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packedwithpackards · 1 year

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Sneering at "sickly sentimentality": John Hooker Packard's advocacy for gas chambers

Going a complete different direction from my last post, I'm focusing on John Hooker Packard, my ancestor, herein called Dr. Packard, as today is the World Day Against the Death Penalty. As a warning, this article goes down a dark road, discussing death, suicide, and injury. Dr. Packard was more than a person who had a "large practice as a physician" and died from heart disease at the Hotel Chalfont, Atlantic City at age 75 in May 22, 1907, as noted in an obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time. He was well-known for his medical practice, as was his son Frederick. He was even described in the 1920 A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography [1]:

"He was also one of the original members of the American Surgical Association…In 1886, in a paper read before the Medico-Legal Society of New York, he suggested the use of a lethal chamber for the infliction of the death penalty, death to be caused by the abstraction of oxygen from the atmosphere and the introduction of carbonic acid gas. Dr. Packard was a profoundly religious man, an Episcopalian…his belief was a vital part of his existence and colored all the important actions of his life. He had very considerable artistic ability and much of his work was illustrated with his own pencil…His culture, geniality and sense of humor endeared him to many, both contemporaries and also many of a younger generation, with all he maintained a pleasant social intercourse."

When reading that, I looked more into the anecdote about the use of a lethal chamber for the death penalty within this biography. While some repeated it without giving any more details, others excluded it entirely from their biographies. This is despite the fact that some even declare he was one of the "most prominent surgeons" of the latter 9th century and a "pioneer of modern American surgery". [2] In contrast to Volume 2 of University of Pennsylvania: Its History, Influence, Equipment and Characteristics; with Biographical Sketches and Portraits of Founders, Benefactors, Officers and Alumni stated he was president of Medico-Legal Society of New York.

At first, it did not seem that this page survived, as it is not within the National Library of Medicine, but after digging a little, I found the paper, which is entitled "The Mode for Inflicting the Death Penalty" and it was actually read before the society on April 1, 1878 not in 1886 as the biography had stated. At first he gives a background and talks about the "humanitarian side" of the equation, noted that many human societies have murderers of people killed. He pushes back against those who view law and order as "oppressive shackles" and claims that the death penalty is calm and dispassionate, not a "physical terror". He does say that executions are public, even if they are claimed to be private, and suggests that instead of other forms of execution (he cites lynching of a Black man as an example, something which he doesn't seem to approve of), people are, instead put in an airtight room and killed by carbonic oxide. He defends this method of killing as painless and not causing suffering. He then sneers at those opposed to such capital punishment, writing:

"Between the sickly sentimentality which wold spare merciless murderers and the brutal ferocity which would exult over their dying agonies, there seems to be a just and wise medium, where the law can take its stand…and yet inflicting no needless torture on the unhappy criminal"

If I understand this correctly, Dr. Packard is saying that death by carbonic oxide does not cause needless suffering and that the form of death he is proposing is more humane. These deaths would also be private.

Carbonic oxide is another name for carbon monoxide (CO). During the Texas power crisis last year, people were poisoned by turning on cars in garages, bringing grills into houses, etc. in an attempt to stay warm. Are those deaths humane? The Consumer Product Safety Commission describes CO as a "deadly, colorless, odorless, poisonous gas"which is undetectable to human sense, and notes that initial symptoms of low to moderate CO poisoning are similar to the flu but without the fever, such as headaches, fatigue, shortness of breath, nausea, and dizziness. What Dr. Packard is talking about falls more into the higher level of CO poisoning which has more severe symptoms, like mental confusion, vomiting, loss of muscular coordination, loss of consciousness, and untimely death. The page goes onto say that those with higher level exposures to CO can "rapidly become mentally confused...[and] lose muscle control without having first experienced milder symptoms". This is echoed by New Health Advisor which states that those who attempt to kill themselves by poisoning themselves with CO suffer a lot, causing their head to get clouded, vomiting and fainting, and are likely to fail.

CO can come from exhaust of internal combustion engines or combustion of various other fuels like wood, coal, charcoal, trash, and so on. It is even more problematic that Dr. Packard is supporting this considering that the Nazis used CO for genocide during the Holocaust, either with gas vans, in so-called euthanasia programs, or in infamous gas chambers. Specifically, it was used to murder over 700,000 people, as gas was fed into tubes at medical hospitals and concentration camps, using exhaust fumes from engines of tanks and other CO. [3] He wants there to be gas chambers to kill murderers. Others who support CO as a way to execute people include an aide of the notorious Jack Kevorkian who claimed it is "extremely painless" and replace lethal injections. It is much more painful than many think it is and is not environmentally friendly, even though it may be a quick death. [4]

Lethal gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison in 1938. Luckily, it is no longer operational.

At the time that Dr. Packard presented that article, there had been the extermination of stray dogs by a CO gas chamber a few years before (he references it in the article) in 1874. It would be followed, in 1884, by a carbon monoxide gas chamber in a slaughterhouse as described in Scientific American. There have been, more recently, CO gas chambers used to kill prisoners at San Quentin State Prison in California, [5] and only closed after public pressure. Currently, the last person to die in the U.S. with a gas chamber was Walter LaGrand, who the state of Arizona executed in 1999. Gas chambers have been rarely used since 1976 for executions.

If Dr. Packard wrote a similar article today, it would likely receive much more criticism. A September 2021 poll said that 54% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty, a five decade low. Additionally, of the over 8,700 executions between 1890 and 2010 carried out by gas chamber, 5.4% were botched, making the "gas chamber the second most unreliable execution method...used in that period". [6] It was, as I noted earlier, prominently used by General Rochambeau against Haitians during the Haitian Revolution, the Nazis, and the U.S., [7] It involves use of CO or hydrogen cyanide.

More recently, in the 18th and 19th century, scientists "suggested a therapeutic application of CO" and it is even seen as a "viable pharmaceutical candidate". Hopefully, Dr. Packard would not be seen as a person of "culture, geniality and sense of humor" for favoring gas chambers, said to be one of the cruelest methods of death, since a majority of Americans believe that life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is a "better punishment for murder than the death penalty is."

Notes

[1] Howard Atwood Kelly, A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography: Comprising the Lives of Eminent Deceased Physicians and Surgeons from 1610 to 1910, Vol. 1 (W.B. Saunders Company, 1920), pp. 873-874. His son, Frederick is described on pages 872-873 in a biography by Francis R. Packard. The latter also wrote his biography. Francis is Dr. Packard's son.

[2] See page lviii of the Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. In contrast, the Encyclopedia of Civil War Biography which has a biography on him, Charles Packard (Lancaster, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Abolition Society, Manager, 1842-44), Alpheus Spring Packard, Jasper Packard, and Theodore Packard (Shelburn, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1836-40), does not mention this. The last sentence is quoting from the biography of him on the American Civil War Medicine & Surgical Antiques website.

[3] This is said to be stated on page 323 of A History of Modern Germany 1800 - 2000. More specifically it is described in horrifying detail on page 156 of Dictionary of Genocide [2 volumes] by Paul R. Bartrop and Samuel Totten.

[4] "Jack Kevorkian's Aide Pushed Carbon Monoxide for Executions," NBC News, Jun. 2, 2014. Also see "Why not use carbon monoxide for executions?" (Quora), "Why do states not use carbon monoxide for legal executions?" (Quora), "Is carbon monoxide poisoning the fastest and least painful way to die?" (Quora), "Why is carbon monoxide poisoning the easiest and least painful way to die?" (Quora), "What is it like to get carbon monoxide poisoning?" (Quora), "Why do people not know they are being poisoned by carbon monoxide? What would it feel like? Surely they notice they start to feel different?" (Quora), "Why Don't We Use Carbon Monoxide for Capital Punishment?" (Reddit), "Recommendation: A Death Penalty with a Carbon Monoxide Gas Chamber".

[5] The prison's official site says "The state’s only gas chamber and death row for all male condemned inmates are located at San Quentin."

[6] Austin Sarat, "Arizona’s Horrifying Plan to Bring Back the Gas Chamber." Slate, Jun. 4, 2021. Also see "Firing Squad to Gas Chamber: How Long Do Executions Take?" in NBC News, "Gas chamber 'ready' for Thanos execution but prison officials say little else" in Baltimore Sun, The Last Gasp: The rise and fall of the American gas chamber, and Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty.

[7] It was also claimed to be used in Lithuania (before Soviet occupation in 1940), North Korea, and the Soviet Union. However, for North Korea, claims are reliant on defectors and claimed genuine documents, while for the Soviet Union it relies upon somewhat questionable Russian sources.

Note: This was originally posted on Oct. 10, 2022 on the main Packed with Packards WordPress blog (it can also be found on the Wayback Machine here). My research is still ongoing, so some conclusions in this piece may change in the future.

#john hooker packard #packards #gas chambers #genealogy #lineage #family history #death penalty #capital punishment #ancestry #atlantic city #19th century #carbon monoxide

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energylifephilly · 2 years

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Xbox one assassins creed rogue

Įnvironmental hazards have been incorporated in the form of poison gas barrels, which when burst open can drive victims berserk if within the expanding radius of fumes Shay can avoid being affected by pulling a gas mask over his face. All together, the three regions require more exploration than all of Black Flag. New York is also bigger than its first appearance in Assassin's Creed III, as it is 20 years before the Revolution and so the Great Fire of 1776 has not happened yet. Meanwhile, the River Valley is a hybrid of land-based and naval gameplay, with seamless river navigation integrated into a map reminiscent of the Frontier from Assassin's Creed III. With the help of an ice-breaker ram, navigation is supplemented and additional secret areas can be reached. The North Atlantic is an icy water-based region, where icebergs can be used as cover during naval combat, as well as broken to reveal frozen cargo and Animus data fragments. The primary locations in the game are New York City, the Hudson River Valley, and the North Atlantic, specifically, the area around Newfoundland and Nova Scotia known as the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Being smaller than Edward Kenway's brig Jackdaw, it can easily navigate the tight bays of the Hudson River Valley and the iceberg-heavy regions in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Through Shay, the player controls his ship, the modified sloop-of-war Morrigan. With the historical Seven Years' War having almost the same level of European naval activity as the Golden Age of Piracy, if not more due to the unmatched power of England's Royal Navy, Rogue appropriately incorporates the naval element previously established in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Freedom Cry. The compilation was released worldwide on December 6, 2019. On September 4, 2019, it was announced that Rogue, along with Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag would be released together on the Nintendo Switch as a compilation known as Assassin's Creed: The Rebel Collection. A remastered version of the game was later released globally for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on March 20, 2018. The game was released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on Novemin the United States, Novemin Europe, Novemin the United Kingdom, and Mafor the PC. The game follows the story of the Assassin-turned- Templar Shay Cormac, taking place during the Seven Years' War from 1752–1760, and is the closing chapter in the Kenway family's saga. It is the seventh main installment in the Assassin's Creed series. Keep an eye on WindowsCentral.Assassin's Creed: Rogue is a 2014 open-world action adventure game that is developed by Ubisoft Sofia and published by Ubisoft. The Xbox 360 version of Assassin's Creed Rogue is currently backward compatible so if you don't want to wait for a possible remaster, you can experience it right now. The game takes you to a variety of locations like New York City, the Wild River Valley, and even up to the North Atlantic in pursuit of your targets. Cast aside by those he once called brothers, Shay sets out on a mission to wipe out all who turned against him and to ultimately become the most feared Assassin hunter in history. After a dangerous mission goes tragically wrong, Shay turns his back on the Assassins who attempt to end his life. Amid the chaos and violence of the French and Indian War, Shay Patrick Cormac, a fearless young member of the Assassins Brotherhood, undergoes a dark transformation that will forever shape the future of the colonies. Assassin's Creed Rogue takes place in North America around the 18th century.

#Xbox one assassins creed rogue

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fatehbaz · 3 years

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Scientists and naturalists in Britain and the US (holding prestigious positions with allegedly esteemed institutions or publications like Scientific American, MIT, American Naturalist, Kew Gardens, and elsewhere), especially from the Victorian era through the 1920s, were just like: “OK, time to describe women and non-white people as insects and carnivorous plants in hyper-sexualized ways that cast them as oddly-alluring threats to established hierarchies, colonialism, and Empire.”

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Carnivorous or insectivorous plants have long induced fascination [...]. There are many amateur botanical societies that focus upon them. The first living specimen of Dionaea muscipula Ellis ex L. came to the attention of the populace of London in 1768, an event that ‘caused a sensation throughout Europe’ [...]. Prior to this event, John Bartram had sent Patrick Collinson, a London botanical collector, several plant parts, after the specimen sent by Governor Dobbs of North Carolina had failed to arrive (Magee, 2007). Bartram used a popular name for D. muscipula, tipitiwitchet, a somewhat ribald Elizabethan term for vulva (McKinley postscript to Nelson, 1990). This connection between female sexuality and carnivorous plants continued into 19th century England and may have had something to do with their popularity and continued public fascination. [...] These ‘queer flowers’, as Grant Allen described insectivorous plants in 1884, reached a zenith of popular and artistic attention during the mid to late 19th century. Allen’s essay demonstrated the lure of the insectivorous plant as a floral femme fatale and in richly descriptive language described its ‘murderous propensities’ [...].

Source: Mark W. Chase; Maarten J.M. Christenhusz; Dawn Sanders; Michael F. Fay. “Murderous plants: Victorian Gothic, Darwin and modern insights into vegetable carnivory.” Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, Volume 161, Issue 4, December 2009.

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And while Gothic monsters can express a multitude of alienations, the particular anxieties evoked by botanical monstrosities at this time were tied to imperialism [...]. Like the corpse flower, perilous plants were closely associated with the tropics in the Victorian imagination. This was a deliberate manufacture: in 1874, the American Edmund Spencer (not to be confused with his more famous, earlier English namesake) presented as fact a fictional explorer’s encounter with an African tribe that offered human sacrifices to a man-eating tree. [...] Such plants therefore became part of the imperialist mythos about the bizarre and dangerous recesses of the so-called primitive parts of the world, there to test the mettle of white explorers. [...] An entire genre of imperial gothic literature evolved to deal with the perils of foreign elements invading English bodies and English lands, as the colonizers had themselves inflicted on distant countries. Either out of provocation or opportunism, the once safely remote monsters of the colonized world retrace the explorers’ steps back to the metropole. Such monsters range from Kipling’s heathen curses to Haggard’s sorcerous queens, but also includes potential ecological threats such as H. G. Wells’s “The Empire of the Ants” (1905), in which organized, aggressive ants establish themselves as potential rivals to Britain’s global dominion.

Source: Zoe Chadwick. “Perilous plants, botanical monsters, and (reverse) imperialism in fin-de-siecle literature.” In The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates. October 2017.

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[Extreme content warning for this one: child abuse.]

A comparison of the personiﬁed “European” ﬂowers with those from the other continents in The Temple of Flora reveals some of the Orientalist, racial, and gendered conventions that connected plants to colonial experiences or aspirations. In The Temple of Flora, Thornton deploys images and texts based on both the iconography of the Four Continents and the Linnaean sexual system to emphasize the productive yet dangerous sexuality of Europe’s others. These personiﬁed images of plant life embody British attitudes toward colonized people and resources, and the tenuous boundaries between personiﬁed plants and objectiﬁed humans become blurry. [...] Dr. George Shaw (1751-1813), the keeper of the natural history section of the British Museum from 1807 to 1813, personiﬁes this plant [stapelia] for Thornton in a commissioned poem, describing the stapelia either as a “hag” with a “gorgon shape, rough arms, and scowling eyes,” a “dire enchantress” who casts “horrid spells” in her “magic rites,” or a cannibalistic, bloodthirsty “mother” who bears maggots and lures poisonous animals like toads and snakes close to her and eats them […]. The cannibalistic female allegories of America ﬁnd their counterparts in Thornton’s ﬂesh-eating American plants. For male botanists in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the venus ﬂytrap deﬁed classiﬁcation as a specimen on the boundaries between animal and plant. Naturalists such as John and William Bartram, Benjamin Rush, Peter Collinson, and others attributed humanlike passions and sensitivities to the plant […]. The object of peculiar fascination, of both scientiﬁc curiosity and eroticism, the venus ﬂytrap was named in Latin after the goddess of love and was later commonly referred to by the salacious nickname “tipi-tiwitchet” or “twitching fur stole.” Botanist Peter Collinson (1694-1768) exclaimed that he was “ready to Burst with Desire for Root, Seed, or Specimen of the Wagish Tipitiwitchet Sensitive.” He hoped to obtain one from the botanist and North Carolina governor Arthur Dobbs (1689 -- 1765) but lamented that it would probably not be possible because the seventy-three-year-old man had already married a fifteen-year-old bride, whom Collinson referred to as a “Tipitiwitchet,” for him to “play with.”

Source: Miranda Mollendorf. “Allegories of Alterity: Flora’s Children as the Four Continents.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century. 2016.

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“The transformation of cleaning from a matter of dilettantish dusting to a sanitary crusade against ‘dangerous enemies within,’” in Ehrenreich and English’s words, placed women ideologically (though never materially) at the center of a new discourse of national health oriented around the home as an ecological space. This scalar revisioning of the domestic – what Jennifer Fleissner calls the dis/course of the “the great indoors” – proved a kind of mirror image of the Rooseveltian Wild West, with women at the front lines of a new frontier harboring both danger and the promise of revitalization. “Our enemies are no longer Indians and wild animals,” writes Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT’s first female professor and founder of the American domestic science movement, “[t]hose were the days of big things. Today is the day of the infinitely little. To see our cruelest enemies, we must use the microscope.” [...] During the latter half of the nineteenth century, developments in the fields of public health and domestic science transformed the modern home into a space of dangerous multispecies entanglements. In response, state-sponsored hygiene initiatives aimed at the reproduction of white futurity recruited housekeepers as domestic guardians against nature's encroachments. [...] By the turn of the century, the highest level of insect research in the country, the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Entomology, had fully absorbed the emergent cultural discourses around women’s newfound proximity to their domestic co-inhabitants. A widely circulated public memo titled “The House Centipede” written by Bureau Chief Charles Marlatt, begins with the assertion that “the house centipede, particularly within the last 20 or 25 years, has become altogether too common an object in dwelling houses in the Middle and Northern States for the peace of mind of the inmates.” It may often be seen darting across floors with very great speed, occasionally stopping suddenly and remaining absolutely motionless, presently to resume its rapid movements, often darting directly at inmates of the house, particularly women, evidently with a desire to conceal itself beneath their dresses, and thus creating much consternation. Posing as a practical, informative tract “of interest to housewives throughout the United States,” the memo in fact deploys a complex rhetorical vocabulary that figures housekeeping as kind of psychosexual drama between woman and insect, the stakes of which are nothing less than the security of both home and nation. “The house centipede is a Southern species,” the memo notes, “its normal habitat being in the southern tier of States and southwestward through Texas into Mexico.” [...] To be sure, the Bureau’s memo fits neatly into a familiar [...] historicist narrative whereby domestic discourse – understood as a kind of “soft” or “maternal” power – works toward the consolidation of American empire and the reification of sexual difference. From this perspective, the document’s recourse to the logic of [...] the unreciprocated love of centipedes for women [...] can be said to link what Kyla Schuller calls the “biopolitics of feeling” with what Amy Kaplan theorizes as “manifest domesticity,” such that the (white) woman’s heightened capacity to be affected by her environmental milieu consolidates her authority “to police domestic boundaries against the threat of foreignness both within and without.”

Source: David Hollingshead. “Women, insects, modernity: American domestic ecologies in the late nineteenth century.” Feminist Modernist Studies. August 2020.

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Considering the broader selection of newspaper hoaxes alongside the dozens of botanical fictions that appeared around the same time, one will also notice certain repetitive themes and settings accompanying the Darwinian unease. For one, we can observe the pronounced influence of the so-called “orchid fever” that still gripped Europe in the later 19th century, a time when orchid hunting in exotic locations had become a pastime for the more adventurous gentlemen of means, and, in fiction, the most common excuse to write a tale of a monster plant. ]...] In fact, in America during the late 1920s and early 1930s, we see another surge in the popularity of monstrous plant narratives, precisely around the time that the evolution controversy had come to a head during the national media sensation that was the Scopes Monkey Trial. This was also the dawning of speculative fiction’s pulp era [...]. The monster plant narratives of the pulps no doubt inherited this tension from their turn-of-the-century forebears, a simultaneous recognition that these animal-like monsters must be somehow natural, like the real carnivorous plants so carefully anatomized by Darwin, and that their very existence also threatens to destroy distinctions between the animal and plant kingdoms – as well as the hierarchy that those distinctions support.

Source: T.S. Miller. “Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies.”

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Imperial dis/course constructed India as a land of white ants, held India and its inhabitants responsible for the white ant problem, and reinforced the civilizing rhetoric of imperial ideologues by defining white ants as a hallmark of the lack of civilization. [...] Insects were ubiquitous and fundamental to the shaping of British colonial power. British rule in India was vulnerable to white ants because these insects consumed paper and wood, the key material foundations of the colonial state. The white ant problem also made the colonial state more resilient and intrusive. The sphere of strict governmental intervention was extended to include both animate and inanimate non-humans, while these insects were invoked as symbols to characterize colonized landscapes, peoples, and cultures. [...] Contemporary writers in the imperial age, many of them British, appropriated the question of white ants to assert civilizational differences. [...] An article published in the Scientific American in 1891 entitled ‘White ants in India’ implied that in consuming white ants, ‘the Africans’ shared the eating preferences of lizards, toads, and birds’. [...] Before he acquired his notoriety as the pioneer of eugenics, Francis Galton had written a travellers’ manual, first published in 1855, in which he argued that natives of ‘wild countries’ (as distinct from ‘civilised and partly civilised nations’) dug holes ‘in the sides of’ white ants’ nests and used them as ovens for the purposes of cooking. These writers believed that unlike what was to be expected in contemporary ‘civilised England’, white ants were integrated within various social practices [...] of West Africa, in the so-called wild countries and in ‘the east’. An article in the American Naturalist in 1876 argued that advancement of ‘culture’ was antithetical to the proliferation of white ants. It claimed that in Africa and India, ‘where a century ago massive ant-hills were to be found near the shore, now some days’ journey inland have to be made to find them’. This period, according to the article, coincided with the ‘step by step…retreat of white ants…in front of a rapidly advancing culture’, when ‘mankind’ took control over white ants, forcing this representative of ‘nature (to) step behind’. Therefore, the hundred-year period that marked among other developments the advent of colonial rule in Africa and India, this article implied, went hand in hand with ‘the advance of culture’ and the ‘retreat of white ants’. Meanwhile, in India, white ants were described by British naturalists like EHA as ‘the foe of civilization … the Goths … of Indian life’.

Source: Rohan Deb Roy. “White ants, empire, and entomo-politics in South Asia.” Cambridge University Press. 2 October 2019.

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with-my-murder-flute · 4 years

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Initial sketch notes of my historical research on Islamic experiences of the Siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, posted August 6, 2020. This is the long version of “Why might Yusuf al-Kaysani, who is from the Maghreb, have been fighting at Jerusalem in 1099?”

Trigger Warning: Graphic violence, slavery, and genocide

Notes taken from reading Paul M. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise: An Isamic History of the Crusades and supplemented by Dr. Google. I’m reading Cobb’s book partly because it’s on audiobook (though it is a fricking Audible Exclusive) and partly because it’s written for Western non-Muslim audiences, which helps get me up to speed.

The Old Guard Through History video says Joe and Nicky met during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099, so I’ve focused most of my research on that.

Historians generally agree that in the 11th century the Islamic* world did not have a “Muslims vs Christians” worldview like the one Christians were beginning to develop. Their experience led them to expect Christians to be allies as often as enemies. Around the 1060s Christians began a new paradigm of religious war against Muslims, which Muslims didn’t really realize at the time--they responded to times when Christians would choose religious affiliation over clear strategic gain as shocking and bizarre, a departure from the status quo

(*Islamic: Society predominantly defined by Muslim rule and culture, but containing people of many different religions)

The Islamic response to the First Crusade was decentralized and diverse. There were a lot of different groups in the Levant*, many of whom had deep divisions, rivalries, and feuds. They mostly saw the Crusaders as a new factor that might affect their existing rivalries with other Islamic states, and were used to being able to broker deals or treaties with Christian groups to turn local warfare to their advantage.

(*Levant: A term used to describe countries in the Eastern Mediterranean, especially those with traditional religious significance to the Abrahamic religions - modern-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Egypt and Turkey. Comes from the French word for “rising”, in the sense of “where the sun rises”)

Additional term I’m going to be using a lot: “Frank”. It’s the Islamic term for, basically, “Western European” (of both the pagan and Roman Catholic varieties). It’s easier than saying “the Roman Catholics” or “The Crusaders” (which is putting a later cultural construct on people who didn’t call themselves that)

The biggest division of Islamic society in this area is, roughly, the Seljuq Turks and the Fatimid Caliphate.

In the year 1000, the Fatimids were riding high: They ruled Egypt and North Africa stretching across to the Atlantic, much of the Levant, the island of Sicily, and bits of the Arabian Peninsula around the Red Sea.

Then in the mid-11th century the Seljuqs came BLASTING OUTTA NOWHERE like holy shit calm your jets and conquered a lot of Fatimid and Byzantine territory (we’re talking the yellow parts of the map, they’ll destroy the Byzantines entirely later)

In addition to losing land to the Seljuqs, the Fatimids also lost Sicily to the Normans (who don’t even GO THERE but anyway), and North Africa through?? Independence movements?? Sheer carelessness??? I’m not quite certain.

The Seljuqs were Sunni, the Fatimids were Shi’ite, I... am not gonna try to explain that whole thing. Here’s a video.

(Small note for Yusuf character reasons: A big motivation behind the move of Ifriqiya [modern Tunisia and parts of Algieria and Libya] out of Fatimid control was that most of their populations were also Sunni)

So the Franks left Constantinople and travelled through what is now Turkey but was at the time the Byzantine Empire, and then moved into Seljuq lands. Most of the fighting in the First Crusade was against Seljuqs--mostly against tribes who fought for themselves, I think? Although in Damascus (which was a huge city the Franks just breezed by in favour of historically significant ghost towns) there was a general jihad preached like “Hey somebody should do something about all these Europeans”, so some of the people fighting were like... random people from Damascus.

While the Seljuqs were distracted, the Fatimids thought they could win some land back from THOSE UPSTARTS, so they snuck in and grabbed Jerusalem. As Peter Konieczny reports, there are scholars who think the Fatimids thought, partly because they had a lot of experience ruling Egypt’s Coptic Christian population, that they could reach a mutually satisfactory alliance with the Franks, especially since it seemed like most of the Franks didn’t intend to settle in the area, but return to Europe once they ensured pilgrim access to Jerusalem, which had mostly been hindered by banditry in Seljuq-controlled areas.

When I read stuff just generally about the Fatimid army, it’s described as being composed of two groups:

Berber tribesmen (Kutama and Sanhaja) (I’m struggling to find more info about them)

Mamluks, who are... a cross between slaves and mercenaries? Basically, they were captives from non-Muslim territory (in the Fatimids’ case, mostly Circassia in central Asia) who were brought to Muslim lands and trained as soldiers, but once active as soldiers, were paid and hired by different groups, able to achieve freedom, often gained important government posts, and occasionally toppled the government they served and ruled the roost.

This next bit is based on fairly standard histories of the Siege of Jerusalem that rely a lot on Western sources, like this article by Michael D. Hull and this article by Michael Cartwright. Which... have to be taken with a grain of salt, because medieval military histories don’t tend to line up super well with archaeology or plain logistics. Generally, it isn’t wise to take medieval European sources at their word when they say “the army had 10,000 people” or “they killed every last person”. They’re often written after the fact and with clear biases, and, when it comes to the Crusades, with an imperfect understanding of the culture they’re describing. I’d like to have better sources, but this is where I’m starting from, especially since I have limited access to academic sources during the summer.

So, the standard history says that Jerusalem was taken in 1098 by Emir al-Afdal Shahinshah, but by 1099, governor Iftikhar al-Daula was in command of the defenses. and that he had a “garrison of Arab cavalry and Sudanese archers.” Cartwright reports it as “perhaps several thousand infantry and an elite cavalry corps of 400 Egyptians.” I currently have no way of knowing which of these troops were Mamluks and which weren’t.

According to Hull, when the Fatimids in Jerusalem realized they would have to face a siege, they expelled all Christians of any denomination from the city, as well as all Jews “except for those of a sect for whom it was mandatory to reside in the Holy City”. Cartwright reports it as “...all Christians were kicked out if the city. In contrast, the Jewish population were allowed to stay”. Cartwright reports that Jerusalem’s population, 70,000 at the beginning of the year, was lowered to 30,000 by the expulsions (though some people were also coming into the city to take refuge from the oncoming Frankish army). Additional preparations included poisoning wells outside of Jerusalem to deny the Frankish army water, and emptying the land around the city of livestock and people.

The Fatimids were also expecting the arrival of an army marching north from Egypt to help them out relatively soon, which explains why their strategy was mostly “hunker down and wait” with very limited attacks outside the city.

The Franks came southward down the coast to Jaffa, where they took the nearest port to Jerusalem, and then approached the city.

June 7, 1099: The Frankish army shows up at Jerusalem with about 15,000 people total and less than 1,500 armed knights. They split into two camps, one attacking from the south, one from the north. They were in rough shape and didn’t have any siege weapons, so the Fatimid defenders were able to sit up on the walls, taunt them, and shoot arrows. They enlivened the tedium by sending cavalry units outside the walls to harass Franks who were scavenging for food and water.

June 13, 1099: Some Franks on the north side of the city managed to scrabble together siege ladders and try to climb up and assault the walls; they were repelled pretty easily by the defenders.

June 17, 1099: English and Genoese ships land at Jaffa, carrying siege equipment and fresh supplies. Hull reports that the Fatimids dispatched troops, 400 Arabs and 200 Turks, to attack the supply chain between Jaffa and Jerusalem; Hull reports that the Franks only lost 5 of the force of maybe 150-200 knights, and “all of the archers” (about 50?)

It takes about three weeks to transport the supplies to Jerusalem and for the siege towers to be built; the Genoese played an especially large role in building the siege equipment, and their chief engineer is named as William Embriaco.

On July 10 the siege engines were finished and wheeled to the walls. That night everyone inside the city and out sat over campfires, showing each other pictures of their families and trying to humanize themselves for the audience to make their impending deaths more impactful

(I kid)

(mostly)

June 13-15: Almost continuous fighting between the Franks, who are trying to move their siege engines close enough to make it onto the walls of Jerusalem, and the Fatimid defenders, who were trying to fight them off and burn their towers down.

June 15: The Franks breach the walls and begin pouring inside, killing and looting its inhabitants. There is well-documented destruction of Muslim and Jewish holy places, where Muslims and Jews fled for refuge and were killed. This part is. Sickening. Tens of thousands of people dead; the streets running with blood.

The Fatimid governor and various others (possibly the remainders of the army? Possibly important citizens? Some Jews appear to be in this group?) took refuge in the Tower of David, and were able to negotiate to leave Jerusalem safely. The Fatimid soldiers who left the city that way joined the advancing Fatimid army at Ascalon, southwest of Jerusalem.

It’s unclear who the survivors were--the sources mention people left aside being made into slaves, being allowed to leave the city, or being ransomed by rich relatives outside the city. The fact that we have Jewish and Muslim accounts of what happened during this time means there were survivors

But let’s face it: The survivors were the minority. The majority of people, thousands of them, were slaughtered by the Franks as they took over the city.

Epilogue: The Fatimids tried to take Jerusalem back a month later, and failed. Jerusalem was in Crusader hands.

It’s taken me three days to write this up and I’m ending it feeling really blah and drained by the enormity of this shit. I...

The Race for Paradise has this bit that talks about two Western ways of talking about the Crusades:

The Traditional paradigm, where this was a great moment for Christianity, whew we kicked those guys’ BUTTS!

The Lachrymose (Latin for “full of tears”) paradigm, coming to popularity since the Enlightenment, where this was horrific mass slaughter caused by religious zealotry and it was bad and everything was bad

But the thing is, we can’t actually stop there. Or, that is: It’s not actually useful for our only narratives about the Crusades to be either “Christians kill everyone and it’s awesome” or “Christians kill everyone and it’s terrible”. It’s not true; it feeds into the overall false narrative of “European Christians only interacted with [Muslims/Middle Easterners/People of Colour] very rarely, and only when there was an atrocity happening.” It means we fail to acknowledge all the cross-cultural contacts that happened without an atrocity, and fail to realize that a lot of these atrocities came out of the context of incredibly warlike countries whose economies depended on warfare and conquest.

Another element is... during the 11th century, when all of this happened, the Normans also invaded England. Their conquest was absolutely brutal. England was ethnically and linguistically divided for centuries between a French-speaking colonial upper class, and the English-speaking peasantry. But over the centuries, these two groups came to live together peacefully and build a distinctly new society. Most peoples’ narratives of medieval England are not “a land of massacre, genocide, and ethnic strife”, even though those things definitely happened. We just have much stronger associations with medieval English art, literature, culture, fashion, and architecture than its slaughters.

So basically: The challenge for us in the 21st century is to develop a richer understanding of the past. We know a hell of a lot about battles and armies; we know way less about merchants and farmers, and about the long decades between battles and armies. Military history tells us about waging war, but if we can look past that, we can find out about waging peace.

Now I’m going to go collapse into my bed, and in a day or five I’ll write up a TL;DR version about what I think the likeliest backstories for Joe are (Briefly: probably a Fatimid cavalry soldier or an ordinary person who thought it was safe to be in Jerusalem at the time, and had to defend himself and his servants etc when the city fell)

#medievalism #my stuff #the old guard #nicky/joe #yusuf al-kaysani

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yourreddancer · 2 years

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HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

March 13, 2022 (Sunday)Russian president Vladimir Putin has asked China for help in his war against Ukraine, according to U.S. officials. Observers see this as a defining moment for China and the direction it wants to take in the twenty-first century. In what might be a sign of how China will react to that request, the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said he had never heard of it. "The high priority now is to prevent the tense situation from escalating or even getting out of control,” he said.

Meanwhile, Russian forces struck a military facility in Ukraine about 15 miles from the Polish border. Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and by the terms of the treaty establishing NATO, “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and the parties will retaliate accordingly.

Biden has repeatedly warned that NATO will respond to any attack on a member country, but Russian state TV continues to insist that no NATO country will actually help another. This assertion has observers concerned that Putin might widen the war to involve NATO, which would give him the legitimacy he needs to justify his war of aggression.

Others say that these events indicate weakness and frustration on Putin’s part. As the Russian invasion has gone more slowly than he had apparently anticipated, the Russian military is firing indiscriminately at civilian targets, evidently trying to terrorize the country into submission. But the troops are underfed and undersupplied, and there appear to be too few of them to subdue Ukraine. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press says that Russia has opened 14 recruitment centers in Syria.

The strike in western Ukraine near the Polish border killed at least 35 people and wounded more than 100. The facility received western arms shipments. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the strike “does not come as a surprise” but “shows…that Vladimir Putin is frustrated by the fact that his forces are not making the kind of progress that he thought that they would make against major cities including Kyiv, that he’s expanding the number of targets, that he’s lashing out and he’s trying to cause damage in every part of the country.”

Sullivan also said that the U.S. is very concerned that Russia will use chemical weapons. It has falsely accused Ukraine and the U.S. of preparing chemical weapons, which might well be a warning that Putin intends to use them himself.

Putin, of course, has used chemical weapons before, most recently against opposition leader Alexei Navalny. His goons also did so on March 4, 2018, in the U.K, in a poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. That poisoning seemed to be a sign that Putin was confident enough in his power that he was willing to kill someone in England and dare then–prime minister Theresa May to do something about it.

What happened next seemed to illustrate Putin’s growing security in the face of weak U.S. and European resistance. May condemned the attack, as did U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But May couldn’t do much because Brexit had isolated England and then-president Trump refused to back her. He promptly fired Tillerson, along with one of Tillerson’s deputies who contradicted the White House version of why Tillerson was out. Russian state TV then warned May not to threaten a country armed with nuclear warheads. And, just about then, Republicans in the House exonerated Trump from “colluding” with Russia in the 2016 election, outright rejecting the evidence and findings of our own intelligence community.

There remains a lot to learn not only about why former president Trump allowed such aggression, but also about why members of the Republican Party were willing to look the other way when U.S. policy under Trump benefited Russia—when the U.S. abruptly withdrew from northern Syria in October 2019, for example, or when Trump withheld money appropriated for Ukraine’s defense to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him rig the 2020 election.

At least part of the answer to that question is the disinformation campaign launched by Russia to undermine our democracy. False stories in the media have divided us and convinced many people in the U.S. of things that are simply lies.Former representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) released a video today echoing Russia’s false story of “25 to 30 U.S. funded bio labs in Ukraine,” and demanded a ceasefire to secure them.

Later this afternoon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted: "This is preposterous. It's the kind of disinformation operation we've seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.” Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) slammed Gabbard for “parroting false Russian propaganda.”

David Corn of Mother Jones today broke another news story: a Russian government agency distributed a 12-page document to media outlets telling them, “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally….” The call to feature Carlson is in the section titled “Victory in Information War.”

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wisdomrays · 3 years

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TAFAKKUR: Part 297

A WORLD OF BALANCE

We live in a cozy and dynamic home called the Earth, which moves through cold, dark space at a great speed. Everything we need can be found on this specially made spacecraft of ours. There is neither excessive cold nor excessive heat. A moderate and pleasant climate prevails. There is an average temperature which has been kept at a dynamic balance throughout the centuries. In short, the earth has been made just for us. In order to understand this better, we need only to look at our satellite, the moon. During the day on the moon there is a burning heat which can rise up to 120 C and at night-time there is freezing cold which can fall down to -150 C. The moon is a land exposed to meteors, ultraviolet rays and cosmic rays; it is desolate and silent with no signs of life whatsoever.

In our world, the most practical solutions exist for the most complicated matters; the simplest things have important duties and splendid mechanisms are developed from these to carry out the same. Thanks to these mechanisms, there is a moderate climate and there are ideal values of air, pressure, heat and precipitation. Let us briefly consider a few of these systems that contribute to maintaining the average temperature in the world. The exact amount of solar energy we need reaches the Earth, and the distance between the sun and the earth plays an important role in this. If we think about the freezing cold on Mars, which is farther away from the sun, or the burning heat - a heat which melts even lead - of Venus, which is nearer to the Sun, we can appreciate the special status of the Earth and how carefully chosen its position is. If the solar energy that reaches the Earth were to decrease by only 10%, the average temperature of the Earth would decrease, and subsequently our planet would be iced over with an ice layer measuring a couple of meters in depth. A slight increase of solar energy, however, would burn everything and eradicate life on Earth.

We should not ignore the fact that our planet is of such a size that it is able to keep its gases within the atmosphere in ideal amounts and proportions. Our planet could have been created as small as Mercury (1/8 the Earth's size) or as big as Jupiter (318 times bigger than Earth). A smaller planet with lower gravity would disperse gases into space and therefore would have no atmosphere. A bigger planet would keep all the gases within the atmosphere, including poisonous gases, due to its high gravity. Furthermore, the Earth would be uninhabitable due to high atmospheric pressure and density. The fact that carbon dioxide and water molecules are scattered throughout the air in sufficient amounts means that they absorb heat from the sunlight during the daytime, thanks to their highly absorbent potential. At night, when there is no sunlight at all, the air keeps the previously absorbed heat in, just like a greenhouse, preventing it from being released into cold space. During the day, the atmosphere serves as a curtain protecting the world from the harmful effects of the rays of the sun; at night, it serves as a blanket preserving the heat. Devoid of such a protective shield, the moon is scorched by the rays of the sun during the day and it freezes at night.

Do we owe the small difference in temperature between day and night only to the gases in the atmosphere, which function like a thermos flask? Of course not! We can observe that the time span (24 hours) in which our world completes its rotation is so perfectly adjusted that the difference in heat is kept at a minimum. If the nights were longer, the Earth would get too cold; if the days were longer, it would become too hot. Mercury, rotating very slowly, is a good example, the heat difference between day and night can reach up to 1,000 degrees.

Seas constitute one of the systems which help to adjust the climate. At first, we may find it strange that seas cover a far greater area than land. We have named the planet that plays host to us "the Earth". The word "earth" also means soil. However, most of the Earth's surface (70%) is covered by water, not soil. Thanks to this reality, neither polar cold, nor boiling tropical heat prevails on our planet. The land, which is heated by the rays of the sun during the day, radiates the heat it has absorbed, just like a radiator. As for the sea, which is a huge mass of water, it only warms up a few degrees, despite the millions of solar calories it takes in. Nevertheless, once it warms up, it does not grow cold easily. The oceans, which cover a larger area than land, supply water to the land through evaporation, as well as serving as a thermostat that regulates the climate and prevents it from becoming too hot or cold. If the oceans were to occupy a smaller area, there would be less evaporation and less precipitation; the land would turn to desert.

The air that is heated by the sun rises to be replaced by cold air. In this way, low pressure centers appear where there is hot weather and high pressure centers appear where there is cold weather.

The tilting axis of the Earth plays a significant role in keeping the average heat within tolerable limits. On the other hand, the way the mountain ranges are arranged and the 100 difference in temperature between the equatorial and polar regions lead to the creation of winds. If such a heat difference were to appear on a planet that had an even surface, nothing would stand in the way of the storms, and they would reach a speed up to 600mph. The Earth however, is provided with natural barriers that block powerful air currents. These barriers begin at the Himalayas and continue as mountain ranges through the Taurus Mountains and the Alps, ending with the Atlantic Ocean in the west and the Pacific in the east. Another mechanism that helps regulate the heat in the atmosphere is that of the ocean streams. Overheating generated in the equatorial region is transferred to the north and south by the ocean streams, balancing the heat in different parts of the world.

This is not the only way in which the Exalted Creator Who has absolute control over the systems balancing the heat in the atmosphere manifests His Power. He assigned the clouds a similar job. Hot weather causes evaporation, which leads to formation of clouds. Clouds prevent some of the sunlight from reaching the Earth, reflecting it like a mirror.

THE PROPORTION OF GASES

The atmosphere consists of approximately 77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% argon and other gases. The majority of living organisms, including human beings have been created with a metabolism that needs oxygen. When carbon compounds react with oxygen, the outcome is energy, with by-products being water and carbon dioxide. When such a reaction takes place in our body, the energy obtained is transferred to the energy packs (tiny accumulators) called ATP, which we use in our cells. Since all metabolic activities require ATP energy, we constantly need oxygen and this need is met through respiration.

Given that oxygen is a vital substance for us, we might think that it would be better for us if there were more oxygen in the atmosphere. Fortunately, our Lord did not create the universe in accordance with such simple logic. It is estimated that every oxygen increase of 1% over a level of 21% will also increase the possibility of forest fires by 70%, owing to the high inflammability of oxygen. An oxygen rate over 25% would cause the majority of our greenery to be burned to ashes. All the tropical forests and arctic tundra would be destroyed and it would be impossible to prevent great fires. This all goes to demonstrate that the present oxygen rate in the atmosphere is at equilibrium.

In spite of constant consumption, the rate of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is maintained thanks to a wonderful transformative mechanism which runs smoothly without failure (that is if we do not damage it). While animals consume oxygen, they continually release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; carbon dioxide is a poisonous gas for animal life. Plants however, perform just the opposite activity, transforming carbon dioxide into oxygen, and producing nutrients as well, the most common being sugar. In this way, billions of tons of oxygen are produced and released into the air everyday.

What if plants, like animals, were to carry out the same reaction, consuming oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide? In a short time, our planet would turn into an uninhabitable place. We would use up the oxygen in the atmosphere in a short time and all life forms would be eradicated. And how about a world where both animals and plants produce oxygen? The atmosphere would have such a flammable quality that even the tiniest spark would cause great fires.

Like the other gases in the atmosphere, oxygen is kept at an ideal rate, its benefit and harm being precisely balanced. This is nothing more than the result of a perfect adjustment made by 'Him'. There can be no coincidence in such splendidly created systems and nor can these things happen on their own.

A BREATH OF AIR

The fact that the density of the atmosphere is ideal for respiration also indicates the impossibility of 'coincidence' in this delicate arrangement. No matter whether we feel it or not, we continue breathing every moment of our life.

We constantly inhale and exhale the air. The reason why we need to breathe so much is that there are billions of biochemical reactions taking place in our body all the time which can only be realized with oxygen. Oxygen is even helping you to read this article, for the millions of cells in your retina need to be supplied with oxygen. If the oxygen rate in your blood decreases, your vision blurs. All the cells that make up the muscles in our body have energy generating centers which function by burning carbon; in other words, they react with oxygen.

When we inhale, nearly 300 million tiny spherical bags (alveols) are filled with high-pressure oxygen. The oxygen in the capillaries that cover the cell walls is reduced and then is at a low pressure. This allows the oxygen in the air to be absorbed by the capillaries and to be carried away by the hemoglobin found in the red blood cells - the magnificent servants of our body. Then it begins to serve our entire body, starting with the heart.

The red blood cells which travel to the lungs from different parts of the body carry oxygen from the lungs to the energy centers of the cells and they carry the waste material - carbon dioxide - back again to the lungs. In this process, clean air (with oxygen) is inhaled and is exhaled with carbon dioxide. Obviously, both inhalation and exhalation are vital functions for which we should be thankful. The words we utter can be considered the fruit of the carbon dioxide we exhale. On the other hand, this waste gas is recycled into oxygen and sugar by plants.

The fact that 300 million tiny bags in our lungs have been constructed to fit into a limited area clearly indicates God's infinite knowledge and the fact that He is Omniscient. If these were to be spread out over the ground, they would cover an area as big as a tennis court. They should, logically, require a gigantic organ to carry them; think about how we would carry this organ around with us...

In spite of being so tiny, the alveols and alveolar tubes in our lungs are large enough to let air move freely, which is another sign reflecting His wisdom.

The atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1 atm. This means that 1 kilogram of pressure is applied over a square centimeter, an area that is only as large as the tip of one's finger. At sea level, 1 liter of air weighs 1 gram. As it is seen, the air has an immense pressure, in spite of its lightness.

The fluidity of air is fifty times greater than that of water. As a matter of fact, these values are very accurate and the fact that they are so is critical for our life. If the density of the atmosphere were to be slightly increased, breathing would become as difficult as sucking honey through a straw. Do not even think of saying "make the straw wider", i.e, making the alveolar tubes in our lungs wider. In such a case, the area contacting the air would be diminished and the lungs would be unable to receive a sufficient amount of oxygen to meet the needs of our body. The resistance of the air would be too great and it would be impossible to design a respiratory system capable of supplying the oxygen we need.

Several conditions that make life possible are only realized at certain values, and the atmosphere possesses precisely all of these values. All these only go to show how delicate His adjustments are.

What if the atmospheric pressure was lower, for instance, just 20% lower than it is at present? Given that the conditions of evaporation and boiling depend on the air pressure, more water would evaporate from the oceans and eventually the high humidity of the atmosphere would create a greenhouse effect on the Earth. In other words, there would be excessive heat in the world. And if the atmospheric pressure was twice as great, the humidity would be so low that there would be terrible drought, turning almost all of the land into desert.

Several conditions that make life possible are only realized at certain values, and the atmosphere possesses precisely all of them.

WHO ARE ALL THESE THINGS BALANCED FOR?

The air that is in front of our nose, ready to be of use to us, the ground under our feet, the night and day that follow one another in succession... the sun, the honey bee covering miles for us... When we contemplate all these, we realize that all their activities are directed to serve us.

The beings in this universe do not serve us from their own free will. It is crystal clear that all things point to a Creator Who takes care of us.

Our Creator has bestowed us with ears, providing the world of sounds for us. He has created a brain in our skull, a heart in our chest and a tongue in our mouth; these serve as devices by which we sense and appreciate His blessings that overflow from His treasures of Mercy. He has presented various fragrances, tastes and colors for our senses; He has created numerous species in order to help such devices fulfill their true duty. Only the atmosphere and what it covers will suffice as signs that indicate the ultimate truth. Study the following Qur'anic verse, that reminds us of the divine grace: "And He subjected to you what is in the heavens and the earth all together, (as a grace) from Him." The rest of the verse counsels us to reflect: "There are in that signs for a people who reflect." (45:13)

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devientdeco · 4 years

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I’ve compiled a list of my books which may interest yall, due to things relating to murder, history, or other interesting things:

The Murder Of The Century by Paul Collins; Fascinating and, at the time, famous murder case in 1890s New York. The over-the-top and theatrical lawyer William Howe would make a fascinating walk-on role if a lawyer is ever required given his penchant for the dramatic and unusual. (in unrelated cases, he once had a witness move to Japan, and successfully convinced a jury that a trigger finger “slipped” four times)

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum; An excellent and quite readable analysis of the mass starvation known as the Holodomor, in the Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, told alongside the Soviet campaign to destroy Ukrainian identity and religion.

The Vampire: A New History, by Nick Groom; An interesting account of the history of the vampire and associated folklore prior to Dracula. Focuses mostly on England, but still an interesting book.

The Ghosts of Eden Park by Karen Abbott; An interesting Jazz Age murder coupled with bootlegging and madness.

The Berlin-Baghdad Express by Sean McMeekin: Detailing Imperial Germany’s attempts at courting the Ottoman Empire and trying to weaponize the concept of Jihad against the British, it also delves briefly into German spy-archeologists who wouldn’t be out of place in Imprisoned With The Pharaohs, like the scandalous Baron Max Von Oppenheim.

The Wolf; The Mystery Raider That Terrorized The Seas During WW1 by Richard Gulliat: In Dagon, a German “sea-raider” captures the narrator. I’m assuming it was one of the cargo ships converted into lethal raiding vessels, like the SMS Wolf; which spent 15 months at sea. I also wrote a paper for my history methods class, all about differences in newspaper accounts between the New York Times and the London Times, with regards to the fascinating SMS Mowe, which operated in the Atlantic, so I have other books about the raiding vessels if anyone is interested by them.

The Radium Girls by Kate Moore; Tells the tale of radioactive paint and the girls who licked the paintbrushes to get them fine enough for the number painting; and their inevitable horrible deaths and the lawsuits and struggles of the longest living ones.

Issac’s Storm by Erik Larson; Pretty much everything by Larson is fantastic; it’s non-fiction, but it’s thrilling and reads like a novel. This one tells the story of Issac Cline, a metrologist working in Galveston Texas, and the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, the deadliest in US history. A tale of hubris and storms.

In The Garden Of Beasts by Erik Larson; The story of the first US ambassador to Nazi Germany (from my state!), and his family in Berlin in the late 1930s. Politics, murder, and affairs with the head of the Gestapo and a Soviet agent (simultaneously!).

The Poisoners Handbook by Deborah Blum; A book about Jazz Age NYC and poisonings as well as the first Chief Medical Examiner (the corruption and sheer ineptitude of the last coroner before the position was abolished is almost comical; see the fact that he ruled a death as “assault or diabetes”). Explains in a understandable way how many poisons work, and provides fascinating cases as examples.

The Witches by Stacy Schiff; An account of the Salem Witch Trials, as well as an interesting overview of Puritan New England.

The Devil In The White City by Erik Larson; Another excellent book by Larson, juxtaposing the the 1893 Worlds Fair and the activities of serial killer H. H Holmes.

Dead Wake by Erik Larson; This one covers their sinking of the Lusitania and the activities of the U-Boat which sank it. Also covers the going’s-on of British Naval Intelligence and Woodrow Wilson.

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson; Another book of ships and serial killers and science, juxtaposing the invention of wireless by Marconi with the murder committed by George Crippen and how wireless led to a trans-Atlantic chase by Scotland Yard.

African Kaiser by Robert Gaudi; Tells the story of the fascinating Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck and his guerrilla campaign in Africa. Featuring recon on bikes, a British Intelligence nemesis/friend, and an airship resupply mission.

The American Plague by Molly Crosby: About Yellow Fever and it’s outbreak in Memphis, TN, in 1878, and the work of Walter Reed to discover its vector.

City of Light, City of Poison by Holly Tucker; A fascinating historical incident in 1670s France, where poisonings, murder, witchcraft, and corruption amongst the aristocracy led to scandalous trials and King Louis XIV ordering documents destroyed after a mistress was implicated. Witches, poison, and intrigue!

Black Death at The Golden Gate by David Randall; An interesting account of the 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco.

The Splendid And the Vile by Erik Larson; An excellent account of Churchill and London from 1940 to 1941, the brunt of The Blitz.

Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higgenbotham; An excellent and well-written account of Chernobyl. Very easy to understand and well-written, and also provides an interesting glimpse into Soviet culture.

And finally, a fiction book that I thought might intrigue y’all;

The Devil Aspect by Craig Russell; Set in 1930s Czechoslovakia, a psychologist interviews 6 serial killers at an asylum in an effort at discovering what he terms “The Devil Aspect”. Things take an unusual turn when he experiments with drugs to unlock the unconsciousness of his patients, as another serial killer stalks Vienna. Almost like a 1930s take on Silence Of The Lambs. Very well-written, in my opinion. Has a slightly Lovecraftian-ish twist, and the asylum overall/experiments make me think of Lovecraft a bit (don’t think Call of Cthulhu, think Thing On The Doorstep or Shadow Out of Time).

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 5, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Yet another Friday without a news dump from the federal government (woo hoo!) means that I have the room to highlight something really interesting that was buried in President Biden’s speech at the State Department yesterday afternoon. Not surprisingly, Biden announced a return to a more traditional foreign policy than his predecessor’s. But he did more than that: he tied foreign policy to domestic interests in a way that echoed Republican president Theodore Roosevelt when he helped to launch the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century.

Biden’s predecessor wrenched U.S. foreign policy from the channel in which it had operated since WWII, replacing it with a new focus on the economic interests of business leaders. Trump chose as Secretary of State the former chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, who oversaw the gutting of career officers in the State Department. When the department lost 12% of its foreign-affairs specialists in the first eight months of 2017, it was clear that the Trump administration was abandoning a foreign policy in which the United States tried to defend the idea of democracy and to advance its interests through diplomacy.

Instead, in his first trip overseas, the former president traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he announced the largest single arms deal in American history, worth $110 billion immediately and more than $350 billion over ten years. The White House noted that the deal was “a significant expansion of… [the] security relationship” between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

"That was a tremendous day. Tremendous investments in the United States," Trump told reporters. "Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs." Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest defense contractors, cheered the sale.

It was a public relations victory for Mohammed bin Salman, often referred to as MBS and the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia at the time, coming as it did just a year after Congress voted to allow the families of those killed in the 9/11 attacks to sue the country from which 15 of the 19 hijackers came. It also would increase the U.S. supply of arms to his country’s intervention in Yemen, the country to its south, where a pro-Saudi president had been ousted in 2015 by the Houthi movement, whose members accused him of corruption and ties to Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

In his remarks during his May visit to Saudi Arabia, Trump backed away from the role the United States had claimed to take on since its war with Spain in 1898, aiming to defend democracy around the world. “We are not here to lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship,” Trump said. “[W]e are here to offer partnership-- based on shared interests and values—to pursue a better future for us all.”

For the rest of his presidency, Trump worked to weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance among 30 nations of Europe, the U.S., and Canada, formed in 1949 to stop the spread of Soviet, and now Russian, aggression in Europe. Instead, he worked to strengthen U.S. ties to countries with strongman leaders, such as MBS and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He sidestepped career diplomats to run his own, shadow diplomacy out of the White House, tapping his son-in-law Jared Kushner to secure peace in the Middle East, for example, and asking administration officials to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

And he continued to sell billions worth of arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, even after Congress halted such transfers as indiscriminate Saudi bombing in Yemen created a deadly humanitarian crisis.

One of the first things Biden did when he took office was to freeze for review $23 billion in pending arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates negotiated by his predecessor (including 50 Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets). Yesterday, he announced he was ending U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen.

In his speech to the State Department yesterday Biden immediately indicated that he was restoring traditional American diplomacy. The first thing he did was to acknowledge his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, a career diplomat with a degree from Columbia Law School and a long and impressive resume including work on U.S. policy in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan.

The next thing Biden said was to assure the world that diplomats around the world spoke for the country again: “when you speak, you speak for me.” Later on, he reiterated that idea: “I value your expertise and I respect you, and I will have your back. This administration is going to empower you to do your jobs, not target or politicize you.”

Biden emphasized that he had spoken to “the leaders of many of our closest friends — Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia — to [begin] reforming the habits of cooperation and rebuilding the muscle of democratic alliances that have atrophied over the past few years of neglect and, I would argue, abuse.” The message he wants the world to hear is: “America is back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”

Also back at the center of American diplomacy are “America’s most cherished democratic values,” Biden said, “defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.” The case of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was poisoned in August and returned to Russia in mid-January only to be thrown into jail, has enabled Biden to illustrate how dramatically his foreign policy differs from that of his predecessor. Biden called on Putin to release Navalny “immediately and without condition.”

Biden outlined his approach to Yemen, China, and Russia… and then he said something that jumped out.

Biden argued that foreign policy is an integral part of domestic policy. It requires that the government address the needs of ordinary Americans. “We will compete from a position of strength by building back better at home,” he said. “That’s why my administration has already taken the important step to live our domestic values at home — our democratic values at home.”

This idea—that the U.S. must reform its own society in order to extend the principles of democracy overseas-- was precisely the argument Theodore Roosevelt and other reformers made in the late 1890s when they launched the Progressive Era. When Roosevelt became president in 1901, he used this rationale to take the government out of the hands of business interests and use it to protect ordinary Americans.

Roosevelt argued that the government must clean up the cities, educate children, protect workers and consumers, support farmers, and make business pay its fair share. Biden shared his own list on Thursday: ending the so-called Muslim ban, reversing the ban on transgender troops, defending the free press, respecting science, addressing systemic racism and white supremacy, and rebuilding the economy.

“All this matters to foreign policy,” he said, “because when we… rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally, to push back… authoritarianism’s advance, we’ll be a much more credible partner because of these efforts to shore up our own foundations.”

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#quotes #political #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #history #progressive #domestic policy #foreign policy

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seuzz · 3 years

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Nonfiction: Atlantis/Lemuria

William Scott-Elliot was a nineteenth-century theosophist, and one of the popularizers of the theosophical account of the history of Atlantis. His 1896 book The Story of Atlantis used arguments from archaeology, geology, paleontology, botany, and linguistics to argue for the existence of a great continent that linked and overlapped with Europe, Africa, and the Americas. He relied upon the "astral clairvoyance" of Charles Webster Leadbeater to describe its history. In 1904 he followed up that book with the shorter Lost Lemuria, describing the continent and civilization that preceded Atlantis. Both are available in a single volume online in a variety of formats.

Scott-Elliot's history is a wild mishmash of sober scientific argumentation (referencing real botanical and geological facts, even if the explanation he gives is wrong), outrageous metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, and a splash of late nineteenth-century race theory. The content is wildly entertaining, and it's easy to imagine authors from H. P. Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard drawing, if not on it, at least from the same wellspring of serious-minded hokum to craft their own, avowedly literary universes. Scott-Elliot, alas, meant his history seriously, and he is a pompous and humorless writer. Though the book implies much that would be gloriously entertaining, it reads like the imaginative but unliterary background notes for a D&D campaign, as compiled by a dungeon master the weekend before the first meeting.

Nonetheless, as source material for pulp fantasy-historical adventure, it is of possible interest. An outline and summary of the high points is provided below.

The Story of Atlantis (1896) by William Scott-Elliot

Preface: Clairvoyance is a real faculty, and by it one can learn facts about places distant in time and space that cannot be otherwise accessed. Memory is a non-materialistic faculty, and it is a universal faculty, not one particular to individuals; however, most individuals are only able to access that part of "Nature's memory" which they are individually in contact with. However, the shared natured of memory explains how clairvoyance, "thought transference," etc., are possible. It is by the use of this "astral clairvoyance" that a history of Atlantis has been painstakingly written

The Aryan Race (composed so far of five sub-races, of which the Teutonic sub-race is the fifth historical race to arise) is the successor to the Atlantean Race, whose history stretched over thousands of years and encompassed the history of many nations and civilizations. Atlantis suffered four great catastrophes, in approximately 800,000 B.C.; 200,000 B.C.; 80,000 B.C.; and 9564 B.C. The third was the greatest, and it destroyed all the continent but the island of Poseidonis, which was the land whose destruction Plato recorded.

Evidence of Atlantis's existence comes from deep-sea soundings; the distribution of flora and fauna; linguistic similarities; cultural similarities; and the testimony of ancient writers, folklore, etc. Taking these in turn:

1. There is a great ridge in the midst of the Atlantic, and the seabed all the way to the Americas is covered in volcanic debris.

2. The similarity of flora and fauna in lands separated by wide oceans can only be explained by the existence of long-since-drowned land bridges.

3. There are great similarities of language and alphabet in ancient Asia and central America, and the diversity of complexions and features in the Old World is mirrored in the new, suggesting that all races stem from a single, original location.

4. There are similarities of cultural practice and symbolism across the continents.

5. Peoples on both sides of the Atlantic have flood traditions, and traditions of having originated on an island in the Atlantic.

The Atlantean Race was divided into seven sub-races:

a. Rmoahal: The first race, which rose 4 million years ago. These were dark-skinned giants (10 to 12 feet) that eventually dwindled in size, and the northern branches lightened in color.

b. Tlavatli: The second race, a mountain-loving people of reddish-brown, not as tall as the Rmoahal. They were ruled by chiefs and kings who received authority by acclamation. They eventually achieved an imperial state with a nominal king over them all, but his authority was nominal.

c. Toltec: The third race, dominant for thousands of years of power and glory. Copper-colored and tall (8 feet average). Theirs was the most powerful empire of the Atlantean peoples, and they established the principle of hereditary succession. They were divided into independent kingdoms at first, at war with the Rmoahal, but eventually united into a federation with an emperor over it all. The races still at that time possessed psychic attributes, and the dynasty was divine and ruled by adepts, submitting to the Occult Hierarchy. These took Atlantean civilization to its heights. But decay set in after 100K years, and the connection to the OH was broken, and their occult powers were turned to selfish and malevolent purposes—sorcery. [**] The followers of the "black arts" rebelled against the Initiate rulers, and the "white" emperor fled and a pretender dynasty took the throne. The empire was engulfed by civil wars. The capital ("The City of the Golden Gates") and the evil dynasty were finally destroyed in a cataclysm that left whole provinces desolate. But sorcery continued to be practiced, and "white" kings vied with "black" until the very last and the destruction of Poseidonis.

[**] On "sorcery": Thanks to scientific advance and their psychic faculties, men attained more and more control and control over the hidden forces of Nature. The awful effects of corruption meant that its practice spread, increasing lust, brutality, and ferocity.

d. First Turanian: Colonial-minded people who migrated to eastern lands. Turbulent and cruel, their government structure was feudal. A kind of socialism evolved, centered on state adoption and control of children, but it ultimately failed.

e. Original Semite: Turbulent race hemmed into mountainous districts. Patriarchical government, nomadic lifestyle.

f. Akkadian: Rose after 800K BC catastrophe and ultimately dominated. Lived in settled communities and adopted oligarchic forms of government. Invented dual-kingships, and made great advances in astrology and astronomy.

g. Mongolian: Only Atlantean race to arise with no connection with Atlantis, having arisen in Tartary. More psychic and religious than their immediate predecessors, and gravitated to a theocratic style of government.

Colonization tended to increase over time as subsistence levels decreased. But some colonization efforts were spear-headed by the "good" kings and priests, who were aware of impending catastrophes. The effects of these migrations can be seen in latter-day peoples, such as the Lapps and North and South Americans.

Egypt began not as a colony but as the center for a White Lodge of Initiates after the Toltec cataclysm. After 200K years, a great body of colonists was brought from Atlantis and the first "Divine Empire" established in Egypt. The pyramids were Halls of Initiation and also treasure-houses and shrines for talismans of power. The land was briefly underwater and the rulers in exile in Abyssinia, but its reemergence led to its reoccupation. An Akkadian influx modified the Egyptian "type." The final submergence of Poseidonis briefly submerged Egypt again (a third submergence) and ended the Divine Dynasties, and the White Lodge moved.

The Turanians founded the Aztec Empire, which was of pure Turanian blood.

The original Semites spread widely, even into Egypt, but the Jews are the only unmixed remnants of the race. The Aryan race arose from the original Semites who congregated on the southern shore of the central Asian sea.

The Mongolian race spread over Asia and the Americas and is still in a rising race with a history in front of it.

Arts and Sciences The Aryan race exceeds greatly in its artistic achievements those of the Atlantean, but architecture, sculpture, painting and music were practiced. Music and painting were primitive, but sculpture attained some subtlety, and architecture was gargantuan and decorated with bright colors. Temples were giant halls of Egyptian style, with square pillars, and filled with statues of great men which they paid to have ceremonially worshipped. The precious metals were plentiful thanks to alchemical transmutation.

Education Most children received a rudimentary education before being shunted into agriculture and mechanical arts. Those with superior ability received training in botany, chemistry, math, and astronomy, but with a goal of developing the student's psychic faculties and the occult aspects of the subjects.

Description of the City of the Golden Gates.

Atlanteans had flying ships, but only for the rich. They were boat-like in shape, but built of wood or metal. The propulsive force is still a mystery. They flew at 100 mph, never more than a few hundred feet in the air.

Manners and Customs Atlantean manners and customs naturally fluctuated throughout the ages, but in the main:

Polygamy was practiced, though in most cases only one wife was ever had. Women were treated as the equals of men, and co-ed education was also practiced. Women also had a part in government.

Atlantean cuisine made great use of animal blood and other parts not consumed by us, while the flesh was discarded. They also ate decomposed fish. But milk, grains, and vegetables were eaten. The upper castes, though, tended to be vegetarians. Liquor was forbidden.

Atlantean explosives killed by the release of poison gas, not by concussive force.

State coinage made a late appearance; previously, men manufactured tokens that worked as promissory notes.

Agriculture was centralized and food distributed by the government.

Religion The Rmoahals originally worshipped the memory of Manu, the divine founder of the race. This practice eventually turned into a kind of ancestor worship. The Tlavatli developed a sun worship, the sun being the symbol of the Supreme Being, and erected monoliths on hilltops. Under the Toltecs, massive temples to the sun and to fire were erected. In some of these, the image of a man as the highest representation of the divine was installed. Eventually, this passed into self-worship, with each person worshipping himself as a god. (Wealthy men even employed priests to themselves.)

Under the Turanians, the Unity of the divine became a Trinity—creator, preserver, destroyer—that under the Semites became a trinity of father, mother, and child. Also under the Turanians evolved the worship of elementals—beings created out of malevolent will to serve their creator—involving blood sacrifices to preserve and strengthen them. The human sacrifices of the Aztecs was a reversion to this sort of practice.

Lost Lemuria (1904) Science has shown that shape of the continents and ocean is in constant flux. During the Triassic through Eocene eras, the equatorial regions were dominated first by a single continent, then by a pair of continents when the original land mass broke up. This continent was Lemuria. The inhabitants thus co-existed with the dinosaurs.

The Lemurians were not truly human, not having the Divine Spark that endows mind and individuality and were closer to animals. They showed rapid evolution during their time, developing from an etheric form (the form of the Second Race) into a gelatinous body and then into a solid, skeletal body. In its early form it had three eyes (the third in the back of its head, which evolved into the pineal gland and the focus of psychic vision). In its developed form, the Lemurian stood between 12 and 15 feet in height with dark skin, a long jaw, a flattened face, eyes set far apart like a bird’s, and no forehead. The arms and legs were proportionately longer than ours and could not be fully straightened, and thanks to the third eye and a protruding heel, the Lemurian could walk backward as easily as forward. The skin was loose and scaly.

Early Lemurians reproduced by self-division and by budding, then by being birthed from eggs. Eventually they evolved to give live birth.

Early, mindless Lemurians bred with animals, yielding ape-like creatures that became fully human.

Life and arts were primitive, so that by the time of the fifth sub-race the Lemurians were living only in huts, and agriculture and fire were unknown. It was at this point that the Lhas entered.

The Lhas were a race of supremely evolved humans from Venus who, having returned to the spirit world, took human bodies in order to become teachers of the Lemurians. Thanks to their guidance, the Lemurians acquired the Divine Spark. The Lhas taught them fire, smelting, agriculture, weaving, and brought with them from Venus wheat and the bee.

During the time of the sixth and seventh sub-races the Lemurians built great cities. (The statues of Easter Island are representative of these sub-races and erected by them.)

Lemuria perished in volcanic action, covering the land with ash over a long period of time, ending gradually with the full subsidence of

#non fiction #atlantis #lemuria

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wikipediaredoengl199fa20 · 3 years

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Wikipedia Redo!

The Essay

Wikipedia’s View of Columbus

In recent years, the holiday “Columbus Day” has been questioned as to whether it should be renamed or removed because of the historical figure it celebrates. And, each year Christopher Columbus undergoes valid scrutiny for his actions against the indigenous populations in the Caribbean and the Americas. Therefore, when looking at the Wikipedia page detailing Columbus’s early life, voyages, and impact on history there were biases throughout the page. Choosing to focus on the section titled “Brutality”, the author used a phrase like “historians have criticized” and words such as “accused” and “allegedly” in a way that makes the reader question whether or not Columbus committed these acts (Christopher Columbus). The author also cited sources that said these criticisms of Columbus stem from the “intentional defamation of Spain”. This author’s word choice shows their explicit bias or their conscious “prejudices and beliefs” (Ruhl). The author cites articles that either attempt to debunk historians’ research or use words that by definition means that what follows isn’t proven. Therefore the wording and evidence in the Wikipedia page about Columbus’s brutality has an explicit bias.

Based on the biases evident in the Wikipedia page, I revised it. Rereading the section of Wikipedia, I highlighted any words or phrases that attempted to sway the reader on how they would feel about Columbus. After identifying biased language, I researched Columbus’s time in the Caribbean and the Americas to find what exactly happened. These research articles, journals, and books offered insight and primary sources on what occurred during Columbus’s colonial occupation. Therefore, when rewriting the section of the Wikipedia article that detailed that time period I changed the wording so that it was more neutral and gave the reader the ability to decide for themselves. For example, rather than saying “historians have criticized Columbus for initiating colonization” I revised it to read “historians have begun to reexamine and evaluate Columbus’s character for initiating colonization.” In addition, I added more information and citations to sources that had more in-depth accounts of Columbus’s participation in the slave trade and the mistreatment of indigenous populations. A journal article titled “Myths, Facts, and Debates: Christopher Columbus and the New World” by James W. Cortada was useful in identifying what was accurate in the Wikipedia article and what needed to be corrected.

After researching the psychology of implicit and explicit biases, I realized the importance of eliminating biases in the Wikipedia page. Implicit biases are prejudices or beliefs one has unconsciously. These biases usually relate to negative racial stereotypes and gender stereotypes. If one cannot identify and remove their implicit bias, it becomes their explicit bias. This means one is aware of and acts on their harmful biases which can have negative impacts on those who are the most affected by stereotypes. Therefore, it is important to remove bias before it can influence a person. By first identifying the specific prejudices and protective nature of the author for keeping Christopher Columbus’s positive character portrayal I was able to see where the page was lacking. The section titled “Brutality” left out a lot of information and history that has been discovered through primary accounts of Columbus. This was purposely pushing the reader to believe Columbus did not actually commit many crimes against indigenous people and if he did then the author says we cannot judge him “by the morality of the 20th century”(Christopher Columbus). This shifts blame away from the historical figure and ignore the way that Columbus’s actions still affect people today. Therefore, by rewriting and revising the article so it lays out all the facts without bias wording, it allows the reader to decide for themselves. It is important to recognize bias, both implicit and explicit so that people can research and remove those prejudices that are offensive, harmful, or untrue.

Works Cited

“Christopher Columbus.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Nov. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus.

Cortada, James W. “Myths, Facts, and Debates: Christopher Columbus and the New World before 1492.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance Et Réforme, vol. 12, no. 2, 1976, pp. 89–95. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43464992. Accessed 19 Nov. 2020.

Daumeyer, Natalie, et al. “Consequences of Attributing Discrimination to Implicit vs. Explicit Bias.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2019, spcl.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Daumeyer_etal2019JESP.pdf.

Howard Schuman, Barry Schwartz, Hannah D’Arcy, Elite Revisionists and Popular Beliefs: Christopher Columbus, Hero or Villain?, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 69, Issue 1, Spring 2005, Pages 2–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfi001

Ruhl, Charlotte. “Implicit or Unconscious Bias.” Implicit Bias | Simply Psychology, 2020, www.simplypsychology.org/implicit-bias.html.

Tinker, Tink, and Mark Freeland. “Thief, Slave Trader, Murderer: Christopher Columbus and Caribbean Population Decline.” Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 2008, pp. 25–50., www.jstor.org/stable/30131245. Accessed 19 Nov. 2020.

The Revision:

Since the late 20th century, historians have begun to reexamine and reevaluate Columbus’s character for initiating colonization, depopulation of indigenous people, and for the mistreatment of natives.[185][74][186][187] In a journal articled by Tinker and Freeland, they discuss Columbus’s involvement with the slave trade both before and after his voyage to the Caribbean islands. In Tony Horwitz’s work, on St. Croix, he details Columbus’s interaction with indigenous women citing an instance in which he gave a captured indigenous woman as a present to his friend Michele de Cuneo, who, by his own account, sexually assaulted her. According to scholars and historians alike, this type of treatment became commonplace during Columbus’s colonization period. In Hans Koning's 1976 biography of Columbus and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States a punishment for an indigenous person failing to fill their hawk's bell of gold dust every three months was cutting off the hands of those without tokens and due to the lack of medical treatment many died. .[74][189][105] In 2005, Spanish historians discovered documents that detailed the natives’ unrest and revolt. Columbus’s response was to kill those who rebelled and to deter further dissent, leave their dismembered bodies in the street. Because of the intense circumstances these natives were now in, thousands are thought to have committed suicide by poison to escape their persecution.[105] Bobadilla's 48-page report talks about Columbus and his brothers of using torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola. Some Historians argue that Bobadilla’s report spreads the anti-Italian sentiment of the Spaniards and is instead rooted in Bobadilla's desire to take over Columbus' position.[190][191][192] This example of controversy between scholars and histories shows the difficulty of reevaluating Columbus’s character. Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian who has seen the report, states that "Columbus's government was characterized by a form of tyranny. Even those who loved him had to admit the atrocities that had taken place."[126]

Some of the accounts of Columbus and his brothers’ mistreatment of indigenous people is believed to part of the Black Legend, a theory of the intentional defamation of Spain.[193][194][195] Some scholars recognize, through research and primary source documents, the long term effects of Columbus’s depopulation, brutality, and enslavement of indigenous people. [98][196] Some historians have argued that Columbus’s brutal nature was a normal product of his time period. That being said, a man of the 15th century, should not be judged by the morality of the 20th century.[197]However, the general public believes the people who still face the consequences of Columbus’s actions today should have the deciding voice on the continuation of Columbus Day, which celebrates this controversial historical figure. Spanish ambassador María Jesús Figa López-Palop says, "Normally we melded with the cultures in America, we stayed there, we spread our language and culture and religion."[198] Horwitz asserts that paternalistic attitudes were often characteristic of the colonists like Columbus.[199] Historian James W. Loewen says that "Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves—about five thousand—than any other individual."[200]

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carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory · 5 years

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October 4, 1940: 79 years ago

Loved and hated: An urban plant with history

"There’s a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly...survives without sun, water, and seemingly earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it."

-from Betty Smith’s classic novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)

(Fact check: the species is impressively resilient but does indeed require light and water. But we’ll let it slide with an artistic license here.)

This specimen of tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima) was collected on October 4, 1940 by D. Berkheimer near Klapperthal in Berks county, Pennsylvania.

Tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima) is a species with a fascinating and complex cultural history. It was once glorified as a beautiful urban street tree in the United States. It was tolerant of insects, pollution, and poor growing conditions. The earliest recorded planting in the US (via England) was at William Hamilton’s estate (currently the “Woodlands Cemetery”) in Philadelphia around 1784. It was also in Bartram’s famous garden nearby. It became popular in the plant nursery industry after 1820. But that feeling didn’t stay long, and within decades it was vilified as an unwanted weed – it had an unpleasant smell, produced prolific seeds, and resprouted from suckers causing it to spread. Today, it is a common urban “weed” found in urban and non-urban areas across the eastern US. It is considered invasive in Pennsylvania (and many other states). It is also considered invasive in many parts of Europe.

But where’s it from? Ailanthus altissima is native to East Asia, including China, Taiwan, and Korea. It has a deep ethnobotanical history in China, where it has been used in various ways in traditional Chinese medicine, with written records of its use dating to 732 AD! It also has deep roots in Chinese literature and culture. Among other uses, it has also been used in silk production, as it is a food host to a silkworm.

The oldest herbarium specimen from the Eastern US is undated but inferred to date from 1815-1831 from Philadelphia. It is in the herbarium of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (PH). The second oldest Pennsylvania specimen is dated 1841, also from Philadelphia.

It is around this time of year that the abundance of Tree of Heaven in the Pittsburgh area becomes especially obvious, especially along roadsides. With large, compound leaves and found in disturbed, “weedy” areas, Ailanthus can be easily confused with the similar looking native tree, staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina). Staghorn sumac is in a different plant family (poison ivy family, Anacardiaceae), but this confusion goes way back. Linnaeus even described the species as in the same genus as sumac, so don’t feel too bad if you make the same mistake! (Side note – the taxonomic history of the species is also intense. It has been given many different scientific names over the past three centuries, with three people independently naming it at around mid-1700s!) The leaves are noticeably different upon closer inspection. The fruits are even more clearly different. Ailanthus has brown clusters of winged seeds (called samaras, like that of maple trees’ “helicopter” seeds). These seeds can be clearly seen now on trees as their leaves drop along most highways around Pittsburgh.

Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina)

Tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima)

Given its introduction history in the Mid-Atlantic and its intentional planting and affinity for urban areas, the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis Project will be important and fascinating to understanding more about this plant. The Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis Project is a specimen digitation effort involving more than 12 herbaria (including Carnegie Museum herbarium) funded by a National Science Foundation grant to database (put in computer), image (high res. pictures), and georeference (put on map) all specimens in the region. The region is significant because it is one the oldest densely populated urban corridors in the US, from New York City to Washington, D.C. The Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis Project is producing a critical dataset to look at the introduction history and invasive success (and failure) of species in urban and non-urban areas across this connected region – including Tree of Heaven and many other species. This specimen image (and many other Tree of Heaven specimens in the region) are available online: http://midatlanticherbaria.org/portal/collections/list.php?db=328&taxa=Ailanthus+altissima&usethes=1&taxontype=2 The earliest specimen in southwestern PA at the museum was collected in 1881 in Beaver county. For more on the species’ fascinating history and biology in our region, check out this detailed study by Dr. Matt Kasson and colleagues done at Penn State published in 2013 in Northeastern Naturalist.

Check back for more! Botanists at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History share digital specimens from the herbarium on dates they were collected. They are in the midst of a three-year project to digitize nearly 190,000 plant specimens collected in the region, making images and other data publicly available online. This effort is part of the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis Project (mamdigitization.org), a network of thirteen herbaria spanning the densely populated urban corridor from Washington, D.C. to New York City to achieve a greater understanding of our urban areas, including the unique industrial and environmental history of the greater Pittsburgh region. This project is made possible by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1801022.

Mason Heberling is Assistant Curator of Botany at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

#Carnegie Museum of Natural History #Botany #Collected On This Day #Tree of Heaven #Plants #Staghorn Sumac

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atlanticcanada · 4 years

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Sen. Mike Duffy begins appeal of ruling blocking him from suing Senate

The Senate forfeited any claim to immunity from lawsuits over its suspension of Mike Duffy, because its actions were politically motivated and unlawful, the senator's lawyer argued on Thursday.

In submissions to the Ontario Court of Appeal, Lawrence Greenspon said the decision in November 2013 to suspend Duffy without pay came at the direction of then-Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper's office.

"It's constitutionally outrageous what happened here," Greenspon said. "Our claim is that parliamentary privilegeΓÇªdoes not extend to unlawful conduct."

The P.E.I. senator was ultimately acquitted in 2016 of 31 criminal charges in a ruling that slammed the conduct of Harper's office in what was one of the biggest political scandals of his government. Despite Duffy's exoneration, the Senate refused to repay the hundreds of thousands of dollars he lost in pay and pension, court heard.

Duffy now wants $7.8 million in reimbursement and damages from the Senate, RCMP and federal government. However, a lower court in December 2018 sided with the Senate that parliamentary privilege made it immune to lawsuits, prompting Duffy's appeal.

Greenspon told the three-judge panel that immunity -- designed to separate parliamentary and executive powers -- should not apply in this case. The Senate's actions against Duffy, he said, were carried out on behalf of what he called misconduct in the Prime Minister's Office.

"The Senate bowed to the directions of the executive from which it was supposed to be independent," Greenspon said. "Unlawful conduct caused the loss. Parliamentary privilegeΓÇªdoes not extend to unlawful conduct."

Among other things, Greenspon said Harper's office threatened Duffy that he'd be kicked out of Senate unless he admitted to inadvertently abusing his expense account and repaid the money, about $90,000. The threats, the lawyer said, amounted to extortion.

If the Senate believes its actions were proper, Greenspon said, it should defend itself in court.

"Let them call the evidence," Greenspon said. "Let them defend the propriety of their actions."

Government lawyer Maxime Faille urged the court to dismiss the appeal. Separation of powers, he argued, is a constitutional cornerstone.

"Parliamentary privilege is one of the ways the fundamental constitutional separation of powers is respected," Faille said.

Both Chief Justice George Strathy and Justice James MacPherson queried whether such privilege is absolute, even if the Senate were acting for a "corrupt purpose" as Duffy alleges.

"The action here is that the conduct of the executive branch poisons both the Senate process and the resulting decision relating to Sen. Duffy," MacPherson said. "If that's true, is there no remedy?"

Faille countered that the Senate is the "sole judge" of whether it follows its own rules. Duffy's suspension and request for reimbursement falls entirely within Senate purview, and allowing the courts to review internal Senate decisions would be an unprecedented undermining of its independence, he said.

"We are dealing with a Senate decision regarding the use of Senate resources by a senator," Faille told the panel, which also includes Justice Mahmud Jamal.

Duffy's side believes his case was given a boost by a top court ruling in the United Kingdom last fall that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had acted illegally when he prorogued the British parliament.

The U.K. decision, Faille argued, was a review of executive action -- not parliamentary proceedings -- something courts have done for centuries.

But Greenspon said in closing that asserting privilege if the underlying conduct is unlawful defies logic, fairness and the rule of law.

"This is an important case and we'll reserve," Strathy said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 16, 2020.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/2FUv6o7

#new brunswick #prince edward island #nova scotia #news #politics #canada #CTVAtlantic

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7r0773r · 5 years

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The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

I was leaving the South To fling myself into the unknown. . . . I was taking a part of the South To transplant in alien soil, To see if it could grow differently, If it could drink of new and cool rains, Bend in strange winds, Respond to the warmth of other suns And, perhaps, to bloom. —RICHARD WRIGHT

***

Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such alleged crimes as “stealing hogs, horse-stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks” or “trying to act like a white person.” Sixty-six were killed after being accused of “insult to a white person.” One was killed for stealing seventy-five cents. (p.39)

***

Throughout the South, the conventional rules of the road did not apply when a colored motorist was behind the wheel. If he reached an intersection first, he had to let the white motorist go ahead of him. He could not pass a white motorist on the road no matter how slowly the white motorist was going and had to take extreme caution to avoid an accident because he would likely be blamed no matter who was at fault. In everyday interactions, a black person could not contradict a white person or speak unless spoken to first. A black person could not be the first to offer to shake a white person’s hand. A handshake could occur only if a white person so gestured, leaving many people having never shaken hands with a person of the other race. The consequences for the slightest misstep were swift and brutal. Two whites beat a black tenant farmer in Louise, Mississippi, in 1948, wrote the historian James C. Cobb, because the man “asked for a receipt after paying his water bill.”

It was against the law for a colored person and a white person to play checkers together in Birmingham. White and colored gamblers had to place their bets at separate windows and sit in separate aisles at racetracks in Arkansas. At saloons in Atlanta, the bars were segregated; Whites drank on stools at one end of the bar and blacks on stools at the other end, until the city outlawed even that, resulting in white-only and colored-only saloons. There were white parking spaces and colored parking spaces in the town square in Calhoun City, Mississippi. In one North Carolina courthouse, there was a white Bible and a black Bible to swear to tell the truth on. (pp. 44-45)

***

[In 1861] Florida heartily joined a new country whose cornerstone, according to the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” This new government, Stephens declared, “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” (pp. 58-59)

***

But the masses did not pour out of the South until they had something to go to. They got their chance when the North began courting them, hard and in secret, in the face of southern hostility, during the labor crisis of World War I. Word had spread like wildfire that the North was finally “opening up.” (p. 161)

***

When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time across the Atlantic. Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and could not be certain they would be able to make it out. In Brookhaven, Mississippi, authorities stopped a train with fifty colored migrants on it and sidetracked it for three days. In Albany, Georgia, the police tore up the tickets of colored passengers as they stood waiting to board, dashing their hopes of escape. A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out. In Savannah, Georgia, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where he or she was going. In Summit, Mississippi, authorities simply closed the ticket office and did not let northbound trains stop for the colored people waiting to get on. (p. 163)

***

Fewer than one out of five sharecroppers ever saw a profit at the end of the year. Of the few who got anything, their pay came to between $30 and $150 in the 1930s for a year of hard toil in the field, according to a leading Yale anthropologist of the era, or between nine and forty-eight cents a day. The remaining eighty percent either broke even, meaning they got nothing, or stayed in debt, which meant they were as bound to the planter as a slave was to his master. (p. 167)

***

Yet the hardened and peculiar institution of Jim Crow made the Great Migration different from ordinary human migrations. In their desperation to escape what might be considered a man-made pestilence, southern blacks challenged some scholarly assumptions about human migration. One theory had it that, due to human pragmatism and inertia, migrating people tend to “go no further from their homes in search of work than is absolutely necessary,” [British historian E. G.] Ravenstein observed.

“The bulk of migrants prefers a short journey to a long one,” he wrote. “The more enterprising long-journey migrants are the exceptions and not the rule.” Southern blacks were the exception. They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land. (p. 179)

***

Against nearly every assumption about the Migration, the 1965 census study found that the migrants of the 1950s—particularly those who came from towns and cities, as had George Starling and Robert Foster—had more education than even the northern white population they joined. (p. 262)

***

Overall, however, what was becoming clear was that, north or south, wherever colored labor was introduced, a rivalrous sense of unease and insecurity washed over the working-class people who were already there, an unease that was economically not without merit but rose to near hysteria when race and xenophobia were added to preexisting fears. The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races. The southern caste system that held down the wages of colored people also undercut the earning power of the whites around them, who could not command higher pay as long as colored people were forced to accept subsistence wages. (p. 317)

***

[George Starling] and his co-worker barely noticed that everyone else at the bar happened to be white as they regaled each other with stories from riding the rails. When it was time to go, they paid their tab and put their glasses down.

The bartender had said very little to them the whole time they were there. Now the bartender calmly picked up their glasses, and instead of loading them into a tray to be washed, he took them and smashed them under the counter. The sound of glass breaking on concrete startled George and his co-worker, even though this wasn’t the first time this had happened to them, just not at this bar, and it attracted the attention of other patrons.

“They do it right in front of us,” George said. “That’s the way they let us know they didn’t want us in there. As fast as you drink out of a glass and set it down, they break it.”

There were not colored or white signs in New York. That was the unnerving and tricky part of making your way through a place that looked free. You never knew when perfect strangers would remind you that, as far as they were concerned, you weren’t equal and might never be. (pp. 340-41)

***

“Even in the North, refugees were not always safe,” wrote Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy in the 1945 book Anyplace but Here. “One hard-working migrant was astonished when a detective from Atlanta approached him and informed him that he was wanted back home for ‘spitting on the sidewalk.’”(p. 367)

***

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the decline in property values and neighborhood prestige was a by-product of the fear and tension itself, sociologists found. The decline often began, they noted, in barely perceptible ways, before the first colored buyer moved in.

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped “in a futile attempt to attract white residents,” as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood’s future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties.

Thus many white neighborhoods began declining before colored residents even arrived, Hirsch noted. There emerged a perfect storm of nervous owners, falling prices, vacancies unfillable with white tenants or buyers, and a market of colored buyers who may not have been able to afford the neighborhood at first but now could with prices within their reach. The arrival of colored home buyers was often the final verdict on a neighborhood’s falling property value rather than the cause of it. (pp. 376-77)

***

[Martin Luther] King was running headlong into what the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called the Northern Paradox. In the North, Myrdal wrote, “almost everybody is against discrimination in general, but, at the same time, almost everybody practices discrimination in his own personal affairs”—that is, by not allowing blacks into unions or clubhouses, certain jobs, and white neighborhoods, indeed, avoiding social interaction overall.

“It is the culmination of all these personal discriminations,” he continued, “which creates the color bar in the North, and, for the Negro, causes unusually severe unemployment, crowded housing conditions, crime and vice. About this social process, the ordinary white Northerner keeps sublimely ignorant and unconcerned.” (p. 387)

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the-desolated-quill · 5 years

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Demons Of The Punjab - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Let us now look at our first non-Chibnall episode this series. Demons Of The Punjab, written by Vinay Patel.

Curious about her grandmother’s past, Yasmin persuades the Doctor to take them to India in 1947 only to discover that the man her grandmother is marrying isn’t her grandfather, but a Hindu man named Prem. What follows is quite possibly the most well written and emotionally charged Who historical story I think I’ve ever seen.

Honestly this comes as something of a relief. I confess when the giant alien bats showed up, screeching and teleporting all over the place like something out of a tacky horror film, I was worried. Chris Chibnall and Malorie Blackman showed remarkable restraint with their episode Rosa, focusing solely on Rosa Parks and the oppressive society she was forced to endure without letting the sci-fi elements intrude or distract from the narrative. With this in mind, an amateur production of ‘Attack of the Killer Bat People’ trouncing all over partitioned India doesn’t exactly seem like a good follow up to me. Thankfully they don’t go that route. Turns out that the Thijarians (not the Vaginas, as I first misheard them) are just a massive red herring. They’re not alien invaders. They’re just travelling psychopomps comforting the dead. Presumably they’re the basis for the numerous death deities that have appeared throughout many cultures and civilisations. It’s a nice idea. Granted the episode would have worked just as well without them, but it’s still a good twist on the monster of the week format nonetheless.

Patel quite rightly focuses on the characters and historical setting. Demons Of The Punjab is refreshing in more ways than one. It’s a historical, but it’s not set in Britain or America. Some people (let’s call them idiots) may complain that the show is getting ‘too PC’, but I for one am quite interested in the history of India. It’s about time we delved into the past of another country and another culture. New Who has spent so much time in Victorian London in recent years, I’m surprised the Doctor doesn’t just rent a holiday home there. It’s also nice to have an episode that isn’t afraid to point out that the British Empire was... well... a bit of a bastard, to put it mildly. The Moffat era in particular was very much guilty of romanticising British history (the most notable example being Winston Churchill, presented as a cuddly leader and the Doctor’s bezzie mate when in reality he was a colossal racist and arguably the very epitome of British imperialism in the early twentieth century). Patriots and anglophiles can’t help but think of Britain in positive terms, seeing the British Empire as some kind of noble ideal. The truth of the matter is the British Empire wasn’t some Utopian peace keeping force uniting the world. It was a bunch of white colonialists taking other people’s land and resources and not giving a tally-ho fuck what the ‘alien races’ thought.

The partition of India is quite possibly one of the most petty and irresponsible things we as a country have ever done. Crudely dividing the country into regions before picking up their ball and going home, leaving the native Indians to sort it out for themselves. What angers me is that I was never actually taught this in school. I learned about the partition of India years later through fucking Wikipedia. And you’d think this is something we ought to know. Like the Atlantic slave trade, this isn’t ancient history. This happened relatively recently and the after effects are still being felt today.

So not only am I’m glad we’ve got an episode like this, I’m also glad that Patel chooses to explore the partition of India in a very intelligent and respectful way. Like with previous episodes, Demons Of The Punjab is very intimate and small scale. It’s not about the Doctor combating a massive threat. It’s about how a massive threat affects the lives of this one family.

Demons Of The Punjab has a stellar cast to play Yasmin’s extended family. Amita Suman does an excellent job as the younger version of Yasmin’s grandmother Umbreen. Something this series has been really good at for the most part is finding that humanity at the core of the stories. It’s not about the aliens. It’s about the people. Demons is not about the space bats. It’s about this young woman struggling to compromise between committing to her Hindu fiance and staying faithful to her Muslim faith in the wake of rising political and societal tension, and Suman portrays this perfectly. It’s an incredibly powerful and moving performance and it’s her character you feel for the most.

Then there’s Shane Zaza as Prem, quite possibly the nicest guy in the fucking world and definitely didn’t deserve his final fate. He’s appalled by the rioting and infighting, saying how this wasn’t what he fought for in the war. Despite being confused and scared by the ‘demons’, he still accompanies the Doctor and Ryan and protects them from harm. But most importantly, he clearly loves Umbreen dearly, preparing to share and adapt his beliefs to hers and vice versa. Throughout the episode, Prem and Umbreen’s relationship is presented as the ideal. A love for the ages. How the world should be, transcending belief systems and cultural barriers. This could have become quite sickly in the wrong hands, bu thankfully the episode never over-eggs the pudding. We like this couple and we like Prem, which is what makes his death at the end one of the most heartbreaking in all of New Who and the fact that this comes at the hands of his own brother makes it all the more tragic.

Hamza Jeetoa’s performance as Manish was exceptional. From the start you know there’s something not quite right with him as he seems to buy into the India/Pakistan border quite enthusiastically, but I assumed (perhaps in my naivety) that the Doctor would persuade him to accept his new sister in law Umbreen over the course of the story. Of course that’s not the case. Like I said, the aliens are the red herring. The real villain is Manish. Except... it’s not. While Prem was out fighting for the Brits, a disillusioned and confused Manish was left alone, leaving him a prime target for radicalisation. So as disgusting and horrifying as his actions are, it’s hard to truly hate him because he’s not a bad person. You do see occasional glimpses of brotherly affection between him and Prem, a brief window into their relationship before the partition, and it’s this that humanises him and makes him an effective antagonist. Yes he’s killed people, yes he killed his own brother, yes his views are downright poisonous, but he is in many ways just another victim of this turbulent time. He’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of rigid belief systems and how easy it is to indoctrinate and radicalise the young and disenfranchised. Jeetoa does a great job selling this character without tipping over into panto. He’s not some rabid bigot foaming at the mouth. He’s a confused young man who has willingly bought into this anti-Islamic dogma because of his own frustrations toward the British, He feels like an actual person. It’s this that makes the ending truly shocking.

I don’t think there’s any need to talk about the main cast. They are predictably good. Jodie Whittaker continues to blow me away as the Doctor. Her eulogy at the wedding, her excitement and enthusiasm when celebrating the night before with Yaz and Umbreen, and her sorrow and disgust when Manish shoots Prem are all memorable moments showing Whittaker’s range as an actor. Graham and Ryan don’t have as much to do this episode, although they do still have their moments (the scene where Graham hugged Prem and told him what a good man he was made me cry. God, Bradley Walsh can act!). This really is Yasmin’s episode and it’s about time too. My one complaint I’ve had throughout this series so far has been that Yaz has felt largely superfluous. She’s not a bad character by any means. It’s a problem common with many of the ensemble casts Doctor Who has had over the years. There’s always at least one cast member reduced to being the spare part. So it was great to see Yaz finally get a chance in the spotlight and Mandip Gill rises to the occasion as she portrays her character’s internal conflict. Obviously she doesn’t want Prem to die. He’s a nice guy and her grandmother clearly loves him, but he’s not her grandfather. In order for Yaz to exist in the future, Prem has to die. I love episodes where the Doctor and his companions can’t interfere as they often serve as great moral dilemmas as well as the means of exploring internal strife. Watching Prem die, knowing she can’t change it for risk of damaging her own timeline, is painful and gut-wrenching, and Gill gives her best performance to date.

Demons Of The Punjab I think is my favourite episode so far this series because it shows just how flexible the Doctor Who format is and what kind of stories you can tell. This is a very human story that packs a massive dramatic punch and has great relevance to today. As I said, the effects of the partition of India are still being felt today and the radicalisation of young people is something we’ve sadly become all too familiar with (see ISIS and the alt-right). It’s what makes this episode’s central theme, to love and respect everyone regardless of cultural differences, all the more poignant. If Demons Of The Punjab teaches us anything, it’s that we could use a lot more Prems in the world right now.

#demons of the punjab #vinay patel #doctor who #thirteenth doctor #jodie whittaker #graham o'brien #bradley walsh #yasmin khan #mandip gill #ryan sinclair #tosin cole #chris chibnall #bbc #review #spoilers

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loretranscripts · 5 years

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Lore Episode 3: The Beast Within (Transcript) - 6th April 2015

tw: murder, rape, death of children, bodily mutilation, cannibalism, graphic descriptions of violence, ableist language, disease, werewolves

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Ask anyone in the mental health profession about full moons and you’ll get a surprising answer. They’ll respond with something that sounds incredibly like folklore and myth. The full moon has the power to bring out the crazy in people. We’ve believed this for a long time. We refer to unstable people as “lunatics”, a word that is Latin. It’s built from the root word luna, which means “moon”. And for centuries, has operated under the conviction that changes in the luna cycle can cause people to lose touch with reality. Just ask the parents of a young child and they’ll tell you tales of wild behaviour and out-of-the-ordinary disobedience at certain times of the month. Science tells us that just as the moon’s pull on the ocean creates tides that rise and fall in severity, so too does our planet’s first satellite tug on the water inside our bodies, changing our behaviour. As modern people, when we talk about the full moon we tend to joke about this insane, extraordinary behaviour. But maybe we joke to avoid the deeper truth, an idea that we are both frightened and embarrassed that we even entertain. For most of us, you see, the full moon conjures up an image that is altogether unnatural and unbelievable. That large, glowing, perfect circle in the night sky makes us think of just one thing: werewolves. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

Science has tried many times over the years to explain our obsession with the werewolf. One theory is a disease known as hypertrichosis, sometimes known as “wolfitis”. It’s a condition of excessive, unusual body hair growth, oftentimes covering the person’s entire face. Think Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. Psychologists actually have an official diagnosis in the DSM IV handbook known as “clinical lycanthropy”. It’s defined as a delusional syndrome where the patient believes they can transform into an animal, but the changes only take place in their mind, of course. Delusions, though, have to start somewhere. Patients who believe that they are Napoleon Bonaparte have some previous knowledge of who he was. I think it’s fair to assume that those who suffer from clinical lycanthropy have heard of werewolves before. It’s actually pretty easy to bump into the myth, thanks to modern popular culture. Werewolves have been featured in, or at least appeared in, close to 100 films in Hollywood since 1913.

One of the earliest mentions of something even resembling the modern werewolf can actually be found in the 2000-year-old writings of the Roman poet Vergil. In his Eclogue 9, written about 40BCE, he described a man named Moeris, who could transform himself into a wolf using herbs and poisons. About 50 years later, Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical novel called, appropriately, Satyricon, which I think is basically the equivalent of Stephen King writing a horror novel called “Frighticon”. In it, he tells the tale of a man named Niceros. In the story, Niceros was travelling with a friend, and when that friend suddenly took off his clothes, urinated in a circle and transformed into a wolf right before his eyes, before running off toward a large field of sheep. The next day, Niceros was told by the sheep-owner that one of the shepherds stabbed a wolf in the neck with a pitch fork. Later that day, Niceros noticed that his friend, now returned to the house, had a similar wound on his neck.

In the Greek myth of the god Zeus and an Arcadian king named Lycaon, Zeus took on the form of a human traveller. At one point in his journey he visited Arcadia, and during his time in that country, he visited the royal court. The king of the land, Lycaon, somehow recognised Zeus for who he truly was and tried, in true Greek form, of course, to kill him by serving him a meal of human flesh. But Zeus was a smart guy, after all, and he caught Lycaon in the act, throwing the mythological equivalent of a temper tantrum. He destroyed the palace, killed all 50 of the king’s sons with lightning bolts, and then of course cursed King Lycaon himself. The punishment? Lycaon would be doomed to spend the rest of his life as a wolf, presumably because wolves were known for attacking and eating humans, and he tried to serve human flesh. Most scholars believe that this legend is what gives birth to the term lycanthropy: lukos being the Greek word for wolf, and anthropos, the word for man.

Werewolves aren’t just a Greco-Roman thing. In the 13th century, the Norse recorded their mythological origins in something called the Völsunga saga. Despite their culture being separated from the Greeks by thousands of miles and many centuries, there are in fact tales of werewolves present in their histories. One of the stories in the Völsunga saga involves a father and son pair: Sigmund and Sinfjotli. During their travels, the two men came across a hut in the woods where they found two enchanted wolf skins. These skins had the power to change the wearer into a wolf, giving them all the characteristics that the beast was known for: power, speed, and cunning. The catch, according to the saga, was that once put on, the wolf pelt could only be taken off every 10 days. Undeterred, the father son duo each put on one of the wolf skins, and transform into the beasts. They decided to split up and go hunting in their new forms, but they made an arrangement that if either of them encountered a party of men over the certain size of seven, then they were supposed to howl for the other to come join them in the hunt. Sigmund’s son, however, broke his promise, killing off a hunting party of 11 men. When Sigmund discovered this, he fatally injured his son. After the god Odin intervened and healed him, both men took off the pelts and burned them. You see, from the very beginning, werewolves were a supernatural thing, a curse, a change in the very nature of humanity. They were ruled by cycles of time and feared by those around them.

Things get interesting when we go to Germany. In 1582, the country of Germany was being pulled apart by a war between Catholics and Protestants, and one of the towns that played host to both sides was the small town of Bedburg. Keep in mind that there were also still outbreaks of the Black Death, so this was an age of conflict and violence. People understood loss – they had become numb to it, and it would take something incredibly extraordinary to surprise them. First, there were cattle mutilations: farmers from the area surrounding Bedburg would find dead cattle in their fields. It started of infrequent, but grew to become a daily occurrence, something that went on for weeks. Cows that had been sent out to pasture were found torn apart. It was as if a wild animal had attacked them. Naturally, the farmers assumed it was wolves, but it didn’t stop there. Children began to go missing. Young women vanished from the main roads around Bedburg. In some cases their bodies were never found, but those that were had been mauled by something horribly violent. Finding your cattle disembowelled is one thing, but when it’s your daughter or your wife, well, it can cause panic, and fear, and so the community spiralled into hysteria.

Now, we think of historical European paranoia and we often think of witchcraft. The 15th and 16th centuries were filled with witch hunts: burnings, hangings, and an overwhelming hysteria that even spread across the Atlantic to the British colonies, where it destroyed more lives. The Witch Trails of Salem, Massachusetts are the most famous of those examples, but at the same time, Europe was also on fire with fear of werewolves. Some historians think that in France alone, some 30,000 people were accused of being werewolves, and some (hundreds, they say) were even executed for it, either by hanging or being burnt at the stake. You see, the fear of werewolves was real, and for the town of Bedburg, it was very real.

One report from this event tells of two men and a woman, who were travelling just outside the city walls. They heard a voice call out to them for help from within the trees beside the road, and one of the men stepped into the trees to give assistance. When he didn’t return, the second man entered the woods to find him, and he also didn’t return. The woman caught on, attempted to run, but something exited the woods and attacked her. The bodies of the men were later found, mangled and torn apart, but the woman’s never was. Later, villagers found severed limbs in the fields near Bedburg, limbs from the people who were missing. It was clear that something horrible was hunting them.

Another report tells of a group of children playing in a field near the cattle. As they played, something ran into the field and grabbed a small girl by the neck before trying to tear her throat out. Thankfully the high collar on her dress actually saved her life, and she managed to scream. Now, cows don’t like screaming apparently, and they began to stampede. Frightened by the cattle, the attacker let go of the girl and ran for the forest, and this was the last straw for the people of Bedburg. They took the hunt to the beast.

According to a pamphlet from 1589, the men of the town hunted for the creature for days. Accompanied by dogs and armed for killing, these brave men ventured into the forest and, finally, found it. In the end, it was the dogs that cornered the beast. Dogs are fast and they beat the men to their prey. When the hunters finally did arrive, they found the creature cornered. According to the pamphlet, the wolf transformed into a man right before their eyes. While the wolf had been just another beast, the man was someone they recognised. It was a wealthy, well-respected farmer from town named Peter Stubbe, sometimes recorded as Stumpp. Stubbe confessed to it all, and his story seemed to confirm their darkest fears. He told them that he had made a pact with the devil at the age of 12. The deal? In exchange for his soul, the devil would give him a plethora of worldly pleasures, but like most stories, a greedy heart is difficult to satisfy. Stubbe admitted to being a, and I quote, “wicked fiend, with the desire for wrong and destruction”, that he was “inclined to blood and cruelty”. Now, to sate that thirst, the devil had given him a magical belt of wolf skin. Putting it on, he claimed, would transform him into the monstrous shape of a wolf. Sound familiar?

He told the men that had captured him that he had taken off the belt in the forest, and some were sent back to retrieve it, but it was never found. Still, superstition and fear drove them to torture and interrogate the man, who confessed to decades of horrible, unspeakable crimes. Well-known around the town, Stubbe told his captors that he would often walk through Bedburg and wave to the families and friends of those he had killed. It delighted him, he said, that none of them suspected that he was the killer. Sometimes he would use these walks to pick out future victims, planning how he would get them outside the city walls, where he could, and I quote, “ravish and cruelly murder them”. Stubbe even admitted to going on killing sprees simply because he took pleasure in the bloodshed. He would kill lambs and goats and eat their raw flesh. He even claimed to have eaten unborn children, ripped straight from their mothers’ wombs.

The human mind is always solving problems, even when we’re asleep and unaware of it. The world is full of things that don’t always sit right with us, and in our attempt to deal with life we… rationalise. In more superstitious times it was easy to lean on old fears and legends. The Tuberculosis outbreaks of the 1800s led people to truly believe that the dead were sucking the life out of the living. The stories that gave birth to the vampire mythology also provided people with a way to process Tuberculosis and its horrible symptoms. Perhaps the story of the werewolf shows us that same phenomenon, but in reverse. Rather than creating stories to explain the mysteries of death, perhaps we created the story of the werewolf to help justify the horrors of life and human nature. The tale of Peter Stubbe sounds terrible, but when you hold it up to modern day serial killers, such as Jeffery Dahmer or Richard Trenton Chase, it’s par for the course. The difference between them and Stubbe is simply 400 years of modernisation. With the advent of electrical lights pushing away the darkness and global exploration exposing much of the world’s fears to be just myth, it’s become more and more difficult to blame our flaws on monsters. The beast, it turns out, has been inside us the whole time.

And Peter Stubbe? Well, the people of Bedburg executed him for his crimes. On October 31st, 1589, (Halloween, mind you) he was given what was thought to be a fair and just punishment. He was strapped, spread eagle and naked, to a large, wooden wheel, and then his skin was pealed off with red hot pinchers. They broke his arms and legs with the blunt end of an axe before finally turning the blade over, and chopping off his head. His body was burnt at the stake in front of the entire town, and then his torture wheel was mounted on a tall pole, topped with the statue of a wolf. On top of that, they placed his severed head. Justice, or just one more example of the cruelty of mankind? Perhaps in the end, we’re all really monsters, aren’t we?

Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can find a transcript of the show, as well as links to source material, at lorepodcast.com. Lore is a bi-weekly podcast, so be sure to check back in for a new episode every two weeks. And if you enjoy scary stories, I happen to write them. You can find a full list of my supernatural thrillers, available in paperback and ebook format, at aaronmahnke.com/novels. Thanks for listening.

#lore podcast #podcasts #aaron mahnke #werewolves #peter stubbe #germany #peter stumpp #vergil #eclogues #serial killer #folklore #transcripts #3

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