Looks like slick Rick Santorum has found some way to really meaningfully engage younger voters:
Rick Santorum launched into a scathing attack on the left, charging during an appearance in South Carolina that the history of the Crusades has been corrupted by “the American left who hates Christendom.”
“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical,” Santorum said in Spartanburg on Tuesday. “And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”
He added, “They hate Western civilization at the core. That’s the problem.”
After asserting that Christianity had not shown any “aggression” to the Muslim world, the former Pennsylvania senator — who is considering a 2012 run for the White House — argued that American intervention in the Middle East helps promote “core American values.”
“What I’m talking about is onward American soldiers,” he said. “What we’re talking about are core American values. ‘All men are created equal’ — that’s a Christian value, but it’s an American value.”
Nothing gets the MTV crowd motivated like culture wars bullshit centering on the Crusades.
Guster
‘Christendom?’
That sounds like a word for Dan Savage.
Cronin
Yes, an invasion of the Levant and the massacring of the residents of Jerusalem was clearly not Frankish “aggression.” They were just promoting Christian values!
Chuck Butcher
The question I have (paid no attention to his first run) is if he was always this demonstrably stupid or he just started giving evidence once elected?
Studly Pantload
Good to see the man living up to his name.
dmsilev
Well, if the MTV generation isn’t careful, they’ll get drafted into a reprise of the Children’s Crusade…
greennotGreen
“All men are created equal” is a Christian value? In the sense that women are excluded, I guess it is. But no where in the New Testament is slavery condemned. That’s kind of incompatible with equality.
Just Some Fuckhead
I’m thinking about inviting Rick Santorum to my daughter’s 16th birthday party. Do you think he will wear the clown outfit?
Ana Gama
Unless you are Mooslim, or brown.
Pooh
I mean it’s a good thing we stopped those damn Muslims at the walls of Paris and Berlin!
celticdragonchick
You can make a case that the Crusades were a reaction to a couple hundred years of Islamic military aggression (the Battle of Tours was fought to kick an Islamic army out of France for crying out loud)and some of the the actions in Spain (like the support of Scottish crusaders to Spanish requests to drive out the Moors)certainly fit that model.
However, the Crusades quickly turned into their own form of murderous mayhem that preyed equally on Jews, Muslims and other (Orthodox)Christians.
But Santorum would rather go with the version that the Catholic Church endorses.
HyperIon
I just finished a history of the crusades.
I’m thinking Mr. Santorum is full o’ shit.
So what else is new?
trollhattan
Those darn kids and their darn uncomfortable questions. et tu, Newt?
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/50021.html
dmsilev
Well, let’s ask that fount of knowledge, Conservapedia:
So, the Christians started the fighting, and in the end, they lost. Oh, and a lot of heretics and infidels were killed along the way.
dms
Amanda in the South Bay
@Cronin:
Well, just to play devil’s advocate…
It was the Muslim Arabs who invaded and conquered large chunks of the Christian Roman Empire in the 7th century. From that perspective, the Crusades were an act of revanchism-retaking lands that had once been very solidly Christian.
BTW, the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzmcizes in the late 10th century actually *almost* managed to conqueror Jerusalem, he died in the field in the Levant.
dr. bloor
How is it possible that the real Santorum is so much more offensive and even less capable of rational thought than the Dan Savage version?
Michael
…especially coming from the sorts of guys who get all upset when they see a set of tits.
celticdragonchick
@Pooh:
The Franks stopped them at Tours in France. There is some interesting counter historical speculation that had the Franks lost, Europe would have been Islamisized and America as we know today would not exist.
That does depend somewhat on whether you consider the invading force to be merely a raid or an actual invasion bent on occupation.
Jack
And this has exactly what to do with the fact that we have 10% unemployment and are rapidly turning the US into both a banana republic and a third world country?
Gads…
Some kind of strategy to deal with the problems of the present would be appreciated.
Joshua Norton
HaHaHa! !
Western Civ. and Buttsecks Santorum don’t even have a nodding acquaintance. Not only did the Crusaders attack Muslims on an regular basis, they even pillaged their own side when they failed to conquer Jerusalem.
Mike in NC
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Check his website. There’s probably a fee schedule listed.
Just how did this lunatic get elected to the US Senate? Then again, I’ve heard it said that “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between”.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Pooh:
I dunno, I’m much happier living in a civilization that avoided being conquered by Islam in the early middle ages/late antiquity. For starters, I like art depicting human beings.
celticdragonchick
@dmsilev:
Not so much. The fighting and killing started when Christian kingdoms in North Africa were overrun and enslaved by early jihadi warriors.
That does not excuse what the Crusaders did in turn.
Southern Beale
Woopsies. Looks like Scott Walker may have violated campaign finance and ethics laws taking a phone call from what he thought was a major political donor while in the Governor’s office.
Ana Gama
I wonder if Santorum knows how many Jews the Christians slaughtered during the Crusades….
Omnes Omnibus
The stated goal (broadly speaking) of each of the fucking crusades was to reconquer the “Holy Land.” and drive out the “infidels.” How is that not a series of acts of aggression?
celticdragonchick
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Trying for nuance in this forum is a lost cause, but I appreciate your effort.
Lev
Ah, old Rick…reminds me of when I was back in school, and one of my (Republican) profs and I would always make jokes about the stupidity of Santorum. Good times.
I’m guessing that Santorum is going to talk next about why the Puritans get a bad rap, why McCarthy was actually right, and then move on to why the Jews really do deserve the blame for killing Christ. I’m joking about the last one, but maybe not…Santorum doesn’t seem like a Vatican II Catholic to me. If you wonder why the Catholic Church has been so wrong for so often…well, the fact that everyone in power in the church had to either accept that anti-Semitic assertion or just not care about it, even though the Bible clearly states that the Romans killed Jesus! I guess it makes sense that their descendants would want to deflect blame, but still. Hundreds of years’ worth of shitheadedness, and Ricky stands as the natural heir to all of that bullshit.
Finally, I think Bob Kerrey had it right when he said that Santorum is Latin for asshole.
rob!
Wow, they’re now naming ex-Senators after anal discharge? Welcome to Obama’s America, I guess…
Villago Delenda Est
The ongoing effort to turn the Founding Fathers into raving Jeebofascists continues.
Amanda in the South Bay
@celticdragonchick:
I’ve long since thought had Basil II’s successors been much more competent, the Byzantines may very well have taken Palestine themselves in the 11th century.
celticdragonchick
@Omnes Omnibus:
Indeed, and Muslims had been pretty damned aggressive in wiping out Christians in North Africa, Spain, southern France and the Balkans.
Again, one set of brutal, criminal actions does not excuse another like set.
It demonstrates just how nasty a time it was to live in.
celticdragonchick
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Possibly, bu we have the word “Byzantine” in our language for a reason…and it does not connote directness, simplicity or getting anything done.
The Dangerman
Fuck me; if he had also attacked our desire to implement Sharia Law, I would have Bingo’d. Fucker.
Warren Terra
@dmsilev:
I’ve gotten into the (somewhat lazy) habit of making jokes about the Albigensian Crusade (for example, saying I won’t support any politician who doesn’t frequently express their continuing sense of outrage about the Albigensian Crusade), mostly because it’s a bit obscure and I think the work “Albigensian” is funny (not that the mass slaughter was at all humorous), and of course it includes the fantastic line “kill them all, God will recognize his own”. But it’s worth remembering that the Crusades were a thoroughly blood-soaked endeavor every place they touched, not only in Muslim lands but also involving the sacking of Christian cities by crusaders, genocidal anti-heresy campaigns, and of course the mass deaths of under-clothed under-fed civilians in travesties and tragedies such as the Children’s Crusade.
Still, all of that adds to the basic picture, which (contrary to Santorum‘s assertion), absolutely is Christian warriors looting and pillaging Muslim lands and peoples that had never done anything to them.
P.S. It is always important, when invoking the name of Santorum, to remember the appropriate hyperlink.
Violet
@Omnes Omnibus:
Because it was done in the name of Jeebus, so that makes it right.
@Southern Beale: Lolz. That’s funny. Walker is following The Moustache’s Rules of Holes:
“The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”
Cronin
@Amanda in the South Bay: True, yes, but the Crusades were as hostile to Byzantium as they were to the Arabs. During the First Crusade, the Latins were *supposed* to give Asia Minor back to Constantinople after conquering it, but instead kept it for themselves. So this wasn’t exactly the Eastern Empire reconquering lost territory.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Omnes Omnibus:
“reconquer” is the key word. Revanchism, perhaps, but to those accustomed to taking a longer view of history (which we aren’t so much these days) not un-unacceptable. Middle Eastern history didn’t start in the 19th century with Western Imperialism.
Besides, demographically the Near East in the 11th century wasn’t nearly as Muslim as it is today.
JGabriel
Between Slick Santorum and Scott Walker, it looks like the Republicans have the youth vote all tied up. How will we Democrats ever defeat them?
.
Villago Delenda Est
Hey, let’s knock the Crusades too much. Banking was pretty much invented by the Knights Templar to keep those Crusaders solvent as they marched across the Med on their way to liberate Jerusalem.
celticdragonchick
@Joshua Norton:
Mercenaries want to be paid. That is the problem when you don’t have professional state armies and a banking system the state can use to manage wealth. You have to pay troops with plunder and wars can only be financed by securing loans against crown possessions.
Read about the bullshit the English found necessary to deal with to fight at Agincourt.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Cronin:
Of course Byzantium ended up with the short end of the stick (but at the same time they were hardly generous or completely helpful to the crusaders either).
Ultimately, the point is that the Crusades were a delayed response to 400 years of Islamic aggression against Christendom (and yes, the term I think does make sense when you are talking about the society and culture of the Middle Ages). If the Crusades had happened exactly 400 years earlier, at a time much closer in proximity to the initial Muslim expansion, would we be having this conversation?
Cat Lady
Every time I’m sure which century the Goopers are aiming for, it turns out I’m off by a few hundred years.
OnwardsBackwards Christian Soldiers.Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
Damn. DAMN. I don’t even study the Crusades era in detail, and I know he’s full of the worst crap possible.
Worse? I think he honestly, truly, fully believes exactly what he said. No riling up the troops, no lying to gin up votes, this is the voice of a man who’s smokin’ what he’s sellin’.
@Southern Beale: BEAUTIFUL. Just the best thing I’ve seen all day. I hope this news, too, goes viral.
Can’t wait to see Maddow on all this tonight.
Mike in NC
@JGabriel:
From reading one of the previous threads about Gov. Scott Walker (R-Koch), it seems like he’ll have a guaranteed spot on the list of “50 Most Loathsome People in America” for 2011.
fucen tarmal
and soon, rick santorum will claim that Jif was the aggressor in the cola wars of the 1980s.
hildebrand
This misses out on a couple of interesting points: One, after the Peace and Truce of God movements of the late 10th to mid-11th centuries the folks in Europe had essentially banned each other from beating the hell out of each other, thus some outlet was needed for those who needed somebody on which to work out their aggression. (The Peace and Truce movements were popular movements begun by common folks and parish priests rather sick of being the targets whenever the rich goons decided to go a sacking.) Two, the Christians, Muslims, and Jews had relatively decent relations in Jerusalem and parts of North Africa (Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) even wrote some rather kind words about shared belief in the ‘one God’ with an Emir in what would be present day Tunisia – it was the only time, but it is an interesting tidbit). This came to an end when the Seljuk Turks finally took control of Jerusalem in the latter half of the eleventh century.
Of course, I am not letting the Franks, or any of the other Europeans who joined them, off the hook. It was a ghastly piece of work, and no matter what kind of whitewashing Santorum attempts he cannot remake history to suit his own needs or prejudices.
Villago Delenda Est
@fucen tarmal:
Oh, what nonsense. We all know it was Frosted Flakes!
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Poor Ricky’s probably too afraid of the Google these days (given what Dan Savage did to his name) to find out how the Fourth Crusade ended. Sacking Constantinople to pay the Venetian bankers wasn’t exactly a high point in Western Civilization.
MikeJ
@dmsilev:
The MTV generation is in their 40s.
shawntos
Sounds like Santorum has been taking Medieval History 101 at Beck University while he has been out of work.
You also have to remember he is running to the right, all these candidates will be running hard right and groveling at the altar of Holy Reagan from now till the General Election. Remember 2007-8 with each moron trying to our Republican the other in debate. McCain almost had Mittens crying at the Reagan Pres Library Debate.
celticdragonchick
@Amanda in the South Bay:
The deeply fractured nature of Christendom in the Dark Ages was the real culprit that allowed invading Muslim armies free reign for so long. Until the Siege of Vienna, Islam was ascendant in the Mediterranean and Turkish slavers were still selling Greek Christian women in the slave markets well past the mid point of the 19th century. I think there is still considerable umbrage in radical corners that it is not the case today.
As always, criminal actions by Muslims do not mean that western Christians get to reciprocate (which there was plenty of, unfortunately).
joe from Lowell
This guy sounds more like bin Laden every time he opens his mouth.
Or like some Serbian war criminal, rambling on about the looting of a church a thousand years ago.
Amanda in the South Bay
@hildebrand:
I wouldn’t call 11th century Christian-Muslim relations all that peachy. The Fatimid Caliph Hakim ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre destroyed, and was pretty harsh towards Christians and Jews.
Also, when looking for proximate causes of the Crusades, you can’t forget that the Seljuk Turks invaded Byzantium (how about that for some Muslim aggression) and severely defeated the Byzantine Army at the Battle of Manzikert-hence Alexius Commeneus sending envoys to Urban II for help.
This issue I think tends to be much more complex than revisionism of the kind that says “Christians bad, Muslims peaceniks.”
Emma
You know that Internet cliche, the stoopid, it burns? Well, that’s what’s happening here. The man’s brain is on fire.
Lev
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: You have a point. And if you ever meet a Greek Orthodox Christian, DO NOT BRING IT UP TO THEM. Trust me, they are still bitter about that whole “Crusaders sacking Constantinople and putting a whore in the patriarch’s chair” thing. Which makes more sense to me than the “How dare Abu Bakr succeed Mohammad instead of Ali! We will now choose to be bitter about it for 1300 years, even though Ali got the position just a few years later!” deal that the Muslims have.
RSR
He seems pretty frothy delivering that message.
Cronin
@Amanda in the South Bay: That depends, honestly. In regards to Spain, no, but in regards to the middle easy, yes, actually, but in a very different context.
The Nestorians and other various sects of Christianity across Byzantium were heretics, both in the views of Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics. These hadn’t been proper Western European Catholic territories since the division of the Empire, and especially at the time that was a very, very important distinction.
Among the many reasons for the success of the initial expansion of Islam was that these divergent Christian sects, who made up large portions of the Christians in modern day Palestine and Egypt were actually treated more fairly (at least initially) by the Muslims then they’d been by the Byzantines. Most of the cities in the region surrendered without a fight, in some part because of this.
Put that into the context of the Crusader massacre in Jerusalem, which didn’t discriminate by religion, and yeah, this was certainly an invasion. They justified it by calling it a reconquest, and I’m sure most of those going thought of it that way, but this wasn’t Spain. No one like the Germanic-descended largely Frankish invasion force had ever had any claim to that land, religious or otherwise.
joe from Lowell
@celticdragonchick:
Cain slew Abel?
I mean, come on.
hildebrand
@Amanda in the South Bay: I don’t disagree with you – the relationships were not particularly good, but there is ample evidence that it was not always wretched either. Carthage is a decent example – during the late 11th century the Christian communities were tolerated. Granted, that is not anything close to acceptance, but there was at least a willingness to work with one another. The Emir was concerned with working out trading agreements with the Pope, and was quite open to receiving papal envoys.
celticdragonchick
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I’m afraid some folks here are guilty of doing exactly what Santorum is doing, but in reverse: Using an ahistorical, revisionist version of events to buttress current culture war positions.
The actual history gives no comfort to anybody of any belief that I can see.
Cronin
@Amanda in the South Bay: The point of the Byzantine Emperor appealing for help is an important point here. The fact that the Crusaders used that as a pretext to create their own kingdoms and ignore the reason they had supposedly gone there to begin with is equally important.
JPL
OT..NBC nightly news was not kind to Walker. Fair and balanced but not kind.
Davis X. Machina
If the MTV crowd actually decided elections, especially low-turnout mid-term elections, you wouldn’t see this shit, because you couldn’t get any traction with it at the polls.
But you do, because you can.
celticdragonchick
@joe from Lowell:
We are dealing with proximate causation in Muslim/Christian fighting.
The assertion that the killing did not start until after 400 years of Muslim military conquests of Christian kingdoms is simply not correct.
And as always…criminal actions on one side do not excuse criminal actions on the other side.
Just in case anybody wants to claim I said otherwise.
lacp
The Crusades? You are for sure shitting me. Remember when Bush Minor had to quick-quick change the name of his glorious southwest Asian adventure because it reminded the natives of….the Crusades. And this bozo has forgotten that already? Jeez, he’s even dumber than when he was our senator.
Probably thinks that Saladin is something you find in a Middle Eastern restaurant under the sneeze guard and the dude who fought him was Crusader Rabbit. What a fucking maroon.
Nutella
Wow, he’s really desperate to change the subject from santorum, isn’t he?
joe from Lowell
@Lev:
Not having to think about things like this makes me glad I was born on this side of the ocean.
Martin
We need a ‘Show me on the doll where Mohammed touched you’ tag.
Just Some Fuckhead
There once was a douche named Santorum
Who waxed nostalgic for Crusaders’ decorum
If time could rewind
For fantasies pined..
Could we at least start back at the Forum?
Cat Lady
@JPL:
Really. It’s been years since I watched nightly “news”. What was the moral of the story?
Amanda in the South Bay
@Cronin:
Actually, as the present day demographics show, I believe the predominant Christian community in Palestine proper has always been the Chalcedonian Orthodox Patriarchate. The proportion of Chalcedonians to Monophysites (the Nestorians for the most part having decamped to points east well before)of course varied throughout Syria and Lebanon. Even if the Byzantine themselves had managed to avoid their 11th century decline and reconquer those territories, they’d have to have resorted to force most likely to bring the Monophysites back into the fold.
Anyways, the first crusade happened before the schism between East and West (1054 being usually considered as a red herring that did nothing to change anything) and Christians in the West did think of themselves as being part of one organic society with the Christians (of the Chalcedonian variety) in the East, weird, different customs notwithstanding.
All this sorta ignores that the Byzantines themselves were pretty aggressive in retaking the offensive against Islam in the late 10th/early 11th centuries, and had Basil II focused more on the Middle East rather than Bulgaria, or his successors been much more competent…
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, the American left likes Western Civilization, as informed by the Enlightenment, just fine. We want to advance it to every corner of the world.
We do, however, have a problem with the reactionary force and child raping institution that is the Roman Catholic Church, though…
joe from Lowell
@celticdragonchick:
Actually, you were dealing with the proximate cause of the Crusades.
The proximate cause of which is certainly not the sacking of Christian communities in North Africa 400 years earlier.
When you go that far back, you’re not talking about “proximate” anything. So, it’s odd that you’d bring up that particular moment at the historical starting point.
Wouldn’t a much more proximate cause have something to do with a pope that decided that Jerusalem had to be under the military control of Christians?
Dennis SGMM
@celticdragonchick:
You’re correct. I’m just finishing reading a third book on the history of the Middle Ages. Anyone who characterizes the Crusaders as in any way noble doesn’t know shit from Shinola about the time. There were very, very, few good guys then.
celticdragonchick
@joe from Lowell:
Don’t bring up anything at Turkey at all to a Greek person, while we are on the subject.
Trust me on this one. The hatred is real and very intense. The last war is still in living memory.
My speech coach at UNCG in North Carolina a couple of years back was a lovely grad student from Cyprus, which the Turks invaded back in the 70’s. Her parents still live there. Real bad subject.
Amanda in the South Bay
@joe from Lowell:
Are you aware that one of the most popular historians and writers of the Crusades-Sir Steven Runciman, who was very pro-Byzantine and anti-Latin in his outlook-started off the first chapter of his History of the First Crusade with the Arab capture of Jerusalem in the 7th century?
celticdragonchick
@joe from Lowell:
I had made the point that the Crusades were a reaction to sustained Muslim military aggression. Until the Middle Ages, the Christian West was unable to muster the resources to mount any sort of counter offensive action due to the social and economic conditions of the Dark Ages. It took considerable time for trade, communication and cultural ties to develop that would allow for joint military ventures, since the west was far more affected by the collapse of Roman civilization then the Islamic east.
j low
@Guster: Dominatrix in a Nuns habit.
scav
As I understand it, loads of the Muslims the Reconquista fought against were of native Spanish ancestry as so many had converted during the 700+ years of Muslim rule. The late rulers were weak and had to bring in foreign (North African) mercenaries and they turned out to be fundamentalists, worse the luck. So yeah, life is complex. Think about it. 700 years. And the Albigensian Crusade was pretty much a power grab by the northern French against Occitania.
joe from Lowell
@celticdragonchick:
GOD BLESS AMERICA!
LAND THAT I LOVE!
Oh, look, people from Greece and Turkey and “the Holy Land” and whatever have this totally deep connection to their history, isn’t that so great?
STAND BESIDE HER!
AND GUIDE HER!…
Cronin
@Amanda in the South Bay: You’re right, although I thought there were significant populations of Gnostics and Nestorians in the region during the emergence of the first caliphate. It was definitely some time ago when I did most of my reading on the Crusades, so I won’t pretend that my memory isn’t fuzzy / wrong in some areas.
This does get away from the starting point of this, however: Byzantium aside (since, whatever their intention, they didn’t participate in the first Crusade in any way that got them any of their old territory back) it’s very hard to argue that this wasn’t an invasion / act of aggression. These hadn’t been Roman Christian lands since Diocletian split the Empire (or Justinian, I suppose, would make more sense).
And even all THAT said, the greater point is that Santorum knows less than most of the people on this forum about this and we’re just screwing around on the intarwebs.
PS: It’s always nice to be able to talk to people who know more than me about this stuff. I always feel like I’m picking up a few details I’ve missed along the way.
celticdragonchick
@joe from Lowell:
Heh!
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
Its getting hard for the Repugs to out crazy each other in their quest for media attention. $arah, Newt, Haley? your turn.
Pooh
All, sorry went for the quick snark and a bona fide historical discussion broke out!
cathyx
Do young people even know who Rick Santorum is?
I can’t believe anyone under 30 even cares what he has to say.
celticdragonchick
BY the way…we have managed to have a rational discussion with no flame wars, rudeness or machoko_chan.
Cool.
Cermet (Live to learn or die stupid)
@joe from Lowell: But remember, in that fight even god was too stupid to know what happened and had to ask Cain were was his brother? Cain would have been the worlds first lawyer considering his answer … Still, god didn’t know what had happen and this is the guy who created the universe?
John W.
I really wish Steven Runciman was not dead, just to see what this would make him do.
scav
@Pooh: You should see our hockey matches. We go all meta.
joe from Lowell
@Amanda in the South Bay: Fascinating.
History is an ideological project. Always has been.
@celticdragonchick:
See, it’s perfectly appropriate and useful to talk about civilizations in those broad terms when discussing the broad trends and currents of history.
But it doesn’t really go to the point of “aggression,” in the sense of military aggressors. That’s a description that applies to specific leaders and forces in their specific time. We were clearly not the aggressors in World War Two, for instance, and yet look at the sphere of influence maps before and after.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
@rob!: You have that backward. The anal discharge was named for him. I believe he was still a Senator at the time.
Hypnos
As far as the high middle age is concerned, a rough generalization of “Christians bad, Muslims good” would be mostly correct. Muslim Arabs were vastly more cultured, tolerant and open than comparable Christian kingdoms. As per the whole “saved classical Greco-Roman knowledge” thing.
Levant territories ruled by Byzantium were quite welcoming of the invaders.
The crusades, on the other hand, were a senseless bloodbath generated by European greed and a need to offload some surplus knights and nobles. The connection with the previous Muslim conquest was tenous at best, and almost entirely irrelevant as to the real motivations of the powers involved.
joe from Lowell
@cathyx:
Yes.
They know he’s the guy santorum is named after.
Bubblegum Tate
I dunno…I feel like if you’re the type to voluntarily listen to that dumbfuck prattle, then you’re probably open to the dumbfuck prattle that comes out of that dumbfuck’s mouth.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Cronin:
Well, they were **Christian**, and especially Palestine proper, Chalcedonian, since the 7th century. I think the people of Western Europe in the 11th century didn’t think of themselves as being mere Roman Catholics, i.e. subjects of the Church of Rome. They saw themselves as being part of a greater body of people, which at that time did include Eastern Christendom (or at least those parts that did adhere to the first four oecumencial councils).
Blah, I haven’t thought of this shit in years either, I guess it sorta galls me when people start blabbering about this shit and really don’t get the history-I don’t think one can really talk about the Crusades at all without a thorough grounding in Eastern Christendom or Byzantium, for example. But then again, those have always been blank spots in the education of Westerners, from Gibbons to the present.
Somewhere, in some book on the Crusades I read in recent years, (see, I’m pulling a lot of this out of my ass as well) I vaguely remember reading that many of the Orthodox bishops in Palestine recognized the authority of the first Latin Patriarch that was elected (the Chalcedonian Orthodox patriarch having fled the city, or something?).
joe from lowell sorta pointed out (indirectly) the problem many Westerners have with understanding this sorta thing. Eastern Christians (and Muslims, for that matter) have a much, much longer and different view of history and Westerners (Protestant, vaguely Protestantized American Catholic, and secular) have.
Bob L
So was the 4th Crusade merely a preemptive strike against the growing Greek Orthodox menace to Western Values?
Bubblegum Tate
@celticdragonchick:
Hey, you’re a Spartan? Class of ’98 right here!
JPL
@Cat Lady: The report covered the phone call highlighting the same talking points that we did. They interviewed a pro union person and then spoke about the no bid contracts and the Koch brothers. David Koch came out and said his companies were not interested in the power plants. hahaha.. The prank call has put the Koch brothers on the front page which they don’t like to be. It’s much better to have their little deeds done under the table.
joe from Lowell
@Bubblegum Tate:
She sure is. Her grandmother still hates Athenians.
HyperIon
@dmsilev quoted Conservapedia:
Yeah, this is the really good part. The Crusaders were most effective at attacking and killing other Christians.
And they thought the folks (Muslim or Eastern Orthodox) in the Middle East were effete and degenerate because of their habit of bathing regularly.
celticdragonchick
@joe from Lowell:
Muslim conquest had both military and trade/social components, and arguably much more of the latter than could be found in the later Crusades, which did little to to nothing in bringing European culture and immigrants to the Middle East. In that, I would agree with you that contingency is not playing a role (IE…there were cultural trends at work that far outweighed any individual action by a military leader)…but the military dimensions cannot be overlooked. By way of example, look at the displacement of Native Americans in the 19th Century. The displacement was going to happen come hell or high water given the cultural trends and individual military leaders were not a real factor in actual causation…but the overall military component was still the tip of the cultural spear, so to speak.
celticdragonchick
@Bubblegum Tate:
I actually go to Guilford College, but I took some independent work at UNCG and Yianna was doing her doctoral thesis. I was happy to be in her control group.
celticdragonchick
Gotta go get dinner. BBL. Having fun here tonite. :)
joe from Lowell
@celticdragonchick:
The distinction I’m trying to make isn’t between military and non-military means. In my WW2 example, we most certainly did use military means to capture all of that territory, and yet we were not the aggressors.
I’m saying that the question of whether the military means the popes used in calling up the crusades constituted aggression is answered by the political and military circumstances surrounding that particular historical moment, not the broader historical currents about the relative waxing and waning of the power of Christendom and Dar-al-Islam.
Cat Lady
@JPL: Well, even the lamestream media is connecting the dots. Aren’t a lot of them in unions?
jl
Wasn’t the extermination of the Cathars in France considered a crusade?
Even if not, the Fourth Crusade is hard to explain away.
Noticing problems with the crusade franchise does not originate with self hating liberals in the modern world.
Chaucer decided for some reason to give his Knight in the Canterbury Tales a history of fighting in murky campaigns where groups of Christians, Muslims ganged up to fight similar dubious alliances over money and land.
Edit: but maybe not. Maybe Chaucer was a Democrat spreading propaganda.
Gardenvarietygator
I like western civilization just fine. I don’t consider santorum to be a part of it. He’s a leech who doesn’t know it.
I can’t remember the last time a liberal politician even mentioned the crusades, let alone speculated who was the agressor. S is just making stuff up. Or maybe he knows that the voters that actually care about FACTS won’t be able to resist “correcting” his stupid and thus will seem to the willfully low info voters to be attacking the crusades. Historical fact-west was not doing good then. Also a fact why should I care? I didn’t do it. america didn’t exist. Lots if bad things happened in history and a lot of our western “progress” was a result of us saying wow, that was bad, how can we not have that happen again. I don’t think the bill of rights or for that matter the Magna Carta would have come about if the past had been full of nice. We tend to learn and get better. the past was NOT golden.
Cacti
So, was the sack of Constantinople in defense of Christendom?
Or did they have it coming for being the wrong kind of christians?
soonergrunt
@Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937: No. No. No.
He was named for the anal discharge. That is how we should refer to him. The more people come to believe that his name has always referred to “frothy mix of anal discharge and lube that is the occasional byproduct of gay sex” the better.
soonergrunt
@Cacti: Neither. They had it coming because they had a bunch of stuff that was worth money, and the mercenaries had to be paid.
Xecky Gilchrist
The MTV crowd is all over 40 these days.
At least, the MTV crowd that watched it when they still showed music vids.
Suffern ACE
@soonergrunt:
Tried to pay the mercenaries, but the emperor couldn’t raise the funds fast enough. He tried to explain to them that he had just cut taxes and that any day now the gold would just come rolling in. Not sophisticated in their understanding of the public finance economics, the crusaders simply wouldn’t believe that if the people had all that gold, cutting their taxes would increase revenues. So they decided to collect the taxes directly.
Svensker
@joe from Lowell:
Which side would that be? From where I sit, the Greeks are everywhere.
liberal
@joe from Lowell:
Amen. God bless the US of A.
Darkrose
@Amanda in the South Bay:
…that’s a really intriguing premise for an alternate history.
Darkrose
@Just Some Fuckhead: You win the interwebs. Gratz.
Ryan Cunningham
The only appropriate response to this level of revisionist bullshit is to get really close to the person who said it and say the following:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@joe from Lowell: There are quite a few Greek Orthodox Christians on this side of the ocean.
Joseph Nobles
So according to Santorum, the best offense is one that can be framed as a defense.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Cermet (Live to learn or die stupid): God knew what had happened. A lot of parents start out their line of questioning this way when they already have a darned good idea what happened to the cat and why it was covered in three shades of paint.
Tattoosydney
There are far too many mentions of ex-Senator Rick Santorum‘s name in this thread that don’t link to the website that pisses Rick Santorum off more than anything in Rick Santorum‘s life ever has.
Cole has the idea, but some of you guys are falling down on the job.
Google bombs don’t maintain themselves, you know.
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@celticdragonchick:
That’s always been my take, which is why I tend to stay out of the “my sect of superstition took the high road and yours was a roving band of thugs during the cirsudaes” discussions. Near as I can tell, they were all assholes to everyone else. It was not a pleasant time.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“I wouldn’t call 11th century Christian-Muslim relations all that peachy. The Fatimid Caliph Hakim ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre destroyed, and was pretty harsh towards Christians and Jews.”
IIRC, al-Hakim was pretty fucking harsh to *everyone*.
Wasn’t he the Caliph who’d ride around the markets in Cairo on a donkey with a burly slave behind him, and if he thought a merchant was cheating his customers, he’d order the slave to sodomize the merchant in the middle of the street?
A harsh guy, although I think he’d be great as a head of the SEC.
Suffern ACE
@Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q): Speaking on behalf of Manicheans everywhere, I say a pox on all your houses.
Snarla
The Battle of Tours was three hundred years before the Crusades.
Bulworth
@Cronin: But they had WMD.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“The Battle of Tours was three hundred years before the Crusades.”
You’re thinking like a American, where three hundred years is old history.
Go to Northern Ireland, where you’ll find Oliver Cromwell or the Battle of the Boyne in the 1600s talked about like they happened last year, or the Balkans, where Serbs will talk about the 13th Century battle of Kosovo Polje like their dad fought in it.
Uloborus
@celticdragonchick: and @joe from Lowell:
I’m too late to really take part in this discussion, but I fall heavily on Joe’s side here. If you want to make the point that nobody’s hands are clean, absolutely. Islam technically even attacked first, since they came out of nowhere and spread over lands that were previously Christian. And people forget that the attitude that war was good and noble was damn near universal through history until WWI.
However, I cannot possibly agree with any description of the Crusades as a reaction to Muslim aggression. 250 years was actually more time back then than it is now, because the Dark Ages were defined by almost nonexistent history keeping and communication. By the time of the first Crusade the invasion of the Moors was basically ‘The Song Of Roland’, which came down to ‘Aren’t we Christians awesome superior warriors because God is on our side?’
The Crusades were sold as a war of conquest to take what was ‘rightfully Christian’, not as revenge. They were pushed for and dealt with in terms of xenophobia, greed, political pressures of the time, and in a few cases actual religious zeal. They were solidly wars of aggression, especially since the 250 years since the Moorish invasion had seen the Muslims of that region settle down to become a much more peaceful, tolerant, technologically advanced, and generally civilized culture than Christendom of the time.
Yes, everyone’s hands are bloody, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Crusades specifically were actions of aggression, not reactions of revenge.
…and incidentally, yes, I also love that this can be handled as an intellectual and historical debate rather than a source of derision and insults. It makes me sad I really missed it.