BE NICE TO BANKERS, OR ELSE..."WE ARE ALL DEAD"...
(An expanded version of this essay below will, hopefully, be on wordpress some day soon).
***
Henri Pirenne had a new version of history: Western Europe encountered severe economic difficulties because of the Muslim invasion and embargo, he opined. That was really the break with, and the break of, the Roman empire. Aspects of this thesis are increasingly supported by archeological evidence (which increasingly shows wealth, and even increasing wealth, until savage invasions of the 6C and 7C: these invasions are not the famous German invasions around 400 CE, but a full 200 to 300 years later).
Earlier Gibbon (born 1737) had his own version of the Dark Ages; mostly caused by Christianism, he said. In truth, emperor Julianus had anticipated that situation, and tried mightily to stop it. But, mysteriously, a lance pierced his lung, and he died (363 CE).
This does not contradict Pirenne's thesis. Curiously and a mark of the power of religion, both points of view are still controversial, although the evidence for both, in first approximation, is as big as evidence can be.
When the Arab Muslims attacked (630 CE to 750 CE), they pretty much used total war (the milder Persians killed the Umayyads, and took control in 750 CE).
The Muslim embargo cut off paper to Europe (from papyrus), so the Europeans had to learn to write on animal hides, and learning took a big blow (books became very difficult to make, and got recycled). That is just one example of the impact of the Muslim embargo. Spices, which were obtained by the trade routes through the Middle East is another (they were life saving, because they protected foods from spoilage). Suddenly more than half of the Roman empire was missing, and the world was at war, total war (a telling anecdote: the Roman emperor visited Rome to take the metallic roofs of the capital away, to melt them and make weapons, to fight the Arabs). Cut off from more than half of its own country, the GDP of Europe got devastated.
Christian enthusiasm (363 CE: first burning of a large library under emperor Jovian) led to the destruction of nearly all books of Greco-Roman Antiquity, including basic knowledge, and making the surviving roman intellectuals flee to Persia, and the treacherous denial of their rights by the Roman Catholics, even after an international accord with the Persians about the right of return of Romans intellectuals into the Roman empire, led to a massive war between Rome (verily Constantinople) and Persia. Hence Gibbon's vision of what caused the Dark Ages is just as obvious, in first approximation. The Jews barely survived, every body else got eliminated (except on the fringes of the Roman Catholic empire). Antijudaism is the echo of that holocaust, throughout history.
I got great hostility from a European web site, the European Tribune, for suggesting some of the preceding (it was viewed as "Islamophobia", and an attack against this treasure for mankind, Christianity). Today I got banned from that site because I asserted that plutocrats had supported Hitler (never mind that the Dawes plan and that a USA bank such as JP Morgan in the 1920s, and the anti Jew Ford, financed the cartel IG Farben, of Zyklon B fame, or that Hitler was notoriously financed by many top industrialists; for example the magnate Thyssen wrote the famous book: "I paid Hitler").
One editor there violently disagreed with me about the number of people the Nazis had killed, before 1933,by more than an order of magnitude. He quoted what were obviously Nazi influenced numbers, and called my work "crap". Apparently he is German, and a pretty good expert at misquoting (me, at the very least). But I did not tell him he was overly sympathetic to Nazi reasonings, for once, I did not reply, because he and other people were using obcenities and were evoking human waste at this point.
The insulters asked for references. When I took the pain to give some, including the historian and USA defense advisor Carrol Quigley, my comments were removed from the site, and then another editor, Mr. Guillet, advised me that:"please go away or stop posting your junk. You're polluting the site with hateful or incoherent crap and you kill all possibility of dialogue by your inability/refusal to listen. Behave, or you'll be banned. This is the one and only warning you'll get. In the long run, we're all dead." Thu Jun 11th, 2009 at 04:22:23 PM EST.
It turns out that the admonishing not so gentle man, Jerome Guillet, is a banker in Paris in charge of financing renewable energy ("You make them, I finance them" is his motto). He seems to have beenn irritated by some comments of mine on the dearth of financing in renewable energy in 2009 (which I deplore, by the way). Or may be it was my observation that bankers are still in charge of saving the world, but that is not their calling (the quote above was at the end of a version of a post on banking, "Lesson Not Learned", which is on wordpress)
I did not react. Hours later, I got an email informing me that I was banned from the European Tribune.
So this is, 2009, 64 years after the defeat of Nazism, and philosophers get banned for presenting bankers with evidence about who financed Nazism. On croit rever... (One feels one is surely dreaming...) I wonder what that means, some Americans would say ironically. Can one relate such hysterical attitudes to holocaust denial? Should one do so? Do not media have a fiduciary duty of honesty relative to truth?
I guess Europe is not as advanced as one ought to hope...
Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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