RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/book-review-the-russian-revolution-revisionist-history-sean-mcmeekin/

EXCERPT

Some observations about the Russian Revolution, and about Sean McMeekin’s new revisionist history of it.

Editor’s Note: Every week, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes an “Off the Shelf” column sharing casual observations on the books he’s reading and the passing scene.

“…….Luckily, in the midst of all this, I assigned myself the utterly light reading of Sean McMeekin’s blockbuster revisionist history, The Russian Revolution. Actually, I’m not even kidding. Compared with the history books I was reading in earlier editions of this column, the death counts in this one were much lower. Fewer long descriptions of mass torture; Stalin is not yet in full flower in this volume, which follows in the tradition of Richard Pipes’s history of the same. McMeekin’s book, however, does more to locate Lenin’s success as due to the assistance and wishes of Germany.

I was raised in an era where Communism was largely detested and laughed at even on the left. By the time I got to Bard College (where McMeekin teaches now), the presence at the school of an Alger Hiss Chair of Social Science was kind of a joke among the politically aware on campus. In fact, I still have a hard time taking McMeekin’s conclusory warnings against radical socialism and Communism seriously precisely because it all seemed so obviously discredited in my life, even in places that vestigially venerated Alger Hiss. Still, I’m grateful for McMeekin’s work, which corrects the dim and entirely incomplete picture of the Russian Revolution given to me in my high-school education.

McMeekin is very helpful in making observations about the state of pre-revolutionary Russia:

The strength and also the weakness of autocracy was that there were few intermediary institutions between the tsar and his subjects to absorb and dampen popular frustrations. Labor unions were illegal. There was no national parliament to focus the government’s attention on social problems. In the brief era of liberal concessions that had followed Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856), Tsar Alexander II had allowed the creation of small provincial assemblies known as zemstvos in 1864, but their power had been substantially curtailed by his more conservative successor, Alexander III, in 1890, when the zemstvo councils were subordinated to regional governors appointed by the tsar.

Pre-revolutionary Russia was also shocked by its embarrassing showing in a war with Japan in 1905, a conflict that began in divergent interests and could even be said to have made a permanent mark on Tsar Nicholas II, in the form of a three-and-a-half-inch scar, given to him in all the way back in 1891 when a Japanese police escort lunged at him with his saber.

This title will be released on December 18, 2018.

There is a war being waged on America and the West. The aggressors? Islamic Supremacists. Their method? Duplicating the sinister methodology of psychopaths who routinely charm, seduce, capture, and devour their prey.

Every element of the formula by which the psychopath subjugates his victim, the Islamic Supremacist likewise uses to ensnare and subjugate non-Muslims. And in the same way that the victim of the psychopath is complicit in his own destruction, Western civilization is now embracing and enabling its own conquest and consumption.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/crusade-and-jihad-review-conquest-and-conquerors-1535311504
By
Bartle Bull
Aug. 26, 2018 3:25 p.m. ET

When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, Islam had not expanded beyond the borders of the Arabian peninsula. His Islamic state grew swiftly in the following century, reaching farther than the empires of Alexander and Genghis Khan and sinking deeper roots. Islam was the only world religion to spread almost entirely by the sword, from North Africa to the northern tier of Sub-Saharan Africa, from the Levant to Mesopotamia and Iran, from Central Asia to India and western China. In foreign lands from the Ganges to the Pillars of Hercules, the invaders left an enduring faith. It was a peerless achievement.

By the time Muhammad died, he had conquered an area larger than Western Europe, but his Arabs were still stopped up in their sandy peninsula by the ancient and powerful empires to the north: Persia and Byzantium. Yet the coming imperial expansion was in the DNA of the system he left behind. Offensive jihad—warfare against the Unbeliever—was a primary obligation of his followers. Muhammad’s own daily example had the force of eternal law, and according to the holy traditions he had fought successfully as a military commander, personally killing, or ordering the killing of, numerous foes as he brought Jews, Christians and pagans under his rule.

Islam’s imperial success, then, was a success on the faith’s own terms. A glorious undertaking, in an old-fashioned martial way, it was triumphant for nigh on a millennium, with the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (d. 1566), the Ottoman sultan, the approximate pinnacle. The Islamic world subsequently grew weak and the West strong—to simplify somewhat—and the West soon enough became the imperialist side.

usade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North,” William R. Polk presents things a bit differently. In 1095, Pope Urban II called the First Crusade. Since then, Mr. Polk contends, a pattern of Western aggression has produced the generally illiberal and often violent condition of the Islamic world today.

Many facts in his book likely will be new to some readers. Various details emphasize European cruelty toward Muslim populations: In 1502 Vasco da Gama cut off the “hands, ears and noses of some eight hundred ‘Moorish’ seamen” of Calicut, for example. Other observations point out curious continuities across the years: During the U.S. fight to suppress the Moros (“moors”) of the southern Philippines, the Moros used suicide fighters called fidayin, just like Saddam Hussein’s suicidal fedayeen, as well as “improvised explosive devices.”

Unfortunately, the book is sometimes on factually shaky ground. The Dutch suppression of Java between 1825 and 1830 (Mr. Polk says it happened a decade later) most likely killed somewhat less than 200,000 natives—not, as the author states, 300,000. In Libya, we are told, Mussolini’s repression of the Senussi revolt of 1923-32 “killed about two-thirds of the population.” Again the truth is bad enough: The Italian campaign in eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) led to the death of perhaps a quarter of that region’s people while missing western Libya (with about 70% of the country’s population) more or less entirely.

The conduct in Islamic lands of the English, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, French and others has indeed been frequently appalling. Mr. Polk’s case would be better served, however, if he mentioned that such conduct often occurred in lands Islam itself had conquered first—usually through great violence. The Muslim subjection of Iran took nine years (642-651) of bloody warfare. Tamerlane (d. 1405), the self-appointed “Sword of Islam,” left pyramids of skulls outside the wrecks of great cities. The “great Mughal Empire,” as Mr. Polk repeatedly calls Babur’s admittedly splendid 16th-century creation, likely saw at least two million killed in a single war (the Deccan campaign, in present-day southern India, of the fanatic emperor Aurangzeb). CONTINUE AT SITE

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/08/review-history-of-jihad.html

The initial three quarters of Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS, is so packed with information about the 1,400-year jihad waged by Islam against the world that one can only read it with continuous, stunned astonishment. You wind up asking yourself: did so many millions die or become enslaved by the sword of Islam, AKA the “religion of peace”?

Well, yes, they did. Whole populations were slaughtered, cities were destroyed, and nations, on all four continents, were erased as though they had never existed (Persia, for example, was never Iran). Spencer meticulously traces the bloody depredations and history of Islam from the 19th century clear back to Mohammad’s time in the seventh century, citing current and contemporary works on the conquests and triumphs of Islam by both Western and Islamic writers and chroniclers. The jihad never stopped, and rarely lost steam, but if it lost impetus, it was only because of infighting between sects of Islam, which temporarily sapped and diverted its energy and appetite for conquest and dominance. But jihad was rarely forgotten.

It continues in our age of jet planes and nuclear power to wreck death and destruction. It guarantees more if the West does not reverse its ludicrously pacific and “tolerant” appraisal of Islam and condemn it as a power-hungry totalitarian “religion,” which it has always been, especially in the actions of the possibly fictive character of Muhammad. Spencer recreates and details Islam’s history as no writer in the past has done before or is likely to replicate. Spencer’s book should become required reading for any government policymaker or foreign affairs specialist committed to understanding our nemesis.