John Derbyshire reports that his friend the Z-man (ZMAN, @TheRealZBlog) died Wednesday night or Thursday morning, apparently of natural causes:
As well as being a fellow dissident, Chris was a keen & very helpful supporter of my own efforts. He edited and hosted Radio Derb at his website from the destruction of VDare last July to June 6th this year, when I retired. Rest in peace, Z.
Addendum: Z-Man had this blog listed in his sidebar — under “Bad Thoughts”:
At first it was known by the outside world as ISIL, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but as the Arabic word for the Levant is al-Sham, gradually it became ISIS:
In the summer of 2014 the group began calling itself the Islamic State, having proclaimed such an entity in large parts of Iraq and Syria.
[…]
By the summer of 2015 many Arabs across the Middle East, including most of the regional media, were calling the Islamic State by another name, one which encapsulated how repulsive many ordinary people felt the organization to be—DAESH.
It is an acronym of sorts for the Arabic Dawlat al-Islamiya f’al-Iraq wa al-Shams, but the reason people came up with the name is because the Islamic State members hate the term. It sounds similar to the word daes—one who is underhanded and sows dissent. More important, it rhymes with negative words such as fahish—“ sinner”—and best of all, for those who despise the organization’s particular brand of Islam, is that it rhymes with and sounds a bit like jahesh—“stupid ass.” This is worse than being called a donkey, because in Arab culture one of the few things more stupid than a donkey is an ass.
[…]
In the battle for Tikrit the US Air Force found itself in the odd position of flying reconnaissance missions and limited air strikes, which assisted Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders who had been brought in to oversee the Iraqi assault on the town.
[…]
The US pilots, who flew the majority of the missions, suffered from not having American Special Forces forward air controllers calling in the coordinates for the strikes. As targets were frequently in the urban areas, the “rules of engagement” meant many planes returned to their bases without firing their weapons.
[…]
History bequeathed oil to “Iraq,” but the de facto division of the country means the oil is mostly in the Kurdish and Shia areas; and if there is no strong, unified Iraq then the oil money flows back to where the oil is found.
[…]
In the event of a split, the Shia are geographically best placed to take advantage. The region they dominate has oil fields; thirty-five miles of coastline; the Shatt al-Arab waterway; ports; access to the outside world; and a religious, economic, and military ally next door in the form of Iran.
[…]
The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate, this became Palestine.
For millennia the Jews had lived in what used to be called Israel, but the ravages of history had dispersed them across the globe. Israel remained for them the “promised land,” and Jerusalem, in particular, was sacred ground. However, by 1948 Arab Muslims and Christians had been a clear majority in the land for more than a thousand years.
[…]
The British looked favorably on the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine and allowed Jews to move there and buy land from the Arabs. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, Jews tried to get to Palestine in even greater numbers. Tensions between Jews and non-Jews reached the boiling point, and an exhausted Britain handed over the problem to the United Nations in 1948, which voted to partition the region into two countries. The Jews agreed, the Arabs said no. The outcome was war, which created the first wave of Palestinian refugees fleeing the area and Jewish refugees coming in from across the Middle East.
Jordan occupied the West Bank region, including East Jerusalem. Egypt occupied Gaza, considering it to be an extension of its territory. Neither was minded to give the people living there citizenship or statehood as Palestinians, nor was there any significant movement by the inhabitants calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. Syria meanwhile considered the whole area to be part of greater Syria and the people living there Syrians. To this day Egypt, Syria, and Jordan are suspicious of Palestinian independence, and if Israel vanished and were replaced by Palestine, all three might make claims to parts of the territory. In this century, however, there is a fierce sense of nationhood among the Palestinians, and any Arab dictatorship seeking to take a chunk out of a Palestinian state of whatever shape or size would be met with massive opposition. The Palestinians are very aware that most of the Arab countries, to which some of them fled in the twentieth century, refuse to give them citizenship; they insist that the status of their children and grandchildren remains “refugee,” and work to ensure that they do not integrate into the country.
[…]
Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal, indivisible capital. The Jewish religion says the rock upon which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac is there, and that it stands directly above the Holy of Holies, King Solomon’s Temple. For the Palestinians, Jerusalem has a religious resonance that runs deep throughout the Muslim world: the city is regarded as the third most holy place in Islam because the prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from that same rock, which is on the site of what is now the “Farthest Mosque” (Al-Aqsa). Militarily, the city is of only moderate strategic geographical importance—it has no real industry to speak of, no river, and no airport—but it is of overwhelming significance in cultural and religious terms: the ideological need for the place is of more importance than its location. Control of, and access to, Jerusalem is not an issue upon which a compromise solution can be easily achieved.
[…]
Iran is a non-Arabic, majority Farsi-speaking giant. It is bigger than France, Germany, and the UK combined, but while the populations of those countries amount to 200 million people, Iran has only 78 million. With limited habitable space, most live in the mountains; the great deserts and salt plains of the interior of Iran are no place for human habitation.
[…]
There are two huge mountain ranges in Iran: the Zagros and the Elburz. The Zagros runs from the north, nine hundred miles down along Iran’s borders with Turkey and Iraq, ending almost at the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf. In the southern half of the range there is a plain to the west where the Shatt al-Arab divides Iran and Iraq. This is also where the major Iranian oil fields are, the others being in the north and center. Together they are thought to comprise the world’s third-largest reserves. Despite this, Iran remains relatively poor due to mismanagement, corruption, mountainous topography that hinders transport connections, and economic sanctions that have, in part, prevented certain sections of industry from modernizing.
The Elburz range also begins in the north, but along the border with Armenia. It runs the whole length of the Caspian Sea’s south shore and on to the border with Turkmenistan before descending as it reaches Afghanistan. This is the mountain range you can see from the capital, Tehran, towering above the city to its north. It provides spectacular views, and also a better-kept secret than the Iranian nuclear project: the skiing conditions are excellent for several months each year.
Iran is defended by this geography, with mountains on three sides, swampland and water on the fourth. The Mongols were the last force to make any progress through the territory, in 1219–21, and since then attackers have ground themselves into dust trying to make headway across the mountains.
[…]
In fact, the US military had a catchphrase at the time: “We do deserts, not mountains.”
In 1980, when the Iran-Iraq War broke out, the Iraqis used six divisions to cross the Shatt al-Arab in an attempt to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan. They never even made it off the swamp-ridden plains, let alone entered the foothills of the Zagros. The war dragged on for eight years, taking at least a million lives.
The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics. Khuzestan, for example, is ethnically majority Arab, and elsewhere there are Kurds, Azeri, Turkmen, and Georgians, among others. At most, 60 percent of the country speaks Farsi, the language of the dominant Persian majority. As a result of this diversity, Iran has traditionally centralized power and used force and a fearsome intelligence network to maintain internal stability. Tehran knows that no one is about to invade Iran, but also that hostile powers can use its minorities to try and stir dissent and thus endanger its Islamic revolution.
Iran also has a nuclear industry that many countries, particularly Israel, believe is being used to prepare for the construction of nuclear weapons, increasing tensions in the region. The Israelis feel threatened by the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons. It is not just Iran’s potential to rival their own arsenal and wipe out Israel with just one bomb: if Iran were to get the bomb, then the Arab countries would probably panic and attempt to get their own as well. The Saudis, for example, fear that the ayatollahs want to dominate the region, bring all the Shia Arabs under their guidance, and even have designs on controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. A nuclear-armed Iran would be the regional superpower par excellence, and to counter this danger the Saudis would probably try to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan (with whom they have close ties). Egypt and Turkey might follow suit.
This means that the threat of an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a constant presence, but there are many restraining factors. One is that, in a straight line, it is one thousand miles from Israel to Iran. The Israeli air force would need to cross two sovereign borders, those of Jordan and Iraq; the latter would certainly tell Iran that the attack was coming. Another is that any other route requires refueling capabilities that may be beyond Israel, and that (if flying the northern route) also overfly sovereign territory. A final reason is that Iran holds what might be a trump card—the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf through which passes each day, depending on sales, about 20 percent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest point, the Strait, which is regarded as the most strategic in the world, is only twenty-one miles across. The industrialized world fears the effect of Hormuz being closed possibly for months on end, with ensuing spiraling prices. This is one reason why so many countries pressure Israel not to act.
[…]
In the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE the Persian Empire stretched all the way from Egypt to India. Modern-day Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west—the Arab world and its Shia minorities. It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, and it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (28 million Saudis as opposed to 78 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbor if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront each other directly. Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards themselves as the champions of their respective versions of Islam. When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf.
[…]
This was the background to the shocking events of early 2016 when Saudi Arabia (a majority Sunni country) executed forty-seven prisoners in a single day, among them the country’s most senior Shia sheikh—Nimr al-Nimr. This was a calculated move by the ruling Sunni royal family to show the world, including America, that nuclear deal or no nuclear deal—the Saudis were going to face down Iran. Demonstrations broke out across the Shia Muslim world, the Saudi embassy in Tehran was duly ransacked and set on fire, diplomatic relations were broken between the two countries, and the scene was set for the continuation of the bitter Sunni/ Shia civil war.
Northwest of Iran is a country that is both European and Asian. Turkey lies on the borders of the Arab lands but is not Arabic, and although most of its landmass is part of the wider Middle East region, it tries to distance itself from the conflicts taking place there.
[…]
Its population is 75 million, and European countries fear that given the disparity in living standards, EU membership would result in a mass influx of labor. What may also be a factor, albeit unspoken within the EU, is that Turkey is a majority Muslim country (98 percent). The EU is neither a secular nor a Christian organization, but there has been a difficult debate about “values.”
In the 1920s, for one man at least, there was no choice. His name was Mustafa Kemal and he was the only Turkish general to emerge from the First World War with an enhanced reputation. After the victorious powers carved up Turkey, he rose to become president on a platform of resisting the terms imposed by the Allies, but at the same time modernizing Turkey and making it part of Europe. Western legal codes and the Gregorian calendar were introduced and Islamic public institutions banned. The wearing of the fez was forbidden, the Latin alphabet replaced Arabic script, and he even granted the vote to women (two years ahead of Spain and fifteen years ahead of France). In 1934, when Turks embraced legally binding surnames, Kemal was given the name Atatürk—“ Father of the Turks.” He died in 1938, but subsequent Turkish leaders continued working to bring Turkey into the West European fold, and those who didn’t found themselves on the wrong end of a coup d’état by a military determined to complete Atatürk’s legacy.
By the late 1980s, however, the continued rejection by Europe and the stubborn refusal of many ordinary Turks to become less religious resulted in a generation of politicians who began to think the unthinkable—that perhaps Turkey needed a plan B. President Turgut Özal, a religious man, came to office in 1989 and began the change. He encouraged Turks to again see Turkey as the great land bridge between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and a country that could again be a great power in all three regions. The current president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has similar ambitions, perhaps even greater ones, but has faced similar hurdles in achieving them. These are in part geographical.
[…]
In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus takes you only into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Strait to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean.
[…]
Until a few years ago, Turkey was held up as an example of how a Middle Eastern country, other than Israel, could embrace democracy. That example has taken a few knocks recently with the ongoing Kurdish problem, the difficulties facing some of the tiny Christian communities, and the tacit support for Islamist groups in their fight against the Syrian government. President Erdo?an’s remarks on Jews, race, and gender equality, taken with the creeping Islamization of Turkey, have set alarm bells ringing. However, compared with the majority of Arab states, Turkey is far more developed and recognizable as a democracy. Erdo?a may be undoing some of Atatürk’s work, but the grandchildren of the Father of the Turks live more freely than anyone in the Arab Middle East.
[…]
The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the Green Revolution, describing the young students of north Tehran as the “Youth of Iran,” thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.
[…]
The second phase of the Arab uprising is well into its stride. This is the complex internal struggle within societies where religious beliefs, social mores, tribal links, and guns are currently far more powerful forces than “Western” ideals of equality, freedom of expression, and universal suffrage. The Arab countries are beset by prejudices, indeed hatreds, of which average Westerners know so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes.
[…]
When Hosni Mubarak was ousted as president of Egypt, it was indeed people power that toppled him, but what the outside world failed to see was that the military had been waiting for years for an opportunity to be rid of him and his son Gamal, and that the theater of the street provided the cover they needed. It was only when the Muslim Brotherhood called its supporters out that there was enough cover. There were only three institutions in Egypt: Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the military, and the Brotherhood. The latter two destroyed the former, the Brotherhood then won an election, began turning Egypt into an Islamist state, and paid the price by itself being overthrown by the real power in the land—the military.
Ideology, Kulak argues, is first and foremost an organizing principle for violence:
The history of modernity is the history of new ideological constructs arising to create ever more effective war waging coalitions of beneficiaries, ever larger groups of enforcers, and ever larger charnel houses of the losers.
[…]
The various spiritual, moral, and political evolutions and revolutions in the medieval and later absolutist systems allowed larger military forces, and more coherent better trained men, the Protestant reformation itself was a massive catalyst for new ideological coalitions and the confiscation of the property of wealthy monasteries and institutions.
But the real Revolution in ideological warfighting begins with the enlightenment revolutions, and the role radical printers, daily publications, and ideological pamphleteers played to revolutionize the memetic space.
The siren cry of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (Brotherhood)) set off by the enlightenment was their slogan, and their organizing principle, which allowed the immediate overthrow of the Ancien Regime in France and the aging decayed fuedal aristocracy and its bizzare bureaucracy.
Of course almost imediately the ideologies changed upon attaining power.
Out of the cry of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, came three world changing national revolutions.
Like the Judgement of Paris, the Peoples of the west each chose a Goddess.
The American Revolution, Corresponding to the idea of Liberty. Obviously.
The French Revolution, which despite its tri-color flag and tri-value slogan very quickly devolved into egalitarian terror.
And finally Otto Von Bismarck’s unification of Germany was the final Fraternal “revolution” in the western world.
Dominic Cummings discusses some theories of regime change and civil war:
Inside the intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.
Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.
President Joe Biden’s inner circle was running the White House like a “politburo,” and they were the “ultimate decision-makers” as Biden’s health and cognitive function continued to decline, according to Jake Tapper and Alex Thompso’s new book Original Sin:
This group, dubbed the “politburo,” included a coterie of seasoned political veterans, including Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed — but also family members such as first lady Jill Biden and the president’s son Hunter, the authors of “Original Sin” claim.
“In terms of who was running the White House, it’s a small group of people that have been around,” “Original Sin” author Alex Thompson told PBS’ “Washington Week” on Friday. “Some people within the administration called them the Politburo. That’s the term we used in the book.”
Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain was at times part of the “politburo,” as was former senior adviser to the president Annie Tomasini. Also on the “politburo” was the first lady’s former top adviser and “work husband,” Anthony Bernal, whom The Post previously reported created a toxic workplace environment.
Are we born to succeed or are we made to succeed? Lizah van der Aart illustrates a recent Nature Human Behaviour article:
On Friday, November 21, 1806, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon signed into law the Berlin Decrees:
These were designed to force Great Britain to the negotiating table, but instead were to lead — once he tried to impose them by force on Portugal, Spain and Russia — to his own downfall. The ‘Continental System’ created by the Berlin Decrees (and their successors the Milan and Fontainebleau Decrees of 1807 and 1810) was what Napoleon called ‘a retaliation’ against the British Order-in-Council of May 16, 1806, which had imposed a blockade of the European coast from Brest to the Elbe.
[…]
Since one-third of Britain’s direct exports and three-quarters of her re-exports went to continental Europe, Napoleon intended the decrees to put huge political pressure on the British government to restart the peace negotiations broken off in August.
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International trade simply wasn’t the zero-sum game that, with his crude Colbertism, Napoleon assumed it to be
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The Continental System damaged precisely those people who had done well from Napoleon’s regime and had hitherto been his strongest supporters: the middle classes, tradesmen, merchants and better-off peasantry, the acquirers of biens nationaux property he had always sought to help.
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All American trade with France was therefore blocked unless the United States’ ships bought a licence in a British port for a substantial fee. Along with the British practice of ‘impressing’ (i.e. kidnapping) thousands of Americans for service in the Royal Navy, the November 1807 Orders-in-Council were the primary cause of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.
[…]
One major problem with the Continental System was that it could not be imposed universally. In 1807, for example, because Hamburg and the Hanseatic towns such as Lübeck, Lüneburg, Rostock, Stralsund and Bremen couldn’t manufacture the 200,000 pairs of shoes, 50,000 greatcoats, 37,000 vests and so on that the Grande Armée required, their governors were forced to buy them from British manufacturers under special licences allowing them through the blockade. Many of Napoleon’s soldiers in the coming battles of the Polish campaign wore uniforms made in Halifax and Leeds, and British ministers boasted in the House of Commons that Napoleon couldn’t even provide the insignia stitched onto his officers’ uniforms except by resort to British manufacturers.
[…]
By 1811 there were 840 vessels plying their often night-time trade between Malta and southern Mediterranean ports. Once landed, coffee and sugar were smuggled across borders despite the penalty of ten years’ penal servitude and branding, and after 1808 the death penalty on occasion for repeat offenders.
[…]
(Britain had imposed the death penalty for smuggling in 1736, which was regularly enforced.)
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When French customs officials did capture contraband a proportion of it was often returnable for a bribe, and in due course it became possible to take out insurance against seizures at Lloyd’s of London.
[…]
Meanwhile, French imperial customs revenues collapsed from 51 million francs in 1806 to 11.5 million in 1809, when Napoleon allowed the export of grain to the British at high price when their harvest was weak – some 74 per cent of all British imported wheat came from France that year – in order to deplete British bullion reserves.
[…]
The Continental System failed to work because merchants continued to accept British bills-of-exchange, so London continued to see net capital inflows.
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Much to Napoleon’s frustration, the British currency depreciated against European currencies by 15 per cent between 1808 and 1810, making British exports cheaper.
[…]
The Continental System also forced British merchants to become more flexible and to diversify, investing in Asia, Africa, the Near East and Latin America much more than before, so exports that had been running at an average of £25.4 million per annum between 1800 and 1809 rose to £35 million between 1810 and 1819.
The Greater Middle East extends across one thousand miles, west to east, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), from the Mediterranean Sea to the mountains of Iran:
From north to south, if we start at the Black Sea and end on the shores of the Arabian Sea off Oman, it is two thousand miles long. The region includes vast deserts, oases, snow-covered mountains, long rivers, great cities, and coastal plains. And it has a great deal of natural wealth in the form that every industrialized and industrializing country around the world needs—oil and gas.
It also contains the fertile region known as Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers” (Euphrates and Tigris). However, the most dominant feature is the vast Arabian Desert and scrubland in its center, which touches parts of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and most of Saudi Arabia, including the Rub al Khali or “Empty Quarter.” This is the largest continuous sand desert in the world, incorporating an area the size of France. It is due to this feature that not only the majority of the inhabitants of the region live on its periphery, but also that, until European colonization, most of the people within it did not think in terms of nation states and legally fixed borders.
The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.
The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) was ruled from Istanbul. At its height, it stretched from the gates of Vienna, across Anatolia, and down through Arabia to the Indian Ocean. From west to east it took in what are now Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Israel/ Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and parts of Iran. It had never bothered to make up names for most of these regions; in 1867 it simply divided them into administrative areas known as Vilayets, which were usually based on where certain tribes lived, be they the Kurds in present-day northern Iraq, or the tribal federations in what is now part of Syria and part of Iraq.
When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse, the British and French had a different idea. In 1916, the British diplomat Colonel Sir Mark Sykes took a grease pencil and drew a crude line across a map of the Middle East. It ran from Haifa on the Mediterranean in what is now Israel to Kirkuk (now in Iraq) in the northeast. It became the basis of his secret agreement with his French counterpart François Georges-Picot to divide the region into two spheres of influence should the Triple Entente defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. North of the line was to be under French control, south of it under British hegemony.
The term Sykes-Picot has become shorthand for the various decisions made in the first third of the twentieth century, which betrayed promises given to tribal leaders and which partially explains the unrest and extremism of today. This explanation can be overstated, though: there was violence and extremism before the Europeans arrived.
[…]
The legacy of European colonialism left the Arabs grouped into nation states and ruled by leaders who tended to favor whichever branch of Islam (and tribe) from which they themselves came. These dictators then used the machinery of state to ensure their writ ruled over the entire area within the artificial lines drawn by the Europeans, regardless of whether this was historically appropriate and fair to the different tribes and religions that had been thrown together.
[…]
As rulers of the Ottoman Empire the Turks saw a rugged, mountainous area dominated by Kurds, then, as the mountains fell away into the flatlands leading toward Baghdad and west to what is now Syria, they saw a place where the majority of people were Sunni Arabs. Finally, after the two great rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates merged and ran down to the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the marshlands, and the city of Basra, they saw more Arabs, most of whom were Shia. They ruled this space accordingly, dividing it into three administrative regions: Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.
In antiquity, the regions very roughly corresponding to the above were known as Assyria, Babylonia, and Sumer. When the Persians controlled the space they divided it in a similar way, as did Alexander the Great, and later the Umayyad dynasty.
[…]
Iraqi Kurdistan has long been divided between two rival families. Syria’s Kurds are trying to create a statelet they call Rojava. They see it as part of a future, greater Kurdistan, but in the event of its creation, questions would arise as to who would have how much power, and where. If Kurdistan does become an internationally recognized state, then the shape of Iraq will change.
[…]
Various Arabian tribes had helped the British against the Ottomans during the First World War, but there were two in particular that London promised to reward at the war’s end. Unfortunately, both were promised the same thing—control of the Arabian Peninsula. Given that the Saudi and Hashemite tribes frequently fought each other, this was a little awkward. So London dusted off the maps, drew some lines, and said the head of the Saudi family could rule over one region and the head of the Hashemites could rule the other, although each would “need” a British diplomat to keep an eye on things. The Saudi leader eventually landed on a name for his territory, calling it after himself, hence we know the area as Saudi Arabia—the rough equivalent would be calling the UK “Windsorland.”
The British, sticklers for administration, named the other area Transjordan, which was shorthand for “the other side of the Jordan River.” A dusty little town called Amman became the capital of Transjordan, and when the British went home in 1948 the country’s name changed to Jordan. But the Hashemites were not from the Amman area: they were originally part of the powerful Qureshi tribe from the Mecca region, and the original inhabitants were mostly Bedouin. The majority of the population is now Palestinian: when the Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967, many Palestinians fled to Jordan, which was the only Arab state to grant them citizenship. We now have a situation where the majority of Jordan’s 6.5 million citizens are Palestinian, many of whom do not regard themselves as loyal subjects of the current Hashemite ruler, King Abdullah. Added to this problem are the one million Iraqi and Syrian refugees the country has also taken in who are putting a huge strain on its extremely limited resources.
[…]
Until the twentieth century, the Arabs in the region saw the area between the Lebanese mountains and the sea as simply a province of the region of Syria. The French, into whose grasp it fell after the First World War, saw things differently.
The French had long allied themselves with the region’s Arab Christians and by way of thanks made up a country for them in a place in which they appeared in the 1920s to be the dominant population. As there was no other obvious name for this country the French named it after the nearby mountains, and thus Lebanon was born. This geographical fancy held until the late 1950s. By then the birthrate among Lebanon’s Shia and Sunni Muslims was growing faster than that of the Christians, while the Muslim population had been swollen by Palestinians fleeing the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in neighboring Israel/ Palestine. There has been only one official census in Lebanon (in 1932), because demographics is such a sensitive issue and the political system is partially based on population sizes.
[…]
Some parts of the capital, Beirut, are exclusively Shia Muslim, as is most of the south of the country. This is where the Shia Hezbollah group (backed by Shia-dominated Iran) is dominant. Another Shia stronghold is the Bekaa Valley, which Hezbollah has used as a staging post for its forages into Syria to support government forces there. Other towns are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. For example, Tripoli, in the north, is thought to be 80 percent Sunni, but it also has a sizable Alawite minority, and given the Sunni-Alawite tensions next door in Syria, this has led to sporadic bouts of fighting.
Lebanon appears to be a unified state only from the perspective of seeing it on a map.
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When the French ruled the region they followed the British example of divide and rule. At that time, the Alawites were known as Nusayris. Many Sunnis do not count them as Muslims, and such was the hostility toward them that they rebranded themselves as Alawites, as in “followers of Ali” to reinforce their Islamic credentials. They were a backward hill people, at the bottom of the social strata in Syrian society. The French took them and put them into the police force and military, from where, over the years, they established themselves as a major power in the land.
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The Assad clan, from which President Bashar al-Assad comes, is Alawite, which comprises approximately 12 percent of the population. The family has ruled the country since Bashar’s father, Hafez, took power in a coup d’état in 1970. In 1982, Hafez crushed a Muslim Brotherhood Sunni uprising in Hama, killing perhaps thirty thousand people over several days. The Brotherhood never forgave or forgot, and when the nationwide uprising began in 2011 there were scores to be settled.
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It is doubtful that whoever eventually “wins” would look kindly upon a Kurdish statelet within what are nominally the borders of Syria. Not only would the Syrian Sunni majority oppose losing territory, but the Turks would be horrified at having a Syrian Kurdish state on its borders. There would inevitably be moves to join it up to some of the Kurdish-dominated regions inside Turkey itself.
Despite the furtive nature of “Jolly” West’s research, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), he could be surprisingly garrulous
Among the press clippings in his file were two items from Portland, Oregon, newspapers, both dated October 1963—the murky period between his Oklahoma hypnosis studies and the Haight-Ashbury Project. West had given an address to the Mental Health Association of Oregon, letting it slip that he was inducing insanity in the lab. He framed these studies as positive developments: they might someday cure mental illness.
“We are at the dawning of a new era,” West told the crowd, “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.” The Oregon Journal noted that West “listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation as some of the things that [he was] using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people.” Reporting that West had done “extensive work” with LSD, the Journal continued: “The most important contribution of the drug so far is in producing model mental illnesses.”
Almost fifteen years later, besieged by reporters after the New York Times alleged that he’d taken part in MKULTRA’s secret LSD experimentation program, West insisted that all of his LSD work “had been confined to animals,” denying any CIA affiliation. When reporters pointed out that he’d received an awful lot of money from the agency, he retorted that he’d had no idea that the Geschickter Fund and other sources were CIA fronts. Legally, the CIA was obligated to tell the University of Oklahoma that one of its faculty had been on the agency payroll. Oklahoma revealed a heavily redacted memo saying that an unnamed professor—West, I confirmed through financial records—had been investigating “a number of dissociative phenomena” on humans “in the lab,” including an exceptionally rare clinical disorder known as “latah,” “a neurotic condition marked by automatic obedience.”
None of the allegations harmed West’s reputation. By then he’d left Oklahoma for UCLA, where he offered a steady stream of denials and continued to thrive through his retirement in 1988. Irascible and arrogant, he was quick to threaten lawsuits when anyone brought up the charges. Sometimes he threw in diversionary tactics: in a 1991 rebuttal, he claimed, “My secret connection to Washington, D.C. is not as a spook, but rather as a confidential advisor to Presidents… From Eisenhower to Bush, Democrat and Republican Presidents alike have freely sought and received my counsel.” In a 1993 letter to the editor of the UCLA Bruin, he had the temerity to compare his accusers to Nazi propagandists “in Goebbels’ tradition of the Big Lie.” West added, “I have never taken part in ‘mind-control’ experiments funded by the CIA or anybody else”: a statement belied by his own files.
Even before his CIA connections came out, West’s experiments got him in plenty of trouble. In 1972, he announced plans to build a lab in an abandoned Nike Missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains. He would call it “The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence,” or the Violence Center, for short. There, in perfect isolation, he could study the origins and control of human violence by experimenting on prisoners. Governor Ronald Reagan gave the Violence Center a full-throated endorsement.
But West’s proposal for grant money landed him in hot water. He planned to test radical forms of behavior modification, implanting electrodes and “remote monitoring devices” in prisoners’ brains. A federal investigation concluded that the program involved “coercive methods” that threatened “privacy and self-determination.”
The committee’s disclosures stymied the Violence Center before it got past the planning stages. The California legislature vetoed the project; UCLA’s student body rose up in protest of West. And this, to reiterate, was before anyone had a clue about his CIA work.
Napoleon was at Bamberg, waiting to see what the Prussians intended, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when the Prussian declaration of war arrived:
‘He threw it away contemptuously,’ recalled Rapp, and said of Frederick William, ‘Does he think himself in Champagne?’ — a reference to the Prussian victories of 1792. ‘Really, I pity Prussia. I feel for William. He is not aware what rhapsodies he is made to write. This is too ridiculous.’
His reply:
Your Majesty will be defeated, you will compromise your repose and the existence of your subjects without the shadow of a pretext. Prussia is today intact, and can treat with me in a manner suitable to her dignity; in a month’s time she will be in a very different position. You are still in a position to save your subjects from the ravages and misfortunes of war. It has barely started, you could stop it, and Europe would be grateful to you.
He had his reasons for being confident:
Although Prussia had a potentially very large army of 225,000 troops, 90,000 of them were tied up garrisoning fortresses. No immediate help could be expected from Russia or Britain, and although some of her commanders had fought under Frederick the Great, none had seen a battlefield in a decade. Her commander-in-chief, the Duke of Brunswick, was a septuagenarian and her other senior commander, General Joachim von Möllendorf, an octogenarian. Moreover, Brunswick and the general in charge of the left wing of the Prussian army, Prince Friedrich von Hohenlohe, had rival strategies and hated each other, so councils of war could take up to three ill-tempered days to reach a conclusion. Napoleon didn’t hold a single council of war throughout the entire campaign.
South Africa’s economy is ranked second-largest on the continent, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), behind Nigeria:
It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy (three times the size of Angola’s), military, and population (53 million).
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Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into highland, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much farther and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity that grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.
For most of southern Africa, doing business with the outside world means doing business with Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Cape Town. South Africa has used its natural wealth and location to tie its neighbors into its transport system, meaning there is a two-way rail and road conveyor belt stretching from the ports in East London, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban; stretching north through Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania; reaching even into Katanga Province of the DRC and eastward into Mozambique. The new Chinese-built railway from Katanga to the Angolan coast has been laid to challenge this dominance and might take some traffic from the DRC, but South Africa looks destined to maintain its advantages.
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In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea-lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Modern navies can venture much farther out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent.
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Nevertheless, every year more roads and railroads are being built connecting this incredibly diverse space. The vast distances of the oceans and deserts separating Africa from everywhere have been overcome by air travel, and industrial muscle has created harbors in places nature had not intended them to be.
In every decade since the 1960s, optimists have written about how Africa is on the brink of prevailing over the hand that history and nature have dealt it. Perhaps this time it is true. It needs to be. By some estimates, Sub-Saharan Africa currently holds 1.1 billion people—by 2050 that may just more than double, to 2.4 billion.
Why do we suddenly get an explosion of creativity and progress in certain places and moments, Johan Norberg asks, and why do these golden ages end?
I have learned that ages become golden because they imitate and innovate. They first emerge because of cheating. They didn’t come up with all the innovations that made them prosper; instead they took them from others.
Athenian, Italian and Dutch merchants picked up new ideas on their business trips. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the Romans constantly absorbed peoples, ideas and methods by conquest, and Abbasid Baghdad actively sponsored a translation project to lay their hands on the world’s knowledge and science.
But there is a limit to how far imitation can get you. To make this progress self-propelling, these cultures had to combine these inputs with their own thoughts to create innovations, from higher agricultural yields to artistic rebellions. This takes inclusivity back home. People have to be allowed to try new things. Free speech, free markets and a rule of law that constrains the arbitrary actions of rulers leave room for this.
But get Giotto and the flying shuttle, it takes something more: a broader culture of optimism. Innovation is difficult and controversial, and the results are never guaranteed. Therefore, you need a sense that there is hope and possibility, and you need role models around you who have shown the way, to make it seem like it is worth trying. Others to be inspired by, learn from, and to compete with.
This progress sometimes became self-sustaining because, at a certain point, it started transforming the self-identity of these cultures. That is why we often see clusters of creativity, like philosophy in Athens, art during the Renaissance, classical music in Vienna and technology in Silicon Valley.
Pessimism, the sense that it is hopeless, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a clue to the decline and fall of golden ages.
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All these golden ages experienced a death-to-Socrates moment in times of crisis, when they soured on their previous commitment to open intellectual exchange. They started to support strongmen, control the economy and abandon international exchange. This made the fear of disaster self-fulfilling, since those barriers limited access to other possibilities and restricted the adaptation and innovation that could have helped them deal with the threat.
While Metternich would go on to be an implacable foe, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), his initial impression of Napoleon was largely positive:
What at first struck me most was the remarkable perspicuity and grand simplicity of his mind and its processes. Conversation with him always had a charm for me, difficult to define. Seizing the essential point of subjects, stripping them of useless accessories, developing his thought and never ceasing to elaborate it till he had made it perfectly clear and conclusive, always finding the fitting word for the thing, or inventing one where the image of language had not created it, his conversation was ever full of interest. Yet he did not fail to listen to the remarks and objections addressed to him. He accepted them, questioned or opposed them, without losing the tone or overstepping the bounds of a business conversation; and I have never felt the least difficulty in saying to him what I believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him.
The Chinese are everywhere, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and they mean business:
About a third of China’s oil imports come from Africa, which—along with the precious metals to be found in many African countries—means they have arrived, and will stay. European and American oil companies and big multinationals are still far more heavily involved in Africa, but China is quickly catching up. For example, in Liberia it is seeking iron ore, in the DRC and Zambia it’s mining copper and, also in the DRC, cobalt. It has already helped develop the Kenyan port of Mombasa and is now embarking on much larger projects just as Kenya’s oil assets are beginning to become commercially viable.
China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $ 14 billion railroad project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 percent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the Eastern Seaboard.
Over the southern border, Tanzania is trying a rival bid to become East Africa’s leader and has concluded billions of dollars’ worth of deals with the Chinese on infrastructure projects.
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China’s presence also stretches into Niger, with their National Petroleum Corporation investing in the small oil field in the Ténéré fields in the center of the country. And Chinese investment in Angola over the past decade exceeds $ 8 billion and is growing every year. The China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC) has already spent almost $ 2 billion modernizing the Benguela railroad line, which links the DRC to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic coast eight hundred miles away. In this way travel the cobalt, copper, and manganese with which Katanga Province in the DRC is cursed and blessed.
In Luanda, the CREC is constructing a new international airport, and around the capital huge apartment buildings built to the Chinese model have sprung up to house some of the estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Chinese workers now in the country. Thousands of these workers are also trained in military skills and could provide a ready-made militia if China so required.
What Beijing wants in Angola is what it wants everywhere: the materials with which to make its products, and political stability to ensure the flow of those materials and products.
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Beijing and the big Chinese companies don’t ask difficult questions about human rights, and they don’t demand economic reform or even suggest that certain African leaders stop stealing their countries’ wealth, as the IMF or World Bank might.
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South Africa is China’s largest trading partner in Africa. The two countries have a long political and economic history and are well placed to work together. Hundreds of Chinese companies, both state-owned and private, now operate in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, and Port Elizabeth.
The Holy Roman Empire had a logic to it in the Middle Ages, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when it brought together hundreds of tiny German and central European states in a loose agglomeration for mutual trade and security, but it had grown less relevant:
On July 12, 1806 Napoleon made it yet more irrelevant when he proclaimed himself Protector of a new German entity, the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund), comprising the sixteen client states allied to France, from which Austria and Prussia were notably excluded.
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Under the terms of the founding of the Rhine Confederation, Napoleon now had an extra 63,000 German troops at his disposal, a number that was soon increased; indeed the term ‘French army’ becomes something of a misnomer from 1806 until the Confederation’s collapse in 1813.
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Meanwhile, the Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism, and dreams that one day Germany could be an independent state ruled by Germans. There is no more powerful example of history’s law of unintended consequences than that Napoleon should have contributed to the creation of the country that was, half a century after his death, to destroy the French Empire of his own nephew, Napoleon III.