The League of David

A brief history of jihad

Philistines everywhere have decided that terrorism somehow started after the US invaded Iraq.  It's part of the sort of collective, selective amnesia  that picks and chooses basic facts in order to color every action in Iraq and elsewhere in the worst possible light.  They've conveniently forgotten the last, oh, 1200 years of ideological and political development that serves as the strong and steady foundation for today's global terrorist movement.  It's all about Bush and Rove and the Zionist/neocon conspiracy of the day.

It's now time to remind my Philistine friends that the world began long before March 2003.  Jihad has a long history, and would have done so whether we invaded Iraq or lifted the sanctions and let Saddam continue the WMD programs that he didn't have.

A brief history of jihad  for the addled and confused

Twelve hundred years before the US invasion of Iraq, Ahmad ibn Hanbal, the "Imam  of Baghdad," founded a school of Islamic jurisprudence that takes a more, er,  fundamental approach to the practice of Islam. He caused a fuss, was imprisoned  several times.

Seven hundred years before the invasion of Iraq, Sheik ul-Islam Ibn Taymiyya  studied Hanbali's work, persuasively argued for a strict interpretation and application of islamic law.  He caused a fuss, was imprisoned several times. Today, he's more popular among  terrorists than Noam Chomsky.

Two hundred and fifty years before the US invasion of Iraq, Muhammad bin  Abdul-Wahhab, studied Hanbal, Taymiyya, and founded his own school of Islamic  thought that had nothing to do with improved self-esteem or multiculturalism.  He caused a fuss, but eventually became the spiritual guide of the Al Saud tribe.

One hundred and ten years before the U.S. invasion of Iraq Muhammad Abduh, an  Egyptian influenced by the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence and by the thinking of ibn Wahhab, among many others, reintroduced Salafist thinking into the cultural and political landscape of the Arab world, as a response to Western influences.  He helped found the modern Salafist movement that includes Wahhabi, Deobandis, MBs, and practically every jihadi in the world.  He caused a fuss, was exiled, but returned to Egypt and died the Grand Mufti.

Seventy-five years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian educator, was inspired by the thinking of a Muhammad Abduh, among others, and founded the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ihkwan. He caused a fuss and was executed in 1949.  MB now has a presence in every country.  Pluralism and freedom of speech highlight the group's ideology:

"Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."

Sixty-three years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Maulana Maududi, an Indian Muslim journalist, -- inspired by the MB in Egypt and the rich ideological history that included Hanbali, Tamiyya, Wahhab, Deobandi thinkers and other Salafist intellectual -- founded the Jemmat-e-Islami political party in Pakistan. It had the stated goal of founding a strict Islamic state. He caused a fuss, was imprisoned on several occasions.  He died in Buffalo, NY in 1979.  He too is famous for his political pluralism:

"Therefore the goal aspired for in the messengership of the Prophets in this world did not cease to be the establishment of the Islamic government upon the earth."

Sixty five years before the US invaded Iraq, Sayyid Qutb was teaching and writing about literary theory when he was inspired by Maududi and al-Banna.  From 1948-1950, Qutb attended college in Greeley, CO in an exchange program.  Americans interest in church dances, ritual lawn mowing and football offended him. He wrote some of the most important works of modern Islamic thought, including Milestones, In the Shade of the Quran, and The America I Have Seen.  He's considered the founder of modern political Islam.  He caused much fuss, was imprisoned and eventually executed in 1966 (37 years before the US invasion of Iraq).

Here begins the contemporary time line. It's heavy on 1979, because the year really, really sucked.

Twenty four years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Juhayman al-Utaybi and a band of  terrorist (now called insurgents) seized control of the Grand Mosque in  Mecca, demanding that the royal family return the country to a more pious Islam.  They caused a fuss, and were eventually killed or executed.

Twenty four years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, while our president wore a sweater and scolded us for being down on everything, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan for its vast oil reserves and technology-driven economy.  This caused a really BIG  fuss throughout the Islamic world. Our president boycotted the Olympic games in  Moscow.


Twenty four years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Iranian fundamentalists seized control of the US embassy in Tehran and took American hostage.  They were very energetic, pasting together shredded documents and mugging for the cameras whenever possible.

Twenty four years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian educator who studied in Egypt, writes In Defense of Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan, among other classics.  He'd eventually hook up with his former student, Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. He had a hand in establishing two prominent organization -- Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.  Both groups are dedicated to pluralism, multicultural tolerance, and the vegan way of life. 

Twelve years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a follower of Abdel Rahman (friend of Abdullah Azzam), murdered Rabi Meir Kahane. Rahman -- ever the grateful asylum seeker -- had several other achievements under his belt before being arrested, tried and imprisoned for life.  These achievements include:  a foiled plot to blow up the United Nations building, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the Manhattan offices of the FBI.

Ten years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Ramzi Yousef and his band of New York "insurgents" blew up the World Trade Center using home-mixed explosives packed into a rental truck.  He promptly fled the country, but only after he returned to the rental company to request a refund for the truck.

Eight years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, the Bojinka plot, cooked up in the Philippines by Yousef and uncle Khalid Sheik Mohammed (whose later a-ha moment killed 3000 Americans), failed to materialize.  Neither did their plot to assassinate the Pope.

Eight years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, a car bomb in downtown Riyadh killed 5 Americans.

Seven years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States:

Under the present circumstances, and under the banner of the blessed awakening which is sweeping the world in general and the Islamic world in particular, I meet with you today...who fears that they, the scholars and callers of Islam, will instigate the Ummah of Islam against its' enemies as their ancestor scholars like Ibn Taymiyyah and Al'iz Ibn Abdes-Salaam did.

Seven years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, terrorists bombed the US military installation, Khobar Towers.

Six years before the U.S. invaded Iraq, members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, lead by  pediatrician Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed and mutilated 58 tourists near Luxor,  Egypt.

Five years before the US invaded Iraq, Usama bin Laden and his friend Ayman  al-Zawahiri declared the merger of their two groups calling the new ecumenical organization,  The World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders. Their  application for 501(c)3 status was rejected by the IRS.

The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are  against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess  of 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat  the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

Sound familiar?

Five years before the US invaded Iraq, Al Qaeda blew up two American embassies in Africa, killing hundreds.

Four years before the US invaded Iraq, Ahmed Ressam was arrested on his way to carrying out an attack against LA airport. Apparently, they didn't teach him how not to sweat at Al Qaeda's Afghan training camps where he learned to build bombs and improve his self esteem..

Four years before the US invaded Iraq, bin Laden sent attackers to Jordan to bomb holy sites at the turn of the millennium, including "SAS Radisson Hotel in downtown Amman, the border crossings from Jordan into Israel, and two Christian holy sites,  at a time when all these locations were likely to be thronged with American and other tourists."

Three years before the US invaded Iraq, Al Qaeda members in Yemen tried to blow the USS Sullivans in the port of Aden.  The attack failed when the terrorists' dingy sank from the weight of the explosives.  But they were successful with the USS Cole.

Two years before the US invaded Iraq, Al Qaeda sent 19 men to kill tens of thousands of Americans.
Remember 9/11.

I found this picture on the internet, but this is how it looked outside the office window, from my job location in Crystal City.

One year before the US invaded Iraq, Al Qaeda sponsored the bombing of a a bunch  of nightclubs in Bali, Indonesia.  The bombs killed over 200 young men and women on the Australian equivalent of Spring Break:

The bombing was planned for Friday 11th to maximise Western, and minimise local victims, but the bombs weren't ready in time so it had to be postponed for 24-hours. When the white Mitsubishi van drove up to the Sari Club on the Saturday  evening about 500 patrons were drinking, chatting, laughing, dancing - the band was playing Eminem's Without Me. Jake Ryan, a 22 year old student and footballer, was in the club for some end-of-season fun with his team mates.

In The Australian of October 10th, Jake described how the explosion blasted  shrapnel into his stomach, shot a piece of someone's bone into his leg, and hacked  half his foot away. On one and a half feet and adrenalin he ran to help a girl who  sat in a circle of flame holding someone whose skin was totally blackened. He yelled at her to lift her arms so he could pull her from the fire. "I have no  legs" she screamed, and died looking into his eyes. He grabbed someone's hand and  the skin peeled off like a glove.  During his ride to the hospital a Balinese man  died beside him.

Jake analysed the nature of the act committed that evening in Bali, with the  clarity of the self evident - a clarity that eludes so many. "People who blame the  West ... should blame the cowards who actually detonated the bomb and the bastards  who financed them. It isn't difficult to work out. ... If terrorists aren't stopped, they'll keep going, from New York to Bali to wherever next".

The bombers are unapologetic.

In jihad ideology there are no "noncombatants," but let's not have reality get in the way of a good leftist argument for appeasement and surrender.  After all, if it wasn't for Iraq we wouldn't be in this predicament in the first place.

The Only Frog Who Matters

July 29th was the 200th birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville.  His Democracy in America is a remarkable account of the United States in the 1830s.  His insights into everyday America show a country filled with contradictions, but pulsing with optimism and opportunity. 

As the Opinion Journal says:  "Yet the chief measure of Tocqueville's greatness--which we celebrate today on his 200th birthday--is that, in reading his "Democracy in America," we instantly recognize ourselves."

Every page is an pleasant surprise, with stunning insights into the American experience that are as familiar to us now, as it would have been in pre-Civil War America. 

On our Restlessness:

If I were to inquire what passion is most natural to men who are stimulated and circumscribed by the obscurity of their birth or the mediocrity of their fortune, I could discover none more peculiarly appropriate to their condition than this love of physical prosperity. The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes; with those classes it grows and spreads, with them it is preponderant. From them it mounts into the higher orders of society and descends into the mass of the people.

I never met in America any citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich or whose imagination did not possess itself by anticipation of those good things that fate still obstinately withheld from him.

On the Publishing industry:

Democratic literature is always infested with a tribe of writers who look upon letters as a mere trade; and for some few great authors who adorn it, you may reckon thousands of idea-mongers.

On American women:

As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

On Roman Catholicism in America:

The men of our days are naturally little disposed to believe; but as soon as they have any religion, they immediately find in themselves a latent instinct that urges them unconsciously towards Catholicism. Many of the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church astonish them, but they feel a secret admiration for its discipline, and its great unity attracts them. If Catholicism could at length withdraw itself from the political animosities to which it has given rise, I have hardly any doubt but that the same spirit of the age which appears to be so opposed to it would become so favorable as to admit of its great and sudden advancement.

Poor Abe

Everyone is trying to reinvent Abe Lincoln these days.  First, they wanted him to be gay, because, you know...he signed a letter to a male friend with "Yours forever."

Now, Philistines are criticizing him because he wasn't sufficient politically correct:

Still, as I look at his picture, it is the man and not the icon that speaks to me. I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice. Scholars tell us too that Lincoln wasn't immune from political considerations and that his temperament could be indecisive and morose.

Poor Abe.  I took this picture in the basement of the Lincoln Memorial.  Catch the memorial now, before Philistines redesign it as another memorial to all the horrible things white Western males have done throughout the ages, especially those...Americans.

Out of the Dust and Ash

I have no clue how I ran into this site, but for lovers of obscure knowledge, this is cool:

The Philodemus Project

The UCLA Campus magazine, UCLA Today, explains the importance of the project and the little known ancient writer whose name is given to it:

Two-thousand year-old papyri written by a first-century B.C. philosopher and lost in the volcanic eruption that destroyed the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum are yielding new insights into the ancient world.

The scrolls were excavated in the eighteenth century after being buried from some 1700 years. Now, for the first time, they are being translated into English and analyzed by a team of scholars led by UCLA Classics Professor David Blank. Co-directors of the project are Richard Janko (University College, London) and Dirk Obbink (Christ Church, Oxford).

The research team is studying the writings of a philosopher and poet named Philodemus, a follower of Epicurus from the first century B.C. who summarized nearly three centuries of wisdom on literary matters that were otherwise lost.

"Philodemus is virtually our only source on poetry and literary criticsm from 300 B.C. to the time of Christ, and those were very important centuries," said Prof. Richard Janko, a member of the team from University College, London.

Blank, chair of the UCLA Department of Classics and an expert on ancient philosophy, said the documents are "comparable to the Dead Sea Scrolls in the insight they give into the ancient world."

If you take a look at the artifacts Prof. Blank and his colleagues are working with, you'll get a sense of the monumental challenges they face.  How else but through hard work will Philodemus' works become known to us.   Hat's off to the men and women working to pull the ancient world out of the dust and ash.  It's a labor of love without much public recognition, and little respect.

Those Silly Nazis, er, Philistines

Belmont Club has a fascinating rebuttal to the use of the word Nazi by mainstream media, celebrities and blue state commentators.  It's constantly used these days by liberals to describe conservative Christians: 

"When people aver that 'Bush is like Hitler', it presumes the speaker has a clear historical knowledge of what Hitler was really like, an assumption which is increasingly invalid. "

Mr. Wretchard breaks apart -- concept by concept -- the current misuse of  the term Nazi, by using uncomfortable facts in the face of self-serving blue-state fantasy.  This is something that the blogosphere excels at these days.  However, he doesn't go deep into the artistic and cultural sources of real Nazism, and so I decided to write up a little essay about this fascinating and bizarre history.

=======

When I tell people what I studied in college, I usually end up staring into a puzzled gaze.  Sometimes, there's a guffaw.  At least in those moments I know they know something about the subject.   What was it?

Medieval literature. 

More precisely,  I read the stories of the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, a tiny bit of the French, but mostly it was the Germans, the Scandinavians, and the Anglo-Saxons.  They're great stories, many very long, and filled with action and moral consequence.  After many years, I can visualize the men of the Gododdin riding to battle.  I recall the wacked out chess game in the Dream of Rhonabwy. And I can see Tristan sickened by the dragon's tongue, and later, Isolde raising Tristan's own sword to strike him while he soaks in a bath.  I can see Egil Skallagrimson at York offering his head to King Erik Blood axe, and his friend, Arinbjorn, holding vigil on a window sill, protecting Egil from the evil intentions of a changling-nightingale.  I still think about Njal's decision to order his family into the burning house, all to die, save one; and every once in a while I'm reminded of Njal's creepy son, Skarphedin. 

Don't even get me started with the Irish stories.  There's the story of two birds hunted by Ireland's greatest hero, Cu Chulainn, who transform themselves into women.  One, wielding a whip, strikes him down, and he wastes away. Whenever I read a story of our brave young men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think of the courage Beorhtnoth's men, fighting the Danish viking invaders:  will the stronger, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens. 

What is old is ever new again.  There's something effervescent about pop culture.  A decades-long international obsession with neopaganism barely registers with people today.  Cultural undercurrents that produced some of the most beautiful works of art and music of a century, are forgotten by most people.  However, they show up in contemporary pop culture, usually in the form of some sort of secret knowledge or age-old wisdom.  I'm particularly stunned at the silliness generated by The DaVinci Code, a pile of neopagan fluff wrapped in a good story, and passed off as ancient wisdom.  My friends ask me about the "facts" in this stupid novel, because they know I've always had an interest in things medieval.   I always disappoint them.

When I studied medieval literature in college, I also studied the men (and women) who first brought them into the modern age.  The epic stories of poets like Wolfram von Eschenbach had survived in manuscripts for centuries, but in the 19th century they were rediscovered.  That rediscovery is a story in itself, and the late Norman Cantor only scratches the surface in Inventing the Middle Ages.  One sad result of this rediscovery was the use of these works in nationalist movements in countries like Ireland and Russia.  However, it was used to greatest effect in Germany. 

The revival of the European Middle Ages wasn't the renewal of a Christian civilization, it was the revival of a pagan past.  And that pagan past took 19th century Germany by storm.  Richard Wagner can take the lion's share of responsibility for this movement.  His last opera, Parsifal, was for decades one of the most popular operas on both sides of the Atlantic.  Ten years ago I had the pleasure of seeing a recently restored 1904 version of Parsifal, complete with accompanying piano score.  Wagner died in 1883.  Twenty years later Thomas Edison invests his money on what movie?  It would take World War I to wrench Wagner-love from the hearts of many Americans. 

Wagner's Parsifal and the pagan ideals it articulated show up everywhere in the the Art Nouveau movement.  Stretching from the 1880s up through World War I, the Art Nouveau movement represented almost 40 years of neopagan and non-Christian influence in Western popular art. 

In his biography of Brahms, Jan Swafford sums up the Wagnerian influence on Western civilization:

By the turn of the last century before the millennium, Wagner's world-ideas were some of the most influential in the Western artistic milieu. In Austria and Germany the reactionary antisemitic nationalism that he helped inspire eventually culminated in violent and world-threatening forms. In the arts, the period called Modern became a vast, sprawling movement, different in every art, splintering into subdivisions from Primitivism to Futurism, Surrealism to Serialism (and including Modernists who claimed to despise Modernism). All the while a necessary underpinning for this Babel was the one Wagner and the New Germans proclaimed in the middle of the nineteenth century: the creator as high priest in the religion of art, not the entertainer of the public but a revolutionary leader to whom the masses owe understanding. For the duration of Modernism, even if the nature and extent of his victory is hard to pin down, Wagner had won the War of Romantics that raged between the two camps in the nineteenth century.

[Please note that in the 1830-40s, Robert Schumann identified the destructive potency of Wagner's ideas, and called Wagner and his followers Philistines. The struggle between Schumann (and later Brahms) and Wagnerites, is a precursor to today's culture wars, and is the inspiration for this blog.]

Any genuine scholar of medieval Germanic literature cannot ignore the 100 year stain of racist nationalism on the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Nibelungelied poet, and many others medieval poets.  It's there, and a teacher is always doing the right thing by acknowledging this tainted past so that their students don't repeat those mistakes.  I had a professor who used to tell stories of his "reeducated" Nazi professors at the University of Vienna in the 1950s.  He didn't shrink from the truth. 

Where there is Siegfried, there's also the shadow of an ugly past. 

I get a kick out of my blue state friends (some of them Jewish) embracing the senseless "facts" of the DaVinci Code, which is really a mishmash of proto-Nazi fantasy that has its source, not in the Middle Ages, but in 19th century German salons.  These are the same salons that showcased Wagner's disdain for Jews.  These were fertile ground for idiotic neopagan fads such as vegetarianism.  According to Wagner, the pagans of German's past were vegetarians, and so he was.  But he wasn't.  Decades later,  Hitler and his followers, believing Wagner's b.s., were exacting vegetarians.

[I get a kick out of modern-day Philistines who practice vegetarianism and accept neopagan "belief systems."  They're usually humorless people, who mutter crap about "too many people in the world" as a justification for abortion rights and feel strongly about stopping the "holocaust" against chickens.  Their world view shares its source with some of the most violent and racist ideologies ever devised.   It's a monumental irony.]

The Nazis so embraced their neopagan ideology that they used to sponsor these vast, outdoor "events" called Dingspiels.  When I was in college I read about these silly pagan pageants, but couldn't believe that Germans would dress up in "viking" garb and parade around like some Wagnerian Grail Castle ceremony.   I was stunned to find a picture of one such event in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings:

I can't find any attribution for this picture, but the author is succinct in his context for it:

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933 they started a crusade against 'decadent' modern culture, systematically replacing it with their own version of 'Aryan' culture, based on the heritage of the Vikings, Old Norse mythology, Wagner, and German peasant culture. The Nazis particularly encouraged a new and supposedly Germanic form of drama, called Dingspiel ('thing play'), huge collective manifestations of the 'folk soul', with much parading and collective chanting of political slogans, performed in majestic outdoor arenas made to look like the places where, according to the sagas, Norse farmers held their [th]ing meetings.

Sound familiar?  This resembles the argument for nanny-government policies of blue state politicians and commentators.  Their argument goes: we live in a decadent world of cigarettes and fast food, big cars, and too many children.  We need government controls on people in order to curb their behavior, make them healthier, improve the air quality, control their fertility, etc.  We need to get back to simpler times when people walked to work or were in "balance" with nature.  One commentator has called this McMoralism.  In an earlier time, such beliefs were associated with the very ideologies Philistines are hoisting on to conservative Christians.  Go figure.

The fantasy imagery in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal continues to find resonance, and exerts itself in ever-more absurd forms.  The past two decades have seen a spurt of neopagan "studies" of the Holy Grail.  Blue state men and women, longing for some excuse to throw away the last vestiges of Christianity in their lives, have embraced the "ideas" discussed among the characters in the DaVinci Code.  It's just proto-Nazi paganism, folks, wrapped in a new package.  Wagner must be smirking from his place in Hell.

I recently had to disappoint a friend by telling her that the Grail Quest really didn't happen, even if all those folks in the Middle Ages wrote about it.  It was fiction, you know, like Star Wars.  And as a matter of fact, I told her, the original "grail" was a big rock that eminated "energy" and filled a banquet table with food.  She was so bummed. 

Curse you, Dan Brown.

You cannot separate pagan idealism from Nazism, one is wellspring of the other.  So it always surprises me when I hear Philistines describe conservative Christians as Nazis.  They obviously know nothing about Nazis.

The First Blogs

The National Library of Scotland has made its collection of broadsides available on the Net. Before the newspaper, broadsides were an anything-goes communication medium, that according to the Library was

The most popular form of this for nearly 300 years was 'broadsides' - the tabloids of their day. Sometimes pinned up on walls in houses and ale-houses, these single sheets carried public notices, news, speeches and songs that could be read (or sung) aloud.

Check out this one:

Good Question

Protest Warriors ask a good question.

Philistines on Ice

Iceman, that poor schnook who was killed on an Alpine mountaintop some 5000 years ago, has been the focus of so much pseudoscience that it was a stunner for me to find out that he was probably murdered. Of course, Philistines don't like this one bit:

The Iceman Cometh

When they first dug Iceman out of the permafrost in 1991, local officials thought he was some unfortunate hiker who had died on the slopes of an Alpine mountain. Twelve years on, their initial assessment was far from correct, but it had nothing on the senseless speculation that followed the initial discovery. It was speculation centered on a set of ideological assumptions that were vogue ten years ago, but that are finally (and thankfully) being proven false and noxious, at least where Iceman is concerned.

As early as 1995, researchers had noticed something about Iceman (or Otzi, as the locals call him). He had an arrowhead embedded in his back, right below the shoulders. It was almost certainly a fatal wound, but this fact was not explored in depth. Why? Because the assumption was (and still is in many academic circles) that prehistoric humanity lived in harmony with Nature, worshipped the great mother Goddess and because of these things, lived without violence. Some even believe that prehistoric humans were vegetarians. In 1998, some scientists tried to prove that Iceman was a “strict” vegetarian.

Scholars speculated for years on every conceivable theory about Iceman and his life and the circumstances of his death. They included serious speculation that Iceman was a shaman, a heavily tattooed man of religion and peace who had gone up to the mountains with his magic mushrooms to be one with mother earth. Or, he was a peaceful shepherd who had an accident.

Any speculation was acceptable but the obvious, that he was intentionally killed and his body abandoned on the mountaintop.

All the physical evidence points to this:

Iceman’s hand grasped a knife. He had a bow and a (partially filled) quiver of arrows. He had an arrow embedded in his back. According to a recent Scientific American article, Iceman was “extremely well-equipped, each object fashioned from the materials best suited for its purpose." He was also well armed. Besides the quiver of arrows, he was found with an incomplete long bow, a dagger, and a kind of food and medicine survival pack.

The academic speculation is finally giving way to common sense, but this hasn’t stopped many scholars from dismissing the obvious (like the stab wounds on Iceman’s right hand) in order to accommodate the prevailing myth of prehistoric man as the Goddess worshipping commune living vegetarians. To the academics who embrace these theories – most archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, etc – prehistory was the Edenic time when women ruled the world in peace and environmental balance (before men took control). With the invention of writing -- a “patriarchal” invention (see The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain, chief of laproscopic surgery at the UC San Francisco Medical Center ) – came war and organized society based on laws and male rulers.

I’m kidding, right? Read this from the good doctor:

I believe the right hemisphere (of both men and women who are right-handed) processes tasks traditionally female. The left hemisphere (of both men and women who are right-handed) processes tasks traditionally male. Literacy reinforces the masculine left hemisphere and devalues the right lobe, and this factor inflamed misogyny in literate societies.

Even more devastating was the coming of monotheism and with that an end came to all the peace, love and vegetarianism.

Of course, if Iceman was intentionally killed it begs the question: Why? Was he a good guy (a murder victim) or a bad guy (a fugitive)? It’s a terribly inconvenient question for people who don’t want to acknowledge that Good and Evil might exist without quotation marks. It’s way too monotheistic, and seems to imply that the rules of human nature supported by silly monotheists like Jews, Muslims and, yes, even some Christians, may have justification in the pre-biblical past. It suggests the existence of sin before the Hebrews wrote about it.

To those who embrace theories of goddess worship, communal living, and hippie-style peace, the existence of such a funky concept as Sin is way too much.

One of the greatest weaknesses of these theories is the absurd idea that war did not exist in prehistory. That somehow, before writing, men and women lived in almost perfect harmony (with only occasional outbursts of lethal violence). However, since the mid-1990s a few courageous individuals have come forward to challenge these ideological falsehoods.

In her book, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future, Cynthia Eller challenged the prevailing feminist theories that there was prehistoric time when women controlled the world:

In a time before written records, society was centered around women. Women were revered for their mysterious life-giving powers, honored as incarnations and priestesses of the great goddess. They reared their children to carry on their line, created both art and technology, and made important decisions for their communities.

Then a great transformation occurred—whether through a sudden cataclysm or a long, drawn-out sea change—and society was thereafter dominated by men. This is the culture and the mindset that we know as "patriarchy," and in which we live today.

These theories are based on very scant archaeological evidence, and most of the evidence such as the tiny “Venus” sculptures, have been taken out of their archeological context for more than a century. This, she says, is not a sound foundation for future serious study in this area. In academic inquiry, first and foremost, you have to tell the truth. When you begin to rely on lies and half-truths to continue to support your theories, the theories won’t have a chance of surviving even a modest challenge. You also end up muscling in on any challenging inquiry, controlling all scrutiny with the threat of force, not evidence, and certainly not truth.

In his recent book, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage (St Martin’s Press, 2003), Steven LeBlanc, director of collections at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; also explores the truth. In this case it’s prehistoric warfare. “Virtually all the basic textbooks on archaeology ignore the prevalence or significance of past warfare, which is usually not discussed until the formation of state-level civilizations…” Mr. LeBlanc writes in a recent article in Archaeology magazine.

Fellow researchers are not happy that he is exploring these issues. You can guess why. He’s reminding them of all that pesky evidence that proves their assumptions about prehistory to be patently false, evidence like mass graves of people who were bludgeoned to death (in New Mexico), cannibalism, and evidence of the use of fire to destroy prehistoric settlements. Of course, there’s also Iceman’s violent end to add to the growing list.

Now, before we start passing assumptions about these authors’ political or ideological leanings, both sound to be as liberal as any of their academic colleagues. Ms. Eller considers herself a feminist, and Mr. LeBlanc sees his research as part of a broader discipline in “peace studies.” The difference here is that they take their research seriously. They observed nature with an honest eye, and will not compromise for ideological trends.

I wish this had been the case with the academics and researchers picking over poor Iceman. That it took ten years to acknowledge the obvious is far too long. However, it’s nice to know they’re coming to. Recently, the knife Iceman grasped was found on the mountainside not far from where they originally picked up his body. It was shown to have the DNA of three different individuals on it. It looks like it was one hell of a fight.

Researchers are looking forward to returning to mountaintop soon to see if they can uncover any remains of Iceman’s “friends.” I hope they find more remains, in what is looking to turn into a 5,000 year old murder mystery.

I wonder if he was the good guy or the bad guy.

How things have changed

I can't imagine a president going on national television and saying the crap that Jimmy Carter said on July 15. 1979:

It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper -- deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as president I need your help. So I decided to reach out and listen to the voices of America.

Or how about this pithy paragraph:

I know, of course, being president, that government actions and legislation can be very important. That's why I've worked hard to put my campaign promises into law -- and I have to admit, with just mixed success. But after listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.

All I can say is: thank God my parents were smart enough to vote for Reagan.

After reading this, I got a sense that government run by a bunch of tired old Philistines who didn't have a clue what it meant to be an American had finally run its course, and the country was looking for something new...

Ronald Reagan

Adios, Mr. President. You rescued civilization from the brink of oblivion.

The Philistine's Candidate (I)

I'm all for poetry, even some 20th century poetry, but this is too much...

John Kerry has chosen a campaign slogan, "Let America be America again."

Huh?

It's the opening of a Langston Hughes' poem, that so happens to be about class and race warfare.

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

The poem ends with this stanza

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Fantastic! A call to race and class warefare from the Democratic candidate for president who just so happens to be one of the wealthiest (and whitest) men ever to run for president. It's not the best poem in the world, either. Hughes did better, and there are many American poets he could have drawn from. Leaves of Grass? Something from Dickison?

Why this one?

Perhaps he was looking for something that would convince black voters that he was one of them. That's an insult to blacks, who aren't as naive as he makes them out to be. They don't want race and class warfare, and they don't see him as the "second black president" even if he does say he likes hip-hop.

So my question remains: why this poem?

We may never know, because the Philistine press hasn't covered the decision, and so they haven't put it under any scrutiny. The Philisitine, er, Washington Post has not covered it. Except for one brief mention at the bottom of Thursday's Howard Kurtz column, there is no mention of it.

Why talk about the obvious missteps of the Democratic presidential candate when you can publish more pictures from Abu Ghraib?

I don't know what's more awful, this poem or the choice to use it as a campaign rallying cry during one of the toughest moments in American history.