Do the revisionists belittle history?

[Key Peninsula Redneck]

Then again maybe there is a perfectly logical explanation as to why history is biased and in favour of the 'white' man: He was one of very few who kept such records and made such expeditions to seek out the rest of the world.

That is an interesting point. Records that the white man kept will probably also be biased in favor of the white man and there will probably be more of them as well, simply because of the fact that Europeans are a more recent culture.

 

[Brimshack]

I apologize if I was a little too extreme and overstated my own point. I am not trying to express that we were perfect in any sense, but the claim that everybody was better than Europeans is a common thought nowadays. It is surprisingly common.

Could you please cite 3 examples of someone advocating this "common" thought?

 

[Lifesaver]

Thank God for the Crusades, or else the Muslim nations would have conquered all, or at least many more, Christian kingdoms than they did.
The Crusades were the just Christian response to the Muslim invasions and domination of their lands.

And the Crusaders were not "murderous thieves". Many, as are many people today and in any age, were. Others were saints.

The presentation of the Medieval times as being dark ages of opression, obscurantism and cultural death were created by Modern historians; most serious historians of today agree that it has very little to do with the truth.

 

[Axion]

Yes.

Pre 1960 histories WERE biased in favour of the "civilising white man" approach, with everyone else playing the role of savages and villains.

However

Now we are seeing an extreme swing of the pendulum the other way, which is driven by:
1. The desire of every historian to have something "new" to say in order to make a reputation. So if the standard view is that the Vikings were murderous thugs, the revisionist will try to "prove" they were cultured intellectuals of a caring, sharing disposition. (I have seen laughable examples of this on British Television, where one sees people going on about the "exquisite" craftmanship of viking knives, whilst neglecting to inform us what they did with them!)

2. The need of many in modern society to tear down the specifically Christian part of our heritage. These people like to tell the story that modern society developed despite Christianity, rather than because of it. So they run down Christianity's contribution to society, progress and civilisation, and over emphasize any bad aspects they can find.

This is where the CRUSADES seem to be a cornerstone issue.

Until about 30 years ago, the public image of the Crusaders was as of the most noble of chivalric knights who rode bravely into battle to defend Christendom from dire threat.

The revisionists have scored their greatest success here, for nowadays few people mention the Crusaders except to say how vile and evil they were.

And what is the truth?

Basically it has been a hatchet-job and incredibly bad history. By and large we have the same sources now, as the historians of the past three hundred years or so. They have just been presented differently.

Today's history books are less rigorous than the older ones. Where a history written 50 or more years ago will relate all the known facts chronologically and in great detail, about the personalities involved, the lead up to the conflict and every event along the way. Today's histories are far lazier, and far more prone to being twisted and opinionated. Writers give a general overview of wha they say happened, with little precise detail and few names and places. What detail is added tends to be odd stories to add colour and "prove" the writers point.

So with the Crusades, we get told in detail of the Christian massacre in Jerusalem, but nothing of the larger and more brutal massacres of Christians by Muslims in city after city across the Holy Land. We get told of the chivalry of Saladin, but nothing of the brutality of Baybars. I have had to argue with people who claim to "know" after reading such "histories", that the crusaders attacked peaceful Muslims who had "always" lived in the Holy Land. People have even told me that Christians "never" lived in the Holy Land!!

The key point is that the Crusades were a defensive war.

From 600 AD on, Islam has been an expanding religion, which has aimed to conquer the lands of Christianity. This continuous war or "jihad" began just three years after Muhammad's death and continued continuously for the next thousand years. In this time the Muslim overran the Christian Lands of

Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine 630 AD
Egypt 650 AD
North Africa, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco 700 AD
Spain 780 AD
Southern France 790 AD
Sicily 850 AD
Southern Italy 860 AD
Turkish borders 900 AD
Central Turkey 1070 AD
Greece 1300 AD
Bulgaria and the Balkans 1400 AD
Constantinople 1450 AD

Piratical raids and campaigns of raiding on land, slave-taking and slaughter took place virtually every summer for a thousand years to destabilise neighbouring Christian lands. No permanent peace with "infidels" was allowed by Islam.

The one time the Christians decided that enough was enough and united to fight back was the Crusades. And it is arguable that without them, Europe would be Muslim ruled today. The Crusades had two causes:

1. An appeal from the Byzanine Empire because the Muslims had broken through their defenses and laying waste to Christian Anatolia.

2. The systematic destruction of Christian sites in the Holy Land and the prevention of pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The idea that the crusaders were somehow evil or greedy or worse than any other soldiers of the period is utter rubbish. They were not saints or monks or churchmen, by and large. They were soldiers (like those who take part in wars today, in Iraq and elsewhere), who go into battle, kill and are killed. They obeyed the rules of war of their day. Those rules were that if a city refused to surrender without bloodshed, and resisted assault, needing to be stormed at great cost of life to the attackers, then the successful attackers took vengeance on the city. Once a battering ram hit the gates of a city, the die was cast and all inside could be subject to attack and treated as enemy. This happened far more often on the Muslim side, with Muslim leaders often gloating in the bloodshed - such as at the sack of Christian Antioch, which never recovered, and went from being one of he world's major cities to a deserted ruin.

But instead of truth, we get "histories" that totally distort the facts. This gives Muslims of today a wrongful sense of grievance. They forget, like our modern historians, the 1000 years of continuous and deadly Muslim aggression against the West, and focus on the brief period when the Christians retaliated.

 

[hemis]

Revisionist also want you to not know of the Polish invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1938 and the agreement of Hitler to protect certain areas of Czechoslovakia from Poland expansion, they also want you to believe Gliewitz was staged by Hitler.

 

[Russebby]

This was an excellent post concerning the recent trend of PC history, and how it seeks to not neessarily paint Europeans as monsters, but perhaps seek the diametric opposite positions. In that I agree with some and can agree to disagree with the rest. One problem I have with it, and it seems to be the same problem everyone else is having:

The key point is that the Crusades were a defensive war.

From 600 AD on, Islam has been an expanding religion, which has aimed to conquer the lands of Christianity. This continuous war or "jihad" began just three years after Muhammad's death and continued continuously for the next thousand years. In this time the Muslim overran the Christian Lands of

You are lumping the entire history of the Middle East into one aggregate, and I find this erred and even a little closed-minded. I say this because, living in a still-eurocentrist culture, we tend to differentiate between nationalities and races when it comes to "our own" history--we talk about the Germans doing this and the Spanish doing that and the British the other, and we differentiate because we seek differences between cultures, languages, geographies, and races.

I think you and everyone else here who lumps in everyone as "Muslim" are doing a disservice to discussing history, and I believe it is self-serving and belies the current Neo-con agenda that Islam has been a religion based on world domination since its inception. I think this is not only wrong, it is borderline bigoted.

There are sincere differences between Turks and Arabs in terms of history, geography, and culture. Turks generally came from central Asia, Arabs from North Africa and Arabia. They speak different languages. There is a reason
why Turkey has been a long-time memeber of NATO and the rest of the Arab world has been left in the dust--aside from its proximity to the former USSR, Turkey has for a long time, since the Ottoman days, seen itself as much as a Western-styled nation as it has seen itself a Muslim nation. It has a system of law based on precedent and a government nominally democratic, whereas the rest of the Arab world is theocratic and autocratic in nature.

It is exactly as insulting to lump all Muslims together, without considering cultures to delineate one people from another, as it would be to lump the US and Germany together as Christians, blame all Christians around the world for the Holocaust, and then badmouth the US. That is essentially what you are doing when you lump the entire Islamic world together.

The Crusades began with a plea from King Alexios of Constantinople to Pope Urban II in 1095 to send aid against the rival Seljuk Turks. Alexios did not talk about Islamic infidels, he did not talk about any greater Christian glory. He talked about saving his city from the Turks, a people about as Muslim in that day as Britain is Catholic.

The Crusades were as defensive a war as is the current war in Iraq, and Urban II played the peoples of Europe just like Bush did America in concocting something that only tenuously existed at best to awaken the animalistic zeal therein.

When you begin saying that Christians were responsible for the Holocaust, Inquisition, the massacres during the Black Death, the Thirty Years War, World War I, the enslaving of the African peoples, the genocide of the Native Americans, apartheid in the US and South Africa, then lumping all Muslims into the warmongering cubbyhole you and others conveniently place them in will be consistent. It would still be horribly wrong, but at least you will be consistently wrong.

And leaving a laundry list of all things perceived to be Islamic shortcoming, as I mentioned before, is self-serving and perpetuates the myth in America that Islam is little more than a religion for the warmongering. When we get to brass tacks, every one of these events was trumped at some level by the so-called Christian peoples: Allow me to demonstrate:

Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine 630 AD

The Holy Land was ruled by Rome and the Byzantine Empires, Christian since about 300 anno domini. Rome was notorious for not only crucifying Jesus and every other dissident of the era, they also burned the temple of Jerusalem to the ground and dispursed the Jewish peoples, something that in this day and age might be considered genocide. Both Rome and Byzantium saw the Holy Land as little more than a cash cow and treated the indigenous peoples there with indignation. THAT IS HOW CHRISTIANS RAN THE HOLY LAND BEFORE THE MUSLIMS CAME.

Egypt 650 AD

From the time Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798 to now, the Middle East has been seen as a vassal state to the West. The British and the French carved up North Africa, Palestine, and Mesopotamia at their leisure, breaking them up politically in the attempt to keep them divided and quarrelling. The US got into the act of political manipulation of the area in the 1950's by sponsoring a coup in the nominally democratic Iran and imposing the US-friendly Shah, who ruled that country not unlike the US-backed Saddam Hussein ruled Irag for decades. THAT IS HOW CHRISTIANS HAVE RUN THE MIDDLE EAST FOR TWO CENTURIES AND UNWITTINGLY CREATED THE VERY TERRORISTS WE ARE FIGHTING TODAY.

North Africa, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco 700 AD

Italy and Germany ran roughshod over North Africa in the 1930's in their rave for world domination. The countries you mentioned were previously owned part and parcel by France, Britain, and Spain--Christian nations who treated their colonies like feudal states. North Africa was the theater for some of the more intense fighting and some of the worst Allied losses in WWII. After the bloosiest war of all time, instead of granting these nations their independence, the Allies returned them to their colonial masters. THAT IS HOW CHRISTIANS RAN NORTH AFRICA, AS A FEUDAL STATE AND A THEATER FOR WAR.

Spain 780 AD

The Catholics spent literally centuries reconquering the Iberian peninsula. By 1450 they had almost completely rid the area of Muslims. In their divine wisdom, Ferdinand and Isabella instituted the Inquisition, one of the darkest chapters in European history, one which dwarfs more recent efforts of ethnic cleansing. First the Catholics sought to persecute the conversi--the Jews therein who were converted to Chrsitianity under duress, but secretly maintained their traditions--but in no time at all they brought all Jewish and Muslim men, women, and children to the medieval torture rooms. THAT IS HOW CHRISTIANS RECONQUERED SPAIN, THROUGH WAR AND TORTURE.

Southern France 790 AD

By the Middle Ages Christians had thrust the Moors back to the other side of the Pyrenees. From the time of Charlemagne to the end of the Crusades, France became a hotbed for violence against non-Catholic peoples. In the Alcase-Lorraine region Jews were persecuted as the continent-crossing Crusaders took them out to practice their warmongering skills. Every few years, in almost every town in France, law-abiding Jews would be purged by any particular town and region. Jews in France and elsewhere were blamed for the Black Death in the 1350's, and they were slaughtered at a level only beaten by the Holocaust, another event which, under your belief of lumping all Muslims togeher, Christians killed off Jews in ghastly numbers. Probably the saddest event in medieval France was the Crusade to slaughter the Albigensians, a nominally Christian people living in Southern France; Pope Innocent III called for a CRUSADE against them in the 13th century, and by 1244 the Albigensians were crushed in one of the most brutal genocidal campaigns in European history. THAT IS WHAT CHRISTIANS DID TO NON-CHRISTIANS IN FRANCE.

Sicily 850 AD
Southern Italy 860 AD

I like how you make distinctions between Sicily and Southern Italy when it suits you, yet you lump Turks and Arabs together conveniently to prove whatever point you were trying to make. THAT IS WHAT CHRISTIANS DO IN THE ATTEMPT TO PAINT MUSLIMS AS WARMONGERS.

Turkish borders 900 AD

At about this same time, you had the Viking peoples becoming slowly christianized and, at the same time, raping and pillaging and invading every sea-bordering nation in Europe and western Asia. By 900 the Vikings were founding Kiev and the underbelly of Mediterranean Europe. Within a century they were on the coast of Graanland and America, and a few decades thereafter they greatest triumph, the Normans, successfully invaded Britain once and for all. THIS IS WHAT CHRISTIANS WERE DOING AT THE SAME TIME, 900 ANNO DOMINI, THAT THE TURKS WERE HOUNDING CONSTANTINOPLE.

Central Turkey 1070 AD
Greece 1300 AD
Bulgaria and the Balkans 1400 AD
Constantinople 1450 AD

These last few are incredibly misleading. Realize that these are all the same camoaign. Again you list separate Christian entites for the sake of making the allegedly united Muslim peoples look worse. It would be equally disturbing--but exactly as consistent as you--to list the hundreds of Native American cultures destroyed by the US government individually and make it look like Anglo-Americans successfully waged genocide over hundreds of peoples. Another problem with this is you neglect what Christian peoples were doing at the same time--I mentioned the genocide against the Albigensians in 1244--in 1204 the Venetian fleet sacked Constantinople in an event that would have made the Vikings jealous--you can still see the booty in Venetian museums to this day. This was also the era of the Black Death, where superstitous Christians were blaming and massacring Jews in their belief that their evil caused the plague. And last but hardly least, this was the era of the presence of the Romani in Europe, and I call them Romani because it is equally as insulting to call Romani Gypsies as it is to call African-Americans the N-word--here comes another people that the Christians persecute and leave on the fringes of society to be scapegoats whenever the cause arises; never forget that (using your logic) while Christians were slaughtering SIX MILLION JEWS, they also murdered ONE MILLION ROMANI! THIS IS WHAT CHRISTIANS WERE DOING WHEN THE TURKS WERE WREAKING HAVOC ON SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE.


I hope you are seeing the points I am trying to make. Stop making the bigoted mistake of lumping in all Muslim peoples as a single entity--it is equally as narrow-minded to lump all Poles, Germans, Americans, Brits, Italians, and others as Christians and blame all these peoples collectively for the Holocaust, Inquisition, Black Death, and a myriad of other massacres. Realize that Christians in roughtly the same era and same part of the world were just as warmongering, if not more so, than the Muslims, and that singling out one half of the equation is historically irresponsible.

I like much of what you said about the ethics of revisionist history. Unfortunately, this point I am fixing on undoes all the good of the rest of the post.

 

[ShadowAspect]

Nice work...!

I don't believe revisionists have much of a political agenda. I don't think they are trying to be PC or liberal, they are just not as jingoistic and right wing? or as Christian as they used to be.

My own introduction to history was as a revisionist. I asked my grandfather what he did during the war, and for years he refused to tell me much. Then when I was old enough, he gave me a load of books to read about his regiment. Once I had read them all, he sat me down and basically said, "It's all propaganda! hardly a grain of truth in any of it!".
The reason is that the truth goes to the victors, and they shape history in a way that makes them look good.

It?s only since the war that it has been acceptable to refute the official versions of events and search for the real facts, evidence and the truth.

Unfortunately the truth often hurts. Myths have been shattered? although often it may take a long while for the new versions of history to filter through to the mainstream.

I think the greatest coup thus far for revisionism has been the revelation that General George Armstrong Custer was a complete idiot. I often wonder how Americans in general feel about this? it wasn?t so many years ago (1950s) that films were being made about what a great hero he was. What is your view on this? Is this just liberal bias?

Another area which has been subject to revision is the Inquisition, which has been mentioned many times on this thread. This is not yet a closed chapter, but is it possible that it wasn't really as bad as 'protestant propaganda' would have us believe? I think it is quite possible, but I don?t for a moment think that the revisionists are making an attempt to say that it wasn't bad, or that it didn't happen? they are just trying to get to the truth, and if the truth is that most of the executions were carried out on effigies and not on the real people, then what is wrong with that?
Somebody once sad that the truth will set you free.

The problem is that a lot of people over react when history which they feel should be set in stone comes under scrutiny.

My own area of revisionism is on the back burner at the moment due to other commitments, so I am a long way from reaching any definite conclusions, but maybe I should mention it. I was concerned that after WWII, the Italian role in the Axis was somewhat glossed over for two reasons, firstly, Italy was now on the allies side, secondly, America had a large Italian population which it didn't want to upset..
Unfortunately, I am not the first person to take an interest in Italy's involvement in the war, and there seems to be a growing number of Italian American revisionists who not only want to gloss over this subject still further by attributing the Italian army's negative press to British propaganda.

You tell me, which set of revisionists is Liberal or Politically correct? Me or the Italians?

Most of my research so far has centred on North Africa, which is an area of history with many fabrications. For example, the myth that Rommel was a Genius, this is British propaganda, it is far easier to say you had your **** handed to you by a demi-god than admit that your own generals were useless.

When you see a hole in history, or an indescrepancey in the official version of events, you should go after the truth like a terrier. I have to say that I wish I had become a historian, because on my travels I have come across a lot of history which obviously needs revising. Not just because its wrong for it to be wrong? but because history is our foundations when building the future, the record needs to be set straight so that we can set aside our bigotry and move ahead in the right direction.

In the end of the day, Revisionism is what it's about now. And just about every area of history is being revised. Nothing is sacred anymore (well almost nothing, the holocaust is still taboo) and this is going to rub conservatives up he wrong way, because they are conservative, not because the historians are liberal.

 

[Lifesaver]

the Inquisition, one of the darkest chapters in European history, one which dwarfs more recent efforts of ethnic cleansing.

You do know that contemporary history completely refutes all those myths about the Inquisition, right?
What sources do you base yourself for this highly dubious claim?

What's worse, there's people who claim that such a high number of people died in the Inquisition that we can rule them out a priori: there wasn't enough population in Europe in those ages.

 

[Axion]

There are sincere differences between Turks and Arabs in terms of history, geography, and culture. Turks generally came from central Asia, Arabs from North Africa and Arabia. They speak different languages...
It is exactly as insulting to lump all Muslims together, without considering cultures to delineate one people from another, as it would be to lump the US and Germany together as Christians, blame all Christians around the world for the Holocaust, and then badmouth the US. That is essentially what you are doing when you lump the entire Islamic world together.

I think you are failing to see the wood for the trees here.
1) Islam is a religion with no concept of "separation of church and state". In Islam, the state is formed by the religion and exists to enforce the laws of Islam. This estabishes the same culture and the same framework of laws in all Islamic states. All are under the same duty to make war on Infidels and to unite against them.
2) Through most of its history the bulk of the Islamic world has been united in ONE STATE, unlike the Christian world. First under the Arab Caliphs in Damascus and Baghdad, then under the Turkish Sultans. (The modern Arab states are recent inventions since 1914). In effect, the mass of Islam was largely one state, speaking Arabic to the south and Turkish in the north.

The Crusades began with a plea from King Alexios of Constantinople to Pope Urban II in 1095 to send aid against the rival Seljuk Turks. Alexios did not talk about Islamic infidels, he did not talk about any greater Christian glory. He talked about saving his city from the Turks, a people about as Muslim in that day as Britain is Catholic.

You are wrong here. The Turks were muslim in 1070 when they poured into the Anatolian hinterland of Constantinople.

The Crusades were as defensive a war as is the current war in Iraq, and Urban II played the peoples of Europe just like Bush did America in concocting something that only tenuously existed at best to awaken the animalistic zeal therein.

The Turkish Muslim invasion of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) existed all right. The lands wich had been the breadbasket of Constantinople were depopulated and ravaged. Constantinople and the rest of Europe were threatened. Very different from the non-existent WMD.

And leaving a laundry list of all things perceived to be Islamic shortcoming, as I mentioned before, is self-serving and perpetuates the myth in America that Islam is little more than a religion for the warmongering.

I think that the fact has to be faced that there is a problem with Islam, and always has been. You are refusing to face the fact that Islam has from the start been a militantly expansionist religion that spread largely through violent conquest. To be a complete Muslim, you must live under Islamic Law, and this requires political control of the state. It is no accident that most of the inter-faith conflicts in the world today involve Muslims:
Chechnya, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Israel, Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, India, Kashmir, The Philippines, Somalia, Burma... Why can't Muslims peacefully co-exist with other religions unless they are dominating them?

Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine 630 AD

The Holy Land was ruled by Rome and the Byzantine Empires, Christian since about 300 anno domini. Rome was notorious for not only crucifying Jesus and every other dissident of the era, they also burned the temple of Jerusalem to the ground and dispursed the Jewish peoples, something that in this day and age might be considered genocide. Both Rome and Byzantium saw the Holy Land as little more than a cash cow and treated the indigenous peoples there with indignation. THAT IS HOW CHRISTIANS RAN THE HOLY LAND BEFORE THE MUSLIMS CAME.

Pagan (not Christian) Rome crucified Jesus and dispersed the Jews. Christianity spread by conversion and evangelisation. The christians were living at peace throughout the Eastern meditteranean until the Invasions came.

Egypt 650 AD

From the time Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798 to now, the Middle East has been seen as a vassal state to the West. The British and the French carved up North Africa, Palestine, and Mesopotamia at their leisure, breaking them up politically in the attempt to keep them divided and quarrelling. The US got into the act of political manipulation of the area in the 1950's by sponsoring a coup in the nominally democratic Iran and imposing the US-friendly Shah, who ruled that country not unlike the US-backed Saddam Hussein ruled Irag for decades. THAT IS HOW CHRISTIANS HAVE RUN THE MIDDLE EAST FOR TWO CENTURIES AND UNWITTINGLY CREATED THE VERY TERRORISTS WE ARE FIGHTING TODAY.

None of this has anything to do with the Christians of Egypt being overrun in 650 AD in an unprovoked invasion. Napoleon and the western interventions in the 20th Century were largely SECULAR. The Western powers have not been interested in imposing or even supporting Christianity, but in secular wealth and geopolitics.

North Africa, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco 700 AD

Italy and Germany ran roughshod over North Africa in the 1930's in their rave for world domination.

I don't see the relevance. My point was that peaceable Christian lands were attacked, unprovoked, by Muslim armies, overrun, and Christianity gradually wiped out.

Spain 780 AD

The Catholics spent literally centuries reconquering the Iberian peninsula. By 1450 they had almost completely rid the area of Muslims.

Again, Spain was invaded by Muslim armies, churches were replaced by Mosques, and Christians became 3rd class citizens. Yes. There was a fightback, and a long and vicious series of wars. But your argument is rather like blaming the Dutch, belgians and French for fighting back against the Nazi occupiers of their countries, and saying this proves they were as bad as each other!

Southern France 790 AD

By the Middle Ages Christians had thrust the Moors back to the other side of the Pyrenees. From the time of Charlemagne to the end of the Crusades, France became a hotbed for violence against non-Catholic peoples. In the Alcase-Lorraine region Jews were persecuted as the continent-crossing Crusaders took them out to practice their warmongering skills. Every few years, in almost every town in France, law-abiding Jews would be purged by any particular town and region. Jews in France and elsewhere were blamed for the Black Death in the 1350's, and they were slaughtered at a level only beaten by the Holocaust, another event which, under your belief of lumping all Muslims togeher, Christians killed off Jews in ghastly numbers. Probably the saddest event in medieval France was the Crusade to slaughter the Albigensians, a nominally Christian people living in Southern France; Pope Innocent III called for a CRUSADE against them in the 13th century, and by 1244 the Albigensians were crushed in one of the most brutal genocidal campaigns in European history. THAT IS WHAT CHRISTIANS DID TO NON-CHRISTIANS IN FRANCE.

I think you have been reading inaccurate histories here.
1) Sporadic attacks on jews in Christian lands indeed took place, for the same reasons attacks on minorities take place in nearly all cultures throughout the world up to the present day. Even in the Crusades, these were not systematic, and the Church generally tried to protect jews from hostile mobs. In terms of the over-all population of Jews, the assaults were nasty but marginal, and this is borne out by the fact that very large Jewish communities survived and prospered throughout Europe.
2) The Albigensian Crusade is a separate matter, which is a discussion on its own. leave it to be said that the term Genocide is completely unjustified in referring to what became virtually a North-South civil war in France.

Sicily 850 AD
Southern Italy 860 AD

I like how you make distinctions between Sicily and Southern Italy when it suits you, yet you lump Turks and Arabs together conveniently to prove whatever point you were trying to make. THAT IS WHAT CHRISTIANS DO IN THE ATTEMPT TO PAINT MUSLIMS AS WARMONGERS.

But the Turks and Arabs functioned as one under the Sultanate from the 1450s on. They were not separate nations. The Arabs became generally loyal subjects of the Turkish elite.

Central Turkey 1070 AD
Greece 1300 AD
Bulgaria and the Balkans 1400 AD
Constantinople 1450 AD

These last few are incredibly misleading. Realize that these are all the same camoaign. Again you list separate Christian entites for the sake of making the allegedly united Muslim peoples look worse.

There was a big break after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia in 1070 AD. This was the period of the Crusades, when Muslim advance nto Christian Lands was halted and partially reversed.

IN 1300, the Crusading zeal had abated, and the Turks were able to take up the offensive again in Eastern Europe.

It would be equally disturbing--but exactly as consistent as you--to list the hundreds of Native American cultures destroyed by the US government individually and make it look like Anglo-Americans successfully waged genocide over hundreds of peoples.

I'd have to say that hundreds of native American cultures were indeed wiped out. It may have been aided by disease. But some of the settlers actions were indeed genocidal.

in 1204 the Venetian fleet sacked Constantinople in an event that would have made the Vikings jealous--you can still see the booty in Venetian museums to this day.

Yes. And muslims sometimes attacked Muslims. However this does not alter the point that for the vast majority of the period 600AD - 1700 AD Muslims were the consistent aggressors against Christianity, and Christians merely reacted to this, mostly defensively.

while Christians were slaughtering SIX MILLION JEWS, they also murdered ONE MILLION ROMANI!

The nazis were not Christians. they despised Christianity. Christians had to renounce their allegiance before taking rank in the SS. The Million ROMANI killed, were virtually all Christians.

Realize that Christians in roughtly the same era and same part of the world were just as warmongering, if not more so, than the Muslims, and that singling out one half of the equation is historically irresponsible.

No. I would say that evidence shows clearly that the Muslims were the initial and the constant aggressors from 600 AD to the Crusades, and from the Crusades to 1700, when Europe finally gained a huge technological advantage. Like other peoples, Christians were involved in wars. However Islam grew primarily by conquest, and Christian lands were the prime target. The Koran makes fighting the "infidels" a duty on all Muslims, while the Bible places no such duty of conquest on Christians. That is a historical fact. The crusades were defensive in that they were a response to continued Muslim assaults on Christian lands.

I like much of what you said about the ethics of revisionist history. Unfortunately, this point I am fixing on undoes all the good of the rest of the post.

There is good and bad in revisionism. However where it is done with an agenda in view, it can lead to appalling distortions of the truth.

 

[oldrooster]

Rooster, you indicated "Christian" as your religion. By chance, are you Christian Identity?

No I am not, I am of European decent, I am no nazi. I just have a greater respect for European history than all others save China, who actually have had civilization for many thousands of years. Unlike cannibals who are put upon pedestals.....

 

[Russebby]

I think you are failing to see the wood for the trees here.

Am I? The point I was making is that it is completely errant to lump in all Muslims into a single mold, just as it is completely errant to lump all Christian nations into a single stereotype.

My point from the start is that it is wrong to lump Turks and Arabs together.

1) Islam is a religion with no concept of "separation of church and state". In Islam, the state is formed by the religion and exists to enforce the laws of Islam. This estabishes the same culture and the same framework of laws in all Islamic states. All are under the same duty to make war on Infidels and to unite against them.

And yet we have pseudo-democracies in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Indonesia. We have India, the largest democracy on earth, with a distinct Islamic minority. Again, you are making gross generalizations because you see the fundamentalist bent of Iran, and you assume the rest of the Muslim world is full of the same kind of nutjobs. Pakistan, for instance, under your definition, should have never assisted the US in 2002 by allowing American forces to enter to get to Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia should have long ago let us starve from oil deprivation, would they not have the duty to make the petroleum-gorging infidels suffer?

The US allegedly is a Christian nation, and if you talk to most, they believe our basic set of values and laws stem from Mosaic law. How is America, therefore, fundamentally different in terms of personal outlook?

2) Through most of its history the bulk of the Islamic world has been united in ONE STATE, unlike the Christian world.

Through the majority of its history the bulk of the Christian world (Europe) had been united under one ruler (the Pope). From the fall of the Roman Empire to the Protestant Reformation--roughly from 500 to 1500 anno domini--all kings bowed to the power of the Pope, and his rule met little resistance. Until Henry VIII came along in the 16th century, no monarch had the nad to challenge the Pope's authority. Kings sought his favor, kings fought to defend Christendom under his authority, and kings were manipulated according to his whims.

The Turks have always been a separate entity from the rest of the Islamic world, acting within its own agenda, maintaining the same religion as the rest of the Islamic world, but little else. Arabs are but one racial entity within the Islamic world--you have Turks, Kurds, Africans of all varieties, Indians of all varieties, Asians, Europeans. Each have had a separate history. The Muslims of western China have had a separate course from the ones of Albania or Bangladesh or Morocco. You can talk about the superficial borders created after the end of WWI, but one can hardly call the entire Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia, as one homogenous entity, completely unanimous in all thought.

The Turks were muslim in 1070

Never said they weren't. They aren't Arab, though.

In 1100 you had German and French Crusaders pouring across the Rhineland slaughtering Jews. By your logic, it would fine to just call them all Christian and them label Christianity as a religion with a warmongering bent to kill all Jews. I find this offensive, personally. Anyone who has read the Gospels would know there is nothing in it to validate war, and yet here are the Christians, from Constantinople to today, constantly at war with one another or with others, enslaving some and eradicating others. Seems to me, under your logic, Christianity is pretty disgusting.

The Turkish Muslim invasion of Anatolia existed all right. Very different from the non-existent WMD.

The Crusades were a pre-emptive strike initiated by a ruler who took a localized threat out of context and used it to stir up the zeal of his followers to initiate a larger series of wars. Substitute "war in Iraq" for "Crusades" and I think they are pretty much the same.

BTW--Constantinople did not finally fall to the Turks until 1453--some pre-emptive strike, almost four hundred years. Maybe Bush should go after Leichtenstein, Botswana, and New Zealand--under your logic, in four centuries they might be the countries to knock America on its proverbial buttocks.

I think that the fact has to be faced that there is a problem with Islam, and always has been. It is no accident that most of the inter-faith conflicts in the world today involve Muslims:
Chechnya, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Israel, Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, India, Kashmir, The Philippines, Somalia, Burma... Why can't Muslims peacefully co-exist with other religions unless they are dominating them?

I never said there wasn't a problem with Islam having a violent nature. What you are ignoring is that the Christian world has just as violent a history. My point from the start is that though the Turks and the Arabs are both Islamic, it is dangerously wrong to lump them into the same mold.

I take exception to a couple on your list. The genocidal warfare in the former Yugoslavia has happened because of the Slavic Serbia wanting to cleanse the region of undesirables. Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo have been the victim, not the prepetrator in this. Chechnya's crisis is more political than religious, stemming from a want for independence from a crippled former superpower wanting to cling to the small Islamic border region for its own sake.

Rwanda saw the most gruesome genocide since WWII--where is the Islamic bent there? How about the problems with North Korea? Rebels in Guatemala? Potential civil war in Venezuela? A potential end to the cease-fire between the UK and the IRA? Where are the Islamic elements in all this? Do you see the point I am trying to make? The world is still a very violent place, and though I even agree with you that there are many in this world that use Islam's more radical scripture for their pernicious advantage, blaming the whole world's problems on this one religion is self-serving and erred.

Pagan Rome crucified Jesus and dispersed the Jews. Christianity spread by conversion and evangelisation. The christians were living at peace throughout the Eastern meditteranean until the Invasions came.

I don't remember Constantine, upon conversion, apologizing to the Jews and offering them back their homeland. And when did the Jews ever live in peace with its neighbors, ever? EVER?

Christians and Muslims have been feuding with each other. Plain and simple. You might think that, because the Muslims started this whole thing in the 8th century, they are therefore worse, but I disagree. Wholeheartedly. When your kids get in a fight that you have to break up, you get a lot of fingerpointing as to which one started it, but in the end they both are in trouble by Dad. That is how I see this entire topic--two segments of God's children bickering until Dad gets home. Both in my mind are incredible guilty.

None of this has anything to do with the Christians of Egypt being overrun in 650 AD in an unprovoked invasion. Napoleon and the western interventions in the 20th Century were largely SECULAR.

Does it really matter? Iraq was a nation with a secular ruler. So is Turkey and India and Indonesia, yet you lump them all together. You prove my point, that Westerners like to lump all Islamic nations and races together and paint them with the same broad warmongering brush, but when the shoe is on the other foot, you get defensive.

The colonization by Christians of the East and the Americas in the 16th century had a large religious following. Gold, God, Glory. Napoleon want to Egypt in 1798. The British and French gobbled up much of the Islamic world, all unprovoked. When the Ottoman Empire fell once and for all in 1918, the British ate that up too, all unprovoked. Now, under your generalities, this was Christiandom subjugating Islam in unprovoked invasions. You can quibble all you want on this. But ask the people who lived in those countries--they don't particularly care if it was Britain or France or the US manipulating their politics, they pretty much hate all Westerners.

Real historical scholarship requires stepping out of one particular narrow point of view and try to see things through the eyes of others.

I don't see the relevance.

Of course you won't see anything when you put your hands over your eyes and refuse to look at it for what it is. Of course you will not acknowledge relevance if it shreds your point of view. I know what your point is. I wish you would acknowledge mine.

But your argument is rather like blaming the Dutch, belgians and French for fighting back against the Nazi occupiers of their countries, and saying this proves they were as bad as each other!

Fighting back against the Nazis, no, the Dutch and Belgians would not be wrong at all. But after driving the Nazis out, if they went out and demanded they all give up their religious affiliations for theirs, if they systematically sought to wipe out all Germans living in their lands and used torture to get confessions out of them, if they rounded up all Germans and put them in concentration camps, then yes, I would think they are just as bad.

And that is basically what the Catholics did in Spain--they not only moved the Muslims off the peninsula, they used medieval torture to either convert the rest of kill them.

An eye for an eye ends up with the whole world gone blind.

I think you have been reading inaccurate histories here.
1) Sporadic attacks on jews in Christian lands indeed took place, for the same reasons attacks on minorities take place in nearly all cultures throughout the world up to the present day. Even in the Crusades, these were not systematic, and the Church generally tried to protect jews from hostile mobs. In terms of the over-all population of Jews, the assaults were nasty but marginal, and this is borne out by the fact that very large Jewish communities survived and prospered throughout Europe.

I beg to differ. The persecution of the Jews from the Dark Ages to today involved a definite general pattern of nominal acceptance, then once their population grew in a particular locale, they were purged. Occasionally you would have Crusades and Inquisitions and the Black Death and Holocaust where the entire fury of the Christian world, all the penned-up hate against the Jews, would rear its ugly head.

As for "in terms of the overall population", I always find it disgusting when people say ONLY 2000 Jews were slaughtered in Geneva on a certain date or that ONLY 30,000 Jews were killed in a particular country in a particular year. I am sure you would find it offensive to say ONLY 3000 people died when the World Trade Center imploded, wouldn't you? I mean, using your own words, in terms of over-all population, the assaults were nasty but marginal, and this is borne out by the fact that 99.99% of the American population was not killed on 9/11.

2) The Albigensian Crusade is a separate matter, which is a discussion on its own. leave it to be said that the term Genocide is completely unjustified in referring to what became virtually a North-South civil war in France.

It is further proof that Christians crusaded for reasons other than defense, as you would like to claim. I think it is relevant to the matter that collectively, the Christian world is just as violent throughout history as the Islamic world.

The last sentence I find inherently offensive because you are trying so hard to blow off what was a pretty valid point. The Albigensians were more or less isolated from the rest of Europe. It is through the virtue of ethnic cleaning and religious zeal that Christians sought to destroy them. Nothing else. The Albigensians did not wage any major campaign against Rome or Paris, they posed no threat to anyone except that they were a religious minority on a continent seeking to achieve religious purity. Their only fault was to exist.

 

[Russebby]

Forgive me, there is a 15000 limit on characters on a post. My words are rare and valuable, so I dare not waste them.

But the Turks and Arabs functioned as one under the Sultanate from the 1450s on. They were not separate nations. The Arabs became generally loyal subjects of the Turkish elite.

That is wrong on so many levels. The Ottoman Turks and the Arab caliphates were separate entities. Muslims in Indonesia were separate entites. The soon-to-be Muslim Albanians were separate entites from the Arabs. Muslims in western China. Siberia. India. Burma. They were all separate entities politically, racially, linguistically, and culturally. The only thing that tenuously held them together was Islam. Just like Christianity only tenuously held Poland, Russia, Sweden, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and the rest together.

It is self-serving to maintain all the nationalistic and cultural differences for one half of this equation and not the other. INCREDIBLY inconsistent of you.

There was a big break after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia in 1070 AD. This was the period of the Crusades, when Muslim advance nto Christian Lands was halted and partially reversed.

The Christians invaded what was Muslim land in 1096 and on several separate occasions thereafter. Under Peter the Great, a Christian king, Russia sought to overtake Muslim lands in central Asia--this began circa 1700 and continued under Catherine the Great. Are we to assume that the Christians were merely "halted and partially reversed" in the years between the Crusades and Peter?

Just acknowledge that I might have a point here.

IN 1300, the Crusading zeal had abated, and the Turks were able to take up the offensive again in Eastern Europe.

It's about time you acknowledged the Turks as a separate entity from the Arabs. That is all I wanted.

As for Christian zeal for violence, let's take a quick glimpse of the Middle Ages.
1100-1300: CRUSADES
1350-1400: BLACK DEATH RETRIBUTION
1425-1475: FIGHTING THE TURKISH INVASION
1475-1600: INQUISITIONS
1525-1600: PLETHERA OF REFORMATION-INSPIRED WARS
1600-1750: MISSIONARIES IN THE NEW WORLD, another form of religious zealotry we haven't touched on yet, where Christians sought to convert Native Americans, or in many cases, kill them in the process.

So much for religious zeal ever abating in Christian Europe. There's a good six solid centuries of religious zealotry for you.

I'd have to say that hundreds of native American cultures were indeed wiped out. It may have been aided by disease. But some of the settlers actions were indeed genocidal.

I think it is more than just SOME. It goes back to America's Manifest Destiny, the belief that America was fated to rule the continent, no matter who stood in its way. As such, it takes such a belief for God-fearing people to think the only good Indian is a dead Indian.

However this does not alter the point that for the vast majority of the period 600AD - 1700 AD Muslims were the consistent aggressors against Christianity, and Christians merely reacted to this, mostly defensively.

Napoleon was merely reacting in 1798? Peter the Great was merely reacting? The British were merely reacting when they carved up the old Ottoman Empire? The US was merely reacting when they imposed the Shah in Iran in 1954, more or less sowing the seems for Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism?

I will acknowledge the point that prior to 1700, Muslims sought to dominate Europe, if you will acknowledge that since 1700 the Christian powers have sought to dominate the Muslim world, not in defensive modes, but purely for their own vanity.

The nazis were not Christians. they despised Christianity. Christians had to renounce their allegiance before taking rank in the SS. The Million ROMANI killed, were virtually all Christians.

Again, you are trying to split hairs, which is what I condemned you for. I don't think there was anything Christian about the Nazis. I don't think there is anything Islamic in the modern terrorism cycle. But if you are going to paint an entire religion based on the shenanigans of a few nutbars, be prepared to have Christianity painted in the same light.

As for the Romani, since their appearance in the late 1400's, they never belonged to any particular religion at all. They took on appearances as necessary to keep Christians off their backs. Of course it never worked, the Christians always pushed the nomads to the fringes of culture, associating with them all too infrequently. No Christian ever saw a Gypsy as Christian, and no Gypsy ever saw himself as a Christian in terms of believing Jesus Christ was his personal savior. For the last 500 years, you can rest assured that the Romani suffered right alongside the Jews in every fracas. Truth be told, even deep into the 1980's, there were laws here in the US that attempted to ban the Romani from his nomadic way of life.

Only "gadge" would call the Romani Christian to try to validate their point.

No. I would say that evidence shows clearly that the Muslims were the initial and the constant aggressors from 600 AD to the Crusades, and from the Crusades to 1700, when Europe finally gained a huge technological advantage. Like other peoples, Christians were involved in wars. However Islam grew primarily by conquest, and Christian lands were the prime target. The Koran makes fighting the "infidels" a duty on all Muslims, while the Bible places no such duty of conquest on Christians. That is a historical fact. The crusades were defensive in that they were a response to continued Muslim assaults on Christian lands.

Two points I have for this, but you seem to dodge them for whatever reason:
1--It is borderline bigotry for you to lump all Muslims together. You want me to explain this AGAIN?
2--The Gospels indeed do not talk about warmongering. The Old Testament, though, is chock full of God permitting war. It pains me to no end how many people call themselves Christian but believe in AN EYE FOR AN EYE above TURN THE OTHER CHEEK. Two thousand years of Christian dogma validate war. And you cannot escape this. Much of Catholic teachings [and lest you forget, Roman Catholicism is the largest religion in the history of mankind] stray from the Gospels. Most Christian denominations take only certain Gospel teachings to heaet while discarding others. I wish the Christian world really did believe in the Gospels. But unfortunately, they do not, and they never did. We can both pull out our Bibles and quote scripture, that is easy. What is not easy is what Christian nations and people have done using scripture to validate their wicked deeds. People who saw themselves as Christians found scripture to validate slavery and genocide and war.

There is good and bad in revisionism. However where it is done with an agenda in view, it can lead to appalling distortions of the truth.

Agreed. My agenda all along has been to not conveniently lump all Islamic peoples into a certain set of stereotypes, and that when the shoe is on the other foot, Christians don't seem to like it very much either. My agenda has been that Christian history is just as bloody as any other history on earth, including Islamic. Your agenda appears to be to lump all Muslims together and call them all warmongers, to demonize Muslims for waging war but exonerating Christians for the same, and to ignore your very logic when someone calls you out on it. We all have an agenda.

Look, just agree to disagree with me, and move on. It is clear you want to hold onto your stereotypical points of view so tightly to your cheek that you cannot hear any other perspective. And that is fine, it really is. I agree that in general, Muslim history has shown a zeal for territorial expansion. And I agree that modern fundamentalists use the Koran to fuel hatred for the West, and as a result the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims in every country in the world are painted with the same pernicious strokes of the broad brush. But in lumping Turks with Arabs, you are seeking to validate the stereotype that ALL Muslims want to kill Westerners. I respect you, I really do, but I think you are wrong in trying to validate your bigoted beliefs by lumping all Islamic history into a neat and tidy package. No one does that with the Christian nations, so in a want to gain a shred of consistency, I would hope you would pull apart the different Islamic components as well.

 

[Brimshack]

No I am not, I am of European decent, I am no nazi. I just have a greater respect for European history than all others save China, who actually have had civilization for many thousands of years. Unlike cannibals who are put upon pedestals.....

Could you please identify three cannibal societies, and explain just hown anyone here has put them up on a pedastal?

 

[Axion]

Why do I always get into arguments with people who write enormous posts?

The point I was making is that it is completely errant to lump in all Muslims into a single mold, just as it is completely errant to lump all Christian nations into a single stereotype. My point from the start is that it is wrong to lump Turks and Arabs together.

The point I am trying to make is that there IS an underlying dynamic that on this issue DOES link most Muslims. You seem to find the very suggestion that Muslims, as muslims, have a different world-outlook to be offensive. And you seem to be of the opinion that I should not even be making this argument. But I am arguing that this is an important reality that has to be acknowledged and dealt with, otherwise some form of new religious conflict is more likely.

My argument is that Islam (not all muslims) has a mindset embedded in the faith as it is often taught that states:
a) That it is the duty of Muslims to create and live in an Islamic Society, which requires an Islamic State. In an Islamic state, everyone, muslim and non-muslim is subject to the laws of Islam.
b) Muslims have the right and duty to make all lands into lands of Islam, whether or not the inhabitants approve. This can be done by violent or non-violent means, but both are valid.

Christians (and many other religions) on the other hand have developed the idea of the separation of Church and State. You do not need to live in a Christian State to practice Christianity to the full. Conquering other people and forcing them to live under Christian rule is not advocated in the scriptures. It has happened, but against the teachings of Jesus, not in accordance with them.

And yet we have pseudo-democracies in Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Indonesia. We have India, the largest democracy on earth, with a distinct Islamic minority. Again, you are making gross generalizations because you see the fundamentalist bent of Iran, and you assume the rest of the Muslim world is full of the same kind of nutjobs. Pakistan, for instance, under your definition, should have never assisted the US in 2002 by allowing American forces to enter to get to Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia should have long ago let us starve from oil deprivation, would they not have the duty to make the petroleum-gorging infidels suffer?

Islamic countries have been the most resistant to democracy. Only Turkey has kept anything resembling democracy going for more than ten years or so. Egypt, Indonesia and Algeria could not be considered democracies in western terms, with "strong men" in control, and with bloody battles with Islamic fundamentalists. Forty years ago there were 2,000,000 christians in Algeria. Now there are 2,000, living in fear most of the time. Even Turkey fails to acknowledge the massacre of 2 million Armenians, still illegally occupies northern Cyprus, and has ethnically cleansed most other Christians from all of Turkey but Istanbul.

The US allegedly is a Christian nation, and if you talk to most, they believe our basic set of values and laws stem from Mosaic law. How is America, therefore, fundamentally different in terms of personal outlook?

America bases many of its laws on Christian principles. It doesn't apply mosaic law to the letter, which is what Islam tries to do. In Islamic countries you can be killed for converting to Christianity or "defaming" Islam. I don't think this happens in the US.

Through the majority of its history the bulk of the Christian world (Europe) had been united under one ruler (the Pope). From the fall of the Roman Empire to the Protestant Reformation--roughly from 500 to 1500 anno domini--all kings bowed to the power of the Pope, and his rule met little resistance. Until Henry VIII came along in the 16th century, no monarch had the nad to challenge the Pope's authority. Kings sought his favor, kings fought to defend Christendom under his authority, and kings were manipulated according to his whims.

No. No. No. You don't think you're getting away with that, do you?

The Pope never had political power over anything but a few square miles round Rome and Ravenna. Political power over armies and nations was held by the Kings and Emperors. The Pope had moral authority, but it couldn't prevent Christian nations from warring with each other, taking papal lands, even setting up their own rival "popes" on some occasions. The Caliphs of Baghdad and the Sultans of Turkey, however, were absolute political rulers over vast empires, with enormous armies and the power of life and death throughout the muslim world. Huge difference.

The Turks have always been a separate entity from the rest of the Islamic world, acting within its own agenda, maintaining the same religion as the rest of the Islamic world, but little else. Arabs are but one racial entity within the Islamic world--you have Turks, Kurds, Africans of all varieties, Indians of all varieties, Asians, Europeans. Each have had a separate history. The Muslims of western China have had a separate course from the ones of Albania or Bangladesh or Morocco. You can talk about the superficial borders created after the end of WWI, but one can hardly call the entire Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia, as one homogenous entity, completely unanimous in all thought.

The Turks were originally separate, but from 1516 they conquered the Arab caliphates and became rulers of virtually all the Arab lands. There was not one racial entity, but there was one state and one law, which covered most of the Muslim world.

In 1100 you had German and French Crusaders pouring across the Rhineland slaughtering Jews. By your logic, it would fine to just call them all Christian and them label Christianity as a religion with a warmongering bent to kill all Jews. I find this offensive, personally. Anyone who has read the Gospels would know there is nothing in it to validate war, and yet here are the Christians, from Constantinople to today, constantly at war with one another or with others, enslaving some and eradicating others. Seems to me, under your logic, Christianity is pretty disgusting.

Christianity never attempted to kill all jews. What you seem to have misunderstood about my point is that the difference between Islam and Christianity, is that in Islam, conquest is a duty in Christianity it is something that goes against the basics of the faith. This is a big difference. In Christian lands such acts as you describe are eventually criticised and condemned. In Islam massacres were often celebrated.

The Crusades were a pre-emptive strike initiated by a ruler who took a localized threat out of context and used it to stir up the zeal of his followers to initiate a larger series of wars. Substitute "war in Iraq" for "Crusades" and I think they are pretty much the same.

The crusades were more comparable to the first gulf War, when Kuwait was invaded, and an alliance of different countries came to Kuwait's aid.

BTW--Constantinople did not finally fall to the Turks until 1453--some pre-emptive strike, almost four hundred years.

Without the Crusades, Constantinople would probably have fallen 300 years earlier.

I never said there wasn't a problem with Islam having a violent nature. What you are ignoring is that the Christian world has just as violent a history.

No. The original argument was from a statement that the Christians launched unprovoked attacks on Islam in the Crusades. I have been pointing out that the Christian reaction was a response to muslim aggression, and a muslim determination to conquer Christendom. I never said that Christians were perfect non-violent paragons. My point is that revisionist historians try to paint a picture that is the reverse of the truth, namely uncouth, murderous Christians descending unprovoked on cultured, tolerant muslims. That was never the case.

I take exception to a couple on your list. The genocidal warfare in the former Yugoslavia has happened because of the Slavic Serbia wanting to cleanse the region of undesirables. Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo have been the victim, not the prepetrator in this.

No. It is far more complex than this. There has been a long history of bloodshed there in which the Serbs suffered as much, if not more than any. Why did the Muslims want to break away from multi-ethnic, tolerant Yugoslavia, starting the conflict? Because they wanted a muslim-dominated state. The same applies in Chechnya. The muslim religion demands they live in a state ruled by Islam.

Rwanda saw the most gruesome genocide since WWII--where is the Islamic bent there? How about the problems with North Korea? Rebels in Guatemala? Potential civil war in Venezuela? A potential end to the cease-fire between the UK and the IRA?

Again. I didn't say, Islam is the only creator of violence in the world. That would be silly. What I said was that Islam always seems to be in conflict with neighbouring religions. The list I gave includes Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and others who find themselves facing conflict with Islam.

Christians and Muslims have been feuding with each other. Plain and simple. You might think that, because the Muslims started this whole thing in the 8th century, they are therefore worse, but I disagree. Wholeheartedly. When your kids get in a fight that you have to break up, you get a lot of fingerpointing as to which one started it, but in the end they both are in trouble by Dad. That is how I see this entire topic--two segments of God's children bickering until Dad gets home. Both in my mind are incredible guilty.

But what if one of the children is nearly always "starting it"?

I would say we would have to look into the reasons for that, and what can be done to sort it out....

Fighting back against the Nazis, no, the Dutch and Belgians would not be wrong at all. But after driving the Nazis out, if they went out and demanded they all give up their religious affiliations for theirs, if they systematically sought to wipe out all Germans living in their lands and used torture to get confessions out of them, if they rounded up all Germans and put them in concentration camps, then yes, I would think they are just as bad.
And that is basically what the Catholics did in Spain--they not only moved the Muslims off the peninsula, they used medieval torture to either convert the rest of kill them.

The Muslims weren't killed, or put in concentration camps. They were given the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving for North Africa. Those who pretended to convert and accepted baptism while actually remaining Muslim were indeed persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition was a) A State institution of the Spanish Crown, and b) Only allowed to investigate Christians. So a muslim who stayed Muslim could not be touched by them.

And did you know that the Pope condemned the tactics of the inquisition at the time, and that the Spanish were considered backward and racist in their attitude to the moors and the Jews by the rest of Christendom?

As for "in terms of the overall population", I always find it disgusting when people say ONLY 2000 Jews were slaughtered in Geneva on a certain date or that ONLY 30,000 Jews were killed in a particular country in a particular year. I am sure you would find it offensive to say ONLY 3000 people died when the World Trade Center imploded, wouldn't you? I mean, using your own words, in terms of over-all population, the assaults were nasty but marginal, and this is borne out by the fact that 99.99% of the American population was not killed on 9/11.

My point is that certain "Christians" may have killed Jews and others in history. Yes. And that was appalling. But this went against the tenets of Christianity. Even at the time, people condemned it and knew it was wrong. Under Islam, however, the prophet himself massacred tribes of Jews and Christians. Massacres were a regular instrument of state control under the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the genocide of the Armenians, and these acts are rarely apologised for because they do have a precedent in Islamic religion.

The last sentence I find inherently offensive because you are trying so hard to blow off what was a pretty valid point. The Albigensians were more or less isolated from the rest of Europe. It is through the virtue of ethnic cleaning and religious zeal that Christians sought to destroy them. Nothing else. The Albigensians did not wage any major campaign against Rome or Paris, they posed no threat to anyone except that they were a religious minority on a continent seeking to achieve religious purity. Their only fault was to exist.

I was not trying to avoid a point. It was just a stretch, bringing a topic like the Albigensian crusade into this. As I said, the Albigensian crusade is an issue complex enough to deserve a discussion on its own. The Albigensians had abandoned Christianity and had killed a papal legate. This was seen as initiating violence, peaceful methods of dealing with them having failed. A crusade was called, which rapidly developed into a civil war, with the King of France and Northern knights anxious to gain control of southern France. It proves that christians fought people who tried to take over lands traditionally belonging to Christianity, but it doesn't demonstrate Christians attacking Muslims unprovoked, or even in areas that had not originally been Christian.

 

[Russebby]

For the record, yes, I am INCREDIBLY long-winded. I respect the heck out of you, I really do. And we can go around and around on this, and it seems we are going to because we aren't clicking on something here.

I have agreed with you all along that there is something within Islamic scripture that turns religious people into zealots, and that history has proven this. In all our hairsplitting, I had but two points to make, and that was it:

1--Christian history is just as bloody as Islamic history, and you seem to agree with me on this as well. You might see the motives for this differently from me, but all in all, you seem to agree that as much wrong was done in this world in the name of Jesus as in the name of Muhammad.

2--It is self-serving and shortsighted to lump Turks and Arabs together because they share religion and little else. Little you have said changes my thoughts on this. You provide the same histories that I've studied, and I come to a different conclusion.

Again, I invite you to agree to disagree and be done with this.

You continue to do the exact thing I am talking about--you lump all Muslims together and maintain the stereotypes to serve your purposes. I tell you it is as wrong to do that as it is to lump all Christians together and blame them all for the crimes therein. You prove my point every time you talk about how Nazis are not Christians--I agree with you that there is nothing in the Gospels to condone things like genocide and slavery, and yet there is much in Christian dogma and history to show otherwise. If your point is that the Koran itself dictates that the people of Islam are to be warlike, I am not at liberty to talk on an educated level on it, but no one has convinced me otherwise either; I tend to agree with you. But Christians have used Biblical passsages for centuries to justify the enslavement of Africans, the killing of Native Americans, the persecution of Jews, and I know you're not a dumb person, you should know all this. To say there is nothing in Christianity that condones these evils is to ignore 1700 years of dogma and history. I agree that Jesus said nothing of the sort, and yet people for centuries picked verses out of the Bible to validate their treachery.

In my own search for the truth and in following Jesus, I am trying to sort out His true teachings from the bull the various churches and evangelists have said on the subject for years. I am seeking my own way. I was told belief in Christ is not a religion, it is a relationship--I am trying desperately to weed out the nonsense. Maybe you are on a similar path. But part of the reason why, in this day and age, people tend to reject Jesus is because of all the other garbage within Christianity. Jesus promoted peace and goodwill to one another, yet Christianity has used scripture from the OT and the Pauline letters to justify slavery and war. There are contradictions in this, glaring and bright, and these contradictions people see as hypocrisies and just shuck it all. I admit that for a while I too was disenchanted with the religion of Christ because what evangelists and churches and centuries of history were telling me seemed to have nothing to do with Jesus in and of Himself. Once I learned the hard way that I could and should seek my own path, I started reading the Gospels in a new light, separate from everything else associated with Him.

I don't know if you have come to the same conclusions as I have. I agree that there is nothing in the Gospels to condone the evil acts performed in Christian nations in Jesus's name. And yet they stand, and the religion has blood on its hands. Just like Islam does. And no matter how you spin on this, the fact remains that people before the rise of Islam were commiting heinous acts against one another in the name of God, Christians were committing heinous acts with or without Islamic threats, and Christians have been committing them long since the Muslims ceased to be a constant threat.

I appreciate the discussion, but I know when we are getting to the point of hairsplitting, and when we get to that point, it's best to shake hands and part as friends. I agree to disagree, and I hope you do the same, and I hope we get to chat on a different subject. I still think you are merely spindoctoring, and I think you think I am a whackjob. And all that is fine. But you have earned my respect, and I hope to chat with you again.

 

[Axion]

Hello Russeby,

Thanks for your last post

I still have to disagree with you that Islam and Christianity are morally equivalent in their teachings. I feel that there is something in Islam that causes aggression and conflict, and that there will always be trouble with Islam until that element is sorted out, or reformed out of Islam.

But part of the reason why, in this day and age, people tend to reject Jesus is because of all the other garbage within Christianity. Jesus promoted peace and goodwill to one another, yet Christianity has used scripture from the OT and the Pauline letters to justify slavery and war. There are contradictions in this, glaring and bright, and these contradictions people see as hypocrisies and just shuck it all. I admit that for a while I too was disenchanted with the religion of Christ because what evangelists and churches and centuries of history were telling me seemed to have nothing to do with Jesus in and of Himself. Once I learned the hard way that I could and should seek my own path, I started reading the Gospels in a new light, separate from everything else associated with Him.

I tend to believe that Christianity has had a beneficial effect on how nations and people have behaved through history. You may gasp at this and recall all the terrible crimes committed by Christians through the past two thousand years. However, the teachings of Jesus are what have allowed us to see these things as wrong, and have given people guidance and strength to fight against them, and to shout "hypocricy" when so-called Christians have done these things.

Why I am against certain revisionism is that it comes from an anti-christian perspective, which delights in telling us about all the evils done by Christians, and none of the good. And so Christianity is painted as an evil force in the world in the minds of many people. Christianity then becomes something that people hate. That's why I try to correct some of these distortions when they appear. The crusades being a case in point.

 

[Russebby]

I still have to disagree with you that Islam and Christianity are morally equivalent in their teachings. I feel that there is something in Islam that causes aggression and conflict, and that there will always be trouble with Islam until that element is sorted out, or reformed out of Islam.

I never said Islam and Christianity were morally equivalent. What I said was there is plenty in Christian history to be ashamed of, just as there is in Islamic history, and I thought you agreed with me on this. I agreed that Islamic scripture does have violent tendencies, but I also said that good decent people have used Biblical passages for their own diabolical ends.

I tend to believe that Christianity has had a beneficial effect on how nations and people have behaved through history. You may gasp at this and recall all the terrible crimes committed by Christians through the past two thousand years. However, the teachings of Jesus are what have allowed us to see these things as wrong, and have given people guidance and strength to fight against them, and to shout "hypocricy" when so-called Christians have done these things.

I will grant you that, at the end of every tragedy, good always triumphs over evil. That does not exonerate people who, through good and bad intentions alike, used the Bible as the ecclesiastic platform for conducting whatever evils they desire.

Why I am against certain revisionism is that it comes from an anti-christian perspective, which delights in telling us about all the evils done by Christians, and none of the good. And so Christianity is painted as an evil force in the world in the minds of many people. Christianity then becomes something that people hate. That's why I try to correct some of these distortions when they appear. The crusades being a case in point.

I am a Christian trying to get past centuries of dogma to find the kernel of truth in Jesus's words and deeds. I think it is highly erroneous to focus on only the good aspects of a given thing without giving credence to the bad as well. You cannot deny that many bad things have been done in this world in the name of Jesus. I am not saying Jesus Himself condones any of it, but I am saying that at some point one has to get past all the ritual, all the history, all the dogma, and find out for himself what He truly said and did and believed.

The only point on the Crusades we seem to be in conflict on--and I don't think we're really in conflict on this, but rather, we are merely splitting hairs--is that the Turks and the Arabs were two separate peoples united by religion alone. That is it. All this because of this one difference which you have not refuted.

Take care and God Bless.

 

[oldrooster]

Could you please identify three cannibal societies, and explain just hown anyone here has put them up on a pedastal?

I can name many in Africa, and many in South and Central America that practiced human sacrafice.....The Africans have gone out on a limb to claim much that isn't theirs. The revisionists make out North America to be paradise before Columbus came, both out and out lies.

 

[ShadowAspect]

I can name many in Africa, and many in South and Central America that practiced human sacrafice.....The Africans have gone out on a limb to claim much that isn't theirs. The revisionists make out North America to be paradise before Columbus came, both out and out lies.

Depends what you mean by paradise.

There has been a lot of revision about pre-Christian culture over recent years. There are reasons for this... firstly, the Christian cultures misrepresented them as primitive, barbaric and uncivilized, and often as not, projected these people as sub-human. It is high time that the record was put straight about this. Far from being primitive, it can easily be said that the social structure of some pre-Christian cultures was far more sophisticated than anything we have today. Christianity brought about changes which smashed this social structure, and with this came social problems and inequality.
It's also now known that pre-christian attitudes to things like sex, may seem immoral when viewed through Christian eyes, but they were based on purely practical thinking. Likewise, custmes surrounding human sacrifice and warfare had practical grounding. far from being barbaric and primitive, they were wholy sensible... they had systems and social mechanisms in place which not only worked, but were extremly efficient in many cases.

It's true, it was no paradise back then. No culture or religion could change the fact that technology levels were pretty low, there were no dish washers and microwaves. It was a tough life. However, a case can be made that new cultres and religions changed things for the worse for the average man/woman.

It's certainly the case that we have much to learn from these cultures. We may not want to reintroduce some of their customs such as cannabalism, but we can still learn about mankind from the study.

This honest approach to pre-christian culture is in it's infancy, and it is too early to draw definite conclusions. But from my own observations, one thing is becomming clear... the more 'Civilized' a culture becomes, the more it thinks it has the right to behave in an uncivilized manor to other cultures.
It cannot be disputed that civilization has it's down-side as well as it's up-side.

 

[Brimshack]

I can name many in Africa, and many in South and Central America that practiced human sacrafice.....The Africans have gone out on a limb to claim much that isn't theirs. The revisionists make out North America to be paradise before Columbus came, both out and out lies.

Note that you did not name one society which practices cannibalism.

Note that you did not name one person who treats cannibal societies with deference.

And note that although the regions you referred toin vague terms as possessing cannibals were Africa, South, and Central American, the only of revisionist deference that you refer to is North America.One would think that when painting with such broad stokes you ought to be able to connect them better than that.

Note also that you did not provide any examples of the revisionists that supposedly think America a paradise.

(But I suppose this is fair enough. You aren't really trying to tell us anything about how to do history here at all. You are just telling horror stories, and revisionists are simply the goblins in your narrative. What do you care what real people say about actual historical questions? The important thing is here is that your story needs a villain. Enjoy.)