I Pledge Allegiance: Flag, Republic, Nation

We give our heads and hearts to God and our country; 

one country, one language, one flag! — 

Pledge as written by Capt. George T Balch

(used in various places 1887-1923)

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, 

one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. — 

Pledge as written by Francis Bellamy in 1892

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, 

and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation 

{under God}, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. —

Form recognized by the US Congress in 1942, 

with “under God” added Flag Day 1954

            The last time I was in the United Kingdom was shortly after Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, and there were still many flags flying; interestingly, and relevant here, only one of the flags I saw was the Union Jackof the UK — at a touristy location —  while the rest were the national flags of England (the cross of St. George), Scotland (the cross of St. Andrew), and Wales (the Welsh Red Dragon). The United Kingdom is one country with at least three nations, united (more or less) under the monarchy and the Parliament at Westminster. Kingdom and country are one thing; nation is another.

            The current US Pledge of Allegiance substitutes the Flag for the Monarch as a focus for allegiance, and conflates — in a colloquially correct and politically useful way — the American Republic and the United States as “one Nation under God.” 

            Especially with US President Donald J. Trump identifying himself (correctly) as a nationalist, and with nationalism on the rise in the US and elsewhere, the convenient conflation of Republic and Nation in the Pledge is not holding and perhaps should not.

            So, is, or are, The United States of America basically, even essentially, the American Republic or the American Nation (under God)?

            Citing a 1991 book by Anthony D. Smith, the Wikipedia entry has it that “A nationis a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture. […] It is a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity, and particular interests.”^[3]And when it possesses and can hold its own territory, and establishes its own government, we have a nation-state.Stricter definitions by nationalists have usually required also one origin, one history, one religion — and, at least since the great Eurasian migrations of ancient and medieval times, one land and one descent: nationhood rooted “in blood and soil.”

            “One Ruler, One Law; One Faith” for one old formula that could work for a multinational empire or country — and tossing in Racism and one form of Romanticism one could get «Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer»: “One People, One Realm, One Leader.” And those “People” — the Folk — would be a subgroup of a Race, the Nation in Adolf Hitler’s phrase “Nation and Race” (Mein Kampfvol. 1, ch. 11).

            That’s one extreme, and not the idea of Nation meant, say, in the name of the oldest US magazine, the Leftist, The Nation. 

            The Right-wing extreme is, though, what’s meant by Right-wing extremists who talk of the US as part of “the Aryan Nation,” and it is a strong possibility for those who speak of the US as “a White, Christian Nation,” with “White” and “Christian” excluding Jews and other swarthy Caucasians, and “Christian” kind of iffy for Catholics. 

            Is the United States, essentially— of its essence — an English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon, White Christian (Patriarchal) Nation, with a territory? In that case we — or they(I’d be excluded) — in that case Americans, realAmericans would want a strong state to protect the Nation and Motherland, but the nature of that state is negotiable, with the traditional upshot a Leader of some sort, perhaps elected, perhaps hereditary, perhaps just, “Let the strongest rule.” 

            So it is for a minority of Americans, but in part or parts this is also the case for a fair number: those for whom America is a Nation of some sort and under God, being, clearly, a substantial number. 

            Or is America a Nation, but one where the Republic part isn’t negotiable but essential to our culture?

            Or is America essentially a Republic, like the old Roman Republic, but one that hadn’t fallen under an Emperor and, eventually, Emperors who made a state religion of the Christian Church — but instead an alternative Rome that had continued as a multi-national, religiously diverse polity, based in law and (the modern contribution) developed a written Constitution? And evolved out of a good deal of the monstrousness that was even the Roman Republic at its best. Okay: let’s imagine an evolution to us, with the American flag as a symbol and focus for allegiance, maybe just a tiny Roman-ish/American eagle at the top. 

            It makes a difference how we define ourselves.

            If the United States are/is essentially a Nation with a territory, a central task would be preserving the purity of the Nation. Not just regulating immigration: the Roman experience warns against weakness, division, and incompetence allowing an influx of whole tribes. No, traditional nationalism has a traditional hang-up with by-God purity, and it doesn’t take much penetration of foreign elements to impurify the body of the Nation. 

            If we’re essentially a Nation under a Leader, there is much to be said for the primacy of the Leader’s protecting the purity of the Nation with a beautiful if largely symbolic wall, backed by the force necessary to keep out even small groups of what must be seen as invaders. If the Leader can fulfill that most basic duty and then go on to embody and channel and to a some extent fulfill the will of the Nation, then it doesn’t matter much if the Leader himself is flawed or performs acts that in ordinary people would be criminal. The Leader of the Nation is the perfect democrat, bypassing elitist bureaucracies and institutions to perform the will of the demos: the true People, the ultimate Sovereign, and the figurative King that can do no wrong.

            If we’re essentially a Republic, especially one with liberal democratic aspirations and dedication to the rule of law, then things are different. In that case, “No one is above the law”; the President is the commander-in-chief only of the military, not of the country s/he serves; a Leader of the Folk is a danger; if you’re born here, you’re a citizen of the Republic; and for all the usefulness of “civic/civil religion,” our literal allegiance is to the Constitution and Republic, not to the symbol of the flag. 

            My oath was to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and I swore my loyalty to the Republic. There are a lot of “republicans” like that out there. We need to talk with each other and with the Nationalists; and this force of “republicans” must prepare, if necessary, to resist takeover of our country by Nationalists.

Slavery and the Continuum and Continuity of Cruelty

THIS IS A ST. PATRICK'S DAY REPRINT (so to speak) AND UPDATING OF AN ESSAY FROM NOVEMBER 2011.

I'll start with a disclaimer of sorts.

            The word "presentism" apparently has technical uses in philosophy and for literary and historical analysis, but I found an almost colloquial usage more immediately useful. In this sense, "presentism" is the dumb-ass cousin of a belief in progress and is shown when people too literally think, "In every day / In every way," people have grown "better and better and better," and believe the way we live today is, across-the-board, the norm. If that's the case, then — given where we are today — our ancestors must have been pretty damn stupid and unsophisticated.

            I ran into this attitude when some of my 18-20-something students made clear they thought pretty ignorant and unsophisticated such folk as noble and royal politicians in the courts of Richard II and Elizabeth I, or London theater fans ca. 1600. There are a lot of things you can say about rulers and courtiers in the late medieval and early modern periods —words like "criminal" and "immoral" are frequently apt — but, as a rule, unsophisticated they were not. King Richard II had some weird weaknesses of character, but he wasn't stupid, and when it came to running the family business (England and such), the Tudor Queen Elizabeth was very, very, very bright, sophisticated, and good at her job. And, of course, London audiences ca. 1600 supported a good deal of crap, but they also saw, heard, and apparently appreciated some of the best drama ever produced.

            It is useful to avoid "presentism" in this sense when doing literary criticism so you don't find yourself thinking that the writing of Chaucer and Shakespeare and such couldn't be as sophisticated as your instructors have suggested because Chaucer and Shakespeare and their audiences couldn't have been that sophisticated. Now one or more of your instructors may have been overly ingenious or, well, even just full of shit with a reading or two  — but not because an idea we can have was necessarily too clever for the likes of our ancestors.

            If useful to avoid presentism in this sense in LitCrit, it is actually important to avoid it when doing politics — nothing in LitCrit is truly important — it is important to avoid presentism in talking politics since we shouldn't often change current practices on the assumption that our ancestors were idiots when they came up with them. (For example, after the 2008 financial crises, the "Glass-Steagall" Banking Act of 1933 looks like a really good idea after all.)

            Sometimes our ancestors were stupid, of course; see above on professors sometimes being stupid and apply the rule broadly: even bright humans, even bright humans acting where we're experts say dumb things and do even dumber. But not all that often: Usually our predecessors knew what they were doing, thank you, and the conservatives are correct in the traditional conservative belief that we shouldn't muck around changing things unless we have strong reasons to change things.

            So, our ancestors weren't stupid, or incompetent.

            Having said that, however, I want get to what is, as I write and update, a newly-released movie I have not seen (and may not) and to the serious implications of the idea a character in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness summed up in his reference to his "criminal ancestors": i.e., us and those predecessors I've been defending.

            The movie I want to take off from is 12 Years a Slave (2013) and the inevitable viewer reactions to the cruelty of nineteenth-century Black slavery in the southern United States. The reactions are better nowadays than with Roots in 1977, when I heard and read from some of my fellow Americans — adults, and people who could read — "Why didn't they tell us?!" i.e., why weren't we told that slavery was so bad. Well, indeed they didn't tell us as much as they should have, but the basic information was there. People are told more nowadays and at least quieter about being shocked ("Shocked!") that cruelty was going on, but I want now to point out that in many ways, important ways, things were worse in the past than most of us assume.

            Sorry gang, but you need to know this — and the upshot will be rather hopeful.

            In Origin of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt makes clear that people won't understand the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews if they think of it as the Holocaust and don't put the Shoah in its historical context, including a tradition of massacres. Furthermore, those of us who talk of the eleven million victims of the Hitlerian Holocaust, and not just the five to six million murdered Jews, sometimes have the prudent political motivation of reminding people who are not Jews that they have more at stake here than sentimental sympathy for victims. The "First they came for …" litany has become a cliché, but it remains one of the most practical bits of wisdom that history can teach. "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was central to the Nazis systematic slaughter, but the machinery of exterminations found a variety of victims and had roots in soils in addition to anti-Semitism.

            And even as you have to have some feeling for the history of massacres to understand the Hitlerian Holocaust, even so you need to know the continuity of the cruelty of slavery, and you need to know that slavery was at the extreme end and a logical extension of a continuum of cruelty that lasted into modern times, and came back for a season of hell in the 20^th century.

            Since my form in these blogs is the meditation or personal essay, I'll start with a personal observation from my PhD candidacy in the late 1960s, when, in theory, I learned to read Latin.

            I was using for homework The New Collegiate Latin & English Dictionary (1966) and one day noticed how often on the way to looking up something else — we were mostly reading Aesop's Fables, for God's sake! — how often I saw Latin words referring to things military, violent, and/or violent in relationship to managing slaves. Slavery was woven into the fabric of the Latin language, as was the idea that slaves had to be kept in line, fairly often through terror: beatings, blindings (altero oculo captus 'to blind in one eye'), breaking bones, branding, … well, a series of horrors up to and including crucifixion. Educated and valuable slaves might be treated well; however "Unskilled slaves, or those condemned to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short." Legal testimony from slaves was admissible only after slaves had been tortured.

            Roman slaves gained rights as time went on, but there was continuity, with some slavery in the European Middle Ages, moving more toward serfdom, which got into full gear in parts of Russia in the 17^th century and lasted until fairly recently: 1861. Literal slavery in Russia got a significant boost from the medieval Mongol and Tatar invasions and lasted until 1723.

            There was also continuity of slavery in areas in more constant contact with western Europe than most of Russia: The Mideast slave trade lasted from the 7^th century C.E. through the 19^th, and it ranks #8 on Matthew White's list of "The One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in human history, accounting for some 18.5 million deaths, to say nothing of families torn apart and lives reduced (by definition) to slavery.

            So slavery was known in Europe from their neighbors, and when the Reformation and Renaissance got into full swing, such knowledge was increased by reminders that slavery had been regulated but accepted in the now much-translated and much-read Bible and had been accepted and defended by the now born again, so to speak, classics: the revitalized and revitalizing admiration of ancient Greece and Rome and their cultures (renaissance). If the Hebrews practiced, and the noble Greeks and Romans accepted, practiced, and, as we used to say in academe, theorized slavery — how bad could it be?

            In his "General Introduction" to The Norton Shakespeare (2000), Stephen Greenblatt has a beautiful little quotation attributed to Elizabeth I referring to Her Majesty's Loyal Pirate, John Hawkins and his first slaving voyage, where he transported "some three hundred blacks from the Guinea coast to Hispaniola." She "is reported to have said of this venture that it was 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance of Heaven upon the Undertakers.'" As I said, Elizabeth was bright and sophisticated, and as Head of the Church of England she knew a wicked act when she learned of one. However, Hawkins's venture grossed £10,000 — a huge sum during the period — and so "she invested in Hawkins's subsequent voyages and lent him ships" (23); business is business.

            And business for some was most excellent in the early part of early modern times as the voyages of exploration and discovery discovered silver mines in the New World and empires loaded with gold to plunder and new marketing opportunities with sugar and then tobacco and rum (making fortunes through drug-dealing is old news in the Americas).

            There was money to be made, and if some of the methods were "detestable," well …. Well, by the late 17^th century, racism would theorize why a little detestable slavery was OK for Black people, and there was the tradition of slavery from the Holy and semi-holy scripture of the Bible and the classics. Say what you will about the Romans, they were equal-opportunity oppressors. If they could enslave the two known races of White and Black, plus every ethnicity they could conquer, surely Europeans could enslave Africans, who could be presented, in a Christian variation on Aristotle, as by nature servile and, indeed, who could profit infinitely from contact with Europeans, and getting Christianized (although that Christianizing bit got problematic with conservative or proto-liberal Christians — depending on how you saw them — who disapproved of enslaving other Christians).

            There is one other item to add to the hell-broth as we moved into the slavery inherited in the New World colonies that became the United States. The detestable cruelty of slavery in itself, the terrorism required to maintain people in slavery, was less obvious in its time, including in the years of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from 1452-1807 (#10 on Matthew White's list, with 16 million dead), until the end of slavery in the United States in 1865. Slavery was indeed opposed by an abolitionist movement that over time moved from the political fringe to the mainstream; but that movement took a long time, in part precisely because Black chattel slavery was the extreme end of a continuum of cruelty but definitely part of a continuum.

            In 2011, Steven Pinker published an impressive book on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which required him to come up with some strong hypotheses on Why Violence Has Declined but more so required for him to demonstrate that, indeed, violence has, in fact, declined.

            He was able to perform that demonstration for a reason crucial here: Violence in our time is less than in earlier times, even acknowledging the horrors of the "hemoclysm" (blood deluge) of the two world wars of the 20^th century; but violence is less not because this generation is all that good but more because life for many people before quite recently was very, very bad. As Pinker summarizes much of his book: "Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals — all substantially down."

            Pinker has been critiqued, and figuratively attacked, for his conclusions, but they jibe with a Latin-English dictionary of decades earlier with no political agenda, and with such works as Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978), and the fictional but very well researched BAROQUE CYCLE by Neal Stephenson (2003-4). They also go along with a side comment by the US Army colonel who taught my American military history course ca. 1961. In 1776, the Continental Congress increased the maximum number of lashes a court martial could order from the Biblical 39 to the decimal 100; as the colonel noted, it could have been worse, since the 100 limit "at least meant it was unlikely you'd be whipped to death," as could happen in the British tradition of having someone "whipped through the fleet" or receiving up to a deadly 200 lashes. And then there was reading Herman Melville's, White Jacket (1850), the book arguably most responsible for ending flogging in the US Navy. One memorable and undoubtedly effective — if problematic — sentence: "The chivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, declared, in his place in Congress, that on board the American man-of-war that carried him out Ambassador to Russia he had witnessed more flogging than had taken place on his own plantation of five hundred African slaves in ten years."

            In the words of an old joke, as H. Rap Brown (of the Black Panther Party) might've said of the chivalric slave-owner John Randolph, "damn White of him." Still, the point remains that sailors and soldiers, servants and prisoners were often treated with great cruelty. As Pinker stresses, it was part of everyday life to encounter brutality toward non-human animals, children, wives, and others in positions of weakness, people in culturally-sanctioned and enforced inferiority. And one definition of "liberty" included the liberty to practice such brutality without interference by the state in family matters or labor management or doing what the social superior thought right to do with "my own."

            Books like Pinker's Better Angels and essays like mine here are — or should be — unpleasant to read, but there is that hopeful upshot. Things really have gotten better, and there is hope for getting them actually pretty good for increasing numbers of people.

            As part of that improvement, it's necessary to remember that sympathy for the oppressed is nice as a form of altruism, but politically more effective when aspects of good character are reinforced by insightful self-interest.

            It wasn't just Jews caught up in the Nazi exterminations, and it was not just Blacks who suffered: these atrocities happened in worlds that kept up traditions of cruelty and fitted them to newfangled ideologies of racism and very old-fashioned sins of pride and greed. Jews and Blacks are strong contenders for the "Grimmy Award" for some areas of worst suffering, but there are many out there to join us.

            Americans in the 21^st century are not particularly exceptional nor are we all that much smarter than our ancestors; and our current relative decency is a matter of culture, inheritance, and, in a sense, fashion. There was great continuity of slavery and other oppression, and bad old days can return. One way to prevent such a return is to be at least smart enough to do the arithmetic: slavery is a great way to live, for a rich slave-owner; an oppressive hierarchical society is great, if you're on the top. But that's not how the numbers work: If we return to worlds with a long continuum of cruelty, there's a good chance each of us will be receiving most of that cruelty, not dishing it out.

History "Rhyming": The Fall of Rome, Post-Reformation Wars of Religion — ISIS

           "History never repeats itself; but sometimes it rhymes," is line worthy of Mark Twain, although he probably didn't say it.

            If you're a Jew or old-Lefty Pole of my generation, or a Japanese-American or some others — if World War II history is relevant to you fairly personally — you've recently had thrust at you some very disturbing "rimes." Most immediately there has been the turning away of refugees and proposing of such fascistic policies as registering Muslims in America by religion, along with mutterings of internment. There has also been the rise in Europe of political movements and parties that are near the border of fascism or over it; and the US Congress has insisted on continuing at least one policy that is hard-core fascist: the zone of statelessness we maintain at Guantanamo, outside of the Constitution and much of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Plus, of course, the small zones of literal lawlessness at US "black sites" for captured or kidnapped suspects during "The War on Terror" and — very recently, if hyperbolically and ignorantly — bellicose threats of a return to carpet bombing by the US, which is most effective as a terror tactic, necessarily killing civilians.

            Except for precisely how despicable it is that the US still holds enemies (and maybe some relative innocents) at Guantanamo, however, such topics have been covered extensively by others, and here I'm going to handle something more general and long term, but equally … let's say concerning.

            I've been thinking of historical parallels while using a lull in "my brilliant career" in the movie biz to fill in a bit some areas of my ignorance: transitions between major historical periods. I'm talking the biggies here: the movement into cities and kingdoms in the early Bronze Age, and in the West the transition from Late Antiquity into the Medieval in the 600's (in the Christian Calendar), and, much later, the move into the Modern Period, Enlightenment, and the Age of Revolutions in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

            We can't know much detail about the rise of the earliest civilizations, but two things seem important. First, there was frequently a big king with a close connection to "Big Gods," as a kind of god himself, as with the Egyptian pharaoh as (usually at least) the living Horus, or with the somewhat less formal godhead among the rulers in Mesopotamia, where the "first instance of self-deification […] coincides with the first world empire" — i.e., rule of the very ancient Near East — "of the rulers of Akkad." Second, a crucial thing these early kings could do was arrange irrigation projects and control the water: impressively, if "hyperbolically," imaged in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). We don't need to worry about god-kings this side of some apocalypse, but one potential of long-prolonged and severe drought and other climatic stress would be an increasing willingness to succumb to a Führerprinzip and follow capital "L" Leaders who could promise stability and water — and other necessities. To continue with the Mad Max "mythos," at stake along with water might be power; in Mad Max [3] Beyond Thunderdome (1985), those who control hydrocarbon power control proto-capitalist civilization.

            In a world that has returned to widespread scarcity, the condition for most people for much of the history of civilization, liberal democracy could come to be widely seen as an unaffordable luxury.

            But that's a rough sort of "partial rime," and warning about the danger of renewed scarcity is a cliché. There are parallels to current events where we've seen the movie before as a Western (as in Europe as the West):

                        * The invention of new and powerful means of communication,

                        * reforming theorists calling for return to the fundamentals of the pure, original religion,

                        * the entanglement of movements for reformation into long-standing political tensions,

                        * civil and international wars among competing monotheistic sects.

            My reference here is to the printing press, the Protestant Reformation from Tyndall and Luther through the radical Calvinists — and the Counterreformation and the various theological and political splits and military unpleasantnesses concurrent and following. We are not there yet, and ISIS is the "junior varsity," as Pres. Obama said; but successor groups to ISIS may prove as successful as John Calvin in Geneva and the Puritan Roundheads in England; and our wars of religion, possibly starting with Shia vs. Sunni, will be in a world with nukes.

           

            I for one am happy that the West moved from the Early Modern world of the Renaissance and Reformation into the Modern one of the Enlightenment and the Revolutions: the "Glorious Revolution" in England in 1688, the American, the French, the scientific, and the industrial. But there were costs, and those costs included two to four million dead of famine and disease, war and massacres in France (1562-98), the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), with massive casualties, and the English Civil War (1642-51), with death, exile, and enslavement resulting in losses of population estimated at 3.7% for England, 6% for Scotland, and forty-one percent (41%) for Ireland. Indeed, even as in America we are still dealing with our Civil War, that war and some of our deepest divisions go back to the English Civil War and the struggle between radical-Protestant Puritans and Royalist "Cavaliers."

            There is no "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, but there was no clash of civilizations between Catholics and Protestants — and their splinter groups — during the Wars of Religion; and, for that matter there wasn't that much of a clash of civilizations during the Crusades, except perhaps between the relatively high culture of Islam and the more … basic, let's say, culture of Christendom (Matthew White estimates the body count from the Crusades of 1095-1291 at about three million, putting it in a tie with his estimate for the French Wars of Religion).

            An extended Sunni vs. Shia civil war/war(s) of religion would be horrendous. If it brings in elements of a revived Christendom and then Israeli Jews and Indian Hindus, it would be catastrophic.

            Which is the background reason why it is so important to defeat ISIS while it's still the JV, and before they've found a charismatic Leader to act as a new Saladin or a more secular — Caliph at most, not Prophet — Mohammed. And which brings us to what I've skipped over: the move from Late Antiquity and the Roman Empire in western Eurasia to the Middle Ages, with Rome reduced to the Byzantine Empire as a relatively small and threatened entity and Europe evolving into perhaps nation-states, for sure smaller, generally poorer, less sophisticated political units. That is, I want to get to what is often thought of as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and/or the run-up to, and then the rise of, "The Empire of the Arabs."

            And here I'm going to give you two long quotations from my old text books for ancient and medieval history: Joseph Ward Swain's The Ancient World, Volume Two, The World Empires: Alexander and the Romans After 334 B.C. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), and James W. Thompson and Edgar Nathaniel Johnson's An Introduction to Medieval Europe: 300-1500 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). I'm going to repeat the dates, 1950 and 1937; when I said "old," I meant old — at least old as textbooks go, comparatively speaking, given that it's been over half a millennium since the end of the periods they cover. Anyway, these books were written before the middle of the twentieth century and can have no axes to grind, no agendas concerning current events in the second decade of the twenty-first.

            The quotation from Swain ends the period he covers in his second volume, from the reign and conquests of Alexander the Great (336-323 BCE) to the end of the ancient world. The quotation from Thompson and Johnson doesn't come at the beginning of their book. Thompson and Johnson start their survey about the time of the Roman emperor Constantine and what they call "The Græco-Oriental Conquest of the Roman Empire," then move through "The Christian Conquest of the Roman Empire," "The German Conquest of the Roman Empire" (from early migrations to 600 CE), to a summary discussion of "The Byzantine Empire" — a rump Rome in the east that lasted until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 — and then get to "The Empire of the Arabs," which is important for their discussion for three basic reasons. First, the "long-continued struggle" between the Arabs and their Muslim allies and subordinates; second, as one of "the great civilizations of the world," and for a third point often overlooked by those raised in Christendom. The "Dark Ages" weren't total disasters everywhere, but with the fall of Rome in the West, a whole lot of ancient learning was lost or at least misplaced, while intellectuals and others in "The Empire of the Arabs" conserved a good deal and added to it. When during and after the Crusades Islam again directly "encountered the civilization of western Europe[,] they had rich treasures of science and philosophy quite unknown to the west. They accordingly contributed one of the basic elements in the composition of western culture" (p. 153).

            To the "Græco-Oriental," Greco-Roman, Germanic, and Christian threads in the fabric of western European civilization, one must add the Arab-Islamic, but we need to make that addition while carefully noting that Arab-Islamic conquests marked both the beginning of one era in the West and the end of another.

            Joseph Ward Swain begins his coda to his story of the ancient world with the end of the reign of the East Roman Emperor Justinian in 565 CE.

          A few years after Justinian's death, Mohammed was born in Arabia, and when he died in 632 his new religion was accepted in many parts of that country. Within ten years[,] Moslem armies had conquered Syria, Palestine, Persia, and Egypt, and while their advances were less rapid thereafter, they did not stop until they reached the frontiers of India and China in the East and the Atlantic in the West. They entered Europe at Gibraltar in 711, and overthrew the Visigothic Kingdom. Though the Moors were turned back by the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732, and soon left Gaul, they retained large parts of Spain for several centuries [and kept a toe-hold until 1492]. Throughout this vast territory, Christians and pagans accepted Mohammedanism [sic] readily. 

         Such military and religious successes are amazing, even though many factors aided the Moslems. Exhausted Constantinople could not raise the armies needed to hold its provinces. The peoples of Asia and Africa often looked upon the Arabs as liberators freeing them from the bureaucrats and bishops of the hated Byzantine autocracy. But in the long run Moslem successes may best be regarded as the triumph of the [ancient] Orient over European invaders. Almost a thousand years had passed since Alexander overthrew the first Persian Empire. During all that time a small aristocracy of Europeans and Europeanized Orientals had dominated a vast oriental population. Orientals now became masters in their own house once more. Except during the Crusades [1095-1291 CE, ca. three million dead], they remained so until the nineteenth century. (pp. 613-14)

Persia was an independent empire, the Sasanian, never conquered by Rome, but Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain had been in the Roman Empire, as was, of course, much of Europe; and the causes of their fall to various conquests has been a matter of debate since at least St. Augustine's City of God (426 CE), written after the sack of the City of Rome by the Visigoths, while the Empire was in decline but not yet fallen. So significant in the quotation from Swain are the ideas of the Muslim conquests as initially anti-colonialism on a massive scale and the issue of the weakness of the Roman Empire: as Edward Gibbon put it, it was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (publication starting in 1776, an appropriate date).

            The reasons for that weakness of course are many, from economic failures to civil wars. I'm going to mention two that are significant for "rimes" and aren't, I hope, total clichés.

            The first is discussed in a book by William Rosen with the intriguing title Justinian's Flea and the alternative subtitles Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe and, for the Reprint and/or British Edition, The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (2007). One of the reasons the Roman and Persian Empires were weak was that both had been hit by a new and virulent form of bubonic plague: "One of the greatest plagues in history, this devastating pandemic resulted in the deaths of an estimated 25 million (initial outbreak) to 50 million (two centuries of recurrence) people." The immediate source of plague in Justinian's empire were rats from grain ships from Egypt; recent "Genetic studies point to China" as the ultimate "source of the contagion."

            And how would a disease from China get to Egypt and from Egypt into the Mediterranean commodities trade? One obvious route would be the complex system in the trade of commodities more compact and precious than grain coming over what's usually called "The Silk Road."

            There wasn't exactly globalization in the ancient and medieval worlds, but very early on there was long distance trade that covered surprisingly large stretches of Eurasia. Trade is overall a good thing — or so I believe, living next to a deep-water port — but among things inadvertently exchanged in commerce are pathogens, and those pathogens can have world-historical effects. Yersinia pestis using fleas as vectors thrived in much of Eurasia at least for a while, or a while from an epidemiological point of view; it did less well — at least in this visitation of the plague — in the hot and dry deserts of Arabia, where people do not grow, store, and transport large quantities of rat chow (i.e., grain).

            In a time of increasing global trade, in a time when the last unexploited areas of the Earth are being entered and/or exposed by a warming climate, in a time of continuing resentments against forms of colonialism far gentler but perhaps more invasive than those of Alexander's Greeks or Imperial Romans: in our time, such "rimes" should give us pause. We know about germs and quarantines, so we will not have plagues similar to that of the time of Justinian or the medieval Black Death; but we modern folk are uniquely unfamiliar with death from infectious diseases, and even a pandemic like the flu following World War I could proved disastrous not just in body count but also for social order and confidence.

            A second reason for the weakening of Rome was, initially and mostly at one remove, the movement west of the Huns across the Eurasian steppes, driving before them large numbers of refugees; "The Huns may have stimulated the Great Migration" of "barbarians" into the Roman world: "a contributing factor in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire."

            Aiding refugees is an ethical obligation and for many of us a religious duty; still, to "welcome the stranger" can be an obligation and duty with risks, and however one judges the often racist and fascistic resistance to welcoming refugees from conflict in Syria and elsewhere, the extent of the influx and migration of refugees is destabilizing in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and the Balkans, and contributes to tensions in Turkey, the European Union, and elsewhere.

            For people who know my obsessions, it will be clear that the major "rime" I'm moving toward is the fanaticism of ISIS and the competing fanaticisms it will inspire. Still, there is one more ingredient to throw into the brew, and it comes from an alternative suggestion endorsed by Thompson and Johnson for the incredible early expansion of Islam.

          The easy explanation has long been that Mohammed first succeeded in giving political cohesion to Arabia, and then so fired the Arabs with the burning zeal of religious fanaticism that almost en masse they dashed out of the [Arabian] peninsula with the fierce determination to convert they world by the sword, knowing that, if they died in the attempt, Islam guaranteed them the most precious of all booty, the fruits of paradise.

          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. For all its expansion and conquest, from Mesopotamia to Spain, Judaism and Christianity by no means ceased to exist by its side. The only impositions made by the Arab conquerors upon unbelievers were a special poll tax and the prohibition of the possession of weapons. […]

          In the second place, it is impossible to speak of Mohammed's creating any such thing as Arabian unity, nor can it be supposed that in any substantial way the nomadic Arab tribes were suddenly consolidated into a unified state after his death. Unified states are not organized in the desert. In fact, after Mohammed's death it was only by hard fighting […] that a recognition of the loose political overlordship of Medina over the other Arab tribes was secured. Even then there was not, and could not be, any interference with tribal organization. As for the early Arabian conquests, few of Mohammed's followers in Medina participated in them, and those Arabs who did knew and cared little about Islam. 

         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 climatic conditions, which always drove nomadic peoples outwards. [… There was a slow Arab expansion previous to Mohammed, and in his time] 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 probable that what occurred would have happened even without Mohammed and Islam. [Still,] After the conquest of Mecca[,] the tribes subject to Medina had for the moment no outlet for their customary warlike activities. The new Moslem tribes that became subject after the Ridda Wars [under Abu Bakr, the first Caliph] were constrained in their intertribal warfare by the dictates of the new religion, which preached that Moslems should help rather than fight other Moslems.

        At just the right moment[,] a revolt of Arab mercenaries of Byzantium on the Syrian frontier led to their calling for assistance against Byzantium upon Medina, whose military reputation had by then pervaded all Arabia. Here was an opportunity for expansion, the most pressing need, for relief of hunger and for booty. Islam found it easy to sanctify such opportunities with the seal of religious approval of a holy war, as Christianity had done for Clovis's war against the heretic Visigoths. Such unity as was gained in the conquests of the Arabs was produced by enthusiasm for the profits of expansion and for escape from "the hot prison of the desert" rather than by enthusiasm over the opportunity to spread the true gospel — with which by no means all of them were even acquainted. "Had it not been for the disaffection rife among these disciplined Arabs of the marches [of Syria], it is likely that the religion of Mohammed would have gone the way of other minor eastern heresies. Hunger and covetousness, far more potent forces than fanaticism, drove the Arabs from their arid peninsula to the fair places of the earth." [In Bevan and Singer, The Legacy of Israel (1927), p. 150] (Thompson and Johnson pp. 164, 166).

A good deal has changed in the writing of history since the 1920s and 1930s, and reductive materialist explanations (geographic, climatic) are no longer convincing. More important, a great deal has changed since the seventh century Anno Domini and the first couple centuries Anno Hegirae — i.e., of the Christian and Muslim Eras — when nomadic tribes could march and ride out of the desert to conquer large swaths of the world. Still, in ISIS there is a fundamentalism impossible back in the time of Mohammed and Abu Bakr when the "fundamentals" were still getting worked out, and ISIS is a fanatical organization that could evolve into the core of a fanatical mass movement that appeals to peoples made desperate in "desiccations" of hot and dry places of the Earth far beyond the Arabian Peninsula.

            "History never repeats itself; but sometimes it rhymes." The rise of ISIS should not get us to panic (spreading terror is what terrorism is about), but it should give us a sense of concern and cautious urgency. ISIS must be destroyed — to recycle and modernize a dumb-ass slogan from Roman rhetoric and a Roman senator — but carefully and as part of much broader programs.

            Those programs would include working to slow climate change and ameliorate its damage, projects we should be working on anyway. And they need to include warfare by a wide coalition against ISIS, and a coalition using economic and psychological warfare as well as the sort that shoots people or blows them up. The refugee problem needs to be worked on cooperatively as well, spreading out the burdens and costs; the countries of the world need to be much better prepared for the public health challenges of infectious diseases. The neo-colonial aspects of globalization must be restricted, and potential True Believe fanatics need to be offered decent jobs and the possibility of relatively meaningful lives in societies that work. And every Bible-pounding, Quran-pushing, Likudnik-equivalent, heresy-hunting zealot should be shamed into studying the history of the Sunni/Shi'a split, the horrors of the Crusades, and the utter catastrophe for Europe of the Catholic vs. Protestant Wars of Religion.

            History never repeats itself, but "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," or may be so condemned, sometimes: condemned,  sometimes, to repeating historical tragedies as bloody, horrific farce. To repeat a point that needs repeating, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century we risk repeating historical tragedies in Dr. Strangelove-ian farces with nukes in the hands of Hindus and Jews, two varieties of Muslims, Confucian Communists, the occasional outlier weirdo (Kim Jong-un, maybe Donald Trump), and a variety of Christians, from Evangelical to Russian Orthodox. 

         So, be not afraid, but do "Be concerned; be very concerned."