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Sethomas Sethomas is offline
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Old Apr 13th, 2008, 12:30 AM        Lunacy: Then (ca. 1360 AD) and now
So, I’m re-reading one of my favorite books of all fucking time. It’s called A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. It was written by the late Barbara Tuchman. It’s about the Fourteenh Century, which was by its calamity a mirror, albeit distant, to modernity.

Anyways, I first read this when I was 18 and 19 and I don’t know why all the things that amaze me about it now didn’t amaze me nearly as much back then. Back then, I was reading it not for the author’s intent as an incredible historian looking at the present, but as a kid in the present wanting to learn about the events she so illustriously details.

What sticks out most is this: to say nothing of what the average man was like, she demonstrates with crystalline precision that for any of the names to exist in her book through passing into history, most of them were incredibly brilliant by today’s standards. Especially by today’s standards, even. All of this would include incredible buildup of the fantastic minds of individuals that leads to a description of an amazingly idiotic Duck Soup scenario. This happens several times in each decade she describes.

The mind of the age held a huge amount of cognitive dissonance that I can’t even begin to touch upon. A precise image of chivalry that permeated every work of the time, yet was deliberately ignored in practice and substituted with a convoluted knockoff. The King of France was chosen among a number of essentially equally-legitimate (by their own standards) candidates, thus leading to the Hundred Year War. When he was kidnapped in battle, the people of France rallied together to pay his ridiculously high ransom. In so doing, they decided that the nobility of France were the symbol of everything wrong with France, so the nobility was attacked and slaughtered in many cases to earn the money of the symbol of everything GOOD about France (the king) who was merely one of them.

The central figure around whom the book revolves, Enguerrand de Coucy, used a pearl necklace as a small piece of a dowry. That necklace was appraised in the transaction at, if I remember, 10 000 Livres. By contemporaneous economic theory, if not practice, that would equate literally to about five tons of sterling silver or, more aptly, the value of the common peasant’s lifetime labor. However, we have to assume that this particular peasant manages to live for over five thousand years.

In case you were wondering, the Simpsons joke that the Hundred Years War (which technically was quite a bit longer than 100 years) was originally called “Operation: Speedy Resolution” is not at all far-fetched. At that time, in a way that is incomprehensible in a world inundated with the more famous Simpsons kenning “Cheese-eating surrender-monkeys”, France was the pinnacle of Western culture and its army was probably the greatest in the world. England, on the other hand, was the unshaved armpit of the West where people were literally too embarrassed to admit that they could even speak the land’s eponymous language, which most members of the gentry could not. The English nobility was fluent in French and whatever languages their familial ties to the continent demanded, often Latin as well, but rarely English. The fact that they put up so much of a struggle in a war that they lost despite decades of brutal victories over the French is the only reason why English exists as a language so popular today, as it tied into Chaucer’s decision to eccentrically depict the common man as he might actually talk.

The reason why it lasted more than a few months? The French interpretation of chivalry (see above) forbad them from dismounting along with relying on yeomen mercenaries, which the English did both. As a result, they were slaughtered time and time again by the Welsh longbow. Many knights went into battle understanding this, but in all seriousness they’d rather die with an arrow on horseback than to stop using their horses or, worse, employ lower-class fighters along with their tactics.

Anyways, I can only really set up the fact that brilliant people did remarkably, historically stupid things that led to bizarre political climates. Tuchman calls the entire century out as “lacking sanity” at various points.

Also, the English financed the war by indiscriminate plunder of the French peasantry. When there was no direct fighting going on between the French and English, the French knights observed how effective that was. So, they began to initiate total war, in the most absolute modern sense of the term, upon their own countrymen to pay what they felt would be their salaries when the treasury could not provide it. (!?!!!) They also did this often when the treasury DID provide it.

The Avignon Papacy, in how it related between religion and politics and how the masses from the greatest of politicos to the common peasant interpreted it, is waaaaaay too much for me to talk about either in the role as wannabe historian or wannabe fidei defensor.

A perfect microcosm was when a woman (Catherine of Siena), canonized in relatively short order after her death for her brilliance and purity along with her political influence, implored the worst of the brigand knights (John Hawkwood) to fight in Turkey instead of against the Italian peasantry (yes, he somehow ended up in Italy when the France peasantry got too boring) by means of calling into question his “manliness”, per translation of the Tuscan dialect word she used. This was somewhat funny because Hawkwood had by that time killed hundreds of people by his own hand, many of whom were rather important and well-liked, along with being responsible for the deaths of thousands of others.

Anyways. This is important because of how it speaks not of the medieval mind but of the human spirit. We have not changed at all. How are people in the future going to look at:

The Iraq War?
The aforementioned Armenian Genocide recognition farce I detailed?
The absolute apathy toward the Third World?
The American Party system that mandates that, by one’s tacit approval in voting one way or another, her stances on fiscal policy, social policy, foreign relations, and everything else all have to be defined by a Manichaean manifestation of only two of a huge number (when accounting for varying degrees, priorities, &c.) of possible permutations?
The creation of the Israeli state? (It’s a cultural homeland, taken from legitimate members of a culture that has equal or greater cultural ties to the land, for a culture defined by a religion. Yet, it’s not a theocracy. Yet, anti-Zionism is popularly, often definitionally, associated with Anti-Semitism. Equating Judaism as a religion with Semitic culture is racist because it precludes Jewish atheists and the enormous amount of diasporic converts. ???)

Here’s some lunacy that clicked in today: grocery store psychological marketing. In order to instill a positive association with the store, grocers will put out enormous quantities of exotic and unpopular foods to create the illusion for the shopper that they’re Julia Childs cooking for a dinner attended by the Emperor of China and the pope. As a result of which they’re fully cognizant, they throw away probably hundreds of tons of food annually. Also, while tens of thousands of people die of hunger elsewhere, malnutrition is an actual domestic issue. Also, it takes a shit ton of fertile land to grow those crops destined for the dumpster.

Thoughts?

Contributions?
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Old Apr 13th, 2008, 01:27 AM       
I know perfectly well that I'm not nearly well-versed enough in this time period to really bring much to this discussion--not to mention the fact that I'm not on the Sethomas plane at any point--but there were a couple of points that I really wanted to say, so here I go:

Quote:
The reason why it lasted more than a few months? The French interpretation of chivalry (see above) forbad them from dismounting along with relying on yeomen mercenaries, which the English did both. As a result, they were slaughtered time and time again by the Welsh longbow. Many knights went into battle understanding this, but in all seriousness they’d rather die with an arrow on horseback than to stop using their horses or, worse, employ lower-class fighters along with their tactics.
There was another battle that this reminded me of, (and I had a nice long explanation for why I couldn't remember the name but yay Google) the Battle of Pylos, between the athenians and the spartans. It's not quite the same thing, but I remember it being explained that the spartans would not use bows and arrows as they felt them to be a cowardly weapon, and after the 420 hoplites were taken back to Athens they complained about this, saying that their defeat wasn't manly so it didn't count. But then it went on to say that this was one symptom of the spartan mindset, holding fast to the past methods of glory, and this was also of course one of the reasons for their downfall. It's a laboured connection but a connection nonetheless.
The second point was that I've noticed in my own thoughts that it seems like we've fallen into a mental rut--certainly the genius people are out there but there are so many periods of time that were simply swollen with amazing individuals. I'm just glad that it's not just a paranoid thought process on my part.

And I wish you were someone that I could simply sit down and have conversations with, because as much as you'd leave me behind I'd just love it.
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Old Apr 13th, 2008, 05:18 AM       
I'm confused about what you say about Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism and so forth. Anti-Semitism is generally considered to be a racist attitude towards Semitic culture, not towards Jewish religion as such, they call that Anti-Judaism I believe. So I'm not following why people who call anti-zionists anti-semites are racists for equating jewish religion to semitic culture, since there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that that's what they're doing. You'd think people who associate anti-zionism and anti-semitism would be people who think that Israel is a non-religious state of more or less secular jews and the people that are against it are against the culturally semitic population, but not neccesarily the jewish religion.

And does that stuff about grocery stores with exotic food really happen? Don't grocery stores usually have low enough margins that they wouldn't be buying up exotic (and probably thereby expensive) food just for marketing/throwing away purposes? I mean, why would a grocery store use psychological marketing with things they're not going to sell anyway? It's not like they need to use complicated marketing to get you in the store, it's a grocery store, everyone has to go there anyway, it's not like they need to be convinced to shop for food by the idea that they might be cooking something fancy. Not that grocery stores don't throw away food, but I don't think they're deliberately buying too much food that they know won't sell just to look fancy, it just seems pretty contrary to their own interests.
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Old Apr 13th, 2008, 07:15 AM       
I love the smell of politics and philosophy in the morning!

I've always drawn a parallel, somewhat more recent in vintage, between the American Revolution and the Vietnam War. Both had the imperialist aggressor and the ostensibly weaker populist defender, the outsider vs. the native, however you want to view it, and in both cases the victor chose guerrila tactics to wear down the enemy and eventually win the campaign. The comparison is not perfect, but then again, nothing is.

So if you're looking at how history will view the Iraq war, I'd suggest looking at our own history 220 years after the fact, or even 35 years after Vietnam. Sadly, the picture is not pretty, either for those who were directly involved with the conflict, or the goverment officials and military commanders who orchestrated it.

I like the reliance on historical documention to prove the age-old adage "the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history". Humorous and tragic on so many levels.

Seth, I'm curious at your picking the creation of Israel as a pivotal moment in recent history. In most cases that I've either read about or lived through, nearly every time in history people or governing bodies decided to physically and politically separate those of different ethnicity/creed/color/length of hair/whatever, the result has often been conflict. Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. African Homelands within South Africa. Muslim enclaves within Bosnia and Serbia. The Kurdish regions of Iraq. Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. Closer to home, the Branch Davidians, the FLDS mess, the Freemen, etc. I guess my point is by physically or politically separating groups of individuals we either make them targets, or make them feel oppressed. Neither is a good option.

You made me think, which is a good thing.
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Old Apr 13th, 2008, 12:38 PM       
Big Papa Goat: I probably should have made clear that the line of reasoning wasn't the only possible one in outlining why the Israeli state is absurd, it was just one of many and I found that one to be the most succinctly outrageous. I incidentally left out the weirdest, as opposed to most convoluted, explanation for its existence which is that it derived endorsement from fundamentalist Americans who otherwise bore an abject loathing of Jewish/Semitic culture. But, they ignored this and encouraged the (I think) Truman administration to be the first country to recognize Israeli diplomatically because of the way Israel fit into their eschatological notions of the New Testament.

Thus, the line of reasoning I went through was something similar or exact to things I've heard before, but it ideally wouldn't represent many people's thoughts and the whole convoluted thing was what I was going for. Reductio ad absurdum can be applied here in many ways with the spirit of the name fully intact. You are absolutely right: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Judaism, and so forth are all totally different subjects. Karl Marx was Jewish by birth but voraciously attacked the religion, making him Anti-Judaic but not Anti-Semitic (Anti-Zionism was a very obscure issue at this time). Up until roughly 1944, a healthy majority of conservative Jews including the Ashkenazim Hasidim and I believe also most Sephardi Jews vehemently opposed the creation of Israel because their post-Rabbinical theology had established such an idea as the worst of blasphemies. Thus, you had Anti-Zionist Jewish Semites.

So, I'll quote you: You'd think people who associate anti-zionism and anti-semitism would be people who think that Israel is a non-religious state of more or less secular jews and the people that are against it are against the culturally semitic population, but not neccesarily the jewish religion.

You expressed yourself as clearly as possible, but I'll admit that I had to re-read that several times to figure out what was going on. Yes, what you describe does happen, but so does every other permutation of anti-*'s and pro-*'s who support or reject Israel, often with totally bizarre results. Are there anti-Semitic Zionists? Yes. I've met people who would invent ethnic/religious slurs against Jews on the spot because they didn't know enough beforehand whenever they would see a Jewish person, yet they're pro-Israel because that's what Jesus would want.

I picked Israel to talk about among a huge list of political manifestations of racism/anti-whatever-culture-ism, because of the weird bizarre twists and turns that took it from a Jewish blasphemy to a political powderkeg that threatens the future of civilization. The movie Lawrence of Arabia could not have been made much later than it was. That was the period when the average American began to take his complete ignorance of Arab culture, which accommodated a Romanticized image, and juxtapose it with his hatred of the Jews whom he had ever-so-intimately known as the killers of Christ who spread the Black Death by running town to town and poisoning wells.
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Old Apr 14th, 2008, 10:53 PM       
Just now I was trying to find a reference to something I'd read long ago about economic politics by reading my old college papers, and I happened across this:

"We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and cleverness." -Erich Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Wow.
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Old Apr 15th, 2008, 05:59 AM       
So is the Lukiwski affair going on in Canada (actually to our credit I think it's starting to blow over) that I posted about earlier enough of contemporary lunacy to get included in this thread?
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