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Javier E

Trump Unites Left and Right Against Troop Plans, but Puts Off Debate on War Aims - The ... - 0 views

  • Mr. Trump, he said, wanted to end these military campaigns so he could focus on the economic and geopolitical contest with China, which he views as America’s biggest foreign threat. “This is not about a return to isolationism,” Mr. Bannon said. “It’s the pivot away from the humanitarian expeditionary mentality of the internationalists.”
  • While Mr. Trump’s critics would shrink from that language, military analysts, former officials and diplomats acknowledge there is a case for withdrawing from both conflicts.Open-ended but limited troop deployments are not likely to alter the battlefield in either Afghanistan, where the Taliban now holds more ground than at any other time since 2001, or in Syria, where the Islamic State’s territorial grip has been broken and President Bashar al-Assad, with the help of Russia and Iran, has largely stymied the rebellion.
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  • The situation is even starker in Afghanistan. Last month, a year after Mr. Trump grudgingly authorized the deployment of nearly 4,000 troops, bringing the total number there to 14,000, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., admitted that the Taliban “are not losing.”“If someone has a better idea than we have right now, which is to support the Afghans and put pressure on the terrorist groups in the region, I’m certainly open to dialogue on that,” General Dunford said at a panel sponsored by The Washington Post earlier this month.
  • “Despite holding most of eastern Syria for two years, including the oil-fields, the U.S. and its Syrian allies have extracted exactly zero political concessions from Assad,” said Mr. Ford, who now teaches at Yale and is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Assad will wait us out.”
  • Announcing troop withdrawals will force the United States to rethink long-term military commitments that have little public support and are no longer effective. It could also force the Afghans and Syrians to confront their own deep-rooted problems, without the presence of foreign soldiers who often delay the day of reckoning.“I, for one, think the decision to withdraw is sound and wise,” said Robert S. Ford, the last American ambassador to Syria
  • During a meeting in the Situation Room in July 2017, when Mr. Mattis and other advisers were pitching their plan to deploy more troops, an angry Mr. Trump lashed out. “We’re losing,” he declared, according to a person in the room.
  • Those frustrations are widely held by NATO allies who have been America’s partners in Afghanistan.“It’s been getting increasingly harder to explain to European publics why we need to stay there,” said Tomas Valasek, a former NATO ambassador from Slovakia who is the director of Carnegie Europe. “Perhaps Trump’s tendency to disrupt things, including by withdrawing from Afghanistan, may not be such a bad idea after all.”
  • .Afghanistan’s leaders, mired in political infighting and corruption, need to see the partial pullout as a sign that they don’t have much time, he said.But that is not without risk, Mr. Mir warned, because if the Taliban returned, it would haunt the Americans “that they were defeated by a ragtag force after 17 years of fighting them.”However precipitously Mr. Trump acted, he was channeling the same reservations that Mr. Obama had. Both presidents questioned the open-ended nature of these campaigns, pressed their advisers to define success, and faced the problem of “mission creep.” Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, recently vowed that the United States would not leave Syria as long as Iran, or its proxies, were active there.“Suggesting they stay until Iranian influence was gone was an unachievable goal and a recipe for potential escalation for a deployment that the Trump people have never been particularly transparent about,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama.Expanding the mission to resisting Iran, he pointed out, also “has no distinct congressional authorization.”
  • Mr. Rhodes said he supported the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Syria. But like many former officials, from Democratic and Republican administrations, he harshly criticized how Mr. Trump made the decision, without consulting allies or Congress, or even warning his generals
  • Even the president’s supporters did not defend him. James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation who worked on Mr. Trump’s transition, said he gave the president credit for not just accepting the status quo.But he added, “It’s not really clear what the plan is in Syria. It’s not clear how we protect our interests after we leave, and it’s not clear how it fits into our regional strategy.”
Javier E

We killed the cigarette. What we got in return is mango-flavored nicotine in 'party mod... - 0 views

  • The secret to Juul's controversial success may be a twist on the age-old story of smoking as an outlet for teenage rebellion. The popularity of Juul seems to grow in tandem with the uproar: Sales of Juul are up more than 700 percent from a year ago, according to Nielsen data.
  • American puffing peaked in 1970, when almost half of all adults smoked cigarettes
  • “All of our smoking actual tobacco has gone way, way down,” noted Brian Maslowski, an instructor of alcohol, drug and tobacco seminars for Fairfax County Public Schools. The kids he encounters Juuling, he says, are “very much aware of the risks and consequences of smoking.
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  • Even the surgeon general’s landmark warning in the late 1960s that linked smoking to cancer couldn’t get Americans to quit. Instead, they gave it up at a glacial pace — by 2016 just 15.5 percent of adults smoked, according to the most recent CDC data, and it was largely thanks to a culture shift that cast the small circles of smokers who’d gather to puff outside of office buildings and bars as deeply uncool. They were addicts.
  • And Juul kept the nicotine and chucked out all the rest — the thin casing of paper that always seemed to fall apart in the bottom of our purses, the flakes of tobacco, the tar, the carbon dioxide, the smell, the very form of the cigarette.
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  • To Allan M. Brandt, a historian and author of "The Cigarette Century," Juul is anything but new and different. "It represents the cultural norms and notions of the cigarette, which was very much youth-oriented," he said. "It was kind of forbidden; it was extremely cool."
  • Could it be that with Juul, it’s just a different generation simply doing what young people have always done — testing boundaries, sneaking independence? Teen pregnancy is down, and marijuana is practically normalized. Perhaps Juul is just the new boogeyman to replace all the old ones.
  • “It spread like wildfire, for two reasons,” he said. “The first reason is the flashy flavors like creme brulee. The flavors are responsible for bringing the kids in, the nicotine keeps them.”
  • “I think the history of this tells me, don’t trust these industries,” said Brandt, the smoking historian. “Juul can say, ‘We’re not interested in kids; we’re going to fight the use of this in kids.’ But with flavors like mango, and cool cucumber. . . .” Cigarette makers have always said they didn’t want kids to smoke, he continued. But bad news about children lighting up on the schoolyard, he said, “was always great news for the tobacco companies.
Javier E

Claudia Rankine, John Lucas Document Blondness in 'Stamped' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • naturally fair hair is uncommon: An estimated 2 percent of the world’s population—and 5 percent of white Americans—is actually towheaded. Blond hair is the result of a genetic mutation typically associated with northern Europeans, but it has also been seen in a small percentage of Aboriginal Australians, Northern Africans, and Asians.
  • There are a multitude of reasons why someone might choose blond. For subjects featured in Stamped, it was a way to cover gray hair, to look younger, to be treated better, to look better, or to look more like themselves:
  • for the most part, interviewees didn’t mention the connection between whiteness and blondness until Rankine prompted them. “I think part of our orientation as Americans has been to substitute the word ‘white’ with ‘people,’” Rankine says. “Consequently, when they think of blondness, they're thinking of the hair color of ‘people,’ people who are valued. But they don’t understand that that value attaches to whiteness.”
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  • Blondness, then, exists as a complicated form of self-expression. It can signal youth, beauty, privilege, and conformity. But it can also represent rebellion, independence, and the demand to be looked at and respected. It’s a choice that’s both distinctly personal and deeply intertwined with what society has taught people to value. Rankine and Lucas have a term for that: complicit freedom
Javier E

Republican Support for Kavanaugh Is Driven by Fear - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Trumpism, at its core, is a rebellion against changes in American society that undermine traditional hierarchies. It’s based on the belief that these changes, rather than promoting fairness for historically oppressed groups, actually promote “political correctness”: the oppression of white, native-born Christian men.
  • From 2013 to 2018, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of Republicans who said that in the U.S. “there is a lot of discrimination against women” fell by half, from 28 to 14 percent. (Among Democrats during the same period it rose from 55 to 71 percent). By contrast, from 2012 to 2016, the percentage of Republicans who said men face a “great deal” or a “lot” of discrimination doubled, from 9 to 18 percent. (Among Democrats it declined slightly). And in 2016, according to PRRI, 68 percent of Donald Trump supporters said American society is becoming “too soft and feminine.”
  • If you’re already inclined to believe that America increasingly victimizes men simply for acting like men, the accusations against Kavanaugh confirm your fears. First, because if these charges can sink Kavanaugh, they can sink lots of other men, too. “Is there any man in this room that wouldn’t be subjected to such an allegation?” asked Republican Representative Steve King of Iowa earlier this week.
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  • The #MeToo movement has established just how pervasive sexual harassment and assault are, and conservatives suspect that Democrats and the media will weaponize such allegations to destroy as many prominent Republicans as possible. Which means that if the GOP can’t hold the line on Kavanaugh, it faces an endless series of Kavanaugh-style scandals.
  • Even more alarming for many conservatives is that, until recently, Kavanaugh’s alleged offenses would have carried few consequences. Liberals have moved the goalposts.
  • every new allegation convinces conservatives that they might as well defend Kavanaugh now rather than fight the next cultural battle after having ceded precious ground.
  • Conservatives, by contrast, fear a kind of cultural delegitimization—a liberal rewriting of America’s moral code so that conservatives are forever deemed too sexist or racist to hold jobs like associate justice of the Supreme Court.
Javier E

The Cancer in the Constitution - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The amendment itself is not the problem. Yes, it’s vague, poorly worded, lacking nuance. But the intent is clear with the opening clause: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”
  • The purpose is security — against foreign invaders and domestic insurrectionists. President George Washington relied on a well-regulated militia from three states to put down the Tea Partyers of his day, the tax-evading lawbreakers in the Whiskey Rebellion.
  • the Second Amendment became a cancer because lawmakers stopped making laws to match the technological advances of weaponry. They did it to appease a lobby of gunmakers. And that cowering to a single special interest shows how the cancer has spread to the democracy itself, making it nearly impossible for majority will to be exercised.
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  • . The Supreme Court, though it ruled 5-4 in the 2008 Heller case that an individual has the right to own a gun unconnected to service in a militia, has left the door open to sensible regulation.“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited,” the court wrote in that case. “It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever for whatever purpose.”
  • The disgraced former cable pundit Bill O’Reilly said all the recent carnage is “the price of freedom.” But it’s not the price of freedom in Canada or Japan or England. It’s the price of freedom only in the United States, where mass killings have surged. In every other free country, sanity has prevailed.
  • It’s a no-brainer to pass a law designed to keep people from turning their AKs into machine guns with the so-called bump stocks. But it was also a no-brainer to restrict people on terrorism watch lists from buying guns, as was proposed after the Orlando slaughter of 49 people last year. It failed.
Javier E

Ralph Northam and Virginia's 400-year history of slavery, segregation and racial oppres... - 0 views

  • Although slavery and then racism were eventually widespread across what became the United States, it was in Virginia where the so-called peculiar institution was born, where it was codified in law, and where the most famous slave-led rebellion in America, the Nat Turner uprising of 1831, occurred.
  • There, too, reverence for slavery’s defenders and monuments to its military heroes still haunt public spaces and dialogue, and memorialize a time when the country was ripped in two
  • In 1860, more slaves lived in Virginia — 490,000 — than in any other state in the Union, according to census data. The year before, in what was then Harpers Ferry, Va., the white abolitionist, John Brown, headed the doomed slave insurrection that helped spark the Civil War
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  • - 1705: The Virginia General Assembly passes a law that made it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, for a free white person to marry a black person — to prevent “that abominable mixture and spurious issue.” The law went on to state that if a slave happened to be killed while being punished, no crime would be attached, and the murder would be viewed “as if such incident had never happened.”
  • - 1877 to 1950: An estimated 76 lynchings of African Americans take place in Virginia. This is far fewer than the 500-plus in both Georgia and Mississippi, according to Encyclopedia Virginia, but equally as brutal
  • - 1956: Segregationist Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia heads what comes to be called the “Massive Resistance” movement to block court-ordered integration of Virginia’s public schools. Across the state, schools shut down rather than integrate and instead set up private schools for whites.
  • - 1959: Virginia’s Prince Edward County closes its school system rather than integrate. The county’s schools remained closed until forced by the Supreme Court to reopen in 1964. But many students had already been denied education for five years, and many never recovered from the loss.
Javier E

James Comey: Take down the Confederate statues now - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • White people designed blackface to keep black people down, to intimidate, mock and stereotype. It began during the 19th century and wasn’t about white people honoring the talent of black people by dressing up to look like them. It was about mocking them and depicting them as lazy, stupid and less than fully human. It was a tool of oppression. As a college kid in Virginia during the 1980s, I knew that and so did my classmates. But a whole lot of white people seem to not know that history or understand why blackface is so offensive, whether it’s practiced by a college student or a new doctor
  • The turmoil in Virginia — where I have lived most of my adult life, including nine years in Richmond — may do some good if it reminds white people that a river of oppression runs through U.S. history, deep and wide, down to today.
  • There is no doubt that Virginia’s leaders need to be held accountable for their personal history, but every Virginia leader is responsible for the racist symbols that still loom over our lives.
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  • The towering likenesses of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson weren’t put up to celebrate history or heritage; they were put up as a message: The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution aren’t going to help you black folks because the South has risen from that humiliation. Jim Crow — a name rooted in blackface mockery — is king.
  • No, the statues were put up by white people, beginning in the 1890s, to remind black people that, despite all that nonsense of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, as well as the so-called Reconstruction, we are back, and you are back down.
  • The Confederate statues of Richmond’s Monument Avenue weren’t erected to honor the service of brave warriors. Those soldiers had been dead for decades before the statues went up
  • If you doubt that well-documented history — if you are tempted to buy the “heritage, not hate” rhetoric — ask yourself this question: “Where are the statues of James Longstreet?
  • Longstreet committed two unforgivable sins in the eyes of white supremacists: He criticized Lee’s war leadership, and he led an African American militia to put down an 1874 white rebellion in Louisiana. That’s why this central figure in Civil War history is not depicted among the other Confederate statues in Richmond.
  • The statues were about only a certain kind of heritage, just as blackface was about a certain kind of storytelling. It was about hate, not history or art.
  • If Virginia’s leaders want to atone for a troubling legacy, changing state law so Richmond’s statues no longer taunt the progress of our country would be a good place to start
manhefnawi

James Edward, the Old Pretender | claimant to English and Scottish thrones | Britannica... - 0 views

  • he made several halfhearted efforts to gain his crown
  • At his birth it was widely and erroneously believed that he was an impostor
  • When the Protestant ruler William of Orange, stadtholder of Holland, deposed James II in 1688, the infant prince was taken to France, where his father set up a court in exile
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  • James’s adherence to Roman Catholicism caused the English Parliament to pass a bill of attainder against him in 1701
  • he was driven away by the British before he could land
  • In 1708 the Pretender set out in French ships to invade Scotland
  • that he renounce Roman Catholicism and become an Anglican in order to be designated Queen Anne’s heir to the throne of England
  • He passed the remainder of his life in or near Rome
  • Charles Edward precipitated one last, futile Jacobite rebellion in Britain in 1745
Javier E

A New Generation of Activists Confronts the Extinction Crisis | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • the unarrested progress of climate change and environmental degradation are forcing us to stretch our imaginations beyond specific narratives of loss. We face not just the collapse of particular habitats or particular ecosystems but, as Elizabeth Kolbert documented five years ago, in “The Sixth Extinction,” a vast, general collapse.
  • a mass extinction will profoundly affect the living things likely to survive it, including us.
  • The consequences of losing obscure insects and plant life—uncharismatic microflora and fauna, not polar bear or Bengal tigers—are harder to conceptualize. The report’s authors have taken pains to insure we try anyway. “Nature, through its ecological and evolutionary processes, sustains the quality of the air, fresh water and soils on which humanity depends, distributes fresh water, regulates the climate, provides pollination and pest control and reduces the impact of natural hazards,”
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  • The group has previously estimated that, in the Americas, nature itself—animals, plants, soil, water, all of it—is worth about twenty-four trillion dollars to us, an implausibly specific figure that makes the costs of degradation both more and less concrete.
  • “I think fundamentally we’ve got to get the message across that this is a crisis for humanity that could signal the end of human civilization as we know it. It’s not about animals somewhere off in the Arctic. It’s about the life that we lead, and whether we can keep leading it, and the chaos and violence that could ensue if we don’t do something immediately.”
  • “Even as someone who is basically an alarmist, it seemed really up in your face,” Wallace-Wells said of the group’s name and messaging. “But I also think, like, you kind of can’t argue with the results.”
  • Extinction Rebellion considers climate change and looming mass extinctions as intersecting but separate and potentially competing issues. In a statement last week, in response to the I.P.B.E.S. report, the group said that “too much of the focus has been on greenhouse gases and climate change. We also face an ecological crisis—the sixth mass extinction—which is as dangerous for our planet as climate change.” Jonathan Franzen said much the same, in this magazine, in 2015, describing climate change as a “usefully imponderable” problem compared to the threat of mass extinctions.
  • “There’s places where you’re losing habitat because temperatures are increasing, climate ranges are shifting north,
  • One third of the planet right now is in production of agriculture, and only about half of that is actually agriculture that has any kind of mind for the wildlife-habitat benefits that could be provided by just doing things slightly differently.”
  • “We’re trying to convince folks that, like, if we save nature, we save ourselves,” he continued. “If you have healthy habitats, we have healthy wildlife populations with clean water—all of that can help reduce emissions.”
  • Environmental groups insist that the sage grouse, just one of the countless bird species now thought to be at risk, really matters, and not only because undermining protections for it would be a boon for the fossil-fuel industries.
  • “It’s not just the sage grouse, right?” O’Mara said. “It’s the pronghorn. It’s the pygmy rabbit, the sagebrush vole. There’s a series of smaller species and bigger species that—if the sage grouse is healthy, that means the bigger ecosystem is doing pretty well. There’s three hundred and fifty other species that are likely doing O.K. if this one indicator species is doing O.K.”
  • the reality is that you have folks in both parties that deeply care about wildlife.”
  • We could all be doing more, but there’s maybe no greater separation between Democrats and Republicans today than on climate and pollution.”
  • Unlike climate change, the extinction crisis offers no clear targets to race toward or timelines to stick to. But addressing both will require, instead, a million revolutions, large and small, in the way we interact with and think about the natural world.
Javier E

Denmark Election Is Fueled by Anger on Climate and Immigration - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It was the sort of campaign appearance that Mette Frederiksen, leader of the left-leaning Social Democrats, would have ordinarily considered friendly terrain — a gathering of environmentally minded students in her hometown, Aalborg, in Denmark. Except the students demanded whether Ms. Frederiksen knew the carbon footprint of the red roses her party gave away at campaign stops.She didn’t. And the students — who also criticized her climate policy for failing to mention the Paris accord — didn’t let her forget it.
  • “We want action. Something must happen,” said Mathilde Christiansen, a senior.
  • Four years ago, climate change barely registered as an election concern in Denmark. But in a nation that juts into the North and Baltic Seas, polls now show that 46 percent of voters rank climate change as their top concern, compared to 27 percent in 2017.
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  • Mr. Madsen, the political analyst, said that many parties were only recently waking up to the climate rebellion, which is happening among the broader electorate as well as among students and other younger voters.
  • In a recent survey of 9,000 Danish respondents, more than 50 percent said they were willing to make “significant reductions” in consumption and wealth to mitigate the climate problem, while four out of five predicted that future generations would suffer from environmental change.
  • “I was doubting if I could allow myself to have children in this world which could collapse in 30 to 40 years,” Frederik Sandby, 26, said.
  • Pia Kjaersgaard, a leader of the Danish People’s Party and the speaker of Parliament, recently dismissed environmentally focused voters as “climate fools,” while her party’s chairman, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, warned that critics who criticized the agricultural sector for its carbon emissions were guilty of “climate hysteria.”
  • Martin Krasnik, editor in chief of Weekendavisen, a weekly newspaper, said their appearance on the scene was part of a trend. “For 30 years, everybody’s been moving to the right, right, right,” he said
  • Figures show the number of asylum seekers has actually dropped to the lowest level in Denmark in a decade. Even as the Danish People’s Party warns that the Social Democrats could loosen immigration policies, the reality is that both parties have largely supported the tougher line in parliamentary votes in recent years.
  • Ms. Frederiksen, the leader of the Social Democrats, has been ahead in the polls and has said that she would mostly maintain a tough stance on migrants, creating a highly unusual policy mix for a European left-wing party. She said such an approach was a necessity, “if we want this society to function.”
  • Mr. Madsen, the analyst, noted that the tactics could provide a template. “What we’re seeing is a laboratory for what the center-left can be,” he said.
oliviaodon

The War in Syria Is Getting More Complicated - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The Middle East is a “troubled place,” President Donald Trump said Friday night as he described his decision to use America’s “righteous power” in a retaliatory attack against government targets in Syria following a suspected chemical attack there.
  • Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seems to have won the civil war in his country—but that doesn’t mean peace is coming. In fact, the conflict seems to be escalating—fueled by the many outside powers who have joined the Syrian battlefield with interests of their own.
  • Over the seven years of Syria’s war, it has sucked in numerous other countries, who have attempted to shape the conflict with every tool from bombing to mercenaries to special operators to weapons shipments to money. The war has grown ever more complicated and more deadly over time, and Syria’s future is now largely being determined outside of its borders.
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  • The United States is in Syria mainly because of ISIS.
  • Iran is in Syria to protect the Assad regime, and also to use its proxies to menace its archenemy Israel from a neighboring country.
  • Prior to the rise of ISIS in 2014, the United States generally sought to contain the conflict, as efforts at international diplomacy failed to resolve it. The Obama administration advocated for Assad to step aside, but was reluctant to send weapons or funds to the rebels opposing him, out of fear that they would fall into the hands of Islamists and radical jihadists among them. In 2012, Obama also famously set a “red line” regarding chemical weapons, saying that their use would change his calculus on U.S. strategy there. But when Assad used sarin gas on civilians in 2013, Obama opted, instead of using force, for an agreement with Russia to destroy Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons. The U.S. started bombing Syria for the first time a year later, hitting not regime targets but targets associated with ISIS. It has continued bombing ever since.President Trump recently said the U.S. would leave Syria “very soon”—even as his military advisers were planning to send additional troops. By the time he spoke, the U.S. presence in the country had grown to some 2,000 troops; news reports say Trump wants them out within six months.Then came the suspected chemical attack of last weekend, to which Trump retaliated with strikes against the regime, as he did to a similar attack last year. This means the United States has once again expanded its mission beyond counterterrorism.
  • Russia is in Syria to protect the Assad regime from rebels it sees as terrorists, and project influence in the Middle East. Its military intervention in September 2015 ensured Assad would not only reverse his losses, but regain much of Syria. America’s scattershot approach to Syrian policy helped, as did the metastatic spread of ISIS that created a common enemy for both the pro- and anti-Assad camps.  
  • European countries like France and Britain are also in Syria because of ISIS. These countries’ policies have hewed largely to those of the United States
  • Saudi Arabia is in Syria—primarily by financing the rebellion—to oppose Iran.
  • Israel is in Syria to oppose Iran. For years, its border with Syria was its quietest frontier—despite its poor relationship with Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad. But Israel has watched Iran’s growing influence there with alarm.
  • Turkey is in Syria because of the Kurds.
Javier E

Why conservative magazines are more important than ever - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • political magazines, of any persuasion, can be at their worst when ideological team spirit is strongest.
  • For conservative magazines, the years after Sept. 11, 2001, when patriotism seemed to demand loyalty to the White House, were such a time. “We did allow ourselves to become house organs for the Republican Party and the conservative movement,” says American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher, who worked at National Review from 2002 to 2003. “I would have denied it at the time, but that really happened.”
  • This also made many conservatives reluctant to confront the flaws of George W. Bush, even years after his presidency. “What did we think about compassionate conservatism? About No Child Left Behind? About the Iraq War? The truth is a lot of conservatives thought they were basically a mistake and badly considered,”
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  • I think that was something the right had failed to wrestle with. They hadn’t had those conversations.”
  • right-of-center magazines have been debating and reassessing the soul of their political philosophy. Trumpism has torn down the conservative house and broken it up for parts. Conservative magazines are working to bring a plausible intellectual order to this new reality — and figure out what comes next.
  • “I’ve been a big critic of mainstream-media ideological blinders and biases, and I still am,” he said. “But we also have a president who lies aggressively, who lies casually, who lies about things that matter in huge ways and about things that don’t matter at all.”
  • Goldberg and writers Jay Nordlinger and Kevin D. Williamson are perhaps the most conspicuous members of National Review’s anti-Trump camp.
  • Hayes hopes that when a reader of the liberal magazine the Nation or a watcher of MSNBC seeks out an “intellectually honest conservative take,” that person will go to the Weekly Standard.
  • Kristol said he was reluctant to assess the present-day magazine as a whole, but he agreed that such a change was possible. “I feel now like I was unconsciously constraining the ways I was thinking,” he said. “You had friends. You had allies. You didn’t want to look too closely at the less savory parts of them.”
  • While the Weekly Standard has generally reflected a conventionally hawkish Republican worldview, it has also been willing to entertain varying political outlooks, with its writers landing in different places on Trump and many other matters. Labash, for instance, never hid his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s a magazine, not a cult,” he says. “You’re free to think freely.”
  • Goldberg told me that he had been spared any pressure from his employers to line up with the White House — “not a peep from a soul” at AEI or National Review — but that other employers were less tolerant. “One of the things I have much less respect for is Conservatism Inc.,” he said. “When the real histories of this period are done, one of the more important points is that institutions, both in the media and the think- tank universe, that are dependent on really large donor bases, they were among the first to give way.”
  • In response, Hayes has increased the magazine’s focus on reporting, he said, less for the purpose of winning debates than to rescue a sense of shared premises. “We thought it was important to focus on reporting and facts and try to determine what the facts are, so that we can have a big debate about policies we should pursue as a country based on a common understanding of those facts,”
  • Krein seemed more sanguine than most conservative intellectuals I met, viewing the changed policy discourse as a good in itself. “We have an honest question — what the role of the nation-state is,” Krein said. “This is a world of nation-states, but we no longer have any positive rationale for them. Those questions need to be worked out.”
  • Most of the magazine’s writers are somewhere in between. “We have a number of writers who are vehemently anti-Trump; I’m one of them,” says National Review Online editor Charles C.W. Cooke. “That doesn’t mean he can’t do anything right. That would be to throw my brain away.”
  • “One of the giant ironies of this whole phenomenon for us is that Trump represents a cartoonish, often exaggerated, version of the direction we wanted to see the party go in,” Lowry said. “Trump was in a very different place on regulation and trade, but we had been widening the lens of mainstream conservatism and arguing that the party needed to be more populist.”
  • “National Review has absolutely become more interesting,” says Helen Andrews, an essayist who has written for nearly all of the publications mentioned in this article. “When Trump won, I thought that’s it. National Review is done. There’s no way they can bounce back. But it turns out that all the folks over there that I thought were peacetime consiglieres were actually ready to seize the moment.”
  • Other contributors, like Dennis Prager and Victor Davis Hanson, reliably line up behind Trump, arguing he’s the only defense against an overpowering left.
  • Merry’s hope, in the face of what he feels are increasingly unfavorable odds, is that Trump will fulfill some of his promises. Assessing that will be one of the main goals of the magazine in the coming years. “We’re interested in the Trump constituency,” Merry says. “The question for us is whether Trump is proving worthy of his voters.”
  • One curse of the American Conservative, starting with Iraq, has been to serve as an unheeded voice in the face of indifferent or hostile elite opinion. In 2011, Larison was sounding repeated warnings against intervening in Libya, and for several years, before more famous names took notice, he was a lonely voice against the Saudi war in Yemen.
  • Back in June 2016, the magazine ran a cover story by McConnell, “Why Trump Wins,” which argued that globalism vs. nationalism was the new defining issue in our politics and that GOP elites would be unable to “put the lid on the aspirations Trump has unleashed.”
  • A sense of the political power of cultural conversations likewise inspired former Senate staffer Ben Domenech, now 36, to launch the Federalist in the fall of 2013
  • Each of them is playing a distinct role on the right.
  • Modern Age, founded by conservative luminary Russell Kirk in 1957 and operated by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, takes what may be the most high-toned approach to politics, with many academic contributors, and McCarthy hopes to see its pages synthesizing ideas from different strains of conservatism.
  • The National Interest, co-founded in 1985 by the late Irving Kristol, father of Bill, remains devoted to foreign-policy realism, offering thoughtful articles on what role the United States should play on a changed world stage.
  • National Affairs, founded by former George W. Bush policy staffer Yuval Levin in 2009 as a venue in which conservative policy could be considered more deeply, spent the Obama years offering broad philosophical articles along with wonkier explorations of policymaking, from housing to public broadcasting. This continues, but after the rise of Trump, the journal has become even more introspective, running articles with titles like “Redeeming Ourselves” and “Is the Party Over?”
  • These publications are highly unlikely to affect the course of Trump, but, by making plausible sense of this moment sooner rather than later, they may affect the course of his successors.
  • Two surprising stars of the Trump era have been the Claremont Review of Books and the religious journal First Things. It was in the normally restrained Claremont Review of Books that someone going by the name “Publius Decius Mus” (later revealed to be Michael Anton) published “The Flight 93 Election,” an influential essay arguing that the election of Trump, however extreme the risks, was the only hope of preventing a complete surrender to the cultural left.
  • The trajectory of First Things, a journal of religion and public life founded in 1990, has been even more striking. Its editor, R.R. Reno, contributed to the “Against Trump” issue of National Review but became increasingly frustrated by what he felt was the failure of his fellow conservatives to understand the nature of the rebellion taking place. Eventually, Reno wound up signing on to a “Statement of Unity” in support of Trump by a group called Scholars & Writers for America. First Things is now devoting itself to understanding the altered political and cultural landscape. “The conservative intellectual infrastructure is like a city after the neutron bomb goes off,” says Reno. “There’s a whole network of ideas, and it turns out there are no voters for those ideas.”
  • The monthly conservative magazine the New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball, may devote the bulk of its pages to reviews of things like symphonies or art exhibits, but it was also among the first journals to take Trump seriously and understand, as contributor James Bowman put it in October 2015, that Trump spoke for “those whom the progressives have sought to shut out of decent society, which encompasses a much larger universe than that of the movement conservatives.”
  • Commentary, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee — from which it separated in 2007, becoming a stand-alone nonprofit — has always balanced its forays into politics with grander musings on Western civilization, Judaism and high culture. This seems to be a successful combination in the Trump era, because the circulation, according to Podhoretz, has risen by over 20 percent since the 2016 election. Podhoretz, who has edited the magazine since 2009 (his father, Norman Podhoretz, edited it from 1960 to 1995), is known for a prickly and combative approach to public life
  • “It may be that Commentary is uniquely suited to the weirdness of this position because it has been a countercultural publication for close to 50 years. It is a Jewish publication on the right. It is a conservative publication in a liberal Jewish community. It remains a journal with literary, cultural and intellectual interests, which makes it a minority in the world of conservative opinion, which tends not to focus on the life of the cultural mind.”
  • Commentary has had several high-profile articles in the past year. In February 2017, it published “Our Miserable 21st Century,” by Nicholas N. Eberstadt, who argued that the economic insecurity of Americans spiked after 2000 and never recovered.
  • Many of the smallest conservative journals are unadorned and low in circulation. But, in keeping with the rule that what’s in the wilderness today can be most influential tomorrow, they too are awash in fresh ideas. “There’s still a pretty substantial community that relies on these publications as a channel of communications within the conservative neural network,” observes Daniel McCarthy, editor of one such journal, Modern Age. “They’re even more relevant today than they were in 2012.”
  • Domenech told me he started to envision a new kind of conservative opinion site after observing that more and more areas of our culture — movies, talk shows, sports — were becoming politicized.
  • The staff of the Federalist is majority female, half millennial, and a quarter minority, according to Domenech, and youthfulness was reflected in the publication’s design
  • By engaging in pop-culture debates, going on television, and focusing on engagement with writers and voices outside the conservative sphere, the Federalist hopes to reach audiences that might normally be dismissive
  • Conservative magazines, Domenech said, had been mistaken to think they spoke for voters on the right. “This battle was not over whether we’re going to have a Chamber of Commerce agenda or a constitutionalist agenda,” Domenech said. “It left out this huge swath of people who weren’t interested in either of those things.”
  • As much as their contributors may differ in opinion or even dislike one another, what unites these magazines — and distinguishes them from right-wing outlets like Breitbart — is an almost quaint belief in debate as an instrument of enlightenment rather than as a mere tool of political warfare.
  • “There’s an argument on part of the right that the left is utterly remorseless and we need to be like that,” says Lowry. “That’s the way you lose your soul and you have no standards.”
  • “You want to be a revolutionary on the right?” asks Labash. “Tell the truth. Call honest balls and strikes. That’s become pretty revolutionary behavior in these hopelessly tribal times.”
  • With so many Americans today engaged in partisan war, any publication with a commitment to honesty in argument becomes a potential peacemaker. It also becomes an indispensable forum for working out which ideas merit a fight in the first place. This is what, in their best moments, the conservative magazines are now doing.
malonema1

What Makes a Country Great? Meet Haiti's People. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • When I was growing up in Gonaives, Haiti, we didn’t have a toilet. We had a latrine, an outhouse in the back of our yard where we went to the bathroom. A literal “shithole.”By Western standards of modernity, you could say the same of Haiti. Our roads aren’t great. Our politicians are corrupt. The late dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, a.k.a. Baby Doc, stole hundreds of millions. His wedding famously cost $2 million. That was a lot of money in 1980. Today, the average Haitian lives on less than $2 a day.
  • didn’t. We finally got through it. The next week, she cooked diri ak lalo — the best Haitian meal, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — and brought it for me in class and thanked me profusely. It nearly brought me to tears. She was my Davos Seaworth and I was her Shireen Baratheon. It’s one of my most cherished memories, and I will take the grateful look on her face to the grave with me.
  • I’m not going to give you a history lesson here, but there’s a short apocryphal story that illustrates the pride and sense of righteousness of Haitians. It goes like this: In 1939, when World War II broke out, Haiti, a pioneer of freedom, having led the most successful slave rebellion in the history of the world, joined the Allied forces and declared war on Nazi Germany. When that was reported to Hitler, he picked up a map to look for this presumptuous place he’d never heard of. He couldn’t find it. Suddenly, a fly fle
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  • And yet Haiti, for all its ills, has produced some of the strongest and proudest people on the planet. I’m a college dropout, English is my third language, yet I speak it better than the president of the United States who went to Wharton. Rosemarie, who learned how to read and write in her 70s, has more decency and compassion than the leader of the free world could ever imagine.
g-dragon

How British Rule of India Came About and How It Ended - 0 views

  • The very idea of the British Raj—the British rule over India—seems inexplicable today.
  • Indian written history stretches back almost 4,000 years, to the civilization centers of the Indus Valley Culture at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Also, by 1850 C.E., India had a population of some 200 million or more.
  • Britain, on the other hand, had no indigenous written language until the 9th century
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  • superior weaponry, a strong profit motive, and Eurocentric confidence.
  • At first, the European powers in Asia were solely interested in trade, but over time, the acquisition of territory grew in importance. Among the nations looking for a piece of the action was Britain.
  • Britain had been trading in India since about 1600, but it did not begin to seize large sections of land until 1757, after the Battle of Plassey. This battle pitted 3,000 soldiers of the British East India Company against the 5,000-strong army of the young Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud Daulah, and his French East India Company allies.
  • Heavy rain spoiled the Nawab's cannon powder (the British covered theirs), leading to his defeat.
  • The East India Company traded in cotton, silk, tea, and opium. Following the Battle of Plassey, it functioned as the military authority in growing sections of India, as well.
  • heavy Company taxation and other policies had left millions of Bengalis impoverished. While British soldiers and traders made their fortunes, the Indians starved.
  • Indians also were barred from high office in their own land. The British considered them inherently corrupt and untrustworthy.
  • Many Indians were distressed by the rapid cultural changes imposed by the British. They worried that Hindu and Muslim India would be Christianized.
  • new type of rifle cartridge was given to the soldiers of the British Indian Army.
  • Rumors spread that the cartridges had been greased with pig and cow fat, an abomination to both major Indian religions.
  • During World War I, Britain declared war on Germany on India's behalf, without consulting Indian leaders.
  • It should be noted that the British Raj included only about two-thirds of modern India, with the other portions under the control of local princes. However, Britain exerted a lot of pressure on these princes, effectively controlling all of India.
  • Queen Victoria promised that the British government would work to "better" its Indian subjects. To the British, this meant educating them in British modes of thought and stamping out cultural practices such as sati.
  • The British also practiced "divide and rule" policies, pitting Hindu and Muslim Indians against one another.
  • Muslim League of India in 1907. The Indian Army was made up mostly of Muslims, Sikhs, Nepalese Gurkhas, and other minority groups, as well.
  • Following the Rebellion of 1857–1858, the British government abolished both the Mughal Dynasty, which had ruled India more or less for 300 years, and the East India Company. The Emperor, Bahadur Shah, was convicted of sedition and exiled to
  • When World War II broke out, once again, India contributed hugely to the British war effort.
  • The Indian independence movement was very strong by this time, though, and British rule was widely resented
  • . Some 30,000 Indian POWs were recruited by the Germans and Japanese to fight against the Allies, in exchange for their freedom. Most, however, remained loyal. Indian troops fought in Burma, North Africa, Italy, and elsewhere.
  • In any case, Gandhi and the INC did not trust the British envoy and demanded immediate independence in return for their cooperation. When the talks broke down, the INC launched the "Quit India" movement, calling for the immediate withdrawal of Britain from India.
  • The offer of independence had been made, however. Britain may not have realized it, but it was now just a question of when the British Raj would end.
  • violent fighting broke out between Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta. The trouble quickly spread across India. Meanwhile, cash-strapped Britain announced its decision to withdraw from India
  • Sectarian violence flared again as independence approached. In June of 1947, representatives of the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs agreed to divide India along sectarian lines. Hindu and Sikh areas stayed in India, while predominantly Muslim areas in the north became the nation of Pakistan.
oliviaodon

American War - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Dystopian novels are a difficult genre: They need to be imaginative, edging on the far-fetched, while being just plausible enough to terrify. Omar El Akkad’s American War, which interprets the American South by way of the Middle East, challenges Americans to imagine what it might be like to die for, but also kill, their fellow citizens.
  • There are little details that stand out: the stubbornness of symbols; how the simple revving of an engine still running on old fuel, while ultimately meaningless, becomes an act of rebellion, an expression of self-affirmation but a completely futile one in the face of so much killing.
  • The Founding Fathers do not exist, or at least no one seems interested in mentioning them or calling upon their memory. The Constitution isn’t so much a historical curiosity but an abstraction; there’s only reference, during peace negotiations, to a “Constitutional Defense Officer,” which suggests that there’s a constitution he is trying to defend. Interestingly, in a book that elevates Southern culture, or any cultural nationalism, to its logical conclusion, the racial composition of this new America isn’t made clear. The main character, Sarat, is a person of color. That this is never made entirely explicit adds to the book’s eerie haziness. In unmooring America from its own racial legacy, El Akkad seems to be saying that war could happen here, but it could also happen anywhere.   
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  • What fills the gap isn’t any distinctive ideology or religion but a kind of nothingness. The Bible is cited, but only as a plot device and a scene setter—in other words something incidental to the act of killing. On the radio, bible reciters are “disembodied” voices disconnected from the daily horrors of war.The book’s most violent character—who is also the closest thing American War has to a heroine—is not a believer; there is no investigation of deeply held beliefs and what they might entail. But the fact that no one seems to believe in any set of ideas particularly strongly does not impede their willingness to kill. It’s hard to know if the author, here, is trying to make an argument about the pointlessness of war—that there will always be a justification, with or without the divine.
  • In the actual Civil War, the one that happened, the question of the divine and, more specifically, of theodicy—why God permits evil—was at the forefront, but perhaps more so after the fact. Only one of the two sides, both of which prayed to the same God, could win. At the start of the war, after the first bloodless Southern victory at the Battle of Fort Sumter, many, particularly on the Southern side, assumed it would last weeks or months. When it was finally over, 2 percent of the American population was dead, making it one of the most bloody conflicts in human history. At the same time, it was one of the last conventional wars where death wasn’t quite mechanized. In infantry engagements, you had little choice but to look right at the people you were trying to kill. They generally looked like you, spoke the same language, and were around the same age.  
  • In this sense, ideas, including religious ideas—to the extent that they cut across ethnic, tribal, and partisan divisions—have the potential to be powerful obstacles to the breakdown of society and the violence that often ensues.
  • Getting Democrats to rediscover religion, then, isn’t just a matter of winning elections—as important as that may be—but of beginning to close a worsening divide that exacerbates polarization and further undermines any shared sense of national identity.
  • Voters might be irrational, but they aren’t stupid. They can sense disdain from their politicians, particularly when it comes to matters of identity.
  • Religion isn’t just a problem for Democrats, however. The weakness of American Christianity is leaving its mark on the Republican Party, with organized religion in decline among white Republicans
  • The ideological drift of recent years might have provided as opportune a moment as any for political Christianity to reassert itself among whites.
  • With a more secular generation coming of age, the percentage of Christian conservatives will continue to decrease. There will still be a Pence wing of the Republican Party, but it is likely to find itself increasingly intertwined with ethno-nationalism, confusing, perhaps permanently, which matters more—the white or the Christian—in White Christian. The assumption, long held by members of minority religious groups like myself, that a secular America would be a more tolerant, pluralistic, and therefore more stable place will be tested. In the meantime, we would do well to remember that demographic conflicts aren’t necessarily better than religious ones.
manhefnawi

King Philip of England | History Today - 0 views

  • Philip, the only legitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1530-56), and known to history as Philip II of Spain (r.1556-98), was King of England for rather more than four years. He achieved that dignity when he married Queen Mary (‘Bloody Mary’, r.1553-58) in July 1554, and surrendered it when she died in November 1558
  • Philip of Spain, he was the bitter enemy of Elizabethan England, against whom a twenty-year war was fought
  • potentially his reign was one of huge significance. Had Mary borne him children, particularly a healthy son, the entire subsequent history of England could have been different
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  • Neither he nor his courtiers knew much about England
  • Charles V’s ambition and Mary’s suggestibility
  • Both the Ottoman threat and the schism would go (he thought) with Germany to his brother Ferdinand, but the French rivalry would remain to Spain
  • A marriage to the Queen of England provided the perfect solution – a powerbase in the north from which the Netherlands could be secured
  • Mary secured the English succession in July 1553
  • Throughout Edward’s reign (1547-53) she had attempted to defend her father’s religious settlement, and when her brother died young in July 1553 she was the heir by law, and a notorious religious conservative
  • She also owed, and willingly acknowledged, a debt of gratitude to Charles, who had defended her by diplomatic means over many years
  • There were only three candidates: Dom Luis of Portugal, the brother of King Juan; Edward Courtenay, son of the Marquis of Exeter (executed in 1539) and related through his mother to Edward IV; and Prince Philip
  • Elizabeth would never have come to the throne, the country would have remained Roman Catholic, and England would have been linked for an indefinite period with the Netherlands in a dynastic union
  • Although his support remained, there is no evidence that the Queen ever had any intention of marrying him
  • There were protests in Parliament which Mary brushed aside, and a briefly serious rebellion in Kent in January 1554, which was with some difficulty suppressed
  • As a result, the prince found himself with little more than the title of King of England
  • had no authority in England independent of the Queen, and must surrender his title if she should die childless
  • Their numerous titles had been officially proclaimed, and ‘King and Queen of England, France and Ireland …’ duly took precedence.
  • Whether by calculation or oversight, he found that he had two households, one Spanish, one English, and in spite of fair-minded attempts to divide his service between them, he was besieged with complaints on all sides
  • Mary’s much heralded pregnancy turned out to be an illusion
  • If Henry’s settlement was reversed, the whole process of dissolution could be declared invalid, and the land reclaimed by the Church, at the cost of immense disruption. Such a situation would be unacceptable to the English Parliament
  • Philip therefore used Habsburg clout in Rome to persuade Pope Julius III to do a deal. If he waived the Church’s claim to these lands, the King and Queen would reconcile England to his ecclesiastical authority
  • By the middle of January 1555, Philip had performed his first major service to the realm of England
  • The Queen consorts of Henry VIII had all been given generous settlements, but Philip got nothing
  • The Queen was sick, bewitched, even dead; there was a substitution plot in which Philip was implicated
  • On August 3rd the royal couple removed to Oatlands, and on the 5th, as soon as he could decently leave her, Philip departed for the Netherlands
  • Within a few weeks he had taken over his father’s authority in the Low Countries, and the real test of Charles’s intentions had arrived
  • Charles V abdicated in Brussels in September 1555, and handed over the Crowns of Spain to Philip in January 1556
  • There was talk of the council being divided into King’s men and Queen’s men, and the Duke of Alba urged him to get a grip on the appointments to English offices
  • The war with France, temporarily suspended by truce in February 1556, flared up again in the autumn, and Mary’s increasingly desperate pleas for Philip’s return were met with professions of affection, and bland excuses
  • Both his honour and his shortage of resources necessitated that England join him in his war against France. Mary was only too anxious to do something to gratify him that would not compromise her authority in England, so she was keen to oblige
  • Philip had left in July, and when in January 1558 the Queen announced that she was again pregnant, no one believed her. This was not only immensely sad, it was also a warning that there was something seriously wrong with her health, and Philip got the message. Ever since he had abandoned his campaign for a coronation in 1556, the King had had his eye upon Elizabeth
  • At first the King sought to neutralise Elizabeth by marriage to one of his loyal dependents, the Duke of Savoy
  • The princess was the heir by English law – the same law which had brought Mary to the throne – but the heir in the eyes of the Catholic church should have been Mary Stuart, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret. Mary was in France and betrothed to the Dauphin, so that neither Philip nor Mary wanted her on the English throne
  • As her health deteriorated in the early autumn of 1558, to Mary’s intense distress, her husband concentrated on ensuring that Elizabeth’s succession would be as smooth as possible
  • Mary’s death was a relief to Philip. The affection in their relationship had been all on her side, and he urgently needed a fertile wife who would bear him more children. In the event he had failed to transcend the limitations of his marriage treaty, and his power in England had remained extremely limited. In the course of time, the country became a liability
  • he also brought it into the war which cost Calais; but he protected Elizabeth during the latter part of the reign, and made sure that she came safely to the throne. Paradoxically, that was his most lasting achievement as King of England
manhefnawi

The Throne of Zog: Monarchy in Albania 1928-1939 | History Today - 0 views

  • September 1st, 1928, Europe gained a new kingdom and its only Muslim king: thirty-two year-old Zog I of Albania
  • the birth of the Kingdom of Albania – a native monarchy, not an alien imposition – did attract a flicker of international attention
  • For five decades, Albania was synonymous with hard-line Marxism-Leninism
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  • The modern state of Albania came into being as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 after 500 years of Ottoman Turkish rule
  • A population of just under one million lived in a territory about half as big again as Wales
  • The Ottomans had never really mastered these people
  • Language did act as a unifying force
  • Nominally neutral during the First World War, and without a recognised government, the country was overrun by seven foreign armies
  • Like other Balkan states, it should repudiate the legacy of the Ottoman period and strive to catch up with the rest of Europe
  • He had first been fascinated by the story of Napoleon Bonaparte during his schooldays in Istanbul. King Ahmed sounded too exclusively Islamic, so the new monarch adopted his surname (which means ‘bird’)
  • According to Zogists, the Albanian throne had a 2,500-year history
  • In 1928, Zog purported to be filling Skanderbeg’s throne, left vacant for 450 years, and he claimed the medieval hero’s helmet and sword as regalia
  • Prince Xhelal, his half-brother, played no part in royal events, remaining largely forgotten in Mati
  • The day-to-day lifestyle of Zog did not seem so lavish to upper middle-class Western European diplomats
  • Albanians endured the poorest living conditions in Europe.
  • Zog did not dare to tax the rich and powerful for fear of provoking rebellion
  • Great Britain, France, and the US had greeted the kingdom with a modicum of politeness. They wanted to believe Zog when he assured them that monarchy would help promote peace and stability
  • Though Albania was legally a sovereign nation, it was wholly subordinate to Italy in all its foreign affairs
  • The Albanian monarchy reached the peak of its publicity in April 1938
  • Zog had always wanted a Christian queen, as a Westernising influence and a mark of approval for mixed marriages in general
  • Albanian resistance was minimal, King Zog fled abroad with a considerable fortune, and the monarchy stood revealed as a failure as great as most of his other modernising schemes
  • Had their King meant any more to them than the Ottoman Sultan before him
  • King Zog himself had sometimes observed that his homeland was ‘centuries behind the rest of Europe in civilisation’
  • The King, who died in France in 1961, never abandoned his claim to the throne
manhefnawi

The Welshness of the Tudors | History Today - 0 views

  • The fortunes of the Tudor dynasty were laid by the most romantic mésalliance in English history, the secret betrothal of a Welsh attendant at the Court of Henry VI to the dowager queen
  • Henry V, the hammer of the Welsh, had continued his father's proscription of the whole nation in punishment for the rebellion
  • Owain's marriage to Katherine of Valois, although hubristic, was not annulled when discovered, and the fruit of its consummation, the two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were not declared illegitimate.
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  • While Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, was an indispensable agent of his interests in England, Jasper was his political mentor in the years spent in exile
  • Henry VI bestowed the English honour of Richmond on Edmund, while the younger brother, Jasper, was endowed with a title and estates in Wales
  • After the death of Gloucester, and after several mishaps, they recovered favour under the indulgent protection of the young Henry VI
  • His Welshness was thus of crucial importance in easing Henry's path to the throne, for quite literally no other route was feasible than that which took him through Wales. It was also to be an essential ingredient in the success of Tudor policy in Wales
  • As a landless exile, Jasper's most common point of con- tact continued to be Wales: most of his incursions during the reign of Edward IV
  • In the reign of Richard III, as events were to show, Wales and the Marches were the most vulnerable parts of his dominions
  • Edward IV himself, as a descendant through the Mortimer connection of Llywelyn Fawr (the Great), could be regarded by Guto'r Glyn and Lewis Glyn Cothi as the potential deliverer of the Welsh and the heir to the kings of Britain
  • He had been a patron of the bards since the 1450s, and was praised as a faithful supporter of Henry VI and as the man who would unite Wales under the Lancastrians.
  • He predicted a victory for Henry as the last of the triumphant line of Brutus and Cadwalader, kings of the Britons
  • The route of the march from Milford Haven avoided the south eastern Marches, which were dominated by the lords loyal to Richard III
  • How Welsh was Henry Tudor? In blood he was a quarter Welsh, a quarter French and half English (or at least Platagenet). In so far as place of birth and residence could determine his nationality, he was certainly Welsh
  • Nothing daunted, the resourceful author dedicated it instead to King James and his son Prince Henry, whom he addressed as the future Prince of Wales. The adaptation was plausible enough, in all senses of that word, for James, after all, was descended from Henry VII and his forebears, the Welsh Tudors; and with this reminder Holland's readers in Wales could the more readily transfer their loyalty to the Scottish Stuarts
  • Unless he had been presented at Henry VI's court in his youth (and there is no evidence for this), Henry was a stranger to England before his ar6val at Shrewsbury on August 17th, 1485
  • In his first proclamation, on August 25th, 1485, Henry announced his titles to be, besides King of England and of France, 'Prince of Wales and lord of Ireland'. This was the first time any King who had not himself been invested with the principality as heir apparent to a reigning monarch had appropriated the title to himself
  • Whereas letters of denizenship conferred English status upon individuals, charters of privileges were granted between 1504 and 1508 to the ancient principality and five marcher lordships in North Wales, dispensing the inhabitants from various civic disabilities imposed by the penal laws of Henry IV and Henry V
  • The inhabitants of North Wales were released not only from the prohibitions of Lancastrian penal laws but from those of the Edwardian settlement of 1284, which had excluded the Welsh from the plantation boroughs.
  • Edward IV had used motifs from the British Legend in his court rituals and had fostered an Arthurian cult in celebration of his own descent from British kings and the princes of Gwynedd
  • By marrying Elizabeth, Henry thus enhanced his connection with British as well as English kingship, and their son and heir personified both traditions
  • Richard III had referred disparagingly in two proclamations to the rebel 'Henry Tydder'; this may well have stung, so that the new King was all the more concerned to establish an honourable lineage for his family. A commission of Welsh genealogists was therefore set up to trace his pedigree. Only the report has survived, to show Henry's descent from medieval Welsh and British rulers. However fantastic its remoter claims, there is no sound reason to doubt its authenticity as an official document. Even Sir Edward Coke in his Fourth Institutes of the Laws of England (1644) accepted its validity and gave as his source for the original commission the patent rolls for Henry VII, though no-one else has found any trace of it there. (The great champion of the common law who set such store by precedents was notoriously careless in his scholarship.) Henry did not draw on this pedigree to confirm the legitimacy of his monarchy, only to embellish it. What was important for him was the historical associations with British, rather than Welsh, royalty. That these also proved to be flattering to the Welsh nation was an incidental and inexpensive form of propaganda.
  • His beneficence was a distinct policy that culminated in Henry VIII's measure of incorporation of 1536-43
  • This consolidated and elaborated upon a form of administration that had existed in its essentials in the principality of North Wales since Edward I's Statute of Wales of 1284
  • Owen spoke for his own class of prosperous Protestant gentry, but the very fact that Welsh commentators thought of the extension of English law as a boon and an act of grace ensured the success of Tudor rule in Wales
  • There was no tacit acknowledgement of their Welsh identity by Henry VII's son and grandchildren – it was something claimed for them by the Welsh
  • In 1603 Hugh Holland published the first (and only) book of his Pancharis, which related the love between Owen Tudor and Katherine of Valois
  • Henry VI had commissioned both his half-brothers to represent and defend the crown's interests in Wales against the Yorkist enemies, the Vaughans, the Herberts and the Earl of March, later Edward IV.
  • The family of monarchs who ruled England and Wales from 1485 to 1603 did indeed form a dynasty, but they do not seem to have called themselves the 'Tudor' dynasty: the only con- temporaries who regarded them as such were the Welsh
g-dragon

The Collapse of Gupta India - 0 views

  • The Gupta Empire may have lasted only about 230 years, but it was characterized by a sophisticated culture with innovative advances in literature, arts, and sciences.
  • Called India's Golden Age by most scholars, the Gupta Empire was likely founded by a member of a lower Hindu caste called Sri Gupta.
  • During this Golden Age, India was part of an international trade network which also included other great classical empires of the day, the Han Dynasty in China to the east and the Roman Empire to the west.
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  • The famed Chinese pilgrim to India Fa Hsien (Faxien), noted that Gupta law was exceptionally generous; crimes were punished only with fines.
  • The surviving architecture includes palaces and purpose-built temples for both Hindu and Buddhist religions, such as the Parvati Temple at Nachna Kuthara and the Dashavatara temple at Deogarh in Madhya Pradesh.
  • The emperors also founded free hospitals for their citizens, as well as monasteries and universities.
  • Aryabhata's incredibly accurate calculation of pi as 3.1416, and his equally amazing calculation that the solar year is 365.358 days long.
  • In part, this was due to the common people's dislike of the meddlesome and unwieldy bureaucracy.
  • As with the collapses of other classical political systems, the Gupta Empire crumbled under both internal and external pressures.
  • Internally, the Gupta Dynasty grew weak from a number of succession disputes. As the emperors lost power, regional lords gained increasing autonomy. In a sprawling empire with weak leadership, it was easy for rebellions in Gujarat or Bengal to break out, and difficult for the Gupta emperors to put such uprisings down.
  • By 500, many regional princes were declaring their independence and refusing to pay taxes to the central Gupta state. These included the Maukhari Dynasty, who ruled over Uttar Pradesh and Magadha.
  • By the later Gupta era, the government was having trouble collecting enough taxes to fund both its hugely complex bureaucracy, and constant wars against foreign invaders like the Pushyamitras and the Huns.
  • Chandragupta's son, Samudragupta (ruled 335–380 CE), was a brilliant warrior and statesman, sometimes called the "Napoleon of India."
  • Even those who felt a personal loyalty to the Gupta Emperor generally disliked his government and were happy to avoid paying for it if they could.
  • In addition to internal disputes, the Gupta Empire faced constant threats of invasion from the north. The cost of fighting off these invasions drained the Gupta treasury, and the government had difficulty refilling the coffers. Among the most troublesome of the invaders were the White Huns (or Hunas), who had conquered much of the northwestern section of Gupta territory by 500 CE.
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