Category Archives: History

UPDATED: Masada on Mount Sinjar (ISIS Crisis Continued)

Ancient History, Europe, History, Iraq, Israel, Jihad, Media, States' Rights

“Masada on Mount Sinjar” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

Purportedly, forty thousand refugees, among them 25,000 children, were said to be stranded on the parched terrains of the Sinjar, in scorching heat, without sustenance. That is until Barack Obama broke up the gathering. Overnight. “That’s enough, Yazidis. Go home, now. The crisis is over.” Yes, the president and his minions have pronounced the catastrophe on the Sinjar Mountains over. However, just because the Obama machine declares it so, does not make it so. I would point BHO believers to Channel 4 veteran reporter Jonathan Rugman, who questions—even mocks—the administration’s rapid, fact-finding methodology:

Crisis, what crisis? The Americans have ruled out a military airlift of Yazidis stranded on Mount Sinjar on the grounds that the situation is not as bad as previously thought. … Are the Americans saying that the refugees are not spread out any more but have either been shepherded or moved into a concentrated area where they can be counted?

Let us, then, stick with Mr. Rugman’s findings, shall we? As the courageous correspondent has discovered, the Kurd-coordinated airdrops are executed by only four helicopters (one has since crashed), allotted by Baghdad. Emergency supplies are available in abundance at various nodal points; not so the means to deliver them. Priorities set by the central government do not include “rescuing a little known Yazidi minority in Kurdistan, a region which wants to break away from Iraq and become its own country.”

The Kurds assisting those marooned on the mountains would like to secede from the morass that is Iraq. Alas, the master puppeteers in Washington have hitherto been wedded to a unified (at the point of a gun) Iraq, dominated by a strong (sectarian and corrupt) central authority. This White House, and the one before it, fetishizes Iraqi national unity. It believes that to succeed, Iraqis should be like Americans, forever imprisoned in an arranged, unhappy political marriage. …

Read the complete column. “Masada on Mount Sinjar” is now on WND.

UPDATE (8/15): If there is one constant you can trust it is that he lies. They all lie. “Break it up, Yazidis. Go home, now. The crisis is over,” Obama announced to the world, Thursday. I guess the president was attempting to will a new reality with words. The American media bought it and scattered. I was quite comfortable that “Masada on Mount Sinjar” was closer to the truth than Obama’s agitprop, even though it was submitted before his “Yazidis disperse” injunction.

Indeed, the ISIS crisis continues. Thirty miles from Sinjar, on Friday afternoon, reports BBCNews, “Militants in northern Iraq … massacred at least 80 men from the Yazidi faith in a village and abducted women and children.”

MORE.

Hamas, Qatar, Turkey And A Turkey Named Kerry

Critique, History, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East

The one “regional coalition” in the current conflict in the Middle East is said to consist of Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi, the UAE ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and … the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. The other, rival coalition is purported to be the “Save Hamas Squad.” It comprises “US Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “a brace of European ministers,” as well as Qatar and Turkey.

An interesting and certainly analytical glimpse of the dynamic forces at play in the current Middle-Eastern conflict is offered by DEBKAfile (and, naturally, not by the American press). Read it.

America thinks that it must and can be a decisive force for good in the Middle East. However, the region’s players march to their own drumbeat. In Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923, Efraim and Inari Karsh marshal prodigious scholarship to show that, “Twentieth-century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.” The trend continues.

And then there are the victims of the power players.

UPDATED: When In Doubt About Dramatic Underachievement In Math—Blame RACISM (Bro Euclid)

Gender, History, Intelligence, Race, Science, Sex

Who does math best? John Derbyshire has analyzed this year’s International Math Olympiad (IMO), just held in Cape Town (bravo my old stomping ground!). Apropos, editor Peter Brimelow has linked to my VDARE column, “The Silly Sex?”

Here’s “Derbyshire On Race And The International Math Olympiad”

Of the 560 participants this year, only 56 were female. That ten percent is, according to Rindermann, historically normal. In this year’s IMO, 58 of the 101 participating countries fielded all-male teams. Among the 58: the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., China, Japan, both Koreas, Russia, and host country South Africa. …
… Of the three participants who got the maximum 42-point score, two are Chinese. Of the 49 gold medal winners, 31 are East Asian and 18 are white European.

Down at the other end, of the 17 participants scoring no points at all, one is West Asian, two are Indios (that is, Latin American aboriginal), and the other 14 are black African.

I am told that because this was the first IMO held in Africa, black African countries tried hard to make a good showing. Yet the highest-ranked black African nation among the 101 nations participating was South Africa at #67, followed by Nigeria at #91.
And the South African team contained no blacks!
… there have been only three black African IMO medalists in recent years: Chigozie Henry Aniobe of Nigeria with a bronze in each of the last four years; Puis Aje Onah of Nigeria with a bronze in 2010 and Isaac Jean Eliel Konan of Ivory Coast with a silver that same year. …

Concludes Derb: “It’s a poor showing for a continent that has had established universities for decades. … We should … be skeptical of explanations involving racism. Most claims to have been disadvantaged by racism in the past fifty years amount to nothing more than rent-seeking on the part of educated blacks.”

MORE.

UPDATE: BRO, WAS Euclid BLACK? So claims mathematician Jonathan Farley. I thought Euclid was a Greek. There is a branch of mythistory (like Holocaust denial) called Afrocentrism, according to which the “venerable Greeks, the founders of Western Civilization, stole their philosophical and scientific know-how from Egypt. Egypt, and not Greece, is the fount of Western tradition.” The Egyptians, by this pseudo-scientific, feel-good fabrication, were actually black Africans. Read about it in “Safari Scholarship Reinvents History.”

Going by this “linage,” perhaps Euclid was black.

Ghostbuster Of Yankie Propaganda

America, Federalism, History, States' Rights

It’s 4:17 AM. Sleep has never come easily. I reach for one of the books I delve into for relaxation—non-fiction always. Facts, nothing but facts are my preference; well-reasoned opinions I have in abundance. I get to “Civil War America, 1850-1870,” in Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People. Facts? Perhaps in the strictest sense of the word: timeline, dates, etc. Otherwise, the section is simplistic and biased. To wit, Lincoln was as pure as the driven snow (his wife thought otherwise, describing him as a good-for-nothing lay about around the home). Southern secession was undemocratic and nonsensical. Jefferson Davis was an imbecile. The dispute between North and South was purely about slavery, no more; the South being steeped in that Original Sin, but not the North.

“If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” The Ghostbuster of this dross is my friend, historian Clyde Wilson. In “Derailment of Civil War History,” Prof. Wilson muses about the rigidity of “fixed and eternal dogmas in the interpretation of the past”:

… the Civil War sesquicentennial has received slight public interest and produced little in the way of new knowledge and perspective. This is true despite the fact that the great war of 1861—1865, with its prelude and sequel, arguably remains the most significant (as well as the most interesting) part of American history. Is it possible that this lack has something to do with the now official and pervasive dogma that the Civil War was “about slavery” and “caused by slavery”? Any challenge to this understanding is, in the Marxist language now prevalent in American academic discourse, condemned as “revisionism,” no longer a good thing but defined as the conniving of evilly-motivated people to challenge the party line established by the all-wise experts. There has even been created a whole literature dismissing dissidents as deluded victims of a “Lost Cause Myth.” Gary Gallagher, one of the celebrity historians of present Civil War historianship, describes such people as suffering from a mental “syndrome.” [1]

But, in fact, it is impossible to find any qualified historian of the first half of the 20th century who accepted the current party line of “slavery and nothing but slavery” in regard to the Civil War. This current dogma is nothing more than a replay of the early partisan presentation of the war as a morality play about the suppression of slavery and treason by the forces of righteousness. A little Marxist class conflict and racial vengeance has been mixed in to update the tale. Responsible historians before the present era realized that no large human event can be understood in such a trivial way, and that “about” and “caused by” are deceptive terms when applied to great happenings. Historians of the not-too-distant past realized that their proper task was to go beyond the claims of partisans. In pursuit of such a mission, a large literature was created treating the Civil War as a thing of great complexity and moral ambiguity. This great scholarly achievement has been washed down the Memory Hole. Thus the study of history is no longer a matter of cumulative knowledge. To control understanding of the past has always been an objective of power-seekers. We live in a time when such control flourishes.

MORE of Prof. Wilson’s intellectual sanity.