The crusades – the long series of wars fought between 1096 and 1492 under the direction of medieval popes against a wide range of enemies of many different faiths, including Sunni and Shia Muslims – have long been fascinating to the extreme right wing, both in the United States and elsewhere.

The square-limbed crusader cross

is a symbol often spotted on white supremacist marches.

Crusader iconography and the language of crusading is usually rolled together with other right-wing tropes and generic threats of violence against non-whites and women.

Sometimes, the crusading rhetoric of online cranks and neo-Nazis is translated into deadly action. Nowhere has this been more chillingly demonstrated recently than in New Zealand, where on March 15th this year a lone gunman murdered more than forty people worshiping at mosques in Christchurch. The assault rifles and automatic shotguns used to carry out his crimes were daubed with the references to crusader battles dating back to the twelfth century AD and the names of crusader warriors including the medieval lord Bohemond of Taranto, prince of Antioch.

The crusades have immense propaganda value to anyone who wishes to suggest that the Islamic world and the Christian West are engaged in a permanent civilizational war dating back a thousand years or more, from which there is no escape and in which there can only be one victor. Superficially, at least, it is possible to read the history of the medieval crusades in such a way.

In other words, the medieval crusades did indeed contain a clear spine of conflict between Christian and Islamic powers. It is also true that at certain times, these wars were essentially spiritual: that is to say, making war on unbelievers, either through the crusade or its Islamic equivalent, the jihad, was an end in itself. Yet we do not have to look very far at all to realize that the story is rather more complex than it appears.

for all that modern zealots like to paint the crusades as a period of mutual hostility between Christians and Muslims, the truth is that the story was more often one of co-operation, trade and co-existence between people of different faiths and backgrounds.

None of this nuanced history tends to appear in the manifestos of terrorists, or would-be car-bombers. They are content, alas, to perpetuate an idea of the crusades that is binary and zero-sum: an us-or-them narrative designed to justify hatred, racist vitriol, violence and even murder. The medieval crusades were a largely dreadful misdirection of religious enthusiasm towards painful and bloody ends. They were neither a glorious clash of civilizations, nor a model for the world as it is today.

His name was William Blount, born in 1749 to a wealthy family in North Carolina, one of the most corrupt parts of British North America.

But with so many groups — the Cherokee and Creek nations, the Continental Congress, the British, the Spanish, etc. — vying for the southern frontiers, no one knew how to claim those lands.

Blount had other ideas.His strategy was simple: Make up the names of hundreds of settlers and then snap up the best plots with these ghost entries at North Carolina’s new land office, which opened in 1783. Then, he tried to raise land values by luring British investors with fairy tales of North America’s emerging real estate markets.

With his associates, among them a young lawyer named Andrew Jackson, Blount eventually “owned” about 1 million acres, much of it deep inside Indian country. He used these claims to gain influence with both state and federal officials. In 1790, Blount became governor of the Southwest Territory

In the face of constant invasion, several hundred Cherokees declared war on the Southwest Territory on Sept. 11, 1792.

Blount begged U.S. officials for aid, but federal authorities were focused on Ohio, prompting Blount and his confidants to privately rage that the do-gooders in the nation’s capital preferred “savage” friends to white families. So they took matters into their own hands, with Blount quietly instructing Jackson and other confidants to launch scorched-earth missions into Indian country.

required U.S. citizens to abide by solemn treaties, including a new one with the Cherokee in 1794.

this treaty blocked white settlers from further trespassing on Indian grounds, which meant they could not buy Blount’s more remote claims.

in early 1797, he used his position as one of the first senators from Tennessee to approach British agents about invading the Spanish-held lands of the Gulf Coast.

President Adams found out about these half-baked plans in a bombshell letter, which he showed to his wife, Abigail. “Here is a diabolical plot,” she wrote. The president also sent the evidence to the House of Representatives, which voted to impeach Blount “for high crimes and misdemeanors” on July 7, 1797. The senators then used their removal powers from Article I, Section 5, to expel him from the chamber.

The next year, they drew up five articles of impeachment, each of which noted that Blount had acted “contrary to the duty of his trust and station” and “against the peace and interests” of the United States.

When Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Union cemetery there, he called on the memory of the dead to embolden the living.

Then there are the unknown war dead, whose anonymity offers rich rhetorical soil to till, especially for presidents reflecting on national sacrifice in the wake of war.

Six decades later, with the help of another set of unknown, unidentified remains, this time from the Vietnam War, and a nod toward Lincoln’s famous oration at Gettysburg, President Ronald Reagan seized the opportunity to recast the conflict in Southeast Asia as a “noble cause.”

Through the figure of this unnamed fallen, Reagan sought to advance his goal of reviving “proud faith in American exceptionalism,”

U.S. presidents come to lay wreaths before the crypts on Memorial Day and Veterans Day and give speeches in times of war and peace. It has become an obligatory tradition for presidents to telegraph the gravitas of their new station.

Rather than deference to the fallen and their sacrifices, Trump displayed a personal defiance toward their surviving kin, breaking with his predecessors’ tradition of paying homage to sacrifice in an effort to promote national unity.

No doubt each president grapples differently with the responsibility of sending troops into harm’s way and honoring those who die in service of the nation. And political agendas have long been interwoven with the decorum and reverence these occasions demand and deserve. But each time Trump elevates personal vendettas over national unity, he loses the power of this tradition. In the process, he faces renewed criticism, whether for violating the trust of his office or failing to capitalize on the symbolism of the moment, hardly the best way to achieve his policy goals.

Mr. Mulvaney issued a statement flatly denying what he had earlier said.

In wide-ranging remarks, Mr. Mulvaney told reporters at the White House that the $391 million in military aid was initially withheld from Ukraine because the president was displeased that European countries were not as generous with their assistance.

But the president did pressure Ukraine to re-examine discredited theories that Ukraine, not Russia, had worked to sway the 2016 campaign. Mr. Mulvaney’s mention of a “D.N.C. server” was a reference to an unfounded conspiracy theory promoted by Mr. Trump that Ukraine was somehow involved in Russia’s 2016 theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Russian military officers hacked Democratic servers to steal thousands of emails in 2016,

no one has uncovered evidence of Ukrainian involvement.

He blasted the current and former administration officials who have testified in the impeachment inquiry, describing them as personally opposed to the changes in foreign policy that Mr. Trump had put in place.

“What you’re seeing now, I believe, is a group of mostly career bureaucrats who are saying, ‘You know what, I don’t like President Trump’s politics, so I’m going to participate in this witch hunt that they are undertaking on the hill.’”

Asked whether he had admitted to a quid pro quo, Mr. Mulvaney said, “We do that all the time with foreign policy."

His answer ignored the distinction

between holding up foreign aid to further American interests and holding up foreign aid to further Mr. Trump’s personal interests.

They also have said they want to know whether Mr. Mulvaney helped prevent a White House meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky until the Ukrainian government agreed to investigate the president’s rivals, including the D.N.C. and the Bidens.

Mr. Mulvaney was part of a trio of Trump loyalists who conducted a rogue foreign policy operation in Ukraine.

his name has mostly been erased from the Chinese news media, histories and websites.

China could send the People’s Liberation Army in to quell pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have rekindled memories of the armed crackdown 30 years ago that ended the student-led protests in Beijing and other Chinese cities.

He represents a different path for China’s rise — one profoundly different from Xi Jinping’s today.”

Mr. Zhao’s children said that his time as premier and Communist Party general secretary in the 1980s was an era of bold change and intellectual ferment

“These days we’re confronted with ideological regression and doctrinal shortcomings,”

As China’s prime minister from 1980, Mr. Zhao became a chief proponent of the market overhauls introduced in that decade, including promoting private businesses and foreign investment, as well as cutting controls on prices and supplies.

China’s market changes could succeed only if they were accompanied by political liberalization that would free up businesses and discourage corruption