This is how AMDG begins his essay:
Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not a democrat. I think that “the people” cannot really rule a polity, save temporarily and under very special circumstances. I am for the Rule of Law against the rule of majority, even if it is an encompassing majority. And not of any Law, but only the traditional Christian Natural Law.
On the other hand, that people cannot rule does not mean they should not have a role in political affairs. Possibly, that role could be more influential than the one they currently have in the “oldest democracies” of our world. In particular, I agree with the “no taxation without representation” rule (a representation of auditors, not “lawmakers”). People have the right to scrutinise how the taxes collected from them are spent; as a matter of fact this was the most important role of the medieval parliaments, the real predecessors of our “democratic” ones.
The first of those parliaments was not — as it is usually stated — the English parliament, but the Cortes of Leon, a kingdom taken over by Castilla later on during the Reconquista. The wikipedia has the following details on the Cortes de Leon:Although there are documented councils held in 873, 1020, 1050 and 1063, there was no representation of commoners. What is considered to be the first Spanish Parliament (with the presence of commoners), Cortes — was held in the Kingdom of Leon in 1118. Prelates, nobles and commoners met separately in the three estates of the Cortes. In this meeting new laws were approved to protect commoners against the arbitrarities of nobles, prelates and the king. This important set of laws is known as the “Carta Magna Leonesa”
I had never read any suggestion regarding an Islamic influence on that institution up until this summer, in a local newspaper from Leon, the old capital of the kingdom and a quiet provincial city nowadays. This is my inverse translation, from Spanish, of a quotation from the book:[…]
‘With some exaggeration, one could say that Muslims were responsible for the emergence of parliaments, since they were born from the power struggles among Christians aiming at the military conquest Islamic territory from Spain to Constantinople. “
I was thinking about buying the book (The Life and Death of Democracy, by John Keane), but my to-read-list for the next months is already fully booked (pun intended). I decided therefore to have a look to the online information on this book and its author. His home page has a summary of the book; Democracy. A short history and this Introduction, whose extension is double that the former. These summaries are enough to conclude that we have, once more, another case of “deconstruction” of our institutions and of demeaning of the Greek, Rome and Christian roles in the framing of our culture. I list the main ideas and copy the most relevant points from the latter, adding some comments…
See AMDG’s post for the details on the main points made by Keane in his deconstruction of Western institutions. This is a list of the premises under consideration:
- - - - - - - - -
| 1. | Democracy is not originally Greek. | |
| 2. | Only democratic forms of government are really human. | |
| 3. | Democracy knows no limits. | |
| 4. | Islam contributed greatly to the development of democracy. | |
| 5. | The EU experiment is a democratic endeavor. | |
| 6. | The current enemies of democracy: markets, populism, material insecurity, US militarism… | |
The process at work here is one that has become quite familiar in recent years: the rewriting of history in order to denigrate European civilization and elevate Islam. Historians, social scientists, government employees, and politicians are busy creating an alternative version of history and thus paving the way for the ascendancy of Islam.
According to the New History, the emergence of Islam is a natural development arising out of indigenous democratic conditions, and it is not at all incompatible with our European heritage. Only racism and xenophobia cause its critics to see things any differently.
It doesn’t really matter whether the intention of the New Historians is to elevate Islam or simply to engage in the favorite pastime of the Left, the destruction of Western Civilization. The end result is the same: a field of rubble where the cherished institutions of our culture used to be, and a totalitarian Islamic theocracy built upon the ruins.
8 comments:
So as the Cathedral, as Mencius Moldbug calls it, rewrites history in "Kosova" today, so it will do for all of us tomorrow.
Does anyone have some good links to information on how the French are rewriting history with regards to Islam and Muslims and the Battle of Tours and Charles Martel.
Furthermore, I am looking for information on anywhere in Europe rewriting history with regards to the Muslim advance in teh East, which was stopped at Vienna twice.
Those Muslims in the Balkans turned out to be quite the nasty lot, didnt they. How many Churches have they burnt, defiled, and desecrated in Bosnia and Kosovo? Every one of them?
I wonder how long it will take until the events in Vienna 1683 will be viewed as something very negative towards our civilisation and that the muslims was actually trying to save us when they where repelled outside Vienna. Phase 1. It starts as someones opinion. Phase 2. Theories are starting to form around these opinions. Phase 3. It becomes dogma cut ins stone and haram to critiscize.
As for a new view at history I can recommend the 'National Manifesto' by Dr. Andrei Savelev, Sergey Pykhtin and Igor Kalyadin. The book (published 2009) was written in Russia, but there exists an english translation as well:
http://tinyurl.com/ye4og5w
and meanwhile also one in german language:
http://tinyurl.com/l2b8vz
anyone, who lives in Germany and is interested in learning about the fundamentals of this manifesto should consider to visit this conference
http://tinyurl.com/ydhobxu
I didnt specify, but Im looking for revision of history taught in French schools, to adapt to Muslim sensibilities, since their are som many young Muslims coming up through the system.
As opposed to general historical revisionism in the Unis or Academic works.
BTW, the ethnic and minority studies divisions of Universities are filled with people that are paid well to think up tactics and strategies to subvert and undermine Western Civilization, on the Taxpayer Dime, no less. All the while seeding hatred for the host socieity and civiliztaion in young people.
How did we end up in here?
What does Bat Yeor say about this filth?
"The myth didn't die with the collapse of the Turkish Empire after World War I. Rather it took another form: that of the National Arab Movement, which promoted an Arab society where Christians and Muslims would live in perfect harmony. Once again, this was the fabrication of European politicians, writers and clergyman. And in the same way as the myth of the Ottoman political paradise was created to block the independence of the Balkan nations, so the Arab multi-religious fraternity was an argument to destroy the national liberation of non-Arab peoples of the Middle East (Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Maronites and Zionists.)
And although from the beginning of this century until the 1930s, a stream of Christian refugees were fleeing massacres and genocide on the roads of Turkey, Irak and Syria, the myth continued to flourish, sustained mostly by Arab writers and clergyman. After the Israelis had succeeded in liberating their land from the laws of Jihad and Dhimmitude, the myth reappeared in the form of a multi-cultural and multi-religious fraternal Palestine which had to replace the State of Israel (Cf. Arafat's 1975 UN speech). Its pernicious effects led to the destruction of the Christians in Lebanon. One might have thought that the myth would end there.
But suddenly the recent crisis in Yugoslavia offered a new chance for its reincarnation in a multi-religious Muslim Bosnian state. What a chance! A Muslim state again in the heartland of Europe. And we know the rest, the sufferings, the miseries, the trials of the war that this myth once again brought in its wake.
To conclude, I would like to say a few last words. The civilization of dhimmitude does not develop all at once. It is a long process that involves many elements and a specific conditioning. It happens when peoples replace history by myths, when they fight to uphold these destructive myths, more then their own values because they are confused by having transformed lies into truth. They hold to those myths as if they were the only guarantee of their survival, when, in fact, they are the path to destruction. Terrorized by the evidence and teaching of history, those peoples preferred to destroy it rather than to face it. They replace history with childish tales, thus living in amnesia."
"I wonder how long it will take until the events in Vienna 1683 will be viewed as something very negative towards our civilisation and that the muslims was actually trying to save us when they where repelled outside Vienna".
Well after a brief period of history glasnost, Putin and his history re-writers are returning to the fiction that Soviet Russia was invited in and "saved" the independent nations ringing it. The "saving" started with slaughter of leading government, police, education and press officials followed by decimation of ordinary citizens by loading them willy nilly including women and children onto cattle cars bound for the gulags.
The World has been content to white out this evil blot in history in deference to the Russian version or at least turn its eyes whistling: "nothing to see here folks".
In Canada's capital city Ottawa, the committee overseeing public spaces was having trouble with allowing a monument entitled: "Memorial to the Victims of Communism" (100 million at last count). They were worried the name might "offend Canadian communists". They insisted it be changed to "victims of totalitarian communism" and one committee member of spectacular density still fretted that Canada was hardly in a position to criticize, since it had interned Japanese during WWII.
Let's see now, an ideology that was inhumanely oppressive in every country it dominated over decades with 100 million dead, shot in the head or slowly killed by starvation, exposure and slave labor vs some economic losses and temporary wartime retention in reasonable living conditions for a few thousand people with government apologies and guilt money paid...
Only leftist moth- eaten minds can come up with such bizarro equivalences and there they are, ensconced as richly paid government bureaucrats, no matter what the political stripe of their supposed political masters, sticking their thousands of little wrenches in the works, blocking and betraying history.
*Ahem.* The first parliament was the Icelandic Althing, which had precious bloody little to do with Islam. Islam is structurally antithetical to any form of democracy, since it regards law as something laid down by Mohammed for all time.
By contrast, the various Germanic tribes engaged in a rough-and-ready sort of democracy from earliest times- Tacitus describes it- and it's perhaps no accident at all that restricted monarchies and then parliaments arose among teutonic populations, such as Saxon Wessex. Leon's people were very largely Vandalic and Visigothic.
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