Our Apocalyptic Media

Reading a newspaper is like being waterboarded by a stream of apocalyptic water (propaganda masquerading as news). Here’s Michael Crichton’s take on the mainstream media: “The media is like the guy going down the street with a sign that says 'The End of the World is Near,' and he picks a date and the day comes and goes, and the world doesn't end. So he doesn't stop with the sign. He goes home, makes another sign, puts a new date on it, and starts marching again. That's the way the media is.”

Napoleon and the Making of Modern Egypt

After the fall of Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty in the thirteenth century, the Mamluk Sultanate became the masters of Egypt. The Mamluks were overthrown by the Ottomans in the Ottoman–Mamluk war of 1516 and 1517. But the victorious Ottomans retained the Mamluks as an Egyptian ruling class. The Mamluks were allowed to rule Egypt as the vassals of the Ottomans. 

When Napoleon attacked Egypt in 1798, the country was out of direct control of the Ottomans and was being dominated by the local Mamluk elite. In the Battle of the Pyramids, fought on 21 July 1798, Napoleon’s French forces decisively defeated the Mamluk cavalry. The battle was over in an hour, with the French suffering just 300 casualties while inflicting more than 6000 casualties on the Mamluk cavalry. Mamluk power was finished in Egypt. The Mamluk survivors moved into Syria, leaving Egypt in the hands of Napoleon who, three days later, triumphantly marched his troops into Cairo.

With his quick victory in Egypt, Napoleon had created the impression in Western Europe that he would achieve what all the crusades of the past had failed to achieve. But ten days later, the British Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson shattered Napoleon’s dream of founding a French Empire in North Africa and the Middle East. In the Battle of the Nile, between 1st and 3rd of August 1798, Nelson destroyed Napoleon’s navy at Aboukir Bay on the Mediterranean coast. With most of his ships destroyed, Napoleon was cut off from France and stuck in Egypt with his 35,000 troops. He remained in Cairo for three years, till 1801. 

Napoleon’s three year stay in Cairo wrought profound, long-term consequences for Egypt. He had not arrived in Egypt to merely conquer and loot—he believed that it was his destiny to liberate, reform, and bring modern ideas to the backward nations of the world. He had brought with him a team of more than 160 scholars. In three years, he gave Egypt the kind of reforms that this country had not seen for several centuries. He turned the traditional Egyptian society on its head. 

Egypt got a postal service. In Cairo and other urban areas street lighting and sanitation was created. A modern mint was established. A French trading company came up. There was creation of plague hospitals, and printing presses with typescript for French, Greek, and Arabic. Slavery was abolished. The dhimmi system was abolished, and the Ottoman and Mamluk social hierarchy came to an end. Though the Egyptian elite remained unconvinced of Napoleon’s intentions, many of his reforms worked so well that they were not abolished after he left the country. 

It can be argued that Napoleon led to the rise of Egyptian nationalism through his support of Egyptian scholarship. He encouraged the study of Egyptian culture before the time of the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire. He funded several scholarly works on ancient Egypt. This led to the rise of the new discipline of Egyptology. In July 1799, a young engineering officer, Pierre-François-Xavier Bouchard, who had arrived in Egypt with Napoleon, discovered the Rosetta Stone, which played a significant role in the deciphering of ancient Egyptian language.

Genghis Khan: The Excellent, Noble King

Genghis Khan was viewed as an “excellent, noble king” before the onset of the Age of Enlightenment (eighteenth century), when the Western historians started presenting him as a “brutal pagan.” But the post-Enlightenment Western historians were wrong about Genghis Khans and his Mongols. The Mongols were not savages. They did not cause death and destruction purposelessly. They had a plan to build a great empire, and they were successful. After the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire became the largest contiguous empire in history. The Mongols usually killed the ruling classes in the places that they conquered in order to subdue the local population—all empires of the Middle Ages (and even the modern age) can be accused of using such strategies. 

In his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford offers a different perspective on Genghis Khan. Weatherford argues that it is a mistake to see Genghis Khan as a savage and sadistic warlord who caused death and devastation wherever he went. He attributes several aspects of the Renaissance to Genghis Khan, such as the spread of paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder, paintings, and musical instruments such as the violin. He says that Genghis Khan was religiously tolerant and deeply interested in learning about the moral philosophy of other religions. He used to consult Buddhist monks, Christian missionaries (Nestorian and Catholics), Islamic preachers, and Taoist monks. In Mongol culture men and women had equal rights. There are several instances of women acquiring powerful positions in Mongol politics. Weatherford suggests that the Mongol Empire was an inspiration for the Age of Discovery in Europe. 

Here’s an excerpt from Weatherford’s book: “The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turks from the East had failed to do in two centuries of sustained effort. They had conquered the heart of the Arab world. No other non-Muslim troops would conquer Baghdad or Iraq again until the arrival of the American and British forces in 2003.”

Galileo and The Medici

The Medici family played an important role in Galileo’s life. Galileo was the son of a poor descendent of a Florentine noble family. He wanted to become a painter but his father felt that painting was not a worthy profession for a man of noble birth. So Galileo studied medicine. He began his career in 1589 as a teacher of mathematics in the University of Pisa. His colleagues were unable to bear his sarcasm and independence, and they made it clear to him that if he decided to resign, they would gladly accept his resignation. 

In 1592, Galileo moved to the University of Padua where he taught geometry, mechanics, and astronomy for eighteen years. Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had once been Galileo’s student, invited him to Florence where he could do his studies and experiments in a rich environment without having to worry about the interference from his detractors. Galileo accepted the offer and he spent the final years of his life under the protection of the Medici. Cosimo gave Galileo the title of court mathematician. This position brought Galileo the freedom to present his radical ideas in astronomy and mathematics. He made a powerful case to support the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus. 

In his 1610 book Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo honored his Medici benefactors by naming the four moons of Jupiter, which he had discovered through his telescope, Medicea Sidera (Medicean stars), in reference to Cosimo and his three brothers.

The Ottoman-Safavid Wars

In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans and the Safavids had an apocalyptic view of the conflict between them—each power was convinced that the religious truth was on its side and that the other side was indulging in heresy and had to be annihilated. Both sides wanted to claim the religious leadership of the Islamic world. Safavid Iran arose in the early sixteenth century after the fall of the Timurid Empire, which was founded by Tamerlane. Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, contributed to the rise of the Safavid dynasty by his victories over Uzun Hasan, one of the descendants of Tamerlane. With the Timurid Empire gone, the Safavids had the space to grow their empire. 

The Safavids wanted Shiaism to be recognized as the fifth school of Islam, but that was not acceptable to the Sunni Ottomans. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Ottomans and the Safavids fought several wars over religious reasons, and over the control of the South Caucasus and Mesopotamia. The Sunni-Shia divide in the Middle East today is to some extent influenced by the conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids.

In 1514, the Ottoman Sultan Selim I issued a fatwa in the name of Sunni Islam against Shia Iran, then ruled by Shah Ismail. Selim transformed his war against Iran into a Holy War by declaring that the Safavids were heretics and must be annihilated. As he marched through the cities in Anatolia, his forces beheaded every Shiite between the age of seven and seventy. This led to the greatest massacre in Ottoman history. The forces of Shah Ismail fought bravely but Selim’s forces had the upper hand in the battle. The Safavids survived the defeat by moving their capital to Qazvin in 1555 and then from Qazvin to Isfahan in 1598—this ensured that the Safavid ruling elite was beyond the reach of the Ottoman forces. The Safavids adopted the strategy of continuous guerrilla warfare which was immensely damaging to the Ottoman economy. 

In 1548, Suleiman the Magnificent launched a campaign against Iran. His army laid waste to large parts of Persia and conquered most of modern Iraq, including the city of Baghdad, the historic seat of the Abbasid caliphate, which was of religious importance to the Shi'ites. In 1555, Suleiman the Magnificent and Shah Tahmasp, the Iranian Emperor, negotiated the Treaty of Amasya to draw a border between their empires and end their conflict. But in 1577, the Ottoman sultan Murad III discarded the treaty. He was determined to destroy the Safavids. His ambition condemned the two empires for fifty years of bloodshed. Between 1578 and 1639, the Ottomans and the Safavids fought three wars. For a  brief period, 1588–1629, Baghdad came under direct Safavid rule. 

In 1638, Murad IV took the leadership of the Ottoman military and he captured Revan and Tabriz from the Safavids. In 1638, he captured Baghdad after a siege of forty days. On 17 May 1639, both sides signed the Treaty of Zuhab which settled the Ottoman–Persian frontier, with Iraq ceded to the Ottomans. The Safavid Empire went into decline towards the end of the seventeenth century, and the Ottomans took advantage of their problems to usurp several territories in Georgia, Iranian Azerbaijan, and Armenia. But in the eighteenth century there was the rise of Nadir Shah who deposed the last members of the Safavid dynasty and became a Shah himself. During the Ottoman–Persian War of 1730–1735, Nadir Shah forced the Ottomans to accept Persian hegemony over the Caucasus.

Weakened by the unending conflict with the Safavids and other powerful forces in the Middle East, the Ottomans could not defend their lengthy northern border in Europe which they shared with the Habsburg empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Orthodox Russia. They were doomed after the eighteenth century (perhaps from the middle of the seventeenth century). It is surprising that they continued to be a geopolitical power in the twentieth century and it took a world-historical event like the First World War to break apart their empire.

Civilization is a Children’s Project

The average life expectancy four thousand years ago was twenty-five years. Before that it was even less. This implies that the world we live in is the creation of young adults (many of them were children by modern standards). 

Mankind’s achievements in the prehistoric age—from the invention of wheel, to the discovery of agriculture, domestication of cattle, development of languages, rise of the world’s first primitive religions, mythologies, philosophies, and political systems—was the outcome of the labor and enterprise of people who would be of ten to thirty-five years. A few people in the prehistoric age would live to the age of fifty or even ninety, but the lifecycle of most would plateau at thirty-five. 

In the prehistoric period, which encompasses 99 percent of human existence on this planet, the young adults were the driving force of civilization. 

In the modern age, the situation has changed. In the last three hundred years, there has been a rise in average life expectancy—this has ensured that the forces of civilization are in the hands of older people. The average age in Japan is currently forty-eight years; in the USA it is thirty-eight; in Germany it is forty-five; in the UK it is forty. But when Japan, the USA, Germany, and the UK were in a high-growth phase, their average age was much lower.

The young adults are often the best barbarians. The older generations are often the best utopians. History tells us that the barbarians are often the creators of new civilizations, whereas the utopians are often the destroyers of old civilizations.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement to Divide the Ottoman Empire

After capturing power in Russia, the Bolshevik government led by Lenin and Trotsky went to extraordinary lengths to discredit the policies of the deposed government of Tsar Nicholas II. Trotsky, then People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, published dirty secrets of the Tsar’s regime in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia. In late November 1917, he published documents related to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement between Russia, England, France, and Italy to partition the territory controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The agreement signed on May 16, 1916, was based on the premise that these four nations would defeat the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.  

The Sykes-Picot Agreement stipulated that the Ottoman territory outside the Arabian Peninsula would be divided along the Sykes-Picot line into areas of British and French dominance. Britain would get the areas where today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq are located—they would get the ports of Haifa and Acre to enable them to have direct access to the Mediterranean. The areas where southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are located today was to be France’s share. Russia was to get Western Armenia in addition to Constantinople (which was of great importance to the Orthodox Tsarist regime for religious and historical reasons) and the Turkish Straits. Italy was to receive southern Anatolia.  

Under the secret Constantinople Agreement (also known as the Straits Agreement), ratified by Russia, England, and France in 1915, the territories of Constantinople and the Dardanelles had already been promised to Russia in the event of their victory in the First World War. The leaking of the Sykes-Picot Agreement caused a major political scandal in Europe, Asia, and the USA.

The Sick Man of Europe

In the nineteenth century, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia coined the phrase the “sick man of Europe” to define the Ottoman Empire. He used this phrase in a series of confidential letters, written in 1853 to the British ambassador Sir George Hamilton Seymour. 

Nicholas I was the first world leader to realize that the Ottoman Empire had become ossified and weak. He asserted in his letters that the Ottomans do not possess the military capability to defend their vast territory and economic interests. He predicted that the fall of the Ottomans was imminent. He invited the British to join his government in the exercise of drawing plans for dividing the Ottoman territory among the traditional European powers and the emerging powers in the Middle East.

The British Establishment of that time was taken by surprise by the Tsar’s view. They, like the French and other West European powers, believed that the Ottomans were a powerful empire and, notwithstanding the few military defeats that they had suffered in the last two centuries, they would continue to exist forever.

The Russo-Ottoman Wars of the Eighteenth Century

During the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774, Catherine the Great, Tsarina of Russia, concocted a plan for driving the Ottomans out of the territory held by the former Byzantine Empire and placing her grandson Constantine on the imperial throne of Constantinople. 

More than three centuries after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans were defending themselves against another orthodox Christian power: Tsarist Russia. The Russian forces were largely victorious in the war and they were in a position to annex Ottoman territory in Europe and the Middle East. But the complexities of European politics of that time were such that the West European powers feared that the balance of power in Europe could tilt permanently in Russia’s favor if they allowed the Russians to dominate a significant part of Ottoman territory. Austria and other West European states intervened diplomatically to place a limit on the territorial gains that the Russians could expect from their victory.

The Ottomans and the Russians signed the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. Russia returned the territories of Wallachia and Moldavia to the Ottomans. Catherine negotiated and got the guardianship of the Orthodox Christian holy sites and the right to protect Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman Empire—this provision ensured that the Russians had a ready-made excuse to interfere in Ottoman territory whenever they thought that the time was ripe. A second war between the Russian and Ottoman empires was inevitable.  

In 1783, Russia annexed Crimea and Kabardia. In May and June 1787, Catherine and her new ally, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, held a triumphal procession in New Russia and the annexed Crimea. The Ottomans saw the triumphal procession as a violation of their territory—they ordered the Russians to evacuate Crimea. In August 1787, the Ottomans declared a war on Russia with the aim of reversing the losses of the earlier Russo-Turkish war. While this war was being fought, the Ottomans became involved in another war with Austria in 1788. Both wars were fought concomitantly till 1792. Caught between two wars, the Ottoman situation became militarily hopeless. Their logistics collapsed, and they were forced to negotiate.

The Treaty of Jassy, signed between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1792, established Russian dominance in the Black Sea region. The Ottoman aim of reclaiming Crimea had failed. If the West European powers and the Orthodox Russian Empire had not been distracted by the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, the fate of the Ottoman Empire could have been much worse during the second Russo-Turkish War.

Ottomans, Seljuks, and their Land of the Rum

When Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he adopted the title Qayser-i Rum (Caesar of the Roman Empire), and he gave the name “Rumelia” (land of the Romans) to the Ottoman Empire’s possessions in southeastern Europe (the Balkans). The Seljuk dynasty, which can be seen as a geopolitical predecessor of the Ottomans in the Levant, used the title “land of the Rûm" (land of the Romans) to refer to Anatolia (much of modern-day Turkey), which they had conquered after defeating the Byzantine Empire in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.

The Qayser-i Rum: The Caesar of the Roman Empire

The Ottomans had been trying to conquer the Byzantine Empire since the early 14th century. Osman Ghazi had laid a siege to Nicaea in 1301. He defeated the Byzantine army, but failed to capture Nicaea because of the arrival of a mercenary army of 8000 troops led by Roger de Flor. Osman was succeeded by his son Orhan in 1324. Orhan captured several cities belonging to the Byzantines in northwest Turkey. He took advantage of the civil war, which followed the death of the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos in 1341, and captured the peninsula of Gallipoli, which he fortified to gain control of Dardanelles. Orhan’s son Murad I became the sultan in 1362 and continued to pursue the policy of expanding the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. 

When Murad I was killed in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the sultanate passed into the hands of his son Bayezid I Yildirim, who took the title Sultan-i Rum (Rum being an old oriental name for the Roman Empire). Bayezid had his brothers strangled to prevent any disputes regarding his succession. He blamed the death of his father to Byzantine and Serbian treachery, and was determined to conquer Constantinople. In 1394, he laid siege to Constantinople and ordered the Byzantine emperor to surrender. The Byzantines pleaded before Pope Boniface IX, who called a crusade to vanquish the Ottoman forces. Sigismund of Luxembourg, the King of Hungary, who later became the Holy Roman Emperor, and knights from France, Germany, Venice, and Genoa, answered the pope’s call. Bayezid defeated the crusader forces in the Battle of Nicopolis, before bringing back his army to once again besiege Constantinople. 

Bayezid's heavy artillery did not cause much damage to the ancient wall which protected Constantinople. But he would have found a way to enter the city, if he had not been forced to lift the seize in 1402 due to the appearance of the army of Tamerlane, the Prince of Destruction, who had fought several wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe and had the reputation of never being defeated. 

Tamerlane and Bayezid had been insulting each other in letters for some time. In one of his letters, Tamerlane wrote: “Believe me, you are but pismire ant: don't seek to fight the elephants for they'll crush you under their feet. Shall a petty prince such as you are contend with us? But your rodomontades (braggadocio) are not extraordinary; for a Turcoman never spake with judgement. If you don't follow our counsels you will regret it.” Tamerlane’s army marched into Syria in 1400, killing most of the inhabitants of Aleppo and Damascus. They sacked Baghdad in 1401, slaughtering 20,000 people, and on July 20, 1402, they marched into Anatolia. In the war that followed, Bayezid was defeated and captured. He died in Tamerlane’s prison. 

With Bayezid death, there was a period of respite for the Byzantine Empire since the Ottomans became entangled in a succession related civil war. Four of Bayezid's sons, Süleyman Çelebi, İsa Çelebi, Mehmed Çelebi, and Musa Çelebi, were the main contenders for the throne. Mehmed Çelebi was victorious. At his coronation in 1413, he took the name Mehmed I. When Mehmed I died in 1421, the power went to his son Murad II who began his reign by besieging Constantinople. But the Byzantines managed to coerce Murad’s younger brother Küçük Mustafa, who was only thirteen years old, to rebel against the sultan and besiege Bursa. Murad was forced to abandon the siege of Constantinople and rush to Bursa to deal with his rebellious brother. He defeated Mustafa’s army and executed him. 

In 1451, Murad II was succeeded by his son Mehmed II who achieved the dream of his ancestors by conquering Constantinople in 1453. After the conquest, Mehmed II took the title, Qayser-i Rum (the Caesar of the Roman Empire). According to some historical accounts, Mehmed II used to say: “I have conquered New Rome. Now it is time to conquer Old Rome.”

The Split in the Orthodox World

In the fourteenth century, the Orthodox Russians realized that the Byzantine Empire had surrendered itself to not just papal authority in Rome but also the Ottoman sultans. They accused the Byzantine Emperors of abdicating their leadership of the Orthodox world by accepting papal and Ottoman overlordship. 

The Byzantine Empire of Nicaea had recaptured Constantinople in 1261, but their military power was inadequate for settling the territorial disputes in which they were involved in the Middle East and southeastern Europe. Their weakness forced them to solicit military support from the Ottoman sultans. The Ottomans arrived in Europe on the invitation of the Byzantines—in the Byzantine civil war between 1341 and 1347, one of the Byzantine factions used the support of Orhan Ghazi, the Ottoman Sultan, to gain an upper hand in southeastern Europe. Once the Ottomans had got a taste of European politics and warfare, they decided to expand into Europe. In 1354, they captured Gallipoli, and in 1361, they won Adrianople in the Balkans. 

In 1274, Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, the founder of the dynasty that would rule the Byzantine Empire until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, pleaded before the Latin Church for military assistance. In 1366, John V Palaiologos visited the Hungarian Kingdom and pleaded for help. The Hungarian King agreed to help on one condition—John V should convert to Catholicism. In October 1369, John V became the first Byzantine Emperor, in seven hundred years, to travel to Rome, where he converted to Catholicism in St Peter's Basilica and acknowledged the pope as the supreme head of the Church. But his acceptance of Catholicism did not hinder John V from accepting the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan Murad I in 1371. In 1376, Murad I helped John V suppress a civil war.

The Russians were appalled by the Byzantine attempts to merge Orthodox Christianity with Catholicism, and they were suspicious of the Ottoman sultans. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Orthodox Christianity was split into Russian and Greek (Byzantine) branches. The Russians claimed that they were the true representatives of Orthodox Christianity and the inheritors of the Roman Empire. The Russian Emperors started viewing Moscow as the third Rome, and they assumed the title of Caesar (Tsar in Russian).

The Twilight of Dwaraka and the Metaphysical Disintegration of a Yuga: Reflections on the Mausala Parva

When the divine retires, even memory becomes myth.

The Mausala Parva, the sixteenth book of the Mahabharata, stands as a somber and haunting coda to an epic shaped by heroism, dharma, and cosmic war. Set thirty-six years after the cataclysm of Kurukshetra, it chronicles not only the demise of Krishna—the divine architect of destiny—but also the unraveling of his clan, the Yadavas, and the inundation of the fabled city of Dwaraka. What unfolds is not merely a historical denouement, but the metaphysical disintegration of a yuga.

The destruction is both literal and allegorical. The mighty Yadava clan, once unparalleled in strength and splendor, is undone by internal strife—a drunken civil war ignited not by foreign invasion or divine wrath, but by ego, pride, and the slow corrosion of prosperity unmoored from restraint. In the Mausala Parva, dharma decays not through external defeat but through internal decay. It is a portrait of entropy in moral and political order.

Krishna’s death is strikingly unceremonious. The Supreme Being, incarnated to restore cosmic balance, meets his end not on a battlefield but in the forest, felled by the arrow of a hunter who mistakes his foot for a deer. His elder brother Balarama, too, withdraws to the forest and dissolves into the ocean, while their father Vasudeva dies grieving the fratricidal war of his sons. The divine exits not with thunder but with silence.

When Arjuna arrives in Dwaraka, he finds not a city, but a requiem. The mighty kingdom—built on the sea, shimmering with opulence, protected by Krishna’s presence—has already met its fate. Nature, once held at bay by divine will, has reclaimed its due. In a passage as elegiac as it is vivid, Arjuna recounts the final submergence:

“The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed on it by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the beautiful city. The sea covered up everything in the city. I saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. In a matter of a few moments it was all over. The sea had now become as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the city. Dwaraka was just a name; just a memory.”

What is most unsettling in this vision is the swiftness—the erasure of grandeur not by conquest, but by time. The Mausala Parva does not offer dramatic lamentation; rather, it presents an existential stillness, where the silence after destruction is more deafening than the clash of arms.

The end of Krishna’s era marks the end of Dvapara Yuga, the third age of the cosmic cycle, and signals the fading of divine intervention in human affairs. In response, the Pandava brothers—Arjuna, Bhima, Nakula, Sahadeva, and Yudhishthira—renounce their crowns and worldly attachments. With Draupadi, they embark on the Mahaprasthanika—the great departure—towards the Himalayas, in pursuit of heaven, in pursuit of liberation.

The Mausala Parva is thus not merely a chronicle of destruction—it is a meditation on impermanence. It reminds us that even divine kingdoms dissolve, that dharma is cyclical and mortal, and that all stories, however grand, must make peace with their ending. In the fading of Dwaraka and the vanishing of Krishna, the epic confronts us with the ultimate truth: that what remains, in the end, is not empire or lineage—but memory, myth, and the search for meaning beyond the ruins.

On Richard Lionheart’s Crusade

After mentioning that Richard Lionheart’s life came to a close when he was hit by a stray arrow shot from a rebel castle in France on 26 March 1199, Steven Runciman uses a single sentence to deliver his judgement on Lionheart’s life: “He was a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier.” (A History of the Crusades III: The Kingdom of Acre; Chapter III, “Coeur-de-Lion”)

Lionheart was not fully committed to the war for the Holy Land—his first priority was to safeguard the interests of his empire in England and France. He arrived in Acre on 8 June 1191 and departed for Europe on 9 October 1192. During his sixteen months that he spent in the Levant, Lionheart acted like a shrewd political operator and a pragmatic military commander. He carried out long negotiations with Emperor Saladin even as they were trying to defeat each other in a series of battles. He and Saladin delighted in being respectful and generous to each other. Lionheart realized that with the kind of military commitment that Western Europe could make in the Levant, Saladin and other oriental forces could not be defeated. 

After a siege that lasted for about two years (started by King Guy in August 1189), the crusaders conquered Acre on 12 July 1191. Lionheart played a decisive role in the success at Acre. In September 1191, Lionheart defeated Saladin in a battle north of Arsuf. Towards the end of May 1192, the crusaders had taken all the coastal areas that they had lost to Saladin. In January 1192, and then for the second time in June 1192, the crusaders were just ten to twelve miles from Jerusalem, which was largely undefended since most of Saladin’s forces were committed to other parts of the battlefield. On both occasions, Lionheart refused to besiege Jerusalem. He believed that even if the crusaders managed to conquer Jerusalem, they would not be able to hold it while Saladin was the ruler of Egypt and Syria. 

Lionheart’s struggle to make it back to England proved to be as perilous as his struggle against Saladin. The ship in which he left Acre was wrecked by a storm near Venice, forcing him to continue his journey overland. To evade his European enemies, he was traveling in disguise, but he was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria. Leopold accused Lionheart of the murder of Conrad of Montferrat and locked him in a castle. On 28 March 1193, Lionheart was handed over to Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who imprisoned him in a castle in Germany. After the payment of a ransom, Lionheart was released on 4 February 1194. On his release, King Philip of France sent a message to John, Lionheart’s brother: “Look to yourself; the devil is loose"

A View of the Mahabharata’s Lunar Dynasty

The Mahabharata is the history of the Chandravansha (the Lunar dynasty), which originated with Soma, the Moon God. The son of Soma was Chandra. Chandra had a son called Pururava who ruled the kingdom of Prayaga, whose capital was located at Pratisthana. Pururava’s eldest son Āyu had a son called Nahusha. Nahusha married Viraja and they had six or seven sons. The second son was Yayati. According to another legend, Nahusha married Ashokasundari, the daughter of Shiva and Parvati, and she gave birth to Yayati and a hundred daughters. 

Yayati had five sons: Yadu and Turvasu, through his first wife Devayani; Druhyu, Anu and Puru, through his second wife Sharmishtha. When Yayati became old, he continued to lust for the pleasures of a youthful life. He summoned his five sons and asked them to temporarily loan him their youth. Four of his sons refused. They were cursed by Yayati that they would never be kings—this curse impacted the Yadava dynasty too, since one of Yayati’s five sons was Yadu. Puru, Yayati’s youngest son, agreed to loan his youth to his father. After enjoying the pleasures of the senses for a thousand years, Yayati returned to Puru the youth that he had borrowed from him, and made him the king. The lunar dynasty goes forward with Puru. 

Puru’s son Duhshanta married Shakuntala and they had a son called Bharata (the founder of the empire called Bharatavarsha). Bharata had a grandson called Kuru, whose descendent Pratipa had a son called Shantanu. Shantanu married Satyavati and they had two sons: Chitrangada and Vichitravirya. Krishna Dvaipayana (Veda Vyasa) had been born through a union between Sage Parashara and Satyavati. A union between Shantanu and Ganga had resulted in the birth of the powerful warrior Bhishma. Krishna Dvaipayana fathered Dhristarashtra on Vichitravirya’s first wife Ambika, and Pandu on Vichitravirya’s second wife Ambalika. He also fathered a son called Vidura on Vichitravirya’s maid. 

The hundred Kourava brothers were the sons of Dhristarashtra, and the five Pandava brothers were the acknowledged sons of Pandu. Since Kuru was the common ancestor of both the Kouravas and the Pandavas—in terms of bloodline, the five Pandava brothers too were Kouravas. Krishna was born in the Yadava branch of the Lunar dynasty.

The Fourth Crusade: The 1204 Sack of Constantinople

The claim that the crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204 is not the complete truth. The crusaders didn’t sack Constantinople. They engineered a regime change in the Byzantine Empire, at the behest of a powerful faction in Byzantine politics and some Venetian and French nobles. Here’s a brief account of the Fourth Crusade:

Pope Innocent III was elected on 8 January 1198. On 15 August 1198, he launched a new crusade (the fourth one). By the summer of 1200, a sizable crusading army had taken shape. Instead of taking a land route, which experience of the past crusades had shown was fraught with danger, the crusaders decided to take the route that Richard Lionheart and Philip II Augustus had taken during the Third Crusade. They planned to sail across the Mediterranean to Palestine.

The French Barons who were leading the Fourth Crusade entered into an agreement with Enrico Dandolo, the half-blind octogenarian Doge of Venice. Dandolo agreed to build ships for ferrying about forty-thousand crusaders, including the knights and their horses, across the Mediterranean for 85,000 silver marks. Pope Innocent III had exhorted the crusaders to conquer the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but without informing the Pope, the French Barons and Dandolo decided that the crusaders would conquer Egypt first. 

The crusaders had to arrive at the Venetian port no later than June 1202, but most of them were late. By August 1202, only eleven thousand men had gathered, and to make matters worse, they didn’t have enough money to pay the shipping charges to the Venetians. The Venetians suggested that they would postpone the payment if the crusaders helped Venice conquer its enemy, the Croatian port town of Zadar. Zadar was under a Christian king, and several crusaders, who thought that they were going to fight for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, were appalled by the idea of attacking a Christian state. But most crusaders went ahead with the new plan. They conquered Zadar for the Venetians in November 1202. 

From Zadar, the crusader ships should have gone to Egypt—that is what the general mass of crusaders had been expecting. But the crusaders found themselves in Constantinople. Who made the decision to navigate the ships towards Constantinople is one of the great mysteries of history. A powerful faction of Byzantine politics certainly had a role to play. 

Alexius Angelus, son of the deposed and blinded Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelus, had reached Europe before the Fourth Crusade departed from Venice. He offered to clear the Fourth Crusade’s entire debt to Venice, and equip the crusaders with enough manpower and funds to ensure the success of their campaign to conquer the Kingdom of Jerusalem, if they reinstated his father on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. He also offered to end the schism between Orthodox Christianity and Latin Christianity. 

A deal must have been struck between some leaders of the Fourth Crusade and Alexius Angelus. This deal must have enjoyed Venetian support, since they controlled the shipping routes and without their cooperation the ships carrying the crusaders could not be diverted to Constantinople. The Venetians were in a position to gain a lot of commercial benefits if the regime change operation in Constantinople was successful. It is possible that the deal had German and French support since Alexius Angelus had meetings with German and French nobility before he arrived at Venice. Who was not part of the deal? Pope Innocent III and many of the crusaders. 

On June 24, 1203, the Fourth Crusade had reached Constantinople. They demanded that Isaac II Angelus and his son Alexius Angelus should be restored to the throne. When Alexius III, who was then the Emperor, refused, the crusaders went on a rampage. In July 1203, Alexius III fled from the city. Isaac II Angelus and Alexius Angelus were proclaimed the joint rulers of the Byzantine Empire. The crusaders had accomplished their mission. But now a new problem arose—the two new Emperors were unable to honor the lavish promises that they had made to the crusaders and the Venetians. This led to a rapid deterioration in the popularity of their regime. 

The two Emperors were arrested on 27 January 1204—apparently without the knowledge of the crusaders. Isaac II Angelus died soon after his arrest (perhaps due to poisoning). On 8 February 1204, Alexius III was killed by strangling. Despite the failure of Isaac II Angelus and Alexius Angelus to honor their commitments, the crusaders interpreted the deposition and murder of the two Emperors as a coup. They besieged Constantinople for more than a month. On 12 April 1204, they managed to enter the city. For three days, they rioted, vandalized, and looted, causing significant damage to life and property in Constantinople. 

The two regimes that the Fourth Crusade toppled were Christian: Zadar and the Byzantine Empire. The Fourth Crusade never went to Palestine. The crusaders never marched towards Jerusalem. They stayed in Constantinople and founded a new kingdom to which they gave the name Romania. They first offered the imperial crown to Enrico Dandolo who refused it. Baldwin I was crowned as the first emperor of Romania on 9 May 1204. The surviving members of the Byzantine Empire’s aristocracy founded their own empire in Nicaea, where they awaited for an opportunity to win back the empire that they had lost.

On Viking Wisdom

“Wake early if you want another man’s life or land. No land for the lazy wolf. No battle’s won in bed.” ~ A viking saying (Edda of Saemund the Wise, a collection of the sayings of Odin). This viking saying makes sense—a nation that does not awake early to the political realities will lose its land and culture. 

The vikings were not doctrinaires. Their religious and cultural tradition was oral. But they were good political thinkers. There is a lot that can be learned from their history. Between the eighth and eleventh centuries, they played a major role in awakening the West from the slumber in which it had fallen after the end of the Western Roman Empire.

Kant: The Spectator of the French Revolution

Kant was a supporter of the idea of a French Revolution before 1789, the year when the French Revolution commenced. He thought that the revolution would lead to the rise of a culture of liberty, science, and reason in Europe. He was shocked when he learned of the massive violence that the revolutionaries were unleashing in France. To his close associates, he used to say with agitation that the revolutionaries were children with weapons who had gone out of control. 

In her book Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Hannah Arendt writes: 

“[Kant’s] final position on the French Revolution, an event that played a central role in his old age, when he waited with great impatience every day for the newspapers, was decided by this attitude of the mere spectator, of those "who are not engaged in the game themselves" but only follow it with "wishful, passionate participation," which certainly did not mean, least of all for Kant, that they now wanted to make a revolution; their sym­pathy arose from mere "contemplative pleasure and inactive de­light.”

On The Political Influence Of Books

“Is it this simple to influence the world. If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize at one effort the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own — the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — "My Heart Laid Bare." But — this little book must be true to its title.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe in 1844. 

I disagree with Edgar Allan Poe. It is not simple to influence the world. A book can influence the world only if it appears at the right place, at the right time, and is discovered by the right kind of politicians. Marx could become known as the great revolutionary philosopher of the twentieth century because politicians like Lenin and Trotsky decided to use the tenets of Marxism to build a ruthless revolutionary army which went on to overthrow the tsarist regime in Russia. The success of Lenin and Trotsky in overthrowing the Russian monarchy turned Marxism into the twentieth century’s most lethal political weapon.

Without the revolutionary actions of politicians like Lenin and Trotsky, a philosopher like Marx has no power to influence the world.

Religion and Science

It is not possible to refute God and religion by using the methods of science and technology. This is because a belief in God and religion is not the mark of an irrational, uneducated, and naive mind, as the atheists claim. The religious people are often more well-read, rational, philosophical, and brilliant than those who reject religious belief. 

To prove God’s existence, the religious thinkers develop philosophical (theological) theories which are brilliant because they are rationally argued. People believe in God because they are driven by a biological instinct to transcend the material world and find a spiritual explanation for the universe. Some of the best philosophers, scientists, discoverers, and innovators in history were people with a religious bent of mind. The idea that religious people cannot make advancements in science and other intellectual endeavors is atheist propaganda. 

The need for God and theology (religion is more fundamental to human beings than the desire for the marvels of technology.

History Does Not Vindicate The Truth

History is made by the historians, not by the people who participate in the political events in any particular age. You might feel certain that the political truth is on your side, that your cause is just, and that though your cause does not enjoy much support today, history will vindicate your political position. But if the historians of the future are against your type of politics, then you won’t find support in the pages of history—you will be discarded by history just as, in the present, you are being discarded by your contemporaries. History is a view of the past developed by the intellectual elites, who are more interested in currying favor with the political establishment than in describing the facts.

The Most Important Historical Events of Three Centuries

In the nineteenth century, the most important historical event was the defeat of Napoleon—this set the stage for the creation of Pax Britannica (the British Empire became the global hegemonic power). In the twentieth century, the most important historical event was the fall of the British Empire —this century was not about the communist movements (the rise and fall of the Soviet Union) but about anti-imperialism. What will be the most important historical event of the twenty-first century? The USA could fall due to a combination of factors—the collapse of the dollar, soaring inflation, political scandals, civil unrest, and military pressure from its geopolitical adversaries. The end of the USA would mark the end of Western power in the world.

Runciman’s Judgement of the Crusades

Steven Runciman concludes the final volume (Volume 3) of his A History of the Crusades with the following judgement on the two centuries of the crusades: 

“The triumphs of the Crusade were the triumphs of faith. But faith without wisdom is a dangerous thing. By the inexorable laws of history the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens. In the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident out of which our civilization has grown, the Crusades were a tragic and destructive episode. The historian as he gazes back across the centuries at their gallant story must find his admiration overcast by sorrow at the witness that it bears to the limitations of human nature. There was so much courage and so little honor, so much devotion and so little understanding. High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed, enterprise and endurance by a blind and narrow self-righteousness; and the Holy War itself is nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

The Battle of the Somme Versus the Iraq War

The Battle of the Somme (during the First World War), which pitted the troops of the British Empire and the French Third Republic against the German Empire, began on July 1, 1916. On this single day of fighting, the British side suffered 57,470 casualties (worst in British history), out of which 19,240 died. But there were no calls for ending the battle in Britain and France. The battle went on for four months (till November 18, 1916 ), leading to over a million casualties on both sides, and the war continued for another two years. 

The majority of the people in the USA and the UK turned against the Iraq war when about 3000 of their soldiers died. In the twenty-first century, for good or for bad, the West is no longer the ruthless fighting machine that it used to be till the first half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century Westerners are not willing to die in the name of a “Holy War” or “to save their nation”. Yet they want to be regarded as a superpower—but this is not possible. To be a superpower, you have to be prepared to make super-sacrifices. 

I have never supported the Western military interventions in the Middle East in the last two decades, because I have always known that the West could not win against an old oriental civilization defending its home turf. But the people in the West thought that they could win these wars without suffering any casualties.

The Keynesian Ponzi Scheme

The FED’s balance sheet has soared to $7.923 trillion. Next week it will cross $8 trillion, and by 2022 it is certain to surpass $10 trillion. Add to this the high balance sheets that the central banks in other nations, especially the democratic ones, are running. We are living in the age of the greatest ponzi scheme in history. When this ponzi scheme goes bust, which will be quite soon, it will hit life on this planet with the force of a giant meteor. The world economy will be wiped out. A depression like condition will prevail for up to thirty years. The Western countries, which have a consumer driven economy, will be the hardest hit. But let’s look at the bright picture: With the annihilation of the world economy, we will finally manage to prove that the Keynesian theory of economics does not work.

Kritovoulos: On the Fall of Constantinople

The Greek scholar Michael Kritovoulos, who was in the service of Ottoman Emperor Sultan Mehmed II when the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, wrote a history of the Ottoman Empire. The book contains an account of the siege and fall of Constantinople. Though he was employed by Mehmed II, Kritovoulos was sympathetic to Byzantine culture and its last emperor Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos. He viewed the fall of Constantinople as an event far more worrisome than the fall of the last Crusader stronghold of Acre in 1291. Here’s an excerpt from Kritovoulos’s elegy over Emperor Palaiologos: 

“The Emperor Constantine himself, as I have said, died fighting. He was wise and moderate in his private life and diligent to the highest degree in prudence and virtue, sagacious as the most highly-trained of men. In political affairs and in matters of government he yielded to no one of the kings before him in preeminence. Quick to perceive his duty, and still more quick to do it, he was eloquent in speech, clever in thought, and very accomplished in talking of public affairs. He was exact in his judgments of the present, as someone has said of Pericles, and usually correct in regard to the future, a splendid worker, who chose to do and to suffer everything for the fatherland and his subjects. Therefore, when he saw with his own eyes the evident danger threatening the City, and was able to save himself, he did not choose to do so, although there were many who begged him to, but preferred to die with his country and his subjects, or rather to die beforehand himself, so that he might not see his country captured and all the inhabitants either cruelly murdered or made captive and ignominiously taken away. For when he saw the enemy pressing in on him and coming into the City through the broken wall, he is stated to have cried aloud this last word: “The city is taken and it is useless for me to live any longer.” So saying he hurled himself into the midst of the enemy and was cut to pieces. He was a splendid man and the guardian of the common good, but unfortunate all through his life and doubly unfortunate at its close.” (Source: Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles Riggs)

Kritovoulos’s book includes an account of the past Ottoman conquests. He saw the crossing of the Hellespont (the capture of Gallipoli) in March 1354, by the troops led by Ottoman Emperor Orhan Ghazi, as a symbolic beginning of the Ottoman expansion into Europe. He uses Herodotus’s terminology to describe Orhan Ghaz’s crossing of the Hellespont, comparing that event with Xerxes’s foray into Ancient Greece. He uses the term “Persians” to describe the Ottoman troops.

Crusaders at the Gates: Why Byzantium Feared the West More Than the East

In the medieval imagination of Christendom, a deep cultural fault line separated East from West—one not merely of geography or liturgy, but of identity itself. The Orthodox Christians of the Middle East and North Africa regarded themselves as the cerebral custodians of true faith, the rightful heirs of the Roman Empire’s intellectual and spiritual legacy. To them, orthodoxy was not only a matter of doctrine but of dignity, continuity, and civilization.

In contrast, the Roman Catholics of Western Europe saw themselves as the brawny instruments of divine will—the militant arm of Christendom entrusted with reclaiming the Holy Land from infidels and heretics. They wore the mantle of crusade with pride, believing that history had summoned them to act where the East had failed. To the Latin West, the Eastern Christians appeared effete, overly speculative, and compromised—guardians of a brittle tradition, more interested in metaphysical subtlety than in moral courage or political action.

The disdain was mutual. Orthodox Christians viewed the Latin crusaders not as saviors but as barbarians in chainmail—crude, avaricious, and indifferent to the delicate structures of Byzantine polity and faith. Anna Komnene, daughter of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos and one of the most brilliant chroniclers of her age, captured this tension with clarity and disdain. In her great historical work The Alexiad, she wrote of the approaching Frankish crusaders during the First Crusade:

"Alexios had dreaded their arrival, knowing as he did their uncontrollable passion, their erratic character, and their irresolution, not to mention their greed."

Her words, shaped by hindsight and the wounds left by betrayal and devastation, reflect a broader Byzantine sentiment: the crusaders were not brothers-in-arms but a force of disruption. The Franks, welcomed as allies, often behaved like conquerors.

Despite sharing the same sacred texts, the same Christ, and ostensibly the same faith, the rift between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism proved insurmountable. Their visions of Christian duty, governance, and civilization diverged too deeply. One prized tradition, the other action; one emphasized reasoned faith, the other militant zeal. The schism was not only theological—it was psychological, cultural, and ultimately civilizational.

The legacy of this divide would shape the future of Europe and the Near East for centuries. East and West remained estranged, each convinced of its own orthodoxy and the other's deviation. And so, in the crucible of crusade and empire, the brain and the brawn of Christendom drifted irreversibly apart.

Herodotus The Barbarophile

Herodotus was viewed as a Barbarophile (a lover of barbarians) by the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans because in his Histories he had disparaged Greek culture while heaping praise on the non-Greek cultures. The Histories contains a glowing account of the achievements of the Egyptian pharaohs and the grandeur of their kingdom, before their lands fell into the hands of the Persians. The book has lot of good things to say about the Persians too. 

Plutarch, who came almost four centuries after Herodotus, wrote an essay, “On the Malice of Herodotus,” which takes Herodotus to task for vilifying the Greek world while falsely praising non-Greek cultures. He accuses Herodotus of being obsessed with non-Greek cultures and ignoring the achievements of Greek culture. He calls Herodotus a “foreigner-lover,” by which he means “Egyptian-lover” and “Persian-lover,” and a lair. Here’s an excerpt from Plutarch’s essay:

“Hitherto no one has dared to expose him [Herodotus] as a liar. Since his principal victims are the Boeotians and the Corinthians, though he spares no one, I think it is proper that I should now stand up for the cause of my ancestors and the cause of truth and show how dishonest this part of his work is; it would, of course, take many books if one wanted to describe all his other lies and fabrications.”

Along with being a historian, Plutarch served as the priest of Apollo at Delphi. Perhaps his antipathy to Herodotus is a result of Herodotus’s criticism of the role that the oracle played in the Persian Wars. Herodotus had suggested that the Delphic oracle was pro-Persian. He gave the Delphic oracle no credit for the Hellenic victory at Platae. But Plutarch believed that the Delphic oracle told the Hellenes where the battle must be fought, and what Gods and heroes must be propitiated in order to ensure victory.

Technology and Tyranny

In the early days of the digital revolution, it seemed that the proliferation of digital technologies would lead to an improvement in the human condition but the industry fell into the hands of nihilists, communists, racketeers, looters, tyrants, and psychopaths who want to control the world and create a global digital utopia. Perhaps it is the fate of all new technologies to become a tool for imposing a new kind of tyranny. 

In his 1945 essay, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” George Orwell lamented: 

“We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt…”

What is history?

What is history? The best answer is the despairing line that Macbeth speaks when he hears of Lady Macbeth's death: “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.” Emotional motivations, prejudices, jealousies, and chance events play a far bigger role in history than political, economic, and intellectual considerations. Large patterns and regularities are precisely the kind of things which cannot be found in the procession of historical events. We can learn lessons from history, but these lessons are useless in predicting the future.

Victor Hugo: On the Fate of Napoleon

Victor Hugo’s commentary on the fate of Napoleon (from his novel Les Misérables):

“Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God. 

“Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had declared itself long before. 

“It was time that this vast man should fall. 

“The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear. 

“Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on. 

“He embarrassed God. 

“Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe.”

Victor Hugo: The Sound of Revolution

In 1831 Victor Hugo wrote that he was hearing “the dull sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under every kingdom in Europe its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris.” In 1847 the sound grew louder. In 1848 the revolution erupted, beginning in Sicily and spreading to France, Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire. Europe was on fire. In 2021, a dull sound of revolution can be heard once again. For which nations the bells of revolution toll this time—we will soon find out.

The Renaissance Humanists Versus The Arabic Scholars

The European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to a large-scale rejection of Arabic scholarship. The humanist scholars of the Renaissance quested for the original texts of Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other ancient masters. Most of these manuscripts were available to the European scholars of this period in texts translated into Latin from the previous Arabic translations. The Renaissance humanists rejected the translations which were based on Arabic texts—they claimed that the Arabic translations were missing the real essence of the ancient masters. 

To make their case against Arabic scholarship, the humanists cited the views of the thirteenth and fourteenth century scholars like Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and Francesco Petrarch. For his work on Aristotle, Aquinas had gone beyond the Latin translations of the Arabic translations of Aristotle and relied upon William of Moerbeke's Latin translation from original Greek resources. Bacon had complained about the European hacks who lower the quality of scholarship by translating the old texts from Arabic to Latin. Petrarch, a strong critic of Arab culture, complained that the Arabic translations were clumsy and inaccurate, and he often targeted Averroes for propagating a weak version of Aristotle in Europe.

With more original texts becoming available to the Renaissance humanists, they were able to establish that there were significant style-related and philosophy-related deviations between the teachings of the ancient masters and the Arabic translations.

Aristotle’s View of Persian Culture

In his treatise, The Politics, Aristotle’s focus is on the political structure of the Greek city-states, but in some passages he offers a scathing critique of Persian despotism. Persia in those days was a political rival of the Greek city-states, and Aristotle must have felt obliged to comment negatively on their political system. 

His anti-Persian sentiments might also be related to the torture and murder of his friend Hermeias (an associate of King Philip) by a Persian general. 

Aristotle lambasts Persia as a tyranny which keeps its citizens under surveillance and does not allow them to form private associations. He says that such tyranny is acceptable to the people of Persia because, being barbarians, they are “by natural character more slavish than Greeks and they tolerate despotic rule without resentment.” 

In the final passages of The Politics, Aristotle reflects on the role that climate can exercise on people’s political inclinations. In Greek city-states, he says, climate makes people full of energy and lusting to be free. In Persia, the climate is such that the Persians, though not lacking in brains and skill, become denuded of the courage and will to resist tyranny. 

Aristotle’s view of the impact of climate on the human mind finds a reflection in some of the works of Montesquieu and Voltaire.

The Culture Wars of the Twentieth Century

“The culture wars have ended in America in a near-universal victory of the left. Many of those appointed as the guardians of Western culture will seize on any argument, however flawed, and any scholarship, however phony, in order to denigrate their cultural inheritance. We have entered a period of cultural suicide, comparable to that undergone by Islam after the ossification of the Ottoman Empire.” ~ writes Roger Scruton in his book Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. 

There are two ways by which the left acquires political power in a country: first, through a proletarian revolution (Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba); second, through the subversion of culture (the UK, the USA). In the early decades of the twentieth century, the USA didn’t possess a poor and powerless proletariat, so there was no possibility of organizing a communist revolution here. The only way by which the left could have conquered this country is by subverting its culture. American culture turned into a battleground between the left and the capitalist establishment which was being intellectually defended (in a feeble way) by the conservatives.

Between the 1930s and 1990s, the left had managed to conclusively defeat the conservative intellectuals and gain control of American culture. When the conservatives were celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, they didn’t realize that in the battle for culture, they had lost.

The Winter of Despair for World Markets

What will be the point of no return for the global stock markets? There are several numbers that can be watched but I think two of the most crucial numbers are the DOW (Dow Jones Industrial Average) and the inflation figures in the USA. When the DOW goes below 15000 and the inflation in the USA edges close to 20%, then it will be a point of no return. 

I call this the point of no return, because from here there will be no possibility of recovery. This will herald the end of the American and British led world order. History will come to an end for the Western civilization.

The famous line by Charles Dickens comes to my mind: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Can History Take an Unexpected Turn?

The major historical event of the twentieth century was not the rise and defeat of fascism and nazism, it was not the rise and fall of the Soviet Union either, but the end of colonization with the fall of the British Empire and the empires of other Western powers. The end of colonization spawned several new nations, some of which made great progress after the 1970s and now they command a major slice of global economy and military strength. History repeats itself but in unexpected ways: I won’t be surprised if in the twenty-first century, many of the Western powers become colonies of those nations which were the colonies of the West in the twentieth century.

The Faith of the Communists

“The theories of Marx are true because they are correct.” ~ slogan popular among the Russian communists in the 1930s (generally attributed to Josef Stalin). 

Communism might be a God that has failed, but the leftists will never lose their faith. Their devotion to their ideology becomes stronger with every political disaster which is caused by the policies and methods of the communist regimes.

Kant: The Moral Norms are Priceless

“In the Kingdom of Ends everything has either a price or a dignity. If it has a price, something else can be put in its place as an equivalent; if it is exalted above all price and so admits of no equivalent, then it has a dignity.” ~ Immanuel Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant believed that only morality, which is founded on the religious and philosophical teachings of the past, has dignity, and that this morality is priceless and is irreplaceable.

The Rubbish That Rules People's Mind

People venerate the rubbish that dehumanizes and enslaves them. This is why the mainstream media, the movie industry, and modern art, which show a profound indifference to the human condition and seek to impose frivolous and destructive remedies, are so popular and powerful.

The Two Enemies Who are in Love: Communism & Capitalism

Communism and capitalism are like two enemies who are in love with one another. Each claims that it will destroy the other, but they cannot bear to live without each other. Every capitalist country is driven by a natural instinct to embrace some form of communism, and every communist country is driven to embrace some form of capitalism.

Orwell: Small Arms are Democratic

In his 1945 essay, “You and the Atom Bomb,” Orwell predicted that the nuclear powers would become like the “slave empires of antiquity.” Here’s an excerpt from his essay: 

“It is a commonplace that the history of civilization is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.

“The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans – even Tibetans – could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favored the State as against the individual, and the industrialized country as against the backward one.”

Empire, Industry, and the Uneven Burden of Progress: Rethinking the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution that swept through Britain in the nineteenth century was not merely a technological or economic shift—it was a seismic transformation of society. Over the span of just five decades, the very fabric of British life was reshaped. 

Traditional modes of work gave way to factory systems, urban populations exploded, and new class dynamics emerged from the smokestacks of the industrial age. Yet this revolution, often celebrated for its ingenuity and productivity, was underwritten by forces far beyond the British Isles.

The success of Britain’s industrial ascent was inextricably linked to its status as a global colonial power. The empire did not merely enrich Britain with resources—it enabled the rise of industry through structural exploitation. Colonies provided both the labor and the markets that fueled Britain's manufacturing machine. In many cases, labor came in the form of slavery or indenture; in others, it was cheap, coerced, or deliberately impoverished through colonial economic policy.

Crucially, the empire functioned as a financial engine for industrial growth. Colonial taxation, particularly in India, became a vital source of revenue for Britain’s infrastructural expansion. The very capital that sustained steel, coal, and textile industries often originated not in British banks but in the forced extractions from colonized economies. 

Nowhere is this more evident than in the textile trade. India, once a world-renowned hub of fine cotton and handloom weaving, saw its indigenous textile economy systematically dismantled to clear the path for British manufactured cloth. British goods were dumped into colonial markets at scale, often protected by tariffs and backed by imperial force, while Indian weavers faced ruin.

Yet the social acceptance of industrialization within Britain itself presents an instructive contrast. While the transformation was profound, it was not accompanied by mass upheaval or widespread domestic resistance. One reason for this relative acquiescence lies in the asymmetry of sacrifice. 

The British populace, by and large, reaped the fruits of industrial progress—jobs, wages, urban amenities, and rising global prestige—without shouldering the harshest burdens of its emergence. The costs of empire and industrial dominance were largely outsourced to colonial subjects, who bore the brunt of displacement, deindustrialization, and dispossession.

This disjuncture between industrial gain and colonial suffering complicates the triumphalist narrative of the Industrial Revolution. It demands a reframing: not as an isolated national achievement, but as a chapter in a broader global story—one marked by uneven development, coerced interdependence, and the profound moral ambiguities of progress.

The Industrial Revolution, then, was not solely a story of steam and steel. It was also a story of silence—the silence of those erased from its heroic accounts, and the silence that allowed a nation to transform without reckoning with who paid the true price of its ascent.

The Pitfalls of Power and Brilliance

In the world of superheroes: With great power comes great responsibility. In the world of mortals: With great power comes great insanity, and with great brilliance comes great stupidity.

Faulkner: To Transcend the Clock

Man invented the clock, and the clock made man its prisoner. Man became awed by the hands on the clock’s face. He became habituated to looking at the clock’s face for guidance. The clock’s hands started exercising tyrannical control over his daily routine. 

Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury offers an insight on the power that time exercises on man. Faulkner writes: “A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.” In another passage, he writes, “And so as soon as I knew I couldn’t see it, I began to wonder what time it was. Father said that constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function.” He suggests that time cannot become alive until the clock is abandoned: “Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” Quentin’s act of breaking his watch is an act of rebellion.

In his novels, Proust reminisces about time. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s focus is not on time but on absolution from the clock.

The Dark Regime of the Brilliant Totalitarians

If civilization is to survive, then the regime of brilliant totalitarians—politicians, intellectuals, experts, celebrities, journalists, and businessmen—has to be overthrown. Their “brilliance” has made them blind to reality. They are creating darkness everywhere. They will not stop regulating; they will not stop imposing new restrictions; they will not stop propagating new fears. They will drive us into a new Stone Age. 

The stupid people are the wise people—they understand reality far better than the brilliant people. The world is safer when political power is being wielded by the stupid. 

There is much wisdom in what Ivan Karamazov says to his younger brother Alexei Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov: “the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.”

The Leftist Historiography of Hobsbawm

“In theory its [The Enlightenment] object was to set all human beings free. All progressive, rationalist and humanist ideologies are implicit in it and indeed come out of it.” ~ Eric Hobsbawm in his 1962 book The Age of Revolution. 

Hobsbawm saw the Enlightenment as the first step towards the achievement of a global communist utopia. In his 1971 book Primitive Rebels, he posited that “utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.” In a 1994 interview with Michael Ignatieff, Hobsbawm said that the death of fifteen to twenty million people for the achievement of a utopia is justified. 

Hobsbawm joined the British Communist Party in 1936 and stayed with it until 1991, when the Party was dissolved. He never wavered in his commitment to the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, he wrote in an article stating that he approved of their action in Hungary, though “with a heavy heart.” In his 2002 autobiography, Interesting Times, he wrote that being a communist means “utter emotional identification” and “total dedication” to communism.

In 1990, when it became clear that the Soviet Union was on the verge of disintegrating, he lamented that the disintegration of the Soviet Union would revive the reactionary forces which the Soviet communists “have been kept frozen for up to 70 years.”

The Communist True Believers

The intellectuals of the left, between the 1920s and 1990s (from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union), trenchantly rejected the idea that the masses could reject communism. H. G. Wells and Sidney and Beatrice Webb were convinced that communism was synonymous with progress, and if the nations were given a free choice, their masses would opt for the communist model. 

In 1968, when there was a rebellion against the communist government in Czechoslovakia (the Prague Spring), Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the Czechs were not rebelling against communism but against the communist system with which they cannot identify since this system was not “home grown.” He explained that the Soviet Union made a mistake when it compelled the “Czechs of the 1950s” to accept a communist system that was fit for the “Russian peasants of the 1920s,” and that the rebellion would not have happened if Czechoslovakia had been allowed to develop its own form of communism.

Eric Hobsbawm refused to believe that the Czechs could be against communism. He firmly defended the cruelty with which the Soviet Union was suppressing the Czech rebellion as “a necessity of time.” Saving the communist government was for him the absolute priority.

Mephistopheles: The Creature of Communism & Capitalism

In Goethe’s play Faust, when the demon Mephistopheles is asked to reveal his true nature, he says that he is the spirit who always invalidates, who reduces something to nothing, and who undoes the acts of creation. Here’s a translation of Mephistopheles’s words:   

“I am the spirit that negates.

And rightly so, for all that comes to be

Deserves to perish wretchedly;

'Twere better nothing would begin.

Thus everything that that your terms, sin,

Destruction, evil represent—

That is my proper element.” 

Mephistopheles is like the twin forces of modernity: communism and capitalism. Like the communists and the capitalists, he is devoted to saying no to the facts of reality. He wants to obliterate the traditional systems and impose his own ideological agenda.