Vérification de la réalité

Reality Check!

• Ann Coulter's new book should be boycotted. Why? She seems to think there's some association between Anglo-Saxon culture and having an orderly, peaceable revolution.
  
  Now, let us leave to one side the Sons of Liberty tarring and feathering, lynching, and just generally terrorizing Tories; the fact of the matter is, the major reason the American "Revolution" was orderly was, it wasn't a revolution, just a secession. Secessions are usually comparatively orderly; look at Ireland or the breakup of the Soviet Union. Revolutions, real ones, are much nastier, because they have to get more done. "Slightly modify the system in use here according to long-fetishized Liberal principles, and cut ties to the exploitative homeland" isn't exactly major surgery. "Abolish the monarchy whose incumbent is the patriotism of the people, disregard four and a half centuries of entrenched legal and property rights, and attempt the first, only, and last rational republic in the history of the egg-sucking ape-race of Adam" is a bit more invasive of a procedure.
  
  And yet, Annykins, remember, the Terror killed about 20,000 people, under imminent threat of invasion. Not only did the English kill twice that many in Ireland 5 years later, with no national peril whatsoever—while gang-raping every single woman who caught their attention, with special care to violate virgins—they had also killed at least twice, and more like 2.5 times, as many during the Reformation. Because that's what you compare the French Revolution to: the English Reformation was a revolution, not a secession. And it was a filthy brutal thing that, point by point, presaged not the French Revolution, but the Bolshevik Revolution. It followed all the same stages; Cromwell and the Puritans would be the shift from Leninism to Stalinism.
  
  The only rational definition of American exceptionalism is "the only good thing the Saxon dog ever did"; it's important to remember that right up to about 1900, we regarded the English as what they are, to every decent human society: an enemy.


• I was reading this Jewish columnist, Jeff Dunetz, who said, get this, that the Blood Libel was started by Crusaders "worried that their families would fall into the hands of Jews".
  
  Pffft. Okay so first off, protecting the families of crusaders was a high priority for all the (incredibly powerful) charitable institutions of the medieval world—in the unlikely event that those crusaders' liege-lords wouldn't take them in (if you don't know how feudalism worked, you shut your noise hole about the Middle Ages, got it?). Second off, the first medieval blood libel is that of St. Hugh, which dates to 1255, right after the Seventh Crusade and 15 years before the Eighth: the timing is a bit off for it to directly relate to the Crusades.
  Late addendum: Especially because both the countries where the St. Hugh business was most influential, England and France, were more or less boycotting the Seventh Crusade...because they didn't like the Holy Roman Emperor who was leading it. I hate to invoke the shallow skeptic's catchphrase but this myth has been busted.
  
  There's this association used by a lot of Jewish writers, blatantly bigoted and risibly unhistoric though it is, between the Crusades and anti-Semitism. Only, there are only two incidents that can form a basis for it, and neither holds up to any scrutiny. The first is the Rhineland massacres during the First Crusade, but those were by the followers of the rabble-rousing lay preacher Peter the Hermit, who were no more crusaders than the Westboro Baptist Church is the DoD. Indeed, it was actual crusaders that diverted on their way to the Holy Land to wipe out Peter and his mob.
  
  The other example would be the sack of Jerusalem. Only, aside from the fact it only killed about 3000 people (and that only because the defenders had deliberately provoked the besiegers; nothing like that happened at Antioch), I'm pretty sure almost all the victims were Muslim, not Jewish. Why? Byzantium, my son, Byzantium. Byzantines had the same policies RE: Jews as the ancient Romans, and the Roman policy on Jerusalem was that Jews were only allowed in exactly once a year, on the anniversary of the end of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, and then only to visit the Wailing Wall (that is in fact how the custom of wailing at that wall began).


• It was very odd, once, on this one blog, seeing one of the commenters treating the Bar Kokhba rebellion as if it was a victory for the Jews. I didn't have the ability to comment, but if I had, I would've pointed out that, though they certainly fought bravely, Jewish status in the Empire was utterly annihilated as a result. Not only that, but the humiliating lamentations imposed as a condition of surrender continue to this day—people still go to the wailing wall and wail.
  
  Imagine if World War II had never happened, and in 3794, we still found Germany paying France reparations, though virtually no German remembered why (or if neither World War had ever happened, and 3746 France was still paying Germany reparations over the Franco-Prussian war of 1870). That ain't the behavior of the victor.


• Speaking of Crusader massacres, you know what's interesting? If you look at reactions to the sack of Constantinople (just like Jerusalem, deliberately provoked by the defenders: pro tip, if you're under siege, don't taunt the besiegers), the Byzantines' main problem seems to have been that Hagia Sophia was desecrated. It was the Latins themselves who denounced the rape, massacres, and looting. Why?
  
  Well, because Byzantines—like Confucians and everyone else who despises war—pretty much considered rape, massacre, and looting par for the course, when you took a city. But desecrating churches just wasn't done. The Latins only raped, massacred, and looted when they broke discipline (that's why they also desecrated the cathedral); the See of Rome had made conscious efforts for the previous half-millennium to minimize that sort of behavior, in its communicants.