It's all connected. If you calm down and look at history, it makes more sense.
Monday was Columbus Day, so I've been hearing discussions of European atrocities in the New World. Old Cristofero Colombo was a monster, a pedophile, a rapist and a murderer. His genocide of the indigenous people of the Caribbean has been laundered to cast him as some sort of heroic explorer, but he was not. He killed off an entire people in his relentless pursuit of wealth.
Apologists dismiss the enslavement, torture and murder of indigenous peoples with a wave of the hand, calling it "the temper of the times" as if that were an excuse. Mass murder is murder; it doesn't matter when it happened or what the convenient rationale for it might be. But, to understand what compelled Columbus to do what he did we have to think about where he was in 1492 and what was going on in Iberia at the time.
Have you ever seen the movie El Cid? Charlton Heston played Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a Spaniard who died in 1099. When I was a kid and saw this movie, I thought that that they were portraying the Christians driving the Moors out of Spain. That took almost another 400 years to accomplish. The Spanish Christians finally got through squabbling, united their countries into a single kingdom, and finished their 781-year effort of killing or driving out anyone who wasn't a Catholic, predominantly Muslims and Jews, but also Protestants, Unitarians and others. In short, not being a Catholic was a capital crime. The Holy Inquisition was founded in France, but took hold more strongly in Spain and Portugal because it was politically expedient. There were a lot of Muslims and a good number of Jews that had to be gotten rid of for various venal reasons. No one understood, much less entertained, the idea of religious freedom anywhere except in Muslim-controlled lands. There, Islam was the state religion, but nobody would kill you for being a Christian or a Jew. You would have to pay some extra taxes, but otherwise were left alone. Not so in post-Moorish Spain and Portugal. It was "convert, leave or die". Non-Muslims were a protected, but subjugated class, like African-Americans were until fairly recently, or like those who consort with a member of the same gender are still to some extent in at least fifteen states of the USA.
Let's get back to 1492. The Reconquista has prevailed. Ferdinand and Isabella were broke, though. Uniting their kingdoms and completing the last push for an all-Christian Iberia had depleted their resources so much that they were heavily in debt, some of it to Jewish and Muslim moneylenders. Queen Isabella (known as Isabella la católica) fancied herself principally as a champion of Christianity, but you can't dismiss the idea that she may have wanted to reduce her indebtedness by killing or driving away creditors. At this same time, there was a Genoese huckster hanging around promoting a theory that one could get to China and the Indies more easily by going west by sea, where, as everyone knew, there was great wealth to be had. The royalty got wind of this and called in Cristobal Colón, as he now called himself, to get the scoop. Mainly, they wanted gold and silver, cash money to square their finances. Chris said, "Sure. I can get you that. Give me a fleet of ships and I'll go get it."
Well, as we know, they loaned him three ships, a decent one and two decrepit scows, manned them with fortune hunters, unemployed sailors, and at Isabella's insistence, a few priests to cloak this piracy enterprise with a religious veneer. That was all they could scrounge up because, as mentioned earlier, they were strapped for cash. They gave Columbus an ultimatum: "Bring back the gold, or else!" So, he sailed off for Japan or China or the Indies going the wrong way as far as anyone knew for sure. He had balls, but in the intervening 522 years we've lost sight of his principal objective, wealth. He was going to get it or die trying.
We also heard in elementary school how he didn't find much gold. The history that children learn in our schools pretty much stops there because our national hagiography does not favor the idea that the guy who got things started was not a good person. Desperate to satisfy his royal backers, Columbus enslaved everyone he could find and started the systematic plundering of every place he landed. He returned to Spain and tried to promote the idea of using slaves in mining (to get the gold and silver, right?) and in agriculture. That didn't satisfy their lust for treasure, but they made him governor of Hispaniola to pursue the modified agenda. There, he distinguished himself by killing and dismembering indigenous people who stole, did not submit to slavery, resisted sexual overtures or just pissed someone off. There is some conjecture about how bad he was and how consistent or inconsistent his behavior was with European cultural norms of the time, but it is clear that he was a nasty piece of work. One contemporary, a priest, was appalled at how Columbus ordered a man to be pierced from anus to mouth with an iron rod and put out for display like an animal skewered for the barbeque. You may recognize this practice from accounts of Vlad the Impaler in Transylvania. Yes, it was brutal and appalling, but, hey, it's what they did in those days.
Is this starting to sound familiar? We've been hearing reports of ISIL fighters slaughtering people, beheading them, selling women into sexual slavery and stealing everything of value. They charged into Iraq and took Mosul early on, apparently to get the money in the banks there, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000,000. Reports are that had most of it had come from, you guessed it, the United States of America. ISIL is pulling in at least $500,000 a day in revenue from oil fields in captured territory. These guys are in it for the money, and like Columbus, they are ruthless, justifying their actions in the name of God and his one true religion.
Like it or not, this is the end result of unrestrained religious fanaticism. There is nothing unique or new in ISIL's perpetration of such atrocities. We are having a big kerfuffle in our news media these days because we haven't seen this sort of thing in a long time done in the name of a monotheistic deity. When you think about it, what they are doing is not any different than the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda or the extermination of millions by the Khmer Rouge in the killing fields of Cambodia. It's just a bunch of murderous thugs running amok.
This is where the comparison with Spanish and Portuguese colonialists diverges a little. The ruthless, greedy, but otherwise rational sociopath can be bargained with as long as he is not in a position of overwhelming power. Savagery can be elicited from the troops by invoking religion, ethnic strife or their own greed, but the leaders will back off when they are no longer able to overcome opposition easily. The leaders may even become reasonable, and very quickly so, if they start losing. Note how Assad has tried to promote himself as a stabilizing force, and insisted that keeping him in power is the only way to prevent a descent into chaos. However, once we and a few other countries started attacking ISIL from the air, Assad resumed dropping barrel bombs in areas of Syria not under his control. He does what he can get away with, and is never constrained by morality.
The trouble with ISIL, though, is that it's quite possible that everyone in the organization is just bat-shit crazy. They will have to be killed. You can't reason with these guys. Just like Osama bin Laden, when you kill one, any of his cronies still alive will keep on coming. There is no accommodation or mitigation. If you are living where they want to go, it's kill or be killed.
The battle for the Syrian city of Kobani on the Turkish border remains a standoff because the Kurds defending the city know that they will be killed if they are captured by ISIL. Suddenly, ISIL is no longer rolling over everyone at will. It doesn't matter that no one is helping the Kurds. The Turks won't help because they are waiting for ISIL to kill all the Kurds, whom they hate, before they will lift a finger against a direct threat to their territory. If ISIL stays in Syria, they will not be confronted by the Turks. You see, ISIL recently released 40 Turkish diplomats and sent them home safely. Supposedly, no ransom was paid, but I suspect that a deal was made. "You stay out of Turkey and we won't mess with you. And, we wouldn't mind at all if you exterminated the Kurds." Today, I heard that the Turks will allow other nations (i.e., us) to launch air strikes against ISIL, but won't commit any troops to the fight. There's a simple reason for this diffidence.
The Turks won't arm and send in Turkish Kurds who want to save their brethren in Syria and Iraq. They won't even let volunteers go there on their own. (That's why the Turkish army is on the Syrian border across from Kobani, to keep Kurds getting into Syria via Turkey!) They don't want Kurds to have guns because that would bolster an independent Kurdish state, which they fear would eventually attempt to carve out the southeastern corner of Turkey which is predominantly populated by ethnic Kurds. No guns for Kurds. No additional Kurdish fighers in Syria or Iraq. No Kurdistan, ever.
This has been the cornerstone of Turkish foreign policy since they lost a lot of territory in World War I. Every deal they make with anyone starts with the promise that Turkey will not lose any more territory, especially to a Kurdish state. Why do you think they went along with ousting Saddam Hussein? We promised them that Iraq would remain a unified nation within its present borders and that Kurdish national aspirations would be curbed. We made that deal. Do you see why we're not pressing the Turks to send in their tanks and rout ISIL from Kobani? We know they won't do it no matter how hard we whine.
The British and French carved up the land ceded by the defunct Ottoman Empire without regard to the Kurds, who have always wanted their historical homeland for themselves as an independent nation. They don't want to be a subjugated minority in another state, and they will fight as long as they must to be free of outside oppression.
Is this starting to sound like the 781 years the Christians spent driving the Moors out of the Iberian peninsula? I have no doubt that one day there will be a Kurdish nation, just as there is once again a German nation, a Vietnamese nation, and there will shortly be a single Korean nation. (Oh, yes, it's coming soon.) I mention these examples solely to illustrate that ISIL can be stopped, but only if those opposing them are desperate enough to fight for their lives.
With all these correlations between the conquistadores and ISIL swimming around in my mind on Columbus Day, I went back and looked at some email I got a few days ago. My favorite knee-jerk Republican dupe forwarded me a message from someone else with pictures of recent ISIL atrocities. Of course, the comments added to the original message had to add a jab at "liberals" implying that we're soft on terrorists because we don't want our government to torture people. There is also the derogatory remark about Islam as a whole, which implies that they mean to condemn all Muslims as terrorists. I swear! Will these jackasses let up for just a minute once in a while and disuss anything rationally?
Subject: The religion of peace!
From: (my ear-to-the-ground with the Tea Party)
Date: October 10, 2014
It's time for America to wake up!
The liberals think that waterboarding is bad. Check out the the religion of peace!
Some religion?
Careful! This is very graphic!
Photos the news won't show
These photos show ISIS brutality in action. The photos get worse as you progress through them. They show the ISIS' treatment of Christians and other "Infidels" in Iraq and Syria. The photos were received from a Franciscan priest to show with what we are dealing and to begin to understand what is at hand in order to develop solutions.
Following this garbled missive, there were 46 photos showing the most explicit snuff pictures I have ever seen. They're right; our news media won't show these pictures. After running through them quickly, I had seen enough. I decided to scrape the text of the message to a text file so I could draft this essay without looking at the pictures further.
While looking at the photos, I noticed that they were all emblazoned with a URL, mPOLSKA24.pl . From the domain, "pl", it was clearly a Polish web site, which was also evident from "POLSKA", which is Polish for "Poland". Poland is a predominantly Catholic country, so a Franciscan priest's being involved with getting the photos seems likely. I hope the good father made it out of there alive.
The site belongs to some kind of news organization. It has photo essays, news stories and blogs. This is their motto.
Historia jest świadkiem czasów, światłem prawdy, życiem pamięci, nauczycielką życia.
— Cyceron
The translation is as follows.
History is the witness of the times, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life.
- Cicero
These psycho killers in Iraq and Syria are terrible, but this kind of thing is not new. The 46 photos depict the worst atrocities I've seen reported since the Rwanda genocide. Before that, another really nasty slaughter was Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge reign of terror in Cambodia. Those were hundreds of thousands or millions of people. So far, ISIS (or ISIL) is well below that scale, but just as brutal. The only similar thing going on at the moment is the drug cartel war in Mexico and related activity in Central and South America. They're shooting and beheading people there, too, but usually just one or two at a time.
Interspersed between the photos, there were several lines of descriptive text in Polish. My screen scrape was mainly to capture these so I could use an automated translation tool. I've studied Russian for years, so I could suss out most of the meaning by using the rules of Polish orthography to pronounce the words, and then identifying the Russian cognate. The languages are close enough that I could get most of it this way, but I used the translation tool to check. I was wrong in several places, so it was best that I did.
In addition to the descriptive text, the screen scrape yielded the original file names of the images. Many of these names were Polish words and phrases. I've translated everything and added a few comments. My notations follow the character "=". The photo file names are numbered; I added them so I could add my notations and descriptions. The descriptive text lines are not numbered. They are shown in th same place they were with respect to the photos in the message I received.
1. 3_3.jpg = 4 men being executed by being shot in the back of the head, 2 down, 1 with a gun to his neck, 1 cringing and waiting
2. 6.jpg = their bodies
Jeńcy z 17 dywizji w Raqqa w Syrii = Prisoners of the 17(th) division in Raqqa in Syria
3. 25-lipca-Raqqa-17-dywizji-syrian-1.jpg = 25 July - Raqqa 17th division, Syria (severed heads on spikes)
4. 25-lipca-syria-raqqa-17-dyw-niejaki-abdu = Syria Raqqa 17th division, named "abdu" (truncation of name, "Abdul-..."; a smug guy with a beard posing in front of 8 severed heads on spikes of a fence; he is pointing his index finger up to the sky like a an NFL player thanking Jesus after a touchdown)
5. oficerowie-17-dywizji-podarki-w-obu-reka = officer of the 17th division, gifts in both hands (2 severed heads)
Chrześcijanie w Raqqa = Christians in Raqqa
6. Chrześcijanie.jpg = Christians (6 severed heads neatly lined up on a sidewalk)
7. chrzescijanin-w-raqqa.jpg = (a) Christian in Raqqa (bloody scars and bruises on back from being beaten and whipped)
8. chrzescijanin.jpg = (a) Christian('s decapitated head held aloft by a masked man)
Egzekucja 1700 jeńców w Tikricie = execution of 1700 prisoners (of war) in Tikrit (Saddam Hussein's home town)
9. tikrit-2.jpg = Tikrit (about 30 bodies in a shallow ditch being sprayed with bullets by one gunman as others stand by; there is dust being kicked up)
10. 1700-jencow-irackich-tikrit-egzekucje.jp = execution of 1700 Iraqi prisoners in Tikrit (same thing with everyone's weapons raised, but no dust, probably after the shooting)
11. tikrit1.jpg = Tikrit (another ditch full of bodies, one gunman, muzzle smoke, still firing)
12. iraq-5.jpg = Iraq (another ditch with many more bodies, 1 gunman, muzzle smoke, still firing)
13. 2014-08-11-2354-001.jpg = 2014-08-11 (date: yyyy-mm-dd format, severed head in front of a banner)
Krzyżowanie = crossing ("putting on a cross", i.e., crucifixion)
14. 2014-08-11-2355.jpg = strapping the guy's arms to a "T" made of metal pipe, similar to a what is often used to support several clothes line. The tau cross is not yet erected.
15. 2014-08-11-2356.jpg = two guys suspended from clothes-line crosses that have been planted
16. 2014-08-11-2356-001.jpg = a guy the same way in a town square being arrayed by masked gunmen, one of who looks to be about 12; a 5th guy, bearded and without a mask, supervises the crucifixion
17. 2014-08-11-2357.jpg = that guy and another one in the town square; a guy carrying an ISIL flag appears to be guarding them
18. isis-crucified-people-in-syria-yesterday (file name in English; the crosspiece is a board and he is posed a lot like Crucifixion art; he has a sign on him in Arabic; I can't make out what it says other than it ends, "...in this!")
19. ukryzowani-1.jpg (ukrzyżowany) = crucified (person) (2 decapitated heads on a spiked fence, their headless bodies lashed to the fence below the heads; someting that looks like a magazine is stuffed into the bloody neck hole of one guy)
20. ukryzowani-2.jpg = (a smiling young guy with a short beard and a baseball cap on backwards holds up a man's severeed head)
21. ukrzyzowani-3.jpg = (a crucified man wearing a sweatshirt with the legend "WhatsAP?")
Al Shaer Syria 21 lipca = al-Shaer, Syria, July 21
22. al-shaer-syria-21-lipca.jpg = 9 thumbnails of bodies on the ground, apparently killed by gunfire
Egzekucje = executions
23. 2014-08-11-2359.jpg = date: yyyy-mm-dd + sequence number (a large man, bound and lyring prone, his head held up and back s his throat is being slit with a machete; appears to be the moment of death; inset of the same man previously holding up his ID card)
24. 2014-08-11-2359-001.jpg (same guy a moment later as the knife cuts into his neck)
25. 2014-08-11-2359-002.jpg (his headless body, head not shown)
26. 2014-08-12-0000.jpg (a small man restrained and held the same way with the machete at his neck, inset holding up ID papers)
27. 2014-08-12-0000-001.jpg (same guy moments later, executioner setting his decapitated head on his back, as the blood drains from his neck into a ditch)
28. 2014-08-12-0000-002.jpg (another guy with knife to neck, doesn't look Arab, inset hold up ID card)
29. bpjudgcceaaew3p.jpg = ? (not Polish, probably photographer's code, 2 decapitated heads set upon the back of 1 decapitated torso)
30. jency-irak-czerwiec.jpg = prisoners, Iraq, June (a bin holding 9 decapitated heads)
31. podzynanie-seria.jpg (podrzynanie seria) = slits series (4 shots: knife to throat, last scream as cutting begins, severed head on back of prone torso, a bound youth next to him about to be killed or while being shot with dusk kicked up by firing of AK-47 pointed at his head)
32. diyala-province-15-lipca.jpg = Diyala province, July 15 (6 men kneeling in front of ditch about to be shot from behind, ISIL flag)
33. dzieci-mordujace.jpg = child-murder(er) (several armed boys with AK-47s about to shoot a guy who appears to be a young man)
34. egzekucja.jpg = execution (thumbnail series of about 20 men marched in, kneeling, being shot by a squad of gunmen, their bodies having a coup-de-grâce applied with a pistol)
35. homs-syria-4.jpg = Homs, syria (a jumbled pile of 10 or 12 bodies in a ditch)
36. irak-3-lipca-1.jpg = Iraq, July 3 (9 blindfolded guys kneeling in a ditch, about to be shot in the back of the head, one gun visible)
37. irak-18-czerwca.jpg = Iraq, June 18 (5 blindfolded guys kneeling in the process of being shot in the back of the head with a pistol, 1st victim already dead and pitched forward, muzzle smoke as the 2nd victim is shot)
38. jency-lipiec-irak.jpg = prisoners (of war), July, Iraq (at least 12 bodies, apparently killed together, execution style, i.e., "no prisoneers")
39. masowe-morderstwo.jpeg = mass-murder (a large number of bodies in a pit, stacked like cordwood, 3 or 4 deep, plastic sheeting about to be used in some manner, perhaps as a cover)
40. pojmani-alaiwci-gdzies-w-syrii-2-lipiec- = Alawite captured somewhere in Syria July 2 (2 decapitated heads with their headless torsos, implying that all Alawite men are killed)
41. pojmani-alawici-gdzies-w-syrii-lipiec-20 = Alawite captured somewhere in Syria July 20 (11 bodies, neatly lined up, face down with hands bound, lots of blood pooling in front of heads suggesting that their throats were slit)
42. village-of-bashir-1.jpg = village of Bashir (supine young man having his head sawed off by a bearded fighter with a sidearm, suggesting that he is an officer)
43. village-of-bashir-3.jpg = village of Bashir (supine body in combat fatigues with 1 foot tied to a strap and other end to rear bumper of a vehicle, implying death by being dragged behind the vehicle)
44. zastrzelony-dumdum.jpg = shot dumdum (dum-dum bullet? a supine corpse with eyes open, shattered skull and both hemispheres of his brain outside on the ground in a large pool of blood)
Niszczenie świątyń Niniwa. = destruction of temples in Nineveh
45. burzenie-irak-niniwa-meczet-szycki-1.jpg = demolition of Iraq Nineveh Shi'ite mosque (effective, professional-looking, simultaneous blasts)
46. burzenie-niniwa-irak-niszczenie-swiatyn- = demolition of temples destruction of Nineveh, Iraq (small mosque being knocked down with an earth mover)
Even without the pictures, it gives you chills, doesn't it? The pictures were so gruesome that I can't in good conscience show them others. It would be improper to do so anyway without the permission of mPOLSKA24. If you come across this same collection of 46 photos, and you can stomach viewing them, you can use this text to connect the details I've ferreted out. I've had to look at them twice now to prepare this piece. That's enough for me. I almost wish I could un-see them now. I gritted my teeth and slogged through because I wanted to be sure that the reports of ISIL's atrocities were not hyperbole. They are not.
This genocidal frenzy is happening right now. Maybe the Shi'ite majority in Iraq will become adequately alarmed and start fighting for their lives like the Kurds. Maybe we won't have to again sacrifice the lives of our youth again for oil. Maybe the U.S.A. with light a fire under the Saudis and the Emiratis and get them to stop funding Sunni extremists like the mostly Saudi hijackers who killed everyone on four commercial aircraft on September 11, 2001. Maybe we could get them to send a few guys into Iraq and Syria to wipe these ISIL guys out. Maybe we can get rid of enough of these chicken-hawk Republicans in the next congress to make some changes and prevent further involvement in Middle Eastern wars.
I've been thinking about what the U.S.A. can do to rid the earth of ISIL, but so far I've got nothing. Let's have a poll to help us decide how angry we are about these monsters. It may help us calm down and think rationally.