they flew the flag of Moses and metaphorically, culturally waged war with episcopal Christianity. Another historian, Cunningham, sums it up neatly: "The general tendency of Puritanism was to discard Christian morality and to substitute Jewish habits in its stead".
For the rest go to the source
A Quick Look at Piracy
Taken from Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/22/piracy-somalia
Pirate is a forgiving word. Thanks to at least two centuries of British and American romanticism - Lord Byron to Johnny Depp - it implies a man (or in two famous instances, a woman) who is not wholly bad and many moral levels professionally above footpads, rapists and serial killers. For instance, is there an epoch known to historians as the Golden Age of Rape? No, but sometimes in books about buccaneers you will find the Golden Age of Piracy, which in British terms lasted from the 1650s till about 1725.
In some respects, the pirates of Somalia are behaving in the classic tradition. According to reports, they are spending millions of dollars of ransom money on imported food, alcohol, drugs and prostitutes, just as predecessors debauched and befuddled themselves whenever possible with tobacco, rum and whoring. In other ways, though, their behaviour (so far) matches the romantic ideal rather than the brutal reality.
More than 200 kidnapped sailors are being well looked after on a dozen hijacked ships that have been moored at the fishing port of Eyl; or, in the case of the Sirius Star, their biggest prize, a few hundred miles down the Somali coast at Harardheere. No harm has been done to them. What their captors want are dollars from the ships' owners, not the blood of their crews. With this in mind, a Somali pirate with historical leanings might scoff at the outrage of David Miliband and consider the case of Thomas Avery, whose old exploits in the present Somali hunting ground, the Gulf of Aden, make modern piracy look like peacetime manoeuvres by a marine branch of the Fabian Society.
According to the historian David Cordingly's account, in his book Life Among the Pirates, Avery was a typical British pirate - "of middle height, rather fat, with a dissolute appearance". He was born in Plymouth in 1653, served in the Royal Navy, and then seized command (the captain was drunk at the time) of an English privateer - a privately owned ship licensed by the government to attack the state's enemies. By 1695, he was prowling at the entrance to the Red Sea waiting for the pilgrim fleet that sailed every year from India to Mecca, filled with valuables, because pilgrimage was also an opportunity to trade, and protected by the heavily armed ships of the Great Mogul in Delhi. Avery got lucky. One of his cannonballs dismasted the Great Mogul's flagship, which was not only carrying piles of gold and silver but also many slave girls and, it was said, one of the Great Mogul's daughters. What Cordingly calls "an orgy of rape, torture and plunder" lasted days and Avery's crew got away with the equivalent of £1,000 each.
The English government was embarrassed - it needed to preserve the East India Company's relationship with the Mogul emperor - and eventually caught six of the pirates and had them hanged. Avery himself vanished; rumour suggests he died in poverty in Devon, rather like Ben Gunn at the end of Treasure Island who spent a thousand pounds in 19 days and was "back begging on the twentieth". Like most pirates, Avery was an amoral opportunist who switched easily among the blurred divisions between privateering, buccaneering and sailing as a navy or merchant seaman (by the end of the 17th century the average age of a pirate was 27 - roughly the same as Somalia's modern pirates - and almost all had begun their working lives in the Royal Navy or on cargo ships).
Still, his legacy was profound: you might even argue that he began the process that enabled the careers of Byron's Corsair, Long John Silver, Captain Hook and Errol Flynn, and has brought us to the recently announced Pirates of Caribbean, Part IV. A now obscure dramatist, Charles Johnson, took the story of Avery's barbarous raid in the Gulf of Aden and turned it into a play, The Successful Pyrate, in which all the horrid facts were left behind.
Avery, now King Arviragus of Madagascar, became the first of piracy's noble outlaws. A captured ship is brought to him. It contains the Mogul's granddaughter, the fair Zaida. Arviragus falls in love, but Zaida loves another: one of her fellow captives, the young Aranes. Disaster! Revelation! Aranes turns out to be Arviragus's long lost son.
The play opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1713, the first in a succession of pirate melodramas that went on being produced well into the 19th century, until Gilbert and Sullivan's satirical The Pirates of Penzance put an end to them. But where did writers do their research, supposing any were needed? The answer comes from the same period in a book by a Captain Johnson, who in 1724 published A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, which ran to several editions and was translated into French.
Nobody knows who Johnson was: a theory that Daniel Defoe was the author has now been discredited. But his book became the seminal text. Out of it came the public's first appreciation of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd and the two women pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Robert Louis Stevenson consulted it, when, in a Highland cottage during the wet and chill summer of 1881, he began to devise an entertainment for his stepson. Nobody in Johnson's book says "yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" but there is a vivid description of "a fellow with a terrible pair of whiskers, and a wooden leg, being stuck around with pistols ... swearing and vapouring on the quarter deck".
By the time Stevenson invented John Silver, real pirates were at best a folk memory in the western world. A few might survive in the South China Sea, but efficient navies had destroyed them elsewhere. Motivation had also been reduced. Pirates often fenced their stolen cargoes to smugglers, but free trade had dramatically lowered import duties and smuggling died as an occupation.
The way was open for the pirate as an antihero, the rebel against society, or simply a comic character as in Captain Hook. As Pieter van der Merwe of the National Maritime Museum says: "Blackbeard was a terrible man - a psychopath - but piracy had been effectively wiped out in the 18th century. You forgot the fact that it was a curse.'
It became a hobby. Philip Gosse, the son of litterateur and memoirist Edmund Gosse, was a doctor who collected nearly 500 books on piracy and in 1932 published an authoritative history of the subject (his library is now the Gosse collection at the National Maritime). And next it became a study, with historians anxious to revise or enlarge our previously simple ideas. Some pirates were proto-feminists and others gay (Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, 1983). In The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker define pirate ships as "multinational, multicultural and multiracial" institutions - fine little democracies - that resisted the oppression of the capitalist merchant shipping industry. Pirates were "egalitarian, class-conscious and justice-seeking" and always shared their spoils.
For the rest gp to the source
Pirate is a forgiving word. Thanks to at least two centuries of British and American romanticism - Lord Byron to Johnny Depp - it implies a man (or in two famous instances, a woman) who is not wholly bad and many moral levels professionally above footpads, rapists and serial killers. For instance, is there an epoch known to historians as the Golden Age of Rape? No, but sometimes in books about buccaneers you will find the Golden Age of Piracy, which in British terms lasted from the 1650s till about 1725.
In some respects, the pirates of Somalia are behaving in the classic tradition. According to reports, they are spending millions of dollars of ransom money on imported food, alcohol, drugs and prostitutes, just as predecessors debauched and befuddled themselves whenever possible with tobacco, rum and whoring. In other ways, though, their behaviour (so far) matches the romantic ideal rather than the brutal reality.
More than 200 kidnapped sailors are being well looked after on a dozen hijacked ships that have been moored at the fishing port of Eyl; or, in the case of the Sirius Star, their biggest prize, a few hundred miles down the Somali coast at Harardheere. No harm has been done to them. What their captors want are dollars from the ships' owners, not the blood of their crews. With this in mind, a Somali pirate with historical leanings might scoff at the outrage of David Miliband and consider the case of Thomas Avery, whose old exploits in the present Somali hunting ground, the Gulf of Aden, make modern piracy look like peacetime manoeuvres by a marine branch of the Fabian Society.
According to the historian David Cordingly's account, in his book Life Among the Pirates, Avery was a typical British pirate - "of middle height, rather fat, with a dissolute appearance". He was born in Plymouth in 1653, served in the Royal Navy, and then seized command (the captain was drunk at the time) of an English privateer - a privately owned ship licensed by the government to attack the state's enemies. By 1695, he was prowling at the entrance to the Red Sea waiting for the pilgrim fleet that sailed every year from India to Mecca, filled with valuables, because pilgrimage was also an opportunity to trade, and protected by the heavily armed ships of the Great Mogul in Delhi. Avery got lucky. One of his cannonballs dismasted the Great Mogul's flagship, which was not only carrying piles of gold and silver but also many slave girls and, it was said, one of the Great Mogul's daughters. What Cordingly calls "an orgy of rape, torture and plunder" lasted days and Avery's crew got away with the equivalent of £1,000 each.
The English government was embarrassed - it needed to preserve the East India Company's relationship with the Mogul emperor - and eventually caught six of the pirates and had them hanged. Avery himself vanished; rumour suggests he died in poverty in Devon, rather like Ben Gunn at the end of Treasure Island who spent a thousand pounds in 19 days and was "back begging on the twentieth". Like most pirates, Avery was an amoral opportunist who switched easily among the blurred divisions between privateering, buccaneering and sailing as a navy or merchant seaman (by the end of the 17th century the average age of a pirate was 27 - roughly the same as Somalia's modern pirates - and almost all had begun their working lives in the Royal Navy or on cargo ships).
Still, his legacy was profound: you might even argue that he began the process that enabled the careers of Byron's Corsair, Long John Silver, Captain Hook and Errol Flynn, and has brought us to the recently announced Pirates of Caribbean, Part IV. A now obscure dramatist, Charles Johnson, took the story of Avery's barbarous raid in the Gulf of Aden and turned it into a play, The Successful Pyrate, in which all the horrid facts were left behind.
Avery, now King Arviragus of Madagascar, became the first of piracy's noble outlaws. A captured ship is brought to him. It contains the Mogul's granddaughter, the fair Zaida. Arviragus falls in love, but Zaida loves another: one of her fellow captives, the young Aranes. Disaster! Revelation! Aranes turns out to be Arviragus's long lost son.
The play opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1713, the first in a succession of pirate melodramas that went on being produced well into the 19th century, until Gilbert and Sullivan's satirical The Pirates of Penzance put an end to them. But where did writers do their research, supposing any were needed? The answer comes from the same period in a book by a Captain Johnson, who in 1724 published A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, which ran to several editions and was translated into French.
Nobody knows who Johnson was: a theory that Daniel Defoe was the author has now been discredited. But his book became the seminal text. Out of it came the public's first appreciation of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd and the two women pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Robert Louis Stevenson consulted it, when, in a Highland cottage during the wet and chill summer of 1881, he began to devise an entertainment for his stepson. Nobody in Johnson's book says "yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" but there is a vivid description of "a fellow with a terrible pair of whiskers, and a wooden leg, being stuck around with pistols ... swearing and vapouring on the quarter deck".
By the time Stevenson invented John Silver, real pirates were at best a folk memory in the western world. A few might survive in the South China Sea, but efficient navies had destroyed them elsewhere. Motivation had also been reduced. Pirates often fenced their stolen cargoes to smugglers, but free trade had dramatically lowered import duties and smuggling died as an occupation.
The way was open for the pirate as an antihero, the rebel against society, or simply a comic character as in Captain Hook. As Pieter van der Merwe of the National Maritime Museum says: "Blackbeard was a terrible man - a psychopath - but piracy had been effectively wiped out in the 18th century. You forgot the fact that it was a curse.'
It became a hobby. Philip Gosse, the son of litterateur and memoirist Edmund Gosse, was a doctor who collected nearly 500 books on piracy and in 1932 published an authoritative history of the subject (his library is now the Gosse collection at the National Maritime). And next it became a study, with historians anxious to revise or enlarge our previously simple ideas. Some pirates were proto-feminists and others gay (Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, 1983). In The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker define pirate ships as "multinational, multicultural and multiracial" institutions - fine little democracies - that resisted the oppression of the capitalist merchant shipping industry. Pirates were "egalitarian, class-conscious and justice-seeking" and always shared their spoils.
For the rest gp to the source
Monday, October 27, 2008
Tomb of real Gladiator found
Source: http://news.scotsman.com/world/Tomb-of-the-real-Gladiator.4602320.jp
By Nick Pisa
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed the tomb of the Roman warrior who inspired the title role in Ridley Scott's epic Oscar-winning film Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe.Marble columns and a Latin inscription to Marcus Nonius Macrinus have been uncovered at a 1,800-year-old stone mausoleum built in his honour on the banks of the River Tiber at Saxa Rubra, not far from the headquarters of Rai, Italy's state-run television station.The site, which also includes friezes and stone blocks, was discovered as a warehouse was being demolished to make way for a housing development.The remains are located north of Rome, near the ancient road, the Via Flaminia, which once connected the city to the Adriatic, on Italy's east coast.
Although parts of the tomb have crumbled into the Tiber over the centuries, enough has been recovered during months of excavation that experts are discussing the possibility of rebuilding the tomb as the centrepiece of an archaeological theme park. This would also include the house of Empress Livia, the wife of Emperor Augustus, at Prima Porta nearby.
This villa occupied the high ground dominating the view down the Tiber valley to Rome and some of the walling that retained its terraces can still be seen. Except for the terracing – the gardens are currently being excavated – all that can be seen today are three vaulted subterranean rooms, from the largest of which the fresco decor of an illusionistic garden view was removed to Rome, where it has recently been installed in the Palazzo Massimo, following cleaning and restoration. Marcus Nonius Macrinus was from the northern Italian city of Brescia.He was consul in AD154 and proconsul of Asia from AD170 to 171. Consuls were the highest civil and military magistrates in ancient Rome.
His villa on the shores of Lake Garda is also under excavation. Macrinus was said to have been a particular favourite of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ruled Rome between AD161 and 180, and became part of the emperor's inner circle after he won numerous battles for him.
For the rest go to the source
By Nick Pisa
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed the tomb of the Roman warrior who inspired the title role in Ridley Scott's epic Oscar-winning film Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe.Marble columns and a Latin inscription to Marcus Nonius Macrinus have been uncovered at a 1,800-year-old stone mausoleum built in his honour on the banks of the River Tiber at Saxa Rubra, not far from the headquarters of Rai, Italy's state-run television station.The site, which also includes friezes and stone blocks, was discovered as a warehouse was being demolished to make way for a housing development.The remains are located north of Rome, near the ancient road, the Via Flaminia, which once connected the city to the Adriatic, on Italy's east coast.
Although parts of the tomb have crumbled into the Tiber over the centuries, enough has been recovered during months of excavation that experts are discussing the possibility of rebuilding the tomb as the centrepiece of an archaeological theme park. This would also include the house of Empress Livia, the wife of Emperor Augustus, at Prima Porta nearby.
This villa occupied the high ground dominating the view down the Tiber valley to Rome and some of the walling that retained its terraces can still be seen. Except for the terracing – the gardens are currently being excavated – all that can be seen today are three vaulted subterranean rooms, from the largest of which the fresco decor of an illusionistic garden view was removed to Rome, where it has recently been installed in the Palazzo Massimo, following cleaning and restoration. Marcus Nonius Macrinus was from the northern Italian city of Brescia.He was consul in AD154 and proconsul of Asia from AD170 to 171. Consuls were the highest civil and military magistrates in ancient Rome.
His villa on the shores of Lake Garda is also under excavation. Macrinus was said to have been a particular favourite of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ruled Rome between AD161 and 180, and became part of the emperor's inner circle after he won numerous battles for him.
For the rest go to the source
Memorial in Berlin for WWII Germans who helped Jews
Source:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hotXbksm71R6tObAUjehxdGqhKwwD942U9VG0
BERLIN (AP) — The "Silent Heroes" now have a voice.
A new memorial center in Berlin pays tribute to the thousands of German gentiles who risked everything to save Jews from persecution by the Nazis and documents the stories of those who sometimes spent years in hiding.
The "Silent Heroes" memorial center opens to the public Tuesday amid a new focus in recent years on the legacy of the "good German" — those individuals who resisted Hitler and his policies, were labeled as traitors by the Nazis and were often shunned in decades after the war.
"Their accomplishments were totally forgotten, and this is an initiative to bring them back into our memory," said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center Foundation, which is behind the new memorial.
Some 5,000 Jews were able to survive the war in hiding in Germany but it is not clear how many people were involved in helping them, Tuchel said. Research suggests that for each person in hiding, around 10 people were involved in aiding them.
Peter Michalski, whose family went into hiding in 1944, said it was a long overdue tribute to the Germans who helped people like him escape almost certain death, even if it meant putting their own lives in jeopardy.
"Where would you be now if these people hadn't existed?" he asked contemplatively while looking at an exhibit focusing on his family's plight. "The answer is simple: We wouldn't be."
The three-room exhibition relies heavily on multimedia displays in both English and German — audio accounts, touch-screen computers focusing on 18 aspects of survival, and computers with more detailed information on those in hiding and their rescuers. Original artifacts include personal photos, diaries and letters.
The best-known subject is Oskar Schindler, whose story was made famous by Steven Spielberg's 1993 Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List," which chronicled the German businessman's efforts to shield more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps by hiring them to work in his factories.
For the rest go to the source
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hotXbksm71R6tObAUjehxdGqhKwwD942U9VG0
BERLIN (AP) — The "Silent Heroes" now have a voice.
A new memorial center in Berlin pays tribute to the thousands of German gentiles who risked everything to save Jews from persecution by the Nazis and documents the stories of those who sometimes spent years in hiding.
The "Silent Heroes" memorial center opens to the public Tuesday amid a new focus in recent years on the legacy of the "good German" — those individuals who resisted Hitler and his policies, were labeled as traitors by the Nazis and were often shunned in decades after the war.
"Their accomplishments were totally forgotten, and this is an initiative to bring them back into our memory," said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center Foundation, which is behind the new memorial.
Some 5,000 Jews were able to survive the war in hiding in Germany but it is not clear how many people were involved in helping them, Tuchel said. Research suggests that for each person in hiding, around 10 people were involved in aiding them.
Peter Michalski, whose family went into hiding in 1944, said it was a long overdue tribute to the Germans who helped people like him escape almost certain death, even if it meant putting their own lives in jeopardy.
"Where would you be now if these people hadn't existed?" he asked contemplatively while looking at an exhibit focusing on his family's plight. "The answer is simple: We wouldn't be."
The three-room exhibition relies heavily on multimedia displays in both English and German — audio accounts, touch-screen computers focusing on 18 aspects of survival, and computers with more detailed information on those in hiding and their rescuers. Original artifacts include personal photos, diaries and letters.
The best-known subject is Oskar Schindler, whose story was made famous by Steven Spielberg's 1993 Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List," which chronicled the German businessman's efforts to shield more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps by hiring them to work in his factories.
For the rest go to the source
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Battle of Agincourt...Our Finest Hour
Written by Bernard Cornwell...
Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080764/War-crime-Battle-Agincourt-finest-hour-says-author-Bernard-Cornwell.html
Legend says the Battle of Agincourt was won by stalwart English archers. It was not. In the end it was won by men using lead-weighted hammers, poleaxes, mauls and falcon-beaks, the ghastly paraphernalia of medieval hand-to-hand fighting. It was fought on a field knee-deep in mud and it was more of a massacre than a battle.
Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V shows French knights charging on horseback, but very few men were mounted at Agincourt.
The French came on foot and the battle was reduced to men hitting other armoured men with hammers, maces and axes.
A sword would not penetrate armour and did not have the weight to knock a man off his feet, but a poleaxe (a long-handled axe or hammer, topped with a fearsome spike) would fell him fast, and then it was easy to raise the victim's visor and slide a knife through an eye. That was how hundreds of men died; their last sight on earth a dagger's point.
It is not a tale of chivalry, but rather of armoured men hacking at each other to break limbs and crush skulls. At the battle's height, when Henry V expected an attack on his rear that never materialised, he ordered the newly captured French prisoners to be killed. They were murdered.
Over the weekend, during a conference at the Medieval History Museum in Agincourt, French academics met to declare that English soldiers acted like 'war criminals' during the battle, setting fire to prisoners and killing French noblemen who had surrendered. The French 'were met with barbarism by the English', said the museum's director Christophe Gilliot.
The French pronouncement smacks of bias, but what is certain is that Agincourt was filthy, horrible and merciless. Yet it is still celebrated as a golden moment in England's history.
Why do we remember it? Why has this battle galvanised English hearts over the centuries? These are questions I came to ask as I researched my new novel Azincourt - spelled as it is in France - and discovered just what an extraordinary event it was.
Part of the legend about the archers is certainly true. Most of the English army were archers and their arrows caused huge damage, although they never delivered the knock-out blow it is claimed.
Henry V was also an inspirational leader. He fought in the front rank and part of his crown was knocked off. Eighteen Frenchmen had taken an oath to kill him and all of them died at Henry's feet, slaughtered by the King or by his bodyguard. And, despite recent claims to the contrary, it seems the English were horribly outnumbered.
In the cold, wet dawn of October 25, 1415, no one could have expected Henry's army to survive the day. He had about 6,000 men, more than 5,000 of them archers, while the French numbered at least 30,000 and were so confident that, before the battle was joined, they sent away some newly arrived reinforcements. By dusk on that Saint Crispin's Day, Henry's small army had entered legend.
But the English should never have been at Agincourt, which lies 25 miles south of Calais. England was in the thick of the 100 Years' War with France, and Henry had invaded Normandy in the hope of making a quick conquest of Harfleur, a strategic port. Yet the town's stubborn defence delayed him and by the siege's end his army had been struck by dysentery.
Sick men were dying and the campaign season was ending as winter drew in. Sensible advice suggested that Henry cut his losses and sail back to England. But he had borrowed huge amounts of money to invade France and all he had to show for it was one gun-battered port. Going home looked suspiciously like defeat.
He instead marched north to Calais with probably nothing more in mind than cocking a snook at the French who, though they had gathered an army, had done nothing to relieve the brave defenders of Harfleur.
For the rest go to the source
Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080764/War-crime-Battle-Agincourt-finest-hour-says-author-Bernard-Cornwell.html
Legend says the Battle of Agincourt was won by stalwart English archers. It was not. In the end it was won by men using lead-weighted hammers, poleaxes, mauls and falcon-beaks, the ghastly paraphernalia of medieval hand-to-hand fighting. It was fought on a field knee-deep in mud and it was more of a massacre than a battle.
Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V shows French knights charging on horseback, but very few men were mounted at Agincourt.
The French came on foot and the battle was reduced to men hitting other armoured men with hammers, maces and axes.
A sword would not penetrate armour and did not have the weight to knock a man off his feet, but a poleaxe (a long-handled axe or hammer, topped with a fearsome spike) would fell him fast, and then it was easy to raise the victim's visor and slide a knife through an eye. That was how hundreds of men died; their last sight on earth a dagger's point.
It is not a tale of chivalry, but rather of armoured men hacking at each other to break limbs and crush skulls. At the battle's height, when Henry V expected an attack on his rear that never materialised, he ordered the newly captured French prisoners to be killed. They were murdered.
Over the weekend, during a conference at the Medieval History Museum in Agincourt, French academics met to declare that English soldiers acted like 'war criminals' during the battle, setting fire to prisoners and killing French noblemen who had surrendered. The French 'were met with barbarism by the English', said the museum's director Christophe Gilliot.
The French pronouncement smacks of bias, but what is certain is that Agincourt was filthy, horrible and merciless. Yet it is still celebrated as a golden moment in England's history.
Why do we remember it? Why has this battle galvanised English hearts over the centuries? These are questions I came to ask as I researched my new novel Azincourt - spelled as it is in France - and discovered just what an extraordinary event it was.
Part of the legend about the archers is certainly true. Most of the English army were archers and their arrows caused huge damage, although they never delivered the knock-out blow it is claimed.
Henry V was also an inspirational leader. He fought in the front rank and part of his crown was knocked off. Eighteen Frenchmen had taken an oath to kill him and all of them died at Henry's feet, slaughtered by the King or by his bodyguard. And, despite recent claims to the contrary, it seems the English were horribly outnumbered.
In the cold, wet dawn of October 25, 1415, no one could have expected Henry's army to survive the day. He had about 6,000 men, more than 5,000 of them archers, while the French numbered at least 30,000 and were so confident that, before the battle was joined, they sent away some newly arrived reinforcements. By dusk on that Saint Crispin's Day, Henry's small army had entered legend.
But the English should never have been at Agincourt, which lies 25 miles south of Calais. England was in the thick of the 100 Years' War with France, and Henry had invaded Normandy in the hope of making a quick conquest of Harfleur, a strategic port. Yet the town's stubborn defence delayed him and by the siege's end his army had been struck by dysentery.
Sick men were dying and the campaign season was ending as winter drew in. Sensible advice suggested that Henry cut his losses and sail back to England. But he had borrowed huge amounts of money to invade France and all he had to show for it was one gun-battered port. Going home looked suspiciously like defeat.
He instead marched north to Calais with probably nothing more in mind than cocking a snook at the French who, though they had gathered an army, had done nothing to relieve the brave defenders of Harfleur.
For the rest go to the source
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