Climate and the World Turned Upside Down (A.D. 7th Century, 1st Century and a Bit A.H.)

         One of my favorite quotations is usually attributed to Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain, and it'd be appropriate for either of them, though it's probable neither said it. I'll pass it along, though: "War is God's way of teaching American geography" — and suggest a variation: «Planning for war is a pressing invitation to learn some history.»

         Unlike many in their civilian leadership — Donald J. Trump for one — U.S. war planners and others represented in the figure of speech "the Pentagon" are looking very seriously at climate change as "a national security threat," and some quick history lessons can help drive home the point that they have good reason to do so.

         The major history lesson is in a book like The Great Warming (2008), which has as its subtitle Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. But Brian Fagan's book was researched and written recently, and he relates "The Great Warming" — the Medieval Climate Anomaly of ca. 800-1300 C.E. — very specifically to global warming nowadays, and stresses its threat of extended droughts. What might be more persuasive is some historical work done a good while before our time and therefore innocent of our current political debates — and on a topic very directly relevant for one national security issue.

         So here is an excerpt from James W. Thomson and Edgar N. Johnson's An Introduction to Medieval Europe: 300-1500 (New York: Norton, 1937) — again 1937 — from Chapter 7, "The Empire of the Arabs" (I have marked but left unchanged locutions neutral in 1937 but probably discourteous today). The topic is the Muslim conquests of what Christians call the 7^th century and a bit thereafter, usually explained by both Muslims and historians from Christendom in religious terms. Thompson and Johnson have a different take.

          From these small beginnings at Medina the Arab church-state [sic] spread with prodigious rapidity. Within fifty years after Mohammed's death [in 632 C.E., 11 A.H.] it had conquered Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Within one hundred years it had spread to the frontiers of India to the east, and to the west had swept across North Africa through Spain and beyond the Pyrenees. [Usual explanation for such success (an act of God for the faithful; for secular historians) political cohesion combined with, and mutually reinforcing, religious fanaticism. …]

          The facts are quite otherwise. In the first place, it is impossible at this early date to speak of Mohammedan [sic] fanaticism, except possibly in isolated instances. Mohammed himself in his conquest of Mecca displayed a fierce enough zeal; but in general no such militant intolerance as, for example, characterized the struggle of Christianity against paganism characterized Mohammedan expansion. The fanaticism of Islam is that of much later converts, and even so Mohammedanism has normally been marked in practice by its tolerance. […]

          In the second place, it is impossible to speak of Mohammed's creating any such thing as Arab unity, nor can it be supposed that in any substantial way the nomadic Arab tribes suddenly consolidated into a unified state after his death. […] [163-64]

         The expansion of the Arabs is best understood in the light of previous movements out of the desert into the neighboring Fertile Crescent. These were constant phenomena, to be explained by the vicissitudes of climactic conditions, which always drove nomadic peoples onwards. It is now known that for a long time previous to Mohammed there had been a gradual movement of Arabs into the adjoining Byzantine and Persian empires. […] The [Arabian] peninsula itself was experiencing a periodic desiccation, which made life within it ever more unbearable and drove its inhabitants to seek relief elsewhere. It seems, accordingly, highly probably that what occurred would have happened [given the weakness of Persia and Byzantium after prolonged war (and plague)] even without Mohammed and Islam. (166).

         A couple things here. First, when you hear people talk about "Islam vs. the West," tell them that to say nothing of geography — Islam has been or remains the dominant religion in regions clearly in the western part of the Old World — there is the commonplace in European history that Islam joins the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Germanic streams in the making of Medieval Europe. Second,  whether you accept the theory in Thompson and Johnson or not, note that in 1937 historians could find plausible that at least local long-term weather — "a periodic desiccation" — was a key factor in one of the most important political/military events in world history: the Islamic conquests and expansion leading to "The Empire of the Arabs" and, arguably, the final push taking western Europe from Late Antiquity into the early Medieval.

         Two common figures of speech for the countries on and around the Arabian Peninsula are "the Middle East" — how you'd see things if you're looking out from the British Isles toward your "Far East" — and "tinderbox": from a literal "box containing tinder, flint, a steel, and other items for kindling fires," and having as its tenor, "a potentially explosive place or situation."

         "Tinder" refers to dry slips of wood that you use for starting fires; "desiccation" means a drying out; in the Middle East and large areas in Africa, desiccation could get to desertification: taking dry areas to outright desert.

         And people will yet again move out, and there are few places to go nearby that (1) can support them and (2) do not have a lot of people already. Now add to that a large number of small-arms in the world and a fair number of people willing and able to sell not-so-small arms or teach how to make IEDs, and add to that the fairly recent and still vigorous development of Fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam, and fanatical varieties of the big three monotheisms and even in such fanaticism-resistant traditions as Hinduism and Buddhism.

         Take a tinderbox, add heat, wait for a spark. Or, change the figure of speech and let ISIS evolve into something more sophisticated, add a charismatic leader (a modern Saladin), oppose it to a Christendom relearning fanaticism, tell them all "God wills it!" (Deus vult!), and be prepared to learn geography.

         If very unlucky, you'll become and expert in geography and in the history of downright fascinating times parallel to the transition from Late Antiquity to early Medieval, known some places in Europe as "the Dark Ages."

About that Christian Mercy …

           John M. Crisp introduces an excellent column on "Solving the puzzle of children, war" (17 April 2017) with the Christian trope contrasting the "god of wrath and battles" of much of the "Old Testament" with the kinder, gentler God of the New.

            It's not that simple. The peace-and-love Jesus of the Beatitudes goes on to say, figuratively, "[…] I have not come to bring peace but a sword" (Matthew 5.2-12, 10.34). And both figuratively and Prophetically, John of Patmos presents a kick-ass Christ in his Apocalypse, "clad in a robe dipped in blood," with a "sharp sword with which to smite the nations" and "tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God," crushing the unsaved like grapes (Revelation 19.13-16). Later in the Book of Revelation, we get beautiful visions of "a new heaven and a new earth," for the saved. "But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars" — and later members of the wrong church, or those God just chose to damn — "their lot shall be in the lake that burns" forever (20.1, 4; 21.8).

            In history, in A.D. 1099, the takingof Jerusalem to climax the First Crusade included a massacre near Temple Mount where Christian sources concede or brag, "[…] the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles [...]" — or bridles and knees. "None of them" — Muslims in the area — "were left alive; neither women nor children were spared." The Jews of Jerusalem were burned.

            Deusvult; God willed it.

            So there's Jesus's " mercy and peace" that Crisp says, "we've never really tried"; and that lack of trying goes far back. Since antiquity, many have accepted Jesus only once that wimpy preaching gets toughened up.

Déjà Vu 2: Jihads and Crusades, 1095, 2003, 2015 (24 Feb. 2015)

As long as the old war hawks are recycling arguments from earlier eras, I'm going to recycle a counter-argument I made toward the end of January 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq War of March 2003 to 2011 (and counting). It's still relevant, unfortunately, for the "and counting" part: arguably, and even more unfortunately, more relevant given the rise of ISIS and the threat nor so much from ISIS but from a successor movement that's equally savvy in its organizing but a "kinder, gentler version" — which would still be vicious — and better organized.
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              In commentary on "The 21st-Century Crusade" appearing in The Washington Post Weekly Edition for January 13-19 [2003], Dennis Mullin usefully analyzes the threat to world peace of militant Islam; his enthusiasm for a crusade to match the jihad, however, is at best badly timed.
              Eric Hoffer's 1951 book The True Believer makes some points Mullin and everyone else should keep in mind. If Hoffer is right, the undermining of traditional societies frees up large numbers of people to lead unsatisfying lives and is a major source of potential converts to mass movements. Also available for mass movements are people recently unemployed and people with education and no suitable jobs.
              Globalization and recession have produced a large number of potential True Believers, and there are religious and nationalistic mass movements actively recruiting or just waiting to happen not only among Muslims but also Jews, Hindus, Christians, and maybe Korean Communists.
              All that is missing is charismatic leadership, and there is a fair chance a crusade against Iraq will generate that leadership for many Muslims, possibly by making Saddam Hussein a hero (or martyr) of Islam.
              When fanatics march, things get deadly: estimates for deaths in World War II range between 40 and 61 million. Significantly, those deaths were barely a pause in the increase of Earth's human population. Since World War II, we have seen the proliferation of atomic weapons, and the desire Mullin cites for an "Islamic Bomb," to match what can be perceived as Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and godless Communist or secular Capitalist bombs.
              Everything did not change 11 September 2001; to re-date Albert Einstein's assessment, everything changed for humans some time in the 1960s, when the USA, USSR, and other nuclear powers accumulated enough weapons to destroy much of human civilization directly and perhaps all of human civilization, and the human species, through nuclear winter.
              One generation does not have the right to preclude or even endanger the existence of succeeding generations. Total nuclear disarmament is not currently possible, but before we Americans start crusading, we and the other nuclear powers need to destroy—not store, destroy—a large number of nuclear weapons. And then we need serious nonproliferation treaties.
              When Earth is safe again for war, we can start thinking about risking another forty to sixty million deaths and develop serious ways to resolve disputes that do not involve mass killing—and ways to capture, try, and put away for life fanatics who murder.
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         Well, Saddam Hussein failed in his attempt to present himself as a defender of Islam — the attempt was a hell of a stretch on his part — and he never became a martyr of the faith, nor its leader; and more recent estimates on the body count for World War II, worldwide and from 1939-45, are up to 65 million, although people in Manchuria and Nanking people might assert that World War II began earlier than 1939, and, certainly, the dying continued after 1945.
         I'll stick with the point on nuclear and thermonuclear bombs as the truest weapons of mass destruction and the only weapons posing a literal existential threat to human civilization and the human species. Still, in 2015 — when Jihad is more likely than ever to provoke a crusade — a few words are needed on old-fashioned massacres and what can be done with merely Medieval technology of destruction and death.
         The words here aren't mine but one major and some minor witnesses to a literal Crusade, one of the crusades President Obama was chided for being "artless" and insensitive enough to throw into a conversation on fanaticism, suggesting that Christianity, too, has done some very bad thing because, some important people thought, "God wills it" (Deus vult!).

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From Raymond d'Aguiliers: Historia francorum qui ceperint Jerusalem ["The History of the Franks who Captured Jerusalem"]

But now that our men had possession of the walls and towers, wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood. Some of the enemy took refuge in the Tower of David, and, petitioning Count Raymond for protection, surrendered the Tower into his hands.

WIKIPEDIA NOTE: However, this imagery should not be taken literally; it was taken directly from [the New Testament, Christian God-of-Wrath (RDE)] biblical passage Revelation 14:20. Writing about the Temple Mount area alone[,] Fulcher of Chartres […] says: "In this temple 10,000 were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet coloured to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared."  ^¶ The eyewitness Gesta Francorum states that some people were spared. Its anonymous author wrote, "When the pagans had been overcome, our men seized great numbers, both men and women, either killing them or keeping them captive, as they wished." Later the same source writes, "[Our leaders] also ordered all the Saracen dead to be cast outside because of the great stench, since the whole city was filled with their corpses; and so the living Saracens dragged the dead before the exits of the gates and arranged them in heaps, as if they were houses. No one ever saw or heard of such slaughter of pagan people, for funeral pyres were formed from them like pyramids, and no one knows their number except God alone.

Now that the city was taken, it was well worth all our previous labors and hardships to see the devotion of the pilgrims at the Holy Sepulchre. How they rejoiced and exulted and sang a new song to the Lord! For their hearts offered prayers of praise to God, victorious and triumphant, which cannot be told in words. A new day, new joy, new and perpetual gladness, the consummation of our labor and devotion, drew forth from all new words and new songs. This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation; this day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, and the renewal of our faith.

Fordham University: The Jesuit University of New York, "Medieval Source Book: Raymond d'Aguiliers Historia francorum qui ceperint Jerusalem represents the experiences of chaplain of Raymond de Saint Gilles, Count of Toulouse, who lead the Southern French army of the First Crusade. Here. Selection 12, 'The Frankish Victory,' capturing Jerusalem, 15 July 1099. "

         Non-nuclear Wars of Religion would not threaten human survival; they would, however, produce horrible suffering and loss of life and, necessarily, at least a variety of new Dark Age.