“You should be more afraid of a stupid man than of an evil one.”

Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626-1689) [emailed by a friend and quoted for instance at https://www.azquotes.com/quote/966702]

“Although barely literate, he [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] had received a formidable education from one of the most influential of all Muslim radicals. In 1994, arrested for planning terrorist offences and Jordan, al-Zarqawi had stood trial alongside a Palestinian scholar named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. For five years, while serving his prison term, he had been tutored by al-Maqdisi in the crisis that was facing Islam. Muslims, despite God's gift to them of a perfect and eternal law, had been seduced into obeying laws offered by men. They had become, al-Maqdisi warned, like Christians: infidels who took legislators as their lords ‘instead of God’. Governments across the Muslim world had adopted constitutions that directly contradicted the Sunna. Worse, they had signed up to international bodies that, despite their claims to neutrality, served to foist on Muslims alien law codes. Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God. Muslim countries, by joining the United Nations, had signed up to a host of commitments that derived, not from the Qur’an or the Sunna, but from law codes devised in Christian countries: that there should be equality between men and women; equality between Muslims and non-Muslims; a ban on slavery; a ban on offensive warfare. Such doctrines, al-Maqdisi sternly ruled, had no place in Islam. To accept them was to become an apostate. Al-Zarqawi, released from prison in 1999, did not forget al-Maqdisi's warnings. In 2003, launching his campaign in Iraq, he went for a soft and telling target. On 19 August, a car bomb blew up the United Nations headquarters in the country. The UN special representative was crushed to death in his office. Twenty-two others were also killed. Over 100 were left maimed and wounded. Shortly afterwards, the United Nations withdrew from Iraq. ‘Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith.’ President Bush’s reassurance, offered before the invasion of Iraq, was not one that al-Zarqawi was remotely prepared to accept.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

On the 9th Hour podcast I joined theatre artist Breanna Doyle and host Charley to discuss heroes and villains in history, finding truth among shifting interpretations, and what it means for us today.

“As the myth of inevitable victory fragmented, the fragments became new, even larger, even brighter, myths. In a prolific spasm, illusion gave birth to a host of illusions. Horror was turned into spiritual fulfillment. War became peace. Death, life. Annihilation, freedom. Machine, poetry. Amorality, truth. Over eighteen thousand church bells and innumerable organ pipes were donated to the war effort, to be melted down and used for arms and ammunition. As the assault on the physical and social fixities of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world was intensified the resulting sensation was one of growing liberation from constraint, frontiers, forms. The promotion of this liberation continue to be the most important component of Pflicht. This association of death with life was a re-enactment, writ large, of the sacrificial sequence of Le Sacre du Printemps.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound – as Tolkien, that devote Catholic, always argued – a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: that fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it – the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe – that serves to explain, much more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross. No doubt I should have appreciated this earlier. As it was, only during the early stages of writing this book, when I traveled to Iraq to make a film, did it properly dawn on me. Sinjar was a town that, when I visited it, stood directly on the frontier with the Islamic State. It had been seized from their fighters just a few weeks before. Back in 2014, when they captured and occupied Sinjar, it had been home to large numbers of Yazidis, a religious minority condemned by the Islamic state as devil-worshippers. Their fate had been grim precisely as the fate of those who resisted the Romans had been grim. Men had been crucified; women had been enslaved. To stand amid the ruins of Sinjar, knowing that two miles away, across flat and open ground, were ranged the very people who had committed such atrocities, was to appreciate how, in antiquity, the stench of heat and corpses would have served the conqueror as the marker of his possession. Crucifixion was not merely a punishment. It was a means to achieving dominance: a dominance felt as a dread in the guts of the subdued. Terror of power was the index of power. That was how it had always been, and always would be. It was the way of the world. For two thousand years, though, Christians have disputed this. Many of them, over the course of this time, have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake. Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.’ This is the myth that we in the West still persist in clinging too. Christendom, in that sense, remains Christendom still.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [end of book]

“The poet Rainer Maria Rilke and many others bowed in humble and awed obeisance to the ‘War God.’ Und wir? Glühen in Eines zusammen,/ In ein neues Geschöpf, das er tödlich belebt.* [“*And we? We glow as One/ A new creature invigorated by death.”] Invigoration by death: such was Germany's ‘rite of spring.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“The inclination here was to regard the war as a form of art, as a superior representation of life: only when mankind recognized that salvation lay in aesthetic values, in the symbolism of life and death, and not in sterile social norms, would the horror and sadness have meaning and be overcome. As evocation, as an instrument of change, the war had a positive purpose – that was the judgment of many artists, at least early on. The most radical artistic response to the war came from a group of people who made a complete break with traditional loyalties and gathered in neutral Zürich in 1915 to found there the Dada idea – if one can speak of this nihilistic manifestation as an idea. The cohort had an international flavor but its core was German.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“From an early age, then, Hitler certainly had the temperament, exacerbated by his social circumstances, to become an artist of the ‘adversary culture.’ What he lacked was any exceptional talent as a painter or draughtsman.... Yet in spirit an artist was what he was and, as he would insist to the end, what he always remained.... He would, so he claimed, turn politics and life into art. It was the war, the Great War, that broadened his canvas so immeasurably. Like many in the artistic, intellectual, and radical community, he saw the outbreak of the war in August 1914 as a sudden liberation from stultifying bourgeois constraints, as an opportunity for a new beginning, as a means of bringing about a revolution of one sort or turn another. The remarkable picture we have of Hitler as a part of the crowd in the Odeonsplatz in Munich cheering the announcement of war speaks volumes. He is standing in one of the front rows, this misfit, without friends, without women in his life, without a job, without a future. And yet his face is ecstatic, radiant. The eyes seemed to sparkle. He looked as if – suddenly and as a complete surprise – he had just been informed that all those rejections from the Vienna Academy of arts have been a terrible mistake, and that he, Adolf Hitler, has in fact submitted, with his applications, the finest samples of work the academy has ever received. ‘To me those hours,’ he declared later, ‘seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by a mighty enthusiasm, I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to be alive at such a time.’.... ‘It was,’ he said, ‘with feelings of pure idealism that I set out for the front in 1914.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era