I liked this image and message in the sidebar of the Sudanese blog If God Brings You To It, He Will Bring You Through It. I really liked the blog, as well.
I know it seems trite to say it, given the situation — but you go, Kizzie. Keep safe, and God bless.
Fundamentalist Muslims look back at Mongol secularism as a scourge. But, although U.S. rule in Iraq has produced a constant flow of refugees, particularly religious minorities, out of the country, under Mongol rule Christian, Muslim, Jewish and even Buddhist immigrants poured into the newly conquered Iraq to live under the Great Law of Genghis Khan. It was said that during this time a virgin could cross the length of the Mongol Empire with a pot of gold on her head and never be molested.
Jack Weatherford
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Now that’s what I call civil society.
Seriously, though. Think about the kind of institutions and mechanisms that would be needed to secure that kind of result.
Another version — even more apocryphal — stipulates a naked virgin.
Golly.
We’re talking about a journey from Kiev to Peking, after all.
Two scenes from Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera] (1931), the film by G.W. Pabst that infuriated its authors, Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill, by removing most of its nihilism. It’s a very fine film, nonetheless. The first piece features Lotte Lenya as Pirate Jenny, in one of the most seductively subversive songs ever written….
….and the second Ernst Busch in Moritatsong, later ruined by Frank Sinatra, among others, as Mack the Knife.
Folk legend Sandy Denny (tragically, d. 1978).
I loved her when I was a teenager.
Her voice was the closest thing I ever heard to a living bell — blood and breath mixed in with the brass. It’s hard to get from this video, but it’s there all right on LP and CD. With Fairport Convention, she made Liege and Lief, the finest folk-rock record of the ’60’s, and perhaps of all time.
If you follow the links, you’ll see she burned brightly but crashed badly, as so many do and have done. Somewhere amid alcohol, brain trauma and accident she fell in with death, aged only 31.
It makes your teeth hurt to say it, but I think he may have been.
Now the situation had changed. The more immediate, more dangerous enemy was the Soviet Union, already ruling a number of Muslim countries, and daily increasing its influence and presence in others. It was therefore natural to seek and accept American help. As Osama bin Laden explained, in this final phase of the millennial struggle, the world of the unbelievers was divided between two superpowers. The first task was to deal with the more deadly and more dangerous of the two, the Soviet Union. After that, dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would be easy.
All of which brings us back to bin Laden. It was his dream and purpose, in planning the 9/11 attacks, to needle the US into Afghanistan, into the Islamic heartland, there to suffer the kind of defeat that the jihadis believed they inflicted on the Soviets. That defeat, as they dreamed it, led to the collapse of the godless Soviet Union. The crusader US, as they dreamed it, would suffer a similar defeat, and a similar collapse. It seemed insane at the time; but was it? I think bin Laden would be pleased with the results so far.
Another masterpiece. This was the film upon which Terry Gilliam based 12 Monkeys. But Gilliam never even came close to the spirit and genius of the original. For my money one of the five best films ever made. Captured almost entirely in a series of stills, there is only is one moment of movement.
26 minutes of magic. Do watch it. You cannot help but be enthralled.
On 7 March this year, addressing the American Enterprise Institute — you know, the organisation that befriended Ayaan Hirsi Ali — Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Western historians of Islam, had some interesting things to say:
Osama bin Laden, in some very interesting proclamations and declarations, has this to say about the war in Afghanistan which, you will remember, led to the defeat and retreat of the Red Army and the collapse of the Soviet Union. We tend to see that as a Western victory, more specifically an American victory, in the Cold War against the Soviets. For Osama bin Laden, it was nothing of the kind. It is a Muslim victory in a jihad. If one looks at what happened in Afghanistan and what followed, this is, I think one must say, a not implausible interpretation.
As Osama bin Laden saw it, Islam had reached the ultimate humiliation in this long struggle after World War I, when the last of the great Muslim empires–the Ottoman Empire–was broken up and most of its territories divided between the victorious allies; when the caliphate was suppressed and abolished, and the last caliph driven into exile. This seemed to be the lowest point in Muslim history. From there they went upwards.
….
This belief was confirmed in the 1990s when we saw one attack after another on American bases and installations with virtually no effective response of any kind–only angry words and expensive missiles dispatched to remote and uninhabited places. The lessons of Vietnam and Beirut were confirmed by Mogadishu. “Hit them, and they’ll run.” This was the perceived sequence leading up to 9/11. That attack was clearly intended to be the completion of the first sequence and the beginning of the new one, taking the war into the heart of the enemy camp.
Seeing as how you can, I thought I’d post some favourite films here from time to time.
This is the great surrealist masterpiece from Luis Bunuel, with dream sequences by Salvadore Dali. The famous razor-slices-eye scene at 01:30 is still genuinely shocking, even after all these years of slasher movies. The film itself is all of 16 minutes long.
Humanitarian Intervention post-Iraq, Monday 30 th April.
Jubilee Room, Westminster Hall, Houses of Parliament, London.
A Euston Manifesto event
This informative discussion involving key Ministers in the British government, trade unionist activists, a top journalist and key NGO leaders; discussed the lack of a Arab response to the crisis in the Darfur, the excuses made by Western intellectuals for suicide bombings and other terrorist acts, Iraq and the need to support democrats, and the future for the UN (and whether it is a ‘failed’ organisation).
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The whole thing is available on YouTube. There’s massive material here. Watch. Enjoy. Reflect.
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As well as cats, Rob loves classical music and is Australia's #1 fan of Wilhelm Furtwangler (1886-1954), the greatest conductor in the history of recorded music. Hence the gravatar.
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