2. Aggression Defined as Man’s Nature can never be Investigated further
I am proposing that aggression is a widely practiced belief that we are calling the Anti-System. Let’s lay a foundation with a survey of the action on the ground in Medieval European events.
“Action on the ground” means when we look at culture, truly admirable statues and paintings of the Renaissance, we lose sight of many things. In particular, the fact that all the cultural content of the Renaissance was created by the work of several dozen talented artists and humanists fascinated by antiquity, at a time when manslaughter was a daily occurrence for Western Europeans, and it took on massive proportions. But neither Raphael's Sistine Madonna nor Michelangelo's David will tell historians anything about the atrocities of the Borgia papal family or the violence perpetrated by the Sforza dukes. Therefore, for a person interested in what really happened, it is preferable not to confuse works of culture with the system of behavior of the ethnos that created that culture.
There are two facets to the growth and improvement of society and/or its dissolution. One is the optic of what we are doing now, (present collective behavior), That may bring positive or negative results. Our premise is that society should be gradually built upon, or modified, but not destroyed. In other words, few living people know of the horrors of starting over from scratch. It’s sure that many things have to be deconstructed, perhaps to move forward, but that it should be done in a measured way.
The other facet is a survey of our heritage from previous times. No society arises ex-novo without being an extension of its antecedents. There are only modifications to the old “stereo-type of behavior”, which are from the mind-set and morals of those past times. What is the burden, (mostly likely unconscious), that we carry from our western traditions? And where are we still employing, what we now call outmoded conventions?
I am studying ancient history. The point is to find the roots of our current societies / civilizations. Below I am going to list a chronicle of European events during the middle-ages. It moves fast, it’s long, and I admit that this is no way to study, absorb or even know about history. The point of the survey is these are the moral imperatives that we take from our heritage. I am proposing that the way this is carried forward is through philosophies, that I am calling (from Gumilev) the anti-system, that were developed in parallel of the times of Christianity, and are still active.
In the previous post on this thread, we discussed the development of Manichaesim, and like philosophies. The point was to take them as a serious force. Tribal feuds and killing existed way before the Christian era, but the anti-systems that we are investigating institutionalized destruction and murder and brought it to a whole new level.
I propose that the most devastating of western beliefs is that if you ignore negativity, pretend that it doesn’t exist, or that it never happened, it will disappear. When really it is right here, underlying all that you do, until you confront it directly, and actively reject it in all of its manifestations.
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Good words of high culture can be a model of reality. They can also be a model of concepts, either more or less connected with reality. But life is moved by deeds, not by concepts. Deeds can be moved by concepts, but let's judge ideas through the results of events that unfolded around them. If the claimed Western ethics have never been successfully applied, then how have they been unsuccessfully applied. That is the domain of the history of events.
I am more directed toward these well-known events, population migrations, the forming and disintegration of ethnic civilizations, and wars and conflict, that were happening all throughout these periods.
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We could talk about the Christian heritage. It relates to the European heritage during this time. I am not doing “comparative religions”. But I am bringing forward the little-known antithesis to Christianity. That is, that all of humanity is classified as evil in Manichaeanism. It is the anti-system from the last post. There are lots of judgement systems, that assign good to spirit and evil to the other. This Dualism is the justification for most of the atrocities in the world. Maybe it also works somewhere for the good, but that is what I am trying to discover through the events listed below. What the wide possibilities are, once you enter the world of concepts is another discussion.
Let’s start somewhat after Rome. Looking at the subsequent history of the Western European or Romano-Germanic super-ethnos, it is easy to see that different ethnoses alternately lead and give way to one another. By this time these cultures are all Christian. After 1517 (Luther and shortly thereafter Calvin 1536), then half of them were the Protestants against the Catholics. Orthodox was in Byzantium. The Roman pope did declare a Crusade against Orthodox; and Poland, Germany and Lithuania carried it out. I’ll mention it below. How did these Christians act and how did they treat each other? (I could give a snapshot of Asian history too, but our discussion centers around the Western heritage. My goal is to know if this history was continuous chaos, and an ocean of bloodshed. It is not that I expect you to absorb this vast array of this insanity.
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Charlemagne the son of Pippin, became the king of the Franks in 768. Charlemagne built churches and scholars came from afar to council him. (He was a devout Catholic and the Pope consecrated him as king).
It’s said that "Charlemagne laid the base for unity of ideas (concepts) throughout western Europe".
Some attempt to restore order was the policy of the early Carolingians: It was Pepin the Long, Charles Martel, and Pepin the Short, who stopped the Arab onslaught and allied themselves with the pope. Their efforts culminated in the empire of Charlemagne, which collapsed under his grandchildren. Everything in this empire was imported. Ideology from Byzantium, education from Ireland, military technology (the cavalry) from the Avars, medicine from the Spanish Arabs and Jews. All of this together is called the Carolingian Renaissance.
The Carolingian Empire is viewed in traditional historiography as a French dynasty, with the counting of kings beginning with Charlemagne. A more thorough conception was offered by Augustin Thierry, the French historian 1795 - 1856, who pointed out that the Carolingians exercised their dominion in the territory of modern France exclusively by brute force. Brittany, Aquitaine, Provence and Burgundy only recognized the Carolinian power because they were powerless to assert their independence. Conversely, the Eastern Franks, the ancestors of the Francons, were inseparably linked to the Carolingians. Thus, this dynasty and the ethnic group that supported it, "the Franks", should be attributed to the Germanic oppressors, super-ethnos of the Great Migration. So it is, and from this point of view their German military successes can be easily explained.
Against the general background of the waning passionate energy of the Germanic settlers mixed with the descendants of the Gallo-Romans, the bunch of vigilantes gathered around Charles Martell, Pepin the Short, and Charlemagne, was a force; only because their opponents were even weaker. The Christian Carolingians destroyed the independence of Provence (737-739), destroyed Aquitaine (760-768), destroyed Lombardy (774), Bavaria (788), the Saxon tribe (797), took Barcelona from the Arabs (801) and defeated the Avars (802-803). But in all with the exception of the last two operations, these were victories over their own people: "the Germans beating the Germans." And under Charlemagne's successors even these successes were nullified: the Danube and Elbe valleys were taken over by the Slavs, the "Spanish Brand" was separated from the empire, and the latter disintegrated into its component parts.
The first place after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire was taken by the Germans. Their kings Heinrich Ptitzeloff and Otgon the Great stopped the Hungarian raids, thus ensuring the economic growth of Germany on both sides of the Rhine. The borders of their domain were the Elbe and Rhone, and in Italy they inherited the iron crown of the Lombards. Otgon II tried to wrest southern Italy from the Byzantines, but unsuccessfully, and then the French Normans took over the initiative. But they too fell victim to the Germans in 1194. All of them our Christian heritage.
Some say that the Crusades were the pope’s vehicle for economic expansion. That seems a far-out way to categorize them. The Crusades, i.e., the first attempt at colonial expansion, ended in grand defeat on all fronts. The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Latin Empire generally disappeared from the map of the world at that time. Only the Livonian Order survived, but it changed from a springboard of the European Crusader knightly advance, into a small feudal possession in a territory, which neither Lithuania nor Russia contested.
In the Crusades up to 3 million were killed, which evolved into Christians vs. Muslims. The final sacking of Constantinople was something like Rome for people’s disinvolvement. Maybe a couple hundred troops and a few dozen knights defended the walls. The 400,000 Constantinople citizens did nothing to defend itself (just like in Rome 650 years before). They finally opened the gates, at which point about 20,000 of them were ruthlessly slaughtered. Soldiers from the provinces finally came and destroyed ALL of the Crusaders. City folk were do-nothing people, the country boys came from the periphery and got the job done quite quickly. (It is a phase in urban civilization, to lose motivation, or to focus only on personal accumulation.)
More often than not, such a "blossom" of energy on the domestic front causes a reaction, i.e. a desire to limit strife and murder that they commit. These wild people were pushed off into saving the holy land, and thus the internal European turmoil lessened. This is aided by the fact that the representatives of these individualist generations so intensively exterminate each other, or perish in external wars, which beckon them with rich booty, that their percentage is steadily decreasing. (The crazies gradually disappear.) This is actually the cause of “the enlightenment” later, (see below), that the restless high-energy people were moved off to rampage in the colonies, leaving some peace on the home front.
Three dynasties changed in Germany during this time: the Saxon, Franconian and Swabian (Hohenstaufen) dynasties, and in the 13th century the Germans began to lose their positions. The French took the Languedoc and part of Lorraine from the German empire, and the Italians managed to get rid of the "beastly race" (Germans) altogether. Politically, it was the war between emperors (Frederick II, the Hohenstaufen dynasty), and popes; socially, the struggle between feudal lords and cities; historically and culturally, the rivalry between jurists and prelates, (the clergy); and ethnically, the loss of the leading German tribe, the Swabians, of their stock of passionate excesses and the consequent loss of their margins.
The Albigensian Crusade, the Papal States and France vs. Cathar (anti-system) States 1208- 1229. I think it’s often call the peasant wars, but peasants were not the driving principle, and it was not a class war, (up to one million killed.)
The war of Scottish Independence was 1296 - 1368, (60 to 150,000 deaths).
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Christian Italians were the leading ethnos of Catholic Europe. Profiting from the Crusade’s robbery of Byzantium, trade with the East, and usury, they simultaneously supplied all the kings of Europe with lawyers, diplomats, theologians, poets, artists, builders, and sailors. Dante wrote: "Be proud, Florence, of your share of majesty, you beat the earth and the sea with your wings, and your very Hell is filled with glory..." With the Florentines successfully competed with no less dexterous and unscrupulous Venetians, corrupt Romans, cunning Bolognese, hypocritical Sienese, thuggish Calabrians, but the right to first place on the road to Hell, (according to the same Dante), belonged to the Genoese, who broke through for the sake of their trade affairs not only into the Golden Horde, (the Mongols) but even into Russia; though there they failed. They had a trading colony in the Crimea, and were looking to get rights to the furs produced in the north.
During the heyday of the urban republics of Italy, the other countries of Europe were going through hard times. England and France were locked at each other's throats, with the English supported by the Gascons and the French by the Scots. This war lasted more than a hundred years, and bound the two countries together and left them utterly exhausted. Can you imagine, five generations of Christians killing Christians. Your grandfather and your grandchild got to participate in the same conflict. It became a fact of life.
England and France were at war for 100 years, 1337 - 1453, (2.3 to 3.5 million deaths).
And even after the English left "Belle France", (that was Joan of Arc's battle cry rally "Beautiful France"), with the exception of Calais, they transferred the edge of their irrepressible passions to each other and began the War of the Scarlet and White Rose. 1454 - 1487. (35 to 100,000 deaths) These feudal lords were so accustomed to war and so incapable of doing anything else that "Old England" knew no rest.
The High Renaissance (first half of the 16th century), marked by the names of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael Santi, Michelangelo Buanorrotti, Titian, Ariosto and Machiavelli, and it took place against the background of a series of wars between Spain and France, where Italy was not a participant but the arena for the struggling predators. These wars began with the French invasion of Italy in 1494, and until 1525. France claimed power in Italy. The victor, Hapsburg Emperor Charles V, after defeating of the French at Pavia, (Italian War of 1521–1526 between the Kingdom of France and the Habsburg Empire of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor as well as ruler of Spain, Austria, the Low Countries, and the Two Sicilies.), was forced to throw in troops to suppress Italian resistance, which was accomplished in 1527 with the barbaric defeat of Rome.
It cannot be said that the Italians made no attempt to get rid of their tyrants, for which they sometimes used the appearance of foreign troops. For example, in 1494, when the French approached Florence, the Medici family was overthrown there and power went to the Dominican friar Savonarola, (puritan fanatic wanting to destroy all secular art and culture). It did not become easier, even after Savonarola's death (his execution) in 1498. The republic was reconstituted and showed complete impotence, and in 1512 the power of the Medici family was restored. A second attempt to recreate the republic was made with the great artist Michelangelo in 1527 and crushed by imperial troops in 1530. "The heroic age of Florence ended, and with it ended the culture of the Italian Renaissance."
Italian wars 1494 - 1559, 350,000 killed
In the second half of the 16th century Italy found itself under the influence of Spain. The principles of the Counter-Reformation adopted at the Council of Trent in 1563, in essence a new Catholicism, met not much popular resistance in Italy, but scattered intellectual protests. They were easily dealt with by the Catholic reaction. After the burning of Giordano Bruno, the imprisonment of Campanella, and the abdication of Galileo, there was a complete decline in resistance that lasted about 150 years.
Thus, the Renaissance (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) was succeeded by the Reformation (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), and following the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, the Huguenot Wars and Dragonades, and the ferocity of, (In Engels' words), “he combined Robespierre and Napoleon in one person”; but since there cannot be a poet without a reader, a scientist without a teacher and students, a prophet without a flock, and a commander without officers and soldiers, the mechanism of development lies not in these or those particular individual despotic leaders, but in the systemic integrity of the total ethnos, which has one or another degree of passionate tension, the Christian world at the time.
German peasants war 1524-1525, 100,000 killed
French Religions war 1562 - 1598. Catholics vs. Protestants (Huguenot), 3 million killed
Eighty years' war 1568 - 1648 England & France vs. Spain 650,000 killed
Nine years Irish-English war 1593-1603 130,000 killed
Thirty years' war 1618 - 1648, Austria and Spain vs. anti-Habsburg coalition, really this is the big one up to 12 (twelve) million killed, where Germany lost 75% of the total population. (Of course, all the soldiers and all civilians) (Luther was 100 years prior)
Franco-Spanish war 1635 - 1659, 200,000 killed
Royalists vs Irish, Scottish Protestants vs Parliamentarians 1639 - 1651, 800,000 killed
Portugal, France, England vs. Spain 1640 -1688, 80,000 killed
Poland, vs Sweden, Russia, 1655 - 1667, 3 million killed (This is the pope’s Catholics crusade against Orthodox)
Franco Dutch war, 1672 - 1678, 340,000 killed
Ottoman vs holy league (Catholic) 1683 - 1699, 380,000 killed
Nine years, France vs. Dutch, England, Scotland, Spain, 1688 - 1697, 680,000 killed
And then the hitherto small countries rose up: the Czech Hussites and the Swiss Highlanders poured blood into Germany, Austria, and Burgundy. In short, almost all the forces of Western Europe were locked in on themselves and were mutually destructive. Passionary fracture made the "Christian world" powerless, which was very beneficial to the strengthening of Turkey and Russia, i.e. the countries which began their ascent in the XIV century, therefore, as compared with Western Europe – they were still young.
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A similar change of passionary blossoms is traced in the eastern half of the European super-ethnos, where the Slavs were in contact with the Germans. In the 14th century, the Czech Hussites carried out the first stage of the Reformation, which bleached both Bohemia and the neighboring regions of Germany. In the 16th century Poland came out on top, absorbed Lithuania and became a pillar of the Counter-Reformation. This was its undoing, for it deprived it of the opportunity to establish contact with the Orthodox.
In the middle of the XVII century the Ukrainian Cossacks inflicted a few crushing defeats on the Polish troops, then the Swedes marched through Poland and robbed it clean, and, finally, the Turks conquered Podolia, (west-central and south-western parts of Ukraine and in northeastern Moldova). The heroic victory in 1688 saved Austria, but finally wore out Poland, whose decline in the XVIII century is well known.
Sweden was the most successful in the XVII century, but this sparsely populated country had spilled its passionate energy reserve of blood with Gustav Adolf in Germany, with Charles X in Poland, with Charles XII - in Russia, and did not compensate for the damage in population growth. There was no one left to carry on the fight. There were some children born, but not as many as there were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It should be noted that there was no economic or cultural decline in the Scandinavian and Slavic countries, nor in the western duchies of Germany, Austria, and Holland. In the 18th century (1700’s) almost all European countries, having overcome the passionary "overheating" of the “burn-out” phase, developed their economy, built beautiful cities, traded with the whole world, making huge profits on colonialism, and patronized writers, artists and scientists, i.e. people gifted but not excessively passionary. This was the so-called Age of Enlightenment. The optimal level of passionate tension in Europe was achieved by the fact that "excessive" passionarians went to the colonies and rampaged there. The colonies were therefore the basis of “the enlightenment”, both in supplying the money to create it, and in eliminating the violent people.
And yet, there was one country in eighteenth-century Europe where the passionary tensions were still growing, Prussia.
Germany suffered more than any other country from the horrors of the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years' War. This is understandable: the passionate tension there began to subside already in the XIII century, which was mentioned above, and if so, then this rich and civilized country became a victim of ethnic groups with a high level of passionarity. Croats, Spaniards, Walloons, Danes, Swedes and the French passed (rampaged) through Germany, while Germans, both Lutherans and Catholics, either endured the outrages of the Landsknecht, (Germanic mercenaries), or joined their gangs themselves. Faith did not play a role here; they went to whichever colonels paid the most.
Since the Catholics were defeated at White Mountain in 1618, the Protestants from Bohemia had to emigrate; many of them found refuge in the neighboring Margraviate of Brandenburg. French Huguenots as well as Polish "Arians" resettled there as well. Berlin became a haven for persecuted ideological Protestants who brought their passions with them.
The Brandenburg Brand was founded on the land of the Slavic Lutic tribe, (West Slavic Polabian tribes, federation: the Redarians, Circipanians, Kessinians and Tollensians), and its population in the 18th century was mixed - Slavic-Germanic. The importation of the passionate imperative entailed a fusion of these ethnicities, similar to what happened in England in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Thus, Brandenburg, which became the Brandenburgian-Prussian state, was one phase behind Western Germany and Austria in terms of ethnogenesis: when everyone else was "enlightened," the Prussians still wanted to fight. That is why they won the War of the Austrian Succession. The Seven Years' War, the war with Napoleon I and finally with Napoleon III, after which Prussia became the leader of a unified Germany, excluding Austria and Luxemburg.
Russia vs. Swedish 1700 – 1721, 350,000 killed
Seven years Britain vs. France 1756 - 1763, one million killed
Napoleonic wars, 1803 - 1815, probably 5 million killed, (3 – 7 million)
Peninsular war Spain, England vs, France, Italy, 1808 - 1814, one million killed
The end of the fifteenth century saw the unification of Castile with Aragon, the Spanish conquest of Granada, and the discovery of America (1492) and the discovery of India (1498). The forces of Spanish and Portuguese passionaries found use in the far-away lands, and the passionate tension in the Iberian Peninsula decreased to an optimum level. This gave great advantages to the Habsburgs, who inherited the Spanish crown.
Throughout the sixteenth century the Spanish infantry went from victory to victory, Spanish gold solved the complexities of diplomacy, and the Spanish navy dominated the seas. The glitter of the victory over the Turks at Lepanto (1571) lessened the bitterness of finally losing the war, especially since it was Venice that had to pay for the defeat. But the collapse of the Invincible Armada (1585) and the fall of Holland (1581) showed that Spain's strength was declining rather than growing. In the seventeenth century, Spain suffered defeat after defeat. It did not have enough men to replenish its army and navy, nor for the needs of its industry, nor to defend its American possessions against English and French corsairs (pirate ships). And it was not that Spain was depopulating, but simply that Spaniards were fighting less well and working less. In 1648, at the Peace of Westphalia, the Spaniards accepted the loss of their hegemony in Europe to France and, on the seas, to Holland. But the domination of the Dutch was short-lived, as England came forward. And then began her new, the Hundred Years' War with France, which ended with the battle (1815) at Waterloo, after which the palm of primacy in Western Europe went to England.
In Europe, these phases coincided with the Reformation, the great discoveries, the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.
After Rome, Christians killed Christians, Europeans killed Europeans for about 1,700 years and are still doing it. If I wanted to go to the colonies I could surely double or triple the death toll. Let's face it; These Christians were "Bible Thumpers" and used God's word to spur themselves on to their great deeds.
It is not my "Duty" to say what could have been different. I am just re-telling you what I acknowledge as the most obvious truth, known to all.
I AM GOING TO PROPOSE THAT THE MIDDLE AGES WAS RUN BY THE ANTI-SYSTEM FANATICS.
Others will excuse it saying that this is the nature of mankind, and man cannot be trusted with his own mind. What they propose is an “enlightened western hegemon” called Globalist Fascism. We will set the rules for you. OF COURSE, those rules will be the rules favoring the most powerful, in this new “family of (no)nations”.
I am also going to propose that the present world is run by the same anti-system. The next few posts will be concrete examples of (now) declassified hatred. It is all in the public record.
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Good writing!