Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts

Saturday, 7 October 2023

Civilisation does not assure civility!

Civilisation does not assure civility!

So, what is it that makes someone great? Is he the one who has conquered all his animalistic desires and knows that his real needs are beyond the realm of physicality and materialism? This man seeks knowledge and is satisfied when the lock of the meaning of life and the hidden secret of the Universe is unlocked. Such a man is fiction. Nietsche described him as Ubermensch; Hindus referred to him as Rama or Krishna, as the revised 2.0 version of a complex man.

Another version of understanding how life works is to look at Hinduism's representation of the Universe - Trimurthi, the Trinity - Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and their consorts. Brahma, the creator, has to work in tandem with his consort, Saraswathi. Saraswathi is the Goddess of education and creativity. The take-home message is that one must have enough knowledge and creativity to create anything.

Once the creation is done, life does not just go on unabashed. It has to be preserved and preserved well. For this comes Vishnu, the divinity assigned for this purpose, operates with his consort, Laxmi, the Goddess of wealth and prosperity. The point here is that to conserve any creation, we need affluence. Wealth is required to ensure the continuity of anything that we create. Maintenance takes money.

At the same time, to guard any property, one should have the power to destroy evil and negative forces. The guardian of this is Shiva, the destroyer. To assist him in his task is Goddess Sakthi or her manifestations Parvathi or Kaali, the most ferocious form of divinity. To maintain the status quo and to keep one's possessions intact, He needs to have the power to destroy. Power is necessary to stay in charge.

One cannot go on destroying everything in sight forever like what the jihadists are doing. Nothing would left to protect or protect for. Hence, the creation, preservation and destruction cycle needs to be repeated.


Military Museum Vienna


The Austrio-Hungarian Empire has the
dubious reputation of sending Napoleon
packing (to St.Elba)



Belvedere Palace, Vienna


Military Museum Vienna


Natural History Museum, Vienna.



Russian Orthodox Church in Vienna, built by prisoners. Gifted to the Coptic Christians.

Tuesday, 22 March 2022

So much about being civilised!

Donbass (Russian/Ukrainian; 2018)
Written/Direction: Sergei Loznitsa

The other day, a day after Putin's army invaded Ukraine, posts on many Malaysians' social media posts read, 'Pray for Ukraine'. One should not have sleepless nights thinking of 'writings on the walls' like this, as it has become almost like a knee-jerk reaction to any world event. Nobody wants to ask why should we pray to an omnipotent God who was in a position not to let it happen at all in the first place. But yet, they convince themselves by alleging that great things are willed by Him, but the follies are only ours. His Grace will save us.

Hey, don't the Malaysians have a bone to pick with the Ukrainians? After all, it is above their airspace that our national carrier MH17 went down in 2014? Ukrainian pro-Russian freedom fighters allegedly shot the MAS plane with Russian firepower as determined by the multinational Joint Investigative Tribunal. So Ukrainians are not all at fault but Putin and the Russians? To date, nothing has happened. Putin denies everything. Family members have sued the airline for taking that war-torn route, but nobody can touch Russia.

MH17: What was left of it!
The recent Ukraine invasion has taught us that everybody in Russia is convinced that their reason for war is just. They bring in the pride of patriotism defending one's nationalistic spirit, ideology, free spirit or religion. They forget that, like what Lao Tsu had said, 'Nobody wins in a war!' This message is specially targetted to the layman in the street.s The leaders who stir the false sentiment can quickly flee from the country for political asylum. The public dies as martyrs to be immortalised as national treasures in monuments for crows to lay their excrements.

The current situation is more complicated than meets the eye. The world media paints a very one-dimensional narrative of the whole conflict - the badass communist infiltrating a young country newly escaped from the evil clutches of communism trying to be spread love in the free world! It is more complicated than that. 

The history of Ukraine goes way back before that of Russia. Whilst the Russian wasteland was roamed by nomadic tribes and barbaric horsemen, Ukraine already had a semblance of civilisational living which the Christian invader later labelled as pagan. Empires over empires split up this region over the centuries till it was usurped by the winning Red Soviet. The Reds wanting to maintain their hegemony started russifying the area. The Eastern part of Ukraine ended up with a large population who associated themselves with Mother Russia.
Wars bring out the best and worst of humanity!

After losing its communist mettle, Putin and his henchmen try to influence Ukrainian leaders with carrots. The citizens, still reeling from the tail-end days of communism, are reasonably contented with capitalism and the free spirit it had to offer. 

Now, the region is left with a zombie-like Neonazi faction of Ukrainian and Wagner's group of mercenary soldiers who do Putin's dirty work. 

Ukraine is now in the same position as a child caught between two divorcing parents. On one side, the West enticed them with business and bio-weapon laboratories. The Russian oligarchs brought in the mollah, but they centred it around Dondass and the eastern part of the country. The Western part ended up as rent-seekers depending on the Eastern industrialists. Now the helpers from both sides have washed their hands. To add salt on the wound, Ukraine, in the name of saving humanity from annihilation from a nuclear mushroom, have given up their nuclear facilities. Now they have to depend on the world's goodwill to stay afloat. 

This documentary was made in 2014 amid a civil war when Russians supported rebel groups that wanted to take the country. It is a kind of cruel caricature of war does, not to powers that be in the ivory tower, but to average Joe Public. Disruption of daily routine, loss of basic amenities, basic decency and lack of basic needs of life are not felt by the generals but by the man on the street. In the name of patriotism and wanting to defend a piece of cloth, they thump their chest to protect their land and send their offspring to the slaughter.

Love and marriage go on still!
It was a time when Russia annexed Crimea that a separatist group from the Donbas region tried to redeem autonomy from Ukraine with the help of the Russian army.

From time immemorial, people from this region have been fighting. From the time of the Kievan Rus to the Cossack to the reign of Catherine the Great to the Habsburg Empire, then to the World Wars and Soviet era, it has been just wars over wars. And the Caucasians have the audacity to consider themselves as higher beings ordained by God to civilise the coloured natives of their dark and demonic civilisations. 

Thursday, 22 November 2018

Who says history is bone dry?

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited, The History of A Controversy (2012)
Author: Emmet Scott.

Warning: For mature readers only. 
Discretion advised.

The conventional wisdom about the antiquity and the medieval eras of Europe is the Roman empire collapsed upon his own weight, Europe went into the Dark Ages only to be shown the light by the Muslim liberators. When culture and science were being developed in the Muslim land, Europeans were barbaric and were in the dark about philosophy and technology.

Emmet Scott (see here), the controversial writer who argued against such a straightforward timeline to the evolution of civilisation in Europe, here uses the findings of Belgian Historian Henri Pirenne together with the results of archaeological discoveries to argue a different narration of European history and the terrible course that it took because of ruthless riders from Arab land.


During the 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne came to an astonishing conclusion: the ancient classical civilization, which Rome had established throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world, was not destroyed by the Barbarians who invaded the western provinces in the fifth century, it was destroyed by the Arabs, whose conquest of the Middle East and North Africa terminated Roman civilization in those regions and cut off Europe from any further trading and cultural contact with the East. According to Pirenne, it was only in the mid-seventh century that the characteristic features of classical life disappeared from Europe, after which time the continent began to develop its own distinctive and somewhat primitive medieval culture. The author compares arguments proffered both by Pirenne and his nemesis Hodges & Whitehouse to draw his conclusions.

The barbarians often referred to as being the reason for the Roman decline were the nomadic Germanic tribes of Franks, Goths and Vandals. It is true that many archaeological data suggest cessation of finds of innovation between the 7th and 10th century in some regions of Europe and around the Mediterranean. In other areas of the continent, in Britain, Ireland, Gaul and even Spain and Italy, Greco-Roman civilisation and institutions continued unabashed. 

Byzantine Emblem

The ‘Dark Age’ in Europe was not really an era of the ignoramus. By the 4th century, the vastness of the Roman Empire had its toll. It started a steady decline. This was compounded by frequent attacks from the Germanic tribes on its Western front and from the Persians and Huns from the East. Successive wars, destruction and rebuilding, was the norm. By the 7th century, the vibrant trade along shipping lines in the Mediterranean took a dip. The Arab invaders had then controlled the high seas. Piracy was rife, and slave reared its ugly head. Pirates including Vikings were hellbent on trading white slaves. That caused people to fear away from cities to the countryside. People indulged in agricultural activities.

Disruption of the supply of luxury items from Syria and Egypt as a result of the loss of trading lines is evident from archaeological discoveries. African Red Slip wares, markers of affluence, were Gould to be scarce in that era. Dwindling of supply of papyrus from Egypt, in the long term affected the educational level of the people. Literacy soon became within the confines of the church. People still lived modest lives. 


One puzzling discovery in archaeological finds in Europe is the dearth of finds of artefacts circa 7th to 10th centuries. Was there a malady of Nature at that time or was there a fictional creation of history to appease certain geopolitical situations? The history of this region was written at a time when pressures were there to put forward a particular narrative to portray the Islamic Empires as the liberators of a Dark Era.

476 AD is the year the Roman Empire was said to have crumpled as the Ostrogoths took over Italy. In actuality, the civilisation continued in the form of the Byzantine Empire. The Germanic invaders actually kept with the wisdom they saw. There were partial recoveries from the barbaric invasions. The conquerors followed the cultures of the conquered.

Many industries still prospered during this time. Glass manufacturing continued. Metallurgical sectors improved. Clockmaking with spring mechanism is another example.

In Britannia, the Anglo-Saxons destroyed the Roman civilisation there and transplanted their Germanic language there. In Ireland and Scotland, Christianity took roots and translations of knowledge were done.

Mid 7th century London even saw extractions of wine bottles, bronze ware, jewellery and beautiful metalworks.

The Visigoths in Spain, after the ruins of their attack, improved the Roman buildings. Even silk was sourced from China during their rule. Their sovereignty was marred with a massive crop failure probably by a locust attack. This economic recession must have angered the traders, mostly Jews, as a version says, who decided to ally with the invading Arab army with their conquest.

Another glaring example that Europe was not going through the Dark Ages was the presence of many thinkers who evaluated and treatise thoughts. Boethius, a philosopher ahead of his time, was a bridge between Roman civilisation and the Middle Age. His vision was to translate Aristotelean and Platonic thoughts from Greek to Latin. John Scotus Eriugena, a Neo-Platonic thinker, was bold in his quest of the unknown.

Benediction monks made sure the work of the Greeks never went anywhere. It thrived in churches amongst theologians. Scrolls on philosophy, astronomy, medicine, printing and others were guarded in monasteries. The Benedictions helped to invent plough, crop rotation techniques and horse collars to utilise animals in farming. Steel production in Ireland, Britain and Gaul was seen. Another technical innovation was windmill building and paper manufacture.

The Byzantium Empire continued its existence with the merger of Christianity and Hellenism. The author throws in the idea that maybe there is no such a thing as the Golden Age of Islam. No excavations in the three said centuries point to that effect. What he means is apparent is that the unprecedented level of violence in Europe is only seen after the jihadi wars propagated by the religiously motivated Arab horsemen. Even though Christians had issues with Jews before the Islamic invasion, the level of anti-Semitism escalated tremendously afterwards.

Charlemagne
- with him started the unholy alliance with the 
Church and senseless killings for conversion 
in Europe

Many of the so-called Islamic scholars are not Arabs. They come from areas ruled by other empires previously, like Persia and Central Asia. Persia, by virtue of its position adjacent to Silk Trade Route and access to the Eastern wisdom of India and China, was a hub for modernity. These were hijacked by Arabs and re-branded as theirs - Arabic numerals were Hindu; alcohol was first distilled during the Sassanid era. 

Why Charlemagne is mentioned in the title? Charlemagne is one of the earlier monarchs of Europe who initiated the idea of giving power to the Churches. As revenue was dwindling as trade took a dive after the Mediterranean Sea was turned into a 'Mussulman Lake', the axis of power was pushed northerly, and the kings were poor. As the Church still commanded power in those hard times, ensuing rulers decided to put the fear of God into people just as the invading Arabs who fought a holy war.

Who knows what direction our world would have led to if there was no Arab invasion? Would our world appear different than it is today? These are all just mere speculations.



“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”*