tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82885057426762418742024-03-19T07:11:55.305-04:00The ExcavatorSaman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comBlogger6911125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-74952878089856194172024-03-19T07:10:00.003-04:002024-03-19T07:11:03.798-04:00Prof. Norman Domeier - Collaboration Between Associated Press and Nazi Germany<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhSUBX7GQN5352lBbUnwGP0siQ1kp7ICHKzK3fmRh6fh5293UcAYqZQdauDrehM-xUi2MJAhZK-mNFGtFW5XFoJAJMDUrSMsse06nyr_rK_zLJ38Q3TOF_ucC6dI_31L0U4kAwjcnZ66WVISTM0NQDTBpsDIKTKsRC1TZsxcQQqYn7AgTZYF-MT1MWfXZY/s600/st,small,507x507-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhSUBX7GQN5352lBbUnwGP0siQ1kp7ICHKzK3fmRh6fh5293UcAYqZQdauDrehM-xUi2MJAhZK-mNFGtFW5XFoJAJMDUrSMsse06nyr_rK_zLJ38Q3TOF_ucC6dI_31L0U4kAwjcnZ66WVISTM0NQDTBpsDIKTKsRC1TZsxcQQqYn7AgTZYF-MT1MWfXZY/w320-h320/st,small,507x507-pad,600x600,f8f8f8.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/10/the-secret-deal-the-associated-press-made-with-the-nazis-during-wwii/">"The secret deal the Associated Press made with the Nazis during WWII"</a></i> By Michael S. Rosenwald, The Washington Post, May 10, 2017:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>At the height of World War II, the Associated Press made secret arrangements with an SS officer to obtain pictures taken by Nazi photographers that were distributed to American newspapers — a deal authorized by senior U.S. officials.</p><p>The extraordinary arrangement, which began in 1941 and ended with Hitler’s fall, is detailed in a lengthy internal report the AP released Wednesday morning. It comes several months after Norman Domeier, a German historian, discovered a letter describing the deal in the papers of AP’s then-bureau chief.</p><p>The report includes documents recently declassified at the request of AP’s management, including letters of approval from a wartime censorship office run by an ex-AP editor who reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As part of the arrangement, AP shared pictures of U.S. war operations and Allied advances, which were reviewed by Hitler and published in Nazi publications.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://mosseprogram.wisc.edu/2023/07/12/domeier/">"Lecture: Norman Domeier, “World Domination and Genocide: The ‘Lochner Version’ of Hitler’s Speech on 22 August 1939, a Key Document of National Socialist Ideology”</a></i> University of Wisconsin-Madison, July 12, 2023:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>In Nuremberg, some of the former foreign correspondents in Berlin, among them Louis Lochner, must have been immensely relieved that their names did not appear in the trial, and that their confidential collusions, arrangements and deals with some of the accused ended on the gallows. Especially Louis Lochner, who had planned a secret deal between Associated Press and Nazi Germany which lasted from the US entry in the war in December 1941 until spring 1945. So this is a topic in itself. It’s also something that I discovered here from Louis Lochner’s papers in early 2017. We can also talk about that in the discussion. It is basically, short version, a secret deal to exchange news photos via the neutral capitals of Lisbon and Stockholm during the whole war. So probably around forty thousand news photos were exchanged between Nazi Germany and the United States and Great Britain. And that is the explanation why during the Second World War, all American newspapers and journals were actually full of fresh, nice Nazi photos. And the other way around, you will find in all Nazi newspapers, also in the occupied territories, fresh photos from Associated Press. We can come back to that in the discussion if you’re interested in that.</p><p>Therefore, Lochner was mastermind behind this secret deal already planned in 1940. Therefore Lochner missed a truly historic opportunity in Nuremberg. Only with his testimony, his version of the Hitler speech, could have been used as valid evidence during the hearings in Nuremberg. All of the others who had ensured the speech would eventually reach him, Admiral Canaris, General Beck, General Oster, and Hermann Maas had been murdered by the National Socialists.</p></blockquote><p>Norman Domeier is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Stuttgart.</p><p><b>Video Title: Prof. Norman Domeier - Collaboration Between Associated Press and Nazi Germany. Source: Poland First to Fight. Date Published: December 30, 2019.</b></p>
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Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-7890415192839991982024-03-04T10:00:00.007-05:002024-03-04T10:30:47.289-05:00Geopolitical Bloodletting: NATO's Cynicism In Ukraine <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEifMOEo-e1drKhhAQbMeIveNYZlgDWs0cF1VrpwHjwfNGY0Q9_jtlblJOi7AHePciHuuMT2CiwWI-6dDkXjhMLso4jx45UdJiyuMRN2jD1Rzwyl_2_PRkGAM7plpTxxC5vzrJ1wnr9Burcor7z3cAG8dW9Vl-g4Lhf128W2ryFDbiM-dC_wJMMQB0GsjGsO" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="251" data-original-width="201" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEifMOEo-e1drKhhAQbMeIveNYZlgDWs0cF1VrpwHjwfNGY0Q9_jtlblJOi7AHePciHuuMT2CiwWI-6dDkXjhMLso4jx45UdJiyuMRN2jD1Rzwyl_2_PRkGAM7plpTxxC5vzrJ1wnr9Burcor7z3cAG8dW9Vl-g4Lhf128W2ryFDbiM-dC_wJMMQB0GsjGsO=w256-h320" width="256" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>A generation of Ukrainian youth was sacrificed by the ghouls who rule Washington and London.</b></div><p><br /></p><p>What Europe has enabled in its own backyard for the last decade can only be categorized as strategic suicide. </p><p>England and America, two countries that ravaged Europe in two world wars in the last century, have led Germany and France by the nose against their collective long-term interests in Ukraine. </p><p>Washington and London would prefer to see Europe burn and collapse than see it prosper with a rising Russia and China.</p><p>The sad pushovers in Berlin and Paris don't realize that an alliance with Moscow would benefit them more than their current one-sided partnership with the evil ghouls who rule the U.S. and U.K. </p><p>As for the Ukrainians, their stupidity can be forgiven because they were systematically brainwashed to hate the Russians. Hate is a powerful emotion. It freezes reason. </p><p>Ukraine is a victim. It was psychologically raped by propagandists with a century of research behind them. They were mindfucked on a national level and led to the ditch by a cokehead clown who masquerades as a statesman.</p><p>The majority of Ukrainians don't even know what they're fighting and dying for. They should have learned from the recent history in Afghanistan that empires don't take interest in wars of national liberation out of goodwill.</p><p>Ukraine's corrupt political class committed their nation to ruin when they let Washington in through the front door. They feared the bear in the woods but not the snakes in their living room. </p>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-86608850651873877762024-03-03T01:11:00.003-05:002024-03-03T19:44:32.333-05:00A Crime Remembered<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgG1ogTu1-WUsSgUVKWQ53CDLhUYK8PGmqHTpzPKlPFhd5xdCiI6N0BiDJEu_27_tjk0pHbdshnowtXQzPLphxOS_EtcpWZjIPieoszeIrY_-5CYFc2dh0XQNRWkPyaGHCmAQZ-a8HumB6JCB6JJYC5dVvnlw7oYoRWJYbpw4TBNBXtTWv_MEo43wdIT1Hn" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1151" data-original-width="2047" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgG1ogTu1-WUsSgUVKWQ53CDLhUYK8PGmqHTpzPKlPFhd5xdCiI6N0BiDJEu_27_tjk0pHbdshnowtXQzPLphxOS_EtcpWZjIPieoszeIrY_-5CYFc2dh0XQNRWkPyaGHCmAQZ-a8HumB6JCB6JJYC5dVvnlw7oYoRWJYbpw4TBNBXtTWv_MEo43wdIT1Hn=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><b>The same evil monsters who massacred this innocent family a century ago are behind the needless slaughter in Ukraine today. Putin has been too gentle in his prosecution of this awful war. He could have and should have ended this fight quickly to avoid needless Ukrainian deaths. History will judge him for that. But his evil accusers in the West deserve a worse judgment and a harsher fate.</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></div></b><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/45325522?read-now=1#page_scan_tab_contents">"Murder of The Czar's Family: Complete Story of Their Imprisonment and Execution at Ekaterinburg - One of the Grimmest Tragedies in the History of Royalty"</a></i> Current History (1916-1940), Vol. 13, No. 2, Part I (NOVEMBER, 1920):</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>No grimmer or more tragic story than that told in the October issue of Current History of the manner in which the former Czar of Russia and his entire family were slaughtered in cold blood in the remote Ural town of Ekaterinburg, it would seem, could be invented by the most morbidly imaginative of romancers. The Chamber of Horrors of the Russian epileptic, Dostoievsky, has nothing to equal it. That sombre and pathological genius, Leonid Andreiev, whose short stories of Russian life even went beyond those of Dostoievsky in their obsession by the horror of Russian life and the depths of the Russian soul, would have reveled in such a theme, had he lived to read the revelations only now being made of the way in which the Czar, the Czarina, their children and their personal attendants met their death in a remote provincial town on the outskirts of Siberia.</p><p>Even in the bare outline which was given in last month's issue of this magazine the story is as horrible as any story by Andreiev or Edgar Allan Poe. But the full story recently published in all details in The London Times masses in black shadows between the cold and naked lines, deepens, touch by touch, the impression of brooding fate, the horror of men's souls.</p><p>Those who read this story in full, even those who were hostile to the Czar and his Government during the Romanov regime and have not yet been convinced that the ruthless executions by which the Czar's reign was marked were permitted by the Czar through weakness of character, not through inherent cruelty, cannot but feel compassion for the innocent children who were included in the ghastly murders of the house of Ipatiev. Nor can they fail to be impressed by the unfailing courtesy, patience and humility of the Czar throughout the most cruel and degrading captivity which any deposed monarch ever had to face, by the Czarina's love of her sick boy, by her unfailing devotion to the man to whose downfall, through her blind cult for the sinister priest Rasputin, she had herself so powerfully contributed.</p><p>On the heads of this man and woman - the last representatives of Czardom - rested the ultimate responsibility for the woes of modern Russia, for the violent end of many Russian idealists, but they went to their own deaths like the aristocrats of the French Revolution: nobles they were, and nobles they remained to the very end. The quiet courtesy of their demeanor, their unshakable dignity and fortitude of soul, contrast powerfully with the brutality, the cruelty, the unspeakable obscenity of their Bolshevist guards and executioners.</p></blockquote>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-74275648592869980812024-02-20T00:24:00.000-05:002024-02-20T00:24:07.520-05:00Family Jewels<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgRTqeJUuvmCyLIJVpQI89aseL4Hx4stSF2Q0p-7hOmZi8-ufxKwCzMJY5SRFqKmNUcgsU4i4S4qvNImHgBWAWJgP5PBrxAtuoMBFwDC90eWWibA8cbljNibPoGgTGLkLP-pycGqX0-pNmj6Fp81pH1OgCsJWn-469N3gAgafiD6qxIQ-9lok1wk5chHVuo" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="314" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgRTqeJUuvmCyLIJVpQI89aseL4Hx4stSF2Q0p-7hOmZi8-ufxKwCzMJY5SRFqKmNUcgsU4i4S4qvNImHgBWAWJgP5PBrxAtuoMBFwDC90eWWibA8cbljNibPoGgTGLkLP-pycGqX0-pNmj6Fp81pH1OgCsJWn-469N3gAgafiD6qxIQ-9lok1wk5chHVuo=w265-h400" width="265" /></a></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Historys-Greatest-Heist-Looting-Bolsheviks/dp/0300135580?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=2aa94086-72ad-4923-b91b-82c6d9a7e549">"History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks"</a></i> by Sean McMeekin.</b></div></b><br /><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://tsarnicholas.org/2020/10/09/the-bolshevik-sale-of-the-romanov-jewels/#:~:text=Of%20the%20773%20items%20of,large%2Dscale%20and%20criminal%20sale.">"The Bolshevik sale of the Romanov jewels"</a> </i>By Paul Gilbert, October 9, 2020:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>There is no greater example of such a large-scale criminal sale in history, than that of the jewels of the Russian Imperial Court – perhaps, the finest collection in the world. The Bolsheviks inherited an impressive legacy, and wasted little time in profiting from the sale of many pieces to eager buyers in the West during the 1920s.</p><p>. . .In 1932, the Romanov treasures bought by Armand Hammer could be purchased at American department stores. Later, he opened an antique shop, which sold Easter eggs that belonged to the empresses, icons in jewelled frames of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna, a Fabergé cigarette case commissioned by Maria Feodorovna, her notebook embossed with her monogram and an Imperial crown, among many other items.</p><p>Of the 773 items of the Diamond Fund, 569 were sold in the 1920s – 1930s. These Romanov treasures were stolen from the Russian Imperial Family by the Bolsheviks, and bought up by greedy, materialistic buyers in the West. It is hardly possible to find in history an example of such a large-scale and criminal sale.</p><p>Further reading: I highly recommend <i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Historys-Greatest-Heist-Looting-Bolsheviks/dp/0300135580?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=9f90511a-f71c-41f6-b71e-e1c56a556f48">History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks</a></i> by Sean McMeekin. Published by Yale University Press in 2009.</p></blockquote><p></p><div><b>Video Title: How the Bolsheviks Took Russia - Sean McMeekin, Ph.D. & Matthew Raphael Johnson, Ph.D. Source: Keith Knight - Don't Tread on Anyone. Date Published: February 27, 2023.</b></div><div><br /></div>
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Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-49450742595758625932024-02-05T20:31:00.001-05:002024-02-05T20:31:06.145-05:00Journey with the Romanovs <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirOWQcq1KIBLFBalo7q_xncxh4vPiUkgxHbQMRgGxbJ937VKm2Ue05VwZHIcU_2vmFxL1pzxkF74XNo0Xzovu6nHow1oywWvJ4r0ykYb9hmg-Cjkb6fGatki8D2ty85t952MD85d53zQ5z7aYIN1HrxjKwG9gMioKP8c9Izd-GzwtBzZx3fveVVhMe6K_C" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="720" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirOWQcq1KIBLFBalo7q_xncxh4vPiUkgxHbQMRgGxbJ937VKm2Ue05VwZHIcU_2vmFxL1pzxkF74XNo0Xzovu6nHow1oywWvJ4r0ykYb9hmg-Cjkb6fGatki8D2ty85t952MD85d53zQ5z7aYIN1HrxjKwG9gMioKP8c9Izd-GzwtBzZx3fveVVhMe6K_C=w288-h400" width="288" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><b><i><a href="https://www.romanovs.eu/">"The Romanov Royal Martyrs: What Silence Could Not Conceal" </a></i></b></span></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p><b>Video Title: Journey with the Romanovs | Part 1. Source: The Romanov Royal Martyrs. Date Published: February 17, 2023.</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>A live interview about the Romanov family, giving a new understanding of how were the first years of their life. Learn why there is still a lot that has not been told about this story, a story that intrigues so many people around the world. New documents, new materials, and retranslated texts show that there is still much that is has never been told before. The video ends with the events of 1905. </p><p>Nicholas B.A. Nicholson was interviewed by Elissa Bjeletich about the content of the book “The Romanov Royal Martyrs: What Silence Could Not Conceal” and the show was broadcast live on February 9, 2020, on Ancient Faith Radio. </p></blockquote><p></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-WJBsF5r_HQ?si=JVpVT2RRYDvnivTx" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe> <div><b>Part 2. Description:</b></div><div><blockquote>Did any new archival documents appear? How were the Romanov children raised? What did religion mean for the family? What did autocracy mean and what powers did the Tsar have? These and many other issues are raised in this second episode of the series. You will be surprised by the new truths and how history has been distorted. Get a taste by watching this video. </blockquote></div>
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Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-91284213854856645032024-01-30T09:01:00.001-05:002024-01-30T09:43:55.625-05:00The al-Tanf Key<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfJbD1h9XXLuX_z0MNTaZEE0RrCuz3tOUqU4t5gm1lgBgkSI_5OVZDNI_O_hhTgDXewf7Z1kI60ATj39RyVqOPJ1DZKIdMfDJ18EsTF0_mJbN4GhjmgMycm_C_FZS2iPId-23YFKyc3epdorDLlw_S4aB-G__zMDj0w9wVbZ8fIG7_B0EGzIJ-ZGys5S9e" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="568" data-original-width="910" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfJbD1h9XXLuX_z0MNTaZEE0RrCuz3tOUqU4t5gm1lgBgkSI_5OVZDNI_O_hhTgDXewf7Z1kI60ATj39RyVqOPJ1DZKIdMfDJ18EsTF0_mJbN4GhjmgMycm_C_FZS2iPId-23YFKyc3epdorDLlw_S4aB-G__zMDj0w9wVbZ8fIG7_B0EGzIJ-ZGys5S9e=w400-h250" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>Al-Tanf is a strategic jewel in Syria, a key link in an invisible chain. Israeli and Jordanian troops should serve there and defend it with their lives since it is they who profit most from its existence.</b></div><br /></div></div><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/al-tanf-garrison-americas-strategic-baggage-in-the-middle-east/">"Al Tanf garrison: America’s strategic baggage in the Middle East"</a></i> </b><b>By </b><b>Daniel L. Magruder Jr, </b><b>Brookings, November 20, 2020:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Al Tanf is a tiny outpost near the tri-border region in southeast Syria straddling the Baghdad-Damascus highway. There is a token U.S. military presence along with a partner force, the Maghawir al-Thawra (previously called the New Syrian Army). Originally, the area was held by ISIS, but was occupied by friendly forces in early 2016. In a deal brokered with the Russians, there was a 55-kilometer deconfliction zone circumscribed around the garrison, which is patrolled by Americans and their partners.</p><p>Currently, there are at least three justifications for sustaining the U.S. presence at Al Tanf: interdicting ISIS remnants, disrupting the Syrian economy and Iranian influence, and its potential for political leverage in negotiations. </p></blockquote><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep04648?seq=1">"Trump’s Air Strike on al-Tanf: No to the Shiite Crescent"</a></i> By Hillel Frisch, BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 483, June 1, 2017:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>The two recent US air strikes on a Syrian convoy heading to the al-Tanf military base in the southern Syrian Desert a few miles from the Jordanian-Syrian border have major strategic importance. The attack signaled for the first time since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011 that the US would not countenance the reemergence of the Iranian-controlled Shiite crescent that Iran had created through Teheran, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut after the US exited Iraq in 2010.</p><p>The US air strikes on a Syrian convoy heading to al-Tanf military base in the southern Syrian Desert a few miles from the Jordanian-Syrian border scarcely made any front pages in the world media. This was a major oversight. The strikes should have been a major headline, especially as they occurred prior to Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia.</p><p>The attack signaled for the first time since the Syrian civil war broke out in the spring of 2011 that the US, under Trump, will not countenance the reemergence of the Iranian-controlled Shiite crescent that Iran had created to connect Teheran, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut. Iran had taken advantage of the US’s exit from Iraq in 2010 and the outbreak of the Syrian civil war a year later to establish that Shiite crescent.</p><p>Technically, the two air strikes were a minor affair. Two fighting F-15 jets struck a convoy of Syrian troops and unidentified pro-Syrian militia members, killing five to fifty of them as well as destroying several vehicles. The US justified the strike on military grounds. The convoy was likely to threaten elite US army troops advising Free Syrian Army-linked forces, who, together with YPG Kurdish forces, have pushed ISIS back to Raqqa, its last major stronghold in Syria.</p><p>According to the US army spokesperson, the strike hardly came as a surprise. The Syrians had long known of the 35-mile radius “deconfliction” zone around a former Syrian army base that US special troops use to train their local allies. Syrian forces were aware that they were forbidden to enter that zone.</p><p>The real goal behind the attack lies in the reason the Syrian convoy risked penetrating the area. The Syrians and their allies were obviously trying to link up with pro-Iranian militias operating against ISIS around Mosul, the last and crumbling stronghold of ISIS in Iraq. Syria and its Iranian patron reasoned that as ISIS was responsible for rupturing the Iranian-controlled Shiite crescent in 2014 when it captured Raqqa and Mosul and the vast space in between, the defeat of ISIS had to be a prelude to resurrecting the crescent.</p><p>President Trump obviously thought otherwise. Unlike his predecessor, who viewed Iran as part of the solution to lowering the flames in the Middle East, Trump sees Iran as very much part of the problem. That position that is in tandem with that of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Jordan (from where the F-15s might have taken off). All those states view Iran as the major threat by far to their national security. </p><p>There could be no better way to express the new American administration’s unity of purpose with its traditional Gulf allies than a military strike to show its commitment to containing the Iranian crescent threat. The timing of the strike was perfect – two days before the president and his entourage landed in Riyadh to sign multibillion-dollar armament deals between the US and Riyadh. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>. . . Above all, the strike and its vast regional implications demonstrate that the containment and, possibly, the ultimate defeat of ISIS are hardly likely to enhance the prospects of achieving peace in the area. To the contrary, the rollback of ISIS is only going to intensify the conflict between the various militias on the ground, as well as their national and international sponsors. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Only the promotion – or thwarting – of an Iran-dominated Shiite and heterodox arc, with all its implications for the regional and international balance of power, can catapult a small patch of desert devoid of any natural resources, known hitherto only to local geographers, into an international flashpoint. <b>Commit to memory the name and location of al-Tanf. It is liable to haunt the wider Middle East for years to come.</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/10/26/contain-enforce-and-engage-integrated-u.s.-strategy-to-address-iran-s-nuclear-and-regional-challenges-pub-73484">"Contain, Enforce, and Engage: </a></i></b><b><i><a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/10/26/contain-enforce-and-engage-integrated-u.s.-strategy-to-address-iran-s-nuclear-and-regional-challenges-pub-73484">An Integrated U.S. Strategy to Address Iran’s Nuclear and Regional Challenges"</a></i> Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, October 26, 2017:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Protection of Israel and Jordan has been one of the central rationales behind U.S. support for the Southern Front—a coalition of moderate fighters who control portions of southwest Syria. Keeping Iran-supported militias out of this area should be a readily achievable objective, as U.S. partners hold the upper hand in this part of Syria and simply keeping the status quo in place would be sufficient. The Trump administration has agreed to a ceasefire in southwest Syria with Russia and Jordan to address this concern. But while the U.S. administration appears committed to keeping Iranian forces off of Israel’s border, it is not yet clear whether the details of the de-escalation agreement will ensure that outcome. And Israel has expressed concerns that if Russian forces act as monitor of the agreement they will not stop Iranian encroachment into this area. The United States should prioritize this objective in its broader negotiation with Russia on Syria and if necessary be willing to place a number of U.S. forces into southwest Syria to oversee the implementation of a ceasefire and also provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to monitor implementation of the agreement.</p><p>The concept of an Iranian land bridge has received significant attention in the press and from regional analysts but is often misunderstood. Using land routes to transport a large number of Iranian forces or materiel 1,000 miles across some of the most treacherous terrain of the Middle East is impractical, especially when Iran already has air routes into Damascus and is helping Hezbollah build a domestic weapons production capability Lebanon. Iran’s real objective is to hold as many key lines of communication as possible within Syria and Iraq so that it can more easily move its forces including Hezbollah, other Shia militias, or the IRGC Quds Force within and between these territories; give itself maximum battlefield flexibility; and develop diversified supply routes.</p><p><b>The United States should limit Iranian flexibility and control of these lines of communication, though it must also recognize that this will be more difficult and less important than its top priority in keeping Iran out of the Golan Heights and Israel’s border areas. By maintaining forces at al-Tanf in Syria, the United States has cut off Iranian use of the southern (and most direct) route from Baghdad to Damascus. Because protecting this enclave comes with a significant U.S. resource commitment, especially in terms of air support, the United States should look for alternatives with partners that reduce this burden</b>. In the north, the United States should be able to use its close alliance with Syrian Kurds to prevent Iranian shipments of weapons. The question will be at the border crossing between Anbar and Deir Ezzor Provinces. If American-supported forces are able to retake this territory from the Islamic State, they would cut off any options for Iran—though even if Iranian proxies hold it, it is highly inhospitable terrain for Shia militia groups.</p><p>Finally, it is important to recognize that such an approach will not fully prevent Iranian movement through this territory. Security vacuums plague eastern Syria and will continue to for years to come, and in that environment Iran will find opportunities to increase its influence and move materiel and personnel.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/future-al-tanf-garrison-syria">"The Future of al-Tanf Garrison in Syria"</a> </i>By Grant Rumley and David Schenker, Washington Institute For Near East Policy, December 6, 2021:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>At a Middle East Institute event in July 2020, U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr. noted that “our primary purpose for being in Syria is to conduct operations against [IS].” Yet his predecessor, Gen. Joseph Votel, hinted at broader goals while testifying to Congress in 2018: “[ATG] does have the derivative value of being along a principal line of access [and] communication that Iran and her proxies would like to exploit...So while that isn’t our mission, we do recognize the indirect impact that we have.”</p><p><b>In addition to impeding Iran’s ground line of communication with Hezbollah and the Assad regime, the U.S. presence at ATG has also proven useful to Israel’s “campaign between the wars,” which has reportedly included dozens of air missions against targets in Syria. Some of these operations have struck Syrian bases where Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and/or their militia proxies were expanding their presence. In the past, these missions were usually conducted by flying over Lebanon, but two factors have made the ATG deconfliction zone the less risky, more appealing route for Israel: the reportedly higher concentration of air defense systems in west Syria and around Damascus, and the growing Israeli concern about Iran supplying more advanced capabilities to its proxies</b>. <b>The ATG route of attack enables Israeli forces to avoid Syrian early-warning radar systems oriented to the west/southwest. It is unclear whether Damascus would deploy air defense systems to the area around ATG if U.S. forces were no longer present there</b>.</p><p>The garrison has served Jordanian interests as well. American troops and their MaT partners help secure the kingdom’s remote borders with Iraq and Syria against smuggling and potential infiltration by IS or Iranian militias. Although Jordan has warned of the terrorism threat posed by Rukban camp, Washington has helped reduce this danger by establishing checkpoints and supporting the U.S.-trained security personnel who patrol the Syrian side of the border. Indeed, after President Trump ordered all U.S. forces out of Syria in 2018, King Abdullah II personally lobbied the administration to remain at ATG.</p></blockquote>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-88273086845874367162024-01-29T08:45:00.000-05:002024-01-29T08:45:28.383-05:00"Beowulf: The Harrowing of Heorot, A Literary Analysis"<p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg5STdcWC1XzX7bAJiuOfGUAFxryd3Yd5VmDod_x9BCffg4JudTz4UKJUBeoJ4pDLin8P3leWUic87at7yIxC-sI_XqsQfQqI1a-2rPlxToU-KgfZS7kD7erFUVx4sUhmWzq92hk_W0gq-XqRRxQNvHYTaSFnSOgDk7KbDDz8dcgEX5qMdJsACHs5jzBdJY" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg5STdcWC1XzX7bAJiuOfGUAFxryd3Yd5VmDod_x9BCffg4JudTz4UKJUBeoJ4pDLin8P3leWUic87at7yIxC-sI_XqsQfQqI1a-2rPlxToU-KgfZS7kD7erFUVx4sUhmWzq92hk_W0gq-XqRRxQNvHYTaSFnSOgDk7KbDDz8dcgEX5qMdJsACHs5jzBdJY" width="320" /></a></b></div><b><br /></b><p></p><p><b>Video Title: "Beowulf: The Harrowing of Heorot, A Literary Analysis." Source: Mountains of Books. Date Published: December 19, 2021. Description:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>A Christian poem with pagan roots, Beowulf stands as one of the oldest intact pieces of Anglo-Saxon writing. Capturing imaginations for a millennia, the poem has stood the test of time and is a fascinating glimpse into the period of Christianization of England and the new cultural and religious tensions within the Germanic tribes that made up the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. </p><div><div>Bibliography :</div><div><br /></div><div>Beowulf - Seamus Heaney Translation </div><div><br /></div><div>Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics by J R R Tolkien </div><div><br /></div><div>Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of Britain </div><div><br /></div><div>The nature of Christianity in Beowulf by Edward Irving </div><div><br /></div><div>Water and fire: the myth of the flood in Anglo-Saxon England by Daniel Anlezark </div><div><br /></div><div>"BEOWULF" AND CHRISTIAN TRADITION: A RECONSIDERATION FROM A CELTIC STANCE by CHARLES DONAHUE </div><div><br /></div><div>A Critical Companion to Beowulf by Andy Orchard.</div></div></blockquote>
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Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-83976583673000644902024-01-15T20:36:00.005-05:002024-01-15T20:36:51.706-05:00The Nephilim in Beowulf | Richard Rohlin & Jonathan Pageau<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhN1ppaEl792WV20MTSQxegWzMl-0hvg2WSJ3frOgU-ylFY4xzmKQ-heUmgtbHlJcIfMSLnR7HZegc_L3z7ta8lhZljLO4E25HiN640AiXTKifFRFT4Lx6J1FUb_VQ6JZc5Q6u-guap3q-EPurbEPh1IKASUCCYE5q_9MyQMJ2fdtFUZflrfxG39kO8Rm6n" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhN1ppaEl792WV20MTSQxegWzMl-0hvg2WSJ3frOgU-ylFY4xzmKQ-heUmgtbHlJcIfMSLnR7HZegc_L3z7ta8lhZljLO4E25HiN640AiXTKifFRFT4Lx6J1FUb_VQ6JZc5Q6u-guap3q-EPurbEPh1IKASUCCYE5q_9MyQMJ2fdtFUZflrfxG39kO8Rm6n=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><b>Video Title: The Nephilim in Beowulf | Richard Rohlin & Jonathan Pageau. Source: Jonathan Pageau - Clips. Date Published: April 4, 2023.</b></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LZF_yIV8WEo?si=PoQ9a7RcDQNl09Dg" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-79566058053268231752024-01-04T11:52:00.000-05:002024-01-04T11:52:05.797-05:00Beowulf - Literature versus Oral Tradition <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg41NHxrf2KQ5mKhnQpC2FPw9TzDhty-jlYAsk_ah1H5hmCx5k9AM7Y8FI_E5bzGbdbDEm1xilwzJRRtLzIETlamjVqlVnt_CG_Kd2YAgPW6HMS2TiSLAmJqRYUD3esM44wgH2rxlVRr_QTvLBlxwixGOIyo6JKQ6fjarJnrHwhHkdwDQi5LjfkRFt1l45Q/s755/9780252078699_lg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="755" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg41NHxrf2KQ5mKhnQpC2FPw9TzDhty-jlYAsk_ah1H5hmCx5k9AM7Y8FI_E5bzGbdbDEm1xilwzJRRtLzIETlamjVqlVnt_CG_Kd2YAgPW6HMS2TiSLAmJqRYUD3esM44wgH2rxlVRr_QTvLBlxwixGOIyo6JKQ6fjarJnrHwhHkdwDQi5LjfkRFt1l45Q/s320/9780252078699_lg.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i><a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p078699">"Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind"</a></i> By John Miles Foley (University of Illinois Press, 2012).</b></div></b><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p><b>Video Title: Oral Tradition 1/2. Source: Theudebrand. Date Published: December 25, 2016. Description: </b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>The law itself in oral cultures is enshrined in formulaic sayings, proverbs, which are not mere jurisprudential decorations, but themselves constitute the law. A judge in an oral culture is often called on to articulate sets of relevant proverbs out of which he can produce equitable decisions in the cases under formal litigation before him. </p><p>Oral tradition never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality. </p><p>The theory of oral-formulaic composition originated in the scholarly study of epic poetry, being developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It seeks to explain two related issues: the process which enables oral poets to improvise poetry; and why orally improvised poetry has the characteristics it does. </p><p>The key idea of the theory is poets have a store of formulas (a formula being 'an expression that is regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express a particular essential idea') and that by linking these in conventionalised ways, they can rapidly compose verse. </p><p>In the hands of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, this approach transformed the study of ancient and medieval poetry, and oral poetry generally. The main exponent and developer of their approaches was John Miles Foley. </p><p>Lord, and more prominently Francis Peabody Magoun, also applied the theory to Old English poetry (principally Beowulf), where formulaic variation such as the following is prominent:</p><p></p><blockquote>Hrothgar mathelode helm Scildinga ("Hrothgar spoke, protector of the Scildings") Beowulf mathelode bearn Ecgtheowes ("Beowulf spoke, son of Ecgtheow") </blockquote><p></p><p>Magoun thought that formulaic poetry was necessarily oral in origin. This sparked a major and ongoing debate over the extent to which Old English Poetry - which survives only in written form - should be seen as, in some sense, oral poetry. </p><p>The theory of oral tradition would undergo elaboration and development as it grew in acceptance. While the number of formulas documented for various traditions proliferated, the concept of the formula remained lexically-bound. However, numerous innovations appeared, such as the "formulaic system" with structural "substitution slots" for syntactic, morphological and narrative necessity (as well as for artistic invention). </p><p>Sophisticated models such as Foley's "word-type placement rules" followed. Higher levels of formulaic composition were defined over the years, such as "ring composition","responsion" and the "type-scene" (also called a "theme" or "typical scene"). Examples include the "Beasts of Battle" and the "Cliffs of Death". Some of these characteristic patterns of narrative details, (like "the arming sequence;" "the hero on the beach"; "the traveler recognizes his goal") would show evidence of global distribution. </p><p>Very large units would be defined (The Indo-European Return Song) and areas outside of military epic would come under investigation: women's song, riddles and other genres. </p><p>Within Homeric studies specifically, Lord's "The Singer of Tales", which focused on problems and questions that arise in conjunction with applying oral-formulaic theory to problematic texts such as the Iliad, Odyssey, and even Beowulf, influenced nearly all of the articles written on Homer and oral-formulaic composition thereafter. </p><p>Eric Havelock's "Preface to Plato" revolutionized how scholars looked at Homeric epic by arguing not only that it was the product of an oral tradition, but also that the oral-formulas contained therein served as a way for ancient Greeks to preserve cultural knowledge across many different generations. </p><p>Watkins' "How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics" is both an introduction to comparative poetics and an investigation of the myths about dragon-slayers found in different times and in different Indo-European languages. Watkins claims that it is not possible to understand fully the traditional elements in an early Indo-European poetic text without the background of what he calls a "genetic intertextuality" of particular formulas and themes in all languages of the family.</p></blockquote><p></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/15fi-hjIXIs?si=D4vNnQf3PS_66gh0" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe> <div><b>Video Title: Oral Tradition 2/2.</b></div>
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Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-43870478832169969382024-01-03T13:02:00.001-05:002024-01-03T13:02:22.636-05:00The Dating of Beowulf And Why It Matters <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYsMNn8LfAF-aWhm051_bnC0tGg4Jst1u__mtrkzcB3nVpgd8ShEUkjwOevAUDwmd-vpbB_0TCU-ZMJKtDKFL4sodkHjERoyYzRWB1vHr2pFivNk7KZqGV4CAIkqq7eKMs1nMq2u8ibdbHOuBNsHOshovNMPWaSbMTTM5PpUcs34RARqGHw5F3K3bj5L9h" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="700" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgYsMNn8LfAF-aWhm051_bnC0tGg4Jst1u__mtrkzcB3nVpgd8ShEUkjwOevAUDwmd-vpbB_0TCU-ZMJKtDKFL4sodkHjERoyYzRWB1vHr2pFivNk7KZqGV4CAIkqq7eKMs1nMq2u8ibdbHOuBNsHOshovNMPWaSbMTTM5PpUcs34RARqGHw5F3K3bj5L9h=w280-h400" width="280" /></a></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i><a href="https://utorontopress.com/9780802078797/the-dating-of-beowulf/">"The Dating of Beowulf" </a></i>Edited by Colin Chase, University of Toronto Press, originally published 1981.</b></div></b><br /><p></p><p><b><i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Robert_Chase">Wikipedia - Colin Chase:</a></i></b></p><p></p><blockquote>Colin Robert Chase (February 5, 1935 – October 13, 1984) was an American academic. An associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, he was known for his contributions to the studies of Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. His best-known work, The Dating of Beowulf, challenged the accepted orthodoxy of the dating of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf—then thought to be from the latter half of the eighth century—and left behind what was described in A Beowulf Handbook as "a cautious and necessary incertitude".</blockquote><p></p><p><b><i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Frank">Wikipedia - Roberta Frank:</a></i></b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Roberta Frank (born 1941) is an American philologist specializing in Old English and Old Norse language and literature. She is the Marie Borroff Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.</p><p>Frank's research draws upon archaeological as well as literary and linguistic evidence to analyze aspects of early English and Scandinavian texts. Her work has focused on the poetry of England and Scandinavia, including numerous publications on skaldic verse, the early North, and Beowulf.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b><i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Miles_Foley">Wikipedia - John Miles Foley:</a></i></b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>John Miles Foley (January 22, 1947 – May 3, 2012) was a scholar of comparative oral tradition, particularly medieval and Old English literature, Homer and Serbian epic. He was the founder of the academic journal Oral Tradition and the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri, where he was Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English and W. H. Byler Endowed Chair in the Humanities.</p><p>He gave more than 250 invited lectures throughout the United States as well as in China, India, Russia, Mongolia, Japan, throughout Africa and Europe, and the United States.</p><p>Foley was awarded grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, and other institutions, and was a fellow of the Finnish Folklore Society and the American Folklore Society.</p><p>In addition to providing the infrastructure for the comparatively new academic discipline of oral tradition by means of organizing conferences, producing the first bibliography, history and methodological guide and classroom textbook on the subject, his principal contributions involved the study of oral traditional performance in the field, and the application of those observations both to ancient texts and to the emerging secondary orality of the Internet.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26303213?read-now=1&seq=4">""Beowulf" and the Psychohistory of Anglo-Saxon Culture"</a></i> By John Miles Foley, American Imago, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Summer, 1977):</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Only relatively recently, in the last ten or twelve years, have scholars come to recognize the encoding, preservation, and transmission of culturally useful information as the basic function of the traditional oral epic. Eric Havelock has described the operation of the Homeric data retrieval system in the following terms:</p><p></p><blockquote>poetry is central in the educational theory. It occupied this position so it seems in contemporary society, and it was a position held apparently not on the grounds that we would offer, namely poetry's inspirational and imaginative effects, but on the ground that it provided a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment. Poetry represented not some thing we call by that name, but an indoctrination which today would be comprised in a shelf of text books and works of reference.<i> (Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato, 1963, p. 27).</i></blockquote><i></i><p></p><p>At the factual level, we may pore over extant "volumes" of the Homeric encyclopedia in, for example, the Iliadic "Catalogs" or the Odyssean raft-building manual; we can carry on similar research in the Old English reference library by consulting such Beowulfian sub-genres as the catalog, the sermon, the genealogy, and so forth. In addition, however, the epic genre encodes cultural attitudes, beliefs, laws, and customs in the actions of its heroes: the divine épya of an Achilles or the superhuman ellendœdas of a Beowulf become traditional models or exempla to assist Everyman in the process of acculturation. The traditional oral society educates its members—that is, it provides them with necessary information through the repeated and collective experience of performed epic poetry, by presenting them time and again with a verbal montage of the group's poetic models and thereby with the data which these models encode: </p><p></p><blockquote>In oral cultures virtually all conceptualization, including what will later be reshaped into abstract sciences, is thus kept close to the human life-world. Moreover, since public law and custom are of major importance for social survival but cannot be put on record, they must continually be talked about or sung about, else they vanish from consciousness. Hence the figures around whom knowledge is made to cluster, those about whom stories are told or sung, must be made into specific personages, foci of common attention, individuals embodying open public concerns, as written laws would later be matters of open public concern . . .Thus the epic hero, from one point of view, appears as an answer to the problem of knowledge storage and communication in oral-aural cultures (where indeed storage and communication are virtually the same thing) <i>(Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 1967, p. 204).</i></blockquote><i></i><p></p><p>The purpose of this paper is to examine a different kind of information, which is also traditionally inscribed in the epic hero and his actions. I will attempt to show how Beowulf is educative in a much more basic way than has heretofore been realized, that it served for the people who composed and re-composed it as a history of human psychological development—in other words, as a psychohistory. By making and keeping available, through oral performance and aural apprehension, consciously formed symbols of unconscious processes in a rational, organic, ontogenic sequence, the Anglo-Saxon epic records and transmits the story of the psychological development of individual and of culture. At the mythic, story level we deal with the hero Beowulf and a narrative of the events which occasioned his apotheosis in song; at the psychohistorical level, we come to grips with an account of those events of the mind which generated the mythic apotheosis. As a " handbook " on the continuing struggle toward ego consciousness, Beowulf is, I will maintain, finally therapeutic, in that it actively counseled all members at all levels of social and psychological growth and, by symbolically reenforcing the human maturation process, contributed quite systematically to the collective well-being of the society.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20466079?read-now=1&seq=22">"A Scandal in Toronto: "The Dating of "Beowulf" " a Quarter Century On"</a></i> By Roberta Frank, Speculum, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Oct., 2007):</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>"Fiction," Terry Eagleton recently observed, "is a kind of writing in which you can neither lie, tell the truth nor make a mistake." Invention is needed, because most problems, from the existence of God to the dating of <i>Beowulf</i>, are just too hard for us, involving propositions that we can neither prove nor refute. We entangle ourselves in vertigo-inducing iteration loops, feeding the solution into the equation and then solving it, over and over again. But inertia is no answer either. </p><p>What we don't know does hurt us. <i>Beowulf</i> is a text from the past in the past's own voice. It matters whether the poem, when new, was close to its oral roots, or whether it was a nostalgic reconstruction of a northern heroic age; it matters whether <i>Beowulf</i> was a prop by which an aristocratic ideology established itself in a society not so different from that portrayed in the poem, or whether it was a late, culturally charged act of repetition, imaginatively reconciling its readers to new realities. It matters "who-dunit" and when and how and why. And that we don't know and perhaps never shall. The elusiveness of <i>Beowulf</i> is not much different from that of all other long Old English poems, none of which can be securely situated before the tenth century. Anglo-Saxonists must accept a burden of ignorance about matters of authorship and chronology, composition, patronage, and transmission that would be intolerable to those who work in most other periods of literary history. Old English poems---not entirely oral in style, not entirely fixed in text---give no intelligible or adequate answer to ordinary modern questions about authorial styles, literary indebtedness, schools, genres, performance, theme, and structure, even beginnings and endings. So why do we keep asking? Our individual myths as medievalists about why we pursue our reticent corpora, our fragmentary remains from an unknowable past, are as various as we are. At their core, perhaps, is a radical skepticism (the handwriting on the wall may be a forgery) as well as a complementary longing for something to stir and stretch the imagination. The sense of "wonder" that is so important in Old English poetry itself, the experience of being totally involved in and caught up by what one sees, is close to the etymological meaning of "theory" as both contemplation and rapture. (And not a few influential French theorists, we have recently been reminded, were trained as medievalists.) There is wonder in learning from solemn philologists that the singular noun eolet in <i>Beowulf</i> 224a means "river-junction," or "water-course," or "foreign-journey," "pasture of an elk," "horse-abandoning," "boar-carrying," "boundary," "desert," "divorced woman," "remote landing-place" ---or was it an interjection signaling intense disgust? The poem resists our intelligence quite successfully.</p><p>The dating of <i>Beowulf</i> involves bedrock assumptions about the nature of Anglo-Saxon society and manuscript culture, about concepts of morality, and style, held a millennium and more ago, about the language and feelings of people whose beliefs we find quaint and whose private habits we don't like to think about. That 1981 scandal in Toronto got us down and dirty at the exposed coal-face of our field, tapping at its precarious foundations, doing work that needed to be done and that continues to be worth doing.</p></blockquote>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-74058040925929873882024-01-02T15:09:00.000-05:002024-01-02T15:09:39.466-05:00Lorraine Pangle on the quarrel of Plato and Homer<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiTKkggRPENX2FfTJWm9h0PGlAFuasyaRwg7Up5aSrFA5TEmGSuWg4lPbqrTXl-Kv018T-C7sCgil3wOSwtSoHW5KH9YvpODLo6AGivPuSPFSMslN1Tsg4yylrHr99d4rNPatQYW35jYJgeLDji9w_SwX16NuXkMbrnSOglMr4bY0Qe0FKVBLOfOIZTHwZS" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiTKkggRPENX2FfTJWm9h0PGlAFuasyaRwg7Up5aSrFA5TEmGSuWg4lPbqrTXl-Kv018T-C7sCgil3wOSwtSoHW5KH9YvpODLo6AGivPuSPFSMslN1Tsg4yylrHr99d4rNPatQYW35jYJgeLDji9w_SwX16NuXkMbrnSOglMr4bY0Qe0FKVBLOfOIZTHwZS=w320-h320" width="320" /></a></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiH0IyEn-QjbBhadBKMIvbdbY8rc82UX-HwGrCHhnZPhSzXf6rzOTacr27jxAzc_vX943bqnPo2vucl2K86BCILRfTd2UXeCQnZKNn-gY4JRCwSwOHNJjF4laiVQ9EzCcjfwr6UES1U-nPkQCf7iTwmuS-DI_W7LjpqQp-rfelEDHt2lYkj3GO38hCqB79L" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="662" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiH0IyEn-QjbBhadBKMIvbdbY8rc82UX-HwGrCHhnZPhSzXf6rzOTacr27jxAzc_vX943bqnPo2vucl2K86BCILRfTd2UXeCQnZKNn-gY4JRCwSwOHNJjF4laiVQ9EzCcjfwr6UES1U-nPkQCf7iTwmuS-DI_W7LjpqQp-rfelEDHt2lYkj3GO38hCqB79L=w212-h320" width="212" /></a></div><b>Lorraine Pangle is the author of, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Virtue-Knowledge-Foundations-Political-Philosophy/dp/022613654X?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=b01b9ac4-bb3d-4aa4-95a9-eb0a45bc2d18">"Virtue Is Knowledge: The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy"</a></i> <i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Political-Philosophy-Benjamin-Franklin/dp/080188666X?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=31e45725-6710-4474-873b-8c9b1725c045">"The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin"</a></i> and other books.</b></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></div></div><p></p><p><b><i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Smith_Pangle">Wikipedia:</a></i></b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Lorraine Smith Pangle (born April 26, 1958) is a professor of political philosophy in the Department of Government and co-director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests are ancient, early modern, and American political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of education, and problems of justice and moral responsibility. She has won fellowships from the Searle, Olin, and Earhart Foundations, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Pangle received her B.A. in history from Yale, a B.Ed. from the University of Toronto, and her PhD from University of Chicago in 1999. </p></blockquote><p><b>Video Title: Lorraine Pangle on the quarrel of Plato and Homer. Source: Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard. Date Published: May 28, 2019. Description:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Lorraine Pangle on “Plato vs. Homer: The Old Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry.” Lorraine Pangle is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches ancient, early modern, and American political philosophy, with special interests in ethics, the philosophy of education, and problems of justice and moral responsibility. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Earhart Foundation. Her publications include Virtue is Knowledge: The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2014), The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin (Johns Hopkins, 2007), and Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge, 2003).</p><p>Presented by the Program on Constitutional Government on April 25, 2019.</p></blockquote>
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Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-21809133517666891462024-01-01T12:24:00.000-05:002024-01-01T12:24:18.576-05:00Beowulf: How A Legendary Poem Offers A Portal To Our Ancient Past <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjmUWWzvpSRrMaoDejVUuSnecU3sGrxWdXE4ts5CrhSzOGRbhXInk2TU7MO-88N0unUpn5I_bkt05Ztaz3FXR6zIU5_4T7p0luRaYsWOYHH4vD22QWEtyhhn8BiBcmN_MlJhnvYtHtOIQxIlLOB8iwO22IkB0aeMXO7oJKyUebNDXQKbN5LH-ZabWVT6QlF" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1091" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjmUWWzvpSRrMaoDejVUuSnecU3sGrxWdXE4ts5CrhSzOGRbhXInk2TU7MO-88N0unUpn5I_bkt05Ztaz3FXR6zIU5_4T7p0luRaYsWOYHH4vD22QWEtyhhn8BiBcmN_MlJhnvYtHtOIQxIlLOB8iwO22IkB0aeMXO7oJKyUebNDXQKbN5LH-ZabWVT6QlF=w273-h400" width="273" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/437569?read-now=1&seq=1">"Beowulf: The Hero as Keeper of Human Polity"</a> </i>By Norma Kroll, Modern Philology, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Nov., 1986):</b></p><p></p><blockquote>Current critical responses to Tolkien's demand that we look at <i>Beowulf</i> as "a productof art" still tend to generate as much controversy as agreement over what kind of the poem reveals. On the one side, scholars see the poem as a symbolic representation of man's moral and social struggles, with the monsters as earthly, virtually human creatures who are not entirely evil. On the other, some view it more or less as a psychomachia, an allegorical struggle between virtues and vices, with the battles between the marvelous characters representing cosmic confrontations between Christ and Satan. The critical controversy has its basis in the essential similarities radical differences between the hero and the two monsters. Nonetheless, Beowulf, Grendel, and the dragon do not symbolize either cosmic absolutes or ordinary humans. Instead, they are identical and opposite enough to be doubles, a relationship that shows all three to be physically, emotionally, and, in a sense, morally superior to the nonheroic characters. At issue is the question of what kinds of moral dilemma are central to the doubles relationships in the poem. As we shall see, the hero's and the monsters' prodigious battles have social and political rather than personal and psychological consequences. In essence, the <i>Beowulf</i> poet explores the problems inherent in a practical politics of civilization, presenting virtue as acts that sustain and vice as acts that disrupt human brotherhood.</blockquote><p></p><p><b>Video Title: Beowulf: How A Legendary Poem Offers A Portal To Our Ancient Past | Literary Classics | Perspective. Source: Perspective. Date Published: May 16, 2023. </b></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZKtkkBUwAwQ?si=u2By7ltRMSnud_VM" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-28665695925383743872023-12-29T15:08:00.003-05:002023-12-29T15:08:46.471-05:00J R R Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjepT8kpd6Xm3_ji_a3w8ATN9jYy5tKfMsjQ35ephEiDyJlFJEoGQDu3WCB2Tf6SVYOaZp5rgd7CAJs_rIvnEBxravTHlihoJsq7kapl0XSCPazKv6uQrDaSiX5xZ3_HHjx6Nk50v7g8HbJiRM1kU_k6WSvQr7K78CFcynGm3HOZ9AAwUauFyjIcI0y7-AI" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="658" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjepT8kpd6Xm3_ji_a3w8ATN9jYy5tKfMsjQ35ephEiDyJlFJEoGQDu3WCB2Tf6SVYOaZp5rgd7CAJs_rIvnEBxravTHlihoJsq7kapl0XSCPazKv6uQrDaSiX5xZ3_HHjx6Nk50v7g8HbJiRM1kU_k6WSvQr7K78CFcynGm3HOZ9AAwUauFyjIcI0y7-AI=w263-h400" width="263" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf:_The_Monsters_and_the_Critics"><b>Wikipedia - Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics:</b></a></i></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Tolkien argues that the original poem has almost been lost under the weight of the scholarship on it; that Beowulf must be seen as a poem, not just as a historical document; and that the quality of its verse and its structure give it a powerful effect. He rebuts suggestions that the poem is an epic or exciting narrative, likening it instead to a strong masonry structure built of blocks that fit together. He points out that the poem's theme is a serious one, mortality, and that the poem is in two parts: the first on Beowulf as a young man, defeating Grendel and his mother; the second on Beowulf in old age, going to his death fighting the dragon.</p><p>The work has been praised by critics including the poet and Beowulf translator Seamus Heaney. Michael D. C. Drout called it the most important article ever written about the poem. Scholars of Anglo-Saxon agree that the work was influential, transforming the study of Beowulf.</p><p>. . .In Tolkien's view, the poem is essentially about a "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time". The underlying tragedy is man's brief mortal life. Grendel and the dragon are identified as enemies of a Christian God, unlike the monsters encountered by Odysseus on his travels. What had happened is that Northern courage, exultant, defiant in the face of inevitable defeat by "Chaos and Unreason" (Tolkien cites Ker's words), fuses with a Christian faith and outlook. The Beowulf poet uses both what he knew to be the old heroic tradition, darkened by distance in time, along with the newly acquired Christian tradition. The Christian, Tolkien notes, is "hemmed in a hostile world", and the monsters are evil spirits: but as the transition was incomplete in the poem, the monsters remain real and the focus remains "an ancient theme: that man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die".</p><p>Tolkien returns to the monsters, and regrets we know so little about pre-Christian English mythology; he resorts instead to Icelandic myth, which he argues must have had a similar attitude to monsters, men and gods. The Northern gods, like men, are doomed to die. The Southern (Roman and Greek) pagan gods were immortal, so to Tolkien (a Christian), the Southern religion "must go forward to philosophy or relapse into anarchy": death and the monsters are peripheral. But the Northern myths, and Beowulf, put the monsters, mortality and death in the centre. Tolkien is therefore very interested in the contact of Northern and Christian thought in the poem, where the scriptural Cain is linked to eotenas (giants) and ylfe (elves), not through confusion but "an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old and new, was kindled". The poem is, Tolkien states, "an historical poem about the pagan past, or an attempt at one", obviously not with modern ideas of "literal historical fidelity". The poet takes an old plot (a marauding monster troubling the Scylding court) and paints a vivid picture of the old days, for instance using the Old Testament image of the shepherd patriarchs of Israel in the folces hyrde (people's shepherd) of the Danes.</p></blockquote><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/02/slaying-monsters">"Slaying Monsters"</a></i> by Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, May 26, 2014:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>“Beowulf” was most likely written in Britain—by whom, we don’t know—in around the eighth century. (That is Tolkien’s date. Some scholars put it later.) The plot is simple and exalted. Beowulf is a prince of the Geats, a tribe living in what is now southern Sweden. He is peerlessly noble, brave, and strong. Each of his hands has a grip equal to that of thirty men. He is alone in the world; he was an orphan, and he never acquires a wife or children. Partly for that reason—because he has no one to behave toward in an intimate way—he has no real psychology. Unlike Anna Karenina or Huckleberry Finn, he is not a filter, a point of view, standing between us and his world.</p><p>. . .Tolkien may have put away his translation of “Beowulf,” but about a decade later he published a paper that many people regard as not just the finest essay on the poem but one of the finest essays on English literature. This is “ ‘Beowulf’: The Monsters and the Critics.” Tolkien preferred the monsters to the critics. In his view, the meaning of the poem had been ignored in favor of archeological and philological study. How much of “Beowulf” was fact, and how much fancy? What was its relationship to recent archeological finds?</p><p>Tolkien saw all this as an evasion of the poem’s true subject: death, defeat, which come not only to Beowulf but to his kingdom, and every kingdom. Many critics, Tolkien says, consider “Beowulf” to be something of a mess, artistically—for example, in its mixing of pagan with Christian ideas. But the narrator of “Beowulf” repeatedly says that, like the minstrels who entertain the knights, he is telling a tale from the old days. “I have heard,” he says. “I have learned.” Tolkien claims that the events of the poem, insofar as they are real, occurred in about 500 A.D. But the poet was a man of the new days, when the British Isles were being converted to Christianity. It didn’t happen overnight. And so, while he tells how God girded the earth with the seas, and hung the sun in the sky, he again and again reverts to pagan values. None of the people in the poem care anything about modesty, simplicity (they adore treasure, they count it up), or humility (they boast of their valorous deeds). And death is regarded as final. No one, including Beowulf, is said to be going on to a better place.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>Video Title: J R R Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics. Source: Dr Scott Masson. Date Published: March 8, 2023. Description:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Tolkien's lecture on Beowulf, The Monsters and the Critics, is a watershed mark in studies in Anglo Saxon. Tolkien rounds on the critics of the poem who dismiss its literary merits. </p><p>Of greater interest here is the way in which Tolkien seems to emulate some of the features he talks about in relation to Beowulf in The Lord of the Rings.</p></blockquote><p></p>
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Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-28244251138972120322023-12-23T16:16:00.002-05:002023-12-23T16:16:56.989-05:00Julian Glover reads Beowulf<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjipRL3vndpqwbA_JmOoUckNscMhS7d-wT0ukIuvVVtzhr6xHeCRJwFSSBl-QY0GryY4935EB4aNtLekLqkRYQbdwyfzc7BcUGoJzY0cWKvnG-aj8sGThqQFheirWjvr028sYDyGtJyFWSu5hcNAkvLCfABeEG58LJeblHmnr1zMsR52xVBUyncnMEPMHs_" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="756" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjipRL3vndpqwbA_JmOoUckNscMhS7d-wT0ukIuvVVtzhr6xHeCRJwFSSBl-QY0GryY4935EB4aNtLekLqkRYQbdwyfzc7BcUGoJzY0cWKvnG-aj8sGThqQFheirWjvr028sYDyGtJyFWSu5hcNAkvLCfABeEG58LJeblHmnr1zMsR52xVBUyncnMEPMHs_=w302-h400" width="302" /></a></div><p></p><p><b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Beowulf-Julian-Glover/dp/0750911042?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=5148ed28-9bd3-40da-a176-52561677d9ea#aw-udpv3-customer-reviews_feature_div">"Beowulf: An Adaptation by Julian Glover of the Verse Translations of Michael Alexander and Edwin Morgan"</a></i> By Julian Glover, Sheila Mackie, and Magnus Magnusson, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1987.</b></p><p>An excerpt from the book:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>"The poem, Beowulf, is one of the glories of European literature. It was composed in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) verse early in the 8th century, as far as we can tell, in the heyday of Anglian culture, probably in the Northumbria of the Venerable Bede and the Lindisfarne Gospels; but the oral material which informed it - the building-blocks of the epic, as it were - date back to the 6th century. It has come down to us in only one surviving manuscript, which was made around the year 1000 and is now in the British Museum. In other circumstances it would be hailed as England's national epic, like the Kalevala of Finland; and certainly it dates from the very dawn of what can fairly be called English literature. Yet the poem, although composed in England, is not about England at all; it is set in the Scandinavian homelands from which the invading Angles and Saxons (the 'English' of the future) had come, bringing with them a rich heritage of ancestral Germanic legends and traditions.</p><p>These traditions were grounded in memories of a quasi-historical past - the past of the Danes and the Geats, a tribe who lived in the southern part of Sweden. In no sense can Beowulf be considered 'historical'; but there is one event in it that is frequently referred to and which serves to place the poem in the largely uncharted realm of legend. We know from a near contemporary source that one of the royal characters in Beowulf, the hero's liege lord Hygelac, king of the Geats, was killed in a raid on the Franks and the Frisians around the year 520. But Beowulf himself is pure legend. He did not live in any history that we know, nor did he belong to any dynasty that we know. The historical framework is invoked merely to provide a recognisable context in which the hero operates." - <i>From the Introduction by Magnus Magnusson.</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p><b>Video Title: Julian Glover reads Beowulf. Source: Tony Begbie. Date Published: June 19, 2008. Description:</b></p><p></p><blockquote>Julian Glover reads his dynamic interpretation of Beowulf, the epic heroic poem of anonymous authorship which dates somewhere between the 8th and 11th centuries. Glover cleverly inserts stanzas in the original Old English. Introduced by Sir John Giulgud.</blockquote><p></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IR464WBmA2s?si=yWVPgY0V_ZAzSDSa" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-62982167771355689652023-12-22T18:16:00.004-05:002023-12-22T20:00:20.574-05:00The Kaiser Was Indeed Wiser<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgIeZAnRMOe1JTf5HCrZ6SWhfHT-nhCKb8TWwUlWqgoVJ-Ax_7F3phxvGJOv6E2j1fOZUxx5A4LxcQ-iidrkWhhGz-ZPFHJEXdA41xzxKlyFZISSFVY-M0pcTUGjyypg1M949fnGadyEgwcRkiL88BTAoCXTejLHJPmoTm3LEn6gMEgd-eRc_ZotxlcOhys" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="309" data-original-width="550" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgIeZAnRMOe1JTf5HCrZ6SWhfHT-nhCKb8TWwUlWqgoVJ-Ax_7F3phxvGJOv6E2j1fOZUxx5A4LxcQ-iidrkWhhGz-ZPFHJEXdA41xzxKlyFZISSFVY-M0pcTUGjyypg1M949fnGadyEgwcRkiL88BTAoCXTejLHJPmoTm3LEn6gMEgd-eRc_ZotxlcOhys=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/kaiserslettersto00willuoft/page/n5/mode/1up">"The Kaiser's letters to the Tsar"</a></i> By German Emperor William II, Isaac Don Levine, and Neil Forbes Grant, Hodder & Stoughton, 1920, Pg. 80 - 86:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Neues Palais, 3/1, 1902.</p><p>Dearest Nicky,</p><p>These lines are to wish you a merry Xmas and a happy new Year. May God bless you and protect you and wife and children and keep you all sound in body and soul. May your work for the Peace of the world be successful as well as the plans you are maturing for the welfare of your country.</p><p>I send you as Xmas present an officer's dirk corresponding to the model I introduced into our Navy by order dated from the Variag which I beg you to accept as a souvenir of the kind visit you paid me off Danzig and of the merry hours we spent together.</p><p>This new sidearm is so popular among our officers that I believe they even go to bed with it.</p><p>My fleet, Henry and I are already looking forward to the day we shall be able to repay your visit x this year, and I shall be most glad to know when you expect us and where ?</p><p>As you take such interest in our navy, it will interest you to hear, that the new armoured cruiser Prince Henry is rapidly nearing completion and has already tried her engines on the spot with most satisfactory results. She is expected to join the fleet after her trials end of the winter. The new Line of Battleship Charlemagne the 5th of the " Kaiser Class " will, it is hoped, be ready for her trials at sea end of next week, and Henry hopes he will join him in a month.</p><p>The " Wittelbach " Class is being pushed forward with all speed, and it is hoped will be able to join Henry's flag after the manouvres. This means an addition of 5 Line of Battleships, whieh will enable him to dispose of a fully homogeneous fleet of " Peacemakers " which no doubt will make themselves most agreeably felt and useful in helping you to keep the world quiet. The 5 new Line of Battleships have all been contracted for and have been begun. They constitute the first Division of the second Squadron.</p><p>Bye the bye I see by the papers, that the " historical " Variag has arrived at " Koweit." That is a very wise thing that your flag is shown there. <b>For it does not seem impossible that another Power was in the act of repeating the very successful experiment it made on the Nile, to haul down the Sultan's flag, land some men and guns, hoist some flag or other under a pretext, and then say : " J'y suis, J'y reste "</b> ! In this case it would have meant paramount rule of all the trade routes of Persia leading to the Gulf, by this of Persia itself, and by that " Ta-ta " to your proposed establishment of Russian Commerce, which is very ably begun by the conclusion of the " Zollverein " with Persia by you.</p><p><b>The behaviour of the Foreign Power at " Koweit " sets into a strong relief the enormous advantage of an overwhelming fleet which rules the approaches from the sea to places that have no means of communication over land, but which we others cannot approach because our fleets are too weak, and without them our transports at the mercy of the enemy. This shows once more how very necessary the Bagdad Railway is which I intend German Capital to build. If that most excellent Sultan had not been dawdling for years with this question the Line might have been begun years ago, and would now have offered you the opportunity of despatching a few Regiments from Odessa straight down to " Koweit," and then that would have turned the tables on the other Power by reason of the Russian Troops having the command of the inner Lines on shore against which even the greatest fleet is powerless for many reasons.</b></p><p>. . .I am sending you beside the dirk a most interesting book about the South African war, written by an Englishman, who wholly condemns the way it was entered into and the ends for which it was begun. It is very lucid to the point and shows that the Author maintains his impartiality to the last moment ; a most gratifying exception to the rule now at work in England. The parallel he draws between this war and the war against American Colonies 1775-83 is most surprising and striking.</p><p>The bearer of my gifts is my Aide-de-Camp Captain von Usedom — years ago for a time Henry's adjutant — he was in Command of the Hertha during the China affair, and it is he who saved the Seymour Expedition and brought it safe back to Tientsin. He was in fact the Admiral's Chief of the Staff and to him was given the now " historical " order of which my " blue jackets " are so proud " Germans to the Front," when the British Sailors refused to go on any farther. He was not present at Danzig, having injured his leg by a fall from his horse, so I thought you would like to hear from his own lips the record of what men composing that illstarred expedition suffered.</p><p>Now dearest Nicky, goodbye, best love to Alix, Micha and your Mama from Ever Your most affate and devoted Cousin and friend.</p></blockquote>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-55810161542074648122023-12-21T09:55:00.009-05:002023-12-21T10:09:04.364-05:00Some Historic Background On The Houthis <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg-NrOpkCvlmensH8HT85BGQR5uHIV6hiowhj_aSPTIu75pTS1pVJ0S1SH9yGwwisvwLIIo652QxGdj8QH0JCHf9pIbMuSJ6WDK8X7yhuiiU2Kzq_uZ-GIMORaQS0bEyapbVIXxN_LdwDlRaI-4ktI39huoNscmFoY2wKQFzDfOQpkk1UO2xgIPAbQSobpc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg-NrOpkCvlmensH8HT85BGQR5uHIV6hiowhj_aSPTIu75pTS1pVJ0S1SH9yGwwisvwLIIo652QxGdj8QH0JCHf9pIbMuSJ6WDK8X7yhuiiU2Kzq_uZ-GIMORaQS0bEyapbVIXxN_LdwDlRaI-4ktI39huoNscmFoY2wKQFzDfOQpkk1UO2xgIPAbQSobpc=w400-h225" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">They say war is the great equalizer. That saying has held true in Yemen in the last two decades.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">What must be understood is that Yemen is far more important and influential, historically speaking, than Saudi Arabia. It has always been the true power of the Arabian Peninsula. It has contributed more to the history of theology, religion, politics, poetry, and architecture of Islam and world history than central Arabia. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The Houthis are only the latest expression of Yemen's rich history. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">They are not blameless for the destruction of Yemen since they aimed for more and more power at every turn of their war with the Saudis. But it's a mistake to assume they are completely power hungry. They are a reaction to local, regional and world historical events, and not just a Yemeni phenomenon. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Their leaders cite the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian war, as strong ideological and political motivations for their group's origins and evolution. Their connection to the unpopular Islamic leadership in Iran is deeply rooted and poses political problems for Yemen long-term. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It is also not sustainable for any group or nation to be in an eternal antagonistic relationship with its neighbours. Israel has not learned this truth, and neither has the Islamic opposition its criminal actions have helped spawn, of which the Houthis now stand as the most militarily effective and alluring.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>II.</b></div><div><br /></div><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44823824?read-now=1&seq=4">"Yemen's Humanitarian Nightmare: The Real Roots of the Conflict"</a></i> By Asher Orkaby, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2017:</b><div><div><div></div><blockquote><div>The modern state of Yemen was born in 1962, when revolutionaries, many of whom had absorbed contemporary ideas of nationalism at foreign universities, deposed Imam Muhammad al-Badr and created the Yemen Arab Republic, or North Yemen. For the next 40 years, the foreign-educated elite who had sparked the revolution occupied some of the most important positions in the new republic, serving as presidents, prime ministers, cabinet ministers, and chief executives. They based their legitimacy on the roles they had played during the revolution and its aftermath, achieving an almost mythic status in the national imagination. The revolution also transformed the rest of Yemeni society. It empowered Yemen's growing urban population and ended the dominance of those families - known as "sayyids" - who could trace their lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. And it sent Yemen's northern tribes, which had supported the deposed Badr, into the political wilderness. Shut off from government funding, their region stagnated and their problems festered.</div><div><br /></div><div>After North and South Yemen unified, in 1990, discrimination against the northern tribes gave rise to a protest movement in the north, led in part by the Houthi family, one of the most prominent sayyid dynasties in northern Yemen. Then, in 2004, during early clashes between northern tribes and the government, the Yemeni military killed Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, one of the leaders of the movement. His death marked the beginning of the northern tribes' armed insurgency and gave the rebels their name. For the next seven years, sporadic fighting continued, with neither side gaining a meaningful advantage.</div><div><br /></div><div>. . .The Houthi advance unnerved Riyadh. Ever since Saudi Arabia was founded, in 1932, its leaders have worried about the security of the country's southern border with Yemen. In 1934, Saudi Arabia fought its first war against the Kingdom of Yemen to secure that border. Under the treaty that ended the war, Saudi Arabia annexed three Yemeni border provinces that it had occupied during the fighting. Since then, Saudi foreign policy toward Yemen has been driven by the need to maintain a weak central government in Sanaa that does not threaten Saudi security. Each time a popular movement or a strong central authority has looked as though it were appearing in Yemen, the Saudi government has responded with military action and financial support for pro-Saudi groups.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Houthis' rise was the realization of Saudi leaders' worst fears. In 2009 and 2010, cross-border skirmishes between Houthi fighters and Saudi forces caused the first Saudi casualties along the Saudi-Yemeni border since the 1960s. After taking Sanaa in 2014, the Houthi leadership openly called for war with Saudi Arabia, using demands for the return of the three border provinces as a rallying cry for the movement.</div></blockquote><div><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/destruction-of-yemen-and-its-cultural-heritage/53D08264CAACB808618BCF9D70053D25">"The Destruction of Yemen and Its Cultural Heritage"</a></i> By Lamya Khalidi, Cambridge University Press, October 16, 2017:</b></div></div><div><div></div><blockquote><div>After losing control of the capital Sanaa to Yemen's northern Houthi movement, which is aligned with forces loyal to the former president ʿAli ʿAbd Allah Salih, current Yemeni President ʿAbd Rabbu Mansur Hadi turned to Saudi Arabia for help. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its coalition of nine states began a bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. Prior to the conflict, Yemen was already 90-percent dependent on imported food and had been battling a severe water deficit. A twenty-eight-month-long siege of its civilian population has left the country in a situation that some humanitarian groups deem to be worse than the crisis in Syria. The media has barely covered Yemen's catastrophic crisis, partially because of overt censorship by the Saudi kingdom and a shielding of its systemic violations of international law by powerful allies including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. These countries are clearly more concerned with billion-dollar arms deals with the kingdom than with putting an end to what has been described as the worst food crisis since the establishment of the United Nations.</div><div><br /></div><div>Even less visible than the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Yemen has been the systematic degradation of the country's millennia-old cultural heritage by the coalition, its Yemeni opponents, and jihadi terrorist groups including the so-called Islamic State (IS). Tragically, much of this damage, notably that from Saudi air strikes and from demolitions carried out by the IS, appears to be intentional. The systemic destruction of the country's cultural heritage is in effect a targeting of its people and a gradual erasure of their cultural identity—once a point of unity amongst Yemenis.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yemen's cultural heritage is as unique as it is universal, and those who value it most (often intuitively) are Yemenis themselves. It is the fingerprint of hundreds of thousands of years of human history and resilience, starting with the first waves of Homo sapiens migration out of Africa across the Bab al-Mandab strait 60,000 years ago, to the megalithic monuments, walled hilltop settlements, and desert necropolises of the Bronze Age (third–second millennium bce), followed by the golden age of the Sabaean kingdoms (900 bce–520 ce) which controlled the incense caravan routes, built the Great Marib dam irrigating the desert, developed writing and a legal system, and built pillared stone temples to their gods.</div><div><br /></div><div>If mentions of the region in the writings of Herodotus, Pliny, and Strabo —including the unsurmountable difficulties encountered by Augustus's Roman legions under Aelius Gallus in trying to penetrate it between 26 and 24 bce—are not enough to highlight the importance of this region and its dichotomous history of insularity and interaction, one need only add that this was also one of the most ancient cradles of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with the latter still visible in the mosque architecture and in Yemen's rich ancient Islamic archives.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yemen is a country of deserts, valleys, coastal landscapes, and spectacular mountains (3,666 m a.s.l.) watered by the tail end of the Indian monsoons. These landscapes meld with villages and cities built of mud and stone that are a testament to some of the most diverse and exceptional vernacular architecture in the world, recognized as such by UNESCO. Tim Mackintosh Smith captures the magical essence of this country when he writes that “the cities seemed to have been baked, not built, of iced gingerbread; Yemen was part of Arabia but the landscape looked like . . . well, nowhere else on Earth.”</div></blockquote></div><div><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Tribes_and_Politics_in_Yemen.html?id=0WhNDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">"Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict"</a></i> By Marieke Brandt, Oxford University Press, 2017, Pg. 37:</b></p><p></p><blockquote>The recent decades of religious radicalization in Yemen are tantamount to a declaration of failure of Yemen's 'Traditionist Project', as Haykel has called it, which aimed to bridge the differences between domestic Sunni and Zaydi-Shia denominations. The spread of radical Sunnism in the Zaydi heartland, at times promoted by the Yemeni government, triggered the emergence of a Zaydi resistance movement, which not only was directed against the increasing 'Sunnization' of Zaydism, but also addressed the marginalization of the local Zaydi community. The Zaydi revival managed to develop a powerful social revolutionary and political component through its resistance to the post- revolutionary elite described above, and its more or less artificial stabilization by the patronage politics of the Yemeni and Saudi governments. Since the turn of the millennium, the Zaydi revival's sectarian, social revolutionary and political agenda has been significantly influenced and shaped by the Zaydi cleric and former politician Husayn Badr al-Din al-Hūthi, who has given the Houthi movement its name.</blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/20788364?read-now=1&seq=1">"Regimes of Piety Revisited: Zaydī Political Moralities in Republican Yemen"</a></i> By Gabriele vom Bruck, Die Welt des Islams, New Series, Vol. 50, Issue 2 (2010), Pg. 203 - 205., and 222 - 223:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>During the 1990s, the Zaydi revival movement had concentrated on the establishment of study circles and on propagating the Hizb al-Haqq. It took on a further overt political expression when in 2003 some of the movement's leaders organised protests against the American invasion of Iraq. Because of their slogan shouting at mosques which expressed their rejection of foreign interference, they were accused of violating their sanctity and of calling on citizens not to pay zakat to the local authorities. The Hizb al-Haqq's programmatic defense of the bilad al-zaydiyya---the spiritual and territorial space of the Zaydiyya---against 'foreign' regimes of piety provided the largest impetus towards political activism which the government, now representing itself as an ally of the United States, was unwilling to tolerate. Five years after the army had failed to crush the Zaydi militia, the conflict gained further momentum when Saudi Arabia officially entered the war on 4 November 2009, conceiving of it as a jihad. Disapproving of the rise of an energetic anti-'Wahhabi' movement at its southern borders, Saudi Arabia has been determined to eliminate (or at least contain) it as a political force. It might also have reasoned that if the Yemeni leadership was ever to commit itself to a decentralised form of government (as proposed in 2009), locally elected leaders of the movement might control vital resources in the border region. There was concern, too, about further unrest in the southern province of Najran where, following Mish'al b. Saud's appointment as governor in 1996, many Ismailis lost their positions in the government and the army and their leaders were harassed. Even before it began combating Zaydi forces in Sa'da province, Saudi Arabia had provided substantial financial and military assistance to the Yemeni government, and was disinclined to support the Doha peace agreements of 2007 and 2008. The war was depicted as a case of defending Islam against aggression by Saudi Arabia's irreligious neighbours. It was the first time in the state's history that it committed its own army to fight an enemy and that a jihad was declared in self-defence. Officially there was no objective to occupy foreign land; nonetheless the state sought to turn its righteousness outwards by conducting a jihad against those labelled "rafida (renegates)" and "mulhidun (heretics). This was a crucial incident of the young monarchy's self-assertion, of 'acting like a state'. Most importantly, by declaring a jihad against 'evil-doers' outside its borders (one of the Saudi states' raison d'etre since the mid-18th century), the Saudi leadership has sought to restore its legitimacy among its internal critics. Moreover, the portrayal of the war as one against 'infidels' served to dispel possible doubts about the righteousness of a battle that led to a much higher death toll among women and children than among combatants.</p><p>. . .Invoking poetic and historical narrative as well as religious sources to buttress their arguments, some Zaydis warn against styles of piety that might provoke the authorities and cause divisions in society. Mindful of their own formative years and of the history of persecution of the ahl al-bayt, scholars such as Muhammad Sharaf al-Din who specifically address the sada advocate complicity with the state and political aloofness. On the other hand, the activists consider it their religious and national duty to defend those communities of faith they identify with and claim to represent. Here specific forms of enacting Zaydi identity can be contextualised in terms of local, transnational and even global factors. In important respects Zaydi activism---ranging from street protests to staging children's theatre---is linked to the rise of the Salafiyya in Yemen, energised ideologically and financially by regional powers. Representing itself as the promoter of indispensable reform, it has contributed to undermining the power bases of the Zaydi "ulama" in Sa'da and to aggravating Zaydi fears of extinction. Furthermore, events in Palestine and Iraq in the late 20th and 21st centuries have helped shape political solidarities and thus specific forms of Zaydi political expression. The repression of the latter was dictated partly by the 'war on terror'. In 2009/2010, those solidarities culminated in religious nationalism fostered by Saudi Arabia's war against its Zaydi adversaries, a war which will require further intense reflection on its agenda in Yemen and on the Zaydi---'Wahhabi' dynamic.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep24837.11?seq=1">"Houthi Missiles: A Military, Economic, and Political Tool"</a></i> By Ian Williams and Shaan Shaikh, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), 2020:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>The Houthis have also employed antiship missiles to put warships and shipping vessels at risk along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since at least October 2015. They have successfully fired antiship missiles on Saudi, UAE, Turkish, and U.S. ships. </p><p>Nevertheless, the Houthi’s lack of permanent radar since October 2016 has decreased the operational effectiveness of these weapons. The Houthis have instead had to deploy small boats to relay approximate target locations.</p><p>The Houthis also have antiair missile capabilities that they have used to down several aircraft. They have used these weapons to shoot down at least three U.S. UAVs, in October 2017 and June and August 2019. Earlier, in May 2015, the Houthis also reportedly shot down a Moroccan F-16 over Yemen’s Sa’ada province. In February 2020, Houthi forces shot down a Saudi Tornado fighter aircraft in northern al-Jawf province</p><p>Several coalition aircraft have also fallen near Houthi-controlled territory, supposedly due to mechanical or human error. However, the proximity of these incidents to Houthi territory raises the possibility that hostile fire was to blame. In March 2015, a Saudi F-15 crashed into the Gulf of Aden, reportedly due to mechanical failure. The same month, Houthi fighters claimed to have shot down a Sudanese warplane in northern Sana’a, although Sudanese officials denied the incident. In December 2015, a Bahraini F-16 crashed in Saudi Arabia’s southern Jizan province. In February 2017, a Jordanian F-16 crashed in Najran, Saudi Arabia. In November 2019, a coalition AH-64 Apache helicopter and Wing Loong UAV went down along the Saudi-Yemen border.</p><p>Arguably the most effective missiles the Houthis possess, however, are shoulder-fired and antitank guided missiles (ATGMs), among the smallest and least discussed weapons in their arsenal. These weapons are widespread in Yemen. Propaganda videos going back to August 2015 show fighters using ATGMs against Saudi tanks to great effect. A 2016 report suggests Saudi Arabia lost at least 20 Abrams tanks in a little over a year of fighting in Yemen. Houthi forces had previously gained experience with antitank weapons in their wars with the Yemeni government between 2004 and 2010. Still, they have since gained even greater lethality due to continued practice and acquisition of more advanced ATGMs.</p></blockquote><p></p></div></div>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-81597933953206240552023-12-19T21:41:00.008-05:002023-12-20T01:37:57.445-05:00China's Influence In The Red Sea And The History of Mines In The Red Sea<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4kP-u0sA4RiIwkrf-5cOUi6m-p_W_VOE4PeGtDFqTy5LIeP7UBVEaC0bg6dhV6suSLqYSOwwmxTJtLG41dw32DAAR2l9rrP8IBRdHnWgwlR8Sw4aln0xLL1z_3zMldAAe8CFtV8bpSS0X74OCTYTP5X5cJqDHVLkErD8lBLPfG3XBbQQ8VgiCvPO2D9SE" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1800" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4kP-u0sA4RiIwkrf-5cOUi6m-p_W_VOE4PeGtDFqTy5LIeP7UBVEaC0bg6dhV6suSLqYSOwwmxTJtLG41dw32DAAR2l9rrP8IBRdHnWgwlR8Sw4aln0xLL1z_3zMldAAe8CFtV8bpSS0X74OCTYTP5X5cJqDHVLkErD8lBLPfG3XBbQQ8VgiCvPO2D9SE=w400-h266" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/resrep24926.4.pdf">"China’s Impact on Conflict Dynamics in the Red Sea Arena" (PDF)</a></i> US Institute of Peace, 2020: </b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>The Red Sea arena—which this report defines as the eastern and western shores of the Red Sea, from the Arabian Peninsula to Egypt and the Horn of Africa, and the strategic waterways that run between, including the Red Sea, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and the Suez Canal—has long been a center of political turbulence, regional rivalries, and geopolitical interest. Historic political transitions currently underway in Sudan and Ethiopia, burgeoning economic investments amid fragility and debt in the Horn, continued conflict and humanitarian crisis in Yemen, Middle Eastern rivalries and their impact on regional conflict dynamics, and the growing presence of China have further heightened geopolitical interest in this arena. This report focuses on China’s influence and activities in the region and its relationships with twelve Red Sea arena states: Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Yemen .</p><p>With the rapid expansion of its economic, diplomatic, and military activities in the region, China has become a significant player in the Red Sea arena over the last two decades . This engagement, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has brought infrastructure and economic opportunities to the region that could benefit Red Sea states under certain conditions. Questions remain, however, about the long-term impact China’s engagement might have on countries in the Horn and the Gulf. The opening of China’s first overseas military base in Djibouti, along one of the world’s busiest and most critical waterways and in proximity to the military bases of the United States and three other states, has further elevated the geopolitical stakes in the region and raised concerns about the increasing militarization of the Red Sea .</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/45182544?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">"Red Sea Mines"</a></i> Strategic Studies, Autumn 1984:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Twenty vessels of various countries, including Soviet, Chinese, Turkish, Greek, Liberian and East German ship were damaged when they struck mines in the Red Sea between July and September 1984. The first five ships to be struck were all in the Gulf of Suez, where the Red Sea joins the Mediterranean, while many more hit mines 1900 km away in the Straits of Bab Mandab at the Red Sea's southern entrance.</p><p>1700 ships including passenger ships use this route every month. It is the main trade route linking North America and Europe with the Middle East, South Asia, and South East Asia. Efforts by Western minesweepers and mine detecting aircrafts for retrieving the mines have so far failed to solve the mystery. These operations, however, have led to an unprecedented naval presence of Western forces - American, British, French and Italian - in the region. Moscow, unhappy at this naval build up, accused America for laying the mines as a pretext for what it called Natoization of the Red Sea.</p><p>Shortly after the mines began damaging ships, an organization calling itself the 'Islamic Jihad' claimed it had planted 180 mines in the 1400 km area of the Sea. However, most observers believe that the 'Islamic Jihad' is a fictitious organization which a country equipped with advanced technology was using for disrupting shipping in the area. </p><p>Tehran radio's prompt approval of the Red Sea mining gave credence to allegations that Iran was responsible for the mining. According to this view, Iran had planted mines to exert pressure on Arab allies of Iraq. If the mines could endanger shipping in ports of Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, the Yemens, and Jordan, the argument ran, those countries might then ask Iraq to stop its mining of Iranian ports of Bandar Khomeini and Bushehr. Ayatollah Khomeini's equally prompt condemnation of the mining operation as 'un-Islamic', while dispelling some doubts added to the confusion. Following the Ayatollah denial, Egypt, which had initially signled out Iran as the most probable source of the trouble, shifted the focus of accusation to Libya. A Libyan ship, it was alleged, had sailed in the affected area during July. </p><p>The mystery is compounded by the fact that despite all the sophisticated means at its disposal, the West has so far failed to identity the country that had laid the mines. This has given rise to another set of speculation which focuses the blame on America and Israel for the mining. According to this argument, the presence of Western fleets in the Red Sea have taken place in an atmosphere of improving Soviet-Arab relations: While Cairo and Baghdad are exchanging Ambassadors with Moscow and Washington respectively, Kuwait has signed a $ 370 million agreement with Moscow for arms. Moreover, since the Arabs have generally welcomed the new Soviet initiative for Middle East peace, it is argued that the mines were planted to disrupt this atmosphere by creating suspicion against Moscow and its allies in the Middle East.</p><p>The discovery of two mines after weeks of search did little in solving the mystery. British minesweepers were the first to find a mine, but it turned out to be a World War II German-mine. A Soviet made mine found and detonated by the French was reportedly a leftover from the 1973 Arab-Israel War. Since some of the mines were reportedly mined by sophisticated submarines, and Israel, Libya and Egypt are the only countries in the region that possess such submarines, Israel has also been included in the list of 'suspects'. The reported presence of two Israeli intelligence officers who were carried by a British mine-sweeper to the Egyptian Al-Adabeyah port on the Red Sea has strengthened suspicion in some Arab quarters of U.S.-Israel collusion in enacting the Red Sea drama.</p><p>As for the 'Islamic Jihad', the only claimant to the mining operation, Sheikh Fadhallah, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim Leader who is often linked to this organization in press reports, ridiculed the claims of the organization: "This (Islamic Jihad) organization must be immense with its sophistication that it mined the Red Sea and the whole world was unable to find a clue". Sheikh Fadhallah repeated the commonly held view that different countries or forces could be using the 'Islamic Jihad' as a cover. "They could be Islamic, or some people who want to give Islam the brand of terrorism. They could be Western intelligence agents or Lebanese Christians". The fact that neither the CIA nor any other agency has resolved the mystery of the 'Islamic Jihad', nor of the Red Sea mines, would seem to strengthen this agrument.</p></blockquote><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.cia.gov/static/RedSeaMiningMystery1984.pdf">"Revisiting the 1984 Naval Mining of the Red Sea: Intelligence Challenges and Lessons" (PDF)</a></i> By Richard A. Mobley, Central Intelligence Agency, June 2022:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>With respect to Libyan aims, the CIA memorandum argued that Qadhafi’s motives for mining the Red Sea stemmed from his ambitions and feuds with others in the Arab world and with Israel and the United States. It observed that “Qadhafi may be making good on threats made last June against Arab regimes who fail to unite against Israel and the United States,” and he wanted to “seize the initiative in regional affairs from moderate Arab regimes, and the mining would be a way to emphasize to Arab moderates the consequences of close relations with Washington.” The memo also asserted that Qadhafi might have viewed mining as a way to “embarrass Egypt’s President Mubarak by highlighting Cairo’s dependence for security on the United States and Western Europe.”</p><p>The Libyan-flagged ship that aroused suspicion was the RO/RO (roll-on/roll-off) ship Ghat. The extensive documentation Suez Canal officials required from each shipment provided the strongest direct evidence—cited in US and UK documents on the subject—of the Ghat’s and Libya’s responsibility. Foremost of these were the Ghat’s changing crew lists. Also providing strong circumstantial evidence are the few location/time points known along the Ghat’s south- and northbound voyages. </p><p>Egyptian authorities had come to the conclusion that Libya was responsible by August 17, when Egyptian Defense Minister Abu Ghazala in meeting with a US congressional delegation on August 19 said he was “in a position to say it is Libya [who is responsible for laying the mines]. . . . Since two days ago, 100 percent sure.” He based his judgment on the “timing of Ghat’s passage through the area and that Libyan military officers had been substituted for regular crew members prior to that passage.” Ghazala also claimed to “have information” that the mines used came from Italy.</p><p>. . .The Ghat’s probable track could have put it in position to lay mines. A UK Ministry of Defence memo dated September 12 concluded that the Ghat’s “dates of passage fit well with the earliest mining incidents at both ends of the Red Sea.”19 The Ghat’s declared cargo was “agricultural machinery” to be delivered to Assab, Ethiopia—the Ghat’s only port call. In fact, it delivered 950 tons of military materiel, mostly ammunition and small arms. It was scheduled to arrive in mid-July, according to UK diplomatic sources.20 Unfortunately, other than Assab, there are few datapoints revealing the ship’s actual locations during its two transits through the Red Sea south of the Suez Canal. </p><p>As noted above, the duration of the Ghat’s trip from Libya to Ethiopia was suspicious. The voyage lasted 15 days—seven days longer than a typical merchant ship would take to traverse that distance. Only three days sailing time was typically required for a RO/RO to steam from Suez to Assab, according to the UK Defence Intelligence Staff.</p><p>Consideration of a Libyan mine warfare planner’s likely planning precepts would suggest an explanation. To make the most of a single shipload of mines, important priorities would have been stealth, speed of delivery, focus on mining choke points, and measures to make sure no explosions took place before the Ghat was able to get back to the Mediterranean.</p><p>The requirement for stealth depended on confidence that any inspection on entry into the Suez Canal would not lead to discovery that the ship’s cargo manifest was false. With respect to speed, mines would have to be quickly and stealthily laid since secrecy was paramount and accuracy was secondary. Parts of the voyage absolutely had to be clandestine.</p><p>The cargo apparently did go undetected, and the ship’s minelaying efforts were unseen, but the Ghat did not carry out its operations quickly enough to avoid suspicion, although it succeeded in distributing its full load in key choke points. Possibly the need to set timers to arm the magnetic/acoustic bottom influence mines—eventually determined to be the type laid—most likely slowed the process. Still, the Ghat completed its return, northbound transit of the Suez Canal and avoided Egyptian seizure of the ship as a suspect. Indeed, once the series of incidents occurred, the Egyptians did seize or escort suspect ships. </p><p>The Ghat could have laid mines on both north and southbound runs to reduce time spent laying mines going in either direction. The first explosion, three days after its southbound passage, suggested the RO/ RO laid mines on the southbound run out of the Suez Canal. According to UK Defence Intelligence Staff analysis, the Ghat also would have been positioned to lay mines on the northbound run in the Gulf of Suez, approximately nine days before most of the mine strikes started occurring there on July 27. The timer on the surviving Type 995 mine had been set to arm the mine in just under nine days, suggesting the timing and positioning would have coincided with the mine strikes nine days after the Ghat passed through the area.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://almashareq.com/en_GB/articles/cnmi_am/features/2022/06/10/feature-03#:~:text=Unmoored%20by%20the%20wind%20and,on%20Yemen's%20Red%20Sea%20coast.&text=A%20sea%20mine%20reportedly%20placed,account%20on%20November%2024%2C%202020.">"'Floating Death': Houthis' Red Sea mines pose lasting threat"</a></i> By Nabil Abdullah al-Tamimi, Al-Mashareq, June 10, 2022:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>In recent years, the Al-Ain News report said, mine removal operations carried out by the Arab coalition, the Joint Forces and the Yemeni army have revealed that the Houthis deploy three types of mines in the Red Sea.</p><p>The group uses two types of Iranian sea mines, Sadaf and Qaa, as well as primitive mines that vary in size, with some the size of a domestic gas cylinder.</p><p>The primitive mine is the most dangerous, according to the report.</p><p>These mines are moored at a depth of 2 metres and are tethered to a metal base. They break free when the mooring cables are cut, and are then swept away by the wind and tides, becoming floating bombs drifting in the sea.</p><p>They can be dangerous for many years.</p><p>According to Yemeni Deputy Minister of Legal Affairs and Human Rights Nabil Abdul Hafeez, "the sea mines used by the Houthis came with the support and training of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)".</p><p>This was in addition to providing the Houthis with sea mines manufactured in Iran, he said.</p><p>Sea mines planted by the Houthis "have killed more than 100 fishermen", Abdul Hafeez said, noting that this figure would likely double "if accurate documentation is done".</p><p>He said the sea mines are "a human catastrophe due to their nature and the fact that they will continue to pose a danger for years if they are not discovered".</p></blockquote><p></p>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-18061038420335149522023-12-19T12:28:00.005-05:002023-12-19T12:41:45.421-05:00The Red Sea Taken Hostage <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgynskS5VI-ZC3lIn-ijSDdL_OzYTbJfklgpIKt9iXTArmAjeVy4hXsBkZIE8lbGKoMXfOwmL8mIHl_UCBohytv5Nd56_6OmNvJbilOdRnNTg8WBtmTXpoz2blAe6DIn_d9Y-2sRgLgNZS8R55RPqjvAI0TpF-t5KU2rOjLOLd2kT63RwS6oyP86JrS3b7z" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="705" data-original-width="940" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgynskS5VI-ZC3lIn-ijSDdL_OzYTbJfklgpIKt9iXTArmAjeVy4hXsBkZIE8lbGKoMXfOwmL8mIHl_UCBohytv5Nd56_6OmNvJbilOdRnNTg8WBtmTXpoz2blAe6DIn_d9Y-2sRgLgNZS8R55RPqjvAI0TpF-t5KU2rOjLOLd2kT63RwS6oyP86JrS3b7z" width="320" /></a></div><b>U.S. President Netanyahu addressing the nation's Congress in 2015.</b></div></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></b><p></p><p>"We cannot begin in a better cause nor against a weaker foe." </p><p>Those were Thomas Jefferson's <i><a href="https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/first-barbary-war/">words in 1784</a></i> when faced with the challenge presented by the Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa. As President two decades later he backed up his words and went to war.</p><p>It is easy to draw parallels to today's situation in the Red Sea. But the Houthis of Yemen are not demanding money, or attacking U.S. ships. They do not want war with the United States.</p><p>They are merely asking an end to the blockade against Gaza by Israel, allowing food and medicine to reach the Palestinians. A humble and humanitarian appeal.</p><p>Those demands could change into something more politically meaningful in the near future if they succeed. That's a real possibility. Acquiescing to terrorists is never a good idea.</p><p>But that's exactly what the United States, England, and Europe have done with regard to IIsrael. They allowed terrorism and blackmail to dictate their policies in Palestine and the Middle East. In the process they turned fables into facts and victims into monsters.</p><p>Despite its rhetoric, the United States has proven it can not protect the freedom of navigation in the Red Sea because it has surrendered its mind, body, and soul to IIsrael. </p><div>To even speak of an "America" at this critical historical juncture is not factually correct. America died a long time ago. It was a walking corpse before Biden. It is IIsrael that acts in its name. It is IIsrael that speaks for it.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is like saying Ukraine is fighting against Russia when it is Washington and NATO pulling the strings. Ukraine ceased to exist in 2014 when an illegal coup killed its independence. A crackhead comedian is under the delusion that his word carries weight when he addresses parliaments and audiences. Obama believed the same.</div><div><br /></div><div>Much like the U.S., Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran are not actors in the Middle East. In reality it is Islam that is acting in their names. </div><div><br /></div><div>The religious forces that have taken over these countries are acting against the national interests and the economic well-being of their states. The Houthis are causing problems for Yemen by disrupting Red Sea traffic. But economics do not enter their calculations. National interests do not concern them. Global trade is the least of their worries. </div><div><br /></div><div>War against IIsrael is the only thing that occupies their minds.</div><div><br /></div><div>You cannot reason with that. What is there to negotiate with Islam? It has only known the language of war since its beginning. IIsrael understands this, but the IIsraeli military is stupid and doesn't know how to wage war in the 21st century. Wiping out hospitals is not an effective strategy. Targeting children is just plain evil.</div><div><br /></div><div>All IIsrael has done is woken up Islam from its long slumber. Its criminal actions have united Hamas and the Houthis on the same front. They are beginning to fight with a single brain, towards a single aim. </div><div><br /></div><div>Decades of American, IIsraeli, and Western military and political failures led to this point. But the latest slaughter in Gaza has tipped the scale.</div><div><br /></div><div>Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two of the traditional leaders of the Arab world, are being left behind in this moment despite their size, wealth, theological influence, and geopolitical significance. The Houthis, who are poorer than dirt and probably eat it for sustenance, went into their backyard and internationalized the war in Gaza with their bold acts to a degree that has even surprised themselves. </div><div><br /></div><div>So the battle that is being waged now in Gaza and the Red Sea is not between world police and terrorists, cops and robbers, international merchants and pirates, America and Iran, Hamas and the IDF, IIsrael and the Palestinians, Houthis and the West, but between Islam and IIsrael. </div><div><br /></div><div>One side has the numbers, the other side has nukes. And the side with nukes has no qualms about wiping out hundreds of millions of people. </div>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-73744467236364130462023-12-19T02:55:00.004-05:002023-12-19T03:01:31.300-05:00The Strategic Irrelevance of Israel And The Geopolitical Importance of The Red Sea <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-weight: bold; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjv1zVrCPKqFxPyOnb8rcQXNQn-O5YisE8zfVqpy6-QonOhtguxL8po_Le6R3OGN_gsCBkRQlIZPl2iXEUAheus5Mj0e0F4tYvD8DH7kk9IiLiODxxbZUuBJFO3RBoao6vW7c72h4Tv5reOItcuPkCq3SiHEqrz2P-1WUmdckBgIqekLsiSzDJ_d9sYaK5t" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="768" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjv1zVrCPKqFxPyOnb8rcQXNQn-O5YisE8zfVqpy6-QonOhtguxL8po_Le6R3OGN_gsCBkRQlIZPl2iXEUAheus5Mj0e0F4tYvD8DH7kk9IiLiODxxbZUuBJFO3RBoao6vW7c72h4Tv5reOItcuPkCq3SiHEqrz2P-1WUmdckBgIqekLsiSzDJ_d9sYaK5t" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Yet again, China will come out the winner. Source of image: <i><a href="https://news.sky.com/story/who-are-the-houthis-and-what-is-happening-in-the-red-sea-13033641">Sky News</a></i>.</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/42894710">"The Strategic Irrelevance of Israel"</a></i> By Graham E. Fuller, The National Interest, No. 22 (Winter 1990/91):</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Though I concur with much of Steven Spiegel's historical analysis, I find myself at odds with his fundamental assertion that Israel is and will remain "a useful ally on a wide range of global and regional problems." In fact, to my mind, the Iraq-Kuwait crisis has made one thing quite clear: the near strategic irrelevance of Israel to the U.S. when it comes to coping with inter-Arab crises. <b>During the Cold War, America's strategic alliance with Israel made some sense in view of the possible need to repel either a Soviet invasion of the region, or a Soviet-backed radical Arab move against Israel or its moderate Arab neighbors. The end of the Cold War eliminates that need</b>. <b>Israel cannot---at this stage of its evolution--- play a significant role in regional Arab crises.</b> Any Israeli involvement in the politics of the region instantly transforms that issue into a facet of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict---which none of the parties in the region needs.</p><p>The Iraqi crisis also reminds us once again that the Palestinian issue is integrally linked with almost any conflict that emerges in the area. Just as the prism of the Cold War warped America's perception of each conflict around the globe---as we examined its impact on the East-West chess game---so too the Palestinian-Israeli problem warps perception of all events in the Middle East, forcing the U.S. to cope daily with the long shadows of that conflict as we try to forge effective Arab cooperation to meet Iraq's relentless drive toward regional hegemony.</p><p>The third thing the crisis emphasizes is that the Middle East is such a dangerous place that, perhaps more than any other, it requires a concerted international order that can stop not only Saddam, but any future Saddam as well.</p><p>Contrary to what Steven Spiegel believes, the strategic interests of no one-notAmerica, Israel, or the Arabs are served over the long run by the maintenance of the U.S.-Israeli strategic alliance. The United States wishes to operate freely, unhindered by Israel's refusal to consider land for peace---an agenda that drifts ever further away from the rest of the world. Israel itself needs to operate as an independent state in the region, and not as somebody's strategic instrument. The Arab states need to begin working with each other in the region without constant obsession with the Palestinian problem that so plagues their every move even today. Cutting the binding and usually conflicting ties of the present alliance will better serve everyone's interest.</p><p>Israel is a very important state in terms of its military power, its cultural richness, its democratic traditions, and the skills of its people. Israel, too, must have the right to become a "normal" state in the Middle East; no other development can be so important to its future. It must move to cut the apron strings of reliance on, and identification with, "imperial powers" as it seeks to coexist in the region. In years past, the idea of Israel coexisting with Arab states was not really thinkable. Today that equation is changing. Saddam can thrill a few disenfranchised or desperate Arabs with his saber-rattling, but on the whole the Arab world is not buying. </p><p><b>Until now, contemporary Middle Eastern politics have been essentially dominated by a "Wild West" approach to regional crisis. When things start getting bad, eventually some "stranger" emerges from the wings---usually America or Israel---to set things right with a lightning war, or invasion, or air strike, or commando raid, or flotilla of warships. When the villain - Qaddafi, the PLO, Syria, Iran, or whoever - has been chastised or smitten, the "lone sheriff' withdraws from the scene. </b>This kind of ad hoc approach made some sense during the Cold War when few international mechanisms could be made to work. But today the Iraqi crisis seems to herald the first steps toward a more workable international order - one in which reasonable international consensus can be reached to take joint defensive action.</p></blockquote><div><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43660318?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">"An Aspect of The Geo-Politics of The Red Sea"</a></i> By Daniel Kendie, Northeast African Studies, 1990: </b></div><p><b></b></p><blockquote><p><b>In fact there have been few incidents in history affecting the peace of the Middle East that did not have serious repercussions for the security of the Horn of Africa. Furthermore, because of its geographic location, the Red Sea extends geo-politically beyond its geographic limits, and therefore, it affects the interests of all nations that are connected with it geographically, economically, politically, and strategically</b>. <b>While the Arabs and Israel, Ethiopia and the Sudan, have both national interests and geo-political interests in the Red Sea, Western Europe and North America also have geo-political interests in the Red Sea, arising from their political, economic and strategic stakes. </b>Similarly, the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies have their own interests in the area.</p><p>As a result, even ordinary conflicts that take place in the Red Sea littoral can easily become internationalized. Hence, it should not be surprising if some of the major problems of the Horn of Africa, like the Eritrean conflict, have become extensions of the conflicts in the Middle East and of those of East and West.</p><p>. . .The Red Sea is a long and narrow body of water that ordinarily separates Northeastern Africa from the Arabian Peninsula. However, authorities in field maintain that it is, in fact, an ocean in the making, which took its present form as a result of the drifting apart of the continents of Africa and Asia. In any case, the Red Sea is connected at its southern end with the Gulf of Aden by the narrow Strait of the Bab-el-Mandeb, which links it with the Indian Ocean. At its northern end, it divides into two narrow bodies, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez, between which lies the Sinai Peninsula. It is linked with the Mediterranean Sea by the Gulf of Suez.</p><p>The Red Sea has a total area of some 170,000 square miles, and stretches about 1,400 miles from Bab-el-Mandeb in the south, to the Gulf of Suez in the north. While it is 220 miles long at its widest point, it is only 17 miles at its narrowest. Much of the bottom is shallow, consisting of broad coastal shelves which are studded with coral reefs and islands. But it also contains deposits of gold, silver, copper, iron ore, lead, chromium, zinc, oil and natural gas.</p><p>There are a total of nine countries that surround the Red Sea. Of these, Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Djibouti occupy the African side of the sea and Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen and South Yemen dominate the Asian side of the Red Sea. For most of these states, the Red Sea is their only outlet to the open waters of the oceans. Those that have alternative means are Egypt, which has 538 miles of coastline on the Mediterranean Sea, Saudi Arabia, which owns 350 miles of outlet in the Arabian Gulf, and Israel, which has 118 miles of coastline on the Mediterranean Sea.</p><p><b>A glance at a world map gives an indication of the paramount strategic importance of the Red Sea. Lying as it does between Africa and Asia and between the Middle East and Europe, this sea has served as an important trade route since ancient times.</b> Before the opening of the Suez Canal, for instance, goods were transported overland by camel or donkey between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea.</p><p>In the past, powers ranging from the Persians and the Romans to the Portuguese and the Ottoman Turks, competed to control this vital seaway. They engaged in maneuvers and armed conflicts in order to achieve commercial, military and political objectives. <b>In fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that no international waterway has ever been the cause of more conflicts among nations then the Red Sea</b>.</p></blockquote>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-58696754577037868492023-12-18T00:39:00.003-05:002023-12-19T02:52:40.744-05:00Napoleon, The Liberator of The Jews<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEihrC8gk6t8iyCJdPauPd0CqZ2wst5CJXKy0MqNHGuRS1ez88hFNwudk1n0YSzmmufH0FfPahv1VVLfGSOjYLZLw5w347lpHhc5_cwyJs-HoxYaMKhuC4_GZqrirf7KFgmjlPZvdEBtiE8KpwwL0fyyxl7MYZc0iWgxKrdklZKdu-URB_F95N73mM9HjS9M" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEihrC8gk6t8iyCJdPauPd0CqZ2wst5CJXKy0MqNHGuRS1ez88hFNwudk1n0YSzmmufH0FfPahv1VVLfGSOjYLZLw5w347lpHhc5_cwyJs-HoxYaMKhuC4_GZqrirf7KFgmjlPZvdEBtiE8KpwwL0fyyxl7MYZc0iWgxKrdklZKdu-URB_F95N73mM9HjS9M=w320-h320" width="320" /></a></div><b><div style="text-align: center;"><b>"Medallion struck by the Paris mint in commemoration of the Grand Sanhedrin. In the collection of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland." (<i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Sanhedrin">Source: Wikipedia</a></i>).</b></div></b><p></p><p><br /></p><p><b><i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Sanhedrin">Wikipedia: </a></i></b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>The Grand Sanhedrin was a Jewish high court convened in Europe by Napoleon to give legal sanction to the principles expressed by an assembly of Jewish notables in answer to the twelve questions submitted to it by the government. The name was chosen to imply that the Grand Sanhedrin had the authority of the original Sanhedrin that had been the main legislative and judicial body of the Jewish people in classical antiquity and late antiquity.</p><p>On October 6, 1806, the Assembly of Notables issued a proclamation to all the Jewish communities of Europe, inviting them to send delegates to the sanhedrin, to convene on October 20. This proclamation, written in Hebrew, French, German, and Italian, speaks in extravagant terms of the importance of this revived institution and of the greatness of its imperial protector. While the action of Napoleon aroused in many Jews of Germany the hope that, influenced by it, their governments also would grant them the rights of citizenship, others looked upon it as a political contrivance. When in the war against Prussia (1806-7) the emperor invaded Poland and the Jews rendered great services to his army, he remarked, laughing, "The sanhedrin is at least useful to me." </p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Emancipation-Liberating-Europes-Revolution-Renaissance/dp/1416547967?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=74ca6a27-c269-472a-9154-ab0cb01be476">"Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance"</a></i> By Michael Goldfarb, Simon & Schuster, 2009, Pg. 163 - 167 (<i><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=_IYvjkNrTe0C&pg=PA163&lpg=PA163&dq=%22By+1828,+Heine+was+truly+famous,+but+money+remained+a+problem%22&source=bl&ots=LEg1uOwSaE&sig=ACfU3U0YLPcQbQkmiHfnSbJ8yf5LjIy3GQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjSiOLno5iDAxWVlIkEHYb2CjQQ6AF6BAgNEAI#v=onepage&q=%22By%201828%2C%20Heine%20was%20truly%20famous%2C%20but%20money%20remained%20a%20problem%22&f=false">Source: Google Books</a></i>):</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>By 1828, Heine was truly famous, but money remained a problem. The author showed the same business skill in managing his writing career as he had in the import-export business. He needed a job and asked Karl August Varnhagen von Ense to write Germany's foremost publisher, J. F. Cotta, on his behalf. Cotta published both Goethe and Schiller and to work for the firm was to join the establishment. With baptismal certificate and Byronic status in hand, Heine met with Cotta. The company was keen to join the journalism boom and was setting up a new weekly called the New World Political Annals. Heine was appointed editor and moved to Cotta's headquarters in Munich.</p><p>It didn't take long for Cotta and Heine to mutually realize that editing was not a good fit. The publisher decided to send his famous new signing back out on the road. The demand for Heine's travel writing was high. Where to go was the question. Goethe had written a famous travelogue about Italy. Heine, always on the lookout for an opportunity to try and knock that living icon off his pedestal, decided to head over the Alps and write a better book about Italy than the greatest German writer of all time had.</p><p>Once again travel deepened his imagination. For Heine, reconciling Napoleon the conqueror of Germany with Napoleon the liberator of the Jews and the oppressed had been an almost impossible conundrum. He and Börne argued about it. The latter was a German patriot when it came to the question of Napoleon. He abhorred the emperor's work. Heine's view was more complicated. What happens to the ideal of Emancipation if there is no great man to spread it? Somewhere along the road over the Alps he resolved the question.</p><p>In The Journey from Munich to Genoa, he invents a scene. Dr. Heine finds himself riding in a stagecoach, and as it crosses an open plain in northern Italy the guard calls down to the passengers, "We are on the battlefield of Marengo." Marengo was the scene of Napoleon's greatest victory in Italy. For Heine this is where it all started to go wrong. Marengo was where the seeds of egotism were planted that grew into Napoleon's imperial delusion. This place was where the betrayal of freedom and democratic ideals began. But looking out over Marengo, three decades after the battle, Heine has an epiphany. History has come to a new age. The nationalism that separated Europeans is fading. From country to country the same questions are being asked about justice and equality. Heine had the greatest gift of poets, the gift of prophecy, and in this imagined scene his vision is full of optimism. </p><p>"Gradually, day by day, foolish national prejudices are disappearing; all harsh differentiations are lost in the generality of European civilization. There are no more nations in Europe only parties; and it is marvellous to see how these parties, for all their varying coloration recognize one another and how they understand one another, despite many differences in language. Our age hastens towards its great task.</p><p>"But what is the great task of our own age? It is emancipation. Not only the emancipation of Irishmen, Greeks, Frankfurt Jews, West Indian Blacks and other such oppressed peoples but the emancipation of the whole world..."</p><p>Heine was a man of letters, a poet, essayist, journalist. He was not as keen a political theorist as Börne but he understood just as clearly that Emancipation could not just be about Jews or any particular group gaining equal rights. It had to be a universal mission on behalf of all the oppressed people of the world.</p><p>The 1820s meandered to a close in the German-speaking lands. The society remained ill defined and backward compared to the rest of Europe. The industrial revolution was well under way in Britain and France, but not in Germany. The movement for national unity was split between the blood-and-soil Romantics and liberal modernists, and the split was in turn exploited by censors and secret police keeping a tight lid on political activity. Torpor surrounded the society, and Heine and Börne were floating listlessly in it. Then in the summer of 1830 came a revolutionary explosion that rocked Europe. Once again, it happened in France. For three days in July, Parisians rebelled against new censorship laws imposed by King Charles X. He was forced to abdicate and a constitutional monarchy was established.</p><p>Ludwig Börne raced off to Paris to report on events. Perhaps he could stir up his fellow Germans to act. Heine, typically, was traveling, spending the summer on an island in the North Sea off the German coast. By the time news of the revolution reached him it was over and the new French Constitution was in place. No matter. Heine set off immediately to join Börne in the French capital.</p><p>Neither Börne nor Heine would ever leave the city. They went to report on events for Germans. They hoped to use their writing to proselytize for change in their homeland. But they stayed because both men found that Paris was a place where they could be German. In Germany they would always be Jews.</p><p>Both sent dispatches in the form of letters back to German newspapers on the political changes in France and what they might mean for Germany. Börne's letters in particular gained him a wide new readership. In time, his collected Letters from Paris became a classic text of German liberalism. He could write things from Paris secure in the knowledge that he wouldn't be arrested. He became bolder. "When I say that all our various German governments have gone crazy, I mean it in the medical sense." What makes them crazy, according to Börne, is their obsession with the dark side of the French Revolution, which blinds them to the many good ideas that motivated it. "How sad! for when governments take leave of their senses, it's the sane who get locked up."</p><p>Over the Rhine, in Germany, Börne and Heine inspired a literary movement among the coming generation of liberal writers. "Young Germany" echoed the sentiments of Börne's and Heine's dispatches from Paris. For those who agreed with them the two authors were exemplary Germans. However, conservative nationalists answered back. They referred to Young Germany as Young Israel. The critics seemed incapable of writing about Heine's or Börne's ideas without referring to their Jewish origins, as if that explained everything about their at- tacks on "good" Germans and their beloved status quo: fragmented, semifeudal states, and lack of basic freedoms such as freedom of speech and the press. Börne finally had to answer.</p><p>"It is miraculous! Certain people object to my being a Jew; others forgive me; still others even praise me for it; but everybody remem- bers it," he wrote in an article for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung or Augsburg General Gazette. "No, that I was born a Jew has never made me bitter against the Germans and has never distorted my perspective. I would not be worthy of the sunlight if I repaid with ingratitude the grace which God had bestowed upon me by making me a German and Jew at the same time.</p><p>"I am well aware of the value of my unearned fortune, my being both a German and Jew. Thus being able to strive for German virtues without having to share any German faults."</p><p>Börne acknowledged that his ghetto birth had shaped his politics. "Yes, since I was born a slave I love freedom more than you do... Yes, since I was not born in a fatherland I wish for a fatherland more pas- sionately than you do."</p><p>He ended his letter with a missionary's zeal, urging his German antagonists to follow the lead of assimilated Jews and liberate themselves from the constrictions of the past.</p><p>For Heine life in Paris was sweet. The city was the epicenter of European culture and Heine's reputation as the voice of young Germany preceded him. He was immediately taken up by the city's glitterati. Victor Hugo and George Sand treated him as an equal. Despite the fact he was still living on an allowance from uncle Salomon he man- aged to find a way to hang out with aristocrats and the superrich, particularly Baron James de Rothschild. Börne spent his time exploring the new socialist ideas bubbling in the corners of the city. While Heine reveled, Börne became more and more serious about inventing a political program that would inspire a revolution.</p><p>That they would fall out was inevitable. Börne was a political polemicist searching for a system to change society, but Heine was an artist; the ideal society for him was one in which he could be left alone to write in perfect freedom. For him political writing was metaphori- cal. He was always willing to fight a duel and thought of himself as a soldier. Heine asked that at his death, mourners lay a sword on his coffin, not a poet's laurel wreath, because he had been a "good soldier in the fight for the Emancipation of mankind." Börne was dismissive. Heine was "a boy chasing butterflies on the battlefield while bloodshed rages all around."</p><p>Börne was brilliant but Heine was a genius. In the end that destroyed their relationship, but not before they had crossed together out of no-man's-land and established a place for their writing inside the mainstream of German and European society. </p></blockquote><p></p>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-44331191664257513922023-12-14T13:55:00.005-05:002023-12-14T13:55:38.144-05:00Antoine Destutt de Tracy<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjNuU89Z7x1LkfrGhysxFu8K6gjCzNRxZ_AWPYwlqBIoeS_eTlyU-94ScKBAqRpN2astsriuYo99j3jE4W_8AbYkfNbCo0PuJLnLU3GJWqhYTd9DCg0UVALz8RQuAEFezvAB15g5kmxc-A2eaV-cW-cxCN1GLjQqfJaBEfNvQp82mcMChFShpsjrsYl7OzT" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="188" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjNuU89Z7x1LkfrGhysxFu8K6gjCzNRxZ_AWPYwlqBIoeS_eTlyU-94ScKBAqRpN2astsriuYo99j3jE4W_8AbYkfNbCo0PuJLnLU3GJWqhYTd9DCg0UVALz8RQuAEFezvAB15g5kmxc-A2eaV-cW-cxCN1GLjQqfJaBEfNvQp82mcMChFShpsjrsYl7OzT=w267-h400" width="267" /></a></div><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://www.econlib.org/library/Tracy/DestuttdeTracyBio.html">"Life and Works of Antoine Louis Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy"</a></i> By David M. Hart, Econlib, January 1, 2002:</b></p><p></p><blockquote>Destutt de Tracy was born in Paris on July 20, 1754 and died in Paris on March 10, 1836. He was a philosophe, one of the founders in the 1790s of the classical liberal republican group known as the Idéologues (which included Cabanis, Condorcet, Constant, Daunou, Say, Madame de Staël), a politician under several regimes spanning the Revolution and the Restoration, and an influential author. When the Estates General were called to meet in 1789 he, although a member of an aristocratic family which had been ennobled twice (hence his name), joined the Third Estate and renounced his title. He was later elected to the Constituent Assembly and served in the army in 1792 under the Marquis de Lafayette. During the Terror he was imprisoned and only escaped execution because Robespierre beat him to the scaffold. It was during his period of imprisonment that he read the works of Condillac and Locke and began working on his theory of idéologie. He was made a member of the Institut National in 1796 (he was part of the Section of the Analysis of Sensations and Ideas in the Class of Moral and Political Sciences, which was later suppressed by Napoleon in 1803) and later appointed to theFrench Academy (1808). During the Directory Tracy was active in educational reform, especially in creating a national system of education. His membership of the Senate during the Consulate and Empire gave him many opportunities to express his “ideological” opposition to Napoleon’s illiberal regime, which culminated in 1814 with Tracy’s call for the removal of the Emperor. For this, he was rewarded with the restoration of his noble title by Louis XVIII later that year.</blockquote><p></p><div><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/destutt-de-tracy-on-the-mutually-beneficial-nature-of-exchange-1817">"Destutt de Tracy on the mutually beneficial nature of exchange (1817)"</a></i> Online Library of Liberty:</b></div><div></div><blockquote><div>In his Treatise on Political Economy (1817) which was so admired by Thomas Jefferson, the French revolutionary politician and republican Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) argues that both parties to a voluntary exchange benefit (i..e profit) from the same transaction:</div><div><div><blockquote>(A)n exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties both gain. Whenever I make an exchange freely, and without constraint, it is because I desire the thing I receive more than that I give; and, on the contrary, he with whom I bargain desires what I offer more than that which he renders me. When I give my labour for wages it is because I esteem the wages more than what I should have been able to produce by labouring for myself; and he who pays me prizes more the services I render him than what he gives me in return.</blockquote></div></div></blockquote><div><div><blockquote></blockquote></div><div><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://mises.org/library/treatise-political-economy-0">"A Treatise on Political Economy"</a></i> Mises Institute:</b> </div><div><div></div></div><blockquote><div><div>The neglect of Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) in the history of political economy is both strange and tragic. He was, after all, Thomas Jefferson's number one favorite economist, the thinker who influenced him and, arguably, laid the ideological foundation of the American economic system as Jefferson understood it.</div><div><br /></div><div>What's more, this reprint of the 1817 edition of his book was prepared personally by Jefferson and contains an editorial note by him:</div></div><div><div><br /></div><div>"It would be difficult to do justice, in any translation, to the style of the original, in which no word is unnecessary, no word can be changed for the better, and severity of logic results in that brevity, to which we wish all science reduced. The merit of this work will, I hope, place it in the hands of every reader in our country. By diffusing sound principles of Political Economy, it will protect the public industry from the parasite institutions now consuming it, and lead us to that just and regular distribution of the public burthens from which we have sometimes strayed."</div><div><br /></div><div>This high praise from Jefferson has somehow not translated into deserved fame for this book. One reason for this has to do with Tracy's own radicalism. He went further than any of his French contemporaries in the defense of trade, property, hard money, commerce, and his attacks on the state. This led to the banishment of his works in France, and an attempt by Napoleon to blunt his influence. Whereas Tracy coined the term "ideology" to refer to the science of the formation of ideals, Napoleon dismissed him and all those he influenced as "ideologues." This is how the term enters into modern usage.</div></div></blockquote><p><b><i><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Destutt_de_Tracy">Wikipedia:</a></i></b></p><p></p><blockquote>Tracy advanced a rigorous use of deductive method in social theory, seeing economics in terms of actions (praxeology) and exchanges (catallactics).[7] Tracy's influence can be seen both on the Continent (particularly on Stendhal, Augustin Thierry, Auguste Comte and Charles Dunoyer) and in the United States, where the general approach of the French Liberal School of political economy competed evenly with British classical political economy well until the end of the 19th century as evidenced in the work and reputation of Arthur Latham Perry and others. In his political writings[8] Tracy rejected monarchism, favoring the American republican form of government. This republicanism as well as his advocacy of reason in philosophy and laissez-faire for economic policy lost him favor with Napoleon, who turned Tracy's coinage of "ideology" into a term of abuse. </blockquote><p></p><div><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-03-02-0258">"Thomas Jefferson to Destutt de Tracy, 26 January 1811"</a></i> Founders Online:</b></div><div><div></div><blockquote><div>One of it’s doctrines indeed, the preference of a plural over a single executive, will probably not be assented to here. when our present government was first established, we had many doubts on this question, and many leanings towards a supreme executive council. it happened that at that time the experiment of such an one was commenced in France, while the single Executive was under trial here. we watched the motions & effects of these two rival plans with an interest and anxiety proportioned to the importance of a choice between them. the experiment in France failed after a short course, and not from any circumstance peculiar to the times or nation, but from those internal jealousies & dissensions in the Directory which will ever arise among men, equal in power, without a Principal to decide and controul their differences. we had tried a similar experiment in 1784 by establishing a Committee of the States, composed of a member from every state, then 13, to exercise the executive functions, during the recess of Congress. they fell immediately into schisms and dissensions, which became at length so inveterate as to render all cooperation among them impracticable: they dissolved themselves, abandoning the helm of government, and it continued without a head, until Congress met the ensuing winter. this was then imputed to the temper of two or three individuals; but the wise ascribed it to the nature of man. the failure of the French Directory, and from the same cause, seems to have authorised a belief that the form of a plurality, however promising in theory is impracticable with men constituted with the ordinary passions. while the tranquil & steady tenor of our single Executive, during a course of twenty two years of the most tempestuous times the history of the world has ever presented, gives a rational hope that this important problem is at length solved. aided by the counsels of a Cabinet of heads of departments, originally four, but now five, with whom the President consults, either singly or all together, he has the benefit of their wisdom and information, brings their views to one center, & produces an unity of action & direction in all the branches of the government. the excellence of this construction of the Executive power has already manifested itself here under very opposite circumstances. during the administration of our first President, his cabinet, of four members, was equally divided, by as marked an opposition of principle as monarchism and republicanism could bring into conflict. had that Cabinet been a Directory, like positive and negative quantities in Algebra, the opposing wills would have balanced each other, and produced a state of absolute inaction. but the President heard with calmness the opinions and reasons of each, decided the course to be pursued, and kept the government steadily in it, unaffected by the agitation. the public knew well the dissentions of the Cabinet, but never had an uneasy thought on their account; because they knew also they had provided a regulating power which would keep the machine in steady movement. I speak with an intimate knolege of these scenes, quorum pars fui; as I may of others of a character entirely opposite. the third administration, which was of eight years, presented an example of harmony in a cabinet of six persons, to which perhaps history has furnished no parallel. there never arose, during the whole time, an instance of an unpleasant thought or word between the members. we sometimes met under differences of opinion, but scarcely ever failed, by conversing & reasoning, so to modify each other’s ideas, as to produce an unanimous result. yet, able & amiable as these members were, I am not certain this would have been the case had each possessed equal & independant powers. ill-defined limits of their respective departments, jealousies trifling at first, but nourished & strengthened by repetition of occasions, intrigues without doors of designing persons to build an importance to themselves on the divisions of others, might, from small beginnings, have produced persevering oppositions. but the power of decision in the president left no object for internal dissension, & external intrigue was stifled in embryo by the knolege which incendiaries possessed that no divisions they could foment would change the course of the Executive power. I am not conscious that my participations in Executive authority have produced any bias in favor of the single executive; because the parts I have acted have been in the subordinate, as well as superior stations, and because, if I know myself, what I have felt, and what I have wished, I know that I have never been so well pleased as when I could shift power3 from my own, on the shoulders of others; nor have I ever been able to concieve how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others. I am still however sensible of the solidity of your principle, that, to ensure the safety of the public liberty, it’s depository should be subject to be changed with the greatest ease possible, and without suspending or disturbing for a moment the movements of the machine of government. you apprehend that a single Executive, with eminence of talent, and destitution of principle, equal to the object, might, by usurpation, render his powers hereditary. yet I think history furnishes as many examples of a single usurper arising out of a government by a plurality, as of temporary trusts of power in a single hand rendered permanent by usurpation. I do not believe therefore that this danger is lessened in the hands of a plural Executive. perhaps it is greatly increased by the state of inefficiency to which they are liable from feuds & divisions among themselves.</div></blockquote></div></div>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-13713546058911105332023-12-12T10:02:00.000-05:002023-12-12T10:02:49.555-05:00History, Abstraction, and the Problem of Ideology - Michael Federici<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglL5ruRyhK2IGpewv406Pu_3ADeuA4tynBi2ZrWD_1hsIU1xM5gvWWBzA-GVSk219ZR4azVUqLpmobnRfq_jqYyrcwsNDGOfoFXsPWuigc8Eve595d06-SXDmlZNwNba-_NXpF2MBYCTdQG1YW98iPCgS0a7wUsKit-44soLhnSSvZIUCyuNoJR9e0mhL4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="650" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglL5ruRyhK2IGpewv406Pu_3ADeuA4tynBi2ZrWD_1hsIU1xM5gvWWBzA-GVSk219ZR4azVUqLpmobnRfq_jqYyrcwsNDGOfoFXsPWuigc8Eve595d06-SXDmlZNwNba-_NXpF2MBYCTdQG1YW98iPCgS0a7wUsKit-44soLhnSSvZIUCyuNoJR9e0mhL4=w260-h400" width="260" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><b><i><a href="https://theimaginativeconservative.org/author/michael-federici">The Imaginative Conservative:</a></i></b></p><p></p><blockquote>Michael P. Federici is Professor of Political Science at Mercyhurst University and Director of the National Humanities Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. He is the author of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Political-Philosophy-Alexander-Hamilton-American/dp/1421405393/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1514092357&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Political+Philosophy+of+Alexander+Hamilton+federici&ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=62f45611-4734-4a1c-8067-b0e72829db1c">The Political Philosophy of Alexander Hamilton</a></i>.</blockquote><p></p><p><b>An excerpt from, <i><a href="https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/12/thinker-know-eric-voegelin-michael-federici.html">"A Thinker You Should Know: Eric Voegelin"</a></i> By Michael Federici, The Imaginative Conservative, December 27, 2017:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Voegelin’s work is not well known outside a relatively small group of academics and their students. Yet within this domain Voegelin’s influence is impressive. His work has inspired a growing secondary literature and his political philosophy has been applied to a variety of topics in a broad range of academic fields. His philosophy of history and philosophy of consciousness have influenced the work of thinkers who are significant in their own right. Among these are Gerhart Niemeyer, Flannery O’Connor, David Walsh, Marion Montgomery, Russell Kirk, James L. Wiser, Ellis Sandoz, Dante Germino, and Jürgen Gebhardt. Further evidence of Voegelin’s influence is the creation in 1987 of the Voegelin Institute at Louisiania State University and the establishment of the Centre for Voegelin Studies in the Department of Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester. But while Voegelin’s work has influenced several first-rate scholars, his political theory has not found its way into the broader culture.</p><p>Faced with widespread and profound cultural, social, and moral decay, Voegelin theorized that the West had lost its consciousness of certain historical experiences vital to the formation of political, social, and existential order. In Voegelin’s terms, historical experiences and their corresponding language symbols illuminated the truth of reality. Language was necessary to articulate “experiences of order” and preserve them over time, since such experiences were rare. The truth of existence embodied in experience was an ordering force because it attuned the open soul to the Agathon (the Good). And a just political and social order, like the just soul, is dependent on this sort of attunement. Unfortunately, historical experience cannot have an ordering effect if the language symbols that preserve it lose their original meaning, as occurs when they are transformed or obscured by ideological movements. Such movements act to detach language symbols from their engendering experiences.</p></blockquote><p><b>Video Title: History, Abstraction, and the Problem of Ideology - Michael Federici. Source: Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Date Published: September 21, 2021. Description:</b></p><p></p><blockquote>This lecture was given at the 2021 National Honors Conference in Williamsburg, VA.</blockquote><p></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vZ899tLAPKQ?si=-v9E9xFNqJAP6lEd" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-15491490932456641462023-12-11T19:56:00.006-05:002023-12-11T19:56:58.365-05:00The Witch of the Westmorland (Kate Rusby)<p><b>Video Title: The Witch of the Westmorland (Kate Rusby). Source: Russell Gummelt. Date Published: March 6, 2023. Description:</b></p><p></p><blockquote>Combined Kate Rusby's cover of The Witch of the Westmorland with footage from my short film based on the song.</blockquote><p></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dbhn0K1xNlI?si=AiqJ1bdKJzVNaCza" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-21115337629246541792023-12-10T17:45:00.010-05:002023-12-11T00:50:55.510-05:00The Witch of the Westmoreland<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWID0exhvqn8Xa0I-gjO8lThR6l8bJML-2U0ziTdVRAcySn8gKbtB_nsqU0kp3Lt5SOFxRGkwCnIOSKd-KqM1B3uUFb2G5TpLM16VJBWl-PJmCLb8QyOGyV2BYAOQpEoyeu2RIUL3m-KeE0te35JqEMXJbRhZrFak6UNtR3Melw3_C_mrBvJYxdaE03mlX/s842/ZRxSFotT6hbK6SWBOyx6LtLmUPG-0SCRNIqv2ZjQZM4tMiTeCXr8kL0MqBXPck70O_jNEox-EwlEQvt5StNKoA.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="613" data-original-width="842" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWID0exhvqn8Xa0I-gjO8lThR6l8bJML-2U0ziTdVRAcySn8gKbtB_nsqU0kp3Lt5SOFxRGkwCnIOSKd-KqM1B3uUFb2G5TpLM16VJBWl-PJmCLb8QyOGyV2BYAOQpEoyeu2RIUL3m-KeE0te35JqEMXJbRhZrFak6UNtR3Melw3_C_mrBvJYxdaE03mlX/w400-h291/ZRxSFotT6hbK6SWBOyx6LtLmUPG-0SCRNIqv2ZjQZM4tMiTeCXr8kL0MqBXPck70O_jNEox-EwlEQvt5StNKoA.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><i><a href="https://glockart.livejournal.com/30815.html?page=4">Source of painting</a></i></b>.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p><b><i><a href="https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/songs/thewitchofthewestmorlands.html">MainlyNorfolk.info: </a></i></b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Archie Fisher sang his own ballad The Witch of the West-Mer-Lands in 1976 on his Folk-Legacy album The Man With a Rhyme. He commented in his liner notes:</p><p></p><blockquote>I have borrowed, for this song, the form of the narrative ballad. The ingredients are a mixture of legend, superstition, and ballad themes brought into focus by the Lakeland painter, Joni Turner. As far as I know, the female centaur is not a creature of mythology, and this role of witch disguise was suggested by the tales of antlered women with bodies of deer seen wading in the shallows of the lakes in the moonlight. There are many pleasant and hospitable inns in the Lake District.</blockquote><p></p><p>Barbara Dickson sang Witch of the Westmorlands in 1971 on her album From the Beggar’s Mantle. Archie Fisher played guitar and concertina on this album, too.</p><p>Stan Rogers sang The Witch of the Westmorland in April 1979 live at The Groaning Board, Toronto. This concert was released in the same year on his album Between the Breaks… Live!. He commented in the liner notes:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I first heard this song on Archie Fisher’ beautiful album for Folk-Legacy Records, The Man With a Rhyme, where it is called The Witch of the West-Mer-Lands. In a recent letter, Archie referred to it as simply “Westmoreland”, and I’ve used that spelling here. We have edited three verses from the original, and modernised the language a little for the sake of having the story understood by the average North American listener at the first pass. I highly recommend Archie’s version to those of you who want all the verses.</p></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><p></p></blockquote><p><b>Stan Rogers - Witch of the Westmoreland.</b></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Nxls60aYSZA?si=l_Sg1M1uwhrHhmVC" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe> <div><b>Archie Fisher - Witch of the West-Mer-Lands.</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5uOHlc-Zzvw?si=3lmA4_G_t1SidoZx" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8288505742676241874.post-23704497670893750452023-12-09T18:05:00.002-05:002023-12-09T18:05:14.406-05:00Stan Rogers - Live Concert Video 5-28-1983 - Down The Road<p><b>Video Title: Stan Rogers - Live Concert Video 5-28-1983 - Down The Road. Source: Wayne Griffith. Date Published: November 6, 2017. Description:</b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>Down The Road by Mary McCaslin. </p><p>This video was recorded by Alan Kanter on 5-28-83 at McCabe's Guitar Shop, Santa Monica, CA. Stan died 5 days later on Air Canada Flight 797. This was the encore from the 1st show that night. I was doing the house sound. Howard & Roz Larman were recording a live 2 track for future broadcast on their KPFK show FolkScene. Peter Cole mixed the live 2 track to Sony Beta F1. Thanks to Peter Cutler for furnishing the audio. Vocal mics were Sennheiser MD 441u. Guitar mics were Sony ECM 22p. Video digitizing, color correcting, editing, audio replacement by Wayne Griffith.</p></blockquote><p></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gpis0Q3VBFg?si=QF2v6sW7IOCJvw9T" title="YouTube video player" width="425"></iframe>Saman Mohammadihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00901309111851547218noreply@blogger.com