Obscure History Part I

While there is quite a bit going on in the world right now, I don't really feel much like writing about any of it. I didn't want to let this blog sit around and moulder any longer than it already has, though, so instead, here's a whole bunch of obscure pieces of history that I personally find interesting, entertaining, illuminating, intriguing, or otherwise useful to drop on pretentious people at parties. Doubtless when I hit another dry spot with this blog, I'll do this again.

Pepin the Short was the great-grandfather of Charles the Bald.

Immediately before the Battle of Chancellorsville, a cannonball took out the wooden post Fighting Joe Hooker (commander of the Union army) was leaning against. He was knocked senseless and was so shaken by the experience he was never an effective general again.

Alexander the Great founded at least 70 cities named “Alexandria.” The last was Alexandria Eschate (“Alexandria the Farthest”) in modern-day Tajikistan. The group of retired veterans and wounded he left there (as well as their descendants) defended the outpost as part of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom for almost two hundred years. Their expeditions ranged as far as Xinjiang in China and their children were known as the Ta-Yuan to the Chinese, and it was they who opened the Silk Road to the west.

Alexander also had a giant glass cylinder built because he was curious what things looked like at the bottom of the ocean.

The term “assassin” is a corruption of the name of the Hashshashin sect of Ismaili Muslims who terrorized the ruling Abbasid elite from the 8^th to the 14^th centuries. Their name derived from the use of hashish in their training and indoctrination rituals, and they were known for taking enormous doses before setting off to murder prominent Abbasids in public. Their founder, Hasan-i-Sabbah built them a mountaintop fortress and was thereafter known as “The Old Man in the Mountain.” Among their more prominent victims was Conrad of Montferrat, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Genghis Khan’s second son, Jagatai.

There was a woman named Alys who lived from 1160-1220. She was the daughter of Louis VII of France and his second wife, and was betrothed to Richard I of England (Richard the Lionheart), who was the son of Eleanor of Aquitaine—Louis VII’s first wife. She was mistress to Henry II, Richard’s father, and was imprisoned by Eleanor as a result. Her half-brother, Philip II (Augustus) betrothed her to John, Richard’s younger brother (after Richard terminated his engagement to her on the grounds that she had been impregnated by his father), but when John was deposed by Richard, she was married to a fairly minor French count. She was daughter of a king, betrothed to two kings, mistress of another king, and brother of yet another king. All of them related.

Israel Beer Josaphat, also known as Joseph Josephat, also known as Paul Julius Reuter, and known finally as Paul Julius Baron von Reuter, founder of the Reuters news agency purchased the rights to all Iranian oil from Nasser al-Din Shah of the dying Qajar dynasty in the late 1890’s before reports of the discovery of oil in Iran had even been confirmed. He paid roughly thirty thousand dollars.

Caligula, Emperor of Rome from 12-41 AD opened a brothel in his palace, had incestuous relationships with all three of his sisters (and later disemboweled one in order to see the baby he had fathered), made his horse Incitatus a consul, made it illegal not to leave him everything in a will, and declared war on both the ocean (because the tide refused to go out) and the sun (because it refused to rise when ordered).

The country of Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society as a place to send freed African slaves. At their insistence, the citizens of Liberia were recognized by the local Africans and British colonial authorities in Sierra Leone as Americans. The ACS, incidentally, was founded following reports of planned slave uprisings and was based on the belief that freed African slaves would bring about widespread chaos and anarchy in civilized society.

In 1826, the Ottoman sultan Mahmoud II, when faced with the janissary corps as an intractable obstacle to military modernization, invited every officer in the corps to his palace on the shores of the Bosphorus for a birthday celebration. When they had all arrived, he had the doors blocked behind them and destroyed the palace with artillery fire, killing them to the last man. This is known in history as “The Auspicious Event.”

In order to raise revenue after the Thirty Years War, the Swedish monarchy decided to seize 10% of the land of every noble family. The nobles would have the option to buy back the land if they chose (since that would fill the royal treasury) or it would be used to farm and raise money for the government. The figure was initially meant to be 25%, but the nobles threatened revolt, so it was lowered to 10% in compromise—but with the restriction that the crown could choose which 10%. Thus, the crown selected the land that the nobles’ castles happened to be standing on, giving them the option to either buy the land back at exorbitant prices or become homeless.

The most prized relic of the French Foreign Legion is the severed, preserved arm of a lieutenant who was killed at the Battle of Cameron in 1863 in Mexico, where a patrol of 65 legionnaires held off over two thousand Mexican soldiers for over twelve hours until, their ammunition exhausted, the last five survivors fixed bayonets and charged. Two legionnaires were taken alive and refused to surrender unless given safe passage home, and an escort for their flag and the body of their commander.

The first English colony in North American was founded on Roanoke Island in North Carolina in 1584. When the English ships returned two years later with supplies and more colonists, they found the colony deserted with no signs of struggle or disease. The only clue was the word “Croatoan” carved into a nearby tree. What happened to the colony remains unsolved.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s personal diary, which is on display at the National Archives in Washington D.C. contains the name and home telephone number of George Bush Senior, who was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time.

Bangladesh was formerly part of Pakistan, despite it being separated by (and surrounded by) roughly a thousand miles of India. It seceded in 1971 following the bloody Bangladesh Liberation War.

In 1190, Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, fell into a river in Asia Minor and died, aged 70. His 100,000-man army, which he was leading to what is now known as the Third Crusade evaporated. Had he reached the Levant, it is extremely likely the Crusaders would have retaken Jerusalem and the course of eight hundred years of European/Islamic relations would have been radically different.

The city of Montevideo was besieged by the forces of Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas for nine years, beginning in 1838. This “New Troy,” as it was called in the European press, was at that time home of Italian revolutionary Guiseppe Garibaldi, who formed an Italian Legion and fought against the Argentines.

Iran’s first, last, and only democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, who was overthrown by the CIA in 1953, conducted virtually all state business from his bed.

Field Marshal Viscount William Slim took command of scattered and defeated British colonial forces in Southeast Asia in 1942, conducted a retreat all the way to India, where he reformed and reorganized and led an offensive against the Japanese during a monsoon: this was the only instance of a successful Allied land campaign against Japan during the entire war.

The War of Jenkin’s Ear took place between Great Britain and Spain from 1739-48 mainly in the Caribbean, was profoundly indecisive, and eventually became part of the larger War of the Austrian Succession. The one and only major engagement was at the silver exporting town of Puerto Bello, which is where the name of Portobello Road in Notting Hill comes from.

A Swedish Viking named Ingvar the Far-Travelled led a raid against Persia circa 1042 and fought in a battle in a civil war in what is now the country of Georgia. A runestone left on the shores of the Caspian Sea mark the furthest extent of Viking travels. It is also noteworthy that at about the same time, Vikings proved to be such a problem in the city of Constantinople that a law was enacted which limited the number of Vikings in the city at any one time to fifty.

Covering a Lot of Ground

I've been meaning to put another post up here for quite some time; consequently, I have about five topics I want to address, which means this will be a very lengthy post. My apologies in advance, and I'll try to clearly label the sections for the ease of the reader.

Elaboration on Last Post

I watched the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares" recently and while I thought most of its reasoning was somewhat simplistic and it's presentation overly conspiratorial in a rather juvenile manner, it raised a provocative argument which would explain the topic of my last post. The essential claim of the film is that modern politicians have shifted from presenting utopian visions of the future to be worked towards to instead describing nightmarish dangers in the present from which the populace must be saved. "Modern" is tricky here, since this is a technique at least as old as Alcibiades, but the point is that we have been presented with an image of al-Qaeda as a massive, monolithic global organization with tentacles extending even into the most innocuous parts of middle America, supported by a network of subservient Islamist terrorist groups, and financed by intelligence agencies, unfriendly governments, and Arab billionaires, all of whom work as cogs in a vast machine led by Osama bin Laden which labors tirelessly to destroy America, Christianity, freedom, and democracy.
Unfortunately, (or perhaps, quite fortunately) this all appears to be entirely incorrect. According to this documentary (and what I've read in books by Steve Coll and whoever wrote Imperial Hubris) the vast majority of what we know about al-Qaeda comes from a single source: a man named Jamal al-Fadl, who was on the run from bin Laden due to an outstanding debt. The problem that most actual facts seem to contradict his stories has received very little attention.

For instance, we are told that Osama bin Laden is the leader and mastermind of al-Qaeda and its activities. But the fact is that it has been proven that the attacks of September 11 were planned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who seems to have an unflattering view of bin Laden as a simple, easily-manipulated man with money to burn.
We are told that al-Qaeda has been around for quite some time, meticulously plotting attacks well in advance. But the fact is that alleged members of al-Qaeda never referred to it or gave any indication of its existence until after September 11.
We are told that al-Qaeda has massive, elaborate bunkers in the mountains of Afghanistan, although none have actually been found. We are told that Afghanistan and northern Pakistan are crawling with their operatives, although the leader of the international force in Afghanistan reported that he had captured or killed exactly zero members of al-Qaeda by early 2006. We are told that al-Qaeda maintains sleeper cells in the United States, but the two alleged "sleeper cells" discovered turned out to be entirely fabricated with no actual evidence whatsoever, and their alleged members have been quietly acquitted.

The argument of the documentary is that the reason al-Qaeda has not been found (and likewise, the reason there have not been any further spectacular attacks, despite apparent means and motive) is because it simply does not exist beyond a handful of (probably dead) members surrounding bin Laden and Zawahiri.

Of course, there is a further problem here. The film goes on to argue that the real danger is the thousands of angry, disaffected, impoverished, threatened Muslim youths who see a Crusade from the West against their culture and a large-scale theft of their natural resources. If there were not enormous numbers of America-hating terrorists before, we have certainly created them. Back to square one.

Prospects for the 2008 Presidential Election

What I find most interesting about the current field of candidates is that there are excellent reasons for all of them to fail miserably. Consider: Giuliani should fail to mobilize the Religious Right base because he's pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-gay marriage, and has himself been married several times. McCain should fail because the "black baby" slur from the 2000 race has never really gone away in the Deep South, and his stubborn pro-war stance has alienated him from the moderates which used to love him. Romney should fail because he's a Mormon. Obama should fail because he's black, inexperienced, and his middle name is "Hussein." Hillary should fail because she's one of the best Republicans the Democrats ever elected, she was for the war (among other right-wing initiatives), and is tied to Bill Clinton and all the virulent Clinton-hate which still exists in so much of the country.
Every one of these candidates has both huge liabilities in the primaries and in the general election, and even in terms of Electoral College strategy, the board is a nightmare. Running Giuliani in an effort to take New York would be a Republican dream...unless it cost them Florida and a couple of the other swing states. And of course it would necessitate running Hillary against him (because the Democrats can't afford to lose New York), which in turn could lose all sorts of votes across the board and bring out those anti-Clintonites who otherwise wouldn't show up to vote for a gun-stealin, baby-killin, gay-lovin New Yorker.

The biggest factor (in the primaries, at least) is the phenomenon of Keynes' Beauty Contest: not that people will vote for who they think is best, but instead for who they think most other people will think is best. In Keynes' words, "we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects average opinion to be." This will be a problem when people decide not to vote for Barack Obama (for instance) not because he's black and they have a problem with that, but because they expect most other people will have a problem with it. Same goes for any of the other liabilities listed above.

But, as every pundit quite rightly keeps saying, it's still a year and a half early. A lot can (and will) happen. The numbers in six months will look nothing like what they do now. But America is quite clearly ready for a change, and the public is already following this race quite closely. It'll be interesting to watch, and I think it has the potential to be seen as a historic turning point.

Problems of Democratisation in Yugoslavia and a Model for Iraq

I have a class on democratisation and ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia, and its essential argument is that anywhere a transition is made from a dictatorship to democracy in a multiethnic state, ethnic violence results. The reasons for this are numerous, but primarily it is because most people identify themselves along ethnic lines (rather than, say, class) which results in nationalist ethnic political parties. A victory or advantage for one party is seen as a threat to the other ethnic groups, who in turn try to increase their security and in doing so, seem threatening to the first group, and so on. It's the classic security dilemma, but with ethnic groups rather than nation-states as the primary actors.
Eventually, it becomes clear that all ethnic groups cannot govern equally (and don't want to, for that matter) and that even if they could, it is very difficult to determine the territorial extent of each group, which leads to differing groups laying claim to the same territory, each feeling threatened and persecuted by the other, and conflict results.

Setting aside for a moment the numerous objections to this explanation which result from an economic view of history, it seems to me the basic problem here is one of identity. Take Bosnia-Herzegovina for instance. At present, the state is made up of three ethnic groups: the Croats, the Serbs, and the Bosnian Muslims (or "Bosniaks," henceforth). They cannot agree on anything (to the point where the national anthem has no words, because they couldn't decide on which language to have it in) and each has carried out brutal campaigns of ethnic cleansing against all of the others. There is an international military force keeping the peace, and an international governing body (the Office of High Responsibility, or OHR) which has the power to review and repeal any acts of the national government. This has led to the removal of numerous politicans, up to and including Prime Ministers, as well as the dissollution of governments, the repeal of laws, and so forth. The OHR is viewed with a great deal of hostility by all three ethnic groups, each of which feel it is both a tool of the others and an outside occupier.
According to the firsthand research my professor has done, virtually nobody in the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina indentifies themselves by that fact. Their citizenship, in other words, is meaningless to them: they identify themselves based on their ethnic group, and as long as this continues, unity is impossible and the instant the international force leaves, war will break out again.
This actually seems a bit ludicrous to me. The chief criteria of identity is the belief that you are more like other people in your group than you are like members of a different group. I identify myself as American only by accident--the fact that I am American will allow you to predict virtually nothing accurately about me, and I have very, very little in common with most people who are Americans. The idea of bothering to kill large groups of people over this issue seems the height of human stupidity to me, but nevertheless, it is apparently a rather popular thing to do.
Anyhow. So the problem is how to shift identity away from ethnic groups to that of the national level (of course, that then creates the problem of aggressive states, but never mind--one thing at a time) without the transition being threatening to the groups which are essentially being subverted or at least made subservient. Can this be done? Is it something that has to happen with time? Is it particular to certian sets of circumstances? That would explain why India, with its 23 official languages did not collapse into a mass of ethnic extermination in 1950. Perhaps the economic explanation comes into play here: if all ethnic groups are equally wealthy or equally poor, perhaps democratisation and unity are possible? Perhaps rural economies are necessary, because only then is there a perpetual shortage of labor, which precludes mass violence as an effective tool for economic redistribution--whereas in industrial economies, with a perpetual and necessary labor surplus, there are literally extra people and it is far easier to make them a target of rhetoric.
Quite frankly, there doesn't seem to be an answer. There is, however, a suggestion.

I've referred to it before as the theory of my Bavarian monarchist friend, but it turns out there's actually a book which puts it forward: At War's End, by Roland Paris. The idea is essentially that there needs to be a transition phase between dictatorship and democracy: a benevolent dictator sort of government should be installed and should set up the institutions of liberal democracy, while still restricting their use and alloting their benefits and resources evenly. Rule of law and constitutionality should be established, and ideally moderate political parties should arise. Only after many years of this should the autocratic regime be replaced by actual democracy.
Obviously there are a litany of problems with the practicalities of this, and I look forward to reading the book to see if and how he deals with them. I'll leave the criticisms of this theory for then. In the meantime, if we accept this as a better alternative to the disastrous policy of crash democracy building, consider how these Bosnian lessons can be applied to the current problem of Iraq.

The states have some striking similarities: three overlapping ethnic groups, unequal geographic distribution of resources among them, a past of dictatorship in which one group was dominant, extreme nationalist ethnic political parties, and so forth. Even if an international solution can be met and some sort of equitable power-sharing arrangement worked out in terms of national politics, (not to mention an end to what looks increasingly like widespread ethnic cleansing) this ethnic security dilemma will still exist, and it is highly unlikely that there will be any sort of government of moderate political parties. Add to this the problems of Iranian, Saudi, and Syrian meddling and the resentment of European and American interference, and the idea that a pluralistic liberal democracy will exist in Iraq any time soon becomes nothing more than sadly laughable.
Regarding that last point: I think a great deal could be learned from Lord Salisbury's 1878 diplomacy with Austria, Germany, Turkey, and Russia before the Congress of Berlin following the Russo-Turkish war of that same year. There was a similar problem: a multiethnic and strategically significant territory which had just been "liberated" from its former autocratic overlords (Bulgaria in this case), on which every neighboring party had designs. What Salisbury did was reach interlocking, complementary bilateral agreements with each party separately before going to the summit, so that it became clear to each party that it was in their interests to have a stable, neutral, relatively weak Bulgaria rather than endemic internal conflict, the possibility of regional war, dissatisfaction of other parties leading to further Great Power conflict, or an essentially "failed state."

The charge is often levelled against intellectuals that they make a living by making criticism and have no actual practical suggestions to anything. I think this is mostly fair (and is the majority of my problem with Chomsky, among many others) so in an effort to avert that criticism, I think I've reached the point where I can safely say what I would do if I were put in charge of all American diplomacy in Iraq:

I would set up negotiations with Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey and other negotiations with representatives of the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds. To the latter group, I would do what Holbrooke did at the Dayton negotiations: declare that they are responsible for the actions of the extremist groups of their constituencies, and if they cannot control these groups, they will be left out of any settlement reached.
I would then appeal to NATO to set up something similar to the Office of High Responsibility, bankrolled by the United States (since it's our mess, after all) but with non-American troops. The purpose of this office would be to distribute the resources and benefits of the society evenly among all three ethnic groups and to ensure that no group achieves dominance over the others.
I would conduct individual bilateral negotiations with each of the aforementioned neighboring countries to the effect that it is in their interest to have a stable, prosperous Iraq as a neighbor--and to make it clear that the alternative is not an Iraq governed by their pet group, but an Iraq governed by a group hostile to them. In other words, I would tell the Iranians that if they do not invest in a stable, neutral Iraq, then America will ensure that Iraq becomes a bastion of Sunni strength. And so on to each group, to indicate that it is in their interests to play along, if nothing else, to avert a civil war which would doubtless spread over their borders.
I would then invest massively in a front organization (some sort of Islamic charity, preferably, full of brown Arabic speakers) and perhaps set up contracts with absurdly wealthy Saudi construction magnates like the Bin Laden Group to rebuild Iraq. Get the lights on, get the water running, get some infrastructure going. Hopefully the fact that the construction is being done by Muslims for Muslims will lessen the degree to which this newly constructed infrastructure is a target.
I would then have the international summit to solidify the already-agreed neutrality (and hopefully participation) from the neighboring countries.
Lastly, I would have the official national summit, to show that the plan has support of Turks, Arabs, Iranians, and the international community. This would hopefully give the OHR clone some degree of legitimacy and would force the national parties to abide by their promises to the foreign powers which back them.

Peace would be fragile. There would still be extremists which are difficult to control. Al-Qaeda in Iraq would still be active, provoking ethnic violence. There would be resentment against the OHR office. But I think it's the best plan for peace I've ever heard of, and it'd get the Americans out without an immediate collapse into civil war...as well as not abandoning any group to the mercies of the others or to the predatory states which encircle them.

So, if you're reading this, Condi? I just solved all your problems. You'll understand if I insist on cash rather than a personal check, right?