Most regrettably,

your humble scribbler must resume an Odyssey beyond the keyboard.

On the Various Traditions of Hospitality

Compare and contrast:



1. )Afghan Irregulars, fighting an enemy that booby-trapped toys in order to maim children, and the Geneva Conventions:

Durant la guerre en Afghanistan (1979-1988), des Soviétiques sont capturés par des résistants afghans qui ne peuvent les traiter conformément aux conventions de Genève. Avec l'accord des deux parties, la Suisse accepte de les garder au Zugerberg pendant deux ans comme prisonniers de guerre, mais non comme internés puisqu'ils ne sont pas arrivés par leurs propres moyens à la frontière. (From the Historical Encylopedia of Switzerland (Dictionnaire Historique de la Suisse.)

My translation:

During the War in Afghanistan (1979-1988) some Soviet soldiers were captured by the Afghani resistance, who were unable to treat them as prescribed by the Geneva Conventions. In agreement with the two parties, Switzerland agreed to incarcerate them on the Zugerberg for two years as Prisoners of War, but not as Internees, because they had not come to Switzerland by their own efforts.

To summarize, because the Muj realized they were not able to meet the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, even though they were under no obligation to do so, they sent some of their prisoners to Switzerland, where they were imprisoned in circumstances that met the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. (Others were lynched on the spot; among other bad habits, the Soviets would drop booby-trapped toys over villages. The idea was to generally tear the limbs off, but not kill, small children, because when a child was maimed, the entire family would leave for Pakistan in order to care for their child.



For those who read Der Spiegel.


The prisoners' legal status:

Erstmals wird damit in einem völkerrechtlich nicht als "Krieg" definierten Konflikt die Genfer Konvention zum Schutz von Kriegsgefangenen angewendet - wenn auch ausdrücklich bloß "in Analogie". Und erstmals ist es möglich, Gefangene in einem unbeteiligten Drittland zu internieren - obwohl weder von Gefangenen noch von Internierung die Rede ist.

For the first time ever, the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Prisoners of War was applied in a conflict that did not meet the definition of war under international law, though admittedly this was explicitly only done "in analogy". And for the first time ever, it was possible to intern prisoners in an uninvolved third country, although no determination of "prisoners" or "internment" was made.

The prisoners' amenities:

Soviet prisoners of the Mujahideen got a monthly pass to go to the nearest city for R&R.



2.) Donald Rumsfeld and the Geneva Conventions:

Reporting from Washington -- A bipartisan Senate report released Thursday concludes that decisions made by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were a "direct cause" of widespread detainee abuses, and that other Bush administration officials were to blame for creating a legal and moral climate that contributed to inhumane treatment....

The report also criticizes President Bush, although less harshly. In particular, it cites a presidential memorandum signed Feb. 7, 2002, that denied detainees captured in Afghanistan the protections of the Geneva Conventions, which ban abusive treatment of prisoners of war.

Bush's decision to bypass an international law that had been observed by American troops for decades sent a message that "impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody," the report says.

That message was bolstered by a series of memos from the Justice Department, the report says, that "distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws" and "rationalized the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody."

"Rumsfeld blamed in detainee abuse scandals," Los Angeles Times, December 12, 2008


The prisoners' amenities:

In 2004, photographs of cowed Guantanamo prisoners in orange jump suits shocked the world.

"The majority are kept in isolation in cells that are no bigger than a toilet," said Katznelson. "There is no sea view. Instead, if they have a window, it looks out on to a bleak corridor. The cells are lined with steel from floor to ceiling, including the toilet, sink and bed base.

"There is a popular misconception that these men have had trials and been found guilty. Nothing is further from the truth. Not one of them has.

"The tortures that the Americans use are wide-ranging and inhuman. One is to blast the cell with freezing cold air. Another is to pretend to take the prisoners to a country like Egypt where prisoners are tortured, even to the extent of taking them on a mock flight, so they can be treated in a barbaric fashion."

Katznelson continued: "Inmates are offered three meals a day, but there are eight prisoners who have been on hunger strike for over a year asking either for a trial or to be set free.

"These men are force-fed twice a day. First they are strapped down with 16 different restrictions, including one that jerks their head back. Then a tube is fed through their nose and down into their stomach.

"The guards don't always use lubrication and regularly use the same tube for several different prisoners without bothering to clean it."

The Scenery:


The Zugerberg, where John Kerry went to boarding school:





Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo:

Life after confinement:


Yvonne Ridley: From captive to convert:

If you were being interrogated by the Taleban as a suspected US spy, it might be hard to imagine a happy ending.

But for journalist Yvonne Ridley, the ordeal in Afghanistan led her to convert to a religion she says is "the biggest and best family in the world".

The formerly hard-drinking Sunday school teacher became a Muslim after reading the Koran on her release.

She now describes radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri as "quite sweet really" and says the Taleban have suffered an unfair press.

Freed by the U.S., Saudi becomes al Qaeda chief

BEIRUT, Lebanon: The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Barack Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Please forward a link to this post to those who you may feel may find it to be of interest.

A Pictorial Marriage Primer

The world and its many cultures, past and present, lack surely not for motley matrimonial rites and traditions. In my opinion, among the most charming are those of Fribourg, Switzerland, where the facts of conjugal life are made patent, and portions of liquid courage available, to newlyweds-to-be before they cross the threshold of Fribourg's St. Nicholas Cathedral. Here are pictures:





Fribourg's St. Nicholas Cathedral , built in 1490.

In front of the cathedral is the Rue des Epouses / Hochzeitergasse, the Street of Spouses-to-be, where brides and grooms waited before entering the cathedral to get married. There is a brewery in the alley, which would have afforded the spouses-to-be liquid courage, with which to dispel any apprehensions.

In the Rue des Epouses, there's an arch, the front side of which is adorned by a French rhyme.

"Voice la rue des epouses fidèles,
et aussi le coin des maris modèles."

"Here's the road of faithful wives,
and also the corner of exemplary husbands."

On the other side of the arch the facts of (harmonious) married life are explained to grooms-to-be in a rhyme in the Swiss-German dialect.

"Hüt! Freu di, Hochzitter, Du guete Ma,
Morn het am End d'frau scho dini Hosa a!"

"Today! Bridegroom enjoy yourself, you good man;
by the end of tomorrow the wife shall wear your pants."

A historical curiosity for which Fribourg is noted is that as late as the 1960s, it had more than 100 monasteries and convents within its city limits where some, who felt they were not called to married life, resided.

The Pumpkinification of the Divine Emperor Claudius

One of the pious myths maintained by the Roman Empire was that of the Apotheosis, the belief that after their death the better emperors would assume a place amongst the gods. As pious myths generally do, the Apotheosis came to serve as subject matter for comedians. Suetonius has it that when Emperor Vespasian concluded on his death bed that his ailments would presumably prove to be fatal, he uttered his famous last words, "Vae, puto deus fio," "Drat it! I think I am becoming a god." The most memorable satire of this tradition is the Apocolocyntosis, the Pumpkinification of the Divine (Emperor) Claudius, which is attributed to Seneca, the Roman author and philosopher.

Seneca had some good reasons to be critical of Claudius' reign; Claudius had been the first emperor to not be elected by the Senate but rather selected by the Praetorian Guard, after the assassination of Caligula. He also had personal reasons to resent him, as Claudius had banished him to Corsica because of his improprieties. When Claudius died, be it of poison or old age, Seneca seized the opportunity to settle scores, and wrote a satire that had Claudius not becoming a deity, but rather being transmuted into a banal pumpkin.

The Apocolocyntosis is quickly summarized; upon his death, Claudius makes his way to Mount Olympus to seek admission to live among the gods, but Hercules finds that he mangles his enunciation and syntax so badly as to be unintelligible, a huge humiliation for any Roman, a people among whom eloquence was highly prized.

Tum Hercules primo aspectu sane perturbatus est, ut qui etiam non omnia monstra timuerit. Ut vidit novi generis faciem, insolitum incessum, vocem nullius terrestris animalis sed qualis esse marinis beluis solet, raucam et implicatam, putavit sibi tertium decimum laborem venisse. Diligentius intuenti visus est quasi homo.

"But when Hercules, first saw him, he was badly shaken, even though not all the monsters in the world could frighten him; when he saw the face of this new object, with its extraordinary gait, and heard its voice, hoarse and inarticulate, like that of no land animal, but such as you might hear from a monster of the deep, he thought he had encountered his thirteenth labor. But when he looked closer, the thing seemed to be a kind of man."

Eventually the gods debate whether he should be admitted to their ranks, and give him the thumbs down. The hapless Claudius makes his way to the underworld, where as a punishment for his love of gambling and his generally having been a wastrel, he is sentenced to spend eternity trying to roll dice out of a box with no bottom; every time he tries to roll them, they fall to the floor, and he has to search for them and then pick them up, only to shake them again in their bottomless box. He is then saved from this futile drudgery when his predecessor, Emperor Caligula, appears, and claims Claudius as his former slave, a false and humiliating claim, and turns him over to be a law clerk in the court of the underworld.

Many believe the most memorable passage in the Apocolyntosis to be the description of Claudius' passing:

"Et ille quidem animam ebulliit, et ex eo desiit vivere videri. Exspiravit autem dum comoedos audit, ut scias me non sine causa illos timere.

Ultima vox eius haec inter homines audita est, cum maiorem sonitum emisisset illa parte, qua facilius loquebatur: "vae me, puto, concacavi me." Quod an fecerit, nescio: omnia certe concacavit."

And he really bubbled up his ghost, and the signs of life left him. He died while listening to comedians, so you know why I am wary of them, not without reason.

His last statement among humans was heard after he had let loose a very loud sound from that body part of him with which he spoke the most fluently; “Dear me, I think I’ve thoroughly crapped all over myself.” If he really did this I do not know, but what is certain is that he thoroughly crapped up everything he did.

P.S. Your humble author concluded his six years of studying Latin with a half-hour oral final exam on the works of his Seneca. His last words in that exam alluded to Seneca's having been Emperor Nero's tutor, Nero having been the emperor that Sueton and Dio Cassius accuse of having been responsible for the great fire which devastated the City of Rome, and of playing his lyre as Rome burned. To be fair, Tacitus, the great historian, defended him on this count, writing that this was only an unproven rumor. In any event, Nero blamed the fire on the hapless Christians, then a religious sect poorly understood in Rome, and began a savage persecution of them, accusing them, among other things, of cannibalism, introducing Rome's lions to the nutritive value of the flesh of Christians. This persecution made him immensely popular among the people of Rome, until the sheer brutality of his persecution and his crassness turned many of them against him.

To quote Tacitus:

Sed non ope humana, non largitionibus principis aut deum placamentis decedebat infamia quin iussum incendium crederetur. ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiabilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque. igitur primum correpti qui fatebantur, deinde indicio eorum multitudo ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis convicti sunt. et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut ferarum tergis contecti laniatu canum interirent, aut crucibus adfixi aut flammandi, atque ubi defecisset dies in usum nocturni luminis urerentur. hortos suos ei spectaculo Nero obtulerat et circense ludicrum edebat, habitu aurigae permixtus plebi vel curriculo insistens. unde quamquam adversus sontis et novissima exempla meritos miseratio oriebatur, tamquam non utilitate publica sed in saevitiam unius absumerentur.

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to torture-stakes, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired. Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft on a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty, that they were being destroyed.

Tacitus Annals XV.44

When the Pisonian conspiracy to murder Nero failed, Seneca was accused of at the least having been sympathetic to the conspirators, and their goal of ending Nero's despotic reign; Nero ordered Seneca to commit suicide, which he duly did. Your humble author concluded his endeavor of six years, which had seen him progress from "amo, amas, amat" to Seneca by reminding his teacher that Seneca's having been Nero's tutor proved that even the best teachers had their limits. His teacher burst into laughter, and replied that he felt that his efforts with your humble author would prove to be more successful than Seneca's with Nero. Tempus patebit.

Exigencies beyond the keyboard

account for the slowing in my additions to these pages. More will come as they diminish.

The Lüscher Code: The Professor who Investigated the Connections between Color, Psyche, and Health

The trite state of the medical arts and sciences and the seeming indifference of many if not most of its practitioners to this sad state of affairs has been one of the steady laments of these pages. These are not complaints that are plucked out of thin air, nor are there no laudable examples of doctors and scientists who have made huge breakthroughs in medicine in recent years.

One of those very interesting scientists to make some extremely interesting discoveries, and, as is customary in a field dominated by mountebanks, all but completely be ignored, is Professor Max Lüscher (b 1923). In his day he taught at institutes of higher learning such as Yale University's School of Medicine and the Sorbonne's Psychology Department among many others. Lüscher had been fascinated by philosophy and psychology from an early age, and was given special - and rarely given - permission to audit university courses in psychology and philosophy at the age of 16. At 18, he began to ponder what influence the perception of color has on understanding the Rorschach test. The more he busied himself with the question, the more interesting the results were that he found. Colors have clear physiological effects on humans; some shades of red, for example, cause the heart rate to pick up and other involuntary symptoms of arousal to manifest themselves, similarly some shades of blue have an opposite effect. In more medical terms, this would be equivalent to the stimulation of the sympathetic or parasympathetic nerves.

Lüscher came to understand that while everyone sees the exact same colors when presented with the same color samples, how they perceive the colors is completely subjective, and often very informative about their state of mind and their health. His research was made easier by a lucky break; a befriended doctor arranged for him to enjoy unlimited access to the patients at the hospital he directed, and to their medical records, which Lüscher used to assiduously investigate how patients perceived certain colors he had identified as particularly useful for such diagnostic purposes, and what correlations existed with their physical and psychological states. Another obvious result is that once enough patients with clear medical records had been examined to allow clear conclusions to be drawn about how health states affect the perception of colors, testing the perception of colors would allow clear conclusions to be drawn about health problems that exist, and about health problems which were likely to appear in the future, simply by measuring how people perceive colors. The obvious caveat is that these conclusions will only be as reliable as the data and common sense that is used to draw them. All the same, this is extremely interesting. Such a color test can be done in 5 minutes; rather than requiring that blood be drawn and sent to laboratories and the like, the only equipment required is a sheet of paper, a pen, and eight pages with Lüscher's copyrighted colors on them.

His discoveries were sufficiently interesting enough for him to be invited to be a speaker at the first International Congress of Psychology to meet after the Second World War, this while he was still a student. His talks there made such an impression that he was invited to lecture about his work at the Sorbonne and to the Quai d'Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, right after receiving his doctorate. To this day, Dr. Lüscher's lectures are well attended.

Lüscher's (copyrighted) color test consists of batteries of seven tests; first of all, the testee is acted to rate eight colors according to how pleasant and unpleasant he or she finds them to be, then to rate a few shapes by the same criteria, and then to identify which of four colors and then which of four shades of four colors seem most appealing, and then to rerate the eight colors. What the results can tell you is amazing.

• Personality traits are clearly reflected in the results of his test.
  

• One of the conclusions that can be drawn from some results of the Lüscher Color test is that some patients either do or don't have a predisposition to get cancer. Admittedly, in the material I've read, the likelihood of the testee getting or not getting cancer are only given for less common color preferences not indicative of overall good health, but they are strong (p<0.001.)

• A Norwegian researcher found that in a study of 4275 13 year olds who grow up to be delinquents as adults already show significant differences in their subjective perceptions of the colors compared to those who don't; they find Lüscher's strains of black to be much more pleasant and yellow much less pleasant than their peers who go on to lead troubled lives. (Lie N, Boys who became offenders. A follow-up study of 2203 boys tested with projective methods, Acta Psychiatr Scand Suppl. 1988;342:1-122.)

• Elena Schikowa wrote her 2001 dissertation at Moscow State University in which she documented that male and female asthmatics have statistically significant deviations (i.e. p<0.05)

• A predisposition to heart attacks is also reflected in the choice of colors.

• Finding Lüscher's yellow to be, in relative terms, very unattractive correlates with having a high T-lymphocyte count.
  

• A. Vegliach reports that in a sample of 25 depressives, depression could be diagnosed with p=0.00522, in other words probably with more precision than with the diagnostic checklists used today.

• I'm in the process of confirming that pregnant women and hyperthyroids also reveal themselves through their perception of colors.
  

Being a psychologist and philosopher, Dr. Lüscher not surpisingly also has some fairly interesting explanations to offer for why the different colors have different meanings, how, for example, his strain of violet, the color that results when red and blue is mixed, unites some traits associated with red and some with blue and more.

Another interesting fact is that Albert Szent-Györgyi, whose contributions to science have already been touched on in these pages, was also convinced the many colors one finds in the human body also must have some significance in the greater scheme of bodily functions. Why, he had asked his professors as an aspiring medico, was the liver brown? Their answer was that the liver is brown because.. well the liver is brown. This wasn't good enough for Szent-Györgyi, who was still pondering this in his 70s and asking his readers what the significance of oxygenated blood being the vibrant crimson is. Oxgenated blood is rich in oxygen, which is the primary source of oxidation in the body. Is it a surprise that the color of blood that powers this most important process has such an visual impact on us humans?

As the gentle reader may recall, Szent-Györgyi was convinced that semiconduction plays an important role in human biology, particularly that of cancer, and that cancer ultimately is a problem of - among other things - electron shell configurations. Since photons can change electron shell configurations, the reports that a person's color preference allows statistically very meaningful conclusions to be drawn about an individuals predisposition to cancer at the very least confirms that there is a good likelihood that Szent-Györgyi was onto something interesting. I have no idea to what all uses Dr. Lüscher's work can be put. Nevertheless...

• Could it be that routine mammograms do more harm than good in patients whose likelihood of suffering cancer during their lifetime is 0.1%, if said minority can be identified with a 5 minute color perception test?

• Could it be that people at a high risk of suffering a heart attack could be identified, and perhaps helped to reduce their likelihood of suffering a heart attack with this 5 minute test?

• Would it make sense to seek to identify adolescents who are highly likely to commit violent crimes as adults, and perhaps monitor them more extensively than people who appear to be at no risk?

• Could it be that one could identify which medications are most likely to be helpful in some illnesses with this test? I suspect so. Lüscher, in fact, says so.

• If illnesses and psychology are linked, would the competent and beneficial practice of medicine also involve identifying and instilling values and helping to order patients and society? Is this compatible with medicine by committee?
  

Unfortunately, medicine has all too often become neither an art nor a science, but rather a system of following flow charts that generally are created by committees in highly opaque circumstances. The only thing that is somewhat transparent is the flow of funding from the pharmaceutical industry to the politicians who chose those who are to regulate the industry. Thinking is deemed unbecoming; how else can one explain that it generally takes years until very serious, sometimes lethal, side-effects of "blockbuster" treatments are documented, if they ever are. For many doctors pretty much their only art is determining how to best code illness in order to maximize renumeration from the health insurances. This is an art particularly suited to mediocrities and the mediocrities among mediocrities; not surprisingly medicine today is full of such creatures. Whenever decisions are customarily made by committees, as is the wont in academia in our days, those who have better things to do than attend sempiternal committee meetings will neither thrive nor often get the acknowledgment that ought be their due.

The ancient Greeks had their priests who praised Zeus, Neptune and Hera; when they needed advice, they would consult among others the Oracle at Delphi. The Romans had priests who praised Jupiter, Saturn and the Lares. The ancient Germans had priests who praised Wotan, Thor, Freya, Odin, and others. contemporary Americans are plagued by clowns who praise the likes of Lipitor, Prozac, Vioxx, and Neurontin, and ascribe to them and all the other deities and semi-deities listed in the American pharmacopoeia magical powers that are not only not scientifically proven but sometimes even embarrassingly prove to be scientifically disproved. Every people must have its witchdoctors.

To round the buffooneries off, Americans even suffer the attentions of professional "drug czars," men rarely thought to understand much of pharmacology or medicine, but who have nevertheless taken in upon themselves to craft and enforce an American pharmacological demonology that few but the most abject of morons take even halfway serious. Curiously, the deities in this bizarre belief system all too often are under patent; the demons that must be vigorously exorcised, even publicly burned, generally have been treasured for their medicinal uses for thousands of years, and could generally be easily cultivated in your backyard were it not for these purported public servants. We are now at the point of a system of mountebanks, for mountebanks, and by mountebanks.

As long as people are accept as an article of faith that medicine by committee and insurance claim is superior to medicine practiced as an art and science between doctor and patient, and to tolerate legislation which prohibits the latter by force of law, they will get exactly what they deserve, nothing more and nothing less.


Links:

There are several pages dedicated to the Lüscher test that are online. But as they are at best rather shoddy attempts to emulate a copyrighted test, I won't link to them. Dr. Lüscher spent two years going through no less than 4,500 colors before he settled on the 43 colors and shades of gray that feature in his test. The results of his test are calibrated to his colors; any attempt to create a test that doesn't use his colors is a fool's errand.

Here is the website licensed to sell Dr. Lüscher's tests:

General Leopoldo Galtieri and the Invasion of the Falklands

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the end of the Falklands War.

When the war was declared, Argentina was one of those countries that had long suffered leaders who assiduously snatched poverty out of the jaws of prosperity. In 1933 Argentina had been the ninth most prosperous country in the world, to which immigrants from Europe, and in particular Italy, flocked in great number. After the Second World War, Argentina fell in the thrall of Juan Perón, whose catastrophic mixture of cronyism and corporatism left Argentina an economic and political basket case. Nor did his hospitality towards people one could euphemistically describe as "political refugees" from postwar Europe endear him to the wider world.

Perón's last wife, whose life was not made into a famous London musical, succeeded him to the presidency of an Argentina plagued by left-wingers given to the notion that it was justified, even ethical, to summarily kill purported "enemies of the revolution," and a military that had no compunctions about "disappearing" thousands of revolutionaries known to entertain such beliefs, or suspected of doing so, without worrying about legal niceties. Such circumstances rarely make for too happy a country; as General Leopoldo Galtieri, the head of the junta that held the reigns of power in Argentina, realized that time was running out for his increasingly unpopular regime, he decided to invade the Falkland Islands.

The Falklands had belonged to Spain, and been part of the Spanish province to which Argentina belonged when Argentina declared its independence from Spain in 1816. In 1833, the British occupied the Falklands, deported the remaining Argentines, and settled some of Her Majesty's Subjects on the islands. Argentina had never - and does not - recognize the British claim to these islands; to this day it remains a matter of national pride that the "Malvinas" as they are known in Spanish, are Argentinian.

General Galtieri believed - or wanted to believe - that the British under Maggie Thatcher's leadership, would quietly acquiesce to his conquest, and that the United States, with whom he enjoyed a good working relationship based on their mutual enmity of Communism, would put its friendship with Argentina above its venerable, almost fraternal, ties with Great Britain. In both of these he was sorely mistaken; Argentina's forces on the Falklands were no match for the British forces. The Falklands were lost, and his government fell. The talks between the United Kingdom and Argentina about the future of the islands - however soporific they may have been - are also a thing of the past.

But for the few days or weeks in which it seemed that Argentina may have regained the Malvinas, General Leopoldo Galtieri was the talk of the town.

Justice

In medieval Europe, towns were the seat of government, site of markets, and seat of the courts. Not coincidentally, many towns would have drinking fountains adorned with allegories of justice, presumably near where the courthouses were. Note how this particular allegory of justice is not only blind-folded, but, by modern standards for models, remarkably portly. Times change, and so do fashions. In which age, do you think, were models healthier?

Sir Wilfred Thesiger: Explorer, Friend of Ethiopia, and Refugee from Modernity

After I posted this article, I learned that the Pitt River Museum at Oxford owns the rights to Thesiger's photographs. Rather than purchase a license for £350 (about $500,) Ie decided to remove the pictures, and offer my readers hyperlinks to the pictures. They are worth the time.

One of the men who has long fascinated me, because he was a very interesting person with an even more interesting life was Sir Wilfred Thesiger. Click here for the first picture.

Probably the last of the great explorers that the British Empire produced, Thesiger's life is interesting not only for the places he explored and the events he witnessed, but also because of the lessons Thesiger drew. Thesiger understood that there was no stopping the course of history and technological progress. But he never made his peace with modernity; for him motorcar and aeroplane, and even more so poison gas and nuclear weapons, were epithets. He spent most of his life living with "backward" tribes in remote parts of the world; it was not until Parkinson's got the better of him that he left his dwellings in a remote part of Kenya to return to England.


Thesiger was born in one of the thatched-roof huts (click here for a picture) that then constituted the British legation in Addis Ababa, the capital of what was then Abyssinia, where his father, a seasoned diplomat, was the British Consul General. His family was part of the British aristocracy; his uncle was the Viceroy of India and a Viscount, his grandfather had been a general and the second Baron Chelmsford. When Thesiger was born, Ethiopia, then known as Abyssinia, was the only African country to never have been colonized, and far and away the country south of the Sahara with the richest and most interesting history.

Ethiopia's is mentioned in Greek and perhaps Egyptian chronicles; Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian and near contemporary of Christ, mentions that the Queen of Sheba with whom King Solomon enjoyed a friendship, and in the Ethiopian tradition a relationship, was from Ethiopia. Until the 1980s, Ethiopia had a fair sized Jewish community that traced its roots back to King Solomon. The Acts of the Apostles in New Testament tells of a visit by by the an official of the Queen Candace of Ethiopia to the Holy Land, who met Philip the Evangelist. 100 years before Saint Patrick sailed for Ireland, Ethiopia adopted the Coptic form of Christianity. When Islam arose, the Ethiopians sacked Jeddah, and then, when the Muslims counterattacked, lost their cities on the Red Sea. The neighboring countries were overran by Islam, Ethiopia, like Tibet, another country on a plateau, was able to resist the new religion; Somalia, the Sudan, Egypt and to some degree Kenya didn't. Gibbon's memorable summary was: "Encompassed on all sides by the enemies of their religion, the Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom they were forgotten."

Click here for the next picture.

In the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese became a naval power and established their colonies from Goa to Macao and points in between, they came into contact with the Ethiopians. The Ethiopians had just suffered a major defeat to the Turks, in a battle in which the Turks introduced the flintlock to Ethiopia. The Ethiopians looked to the Portuguese, their fellow Christians, for help, which came in the form of an expedition under Christopher da Gama, son of Vasco da Gama. Much as in the story of Matteo Ricci, for a while things went quite well. The Jesuits who came to Ethiopia with the Portuguese quickly gained influence at the Ethiopian court, but personality and theological (Copts are monophysites loyal to the Patriarch of Alexandria, Catholics were neither) conflicts led to their being expelled. They left traces; when Thesiger began to explore those parts of Ethiopia that had never before been explored by Europeans, there were instances where he had to confess in his memoirs, much to his chagrin, that in the sixteenth century, a Jesuit father by the name of so and so had indeed been there, but never since had a European returned.

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For the purposes of discussing Thesiger's life, and his love of Ethiopia, we can move forward to the reign of Emperor Menelik II, during whose reign Thesiger and his family moved to Ethiopia. Menelik was the first modern African head of states to defeat a European army in the field; the Italians, late in the scramble for Africa, had sought to make a "protectorate" of Ethiopia. Menelik declined the questionable honor, and at the Battle of Adowa in 1896, his men resoundingly defeated the invading Italian army, in what was a truly humiliating defeat for the Italians. Mussolini, who was expelled from school for knifing a fellow student - a priest who taught him told him that he had a heart "black as sin" - would never forgive the Ethiopians for doing so, and order his thugs in uniform to use poison gas to ensure that they would prevail on the field of battle.

One of Thesiger's memories from his time in Ethiopia was of Ethiopian civil war of 1916. Of the three Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire was Muslim, in fact the Ottoman Sultan would intermittently claim to be the Caliph, or highest authority, of Sunni Islam. The Germans adopted the shameful ruse of war of suggesting to the Muslim peoples under British rule that the Kaiser had secretly converted to Islam, and that they ought make common cause with the Germans for this reason. At the time, the British were fighting the Germans and Ottomans in several countries near Ethiopia, among them Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, Palestine, and Syria. Probably under Turkish and German influence, and convinced after the British defeats at Kut and Gallipoli that the Central Powers would probably win, Liy Yasu, the Emperor of Ethiopia all but converted to Islam, and was quickly deposed by the Ethiopian church and nobility, Ras (Prince) Tafari, later known as Haile Selassie, was installed as the new regent, Empress Zaitu remained as the empress.

A civil war erupted, and was quickly put down. At the end of this war, Haile Selassie and his soldiers were accorded a triumph through Addis Abeba which Thesiger described:

Huge tents, open-fronted, had been put up and the Empress came in state with all her ladies, veiled to the eyes, add took her place on the throne. We were presented and Billy and Brian shook hands. All the local army was ranged up on either side and in front, the chiefs a mass of colour, with their gold-embroidered robes and jewelled crowns and shields, the lesser chiefs in lion- or leopard- skins or sheep-skins dyed in brilliant colors. About 10:30 am, the army began to march past. First came the ministrels, yelling war songs, and when they had finished they tore off their mantles and threw them down before the Empress, saying now that they had fought for her such clothes were no longer worthy of them and would she give them new ones? On these occasions every freedom of speech is allowed. The advance guard of men on mules and horses came up in regular lines but as soon as they got near they dashed up at full gallop, shouting and brandishing their weapons, each men shrieking out how many men he had killed; and then they wheeled round to make room for others....

The whole description takes up two pages of his autobiography, which is currently out of print. But that is what used book stores are for. Thesiger concludes his reminiscencing:

"I believe that day implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovation in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world."

After the First World War ended, and travel once again became safe, Thesiger left for boarding school in England, then for Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he excelled more as a boxer than a scholar. After he graduated from Oxford, he spent a year leading an expedition that explored parts of Ethiopia that no European had yet traversed or mapped. Parts of his expedition took him into the lands inhabited by a tribe then known as a Danakil, amongst whose menfolk, the number of men a man had killed and then emasculated for trophies was the primary indicator of status. Although Emperor Haile Selassie, his life-long friend, (the two are in the picture at this link) had given him permission to embark on his trek, the local governor insisted that Thesiger indemnify him before setting off for the the wilderness. After the trek, he joined the Sudanese colonial service in Darfur.

Thesiger was greatly disappointed when the British politicians of the 1930s assented to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, in the vain and foolish hope that to not condemn the invasion, and the routine use of poison gas, would help keep Mussolini from making common cause with Hitler, and avoid war in Europe. Mussolini's attitude to the war was such that he ordered his soldiers to not only use poison gas and flame-throwers liberally but also to employ "bacteriological warfare," only to be told that the last was impractical. When Addis Abeba fell, the Blackshirts went through the city "liquidating" educated Ethiopians. Thesiger later wrote of his satisfaction when he learned that Mussolini had been put to death by his own people, and "appropriately" hung on a meat hook.

Another reason for the British reticence may have been that the British themselves were using poison gas to quell the rebellious Iraqi tribes at the time. Pots and kettles have their own etiquette. The British ignored their obligations under a treaty to sell Ethiopia weaponry, and even denied, contrary to all evidence, that Italy was using poison gas, and turned a blind eye to a war that was more annihilation than a good war. When all was lost, Haile Selassie went on a pilgrimage to Ethiopia's national shrine, prayed there for two days, and then traveled on to Geneva to give a haunting speech, in Amharic, at the League of Nations, in which he informed the other nations that if they abandoned the Covenant of League of Nations, which required that all disputes be settled by diplomacy rather than war, they, too, would reap the whirlwind. And indeed they did. His eloquence, once the galleries had been cleared of Italian agitators paid to disrupt his speech, was such that he was made Time magazine's Man of the Year. Here's a pathos-filled picture of His Imperial Highness during the speech. And here's the beginning of the speech:

"I, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, am here today to claim that justice which is due to my people, and the assistance promised to it eight months ago, when fifty nations asserted that aggression had been committed in violation of international treaties.

There is no precedent for a Head of State himself speaking in this assembly. But there is also no precedent for a people being victim of such injustice and being at present threatened by abandonment to its aggressor. Also, there has never before been an example of any Government proceeding to the systematic extermination of a nation by barbarous means, in violation of the most solemn promises made by the nations of the earth that there should not be used against innocent human beings the terrible poison of harmful gases. It is to defend a people struggling for its age-old independence that the head of the Ethiopian Empire has come to Geneva to fulfil this supreme duty, after having himself fought at the head of his armies.

I pray to Almighty God that He may spare nations the terrible sufferings that have just been inflicted on my people, and of which the chiefs who accompany me here have been the horrified witnesses.

It is my duty to inform the Governments assembled in Geneva, responsible as they are for the lives of millions of men, women and children, of the deadly peril which threatens them, by describing to them the fate which has been suffered by Ethiopia. It is not only upon warriors that the Italian Government has made war. It has above all attacked populations far removed from hostilities, in order to terrorize and exterminate them.

At the beginning, towards the end of 1935, Italian aircraft hurled upon my armies bombs of tear-gas. Their effects were but slight. The soldiers learned to scatter, waiting until the wind had rapidly dispersed the poisonous gases. The Italian aircraft then resorted to mustard gas. Barrels of liquid were hurled upon armed groups. But this means also was not effective; the liquid affected only a few soldiers, and barrels upon the ground were themselves a warning to troops and to the population of the danger.

It was at the time when the operations for the encircling of Makalle were taking place that the Italian command, fearing a rout, followed the procedure which it is now my duty to denounce to the world. Special sprayers were installed on board aircraft so that they could vaporize, over vast areas of territory, a fine, death-dealing rain. Groups of nine, fifteen, eighteen aircraft followed one another so that the fog issuing from them formed a continuous sheet. It was thus that, as from the end of January, 1936, soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes and pastures were drenched continually with this deadly rain. In order to kill off systematically all living creatures, in order to more surely to poison waters and pastures, the Italian command made its aircraft pass over and over again. That was its chief method of warfare.

Ravage and Terror

The very refinement of barbarism consisted in carrying ravage and terror into the most densely populated parts of the territory, the points farthest removed from the scene of hostilities. The object was to scatter fear and death over a great part of the Ethiopian territory. These fearful tactics succeeded. Men and animals succumbed. The deadly rain that fell from the aircraft made all those whom it touched fly shrieking with pain. All those who drank the poisoned water or ate the infected food also succumbed in dreadful suffering. In tens of thousands, the victims of the Italian mustard gas fell. It is in order to denounce to the civilized world the tortures inflicted upon the Ethiopian people that I resolved to come to Geneva. None other than myself and my brave companions in arms could bring the League of Nations the undeniable proof. The appeals of my delegates addressed to the League of Nations had remained without any answer; my delegates had not been witnesses. That is why I decided to come myself to bear witness against the crime perpetrated against my people and give Europe a warning of the doom that awaits it, if it should bow before the accomplished fact."

When the Second World War was declared, Thesiger fought with the SAS, i.e. as a commando, in North Africa; once when he was on a mission behind enemies lines, he covered himself with sand when he heard German soldiers approach, looking for saboteurs. They came within 50 feet, but didn't see him; when Thesiger read Rommel's diary, it became clear to him that, given the time and location at which he barely escaped the German patrol, it had been Rommel himself who had been looking for saboteurs.

When the time came for the British to liberate Ethiopia from Mussolini's footmen, Thesiger served with valor and distinction, winning a DSO, and helping his life long friend Emperor Haile Selassie, Emperor to the Ethiopians, and god to the Rastafarians (Haile Selassie's pre-emperor name was Ras (prince) Tafari,) regain his throne. He then fought with the Druze in Lebanon. After the war, Thesiger went on to become one of the most noted explorers of our day, traveling to wilds of Afghanistan, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Kenya. But that is for another post.


Links:

Wilfred Thesiger's picture collection at Pitt Rivers Museum

Haile Selassie's speech to the League of Nations, asking them why they abandoned his country to Mussolini.

Plato and Polybius, Saint Francis of Assisi, Richard the Lionheart, Emperor Frederick and "Eurabian" history

"Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt."

The Counsels of the Holy Father St. Francis, Admonition 27


Political Theory Today, and a Century Ago

In the days since the man HL Mencken referred to as the "Archangel Woodrow," re-elected on  his promises to "keep us out of the war," took it upon himself to impose an end to  senseless and stupid European family feuds, giving self-determination to those ethnicities who lost the war, but not to those whose governments who won the war, or perhaps more accurately had lost that bloodbath less badly, the Western understanding of the ideal form of government has radically changed.

Plato, a Greek philosopher known for his works on politics and laws, identified six different forms of regimes. He concluded that the ideal form of government was the rule of philosopher-kings, but that, human nature being what it is, humanity's lot is to go through cycles in which the weaknesses inherent in every form of government lead to its replacement by a different new form of government. (The inherent weaknesses were such that Plato concluded that the inevitable cycle was an ouroboros of political scientists.) Polybius went him one better, and suggested the idea of a "mixed regime" in which regimes try to counterbalance the different forms of governments in such a way that the various strengths of the different forms augment each other. Until 1917-18, the Western world was a lot closer to the rule by anointed philosopher kings than it is today. Europe had five empires (British, German, Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian,) sundry monarchies of various flavors, and a few republics, preeminent among them the French Republic.

France had oscillated between the most monarchical and most republican governments with an amazing frequency; consider Louis XIV roi soleil (absolute monarch), Louis XVI (guillotined liberalizing king), Robespierre (guillotined republican), Napoleon (exiled emperor), Charles X (exiled king), Louis-Philippe (deposed liberal king), Napoleon III (exiled emperor), the Third Republic (overthrown republic), the undemocratic Vichy Regime (overthrown authoritarian state), the fourth Republic (overthrown republic), de Gaulle (democracy led by a strong man), the Fifth Republic (democracy).  Canada was part of the British Empire, as were various islands such as Bermuda, Jamaica, and more.  England had gone through a republican phase, whose legacy lived on resentments in Ireland and Republicans in Massachusetts and the rest of the United States. In short, had you journeyed from San Francisco to Vladivostok the long way in 1912, the only unabashed republics whose soil you would have crossed would have been the United States and France.  Had you in 1914 been of the opinion that democracy was the only tolerable form of government, the most charitable response you would have elicited was that that the inevitable eccentrics who help define and enrich the human condition, like the amateur political scientists who in the 1990s concluded that the United States' annexation of Texas was legally invalid, and reestablished the Republic of Texas, elicit.


America's Mixed Regime


While the text books that American political scientists must consult during their periods of indoctrination unanimously and emphatically declaim that the United States is a constitutional republic, a closer look at American realities reveals that the American polity does have elements of a mixed regime. One of the most obvious was the fair city of Chicago under Mayor Daley the Elder, where rumor has it that the city elders extended the right to vote not only to the indigent and ignorant but also to the deceased, and even more graciously, to those who had already exercised their right to vote. "Vote early and vote often" they said. Things being as they were, His Honor was consistently reelected; today his son has the honor. This isn't to criticize the arrangement; part of the implicit bargain offered the electorate was that there never was even a whiff of corruption surrounding Mayor Daley personally, nor was there any doubt that Daley père was faithful to his wife. While some bewailed the somewhat undemocratic character of the Daley years, there is no doubt that Mayor Daley was correct in asserting that "We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement:" today Chicago prospers while Detroit, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, which enjoyed more democratic forms of government, don't.


The Change in our Understanding of Regimes


Only after the rank folly that was the First World War, and the orgies of sadism that were Bolshevism and and National Socialism, did the consensus come to be that democracy was the best, or perhaps least unattractive, form of government. I rue not the end of those regimes that sent their men to die by the millions, in the name of "God and Country." The first obligation of any government is to the well-being of its people; any regime willing to sacrifice its youth for the careers and egos of its elders is illegitimate. One of the problems inherent in empires and monarchies is that if the emperor or king is a senile or demented and slaughters or abuses his subjects, there is not that much subjects can do to stop them. In France, on the other hand, after more than a million of France's twenty million men had fallen in the field, more than fifty divisions mutinied. More than 20,000 men were tried in courts martial; pictured is a ceremony pour encourager les autres. Nivelle, the French commander was replaced by a new commander unwilling to let the British and Americans fight the Germans to the last Frenchman, and the French army didn't involve itself in offensive operations for the next year. The same commander was retrieved from retirement and put into high office a second time in 1940, after the Maginot Line had fallen, and the French army been soundly beaten.

The only emperor, in fact the only political leader, who consistently sought to end the carnage that was World War One was Blessed Charles of Austria, who also happened to be the only statesman to regularly visit the soldiers fighting at the front.  He also was the only political leader in that war to forbid his armies to use poison gas. After the German army had made it clear it would not accept any peace proposal, he sought to reach a separate peace with the Allied Powers, alas without success. One of my heroes. Even noted socialists, not generally known for praising monarchs, have been known to publicly and unequivocally declare that Charles, Emperor of Austria, and King of Hungary (pictured above) was the only decent person to serve as head of state during those years of slaughter.


Divide et Impera! or How to Get and Stay Elected


One of the less pleasant aspects of a democracy is that it is generally easier to rally voters around shared hatreds that are often all too clear than around shared dreams, which by their very nature are also frequently somewhat vague. Witness the raw racism all too prevalent in the old Confederacy after its voters were deprived of their right to vote, and only the previously disenfranchised and carpet-baggers could vote. Witness the odious race-baiting that helped bring the National-Socialists to power; remember Bush père's Willie Horton advertisement with its racial overtones, etc, etc. This isn't to say that undemocratic forms of governments don't have their flaws - they certainly do - but that theirs are different; in some ways better, in some ways worse. For an ambitious and immoral politician the ideal bogeyman to wave in front of the electorate is one that inspires fear and loathing, and either doesn't exist, or can't fight back. Attacking adversaries who can't defend themselves is an old trick, but it is bogeymen who don't exist that are a demagogue's dream, for the simple reason that in politics solving any real problem requires compromises that entail expending political capital. Inventing, and then solving, non-existent problems allows demagogues to craft solutions that cost them no political capital but redound to their friends' benefit and usually their enrichment, while at the same time winning them the acclaim and gratitude of the dolts in the electorate, even though the remedy doesn't serve said dolts, and indeed usually is to their detriment.

There are many resentments that demagogues use in their attempts to forge coalitions; those of the left generally tend to incite hatred of the rich, the talented and the authorities, those of the right generally foster the hatred of the poor, slothful, untalented, and unfortunate. Another old standby, of which both the right and left have availed themselves, are racial animosities, spoken and unspoken, sometimes even disingenuously denied. It seems to me that some present day politicians have fallen to this temptation to campaign not against an enemy but rather an ethnicity or culture; the point of this long, perhaps somewhat ponderous, introduction is to write of leaders in earlier times who interacted with their Muslim enemies at a time when the "West," whatever that exactly is, was at war with the "infidel" or Muslim world.  Ideally I would supply my reader with copious footnotes, references, and further suggestions for reading; I can, alas, only offer but a bare outline of what I think is a fascinating topic.


Francis of Assisi and the Crusades


I trust that the basic outlines of Francis of Assisi's life are known to my readers; the abandonment of a life of luxury for that of a mendicant friar, the founding of an order, and more.

Fewer people are aware that Francis of Assisi thought that the Fifth Crusade was an unjust war, and that the only way to end the fighting was to convert the Muslim Sultan (commander) Al Kamil to Christianity by nonviolent means. To do so, he traveled to Egypt, and obtained very reluctant permission from Pelagius, the hapless Cardinal the Pope had charged with leading the crusade, for him to cross behind enemy lines and preach the Gospel, which Pelagius was sure would cost Francis his head. Francis went forth nonetheless, and soon found himself talking face to face with Al-Kamil, pleading for peace and explaining his faith. In Shari'a law proselytizing is a capital offense, and soon the Muslim theologians to whom Francis had explained his beliefs wanted to see him lose his head. Al Kamil, impressed by Francis's character and life of poverty, refused, telling Francis that it would be an injustice to punish him for what he clearly believed to be an act of charity performed at great risk to himself.

Nevertheless, Francis found himself unable to convert any Muslims and equally unable to end the war to which he was opposed. In fact, he would have liked to convert some of the crusaders, of whose attitudes he heartily disapproved, to Christianity. Pelagius unwisely turned down the offer of a cease-fire, and Francis decided it was time to travel on. Declining expensive farewell gifts from his friend Al-Kamil, which only further impressed Al-Kamil, he left for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.


Richard Lionheart tries to Betroth his Sister to Saladin


Richard I, King of England, (1157-1199) was also known as Richard Cœur de Lion or Richard the Lionheart, was the son of Henry II and Eleanor of Acquitaine, one of the most memorable women of the Late Middle Ages, who had previously been married to Louis, King of France, until they were mercifully granted an annulment. Richard inherited extensive holdings in France including Aquitaine and Normandy, Maine and Anjou. He spoke fluent French and Occitan, (a language spoken in southern France) and made a name for himself with his contributions to Occitan poetry. As King of England, he spent but a few months on English soil, preferring to take part in the Third Crusade and defend his French realms.


Richard invaded Sicily to settle a dispute within the family, occupied Cyprus, which was to serve as a base for the Crusaders, and then advanced to Jaffa, where he realized that he didn't have the men and weapons necessary to conquer Jerusalem. As this realization sunk in, he sought a diplomatic solution to attain his goals. He parlayed with Saladin, the Kurd who was the Muslim leader, and Al Kamil's uncle. One proposal was that Saladin's brother marry Richard's sister, but Richard's sister would marry no Muslim and Saladin's brother no Christian. It is an irony of history, into which a few undoubtedly read too much, that Saladin and Saddam Hussein shared the same hometown.  In any event, never again has a King of England offered to betroth his sister to a son of Tikrit.  Richard and Saladin agreed that Jerusalem would remain in Muslim hands, but that Christian pilgrims would be free to enter it to visit their holy places, and King Richard began his long (and tortuous) journey home. Richard the Lionheart is not forgotten in the Arab world; because he had several thousand Arab prisoners slain to this day misbehaving Arab children are urged to mend their ways, lest King Richard come looking for them. In England, where Richard spent but a few months of his reign, but let the efficient administration his father had set in place run its course, taxing England to the bleeding point to fund his adventures in the Middle East, his personal bravery is not forgotten. He is remembered as "a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier."


Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Rome, Conqueror of Jerusalem

Another truly interesting historical figures from those days was Frederick II (1194-1250). Among other titles, he was the King of Italy, Germany, Burgundy, Rome and Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick was the scion of a German royal family, that of the Hohenstaufen, his maternal grandfather though, was a Norman.

A man of great learning, he was said to speak nine languages, among them Italian, French, German, Arabic, Latin and Greek, and understand another seven; he corresponded with Leonardo of Pisa, aka Fibonacci, one of the greatest mathematicians of his day, founded the University of Naples in 1224 (Thomas Aquinas and Giambattista Vico were alumni), sponsored some of the earliest Italian poetry (in the Sicilian dialect) at his court in Palermo, regulated medical practitioners working in his realms and more. Frederick was known for wearing Arab garb at his court in Sicily, and refusing to expel the Saracens (Arabs) from his domains. In fact, like Francisco Franco, whose bodyguards were Moors, Frederick employed Saracens as his bodyguards; among other advantages, being excommunicated by the pope or the threat thereof worried them not one iota.

Frederick had his problems with the papacy, which at the time was as much a political as a religious institution.  Being the Pope's neighbor all but guaranteed difficulties; one Vicar of the Prince of Peace went so far as to try to have him assasinated. Frederick was excommunicated for delaying his involvement in the crusades, and then embarked on one without the Pope's blessing, which got him excommunicated a second time. After time on Cyprus, Frederick proceeded to the Holy Land, where, rather than fight, - his army was too small anyway - he found himself negotiating with Al-Kamil, who was keen to fight other enemies who he deemed greater dangers. A compromise was reached, Jerusalem but for the Muslim and Jewish holy places was turned over to the Crusaders, as were Bethlehem, Nazareth, and more. It was the first crusade since the First Crusade to be successful, and the first not to end in a bloodbath.

Similarities, and differences, with some contemporary political leaders and their antics may be apparent.



Books: I greatly enjoyed, and highly recommend, Donald Spoto's Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi

A Spectular Article: A Heart Surgeon Repeats Hippocrates' Observations

Donald Miller, a cardiac surgeon and professor of medicine, has written a spectacular article, The Trouble with Government Grants, which describes just how corrupt, out of touch with reality, often useless and even harmful, what passes for medical research has become.

The bottom line is that the medical discoveries that really serve humanity do not, and have never, come in discrete packets, but have always been due to great minds making breakthroughs. For example, Albert Einstein was working as a patent clerk at the time he rewrote the physics books. The problem when a government puts x amount of dollars into research, is that it attracts second and third rate minds like rotting flesh attracts maggots, is that because such people rarely if ever make huge breakthroughs, and depend on an absence of breakthroughs for their subsistence, what ostensibly is a constituency for medical discoveries rapidly becomes a constituency against medical discoveries.

This is nothing new, here are Hippocrates' thoughts on the matter:

The Law of Hippocrates

MEDICINE is of all the arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present far behind all the other arts. Their mistake appears to me to arise principally from this, that in the cities there is no punishment connected with the practice of medicine (and with it alone) except disgrace, and that does not hurt those who are familiar with it. Such persons are like the figures which are introduced in tragedies, for as they have the shape, and dress, and personal appearance of an actor, but are not actors, so also physicians are many in title but very few in reality.

2. Whoever is to acquire a competent knowledge of medicine, ought to be possessed of the following advantages: a natural disposition; instruction; a favorable position for the study; early tuition; love of labor; leisure. First of all, a natural talent is required; for, when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place, which the student must try to appropriate to himself by reflection, becoming an early pupil in a place well adapted for instruction. He must also bring to the task a love of labor and perseverance, so that the instruction taking root may bring forth proper and abundant fruits.

3. Instruction in medicine is like the culture of the productions of the earth. For our natural disposition, is, as it were, the soil; the tenets of our teacher are, as it were, the seed; instruction in youth is like the planting of the seed in the ground at the proper season; the place where the instruction is communicated is like the food imparted to vegetables by the atmosphere; diligent study is like the cultivation of the fields; and it is time which imparts strength to all things and brings them to maturity.

4. Having brought all these requisites to the study of medicine, and having acquired a true knowledge of it, we shall thus, in traveling through the cities, be esteemed physicians not only in name but in reality. But inexperience is a bad treasure, and a bad fund to those who possess it, whether in opinion or reality, being devoid of self-reliance and contentedness, and the nurse both of timidity and audacity. For timidity betrays a want of powers, and audacity a lack of skill. They are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant.

5. Those things which are sacred, are to be imparted only to sacred persons; and it is not lawful to impart them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science.

Ralph Moss, Dean Burk, and Your Precious Bodily Fluids

As previously blogged, Ralph Moss was a PhD working at Sloan-Kettering until he and elements of senior management developed irreconcilable differences of opinion and went their separate ways. After he left Sloan-Kettering, his interest in cancer research undiminished, he befriended Albert Szent-Györgyi, whose theories about and understandings of cancer have already graced this blog.

Ralph Moss also befriended Dean Burk, a biochemist, who, among other things, co-discovered a B Vitamin, played a role in the invention of the MRI, studied with two Nobel Laureates, and more. One of these Nobel Laureates, with whom Dean Burk became an extremely close friend, was Otto Warburg, who also had an extremely interesting life. An MD, a PhD, who won the Iron Cross, second class, and two Nobel Prizes, (unfortunately at the time he won the second, it was considered unGerman to accept a Nobel Prize), a distinguished cancer researcher, whose ideas are coming back into fashion.

Warburg stayed in Germany and kept his job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute during the Nazi years despite the fact that his father had been of Jewish origin. The reason for this, the grapevine has it, was that very high-ranking Nazis, if not their leader himself, believed that he was on the cusp of finding a cure for cancer, and wanted to keep him close by, in case they, or their friends or family should need his ministrations. When laws were passed that banned Germany's Jews, and those with a parent of Jewish origin, from its universities, the highest echelons of the Nazi party saw to it that their office responsible for determining racial "purity" "reassessed" Warburg's Jewish background and reported that only one grandparent had been of Jewish ancestry, which, to poisoned minds meant that he was to be left alone. And thus, right to the end of the war, Warburg had a lab wherein he could do his research oblivious to the clash of arms all around him.

One of Burk's passions was the fight against fluoridation. When Dr. John Yiamouyiannis PhD first approached Burk and told him that there was evidence that suggested that adding fluoride to drinking water was an utter catastrophe for public health, Burk all but urged him to get lost, because he'd been at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute when the initial studies had been done that had concluded that it was safe. Yiamouyiannis dared Burk to examine his data and tell him where he'd gone wrong; Burk did so, agreed that he had to be right, and, convinced that water fluoridation accounts for tens of thousands of deaths per year in the United States, began his crusade against fluoridating public water supplies. Among other accomplishments, he was able to convince the Dutch and Australian authorities to end their fluoridation programs.

Here are Ralph Moss's recollections of Dean Burk.

You may, of course, be asking yourself, why would anyone ever put anything into the drinking water if there is any doubt at all that it is poisonous. The answer is that fluoride is a byproduct of the production of aluminum, uranium and some fertilizers. A few studies and scientists with a distinct whiff of "liars for hire," transformed what would otherwise have been a hazardous byproduct requiring expensive disposal into an expensive asset that the tax-payer in some countries is forced to buy, pay to put into his drinking water, and then ingest.

If you find this hard to believe, watch this incomparable video.

If you want more information, here is a good starting point.

Iran and its Minorities

A while back, I wrote an entry about the tragic life of Mohammed Mossadegh, and mentioned that Iran has a millenia long history of religious tolerance that belies some of the wilder claims made about its government in recent times.

Last week the Christian Science Monitor published an article on Iran's Jews. When the Iranian Revolution began, Iran's Jewish community sent a delegation to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and essentially asked him if they were going to have "problems." He replied that he did not approve of the State of Israel, but that had no bearing on the fact that the Koran enjoined him to tolerate Jews and Christians, and that he had no intention of deviating from the Koran. Many left Iran nonetheless; many of those that stayed reported that they preferred Iran after the Revolution to Iran before the Revolution, when corruption, prostitution, and more had been notoriously widespread. The war between Iran and Iraq, of course, was a tragedy that benefited neither Iran or Iraq.

As the article correctly reports, Iran has reserved seats in its parliament for its Jewish minority, and, if memory serves me right, also for its Christian and Zoroastrian minorities. On the other hand, the Baha'is, who claim to adhere to a new and improved brand of Shi'a Islam, not so unsurprisingly do suffer brutal persecution.

I could not disagree more with some the antics of Iran's current president, which are in exceedingly poor taste; all the same, I feel that it would be disastrous to misreport an unfortunate situation and imply that there is no solution but war. Every country will always have a few nuts, sometimes in high office, but as long as a tradition of tolerance is alive, things are not quite that dire. Perhaps the problem to focus on would be the plight of the Baha'is...

Without further ado, here's the article.

Lake Van and Aghdamar Island

One of the areas of the world in which I've always wanted to tramp around is the area of eastern Anatolia around Lake Van, Turkey's largest lake and very close to the Iranian border. That area of Turkey has some spectacular archaeological remains, particularly of the Urartians, whose kingdom lasted from the thirteenth to sixth century BC. When their kingdom crumbled, they were succeeded by the Armenians, who were converted to Christianity by the apostles Bartholomew and Jude Thaddeus.

The "Great War" wasn't kind to Van, the largest city on Lake Van, or its inhabitants; many Armenians sided with the Russians against the Turks; the Russians completely destroyed Van; the Turks slaughtered an ungodly number of Armenians; the thousands of Turks held prisoner in Baku by the Russians and Armenians were also smote lest they be freed by the Turks.

In any event, in 915 AD an Armenian king chose to live on Aghdamar; the only building that remains of his palace complex is the Church of the Holy Cross, built in 915-921 AD. For almost 800 years, it served as the seat of the leader of the Armenian Church; everything came to a bloody end in the 1915. In November 2004 a Turkish newspaper reported that Turkish soldiers had recently been using the frescoes in the church for target practice, since then it has been renovated and turned in a museum.

Below are some pictures of Lake Van, Aghdamar Island, and the Church of the Holy Cross.

Lake Van on a nice day.

Aghdamar Island and Lake Van.

Inside the Church

Adam and Eve.

Another Picture.

Another picture.


Links:

More images of the Church of the Holy Cross.