He makes the argument that in the later Roman Empire, the Huns treated the Roman Empire as either a vassal or a buffer state to their own empire. They demanded tribute from them and even forced the romans to chase down and return refugees. It's really interesting to look at the Roman Empire from a hun-centered point of view-- just one more border state along a small section of a vast empire.
They seem to have been one of a long series of steppe empires with the same basic organization-- from the Scythians to the Mongols.
Speaking of Scythia - somewhat bizarrely Scottish legends claim that the Scots were originally from there!
"They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today."
Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain makes similar claims for Scythian ancestry, and that the Scythians were in turn refugees from Troy.
He also claimed that ancient Britons laid seige to Rome.
Pretty funny how his bullshit survived and was repeated through the centuries.
And on the way from Scythia the Scots somehow also apparently also picked up the stone that Jacob rested his head on at Bethel which became, via a detour to Dunadd and Scone, the Stone of Destiny!
[Spoilsport geologists dispute this story with their pesky "facts" ;-)]
It's not an unreasonable legend. Conventional wisdom is that all Indo-Europeans sprang from the steppes of Central Asia. Having it mentioned in a 14th century declaration is pretty fascinating!
Given the context of the Declaration (i.e. The First Scottish War of Independence) it sounds to me like propaganda trying to claim an ancient and separate lineage for the Scots.
Mind you the Declaration is a great document - proclaiming Scottish freedom and saying that while Robert the Bruce is a cool guy if he doesn't turn out to be a good king then he'll be sacked and another one found from somewhere. Which is a fairly novel idea for kings.
Source on that? IE spread from the Dnieper River area to Western Europe and Western China in a rather short amount of time. Clearly there was a lot of migration from the Urheimat.
Interesting that they talk about their predecessors completely dying out. There was a fascinating Time Team special where they mentioned that Britain has had seven completely separate waves of inhabitants - with the predecessors apparently all dying out.
Probably a coincidence though as the timescales won't match up but fascinating to even consider that there was some historical truth behind those old myths.
Sounds similar to the stories of the deluge in many cultures, that supposedly wiped out all or most earlier life, once or periodically. Bible's Noah's ark, Hinduism's pralaya (IIRC, primeval flood), many others ...
If there really was such a thing, it might explain a lot of these stories.
I was astonished to learn that the biggest Celtic megalith structures are in northern France. Easy to forget how certain empires spread and collapsed in different directions.
Wow. What a weak article. It basically tells nothing other than the fact that the Huns were people (we knew that) and that different people may lead different lives (we knew that also).
I was thinking the same thing. As someone who spent a lot of his PhD time with Late Antiquity as a secondary area of specialization, I can say that an enormous amount of this is "duh". It does not uproot the commonly accepted research by any stretch.
Indeed. I've spent many a Sunday at university libraries reading about history and this was interesting and largely new to me. That people with some expertise thinks it's a duh article makes me happy that I didn't just read a bunch of bullshit!
In the context of the article, it's clear they mean the now common meaning of "barbarian: a person in a savage, primitive state; uncivilized person." TFA even mentions the Romans considered Huns "scarcely human".
Obviously they are not referring to the Roman meaning of "any non-Romans", because that would be a tautology.
Came here to write this. I think it's the headline writer who made the error. The first part of the article just says the Romans thought they acted like animals. So the issue is really what was the culture of the Barbarians.
Fun fact, "Barbarian" is a Greek word as a label for non-Greeks. To the Greeks, foreign languages just sounded like they were mumbling "bar-bar-bar", hence Barbarians = Non-Greeks.
"from Greek barbaros 'foreign, strange, ignorant,' from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (compare Sanskrit barbara- 'stammering,' also 'non-Aryan,' Latin balbus 'stammering,' Czech blblati 'to stammer')." I don't know if the source I'm quoting is reliable, but I find the same reference to Sanskrit in a variety of sources.
Interesting. Though I knew Sanskrit (well in school), didn't know or remember that word - but still know Hindi well, and in Hindi, bad-bad (pronounced like bud-bud) means blabbing, as in:
Kya bad-bad kar rahe ho - What are you blabbing.
And to close the loop, in Hindi, the sounds r and d are closely related and sometimes substituted for one another - at least while talking.
Pretty sure this explanation is just really old speculation. Even if the ancient greeks kept records of word origins, those documents would likely be lost by now
Judging by this link: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=barbarian,
the reasoning is based on words in other indoeuropean languages having a similar root to 'barbarian' being used to refer to stammering or incoherent speech.
How about a dystopian Law and Order where every week a new batch of innocent people are sent to prison based on dubious science and willful ignorance from police and prosecutors.
Fun fact: for radiocarbon dating and similar techniques, when something is identified as from "ten thousand years before now," "now" is defined as January 1st, 1950. Anything past that date is too screwed up compared to historical trends to use standard archaeology on.
History is written by the... victors. It's not surprising to get a single-sided story when the other side didn't care much about leaving written detailed records.
Not really. In my mind, they won the battle but lost the war.
It all depends on your point of view. If you look over the last millennia, the Huns didn't leave a lot of legacy beyond finishing off the corpse of Western Roman Empire, which wasn't really an empire then anyway. Their culture was absorbed and we only know of them because of that.
End of the day, they were ultimately just another band of warlords.
Burning wasn't necessary. Most texts that weren't copied continuously were simply lost. Our oldest sources for written Chinese are on dinosaur bones -- but the script already had characters that clearly show they also wrote with pen on bamboo slips, but we don't have any surviving examples of that until the Classical Chinese era.
Historians have no problem incorporating reliable documents written by the "other side". You just have to understand the context that it was written in.
However, all the "alternative" history I've looked at has ended up being fan fiction, with no real supporting evidence.
Please don't post snarky dismissals to HN. It sounds like you know a lot about history. If someone is wrong, explain why, so we all learn something. Putting other people down because they don't know as much as you doesn't belong in thoughtful conversation.
> Some bones suggested that the individual was born into a roaming tribe but later settled down; others indicated the opposite lifestyle change.
Not sure what history Susanne Hakenbeck studies, but asiatic hersdmen populations in Eastern Europe have a long documented history of looting for slaves.
Washington Post has become a rather low bar in general the last few years. I've stopped reading it all together and am disappointed to see the number of articles from it cropping up on HN lately.
Also (off topic) they have begin a policy of shadowbanning commenters in their comment sections who disagree with their "official" policy on things. It's really barely one step above Brietbart now days in my opinion.
You mean is it a published policy? Not that I know of.
Does it happen? At least once (personally observed) and I assume more.
They really ought to get rid of comments if they are going to shadowban. An echo chamber of Clinton support is kind of sad at this point and I doubt it fools anyone.
It is their paper and they have a right to publish whatever propaganda they want. And they certainly have been doing that. It's kind of sad to see the major paper of our nations capital sunk to this level but I guess it's the trajectory of big media right now.
About as ironic as the Romans taking Visigoth refugees kicked out of the Black Sea area by the Huns... and that the Visigoths ended up sacking Rome within a few generations.
So, this is also how Rome fell in 476. My source for this is a documentary I watched about a decade ago (back when the History Channel actually aired history stuff).
By the mid-470s, the Eastern Empire was rich, but the Western Empire was poor and struggling in every capacity. The Western Empire's army was so dependent on Germanic soldiers that the Emperor was a puppet of the commander of the Germanic forces, Ricimer. Ricimer would even kill emperors who stopped acting as loyal puppets! After Ricimer died, the emperor of the Eastern Empire decided enough was enough, and he took the opportunity to restore Roman rule to the Western Empire by sending Julius Nepos to lead an army to depose both Ricimer's successor Gundobad and his puppet Glycerius.
Julius Nepos was successful, establishing himself as the new emperor of the Western Empire. He appointed two key generals who he believed were loyal to him: Orestes leading the Roman forces, and Odoacer leading the Germanic forces. Shortly after this, there was an uprising in Gaul by a group of Germanic tribes who were upset over not having enough land. Julius Nepos sent Orestes to put down the rebellion, which wound up being a fatal mistake. Orestes had a dream his entire life of restoring the Western Empire to its former glory, and he believed Julius Nepos wasn't strong enough to do so. In fact, he believed that the only person who could make Rome great again was himself. So when he arrived in Gaul, he made a deal with the rebels. He told them that if they followed him home to the capital in Ravenna and helped him overthrow Julius Nepos, he'd grant them all the Italian land they want.
And so Orestes and an army of Germanic rebels entered Ravenna and sent both Julius Nepos and his remaining general Odoacer into exile. Orestes knew that it would be a mistake to take the throne himself -- nobody would tolerate an emperor who had the last guy kicked out -- so he instead appointed a puppet he could control, his nephew Romulus Augustulus ("Augustulus" being a nickname for "little emperor", not his actual name). But then Orestes made his own fatal mistake. He turned his back on the Germanic forces who helped him defeat Julius Nepos and said "I lied". He gave them no land and told them to beat it back to Gaul.
They weren't happy at all. They were so pissed in fact that they tracked down Odoacer in his exile and begged him to lead them to overthrow Orestes and his puppet. Odoacer agreed. In the civil war that resulted, Orestes and his brother were both captured and executed, Ravenna was sacked, and Romulus Augustulus sent into exile. Odoacer was nice enough to actually give the kid a generous stipend and sent him to live with the rest of his family, since it wasn't really his fault Orestes put him on the throne. Tired of the cycle of conflicts over the emperorship, Odoacer declared himself King of Italy and sent all the imperial regalia to Constantinople along with a note saying that an emperor in the west is no longer needed. And the Germanic refugees got all the land they could ever want.
And that is how the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. Breaking your promises to your refugees is a good way to get overthrown.
(edited to fix a typo; thank you jacquesm for pointing it out)
>And that is how the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. Breaking your promises to your refugees is a good way to get overthrown.
How to spot someone ignorant of history: Use of the argument "Thing X (that just happens to relate to contemporary political angle they are pushing) caused the fall of Rome."
If by "taking refugees" you mean "using as troops and mercenaries in their wars against other border groups" sure.
They played a chess game with the people around them, and the right to settle or not within their rather arbitrarily defined borders was part of the game. Remember that the borders that they gave rights to enter were borders they established through imperial conquest anyways...
The Franks and the Goths both Romanized and created successor states that mimiced the Romans. To many of the people who lived in these areas the transition from Rome to these new states was so gradual they never fully clued into it. The successor states of Francia, Visigothic Spain, Lombardic Italy, etc. all inherited most of the legal and cultural framework of Rome.
Additionally the Western part of the empire fell for reasons probably not much related to barbarian invaders but more to economic and political decline. Taxation models shifted, landholding models shifted, raising large successful armies became harder, and the empire became harder to defend.
And the eastern half of the Empire continued with significant vibrancy for quite some time.
> If by "taking refugees" you mean "using as troops and mercenaries in their wars against other border groups" sure.
He was informed that the North was agitated by a furious tempest; that the irruption of the Huns, an unknown and monstrous race of savages, had subverted the power of the Goths; and that the suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation, whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space many miles along the banks of the river. With outstretched arms and pathetic lamentations they loudly deplored their past misfortunes and their present danger; acknowledged that their only hope of safety was in the clemency of the Roman government; and most solemnly protested that, if the gracious liberality of the emperor would permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace, they should ever hold themselves bound, by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude, to obey the laws and to guard the limits of the republic.
I think it is more than fair to describe this as "taking refugees", though the Romans didn't really have the option of saying "no", because the consequence would have been more immediately ruinous.
It was thought expedient that an accurate account should be taken of their numbers; but the persons who were employed soon desisted, with amazement and dismay, from the prosecution of the endless and impracticable task;(67) and the principal historian of the age most seriously affirms that the prodigious armies of Darius and Xerxes, which had so long been considered as the fables of vain and credulous antiquity, were now justified, in the eyes of mankind, by the evidence of fact and experience. A probable testimony has fixed the number of the Gothic warriors at two hundred thousand men; and if we can venture to add the just proportion of women, of children, and of slaves, the whole mass of people which composed this formidable emigration must have amounted to near a million of persons, of both sexes and of all ages.
The ancient empires weren't modern nation states. People, particularly the Roman designated barbarians were more mobile. The Romans used these peoples as buffer states to keep other tribes migrating from the East away from their borders.
Even the "Roman" lands weren't necessarily Roman. There were petty kingdoms and tribes in there too, with scattered Roman settlements. As the empire declined economically, they started depending more and more on the non-Roman kingdoms to fight as mercenaries, etc.
Let's just say that we're not impressed. And plenty of people of Turkish origin living in European countries aren't impressed either.
Erdogan is working hard to undo approximately 80 years of Turkish progress. He may succeed in Turkey, but I highly doubt he will succeed to destabilize the rest of Europe or to make good on his threats of using Turkish citizens that have moved abroad as some kind of fifth column. He's mostly playing to a local audience with statements like that and likes to depict himself as the strong man in a struggle that is mostly initiated by Erdogan himself.
I feel pretty safe on the streets here. Much safer than I would feel in Ankara or Istanbul, and much safer than plenty of Turks feel in their own country.
It's a bit of a problem, but 'you break it, you own it' is a good rule.
See also: Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and a very large number of other places where proxy wars between western states and meddling in local affairs in order to gain the upper hand in veiled conflicts over resources have made the world a much worse place for a very large number of people.
Same principle, really. In geopolitics if you either go to war or you decide to do some empire building if you want things to remain stable after you turn your back you end up being responsible for the aftermath. And if things go pear shaped and you turn your back they likely will come to haunt you in one way or another. These are not laws, merely extracts from observable reality, from Roman times right up to the present.
Sure it could end different but for some reason it never does.
You are suggesting that westerners should, of their own accord, import millions of fighting age and potentially bitter men into their homelands. You admit this is a 'bit of a problem' for those westerners. Now you are suggesting that if westerners choose not to import these millions of people into their homelands, some nebulous force will haunt them. And your basis for this claim is, ultimately, the fact that civilizations tend to fall apart after a while? Given the enormous complexity of the causes of the downfall of great civilizations, do you realize how absurd that sounds? Given the enormous, albeit temporary (as all things are), success of civilizations that didn't feel bad about taking advantage of their neighbors, do you understand why your argument is so unpersuasive?
The US not being very good at cleaning up the messes they make is fairly well documented, props to the Swedes (and quite a few other countries besides) for doing far more than their fair share (which would have been 'nothing to very little') in this.
Our elites broke it, I don't understand why plain civilians like you have to own it. Why do you feel responsible for those wars? Why do you feel like you have to pay the toll for it? Honest questions.
I get to vote but, in democracy, we are a drop in the ocean.
In any case what's done is done, and if we've already waged war on them, it makes no sense to open our borders to them because most of them are bitter at us and some of them want to and have succeeded in killing us in our own soil. It's simply a security issue.
There are millions of Muslims now scattered everywhere in Europe, and these last attacks are simply the beginning. Now Erdogan can threaten us because he has a dormant army everywhere. And we let them in, like a trojan horse.
> I get to vote but, in democracy, we are a drop in the ocean.
No, we all together own the result and fractionally each of us. That's the price of living in a democracy, and one I gladly accept. In a dictatorship you could argue like you do (and even there there are options, but with a much higher personal price).
> In any case what's done is done, and if we've already waged war on them, it makes no sense to open our borders to them because most of them are bitter at us and some of them want to and have succeeded in killing us in our own soil.
That is a vanishingly small fraction of those entering. In fact, the vast majority would like nothing better than to turn back if not for the fact that their lives are in danger where they lived. Sure, there are people who move with economic motives, but those are even less likely to be a danger.
> It's simply a security issue.
Yes, it is a security issue. And you deal with that like you deal with any other security issue: through law enforcement.
> There are millions of Muslims now scattered everywhere in Europe, and these last attacks are simply the beginning.
Do you actually believe that these 'millions of Muslims' are going to pick up arms and attack the citizens of the countries they have shared their lives with and who for the most part employ them and ensure their bread is buttered over the silly statements of some dictator? What you'll likely see is some angry youths who might rebel, but that's not too far from what Western raised youths do when given half a chance. There are plenty of examples of that.
And given that if your name is 'Muhammed' or 'Mustafa' or your skin a little bit different than lily white they actually have some reasons to be upset.
> Now Erdogan can threaten us because he has a dormant army everywhere.
No, sorry, he really doesn't. Erdogan, for all his bluster is incapable of ruling Turkey the way he wants to without vast human rights violations, there is little to no chance of him being able to rouse the Turks in Western European societies in the numbers required to cause a real problem.
That does leave open the door to polarization and escalation, and because of that those need to be fought tooth and nail, we all of us living here, Turks, Morroccans (and their children, who usually have the nationality of the country they were born in), refugees and natives (who likely were refugees of some war a couple of generations back) need to work out our differences and settle on something long-term viable and give Erdogan the collective finger.
And for the most part, we are doing just that. A few hundred misguided people are not going to change anything, and there are plenty of misguided people in our own ranks.
>No, we all together own the result and fractionally each of us. That's the price of living in a democracy, and one I gladly accept. In a dictatorship you could argue like you do (and even there there are options, but with a much higher personal price).
Well, you said I could change things, I'm telling you I can't, because I don't get to choose. We all do, and the majority, by now, disagrees with me.
>That is a vanishingly small fraction of those entering. In fact, the vast majority would like nothing better than to turn back if not for the fact that their lives are in danger where they lived. Sure, there are people who move with economic motives, but those are even less likely to be a danger.
I am aware of it, but it's not worth the risk to let any of them in.
>Yes, it is a security issue. And you deal with that like you deal with any other security issue: through law enforcement.
That's supposing law enforcement can stop 100% of terror attacks before they have happened. Isn't it better to just remove the root of the issue?
>Do you actually believe that these 'millions of Muslims' are going to pick up arms and attack the citizens of the countries they have shared their lives with and who for the most part employ them and ensure their bread is buttered over the silly statements of some dictator?
No, not millions of them, but just a few ones are enough to wreak havoc.
And yes, they are going to attack us, first because they are bitter we made them lose everything, and second because there's definitely not enough butter for all of them (in my own country, there isn't even enough butter for us natives!).
>No, sorry, he really doesn't. Erdogan, for all his bluster is incapable of ruling Turkey the way he wants to without vast human rights violations, there is little to no chance of him being able to rouse the Turks in Western European societies in the numbers required to cause a real problem.
Nobody talked about Turks. Turkey will covertly support ISIS as long as ISIS keeps killing Kurds, and they will because, let's be honest, all Muslims hate Kurds. And yes, ISIS lone fighters will keep terrorising us. It just happened yesterday.
About the rest, that's wishful thinking. I don't believe for a second two cultures that are fundamentally so different will ever manage to work together for one specific goal, let alone create something viable in the long term.
> I am aware of it, but it's not worth the risk to let any of them in.
You'd rather see 10's or 100's of thousands dead than risk a few incidents?
> That's supposing law enforcement can stop 100% of terror attacks before they have happened.
There are so few of them that even with broken LE the dangers from terrorism are smaller than from smoking.
> Isn't it better to just remove the root of the issue?
Yes, but it is too late for that as you already wrote.
> No, not millions of them, but just a few ones are enough to wreak havoc.
Nah, only when viewed through the magnifying lens of the media. Traffic and obesity kill vastly more people than terrorists ever can.
> And yes, they are going to attack us, first because they are bitter we made them lose everything, and second because there's definitely not enough butter for all of them (in my own country, there isn't even enough butter for us natives!).
Where do you live then?
> Turkey will covertly support ISIS as long as ISIS keeps killing Kurds, and they will because, let's be honest, all Muslims hate Kurds.
Do you realize the majority of Kurds are Muslims? Are you suggesting they hate themselves?
> And yes, ISIS lone fighters will keep terrorising us. It just happened yesterday.
You let it happen to you, yesterday. Statistically speaking I feel no less safe than I did on Thursday last week, and if I see something that hints at an attack in progress I'll act. Until then life goes on.
> I don't believe for a second two cultures that are fundamentally so different will ever manage to work together for one specific goal, let alone create something viable in the long term.
It's already working. What do you suggest?
Isolationism? Close all borders to refugees? Barbed wire borders and soldiers with orders to shoot if the refugees should approach the border?
Are you willing to go and stand there to pull the trigger?
But their primary defense was offense. The Roman response to true enemy was always "kill them all, man woman and child". That's why they genocided Carthage, the Gauls, destroyed Israel, massacred rebelling slaves in Sicily and lined the roads from Campania to Rome with crucified rebels. To bring in a modern political analogy is stupid.
That's the human condition. If you think that we're any better, you're wrong.
If any nation today had the ability to slaughter their enemies, they would. When the United States had that ability in the 1940s, we planned on doing so and reengineered the entire military complex to do so. When the Germans had the ability to do so in Angola in the early 1900s, they did.
> If any nation today had the ability to slaughter their enemies, they would.
This is untrue. Most citizens don't have the stomach for total war or civilian massacre. It's not considered acceptable or moral by most people. There was no lack of ability constraining the US from carpet bombing everything habitable in Afghanistan after 9/11, but relatively few people were advocating for that.
They don't need to. Ancient people were no more or less moral than we are today.
Only the people running the tribe matter, whether that be a bronze age war band or a modern army. The fact that only a few people advocated the bombing you described doesn't change the fact that bombs were dropped.
To be completely honest, that's what everyone was doing back then. The Romans were just better at it and all things considered they were quite benevolent as far as empires go.
Multiple walls in some cases - although around here it was to keep the people from the North out of the South - but I'm in the bit that was described as the "uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom"
The number of downvotes will reveal that your initial comment adds little to the conversation and your second comment is basically a downvote complaint.
Would you please stop doing this on HN? This is a site for thoughtful conversation, not political or ideological venting. Deleting the comments after the damage is done doesn't help.
I've lived in Canada, I did not notice any culture that I should respect other than to learn the language and obey the laws. In other countries that I've lived in (Poland, Romania) it was much the same. And that's being an atheist in countries that were fairly religious.
Do you want refugees to start acting like the locals in every respect? Do you want them to start wearing local traditional dress and pretend that they're part of something they do not feel in their hearts? Do you feel threatened by people that you can't easily communicate with, that have different customs than you do and that pray to different gods? Should they convert to some local religion?
> In other words: don't let them in.
Why?
Refugees are the people that will help your descendants a few generations down the line when the tides have turned. Likely they or their children will be the ones to wipe your ass when you're old and gray and unable to do so yourself.
All this fearmongering and irrational angst of other cultures isn't doing any good whatsoever.
Actually, I think there is a strong culture in Canada and the United States that in each case is a testament to their political and economic success.
In the case of the U.S. that culture would be the WASPy social ethic of the original elites, which was carried forward until recently. That's more Puritan in New England, less so in Virginia, and non-existent in the Deep South. I'd call it the protestant work ethic, but I think there's something much more distinct in the U.S. Whatever Canada has going on is also distinct, though definitely seems close to the U.S. Mid-Western Lutheran culture.
The irony is that these days I'd argue it's immigrants that come closest to exemplifying the traditional, dominate U.S. ethic. Previous immigrant groups, like the Irish and Italians, didn't bring that culture but merely adopted it--in some cases poorly. (Maybe because they were less educated than the current influx, or because the British Empire left such a tremendous technocratic legacy throughout Asia, especially compared to Southern and Eastern Europe.) The past 50+ years a poor, white, Southern ethic seems to have come to dominate popular U.S. culture. That culture emphasizes the pursuit of wealth and the trappings of wealth rather than valuing work for it's own sake, despite the rhetoric. It also emphasizes blue collar "authenticity" over respecting the dictates of the elite, which on balance is a net negative. This is why that culture looks down on education, and why it's lost on so many people that so-called "book learning" is actually a kind of labor--a labor that alot of people dislike just as much as mopping floors, but something you endure nonetheless because it's what the WASPy work ethic demands, especially in the current economic environment. A college education is for many people the same kind of sublimation of personal aspirations that going straight to the factory was for people a few generations ago.
It's a shame we don't accept more Syrian refugees. By and large they're the middle class of Syria--educated, family-oriented, and instinctively averse to radicalism and fundamentalism. They've spent decades learning to avoid dependencies on political solutions and to grow business organically rather than through rent seeking. Syria's loss could be our gain. Such a wasted opportunity. It's especially egregious given how grim and horrendous the situation is there.
Most terrorist acts in the U.S. are committed by white people, and the people pushing to make their religion the basis of law are also Christians, not Muslims. Your statements have no basis in facts or data, which leads me to suspect plain old racism.
Most terrorist acts in the U.S. are committed by white people
By death count? Even if this is so, there are vastly more white people in the US. What's important are the per capita numbers.
and the people pushing to make their religion the basis of law are also Christians, not Muslims.
Why would you expect Muslims to try to impose their law on a society when they haven't got anywhere near the political power to succeed? How dumb do you think they are? The important questions are whether they'd try to impose their religion if they had much more political clout, and what the outcome of a successful imposition would be for the people here (hint: not awesome).
Personal attacks and religious flamewars are probably the two most toxic things on HN. You managed to combine them in a comment that stands out for its vileness even in this wretched a flamewar.
We've banned this account. Please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with.
All: users who upvote poison like this eventually lose their voting rights on HN.
Killing abortion providers or bombing a clinic explicitly in the name of some version of Christianity are examples of Christian terrorism, though, which have happened in the US recently. These are not acts that are incidental to the religious beliefs of the individuals perpetrating them.
It's not anti-Christian to recognize patterns. You can't be a clinic that provides reproductive health services (even without abortions!) without getting threats, and you definitely can't provide abortions without getting death threats or even getting killed.
If you look at mass killings in the US, the majority of major attacks in the US have been done by men who are white and nominally Christian, falling into the broad categories of "Christianity-motivated" or "bitter at life, esp. the military or women". Check out a list of US shootings at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-m... for instance.
Full disclosure: I'm some version of Christian too, but I feel quite threatened by other Christians who want to enforce their versions of morality upon me by law. I do not feel threatened by Sharia. When I got some testing done on my fetus at 20 weeks and was faced with a possible, but thankfully irrelevant, choice of being forced to carry a terminally ill or dead kid to term or not, it wasn't Muslims forcing me to make that choice.
If you read upthread it was explained the final fall of the Roman Empire could be attributed to treating their refugees like dirt and lying to them.
Also, I'm currently in US and I don't feel my way of life is being destroyed by Muslim people. I think anti-Muslim sentiment is more of a negative influence on my life, as I work in academia and have had to deal with co workers and students being unable to continue research due to the immigration ban amongst other things. Also the whole "an Indian engineer was shot and killed by a white man for looking like a Muslim" that occurred recently has put fear into a lot of my peers, a significant chunk of them Indian or Pakistani. It's really kind of made my workplace tense and afraid whenever current events and the current political administration are brought up.
Most all major acts of terror in the USA have been by white people. I believe the vast majority have been by whites in the USA. In the last 10 years included. I don't see where you're getting the "major terror attacks" thing. In USA we had a stint where white men were shooting up schools and killing children practically every month. I'm pretty sure white people have committed more acts of mass killing in the USA than Islamic terrorists. Where is the pattern recognition here?
Anti-Islamic sentiment has long been regarded as applying to a lot more than Islamic people. Sikhs, Indians, anyone that looks "brown" enough gets the anti-Islamic sentiment. I've even had an anti-Islamic person tell me that there's a rule in the Quran that allows an Islamic person to lie about being Islamic if they feel they are in danger, and therefore you can never trust anyone who looks Islamic, because they could be lying about their belief in Islam. I'm not saying you personally agree with this, but these are also other anti-Islamic sentiments I've discussed with my peers. They seem to trend towards racism.
"Also, I'm currently in US and I don't feel my way of life is being destroyed by Muslim people."
Given they constitute 1% of the population, would you expect to feel that way? Why would a visible 1% minority group openly try to attack the way of life of the host population?
"Most all major acts of terror in the USA have been by white people.... In USA we had a stint where white men were shooting up schools and killing children practically every month."
Those aren't considered terrorist attacks. Also, what are the per-capita numbers? Isn't that what's important?
"I've even had an anti-Islamic person tell me that there's a rule in the Quran that allows an Islamic person to lie about being Islamic if they feel they are in danger"
>If you read upthread it was explained the final fall of the Roman Empire could be attributed to treating their refugees like dirt and lying to them.
How to spot someone ignorant of history: Use of the argument "Thing X (that just happens to relate to contemporary political angle the are pushing) caused the fall of Rome."
> I'd prefer they integrate, speak the language, and stop blowing shit up.
Guess what: For 99.999% of them this already holds true.
> Apparently that's too much to ask.
No it isn't, and the refugees actually agree with you.
> I'd also prefer they stop preaching support for fucking Sharia law, but that's too much to ask.
Oh, the old Sharia law saw. Again, in no Western country is there a realistic chance of Sharia law being applied to you or me. But if two parties consent to having a non-official arbitration done then they are welcome to do so. Similar things happen in the Vatican and in the Jewish community and nobody ever thought that that was a problem.
Do you see me as supporting Sharia law? As for being against integration, teaching immigrants the local language or being pro 'blowing shit up':
I'm against Sharia law as much as I'm against religion: but I recognize the law of the land here that says that people are allowed to do this since they are consenting adults, even if the net effects of both are quite possibly negatives. Just like I can't stop you from eating bad food or from smoking. Those are freedoms we give to everybody in order to not limit ourselves. Reduce those freedoms for others and we too will end up with reduced freedoms.
I'm hardline against genital mutilation, whether done by Islam adherents or Jews is not relevant to me. That is the sort of invasion of bodily integrity that I really strongly disagree with and that no person should have the right to do to another, even when we're talking about parents and children.
I'm 'pro' integration, but I also recognize that not everybody integrates equally well. And some simply don't care. Most notably: American, British and Japanese friends who after having been here decades still don't speak the language because they simply do not need to. Contrast with most Turkish and Moroccan immigrants who speak the language just fine.
Other than that their 'integration' is their affair, not mine and the embarrassing integration courses that the government forces on refugees here are more hinder than help (and cost a fortune). Who gives a damn where our (immigrant) queen comes from?
As for blowing shit up: the people that have the most to lose from assholes blowing shit up (or, you know, white guys running people through with swords) are the refugees and the immigrants. Because they (and their children) are going to be the ones to pay the price, not the idiots that blow themselves up.
Gee, it is almost like white people make up a huge part of the population. Apply a little Bayes Theorem and visit back when you've run the numbers.
Also, fwiw, Islam is not a race, hence you can't be racist for criticizing it. It is an ideological system. In that way it is no different than Democracy, Communism, Buddhism, Capitalism, Mormonism, Anarchism, etc, etc. Race doesn't define any of those ideologies either. In a free society we must be allowed to criticize ideas.
I'm allowed to criticize Islamism and its practices and beliefs. I'm also allowed to criticize Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, et al. However only one of these ideologies regularly/commonly threatens to kill (and actually will kill) people who leave the faith. Only one of these ideologies has a large constituency who condones the intentional targeting of innocent civilians. It isn't a majority, but it isn't a fringe 1% either. Pew Research Surveys show the number to be 20-30% of these practitioners worldwide. (http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...)
Yeah, look at them evil Muslims.[1] Fundamentalists, every single one, right? Islam has issues, of course, just like any other ideology. Too bad the Wahhabis are largely successful in exporting their flavor of Islam.. but I guess that's what happens when you prop up oppressive regimes in the name of stability (and preferential access to natural resources).
The problem with all this is if it achieves escape velocity then it can take a long long time to undo the damage. We're almost four decades into Iran being an Islamic state and I wonder how that would have all ended if there had not been so much meddling in Iran and Iraq (and less money flowing to the house of Saud).
Quite possibly Iran (then Persia) would have been a real powerhouse in the region, highly educated citizenry and vast natural resources.
I'm curious why you refer to that as "normalcy". Was that kind of lifestyle really "normal" for the Arab world? Did people outside of major cities live like that? Were the major cities like that for a long period of time? From what I've seen, those Western-looking cities are the anomaly, resulting from either European colonization or from Western-looking rulers seeking to modernize, against the wishes of the general population.
Highrises are simply a function of the price of ground in cities going up dictating more use per square unit of area.
And FWIW the roots of most of our civilizations lie in the Arab world, at some point in time those regions were the moderns and our regions were backwards.
To directly answer your question: Major cities like that have existed all over the globe for many centuries, the 'modern' look as you call it was most likely inspired by looking abroad but that has never stopped anybody from imitation.
I'm not sure why you think I'm talking about the way the skyline looks. I'm talking about the acceptance of modern Western values. Do you really think that has been the normal state of the middle east, and Islamic fundamentalism is the anomaly?
Turkey was well underway to becoming a very modern state, Iran ditto. All this long before we began propping up the Shah and destabilizing the region around Turkey. The meddling began roughly around the time oil became important and really took off after World War II, in part accelerated because of the cold war.
Yes, Islamic fundamentalism is the anomaly, and it would not nearly be as powerful as it is without the CIA and the Saudi's funding and arming their initial round.
Do you think that kind of thing was "normal" for the Islamic middle east?
Turkey was well underway to becoming a very modern state
The temporary modernization of Turkey was a result of having rulers and elites who looked to the west to copy their success. It was absolutely not a result of a popular movement. Modernization was not supported by the bulk of the population at any point in time.
.jpg){kind=link}
He makes the argument that in the later Roman Empire, the Huns treated the Roman Empire as either a vassal or a buffer state to their own empire. They demanded tribute from them and even forced the romans to chase down and return refugees. It's really interesting to look at the Roman Empire from a hun-centered point of view-- just one more border state along a small section of a vast empire.
They seem to have been one of a long series of steppe empires with the same basic organization-- from the Scythians to the Mongols.